Vox Clamantis En Deserto

Eschatological Again

2010-10-21T23:01:00.000-07:00

I've posted below an entry I made years ago, when I was thinking about the topic of death and Derrida; it holds up pretty well but of course my life has changed. Because the planets have turned many times, and because I have become more aware of my body's pathway, my experience with the end of life has become, as Paul Wallace over at Positive Science/Negative Theology says, "most literal and most frightening." And I, like Paul, don't have a strong faith in the heaven thing to tide me over the final approach.

But I have to admit, I'm still not that scared--yet. One of the reasons may be my spiritual condition, which is far from enlightened but is the result of a few little-deaths, experiences such as the ones described in Drinking the Dragon, a Jungian self-help guide by San Diegan Patricia Ariadne that I am finding remarkably interesting right now:

Life is full of seemingly random, senseless events that shake our faith in those things which formerly made us feel secure, leaving us feeling vulnerable and uncertain. In some cases, a crisis is a spiritual call to live our lives less superficially, to recognize our own complexity, to explore what sustains us when we can no longer carry on (pg. 18).

Ariadne is not talking only about major turning points, although she uses many such events to illustrate her guidebook. The "crises common to modern life" she is talking about are seemingly mundane things such as divorce, the loss of a job, the medical issues we all face (and I am facing) as we grow older, and in addition, the stuff that really turns us around: the death of a loved one or a child, one's own impending death, the depths of depression so deep that life seems, in the words of Mother Theresa, "an arid desert," the emptiness and lack of god-presence that brings people, well, to their knees, not in prayer but in despair. What Ariadne calls "The Dark Night of Soul" and I have my own list, stuff in my own life and in the life of the love of my life, that has turned me around and will turn us around eventually. Or not.

But stuff has happened to me, and to people close to me, that causes me to assess the reality of things unseen. Like Wallace notes in his latest post, I am not usually looking for the unseen wonders when I run across them; usually, it's like this:

When do I see God? Not often, I can tell you that. . . . The precipice I mentioned earlier, the one above which we have each walked our entire lives, the one that scares us because it’s about the reality of our creatureliness and frailty and mortality, has a lot to do with God for me. It is only after a good long look down into that abyss that I have found God. And I never look down in search of God. It’s kind of an involuntary thing, and I don’t know what I look for when I look down there. But if I hold the emptiness in my view for longer than is comfortable, something shows up that I can’t deny. Something that makes me at first scared as hell, and then peaceful beyond words. Strange, that that’s how it is for me. Am I alone in this?

This might be an occasion members of Alcoholics Anonymous call the "ninth inning," as in the phrase "using God as a bush-league ninth inning pinch hitter" but there it is. I have been at that abyss, but I have also been places I didn't know were at the edge, but it turned out that God, or whatever, was right there signaling to me. They are the signs of the holy that have come my way, the symbols I have come to realize are meaningful in a psychic sense, a sense that is not scientific but literary, a personal narrative of events and presences, stories I made up and ones told to me: a butterfly, a coyote's howl, a cat crossing the sidewalk at night, a crowd of people at a traffic light, listening to a siren as the light turns from red to green, making the sign of the cross and reminding me my mother, and the wonder of the sign at the time, in just this place, right here.

And for a split second, I know what it means and then I'm back, wondering what will happen next but sure that a sign will come, like it has before.

Because I've already pushed the button, and surely the light will change, and surely I will cross to the other side, eventually.

Toldja

2010-10-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

A very long time ago (Aug. 20, 2004) I wrote a letter (behind a firewall, sorry!) to the San Diego Union-Tribune about immigration and the U.S. border policies as they affect us in San Diego County. Here's a clip:

The article's focus on illegal immigrants as the "trespassers" ignores the real issue behind illegal immigration in San Diego: In pursuit of a nebulous, unattainable security, the Border Patrol has made a Soviet-style police state out of rural San Diego, and many residents I know are furious at being asked for their "papers" by uniformed, federal trespassers who ignore the civil rights of Americans along with the human rights of their immigrant "prey."
But there is hope. History has shown us that those who aspire to freedom will find it, no matter how high the wall or how ruthless its guards, in Berlin or in Jacumba.

In the fall of 2010 we have candidate Joe Miller, running for the U.S. Senate in the state of Alaska, telling his future constituents about his philosophy of national borders:

"East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could."

The Tea Party-backed candidate, who is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, explained that he once served at the Fulda Gap, a point on the former East-West German border. East Germany's border troops were given orders to shoot anyone trying to flee East Germany.

Some things just never get old, I guess; but I'm sure getting sick of this crap.

Images courtesy of Thinkquest and The Border Angels

After Four Years, and a New Post

2010-10-19T20:06:00.000-07:00

The best way to start is to start, and so I'll start by saying I'm not sorry. I didn't write a post because I didn't want to write one, for various reasons that I'm sure you will figure out as you read the blog--if you read it after all these years or if you are just starting to read it. I don't feel like rehashing the last three and a half years so I won't, but one thing I can say about my interior and exterior life lately, in a general way, is that I have not been busy. To begin (again):

I have enjoyed reading PZ Meyers for many years, but I did not enjoy listening to him the other day on Point of Inquiry, and I think the reason has more to do with the media than the message. It's funny how I can read the most strident opinions on the web and maintain a distance from the discourse, but the more intimate--if that is the correct term--dialogue of radio, the speech acts wafting into my ears, affects me on a more emotional level, and affects my rhetorical response which, after all, is just as much emotional as rational. Listening to him helped me to locate myself in the spectrum of the debate between atheists and theists, and if he represents, as he purports to do in a rational sense, the atheist point of view then I am squarely not an atheist--not because I do not admire his rationality but because I do not admire him. He has successfully persuaded me to realize that I do not want to think the way he thinks, and to treat the experience of other human beings the way he treats the existential experience of his listeners.

On the other hand, Jennifer Michael Hecht (who is an atheist, too) is able to sum up my response nicely, in an unemotional way: "[rationality and by extension, science] is not the totality of human experience." She does not believe this, but realizes that many people do believe it, and I get a feeling of exasperation from her, coming over the airwaves as if by magic. Hecht is aware that when discussing God, she is in a rhetorical situation, not a rational one.

To sum up, my rhetorical response to philosopher Hecht (in an imaginary bar) is to buy her another beer; my response to developmental biologist Meyer is to pour his beer over his head and remind him that the lab bottles are full of fish urine and need to be wiped out.

Derrida to the End

2010-10-19T01:00:00.000-07:00

"I shall always have been eschatological," Jacques Derrida writes in Circumfessions, "if one can say so, in the extreme . . ."; if my walks in the natural world show me beginnings and ends, if they point out the connectedness of life and the end, death, Derrida shows me how language itself constitutes its own death, its own end. And it's not as bad as one might think, not as bad as Duerer and the other Christians thought the End might be because, after all, we all are gonna get there someday anyway: we all die, and have friends, lovers, loved ones, and cultural icons who pass away. He saw it as a condition of living, as a state of being, and notes, like me, that "I have to this day above all lived, enjoyed, wept, prayed, suffered as though the last second, in the imminence of the flashback end . . ." in a wonderfully realistic stance that has taken me many decades to master, if I have mastered it at all. Derrida's biographer Bennington approaches this stance by looking at the way language works in our heads, trying to figure out the exact moment when a sentence, for example, is real: at the beginning, when it is spoken or thought; after the author dies, when it is memorialized on paper, or in a flash, an augenlid, or eyeblink, when meaning and world are one, which is forever memorialized in a word.

The master Derrida knows, however, that this instant is already gone, effaced, before we realize what happened. What he confesses is that the end time is the final meaning of our metaphysic, the only time we can be at one with our language, and who wants to rush that? So we content ourselves with a field of negotiated mystery we call writing, and hope that once in a while we get a glimpse of eternity: a white butterfly flitting in memory of a loved one who has passed; the phantom white Oldsmobile our father used to drive, stopped at a light; the dried skin of a rattlesnake floating across the sand; the chipped, crakced reproduction of our Lady of Guadelupe left on the trail as a token of good luck.

The geologic traces of ancient lakes, the evolved landscapes of the south California deserts, leave their memories of the effaced suffering, ecstasy, god and human, in my soul as I walk in the stones. Most of the time the wind blows clean and clear, buffeting the dried flowers of last year's bloomings, swirling the sand in rounded patterns among the stones, which have sat for centuries remembering their submersion, exposed for the first time to sun for thousands of years. The stones sit, immovably speaking to me as I walk, of distance, direction, patience, stillness, the final resting place that has been here all along.

Ethnic Mannequins of the Desert (Thesis Statements I)

2007-04-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

As I've been doing the deeds for my graduate seminar on ethnic american theory and gender studies in film and literature, I've been thinking about the way "types" or "stereotypes" or "tropes" or "characters" emerge from the burning sands of the deserts of the american southwest, and I have some ideas. One is that over the past century or so, at least from the point of view of the dominant white culture, that abstract machine, the constitutive mechanism, the stuff that makes the desert story go, has changed a bit. One of the changes may be a kind of diffusion or infusion brought on by the processes of globalization, that thing that has both McDonald-ized world culture and brought interesting connections to the foreground.

Out of Japan, which Jean Baudrillard claims is "already a [cultural] satellite of Earth," comes an anime set in a desert that has many of the same processes in operation as any late 20-21st-century Sonoran desert story. Water is scarce, ruins are ancient, rocks are hot, sand is hot, outlaws roam freely, and most tellingly, the silence breaks in with wind and bright sun, forcing the wanderers to stop and wonder--if only to reload.

Desert Punk is otherworldly not because the characters are from another planet, but because the tropospherics are pasted onto animated ethnic mannequins that are stereotypes from an otherworldly cultural space: a Baja 500 on Mt Fuji, a Hiroshimic Sierra Madre with borderland bandidos sporting Dune-type stillsuits and conical sun hats.
The Sonoran/Coloradan Desert has gone global, generating the silences, stillnesses, and liminal spaces from which sprout the stuff that usually sprouts in the wilderness.
Baudrillard quoted from "Utopia Achieved", which I make my poor RWS 200 students read in Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, 6th ed. (ed. by Bartholomae and Petrovsky), pg. 110. You may download Desert Punk on iTunes or get some dvds, or watch it on the SciFi channel, I hear.

To The Sacred Land

2007-03-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

I'm off to the Desert, to walk the Holy Landscape of Creation.

Ya--Hey!

How to do Environmental Work Osmotically

2007-03-21T07:42:00.000-07:00

KPBS has a wonderful story about mexican Superhero Wrestler, El Hijo Del Santo, leading a campaign to promote social and environmental education and justice in Tijuana. He's also helped save sea turtles.

From Frontera, March 20:
Lucha Hijo del Santo contra contaminación

Un niño pide un autógrafo al Hijo del Santo, quien ayer acudió a una primaria de la colonia San Bernardo,
en San Antonio de los Buenos, para apoyar acciones de ecologistas contra la contaminación del mar.

(Photo by Sergio Ortiz, Frontera)

Still Life Osmosis

2007-03-19T21:35:00.000-07:00

Vincent Van Gogh, Still Life Majolica with Wildflowers
(This post is ~~stolen from~~ inspired by concepts and readings from Dr. Bill Nericcio's English 725 Ethnic American Literature Seminar and especially from a close reading of Chapter 5 of Tex{t}-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the Mexican in America, a fine study of Frida Kahlo and Gilberto Hernandez titled "Xicanosmosis: Frida Kahlo and Mexico in the Eyes of Gilbert Hernandez.)

When we got civilized, Westerners in the Old World built walls to separate the inside from the outside, and for many years, most of us thought they separated us from the natural world--the walls protected us from cold and rain but cut us off from the pretty stuff, too, such as blue skies and flowers. Pretty soon, we started trying to bring the outside in through representation. The idea was to decorate our houses with tamed images of nature, pictures that didn't have all those funny smells and runny fluids associated with biological stuff.
This detail from a Pompeian fresco shows how the architectural borders become natural representational windows; later, when painters got framed into the making art (with a Capitalist A) even tortured souls such as Vincent Van Gogh stuffed their inspired visions of the natural world into tidy pictures that didn't get dirt on the floor.

