confessio, spring 2006

Love, undistracted, would add up to:

not undressing You
not the inward smile turned into exemplary sneer
not letting loose one single, wild
Thought
of being the measure of all things
or of wallowing in thick self-loathing.
(but I have, and have offended)

not misnaming Them
not the ill-timed blurting of a verdict too soon reached
not baptizing with an ardent
Word
the kiss that leaves to count its silver,
and dangle in asphyxiating fault.
(but I have, and have offended)

not cutting Her off
not the heedless swipe of plastic, the guzzling of gas
not parading for notice the
Deed
which for Love should go untrumpeted...
but I have, and have offended
by what I have
Done
and left
(the devotion of dishwashing and rinsing the sink
the letter to the editor
the yellow post-it thanks for sharing this room
the silent praise for a gold-grey sunrise
the willing suspension of huff and hearing Him out
the question that sues for research)
Undone.

highway, spring 2006

I have seen the highway
drawn up short
near the sidewalk
to plod
past horses with iron-ringed mouths
the grey courthouse in the shade,
the creak of front porch swings, peeling white
and the buzz of the barber shop.
Then, with a snort,
and a head-toss toward the last red light
it takes to the turf,
a full gallop--
where the green overgrows its fences,
driving in waves
toward unbolted blue and gold.

verge, spring 2003

a drop of water
stares out
from shower wall:
translucent iris
penetrating,
fixed fast on me
while others slip down,
drop their gaze.

say profundity
is a single
droplet, stretched
full to the brim
with light pictures
compressed
and hanging
from the faucet,
ready for release.

say tragedy
is a water balloon
ripe for contact
with skin and sunny
afternoon,
warily kept
from mirth's
twinkling eyes
and spraying laughter.

say the eye
itching to well up,
spill its guts
is the greatest
intensity -
passion's red,
undeclared presence
possible in torrents
still pent up.

then in a fixing stare,
anticipation
has me
wet-eyed, willing,
anchored
to wall or faucet -
water balloon
that never breaks
or flies.

untitled, fall 2002

These linear days
tread on cracking sidewalks.
Routed through fraying circuit wires,
they plot the hours on fading axes.
Columns of pixels, rows
chronicle the hours, until system failure
shuts down the status quo
and chaos pushes
off
     the
            last
                    abacus
                                 bead.

Then there is
the disappearance of whole species -
erosion layer by layer
of nonrenewable fossil fuels.
Forged only for Time's use,
the great Chain of existence
begins to snap,
the links traveling one-way
to
    disjoint
             nodes
                     of not
                               being.

This succession
of inevitable will-be's
teases thought away from comprehension -
in full, present, circles.
The disjoint not-being
curls up and finds a corner to nap in.
Content to trace the creases in my palm,
I walk along the unraveling road,
pulling
        on a
              loose
                    sweater
                            thread.

Stiff leaf veins
are still giving themselves
to impermanent death.
Resonant strings play a canon
not yet broken from song's exhaustion.
Out on the ocean, where it meets
the sky, the vagrant horizon waits.
My laugh-lines deepen
as I
    navigate,
           make
                 for its
                          eternity.

marian thoughts

Several years ago, while visiting Washington state family and friends, I went with a close friend from high school to see the "Bodies" exhibit in Seattle. A controversial German gentleman who developed a process known as polymer relacement for preserving organic tissue had prepared all the bodies the exhibit.  I had been reading about the Desert Fathers, whose movement Henri Nouwen sums up in three disciplines: solitude, silence, and prayer.  Being at this "Bodies" exhibit invited us into just such a desert space, and caused us to gaze in wonder and quiet at the mystery that is the human creature.  Each person shuffling about in that gallery was forced  to be alone in a way--to confront his or her own fragility in pleasant, quiet bewilderment ("how fearfully and wonderfully we are made!").  There were two exhibits I found so beautiful that they were painful: a tiny progression of fetuses that had died of natural causes in utero. It seemed to me that each woman caught her breath a little when she came to them. The other was the of the vascular systems surrounding the heart.  Its funny, because when you see these things a tiny part of you wants to deny that this is how you are inside--that you are not made of any stronger stuff.  You almost want to walk away in protest, as if burying these bodies out of sight would erase the fact of decay that no one (except these preserved ones) will escape.  But your curiosity gets the better of you, and you find yourself being careful that no aspect of the human spinal cord go missed or wasted by you.  It is humbling, but you almost have to stare and stare. You remind yourself that down on the street, as you wait in your warm coat for the crosswalk and charmed by the lovely New Year's displays in store windows, these things that you can now see so clearly will be no less true about you--your brief, temporary tendons and muscles are still knit together quite literally by a Someone you have never seen.  Something visceral and in the bones wants to resist this knowledge, this awful fragility, but in the end it must always resolve in an "amen": "May it be to me as you have said." My thoughts returned to Mary again, several weeks after Christmas.  Most of us will never be faced with an angel bringing weighty news like that she received, but every day there are these moments where we can either choose denial or a full affirmation of what has been revealed to us as our true situation: "I am the Lord's servant.  May it be to me as you have said."

I wrote this after seeing the exhibit, and wanted to archive it here.

