Reflexivity

Andy, in the tradition of Andy Warhol, Andy Kaufman, and Mahatma Andi, read & rapped his poetry to the sonorous sounds of a contrabass and various accompanying instruments, including electric guitar, flute, and vocal percussion.
Given the fact that Andy and The Androids deliver their art in Flemish, my interpretation is based upon the one in a thousand words I understood: periodic English terms dotted throughout, and/or phrases that my mind could hear as English, even if it wasn’t! I gleaned some things by the tenor of the music and the interplay of syncopation among/between instruments (including Andy’s voice) and the trio of artists.
The flavor I captured was dark and humourous: at turns optimistic (and-or-but activist optimism doesn’t seem to matter?), engaged with/against violence (superspastic, illustrated by the pro- and anti-taser brigades), or calling out the Serial Thing to Kill or was it the need for Serial Pain Killers? I enjoyed watching my friends laugh, yet also noticed disparate effects on the audience-as-a-whole. At times a laugh would ripple throughout in a spontaneous wave, other times the audience was carved into thirds: those attempting to suppress their amusement, those with quizzical expressions – apparently puzzled or processing, and those whose stiff blank visages suggested a deep unease or even disassociation. Countering the bursts of laughter, silence often echoed in the cozy, filled lobby of the cultuurcentra Antwerpen (Berchem).
I enjoyed the challenge of applying my closure skills: that particular leap of faith interpreters make as their best guess as to the meaning being attempted by a particular message right now. Andy jumps from one non-sequitur to the next; how else can Albania, the ozone layer, “lesbes in El Dorado,” “Income Walker,” kanker zo hip, and “nipples” appear in such close linguistic proximity?
Why has the burghermeister gone underground?
Who is wearing moonboots?
What is the title of the song of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s that was emulated? (I recognized the melody but my musical recall is pure lousy.) :-/
The moan of disappointment that shot through the crowd when Andy announced the last number, after the guitarist had just amended his earlier superspastic claim to a psychopathic fascination with degrading fruitcake sex with every girl, testified to the coherence of his unlikely combinations.
I am not sure if the last rap about Caesar referenced the political hate group here or some larger human entity (groups and/or institutions) seeking control, but what Andy is doing with language proves how supple, creative, empowering and membering our ways of speaking can be.

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Some days are just quiet.
I decided to play tourist and went looking for a museum and a recommended bookshop. I found a church! (Make of it what you will!) Street names here change every few blocks, requiring navigational vigilance.

Some time thereafter, I stumbled upon a square, Mechelse Plain, in full preparations for an art opening, featuring the photography of a Belgian artist who died last year, Patrick De Spiegelaere.

A coalition of NGOs hosted the event, Wereldbeelden (World Images). There were some speeches, improv, and then live music. Perhaps folks got to dancing, eventually? It seemed everyone was enjoying mingling. The improv artists promised me a word in English – I suppose I did not wave vigorously enough from the audience but it was a bit tough (!) to gauge timing given my three phrase Dutch vocabulary (”ja,” “nee,” and “dank u”). The audience did provide a few words I could recognize: macaroni, John Lennon, and eyeliner are the ones I recall.
Belgian NGOs are “debating development” this year, in concert with initiatives agreed upon by the World Social Forum.

Meanwhile, in local development (!), I learned that the school of interpretation and translation here in Antwerp has added Gebarentaal (Flemish Sign Language) to its curriculum.

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Some thirty stalwart spirits braved the edge of Hurricane Hannah to begin building “Belchertown’s own pyramid.” Sailing knots secured the tarp which – propped up by two ladders – withstood the night, protecting us from the downpour and thrilling us with sounds of rain and wind as we christened the cairn near midnight with Wrongo Dongo. Howls mixed with cheers in a cacophony of exuberance as we embraced the spirit of ritual, blending our voices with nature’s infinite chanting. I was asked for a convocation (see “Other Use“); all I could muster was Thank You. I felt calm and peaceful in our candlelit circle, humbled by and proud of my friends.

