letters from barabbas

What a strange time to be alive. In ten days it is graduation. My teachers smile sympathetically when they recognize how stressed, how paralyzed I've become.

But I've gotten into a good grad program. I've been dreaming furtively about my courseload, about the winter. I am here in Auburn, Alabama...physically. Home that I love. Spring is here. Azaleas have already gone. But I lay in the hammock and look up at the moon, and forget that I'm not already in Malawi. The moon is the same everywhere. But then I remember I'm still here. Writing a thesis. Over stuff I don't even care about anymore. Spending time with friends I may never see again. Wrestling with decisions that will determine the rest of my life.

Waiting for my bloody graduation. Parturition.
And New England. Trypanosomes. Africa.

Written on the concourse today. Made me laugh.

If you feel the pull of the moon,
be careful. You might be a liquid.

In international health near the turn of the twenty-first century, a mentality prevailed that borrowed from the nineteenth-century utilitarian philosophers, from the notion that one should provide the greatest good for the greatest number, and it was expressed in a language of realism. The world had limited resources. Nations whose resources weren't just limited but scarce had to make the best possible uses of the little they had. Other countries and international institutions might help out, but these days, if you wanted money from big donors for health projects in poor countries, if you wanted to be taken seriously, your proposals had to pass a test, called cost-effectiveness analysis.
The general technique was first used in engineering, later on in war and medicine. You calculated the cost of a public health project or medical procedure and tried to quantify its effectiveness. Then you compared the results for competing projects or procedures. But it seemed to Farmer that the high councils in international health often used this analytic tool to rationalize an irrational status quo: TB treatment was cost-effective in a place like New York, but not in a place like Peru.

"Resources are always limited." In international health, this saying had great force. It lay behind most cost-effective analyses. It often meant, "Be realistic." But it was usually uttered, Farmer thought, without any recognition of how, in a given place, resources had come to be limited, as if God had imposed poverty on places like Haiti. Strictly speaking, all resources everywhere were limited, Farmer would say in speeches. Then he'd add, "But they're less limited now than ever before in human history." That is, medicine now had the tools for stopping many plagues, and no one could say there wasn't enough money in the world to pay for them.

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains

-----

Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary society. Complete analogy.
Algebra and money are essentially levelers, the first intellectually, the second effectively.

The relation of the sign to the thing signified is being destroyed, the game of exchanges between signs is being multiplied of itself and for itself. And the increasing complication demands that there should be signs for signs....

Among the characterizations of the modern world we must not forget the impossibility of thinking in concrete terms of the relationship between effort and the result of effort. There are too many intermediaries. As in the other cases, this relationship which does not lie in any thought, lies in a thing: money.

As collective thought cannot exist as thought, it passes into things (signs, machines...) Hence the paradox: It is the thing which thinks, and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing.

The spirit, overcome by the weight of quantity, has no longer any criterion other than efficiency.
Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.
This is true even with material things: fire, water, etc. The community has taken possession of all these natural forces.
Question: Can this emancipation, won by society, be transferred to the individual?

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

My friend Emily dreamed she had a pet octopus that sang like Jim Morrison. It didn't have to be underwater, as long as it had a tentacle in something wet. It made her feel better about her life.
I keep having nightmares about my research going horribly wrong. Animal resources shuts us down. Someone guts my birds like a savage. I set them all free on accident. It makes me feel worse about mine.
Emily asked if I was a lucid dreamer. When a friend of hers realizes that she is dreaming, she takes control. She flies, takes over countries, makes out with boys.
If I could control what happened in my dreams, I'd invent a cat that would stand guard over my birds during the night. He wouldn't want to eat them, obviously. Then I wouldn't have to be anxious about my little pretties while I'm resting. And maybe I'd grow wings and fly back and forth with my goldfinches in their cage.


A lecture is a waking dream, in its own way. This realization has renewed the joy of learning for me: Four days a week, Dr. Wit makes his laser pointer dance on the wall as he sings to us the Songs of Innerspace. And then, Dr. Roberts turns the lights down low as she tells a tale to make your cytoplasm quiver.