"Bodies," Seattle, January 2007

I will not speak for hours
but hear deep, gurgled things
between my pelvis and my throat.
I saw a woman springing forward,
fertile, dance high-heeled
with a rubber-coated man whose small,
flaccid member made her giggle.
She could not tear her eyes from him,
admiring his peeled-back buttocks,
the prowess of his perpetual lunge.
A longer man recoiled
from two, white, fatty half-orbs:
a convex invitation punctuated by a nipple.
He grimaced unawares, shuffled over
to another woman and lost himself
in her fallopian links and smiled,
coming to the brief fairway of a uterus.
I saw one child behold another
smaller than a silver dollar,
curled upon itself like a jelly bean.
A narrow void above my groin
and through my abdomen stirred.
I followed yards of empty, looped intestine
whose latex sheen like a used glove
alarmed me.
I saw a fragile forest
of red and blue stemming downward
from a pulsing firmament;
I climbed their lichened branches
into all the hollow chambers of the heart.
Myriad pipes and conduits moved me up
from visceral heaviness
to where grey and lofty matters sit
rippling, electric clouds.
Sometimes from there the eyes flash,
heat and sound let loose upon the world--
some say it is the seat of God.
I saw it there in glass and light,
and I will not speak for hours.

take up your cross

What did Christ mean when he told his disciples that anyone following him must "take up his cross and follow me"? I cannot follow in sandaled feet down dusty Palestinian roads with nothing but the clothes on my back: too many things call me back to my own continent, my livelihood, my books and belongings, my family. For those that could, and did, leave everything to take up the burden of discipleship during those uncertain times, what did it do to their families? Did they ever go back to fishing for a living? This is not the first time I've wondered about this, of course, but the first time that the real weight of adulthood, sitting squarely on my shoulders, has made me wonder what other burdens might take its place, what lighter or heavier loads might eventually rest there. What cross is mine to take up now, and where must I go with it?

I didn't think of anything in my life as much of a cross to bear while growing up, even as I heard sermons and lessons about it. By the end of college, I had come to identify the pervasive loneliness that had crept over me and settled for four years--a loneliness I knew would only leave with the arrival of romance--as my cross to bear. All else was really right in my life, and this one thing the source of pain, fatigue, and emotional splinters in my side. To call it a cross was my way of acknowledging its very real presence, while propelling myself forward out of self-pity and debilitating self-awareness. When romance did come, and stayed, life was suddenly more bearable, and I more resilient. We might say that carrying a burden strengthens a person in specific ways, but most of us are (and ought to be) relieved to find our tasks simpler and more fluid when we are free to perform them without the extra weight.

If I had to guess, I would say that my cross now is my work: a constant source of dissatisfaction, it daily steals my joy and makes me feel...so...old and uninspired. Short of that, all else is basically well. So how should I bear that cross? I put it down, kick it around, complain of splinters, and then pick it up again for a few more hours. I "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," and grudgingly, but what in my work is God's and ought to be rendered more cheerfully?

dewdrop inn

Just around the corner from the National WWII Museum on Andrew Higgins Street in New Orleans, I found a small, transient installation at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), worth mentioning. It should be said first that the D-Day Museum, aptly located in the old Higgins boat factory that produced so many of the boats that landed on the beaches of Europe, is itself a must-see. My husband loves to revisit it each time we come to New Orleans, and I have been three times myself. Still, there is nothing, for me, like running smack into the very creative, even irreverent cultural forces that are allowed to proliferate because so many men and women of the Greatest Generation dared to defy fascism; I crave the logical incongruity of an art museum just after my veins have been swelled with patriotic pride, and so I often go to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, or the CAC, while my husband rehashes the beaches of Normandy. He is rediscovering how the free world was dearly bought, while I am preoccupied, in the borrowed words of Lorraine Hansberry's Asagai (from "A Raisin in the Sun"), with "what the New World hath wrought."

On this particular occasion, I happened into Thomas Woodruff's "Freak Parade" exhibition, described as an "ambitious and dazzling parade of images that celebrates beauty in aberrance. ...a reaction against the global standardization of culture."

Himself a tattoo artist with a cult following in the alternative art community, Woodruff "hybridizes vocabularies past and present, ...references sideshow banners, Pompeian wall frescoes, baroque religious paintings, theatrical posters, and Victorian penmanship charts to create a new yet oddly familiar world." Stepping into this world, my mental iPod cued up an album from Beats Antique, whose fans include members of the steampunk movement and others, like my husband, whose ears constantly itch for innovation and reinvention--for what is best in music from all times and places. This, it occurred to me, was the perfect auditory companion for the 34-piece parade of Woodruff's protesting imagination, congenial in its love of anachronisms and juxtaposition, borrowing much (and without apology) from surrealism and romanticism, and any other -ism you can draw connection with.

Almost as quickly, I yearned for the Ed Hardy t-shirt sitting in my suitcase in the hotel--a hand-me-up from my taller, younger sister who had found it on sale and decided it was too much for her. Another of my sisters, who had bought herself one during the same spree, had no such buyer's remorse, and bubbled about Christian Audigier's artistic vision and collaboration with tattoo artist Don
Ed Hardy to bring about rhinestone-studded, folk-urban, uncommonly attractive and too-expensive t-shirts that flaunted their cultural collage in the street. I decided it was not too much for me, and since it was free, I was spared the moral dilemma of how much it might have cost. I once heard literary critic Stanley Fish take this question head-on, however, and though he was speaking about preserving the intellectual freedom of the academy and the value of a liberal arts education, I think it can be applied here to art in general: "these things belong to an economy of waste, and that in itself is gorgeous and valuable."

