epiphanies that freeze in your mind

E.M., my writing professor, just sat me down in her office after class. she told me i was brilliant, service-oriented, and a have a gift for writing. but that if i live to serve others, if i keep trying so hard to please other people and what they would like, i will wake up at age 45 and ask "what the fuck happened?"

to which i replied, ive been struggling with it for a while. and then mentioned these three quotes from the narrator of Baron in the Trees:

"This he understood: that association renders men stronger and brings out each person’s best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one’s best (while living just for oneself very often the opposite happens, of seeing people’s other side, the side which makes one keep one’s hand always on the hilt of one’s sword)"

"There can be no love if one does not remain oneself with all one’s strength"

"I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. Only by being so frankly himself as he was till his death could he give something to all men"

E.M. then told me that this division i have in my mind, between what i might really want and what others might want for me, is false, an illusion. and that if i look into my own Quaker faith, ill find that it is only by following my own desire and self that i can best serve the world.

as i read in an anonymous quote a while back in time, back in Amazonia, something along the lines of, "don't do what you think the world needs. do something that makes you come alive, because that's exactly what the world needs"

its now a year after i came back and grew from that trip, and i dont know how to snap out of this cycle of juggling desire. why is it so hard? do i think i wouldn't be good enough? is there just too much im interested in to narrow down?

i love my ethnographic fiction class (not so much my nature writing course). i dont think of myself as a fiction person, but maybe its traditional novels that i dont care for. but i loved invisible cities, i loved the emperor, things that play with structure and how a novel might read. hell, i really liked V.K.'s timothy, notes of an abject reptile, and i dont even know what genre you'd place it in. maybe that's part of it. not liking to be placed.

i think im afraid of settling somewhere, feeling tied and trapped.

doing good things. im writing a collection of short vignettes, in the spirit of Ryszard Kapuscinksi's The Emperor, about Henry Walter Bates, a 19th century amateur entomologist who traveled on a four year expedition to Amazonia to collect insect specimens. im writing from his own notebook, published as Naturalist on the River Amazons, from the perspective of those around him, his assistants, residents of Para state, workers on his ship, etc. its fiction, but ethnographically based:

J. S. :

Took us a month to cross from Liverpool. I kept the stoves below deck going hot. Two of my mates down there got scurvy, but in a month we arrived in Pará state. Across the Atlantic, a long way from England, but the naturalists needed to come here, to get specimens. The Mischief needed more hands, and a job's a job, eh? Better than working the mines.

Our first stop was a small jesuit village off the coast. Too hot and humid, made the stoves and the mines seem fair. Those two, the scientists I mean, they began talking to the natives, using their translator, asking about insects. The next day we sailed up the river, finally arriving in that port city, Belém. We helped carry some of their things to the house, passing the merchants and shanty dwellings. I remember the one, the younger one, early twenties, the way he eyed those dark skinned women as we passed by. But then again, there were more than enough plants growing around the place to keep him occupied.

on another note, i was brainstorming and decided to list my top classes ive taken at Bard, in terms of how much ive taken out of them. it was surprisingly easy to generate a list.

ecology of infectious disease

photography, history & news

writing the world

ethnographic fiction

political ecology and poetics

the gift of literature

hooke's micrographia

history of technology of economics

biology of infectious disease

doing so gives a good idea of what interests me now, and the direction i am trying to create for myself right now. i once said to somebody that i wanted to write, and hemmingway said to write what you know, and that im never going to content with what i know in any given moment. always wanting more, learning more, expanding. and so i didnt become a writing major. and i dont immediately want to write. i want experience, outside of academy, outside of programs. i want to travel. i want to experience mundane detail. i want to work and toil for some time. i want something to torture me in the back of my mind so much that i know i need to follow it. i want to go back to brazil, i want to do work in global health, i want to keep interviewing about Lyme disease and organize support groups, i want to mediate conflicting opinions and stances. i want to learn poetics, i want to explore the microcosm. and extrapolate.

today my adviser made a point to remind me of the shift in ethnography: away from order and "making sense," and embracing the realism of chaos in form. i keep it in mind both for senior project (with which i feel a heavy obligation, in the motivational sense, for this group with which i am working) and for my fiction-nonfiction hybrid writing i hope to do.

if you took ryszard kapuscinksi's the emperor, italo calvino's invisible cities, and deniel defoe's journal of the plague year and combined them, i think it gives some image of what id like to do. its not fiction. but its playing with fact to accomplish something while still conjuring representation of some kind. one of the greatest lessons i've teased from anthropology and ethnography is that all writing is a fiction of sorts: all texts include and exclude, omit something, order information. there is no completely objective recording of reality. social scientists refer to this as the politics of representation, and throughout 4 years of anthropology and history classes, its the one thing that has held my interest. i think some fiction represents better than nonfiction. the hungry tide by amitav ghosh may be one example, the brothers by milton hatoum might be another.

