Terra Heatherly-Norton

5/5/15

Journal Entry #5

I am interviewing my roommate’s grandmother for my final project and I thought I’d share a short story from the memoir. Anna grew up in South Korea at age seven her family became extremely poor, by age nine she had to drop out of school. At age ten the Korean War started and at age eleven the beginning of a three-year drought ensued. At age fourteen she attended nigh school and work as a janitor during the day to afford it. One day one of her teachers invited Anna to her house after school. Anna was always starving, her family had very little money and many of their recourses went to helping refuges from the north. She was so hungry she wasn’t able to study.

While the teacher had not mentioned anything about it Anna reflected that she must have known about her starvation for when she got to the teachers house a “huge bowl of beautiful white rice” was sitting on the kitchen counter and it was “surrounded by a sea of fruits and meat.” The teacher fed Anna and told her to run along and complete her studies because there is nothing more important than education. As Anna told me this story we are sitting in a Chinese buffet surrounded by food. She starts to look around and tears up a bit. “I think of her often” she states simply.

Anna came to America around age 30 learned English and became a lunch lady in Ohio. She feels very passionately about feeding children since she was always hungry growing up. “You must eat to study and you must study to eat,” she says, “I love feeding the children, they put food in them and then they can learn.” As I listen to her story I reflect on her comments about my weight, when Katie first introduced me to her grandma a couple weeks earlier she had commented on how skinny I was then gave Katie 20 dollars to take us to McDonalds. It struck me as odd at the time but I now realize Anna doesn’t have the perspective most of western civilization are privileged enough to have, we associate being skinny with being beautiful, but Anna relates it to starvation and poverty.

So when she insists Katie and I get another plate of stir fry before we leave and asks us twelve times if we have enough food, it is coming from such a genuine place of concern that I am thrust into confronting my own privileged upbringing and the alien idea of starvation, a concept I can barely grasp. These types of stories put into perspective the problems that most people today face and how truly trivial they are in the grand scheme of life. The reality of it refreshes my views constantly and puts into perspective what the true meaning of suffering really is.

I have not seen Russ in five years. I have many memories during my time working at Mt Rainier in which he is included. I remember the stories he would tell me while we hiked side by side in the woods while we searched for owls, and I remember going to visit him at his house filled with natural objects he’d collected. One of the last times I remember seeing him, he came with me to investigate a fox sighting at Paradise.

Russ is the kind of volunteer you want to send deep into the back country, not drag to the most populated spot in the whole park. He is a quiet man in his seventies. Gangly with large oval glasses perched on his nose. He is incredibly soft spoken, almost to the point you have to lean toward him to make out the shape of his words. He smiles easily, but rarely offers his opinion. Russ is not a people person, he prefers the quiet solitude of the forest or the peaceful sanctuary of his little house in Packwood. I took him with me, because I needed someone to help collect any scat we might find. Owl surveys, his usual gig, had been canceled due to rain and the wildlife crew had nothing to task him with. So I had snagged him, taking advantage of this rare chance to spend time with him, since I rarely did owl surveys anymore.

At the time, Mt. Rainier was doing a genetic study on the foxes in the park. They are a special sub-species, biologist think are only found at Mt Rainier and Mt hood.  High elevation red foxes, perched on an island of snow and encroached on by people. Scat is a marvelous genetic marker, and so a sample of any found was sent off to the lab for inspection. And it fell to us to collect the samples.

My memory of that day is still very sharp in my mind. I can still smell the inside of our truck, an odor created by hours of sweaty, dirty field biologists crammed into a small space after a long day in the backcountry. I can remember Russ’s plaid shirt, and the way the afternoon sun peaked out from behind the clouds as we drove higher up the mountain. The rest of the memory goes something like this:

As we pull the truck into the parking lot I can see the male fox with his singed coat of grey and silver. He is infamous for hanging around the lower parking lot near the visitor center. He sees our vehicle and stops to watch us park. It’s been my job for the past three years to teach the park employees to encourage the foxes to not beg or hang around the roads where they are in danger of getting hit (“Encourage” meaning chase, harass, scare, threaten and/or anything I have to do to get them to run away).

