learning to say

The beginnings of a beginning: Draft 0

2008-10-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

Wordsworth’s pastoral poems reveal a verdant landscape in which rustic figures share a special communion with the environment. And yet the relationship between man and nature in these poems while at times harmonious is acutely fragile. As notable as Wordsworth’s ardent praise of the rustic community is its tragic dissolution. Indeed the poet’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads are consumed with images of rural decay, the disruption and despair of families, and the gradual disappearance of the rustic’s uniquely intimate relationship to the land. Michael, The Ruined Cottage, and The Female Vagrant all revolve around the disenfranchisement and subsequent dissolution of idyllic rural families, all of them uniquely situated with the land as farmers, shepherds, and fishermen- figures who’s close kinship with and fluency in the languages of the environment make them at once special and endangered. This repetitive pattern of decay, as I shall suggest, advance an ecological argument about the fragility of human relationships with the environment, and brings to bare important questions about sustainability (I know I need to explain this more…I’m trying to work out my thoughts about these patterns and what they mean.)..........

Hear my ideas go pop, bam, fizz, siz z z z le...

2008-09-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

I've been toying with the idea of composing a creative thesis for a couple weeks, and by toying I mean that I've batted the notion of doing and not doing one back and forth in my mind without any real, solid consideration of what a creative thesis might constitute should I undertake one. Until today. As I mentioned in my last post, I've begun sifting through ecocritical writings, principally those in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harlod Fromm's Ecocrtitcal Reader, with the hope of expanding my understanding of what ecocriticism looks like and how I might apply it to my thesis work on Romantic poetry. This morning I began reading William Ruekert's piece in the anthology, Literature and Ecology. Given the title its little wonder I settled on this piece to read- literature and ecology are after all exactly the two fields I am interested in bridging with my thesis. But Ruekerts's essay offered me more than the critical frame work I expected from its title; it offered me what I think might be a door into a creative approach to exploring Romanticism and the environment.

Poetry, Ruekert suggests, "is stored energy, a formal turbulence, a living thing, a swirl in a flow," (108).

A swirl in a flow.

Poetry, he tells me,
is part of the energy that sustains all life.

It feeds community and creativity.
These its greatest recipients.
Ruekert explains, "poems are a verbal equivalent of fossil fuel
(stored energy),
but
they are a renewable source of energy,
coming as they do, from those ever generative
twin matrices, language and imagination," (108).
Language provides a container
for the imaginative energy that it expresses;
it is
the imagination then, not language, that is
the potent fuel of creative energy.

Through reading, the exchange of energy
from poet,
through poem,
to reader
the energy is translated from entropy
(the dissipation or loss of potential)
to sustain the community that depends on a constant flow
of creative energy. It is through the movement
of energy through poetry to the human community,
Ruekert romantically suggests, the higher ideals of literature
might
be
accomplished (111).

Building on these ideas,
I find the following passage from the essay particularly inspiring:

"Green plants...
are among the most creative organisms on earth.
They are nature's poets....
Poems are the green plants among us;
if poets are suns (the vibrant sources
of imaginative creativity), then poems are
green plants among us
for they clearly arrest energy
on its path to entropy and in so doing, not only
raise matter from lower to higher order,
but help to create a self-perpetuating and evolving
system. That is they help
create creativity and community,
and when their energy is released and flows
out into others, to again raise matter from lower
to higher order (to use the most common description of what
culture is)..." (111--- parenthetical insert mine).

Ruekert goes on to explain that following from this line of thought, teaching becomes a vital means of intesifying and perpetuating the process of creative transfer from poetry to human minds, by as he says "providing an the environment in which the stored energy can be released to carry on its work of creation and community," (111). I love the notion of poetry a ball of sustainable imaginative and creative energy with the potential to animate the creative minds of human communities. I love the notion of a poem, like a mouthful of of the richest fruit or a spark from the vaporous finger of a electrified cloud, energizing people to action. And while I do not think that this is how Romanitic poets conceived of the effect of poetry, this is I believe (honestly I believe) the potential power of their poetry on the creative minds its recipients. A great example is I think the fair assertion that romantic nature writing fueled the creative, and active work of later environmentalist writers in at least in America.

But how does this apply to my project? I think I would like to draw from this ecological metaphor to compose creative responses to the renewable creative fuel of the romantic poetry I will investigate. My responses could take many forms. As I am often a writer deeply influenced by the convulsions and densely layered activity of my place in history my writing shifts shapes and resists neat categorization. I might therefore produce poetic prose, free-from poetry, and maybe even include snatches of my own nature writing and reflections from journals and from blogs. All of which though would spring up in response to the poetic meditations of the writers at the center of my project. Sort of like a tangible representation of the creative potency and continuing relevance of the poetry to my own struggle to reconcile the relationship between myself/humanity and nature, which is now just as alluring, estranged, and symbolically important to the way we see ourselves and our place in the world.

Call this is an idea under construction. Call this a serious attempt to enlist my ideas in the construction of something new, something maybe not perfect or tidy but something important I think...at least to me.

Environmental Texts-Environmental Imagination

2008-09-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

This morning Debbie provided us with a list of criteria for environmental texts from Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination. According to Buell, environmental texts are characterized by the following traits...

1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text's ethical orientation.
4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.

As Debbie suggests Romantic imaginative texts with their rich environmental imagery may not qualify as environmental writing as Buell defines it. The question at hand is whether or the work of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and all those Romantic's bewitched of nature constitutes environmental writing. Confronted with the question my first response is a mixture of confusion and unsettled uncertainty. In my conception of Romanticism the environment figures prominently, if not as a vital element to the writer's world vision. But, if we are to take Buell's criteria into consideration it becomes I think difficult to say if Romantic writing is also environmental writing.

That the Romantics express a reverence for the natural world is undeniable. However, I am not entirely confident that the environment in Romantic writing does not operate as resource for the use of poetic and artistic expression; an introspective realm, if you will, rich with metaphor and symbolism that poets tapped and used for human interests. Considering Buell's second point, "the human interest is not understood to be the only interest," and the abundant use of the natural as a metaphor for elements of the human experience it may not be unreasonable to suggest that the Romantics used the environment to advance human interests. To be more clear, I begin to wonder if the natural is more a poetic tool rather than a legitimate interest. For example, Keats Ode to Nightingale takes as its subject the poet, using nature or rather the desire to merge completely and irrevocably with a pure natural state to express the frustration that comes with the impermanence of the imaginative experience. When I say "imaginative experience" what I mean is the process of the romantic imagination that enables the poet to transcend himself and commune with the natural. While the nightingale figures prominently in the poem as an idealized object of the poet's desire; it representative of a state of being Keats both celebrates and longs for, the ode is I think an ode to the poet rather than to the natural. (Insert textual analysis) It it is the poet's desire, the poet's persistent humanity, the poet's lament of the transient ecstasy of imagination that is the subject of the ode. Therefore, the poem presents an interesting, and I don't think unique example, of the use of the environment to express the human. It is easy, given that the natural world is as in this poem often so exalted to believe that Romantic poetry advocates the notion that the human interest is not the only interest. But, how often the environment is represented as a mirror for humanity, a contemplative space in which man sojourns for a time to contemplate himself, his species, and the civilization lingering at the forest's edge. It is not therefore, representative of another legitimate interest, but a resource for poetic contemplation and expression.....

I broke off on the above thought about a week ago with the intention of picking up where I began. Since then however I tipped my toes in the world of ecocritism, searching for a better sense of how others have spoken about the relationship between nature and literature. Today I find myself reading my own thoughts with a new perspective I can only thank Fredrik Turner for. Turner points out in Cultivating the American Garden the very problem of trying to write about nature and culture (or lit as a cultural artifact) as separate entities (as I attempt to do above). My thoughts about romantic poetry and its exploitation of the environment to express human interests hinge on the assumption that man (and his products) and nature are mutually exclusive. Man is the exploitative other to the nature (which I suppose I think of as an untampered with, vulnerable green space).

Now, in his article Turner rightly points out something about ecological discussions that I fail to do in my above thoughts, and that is clearly define nature and culture- but I think more importantly nature. Discussions about the relationship between man and nature often hinge on the (often unaddressed) assumption that the two are mutually exclusive entities. Turner points out, a weakness of such discussions is the failure to explicit consider how nature is being defined, and to consider that man and nature are actually inseparable. What is nature after all? And for that matter what is man, if not nature?

More than a few of us might attempt to define nature as the ecosystem outside, out there. It is the trees and plants, bears, wolves, and the insects in the grass at night (or some other variation on these ideas) isn't it? And yet nature is often also bound up in the notion of wilderness, or wild, unrestrained life. I think it's fair to reiterate an apt point Turner makes when he notes that for many of us there is a clear distinction between the wild nature of uninhabited forests and mountains and the fabricated or manipulated nature of a suburban garden or green house flowers. The absence of human influence is essential to a pure definition of nature. As Turner points out nature is often always "out there" in the green spaces that (and I think this is vital) remain outside the bounds of human interference and habitation. But, and I don't mean to come off like a parrot here, Turner suggest that nature and culture are not in fact exclusive- that in fact humanity, its social matrix, habitations, and interferences are in fact nature. If we are to assert that human culture is not nature after all, if it something separate from nature, then let's face it we are suggesting an alternative source for our existence, behaviors, and cultural artifacts that as far as I know has only been (popularly) described as well God- or a God force. More importantly, as I boldly step out onto some highly political ice here, we would be denying the stacks of evidence (widely accepted evidence I might add) that we are fundamentally animals, and culture as we understand it is evolved. I suppose what Turner is getting at (and what I am beginning to accept myself) is the notion of "natural" social matrices like bee or ant colonies are not any more natural (as in not artificial) than the human colonies we call civilization. Where things start to get messy is when we try to separate the technologies of culture (say agriculture, genetically engineering flowers, crops, or industry) and what we perceived to be that natural touch stone from which these technologies sprung and now encroach upon. I am not saying that I think it is natural to deforest hundreds of acres of land in the name of cattle grazing and ultimately beef production. But in as much as these sort of activities sprung from human evolution (and by that I mean our development overtime into the highly social, creative, if not also destructive, species we are now) they are fundamentally natural. Unfortunate. Depressing. Hopefully abandoned or heavily revised. Yes. Yes. Yes. But I have a hard time after reading Turner's article so easily differentiating these activities and realities from nature. If not nature then what? And if we think of pure nature as that which remains largely untouched- the organisms, communities, and cultures that are not human- then it must be pointed out that even these do not really exist. Are the neatly enclosed spaces of the national parks nature? Are the vistas prepared for strategic viewing (and photographing) of various landscapes in these parks natural? And what I think is most interesting and perhaps applicable to my thoughts about Romantic poetry, is it even possible for us to see nature except through ideological/cultural filters that impose meaning upon them? Did I state that clearly? What I'm asking is when we see the Grand Canyon or stumble upon a yet untred upon spot in a forest somewhere does not just the way we see and apply meaning to these spaces interfere with them? Aren't we always interfering with the natural, putting it in neat symbolic boxes and affixing meanings to its colors, shapes, and sounds that then have significance not only for us as a species but nature, in as much as how it is viewed influences how it is treated in this ever human-dominated world?

