A few lines I copied down from a recent read: Dancing in Cuba, by Alma Guillermoprieto.
There was a prevailing sense of immobility, and since nothing ever seemed to happen, the hours abounded.
It was a fervor that came to find me as I trotted through my daily itinerary...deeply immersed in my ongoing arguments for and against myself and my life.
...it seems...when he distanced himself from the gangsterish student groups who controlled the political life of the university, Fidel opted for romanticism as an existential posture...the one who excited and moved me was not the Marxist or the troublemaker but the armed dreamer.
"There should always be avant-garde, but not everyone should have to endure it."
"It's just that we're still living like consumers of culture here...Why don't we produce it ourselves?"
But we were afraid of the void and longed for the order of the Revolution.
Determined to find some answers, I spent that whole night in dialogue with myself, and though I listened very carefully, I was impossible to understand.
(Jose Marti) He admired the vigor of the North American culture he inhabited for so long, and by writing he found ways to keep from drowning in it.
Monday, June 27, 2011
loco motor
Just a little found-poem I came across today in a borrowed book on Alexander Technique. The author (Missy Vineyard, How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live), is explaining the challenges and advantages of being bipedal, beginning with a bit of an evolutionary biology lesson. But her review of invertebrates and quadrupeds also seemed to offer some nice implications about personal, inner evolution, and the drive to move and advance: within the self, among life's elemental forces, and as part of whatever greater context that self may perceive...
all
possess their own
complex locomotor strategies
move individual parts
as well as the whole
earliest
in a watery world
range of motion
spanned the length
generating rhythmically alternating contractions
this sideward bending was not random
functioned to orient and propel
body followed head's direction
moved out of the water
strategies were derived as offshoots
turned scales
into feathers
leave the ground altogether
supported
upward from below
the body up off the ground
nature layered new
double helix arrangement
wrapped around the trunk and spiraled downward
onto the limbs
means of propulsion
no longer a laterally bending
leveraging against water's resistance
but
coordinated synchrony
pushing against the ground
forward
not through water but air
still toward its head
now a second orienting direction
toward the earth and gravity's pull
every weight-bearing step
musculature
coordinated its movement
ground
standing on two feet
a delicately adjusting and readjusting
balancing act
step onto each successive forward limb
toward the front
transfer
entire body from single limb to single limb
we run
become limbless again, propelling
into space and leaving the earth
(for brief moments) altogether
all
possess their own
complex locomotor strategies
move individual parts
as well as the whole
earliest
in a watery world
range of motion
spanned the length
generating rhythmically alternating contractions
this sideward bending was not random
functioned to orient and propel
body followed head's direction
moved out of the water
strategies were derived as offshoots
turned scales
into feathers
leave the ground altogether
supported
upward from below
the body up off the ground
nature layered new
double helix arrangement
wrapped around the trunk and spiraled downward
onto the limbs
means of propulsion
no longer a laterally bending
leveraging against water's resistance
but
coordinated synchrony
pushing against the ground
forward
not through water but air
still toward its head
now a second orienting direction
toward the earth and gravity's pull
every weight-bearing step
musculature
coordinated its movement
ground
standing on two feet
a delicately adjusting and readjusting
balancing act
step onto each successive forward limb
toward the front
transfer
entire body from single limb to single limb
we run
become limbless again, propelling
into space and leaving the earth
(for brief moments) altogether
Sunday, June 12, 2011
el círculo
!Como extraño a mi círculo de danza cuando no estoy con ellos! How I have missed my circle, la danza. My most beautiful community. Today we gather beneath skies finally blue again, instead of copper-grey from the smoke of distant forest fires. The space we're given at this event (the annual fiesta of a Catholic church in Barelas, just off downtown) is mid-side-street, across from the main stage where the ranchera band plays. Fewer than ten people wander over to observe. But as always, I'm pleasantly surprised at the willingness of those coming from very different places in this life -- even from 'organized' religion -- to simply observe our form of embodied prayer and song. This is certainly not the world of angry closed minds that I grew up in.
