drafting

to begin and to discard (what possible?)
early drafts, plotlines, trains of
loving is such simple, inefficient work ah, well
day fraying, cloudlit, little
frayed so, so (it’s the end of the rope)
so - how do we tie the damn thing together?
must musty dustcollect
we have so much
to live for/getting /giving /tune
pick it up as you go along, will ya?
we go a long
while
meanwhile, and with similar
endurances
we go a stray
dog, a pregnant one
resting roadside in the dust
we go a way
so - carefully

how is home?

what you dreamed

the first time I came back from East Africa:

The island in the dark. Tiki torches. The gutted plane. The steward? Yes, they call them so? Male flight attendant. The story: you are on an island. There is this much light here. You have a chance now to go home. Yes? You will have to travel into the dark, dark, dark. the storm over the ocean. Are you willing?
Is it safe?
No.
Will I survive?
Maybe.
Would you do it?
No.
(the only way home)
I go. I choose to go. (and today?)

to the heartland

to the heartland
breathing, the body
the city turns to corn
one at a time like teeth
corn turns to sky, flat
your hand perhaps here
the center a river-dug canyon
skin, nerve, spine, sun
falls away and stars
hurtle light to a point
to a pupil, through years
or the moon gives us back our shadow
or the dark we don’t know
not a distance, not quite
a ruin or a name

out

IMF on the news advertising cuts
grass grown tall
rain, diagonal
R makes chapatti and puts a plate over it so it stays warm
3:09 AM

(in you)

I hear there is a strike for transport. There is no money here since elections and many people walk miles to work. They show the silhouette of crowds at dawn on the news. Today A tells me there is a strike. For what? I don't know exactly. I walk to town.

What is on my mind while I am walking:

Bonnie Marranca quotes Cage quoting Thoreau.
"If when you are in the woods, the woods are not in you, then what right do you have being in the woods?"

Young man walking halfway. I am walking to church. Jesus is my personal saviour. (I don't understand what salvation is.) So, when you are free, you pray to him. (I don't understand what praying is.) Do you know how I can get a friend in the states? (I don't understand what a friend is.) It is hot here in Africa. (Shhhhh. shhhh. I am thinking.)

To be in Africa. In solitude. In Africa. For Africa to be in solitude. I am because we are in solitude. What right do I have to be in Africa?

Pinch my nose through a cloud of diesel. Shortcut.

I'm not a very good activist. I am interested in politics as an extension of an aesthetic exploration of "the real" - an imagination that the real is the consequential. What is made to have consequence through action in the world. It's a formal interest, a passionate curiosity about perception and ontology.
MLK talks this way about JFK - that he is interested in the race issue intellectually, it does not yet touch him personally.
I think this is true for me too. Not necessarily about racism, but about advocacy in general.

I dream broken language. I dream reading that oscillates between sound and sign. I dream trying to read everything at once.

Bonnie says, US avant garde has long history of trying to break stillness against the social. The impulse towards abstraction (exploration of consciousness, "I am") against impulse towards democracy (popular/populist culture, popular modes and sites of production, "we are"). Made-up, if useful, dichotomy of Eastern culture against Western culture. Or here, in communal impulses in much African dance, drama, ways of working and my own love of solitude. If much energy here is towards mainstreaming, towards careful and self-guided development of voice from within - than it should be. How do I remain responsible to my own interests in order to be responsible to others?

A fork in the road. Am momentarily disoriented. All the ways look familiar.

To what, or to whom do we... I forget the rest...

To
be fully here
in a room where you are not wanted -
who is wanting?
to be fully
impatient
to be
to be impatient
to be fully here in the room (in you) where you are not wanted
to be fully here

parking lot. bag search. french toast.

I don't want this.
(shape of surrender)

impatience

if witness is patient. if perfect patience is not for satisfaction...


I listened to Martin Luther King's autobiography a couple times last summer when driving from LA to CT, and one thing that stays with me is his frustration with people asking for patience inside of social change; that he should ask for justice along a more comfortable timeline. He says the people who advocated patience were more difficult to bear than the people who were overtly defending racist laws and practices.

