believing is seeing

I am planning to return to school next year to get a Masters Degree in Art Education.

Everyone knows that those who can't do, teach; so why would I want to teach others to make art? Am I giving up, admitting I don't have "it"? Maybe, you judgemental pigsnout. But maybe not. This "they" who tells us that teaching others is an admission of inability have perhaps never heard that most of the so-called "great" artists of the past taught on the side - and some of them even liked it (Gauguin was known to pull a revolver on people who mixed colors too much - what's not to love about that?).

Besides, while I may be an artist, I am also a person, which means my interests are more varied than they ought to be. I like to read, write poetry (check it out! new poems in the poetry section! come one, come all!), play the occasional soccer or tennis match, toodle around with my motorcycle, and sing loudly in the shower. Besides, teaching is HARD, and beyond just loving the feeling of inspiring others to greatness, I'm a sucker for a challenge. What, you might ask, is so challenging about teaching art?

Well, to teach someone to draw, you have to first teach them to see. To teach them to see, to really SEE, you have to convince them to want to see. To teach someone to want to see, you have to make them believe that what they currently do with their eyes is a sort of selective blindness, brought about by the mind's inability to process all the information it receives, which is why it cheats, boxing objects under general headings, like "tree" and "chair" and forgetting to notice the carved initials, or the ornate painting of a chinese dragon. Once you've convinced them of this, you have to convince them that it is worthwhile, sometimes (if only for a few minutes), to fight back the boxing urge and actually LOOK.

This is the hard part, because at this point you have to get all philosophical and convince people that the forms of the world are real enough to matter enough that you might want to bother to spend an hour or more actually looking at them. In our postmodern age, this is a hard task indeed, so often you have to start by tricking them with magic. You tell them that there is a power in drawing, and that eventually they'll be able to take up a pencil and steal a person's soul.

Another tack you can try is to convince people that they are themselves magic and that the only way to release that magic is to stop their mind from working in the normal, boring, non-magical way in which they've trained it. You do this in rationalistic terms, though, because you (the teacher) are fighting a fixed battle against everything else they're being told by all their other teachers - television, movies, parents, the educational system - and so you have to claw tooth-and-nail, gouging eyes if necessary and using whatever sneaky, underhanded method you can.

Once you do this, once you get your way and they believe that they are blind, then their eyes are opened. Believing is seeing, in a sense, so they can begin to notice things as they really are.

What is all this worth?

I don't know.

Perhaps in the future, when they're confronted with something that some primal instinct tells them is not exactly right, then they'll be able to shut down for a second that boxing, reactionary thought pattern and take a moment to evaluate what it is they're actually seeing. They will look for truth behind depicted reality. They will search for meaning in the madness.

They may not find it (it is, I think, unlikely that they will). But something will have changed, and in some small way they may find themselves less the victims of their slavish nature, which could (a teacher can dream, can't he?) allow them the hope necessary to give them the determination enact some sort of change.

Also, they'll be able to draw pretty pictures of ducks for their aunt.

dream lover

Do you have one of those annoying dream-friends, the kind who tells his dreams all the time in painful, teeth-gnashing detail? Doesn't it just get your knickers in a bunch the way he thinks that the disjointed, fractal, irrational narrative going on in his head should somehow matter to the poor, beknighted souls unfortunate enough to drift into dream-range?

Well, tough luck to you, because I am that guy.

So. Last night, I am in this class with an improbable assortment of people - some I knew in Peru, some from planting, some from university, my wife - and I am joking around not paying attention (as I am want to do) when Dan Archibald shooshes me from behind, saying "quiet, this is an important math test we're getting back here". My soul shrinks, shrivels, and explodes in a poof! of grey dust.

I hate math. I don't do math. The last mathematics-related course I took was Algebra One in eighth grade. I know, I know - that's odd. But my dad was the principal and what with the compromising photos and all, things were "arranged". Yet here I am, sitting in a crowd of my trans-era peers, being handed back a paper with a big red "50%" slashed boldly across the top. I slap my hand down on it hard, so no one will see, and stumble through some concealeatory joke or another before the balding, bleary-eyed teacher cuts in, beginning to mock those who did not do well - suggesting that perhaps we ought to drop the class before it's too late. He's really warming to the subject, and I find myself wanting to throw a book at him.

Instead, I squirm in place, nervously suggesting that "I'll see who's laughing in English class", but no one is really listening and it just comes off as pathetic. Down the row to my right, Matt Simmons (archetypal high school cool guy) flips his perfect hair and laughs and jokes around with Jeremy, already thinking of something else.

