meaning in the moving design

you said hello, i said i'm sorry
our first meeting.
I didn't know him. Or you.
but i held your hand at the buriel nonetheless.
family, in its absence.
makeshift and hesitant.
connection forged of necessity.
12,000 miles from home.

Later my husband would ask about you, how it went.
did i remember to explain his absence by way of inauspicious warnings and unlucky numbers and prayers
the absent mourner and I, the ambassador

im holding your hand again
your eyes are heavy with death
the machines beep and click
punctuates the silence that cloaks us in a heavy embrace
i imagine that you can feel my hands closed over yours
i imagine sneaking beneath your eyelids for candid conversations
i imagine the flow of history and love and blood between us
though we are not bound by blood, not in the strictest sense.

We weaved those blood lines years ago
in the days and moments and pauses that followed
sitting across the table, flipping tiles and clucking tongues,
throwing back tea like it was bourbon
gambling in the dignified way that Chinese people do
You had seen the world and been back again
middle aged, widowed and wearing it well
san francisco. new york. paris.
you understood this thing called the west
you wore it in your voice
booming fierce and full
oblivious to the mild looks of embarrassment from your muted company.
You were always apart.
Bigger and louder
boasting a kind of freedom we all feared but secretly envied.

Once, at a party
I caught you sitting alone, eyes closed with your head tilted towards the sun
"C'mon, let's play" you said, grabbing my hand to sit down. "Close your eyes, look up at the sun and think red. Till the spots go away. Think it as red as possible.
i closed my eyes self consciously and after a few prompts, kept them shut. Through my eyelids I saw red with speckles of black, strobes of white.
"C'mon," you said. "Think red"
The speckles and stripes cleared and the red beneath my eyelids grew deeper and darker
filled like wells and burned.

cancer is a funny thing
a disease composed of question marks
a no-fucking-clue-why malfunctioning body
a no-fucking-clue-how malfunctioning body
suddenly things are wrong and get more wrong
and can't seem to remember how to be right again

I had a dream about this moment years ago.
I dreamed we were both children, down by the river.
I was following you, I crept behind you and stationed myself downstream as you knelt by the river in tears.
"I'm sick," you screamed into the river.
"I'm sick," the river whispered to me.
"I'm sick, I'm sick, I'm sick"

It claimed him 20 years ago and now it's come back for you.
A hungry ghost.
I squeeze your hand again.
"i'll be back tomorrow," I say.
And I am. But you're not in bed.
The nurse puts a hand on my shoulder and whispers
I'm sorry.
She is prepared for a reaction but i swallow back the weight in my heart
Thank her and turn away.
on the way home I stop in a parking lot and empty myself
before turning the key,kissing my husband on the cheek and starting dinner.

Lately, I've been eavesdropping on a lot of people talking about greatness. Toronto is a magnet for ambition, and for people who thirst and strive for greatness. I started asking myself if that was something I strove for and the answer came back a very resolute NO. I don't want to be great. I just want to be whole.

It's the difference between growing in a line and growing in layers; filling up and filling out. I don't care for the greatness of stuff, the greatness of ego and self-importance- really, I'd like to trash that whole show. I hate capitalism in part because it engenders this very idea of greatness. I never want my sense of self to be tied to my job title. My thirst is for something different. I want to feel... full. My life choices are all about making me feel this intangible fullness, wholeness, satiated with ideas and knowledge and never-befores...

I keep waiting for reality to kick in, to realize I'm old and need to be making more soberingly responsible decisions... but it hasn't happened yet. I think I'm going to ride this out as long as I can. I hope the world can live with that.

I am a shit talker. I love telling stories- about myself and about the world- and when I'm talking about anything, in any context, about anyone, you can be sure that it's really just all about me.

Consequently, when I interact with others, I can't help but assume that they too are wrapped in self-reflexive sticky tape, and that the whisper of insight I glean from our interaction is a small fraction of the scream they intend to communicate. This is pretty much my working assumption with all attempts at communication- I don't know you; I can't know you; I can only know the you in me and that you is a story I've crafted through careful detective work laden with my own subjective bullshit.

So I find it pretty amusing that I've somehow found myself dating someone with an unshakeable faith in words; who firmly believes in the importance of classification; who has an aversion to narrative; who is happy to see a spade as a spade, whosoever should call it so. All this talk about talk brought me back to certain ideas that I used to circle around a lot, and back to Hannah Arendt. Last year, while writing an article for work about Women and Philosophy, I discovered Arendt's The Human Condition, and found all my thesis ideas articulated by A Famous Person, which made me feel both cheap and unoriginal, and immensely privileged to be philosophically aligned with A Famous Person.

