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