Kenya, December 21, 2007 to January 8, 2008

My wife and I are just back from a trip to Kenya. The trip was amazing. We arranged the whole thing through a company called Let’s Go Travel, a Nairobi based travel agency (which is different than a lot of the European or American based agencies as presumably the money stays in Kenya – important consideration I think.) George Ogola set everything up through email, and we transferred (gulp) payment to him with a bit of an “oh well” feeling, wondering if somehow it all might end up in the ether. But on the appointed day, a safari matatu (sort of a combi-van with a full-length pop-top roof) showed up at the gate of our friends’ house, honked, and we were away.

Landa was our guide, and he had pretty amazing driving skills. Most of the roads we took, except for one stretch around the base of Mt. Kenya, were rough and that’s an understatement. After the brutal drive from Amboseli to Lake Nakuru, Landa had to take the matatu in to the shop overnight to have every nut and bolt on the suspension checked and tighten. Good thing too, as many of them were loose, which explains why on the last leg of that stretch he could drive at about 50 kph.

Our itinerary was Amboseli, Lake Nakuru, Aberdares, Samburu, and then after a short flight, Masai Mara – basically the same places just about everyone goes when they do the whole safari tamale.

Amboseli is this incredible wetlands formed by the snow melt from Mt. Kilimanjaro. When the snows melt at the top of the mountain, the water flows underground until it hits a bed of less absorptive rock and pools in the middle of an otherwise arid plain just across the Tanzanian border in Kenya. On a clear day, you can see Kilimanjaro very well, and like most huge mountains that I have seen, the size is several orders of magnitude larger than I expected. What seems merely to be a cloud hanging over a mountain is actually the mountain surrounded by clouds, and the peak is just slightly lower than the highest cloud. Amboseli’s waters attract elephants and hippos, and each morning we saw quite a few elephants sunk up to their chins in the vegetables that nearly choke the water in each of the pools. Because the aquatic vegetation is so dense, the birds depend on the large animals to push aside the plants and reveal the fish and other goodies otherwise hidden beneath. As a result, each elephant or hippo has its own attendant flock of ibis’, egrets, jacanas, and other birds. Very lush. However, just beyond the banks of each verdant pool is arid grasslands, making for an immediate contrast between the lush watery elephant playground and the drier dominion of the giraffes, bustards, lions and cheetahs. We saw one large groups of lions, but unfortunately no cheetahs. Easy to imagine one zipping after a gazelle though. Plenty of runway.

Lake Nakuru is an alkali lake, famous for its large flocks of flamingos. We stayed in an excellent but small tent lodge – tent being an insufficient word for what is essentially a canvas house with full bathroom and four-poster bed. Not roughing it. In the morning, the black rhino showed up at our doorstep, making the thin wire fence seem entirely insufficient, especially when one of the other people at the lodge took a photo of the rhino at close range with a flash and the rhino charged the fence. These are the people you read about in the paper – “Man Trampled By Charging Rhino: Experts Puzzled Over Cause”. The flamingos are pretty amazing. The noise is what I thought was most impressive. All the squawking and carrying on blends into a single tenor-pitched sound that only elevates in volume when a hyena splashes into the flock to see if anyone is napping or a tawny eagle cruises through for a quick snack. The most impressive birds we saw were a pair of Verreaux’s eagles perched just above the matatu as we drove through the outer edges of the park. They looked like a pair of burghers in their black feathers and white “necklace” that extends down over their shoulders and across their backs.

To get to the Aberdares Mountains, you have to climb up out of the Rift Valley where Lake Nakuru sits. The vegetation moves from arid acacia scrub to more deciduous tangle. We stopped first at the Aberdares Country Club, the launching point for a bus ride to the strangely built Ark Hotel – strange because the roof of the hotel looks like that of an ark from the “classic comic” version of the Bible. The Country Club sits above a wide valley that holds a free ranging flock of Rothschild’s giraffes. After lunch and a few hours counting the many different kinds of sunbirds that flock to the flowers in the excellent gardens, my wife and I took a game ride down to the valley to see the giraffes. When we got there, the guide said we could get out if we liked. As most of the national parks prohibit anyone from exiting their cars for any length of time, an opportunity to walk among the animals is not to be missed. The giraffes were terrific – totally silent and perhaps a bit curious, moving across the ground so steadily and smoothly it was almost as if they were not moving at all. Once we got out, they started poking their heads above the bus-sized hedges that were spaced randomly around the edges of the clearing where the guide parked the truck (a big safari Land Cruiser from 1970 something – like riding in a washing machine.) I was not sure my wife would ever want to leave.

When we got up to the Ark, we were shown the system of bells that alert the guests to the arrival of certain animals who frequent the water hole the Ark was built to showcase. Each animal – leopard, rhino, elephant, hyena pack, and a few others – got a separate number of rings on the bell. As bells were placed at the head of each bed in the guest rooms, a ring was certain to alert most sleepers to an opportunity to stumble outside and look down on the floodlit water hole while wrapped in a large, thick blanket against the cold of the higher altitudes. And it was cold – we wore nearly every scrap of clothing we had and were still glad to find a hot water bottle placed between the sheets when we went to bed. Alas, no exotic creatures, though we did have a bit of excitement involving elephants and hyenas.

