Nonfiction

I wrote my first nonfiction piece and had fun doing it. It's dry.

I and Squirrel

1. I know about people who walk in aimless longing and look for something outside their subjectivity. The ones that produced creepy paintings of factory workers melding into machines or the pretty, disaffected German poets that descended into the Black Forest to find natural law. If they lived here, they’d tip up a squirrel’s chin and stare hard into its polished black eyes. And like of their any supple, powdered dames, no squirrel gal can resist Lord Byron, not during mating season.

Without Schwarzwald, they would concentrate on what little Nature escapes the tacky tastes of people who disappear at eight and come home at five: green tufts on power lines, round bushes, and pointy, mean trees that loom over all the landscaping. I happen to be an old hand at glorifying suburbia and sing this diorama of weird old ladies and brick buildings electric no less expertly than in my old town. I raise my coat collar, hands tight in my pockets, and walk aimlessly with the best of them.

The difference is that I am a humanist, by which I mean that though trespassing private property to distraction, I could never fall in love with a squirrel. Unlike a tiger who looks like death, sex, and danger (and correspondingly, Lord Byron), a squirrel is like a drop of crap with a ball of lint behind it though some misguided poet once complemented its “beautiful ass.” While suffering a shortage of tigers, this place happens to be flush with gray and black bodies, a human interest touch that the Set Designer (who probably dons a green sweatshirt in the sky) could have omitted.

Okay, I admit that I too stare at one cloudy-tailed specimen sometimes because Romantic desperation told me to. Rigid with its paws up in bonsai position, it stops chewing and boldly directs at least one eye my way, no mean feat because both seem stapled to opposite sides of its head. Every mental muscle is effortlessly taut as it waits to decide whether it can stay or run in the opposite direction. I also look like I have some potential energy, the kind I usually express by chasing pigeons.

As for its look, one could learn as much staring at a suit button in the Garment District. Its eye is convex and intense in the same way shoe polish can be intense. A frustrating natural mystery because the deeper you penetrate past the round surface, the faster the ray of your look ricochets back to you. Even if you squint like Dirty Harry and ask, “What do you know that I don’t?” the squirrel will give you no saucier “Shenaynay says no” than its body language can muster. Unlike a Morpho butterfly that landed on my shoulder and gained admission to the family crest, the squirrel didn’t choose me and has no fealty, but is looking out of less than mere impudence. With a man’s disturbing repulsion at his stringy, red newborn, I can only like a squirrel when it pelts me with chestnuts from the trees. At least it shows human traits, something you can latch onto, like the baby when it sneezes. Besides, everyone knows that you can only have an I-Thou experience with something colorful. Next time I’ll seek out a Nicaraguan mut-mut and be sure to invite Novalis.

St. Mathieu-du-Parc

2. What did they put in my lentil sauce or cucumber yoghurt that brings me here to a bench near the wide pond in its most glinty afternoon hour, staring into the eyes of a frog? Guruji said that we should observe nature with the awe and wonderment of a child, but other than the huge amount of water I drank during these six tormenting, amusing days of silence, I’ve not been slipped any Kool Aid as far as I know. Tracing the path of Christmas lights to the meditation tent, I’ve had every sitcom theme song stuck in my head and after a bout of desperation, rebelliously matched Erlend Oye’s “Sheltered Life” to the poor accompaniment of bongo drums. And damn it all, I began to zone out on patches of sky by the end of the fourth day.

All this time I felt guilty and stupid for heaping guilty and stupid thoughts on my imposed mental silence. Or jealous of the older ladies in Punjabi dresses dancing like idiots at the satsang and spouting “I belong to you.” The Canadian boys my age ride around on tractors filled with daikon radishes as if they bought the ashram’s “this is your home” schtick. The people that work in the garden with me skipped two levels of Enlightenment crushing potato bugs. Jai Guru fucking Dev.