Russ does not have the demeanor to chase the fox, so I do not ask him to help me. He is one of the most mellow and calm people I have ever met. I doubt he would have the vocal range to even yell at it. I tell him to scout around the area for scat while I do the chasing. He seems relieved and takes the scat kit filled with ziplock bags. Meanwhile I grab my Nerf water gun filled with lemon juice and water, and my radio before sliding out of the truck and shutting the door.

The fox has gone around the other side of the vehicle, Russ, being a volunteer, is dressed in his own clothes and looks like a regular visitor. The fox is smart enough to tag him as safe. The foxes have learned to associate the parking lot, roads, and even the people with food, just as they have learned to associate the green and grey uniform with trouble, thanks to me.

I can hear Russ’s voice from somewhere on the other side of the truck talking to the fox. I smile inwardly; only Russ would try reasoning with the fox to leave. I on the other hand had been dealing with the foxes for three years. I gave up asking a long time ago. As much as I love animals, and would do absolutely anything in my power to not harm them, in this case, in this role I play at the park, I get to be the Rambo version of animal lover. And it is a lot of fun.

I pump the water gun three times as quietly as possible. The foxes know the sound. I place my back to the truck and slide down the side, gun perched in my hands. Russ has wandered away from the truck, stooped over searching for scat. I am far enough down the side to be able to see over the bed of the truck; the fox is standing erect, focused on Russ. His ears are prominent features to his round furry face, large and slightly tuffed at the tips. His black eyes are ringed by white sprinkles of fur, and his perfectly black nose is balanced at the end of a long narrow snout. He is absolutely adorable.

I get why people feed the foxes. They are cute to a ridiculous degree. They also have been lucky when it comes to their relationship with people. Labeled as a charming tricksters, secretive and aloof; the characters the fox plays in folklore are never monsters. Unlike the bear, or wolf, cultural identity has been kind to the fox. Because of this, people do not have a deep rooted, unconscious fear of them. They are small, inquisitive, and like I said, obnoxiously cute.

All this plays to the fox’s advantage, people see them as harmless. It’s a rare treat to see a fox, people are immediately captivated by the way they prance along the road, fluffy tail bouncing behind them. They cock their head just like our pet dogs do when they are curious, and they often make eye contact with you, hinting at intelligence behind their mysterious stare. And people feed them. They dangle bits of lunch meat from their sandwiches, to coax the creatures closer, in a human need to touch the object of curiosity. The foxes never get that close; they creep near enough, but always elude the visitor’s reach. However the ploy works anyway, the human ends up tossing the yummy morsel. When this happens, the fox is rewarded, just like a dog who gets a treat when he sits. After a few encounters with a friendly, food laden visitor the fox has it down to an art. And that’s when it gets dangerous.

I duck down and slink to the end of the truck to peak around the tailgate. We call this one the Silver male. He’s been a regular at this parking lot for the past two years. He likes to hit up the visitors while they are still at their cars, having learned that the giant metal boxes contain all kinds of hidden goodies. He’s been hit twice by vehicles while begging along the road. He’s been fortunate they’ve only been close calls, coming away with temporary limps both times. One of his kits the year before was not so lucky, emulating its parents, we’d found the dead youngster, smashed and bloody on the asphalt, hit because he was begging for food along the roadway.

I lower into a squat, and balance the gun against the truck for stability, careful not to make any nose. Nerf guns are incredibly accurate if you get a good one. Some even have little sites on the top like regular guns; if you have a steady hand you can usually hit your target.

I take aim.

My goal here is to hit the male square in the face. It’s just water and some lemon juice. It’s won’t hurt him but it will smell strong and foreign and hopefully scare the crap out of him. My body is tense, ready to spring. I shut one eye to get a better view. Then I squeeze the trigger.

But the fox is already moving. Somehow he knew I was there. The water crests over his ears as he duck and lurches to the side, only misting his back as he spins around to run. I leap out from behind the truck and with my best guttural roar I race after him, water blasting triumphantly from my gun and splattering the ground behind him.