“What do you want the most?”
“What do you mean, like, physically? Spiritually?”
He laughed, “What’s the difference?”
I didn’t laugh back. “Well, the first is what I really want, and the second is what I want to want.”
“Whichever. What do you want the most?”
“I guess what I really want is peace. To stop feeling at war with myself.”
“And what do you think that will take?”
“Oh, surrender, I guess.” I kicked a swath of pebbles out ahead of me as I walked, adding hastily, “That’s the church answer, anyway.”
He stopped to examine the bamboo around us. “Did you know that bamboo shoots can grow a foot taller every day? It’s amazing, isn’t it? Straight up into the sky.”
“I wish I were that desperate.”

That is a piece of a conversation in the story that I brought to Dr. Troy to read during our first conference this semester. She said she liked it, "Good fiction is the careful compilation of tiny surprises." But she never says anything negative, so it's hard to tell.
Then she looked hard at me and asked if I was doing okay. I said yes, not to worry. Because I am doing quite well, more or less. I asked for her advice on how to weave ideological beliefs into a story without sullying the narrative, and she brought down a novel she had written in which she had incorporated the writings of Simone Weil, a 20th century French Jewish-born Catholic mystic.
I was so impressed with what I heard that I went to the library and checked out some of Weil's books. This is the excerpt that Dr. Troy quoted. I think it's beautiful, and perfectly resonant with my present mood.

I cannot conceive the necessity for God to love me, when I feel so clearly that even with human beings affection for me can only be a mistake. But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am. But I act as a screen. I must withdraw so that he may see it.
I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves. It is tactless for me to be there. It is as though I were placed between two lovers or two friends. I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed, but the unwelcome third who is with two betrothed lovers and ought to go away so that they can really be together.
If only I knew how to disappear, there would be a perfect love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear....
What do the energy, the gifts, etc., which are in me matter? I always have enough of them to disappear.

May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.

I do not in the least wish that this created world should fade from my view, but I do wish that it should no longer be shown to me in person. To me it cannot tell its secret which is too high. If I go, then the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets.
To see a landscape as it is when I am not there...
When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.

--Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

This is what I told the admissions committees at Yale, Tulane, UAB and Boston U. In case you wanted to know why the hell I'm doing this.


As I have progressed through the pre-med program at Auburn, the vision I hold for my future has shifted from a strictly clinical focus to a much broader conception of my place in the medical community. My current interests lie in cooperative community approaches to preventing disease. I am particularly interested in exploring innovative, culturally conscious methods of controlling disease within developing nations. My next step in this new direction is to obtain an MPH in Epidemiology, focusing on infectious diseases of Sub-Saharan Africa.

My experience with undergraduate research has been the greatest motivation for my shifting away from traditional medicine towards Public Health. As an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Sharon Roberts’s lab, I spent my junior year helping graduate students with the culture and molecular analysis of Mycoplasma gallisepticum for an ongoing study of Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis in house finches. Because Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis is an emerging infection in the eastern house finch population, it provides an excellent model for studying the evolution of host-parasite relationships. As a senior, I have had the opportunity to take on my own projects that examine the disease not only on a molecular level but within the whole organism as well. I am currently conducting two projects: a natural transmission study in live birds that I captured from the wild and the genetic analysis of Mycoplasma gallisepticum isolates that I collected from wild birds last summer. When Dr. Roberts explained the classical transmission study’s further applications to medicine, I started taking a more active interest in Epidemiology. I found myself more excited about preventing the transmission of disease throughout a community than in treating infected individuals. My primary research interests for the graduate level include both international field work and laboratory analysis of tropical parasites and vector-borne diseases.

I have wanted to work overseas since high school, though at first I only expected to be reproducing traditional western medicine as a traveling medical doctor. As I have learned about the history of Africa, however, I have begun looking for ways to integrate novel prophylactic measures into preexisting value systems while seeking to understand their cultural assumptions as deeply as I may communicate my own. Rather than using medicine as a means for disseminating western culture, I hope to enter into the campaign for social justice by leveling disparities in the quality of healthcare across the globe. My talents and passions will best be served by devoting my attention to the understanding of specific host-parasite relationships and working cooperatively with a population to adapt appropriate methods for overcoming its unique health barriers.