When the Colonists came to impose their wallish borders on the indigenous peoples of America, they ran into osmosis.
Gilberto Hernandez's frame from his graphic novel series on the magically realist Palomar shows us the problem for the conquistador of the New World: stuck in an environment that has no walls or borders, the photographer is forced to realize his own position, a position that is ozmotically connected to everything, especially connected to the people who make a habit of picking stuff up and bringing it inside.

The people who met the colonizers had still lifes, but the art they made, at least from the perspective of the art dealer-border guards, didn't fit in the dualism of inside and outside, wild and civilized, natural and artificial. Most importantly, these emergent ozmoticians--and we can include Van Gogh among their number--engaged, in their arts, in a valiant effort to increase the permeability of the borders that civilization put between the bodily natural, the inner spirit, and the outer representation, recognizing that the ozmotic process is not one of separation, of keeping things--molecules, energies, fluids, psyches, experiences, flowers--apart but a way to comingle them, to assert the connectivity between the natural and us. The doorway into the natural has one (of many) permeable pathway, and that is our own bodies, the way we perceive, the experience we share when we make or look at art. Artistic border crossers, some of them, start here.

The establishment types, colonists of nature and used to seeing safe and non-throbbing representations framed on the wall, thought that idea was kind of icky.

When Frida Kahlo presented the still life above (Naturaleza Muerta (Tondo), 1942) to the wife of the president of Mexico, the story goes, she refused it--presumably because of its oh-so-biologically-female innards represented as fruit. That's the story, and it makes sense, but the most dangerous thing, for the indigenously inclined, is not the representation of female parts, but the illegal osmosis of perceiving the wild inside us, connected to the wild all around us, outside.

But those Mexican artists haven't given up, despite the danger, as a photograph of a pear, a classic still life subject, by Flor Guarduño shows. This naturaleza muerta brings the natural reproductive system into the house and leans it up against a wall, seducing us into a voyeuristic pear-slit attraction, undeniably inviting us to peer into the pears natural insides, exposing us to the wilderness of our own representationally scandalous ideations.

This photograph makes me hot for pears, and according to the Colonial paradigm, that ain't right.

South California artist Hernandez does it--that is, lives in the semi-permeable, osmotic moment--in his magical realism, embedded in the graphic novels, serialized in comic form in the Love and Rockets series. His experience with still lifes is probably more like the orange crate here than some painterly pot of flowers, so he comes at it from a different perspective--that of a South Central L.A. chicano dude--but the osmosis happens anyway, even though in his cinematic, people-centered space a still life more probably is a dead memory of representation--but still an indigenous text of graphically natural representation:

Hernandez does an ultimate form of ozmotic function--he portrays natural people in his art, indigenous people who are not "corrupted" by Western civilization but who function in the semi-permeable states, what some might call "on the border" but what is important here--at least for me--is that these people don't "cross", they live in the membrane, on the border, in the place where the osmosis happens. They emerge, Hernandez emerges, not as a new type of, as Nericcio puts it, "border as wound, border as hyphen" but within a look at the process of "absorption, evaporation, and secretion" that flows both ways--indeed in many directions--across borders that are culturally, geographically, historically, psychologically, scientifically constructed to traditionally divide things but in reality connect them (195-96). This type of osmosis doesn't happen at the approved sites of the Mexican-American War but all over culture, art creatively emerging as a process of osmosis. So a still life lies in our naturally occurring function of permeability, our human, geological, biological flow that depends on the connective tissue in our heads and on our bodies for its creative function, a function that creates beings of beauty who are functions of osmosis.

Another local nature writer

2007-03-09T12:44:00.000-08:00

(photo by Kate Anderson for Orion Magazine)

Richard Louv, who recently quit his gig at the Union-Tribune to devote himself full-time to the cause, has a good article in the recent issue of the beautiful Orion magazine titled leave No Child Inside: The Growing Movement to Reconnect Chiuldren and Nature. An excerpt:

In similar ways, the leave-no-child-inside movement could become one of the best ways to challenge other entrenched conceptions—for example, the current, test-centric definition of education reform. Bring unlike-minded people through the doorway to talk about the effect of society’s nature-deficit on child development, and pretty soon they’ll be asking hard questions: Just why have school districts canceled field trips and recess and environmental education? And why doesn’t our school have windows that open and natural light? At a deeper level, when we challenge schools to incorporate place-based learning in the natural world, we will help students realize that school isn’t supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.

Seems like a good way to think about my return to SDSU as a stud34nt-teacher next week. We'll have to get out.

A Real Desert Writer

2007-03-02T09:53:00.000-08:00

Lawrence Hogue, author of All the Wild and Lonely Places: Journeys in a Desert Landscape, a fine work of postmodern environmental literature, has a new website with links to two of his essays about our beautiful deserts. He posted a picture of a bighorn I just had to steal.

Check him out!

Bloodlines, Arterial Flows, and You and Me

2007-02-03T22:12:00.000-08:00

My friend Kelly from MN, in her comment to my post of January 23rd, wonders whether I, or anyone down here in the South Cali Virtual Space connects riding the bus with environmentla justice; she notes that even in the liberal wonderland of Minneapolis the people who ride the bus are mostly folks of color and other Others.

Well yes, dear Kelly, I have noticed, but let me see if I can put it in terms that have meaning for me today, paradigms that connect the flows of trafffic with the human arteriality, the individual practices of deterritorialization that have gone on with me lately. Arterial flow is structured similarly in humans and in transportation systems, and solutions to blockages in these systems have similar dynamics.

The problem for our freeway system is usually presented here in gas-tax rich California as a problem that can be solved by more roads; these addditional freeways, we are told, "relieve" the "congestion" caused by the increasing numbers of cars. We eco-travelers, however, know the score: no amount of freeway concrete will be enough to relieve the need for more freeways unitl we learn to transport ourselves more effeciently, with less space, using fewer calories of fuel and fewer acres of land.

The problem runs deeper than the number of cars. It is the way we transport ourselves, with wasted space and wasted materials, in an ever-increasing, addictive need for speed that is unhealthy for us and for the ecosystem. Freeway bypasses fill up as fast as they are built, and will continue to do so, until we develop new habits of travel that relieve the source of the congestion, not its flow.

I know this fact from personal experience in my own arterial flows. When I went under the knife recently to have femoral arterial bypass surgery, I knew that despite the new routes for blood flow offered by the new freeway in my leg, I would have to get at the root cause of the congestion, and not merely provide yet another road for the sanguine traffic within me. The causes for the congestion, such as smoking, eating fatty foods, an overabundance of shallow bodily gratifications, would fill up my new freeway just as fast as the new bypass over State Route 56 will fill up if it ever gets done.

Reducing arterial congestion, you see, is as easy as quitting a few bad habits which tend to territorialize many systems in our modern world. Driving to the store for Cheetos not only plugs up my arteries, but the community's arteries, too.

After going through the surgery, I plan to just cut it out.

Bloggy Goodness

2007-01-23T13:40:00.000-08:00

If you are looking for something to while away the hours while your inner genealogy emerges from its interconnection with the Creator, there's no better way than to consult my Ethnic Literature and Film professor, William A. Nericcio's Tex[t]-Mex:Galleryblog. His new book, Tex{t}Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the Mexican in America is OUT and it's really, really, cool.

Besides, he linked to me.

Rhizomatic Genealogy: Meditations on Connectivity III

2007-01-20T20:47:00.000-08:00

The frontera between our Patrimony and its cultural, colonial reality becomes even more twisted, and nebulous when we look at the way men and women characterize(d) their racial origins and appliy(ed) labels to themselves in the historic Mexico and in our present-day genealogical meanderings. Observe how one can create a Spaniard out of mestizo root stock:

Here we have the beginnings of La Nueva Raza. A spanish guy, origin and genetic stock unknown, marries a Native American woman and fathers a mestizo daughter. You can tell he's a Spaniard by the kewl moustache.

The fun begins when the intermarriages (we call them intermarriages when we want to racialize whole groups of people so we can colonize them) need to be socially accepted--the colonizers devise a rape scheme that essentially recolonizes the children of decolonial intermarriages by labeling them as rewhitened. Notice the progression in Sr Don Pedro's descriptions, from Espanol to Meztizo to Castizo to Espanol, a process my cousin notes ends up with a group of people "sufficiently white to be accepted at higher levels of local society.

You can tell the little girl is Espanola by her spiffy hairdo.

However, My cousin has doggedly followed the daddies back to the Roots of Spain, to the fifteenth century, and if we are to believe the yDNA of my first cousin Beto, who springs from the tamale of my uncle Juan, we are european on our male, colonizer side: the haplogroup of that DNA is definitely honkie Nordic-L1a, (M253+) (like I know what that means but I trust the science when its proves what I want), so the idea is, that no matter who the mothers have been in our Mexican genealogy, the fathers all have been Old World, which means not really Mexican. Like Mr. Heston here, we have all been Mexican on the outside but Royally Spanish on the inside all along--but that was just a movie.

So I don't know what to make of all this, except to say that I don't share my cousin's hope that a "genealogical paper trail" will in time, "give us the answer" but I am optimistically sure that I do have an answer: We may all just only be walk-ons in a world-spanning movie set, but we are as John Muir says, "hitched to everything else", including Mexicans, Europeans, Nordic l1a, trees, rocks, natives, colonists, and most assuredly to those we love.

And if that is only just a good movie, that's enough for me.

I Went Down/To the Demonstration

2007-01-11T22:30:00.000-08:00

And saw some really cool people and decided that while I can't always get what I want I do get what I need.

Meditation on Personal Connectivity II

2007-01-08T23:05:00.000-08:00

My cousin has drafted the latest chapter of her massive, three-volume, genealogical record of the Mexican heritage in our family on my mother's side, and her essay, a sort of summation, exemplifies the issues we run into when we try to analyze non-linear processes with linear paradigms. After the meticulous and intrepidly-researched (she has been known to haunt dusty church basement archives from Cuatros Cienagas, Mexico to Toledo, Spain) volumes of genealogical records were set down and published for us, my cousin set out to discover just what "kind" of people we are, or in her words, "What kind of 'label'" we can put on our heritage: are we, or were our ancestors, mestizos, that product of the colonial encounter from which emerges the culture of Mexico, with all its paradoxes and pertubations, or are we still children of criollos, "pure" spanish, as the old-fashioned genealogists, who talked about "bloodlines" and such, would have it? The records of our ancestors are necessarily objects embedded in a cultural milieu, and the colonial project that was the Mexican Conquest privileged the Spanish oppressors; my cousin, leery of taking the baptismal certificates at their word and on the prowl for more interesting ancestors such as crytpo-jews or Aztec princesses, puts the problem succinctly:

"Genetic studies are the only way that most questions of racial origin will be fully answered. they are not compromised by prejudice, marital infidelity, or priests who accommodated families by indicating more desirable racial epithets in birth, marriage, or death records."

When my cousin puts together the DNA tests she has run on selected members of our family with the records available on the web of DNA results with other families related to us according to her research, she finds some interesting things. Results of Y-DNA, the stuff that is passed from father to son only, have identified a distant ancestor who possibly was a Jew, a member of the Coronado Expedition of 1540 named Villareal. Results of the Mt-DNA, the mitochondrial stuff that passes from mother to daughter (actually, mother to everyone but only the daughters pass it along to their offspring) are even more interesting; it shows us in "Haplogroup B", a native American identifier that originated in Asia and came to North America possibly aroun 10-13,000 years ago (late: other haplogroups may have arrived 20-30,000 years ago). Of course, because my cousin and I are both modern mestizos, the children of Mexican mothers and (presumably) white American fathers, her decision to follow the Mexican lineage and my fascination with it are cultural, personal, decisions, but these decisions eerily mimic the mitochondrial matrix in which we embedded--and present us with paradoxes when we consider the patriarchal roots of our immediate ancestors, genetically speaking. More about that later.
(Mestizo drawing scanned by my cousin; DNA pics by the .gov people at The Human Genome Project)

smokeless

2007-01-08T22:55:00.000-08:00

6 days, 21 hours, 5 minutes. yikes.

