Out of Wisdom

I don't have much to say to the world. I've been whittled down to the basic individual interactions. Is that where I'm supposed to be? No such thing. That's just where I am at the moment.

I've known enough people that younger people sometimes find me funnily, almost spookily knowledgeable. "Stop being so insightful!" my friend's sister--both are roommates--says with a laugh. She's 21. I find it funny in that grim, poker-faced way. I'm not insightful. I've just read this book too many times.

But others have lived more, outlived me by decades. Have they just not paid attention, or been too deep in the bottle, to notice what I observe about their ancient cycle of pain, indulgence, guilt, and oblivion? This isn't insight. Wisdom's all around me, in the moves people make, in the ways their lives play out in such familiar patterns. What intelligence is behind me knowing that her mother will speak Urdu, but a Hindi speaker will do? That's knowledge. I don't feel smart. I don't feel witty. It's all replay. I know my brain too well. You don't act surprised at the player producing music from its files--or, for antiques like me, a disc (let alone a cassette or cartridge!). You don't act surprised at the gun firing bullets concealed in its clip. That's all I'm doing. Spitting out. It's not intelligence.

Dealing with authorities makes me familiar with them, their needs for respect, flattery, and obeisance. Dealing with the weak makes me familiar with the way to walk, the way to talk, the way that at the end of a session you can throw out a curse and they'll think you're an okay guy, not this little stuff-shirt shit. I pretend to be way more composed than I am.

"You! Are you white?"
"Mostly, sir."
"You must be some kind of Native American. You don't look prejudiced to me."
"No, sir. My people are all invaders. Mostly white, and Turk."
"Ottoman Turks! Like Genghis Khan, now he was some fighter."
"Some of my people followed him, yes. But if you'll excuse me..."
"Oh, I'm sorry about that--"
"Nothing to apologize for, sir. We're all here to talk."

Didn't know his story at the time. Came off as grandiose, but then a lot checked out. I've let myself be surprised quite a bit. It's good to let others have some space to define themselves. But that's not decency or intellect. That's just experience.

And I still find myself out of my league when it comes to certain fields. Like dealing with people I don't know but want to, and people I thought I knew who have become very, very different, or simply changed their presentation. Dropped their masks.

Best I've come up with is the mask of a calm face. I had a genuinely blissful, round face when I was a baby. Then came the desperate eyes of the clever, rail-thin teen. Now I'm a slightly narrow-eyed white with a beard and the face like some monk. My brow furrows at times, but I try to let my eyes go cool. Pictures of my old country grandfather, sitting there, open to the world but inscrutable if you lacked the comfort to ask him his thoughts. I can really appear profound and still like a calm, deep lake. There is no conclusion to any of this. Stillness, solitude, has become natural to me. It is an attempt to balance out the change in my life, I rationalize. But a part of me is realizing that I'm becoming more me everyday. There are some parts of my life that will only return, however, when I'm past the attacks and the danger and the crisis. I don't know where this is going. I'm trying to be okay with that. Looking forward to a life that's not so full of calming self-talk. I'm tired of soothing myself like I've had to do for my children, like I had to do for my brother after the beatings my father would give him. I want to cheer, but there is no joy. Shit is too serious to laugh, too dangerous still to cry.

One Death, a Hundred Thousand

President Obama expressed sadness that a person could kill a young man on nothing more than suspicion and, maybe, a little too much eagerness to use force.

Um, but that's the president's foreign policy.

Facebook Action!

I read what I wrote, my son sleeping a few feet away from me, and I don't know what to think. I am buoyed and then I sink with the waves. I am trying very hard to float. I will be cast along by the tsunami, but I will not be crushed. Right?

Anyway, what I want to say today is that, while I abhor the missionary impulse, I hate the "let's get together with likeminded people and bitch" mentality even more.

I want to articulate this, even if it's just in my own little echo chamber here.

I do not want to hear you talk about Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum and how sexist they are, how cruel they are, how they don't like darkies or A-rabs or whomever, while you practice polite with your friends who talk of welfare queens and queers and knuckle under when Granddad booms at the table.

On one hand, yes, the Mitt and the Rick and the scary men, be they Repub or Dem or Paulite or whatever, are so much stronger than your Demjanjuk of a father. They can do a lot of great harm. So yeah, act against them, but don't rail against them. Don't make it psychological. Don't make them the scapegoat of your unease in this unjust world. Because the thing is that this shit is imposed from above and below. This stuff grows up through the family, through the neighborhood, through the Bible study daycare as sure as from some priesthood from on high.