And I've got no desire for 'audiences' anyway. This is personal: between us and Earth. La danza is an offering. And as always, it asks me to offer everything I've got. The asphalt surface starts to raise blisters, even with huaraches on, by the second dance. My legs are stronger than they used to be, but my lungs still don't quite make it, and by the time I offer my dance I'm nearly always close to collapse. I try to put mind over matter, drink air like water, welcome the copal smoke as the nourishment that it often is. But I'm swaying on my feet, under this sun that seems to have found a hole in the top of my head, and is radiating straight into the center of my brain. And I'm thinking that pretty soon, in these rays, I'll change from the only gringa in the group to la roja - the red one - and wondering if that'll be an improvement.
What in the world am I doing here? I still wonder -- and yes, at times, feel fairly uncomfortable -- about my place in this circle. Not only because it's possibly the hardest thing I've ever done. I'm not of the right genetic or cultural background for this. Obviously. Once, at some event, an observer asked our jefe more or less that question. The man's intent seemed a curiosity more friendly than otherwise (there certainly are those of the sincere opinion that nobody with my skin color should be part of any circle). El Jefe answered with his usual charisma and inclusive enthusiasm: "She is here representing that aspect of humanity that is without race or color or borders." Wow, I told him, I hope I can live up to that.
What am I doing here? Simplest answer: I'm here because, almost two and a half years ago, I had a companion whose life orbited this circle, and he invited me to join them. I soon found in the group an expression of kind community, of whole-being, nonideological prayer, and of self-challenge that left my previous definition all of those concepts in the dust.
Answer harder to put (few) words to: I'm here because, three years ago this month, I walked out of the Hostal Catedral in El Centro de Mexico D.F., el Ombligo del Universo (as I was soon informed), and plunged into a sonic ocean of heartbeats magnified ten thousand times and shooting skyward in every direction: the reverberation of the four wooden drums of four separate circles of danzantes, bouncing off the storied stone walls of El Palacio Nacional and the other four facets of this titanic and troubled diamond called the Zocalo. It was like nothing I'd ever heard, or felt. I could not move anywhere other than toward the heart of the sound, and there, seated on a low stone ledge in sight of the Templo Mayor, shoulder to shoulder with the tourists, travellers, and weary walkers of the City, to try and drink it in. First a man came by playing up the tourist crowd with a printed sheet on Mexica cosmology; I gave him a few cents for one, just to be neighborly, but when he asked where I was from and heard "Nuevo Mexico" he smiled and exclaimed "Ah, eres vecina entonces!" and I felt, suddenly, welcome.
Then, a short time later, a quiet voice materialized next to my left shoulder, and began, without preamble, a detailed, unhurried discourse on the history of the danzantes and the society in which they had their origin. The source of this voice looked like a young homeless man, my age at most, with waist-length dreds matted into one massive plume down his back, wisp of mustache over friendly smile, tattered NFL-logo jacket held together with safety pins and duct tape, holy shoes. He didn't ask my name, didn't offer the slightest hint of flirtation like I'd already seen round that block, didn't ask for anything. Only murmured, like a clear stream, an astonishing current of seasons, origins, social orders, details of dress, diet, medicine, rhythms of songs and of stars. It was a dream of wholeness, of right relating with earth, the pueblo, and the heavens. He said he had learned these things while studying to be a shaman, but had to leave off his studies. Of course, having lived in Santa Fe, a declaration like this comes of necessity as somewhat suspect. But his humility impressed me: this was obviously a guy with little to prove. As did the expanse and conscientiousness of his information. And I was later to hear many of the same details repeated by others; as far as I can tell, this strange traveller spoke well.
I spent about a week at the Hostal, and the drums pulled me back outside every evening. The dancers were there every day. In sun, in rain, in darkness at times. They didn't stop for anything. They were clearly there for the audience - some even put out little baskets for donations - but they weren't showy. There was an inwardness, a collectivity, a focus about the groups that I found attractive. I drank in the color, movement and sound at every chance that week. Not at all imagining, of course, that it had anything to do with me.
