Mar 4, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
The Very Inspiring Blogger Award, to wit.
That’s quite unexpected, seeing as I’ve been blogging for precisely twenty-three days now. I’m a little amazed and stunned by it.
Of course, as Miles Howard puts it, it’s not a “handout.” I’m supposed to link back to him, display the award logo (see featured image — still figuring out how to do this, but that’s the best I could do, given the late hour), state seven things about myself, and nominate fifteen names. Since I’m new to this business, I’ll try and nominate the ones I have followed recently.
All right, here goes: Seven Things About Myself:
1. Indian-born and raised, but American citizen for half my life now.
2. Married to Warren Senders, brilliant musician and music-teacher, thinker, 350.org activist, concert-producer, philosopher and blogger.
3. Mother of an eight-year old daughter, who is the light of our lives, and is full of spark and wit, music and laughter, silliness and depth.
4. English Teacher of 8th Graders in the suburbs of the Greater Boston area.
5. Singer-songwriter, guitarist, composer, poet, short-story-writer, former Drama Club director/advisor/playwright, current Poetry Club advisor at school, current Green (Ecology) Team advisor at school.
6. Avid reader of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, and deep admirer of Oscar Wilde, J.K. Rowling, Phillip Pullman, Jonathan Stroud, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Neil Gaiman, Arundhati Rao, Vladimir Nabokov, Ursula K. LeGuin and Margaret Atwood.
7. Classically trained vocalist and sitarist in the North Indian tradition.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here are some of the bloggers I am currently following:
1. Warren Senders: Running Gamak
2. Miles Howard: Drive All Night
3. Matthew of Rooks: Nubes De La Mente
4. Alexey Markovich: Brebza
5. Bea: beingawallflowerhasitsperks
8. Sindhu Vijayasarathy: SindhuSays
10. Matt Samolis
11. Ray Ferrer: UrbanWallArt
12. Ciucela
13. The Seeker
14. Pavithra Mehta: The Poetry of …
15. Kalpana Sunder: Footprints on the Sands of Time
There are others. I couldn’t find their handles right away. Got to organize my list of people I follow and people who follow me.
For now, goodnight! And thanks again, Miles!
~Vijaya~
Mar 3, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning
Curiously, it didn’t hurt. It didn’t do much of anything, except to create a sense of dull satisfaction: Yup. I knew my poems didn’t suit their needs, but I sent them off anyway.
Realism, thy name is DreamersOfDreams.
It must be because I’m almost forty-nine — the almost part is crucial.
It must be because I know how long a struggle all this is for most writers. That’s why, I guess, they send stuff off when they’re in their twenties.
I didn’t do that in my twenties. I was too busy struggling to find a footing, instead. Married to an American, and finding myself on American soil for the first time at age twenty-four, I looked for work and found it in an independent record label and distribution company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Working between ten and fourteen hours a day at $4.25 an hour for the first year, standing on concrete floors, pushing a shopping cart from aisle to aisle, picking LPs, cassettes and CDs, packing them, and shipping them via UPS, I got a taste for what it meant to be really low on the totem pole. Forced to listen to strange LPs played by angry young men during work hours, who indulged in mindless vulgarity and obscene epithets strewn carelessly about, I winced in almost-physical pain and went home to practise jazz and Indian classical music with a loving and kind husband.
For that first year, despite the hours of badly recompensed, and mindless, labor during the day, we composed music, played together, saw movies on the weekends at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, and ate out at an Indian restaurant once a week. I wrote short stories, poems and songs. He composed his music. We performed together. I had vivid dreams. I felt newly born, innocent.
We owned hardly anything — just books, instruments, cassettes and LPs, and later, CDs. I wore old clothes, dressed oddly, didn’t much care for the trappings of middle-class modes of dress and manner. My husband and I were in love, we had music, we had a good, rich-in-music, if financially-impoverished life. Music saturated our waking and sleeping hours, and it was beautiful.
I realized that all my ambitions of my early college years had taken a back seat to all this creative sweetness. It was enough to do music, practise voice and guitar, get better at singing and song-writing and take long walks, after a rough day at the warehouse. It was enough to be content.