In all important respects, we gathered as we always do – indulging delicious food, drinking comfortably, talking, dancing, teasing, touching, teaching and calling each other into being. I learned so much, as I always do. Everyone oriented to the ceremonial element in their own way. Some recalled significant moments of shared interpersonal interaction, acknowledged difficult aspects of private histories and/or future challenges, and speculated on the symbolism of our individually swirling energies encapsulated by nature’s capacity for storm. Others lost themselves in dance, told tall tales, lampooned themselves and others, played tricks and carefully watched for the precise moment to deliver a perfect pun. Most of us did some of everything. We take our fun seriously, without letting fun completely overtake the serious.

There was power in our utterances last night and this morning. Dorothee educated me on linguistic minorities in France and the Belgian Flemish/French controversy (more on these later!), and Nick proposed jazz as a uniquely unreproducible medium. The confluence of these topics with my upcoming research woke me right up (or was it the Turkish coffee?!)
“Oh yea, that was in quotes,” Don said, walking by a few minutes later as Nick explained, “I don’t want my life to be an open book, I want people to question me.” We were talking about how online social networking could remove mystery from our lives by producing a vast field of ambient awareness (another longer-term side effect of ambient awareness could be the evolutionary loss of certain cognitive skills associated with fact-based memory). An iPhone provided entertainment for awhile, its accelerometer on display with Newton’s Cradle . This put me in mind of the results of a recent “mind map” of local and global trends affecting a particular organization’s anti-racism and social justice activities, in which nearly all trends were described in terms of increase (more more more and faster) instead of decrease.
How did we get from the accelerometer to air-conditioning? I cannot recall, but the comment reminded me of Christopher Dickey’s claim:

as air conditioning conquered the lethargy-inducing climate and Northerners by the millions abandoned the rust belt for the sun belt, the past wasn’t forgotten or forgiven so much as put aside while people got on with their lives and their business.

Somehow nostalgia for the “old days” of answering machines (when you received your telephone messages only when you got home at the end of the day) got intertwined with the luxuries of heating and cooling . . . The Chosen One mused, “we’ve had heat for a long time, it’s harder to make cold.” Indeed, air-conditioning as we know it today is a phenomenon of only the last century: for millenia humans have known how to keep ourselves warm, but only “yesterday” have we figured out how to make ourselves cool. (Uh oh. Global warming is here, now.)
When Brandon left is when it hit me. Some of these people I really may not see again. Dhara reminisced about meeting me at bowling her first year here. She and Henk had been the ones to unveil the group present. (Rumor Mill: going viral. First batch original orders for t-shirts and bumperstickers should be placed here.)

The Nepalese mantra gracing the cairn is, as best I understand it to date, a kind of paean to precious knowledge and pure beauty. We have created physical evidence of passing this way; and less tangibly we have left our marks upon each other – bits of spirit inspiring compelling turning and calling us on, always with the invitation to return. “It’s good,” Franz said today, “to be a little bit bothered by each other.” Yes – such is the evidence of communal connections: they persist!

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There is always so much going on.
Too much?
I’ve been trying to sort out some distinctions between “being spiritual” and “being religious” (after being tag-teamed by an Eastern European cynic and an Undertaker from India for the past six years, it seems I’ve finally cracked). I know I become overwhelmed, often, trying to make sense of the whole – yet . . . the alternative doesn’t appeal. If we give up trying to grasp the whole, then what? Well, people carve out a niche for themselves, making intellectual, emotional, aesthetic choices and compromises and doing the best they can. Meanwhile, social forces twist and buckle the fabric of communities and our cross-cultural relations with each other.
When, I wonder, do we decide it is time to work together? And on what basis? At a community meeting yesterday, someone raised a concern with the erosion of constitutional rights, and someone else objected to the extremity of the claim. But world-class journalists are not supposed to get arrested in America. This occurred at the Republican National Convention, where riot police are keeping protesters as far as possible from the convention center. Since when did protests become such a problem in the land of free speech, the home of originary revolution?
Speaking of which, can you imagine the conversation in Governor Palin’s family? “Uh, mom, it’s great you just got selected to be the next Vice-President of the United States, but, uh, I’ve got to tell you something.” When does the generosity and understanding that we give our own children extend to other kids’ parents?
I was recently at a yoga center where hundreds of earnest persons went about their spiritual work. “Practice,” I thought to myself, “for being soon in another country.” All the anonymous people were nice enough: polite and indifferent. Don’t get me wrong, I was the same way: there to do what I came to do for me, open to engagement if it happened but not seeking interpersonal connection. It was a mild form of alienation. I “belonged” there as much as anyone else who had paid the fee. I look like 95% of the people who were there, and I behave similarly in culturally substantial ways. But I was bothered – it’s a commercial place from which collaborative social action might grow but (it seems) only on the basis of similarity.
In the U.S. (the one that I grew up in, have been shaped by, and currently worry about), the emphasis on individuality leads to the massive reproduction of independent spiritualists who – typically, usually – fail to commit to work together for any coherent social action. Even if people are atheists, that identity is defined in opposition to the notion of some kind of spiritual center. With secular yoga, the body has replaced god as the object of worship. In politics, the body is also central: “what” one looks like, and “how” one sounds become the basis for argumentation and persuasion.
Still . . . it is a measure of how far America has come that both candidates for President of the United States are members of multiracial families. (This point was also raised by a participant during that community meeting.) In my opinion, the most important thing Senator Obama said during the Democratic National Convention (quoted from memory) was to assert