While I have always been moving towards a career in healing, I have felt constricted by the limitations of modern medicine. Unimpressed by a purely scientific approach to human welfare, I began taking English classes as a sophomore to acquire a fuller understanding of the human condition. When I began volunteering as a counselor at Alabama’s oncology camp, Camp Smile-A-Mile, I was introduced to a whole community of health care professionals beyond the doctors and nurses. I realized that my contribution to patients’ well-being depended on more than my acquisition of an MD. I finally came to understand medicine as the cooperative treatment of whole families by whole communities. Dissatisfied with the sciences but unwilling to simply switch to humanities, Public Health offers me the opportunity to pursue scientific understanding while working within the whole spectrum of human experience.

Human mechanics. Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering (either by ill-treating someone or calling forth his pity) in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. In the case of a man in the uttermost depths, whom no one pities, who is without power to ill-treat anyone (if he has no child or being who loves him), the suffering remains within him and poisons him.
This is imperative, like gravity. How can one gain deliverance? How can one gain deliverance from a force which is like gravity?

It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm, if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.

To harm a person is to receive something from him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.

A beloved being who disappoints me. I wrote to him. It is impossible that he should not reply by saying what I have said to myself in his name.
Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God.
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

*

well, maybe there's a god above
but all i've ever learned from love
was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
it's not a cry that you hear at night
it's not somebody who's seen the light
it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah

Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

As far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

And yet I still long for them, the lusts of the flesh--flesh which has been removed from me. I have been cut off from my old self, made naked, but I have not got my New Man yet. I am disembodied. But I should be glad for that, content that one day I may be further clothed in Righteousness and Truth. Instead, I am chasing after an old sin that is always as far as the horizon. It is an attempt to reunite my soul and body, to resolve the tension and to settle on some tangible existence. It is understandable, and even natural, but it is in error. It is betraying the way of things, chasing in the wrong direction, towards a home that no longer welcomes me. I cannot fuse future and past to condense my distilling breath. I must wait for both to explode, for only in timelessness will I be fully present. In the meantime, I must refrain from following the flesh, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner without sin.
Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner without sin who would it were otherwise.

i have not seen this day before

If I could, I would break into flower.
If I could, I'd no longer be barren.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

Oh, mourning dove, we'll go up to my roof.
Oh, mourning dove, we'll go into the sky.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

And the cars are a stream running by me,
bending away to a place I don't know.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

I used to think of this song as a simple expression of joy. A release in the tension of a very dark album--the bright spot. But perhaps it is not strictly so. I have not seen this day before: "It must be a sunny day, a good day for once," I thought. But maybe it's just another day, one we haven't seen yet. And whether it is sunny or stormy, it is here, and we haven't seen it before, and it is filling up our rooms whether we want it or not. Jump in the stream and fill it up (surrounding the stones gracefully, if you are able), because you have no other choice.

I've been thinking a lot about how God works--how wrong it is to assume that God ought to do good things for us, though He often does. The "How could a good god let bad things happen?" dilemma is getting old for me. The Israelites were on a wild ride with an incomprehensible Guide, who had a plan though it often didn't seem so. The indication of any sort of plan didn't make it seem any better, at least. "Step in that river? What, and drown?" "Slay that whole village over there? Where is Your compassion?" "Four hundred years of captivity? Do we really deserve that?" They went with the flow, did as they were told, yet there seems to be the sense that the Lord, omniscient and all-powerful though He was, was always weeping with them. He was on their side--so who could be against them?
Yet they wept, and He wept with them.
And if His Spirit filled the tabernacle, and our hearts are now that tabernacle, then He must be filling up our rooms right now, and so the day with all its tears and all its small surprises really is coming through the door.

If I could, I'd no longer be barren. Who knows whether this day will change that? But what choice is there for me but to live it?

