A Grand Sand Castle Built Us We

A grand sand castle built us we
and as kings we reigned over all we could see
and even the sun seemed to sing from on high
that never had greater been under its sky
but though we labored while it was still called day
we saw that our labors must soon waste away
for the tide must turn in and wash it by night
or come some punk kid to kick it in spite
so rather than leave it for who it be found
we decided to bring our own castle on down
we rushed and crushed it, laughed in our fun
then marched off exultant, our victory won
and the works of men so meet an end, true
the slow setting sun showed something new
all while the waves crashed through the ocean blue
while the waves roared through the Pacific blue

Surrealism in Baby-sitting

Ever had one of those memories that's so weird that you wonder if you just dreamed it, but was so surreal you conclude it must indeed have actually happened?

Once in High School I got a call late one night from a woman in my stake from the neighboring town, desperately looking for a baby-sitter. It was already past 10 when I pulled up to this large, three-story, expensive looking house, and was let in by Mom, and was introduced to a cacophony of two crying boys, hysterically begging their mother not to go on her date with...

These two biker dudes.

Seriously.

And when I say biker dudes, I don't just mean they owned motorcycles; I mean they had the American-flag doo-rags, handlebar mustaches, leather-jackets, beer-guts, finger-less black gloves, cowboy boots, torn Wrangler jeans, and confederate belt-buckles. It felt like a late-night cartoon. I think at least one of them was sipping on a beer. One of them at one point said to me, "Now, don't let these brats give you any sh--" and I just nodded non-concomitantly, all while wondering what the hell was going on.

This scene lasted about half hour, the mother's time was split between thanking me so much for coming on such short notice, and promising her...dates?...that they were just about to leave, and reassuring her (rightfully, in retrospect) devastated boys that she'd be home later that night. Finally the three of them roared off on their Harleys, one of the boys cried out mournfully from the window, "Mom, I love you, come baaaaaack!" I was then alone with these two little boys wailing in despair, and all I could say was, "So, who wants to watch a movie?"

Other than that the night went by uneventfully; I popped some popcorn and put in Babe while the two boys cried themselves to sleep. She eventually returned, paid me generously, and I sped outta there myself. I was pretty weirded out at the time, but a decade later it retrospectively is such a bizarre memory that I question if it actually happened. Seriously, how many successful LDS single-mothers go on impromptu dates with two chubby biker-dudes? What was she thinking?

But then, maybe that's how we at last can tell the difference between when we're dreaming and when we're awake--if it's surreal enough to feel real, it's a dream; whereas if it's too surreal to be fiction, well, then it really happened, I guess.

Misreading Jane Austen

Once this girl came into the writing center with a paper comparing Pride and Prejudice and Madame Bovary, wherein she argued that the fundamental difference between Madame Bovary and Elizabeth Bennett was that the former refused to be satisfied with her life while the latter happily accepted whatever life gave her. I politely pointed out if Elizabeth was the type to simply accept what life gave her, then she would have married Mr. Collins; or, she would have married Mr. Darcy while he was still being a condescending prick to her. I argued that Elizabeth Bennett is every bit as unyielding in her demands on life as Madame Bovary, and that her analysis should therefore dwell on why Bennett gets what she wants in the end while Bovary does not.

I offer this vignette as an example of the typical misreading of most "women's" literature, wherein women who are compliant, docile, and domestic are supposedly set up as the ideal, in spite of how often this character isn't present at all, even in Jane Austen novels. I find this misreading tendency relevant because I recently saw a set of seven novels "for LDS women" being promoted at Deseret Book. I have no problem with the selection itself, which included Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Little Women, Little House on the Prairie, and Jane Eyre. At least five of those are undisputed classics of English literature.

No, what I find distressing is how they are presented, as "books for LDS women," complete with flowery book covers to emphasize their (false) simplicity and frivolity. I wrote an essay recently arguing that the genre a text is presented in influences how we read the text (for example, Frankenstein reads differently if you approach is as a horror rather than as a Gothic Romance). In other words, I'm distressed that these complex works of literature, in being presented as "for LDS women," will perpetuate the same misreadings as shown by the girl who came into the Writing Center.

The role of women in the LDS Church is complex and often misunderstood, and filtering the readings of difficult texts through this reductionist lens of a "model for the proper behavior of women" does nothing to address this complex relationship. This simplistic presentation cheats both the text and the reader.

