I am having a week. I suppose this happens, you guessed it, every week, but this week seems to be ending on a rather surreal note, a heavy, hard blow to the gut kind of week. I am writing this in my living room while my friend’s four year old son destroys my bathroom. Equipped with multiple, variously sized plastic containers and some small plastic lizards, Townes is taking a bath. I hear the water splashing in ways that could only occur when hitting the floor. I told him he was stinky, he agreed, so now he bathes, and destroys.

Townes has been coming to stay with me off and on for several months. His mother has to take his younger brother, Laszlo, to therapy several times a week; he has a degenerative disorder called SMA. He cannot hold himself up and cannot do most things that a healthy two year old can do. But he laughs and smiles like the best of them, his bright blue eyes sing.

Yesterday (Friday), I received a message from Valerie, Townes’s mother, asking me to work for her, stating that she had been up all night with the little Laszlo. A few hours later I would find myself instead, in the company of Townes, as they were forced to rush Laszlo to the Seattle Children’s Hospital; I have just acquired a child for an undetermined amount of time.

It is hard to have a friend describe to you what it is like to have a sick child. She tells me about how he quit breathing. She tells me that her partner spent 15 minutes trying to “bring him back”. She tells me that she thought they had lost him and about the feeding tube that runs down his nose and the tubes are shoved down to help him breath and the morphine they have to give him now to keep him calm. She tells me all these things as I talk to her on the phone Saturday night, Townes asleep soundly in the living room. She tells me how all the tubes and machines failed during the afternoon and for another short moment, she believed her young son had died.

A friend comes to take Townes for the afternoon so I can work on school stuff (so I can read, that’s all I ever do). It is now Sunday, today, and I have taken the afternoon off of work. I read Proust. I read about his ailing grandmother. “We see ourselves dying, in these cases, not at the actual moment of death but months, sometimes years before, when death has hideously come to dwell in us.”[1] I think about my friend and her fiancé standing over the bed of their youngest child. Is death looming over too? Has death entered their life, an unwanted intruder? I am trying to remain positive. I continue to read through the Proust; it seems so unimportant.

I find out through a text message that Townes’s father will be coming down from the hospital to retrieve him tomorrow, they want the family to be together. I think again of the Proust and the relationship that our narrator had with his mother and grandmother. I think of little Laszlo and the love that his mother feels for him. I think of the way that she must be feeling right now, being so close to losing a child.

Perhaps the relationship that Proust wrote of Marcel and his mother, is just how love works when someone has been so close to death. Maybe in sickness and the reality of death looming changes things. Maybe the love Marcel felt for his mother was honest. Maybe it is us who do it wrong.

Townes is currently watching the Ewok Adventure with my house mate. He occasionally bounds over and asks him what I am doing, I am sitting in another part of the house. I explain that I am doing homework for school. He tells me that he didn’t know grown-ups could go to school, rolls his eyes, and returns to the couch. Earlier he told me that Laszlo was sick. He asked me if I knew that his mom and dad had gone to the hospital. I wonder what he thinks and what he knows. I wonder what he will remember from all of this. I wonder what all of us will remember from this.

[1] The Guermantes Way page 430

This weekend I read Proust on a train. Sitting at the station I looked up at the tall annular clock, with its moss green numbers and ornate faithfully ticking hands, and my mind was flooded with thoughts of Marcel and Time and Space and Kafka and years and years of trains. As I boarded and walked past the dining car, I saw M’s grandmother sitting there, nose buried in Madame de Sévigné, eyes occasionally rising to gaze with satisfaction at the wild french countryside whipping by. As I watched the Puget Sound out my window, I felt M sitting beside me, gazing out at the coast of Balbec he had so romanticized.

It’s fascinating how the books I read inundated the world around me; I run into  characters on the streets, sitting on park benches, walking the aisles of grocery stores and libraries. This weekend in the Seattle Art Museum I was wandering the Indigenous Beauty collection when I took a wrong turn and found myself in the European art wing, eye to eye with Lucie Léon at the Piano. Oil on canvas, Berthe Morisot, France, 1890.

To my eyes, this was a young Gilberte. Poised at her piano learning to play, just as her mother did. Perhaps one day she would happen upon that little phrase by Vinteul that her father loved so much, and send him off in some reverie with her playing. And if M has seen her portrait, I imagined how he would have looked upon it, standing beside me and staring wistfully at the subject of his admiration.