Just before dinner, four female elephants showed up with a very small baby elephant. They were not particularly interested in the water – the area was actually quite wet which is probably why we did not see many other animals. Instead, they wanted the deposits of salt in the dirt around the shore of the water hole and quietly went about digging up the dirt by bending down onto their front knees and gouging the dirt with their tusks. While they were so occupied, however, first one, then another, and another hyena showed up. Soon there were 15 hyenas, and the first hyena became to make experimental sorties into the outer limits of the elephants’ comfort zone. Finally, one got a bit too close, and the largest of the female elephants gave the smallest a not-so-gentle poke in the butt, sending her out to walk the perimeter as it were, against the encroaching hyenas. The small elephant was about 3-4 years old, and she did a pretty good job chasing the hyenas. They were none too keen on getting stepped on or tusked, but they still did not leave and more arrived each minute or so, increasing the odds in their favor of getting at the baby elephant sometime later in the evening. Then the largest female stopped, stood a few feet apart from the rest, and made a rumbling sound that seemed to be something you heard in your head rather than with your ears. A few minutes later, a very large male elephant walked out of the forest into the clearing. There was a pause, some throaty notes from each animal, then the male elephant stepped into the ring of female elephants for a session of trunk “handshakes”, body rubbing and bumping – quite a scene. Afterwards, the male elephant turned to face the hyenas with a sort of huff! and that was that. The hyenas gave up, leaving the elephants to finish their meal of salty dirt in peace.

The road to Samburu from Aberdares goes through some of the richest farm land in Kenya, much of it owned either by corporations or rich white Kenyans. The transition is most obvious when one looks at the telephone & electricity lines. Before one gets to the wealthy farming area, most of the lines are merely forlorn poles with balding strands of wire waving awkwardly in the wind. By the time Mt. Kenya becomes a roadside vista, the poles are straight and sturdy, and the wires connecting them are 1.) connected and 2.) continuous. In no other place we went in Kenya, including Nairobi, was the infrastructure for electricity and communications so shiny and new.

Once we reach Isiola, however, the road took on a decidedly more tense feeling. Perhaps part of this was the elections, which had taken place while we were in Nakuru a few days earlier and were still without conclusion. But I also think that Isiola is a pretty desperate place. In other parts of Kenya, even poor people would look you in your eye and see you – at least it felt that way. In Isiola, I kept wondering if most the town were glue sniffers. There was something hazy about the way they looked about two inches in front of you, rather than at the surface of your face. Then Landa said, “They are all chewing khat,” a leaf that when chewed produces a buzz stronger than tobacco but perhaps a bit weaker than marijuana. They were stoned. The kids came up to the windows of the matatu and asked for ink pens & paper, making me immediately regret not having followed our friends’ advice to bring a box of pens for the kids we would meet along the way. My wife and I had dedicated ourselves to traveling light, but now this compulsion for lightness felt a bit rude. Before we left Isiola, Landa registered with the police – the road from Isiola to Samburu had in the past been the realm of bandits who waylaid cars and then robbed the occupants. While the police had clamped down on this stretch a while ago, killing or chasing off most of the bandits, I think Landa felt that the unsteady elections might embolden some to go back into business. Even though the road was horrible, we didn’t stop or slow down until we reached Samburu.

Samburu is my kind of place. Hot, dry and plenty of arid vegetation. Even though it was far more lush, it reminded me of my favorite place in the states, the foothills of the Chiricahua mountains in Arizona. Samburu is better though. The birds are tremendous – we even found a pearl-spotted owlet perched on the edge of a bush late one morning. And the animals seem very much in their element, moseying through the brush as they looked for things to graze. The gerenuk is here, a long necked antelope whose name means “giraffe-necked” in the local Samburu dialect. And there are actual giraffes, this time the reticulated giraffes instead of the Masai giraffes in Amboseli and Masai Mara, or the Rothschild’s in Aberdares. Hornbills are ubiquitous here, and we found several different kinds, each separated out by the different patterns on the wings, the face and the color of the bill even though their over-all scheme is black & white with a bit of lipstick red on the bill. And that is most of bird watching in Kenya – 4 or 5 species of whatever, each looking nearly the same as the next, except for slight, perhaps even nearly imperceptible, differences in markings, or range, or song. The family of Cisticolas, small fussy birds that seem to be a cross between a warbler and a wren, proved the limit of my birding skills. With few exceptions, they are all a very limited variation on brown, rust and white.

During the day, we fended off the monkeys who came to raid each tent in our lodge. Bad monkeys. For that reason, we cheered when a Bateleur eagle showed up and tried to bash a monkey out of the trees over our heads. Bateleurs are big strong birds with very powerful wings, but the monkey held on, ducking and weaving out along the end of his branch, until finally he was able to leap to another tree and skitter down to safety.