I chase him past Russ, who stops to watch the show, and toward the snow embankment where forest meets road. The fox nimbly mounts the hill with two graceful leaps and disappears over the side as I some crashing into it. My feet sink into the snow, throwing me off balance. I make one last valiant aim, sending the stream of water in an arch above my head before tossing the gun to the side as I tumble onto my side in the wet snow.

After a few moments, I see Russ’s face peering down at me, a halo of blue sky behind. He doesn’t say anything at first. His face is solemn. I know he knows the purpose of this display. He knows I play the bad guy for a reason; to get the foxes to associate people with danger and not food. The water and the yelling and the chasing are meant to be scary, meant to teach the foxes to stay away from people and roads. I know I appear like a crazed lunatic chasing the poor endearing fox. Russ is an animal lover too. He’s devoted his life to roaming the park’s cathedral-like forests, searching among the towering old growth for the silent flyers of the night. He is good at it too; his energy is serine and patient, perfect for owl surveys.  I wonder for a moment if I have just ruined his judgment of me. Did I look like a big bully to him, picking on the lovable fox? It’s one thing to understand the reasoning behind why I chase the foxes, however it still looks contrary to the feelings of awe and reverence I have for these beautiful creatures. I have always felt a kinship with Russ, a connection brought on by our love for nature. Maybe, I think, I shouldn’t have brought him along.

Russ’s eyes look gravely into mine; his brows furrowed. His mouth pinches into a frown.  I wonder how I am going to explain this all to him. I wonder if he is appalled by my actions. I wonder how I will get him to understand I was trying to help the fox.

Slowly Russ stoops and pick up the water gun, holding it gingerly between his weathered hands. I hold my breath, ready to be chastised. He looks at me, his eyes twinkling as he says “You missed.”

Tonight at aikido my sensei read to us a newspaper article about serendipity.  He related what was in the article to what we do as part of our practice.  Laughing, he told us that he sees in aikido in everything he reads.  Now I laughed too as I thought about how I felt reading Wisdom Sits in Places.  There were many points while reading that chapter where I found myself thinking, “Hey, that’s what sensei talks about!”

The Western Apache notions of wisdom as having a smooth, steady, and resilient mind struck me as being relevant to my training.  There are many parallels between Dudley’s explanation of wisdom and my sensei’s explanation of our aikido practice.  Dudley’s story about his grandmother begins with her telling him “life is like a trail.”  The concept that in our lives we walk a trail or path, sometimes called a way, is a theme found in martial arts.  You walk this path, physically and metaphorically, to develop yourself in body and mind.  Dudley’s story starts with “the trail of wisdom.”  My sensei too usually starts with an explanation of the word aikido.  The last character, do or tao, means “the way,” or even “the way that it is.”  Aikido is a practice of walking this path the way Dudley walks his trail.
Then Dudley explains briefly what it means to have a smooth, steady, and resilient mind.  A smooth mind requires one to be present and aware of surroundings.  This parallels the precept in martial arts that “the eye must see all sides.”  A surface level meaning of this precept is that one should be aware of physical surroundings in order to avoid danger.  On a deeper level, the precept refers to seeing from someone else’s perspective; seeing all sides to the situation.

Dudley goes on to say that to have a resilient mind you must not block your own path, and that only you stand in your way.  The founder of aikido used to say that to have victory over others is a relative victory, while to have victory over yourself is an absolute victory.  In our practice today we emphasize that our biggest obstacle is ourselves and our perceptions.  If I can change my mind and have control over myself then I need not worry about trying to have power over others.

A steady mind, according to Dudley, is demonstrated by the ability to control your emotions and treat others well.  Tonight my sensei reminded us how the founder developed aikido so that we could develop ourselves and help one another.  Part of mastering yourself means behaving compassionately and respectfully towards others.

