Durham in Wonderland

The night before it snowed
two men were killed
and several others shot
for reasons not yet known. 

And the city awoke
to southern streets
Kissed
with cold complexities. 

That fall unique
and quickly melt
into puddles of
nuisance 

Sludge and mud
to be scraped
off boots
before entering the house. 

In the morning
a thin shroud
Blankets
this small town. 

With an innocence
Undeserved
yet offered
all the same. 

The addicts and the elderly
the pushers and professors
Watch from the window
and Witness 

An ephemeral absolution.

Table For One

“This is not full circle. It’s Life carrying on. It’s the next breath we all take. It’s the choice we make to get on with it.”
-Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dog’s Tonight

My mother calls her life a sacrament of interruption. Growing up, the door was always open. Each day would begin with the fear and possibility that came with never knowing who would grace us with their presence and their problems. Solitude was an unknown entity for me. When I graduated from college, however, I moved to Nicaragua. There, I was constantly surrounded by people. All the same, I felt a loneliness that was as foreign to me as the strange country that I was supposed to be calling home. I had no real reason to be there, no purpose or direction except for the faint sense that it had been the right decision at the time—cold comfort and no substitute for a loving coterie of family and friends. It was the only time that I lived in fear, the only time I was ever attacked, the only time I cried myself to sleep on a regular basis. It was also the only time I ever lived alone.

After Nicaragua, I lived with my family in the home where I grew up, in an intentional community in rural Georgia, with a roommate in Gabon who has probably heard my stories more than my fiancé, in a shared student accommodation with seven other people in Belfast, and finally with Gareth in a wonderful little cottage in an idyllic seaside town. Several months before leaving Northern Ireland, I began searching for a place to live in Durham. While the process consumed me, it never came to any resolution. It was only when I was in Durham looking for a place that I realized that I was scared to live alone.

While I have many weaknesses, dependency has never been one of them. After almost a decade of bouncing around to new places around the world, I came to pride myself on my independence and adaptability. It came as a shock to me that I might be frightened by something so simple as finding a place to live in my own country, in my own region even. Gareth and I drove to Durham several days ago. It was 105 degrees. Before we even got on the interstate, I had somehow managed to douse both of us with gasoline due to a broken gas nozzle and my own special ability to do amazingly stupid things. When we arrived, Gareth was appalled by the Spartan accommodations I had chosen, a cinder-block duplex with no ventilation in a neighborhood scared him.

In the few days that he was here, we explored the city together. We ate good food, saw good movies, even bought a good house. In the back of my mind, however, I envisioned how I would feel when Gareth would leave and I would be alone in a place reminiscent of a bomb shelter or township home. In my mind’s eye, I saw a prison door closing; in my mind’s ear I heard the clang reverberate and reiterate my lone status. When he left, however, the anticipated fear never arrived. Instead, I felt an unexpected relief for the opportunity afforded to me to read, to sleep, to drink beer in my very first piece of purchased furniture (a seven dollar red camp chair complete with a convenient drink holder) and listen to the noises of the neighborhood. I sat in my solitude surrounded by the hum of the wall unit air conditioner, the thud of a basketball on the asphalt, the buzz of the crickets outside and was reminded that I was not alone.

It Takes a Village to Raise a Wizard

The condiments and salad dressing aisle of any major grocery store in the United States can be a pretty stressful place. Would wasabi mayonnaise be the correct compliment for roast beef, or might the horseradish honey mustard give it just the right kick? The eternal quandaries of the playground of consumerism. Each time I return to the States, I am so overwhelmed by the options afforded me that I become paralyzed by choice, and often return home from a shopping excursion empty-handed.

This time around, in order to avoid my inevitable failure, I made my first purchase a buffer from all others and from the outside world in general—I bought the last Harry Potter book. For this reason, my first three weeks back home have been all but devoted to the final escapades of imaginary wizards in a children’s book. While I did make time to see my family, play with my niece, and run the requisite errands, I would quickly scurry back to the warm and protective shield of a make-believe world. What I saw there was as frightening and familiar as the bustling and confusing world I was trying to escape.

Harry Potter is a deeply traumatized child. As the narratives in each story grow increasingly complex, so does the suffering of one young boy, a child who must suffer in order to save the rest of the world. It would not have been surprising if Harry had used his angst as a reason to hurt others – if he had turned his pain outward, projecting it at the world that has damaged him. Yet what stopped Harry from turning to the dark side, from devoting his life to crime and black magic? So many children in our muggle world are similarly traumatized; so many children suffer through situations that adults should never be forced to face. Some of them turn to gangs, some get pregnant, some get addicted, and some—a few—fight and rage against their circumstances and make it through. Why?