Finally, we finished up in Samburu, and Landa took us to the small tarmac where we were to catch an airplane to Masai Mara. I think in the worst situation, traveling with a guide becomes a laborious process of tug-of-war. You want to go here or see this, and your guide has a seemingly invisible agenda that keeps him from ever giving in. However, in the best situation, you and your guide become collaborators on the adventure, and he is as receptive to your suggestions as you are deferential to his direction. That was the situation with Landa. He was instrumental in educating us in flora and fauna, as well as keeping us up-to-date with the shenanigans associated with the elections. That last day in Samburu was the first day of election violence in Kenya. After we got on the plane, Landa had to drive all the way home to Nairobi alone in that matatu. We hope he arrived safely, and that he continues to do well in the futre. He is a terrific gentleman, and someone I would recommend asking for if you travel with Let’s Go in Kenya sometime in the near future.

For us, I think, Masai Mara was a bit anti-climatic – though that might be the wrong word actually. The lodge was spectacular, run by Nick the half-crazy, half-sane, totally eccentric Tanzanian-Englishman-American owner. He made it his goal to employ the smartest of the local guys to work for him, and they repaid him with loyalty that meant that several had worked with him at the lodge since the early 1980’s. He is also making the lodge greener and greener by the day, sending the sink and bath water to a small wetlands set up to clean out the suds and installing solar/instantaneous water heater combos to take advantage of the sun without running out in the evening or on shady cool days. The food was uncomplicated but perfectly delicious and fresh. When the chef found out we were vegetarians, he made us a special dish each dinner. And the landscape & the animals are truly amazing. To look out across a plain and see gazelles, antelopes, buffalo, zebras, a few lions, a couple elephants, several giraffes, as far as the eye or binoculars can see, is mind-boggling, especially when one considers that we were there in the quiet season. When the wildebeest show up, things are really crazy. We even got to get out of the car again and go for a hike up the ridge above the lodge with a couple Masai (one of which received a prestigious offer of a spot in seconday school, which it seems the lodge owner is preparing to sponsor) to watch out for leopards (there are several in the lodge’s valley) and a guide to help with the birds. One of the highlights of the whole trip.

I think by the time we got to Masai Mara, we were fully into the whole safari routine, so instead of a mild sense of panic about what comes next and whether we were going to get to see this or that, we could just relax and let it all go by. And we had the perfect vehicle for it too – a huge, fully padded, Toyota Landcruiser that plowed along through the grasslands at about 20kph while we stood up through the roof and watched for cheetahs. No luck on the cheetahs though. The relatively wet conditions – not muddy but bright green grass everywhere as far as the eye could see – meant that there was no natural feature focusing the activities of the succulent gazelles that are cheetahs’ favorite snacks. Everyone was spread out all over the place, and thus, so were the cheetahs, which made finding them in the huge expanse of the Mara fairly imprecise. Each group of cheetahs have fairly distinct territories, but the guide said that some of these territories are as large as ten square miles. That’s a lot of space to cover at 20kph. But we did see plenty of lions, various eagles, hippos, elephants, hundreds of antelopes of all sorts, giraffes, and a nice Serval cat on the way to the airport to return to Nairobi. I can imagine that the spectacle of the Wildebeest migration would change my impression markedly, but ignorant of that experience, I prefer Samburu to Masai Mara.

The last day we were at the lodge in Masai Mara, we heard the story of the Eldoret church fire. A mob made up of opposition supporters (though who instigated their actions may never be known – in these situations, the instigation for events can as easily come from one side as the other, even when the results seem to indicate the culpability of particular group) chased a group of Kikujus from their homes. The Kikujus took refuge in a church, which was then surrounded by the mob and burned, killing 30 people, some of them women and children. When our plane from Masai Mara to Nairobi reached Nairobi airspace, we were told that we would not be going to Wilson Airport, the regional airport serving destinations in Kenya, but instead would be landing at Kenyatta Airport, the international airport in Nairobi. The reason given was that Wilson Airport did not have fuel available for refueling the plane; however, Wilson Airport is very close to one of the largest slums in Nairobi, called Kibera. One wonders if the fuel or lack thereof was not truly the problem, but that security and the threat of potential riots made landing at Wilson a bit more sketchy than would be smart or safe. Whatever the matter, our driver met us at Kenyatta, the streets of Nairobi were empty, and we fairly well flew back along the streets to the Karen district and our friends’ house with its lovely garden.

We had meant to go to Mt. Kenya, the second tallest peak (17,058’) in Africa to Mt. Kilimanjaro (19,340’,) but the potential for random violence strongly suggested that staying put in Nairobi was a better plan. In the west, even when things are tense politically, you have some assurance of the continued support of police or security. In the third world, this assurance barely exists when things are calm. A police officer at a checkpoint in the middle of the night might just as easily throw you in the dark hole of a jail someplace as wave you along to continue your journey home or to the market or wherever you might be going. In other words, if you find yourself in questionable conditions in a third world country some time, unless you are a journalist, a military advisor, a government official, a priest, an aid worker, or someone else who has a completely solid reason for being where you think you need to go, don’t go. First, you might get killed, but second, if you just get in trouble, then you are going to create all sorts of problems for the people who are going to have to figure out a way to get your ass out of trouble – people who probably have much better and more important things to do at that moment than deal with some idiot who drove into an unknown situation in search of excitement and a few photographs. Plus, you might just find that the embassy really couldn’t be bothered, which means you might sit wherever you are sitting for quite a while. Stay home. Watch the news on television and send email to your friends.

