End Title for a Blog: There Are No Angels in America, or How the Great Work Begins

I never much cared for blogging.

I hate the idea of having my words published for any eye to see and judge.  Well, no, not judge.  Judging is okay.  Human.  But being my own worst critic, the thought was horrifying, to say the least.

Well, here I am, ten weeks wiser, ten weeks older, and I survived.  We all have.  And that's funny, to word it that way, when we have spent all of our time speaking of one the greatest survival stories in the entire world...the survival of this country.  This America.

Let's get right down to the meat on those bones, shall we?

Part I, or Surviving the Soul:

Mather and Hawthorne are first, On Witchcraft and Young Goodman Brown, respectively, both distinctly separate entities, and yet, both unequivocally tied to the same Faith, the same Fear.

Part II, or Surviving the Body:

Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative not only bridges the gap between the American Soul and the American Body, it serves as the perfect introduction into the later texts of The Conquest of New Spain and The Coquette.

Part III, or Surviving the Mind:

That leaves Mr. Poe and Ms. Dickinson, acolytes of the Mind and of Thought, if not always of Reason.  They are, of course, the two figures who bring all three parts together to form one American Whole, the whole reason I'm here now, about to explode, I mean, explore, why we even bothered at all...

To be honest, I never cared much for America.  Can't say I do, still.  But that does not, in any shape or shapeless form, translate to an indifference or disrespect.  This country has me in awe, and I find myself more and more aware of the fact that it is, in fact, growing on me...slowly, one could almost say imperceptibly, but there it is.  My first of a few confessions.  What could have I expected out of a country born of so many contradictions, a hodge-podge of so many faces and cultures, of so many dying civilizations and so many new ones just opening their eyes to the big, bright world!  This country IS paradox, IS change...and so, refuses any names, and demands all of them, all at once, and never again.  At first you have the Sinning (at the hands of an angry God, of course), and anyone who tells me this country was born out of Love is shitting me and deserves the very punishment they are denying the Puritans inflicted on this land.

Yes, the punishment, because that is all Mather talks about in his rambles.  The punishment of ignorance and how it punishes the intelligent few keen enough (and sage enough) to walk off that proverbial beaten path and...and what?  Be damned, be sent to Hellish places, be lied to, be treated like Children with no mind and no conscience.  Be mind-drugged and sedated, be made into nameless sheep in the herds upon herds on which this America would be built.  Are we really still surprised today that Religion is not only Public Enemy but also Public Savior No. 1?  Of course it is!  That's the greatest paradox this country has to offer: a quiet little war between both sides of the coin, neither right or wrong, but both stubbornly refusing to give in, killing millions of innocent people in the process (yes, millions), because a death does not just have to end in funerals...it too can end in the snuffing out of thinking, of questioning.  In silence.  Is this not, at least in part, what Hawthorne talks of?

Goodman Brown, after all, is left condemned, damned as he was, and damned as he wasn't.  There IS no solution or resolution, there is only the inescapable cycle of viciousness and irony, of knowing America is the product of its own vices and virtues, and that it cannot (will not!) escape its own trappings until its inhabitants find a way to come together as American Citizens and fight what they themselves are doing to it.  9/11 should not be our only call to arms.  In a way, it was more than a wake-up call...it was a warning bell to what had been there all along.  America began on a rock so many years ago, and before we had even stepped onto fresh land, America's soul was already at stake, already on the verge of being lost...

People fought back.  Entire civilizations really.  Ask Ms. Rowlandson.  Ask any of the other women taken captive by the Native Americans, a clear response to the very violence and the very injustice done to them, the 'Reds', by these foreign creatures, these 'Whites'.  And the color play is amazing, is it not, that Red is blood and White is pure and yet it is the White that kills first and the Blood that tries for bargaining before anyone else.  This country knows no order, just continues to feed itself by the very notions it destroys and creates from that destruction, a Phoenix rising over and over from the very ashes it wishes to obliterate.  And then came the Conquistadors, to prove that it isn't just the Puritans, but also the Spaniards (and the Portuguese, and the French, etc. et etc....) that want a piece of this American Body, this American Flesh.  Oh yes, there will be blood...and I harbor no secret when I say The Conquest of New Spain is my prime example for how we turned out the way we did (we being America).

Please do refer back to my blog on that one, no sense in repeating myself when there's still so much to cover!

Which brings me to The Coquette, perhaps an even more damaging violence committed to America, and one, sadly, which rings truer day by day (even if we have learned to hide it better all the same).  Martin Scorsese once called his adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence "the most violent movie I've ever made."  It should be of no great consequence then, that it was that violence of which he speaks of that most critically wounded this country: the violence to our Free Will.  And yes, we have the Amendment, don't we, but writing down that you have Liberty does not guarantee it so (hey, slavery never happened here, right?  Surely not!).  Sometimes, this country provides the punchline to the jokes from which it tries to hide...from which it tries to protect itself from.  Eliza was doomed from the start, by trying to choose with her heart and her mind, with her soul, and in that long end, finding herself unable to penetrate the frigid heart of a society uncaring and uninterested in responding as individuals, in accessing themselves as cohesive beings that could, potentially, talk and react as more than just One People, as true fellows...as Americans.

