in the land of the ice giants

I've been visiting the castle of the Ice Queen in the land of the Ice Giants. Anthropologists do things like that.  Spend time. Get to know the natives. Learn the language. But this time, it's a language made up of primarily vowels. O's with lines through them, and the like. My mouth can't capture the language at all.

The castle is tall, and I feel like Alice. Need to drink a bottle of grow-me in order to reach the kitchen cabinet for a cup or a dish. The plates weigh at least three pounds each. The bowls are papa-bear bowls.
And there are all these machines I have no idea how to use—but that's not to the point.

Everything's in black and white and chrome. Scandinavian designs or with a capital D as well. Sleek bleak and shiny. White paint. Black leather. Shiny chrome fixtures.

Anthropologists love such places. Cultural identity on every surface. And in the frig and freezer. The Ice Queen knows who she is. She celebrates her identity. Maintains it in this Nordic diaspora. Even her sweaters speak to her identity. The ring upon her royal hand. Her— well, her everything.

In this, she's just like me.

But I'm a short Jewish person. With short Jewish icons in my house. And short Jewish foods. Like yaprakas (stuffed grape leaves). Doesn't get any shorter than that.

We both eat lox, however.

So. Here's the deal. Anthropologists are committed for the long haul, despite the impossible vowels. But what we want is to immerse in the other in her native ecosystem. That would be: delight in the land of the ice giants. Participant/observation in the castle of the Queen. I mean, how lucky can you get to have a gig like that? I myself am used to peasantry.  Short peasants. Not that dissimilar from me.

While we anthropologists have long observed that there are no pure cultures (or not any more, at least) (and likely never were) (diffusion, and all) (and trade) (etc etc) this comes as close to anywhere I've been to studying an intact culture.

And, miracle of miracles—she's basically doing the same with me.

Mutual exotification.

She laughs when I call her exotic. She's more used to hegemonic. Blonde and blue eyes and white and all that goes with it. Guns and alcohol and hunting-and-fishing. And baseball hats. And Christian of a certain persuasion. In my book, she's a rare species of bird.

I laugh when she calls me exotic. I feel more the global norm. Dark. And dark. And darkness. We peasants ought to stick together, right? But no. I'm drawn to the Ice Queen.

You know the old adage. It's straight out of Fiddler on the Roof. Tevya. Get the lilting accent right.

"A fish may love a bird, but where would they live?"

We're okay, if she's the native and I'm the anthropologist. We're okay, if the Ice Queen's slumming it down here where the short Jewish peasantry resides.

But build a home together?

Disrupt and taint pure systems?

The only way to even think about that is with a sense of humor. Whimsy, crinkly eyes, and a great appreciation for the eclectic. Celebrate diversity, and all that. Syncretism. Heterosis. Mix it up and depurify.

It's the dream I had when I first learned about genetics and evolution. Fifth grade, as I recall.

All the people of the world would blend together. No more pure-bloods. No more this-land-is-my-land/this-land-is-your-land. Lift the borders, mix it up.  And we'd all be merely human.

But that would mean no more ice giants, no more Ice Queen, and no more short and zaftig Jews.

I've never been able to figure it out. Have appreciated those who know their own identity. Who celebrate the intactness of their heritage. How wonderful, right? But I've admired more those who have the courage to let go. Not the ones who steal indigenous ways and take them for their own. But those who bring together the best of multiple ways—and live it.

I'm balled up inside the argument. Ambivalent at best. Pure systems lead to prejudice and outrage. But syncretism makes a mess.

too bad you don't like opera, she said

It came out of the blue. People say that, right? It came out of the blue.

A phrase I never expected to hear, let alone to say. But — it came out of the blue, and now I have to examine it.

"Too bad you don't like opera," she said.

"Huh?"

"You don't yell. You don't scream. You don't do opera!" she chided me.

It's always bothered her that I practice equanimity, or try to, especially in my interactions with her. I've learned that frequently her goal is to get me to cry. Yes, even now. But recently I learned, her goal is to get me to scream. I think she wants me to scream back.

My ex-husband called me after we split up and he had achieved shikse-goddess possession. Finally. Thank god. It was exactly what he needed at that point.

"She yells!" he told me.

"What?" I was horrified.

"She yells," he repeated. We both were stunned by it.

"She yells, and then she's done. And it's all gone."

It was shocking.

So that's what my mother meant when she said I don't do opera. Because of course, I do do opera. Ever since I was a kid I've done opera. I was obsessed with one particular opera. And when I really was feeling down and low, I would put it on the record player in the living room, open the libretto, and follow along in Italian on the left and English on the right, and just wail. It still moves me to tears.

Il Trovatore.

Io fremo. I tremble.

Il Trovatore entered my non-existent soul and pierced my barricaded heart in a way I can't explain. I liked other operas of course, how could I not? But this one is at this point in my sabbatical from all things music (save obligatory listening for our Kaddish in Two-Part Harmony project), this one still brings me to tears.

Maybe she's right. Maybe I don't like opera. D and I looked at each other and walked out of Carmen a couple years ago. We hadn't bonded like that in a long time. But the reviewers had agreed with us. It was crap.

So. What is it about Il Trovatore that gets to me. I mean apart from the gypsy camp that has me drooling to enter and yearning to — well, not to be the gypsies, but maybe to be there with my pen and notebook taking notes. An anthropological dream come true. But is that it? The aesthetic? Or the incredible driving music, rough and rhythmic and unsentimental. These days I use the remote to skip through all the mushy lyrical parts — no mush for me. But I could play the Anvil Chorus all day long without any problem. I mean, you know they're using real anvils when they play it, right? And then, and then...

La zingarelllllllla. She enters. The old gypsy hag. And she tells her terrible tale. And she calls for revenge. And the camp has enough solidarity, and she enough standing, that they support her. But of course, goddamn, she can take care of the job herself. By the end, she's taken her revenge — and she feels not a drop of remorse for her actions. Redemption! Vengeance! Right. It's opera. And I was raised with opera.

"Too bad you don't like opera," she accused.

And since she's always right, and since I'm always reasonable, I tried to examine her statement.

OK. There's a love story. The aristocratic Leonora (right — my precious daughter's middle name) has fallen in love with the gypsy troubador. Boring! And her betrothed, the equally aristocratic diLuna wants to keep her under control. Who cares? Just sappy operatic stuff, right?

But Azucena, the old gypsy woman wants revenge for her mother being burned as a witch. And her revenge starts by stealing the infant son of the Count and raising him as her own. And purporting to love him. And raising him up to seal her revenge so that when he is a man he is murdered by his own brother, his rival for the love of Leonora.

So what do we have? A mother who steals a child and raises him not out of love but to wreak her vengeance upon him. Twenty plus years of binding him in obligation to her. He loves her. She despises him. What kind of a mother would do that to a child? Even a child not her own? Raise him up to slaughter him at the right moment.

(hm. It's not unlike what God does to Abraham by giving him a son, and then asking him to sacrifice him on a fiery altar. But God then says, sorry, just kidding, you're a good guy, so keep him and use this ram instead...)

What gets me about Il Trovatore (apart from the force of the music) is the horror that parents can perpetrate on their children. And you listen, and you listen, and it never comes out any other way. And it never will.

It's opera.

In which injustice reigns supreme. In which there are no happy endings. In which 'training' a woman who speaks her own mind to be an obedient and submissive wife is the best you can get to a happy ending.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. ...

Dylan Thomas expresses well my mother's philosophy of both opera and life. She wants me to rage, as she herself rages.

"It moves energy," she explains wisely.

But this is me, calm waters. When I say that my tears are falling I mean that my eyes just might be a little damp. Were I to rage, it means that I wonder at the tremble that my limbs have conjured up. I cling to my composure like a man thrown overboard clings to floating flotsam. Even-handed, and if not that — then run. Run fast, run far!

So maybe the wise old woman was right. Maybe she understated it, being kind. Maybe I despise opera.

But I don't agree that it's too bad.

tabouna — Tunisian style (and that's the problem)

In the countryside of Tunisia women make خبز الطبونة (khubz tabouna) on a daily basis. Which I may well have spelled wrong, because my Lang Arabic Lexicon seems to have omitted it — and besides, it's in idiomatic fellahi dialect. Generally not written at all.

And that was the problem, of course.

So. For about five hours a day, country women are mixing and kneading, letting rise and slapping down, and forming nice flat, round loaves of durum wheat bread about the size of the American dinner plate. They make about 15 loaves a day — a major enterprise, as far as I'm concerned.