Which is what we did. Conveniently, our friend is a correspondent for a big news magazine, so we got hourly reports on the political situation from him while he was in the field or from his contacts. The basic issue seemed to be this: Kenya’s leaders (and perhaps Kenyans themselves) have deluded themselves that democracy was the universalizing influence that would bind all Kenyans together irrespective of tribal allegiances. And I think that perhaps this delusion was not a delusion really, if our conversations with the young men and women at Nakuru was any indication. They were all very excited about the potential for change that voting represented. Here was, they said, a perfect opportunity for political progress, to help improve the future of the country, through the democratic selection of a progressive alternative to the status quo – a vote for Odinga, instead of merely reelecting Kibaki. The night watchman at Nakuru spoke with us at length, and then he took his flashlight and shined it on his pinkie finger to show us the purple dye used to confirm that he had indeed voted earlier in the day. They were optimistic, bright-eyed, idealistic and in the end, naïve.

But they were naïve, not because of their own frailties, but because of the frailties of their own leaders. They believed that their leaders had as strong a faith in the process of democracy as they did. However, in the last hour of the vote count, with Odinga leading Kibaki by a slim but solid number, a sudden burst of votes for Kibaki put him over the edge, and he was declared the winner by an embattled elections commissioner (we heard the commissioner get shouted down several times on the radio while we were in Samburu, until finally he cleared the audience and made the announcement to an empty room.) Within a few minutes, Kibaki was sworn in and all the optimism we heard in the voices of the people we met in Nakuru drained out of the country. And when that happened, the reality that democracy could bind Kenyans of diverse ethnicity together, one to the other, neighbor to neighbor, tribe to tribe, became merely the delusion of political leaders disconnected from the will of their people.

Once the election was seemingly busted into pieces, democracy no longer had the ability to offer people something higher than tribal allegiances. For democracy to work, even the lowest of the low must believe that their vote will offer them a chance to select someone who will be their representative, who will speak for them fairly and seek changes that will improve their lives in some small degree. There must at least be some hope for the future affirmed by the process of registering the votes cast. Remove that hope and democracy no longer sits as the voice of the people, and the tribal allegiances – family, village, ethnic group – become the strongest voices speaking to people seeking protective assurance. Add a few politicians who see these multiplex arrangements as a path to power, and suddenly two life-long neighbors look at each other not as fellow Kenyans struggling to get by but as one Kikuju and one Kalenjin or one Luo struggling against all 40 other tribal groups that otherwise live side by next in Kenya every day. And then every one of each person’s troubles become the final result of who they are and who they are not, rather than part of a country’s worth of troubles that require a country’s worth of people working together to solve.

Since the Kikuju tribe has largely controlled the political landscape since the end of British control, Kikujus sit in all the important ministerial and regulatory positions in government, they own the best businesses, the most arable land, the freshest water supplies, and benefit most directly from infrastructure development in the parts of the country where they are the majority tribe. The other tribes have not had the same access to the government, and so they have been progressively excluded from more and more of the day to day necessities required to not just make a living, but to advance and improve one’s station in life. What I read in the man-on-the-street interviews in the papers and heard on the news is that Kikujus seem to feel the other tribes are merely whiners. After all, what any Kikuju has is the result of hard work and the building of interpersonal networks to ensure that their businesses and farms are successful and well supported by infrastructure and resources. Anyone could do this. Of course, what they don’t see (or choose not to factor into the equation) is that their access to infrastructure and resources, their network of business associates and customers, are largely a result of their position as a member of the Kikuju tribe. There is no pejorative definition of nepotism in tribal politics. Nepotism is just another word for family, and in a resource-poor environment, you look out for your family first and others second (if at all.) The idea that hard work gets you anywhere when the reality is that in order to get the chance to do the hard work depends on which tribe you are from is a fantasy built to support the institutionalization of unfairness. Not an uncommon form of denial. And now, with the hope of democracy as a correcting influence on this institutionalized unfairness stripped from the electorate by the base need for power by the political elite, all the other tribes in Kenya are counting out loud each time a Kikuju got an opportunity and others did not. Legitimate or not, the perception of years of unfairness without recourse to a fair electoral process has created the perfect opportunity for violence to spring up like a fast growing weed of frustration.

The situation of sitting in Nairobi, in a lovely garden with brightly colored birds flitting across brightly colored flowers, while a short car ride away police were shooting tear gas canisters at protestors was unavoidably surreal. And as the images of strife in the towns of Eldoret, Kisumu, Mombasa, and other towns across the country flowed across the television screen, I felt as if I was still separated from Kenya by an Atlantic Ocean of space. Somewhere people were staying up all night to make sure that marauding gangs did not light their houses on fire. Somewhere people were wrapping all their belongings in blankets and heading for areas were their tribe was not the minority and they would hopefully be safe. And somewhere people were lighting stores on fire and picking out one tribe’s members from another tribe’s members, beating one while allowing the other to pass. Meanwhile, we were sipping coffee (excellent coffee) in the shade of a garden, watching the kids jump in and out of the freezing blue water pool, and eating mango each morning for breakfast. The reality remains if you have money and the mobility that comes from having money, your experience with violence will be very different from someone locked down in the slums by their lack of money, their lack of mobility, and their complete lack of anywhere else to go.