I also can't help but note the texts that were left out: Mrs. Dalloway, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Frankenstein and Villette are all famous, inoffensive texts by women that are no where in sight in this collection. Now, I recognize that it's asking a lot to expect Virginia Woolf to appear in any official LDS book list; but the inclusion of even a single text that couldn't be immediately misread as a call for marriage and feminine-docility would be encouraging.

I Failed To Fall Asleep One Night

I failed to fall asleep one night
Tossing and turning, try as I might

while a million thoughts swarmed my mind
Like flies, I heard them all but none could find

Tumbled from bed, slipped on empty shoes
and half naked, without further ado

Out the door and up the hill
I hiked amid the chill

The silent steam escaped my skin
Indifferent Evergreens enclosed me in

I saw no stars when I reached the peak panting
I sat on a stump, long dead yet long standing

I meditated, awaited the colors' change
Something I hadn't seen since I came of age

A gathering light around the mountains
A thousand shadows from a thousand fountains

Of light, weaving the branches
I closed my eyes and entered trances

The rising sun makes no noise
Yet still my whole body felt the sun's voice

My swarming mind rested, washed and rinsed
Such a sense I've felt rarely since

Until the day I fell for you
And every day since I've been with you

I understand and yet...

Clear back in High School, I remember my AP English teacher teaching about the plight of the homeless, and he told of encountering a homeless man who had a Masters Degree but now lived on the streets. At the time my teenage self wondered, "How on earth does someone who's motivated and intelligent enough to get a Masters degree end up homeless??!" Now that I've finished my MA, I don't wonder anymore; frankly, it makes perfect sense.

When I was an undergrad at BYUI, there was a guy in my apt complex who was 27, who steadfastly refused to finish that final credit to graduate, presumably holding out to get married. At the time I wondered why on earth he wanted to stay in that forsaken corner of the globe, why he didn't just finish, break free, travel the world, live life at last. At the time I was preparing to go to China to teach. But now I'm 27, and I understand how easy it is to just sorta stay where all your stuff's at.

The older I get the more I understand; yet also the older I get the more it burns within me. I need an adventure.

A single shot

He was a high talker certainly; on the mat he strutted like he owned it--could just assume he would flatten you, that was the key, you see. He'd flex in front of every reflective surface, dangle his endowments in the shower room, and on the bus to meets regale us with tales of conquests of the girls we discussed the most. Thought himself handsome, kept himself clean (no sweat stuck to him), belittle your bitterest weaknesses then say he's just kidding, but seriously--

He'd stretch his legs more than once on the bus and rest them on mine, me a frightened, insecure JV freshmen wondering what I was doing there, unsure what to do but somehow sensing a wrestler should say something more. But perhaps not so far down, because every time he saw my lips move he'd tell me not to worry 'bout it and relax, then he'd lean back and close his eyes. Besides, in practice he could just flatten me, like he assumed he could, and I wondered years later if that was the key, you see--

So it was with some wonderment, and something approaching pity in my eyes (as I wondered if there was any key at all), when one minute in his first match his opponent deftly lifted him up and slammed him to the mat with a thud that briefly echoed the gymnasium, and the tears immediately streamed from his eyes, and he cried out loudly, longingly, mournfully, "I wanna go home, no more, no more, I just wannna go hooooome..."

The music from the birth of the universe fills creation

The music from the birth of the universe fills creation

When all matter filled the width of a rugby ball

A sound traveled end to end

What song was it?

A punk riff distorted across the cosmos perhaps

might shatter the void with violent release

Or an operatic aria might be more appropriate (the fat lady as big as the sky)

Or a Ronda ending as beginning (in silence)

Or a Fugue variating endlessly but never changing (like a history book)

seems about right

Perhaps nothing more than a show-tune, all bombast and contentless

Or a simply little diddy one whistles in the dark and forgets

A power ballad, a trance rhythm, a sampled re/mix

are a big bang, an endless dance, a matter reorganized

Or a single “ohm” in harmony after all

I can’t decide

Or maybe that last song has yet to finish

And waves through now, just takes a little longer till the next metronome tick

Universe a little bigger now, but reverberates every atom

Space is silent

But silent megahertz switch the pitch

Of every note

All silence combines to pierce your ear in every note

Sing the song of the universe with your silence

And prick your ear to the pitch shaking everything, shakes you

Sing the song of the Universe, then remain shattered

fill all matter with yourself

The Son of God subjected to the suns

To subject all the suns to this new song

Then sing a hymn to God

with arms uplifted

We have only cleared our throat

Theories on Nostolgia

So busy was I this past semester that I found myself feeling distant and disconnected from any memories more than a year old--my mission was a millennium ago; Puerto Rico, Nauvoo, China, Rexburg, Mexico, all seemed far and away; I still treasured these memories but somehow felt alienated from them. I felt a little consternation about it, that is, I did when I had the luxury of introspection.

