india

i have never been to india. mental index-->search-->india-->go: it's a place that is hot, overwhelming, crowded, and magical. there are elephants, spices, rugs, snakes, men who wriggle up telephone poles either for work or for tourists' entertainment -- also work. i imagine myself on the back of a mo-ped, marinating in filthy exhaust, putting through congested highways, my hair three shades lighter from the soot. i imagine myself wearing a white linen shirt, because it's the most romantic and the least practical in a country where clothes are washed in the same river that entombs the dead. i imagine true green saris, with gold and magenta accents. i imagine necklaces, lengthy strands, entire dance halls adorned in bright orange marigolds. i see nose rings, brown lace henna designs on hands and feet, and i hear thick women shouting down dusty alleys -- lovers quarrels, arranged marriage quarrels, what do you want for dinner? it doesn't matter we're having X.

i smell curry. i see black mustaches, stiff as push brooms, shit-eating grins and interesting dentistry. i see food stalls, street vendors, reptiles in hats, scarlet bindis. i'm wandering, walking through revolving pockets of stench and journeying scents, reminders of being not in kansas anymore. i see tragedy, wonder, nothing i can relate to, everything that i am. it's hot, water is...bottled? water is precarious. water is warm. water is cheap, or expensive. cups are copper, lightweight, made in china.

i wear a money belt, also an indigo woven purse that i bought in morocco. looks unassuming. i can be canadian. would it matter, would i be convincing as something i know little about? why pretend.

i consult my flashcards, lint on india -- yoga, hindu gods, lamb curry combo from curry in a hurry, vishnu, ramayana, diwali, chakras, all seen with my third eye from lonely planets, know-before-you-go's, juju beads and crystal balls. it's imagination. it's probably ignorant, politically incorrect, racist, stereotypical, prejudiced and all of the above. but what draws a traveler to a new chunk of the earth's crust, one where her parents have never set foot, nor their parents or their great greats? it's that innocent wonder, the kind you're not supposed to talk about if you are educated. but it doesnt matter how much you study before embarking on an exotic tour of the silk road, of macchu picchu, or the great wall. it's the fairytale aspect that stirs the heart in anticipation -- and into a billowing boil when imagination meets reality. it makes the hard parts bearable -- the fairytales have teeth, it turns out, claws and a black magic built right into the dirt. we have it too, but we're less familiar with it because it's not our own. feeling at home in a new place comes with understanding its black magic rooted deep in the soil, the trees, the hearts -- and approaching it like a riptide: beautiful from the shore, so picturesque and powerful...but up close, inside the barrels, it is deadly and disorienting. that razor within the cupcake is what gives a place its full-bodied flavor, even if it makes you bleed. bite down hard, to really get the full effect of frosting on an open wound.

i imagine "place" before i go, whether it's wichita, vancouver, santiago or mumbai. and i let myself revel in the orientalist romanticist -isticisms of each. when i arrive, i find the maps helpful but no amount of frommer's can teach you how to navigate the black magic as it intertwines with the friendly teas, curious "third world" inventiveness, kodak moments...the oddity of people as spectacle, as facebook fodder, as photo ops to rival nat geo classics. humanity, staggering, adjusting to a turbulence of its own making, can be felt like a ripple across the ancient lake of time and space.

whether it's tipped berets in paris, cohibas in havana, or flying carpets in riyadh, cliche has its place in rough drafting adventure.

jack + butterflies

jack lived in the basement of our house on laird avenue, where i arrived in a pink cocoon in september 1984. jack had long black hair -- long because it was longer than dad's and he combed it forward, slicked vertically across his forehead and all around his head like black seaweed.

jack collected butterflies. he pinned them into shadow boxes that he never hung on his wall, he just stacked them like clay soldiers against the baseboards of his living room. four, five, six deep. my sister and i discovered this one day when we turned the knob of his front door and pushed. he was gone, mom was watching soap operas and eating grapefruit with sugar and a green serrated spoon. we were supposed to be on our yellow plastic swing behind the garage, next to the cherry tree. we saw the butterflies, some the size of quarters, others the size of our 4-year-old hands, and then the saucer-sized, iridescent blue ones -- too bright to be real, or dead. i saw them suspended inside the box -- sewing pins pierced through their candystriped bodies. their eyes were wide open, i thought perhaps they could still fly if only the pins were taken out. we pried one of the boxes open. i felt a kind of stewardship over butterflies ever since my mom told me that my name meant butterfly (shorthand explanation for genus of butterfly). i took that as a sacred calling to free the butterflies, to never stomp on a crisp fall leaf (what if a butterfly was hiding on the underside?) and to always help a butterfly in distress without touching their wings (special butterfly dust that human hands can destroy).

