In Memoriam–Suzanna Nelson, 1990-2013

As many of you may know (or not) my teaching assistant for the past three years, Suzanna Nelson, died out in San Diego last week. I wrote the following “planctus” to her, trying to figure out how I feel about her death at such a young age, being my student and friend. I have lost students before–we all have, but this one was special, fearless, intense, memorable. Your star burned so brightly, a supernova that dazzled. A flamboyant fashionista hipster, you even had a pair of glasses with no lenses. You handled a cell phone as if it were a sword, texting at the speed of light. Now your star has gone out and your death humbles and confuses me. For whatever forces brought you to Baylor, sheer chance, fate, predestination, coincidence, I will always be so grateful for your presence these four years. You arrived as a child, but there was always an older person behind those eyes who wanted to know things, who wanted to belong, who wanted to be loved, who wanted to make sense of a chaotic and cruel world. They were four years of steady tumult, of chaos, of conversations over coffee, text messages, and we talked about art,Shakespeare, horses, San Francisco, equal rights, women’s rights, philosophy, God, whatever happened to be on your mind. Your horses, you were so proud of your team, bringing me posters which now hang in my office, mute testimony to both your continuing presence and your profound absence. Just like a dad, I was so proud of your success. Your generosity was broad, kind, uncompromising. Your loyalty was unbending. You sometimes trusted my judgment, and I appreciated that–you didn’t trust very easily. You could be a royal pain in the ass, but I always forgave you for talking back or acting out because that was my job. You always questioned me when you thought I was wrong, and rightly so. We read so many things together–Augustine, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Petrarch, Wilde, Bradbury, Coelho. You brought your skepticism to bear. It was your way, but you listened. You let me know when I was defending the establishment, and that I had no right to do that. Your intellect was keen, sharp, reactive. You worried about each class of kids that you cared for–they are so young and naive, you always said. Will they ever learn? Now, you are gone,and we who are left cannot fathom what has happened. You graduated last May,and since neither you nor I are good with goodbyes, we said our fair-wells and just walked away, assuming that we would drift together again at some point. Our four-year collaboration as professor and student was over. You left Baylor, you left Waco, and you returned to California, and something went wrong. I will not try to ponder what that was. You are now beyond earthly speculation, so it doesn´t matter. I pray to God that when your crisis came and you were afraid and lonely and desperate, that God was with you. I pray also that God will grant peace to your family and friends in their time of sorrow and grief. I will remember you always. My tears are for myself, to be shed in private, but I am profoundly sad because I know you will never show up in my office door again. You are now beyond judgment, beyond any mortal bonds, beyond reproach, cares, worries or tears. Your struggle is over. Your Baylor family adored you, and whether you ever knew it or not, but I think you did, we deeply cared for you. In the end we are left with memories and our own sorrow. As one of the more famous characters from Spanish literature says while lamenting the death of his daughter, “¿porque me dexaste penado? ¿porque me dexaste triste e solo? in hac lachrimarum valle.”

