6 october 2007

a Capital time / travel again, again, again / Prague poem

In the past month, I had the opportunity to visit many European Capitals. The great weight of them: Dublin, Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana, Madrid. It wasn't causual whimsy that brought me to each of them, so I felt like I did not glean much: presented are simply some brief impressions, in case there is a value to reading someone's notes upon other places (I'll leave that for you to decide).

Prague, first impressions: acid-rain-melted stones, concrete blocks of flats dressed up in easter-eggpastels as if to cover up the mistake of them... Grand old buildings plastered over with capitalist screamings, their subtle nuances lost in the craze. Advertisments for Irish pubs. Tourist packs roving and chewing their cud before windows of Bohemian crystal, always in the way. Leaden industrial skies, power lines. Names of subway stations: Chodov, Pankrac, I.P. Pavlova.

framing one: the view from my window

framing two:

the buildings are waiting for this era to pass, so they can shine quietly again.

Ljubljana! The only light city I have met Europe. Ljubljana spilling lightly off the tongue, Ljubljana lightly dressed in autumn, Ljubljana where optimism truly springs. They have a poet on their 2-euro coin, you know that? Imagine if the U.S. started splashing its money with poets and mountains and word-fragments. Once riding my bike out from the forest I caught the full moon rising over the castle and it truly stole the breath out of my body; I have not experienced that feeling in so long. Ljubljana is a place to live, but it is not full of itself (yet); it is quietly pleased with its standing. The true promise of Europe is quietly breathing here. I wonder if Ljubljana will change, as Slovenia grows even richer into the new century.

Run your finger around the ridges of the translucent cup
resonance of plastic and static
the layers of curtains, sensory deprivation,
soft whoosh of the climatisation

The hotel bed a nexus to all the other hotel beds I've slept in
german, russian, in Indiana or anywhere

Always these hours to fill while the other is sleeping or resting or still
she picks up her pen and her little book looks into the mirror, those ancient eyes

In the always room
i caught your sleepsteeped scent

(in the always room i meet myself again exactly this encounter which helps me meet myself again)

*

Why do they pile so many pillows on the hotel bed?
-- for screaming into --
If you open the window all the screams caught in the polyester fibers
metamorphize and fly into the chilltinted night

If you do not open the window then you are sleeping
upon all the compressed screams of the lonely men who have lain awake there

Once I used to feel like I could not fully enjoy making love in hotel rooms--
can't we slip out of the carpeted labyrinth, exchanging secret glances,
evade the figures in the hotel lobby and find a field     any field     with ragged imperfect grass

Yet -- how grownuplovely to be on the executive floor in the Panorama Hotel
with the lights of the city splayed out like diamonds in the dark sand just for you
No they are not the lights of humble human beings cooking dumplings by fluorescent ceiling bulbs.
They are the lights for you to enjoy. They are the sheets for you to enjoy. They are the fluffy white towels for your clean body.

*

Sometimes I search for you when I'm walking, semiconsciously
tracing a route of places where you might be.
Expecting to see your lean frame sprawled under
a certain mythic tree,
making a mandala of the chestnuts in the park, or
loitering on a certain stone bridge, transfixed by
the currents swirling below.

I was looking for you in my dream last night,
ended in many dark streets and could not find you.
I spent hours in a pet shop
with the glassy-eyed guinea pigs
and the hamsters spinning on their plastic wheels,
got filled with the sudden aching existential loneliness
and left the store, left the dream.
Woke up and the nearness of you
exploded some chemical reaction that swept through my body
the same way that heroin sweeps through the body: from the heart down and out.

These chemical equations-- I can't bear to study--
wishing not to gaze deep into the well of love -- lest i find
only a biochemical residue, thin drip of neurotransmitters
caught in the plastic cup lying in wait
on the nightstand of the always room--

6 september 2007

a travel story / Eire

It was on the flight from Toulouse to Shannon that I lost them. The carousel clanked and clacked tunelessly around, the one black duffel bag which was a false impostor for my black duffel bag circled aimlessly. As people collected their lives and departed, the baggage claim grew desolate.

I should have known better than to pack them, but it is a habit of mine, you know. These I had packed in a plastic ziplock freezer bag. I do the same with my shampoo and conditioner, else it might leak rose-scented goo all over my books and clothes. It is just the traveler's way. I pack them in whatever material I can find. And I have a whole storage unit full, somewhere far from here. Boxes, mainly. Autumn kissing among the yellow leaves with the sounds of acorns dropping in black sharpie marker across the tattered cardboard. Texas, miscellaneous. Mornings on the porch eating porridge with the bunny rabbit in my lap when you were not there. All the feelings and memories that are too much to bear, they get wrapped up and put in storage. It is only at the baggage claim at the end of the world that I am remembering the obvious: if you are going to take them along instead of store them elsewhere, you should at least package the images and the feelings together. Else you get stuck with a bunch of images and snippets of sound that are drained of all feeling... It's common sense, like packing your toothbrush and toothpaste together. Just one or the other-- the image or the feeling-- does not do you much good. This is what I am thinking as the carousel groans and grinds to a halt.

We were sitting on top of a limestone cliff having a picnic, tomatoes maybe, and a cucumber, you composed me little sandwiches and passed them across the rock, my scarf as a plate, the blue of the bay below impossible and there is no feeling there. Just the image. I cannot remember what it was like though I suppose it was loving and lovely. I silently join in a queue outside the Aer Lingus baggage office. The girl behind me has silent tears pooling her eyeliner. Cherie, it's not so bad, I want to tell her; what did you lose? I'm sure it will come in on the next flight. It's only because the connection in Dublin was so close that the bags didn't make it; real ATC snarl over there; c'est la vie. It seems everyone else in the queue is part of a German tourist group on a delayed flight from Dusseldorf. Certainly they are off to do some sporty adventure tour, since they are all wearing daypacks with supportive hip-belts, and they are shod in expensive hiking boots. I wonder if the lost luggage has foiled their day in the Irish countryside, and how many of them have packaged up their feelings too. Their absent packs may be full of Nordic walking sticks and fleece jackets and That spring when we would ride together by the river Spree and the world was young. I take a seat in a black vinyl chair and let the concerned Germans swarm the counter, trying to pick out by sight and intuition which of them are now separated from their feelings.

