Tim Jones in the desert
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- VERMILION's TEXT -
[Communique: 07.18.03]
Angels in America.
[Communique: 07.09.03]
I used to wonder what was so powerful about the U. S. Armed Forces ads. Was it the color? The editing? These days they look just like movie trailers. But today I figured it out: it's the power. Just that - the sheer unadulterated power. The power to write the script, the power of mythographic imperialism to direct the real world like a movie, to manufacture reality. The Armed Forces offer young people the chance to participate in the largest live-action role-playing game ever staged. Who could resist such a temptation?
I saw The Angel Project today.
"Do you believe in love, Mr. Beckett?" - Fictional Dialogue composed with David Hanlon
He didn't say it, but it sounds like something that he would have said.
[Communique: 07.08.03 - Later]
... While I understand the dangers of a merely sentimental guilt, I believe there is some burden we must bear by being white Americans. This is a burden which can be redemptive, not oppressive. It is a burden which involves joining, not exclusion. It reminds me of the first time I, as a young woman, was allowed to be a pallbearer, a responsibility usually reserved for men in a family. I remember feeling a sense of self-respect, of being honored by being allowed to help support the coffin of a beloved brother-in-law. I wanted the strained muscles and aching back I knew would follow in the morning, and when a fellow pallbearer, a man, offered to carry my load as well as his own, I responded, I'll do my share.
- Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whitness of Whiteness
A point of information: My sister says that my reservations about Acker are not what she meant at all.
[Communique: 07.08.03]
I linked an article by Kathy Acker a week ago, and my sister pointed out a double-edged sword within it. In her rush to empower the sick, Acker oversimplifies the nature of sickness. In her excitement about the power of will and spirit, she lets herself say: "First, one must want to be well." It is the first that is dangerous here. First, one must face sickness and its causes, mortality and the power-laden distribution of health. Then, as a warrior in that context, one can continue the work of living that starts from within. Acker calls the American establishment on its teaching of despair after cancer, but not on its complicity in the illness itself. Here, then, is something more:
It was very important to me, after my mastectomy, to develop and encourage my own internal sense of power. I needed to rally my energies in such a way as to image myself as a fighter resisting rather than as a passive victim suffering. At all times, it felt crucial to me that I make a conscious commitment to survival. It is physically important for me to be loving my life rather than to be mourning my breast. I believe it is this love of my life and my self, and the careful tending of that love which was done by women who love and support me, which has been largely responsible for my strong and healthy recovery from the effects of my mastectomy. But a clear distinctionmust be made between this affirmation of self and the superficial farce of "looking on the bright side of things."
Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo. Last week I read a letter from a doctor in a medical magazine which said that no truly happy person ever gets cancer. Despite my knowing better, and despite my having dealt with this blame-the-victim thinking for years, for a moment this letter hit my guilt button. Had I really been guilty of the crime of not being happy in this best of all possible infernos? ...
Was I wrong to be working so hard against the oppressions afflicting women and Black people? Was I in error to be speaking out against our silent passivity and the cynicism of a mechanized and inhuman civilization that is destroying our earth and those who live upon it? Was I really fighting the spread of radiation, racism, woman-slaughter, chemical invasion of our food, pollution of our environment, the abuse and psychic destruction of our young, merely to avoid dealing with my first and greatest responsibility - to be happy? In this disastrous time, when little girls are still be stitched shut between their legs, when victims of cancer are urged to court more cancer in order to be attractive to men, when 12 year old Black boys are shot down in the street at random by uniformed men who are cleared of any wrong-doing, when ancient and honorable citizens scavenge for food in garbage pails, and the growing answer to all this is media hype or surgical lobotomy; when daily gruesome murders of women from coast to coast no longer warrant mention in The N. Y. Times, when grants to teach retarded children are cut in favor of more billion dollar airplanes, when 900 people commit mass suicide rather than face life in america, and when we are told it is the job of the poor to stem inflation; what depraved monster could possibly be always happy?
- Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
I lie around all day and complain about lying around all day. I blame myself for not knowing what to do. First you come to grips with the context and release the paralyzing burden of guilt. Then you begin the work from within. This is true for everyone, no matter how great the differences in what that context is or in what work needs to be done.
I pretty much functioned automatically, except to cry. Everyonce in a while I would think, "what do I eat? how do I act to announce or preserve my new status as temporary upon this earth?" and then I'd remember that we have always been temporary, and that I had just never really underlined it before, or acted out of it so completely before. And then I would feel a little foolish and needlessly melodramatic, but only a little.
- The Cancer Journals
So long as we can cry, change is possible.
"Take it easy," Sonny said. "Remember you're not really as strong now as you feel."
- The Cancer Journals
[Communique: 07.05.03]
The cool blue feeling. It is unlike anything else. I call it blue because it is like swimming. You can feel that you are moving forward, but not because you can see where you are going. Instead, you can feel the passage of the present moment on your skin like a liquid. This is the cool blue feeling: the feeling of speaking truth. Not uttering analytically true statements, but speaking from the heart in a way that is honest because it is not clouded by ulterior motives. It is this absence of dishonesty -- of any attempt at manipulation or coercion -- that feels like water. The honesty is what you are moving through in that moment, and you can feel it. This is the physical sensation of courage.
