screed time

there's nothing like an advanced dental procedure to make you feel truly grateful for the material privileges of Western modernity. Today I had a root canal, a long-awaited corrective to a botched filling from around 2009 (that is, five years ago). The dentist, a kindly, bear-like man, seemed to anticipate all of my questions. He held a bar of ice to my tooth, and it hurt. I asked him if the root canal would stop the pain, and he said, "You'll never feel anything again. You'll be able to eat as much ice cream as you want and get fat, like me." I joked that it was muscle (?) - wasn't sure what to do. But he took it all in stride. He shot up my left mouth region with painkilling anesthesia and started right in. Soon I didn't feel any pain, but the sensations made by the various drills and implements were so strange. It was like someone was grinding my face with a mortar and pestle, or rooting around in there like a sea-worm into coral...I tried to match the sensations with images, but I couldn't (and actually, I didn't really want to).

At one point he said, "Do you like cooking? We're going to cook you now." He and his assistant giggled and joked about popular music ("It's Pink," he said, referring to the radio and not my root, "I like Pink.") as he stuck this burning tool into my mouth, which sizzled and smoked. It smelled like incense and cauterized flesh. Other tools included the Really Long Drill, which had a long, thin bit and seemed to root around a lot. The two of them were mining for gold in there - apparently their subterranean spelunking discovered three canals, long ("very long") roots. They then measured these roots, apparently. The process could have been narrated better - I always like it when doctors tell you what they're doing while, or slightly before, they do it. I also kept wondering how long the procedure would last. But all in all, it was as painless as possible.

It's hard to be in that prone position and not feel like your health and wellbeing - in fact, your very life - are in the hands of another person, whom you don't know but have to trust. I can't help but think about people who don't have access to adequate medical care - about the story in Harper's of the South African townships, an observation on a day's journey with a man and his daughter, who needed a tooth removed. Apparently a doctor just yanked it out with pliars, leaving her screaming, bloody, and fainting. In my case, it felt like the doctor was rooting out my tooth - he kept sort of grabbing and manipulating it in a certain way, as if polishing it or rolling it around in his fingers (roughly) - I wondered if he were just going to loosen it up and yank it out. But he didn't, thankfully. I can't imagine how traumatized that young girl must have been, or if she had an abscessed wound afterward, or if she decided to avoid medical care in the future because of this incident...
Then my thoughts turned to Gaza and what has been going on there. I know, it's a leap from the dentist's chair to Palestine, but it's been so on my mind. I haven't been talking much about it, because I don't want to be a "geopolitician of facebook," and I don't really know anything, and so the thoughts have just been sort of looping. But the whole thing - the blockade, the bombings, the food shortages, and inevitably the bad medical care and pain - sucks terribly. Generations of people are being oppressed, in ways that they'll never escape, it seems. I wonder what would happen if this were any other place - Syria, for instance. I know that the situation is far different there, because it's a nation repressing its own citizens, and there are now bona-fide terrorists in the scene. But of course the international community can only condemn, send sanctions. In the case of Israel, the United States - naive ideologues that we are - are funding a lot of this. The hypocrisy seems to be overwhelming. And of course, there's the Jewish thing.

It's all pretty complex, and it's hard to blame one person - although Israel's hawkish right-wing government, and their paranoid fantasies and need to 'protect' themselves with preemptive killings - comes close. Nevertheless, I know that a lot of this is about the trauma of displacement (on both sides), the mistake of statehood-linked sovereignty, the Holocaust, colonialism, anti-Semitism, anti-Islam - so pretty much everything. I am sure that there are good people on both sides, people who disavow what's happening and resolve to forgive. At the same time, it would be entirely justified for the Palestinians to be angry about their treatment. They really are treated like subhumans and denied all of the first-world amenities that Israel has (in droves). The contrasts are fairly obscene. I feel like this has transcended geopolitics and become a humanitarian issue, an ethical concern, and that Palestinians should become a protectorate of the UN, if that were possible. They should be allowed to flee, since they are political prisoners, essentially. It's hard to see how Israel can ignore the echoes of this situation...their excuses seem so flimsy and tired.

I remember when I was taught about the Jewish wars for liberation in Sunday school. Even as a child, I remember thinking, "Why am I being asked to celebrate violence?" I didn't get it. I saw the causes of the war, but I didn't see the need to cheer. This actually seemed to contradict some fundamental tenets of Judaism. Incidentally, I also recall feeling confused about the phrase "bringing a criminal to justice," because what was really happening was that the criminal was being punished for his/her crime.

