Ralph's Photographs

Joe and Ralph are brothers,
and they inspire me--
what's possible.
It's like for Ralph,
everything is just a lens to focus love through.

Ralph took this photo
of my friend nikki
and the sun was shining through her purple skirt and her hair had flowers in it.
and i would like Ralph to photograph my sadness,
to catch me in a moment when it is in me
and the sun is shining through it
and what color would its skirt be?
and what its hair look like?

Tonight I was talking on the phone, to alex, about my childhood
and i said that if i read my life in a book,
i would cry the whole way through.
and even now, writing that,
i feel i need to justify it,
explain myself
to tell you sad, sad stories,
to write you a whole book that would make you cry the whole way through.

and what's so sad is that as a child
you think you made your sadness up,
like the games you play alone in your room,
and so does everyone else.
and so i feel like i'm still living to prove my sadness is real,
and until i completely believe it exists
and and it has a story to tell
and photographs to take
like a real, live human being,
like a ralph or a joe,
it won't leave me.

today, in the kitchen,
i was cooking and eating mango with my hands
and listening to this american life,
and the story was about a retarded woman,
who watched children's videos over and over,
and when her mother was dying of cancer
she made her a video to remember her by
but after she died,
the woman never watched the video,
and she forgot her mother,
who had taken care of her every day.
i was crying
over the sink
because my hands were dirty
and i didn't want to cry over the floor.
i guess it's good to remember
even small, sad things.

ralph showed me a video, tonight,
about physics,
and an important man being interviewed said the reason nuclear power is so powerful
is because it splits not just an atom,
but the center of an atom,
and if we could get to the center of that,
and the center of that,
the energy would be infinite--
the power at the center of the smallest thing.
i would like to commit this alchemy,
split, into love,
the center of my smallest sadness,
my sadness that is so ashamed it lives in my wisdom tooth,
the one that is aching and buried under my cheek bone,
or the birthmark i noticed tonight,
in the bathtub,
might be beautiful,
just to the right of the center of my chest.
i imagined it in a photagraph,
a portrait of it at that moment--
just my breasts and thighs above the water,
my face half-submerged.

and i thought of water as a surface,
a plane, like in mathematics or physics--
its own universe,
or new ground to walk on.
and it's Easter and Passover all at once,
and i thought of how jesus walked on water
and moses parted water,
split it in the center,
and i wonder how much sadness he found at its center.
and i wonder
if he believed in it.

i am going to write this as if i am sadness, for a moment, ok?
i am ana's little girl sadness.

i am sorry, i am sorry, i am sorry
i didn't mean to
i don't know how this happened
it was an accident
i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry
i'm scared i'm scared i'm scared
forgive me forgive me
i didn't mean to
run away from you
i didn't mean to make such a mess
to have knotty hair
to be so dirty
to cry so much
i didn't mean to forget to wear underwear on the swingset in my blue dress in the sun
and spend hours in my room rearranging doll furniture and drawing circles on the floor
it's just that i didn't know what else to do
i didn't mean to be so clumsy
and kiss all my friends
and tell secrets behind the tree
i am afraid of you
and i don't mean to be afraid of you
i find you in colors
i dream sad things
i wish you wouldn't sit so close to me
and say the things you say to me
you come too close to me
you violate me
but i don't have the words to say that
get the fuck away from me
i'm sorry i don't mean to say that
but it's what i want to say
what i don't have the words to say
go away, go away, go away.
i am afraid of you.

Bluebird

I was rambling today to Mark,
my favorite professor,
about how I don't wear dresses anymore.
It's a perfect day outside his office window
the way it's been these past few days
the blue of archetypes and fairytales
the blue that launched a million metaphors
occuring all across eternity
like specks of blue dripped, by jackson pollock, across a timeline that stretches out forever in every direction
the blue of the eyeballs of Disney princesses
with eyelashes that flutter open and closed helplessly.
Snow White and Cinderella would frolick on the lawn today,
butterflies caught in their hands
before they release them,
benevolently,
their red lips bowing like clouds.
the bottoms of their ball gowns would collect grass stains today
befitting a Tide commercial
and the squirrels would crawl up their arms and whisper stories in their ears that would make them giggle and sing and spin in circles, silk sown into the wind.