Now, all that I have said here I must admit is extremely uncomfortable for me. I don't know how to make sense of these ideas and my own ecological convictions. On some level Turner's ideas deeply resonate with this until now unvocalized sense that I could never really access nature. It seemed to me strange and uncomfortable that the only way to access nature for one unexperienced in hiking solo in the wilderness is to follow a map, or drive to a state park, or rent a cabin in the woods somewhere. Take a hike I went on with my sister last summer for example. Even as we climbed higher into the mountains we passed troops of fellow hikers, all destined for the same scenic vista. At the top of the track (and the fact that we were following a well trodden track says something I think) there were scores of sunny-cheeked hikers taking the view in while enjoying a lunch or snapping pictures of friends in front of the wide green landscape. While at the time I too delighted in the sense that I had done something deeply beautiful and worthwhile- I'd left the city to climb up onto a high cliff and look out in wonder at the landscape- I look back now in awe of how fundamentally artificial that experience really was. Time and time again I am confronted by that feeling of some how being tricked into seeing nature, when in fact I'm see a designed form of nature. Where is NATURE? I feel always like its beyond me. Like it's this distant other I think about when I shop for organic, sustainable foods at the Coop or take out the recycling. I think about nature sometimes the same way I think about children starving in the Sudan. It is this precious entity I remember while I contemplate what to eat or buy or want or deny myself with a sense of guilt and responsibility. But it is always distant from me. So while some of what I said above sounds almost blasphemous even to me, I have to admit that even as I feel this desperate desire to care for Nature, to remember, and consider the consequences my actions have on it I feel still, always estranged from and unsure about what it really is. It is sad to say I would not recognize the face of my mother if I saw it. Not for all the picturesque simulations we've cut her up in to. I would not know her to see her in whole, and sometimes I think it is no longer possible to see her that way. Now of course as I say this, the mother I am referring to is the primal earth that reared my species up over millions of years like an oyster suffering a very dark, very peculiar pearl. I think she is gone. But I love, even as I lament, her thousand broken pieces.

I have not arrive at a complete understanding of how to define nature, but what I think interests me most is the sheer difficulty and tension inherent in trying to do so. While Turner's thoughts at first threatened to over throw my ideas about romantic poetry and nature it they could instead support my ideas. I'm wondering if the struggle to understand nature, and man's connection or perceived alienation from it that is the very draw of poets to nature, particularly in the 19th century, when modern civilization began to rear its coal-blackened head up from the landscapes of history. And on that note, I will elicit a sigh and say....more on that later.

In book-ending my thoughts with images of nature on one hand and culture in the form of urbanization on the other I am visually representing the place my thoughts churn, ceaselessly. I am some what unsure of how to interpret either image. Are they so totally separate as I have often thought? Is one more or less nature? More or less man? I'm caught between ideas at the moment, in the void between what I understand as nature (the green other) and culture (the city, home). It's a tense, creative, and fertile place to be.

2008-08-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

Reading poems I think should always be first an emotional and sensual experience. The desire to pick apart with questions as assign meanings should come only after one has experienced the poem with the heart. Naturally, there is no one way to do anything, particularly something so personal. Poems are of course deeply personal, which is to say that even when they are the product of a stranger half a world or centuries away they speak to profoundly human realities. So while a part of me resists writing as if there is one truly effective way to read a poem I think it is important to encourage certain approaches to experiencing poetry. For one, people tend to want writing that puts its meaning up front. We are a culture that relishes "just getting to the point already." But poetry delights in its sounds, colors, and emotions. These are the source of its life force, the very things that give the words heat and the meanings power. I encourage readers to resist the impulse to know immediately the message of a poem. Instead, consider that perhaps the greatest wisdom of poetry can impart comes through simply feeling its impression on your senses, and on your heart if you let it. I believe that we can begin to demystify the process of reading poetry only when we understand that the effect of poetry on the reader's emotions is integral to arriving at the "meaning" or mission of a piece. Because it is a process like a journey from impression and feeling to understanding.

The journey begins...
With a gaze. The first read should be like looking at a painting in a museum or a photograph of a place you've never been. See the colors, feel the shapes the words make. Take it in without intending to interpret or judge or even speak an impression. Just flow through the lines without asking questions. Close the intellectual mind. Be simply human first.

Try it out:
Gaze at Gustav Klimt's mermaids for practice. Open up and feel the image.

Now read a few lines of Rilke with the same openness.

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

In both the painting and the poem there is so much emotion, so much to taste and smell and touch. The moody colors of the mermaids' waters, her light skin and the eyes. Just like Rilke's rich, thick fluids rising and flowing and the billion stars blazing. The first experience of both poem and painting is thick with impressions of darkness, peace and I think (for me) of something both painful and beautiful. Reading or seeing them first is sensory, and the impressions either evokes begin to signal something about the creator's meaning.

From here....
If the experience is not enough (which I believe sometimes it alone can be) then read again, look again. This time linger on the elements that make you feel or question. Read these words again. Read in you mind. Then aloud. Where do these places figure in the piece as a whole? How to do they appear to operate? For example, Rilke's billion spinning stars "blazing" set up a powerful (yes emotional) contrast to the image of them dead in the final words of the poem. The contrast reinforces something, but what? When an image like this captures your attention, consider what the poet wants you associate with the image. Is it, as in Rilke's last stanza the passage of time? Often, there is a strong relationship between images and repetitive sounds or words and a larger idea the poet is attempting to put across. Remember, of course, sometimes the idea behind the words is not a simple message- sometime the purpose is (returning to where we began) to simply make you feel something. Unsettled. Romantic. Yes, even confused. In such cases the purpose of the poem may rest in you, your time, or times before yours. I can only say that in these case it is useful to consider the poem's relationship to you, or (thanking the library gods for research) go explore what the poem's relationship is to its political, social, or historical context. When all else fails, research and or at least taking the time to read any footnotes can go along way toward interpreting those impressions and sensations that a poem conjures.

Draft

2008-04-30T20:11:00.000-07:00

I completely threw out my first draft, and started over. That said, I still feel really nervous about the paper, and I'm having a hard time writing it. I'm posting the draft here (in place of the original blog prompt about drafts). If you have any comments or advice I would love to hear it. I know there are one or two particularly bad (or absent) transitions. I will have those figured out in the final of course.

Hillary Roberts
English 521
22 April 2008

Ice, Ice Baby: Travelogues, National Geographic, and the Arctic in Twentieth Century Popular Imagination

There is something fascinating and fabulous about blankness. The blank face of a clean page, the unfilled outline of a continent, the icy white vastness of the arctic all contain in them the possibility of exploration and discovery. Signifying the boundaries of the known, blankness has long enticed the curiosity of explorers and tantalized the popular imagination. In his essay Geography and Explorers, Joseph Conrad celebrates the profound appeal “Regions Unknown!” - the “exciting spaces of white paper,” that signified the limitations of geographic knowledge in the 19th century. The essay captures something of the profound appeal of the geographic unknown in the popular imagination of the era, and imaginative potency of travel into the blank spaces of the map….

