gut

this week, i am thinking from within. trying to think from within a gut. because i get so mad outside the gut. when i am within it, there is a place for feeling. otherwise i am just sad all over. the gut is the concentration. it is so often what i lack here, because of the fracture of sight that happens within institutions? within this institution? because my sight feels fractured in iowa? something.

so from within the gut, there is an attempt to note this past week the noose found on madonna g. constantine’s office door at columbia (not to mention anti-semitic graffiti and racist graffiti found earlier on that campus, other nooses found placed outside a ground zero post office, a long island police department locker room, and a coast guard academy in connecticut; and, last ((and curiously sickly-appropriate to the mazes, a?)) a 600 foot swastika carved into a field in mercer county, new jersey last month). tom gitlin, a professor at columbia summed it up thus: a problem of systemic oppression and the consequences of it.

this is something. and how to make myself aware there. always. and always. and likewise of the charges against blackwater for deliberately killing 17 iraqis, as if the whole war wasn’t deliberate, but still it is another transgression of an original transgression? how the transgressions continue, and i keep scratching at my own skin to get at where i am --

without ranting, the u.s. is currently wondering whether we should have come out and said that the armenian genocide happened, as this has angered the turks and we need turkish support to fight our genocide in iraq. and if turks, too, now that they are mad at us for calling them out on their crimes, decide to continue their genocide against the kurds, then the u.s., too, will have to do something about the kurds in northern iraq who have been american-friendly and are now launching attacks against turkey… so we are arguing about genocide and whether to remember it while unable to talk about genocide in the present…

i am going upstairs to find some suitable sentences, doris lessing said last week, bless her, and kara walker said her art should embarrass us into wisdom…

immigration is deporting workers in the meat packing industry and american replacement workers are now leaving the job twice as fast as those before them before they were deported…

and many other things, but in particular a part of a poem by pasolini for the other side of the punishment of the wrong:
When yesterday at Valle Giula you fought
with policemen,
I sympathized with the policemen!
Because policemen are children of the poor.
They come from the outskirts, be they rustic or urban.

and i wonder what is happening as signs change, but systems remain the same. and i wonder can i find in the tangle of my gut, the suitable sentences?

a, you said about the break, to write into it, find the places, and the reunion…
and j, you say begin at the small, and yesterday we wrote the small for a long time…

i get scared of how i need love
that cannot be eased by giving love

being love is different?
is something about embodying, having the gut of --

letting the gut talk

s

so and so

j asks about brokenness and s asks about a body crossed by lines. i feel these two bits of insight from you two helps something- brings a unity to my kitchen and an internal struggle to my kitchen. both are honorable, and illustrate a kind of willingness to take things on: the way we drop things, the way we pick things up, the singularity of the body when we fall.

i was reading merton’s “new seeds of contemplation” just this past week for a book group i’m involved in. of course there is a chapter/seed called “a body of broken bones.” of course, of course. here’s a bit from it that seemed to be talking to us:

As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a Body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the differences that come between them.

There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men. They can love or they can hate.

Hatred recoils from the sacrifice and the sorrow that are the price of this resetting of bones. It refuses the pain of reunion.

i could hardly believe that last line when i read it. thinking about the mayor refusing the bits that seemed to pain him, thinking about our internal borders, lines that cross us, the violence done to the women in the dr congo, all sounds like the sloughing off that comes with the rubbing together of every edge. it makes sense that everything would hurt—so many internal sites of setting, so many almost-external sites.

so then i think that’s part of what the writing is for: showing in the work your own setting of bones, places where you are the breaking. it seems it’d be important for each of us to keep engaging with that—as we do, but you know, it’s hard, and for good reason, and sometimes we get tired.

j says skeptical of brokenness. i thought man oh man. i’ve been that guy, who looks away from the destitution of the other folk, emotionally or physically, who looks away from the chipped parts, and gets all defensive at the insinuation that the broken thing belongs to all of us. that it’s out there, it has a public face, a face we can recognize? “people just dig and deepen the crease in order to protect their placement”—so we don’t have to be lost, confronted with our own borders.

how to deal with the big— i feel like s shows me again and again that i can let the big happen at the small intimate sites where it happens, and be ready, catch it there, pay attention to, be generous from that place. but i don’t know, i don’t know.

there is no justice, and no mercy, in line-drawing, so, find the places where there is a bit of a tangle? where the natural of the line-drawing endeavor is perverted?

i feel silly saying anything. but.

another bit from merton, from that same piece, regarding those unconscious prejudices, s: Punishment cannot cure the feeling that we are unworthy. so i’m thinking about our incarcerated, especially certain populations, who have always been wrong in their existence, who were unworthy or or unhuman or unfree for a long time. where does all this stuff go? i don’t know. what can this country, or any, know about justice? i don’t know. but we do know something. and that non-mythical view can always be aspired to?

a

brokenness

the jena story has always gnawed, and you have articulated something i could not--something about the line-drawing, the borderlines; and people just dig and deepen the creases in order to protect their placement. either the mayor thinks people are overreacting or he is being defensive, or maybe it is the same thing. and this knotted core--he is offended by an image (whether in relation to other images, he is still offended) and at the same time he is dismissive. where i lack hope is in the ability to see that there is something underlying the discomfort, this requires so much effort.

i am not sure why it is easier for me to speak about this than about genocide or such violence. perhaps it is because this first thing i have decided i can attempt to counter in my own small way at least, this i can make a gesture toward grasping on some level; but this other thing is beyond my measurements. it makes me feel so completely overcome--an intensity and a powerlessness-- but at the same time i know that this cannot be an excuse of any kind. so how do we address this? this is not a rhetorical question but one i would like an answer to. do we write about it as we have always written things down? how? and how do we choose, when there is so much.

