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.

DEAR AMJAD, YOSSI and EZRA

 

DEAR AMJAD IRAQUI, YOSSI KLEIN HALEV, & EZRA KLEIN:

I am writing this letter to you after having listened to two episodes of the Ezra Klein podcast as follows:

• The November 7th episode where Ezra interviews Amjad, and
• The November 10th episode where Ezra interviews Yossi.

Thank you all for availing yourselves to these conversations which in turn allows me to confront and grapple with the difficult and conflicting narratives surrounding the current state of the Middle East.

OCTOBER 7th

October 7th is fresh on my mind because it seems like it happened just yesterday. My body responded to that day with my jaw dropping, my eyes weeping, and my heart aching for the people murdered and tortured by Hamas. Today, it's almost two months past October 7th. And before we know it, we will see October 7th shapeshift as it drifts farther away from us. As i see the brutal retaliation by Israel with countless deaths of innocent Palestinians, my jaw drops, my eyes weep, and my heart aches. My soul shakes into a single-word prayer on repeat. That single word is: Please. In Spanish it's por favor. In Korean, it's 제발.

To try to understand WHY October 7th happened, I know I need to understand a story that doesn't begin on that date. It begins more than 75 years ago, maybe longer than that, back to 1917 when Palestine was under British rule, and the British announced a "national home for the Jewish people" to be developed within historic Palestine (Balfour Declaration, November 9, 1917).

A student of mine who is of Arab descent joined me in taking on the challenge of also listening to your interviews, examining your conflicting narratives, and writing among many things in her paper that "both Palestine and people of Jewish descent share indigenous roots to this region and there needs to be a mutual agreement on this from both parties."

Let's assume that everyone can agree to that. Even with such an agreement there have been bad behaviors that get in the way of long-term hope for peace because no one seems to be able to move past the bad behaviors and the insatiable thirst to exact the next best revenge.

BAD BEHAVIORS

Bad behavior #1 of many: Israelis have been militarily occupying Palestinian territory. Extremist religious settlers have invaded much of this territory, inch by inch, in a way that threatens the very existence of the Palestinian people and subjugates their daily existence in oppressive and humiliating ways. Yossi: Even you point out that you (along with many Israelis) who have opposed Netanyahu and his regime's oppressive treatment of Palestinians were marching in protest against Netanyahu all the way up to October 6th, with the threat of an Israeli civil war in regards to this injustice, moving increasingly toward the realm of possibility. And how after October 7th, all of that changed, as the trauma inflicted by Hamas has banded Israelis together to respond not to what was immediately in front of them pre-October 7th but what they see immediately in front of them post-October 7th: fear and terror.

Bad behavior #2 of many: With the departure of Israelis from Gaza in 2005, Palestinians voted in Hamas to lead Gaza. Yossi: you describe Hamas as the materialization of an idea—that Israel needs to be destroyed—a materialization that views armed terrorism as a tactic that you, Amjad, characterize as being the only viable tactic that Hamas believes in, because Hamas believes other tactics as having been ineffective. When I listen to your explanation of this, I have to remind myself that what may sound logical on paper is illogical in real life. I reject the notion that armed terrorism is a tactic equally weighted and therefore interchangeable with other tactics.

PEACE & LIBERATION

My student who has seen in the media, the relentless bombing of Gaza, argues that Israel is now acting beyond the scope of self-defense and says, "This is not self-defense, it is execution for Palestinians." She further points out the irony of an Israel set on destroying Hamas since as Yossi points out, Hamas is not just a militia, but an idea. And ideas cannot be destroyed. Especially through bombs. My student concludes her piece fueled by righteous anger that "Peace isn't the answer; liberation is."