But now that I've graduated, I find all these memories strangely relevant again--suddenly I'm repeating lively conversations with my mission companions, I'm remembering the warmth of the Atlantic during a baptism; certain songs remind me of girls I dated in Rexburg, of roofing in Island Park, of dancing through the JSA; and suddenly I'm hiking Huang Shan and Tianzhu Shan again, I'm teaching Country Roads to Chinese school children, I'm exploring down town Guadalajara, wandering the beaches of Sayulita, I'm following Kyle on his Harley in Denver.

In the space of one week, I've gone from incapable of nostalgia to shrouded in nostalgia, and I've been trying to locate why.

Theory 1: Introspection is re-available. Like I said, I was really busy this semester, and introspection was a luxury. I didn't have time to remember, and now my brain is making up for loss time.

Theory 2: I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, I was progressing in the direction I desired; now that I'm again in the awkward limbo of moving neither forward nor backward, I of necessity must look back into the past for strength and consolation. Nostalgia, then, becomes a survival mechanism until I re-situate myself, until I can move forward again in the direction of my desires.

Theory 3: Simple transition. I have experienced similar deep recurrences of nostalgia at moments of key transition; in other words, the nostalgia isn't simply until I re-situate, nostalgia is the re-situation. My MA must now navigate itself within the Parthenon of memories and experiences by which my identity is informed and constructed. While still incomplete my MA could not inform my future; now that it joins my past, it unites my past once more to construct my future.

Maybe a combination of all three; maybe none of the above. In any case, I at least have the assurance that if I ever find myself disconnected from my own memories once more, I need only rest assured that they are not dead, not lost, but simply waiting for me; not in the past mind you, but in the future, in eternity.

The inherent subversive nature of adventure in "Three Musketeers"

What struck me while reading "Three Musketeers" is how little it seemed to matter which side d'artagnan fought for; I feel he could have just as easily fought for the cardinal as he could have for the King. The antagonism between the two sides was merely the antagonism between two sports teams, nothing more serious than that. d'artagnan and the three musketeers were in it solely for the adventure, for the sheer fun of it. The Cardinal was constantly trying to win their favor, and the King to keep it, yet all around these four musketeers stayed outside of whichever ideology tried to assimilate them. For they couldn't be assimilated, you see, adventure by its very definition must continually exist outside the dominant paradigm.

I read a theorist last semester who argued that the genre of adventure was an expression of 19th-century capitalism, trying to glorify and normalize the investment of risk to produce profit. My mind immediately remembered the Authorian romances of the 12th century, wherein adventure is supposedly performing the same task for feudalism. The Soviets and the communists likewise have their own adventure heroes (e.g. Che Guevera, etc). In short, every dominant ideology tries to assimilate the genre of adventure for its own purposes, to contain it, to validate the ideology, something ideology must constantly attempt because, again, adventure by its very nature resists containment; you cannot have adventures if you are safely contained.

Adventure resists ideology; ideology may try to pull the reigns on adventure, put the bit in its mouth and safely guide it to its own ends, but a domesticated adventure is no adventure at all. To go on an adventure is to invalidate the dominant paradigm, to implicitly declare that the prevailing ideology does not contain all life has to offer. Ideology may try to reclaim adventure later, explain that that's what he wanted it to do all along, but to no avail; adventure is inherently politically subversive. Adventure-seeking d'artagnan, by his mere presence, disrupts the entire political structure of 17th-century France.

Be a political subversive; go on an adventure!

Graduation

I marched

I shook a hand, held an empty red folder, smiled at a camera that stole my soul (so I'm told)

And done. Two years over. A Master of my native tongue.

