Yeah, So Maybe It's Not Going As Well As I'd Planned

Today as I was standing bus duty, my principal came up to me and told me that I looked unhappy.  He was checking in, concerned about me.  I was startled.  I wasn't particularly aware of feeling bad, but I guess maybe I'm not hiding things as well as I thought I was.

I know my patience isn't at its highest point.  I've made an effort to avoid things that might stretch it past its snapping point.  In short, I'm doing the best I can.

I think it may not be quite enough.  I had a dream last night that I just didn't go somewhere I was supposed to.  I started out to go there, but suddenly I noticed a huge rip in the leg of my pants, so I turned around and came home.  From there, the dream flashed to a junktique where I was shopping for something about Abraham Lincoln.

Maybe it's not stress.  Maybe like Scrooge I had something that disagreed with me for dinner....

11 more days.....

Wordless

I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing here.  I stopped awhile back, and I'm not sure exactly why.  All the places and types of things I used to like to write just shut down.  It's like the flow of words I have always relied on just dried up.

I suspect I know why.  Before the semi-cataclysmic events of last Wednesday, I had reached a place of such worry and such stress that I basically shut down every system that wasn't essential.  Does a person do that?  Is that possible?  It feels possible.  Nothing was resolved Wednesday.  In fact, a great many things might get very much worse now.  However, two of the biggest issues in my life came to a moment of crisis, and at least now I'm not running from them.  Sometimes I think I was using up all my energy and effort with the running.  Maybe there's a mercy in the dropping of some of the old juggling balls after all....

There's also the fact that during the most fruitful period of this blog, I was writing with the idea that someone out there was reading it, someone specific.  I won't go into all that, but it's not the same now, and I've found it hard to come back here when I know that one-sided conversation is at an end.  That's just stupid of me.  It never should have been about a single person other than myself.  Knowing that it was stupid has also prevented me from coming back.  Will I fall into those same old patterns?

I miss the writing, though.  At certain times in Turkey, I saw something, and a fragment of a poem or an essay would start to form, and then it's like a hand swept away a cloud of incense, leaving me with the frustrating feeling of having glimpsed the finished work while being totally unable to capture it.  I found something  in a random notebook I  had tried to write about the Hagia Sofia, and I was astonished by how really terrible an effort it was.

I took out my book of poems the other day, the ones I have typed up and mostly in a final form, and it seemed as though another person had written them.  Maybe there's truth to that.  We do grow and change constantly, or at least we're supposed to.  It's not supposed to be a bad thing.  I just can't stand the thought that this new person, this current incarnation of me, is wordless.

Sufis

For some reason, just tonight, that evening in Istanbul when we saw the Sufi performance is stuck in my head.  It's almost like I'm there in that domelike converted bath chamber seeing and hearing it again.

I remember seeing all of them, being interested in the diversity of ages and expressions on the men as they stepped into the circle for the performance.  One looked so young and somehow nervous.  One was stately and older.  One had the face of an angel.

I remember the way their dance began, the way their arms slowly unfurled to their dancing positions as though it were something as natural as a plant's leaves slowly growing under the sun.  I remember the way they seemed to switch off the act of leading until everyone had started the pattern.  It was soothing and compelling.  It made me wonder what it would be like to be one of them, to spin and spin and accept and let go at the same time....

Once I knew the symbolism of what they were doing, something I found out later, it was even more powerful, and it continues to be even now that they are spinning only in my mind.  I'm stealing this from Wikipedia because it's faster than my telling it all myself.  Semazen is another word for sufi:

In the symbolism of the Sema ritual, the semazen's camel's hair hat (sikke) represents the tombstone of the ego; his wide, white skirt (tennure) represents the ego's shroud. By removing his black cloak (hırka), he is spiritually reborn to the truth. At the beginning of the Sema, by holding his arms crosswise, the semazen appears to represent the number one, thus testifying to God's unity. While whirling, his arms are open: his right arm is directed to the sky, ready to receive God's beneficence; his left hand, upon which his eyes are fastened, is turned toward the earth. The semazen conveys God's spiritual gift to those who are witnessing the Sema. Revolving from right to left around the heart, the semazen embraces all humanity with love. The human being has been created with love in order to love. Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi says, "All loves are a bridge to Divine love. Yet, those who have not had a taste of it do not know!"