I wear jeans and baggy sweatshirts
a decision I wish
weren't a decision at all.
I wish I really believed I were born androgynous
like my beautiful friend
who always walks like she's marching in an army of her own making
and doesn't understand the way clothes and colors fit together.
But, goddammit
I like those shoes that look like black lines painted onto cripplingly high-heeled feet
i like the garbage bag dresses
in the photospreads of vogue
with the model whose hair is tangled and spilling in her face
her arms jagged,
like she's not quite human anymore,
a bird
splayed out on a cutting bird
in a gourmet kitchen.
In a day like today she would lie down on the grass and eat the dirt like a malnourished rebellious teenager.
she would point her head down
into her perfect neck
the sinews bent
so thin
so thin.
And if I went up to talk to her, she would only squawk epithets at me,
I bet.
But who knows? because models don't talk
until their crossover careers as actresses
and game show hosts
and by then they've lost their sinewed edge.

it's hard to believe our culture gave birth to both them and cinderella.
i mean, seriously, what kind of mother is that?
maybe she's bipolar and crack-cocaine addicted
suffering from poverty
splintering
going to seed
or maybe she just disappeared
like the mothers in Disney fairytales
died in childbirth
and all her little babies inherited the sin and guilt of that
raised on bottles of soy formula
mixed with too much water.

I wish i didn't have to turn my back on the models dying in the fields
like forgotten crops
or princesses
who awaken from eternal sleep when men kiss their lips--
their last hopes.

"But you do wear dresses, sometimes," he says,
"You did the other day. And that's okay. You don't have to choose."
He means the gala we both went to, for the human rights department.
I was volunteering,
Greeting rich wrinkled faces at the door.
I wore a tight black skirt and tights to cover up my leg hair
and high heels of course.
They clammored for importance on the marble floor
and I felt strangely in-place, a good actress.
commanding authority as I helped squinting old women with crooked lipstick peel back their name tags

and I'm sure it was the shoes.

I was so jealous when Mark walked in sweating in a wrinkled linen shirt
the kind he always wears to class.
He joked he'd spent weeks planning his outfit.
I actually had.
He leaned in close and said he'd biked there,
his eyes glimmering like the sun through the big windows.
We mocked the crystal chandeliers together,
and behind them was all that big blue through the long windows.
and what do you do with all that blue?
do you swallow it?
do you make it into ball gowns?
Well, while I was busy he slipped out the great big front wooden doors
and rode his bike through the blue,
like the end of a movie,
ET or Easy Rider.

I walked outside to greet someone and watched him and thought about waving
but didn't want to ruin the moment
so I grinned and clamored back inside,
a jagged little bird.

procrastination

jess always said she wished she could stop time,
but i think,
if i could,
i'd speed it up
so fast
voices would sound like birds chirping into the wind
their own language
maybe someday i'd learn it too
and we'd all speak like sparrows,
and move our arms like ants
my professors assigning 20 page papers
due in 17 minutes
the cars would just be darts of color
like shooting stars on asphalt sky
shot into the barriers of sound.
and my garden seeds would grow like fountains
spouting out then dying down
digging back into the earth before i have a chance to touch them,
fold their leaves into food
after a while,
i'd just
give up
sigh and lie down in the bathtub of the universe
and let it all roll over me like rivers of jazz
bubble-bath minutes bop-poppin all over my thighs.
i'd dance under the water of time
scat myself to sleep
and then,
make best friends with my prinkly toes.

independent woman

i first see you
in the supemarket
the squeaky clean floors reflect your denim demeanor.
we both reach for the last pack of trident gum
original flavor
because we share an appreciation for the classics.
and your hat is my favorite color: puke green,
and we both have a plentitude of arm hair in the same shade of
eastern european jew
and i like the way you carry yourself,
lightly,
casually,
as if you are dusting the florescent linolium with the hems of your ill-fitting jeans,
and so,
i reason,
sighingly,
we will make love.
i know this because i can imagine it
as clearly as i imagined the guy with the dreads
there was something about them that seemed thoughtful,
like they were matted with insights about the cosmos.
anyway, i'm over him.
Dreads and i imaginary-fucked in a college classroom
but Trident, we'll make love
in a park
on a camping trip,
sleeping under the stars.
you'll point out all the constellations
and say their names in latin,
and i'll resent you for this superior knowledge,
and, trying not to show it,
bury my face in your chest
maybe some nipple-kissing will occur at that point because my mouth will be right there and why else would it be there? and it'd be kind of awkward otherwise
and one thing will lead to another
blah blah blah
and then a month or two later,
i'll discover, at the most inopportune of moments,
that you hate the way my nails are always just a little dirty,
like they can't decide if they want to be dirty or clean,
just like i can't decide if i want to be an activist or a high school teacher. it's all very telling.
we'll be in the car, of course,
and you'll be driving,
because i can't drive and also because the scene is sadder that way,
so maybe it will also be night time
and raining.