What can I do? Where can I go to reclaim my dream-ego and feel again that I matter, that I am worth the air I'm sucking? I do what any dream person does in a situation of such insecurity: I start flying. Up, out of my seat, into the wide, wild blue. I loop, soar, cruise to the tops of impossibly high fruit trees, picking the mangoes and mamays no one else can reach. This is incredible! I am really, really flying!

Somehow, though, no one seems to care. In fact, they don't even notice. Matt and Jeremy are playing video games (which I condemn as morally worthless - mostly because I suck at them) and Michael's doing gymnastics off of forty-foot high tree branches (which, lets face it, is more dangerous and cool than flying).

And I wonder: do I really have to spend my whole life enslaved to the insecurities of my youth? Is my life hereafter doomed to be just a series cyclical, compensatory actions - exercises in futility? I mean, it's not my fault. All the math teachers I ever had were impatient, snarling harbingers of hatred, who didn't have time for someone who didn't quite get it on the first pass. I was probably more of an Einsteinian type, anyway - uncapable of 'rithmatic because I was too busy working out the formula for the universe. But there I go again - compensating. Or self-indulging in endlessly-reductive reasoning, justifying mySelf and drowning out my personal demons through the creation of internal Pathos at any cost.

It may be that I am just truly bonkers, or at least skating on the edge of it. The bottom line is, I think, that I have not yet learned to love myself and until I do I'll be stuck in weird-dream land, incapable of striking out into the real and difficult business of Living; that is, the loving of other people. And even though when I write that the bell immediately strikes and a banner begins to flash saying "Life is a Journey, not a Destination" under a cheezy eighties poster of a marathon runner in short shorts, I can't help but wish for respite, and a little more self-love than I have, today.

getting my goat

Sometimes I sit down to write, wanting to bring some new insight to the internet table, and I feel just blank. Not wise or witty or funny or perturbed - just blank. When this happens, I can either get up and go somewhere else, or I can dig into the past - start writing a story in the hope that some kernel of wholesome goodness will emerge.

---

Every Saturday, my brother Jo-Ben, sister Hannah and I got to take turns going on "adventures". Dad would hoist us up onto his 200cc Suzuki on/off road motorcycle, and together we would ride off on the hot, dusty jungle roads in search of some new thing. Helmets, boots, and thick long clothing - the prerequisites for safe riding - were a joke in the choking humidity of the amazon, so we rode free into boundless possibilities.

One Saturday of mine, we started early. We rode out of our yard and up the main road. Orestes waved, grabbed the handle that pulled open the gate, and saw us off. There had been a light shower already, but the roads were quickly drying, so the red dirt under our tires wavered in that perfect moment of balance between sloppy impassability and all-permeating dustiness. The rain punched up all the smells and the electron-buzz of still-lingering lightning clouds promised that this was going to be a good one.

We rode, then, through Callao: past Ronco's, the mechanic/tire repairman rumored to spread nails in front of his shop, past the scintillating smells of restaurants like "Orlando's" and "El Alamo", where squat, smiling men proved daily that Peruvians were the best cooks in the world. Then it was onto concrete-block pavement for the short stretch into Pucallpa, weaving in and out of the ants' nest of pedestrians, moto-taxis, scooters, and dilapidatedantiquated trucks belching deisel fumes and wobbling along on a prayer and a stick of chewing gum.

It was a dirty frontier town, but there was a frantic, humming life to this population at the end of the twenty-four hour highway from Lima. Like a bees nest on the end of a stick it throbbed, and we wove delicately, burstingly through the melee to emerge, slightly ruffled, on the other side. Shaking off the tension of the moment, dad opened the throttle and we shot up the highway west, straight towards the mountains.

This was early in my time there, before the influence of the terrorist groups of the MRTA and the Sendero Luminoso had fomented such angry, anti-NorthAmerican sentiment that it was hard for a white person to make it through without catching an angry word, or a rock. Peruvians were more like themselves then, a lively, freindly people, bursting with stories and enthusiasms and quick to forgive the indecencies of American Imperialism.

Dad and I smiled wide, letting the bugs thwap into our teeth. At Kilometer Fifteen, we turned left off the highway, dipping down and then up between orderly rows of fifteen-foot rubber trees towards a large barn - a long, low structure of poles and a corrugated tin roof that radiated a pungent odor I'd never smelled before. We were early, but could hear a chorus of bleating through the bushes and mango trees and in a few minutes there came bursting into the feild by the barn what appeared to my six year old self to be a thousand and one goats. Big ones, small ones, goats of every color, shape and size. Goats walking, running, and even little kid goats being carried in shoulder-bags by big ones.

They "flocked" under the tin roof, where food and water awaited them, and dad and I waded into the riotous goat-mess, poking and prodding until we found a young one we coulg agree upon. "Esta cabra esta bueno", he told the man, and after pockets were dug into we wrapped the bleating thing in a burlap bag, tied it onto the motorcycle between us, and rode back through the bustle of Pucallpa and Callao, homeagainhomeagain to free our little poop machine into the new corral and shed dad had fixed up.