I continued not to imagine this for the first several months that I came to the circle here in the South Valley of Albuquerque. The glaring difference of my background alone was always with me, even though everyone was friendly and accepting (and although, when I started, there was another gringa as well as a Navajo woman in the group). The physical endurance was a greater challenge than I had taken on in almost twenty years, and I was sadly unready for it. The complexity of the dances eluded me for months, and when there came the time that I was asked to offer one on my own, I cringed at my lack of memory, skill, and grace. And, strange as it may sound, the 'acceptance of being accepted' by a solid, almost family-like community touched childhood psychic wounds not, at times, like healing balm, but more like the alcohol that burns away a potential infection. It took all the will I had, every week, to keep going back to what body, mind and spirit were both wary of and craving intensely, at the same time. And even coming up on two and a half years, I can still say the same at times: it's perhaps the most impossible and the most necessary effort I've ever taken on.
That's a lot about the personal. What of the bigger picture? What is the circle doing here? How, here, now, after centuries, after conquest and defeat, after materialism and industrialization and forgetting and loss and the burial of Tenochtitlan under time and earth and blood and asphalt? I can only, at this point, speak a regrettably small and subjective response. I can't properly cite and footnote, only retell and respect. I've been told of survivors of la Conquista who, seeing their imminent assimilation and their worldview's disappearance, began quietly and in secret to preserve in the collective memory the songs, dances and other knowledge of their past, often cloaking them for their own survival in the terms and forms of Church and Empire (sounding somewhat similar to the historic response that's always fascinated me on the part of the Celtic peoples). I've heard that the threads of continuity were spun out over surprisingly long years, thanks to their being woven into the structures of extended family. I've also heard suggested, and would imagine, that the effort found much of its momentum reclaimed in the years of the Chicano Movement. John Ross identifies the discovery of the eight-ton Coyolxauhqui stone with its carved 'moon goddess', during the Capital's Metro excavations in 1978, as the moment that 'set the wheels in motion for a revival of pride in the Aztec past'. With how few threads can you span five centuries and arrive, to some degree unchanged, in the now?
I could read up a lot more on this. But I haven't, maybe because there are so many books and so little time (an easy answer). Or maybe because this is personal. This isn't at all intellectual for me. I don't know if it's possible to say that, because I'm not Chicana, or Mexicana, I have no cultural or political point to make in this discussion. Maybe not. And I suppose I've taken on a similar personal responsibility, or lack of same, for the particular implications of the 'Aztec past' as I have for the particular implications of the USAmerican present: I claim marginal acceptance of categories, as an (in many ways) marginalized and barely-existent citizen. I am both victim and chooser of all my names. There isn't a clear answer. But I often don't expect that from Life, so I often don't demand it of myself.
But yes, I'm here, in a sense, precisely because I have no cultural background. I come from ancestors who immigrated and then assimilated as quickly and completely as possible. No language, no traditions, no history. Barely a few old photos. I spent almost 40 years of life without knowing the support and structure of a tradition, and then one was offered, and I met it on the terms with which it spoke to me: engagement with elemental, cyclical, humble and human bearings. And I'm here because, after I accepted the invitation, it was renewed time and time again. In the pain and the healing of muscle and heartbeat and breath. In the acceptance of the comadres and compadres who keep welcoming me. In the affirmation of luminous dreams and of momentary visions so exquisite, so intense that I feel obligated to honor them with my grateful silence. And in the reconnection that I know each time my feet speak their prayers directly to the listening earth, and the voice of the drum realigns my heart with a true pulse. That's the circle that has encircled me.
And I've got no desire for 'audiences' anyway. This is personal: between us and Earth. La danza is an offering. And as always, it asks me to offer everything I've got. The asphalt surface starts to raise blisters, even with huaraches on, by the second dance. My legs are stronger than they used to be, but my lungs still don't quite make it, and by the time I offer my dance I'm nearly always close to collapse. I try to put mind over matter, drink air like water, welcome the copal smoke as the nourishment that it often is. But I'm swaying on my feet, under this sun that seems to have found a hole in the top of my head, and is radiating straight into the center of my brain. And I'm thinking that pretty soon, in these rays, I'll change from the only gringa in the group to la roja - the red one - and wondering if that'll be an improvement.