anyway,
i'll bite my lip
and then i'll say,
o yea, well i hate the way your pants don't fucking fit
and you'll say,
it's really the brand of milk i drink
with the stupid cow on it,
like, do i really think that cow was raised cruelty-free?
does that really make me feel better about my nice ikea furniture?
and i'll say, ok, that didn't really make sense,
and, more importantly,
you remind me of that science teacher i hated in sixth grade
the one who stared
and always wore gray.
and you always reminded me of him
i just couldn't place it until the exact moment you mentioned the cow
but actually, you're EXACTLY like him
with your fucking earth tones
and penetrating glances.
and that makes you realize i kind of remind you of your sister
the one with the buck teeth
and the weird giggle
god, you hate that giggle
but you don't mention that in this moment
because, ya know,
that's kinda weird.
so we fall into silence.

and when you drop me off at home
i can tell by the way you don't look at me
and leave your knuckle on the gear shift when i walk out into the rain
it's the last time i'll see you.
we've both struck nerves, have too much baggage, brought up too many bad memories
and as i walk into my house, i look back, and see you through the rain-stained window,
popping another piece of gum inti your mouth,
shoving the wrapper into your baggy denim pockets.

fucking bastard.
i don't need you anyway.

blues (for john)

feeling lonely on the beach an arm's length away from you,
the ocean a color i have never seen before,
i can't imagine there's anything out past the sky and sea
and the place they meet--
all those dust motes in the mouth of the universe,
yawning open.

but you say
if i held a magnifying glass to a leaf,
i'd see tiny leaves within it,
and a hundred within each of them,
and on and on,
all their little veins stretching out to sea and sky
like our hands in the darkness,
blind to the galaxies just under our dirty fingernails,
the matted roots of cities
clinging to the insides of our eyes.

and what would thought look like magnified a thousand times?
i wish i could hold a magnifying glass to my loneliness.
would i see just me, palm open, at the edge of the ocean,
trapped within my heart,
within my heart,
within my heart,
like russian dolls?
or would it flow,
like air between us,
water boiling,
honeycombs of currents rising and falling
like breaths,
or half-kisses
ferns still opening,
their tips curled under,
spiralling like toes in the sand.

would loneliness include us both
in its infinity?
the sea and sky and 2 near strangers, old friends still unfurling,
a kaleidoscope of skin and blues.

even now i wonder how much i have known you
through your absences,
the way the sea has carved the earth and in these carvings lives its history.
the way they say that cold is an absence of heat.
and i wonder, is there any such thing as an absence of sky?
and what would it look like, magnified?
maybe the stars that burn when they fall,
like cigarettes,
onto the sand.

they say we've burned holes in the sky,
and i wish i could spin my thoughts into string
and weave a new sky
but then we'd never get the chance to feel its absence.
under a magnifying glass, it looks just like loneliness.
like reaching for words that are not yet born,
their syllables unspiraling.

i would like to see your memories under a magnifying glass,
all the places you have been,
till the deserts are just grains of sand,
and in the grains of sand are deserts,
and your lovers' skin
and my skin,
are all just lines that run like rivers
into spirals at the fingertips.

here is where time curls in on itself,
and i have known you for a week,
and also for forever.

in the palm of your hand,
i trace the patterns of your silences,
the contours of your history,
like your body lying next to me,
or its absence,
like the blues on the sand.

today, in the cabinet with all the pots and pans: an old tied publix bag
filled with my grandmother's prescription medications.

i felt sick, and decided not to make the cupcakes.

it hits me in waves like that, knocks me down.

my parents put her life to rest, cleaned up the house, when i was in india, and so i still find fragments all over the house. sometimes i smell her in the linen closet, and i think, she used that towel last. and the undeniable truth of the past hits me--of the way her life is suddenly obsolete, the way it only exists in the past, in the smell on the towels, or in the bags buried at the bottom of the cabinet.

sometimes i wonder--with it being so built into our lives, why we are so unprepared for death. it seems more like anomaly than destiny, something we can't find a place for, something we try to bury under the pots. but it still forces itself upon us, lurches into our consciousness, when we're trying to make cupcakes.