Dressed in the black robes of a false priesthood, I saw ceremony, enacted ancient rites

The convocation was not my education, the paper is not my knowledge

Nor is the referent the signified.

The Cartesian dilemma made manifest

Initiated into the mystery of material opacity

Admiring not the represented, but the art itself

Communicated by signifiers, I took a deep breath, embraced my friends

I smiled, and in spite of myself felt an elation of sorts

Enter the new world

Same as the old world

now radically recontextualized

I am a graduate graduate

I am a Masters of Arts

I blinked twice and remembered it was Spring

feliz cinco de mayo!

If you can read, thank a teacher.

If it's not in German, thank a vet.

And if Spanish class isn't in French,

THANK CINCO DE MAYO!!!

arriba, arriba!

(though we should all be learning French and German anyways--not for colonial reasons, but merely to have access to some of the most important thinkers of the western tradition).

(we should all learn Spanish, too--it's a lovely language, and being good neighbors and all that!)

arriba, arriba!

The Loneliness of Writing

Two years of grad school and working at the Writing Center have taught me that writing is fundamentally a collaborative process; even grad students and faculty have their papers peer reviewed; the whole of the MFA degree is based around aspiring writers reviewing each others' works; Shakespeare flagrantly ripped off others' plots (as did everyone else), then collaborated on plays with them; Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas, and James Joyce all had their close friends they sound-boarded ideas off of; nary a great Poet but that was part of some school/movement/salon/writers-circle that all informed each others' works. The myth of the solitary writer is just that, a myth.

But so far have I over-compensated in at last recognizing the collaborative nature of writing that I suddenly remembered today, while composing yet another 20-page paper, the solitary nature of writing, as well. It's lonely to be a writer; you make friends with other writers so that others can identify your literary "blind-spots," yes, but also because writing is just so fundamentally solitary. You despair of anyone ever reading your work, so you say what you write is still worth writing, even if it remains a loss treasure; but then you bang your head against the wall, and wonder if its even worth writing for no one.

It takes great reserves of emotional strength to write, to be so alone, to persevere. It's hard to even to write well enough to show to someone else. I admired the courage of students who came into the Writing Center and said "Just tear it apart," but I think they forgot that they'd already passed through the most courageous part of all, that of just beginning, that of just having a draft at all to tear apart.

On The Road

The other night I finished Jack Kerouac's "On The Road." The mythos surrounding that novel is such--that it inspired all these hippies to go hitch-hiking across the country in the 60s and so forth--that I was expecting this grand romanticized memoir of the glories of exploring the highways of America, perhaps riding freight trains, eating out at diners, frolicking the amber fields of grain and how "the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww..." and etc, etc.

Well, Kerouac is certainly nostalgic, and often sentimental, but never romantic; he pulls no punches, he doesn't sanitize the hitch-hiker's life at all. The travails of being constantly broke, constantly hungry, car troubles, thefts, the betrayals of those unstable "mad" friends you love, are all on full, unvarnished, unapologetic display. In fact I'm left scratching my head as to why any body, even hippies, felt so inspired by this book to try it out themselves.

No freight-train jumping like in the movies, no fascinating diner conversation, and frankly little description of the American landscape beyond what you would actually have to have seen in person to understand (maybe that's why people went traveling, to see what Kerouac was referencing). The prose style, as one can see from the above passage, is in this manic style that refuses to sit still on any one scene or thought, much like "the mad ones" populating the narrative, who can never bare to stay in one spot. But although Kerouac is clearly enthralled with the traveling experience, the overall tone of the book is one of melancholy--I sense that the novel is more about the loss of time than anything on the road, that the narrator mourns both all the opportunities lost because he was always on the road, as well as mourning all he'll miss because he's no longer on the road.

But then, as unromantic and melancholy as "On The Road" ultimately is, I sense that it's still a good thing I finished it before I graduated, because if I was still reading it after I finished school and while unemployed, I might have done something stupid myself, and gone hitchhiking myself. The novel does put a taste in your mouth for the all-consuming madness, the one that's self-destructive but then that's sort of the point, to not fill up just a single point in space and time but to be torn apart and thus fill all the universe and eternity--

Did I mention Kerouac was Catholic? They're the ones (unlike the Protestants) with an actual bloodied Savior hanging on their crosses. A desecration that elevates, a misery that exalts, I believe it was a religious experience that Kerouac was seeking on the road.