The tabouna is outside, usually just past the women's courtyard. It's about four feet tall and at its base, around three feet wide, narrowing toward the top. The oven is made of baked earth, what we would call adobe here. It's blackened rim and interior attest to the multitude of loaves these ovens have had slapped onto their sides for baking. Yeah, the bread does not lie flat in the oven. Instead, it is sprinkled with cold water and bakes vertically — turned periodically — on the sides of the interior. The tabouna has first been filled with stones and kindling, and when the fire simmers down, it is the heat of the stones that bake the bread. Fifteen loaves take a long time. Every day.

And that's one of my favorite things in the countryside — the taste of freshly baked khubz tabouna.

So. I was thinking about this with great nostalgia and longing, on a flight from Paris to Casablanca, and upon arrival. I was with a belly dancer friend, and some friends of hers (male) were picking us up at the airport.

We get in the car. Both of us sitting in the back seat, of course. The guys are in the front. And I say in Arabic, just to make conversation, and because it really was true,

"I can't wait to get into the countryside and eat some khubz tabouna."

The car screeches, narrowly missing a camionette on the road. There are no lanes, or at least any lanes that anyone pays attention to. I hate driving around Casa. I just don't get it. But Moroccans navigate really well through it all, so what just happened?

The driver pulls over, and the two guys turn around and they're glaring at me.

"What did you say?" the driver asks in French.

So I repeat myself in Arabic.

They look at each other. They look back at me. They really heard right.

"You can't say that here," his front seat passenger says. I didn't remember their names yet.

"Eh?" I say in French.

"C'est interdit!" the driver says — it's forbidden.

I'm very very confused. My belly dancer friend is not really paying attention to any of this. She doesn't speak French, and she doesn't speak Arabic. But well wow, can she dance. She's come with me to find the source of one of her favorite dances, and to see how North African women interpret it. Right here, right where the dance was born. She also wants to see if she should study anthropology. This trip is a big deal for her, and I'm blowing it.

We're barely past the airport, and already something's gone terribly wrong. Ominous for the whole trip we're embarking on. A land rover heading south into the Sahara, looking for a library that may (or may not) have texts still written in tifinagh, the primordial writing system of the Amazigh, or Berber people. So I can see if there's a correspondence between the old writing system and Tamazight women's tattoo patterns. That's the goal this time round.

Morocco. We're in Morocco — not Tunisia.

I catch my bearings, and explain.

"In Tunisia, the women in the countryside make this wonderful bread. The oven is called a ta—"

"Stop!" they both say in unison.

"That word," says the driver, "means something different here."

"Means something different everywhere — except Tunisia," chuckles his buddy. The tension has passed. I'm a moron, clearly, and hadn't intended to be so crude.

I think again of what that oven looks like. Earthen, with a blackened rim. So organic (in the old sense of the word). You look inside and you're looking straight into — oh, I get it.

Just as they, haltingly, explain it.

Cunt.

I had just said that I can't wait to get into the countryside and eat hot cunt.

So much for my Arabic proficiency.

As may now be obvious, Moroccan dialect differs significantly from the Tunisian. And both of them are distant from the mainstream Arabic further east. But worse than that, my Tunisian dialect is fellahi — peasant style. It's like an anthropology Ph.D. candidate from abroad coming to the U.S. to study Appalachian land disputes, and learning English for the first time at the hands of hillbillies of West Virginia, as depicted say, in the movie Deliverance. And that's the English you speak.

Well, that's my Arabic. That's why people would cringe when I'd open my mouth at the Archives Nationales, and tell me to switch to French. That's why the head of the Women's Union in Baghdad hugged me crying her eyes out at the 'authenticity' of my my backwoods language skills. That's why the women of Dubai had a good chuckle at my expense.

Okay, so I've probably made the worst linguistic gaffe possible in the Arabic language. Does that mean shut up and never speak again? No. I figure, after that one, I can say anything I want. Letting people correct you is in part what anthropological fieldwork is all about.

I just wish I was better at languages. Switching dialects is such a pain. And so much of my research has been in the mountains of Morocco in the past ten years. But my language skills just don't want to switch over.

They think I'm North African, but have been living in France way too long (they have no idea just how bad my French is, I guess). Or, they're just being polite.

"Are you from Egypt?" someone asks. "Where are you from?" another inquires. Finally, finally someone recognizes the Tunisianisms I just can't let go of and nails it down.

"Aahhh," they respond, at the identified exotic dialect. Tunisia does not come first to anyone's consciousness, even in North Africa.

There's that French expression:

petit pays, petit esprit

The French always used it in reference to Belgium, but I could see it in the look in their eyes. Small country, small spirit. Everyone underestimates Tunisia. Even now.

We're still in the car on the road to Casa. The ice has clearly been broken. What are you studying they ask, and I explain.

"We're Berber," the driver says.

"My grandmother has those tattoo patterns," the passenger says. His name is Aziz, I learn, finally. "She has those symbols on her hands and face," he says — having always taken them for granted before.

"We're going up to the mountains," his cousin the driver says.

"It's Eid. Come with us," says Aziz.

And so, we abandon the library at the edge of the Sahara (whose manuscripts it turns out, have long since disappeared) — and after picking up the tzaddik at the airport the next day, we all head up the winding dirt roads of the Middle Atlas mountains.

The women are baking bread when we arrive. It smells swooningly good.

I keep my mouth shut.

At least, about the bread.

Every moment goes swimmingly. A perfect fieldtrip, and perfectly unanticipated, given the rocky start. With lasting friendships made and kept, even now.

"So. What do you think?" I say to the bellydancer.

"You made it all look so easy," she says. "I could never do that."

Which is exactly how I feel about her dancing.

how tunisia works, she said

I'm so proud of Tunisia. Repeat 5x. I've been saying this to myself for a while now, and then I thought of Fatima. And her lesson on how Tunisia works.

We were in her so-called kitchen — a tiny room with a hotplate on a countertop. A very weird room, because nobody used countertops — they all squatted on the ground to cook. The French had designed this part of town, figuring the Tunisians would someday appreciate indoor running water and the as yet unappreciated white tiled countertops in houses built in the souri part of town. Countryfolk had long since turned off the indoor faucet in the so-called kitchens of Medjerda. Running (or dripping) water inside would just bring more mosquitos. Unsanitary, Fatima would tell me. The French, she maintained, knew nothing about good health.

It was 1979. Fatima felt me incredibly deficient in most aspects of being alive. In her provincial ethnocentrism, there was only one way that things were done, only one way that anything worked — and it was her job to teach me, since I was so obviously lacking in both knowledge and practice. She had good evidence of this. Obviously, I was incredibly unattractive to my husband since I had no children. She attempted to remedy this by pulling all the body hair off of me with a sticky mixture of sukr. (Problem solved: I was pregnant by the end of the year). My language skills sucked, and so she yelled at me louder until I got it, and my facility with fellahi Tunisian dialect was so dominant over my modern standard Arabic that city people cringed as soon as I opened my mouth. She smacked me gently if I didn't take enough photographs or ask enough questions of the fellahin. And — she taught me to cook.

Her lesson on how to cook chakchouka turned out be the most important of Fatima's lessons by far. Tunisian chakchouka is a stew that simmers for hours in a couscousière in such a way that it also cooks and flavors the couscous piled in the upper steamer part of the pot. Each region and tribal group has a distinct manner of making couscous and chakchouka. This was hers, but the principle remains the same — I paraphrase below:

The water, she said, we're all in the same water. If the water's okay, then we're all okay. If the water is sick, we will all be sick. The environment. Check. I got it. Where we were in the Medjerda Valley, the water was very very good. So, I didn't think about it.

The spices, she said, the spices all differ from family to family. So I could smell the spices of the Trabelsi, and know who they are. She furrowed her brow a tad. And the Djlass. She wagged her head, not quite in disapproval. The spices were clear markers of ethnic and tribal identity — and I wondered right then why I had ever sought to make them Schezuan lamb during Eid that year. What was I thinking? No, it spoke nothing of my own identity. And yes, they hated it. Spices and flavor are supposed to make you instantly transparent, ethnically speaking. And the spices in one's chakchouka flavor everything they encounter.

The vegetables, she said, each have their own level. There's no mixing. This she emphasized by holding me fiercely with her gaze. I love Fatima! I love her ferocity, protectiveness and pride. She wants me to get it right. The vegetables were the key component to make me realize that she wasn't talking about food at all. She repeated it:

Each have their own level.
There's no mixing.
Fierce gaze, to fix the lesson.