and not knowing what else to do, we close the cabinet doors.

went out bike-riding today. i've been doing that a lot lately, ever since i realized that--like jogging--if you just keep going through the ache in your legs and chest, it eventually fades, and you feel like you were born to do this, like this 130-beats-minute, sweat-on-your-face is your body's natural state, and you could go forever--or at least for 20 minutes, until i limp into my driveway, and slobber all over the bottle of water i've left there.

and no matter what i'm wearing, i imagine it's a silky gown flowing out behind me, like priscilla, queen of the damned. it's like i am made of silk and ether, slipping through the atmosphere. hushed. under the radar of the gods--i am camouflaged in the wind, the width of trees or clouds.

and while i'm running or riding, waiting for the seratonin to kick in and make me forget myself, i often think that i wish that were a metaphor for life, that there would be a point it all just feels like flying.

i remember it was suitable a metaphor for culture shock-- that there was a week it all just fell into place--like adjusting the focus on a camera. there was the week it just got easier.

and i thought of jogging.

i did it often. i'd jog through the streets of the village with a stream of 9-year-olds behind me, perfectly imitating me, their arms folded at their sides at 90 degree angles, their legs moving in slow-motion, at exactly the same rhythm as me, their posture perfect, trying not to laugh.

so maybe, i think, life is just a matter of getting used to the culture of life on earth--language, for instance, or the way the wind feels, or the hard fact of time that holds us in, like gravity, pushing against our skin. maybe it's just a matter of adjusting, and there will be a moment it is easy, all of a sudden.

i've heard of freudian ideas that birth is traumatic, and we're all still recovering from that moment we crawled into the world of bright lights and lenolium, orifices covered with hospital gowns. and we're all still reeling from the shock of that, suffering from post-traumatic stress from a cause we can't remember. i like that theory because it makes my sadness universal, my inexplicable emptiness a a part of life on earth, like a chemical deficiency in the air itself, the way we are hold our heads up to the blinding sun.

and it also leaves room for progress, for recovery. for a moment someday when i will ease into the ether, just a woman on a bicycle in a silk skirt, forgetting she even exists.

o, my loneliness
without your company, i
would be so lonely

rachel and i would have dance parties

my mom and i were talking yesterday about how we feel like we personally know certain celebrities, because we know their temperaments and the stories of their lives. she said she realized that when she was walking down the street in NYC, and she saw Dustin Hoffman, and she grinned at him like she would if she were running into a friend, but he looked away. And she felt crushed. And it suddenly became emotionally real that he didn't know her, even though she knew him--the cognitive dissonance of it.

i especially feel as if i know the obamas. rachel maddow. stephen colbert. david sedaris. it's almost as if i could go out to dinner with them on a saturday.


sometimes i think, "o, barack would really appreciate that! i'd like to talk to him about it". and then i imagine sitting across a table from him. he's wearing that thoughtful furrowed brow, pouring it over with me. and i sip my tea in satisfaction.

sudden clarity: in this moment, i absolutely trust that if i put love and growth first in my life, everything else will fall into place.

thinking: ok, but what does that mean in practice? what does that mean when i feel that pressure on my chest that i've got to study for this class, even if i'm miserable, even if i have nightmares in social theory because of all the force behind my choice to put that first?

what is that force?

Love Song for Sadness

O Sadness,
i want to fall in love with you.
i want to know the way your skin smells,
the way your looks across the room
taste.
i want to run down the street to give you flowers
in a rainstorm.
i want your hand against mine
to anchor me.

Sadness,
i want to marry you
in a field of purple flowers taller than we are.
i want to sing my vows to you
like opera,
and make love to you
just after the song is over,
the flowers looking down on us
like angels or apparitions
wearing purple ball gowns
that bow in the sunlight,
our bodies bowed together.

Sadness,
i want to write you love letters
that glide across oceans
as if they have wings,
and i want you to be the wings that carry them.

i want to plant a garden for you.
i want to watch the flowers open for you,
the buds breaking the earth,
like breath in cold air--
a sudden completeness.
i want you to be my hands in the earth and sun,
the cloth of sky,
the strings of silence,
plucked and still sounding.
i want you to be the silent music
my feet move to,
when i walk across the room to you,
the tip-tap rhythms my eyes blink to,
out-of-sync to anything but us
a morse code to count the emptiness and silences and desperations.

