Category Archives: recycling

On diaspora

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Though I have lived far from home, spoken a language I had to learn, eaten strange food, missed my family, I have never been forced to leave my homeland never to return, yet for many people, it has happened more than once, and it continues to be the their “pan de cada día” or their everyday experience. Diaspora is about the scattering of a people, a forced exile, a leaving behind, a tragedy, a disaster. Diaspora has many causes–wars, revolutions, racial cleansing, religious unity, human cruelty, the settling of old scores, scapegoating–but any is as good as none at all if you don’t need one. The cruelty of the diaspora experience is not necessarily about change, but about loss–of tradition, of customs, of language, of an enduring mental landscape that has been left behind. The cruelty of nostalgia resides in the persistence of memory, of families, of lives, of art, of songs, of celebrations. Diaspora is about a separation from what is comfortable, what is expected, happiness, joy, friends, births, weddings, deaths. As a group of people fan out to find new homes, they meet the challenge of finding all the rest of the world already occupied, and if they have been forced to leave one place, they will probably be less than welcome wherever they go. Those who suffer diaspora, forced to leave their homes again and again, will eventually become errant and drifting, unwilling to call anywhere home. Eventually, after being rejected enough, you have an entire group of people with nothing to lose, wandering the world in search of a home. All people want a place to call their home. This is a basic human desire, to have a family and a job and a roof over our heads and not have to move every few years. Diaspora breaks up families, history and tradition are forgotten, identity becomes variable, languages are both forgotten and learned, The dead are left behind, forgotten in unattended graves. Possessions, the relics of tradition, must be packed and transported or left behind. Wealth and land are left behind, lost forever. Perhaps new beginnings in new places can be a good thing as it has been for immigrants around the world, but the nostalgia for what has been lost is an ethos that has come to be emblematic of the human condition. In many ways, diaspora is the human condition.

On diaspora

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Though I have lived far from home, spoken a language I had to learn, eaten strange food, missed my family, I have never been forced to leave my homeland never to return, yet for many people, it has happened more than once, and it continues to be the their “pan de cada día” or their everyday experience. Diaspora is about the scattering of a people, a forced exile, a leaving behind, a tragedy, a disaster. Diaspora has many causes–wars, revolutions, racial cleansing, religious unity, human cruelty, the settling of old scores, scapegoating–but any is as good as none at all if you don’t need one. The cruelty of the diaspora experience is not necessarily about change, but about loss–of tradition, of customs, of language, of an enduring mental landscape that has been left behind. The cruelty of nostalgia resides in the persistence of memory, of families, of lives, of art, of songs, of celebrations. Diaspora is about a separation from what is comfortable, what is expected, happiness, joy, friends, births, weddings, deaths. As a group of people fan out to find new homes, they meet the challenge of finding all the rest of the world already occupied, and if they have been forced to leave one place, they will probably be less than welcome wherever they go. Those who suffer diaspora, forced to leave their homes again and again, will eventually become errant and drifting, unwilling to call anywhere home. Eventually, after being rejected enough, you have an entire group of people with nothing to lose, wandering the world in search of a home. All people want a place to call their home. This is a basic human desire, to have a family and a job and a roof over our heads and not have to move every few years. Diaspora breaks up families, history and tradition are forgotten, identity becomes variable, languages are both forgotten and learned, The dead are left behind, forgotten in unattended graves. Possessions, the relics of tradition, must be packed and transported or left behind. Wealth and land are left behind, lost forever. Perhaps new beginnings in new places can be a good thing as it has been for immigrants around the world, but the nostalgia for what has been lost is an ethos that has come to be emblematic of the human condition. In many ways, diaspora is the human condition.

On déjà vu

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Why do I get the feeling that I’ve written this note before? I know that the feeling of déjà vu is a weird false sense that you have already done a thing and that you are repeating something you have already experienced. The rational empiricist in me knows that my mind is just patching together similar experiences and creating a false sense of repetition in my mind. I know this to be a fact. I know this for a fact but I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve done this before. And why would my mind, which already has so much to do–walk, chew gum, whistle–choose to afflict me with déjà vu? Déjà vu all over again, and it is not a nice, friendly feeling on a clear sunny day. No, déjà vu is always associated with something dark and creepy, an impending sense of doom, let’s say. Let’s just say. The rational empiricist in me dismisses the idea that we have already lived other lives, learned other skills, spoken other languages, lived other lives, but what attracted me to Spanish? A small child of German-Norwegian extraction who speaks Spanish like a native? Say it ain’t so! So I come around a corner in the grocery store the other day and stop dead in my tracks because I knew, before I saw anyone, that there was a young woman standing there with an enormous basket of food. I didn’t run into her because I knew she was there without looking. Why? Because I had had the experience before in exactly the same way, in exactly the same circumstances. I have met people for the first time that I have known my whole life–their faces, the voice, the mannerisms. I know, all of it is a carefully constructed illusion created by my brain. I had déjà vu in school so many times I lost count. I have been able to predict what people would say before they said it on numerous occasions. I do not believe in supernatural phenomenon of this type. I understand the rational explanation, but it doesn’t matter: déjà vu comes coming back to me, repeating itself in people, places and things. It just keeps repeating itself, and the funny thing is, I know it will and there’s nothing I can do about it.

