Pick me up before you go go

Today felt unmanageable.  Up so very early and still not enough time in 24 hours to accomplish what I should get done.  Coffee.  Early morning campus dash to my office.  The swimming pool beckoning, swim suit at the ready, but the clock is relentless and my tasks endless.  The swimming pool remains sequestered in the realm of possibilities.  More emails. At least my dog is relaxed on her little make-shift office bed.

Last night I had so many weird dreams...disconnected, anxious, bloodless, and disorienting.  That feeling persists.  The universe whirls by and I am running after the chunks that I am responsible for. Running, going, doing but not finishing anything really.  I get weird when I am like this.  Kind of crabby and melancholy and nervous all at once.  But don't ask me about it.  I'll cut you short without meaning to.  Nothing important going on here.  Move along.  Hell, I can't even get to my dentist appointment.

Early morning email from a friend of many years saying he had a dream last night and I was in it.  Oh the funnies.  We did silly, crazy shit back then.  He's smiling when he writes it, I can tell.  I smile too.  Starting off the day with a connection.  It's like that Star Trek thingy where the molecules (the transporter?) start putting the person back together after being teleported.  My molecules are sometimes not mine to manage.  Sometimes a ripple crosses the universe, the internet, the virtual whatever and rearranges me for me.  My nightmares from last night are suddenly spongy, like the surface of a leaky water balloon.

The day moves into a new phase off campus.  Car must be located.  I move through the well managed streets of La Jolla.  Suddenly a familiar voice shouts my name.  In a moment's notice I am picked up and ensconced in a car that had moments earlier been whizzing by.  No ceremony, just a casual celebration of spoken and unspoken threads of connection.  A friend from years back.  We talk excitedly about his prospects of becoming a father.  I've never seen him so relaxed.  So sure.  For a few moments we spend time together like we have all the time in the world and talk like we are picking up a conversation we started earlier that day.  It's like having a present given to you when you least expect it.

The email, me, the car, the 2 friends that actually know each other as well as me.  Here we are.  All together.  Making happies.  Picking each other up before we go go into lives that rarely include each other anymore.  And yet.  Here we are.  Making follies of nightmares.  May we live long and prosper.

Gaze respectfully...if you must gaze at all

I have recently realized (I'm slow) that what I have problems with are the practices of looking...looking at bodies racially, sexually, politically, according to size etc.  Even when it comes to the naming taken on in identity politics that demands first a practice of looking.  So, in other words we name ourselves as "Fat" or "Caucasian" or "Natural" or "Femme", etc we might be undermining social practices that can create invisibility and silencing, but we are also continuing to normalize ways of looking that condone a kind of objectification   Identity politics seems to reach a kind of cul-de-sac of activism because of this.  Not that identity politics are dead, nor are they useless, but practices of looking in many ways defy, undermine and damage empathy.  Practices of looking encourage the gaze of power because the person doing the looking is involved in evaluations that are produced within a system that has powerful social norming practices.  Visual media alone, to which we are subject to daily, makes a practice of highlighting bodies that are considered normal and abnormal...and oddly it seems, we willingly turn this practice back on ourselves.  We practice, in this visually centered culture, identity politics that take up the tools that normative media outlets use in order to try and re-define, for example, what is considered "normal" and "abnormal".  So we ask others to gaze at us in particular ways because, we hope, it makes them think about us, and allows us to re-insert ourselves where we have been ousted or silenced.  The result it seems, is that we end up reifying the looking and gazing that ultimately leaves out the experience of being, especially as connected to others.