I'm not trying to preach this. I'm not hoping this will comfort anyone's pain. But I'm hoping that typing these words out and publishing them on the internet will somehow make them real for my life. It's a last-ditch effort to go into the sky, you might say. Because all around me people are dying and losing their faith. And in many ways I'm doing both myself, because maybe that is what it means to be alive.
I have not seen this day before. And the Lord is for me, and weeping too.

This past semester I devoted myself to writing serious fiction for the first time in my life. I took Fiction Writing with Dr. Judy Troy, and I got a lot more than I bargained for. You learn a lot about yourself when you really try to write a story that you will show to someone else.

One of the most annoying things about what I've been writing is my dependence on the weather as a narrative device. We all understand how deeply the weather affects our lives, so it's a great tool to call upon when we need to describe a situation precisely. Good writers use this subtly in a way that I admire and desire to emulate. But for me, so far...
It's easy to explain a situation by explaining what the sky is doing. But to actually explain what the characters are doing--to have someone start crying rather than have it start raining; to describe someone's anger rather than pointing to the hot August sun--that's something I haven't mastered.

I don't know how to describe an emotional response without feeling like it sounds contrived. So I write around the characters, lofting the narrative into intangible clichés. This robs the story of its specific climax, so there's no resolution.
And I'm worried that I do this when I write because I do this with my life.

Rivers knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

--from Regeneration, by Pat Barker

I am writing a paper on this book, right now, at 4:30 in the morning, about the ways masculinity was constructed during the First World War. I am using the word phallus a lot. I can honestly say I wouldn't rather be sleeping. Though I do wish I had finished the assignment a week ago.

I would like to apologize for my reticence this month.
Hee hee. I'm also using the word reticence in my paper, because silence is a form of resistance to the language-driven power structure of western society. Don't worry, though. My silence has nothing to do with my desire to subvert the authority of anyone who may or may not be reading this post.

Next week heralds a much needed break from my studies. I hope to share some words with some of you, when that time comes.

It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation, which is truly the most important time of your life.

Lewis Wolpert, 1986

Well, that's good to know, eh? Takes the pressure off of all the other developmental decisions I've got to make in the next four months.

Sorry that most of my posts this month have been lifted from other people's thoughts, or just recycled paragraphs from old stories and journals of mine: I've been too restricted by my educational servitude lately, and worried and confused about my life, and I just don't have much left to say. But I couldn't keep from directing you to this jewel, because I think you might need it:

Over the Rhine Radio

.....sigh. It never fails. If you aren't drawn in by the first song, and couldn't care less about this music, at least do me a favor and skip to the 9th song, Latter Days. Listen to it. I mean, really listen to it:

What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be.
Lord knows we've learned the hard way all about healthy apathy.
And I use these words pretty loosely.
There's so much more to life than words.

There is a me you would not recognize, dear.
Call it the shadow of myself.
And if the music starts before I get there, dance without me.
You dance so gracefully. I really think I'll be o.k.
They've taken their toll these latter days.

Nothin' like sleepin' on a bed of nails.
Nothin' much here but our broken dreams.
Ah, but baby if all else fails, nothin' is ever quite what it seems.
And I'm dyin' inside to leave you with more than just cliches.

There is a me you would not recognize, dear. Call it the shadow of myself.
And if the music starts before I get there dance without me.
You dance so gracefully. I really think I'll be o.k.
They've taken their toll these latter days.

But tell them it's real. Tell them it's really real.
I just don't have much left to say.
They've taken their toll these latter days.
They've taken their toll these latter days.

I'm not really convinced that Tim LaHaye is writing out of urgent prophecy rather than blasé politics, but oh, God, this is the truth. Whether the moon turns red tonight, we are perishing in the desert every day, with nothing left but broken dreams. But we're okay. It's really real.

Apocalypse doesn't mean ruin, or even judgment. It means unveiling. We will see Him face to face, if we love Him.

Today, in a brief and unexpected moment of clarity, which perhaps began somewhere in the empty slate blue sky, I understood exactly how it really would be a sin to kill a mockingbird.