What happened to unite my fellow Advanced Coursers in a silent ring of experience? What did I miss? Was it something like following a woman in our garden group who showed us edible leaves? Or the fun I had silently teaching a girl to canoe? Against all odds, here I sit like someone blathering drunk and aware of it, alternating pond staring shifts with dusky ladies who are recovering from actual ailments. Finally I’m in earnest and don’t shake my fist at spittle bugs, demanding that they wow me like they do the rest of the ashram illuminati. I too am holding a frog’s watery brown eye, close to tears.

Clearly this tentative ring, no, square of light has to end. All epiphanies do. Soon it will be replaced by other moments of connection, less tenuous because they involve humans. I will even get to witness the guru’s pyrotechnics as he lectures in the tent during a thunderstorm. Though the mark is not indelible, at least I won’t leave like my aunt, wanting pizza.

rolls eyes

Other tidbits:

Remember the Arafat scarf?

The keffiyeh which everyone wore, especially if they were British and only parted with their scarf in the shower? The one that Urban Outfitters discontinued because of complaints from Jews? I finally found out what it was called (keffiyeh) and what it meant: "In the 1930s, the keffiyeh became a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and the intifada as a result of its association with rural areas (as opposed to the city-dweller's fez)." And why it initially left Yasser Arafat and Leila Khaled's heads. In Italy among other places it was worn in solidarity with Palestinians. A conservative blogger commented that retailers have been sugarcoating its original meaning:

Urban Outfitters called their version an "anti-war scarf."

UK clothing store ARK was a little more honest; they called it an "Arafat scarf."

When Kirsten Dunst showed up with one in Teen Vogue magazine, they called it a "breezy global-chic scarf ."

Delias.com called it a "peace scarf," but when people protested they changed the name to " Euro scarf."

Now the symbol of Palestinian terrorism and murder, the kaffiyeh, is being marketed at yet another store for young people, Alloy, this time as a "Riviera scarf ."

Another conservative blogger named little green footballs takes it too far when he says that a keffiyeh scarf with a skull on it adds the insignia of the Nazi SS. Then Ed Hardy is a dyed in the wool Fascist. So is the 10 year old girl who came to my dad's birthday party wearing his Ugg-style snowboots. I wonder if I should kvetch that the trend divorces/doesn't divorce the political symbolism from the item of clothing (so I should be offended as a Jew). Or maybe Freja Beha can wear it to her heart's delight. Somebody might whine that bourgeois consumerism coopts ethnic clothing and saps it of cultural symbolism, proving the gross meaninglessness, yada, yada, yada... the commodity bereft of the means of production... fetishism... slippage... can't step in the same river twice.. Yawn. (An admittedly half-assed rendering, but I have an example of this type of criticism below)
But its so preeetty. I mean, I think that scarf looked incredible on the people I've seen wear it. I know for a fact that Urban Outfitters replaced it with sparkly scarves made in India, probably meant to go with a sari or Punjabi dress. I have two, maybe they are too colorful to be worn with muted Euro olive greens and perhaps a messenger bag (I think European kids, because they are used to dressing this way as part of mainstream fashion, wear more streamlined, muted colors than American hipsters, especially those who have adopted the fitted hats, kicks and screen printed hooded sweatshirts of hip hop streetwear). I can vouch for it too, just.. not with photos, exactly.
I still kind of want one of those scarves, though. I'm probably destined to be ridiculously behind trends, which might liberate me from following them, or trying to outrun them. I worry that I just like what is in style and don't have the foresight to call a trend idiotic, maybe I even jumped on the huge hornet sunglasses bandwagon. I wonder how SLC kids stay looking so put together, since even if they don't admit it, they do follow trends. Where did they put their huge beaded necklaces and colorful 60s inspired coats with big buttons? I don't think the coat thing is done yet, but having a colorful one isn't as big a deal anymore. The big sunglasses have pretty much been trashed and I don't see aviators around as much anymore, even the imitation Ray Bans that replaced them. Colorful leggings, gold lame leggings are seen less and less now. I also haven't been in SLC in a month. Maybe flats are disappearing too, in favor of highlighter colored patent pumps? I hope so, I just bought a cobalt blue pair, my first pumps, though they look stupid in the picture and cobalt blue wore out its popularity. Naw man, they are in Shoe Mania on Union Square, so as far as the high fashion public is concerned, they never happened. I like street fashion better than the runway looks its ideas come from because often high couture looks so dull or silly arranged on the modes. Plus, I don't mind being a little, um, fashion backward because of the new trend projected for the future:
High waisted jeans. Even high waisted white jeans. The four high waisted horsemen of the apocalypse, I'm literally shaking in my shoes. How the hell are they going to sell me this? And I wonder if the models will pair them with a crop top or whether women will hide them under long shirts. Though I loved the skinny jean on other people, it took me a while to start wearing it since people told me that it was unflattering. As far as I can tell, the mom jean widens attention to your ass area and makes your hips kind of jut out. I learned that from the Gilda Radner Jewess Jeans skit and the boney-ar$ed chick from Saturday Night Fever, Karen Lynn Gorney. Both embody the 70s physique, specifically the flat, thin ass with jutting hips. I know almost nobody that fits the 70s chick type other than our medieval history professor, Susan Kramer. Seriously, you should see her. What an idiot Scar J looks in them. Partly because she has one. Though I normally think that having the semblance of an ass is the saving grace of jeans, particularly skinny jeans. And as far as the rest of the world's people, we will see. I wonder when SLC girls will roll out with them.