(i suspect that part of the answer has something to do with what has been said about making words in a way that can also hold that fear of wrongdoing and holes…)

i’ve been thinking about brokenness. no concrete thoughts, only floating wispy things. only it seems to me that the closer i look, the more i see that culture is broken, politics is broken, religion, broken, too. how if we admitted our brokenness, we could redefine those lines or at least question them, dialogue. and what makes us suspicious of the brokenness of others?

some beginning thoughts...

j.

borderlines

there is no justice in line-drawing.

i am thinking about the differences between crossing lines
and being crossed by lines and lines getting crossed.
to make it easier to think about, to blow it up, i think of
borders crossing people, people crossing borders
and people forced to cross; nations themselves arbitrary
constructs, but with real consequence...

today in the nytimes, an article: 'race gap: crime vs.
punishment' in which it states statistics and then
quotes angela davis out of context, but importantly,
saying that she doesn't just blame the intent of justice-bringers,
but somethings [like racism] are unconscious.

this reminds me of something merton writes about the collective
guilt and the need “for a man who wants to be in good faith
to cease identifying himself with actions that are causing the evil
in question, and to disclaim any intention of further participating
in these acts, while also doing whatever he can to restore
the balance of justice and of violated rights. The problem is of
course that in deep and complex problems of this nature,
the responsibility goes far into the area of the unconscious attitudes
and prejudices we all have, and in that area we cannot control
all our reactions at will. That is what makes the whole thing
so terribly hard. But we must as least desire to have a lucid,
honest and non-mythical view of the hard realities, in order to
try to deal with them.”

what the line-drawing mayor seems to wish, is for the dialogue
to disappear; this need to silence voices must come from an
extreme uncomfortability he has, a need to pretend that such
problems don't exist, rather than the desire to understand where
such problems originate and what to try to do to resolve them
or at least to find an opening for the airing of the uncomfortability...

the other thing in the nytimes today was the number of women
who have been violently raped by ex-rwandan genocidaires in the
dr congo just in the last year alone: 27,000
i feel that such a figure, such a number, and the lack of
dialogue and effort surrounding these staggering events
(not to mention the killing of more than 3 million in the dr congo
in the last war) is something that must be (here is the rant)
addressed. part of my rwandan application was toward this
addressing, but obviously there needs to be ways through
the morass of political correctness, postcolonial critique
(dangerous, albeit somewhat well-intentioned and door-opening,
in the same way that we were speaking of postmodernism being
double-edged in that it brings voices to the fore that were not
previously privileged in one particular mass public, while simultaneously
dangerously subscribing narratives for writers of color, etc...).

okay, the rant is, well, a place, an opening?, a hope of a beyond
the red ground of strange fruit, without betraying the meaning
of such ground, but rather paying homage to an underground history...

s

demonstration, lyricism, or?

Dears,

When thinking of prisons, torture, symbols of such, right now, I'm thinking of John Mellencamp. He wrote a song about a situation that happened a year ago in Jena, Louisiana. There were images to accompany his song. The chorus is "Oh oh, Jena, Oh oh, Jena, Oh oh, Jena: take your nooses down." About a year ago, six black boys were accused of attempted murder for a fight involving one white boy who was beaten unconscious. (One line that is crossed here is the line of law.) There was a traditionally all-white shade tree in the school yard of the local high school, and a black student asked permission from the school to abide there. Permission was given. Later, nooses were hung from that tree.

Since these events, there have been demonstrations of all sorts in the town of Jena. I bring this song up because it got a response from the Mayor, who says, unlike any of the other kinds of demonstration, this song "crossed a line." Where is the location of the wrongdoing-- the lyrics, the story portrayed, the typeface, or accompanying images that are found in the video, some/any combination of such? I'm interested in what kinds of things are able to cross this line today, and what said line could be made from? I take the Mayor's discomfort as a good sign because, to me, it signifies a place where some sort of real conversation can occur. I'm also interested in the noose as a symbol that may cross a line for some people, none of whom are the Mayor, for whom a noose, or many, are merely "insulting and hurtful."

Here is a link to the story: Mellencamp song about 'Jena Six' upsets Mayor.

Does this fit the heart of our inquiry?? Too hammering-political??
I'm learning, trying it,
yes, yes
a

s-y-z-y-g-y: yoked together

dear a and j,

here is a space for our yokings together, our threefoldings of paper, as we have spoken of yoking three things -- culture, politics, and religion -- together, to form an umbrella journal of writing under which we can sit, open our bags, and gather the letters.

cheers, s