I found myself wondering, while hearing Fish speak, and relishing Woodruff's canvases, what business an incarnational and patriotic worldview might have in the same room with the surreal, and the irreverent. And then I am reminded of Heironymous Bosch and his famous Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, or of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Pied Beauty." In each of these works, I find a deeply moral impulse, even though the aesthetic is very much centered on what is "counter, original, spare." The place of the surreal in the mind of the Christian seems tenuous, even nonexistent, when those who dominate the marketplace of Christian art insist on trying to "paint the world without the Fall" (Thomas Kinkade), or otherwise sanitize the problem of evil, suffering, the nature of God, and the person of Christ himself. But perhaps there is room for the strange, the other, if we consider the world of our own imaginations, and the world of dreams. One would be hard-pressed to name a single prophetic vision accounted in the Bible that didn't seem at least a bit surreal. I think that G.M.H. sums it up well in these lines, where he even seems to affirm that the created world itself yields up anomalies that, in their strangeness and imperfection, retain their beauty and dignity, and point to the original Mind that spoke them into being. If we do the same, we are no less imitators of God.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

13. Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

All that said, I recommend that you do drop in to see the exhibit for $3, which runs until 24 October.

the myth of sisyphus

My life as Sisyphus began in the Army. If I ever felt that my work was meaningless or menial before that, I don't remember it. I undertook the first few years quite seriously, rolling my proverbial boulder up the hill, and watching it roll back down again. I am pretty sure I skipped and clicked my heels downhill after it, glistening and eager to roll it back to the top again. Then, I began to race myself, and race others. I got a kick out of showing how fast I could roll that rock back to the top, and how I could run to beat it back to the bottom. At some point, this drill began to take a physical toll on me, and gradually an emotional toll, too. I barely recognize myself anymore. There are moments when the pointlessness of my work washes over me, and threatens to tell my entire life as a joke with no punch line. In such moments, tears spring up out of nowhere, much to the consternation of my peers, superiors, and subordinates. I am usually at a loss to explain why I am on the verge of tears, but true to form, I try: I roll my oversized burden back up the hill, huffing and puffing and trying to demonstrate the absurdity of it. I am going through the motions, and I don't know how much longer I can hold up. I keep waiting for someone to tell me, "you don't have to roll that boulder up the hill anymore--what idiot told you to do it in the first place?" No such luck. I am doomed, like Sisyphus, to spend what seems like an eternity fully aware of the pointlessness of my existence, but unable to stop rolling the damn rock up the hill, and trailing it back down to its starting place again.

The day I was introduced to Sisyphus, by way of Camus, is burned into my brain. It was my high school English class, and we had just finished Shakespeare's "Hamlet." We were preparing to segway into Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrans and Guildenstern are Dead," but first, my teacher wanted to mark the philosophical shift into postmodernism. It was a grey, moisture-saturated morning outside, and cool--I wondered if the weather had made coordination with the lesson for that day. The starkness of existentialism as a philosophy struck me first, and then the unbearable weight of it. I did not think that it was viable as a worldview, but the beautiful cynics I had met so far in my life (people who were both real and fictitious, sitting one desk over from me in class or soliloquizing in movies and books) made more sense to me because of it. My brush with existentialism spawned an "Aha!" moment: I now trusted my first hunch, which was to value these people for their awareness, and the fearless resignation with which they called everybody's bluff. I even saw a connection to biblical wisdom, in which the writer of Ecclesiastes laments, "Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!...What does man gain from all his labor?" (from chapter one)

One summer in college, I picked up a book by the Austrian-born, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, called I and Thou. His brand of religious existentialism impressed me, especially how he could boil down all of ontology into the "I-It" and "I-Thou" relationship. His work was an exploration of how the self relates to the world, in either an “I-Thou” or an “I-It” relationship, which demonstrates how I value other beings around me. Rather than seeing myself in an “I-It” relationship with my work or my fellow beings, it was a dynamic, fundamentally relational endeavor that required me to operate in an “I-Thou” mindset at every turn. Buber was also concerned with how we label things, claiming that when we call things by their true names, we have power to transform and change them, and to be changed by them, as well (1923, p. 59).

It was Buber who confirmed my suspicions that we too often treat other human beings as resources to be appropriated, rather than as image-bearers of God who carry the divine spark within them, no matter how far hidden or snuffed out it may seem. It was also Buber who helped anchor my sense of how the moral imperatives of Christianity could be freeing rather than cumbersome. Inasmuch as charity and humility enable the Christian to hold the fleeting things of earth lightly, with an open hand, they can also free her from the perceptual tyranny of the urgent and the myopia of the fractured Self, who does not know her place in the world, but insists on being the center of everything. “How may a man who lives in arbitrary self-will become aware of freedom?” Buber asked (1923, p. 59). A piercing question. "...arbitrary self-will and fate, soul's spectre and world's nightmare, endure one another, living side by side and avoiding one another, without connexion or conflict, in meaninglessness--till in an instant there is confused shock of glance on glance, and confession of their non-salvation breaks from them"(Buber, 1923, p. 59).

