peace and quiet

i think one should not write out of weariness or exasperation because it doesn't make for good writing (it's okay to vent to oneself, of course, but those rants should hit the recycle bin or the private thoughts folder rather than seek the public eye). i will therefore swallow my exhasperation and try to write from a place of sublime remove:

i can't stand unchecked, uninformed, bigoted, intolerant political pronouncements. i want a cultural climate in which ideas such as peace, tolerance, equality, fair distribution of resources, diversity, and public welfare are taken for granted. i want to live in a society that does not attack or criminalize poverty. i want to live in a country with an open and dignified immigration policy. i want a government that doesn't use religion to manipulate public opinion. i don't want the planet to be destroyed. i don't want people to die en masse of a) preventable diseases b) starvation c) war, d) neglect, and e) torture perpetrated by my government (i don't want anyone to die of torture, but i find the idea of my government's perpetrating it intolerable). i don't want people to feel abandoned. i don't want to be scared of my own government. i want there to be more publically recognized women intellectuals, artists, politicians, writers, scientists, and athletes. i want the immediate elimination of child abuse. i want all of us to feel safe.

never let me go

i finished kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go two nights ago and i wish i had written about it immediately, while i was still “inside” it, but i didn’t have time and have now started a new book (ali smith’s the accidental). in any case, never let me go is a quite exceptional literary accomplishment, though i think ishiguro’s decision to break the spell at the end was a bit unfortunate, and aesthetically clumsy. but this may just be me. it’s just that this book is so entirely mysterious, not only because of its subject matter, but, more so, for the way ishiguro decides to portray it. it is mysterious, for instance, that the book’s england should be so bucolic, so a-modern, some fantasy-land not necessarily beautiful (it is often grey and rainy), but certainly uncontaminated by the worst civilization brings (the book is solidly and explicitly set in the late 1990s). even cars figure in it only accidentally, and TV sets. but no phones, no modern devices, no cities. there is a scene near the end when kathy, ruth, and tommy are quite taken by some big advertising poster, and what’s striking is the sense of wonderment these people have, not precisely at manifestations of modernity—they seem not to care, really—, but at allusions to what their life might have been like, or to what other people’s, people not like them, lives are. i think the wonderment at the poster with the office scene is not that different from the wonderment they all feel at the strangely beached boat.

it’s occurring to me now, and i’m not going to go back and organize these thoughts better but i’m going to let myself follow my thoughts as they come, that maybe the clones have a different sensibility from the “other people.” it seems pretty obvious from the boat scene that it is a big deal for all of them, even those who, like tommy, are at first not particularly interested. yet, it is also made somewhat clear (at least to me), that the boat is not a big deal for people in general. it’s like this event that really affects this community but not other communities, for some reason. so one might think that the idea is that the clones have a different sensibility.

their most striking feature—even though ishiguro magisterially makes it come across as if it were absolutely normal, so you realize it is strange only after thinking a little bit—is how obsessed they are by the vagaries of their interpersonal relationships, their relationships with one another. kathy, as the narrator, analyzes little events and exchanges between them to the minutest detail, as if they had the greatest significance in the world. it is only when the book ends that you realize that none of it was really that important, except maybe all the discussions that concern the clones' relationship with the guardians, because those provide clues to their status and future as clones. but this is interesting for us, the readers, the normal people. to them, to the clones, what is important are the subtlest nuances of their friendship, and their rapport to the guardians. it’s as if their world were incredibly fragile, and they needed to pay tremendous attention not to spoil the good mood between them, or make things uncomfortable for themselves and each other.

so the strange thing about this book is that these characters, or at least kathy, are simultaneously rather detached and rather obsessed. they are detached from what worries most of us, the readers. but they are obsessed with their—not inner life exactly, but the inner life of their relationships. kathy never spends much time analyzing the way she feels (the scene with the “never let me go” song is an exception, though obviously an important one), but she spends a tremendous amount of time analyzing the way she feels towards tommy and ruth, and the way they feel towards her and each other.

