a waking mind aware of being here nor there

(or, mental amusement before seeing the light of day)

I am older than the selves of life leap-frogging along the making of time and place.

I am before the restless generations of becoming and dying and becoming. Before the chaos, the watery womanly demos of unthinking flesh and bone generating the moon time. Before the history of fallings from the womb and returnings to its vaginal elections. Before the breeding laying beneath the seeing of me alone unpartnered, uncoupled from the frenzy of fucking before corpses of stone deadly silence.

No music without the drumming of knowing nothing, knowing everything in the dance. The eros of gorging, of nippled firming of magical wands, then seed spewing and lactation. Who understands the middle churning between the alpha and omega, the bearing of souls from wet wombs spasming the vibrating streaming of being in and out of touching the accordian stops and starts. The attuning done by ear, not seeing the measurement in darkness but in light.

What withstands the onslaught of viral memories of how to suck the energy out of nothing and be such being. Rosy redness sainted nick clauses of coded connection, spitting of flakes of blood frozen in falling from night sky of the womb, here and not here, there and not there. Which is it after all?

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Howard Zinn on education and activism

I just started reading Howard Zinn’s You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (1994) and stumbled upon a couple of paragraphs that raise questions in my mind about teaching and activism. Here are those paragraphs copied from page 7:

When I became a teacher I could not possibly keep out of the classroom my own experiences. I have often wondered how so many teachers manage to spend a year with a group of students and never reveal who they are, what kind of lives they have led, where their ideas come from, what they believe in, or what they want for themselves, for their students, and for the world.

Does not the very fact of that concealment teach something terrible–that you can separate the study of literature, history, philosophy, politics, the arts, from your life, your deepest convictions about right and wrong?

In my teaching I never concealed my political views: my detestation of war and militarism [Zinn was a bombardier in WW2.], my anger at racial inequality, my belief in a democratic socialism, in a rational and just distribution of the world’s wealth. I made clear my abhorrence of any kind of bullying, whether by powerful nations over weaker ones, governments over their citizens, employers over employees, or by anyone, on the Right or the Left, who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth.

This mixing of activism and teaching, this insistence that education cannot be neutral on the crucial issues of our time, this movement back and forth from the classroom to the struggles outside by teachers who hope their students will do the same, has always frightened the guardians of traditional education. They prefer that education simply prepare the new generation to take its proper place in the old order, not to question that order.

Are these paragraphs and Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980, 2003), “the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of–and in the words of–America’s women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers,” as unpatriotic, subversive, and dangerous as jingoists claim that they are? And if not, where does that leave us as teachers of our (American) history?

just a momentary dream

(written on Sunday, July 8, 2007; immediately after “time plays no reverse”)

Where river cuts its bend,
through solid rock
lifted by land’s rise,
there is no turning back
to primal where or when.
Nature tells no tale of comfort
but harsh history of irrepressible
re-mattering after re-mattering.

We may stand near canyon’s edge
hand in hand for a time
full of promises we keep
when all seems still
beneath our feet
but the completion we feel
is just a momentary dream
in the time of rushing water
through rock.

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