Momentum

Maybe what I should have been doing

was flying

bouncing around this old world

spreading colors as fast as my fingers could carry them

powders like curry and lapis, crushed

Vermeer's centrifugal force

or eating sand and laughing my heart out til it

bled

tickling you, definitely, always tickling

Parting ways with loneliness

and arcing into the cold

with swollen voices

brimmed with light and some kind of magic,

sparkling

poring over Plutarch,

reinventing the invented

painted cream with columns and majesty

hugging the dolores

keeping them warm with heart's candlelight

ears open like a day-and-night lily

(if there were such a thing),

instead of holding on

as if it were some sort of ride

to be dreaded

a grip so tight

that the knuckles were white, strained

and sad.

Maybe what I could have been doing

was flying

Without a Trace

We are the future (well, depending on the "we" who's reading this, that is.) The kids of the 90s are going to be the ones running the country one day. It makes me wonder, though. It seems to me that we've been robbed of a youth torn by conflict. Which is an odd thing to say, of course. And which isn't actually true, either. In fact, we're growing up in a time of some of the most fearful things imaginable, things like terrorist attacks and hopelessness in the face of the job markets and poverty, always poverty.

But it seems to me that although we daily encounter these terrible things, these horrible truths, we have lost all ability to be moved by them. That's what I mean when I say that we've been robbed of conflict; we've been robbed of the drama of it, the indignation that should stir our souls to action. Instead, we are reaction-less youth. As much as parents worried about their wayward teens in the 1960s, at least their kids were doing something. They were engaged enough with the world around them to be aware, to stand up. The trend continued, albeit perhaps in a degenerate form, into the 1970s and 80s. Maybe not as socially active,they funneled their anger and dissatisfaction through music.

But now we've come to this: a generation of kids who haven't done much. Again, that's not really true. We've done lots, maybe too much, with our own lives. Our parents' pro-active cultivation of our senses of self, through all of our extracurriculars, has left us experienced but disengaged members of society. Opportunities with no meaning because we've never had to fight for anything.

And then there's that little thing called the Internet which kind of sealed our fate. Gone was the need to communicate in person or to think for oneself or to spend time outdoors.

We're the kids of overprivilege, hyper-insulated and clueless. Will we know how to take the reins when the time comes?

No Rest for the Weary

She walked in the front door and met immediate chaos. The panic-inducing kind. Bottles strewn on the ground, piles of shoes on top of newspapers and keys and even bags of rice. The sheer randomness of the collections astounded her. Really? Really?

The bathroom was no better; actually, it was worse. A bottle of foundation sat innocently at the bottom of the sink while glasses full of half-drunk liquids lined the counter. She sagged onto the toilet seat, the only place clear of stuff. That's it, she thought. Too much stuff, just crap really, all this brick-a-brack. Who needs all of this? She saw her cluttered apartment as a metaphor for capitalism and all of its inherent evils. It didn't respect the facts, which was that the world was one of fragility and endings. Which is the point at which she would realize again why she had such trouble connecting with people. Too much going in on the inside, too much mushing and mashing.

But anyway, the point being, she was tired, having spent her day in the confines of academia. And to her, coming home to a trashed apartment meant that there no space for her, for her emotions, her thoughts. A serious funking of her psyche. BER-LOOB. A lipstick tube rolled into the sink, forcing the foundation to share its space. She sighed, scooted off the toilet, and bent down to retrieve her bag. Where to go, you know? For now, her bed was looking like the best option.

This is a short story I wrote in consideration of some of the difficulties of opening up and sharing a life (and more specifically, a room) with somebody. It's a way to explore how one's room affects one's mood, one's state of being. This is something that I don't think most people consciously think about, but I do believe that it has the potential to make quite the impact. This is almost meant to be a piece of magical realism, wherein inanimate objects can take on personas that have the ability to get under our skin...

Tumbling

In my Music History class we were listening to a sacred motet from the medieval ages, layers of pure voices which spun sunbeams. I had this surge of melancholy, prickling my skin. Suddenly, an image popped into my head, an image of all this feeling seeping joyously out of my skin. It was purple and green, Mardi Gras-colored. My body was laying in grass and the feelings were just leaving me, running over the soil like a stream. I was smiling. My eyes were closed. There was sparkling light all around me. And the image, to me, seemed to be what peace would look like. I can't describe it perfectly, but it was a strong enough image that I had to write about. And it got me thinking too...

What would it be like if, for one day, all of our insides, our every thought and feeling could just tumble out of us? A literal outpouring of joy and love and fear, the colors of our souls soaking the earth in their crazy vibrancy?

God, what relief that would be. Too many ideas and uncompleted thoughts and passions, all just pulsing there, incessantly swirling. How heavy our insides are, carrying so much baggage, always.

It seems to me that our bodies are much too small a home for all the things we're capable of feeling. It seems pretty absurd to me that a thin layer of skin should contain so much. I think we all need a day where there is no containment, only fluidity and openness, outpouring upon outpouring. A day where the constraints of this world are irrelevant and forgotten. Not even missed.

That's the kind of day I'm talking about. You know?