She elaborated on the theme. The carrots are heavy, they sink down to here. The potatoes, too, they go down to here. Turnips, here. And chickpeas rise to the highest point. If you add meat, a piece of meat, no matter how rich, sinks to the bottom.

There is no mixing, she repeated.

Okay. The lesson so far.

—The Andalusians and the Kirouani at the top. The holy families, the family of the Imam. The traditional political elite. Clearly chickpeas.

— The Hammami, Mejri and the Djlass and the Trabelsi and more are right there in the middle. They have their own level, and should not try to aspire to be anywhere else in the pot. Carrots, potatoes, and turnips — good fellahi fare.

— The Jews were at the bottom, no matter how rich they might be. The yummy chunk of meat. No mixing, she reminded me. The apartheid of the pot.

Review so far: We are all steeped in the same environment and colored by the same local spices, despite our prescriptive lack of miscegenation. And in that pot, we all have our own level and should not attempt to rise above our station. And we need them all, all levels, from top to bottom, to have a tasty stew. Ingredients who leave, we feel their absence. We ache for them. The next generation does not. They don't know what they're missing. And — they don't really care. Maybe they don't notice any of this, being just happy to get fed.

However:

Every once in a while, the pot has to be stirred. And what happens then?

Everything changes position. The meat at the bottom can rise, the chickpeas at the top can fall. Most likely those vegetables in the middle don't go too far outside their rightful station. But — and here's the key point — she fixes you with her stern eye: When the stirring is done, everyone settles right down to the natural order of things. In the end, the meat will always fall. The chickpeas always rise.

And every once in a while, someone kicks the pot. The flames shoot up. The meat gets scorched. The chick peas spill out escaping the pot. The veggies in the middle end up stuck inside the ruined stew. When someone kicks the pot, it's bad for everyone.

Quaint, you might say. Typical anthropological overinterpretation, you might say. Much ado about not much at all, you might say. But the rules of Fatima's chakchouka are distinctively Tunisian. American stews don't work this way, nor do Egyptian stews.

And we've all had this Tunisian cooking lesson in the past two weeks, when someone kicked the pot.

Ben Ali and his family, the putative elite, spilled out and fled the pot. Mubarrak wants us all to know that he himself would never flee. It's not the Egyptian way. I will die right here in Egypt, he insists. And I believe him and agree. And Ben Ali's flight may have surprised pundits around the world, but it did not surprise the likes of Fatima.

And the synagogue in Gabes was burned, its Torah damaged. Just as in other years of strife in Tunisia. Infrequent, perhaps, but predictable. But no, no, no insists Roger Bismuth [Roger?!], the president of the Tunisian Jewish Community. This was no act of anti-semitism. Be clear on that. This was no more than vandalism.

I think Fatima would agree. It's just the result of being at the bottom of the hierarchical pot that we get scorched (or in this case, torched). Someone left the little synagogue unlocked, so of course it was put on fire. Nothing to do with anti-semitism. Just, someone's gotta be the bottom of the pot.

My colleague J, said the other day with a great big smile, "Come! Let's talk the revolution!"

And I — my usual oppositional self — said without thinking, "It's no revolution." But didn't have time to elaborate. I was thinking of Fatima.

Someone, she would say — and we know who he is — just kicked the pot. The Jews got scorched. The president escaped. This is the political system. This is how it works. And the pot is still being stirred.

But when that stirring stops, the chakchouka simmers down. And all return to their natural and rightful place. Elites will still be elites, and fellahin will still be fellahin. And the Jews will still on occasion feel the fire most of all.

An uprising, yes. Revolution, no. An uprising implies tremendous dissatisfaction. A just complaint. A revolution implies a call for structural change.

That would be like Fatima deciding to switch to cooking Schezuan lamb. But no. It's still going to be chakchouka when dinner time comes.

key moments in baby dyke awakenings

'Baby dyke' is just another stage of life, isn't it? It's just a question of how long it takes to get there, right?

What comes to mind, strangely enough, is spending time with old women in North Africa, especially after they'd been widowed. These were women who had never had a choice of whether or not to marry — let alone who to marry. The happiest women in the older set that I knew in the 1970s were those women in polygynous marriages. They were just fine, thank you, sharing (the burden) of one husband. Grateful as could be at not being stuck with him (and his mother) alone. The freedom felt by widows was not just palpable, it's visible even in photographs.

And the younger women (we're talking rural sector here) complained that polygyny had been outlawed. And therefore, they'd be stuck with some old geezer doing all the labor for him and his brood. They were not at all grateful for the 'liberation' from polygyny.

Not exactly baby-dykes, I agree. And I know that women are also sorrowful at the loss of a lifetime mate. But what I witnessed were women relieved from the burden of serving men. Content to be an elder themselves, served by their younger generation. And the unhappiest old woman I knew was being forced back into a marriage by her son. Long story. Hishma!

But in our country, and in urban life, surely it shouldn't take until widowhood to discover one's own gynephilia. But sometimes the signs are there and we just plain missed it.

Upon reflection, I think I've had five little moments of awakenings that I just clear somehow missed at the time. Not including obvious baby dyke moments like crushes. Or that feeling when getting strapped into a black leather corset for the very first time.

No, these moments were a bit more nuanced. Just a bit.

In chronological order:

the sonny-boy incident: Fifth or sixth grade. I was running back home after getting a 'pixie' haircut (that's what it was called at the time). Ran across the street without looking. And this man (who almost hit me with his car) hollered out his window, "Watch out, sonny!" And I was mortified. It downright scared the butch right outta me. Oh well. Think of all the years that coulda been different if I had risen to that occasion.


the Electra moment: The Greek film Electra came out in 1962. I was fourteen. My mom took me to UC Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium to see it. And my jaw dropped. It was the moment that Irene Pappas, in an act of defiance and grief, finds a private corner and cuts off her long tresses, and is shorn, ready for mourning. A truly orgasmic moment in film making. But my own butch moment had already passed (see above), and instead I spent years trying to personify Pappas' Greek anguish. Mostly I practiced the intensity of her eyes. Failing miserably, of course. But I fell in love for the first time without even noticing.

the kd lang/cindy crawford Vanity Fair photo shoot: I was up skiing with family and friends. Staying back one afternoon to grade (yet another) set of exams. I had the whole condo to myself. Took a break in the middle of a set, and picked up some magazine lying around. Flipped it open. And almost fell to the floor. kd lang! I believe the correct contemporary expression would be OMG!

There's more, of course, but why go any further than kd lang?

My point is that there are these moments when we can choose to know ourselves, or choose to not read the signs. Or, I suppose, we can read the signs, and choose to change or not to change. Or we find ourselves waiting for the life cycle to come round and hand us a form of liberation (as older women do in North Africa). Or we never discover who we are or what we want.

And in some cultures or communities it is just plain too dangerous to display this kind of awakening. Too life-threatening. And so we hide. Or suppress. Or repress (which might be be the best option to live with under some circumstances).

And in other cultures or communities it's not too dangerous to awaken. And we find ourselves wide awake, with another new world to explore.

And why think about all this now?

It was a chance email from North Africa that sent my mind back so many decades ago. Thinking about what happened to the girl who dared wear pants, ride a bike, carry money — in a village where these acts were considered aberrant if not obscene for a teenage girl. It was downright cross-dressing. A form of transvestism there. The boys threw rocks at her. Shouted at her terrible insults of gender confusion ... But her father indulged her. She was one of the girls decidedly in favor of polygyny — so as not to be stuck entirely at a man's whim. And then her father did something no other father in the village had done.

He taught her a trade. And got her out of there.

And with this email, I thought of her. And these moments when we discover ourselves. These moments when we choose either to be or not be what it is we really are. And I thought of the courage it takes to not compromise. And I thought of Irene Pappas' defiant, smoldering eyes. And kd lang.

And I still think it's a life cycle thing. To declare ourselves (or not). And it just takes some of us a whole lot longer to get there.

randy fakefeather and the fakefeather path

Molecular biologist/physical anthropologist Jonathan Karpf has given a talk for me in MSR over the years, part of which examines the principles of Creation Myths. He gives this lecture to his own classes as well. It's a delicious bit in which he tells the tales of the Cherokee, Gond, Yao and Biblical Creation Myths and elicits some hypotheses out of these. Some of his key points are:

First, he says, Creation myths tell of the local origins of a local population.

Second, Creation myths demonstrate why one's own population is better than others — ie. Creation myths are ethnocentric.

Third, that from the outside, these tales seem fantastical and ridiculous, and

Fourth, that from the inside, one's own tale is considered neither fantastical nor ridiculous, nor a myth: People take their own Creation story to be the (gospel) (large 'T') Truth.

