These Boots Were Made for Walking

While walking around the South Bank here in London, one of the heels from my boots fell off. This reminded me of the very last day in Varanasi after 10 weeks in India and that one of my sandals that I had worn every day, broke. Things fall apart.

Heidegger's essay, "The Origin of a Work of Art" deals with the concept of the difference between functionality and Art, where it crosses over, where it does't, inter alia. However, he discusses Van Gogh's painting of a pair peasant's shoes and how they are worn with "care" and serves a purpose. That the painting was a reflection of this purpose. When our tools break, we recognize their functionality and their purpose, specifically when we need said tools. Such as being several miles away from where you need to be an your shoe heel falls off, or some such example.

These boots have served me quite well, and if you look closely, you will see that those are not the original soles. In fact, I have gone through two soles on each and at least as many heels and the sides are splitting.

I have walked. I love to walk and I do so several miles on any given day, and when traveling, that may reach 10-15 in large cities, in addition to a great deal of public transportation, such as the Tube here.

If you know me, you know that I will wear things until they are in shambles if it is a favorite article of clothing, such as these boots. When something serves us well, we should appreciate that, and I appreciate these boots, so I felt that they should have a posting of their own.

Things do fall apart, when the center cannot hold, and I have learned that when certain things break, then it is Time for certain changes. I have not decided the fate of these boots as I will soon be going to Texas and New Mexico, where for the most part I will be again wearing sandals everywhere. Whether they gain yet another life remains to be seen. Or, they will be retired with my sandals from India.

Gap Minded

Without a doubt, one of the most memorable things that people bring back from London is the experience of the Tube, the Underground Metro system that became a transportation icon when the famous schematic was drawn up by Harry Beck in 1931, for the paltry sum of five pounds for his efforts. Now one of the most recognizable maps in the world, most modern Metro maps are modeled after Beck's simple topological design, revolutionizing the way the world look at a transport system.

In addition the half-inch thick painted "Look Left" and "Look Right" designations at the majority of central London streets to avoid hapless American from becoming hood ornaments for Aston Martins and the ubiquitous London Taxi Cabs, the ever-present "Mind the Gap" warning of disembarking from each Tube car is another icon of navigating London transit logistics.

And, what would a trip to London be without a round on the Tube?

Today, after having an incredible full English Breakfast, it began to pour down rain, so I had already planned to make some stops, and there was no better time than the present to duck underground on the Underground for two hours and step out at various stations.

It is always interesting to see how the populations evolve and change along the routes from working-class end-stations like Stratford to the upper-crusty Oxford Circus or Acton to Mile End, with all points in between. Entire mini-demographics emerge, sometimes one stop at a time, others so gradually that suddenly you feel as if you have moved into a different country altogether. At South Kensington where women are still donning Ascot head gear to blue-collar outlays of East Ham, you can see the world in an hour.

Here are a few of the icons that I encountered along the way, minding the Gaps amongst the various peoples one encounters while in London.

Going to Market

Yesterday I went to one of the various markets in Antwerp that have become a weekly experience for me.  It is probably one of the most important and visceral aspects of living in Europe as an American that I experience on a regular basis. It is the romantic view of wandering through life at a different pace and assembling the details of daily life one by one at various stalls and shops.

Although not all part of the market, I gather my goods from a sundry of places, over time, and it is a nice diversion from the modalities of the impersonal life that we often live in modern society.

I get my coffee ground at Helios, circa 1925, the Felix blend, dark and robust. I get my green chiles that are similar to Hatch chiles at the Turkish market store. I get my cheese at the cheese vendor on the De Villegas market on Thursdays and Saturdays. I get my parothas at the Tamil store next to the laundry mat that I do laundry on the Driekonigenstraat.

Most importantly, I get my flowers, on a weekly basis, at the market.

Getting flowers is a privilege. It is the epitome of a culture that has the luxury and aesthetics of making it a business of buying and selling something that grows in the wild to be part of a market economy. I do not begrudge this as I LOVE flowers. I love flowers on so many levels, and that was what I enjoyed so much in India was that flowers were a daily part of life. 80% of the women in Madurai wore flowers in their hair, EVERY day. Flowers were strewn over the streets, over piles of shit, worn as garlands, and adorned every devotional statue or commemorative piece at every street corner. Flowers were, literally, everywhere.

Belgians do like their flowers, that much is true, but it comes at a cost. Like eating, Belgians are not known for being lenient, and TV shows such as Komen Eten and Smaak Politie are testament to making sure that eating is regimented, criticized and enjoyed at a cost.