The Sufis have been turned into big-time tourist capital by Turkey.  Almost any product you can imagine can be found with their image on it. Every country has something like that, some symbol from their past they've turned into a cultural shorthand for commercial endeavours.  I sort of think it's a shame that this really deeply personal thing has been used for that.

On the other hand, maybe it's all good.  Maybe the symbolism and the beauty of it can reach out through all the tshirts and spinning glass dolls somehow.  Maybe when people use the Iznik trivet with the brightly painted dancers on its surface, some of the original intention is passed along.  I am not wise enough to know.  All I can say with any certainty is that, along with the Hagia Sophia's golden dome, the slow wheel of Sufis rests permanently in my mind.

The Big C (again)

I put it off for a year.  My first inclination when dealing with things that distress me, for better or for worse, is flight.  When the thing you fear is actually something you carry around with you, getting away is more than a little hard.

My doctor tells me that some of the symptoms I've been having lately could be indicators of cancer.  He's the sweetest person in the world, and the very last to wave a panic flag.  However, I have known for some time that my condition was changing and not for the better.  It wasn't exactly a surprise that something bad might be lurking.

It's an odd thought, though.  It's like my own body has turned enemy.  Why is that even possible?  Shouldn't all the bits and pieces play together nicely?

Now begins the long run of tests, scans, and procedures.  And the waiting.  The glorious, terrible, soul-eating waiting.

There will be waiting in doctors' offices.  There will be waiting in labs for needles which will withdraw vials of blood.  There will be waiting on padded tables covered with crinkly paper.  There will be waiting in loosely-tied, mostly too-small cotton gowns, feeling that terrible mix of being exposed and being vulnerable.  There will be waiting for procedures.  There will be waiting for test results.

Even though I know all of this is ahead of me and that there's a chance that much worse may follow, I am calm, maybe calmer than I've been in a long time.  Maybe that's because I'm not running from it anymore.  There is a peace that has come from turning to face the demon.  I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned in that, one that I may need in the days to come.

Thoughts on Women

I needed some quotes for something I'm writing, so I headed over to my best resource for that, QuoteGarden.com.  I love them, have been using them for years for research and general entertainment since I love quotes.

Tonight, I was looking for something interesting about strong women for a story I'm doing, and, while these aren't quite ones that fit the thing I'm working on, they are good ones nonetheless.

There is no such thing as an ugly woman.  ~Vincent Van Gogh
Oh, Vincent.  Just one more reason to love, love, love you.  As if I needed another....

Some men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman's toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough, would add immeasurably to world peace.  ~Marianne Williamson, "A Woman's Worth"
Exactly.  I don't think that needs commentary from me other than that.

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.  ~Author Unknown

Hmm.  Maybe.  Definitely the last part is true.  I am not sure about the first.  I have brains but no beauty (although Vincent thinks otherwise), and I don't think I'd trade.

Men who don't like girls with brains don't like girls.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

I have this one on my desk.  I've always thought that guys who don't like girls with brains are really just looking for a mirror or a toy....

They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.  ~Oliver Goldsmith

Oh, Goldsmith.  You old flirt.  I like the idea that he liked the idea of a woman being modest.  That quality certainly doesn't seem to be in high appreciation today.

That's probably enough.  I do have something else I'm doing, after all.  

Not Kyoto

- Written while listening to the soundtrack Suleyman the Magnificent, which you can find here.

For years, when the deepest longing to be somewhere else has struck me, Kyoto or Nara has always been the destination.  The little place in my heart that stores up treasures would tune its shamisen and play me memories of Todaiji, of the Philosopher's Path.

Tonight, I'm longing for the other end of the Silk Road, and it's not the crowded, graceful, grey-tiled roofs and reserved buddha-gazes of those ancient places that I want.  Another imperial city calls to me instead.

Ah, God, to be in Istanbul with the light fading from the sky, to see the Bosphorus changing from blue-green to watered silver silk under the light of a waxing moon.  To be able to look up and see the minarets piercing the growing night like needles occupied with stitching the heavens to the earth.  To be able to hear the muezzins of Sultanahmet and Ayasofya calling the azan, that incredible moment when the accidental harmonies inevitably occur, stopping the breath and the heart with only sound.

To stumble over rough cobblestones in cool air to a place where a meal as simple or as complicated as the palate can stand is waiting.  To be with friends who complement, contrast, embrace without questions, even if you've only known them for days that have somehow become lifetimes.