I'm in a Snow Daze

We didn't have class today due to blizzard conditions. So, naturally, I spent my day mostly hibernating and being extremely, almost inexcusably, nonproductive. In the midst of my sleepy day, I ventured outside with some friends and was treated to a sugar frosted world. I was so astounded by the soft piles of snow over everything that I felt that surely I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that I was part of this mystical, peaceful world.

The most striking image from today was the golden statue at the head of Central Park West that sits atop a stone fountain. The woman on the statue was covered with snow, her upward-pointing arm poking through the mist of snowflakes. My breath caught for a moment as I was transported to another time; images of Jacobin peasants flashed through my mind, and I expected to see a sooty youth kneeling in a pile of snow, flakes catching in his eyelashes. It was an otherworldly moment, to say the least.

..........

When you think about it, snow is time-neutral. It not only blankets our earth, it blankets the modernity that constantly surrounds us: streets, buildings, cars, trash cans. It makes us forget all of these things, which we take so heavily for granted, and pulls us down to a primitive level, a level where we are just helpless and amazed human beings. That was an overwhelmingly freeing feeling today. Remember that no matter how advanced we may become, we'll still always be at the mercy of at least one thing: the weather.

Regarding Rousseau

I am writing to make amends with a French Post-Impressionist painter. You see, the relationship between me and Henri Rousseau has long been estranged. Rousseau, a painter from the time of Monet and Renoir, Van Gogh and Gauguin, has never seemed to me to fit the pleasing category of gentle beauty that the these other men created on their canvases. Rousseau's paintings often offended me when I was younger, earning my resentment and dislike (yes, it's true, I was a very opinionated 10-year-old.) His paintings to me were full of morbidity. I found them frightening. It always angered me that his work wasn't like his counterparts'; instead of celebrating the beauty of the world, his paintings seemed to cast some sort of disturbing shadow on reality. From my very limited perception, I concluded that Rousseau was a deranged and impudent person. Up until today, I have always disliked his work. Up until today, I have always heard his name and associated it with a nightmarish ghost world.

But today, I went to MoMA. I saw one of Rousseau's most famous pieces, "The Dream", and approached it with that familiar shudder of distaste. However, I did notice that there was a plaque next to the painting, and since Rousseau has always presented me with such strong feelings, I figured that it would be worth my time to learn more about the man. What I did learn changed the way I will see his art forever.

Rousseau, whose most famous paintings are all set in jungle scenes, never set foot outside of France. This shocked me. I figured that he was a man that had had extensive contact with African peoples. And it was with this realization that my change of heart occurred. Instead of seeing his paintings as the crude and disturbing depictions of an obsessed white man, I saw them as the explorations of a curious man, a true traveler, a person aching to know the world beyond his own. If he had never been to Africa, the place was obviously imbued with a certain sense of opulent mystery to him. This explains the exaggerated exoticness of his paintings.

I see Rousseau in a new light: a seeker rather than a detractor. To me, Rousseau's extensive dealing with his personal unknown was a cry of desperation, his earnest grasping at that which he yearned for but couldn't understand. I feel a connection to him now, actually.

Because what he really was was a dreamer.

"The Dream" by Henri Rousseau, 1910.

Blossoms. That's What You are to Me.

Tonight began a new chapter in my life. Tonight, I met ten preteens and my heart--and mind--are full.

Once a week, I mentor for a young person in Harlem. Where do I begin with this? How do I tell you what it's like to finally, finally leave my comfort zone and to be surrounded with new faces, faces that represent families so different from my own? You look around and realize there's so much about this big old world that you can't possibly imagine. So much that you're forever insulated from;it's just the nature of life. I live mine and you live yours and the two are not necessarily going to intersect. And if even if they do, they're not necessarily going to make any sort of sense to one another. The contexts of our lives are inherently different. That's why what I am doing is simultaneously strange and wonderful.

Not all of them were that well-behaved; in fact, I 'd say that only four out of the ten were able to remain quiet when others were talking. But, when I looked at these kids, decked in clothes ranging from basic to more gangster-ish, I felt hope and happiness. Sort of indescribable, really. The reason that I'm there is to mentor them, to be a sort of guide and role model, to encourage them and show them why school is enjoyable and worthwhile. I intend to. However, I'm most excited at the prospect of digging back the layers, coming to know and care about these individuals who are tucked only 70-odd blocks from me: seeing them for who they are is going to be beautiful.

I don't want to sound like the naive white girl, heart full of dreamy expectations and head muddled by preconceptions of who they are and who I am to them. So, I apologize if I'm coming off that way--that's certainly not at all how I view this position. Instead, I see it for what, at its most basic, it is: people helping people. Or, put another way: I don't see this as about me at all. I don't see this as some way to fulfill myself or to learn about how lucky I am. This isn't some sort of life validation process. This is about them. And I think that's what I find the most refreshing, quite honestly. There is finally one aspect of my life where "I" am completely removed, where all my energy is invested in cultivating someone else. The rest of my life feels like one big trip to making me happy. I think living at college, where the only person I have to look out for is me, exacerbates this. Lately, there's only been a whole lot of "me me me."

Tonight, all I heard was the din of kids laughing.