tara's tierra

Wolves and Birds in the Dark

José Donoso's El obsceno pájaro de la noche  begins with the following quote from Henry James:

"Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters."

Granted, it is clichéd to be writing about a novel I have not yet read. I have only read, in fact, twenty pages of this book. But I can already tell I am going to love it because of this quote with which it begins. We are walkers in an unsubdued forest, at least at some points in our life.  I recently asked a friend what she thought of all of the thoughts that one has in one's head that never go anywhere. They are thoughts that just float around up there, or depending on one's mental state, sometimes they clang around or bang around or even stomp around, but are so part of you, a part of you that no one else knows, probably not even you, fully, since you kind of just let them be. The obscene cawing, relentless birds of night and even day.

One image I have in my brain that bothers me (don't read this if you are prone to getting unpleasant thoughts stuck in your head) is the idea of a pair of scissors snipping off my finger right at the center of my fingernail. Ick. Awful. Ouch. It's gritty and sore and bloody and the sound that the scissors would make and the pressure on the fingerbed. Wow. It seems plain awful. Easy for me to say, torturing myself in my brain with such an image, never having experienced it myself. But what is that? Is it some kind of mental protection against that really happening? Anxiety.

Speaking of obscene thoughts, when I was seven, someone really did try to kidnap me. I was waiting for school, my red bag with its prim tulips in a row in hand, standing in front of my parents' suburban house waiting for the bus. A gray car pulled up. The man rolled down the window and said, "Hey there, where do you go to school?" And I said, "Assumption School" (catholic, kill me) and he said, "Oh, how about a ride?" and then got out of his car and started walking around it. As I was standing there, kneesocked, scrawny, and freckled, I remember thinking, "I don't think I'm supposed to go with this man." Luckily, my Mom had just gone to get my sweater and suddenly was at the front door. The guy ran back around to the driver's seat and hopped in the car. I remember he was wearing a suit, as if he were going to some important job. Anyway, that happened when I was seven and I  convinced myself from that age forward that every odd-year of my life some kind of tragic event would happen, and if I could make it through the odd years, well, the even years would surely be better.

At nine, we had moved to a new house, but I remember one day I had climbed up into a tree in my front yard. While I was sitting there, probably trying to figure out some existential problem that I had concocted in my head, a weird car pulled up again. I swear. This was just some weird guy with car trouble, I think. And this time no one got out. But I remember thinking, "see, that's what I thought, I'm 9, of course something bad is going to happen." Nothing did, and I think by 17 or so I started breathing slightly easier, even during odd years.

But see, these thoughts we have, these nagging little won't go away type things, they squawk in our ears until 3am and they interrupt us, obscenely even, as we lope around our forests, trying to clear some space, trying to arrive somewhere, trying to find a way to simply turn it off. All I would like to know is how someone else's chatter sounds, just for a day, so that I feel okay with my own. Caaaw. caaw. snip. snip. The endless worry that one day the thoughts will speed up so much that they'll seep right onto the road.

Colortherapy

I am so sad that I have not written on this site in so long. I miss writing so much. The writing I do for myself and not for institutions of higher learning, that is. The rambling pieces where I can emote and use weird word order because I want to. Or incomplete sentences, like the previous one. And this one. And that one.

I will be back to write something inspiring soon, but all I will say for now is that my bed frame is now covered in tiny blue lights and they make me so incredibly happy to look at. Going to bed with blue stars and my blue wall and some day, I hope, with a blue love.

An Empty Cup of Tea

La muñeca abrió los ojos.
                                           --Alejandra Pizarnik

Sitting on the porch, listening to a curious cricket, I heard the bike in front of me as it tic-tic-ticked down my street. Inside, I feel like an empty aquarium, filled with space and a total lack of desire. It's an unfamiliar feeling, the one of just being. It's not unfamiliar at all, actually, but more like the way I felt alone on a third floor leaning porch balcony in Richmond, Virginia or on a night bus from Cuenca, Ecuador to Quito. It's the way I felt when I was unhinged from the thousand desires of a thousand people whose fingers felt like they were always on me, pushing into my skin and leaving one of those white marks as they pulled them back. I feel empty, in a way that is so incredibly freeing. Maybe it is not emptiness, per se, but rather a fullness of only myself brimming with clarity.