This self-will is the unexamined, impulsive life, driven by unchecked fears and desires typical to all of us. I have become aware of my own compulsion, and that of others, to make meaning out of the meaningless everyday by imposing our own sheer will upon it--crushing it, impressing others around us to do the same, until we think we have made it matter. I am beginning to see my stupidity in this project, with wet and swollen eyes, far more clearly than I have seen it before. What I do continues to mean very little in the world, though I work for and with people who want everything we do to matter far too much. I always thought that to feel this way was to flirt with depression and social subversion, and on this account I have had difficulty simply stating the utter despair I feel when I think about my daily routine. When my husband is away, which he is rarely, I think it becomes more acute. The seasons, on the other hand, apparently have little to do with it; my work feels meaningless all year round. Sometimes I wonder if it would seem more meaningful if I deployed overseas, but many who return from war tell me that they, too, are often overwhelmed by the sense that their sacrifices and hardships endured there were also senseless and fruitless. All that I know is that I wonder daily, hourly, what hellians will swoop down, who will sound the alarm or publicly denounce me if one day I simply stop rolling the rock up the hill, up the hill, up the hill...

of cabbages and kings

Earlier this week I had a disturbing exchange with a senior officer who is not my direct supervisor but nevertheless holds significant sway over my tasks, evaluations, and future job opportunities in the unit. He was in a particularly jovial mood, and stopped to ask me why I looked so tired. "Aren't you getting enough sleep?" he asked. This was a loaded question, since he has been monitoring leader resiliency in our organization. My current job placement is a departure from the usual competitive track, and was designed to allow me to regroup and complete my master's degree while maximizing time with family prior to any future deployment.

I explained that I usually sleep 7 hours per night, but that I rarely feel rested, and that I feel more like a thirty-something than a twenty-something. "Well, you look about 30 to me," he laughed, "so at least you look younger than you feel!" Several pairs of ears who had been tuning in to our conversation now became raised eyebrows. "That's so wrong, Sir!" I laughed, but could feel the resentment welling up. I have often wondered aloud whether leaders like him can see past the shiny veneer they create in their organizations, to look into the faces of the people who make it all possible. Surely our dissatisfaction, exhaustion, and existential crises all register there and must count for something? Do such leaders ever wonder about their own contribution to that angst? Here was evidence, it seemed, that at least this one did, but having weighed things in the balance, he came out believing that I, not he, was most likely to blame: "are you getting enough sleep?"

I should have offered, in support of my next statement, that at least I had stopped crying on a weekly basis at work, and this was significant, given my history of chronic stress and borderline depression in this unit. I started to remind him, with a smile, that we haven't achieved the best track record for taking care of our people (deferring their education, calling them in to work at odd hours for trivial things, making 14 hour workdays the norm for leaders). "I can't fix what happened in the past!" he responded, still jovial. He was consummately comfortable greasing the propaganda machine, and well aware of the eyes and ears around us.

"But what if stress is like a hot weather injury?" I asked, accessing one of his favorite safety sermons. "What if it's cumulative? It probably takes time to reverse its effects!"

It should be noted that this sustained volley of debate with junior officers is not typical of every officer at his rank. That, at least, is hopeful. Knowing from experience that the majority of eyes and ears in the room were on my side, I offered that maybe it would get better when I moved to a new duty station. This triggered a litany of examples demonstrating how the "grass ain't always greener." Some of the examples included peers of mine who left the unit for greener pastures and found themselves, as it were, out of the frying pan, into the fire.

The propaganda machine, it seemed, was reaching its zenith for the day, and the conversation shifted abruptly to other things. I felt like the oyster who tried to sound the alarm, as one by one the others left their oyster bed to be devoured in Lewis Carroll's poem, "The Walrus and the Carpenter." I had not been hustled, but had anyone else heard me?

Mostly, though, I had the nagging feeling that I had been sized up as a potential hustlee, who could get other oysters to march with me. Did I appear that foolish? Could I enter the propaganda machine, and join in all the talk of "shoes, and ships, and sealing wax" as if they were all interchangeable things, of equal value? In the currency of organizational culture, this is what happens all too often. We equate people with positions, skills, and identifiers while trying to talk about them as multidimensional human beings with souls and families and ambitions and limits. It is no wonder that "smart career move" becomes synonymous with "rough home life" by lunchtime, and "you don't want it bad enough" and "poor time management" become the best excuses for superiors to blame subordinates for their own management failures. The result is that we don't listen to the people who do the legwork of our organizations, instead presenting them with rigged scenarios and fear-mongering to keep them from leaving for a better work environment or job satisfaction.

I payed attention in my philosophy survey course, and I like to think I can smell a false dilemma a mile away. What is saddens me is how many older, "wiser" people have felt it necessary to administer them to me or my peers and subordinates. It always sounds benign enough: "Well you know, [that other job you want] can be really stressful, too. I know someone who left it to come here because they couldn't take the stress and time away from home." This is unfortunate, because it overlooks what is arguably the most important thing about one's work: a sense of calling, of aptitude and of personal satisfaction. This vocational imperative is often worth more to people than all the money, job security and praise in the world. This means that the person who is working in his or her vocation is likely to be more motivated, adept, and resilient. It is entirely possible then, that one set of work conditions is ill-suited to one person, but advantageous and desirable for another. In this sense, when my commander and I talk about career progression and opportunity on the one hand, and my personal vocation on the other, we are each comparing cabbages and kings, and can never agree.

Despite the current job market slump, which is a small factor in my decision to give the Army another two years, it bothers me how many times people try to convince each other to stay in, for fear of not finding a job on the outside. At twenty-something, if someone considers you talented and competent, they don't tell you, essentially, not to look for better circumstances than the ones you've got--unless they have ulterior motives. It's generally understood that it's just too early in life to settle for less than your best.

