… that faithful place of stress and stress:
ahhhhhh….
I just tried to make that sigh as long and as deep as possible. It’s been a very long weekend, and if monday didn’t happen to be Memorial Day, I probably would have stayed home all day anyways. The weather is its usual perfect grayness for the time of year, fully equiped with a calm coolness, and light breezes. The front door is open, along with the porch and all the windows, and my roommate and I sit together at the red table in the middle of our apartment, doing our repsective activities and listening to Big Youth throw it down on the loud speakers. For some, this time of year is liberation, to the fullest: schools out, the summer sun hangs overhead, and we’ve got a 3-day weekend. But for others of us, we’ve got two weeks left of the term, and nerves are frantic and the days seem to be getting shorter. Taking some time to sit and digest the moment is about as therapeutic as it can get for me…
I’ve found that I’ve been relying on the sun to get me through the past couple weeks. I’m at school until it gets dark, then I ride home, eat food, and try to muster the strength to read again. These days, dusk is taking her sweet time to show herself, and in the meantime, I delusion myself into going outside and making ‘the most of a beautiful day.’ Don’t get me wrong, Oregon is simply gorgeous on a mid-May afternoon and I can gladly justify time spent eating ice cream on the quad and people-watching on a park bench, but, by the time I get home, it’s 8:45pm; another hour and a half goes by and I’ve finished making and eating dinner, but what do I have to show for myself? In terms of production: Nothing. And on top of it, I’m tired. So, I toss on some tunes, put the feet up for what feels like the first time in 80 hours, and open up a book that has nothing to do with my coursework. Next thing I know, it’s 7am, the sun is back, looming over me like a fresh organic carrot, and I have to do it again, with the same sloppy repetition.
But it’s the home stretch. Time to tighten up. Others may have already begun this tighten process, and that’s okay, I’m okay with that, as they should have; you know what I’m sayin’, I’m happy for them, but at least we can all agree that by now in the term, the focus has to be sharp. My game is officially stepped. The goals are explicit, and follow-through must be thorough. I can do it. Three papers to write, 134 to grade - and then I’m done with my first year in grad school.
My roommate and I have been talking a lot about girls, lately. It’s not very hard to do, and quite frankly, it’s a very confusing subject. Recently, he’s (we’ve?) been struggling to negotiate ideological differences between partners, specifically between contrasting (if not opposing) faiths. Are we over the line to not be committed to loving someone because we understand the bible differently? How do we justify that? On the one hand, I know families that have found a way to stick together and raise a family under a blanket of religious compromise. However, whole wars have been fought because of such tension.
So we spun our wheels, and shared some perspective and when it was all over, Jake had a pretty sweet thought: “You know how there are ideas like ‘religion’, or ‘war’, or ‘faith’, or ‘love’, or ‘government’? You know, words that have a deep meaning like music, or movie, or karma, or meditation… what if there was a whole other construct out there that we’re just not thinking of?” Now, maybe it was one of those moments where you had to have been there, but I could feel where Jake was trying to go. It was ambitious, but he kept on. “And it could even be the case that there was once something that played a role in ancient human civilizations, but has now faded to the background of our contemporary cultures?” I was intrigued.
What if there had been something more, some critical construct, some missing piece of human experience that has unjustly been lost to our past? Or what if this additional mental concept has yet to be discovered… Either way, it was fun to feel the feeling of what it might be like to experience a whole new way of the world. I wonder what it could be? … for now, I guess, I’m happily content with the invention of music.
I’ve dilly-dallied enough. It’s time for business. It’s time to get org.anized in this biatch.
Btw, Brown won the Ultimate College Championships this weekend. And that’s good for them. In the back of my mind, I gear up for College Nationals 2006 at Ohio State, in Columbus, OH.
Here is a Star Wars video like you’ve never seen before, and all of you conscientious consumers out there ought to take a look, seriously:
Grocery Store Wars, may the Farm be with you!