He then posits the possibilities.

Maybe they're all right. And each population was created quite separately, and according to radically different cosmological rules, gods and spirits.

Or maybe only one is correct, and that all the rest are crap. (my word, not his).

Or just maybe they're all a load of crap.

Of course, the way Jonathan puts it, with practiced cultural sensitivity, is that each explanation is pre-scientific, and therefore that each population was doing the best that it could in the cosmology department at the time.

He leads up to, of course, that now we have science.

And that science is the best means that humanity has devised to seek understanding of the natural world (which includes us and our origins). He assumes, again, of course, that we humans are part of the natural world. And his point is that science can get to a (small 't') truth that can be independently verified and universally applied.

Every semester that I have him speak, at least some students have a very hard time with his talk in MSR. I've even had students drop the class after he gave his presentation, and come back another semester asking me for warning when he might appear.

The students seem to be fine with the witches, psychics, voudou priestesses, UFO channels, tantric practitioners, martial artists, shape-shifters, shamans, and neo-shamans I bring to class. But the physicists and other scientists sometimes just give them the willies.

We were speaking a post or two ago about Peter Pan playing indigene shaman supreme, and the glorious Tina must be given credit for dubbing him 'Randy Fakefeather', which is absolutely deliciously perfect — a Peter by any other name smells just as fake.

But that's not really fair.

What is the difference between Randy Fakefeather and any other seeker walking that spiritual path? Why do we save our wrath for his inauthenticity, accuse him of insincerity, and then lap it up when the feathers feel a touch more real? Fakefeather's crap, but Harner's okay? Harner's crap but Castaneda's okay? Castaneda's crap, but Starhawk's okay? Starhawk's crap, but the Pope's okay? The Pope's crap, but how can you say no to Peter Pan?

Applying Jonathan's measure, we can say perhaps that all the paths are equally true, authentic and spiritually rewarding.

Or we can say that there is only the One True God (pick one) and that all the rest are crap. This conflict is portrayed deliciously in the BSG/Caprica battle between monotheistic tyranny and terrorism on the one hand, and the tolerance of polytheistic cosmologies on the other.

Or we can say that they're all wrong. And that their adherents are all on the Fakefeather Path.

Why single out Peter Pan of our tale for such reprobation? Why does he anger us so? Especially when he gets the job done.

Now, I feel quite bad defending him in this regard, because my allegiance is clearly on the other side of the tale (see two posts back). And because I so identify with pure-blood systems the same way our Indian friend does, and for exactly the same reasons.

But I'm not sure those reasons are really valid.

This is my song, my land, my ritual, etc. causes terrible strife, and I'm a collectivist at heart. While I too would be offended at the singing of my song in some made-up ritual, I would also be quite pleased that the practitioner bothered to learn it, sings it so well, has found new meaning, uses it in a way that moves people.

And at the same time, I'm cringing inside.

If I believe that all spiritual seekers are on the Fakefeather Path, I have no cause to single out and take offense at one misguided ritual alone.

If I believe in a One True Path/God/Whatever, I give myself cause to take up arms, invade territory, perpetrate genocide and mobilize my own righteous indignation.

If I believe in nothing at all but empiricism, I can (if I don't have a problem with curses) say, a plague upon both their houses. Say, as Jonathan does, that they're all equally wrong, cosmologically speaking. And that they're probably all equally satisfying for their respective practitioners.

From this point of view, I think we should embrace the Fakefeather Path (not for ourselves, of course — we're still purist and empiricist snobs) but for the gentle masses, who take pleasure in the delights of new age ritual, feel good sweating a stolen sweat and singing a stolen song.

We can nod, know the (little 't') truth, stay smug, and maybe just maybe be big enough to let it go.

Right. I know. Not gonna happen, is it?

sociophobes of the world unite!

I thought I made up the word, but no! It's out there, and apparently so are we. Though I'm not sure it's in the DSM IV. I started reading some of the diagnostics, as well as case histories of folks who consider themselves extreme sociophobes. One in particular caught my eye, first he talked about how easy it is for him to do public speaking, and to lecture at his university, but stepping outside his own door is close to torture.

And that, of course, hit home.

I have no intention of exploring the pathology or etiology of sociophobia (my own or the syndrome itself). I thought it would be a whole lot more uplifting to offer my home-baked solutions for any cringing sociophobe who happens to stumble upon this post when nobody's watching. What follows is in no particular order, although I'll probably start with the more obvious solutions — the ones you've probably already tried.

close your eyes — If you close your eyes they can't see you. Although truth be told, recently I've not had much luck with this one. It worked a whole lot better when I was a kid.

turn it into a virtue — I'm borrowing this from Oliver Sach's recommendation for Tourette's Syndrome, and Gille de la Tourette's Syndrome is a whole lot more conspicuous than sociophobia. His point was that Tourette's is associated with greater facility in the creative arts because the inhibitions are lowered to such a great extent. Thus, go off your (Tourette's) meds to play in that jazz band or you won't be able to jam terribly well. Ditto for sports... For sociophobia, the advantages may not be as glaringly apparent as the up side of Tourette's. But a few examples follow:

call it work — When you have to be in the presence of others outside your own domain, just call it work. If it's work, it's not social, and therefore doesn't count. (Kinda like those tiny pieces of pork in the chow mein at the Chinese Restaurant on Shabbes).

get a Ph.D. in anthropology — This is a subset of the above. In this instance, every human encounter outside your door becomes participant/observation: a fieldwork experience of utmost importance. And in that case, you can:

apply for a grant — To study 'it.' And because this is such a difficult piece of work (if you write it up properly), and if you make your argument compelling, you could live your whole life on soft money researching and publishing your results.

invite people over — You may have already tried this. But we all know it sure beats the alternative: going out. Here, you get credit (bravery points) for holding the event to begin with, and when you can't stand it any longer, you can creep upstairs, shut the door and curl up with a good book about the fall of civilization or one of Tom Brown's survivalist guides. Just make sure no one has thrown their coat on your bed, so they won't come up to retrieve it. If you really train your friends well —(yes, you have friends. They are the most tolerant people on the planet) — they will keep the party going a good long time, clean up downstairs, and sleep over so that you can have a fabulous time at breakfast together the next morning talking about what a great party it was. They know where the linens are. And they know where to sleep ...

belly dance for the very very timid — We started this class in my living room, and it was very successful, until some of the participants tried to get a little too chummy. A little too successful. Thankfully our fabulous instructor was going off to grad school, and so we put this one to bed gracefully. I don't remember a thing from the 'routines' that we were taught, but I'd do it again... Oh wait, we've also had the past 15 years of kabbalah at Beit Malkhut, so never mind. It doesn't have to be belly dance. Maybe this is why quilting bees used to be normative?

neutral ground — If you flee in the middle of the night when you're at a lover's house (or Big Sur, or someplace stranding them), pick a spot that won't make you run. Don't pick your own bed, 'cause when you get the get-me-outta-heres it's terribly awkward. I mean, you don't want to wake them with your mishegass, but you're ready to bite your leg off to get away. Too many times have you ended up on your own guest bed because you were being so polite about it. Don't let this happen to you! Favorite neutral spot: under a waterfall a good long hike away. Terrific spot, and you can't really sleep the whole night there.

go into occultation — I'm serious here. Mystics are rather a lot like anthropologists, able to perceive and enjoy the larger patterns from outside the system. If it's good enough for the Shekhinah, it should be good enough for you. Or think of my 16th century namesake, Mirabai. She escaped her tethered fate by jumping off her dead young husband's funeral pyre, and ran into the forest — all the while warbling songs of newfound freedom. Much of her poetry is about escaping abusive family pressure, and falling into the arms of her mystical lover, Krishna. Which is so much more satisfying. Others, come to mind...

become an ecologist — You open your mouth, and clearly no one is listening.

or a psychoanalyst — This one's great. I mean, the patient pays big bucks to lie on a couch and not look at you. And if you say anything at all, they've missed it 'cause they're so self-absorbed. (Bonus: you no longer need your M.D. under your belt before going through the training). And don't worry about those analyst parties: they're all talking to themselves anyway (or trying to avoid their own analyst at the party). Although, to tell the truth, the best way to handle the analyst parties is to go straight to the library in the house (mansion) and sit down in a comfy reading chair with one of the 24 volumes of Freud's Standard Edition. When that no longer works, head for the garden to 'get away from the cigar smoke.' Keep switching between garden and library, until you've put in your time. Warning: hard to get away with your usual torturous twenty minute obligation with this one.

offer to drive — So that when you run from the event (Cinderella was a famous sociophobe—being better with cats and mice and gourds than say, siblings), at least you've got the keys and you're in your own carriage. Having stranded my closest friends and lovers, I must confess this is a tad risky. But it usually works out okay in the end. They meet someone else. Who takes them home. And they have a very very good night. Try not to strand them too far away. Big Sur is definitely too far. Berkeley Hills is probably the most you should try to get away with. (That case was not my fault. It was Rosh Ha-Shanah at the Aquarian Minyan, and I ran like hell when they started doing Pygmie chants. Jesus, what were they thinking?). My good friend and kabbalah partner whom I stranded is a really good sport. He got a marvelous ride back to the City (and brought back my glass slipper as well). He should get a medal for all he's put up with over the years.