I can't blame anyone who scouts for talent and strives to retain quality and experience within their organization. It's self-interest and loyalty that drive this process, and both are healthy impulses, but healthy self-interest should also drive individuals to bargain for more favorable working conditions within their organization. The take-it-or-leave-it approach to hiring only works for people with an external locus of control--people who have left themselves no other option. Organizational culture should be flexible enough to find the best conditions for its members, since this has long been associated with productivity. When organizational culture does not work for individuals, people can leave and market their skills elsewhere.

So, the false dilemma that forces a twenty-something with marketable skills and well-honed aspirations to choose between the monster she knows or the monster she doesn't know is a sham, and a poor recruitment or retention strategy. I am just glad to have the cognitive tools to call this one what it is.

apple and eve

My husband was too quiet, his eyes concealed behind sunglasses he hadn't even wanted to buy, much less wear. He was thinking, it seemed to me, of how to avoid kicking something, and terribly focused on just breathing. I am always caught off-guard by the physical discomfort I experience in the rare moments when I know he is choosing his next words carefully.

I thought this punishment extreme for my "offense," and told him so. "I told you not to do it," he breathed, "and you did it anyway!" I had thought he might be a little upset. I had miscalculated. More than six months I had deliberated--and he had been privy to it--smiling while telling me firmly, "this discussion doesn't matter, because you're not going to do this."

I suppose I should have known he was serious. The smiling threw me off, because it usually accompanies all kinds of admonishments to slow down, relax, and lay my burdens down. My husband knows that I am calibrated to run circles around him most days, and that his job is to find the button, switch, or turnkey that will shut me down when I simply cannot. He smiles in such moments because he also knows that some days he might as well stop the wind from blowing or the tide from coming in.

I was serious, too. I began to entertain the idea at first because I just couldn't keep up with my own default setting. My life had begun to outstrip my stamina, between the bills, the messages, the calls, the to-dos... Then it occurred to me that it would be nice, to be able to hold and polish all that concerned me in he palm of my hand. The risks--and the price--of such convenience weighed on my mind. To hold so much information so readily would make that information not only more accessible and useful, but so precious and easily lost or misused.

It wasn't until later that what I will call the shinyness of it began to grow on me. I want to be clear about this and say that it was first convenience, and later the shinyness. It makes me feel more justified and less shallow...somehow less easily led astray. The shinyness lay in that I would be able to see and hear and do so much with the touch of a finger, that I could customize and accessorize and somehow make a statement about my life and why it mattered. Neither the convenience nor the shinyness mattered now, and neither gave me any comfort in the face of this silence and this breathing. I had shattered some idyllic dream of his, and the world would now be different.

I laid on the bed next to where he sat, the sweat of a day's work pouring off of him. I could see the accusation in his eyes now: he had been slaving away to impose order on chaos, to turn a profit while I had frivolously been throwing it away. Indignation rose into my throat, and I reminded him that I, too, toil to make our living, and that my work in part had motivated my choice. I could not even look at the thing I had brought into our home--it sat lifeless on the bed between us. My eyes were glued to his, which were staring at the wall.

He looked down at the bed, over at me, and picked up my new iPhone. I could tell that my husband, the ludite technophile, was conflicted in this moment. He had never even wanted a cell phone. When his Army instructors cajoled him into getting one when we were brand new lieutenants, he had "stuck it to the man" by buying the cheapest, most obscenely large, brick of a phone he could find. This is also the man who convinced his roommate to heft a typewriter to class in protest against the laptop girl who clicked and clacked a little too loudly in our "Milton and the 17th Century" class in college. Setting the margins as small as they would go in order to maximize the bing! that punctuated every sentence, he even duped the professor, who just laughed and baptized the obnoxious behavior as a clever ludite protest. At the same time, he is the techie who introduced me to StumbleUpon, Skype, Newsmap and Pandora. I can't even listen to Aphex Twin without the music seeming to paint images of his face in my mind, I feel so indebted to his obsession with the marriage of art and technology.

Now, he browsed the first page of apps, without looking at me once. He sighed deeply. In that sigh, I sensed some lofty, dying desire that the two of us would, on a whim, sell all our worldly possessions to go live in the mountains, or go halfway around the world. We would subsist in a desert, like monks, meditating on all the great books and wines and cigars we had ever sampled, without consuming more than the bare necessities ever again. Stripped of everything, we would feed on our rich inner lives and be able to enjoy each other's company unhindered by the world and its ploys, its crassness, its responsibilities. Perhaps in his sigh was also the knowledge that one more radiation source had just been added to our daily routine. With this, the fear of succumbing to brain cancer or distracted driving crept to the forefront of my thoughts, as I watched his fingers learn their way around YouTube and the stock quotes on the smooth touch-screen.

I was fairly certain that I had not been motivated by vanity, even as I knew that it was not modesty, contentment, or survival that had motivated me, either. I had wanted to a tool that would enable me to manage my life more calmly and happily. I wanted maps, answers, raw data, transaction and relationships at my fingertips, because life as I wanted to live it demanded this. I laughed as I watched him nibble at the idea of this new reality, hoping that with time he would only see that it was good. He threw a fiery glance my way, and I was quiet. I hoped that this was not going to get us expelled from our thus far paradaisical experience of marriage.

ticket to ride

On my kitchen table there is CD that is not just a CD. It is a ticket to ride, by train, boat, or anything else that travels along the surface of the earth. It can take you almost anywhere, as long as you are in no rush, and provided you don't have to fly. It's white and deceptively blank-looking, with ADVENTURES 2009-2010 scrawled on it. It records the trips my husband and I have taken since last fall...many of which we will remember even in our old age.This past Christmas, after hoofing it to midnight mass in Jackson Square, we took a train from New Orleans to D.C. to see my mom's side of the family.We hadn't seen them since her funeral two years ago. The romance of the rails was everything we hoped it'd be and more...but I especially appreciated the time to think, decompress, and prepare to see the people I love most. As we left the levees of Lake Ponchartrain I kept Willie Nelson's famous song, "The City of New Orleans" on my brain. As we made our way north to where the snow swished across the tracks connecting small- town America, the towns and stations we passed looked like so many ceramic collectible scenes, warm-lit, nestled in their winterscapes.