So yeah, if it's just about evil men in high places, I can dig that. But the amount of energy you invest in between stints of Farmville appears odd. What about the one teaching your kids that blacks are uppity? What about the one who treats you like shit and devalues you because of what's between your legs? No, no, let's talk about Washington. Tell me about what the Christianists say. Because nobody wants to talk about their old sick bastard mother or their lout of a husband on Facebook. I mean, your friends might. Who knows?

We always like to other what we tolerate in our lives. Let evil thugocracies and despotisms be dressed up like Arabs or blacks or Republicans or Catholics or whomever. And meanwhile, what have you done to make your household or your street better? If you are so arrogant as me that you believe in imposing your will upon the universe, if you are that vain that you say "I say this is wrong and I will make it different and hope it turns out better," then what exactly have you done? And as unlikely as it is that you will change the mind of that bitter, entitled old fool, do you really think that one more Facebook re-post idealizing Obama or denigrating some little clerical fascist shit candidate is going to do one goddamn thing? Fuck, you could fly a black flag on your car antenna and do more.

Protracted Conflict

Today, for the second time in seventy-five days, I slept in the same house as my son.

Things got worse. Far worse. Like violence worse. Like aggression in front of our children's eyes worse.

I am glad that I am a man who chooses not to answer violence with violence. Even as I am attacked, I don't turn the other cheek, but I keep my eyes wide open.

Think of me, and (this sounds so pathetically slogan-y) think of the children exposed to violence, anger, and injustice.

Be willing to suffer any blow while keeping your soul. Love the aggressors, or at least love the part of them that feels, as you do, that injustice is warranted in order to serve their needs--

And do what you must. But do any of us know what we must do? It took me a long time, serving without distinction in a relationship, to distinguish needs from wants. Everything used to be a want. I was like Nietzsche's donkey, gaining dignity through what I could deal with. And then I was like his lion, roaring and aggressing if I wanted.

Today I was like a child. I wept before my mother and son. And I stepped on, played, played parent and told the boy to clean up his toys and brush his teeth, etc. And I made him laugh and he made me laugh and I dreamed of a world being born right now, a world where I and my loved ones are kings and queens of their own....

If you can be conflicted without hate, then you understand more than most of us, for the world is conflict, but you need not debase yourself while struggling with others. I am a wrestler in a grand arena and I can say "I oppose you" without saying "you are wrong." It is a good place. I must remember it often.

Sloganeering

Repression is nine tenths of the law.

Non-Pacifists Need Consider

Thirty seconds ago, she was a slave. Her ownership was not formed in law but in bodily fact. He had no deed to her and yet he fed her. He controlled her movements, limited her world to three rooms in an apartment. She did not speak the language, was not protected by the country's enforcers. Was not sought by a family. Received no mail. Received no money. And he was her companion and her master. He allowed her some property. Through him she encountered the world in pieces. In his implied anger, in the familiar manner that followed, in his soft-seeming touches and the kind-sounding words, she was owned and he owned her. He had everything and she had nothing.

But that was one minute ago, and now he was nothing and she everything, or at least all of what little remained in the apartment. Perhaps soon the gravity of a power-ful world would crush in on her too and soon she would be nothing, but she had made herself, in the pool of his blood and the absence of breath, a conqueror, however small. A revolution, however small.

It is an option for all of us to forsake violence in every form. I will not preach that path here. I am a parent and a family member. I will defend my loved ones against violence by taking up violent means, the same as I pull a dog off another's throat, the same as I have shoved and struck others. If I prevent it otherwise, I have often done this too. To prevent violence through nonviolence is a good. But to prevent violence or cease it through the use of voluntary and conscious violence is justifiable to me.

Is it not also for the soldier? Is it not also for the policewoman? Is it not also for all of us who see violence in our lives as ambiguous, for all of us who have not yet renounced all violence? Let us be plain about it--to consider it in a moment or a bar conversation can be much the same as considering it in training or discipline. We tell ourselves, civilians and state enforcers alike--that if it comes to certain conditions, we will pull the trigger or hold the throat. We will cut into life, and we cannot assign this responsibility to instinct or morality or approval from others. We consider the thought of justifiable homicide when we consider robberies and rapes and reprisals. We make the choice that we would or we wouldn't and delude ourselves that we are not saying that terrible, much more certain thing:

That if it comes to that, we will or we won't.

Perhaps I would take more seriously the threat of violence around me, from bodyguards to military orders, from gun owners to knife owners to martial artists to anyone with the strength of their arm intact and the willingness to, perhaps, use that strength--if they had written out their commitments ahead of time, looked at them on a page. Perhaps police departments could post signs.

And if it's scary out in the open, maybe we should look down at our hands and ask ourselves a few things.

Accidental Learning

On the way to the ex's house I noticed the boy's school with its usual academic message out front.

Only this week it was curiously ambiguous.

I always loved seeing alternative interpretations.