When I was a kid, my mom once asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told her cheerfully that I wanted to be the keeper of the woods. Have a little cottage in the forest all alone (I was thinking Muir Woods). With a broom to tidy up. She burst into tears and stormed out of the room saying that was the most depressing thing she ever heard. What was she thinking? It still sounds delightful to me (although, curiously, I've never actually lived alone in my entire life). To wit:

surround yourself with people — Especially gregarious ones. Then, no one will notice.

cross the street when you see them coming — This works especially well if you cross before they see you. Because then you can wave heartily and walk a little faster, demonstrating your good intentions and that you're late or trying to catch up to the white rabbit in the waist coat receding in the distance.

If they love you, they'll forgive you.

And why should they love you? Because you're sometimes pretty good one-on-one. And you do care about them (in the abstract) (and especially when they're gone). When they're really gone, you miss them just terribly. Besides, these days people are pretty tolerant of all kinds of psychopathology.

When all else fails ...

I know. You thought I was about to say "when all else fails, jump," Or, medicate. But no, I'm not a proponent of either one.

When all else fails, call it a virtue, get that Ph.D. under your belt, get the grant, take notes, publish the whole damned thing (with analysis), don't strand them too far away ... and most of all: laugh. And let them laugh too.

Or call it a commentary on the human condition.

Or... or ... You'll think of something...

So. Sociophobes of the world unite! — but maybe just not in person.

check list for the living

When a good friend checked herself into a posh home for unencumbered elders ... I stopped seeing her. This, despite that she now resided 60 miles closer than she had before. This despite my longstanding secret desire that she move those 60 miles closer.

It took me over a year to visit her in the palace of the still-living. Maybe longer. It was one village I knew I'd never blend in with. For one, I don't speak the language. For two, well, there's everything else. The resident elders have 'drinks' in each others' apartments and then descend to the wood-paneled dining room below (or was it mirrored, or was it both?). Each apartment has a nominal kitchen, but all meals are provided in the Dining Hall below, and the meals are elegant, refined, healthful, and tasteful (in both senses). Jackets are required for men, at least for dinner.

The apartments have call buttons throughout in case of emergency; they have maid service, and linens are provided. I'm not sure if they do all the laundry for you or just provide the linens and towels. There's a pool, a gym (with trainers), rides to and from the opera, the Fromm Institute, wherever. There are high level lectures, a library, holiday celebrations, expeditions. And they let in a certain percentage of Jews. I'm not sure if they've got an actual policy on this. As I said, while this place would make a fascinating study, I'm not the person to do it.

The one visit I did make completely freaked me out. So much for objectivity. So it's also possible I've gotten a lot wrong. But this is how I remember it. I was, however, given the grand tour. There's an infirmary. More than one, I think. Short term and long term. And meds are provided. Doctors. Nurses. All your terminal needs are attended to.

It's a gamble to move in, really. You pay up front for your apartment as well as a monthly — but you won't be selling your apartment when you're gone. It gets reabsorbed into the body (as they put it in Invasion of the Body Snatchers). (I, clearly, am 'not of the body').

The residents don't seem to die, they disappear (another reminder of the Body Snatchers).

"Nobody," my friend told me, "ever speaks of death."

What they say instead, is that an apartment is available.

Residents disappear into the infirmary, and sometimes return for a while. My friend refers to herself and her fellow residents as 'inmates.' and these inmates are all on death row. Although the dates for execution remain indeterminate.

I'm not quite sure why this place scares the shit out of me. It's not just that it seems out of place, belonging more on the Upper East Side. Although a place on the Upper East Side would feel more authentic than this. It's not the tall columns, the sculptures, and flower arrangements. Not just that the place makes me feel like a peasant whose taken a wrong turn and still has mud on her boots. It's not just that 'drink' is not my choice of drug, and it's certainly not that they're 'old' since I do qualify age-wise to be incarcerated in this Death Palace.

It's not just that I can't make conversation to save my life, or the goyische formality and upper crust posture. Or the lack of diversity, including economic...

Where's my anthropological sense of adventure? Where's my enthusiasm to visit my friend? Where's my sense of humor? The place is really hilarious.

Remember Dylan's 'he not busy being born is busy dying'?

It was an anthem. We loved it, repeated it. Had contempt for all those busy dying. The inmates in the Death Palace have already taken care of their 'busy dying' and now are very busy living. Painting, writing, learning, hiking, traveling. With Veblenian vigor. They are, for the most part, pre-terminal. Or at least they start out that way. They've uncluttered their lives, as well as their belongings. They've made room for, well, the pleasure of pleasure.

So how come I can't stand the place?

I think I'm still immersed in the clutter of a messy introspective life. And still immersed in the time consuming lot of 'busy dying' — of sorting out paperwork, of getting things in order (and not just for me). I've spent, I now realize, exactly one year busy living with the dying. One year since my dad's diagnosis. My mom's incapacity. Being consumed with advance directives, hospice, hospitals, and residential treatment centers. Falls in the night. Emergency calls, caregivers, fear of the phone ringing. Paying the bills, paying the taxes, paying the lawyers. Documentation. Documents. Grave diggers. Visitors. Stuff. Distribution of stuff. Recovery. Relapse...

For me, death and dying is a bewildering, messy affair.

But for the inmates at the Death Palace, it's all neat and tidy, squeaky clean and, well, just plain invisible. Just another apartment on the market. Know anyone interested?

drowning at the grotto (rethought)

I wanted the Grotto to look like a grotto: old, womb-like, a bit dank, prehistoric even. I expected it to be mildly tubercular. I pictured the San Francisco Grotto Writers' Collective in a dilapidated old Victorian sitting in a downtown alleyway in dire need of a paint job — but no, none of that. The Collective encompassed the entire 2nd floor of a steel and glass building at the corner of 2nd and Bryant, with an attempt at a row of plants in the entryway downstairs just inside the black iron gate out front. There were buzzers to get buzzed in, and once inside, a large cheerful 'Grotto' sign in script.

The second floor did seem to have a bit of the 'cave' feel. Inside, the writers' offices were, for the most part, as far from the downtown office mentality as possible. My favorites were the two closets that are rented out as writers' offices — caves indeed — and only $20/month. Picture a closet. A small closet. With a shelf as a desk, and a chair, and nothing else but yellow stickies all over the walls. Stickies so close, given the closet dimensions, that all you have to do is turn your head from side to side, and your whole storyboard is right there surrounding you. Now that's a writer's grotto!

What was I doing there? Took an all day Short Story Writing Workshop. My first (and likely last) writing workshop ever. We talked about all the normal things — writing prompts, narrators, characters, dialogue, exposition, plot, story, arc, setting, and even writer's block and marketing. There seemed to be a lot of rules to writing stories.

What did I learn? I learned that there was too much glass and steel for me and downtown vibe. I learned that I don't understand the rules of story writing. I learned that taking a workshop feels like a cooking class (or how I imagine one, anyway). It feels like cheating. Or (like everything else) like a good start for little anthropological study of writing groups.

I learned that I don't care whether dialogue subtly conveys the exposition, and that I don't care if a story arc follows the trajectory of a satisfying sexual encounter (even if that makes a story 'natural' or downright 'biological'), and I learned that I think it's sad to be motivated by the expectation of acceptance letters and the acceptance of rejection letters.

When it comes to writing, I think it's a lot more fun just to write a tale because it wants to be written. And to tell it the way it wants to be told.

I want a 'narrator' to be thoroughly untrustworthy if she feels like it, or out for himself, for his own pleasure if that's what he wants. My model here is Jean Genet in say, Our Lady of the Flowers. Where you know that he's writing in his prison cell and that they did let him write. And we're caught up in his story — and then suddenly he stops — and tells us that the piece he's just written and that we've just read has gotten him off. And because of his pleasure, he'll tell that bit again. He gets off again. And what do we get? As we read, we cannot escape our narrator's pleasure, our narrator's prison cell, our narrator's incarceration, confinement, and his ability to write himself an escape right out of his cell. We're not just in his story, we're escaping his cell with him.

