what i think about, in images of the self, is what images we carry forward...what happens when those images are forgotten, discarded, abandonned. Which do we celebrate? Which do we mourn? How does mourning remotely address the images abandonned, and with them, what losses can we not find language for? That grief unnamed.
When i read about war. I think. I don't have the constitution for it. I would not be amongst those who Carolyn Nordstrom would meet. And yet, my mother would say otherwise...the image she carries of me.
What i end up thinking about are the tattered images we continue to carry that others have given us. Despite my own doubts, i also always carry this image my mother has. tattered. absolutely. stained. The competing competing.
what i long for, most days. is a curandiero, someone who scrapes away the effects of violence, who carries, most days, an image of what life could be like, without the terrible effects of violence. that steady work of defining a family, and a daily ritual that exceeds peace. the stability of nights slept soundly, the desire for. in the midst of all the horrors. a steady performance towards that life which might be, that life of peace.
to somehow find a way to live that includes activism. whether of this curandiero variety or otherwise, that takes on the idiocy without. without fearing, absolutely, the threat of creativity thwarted.
oh of curandieros who have encountered the likes of multiple violences and have something of a steady cure present. or know someone who knows how to take care of this variety...of that variety. to figure a way to healing...that promise. that's the promise of the Nordstrom text. she is somehow there. figuring it out. war is a traveling companion...to be ready for it, to know ways through, to know without giving up...that invitation to relation, that image of ourselves...
Posted by theorythis at March 28, 2004 02:24 PM | TrackBack