both tommy and ruth are, by the way, not wholly sympathetic characters (neither is, one might argue, kathy, though she’s certainly more sympathetic than either ruth or tommy). you keep expecting to find out why we should care about them, but at the end there’s nothing. so it is unclear, too, why kathy should love either of them so much. and it is hard, ultimately, to determine how much she does love them. she does, in spite of the title, let them go rather matter-of-factly, even though i’m fairly sure those separations are meant to be more emotional and devastating than i myself felt them. this may be a failure in ishiguro or a failure in me. i don’t know.

it is undeniable, though, that the book doesn’t call for much identification on the part of the reader. although undeniably human, the characters are also wholly alien, partly because of the things i’ve mentioned so far, partly because of their passive acceptance of their “destiny.” why don’t they conceive of, and put into being, a different life for themselves? why don’t they run away? but they don’t, even though it is absolutely clear that they received little to no indoctrination at hailsham; that, in fact, the whole purpose of hailsham was to keep them as innocent as possible about their future.

so this intensely alien, mysterious atmosphere gets somewhat spoiled, i think, when kathy and tommy (and we) get told about everything, get given the whole sorry story, at emily’s and marie claude’s house at the end. there the book jumps, if for a second, into realist mode, and though i am a great fan of realist fiction and do not enjoy non-realist fiction a whole lot, it is a bit of a let down. we did after all gather a sense of what was going on, and i, for one, would not have minded if the book had left me with some unanswered questions.

a lot of this book reminded me of this incredible japanese film i saw a couple of years ago, afterlife. same mixture of dingy realism (in never let me go, broken down houses, cassette tapes, mud, fences, cement, roadside cafés) and intense concentration on the characters’ interaction with each other, but in a way that makes them absolutely alien to us, the viewers.

this book gathers its rarefied, elegiac atmosphere also, partly, from what it omits: clothing is barely there (not in the sense that the characters go around naked, but in the sense that their clothes are rarely described), as is all physical appearance. in general, what is missing is all that concerns the life and comfort of the body: food, sleep, money, homes, rest, play. and, to some extent, even the life and comfort of the mind: there are books (i found ishiguro’s dropping of classics’ titles playful rather them meaningful in a deep way), but there is no cinema, no theatre, no museums, no history, no buildings and monuments, no science. also: no alcohol, no smoke, no drugs. even illness and physical decay, key elements of course in the novel, are dealt with with incredible scarcity of details: what gets donated on the “donations?” why carers? how are the recovering patients taken care of? are they in pain? do they take medication? do they undergo dialysis? there are only “tests,” and “completions,” and that’s about it for the details of the grueling medical procedures they have been “created for.”

the whole sociology and ethics of the cloning business is touched upon only at the end, in the scene with emily and marie claude that i thought ham-fisted, too explicit for such an inexplicit book. there are these mysterious “they” who send notices and keep the clones lined up for the next task, but one feels strangely incurious about them. the story, ultimately, is not about what goes on (and that’s why the scene at the end doesn’t work). the book is about holding on to one’s humanity, about balancing knowledge and ignorance, maybe about faith and love and those precious, fragile, impalpable things that keep us human in a inhuman world.

i know i know nothing

to a large extent, to understand, which is often the same as to know, is being able to classify. you don't really understand a thing, so you don't really know it, unless you are able to place it in a context, in a category. that is what teaching is mostly about: giving people the tools to decipher the information that comes their way and place in a box that, in turn, is related to other boxes. the more the boxes, the larger the capacity for understanding, the deeper the knowledge. the deeper the knowledge, i.e. the capacity of relating things to things, the deeper the awareness that we know so little we might as well admit that we know nothing at all. when socrates said that the more he learned the better he knew that he knew nothing, that's what he meant, though i doubt he would have put it this way: that, accumulation of information aside, knowledge is relating things to things, knowing in what place in the grid of "things" some piece of information will go; knowledge, in other words, is perspective, and once you acquire a deep feel for putting things into perspective the paucity, the utter meagerness of what you know will not escape you.