Then later, when I went on the Birthright, I felt very disassociated from Judaism and very depressed. Again, I did not see what the fighting was for. I felt, in fact, that I could not be connected to Judaism in any way unless I repudiated all of this pro-Zionist shit. It's nice that there is a place for people to do that, and there's a growing number of people interested in being anti-Zionist Jews, but it's still a minority, and Israel's bad PR (they say that Hamas is their PR agent) is ruining the landscape for nuances.

I do see, also, that it's a generational thing. I'm sure that the equation is something like (guilt over Holocaust)x(US citizenship)/evangelicals = pro-Israel. Or whatever. But I cannot relate to the struggle to protect citizens who have quite the advantage in every respect. The threats from without seem minimal, and the losses are huge. It would seem that if there is a God, s/he is not going to be very happy with this behavior, killing of innocent people, etc.

Empathy should get us farther, I would think. I'm always surprised at its limits, or at the ways that humans, including myself, can turn away from the pain of others so easily. I've never been tortured or in pain - the closest I've come is dental work, really. But even that shows me how porous and vulnerable my body can be, and how the mere intimation of pain can turn me into a trembling, shivering animal. All reflexes and nerves. And then I pray for the fast dulling of pain, to make things easier for myself. What about others?

things to blog

1) boredom: the distinguishing characteristic of Man (also, doing things past the point of satiation)

2) sense of peace/calm - things welling up

3) want to write about the female spider devouring the male after sex - discussion of the provenance of that story

4) brain full but rustling - a movement in the cranial underbrush

5) feminist plays starring feminized actresses - contradictory?

6) overheard these two guys talking on the train about acting and stunt men and teeth

7) the rear-window wiper flicking back and forth like the tail of a large ruminant on the African savanna...

8)

thoughts on Christianity, capitalism and vain striving

i was thinking about this killing that just happened in Binghampton, NY, in which a Vietnamese man went on a rampage and killed over a dozen people after being fired from his job. i was thinking about how economic woes and a feeling of striving for something that you couldn't possibly gain could make you insane and murderous, and this reminded me of Christianity's message that worldly striving and ambition are not useful or beneficial and will lead to mental agony, etc. - and i was thinking that maybe that's more of a way of coping with unachievable desires than anything else, so that christianity is a religion for economic recessions. maybe buddhism's passivity, as loosely interpreted (by me), also springs from this sense that striving in this world is vain not only because there's a better world after this one but also because, in this climate of economic inequality, there's basically no way that you'll get the things that you're striving for anyway. Or something like that.

intersection of the organic and the horrible

it's interesting to think about 'your time' while immersed in it. today i'm reading this book called Babylon Girls, which talks about a half-century of black female popular entertainers in the US, including burlesque stars and anonymous chorusline kickers. I don't know why this makes me wonder about my current moment - perhaps historiography generally has this effect, it being a retrospective assessment of the past. Often historical writing is shot through with moralism - this was bad, we are good - or this was better, we've really sunk low - but I'd like to think that right now things are just about as bad as they could ever be and also just about as good as they could ever be - that we're constantly riding dual asymptotes into our swirling destiny, which parallel steeds balance out to a neutrality that is not benign, nor benevolent, that doesn't allow us to feel 'OK' about things, but is just nature - red in tooth and claw, as nurturing and mechanical as as wasp building a nest around its eggs. The wasp is not driven by nobility, nor by maternal instinct, but by something else - a sort of survival drive - that might well be the thing that moves us all. The 'will to live,' or 'to power' - and perhaps the necessity of fucking things up in the process. There's no shame in that. No absolution either.

thinking about industrial noise

i want to do a project recording the sounds of the hostel next door. and talking about funk/james brown/the sounds of trains and iron things striking other iron things, chains...chain gangs. okay, future projects, post-everything.

doing weird things for many years

this is kind of obvious, but sometimes there are those moments that we have, as strange and ridiculous humans, when we suddenly realize certain things about ourselves that make us even more mystified - as in, we have an epiphany that leaves us further in the dark. The other day i was eating a hard-boiled egg, and i was made aware (or rather, i made myself aware) that the way that i most enjoy eating hard-boiled eggs is this: open the egg, eat the white part, and save the yolk for another time - and if there is an already-saved yolk from a previous episode of doing this, eat it - but AFTER having eaten the white.

why do i do this??? i have no idea. all i know is that i have been doing this for years. it's just the way that i like to eat hard-boiled eggs, and it's become something of a habit, as random as it may be. another window into more darkness...something of the sensation of confronting death in confronting these things about ourselves and touching the peripheries of our weird an unnknowable natures...humm.