I want 'characters' to go ahead and live their own lives without hope of 'redemption,' let alone resolution. I don't think they should have to try to satisfy a 'reader.' Again, Genet is a good model. His characters don't want to stay who they are. They dress up. They are impersonators of other characters trapped in the same story. There's The Maids, for example, which when performed, the maids are played by men playing women playing maids, playing their own mistress. And they're not going to get a nice, neat resolution. Genet doesn't give a shit if this troubles his reader. The reader who gets it, who gets off on it, is really the only reader he needs. And that reader is Genet himself. It was Sartre, after all, who got Genet his audience.

I don't think a story should have to care too much about clarity of 'setting.' Think Kafka or Durrenmatt. Or even Genet again (but I don't want to overdo it here with Genet). They're writing from inside some pretty terrible expressionist landscapes. We don't really need to see them; we can feel them. That's enough. And is there anything at all wrong with sticking in an extra alleyway between say, Bryant and Harrison streets? Must it be either fictional or geographical accuracy? Surely there's room for a little alleyway between? Somebody quick go tell JK Rowling that she can't squeeze Diagon Alley into the heart of London.

Then there's the 'arc,' that nice satisfying arc. I think of North African folk tales. No happily ever after or perfect little story arc there. No, our protagonist learns that life is tough, and just gets tougher and that she can or can't endure it. Or that the prince is the real villain. Or that the villain is really your uncle. Or that your uncle is about to be your father-in-law. Or that your father-in-law is really a sorcerer ... who takes the form of a prince... Or that there is no transformation, no reward, no escape, you're just trapped — get used to it. It's probably a good thing to know.

I learned that I can't just make stuff up. My own 'characters' all exist already, and at least somebody knows them. They've been walking through our consciousnesses for millennia. Avram and Sarai and Hager and the whole dysfunctional mischpaha, for example. And when I write them, they are already fully alive, fully formed, simply going where I send them on the page, getting themselves into trouble, just as they always have.

What I've learned is that I'll never be able to write fiction. I'll only ever be able to just tell a tale. Exactly as it happened.

eating treif

When I was little I used to sleep with two other little girls down the block. In those days, they were called 'colored' and we were called 'jew' — small 'j', said with attitude. It was an adjective. But it was also a verb. Their names were J and J and they were twins, a year older than I. J and I would play under the covers. J, her twin would cry.

One day, J and J came home from Sunday School with the bad news.

"We're going to hell!" she cried. Sister J cried too.

I felt really bad for them. They were going to hell? I mean, I knew that I wasn't. So. Something we were doing was bad for them, but I hadn't a clue exactly what. I think right there I became a little anthropologist, wanting to figure it out.

J went and washed her mouth out with soap — providing herself with her mother's usual punishment. When dad was around, it was the strap — but he was a cook in the Navy, and was close to never home.

The whole world of moral imperatives became something exciting and fun, and worth exploring. I mean, what did it feel like to get your mouth washed out with soap? (The strap sounded interesting too, come to think of it). It all sounded so exotic and quaint.

Their whole house smelled intoxicating, especially weekend mornings. Mrs J made it clear to me that what was sizzling in her skillet was not for me, and eventually I got the idea that she thought that if I ate it, that I'd go to hell too.

I knew that wasn't true.

One morning, J (my J, not crying J) brought me a gift under the covers. One piece of stolen perfectly crisp bacon, right out of the frying pan. The taste was, well, exotic, intoxicating, and downright ineffable (was this my first mystical experience? The salt and fat combo so irresistible to humans?).

And then there was a scream from the kitchen. Of course Mrs J would have counted out the pieces and discovered that one was missing. She hollered at J (my J, it could only have been my J), and then (what a thrill!) she hollered at me.

"Go wash that mouth out with soap!" she commanded, fearing for my soul. I jumped up and complied instantly. What a let down. Boring. And I didn't feel any different. This just reinforced that all these rules, punishments, and eternal hellfire stuff was theirs and not mine.

Fall Semester is coming up, and it looks like the enrollment in my Jewish Mysticism class just isn't going to make it — and the first thing I thought of was this tale of J and J, and the delights of eating treif.

Why?

Don't get me wrong; I love this class. I'll miss teaching it this semester. But still, it brought up the treif story first. Most of all, it seems, I'm gonna miss the treif. After all, I can study Jewish Mysticism on my own, right? You might also say that I could really eat treif at any time I want, too, but it just wouldn't taste the same, would it?

Here's what I discovered. Every time I teach a class on Jewish something or other, I seem to eat a meal that includes treif before the class begins. I've apparently been doing this for, well, decades. At first I thought it was funny, a coincidence, or a just plain balancing things out (like making my kids study Arabic if they want to study Hebrew). But now, I'm not so sure.

Cause when I think of treif, I remember J. And when I remember J, I remember her terror at the possibility of going to hell. I remember great irresistible salty smells, broken 'rules' and the letdown of a mouth full of soap bubbles (maybe I hadn't done it right), and then well, I get stuck.

Pork and parsha? Forbidden fruits, so to speak... I mean, what's the connection?

My default for the moment is still the 'balancing things out' explanation, until someone can come up with something more satisfying. That the treif somehow reaffirms my identity as an anthropologist and not, say, as a theologian (god forbid!), not a practitioner, but a rational, analytical being.

Bottom line: for Fall Semester, it looks like no Jewish Mysticism (at the university, anyway) and (an equal sorrow) it looks like ... no treif.

the experiment

Summer session's winding down. I'm going blind reading the term papers. My eyes just can't sit there for hours at a time any more. But these papers are different.

I offered the class the opportunity to try an experiment, for those who were willing. Do their research paper the old fashioned way: Use the library, bookstores, whatever — but print media only. Journal articles made out of real paper. And read them. All the way through. A few took up the challenge. Cheerfully, I might add. It is summer, after all. Oh. And I offered them an extra 10 points, no matter what the result.

The curious thing is how few were willing to try it. I think even for ten extra points it just wasn't worth their effort or time to set foot in the library. Besides, access to the catalog, is, after all online. And you can access it from home. We made an exception in this regard. It's gotten to the point where it's not possible, even in the library, to not go online. And that transition, I think, happened years ago, when I wasn't paying attention.

Here are some of the student observations:

— Relying on the library was very time consuming and stressful.

— It was difficult to pinpoint the specific details without having to read word for word.

— On the internet I can just use key words and obtain instant information.

— I spent several hours skimming through the many works.

But here's the thing. The experiment was clearly flawed. In reading the papers, it still sounded like a lot of the 'information' was download. Only, instead of now quoting sources, the sources were left out entirely. Introductions had 'information' wreaking of Wikipedia notations, platitudes, and biographical backgrounds that journal articles and even introductions to monographs just don't include.

Oops, how could I have forgotten? A similar experiment in another class rewarded me with the following:

— Is it okay if we use comic books and graphic novels?

— I don't really read. It's not required for my major.

— I just open the book and grab a quote and stick it in somewhere, cause they always want quotes.

— This is a joke, right?

One of my own preferred ecstatic states is sitting on the floor of the Bancroft Library stacks — discovering things I hadn't dreamed of looking for. Or finding journals I'd searched three continents for. And there they were at my fingertips. The Revue Africaine, from 1832 – 1943, right there at the Bancroft, when I'd searched Paris, Aix-en-Provence (known for its fantastic archives), and the libraries in Rabat. Those old journals, gone, all gone! And how did I find them? They were on the shelf below the shelf I was looking for. Right here at home, I quite literally stumbled onto treasures.

I mean, what could be better than stumbling on treasure?

Key words?

Sure, I'll give them their extra 10 points anyway. And I learned from the experience. (Again) I realize now that it's really too late to try to turn back the clock this way. A majority of students see 'research' as the accumulation of 'information' (relevant or not), and the analytical component is (for the most part) reduced to just that accumulation of info-statements (relevant or not).

But there are some, some who are somewhat (maybe) like me, who were not only willing to try, but who took real pleasure in it. And whose writing blossomed (god, I really just used that word!) with complexity, such that there are no one-liners to quote — only flowing prose, filled with both analysis and self-discovery. I mean, how cool is that?

No more experiments, however. Surely, I've had enough? I think I've learned my lesson. At least until the next time I forget that I've already lost this battle — at least a couple times already. Maybe more.