This is what happens when we create things on Idea alone.  This is what happens when we create things in a Place of Fear.  The stink lingers on, and once we've learned the poisoned lessons, the sting is hard to wear off, if it ever does at all...

Then came Poe and Dickinson, like antidotes, much akin to Thoreau and Emerson, to Whitman, and to the Greats who we didn't mention or talk about.  They ARE America too...and the reasons why it works, why this fucking country works, even when ill put-together, even when struggling against its own ambivalences and ambiguities...even when struggling to just survive.  And what a journey it's been, from Fear to Violence to Silence back to Fear and Ignorance and back to Violence and Bloodshed and back to that Silence, back to that Quietness, but always returning, time and time again, to these wonderful Pieces of the Written Word of America, figures so illustrious and everlasting, they don't need the country's weaknesses to make them strong...they stand defiantly by themselves, each one of them a Colossus of this Land.  Because they refused to leave their room, because they refused to deny the perversities of their own mind's eye (and reveled in it, enthralled audiences with its uncanny familiarity and strangeness), because they defied civilization and lived in a cabin in solitude...because they were themselves, and because it is to them who we owe this American Identity we proudly emblazon on our bodies, hearts, on our beating, wingless souls.

I may not like America, but I love America, and I may not understand how it got here, but I see how it came to be how it is.  I may not have always been there, sound mind and spirit, in class or out of class, but I could always see the road, the mythical, destructive, beautiful, terrifying, stupefying, infuriating, blessed, miraculous, infernal, wordless, soundless, faceless road where I walked, and where the Native Americans walked, and where each and every Slave walked, and where Washington stood his ground, and where Lincoln changed minds, and where I arrived, safe at home, and yet not at home, to sit and talk and listen and hope, that these great minds, these Gods, could teach us all, could learn us all, and could shine the light on this America, and why, why, it reigns over us, why it will never die, even as it kills, even as it sings, even as it feels, and even as it clears itself of all possible feeling...it's perhaps too on the point, too ironic (or not ironic enough) to mention, but America is just a baby.

And all babies know nothing except what they want, and what they don't want, reacting with their emotions, only to find, in their adult life, that it is in the retrospective where we derive our meaning, our purpose.  And perhaps that's the rub, the Key...

Maybe we need to let America grow up.  Let it sink in, let it simmer.  And I hope, I so hope, I can live in this America and know, without any doubts or confusion, that it has learned the lessons, the hard and well-fought lessons, from which it grew its Name.

In the meantime, I have nothing but more explosions, more rage, more love...and one more quote, perhaps the most important one I can give.  The one that holds truest today, and the one that changed my American life...enjoy.

"I hate America, Louis.  I hate this country.  It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you.  The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing.  He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it.  That was deliberate.  Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me...I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it.  You do that.  Everybody’s got to love something." - Belize, Angels in America by Tony Kushner

Goodbye, readers.  Thank you for obliging.

To our great works, and to the works behind us...to you, to me, to us...may the best be yet to come, and may our Revelations unfold...one Mighty Word at a time...

Age of Loneliness...or How I Broke Free (A Final Rant)

If I remember correctly, and I tend to with personal matters, my first 'real' friend came in the beginning of eighth grade.  We no longer speak to each other...why?  Time, of course.  My next 'real' friend came when I moved to Florida from Jersey halfway through my sophomore year of high school.  We remain best friends today.  So, the lesson was well learned, it seems.  Whether by living close to each other even during summer and winter breaks, or by luck, or by the force of our own quiet wills, or hey, even by love...we've managed to make it past nearly our entire college careers as friends, real, legitimate Friends.

This wasn't always the case with me.  I was a child of self-fun and self-actualization (I'm sure I must have mentioned this before, no?).  Now, I did not have a pretty garden to tend to, having no green thumb to speak of (that's my father and to a lesser degree my mother) but I kept a tidy, near medicinally sparse room, full of the Things I loved, mainly movies and video games and my books (the few I could bring myself to read over and over again).  Posters were there too, stuffed pandas, stuffed dogs, and boy, did I love my room, in all of its incarnations, in all of its colors (forest green in Jersey being my favorite to this day), in all of its imperfect, cracked little parts...and in a way, that's who I was: my own room.  I distinctly remember one winter break, anticipating the arrival of the latest Harry Potter movie (Azkaban, I believe) and realizing it would be directed right and, to my gasps, fit for someone not under 8 years old (sorry, but those first adaptations were absolute shit).  So I prepared myself.  Not having read any of the books beforehand and not having seen the first 2 films until they arrived on DVD, I went out to the library, all 5 minutes from my house, and got all the books.

And I read, starting with the third and moving, in typical form for me, in non-chronological order (it went 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, then eventually 6 and 7).  Every morning, my parents already at work, I'd get up, my bed unmade, no sun to speak off, the heater clanking away the chill, and make breakfast: 4 buttered toasts and a hot mug of coffee with milk to dip my bread in.  I'd place it all on a tray and take it to my room and I'd begin plowing through each book, oftentimes taking breaks to check sites on the Internet or to watch the trailers for Azkaban just one more time.  Oh, and yes, I had the soundtracks...they played all throughout my mornings.  It's 7:21 p.m., on Tuesday, March 16, 2o10...and that week remains the most innocent and glorious week I've ever had.  Period, and signed.