On déjà vu

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Why do I get the feeling that I’ve written this note before? I know that the feeling of déjà vu is a weird false sense that you have already done a thing and that you are repeating something you have already experienced. The rational empiricist in me knows that my mind is just patching together similar experiences and creating a false sense of repetition in my mind. I know this to be a fact. I know this for a fact but I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve done this before. And why would my mind, which already has so much to do–walk, chew gum, whistle–choose to afflict me with déjà vu? Déjà vu all over again, and it is not a nice, friendly feeling on a clear sunny day. No, déjà vu is always associated with something dark and creepy, an impending sense of doom, let’s say. Let’s just say. The rational empiricist in me dismisses the idea that we have already lived other lives, learned other skills, spoken other languages, lived other lives, but what attracted me to Spanish? A small child of German-Norwegian extraction who speaks Spanish like a native? Say it ain’t so! So I come around a corner in the grocery store the other day and stop dead in my tracks because I knew, before I saw anyone, that there was a young woman standing there with an enormous basket of food. I didn’t run into her because I knew she was there without looking. Why? Because I had had the experience before in exactly the same way, in exactly the same circumstances. I have met people for the first time that I have known my whole life–their faces, the voice, the mannerisms. I know, all of it is a carefully constructed illusion created by my brain. I had déjà vu in school so many times I lost count. I have been able to predict what people would say before they said it on numerous occasions. I do not believe in supernatural phenomenon of this type. I understand the rational explanation, but it doesn’t matter: déjà vu comes coming back to me, repeating itself in people, places and things. It just keeps repeating itself, and the funny thing is, I know it will and there’s nothing I can do about it.

On the sea

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Nuestras vidas son los ríos que van a dar en la mar, que es el morir–“Coplas” Manrique Are our lives like rivers that run to the sea, which is death? Three quarters of the world, or perhaps even a little more, is covered with water. The sea is vast, deep, anonymous, unknowable. We pride ourselves in our positivist investigations of the oceans, but I get the feeling that the more we know, the more we don’t know. We have both a past and present of raping the seas for their riches–fish, whales, beaches, salt, transportation. Take it from the sea, no one cares; dump it in the sea, no one cares; spill it in the sea, and kill everything in a thirty mile radius. We have fought wars on the seas, but the outcomes have never, ever meant a thing in the grand scheme of the universe. We sink ships, let the victims float away, and the sea remains the same, zealously giving up her dead. The waves roll into the shore, and ships and boats bob in the distance, testing their luck against the unrelenting motion of the sea. The sea is transcendent, universal, an entity out of time; its rhythms ceaselessly hammer its stone boundaries, which eventually erode, break down, wash away, and turn to sand. There are those creatures that have learned to survive in the waves by letting themselves wash to and fro with the tides. Human hubris may challenge the seas, but long after the ships and subs, deep submersibles and bathyscaphes, have gone, the sea will still be there, indifferent, rising and falling. If the sea is death, then it must also be life because those two concepts can only exist together as one. This has been as true since creation, and it will be true when the sun goes out in some distant future. We may paddle around and take specimens, do experiments and write papers, we may describe and predict the tides, study salinity, categorize new species, even learn to swim. Perhaps we can even learn from those humble creatures that live in the tidal pools that live and die with the tides as the sea washes over them. The sea is more than a metaphor, but it also more than just a body of water. So our lives, as Manrique says, are like rivers, big and small, and they all do run to the sea. We pick the biggest, most unknowable sign as the metaphor for death because no one ever returns from that voyage.