To feel History (very much with a capital H) surround you like an embroidered garment of many silken layers that flutter in the wind, showing now this embellishment, now this flaw in the pattern.  To be surrounded constantly by faded empires, to see the still-glorious monuments of world-rulers now returned to dust.

I yearn for Byzantium, for Constantinople, for Istanbul. Tonight I will sleep and walk there again, feel the cold marble of Ayasofya trail beneath my dreaming fingers, watch the crowds surge like the steady tides.  No distance can keep all of it from me.  One tiny corner I have managed to carry away for myself for the times - like now - when I have the most need.

The Gap

Have you ever been somewhere you just don't fit?  Maybe it used to be a place that made sense for you or maybe you used to be different.  Now, though, just the thought of having to be there makes you uneasy.

I have one of those places, and the dread of encountering it on a regular basis gets worse as time goes by.

When I'm at work or when I'm with my friends, I'm comfortable.  I feel like the people I am around know me on at least some type of basic functional level.  I am an individual with some sort of value.  Maybe they love me.  Maybe they hate my guts.  Whatever it is, they are basing those decisions on current knowledge of me as a person, not the offspring of so-and-so, not the assumption that all people everywhere do the same things in the same ways.

When I'm at this other place, I feel like people neither know who I really am nor very much care.  They know I'm not like them, and that's good enough.  I haven't followed the paths they have.  For a lot of reasons, I have wound up doing some fundamentally different things from most of them.   I didn't go to school here.  I don't work around here.  I am not married.  I'm not dating.  I don't have small children.  I like to travel mostly alone to places most of them consider bizarre, and I would love to live in most of those places as well.  I'm not passing any kind of value judgement here, that my way or their way is better.  I'm just saying they're not the same, and it causes problems.  Sometimes, I think maybe they might not know what to say to me.  And I suppose that's fair enough, since mostly I can say that's true from my side, too.  There is no commonality, and they're content to watch me from the corners of their eyes.

For my part, I endure and run.

It's all well and good to say, "Well, if it makes you that uncomfortable, why don't you stop going there?"  Reality tends to be a great deal less clear-cut and precise.  There are ties that bind, ties that become bonds in the strongest sense of that word.  I don't know how to get out of them.  I just know that every time I am there, I want to be away a little more and a little faster.

Variation on a Theme

In the past two days, I have found myself enthusing over Chris Thile's new Bach album (more about that later) and the YouTube video series Thug Notes.  My first reaction to these in juxtaposition was that they were very different things.  After a little thought, though, I'm not so sure.

What I appreciate about both of them is that they're taking things I traditionally enjoy (Bach, literature) and putting a distinctive personal touch on them (mandolin, thugness).  You have to be very clever and very good at what you do to pull reinterpretation of a masterwork off correctly.  You can take do pale imitations all day long, but to make a genuine new version of something already great means you have to understand the work in question thoroughly.

I think of it like Picasso's art.  Everyone associates him with Cubism and abstraction.  How many people remember that before he found his own new style that he made sure he was a master of traditional techniques?  He admonished people to "[l]earn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist."  It's not that he couldn't paint in the more traditional way; it's that he had mastered and surpassed it.

Even though it may seem odd to put a YouTube series in the same category with Thile and maybe both of them with Picasso to some people, I can't help but see their relationship to one another.  True interpretation leads to a new invention all of its own.

The Great Game

It's been a long time since I was in a country where I could use my haggling skills.  I know some people hate it, but I sort of love it.  It's a game.  How low can I get you to go?  The price you receive depends directly on the skills you bring.  It's like competitive shopping.

I always come armed to the teeth.  One thing about growing up in the Deep South, I know how to manipulate the male ego.  It's not something I do often.  I find it almost distatefully easy when it doesn't matter to me.  It's not something we're taught.  It's something we sort of absorb, I suppose.

Like all fine arts, there is a procedure for it.  I find something I want and ask its price.  Then I get all sweet and Southern.  I smile a lot. My accent becomes a little more pronounced.  I start my end of the game at half of whatever the asked me for in the first place.  Every Southern man knows that underneath that little butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth smile is a straight razor.  These guys know it, too, I'm sure.  Maybe all men recognize that steel under the sweet.  God help them if they don't.  After all, it's all a part of the game.  Whether they see it or not, I must say that the straight razor never seems to bother them....

I got a marriage proposal today.  I wanted a scarf, and I could have come away with a husband.  This is another part of the game.  "You're so beautiful.  You're so fascinating.  Won't you give me a little more money if I tell you this?"  Perhaps this is their version of the straight-razor.

