A Little Behind

Sorry for the pause in the blog-0-sphere.

I'm still out here, but haven't been able to focus enough to blog. I hope to do better soon.

Things to think about until then:

1) I am reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins as a sort of continuing of my "thinking about god." It has all sorts of interesting statistics and examples. I tend to think, though, that Darwin (or at least Science) is Dawkins' replacement for God. I don't like that. Nietzsche wouldn't either. It is just another God. Still, it is interesting so far.

2) I am trying to pack my bags. Road trips are fun because you can take so much stuff. But when I can, I tend to. This leads to too much packing and taking too much crap.

3) Am I really doing the right thing by moving to Montgomery? Is there really another option? Can driving half way across the country help me figure that out? :)


Sigh

Roller Coaster Life

I love roller coasters. Ask C or A & H about how I will charge onto a ride at Six Flags with the kind of smile and expectancy that is usually reserved for children.

What I like most about roller coasters is that horribly frightening drop: or more accurately, the precise moment when the drop ends and your stomach is both flipping out and sighing with relief. In that moment, the body releases some chemicals (is it adrenaline?) that make me feel good. It has always been interesting to me that some people (C and A, among others) hate that exact feeling.

But this post is about those things as a metaphor.

My life is like a roller coaster. Maybe it is because of bipolar, maybe not. But I've had some incredible highs and lows in my life. When I look around me, I tend to think my highs are higher and my lows are lower. But it is hard to know what other people are feeling.

The thing is, I don't mind it. I might even say that usually, I like my life this way. C, on the other hand, does everything in his power to keep things even: to escape the roller coaster.

Lately, I've been bouncing in and out of emotions very much like I'm riding the Scream Machine. Some days I am happy that I have a new job. Some days I am scared to death. Some days I'm okay with C's decision to stay here; some days I want to strangle him. I think it might be because this is so huge: so much out of my own control that I have to deal with it in little chunks. I'm not sure. I only know that this is one of those coasters that makes my neck hurt: that the quick slinging is not producing much other than aches and stiffness.

I'm beginning to wonder what kind of permanent damage is happening.

But I'm unwilling too to get off or to stuff all this emotion into a box and seal it up. So C called me Jekyll and Hyde last night. Maybe he's right.

On the other hand, life without the coaster? No way.

eat, pray, love, II

I finished it.

It is worth reading.

I found the first two sections most interesting. Not that I don't like love. I just read about it all the time. :)

What do you know about lead paint?

That cute cute house I'm trying to buy has "evidence" of lead paint. Well, of course it does. It was built in 1940. But I'm getting widely varied viewpoints on what that means.

Next to having workers in space suits come in and remove the siding and drywall and replacing it with new siding and drywall, it seems that leaving it there covered up with new (non-lead) paint is the best one can do.

Some say this will lower my ability to resell. Others say it might poison my dog.

Surely people who live in "older" areas of the country deal with this all of the time. Why am I so freaked about it?

eat, pray, love

All my thinking last week about God was prompted by this book that I am reading: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I'm not finished yet, but even so, I think that I can recommend the book.

Here is something she said:

I believe that all the world's religions share, at their core, a desire to find a transporting metaphor. When you want to attain communion with God, what you're really trying to do is move away from the worldly into the eternal (from the village to the forest, you might say, keeping with the theme of the antevasin) and you need some kind of magnificent idea to convey you there. It has to be a big one, this metaphor -- really big and magic and powerful, because it needs to carry you across a mighty distance. It has to be the biggest boat imaginable.

I, of course, also believe in metaphors. And Gilbert's attachment to the Sanskrit term "antevasin" (a person who lives at the border) is a fruitful place for me to start. I am always on the lines: between worlds, between rituals, between full understandings. Never apart but never a part either.

Much of Gilbert's search begins in Yoga. This is something I, while still on the fringes, understand more and more. It is a nice place to focus, a nice place to begin to focus on new things.

Anyway. This is a guarded recommendation for the book. When I'm finished, maybe I'll remove the guard.

Until then, the title does its own recommendation.

Punishing (?) our artists

Image of Annie Mae Young's (b. 1928) work clothes quilt with center medallion
created in 1976 with denim and corduroy.
This image is on the front of one of the promotional books that accompanies the touring quilts.