Literally situated on the icy periphery of the known world, the poles have long enticed Western “cartographic fantasies”, or romantic, imaginative visions of the unknown (Yan). Interest in the artic peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when attempts to conquer the “last great frontiers” of the earth sent explores into the icy blank spaces of the map. As one of the least known and certainly least accessible regions of the earth, the arctic represented an exotic and anomalous space, persistently outside beyond the reach of Western knowledge and the influence of civilization. Here is a space in which nature rises up icy, and sublime against the push of Western explorers; where ships shatter like tooth picks in the jaws of the ice, and time and space do not comply with Western norms. For this reason, the persistent blankness of arctic signified the limitations of Western power and knowledge. The very blankness of the region thus typifies it as a sublime and mysterious space, wherein the popular imagination could chart fantastic cartographies on the face of the unknown. As Lisa Bloom explains in Gender on Ice, “if (one) was forbidden to color in the known parts (of the world) in any way he chose, (one) was permitted to do what he liked with the blank spaces, which were all brought together to the same plane of representation,” (1). The romantic appeal of the artic is therefore in the inaccessibility and awesome barrenness of the landscape. Both features mark the space out as a sublime and fantastic region, far removed from the known world; a playground if you will for the Western imagination wherein the heroic explorer looms large against an alien and inhospitable background.
The romantic appeal of Arctic exploration at the turn of the twentieth century is indisputable. However, the role of arctic travel writing in the construction and representation of the arctic in the popular imagination of the twentieth century is a largely neglected area of scholarship. A few recent examinations of arctic travel writing have focused on the popular fascination with exploration of the region. Perhaps most notably, Peter Kitson’s introduction to Travels, Explorations, and Empires and Robert David’s book The Arctic in the British Imagination shed light on the influence arctic travelogues on the popular conception of the region as sublime, and fascinatingly remote space. However, few scholars have examined reciprocal role of popular interest in tales romantic heroism and adventure and the construction travelogues at the turn of the century. My paper will focus on the role increasing what Peter Kitson aptly describes as “public fascination with ice and snow, and with the extremes of human endeavor and hardship,” on the construction of twentieth century travel writing. Specifically, I will frame my investigation with in the context of the popularization of science at the turn of the century, a period which emerging popular science periodicals like National Geographic exploited the public interest in the unknown and tales of adventure to proliferate scientific knowledge among the literate masses. Given the abundance of travel writing from the period, I will focus predominantly on construction of Robert Peary’s much disputed 1909 travelogue, The North Pole, and the influence of the National Geographic Society on its promotion as the preeminent narrative of arctic discovery and heroism of the 20th century. Chiefly, I will argue the text actively exploits popular interest in the tales of Arctic heroism and adventure, and oversteps the boundary between travelogue and self-promoting adventure writing; aimed not at illuminating the icy vastness of the north but at validating the heroism of the explorer.
The power of travel writing derived from its ability to make visible that which is beyond the sight of readers, and to illuminate the landscapes hidden behind the blank spaces on the map. In the early part of the twentieth century, Lisa Bloom explains, “the ability to make a faithful record out of what was previously considered imaginary was regarded as a great modern achievement,” (5). Particularly in the Arctic, the ability to push the bounds of knowledge into the “last great frontiers” of the map represented the “crowning achievement” of four centuries of exploration. For Peary however, “a faithful record” of the polar discovery may easily have been eclipsed by the desire to write “the last of the great adventure stories- a story the world had been waiting to hear for nearly four hundred years, a story which was to be told at last under the folds of the Stars and Stripes,”(298-300). That is not say, his 1909 narrative of reaching the pole is a total forgery, but rather, perhaps better characterized an attempt at writing “the last of the great adventure stories,” featuring him as the patriotic and determined hero. Thus, as Bloom aptly points out, “the ‘faithful record’ made at the North Pole was from the start contested and unstable,” (5).
The 1909 saw a strange and dramatic conflict over the discovery of the pole, which is I think inseperable from the nature of Peary’s subsequent narrative production of the journey. Although the Peary-Cook polar conflict was in its time incendiary, it likely unfamiliar to most of us today. Thus, a brief history of Peary, and the polar conflict will provide useful framework for my discussion of the text. A prominent figure in the history of arctic exploration, Robert Peary’s reputation includes both legitimate discovery and accusations of falsity. Most notably, his often remembered for the controversy which surrounds his claim of reaching the pole in April 1909. Peary’s triumphant declaration, dispatched by telegraph from the north, “Stars and Stripes Nailed to the North Pole,” and later “…the North Pole was reached April 6th by Peary Arctic Club’s expedition, under Commander Peary,” inspired a mixture of awe and confusion, coming as it was within days of Captain James Cook’s own professed discovery of the pole. Contemporary, James Marshall, in 1913 explained the confusion as such, “it was far from certain that this (Peary’s telegraph) was not a hoax, the outcome of the sense of humor of some fantastic individual at Indian Harbor,” since when it arrived, “Dr. Frederick Cook was being acclaimed by the crowned heads of Europe and by the world at large as the discoverer of the North pole,”(79). There could after all be only one discoverer of the pole. Thus, accusations flew back forth between camps about the veracity of either explorers’ alleged discovery of the pole. Predominently criticism of Peary’s expedition in particular focuses on the speed with which his crew made the pole and his ability to maintain a northern course over the moving ice without making frequent, precise geographic measurements (cite). In either case, Bloom explains, “both expedition accounts were purported to contain information and were written in a style of scientific precision….(but) the importance given to science alone could not provide a means to determine justly who the winner might be,” presumably because measurements and calculations can be inaccurate and fakery is always possible (5).
Although doubts surrounded the veracity of both explorers claim, Cook would ultimately prove the loser of the battle for the pole. Demands to see Cooks expedition journals met with excuses until finally a diary was produced. The diary did more to undermine Cook’s claims however; it was Flemming explains “branded a manufacture from beginning to end,” as were the photographs Cook alleged he took on the journey (421). The photos, contemporaries argued, came not from the polar trek but from a previous expedition to Greenland six years before (Flemming 421). Topping it all off, evidence appeared that invalidated Cook’s claim of summating Mt. McKinley in 1906. The ascent never took place, and the alleged photograph of him at the summit was in fact taken on a lower hill (Flemming 421). Declared a fake, Cook became the focal point of public outrage and ultimately fled to South America, thus leaving Peary to enjoy the title of Polar discoverer, presumably by proxy of Cook’s invalidation and willingness of the leading popular scientific society to validate his claim.
Peary’s own journals received little scrutiny, and after a cursory investigation the National Geographic Society, also financial backers of the expedition, proclaimed him the rightful discoverer of the Pole (Flemming 421). The involvement of the National Geographic Society the construction of Peary’s as heroic explorer is undeniable, and palpably present in his text, particularly in society president, Gilbert Grosvenor’s foreword to narrative. Chronicling four centuries of polar exploration, Grosvenor’s foreword endeavors to contextualize Peary’s narrative within a heroic legacy of exploration and discovery. Interestingly, the Grosvenor describes the history of polar exploration in terms of riches, adventure, and danger. For example, “the preceding brief summary,” of exploration he says before moving on to focus on Peary’s achievement explicitly, “gives only an inadequate conception of the immense treasures of money and lives expended by the nations to explore the north ice world and to attain the apex of the earth,” (xxvii). The fantastic language with which Grosvenor describes exploration, emphasizes its heroic quality while belittling its scientific importance; science he suggest is “compensation” for the danger and travail of exploration, not the trophy (xxviii). As he says,
“All efforts to reach the Pole had failed, nothwithstanding the unlimited sacrifice of gold, energy and blood which had been poured out without stint for nearly four centuries. But the sacrifice had not been without compensation. Those who had ventured their lives in the contest had not been actuated solely by the ambition to win a race- to breast the tap first- but to contribute, in Sir John Franklin’s words “to the extension of the bounds of science,’” (xxviii).
While he acknowledges the scientific contribution of exploration to the enrichment of human knowledge, Grosvenor’s language emphasizes I think the notion of heroic conquest and competition above all else. The pole is, according to Grosvenor, “the prize of four centuries of striving,” it’s discovery a “victory,” and “crowning” achievement (xxxii). The foreword thus frames Peary’s achievement as the preeminent event in a long and dangerous enterprise. In so doing, the Grosvenor frames the narrative itself as heroic testimony of adventure and discovery, to which his name gives authority.
The addition of the foreward, like the scientific appendices at the back are a clear attempt at imparting a sense of scientific authority to the an otherwise subjective and scientifically impoverished narrative. As the president of the National Geographic Society, by 1900 a major popular scientific community, Grosvenor lends a clear authority to the narrative. Perhaps, no more so than in his statement of confidence at the end of the narrative that “Robert E. Peary has crowned a life of devoted to the exploration of the icy north and to the advancement of science by hard-won discovery of the North Pole,” and expressed dissaproval of criticism of Peary’s claim (xxxii). Grosvenor even attempts to turn the Peary-Cook controversy in an illustration of Peary’s honor, suggesting that no one but the most stalwart, perservering and honorable men could have bore the “scoffing” and discouragement that accompanied his discovery of the pole (xxxii). He therefore attempts to validate, both in adding his testimony to the text and in framing Peary as a legitimate and heroic explorer, to lend authority to the narrative.
Grosvenor’s efforts in the foreword derive from the close relationship between National Geographic Society and the Peary polar expedition. As financial backers of the expedition, the society was keen on validating his as a hero and the discoverer of the pole. Initiated in 1888 as a professional geographic society, the reign of its sporadic scientific journal as the leading publication among professional geographers ended with the 19th century (Rothenberg 28). The Spanish American War, resulting as it did in the first United States colonies, awakened popular interest in geography and exploration (Rothenberg 32). Responding to increased public interest in the world abroad the society shifted its focus, and its publication, toward reaching popular audiences; the goal increasing membership in the organization by appealing to the national public interest…..

Presentations

2008-04-10T10:08:00.000-07:00

Julie: Right out I want to say that I love that Julie chose a text that focused on an area of personal significance to her. I found your personal awareness of the area your text dealt with leant something unique to your presentation, and it got me to thinking how interesting it would be read an traveler's account of my own home area when it was just a budding community. On another note, I really enjoyed the way you addressed both the important historical context of the text- which of course is closely connected to the traveler's travel, his perspectives, and motives for writing- and the political influence of the book after its publication. To be honest, up until your presentation I had considered the important influence of cultural/political contexts on travel writing, but not the possibility of a reciprocal relationship between travel text and culture/politics. I think that in discussing the influence of the text you opened up- at least to me- an interesting area for discussion: the travel text as not only a product of its historical cultural and political context but as a cultural and political influence of itself. I think we've been working in class with this in mind- for example, talking about centers of calculation and the way travel narrative was both product of the desire (as in produced from the desire) to know and name the world, but also the informative well from which knowledge- or the struggle to understand the world- was drawn. However, I really don't think I grasped the potential power of the scientific travel narrative to shape, reshape, or reinforce cultural/political notions of the world until listening to your presentation. If I'm slow on the pickup with this one...well, I'm slow....but your presentation made it clear to me that scientific travel narratives are not just artifacts of an age overflowing with curiosity and the desire to know, but powerful and potentially influential forces in their own right.

Bravo.

Jerry:
From the get go I think your own curiosity and desire to know- to travel deeper in to the narrative you selected, in search of order and meaning- really came through in the energy and excitement with which you presented. I love that you recognized strange inconsistencies in your text as an opportunity to take on the role of an intellecutal sleuth, and suss out the reason for the peculiarity that troubled you in the writing. What you uncovered, a secret spy voyage disguised as a legit travel expedition, made me a little jealous to be honest. How exciting! I think your presentation could open an interesting inquiry into other similair uses of exploratory travel and travel writing to mask alterior (i.e. political) motives for travel. Is it likely that the prevalence of scientific/exploratory voyages and expeditions, and the wealth of narratives produced about such expeditions made it possible your writer and the expedition about which he wrote (and perhaps others like it) to do what he did? One question that remains for me is why he wrote this account at all. If in fact the voyage was for shadowed purposes why risk sheding light on it by producing an account- especially is said account is poorly writen, suspicious, and not altogether very informative? Seems like the move of someone who didn't realize what was going on and just wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to publish- and perhaps thereby profit some- but I doubt that he would not know the real aim of the voyage he was on. Perhaps, this is a question you might persue further- in a sittuation in which the expedition is decidely not scientific, but actually for more covert political ends, why record it in narrative?

Toria:
Okay, I personally loved hearing you narrate passages of your gentleman traveler's wanderings through the world. I think it's absolutely fitting that your text would include with it's observations of world cultures and politics (and donkey riding) a lot of wit. I appreciated the way you summarized what was truly a long journey in detail, providing also actual textual examples of the language with which your traveler spoke about his observations. Together, the detailed outline of the journey and textual examples- which illustrated both writer's vibrant (somewhat egotistical) persona and impressions of the world (also vibrant and egotistical)- did more than beautifully lay out the text for those who hadn't read it; it beautifully illustrated the concept of travel as a search for self (both individual and cultural) in the world. I'm intrigued by the notion of voluntary displacement as a means of locating one's cultural/individual identity, and I think your text provides some interesting possiblilities for examining this notiton in text. Your traveler, it seemed from your examples, even when he attempted to observe and understand Other, was concerned more with orienting his self and his identity among the scenes and spectacles he witnessed. I recall one powerful examlple being a festival he observed, which he suggests in the text flourished and glittered in performance for HIM (him who was decidedly marginalized and invisible in earlier encounters). It could be interesting to further examine visibility and invisibility of the British traveler in an Other setting, and (cultural) identity preformance in travel writing like your's (both of the traveller and of the "native"). Perhaps the preformance is reciprocal? Perhaps the preformance prevents one from really ever understanding the other, while becoming more near an essentialized vision of oneself? Does that make sense? Like when one is out of country (let's say one is British) in a place decidely different from one's home and culture, among people who identify themselves as let's say of a specific African tribe is it possible that cultural identity becomes a preformance in which one actively esssentializes oneself in an attempt to identify and distinguish oneself?.....I think it would be interesting to look at that in terms of a traveler like your's- how does he react to the festival (a literal preformance of cultural identity), how does he preform his identity as a British man/observer/traveler? If anything, you could say that all these questions- be they interesting or just plain indecipherable- arise from my own personal interest in what was I think a really wonderful and rich presentation and travel text. I loved it.