Again, Southern woman training comes in handy for that.  We grow up surrounded by gallant men who are so full of crap that hip boots are commonly required.  I know how to smile and say, "Aw.  Thank you, honey," and walk off to the next challenge.

And really, everybody is happy at the end of it.   Somehow the items I get this way mean more to me.  I have a ring I got in Costa Rica that was my best ever haggle. I paid less than half of his asking price. Every time I put it on, I think about it and smile to myself.  That was a good day.

Today was, too. Today I was sweetheart, darling, and I think even precious one time.  That's fine.  I got good prices on everything I purchased, and I felt like I won a State Championship.  They got what was undoubtedly a good profit on me, since that is the way of these things, and they also got to feel all manly and stuff.  Win-win.  Totally win-win.  I wish we did this back home.  I would probably shop more if we did.

Getting Ready

Tomorrow my journey to Turkey begins.  I've been waiting for it so long that it hardly seems possible that I will finally get on a plane and start the long, long process of getting there.

Today was dedicated to packing.  I got out my new bag and loaded it.  I love that thing.  It was some of the best money I've ever spent.  While I was trying not to have to carry a rolling carry-on, I still have one for my camera gear and so forth.  Everything else, and I do mean EVERYTHING else fit inside that new back and I'm almost ten pounds under the weight limit.  It's surreal.

Every trip is the beginning of a new way of looking at the world.  Every journey opens up a new perspective.  I feel as if this one is going to truly momentous, though.  Maybe it's because of how long it is.  Maybe it's the distance I'm going.  I don't know.  It just feels like I'm on the edge of a big cliff waiting for the courage to leap.  How thrilling.

That Was Unexpected

I went on a trip recently.  I wasn't expecting much from it.  In fact, I had totally negative expectations.  I was grumpy.  I stomped my feet.  I did not want to go.

Shows what I know.

I had a great trip.  Unexpectedly, I found myself with lots of people whose company I really enjoyed.  Some of them were old friends rediscovered.  Some of them were brand new acquaintances I hope to know better.  We had meals, saw the sights, talked together, and it was refreshing in a way I really needed.

Additionally, we got lots of new information and ideas to bring back to our school.  We had conversations with administration at the school and district level.  That hasn't happened in a long time.  I feel more positive about the upcoming school year than I have in a long, long time.

The most unexpected thing was meeting someone who caught my attention.  He's cute.  He's smart.  He's interesting.  Of course, I did what I always do in such prime situations.  I ran like hell, couldn't even talk much to him, he unnerved me so much.  (Sigh.)  I don't know if I'll see him again, but it's likely.  We're both "local," so I imagine we'll run into each other at some point.  Another chance to run away on another day....

Despite my general lack of sense and courage, the trip I was dreading turned into something quite refreshing.  It's nice when that happens.  Hopeful, sort of....

Preparing for Travel

I have a couple of trips coming up, and although I like to travel once I'm on the road, the process leading up to that moment is always mixed for me.  There is such a mixture of anticipation and dread that comes with heading out the door.

I think part of it is the million things that have to be taken care of before I can leave.  There's the laundry, the cleaning, the shopping, the packing.  Just the packing itself is enough to be discouraging.  There are money matters and last-minute crises.  It gets overwhelming.

There's also the leaving of the animals.  Yoda especially has been through this enough with me to know that when suitcases are spotted, separation is imminent.  She hates my suitcases and goes back and forth between packing herself inside them, refusing to get out or be removed and clawing the outside with those discrete sabers she keeps at the ends of her paws.

A strange immobility engulfs me.  There are things I know I need to do.  Minutes click away, and still I wait.  Since this action (or inaction) actually causes more stress and last-minute problems, I can't for the life of me figure out why I do it.  But I do.  Every single time.

Even this blog is just a form of it.  Soon the trip will be on, and I will be involved in it.  I just have to find a way to start the ball rolling to begin with.

Things I'd Rather Not Consider

Today, my mother came down to go through the storage building behind my house.  There's not much space in it, so only one person can fit between the stacks of stuff at a time.  She was going through to weed out things she knew were old and of no use.  Later on, I'll go through and purge my own stuff.

