beautiful sadness

One of the challenges of my life is finding balance. I've constructed a black and white world that often smacks me with its brightness and rigidity. I need more gray. I need fuzziness and shadows and opportunities to pull away from the magnetic polarities that seduce me into believing that things are either fantastic or hopeless. Today is Mardi Gras, a day devoted to over-indulgence, to final binging before the subdued asceticism of Lent. It's a holiday of extremes. Exactly what I want to get away from.

Which reminds me of two heartbreaking pieces of art where both suffering and joy shimmer because they are linked, not absolute, not separate. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is a book to savor slowly, like fine chocolate. It melts on the tongue and warms the belly. Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of Elle magazine in France, had a sudden stroke that left him completely mute and rigid except for the blinking of his left eye, which is how he wrote this gut-stirring testament to life. Though his corporeal life is over, his mind, his spirit, rustles with vibrant urgency. I read it easily in a day, from the car ride through the forest to the couch, bathed in evening
light.

Dirty Filthy Love is a movie about a man suffering with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Turrets Syndrome. He suffers because he is aware of what he is doing and yet he can’t help it. He suffers because anxiety is isolating. And yet he also experiences some of the sweetest moments life can possibly offer up, even a transcendental intimacy with a lovely woman. Set in London, this film has smartly satisfying camera work; it approaches the characters with the utmost compassion, as if stroking them gently on the cheek. I haven’t cried this much since The Wrestler---the good, heaving kind of crying that feels like all the beautiful sadness of the world is breathing right through me.

Who dat?

When you grow up in Louisiana, you know that the Saints are a joke. Even in my single-mother household, where the only male was my older brother who would rather make brownies than field goals, where Nickelodeon, not organized sports, ruled afternoon television, I still knew that the New Orleans Saints stunk. Even their slogan---Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say they gonna beat dem Saints?---made me blush with shame.

If there was any reason to pay attention to the Saints it was because they represent New Orleans: one of those cities, like San Francisco or Istanbul, that is unlike any other metropolis on earth. As teenagers, my grandfather courted my grandmother in the Magazine district, with its second-storied corner stores and big front porches. There’s nothing like having beignets (French doughnuts) and coffee at the open-air Cafe du Monde, powdered sugar on your shoes and black waiters in long aprons leaned against the wall smoking cigarettes on break. Behind you the chocolate Mississippi so lazy you can't tell which way it flows.

I've always been ready to criticize football. It reminds me of dog or cock fighting, a primitive blood-sport that sanctifies aggressive competition. A modern gladiator match that degrades the human body for the pleasure and greed of the audience. Football emphasizes hyper-masculinity, a scary trend that encourages men to perpetrate violence to validate their egos. And then there's the Super Bowl---a circus that, like most of television, keeps Americans placated and inactive. I want to retch when I think about 30 seconds of commercial airspace costing more than three million dollars.

But no matter how analytical us big-brained creatures are, no matter how intellectual, still we are animals, excitable and instinctual. And what are organized sports if not microcosms of our primal behaviors? When we choose teams, we render loyalty to a tribe. When we form crowds of screaming fans, we show just how comfortable we are in a herd, everyone bleating and barking their victories and grief together.

And so, last night, despite all of my heady objections to the sport, I tuned in to the most watched program in all of American history; I yelped with glee when the Saints (my team! my home state team!) made their fourth quarter interception; I even gnawed on a couple of buffalo wings. And boy did it feel good to let my inner critter roam off the leash for awhile.

Another Revolution

In memory of Dennis, who would have been (unbelievable) 47 years old today.

Bandito

loss is sudden

no time to back up
no chance to retreat

then: you're not even a heartbeat

but you made everything happen
like magic, it was done

forget Marx and Lenin
your revolution was fun

your dead tunes your incense your 80s tight jeans
your rebellion your sadness your impossible dreams

all glowing red inside the coziest lair
socialist provocateur meets mechanic extraordinaire

fall in love with a broken heart, they said
go ahead, if you dare

but breaking the rules never felt better
bamboo windows and borders,
we snuck through them together

june green silver wet night
i was the sky, and you were my weather

those weeks of scheming through dense jungle heat
rainbows and water slides, two hearts, one beat---

escapes usually come with a price
but if i had to do it over again i wouldn’t think twice

wouldn’t wish for a warning beneath the tropical moon
forever and always the warning would come too soon

Thank You Howard Zinn

On Wednesday I gave my ninth and tenth grade students a history mid-term---an hour and a half long test that spanned centuries and continents. As I read over the questions I'd written on the board (my school cannot afford photo-copies), and listened to the choir of pencils scratching, I marveled that these teenagers were capable of explaining the crippling effects of colonialism and analyzing the convergence of geography and history.