What in the world am I doing here? I still wonder -- and yes, at times, feel fairly uncomfortable -- about my place in this circle. Not only because it's possibly the hardest thing I've ever done. I'm not of the right genetic or cultural background for this. Obviously. Once, at some event, an observer asked our jefe more or less that question. The man's intent seemed a curiosity more friendly than otherwise (there certainly are those of the sincere opinion that nobody with my skin color should be part of any circle). El Jefe answered with his usual charisma and inclusive enthusiasm: "She is here representing that aspect of humanity that is without race or color or borders." Wow, I told him, I hope I can live up to that.
What am I doing here? Simplest answer: I'm here because, almost two and a half years ago, I had a companion whose life orbited this circle, and he invited me to join them. I soon found in the group an expression of kind community, of whole-being, nonideological prayer, and of self-challenge that left my previous definition all of those concepts in the dust.
Answer harder to put (few) words to: I'm here because, three years ago this month, I walked out of the Hostal Catedral in El Centro de Mexico D.F., el Ombligo del Universo (as I was soon informed), and plunged into a sonic ocean of heartbeats magnified ten thousand times and shooting skyward in every direction: the reverberation of the four wooden drums of four separate circles of danzantes, bouncing off the storied stone walls of El Palacio Nacional and the other four facets of this titanic and troubled diamond called the Zocalo. It was like nothing I'd ever heard, or felt. I could not move anywhere other than toward the heart of the sound, and there, seated on a low stone ledge in sight of the Templo Mayor, shoulder to shoulder with the tourists, travellers, and weary walkers of the City, to try and drink it in. First a man came by playing up the tourist crowd with a printed sheet on Mexica cosmology; I gave him a few cents for one, just to be neighborly, but when he asked where I was from and heard "Nuevo Mexico" he smiled and exclaimed "Ah, eres vecina entonces!" and I felt, suddenly, welcome.
Then, a short time later, a quiet voice materialized next to my left shoulder, and began, without preamble, a detailed, unhurried discourse on the history of the danzantes and the society in which they had their origin. The source of this voice looked like a young homeless man, my age at most, with waist-length dreds matted into one massive plume down his back, wisp of mustache over friendly smile, tattered NFL-logo jacket held together with safety pins and duct tape, holy shoes. He didn't ask my name, didn't offer the slightest hint of flirtation like I'd already seen round that block, didn't ask for anything. Only murmured, like a clear stream, an astonishing current of seasons, origins, social orders, details of dress, diet, medicine, rhythms of songs and of stars. It was a dream of wholeness, of right relating with earth, the pueblo, and the heavens. He said he had learned these things while studying to be a shaman, but had to leave off his studies. Of course, having lived in Santa Fe, a declaration like this comes of necessity as somewhat suspect. But his humility impressed me: this was obviously a guy with little to prove. As did the expanse and conscientiousness of his information. And I was later to hear many of the same details repeated by others; as far as I can tell, this strange traveller spoke well.
I spent about a week at the Hostal, and the drums pulled me back outside every evening. The dancers were there every day. In sun, in rain, in darkness at times. They didn't stop for anything. They were clearly there for the audience - some even put out little baskets for donations - but they weren't showy. There was an inwardness, a collectivity, a focus about the groups that I found attractive. I drank in the color, movement and sound at every chance that week. Not at all imagining, of course, that it had anything to do with me.
I continued not to imagine this for the first several months that I came to the circle here in the South Valley of Albuquerque. The glaring difference of my background alone was always with me, even though everyone was friendly and accepting (and although, when I started, there was another gringa as well as a Navajo woman in the group). The physical endurance was a greater challenge than I had taken on in almost twenty years, and I was sadly unready for it. The complexity of the dances eluded me for months, and when there came the time that I was asked to offer one on my own, I cringed at my lack of memory, skill, and grace. And, strange as it may sound, the 'acceptance of being accepted' by a solid, almost family-like community touched childhood psychic wounds not, at times, like healing balm, but more like the alcohol that burns away a potential infection. It took all the will I had, every week, to keep going back to what body, mind and spirit were both wary of and craving intensely, at the same time. And even coming up on two and a half years, I can still say the same at times: it's perhaps the most impossible and the most necessary effort I've ever taken on.
