The movie this week was very interesting and a good history lesson for me.  Although, I must say, I hated the ending!

I don’t remember the name of the movie, I must have missed it.  But it was about the Black Panther group.  It was interesting to see the dynamics of the characters and the corruption woven in and out of the whole story.  The little girl, who had lost her father, was kept in the dark by her mother, which I can relate to.  My parents lied to me until their divorce when I was 12, about how my grandfather, my dad’s dad, died.  I guess they felt that they were protecting me from something…?  The girls mother didn’t want to tell her that her father was in a gang and was shot to death by the police after someone, which ended up being the mother, ratted him out.  Unfortunately, when parents, or anyone for that matter, choose to lie about something, the person being lied to can either 1. make up their own story about what happened, or 2. have to hear about it from other people, which may or may not be an accurate account of what actually happened.  My grandfather shot himself, but my parents told me that he died from a beam falling on him while building a house.  When my father finally told me, I felt betrayed, and I wondered how I could trust anything they had ever told me.  A child doesn’t understand reasons behind deceit.  The little girl in the movie grew up without a father, and her mother coped the only/best way she knew how I suppose.  But, I think that when she found out the real story, it hurt her more than if she had been trusted to be told the truth in the first place.  Children are stronger than many people give them credit for.  I feel that we should allow people to make their own decisions and feel what ever they need to feel by offering them the truth to begin with.

Other than that, me being a hopeless romantic, I was hoping the the end would have her going off with him and starting a new life for herself and her daughter.  But, maybe guilt, pride, stubbornness, all factored in to the decision that she made to stay where she was and live in the past a little, or a lot longer.  I would like to think that eventually he would come back for her or she would change her mind and go to him.  But, life is usually not a fairy tale, and things don’t work out that nicely often.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie.

Journal Entry #7

May 12th, 2015

I set out on my journey back to NY in high spirits, brimming with anticipation for what was to come. The catalyst for my trip was to interview Isabella in person for my memory project, and although this remained my main ambition I couldn’t deny the appeal of certain other secondary motives. A chance to revisit my hometown, however briefly, and reconnect with my mother on the westward ride back to Olympia. Even after enduring two taxi rides, a commuter train, a lengthy wait in the airport, and a particularly rough “red eye” flight fro Seattle, I arrived home early on a Friday morning with the same enthused energy with which I had begun my trip. I was eager to sleep the morning away in my own bed beside my content house cat, and looked forward to beginning the interview process with Isabella that afternoon.

My initial attempts to set up a pre-interview with her had to be postponed due to some pressing health concerns involving her parents. By the time things had stabilized on her end and she was ready to conduct the pre-interview with me, I found myself rushing through the process while hectically boarding the train in Olympia the day of me departure. At that moment things were a little rushed, but luckily I had already laid the groundwork well in advance and had gently reminded her through numerous calls and texts in the weeks before the interview that I would be on a tight schedule. I thought I had stressed the importance of maintaining the agreed upon timetable enough, but when in my rush to board the train she made a plea to postpone the interview that afternoon despite my objections, I found myself distractedly agreeing. It wasn’t ideal, but I just figured I’d have to make it work.

Shortly after I awoke that Friday at around noon, I found myself confronted by my mother who gave me a reality check about the risks of leaving so late after the interview. I had been unrealistically hoping that maybe we could leave late at night on Friday or else make up the time by adding a few hours of marathon driving to the already drawn out lang-haul days we would have to pull. My mom reminded me that the most likely outcome of doing the interview in the afternoon would be arriving late to school and missing an additional day of class as a result. This would put me right at the limit of allowed absences for the quarter, and also leave me extremely behind in my work. I had already allowed myself to fall a little behind schedule in order to meet with Isabella in person rather than do the whole project over the phone or using Skype, so for a myriad of reasons it would be unwise to miss any more class time than absolutely necessary. I called Isabella a few hours before our appointment to break the news to her that we needed to reschedule and would have to do the interview at a distance, but she didn’t pick up, so I sent her a text message instead.