I am the last to speak to the Aer Lingus representative who has me fill out the requisite form: Black duffel bag, blue backpack, contents books, clothes, our first drink together listening to the lounge lizard in Vegas with all the feeling of the time completely absent-- and then the woman behind the counter beckons me to follow her. We walk back across the baggage claim area with its dead black baggage-carrying-snake, her heels clicking and echoing in the empty hall. She leads me down a fluorescent-lit corridor into a cement cavern.

Broken handles of baby carriages are strewn across the dirty untiled floor. A corner is piled with shredded vinyl. There are strange cardboard forms wrapped in duct tape, skis which will never see the snow again, empty plastic animal carriers with their doors hanging askew. I have reached the graveyard of all unclaimed baggage.

"Sometimes," the baggage representative shrugs, "things wash up here. You can have a look, if you like." Then she whirls around and disappears into airport-space, the scent of her perfume lost behind her.

I stand for a moment and scan the shadows for my black bag. There is a mound of black bags, and I fall to my knees, scanning the tags for the one with my business card, the one that says ghost. I do not think it is here. I do not think anything is here.

It is silent except for perhaps a rat gnawing on bones in the corner and I wish for music, because that would be the surest line back to my feelings, music that Ariadne's thread that would lead me out of the airport chambers into a place where the feeling of a time blossomed alive... No music. No scent to follow, no voice to follow, no trace to track down where the feelings might have ended up. I wish to be outside so I strap on my blue backpack, the lone survivor of this flight, and head towards outside. Probably, I tell myself, the airline will send a van to the address I put on the form whenever the bag shows up. Unless there are problems with customs, they are normally doing this, it happened to me in Midland once and it worked out grand. Right? Right. I step outside the Shannon terminal and a light mist is falling. I will take a bus to yet another life and even if the feelings never show up again, it doesn't stop me from creating new ones to fill their place. My steps on the cement are weightless and part of me has remained in the sky.

-- composed on Czech Airlines flight DUB --> PRG --

*

It is hard for me to write about a place until I have left it.

In honor of Ireland I will post a poem I wrote four years ago in Ireland.
My impression of the place has not fundamentally changed. The only difference is that there is a stronger Polish presence now, which makes things slightly more interesting.

disconsolate by the River Liffey

This place is hard and crusty like old bread
kneaded by the silence of the desolate
and picked apart by pigeonrats.

Cinder blocks.

My socialist boy thinks it'll be a potent place for a revolution.

I think their anger is the stupified passion of alcohol,
and they'd rather sleep it off than let it catch.

The river slants obscenely to my left
the traffic is muted
the panning all wrong.

My socks slip below my boots
pool around my ankles and
defeated i don't bother to yank them up,
knowing they will just slip down again.

Men striding in denim jackets and
old women with armfuls of lilies and
nobody knows any more than i do.

There is no summer in this weatherbeaten land.
I'll go alone into the summerplace,
my heart stretching like a rubber band
that will eventually snap
back to me.

Dublin is hell, I will remember always watching a boy outside the McDonald's on Grafton Street pull out a tattered shoelace in the rain, the vial in his pocket; but the Irish countryside is lovely. When the some comes out, the mornings are among the most liquid, fresh, and tranquil you will ever know.

This is the tower that William Butler Yeats restored and lived in. I maintain he still lives here... circumambulating in the tower chambers, conducting automatic writing sessions with his young Golden Dawn wife... he wished to still live here, as the poem inscribed on his tower shows-- A true sense of Home--

31 juillet 2007

the Tour de France; a few notes on Basque country

A few days ago, I was on my way to a field in the Pyrenees, driving along a gentle country lane, when I came to a crowd in the middle of nowhere. The Tour de France was blocking my path. There was nothing to do but park the car and observe.

The road would be silent for awhile, a hundred or so people crowded at the roadbend, lolling around... and then... a vehicle festooned with brilliant decorations for Omo laundry detergent would rocket past. "Omo!" the crowd would scream. Women in bikinis would jump up and down and bounce their hips; but in a second, Omo had passed, its incomprehensible loundspeakers faded into the distance. Five minutes of quiet, Aquarel brand water would speed past with its bus, and the ritual would repeat. On the more elaborate floats, people would toss out packets of something into the crowd; the watchers would clamber in the ditches for whatever had been thrown down. The afternoon in the French countryside was so placid that it made these unexpected rips into the fabric of it even more shocking; the people were incredibly placid too, with their lawn chairs and soda pop, except when a vehicle would scream by. I never saw anyone on a bicycle.

 

This seems a good idea, to animate / anthropormorphize one's land.
If the United States had a shape that could easily be made into a cartoon character that would go stomp on its enemies, like Coca-Cola... what would it even look like?

8 juin 2007

living in the spaces between / the European Road / France

"It is accounted a romantic thing to wander among strangers and to eat their bread by the camp-fires of the other half of the world. There is romance in doing this, though the romance has been over-estimated by those whose sedentary lives have created in them a false taste for action. Marco Polo wandered among strangers, but it is open to any one (with courage and the power of motion) to do the same. Wandering itself is merely a form of self-indulgence. If it adds not to the stock of human knowledge, or if it gives not to others the imaginative posssession of some part of the world, it is a pernicious habit. The acquisiton of knowledge, the accumulation of fact, is noble only in those few who have that alchemy which transmutes such clay to heavenly eternal gold ... It is only the wonderful traveller who sees a wonder, and only five travellers in the world’s history have seen wodners. The others have seen birds and beasts, rivers and wastes, the earth and the (local) fullness therof. The five travellers are Herodotus, Gaspar, Melchio, Balthazar and Marco Polo himself. The wonder of Marco Polo is this-- that he created Asia for the European mind..." -- John Masefield, introduction to The Travels of Marco Polo, qtd. by Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I got so captivated by this idea of never leaving this strange airport with the runways encircling your little world... and then I looked up Charles de Gaulle airport in Wikipedia, where I read the story of Mehran Karimi Nesseri. He lived there for 16 years while in refugee-limbo. Probably you have already heard of him because of the book and movie about him, The Terminal, but I (not being well-acquainted with cinema) had never heard this story. Fascinating.