When we were in Masai Mara, there were big dark clouds scooting across the plains. Some were producing rain. However, we didn’t get rained on at all, partly because the rain never reached us, but if it had, we could have merely driven around the rain in our truck. We had enough open space, we had a truck and we had fuel enough to move wherever we wanted to go. The Masai across the short valley who were leading an errant cow home from its stray adventure in the national park would have been stuck. They were on foot, they were far from home, and they were not supposed to be where they were. If caught by park rangers, they would have been fined and their cow taken from them until they paid up in full. And usually the fine would be equal to the value of the cow they were trying to save.

Damn You, Mr. Guggenheim!

I am struggling to finish a Guggenheim application. There is something about congratulating oneself and asking for money simultaneously that feels well, like a Presidential candidate. No, not like a Presidential candidate. Maybe like a really sorry-assed rap star. Who is running for President. That's it. But these are the things poets do. The grant would be a tremendous honor, and the money would allow me to travel to the Philippines and visit the places my grandfather and his family, including my mother, were during their internment in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. My next project will use my grandfather's notebook kept while there, so seeing places personally would be a terrific asset. You see, I can't stop writing my grant proposal even now.

Tonight I listened to the Mets beat Atlanta again, and while I was worrying about Mota's inability to keep opposing batters from hitting RBI singles at will, I picked up Gerhard Richter's Atlas. I saw the show in London at the Whitechapel Gallery, and I was totally floored by it. One of those things that makes the Rilke poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo spring to mind.

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Part of the power of that poem is of course the turn that the end where the lyric description is end-stopped by a Zen-like crack of the bamboo on the back of "You must change your life." But for me, the best line is just preceding that: "for here there is no place/that does not see you." That's totally spooky, but I like it. I want that. I want to be able to see like that. Not only to see everything, but to not be able to not see everything.

In an earlier poem of my own, Death of a Tractor's Son, I was writing about the death of a farmworker who was carried out of the house into the fields by another person. It came from a moment spent talking to a farmer on the edge of his land in Charles City County, Virginia near the James River. He was one of those naturally poetic figures who spoke about the depression of being a farmer with a full-hearted love. When I sat down to write the poem, I found I couldn't remember what he had said exactly, but I could see it. So I tried to decribe what I saw with a made up epigraph:

If I ever see that white light
that comes up the back of the head
and lays out all sides of everything,
I'll lay down my tools.
I'll walk away.

What I like about Gerhard Richter is his sight. His ability to see everything. Sure, there is a Germanic organizational fetish that is a little scary (I once had a professor who told us about an epiphany he had when he realized the pristine level of organization that was whisking him speedily through Frankfurt airport to his waiting plane was the same organization that whisked people to the gas chambers during the Holocaust.) But beyond that is a vision that sees everything as important enough to organize it. To see it and keep it. To put it somewhere it can be found and used. Each photo in his Atlas is part of the lyric chain that leads to the denouement of his final expressions - his paintings. By looking at the photos in Atlas, you come to understand how he arrived upon the blurry black & white paintings, the smeared paintings, the portraits, the military paints, the gray paintings, etc. - all of these in their infancies were a moment in which a shutter clicked right after an eye saw something. Or just before.

And that's the real excitement for me in the conceptual expression that is the Atlas as exhibited. How many images? A lot - many rooms. It took me 2 or 3 hours just to feel like I had seen everything, and yet I could have stayed longer and seen more. But what I did see was perhaps the shadow of an eye - what gets projected upon it or through it - and a willingness to allow things to project and be seen without evident filters.

Of course, Richter is filtering things throughout Atlas. We don't see totally bad shots or every waking moment of his day. Still there is an openness to seeing everything - in the construction and in the presentation - that means a lot to someone who is trying to write poetry.

So what to write? Everything. What to photograph? Everything. As Wolfgang Tillmans' exhibition title said, "If one thing matters, everything matters." Quite a romantic notion, which is exactly why applying for things like the Guggenheim makes me feel like someone dropped sand in my shorts. It feels so much like the person who hasn't yet seen the archaic torse of Apollo or been elevated by Gerhard Richter. What good are these visions?

I operate from a position of resistance in nearly everything I do. Politics, art, academics. Poetry. I am frequently furious. Quite often rebellious. And yet, here I sit worrying that my Guggenheim grant application sucks. I am not sure I see well enough, and yet I see everything. I must change my life.

David Grossman's "Writing in the Dark" essay, NYTimes 05.13.07

David Grossman has a nice essay in the New York Times today. I remember reading something about him at the time of his son's death during the recent fighting in Lebanon. And I remember him being quite well-spoken even then when he was obviously distraught at the loss of his son. I guess he is one of the literary voices for peace in Israel, and a number of people felt that perhaps now that he had lost his son in battle, his views would shift. But he didn't, and if I remember correctly, that was what the original article was about.