It seems that both the attainment of wisdom in Apache culture and proficiency in aikido require having your center; both physically and mentally.  With all the stories Dudley shares of places he says to Basso to think on it, that to develop wisdom he must keep on thinking about it.  To achieve wisdom it is a continual practice that must be worked on over time.  Those who have attained wisdom help to guide those still on the trail of wisdom.  This role parallels perfectly with that of the sensei.  The sensei doesn’t tell you exactly what to do or how to be, but they have gone down the path and now turn back to point you in the right direction so you may discover for yourself the way to be.

The way Dudley explained wisdom as a continuous practice to develop oneself resonated with our practice at the dojo.  Perhaps, like my sensei, I see aikido everywhere and make connections that others outside our practice wouldn’t immediately see.  However, like the cowboys who knew the story of Old Man Owl without needing further explanation, so too in our dojo community do we have an understanding of these precepts and explanations of our practice.  We share these stories with new students and point them down the path.  Some people stop on the way, and some continue to “keep on thinking about it” (Basso, p. 127).

After the close reading our guest did on Thursday I have been thinking about action and passivity.  The narrator, at this point in the book, seems to be a very passive participant in his own life.  He spends much of his time watching others and waiting for others to do what he wants.  When things don’t go as he hopes he is let down and is upset.  However, if he never puts something into action himself how is he going to get the result he expects?  I was particularly stuck on the sentence on page 595 of Within a Budding Grove when the narrator says “My whole plan was wrecked.”  The plan he’s referring to is his plan to look indifferently at pottery and hope that Elstir will introduce him to the little group of girls.  However, he only tells Elstir after the fact how much he’d like to meet them.  I was stuck on his notion that waiting for someone to do what he wanted was a plan.  To me, not doing anything and expecting results is typically not a very effective plan.

The more I thought on his passivity I realized there were two events in Combray where the narrator made a plan and followed through.  The first was when, as a child, he writes to his mother while she’s at dinner to have her come kiss him goodnight.  He even confronts her in the hallway.  His plan works, she even spends the night with him, but he’s miserable.  The second plan he acts on is when he works out a way to visit his old uncle Adolphe without his parents.  He sneaks over to visit his uncle so he can meet some of the beautiful women his uncle hangs out with.  While his uncle seems irritated, it seems as though this plan has worked.  However, the narrator tells his parents what happened.  This causes conflict in the family and uncle Adolphe no longer visits them.

In both instances the narrator made a plan and acted.  In both instances he got the result he wanted.  And in both instances there were negative consequences that overshadowed the victory of enacting his plan.  This may have taught him as a child that action isn’t the best way to go about things.  It makes more sense now that as a teenager the narrator opts for waiting and watching rather than jumping in and doing anything.  I’m interested as the novel progresses to see if the narrator continues to be so passive in his life.

Though it was last week when we watched that film, I still see that man’s eyes staring into the faces of those who’ve been forgotten.  Not just that young girl’s face, who hadn’t lived long enough to know which memory to choose, but the faces of the rest of the council too, like somehow that guy had seen when the old man cheated at checkers using, ‘the oldest trick in the book’ or saw how the outside of the memory bank looked like the park that has been the source of bittersweet recollection for so many people.  I wonder if somehow it is the same park they all remember, and if it’s winter there because the workers are all ghosts, and ghosts seem to make places cold.  So maybe when the old man goes to the park to be with his wife, and she has gone there to be with that young soldier, and the soldier goes to the idea of the park with his death-made friends, if they’re all seasons of the same park, seasons of time as it passes for that space, and not just the people.

Maybe places can’t remember because they’re inanimate, but as Modiano expressed in his book, and what this film seems to say to me, is that places are impressed on by people and by their sense of time and memory.

Maybe the guy in charge of the moon in that place is the man on the moon…That’s just silly romanticizing, but it is pretty to imagine.  This reminds me of a fantasy trilogy at the end of which these two kids fell in love, but couldn’t exist in the same world.  They lived the rest of their lives in parallel universes but once a year visited the same park at the same time on the same bench (or maybe it was under a tree).  How do they remember each other? Do they imagine the other as they’d age? I wonder if that soldier guy gets to sit and think forever now and if that’s good or bad.  No birds, no wind, no music, just the silent staring and remembering….

