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Parallel

13 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by racheltejas in Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Yoga

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attachment, Barack Obama, greed, historical background, passage of time, political essay, politics, presidents, racism, spiritual essay, Trump, Trump after Obama, visions, yoga

Parallel
One of the great failings and discouragements of my intellectual life is that I can’t write politics. I admire and love astute political writers and commentators; without them we would have little guidance and insight into the broader reaches of our society, other societies, history, indeed the human condition in general. The best writers offer perspective and context, always, and they are usually the least read. But it is my habit, gift, failing and need to turn most events, whether personal or the furthest universe away, toward metaphor and the reflective patterns of what humans repeat again and again and stumblingly again.

Donald Trump’s egregious election and administration, if one can even call it that, has erased my higher, broader mind, taken it captive. In its place is an inarticulate rage, a helplessness and disbelief, that is a truly useless attribute when attempting to comprehend the selfish idiocy of this person, his political groupies, and the pathetically ignorant (or purely self-interested) people who elected him. A racist showman who began the blushingly backward “birther” distraction, a father who spoke about fucking his own daughter, and who was caught on tape admitting to assaulting women – we took him on, swallowed his nativist lies and race baiting fear mongering, drop by eager drop. My Buddha heart wilts and falls away: I cannot find compassion for people who support this person, and what he has done, will do, to his own country and, more importantly, our dying Earth. I hate him. Part of me hates every single person who voted for him. There is simply… no excuse.
I was thinking the other day, as I often do, of Barack, and how innocent and silly I became during his administration. I loved him – I still love him – despite his failings and overly intellectual pondering on humanitarian crises like Syria. His failings are rooted in a deeply refined intellect and sense of humanity and grace. This country responded to such a presence in a manner so violent, so racist, and in a way so utterly, there is no other word, idiotic, that I don’t recognize myself here. I am ashamed upon hearing the broader, wiser commentaries from black people, brown people, anyone not white and comfortable: “Wake the fuck up. And so it has always been. Trump just gave public permission for these people to more openly align and vent their horrible, ignorant rage and fear. It’s nothing new.”

I am a mother of three children. Most days I am a broken record: “I am single now. Broke. Single mother and fucking broke and as lonely as I’ve ever known.” But then I think: “If I were a black woman… with a black son..” how would I go on? Shame. That’s the primary emotion I feel. Shame, all my love and pride over Barack and his brilliant ambitions shattered by the blind seething larvae that lay beneath that whole damn time.

In the 80’s Barack was going to Harvard, head of the Harvard Law Review. He did community work, and then, as everyone knows, went to Chicago and met Michelle at the great law firm Sidley Austin. (In the oddest personal aside: my grandfather many decades earlier did the same, attending Harvard, Law Review etc, then worked at Sidley… I used to love the idea that a black man with a mixed race background could follow the exact trail of a white Southern boy working his way up in the early 1950’s.)

And, as we all know from such erudite publications as People Magazine and the New York Post, the 80’s Trump was snorting coke and making shit deals to ruin the landscape of Manhattan or New Jersey or Florida or wherever his pathological narcissism led him. The pasts of the two men reflect precisely what they both brought to public service (or public destruction). One, a humanist, an intellectual giant who understood the forces of history, the ugliness of nationalism and the belief that being forever a solitary ascendant world power was a dangerous belief indeed. The other: no belief at all save the most primitive kind, like an Id stripped to its basest form: money, power, more money, submissive women, ownership, and fuck the rest and whomever or whatever got in his greedy way.

Barack is as dignified as the current occupier of the White House is vulgar. Where the latter can barely put two tweets together, and never coherently, Barack is a brilliant student of strategy, history, politics, music, and literature. Who would ever imagine we would have had a great man for president who can also sing like Al Green and reads Alice Munro, a name Trump might hear and think, “Didn’t I fuck her once?”

And so in parallel I place the two together, and compare, like a child handed two toys for evaluation and preference. But unlike the child I can feel the veins of bitterness move into my heart: this administration does so much damage to everything it touches, and is in power at a moment of such profound importance to the planet, to the stability of other countries, that I feel myself grow exhausted from my own hatred. And this trait is, of course, the old and easy path that allows oneself to become mirror and puppet to the thing one least admires. This is the common way of history, of human emotion, of attachment and the desire to see life unfold in ways beyond the control of an individual’s egoic passions.

This evening, after a particularly painful day of loneliness and fear – sometimes I feel I can only wake for a moment to the huge pressures surrounding this new identity of “Single Mother of 3” – well, this evening I poured a lovely, small glass of sauvignon blanc from the Loire Valley, and it promptly spilled all over my freezer and floor.

Anger, frustration, Small Mind: I became the muttering middle aged woman complaining about her lot in life, and I knew it, which made the moment all the harder and all the more comical.

Suddenly an image flashed through my weary mind. First I saw the smallness of my anger, the waste of it. But that was a micro-second. Next came a picture, a real picture, though still impossible to describe: indelible, real as flesh, a painting, but a truth, too.

There was a god. The god was holding something in his hand, something I could not quite see, but knew. He was holding the body of the Earth. And it was a true body, corporeal and shaped, as if the molten core had emerged but was no longer a supporting sphere. The god was watching with just one eye the slowly writhing, tiny creature, our World, our lives, our Planet. And he said, in the softest voice, “That was a good death. It was peaceful, short compared to some others I’ve seen.”

We are only a passing, quicker than a leopard at hunt. All the parallels, all the loves, the raging battlefields and the awesome peace of a high desert moon; even, dare I say it, the silken first touch of the child just as she emerges from her mother’s hard-heaving body: Passing. Passing. So fast we never know it. Not really. Maybe at the end, maybe at the last breath, when the god breathes us in, and we might share his sight before – oh! – the mind shuts the eyes the heart the heavy lungs.