I think the current article is very well written in that it explains writing from the position of self-preservation against the onslaught of mind-numbing conflict. He suggests that “the ongoing state of war” creates a “shrinking of the 'surface area' of the soul that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there.” Susan Sontag presented a similar model in regard to the viewing of photographs of tragedy in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, in which the viewer feels first the shock at the horror depicted, then the call to action to cease the current or prevent any future horror, followed quickly by impotence in the face of the immense inevitability of the institutional perpetrators of horror, and then lapsing finally into the malaise of an apathy ironically inoculated against feeling anything like the original shock ever again. Both Grossman and Sontag understand that the danger here is that conflict and its continuous spectacle of tragedy, rather than preventing future tragedy (i.e. a war to end all wars) make it easier for future tragedy to be perpetrated by “those who might 'know better'” as it serves their interests against our own. As our exposure to conflict increases, our apathy grows, our compliance increases, and those who might lead us find their jobs easier and truth more malleable. We contract. They expand.

The Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, suggests that the model for modern governance is that of a “state of exception” in which the ruling body convinces the polity that the current epoch is unique in its relationship to imminent threat, and as such, special powers should be accorded the ruling body that might not otherwise be accorded in a free and open society. All language is focused on supporting this idea, and the energy of the state is expended, through military action, through legislation, and through the daily rhetoric of those in power, to convince the polity that this state of conflict is continuous and imminent. The cloak in this case is that democracy is held out as the model, while the hidden dagger of fascism slices off individual freedoms one by one. The power of polity is decreased. The power of the ruling body is consolidated and increased.

Grossman offers that writing is the act that reverses this “narrowing” of the world, a phrase he borrows from Kafka's mouse in the short story, “A Little Fable”. Through writing, Grossman says, he can “relieve myself of one of the dubious and distinctive capacities created by the state of war in which I live - the capacity to be an enemy and an enemy only.” I think this is right on. Following from J.M. Coetzee's book, Waiting for the Barbarians, having an enemy and being an enemy are the same form of subjugation, especially if the definition of “enemy” is one handed down to you by “those who might 'know better'” and occupy a position of power over you. Or as President Bush said, “You are either for us or against us,” as statement, when made from a position of power (and therefore as a deadly threat,) is so anaerobic that objectors are reduced to meaningless defenses of their positions like, “I support the troops.”

Grossman, on the other hand, points out that writing allows the writer to escape the subjugation of this false oppositional duality: “All of a sudden I am not condemned to this absolute, fallacious and suffocating dichotomy - this inhumane choice to 'be victim or aggressor,' without having any third, more humane alternative. When I write, I can be a human being whose parts have natural and vital passages between them; a human who is able to feel close to his enemies' sufferings and to acknowledge his just claims without relinquishing a grain of his own identity.” Right on.

Part of Jean Amery's argument in his book, At the Mind's Limits, is that the purpose of resistance is resistance, not winning or change. Thus when all else seems lost, resistance is still important - in fact, it is paramount. If one accepts that writing one's conscience is a form of resistance that allows one to “cease to be the helpless victims of whatever it was that enslaved and diminished us,“ then Grossman's ideas about why one must write dovetails nicely with the philosophy that came out of the Holocaust and the determination that it never be allowed to happen again, that we are active, vigilant & aware, “not the slaves of our predicament nor of our private anxieties; not of the 'official narrative' of our country, nor of fate itself.“ In a word, resistant.

“Our private anxieties” and the dislocated behaviors they produce - anti-immigration polemics in a nation of immigrants, intolerant rhetoric in a nation stitched together by tolerance, persecution of difference globally by a country made of diversity - are what make the United States such a polarized and polarizing country right now. If writing can free us, let's get to work.

Finally, I like Grossman's perception that the rhetoric of “predicament“ comes down through society from the military in a way that “ultimately seeps into the private, intimate language of the conflict's citizens, even if they deny it.” In the United States, one need look no farther for a physical manifestation of that phenomenon than the products developed by the military that now appear in everyday society - Humvees, nylon, SPAM, GPS systems, etc. We are more Sparta than Athens I think.

Popular Ink—because everyone needs a shirt and everyone needs a story!

My new chapbook, All About the Blindspot & Other Poems, just came out the other week. There should be a link to the publisher's site to the right. Popular Ink is a cool company, and I hope they do very well. Below find their press release to find out more about their company.

"The high-concept publishing and accessories company, Popular Ink, is reinventing the traditional literary publishing model for the 21st century with its debut line of five limited-edition books and matching t-shirts. The founders of Popular Ink, a collective of writers and artists who wish to keep their identities anonymous, have created a new publishing approach and online community to share writing and spark interest in reading. What better way to get people talking than with stylish t-shirts printed with enigmatic phrases from portable new works?

Inspired by the affordability and accessibility of the wildly popular Penny Press, Popular Ink tees sport attention-getting lines from the work of new writers. And each tee comes with the matching book—a pocket-sized, perfect-bound cache of poems or a fresh, new story. The writers for the debut line are: Jorn Ake, M. C. Boyes, Paula Champa, Nathan Alling Long and Jessamyn Joy Ross. (Collect the whole set and you'll never go naked or lack for a good read again.)

Popular Ink's first in a series of tees can go from yoga to brunch to Memorial Day barbeques. Choose the washable, giftable tees and mini-books in five limited-edition colors, like lazy-ass yellow, disturbing fin gray and think-tank pink. Popular Ink tees and books are available only at PopularInk.com. To link directly to the shop: http://store.PopularInk.com/. (Shipping is free.)