Kellan:
First of all, I love that you found a text that so perfectly falls in line with your interests in colonialism/postcolonialism. I liked how our texts (your's, Toria's, and my own) illustrated what must be only a small smathering of a truly diverse assortment of travel writings. While my text represented I think an example of predominently scientific exploratory writing, and Toria's text seemed almost ethnographic, your text presented an interesting, specifically political use of travel writing, with important colonial undertones. However, in reflection, I think a case could be made that all of our texts were very much concerned with similair interests- all were very much bound of in (forgive me Debbie) imperialism in one way or another. I think your text though, while commericial and strategic motives likely belied the motives of travel and the specific information recorded, presented some interesting questions that you can seperate from imperialism to focus instead on British print culture, and more specifically the construction of a travel text. Specifically, I thought it was really interesting the way you addressed the somewhat strange construction of your text. Given that the writer/traveller was clearly instructed at the opening to study medicinal plants and other things that could be of use medically it is interesting that the text focuses instead on commerical mechanical things, and (for whatever reason) goats (which appeared to be important enough to illustrate). That, as you pointed out, the text does not include more material of medical interest or even botanical illustrations is curious. Listening to you talk about this strange inconsistency in your book I got to wondering how travel texts were constructed- what determined what was or was not illustrated, and how information was organized/presented? Was it purely financial? Is you text typical, or unusual? More generally, do you think illustrations provide authority to a text, or perhaps are unnessecary? I know that these are not questions you were to answer, only thoughts that your presentation inspired in me. I really enjoyed presenting along side you and Toria. You both inspired me to look at my own text from different angles, and to think about travel literature as a whole in new ways.

map pictures

2008-03-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

Anorexia: Looking at the thing inside

The arm: A region of contention, and focus of self-loathing. When I wanted to be thin, during the conditioning phase of the disease and while I was in the process of wasting I hated my arms, and legs, belly, and backside. I saw these parts of my body as large, almost as expansive as continents. I wanted to control those areas, tame, and shrink them. The language (fat, pig, too soft, etc) reflects the way I saw these areas when I was ill. Later, however, when I was in the process of healing, and to some extent recognized that I was thin (my arms, legs, belly, etc were thin) I felt attached to these areas, and terrified to loose them. I wanted to preserve what I created, and the process of watching the body take over again was like watching plant life overwhelm a hard-built city, home- if you will. Currently, I have returned to seeing my arms and legs and other body parts the way I did when I was conditioning myself to starve, and during the process of actually starving. The comments on these body parts are therefore both a reflection and current with the way I understand my body now.
It is difficult to see here, but the legs were and are an area that is although somewhat barren here very finely detailed in my mind. I struggled to deal with this part of my map, as the legs are a point of obsession, pain, and shame for me. Comments like "thick" or "disgusting" knees, thick ankles, fat, cellulite, and too wide reflect both the general contempt I have my this area of my body (both then and now) and the very specific areas (i.e. knees, thighs, and ankles) that are a point of obsession for me. I admit that I am humiliated by the shape and size of my outline in this area, and found mapping it very painful. Interestingly, had I mapped my legs when I was recovering they like my arms would have likely been marked with describing words like "beautiful" "thin" "womanly"- because when I was recovering I was especially attached to my legs and arms, both of which were undeniably thin. I deeply feared watching them swell. In some ways they were the prize of my sickly empire.

Another over-view of the entire disease.

The face/mind: In looking back at my journals and blog from the period of conditioning to when I was the thinnest it became clear that the mind of Anorexia (or of the Anorexic) is consumed in ideals. Everything from your sensory organs (eyes, mouth, ears, skin) to your thoughts is consumed with the desire for and obsession with ideal beauty, thinness, and interestingly (for me) romantic and deluded ideas about the world in general. My mouth and tongue tasted only the desire to be thin, in control, and safe. Food became meaningless, beauty became nourishment to starve on. My ears heard only what I wanted to- and often echoed with observations about my body that others made. If someone said I looked great (as people often did when I first began to loose weight) or alternatively if someone made a comment I interpreted as critical their words rung in my head, blocking all else out. Also, my eyes ceased to function properly. I saw only in terms of ideals, and mirrors reflected only what I desired or what I was NOT (i.e. my thighs always looked heavy, my belly was never smooth enough, etc). And my thoughts- oh god- I was OBSESSED with thinness, perfection, and control. Most of the time I would spend thinking about wanting to be thin, how was I going to get thinner, and thinner, who was thinner than me, who I wanted to look like, who I did not want to look like, etc. I also spent a lot of time either chastizing myself for eating to much, not working out enough, or just not being thin enough or congratulating myself for being controlled with food (only breakfast and dinner today, and only 300 calories each), for working out (especially on days when I burnt over a 1,000 calories), and for other "good" or ideal behavoir. When those thoughts were not occupying the fore front of my mind, I fixating on numbers. How many calories, how many calories? Unlike many people who tend to underestimate how much they consume, I would intentionally ad calories on to my count to convince myself to eat less tomorrow, or stay longer at the gym (or often both). Thus, the mind of the disease I felt should represent the idealistic realm that it was. I wanted the mind to appear like a garden, with the central, thin female figures like gods or muses located in the center. I felt that presenting the mind of the disease as a garden appropriately captured on of the many paradoxes of the disease for me when I was ill, and now that I struggle to accept my current "healthy" weight: Anorexia is consumed with ideals, beauty, and the desire for security. Through starvation I tried to make my body a symbol of control, to embody what I understood to be perfection, and through that to achieve the sense of security and acceptance I was so hungry for. In the end, a cancer not flowers grew inside of me.
The heart: To put it simply pain lies at the heart of the disease- pain, ugliness, and the horrible truth that you want to starve away. For me, at the heart of it all, the truth was I was scared, I was hurt, and I felt both undeserving of and denied love and a sense of "fullness." The heart, is a sharp contrast to the mind and stomach of the disease, but all are intimately connected. The heart (the pain) feeds and sustains the ideals that consume and dellude the mind and body. The heart is the essence of the illness, the engine of the disease, the last, hardest thing to repair. If I were to map the heart at any point, be it in conditioning, wasting, or recovery it would look the same. Until you heal this broken, diseased region you are always Anorexic- this thing always lives in you.
The Breast Obsession: My disease is intimately connected to my gendered body. One might say that anorexia was for me conceived at puberty, in the swelling of my breasts, spreading of my hips, and developing fullness of my thighs. The breasts however became a particularly painful region of the body for me, and so an important- if a little odd- thing to map. When I hit puberty and all through adolescents and adulthood my breasts were larger than my female friends', and wildly out of proportion for my body. They earned my nicknames at home and at school that I found humiliating. I felt out of control of my body, which was developing wild animal shapes that the attention of others sexualized. I was ashamed of my body, but I often wore revealing tops that displayed the very things I was ashamed of. In this way I have always been an exhibitionist of my pain- I've always show cased it for others, even though many did not understand what I showed them. I think too I showed my chest that way because I felt that I was suppose to- my body had grown this way without my consent, and my friends, family, and culture suggested it was suppose to, and that these once innocent (or at least insignificant) parts of my body were sexual symbols. I supposes showing them off, like being thin, was an attempt at embodying an expectation, and a meaning imposed on my body as a woman. That said, I must add, that after I experienced wasting my breasts became an even more painful, and hideous area of my body. Suddenly, I had only the debri of what wasting had done to the flesh in my breasts; only empty, hanging skin, ugliness, shame. Even now, my breasts look to me like symbols of a war- monuments to the disease, if you will. Now they are too small, ugly, old-looking. The perkiness, the fullness, the strange sexuality they once had is destroyed utterly, and I'm left with the remains of the destruction. I veiled this area behind tranluscent paper because, despite my honesty here, this is an issue and an area of my body I am both ashamed of, and pained by.

The Stomach (below): The stomach is another strangely paradoxical area to visit. The largest organ on the map, the stomach is full of rich foods and a few hidden images of women enjoying food. The stomach is thus a symbol of my repressed and very rampant appetite (like the breast, the area is shrouded, or veiled). The stomach is also a symbol of my desire for fullness, that sense of security I felt deprived of, and later (during recovery) a positive relationship to food. When I was not obsessing about ideals, my mind was in my stomach, in the emptiness where I sat longing for food, thinking about food, hating other people who could eat without guilt or without thinking, and feeling ashamed and secretive about my own eating. I did not binge, I starved, and I starved out of pain- not out of a hatred or even a disinterest in food. In fact, my stomach, and my battle to control it (its size, shape, impulses, and desires) was a struggle to control my entire body, my life, my family, my world. In many ways, this is the very epicenter of the disease, the battle ground, the focus- and interestingly, perversly even, it is full of hunger, of thoughts of food, of a earnest desire to taste, to feel full, to feel safe, and happy.

Also mapped: The hands
I'm having technical difficulties with the images of these regions, but will post close up's as soon as possible. In the mean time I will explain that the right hand is covered in images of diet pills, each finger "tattooed" with phrases from the cult of pill-dieter's like "two capsules in them morning before breakfast" "ephendra" "caffeine" and "rapid weight loss." Diet pills became a major tool of the disease. I've used them for over 5 years to rapidly drop weight and to sustain impossible thinness. Diet pills not only enabled me to loose weight, they in many ways helped me to affect normalcy in my social and romantic relationships. I took the pills to enable me to eat around friends, family, and boyfriends who as I became thinner and thinner grew suspicious of my eating. In many ways, when I was outed as an anorexic and people began forcing and watching me eat diet pills allowed me to preform eating. I maintain this behavoir on and off today, however more to loose weight than to conceal starvation.

The left hand is full of images of woman before and after using diet pills. The images represent my connection to what is I think a cultural obsesssion with control over the body. I often looked at and regarded these images as inspiration- not necessarily because they suggested I too could drop 20lbs, but because they compelled me to be thinner than these women. I could do more, I could be thinner. Pills, starvation, and hours at the gym were the way.

Papers, papers, papers OR ideas, ideas, ideas

2008-03-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

I suppose where the conception of seminar papers are concerned it is better to have many ideas rather than none at all. However, I suffer- more than perhaps any of my freshman comp. students- to cull from the wild herd of ideas teaming about in my head, a lucrative and narrow focus. In attempt at airing out my thoughts, and perhaps either arriving at that focus I yearn fo, or at least encouraging from others among you some advice or guidance I will take out in turn each of the three favorites that presently allure my attention. I will warn you however, none of my ideas are as of yet fully fleshed out. One, indeed, is as skeletal as its subject matter.

To begin: Science and Travel

Idea 1: Captain Walton/Artic Travel/And The Monster At Home
Last semester I attempted a paper on Frankenstein. I say attempted, because that is merely what the paper amounted to; an attempt, that never fully achieved the hopes that inspired it, nor can be characterized by any particularly well formed thesis. It was a paper about Frankenstein, roughly focused on the issue of female authorship (the female author as a monstrosity). To be honest, the idea is (I think) more interesting than the paper itself, which flopped with a resounding (and not a little bit dissapointing) thud. That said, given our discussions in seminar, and my current project with the artic travel narratives of William Parry (circa early-mid 19th century), I am interested in perhaps reapproaching Frankenstein- or more specifically the framing letters from Walton- as travel writing. What might I focus on specifically in such a paper...? Good question. At present, I am struggling to decide what angle I want to take. To be honest, the first thread I thought I might chase is the question of why Shelley so chose to frame the story of Frankenstein within the W's travel writing. I find it interesting that Walton's letters serve to frame Frankenstein's story, but it is only in light of the story they bookend, that we can fully understand their significance, and W. as a character. Is there a paper here? I'm not sure. What else might I say or consider about these letters? About artic travel? About Shelley's attitudes toward to voracious appetite for knowledge that characterized her age? What connection might I draw between W's travel and Frankenstein's single-minded passion for control of nature--- that has not yet been made? Is there a way to expand what we talked about concerning Emerson, the poet-scientist, and Walton's character?---- I'm desperate for a solid focus.