She was far from thrilled to hear that, and I got the sense that she was upset with me. She expressed disappointment about having been all ready to go through with it, and exclaimed that she had already cancelled her car service appointment in anticipation of being picked up by me. The next several days the topic was never far from my mind as we messaged and emailed back and forth about the project. Although it’s possible that a miscommunication is to blame (I was never able to reach her by phone and we may have misinterpreted each-other’s tones by trying to communicate by texting), I got the sense that she was somehow upset with me or for whatever reason unwilling or hesitant to proceed with the project. This was extremely vexing to me, because although I tend to think of myself as an empathetic person who can easily relate to other people’s perspectives, I couldn’t fathom what was causing Isabella’s erratic response. I tried not to take it personally, but it began to strike me as extremely selfish that she would leave me in such a position even though she knew how important the project was not only to me but for my schoolwork. I could only imagine that the subject was still too painful for her to confront head on, and that maybe the deep psychological trauma was somehow responsible for her completely uncharacteristic behavior. I realized that it would be better to cut my losses than run the risk of jeopardizing the progress of my course further by giving her any more chances to turn things around, just in case her resistance would continue or take other forms. With the deadline looming in the back of my mind, I had hardly begun thinking up alternative ideas when my mom volunteered herself as my interview subject.

As much as I love Isabella and committed myself to recording her story, I began to consider it a blessing in disguise that things didn’t work out with that topic. My mother, who is usually a fairly reserved and soft spoken woman, was for the first time divulging to me a fascinating series of memories which she has always held close that speak volumes about her own identity and perspective. It was our first road trip together, and hearing her tell her story was like getting to know someone that I was never fully acquainted with. She disclosed many details about the life and death of her sister Susan, who was her closest friend and passed away before I was ever born. She linked her sister Susan’ struggles with her sexual orientation to my mother’s struggles with her own identity, and put it all in the context of the struggles of a generation. It was an unexpected and welcome insight into my family history, that begun a new line of inquiry which will culminate into a memory project that I can be proud of.

Proust and Danielewski
Throughout In Search of Lost Time, I’ve noticed Proust takes an experimental approach to the construction of characters and their subversive inner natures, and to the narrative, which is full of discursive asides (with language pushed to its limit) and isn’t quite temporally fixed, as perspective shifts through the narrator’s past experience, his reflections in the present, his omniscient insight into the minds of others, and the voice of Proust himself. In thinking about la recherche, I find myself making connections to House of Leaves, by Mark Z Danielewski, published in 2000–a good contemporary example of experimental narrative fiction (and one of my favorite novels). House of Leaves is full of confounding typography–ballooning margins, rotated and reversed text, color-coded words (‘house’ shows up invariably in dark blue–analogous to a blue-screen chromakey, according to the author)–and narrative glitches, with excessive footnotes and chapters misplaced, interrupted, or missing. The story goes like this: a blind man–Zampanò–dies, and a young guy named Johnny Truant moves into his LA apartment where he finds a manuscript of a detailed recount and criticism of a movie called The Navidson Record. But there is no movie. It’s a work of imagination. As with Proust, we read through several perspectives (in different fonts): through Johnny’s footnotes in the first person, as he pieces together Zampanò’s manuscript (some of these shed light on the old man, but they often run off course into Johnny’s hedonistic life, unsteady past and destabilizing mental state) and through the manuscript itself, which gives a third-person account of The Navidson Record and an analysis of its characters, themes, production and critical reception. Additionally, there’s the occasional presence of mysterious Editors (which makes me wonder how much the voices of the less cryptic Moncrieff, Kilmartin and Enright–not to mention Pléiade editors of the French–influence our interpretation of Proust’s manuscript). Zampanò’s movie never made is bizarre. It’s a documentary of impossible events–a photojournalist settles down in Virginia and rigs up cameras to shoot high-production value home movies and ends up capturing the siege against his family and loved ones waged by his house, which gets a little bit bigger on the inside than it is on the outside–and then a lot bigger, when an infinitely massive pitch-black labyrinth pops up connected to his living room. Unlike Proust’s narrator, who constantly struggles to retrieve his lost memories of childhood joy, Danielewski’s characters are haunted by the events they can never forget. Will Navidson, the photojournalist, won a Pulitzer for capturing a child near death, stalked by a vulture (based on a real photo taken by Kevin Carter who committed suicide weeks after receiving the prize), and carries immense guilt for being unable to save the child’s life. Karen Green, his partner and the mother of his children, was abused by her stepfather, who trapped her in a well while targetting her sister, and became intensely claustrophobic. Their house is a backdrop–or a blue-screen–for their fears. It transforms into a dark, malevolent maw, both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, which Karen will not set foot into and Navidson must explore, even as it claims the lives of his colleagues and family. House of Leaves deals with painful memories, family connections, shifting perspective, unreliable recollection, sexual love, and imagination as a way of plumbing a character’s subconscious, and while going through In Search of Lost Time, I see similar themes. I’m just glad I never have to hold Proust’s books upside down.

“Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny (as contrasted with the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.” (1)

In trying to formulate something to say about time, I remembered an old essay I read by Borges called, A New Refutation of Time. Rereading it while maneuvering Proust was immensely enjoyable, because I originally read it with idealism and metaphysics in mind. Borges’ argument is directed toward Berkeley’s idealism, but I’m going to use it to examine In Search of Lost Time.

When I picture Proust’s narrator in the process of recalling his earlier years in Combray, particularly the scene with the madeleine, I imagine time as being compressed into the treat, waiting to be unlocked in the mind once tasted. Is the present the sum series of the past or is the past simultaneous with the present? It seems that if the past is simultaneous with the present, then there is no past, only the present, meaning there’s no present without the past, creating an endlessly circular paradoxical headache. I think Borges would refute the idea of time being compressed into a madeleine, which awaits being unlocked, but rather call it a reflection of the past. The subtle difference is that one lives again in the moment, while one reflects it, and to Borges time cannot be regained-it cannot be relived.

The second half of the first sentence I’ve quoted states a “desperation[s] and secret consolation[s]” in idealist notions of time. One is to assume the theory Borges is refuting claims time as not structured a->b, but rather something similar to the madeleine, existing in lumps and possibly eternally recurring. The madeleine then is a source of comfort, because it allows us to slip away from the rigid, unbreakable foundation of a linear sequence, which never breaks in its stretch toward the infinite. Ultimately, this desperation and consolation comes from the fear of death, for the human body is bound to die, and one must come to terms somehow with the acknowledgment of non-existence having once existed.

I find solitude in both Borges and Proust, and being the sort of agnostic, unsure-of-everything kind of person I am, I accept both notions presented here. It seems possible to regain those moments you hold on to dearly, to live in them and stow away the present. At the same time, I’m realistic and accept that time, relative, is a cold, merciless idea which seems inescapable, perhaps due to the dimension we exist in. We must come to terms with parting from ‘good times’, if only to see other good times, or perhaps fall on the bad.

1.)  Borges, Jorge Luis. “A New Refutation of Time.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Pub., 2007. 233-234. Print.