"The grassy lands on which the airport is located are notorious for hosting a large population of rabbits and hares, which can clearly be seen by aeroplane passengers at certain times of the day. The airport organizes periodic hunts and captures to keep the population to manageable levels." -- Wikipedia entry on Charles de Gaulle airport

Everything here at manageable levels...

 

 

 

 

 

I know nothing of France; still I will make some notes. Here are some places the autoroutes and cobblestone streets could lead you to-- the point of interest to me is that they seem to exist side-by-side -- (for in the U.S. of A., it seems like the sprawl and the cheap plastic trash and the cheap plastic houses want to consume the totality of space; coexistence with anything else is not possible) -- Well, here the past is also a commodity; the medival-tourist villages; a history to be consumed, yes... but one can still live in a stone house and this is quite normal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

to conclude these notes, we will visit where, in the conventional mind, all roads and pathways appear to end...

 

... montmartre cemetery ...

 

Someone felt it worthy to chronicle his roads on his gravestone;
it is easy to see how each road could seem like an accomplishment,
especially then. What makes a road tombstone-worthy;
what makes a road a feat? that others appreciate?
For now, the once-difficult roads are now the easiest
(AirBerlin or Condor airlines, Munchen to Luxor, 99 Euros)
and the most difficult roads go unacknowledged.
Is there any journey that would be tombstone-worthy today?

29 april 2007

el valle: first images

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

for more information through the eyes of the valle's artist,
see www.sensaciones.de

 

30 march 2007

Springtime in Holland

From Woodward Oklahoma to some Dutch village virtually overnight... admittedly having trouble adjusting to being back in reality. I find myself in the farmhouse of the mad, some clandestino hostel, off-the-books word-of-mouth endeavor, called Houdou (I didn't learn that it had a name until three days of staying here...)-- yes, there are four of us here. I was greeted by a man on a lot of heroin, pale-pinprick-pupils; the dope-haze... He managed to get out of bed to show me my room. The bed was not made but I did not care. It is a fine little alcove really, and who cares if it has no lock, that simply means I will have to drag my laptop around with me--

My first reaction being: You live in the Netherlands, a peaceable functional nation-state, and it is springtime in this placid little village, what do you have to be a junky about?

This of course simplistic, "junky" a convenient dehumanizing label, and as I rode my bicycle along the dikes I thought more on this. Because I suspect I would have understood this five or ten years ago, easier than today: a lost understanding, that understanding of why somebody in a beautiful serene setting would want to be fucked up on junk.

Come to think of it, I have a much harder time understanding the dark side of life than I used to. I can still appreciate darkness that glitters; pure essential darkness, yes. But most people can only achieve a mediocre level of debauchery or unappealing slovenliness-- nothing interesting there.

As I rode around this dollhouse-country, I remembered something of the essential hollowness that lies at the core of Western Europe. It's not all that lies at the core, but as plenty of European writers and philosophers have observed, it's there-- that coldness, that alienation, that existential despair at the civilization we have made.

Everything manicured and cultivated and controlled, the world outside a big park-- Europe how I feel at home in you, like I have come home-- and yet this cannot be my home; there is not room enough here, not a space for me--

yes, and I understand this doped-up cut-faced man a bit more when I learn he is Romanian, and about to be sent back to Romania (for reasons of finance or papers, I know not which)... Everyone wants in, everyone wants to carve out a bit of European space. A morsel of conversation-- The Australian woman giggling, telling me the story of how the Romanian man earned the bruises on his face (an altercation with some rough customers)-- and then I take to the only heated room to drink ginger tea and read a book about pirates. Have I mentioned how loud the Australians are? Australians are just as loud as Americans; loudness as a function of space-- straining to be heard across all that space...

"Do you think she likes to have fun?" I overhear the woman asking; I hope they are thinking of offering me drugs and not sex. Drugs are fairly easy to turn down without having it ruin your night. But there is nothing more awkward than staying in a hostel where everyone is trying to coax you into some strange group sex thing and then you have to vacate your room and walk around an unfamiliar city for several hours when all you really want to do is sleep. Luckily it has been several months since I faced this situation, but I think all those nights at the Courtyard Marriott eroded my guard against it... I am listening to the Australian man order his fiancee to show the Romanian guy her tits when I decide I need to creep back to my room and hide under the covers; the book about pirates can wait for another day to be finished.

O bohemian traveling life, I am so finished with you. It is always like this: some fantastic setting and some ridiculous people and some chickens running all over everything. Where are all the people who love life? Why is it always couples fighting and watching loud action movies and cracking open cheap plastic pens to use for drug paraphenelia? Why? Because I can't afford to stay in a hotel, sure, but there has to be something between this and the sterility of the Courtyard Marriott. You'd think I would have found it by now, though, if it existed. I toss and turn, pass out for sixteen hours straight.

Finally I woke up and looked out the window

and thought, child, for once there is not a Walmart outside your window.

There is a wooden shoe on your windowsill.

So be joyful.