Idea 2: Artic Travel Then and Now/ The nature of exploration in a discovered world
Basically, I'm interested the death of the explorer (and later the traveler) that both Conrad and Fussell declare has taken place, and given way to the age of the tourist- and where does artic travel fit in to this idea. The artic in the 19th century (and I think still today) presented an alluring destination for the would-be explorer, perhaps one of the last mysterious lands, untrafficked by men. Today, with the world seemingly mapped, and little left for the explorer, but psuedo or "re"discovery we see all sorts of interesting trends emerging. One I find interesting, that was brought to my attention by Ben yesterday is this issue of urban discovery- or the phenomena (if you want to call it that) of urban dwellers seeking out danger and adventure in the city, namely through activities like scaling buildings, and exploring rooftops/alleys/etc. But what about the artic? It still remains isolated, and in some ways virginal- if only because it's so frigid and inhospitable, and people (brave or crazy) still trek there in the name of adventure and discovery- or perhaps just for the challenge. In Parry's day the NW Passage presented the an enticing prospect that drew explorers to danger, death, and disaster in the artic, but today- the passage discovered, Africa mapped, the world laid out in detail on google maps- what is the artic? And, what is the artic explorer- is the intrepid traveler to the north just a tourist like those that flock to sun and beach in pseudo-places along in Mexico or other resort hotspots? Are the two really so different? I've got in my possesion a recent travel writing from an expedition to the artic in the 1980's and I suppose I might consider examining it in light of what has been said about the state of the explorer, traveler, and tourist today along side travel writings of the 19th century....could I do that?

Idea 3: Romancing the Skeleton/Exploring, naming, and owning nature and the body
I'd thought to expand my Villette paper from last semester on anorexia and Victorian society/women into a thesis, but lately I've been courting other ideas about how to approach a topic of great personal interest to me. Perhaps there is something to be done concerning travel/science and the body that might appeal to my interests about women, science/medicine and the body....?

the struggle to reconcile apetite with apetite

2008-03-12T18:57:00.000-07:00

I love food. I've always loved food. Cheeses; warm, crusty, buttered and sweet breads; custards, cremes, and tartes; warm bowls of jasmine rice and coconut curry; thick cuts of lamb; the sweet melting comfort of white or thick milky chocolate on the tongue are only a few of the tastes that held my mouth captive through childhood and adolescents. Needless to say by sixteen puberty and my rich affair with food had fully taken hold of my breasts, hips and thighs, making them full and soft- curvaceous if you will. I wish I could say that I relished my womanly figure, but I did not. The only of my friends to have an hour glass figure, I began to resent my apetite, and the body I lived within. In those years a deep sense of embarrassment and desire for smallness bloomed into a full blown obsession with food- or rather, with-holding food- and the shape of my body. What once I considered my home, a fleshy vehicle for my life and experiences- became something wild, unruly, and manipulable. I believed I could attain a sense of control over my flesh. I could be my own master. In later years, when personal crises, pain, and an unbearable sense of powerlessness dominated my daily life, my desire to own, mold, and make perfect my body escalated from an obsessive desire into a full blown religion that ultimately left me nearly 80 lbs, alone, and psychologically destroyed. I can honestly say I went mad, and even though every day I lost weight I felt both more and less in control in my life I developed a strange capacity to love intensely every aspect of the world- as if I was in some way aware of a pending fatality. I loved the movement of light on the floor, the quiet of campus early in the morning, and the movement of chill december air against my face more than I have ever loved anything- more even then I loved food or the idea of thinness. In some ways, I feel that these things became the nourishment that kept me alive- and perhaps the very things I realized I was in danger of loosing when heart palpitations, horrible cramping pains, and soaking night sweats suggested that my body was shutting down. I'd found perfection, and it was painful, ugly, and alienating. I was dying. I know that now. I was insane. I was broken. I was killing myself slowly, like an violent exhibition of my self-hate, agonizing pain, and desire (oh god, how I desired) for a sense of security.

I'm 108lbs now, and I would be a liar if I said I'm happy with those numbers. In honesty, those three digits make me sick, and I often consider them with a sense of disdain for what seems to be my weakness, my ugliness, my embarrassing imperfection. I am at a "healthy weight" but I am not well. I live every day in a constant battle with myself, my combating hungers, my desire for a sense of peace. It is possible that I will never understand what it means to be satisfied with myself, or ever respect my body. I could not begin to tell you what my body wants. I could not begin to tell you what I want. And I could not begin to imagine a day when I will not struggle with these feelings, these questions, this woman's body.

In looking through photos on my boyfriend's computer I came across this and the last photo of me. My heart ached a little. I don't look like that any more. I don't look like that any more. I want those bones. I want that shape.

But I hunger. And I eat. I savor and I regret.

Because it gets me too far away from there.

Tiger, tiger scratching for air OR I'm tired of being mad.

2008-03-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

A bomb, tearing wildly the fabric of the air, screaming into a fatal birth. A fire in a congested, urban apartment building. A star going violently to death. These are nothing compared to the trauma of my heart this day, this hour. Anxiety is crippling, Depression rots out the mind, and Anorexia...is an old cancer that never dies if it never completely kills. I know all three- my sick little trinity- and hate them all.
This morning I awoke in bed in their company. Anxiety had tied my hair in knots as I slept, and the ends are cakey and white with the salt of Depression's tears. The room smelled like an ocean, bottled and stagnant a thousand years. The smell is my heart, which seizes and starts suddenly then sinks- the alternating influence of Anxiety and Depression.

Anorexia, awake before us all, stands in the kitchen staring at empty plates and cups. She twists forks in her hair, and suckles the cold metallic taste of a spoon.Some days she is more a sad, little ghost than a monster, but other's she hulks, heavy and hideous, a cancer that lives on my near death, and as I grow fatter, my pain and embarrassment. She is not kind enough to kill, nor am I strong enough to live without her. This is what you call an unhealthy relationship.

I watch her pick up an empty dish and lick the white porcelain face of it. Her breakfast. My stomach knots, and groans. She looks over at me disdainfully, and comments on my thighs. They were not so big and dimpled when I treated her with the respect she deserved. Remember when I loved you? Remember how close we were? Remember how free and safe you felt inside me, me inside you?

Thin people get away with everything...I know, and remember often how much easier it was to be the thinnest. Flesh is awkward, embarrassing...a good way to be noticed, and for all the wrong reasons. Anorexia will not come back to bed. She is disgusted by me now, and we live most days like a married couple, both equally repulsed but attached to the other. I'm not as beautiful as I once was. She hates my breasts and the soft round flesh at my hips. She often pinches my sides and glares disdainfully. Remember when I loved you? And I...remember when she was beautiful and powerful. I remember when she was the only thing in the world. Not even my sister, not even Micah (my once so Beloved), not even God himself mattered so much as her thin calves and delicate fingers. Since the days we loved, I've grown fat and she more and more like a sore. I lie awake at night and pick at her eyes.

This is the rest of our life.
This is forever.

Depression and anxiety only aid and abed the relationship. When Anorexia grows to angry or jealous to speak to me, they whelm my senses, they chide, and humiliate. It becomes more and more difficult to hide their influence from Dan, who sleeps with us in bed...often pushed to the edge. He asks me, "why are you so unhappy?" He says that he can't understand how some who feels happy to the touch, who- as he says- appears to exude all the joy and love in the world is so sore at heart, so sad, so sick of herself. This orgy has made Love difficult- for me more than for him. How do you love another when you hate or cannot understand yourself? I've turned to God, to the Vedic, and to my gracious mother so many times for a panacea, only to hear again and again that self-love is the only cure. Self love- between you and me- is not so fluffy and simple as Oprah or your grandmother might say. No, my child, my love, my stranger, it is for me the grail that everyone seems to posses and yet crave without satisfaction. I reach for it like dust on the air. I do not know for what I reach. Who are you? What- are you?

I love only the part of me that burns
for you.

I love only what my desire for happiness and peace produces for others;
warmth.

But this morning I am cold. I have nothing to give, and Dan shivers under the covers on the edge of the bed, while Depression makes our pillows soggy with anguish, and Anxiety pinches me awake. This horrible orgy, this sad affair is sadder only because it comes and goes, and when it goes it leaves memories of times that suggest there could be a resolution. I could love my fat thighs. I could eat without guilt, and sleep without screaming awake. I could keep him warm, and feel warm myself.

Couldn't I? God? Mother?

Until then a million pains rattle, grow large, and encompass me. Grandmother, I love you. Mother, I'm sorry you are scared. School, I fear every day I will fail you. I think today I am. My kindred spirit, do not go down this dark road- please. I love you. Hands, can you not create a way out? Words that release a little pressure from my heart? Father, I love him. Sister, I love him. Brother in law, I love him. Even if he tends bar, even if he never wears a white collar, even if we struggle to get by. I love him. I love him. Days like this

Dan, you are the only nourishment I have.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I confess the motives behind these feels are in part very logical, and in part very unclear. I'm dealing with some family trails right now, concerning the health of my grandmother, the mental health of my father, and my own psychological struggles. The three I feel have coalesced, and become an awesome burden on my heart. In addition, I feel guilty for not having done any school work since Wednesday. Do you understand this feeling? I was so tired. I had so much on my heart. I felt I did need and was thankful for this break, no matter what outside issues where going on (and perhaps because of them), but now here it is Tuesday and I feel absolutely terrified that I'm going to fail my courses this semester. I feel stressed out about seminar papers, projects, and teaching. I feel worried. I feel sick. Sure, I always feel that way- but so very much so now. I'm actually scared, and not sure if I have right to be.

I guess that's the most honest thing I can say.

In progress

2008-02-28T10:57:00.000-08:00

You
were not here twelve years ago when my young sister, then very much neophyte in the world came to Pullman- crying. The transfer from the security of home in the comparitively under-developed suburbs of Redmond in 1995, and indeed from the comfort of being possessed of a very tangible family, to the independence of an isolated, small town and its bustling university was rough. She wept for weeks into the starchy blue comforter my parents bought just for the regulation twin xl dormitory bed she often foresook to call home (still crying) to beg for a chance to come home from this "hell hole." It was not that my sister's contempt for her new life in Pullman derived from the painful emotional cramps of comsopolitian withdrawl that often plague young, West-side men and women accustom to a life of traffic choked highways, tall buildings, and an array of shopping outlets to appease their boredom and desire. This (the) one-grocery store, one-book store, no-mall town terrified Heather not for a lack of variety and urban development but because the wide open swath of wheat in which she floated, lost on a sea of her own tears seemed to tremble with the signicance of loneliness she- alone for the first time in her life- suffered.