Months later, when we celebrated our anniversary in Mexico, we went by ship, and I appreciated this slower, almost premodern mode of travel for the same reason. I have a hard time leaving work at work, and being stranded on board a ship or on a train is perfect for making me leave it all behind. During that trip, I finally got to see the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, and my skin crawled with how alive the place still felt. The temple pyramid of the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl rang with echos as we stood before it and clapped--echos that sounded like the call of the Quetzal bird and the flurry of feathers. It was no longer a wistful, grainy image in a textbook, as it had been all my life. I was reminded of deferred dreams of teaching language and literature in Spanish and English, both on hold for awhile while I'm in combat boots.


In many ways traveling by these older modes of travel took me back to a time when steel and steam were at the cutting edge of progress, when everything that now seems slow and cumbersome by comparison was shiny and swift. I went back in time in other ways: back to my mom's childhood, back to the birthplace of America...

workplace angst

I ran into something today that helped me make some sense of my Army experience so far. I just completed 3 years of active service, and though I still have not deployed, I feel like I've been in a war zone in some ways. People close to me know that I've spent most of my three years in a unit with a demanding operational tempo and a less than enjoyable organizational culture. I have run into a lot of peers from ROTC, OCS, and USMA that express similar frustration from other units they've seen, although most affirm that they have seen units where life and work were far more enjoyable and meaningful.

The multiple hypotheses of this article can be summarized in the following sentence:

Subordinates with high self-esteem and an internal locus of control experience decreased motivation and increased stress when their supervisor exercises coercive, perceived, legitimate, reward, expert and referent power.

(I think this means that subordinates with high self-esteem, who like to self-determine and influence others, are often stressed and demoralized by supervisors who use coercion, rewards, status, and even professional expertise to heavily influence their subordinates.)

This made sense to me, and it happens that the kind of leadership described here as stressful and demotivating to someone like me is the very kind of leadership most often displayed and valued in my organization, and possibly in the Army (the article differentiates between high and low self esteem, and internal and external locus of control--in both cases I identify myself with the former type of subordinate). To me, it doesn't really matter that my bosses usually emerge with a high estimate of me and of my work: the angst I carry most days is not worth even the highest praise. One day, I plan to work someplace where I don't constantly have to translate myself into an adverse organizational culture. But for the meantime, I've decided to extend my active service obligation by a few years, so I need to find a way to do that with less wheel-spinning. I am trying to identify some strategies to cope successfully and not lose my mind!

I'm not sure that all workplaces are fraught with these issues, but I imagine to some extent they exist anywhere. The real meat of the article begins on p. 362, and here is an interesting clip about control in the workplace, from which I removed all the cumbersome citations for easier reading:

"People have different beliefs about the factors responsible for what happens to them. Those with an internal locus of control (internals) view what happens to them as primarily under their own control, whereas those with an external locus of control (externals) view what happens to them as determined by factors outside themselves and beyond their control. ... internals are more likely than externals to be in managerial positions and to try to influence the behavior of others. In contrast, externals are more likely to accept attempts by others to influence them, and respond more positively to directive leadership style. Further, internals are more likely to take actions to cope with stress, whereas externals are more likely to endure rather than to act. Overall, internals tend to have a higher desire than externals for personal control in the workplace.

Given these differences between internals and externals, it is hypothesized that internals are generally less receptive to supervisor power than externals, especially to supervisor reward, coercive, legitimate, and referent power. Not only do internals have a tendency to obtain and exert personal control, but they also tend to resist attempts by others to influence them. Therefore, internals might need less supervision from their supervisors than externals and may even perceive the exercising of supervisory power as unnecessary and unwanted, which could lower their motivation and increase stress levels. It can be argued, however, that internals would be more receptive to the supervisor's expert power than externals. Given internals' tendency to perceive situations as controllable and their preference for taking constructive actions to resolve problems in the workplace, they are more likely to appreciate and make use of their supervisors' professional knowledge and expertise to solve problems and improve performance. As a result, internals are likely to react positively to high expert power of the supervisor, especially given their relatively stronger belief that good performance will lead to rewards."

A very interesting dichotomy, to say the least.

References

A. R. Elangovan, Jia Lin Xie. Effects of Perceived Power of Supervisor on Subordinate Stress and Motivation: The Moderating Role of Subordinate Characteristics. Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 20, No. 3 (May, 1999), pp. 359-373

pitter patter

I had the immense privilege today of accompanying a friend and coworker to her ultrasound. That we had to drive 2 hours to get to this appointment should tell you something about just how rural Louisiana can get--how long has ultrasound technology been around? Going in place of her husband, who was very disappointed that he could not get off work to accompany her, I was poised to get the video footage that would make him feel like he hadn't missed this irreplaceable event. (This is especially poignant for this couple, because this pregnancy is the first to successfully pass the first trimester, so this is a story of overcoming odds.)