Over endless slices of toast I am able to bond with this Australian woman for a moment. Tall, blonde, she wears purple heels-- She is almost 30-- Do you think I should have a baby, she asks-- If I was to be candid I would advise her not to procreate, but... They are moving into a flat this weekend, after 3.5 weeks of living at Houdou. It is 900 Euros a month, but they are lucky to even find a place; it's like an audition to find a flat in Holland... She is going to take pole dancing classes and wonders if it is okay to just join in during the middle of the session. I say, sure, tell her some stories of Brandy, the stripper who was the teacher when I took pole dancing... You will love it, I tell her, the gymnastics are really fun, if you used to take gymnastics when you were a kid, and I bet it will just be a bunch of sweet young Dutch girls with stripper fantasies who will spend 15 minutes just learning how to walk-- You know the stripper walk-- And there's all these fun little acrobatic tricks you can learn. Personally, I don't have the flexibility-- Can you do the splits? she asks. I can do them like this, like this, like this. Three ways. --Well, then you're set, I tell her. . . . . . Yes, the pole dancing bonding... I can do this. I can remember how to talk to people in bohemia; how to speak another language besides corporate or all-American-girl-in-Oklahoma; it was innate in me once...

Every time I come to the Netherlands I try to take a picture. I have never managed to take a good picture of the Netherlands. Here are a few not-good pictures, just because perhaps you have never been to the Netherlands, and would like to see what it is like.

What brought me out of my bitter exhaustion was the singing. Roused from my room by the owner of the farmhouse, who thankfully had returned-- I had been feeling like I was living in someone else's broken dream, after seeing the pictures of this man on the walls, his travel-relics from Rio, Beijing, Tibet... yet he had been absent, leaving the 3 madpeople to care for the place... well, upon his return, he insisted I had to go to this Dutch singing event at the village pub. "It is the real Dutch experience. Don't you want the real Dutch experience?" Sigh. Actually I don't care about Holland, was only passing through here because the plane stopped here and I was too tired to go from Oklahoma to Portugal all in one go, but you don't get anywhere in life with an attitude like that, so...

There is only one pub in the village of Alem and it was filled with singing. Somebody thrust the songbook into my hands and I tried to follow along with the Dutch. Traditional songs: "Do you know what this one is about? This one is about the fluttery feeling in your stomach when you see someone... Not, love but... Do you know this one? It is about the inspiration of the sea, about the waves and how it makes you want to become a better person." It is warm and crowded with older Dutch people; a choir of old men gets on stage, striped shirts and black vests, sailor's caps... singing songs of the sea, making these hearty gestures that punctuate the air. They are so into it! It is so heartwarming, to see these old men doing something that they love, simply singing these old Dutch songs. Okay. I am back in the flow. I know I love it that there was someone to drag me down to the village pub for singing; I love it that there is a campfire crackling outside my window; I would not trade it for another lukewarm bed at the Courtyard Marriott. Sometimes you have to get past the junky guardian-of-the-gates before you can see the treasure that's there.

9 december 2006

factories, production, the death-ward

THIS IS A FABRIK (factory) WHERE PEOPLE LIVE. A week ago, I was living there-- in the sense that having no permanent residence, I live wherever I happen to be-- a factory, a farmhouse, a luxury hotel, the ground...

 

(someone's painting gracing the kitchen)

The question is: when the chips come to fall, where does our allegiance lie? With the bourgeoisie, with the intellectuals, with the first-world parasites? Or with the workers, the producers, the third-world which most of us know so little about? And if you decide your allegiance lies with the latter, how do you change your life to reflect this? Is it possible to "switch sides", so to speak?

Now, an indictment of sorts. Consider: this is James Baldwin, writing about a white student (from No Name in the Street, published nearly 40 years ago). The white student is about to take a corporate job, and is trying to face the moral implications of this.

"He, like many students, was being forced to choose between treason and irrelevance. Their moral obligations to the darker brother, if they were real, and if they were really to be acted on, placed them in conflict with all that they had loved and all that had given them an identity, rendered their present uncertain and their future still more so, and even jeopardized their means of staying alive. ... They were privileged and secure only so long as they did, in effect, what they were told: but they had been raised to believe they were free."

So do you "opt out" of your immoral, parasite, fabricated-job-- and join, what, a "third world" foreign culture that doesn't necessarily welcome you, or the workers of the Western world? It may be exceedingly difficult to integrate into either of these realities; there is inner and outer resistance to be faced. The easiest to join are the young revolutionaries, the people living on the fringes, so full of hopes but so often unable to get things done in consensus reality.

This is Baldwin on the flower children of yesterday:

"Yet they looked-- alas-- doomed. They really were flower children, having opted out on the promises and possibilities offered them by the shining and now visibly perishing republic. I could not help feeling, watching them, knowing them to be idealistic, fragmented, and impotent, that, exactly as the Third Reich had had first to conquer the German opposition before getting around to the Jews, and then the rest of Europe, my republic, which unhappily, was beginning to think of as the 4th reich, would be forced to plow under the flower children-- in all their variations-- before getting around to the blacks and then the rest of the world."

Baldwin saw the "third" world rising, the tide turning the other way... and he saw the hippie-kids, rightly I think, being swept under in this turning tide. I think the temporary autonomous zone, the wonder-factory, is brilliant for the time and people it exists for... but it is of course temporary, and all-too-often passes into... what, grim poverty, or bourgeoisie life (for the people who can go "Back"), or a pile of crusty dishes, I don't know exactly... Maybe it can flower into something ripe, beautiful; a free zone, a crowbar to open up the cracks in the capitalist-world-as-it-stands-in-line. I would like to believe so, and will give this my personal vote-of-why-not-confidence-- not out of naivete, but for the lack of any better alternative.

Where does your allegiance lie?