on language, culture, and sex

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the connections between language, culture, and sex. This blog post, however, is mostly instigated by a really surprisingly fabulous cab ride that I had from O'Hare to my house the other day. The driver was a Somali man, and he engaged me right away, for some unknown reason, even though I stumbled into his taxi bedraggled and pungent, not having showered or brushed my teeth in about two days. We got to talking, and he told me that he wrote film scripts when he wasn't driving the cab. I asked him what the scripts were about, and he said that the first one that he'd finished was a sci-fi film featuring only a little killing (he was speaking quickly, and I couldn't catch his description of the film, but I did hear him say that usually in films there was too much killing, and you couldn't watch killing for too long, because it got boring). The new film was a comedy about an African man who comes to the US and experiences intensely comical culture shock. This sounded both autobiographical and somewhat cliched to me, but I didn't say anything. Then the cabdriver directly segued into a discussion of his own coming-to-America story, as well as the preamble. He talked about his introduction to American culture and the three most shocking things: 1) homosexual men; 2)women with their legs uncovered; and 3) doors that automatically opened and closed. About the gay men, he said that there weren't any in Somalia, though men often held hands with friends, and so it was hard to tell, and the Kenyans thought that all Somalis were gay anyway. The man said that he'd been working as a cook in a hotel, and one man was always very friendly to him, and also very "soft." Eventually, another cook told him that the man was gay, after which point he became so spooked that he had to stop working that job. He told me that he later became more educated and now realized that "gays are human too." Once again, I displayed my awkwardly nervous giggle.

Then, he said, when he was in California, he couldn't bear to look at the gorgeous, nearly-naked women - he wanted to look, but didn't know where to look! So many uncovered legs and burqa-less mantles. And finally, as for the automatic doors, he still shadowboxed them from time to time, not knowing exactly how fast to approach or when they'd give way. This was all destined to go into his script.

And I was thinking the whole time: why is culture shock here made equivalent to homosexual panic, or the shock of sexual difference? Why are culture and sex so often conflated when eliciting reactions of fear and disavowal in constituting selfhood? Why should sexuality even have a culture, which (as it turns out) is huge? How can a repeating repertoire of rote acts conjure such fear, paranoia, denial, abnegation, shame, imagination, excitement, devotion??? I remember thinking that sex was not so interesting when I was not so interested in it; but now I know that it has all of these facets, despite still not putatively being very interesting. Like, even though I can go through all of the motions in my mind until I feel like I should be acclimated, I am still excited by the boring. Hm.

We talked more about language, and he told me about the various languages in Somalia - Italian, of course, and Russian and even a Turkic language that was not Turkish and wasn't written in Arabic. He told me that all foreign movies, including cowboy films, are translated into Italian before entering Somalian theatres, and he always loved watching spaghetti Westerns that were both shot in Italy and now translated into Italian, making them thoroughly tangled in spaghetti. Clint Eastwood was his favorite actor.

He could also speak several languages, including the tribal languages of Somali, Italian, (perfect) English, and several other African languages, since he had spent many years moving around Africa on foot, crossing borders illegally with his brother and a friend. He said that Africa was beautiful and very dangerous. I felt that I agreed with that statement.

Then we talked for a while about the strangeness of English, especially to pronounce and spell - he ranted eloquently about its difficulty as compared to Italian, in which the rules spelled out clearly how to pronounce "c" if followed by "i" or "e." I had to agree with him, and I lamented that English was the lingua franca, being so difficult, and with such complicated nuances. He told me that in the tribal language of Somalia that he happens to speak (because there are many, divided into sections within the country), people can say entire sentences by using only one word, a word that can be as precise or as general as they want it to be, depending on the context. He told me that with the variety of expressions in English, he was often lacking a precise statement that would express what he wanted to say.

Anyhow, it was an interesting and rapid-fire discussion. We said goodnight and left; I gave him a pretty big tip for being such a great interlocutor. Also, everything really related to my recent feelings and thoughts about speaking Spanish and feeling comfortable in a world of Spanish - both understanding the signals and giving them. The discomfiting feeling of having misinterpreted signals that I thought I'd had right. I feel like speaking another language is like inhabiting another sexuality, by which I mean being privy to another culture. Hard to describe, but entering a cultural world of Spanish speaking gives me a palpably other identity that actually allows for a lot of erotic play, though not much that is sexually explicit. It's like wearing another set of clothes, granted intimacy to a new place where people might receive me differently but in which I don't have control over my comprehension. To say this a different way: I feel incompletely in control of Spanish, the same way that I feel incompletely in control of sexuality, and yet the destabilization and uncertainty are infinitely titillating to me. There's an erotics to code-switching, for sure, but one that is more than metaphoric.

So I've cooked up the phrases "bilingus" or "multilingus," or even "polylingus" to summon up the meanings of bilingualism, bisexuality, and cunnilingus and invoke the slippery sexiness of linguistic and cultural difference. I think that's pretty good and should make its appearance at the next Encuentro, eh?