From the past seminar, Stacy’s seminar group was talking about the female roles in the novel. Starting from Swan’s way and continuing into Within A Budding Grove this role has stayed the same which is, the power the women have over the men in the book. When we were in seminar on Thursday, someone was talking about Albertin’s character. She is identified as different from the other women that the narrator comes across and its because he actually has real feelings for her. But when this discussion happened, it reminded me of a quote from earlier on in the book when Mme. Swan said, “You can do anything with men when they’re in love with you they’re such idiots!” I feel that she uses her gender (a women being non-intellectual, fragile) and the naiveté of a woman to her advantage so men can think she’s dumb when in fact she’s not. It kinda reminds me of a Black Widow. I’m not sure if this applies to the rest of the female characters but it defiantly adds onto the power   dynamic of the women in the novel.

“Those years of my earlier childhood are no longer a part of myself; they are external to me; I can learn nothing of them save—as we learn things that happened before we were born—from the accounts given me by other people.” (Proust, V. 3, 6)  The most common age to be able to remember is the age of four. It’s unlikely for a lot of people to be able to recall before the age of four. But in Proust’s case and from my own experience he’s saying he can not recall his earlier childhood memories only from what people have told him.  I thought I remembered going to preschool (at maybe 3 years old) and I remember a tall (for a three year old) caucasian boy with light brown hair and he called himself Tiger. But when i would ask my mom (because she has a great memory and can remember to that age for herself) she can not think of a kid with that description that even went to preschool with me. So automatically I think that maybe I made this boy up or it was a different time of my life because my mom says so.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

These are the stages of the Kübler-Ross model (a.k.a the Grief Cycle), in which I really am intrigued by the extent of this cycle’s exclusivity towards the variable of a loss and the qualities which define it.  A Loss, in one of its definitions most simplest forms, is the fact or process of losing something or someone. However to be at a loss for someone or something is also a true occurrence for people. This sense of being at a loss could be defined by the state or feeling of grief when deprived of someone or something of value. I noticed that both of these definitions do not limit themselves to the experience of death, which leads me to ponder over my own experience with that of the Grief Cycle, and whether or not it has, or will ever come to a close.

The Kübler-Ross model, within it’s five stages, suggests a type of emotional conclusion to the experience we have while undergoing the process of mourning — Acceptance. However, from recent personal experience, I have seen these particular stages reappear from where it once went away, specifically within the following months of my grandfather’s death. In one way or another these stages are triggered by unrelated occurrences, for example, the parting of a close friend visiting me on the weekend, who’s departure left me with a sense of loneliness to which I immediately associated with that same feeling I had four months earlier (during the funeral). The weeks leading up to this departure past by as usual, but in the act of saying goodbye to my friend and returning to my dark and empty room, I had somehow been thrown back into the emotional state of depression I experienced when returning from my final goodbye to my good ol’ abuelo. My mother (the daughter of the deceased) had a similar reaction when seeing an old man waiting for the bus stop, just as her own elderly father had done so frequently before. Both her and I had thought the grief was over, yet we kept coming across some sort of reminder to the emotional pain we had experienced; reminders which were often unrelated in its immediate nature.

These experiences occur without prediction, but by no means are they hindering to everyday life. We do not suffer continuously, nor was the event enough to establish a disorder such as PTSD, but these moments in which we remember our troubles brings about an anxiety for when the next episode will occur, or worse, an episode which perpetuates an overall lifetime’s worth of sorrow. These low points of life occur for the majority of people, and they cause the scars which form our own personal identity. The experience of all this sadness can be quite disheartening, but my own mind is soothed when remembering that the feeling of sadness is only one of many facts of life which contribute to the human experience. Life is not ill-fated, it is a large potential. Optimism returns upon the acknowledgments of these thoughts – such as those charmingly expressed within the video below.

We all experience low points; You, me, Marcel and Butters (the name of the cartoon characters in the video above). We also all long for happiness. Often in our own search for lost time it is easy to return to sorrowful moments, but do not forget to return to those moments of bliss as well.

ATTENTION: This is not an attack on anyone personally, I felt that I needed to address this issue that came up in our seminar and would not be able to live with myself if I did not.

When I was first prepared to write on Baltimore, I was inspired deep in my soul (and on an empty stomach) with a burning force. As the minutes progressed and I tackled one task after another, I found myself preparing oven-baked potatoes and before I knew it my belly was full of food.

It’s amazing how drastically ones view of the world changes before and after eating. I know I’ve read about this somewhere before… Some French writer, quite possibly in the book Variations On A Theme by Aldous Huxley wherein he reviews the diaries of Maine de Biran. Nonetheless, it is still important I tackle the central issue: Baltimore.

