Justification for writing this post: so far today I have dated, organized, and sent A all the most recent versions of essays for the Murdoch book, downloaded most of the Challenging Cultures of Death papers for future reference and noted to self that one of the presenters NEEDS to send some work to Common Knowledge like right fucking now, tallied up cash burnt in Dublin and winced and made grateful for the adjuncting job, downloaded and organized about twenty PDF files of essays on St.-John Perse in preparation for swimming in Amers for about two months, and popped a frozen pizza in the oven in order to fuel the bod. But, I'll have to replace the pizza because I'm at Speed's girl's house and its not mine (tho she would tell me not to worry about it). Which, also means I need a shower so I can get to the store.... but anyway. So now I can catch me and you up on the last month. This will, I warn, be a bit impressionistic.
Henry and class reunions: I was watching the Twain Award for American Humor on PBS last night and welled up because Billy Crystal got all properly honored and seeing people properly honored breaks my heart in the good way. But, I have to say that Henry Rollins deserves the Twain Award. His speaking tours are the punk Twain, all observation and storytelling that crack us up, points out the outrageous and gets outraged over it, and constantly attests to the frail and fierce amazement that is the human being, all of us. Someone nominate the guy, someone rightly connected. --- Also, he'll tell you stories for three solid hours and then some if you sit there the whole time, and you should. And he's just so stars and garters hot. But, thanks to all that, I missed my 20th reunion. 11:30 was just too late for my sated self to even think about "catching up" with "old friends" I haven't known for two decades. Which, turns out, was spot on as my horoscope has recently ordered me to shed, forget, burn and otherwise disappear all things covered in the past. I know the people who will travel with me now and tomorrow, the rest is gone for good reason. This applies to much more than reunions, but that's where the horoscope and the choices slammed into each other. My history is less, less, and less important. What that might mean for poems is a mystery.
Brief stint of teaching. And you know that drill.
Felt something tick loose and melt in my heart for M-dreds. This will be complicated, but who am I to pass up the gift of a man's sweetness and the chance to be sweet to him? So, as much time crammed in with him before the dead run of travel and smartness.
Off to U of Indiana to hear His Holiness speak. Two gorgeous points there besides the Buddha 101. Point the first: DL addressed the students in the crowd of 15,000 of which there were many. The last century was his century, he said, his time and the time of his generation and by and large they'd made a bloodbath of it, a power struggle, a mad-sad scramble to shore up and secure and who cared much who got hurt? This century, he said to the students, is yours, your time. Make it, he ordered, a century of dialogue and healing, of sharing your toys. YES, sir. Then he asked for the teachers, of which there were many. Teach compassion, warmheartedness, loving-kindness, teach the bravery and flexibility needed for these students to go into their stewardship well ready. Well, you got it, DL!!! Totally worth the eight hours round trip in the car. Jasmine and Scorpio 2 were lovely companions, and my thanks for her making that trip real. On the way home, Jasmine played me a CD of songs she'd recorded some years back, and I have to say: Admire this woman. Stuns me blinking that she's not giving more of her life to that work. I know why, and I grieve it.
Home quick, pack quick, teach a class, set up some subs for classes, and blammo, I'm in O'Hare on Tuesday for an eight hour layover. Thanks to the dead run, I was without the ambition to get to a museum, so I hung out there, and layed about on the floors of empty gates to read Murdoch papers and contemplate the new fact that no matter how long you lie down on an airport floor, it will not, not ever, warm up. At last, Lioness arrives. At last, we're ready, we're gathered, and soon we'll be a little changed.