rolls eyes x 2:

This is from the michigoss blog, a post called "Nihil Es Hipsteri" attempting to define hipsters. Note the similarity to the Lukacs discussion above. I hate this stuff. And the blog would probably attack the keffiyeh with gusto, with criticisms considerably more interesting and therefore annoying than a conservative blog can put out:

"Must we give up the hope for an identification of the penumbra of "hipster"? Utilizing some sort of Wittgensteinian game, or a post-modern, anti-structuralist strategy would hardly be enlightening. Obviously I wouldn't write this article if I didn't have some sort of hypothesis. So here it is: the hipster is so hard to identify because what unites this group is nothing. It is a lack of belief, a lack of unity, a pervasive nihilism of the 21st century, and yet a deep and almost nostalgic yearning for some time in which there was still something to believe in, something worth fighting for. Paradoxically, this lack of unity in beliefs and aesthetics leads to overall cohesion.

Since the modern search for cause is empty, it leads to the all-encompassing, non-unifying wear and tastes of the hipster. The power of this movement without meaning is indicative of our current cultural condition. We bourgeois intellectuals can no longer justify violent action, nor can we even justify non-violent action. We are so disillusioned that no cause is without fault and we are imprisoned in a Dostoyevskyesque stagnation. Not only are we rebels without a cause, but we don't even have a rebellion. And so all we can believe in is aesthetic value. We are forced to enter the cult of beauty, with a longing for more morally transparent times.

It is for this reason that hipsters fetishize those icons of American identity: the cowboy "going west," the 50's beatnik rebelling against her oppressive society, the punk throwing off the bonds of 80's yuppiedom. And yet these in essence only share a small number of precepts, stemming from a desire for "something else". This is why one amazingly finds hipsters espousing some aspects of these various movements and even opposing ones as well."