I've been neglecting the blog, and for that I apologize. I'll have some interesting stuff tomorrow, about my genealogy, Mexicans, Spaniards, norwegians, and complex aggregates. Think rhizomes instead of roots.

Lori saw this tree growing out of a big rock.

Obsessed with Time

2007-01-03T09:44:00.000-08:00

Thomas Moran, A Miracle of Nature (1913)
A recent press release by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility points out, for me, the problems we run into when we try to use language, and only language, to define the spiritual and scientific reality that embraces us with love and beauty. It seems that some creationists have got to the Park Service Administration for political gain, and got them not only to sell a book in the Grand Canyon bookstore that claims the Canyon is only 6,100 years old, but also to gag the Park Service Rangers and Volunteers when it comes to the Canyon's "real" age, which of couse is subject to the relativistic notions of geological theory and science. We (that is, those of us in the 21st century who use television, cell phones, and rolled tacos) are pretty sure that it's a bit more than 6,000 years: more like a few hundred million.

So here's the deal, at least the way it's presented to us by this "Church/State issue":
--Those who view the Bible as an authoritative source for knowledge about the real world say that their research indicates that god "created" (the word, the verb tense is important here) the world according to a certain order, one promulgated by the text of the Bible. Not all religious people think the Bible is literally true, but even metaphorically, the act of creation, the one that happened in the past, and is described in Genesis, really happened: God created the world.
--Those who view the Bible as a work of literature and those who look at it metaphorically--that is, both non-theist scientists and scientists who are religious--are willing to say only that the world "was created" (they won't specify the subject, but for some it is God) however many billions of years ago current knowledge of physics and cosmology tell us about the nature of reality and stuff such as rolled tacos, cheeseburgers, and ipods.

So this church state issue is presented to us as a conflict between two sets of knowledge: knowledge of Who created, and knowledge of When it was created. And here's where language and its church/state issue comes in: the problem is not when or who, but how did everyone decide to say the past tense, "created"? This decision was made when we chose to use language to describe reality, which we do everytime we pass along some idea we have had. We do it all the time, which means we are still doing it, just like I'm doing it now, writing this thing, which is about creation--which happenns all the time: Now.

God creates, I create, the world is created; the problem is not who or when, but which verb tense to use and I propose we use the present tense. God, who creates the universe, has only given us this piss-poor way to talk about it, a way that has a subject and a verb with tenses to organize it into a before/after timeline which may correspond, at times (!) to reality but not all of it, not god.

Thusly, a National Park Service Ranger may, with complete abandon at the edge of the Grand Canyon--is there anyway else to be at the edge of the Grand Canyon but filled with abandon?--say the Canyon is six thousand years old AND eight-hundred million years old and still be right, and that the canyon has been created by god AND by the universe and still be right.

But really, he or she is wrong. The Canyon is created by the universe and by God always.

How do I know this? Easy: I'm not smoking; for fifty-seven hours, forty-four minutes and thirty seconds I have not been smoking.

Notice that this timeline burns left to its end but right to my death.
I am not smoking, and for now, that is the way it shall always be. The world is always, already with me, a nonsmoker.

No Mas

2007-01-01T22:29:00.000-08:00

It's been 22 hours and 31 minutes since my last one, but hey--who's counting?

Good riddance.

Meditation on Personal Connectivity

2006-12-28T22:02:00.000-08:00

A passage from Deleuze and Guttari's A Thousand Plateaus (1987, Minn. Press, pg. 29) hits me:

"There is a desert. Again, it wouldn't make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It's a panoramic vision of the desert, and it's not a tragic or uninhabited desert. It's only a desert because of its ocher color and its blazing, shadowless sun. There is a teeming crowd in it, a swarm of bees, a rumble of soccer players, or a group of Tuareg. I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as ceertainly if I let go the crowd."

And somehow the dream feels right to me. It's a feeling I get when I walk in the wildlands anywhere, a feeling, a pull, to the network of earth/biome/spirit mixed with the individuality of my being, which more and more I think is an illusion. The "me" that I think I am, the one who writes this blog, who is the subject, I am coming to see is merely a point of connection to everything else, an instance of thought process in the dance of interconnected dances, processes, instances. When I walk in the desert or even on the sidewalk in the city, I know about the process that is me, walking, and I know that process is a fleeting moment, a moment when the cells of "my" body connect with concrete or stone or sand, when the chemicals in the air electrochemically network with the neurons attached to my nose and I smell smoke, in the fireplace on Madison Street or in the air around the campfire. But like Franny in her dream, I am schizophrenic: I am afraid to give up my Self, and I can't seem to let go and join the natural world, not really.

Because my leg hurts, and I have to quit smoking, and I need to work, and I have bills to pay, and I think I need to force myself to do right things, over and over, and I can't seem to do it by connecting to the universe but I can't do it if I don't connect to the All-in-All. And sometimes everything is outside of me, most of the time, and it is just me, inside my aching body, willing to feel everything but unable to feel anything without setting me, my individual mind, in the subject position: I feel, I need, I ache, I am angry, lonely, alone, just me.

And everything seems impossibly far away.

But then I'll read about someone else, or talk to a person on the bus, or go for a walk and pet a cat on its front lawn, in the sun, warm, glowing on my face and I feel the earth solid under me, comforting my feet, and the network substantiates itself in me once more, on the sidewalk, at the cat's front lawn, in the sun. Even in University Heights I can perceive the swarm of matter and evergy around me, pulsing with universal being, for a moment. In the desert that moment lasts longer, and stays in my soul--if it is really mine--for the next time. On a walk in the natural world, which is everything, whether its is in the Sierras or in the desert or in the neighborhood, we are all together most of the time.

A Friend is Passing

2006-12-19T12:05:00.000-08:00

Chris over at Creek Running North is transitioning with his friend Zeke. Please go over there and read about the magic and wonder of friendship and life, change and everything.

Much love to Zeke.

Van Dyke's Abstract Machine

2006-12-15T09:06:00.000-08:00

The goal of the colonial project is to distribute the strata of State along a plane of consistency that assigns landscapes a function, a use, a purpose; however, by territorializing the spaces of the desert southwest to function as a border and as a resource bank, the colonial project creates the empty spaces of sublimity, the ruptures where aesthetic abstract machines, which function to deterritorialize, can emerge. The process of writing I describe in this essay is, like the painting process articulated by Stephen Zepke in Art as Abstract Machine, “first of all, an articulation of its finite and infinite dimensions, an art of creation that in its finite processes of construction absolutely deterritorializes the world (destratifies it Deleuze and Guttari will say) and expresses its destratified and infinite ‘plane of consistency’” (Zepke 118). The aesthetic is an abstract machine that is what Deleuze and Guttari call a “line of flight,” a process of deterritorialization, an emergent property that moves from one stratification to an infinite plane of consistency where one can, like Van Dyke says of an antelope on the plain, see in all directions. The State apparatus sees this movement as a flight to another stratified plane of consistency; the desert becomes “tamed” in its emptiness, a framed picture of empty sandstone mesas, with ancient ruins of a long-forgotten people. Such is the picture John Van Dyke surely had in mind when he wrote The Desert.
John Van Dyke may have proposed to fossilize the desert landscape into a gallery of beauty, but his nomadic project, the act of walking across the sands, belies this goal. The meshwork Van Dyke generated in his aesthetic, or to put it more exactly, the meshwork into which he was inserted was, in the early years of the twentieth century, a stratified landscape on the brink of deterritorialization, a process he sparked with the abstract machine of his writing aesthetic. Like the wasp and the orchid, Van Dyke and the desert are engaged in simultaneous processes of de-and re-territorialization, making up a network constituted by flows of energy and materials, ideas and language, that grow and flow towards possibility, adding elements and materials, periodically expanding and contracting over a landscape that always, already contains the traces of its stratifications and destratifications. As we shall see, with the dawn of the 21st century new materials, global in scope and human in their nomadism, will fly into the system, walking across the dehydrated sands to tell their own stories of savage beauty.

John Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances
Pictures: Borderhack, Defenders of Wildlife, Univ. of Arizona, Desert Survivors

the Wasp and The Orchid

2006-12-13T22:42:00.000-08:00

Remarkably, the Western Stream Orchid (pictured) has found a home at the 49 Palms Trail near Joshua Tree National Park. No one really knows what wind blew the seeds here so long ago, or if this is a relict population from the good old days of water wonderfulness during the Pleistocene, but it doesn't matter because the system still works, and that's a fancy enough piece of naturalness as it is. And speaking of that which no one really knows, how the heck do I relate this to Literature? Hmmm.

Consider:
(from a paper I just turned in)

In their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari describe the process of what they call “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” that occurs when a wasp lands on an orchid. “The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing, of the wasp,” they write; the flower steps out of its botanical plane, its territory (which we human beings have assigned it with language) to genetically connect using the wasp as its carrier of pollen (Deleuze 10). The wasp is deterritorialized, that is, inserted into another territory of meaning, by “becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus,” but it reterritorializes the orchid by responding to the flower as an insect, and by inserting its function into the reproductive system of the orchid (10). This instance of natural cooperation between heterogeneous processes, animal and plant, they call “rhizomatic,” an interconnection that emerges not out of structural elements that constitute essential principles of each organism, but out of intense interconnection of multiple possibilities in functions, in flows of matter-energy that are open to different planes of analysis. The relationship between the orchid and the wasp is an example not only of the material flows that occur in nature but of psychic flows that occur in our thought processes: we may think of the orchid as a result of its genealogical roots, evolved over millennia of responses to environmental milieus into a stratified state of orchid-ness that just happens to look like an alluring wasp; we may also think of a wasp as a nomadic bit of genetic flowing, populations of which have evolved the most effective way to gather nectar, which just happens to be to make virtual love to a flower.

These matter-energy flows and the functions that integrate with them constitute Deleuze’s and Guttari’s ontology, which attempts to describe structural types of morphogenesis, of becoming, and these types can be applied, notes Manuel Delanda, to a wide variety of contexts (Delanda 500). These structural processes Delanda positions into two types: strata, which “are composed of homogenous elements” that may be considered in terms of territorialization, a process that is hierarchical and moves toward stasis, and “meshworks” (what Deleuze and Guttari call “self-consistent aggregates”), which “articulate heterogeneous elements as such” (500). The genealogical evolution of a wasp or an orchid, expressed as a historical “tree,” is a strata, a species; the network of processes that make up the parallel evolution of wasp/orchid, expressed as a “rhizome,” is a meshwork, an ecosystem. The strata proceeds towards deterritoriality, becoming heterogeneous; the meshwork proceeds towards territoriality, becoming stratified. Delanda and others who study this ontological method insist that these ways of knowing describe actualities in fields such as geology, biology, socioeconomics, linguistics; Delanda believes that “a deep, objective, isomorphism underlies the different instantiations of strata and meshworks” (501). So the description of the wasp and the orchid describe not only a metaphor for accessing actual structures, but the structures as they are actually formed and evolve.

The syrphid fly is the most probable pollinator of the stream orchid, near as anyone can tell.

Sources:
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus
Manuel Delanda, “Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form.” South Atlantic Quarterly. 96 (1997): 499-514.
Photos:
syrphid fly--High Plains Integrated Pest Management http://highplainsipm.org/
orchid--Gerald and Buff Corsi © California Academy of Sciences
rhizome--some place called "the grange" in australia I got off the internet

"Conjugate Deterritorialized Flows" --Giles Deleuze

2006-12-06T21:04:00.000-08:00

I have been wandering in the sands of a borderland desert, looking for water, desiring to quench, to quaff, to drink from a lost well, a hidden spring, a secret stream. I was lost. I am still walking the pages of the drylands, in the language of salt, of death, of fences, roads, trails, blisters, fear, hope. I turn the page to the next sign, the other paragraph, the distant mountains and I know on the other side, el otro lado, the ancestral flow mires itself in a genealogy so familiar to me, so ancient, and my mother, God rest her soul, remembers the journey north from Mexico, is a remembrance from whence I came. I fear not finding water but am more afraid of standing still in the safe havens of the American Fortress, the dream-social that parches my soul, dries my desires, dehydrates my wanting until I die, a death stood up against a cultural wall, an execution mandated, administered, by that which would keep me from moving.