Graduate school takes a toll, she says. It's not that it just opens the mind, it opens the center of desire. Michael Warner observes that we don't know what or who we desire until it is upon us. We don't necessarily know what we seek until -- too late or too early -- it has enveloped us in it in a way that makes us realize what we were looking for without even trying. It's like arriving to gate 32 at the airport, getting on a plane, and winding up somewhere you never intended to go, but upon stepping foot in the sand, realizing that you are home. Desire. It's so hard to control because it is precisely letting go of that control. But desire is dangerous. It brings us to the brink of loss of self, as we dive, foolhardy, without even knowing we are diving into pools that can drown the very person we are.

I'm empty of desire right now, in the serenest of ways. I want things, sure, but they are elusive and unnamed. And the most important part is that they do not want me. In the not wanting, the pushing away, the clearing of space, the emptiness enables one to close up only so that one can open up again, with an ownership and a steadfastness and an assurance that was muddled in a forest of too many trees.

In the greatest of ways, I am in my own clearing. It's scary, the exposure of myself to myself, the exposure of the responsibility and the unhinging, but in facing the raw openness of the clearing, I can see my own version of the story. I can see my own version of the present. And I can just sit and enjoy it, and not desire at all, only so that I may, one day, desire all over again.

Yo estaba en el pequeño jardín triangular y tomaba el té con mis muñecas y con la muerte.
                                                                            --Alejandra Pizarnik

Good-byes

I just said good-bye to one of my favorite professors. He was the first professor at Berkeley that made me feel really smart. He was the first one that opened up philosophic doors into literature for me, doors that would lead me to unanswerable questions. He taught me the word aporia and that complicating the obvious, while it may create more enemies than friends,  leads to the most rewarding work. Of course, he also brought me to tears on numerous occasions because he pushes when sometimes you just want someone to agree with you and he is aggressive while still having the arms of a teddy bear at times. I think his way of professoring is based on the fact that he actually takes what you write seriously before you take it seriously yourself. He makes you stand behind what you think instead of just nodding his head in tacit agreement (or utter boredom).

Anyway, I have been uncharacteristically unsappy of late, overall a good thing. But today, I felt that feeling of wanting to hug the universe. I mean, my professor is just going to another university, and email is all too easy. But it's that feeling of my years as a graduate student slowly -- oh too slowly some days -- concluding. I am writing this from a computer where I wrote blog posts almost daily for a time in Doe library. Earlier, I was sitting in places I used to sit, wondering where it all went. I kind of feel like a visitor sometimes, looking at a world that somehow is moving into the past and slipping away from the present, even though I am still here.

All this to say, on days like this, I think about chance encounters and mis-takes, of faces in buses and staircases leading to benches. I think about the way I feel when I breathe in, so deeply, that I am sure my body is filled with the sea or when I open my eyes and for two split seconds am positive that I am a balloon in your hand.

Why Microsoft Word Sucks and other Negative Comments on Dissertating as Told by a Grump on a Friday Night at 10:44pm

Microsoft Word, especially as designed for macs, sucks. Not only does it suck lemons, it also sucks eggs. Runny, yellow eggs.  For one thing, my version of Word has the weirdest, oddest bug that runs like this: I open a new document. I write a bunch of pages (let's say 38, because that's the # of shitty, illegible, verbose, vague, convoluted pages that I have so-called written in my current chapter). I get to about page 23 by scrolling around aimlessly, since that's what I do most of the time while I am writing, and realize that I had better put page numbers into the document because I am getting completely lost, dizzy, and discombobulated because I have no guideposts. So, I insert pages, as a normal person working in Word does to their multi-paged manifesto. Well, my computer is on a very expensive form of page number cocaine. It starts inserting pages, blank ones, by the thousands in between page 23 and 38 (the end of the document). You have to hit Ctrl+Command+Shift (or something like that) to get it to stop. I kid you not. So, I wind up with a document that is 23,423 pages long. It is seriously insane. It is so aggravating because to get from page 23 to 38, you have to s-c-r-o-l-l-l-l-o-r-c-s-c-s-ll  through the thousands of pages that have been inserted! Oh my marbles.