I used to be ambitious. It had all vanished.
This is not to say there weren’t troubles in our life. Somehow, anything that smacked of trouble in my life simply rolled off my back. People use the phrase, “water off a duck’s back.” I prefer my mother’s beautiful image in Tamil — “water off the petals of a lotus.” That was what she’s been like all her life. Troubles, terrible troubles, financial and medical, happened to her and my father. She withstood it all, and seems to grow every year into a more beautiful, complete person.
We had our troubles too. I don’t remember them, not much, anyway.
Over the years, my husband and I grew in music. We went back twice for a year at a time to study with our beloved Indian classical vocal teacher, Pandit S.G. Devasthali (now “late,” to use the classic phrase used by Indians as well as Batswana people, like the fictional Mma Ramotswe). We performed Hindustani classical vocal together. I wrote many songs, composed surreal music, arranged them for sax, ‘bone, bass, guitar and drums (my husband’s ensemble, Antigravity), and later for sitar, dilruba, flute, Indian violin (with our dear friends playing those instruments, in the Indian version of Antigravity). I played my songs in coffeehouses and the streets of Harvard Square, as well as the subways and made grocery money. We slept on a futon bed and used milk-crates with cushions as chairs in the living room. Drank a lot of black coffee. Ate veggie-lentils and rice. One can do that in one’s twenties.
I continued to work at the company. Rose in wages, rose on the totem pole, not dramatically, just steadily. Then, came the urge to get settled –that dreaded phrase, which smacks of middle-class ambition and morality. The urge to become a teacher had become paramount. I enrolled in an M.Ed. program at Lesley College, now Lesley University, got my degree, worked as Teaching Assistant in a Cambridge School, while doing my college courses in the evening, got my license, got a job at a nearby school (while finishing the last of my graduate courses and graduated), and have been at that suburban school ever since.
Then, came the house and the grinding work of rebuilding a wreck of a place, while living in it, dust and all. Then, came our daughter. Now, it’s all about teaching, being domestic and homeschooling. I love it all.
And I also miss all that music and creative writing that I used to do.
Ambition is making a comeback, rather late in my life. I’m not crazy-ambitious, just enough to want to publish my three plays, all those short stories I’ve written, all those poems I’ve poured out, and at least one novel before I die.
I want to write, just write. I don’t want to do much else, sometimes. However, I also love to teach. I love singing and playing music. I love bringing up my daughter.
So, I’ll try and fashion a life in which all these strands are inter-woven, and they’ll create a tapestry which will make sense for me.
And I won’t let any rejections get in my way.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Music, Antigravity, Cambridge, Harvard Square, looking back, Massachusetts, Rejection letters, Rounder Records, Writing
Feb 26, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
Finster –A Tragic Tale of a Heartless Fish
©By Vijaya Sundaram
(Written on June 9th, 2012)
Come gather around friends, and listen to my tale of woe, that is, if you have the time, the energy, the inclination, the patience and the sympathy to do so:
I had a Siamese Fighting Fish (Beta) once, long ago, and I called him Finster. He was fierce and mean, and chased any other fish away, and they fled in terror, with him in full pursuit. Unfortunately, he was also a very beautiful fish, blue-green and exquisitely iridescent, with flowing fins and a very elegant turn of the tail – and I being a sucker for beautiful fish, decided to keep him, but apart from the rest. That way, I could enjoy both Finster, plus all my other fish in the larger aquarium, and be assured of their safety from Finster.
So, I put him in a separate, pretty bowl, and he swam to his heart’s content — in and out of some fishy structures I’d made for him. I admired his beauty and gazed lovingly, if exasperatedly at him, while he looked belligerently back at me (or perhaps, at his own reflection – no narcissist he!).
One day, observing him blowing many, many bubbles (which, my research told me, was a sign of his need to mate and have babies with his mate—because it’s the male Siamese Fighting Fish which protects its babies from predators, by blowing bubbles up to the surface, and making sure each bubble holds an egg), I knew he was ready for a mate, so I bought him a pretty little female Fighting Fish.