There.
It’s gone.

 

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Nina

12 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by racheltejas in Grief, Meditations and Poetry

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Tags

anger, history of racism, KKK, music, Nina Simone, politics, racism, Virginia protests

This morning I listened for hours to Nina Simone. Sometimes it is too painful to listen to Ms. Simone. Too much pain, too much truth, too much prescience, too much beauty. She blinds one. And then forces one to see. And then blinds again, witchy and sexy and one of the sublime American soothsayers in this country’s entire bloody history.

During one electric moment with her audience, Nina said, “They are gunning us down. One by one. You know they are.” And a man shouted from the rows (pews), “We love you Nina.” And she said, and we all believe it, “I love you too.”

I saw her a year before she died. Now, I am almost relieved she is gone, though she saw this coming with such clarity she would have been the least surprised of all of us.
This picture was taken yesterday, of course. Not 50 or 60 years ago.

I know only shame and anger about the United States. Then I think, well, Nina came from its haunted depths.

But her pain was shaped in large part by the forces depicted so crudely in this photograph. And she left.

All these words: tolerance, progress, peace, acceptance: empty. The words of a white world, blind to the reality of our history and history’s constant repetition, record on repeat.
Nina became ill with rage.
Or was it Sight?

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Vintage

01 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by racheltejas in Fashion and Aesthetics, Meditations and Poetry, photography, Travel

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animals, cultural differences, culture and race, feminism, hip-hop, meditation on culture, Paris, personal essay, photography, racism, the Marais, vintage, vintage fur, walking in Paris

Vintage

Je est un autre
   – Rimbaud, age 16

Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem
   – Lauryn Hill, ageless

(A small postcard of a brief moment in the Marais on a sun-drenched winter afternoon)
20160220_181707-2

About ten days ago I wandered into a small vintage clothing shop hidden in one of the cobblestone lanes of the 4th arrondissement. The clothing-addicted have a nose for such locations. Almost immediately upon my arrival in Paris some time before I had realized the unsurprising fact that I would never, ever, for even a moment be warm during my long stay in the great city. Between my weight (low in the States, normal in Paris), my health (not great by any Western measure), and my general constitution (vata vata vata, as my Ayurvedic doctor says), I seek heat like a lizard and am forever chilled like a Maltese left out in the rain.

Because I am a person of conflict, like everyone else, and I was inhabiting for awhile a culture that recognizes no problem with conflict, particularly of the inward sort, or of the moral sort, I found my almost-vegan self yearning for the embrace of old vintage fur. The heat, the soft aura of illumination fur grants to its owner (look briefly at your cat, in any light but total darkness – he glows), the beauty and the enfolding grace of an old well made coat: I couldn’t, could I? The animals, even though they were slaughtered long ago, and for the bodies of many women before me (oh, but I love that part) – they are still victims of vanity, of fashion, of desire and human power.

One can look. As I traced the lines of soft pelts rich with differing histories but all bearing the same odd, pleasantly musty smell of true vintage, I heard a man speaking to the storekeeper. He was one of those irritating types one finds in probably every culture: a lingerer, a constant commentator, filters permanently set to low.

In this case, a German! Speaking with great authority to the beautiful black man with gorgeous blonde dread locks behind the counter about racism, and the word – dare I write it – no. The word n—-r. He was speaking about hip-hop and his love of hip-hop, and that white people now say the word with regularity because hip-hop has made the word belong more to the general culture than a specific, black culture. The man behind the counter, sweet, tolerant, probably unable to hear everything the German was saying because of the astonishingly loud, quite good hip-hop playing on the stereo (heavy on the word n—r), nodded in agreement, and said he thought perhaps things were “softening.”

And then the German turned his attention toward me. Speaking in a loud tone, believing either that I was deaf or spoke no English or was too passive to respond, he began a long explication to his patient friend about why I look beautiful in grey, but my boots are bad, and that I should buy the black fur (yes, by then on my body) instead of the white, etc etc.

Does one harden or laugh, when being gauged so openly by the male gaze? A few years ago I would have been traumatized, embarrassed, perhaps felt harassed and guilty – so often women feel guilty because of the judgment or actions of men. We live our lives inverted, in a permanent handstand of upside-down, confused vision. Put as simply as possible, it is so very difficult to be clear about oneself when one lives primarily in a world created in its essence by the Other.

Difficult but not impossible, as I am learning through age. So it was at this moment I turned to the vulgar German and the lovely Rasta and started telling them my opinion of the word I won’t even write, and how it is perceived in this country. At first the good German blanched (he thought I was Italian), and then quickly recovered, and for the next 15 minutes or so the three of us had a lively discussion, a bit in French, mostly in English, sadly no German which probably would have been best, about the nature of race and the problems with linguistic ownership of a particular phrase or word, and the cultural weight and history such words possess.

And then with equal intensity my new German friend switched suddenly the subject to me, and began dissecting my clothing with the same blunt honesty with which we had just been speaking about politics and culture. I just as bluntly argued back, and it was all wonderfully intimate, polite, totally honest and extremely impersonal all at the same time. The way conversation should be, I think, and never is in the places I inhabit in this country. What is the rule? We don’t talk politics or religion at the dinner table? The inverse seems true in France, which of course has solved none of their entrenched problems but makes the country that much more irresistible to me.

The sun was setting, it was time to be off. I had a lusciously long walk ahead of me, back through the 3rd, into my favorite part of the city, the sacred ancient island, and then on up to the Cluny, eerie in the twilight, and down the forever elegant blvd. Saint Germain, off of which I had found a perfect little flat down the Rue de Seine.

Did I buy the coat? Only the German and the Rasta would say.
20160223_201324-2

 

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