From the first, tentative images of the baby wiggling around inside of my friend, I found myself referring oddly to this child as "it." Was "it" an alien, or an animal, that this pronoun was appropriate? Of course not, but I didn't know how else to relate. Still, I was captivated as we traced from one human feature to another. Spinal column, upturned nose, flexing ankles and fists... I was one creature beholding another, a new and still-forming life. And then, without warning, we moved to the baby's lower regions, where, prominently displayed, spread-eagle, between (already!) muscular legs was the mark of future manhood. From then on, it was not so hard to talk about hands and diaphragms--they were all his, and he was breathing, moving, living as we watched and held our breaths with anticipation.

Later that evening, with our small group bible study, we talked about how he will reorient the lives of his parents. In a sort of alien invasion, he will reprioritize and reorder the world as they know it, abolishing all notions of "his" and "hers" and "yours" and "mine," becoming the first thing that is totally "ours" for both mom and dad. We laughed about the ways he is already beginning that shift, making way for his arrival. Watch out world! We prayed the following portion of Psalm 139 as an appropriate prayer of thanks for the health and safety of this baby, and for the life given to each of us:

¹³For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother's womb.
¹⁴I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
¹⁶Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.

(from the New American Standard Bible)

becoming "normal"

I have been reading for my Masters in Education program, otherwise known as the MAT@USC. We talk about being sociotechnically literate, and the program is a good example of that, with all its multi-print/media sources and modes of conducting class online. An article by I would like to focus on by Miraca U. M. Gross introduces the central dialectic of identity construction for gifted students. She posits that there are two extremes for identity diffusion that many gifted students tend toward, but advocates a more integrated, socialized, and balanced view of gifted student identity (Gross, 1998). Gross contrasts George Bernard Shaw, who created a "dazzling array of masks" behind which to hide his giftedness, with Einstein and Cyril Joad, who seemed to remove themselves "gently but firmly from the obligations of social intimacy," believing that the "differences between [themselves] and the people with whom [they have] to associate are so much greater than the differences among them, that there is little hope of finding someone with similar values, or beliefs, or interests" (Gross, 1998, p. 8). I have often found myself straddling this line, and have been jealous of others who were better at role experimentation and creating glamorous masks for themselves, or who could get away with being reclusive and people were in awe of them for it. I always had a sense that there was something unhealthy in it, but I envied them because I wasn't any good at role playing or forswearing the company of people altogether. I envied them, but I didn't see a future for myself in their shoes, so I was stuck working out my identity in the context of the people left and right of me.

I was fortunate enough to have several schools and teachers who knew what to do with me, and I made friends with others who learned and developed much like I did in Honors, AP, and special elective classes. But there was always the reality in the hallways, at sports practice after school, even in orchestra or the school play, that not everyone was on the same page. In college it still surprised me to find that my genuine love of learning (I think we talked about the accompanying physiological arousal in the 518 class) was not shared by many of my classmates. I assumed that the love of learning was why you went to college, and yet they were surprised by my caffeinated persona following a good read or an essay test. Gross outlines this difference by saying that "one of the basic characteristics of the gifted is their intensity and an expanded field of their subjective experience" (Piechowski, 1991, p. 181 as quoted in Gross, 1998, p. 5).

Here is where the rubber continues to meet the road for me. In college, I became close friends with my roommate who by her own admission was not academically inclined whatsoever. We became close primarily because she was patient with me while I continued to be myself. I wove into our daily conversations about typical college girl things my reflections on what I was reading, listening to, experiencing in my classes and hobbies. I persevered when I noticed that she was losing interest, either by linking it to something I knew she was genuinely interested in or by giving myself permission to lose her interest--without taking it as a negative assessment of who I was. (I still employ this technique today with friends, bosses and coworkers in the Army, when our interests don't align.) To me, it was a better use of my "giftedness" than to cloister myself away from the women on my hall or prefer only fractured, pedantic relationships with other bookworms like myself. I had sought her out as a socially stabilizing force because I perceived, perhaps selfishly, that she could bring me into a world of relationships that I would otherwise struggle to cultivate on my own. In a sense, I sought her out because she was "normal."

As much as I loved learning, I wanted it to be relevant to the people I was meeting, and I did not want to be consumed by the isolation of my own academic ego and miss out on the pure, wreckless joy and adventure that college friendships could bring. My roommate did just that, introducing me to people I would have barely sought out or talked to otherwise. If I felt they were boring or shallow, it became my challenge to invite them into a deeper dialogue, which I instinctively knew they must have something to contribute to. That was when I stopped envying my more gifted friends and acquaintances who put on masks or withdrew from community. I was watching them become fit only for academia or niche interests, and I couldn't follow them there. I wanted my life to be lived in the arena, inviting others to realize their potential instead of entrenching or flaunting mine. I would like to say that at this point I was unequivocal about my self-acceptance and the social integration of my gifts; however, I recall on several occasions attributing my enjoyment of less intellectual company to the fact that I just wanted as intelligent as my more reclusive or flamboyant friends.

It is only for God (and my employers, perhaps) to know where I fall on the spectrum of giftedness: others are more gifted than I, certainly. The essential thing is that I have known for a long time that I am different than many of the people I run into in life. My moral sense was perhaps the first thing I noticed was heightened compared to many of my grade-school peers, then other acuities followed. This is a classic nature vs. nurture debate as well, which I do not want to explore at the moment--I only know that who/whatever is responsible for my giftedness, I am responsible for revealing the greatest good out of what I was given, for myself and for others. That my roommate could begin to sense this impulse in me--where others wrote me off as nerdy, ostentatious, or even insecure--is half of the miracle of relationship for someone like me. (That said, it still wasn't much fun when, using my normal vocabulary in daily conversation, people often gave me a hard time about using "big words" or being "too excited" about how my theology class related to my Emily Dickenson reading that week.)