At the market, then, this Saturday, I went to my usual stall, and was feeling very happy about the selections. However, there was one middle-aged (50-60 year-old woman) who was getting very upset about the wait. She began drumming her knuckles on the metal counter of the flower stand that we were all (about 20 of us) were waiting and begin to become more and more vocal about how long SHE had to wait. Well, last time I checked, we were all waiting, but what I see more and more here is that it is always about ME and not about the whole scenario. We were ALL waiting, just as long. At one point, only ten minutes or so on a very, very busy market day, the woman vociferously leaves the line and yells, and I do mean yells, at the three women behind the counter that have been busting their asses to get to everyone as soon as possible that it is beyond reproach that they did not have someone dedicated to people like herself who just wanted a ready-made bouquet and that god forbid they gave individual attention to the details of making individual bouquet, something which to me makes this particular flower stand impressive, and she then says that she will never come back to this so-and-so vendor. And, she leaves in a huff, without her flowers, despite being next in line.

What happens next was the telling tale of the devil in the details. Not only did the remaining customers not discard the actions/words of the woman who left as such as an aberration of norms, but suddenly there was a wave of negativity from the group and they all began to bitch and complain to the people behind the counter for having to wait, etc. etc.

I am unforgiving in this mentality and it disgusted me. We had the luxury and the wealth to wait in a line of beautiful flowers, of which you can see below and people decided to use their voice of dissent and anger instead of gratitude for what they would soon be enjoying.

It makes me ill.

If you cannot wait for flowers, nor realize that you are lucky enough to enjoy a gift of nature at any cost that enhances and beautifies your life, then the only flowers you will ever appreciate will be those on your grave.

Like Ferdinand the beleaguered bull from the children's story, flowers are the portals to beauty and to stopping and enjoying life. If you cannot, then I am very sad for you.

Small Deaths

In a few days will mark the 7th anniversary of my father’s death .

I was living in Castiglion Fiorentino at the time, and had just returned to Austin for a job interview at the Harry Ransom Center, where I would soon become the Curator for Academic Affairs for a few years. During the interview process, of which there were several days, I was walking down Duval street, near where we had lived for many years and were renting out our house and I was staying in the garage apartment, and Charlton, a friend of the family, pulled over in his car and told me that people were looking for me, my father was in the hospital.

He died soon afterwards in Louisville, Kentucky, where he had been living, racing cars, teaching surgery, and living hard as he always had. I remember calling my ex-wife at the time, who was visiting Rome with her mother, and just said, “He didn’t make it.”

I flew to the funeral, attended it, gave a eulogy along with my sisters, and then went back to Austin, finished the job interview process, then flew back to Italy, where we were wrapping up an eventful two years, for better and for worse, with a small death of our own, and was about to repatriate to the US for what would just be a couple years before coming back to Europe, this time here in Belgium.

While I was a visiting professor at L’Università di Bologna, I had the pleasure of teaching a course on James Joyce’s Ulysses with the eminent Joycean scholar Rosa Maria Bosinelli, for whom I am grateful for introducing me into the international community of Joyceans in Italy and Europe.

It was during that course that I was able to flesh out the Ulysses portion of my book on James Joyce, and specifically with regards to the chapter that is often colloquially called “Circe” within the novel and is often considered to be the chapter that ushered in the post-modern within the novel. Superficially it is a play within a play, but that is nothing new, and Joyce already makes the cameo of such a literary device in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter, directly given the nod to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” which itself plays a critical role in the novel, and most certainly in “Circe” as well.

My book is about the relationships of Memory and Death in the works of James Joyce, and how like the Ancient Greeks believed, we die two deaths. One death is the physical death, the small death, but the big one, is if we are forgotten. To truly kill an Ancient Greek was to forget him or her after his or her death.

Thinking about my father this week, there is still something hanging over me, as what happens with Odysseus. Odysseus learns from Circe that he must go to the Underworld and to propitiate a hungry ghost, that of Elpinor, a minor character at best, before he can unlock the lips of the dearly departed to find out more about his own Fate in the world of the living. Elpinor was amongst the partying crowd of Odysseus’ sailors, who in their revelry, got drunk and Elpinor fell to his death from a second-story roof, breaking his neck. The point was, though, is that Elpinor’s ghost was unquiet, or hungry, because he had been forgotten when the ships left again to try and return to Ithaca. As such, Odysseus had to pay homage to his ghost and to appease the Shades of Hades in order to continue with his own life.