Most of what was thrown out today goes all the way back to my grandmother and grandfather.  We threw out old empty boxes, broken items, and all those other types of debris that collects in storage spaces.  One of the last things I helped with was pulling down a huge box of my grandmother's clothes that had been put there when I first came to live here and cleaned out the closets.

It's been there for years.  When I moved in, my mother was not able to handle going through all the stuff, so we just boxed and stored it.  Today, she sorted, and although I could tell that she was remembering Granny, she was able to get through it.

Late this afternoon, she called me from home to talk about something, and the stuff in storage came up as a topic.  I was talking about things I plan to move into the empty space that is slowly emerging, and she laughed.  "I don't know who's going to clean all that stuff out when you're gone," she said.  I made some kind of non-committal noise to which she replied, "I guess that's not really your problem at that point, though, is it?"

It's one of two things that hit me hard today.  The other, stupidly enough, was a set of Star Wars onesies from ThinkGeek.  Both of them revolve around the same thing.  I am getting too old to have someone to clean up after me when I'm gone. I'm getting too old to find someone to grow old with.  I'm just getting too old.

Yesterday, in my course readings for Turkey, I read about Evliya Chelebi, a travel writer in the late 17th century.  He considered his life dedicated to wanderlust, wanting to see and record every possible thing.  He deliberately chose not to pursue marriage and a family so he would have every possible opportunity to go.  There are certainly significant benefits to being single and childless - I can pick up and go wherever I wish, whenever I wish, stay as long as I wish (or at least as long as I can afford) - but I'm not sure I really believe that these outweigh the drawbacks.  Who is there to share it all with?  Who can I leave any of it to?

Most of the time, I'm happy.  Most of the time, I'm okay.  (And before I start sounding too much like a Bob Dylan song, I'll quit that.) Just sometimes, just today, though, I'm not.

Travel Companion

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where –" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"– so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
~ Alice and the Cheshire Cat, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
____________

For a long time, I have wanted to have something to take pictures with on my travels.  I suspect this started when I saw Amalie.  I (and the rest of the entire universe) loved it when she sent her father's gnome travelling.

As a part of the Teachers for Global Classrooms program, I met people who had been doing this for years.  One of them has a sock monkey who actually has his own Facebook page.  Another has a laminated cut out of her high school's mascot.  I started thinking about it again when I saw theirs, but I couldn't find anything that was small enough not to be a nuisance.  I know enough about myself as a traveler to know that if it's a hassle, I'm not going to fool with it.  I considered several items - a small beanie of our school mascot, an exceedingly tiny and grumpy sock monkey, a small blue owl someone gave me - but none of them seemed right.

A couple of weeks ago, a teacher buddy of mine started putting up pictures of a tiny finger puppet of Vincent Van Gogh she'd gotten at a museum.  I had a forehead-smacking moment when I saw it.  I actually have the William Shakespeare from that same series.  I bought it at the Frazier Museum in Louisville the first year I read for the AP test.  It's been guarding my Diet Mt. Dew in my classroom since that summer.

However, I didn't want to travel with Will.  I have so many things that are Shakespeare.  I love him.  I just didn't want to travel with him.  I looked over the line of the puppets from the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild for another option. They're all so cute and funny that the kid in me wanted all of them.  The adult in charge of the checkbook managed to limit that other aspect to purchasing two:  the Cheshire Cat and Emily Dickinson.

I got Chessy today.  I am pretty positive that he will be the one I travel with.  The quote at the top is most of the reason why, but there are other quotes that fit every long journey I've ever been on.  The one that springs to mind is the famous:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "otherwise you wouldn't have come here."

As anybody who has ever traveled knows, there comes a point (maybe the exact moment you break out the suitcases) that this quote becomes painfully true....

I also like Chessy because he's a cat. That fits in with many things, the real-life furry beasts sleeping on my furniture that I miss when I'm travelling, the mankei neko I collected in Japan, the mascot of my school.  Cats are also good travel buddies because they remind you to be curious, to dress simply but with elegance, to enjoy any and all luxuries that come your way, and to sniff at unfamiliar things (possibly also while smacking them lightly with your paw) before accepting them.

It's a silly little thing, but I am looking forward to taking Chessie with me to Turkey.  If I can get a picture of him inside the Hagia Sofia, then that's going to be a very good thing.

Ah. So That's What That's All About.....

