While this advice is likely most useless to anyone else, because I'm a fool with a very short span of attention, I need to be reminded... in the company of historians of indigenous traditions the world over (+ activists or would be activists) never suggest that identity has nothing to do with analysis, or that it shouldn't have anything to do with analysis, 'cause you always get the same response, "yeah, well, maybe 'your' analysis and that's why you're the problem." Keep your mouth shut, man, how many times have you been through this before?
I should know enough to know my audience, what's the matter with me, good grief.
I've heard it said one too many times now that the life of a graduate student is characterized by sleeplessness, exhaustion and physical misery. While I do not doubt that this is indeed the case for some graduate students I also do not doubt that this is equally descriptive of much of humanity.
I spent the majority of my nights in the year of 2002 tending the desk at a hotel on the shores of Bedford Basin. Come, 4 am, or second break, I'd smoke two cigarettes and spend what remained of the fifteen minutes in the bathroom running water over my eyes. When I turned off the stream, I'd look in the mirror, and I could see that I was very tired, and when I returned to the lobby I could see that the security guards, the taxi drivers, and the other auditors were very tired too. Many of whom had more reason to be tired than me, some had families who wouldn't let them sleep during the day, others had two jobs to work to support children of sometimes many marriages, and still others, who in their coldness, seemed to make everyone more tired by either putting someone down or sadly elicitng sympathy for themselves.
People get dreadfully tired, living can make people dreadfully tired. I'm tired too, but I'm almost certain my tiredness cannot be reduced to the fact that I'm enrolled in, and attend courses in a graduate program. I find the desire to personally own misery very strange - how can it belong to anyone alone? And, I can't help but thinking that this must somehow make it all harder for yourself, and consequently, for others.
Maybe I missed the joke, ok, even (especially) jokes wear themselves out.
I've condensed in a few words what it is that I find both humorous and at times tiresome about this guy: conversations do not exist with him, what appears as conversation amounts to this: he talks at you, you listen (or not, a physical presence is the only requirement of the audience).
So, as a passive recipient, here's a random selection of some of the topics that I had learned about the other night:
the aquatic conditions that are most favourable for moray eels.
what 'polemic' means.
the characteristics of white noise (that is, he calrified, "white noise, not be confused with pink noise or brown noise").
why hurricanes influence the climate of southern Ontario and not southern Manitoba.
various locations in the city where pornographic films are made.
that his ancestors did not themselves personally kill any Native Americans.
Some of the details associated with the above topics I had already known, others I had not, though most I found uniquly uninteresting, despite the words and efforts associated with them.
Dreaming about war again, come night time if I can't sleep I'm dreaming abut war, it's rough going... captured and thrown into the basement of some house, me and three other guys, awaiting tomorrow's execution. Trying to plan an escape that clearly won't work... the night is spent in a feverish sweat... just before sunrise we manage to pry open some window, everyone climbs out, the impending sun rise gives us the illusion of freedom, we're so proud.... but the dudes with the guns are standing on the roof mocking us, letting the fright rise in our eyes, next come the shots, I'm the last to get it, standing there watching and listening to those around me scream in agnoy as they die. A misreable way to spend a night.
The girl with the bell on her bicycle rides through the town, day and night, I've seen her ring the bell. There she goes ringing her bell - ring, ring - seemingly less obnoxious than a car horn, bicycles are harmless, after all.
Wheeling through the streets the bell rings and the people jump and scatter - what is that thing making that noise? And, by the time you've got it the machine has already whizzed by, it's such a cheap noise and hard to match it to much of anything without sight.
'ring' - I'm coming through. With the best of intentions, kindness even. The alert was sounded well in advance, the deed was done, no collision, you made your way. So go ahead and bowl on through, coast over the Assini, the city was made for you, didn't you know?
Though there's no excuse to be made for the pylons (me too), 'cause the fright is the instinct "they've finally caught up to me and I've now nowhere to hide." For many though it only takes the sight of the machine to bring the "phew, thank goodness is was only the girl on the bike and her bell." But not me, I'm still hiding.