I read across a century of desire that has been blocked, paved, dessicated, effaced, fenced, walled, enforced, and I have read into the texts, perusing line by line the performance of ideas, memes, cultural flotsam that has rolled across the sand, across the border like butterflies, like dried rolling leaves, brittle seedcases of genetic drift, flowing and returning, blossoming at the confluence of water and earth and air, heated by the sun, blasted to hardness, to archival footprints of books and trails that threaten death to those who cross, who walk, who transgress territorial imperatives. I will read John Van Dyke, Dr. W.J. McGee, Edward Abbey and Luis Alberto Urrea as they trace the flow across the frontier and attempt to map the travelers, to walk along the border of the abstract machine that runs straight as a razor across hundreds of mile of land that is named after the Devil, a Satanic line one can see from space, as I hover, will hover, have hovered, over the barrier between Mexico and the United States, in front of a computer, seeing nothing but lines on a screen. I am turning the pages of a book that has no end, no beginning, but starts when I walk, when I finally walk.

It is possible the text will emerge.

And from that possibility blossoms hope, my desire for a love of land, a desire to share the wonder, a wishing, longing to love the people who walk, who transgress, and wish them well on their journeys. I want to give them water when they are thirsty but I will read instead; in the text I may find conception as they, writing, walking, pine for redemption. While these writers languish in the books, archived in ink and paper, I read and ache for them, want for them, hope for them to find water. And that hope springs eternal.

This really happened:

I was standing on a desolate plain, surface gently rolling with tides of stones, dark against the light sand, a desert pavement treeless and paved with ancient volcanic ejecta, inscribed with countless trails made by gophers, tortoises, rabbits, humans, coyotes, shamans, and as always now in the California desert, cars. But I was in the open, exposed to the sun with no place to hide and I could see for miles to the low mountains near Paso Pichacho. It was silent, daylight streaming quiet as I looked across the landscape at the glitter of the stones in the sun. I heard the faint buzzing and as I turned to the east I could barely see the swirling gray living cloud as it bounced, flowed, meandered in the air at neck height across the plain, coming in my direction. I was wide open to anything that would come by; I felt like the tallest thing for miles, except for a very few dried out willows in a distant wash, or the occasional man-sized cholla or ocotillo. The swarm was coming my way.

The buzzing grew closer, but it still looked like a gray moving mist, a magic cloud swirling over the desert floor, and I stooped to my knees so as not to be the only thing for it to fly into on its journey over this Sacred Land, this Trail of Dreams near the Colorado River. I started to see individual bees as the cloud became more particularized, but their buzzing was foreign to me—they, it, was not interested in me. It was kind of like standing beside a moving train, a train that ignores one as it moves clacking down its tracks, and this swarm of bees, moving in the holy direction, southeast to northwest, Rattlesnake’s direction during the Creation, had much on its mind and it wasn’t me, and for that I was grateful. As the cloud passed over me scattered bees individually flew close to me, close enough for me to feel their wings, and for a moment I was engulfed in humming, and I felt watched, examined, momentarily under surveillance, as the swarm passed overhead, three feet above me and then the mist was passing to the northwest, its back to me, whom it had ignored, and I slowly stood up and watched it as the swirl of misty blackness, a living smoke, trailed away in the bright air to its destination.

I now understand that what I saw (and what I was) was an ontological instance, a kind of abstract machine.

For the Cause of MLA science

2006-11-28T07:39:00.000-08:00

I have put it up and linked, and pinged, and now we'll see what happens. He should probably have a "no traffic" blog as a control for the experiment.

Measuring the Speed of a Meme: An experiment in which you will Participate, or Else . . .

Back Blogging for Theory

2006-09-02T22:25:00.000-07:00

This is the beginning, a new one, to initiate my draftish thoughts on a class I am taking now at SDSU, Chicano Scholarship. We'll be studying--andI I'll be blogging about--efforts by chicana feminists and others to resist effectively the colonizing effects of the new global postmodernism. I'll also be thinking about my thesis, a thing dealing with the colorado and sonoran deserts with a whiff of DeLanda's theory attached. Last year it was the end--this year, the beginning.

Welcome, fellows from CCS 601. For the present, this blog's for you.

Sacred Texts

2005-09-03T22:55:00.000-07:00

As I think about my schedule for Fall, I realize that I'll be studying and using the ideas of Jacques Derrida a lot. The relationships between texts, writing, and the experiences we share on this earth, and the ways we take the representations apart in our heads to make sense of those experiences, the way we deconstruct them as described by Derrida, is an idea I first got ahold of while I was walking in the desert. I was walking and I came upon some writing.

Reading Derrida and reading the inscriptions on the desert floor was hard going, and both took some time. At first, I thought I was reading something that stood for something else; either a philosophical idea expressed as words on a page or a sacred event recorded on the stones of the desert floor. I didn't quite get it, that the thing to do was to read the experience directly, experience the reading directly, on the earth, walking. I started to realize that to read, I had to take a few steps, walk on the searing sand, the burnt stone, and sacred spaces would become spaces that wrote on me.

I talked to some people who knew the writings on the desert floor and saw that reading the stones, like reading Derrida, was not a process of transliteration or translation, not a way to see what was represented by the horses, running men, or sacred trails laid out on the playas, but a way to experience, as he describes it, "that which had to be comprehended: within a nature or a natural law, created or not, but first thought within an eternal presence." The eternal presence of ancient stone did not make pictures of horses or men, something I stood away from and tried to figure out, but a mystery within which I walked, a sacred text I walked in and got closer to god in.

Those old ones could really write and if I step lightly in the hot stones, tread steadily under the burning sun and wiggle my toes in the searing sands of the holy lands, I get that sacred feeling of walking, the reading, the writing all happening at once as creosote sways in the breeze, and silent, ancient lands speak to me of presences past and future, an eternal silence of stone, written while walking, read while sitting.

Despite our technological marvels of communication, our 21st-century writing is still far away, I think, from the sacredness I find in the desert texts. We seem to be overly concerned with surfaces, and are too easily satisfied with shallow description, too unwilling to do the walking with our reading. We write on the skin of the earth, and read only the cover of the book. We read the letters of the spirit, but leave the experience of spirit unread, hence unwritten, and maybe we will never read the full text until we die. But I know that someone has read it, because I have seen the texts, and read the walking spirits on the desert floor of the Colorado.

2005-08-22T08:01:00.000-07:00

Submit!

Bill Nericcio, who will lead this semester's fall seminar on "Chasing Derrida: Lights, Camera, Writing," is the web whiz who whomped up this fine graphic for the Fall Crisis Carnival Conference at SDSU. If you have a hankering to tell the academic world about how you reach the people, please get in touch with us. Email Cathy at: ccmiller22@yahoo.com

Pointing to the Good stuff

2005-08-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

Wood S Lot has a link on his page to some good writing by my favorite desert writer and the online magazine Killing the Buddha, new to me, with the properly irreverent, yet reverent attitude towards religious experience. Charles Bowden's Entrance Wound starts out just right:

Come with me and we will sink into our pleasures. No, we won’t do a line or have a toke or open that bottle. Those things are nice but they never go far enough. The nose goes, the weed takes too long and the liver must be considered, don’t you agree? This time we will get ripped and it will not be an idiom or a metaphor. This time we will take a harder drug, one denounced by the authorities.

Ah yes, the old drug awareness metaphor, livid and vivid for me and yes, I agree, Chuck. I'll let you figure out how Bowden gets from there to here:

The mesquite lives for centuries and we come and go with our cigarettes and coffee, and the mesquite rolls on and on as we pass through from womb to grave. The tree is stark, all bent and gnarly, and fails to make good wood for lumber. There is no straight to it, just this twisting and turning as it roasts under the sun. The grain is close and dark and runs to rich reds that rouge our eyes and make us envy. When burnt, the smoke is acrid, yet sweet, and hangs over our lives as incense for a church we cannot name and a faith we cannot fathom.

But you probably have to have a warm fuzzy feeling for spiny pleasures of the spirit. I do.

The site is good, too. An article about the spirituality of hopelessness, as expressed in a church newsletter contribution called My Kitty, is superb. And the magazine focuses on cooking, too!

Thanks, Terry!

dream on

2005-08-06T12:25:00.000-07:00

I met a guy on the bus the other day who is following his dreams. He started paying attention to them when he found himself driving down the freeway and woke up; he realized he had been sleepwalking and actually got up and started down the road in a dream, and in reality, too. When he woke up one night from a nightmare about pulling his wife out of a flaming car wreck and saw he was pulling his wife out of their bed, he woke up to the need for help. He has gone to all the famous sleep therapy centers, including the ones here in California such as Stanford, but what has really started to show some promise is a California therapy straight out of the fruits and nuts category: ambient light acupuncture and meditation, delivered by a Chinese-American New age therapist in his Mission Valley office. My sleepwalking bus buddy is an Aisan-Fusion chef from Sun Valley so he is no stranger to cultural mixes or to continual reevaluation of his paradigms. The experience with his dreams becoming some sort of dysfunctional reality has cause him to reevaluate his path in life, too. He's thinking about selling his house, buying an RV and heading south before he gets too old to enjoy it. We were talking about our life paths, and he said "you seem like you're following your dream--at least you aren't cooking anymore," and I had to agree. I have given up the pan for the pen, the kitchen for the classroom, and I'm doing it before I get to old to enjoy it.

Henri Rousseau, "The Dream" (1910)

I am followint some sort of dream, and he is getting set to follow his, just as soon as he gets that dreamwaliking thing under some sort of control. What this little interchange that happened as we rode to the nether regions of North Park has shown me is that we all follow our dreams whether we want to or not, and if we ignore the unstoppable route laid out by our prescient minds, it doesn't matter; our minds will take us there anyway. Might as well go with the flow, or in this case, stay on the bus for the full ride.

Atomic Guilt

2005-08-05T23:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wrote about sin, but the horrendous anniversary marked by August 6 boggles my soul. I'm sorry. Please forgive us

1945, over Hiroshima, Japan. 150,000 dead after a minute or two
"Mother or Murderer, you have
given or taken life—
Now all is one!"
Dame Edith Sitwell, "Poems for the Atomic Age"

And we, as readers and writers, look to the works of our creator for, once again, natural forgiveness. At least that what it sounds like John Hersey is doing in his description of the wildflowers blooming in the aftermath of The Bomb:

"Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-footed bean, purslane and clothbur and sesame and panicgrass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb."

The thing is, we're still doing it. No forgivness for us yet.

Canchalagua

2005-08-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

Centaurium venustum Charming Centaury
photo courtesy CalFlora

I went up to Iron Mountain the other day and saw a patch of these fire-following beauties on the hillside. The flowers reminded me of my roots in eco-warriorhood over ten years ago. Or rather, I thought the pretty little flowers reminded me of something important; as I looked at them they looked familiar somehow, like a friend met in the street who is out of context and consequently, out of place in the complicated network of connections that make up a human being's neural address book. Terry reminded me of the connection to the past: the fight over the vernal pool habitat near Carmel Valley led by Isabelle Kay, an area called Arroyo Sorrento or Carmel Mountain. Thinking about those flowers rekindled the memories of the fight over San Diego's Multiple Species Conservation Plan, an exercise in negotiating away nonnegotiable items such as San Diego Mesa Mint (below, courtesy High Country News in a great article about the MSCP), a kind of life we probably won't ever see again, one of God's creations we have bulldozed.

As I rode past Carmel Mountain the other day I remembered again the lost past, the world-encompassing futility that accompanies the loss of a whole landscape, even if it is only a square mile or two. Arroyo Sorrento is now a cookie-cutter housing development that maintains vestigial remnants of its agricultural past in struggling small habitats such as Seabreeze Organic Farms, and nonfunctioning scraps of natural ecosystems unable to support vernal pools and other endemic habitats that the Creator put on the planet not for us, but for other lives with whom we share this plane of existence. I remember the feeling I got as I played my own little part in this process, and I don't like remembering that sin.