Dear Journal,

It’s interesting to me, to see how ignorant society was back in the 1800’s. It’s sad to see woman treated as objects and only falling into two categories either they were at home and “pure” category or they were in the “impure” but necessary to keep the woman at home “pure” category. It’s funny to see how this how this Dr. so and so Stacey was telling us about the other day can say practically in the same sentence that sexual intercourse is a necessity for the men in order to relieve them while keeping their wife’s at home and “pure” , only looking at them as undesirable fertility gate keepers, then turn around and say unprotected sex with shop girls or brothel girls leads to Syphilis and many of the men would contract it and bring it home to their wife’s and their unborn babies, If the men where trying to “protect” their wife’s  and their children then this completely contradicts the reason. I think that desiring your woman is a far less evil then bringing home an incurable sexually transmitted disease. You have to wonder how woman became a man’s object. Someone so vital in the continuance of man is stripped of her dignity and forced to have sex with men for money and not for love and the woman who is in some cases forced to marry a man and bare his children without being pleasured. It seems to me that the man just wanted to get his cake and eat it too. I don’t understand the hierarchy here, if woman are the reason man is alive then why are woman treated as dispensable? I understand that in a way man has been punishing woman since the day she took the fruit from the forbidden tree and gave it to her husband to eat, ultimately casting man away from God and onto a barren earth and many of the older days consisted of biblical teaching and rules but jeez that was a long time ago and if men were smart they would start protecting their woman like a group of bees would protect their queen bee since she is the key to their continuance of life.

Kindred is by far my favorite selection of reading from the In Search of Lost Time  program thus far. I actually managed to read the entire book in the week before the program started. I was so captivated by the intensity of the subject matter that I had trouble putting it down. The story, which is about a young African American woman living in the 1970s who is repeatedly dragged back in time to the antebellum south to aid her white male ancestor.  Such situation would be horrific enough for a young black man, but as a woman, Dana’s vulnerability is at least doubled. The significance of Dana’s sex as well as her ethnicity in the Kindred novel inspired me to look at the novel in conjunction with the subject matter of our latest ancillary reading, Breaking the Codes: The Sexual Politics of Female Criminality. 

In Kindred, there is an especially traumatic scene in which Dana’s male ancestor, Rufus, has just been beaten in a fight with a run away slave who attacked him for trying to rape his wife. When Dana questions his atrocious behavior he justifies it by saying that he had no other choice and that he would have made her his wife it it weren’t that she refused him (and there for offended his honor). In Breaking the Codes  it is suggested through out that for women to demand equality was an attack on male masculinity, in other words, for women to have the freedom to do as they wish independent of a males authority was offensive to the male ego. This is the case in Kindred for not only Alice (the woman Rufus tried to rape), but for Dana as well. They were challenging the authority of not only men, but of white men. It used to be that any woman who was upset with a man, or claimed she had reverences against them was labeled a hysteric. Similarly, slaves who ran away were said to have drapetomania. Apparently, oppressed individuals who desired freedom, or fair treatment are mentally ill.

When presented with the collection of atrocities against women which history has to offer, I can never help but be baffled: how can white men like Rufus who owned slaves and were clearly racist claim to love women who they quite clearly see as inferior creatures. Breaking the Codes makes it clear that such a phenomena is not isolated to the pre-civil war South, but has been a sad reality throughout history. For instance, during the late 1800s when feminists and some of their male sympathizers were pushing for female equality they were met with fierce resistance. Some insisted that to shelter the woman within the home was a natural practice justified by a long history of holding women captive(187). One lawyer supported this claim by insisting that women naturally preferred to be alone. A French doctor by the name of Broca produced studies concluding that women had an inferior cranial capacity and there for it would be detrimental to society to allow them to participate in higher education or matters of politics(187). So, it would seem that for many hundreds of years men have claimed to love women despite an utter lack of respect for her as an equal allowing him to feel little to no remorse when he pushes his will upon her. Such ill founded feelings of superiority would  only be exasperated  for an African American woman who finds herself in the grip of slavery.

In Breaking Social Codes the feminist was compared to the female criminal, for they both “tested societies established boundaries.” Feminists did this by trying to claim their rightful place in society. The same could be said of black American’s who tried to raise themselves up in society, either by attempting to escape slavery (in which case they were quite literally labeled as criminals), or even well into the 20th century or 21st for that matter if they try to establish themselves in a certain neighborhood or area of society. In both cases, the privileged of society “envision the over turning of all that makes social life familiar.” This irrational fear of losing power by allowing others to have power over themselves is what has allowed the social injustices of sexism and racism to carry on as long as they have.

There are other versions but this one was the most moving for me.