(This might take a while for those of you with 54k modems; but its worth it…)
… call it a rant, call it a lecture; the problem is that we “call” it. Our language itself undeniably prevents us from truly listening. We are a culture that is plagued with a quickness to judge and an appetite to label. Before the words are completely out of my mouth they’ve been cookie-cut into categories, and dissected into (dis-)order. From the start, I am a speaker already in a vertigo of vulnerability! To begin to speak, to begin to share the very thought I assemble, is to endure a process of filterization in the receiver, and to be slated with a historical interpretation from our past. I ask you NOT to hear me through the lens of our ‘occidental’ logic and ‘civilized’ grammar. I beg you to put down your allegiance to your society and to your theology and to your philosophy, as I have done mine. I repeat, we must shake ourselves from such linguistical constraints. Today we will speak the SAME voice; today we will speak the language of Being. You must FEEL me. This is what it is to hear. I profess only what it is that we share: Being. Say it slowly: We are all human beings. Yes my sisters and brothers, we are a being like no other. And despite the pain-staking spouts between races and genders that have plagued our chronology, and because of the merciless wars amidst religions and nations, we have come to find the very diversity that highlights our commonality. We all have Being. We are undoubtedly animal rationale: all a living, breathing, animal with the capacity for reason, and propensity for language. This unites us! As Heidegger would say, we are being and Being together, make no mistake. We are like the vague being which resides in plants and animals and life, yet we are something more: we are a subjective enterprise; a rational, emotional, contemplative consciousness; we are a being wrapped-up in the thinking of our being. It is a conversion that is necessary here. It is a conversion that must take place to bring us back to the clearing of our being, back to eachother. To truly hear one another is to restore language its originality. Let the words drip from my lips like a familiar honey, for they are in the spirit of what it is to be human. Let us speak in the original language of Being, and we will finally begin to see our place in the world. But I must admit, there will be no sugar-coating here. The reality of the world is no candy-land. Come and open your eyes, and you will see that we are living in an era that devalues the Self, that desensitizes our Being, that dehumanizes our neighbor… To be a Being is to be affected by other Beings. Every boy has his mother, and every girl has her father; our lives are filled with family and friends, with neighbors and co-workers; we act and react to strangers on the street and to employees behind the counter. We are inseperably in communion with eachother. This is the foundation from which we are able to understand what it is to be human; this is the foundation from which we must re-address what is to be called ‘Humanism.’ Let us together notice the historical interpretations necessarily woven into such a term: Humanism. The ‘-ism’ itself speaks to a langauge of tradition. But, alas, we are taking the word back! We must empower the word with originality. For too long, a systemic ideology has taken humanity by the reins, torturing us into submission, and enslaving us to ‘objective truths.’ As Sartre might say, by the right of the Divine, Christianity has once seized our nations and fed us a tangible morality. Too off-putting? Alternatively, by the insight of human brilliance, Communism has once appropriated our ambitions, and we got drunk on its unwavering definitude. Too nostalgic? To subscribe to either tradition, among others, is to forfeit the essence of our Being. There’s a primordial characteristic to Being which places the essence of humanhood at the forefront of our discussion. We are given Being first. From Being we go into the world. We are not arguing for the existence or denial of God. We are recognizing our existential plight. We know not objective certainty. We know not divine truths. We can know only what it is to experience life as a human, and even then, our path is a difficult one. Our essence, our identity, our selfhood is in a constant limbo of being while becoming, simultaneously. We discover who we are, while we grow. There can be no objectivity to this. But our commonality can bring us to an ethic. Heidegger will insist that a true Humanism is one that does not allow humankind to live outside its essence. And so, let’s take a moment to step back. Let’s take a contemplative stance and gaze at the Humanism that surrounds us. What does it look like? Are we surrounded by a humanism that embraces the essence of our Being? Where are we? I see a tension. A tertiary tension in our industrialized world between the government, the corporatations and the people. My allegiance lies with the government, by the people…
Where do I begin? Where do I begin to vent the rage? The anguish? The pain? I feel so slight, and I know my plight, but I must keep fighting, fighting to address the issues of what it means to be a living Being; of what it means to be a human citizen of this world; of what it means to be the organized, and psychological, and conscientious, and ever-driven incarnation of Life, itself. I am that moment of now. I am that sweltering heap of action and dream. My subjectivity, my very soul is at that intersection of progress and project. I am who I make, and I make myself in coordination to my beliefs and to my goals. Ask me not what the meaning of life is, for that is a silly question: I cannot know, I cannot begin to know; thousands of years of humankind have been spent fiddling with the construction of theology, and philosophy, and society so as to bring some certainty to questions of the objective - with no avail!; for what seems to be an eternity we’ve tried to provide an ontological