very often lack of articulateness, inability to think clearly, is a function of not knowing how to classify things. when you look at something unfamiliar and you are able to call that unfamiliar, and also perhaps to say in what ballpark that unfamiliar object resides (a form of greeting, a work of art, an internet tool, things french, astrophysics), you feel enormously empowered. people who place stock in increasing their knowledgeableness experience this almost daily. something they used to find utterly baffling and strange becomes suddenly familiar, not because they know much more about it, but because they can place it. this empowerment generally produces the only apparently contradictory ability to say comfortably, "i don't know." it's hard to say "i don't know" when you don't know what it is you don't know, and how to go about finding out. so this is another sense in which socrates' famous statement works: that increase in knowledge is necessarily also increase in awareness of one's ignorance, and capacity not to be utterly terrified by it.

i can't get over how beautiful miami is in winter

i'm driving south on red road around 6 pm. i am slightly woozy because my friend r. and i have drunk two bottles of champagne between 12 and 3, sitting out on her front lawn in the hot sun. as i drive south on the very fabulous red road (designated scenic by the benevolent and beauty-minded county of miami-dade) i think about this drawing i'm going to make. i'm going to use pastels, chalk pastels, not the kind you use on blackboards or on sidewalks, but a really thick and smooth kind of chalk, one that doesn't leave dusty residue but also one that doesn't have a hint, not even a suggestion, of grease.

for the sky i'll use an intense blue, just like the shirt i got s. once and which he calls his habonim shirt because it is the color habonim kids wear. just below that blue i'll put a luminous light blue, like the pale blue of this kid danny's eyes, so clear you feel self-conscious staring into them, almost transparent. under that i'll use the palest of oranges, the orange of hard-boiled egg yoke. the sky will be huge and backlit, and it will hurt with longing to look at it too long. in the sky i'll put exactly two stars, very very bright.

for the houses i'll use a charcoal gray chalk pastel. i'll lay on the chalk really thick so it will look almost black. this almost uniform and dense blackness will be broken by startling lights coming from windows, streetlights, colored shop signs, traffic signals, and the cars that share the road with me. for all these lights, i'll use charcoal pastels as vibrant as glass.

i'll make the drawing very fast, because miami's sunset is over in a minute and the next minute you are at home, parking your car, in the thickening dusk.

blessyourheart

blessyourheart told me he'd tell me a story and since i really like his stories i sat quietly waiting. i waited and waited but blessyourheart looked like he had no mind to start any time soon. i thought he was gathering inspiration and i didn't want to disturb him, so i went and made myself a peanut butter sandwich which i took to my place at blessyourheart's feet. blessyourheart had not moved an inch, he was still staring into some spot on the carpet and well he might have done that because the carpet was full of spots and often i, too, sat looking at them and making up stories about them. i got it into my head that the story blessyourheart was going to tell me was about some spots in the carpet and i got excited because he had never told me a story about them, this was something i did only on my own. i finished my sandwich and asked blessyourheart if he wanted one or maybe a glass of milk, but he didn't move a muscle so i took my plate to the sink and poured myself a tall glass of ice cold milk. i drank it fast and waited for the headache to come and sure enough it came and i liked that because i knew it wouldn't last long. when i returned to the living room blessyourheart still hadn't moved so i touched him lightly with my hand. he didn't move and he didn't do a thing. i said, "blessyourheart, are you okay?" then i shook him a bit, and then i shook him more, and then he fell on the floor. then i knew he was dead. he had a position no living person lying down would have. i didn't know how i knew that but i knew it. i didn't try to make him more comfortable because he's a big man and i am a small girl. anyway i thought that since he was dead it didn't matter. i smoothed his hair, though, because i always liked to do that but he never let me. and i closed his eyes gently with both hands. then i started telling him a long, sweet story about the spots on the carpet.