Harry has no parents, lives under the constant fear of death, possesses the rather sinister ability to talk to snakes, suffers from being the topic of slanderous gossip, and is used as a pawn in adult games and power plays. But he has one thing going for him—community. He is surrounded by people who love and nurture him. They might not be perfect and a lot of them are weird. Some are criminals and misfits; some shine too brightly and dance to a different drummer. But they love him and protect him and offer to give up their lives for him. They are his family.

I look around and see so many children whose lives will probably not work out well because of circumstances beyond their control. I wonder what we could do to alter their trajectories if we weren’t too busy being distracted by the small details of our own lives. I wonder if we would have more time for the individuals around us who need our help if we spent less time in the overstocked aisles and overflowing shelves of shopping malls and grocery stores. I wonder what would change if we decided to prioritize relationships over things. Our lives are filled with distractions, both voluntary and compulsory, that prevent us from creating communities that might just be the saving grace for other people and even for ourselves. In the world of Harry Potter, magic coexists within the ordinary human world; the muggles, however, are blind to the magic that surrounds them. If there’s one thing to learn from Harry Potter, it’s that we have the power to alter circumstances through our own caring if we open our eyes and our hearts to those in need. That’s our muggle brand of magic.

Leaving Belfast, Part 2: I am Jack’s Cold Sweat

A couple nights ago, I couldn’t sleep so I sat in my living room with my computer on my lap, searching on-line for a bed. Insomnia was a constant throughout my childhood. My parents were political activists and I absorbed their conversations about nuclear war, the abuses of the Reagan administration, the threat of toxic rain, or whatever issue was currently on the front burner of their ire and converted these themes into persistent nightmares. Later on in life, I learned to channel these dreams into my waking interests and, for the most part, my dreamscape became far more banal and my sleep far less arrested. But lately, something has gone terribly wrong.

My dreams are terminally boring. I wake up in the middle of the night with the dreadful realization that my REM wanderings consisted of me scouring the classifieds for houses in my price range. Instead of seeking inspiration for a more imaginative sleep state, instead of reading poetry or teaching myself how to make mosaics or finally tackling the Portuguese language in the wee hours of the morning, I trawl through the dredges of the internet for free home furnishings that would no longer be available when I would actually need them. I engage in pointless acts of futility in the hopes that I will bore myself back into dreary dreams. It doesn’t work.

The narrator of the film Fight Club had a similar existence to mine until he blew up his apartment. He described his condition as becoming “slave to the Ikea nesting instinct.” I have become a slave to the “free stuff” section of Craig’s list. It has become an obsession to search for the components of projects I will never engage in. “Someone has free tree stumps in Cary, you must uproot.” Hadn’t I always wanted to make stools out of the rotted stumps of North Carolina piedmont pine? “Free magazines in North Raleigh, Better Homes and Gardens, People, and US Weekly. First come, first serve.” That would work perfectly for that decoupage project of the coffee table that I do not yet own. And so the search continues.

Possession accrual, real or imaginary, can be an attempt to tether ourselves to a present that is far too rapidly becoming subsumed into the past. The present moment can be a terrifying thing. If I pay too close of attention to the moment at hand, I can actually feel my life slipping away. And so I engage in the persistent project of distraction, engaging in an extensive exploration of the imagined topography of my future all to avoid the reality of what is right before me, which is now.

Falling asleep is our daily act of cutting the cord to the present. We dream of tomorrow and wake up in today. If drifting off to sleep is a forced act of faith, then insomnia is the victory of fear over necessity. It is also an untenable state. Eventually, I have to stop the housing search, give up on the pursuit of free dirt to be found somewhere in the Triangle area, and submit myself to the sweet and scary abyss of the unknown. Late last night, I read Christopher Lydon’s farewell to the listeners and readers of Radio Open Source. He quoted the end of Emerson’s essay, “Circles”:“Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”  Then I took a Tylenol PM and fell asleep.

Leaving Belfast, Part 1: The Things I Carry

“The things they carried were largely determined by necessity…. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Ray Kiley carried comic books…. Necessity dictated.”

-Tim O’Brien, from The Things They Carried

For nearly a decade, I have lived out of suitcases and one unfortunate back-pack that has graciously suffered being tied to the tops of school buses and pick-up trucks, stuffed in the belly of trains and dragged down dirt roads, silently keeping company alongside dead goats and live chickens. Throughout my twenties, I have carried most of my possessions on my back. The contents of the bag evolve as the representations of what I hold important or necessary shift with time, location, and my own whims.