On the fingerpost

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The fingerpost is a sign in the shape of a hand with a pointing figure that medieval writers and scribes used to indicate the beginning of a text, the beginning of a new section or story, or that this section of their manuscript was particularly important. Yet, the sign of the fingerpost, though a part of the text, is not a word or a sign in any language, but was used as a universal sign of “interest” or “begin here” or “special” or “pay attention” by the speakers of many languages. Today, in our haste, we underline or use a highlighter—yellow, orange, green, purple. We have no time to draw a small hand to let our readers know that THIS is important. We are only interested in getting to our next meeting, making our next committee, attending our next event, so in our haste, we make waste with our clumsy and anti-aesthetic anonymous marking of texts. Highlighting and underlining are mark by their banal and mundane experience to such an extent that they are empty of meaning and are almost worse than nothing at all. A book that has been heavily marked is ready for the recycling bin—a merciful end. The fingerpost is different in that it took a writer or scribe or artist time to draw the thing. It is a tiny work of art that is meant as a signal to those who will encounter the text down the road when it has been turned into a book, bought, sold, traded, stolen. The fingerpost is a hand which guiltily implicates the artist, the text and itself. The fingerpost is a self-conscious mark which cannot but help drawn attention to itself, and as the new reader ponders the importance of this little hand, their eyes might wander to see if the hand is attached via wrist, arm and shoulder to an actual person. The fingerpost is a personal mark of identity left behind by a scribe who, by leaving the fingerpost, is also critic, artist, and teacher. The fingerpost is hyper-personal in ways that underlining can never be; it is a sign that may transcend its very text, indicating longing, desire, and melancholy; it is a mark that lingers in the mind’s eye, a silent, persistent, and accusing commentary on the text. Yet it is also innocent of wrong-doing, neither good nor evil, adding a new level of meaning to a text. The fingerpost, at once the synthesis and symbiosis of creation, imagination, aesthetics, design and direction, is still a human hand, lent in kindness, friendship, duty and compassion. The fingerpost is about lingering and pondering, wondering about which direction a body should go—it points in a certain direction, it points at humanity, it points at some words.

On "no name" post

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Who says you must have a topic when you write. Topics, thesis sentences, are way over-rated. I listen to people talk on cable news, and they don’t have anything to say, but they sit and blather on and get paid for it. So tonight I am opting for the “no theme” option. I’m not going to talk about new stadiums, or basketball, or primaries, or anything else that might be in the news. I’m going to focus on nothing at all. Now one would think that this would be easy, but trying to write about nothing at all is harder than it appears. You first must flush everything out of your brain drain that has been stuck there since you wrote yesterday, and there’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam floating around in that trap. I can’t write about budgets, wars, sexism, drug cartels, dog food ads, home shopping networks, Wisconsin, Rush, Rick, Mitt, summer-like weather in March, spring training, football, birth control or voter fraud. Those are topics, and I’m not writing about any of them. Of course, more mundane topics such as potato chips or dogs are also off the table. Spring break is off the table. I am tempted to write about going on vacation, or trying to stop a leak in one of our bathrooms, but I shall refrain from any of that to maintain this note free of content. To focus on nothing is to really focus on everything, and then brush everything out of your mind. I’m not going to worry, complain, criticize, critique, ponder, mull or ruminate on anything but the emptiness of this meditation. I’m not going to use any literary tropes, metaphors or synecdoche to express the universal emptiness of a note about nothing that is slowly rotting over a very slow heat. Let the vultures make their nests on the balconies of the presidential palace, I just won’t go there. I won’t write about decadence, chaos, or dust. Nothingness is an ideology all of its own, nestled comfortably between nihilism and contrariness. Why does everything have to be about something? What about not getting upset, about not worrying about the next thing, and letting go of the latest cause célèbre? So I write about nothing: not the apple that Adam ate, not the computer that Gates built, not about turning the double play. Clean slate, no topic, nothing, null set, zero, a void, dark matter, vacuum, empty set. (That last sentence doesn’t even have a verb.)

On throwing away old papers

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Do you keep every odd bit of paper that floats into your life? Do you have random piles of junk mail, old receipts, antique bank statements, odd scraps of paper with strange or cryptic messages? “Call Charles–cat caught in disposal–need plumber or animal control?” But you not only don’t recognize the writing, you don’t recognize the message either? Tonight I tackled a random pile of such papers and made three piles: shred, recycle, does anyone know what this is? I can throw things out. I am not one of those poor hoarders that has been caught in the lights of a television reality show. I truly do not understand what makes hoarding interesting enough for television. Those poor devils have an obsessive compulsive disorder and they need help, not national television exposure. So I tackled a random stack of old receipts, scrap papers and what have you. And I threw it all away–some to shredding, but it all goes to recycling. Most of this stuff was from about 2005. Either I wasn’t throwing anything away that year or these papers have been in hiding. I didn’t find any old treasures (or old treasure maps), nothing that had been lost many years, nothing that needed finding. So I ask myself, “Self, why didn’t you throw all of this away ages ago?” It’s just been sitting around gathering dust and grit for seven years. Yes, there are times when it pays to stack and not throw out. Very infrequently will I find some scrap of something that will remind me of another time, of an old writing project, of a person I haven’t seen in a long time, of a debt that was paid, an object that was bought, a dinner that was enjoyed, but all of these relics remind me of how fast the clock moves, how quickly we forget even when we swear we will always remember, an already forgotten unforgettable afternoon in a distant past that has sunk into the shadows of history. I throw away things so that those who come after me will not be burdened with the effort of having to do it themselves. I’ve seen others given the task of throwing out old papers, and it is a horrible task–going through the life of another person. Me, hopefully when it is my turn to go, everything will already be on its way to recycling.