we pulled the pins out of the first butterfly. it didn't move. it didn't slip and fall, didn't flutter awake and escape jack's butterfly prison. jack was evil. jack made dinner at the same time every night, and it smelled terrible. what was he cooking? one morning my mom decided to cut my hair. she combed my dark wet hair down to my chin, over my ears, down the back of my head. i saw my reflection through the vines of my dark brown curls, and realized that my hair looked exactly like the evil butterfly murdering crappy cook neighbor himself...jack. i was horrified, my mom was trying to fashion me after my mortal enemy: the man in the basement. i protested wildly. she explained that it was only a part of the hair-cutting process, that my unruly mass of curls would return once she finished. i took her word for it. she turned out to be right, and i took to combing my hair down the front of my face after my bath as a matter of routine comedy -- something that made my sister laugh and gave me a sense of vengeance taken, on the man who killed butterflies.

i later studied butterflies in more detail as a kindergartener in ms. hansen's class in half moon bay, california. we collected fat green caterpillars with sticky yellow feet and placed them in clear plastic, aerated lunchboxes with red handles on the lid. We colored, labeled, cut and pasted depictions of metamorphosis, cocoons, larva, milkweed, the voracious eating habits of a caterpillar approaching its time for chrysalis. i remembered the butterflies jack had killed. thought about how long it took to transform into a butterfly-- how much work was involved in being a caterpillar-- the effort to complete such an astonishing task. how did they know when it was time? would they sometimes forget and remain fat green slugs devouring milkweed in a sunny field at the base of a copper mine? either way, my contempt for jack was elevated as my caterpillar progressed from one day to the next.

when the day came to watch the butterflies break out of their cocoons, i saw an entirely new creature emerge from its papery shell. new legs, long black and slender tucked into crumpled orange peel wings with black webbing. they were dripping with butterfly blood, so we let them dry out on the classroom ledge -- the sun pouring through their wings like silky stained glass windows. i was immensely proud of my butterfly. i watched it intently, made sure that no one crowded it or threatened to jostle it while it rested and got acquainted with its new life as winged creature.

our butterflies became spry and curious about the corners of their plastic lunchboxes, baffled by the illusive limits of a clear plastic box. parents were invited to the school for release day -- the day that we would all set our butterflies free to tell other butterflies, other caterpillars, about their most unusual experience as subjects in a montessori classroom.

we stepped outside the playground fence to an open space where parents were flashing pleased smiles and complimenting us on our butterflies, like we had just painted them ourselves, adorned them with the perfection we could not comprehend let alone draw with a crayon.

butterflies clambored out of their boxes and escaped hastily without so much as a fond farewell to us, their noble captors. one girl panicked as her butterfly stepped onto the edge of the box with three spindle legs. noooooooooooo! she slammed the lid back into place and severed the butterfly in half. wails ensued. horrified parents hid their shock behind looks of concern. the dismantled insect was collected, in pieces, and buried next to buttercup -- the late guinea pig. i thought about jack. pushing pins through thoraxes in the dark tomb where a girl named butterfly lived upstairs. i thought about the fragility of the butterflies when they're alive, their brilliant colors in life and death -- was that what made people want to keep them in one place, to pin them down in collections?

kəˈri(ə)r

certain words carry a kind of musk that lingers and offends. words like "abeyance", "fornicate", "irregardless","negligence" and "career" illicit a mournful shudder not unlike a mouthful of gangrenous beef tartare. today we'll look at career, since i just discovered that i've had one all along:

to review:

ca·reer/kəˈri(ə)r/Noun: An occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress.


verb: Move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction: "the car careered across the road and went through a hedge".

Synonyms: noun. profession - occupation
verb. rush - run - speed - gallop

until today, i never realized that i have a long and illustrious career in careering. while the prospect of a career (of the noun variety) has often proved elusive and uninspiring, it turns out careering is as simple as pairing martinis and car keys. i've been careering since i can remember -- careering head first down a flight of blue carpeted stairs before i could speak, careering from police after my sister's 18th birthday party, careering smartly, rat-like, through the underground tunnels of the new york city subway, careering recklessly down cherry street on a pinewood sled-on-wheels. i've built a shining career in careering long before i knew how to spell the word.

split

"According to Seinfeld, schizoid individuals frequently act out with substance and alcohol abuse and other addictions which serve as substitutes for human relationships. The substitute of a nonhuman for a human object serves as a schizoid defense. Providing examples of how the schizoid individual creates a personal relation with the drug, Seinfeld tells how "one addict called heroin his 'soothing white pet.' Another referred to crack as his 'bad mama.' I knew a female addict who termed crack her 'boyfriend.' Not all addicts name their drug, but there often is the trace of a personal feeling about the relationship." The object relations view emphasizes that the drug use and alcoholism reinforce the fantasy of union with an internal object, while enabling the addict to be indifferent to the external object world. Addiction is therefore viewed as a schizoid and symbiotic defense.

S. C. Ekleberry suggests that marijuana "may be the single most egosyntonic drug for individuals with SPD because it allows a detached state of fantasy and distance from others, provides a richer internal experience than these individuals can normally create, and reduces an internal sense of emptiness and failure to participate in life. Also, alcohol, readily available and safe to obtain, is another obvious drug of choice for these individuals. Some will use both marijuana and alcohol and see little point in giving up either. They are likely to use in isolation for the effect on internal processes."