In light of our most recent seminar and the dialogue going on over the internet and across the country I would like to address some key points.

The first being, that the general public, as advanced by the media, views themselves as occupying some highly respectable moral ground by shouting booooo to the “violence” and “destruction” that occurred during the rioting in Baltimore. As evidenced by David in our seminar the indoctrination runs so thick that he imagines himself starting “to envision what the best strategies would be to remain safe, and which self-defense measures would be most effective”.
(http://blogs.evergreen.edu/losttimedavidg/journal-entry-6/).

This comment implies that those rioting are some sort of chaotic murderers looking to hurt anyone and everyone. The whole idea, as again has been advanced by the media, is that the rioters don’t represent any goal and are largely young black men looking to cause violence for the sake of violence. To even explore the idea that there is some larger goal, is to admit, that there are other factors at play.

Part of the function of this is to create a closed dialogue which would bring any participant to one conclusion – that the rioters are creating violence for the sake of violence. As evidence, one person in our seminar stated “they are acting like primates”, I don’t feel I need to share the racial implications sitting in the depths of this comment.

Of course, there is no reason to explore this further, because the people who advance these ideas are benefiting from the white privilege and will continue to benefit from things the way they are, IE business as usual… an of alteration of which would cause those who benefit from their privilege to acknowledge their privilege and thus lose some of the things that they hold most dear.

Furthermore, many of those that do acknowledge that there are goals in Baltimore, still condemn the violence, on the grounds violence = bad. This of course, is the dialogue we get in a society that is so extremely tied to it’s material possessions. Their response is that these people should go through traditional methods, including peaceful protests (which by the way DID happen simultaneously during the riots), through voting or IE all of the methods that won’t actually do anything to damage the status quo.

Of course, again, the use of ‘traditional methods’ relies on assumption that young black youth in America have all of the same opportunities as their white counterparts. This is usually the first illusion ascribed to, that needs to be torn down.

Turning to the Human Rights Watch world report of 2014 for The United States we find “Whites, African Americans, and Latinos have comparable rates of drug use but are arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for drug offenses at vastly different rates. For example, African Americans are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, even though their rates of marijuana use are roughly equivalent. While only 13 percent of the US population, African Americans represent 41 percent of state prisoners, and 44 percent of federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses.

Because they are disproportionately likely to have criminal records, members of racial and ethnic minorities are more likely than whites to experience stigma and legal discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, jury service, and the right to vote.” (http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/united-states)

As Jamilah Lemieux in Ebony magazine discusses “If the sustained psychological terror of being reared in an economically disenfranchised neighborhood, babysat by a failing school, and abused by aggressive police didn’t leave you with the tools to effectively organize against state sanctioned terrorism in a way that society finds “respectable”—in other words, voting and being polite enough to say, “Please, suh, don’t kill us no mo’!”—then far be it from me to mourn the loss of Nike socks and Remy bundles and exaggerated reports of violence against police that leave out this week’s violence at the hands of police, and of White counter-protesters who attacked and berated people for the past three days on the city’s streets.”

Read more at EBONY http://www.ebony.com/news-views/baltimore-been-burning-503#ixzz3Z19p716s
Follow us: @EbonyMag on Twitter | EbonyMag on Facebook

BLACK LIVES MATTER. As in fixing the disenfranchisement felt by non-white youth of America is more important than the preservation of material goods of a CVS store, or all that corporate made crap that is fed to us. And that is one of the main objection by individuals, that ‘I agree with their goals, but not the violence’.

Well, when you live in a world where you have no opportunities, you’re continually profiled and harassed by police because of the color of your skin and this is further exacerbated by a rigged economic system… What better way to fight against that system? Read about how these massive inequalities continue to be perpetuated by corporations. –

http://www.alternet.org/visions/chomsky-corporations-and-richest-americans-viscerally-oppose-common-good

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/25/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20100825

In this case, the very system that has disenfranchised the non-white population is the one that faced destruction at the hands of rioters in Baltimore. So of course, the western white privileged world is up in arms shouting out against the violence. Because these riots attack the very system that keeps these people privileged.

Go Baltimore.

[I wrote this during seminar today in response to a comment about the protesters who rioted in Baltimore. I intend this post to serve as an open letter of sorts.]