She was a beaut - light brown, with white patches on her sides and a black strip down her nose.
Jo-Ben and Hannah gathered close, petting and ooing and awwing as I tried my hardest to make them jealous by regaling them with tales of the massive barn and millions of goats.

Later, we borrowed a truck and picked up a male and a few females from the goat farm, and before you knew it we had more than twenty-five goats running around, eating the laundry and pooping up a storm. Jo-Ben and I watered and fed them every day (Hannah was only three), and spent saturdays shoveling out the five-inch thick layer of poop in their shed, watching carefully for the diamond-like crystals that formed through the rules of scatological alchemy. Then we walked the quarter-mile up to the carpenter shop with empty burlap sacks, which we filled with shavings and sawdust from the planer and table saws. When we were done we'd trudge the bags home on our backs, one by one, and spread out a new layer for the goats to poop on. Or, if dad was feeling nice, we'd call and he would go borrow a truck again, bringing them all home at once.

I know, it sounds like a whole lot of work. And it was. But it was also filled with moments of magic - like when birthings went wrong and mom would stand there reading to dad from the goat book while he lay on the floor with his cheek in the mess and rooted his soaped-up arm around inside a disturbed-looking expectant mother, trying to sort out a tangle of legs, heads, and umbilical cords. Or when one of the goats was not producing enough milk for her two kids, so the smaller one found our irish setter, who'd just had puppies, and set to suckling on her.

Along with the blisters, I developed character, a love for the smell of goats, and a burning desire to never own another one for as long as I live and breathe.

---

So after all this, I have to look back over what I've written and wonder, what's the point? I write this stuff, but has it mattered? I mean, I got in a good dig against Americans, and a thumbs-up to Peruvian cooking, but I still feel blank. I guess I just have to content myself with feeling ecclesiastical and hoping that you, at least, are amused.

a benediction

Someone called me up recently to tell me that my last post - the bit about caning all the poor people - is a bit heavy handed.

I don't know.

It's satire... can satire be too heavy handed? In Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", to which my title refers, he suggests eating children as a healthy way to solve the hunger issue. Believe you me this, the poor of the world are going to far prefer a little once-a-year beating (more of a love tap, really), to carniverous cannibal foraging by the "upper" classes.

I understand, though. It's about my approach and my tone, that I come off as a screamer and a thumper of bibles and the heads of anybody who comes too near. There I am, standing up there on a rock, gesticulating loudly to the wind and calling down the curses of heaven upon the indifferent, conformist heads of my countrymenandwomen. I don't mean to - cause as soon as I set myself up as "high-and-almighty-josh-prognosticator-of-putrescence and protector-of-purity" then I veer dangerously close to becoming chummy with that Ted Haggard guy, or whomever else was idiotstick enough this week to pretend to be "God's Voice to the Beknighted (may they rot in hell!)".

What I oughtta do - what I really oughtta do - is to shut up, sit down on that rock for a while, and hummmmmmm. Maybe then when I am done (if indeed that happens) I will come up with something like the following - a calmer, more humble call as was written by the chap way back when who came up with this benediction I crib from my buddy's website:

May God bless you with discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships
So that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
So that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war,
So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and
To turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world.
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done
To bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

Traditional Franciscan Benediction
(original source unknown)


There, now wasn't that nicer? Sharp and too the point, but somehow containing a handful of humility and hopefullness. I like.

Go, therefore, and do likewise.

a modern, modest proposal

Do you ever feel oppressed by the injustice of having to drudge off to degrading “jobs” while other people (like celebrities and billionheiresses) get to spend their time gallivanting from party to resort to party? You should, because there is a reason for this grave imbalance of wealth: while your country is rich, it is NOT RICH ENOUGH! This can and must change.

For years you have grown in wealth along with your nation, reveling in the glorious panoply of cheap consumer goods swirling before your credit-card-laden hands. While most of the world has toiled away in the third world’s so-called “sweatshops” and rice patties, you’ve enjoyed convenience, corpulence and the comfort of completely losing track of the difference between “I need” and “I want”.

Through the marvels of modern technology and globalized economic powermongering, you have managed to remain in that elite majority that can buy anything it desires without having to worry about trivialities like the social, ecological, and spiritual costs of modern economic practice. The best part is that you do all of this without lifting a finger! Your implicit approval has allowed corporations acting in your name to rape most of the world’s population of their very lives, forcing them to eke out a living on a pittance – but so what? You deserve it. I mean, LOOK AT YOU.