I can imagine now, how proud Dickinson would be, if she were to know how quick I took to solitude, how much of it filled me, how much of it delighted me, knowing I could never venture into the world of social interaction, into those mythical little sandboxes, and play...and play at what?  At pretend?  Feign the knowledge of a sports team I didn't know, or a movie I didn't care for, or a girl I knew I'd never kiss?  Yes, I chose to be alone, but chose because there was no alternative, because as all of us know, the world of childhood is not for the faint of heart.  And I had, willingly or not, no armor and no NEED to get bloody, to shed new skin and grow thicker fur.  To be a 'man'.  And Ms. Dickinson...I get it.  I really do.  It's why I painted that little picture above, a little slice of Me, so you could see full well how wondrous and how necessary time for the Self can be, alone and away from everything else that's living, if only for a week (though it was years, for me), but a week that you spend with no one except you...and learn, and see, and hear, and speak to no one.  It should come as no surprise to you, then, Ms. Dickinson...that it did not last.  That, in the end, I sought to open my door, and refuse to ever step back inside alone.

It was the end of January '04, freshly arrived from Jersey into the ghettos of Miami (no need for pity, I'm actually quite fond of them) and thrust onto a different stage: I needed friends.  I lived in a room for three months, one box to my name (and full of nothing but books and movies, mind) and it was lodged underneath the computer (an old, buggy one at that) that I was borrowing, and there, in the makeshift bungalow my parents and I called home while we tried to find a way to settle ourselves in this new place...I made the choice to make friends.  They had happened to me out of accident, or lucky chance, "because I was there" kind of logic...but I knew if I intended to make it out alive, I needed support.  I needed something more than myself.

The first few weeks were rough.  I'd walk the mile, mile and a 1/2 to the school, psyching myself into talking, into doing anything, but to make enough of an impression so as to know I'd find somewhere else to sit in the outside cafeterias that wasn't so...after school special.  But I survived, and sure enough, once I found the theatre there, it was golden, I was in!  I had made my impression.  And two years later...it was done.  It was over.  And none of the 'friends' I made in the black box I called 'home' during my time in that fucking bomb shelter (serious, I can show you pictures if you'd like, my school was a fucking box) are my Friends now.  Not a single one.  And perhaps I should be clearer as to what a Friend is, so there's no misunderstanding.  Some of them I still talk to, some of them I even hang out with, some of them I see a lot of days, some of them I've never seen since graduation...acquaintances, friends of friends, etc. et etc....these are not friends, these are people with recognizable faces.  I think that's clear enough, because if I must define friendship, I would rather do it without words, and then, what would the blog serve its purpose for?

I'd like to play the blame game, but in the end, it all came down to me.  I hadn't quite mastered the art of making friends (because it IS an art, don't let anyone tell you otherwise) so, to be blunt about it, everything I had turned to gold turned right back into shit.  And I won't go into it.  Water under the bridge makes the bridge a bridge, right?  So I won't go into it.  And whether or not it was me, or them, or someone else, or Destiny, or a deus ex machina...no one will ever know.  But I learned the lessons necessary to move on from it...took 2 more years, but I learned them.

College came quickly, and thankfully, it WAS the different beast promised to me.  Yes, it's still high school redressed and refurnished, but only if you look with shallow eyes.  College did not let me down, and that was hard to accept.  Oh, I should mention, spending most of your childhood in a foreign country learning the language and avoiding interaction with your peers (though not the teachers, I could always talk for hours with them, strangely enough) does NOT make you a trustful person.  6th grade was, to say the least, the bottom of the barrel as far as my life is concerned.  Rough.  Haha...that laugh full of irony because only now do I laugh, thinking back on how time makes even the shit storms the funnier BECAUSE you managed to wipe the shit off and like your life anyway.  Stubborn mortals.  But back to college: 'real' friends.  Hordes of them.  Well, okay, not hordes.  But people being genuine, being imperfect little fucks, trying your patience and your love, but owning you in a way you've never known you could BE owned (and like it), sharing stories and nuggets of living, crying and laughing with you or around you, yelling and tensions (sexual or otherwise), etc. et etc.  The good stuff.  The little things.

Did you experience all of these things in your room, Ms. Dickinson?

There are times, especially now, Graduation Day looming even closer, when I wish I hadn't made any choices and had stayed in my rooms.  Always.  Nothing lost, nothing to mourn, nothing to regret.  And nothing found, nothing to love, nothing to remember.  Nothing except what I create, and what I imagine, and what is me, what is nothing but me.  I'm sorry, Ms. Dickinson, but words are words, and no matter how beautiful we string them together, they still do not even approximate the experience of the Life.  It is perhaps the Word's greatest downfall, that if we did not know you were holed up for most of your life, if we had believed you to be like us, one of the Day Walkers (Heh), then your poetry remains great, remains Legend.  That we can believe what you've written even when we know you didn't experience the lot of it (sure, some, but certainly not the bulk) is astonishing...what miracle these words are, to make believers out of liars, and liars out of believers.  HOWEVER, that's unnecessarily harsh, because Inner Life is key too. Hell, some would say its the whole fucking Kingdom!  Let me take the rest of this white space, Ms. Dickinson, to give you my thanks, and repay what you've given me so freely.