Gifts from Furry Children

Yesterday, I had a migraine of the "hammer of God" variety that is always such fun.  I don't really know what caused it, but I suspect it has something to do with the upcoming "supermoon" we're expecting tonight.  My headaches seem tied to the phases of the moon as well as the phases of my body and the vagaries of the weather.  Since there was no supermegastorm destroying the world yesterday, I am guessing it was lunar pull.  Me and the ocean, I guess. The headache hit me hard and early, I took a Maxalt, and the rest of the day melted away into a hazy blur.

My cats and dogs hovered around me all day.  I suppose it was their way of checking on me.  I'm pretty sure they know when I'm sick.  Chewie spent most of his day sprawled out next to the couch.  Dillon, my little cat, stayed on me or beside me all day and on into the night.  It was nice to feel loved.

Other contributions from members of my furry family were less appreciated.  I got up this morning and stumbled for the shower without turning the light on.  The day after a migraine that bad my eyes tend to be fairly light sensitive.  I got clean and returned to my bedroom to dress, and when I finally turned the light on, the last of the critters' kindnesses was neatly laid across the foot of my bed:  a dead mouse.

It was bloodless and quite still.  This undoubtedly means that in the night while I was sleeping, either Dillon or Pearl brought me a mouse.  I know it wasn't Yoda; her Imperial Majesty doesn't lower herself to pursue food unless it's the canned kind.  Probably it was my big grey fluffy lioncat, Pearl.  She is the household huntress.  I keep thinking about her thought processes.  I imagine it went something like this.  "Mama has been sick all day.  There has been an absence of patting and love for me, even though I am furry and gorgeous.  Food will make her better.  I will bring her food.  I will provide.  She will be happy again, and patting and love will fall from the skies."  And voila, mouse.

This isn't the first time this has happened.  Despite all the efforts of me and my pest control guy, the occasional little brown field mouse finds its way in the house.  I saw Pearl stalking one last night in the laundry area.  I can always tell when she's scented something. She stares into odd nooks and crannies. She has a specific noise she makes when the is on the hunt, and her level of complete dedication to it is a little frightening.  There has been at least one other time when I woke up to find a mouse-present at the foot of my bed.

My grandmother's Siamese, Sammy, used to do that all the time.  He was twenty-something pounds of muscle, and when he was young, he'd go hunting in the field behind their house and bring her big field rats.  He'd lay them neatly on the back door mat, and since Nana hated all forms of mice, every time she'd look out the back door and see it, she'd scream.  I suppose Sammy thought she was screaming in joy.  He probably thought, "Yes.  I have made my human loudly happy.  Success."

As for my mouse gift, I removed and disposed of it.  The comforter is even now in the washer.  While I would really like not to wake up to another gift of this kind, I will take it in the feline spirit in which it was given.  It's nice to have something love you enough that it wishes to care for you, I suppose, even if it does come in the form of a dead rodent.

Coming Apart at the Seams

Today, during the process of getting my daily dose of stomach acid reading about Turkey, I came across an article about Brazil.  I suppose the news service I use just decided to lump all the protests together.  The whole damn world is falling apart and the governments thereof are sitting in a corner covering their eyes and ears and pretending it's all okay.

I was in Brazil last summer at this very time.  It is surreal for me to think back over the oddly empty and quiet government buildings that we toured in Brasilia as now being the center of a protest movement.  I look at the pictures of the senate building, all clean lines and Niemeyer angles, and I'm trying to imagine that people overran it and are standing on top of it, that the government ran away.  It's either pure insanity or the beginning of hope.  God knows I'm not wise enough to know which.  Maybe it's both.  Maybe change is made of both.

Some of the protests that have happened lately are very specific.  People have a clear message for their government.  You're spending too much of our money.  You're stealing a bunch of our resources and running away.  You're sticking your fingers into our privacy, our choices.   You're destroying our freedom. We don't like it.  You should quit.

Some of them are not.  People are just generally pissed and gathered.  There is an unnamed sense of unhappiness that spreads or a small thing that touches off a deep-seated pocket of explosive issues.

What's happening to us all?  I used to think that it was just our government here in the States that was fairly out of touch with its constituents.  We always have some scandal or ridiculous sneaky crap going on.  If the people running our nation used half as much passionate ingenuity in solving problems and bettering their country as they do trying to line their own pockets, accrue power, clandestinely pursue illegal activities, and sink the "other guy," we'd probably all live in solid-platinum houses on Mars.  (I'm just saying.)   It's probably been that way since 1776.  Maybe there were times when it abated, but maybe it's always there when governments are more worried about their own power than they are about the good of the people they represent.  Right now seems to be one of those moments where everyone everywhere is just tired of it.