Some things I was thinking about while reading Culture of Space and Time:

In this book it talks about time. And space. And how it shaped modern culture.  I have in my notes on this assignment, like 12 questions;  How is time reversible? How do we ever experience universal time? How can I or anyone really know when our time is ours or everyone’s or? What is time then? What is time’s number, texture, and direction? What about music?

…And then the list gets super weird.  My thoughts on this text are pretty standard.  I am wondering about public time versus private time mostly.  I liked the statement, “Divisions of time ‘brutally interrupt the matter that they frame’” (32), especially in relation to personal time and the impact on the creation of art, or things which people can associate with their culture that take “time” to do, prayer, art, philosophy, science, and other rituals…

It’s interesting to think of the division of time as an invitation to a new kind of space.  We’re not all in our own worlds experiencing life with whatever increments our mind’s use, the universality of the measurement of time, the standardization of the minute, hour, second… It make many wonderful things possible, measuring the age of the Earth, making advancements in science not only in that respect but also in how people understand the mind (Yeah, I’m talking Freud now).  The importance of memories was augmented by the advent of a new, public, social anxiety, and cultures across the world shifted their focus from their arbitrary worlds and instead, focused on existence at a global scale.

I was thinking about how this relates to Proust.  He wrote a book symbolizing how experiences, impressions, compounded and ever compounding, cease to exist once they are named or attempted to be objectively/Truthfully remembered.  We are no longer who we were one second ago even, so our rememberances, are never the same as when we were in the past and living them because we are never the same after any experience, after any measurement of time and input of stimuli.

An idea I attribute to Proust’s work so far is that recollection and remembering can and do place us out of time involuntarily, and only then can we experience a True past.

That notions is shown in this other book through the development of memory therapy with the mentally ill, it’s shown in art with the abstract paintings of clocks with no hands, in new experiences with cinematography and what shows that time-is-happening or this-happened-long-ago.  I think in this way we can all relate to what Proust is trying to comment on in relation to the time part of living.

Ted Radio Hour

My previous posts were kind of bleak and depressing, so I thought I’d be a little bit more upbeat this week and write about desire, with Lacan in mind.

I couldn’t have been older than 12 when I first became confused on what having a girlfriend meant. I remember crossing into the neighbors yard, where an old, yellow, rusty, broken down SUV sat, and having this question. Some of my conclusions was that a girlfriend was someone you kissed, and that nobody else was allowed to kiss them. With this in mind, when everyone in the house would be asleep, I would practice kissing on a stuffed Tigger doll. My first kiss was actually pretty nice, it was snowing and our boots were making slushy sounds in the road. I asked if we could kiss, nervous and shaking, not from the cold, and knowing she had had a few boyfriends before, I was confident she wouldn’t be shy. It was quick and I felt like a hummingbird, airless and rosy cheeked. I confessed to her months later that I thought I was bisexual after we stopped dating. Thinking back on that, I think I was just confused that it’s possible to judge everyone on their looks, in fact I think it’s impossible not to. It’s hard to choose attraction, and sometimes you have to make it, but it comes from meticulous social standards and your own idealized fantasies. True attraction is what makes it hard to speak and your hands get all sweaty as your stomach rumbles with butterflies.

It goes without saying that puberty arises sexual attractions, but the thought of who we desire and what we pine for is an interesting thought experiment. I believe desire is not exclusive to any particular gender, but someone more conservative than me would argue otherwise. Desire to some extent comes from the social environment, and our inherent will to mimic behavior. We imitate at an early age in order to learn, and it’s hard to deny we are influenced by fads in our early years. If we’re not influenced, we’re strongly moved to oppose the fad rather than ignore it. Does this commercial behavior apply to our desires for humans as well?