Living outside one's room and trying to be the same person inside is almost impossible.  The imagined realities and even people start melting together with 'real' places and 'real' people.  How many times have I confused who I thought someone to be with who they really were?  I can't even count...but that's part of the adventure, it's part of walking out the door.  We will never stop wanting what we want to BE what is actually out there waiting for us.  But Ms. Dickinson, thank you, thank you...for refusing to give in to life's second-hand rose.  You asked for the most beautiful one in the world, and you found it, all the time, waiting inside you.  I contend with the world daily, inner and outer, for some sweet compromise between the two.  I still haven't found what I'm looking for (I hear ya, Bono), but each day is a day closer, and hey, what's one more day in the long succession of days.  All of this to say that it is no better to be a man or woman of the world than to be a man or woman of one's simple room.  It is merely a question of finding what is right for you, and what is not, of how far we're willing to go and how much we're willing to put of ourselves out there, for whatever purposes.

Thousands of poems later, and Ms. Dickinson worked for the same goals I am.  We are.  She didn't step out, but I did...and in that garden between the choices, I think we'll find our peace.

I leave you with these Quotes of Note and a clip that I hope leaves you smiling, and wanting a piece of what it offers...pure, pure release.  Take a load off, Spring is here.  See you all 'round the bend...

Quotes of Note:

"You left me boundaries of pain

Capacious as the sea,

Between eternity and time,

Your consciousness and me."

"If certain, when this life was out,

That yours and mine should be,

I'd toss it yonder like a rind,

And taste eternity."

"I hide myself within my flower,

That wearing on your breast,

You, unsuspecting, wear me too---

And angels know the rest."

"When that which is and that which was

Apart, intrinsic, stand,

And this brief tragedy of flesh

Is shifted like a sand;

When figures show their royal front

And mists are carved away,---

Behold the atom I preferred

To all the lists of clay!"

"No tie to earths to come,

Nor action new,

Except through this extent,

The realm of you."

Poem XLVI (yes, the whole bloody thing, because it's my favorite):

"He fumbles at your spirit

As players at the keys

Before they drop full music on;

He stuns you by degrees,

Prepares your brittle substance

For the ethereal blow

By fainter hammers, further heard,

Then nearer, then so slow

Your breath has time to straighten,

Your brain to bubble cool,---

Deals one imperial thunderbolt

That scalps your naked soul."

I Want To Break Free (this movie is high camp, and I recommend it for any group viewing parties that demand its kitsch or flair...highly recommended!)

Civil Disobedience in a Slave Girl (An Interlude)

Harriet Jacobs was a slave.  One cannot question the fact without questioning the validity of history's say-so in her life.  However, she kept a very specific part of her that leads me to believe, as I usually do, that slavery for Ms. Jacobs was not a simple, cut-and-dry process that stripped her of all freedoms and choice.  On the contrary, I think she rightfully tried to take what was hers already, and made the choice to not sit by and remain a slave.  Slavery, ladies and gentlemen, is both a choice and a punishment.

First...the punishment.  One does not choose to want to be a slave, certainly one does not choose to work the sugar canes, or the master's home, to be whipped and chained, to be spat on, to be berated, to be branded...none of these things we choose even at our most masochistic, at our most sadistic.  All of this is thrown upon us by the "greater" forces (i.e. the White Man) we cannot stop or hold back.  To make matters worse for Ms. Jacobs, her slavery took on different facets...it wasn't just relegated to the work.  Mr. Sands, the father of her children, is the owner of her body, whether or not she understands it or not.  Dr. Flint is the master of her living, both daily and otherwise.  His wife, Mrs. Flint, is the tormentor of her mind, there to make sure she does not rest, does not have one easy moment coming.  Slavery for her is, in a twisted, unbearable manner, the key for her survival...it is through these obstacles, these impossible No's, that Ms. Jacobs is able to confront herself and say Yes, above all things, say Yes!

But what was she saying yes to?  Her freedom?  Or something less tangible?  I believe she was saying Yes to herself, independent of her body, independent of her spirit, both in a state of broken repair, both subject to cruelty and despair.  But Ms. Jacobs took hold of her own choices, and in doing so, ceased to be a slave.  Ceased to let that be a punishment.  She was still bound to her master, still bound to the punishment, but neither he nor it could fully overcome her now, neither could claim they knew or had her in their independent (and collective) grasps.  Since she recognized herself as a human being, since she could see the paradox of being a slave and being a free thinker, it is of no great coincidence that it is in Henry David Thoreau where we can look to truly dip our hands into the waters of not only slavery in Early America, but the consequences of this barbarism on Ms. Jacobs's society then...and now.  In her way, Ms. Jacobs was a poster child for the ever-relevant Civil Disobedience.