We can continue to live as Americans without a common “religion,” or as Americans whose religion has become a narrowly-defined nationality, or we can find ways to build common cause with the very material of difference itself.

“This” – all of it – is about us. All of us.

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The problem with democracy – real democracy, in which everyone actually has a say – is that there is so much waiting. I am generalizing from recent revelations acquired while participating in a second tubing adventure with a bunch of friends. In particular, an exchange with LavaMan (an ideal male specimen) showed me something about myself that I suspect is not uncommon.
The first tubing adventure I had to work with suppressing frustration; the second time I thought I was prepared (indeed, I was). My emotional experience was fine – either because I had already ‘gone through’ the frustration previously (and managed it), or because some part of me was prepared for things to go ‘this way’ again … or (probably) a combination of both. I was not wrapped up in the struggle of decision-making either trip, just a recipient of the process and outcome. A bystander, I guess, but an observant one, aware of the implications of my passive participation.
At one point, standing around the parking lot waiting for the downstream vehicle delivery people to return, a pal suggested no one knew what was happening – which was accurate: none of us had the whole picture in mind (where everyone was, who was doing what, what – in total – needed doing, etc). And – we all knew what we were doing: going tubing! (How hard could that be?!)
A few leaders emerged (trying to organize the group in certain directions) but there was always a competing idea or suggestion, so implementation was slow. These dynamics are not new or unique; indeed, I design curriculum so that students have to encounter and engage these dynamics, in order for them to practice how to negotiate roles and identities in uncertain social circumstances.
The crucial learning moment for me came on the river a few hours later. I had realized a couple of guys were behind us, and one of them – a first time rafter – had been described as “struggling” by a friend just a short time before. So I thought, well, I’ll wait for them; they are the last two. I wondered about one other guy, who had been behind us earlier but I had an evanescent impression that he had floated on ahead of me at some point.

The pair came by and informed me that Jake was still behind. I waited awhile longer. As the time stretched, my doubt grew. Surely he couldn’t be that far behind? He knows what he’s doing anyway, so I don’t need to worry, right? And, I did have that sense that he had passed me, hadn’t he? Eventually, I noticed the guys had pulled off – waiting – for me? I didn’t really want to hold up the show with my own stubbornness . . .

