Category Archives: sinking

On endings

Posted on by

Unlike beginnings, which are plenty scary by themselves, endings are often poignant and solitary. You drive off, you walk away from an airport, you get on a train or bus, you stroll down a street never to come back. A car door slams, you lock the door and turn away. It’s over. We have all been through our share of endings–a job, a school, a friendship, a life–so we all have our anecdotes about moving on, saying goodbye, and picking up the broken pieces so that we can start again. Endings make us wistful and nostalgic because we are not always sure that the new thing ahead of us is better than what is being left behind. We are plagued by our memories which torture us into remembering all of those great moments in the past when we were, at least for a moment, happy. The constant truth is that all things end, no matter how we feel about them. Change is, perhaps, the only constant in most of our lives. As a teacher, students come and students go, and that’s the way it’s always been. As an ex-pat in another country, my friends have come and gone many times, and now are scattered to the four corners of the world. It is hard to stay in touch, and even with different digital media sites, it is still difficult to maintain a real friendship from seven thousand miles away. And when old friends finally make their last trip, it is equally difficult to say goodbye, especially when you have known them for more than fifty years. Yet those fifty years are also a monument to that friendship which has had to endure a lot of stuff, not all good, much of it very good. Mortality is, in the end, about endings, and that is the way it must be–one of those rules nobody breaks.

On endings

Posted on by

Unlike beginnings, which are plenty scary by themselves, endings are often poignant and solitary. You drive off, you walk away from an airport, you get on a train or bus, you stroll down a street never to come back. A car door slams, you lock the door and turn away. It’s over. We have all been through our share of endings–a job, a school, a friendship, a life–so we all have our anecdotes about moving on, saying goodbye, and picking up the broken pieces so that we can start again. Endings make us wistful and nostalgic because we are not always sure that the new thing ahead of us is better than what is being left behind. We are plagued by our memories which torture us into remembering all of those great moments in the past when we were, at least for a moment, happy. The constant truth is that all things end, no matter how we feel about them. Change is, perhaps, the only constant in most of our lives. As a teacher, students come and students go, and that’s the way it’s always been. As an ex-pat in another country, my friends have come and gone many times, and now are scattered to the four corners of the world. It is hard to stay in touch, and even with different digital media sites, it is still difficult to maintain a real friendship from seven thousand miles away. And when old friends finally make their last trip, it is equally difficult to say goodbye, especially when you have known them for more than fifty years. Yet those fifty years are also a monument to that friendship which has had to endure a lot of stuff, not all good, much of it very good. Mortality is, in the end, about endings, and that is the way it must be–one of those rules nobody breaks.

On packing

Posted on by

If there is one activity that for me is fraught with ambiguity and melancholy it is packing for long trips. Not that I’m going on a long trip or anything, but many people I know are packing up and moving out because school is out, they are graduating, taking new jobs, and moving on. They are leaving and a big part of leaving is packing. I am happy that they are getting on with their lives, but I am sad that they are leaving once and for all, and when people leave, they never come back. When I pack I invariably forget half a dozen things which are vital to my survival, but I do manage to take forty pounds of stuff that I will never need when I get to my destination. In the meantime, I’ve forgotten my toothbrush, an extra pair of underwear, and my glasses. I would forget shoes but I’ve got to put them on to get out of the door. Living in Waco, I have forgotten to bring a coat or jacket with me and regretted it. Packing is such an imprecise science which prone to fail just when you think you have it right. You forget the little book with all your passwords, the cord to your phone charger, your phone, your keys, your snacks. If there is an art to packing it has to do with traveling light, always including a towel, never expecting that you will remember everything. In other words, when you get to your destination, just imagine that you will have to go buy a few things because that’s just the way packing is. Packing is both the sign for a new destination and leaving behind of a current place, all of which is fraught with multiple complications which are all undergirded by strange feelings of loss. Sure, you can always, “phone home,” but it’s not the same as being there. So even getting out the suitcases makes me just slightly morose and cranky, irked, maybe.