According to Gunderson, people with SPD "feel lost" without the people they are normally around because they require a sense of security and stability. However, when the patient's personal space is violated, they feel suffocated and feel the need to free themselves and be independent. People who have SPD tend to be happiest when they are in a relationship in which the partner places few emotional or intimate demands on them; it is not people as such that they want to avoid, but both negative and positive emotions, emotional intimacy, and self disclosure.

It is possible for schizoid individuals to form relationships with others based on intellectual, physical, familial, occupational, or recreational activities as long as these modes of relating do not require or force the need for emotional intimacy, which the affected individual will reject.

Donald Winnicott summarizes the schizoid need to modulate emotional interaction with others with his comment that schizoid individuals "prefer to make relationships on their own terms and not in terms of the impulses of other people," and failing to attain that, they prefer isolation."

elsewhere

one day, will wild earth be a fable? will bits of it be roped off for observation and visiting hours? will it be wild if we know where it is, if we know what it looks like, if we charge admission? even if we move to a "resource-based economy", where money does not exist, can we eradicate human nature? are all of our grand plans at odds with who we really are and what we really want? how can we save ourselves and stop destroying our planet without losing individuality? what makes anyone believe we can outsmart our own inextricable dark side that got us here in the first place?

is sustainability at odds with the necessity of destructive cycles? is it our fate to eventually be peeled away from our little planet and returned to the dust that we came from? is it a collective naiivete or natural drive that makes us think we can and should reverse this fate?

best case scenario: if we were all to become equal, united, striving for a utopian society where sickness, filth, and greed are obsolete, what on earth would we talk about? how can we cure our addiction to drama, to competition, to solitude? a utopian society is an open one, where privacy is also obsolete because what, in a perfect society, would anyone have to hide?

and what would we wear? without class stratification and with advertisements, department stores, credit cards and cosmetics relegated to the ash heap of history, will we have any reason or right to care how we look? we are no longer competing for resources, so how will we compete for optimal mates? how can we outwardly distinguish ourselves from all of the other mating options if wealth is no longer a substitute for biological disadvantage? when sexy is no longer tied to wealthy, and no single occupation or person holds more power than another, what will the new biological/reproductive competitive edge be?

are people afraid of this type of society because who you are will matter more than what you have or do? are people afraid that they can't change who they are, but they can change their status or appearance or monetary value with enough determination in a money = value society? if, in this new world, money = nothing, and you have a lot of money, you have a lot of nothing. if who you are as a person--your values, morals, charisma, intelligence, kindness, curiosity, brilliance and vices--determines your value to society where collective survival trumps individual greed--there is a possibility for people to be inherently valuable or disposable to society at large. that must be a frightening proposition. no amount of scheming, plotting, or conspiracy can alter individual, in-born nature and aptitude. an artificial invention like money makes it possible for most people to avoid asking themselves or proving to others their fundamental value to society. moreover,there seems to be a negative correlation between individual (and "corporations" as individuals) wealth and the health of the earth which is directly linked to human survival. so when the tides turn and humans are finally faced with the imminent possibility of extinction, survival will take the place of money to create a survival = value society. and perhaps the reason why those who were good at being valuable in the old system (our current system) resist the idea of this new system because they're afraid of discovering that they offer zero value to society or worse, are deemed destructive. maybe there are people who genuinely do not wish to be a truly valuable member of society, when broader social values don't match their personal values. what will we do with these people in the new world? exile them to an industrial, polluted, greed-ridden island/planet/outpost of isolated moral depravity? will that become the new prison system?

when all of this happens, will we know what to do with ourselves and the part of us that still longs for tradition and simplicity? will people still paint, dance, or open galleries? will we go to church if we've found a way to synthesize our own salvation? will MBA programs disappear? will universities disappear? will we scrap entire cities for materials to build new ones? will human culture become totally homogenized as we melt the past in order to forge a future?

isn't this ultimately what the greenpeacers, occupiers, dreamers and idealists want? a new society that centers on equality, sustainability, and a more humane application of technology? do they realize that it may mean taming every vestige of wilderness on earth--when resources become the new global currency that belongs, in principle, to all humans who live here? every bit of it will become inventory, controlled and distributed by a computerized, algorithmic and egalitarian government. it will be sustainable, green, and earth-friendly. but will we feel at home on our own planet? what parts of ourselves will we lose in order to survive? and how will that change the definition or motivation for survival?



in this new world, what would you live for? what would you die for? what would you kill for?

grace

grace.
an om on the pathway to a public promise.
when i was seven
on tiptoe
through a marble maze.
a gothic castle, i dropped a lily on the runway
we took off for a new place
spice, india love melody, divine rubies.
my very own elephant, high on a hill.
two brass doors, the last supper gleaming in city sun.
rings on my fingers, bells on my toes.
do you want to go to the seaside?
a mark of permanence, prominence, forever exalted.
revisiting the rose of my beginning
where i learned who i was + scattered scarlet petals,
before i handed it over, my pearl,
like a purse full of lottery tickets.
one structure
thousands of mirrors
a monument to determination
a shrine to opulence
a tomb for Then.

grace: my dear, i am unbroken.
cracking bones, we are just dust.
i let you shatter my palace
but i sleep in the pieces of your small.
i dream in the wake of your design.