When mom and dad, having decided even before her departure that college education trumped all other concerns or complaints (be it loneliness, depression, or nervous collapse) from their daughter, she turned to me. You were not there in those days, when having taken my place in the vacant bedroom she left behind I listened with guilt - and a little fear- to her describe the landscape of her exile. On those long phone calls Heather took me on a tour of what seemed like a agrarian hell, surrounded on all sides by miles of nothing but wheat. I was quite sure listening to her talk about the miles and mies of wheat that nothing else existed in Pullman but her cramped dorm room (which she alternately described as "suffocating" and "big and lonely") a few classrooms where she was forced to sit out a few hours of the day. I imagined her wading through wheat back to her bedroom, back to the blue comfortor and telephone- te only human being for miles (excluding of course those few cranky professors that when they weren't hiding in the wheat emerged to torture her). It was not until her graduation, when dad and mom packed me in the car to head to Pullman that I discovered in fact much existed in Pullman beyond wheat. There were at least some shops to speak of, a grocery store, and much larger university than I'd imagined (complete with several dorms and departmental buildings no less). I was likewise surprised to see how many people there were in such a small town. Even over the years, when Heather moved in to a Soriority and began to acquire a clutch of friends, it seemed only these few girls existed beside my sister, as if like refugees of loneliness they'd stumbled upon each other one day and formed a bond against the wheat (and the lurking professors). When I arrived in the front hall of Alpha Phi, I was shocked to see so many women, parents, siblings, and friends moving about in the same space. A series of photos picturing classes of soroirity memebers over the years suggested that in fact there had always been a gathering of people in Pullman. One picture, in which my sister smiled sweetly from a row of other girls her age suggested that she in fact was only one of many that had lived some years out in the the town.

However, I confess that back then on my first encounter with Pullman, I like many present visiting loved ones was a mere tourist. Although, having become quite accostum to and dependent on the increasingly urbanized world of Seattle and it's East Side, left in my mouth a taste of disdain for such a removed, and what seemed to be underdevelped town I was shocked by the disparity between my expectations and the reality of the place. In fact, my sister's complaints about the "alienation" and "emptiness" of Pullman seemed to me then to be more mellow dramatic than true. Sure, we had to drive to Moscow, Idaho to see a movie, and yea, the grocery store was miniscule compared to the massive markets the family frequented at home, and yes, the mall was really more of a collection of small shops- most of them uninteresting, but the town was in fact a town rising up from, rather than drowing in the wheat.

But tourists seldom know what it means to immigrate, and assimilate to the reality of a place, and how doing so can both open up and shrink the geography of both the home departed from and the home made. A tourist then, I merely observed with a sense of detachment the difference between the images trasmitted home from my sister over the years and what I now saw for myself. I do not know if you came to Pullman before immigrating here yourself as a graduate student this past fall, but back then the town was indeed much smaller, and what we now take for granted did not exist- even in a whisper. In 1999, when my sister graduated college the same old buildings that exist now, existed then, but with far fewer new developments to break them up. In reflection, the absence of new infrastructure did indeed make the distance between Pullman and the larger cities of Spokane and Seattle seem farther.....

What I cannot collect, but in memories.

2008-02-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

I posted a few weeks about about the things I love- the things that inspire, shape, and stir my heart to passion. Here is a compilation of these "things"- call them muses- that to me, are so sigh-worthy, so inspiring. I might add, that I regard the following collection as an unsucessful attempt to capture what can never full be captured, like the delicate body of an insect perserved under glass that once kept is rendered artificial, inanimate, and empty. However beautiful each piece of my assembly may be, it is only a vain image of what, experienced first hand (be it glimpsed on a walk through the city, or heard read aloud with passion or pain, or be it felt- really felt) simmultaneously lifts up and tears apart the heart. Or at least my heart.

That said, look and imagine these things as realities. At the very least, enjoy.

2008-02-19T10:10:00.000-08:00

Imagine we are seated at my small wooden kitchen table, between us over-stuffed shoe boxes and manila envelopes spew forth their contents. We've had a few drinks, and I sip from my glass- plied enough by now to share this once-loved collection of images and words that for years I compiled with care, only to pack away in the closet and various drawers for the dust and moths to admire. I sit quietly as you sift through the heaps of Polaroid’s, each with a different face, each from a different time and place in my life and the lives of the people pictured.

You notice each Polaroid is marked at the bottom with a word or phrase. "Happy Birthday," is scribbled in blue ink on the bottom of a Polaroid of a girl draped glamorously over the edge of the empty bath tub she, in her panties and blue sweater, sits in, gazing at the camera. "Blessings" reads another- this of the rich, chocolate face of a waiter at Ihop. His smile dominates the glossy panel of the picture, which I admit is a little blurry and off-colored. No camera could ever really capture skin so deep dark, a smile so electric. His teeth in the photo look like creamy pearls, in life they were white.

You look to me for explanation. "He was a waiter that served my ex-boyfriend and I milkshakes on the only day I can remember when it snowed enough in downtown Seattle to shut the city down. I had a thing for chocolate shakes then. He was nice, and laughed at my order." You hold up the picture of the girl as if to say "and her?" Her name is Virginia. She was my neighbor the old, sterile dormitory I lived in as a sophmore in college. The rooms smelled like dust and the faint odor of bleaching agent. We use to pretend the dorm was once a hospital ward, and make up stories about the patients that held our rooms. I can remember none of them, but I can remember the smell of the place, and Virginia. She was a story too beautiful and complex to write. I tried. But there were never words enough to capture her. "She is the reason this all began," I'd tell you. She, and all the strange and complex people that nothing- not writing, nor a picture could ever fully express. "This all began, because of people so beautiful, and complicated they defied and yet inspired words to try to capture them." I think I was in love with everyone I photographed. No, I know I was.

Virginia was the first love (and perhaps curiosity) to pose for me, to tell me what I wanted to know. "What is your favorite word? What words make you feel profoundly?" I wanted to know how these ineffable beings would vocalize themselves; what words resonated deep in their characters- those places I wanted to go but could never get to. When I asked her, she said without a second's thought "Happy Birthday!" and laughed. She was beautiful, and the phrase somehow fit her perfectly...although of course neither of us could ever express why. That was true for almost everyone I asked over the years for the word or phrase that moved them or "spoke" to them more than any other; many people could offer their choice without much thought, but all struggled to vocalize why this word, this phrase meant something important to them, or why they loved it. We were both always at an impass. Even when explanations were offered they felt flat or incomplete. I liked it better when people would speak without explanation. Imagination could prevail in the absence of explanation. Imagination is the only thing that can even come close to capturing the essence of a person; it is that which allows one to on the evocation of a word transcend themself to merge with another in some way, to get inside, perhaps just a small corner of them.

More than the desire to understand people, the desire to capture and preserve them in some way drove my collection. It wasn't enough to simply remember these people, and their words, or jot them down in some one-dimensional note book- I had to somehow capture the origin- the face, the body, the personality from which the meaning of each word derived. The people were always more important that the words they provided to explain some aspect of themselves. I believe now I may have been out to collect them, these strangers who's lives crossed with my own sometimes only for a moment, or sometimes in friendships or affairs that linger still now. I wanted to know, and try to identify with them in some meaningful way, before they drifted away from me- before they became ghosts of a moment, and then only shadows, dissolving, forgotten. It is true that there is something unrepeatable about these people at the moments when I asked them to consider themselves, their lives, and the function and meaning of language in their existence. What one day represented the word that in some way summed up a profound belief or desire- or perhaps their sense of self- would, I know, change just as people change. For some, these words, which they claimed as the most powerful or expressive they knew, have been forgotten, and that once important meaning lost. Just as you cannot replicate a Polaroid, you cannot replicate a person at a single moment in their life, especially those fleeting and seemingly insignificant ones when you delivered an order of milkshakes to a strange couple with an old camera on a snowy day or picked passenger up in your cab one winter night, or stopped by to chat carelessly to an old friend. I loved taking advantage of these moments. With these pictures I tried freeze time and people, holding on, and preserving them together the only way I knew how. As for the question I ritualistically asked of each subject, I can only say I loved slowing people down in their daily business to consider the value of something so easily taken for granted, and yet as powerful and necessary as language is to our lives, and selves.

Sitting before my fast assembly of photos I would explain all this to you, while we surveyed all these captured moments, all these captured souls- so you could see them for what they were suppose to be, and what now I can only explain as my love of people manifested in squares of light and echoless sound. And I expect that you would ask what I sometimes ask myself: "Why did you stop collecting? What will you do with all this...what did you want to do with all this?" I don't know. I would sip my drink, and look searchingly over it all, thinking "I don't know" and saying finally to you the truth...I collected without knowing why, or without a thought about what to do with the collection. At the time, the motives for collecting waxed and waned in my consciousness. I did not always remember why I began this venture. It is only now, after I've put away my questions and camera to consider the collection that I remember why it all began, although I cannot say that remembering the motive much explains it. What did I want from this collection? To what purpose was it intended? I don't know.

All the pictures live now in cupboards, closets and drawers, not unloved but without a purpose for me to put them to. They simply exist. I have begun to think about returning to collection- it has been months since I last asked my question and photographed anyone- but without a sense of purpose I cannot bring myself to continue. At one time, the experience of collection was enough, and I use to look over the images with a sense of awe for the beauty and complexity of human lives. Now, I feel that I must have a purpose greater than simple love and desire. Even preservation is not possible while these images rest in heaps, hidden away, uncatalogued, unexplained, and without display. What use are these things without some end to put them to? Why collect only to stuff away somewhere in darkness? I feel I have done no justice by these subjects, and I loved them. I saw in them some part of myself that I wanted to understand, as much as I wanted to understand them, and yet I remain without a clear sense of what it all means. I believe the collection deserves explanation and order, something more than simply being hoarded and by and by forgotten. If I begin again, I will do so with the intent of creating (or recreating) something from all these voices, all these words, all these glimpses of lives captured on film. I'm not sure what yet, but perhaps in time it will come to me. As I sat with you before my strange assembly I would tell you this ("One day, I'll figure out what it means and what to do with it") and turn the subject to easier things. I would show you my favorites, the one's that touch and move me in some way still- the ones I can feel....:

1. Terra Clarke, a friend and possibly one of my great crushes:
In the picture she lays with her head on her stretched out arm, the acres of brown hair that in memories of her cascaded down her back in the picture softly frame her face, which is blurry- like a dream. The picture reads: Strawberry Fields

2. Joseph, the cabby that picked me up from the bar late on my 21st birthday in Seattle:
The picture is dark and Joseph is barely discernible against the lights of passing cars and the darkness of that wet night in January. He looks like a ghost, his rich olive skin bleeding in to the darkness. I remember his voice; it was rich with an accent I could not place. Soft. Subtly seductive. The picture reads: Blessings

3. A girl I met at a party, whose name is now utterly lost to me:
In her horn-rimmed black glasses and tight blue cardigan she looks like she would be called Olive, or June...something dated, something sweet. She is pretty in an unusual way. She brushes her hair from her face as she laughs, seemingly unaware that she is being photographed. Tattoos mark her neck and forearm. The picture reads: Phantasmagoric

4. The waiter at Ihop the day it snowed so hard the city shut down:
He laughs uncomfortably. He did not like being photographed, and it shows even through his smile. He was kind, though, and intrigued by my question, although he struggled to think of a word that he found particularly meaningful. I liked him, his warmth and the way he teased me for ordering a milk shake on a day so cold, and I wanted an answer from him. I rephrased my question: "What about a word that feels really good to say, something that you love the feel and the sound of?" The picture reads: Hey-yah!

