Friday, February 22, 2008

swimming, bike riding, being sick, and the rnc welcoming committee

I’m sick this morning. It’s a cold or maybe a flu or something like that. But I’m resting up. And taking a little time to write something here.

I went swimming last week and it was great. I’ve been pretty bummed about this foot and knee problem that I’ve been having lately. As a result of both the problem and being depressed, I haven’t been doing a whole lot. And when I’m not active I tend to feel crappy. So, I decided to go swimming. And it worked! I felt great. I went for a really good bike ride later in the day and even a short hike (by taping my foot a certain way, I’ve been able to make it feel a lot better).

A few days ago, I took another great bike ride out to a reservoir just out of town. I sat by the ice for awhile and watched and listened to geese that were paddling around in some open water. Some others were sitting or walking on the ice and talking back and forth. I read some really interesting stuff and just enjoyed being there.

And now whatever I’ve got has really ramped up so that I feel sick enough to just want to sit around and rest.

I’m trying to figure out a place where the RNC Welcoming Committee (an anarchist / anti-authoritarian organizing body preparing for the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota) can give a presentation about their plans to disrupt the RNC this September. They plan to be here March 4th, so it’s getting very close. I’ve checked into getting a space at the university but so far that hasn’t panned out. This morning, I’m going to check with a local coffee shop/used bookstore—I think it’s something they would like to support. One of the nice things about the Welcoming Committee’s presentation, other than the information and excitement concerning the anti-RNC plans, is that a lot of it might be useful for people here who want to be involved in the anti-DNC actions in late August. The presentation has the potential to generate interest in both conventions and one of the really good things for Fort Collins is that they will also incorporate into the evening a presentation on basic activist community building. And right now, I think that’s an important thing for this community—I feel like the activist community here (especially the anarchist/anti-authoritarian community) has fragmented over the last few years (although there are many people working hard on all sorts of important things) and is not tapping into what might be a lot of potentiality (in the sense of students at the university and other people in the community who want to do something but don’t know where to start or even that there are others here who share a similar outlook).

For example, the other day I was selling cookies with another person outside of the food co-op in an attempt to raise money for the Transform Columbus Day legal fund (it was surprisingly successful). Towards the end of the afternoon, a person came over and asked how I had gotten involved in that particular thing. We talked a bit and it was quickly evident that we felt similarly about many things and that he wanted to be politically active but wasn’t aware of individuals or groups in the community that were active in the things he cared about. Later that week, I saw him again—he was reading a book that happens to be one that really resonates with me and I just had no idea that this person, whom I had seen many times in the past, was even interested in that kind of stuff.

So, anyway, I hope the Welcoming Committee’s event can help generate interest in both the conventions and local activism in general, as well as help make connections between individuals.

Yeah. Now I’m gonna go spit some phlegm. And read on the couch.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Omelas (here it is Jen)

THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS
by Ursula K. Le Guin

(Variations on a theme by William James)

Reproduced from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters collection of short stories.

WITH a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no long. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children—though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however—that of the unnecessary but imdestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.—they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas—at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don't think many of them need to take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his bands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering, "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope . . . ." They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes — the child has no understanding of time or interval — sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Monday, February 11, 2008

grasshopper

I had some bad dreams last night. Part of the reason, I think, is that I’ve been reading short stories by Anton Chekhov the last few days and they started filtering into my dreams. Or at least some parts of the stories, some of the feelings, did.

I’m back in Fort Collins now. The bus out of Gillette was about three hours late which was actually pretty nice because the Gillette depot has long couch-like seating that you can stretch out on and sleep. Which is what I did.

Then it was miles of prairie and rolling grassland.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

snow and cold wind

It's cold ears in Billings. After much walking around and happening to catch the last bus back into downtown, I'm in a coffee shop that's only open for another half hour (and there happens to be a computer here).

I really like this 14 hour layover stuff. Seriously. It has something to do with just being in some place and having time to explore a little, sit and read, or just think.

Being in Bismarck and helping my grandparents move was a very good time. There is a lot to learn from others and their lives. And just being together is a wonderful thing. And I laughed a lot with my mom and dad. It was just a really good time in lots of ways.

My ears are burning a little now that they are warming up.

An older man just walked by me and asked if I wanted to see an instrument from the 1800's. I said sure and he showed me a zither that was his grandfather's. It looks kind of like a guitar and harp put together. It's pretty flat and made of dark wood, many strings, and some brass-looking detailing. It's pretty cool.

He told me that if I want to hear zither music, I should check out a movie from 1949 called the Third Man. I think I'll try to watch that sometime.

It's starting to darken outside. The person I rode next to on the bus from Bismarck is on his way to Seattle. He wasn't sure if the pass would be open--he had already been delayed by storms after he left Green Bay.

He's fifty-five and grew up on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. He has a son who's 26 and lives on Rosebud and two younger daughters, 10 and 12, who live with his ex-wife in Wisconsin. He's headed out to Seattle to stay awhile with his girlfriend who he meet a couple of years ago at the annual Rosebud pow-wow.

I enjoyed hearing some of his stories. He used to hitchhike back in the seventies and early eighties but now he buses; he travels quite a bit. I think he has two brothers still alive, the rest of his siblings (I think he had seven all together) are dead now. He visits his children and his remaining siblings and travels around. He wears black shoes and took them off during the ride to rest his feet.

I hope he finds some good time in Seattle.

Friday, February 01, 2008

through the woods

It's up to North Dakota. I've got a ticket for a bus leaving today. I'm going to visit my grandparents and my parents, too, who will be at my grandparents'. My grandparents are going to be moving into town, so I wanted to visit them again while they still live in the house that they have always lived in since I was alive. I'm also going to help a bit with the move.

I think it would be really difficult to move after living somewhere for so long. And just the move from the country into town would be hard, too. I hope it goes well for them and that they find aspects of their new living conditions enjoyable. Hopefully, there will be a good community for them to become a part of.

Thinking about it is sad for me. The woods that we played in growing up. The playhouse my grandparents built in the woods. I remember playing out there with my siblings and my grandmother. There were a couple of old desks out under the boxelder trees and cupboards in the playhouse. And an old trash can that was so cool because it had a foot pedal that opened the lid.

Growing up, we spent a lot of time over there. We lived close and so it was easy to visit. We've had a lot of fantastic family time there. Holidays were a great time to see family (Ben knows what I'm talking about, about the whole thing, I think). There used to be so many of us that we had to have a second "kids" table. I remember sitting at that, while my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles ate at the "grownup" table. Looking back, it doesn't seem like it lasted long enough.

We've played many a game at the dining room table over the years. And games outside, too. I've found snakes in the flowerbeds and deer in the woods. And boxelder bugs are rarely far away.

I have lots of memories of family that are tied to that place. Many of them are from quite awhile ago. I remember things from when everyone was many years younger and it's kinda funny to imagine people like that, when they are younger than today.

Anyway, I'm not really packed yet so I had better get moving.