*~*~*

So I passed from the fabrik
wandering its halls in the dead of night with my LED light
through the plaster dust

to the death ward an ocean away. I was merely a visitor there (as I am everywhere)
with a sticky tag on my black overcoat reading VISITOR
How can I tell you? The woman I was visiting had become a skeleton, the thin skin withered onto her bones; the way the nurses (Moroccan or Nigerian usually) hoisted her onto her bed, expertly, like shoving a large skeleton-doll
I look at you and I don't know how you got to be part of this family
the confusion of someone once-lucid, who now doesn't know who you are; the child-mind taking over, as in someone drugged, I don't want the milk , insistent--

my mother wheeled her down the hall to see her table-mate from Harmony Hall, the nursing home ago-- she had to interpret between the two women, who couldn't hear that wall, sitting on the bed-rail between Phyllis and Edith, these two old souls-- You look well considering -- I'm so glad to see you -- Are you comfortable -- I want to go home -- I'm just here until I get my strength back
yes, the two skeleton-hands clutching each other, the weak warm souls in tenuous connection // four minutes passed and the visit was over; we creaked back down the hall... the fading-out, the confusion set in again... the faded hospital-nightgown printed with stars and moons... stars and moons not to be seen through the closed-blind-window...

The cruelty is in the lie. I'm just here getting my strength back. The woman I'm writing of is ninety-nine years old. Rather than keeping our elderly in death-wards under the blaring glare of the television, where they don't know night from day, and feeding them a stream of placid lies along with the sugar-corn-starch drinks and the tired canned peaches, we should be preparing them for one of life's greatest transitions. Ninety-nine: congratulations, you graduated. You ate apples on the farm in Yakima as a girl and joined up with the socialists and traveled the world and wrote fabulous things-- now you should be allowed to take your last great adventure with your eyes open, not trapped-up-confused in the death ward where your last light fades alone... I'm sorry for my great-aunt and for every other aging consciousness whose body is trapped in the great American-health-nightmare-machine; sorry we haven't created a better death for you.

And how. "In the Philippines, we take care of our old people at home," the Filipino nurse says to my mother, who must be on the verge of tears. Well, of course. That would be the way. But you can't care for the aging-- a full-time job-- when you have to work all day in an office to earn the health insurance to pay for all this health-care. So you toil all day in the office, pay your immigrants to take care of the old people, make a visit every night after work, eat the egg sandwich the dying one has no appetite for, go to sleep, repeat every day. Who is profiting from the death machine here? Not the dying one, not the family of the dying one; marginally the immigrant, if you compare it to working on the farm perhaps; probably the drug companies and the health insurance people (I must speculate, I've never met them personally). Health care, or death care? Furthermore, should I be so callous to suggest that there might be some collective karma at work in this system? The American capitalists who bought in, who let their allegiance lie with the system-- the baby-boomers who shaped the world-as-it-is-now, and their parents who shaped them... now will be forced to die alone in it the clutches of this terrible healthdeathcare system they created-- or allowed to be created, which boils down to the same thing... You play by the rules, you die by the rules. Too bad collective karma works collectively-- if you keep to yourself and try not to make trouble, but remain within the collective, the karma applies to you too. That's why you have to take a stand of some sort-- if you mingle with the parasite-class, you die with the parasite-class, alone with the television / the old white people in their separate boxes, lucky when the immigrant-nurse comes to care, hoping that they will care. I make no conclusion from all this besides my own personal wish: if I make it to old age, this system will probably be in shambles by then; if it's not, hopefully I will have cultivated a network of friends that will help me to die somewhere outside, with stars and candles or sunshine and air, among people I loved.

27 november 2006

chronicles of the ghetto-jet-set

CARTAJIMA is one of these villages. The rain beats down at night, trickles through the narrow stone streets, washes the white buildings... We run among the stones up on the hill, past the cemetery, past the chestnut factory where a man and a woman sew together massive bags of chestnuts, machines humming in the evening... They do not give us any chestnuts; we are foiled. "Go to Balthazar's, see if he'll cook you some," the man whose alcover we're sleeping in recommends.

Balthazar is the only one at Balthazar's bar, an unmarked building hidden beneath the sheets of rain. "Hay castanas?" He pours us two goblets of vino tinto, and motions for us to sit in plastic chairs around the fire, around the television. There is a movie on TV, something with kidnappers and New York City and bank accounts with 50 million dollars. Balthazar shakes the chestnuts around in a heavy iron pan over the fire. There is a skinny dog beneath our feet. We three watch the movie, watch the fire, watch the movie, listen to the rain. There is a card table, covered with a faded orange tablecloth-- velvet, ancient-regal, marked with cigarette burns... Balthazar pours the chestnuts onto a newspaper spread on the table, peels them much more deftly than I can: it is my first chestnut. This is why I travel...

but the rest of this week, completely ghetto-jet-set, and I feel I must write something of it simply because I realized that not everyone lives this way.

There was Cartajima, and then a train from Ronda to some outpost called Bobadilla, where we caught the Talga train to Malaga-- the "nice" train, the one that costs 3x more for the same distance because they play a movie; cell-phone chatter and you can't gaze out of the window without the reflection of some people slaughtering each other on the TV marring your view of the hills... Siglo XXI. Tears pour down my face on this fast-train, the modern train; I can't make this transition from the placid village to the modern world...

but of course I do make the transition-- from the small white villages to the cranes and planes, back in the whirl again-- my crazy-planning or lack thereof gave me two tickets on the same evening departing from Malaga-- one to Shannon and one to Berlin. I made myself one of those airport picnic meals, whole-wheatpita bread and arugula and tomatoes and airport-olives sliced with a McDonald's plastic knife and spread on a paper napkin in the waiting lounge (staples of the ghetto-jet-set)... debated countries, cities, climates, chose the Berlin ticket over the imagined raininess and ire of Ireland, a decision which subjected me an eternity later to the cruel mauve-and-olive patterns of the Berlin S-Bahn at 3 am, life keeps spinning on... stumbled upon the thought two days later that I wanted to be in America for Thanksgiving, some warm suburban memory, bought myself the 99-Euro Condor Airlines Frankfurt-to-Fort-Myers special, yes, it was all set up. The Power... the perverse power to click-and-buy your passage around the globe... It had to do, really, with the fact that I spent an afternoon riding my bicycle to 4 grocery stores in search of black beans. I really craved black-bean-sweet-potato-quinoa burritos-- even pinto beans would have been okay-- but no, no foodstuffs here lean towards Mexico, and I got in one of those moods that every immigrant must face at some point... the exasperation with your new country's lack of something that you take for granted in your birth-country. Yes, America might have wretched foreign policy and a complete lack of culture, etc. etc., but at least you can find black beans in every grocery store, what kind of a fucking country is this, no tortillas and no beans, and in that moment the 33-cent can of refried beans outweighs the evils of the nation you left behind, and with the click-power: voila, passage. This is actually quite a dangerous power, for people like me who are subjected to bouts of whimsy. You really shouldn't be able to end up with a cheap, quick plane ticket to another continent every time you get pissed off that you can't find a can of beans in the supermarket.