I know that some artists get rich. I know that. Like some athletes get rich. But they are very few and far between. We like to hold up the Jordans and the Rowlings of the world as examples so that we can sell the dream that if you follow what you love (practice enough, write in enough coffee shops), you will be rewarded, financially.

Unfortunately, the reality is that most artists can't even feed themselves with their art. Every artist that I know (personally) still does something else to live. And this is true even when the art is "famous."

For several years I was in a (paid) research group to study the Quilts of Gee's Bend. It looks like I made more researching than the artists themselves made from making these now wildly famous quilts. I mean, they are on postage stamps.

See this article on the new lawsuit brought by one of the quilters (Annie Mae Young) of several of the more "famous" quilts.

Admittedly, this was a big part of our study at Auburn: how these artists were not being helped (financially) by all of the fame brought to them by the white guys from Atlanta. We attempted to help, but found we had neither the power or money to go against the structures already in place. So, in the end, we became complicit in/to this structure.

Yet, this phenomenon does seem to speak to my doing/thinking pondering and how thinking is rewarded (at least in finances and in status) even while the doing is heralded. I figure I made over $15,000 studying these quilts while the creator made only $18,000.

And while I also attempt to resist measuring success in dollar amounts, I think that eating is important. And at this level of money, we are talking about just enough money to survive (my money was paid over a three year period and I think hers would have been paid over an even longer period of time).

Thinking of God (part two)

...I'll get to Jebbo's comments later. First I want to finish the post...

Okay. So, there's this critical me: the one that earned my Ph.D., the one that writes academic jargon, the one that makes me iron my clothes, the one that doesn't like the way I dance. But there is also another me: the one that dances, the one that writes poetry, the one that has zen (whatever that is). This is not really a mind/body split or a body/soul split. It is just two philosophical parts (and this is where that Existentialism and film Berkeley course hit a nerve with me: two separate world views colliding in one culture) that don't really find meeting ground.

I can do and I can think about doing.

Thinking about doing is prized in our economic and ladder-climbing culture. But doing (particularly in creative ways) is both needed and resented in this culture. Here I think of Ayn Rand's ideas in the Fountainhead. We need our artists, but we set up our culture to punish then rather than reward them (at least that seems true when you compare artists to business people). My best example is my in-laws taking away a journal from their young son and telling him that writing in a diary will get him nowhere in life.

I am not a religious person. My examples of my experience of religion show that (I hope). Yet, I do want to find some ease/peace in my life. The glimpses that I get of such a thing are through doing: writing a poem, moving in a yoga pose, concentration on the space around me. That is not to say that the other part of me doesn't find pleasure in the results: the poem, the depth of the pose, the tranquility of meditation. But it seems that "god," whatever that might be, is not in the product, but in the act itself. "It" is something that evaporates the moment the action ends. And it is in that way that I refuse to see any "god" as separate from myself. It is not a god/me question. God is just a buzzword that signifies something important, something worth a little extra focus and energy. But this "god" is me.

And, see, now that I've said it, it sounds like what everyone else has already said. I'm sure I'm adding nothing to this conversation.

Here is what I don't think: I don't believe that faith would have made me speak in tongues or feel saved. But there are other things that move me: yoga, dancing, poetry. Those things need me to honor them by letting them be without the rigorous academic shakedown. (Interesting that my dissertation is a rigorous shakedown of poetry and that I haven't written any poetry since I started the dissertation).

What I am doing now is attempting to focus. I need to find the avenues for action instead of reflection. Of course, even this post runs counter to that idea. For here I am thinking about it, giving it a good once (or twice) over. And it is precisely that tendency that I am becoming skeptical of.

Bright Eyes says,

I never thought of running
My feet just led the way

That is what I yearn for.

Thinking about God (part one)

Lately, I've been thinking about God/god/deities/divinity/spiritualism.

Now I (think I) know what you're thinking: either

1) she's going back to religion
2) she's so depressed she's getting crazy (and going back to religion), or
3) she's got too much time on her hands

Well, number three may be true, but this really isn't about religion, and (at least at this point) it isn't much about my personal spirituality either.

It is about thinking.

