THE RENT COLLECTOR

 

DYING ELEPHANT
Toward the end of Camron Wright's masterful novel The Rent Collector, we are immersed in a story within a story where a weary old woman encounters a weary dying elephant. The old woman has experienced the horrors of barely surviving under the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia where in the 1970s, the regime killed over a million of its people, about a quarter of Cambodia's population. The killings were first targeted toward the regime's perceived political opponents, which snowballed into a mass genocide of its educated class—with the belief that the thinking and studying and empathetic elite was at the root of what needed to be expunged for its society to become pure and loyal to its totalitarian and unchecked power.

When I learned of Cambodian history years ago, it seemed like a distant and incomprehensible story. Today, as I recall this history through Wright's historical novel, I am startled to feel the echoes of the unfathomable repeating itself in modern society where power is becoming absolute and hatred toward the educated is growing exponentially. Where free speech absolutists silence dissent with fear that money and influence can buy.

MICRO MOMENTS
As the elephant is dying a slow and sorrowful death without another elephant nearby, the old woman says to the elephant: "I am sorry you are alone today." It is a tender moment because she is saying what most of us believe, which is that no creature should die alone.

Right as she speaks those words, Wright goes on to write:

No sooner had her words been spoken than she realized that the elephant wasn't alone at all. For she, the old woman, was there by her side, helping the dying creature when comfort and friendship were most needed (page 247).

When I've been in proximity to people hurting, I've been quick to think "I wish that person could talk to someone." Only to realize that that person was talking to someone. Me. Her. Him. You. Us. Maybe not long and extensive conversations that outline a path for macro solutions to macro problems but smaller conversations. Micro moments of genuine connection.

THE PEN
It is in a micro moment where we learn of the pivotal moment when a servant girl gives up her life so that an educated teacher can survive one of the killing sprees of the Khmer regime. Wright doesn't spell out the reasons why she does this but the mystery invites theories. My theory is that in that moment, the servant girl imagined a different way of being ... a way to live without fear and a way to fight ignorance with the pen. The pen that she would end up underwriting with her life, to help unshackle her surviving family members out of the unfathomable.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

 

So Speak with Nuance

NIKE & LAMAR
Did you see that Nike commercial during the Super Bowl? I loved it. The message gave me new inspiration to consider that the best part of being a free human is the ability to think and speak freely. The psychology of human development posits that in order to express our authentic selves, we first need to feel secure. Financially, emotionally, physically and all the other adverbs. In other words, we need to know that it's safe before we take risks with our words and actions. 

The one thing I loved more than the Nike commercial was the last moment of Kendrick Lamar's performance where he was daring us to turn him off before he pulled the plug and turned us off. Such poetic nuance.

Whether I am working with college, high school, or middle school students, it seems that no one is immune from the pressures cast by our attention-driven economy to forego heart-to-heart conversations about difficult topics and instead go straight to social media to broadcast the next best insult that can potentially go viral and slash the jugular of our perceived enemy. Fuck nuance. We've got a brand to not authentically but performatively build.

TERF & WOKE

One such difficult conversation in this modern day is about gender identity. It seems almost impossible to agree with the likes of Martina Navratilova who has spoken about the need to prevent transgender women from competing in women's sports without being characterized as being a hateful TERF. It also seems impossible to say that transgender women deserve to live their best lives free from bullying, without being characterized as a WOKE Libtard. Because fuck nuance.

JANUARY 6th

Another difficult conversation is about the events of January 6th. It seems impossible to on the one hand say we need to support the police whose job it is to preserve law and order without being characterized as a right wing racist. It is also risky to say that Daniel Rodriguez, Thomas Sibick and countless others who attacked Michael Fanone and other DC police on January 6th should not have received a presidential pardon without being characterized as part of the deep state. Because fuck nuance.

REDEFINING ACTIVISM

It's tempting to define activism as loud, insulting and lacking nuance. It's tempting to chase the exhilarating viral shouts and forego the smaller connections and deep conversations laced with disagreements. In many ways, our world is saying you can't unplug, and you can't speak with nuance. 

And I say,

So speak with nuance.

The Covenant of Water

 

CHARACTER CHART
I made this chart to help me keep the main characters straight in my head and heart while reading The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. The chart doesn't include all the characters. For example, it doesn't include a minor character named Lenin, who is the lover of Mariamma. Not Mariamma AKA Big Ammachi but Mariamma AKA the daughter of Elsie and her lover Digby. 