The Mesa Mint, Fairy shrimp, California Gnatcatcher, and other species threatened with extinction don't seem like a spiritual problem to us but a scientific or technological one, or to put it socially, a cultural problem. The idea is this: we human beings should be nice to the ecosystem because it would be bad news for us if we aren't nice to it; replacing irreplaceable forms of life with completely replaceable and aesthetically tacky business propositions like the one pictured to the right is bad for the "environment," which we humans defines as a management system organized for our benefit. Failure to maintain this system in this paradigm is not a sin, although it could be a crime: bad social policy done out of ignorance or misplaced motives.

In the kind of paradigm described above, losing a species would be a mistake, possibly a crime, but not a sin. Sins make us feel guilt and shame, and I suppose there are people who do not feel guilt and shame at the loss of one of God's natural works, but I'm not one of those types of people and here's how I know: I still feel ashamed when I look at Arroyo Sorrento and when I remember the patch of Canchalagua that no longer exists, that I helped destroy. It's the same kind of feeling that accompanies any other type of sin described in the ten commandments, the same kind of guilt and shame, and I've learned to trust those feelings, and to recognize within myself when I have sinned.

But part of the system of human existence, as I have come to understand it, includes a god-given component of forgiveness; we can be redeemed, and our sins forgiven. We like to think this is because we do the penance, or some other kind of good works to make up for our foibles, but what I have come to understand is that it is completely out of our control; the management of forgiveness is an enterprise of the spirit, a god-centered and god-powered thing that we, if we are lucky, get a glimpse of once in a while. Ecosystems, too, can forgive sometimes; the diversity and will to live of some species overrides, if we pay attention, our mismanagement of the ecosystem. Little miracles occur, like the spray of purple blooms I saw the other day miles from the site of my sin, the ones that have survived the bulldozer and the wildfires and somehow, in their delicate burst of natural mountainside beauty, forgive me with their blooms.

Photo by Ken Bowles, San Diego County Wildflowers

Paragraph of the week

2005-07-30T20:33:00.000-07:00

I really like this paragraph, from an article by Tim Radford about botanist Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Garden:

Ecosystems, he says, can be whatever you like. Hedgerows in Hampshire are an ecosystem; so are weeds on a railway line at Hammersmith. Savannahs, grasslands, prairies, rainforests, dry forests, pine forests, uplands, heathlands, downlands, wetlands, mangrove swamps, estuaries, oxbow lakes and coral reefs are all ecosystems, and they survive on diversity. The greater the variety of microbes, plants and animals in an ecosystem, the more resilient it is and the better it works for all, including humans. So it would not be a good idea to evict at least half of these creatures, especially if nothing is known about them. But, Raven says, that is what is happening.

I love the long list, so Edward Abbey, and the mix of ecoscience jargon ("ecosystems" "resilient") and plain talk about habitats (and the news is not good for us or them). Sometimes I just like to read.

Post lack not slack

2005-07-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

My blog posts have become infrequent lately, and I wonder why: Is my personal life--at least that part of it I don't feel like sharing at this semi-public level--taking up so much of my time that I can't find the words to post? Are the subjects I am involved with at my job at SDSU's Summer Bridge Program, a set of first-year college composition readings, keeping me from accessing the stuff I need in order to post some personal ecology on the web?

All I know is that it seems like there's less stuff I want to write about on this thing lately. How has my life changed, in ways that make for fewer posts about the nominal paradigms of this blog? When I look at the subtitle of the thing, I start to get a clue; "literary ecosystems, ecological texts, and poetic politics" haven't been happening lately in my life; I haven't written a poem in a while, and most importantly I think, I haven't taken the time to be out in the wilds, really out for a few days, the time it takes to get the civilized smell off me and see the big picture.

Joseph Kleitsch (1881-1931), Laguna Canyon, 1923. Courtesy Florence Griswold Museum

Perhaps I have a classic case of what Richard Louv calls nature-deficit disorder: crushed by the interpersonal dynamics of human discourses, unable to engage in the organic play that frees my mind to write the stuff I want to say here, I find my voice blocked. It's a very complicated way to say "I'm too busy to write" but the problem for me is that writing about natural things, things that take in the total biosphere and integrate it with the human, is necessary for the well-being of my soul and my writing. I find myself thinking about, and writing about, the sterile mindgames of politics and spirit, the disconnected mental spaces of purely theoretical paradigms instead of getting my hands dirty with real work of the spirit, that kind of stuff done with shovels and feet, hands and asses, where you get tired and sit down for a while just to take it all in. I think I want to go for a nice long hike, and read some good stuff.

Pied Beauty
GLORY be to God for dappled things --
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Happy belated birthday, Gerard Manley Hopkins!

Our Democracy at work, Sneaky Democrat Version

2005-07-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

How am I supposed to integrate this little gem of a story into my idea of what it means to be a Democratic member of Congress who serves their constituency? I call the office of Rep. Susan Davis (some kind of D, CA) to find out how she is going to vote on CAFTA, the boondoggle Central American Free Trade Agreement. Her office aide, at 6:00pm EST, claims that Susan has not taken a position on the bill yet; she has not taken a position for months on this bill, despite numerous questions from press and public. I ask, "you mean she is planning on voting on the bill tonight but hasn't formed an opinion yet?" "Yes that's right," the aide responds with what must be a really straight face back there in the humid land of shirtsleeves at midnight. I ask, "well then; what time will the vote occurr? today sometime?" and wait for an answer, like it matters what this toady will say to me to describe the spinless actions of his toady boss. "We think it will be late, ten or maybe even midnight," he says, and I begin to wonder, why the hell am I putting up with this weasel? You call this open government, or democracy? Votes at midnight and she won't say what she's going to say as our representative? Fuck this; we need a new Democrat here, one that represents us or at least will tell us what she's going to do with our franchise.

Sounds like a time for an independence thing: you know,
" He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures."

That was in congress way back in 1776. It could happen again.

Update 9:45 pm pst:
She voted against it, in a roll call vote at 12:03 am EST. But CAFTA passed, 217-215, thanks to the 15 Democrats who did Tom Delay's bidding and voted for it. What a bunch of weenies, Susan included; she could have come out with a position a long time ago, but instead supported the Republican corporations by waffling for a year. Ptui.

Acid Biography

2005-07-23T12:53:00.000-07:00

A friend asks about that "fifth acid trip" from the last post. What was that about? I find it handy, when I think about my drug history, to connect it with music. The suits are right; those irreverent, subversive, rock and rollers of the past, and their present-day kin, really did advocate the use of mind-altering substances, no matter what they said at press conferences. But for me, the tone of the drug culture changed, from within me and from without, around the turn of the decade from the sixties to the early seventies. I was walking in the the desert, reading Carlos Casteneda and looking for the Oneness of the Creator; I was also listening to the Beatles, smoking weed, tripping on the colors and the wavy walls and rocks, looking for the Spirit that Tim Leary said we could find if we would just let the old ways of perception fall off our Western shoulders. For me, 1972 was a critical year to turn 18 and make the decision: drop out or mellow out and learn to take it from the man? I went for the mellow, so I started doing less-spiritual drugs such as coke and pills, drinking beers and going to parties, just to forget my problems: the draft, girls (or lack of them), a job, a future. I knew it was a waste of time but I had to look like I cared and it hurt; it was painful to live a capitalist lie so I needed recreational anethesia. From the positive, spiritual outlook of the Beatles I turned to the real deal of the workingman's Stones, who didn't pretend to Godhead but celebrated the dark passions of a pointless life, whose only solace was the ability to escape from it temporarily in debauchery. I went for it, and it was pretty nice for a while, like twenty years.

So there you have it. From Beatles to Stones, Mods to Rockers. Along in there I realized that a spiritual quest was a waste of time in an insane spiritless age, the Atomic/cold War age, when the spiritual was a refuge for those who couldn't handle the real. With enough substances I could handle it, so I didn't need the seemingly irrelevant spirit of Transcendent Perception. I am only just getting it back, just in time, I think

Saving Small Places

2005-07-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

"A new question in the environmentalist's canon," writes Barbara Kingsolver, "is this one: who will love the imperfect lands, the fragments of backyard desert paradise, the creek that runs between farms?" Here in San Diego it seems like the only spaces we have left are imperfect; possibly, after 16,000 years of human habitation on this little bit of the biosphere the only spaces we have are "imperfect". But when I think of the notion of saving wild spaces and the reality of the history of this region, the "perfect" wilderness seems rather silly. I, for one have no desire to return the canyon near my house to its Pliestocene purity--if that's what it was back then--with mastodons and megathariums in the mix.

Besides, I can only access the sacredness of wild spaces through the people who have been there already. Kingsolver does it by looking at the way her daughter remembers a creek in Kentucky and by welcoming a hermit crab to Tuscon in High Tide in Tucson; she looks at the way habitats work in our heads, and the way we all share the earth as best we can, even those of us who wind up in unexpected places. I have taken hermit crabs home to Mission Hills, miles from the ocean and sat, like Kingsolver, in "stunned reverence" as they adjusted to life inland, and as a kid I had lots of prisoners: Butterflies, bugs, snakes, horned lizards and ants plus the more formalized cats and dogs. So it seems only natural that in order to get the picture in the natural world, I should have to become another human being's prosoner for a bit, and invade some space where I don't belong. Perhaps the words shouldn't be "invade" and "prisoner" at all; maybe what's really going on is integration, a type of expression of the basic ecological principle, connectedness. The spiritual is, for me, a form of communication with people and other beings; I long ago, with my fifth acid trip, gave up on the idea of directly accessing God and realized I would have to settle for glimpses of godhead garnered through the eyes of people like that guy waiting for the bus, or the kid at the pier looking at dead fish.

Or sometimes in a good film. The play of life and death, and the workings of fate, are wonderfully addressed in Ryan, a short animation I saw last night at the La Jolla Contemporary Art Museum's short film party, alt.pictureshows. Even drug addiction can be spiritual, if taken to its logical conclusion, a oneness with god while you're bumming quaters on the street.

Feliz Cumpleanos y Anniversarios

2005-07-20T10:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Wood S Lot:

Happy Birthday, Carlos!
"Se que sera
Let's go sailing on
there's a wise man
in every fool"

And then there's that Moon thing to celebrate:

A Spiritual Extinction?

2005-07-15T04:59:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine has found great peace and sprititual solace in the many appearances of a natural phenomena around her: white butterflies, either native Common White or the imported European variety, have become, for her and her many friends, a sign of recovery from grief, a message from the biopolis that life is forever renewed, and forever in our hearts.

Many of us have a similar attachment to another species of butterfly: the Quino checkerspot, an endangered species indigenous to San Diego County which for us symbolizes, indeed defines, some sacred places in our lives-- places where we find solace and peace, where we rejuvenate out spirits and recover from the many challenges in our lives. As we walk in the chaparral the rare sight of one of these colorful marvels reminds us that we live in a precious place that is inhabitated by very special beings who live no where else, which on good days is the way we like to think of ourselves. Maybe we aren't that special, but it sure feels that way, and when I walk in our backcountry I feel blessed with the biophiliac bliss of communion with other beings in the world; the Quino checkerspot is one of those special beings.
That's why is was so disturbing to watch Nightline last night. In a story devoted to global warming, our own native Quino was featured as one of the many biological victims of global warming, and had a good overview of the problem, the minute changes in temperature that can disrupt natural processes and cause the extinction of species who are unable to cope with the changes and cannot move. Many scientists, such as lepidopterist Tom Emmel, are concerned that "the government is burying its head when it comes to the environment - pointing out that a population of butterflies in the western United States is fleeing to higher altitudes because the climate in its old habitat is suffering the effects of global warming."

It would be a shame to lose the beautiful messengers from the spirit to our non-pedestrian need for fossil fuels. And I wonder if we are not losing something much more valuable to us and to the biosphere than an endemic species that, after all, doesn't do much for many people. Perhaps what we lose when a species goes extinct is not so much its ecological importance but an aspect of spiritual significance in our lives that cuts us off from the relationship we have with the Universal One.