account for the world, we’ve tried to label it, rationalize it, control it, and you’d be insightful to say that we are NOT right back where we started… we are worse, far worse; our attempts to control the restless, unforgiving nature of the world has only led to the foolish abandonment of man towards man, to the turning our backs on our neighbor while looking eachother in the eye; our trusted philosophies, and our divine theologies with their empiricism, and their justifications have left us cold, and deserted, and naked and shivering in the shadows of the trenches, the very trenches they’ve left behind in their wake; No!, I ask, what accomplishments have we made with our capacity for reason, with our high and mighty subjectivity and reflective cogito?, I tell you, and nature whispers it to our ears every single day, “man’s unquenchable thirst for control has spun us OUT of control,” and what’s more, unforgiving nature will not bail us out, will not show us sympathy, will not restore the petroleum levels of the land or clean up the oil spills, nor digest the barrels of toxic waste; the world itself will not respond to our birth defects, our mutated viral diseases, nor human starvation; the world itself will not restore tree resources, or reconstruct ozone damage; it will not bring back extinct animalia or stop hatred, classism, sexism, racism, from dividing us further; mother nature is a palate from which we paint and by which we breathe - we have a responsibility to its preservation on account of our involvement to it. Yes sir, ask me not what the meaning of Life is, for that is a silly question. Instead, remind me of this plight. Remind me of this situation we have found ourselves in. Remind me that the world, in its absurdity and its ambiguity, will unwillingly rebel against our plundering of its lands and will unmistakably revolt against our plot to take over —- Make no mistake, we are extinguishing ourselves. With our bombs, and our greed, we’ve already killed millions, and given birth to billions(!) more that don’t stand a chance: there is an unfathomable future we’ve already raped from them (ourselves?). No ma’am, do not ask me what the meaning of Life is, for that is a silly question. Instead, after you’ve reminded me of this, of our plight, ask me if I want to live. “Do you want to live?” It is a question I wake everyday to answer, and with each new day, with each new breath, I have the freedom to answer, the choice to breath (pure? unpolluted?) oxygen into my lungs AND the choice to cut the very neck that does my breathing. I am my own possibility every second of every day, and with that I am given my choice, and with each, so far, I’ve chosen to live. And for what? For what, then? This you must decide for yourself. And let me make a recommendation. Live to embrace Life. Live to be Life. Live so that you may make the most of your Being, and by doing so, realize your communion with Others. How funny: already you can’t help but take my words and think of religious connotation —- SHAKE IT! Shake yourself from the linguistical contraints. Shake yourself free from the spoon-fed, mass-produced, line-assembled BULLSHIT. Since the industrial revolution there has been a devaluation of Self, a desensitization of Being, a dehumanizing of our neighbor…
Please. Please, go see the movie, The Corporation, and, please, be as critical as you can possibly be, so when next we speak, … we can both recall our concerns as we raise them.
Wha’happen, star? I-man have done it, Rastas. Sight? I-man and the Jah youths in I apartment witnessed Rockers this week’end… ‘bout three o’ foh times. Cha! Now, what the-I say to I-man now, rasta? Seen. In Eugene I and I roll Proper, jah! Through the voice and sounds of I-heights, this dread rocked the roots of reggae… and I-man dun bought the soundtrack to match, rasta. ‘Dis is a take-ovahhh. And if the-I dohn like it:
Remove ya! I say.
Talk about disappointment. Ranked at the top of the country, three bids to nationals, and we fumbled. No team took it away from us. No team put in more time. No team had more bling. But in the end, Oregon beat Oregon when the game was on the line. Needless to say, it’s been a pretty rough three days back in Oregon; and the incessant pouring rain hasn’t been much of a counsel. However, drinking with my teammates everyday from 3pm until 10pm has somehow helped with the deliberation process. Damn.
The craziest part is that we were one of two teams to go 4-0 on Saturday, and this includes a pretty decisive victory over Stanford (15-12), who ended up winning the whole tournament. UW beat UBC on Saturday, so that jumbled the brackets for Sunday. We ended up meeting UBC in semis, instead of UW, and we lost 15-10. Then we played Cal in the backdoor to stay alive. They were rested after throwing their morning game to Stanford 15-3, and, to be honest, they played hard. We just rolled over, for whatever reason. You could blame the rain and wind, you could blame the pressure, you could blame the lack of experience on our team, you could blame the lost van keys and the lack of a warm-up … but regardless of the excuses, we lost. For a full write-up of the games, check out this site.
I guess you need this bitter taste of (self-)defeat in your mouth to really learn how to play like a champion. Losing like this is about as painful as it gets. Honestly. My heart goes out, especially, to all the fellas that will be leaving Ego Ultimate this year (BP, Seth, Jeremy). These guys put in an entire college career, and though they have a 2nd place National medal from 2003, their last season came up short. I can only hope that we returners build from this year, and come out next year with a vengence. Hell, 2006 is my last year of eligibility … might as well go out with a fury.
Here are some pictures for the grandchildren — courtesy of Andrew at Free Heel Images and Scobel.
My mind hurts and my heart throbs, and, at a loss for words, I’m wondering what I could possibly say to make you watch the movie, Hotel Rwanda.