Sadness, i want to find you under my fingernails and be grateful,
the way i am grateful
for the miracles
of stars,
lizards scattering on the sidewalk before me,
conversations.

i want to wear your glances like jewelry,
draped around me.
i want your body against me to be reason enough to exist,
to leave me emptied of wishes for anything but
this moment, this ache,
this breath in the night.

i notice how writers use the same imagery and motifs again and again.

the author i am reading now writes about "eyes scratching darkness," in many different contexts. e.e cummings has his flowers and his moments ever-opening. billy collins dances. linda hogan has impressions and indentations. i write of things being rounded out, worn, softening. these are not conscious choices or devices--they are beyond my control or conscious understanding, something innate, like a mannerism or an accent. like the way i limp a little when i walk, run my tongue over my lips when i'm nervous, my finger over the bridge of my nose when i'm deep in thought. they are signifiers of mysteries.

so i wonder what this imagery means to us, where it comes from, where it lives inside us, if we found it accidentally in our dreams. i wonder of the day these images crystallized inside us, became the closest expression of something otherwise unnamable, something that spoke of the essence of something we needed but couldn't understand. when billy collins looked through the window and first saw the dancing of the moths, what was dancing inside of him? i wonder if there is anything deeper than that?

for myself, i think perhaps i can find the "rounding out" on the beach as a child, in the seashells and seaglass, and the motes i dug, the walls i'd carefully square against the tide that softened them again and again. and perhaps it was also in my father and mother, sitting a little ways away, their marriage crumbling. the beach was the good days. there was no fighting there.

but then, later, the beach was the walks i took with my father and step mother, when he'd scream at her and she'd sob, and i'd look for the colors in the sand, like glimpses of a world made whole, remnants of another way to live. i'd pretend i didn't understand the "goddamn whore," suddenly a foreigner, suddenly ashamed to witness this, apart from it, like the shock of rounded-out blue glass in the sand. my father filled jars with it, proudly displayed them.

i'd play a game when the sand was hard where i'd try not to break the its surface, try not to leave a single mark.

and the days were rounded out by rain and wind in summer. we'd watch from the balcony, the tornados spiralling miles out, rounding the air and water into cycles the size of children, so small and yet so scary because they were impossible to understand. they seemed to defy this flat earth, this horizontal sea. and sometimes we'd get stuck in the storms, the sheets of rain coming towards us, and we'd try to outrun them and fail-- the sand in its countless shades and shapes of beige whipping our legs like curse words spit into the wind.

we went walking every day, religiously. i lagged behind, lonely, but also not wanting to catch up. loneliness was the way life was--the color of the sea and sand. on good days, my dad taught me the names for the shells and the clouds from a little book with pictures--the whispy ones, the ones that burrowed in on themselves. the ones that hollowed out, and rounded the horizon like the sun.

the sudden squawk
gripped me: my grandmother in pain,
a cry from the dead.

it had been a bird outside, but my impulse was instinct, a thought without thinking, an involuntary memory.
i felt shaken for a long time.

my view from the valley of the left, and how i ended up there

Frankly--go with me on this ridiculous analogy for a second: if the American political spectrum is a raised land mass, like the rocky plateau that simba was held off of in the beginning of the lion king, i feel like i've fallen off the left edge of the cliff, and am now in a valley below, frolicking in a hippie meadow with some illegal immigrants and marijuana legalizers, the Yes Men, this professor i kind of have a thing for, and maybe rafiki, that crazy monkey. i bet he was an anarchist.
(This is turning into a political Fantasia.)



Anyway, from here, looking up at the democrats on the cliff, it's pretty hard to idolize obama, or invest in him the sense of hope that apparently inspire so many of my peers. Additionally, i was in India for much of the campaign. I didn't even vote. I tell poeople that's because my absentee ballot didn't arrive on time... but that was probably because someone else ordered it for me days before the election because i couldn't decide if voting was something I wanted to participate in. Kind of ironic because it was the most important election in us history, and one that my generation made happen, but it's also pretty telling.

After interning last fall for a presidential candidate whose goals are more closely aligned with my own, and whose campaign was woefully ineffective and inefficent, i kind of lost faith in bureaucracy and top-down structures. It's funny that that's how it happened, because I think many people would have concluded that the problem with that campaign was that things weren't top-down enough. And they'd be right. Top-down tends to be efficient; Obama is one of many examples of that. Yes, i know there was a lot of talk of his "grass-roots" campaign, but let's clarify the definition of grass roots, for a second: it means regular people, on the ground, outside organized politics, initiating and controlling a movement. Regular people did a lot for obama's campaign, maybe unprecedented amounts of people doing extraordinary amounts of stuff, but they were getting their orders from people above them, who were listening to the people above them, and so on, because they were running a presidential campaign. By nature, that is not a grassroots endeavor, because it didn't begin with the people, no matter how much you need and use that grass to support the candidate.

