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!)