What will happen to us all?  What's coming next?  As always, that old Yeats poem is sneaking around in the back of my head.  Clearly, the center is not holding.  What now?  I'm afraid we are living in what that ancient Chinese proverb calls "interesting times," and you know all about that.....

Turkey Again

I am keeping up with the news on Turkey daily.  What I see makes me more and more concerned.  Something that started as a protest over a public space has turned into an issue big enough to rend a nation.

I do not really feel qualified to comment much on the events I see there.  I am at best an interested outsider.  I can't understand some of the things I see, though, and feel compelled to ask a question.  How do leaders get so out of touch that they refuse to hear the voices of those who put them in power?  If unrest suddenly breaks out in large sections of a nation, I'm not sure I think an elected official should use threats and force to keep themselves in power.

I can't form absolute opinions about Turkey's current situation because everything I'm getting about it is from a few sources, and, of course, both sides are accusing each other of editing for greatest political currency.  As I scroll through images of tear gas, emergency hospitals, water cannons, and the like, though, I wonder if it looks the same to us on the outside as it does to the people affected.  I throw my mind back to the Occupy Wall Street protests, and I remember how divided my own nation was about that.  All I guess I can say with any certainty is that it looks an awful lot like a situation that will end in many more people being wounded or killed.

In addition to thinking about the situation in general, I am also concerned about my upcoming trip. I don't mean to be selfish.  Surely the events that are unfolding are so much more important than just one trip for one group of foreign tourists.  However, I have been excited about this trip for a long time now, and as I have come to know more about this country, so too has my eagerness to see and experience it all increased. I can't help but wonder if we will even get to go at all, if all this will just wind up being a place I yearn to see and never have access to.  I also have to say that I sometimes wonder if we do go if we'll wind up caught in the riptide of this particular moment in history.  I wonder if, once again, being an American will be an uncomfortable thing abroad.

Mostly, though, I am just wondering if Turkey will manage to find a middle way or if it will collapse into the same sort of partisan turmoil that devours the land to its south.  I can only hope that the different groups can come together and somehow find peace.

Flying Roadtrip

Thursday, my best friend and I took a flying roadtrip west.  We started in Port Gibson to see the giant golden hand on the top of First Presbyterian.  From there, we went on the back road that never ends to see Windsor Ruins.  Finally, we finished up in Natchez where we ate at Mammy's Cupboard and toured Longwood before we had to turn back home.

I'd been on mostly this same trip last year and shot a ton of pictures.  It was so different having my friend along.  We talked in that way that people who have known each other forever can do as we traveled, and it wasn't necessarily that anything earthshattering was said.  It was just nice to have someone to say something to.

For both of us, this was sort of an abbreviated version of a long trip we took in 5th grade, the Mississippi Trip.  Both of us remember bits and pieces of that tour of our state.  My friend had a Polaroid camera, and she took pictures everywhere we went.  On this trip, she had her husband's good Nikon instead.  There was a gentle echo of that other trip so long ago as we traveled.

The sites themselves were much as I saw them last time.  Windsor didn't have a carload of thugs napping under the shade trees this time, and part of the single-strand wire fence built to keep people out of the structure was down, but everything else was just like it was before.  The big gold hand in Port Gibson was still large and golden.  Longwood was still frozen in time, silent, majestic, dreaming.

Of them all, Longwood always moves me most.  I don't know why I keep going back there.  There's something about the innovation and the forethought that Haller Nutt put into the design of that house that makes the unfinished part so much more poignant. The potential for wonder that is revealed in all the existing details is tantalizing and somehow saddening as well.  What would it have been if it could have been finished?  Would it still stand today, or would it have been torn down, burned up, forgotten and discarded?

Every tour I've had through the house has been a bit different depending on the docent.   The only thing I don't like about any of these tours is that the guides don't give you enough time inside simply to absorb the history and the feeling of the place.  It deserves a moment of quiet contemplation, of silence, of listening to the wind through the oaks outside.  It deserves a moment for the mind to paint the red brick walls with lustrous plaster, to create the missing statues in the domed niches, to remove the planks that hide the interior or the onion dome and add the mirrors that would have lit the whole house with their reflection.  Instead, there is sort of a brief patter, a quick "run-through," and next thing you know, you're being ushered politely, gently out the graceful front doors and into the nuclear heat of a Mississippi summer where, quite frankly, it is not possible to imagine much of anything that doesn't involve glacial cold.