so, to continue: ICE to Frankfurt, actually to someplace called Wiesbaden, where there was much vodka with the Russian gypsy punks-- then I woke up in the bus on Orianburgerstrasse in Berlin, watching the funky colourful people pass outside... these tour-buses are great for voyeuristic people-watching. You can gaze out, and the people on the sidewalks have no idea. Ah, Berlin... it seemed like a good idea the night before; but with a vodka hangover at twenty past noon it seemed so far from Frankfurt and Florida and Atlanta and Baltimore and all these places I had to go before I could rest. It is true: I still had enough time to catch an ICE back to Frankfurt, but I realized I was tired. Like, really tired. And my head was spinny (schwindlig). And my boots were some-unknown-where, so I put on 3 pairs of socks to go outside because it looked so fascinating outside. Walking around a cold colourful Berlin in sockfeet (the socks here are marked R for rechts and L for links, ja, life can be that orderly here)... buying gourmet chocolate bars in flavours like lemon-polenta and red-beet-ginger, I still thought I might be in America in a few days; it was only in the Berlin train station that I realized this was a crazy way to live. That is, the kind of crazy which is counterproductive. This is why I am still in Europe, one week after falling asleep in a rainy Spanish village with a warm stomach full of red wine and chestnuts, writing this story about all the flights I didn't take.

And today there was that 129-Euro flight to Luxor and I've still never been to Africa and... I said... you must restrain yourself, stay in cold curmudgeony Europe, just for the sake of being still. Please just sit still for two weeks.

11 noviembre 2006

on migration, the City, tarifa

Walking down the street in Amsterdam's Red Light District, two men in long overcoats approached us... "His name is Alejandro... We just bought this building over here and are looking for women to work in the windows; interested?" Ah, the City. Red lighs glowing through sheets of rain, slick cobblestones, City of Opportunity; I am not the least bit interested. Even though Amsterdam is one of the loveliest cities in the world. I am not interested.

What is it about all this that beckons so?

Be specific, be specific. I run into a friend of mine here who was first from India, now rooming with a Tunisian family and making his life here how he can; we have tea at the snackbar and talk about this stuff, this immigration stuff. The question I am always pondering is-- why do we come here? Why do people from the third world flock to Europe and the U.S.? when so often, all that is really offered to them is shit-- work cleaning rooms in a motel all day long isolated from your family in a culture that treats you as second-class? etc? "Economic opportunity." I understand this to a great extent. There is a more comfortable life here in so many ways. You want health care for your family. You want clean drinkable tap water. y Of course. And there is the promise of rationality, of sanity. This is why I am in Europe. If your own government is corrupt, especially if you live in war or chaos-- of course Europe promises order, justice, of course. Europe seems to have it together. I would move here if I could.

But there is the dark side of the move to the West: the fashion show, the alienation, the greed, the competition, the broken families. And also, many of the third-world dictatorships or systems people are fleeing are caused by Western governments and corporations, by the new colonialism-- you leave your people to join the people that are sucking your people dry. Is it not better, then, to try to band together, take your country back, make it a good place to live? Idealistically, it is better-- so accepting this premise, then I must return to the U.S.A., a country where I have never felt at home, and try to struggle with the people in power to make it a liveable place--

If I am to say one clear, coherent thing on this topic, let it be this: immigration will be the issue of the twentyfirst century, especially as climate change creates environmental havoc. Europe and America must open their ears to a real dialogue on immigration. "These people" are not "poor people" from "over there." They are us. Our affluence exists because of their labor and their resources. If we do not confront them, and what we have been doing to them, and what we continue to do in their countries, real darkness will occur. Just open the discussion up. We have to address the causes of immigration and fix them; we're all in this planetary situation together. This system of having the multitudes compete for shining slots in the Sun of Europe is not going to work.

grafitti in tarifa: borders, for what?

*

the beach at the end of Europa, Moroccan mountains in distance

This Andalucian farm lane is an archaeology in itself, built of colorful broken tiles, some of which are worn smooth by the sea. I walk up it and pass an old man on a gray burro, anachronistic perhaps with the wind turbines in the background. Another old man joins me on the uphill climb. He is carrying a bundle of hay on his back-- to feed his vaca, up the hill, he explains. Twentyfive years he has lived here and carried hay to his cow on the top of the hill. Are you francesa? No, de las estados unidos. La vida aqui es mas tranquilo que en los estados unidos, no? Yes, the life in the campo is much more tranquil. I turn off to the farmhouse I am staying in and he disappears up the hill.