Besides, the main reason fifty million children die every year of malnutrition-related illnesses is that their parents are just too freaking lazy to provide for their kids. You work at YOUR job and YOUR kids will never starve, so it stands to reason that if they worked harder, THEIR kids wouldn’t starve either. Should you be forced to pay the economic consequences of the actions of a bunch of insolvent inebriates? I say not. I say you deserve what you’ve got, that you earned it by being born here. And do you know what else? You deserve even more. Why should you have to continue to go to boring, blue and white-collar jobs when others get to have their party-clothes collars starched and pressed for them by scores of servants? They are no better than you – so what is keeping you back?

I’ll tell you what – laziness. Those same lazy, dissolute parents who are causing the deaths of all those children are becoming more and more lazy at their sewing machines, their fruit picking, and their rice planting. They are starting to believe that they have a right to be disillusioned with what is obviously their God-ordained lot in life. Reports are coming in from shops the world over that the majority of the workers are beginning to slack off even more than usual. Riots are expected.

The future of your way of life hangs in the balance. Now is the time to rise up – NOW – before these ingrates crap all over the path you were born to follow. Who knows what could happen if you don’t act now? Your living expenses could skyrocket as corporations become forced to factor things like human dignity into the prices of consumer goods. You could become (gasp!) more like them.

In these dark times, however, there is some hope. Act now, with me, and together we can crush this rising menace that threatens our very way of life. No longer can we stand idly by, letting others do our dirty work as we live in the apathetic acquiescence that has for so long greased the wheels of economic exploitation. Join me in signing the following e-petition and in sending it on to your friends and acquaintances.

When enough signatures have been gathered, send it back to me and I will forward it on to the people who pull the important strings and who can use our open support to make a difference. Politicians, heads of corporations and leaders of state will no longer be shackled by the need to maintain a façade of respectability. Unfettered by antiquated notions of moral restraint, they can operate with greater efficiency in their efforts to force those whose work makes our lives possible to bend further under the load they were born to bear. Together we will stand against the tide of ungracious sluggardy swelling in the ranks of the lower classes. Rise up! Rise up!

PETITION ON BEHALF OF THE UNDERSIGNED:

We the haves, the drinkers of Starbucks and purchasers of everything from American Eagle to Gucci. We the corpulent wearers of Nike and the owners of doodads and trinkets far exceeding our basic needs. We the few, the twenty percent of the world living on eighty percent of its resources, stand together in defiance of any slumping trends in our consumer economy. We, who have risen to the call of a barrage of advertising slogans and newsreel propagandas and have purchased our way into hedonistic history, are standing together to say that we have bartered our souls and the rewards have not been enough! We want more!

So we call on you, the leaders of the “free” world, to give your corporate middle finger to everyone else. We have voted you into power with our wallets – now earn that voter confidence and send a clear, unmitigated message to the world’s poor: We are done with your laziness! We are done with your sloth! We stand against you this coming January first, two thousand and seven, which we hereby declare to be known hereafter as “International Caning Day”.

On January first of this and all subsequent years all people, regardless of race, creed or caste, who make less than what we, in our nation of privilege, consider to be the “poverty line”, will be beaten, harshly and without recourse, as a reminder that laziness will no longer be tolerated! Together we will stand today in the hope of a better tomorrow. God bless the first world!

Sincerely,

JLB - Langley, Canada

one more week

I bought a motorcycle this week. That motorcycle, the one in the picture.

I bought it because I have been evaluating myself and have discovered that a lot of the things I do, I do because I am a chicken - a living, breathing, cackling, grain-grubbing chicken. I went into that before, I know, when I told you all about how I lied to that cop at the border to avoid getting probed with a rubber glove.

In the jungle town of Pucallpa, Peru, where I (nominally) grew up, motorcycles weren't about "cool" or "danger", they were the way to get around. Cars were much more expensive and not worth the hassle, what with the condition of the roads most of the time. Time went by, though, and they started paving more roads. My dad got older, saw more accidents, and decided to start counselling his kidren against the two-wheeled death-beasts. I absorbed this cautioning and translated it into a vague fear.

I am tired of that. It's getting harder and harder to get by in this (rat-son-of-a) suburban milieu with only one modicum transportatum between the wife and I, so instead of picking up another gas guzzler I can not afford, I bought a bike. An old bike. A nineteen-eighty-two Yamaha XS 400 "project" bike.

See, I am also scared of "projects", and mechanicking. I have bought into the lie that I am a certain kind of person - the sort who does not know how to fix stuff. No more! Installing gas fireplaces has taught me that I can be crafty, too. I have played with power tools and problem-solved with the perverse machinations of putting in fireplaces and I have prevailed!

Move over, Hell's Angels! I am getting a motorcycle license, rolling up my sleeves, and diving in.