A chapter from Lilian's Story, an excellent novel:

I had looked forward to reading all the wisdom ever written and to thinking deeply about important things. I had planned serene hours with fearless minds who would help me resolve problems of good and evil, and what everything might mean. I had been excited about my future.
In the lecture hall, I watched the men in tweed mouthing, smothering a yawn before turning to the next page in their notes. F.J. Stroud and I stared down at so many heads bowed over tricky considerations of philosophy, so many pens flying across lined paper. In the first row, right in front of the man in tweed, was the deaf boy who was going to go far in philosophy in spite of his handicap, and the pretty girl who did not know that she did not have to work so hard at understanding. She pressed hard, putting words into her book, pressing each word into the paper as if otherwise it might run away.
But what did any of it have to do with me? Did any of it have to do with the stars that hung low near dawn, or the way the sun came up dripping out of the sea? The notes I took meant nothing: a few facts about enclosure laws, a list of the dates of battles. My notebook did not fill like other people's, and what was in it was largely illegible. Even when it could be read, there did not seem to be much sense in these lists of denuded facts, dates, names. Descartes was a man with a ball of wax, I knew that much, and Philip of Spain had died an unmentionable death, but what else? Even Napoleon seemed boring.
Here up at the back of the hall, where the hot air gathered, and the smells of ink and feet, the fat girl with the red cheeks sat beside the thin ugly boy in black. The man in tweed had not wondered for many years what all this had to do with God, but he was annoyed by so much whispering in the back row. He that has ears, let him hear, he boomed out suddenly, to his suprise as much as his students. The pretty girl dropped her pencil, the deaf boy showed his teeth with the pleasure of having heard for once, and the thin boy and the fat girl stopped their whispering to stare.
I often wanted to stand and yell down into the ring. Where is size? I would have liked to shout. What have you done with the grand and ineffable? Where is the life all around us? I stood in my place, balancing against vertigo with a hand on the bench. The men in tweed stopped what they were saying and stared up, waiting. There would be a long silence which gradually filled up with shuffles, titters, things dropped with a bang or tinkle, during which I struggled to formulate one of my questions. The men in tweed became embarrassed. My formulations evaporated as I stood with my mouth trying to open on words, and watched them toss chalk from hand to hand. One pushed a long hand into his trouser pocket and drew out a gold watch on a chain. He laid it in front of him on the lectern as gently as a souffle. Yes? They would ask, their faces turned up to me in a moonlike way. Yes? The silence would deepen and finally splinter with a snicker from somewhere. The men in tweed prided themselves on their poise and silver temples, and smoothly turned to the board when they had waited long enough.
On the board they enumerated a few more facts about the movements of centuries or battles or philosophies, and when they turned back to the class they continued speaking as if the tall girl was not still standing, her mouth ajar, blocking the view of those behind, but still full of undelivered questions. They would learn to expect her and would finally look around at the beginning of the lecture to see from which bench she would rise, and would recognise her in the quadrangle, and nod, and smile a watchful smile to show they knew but that they would not be impressed.
It is a shock to me, I confessed to F. J. Stroud, who continued to be willing to be made conspicuous as the boy in black beside the standing girl. I expected something else. F. J. Stroud sneered, but did not intend cruelty. What did you expect? he wanted to know. Wisdom? The bedlam of the lunchtime bells strained after a melody--it might have been "Greensleeves" or just as well "Ye Banks and Braes"--but could only produce clamour. Wisdom, he said when we had passed out of the quadrangle. You will not find it here.
I was not sure that anything as complete as wisdom, or an answer, was what I was after. Even one satisfying question would have done me.

If you have fifteen minutes, you should play this song while you read over this text.  I'm on your side, sure, but so is the Lord our Father.

I always hated school pictures. Your teacher would hand you that black plastic comb, and your smile got phonier as the line shrunk in front of you, your eyebrows raised like you just won the raffle at the end of the dance and your teeth clenched tight so your jaw jutted out over your knees. And your mom always made a big fuss about it and mailed wallet sizes to all her friends and hung up an 8 x 10 in the hall, and you didn't even recognize the kid staring out at you. And that's who'll be remembered. Not you, alive and lonely, but that stiff-necked little stranger.