"Last of a dying generation, these Andalucian farmers," the owner of the farmhouse comments as we eat couscous and drink wine. The children of these campesinos are living in the cities, with their cars and electricity, sure, all over the world this is happening, sure. This is the migration I am concerned with: not merely this north-south-crossing-the-river stuff, which is potent stuff, but these campo-city migrations. Which have of course been going on for centuries... And the life in the campo is hard, sure, hiking up the hill every day to feed the cow, sure-- But la vida in the city is hard also; the strain of inaction-- my back strained from the desk chairs and airplane and car seats, my eyes sore from the flicker of the computer screen-- no, life is not easy anywhere. There is no back-to-the-campo possible, no "back" anywhere possible, but maybe we could go forward to somewhere with more activity, more nature-- if the ninos are interested. On the bus to Algeciras there was a baby with a pacifier, deep gray eyes, no more than 2-- with a sport-wristwatch-- we train these children so early, it seems to me almost cruel to put a watch on a baby. But maybe it is a kindness: the baby will be well-adapted to the environment it must live in. My quarrel is not with the city, nor with technology itself, nor with the twenty-first century... it is that these ways of life seem to have to stamp out kill out eradicate all other ways of life. The globalized industrialized technocity (the dystopia, as it seems to me, but I won't speak that value judgment for you)-- it seems to insist on being the only way of life, pastures into luxury townhomes; children playing in forests into children playing with video-murder, etc. Is a peaceful coexistence too much to ask? How can we shape the twentyfirst century into something worth living in?

30 oktober 2006

on movement

Lately, I have been dealing a lot with hotels and airports.

"These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people's noses. As for the cleanliness, which hit him in the face, it wasn't cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be. ... For sleep, one bed; for sitting in, one arm-chair; for cleaning one's teeth and shaving one's chin, one tumbler, one looking-glass." -- Virgina Woolf

yes, the sterility, it is cliche even to speak of the sterility; what is more interesting is the luxury rations they bring you. You can dream all day and night of the breakfast if you wish. It is your just compensation. You can sit in your armchair and eat your breakfast and gaze out at civilization below your window, beneath the glass.

The breakfast is, of course, a kind of coercion. Or perhaps this is only obvious once you have studied history, politics, sociology, and globalization for many years. Beneath the breakfast lurks the threat of the not-breakfast -- fail to comply, and you might be down there, on the sidewalk, without the breakfast. It might be cold, outside no, it will be cold, and then what will you do? Shut up and eat your breakfast; it is getting cold. I know, it is time to speak plainly again: this will make sense later.

To form a rupture with the hotels and airports, I brought my bags to the factory; a huge industrial castle with hidden rooms and plaster dust and interrupted surfaces with trees sprouting out of them. It is cold in the factory, but that's what blankets are for; there was even a bag of oranges; ginger root to mince into tea. Wealth is relative if nothing else. Anyway, a bright October Saturday presented itself, and my friend had this big glowing dahlia, yellow flecked with red... I mean this was the kind of flower you remember for the rest of your life, flower as beacon, the flower to beget all flowers... so we hitchhiked down to Bavaria, to bring it to his mother for her 50th birthday. Yes, a birthday flower, a black hat; who can resist two young people bearing and wearing such things? It took only two rides and a few hours to go the perhaps 300 km. First, a small white car with glorious gypsy music (you know you have re-entered the flow of life when the gypsy music meets you); then after waiting a few minutes at the Shell Tankstelle we entered the German Family Urlaub; husband-wife-son-daughter in their monster sport utility vehicle. Colored spongy disks passed round-- Puff-Rice-- you have to imagine what flavour it is-- chocolate or bird or meat-- I try a lurid pink one which of course tastes only like sugar -- "Watermelon." Then we play I pack in my bag... a surfboard, a bonzai-baum, a cat an apple a lollipop... Pick three things, and we have to guess what Land you've been to. The little girl, perhaps eleven, more fashionable than I will ever be with her hoop earrings and tall leather boots... "I bring a VOLVO, things from IKEA, and a reindeer..." "Schweden! You have been to Schweden!" Eventually the little boy gets rowdy with the soccer ball, the father turns on the audio book-- a story about angels on an island?-- the little arrow designating where we are on the GPS-map moves along the silent highway lines-of-flight... yes, the German family Urlaub, and also gypsies on the Autobahn; any alternative to the great gray airport. There are many lines of flight from the hotels and airports, from the hotel breakfasts; some of them end in hunger and cold, but others end in puff rice, in potato soup, in apple trees, in a million other things that may or may not be better than luxury rations and stylized rooms where the temperature is ambiently warm but the heart is chilled.

21 oktober 2006

on Prada, peanuts, and revolutionary tactics

So somebody in Zurich was dissatisfied with Prada;
probably more likely dissatisfied with commercial culture--
How does one really attack this? with a rock? the primal, ancient impulse?

She looked unflappable, solid; now, yes, she looks shocked, to have received such an attack--

A more subtle assualt, perhaps, involves satire. Rewind to Far-West Texas, where they erected a fake, door-less Prada boutique in the middle of nowhere...

Yes, I prefer the satirical jibe to the direct-rock attack, though there is power in that too. Generally, I prefer to ignore the whole luxury-commercial-culture and not give it any energy... But then there comes a moment when you want an article of clothing.

There are many options, as far as obtaining clothing goes. I had a shopping experience recently that I will share. (Trust me, this gets interesting towards the end). I wanted a pair of loose black pants, and I was in a rare mood where it seemed like fun to go out in the city and find them. When I go shopping, I tend to think that this object is already mine-- I must simply go and uncover where it is hidden-- and since it is already mine, it will call to me-- Usually I don't have the energy to go out and search for it, since it involves subjecting myself to the unwanted sensory assault of the advertising blitz-- but this day, I did.

I found my pants in a shop that was a renovated factory, filled with stuff by local designers; they were the pants I had been seeking, but they were made of Rayon. I found myself wondering what exactly Rayon was-- was it one of those fabrics manufactured from petroleum--?-- it didn't seem like it-- and so I bought them anyway, baffled, bemused; I would have preferred cotton ("Baumwool", or "tree-wool", in German)-- but, ok. Those little consessions we make-- the weight of them adding up--- I resolved to investigate this rayon matter.