I understand her rage. Though I have never lived under occupation, my parents have. From 1910 to 1945, Japanese colonizers occupied the people of Korea, including my mom and dad. And on August 14, 1945, Korea became divided into a North and a South, split along the 38th parallel, marking the surrender of Japan and ushering in the end of WWII. This division was intended to be temporary. Some 78 years later, "temporary" can be used to describe the division ironically, certainly not realistically. It is a division that makes we Koreans fear half of ourselves and distrust and begrudge neighbors who look more like us, eat more like us, and have cultural mannerisms more like us than most of the world. And despite the sameness, they for 35 years colonized us. Occupied us. Humiliated us on the daily.

OCCUPIERS & OCCUPIED

As author Kathy Park Hong points out in her book Minor Feelings, Koreans are a people who have always been on the run as we:

... first went to Manchuria to escape the Japanese occupation, then to Seoul to escape the Soviet invasion, then to Busan to flee North Koreans, and finally to the United States to escape the South Korean dictatorship. And in this 21st century, we know that life in North Korea remains a nightmare, causing people who choose the potential terror that will be theirs if caught defecting, to try anyway.

How can neighbors with an ancestry so similar have constructed relations where one became occupier and the other occupied? This is a question that can be asked not only of the Japanese and Koreans but also the Israelis and Palestinians. How can neighbors who hold legitimate indigenous roots to a region and even share a Semitic identity (i.e., Semites are people who speak Semitic languages especially Hebrew and Arabic) be at once occupiers and the occupied?

I think there is a growing societal sentiment that in order to pursue justice, we need to become agnostic toward the idea of compassion. More and more, I see jaws not dropping and hearts not sinking unless there is assurance that it's safe to do so; that is, as long as the suffering can be framed to keep a pure tribal fidelity of narratives that say who is qualified to be viewed as victims and who is not. It is a rigid binary that I am sure exhausts even the most fervent tribal leaders.

GEORGE FLOYD

When the George Floyd murder happened a few years ago, the pain in the community had people saying assorted things. One thing that some people said was "defund the police." Other people said other things that weren't as sensational, which was essentially, to improve the police. And to improve human connection. To get people talking and interacting and connecting and caring to combat loneliness and to foster belonging. To get bad cops out of the force and to get leadership to negotiate and collaborate and create new and better ways of policing. 

THAT IS MY UNCLE

Before George Floyd was Rodney King. During the civil unrest that exploded in response to King's unwarranted beating by police in 1992, a weird tension developed between African Americans and Korean Americans in Los Angeles. Korean businesses were being looted and vandalized, with a narrative that justified this action, pointing to Koreans' stoic and unfriendly demeanors, along with their businesses profiting from African American patrons. There were ridiculous and hurtful sentences hurled from both communities.

Why do I bring this up? Because in that moment, I felt there was a hopelessness kicking in with people starting to believe that peace was less important than liberation. I felt a desperation when my uncle decided to arm himself to protect his business in Los Angeles as he and his community were being targeted as the oppressive enemy. On the one hand, I wanted to shout to my uncle: "Stop! We are in the same boat as them!" And on the other hand, I wanted to shout to the African American community: "Stop! That is my uncle! That is not Laurence Powell! That is not Daryl Gates!"

And the entire experience had me ask: How can freedom have value when the context is violence and terror?

I thank you for giving these interviews so that I can have the opportunity to strengthen my thinking. As President Obama recently stated, there is no way to speak the whole truth at once. We can speak a slice of truth. And if we dare to be truly brave, we can listen to, and grapple with other slices. I realize that to speak even one small slice, a lot of time and energy is required. I thank my student and also my trusted colleagues for joining me in investing this kind of time and energy at this moment. Perhaps they will join me and perhaps you will also join me in my current single-word prayer to God who I think can be accessed through many paths:

Dear God: 

Please. Por favor. 제발.

 

Hear my prayer. 

Amen.

Sincerely,

Jenny 

//

Amjad Iraqui is editor at +972 magazine and policy analyst at the Al-Shabeka think tank. Here is the link to his interview with Ezra Klein.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Here is the link to his interview with Ezra Klein.