Gayness

My dad and I just watched Bill Maher, which as usual made me feel bad for paying so little attention to current history, aka politics, and brought up the question of what is important. Or my usual question, whether the humanities, particularly the paper on the Magic Mountain I'm working on, are worth pursuing, or relevant for the world's people (just as people keep slogging philosophy as high flown windbag stuff whereas I think that philosophy aims to be wholly applicable and its inquiries underly all "practical" activity on a personal and group level, even something like pouring your cereal in the morning, but that can be stretching it a little bit, it defines the terms under which we live, a complex task). About that, this article by Stanley Fish caught my attention in my New York Times email.. that I pretty much hardly read. It seems that all disciplines, such as economics, (the way we as personal or political entities survive is making money after all) are trumpeting their importance to the daily life of the people, because why study or glory in irrelevance, right? To be a contrarian? Kind of like how art has needed to prove itself through theory or reject proving itself, embracing aestheticism for its own sake and not caring if it's being called extraneous. I've got to put in that what I think is the lingo of postmodernism, namely that past forms are irrelevant in encompassing or communicating with today's world adopts both that of modernism and ultimately that of Enlightenment progress that is considered retardataire. Someone might correct me and say that it doesn't place a value judgment on progress, claiming all value judgments to be false (which would render the words all and false empty of meaning), but I would say that it is claiming itself to be the most useful, or in its opinion, the best language or "discourse" to describe a reality it sees as losing rigid borders. Despite trying to sever time, this idea calls now our "postmodern era" as opposed to maybe "The Gilded Age" and "The Enlightenment?" Should I reserve a chapter of a textbook for "The Postmodern Era?" That made history irrelevant and yet circumscribed itself in terms of time?

Anyway, my dad and I started arguing about homosexuality after the show. My dad, the liberal thinks that gayness is the result of a defective gene and calls my bisexual friends "confused." He blames the fact that a girl I know went gay in Mount Holyoke on her flakiness, the fact that she's in a women's college, and her parent's divorce on her "confusion" despite the fact that she's had two longterm relationships with women with whom she's been in love. I'm in a college with 70% girls, I'm flaky, I'm not exactly falling in love and going out with women for a long period of time. If she is completely straight, why does she have sex with women? Does she love them only intellectually? Or is the divorce to blame for her being attracted to women? I wonder how the defective gene accounts for someone being partially gay, the Kinsey scale, or maybe having a fleeting attraction to the same sex disturbs one's straightness totally and means we're confused? What if we act on it and have sex with the person, oy! The simple classification of attraction as subject to a defective gene ignores the complex emotional underpinnings that psychology burlesqued somewhat (hey, I might be attracted to a woman because I'm attracted to my mother so that doesn't mean I actually like women, right?), though it is often quoted that it was the first to give lip service to irrational, unconscious roots of choices, thoughts, and desires.


The idea behind the defective gene is that gayness is unnatural or out of accord with the "way things are." This has to do with natural law outside of human experience. Applying DNA to homosexuality puts it within the rules of science, which gathers empirical knowledge, or observations of the outside world, in order to register what it feels to be natural patterns that rule over the human, so to speak. I always think of the if a tree falls in the forest analogy, that natural law claims that the very fact that a tree on Earth exists and falls outside of a human's hearing range means that there is a setup or "environment" outside of human experience. It will fall regardless of a human's being able to hear it or not and from there, a scientist can observe whether it does this all the time and think in terms of the tree, a thing untouched by a human.
Scientists observe that overwhelmingly in animal species a male copulates with a female and usually produces an offspring or procreates. The notion of evolution ascribes notions of rational self-interest (survival) to the decision, behavior, and change over time of animals. They draw the conclusion that the primary motive for sexual activity in animals is the perpetuation of the species, which does not occur during sex acts with the same sex. Bonobos are cited as an exception where homosexual activity and oral sex happens presumably for pleasure and purposes related to societal structure. It would seem to people with a rudimentary knowledge of animal science that homosexual activity deviates from the rational self interest of species survival and procreation. Bonobos are one of the few examples of sex possibly for pleasure in nature so "recreation" or connection doesn't seem to hold up as a viable motive. Something that adds credibility to sex practices is the amount of time it's been practiced, i.e. "everyone has been fucking to procreate since day 1" (or in the case of Christians, after day 7). My mom, for example, thinks that there was less homosexuality in Russia because it was repressed. Professors of Queer History have, of course, making it their business to reveal the accounts repressed by hegemonic narratives (I'm not sure of the terminology). In effect, they are contended with the "unnaturalness" verdict or the lack of credibility by pointing out homosexuality as an "age-old" practice.