Well, what do you know? He chased her up and down the bowl, and my poor little female fish driven to a state of unbridled fright stayed under the driftwood I’d placed in the bowl, trembling and quivering, and possibly whimpering in abject terror (but you know, as they say, in space no one can hear you scream). So, I stood outside the fishbowl (where else could I stand?) and scolded him roundly, insulting him in fishy tongue. He turned a deaf ear to my expostulations and continued to maraud and pursue his so-called mate.
One day, when I came home from work, alas! I saw the poor female fish dead, and partly eaten. How I hated my Finster that day! I abused and insulted him, but he looked at me in scorn. (How could I, a mere human, understand his strange, heartless, aquatic nature?) Weeks and months passed, and I went through the motions of caring for this cannibalistic creature, changing his water, feeding him, and so on. He, meanwhile, barely noticed while my heart burned with unrequited, unsatisfied hate.
Then, quite a while later, W and I left for India in 1994. I gave Finster back to The Village Pet Store (now gone the way of all stores) in Arlington. I was thankful to see the last of him. I would, however, have liked him to acknowledge me. He, the guttersnipe, simply turned his back on me, and flicked his tail in contempt. My heart, I’m happy to say, was still intact. But I never bought a Beta again.
He was much too Alpha for me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Fish, aquarium, Beta, original anecdote, Siamese Fighting Fish
Feb 23, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
Nothing new yesterday or today — sorry!
I promise I’ll write tonight and tomorrow, though. Possibly three blog-posts! Who knows?!
What’s new?
House Party at my place today! That’s what!
This means only one thing! An excuse to clean, clear, wipe and dust much of the house, most of the day before yesterday, yesterday and today.
In my home, we need an excuse, or else everything goes straight to hell. This week, there was an explosion of books, toys, student papers on desk, correspondence, clothes, hair-ties, ribbons, projects, sheets with designs, numbers, drawings, dust bunnies in unsuspected corners. My excuse? I was enjoying my Feb. break. Now, there’s no excuse. A party! That is what makes all of us scurry around, cleaning, clearing the debris of a busy, but happy life.
How mundane! I like it. My head is filled with mystery and strangeness. The mundane is a welcome change.
Tags: mundane matters
Feb 21, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
This is not a sentence, either.
In fact, having said that the above was neither a post nor a sentence, I am left to ponder the imponderable: What makes a post a post? For that matter, what makes a sentence a sentence?
Let us leave such maunderings to the philosophers, shall we?
However, the thought does occur: In order to fill up my post, should I toss nonsensical notions, thoughts, musings, and so on overboard, then jump in after them, and fish them out, bedraggled and spitting mad at me?
You see, I missed posting something yesterday, so I didn’t want to miss a post today. I have no excuses, really. I accept my responsibility in this matter, messieurs et mesdames.
Okay, well, I was tired.
Okay, well, that’s not much of an excuse.
I was also exhausted and weary.
Also, not much of an excuse, I agree.
Well then, I had to do lots and lots of laundry to attend to.
Not much of an excuse still?
And I am a school-teacher.
I mean, being a school-teacher is about living in a la-la land of paradoxical states of mind. School energizes and enervates me. School uplifts me and makes me feel downcast. School can make one learn and unlearn everything in a single second. School is a black hole that can never be filled with enough work, because it desires more and more, and nothing ever escapes its gravitational pull. This tiredness is that of prisoners who have been exposed to endless artificial light, so that it breaks them down, except that it doesn’t break me down, so that being tired is almost a badge of honor to be flaunted to the sympathetic (NOT) world.
Still not enough of an excuse? Back to laundry.
I did LOADS and LOADS of laundry yesterday AND today — whole mini-mountains of them. Who creates all this stuff to be washed? It is my theory that clothes multiply (I admit it’s not an original theory, but what the hell) when our backs are turned.
They don’t multiply kindly, or cleanly. They multiply and moulder. Every week, I wash them, dry some in the dryer (careful to set them at the half-mark), hang the other ones up (being Green, you know), fold them and actually put them away. That’s right, AWAY, in lumpy, unpressed stacks. Then, I turn around, and there they are again, next week. Didn’t they get the message? So, I went through all that this week, AND ironed them, and put them away in neat, pressed stacks. And all this makes me feel as if I’m in an endless time-loop.