While I love my bag, I despise filling it. Packing puts me in either a fugue state or one of irrational anger. I sulk and rant; I find time to clean underneath the sink; I sit and read the classified sections of six-month-old newspapers. Anything not to pack. It feels profoundly demoralizing to see what I own. The sum total of my worth seems entirely incoherent. The ephemeral nature of value confronts me as I attempt to remember why I own what I do and make the trickier calculation of whether these unfamiliar possessions might hypothetically serve me in the future.

I once saved several hundred dollars so that I could buy a place on an Air France flight for a suitcase filled with paper. I thought that one day I might need my notes for lesson plans in French or folders with the grammatical structures of various little used-African languages. To throw them away felt like it would be a negation of my work and therefore an invalidation of myself. The suitcase now collects dust in a corner of my parent’s house. As I’m packing to leave Belfast, I engage in the same debate, sifting through graded papers and notebooks filled with grandiose ideas, wondering if that essay could indeed be adapted for Harper’s or if, perhaps, there are any universities waiting to snap up my plans for the creation of designer masters programs.

My bag is filled with unfinished plans and unachieved goals. My bag is filled with unmet potential and unrequited dreams. The jumble of straps on the outside, whose purposes are still unknown to me after all these years, often feel analogous to the incoherent paths I have taken in the past decade. And yet I know that those straps are there for a reason just as I know my previous actions and choices, seen from afar, form a loosely coherent, if a bit tangential, set of interests and passions that inform my present and inspire my future.

As I prepare to install myself in one single location for the next five years, to bind myself to one person for the rest of my life, to engage in studies that will hopefully afford me a career, my green back-pack and its contents remind me of my nomadic past. It is dirty and mildewed and it should be retired to greener pastures. But the bag and its contents are what keep me tethered to my myriad pasts, they are the trinkets and tidbits of memory and I think I’ll have to carry them with me for a little longer. Necessity dictates.

Dirty Little Secret

In a former life, I believed in reincarnation. Concepts of karma and past lives intrigued me and I thought of myself as the latest installation in an ancient tribe of one. Then I met Sedata. She was a lovely Bosnian woman with two young children. Her story was, unfortunately, a typical one for women in conflict. Her husband had been killed during the war; she had been raped. With two small children and the stigma of rape hanging over her, it had been difficult to find another husband. The one she finally found was no prize. He drank and would beat her. When they were finally able to move to the States, the drinking and the violence intensified. Fearful for her life and the lives of her children, Sedata fled once again.

Several years later, I sat and drank a cup of tea with her and she told me her story. We talked for a long time and finally the subject drifted to religious beliefs. We discussed our understandings of Islam and Christianity and then I mentioned my belief in reincarnation. Her entire demeanor changed and her hands began to shake. We sat in silence save for the sound of her cup clinking against the saucer. Then, her face contorted in rage, she slowly spat the words at me, “What…did…I…EVER…do…in…a…past…life…to…deserve…THIS?”

And I was born again into a cosmovision marked by lives locked within the confines of the present and without a logic of coherent reciprocation. One of the most difficult realizations of childhood is that life is not fair, that we do not get what we deserve. Much of adulthood is spent searching for ways to reject the lessons that our parents hammered into our heads as children. Religious tenets and ideological precepts are used to rationalize unjust pains and equally unjust gains. The advent of pop-psychology and its progeny, the self-help book, is just the latest in a long line of existential attempts to explain the unexplainable and new-age author and television producer, Rhonda Byrne, is the latest prophet.

In the best-selling book, The Secret, Byrne collects the wisdom of her co-inhabitants in the rough and tumble genre of self-help and creates an easy-to-follow formula for success for readers and her bank account alike. Byrne’s understanding of the world is simple. Like attracts like. We get not what only what we deserve but also what we want. In such an environment, individuals must be careful what they wish for. While aspirational thinking for wealth, health, and beauty will be rewarded in kind, negative thinking is not suffered lightly. According to the Byrne theology, Sedata would not have rated as a victim of the unfortunate human tendencies towards anger, greed, and violence but instead would only have her self to blame for a fate created by a lack of positive thinking.

The Secret has been a massive international success. Byrne has been graced with Oprah’s suburban seal of approval and Larry King has sung her praises from his throne of prime-time banality. It is not surprising that her philosophy would be embraced by such a large and far-flung flock. Easy answers to complex problems tend to be popular fare and Byrne provides the perfect recipes to nourish tribes of solitary individuals. One would hope that a cup of tea with Sedata would cure the most ardent Byrne supporters of their belief in the wisdom of The Secret. Unfortunately, Oprah hasn’t yet invited Sedata to share her wisdom with the world.