I think it is true that for patience to be virtuous it must be entirely itself, patience for patience. But I also wonder if virtue is enough (for what?) Is a virtuosity of witness irrelevant to the world? What is the advocated thing?

missed

I was sitting in for a little while on a class on indigenous approaches to conflict studies. I miss time this week and skip it.

The conversation in the class struck me as profound. The professor wanted to bring home to his graduate students that a real thing - a knowledge, a series of practices, a way of being together - had been lost. Not a utopia. "The king used to spit in someone's mouth so he didn't waste saliva. He would rest his spear in someone's foot." Not savagery. But a real complex thing. And lost completely. With no archives or means of reconstruction. And that what existed now was a hybrid of that culture (or really set of cultures) and a modern, Western culture. So, how do you talk about authenticity inside of hybrid culture? He even brought it into the body - asks the class: do you know you're African? Completely?

I imagine Marx. I imagine it involves a question of who controls the tools of producing culture now, of directing the synthesis. I imagine it also has something to do with what principles guide that synthesizing.

I imagine a real problem with the word "authenticity".

something

secret

when to leave

On Sunday, I go to Centre Christus - a Jesuit retreat center in Kigali, Rwanda. I walk there from Papyrus. A long morning walk. I am going to mass at Centre Christus. I tell people it is because I like the music but it is not because. Small room. Low ceilings. I am alone and then there are many. On thin wooden benches with no aisles. Mass starts and it occurs to me I want to leave. It occurs to me - too much. I am in the back of a room on the wooden bench. Packed next to the nicely dressed. Against off-white brick. There is singing, yes, and I like it. Everything is singing because I don't know the language. You can't leave when it occurs to you you want to leave. You stay to stay. I tell myself it is the lack of space that makes me stay, but it is not because. It occurs to me if there is no inherent redemptive thing in suffering. If suffering is itself, without interpretation. Then perhaps there are many things that are themselves, and not for something else. Love for the sake of love, for instance. That to be only yourself is to be a gift, for instance. Different from trying to give something. It is just a shape of thinking. To what end?

battle

grey morning
the sillhuette of 5 figures on the sill
bead skirts and bead shields and a giant red bead head balancing baskets
a spike in the center to hold a candle
upright

the UN approves military intervention in Libya. at least to shoot targets across great distances. the new york times quotes Qaddafi - he threatens to drag people out of their closets. agh. i hope we help more than our conscience.

Rwanda.
You also feel far behind the mist. Behind the army of candle holders with distinct spears and shields. A coffee bean, a road, an "i", a star with red colors, a star with green colors. The sound of chopping wood. Red bead heads.

I am midway through rehearsals with D for a project on home. Or on continuity. Or exchanging techniques of performance. 5 Rwandan performers. 3 muzungus. Often the work deals with sorrow. Sorrow can be genocide. Sorrow can be a girlfriend rejecting you. Sorrow cannot be left.

A bee in sillhouette . . .

Do you want to know where I am?
(Always in a different house. A strange house.)
sad sad sad
and if you live here, what is your use? what is your sadness for?
(are you here with me. no wine in your belly and money in your purse)

equidistant

and again. night
the little line of car-lights, in motion, equidistant
following
just so, to write thoughts on index cards pinned to the wall

Toni Morrison speaks at Smith graduation, my graduation
May 2001 – 10 years now
You’ve inherited a broken world.
Don’t try to save it.
Just don’t hurt it anymore.

I continue to believe her. That passivity is the charge of my generation. (Insert 10 years. The light leaving the wall, a steep slope of dry bush, a stop sign by the sound). To bear the world. To bear our inability to bear. (In Uganda, when you want someone to move down so someone else can sit, you say “extend”. Extend.) Somehow we will know from this differently.