Poetic Density and Revolution

2005-07-13T22:00:00.000-07:00

Met a really good dead poet today, and he's good because he uses the fewest words to get over the most complicated things, and because he was a good revolutionary, too; my poetry would be greatly enhanced if I could do the things Roque Dalton did, like formulate a revolutionary strategy that, claims Claribel Alegria, forged "links between the clandestine politico-military organizations and the open mass organizations [and] came to be the accepted line for all the principal revolutionary movements" in Latin America. He also miraculously escaped certain death at the hands his executioners twice, once by coup d'etat, and once by a more spiritually connected earthquake. That would be nice enough, but he was a good writer, too who avoided the overworked, wordy ways of typical revolutionary poetry, good at heart but long of tongue. Like mine:

America I’m sick of pointing my finger at evildoers.
It’s getting too hot in the world, and America keeps putting fossil fuel on the fire while widows in Chicago freeze in the dark, and the butterflies could be wiped out by habitat desecration leaving poets only traffic lights to describe with density.
America do you even want poets anymore?
I haven’t smoked marihuana in years but the gateway is still open for soul butterflies to pass over and I am still psychotropically connected.
Reality TV is still false, newspapers still write lies, and the hyperreal is still unreal but I still see the desert wide open to the sky.
I have not applied for copyright protection but still need security for my own obsessions.
I remain a cocksman but I won’t fuck the world on your dime, for a hundred-dollar pair of sneakers, for a $1.25 gallon of gas, for a low-fat burrito, for fresh strawberries but I will if we all come in a orgasm of atmospheres biospheres tropospheres hydrospheres fucking pulsing juices fragrant with sweaty bliss, lubed for love of planet, wet holy ecstasy.
America do you remember when sex was holy?

Well that's a lot of hooey to say what Dalton says in four short lines:

Love
Love is my other country
the primary one
not the one I'm proud of
but the one I suffer for.

By the way, you can find a lot of great Dalton tributes in Roque Dalton: Redux from Cedar Hill Books. Some of it, of course, is that long-winded Latin Revolutionary stuff. That's ok.

Sorry

2005-07-13T21:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in awhile. Life 'n shit.

Holy Spirit Blowing

2005-07-07T01:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes
I go about pitying myself
While I am carried by
The wind
Across the sky
(a Chippewa song)

As San Diego County gets ready to make use of the "clean energy" of the strong winds in our backcountry, I wonder if we ecologically-minded folk ought to look for a spiritual solution to a knotty problem that seems to divide our community into two opposed camps: on one side, some environmentalists say that human beings need to stop using such destructive technologies to create and distrubute power--we need to start developing renewable energy sources such as wind power quickly, in the most effecient, easy manner possible, in hopes that our slide down a polluted, globally warmed path will cease; on the other side, locally-based conservationists, who also feel the armegeddonish crunch inherent in our ways of producing energy, still want to save what's left of our wild spaces. (For example, read David Suzuki wrestle with both sides of the issue in his own mind here and here.) Two recent reports in the San Diego Union Tribune (which is kind of surprising when one considers its major patrons/advertisers) point out these difficult issues: an article about Altamount Pass and the problems caused by giant windmills that kill birds and bats along this important flyway, and the recent article in Sunday's business section about the issues surrounding development by Big Energy of windy places in the East County of San Diego. These places are valuable ecologically and, because people were living here in harmony with the planet for thousands of years before we white folk got here, valuable in a spiritual sense; three-hundred foot-high windmills seem to take away some holiness from culturally important places, the sacred spaces in our habitat. What to do?

Perhaps we should start from a more humble position:

Oh Great Spirit
whose Voice I hear in the Winds,
whose Breath gives life to all the world,
hear me! I am small and weak; I need you strength and wisdom.
(From a Sioux invocation)

Verses from Earth Prayers, ed. by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon

Celebrate the Cycle with Tenzin Gyatso

2005-07-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday!
(1935-the rest of time)

"I am just a simple Buddhist monk - no more, nor less."

From the Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 1989:

"Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each one of us individually. Peace, for example, starts with each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighbouring communities, and so on. When we feel love and kindness towards others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace. And there are ways in which we can consciously work to develop feelings of love and kindness. For some of us, the most effective way to do so is through religious practice. For others it may be non-religious practices. What is important is that we each make a sincere effort to take our responsibility for each other and for the natural environment we live in seriously."

His Inspiration, from the writings of Saint Shantideva:

"For as long as space endures
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world.

For as long as space endures
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world."

Govenment of Tibet's Website on the Dalai Lama

Time to Get Busy

2005-07-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

It is our right, indeed our duty, to get rid of tyrants. Says so right here in this thing below, from which I took a few relevant excerpts. See if the list of charges reminds you of anyone you might know in Washington DC, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refuted his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

Happy Birthday (1923--)

2005-07-02T08:22:00.000-07:00

Wislawa Szymborska

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

By Wislawa Szymborska Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

From "Tortures"

Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own.

From "The Poet and the World," Nobel Lecture 1996:

" . . . inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it."

Overwhelmed: Supreme Networking Opportunity Edition

2005-07-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

Big stuff happening in that faraway Washington--Sandra Day O'Connor retiring--but here in the 21st century, you can do your little bit with the magic of technology. DavidNYC over at Kos has some suggestions, one of which has been used successfully in Italy and other parts of Europe where they love their cell phones:

If you have a cell phone, sign up for People at the American Way's Mass Immediate Response site. This way, you'll be able to receive text message action items instantly as events break. (If you signed up during the nuclear option fight, you'll need to re-sign up.)

There are some other, more traditional ideas for a bit of action in the post, too. One is to write a letter to the president, not because you think he'll pay any attention to your views but so we can set a rhetorical position for the media. So send a copy to the press, too.

Think Small Power

2005-07-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

As some of my friends get set to make enemies in some quarters of the environmental movement by trying to stop wind power generators in our wild backcountry, we wonder how we are going to come up with an alternative vision for renewal energy on the planet. Never mind the fact that we are not energy experts, and the bad guys spend millions of our taxpayer dollars and use thousands of real experts to promote their vision; we are still supposed to have an alternative energy future in our rhetoric. Thank god I found one that makes a little sense in yeaterday's Guardian: now I can at least suggest something positive. The idea here is that small generation facilities, owned by the users, might take the place of giant profit/power plants.

From "Micro-Power Hailed as Cheap Safe Energy of Future"

Renewable power, particularly schemes where thousands of homes have their own microgenerators for heat and electricity, are a far cheaper way of meeting the UK's energy needs and combating climate change than nuclear stations, says a report out today.

This is an idea I have been kicking around in my head for awhile, and it's always pooh-poohed by people as impossible--impossible to break the stranglehold the big power company has on us and impossible to manage over an urban grid. I know that's not true. So do the guys at the New Economics Foundation:

The potential of getting energy from a decentralised system of very small-scale, micro-generation from renewable sources has been critically overlooked. In the UK, for example, one estimate suggests that if just around one third of electricity customers installed 2kW of micro-generation, using solar photovoltaic (PV) or wind systems it would match the capacity of the UK nuclear programme.

So there. I knew it.

Professor Blogs in a Radical State at SDSU

2005-06-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

When I first met Dr. Carole Kennedy she was dressed in a kind of tuxedo-like thing, with a bullhorn in her hand, exhorting passers-by on the Free Speech Steps at San Diego State University "keep on moving--you have tests to take and there's no time for you to vote or anything! Just keep moving, students, and we'll take care of everything. Really, you can trust us." She and her crew were doing the good work of the Billionaires for Bush and Gore, performing satiric street theater to bring up the main issue of the elections of 2000 and 2004: corrupt politicians have sold us down the river.

The news outlets stopped asking for her expert opinion when it became clear that the opinion wasn't toeing the corporate line, but that didn't stop her--besides, exclamation points, which she uses frequently, don't show up well on TV anyway. So she blogs, here. Check it out!

Overwhelmed: Compassionate Courage edition

2005-06-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

If I can gather just a tiny bit of the courage of this woman, I might be able to apply for citizenship in the globe. I'm with her.

photo from truthout

"But at the end of it, today we do seem to live in a world where the United States of America has defined an enemy combatant, someone whom they can kidnap from any country, from anyplace in the world and take for trial to America. An enemy combatant seems to be anybody who harbors thoughts of resistance. Well, if this is the definition, then I, for one, am an enemy combatant. Thank you."

The World Tribunal on Iraq- Istanbul Session
Arundhati Roy, "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy"

Incendiary Rhetoric

2005-06-27T21:06:00.000-07:00

Daniel Patterson, that inflammatory critic of those who would threaten endangered species, was on the radio today talking and in the San Bernadino Sun writing about the wildfires that have started (early) this summer in the deserts of the American Southwest. The plants of the drylands, says this desert ecologist, "are just not adapted to fire, so unlike chaparral and forest where fires can actually be beneficial," wildfires in the desert, like the one in the Mojave National Preserve over the weekend that burned more than 67,000 acres, may be part of a process that will eventually turn our national heritage of unique, beautiful ecosystems into just another Wal-Mart of boring, invasive weeds. The cactus, says Patterson, don't benefit from wildfires, they "just boil in their own juice," and may be replaced with a rancher's mix of cattle-friendly grasses--which make it easier for the fire to spread next time.

And the welfare queens of Big Cow are already whining, blaming the Park Service for taking cows and burros out of the Park, livestock which is responsible for bringing the weeds in the first place; however, astute ecologists and some ranchers recognize this tactic by its smell, which is remarkably similar to the odor of that vector of exotic invasion, the substance that brought the seeds in from Washington and Texas:

Harry Frankfurt has written a fine philosophical treatise on the subject. The vector, that is.

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West has selected chapters and pictures from this very beautifully-done book for the coffee tables of the environmentally-inclined.

Adventures in the Wild East

2005-06-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

Out here in LaLa land we still think we can preserve some wild spaces for future generations unsullied by human presences, but ecosystemists Back East don't have that luxury--and we might pay attention to the way nature and culture mix around in the big burgs of New Jersey and New York. As I strolled to the Student Center at Marist College yesterday morning, looking for coffee, I ran into a very wide fellow:

Marmota monax Courtesy Thinkquest

Woodchucks, or whistling pigs, or groundhogs, are pests in the Hudson River Valley but I thought this one was pretty neat; I took pictures like a tourist at the Zoo. Remembering Thoreau's ramblings on the species, I thought of a fricassee, maybe. But they're still around, digging holes in all the wrong places, and people put up with them. The wild things are still about, even in the midst of some of the most urbanized space on earth. On the drive up to the college we rode over the New Jersey Meadowlands in its full summer greenery--one of the most astounding wetlands I have seen, and it's still there in the middle of everyone's neighborhood. Beautiful back East, in the summer, in the mix of wild and civilized we can only hope to become.

The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission

Got my own conference to attend (to)

2005-06-22T00:22:00.000-07:00

All the cool bloggers let you know they are attending this or that conference, or speaking here and there, and I finally get to do the deed, just like Michael Froomkin, tbogg, jake at lying media bastards, and the oh-so-cool people at Boing Boing. I'll be at the Edith Wharton Society's Centenary Celebration of the Publication of The House of Mirth conference, delivering a paper on regionalism and global capitalism (scroll down to Saturday). It's in Poughkeepsie, so there should be smokestacks and flowers among the nattering nabobs of East Coast Literati, and I don't mind telling you, I'm way out of my league.

I'll be back Sunday, and everything will still be here, I'm sure.

Nowhere safe

2005-06-18T21:08:00.000-07:00

I like my cell phone, I really do. I arrogantly put off getting one, claiming that they made our public discourse silly, and I got mad at poeple who answered them in restaurants or other public places, and I resented phone chatters who thought it was more important to talk to distant friends than the person in front of them. I went through all that stuff, which seemed so important three years ago but now seems rather quaint, now that I have a phone and know how to use it, and now that our society seems to have arrived at some basic rules of courtesy necessary to keep polite conversations, in public or in private, going smoothly.