First, compliments: Lioness is one easy gal to travel with. This is important, as travelers know. I'd come to prefer traveling alone over companioned travel since at least that way, and missing someone to talk to, I could have experiences that mattered to me. Advantages: lots of talking to locals, no debates about sights/food/events, no whining, lots of getting over one's innate shyness. I tend to do travel as a walkabout, start with a plan, nix the plan for Oh Look That's Neat. Drives other people a little nuts. Disadvantages: only mine own brain to locate fun, no one to say "ooooh" and "ahhhh" and "wow" to. Lioness is the antidote to all this. Faced with the spartan accommodation of hostel Ashfield House, she noted that she was not happy and said narry another word. Just leave your shit in the uncomfy room and get outside, she seemed to say, Temple Bar and the culture and nightlife are One Block away. No whining, excellent intuitions about food (the Moroccan El Bahia was to live for -- have the rabbit), honest responses to experiences (totally freaked out by the saint's heart in iron casket nailed to wall of Mary's chapel in Christ Church -- as well one should), a great ability to go with the flow and make sure one's companions are comfy -- also, let's one sleep when one needs to.
Halloween in Dublin is a city-wide affair. We were hungry and jetlagged, but could see that there was merriment to be had on a grand scale. Probably hetero college boys in drag for the night, a sight homophobic American boys just would never provide. It's not Samhain in any nostalgic or somber sense, but a kind of quiet Mardi Gras. They do drink. This is true. But they don't drive, and they don't think stumbling about bombed out of one's head is cool. Roving bands of singing men, however, are cool. Pubcrawls are also rather interesting tours of the city and its history, so you get to drink and learn on the way. Very Irish, have fun and get smarter.
Thursday, oh do let's walk across the city from Trinity College to St. James Gate. Nice walk. You get away from the city centre and out into lived-in Dublin. A sense of class strata, of local flavor, of real life is to be gotten this way. Guiness tour. All I will tell you about this is that the first room with the pile o' barley, the wall o' hops, and the fall o' crakling clean water from the Wicklow range ... just go stand there and breathe. Almost makes you sad it gets cooked into beer --- almost. Cleverness here, the museum in the old brewery is built around a six story tall glass structure in the shape of a .... wait.... pint glass. Snarf. The beer IS better, crisper and somehow sunnier, even the stout. The view from The Gravity Bar is not to be missed, 360 of the city and big chunk of the county. Dramatic clouds over soft Irish mountains and the whole bit. Silencing. Thence to Christ Church, you know God and booze on Thursday like you do. As mentioned, hearts nailed to walls, but also the organ in full voice, which made me stand still in my cells. Because they're Irish, the first chapel is to the musicians. The ruins of the first building date to 1030. Grock that, Americans. I did a classic PRSC move:walk around the church, follow the line of a spire up and up with eyes, miss the step on the stairs a...n...d plant it. Caught myself on my knee (skinned) and hands (skinned) and noticed that the new shoulder didn't even wiggle! As we left, we in fact and under oath did witness an old woman with her cat feeding and watering the pigeons next to the church. Oh, you bet we got pics. But Lioness has all those for now.
Friday, Challenging Cultures of Death begins. Mary Condren gets props for the opening statement in which she wove 3 millennia of death culture into the theme of making life culture (mercy not death) in a mere 25 minutes. And it was downhill from there. With the exception of the artist (looking her up, hang on) talk, I was up to here with the feminist platitudes, the uncritical notion that the earth and Nature are kind and loving mother figures (have you seen hyenas eat? how does magma fit into this symbolism?), and girls are sweet and fluffy wells of kindness. Whatever. Good is not as gendered as all that. It's one of those feminist generation gap problems. I'm afraid that when women do wield state power ... it's not their gender that determines how they do so. It's their ideology, and that can be feminist or not, ethical or not, merciful or not. Sooooo, yeh, Rwanda is what I have to say to that, and Katherine the Great, and Cleopatra, and give me a break. A bit too naively essentialist some of the work on Friday. Which left me feeling flat and a bit worried on my b-day, so we ate at Ely where the wine is glorious and the food is astonishing, and declared a b-day do-over. But, at lunch we ate at Cafe en Seine, which is a riotous fantasy of 19th Century Paris (should have taken some pics, didn't, sorry). On the walk there with other conferencers, Lioness lost me by following some gal who looked just like me. Here, I'm an exception. There, I'm a type. Hilarious!!!