That's a lot about the personal. What of the bigger picture? What is the circle doing here? How, here, now, after centuries, after conquest and defeat, after materialism and industrialization and forgetting and loss and the burial of Tenochtitlan under time and earth and blood and asphalt? I can only, at this point, speak a regrettably small and subjective response. I can't properly cite and footnote, only retell and respect. I've been told of survivors of la Conquista who, seeing their imminent assimilation and their worldview's disappearance, began quietly and in secret to preserve in the collective memory the songs, dances and other knowledge of their past, often cloaking them for their own survival in the terms and forms of Church and Empire (sounding somewhat similar to the historic response that's always fascinated me on the part of the Celtic peoples). I've heard that the threads of continuity were spun out over surprisingly long years, thanks to their being woven into the structures of extended family. I've also heard suggested, and would imagine, that the effort found much of its momentum reclaimed in the years of the Chicano Movement. John Ross identifies the discovery of the eight-ton Coyolxauhqui stone with its carved 'moon goddess', during the Capital's Metro excavations in 1978, as the moment that 'set the wheels in motion for a revival of pride in the Aztec past'. With how few threads can you span five centuries and arrive, to some degree unchanged, in the now?
I could read up a lot more on this. But I haven't, maybe because there are so many books and so little time (an easy answer). Or maybe because this is personal. This isn't at all intellectual for me. I don't know if it's possible to say that, because I'm not Chicana, or Mexicana, I have no cultural or political point to make in this discussion. Maybe not. And I suppose I've taken on a similar personal responsibility, or lack of same, for the particular implications of the 'Aztec past' as I have for the particular implications of the USAmerican present: I claim marginal acceptance of categories, as an (in many ways) marginalized and barely-existent citizen. I am both victim and chooser of all my names. There isn't a clear answer. But I often don't expect that from Life, so I often don't demand it of myself.
But yes, I'm here, in a sense, precisely because I have no cultural background. I come from ancestors who immigrated and then assimilated as quickly and completely as possible. No language, no traditions, no history. Barely a few old photos. I spent almost 40 years of life without knowing the support and structure of a tradition, and then one was offered, and I met it on the terms with which it spoke to me: engagement with elemental, cyclical, humble and human bearings. And I'm here because, after I accepted the invitation, it was renewed time and time again. In the pain and the healing of muscle and heartbeat and breath. In the acceptance of the comadres and compadres who keep welcoming me. In the affirmation of luminous dreams and of momentary visions so exquisite, so intense that I feel obligated to honor them with my grateful silence. And in the reconnection that I know each time my feet speak their prayers directly to the listening earth, and the voice of the drum realigns my heart with a true pulse. That's the circle that has encircled me.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
papercuts
I've been trying, for months now, to put some kind of words to my last year's experience. Or, more to the point, to release somehow my last year's experience, using words. A year spent in giving ceaselessly, willingly, and illogically far more than I had to give. Of time, energy, emotion, money, ideas, and opportunities. To a supposed partner, and to a living situation shared with his mother and his two children, and his unemployment, and his personal struggles and his unfulfilled dreams and potentials, and his - best I can tell - near complete lack of genuine interest in me.
I can't do it. At least not for now. Even though I've been out of the situation almost six months, it's still too tangled and toxic. The unresolved questions, conversations, anger and sadness find me at the most inopportune moments -- 2 a.m. when sleep leaves, or 4 p.m. on deliveries, or mid-chat with a kinder friend. But they refuse to find their way into poetry, prose, or a word picture, so as to find their way out of me and on downstream.
Except, maybe, for this little image. Not the most impressive analogy ever, but it'll do for now. The pain of the experience is not, nor was it at any point, a mortal blow or a gaping wound. Nothing so acceptedly or obviously insidious occurred that I can point to it and justify this pervasive, whole-self accumulation of suffering and self-second-guessing that I now walk around with. But the experience was, overall, kind of like getting 1,000 papercuts. One after another after another. And now I have them all over. They are on every part of me: on mind, on body, on psyche, on heart. They are inside and out. They amplify my raised pulse-rate in their raw surfaces like any new cut does. And they're healing really, really slowly.