On packing

Posted on by

If there is one activity that for me is fraught with ambiguity and melancholy it is packing for long trips. Not that I’m going on a long trip or anything, but many people I know are packing up and moving out because school is out, they are graduating, taking new jobs, and moving on. They are leaving and a big part of leaving is packing. I am happy that they are getting on with their lives, but I am sad that they are leaving once and for all, and when people leave, they never come back. When I pack I invariably forget half a dozen things which are vital to my survival, but I do manage to take forty pounds of stuff that I will never need when I get to my destination. In the meantime, I’ve forgotten my toothbrush, an extra pair of underwear, and my glasses. I would forget shoes but I’ve got to put them on to get out of the door. Living in Waco, I have forgotten to bring a coat or jacket with me and regretted it. Packing is such an imprecise science which prone to fail just when you think you have it right. You forget the little book with all your passwords, the cord to your phone charger, your phone, your keys, your snacks. If there is an art to packing it has to do with traveling light, always including a towel, never expecting that you will remember everything. In other words, when you get to your destination, just imagine that you will have to go buy a few things because that’s just the way packing is. Packing is both the sign for a new destination and leaving behind of a current place, all of which is fraught with multiple complications which are all undergirded by strange feelings of loss. Sure, you can always, “phone home,” but it’s not the same as being there. So even getting out the suitcases makes me just slightly morose and cranky, irked, maybe.

On losing the Super Bowl

Posted on by

I don’t quite understand the significance of a winner-take-all one-game playoff for the championship of the National Football League. After watching over forty of these things, none of them deliver the drama of the hype that is built up before the big game which turns out to be extremely anticlimactic. Even the exciting, close games are anti-climactic. Yesterday’s game was no different. Some great plays were mixed in with a few awful mistakes, and the Ravens won by three. So, on this given Sunday, the team from Baltimore won by three, which is not to say they were better, it just says that they won. Time finally ran out. The final grains of sand trickled through the hour glass, and the team from San Francisco came up three points short. I’m just not convinced that it means anything. The simulacra of battle, a non-lethal version of “take-the-hill”, is played out on a grid of one hundred yards with each team defending their “hill” at each end of the field, harkening back to the eighteenth century when the English and the French faced off on different battlefields across Europe. What is it about human beings, males in particular, that they must fight to prove dominance, to elect a winner. Why are we hardwired for violence? Granted, football is incredibly violent, but protections are built in to make it very painful, but generally non-lethal. Players are wounded in the simulacra of war, but they aren’t killed. Football is the ultimate simulacra of war with rules in place so that a winner might emerge and vanquish the loser. The losers are destined not only to the shame of defeat, but because they are not destroyed, they must live with their defeat. The worst aspect to their defeat may not be the humiliation of watching the victors pick up their trophy, but perhaps it is the dark shadow of losing which will descend on them, erasing them and their excellent season from the collective memories of all who saw them lose. No one remembers the losers–no fame, no glory, the taste of blood and dirt in their mouths as they lie beaten and sore on the ground, the sound of the winners shouting out their victory. The losers lost only by three points in this case, which makes their loss all the more bitter and painful. Was it a question of luck, of skill, of the stars, of predestination, of cowardly behavior, of bad planning, of poor execution, or perhaps it was a combination of many of those things. Now, it is all over, and planning for the next season is already underway. The fans will remember their heroes, and the vanquished have been swept into the shadows of sports history inhabited by the unlucky second-place finishers. Other than a little excitement when the lights went out, or when the losing side almost caught up to their destroyers, the game was a humdrum affair. Ironically, more people will remember the new advertisements that were displayed during breaks than will remember the actual game, which was pedestrian at best, totally forgettable at worst. So Audi, M & M Mars, Volkswagen, Anhauser-Busch, and Dodge had great games displaying their latest marketing strategies for selling their products. Perhaps playing the Super Bowl is less about deciding which team is best and more about a lollapalooza canon-sized salute to our hyper-consumer capitalistic society, obsessed with selling/buying the next big thing. The game is only a pretext to selling us more stuff.

