it's hard times all around (default)
Music: Skinny Puppy: HanDover (2011)
A couple of days ago I decided to resist the magnetism of screens and attend to some repairs and removals, mostly in the garden. Many plants, thoroughly ravaged by the summer heat, had become dead things that just needed to be buried in a dumpster. Coming home after a long day at the university, I noticed on the short walk from the patio gate to the back door green things had returned. And among the green things were dead things, too far gone (long past gone and neglected). I reasoned the sight of brown and crinkled leaves was somehow crafting an unconscious graveyard mood as the days passed, a mood suitable for Halloween, of course, but not everyday. Strong winds had blown down the mirrors I had hung on the western wooden wall to create a sense of space. After I dumped half a dozen exoskeletons formerly known as flora, I set about to rehang the mirrors. Hammer in hand, I steadied myself on an acacia wood bench and lifted my arm when I soon realized---or rather, retroactively realized---that I was falling; I thrust out my harms and hands to save face. My left palm cleft, confronting a concrete jutting and I scraped the skin off of my knuckles on the right hand.
I slumped on the hard, cold patio floor and thought about it. At first there was no pain. That took a few seconds to come. And in that tiny span of time I remembered impaling a wrist on a barbed wire when I was eleven, the curly spire poking out of my palm, and then the nausea that washed over me, and then resisting the urge to throw up. But I didn't feel that same nausea, just remembered it. And then I remembered all the things I had to do before bedtime and reasoned I should simply just get up and wash up and move on.
When I have nightmares they almost always involved disappointing someone. This week: forgetting some birthdays. I dreamed a parent and then a friend were upset with me. Only after the dream did I recall I had missed the birthdays. Still, aside from letting others down, my nightmares involve bodily traumas: drowning or car accidents. Trauma, often a blunt one. Falling reminded me of these premonitions, however briefly. Not so much parting flesh; I will not die by cutting, I don't think. So: get up.
A leg on the bench had rotted and it collapsed under me. I bled---too much for the scrapes, I thought. The bench ended in the dumpster along with former geraniums. The baby blue pajamas I wore took on a brown, polka dot pattern in spots.
The garden looks better without the dead. There's always a slight sense of guilt when dumping the dead; it's as if I should leave the carcass in the garden to remind myself of the failures (gardens often appear like resumes, don't they?). The mirrors are hung, and scabs have formed on fingers and knees. Still, there's nothing quite like a simple fall to remind one of the smell of trauma---those heightened senses, that retroactive doubt about one's sense of security (or immortality, as infantile as it is). You know the feeling: the inchoate sense of dread that says, for a millisecond, "I'd rather be in bed reading a book than falling on the concrete right this moment." No one enjoys falling on concrete, even for the memories the falling might provoke.
The clutch on my car went out this week. Things, you know, fall apart.
My friend's mother, I learned at dinner, is back in the hospital. I'd say such news "comes with age," but really, it does not. I simply think such news is more in mind as we age.
A student's father was in a hit-and-run accident and she missed class. Another student reported her mother had a stroke last week, and she was busy tending to her. A friend of mine in the Midwest reported that one of his students was killed a couple of weeks ago. This is one week.
It's hard to worry about students' assignments when you find yourself saying, "don't worry about class; you need to focus on what's most important, and that's your family." What is this call for "accountability" in higher education when we are caused to consider the personal lives of students? Does accountability make exceptions for making exceptions? Is it ever alright to attend to the green things instead of the screens, and if so, can you measure that attention? The dead and dying are invisible on screens and pages.
A friend of mine teaches fifth grade. She says aside from the challenge of teaching her bilingual students to take the "no-cog-left-behind" exams, one of the most pressing problems of teaching is head lice (and getting it once a year from her students).
"Accountability" is not, it would seem, a word that is synonymous with responsibility. Response-ability: the capacity or faculty of response and recognition, and some would argue that this capacity entails an obligation to attend to the dead. Response-ability is a quality, a character trait, something that is cultivated, like a virtue. Accountability has become, more or less, a term for surveillance measured in number. Accountability has ceased to be response-able. In the world of policy, accountability my be obligatory, but that obligation is compulsory, or at least seems increasingly so.
And if I return to screens and pages, there is a toad in the garden. A poisonous toad. I read with some interest Rick Perry's "interview" in Parade this past Sunday; his smug portrait appears on the front. He believes global warming is a "fiction," among other things you might expect him to believe. He also quipped that making severe changes in the department of education (presumably modeled on the slashes he made to public services in Texas) would reduce the national deficit. He is proposing a "flat tax," that fantasy of equity that appeals, much like Ayn Rand's writing, to the firm exhilaration of negative liberties: it does not matter that your lover has smacked you across the mouth, drawing blood. Of course, it's violence, but what matters is that the blow was good for you---it even turns you on a little. Everything is in its place, like the imagined scenes of domesticity in the Pottery Barn catalog.
As Benjamin once warned, the aestheticization of the political aims at the beautification of death. We should be wary of leaders who hold out infantile fantasies of omnipotence. When death looks pretty the ugly death will come. There are no lice in the Pottery Barn. Or gurneys.