Although I buried the hatchet with my father when he was alive as I remember our last conversation very well as it was from a small phone shop in Castiglion and for the first time in my life, instead of asking “why are you doing x, y, or z?” and this time the “x” factor was “living in Italy,” he just seemed genuinely happy for me. I am also very happy with my eulogy and that I was able to deliver one, given the timing of it all.

However, I still have part of his ashes here in my apartment, and there is something that I have yet to do. One of the few trips that I took with my father, and one of the few decent moments of that trip, was to Scotland when I was giving a paper in Dundee at a James Joyce conference there. We traveled some afterwards and one of the places we went was the battlefield of Bannockburn, where King Robert Bruce (whom my father dearly hoped we were named after, me being a Junior to his Senior, though he went by Bob) and his Scottish highlanders gave it to the British in the turning of the tide for Scottish Independence in 1314.

It was on that battlefield that I really sensed the power of place, or being in situ for an event in Time. My father was transformed, and I believe that that day he saw Robert the Bruce and his armies fighting. He was on the battlefield of Dharma , and the godhead of History was revealed to him. It was one of the times that I saw my father cry, though not the self-pitying maudlin crying that he was wont to do after too many beers, but tears of a lost Time and a lost Place.

It was then that I made a promise to myself to one day take his ashes, should he be cremated, which he was, to that field and to scatter them. I am sure that I will bring a recording of “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes or have a live piper go with me, for my dad would play that at screechingly loud volumes when he was enthused by the mood, and I believe that then I can put his ghost to rest, or at least the part of him that is with me in my apartment in its small urn. Though a small death in the grand scheme of things, he was my dad, and I loved him, faults and all.

I Saw Something Nasty in the Woodshed

Everyone's got one.

A woodshed that is.

We've all got our own paralyzing fears that have dictated our lives for so long, and we replay them over and over in our minds, injecting a soul-numbing toxicity into our well-being, but for what?

The problem with woodsheds is that we often spend too much time worrying about every else's woodshed instead of our own. We wonder, "what could be in his woodshed?" Or, "I bet her woodshed is dirtier than mine..." And, so on.

I had a woodshed in Austin, Texas, where we lived for many years. Our home was built in the 1930's era by hand by the original German owner. It was, as is typical, a wooden house on a pier and beam construction. Hand-crafted and felt like a home. Soon after moving in, we converted the garage, which was a euphemism for a gigantic cockroach apartment complex, complete with multi-plex theater, full-service gym, a few restaurants, a park for the little cockroaches, and, well, you get the picture. So, I gutted the garage and had Ed the construction guy from North Carolina, along with his hired-gun electrician, John, who inexplicably wore women's underwear and drove a Corvette, renovate the space into a utility area, darkroom, and guest bedroom with bathroom.

In order to not then just have a blank wall where the garage door used to be, I went to Home Depot (which was Builder's Square at the time) and got me a woodshed. (Actually, it was a toolshed, but that doesn't work for this extended metaphor from the movie...so, it was a woodshed). And, with some finagling, I put it together and soon had a bona fide, particle-board woodshed, complete with shingles. I painted it to match the color scheme of the house, which was semi-legendary in our neighborhood I might add, and voilà and voici, there was a woodshed that blended into the house.

However, there was one problem, it was of inferior quality to the house. It looked good and fine on the outside, but on the inside, it was a mess. Try as I might, there was no getting rid of the roaches in the woodshed, and the other myriad of insects, including termites. We had the entire grounds treated for the termites, and it worked for the house, but the damage was done on the woodshed. It continued to rot out over the years, and continued to get junkier and junkier, despite my feeble efforts to clean it out.

So, one day, after many years of having a sub-par woodshed, I emptied it and I tore it down. Razed it to the ground in a triumphant heap of debris and had it carted away with a neighboring construction project. Then, matched the old paint, re-painted the side of the garage and had two window put into that façade. Suddenly, it was a new garage apartment. On the outside, it looked great. On the inside, there was light and air.

Often we try and we try to maintain an old woodshed, or keep shoving junk in there and closing the door, thinking it will just go away, but it doesn't. Sooner or later, we have to tear the woodshed down. Raze it to the ground, and build up something better in its stead.

I admired the craftsmanship of that house, and I insulted it by placing a cheap, knock-off, fake woodshed next to it. A coat of paint won't cover the defects, so it was time to go.

Tearing down the woodshed gave me new perspective on things. You can see new possibilities which were clouded before, and when you don't have the woodshed any longer to throw your junk into, then you stop collecting junk.

Something to learn from the clip below as well. When we are so wrapped up in our own misery, we forget the world around us. Moreover, perspective is a wonderful thing to gain.