The campaign I was a part of, like most structures in American society, was supposed to work similarly, with people getting information and instructions from the people above them. The problem was that the chain-of-command wasn't very well-defined, partly because there wasn't enough money to hire enough people, and partly because of a disturbing, ever-shifting system of alliances and animosities--and information didn't make their way down it, to us, or to the volunteers who called us yelling because their T-shirts never arrived, very efficiently.

So I think the political conclusions I came to from that experience (i.e that i'm not cut out for top-down politics) aren't really proportionate or even directly-related to it. I think they have more to do with how I felt there:

What I liked about the campaign was the sense of community us interns had, all banded together in a run-down old 20's building in Cleveland, drinking boxed wine, and talking about our ideals and ideas. The office was somewhere people didn't care as much about those ideas. And even when they did--which did happen much, much, much more than it would have in a more traditional, better-funded top-down campaign, our ideas still became embroiled in intra-campaign politics, caught in some creaky Cleveland pipe of our poorly-funded leftist bureaucracy.

Before I left for Cleveland, I was already pretty inspired by anarchism, or at least the little bit I'd heard and read about it. Not so much by its goal of no-government, but by my vision of what could exist in its place. As I understand it, and my understanding is limited:

Anarchism doesn't believe in any hierarchy--no president; but also no bosses at work; no sexism, racism, homophobia or heteronormativity-- In short, no coercive and unequal forms of power. In our democracy, the vote of the majority determines the lives of the minority. Anarchism sees that as a form of tyranny for the other 49%--a power dynamic that is unjust and unequal. Additionally, modern electoral politics create a sense of competition that brings out the worst in people. The goal is to win, to gain advantage and power in the race, but not to constructively address the issues opponents share the responsibility for, as American citizens. This competitive rather than creative mindset makes every piece of proposed legislation an uphill battle of winning votes, often at the cost of morality. It's ugly.

Anarchism instead envisions people organized in small, self-sufficient communities that are freely chosen by the people in them. (So, if you want to live in a religious society, for example, you find 20 people who share your ideas and create your own.) These groups make their decisions collectively, by consensus. They problem-solve constructively. They treat each other with respect. They control their own economic lives--run their own factories and farms, without private proverty. They live in a face-to-face society, a direct democracy. I've got this Utopian vision of a bunch of people sitting on the ground, maybe in the woods, a farm in the background, and they're figuring out how they'd like their lives to be run, treating each other equitably, creatively discussing the best place to plant tomatoes. If that sounds idealistic, it is: anarchism places extraordinary faith in the creativity, empathy and ability of human beings. I guess I do too.

I think I the sense of community I found among the interns in the Kucinich campaign was a taste of that experience for me, psychologically at least. It was my first time living in a community I'd chosen for myself, and I could imagine our conversations on cardboard furniture mutating into discussions of where to plant the tomatoes.

I think I was also able to extrapolate that even if the bureaucracy in the office wasn't as creaky as the pipes in the building, the experience of being at the bottom of a chain of command, trying to enact a political agenda I didn't personally create with people I personally knew... just wasn't for me.

After the campaign, I went to India to study abroad, and I returned there this past fall, to live on an ashram that was a living example of the kind of community I imagined, although it wouldn't have called itself anarchist.

It was started by a guy named Vinoba, who was Gandhi's spiritual and political successor. Gandhi appointed him to determine what India's political-economic system would look like, once it had attained independence. Gandhi believed India shouldn't be organized like its former oppressors' government. He saw democracy, and its tyranny of the majority, as a subtle form of violence, and therefore counter to the principle of non-violence that he lived by. After Gandhi's death, Vinoba expanded upon this idea. He saw any political or economic inequalities as a form of psychological violence--a system of fear and intimidation predicated upon unequal and coercive forms of power. He wanted India organized at the village level, the way it had been organized for millenia, before British rule.

At least into the 1960's, many villages in India had never seen money. One of the sisters on the ashram, who was probably 50, told me she didn't know it was possible to buy mangoes until she was in her teens. The experiences of older Indians I've met, in these real-life utopias surprisingly free of conflict and social problems, challenge the notion that anarchism is too idealistic to work. The fact is its model has worked for thousands of years.

