September
"-the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
September 1
I fooled around with the site yesterday. I don’t know why. Partly because my back and knee were buggin and I needed to stay off them. I did some reading for school. We read a F. Scott Fitzgerald piece, about a depression he went through. We also read a James Agee piece, in which he spends two pages describing the father’s in his childhood neighborhood, watering the lawn. The Agee was so tender and sweet. I can actually relate to the Fitzgerald personally, but I read it after the Agee. And it just sounded so whiney! I mean that’s how I sound most of the time, internal, depressed, disenfranchised. Or at least when I get down. Imagine remembering watering the lawn in great detail, the sound of the water pressure changes, the arc of the water, the leaking water running down your forearm. You have love life to be awake to such detail and to treasure it.
Michael & John helped me do a garage sale yesterday. We lasted for two hours, and I made seven dollars. I'm really no good at garage sales. They were very sweet and helpful, and they're gonna try it again in their neighborhood in a few weeks. The traffic in my neighborhood is mostly tourists. Suzanne and her kids stopped by, which was great, and funny because we had already quit. And then Tony, visiting from Vegas, showed up with his friend, Steve. And we went to Mo's for a burger. It was a very social day, for me. And I only got into one extended political diatribe. (But Tony started it!) I settled in to a quiet evening of reading Joan Didion's, The White Album, which I've read many times, and each time I am blown away by it. She manages to communicate a breakdown without ever, really, totally acknowledging that it's happening. And she demonstrates how the personal and the political mooshed together in 1968.
Tony & Steve came to Glide yesterday, and after church, they, Michael & John, Deb & I went to The Meeting House for brunch. My knees and back were aching, so, I came home and slathered my self with Arnica. I finally found a Kobi photo that I could post on "the others", and link to his lovely photos.
I was half listening to PRI yesterday, and there was a discussion with a scientist in genetics about c loning and such. She was a lovely, intelligent woman. At one point she talked about c loned mice having a tendency to become fat. She made a joke about that fact ending c loneing. Now, she wasn't garish, or crude and the audience didn't guffaw. It was just a group of " nice" folks, sharing a joke about fatness. If she had made the same joke about height it would have, at the least, sounded odd. At the most it would have been offensive. And imagine I am sitting in the audience.
Imagine the people all around me laughing about never wanting to pursue c loning if it produces fat folks. Am I laughing? Should I be? Why?
Dean arrived yesterday. He begins his internship with Deb today. He had to wake up at 6:00 which, for a seventeen year old, is a drag. I usually wake up at 7:00 anyway and I couldn't sleep last night. The full moon was interrogating me with reflected light. It just comes right in my window! And I do the best writing while I'm laying there, not sleeping. Of course I forget it all by the time I get to my keyboard. I held Dean when he was a baby, and read him bed time stories when he was a little boy. Seeing this, very tall, young man is quite a trip. I'm happy he's here. We went to Carta for dinner and then shopped for groceries. We took a short walk to the wharf, so that he could see where it is but my knee started to give out. My knee is better, though. I put a link to Dean's dad on "the others".
September 5
I love hanging out with people talking about stuff we've read. That's what we did in class last night. I know, it's serious business, we're there to consider craft and form and other writerly notions. But it was just so much fun! After a life time of pursuing rock and roll coolness, I am becoming a total geek. It's almost embarrassing to me to admit that I've read more than what has been assigned.
Dean had good day juicing oranges and zesting lemons. He seems pretty happy. It was great to have someone here when I got home. And he brought home treats!
Often, when I'm in school, I think of what so many have done, and do, to be educated. People meet in secret, schools, hidden from states that would persecute them if they were discovered. And we, who can be in c lean comfortable class rooms, complain that the material was too difficult. I recently read an interview with Susie Orbach in which she spoke of woman in Eastern Europe who owned ragged, mimeographed, much passed about, copies of Fat is a Feminist issue. People are desperate for intellectual stimulation. In America, anti-intellectualism makes us dull witted and proud of it. I'm so desperate for intellectual stimulation.
And how, can we not say that slavery is a crime against humanity? In Durban, at the conference on racism they are debating this. Language had such power.
I'm still ranting about this Durban thing. This is the market dictating truth. Reparations has never made so much sense to me. I have supported the idea with out believing it would ever happen and with out really thinking about why I believed it. But, something about this debate on slavery, as well as the problems with admitting that things between the Israeli and the Palestinian people is racist, has centered these issues in terms of Capitalism, for me. If there were no cost to industry the conference would be a talk fest. But, there is money to be made. Oil concerns to be protected. And, back to reparations, even a token amount of cash would change the shape of things. So, if we say out loud -- slavery was/is a crime against humanity -- someone would have to pay something for that crime. Not just government but industry.
September 8
Dean and I spent the day at Stinson beach yesterday. I forgot sunscreen and am lobster red today. We took a ferry to Larkspur and Adrienne picked us up and drove us to the beach. We took randoms bits of food, chicken satay, grapes, gouda, bread. It was great. It's good to spend a day staring at water.
September 10
I read this panel on the front page of yesterdays paper in which the document from Durban was summarized. I don't know if the language was from the document but one thing was the recognition of both Palestinian rights and Israeli security concerns. That language says that Palestinians are a threat to Israeli security. It's a complex situation, the likes of which makes me want to throw up my hands, but I notice the frame in which Israelis are the dominant and accepted group and Palestinians are the trouble makers. And I notice that Israeli forces have big tanks and Palestinian forces have rocks. It seems hopeless and it has seemed this way for years. And I don't think it helps that a conference on racism was so silenced, or muffled.