... And, there was this kid a few years back, he was maybe 18 years old, or so my friend who told me the story thought, who stayed out real late, and got real drunk at some watering hole down Pembina. Well, when it came on to early morning, when he was really good and drunk he decided to walk home. And rolling home, halfway acrosse the bridge that crosses the Red, he fell, slid off the bridge, died, drowned right down there in the Red.
The city wouldn't stand for such a thing, he was just a kid the city screamed, everyone was appalled, so the city went ahead and took appropriate city action and decreed that all bars hold last calls real early. This of course has not stopped people from falling into the Red, what does time have to do with it? -- And I wouldn't call you a liar if you came and told me that at least one of those stumblers was frightened to fall by a bell on a bike.
Not the kid here though, he was victim of a whole other storm. His family endured the hushed wrath of the city -- "damn kid, it's all 'cause a that kid I can't stay out and drink no more."
Ramming Vonnegut and Borges together, a recent travelogue (it's unfortunate, I think, that the latter character has been strangled by the university).
----
I've at least one experience in common with Vonnegut:
"It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, somthing they knew all the time."
Yes, I've had the experience too, albeit in a more northern country. Though I certainly don't share the skill of being able to create an easily graspable and insightful idea, I have been ridiculed for laziness and lack of thought. Like when I suggested "Louder than Bombs" was a good album.
Meanwhile, Borges, a darling of the literati writes:
"mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and affirm the universe."
And, then, three pages later,
"Thinking, meditating, imagining... are not anomalous acts - they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occassional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought is to confess our own languor our own barbarie."
You see why he's a darling -- but what's more clear than any of that? -- in any case, you'll say, "I'll listen when he tells me more about labyrinths, memory or mirrors, (but no more about Schopenaeur please). " Or, "You missed the point here" (which was, I'd admit, an exercise in the art of reading that aims at pulling the author out of the story). Okay, and this makes it all more profound?
I get pulled into these series of justifications... what a bore it must to be read, and, for me, to think it might somehow cure my embarrassment of being born.
It's terribly easy to close the book on everyone and everything I've ever met, and I know because I do it perhaps too often (too often as I've not even any phoney authority or particularly agreeable quality to stand on). Though, in any case, I suppose this matters little as everyone continues in their own way as never ending stories as long as I'm around. But where's the fun in reading the same dull passage over and over again? Maybe it's the readers fault, what do you think?
Just yesterday, on the bus, she's telling me about her recent curiosity with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, yup, no kidding. .. Who cares I'm thinking and maybe it falls out of my mouth because I'm quick to be informed that she has it on very reliable information that Roger Rabbit is, in fact, a fantastic film. You see, so I'm told, the film students are watching it.
Aha, there's the reason behind the tone. My opinion on Roger Rabbit has been relegated to the banal mental space of the ignorant and uniformed. Shut out by the silvered painted gates on university crescent...
And I thought briefly of the warning the Tibetans speak into the ears of the dead, 'beware of the alluring light of the jealous gods, do not enter there.' But this just spins me around, now I need the warning.... and anyway, the point of the bus ride conversation, we had said as much, was to be straight about things.
So I asked her what she thought the lopsided heave metal sculpture lying along Freedman was all about.
"Oh, just some industrial installation."
And I've given up on life she said, I once heard her whisper across the room. While she remains correct, and I'm embarassed most days because of it, I haven't died, you know, keeled over, yet.
Some news from the study of religion to test this new boat.
Here's the most intersting collection of species of "cult" I've yet to read:
"Some people I would consider cults are, the KKK (Ku Klux Klan), Charles Manson and the Family, the Guardian, Waco, Catholics, Jehovahs Witnesses, bigamists and nudists."
While it's very hard to care as any collection can at some point be exposed as an essentially random collection,as positioned and interested - and while it's even harder to care in this way - I can't find one thread that runs through each of these examples.