Vinoba wanted villages to collectively own property, and form self-sufficient agrarian economies based around the cow rather than industry. Villagers would farm together, divide labor equitably, treat each other with love, and make decisions by consensus, in direct democracy.

I see Vinoba as the Eastern counterpart to the American 60's counter-culture movement. He said a lot of the same things as the New Left, partly in response to the same issues, like the Nuclear arms race, but he came from a different cultural perspective, that of a Hindu mystic: he believed people were equal because they were all God, all capable of acting with divine love, if they were only given it. Within his country, he also had a lot more pull than the US counter-culture did in this country. As much as he eschewed power, Vinoba was an important public figure in India. He was on the cover of Life magazine in the 60's. When Nehru invited him to an important summit on the other side of India, Vinoba insisted on walking there. National and International leaders waited 3 days for him to arrive. Can you imagine President Kennedy doing that for Mario Savio?

So, sometimes I imagine what India would look like if Vinoba's vision had won, the example it could have been for the world.

It wasn't too hard to do that because the ashram I lived on was established by Vinoba as a "laboratory" of what he wanted the country to look like. There were 20 or so sisters--it was a women's ashram; Vinoba was a feminist, the first notable person who proclaimed Indian women have the right to spiritually renounce the world and their families the way men do--living on a farm that kind of resembled my utopia. It's not that there weren't problems, but people had overwhelming faith in each other's basic goodness, their godliness, and so everything else seemed small in comparison. Living there was catching a rare glimpse of the potentialities of human love. The quote in the masthead of this blog is from one of the sisters there, when I was complaining about how often I fall short of my ideal of non-violence.

Adjusting to life back here--I've been back about 6 weeks--has been difficult. In my time there, which was only about two months, a lot of the things that preoccupy my thoughts on a daily basis just didn't exist: there was no gender, little real conflict, no consumerism or materialism.

Back home, just knowing about that alternate universe, I have found the ground has shifted under me.

On the one hand, I feel a lot more courage to live off the edge of the cliff, be honest about my radicalness, no longer feel the need to "pass" as a member of a society I don't feel an affinity with, because I know my vision for the world is attainable, and I know there are 30 wise old Indian women rooting for it, and me.

On the other hand, I'm still here, in a society vastly different from the one I'd like to live in, and I've got to cope with that reality and make the best of it.

So, to come back to Obama: he's somewhat irrelevant to my view of the universe. I'd like to work on forming my own communities and shaping my own culture more directly than I could through American politics. That's kind of the point.

So, yea, there are obvious structural changes I'd love to see happen that Obama doesn't have the power, or will to make happen, like the end of free trade and US hedgemony-- and, while we're at it, installing a direct democracy would be really fucking nice. But I'm not working toward that, because I'm looking for a smaller-scale society, so I'm going to do that on a smaller scale, through non-violence and basic human kindness, and maybe I'll grow some tomatoes. (I haven't done enough of that since I've been home. I'm party writing this to remind myself to move in that direction.)

But, here's the thing about Obama: politics are psychological at their core. Modern capitalism relies on a psychology of competition and consumerism; neo-conservativism relies on a psychology of force; and anarchism would requires a profound psychological shift towards love and creativity.

And Obama's presidency has changed more than the rhetoric, even if he doesn't change a single policy: he's changed the way that people think. If it didn't do that, the rhetoric just wouldn't have worked.

This speech is an indication of that:



It's a nuanced 30-minute political speech about race that doesn't objectify anyone, even racists. That was an oxymoron, an impossibility in American presidential politics, and yet, people ate it up: 5 million views on Youtube. This represents a psychological change in the people I share this country with.

We're not going to attain my ideal society through this president's actions, but I think he has the ability to create a greater sense of community through his words. It's not everything, and it's not necessarily anything tangible, but it would still be nice.

I think this clip, from 3:47 to 4:32, sums up why Obama won, and why he has the potential to continue to inspire and unite the country, more insightfully than any other commentary I've seen:



If Ken Burns is right, and I think he is, I gotta say I kinda like what America's wishing for these days. :)

the rhetoric of globalization: going out on a limb

I'm reading a book for a class on Neo-liberalism and the movements against it. The author is out to illustrate, in particular, that movements protesting globalization aren't just "against" it (as many of their critics claim), but "for" something else-- that they, too, have a vision of a global community, but that it prioritizes human rights rather than trade. The movements against globalization envision a peaceful global society/community, based on the principle of 'solidarity' rather than a worldwide economy based on consumerism.

