Life Is Cumulative

". . . have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." --Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet

Earlier this month at the start of my transition back to student (and sometimes even now), the concept of beginnings and endings weighed heavy on my mind. I'm getting back into the swing of sifting through texts that sometimes read like stereo instructions, trying to master the language of microeconomics and weigh marginal costs against benefits, etc. It overwhelms me at times. Then, in the middle of my weekly breakdown, I ask God for the answers, for Him to just put them in my mind. Now it's all starting to "click." I'm gratefully confident there will be a positive end to this graduate-study tunnel; I don't feel as if I'm drowning. It is very easy to feel hopeless, sunken, to forget that God will actually make a way for me. (I'm aware, fully aware, of the cliché of these sentences. It's aight.)

But I got to thinking about change, ending one thing and beginning another, and the many manifestations of it in my own life. How it might have sounded at different times: cuss words, slamming doors, pounds on my chest, prideful declarations, the drip of water through an afro, the buzz of a tattoo needle. What it has looked like: a divorce, a shaved head, a college degree, a move from my hometown, a slow crawl from dangerous love, a change of careers, and of course, a baptism. How it's been ushered in with a flipped finger, restrained tears, heavy regret, unbecoming indignities, and eleventh-hour epiphanies.

I've had these transitions many times, just in different forms. Nothing is ever new. And nothing truly ends. Life just morphs a little. Through the "ending" of one thing, we create a passageway, a birth canal, for the beginning of something else. So each time my circumstances change—gracefully or not so much—I create a pathway to make real the emulation of my perfected vision. Be ye perfect . . . yes! Closer, closer, and like Rilke I take the disappointments and/or lessons of each ending and make them work for me in the transition and in the new.

And of course these endings repeat themselves: No relationship will be perfect, and therein lies the test to live in the process and accept the ups and downs. Education is life long. I must have eyes to see there is always something I can learn. Careers evolve and affect new careers. Remember to never burn bridges. But the challenge for me is how will I carry myself in the new circumstance? Each time in the passageway I attempt to shake off a bit more self-deception, laziness, and hopelessness, so that I am able to live the answers that I find. I then determine to usher in a foundation, one from which I can't fall. A knowledge of what works and what doesn't. An ability to handle anger, sorrow, and happiness with emotional maturity. Humility to work on improvement. Self-examination. A closeness to God that keeps my heart beating optimism. 'Cause looking back leaves me like Lot's wife, brittle and in pieces. I cannot run the race successfully looking over my shoulder.

“. . . always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others.” –Rainer Maria Rilke

To Tavia

New Orleans city kids, my brother and I--nine and seven, respectively--usually spent some part of our childhood summers with my paternal grandmother in rural Louisiana. My three cousins Leroy, Delvin, and Marlin, who already lived in Opelousas, joined us at "Muh's" and we played school (with me, of course, as the teacher), shot marbles, caught dragonflies (what we called mosquito-hawks), tormented frogs, and played card games in secret (my grandmother forbade card games: the devil's work). Of the aforementioned activities, I joined in the very first and the very last much more frequently, being too uninterested in marbles and too frightened of dragonflies to be a cling-on to the boys' fun.

The five acres of land running flat from Muh's six-room house (we'd been born just in time to take advantage of the newly installed indoor plumbing) provided ample space to waste away the atoms of energy that bounced us outside the back door and onto the porch, temporarily enclosed us in clubhouses made of milk crates then propelled us on top of them, fueled us as we ran over imaginary baseball diamonds with uprooted pipes and tall plants serving as bases, hardened our "city" feet as we walked barefoot on gravel roads, gave us the speed of Flo Jo when we realized we'd built our sandbox around a colony of ants. Our summer home came complete with a huge pecan tree, fig tree, and chicken coop in the "back yard," gardens to our right and to our left, a swing on the magnolia tree out front, and cows chillin on the land "next door."

In these days we grew older but did not know aging and were ignorant of how our lax summers connected with tomorrow. My brother and I, eager to begin a day of dirt-between-the-toes and swinging-in-the-magnolia-tree, let the screen door slam and entered freedom, "forgetting," sometimes, to brush our teeth (whenever, that is, we could get away with that...kids...). We all took for granted our grandmother, as though we'd be in one of these six rooms every summer and she'd always be working the gardens or making a roux--as if we would never place her on the back burner in efforts to "live our own lives" and "come up."

Well, we thought no further than picking what to wear from our mismanaged suitcases, sopping starchy homemade biscuits with honey, teasing Ronald Potaigne about the smell of the hogs his parents kept, and going off to see "what was back there on all that land anyway." The important was right where the June sun beat down to burn grass, where the smell of muscadines hung ripe in the air, where our grandma watched "The Price Is Right" without fail at ten o'clock each morning, where a hound dog crunched chicken bones for dinner and didn't come in from the cold, and where there was always a little black girl named Shuggie to do Muh a favor and sweep the porch of the yellow house on Bay Ridge.

And wouldn't it always be so? Never did we think of paying gas bills (though we saw the uniformed man come to fill the tank in front of the yard on numerous occasions) or how babysitting your five or six (or sometimes seven or eight) grandchildren during the summer months was a labor of love for a sixty-plus-year-old woman--a woman now eighty-three--whom I have seen maybe three times in the last year. Her last words in our phone conversations haunt me when I think about the weekends I could've driven the hour and fifteen minutes it took to see her more often: "Come when you can, cher." And I will. I will.

Angela Davis: Part 1

This is part 1 of a maybe two-part post about Angela Davis's autobiography. These are just my first impressions. I have more thoughts but gotta pull it all together.

She is amazing. AAAAAH-MAAAAAAAZING.