In Memoriam–Suzanna Nelson, 1990-2013

As many of you may know (or not) my teaching assistant for the past three years, Suzanna Nelson, died out in San Diego last week. I wrote the following “planctus” to her, trying to figure out how I feel about her death at such a young age, being my student and friend. I have lost students before–we all have, but this one was special, fearless, intense, memorable. Your star burned so brightly, a supernova that dazzled. A flamboyant fashionista hipster, you even had a pair of glasses with no lenses. You handled a cell phone as if it were a sword, texting at the speed of light. Now your star has gone out and your death humbles and confuses me. For whatever forces brought you to Baylor, sheer chance, fate, predestination, coincidence, I will always be so grateful for your presence these four years. You arrived as a child, but there was always an older person behind those eyes who wanted to know things, who wanted to belong, who wanted to be loved, who wanted to make sense of a chaotic and cruel world. They were four years of steady tumult, of chaos, of conversations over coffee, text messages, and we talked about art,Shakespeare, horses, San Francisco, equal rights, women’s rights, philosophy, God, whatever happened to be on your mind. Your horses, you were so proud of your team, bringing me posters which now hang in my office, mute testimony to both your continuing presence and your profound absence. Just like a dad, I was so proud of your success. Your generosity was broad, kind, uncompromising. Your loyalty was unbending. You sometimes trusted my judgment, and I appreciated that–you didn’t trust very easily. You could be a royal pain in the ass, but I always forgave you for talking back or acting out because that was my job. You always questioned me when you thought I was wrong, and rightly so. We read so many things together–Augustine, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Petrarch, Wilde, Bradbury, Coelho. You brought your skepticism to bear. It was your way, but you listened. You let me know when I was defending the establishment, and that I had no right to do that. Your intellect was keen, sharp, reactive. You worried about each class of kids that you cared for–they are so young and naive, you always said. Will they ever learn? Now, you are gone,and we who are left cannot fathom what has happened. You graduated last May,and since neither you nor I are good with goodbyes, we said our fair-wells and just walked away, assuming that we would drift together again at some point. Our four-year collaboration as professor and student was over. You left Baylor, you left Waco, and you returned to California, and something went wrong. I will not try to ponder what that was. You are now beyond earthly speculation, so it doesn´t matter. I pray to God that when your crisis came and you were afraid and lonely and desperate, that God was with you. I pray also that God will grant peace to your family and friends in their time of sorrow and grief. I will remember you always. My tears are for myself, to be shed in private, but I am profoundly sad because I know you will never show up in my office door again. You are now beyond judgment, beyond any mortal bonds, beyond reproach, cares, worries or tears. Your struggle is over. Your Baylor family adored you, and whether you ever knew it or not, but I think you did, we deeply cared for you. In the end we are left with memories and our own sorrow. As one of the more famous characters from Spanish literature says while lamenting the death of his daughter, “¿porque me dexaste penado? ¿porque me dexaste triste e solo? in hac lachrimarum valle.”

On the Cuyuni

To say that I was skeptical of spending a day with a group of people–a tribe?–who lived at over 13,000 feet in the Andes near Cusco, Peru would be an understatement. The whole idea of ethno-tourism rocks my world in a strange way. Harkening back to the anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th century who struck out for parts unknown hoping to find some isolated group of humans who were still living in a stone-age culture, we set out from our hotel in Urubamba to visit a group of people, isolated in a small Andean village outside of Cusco, to find out what their daily routine was like. No matter how you look at this, it just feels odd. We drove out of Urubamba and up into the mountains, meeting a small welcome committee on a high, isolated plain in the middle of the Andes, above the tree line at 13,870 feet. The air is thin and cool, the stubby pines that have been planted in this rarefied atmosphere are just that, stubby. The welcoming committee was gracious, and we all hiked up to a grassy knoll where the village priest or pacco or misayoq or shaman was preparing a blessing or prayer to the Pachamama or earth-mountain spirit. The ritual was very moving and very colorful. I was struck by the theatricality of the experience, the colorful costumes worn by the local people, their willingness to interact with us, the outsiders. They then proceeded to show us how they cut the local peat moss for fuel and invited some of us to use one of their locally made spades that they use for digging, tilling and planting their crops. For lunch we made our way to their village, and a brief, but expected, rainstorm, soaked everything, including us, as we gathered for lunch in the center of their community at the local one-room school. The Peruvian government has invested a certain amount of time and money into modernizing the village and its cooking, and we were offered a well-prepared and tasty lunch served up to restaurant standards of presentation and hygiene, and it was very good. After lunch we had a weaving demonstration, and we met a llama or two, and our day ended with traditional music and dancing. I am still at odds as to what I think about all of these “demonstrations” of local traditions and practices. I know that our presence brings much needed income into the area, but I am also sure that our presence is a kind of cultural contamination that will change everything for these people. On the other hand, better roads and technology have improved the lives of these isolated people, and some things, such as their health, has gotten better. Crops and harvests have improved as well as education and parallel social issues. Yet, there is a nagging question that remains: is “ethno-tourism” morally wrong or ethically acceptable? I don’t think the answer is black and white or simple in any particular way. I really enjoyed meeting these people, seeing where they lived, eating their food, checking out the livestock–llamas are not common in central Texas. In a way, they were working by interacting with us, which, of course, brings prosperity to an otherwise economically depressed area, and although the mountains are breathtaking where they live, no one can eat the scenery and life at 13,000 feet is very tough. Tourism works for these people. Perhaps change is not always as horrible as it seems, and I’m not going to idealize their authentic lives or existence all out of proportion. The problem I have with all of this is not a simple one, but it does have to do with radically different cultures clashing and what the different participants of that clash take away from the experience. There are questions of poverty, technology, language, religion, and politics which must go both unanswered and unexplored due to time and space. I would go back, though, because seeing a totally different culture practice its traditions, whatever they might be. re-ignites a person’s fires of self-awareness. You see, the contemplated life is a life worth living even if questions and doubts linger.