On of the tactics a polite member of society uses to make cell phones work is to take responsibility for shutting the technology off once in awhile. That way, we establish the communicative space around us, and define the parameters of that space for ourselves and for the people who inhabit the spaces around us. We control the communicative space, not the social organization or the technology. But one of the aspects of this power we have, the power to decide on our communicative environment, is that we have that power and that responsibility. The ability and the responsibility is all ours, and this is a new, unnatural thing.

This all came to mind as I was clicking around on the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility site, looking for names of people who might know who wrote the new cattle grazing regulations for the BLM, regulations that suck. What I found, however, was this disappointing story about cell phone towers in National Parks. It seem that "in the interests of safety" the National Park Service is set to eventually have cell phone coverage in all National Parks, all areas of the Parks, so there will not be a place in the U.S., except for some secret military sites, that cannot be accessed by cell phones. This means that we will have the power and responsibility everywhere; there will not be a place free of that very modern decision, one that Lewis and Clark did not have to make. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I feel like some kind of dirge should be sung, some kind of poem read, to mark the last wild space, free of human technological communication. The 21st century has, for better or worse, arrived.

The internet makes me feel alien at times

2005-06-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

A story about alien, invasive species being spread by the Indian Ocean Tsunami makes me feel, well, alien. Usually, from my habitat, invasive species like arundo donax or the frustrating pampas grass are the ones to worry about. But the internet gives us nothing if not a global perspective, a perspective that may be localized at the click of a mouse. From the P.O.V. of a Sri Lankan, "the spread of alien invasive species such as prickly-pears (Opuntia) and salt-tolerant mesquite (Prosopis) has been encouraged by the tsunami" and threatens valuable natural resources in Yala National Park, according the the United Nations Environment Program. Our buddy the mesquite, which they call the "Devil Tree" (ouch!) causes problems in Africa, too. The species, prosopsis juliflora, is one that is non-native here, too (it's from the Mexican coast), but it looks like a native, and I like it:

courtesy desert-tropicals.com

So now I know how those frustrated naturalists in Sri Lanka feel.

Fear of Chaparral

2005-06-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

It's getting close to fire season here in S.D., and I've just read a hilarious short story by Nicole Panter, "Mr. Right On," that, with a very thin veil, blows the lid off a certain South California lefty social critic. Poetry seems like the only way to put it all together today.

Reading Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear

Got a postmodern fantasy where

American dreams grow up the hills

while puma sifts through

blue oak ashes.

We’re not safe anymore without

infrared detectors; predators

in the parks with screw-

top bottles and fresh

spikes from some needle exchange program

leave their trash in our very last stand

of California

wild lilac. Soft

white, like clouds on bluffs,

they sway to the west

on salt-sweet winds. Smoke

from centuries-old

indigenous fires,

secured in warty

bark and hairy stems,

in soft petals wet

with fog, comes to life

as morning sun warms

ancient chaparral.

Memories of black

ash and green rebirth. But we got it

going on: our Council voted for new

assessment taxes;

more police have been

assigned to the area; and fire

suppression measures have been taken.

The bright olive tides

of hills flowing down

to meet the sea look

like safe havens, yet

beneath green comfort

small beings scurry

in fear. A small pile

of tan feathers, blood

on their quill-tips, point

to a tiny death

under a perfect

sun. The light touches

dappled soils through

the chest-high brush; all

feel the warmth of day,

feel the fog-kissed breath

of night, know that days

mark the passages

to the impending

transference to the ancestor’s world.

For now, you cannot see that motion

sensors hide beneath

waves of golden earth.

Strange Fruit

2005-06-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

It's hard to figure sometimes how we got this way. . .

(circa 2004)
TORTURE AND TRUTH: AMERICA, ABU GHRAIB, AND THE WAR ON TERROR
By Mark Danner

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Until one looks at where we came from.

(circa 1939)
Senators who did not sign the apology for lynching 5000 Americans
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
--"Strange Fruit" by Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allan)

Southern Poverty Law Center
Center for Constitutional Right s

Overwhelmed: The military-Industrial Complex

2005-06-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

As he was leaving his presidency after one of America's most unsuccessful military engagements in Korea, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us all about the military industrial complex, which he said would take over our economy and spend us into the poorhouse, kill lots of innocent people, and make us less idealistic as a culture. Well, it happened, and it got really big. Especially here in San Diego, the unholy collusion between our economy, which is supposed to provide us with food and good music CD's is forcing us to make cruise missiles and other militant nonsense in order to get those CD's and sometimes it seems like the powerful coalition of government and industry is impregnable, overwhelming.

But then something happens that gives me hope. We need more reporting like the story in the U-T today about Duke Cunningham and his bribery scandal brewing (courtesy of Kos) and we need to go through every one of our government officials' money trees to find out more dirt. The San Diego Union's story about Duke Cunningham gives me hope for two reasons: the fact that the bad guys are getting so bold that they commit such obvious fraud right in front of our eyes means that they are vulnerable; and, the fact that the U-T prints the story means that even they are kind of disgusted by bribery. Shockingly, the Union seems to have had a conscience today. Amazing.

Update: 7:00pm--Not only is our Republican delegation to Congress corrupt, but they are pretty wacky, too. Scroll down Crooks and Liars for a video feed from CNN featuring Rep. Duncan Hunter defending the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners, using Chicken dinners as props. He looks hungry as he claims:

"So the point is that the inmates in Guantánamo have never eaten
better, they've never been treated better and they've never been
more comfortable in their lives."

"You have to see this to believe it," notes C&L. Indeed.

Feeling the Earth

2005-06-12T23:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, I felt the earthquake at around 9 this morning but sadly, I had left its epicenter near Palm Springs the night before, so I only got the mild shakes from 62 miles away. It may seem strange to some, but I like to be where the geological action is, and I would have loved to be near a spring when the quake went off, to see if that had any effect. Oh well--at least I met some fine eco-warriors in Palm Desert, who are fighting the boondogglish Eagle Mountain Landfill, and may, after 18 years of struggle, put this terrible idea in the dust bin of history where it belongs. I also met a guy, Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, who has found the Cradle of Aztlan, which every native California should know about. There's sacred ground all over and it was telling us something today, I think. We should probably listen.

Luis Alberto Urrea spoke at the Hillcrest Book Fair today and he was sacred, too. His latest book, The Hummingbird's Daughter, tells the story of his aunt Teresita, a holy woman of the turn of the 19th-20th canturies in Sonora, Mexico. Urrea's other works, which include fiction, poetry, and my favorites, journalistic studies of border life, exemplify the kind of writing that I think is most relevant to a San Diegan, Californian, or at this point Global citizen; as NPR's Martha Woodruff notes of writer Daniel Alarcon, the new writing by people who we usually call Mexicna-american like Urrea or Peruvian-american like Alarcon, "expands the hyphens" and exist along the borders between the cultures that are "mixed" into our culture. Nothing new to us San Diego natives; we and writers like Urrea have been mixing it up for so long it doesn't seem like a border anymore. And it's not a real line, anyway; butterflies cross it all the time, and aren't we lucky for that?

Take that, you Minutemen, you.

Weekend

2005-06-10T09:42:00.000-07:00

I'm off to the Desert Landscape Forum in Desert Hot Springs, sponsored by the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, where I'm sure I'll find something hot.

No blogging until Sunday--Seeya!

Overwhelmed: Climate change version

2005-06-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Elizabeth Kolbert's superb series on climate change in The New Yorker, and it is a fascinating read. I learned a new word, actually a new way to think about what "age" we live in at present. Traditionally, the present day has been known as the "Halocene," that period of time after the big glaciers of the Ice Age, but Paul Crutzen has coined a new term, the "Anthropocene," which started around 1780 when we started doing some real damage to the atmosphere with carbon dioxide emmisions from our industries. I like the term; it denotes a specific thing, an overwhelming thing, that we humans have done to the Earth that has changed geological processes that we usually measure in thousands, if not millions, of years. The word does something that needs to happen before we can start thinking about how to change the relationship between ourselves and nature--it eliminates the dualistic thinking that puts humans on one side and nature on the other; it puts us in the scientific world along with water cycles, sedimentation, plate tectonics, and species extinction as a scientific framework for classification and study. Now, we can study the differences between the Pliestocene, the Halocene, and now, and one of the definitions will always be the fact that we are a force in the history of the earth, one that creates a new age. That's pretty overwhelming.

The political dialogue has been overwhelming, too. The forces of big oil have tried to paint the climate-change models of reputable climatologists as academic gameplaying, but they are losing--probably because facts, and good science to go with them, and the plethora of pictures of glaciers, icecaps, and snowfields melting in the sun have overcome the rhetoric of the American Petroleum Institute. I feel a tipping point coming on as the propagandists of the Bush administration are outed by the likes of the New York Times, who did a story on a former oil lobbyist who tried to mellow out the facts of government documents that warned about greenhouse gases and global warming. So the discussion, finally, has turned, I think, from one that debated the facts of global warming to what we can do about it.

And as it turns out, we can do quite a lot. Ideas are pouring in from all over ; some of them, like solar design and energy conservation, are technologies we have been using for thousands of years and some are brand new, but at least there's some hope now that we've turned the rhetorical corner on the discussion--so much so that big business even believes us now.

Worldchanging blog has ideas.
The Union of Concerned Scientists does, too.

Overwhelmed: Bigger than me

2005-06-09T17:09:00.000-07:00

Courtesy Astronomy Picture of the Day

For today, I think I'll inagurate a topic that one can search for in the blog, if you're feeling like I feel today, that is, overwhelmed by forces that a puny citizen like me can't seem to do anything about. I read somewhere that one strategy for people who feel full of fear, or depressed, by news of terrorists, or epidemics like Mad Cow disease, or just the news in general is to, in general, inhibit their uptake of news. That way, they won't get depressed or feel like they are frozen in their homes, unable to go outside and face the world.

I don't trust that strategy, because I don't trust the people who advise it; it sounds too much like those cops who tell me "nothing's wrong here, just go on about your business" as they hassle street people for, well, standing in the street. There's all kinds of stuff wrong with the world that really needs to be addressed, and the people who have told me they are handling it are decidely not handling it. So the topic will focus on things that seem to be really, really big, and try to bring these problems down to a manageable size, or at least my reaction to them down to a doable, realizable concept, strategy, or worldview.

Because if I keep watching the news and do nothing about all this crap, I'll go nuts.

Stone Poet

2005-06-08T11:38:00.000-07:00

In a strange kind of portent, one I think Hopkins would have liked, Terry and I were talking about him last night, the night before he died in 1889. His last words, according to W.H. Gardner:

"I am so happy, so happy."

Gerard Manley Hopkins
(July 28, 1844 - June 8, 1889)
thanks to Wood S Lot

The master, some say inventor, of Sprung Rhythym loved the natural features of his neighborhood, including the way natural speech occurred in the 'hood. That's why he broke from the mold of what he called the "same and tame" of formal English verse and went for the Anglo-Saxon roots which are, after all, only natural.
Sprung Rhythym in Wikipedia

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
Práise hím.

"All things counter, original, spare, strange" is a good way to talk about his view of the individuality of experience in the whole, that unified cohesion of the universe that blossoms into one individual thing, like a tree or a flower, what he called its "inscape." The concept puts the observer always in the present, which is the totality of all time, like looking at a bluebell:

"One day when the bluebells were in bloom I wrote the following. I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I am looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it." (from an entry in his Journal)

And God, for this Romantic poet, is best seen in nature:

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge |&| shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast |&| with ah! bright wings.

Cannibals There and Here

2005-06-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

You know how it is on the internets--you never know where you'll end up. Checking the news on Joshua Micah Marshall's new TPM Cafe I spotted an interesting headline on an ad sidebar, which took me to the altWeeklies site. I never found the article I was looking for, but I did find Vince Darcangelo's article in the Boulder Weekly, cleverly titled "To Serve Man." Seems those wacky folks at Hufu, LLC have come up with a soy product sure to appeal to "the Goth crowd, high-school students, people who are into zombie movies": Hufu, "The Healthy Human Flesh Alternative." From the looks of the website, the product, "designed to resemble, as humanly possible, the taste and texture of human flesh," also is designed to appeal to the privileged side of the Post-Colonial crowd; the pictures of quaint indigenes from Fiji and New Guinea, plus T-shirts printed with Easter Island statuary, remind me of the scene in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 that uses old film footage to show some of Bush's spearchucking Iraq Coalition. Racist, but racist for a good cause, I guess.