I caught up with them, and LavaMan insisted Jake was behind us. He engaged my questioning process calmly, as I worked through the arguments pro-staying (based only on a guess?) and con-staying (if he hasn’t come, he can’t – we’ll be better able to reach him from upstream; and he might be in front of us). “Let’s wait five more minutes,” the LavaMan proposed, “if he doesn’t come by then we’ll leave.”
I had a suspicion he was just angling for more time to flirt (!), but lo-and-behold . . . here came Jake.
Wow – what had I been thinking? Even though I was told, “I just saw him,” and “we passed him doing something on shore just before we saw you,” I was ready to up-and-leave on the much-less-certain perception of my own “knowledge.” Ouch! The implication is hard to escape, no? I didn’t trust someone else’s judgment – and not even over something that I was sure of, but something that I wasn’t actually convinced of myself! Why?
The doubt disturbs me: not only as a reflection on me and how I orient to others, but as an indicator of a cultural bias against waiting (in particular). The evidence abounds – I witness it during interpretation when participants complain about how long the communication process takes, I see it in the levels of impatience and frustration expressed by students while they adjust to alternative learning structures – and now I get to recognize it, so blatantly, within myself.
The impulse, it seems, is to hurry up and end the waiting. The solution is usually proposed that “a leader” is needed. Well, I think, “yes, and.” Yes, we need to agree to follow specific suggestions from particular people, and I’m not sure we have to take all the suggestions from only one person. At some point, in a healthy collective, we know each other well enough that we ought to be able to acknowledge who has skills in a given arena. Perhaps it is my imagination, but don’t we know each other well enough, by now, to have a good sense of who makes good decisions about various kinds of things?
The question, then, becomes not “who will lead,” but “when will I suppress my doubt“?

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Summer has been at its peak, climate-wise, for the past few weeks.


During bicycle rides, I’ve been taking in the deep smells of haying, the lighter fragrances of flowers and crops, and the occasional blast of cow manure. The temperature has begun to drop more at night, a harbinger of fall – especially in combination with some early leaf-turning.

I will miss Massachusetts this upcoming year – and who would ever have guessed I’d be saying that?! Yesterday, while floating down the Deerfield River in an inner tube with raucous friends, trying to dodge vigorous rafters and avoid skewering by overzealous kayakers, I thought, “But why not? I was conceived here.” The spark of potential consciousness embedded at that biological instant probably drew energy from these environs. (From where else could it come?)
The past month has been a blur of teaching, proposal-writing/refining, and soaking up as much socializing before the community’s inevitable dispersal. So many have already left, with so many soon to follow. My own departure approaches: probably temporary but who ever knows for sure?



Types of fare-thee-well gatherings vary from certain kinds of overstock to full spread (delectable) meals, and gifts.
All manner of pronouncements have been made at said events, from “I will never forget!” to

Memory is short, however. And so a lot of time gets spent milling around. “We are waiting for a reason,” Hunter posed – not wanting to actually ask the question but wondering nonetheless. “Nobody knows what’s happening.” Dhara explained our group’s arduously slow process of decision-making while I mused on cultural differences. It struck me with the force of revelation that I have hardly ever waited for groups/events to happen. No wonder I’m so apt to the production of something, to doing something, of there being a thing requiring participatory action on my part! This is the (U.S.) american enculturation process – deep training beginning with preschool about time (schedules), timing (hurry up, switch now), and completion (well, we may not get a chance to come back to that so you better just get it done now).

“This,” Don intoned on the edge of the Deerfield River, “is how it was at Troy.” I thought he meant hordes of strangers merging for a common purpose. No, seems he had burning the boats in mind, so there would be no possibility of retreat. That is the way life is, ain’t it? Sometimes you can backtrack but it is never the same as if you went that way the first time. “We need an airlift!” is not the same as, “Hey, can you drop us some more supplies?”

“You’re not in Belgium yet,” Zeynep advised, as she congratulated (us both?!) on returning from our mental moments elsewhere.
This morning I began to read an analysis of Obama’s economic ideology, in which he is characterized as more left and more right than one might think, a position he describes as postpartisan. I definitely approve of this measure: “…changing the tax code so that families making more than $250,000 a year pay more taxes and nearly everyone else pays less. That would begin to address inequality.”
We got kids coming, y’know? And there are so many already in the world, growing up under a new climate, with a different reference point for the planet than we (at least most in my generation) ever imagined. We got chances to make things better, different: more fair, more possible.