Experience of being, you ask?  I look, I see and I experience because, after all, I am a product of Western culture where seeing is a part of my experience.  Fine, but that kind of experience is one that challenges a relationality demanding to be understood, nay to be embraced.   Porn, for example, is an example of this.  I have gone back and forth on porn...hetero porn, gay porn, feminist porn...you see...even in naming the genres, they are named by the ways in which we see the people in these categories!  Porn divides up people into body parts, sizes, predilections, etc. but doesn't remember the interaction, the experience of the people except insofar as they relate to one's own pleasure...These practices of looking are found in the most mundane day-to-day interactions and end up as political fodder (Obama's looking at the Attorney General).  Strangely it is the feminists who are considered radical because they take issue with Obama's comments on A.G. Harris' looks as inappropriate, rather than Obama's comment as a radical departure from the professional norm.  Sadly, the idea that professional behavior would not condone a boss saying, "She sure is a cutie" (Obama's comment in a nutshell), is clearly still a theoretical benchmark.  What feminists bring to light and have brought home (for me) in this Harris instance is that in the moment that Obama made his comment, Harris was turned from an Attorney General into an object of pleasure for men (or women).  We went from interacting with her ideas and with her, to looking at her.  Evaluating her based on her (in her case) attractiveness.  This constant evaluation of attractiveness is a practice of looking and one women in particular undergo.  We must constantly negotiate when we are being interacted with and when we are being looked at, and this happens so seamlessly it is hard to tell the difference at times.  And if we have a problem with it, and it (oops!) leaks out in a unacceptable way (looking "out loud" in a professional setting), it is the person who is looked at who is at fault.  She is too serious.  She shouldn't have been that attractive.  This can also be seen in a culture that still defends rapists the ways in which came to light in the media coverage of the Steubenville rape case.  NBC, ABC, CNN, you name it, employed discourse that highlighted the youth of the men involved, their "normalness" and their tragedy.  This is not to say that they are not victims in a way.  They too are part of a system that teaches them to be predatory in their gazing.  They are trained from a young age to look at women and evaluate them based on various categories of attractive (i.e. "slut", "lesbian", "easy", "virgin", etc).  We can see these men as belonging to us, to our culture and so when NBC airs a program that takes an "inside look" as to how the lives of the rapists had been upended by the accusation, we can sympathize with them.  This despite that the "accusation" that had video and audio corroboration by the rapists themselves (posted on the internet) laughing at the victim for being "dead" at the time of the rapes.  She was unconscious.

Looking is often done, in a noticeable and acceptable way, by the powerful.  People who determine the scope and parameters of looking.  And even as we try to change the terms of how somebody gets represented we don't look at why looking is important to begin with.  Because the practice of looking, the art of looking, if you will, its terms and so forth, are constructed by those with power, people who are disenfranchised are especially subject to practices of looking.  This is why we can talk about poverty porn, because we understand that the gaze on poverty is much like the gaze we have in passing scantily clad people, we look for our own pleasure.  We evaluate what we are looking at based against "normative" models and we appropriate the visual before us in whatever way we like.  We "rubber neck" with fear, loathing and lust.  In the United States, women of color have especially have to endure these evaluations.  Harris is probably not unfamiliar with this and neither are many others.  This is a land where colonialism laid down its laws and boundaries, and where rape was an acceptable tool to conquer unwilling natives, slaves, wives and employees.  This is what is meant, in part, by "rape culture".  This is why the girl who was raped in the Steubenville rape case felt ashamed to come forward.  She had been looked at in a way that was acceptable.  She had made mistakes and was subject to the "natural" practices of over-wrought teenage men.  The culture condemns both, the men legally and her culturally.  She will always be viewed with suspicion and even hostility (which is why she has had to move away from Steubenville).  She engaged in the same drinking behavior as the men, but in her case she passed out.  The scale of power already normally in play shifted even further in favor of those who could now practice their looking unimpeded and act on that practice of looking.  In other words, the practice of looking was boiled down to its essential, the practice itself.

I am not saying any kind of looking, and it's kissing cousin, objectification have NO place, but that this is probably best left done between people for whom power and distance is no issue.  Or if the practice of looking is a mindful one, one where the looking itself becomes highlighted.  Objectification in this instance might even be fun.  Looking and gazing, once the current practice is substantially addressed, might even encourage empathy, rather than a pornographic overtone.  Looking or gazing will never be something that we can completely undo.  However is it possible in making ourselves aware of the practices of power we engage in when looking that we can produce a different kind of looking.  So the next time you find yourself evaluating someone else based on their looks, "positively" or "negatively" remember that you are probably engaging in a practice that inherently reflects the power of social norming behind it.  Gaze mindfully.  Gaze respectfully.  If you must gaze at all.