Had Ms. Jacobs been a free woman (though she was in her mind, she remained shackled otherwise) she would have been a staunch observer and supporter of Thoreau's claim that it is in our government where we must put our faith...and yet, not the American Government, not the one established during her time, during Thoreau's time.  Being primarily an agent of corruption and injustice, this American Idea of Democracy had, for all intensive purposes, failed in promising the most important ideal for all humans on Earth: the right to reign free.  How can the government stand for something and then allow something contradictory to continue to happen?  This central contradiction is what drives Ms. Jacobs and Thoreau, what pushes them both to the boundaries of their own thinking and believing...to really take a stand and say, NO, I will not let you lead me astray.  Strong of will and strong of spirit, the both of them learned how to keep the demons at bay (whether they be your Master or Law, it doesn't matter) and fight, always FIGHT, for what was always rightfully theirs.  See, Civil Disobedience is just another phrase for Being Free.

Ms. Jacobs should be commended for keeping herself pure from the influences of the evils that tried to tie her down.  She should be commended for daring to be liberated even as a slave girl.  She should be commended, if only simply, because she deigned to be something greater than what America tried to make of her...then what she knew.

To Thine Own Self Be True: Between the Selfish Heart and the Selfish Mind (A Self-Reliant Rant)

I am a self-actualized man.  Or boy, depending on the day.  And why is this so?  As all things with life, if one pays enough attention...I was forced into self-actualization by circumstance.

When I boarded the plane from Havana to Miami, October 1995...it took me an additional two years, on another plane, back to Cuba, from Miami...to realize the great irony that my life had just planted at my feet.  It was in that moment that I, unconsciously and consciously, understood what it was to say hello and goodbye in the very same breath.  It was then that I began to plant my feet firmly in the realm of self-reliance.  It took me, I'd say, fourteen more years to come to this point, and say, without a doubt...I still do not know who I am, but I know, always now, that I am the only one I need to survive in the world.  This is not a selfish quest we're on, but one that is incredibly harder to define (and gets harder and harder with each year, it seems).  My friends, my brothers, my family...they are all in me too, yes...and being together is a great pleasure and a great privilege.  One I take so seriously it even sometimes gets in the way of everything else.  But they can never bring me down, and nor can I ever impose my own life on them.  This is Emerson's plea...we must listen to our hearts first and foremost, because THAT is how we can listen to another's, that is how we can love.

I have been ready to say my goodbyes since the first hellos.  This is the way it’s always been for me, and I hazard a guess…the way it’ll always be for everyone else, whether they realize it or not.  The problem with connecting, with that desire to know another, to love another, is that it always passes, travels from person to person, emotion to emotion, and never settles into anything but the transient being it creates between two people, the invisible third hand or foot that allows you to keep the memories, allows you to remember how someone’s eyes looked when cast against dusk, how someone’s words hurt you too much to imagine, how you saw them last, or for the first time.  All we are left with, in the end, are the traces of the people we’ve left behind, the people that have left US behind.  Self-reliance, then, is an act of selflessness.  It’s a protection against one of life’s harshest inevitabilities…we all must end up alone in order to face ourselves.  Emerson says, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.”  That's precisely what we keep if we don't let ourselves be carried by our own regrets, by our own attempts at salvaging and recovering what does not want to be saved or recovered.  If time is cruel, we are crueler still to believe we can do anything to stop it, or to make it run any slower.

And what is this integrity of mind?  For me, it's keeping very clear that we must rule ourselves FIRST, and we must do what is RIGHT for us above everything else.  This is not meant to be a selfish decision, but one of self-preservation, as said before, because no matter how many people surround us today, they can do nothing in the acts of our lives except watch and spew wisdom, what little of it remains in the world to spew.  My best friend can no more rule my life than my best enemy...it's up to me, and no one else.  This is why Emerson so crucially points that it is in the saving of our mind's purity, of its individuality, of its First Thought, where we save our own lives.  Emerson continues his thought by stating, "What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think."  It's just another form of independence...and if we are to follow others, if we really are meant to not have Original Thinking in life...then we would not die as ourselves, but as everyone else.  We would perish more alone than if we were to face solitude in the face.  It must, MUST be true then, that the only choice available to us is that of keeping our paths separate from another's, even when we walk it together, even when we share common ends, or beginnings.  Man is an island, even when no man is an island.  After all, "the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Not quite the perfect setup, but one of Emerson's most important points for me, and one of the most controversial I reckon, is his idea that "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," a statement which I happen to agree with.  We couldn't possibly hold ourselves to consistency...and how could we, living in a world full of contradictions, and paradox, and unknowns?  To live correctly, one must only look to the Self, and ask: Am I following you right?  Here in America especially it's considered a sign of fantastic character if one is reliable, punctual, and, to be blunt about it...a little dull.  The excitement of spontaneity, of not knowing what one wants at all hours of the day...all of that is looked down upon, ESPECIALLY in the world of our work, the most essential to our survival.  One could argue (and rationalize) this is so in order to avoid misunderstandings, to avoid problems of conflicting ideas and personalities...to keep, as Kanye West says, our love locked down.  Such a shame, then, to give up one's rights to never be pinned down to a personality trait, or a characteristic of mind, or a stereotype...a true shame, that the greatest work we will ever undertake, the work of Identity, is always the one most undermined by the Society in which it's meant to survive.