He's out there again today, right in front of the Mellow Mushroom, where a month ago he was improvising a song that went, "What we need is a universal love song, in a language everyone can understand." But this time he isn't singing or strumming his electric guitar without an amp. He's curled up in a ball on a bench in downtown Auburn, I can only assume he's praying for me.

A few weeks ago I was eating dinner alone at the Barbecue House, waiting forty-five minutes for an experiment to run so I could get home and wind down, stressed out from a hard week at school and depressed as hell watching people on the news wade through the toxic wasteland of New Orleans. I had revealed my own self-absorption when I started worrying about my chances of attending graduate school at Tulane next year, and I still didn't know what to do with all that self-disgust. I was fed up with all of us talking smugly from five hours away, nothing constructive or even sympathetic. So close, yet so far.

Six locals in the sunny restaurant had been interviewing a family from New Orleans through the steam coming off their Brunswick stew: whether they knew if their house was still standing, when they would get to go back and see, what they would do in the meantime. A woman with a loud political southern accent showing engagement rings to a sorority girl motioned to the television in the corner saying, "You know, watching all this, I almost feel selfish talking about diamonds in here."
I shook some more hot sauce into my stew and tried to think of something nice to say.

As the family rose to leave the woman said to them, "I'll give you a great deal. I get calls from people from all over the south who've heard about me from friends."
The sorority girl agreed emphatically, "Oh yes, she's the very best!"
The family smiled politely and walked out the door, driving off in their minivan to god knows where. I stared at the diamond hawker bitterly through the fizz coming off my third refill of Diet Coke and walked, pious and complacent, back to the lab to finish my procedure. That night I spent hours in Taylor's studying rather than going home to unwind, drinking down the dark roast like it was the Eucharist blood, sucking on my pencil like unleavened bread.

But it didn't cover my sins, nor hers, and my studies have done less than her diamonds for the people of Katrina.

The last three songs on Björk's Homogenic have been surprisingly motivating to me lately. It's a really angry album, about finding indepence after a bad relationship, but it ends with a sort of release, an acceptance of life's inconveniences and a move towards embracing humanity in its flaws, opening oneself up to love in spite of everything.

(favorite line: the less room you give me, the more space i've got)

Alarm Call

I have walked this earth and watched people
I can be sincere and say I like them
you can't say no to hope
can't say no to happiness

I want to go on a mountaintop
with a radio and good batteries
and play a joyous tune
and free the human race from suffering

I'm no fucking Buddhist
but this is enlightenment
the less room you give me
the more space I've got

this is an alarm-call so wake up wake up now
today has never happened
and it doesn't frighten me

Pluto

excuse me
but i just have to
explode
explode this body
off me

i'll wake up tomorrow
brand new

a little bit tired
but brand new

All is Full of Love

you'll be given love
you'll be taken care of
you'll be given love
you have to trust it

maybe not from the sources
you have poured yours

maybe not from the directions
you are staring at

trust your head around
it's all around you
all is full of love
all around you

all is full of love : you just ain't receiving
all is full of love : your phone is off the hook
all is full of love : your doors are all shut

all is full of love

As she lowered herself to a log, she could see how the pattern of the water changed as it made its way past a rock that jutted from the river. The river did not stop at its base, wailing, blocking all the water coming after it. No, it continued to flow, parted, foamed, but then became whole again after it had passed the rock, leaving its impact on the rock, just as the impact of every hour she had lived was still with her, shaping her like the people who had fed her dreams. All at once she felt as if she were the river, swirling in an ever-changing design around the rock, separating and coming together again without letting herself get snagged into scummy pools. Over the years, she had learned more from the river than from any one person, and what she'd been taught had always come with passion--intense pain or joy. It was the nature of the river to be both turbulent and gentle; to be abundant at times and lean at others; to be greedy and to yield pleasure. And it would always be the nature of the river to remember the dead who lay buried beneath its surface.
What the river was showing her now was that she could flow beyond the brokenness, redeem herself, and fuse once more. If that rock was her love for Hanna, she could let it stop her, block her--or she could acknowledge the rock and have respect for it, alter her course to move around it. She had to smile because, for a moment there, it looked as if the water were trying to crawl upstream, back across the surface of the rock in dozens of small hands, reaching against the stream, defying the current. And that was good. Over the years the rock would be transformed, just like the countless stones at the bottom of the riverbed, stones you couldn't see; they affected the flow but didn't impede its progress, its momentum, its destination. She could see how she had it in her to start out loving and become vindictive--and how she needed to take a look at her love and make sure it was whole before she could offer it to anyone.