On waiting

Posted on by

It seems rather paradoxical, if not downright wrong, to write about waiting. We all wait–for the bathroom, for food, in line, on the phone, in the doctor’s office, at the grocery store, at the movie theater. We get in line and wait. I guess that’s because we can’t all be first. I have waited for the last plane, the last metro, the last bus. Yesterday I spent time waiting to board several planes, then waited to take off, then waited for my cup of soda, then we all waited to land, and then, of course, we all waited to get off the plane that we had all waited to get on. I waited in line at Starbucks for my coffee. I waited for a cook to make me a hamburger (but a real hamburger–not a fast food hamburger). I had to wait to go to the bathroom. I waited to get my suitcase after I spent the day waiting for everything else. But I am no good at waiting. In fact, I hate waiting for someone else to do their job. Today, I waited for my lunch. I was in good company, but it took forty-five minutes for my lunch to come out (it was worth it–why am I complaining?) Waiting seems to be one of those things that is an inherent part of the human condition: you want something; you have to wait for it. I remember as a small child I saved box tops, filled out the little cardboard form, taped a quarter to it, and mailed it in so I could get some prize that was being advertised on the back of the cereal box. I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and then it finally came when I had almost forgotten that I was waiting for something. Then, once I had the thing–whatever it was–I didn’t think it was a cool as I imagined it would be, and it wasn’t. But I had waited an eternity to get it. I am currently waiting for the bread machine to finish baking some bread. Yet, I hate to wait and am impatient. I get annoyed easily when the person in front of me at the grocery story decides to write a check–I have to wait. Couldn’t they just swipe a credit card? I take a book to the doctor’s office because I know I’ll have to wait—actual planning and scheduling is not a part of any medical curriculum anywhere. Waiting in traffic has got to be a special punishment dreamed up by Dante, but it leaked out of Hell and into the world. What did I ever do to deserve such a punishment as waiting?

On the sea

Posted on by

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 melancholy

Posted on by

Tomorrow I get the opportunity to teach Spanish Romanticism. For the Medievalist in me, this is a bit of a stretch since contemporary literature holds no interest for me, especially anything written as recently as 1836. I mean, really, has enough time passed to really test if this material has any real value at all? I think not. But, on the other hand, teaching Jose Mariano de Larra does have at least one huge bright spot: melancholy. I get to teach literature that is concerned with feeling sad for the sake of feeling sad. “Christmas Eve of 1836” has to be one of the most self-deprecating pieces of writing ever penned. I don’t really know which is more interesting–his satire or his cynicism. Certainly, the literary voice narrating a horrible December 24th is pushing every social criticism button it can find, devastating the object of that criticism: the writer. The melancholy hits in waves like thunderstorms “training” over the same patch of flooded ground with no end in sight. Melancholy may be the opposite of happiness, but why anyone would want to continually wallow in it for days and weeks at a time is beyond me. For a moment, perhaps melancholy might be a literary posture that one might adopt for a moment in order to prove a point or illustrate a tight piece of irony, but why would a sane person perpetually gravitate towards a pitched mid-life crisis? So your plants die, you feel sad, but then you have an excuse to go to a greenhouse and replace that ugly thing that died: no melancholy. You feel bad for the baker across the street who lost his wife, but she was a horrific crab of a person who browbeat him endlessly–no melancholy. You sit on a dark, rainy evening, working on a poem about death, sipping a little something, scratching out a few words on your notebook. Raindrops are falling on the window, you pull on a warm woolen sweater, you write a few more words about gravestones, moss, old wrought iron, creepy trees, dark shadows, tears that silently fall across a cheek, an empty chair, a missing voice, and although the poem is not perfect, you now have something to work with: bones, dust, shadows, nothing. You are plumbing the depth of melancholy, but now it has become truly conventional, removed from your soul and converted into art.