Saturday: oh, so, much, better, now. YAY for b-day do-overs. Yay for friends who say "but of course" when one whines that one's birthday was not as yummy as desired. So, the conference picked up its rigor and got on with it. When it comes out read The Pharmacotic War on Terror -- this man, Larry George, is brilliant on the deep flow that makes this particular amalgam of conflicts important to maintaining a sense of stolid identity (which is a big part of the stakes in a more and more interdependent world). The rest of that panel also cracked my head with goodness, as in the cat who needs to publish in CK and so forth. Lioness and I wound up on the same panel so we got to see each other work for the first time. Great that. Lioness was flustered by a technology failure, but rocked it with her Texan grace nonetheless, explaining how progressives manage to work the system in Texas politics and stay sane. Very cool. I managed to do ten minutes of my paper without getting lost and without really looking at it all that much. The other panelists were heavy on the theory and have cracking game. The conference put a premium on the discussion and the Q&A, which was right and refreshing. There's one question I didn't get to answer, so here's my answer.
Question : You put so much emphasis on memory and imagination, the past and the future, that I want to know where now, where the present goes? What merciful concern do we have for the present?
Response: Awesome question!!!! My practical response is that Now is the only place for action. One must be carefully attuned to Now in order to create or offer anything of real value in cultural and political production. It is for the sake of us, here, now that I'm putting so much emphasis on getting life-centered and merciful kinds of imagination front and center in the Humanities. This will make our souls the richer and more flexible, and that can only make our being in the world more merciful, here and now, for us and our others. Au meme temps, it is the business of the Humanities to remember our traditions, our knowledges, and to question them, AND to follow the implications of those questions into the future -- the Hums are thence, quite precisely, revolutionary (or can be when they are not mere academic), and that work takes place now. My model is Modernist, it's Eliot and Pound muttering "make it new" and Postmodernist with Irigaray raging "a future that is not a repetition of the past." It is, only, by knowledge, attenuation to now and its needs-manifestations-meanderings-pulsions, and imagination in the sense of serious play that we will be new now and open history to a future is not the past over again. There.
And then, dinner with A at this great joint just down the street from The Bank, and Lioness and Carrie totally hitting off. Peter catching up with us and being all suave and kind and charming, Master Traveler and PoMo International Cosmopolis kind of cat. I've missed A even though we're working on the anthology together. She's warm and generous, and talented. Did my up a portrait whilst waiting for supper. Post-haste to the after conference reception, with song and story and blessings. How human, how wise to engage the soul at a conference trying think and live out of death and into mercy. But, there was leftover wine, so a gaggle of us who'd coalesced were invited to abscond with it. Which we did.
Lioness records it well:
- the trinity college campus feels like the platonic university - it's so grand and stately and lovely. we expressed our admiration by getting quite drunk on five bottles of red wine with some folks from the conference late saturday night. yes, folks, i'm telling you that we were a small horde of completely smashed critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and other assorted nerds drinking red wine and solving all the world's problems on the green (well, near it - it was damp out) at trinity college. that's a memory that will last me all my days.Oh, here's to the birthday do-over! Cheers, y'all. Thanks for accidentally conspiring to make that just about perfect.
Sunday, I was bit rough around the edges, but got some real decisions made about the anthology with A, took a nap, and then wandered Temple Bar with Peter and Lioness to eat and walk a bit. Found the oldest shop in Dublin, Est. 1607. Yep. While Lioness at one point exclaimed that she was in desperate need some rectilinear organization, I freaking loved the medieval meanderyness of the streets and the buildings. Just too charming and poetically logical, all kinds of time crammed together, and the kindest laid back people. Go there, go there as soon as you can.
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