This first chapter provides a general overview of the rhetoric and narrative used by each side of the debate:

On the pro-globalization side, it's

"Globalization is inevitable and irreversible. There is no real alternative to this model. There are sacrifices and inequalities now, in the short term, but globalization will ultimately lead to a higher standard of living for everyone in the world."

On the dissenting side, it's [this is actually a quote from the book]:

"Solidarity is the awareness of a common humanity and global citizenship, and an awareness of the responsibilities which go with it...It is based on the recognition that in an interdependent world, poverty or oppression anywhere is a threat to prosperity and stability everywhere."

That last quote, especially the "interdependent world" seemed to have an almost spiritual potentiality. Specifically, these words reminded me of the Hindu/Buddhist/New Age idea that (in the language of the latter) "we are all one." I wonder how much the birth of the movements against globalization were shaped by the 60's counter-culture movements, and, in turn, their turn towards spirituality informed by Buddhism and Hinduism. It seems possible that the vision and rhetoric of universal human rights in the past half-decade has, if not consciously borrowed from this spirituality, at least been subconsciously expressing its sentiment. But then again, the vaguely-spiritual notion that we are all connected is, increasingly, a political, social and economic reality. And, arguably, it is also the result of simple, secular compassion.

I could also detect some themes in pro-Globalization rhetoric that reminded me of Christian ideals.

There is the mantra of "inevitability"--or, in other words, "destiny." Some quick googling reveals that pro-globalization business leaders and "organizations" like the WTO invest an almost religious faith in the notion that history has been progressing toward neo-liberalism for all eternity. This, they claim, is the inevitable final step, the capstone, in a historical process that seems almost innate, almost built-in to human potentiality.

"People," they claim, "are economic creatures." In other words, we are all consumers, all desirers (to use a made-up word).

The idea that we are all born with insatiable desires hearkens back to original sin. And the way Pro-Globalization actors trace an arc of history to the inevitable endpoint, the point at which the doors of foreign markets all swing open, is a familiar arc, a familiar sense of destiny, of spiraling out-of-control toward something larger than humanity. It reminded me of the notion of salvation. In the Globalization narrative, the extraordinary suffering of millions is waved aside as a sacrifice that will ultimately pay off--leading to a better quality of life, a higher GDP, development: the american(ized) dream. With the cross as its symbol, Christianity is familiar with sacrifice. But this ideal of sacrifice for the Greater Good is discernible, even ubiquitous, in the rhetoric surrounding many western cultural traditions including military and civil service. Why not Globalization?

I may be going out on a long, scary limb here.

But I'm not claiming that any of these parallels are conscious. I believe that cultural archetypes, narratives and touchstones are inextricably woven into our cultural characters, a part of our collective psyches. We retell the same stories again and again because we've heard them so many times. These stories are all the more powerful when they are intended to get under our skin, like fairytales or morality plays, supposed to become innate, a part of us. And the story of the fall and salvation of mankind is nothing if not a morality play, something meant to affect us deeply, to inform the values we live by, to become a part of who we are. Believers would say it is already who we are. That is debatable, teleological. But what is undeniable is that is a story meant to move us.

The idea that we are all one, while perhaps less linear, is equally emotionally-charged and compelling. And, arguably, as much a part of Asia's cultural fabric as the crucifiction is a part of Western Europe's. Furthermore, activists from this part of the world, who were raised with Buddhist and Hindu ideologies, are some of the prominent visionaries in the movement against globalization. Some of them are affiliated with forces on the left in Western politics that were influenced by 60's counter-culture movements and their alliance with spirituality. And yet it would be a fallacy to claim that activists from all over the world adhere to one (even subconscious) ideology. Movements that support human rights over globsalization incorporate activists from all over the world, many of whom may not have been influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism or their narrative of unity. The idea that "we are all interconnected" is, importantly not just a spiritual narrative: it is also a way to embrace, accommodate and encourage this real diversity.

It would also be a dangerous oversimplification to pretend that the relationship between ideas in this debate is as straightforward or binary as the one I've presented here. I believe it might be possible to detect certain undertones of spiritual and cultural narratives in the rhetoric for, and against, globalization. But there are many undertones present, because there are many cultures at stake in these grand narratives. I suspect they are as complex as we are, as multiple and manifold as the stories of our lives.