September 12
I am having trouble writing about yesterday. It is too vast. But I can say that the rush to find someone to blame is a worry When people are this angry and this sad it's easy to manipulate them. Already the drums of nationalism are being beaten. I want to hope that we can slow down and consider things, not just who might have done this but why. Nothing can excuse what happened. Certainly everything that can be done to insure that it won't happen again should be done. But I hope we can remain mindful. I spent the day listening to KPFA and watching CNN. Mainstream media is so hopelessly reductive in their analysis, so irresponsible with their language. My heart is aching. I send everyone my hopes for a true peace.
I’ve been involved in all manner of conversation. I find that I need to be involved in the ones, where I know my politics and worldview will be well received. I need the comfort of agreement. But in the conversations, where my views may not be well received, or are not shared, I have learned about myself. I have learned about my own capacity for aggression, and my need to be right. If the people who flew the planes into the Trade Towers and the Pentagon were Islamic fundamentalists, they believed that they were doing, what they were doing, for the love of their people and their God. I need to belong to a community, a people, and I need to have a relationship with God. But, I need both to be inclusive, not exclusive. I am trying to be quiet and listen. And not rush to react. I am trying to own those parts of me that may be part of the cycle of violence. I would chose to work for peace.
It seems to be evident that our need for certainty, our inability to relax when things are unknown, has caused a frenzy of misinformation. Every day we read about things, that were reported the day before, which turn out to be not quite true. I am in an information frenzy. I move from the TV, to the radio, to the Internet. I check e-mail repetitively. I feel the need to know. We have been cast into uncertainty. In fact, we always live there, but now it is painfully obvious. I am struggling with the notion of getting back to normal. Normal may have been permanently altered. But we don't know how.
Yesterday, at Glide, a woman from the choir led the prayer. She often does. When she was introduced we were reminded that she is a Muslim. The entire congregation c lapped. It was a long sustained clapping. She cried. We all cried. It was an very powerful moment. The church was so full. It was difficult because I am a bit nervous in crowds.
But yesterday I spent time in more than one crowd. I went to an event in Presida park put on by Medea Benjamin and Michael Franti. It was comforting to be with so many folks. It's the most hopeful I've felt.
A phrase I have been hearing and I am about to use is ... before all this happened we had planned to... go to Chez Panisse. I wanted Dean to see how perfect food, served in a warm environment can feed the soul. Last night, while we ate our perfect meal, I noticed how easy it can be to just forget. It's been a week. Commercials are back on the television. The fall season of new shows begins. Of course the news brings it back. But life goes on, and we must involve ourselves. today I listened to a Buddhist teacher speak about conscious consumption. That's what I hoped we were doing last night. It was perfect food. Prepared with great attention to craft and quality. He also talked about all the toxic things we consume from culture. I keep thinking that people, who only get their info from the mainstream media are being fed war.
September 19
I haven't been writing many of my tales from life in the fat lane, and there have been a few. It's not that it seemed unimportant, but I 've been too distracted. Last week on a bus, an elderly woman sat next to me. It may be a trial to sit next to me. There isn't much room. But she was a tiny woman. We were the perfect seat-sharing team. She seemed a little dotty. She said something about my fatness and said I needed to jog. I smiled and said, no, I don't. And then, someone who I have only recently met said I looked like I was loosing weight, and that was great!!! I sighed. But, yesterday I had a moment that really made me spin. I was sitting near the cafeteria, waiting for a friend, and a young middle eastern woman approached me. She was selling Herbal Life. Herbal Life is a vitamin company with a diet formula. I just said, thanks, but no thanks. And then I thought about how much I try to speak for diversity. And how the diverse-ness of my body is so difficult for people to accept.
Deb, Dean and I went to Green Gulch yesterday. It was so peaceful and beautiful. I thought, it is possible to be peaceful. We live on a planet where it is possible for the great destruction of 9/11, and the great beauty of the Green Gulch gardens to exist simultaneously. And that seems to be the trick. To contain the extemes and position in the middle.
September 22
There is one fact, the plane hitting the building. As far as I know there is no image of the first plane, but we have the one of the second. It has been made, almost, pornographic in repetitive use by mainstream news. But when we saw it first, it was a moment of pure perception. A moment too large to contain. A moment that silenced our easy narratives and left us stumbling. I have felt this kind of perception before, at the birth of my Goddaughter, on top of Haleakala, in a temple in India. Moments that suspended my inner babble by the nature of their overwhelming realness. But, they were happy, peaceful moments. When the narrative returned, it was a narrative of life. The plane hitting the building, and now the rush of narrative, mine and many others. And each contains a specific fact, a story of how the individual life has been effected.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Clear Channel
is a company that has 1,200 radio stations, 247 of them in the nation's 250 largest radio markets. They
dominate the Top 40 format and control 60% of all
rock-radio listening. The company has ordered its stations not to play a list of 150 songs.
The list includes "Bridge Over
Troubled Water," "Peace Train," and John Lennon's "Imagine." No songs by Rage Against
the Machine will
be aired. It boggles the mind. Listening to Cat Stevens
is seditious.