See, (hang in there with me for a little while), I took a Salsa dance lesson a few weeks back. Here's what I noticed: while my feet seem more than willing to step forward, backward, and to each side on measured beats, my brain likes to tell me that I look ridiculous, that I have no rhythm, and that I am useless as a dancer. In voicing my frustration at not being able to get out of my head to my yoga teacher, she informed me that I have the same problem in yoga classes. So, I've been watching myself in yoga classes, and she is right. Those voices in my head don't let up: I am in constant critique of myself. Ironically, what I love about yoga is the few seconds that I can escape those thoughts (albeit only a few seconds). Then I shared both of these insights with my therapist. (Can you see what is coming here?) That's right, I can't "go with the flow" or be "zen" in my life either because I am trapped in my head: overworking every problem and every detail and every angle in my head. I'm trapped, yet again in the thinking and I can't get to the doing.

Now, you ask. Where does God come in?

I have two stories from childhood that I have always used to explain my relationship to religion. One: In second grade, I went to vacation bible school with a friend who convinced me to stay after the opening service to talk with the preacher and get saved. The preacher asked those who felt the calling of God in their lives to stay. I didn't feel anything, but my friend said that she did it every year, so I did it too. That was when I was "saved."

Two: As an early teenager (maybe thirteen), my mother's charismatic church expected those that where saved to get "baptised with the holy ghost" where the gift of speaking in tongues was given. After another long invocation from the minister, my mother finally convinced me to go before the church to receive this gift. I stood as they prayed over me, hands on my back and shoulders, the preacher praying in "unknown tongues" for me to receive the holy ghost. This lasted too many minutes for me. Others had gotten their gift immediately, and I waited and waited, but nothing came. The preacher kept praying more and more forcefully, and I realized that until I played along with this, until I pretended to speak these tongues, the whole church would stand staring at me wondering what I had done wrong. I began to speak gibberish and the crowd roared. I was free to go back to my seat. But there was no holy ghost that I could find in me.

Two frauds: That has been my experience of religious conversions. It is all make believe. And that many people believe these hoaxes has always bothered me.

Now, to my point.

Faith is something I don't have: easiness, serenity, or zen. Those all seem to be similar somehow. Is it possible that it is precisely because God (or whatever this is) is not to be thought about? Is god/God in the doing? Is this somehow connected to my previous post on creativity?




part two tomorrow

Wounded Knee

I just watched the new HBO movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

When I teach American Literature, I always teach the Ghost Dance Songs. If you have never read them, go check this Sioux transcription/translation out. I'll wait.

The HBO film is worth watching. I had heard that they turned it to a love story. They did not. A small love story is present, but it is not the focus of the film, and, in fact, it serves as a disturbing metaphor for the relationship between 19th (and maybe 20th) century whites and Indian people. I will buy a copy of the DVD when it becomes available and teach it along with the Songs because the movie does a nice (and relatively short) job of giving a sense of history.

But, what do I have to say here to you who know the history of the US government?

I just keep seeing that my culture has not changed. That for all of our education, our technologies, our high-mindedness, our liberal intentions, we seem to be hell bent on taking the things we want, the lands we want, the governments we (don't) want, the people we (don't) like. Taking...by force.

I look at my choices. I look at my wish not to take by force. It is yet a struggle between two warring sides.

Told by the victors, history, even when describing the massacres and invasions, becomes the witnessing of horror: a way to mourn without changing the outcome this time or next. It will not be until we are no longer the winners that we will change: our perspectives and our actions.

Uplifting, isn't it?

creativity and envelopement

There was a time in my life that I believed myself to be a creative person. I may have been; I'm not sure. Now, however, I no longer think that I am creative.

I think the world, or our culture, or maybe my need to remain in control and stable, has either separated me from such (possible) creativity or has drained it from me.

I haven't written a poem in months. I haven't written a poem that satisfied me in years.

I don't paint or play music. I don't sing or dance. I don't play sports or design buildings. I don't make babies.

Most of the world is like me.

Do most people like me want to create things?

What is it in the creation of things that I find so miraculous? Someone, after all, should analyze what has been created. I am lucky to be able to do that.

That all makes sense. Yet I find that I yearn to make ... to create. I desire. But the safety of the world as it is envelopes me.

Something happy

Our offer was just accepted on this adorable little house in Montgomery.

I'll do a happy dance if you will.

Back to complaining

Well, I'm just tired. Too much travel in too little time.

Went to AL to house shop and then to NC to see M & ME (they were great).

Have made an offer on an adorable little house in Montgomery. Hoping that works out.

Today I am resting. My 20-year class reunion is this weekend, but I just can't get back in the car. Oh well.


Hope to get back to regular posting again now. Maybe I'll put together a real one for this afternoon.

:)