Zucchini Matters

Wealthy societies have an odd relationship with hunger. Individuals willingly submit themselves to a state of starvation for aesthetic or political reasons. Most Americans would be loathe to admit that involuntary hunger exists in their own country. Eleven percent of Americans, however, are members of “food insecure households.” While food stamps prevent the images of distended bellies that many people equate with sub-Saharan Africa from becoming a local reality, it is not an easy task to make $21 cover a week’s worth of groceries.

In a recent episode of Radio Open Source devoted to this topic, blogger and homemaker extraordinaire, Miss Maggie, recounted how her family survived on food stamps when she was young. At times, neighbors would leave baskets of bumper crops of zucchini on her family’s doorstep and she remarked on the nutritional dent that zucchini made on her during adolescence. Her frame may be three inches taller, or her eyesight keener, or her lifespan longer because of those anonymous baskets of vegetables.

During a recent talk, the Irish poet and mystic, John O’Donohue, noted, “When you get up in the morning, you never know who’s depending on you.” It is easy to look at the profound turmoil in which the world resides and believe that we are helpless to do anything to right the wrongs that surround us, let alone those half a world away. Yet we never know the food we may have offered to curb the emotion or physical pains of hunger.

Nick Kristoff has tirelessly written about Darfur in the pages of the New York Times. His reporting stands out as the loudest and most influential voice in defense of the people of Darfur, a task made much easier by a lack of like-minded colleagues. Kristoff’s articles have not caused a clear change in international policy nor have they hastened the end of genocide in Sudan. It would be easy to say that he’s wasting his time. About a month ago, however, NPR editor Kitty Eisele interviewed a hunger striker who was camped out in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington D.C. The man, who had changed his name to “Start Loving” and tattooed the same on his forehead, cited Kristoff’s articles as the driving force behind his decision to leave his family and make protesting against genocide his full-time job.

This might not be what Kristoff had in mind. There’s a good chance Mr. Loving might be a bit crazy. There’s also a good chance that he was a hungry man, that he felt malnourished of meaning, that he was starving for a way to be of use. Hunger is essentially an issue of absence. Kristoff offered Mr. Loving the sustenance of purpose. We don’t have to have a column in the New York Times to quell the hunger pains of others nor do we need to have a subscription to Times Select to have our appetites satiated. We just need a bumper crop of something and an empty basket. Zucchini might be a gateway drug or it might be the end of the line. Whatever its role in the story, zucchini matters.

Bling on the Blog, Part 2: Lady of the Bling

In the article “Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary,” Jack Hitt wrote about the many faces of Hillary Clinton. What made this different from the volumes written about the subject was that instead of being an analysis of her fractured personalities, it was an exploration of our often-frenetic perceptions. There are very few people in this world that skirt the abyss of neutral emotions where most of us reside in others’ consciousness. Hillary is one of these people. Paris Hilton is another.

I have strong, negative reactions towards both of these women. Mentioning their names or their latest escapades will often elicit facial contortions of the snarling variety that I normally reserve only for practitioners of the most heinous acts. Clinton has called herself a Rorschach test, casting herself in the malleable role of inkblot to be interpreted by our creative fears, doubts, and antipathies. This week, as I have ranted and raved about Paris Hilton’s latest adventures with the criminal justice system, the Paris Hilton Rorschach of my mind has exposed some of the uglier sides of my personality.

When I heard that she was being forced to return to jail, I clapped my hands with glee. This was a victory for accountability, and in a society with a perverted criminal justice system, there’s nothing wrong with that. It got a lot worse, though. Later, I read out the accounts of her tearful courtroom pleas and mocked her for crying out for her mother. I cheered for someone’s fear; I made fun of a frightened young woman asking for her mother. What in the world does that say about me? Why would she inspire such cruelty? Why do I even care enough to waste my energy being so hateful?

It’s because I do not see Paris Hilton as a human being. Instead, she is a representation of the things that I find the most distasteful about a society that gives free clothes to heiresses. She spits on the face of the false notion of meritocracy; she is an acid trip of the American dream, and a bad one to boot. However, the hallucinatory image of Hilton, while carefully crafted by her phalanx of publicists, depends upon our participation in having our perceptions contorted.

Hilton now sits in her cell, apparently the lucky recipient of a timely religious conversion. She expresses surprise at all the media interest in her case and tells us that there are more important things to worry about than her—the war in Iraq, for example. Whether her overnight acquisitions of both depth and self-reflexivity are genuine or, probably more likely, the result of a carefully crafted plan to reshape her image, she is right. There are more important things to worry about than her. We should worry about what she inspires in us.