In thinking about how curious it is labeling someone as a partner, which only hits a few different bullet points in labeling them as a friend, and the role commercialism has in manipulating desire, Lacan has an interesting idea which is interpreted by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “Not being real, the ‘object’ of desire is not natural, either… The ‘object’ of human desire is neither the object that saturates a need… nor the fixed and preestablished object of instinct; it is, properly speaking, their negation.”(1)  In other words, in a condensed, simplified explanation, there’s a void in us that gets continually filled by our creation of desire. There’s no actual object that can fill this desire, otherwise there would be nothing left to want, so desire itself is a manifestation of our own fantasy or creation. Rather, it’s negating the object we choose to fill that void.  My question as a young boy can be tied into this ‘object’ of desire. What I was questioning was how odd it seemed to basically own someone, because if they weren’t faithful to me, then they’d be breaking some sort of partner contract. Thinking of having a lover in this context makes me less judgmental toward Swann and the narrator of Proust’s “Search,” because having a lover is in fact a mutual ownership, where sides take different stakes of levels of ownership. Thinking about polyamorous individuals is interesting because their affection and garnishment isn’t exclusive to one individual, but isn’t as common as the traditional social practice. So, we place humans into this void, hoping to negate our need for desire to be filled, only to then realize it’s not what we thought it would be. We may be satiated, but true 100% bliss seems almost impossible to attain, for even if it’s reached, reality is waiting to swallow you back up and make you thirst for more. 

I guess I don’t really see it that bad that the people we’re reading about obsess over possession of people. It’s in these fantasies that they’re playing with desire, and could inevitably lead to healthy, beautiful relationships. Of course there’s the possibility of all the negative events that may come with possession and unmet desire, and we have to be wary of those consequences.

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 201. Print.

The screams wafts through the window, “You little chicken shit” and then another voice “I’m going to get you chicken shit” and then I know: my youngest, the bane of his brothers existence, has done something yet again. He is the only one known as the “little chicken shit.” This is a name not just given to the youngest by his brothers, but earned. And as long as they are not in my presence when they use it, I ignore this unsavory nickname.

Why? More than likely he has done something to his brothers that if I knew about, would result in more severe consequences than his brothers will dish out. Like many younger brothers, this one follows along, often trying to one-up his older siblings. When they go swimming and practice holding their breath, he tries to hold his longer- to the point of passing out and having to be rescued. If they are riding their bikes, he tries to do a front wheelie, not just a back one. The resulting fall means an ambulance ride and hospital trip. So many that the drivers know his name.

Practical jokes are another thing altogether, and of course he always takes it one step further. This is probably why he is being chased now. His older brothers are quite inventive in their response to him. I’ve come home from work and found him duct taped to the garage door, with the door open so no one could see him. When I asked why he was in this predicament, I was told that he wouldn’t quit telling stories to one of their girlfriends and they had to “shut him up somehow”. They once had him dress in all black, painted a red X on him, then hoisted him up a tree by his ankles, while telling him to wave- he was their pirate flag, as a way to get him out of the way of a game they wanted to play.

Even when the jokes were banned, he would find a way. Glow in the dark spiders glued all over the walls, floor and fixtures in the bathroom- followed by screams in the middle of the night and then a through but fairly quiet pounding. Leaches left in older brothers’ pockets, just in case they might want to go fishing after school. Homework replaced with inventive and embarrassing answers- only discovered after it was turned in to the teacher and parents called. Over and over this youngest boy, insulted, embarrassed and tormented his brothers, and the least of the responses was this nickname “little chicken shit”

This weekend, years later, I found myself knee deep in chicken shit. I was cleaning the chicken coop after a long winter. It reminded me of my son’s nickname and as I shoveled, I realized that he had truly earned this nickname. Chicken shit, smelly enough to make your eyes water, hard work to move it out of the way, gets on everything, messy, dirty and yet has redeeming qualities. It is a great fertilizer and helps things grow bigger and produce better: it comes from chickens, who give us food in several forms, eggs and meat. So it was with this youngest son, he was the dirtiest, messiest, and often smelliest of my boys. He was adventuresome and was never afraid to try something new. So now that he has grown up, what does he do? The little chicken shit is a farmer and proud of his nickname.