The other cannibals I saw today were local, not racist, and not that hungry, either--at least for food--but a lot more bloodthirsty. Some members of the San Diego City Council, in unholy collusion with the retirees of the municipal employee's unions who sit on the City's pension board, and the Mayor are getting set to cannibalize city property to pay for their illegal, unfunded pension benefits. A slew of real estate assets, including the land under the Fairbanks Ranch Country Club--which I didn't even know we owned--were going to be up for grabs to the highest bidder (never mind the legacy of the people) until the redoubtable Mike Aquirre stepped in and tabled the deal. These scandalous, corrupt creeps should be run out of town, and here's how: elect some honest people to get us out of this mess the criminals got us in.

Your choice--this?

2005-06-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Carrizo Plains, National Landscape Conservation System

Or This?

2005-06-06T12:12:00.000-07:00

from the National Geographic

Our Culture, or a Politically-correct Shopping Mall?

2005-06-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has put out its annual list of most endangered places in the U.S. Along with various churches and downtown buildings some stick out at me. The BLM's Clinton-era administrative fantasy, the National Landscape Conservation System is probably the most important natural space left in the American West, and the most at risk from off-road vehicles and other criminals, along with "mismanaged grazing, mineral exploration, unauthorized land use, theft and vandalism." That the corrupt Department of Interior gives away our National birthright of native places to its coporate buddies is old hat to a conservationist, but two other threatened places make me wonder if we want to be a culture at all.

Finca Vigia, Hemingway's house near Havana, deteriorates and dies of neglect while Bush and Castro work out ideological conflicts that are, shall we say, so Twentieth Century. Castro should be given an award for keeping OUR literary heritage alive while we fiddle with economic paradigms and demand that he make his country safe for shopping malls. It's a huge political issue, but what really is at stake here is our literary culture, a thing that is priceless and goes beyond the capitalist/communist conflict, which is already history.

But here at home, a historical place important to our shared memory is about to become just another set of ticky-tacky suburban homes--artless, sterile, cultural phenomenon that preserve nothing but the profit that lasts only a single lifetime. Daniel Webster's farm, which he used as a retreat, model farm, and meeting house until his death in 1852 and which was used as an orphanage for New Hampshire's children until 1925, is set to be developed into 130 homes, part of the surburban sprawl that turns our culture into an empty gesture of mindless selfishness.

Cal l someone.

Flowers, not extinct and not innocuous

2005-06-04T23:32:00.000-07:00

At University Heights Point today we found another hillside bloom of Mariposa lilies, the Point's harbinger of deep summer. It reminded me that the natural, endemic species really do like it here and will pop up in the most unexpected places, even in the midst of urbanity, steeply set on a hillside with an ocean view. Maybe we will get lucky, like that hiker at Mt. Diablo who found a species of buckwheat thought to be extinct for at least thirty years.

photo by associated press

The photo above is of the eriogonum truncatum, Mount Diablo Buckwheat, found by integrated biology grad student and hiker Michael Park and announced last week. The picture of him on The Human Flower Project's blog pos t is, in the words of poster Julie, "nearly as heartening as the flower itself"; he looks like a great guy who loves life and already he has found some life we thought was gone forever. Yes, heartening.

Another post in what might be one of my new favorite blogs is intriguingly titled "The Sudden Gardens of Tashkent," which could be about exotic central Asian poetic endeavors but is really about the way that the dictator of Uzbekistan, a fine fellow whom the Bush administration admires and who boils people, uses flower gardens, planted overnight, to repress his citizens. The article ends with a memorable quote that expresses the confused dualities of our existence:

". . . flowers are rarely innocuous or "mere decoration." As soon as the trowels come out, we know that human purpose has stirred, whether for liberation or repression."

The lead post for today also has that dualistic, good/evil mix that makes for perceptive, if not easy journalism. Check it out.

ps--they love Allen too.

Guess I feel like A.G. Today

2005-06-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

I wrote this when Allen Ginsberg died in 1997. It was my first published work, in SD City College's CityWorks Anthology.

Allen Ginsberg is All About

All about disarmament and harmony shining in the Death Throes of the Twentieth Century.

All About queer boys in dark alleys and I’ll tell you, with no offense intended, for talking about love all love is all.

All about sitting in Zen meditation on the train tracks at Rocky Flats nuclear madness in front of the weapons car chanting love above.

All about telling us God is everywhere even in supermarket aisles with sex and drugs and flowers available at the right price which is freedom.

About all he can say really is that you are one, we are one, one love sex death beauty art appreciates life One.

All about writing automatically gets to the truth which is God which could be about morals but is really about compassion.

All about goodbye. Parting doesn’t really happen in ZaZen universe illusion is hate, intolerance Death is Love transcendence poets speak now.

Happy Birthday

2005-06-03T00:38:00.000-07:00

Allen Ginsberg 1926-1997

At a peace rally, 1966

from Sunflower Sutra, 1955:

We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty
imageless locomotive, we're all golden sunflowers
inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal
sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the
shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco
hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

Tipping My Hat to Some Bad Books

2005-06-03T00:28:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly writes this post about a ridiculous list put together by Human Events, a conservative magazine: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th centuries. As you might guess, The Communist Manifesto, Mien Kampf, and Chairman Mao's Little Red Book lead the list, but there are some interesting others, too--such as John Dewey and Alfred Kinsey. However, what really mystifies Drum is the honorable mention list, which includes Foucault, B.F. Skinner (!?) and Darwin (twice). The list is put together by some people who have academic credentials at major universities, and Kevin wonders just who these guys think they are beating up on the likes of Darwin, et al.

But what strikes me as odd is the comments section, which I usually trust because the writers seem to be a pretty smart bunch of people. Last week, Kevin asked commentors to post their educational levels, career paths, and such to see what they were like and I was impressed. Everyone was college level, and some pretty good colleges, too. So I was surprised when, in response to Kevin's challenge to name THEIR ten most harmful books, the comment section agreed that Alcoholics Anonymous was one of them--and they said it with some vitriol, too. Here's a sample.

from Joe:

Scientology (Christian Scientists late 19th century)

The Twelve Step Program (religious psuedo-science early 20th century)
AA's big blue book (or rather the political maneuvering supporting it) is to psychology what creationism is to biology.

Anything by (or attributed to) Sun Myung Moon

from SocraticGadfly:

8. AA's "Big Book" -- thanks, Joe; count in the whole 12-Step movement, originally Calvinism under a cloak and now Calvinism fused with New Ageism

I have a peculiar fascination with AA and Twelve-Step programs, and it made me wonder: were these just poor sports or did they have a point? And what has AA done to deserve this?

I've been sniffing around meetings for a while, and I can see their point: there is a streak of icky Calvinism in AA, and especially in its Southern California, "Pacific Group" form (which seems to have brethren in Texas and the Southwest), "political manuvering" of the conservative sort does make it seem sometimes like a right-wing cult, dedicated to dressing nice and having nice cars and claiming other forms of material success as proof of one's "emotional sobriety" despite pious claims of humbly recieving gods grace. And that Blue Book=psychology, Creationism=Biology simile stuck true, too. So I guess I'll have a short cocktail and think about it for a bit.

Well, maybe not tonight.

Our president, the dumbass, would fail my class

2005-06-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

I teach first-year college students to write stuff, and I see mistakes like this (from the NY Times, thanks Blogcritics) all the time:

It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not tell the truth.

I saw the news conference, and Bush said the above with his usual fake Texas twang and his also-usual arrogance toward those nitpicky language police who haunt what's left of his Yalie brain. I would mark this as a "word choice" error, and point him in the right direction, like say to a sophmore, to get the right word out on rewrite: That's dissemble, not disassemble. We presume he means that Amnesty International was trying to lie, not take something apart. But as Blogcritic says, "for crying out loud, can't he get some speechwriters that can write things that he can read?" This is the kind of thing that's ripe for becoming a "nucular" issue, when the President of the United States says the wrong word by mispronouncing a close homophone.

And by the way he's lying about Amnesty International and its purported gulag. You know, Concealing. Kinda like Hiding under a false front. Dissembling. I say we disassemble him.

Criminals Outside

2005-06-01T13:52:00.000-07:00

Jeneiene Schaffer posts her article in the Tucson Weekly about an ordinance the city wants to pass in order to protect traffic from protesters--it even has a "rush hour" clause that denies marching permits during the morning and evening hours. Got to keep moving, folks; our 7-11 (in Tucson Circle K) economy depends on the ability to drive a car anywhere, and walking is just not cost-effective. But what about fun?

Richard Louv has an answer for that. In his new book Last Child in the Forest: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv explains in massive detail the ways our culture has criminalized outdoor play. Spreading fear--of strangers, ticks, mosquitos, falling down, getting behind in our work, and yes, traffic--the American way of life has denied our children and us the right to play football in the street, wander in our urban canyons, or otherwise mess around in places that are unregulated by social norms. In a talk I saw him give at the San Diego Natural History Museum, Louv added up all the ordinances, laws, housing association covenants, and cultural rules to come up with the declaration that it is now illegal to go outdoors. But, to paraphrase Bob Dylan:

You can keep some of the people out of the forest all of the time, and all of the people out of the forest some of the time, but you can't keep all of the people out of the forest all of the time. I offer this evidence of TRW as proof.

Why I am a Friend of University Heights Point

2005-06-01T00:38:00.000-07:00

2005-05-31T11:18:00.000-07:00

A First Post--in Honor of Walt W.'s Birthday

At the Bus Stop, Endlessly Waiting (shamelessly sampling)

At the bus stop, endlessly waiting, I look around

and hear a song like one my old friend sings.

Near Bourbon Street, there’s one that sounds

like a cell, so I almost pick up as it rings,

and at Twigg’s yet more birds trill. Everywhere I used

to drink has feathered sentinels on it.

Two more mockingbirds, perching, still stewed

with manly hopes for spring nests, not a bit

deterred, tweet like two dumptrucks in reverse.

I sit, remember the tunes; desperate cocks,

my brothers, sit in trees for weeks, or worse—

under an eave, above a bar, with no sunglasses.

Come into my Melaleuca; it’s cool!

The leaves are thick and we can hide

from any cat and nest and rest and rest

assured, the soft down of your breast

will love the spiders’ webs, the twigs inside,

the yarn and kitten’s fur—right by the pool!

By now, two weeks of baseball and he still

sits in his tea-tree, floats his curious calls,

so like a car alarm, a phoebe’s peeps.

My brother fluffed and trilled through winter’s squalls,

my brother rasped in vain on hot, desert

Santa Ana winds of Super Bowl

Week, 24/7 for months.

The 421

Club’s my spot—we slam shots, extol

the fine tunes, the good drugs, the big wads

we have, but there’s no one to nest with

and my beer’s gone, game’s over, time to bail.

Those willing, drunken dates are just a myth.

It’s getting late, my sweet, don’t mind the light

that cloaks with mist our bright retreat,

our nuptial branch, our bliss. Don’t miss our bliss

this year, my love—you’d be remiss

to merely flutter near. I’ll be discreet;

not one more peep from me, once we’re tight.

At the bus stop next morning my head pounds.

Nothing worked at Bocardo’s where she sat;

not the coke, not the weed, not the literate conversation

from my end, while she sipped burgundy, water back.

She said “thanks a lot” at one o’clock, then left,

not staggering like I was, as I stepped

home, riding cracks in the sidewalk, still bereft,

still on my manly quest, on post-game letdown,

as I passed my brother’s tree—he didn’t sing!

I can’t recall her face—just blue eyes, blonde hair,

the way her nipples poked her top—it’s baffling:

where to sit, what to show, with my Ray-Bans on.