Hannah (The Famous Person with which I am aligned and thus can casually refer to on a first name basis) and I both agree that understanding people through their words is about as exact a science as meteorology- you can amass as much evidence as you want to support your assertion that x is x, and you can devise your plan of action accordingly, but it simply may not be so. We all know this (duh, people are complex) but we sometimes don't recognize how much of our actions and interactions are based on these quick fix placeholders. We are in love with our nouns; intangibles don't sit well with us. So, to get through life without having our heads explode in the ideological netherworld, we say "ok. I know x is not exactly x, but let's assume it is... for the moment" and then we plan our counter-actions accordingly. But the assumptions build on more assumptions, and the placeholders of ourselves become the charicature stand-ins in our shared reality with others.

In Hannah's words, there is a distinction between "who" we are and "what" we are; and words can lead us only to the what: "The moment we want to say who someone is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what she is; we get entagled in a description of qualities she necessarily shares with others like her; we begin to describe a type or a character... with the result that her specific uniqueness escapes us" (The Human Condition, 181).

This is why I put all my words in brackets, and why I like fridge poetry, anecdotes, rants without context, exquisite corpsey writing and non-sensical non-sequiters. Language to me is about codification, so I figure, if I can confuse the law that language governs; if I can use words in ways they aren't meant to be used, then maybe I can reveal more of myself. If I don't name my truth, it forces you to fill in the blanks with your youness, and maybe that will lead you to it via the scenic route. That mystery and revelation, that intangible moment in between, is honestly what most humbles me about being with and among other people.

Ok, let's leave that for now. Let's just frame this conversation in simpler terms- objectivity and subjectivity. Hannah talks about our subjective selves, and about a) how we relate to the common things and stuff of our shared world and b) how we relate to each other. She calls these relations "in-betweens" and says this:


To better explain this to myself, I drew a diagram (the conical shaped things on the sides [that look like tadpoles] are actually supposed to be eyes).


Figure A. illustrates how we relate to "worldly objective reality", you know, my red isn't the same as your red etc. Figure B. illustrates how that simple subjective premise is amplified when you're dealing with and reflecting back a whole other set of subjective filters. The effect is akin to holding a mirror up to another mirror- it's an endless strange loop of interpreted and reinterpreted subjective baggage and poof! brainfuck!

How do we resolve this? How the hell, then, can people understand and relate to one another? I feel like the answer is two-fold: look in and act out. One of the most profound analogies I've ever heard came from a live Saul Williams event at Glendon campus a few years back. He was talking about connecting to people, and he said there are 2 ways of going about this. He said


This, to me, is the starting point. With every social interaction, we should come into the conversation knowing that we're really (in a cynical sort of way) just talking to our own reflection.* That this "ask and answer" just happens to necessitate another body to help you in understanding yourself better. This may sound unconscionably self-serving but I actually think it can be very symbiotic- we are helping each other recognize ourselves more fully; to dig deeper inside to find the source material from which we are all made; to touch the intangible in-between Hannah refers to.

We are all made of the same "stuff", but how we articulate that- the patterns we weave with that universal source material, this unique and unrepeated design called the Self- is infinitely complex. So here comes the second part- I've always thought that the greatest gift you can give the world is to keep articulating who you are and why you are to everyone you encounter. In turn, I also think the most beautiful and humbling part of talking to people is trying to understand who they are and why they are, and this process- of recognizing how we have drawn from the universal "stuff", how we've taken from it or how it has taken from us to weave a unique life experience- this is how we connect.

Hannah and I both agree that the most beautiful thing about humanity is its ability to collectively reflect on both the sum and its parts. Hannah calls it "the paradoxical plurality of unique beings," and that is exactly how I understand the idea of community. Only by screaming out your own subjectivity can you arrive at an honest point of connection*, and it's this gift of difference that we can all collectively draw from, revel in. "Speech and action reveal this unique distinction. Through them, men distinguish themselves... they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other... This appearance rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be human" (The Human Condition, 176).

Ok, this is long and rambly and I've only told you half of Hannah's story (or my story about Hannah and all this other stuff I thunked up) Hannah actually talks a lot about actions... and I've managed to say an awful lot about saying things and nothing about doing stuff.

So I'll end with a reflective observation about me and action. Hannah uses this term called praxis, simply put praxis is the process of gathering your reflections and ideas, and giving them life- putting your ideas into action.

Here's what I'll say about praxis. I use Firefox's "save and quit" function to keep all my existing tabs open, so that the next time I turn on my laptop, I have several tabs staring back at me, reminding me of what my focus/interest/obsession was from the day before. Some of these tabs have been hanging about on my computer for some 10 months- no joke. Here are my tabs:

1. reroot organic CSA, internship information
2. "Make Radio", This American Life
3. Transom.org- Ira Glass interview on making radio docs
4. My own tarsier photo on flickr (to remind myself I want to print it out)
and, newly added
5. Wikipedia definition- praxis

Ahem. I done praxis dem sludam** wicked well. Big up Hannah to the massive...

* You don't have to agree with me. I don't even know if I agree with me... but here's another paraphrased quote to excuse everything I've said: "Things go through me. And if I am individual it is because these threads are knotted together in this particular time and this particular place, and they hold."

** sludam is plural for sluts. I learned that from a Teen Slang expert