Eventually, my roommate began to realize her own unexplored passion for learning, and as her awareness of herself increased, we continued to enjoy the great potential of friendship. I watched her go through a stage of isolation and loneliness as she began to differ from established norms she had taken for granted, and then to flourish as she painfully began to reintegrate herself into our social context as an emerging thinker. She always had an acute moral empathy for others, and she had an exceptional drawing and painting ability, but she had not necessarily been characterized as academically gifted. School continued to be a struggle for her, but she was now aware that substantive learning could occur in many other modes, and that this was attractive and important to her. I think this demonstrates why it would be a mistake to assume that all gifted kids should be kept from interaction with their "normal" peers. Given the right impetus and encouragement, gifted kids can help their peers unlock their own potential, and also benefit from the social interaction that implies.

Finally, most of us will have to work with some "normal" people in the course of our adult lives. My life in the Army has given me painful examples of this, where my analytical, compassionate, and creative impulses have earned me negative social ramifications more than once. Yet I am consistently given more challenging jobs and encouraged to pursue a military career. Someone gifted in the arts and humanities might miss the value in military culture and leadership styles. This can be counteracted to a point through self-reflection, reading the literary works of military thinkers to develop a warrior-scholar paradigm, and appreciating the art-and-science aspects of martial skills. Soldiers will surprise you with their ingenuity, their sometimes beautiful lightning reflexes, their intimate knowledge of equipment, and their logistical sense of the material world by which they live or die. Even the conformist camaraderie of military culture takes on its own life and artfulness from unit to unit, until it can be rightfully called in some cases esprit de corps. (I was so nerdy as to quote the British Romantics to myself while navigating my way through night forests with only my compass and map, to keep from panicking. Similarly, as a cadet, I couldn't march well until I conceptualized the movement as a dance, for which I had prior experience.) If it were not for these kinds of investigations, it would be easy for me to conclude that the people around me were stupid, unimaginative, or base, autocratic literalists. What I have had to perceive over time is that there are many forms of being gifted, and out of sheer necessity some are more valuable in my job than others.

In sum, our definitions of "gifted" and "normal" begin to warp as we place them in close proximity to one another. One realizes that the aim of every human being ought to be social and personal integration, rather than isolation or conformity in either extreme. That each person learns at any age to appreciate solitude and individual pursuits as valuable in and of themselves is vital to identity construction for anyone. In compliment to this, each must learn to appreciate the value of human community as inherently worth the cost, recognizing of course that some communities will always suit her interests and personal growth better than others.

References

Gross, M. (1998). The “me” behind the mask: Intellectually gifted students and the search for Identity. Roeper Review Feb 20 (3).

(-) invective

tell me
without tremors
your sine qua non sobbing--
don't offer
with clenched fists
a cold blanket to wrap up in
against the hurricane
unfurling inside
to wreck all arguments
and make flotsam
out of buoyancy.
spare me
the harsh sand settling--
burying our so-called waterloo
with
finality.

(Written as a perspective meditation from my husband's point of view. He has to put up with too many of my tirades about the Army lately. I think I saw this poem in his eyes this week, bent over the spaghetti he was making, as he asked if I could render the account of my horrible week "without invective.")

past tense: conjugating absence

Today I was talking to my masseuse, oddly enough, about some unpolished silver I have in a drawer, passed from my great grandmother through my mother, to me. We were talking about how tarnished silver has so many fascinating colors, it makes you not want to polish it. I think I feel some kind of compulsion to talk about meaningful, deep things with her because she represents a union of physical and spiritual well-being that can only be described as intentional and, of course, full of meaning. As a result I may force conversation sometimes, trying to appear integrated and whole, when I really come fractured, in knots, and adrift in the world. After all, what you pay a masseuse to do is clearly something you are at least partly missing in your normal daily routine. In my case, it is not a deprivation of human touch or visually appealing environment: I inhabit my office space like a home, changing the lighting and decor to suit, and at home my husband is a constant physical presence that comforts and calms. I come for relaxation, which is too easily left by the wayside even at home, where I can find things to work on and improve when I should be resting, meditating, praying, or otherwise integrating the spiritual and the physical. Talking about the unpolished silver, I started to say that "my mom always says" I should polish it before using it (she never did, because she rarely used it, of course). I caught myself, but didn't know how to conjugate the verb "to say." Clearly, she said it once, or maybe more. She does not say it any longer. Or does she? Every time I replay a memory of her speaking to me, does she "say on"? Does she have speech in my thoughts that continues beyond her lack of vocal chords? Certainly she lives in other capacities, too--in the thoughts of every one who ever knew her and calls her to mind from time to time. Can I say that she says anything--or is all her voice in the past tense, for me? Whatever life she now has is paradoxical: she lives and she does not live, speaks and speaks no more. Am I allowed to say that she still speaks to me, or is that admission insane? There are a handful of songs that reduce me to weeping on my knees in church, because I cannot hear them without her voice leading the singers. I hear it like an echo: faint, but undeniably present. I admit that I am still not very well acquainted with the grammar of loss.