It feels like there are a million untold stories in Longwood.  I am sure this is true of every house, past and present.  There is just something lingering in the air and the objects there, though, that invites imagination to embroider details.  There are paintings of those who lived there through time, and there are the very beds and books they used and loved.  The hand-drawn plans of what was to be created line the walls.  Tools and packing crates with hand-written address labels sit as though workers will return to tidy up soon.  Objects picked with care to provide comfort and beauty remain.  It feels like a place that lives in a half-life, wanting to be more but knowing that somnolent state is all that it will ever know.

Today is the 149th anniversary of Haller Nutt's death.  Heartbroken by the way his fates fell during the Civil War, he contracted pneumonia and succumbed.  I can't help but think that when he died, he must have been so worried about everything, his failing fortunes, his family and what would become of them after he was gone, the treatment he'd received at the hands of a government he had not defied.  He was a brilliant man by all accounts, and that shattered half-finished magnificent experiment of a house is terribly, terribly sad.  I wondered how often he stood in the center of that main floor or roamed the upper levels forbidden to modern tourists, worrying and hoping about the future, seeking some way, any way to bring some level of control and sanity back to his world.

I don't know if I'll make this same trip again, and if I do, I don't know that I will  go back to Longwood.  Likely, at some point, I will travel that way again.  There is so much in Natchez to see that I wouldn't have to go there to have something to do.  I am pretty sure I will make my way up that curving and treelined drive again, though.  The sad majesty of what awaits at the end seems to demand it.

Alif the Unseen

“A girl he loved had decided she did not love him--at least, not enough. How was such a problem usually addressed? Surely not with the clandestine exchange of books and computer surveillance and recourse to the jinn.” 
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
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I saw this book mentioned on Twitter or Facebook by one of the NPR book bloggers, and I was curious enough based upon what they said to go find it on Amazon.  Once I read the full premise, I got a sample on my Kindle.  From that point I was pretty much hooked.

I've never read anything like Alif.  It's the story of a young man of Indian-Arab heritage who lives in an unnamed totalitarian Gulf emirate.  He has created a separate online life for himself.  He works as a programmer/hacker whose programs serve any organization fighting the restrictions of the government.

He has fallen in love with a beautiful, intelligent woman from a rich family.  When that relationship falls apart, he decides to use his computing skills to grant her last request of him, that she should never see him again.  What comes of his fit of anger and sadness is unexpected.  It will lead him into the world of the jinn, a world that has always lain side by side with his everyday world without his knowledge.

Alif is part political protest, part fairy tale.  Some of the events feel very current since it seems that hardly a week goes by without mention of some government who is seeking to control their people by controlling their access to the Internet.  The world of the jinn creeps up on the reader in the same way it creeps up on Alif and his companions.  By the time he's immersed in the deepest part of it, their city and way of living seems entirely possible.  Different, but possible.

I guess this book fits most neatly into the category of fantasy with a side-order of sci-fi.  That label is a bit misleading, though.  It spans other genres; bildungsroman, political theory, and philosophy are all there, too. There is a muted but still moving love story.  Issues of gender and cross-cultural communication are explored.

Then there's the hero himself.  Alif, like most of us, thinks his actions and his motivations are fairly good ones.    Even though he is selfish, careless with those who care for him, and self-isolated from the world around him, he thinks the way he's chosen to live is the right path. What he discovers is that reality has a way of stripping away illusion, even the ones we keep about ourselves.  This, then, is a story of a person becoming attuned to the real told through the profoundly imaginary.  It's lovely.

One of the most important things this book addresses is what it means to be free.  How can we keep ourselves free?  What should we do with freedom when we have it?  What is the price of freedom?  While this may seem trite, the way Alif deals with it is thought-provoking, especially in a time in which government surveillance of our online lives has been confirmed.  (Hi, PRISM.  Scan me.  Go ahead.  Scan me.)

This book is probably the best thing I've read this summer.  In fact, it's one of the best books I've read in quite awhile, period.  I would love to see some kind of sequel with more of the world of the jinn in it.  I think the possibility for that exists in a couple of ways.  I don't know if Ms. Wilson will pursue this storyline or not. What I do know is that as it stands, Alif the Unseen was a profoundly original work in a sea of copycat fiction.  It is very much worth your time.