But wait, wait — I just read another one. From another experiment that I've been trying over the last year or so.

Work together (what a concept). But write the paper as a conversation about the material, working out the analysis together, bringing each perspective to the conversation. And well, this one really worked. It's not an "I'll write this section, and you write that section" — but a let's-think-together. Out loud. And oh, this one was a delight, just a delight to read.

It was on Dawkins, of course. No platitudes. Some attitude. And getting the biology right.

See me flap my wings and soar...
Oh, and my eyes don't feel so bad anymore.

the stormy leather god, estrogen, and vietnam

It was a very long time ago, but I just got jolted by it again.

He, the Vet, had walked into my office. There was already a student in there and she overheard him say, "I could have killed you ..."

I think it opened the conversation. But before I knew it, the student had told the Chair, and the Chair had told Campus Police, and the Chief of Police went undercover in my class, day one. A clear misunderstanding. It was a class on Gender and Anthropology. The cop was a pretty good student; raised his hand, took notes, asked interesting questions. I think the whole thing was just a great excuse for the Police Chief to take a class on gender...

The Vet wore army fatigues every day, camo pants, and T-shirts all with references to the war, like "Vietnam, Take One" with a picture of a movie camera filming the horror. Loud noises made him jumpy. He sat by the door, in case he had to run out at any moment. It didn't happen too often. But it did happen.

He had an arsenal. But so, apparently did a lot of other students.

I liked him instantly. We swapped war stories. Only my war was only six days long. And I hadn't killed anybody. All we'd really done was commandeer an empty bomb shelter (with wall-to-wall mattresses), lock ourselves in and fuck like bunnies the last three days. That one became a rabbi. Or a psychologist. Or both. I think both. Point is, it wasn't Vietnam. Far from it.

I remember one year the Vet and I traded outfits. I got to wear his old dress uniform. He borrowed my Stormy Leather for a while. He got me a belly dancer for my birthday once. It was a friendship based on exploring the potential for transformation. And an appreciation of the power of mythology. And on the search for the ritual that might reverse the rage, ease the warrior's pain and make things right again.

So, when I wrote about embodying God, he really has had a lot more experience in this regard — in the other sense of God. The Stormy Leather God.

Here's what he wrote:

"I was God when I was 20 years old. I ripped and I tore. I did decide who lived and who died. 20 year olds should not be God, though I am still being told that others 'would follow me into hell' — no shit, old team mate really said that and it is being taken as a compliment.

"However, for me being God it is not what it is cracked up to be. I was not very good at it — it really fucked me up..."

Right. So I stand corrected.

That's the other kind of God. The one I wasn't talking about. Makes me sound so warm and fuzzy speaking mommie-god, garden-god... But that's not how men embody God, is it?

He found an antidote. Estrogen. Estrogen and belly dance. And years later I got to see her transformation. And what I'd like to say is, in my book, that was God. He Created a Her he could live with. She could calm the rage. And she could dance. And I was jealous.

He could have killed me. But he didn't.

"My cardiologist," he said, "took me off Estrogen because it was beginning to weaken my blood vessels. Unfortunately, the more it diminishes in me, the more I am returning to a creature I do not want to be again, [that kind of] God. So, I finally decided to say screw it... I've been living on borrowed time for years, so if the Estrogen is going to kill me, let it ... at least I will, I hope, return to a place of semi-peace before it or something else takes me down."

So, here's to our warriors, and a remembrance of what war does to them. And how hard they struggle (if they do struggle) to undo all the harm. I salute you, and I salute what you've become. And I honor your bravery when that war is finally done.

And here's to the Estrogen God, the mommie-gods, and yes, the gardeners too. I'll stick to my story, after all. To Herakles, warrior-slave of Omphale, here's to you.

rumi and the bell-shaped curve

Summer Session. Magic, Science and Religion. Possibly the very last Summer MSR that I ever get to teach. And so, I've really wanted it to be sparkling. Thoughtful. Deep. Fun. Engaging. Paradigm-shifting, if I can manage it. For them. And for me as well. But I always want this. Generally speaking, students signed up for Winter or Summer Session are highly motivated, albeit in a bit of a rush to 'finish' as fast as they can. Frequently, they're taking their very last class before graduating, and I want to send them off with something pretty special. If I can.

And as with all semesters or intersessions, I think we're on track for exactly that experience ... until I start grading the papers. In this case, the first Midterm of the session. And then all my optimism, desires for a joy-filled, meaningful send-off, and just plain exuberance in teaching this extraordinary material ... just plain falls apart.

Last night I read the following sentence in a short essay, that bore not the slightest resemblance to the topic at hand:

"It's always been taught to me 'it's not what you know, it's who' and I thoroughly believe that."

What a slap in the face at content. At the whole concept of a thoughtful–deep–fun–engaging–paradigm-shifting course. At what I've always thought of as performing cartwheels of the mind. It's a course that can change lives, and that does, if given even half a chance. A course that I'm only beginning to understand after all these years, is really at heart an attempt to understand trauma and suffering, and the lengths people can and do go to alleviate that suffering. Desperate acts, irrational but powerful—when rationality fails. I love this course! It encompasses the depth and breadth of the human capacity to try (something/anything!) in the face of the unfathomable.

And then, that one little sentence tells me that none of it matters.

Which maybe explains why there are more and more failing papers. Or barely passing students. Who, in their own words, "just wanna get outta here." Graduate. Without critical thinking skills. Analytical skills. Without having read the important thinkers (from Ibn Khaldun to Thomas Kuhn). Without spelling and without grammar. Without, dare I say it, a real education. And as if there's something spectacular waiting out there for them without these skills.

"I just need the piece of paper."

I've heard that more than once. More than a dozen times or more. I can turn as many remarkable cartwheels of the mind, but many in those classroom seats just want the grade that'll get them outta there.

I had a colleague once who referred to these students as 'the taxpayers.' That they were the ones who simply helped foot the bill for the few who really were engaged, who were excited by the learning. Whose eyes sparkled with delight and discovery. I used to argue with him.

"I aim," I said, "at the yawners." I figure if I can get them engaged, I can reach anybody. His response: Don't bother. But I do bother, and I am bothered, and the bother never goes away. I want everybody, not just the delighted and delightful few.

So, here's the weird thing. Over the many years that I torture myself over bad writing or the lack of analytical skills, every once in a while I examine the grades and discover that they work out to a fairly normal bell-shaped curve. All by themselves. And I find it shocking. The curve is not constructed to distribute the grades. The bell-shaped curve is simply there. Have I merely imagined that the writing has gotten worse over the years? Have I become more lenient in that hideous task called 'grading'?

The A's make me happy. Thrilled! But why are there so few of them?

Who made that curve? Is it a force of nature? Is it a distribution of innate intelligence? Is it one of Durkheim's 'social facts'?

And I wonder (and this really bothers me) why they can't all be A's? Is there some law of nature that says everyone cannot excel? I find the bell-shaped curve somehow insulting. Like if I'm really doing my job right, everyone in that classroom should be excited, engaged, and jazzed by the material (whatever class it happens to be). If I'm excited about the material, why aren't they?

The psychoanalyst Owen Renick used to say that teaching is a seduction. A seduction of the material, I'm sure he meant—not of the person. The teaching isn't about us at all, as far as I'm concerned. When I'm teaching, I feel like I disappear, and the only thing that's left is this remarkable material. Why bother otherwise? I think Rumi would say the same, although he would claim that what remains is God, not 'remarkable material' (but what's the difference)?

The pessimist in me is deeply offended that not everyone in the room is an A student. It just doesn't make sense to me! Why wouldn't every single person strive to achieve at the highest level? Strive for that Rumi-experience in the classroom? If we're not aiming for the extraordinary, why bother?

The mystical experience I await is the annihilation of the bell-shaped curve. Where every person in that classroom is on the same page, breathless and in awe of the thinkers and thinking produced over the millennia, of the beauty of nature and ideas about nature, of the remarkable diversity of understandings—including right there in the classroom.

We have the best job on the planet that we get to engage in the enterprise of the mind. And then the university ruins it by asking us to grade it...

say something about veils...

Here's something I'm actually pretty angry about. There, I said it out loud. I'm angry about my great-grandmother's veils.

My dad spent decades scouring the earth for Judaica. To rescue it and give it a home. Not our home, mind you. But something more permanent. A place where these fragmented treasures of our People would be (or might be) preserved this time forever.