Recent Jedi Encounters:
[Communique: 07.04.03]
Tonight I saw the video of the AC130 gunship targeting civilians in Afghanistan. You can see them blowing people up like it's a video game. Watching this footage on a large projection screen makes the neighboring July 4th fireworks look different. So many explosions.
So much anger.
I gave the finger to someone tonight. I almost never do that. We were at a party, a political and artistic community gathering, on top of Office Ops, three blocks away from my home. Sponsored by Rooftop Films. They hadn't done anything wrong, really. Just wanted their seat back after abandoning it to watch the fireworks. I was so angry, though, and for such a short time. The anger was gone within a minute, and I was left to think about where it came from.
I'm fucking angry that I can't seem to find a life. I'm angry that I feel forced to find and love a meaningless job. A job I don't really want. I'm angry that there is no support for what I want to do in my life which is create radical theater. I'm angry that no one else seems to be doing that and that therefore there is no infrastructure, no jobs, no rehearsal spaces, nothing set up for me to come into.
All of this is me being a spoiled brat.
All anger comes from being spoiled. But not all anger is the same. Some anger is useful.
I'm angry that up on the rooftop there all of us are so white and so much in our twenties in the middle of a neighborhood that is still mostly latino families. I'm angry that I'm part of the wave that is going to push those families out of their homes, and I can't help it because it's the only place I can afford to live, and eventually I will be pushed out too. How can I be profiting so much from my straight white male American privilege at the same time as being almost unable to pay my rent for months in a row? I have so many creature comforts and so many wonderful things and I am so happy in what I have, and yet none of that means anything as long as my life is not sustainable. Everything I have now is still on loan from my parents, from my education, from my skin and my sex. It doesn't matter that I can afford to eat because it won't last. Even the temp jobs don't mean anything because they are not part of a workable future.
Nothing counts unless it is sustainable.
Politics helps. Politics reminds you that:
01. The personal is political.
[Communique: 07.03.03]
Then, of a sudden, but not once troubling my conscious bliss, all the wrongs I had ever done, from far beyond my earthly memory down to the present moment, were with me. Fully in every wrong lived the conscious I, confessing, abjuring, lamenting the dead, making atonement with each person I had injured, hurt, or offended. Every human soul to which I had caused a troubled thought, was now grown unspeakably dear to me, and I humbled myself before it, agonising to cast from between us the clinging offense. I wept at the feet of the mother whose commands I had slighted, with bitter shame I confessed to my father that I had told him two lies, and long forgotten them: now for long had remembered them, and kept them in memory to crush at last at his feet. I was the eager slave of all whom I had thus or anyhow wronged. Countless services I devised to render them! For this one I would build such a house as had never grown from the ground! For that one I would train such horses as had never yet been seen in any world! For a third I would make such a garden as had never bloomed, haunted with still pools, and alive with running waters! I would write songs to make hearts swell, and tales to make them glow! I would turn the forces of the world into such channels of invention as to make them laugh with the joy of wonder! Love possessed me! Love was my life! Love was to me, as to him that made me, all in all!
- George MacDonald, Lilith
Land holds memory. This is why the land and live oak trees rooted in the Georgia Sea Islands whisper in our ear when we allow ourselves to listen. The Ibo of Nigeria were captured and brought to these islands. When they arrived and saw the conditions of their capture and homelessness, they turned around, walked on water, and drowned themselves. The place, bearing the name Ibo Landing, holds the memory of that moment...
- M. Jacqui Alexander in this bridge we call home
There is one who lives without structures in the heat of the desert. Joe met this creature when he traveled across time from the village of women to the city of men. They say that along that journey one may meet many strange things that do not belong in either place. Not everyone wants to live in utopia, no matter who is in charge. But Joe only met one person as he walked that long way. Some kind of sandy figure in the white sun, some fragmented body with the skin almost rubbed off and the features blurred. Nothing going in or out there, or maybe there were holes everywhere. And the word BEAST was scrawled across its chest in tissue raised from being cut. It was a scar, and it was a name. This is the creature with whom Joe fell in love.
Reading:
Watching:
Hits since 03/22/02:
"Yes, but I wouldn't want to make more of it than there is."
Augustus Napier and Carl Whitaker
Charles Red Hawk Thom, Sr.
Gloria Anzaldua
Landmark Forum Leaders
Pedro Alejandro
02. The political is personal.
03. It's not your fault.
04. It is your responsibility.
05. The world is fucking huge.
06. You will not fix it.
07. Doing good things is all you can do.
08. Good things are the only ones worth doing.
09. You don't know shit.
10. Nobody knows shit.
11. People are trying.
12. No one is perfect.
13. Get off your ass.
The Family Crucible
this bridge we call home
Towards a Poor Theater
My Dinner with Andre
Zardoz
vermilion's text = journal of a rootless cosmopolitan
all text by bspatz
return to anagnorisis