Later that evening I found out that Howard Zinn, author of "The People's History of the United States" had died. His brilliant history book is one of the reasons my students are such critical thinkers (I wish I could take the bulk of the credit, but really, I am a conduit). His approach to history reminds me of this African proverb: "Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter."

Zinn re-wrote our history from the point of view of the lions, the people who were often (brutally) mistreated by conquerors, masters, and capitalists, not to glorify or simplify or patronize them, but to humanize them. He reveals the humanity of the conquered, the enslaved, and the workers, in order to reveal the humanity of us all. He uncovers the darkest moments of our history so that we might also see the light. When my students ask why history is so depressing, I remind them of Zinn: "I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare."

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for making my classroom come to life with truth and compassion.

(For a lovely tribute by the editor of The Progressive), click here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/29-6

Rainbow

Lured outside today by the sun, that hussy.

In the state park we climbed slippery trails, slowly peeling off layers. I relished the view of Santa Rosa, our little valley town cradled by bright green foothills. A storm hugged the downtown buildings, fuzzy and gray and insistent. I watched it blow towards us.

The damp forest was so quiet that I heard the drops before I felt them on my skin. Suddenly, faced with the decision to turn back or keep going, we chose neither, veering off onto an unknown trail. Rain came on as we knew it would, and still we climbed, wondering where we were headed and why. Finally with numb fingers and saturated tendrils, we surrendered. Our hike now loomed laborious and fearsome: Isn't it at least an hour back to the car? Is my new Tin House getting soaked in the back-pack? How long til my feet are cold? And I thought, how quick my descent into worry.

Sure enough, soon came nature's gentle remonstrance: as we emerged from the forest, the sun came out. Standing in a meadow fit for hobbits, so homey and green, warmed by that brilliant yolk, the gentlest rain falling, I felt like God had a secret to share with me. A clean rainbow hovered over us. The storm rolled on. We sat in the grass on a raincoat, shared a tart apple, and stared hard back at her, that fickle sun, until she weakened, as we knew she would, and we were left with a muddy trail back into the trees.

Haiti: The Heartbreak of Colonialism

In 1492 the Spanish crown made a fateful decision. Europe was in need of a water route to Asia, now that the Turks had turned Constantinople (once the capital of Eastern Orthodox Christianity) into Istanbul (now the capital of a Muslim empire). Portugal was experimenting with rounding the cape of Africa; Spain decided to chance crossing an unknown ocean. Of course, when Columbus landed in the Bahamas, met by dark lean natives who greeted him with generosity and warmth, he thought he had made it to India (which he insisted upon until his dying day).

On that first voyage to the New World, Columbus's ship, the Santa Maria, ran aground on the western side of a large island that he named Hispaniola (which translates to "The Spanish Isle," but which was home to thousands of Taino people). The native Taino called their land Ayiti, meaning "land of mountains," and eventually this name became Haiti.

With the timbers from his wrecked ship, Columbus and his men built Fort Navidad---the first military base in the Western Hemisphere. Then he left two dozen men behind, with instructions to find gold, and sailed back to Spain with some captive natives to show to the king and queen. The Spanish government granted Columbus a second voyage, with seventeen ships and twelve hundred men, and when they returned to Navidad, he found that the men he'd left behind had been killed. After raping and plundering the Taino in search of gold, these outnumbered Spaniards were finally killed by an otherwise peaceful people. This would be the last time this balance of power occurred; within a hundred and fifty years of Columbus's "discovery," through mass murder, mass suicide, and enslavement, the island of Hispaniola had not one Taino left. The genocide was complete.

Of course, now that the Spaniards had established a lucrative plantation system, growing sugarcane for export, they imported thousands of Africans as slave labor. Today 95% of Haitians are of African descent; they practice a mix of voodoo and Catholicism, the religion of the slaves and of their oppressors. The French came next, and under their rule, Haiti became the most profitable slave colony in the world.

But here is where history turns. In 1791 Boukman Dutty, a voodoo priest, urged his fellow citizens to take up arms against the plantation owners, with the words "Throw away the thoughts of the Whitegod who thirsts for our tears, listen to freedom that speaks from our hearts." This incited the only successful slave revolt that led to independence, the second independent republic in the Western Hemisphere (after the USA), and the very first Black Republic. But the venom of colonialism continued to spread, though the snake had slinked away.