I hate laundry (but you guessed that, right? What gave it away? My pitiful pixellated moans? Oh, surely not!). I am a slave to my laundry. My clothes haunt my waking hours, and stalk my dreaming hours. They rise up from the floor, and do little jigs, while gesturing rudely to me, and whooshing away in gales of muffled laughter. It’s not as if I don’t do my laundry! I am a good doobie (or, to make an Indian pun, a good dhobi)!
Now, in the middle of school vacation week, a whole lot of guilt piles up on the floor of my soul, waiting for me to pick it all up and wash the whole damned thing clean. I would love some writing inspiration to arrive, and it does come, but I hold it at bay, shake it out, and peg it on lines that might get blown away by a passing whim. It has to be laundered first. I need to write, but it all has to appear in clean, well-pressed, wordpressed sentences, and it’s hard to do when I am nothing but a human laundry machine. But where was I?
Oh right, laundry.
Whole piles of them appear full-blown, like the Gods emerging from Brahma’s mind and belly, ready to utter vengeful curses at me if I let them moulder in dreadful heaps on the bedroom floor. There, my guilty secret is out. I let piles of laundry fester and spawn their young on the bedroom floor — only for a short time (she hastened to reassure her somewhat alarmed and on-the-verge-of-disillusioned readers).
Well, actually, that only happens when I am tired, you see. The problem is, I’m tired most of the time.
Plus, there are piles of papers left to plough through (I did the requisite amount, stipulated by me, for mid-term Progress Reports), but I have other happier obligations during this vacation week. I have a daughter with whom I spend happy hours, reading aloud passages from P.G. Wodehouse novels, while she chuckles with delight. OH, and she and I went to the zoo yesterday, and sang to the wolves, who listened with quiet attentiveness. We miaowed loudly and gutturally to the snow leopard, who responded to us in kind (yes, they miaow!), and we watched with delight when three out of four new little Arctic foxes ran to and fro, playing some sort of distracted game.
This week, I cooked some nice food, played, cleaned some parts of the house, wrote posts, sang with husband and daughter, and lazed. And I did enormous loads of laundry.
I have been domestic, in short.
And this is why I have nothing to say, and this is not a post. All of the above were not sentences at all.
They were pixellated moans of laundry-hating domesticity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: Black Hole, laundry, paradoxes
Feb 19, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
The Red Rectangle © By Vijaya Sundaram Written on Thursday, Jan. 25th, 2006 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I am an imposter in the world of the real.
Yesterday, I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and had an atavistic encounter with art — in the room that contained the “red rectangle.” I cannot remember the name of the installation artist, because my mind was busily paper-shredding all the petty numbers I had to rustle up to “feed the beast” (that remarkable phrase which my husband kindly created for me when I ranted petulantly about submitting quarterly grades for my eighth graders). This beast demanded a sacrifice. Numbers satisfied it.
So, there I sat on a subway train rumbling angrily through Cambridge into Boston, seated beside my Head of the Department of English, while internally stacking up inventive curses against an administration which demanded that we turn our grades in before noon on an “Early Release Day.”
The rest of the afternoon was to be a “professional day,” with the English and History departments taking a trip to the ICA. Most of us wanted to be back at school, being PROFESSIONAL, and doing our grading without the added pressure of taking the “T” all the way to the waterfront by 12:30. p.m. Three, tearful, silent meltdowns between school and there and out did not make me look very professional, I admit, but I didn’t care. Weariness was hugging my bones, and exhaustion was curled up in a fetal position in my cerebral cortex, hiccuping, vibrating in my ganglions.
So, there I was at the ICA, not in the least bit in the mood for modern art, fully prepared to be cynical and criticize everything, just because … and there it was: The Red Rectangle.
It looked kind. I looked, hypnotized, into that glowing red rectangle, and walked towards it, thinking, “Is it real?” It seemed to be a bi-dimensional red thing on the wall, pretending to be art. I walked closer, impelled, in spite of myself, by its arterial redness, a translucent ruby-red, space-less projection – and bumped into a wall that stopped at my waist.