Let's not misunderstand, either!  Emerson isn't saying it's okay to be a flake, or to be unreliable, to live, as it were, on the whims of a day...no, he's merely saying that we cannot tie ourselves down to who we think we are, because, in the long run of our existence, who we think we are is an ever-changing cycle of emotions, wants, irrationalities...namely, everything that makes up the map of the world is also in us, and with that in mind: how can we possibly ask for anything even resembling continuity or absolutes?  Even more to Emerson's point, is that there's an inherent sadness, an inherent impossibility, in what he is asking his readers to do.  As he points out, "Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will."  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our lives, as they are.  I'm not entirely sure, though, that Emerson was unaware of the Catch-22 being presented...in fact, I think that's precisely more the reason to bring it up, to introduce it to the world...because THAT is how we grow and how we deal with not only self-reliance, and how to attain it, but also how to release people from our grips, how to release ourselves from theirs...how to stand alone, and know it not as a punishment, but as a right, and as a a gift.

That's all for now, folks, but let me leave you with this:

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men...that is genius."

Thanks for reading, and see you all next week.

I apologize beforehand for the spoilers within the clip, but I cannot imagine a more fitting tribute to self-actualization (AND the bittersweetness of it) than this glorious grace note from Harold and Maude.  Enjoy, and remember...

To Let Go

In This House of Mirth, We Shall Be Free: Injustices of Choice in Captivity (A Rant for a Lost Coquette)

The choice between Boyer and Sanford isn't necessarily a new one, even for Eliza Wharton.  It's a mythical, age-old decision, spanning quite possibly the entire world, for it hits one of the foundational structures of our lives, or rather, our lives as manufactured by society: choosing Right.

What that means, to be honest, I still don't know, because it demands of all of us the supposition that Right is, in fact, a universal truth, when we all know it's not, being one of the most important subjective ideals we carry inside ourselves.  Eliza was trapped, as all women of this age were, trapped because not only had they not yet truly begun to acquire their rights, but because, in reality, men hadn't really come around to the idea that they had any rights to begin with, thereby sealing them in this space of supposed-to and of rightful conduct, never once explaining or justifying why these things had to be so.

All of this, of course, leads into my rant of the week: Why does society, even to a degree now, force us into that corner, between choosing and the inability to choose, and expect a result that is uncomplicated and untangled in the body, in desire, hell...in society?  It's not possible, because if one provides a paradox, the only way to exit it is through another paradox, and then another, and another...another cycle of violence, this one taking place between the heart and the mind.  Boyer and Sanford, being vessels for society's own punishment and cruelty, are only guilty insofar as Eliza is guilty of falling in love and accepting her right (as a perfectly adequate human being) to say no to a comfortable life in favor of one that is thornier and more resilient to the placid dullness her society seemed to almost require in all affairs.  One cannot, CANNOT, put a price on desires, much less ask to visibly simplify them, to adjust and realign them so they fit into the schema of Society, of what we THINK is able to be understood, and NOT what is actually meant to be unearthed in such an understanding.  It's all about appearance here, and apparently, to be resistant to this superficiality meant you were outcast, and exiled, in unimaginably horrid ways (I've linked to it below, but do check out The House of Mirth for an equally harrowing portrayal of a Ruined Woman).

The worst part about it, of course, is that neither man would have satisfied her...she would have, regardless, ended giving up her desire and her happiness in exchange for something darker and much more inefficient: resignation.  It's true that her friends, few she had, tried to warn her at first, but that these warnings came at the price of gossip, of whisperings behind cloistered little drawing rooms, in the privacy of one's own dinner parties...well, none of that should be surprising, for that is the spring on which scandal flows, on which Society builds its own foundations.  Boyer was too stuffy, Sanford too liberated...no happy medium on which to grow love and affection, true or otherwise...and this is a delicate balance that sometimes isn't provided to us, having nothing to do with how good-hearted we are or not.  Life is very Objective like that sometimes, a harsh lesson Eliza was thrust under in her final years.  Plainly put, my main objection to the entire text (in reference to what it speaks to, not the words themselves) is that, once again, we let ourselves get carried with the Word and refuse to accept that each Word can, and usually does, have many meanings.

What I'm saying is: A woman isn't just a woman, but she's a Woman, and in this society especially, it was taken to be a free pass to judge and describe this Woman as one chose freely...giving in to the VERY dangerous trappings of simplifying and decoding what will ALWAYS refuse to be simplified and decoded.  A woman is also a human being, is also the carrier of blood, sweat, tears, organs, emotions, thought...she isn't  just a piece of clay, a mold we can move and deign to choose the path of, otherwise...what would be the point in being human?  We'd just be manipulated corpses, for that is all we are when we remove the inherent Paradox of being Alive (or being Woman, for that matter).

You see, Boyer or Sanford, Eliza would have never been happy, but she would have been a free woman, and you know, despite her horrible ends, I do agree she was, all the way until her very bitter final breaths.  This isn't to say she made the right choices, or knew what she was doing, etc....all this rant is meant to translate is the simple notion that we are choosing creatures, and can NEVER be satisfied with the life that is handed to us forcefully by societies, can never be okay with not being able to be okay with uncertainty and indecision...we must always be on the lookout for the next contradiction, for the next leap into madness and absurdity...things I'm sure would have made Eliza's life seem all the more typical.