Cool tees and provocative reads not enough? In Popular Ink's Indelible Kitchen, everyone is invited to join the riff of conversation. Each week, the blogazine Indelible Kitchen will feature writing, art and more. This lightly juried blogazine is a unique place to post new writing and art — with the opportunity to become a permanent contributor. Simply click on the email function to submit posts.

The editors at Popular Ink routinely read the Indelible Kitchen looking for the authors and illustrators for their next set of books. The Popular Ink website also offers a direct submissions link for authors who hope to see their names in bright lights (or at least in print).

Popular Ink features a stand-alone t-shirt, the Popular Monkey, by artist Chris Shrader. In June, Popular Ink will launch the first Remake the Monkey contest. Artists can submit their illustrations in the Indelible Kitchen.

The company plans to debut new shirts, other unusual items and giftbooks in limited editions of collectible colors and a full range of sizes four times a year. Watch PopularInk.com for new items and contest announcements."

If you get one of my books, send me a photo of you wearing the t-shirt. I'll start collecting them for later posting here!

Virginia Tech and Baghdad

The irony struck me when close on the heels of the tragedy at Virginia Tech (i.e. the next day) there was a huge series of bombings in Baghdad in which over 170 people died immediately. And this was one day. Earlier in January, 70 students and staff were killed in a bombing at a Baghdad university.

Don't misunderstand me - the presence of violence and tragedy in other parts of the world doesn't make an event NOT a tragedy in this part of the world. The VA Tech shooting, where I have friends and acquaintances who are faculty in the English department, was definitively a tragedy in many different ways. There is no mitigating that fact, nor would it be my intention to do so.

But I couldn't help wondering - must not just about every Iraqi who sees coverage of this event on CNN be wondering if any of the students on VA Tech's campus will connect their experience of violence & its psychological aftermath with the experience of violence that has become a daily presence for people living in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq? I am not of course saying that VA Tech was caused by Iraq. That would be a simplistic misreading of my point. I am wondering merely whether the moment of violence at VA Tech might give the people who experienced it directly & those of us who followed it on television, pause to consider what living in Iraq might truthfully mean to the people we insist we are helping. Can anyone of us imagine what it must be like to live in a country where VA Tech happens every day, if not VA Tech x3 or 4 or 5? Even in this dismal moment of meaningless violence, how many of us are considering how insanely lucky we are that we live in this country?

And given the resultant understanding that might come from careful consideration, what are we going to do now?

Helene Cooper in the New York Times, 01-14-07

Sometimes an article appears in the New York Times that is so bad, I wonder really whether the editors read it. Such is the case with Helene Cooper's article, "The Best We Can Hope For" in the Week in Review section of the Sunday edition on 01/14/07. Cooper attempts to suggest that the Spanish Civil War provides a hopeful model for the end of the Iraq War - in short, that the war would remain an Iraq War and not become a regional or global conflict. I was so astonished at the simple-mindedness of this article, that I could barely write a letter to the New York Times. The worst articles are always the most difficult to object to concisely, because they usually are bad in a mind-bendingly three-dimensional manner and their rebuttal seems always to include repeating verbatim the entire history of the twentieth century. Just so, this article by Helene Cooper. I include my attempt to respond to its weaknesses below.

~

Dear Editor:

Helene Cooper's article is astonishingly bad, even for the New York Times. Apart from the flippant cocktail-party tone taken about subjects as serious as the Spanish Civil War and the Iraq War, she insists on missing her own points. To quote:

"But, in the end, the Spanish Civil War stayed Spanish. The Europeans sent money and arms and even volunteers, but they didn’t let the war engulf the continent. (Probably because the continent was busy getting engulfed in World War II, but let’s not be too technical.)"

Huh? So in history, what actually happened is merely a technicality?

Regardless, she continues by warning that somehow we risk turning the Middle East into a nuclear conflagration or merely a world war by not increasing the numbers of troops in the area. Somehow by devoting more troops to the conflict we will keep the Iraq War in Iraq, just as the Spanish War kept the conflict Spanish, thereby averting another world war of some sort. But back to the mere technicalities of history - wasn't the Spanish Civil War followed by World War II? So really, to follow Cooper's logic (which she herself seems reluctant to do, probably because it doesn't make any sense) what we need to keep the conflict in Iraq IN Irag is another world war, just like the one that followed the Spanish Civil War.

Nice.

The Spanish Civil War involved players from all sides of the future conflict that became World War II. Many of these players are also actively involved in the Iraq War - anti-fascists, industrialists, weapons manufacturers, world powers, etc. Even the rhetoric in the speeches is similar - compare those of Franco with those of President Bush and you will find some (shocking) similarities in the use of The Enemy as a pry-bar on their respective countries' sense of democracy and civil justice. The true horror of the Spanish Civil War was the lack of enough tactical and material superiority on either side to end the war quickly. Instead it dragged on for a couple extra years while the fractious combatants bludgeoned each other, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. The half-interested intervention of world powers did much to prolong the conflict and prevent a negotiated peace earlier than it occurred. As a civil war, the situation in the Spanish Civil War is closer to that in the Yugoslavian Wars than it is to that of the Iraq War, which is basically a war of imperialist intervention and why it is dangerous regionally.