Keeping the Fire

I just returned from northern New Mexico, which is where I was born, and is easily the least "American" place in the contiguous 48, but at the same time, could only be found in the US.

I guess I don't have much to say beyond a simple list of the things that are so dear to me there for now.

--Kiva fireplaces

--More stars at night than you can shake a stick at

--Green Chile

--Shed Red sauce

--Chile Rellenos

--Sopapillas

--Ponderosa Pines and Douglass Firs

--Aspen, with or without leaves

--Deer, Elk, Turkeys (and Bears, oh My!)

--Colors

--Piñon in the air

--Mineral springs

--Camel Rock

--Sunrises and Sunsets over the mountains

--Ravens!

--The Slowness of Time

--The Vastness of Space

S.H.A.Z.A.M.!

I was moved to say, "Shazam!" today in a certain instance as it used to be one of my favorite interjections growing up in Kentucky, and what kid didn't want to be either Isis or Captain Marvel, seriously? They were the bomb. (I think that is clearly evinced by the popularity of the either real name or nickname of many women today across all races in America, that being Isis.)

Yet, like with many things, looking at things we knew in childhood can mean something quite different as adults. For me, the great challenge is to find the balance between the wonder of that little boy in Kentucky who wants to be Captain Marvel merely by shouting out "Shazam!" and the middle-aged man in Belgium who says it out of nostalgia, but had to go to Wikipedia to refresh his memory about the show, namely, what the hell does, "Shazam!" mean?

For many, it is a freakishly adept application out of an Orwell or Huxley novel that can "read" music on the radio and tell you what it is. I cannot even begin to fathom that one.

However, the original usage in the show was an acronym for S.olomon, H.ercules. Atlas. Z.eus. Achilles. and M.ercury. Whoah, now that is some power. These were the elders whom Billy Batson would invoke when he needed some extra star power to get the job done as Captain Marvel.

What got me thinking though, was, which "elders" would we call upon today? I am intrigued by the ones who were chosen then:

S.olomon, a wise and judicious lawgiver
H.ercules, a demi-God who had to prove himself through 12 Labors, (though ultimately went berserk and killed his wife,...not in the Disney version, but pretty status quo for a Greek Hero)
A.tlas, the metaphor for ultimate punishment of Duty
Z.eus, all-powerful sleaze bag
A.chilles, demi-God who begrudges his Duty in battle, til it becomes personal, then goes berserk and desecrates Hector's body, who, BTW is waaaaayyy cooler than Achilles
M.ercury, the messenger God, who lives between the Gods and Mortals, aka Hermes

Pretty interesting Rogue Gallery there, ranging from Justice to Injustice, Gods to Human, Power to Defeated, and fallen heroes.

So, whom would America pick now from the Pantheon of Gods and Demi-Gods? What qualities would we value above others? Which would we call upon in our Time of need?

More importantly, perhaps, would we use that council and experience to help others, or to help ourselves? How often do people call out to the Gods for the sake of others, without asking for something for themselves? I wonder. Does that go contrary to the very grain of who we are as Humans?

Since I am stuck in the 70s and 80s today it seems, one of my favorite LPs (Long-Playing, for you young'ins) was Rush's Hemispheres. Being a typical Rush concept album, it tells the story of the emergence of Cygnus X-1, which is the name of a massive black hole, as a New God within the Pantheon. There is a battle amongst the Gods and Goddesses, and the narrator, who becomes Cygnus X-1, watches on in horror and dismay at the dissolution of the Universe. The two main fighters are Apollo and Dionysos, which is clearly a nod to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.

Apollo, the God of Reason and Music, and Light battles with Dionysos, the God of Intoxication, Decadence, and Darkness, a thinly veiled metaphor of the individual soul, much like Plato's well-known allegory of the Soul as a charioteer trying to harness the power of a Light and a Dark horse to keep an even balance.

Ultimately, a new God is needed, Cygnus, who becomes "knighted" as the God of Balance, a perfect sphere of Light and Dark, much like the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang , something Light and something Dark. For Nietzsche, the clash of the titanic Gods of Apollo and Dionysos, the result was Art, forged out of a mixture of passion/intoxication and reason/restraint, Rausch und Rede.

I'll go with that. In essence, that is what Shazam! then is: a mixture of Reason, Passion, Strength, Failure, Success, Mediation, and Mitigation.

Not quite the Super Hero qualities that we see today, though paints a pretty good picture of the complexion of humanity, bringing the full spectrum of our qualities, the Good and the Bad into one, single phrase.

Shazam!