CASTE
Baby Mariamma grows up in India to become a brilliant doctor. During her lifetime, she sees leprocy sweeping segments of the population where a person who is normal one day becomes infected and more tragically outcast the next day, as people afraid of becoming infected designate colonies where the infected live. She also sees life through the system of caste practiced by Hindus, where individuals are born into a specific financial and social rung. There will always be rungs higher than mine and rungs lower than mine, unless my rung happens to be the bottom most. Caste is not a system where aspiration is welcomed. In other words, I can be brilliant and/or work harder than most but I can never climb up the ladder of rungs. Caste is a system where only when I accept the rung I am born into can I have a chance at a higher rung in my next life.

TWO PATHS
Lenin is a radicalized revolutionary. He is willing to commit violence if such extremism can combat the oppressive system of caste. That Mariamma who has toiled to work within a conventional and traditional path of medicine falls in love with an unconventional Lenin is both tragic and poetic as excerpted from one of the most gripping scenes of the book on page 561, as follows:

"Mariamma. Marry me! Come away with me ... She feels very naked. "Listen to you!" she hisses. "Do you hear yourself? Your arrogance? You want me to give up my life? Follow you to a cave? Do you know why I shivered to hear your story? Shivered when the constables passed under the tree? I was terrified that the next thing you would say was that you killed Sivaraman because you felt it was justified. If you had had your gun, you would have, wouldn't you?"

"I've given everything to study the body. To heal, not to harm. Lenin, you understand? But my God, if you really thought I'd go down this path of bloodshed with you, this ... this stupid path you took, not a straight path at all. If you think that, then you don't know me at all."

"And let me tell you, there's nothing heroic about what you're doing. You want to help the downtrodden? Be a social worker! Or go into politics. Join your bloody Party and run for office. No, you're still standing on rooftops waiting for a lighting bolt, playing Manrake the Magician. Grow up!"

TO LIVE THE QUESTION
This scene shook me hard because though I've never condoned the Lenins of the world, I have also understood them. Just like I don't condone the actions taken by the modern day assassin Luigi Mangione, I understand how that sort of path emerges within the context of a dysfunctional health care system, and how individuals decide to get on that radicalized path. Same goes for the radicalized red and the radicalized blue. I don't like them and I understand them.

Prior to that dramatic scene, when Mariamma and Lenin exchange letters as pen pals, Lenin foreshadows the devastating paradox of the human condition, where the cruelty of a social system is answered simultaneously by the resolve of a Mariamma to work within it, and by the resolve of a Lenin or Luigi to destroy it. Writes Lenin on page 532: "He didn't disagree that God may have other plans for me, but he said sometimes we have to 'live the question,' not push for the answer."

PATTERNS
On page 5 of the book, we are invited to consider the divine significance of patterns: The chaos and hurt in God's world are unfathomable mysteries, yet the Bible shows her that there is order beneath. As her father would say, "Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible."

Patterns sometimes emerge long after our patience and hope to see them dissipate. Long after the hope of understanding why her mother may have left her to be raised by her grandmother, Mariamma finds it back at a leprosarium where her mother Elsie has been living. A choice made to protect her daughter from contracting the disease, to give her a fighting chance at a brilliant life.

That brilliance can be found by many who view her long and impressively studied medical career. But really, the only brilliance of import is found by Mariamma and her mother at the leprosarium as they are able to move the immovable hurt aside and feel even through the glass that keeps them separate, their oneness, their love divine.

DISCLOSURE OF CONNECTEDNESS

PARADOX
When I teach about activism in the classroom, there are learners who assume things about that word. By the time the class is done, many learners come to realize that their early assumptions about that word are incomplete. And that the pursuit to become less incomplete requires the embracing of paradox, contradictions, and irony.

I recently listened to an interview of author D. Graham Burnett on the Ezra Klein podcast. In this interview, Burnett references a book titled The Attention Economy, where authors Thomas Davenport and John Beck offer definitions of attention that are contradictory and paradoxical and true. 

The first definition: Attention is what triggers and catalyzes awareness into action.