On the Cuyuni

To say that I was skeptical of spending a day with a group of people–a tribe?–who lived at over 13,000 feet in the Andes near Cusco, Peru would be an understatement. The whole idea of ethno-tourism rocks my world in a strange way. Harkening back to the anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th century who struck out for parts unknown hoping to find some isolated group of humans who were still living in a stone-age culture, we set out from our hotel in Urubamba to visit a group of people, isolated in a small Andean village outside of Cusco, to find out what their daily routine was like. No matter how you look at this, it just feels odd. We drove out of Urubamba and up into the mountains, meeting a small welcome committee on a high, isolated plain in the middle of the Andes, above the tree line at 13,870 feet. The air is thin and cool, the stubby pines that have been planted in this rarefied atmosphere are just that, stubby. The welcoming committee was gracious, and we all hiked up to a grassy knoll where the village priest or pacco or misayoq or shaman was preparing a blessing or prayer to the Pachamama or earth-mountain spirit. The ritual was very moving and very colorful. I was struck by the theatricality of the experience, the colorful costumes worn by the local people, their willingness to interact with us, the outsiders. They then proceeded to show us how they cut the local peat moss for fuel and invited some of us to use one of their locally made spades that they use for digging, tilling and planting their crops. For lunch we made our way to their village, and a brief, but expected, rainstorm, soaked everything, including us, as we gathered for lunch in the center of their community at the local one-room school. The Peruvian government has invested a certain amount of time and money into modernizing the village and its cooking, and we were offered a well-prepared and tasty lunch served up to restaurant standards of presentation and hygiene, and it was very good. After lunch we had a weaving demonstration, and we met a llama or two, and our day ended with traditional music and dancing. I am still at odds as to what I think about all of these “demonstrations” of local traditions and practices. I know that our presence brings much needed income into the area, but I am also sure that our presence is a kind of cultural contamination that will change everything for these people. On the other hand, better roads and technology have improved the lives of these isolated people, and some things, such as their health, has gotten better. Crops and harvests have improved as well as education and parallel social issues. Yet, there is a nagging question that remains: is “ethno-tourism” morally wrong or ethically acceptable? I don’t think the answer is black and white or simple in any particular way. I really enjoyed meeting these people, seeing where they lived, eating their food, checking out the livestock–llamas are not common in central Texas. In a way, they were working by interacting with us, which, of course, brings prosperity to an otherwise economically depressed area, and although the mountains are breathtaking where they live, no one can eat the scenery and life at 13,000 feet is very tough. Tourism works for these people. Perhaps change is not always as horrible as it seems, and I’m not going to idealize their authentic lives or existence all out of proportion. The problem I have with all of this is not a simple one, but it does have to do with radically different cultures clashing and what the different participants of that clash take away from the experience. There are questions of poverty, technology, language, religion, and politics which must go both unanswered and unexplored due to time and space. I would go back, though, because seeing a totally different culture practice its traditions, whatever they might be. re-ignites a person’s fires of self-awareness. You see, the contemplated life is a life worth living even if questions and doubts linger.