A Beginner’s Guide to the Opening of the Third Eye
Little black matte box. Little blue band-aid with a little thin blade containing a microchip outfitted with human nerve connectors. I’d heard the graphene nanotube was too minute, too microscopic for the human body to feel, but when I pulled back the little wax strips–the right side, then the left–grit my teeth when the warm edge sunk to bone, and the unspooling nanotube shot (in a fraction of a second) a human nerve tissue wire up my arms into my neck and my spinal cord, I felt a jerk like a snapping guitar string from my middle finger to the center of my forehead. I blinked, and then my forehead blinked. Superimposed on my point of focus like a hallucination was a little pink bubble with little blue text saying hello. The device was successfully integrated with my neural networks, it informed me, and proceeded to connect to a nearby wireless network.
Advances in lab-grown organic tissues and human nervous system programming made in the early twenty-first century paved the way for body augmentation and sense organ addition, starting in the industrial sector with visible wavelength-extending lens replacements. The first devices of this kind seemed rudimentary, clunky, even primitive compared the sleek, minimal neural gadget I had just gotten my hands on (and into my hands), although fundamentally they worked the same way: reprogramming the human brain to allow for another field of vision, but instead of displaying temperature or radioactivity (which made early so-called ‘parietal’ eyes so invaluable to nuclear engineers) the bubbles massing over my face gave me updates on music events in my area, the locations and activities of my friends and family, and trending global news stories. As technology media outlets had predicted, the first commercially available parietal eye was announced as a thought-integrated smartphone.
To be continued…

“I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one’s perceptions; now I saw it as a dread deity, so riveted to one’s being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one’s heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself.”

Habit has been a reoccurring theme through out the different volumes. In the first Volume it was the narrators habit of endearment from his mother for bed time. During that point, I wasn’t sure if it was for the habit of “routine, a bed time story, a good night kiss” or if it was just the habit of seeing his mothers face as the last person before he shut his eyes. Then as the book goes deeper, the habit grows deeper as well. To me the theme outlines neurotic habits, i didn’t see the anxiety of the habits when the narrator was younger and wanted nothing but his mothers kiss goodnight. But when he gets older, the understanding of the habit grows as well. Which brings me to the reason why I picked this quote, because it shows the development of the narrators understanding of not only habit but habit as a whole (himself, the habits and the people he associates with the habits)

 

In my other class this quarter, the prompt of ” I am the one …” was assigned for a litany poem.

Here is mine.

 

 

I am the one who often loses my personhood,

I get lost within my responsibilities.

The caregiver, of a dying spouse,

A housekeeper,

The landscaper and gardener.

I am becoming the medical expert and manager,

And the bandager of daily wounds.

A masseuse and Chiropractor,

Comforter, entertainer and medication manager.

A cook and nutritionist of specialized diets,

and the cheerleader of healthy food.

His ears and his voice, whenever someone talks to him.

His protector and security manager.

I am the home repair specialist and mechanic.

The technology expert, both computer and phone,

I am the accountant and the legal advisor, tax preparer and bill payer.

I am the one who loves him and is by his side every day and night.

 

I am the one who is a mother and step mother of boys- grown

The one who calls for help with their father and is denied.

I am the grandmother unwanted,

Until work need to be done, or money is needed.

 

I am a dog owner- with 4

Rescued from death, they all depend on me.

The one who calculates nutrition and feeds,

Exercise and training, cleaning and brushing,

I am a chicken owner as well.

I am the one who takes care of them all.

I am the one who cries alone at night,

Who struggles to find time, even a minute for myself.

I am the unavailable friend,

Who doesn’t always return phone calls or messages,

I am the one who needs to stay home.

Who forgets about me.

 

I am the one who is a student now,

Learning to earn, to survive and pay my way.

I am the one proving to myself that I can learn,

That I have something to contribute.

 

I am also the one who is an artist,

The one who used to create and show.

The one who can draw and paint.

I am a writer, one with stories to tell.

I am the one who is still trying to find me.