 

The second definition: Attention is waiting. What kind of waiting? Infinite waiting. The kind that author Bernard Stiegler describes as waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object and are mirroring the rich long webs of connectedness within each self. 

 

Onto these paradoxical definitions is an image that Burnett overlays, which is a scene created by American author Henry James in his novel, Wings of a Dove, where a dying woman is trying to gain the attention of a busy doctor whose practice and knowledge could hold the solution to her ailments. In this scene, the doctor places an exquisitely clear, clean, empty crystal glass on a table that is between the doctor and the dying woman. This overlay recognizes both definitions of attention as 1) the thing that could trigger action and 2) the thing that waits and hopes. To borrow from ecologist Gordon Hempton as cited by Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing, an empty glass (or silence) doesn’t contain the absence of something but rather, the presence of everything.

 

ATTENTION & ACTIVISM

What happens when we exchange the word attention with activism? Is activism the loud thing that triggers action? Or is activism the quiet thing that waits and listens and understands and connects? Can it be both? 

Or to reverse engineer such questions, is there any point to hurling demands? Is there any point to infinitely wait for connection? Megan Phelps-Roper, former member of the Westboro Baptist Church who was raised to hurl loudly, found her offramp to peace not by a counter protester who was louder than her, but a person who was willing to show up, wait, listen, and mirror.

MAJESTIC MOUNTAINS & AUGUSTE RODIN

I recently saw a film about the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 that crashed in the Andes mountains in 1972. The narrator describes how the mountains were at once beautiful and horrific in their ability to destroy their lives not by coming after them but by majestically being.

This point about the mountains reminds me of French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) whose life I have been learning about in the essay about Rodin by Rainer Maria Rilke, who describes Rodin as a quiet, practiced man with infinite patience. Rilke beckons us to feel the complexity of what Rodin must have felt as he discovered the mountain that he would need to climb as he found that the majestic stone would be his medium:

Rodin had now discovered the fundamental element of his art; as it were, the germ of his world. It was the surface, ... of which everything must rise ... the subject-matter of his art, the thing for which he laboured, for which he suffered and for which he was awake.

Rodin would not be distracted by subject matters other than the body "in which life was greater, more cruel and more restless." 

If I close my eyes, I can see the clean, empty crystal glass. I can see that it exists between me and the things I care about in the world. I wonder if I am ready to labor, suffer, and be awake to fill it. I wonder if I am already filling it as I live through the piercing paradoxes of a life that is more beautiful, more cruel, and more restless than I could ever have imagined.  

DEEP LISTENING

One of the journal prompts that I recently developed for the students I teach asks four questions:

• What is awareness?
• What is attention?
• Can I be aware of something without giving it attention?
• Can I give attention to something without having awareness of it?

After writing this prompt, I was happy to learn about Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), an American composer who coined the phrase "deep listening." This phrase isn't just about the horizontal nature of what I think about when I think about deep listening. That is, to intently lean into a person, to hold their gaze, and quietly absorb what they are expressing. In such moments I want the person to feel that I'm not distracted. That I'm neither looking up or down or sideways. That I'm meeting them eye-to-eye and that I'm completely tending to them. Their words. Their fervor. 

The reason I say that Oliveros' phrase isn't just horizontal in nature is because her phrase came about after an experience she had, of descending 14 feet vertically into a cistern in Port Townsend, Washington. A cistern is an underground tank for storing water. Kind of like a well but shorter and fatter. In that cistern, Oliveros made a music recording and found that in such a context, sounds reverberate in ways that are not imaginable unless you make that vertical trek firsthand. 

Back to my journal prompt.

What is awareness?
I think it's when I notice that a person or group is there. And that they are saying or doing something. 

What is attention?
I think it's when what I notice captures my interest or compassion or ego or love or guilt in such a way that I decide to spend extra time to interact with that person or group.

Can I be aware of something without giving it attention?
As much as I want to think that all of my expressions are worthy of captivating every person who experiences them, I know that they don't always captivate. Sometimes they infuriate. And as disappointing as that feels sometimes, I don't want to demand or strong-arm the kind of attention I want. It feels best when it's given to me with free will.

Can I give attention to something without having awareness of it?
I think awareness always precedes attention. And even though awareness alone can feel incomplete, it's not nothing. Not everybody has to dedicate their time leaning into my expressions. Especially if my one person loves me enough to tend to me and my fervor with free will. Even to the depths of an underground cistern. 