--Stones from the River, by Ursula Hegi

It seems I'm in a constant state of self-improvement. To God's unending annoyance, no doubt. I've been thinking a lot about pain, and my problems that have resulted from that pain. I've also been watching some of my friends make decisions in response to their pain that I would not like to make for myself. I have felt the weight of vertigo begging me to fall into my pain with them. My college friendships have served to show me many things, and one of the most valuable lessons I have learned is about the many subtle ways in which I am selfish. I learned at Camp SAM that it really isn't that hard to love someone after all: even a total stranger, even if you're totally dysfunctional, even if you're the most selfish person in the world. You just make a conscious effort to get over yourself and look at the needs of that total stranger. No greater love than to lay down one's life for a friend. I succeeded, for the most part, in doing so for a week, with strangers that I never have to see again.
Back in the real world, however, I found myself less successful. The truth is, it is hard to make that decision. It's the hardest thing we'll ever have to do. But it's the only thing worth doing. Outrageously.

We were discussing anorexia in Reading the Body when someone called it, passingly, a "selfish problem." I was surprised by her wording, although she was getting at something else, and I got distracted by a tangent: all problems are selfish. I have these painful things that have happened in my life, that have messed up the way I see things, at times causing me to turn inward, retreat into well-defined defense mechanisms, exploit other people for my own desires. Everyone does. Ectopia cordis. We have these problems, caused by pain. As long as we think about ourselves, hold tightly to the pain, we are prisoners of the problems that the pain has caused.

To gain your life you have to lose it.

Not that we're supposed to reject our pain, act like it didn't happen, tell ourselves someone else must have felt something worse. Nor can we say that our pain is greater than another's, that what happened to us differentiates us, excuses us from the generous forgiveness Christ demonstrated. Hegi makes that point clear. "Ah, but we can't do that--compare our pain," says the Jew hiding from Nazis in the main character's house. "It minimizes what happens to us, distorts it. We need to say, yes, this is what happened to me, and this is what I'll do with it."

So, what am I going to do with it? Am I going to hold on to the painful experiences I've had to go through, and allow them to shape the way my life turns out? Or am I going to let the waters of life run around them, embrace them, softening them and transforming them into something positive, enriching, human? If you ever ask someone to pray with you for deliverance from some sort of sin pattern, that person will probably lead you, right from the start, through a prayer of forgiveness. Before you can be free from a real problem (we call this a "stronghold" in Christianese), you have to let go of the grudges you hold towards the people and circumstances who have caused you to develop the problem. I've done this, several times. But the ultimate choice remains mine every morning: will I fold gracefully around the stones in the river of my history? Or will I fight against them until I'm snagged in scummy pools, stagnant and stinky and alone?

September is a difficult month, because the sun beats down from that funny angle with all that it has, but the humidity is gone and you just know that this is its last effort. All around campus this week I've been coming across the dead bodies of locusts, white bellies to the sky and delicate wings disassembled by ravenous ants. That characteristic drone that provides a summer day its special air of comfortable oppression has grown softer, but somehow more desparate. The dwindling survivors must call louder to their few remaining friends, and every day someone else fails to call back.
September is like that.