Since the early interactions of white Europeans and Black Africans, white people have questioned the humanity of black people. The belief that Black people were less than human, closer to monkeys than to people, is one of the factors that allowed Europeans and Euro-Americans to colonize, enslave, and commit acts of genocide against them. This belief, among others, was used to justify hundreds of years of slavery, lasting nearly a century more here in America than even in Europe. Though slavery and the treatment of Black Americans as property was legally ended 150 years ago, these prejudiced beliefs are far from dead. Obviously they also ‘justified’ a hundred years of legal segregation and the ongoing de facto segregation of schools, housing and most of the economy.

Even more significantly, these beliefs were at the core of the system that allowed lynching, that continues to allow, or at least neglects to punish, vigilante ‘justice’ against Black people, even vigilante death penalties, without evidence, trial, or jury. Teese killings have been doled out by civilians, as in the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, and by police, as in the more recent cases of Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. Even if you believe that these men may have been guilty of crimes, certainly you must also believe in the American imperative of a fair trial and fitting sentence, decided by an experienced professional judge, not a civilian or police officer. Even if you believe that police have been operating strictly in self-defense or according to procedure, surely you can understand that the disproportionate number of killings of young Black people is traumatizing for their communities and for Black Americans overall. Just as hundreds of years of lynchings were traumatizing. Just as enslavement and genocide were traumatizing. All of these communal traumas are implicit in the comparison of Black Americans to primates.

When you compare Black Americans to primates, regardless of their behavior, you are perpetuating that trauma, participating in that ongoing violence, sustaining the existence of hateful, incorrect beliefs. So…don’t do that.

Things are finally coming together.  I met a woman who is from Germany who remembers WWII and has an awesome story to tell.  I meet with her on Friday and I am really looking forward to hearing all of her memories about that time of her life.  I am having less anxiety about getting this assignment done now.  Breath a sigh of relief…

April 29

My fishing adventure didn’t yield any good photos nor the quality of fish I need for a good story. Now I’m in a bind of sorts. There was a small window of opportunity Tuesday for me to fish, write, and finish the close reading that needs to be posted Wed. For once it happened like clockwork! I was on the water by 7am, boated 4 large mouth bass with one weighing in at 8lbs! That might not seem exciting to those who don’t understand the significance of catching one that size in Washington, but as the pro let me tell you that my sponsors will be happy! I even added In Search of Lost Time into my write up.

“If you’re putting off writing a paper for school, what better way than go fishing right? I agree! Even though I despise Budweiser, and believe NASCAR is a huge waste of time; the good’ol southern boy in me dictates I must fish largemouth bass during the pre-spawn. Maybe again in the summer when topwater action heats up as well. So instead of writing a paper on Proust’s 4000 page novel In Search of Lost Time, I was instead pitching jigs and Texas rigged plastics into fallen timber and weed beds. The wind was whipping, so boat management was a bit challenging at times. This would have been the ideal situation for a Power Pole! Maybe down the rd… When not fighting wind, I was slugging it out with a handful of feisty bass! It was too windy to effectively pitch jigs, although I did pull the one little guy pictured before switching tactics. The next two fish were the biggest of the day, and the larger weighed an even 8# at just over 20″ long! Talk about a tank!! That’s my new personal best for WA bass! All of these fish were released to fight another day. With any luck the big lady and I will meet again in a couple years. I’m still procrastinating as I type this, so finally off to do the responsible thing… Tight Lines!”

After plastering this with multiple pics all over the web, I turned my notes into a finished close reading, posted it on Word Press, and hit the sack by 1am Wed morn. The rest of the 29^th was painful, but I made it through on the sweet high of success. Tight Lines!

April 23

Trevor’s talk was enlightening in ways! I’ve felt a lot of what we’ve read may be a little of Proust writing vicariously through our narrator. Sam and Stacey have touched on this a little as well. I feel like Trevor more or less placed it on the table for us though. The fact he’s been reading In Search of Lost Time for nearly a year made me feel a little better as well. I felt like a man with his education and expertise on such things would have finished it months ago. I realize he’s reading into this far more than our class, but the fact he didn’t finish this set in a few months’ time makes me feel better about my own reading. Patrick was an interesting character as well. I can’t quite say whether or not his occupation as a landscaper is tragic. I feel on one hand he’s far too intelligent for such a job, but on the other this would be a sigh of relief! There are days when I wish for a mindless job that allows me to earn a living while my mind id actually thousands of miles away. His description of reading a book as being able to hold a conversation with the author was quasi brilliant to me! It’s high time that I think of something non-Proust though. I’ve not fished or posted any writings for my sponsors in over a week now, so tomorrow I have to fish! Seems kind of silly, but fishing is part of how I make a living these days. Hopefully my lucky stars align tomorrow and I can throw a bone to the wolves