Wikipedia told me that rayon was made from "naturally occurring polymers and therefore it is not a synthetic fiber, but a manufactured regenerated cellulosic fiber." This was mildly reassuring, but not very: rayon is made from cellulose, but what is cellulose? I mean, what exactly am I wearing?

Time to look up the "Cellulose" article: "Cellulose is the most abundant form of living terrestrial biomass. ... It forms the primary structural component of green plants. The primary cell wall of green plants is made primarily of cellulose." OK. This is sounding kind of better. Even though there were all kinds of industrial chemicals used in the manufacturing of my pants, they were once probably some kind of green plant cells.

A few days later, I am eating from my "Energie" mix, some kind of "studentenfutter" which has gotten to the state where there are mostly peanuts left since I have eaten the good stuff like the almonds already, leaving me with peanuts and raisins that taste like peanuts. If I was more disciplined I could have eaten it at a more even rate, but alas... I am not that thoughtful or neurotic. It strikes me that really, peanuts are kind of weird and they're not really up to par with the other nuts, but I don't know why: Wikipedia time. (Wikipedia time a haceccity-- that moment -- when instead of casually wondering something and passing onto the next thought, it strikes you that you can in fact have your question answered in less than a minute -- the moment when you decide your curiosity is strong enough to get up from whatever you're doing, casual thought turned into energized inquiry, the moment a spark, the spark that moves your muscles toward the computer---)

"Although a nut in the culinary sense, in the botanical sense the fruit of the peanut is a woody, indehiscent legume or pod and not technically a nut."

ah-ha! I had always suspected you, peanut, of being a bit different... And then, this:

"Peanuts for edible uses account for two-thirds of the total peanut consumption in the United States."

well, what on earth is the other 1/3 of peanuts grown being used for? What can you do with a peanut besides eat it? "Peanuts have a variety of industrial end uses. Paint, varnish, lubricating oil, leather dressings, furniture polish, insecticides, and nitroglycerin are made from peanut oil. Soap is made from saponified oil, and many cosmetics contain peanut oil and its derivatives. The protein portion of the oil is used in the manufacture of some textile fibers.

Peanut shells are put to use in the manufacture of plastic, wallboard, abrasives, and fuel. They are also used to make cellulose (used in rayon and paper)..."

So there you have it, my friends, the possible origin of my new pants, another little wikipedia-mystery, (tangent: "It is estimated that half-a-billion people on Earth rely on peanuts as their primary source of protein." -- can you imagine! I had no idea) -- yes, these little tangents you risk with Wikipedia exploration, but here, we come back around to the spooked Zurich face in the Prada display...

you don't need a rock to fight this slickness, this beat, this seduction. Prada, whatever the hell it is, whatever the word whispers in your ear-- whatever resonance you feel when you hear this mystery-magic-word-- this mystique doesn't get shattered by a rock. The rock is important because it shows that the control of the mystique isn't absolute, but the rock doesn't shatter the spell; in the end it feeds the spell. I used to be really into the idea of counter-spell, but counter-spell just wraps you up in an occult war that's probably written in their terms, counter-spell is like counter-anything, which results in this:

yes, cast a mystique around your revolution, shroud yourself in arcane symbols; it just opens your mystique to appropriation... No Future Without Tally the slogan of this European boutique... what rot. Counter, reaction-revolution-reaction-betrayal (listen to this clip i mangled from Hakim Bey-- "How is it that the world turned upside down always manages to right itself? Why does reaction always follow revolution like seasons in hell?") -- yes, counter-spell counter-stratagem counter-culture brings on one more season in hell... Rock, ok; satire, yes; but then there is the possibility of the peanuts.

The promise of the peanuts. If the face is shocked by a rock, if the glass is shattered by this impulse, consider how shocked she'd be if confronted with the peanut farmer in Senegal who may have grown her clothes. She wouldn't know what to do with herself. "Pleased to meet you...?" What we need is not another mystique, but an unveiling, in the simplest plainest terms. Every Prada boutique deserves the chemical formula of its perfume wheatpasted on its doors, say; or take a photo-tour of the Norwegian industrial fishing ship who caught the herring whose scales were used to form your lipstick... trace these lines of commerce to their grimy sources, confront, unveil, reveal, make a map - take a photo - strip away the mystique; this seems to me the best way to silence the fashion beat.

2 oktober 2006

notes from autumn

the aspen forest by the See in golden october
crunchy apples from the tree in the kleingarten, apple in one hand, steering the bicycle with the other, careening through the Wildpark past all the hemmed-in boars snuffling along the ground--

1 oktober 2006

truffles in zurich

Not just any truffles, but passion-fruit truffles. The Swiss, and the Germans as well, are fascinated by tropical fruit. Tacos garnished with kiwi. Chicken served with pineapples and whipped cream. It goes along somehow with the popularity of Brazil; entire kiosks with Brazil paraphanelia, the word Brazil emblazoned on tight T-shirts across the chests of girls across Switzerland... What does it stand for? Sure, it could be simply that Brazil is a good country, like passionfruits and pineapples are essentially yummy. But it makes sense too that these cold countries are fascinated by the tropics, by the rhythms, by the perceived sensuality that is lacking in their culture, by the darkness insinuated. It struck me somewhere between the Alps and Zurich that perhaps I am not white enough to be in Europe. The typical conversation between the stranger and I goes something like this:
--"Where are you from?" --"The United States." --"Yes, but..." (a certain struggling) "Where are your ancestors from?" or, "What's your ethnicity?" --"I don't know, American." --"But," (pointing at my light-brown hands) "You look like you have something in you."
Something in you. Whatever that means. What does it mean to have something in you? (The opposite of being empty?) Am I from Spain, Brazil, the Middle East, Eastern Europe? Where does my complexion come from? Es tut mir leid, ich weiss nicht. Well, but this is an interesting phenomenon. I take this question as a compliment, indicating that I must have some gypsy flavor, but I wonder about the people that ask it. I guess they are just searching for some passion, like all of us.