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...
so then. days later, and not sure about blogs still, i'm writing. here. to see. just to see.
The flight home with Burger's daughter and Carolyn Nordstrom's a different kind of war story. between the two. drawn inevitably towards this africa of youth. knowing insistently, steadily, the frustration of such moves. towards. something that isn't.
Nordstrom says "Surviving war entails the fundamental irony of simultaneously creating meaning and embracing (the reality) of chaos--a demand on cognitive process that confounds even the best philosophers" (109). "William James was one of the first contemporary westher theoreticians to lay to rest the ideal of a fixed identity: "Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind" (1890: 295). And he continues with a line that could not speak more directly to the Mozambican experience: "To wound any one of these images is to wound him."
"The richly nuanced complexity of self has recently come to stand as one of its defining characteristics in contemporary philosophy. Like the stories people fashion to survive the war, self is a continually emergent phenomenon: crafted, enhanced, re-sculpted. The process is a creative one. 188
and
"What happens when very little of social and cultural relevance is left intact? Worlds cannot simply be created, they must be created anew.
The dilemma is clear: between the world as it was, the world as it should be, and the now of a world destroyed lies an abyss, a discontinuity, a need to define the one by the other, and the impossibility of doing so. Identity hinges on bridging this gap." 190
and
I have begun to accept that, at special times, a true spark of creativity is possible, a spark that defies the logic of tradition and the bounds of the culturally possible to forge the wholly new. Yet this spark of creativity is not a light in an otherwise darkened horizon. It is attended by the minutia of daily acts that take place within a field of cultural possibilities; it works amid processes of cultural selection and recombination that hone the day-to-day manifestations of the creative process. 198
and
I have "seen" (a western phrase elevating sight to knowing) Mozambicans create worlds from the voics of burning embers that were once home, family, and accepted reality. The problem I face is not with the knowing or understanding of this, but with translating it into words, words incapable of fully communicating this experience, this creativity. Possibly this dearth of explanatory tools relates back to the simple fact that writers depend on language. How can we write of that which does not partake of language? How can we communicate what the printed word cannot convey? Yet in the same way that the lack of knowledge of the circular nature of the earth or the circulatory system of the human body once thwarted, but did not arrest, scientific understanding, I do not think our inability to transcribe some of life's larger realities should obscure the fact that we theorize in an academic world limited by a language not yet capable of encompassing the vicissitudes and depths of existence." 203
and
"the healing conceptualized in Mozambican/African medicine viewed violence as a pathology that needed to be cured like any other illness or misfortune. Hundreds of conversations I had with Mozambicans reflected their preoccupation with defusing the cultures of violence the (209) war had wrought. It is a violence, they stress, that can last far beyond formal military cease fires. People constantly reminded themselves and others about the insidious nature of violence to reproduce itself, and to destroy worlds and lives in the process...210
and reporting what someone else has said: "the importance of the Curandeiro lies not only in her or his ability to treat the diseases and physical ravages of war, but in their ability to take the violence out of a person and to reintegrate them back into a healthy lifestyle. You see, people who have been exposed to the war, well, some of this violence can affect them, stick with them, like a rash on the soul. They carry this violence with them back to their communities and their homes and their lives, and they begin to act in ways they have never acted before. They bring the war back with them--they become more confused, more violent, more dangerous, and so too does the whole community. We need to protect against this. The Curandeiros make consultations and patiently talk to the person, they give medicinal treatments, they perform ceremonies, they work with the whole family, they include the community. They cut the person off from any holds the war has on him or her, they scrape off the violence from their spirit, they make them forget what they have seen and felt and experienced in the war, they make them alive again, alive and part of the community. ... . the Curandeiros take the war out of them, they uneducate their war education. They remind the person how to be a part of their family, to work their machamba, to get along, to be a part of the community. They cure the violence that others have taught. 210
This set of words from the dictionary on time....