Reflecting on these photos, I admit I feel the same desire to discover new faces and identities, or new corners of those familiar people that I call friends, family, and lovers. Perhaps, I might return to people I've questioned before, and ask them to revisit their relationship to language. What has changed? What moves you now? Perhaps, I will discover entirely new people; or rather discover in them some kernel of personal meaning or truth bigger than us both. Leafing through my collection, with you I might ask for your answer. Now that we have shared these lives and words together, what moves you? Or perhaps, I would simply sigh over the faces smiling, staring, or glancing away from me and begin to pack it all up again, to take out some other date, perhaps over wine, perhaps with someone else, perhaps with a discovered sense of purpose.

H.

2008-02-13T06:41:00.000-08:00

Having determined to help establish a consul in China, and to satiate the buring curiousity of nations about the forbidden interior of the last great civilized country unknown to Europeans I embarked on the great ship Lion with a crew of 45 men on mission of exploration and diplomacy. History is likely not to remember to her children the story of my part to this endeavor, I being but a assistant to greater men, but thinking it worthy to record, I will write for her my true trials and curious observations of a curious land.

My name is Peter J. Williamson, the son of an the most upright ale-house keeper Peter D. Williamson Sr. of London, and good woman Alice Williamson, formerly of South Hampton. The eve before my departure I took a last drink with my good father, my mother standing by, stroking my pale hair with much pain, and thought what a place I am to leave for the misty terrainn of the unknown. Though, I was not to travel alone, as so many have, and will I think for sometime forward, I felt in that moment surrounded by my family in the ale-house whose roof hung affectionately over my infancy, adolescents, and early manhood, that I was leaving to plunge into a land wholey apart from the world. Would I return? When? God knows, voyages of exploration have a unpredictable appetite for men. That said, I kissed my beloved and parents, took my last strong mouthful of ale and strode off for the east.

Our ship, the Lion departed early the following morning into a gray mass of morbid clouds that seemed to dip down to the very face of the see. Needless to say, what excitement I felt was a bit tempered by this dark departure. I'd imagined setting sail for a golden orb of rising sun. I'd imagined song on aboard ship, and many thrilled looks from the men. I saw niether in this solemn business of departure. Rather, all about the ship were about some specific task, and all tended to their works without so much interest purpose as would startle a fly. Indeed, except for the diplomats who conversed about and planned in anticipation of the great hidden East they were to probe, and with hope establish a station in the rest of the ship seemed not to realize, or perhaps care for the adventure ahead.

What excitement their might of been, even in my own heart shrank by and by as the long voyage stretched on, seemingly without end. The greatest excitement came when, landing on the shores of very stopping points we began to notice a change in the terrain, which turned variously more green or more rocky, and showed in places artifacts of man that suggested a difference in cultural domain. By these moments alone, could one feel our progress. By theses moments alone, could I feel that I was progressing toward a reality, much fantasized about. The dream became more and more solid in the progression of land masses, and yet still formless and shifting. At times I struggled to comprehend the solid earth that seated China, our destination, and doubted much if, even as I stood upon it, I would be able to believe or explain it's solidity.....

positano. going back- inside

2008-02-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

What is left but memory to recreate that niche in the Italian coast, its cobbled corridors and alley's, roofed with spindling, leafy vines, that held my life for a moment in dreamy stasis. I took no pictures there, nor bought any trinkets or took any artifact that now endures. Even those gorgeous, horribly uncomfortable sandals I bought to replace my busted sneakers are a mere memory- one whose beginning I cannot trace. When did I loose the thing? When did its shape and weight on my foot transform into a feeling, and image only?

Five years removed from what I sometimes now believe really was the dream it felt, Positano is more a harbor in my imagination than reality. The place itself like its people- whose faces long ago melted- has at turns gradually dissolved, shifted shapes, grown more beautiful, or a times, more ghostly; it is as much feeling and image as the sandals whose place among my possessions is in my mind only. In reflection, I wonder if there is something to be said of those cheap tourist t-shirts and countless pictures of sun-touched tourists smiling in front of some local novelty. At least through these- these things- you can pretend to own a piece of what you really only pass through momentarily on your way to somewhere else. But it is pretense only, isn't it? What is the souvenir but a shred of "evidence" you hold up to remind yourself and others that this place, and you occupation of it, your memory, your story is real. “See, I really did walk the streets of Positano, and touch the sand where the street bleed away into the blue water. I really did taste the salt on my fingers and hear the laugh of richly olive-complected children at play in the drift near by. See, my photo? My shirt? See the evidence?”

The truth is even evidence fails to say anything of the reality of the place you dwelt within. It is only piece, sometimes- as with those t-shirts- a manufactured symbol, that signifies nothing of the local, only the novelty. What I mean is, the trinket- if we will call it that- is a symbol of a place manufactured for a foreigner, intended to be taken away. It has no real connection to the earth, the sound, the energy of the geographic space it was taken from. An artifact, that is a piece of the space (like a rock or pressed flower) is perhaps more closely linked to its source, but it too- once it is taken out of its context- becomes a symbol for the taker, it’s meaning and use permanently altered to suit a new context (that of memory). It is cut from the heart, from its source, and it alone can never recreate the wholeness of the space from which it was pulled. But, unlike the t-shirt or photo, I think it might perhaps retain the spirit of its origin, like a ghost hanging on. Can’t you feel sometimes? When you hold a piece of a place you went that you took home with you, can’t you feel its origin pulse lightly, can’t you feel a sense of the wholeness of which it was once a part? And it there was a wholeness, from which you took a part what happens to that wholeness? It can never be whole- not completely, once it is taken from. Do you feel then, a sense of what you’ve stolen? Do you feel the ghost of what has been broken, sulking somewhere at the periphery of your consciousness? And when the thing looses its potency for you- when it’s symbolical meaning, the meaning you, the tourist, designated to it- and you pack it away in some attic box or toss it out with the trash on a whim of tidiness do you feel anything?

What troubles me further is memory, especially when memory alone is what you take from a place. To think of it, memory seems part manufactured and part truly connected to that wholeness you were a part of once- maybe a foreign part, but still somehow a part of. It seems part tourist t-shirt, part artifact. What do I mean by that? I guess, I mean that memory is in some ways a production, forever in a state of production. As with my vision of Positano, memory is colored by our heart, and desire. Memory is a paper crane, a production created to mean something, to symbolize something. Memory is not a photograph. By that I mean it is not fixed as a single vision, printed forever, unchangeable, but true both photograph and memory are subject to interpretation, and desire. That is, both shift slightly, sometimes dramatically, depending on the way one wants to perceive something- be it an image framed behind a glass screen or the floating images that change color with the weather of our imaginations, and emotions. But memory is also, still I think connected in some very real way to the origin of its creation. That is, if we are still talking about the memory of a visit taken to a geographic reality. The reason I suggest that there is something potent, and connected to the origin of the traveler’s memory of a place is this idea I have that when you create a memory from a lived experience, you take elements of the “remembered” in to your self. The scent, the sound, the weight of the air, the light of the hour, the feel of the crowd or the sand or the living creature at your fingers, as parts of the cognitive processes that are involved in the moment of perception and the creation of a memory imprint themselves on you. They are translated if you will into the chemicals that as much as they will make up your sense of a place when it’s gone, also make up a part of you. You see, so I think (unless I’m wildly off my rocker) there might be something- I hesitate to use this word, but pure or original about a traveler’s memory, as much as it is fallible and shifting, and produced. Maybe, when you come from your travels, with artifacts or with nothing but the imprint of a place (or places) on your memory, you return with these things inside you- as part of you. And maybe in these things, as much as they are cut from their original context, and given new context in you, retain some of that original wholeness of which they were a part.

The place becomes a harbor in your imagination, uprooted from its geographic certainty, drifting within you as a sight for endless recreation. The place becomes a reflection of you, of you remembering, or you (re)remembering a memory of you in a place that is no longer significant because it is a place, but because it is a part of you. Positano was but two days in my life, too sensation-rich, visually stunning, days of my life that I expand and contract according to my place and situation at the moment of remembering, for as long as I remember, and recreate it in me. In a way I think, my location at a given moment of memory has become more important that the location I remember. How have I blurred the lines between my self and this place? How have I recreated that cascading city and its brilliant harbor? Sometimes, the place becomes so gigantic; it expands out and envelops me again. What were vague impressions have at times become gigantic in my memory- the smell of the ocean actually tints the flavor on my tongue and the sunlight filtering through that vine-covered alley shines golden on the backs of my eyes. And yet, there have been years, during which time I failed to practice that all preserving- all distorting- action of re-creative remembering, so that the place shrank, grayed and became a ghost, looming at the rim of my mind. And I think it would be this way, even if I had those sandals still, to remind me. Even if I could still lace their thin leather straps up the length of my calves, and feel my weight settle on the thin leather sole I would have to travel back within myself to that niche in the coastline of my memory, to conjure and recreate (again) the place, the feeling, the moment that wearing them signifies. I suppose that’s it, when you come back with your trinkets, artifacts, or maybe only memories you always come back with nothing, except that which through some strange magic you might endeavor to recreate.