Bling on the Blog, Part 1: Lord of the Bling

Once its inhabitants have vacated the space, a skull becomes a multi-functional object. From Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to museum curators in Cambodia’s Killing Fields, individuals have put the empty shell of human life to decorative use. Former BritArt brat packer, Damien Hirst, follows in this illustrious tradition with his latest work, a platinum cast human skull studded with 8,601 diamonds. In the same way that traffic around an accident will slow to a snail’s pace due to individuals’ tacit desire to witness tragedy and even death, Hirst’s work is frightening and fascinating, repulsive and attractive.

The sight of the diamond-studded cranium, entitled For the Love of God, inspires more than primal fears and fascination of death. It also taps into our own sense of self-importance, lending credence to the belief that a skull acts as a representation of human identity. A world away from genocide memorials, some of which in Rwanda include rows and rows of anonymous skulls with visible machete blows or head scarves still wrapped around them, Hirst’s skull basks in its individuality, radiant in its platinum casting and diamond adornment. More than an elegy to the 18th century man who once inhabited the shape that is now dotted with diamonds, this piece is a celebration of the value of individual life.

It evokes the visceral reaction of a mother looking at her child for the first time, casting an eye on all the terrifying potential and magnitude of a life that has yet to be lived. It is beautiful. I am frightened by it. I want to see it shine. The empty and evocative vestige of who we once may have been, a skull offers no hints to the untrained eye of what was once thought and tasted, heard and said within the now vacant borders of bone and gap, white and black, cavernous shadow framed by the fragile shell that once held together life.

The skull is an empty canvas of potential framed by the unknown confines of a life already lived. Hirst chose to paint an image of beauty and radiant splendor, simultaneously conjuring that which is impermanent and that which is eternal about a human life. This work could be seen as a triumph of capitalism. The artist has become so enormously wealthy that he funded the project himself and claims to not know where on the spectrum of twenty to thirty million dollars the cost of his creation lies. It could also be seen as a triumph of vision, illustrating the true value we place on those we love and the priceless quality of one human life.

Bread and Orchids

I have a black thumb. In fact, I have two of them. My freshman year of college, I watched a cactus wither away and die due to my neglect and subsequently gave up on plants. Shortly after returning to Belfast, however, a friend gave me an orchid as a house warming present. Knowing my dangerous apathy towards flora, she gave me very specific watering instructions and then added, “Don’t worry if you kill it, everything dies in the end anyway.” Assured with the knowledge that this poor plant’s death wouldn’t be my fault but was instead its destiny, I diligently cared for those shockingly violet flowers until I went on vacation. When I returned, the flowers had crumpled into a sad mauve rendition of their once vibrant plumage and I decided to let nature take its course and let the little flowers disappear into the dust from which they had come.

There are many things that I hold dear. Friends, family, good wine, well-spiced food, the hope of decent political candidates, the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, strong coffee, and jazz to name a few. Plants that need tending do not rank on even the longest version of this list. This past week, however, I have found myself spending an hour a day watering flowers. My fiance Gareth and I are house-sitting for his parents with our one responsibility being to make sure the plants don’t die. Neither of his parents really believe we are up to the task. Being stubborn as hell, I’m trying to prove them wrong. Each day I am there, I find a new little plant hiding in some previously unexplored corner of the house that has absolutely no need for greenery, taunting me with the fact that its life is in my not-so-capable or caring hands.

Gareth’s parents love those plants. I feel that each day that I wrestle with the hose to reach a far away seedling and wrestle with my conscience to not just walk away from the watering can and go to the beach. It has become a meditative task. I think of his parents while I am doing their chores and think about the things that they hold dear and what they struggle to keep alive. I think of the flimsy foundations on which we build our faith and the fault lines on which we erect the altars to worship whatever it is that we hold to be of value. The wind at their house can get so strong that they sometimes struggle to get out the door and into the car in the morning. And yet they plant daisies in the yard.

Loving something, loving anything is the bread that sustains us, it is the act that makes us human. I doubt that I will ever have a neatly trimmed lawn or take to tending roses. Tonight, however, a friend gave me a bouquet of lilies and before I went to bed, I mixed its food and gave it water and cut off the edges of the stems and even remembered to put it in the vase afterwards. Understanding what other people love doesn’t mean that we have to change who we are in order to share in their passions but it might change us all the same, it might even enhance our own humanity. At the very least, in my case, it’s let a few more flowers live to see another day. And that’s a small good thing.