The good news is that this inane computer mystery usually results in one of my favorite angry human activities, which is slamming my hands as hard as I possibly can onto my keyboard, in a fit of rage only matched by the times I have jumped on top of my printer with boots on while waiting for some lame worksheet on how to differentiate the verb ensure from assure for a writing class with only ten minutes to spare before the blasted class starts. "Printer jammed." Blink blink blink. "Printer jammed." Yeah, fuck off, Hewlett. And you, too, Packard.  With all these geniuses like Steve Jobs in the world, why is it that printers and photocopiers (oh, don't get me even started) suck so much? Oh yeah, and Word for macs.

__

But actually, let's just face it, it's not really Word's fault, it's really my brain's fault that I hate my dissertation. I write these paragraphs that belong in the Introduction to the entire project, not the current chapter. Those are frequent. Then, I write sentences like this, "It seems to me that it could be very apparent that in the 1920s there may have been a tendency to write what could be called poetry..." Dammit all, Tara. Say what the hell it is you want to say and cut out the beating around the bush. Or I write, "As I will elaborate further..." which is code for, "I am too fucking lazy to talk about this b.s. right now, or ever, so please just remember this chapter as if I spoke eloquently about this certain concept that totally eludes me and always will." And then my favorite is my shorthand, "xyz" which stands in for, "information that will never be inserted but instead just deleted before I hand this into my advisor, or maybe, never."

Oh, and I also have this recurring nightmare that secret thoughts I have write themselves into my document without me even knowing it. I mean, stranger things have happened. So, I'm afraid that I hand it in and someone (haha. who am I kidding? The only person who reads this shit is my poor advisor who tries to be nice to me even though I know she secretly thinks, "How did I wind up with this insane girl who cannot construct a basic argument and clearly knows nothing about that which she writes?") reads something like, "God, I fucking hate this project and wish that Dwinelle burned down" or worse . . .It's the same way I sometimes wonder if I am mentally deranged and the whole world knows it but no one will tell me, so whereas I think I am doing a Ph.D., I have, in reality, been in a mental institution for the last seven years, and everyone just nods their head and tells me what I want to hear while conducting meetings that assess my "limited mental capacities" behind closed doors. Tragically-comically, the difference between the loony bin and academia has become more and more indiscernible with each passing year...

I also just have to ask the obvious question: Has anyone besides Heidegger, Hegel,  Judith Butler and probably one or two annoying loser phenoms I have met at Berkeley ever written a good dissertation? I mean these things are just plain awful. Let's face it. After seven, eight, ten, twelve years of learning, we really lack eloquence, sophistication, precision, and well, knowledge. When it's all said and done, the  best we can hope for, girls and boys of your thirties, is this gem of a comment: "If you wish to publish this interesting draft, you should research more deeply, expand ideas, reformulate argument, rethink topic, and well, possibly just start over. Have you considered the world beyond academia? I hear there is a lot out there for people like you. Of course, I myself have no idea what's out there since I was born this way. But news creeps in from the other side...and there are possibilities for you."

On that note..I think, if I may,  I propose, I surmise, I interrogate, I argue, I postulate, I pontificate, I  contradict, I believe, I sort of have this kind of idea...that it is time to put this cursed MacBook and all her unnecessary words down...at least until tomorrow.

Insert page #: 32,987.

p.s. I just read this over and have to say, for better or worse, once in a great while, I crack myself the hell up.