The Iraq War is dangerous not because it might spread to other countries, but because the Bush administration is trying to prevent the spread of the Iraq War into other countries (and thus ensure its own petro-economic agenda) by keeping other countries from being involved in the solution to the problems in Iraq. Because Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are not involved in the process of creating a peaceful Iraq, they can only distrust any goal that the United States, a (non-Muslim, pro-Israel) foreigner in the region, may have for that peace. Iran fought a long and costly war against Iraq it does not want repeated. Syria sees an American-backed government in Baghdad as a direct threat to its dictatorship, especially since Bush keeps trumpeting the exportation of democracy. Saudi Arabia watched Iraq overrun Kuwait and sees the fate of minority Sunnis as its responsibility in the region. The House of Saud cannot maintain face in the Arab world and allow Sunnis to be killed simultaneously. Keeping all of these countries out of the deal guarantees that each country will seek influence individually in order to ensure their strategic interests are maintained through whatever means possible. The Bush administration needs to involve these countries in order to make certain that what peace can be achieved in the region has the blessings of all parties. Otherwise, nothing but instability will be the result. The Iraq War cannot remain Iraqi. It involves all the other countries in the region already.

And then there are the Kurds and the Turks.

In the end, Helene Cooper's article just seems incredibly shallow and naive, perhaps even slightly malformed. I would suggest the more active participation of an editor in the future.

Sincerely,
J Ake

~

I know, I shouldn't snipe at the editors. But really, the editors at the New York Times are just not paying attention. If Cooper's piece is an Op-Ed, then the article should be in a different section. If the piece is an analysis, it should take that tone and honor the presence of historical information, not denegrate it to mere technicality.

If you would like a good book on the Spanish Civil War (and one that gives good examples of the rhetorical approach of Franco that you can compare to the speeches of Bush and his pals) check out Anthony Beevor's The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

Happy New Year!

Our best wishes to our family and all our friends for a Happy New Year!

Women and the Two Body Conundrum

Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches (NYTimes, 12/19/06)

The New York Times has an interesting article about the "two body" conundrum facing women working in the sciences - a conflict I would argue is present for women in nearly every professional career. There are other aspects of this article surveying the inequities in the sciences that result in more women entering and then leaving the field compared to those numbers among men. However, the two body conundrum is one that is a frequent topic of conversation between my wife, a corporate lawyer, and me, a poet and photographer. Briefly, the two body conundrum is the unresolved conflict between having a career and having a family. In order for women to resolve this conflict successfully, they either have to be gifted individuals with exceptional skills that cannot be readily acquired by others or have two bodies, the punch-line being that no one can be two people. Thus the conundrum.

I think, however, it is also the answer. The focus of the article is upon emancipating women and equalizing the playing field, but it doesn't really address the underlying problem of WORK in the current era, though the article hints at the issue when it questions (through a quote from Evelyn Hammonds, professor at Harvard) whether a 70 hour work week is truly required for anyone to succeed in science. I feel the underlying problem is that contemporary models for employment & career building do not create space for the building of families or even the maintenance of a well individual. The article presents accurately that one of the most tenacious inequities women face emanates from the perception of their relationship to child-rearing as being disruptive to the dedication required for women to be serious scientists. What the article does not discuss is that this perception is based on an equivalent & opposite assumption that child-rearing will not be disruptive to a man's career, because it is institutionally assumed that men will disappear from the family during the period of time required for them to establish themselves in their field.

My father is a scientist and was an academic for 40 years. Until I was ten years old, he was barely home during the week. He left for work at 7 in the morning, returned at 6 in the evening for dinner, and then returned to the lab at 7:30 until after I was asleep. When my mother died, much of the friction in our family was the result of his realization that his absence made my mother the sole historian of those years, followed by his struggle to accept that he could not repair that absence, no matter how well intentioned his efforts might be. My father, if offered the opportunity in retrospect to be two bodies and build his career and his family simultaneously, would have signed whatever Faustian contract was required in order to do so.

The reason that the two body conundrum is difficult for women to overcome is that it is an untenable proposition for anyone - man, woman, mother, father, or parents of any configuration - commited to creating a healthy family. Individuals cannot solve the two body conundrum, because individuals by definition cannot be two bodies. In a family, the second body is the second parent, and current models of employment and career building demand that one parent MUST be absent in order for the family to generate the resources required to raise a family successfully. The current model is not healthy. People should not be doing it. Employers - universities, corporations, factories - are getting away with an unjust stipulation when they force either parent to acquiesce to those terms in order to build a career. And governments are subverting their responsibility to families in situations where a single parent is forced to manage a family without access to the resources having two bodies would otherwise present - child care, health care, and time off from work.

Thurgood Marshall was asked at the end of his career as Supreme Court justice, whether black people were better off now than they were when he first started practicing law. His answer was that the question itself was moot. People are better off now. No one is served by inequity. Humanity is lowered by what costs prejudice exacts upon the spirit of the community. So too I think in terms of women's access to an equitable workplace. I think the goal is not merely make the workplace more equitable to women. The goal is to make the work place more equitable and thus, more humane. We will all benefit from that increase - as individuals, as men, as women, and as parents.