On cemeteries and graveyards

What could I possibly say about cemeteries that has not already been said? Seriously creepy, still, morbid, sad, pastoral, cold, lonely, desolate, the destination from which no one returns but the gravedigger and the clergy. You can call the local bone pile anything you want, but it never stops be exactly that: a bone pile, a pile of bones. That which is left when we die, the mortal combination of bone and flesh, unmoving, unfeeling, unseeing, is not but the leftovers of a life that burned brightly for a short amount of time before the soul took its leave, leaving only ash and emptiness behind. I am not convinced that there is any point in burying bodies in the ground. There are health issues for doing it, but the mortal remains of any person are only what remains after death. In spite of what Dr. Frankenstein might have alleged at some point in the past, bodies cannot be regenerated or reanimated once the end has come. There is a limit to what modern medicine and empirical sciences can do with the spark of life, but then again cemeteries are monuments to defeat and the inevitability of death, an inevitability that gives us all energy and passion, knowing that all mortal things are finite. Cemeteries are clearly about memory, creating memory, creating a monument, mourning, loss, the past, and leaving it behind. We build cemeteries because we fear death and need to put it inside an official area where we normally don’t go. Yes, we go to cemeteries to leave flowers, mourn for the dead, and to leave the newly dead, but otherwise our legends and mythologies are designed to scare away the curious and the foolish. The living know only too well that death is only always too close, but that by isolating death in a special place, death is far away and removed. The tombstones are iconic of both death and memory, and although they carry the names of the dead, the stones are a reassurance to the living that they are, indeed, alive because no stone yet carries their particular name. The cemetery is then both attractive and repellant to the living, a normal by-product of a healthy society which cannot conceive or understand the true nature of life’s final mystery. All will go to the cemetery in their time, and so in our sadness and loss, we erect monuments and stones to the memory of the departed. The stones do nothing to alleviate the sadness of loss, but the simulacrum of funerals, burial, and departure are traditions and rituals which distract us from the business at hand, saying goodbye to a loved one. For outsiders, the cemetery is a completely different kind of place: an inscribed history of a place, the people who lived there, and the people who still live there. Cemeteries, when cared for, are pleasant, quiet, pastoral scenes which are good for thinking and relaxing. What is sad, however, are the forgotten cemeteries which herald changing times and displaced civilizations, forgotten families, the abandoned dead. Perhaps cemeteries exist because the living fear being forgotten at all. Yet the brutal reality of time and memory is the cruel truth that at some point in the future, we will all be forgotten. The physical never endures. Poetry endures, words endure, stories endure. The details may fade, but the essence of art, poetry, words, will endure even when the faces are forgotten. So we dig the graves and plant the headstones.

On flying standby

I am flying standby this morning because I’m on my way home and I don’t want to spend the entire day in the airport.  I have to cross the entire country from north to south, and I have to make two connections if I get on this flight.  It’s all very uncertain, but kind of exciting.  Will the wheels of good fortune turn my way and let me on this flight, or will the Fates keep me here until 3:30 when my regularly scheduled flight will leave?  The Spinners are working overtime today, and I am completely at the mercy of Fortune.  How wonderfully medieval.  To not know the outcome, to gamble as it were, to trust an outcome to the serendipitous nature of a complex and chaotic world.  Will I get on the flight because someone cancels their trip, or decides to fly later today?  Flying standby is about knowing nothing, controlling nothing, waiting will everyone else boards the plane, waiting for the gate attendant to give me a new boarding pass with a seat number.  There is something deliciously out of control about the whole situation.  We live in a world in which we think we can control everything, but that, of course, is an illusion.  Boarding passes with seat numbers are an illusion of control.  In all honesty, most of life is about careening out of control around blind corners down dark alleys and into the abyss of life.  You cannot avoid life no matter how hard you try.  The best laid plans of mice and men too often come to naught, and most discourse is the sound and the fury with no meaning.  Barraged by television, by the internet, by billboards and announcements of all kinds, the Fates set us to dance in a never ending, whirling maelstrom of input that drives us mad with desire for things, for people, for money, for control.  In the end, we are all flying standby whether we like it or not.  I am going to finish this now so that I keep you in suspence.  I still don’t know if I am leaving in an hour or not, and it’s a wonderful feeling.