Poor Woman, that not only could she not choose Right, but she wouldn't have known what Right was if it had stared her in the face.  Such is the folly of a society that names the unnameable, and then throws away the meaning...

Quotes of Note:

"Let me then enjoy that freedom which I so highly prize."

"Marriage is the tomb of friendship."

"I am anxious, lest you should be made the dupe of a coquette..."

"I am convinced of that excellence which I once slighted; and the shade of departed happiness haunts me perpetually!"

"Necessity, dire necessity, forced me into this dernier resort."

"I really wish she had less merit, that I might have a plausible excuse for neglecting her."

"I am too much ingrossed by my divinity, to take an interest in any thing else."

and, of course, what I found to be a most notorious quoting, from Proverbs 9:17: "Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant."

Here is a fantastic preview for an adaptation of a novel very close to The Coquette's heart: the aforementioned The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.  Have a look for yourself, and see if you don't see the parallels falling into one another:

A Ruined Woman, part II

The Catch-22 of a Conquering People: Death to Drive Us All (A Conquest Rant)

I was born out of Conquest.  And I'm here now, trying to rationalize the borderline between understanding the wrong of the Conquistador's actions, and humanizing them, if only for selfish reasons...otherwise, would I be able to say that the possibility of my birth, centuries after, would have still been made possible?

The problem with violence is...it has to grow from somewhere, from someplace.  In the case of the violence between Aztec and Conquistador...it never needed to grow...it had already seeded itself on both sides.  I hope I don't offend anyone when I say the Aztecs were not blameless in the War for Gold.  What is striking to me even now, after so many years of study, is how no one saw the brutal carnage coming!  If you sacrifice your children to God, chances are, you'll be sacrificing peace at all costs, to make sure you don't defy your God.  In this way, Aztecs were already mounting their own way of life against the backdrop of blood, of the very fabric which would tear them to shreds as soon as Cortes stepped through the jungles and told them only Gold could cure their hearts' disease.  I should mention that just now I almost mistyped  Gold as God, and ironic isn't it, that I'm not entirely sure it was an honest mistake...God and Gold, after all, went so hand in hand for Cortes.

All I'm trying to say is, calm can't grow out of chaos, and surely, Cortes and his Spaniards did not mean to go gently into that good night.  No matter how much we emasculate Montezuma and the Aztecs (which Diaz absolutely does just by sheer description of what they wore, how they lived, etc.) they too worked under the very same violence the Conquistadors did.  In fact, I'd say more so, because they SEXUALIZED their violence in a way Cortes and his men didn't...you guessed it, until they arrived in the New World.  Something quite curious happened, I believe, the moment Aztec and Spaniard came together, giving birth (well...not birth, but at the very least create a new chapter in its evolution) to an entirely new form of violence, one which, to this day, gives many of us pause...

The violence of desire and the body.

Hear me out now.  I think it was the audacity in which the Aztecs threw themselves at the glory of their bodies, of the sacrificial quality of Body, that proposed, almost instinctually, the Spaniards' own equally Violent response.  It isn't enough that the heart is ripped out, but that it is shown to the Glory of God, raised high above the death, and in truth, signifying the life that has just been taken, taken in a most ritualized, and most eroticized manner.  How else could Cortes have responded in kind?  Montezuma took them in, suspicious and full of the fear that'd eventually cause his empire's crumble, but it's not as if Cortes had been unaware of what the Aztecs did to appease their God.  It was the very thing the Conquistador did for his Gold.  When two forces collide, two forces so similar in means and so similar in ways, there isn't any end or beginning, there is only an expansion of the Violence, a growth of tensions between the winning side and the side that has to inevitably lose.

Take a box with infinite squares inside, all of them boxes too, and take a people that grow to believe Violence and Ritual to be nearly co-dependent, to be normalized, and understood as traditional and expected...take all of this and put it in the box, then add a Conquistador, another people with the exact mindset but for opposite ends (i.e. the abolition of the former occupants in this hypothetical box)...what will you get?  Violence...infinite amounts of it, because no matter how evolved and how much each box grows within each box, within each box, within each box...the violence IS the norm, and for two cultures unwilling to try Change and unwilling to bend and break to the wills of Nature and the cultural landscapes on which both Aztec and Conquistador traversed...there is nothing doing except the vicious cycle on which they based their own mutual destruction (and creation).  Make sense?

Despite all of this, and though The Aztec is now essentially lost forever, a part of that Symbol lives inside the Spaniard, for that is the greatest piece of the story that many people seem to forget: Cortes and his men may have slaughtered thousands, may have pillaged and raped in the name of the Lord, may have called Mexico their home when they had no right whatsoever to do so...but if they really wanted, if they really understood that to erase the past one cannot leave any traces behind, there would be no Diaz, there would be no Conquest of New Spain.  There would only be silence.

I was born out of Conquest, out of the impossible catch when two warring people crash into one another.  Cortes was King, but Montezuma was King first, and it is from those two stories that I can form my own.  Violence begets violence, it's true, but sometimes it deigns to spring new life...