Jaime Saenz, a magnetic pull

There was a night long ago when I was awake at about 2am on 16 Essex Street. I was in my top bunk, with my sister sound asleep below me, and I had a comforter (it was Laura Ashley, I remember my mother saying this) with widely spread out flowers all over it in many primary colors. The wall paper matched the comforter except the flowers were all yellow. It was like having buttercups all over the wall. There was lots of white space though, which I liked, I remember, between the flowers. And they were scattered about in no particular order. I liked that, their randomness. Anyway, that night in bed, I remember feeling this sense of  mischievous secrecy in that I was the only one up, and I had my small blue typewriter at hand and I was probably talking to myself out loud.  Knowing me, I was probably thinking of all the swear words I knew so far, or all the items my cousin Abby had that I wished were mine. There was something sneaky about me, but I sensed that it would lead to lots of fun . . . that moment of self-awareness then has stayed with me ever since.

Jaime Saenz is someone I discovered when sitting in Guatemala at an internet cafe. I think I google searched something strange like, "depressive artists Bolivia," or some phrase that only made sense to me, and I started reading about Saenz. In all honesty, I am a terrible researcher, but certainly a unique one, because I come up with the oddest ways of saying things. You get 200 hits, I get 5. But my 5 are all gems. Anyway, ever since then, probably about 2002, I have been reading him periodically when the mood strikes me. He is an amazing writer. I read some of his lines and feel like they are running through my veins, like ice-cold water. His words would be glacier blue, not just because I am obsessed with blue. He is from La Paz, and sometimes I feel like I am in a teeny alley way near the plaza of San Francisco when I read him, ducking into a doorway to block myself from the wind. Other times I feel like I am tucked into a narrow twin bed with woolly itchy blankets thinking about how happy I am to be alone. And other times, like I just noted, I am brought back to a corner of myself that is formative not to anyone in the world but me. These formative moments are always so ordinary. They are simple. They are the minutes that no one sees of you, realizing, you are you.

Here's a beautiful section of Saenz that makes me breathe really deeply in thanks for someone else who was once in the world who felt the alienation that some of us still feel:

Nunca me sentí en el mundo como si fuera mi casa; siempre me sentí quisquilloso, susceptible y desasosegado, como un intruso o, en el mejor de los casos, como un mero visitante.

I never felt as if the world were my house; I always felt uneasy, exposed, and restless, like an intruder or, in the best of cases, like a mere visitor.

He also writes, and these lines inspired me to go back to Essex Street, "Aprendí cosas y cosas de la vida y de la muerte, del mundo y del sufrimiento en la oscuridad de mi cuarto, en la soledad de un rincón de mi cuarto, cuando mi madre, joven aún, me miraba con mucha pena, pues según su sentir, yo era muy retraído y huraño, y además muy tímido. . ." I learned things, and things about life and death, about the world and about suffering, in the darkness of my bedroom, in the loneliness of a corner of my room, when my mom, still young, would look at me with concern, because it was her feeling that i was very withdrawn, unsociable, and timid. . ."

His writing consistently pulls on the part of me that loves to have hours at night to myself so that I can sit up in my bunk bed and write without anyone asking me what I am doing, or can imagine bodies under sheets and blankets dreaming while I study them, peering at them, even touching them, from afar. And it's weird, but I feel like the other dwellers of corners know who else is up right now doing the same thing they are, those few lights you see when you arrive on a late bus into a city and think how reassuring it is to know that someone is up; someone who might be your friend. Saenz would have always been up, even if he was in the dark.

L'Abbe C and Excess

L'Abbé C is Georges Bataille's first enigmatic novella and relates the story of twin brothers (or two halves of one person?) -- Charles and Robert. Charles is addicted to vice, both drinking and devious sex, while Robert is a devout priest who by all appearances is wed to morality. However, as the odd somewhat "untold" story unfolds, we learn that things are not as they seem and in fact Robert is on the brink of madness because of his depraved sexual appetites for Eponine, a promiscuous libertine who likes to take to the drink and the boudoir, especially with brother Charles. Although the story iteslf is not full of explicit details, Bataille creates a dark, eroticized environment through his writing and perhaps most abstractly through the "filth" that Charles finds lying on the ground one day. This "filth" is not specified or named, but rather is an ephemeral, oblique presence symbolizing the moral decay and perverse desires of both the brothers: 

When I got outside the sun was just coming up and, as I passed in front of the house, I saw at my feet, under her window, a piece of stinking filth. I tried to imagine what lunatic had deposited it there and wondered what bizarre motive he might have had. (But the act itself was consistent with a complete disintegration) (98).