Her second language is French. While still an undergrad, she began to have an interest in philosophy and since she was an English (or French, I think) major, she began to just read these philosophers to gain knowledge but not for coursework. Certain French philosophers intrigued her most and she pored over these texts (she was still not as fluent a speaker or talker of French to just trudge through these ideas in their original French) and others, deciphering the big ideas. I thought that was such a feat! Then she studied abroad on numerous occasions, traveling through Europe.

When she came back to the states the civil rights movement was well underway and she immersed herself in it. Very intelligent woman. She was involved with the political education programs of groups like the Black Panther Party and the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--I always forget what that stands for). At one point, she was working on a case involving the Soledad Brothers, teaching at UCLA--and fighting to not lose her job teaching at UCLA, because she was a Communist by that time-- giving guest lectures around the country, teaching in the political education program of Che-Lemumba (a Communist organization of primarily blacks from what I can gather). She just had her hands everywhere and she was actually making a difference. I talked to my mom and pop and asked if they thought she was radical at the time. They said no, everybody was behind Angela Davis and they knew she was making history.

Though others at the time may have suffered just like her or even more, I think her story is so important and so powerful. She was an intellectual but realize how elitism infiltrates any college graduates mind. And for the most part her writing is matter of fact. This is no eloquent autobiography by any means. But I get, through her, that if you put your mind to something, if you use everything in you to fight not to be brainwashed and drive to become stronger, realizing that the struggle of the oppressed is not a black or white thing and that it affects all levels of society--your life can make a difference and you can touch other people and make them see that the ceiling over them is actually higher than they thought.

There's one thing, though, I just don't get. I don't understand her infatuation with communism or socialism as the way to end the problems of black people in America. She thought this was the end all be all of the struggle. And wouldn't a system like this still be in the hands of men, and therefore, sure not to prosper in the utopian sense she anticipates? I've had discussions before, I think, about socialism and communism, but I know I don't fully understand either of them. But I think Davis sort of romanticizes the concepts. At one time, she goes to Cuba during or just after the revolution. And she romanticizes Fidel Castro and the revolution (again, another issue I have little knowledge about). On this particular anniversary of the beginning of the revolution, everyone is going to the fields to cut sugarcane instead of throwing a big parade. So Davis and her friends join them for a week, doing their part cutting cane in the serious heat. After one work day, Davis comments to a new Cuban friend of hers, an older man, that the way he cuts cane is almost artful. And he tells her sternly that there is nothing beautiful about cutting cane this way, that he and people like him are making this sacrifice so that equipment could be purchased (by the country) so their children would not have to do this. So their children would not have to work hard. And if this was the pretense that he was toiling under, has that proved to be untrue? Are the children of Cuba (who would now be adults) still toiling in this manner, or more generally, suffering in ways this man had envisioned them avoiding?

Also, A.D. has a way of sticking just about everything to The Man--every responsibility, that is--and saying nothing of personal responsibility. At least that seems to be her focus much of the time. Sometimes she talks about empowering the people with knowledge of injustices and how they can speak out. But what about empowering them out of the situations they get in (stealing, etc.) in the first place? I guess I can't complain if this is just her focus. Maybe you get the people fired up with knowledge and then they see that they have to be mindful of themselves as you are educating them.

Many of the cases featured in the book (cases of police injustice, that is) are similar strands of what happened in Jena, La., recently. I'm not exaggerating here. The book talks about black men going to prison for robbery and getting a sentence for 1 year to life in prison. What gives? It's enough to make you angry and one-sided in your judgment, but as I said earlier, she's an intellectual, so I expect more from her reasoning sometimes. I'm just on the fence (about the sticking-it-to-the-white-man deal), b/c A.D. was living in quite a different time--to read in this book the brazenness of the police! The sad thing is, I know the police still behave this way (invading people's personal space and neighborhoods as if it were martial law, harassing young brothers b/c they're black with cornrows). I just don't see it now b/c I live in mixed neighborhoods.

I'm sorry if I babbled on. I wanted to share this, thought maybe I could get some feedback on socialism, Cuba, etc.

Bridget Jones's Diary 2: The Edge of Reason

I'm late, but I recently watched Bridget Jones's Diary 2: The Edge of Reason. It was funny enough, but I thought the crux of it was so much fodder. Sure mark Darcy--to speak of him as though he were a real person--was a pretty decent guy, but who proposes to a woman after perhaps four months, at the most, of courtship? Bizarre.

I thought it a bit too patronizing of women's fantasies, condescending almost. I can fantasize with the best of them--in the interest of full disclosure--but even for me it was too much. I'm not sure how comfortable I was personally with the fact that Bridget was a real bumbling idiot, a regular screw-up, at everything--everything!!--it seemed. And now that I'm thinking of the condescension...

Was her character a shot at foolish women whose whole worlds revolve around smug-marrieds and singletons? I know I'm being simplistic but so was this movie. I know I'm not 32 either, but I'm almost 30 and while I do think about having a partner who accepts my securities and insecurities, it seems though that Bridget's whole self was wrappped up in this. I would NEVER tell another soul that I felt like a bumbling idiot ALL THE TIME, primarily because I don't. Thus the self-esteem problem with Bridget Jones, one that is not addressed in the movie. It is as if as long as Darcy accepts her as who she is there is no need for her to accept herself as she is.

By the end of this movie I'm thinking Bridget's destiny is that of her mother: to play the bumbling idiot to her husband who tires of her antics but "doesn't work without her," ironic because her mother is the one who says, in part 1, that Bridget and her father can have their grown-up talk but it doesn't give them the right to condescend to the mother. If Bridget can engage in grown-up conversation with her father, why isn't that part of her seen through her interactions with Darcy? All the moviegoers see is that she views him as a sex goddess to whom she sends text messages of "I Miss You Already" when she's 10 steps away, someone who's oh so noble enough to love her "just as she is," even if she can't do the same.