MYOB

i'm sitting at the library of the university where i work, writing on my blog at a terminal reserved for students who are studying for finals (there are empty terminals, so i don't feel bad). the library has extended hours till the end of the week. a number of the students' faces are familiar enough to me that if our eyes met i'd say hi. yet i have no idea who they are and why they are familiar to me. i don't think they ever took classes with me. i think i'd be able to remember that.

this is the situation. in spite of the large signs, put up just for finals week, declaring the whole library a "quiet zone," the library is anything but quiet. in fact, i'd say it is nosier than usual. this is not difficult to understand. i'm sure there are students here who have been seriously cramming, basically living at the library for days on end. many are in sweats, slouched alone or in groups on the comfy chairs, their belongings scattered on the (fortunately new and pleasant-looking) carpet, huddled with their books and laptops. at the terminals there are empty soda cups, stacks of notes, even books and notebooks that have been left behind. this library looks lived in. heck, it feels lived in! i generally freeze in here, but today the air is warm and slightly sour, animal. i'd say a good 30% of the students who are not at a computer terminal are on their cells.

and here comes the "situation" part. because what i have described is not a situation, not a situation at least in the sense of "we have a situation." the situation is about the guards. the university, it seems, has hired private security to guarantee that the quiet ordinance is enforced. the guards i can see from here, two women and a man, are black. the vast preponderance of the students are white or some variety of light brown. not many black students come to this university, not at all. so, you see, it's not good. because the black guards don't have the authority to shut the students up. they know it and the students know it. i just saw one of the women, middle-aged and nicely put together, stand next to a vociferous girl who was herself standing next to a group of sitting kids, explaining something and laughing. stand. the woman just stood there, hoping that her presence alone would shame the student into leaving. but the student completely ignored the woman and left only after she was done saying what she had to say. all the while the woman stood there, not two feet away, waiting, for a few long minutes. i wanted to get up and shout at the girl: don't you see what you're doing?

that wouldn't have helped anyone, of course. the girl would probably have left (i am, after all, white and a faculty member), but the woman would have felt terribly humiliated. or maybe not. i was sure at the time but am not so sure now. no matter. it's done.

this friend of mine told me yesterday that they arrested a rowdy passenger on her plane when she was coming back from visiting her family for thanksgiving. the woman apparently was very drunk when she boarded, but no one noticed. then, when she was on the plane, she started getting loud and happy, and, after being told to calm down, belligerent. eventually they came and took her away.

my friend told me she was sitting directly in front of her. i said, "why didn't you help her calm down, talk to her?" she didn't even stop a second to think: "we are in america," she said. "we mind our own business because we are afraid that, if we get into other people's business, we'll get dragged down with them." she said it with the same tone of voice with which one would say: "we are in america. we eat bread and butter with our dinner." i left soon after, but it stayed with me, you know. it really did.

egg carton room

for a couple of years when my sisters and i were kids we lived with our parents in a fa-bu-lous apartment. it didn't last long, but for those two years we felt on top of the world.

this apartment took two floors. on the bottom floor, which was a semi-basement floor, my dad had built a sort of private club. well, it was a private club, but i doubt that more than a dozen parties took place there. if you have a club but no one comes it's really not a club, is it?

the club had everything: a full bar, a fully furnished orchestra on a slightly raised platform-stage (grand piano, electric organ, full set of drums, other assorted instruments, PA system), a good hi-fi system with turntables, cool collection of records, large dance floor, lights. it was, if my childish memory doesn't fool me, pretty snazzily decorated. i think it might even withstand contemporary standards. believe me, it was a pretty cool room.

since we lived in a 5-story building with a lot of other people in a crowded neighborhood, the basement was fully soundproofed. one day, though, my dad got it into his head that the soundproofing wasn't adequate. it was the ceiling, he said. the ceiling leaked sound. so he started collecting used egg cartons to cover the ceiling with. when he got the right amount, which must have been a thousand or so, he put them up. this took time, but my dad had time.

a few hours after he finished his project, though, my dad started smelling rotten eggs. he had made a mistake. the egg cartons needed to be new.

he took the thousand egg cartons down and went to an egg packaging factory (where the hell did he find an egg packing factory? but he did) to get new, unused ones. another thousand of them.

he put the new egg cartons up.

the smell of rotten eggs reappeared. it didn't make sense, but my dad could swear it was there. the basement reeked with it, the house reeked with it, even the car reeked with it.

my dad took the egg cartons down and no one talked about sound leakage ever again.