Bataille goes on, through the narrator of Charles, to point out the unsaid (the secret, as Yerushalmi would say of Freud) that is always covered by writing itself:

My narrative doesn't quite measure up to what one expects such a book to be. Far from emphasizing that which is its purpose, it somehow conceals it. If I do get around to saying what is most important, if I insinuate it, if I speak of it -- it is, ultimately, just to leave it further in the dark (131).

A few weeks ago I was discussing Archive Fever with a friend of mine and our professor. The archive, a place as well as a law, is distinguished by a death drive -- the desire to repeat itself, to eradicate itself, to undermine its own existence. It is also characterized by the secret which it conceals, the answer to an unanswerable question that is whispered, insinuated, hinted at by partial traces of, in this case, "filth." I just started reading Gilles Deleuze's Masochism, which includes Masoch's novel Venus in Furs. All these authors -- Masoch, Sade, Derrida, Bataille -- are dealing with the excessive desire to go beyond the limits of language, the limits of coherence, the limits of what can be uttered out loud. They conceal the originary secret of our own depraved appetites, while dancing around it, archiving its outcomes.

Right there on that line between what we say (and repeat, and repeat, and repeat) and what can never be said is where our desire lives.

"Don't just do something. SIT there!"

Tonight I spent a solid half an hour learning how to stand. I went to my fourth full Stress Care class at Alta Bates, where the first 30 minutes were spent talking about foot position, spinal curvature, and pelvic angles. David Weinberg, the fantastic instructor, told us to pretend our pelvis was a flower pot and our spine a flower. Grow daisy, grow. After a long day of grading essay after essay, it was internally amusing to spend an hour focusing on standing and breathing.  I learned that in general I am a pretty poor stander (self-judgment), in that, I lock my knees and tend to curve my back. I might be able to talk about post-colonialism and what the term obfuscates, but stand? or sit still?! Not so hot, Daly.

Part of the mental exercise tonight was talking about "unpleasant events" that had happened over the course of the last week. In doing the exercise, I realized that many unpleasant events I experience are also pleasant events at the same time. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it is something we take for granted. The most challenging conversations we have, the most difficult professional obstacles we have to overcome -- they are neither good nor bad, nor satisfying nor disappointing, but a tangled mix of many sensations and feelings at once. Taking the time to notice such things is part of unlocking the mystery of  the ever elusive "inner peace."

Despite my cynical nature -- and believe me, I hear my cynical side piping up all the time in the sitting meditation: "Tara, what the hell are you doing?! You have real work to do!" or "What, Tara, are you some kind of new age Berkeley freak?! Get off the kool-aid. You've been here for too long..."-- I sincerely have found this work to have had some real, tangible impacts on my life. For instance, for the first time in so long, I am no longer reacting to things around me without thinking them through. I let things sit for a few days before I "act," which has led me to make more informed and calm decisions than I have in a very long time.

Additionally, I have started paying attention to my own antsy-ness. It is not that I do not get antsy now, but rather, I am more aware of the situations, people, and events that cause this feeling and I remind myself to pause and assess the things I can actually change about myself or my circumstances and to let go of those that I cannot in relation to such situations. This sounds like AA jargon, and in part, it is. It is about pausing, taking a deep breath, and recognizing what (and as lots of us have brought up in the class, who) can and cannot be controlled.  I don't think anything dramatic has shifted in me, but rather, a few very small things have "turned" and these slight turns have significant effects on so many areas of my life. I feel, for the first time in a really long time, that I am directing my life from a centered self and that I am taking responsibility for who I am and who I want to be.