eon (aion); bee time; blink; calendar; canonical hours; cock's crow; cycle (wheel of time) (from blooms to cell cycles); dawn; day; day keepers (someone who helps you to live as if it were an art); daylight saving time; dilly dallying; dog days and dog nights (three dog night--a chilly one); donkey years; dreamtime; ecological time (on the seasons; nature's time); elevenses--tea time...; epoch (associated with a particular idea, event, or series of events); equinox; eternity; evening; eventide--the time fo day at whiche the chance for company was possible but not guaranteed; events; first time; flower clocks; garden--the place of innocence and timelessness; holiday; in the beginning; in sync; judgment day; kairos; carpe diem; kids' time; life time; light; linear time, cyclical time; ma in japanese it is something of a temporary break in conversation--a pregnant pause; marking time; matinee; midnight; midsummer and midwinter; month; morketiden--norwegian means "the murky time"; nemawashi--the amount of time it takes for agroup of people to agree on something or come to a decision, japan; night; nine days' wonder or warhol's 15 minutes of fame; nocturnal and diurnal; noon; norwegian winter; on time; once upon a time; playtime; puddles of time; reading--time off the clock; rhythm; sacred time; season; shank of the afternoon--the waxing or waning moments-the last few minutes before the sun sets--shank is the beginning or ending of any period of time; sick day; sleep; snail's pace; snow day; solar heartbeat; soldag (sun day, the day the sun returns to the sky after monts of winter darkness in scandinavia; solstice; sunwise--the direction teh sun seems to take through the sky; teatime; tempo (metronom); time of the angels--when all things happen at once--beginning, middle and end; timekeepers; twilight; watchman; week; year; gloaming--dedate hour of twilight; mahayuga is a cycle of twelve thousand divine years. these words from kimberly olson fakih _off the clock: a lexicon of time words and expressions_ Tichnor and Fields, new york 1995
reading this book by a woman who grew up in nigeria, a white child of missionary parents. a certain tonic, the familiarity of it, so absolutely different from that poisonwood book people always ask me about.
starting to think about this paper for the conference, the sort of striated literacy frames. which literacies matter. which literacies must be purged. no blunged. that new word last night from clay. to blunge? something about held in suspension...but not exactly...
literacy seems a certain kind of impossibility to discuss...always.
the bodily involvement in these literacies we acquire. when Jane complains about workng on her web page project, she talks about how difficult it was to see the screen...always, this sense that literate acts have bodily consequence.
shaping a body memory. what is the word for fragmented memory?
this sense that when C talks about the novel, she uses the words I would have for literacy. what possible shards might remain? in a literacy narrative?
starting out on this move towards the next writing, just to scope out that frame of possible directions. For the last months, writing down quite frequently, the descriptors for...acts of contrition. to establish next the framework.
banal acts of contrition...
breathtaking
vulnerable
ambiguous
effaced acts
ceremonial acts
lavish acts
survivor acts
sustainable
whimsical
falling
transformed
studied
elegant
fractured
genuine?
shallow
unstable
steady
impressed
flexible
parallel/echoing
pressed
neglected
condensed
excoriating
breathtaking
palmpsest
primitive
meditative
elemental
submerged
frozen
baccic
add ons...
abandonned
ethereal
exacting
scarred
contemplative
reformed
disintegrating
hidden
saturated
precarious
grand
fluxed
precocious
reminiscent/influenced by
severe
quiet
on a saturday, in rural south georgia, when the weather is near perfect outside, my blinds are shut so that I can talk myself into figuring this out...
confessions: I have avoided even remotely understanding css.
no. not interested. And no idea about perl. or php. or mysql. but this promise to know something soon...the necessity of figuring this out. As Gerard sat here and quickly put the Movable type on my site without any difficulties, I realized again the necessity of finding those literate in the acts one desires...knowing the right person for the job, that delight...
hm. i could write here about the multiplicity of literate acts, of the bodies that move in conjunction/refraction to the literate acts desired...but that's another topic, another day, another five diet cokes later.
a blog! the insanity.
curious in this was the way I was suddenly in the territory I meant to be in long ago regarding data bases...to just catch a glimpse of how easy or how difficult I could make the next writing projects. That steady interest in what might be the future...
It's of that variety of "aha" that happens when having followed reading whims (i.e., why am i checking out this book from the library, etc) I realize that I have gathered together several links...for lack of a better word...and what has been lost in memory suddenly is recovered...that recovery, such an extraordinary pleasure.
but the point. a promise to learn. action scripts for flash, css for this, and php for other kinds of blogging..