Fear

Fear makes a person do funny things.  Not "ha ha" funny, but strange-funny, sad-funny and even tragic-funny.  I have been thinking about this as of late.  Really I have been thinking about this since I killed a baby rattle snake in my yard two weeks ago.  There it was, curled up in the traditional rattle snake coil, except for smaller because it was a baby, no longer than a foot perhaps.  I had been gardening, vigorously pulling weeds in my front yard on a warm San Diego morning when my hand alighted near to the snake and my eyes near to my hand.  The rattling motion of the tail is what caught my attention as it varied from the overall stillness in the background.  The rocks, the dirt even, blended with the snake, but that rattle was shaking like crazy.  I have to admit that I was a little slow in understanding what I was looking at.  This is embarrassing for a person who has mentioned with some pride (on the appropriate occasions of course) that she is the daughter of a biologist and also considers herself to be somewhat savvy when it comes to the various wildlife available in this little nook of Penasquitos Canyon.  Certainly not someone afraid of snakes.  It seems however the moment I realized that what I was gazing at was a rattler I immediately came up with reasons as to why I should kill it.  In the meantime, in order to prove my own rationality was at work, thereby meaning my decision making was clear headed, I stretched out the little snake with the handle of my hand spade.  I contemplated the nose of the snake, the way it's tongue flickered in and out (perhaps smelling me?), it's length and the way it's tail moved though I could not hear any actual rattle noise.  In my rational contemplation of the characteristics of the snake I did allow myself some room to be surprised.  I had never thought of this particular detail before, namely that a baby snake's rattles are not audible because they are not dry enough or big enough to make sound.

Once complete with my various speculations of the snake, (speculations is a generous word for a process that took no more than a minute) I summarily drove the pointed metal part of the hand spade through the rattler's neck, directly behind it's head.  I was surprised that 1) the mouth opened in response and 2) that the dirt beneath the snake and my spade gave way, which made for a less clean cut, if you will.  During this time I continued my reasoning that had commenced with my earlier speculations, that this snake was surely a danger to not only myself, but also my dog Bella.  That even if I took it down the slope of my property and placed it in the canyon, that it would somehow make it's way back up the slope, into my yard and kill either Bella, me or both of us.  After all, as we know, baby rattlers are the deadliest.  They don't know how to control their venom and so inject too much and invariably kill their target.

Once the snake was dead I immediately began to feel shame, but this did not stop me from continuing to pile on more fear laden actions.  Instead of burying the dead snake, so that the thing that it now was, could properly decompose into the earth where it lay and be eaten by the various happy bugs, I subsequently picked it up and plopped it into the garbage can.  Now, I reasoned, it could not attract rodents and other undesirables and wouldn't smell or be dug up by my dog.

Fear.  Not just reactionary, protect-yourself-now kind of fear, the kind of fear that is somewhat forgivable (even if you can feel chagrined about it later, depending on the circumstances), but rationalized, well thought out fear.  I never knew I was capable of that kind of fear.  That is the kind of fear that ends up contemplating the most irrational means for the most improbable ends.  The concentrations camps of Nazi Germany come to immediate mind.  But also the death of Matthew Shepard.  And the pre-emptive war that keeps us safe from something(s) but we're not sure what.  I am, it appears, capable of that kind of fear.  Now I am not saying I could rationalize killing 1000 people tomorrow, but give me time and under the right circumstances, the right "conditions of possibility" perhaps I am no better than George W. Bush or Pat Buchanan or that more "irrational" idiot who accidentally shoots an intruder who turns out to be his wife.

Since that day out in the garden I have determined to arrest my fear.  Come to terms with it.  Understand it.  Not that fear is always useless, but I have come to believe that much of the time it is a hold over emotion and response from a much older human ancestor.  I won't speculate as to which human ancestor as there seems to be some dispute in the Neanderthal connection.  Regardless, pre-historic ancestor no doubt.  In other words, most of the time fear should probably be dealt with as being fundamentally irrational, no matter how many fancy words you put to it.  A survival instinct.  So far nothing dramatic has happened with this new awareness of fear, except that I am perhaps more sympathetic to people who are afraid and respond in anger or self defense.  I am also taking some risks again.  For example I have not written in this personal blog since 2010 and I am picking it up again.  I have put the surfboard in the water and attempted to catch waves, not just ride on the foam that I catch after the wave breaks...the result being I have both caught and ridden 3 waves now.  I trust my partner more instead of live in the fear of old hurts morphing into new ones.  I also want my politics to be kindness.  Fear more often then not, does not encourage kindness.  So now I am learning to embrace my fear and look at it, understand it and then let it go.  I hope by doing this I'll have more time to "live the dash" in my life.  1971 - ?  That dash is what matters now, not the question mark.