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

--from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes I forget why God gave me glasses--to remind me that I can't see much ahead of me: I can't even see past my elbow when I hold my hands out. I can draw connections between the aspects of a moment. I'm good at that. Very analytical and all. And I'm learning how to see things (through those corrective lenses first), to capture an instant's subtleties with my parents' dusty Canon. It's thrilling, but, it's not really seeing. Not how I'd like to. I'm too often looking back, when I'm feeling particularly good. But mostly I'm just staring squarely at my feet. How does one see (and not just look) outside oneself? I wish I knew what was going on. Not just in my little existence, but in eternity. This moment here is pretty useless, severed from the flow of time. I hardly ever remember exactly when I took a specific picture, and all those sloppy journals seem like someone else's artifacts. What's really going on, is what I would like to know.

Epicurus said that eating alone is the life of a wolf. He thought that the whole point of life was to enjoy yourself as much as possible, but that it was pointless if you don't have a few good friends to enjoy it with. So he moved into a big house with a lot of other intellectual types to eat good food and drink good wine (in moderation, of course, for he abhorred over-indulgence) and form a whole philosophy out of it. The part about pleasure being the meaning of life is pretty much bullshit, as far as I can tell, but he's on to something with the part about the friends.

I passed a guy sitting cross-legged on the floor of an off-to-the-side hallway in Parker this morning. He was hunched over a tupperware bowl eating something that looked like sawdust, his face reflecting up at him in the shiny brown linoleum. He glanced at me as I passed the way a dog will shift a little when you get too close to his food. And I thought, "Are we animals without each other?"

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

-Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)


They've started referring to the London bombings as "7/7," presumably to mirror the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, what we now refer to euphemimstically as "9/11."

I was a senior in high school on September 11, 2001, and we turned the television on in the middle of Macroeconomics just in time to see its greatest monument collapse. In between first and second periods, my classmates and I discussed whether they might be reinstating the draft for the war that would inevitably begin the next day. I'm still ashamed that, of all the possible reactions to such a situation, I was most concerned about whether I was going to be required to do anything about it.
Over the next several weeks, the football stadium turned into a rallying point of freedom, as the crowd rose together before the kickoff to sing enthusiastically, "I'm Proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free." In the mornings, my economics teacher would educate us on the secret workings of the world using charts and formulas and specialized jargon. She once led us through a deliberation over whether defending this machine would be worth her own students' lives. She couldn't say for sure. This was the semester that I lost my faith in my country, in countries altogether.
Shit, I lost my faith in people as a species.

September 11th was so horrifying to me because thousands of individuals died for something that they personally had nothing to do with. Autonomous moral agents with distinct lives they had created for themselves were reduced to a category. Americans.
This sacrifice of individual lives for the sake of a political statement is how I choose to define terrorism.
But pay attention to the rhetoric we're using in the west to retaliate. It's the war on terror. It's the Americans (or the west or democracy or Israel or whomever) versus the Terrorists. Us and Them. We have conveniently reduced these depraved or brainwashed or tormented souls (but souls nonetheless) to a faceless group of evil that we have the duty and the right to eradicate. The irony of this reverse "terrorism" aside, fighting back with this sort of attitude seems savagely disrespectful to the victims. Terrorists are not so much bad because they kill people as they're bad because they dehumanize the individual. So in responding as a nation--singing patriotic songs at football games as we did, and now adopting a formated dating system--we are accepting the dehumanization of the individuals who died. We are right and they are wrong. And we are even embracing it: adopting it in order to dehumanize the individuals who started it.
This isn't a medicine we'd like to give them a dose of, is it? How dare they defy democracy? is absolutely the wrong question. How dare they defile humanity?

We can't handle mentioning the actual event. The tragedy is too painful, so we speak of it in terms of the date on which the event occurred. But after five more years of this will we not only refer to 9/11 and 7/7, but 5/18 and 1/22 and 12/25? Will these dates of terrorist attacks come to reflect the act of terrorism itself--individual bombings causing the deaths of individuals lumped into a political/historical/analytical anonymity?

But here's where the really terrifying part comes in, as the quote I opened with brought this whole topic to light in my mind: I can't conceive of any better way to solve the problem.

Go ahead, then. Nuke 'em all to hell.