im eager to see where next year takes me. each step forward i take better shows me what will or will not make me happy and grow.

to begin, id like to renew this year by saying that the livejournal/personal bemoaning phase of this blog's life cycle is ready to come to a close.

i believe that every once in a while, we all need-no, deserve--to be told we are doing a good job. i think we look past, on a daily level, the strength it takes to live and be content. to be appreciated. and often, sadly, it takes a sad thing to force us to remember the credit we all deserve for living. i have been reading through my old posts in this blog--mostly self-absorbed, focused on advancement--and i stumbled back upon an old quote that inspired me in my last fall. of how the world doesnt need saving. doesnt need people to do what they think will help it. the world needs people who come alive. and we should all do that.

vonnegut had a similar one about writing, about how it confirms our existence. shows us that we are not alone. and too often, we feel alone. i dont think all the policies in the world can confirm the same sensation of an intimate connection. that when i read a certain passage in a prose piece, when i have a wonderful conversation on the train, when i sit in content silence with friends at night, i know my presence in appreciated, desired, and necessary to the better of the whole. and that the same is true for each person, each piece of art, each moment. and it is so easy--so very easy--to be blinded of this simple fact by the everyday pressures of our lives. of school, of our own desire to grow, of finance, of a future. but if we can just be shown through the smallest of daily gestures--the holding of a hand, a smile, a thank you, a thats right--then maybe we will be ok. sometimes i feel, we just need to be reminded.

reminding myself too. trying to rekindle memories like charcoal is of no use to anyone. the fragments contained in the past entries are frozen in time. too much has past since, and it would be silly to assume that they are still relatable to the contemporary. the best thing to do is to begin writing, details of not only my personal thoughts of the self, but of social observation. nature. what have you. the importance is in the don juan quote below. dwelling only on yourself becomes taxing and creates a fatigue that cannot be easily dismissed nor cured. the only remedy to the mental impass i have come across, the feeling of overflow and barriers, is to halt this obsession with me my feelings and my future and direct my attention to the places and people that inspire me. not to call myself selfish, because it isnt a case of that. but that there is so much of this world better to engage with than my own questions of what to make of my own life. a year ago i had complete confidence in that everything works out fine, one way or another. im not sure i buy it to the same extent i did then, but i remain steady in seeing it as a central tenant to who i am. i need to nurture my own soul, and that will not happen through dwelling, always dwelling. time for action instead, and i need to make clear that i better acknowledge those around me and improve my ability to record--for myself and my own expression--those things that make this all worth while.

this post is far more optimistic than it seems, only coming in at a moment of somber reflection and the feeling of reaching a mental limit.

goodnight

"you are not used to this kind of life; therefore the indications bypass you. yet you are a serious person, but your seriousness is attached to what you do, not to what goes on outside you. you dwell upon yourself too much. that's the trouble. and that produces a terrible fatigue."

"but what else can anyone do, don Juan?"

"seek and see the marvels all around you. you will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else"

-- The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda

cant i just farm for a while?

i went to do important things at the capitol too.


and this one because its funny. i really want this kind of leather jacket. but alas. fail.

Travels With Herodotus

my own copy of Travels With Herodotus has a crease in the middle from ample time folded in my left back-pocket of my navy-blue skinny jeans. it is a book just large enough to fit in one such pocket. having been with me when I experienced one of Washington D.C.'s more dramatic storms this summer, it also bares the mark of water damage -- so much so that the blue of the jean material has rubbed off along the book's spine and page edges.

and yet, I feel that is how Ryszard Kapuscinksi, its author, would have preferred it to be. the polish journalist, who passed away in january of 2007, spent his working life writing reportage of the third world for the Polish Press Agency. his pieces tended to fall more towards the literary side of reportage rather than on the technical and objective edge. commentators often note how his pieces read more like novels than journalistic material. but Kapuscinski was always a writer of experience rather than the nitty gritty, finding ways to grab hold of something everyday and extrapolate it into its wider meanings.

which is what Travels most notably does. its 275 pages are an odd mix of reportage, autobiography, and ancient greek history -- something that would seem to not make sense. Travels is Kapuscinski's attempt, and his last piece at that, to draw out an overview of his years abroad, the people he met, the places he saw, but ultimately, how he felt and what drew him to each. above all, the book is a glimpse into why we travel, why we move. he sums it up best in the following lines, which alone were enough to keep me reading:

"I wondered what ones experiences when one crosses the border. What does one feel? What does one think? It must be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension. What is it like, on the other side? It must certainly be -- different. But what does 'different' mean? What does it look like? What does it resemble? Maybe it resembles nothing that I know, and thus is inconcievable, unimaginable? And so my greatest desire, which gave me no peace, which tormented and tantalized me, was actually quite modest: I wanted one thing only -- the moment, the act, the simple fact of crossing the border."

mmhmm