Anyway, all this to say, when one slows down life a bit and stops reacting, one really gets to the root of the self and the self's fears, denials, evasions, and coping mechanisms. There are no "magic bullets" to any of life's problems, but sometimes just standing there, feeling your feet on the ground, and remembering to breathe is better for you than any radical action, decision, or movement.

David has said a few times: "Don't just do something! Sit there." See what happens if you start doing this. I swear, it will slowly begin to make a difference in your life. You can roll your eyes and scoff at all those yoga-mat toting hippies, but there is something to it. Doing nothing but breathing and staring at the wall may be the hardest but best thing you can treat yourself to.

Now, off to sit some more I go...

Flowers in the Air

I'm sitting here munching on a mix of Planter's peanuts and chocolate bits. It's a delicious combination, somewhat like an organic reese's peanut butter cup. And I have spent the day primarily by myself, besides a couple of hours, and done a significant amount of work on my dissertation and myself.

For the first time in a really long time, I have no idea where life will take me tomorrow, and I have no idea who or what I particularly desire. I opened so much up the last three years and explored areas of myself I had never explored before with intense depth and breadth. I had three people, very different people, tell me they loved me and that they thought I was amazing. Some meant it more than others. And I had three people, the same three people, tell me they actually had no idea what they really wanted and in fact, wished I would go away. And in the midst of that, I too went through ups and downs of total clarity and utter disillusionment, of saying too much and saying too little, of giving way too little and then giving way too much, of asking for presence and asking for absence. In a Planter's nutshell, it's time to regroup, retreat, and reevaluate the way I have been living because I cannot seem to get things right, mainly because I have been focusing on other people and not myself, and looking to others to solve problems that are at root, my own.

And so, yes, everything is somewhat in the air. But it's not a bad thing, now that I have some perspective. I'm not reacting to anything or anyone anymore. I am not caught up in other people's searches for self and familial peace, and I have a better relationship with my own family and friends than I have ever before in my life. So, I'm going to hang out in my clearing, plant my own flowers, and simply enjoy the pleasure of my own company.

Life as it Unfolds

Today I went on a hike with someone I have known since seventh grade, when I was on the Strikers travel soccer team and ran up and down the midfield with my unbounded lung capacity. Sucking on oranges, downing gatorade drink boxes. As I was walking along the dirt path in Chabot, I was thinking of dirt paths at Devil's Den in Connecticut where I kicked rocks and got dust in my socks while avoiding small gartner snakes that seemed wild and scary. I felt like I was in a timespace somewhere between Fairfield, Connecticut and Oakland, California and that I was 32 and 17 all at once. This happens really frequently lately. Here and there and nowhere at once.

* * *
Walking by the park later, what a beautiful day, I saw so many people. Some were playing frisbee in red t-shirts and beige shorts and others were eating Trader Joe's pretzels and sipping $7 red wine on their blankets in the sun. Kids were cavorting around with dirt underneath their nails and inch worms in their sandals, and furry dogs with drippy mouths were trotting in circles, bumping into each other, giving high fives. I have a longing inside, I thought, to be one of those people in the park that seemed to be living as if they had sprouted from the very grass below their feet. As I walk, I keep banging up against this glass box that they are contained in. I feel like a 17 year-old at the Boston Aquarium on a high school field trip. Look at the axolotl. Look at the shark. Look at the people living a Saturday. The museum of daily life.

* * *
I am in a fold of life. It is a strange fold, between time zones and spaces, between bodies and minds. It's a fold in which I am lying down. Sometimes, while lying, I try to meditate. And sometimes I perch my little birdie head out from the fold, and peek out for a second. Down in my fold, I don't know quite what I want or quite what I look like. I don't know who I desire, or what desire even feels like. Did I desire once and what was that feeling? If once is as good as never, Walter Benjamin, when will never ever happen once, again?

* * *
I'm outside walking through the arcade of life. Looking through the glass windows, seeing images that paralyze me for a second, never thinking I could have possibly dreamed them up days earlier. I see outlines of figures and former selves dancing on tables and sleeping in hammocks. I'm in an alley way, a tunnel, a passage between. And I am not sure how long I will be here.