Last year I drove through the streets (sat in the traffic) of Los Angeles listening to books on tape: Jazz, Love, Beloved, Sula, The Bluest Eye, The Mercy, Paradise – because I was curious: what is “just don’t hurt it anymore?”

instant coffee with milk, smoky
or I smell the ginger of your tea
while C drives to work in Valencia

quoting Lorca

bird or the sound of cooking
or else
where
tiny from here cars, tiny from here houses stretched
over the hill. already

my unconscious quotes Lorca
(I dream of giant falling lobsters)
who believes poetry must acknowledge the future as a stranger

bird flies off

You are wondering how to live and the hills are green burning off mist. The boy in the car driven across the border to Kigali for project smile. His eyes, round deep brown. They are pounding in the fields in the valley with a hoe, tilling, a young woman rests holding the small of her back in her hands. The wind carries Eucalyptus through the open windows.
The men in the car speak in a language I do not. When will we get there?
The heat comes.
To wake up each morning to the hills. It is work to take in so much beauty. It is work to tend these fields.
The familiarity of roadtrip.
In my head, I am trying to tell myself a story of belonging to something so I must feel a little lost in the back seat of the car driving to Kigali - which arrives suddenly and stretches itself out among the hills.

He will be in Kigali four days, the boy. The men, Ugandans who work for an NGO in the villages, say they noticed the other children at school avoid to sit with him. I wonder what the boy thinks. Does he know what surgery is? How long will it take to heal? What will it be like to smile at someone?

I saw the muscle tighten - the involuntary one above the eyes that distinguishes genuine happiness from the polite smile - when he first got in the car to cross the border. A long road for a little boy. He sits forward in the middle seat. He leans forward. There is so much we can recover from.

I am writing a story to myself of how I came to Rwanda to begin with. In the backseat of a car in Valencia, CA I am asked - something that implies the inadequacy of the question 'why does suffering exist' - that fingers the immaturity of shock and of placing all suffering as elsewhere. But I think a series of events the summer of 96 made me stop believing that suffering was redemptive. That the choice to accept suffering led to any meaning. Or at least, parsing through that space for god was much harder than I had been conceiving it. The stranger knocks and you turn him away. He had round brown eyes like the boy.

I wonder the difference between recovery and redemption.

After two days, the incision all the way down to the muscle will hold itself together on its own. Hours, days, weeks in bed and the tissues knit themselves meticulously together. The work of surviving. But we don't. Survive life.

Is it the same work, to support the conditions that make life possible and to support the conditions that make life meaningful?

There is a lake the sound of sheep cows fast paced human voice a thin haze of volcano sun will set no mosquitos how far we all have to go little see-through black trees. \
What is left over.
Abundance.
Where from here?
There is no space between you and alone. Or that is exactly what is there.
the backs of shoes, receeding
to break knowing
Lake Bunyonyi
The second deepest lake in Africa? no, the world
meaning that is not knowing -
what we allow ourselves to be changed by
a lake means
a crater - a volcano, a rock from space
depth, islands, lake, lake smell, dugout canoe, below - another hotel, brick church, that island with the schools. primary and secondary. drums, drumming, curry crawfish, black moth, black
means a kind of quiet
in this way, meaning is lonely, elsewhere
following into knowing less, nothing

giving up

40 presents in 40 days

Today Mbarare. We travel - the roads - it is dark when I am awake and waiting at the Shell Station near my home. And then it is light, warm light on the quiet clay or cement. We pick up all the professional women and we drive east. Doze. Banana trees. fields have soft waves. Slowing on the one lane road for the speed bumps. For this one truck on the uphill. For police checkpoints. And then working out something about being alone in my sleep. We all sleep. Even G falls asleep over the paper she is trying to prep with for her Friday meeting.

We stop by the side of the road and buy sausages. We buy tea. We buy ginger soda. An old man in a bright plad jacket and a broadrimmed hat sells us medicines that he has cultivated and carries in a black plastic bag and we laugh at ourselves and buy them. This one is for heartburn. This one for asthma. We laugh and drive to Mbarare. Yes, we do.

It is like this, a long time ago you had a dream. You were on the bus in Uganda. It was your 30^th birthday and your father gave you a present. There were three words on the wrapping that you can’t remember. But in reading, they translated simultaneously to “Standing in the absence of god is standing in god’s presence” and “To know yourself is to be without self.” Separate, but not sequential. And then you looked to the back of the bus to show the person seated there, but cannot get his attention. It is only now 2 years later that it occurs to you, you were in error. You can’t give a thing you have not received.

in desert learning