I come from a museum family, in which no object —excuse me, artifact— is really personal. History has taken so much from us, my mother would say. We were robbed by the Expulsion, the Inquisition, the Holocaust. And so, my sibling, the museum, got all the attention. History was not our own to be kept, held or savored just in our tiny fragment of a family (or anyone else's family either). It must be preserved — institutionalized — as yet another symbol of the heritage that we collectively lost. Preserved for all to treasure equally. Not for any of us to keep for ourselves.

And so, my great-grandmother's veils, when they were eventually uncovered in my nona's house, went straight to the museum. I only got to wear them once, but I remember how beautiful they were, how delicate, and exactly how complicated it was to wear them. Somewhere, I know there is a picture of me in her veils. But clearly I was not to be entrusted with them beyond that momentary loan.

Besides, my research interests were primarily among Muslim populations (or nominally Muslim, anyway). I keep thinking that perhaps I wasn't worthy of keeping the family veils. I was studying, perhaps, the wrong tradition! The Bukharan veils were all that was left from that particular line of the family. Maybe my parents were right to have them incarcerated. So they could be put on display on a mannequin every five or ten years for little Jewish school children to gawk at for a second or two before moving on to the next exhibit.

My dad collected everything. But he wasn't materialistic about any of the stuff he 'rescued.' What he treasured were the stories they could help uncover. Each object, each bit of junk held a piece of the puzzle. And if you were a good researcher, you could find enough bits of junk to be able to see the whole picture. He was, in his way, an archaeologist of of our fragmented history. And when he died, his apartment became my own excavation site. And it's now my job to find homes for all the remaining orphaned bits of unclaimed culture. And I became the curator of my dad's leftover homeless treasures.

At some point along the way, I started to collect some pretty nifty veils. My travel-veils, I call them. My favorites are the Egyptian ones with all the beaded sparklies on them. They're the closest thing I've found that feel like my noni's veils, though nothing's very close. And when I wear my veils, I feel at home, and safe, and linked up to a line that goes back through time, a thousand years, or two, or three, or longer.

"History is always now," my mom always said. And wearing those veils, well, I can feel it. But truth be told, I really don't like museums very much. It's not just the sibling rivalry. I'd just rather wear my history than stare at it through glass.

the he-man/skeletor debate

Is conflict necessary? And how long have humans thought about that problem? And is it a problem? Darwin, Freud, Kropotkin, Erikson and so many others have weighed in on the subject. Marvin Harris. Napoleon Chagnon. Fanon. Some of my favorite thinkers. Maybe everyone has weighed in on this one, or some version of it. Such as in the question: When is conflict necessary? Which in its very structure preempts the idea that we might not need it at all.

So, thinking about this, and having a bookcase full of experts positing their arguments on a multitude of conflict themes, you'd think I wouldn't have been surprised to hear my kids immersed in the debate. Actually talking it out.

The conflict, if I may be so bold, was that Big Brother wanted Little Sister to play He-Man with her, and she was holding out. They were sitting in their usual places at the kitchen table munching on their afternoon snack. Raw baby carrots, hummus to dip them in, and some fishies. Big Brother really wanted to play. Little Sister was being obstinate.

"Why do I always have to be Skeletor?" she complained.

Big Brother looked at her, struck to the core. He was He-Man. How could you argue that? It was a fact of nature. After all, Grandma had given him the action figures, not her. He was just inviting her to play. He argued to this effect.

"Well, why does there have to be a Bad Guy, anyway? Why can't we both be He-Man?" she persisted.

Big Brother was beside himself. Little Sister was clearly unclear on the concept. He then went into a stunningly lyrical portrayal of life on planet earth, the nature of storytelling, and the basic dynamics of the human condition. He even, as I recall, threw in the social life of the neon tetras in our 35 gallon fish tank, to punctuate his point. He actually used the words Protagonist and Antagonist. Our private school dollars at work. He was eight years old. She was four.

He explained to her that every story on planet earth had protagonists and antagonists. And that every game there was to play, had the same. It was a rule. There was good and there was evil. That's just how it worked. He gave example after example, laying down the foundation of his argument carefully. Using examples from her own experience to make his point. He was eloquent and he was thorough. She remained unmoved.

Finally, Big Brother quite literally threw his arms up in dismay, and said to her, "Okay, fine. You name me one single thing we can play that does not involve Protagonists and Antagonists, and I'll play it with you!" He was almost shouting in his exasperation with her.

She turned toward him, looked him in the eye, and without missing a beat, said,

"Barbies."

He stormed out of the room in a rage. She just didn't get it.

teaching bunnies to fly

I had this student once — I wonder how many tales start that way — and it was a very long time ago. When I was obsessed with being a boxer. Yah. I wanted to box. And nobody would teach me. And I wanted it bad. Just to see what it felt like, to hit and be hit (in some kind of controlled environment). Once. Just once. Let me say right at the outset, that I lost interest in even the idea of boxing pretty quickly after the bunnies...

I was teaching this class at the time called Cultures and Conflict, or maybe it was Cultures in Conflict, I don't really remember anymore. And discovered one afternoon in class that I was a fraud. With a show of hands, every person in the room had had a fight, at least one, physical fight in his or her life — except me. And three quarters had guns, even the nun in the front row. And I was teaching this class?

What I knew was theory. Theories of conflict. I don't actually do conflict itself all that well. Better, I always say, just to run. Just keep running. Passport in hand. After all, we've been doing it for centuries. Millennia, really. It's worked out moderately well, hasn't it?

But this time, I wanted to learn how to fight.

So. At the end of the semester, this student, he told me he wanted to give me a graduation present. That's what he called it. It was, after all, his graduation, and he thought it would be fun. He came up to the City and decided to teach me to fight. Not boxing. Martial arts. My student became my teacher. But that's not what this tale is really about — it's just how it started.

Eventually, he invited us down to his ranch. Me and my kids. He taught my kids to ride the horses his family bred. What I remember most about the ranch were the guns everywhere, leaning against things. Stuck in mattresses, just in case. I watched my kids reach out; little private school urban Jewish children, reaching out ... He offered to teach them to shoot. He was a born teacher.

Mostly though, my kids were drawn to the bunnies. And the bunnies won out over the guns. And at some point, I overheard him telling my kids that his mom taught bunnies to fly.

Driving back, my kids were all about flying bunnies, and they didn't let the subject drop until I promised to find out more. After all, if his mom could teach bunnies to fly, so could theirs. I was a teacher, right?

The life of bunnies, like that of all living things, is a precarious thing. Or maybe, the life of bunnies is more precarious than many of the other creatures who live on the ranch. They require protection. And his family was pretty good at it. Pens and fences and shotguns to keep the bunnies safe (and sure, everything else safe as well). But fine. Safe bunnies. Got it.

But when one died of its own accord, his mom would take it from the pen, holding it up by the feet, climb up to the top of the ridge the ranch stood on, and fling the bunny way out into the wilderness below. And they flew, they really flew. And the coyotes were grateful. His mom, he said, was an expert at teaching bunnies to fly.

And I realize now, although it didn't occur to me then, that boxing or no boxing, martial arts or no martial arts, fieldwork or no fieldwork — and no matter how much my kids might want me to teach them — there was one thing that I would never ever be able to teach, and that was ... teaching bunnies to fly.

when in doubt — run

I've actually finally gotten fed up with the whole 'grades' thing — which has made me realize that it's probably time to quit. Which has made me realize that when I think such things, I act on them. I don't quit — I run. Fast.

I always knew that it would come to this. That one day I'd read a paper or a phrase or just a misspelled word and it would push me over the edge. It happened this past Winter Session in my Magic, Science and Religion intersession class: a whole semester's worth of the weird stuff crammed into 10 or 11 days. Designed for sensory overload, that's for sure. I don't remember what the line was. Should have written it down. But I do remember the overall subject:

Joseph Campbell.

And the thing is that Joseph Campbell actually does have something worth saying, reading, thinking about — but nobody seems to get that far. Reading Campbell takes patience. It's not just about about heroes and follow-your-bliss. But that's all I ever seemed to get.

Here was the problem: There were not one, not two, but three bloody papers on Joseph Campbell in the stack. And two of them were back to back. And I burned out just like that.

And it was time to quit.

That last sentence, whatever it was, paralyzed me, blinded me — it was that powerful — and I couldn't grade another single paper. It's happened before. Then I read the offensive line to someone else, and they become paralyzed by it, and I'm temporarily cured and can get on with it.

But here's the thing. The very next semester I got hit with something worse. And this time I copied it down. So here's the sentence. From my Middle East class. And this part is true:

"Throughout the history the evil and good has been a religion or its minorities at a time"

You're welcome to translate it for me.