For decades the people of Haiti have seen their government vacillate between corrupt dictatorships, military coups, violence, rigged elections, and martial law. In 1915 Haitian law prevented foreign ownership of Haitian land or businesses, which prompted the U.S. to invade under the pretext of.... you guessed it, national security. Many people cite the positive outcomes of the U.S. occupation: infrastructure was built, including roads, schools, hospitals, and lighthouses. But Haitians opposed the martial law and military occupation of their country, sometimes violently, and thousands of Haitians died in the rebellions.

Today, Haiti is still the poorest country in the West, with adult literacy and life expectancy hovering around 50. It is no wonder that in the wake of a devastating earth-quake, the country is ill-equipped to handle the fall-out. Is it unfair to blame colonialism?

Only if you don't know your history.

The Long Loneliness

This year, for the first time ever, I took my boyfriend home to Lafayette, Louisiana for Christmas week. Going home is like going back to the womb, coziness and comfort and ease. And, of course, indulgence. This year, gifts of luxury, like white satin pillowcases, leather-bound journal, and sugared body scrub. Practical gifts, too---stamps and manuscript mailers and patchouli soap. The living room carpet flooded with ribbons and shiny paper, half-eaten plates of ham and potato salad. A dozen different kinds of candies and cookies---sand tarts, pralines, pecan fudge, peanut butter balls.

At the center of it all is Maw-Maw---mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, the sun who keeps everyone in orbit. Her magnetism is polar: she is at once provincial (a born and bred Cajun who grew up in New Orleans and can understand that old bayou French) and cosmopolitan (not even a weakened heart can keep her from jet-setting to France in a few weeks).

Her suffering has become a joyful wisdom. Her burdens have bequeathed wit. She is religious, a devout Catholic, but so too is she spiritual. Last year, when she gave me the autobiography of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, I shelved it in favor of Dave Eggers' "What is the What." An old Catholic lady's mission, I thought, what's exciting about that?

I love when I'm wrong about a book. Dorothy Day's "The Long Loneliness" felt like it was written for me. Day was born in 1897, and came of age in Chicago during the height of the labor movement. The long bread lines and unsanitary working conditions moved and confused her. "I felt even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy." Though her family was not religious, she was compelled to go to church, where she wondered: "Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?"

Her mission in life was to serve people, to uplift them from the drudgery of soul-bribing work, because she intimately understood "the initial agony of having to live." It was this spiritual connection with humanity that informed her political views---Day was an unabashed feminist and anti-capitalist. She not only espoused, but lived the concept of voluntary poverty, forgoing non-essential luxuries like cars, cosmetics, cigarettes, movie tickets, even privacy, so that other people might have access to the necessary food and shelter. (And here I thought my four dollar thrift store shoes and twice yearly haircuts were frugal.)

Having been raised Catholic, witnessing first hand the incongruities of the organized institution with the vision of the revolutionary Jesus---wealthy priests, segregated churches, its patriarchal subterfuge of women's rights---I read with trepidation about Day's conversion to the Catholic church. Why? But it was after her daughter was born (Day never married), so flooded with joy and love, that she felt "the need to worship, to adore." And, she wrote, "My very experience as a radical led me to want to associate myself with the masses in loving and praising God."

Never have I read such an eloquent synthesis of radicalism and spirituality. For Day, class consciousness and Christianity were inseparable. After all, she said, "Christ came to make the rich poor and the poor holy." She was not a missionary; in fact she felt uncomfortable with the idea of "preaching to empty stomachs." She did not try to convert the poor, sick, drunk, criminal people who sought refuge in the ever-multiplying community houses and farms that she helped set up all over the country---and world (and which are still in existence today). Instead, she lived to create community, the cure to "the long loneliness" that too many people experience. As St. John of the Cross, the Christian mystic said, "Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love."

Day is an inspiration to me---to the fiery feminist, anti-capitalist, and radical teacher, and to the spirit seeker. I realize that my spirituality and my revolutionary ideals need not be at odds. In fact, as long as I strive to emulate Jesus, who wanted to heal society's greed and oppression, then I am a Christian in the truest sense of the word. And my community are all of those people out there---my friends, co-workers, family members---who also try as best we can to do unto others as we would like them to do unto us.