I put out my hand, thinking, “It’s not real, is it?” My hand went through the redness, catching air, crimson air that escaped easily. I had been expecting a wall. Instead, beyond it was space – a red space, like a room that was hard to see. It seemed like a cradle for a star or a planet. It was outer space in an alternate reality. It carried the primordial promise and message of blood. It was a womb. It wasn’t an angry red. It looked peaceful.
I felt my breath turn into a many-edged diamond in my throat, crystallizing into sharp points. I looked vaguely about me, and everyone who was there seemed to recede into the far reaches of reality.
What was I doing here, on the outside? I needed to be in there, inside, in that alternate world. I would make my home there, in a nest of straw, a nest of dreams, and plump myself up, ruffle my feathers, stick my head in softness that was everywhere and nowhere, curl up, and fall fast asleep never to wake up for a hundred years, waking up in dream-time. I would escape reality forever. My home was in the land of the unreal, more real to me than this world.
The diamond dissolved. This was home.
It would be the world of the unreal real.
I would not be an imposter there.
And I would carry that red rectangle back with me, deep within my womb back into the world of the real.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~TheEnd~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Peace, Art, Boston, Dream Time, Dreaming, grades, Institute of Contemporary Art, teachers, womb
Feb 18, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
With songs and lines from poems jostling each other to get off, or get in.
I find myself singing a song, then interrupt myself rudely with lines from another song, with no idea that I just did that! So, how do I know? My alert, interested, attentive, bemused, flatteringly fascinated daughter tells me!
Mom, she says, Did you know you just switched in the middle of the song you were just singing to this other song? Surprised and startled, I look up from the mundane task I am doing. I can hear the ghost of the previous song lingering longingly in the the air near my ears — and I laugh.
It’s true, I say, I did just do that –switched to another song right in the middle of this one! And I stop to think in the middle of the song which I just interrupted with another song.
I have this romantic notion that when I am on the point of death, all those songs will come tumbling out of me, winging out into the world, and letting the air take them into the sun, where they belong.
And they will make for me a pillow of song, and I will be borne along on them, higher and higher into the ether, scattering birds and planes, as I turn and turn, spiraling forever upwards into the sun, where they belong, where I belong.
And the crowded bus of song will be transformed into a thing of wings and updrafts, scattering birds and planes, as it lifts itself into the sea of melodies high above the earth, making the spheres hum in their orbits. Not a bad way to go, I think.
First, however, I must make a mental note to arrange for that to happen. I have to find my way to a thought so as to record it in the midst of this unceasing singing in my head.
Sigh! Too late. Another song comes impertinently down the aisle and knocks the thought over, and it falls out of the bus. Still, I can remember it. Quick! Don’t let it be run over. I leap down and give it a helping hand. The songs press back, a little ashamed and mortified. The thought salutes, and goes into the world.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Feb 18, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes
It snowed most of the day today — not quite a blizzardy kind of day, but a sort of blustery and white-swirly-kind of day. The winds, reportedly, were twenty-four miles an hour. We huddled indoors most of the day, mainly because the holidays stretched ahead for me for another seven days, and thus, my family felt a weight roll off our collective chests. Not that I do not have any obligations. They were just, for the nonce, suspended, like stills in those busy-seeming scenes in movies, while chaos reigns all around, because a magical thing might have just occurred.
Late to bed last night, late to arise, late, late, late for everything. We were answerable to no one but ourselves, and that was GREAT!
Oh, my husband had to work (Skype, singing lessons), but my daughter and I hung out, read a bit, sang a bit, and lazed around, and watched strange vids on YouTube.
Then, just to add interest and variety to a day that would have come and gone like a snowflake, she and I tromped together through howling winds and sub-zero temperatures in the latter half of the afternoon, through the snow-sifted landscape, snow that was like so much confectionery sugar heaped on ice-cream, wherever it was clean (and horrid dirt-encrusted sludge wherever it was not), she leaping like a mountain goat from craggy snow-and-dirt-crusted ploughed-piles on the sidewalk, and I stepping gingerly on the road, putting myself at the mercy of drivers who plunged like sea-horses into the wind, gaily proceeding at thirty miles an hour, and slowing down only slightly so as to not mow down this “tropical hot-house flower” as my husband used to jocosely refer to me.