Here is a particularly adequate link, concerning Freud's Death Drive and one that I think holds true ESPECIALLY for the context in which the Aztecs and Conquistadors existed in.  It's super long, so obviously, watch at your own risk, but I do advise that a little skimming might be very helpful, and even illuminating in a way you may not have known before.  Enjoy!

To Die Would Be An Awfully Big Adventure

Adapting the Self: Stockholm, Stockholm! (A Captivity Rant)

Native Americans, first and foremost, were adapters.  They acquainted themselves with Land, with Nature, with their Mother, and over the years, managed not to tame it, but to co-exist within it, blurring the lines constantly between where they ended and the wilderness began. Puritans were never meant to do this, nor would they have ever attempted it, given the chance.  It's a twisted irony that the Puritans, in a very real way, stood for everything the Native Americans did not.  It is for this reason above all that I remain unsurprised their meeting ended in the bloodshed and the heartbreak from which we derive our current understanding of the relations between the New World and the Old.

In Women's Indian Captivity Narratives, Mary Rowlandson is indeed taken by Indians, and throughout what she calls Removes, she accounts the harrowing, at times unbelievably so, tribulations she endured, on her way back to her family.  And yet, I say tribulation, when in reality, something stranger, more intriguing was at work...she learned to adapt, in some bizarre crossroad forming from Indian culture and her steadfast Puritan faith, to the way of life she was stolen into, she was forced to assume.  Now, judgment be not made here...but if one is so easily adaptable, is it not possible, is there no chance, that one can also tolerate another, can let another be and lead his or her own life, without imposing one's own truths and beliefs?

Let me get to the juice here...despite the wrongness of the actions, and the Eye to Eye mentality, which, let's face it, leads nowhere fast...in these captivity narratives (Mary's, anyway), I can see a subtle transformation, a changing of the tides for this Puritan women, as though the Woods have taken hold of her, and though she may fight strongly against its stronghold, there are just too many inconsistencies in her character for me to believe she is the same Mary she began the narrative in, witness to the murder of family, and even the carrier of her Babe's unbearable corpse.  Perhaps the most striking example for me remains the moment in which she snatches a piece of meat from a boy's hand, his teeth still too tender to bite into it.  What a savage act, no, from a woman so delicately cloistered amongst her religion and her home.  This is what captivity does to you...it backs you into a corner, only for you to exit from where your back is facing, a new woman (a new being, really), that looks the same, but is no longer.

To flash forward quite significantly...how many of you are familiar with Patty Hearst?  She the captive of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and later to become the poster child for Stockholm Syndrome.  I'm not saying she's a modern-day Mary Rowlandson (on the contrary, their situations vary too greatly for there to be any real comparison aside from the surface of things), but to believe that a person, either of these women, can turn to their captors and say, Yes, if only for a split second, can mold their existence, if only momentarily, to mirror that of those who have refused her the comforts and knowledge of her old life...this is something extraordinary, and extraordinarily human.  So what if Mary enjoyed smoking from a pipe, so what if she delighted in taking the meat in her hands and letting its juices flow freely, so what if she...you get the idea.  The point is that no matter how furious her religion and her passions, even she could not contain her instincts, her own survival tricks in order to stay alive.  I wouldn't go as far to say came to love her captives (nor did Patty Hearst, in case you're wondering), but it's not a simple/clean metaphor any longer...the victim is, in a way, just as much in power when she/he relinquishes her right to be afraid in public, when she assimilates into the way of life of a prisoner, but REFUSES to be that prisoner she/he is playing the role of now.  Does that make any sense?

Perhaps it's too raw an idea for this blog, even, but all I'm trying to say is that, force or not, these women learned valuable lessons that they would have never even encountered stuck between the halls of their Puritan religion...the freedom and the fright of choice, of simple adaptation.  These women were strong!  Mary did not give in, did not give up, no matter how it may have seemed all throughout that she had...but what if she had never been taken to begin with?  What then, would she have learned of herself, of her mind, of her body, of the resilience of her spirit, of her Faith?  One could call this the slap to the face one needs to really wake up to the world, and I only wish it had happened some other way, one that didn't involve the mass killings of so many innocent lives...for they were all innocent, even the guilty few.

I'm so angry with the Puritans, even now.  Angry that it took captivity for them to see what they were really prisoners of...and yet, who knows.  I could be wrong, and I could have misinterpreted the whole thing.  More room for discussion, then, more room to breathe and talk about this ever-changing landscape on which the Puritans forced their Home.

In all of us exists, I think, the passion, and the will, to be caught, to be taken against our very wills...and then...

set free.

I leave you all with an intriguing little slice of Patty Hearst's endlessly fascinating story (I highly, highly suggest you all read on it, if even on Wikipedia) and some of the quotes I thought stood out for me (and probably some of you, I bet):

The Simple Truth Isn't Ever Simple

Quotes of Note:

"So little do we prize common mercies, when we have them to the full."

"...I cannot but admire to see the wonderful providence of God in preserving the Heathen for farther affliction to our poor Country."

"I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles, and to be quieted under them..."

- Mary Rowlandson.