I used to roll my eyes at Queer History or theory classes (though mining desperately for gay subtext annoys me, you have to really suspend disbelief in some examples). I think that the idea of "incorporating it into 'normal' history" is fallacious because who the hell knows where to limit "normal" history? The textbooks I learned from in high school that taught me about political and social movements? That is one way to interpret and understand viable historical events that is often dubbed political or social history.

Anyway, of course there is the orthodoxy of the Bible as a finished text. In supporting Creation over evolution, Christians are claiming the truth of the text without proving why. There is often a humorous tendency to allegorize and interpret the 7 days as "god time," so it must be like seven thousand years. I might be called thick or even a fundamentalist were I to interpret the Bible so literally, though. I think disagreeing with the very concept of "evolution" is harebrained. Evolution, the processes of change and adaptation are, of course, observable historically and socially, Christians recognize that. Or rather in their belief of linear, apocalyptic history, they know that gradual change does happen. Whether or not they believe in rational, natural adaptation in animals beyond what is god-given is a different story. God created the animals, how many animals? Were there not new animals that surfaced relatively recently? What about the fossil evidence of what appear to be the ancestors of modern fish, for example? What is the explanation for the coelacanth or thylacine? Or the extinct animal?
God's imagination is boundless, of course. It's funny how the Old Testament anthropomorphizes God as speaking, for example, and then denies it in order to attest to his complexity. How much do Christians analyze the behavior of animals? What natural motives do they attribute it to?

My dad's idea of confusion inherent in being bisexual means that there is a strict polarity between gay and not gay and actual sex seems the determinant of your orientation. So at various levels of emotional attraction to another person, the minute they border on the sexual, for whatever reason, some outside factor has got you confused. But the very fact that you are even a little attracted to someone of the same sex means that you are not purely straight! How does one account for the deviation? I don't know what confusing thing in my life is powerful enough to convince me to be sexually attracted to someone I'm not supposed to like. Is it taboo? Sure there is something about having sex with various people I shouldn't want to have sex with like the older, ugly, obese, physically maimed or sick that turns me on not just because of the taboo. People have a somewhat crude, narrow definition of lust. It does not have to be directed at its root to a person, their body parts, or the sex act. Sexual feeling or being turned on can arise out of various emotional, even abstract places. Sometimes I find the reduction of everything to a sex act a turn off and an insult to the emotional experience of sensuality. You can lust for a place or country. Longing is also sensual or sexual. Longing also doesn't have to be wrapped up in typical sex organs. Particularly for the girl this isn't the case, I think. Platonic love is somewhat of a simplified, umbrella term for various kinds of sensuality in this time period that devotes so much attention to sex. Taboo, for example, is connected to lust and outside the gamut of having an object in mind. The emotional dimension of human sexuality encompasses much more than people.

It bothers me that there is such a lack of acceptance in families, still, for gay kids that come out. My mom once told me that she would be disappointed if I ended up gay. I think the scientific notion of procreation as a natural, rational interest in species is viable, though it does not negate other motives for sex acts. I admit I'm still attached to the idea of an opposite sex nuclear family with its simplified solutions for procreation. Also I think that in various American environments, gay families deal with a large amount of hardships and discrimination though this is incredibly trivial if understood as a reason not to start one. I have another prejudice that gay people stay single for long periods of time and it is not taken for granted in the gay community to end up in a stable, nuclear family with children as it is in the straight community partially due to the barriers to legal marriage and societal pressures. In the documentary I watched about Rosie O'Donnell's cruise for gay families, one girl says, "The hardest thing is to have to constantly defend your family." I have a last prejudice, which is mostly against adoption or opting not to have children, I think that particularly for women, raising children is not just a "biological clock" or hormonal thing, but an emotional requirement after a while. It is a choice that can round out and enrich their lives, though definitely a course of action easier to take with a father involved. It makes me sad when girls I know say they won't have children. Seems like after one learns how to take care of oneself and has done it for a while, one feels the need to extend the care outward and unselfishly care for someone else, the bond of unconditional love a mother has for her biological child is the easiest way to achieve that.