"To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically." (Pauline Oliveros)

To Paint in Santa Fe: June 6-10, 2024

 

It feels like I've been preparing for this offering for a long time. And maybe you've been preparing for a long time to join such an offering. 

Journey with us to a land where the light is rich, the land vast, and potential for creative breakthroughs ripe. For five days, join me in saying yes to art in the company of those ready to take the time to see, discover, create, practice, revise, and bask in the joy of this very season. The best season.

Enrollment is now open here, at Muses Santa Fe. 

57 Maven

 

ANNE LAMOTT
I took this selfie 11 days before today, with today being my 57th birthday. Nine days before the selfie, I was at a lecture by one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott. One audience member asked how best to cope with friends and family who have "problematic" world views. Lamott said that it's important not to allow those who hold opinions different from ours, to get us to hate them. She also said that if God exists, that God loves the cutest little newborn baby that we can think of, as much as God loves Donald Trump. 

ESTHER PEREL
Five days prior to the Lamott lecture, I pushed the pause button on the relationship with a man I love. A man who votes differently than me, and who understands my current and urgent need to experience the forest of aloneness. How I ever ended up loving him is not as difficult as I once imagined it to be. This ability to love in spite of differences is brilliantly articulated by Esther Perel during one of her recent podcast episodes where a young woman calls in to discuss her main life problem: her father, who she wants to bring into therapy sessions to have him realize how he needs to change. Change or what? Change ... or ... or ... or no contact. She explains that her father doesn't vote the way she does, nor does he fly the PRIDE flag like she does. And also that she has suffered trauma throughout her life because of his controlling ways. When Perel asks for an example, the woman explains that on one Saturday morning when she was a teen, he repeatedly bounced a tennis ball on her closed bedroom door to try and get her up and moving.  

PREACH & PRACTICE
Perel then asks the young woman to describe how she handles life challenges whenever they emerge. And the woman says that the only person she calls whenever she is in need is her father. And that there is never a time when he is not there for her. That whenever she is in need, he rushes to her to love and support her, and to hold her dear. She knows without a doubt that he loves her and she loves him. In spite of the traumatizing tennis ball. In spite of how he marks his ballot.

Perel observes the irony of a young woman who belongs to a generation that seeks (or perhaps demands) acceptance of differences while requiring some people—usually those closest to them, to rigidly conform to views and style that are not theirs. Preaching the fluidity while practicing the binary.

PRAY WALK READ
Another question that Anne Lamott responded to was what she does in order to cope with life. And she said: "Pray. Walk. Read." Curiously, she did not say "Write." Which makes me wonder whether writing is a byproduct of praying, walking, and reading. Making me wonder even more: if I want writing to become my main byproduct, what ought my three Lamotty practices be? So far, it's: Paint. Read. Exercise. Eat. Cook. Clean. Organize. Pray. Cry. Ponder. Sing. I know. It's too long, so. I need to whittle it down.

Toward the end of her talk, Lamott praised Barbara Kingsolver's latest book, Demon Copperhead (inspired by Charles Dickens). It is a book that gets me not to hate but to love a white male born in Appalachia to a drug-addicted mama, and his brutal destiny that has largely been characterized by the world as "trash," "hillbilly," "hick," "Deplorable." That Lamott praised this book made me squeal in delight as it is the one that my book club selected as our most recent read. It reminds me of a passage in the new book Filterworld, where its author Kyle Chayka describes how as an adolescent, he loved a particular Manga series. Years later, he learned that that series was influenced by a Haruki Murakami book, an author who he has come to enjoy as an adult. 

Hope.

Hope?

Yes, hope. Because when I pursue what I really want (even if there is a mess of books and clothes and music and paint flying everywhere during the pursuit), what I ultimately find isn't chaos. It's beautiful, surprising, paradoxical, ironic, mind-blowing order. There is thread. There is connection. There is fluidity. Lamott. Perel. Kingsolver. Copperfield. Dickens. Chayka. Murakami. Well-read. Unread. Degreed. Self-taught. Democrat. Republican.

Eleven days from now, I'll be way past the one-month mark of confronting my aloneness. I bet I will feel exactly one-month-strong and one-month-wobbly as I continue to Read. Cry. Ponder. Clean.

And everything in between.