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The new UMass Journalism Department weblog documents the disturbing trend in hard news staffing/investigative journalism, linking to an article that contexts the decline of trained journalistic staffing in the age of technological expansion. The embedded example of the linked reference source is powerful and poignant, but while an individual Palestinian enacted terror in Jerusalem, the Israeli military held an entire Palestinian town under curfew in an attempt to minimize civil protests against more construction of the wall.
I received an email Monday: “Urgent!!! International Support Needed In Ni’lin.” An email report yesterday from the Ni’lin Popular Committee Against the Apartheid Wall clarifies that the curfew is over but not – as claimed by an Israeli military spokesperson – because of negotiations or mutual agreements concerning the issues at stake.
Here is where reporting gets tricky, huh? The intention to illustrate a very basic point plays into a much larger – and problematic – pattern, in which alternative perspectives on particular dilemmas are represented disproportionately. The fact of the created media/news statistic (a percentage of reports roughly “pro” Israel and a percentage or reports roughly “pro” Palestinian) perpetuates the majority-minority stances already rooted in historical trajectories, thereby centering the discourse on the most sharply defined edges of the conflict instead of – what I, personally, would like to see journalism do more intentionally – creating representations that allow people to shift from entrenched positions because alternatives are opened up.

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Quoting from a Reuters article by Eric Auchard about Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, on “good, evil and monopoly fears“:

When he first joined Google as CEO seven years ago, Schmidt acknowledged thinking the “Don’t be evil” phrase was a “joke” being played on him by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Schmidt recalled sitting in Google’s offices later in 2001 when an engineer interrupted a strategy discussion over a planned advertising product by saying, “That is evil.”
“It is like a bomb goes off in the room. Everything stopped. Everyone had a moral and ethical conversation, which by the way, stopped the product,” Schmidt said.
“So it is a cultural rule, a way of forcing a conversation, especially in areas which are ambiguous,” he said of how the mission statement works in practice at Google.

The desire to ritualize such a practice of communication illustrates the ethic of “start[ing] from the perspective of what [big, world-class] problems do we have”? This is an example of the political divide characterized by David Brooks a few days ago as “a little culture war” between “”the highly educated coastal rich …. [and] … the inland corporate rich.” It would be nice, somehow, to get away from a blanket condemnation of whomever can be construed as part of the latter group (Brooks doesn’t do such a bad job of representing them – even if he does deploy inflammatory rhetoric at times), because we need them, too, to be part of the solutions we quite urgently need to be putting into place and action.

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The trilogy, billed first as Xenogenesis and then as Lilith’s Brood, closes with more insight on the human condition from the vantage point of maturity. (Am I a grown-up, now?)

“Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once we did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though we had stolen thoughts from their minds.” (p. 548)

Why are we so reluctant to be known? And what is the crime of understanding?

“…the ooloi perceived all that a living being said – all words, all gestures, and a vast array of other internal and external bodily responses. Ooloi absorbed everything and acted according to whatever consensus they discovered. Thus ooloi treated individuals as they treated groups of beings. They sought a consensus. If there was none, it meant the being was confused, ignorant, frightened, or in some other way not yet able to see its own best interests. The ooloi gave information and perhaps calmness until the could perceive a consensus. Then they acted.” (p. 553)

Jodahs is another child of Lilith, Tino and Nikanj, Dichaan and Ahajas. Jodahs has exceeded the limits of genetic engineering designed to ensure only male and female children, instead becoming ooloi, an ungendered being. “Not being able to go to anyone for comfort…can make you like the lightening – mindless and perhaps deadly” (p. 558).
I have acted “like the lightening” sometimes, in past events and instances I’d rather not remember. Quick anger and deep hurt spark words that leap unbidden from the tongue even before my mind has wrapped itself around them. Then come the rationalizations: the excuses and reasons why, the justifications. None suffice.
Some things, however, must be said.

Jodahs is afraid of causing harm. “Give yourself time. you’re a new kind of being. There’s never been anyone like you before. But there’s no flaw in you. You just need time to find out more about yourself.” (p. 571)
The hard things Nikanj had to say were about killing in self-defense – if absolutely necessary. Such an action is a horror to the Oankali, whose reverence for life exceeds all other imperatives. “Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of.” (p. 663)
That is the Oankali religion in a nutshell: “A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution.” (p. 663) I am reminded of Alvin the Maker and quantum physics.
If one accepts the fact of quantum indeterminacy, however unlikely the probability, there remains chance – for life, for change, for health, for happiness, for any good thing (just as equally as, to be fair, any bad thing). One can never predict when, where, how, or why one may discover – in themselves and others -

Note:
Book Two: Adulthood Rites
Book One: Dawn

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