Race in 2010

My essay "Race and Response," appears today at the Eugene Weekly.

Goodwill

Yesterday a student from four years ago brought me a box of chocolate covered Macadamia nuts and thanked me for being the only teacher at the UO who'd ever inspired him. As I passed the chocolates about my three pm class, I was struck with a sudden conviction that something good was going to happen.

Ten minutes later, I opened my email inbox. The Irene Goodman Agency was writing ME to solicit my novel-- they'd read about me winning an Oregon Literary Fellowship and heard I had a finished book I was looking to agent.

As I pressed send with my work, another email appeared in my inbox: The Rumpus will be publishing my-- review? essay? creative nonfiction piece?-- concerning the songwriter Leo London. I have mentioned Leo here before, but to blurb the forthcoming piece yet again:

"Leo London loves the Beats and the Beatles. Leo London loves booze and cigarettes and guitars of many makes. Leo is baby-faced, flop-haired, perpetually unshaven, all intense raccoon eyes and shuffling steps, all stumbling grace and celebration of being laid low. If you took the love child of Dylan and Patti Smith, conceived under a full moon with Waits howling somewhere out of sight, and raised him to twenty-four in a dark cathedral with only a guitar and drumset and organ at the altar and the pews were a bar where the drinks were plentiful and cheap and beautiful, sad, hard-drinking women congregated to worship songs sure to break anew every broken heart you might have a songwriter like Leo. Leo London, son of drug addicts, today hungover and full of new sorrow and excuses, tomorrow hungover and full of bright hope and the possibility of something sung in a cracking, human voice that could encompass all that and then some. Leo, barely twenty-four-years old, sleeping each night in a garage with the guts of the Wurlitzers he spends his time restoring, pieces of instruments made to pieces of music marching rumba staccatto decolletage, brass band two-step jukebox tilt-a-whirl, the music of his dreams as terrible and glorious as the music of his days."


I am excited to be in The Rumpus-- they're fantastic, and I've long admired what they do. Good news indeed.

I'm not particularly woo-woo, but it has often been my experience that some months everything in the cosmos is, if not against you, at least indifferent. And then one day there is some shift, if not in the stars, then in the feeling created by a student's thanks and a shared gift of something sweet, and everything appears altered. Of course, it is not. But for today, I'm going to pretend.

Signals

Today's ashen sky makes me long for Oahu: my aunty’s orchid farm up Waianae Valley where the road ends, the corner where the coastal range meets the Koa mountains. Haleahi Ranch-- literally 'House of Fire,' for the way the morning sun crests the ragged peaks in a blinding flare. I wish for the beach at Pokai Bay and out Makaha, where I spent the best months of childhood, ghetto paradise where at fifteen, I'd wake and run in the still cool dawn, along the water out Farrington highway, the cliffs tipping over the churning reef as the rising sun made everything too bright and beautiful, even to the great piles of trash from the squatter's camps pastiche on the the too-golden sand beside the road, mountain of strange, beautiful broken things: slick black bags full to the bursting, the tire and handlebars of a child's bicycle, a fan torn from its casing, a television with a shattered screen, antaennae on top raised as if to catch a phantom signal from God.

I need a warmer, brighter place, require the grammar of ocean, the idiom of sunshine, the words that are grains of sand that become beach. I have moved too far from a language beautiful enough to sustain me.

As far as Gatsby Goes

There is no honor in diminished hopes, no comfort in the dull compromise of reason. Integrity is failing to sin enough to sully the purity of longing.

Here

I am restless and so I spend my days examining my ills, wanting there to be something I can do, something I ought to do better. This week I worked, and I persevered, and I bitched about working and went for long runs imagining I could reach a finish line that would mean an end, and there was none: my legs only gave out. I was standing miles from home and the sun was hot on my shoulders and when my breath slowed to silence there was a dog barking out of sight, a squirrel’s feet tapping an oak tree, the crooned fush of river.

Sometimes, diagnosis of the problem is the problem. We search for what’s wrong until we find trouble.

I’m learning to trust what I can feel: Spring thick in the hot liquored air of midnight on a Saturday when the reckoning is still distant, and there is only the here and now of a dance floor in a city where what everyone requires is a dance: bodies pressed to bodies, a hundred hands finding spaces that can be opened, tracing the hems of jeans and the plunge of an open-backed blouse and the strobes shadow-stroke of shoulder-blade and spine. Bass hums hairs on the back of the neck, loosens hip-joints and elbow-sockets, as the pursuit of happiness sounds need through the bones of the inner ear and out the lips whispering, yes, right here now, yes.

As far as Prayer Goes

Prayer
by Jorie Graham

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.


I came to this poem via Cheryl Strayed, a wonderful writer. She keyed into the same lines I do:

"motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed."

I mean, that is perfect, the essence of prayer, what it means to be alive and want. The longing is indeed to be pure, and you instead are changed, and not necessarily for the better.

Friday in Spring

The Spring stumbles in, stutters out two sad clouds and five sunny hours and staggers off shamefaced into sunset with promises of returning in finer form. No judgment from me: it is Friday, thank fucking god, and another week is gone, the stacks of essays thinned to none, the open pit of evening beckoning with distant, flickering lights and music and glorious hopes. I like anticipation of the night best, when there is only the unrevealed imminence, no hint yet of the liquored end, the tawdry descent of closing time, when the music is revealed as a man with a pinched mouth playing a harmonica and swaying, and it is all dirty and inglorious and small: two too-made up girls swaying in a corner and frantically running their hungry fingers through their coarse hair, child-men in baseball caps pouring shots of well-whiskey over their faces, and me, standing in a corner watching it all, wondering still what happened.

One hears, it seems to me, in the work of all American novelists, even including the mighty Henry James, songs of of the plains, the memory of a virgin continent, mysteriously despoiled, though all dreams were to have become possible here. This did not happen. And the panic, then … comes out of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed. How have we managed to become what we have, in fact, become? And if we are, as indeed we seem to be, so empty and desperate, what are we to do about it? How shall we put ourselves in touch with reality?

—James Baldwin, 1962

(My thanks to Mark Athitakis of American Fiction for bringing the quote to my attention)

A part of me wants to say, yes! And yet I'd never thought of it quite that way, not about the novel necessarily. It seems to me more that there must be an awful recognition in all of us, and certainly in our best art, of the beautiful possibility of the mysterious continent, inhabited already by native people (and oh, all that could have been learned), so much unnamed possibility... instead it has been our American story to sully that promise, crush that dream by clutching it tight, to tread instead on the backs of those who want only to dream.

Yes, I am talking about Arizona at this moment, and some novel some child born now in a barrio will write about the year of his birth and the poisoned years after. But the same has been the American story in place after place, year after year, for natives and immigrants and the children of immigrants who themselves become narrow, provincial, and greedy-- too American.

We take and take, seize land for ourselves and tear it open and poison the sea and land with black blood.

We rarely become our dreams, or realize them; instead, we become a parody of what we wanted with so pure and great a longing, degrade our alleged ideals with ugly appetite: steal, swill, rut and feast while others die of famine.

We want too much.

If the American novel is to say anything, it cannot ignore what is American, what we are all responsible for and culpable of. What we have done even as we dream, as we imagine we follow a dream, when we are following only the memory of our dreams still echoing on earth, a remnant, a ghost of what could have been.

Some days, I feel we might still find our way. But that will require a sober reckoning of the sort Baldwin speaks of. I'm not sure we have the stomach or the will. I'm not even sure it would be best that we see ourselves as we are and have been. It might be too much to bear.