And my husband? In between the music lessons he gave on Skype, he made fresh pasta using our pasta maker, and dried them on clamps from our basement (which, he assured me, he had washed thoroughly). Later, we had a delicious dinner, and feasted on ambrosia and nectar, or, more accurately, homemade pasta, with homemade pasta sauce that had been slow-cooked to perfection. Oh, and we talked and laughed, and it was all good.
That’s what we did today. Later, we shall all sing together. Perfection.
Now, I sit quietly at the kitchen table, with my daughter reading her favorite book of the moment, and I type up all these lovely, idle happenings, so as to not forget the beauty and pleasantness that are part of my life. I want these memories to sustain me when things are difficult, or when I worry about the state of the world, or when I doubt myself (frequently), or am frustrated by the slowness and stubbornness of the human species when it comes to change for the better (I count myself among these, of course!), or when I am unaccountably sad.
Some days are for long-winded, almost-run-on sentences. Other days are for sentences from Kurt Vonnegut-land.
In short, I was happy today. Not bad for a wintry, icy, blustery Sunday, where naught happened, but idleness. Oscar Wilde would have approved.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~FINIS~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Family, #Oscar Wilde, Gratitude, Idleness, Journal
Feb 17, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning
What would I like to post?
I’d like to post a letter to this planet:
Hello, Earth! What have you been up to in the past week?
Ah yes, a meteor hit the upper atmosphere above the Urals in Russia. Tethered to the planet, we see signs of an imminent inescapable route to extinction. Right? Wrong!
Okay, we are seeing the signs of a possible mass extinction. I mean, didn’t millions die? What’s that you say? Oh, about 1,200 people were injured from the shock generated by it?
Regardless, I feel bad that such a thing happened, and guilty because I’m glad it didn’t happen here, or at least it hasn’t happened yet.
So, when that meteorite comes blazing out of the sky, that’s it, then. How apocalyptic, how random, how utterly pointless to have that tangent to our circle which goes off-course!
We need a blanket that repels those visitors from our solar system, and not just the atmosphere. Let’s create one now. Right!
What however, if you, Earth are suffering from an auto-immune disorder known as human life? What then? Will we be long gone before any meteoric strikes of the truly apocalyptic variety?
Do you remember what happened in December, those events whose shock waves continued into January, O Earth?
Two terrible events came to occupy our news — on December 14th, six adults and twenty children died in an elementary school because of the unhinging of a man, and on December 16th, a twenty-three year old Indian woman was brutalized in the most horrifying way by six unhinged men.
The first event created sorrow and despair in all of us, but it wasn’t long before the crazies in the organization that aims to “protect” the Second Amendment, all stepped up with bizarre rationalizations for MORE weapons. When that meteor came and struck, some went about, creating false myths about it, turning a blind eye to that which was under their noses. Where did the souls of those people go? Where has conscience fled? Where have empathy and reason gone? Are those people who deny the massacre even human?
After the horror of the young woman’s death, India came together, and has had mass rallies, protests, clashes with the police, men and women speaking out against the blame-the-victim attitude of a male-dominated society. Awareness hit like a shock wave, and shattered many people’s hearts. In many Indian cities, men are becoming more aware and women are standing up for their right to be free in a fettered society, while the male-dominated Indian villages speak about pernicious Western influences and blather on about how women dress, which, they proclaim, invites their fate. What does it take to change the minds of all people? What MORE will it take?
Meanwhile, wars continue around the earth. Women and children get sold into slavery, to be exploited brutally, then killed when things get complicated for the exploiters. Young men, the best and sometimes (but not always) the brightest, push off to fight other young men, eliminating any future for either. Greed is rampant. Fear and hatred rule the foolish and the venal. Everything, but EVERYTHING becomes a mind game, or worse, a game of war and peace.
And we buy, buy, buy, more and more stuff, more and more electronic and digital toys. And somewhere in the Congo and elsewhere close by, women and children are brutalized by mercenary soldiers who wish to control the lands that contain coltan, that combination of minerals which our cell-phones and laptops need. The gentle and the innocent, with all that potential for life, peace, hope and beauty are wiped out by greed-unhinged bestial creatures masquerading as men, while the land around them is mercilessly plundered.
