Reality In Question

It sometimes happens that when you're hard at work making fiction, you get invaded by the feeling that what's important is happening elsewhere -- something much more powerful than the story that you have been creating, with care and obsession. Human beings today need their daily dose of fiction, it's true; without it, we would not know how to live. But it is also true that, on many occasions, the rumblings of reality that come across our TVs and computer screens are so powerful that they knock the air out of you and leave you with the feeling that a film is something insignificant in comparison.
-Pedro Almodovar, Reality and Narration 

I adore Pedro Almodovar's films, especially Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and I don't mean to pick on the famous director when he is calling attention to an under-reported story, but to be surprised that reality is more significant than fiction?  Really, we have to rediscover this concept?    Also, do we all really "need" a daily dose of fiction?  In other words, we can't live without being fed some spin on our situation?  Of course, yes, one watches TV or reads and all of it is pure construct, even if it is a form from the Office of Personnel Management (perhaps especially so), so he is correct about the daily exposure.  But is it truly the case that we cannot deal with reality any more; that we need a daily dose of mental conditioning? Darn, we're in pretty bad shape.  Maybe it's only the intelligentsia that have become so self-referential.  That would explain a lot.  Unruly, ugly, scary, glorious, fatal reality: it doesn't come through the TV or computer screen, or even off of an old-fashioned page of paper, but it is there, waiting. 

Model

My daughter, the fashionista, opened up a copy of In Style magazine and said, "These models mostly all look like robots."

Oh Woman

Oh woman

remember who you are

woman

it is the whole earth

-Joy Harjo

I speak to women now because there is a time to speak woman to woman, but that does not mean that I am not speaking to everyone.  Women, we know that there is something not right in the way that the world has gone; that we all live as aliens - almost it seems - in a world that is not a home, that is becoming ever more rigid and lifeless, ever more superficial.  I thought about all of us, with our knowledge that is hidden in our bodies, in our dreams, and it seemed that there was nowhere for this knowledge to go, that we were powerless.  How are we to find the power to bring our knowledge up into the world?  Would we form a political party?  A Union?  Some other kind of organization?  How are we to counter the strength, the deadly will, of those who have lead us to these industrial waste-lands of concrete and asphalt, from which life has been banished and which turn all of our souls, piece by piece, to stone? 

Then I realized that we, women, already have all the power we need.  It is a hidden power; it has been hidden from us for so long we don’t even recognize it anymore, much less know how to use it.  Or if we do use it, we use it wrong, we use it against each other or for small and petty purposes: for seduction, for sexual manipulation, for stealing, for competing against each other in a game that only turns us into objects of desire -  objects, powerless.  That is what we use the enormous power of our bodies for, to make ourselves powerless.  That is what we have forgotten, that is what has been hidden from us.   Still it could not remain hidden forever, and it rises.  Our mothers have struggled for generations now  to become strong again, to win back control  of our own bodies, to have a voice.  We have raised a generation of young women who are stronger than ourselves.  In remembering who we are, we clear the way for them.  

We are the axis of life around which the wheels of civilization turn.  The glow of life hidden deep in our bodies is what civilization tries to forget  and obliterate, and then re-invent, but cannot, and grows sick with longing.  We are the home of the human species: its mothers, its aunties, its sisters, its foundation.  We are the ones that have kept faith with our bodies and our children, with giving birth and making milk, with the house-cleaning and the laundry, with the blood and bone, the sunlight, the garden.    We must remember who we are, now, remember all the wisdom hidden in our bodies, wisdom that our men and children sorely need, now, at this moment of choosing.  Our bodies know what is real and essential: food, shelter, kindness, gardens and forests, a world that is clean but not sanitized, a world in which many different kinds of animals, plants, bacteria, insects, yeasts, lichens, fungi can exist, because they are all part of the world-body.  We must give voice to our longings, support each other in bringing the beauty of bodies and animals, of life, back to the world, back to the center of our daily lives.  

Khadak

Yup, a YouTube music video link, from me! Weird, right? Khadak is on Netflix. Altan Uraq is the band, I believe. Khadak music

We have inherited a civilization in which the things that really matter in human life exist at the margin of our culture.  What matters? How birthing takes place matters; how infants are raised matters; having a rich and active dream life matters.  Animals matter, and so does ontological security and the magic of personal interaction and healthy and passionate sexual expression.  Career and prestige and putting a good face on it and the newest fashion in art or science do not matter.  Coming to our senses means sorting this out once and for all.  It also means becoming embodied.  And the two ultimately amount to the same thing.
- Morris Berman, Coming to our Senses

Not OK

I went to Honolulu to get my collarbone fragments bolted together last Wednesday.  The surgery center at Kaiser's Moanalua hospital was furiously busy.  I'm fortunate not to have a lot of contact with the medical community, so it's all completely fascinating when I do spend time in that world.   The equipment is impressive but what gets me are the people: the medical professionals.  These are very competent, caring, diligent people. To support highly specialized medical professionals is one of the main reasons we all, implicitly or explicitly, consent to our political and economic system.

My mother and I were there early so we waited quite a while in our curtained area of the prep center. Another patient came in on the other side of the curtain to my left.  The nurses started prepping him for his procedure.  He was going to get his stomach stapled to try to help him lose weight.  He had that sweetness of a laid-back, gentle local boy.  He was forty years old, and he was on dialysis.  The list of medicines he took daily numbered in the double digits.    The nurses had a terrible time getting an IV  in him because his veins were so scarred up already. He was not OK.  It was not OK. His was a hurt that went deep.  Yes, his injuries were the result of his own choices to over-eat.  And to choose to do so is his right.  I don't know anything about him but what I heard in that half-hour.  I don't know why he chooses to over-eat.  But I would guess that it was because he was hungry and sad and frightened.  That food was and is his joy and comfort in a world that is so furiously not OK. That would be my guess.

How far back do we need to retrace our steps in order to give him shelter in his world?  So that he and all the others would not need to eat themselves to death, to drug themselves to death, to escape in all the ways our civilization is so eager to provide?

We are crushing humans in our great machines and we say that this is how it has to be.  We say that the technology is the future, that we must have growing economies and we must compete against China and we must have more tourists and build more houses, and educate our kids in STEM subjects or we will be left behind.
What is a human?  What is life? What do we get to at the end of our days?

Shelter

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. - Irish proverb from DailyGood.org