It gets hard to sit still for long, without rubbing against a few dozen of them. I turn over in the night and awaken the sting of several more. A well-intentioned acquaintance gives me a hug, or claps me on the shoulder, and wonders why I burst into tears. Spring wind picks up dust and grit off the sidewalk and I run flinching for the nearest shelter. Working with my hands, even typing, is difficult for the slices running across fingerprints and lifelines. I see them scarring my cheeks and lips when I look in the mirror, and wonder if anybody else notices this. I breathe deep, asking the body to give up just a shred of its tensed outrage and trauma, and feel the tiny slices burning in the lining of my stomach. Those, of course, come from all the words that I swallowed.
I'm not going to attempt to write about how exactly the papercuts happened. The analogy would start to break down there. And anyway, that's another part of the pain: he and I never, ever could agree on how any painful situation came about. It was my fault, or some personal problem of mine: that was the only conclusion. And all the little incidents were so mundane, or so personal, or both, that they simply can't be respoken. It was really the razor of their unexpectedness that made the cut, every time. So. I'm leaving the subject it as it is: unhealed. And, for the moment (and maybe for the indefinite) a largely inexplicable, and largely failed experiment at understanding. I'm not asking for excessive amounts of sympathy here. I should've let it go a lot sooner. I can see that I was overly optimistic and patient. If not downright certifiable, for accepting some aspects of it. But if you see me on the street or at the coffeeshop, don't mention those lines on my face, okay? Hopefully, they're temporary. And pardon me if you offer a hand or a hug and I back away. It's nothing personal. It's just that my skin needs more time to knit itself back together again.
I can't do it. At least not for now. Even though I've been out of the situation almost six months, it's still too tangled and toxic. The unresolved questions, conversations, anger and sadness find me at the most inopportune moments -- 2 a.m. when sleep leaves, or 4 p.m. on deliveries, or mid-chat with a kinder friend. But they refuse to find their way into poetry, prose, or a word picture, so as to find their way out of me and on downstream.
Except, maybe, for this little image. Not the most impressive analogy ever, but it'll do for now. The pain of the experience is not, nor was it at any point, a mortal blow or a gaping wound. Nothing so acceptedly or obviously insidious occurred that I can point to it and justify this pervasive, whole-self accumulation of suffering and self-second-guessing that I now walk around with. But the experience was, overall, kind of like getting 1,000 papercuts. One after another after another. And now I have them all over. They are on every part of me: on mind, on body, on psyche, on heart. They are inside and out. They amplify my raised pulse-rate in their raw surfaces like any new cut does. And they're healing really, really slowly.
It gets hard to sit still for long, without rubbing against a few dozen of them. I turn over in the night and awaken the sting of several more. A well-intentioned acquaintance gives me a hug, or claps me on the shoulder, and wonders why I burst into tears. Spring wind picks up dust and grit off the sidewalk and I run flinching for the nearest shelter. Working with my hands, even typing, is difficult for the slices running across fingerprints and lifelines. I see them scarring my cheeks and lips when I look in the mirror, and wonder if anybody else notices this. I breathe deep, asking the body to give up just a shred of its tensed outrage and trauma, and feel the tiny slices burning in the lining of my stomach. Those, of course, come from all the words that I swallowed.
I'm not going to attempt to write about how exactly the papercuts happened. The analogy would start to break down there. And anyway, that's another part of the pain: he and I never, ever could agree on how any painful situation came about. It was my fault, or some personal problem of mine: that was the only conclusion. And all the little incidents were so mundane, or so personal, or both, that they simply can't be respoken. It was really the razor of their unexpectedness that made the cut, every time. So. I'm leaving the subject it as it is: unhealed. And, for the moment (and maybe for the indefinite) a largely inexplicable, and largely failed experiment at understanding. I'm not asking for excessive amounts of sympathy here. I should've let it go a lot sooner. I can see that I was overly optimistic and patient. If not downright certifiable, for accepting some aspects of it. But if you see me on the street or at the coffeeshop, don't mention those lines on my face, okay? Hopefully, they're temporary. And pardon me if you offer a hand or a hug and I back away. It's nothing personal. It's just that my skin needs more time to knit itself back together again.
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