Those meteors strike human lives every day, every single day. I cannot even wrap my mind around that.
Is this the beginning of suicide of the human species? Are we, the individual cells in the complex organism called human life, dealing with a deadly auto-immune disorder? Are we ever going to achieve balance? Will we see reason? I speak not of the few and far-between, but of the whole.
I am a teacher, and I work for the cause of reason and the intellect. I work for the cause of empathy and kindness. I work for the cause of sharing responsibility for the planet, when I head the “Green Team” at my school, and recruit children to deal with “reducing, reusing and recycling” for the Planet. I work to bring some measure of sanity to the insanity that afflicts my life and the lives of those I know. (Of course, I may not always succeed, irrational and irritable that I might seem to my nearest and dearest when I am tired or sleepy, but I try, I try!) I work to bring the beauty of language and literature into the drab vocabulary of the working world, when I teach Shakespeare, or Steinbeck, or Gaiman. I work for the cause of creating a space for children speak their minds, and for their right to weave their emotional and aesthetic lives into their poetry in my Friday afternoon Poetry Club. I work for the cause of right over wrong, for the cause of humanity over inhumanity within my very small milieu, when I teach about the Civil Rights Movement, and we read Melba Pattillo Beals’ book Warriors Don’t Cry, or when we study the Jewish-holocaust period in Europe. At least, it’s something, or so I tell myself.
Today, right now, in the depths of the night, I’m not so sure.
If earth is suffering from an auto-immune disorder known as humanity, a meteoric visitor from outer space wouldn’t be a bad thing.
I’ll be all right tomorrow, I’m sure. But today … today is all about despair. I’m sorry!
Tags: #Peace, auto-immune disorder, delhi gang-rape, gaiman, meteor strike, Planet Earth, sandy hook, Shakespeare, steinbeck, War
Feb 11, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes
My daughter is happily singing this song by They Might be Giants while making her bed in her room (she’s now used to doing it, and I’m mighty pleased about that). She’s a happy child, and I love the occasional up-shifts in key, so carefree, so unself-conscious! I know she revels in the strangeness of the lyrics (she knows about the Mesopotamians, because her mom, unable to let a teaching moment go waste, told her all about them a couple of years ago. To her credit, she wanted to know).
And as I hear this song about Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh and Sargon, I remember “Ozymandias” by P.B. Shelley, and remember “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” and imagine how, behind the “vast and trunkless legs of stone” in that poetic desert, the “lone and level sands” stretch far away. Then, I look at my calamitous clutter of corrected and uncorrected student papers, and feel a moment’s spasm of rebellion: Why work? Nothing survives.
Of course, I know why. It’s work, silly!
I have a Snow Day today. Like a child, I rejoice, but then soberly contemplate the gritty pile of student writing that I have yet to plough through. Work!!
Still, there’s play, and raccoons in our backyard in the summer, and love, and laughter, lots of good food, great music to play, a child who gets jokes and profound ideas, who laughs and spins and reads and thinks, and loves us unconditionally, and who’s kind to everyone, and a loving husband, who’s kind and hard-working and funny and creative beyond all imagining, and students who are wonderful, hard-working and thoughtful, and friends who are kindred spirits, and my mother who is the well-spring of love and devotion and the epitome of hard-work, and a sister and bother who are good and loyal and hard-working and fearless, and I have all those unwritten stories and poems, and finally, all those dreams waiting me on the far shores of sleep.
Looking back on this run-on sentence, I see one hyphenated word that jumps out at me, like a monkey from a tree (just felt like using that simile. You don’t like it? Ah, well. Better luck next time). What word? You guessed it: Hard-working!
Work! Work! Work! says the monkey on my back.
I’d better get back to working hard. I’ve not much time to waste.
So much to be happy about in the midst of so much work in the world!
Tags: Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh, Grading Papers, Hammurabi, Ozymandias, Sargon, Snow Days, Thankfulness, They Might Be Giants, We're the Mesopotamians, Work