collecting the nest

2008-01-29T10:06:00.000-08:00

I nest. Ever since I left home for college, my domestic space (however cramped it sometimes was) represented a sort of chamber of curiosities in which I collected various artifacts (and at least one Cat) that for me represented a key element to the narrative of my sense of self. However diverse, the items that are collected in and represent my home speak to a distinct sense of identity I have been constructing over the years. I have stacks of old photos of families, men, and women from the early 21st century, I have acquired at antique stores throughout Washington. Many of the first photos I collected, interestingly enough, I purchased from what was once the Antique shop that occupied the building where I now live. Little did I know then, riffling through stacks of photos of ghosts, and other's memories that the spirit of my future lay waiting upstairs. But this is leading away from my main focus. I've collected stacks of old photo's- photos of strangers that now haunt my rooms, dreams and writing with startling clarity. I've also begun to collect the photographs of my family from day before I was even a thought, let alone a possibility. Alongside the strange images the stare without recognition at me from sepia and fading black and white, are pictures of my mother as a baby, a young girl, and bride; pictures of my father in a pram in South Hampton, preparing to pick my mom up for the prom, and leaned out outside his first car- an atrociously green VW bug. My youthful grandparents are also present- their earliest photos of a kind with those strange pictures of unknown faces. For me, these photos have a largely aesthetic quality that makes them so alluring. So gorgeous and necessary as collections in the gallery of my home. But they also have an emotional quality, I can't quite pin down. They evoke in me a sense of romance, of eerie disconnection, of wonder, and passion. They are beautiful, and evoke a strong sort of sense of desire in me. Everything in my home does- all my various collections are united by this feeling. Whether it's the collection of graphic designed and silk-screened posters, the strangely alluring photographs of goddess-like women I have to cut from magazines, have to keep, however cloistered in the curious little gallery of my journal. Even my assemblage of audacious dresses and shoes, hung up or set out like works of art on display represent component collections in a "nest" that is I feel invigorated with a sensation of passion, sensuousness and inspiration. I care little for furniture, and indeed my home is fairly minimally furnished. It is my collections that fill the space. It is my collections that give certain electricity to the air. It is my collections and their collective force in my home that reinforces the narrative of identity I have been writing for myself since I achieved the space and freedom to excavate my self from myself. I am not sure I can quite put into words what all these things together are meant to say specifically about me- perhaps that I conceive of myself as somewhat creative, sensual, expressive, and perhaps like my home- all of these things kept inside the walls of my flesh. In some ways through my collections and place in my domestic space, my home represents to me a very visceral image of my self, full up of all these colors, lights, and intention- all this passion- all this wondering- all these ghosts- all this yearning for beauty (and for embodying beauty) and somewhat contained within walls....well, at least somewhat contained :).

notes on an academic bad ass.

2008-01-17T11:02:00.000-08:00

Is it horrible to say that I feel profoundly liberated by Dyer's delineations of dusty academics as harbingers of death, as morticians, and desiccators of delicious literary fruits? Not to mention wankers. To be true, a rebellious part of me delighted in Dyer's hilarious vituperations of wraith-like academics that theorize the meaning right out of texts. To read him rant recalled the fantasies that occupied my mind at the holiday tables of my childhood, where I sat each year for decades choking on the diplomatic silence of family get-togethers; fantasies of family brawls, instigated by wine thrown in the face of an up-tight aunt- fantasies of some anal relative laid out on a platter with parsley and spices stuffed up their rear, or an apple jammed in their trap. As a kid I knew even as my mom politely patted the sides of her mouth with a starched white napkin and nodded her compliments to grandma's cranberry salad she was visualizing the old bag with the bowl on her head, sticky red mess streaming down her hair. We all were. But no one said it. No one came out and said: "You're all just wankers!"- no matter how true or relieving it would have been. Reading Dyer "say it how it is" provided the sort of relief I've been waiting for every year that passes in polite quiet. I felt at last like someone had finally said- what we were all thinking. I lived for a moment in his shameless rant, I cooled my face in his flying spit, I fanned my frustrations on his breath, and felt the strain of so much frustration ease on my own laughter. I wanted to give him props: "hey Dyer, whoop! whoop!" "Amen."
But of course my position as an "academic fledge" seems to demand some explanation of my sympathy for him and his- uh, harsh?- portrayal of certain intellectauls as frigid, creatively impotent masturbators. How is it that as one who not only professes to want, but works every day to locate at least her professional identity and energies in the very intellectual community Dyer jabs would exalt in such criticism of that community? My strong sympathy for his criticism comes from an equally strong, and newly born angst for the reality of academic work. Call me naive- I am, I was- but before I came to school I visualized graduate study, and indeed the whole profession of literary scholarship as a bustling realm of passionate- well, geeks- like me, whose work if not always pretty or monetarily rewarding- is mostly a work of great love. As I say, I know, and perhaps I knew in some way then that I am naive- naive and achingly romantic, but recognition does not ease the frustration of my awakening. I say awakening because truly these past few months have felt more like an education in jolts and shocks- like starts that bring you sweating from a dream to the reality of your room, its dark, and limitations, its ceiling staring blankly at your hot face- than an education in books and theories. At times I've felt I was in training for a stale, sexless future- a life in which intelligence is defined by how well you pretend it than by your experience and deep awareness of the pains, the passions, the blood, and sweat that are the progenitors of the books you "study". I suppose the truth is I sympathize with Dyer's frustration, not as a seasoned professional, but as a young thing. A young, young thing struggling to understand and to assimilate to the reality of academia without forfeiting the sweet pulpy parts of her heart. I admit it, I want intellectual work to be sexy, fulfilling, generative. I want to feel my powers as a woman meet and mingle with the powers of my mind and heart in the work I do. I want to teach in red stillettos, and spend hours in passionate converstaion about Rilke or Dove or the beauty of a single word. I want to touch the graves of great artists and commune with their ghosts. I want life and living to fuel the work I do- to get out there, to create, to feel, to write for the purpose of revealing something amazing and important about something beautiful. I guess, I'm just sixteen all over again; the difference is the authority I struggle with now is the authority I want to become a part of.

So maybe, the better use of my energy and idealism is to, like Dyer, channel it into my work, rather than let it seethe, and possibly shrink away. More than the balls he has to call certain other scholars "wankers"- I respect that he channeled the idealism that fueled that "sheer rage" in to his intellectual work. Without the project that his rant I believe intends to justify his criticism would be I think just hot air- still somewhat valid (in my opinion), but largely bodiless. His frustration finds purpose, I think, in the form of his work with Lawrence. Does that make sense? I will put it this way, what is criticism like Dyer's if it does not do something- if it does not lead to something- some project- some creation- some work that enacts and invites the very values he so loudly champions? It's like my Mama always said, "If you're going to complain and criticize, you better offer something constructive." Who knew the advice she gave me as a chubby-faced young child (confronted oddly enough with the same sensation of frustration and stifled desire) would be so appropriate now? I suspect she likely knew this would be the case- though hardly that her advice would come in handy as I digest Dyer's innovative academic work and my own feelings as an intellectual neophyte. In the end, it isn't so much his frustration that moves and lingers with me now but what he did with that frustration. I admire, and believe in the creative potency of the jolts, shocks, and disappointments that accompany our struggle to understand and respond to the realities of our dreams, our work, and our world.

Rock on Dyer. Rock on.

thinking about the things i love, miss, feel profoundly about...

2008-01-14T19:51:00.000-08:00

I love graffti. I love murals. I love Montana, the amazing homeless artist who sold a piece of his to me one day at the James St. exit. It was one of few works of art that survived a rainstorm that deteriorated and ultimately destroyed the cubby he dug out under a freeway overpass. I love the Market, even if it is mostly a chaos of tourists. I love the ripe produce and the fish smell- fresh, salty, making the ancient gills under my pale skin stir and flex. My nose perks to the memory. My fingers tingle at the thought of gleaming scales, cold ice, dry flowers, and the smooth and downy skins of ripe fruits. Plums. I love watching the seagulls ride the rifts of air over the 520 bridge on a windy day. I love the way the lake throw sudden wakes over the butress- and my heart- the feeling of it jump in to and burn at my throat when- SPLASH - the water crashes on windshield. I love the sound of things. Even the whistle of dealers. Even the sound of people passing by the studio window when we make love- only the discretion of the flimsy plastic blinds between us. I love the strange intersections of our lives with those of strangers- listening to how closely our distant lives pass by each other. Often there is always only a flimsy plastic blind between us. I love dancing. I love dancing. I love dancing with more than my body. With my heart. With my womanhood in full BOOM. With my heart. I love letting myself out beyond the bounds of my skin to sway and swish and throb and pound and pulse on the humid, sweaty air, to tangle in the music, to cool in the breeze of the heavy breaths of other dancers. I love early mornings in the city, especially sundays, especially in the summer when the light breaks over the tops of the buildings and the streets lay still in shadow. I love sharing the silence with pigeons and garbage and the occasional stranger passing by. I love art. Francis Bacon, Dali, Degas, Banskie, Judith Supine, the pieces left behind to remind me of Micah when he was still searching for himself in his work. I love the strange beauties of urban art that pop up over night and fade just as quickly. The small girl- like a silk screen- printed on the yield sign at the U-district exit. Is she still there? I use to slow down and stare, trying to understand how she was put up there. What medium? The cars behind would honk. A new piece appeared in one of the windows on Bellevue, a beautiful woman with an afro plastered over what must be an apartment window. She smiles out at the street. I smile at her. I think I'm in love with her. I kiss my fingers and blow my admiration up to her every time I pass. How long will she stay? How will it feel when she goes? I love the sudden pop of urban art like the beautiful afro-woman, and how it belongs to no one and everyone at the same time- how it reminds you of the beautiful details of life. Graffti reminds me of flowers bursting through concrete- like a rebellion of color, like a voice screaming out over noise, like a flash of light that catches the eye and just as quickly fades from view. These things inspire me. These things are what I do not want to loose- ever. These things are what I want to make a study of. To contemplate. To understand. To live inside of.

(Pictures to come)

space, place, field, travel, one two three my mind unraveled...

2008-01-10T13:58:00.000-08:00

I am not new to this field. Four winters have passed since I came to this wheat, the swath of openness. This, my fifth, finds me here still at the work of excavating my "passion" from the heaps of books, concepts, histories, and possibilities that daily accumulate in the already cluttered space of my mind. Someone once told me, "you go to college to learn what you've got to learn to make a living in this world, but you go also to find your passion- that thing that is the living of your life." The words, writen in a high school graduation card, and other such advice spoken to me over the past few years have served to both liberate me and to weight me to this search- this search for a nourishing, directing passion- which finds me here, still, a student, excavating every conceivable field for the palpitating heart of my purpose. I can hear it beating sometimes, as I write, as I read Rilke or walk through the city (that is, Seattle, my first and truest home) admiring the galleries of grafity on the exterior walls of Jack in the Box and various electrical boxes on Broadway that grow more and more sophisticated, more beautiful each year. I hear it sometimes beating in the palm of Dan's hand when he thoughtlessly touches my face in his sleep. I hear it sometimes in the heavy silence of the loft at night- throbbing, pounding, wailing for me to find it. Every day I'm excating the various fields of my life- the intellectual, the private, the poetic, the dream fields in which I'm desperate to unearth a sense of myself beyond this search. The self realized. The passion. I'm searching for the passion, direction, purpose not for my life time, no, simply the first driving need that will allow me to leave this scowered field, to begin moving, working, and growing my love, my life, my future. It is no easy task. It is no easy task. It is no easy task, but I do it and I hope and I keep my ears open to listen for the beat.

i use to be an verbal exhibitionist. now i'm an academic. now i'm mute. closed. pulling the covers around the body of my writing. don't look at me.

2008-01-10T11:14:00.001-08:00

learning to say to say to say
what? learning to say
how
to say what?
learning to speak it,
how? what?
everything
learning everything
to say everything to say
it.
say it
say it
say it,
say what?
how?