Luco d'Hiver

There are some who scoff at the holidays, but please, count me no longer among their number. Oh, not that I have become tinsel-brained, but it seems to me there is a certain potential existent within holiday traditions.

Thanksgiving. Exuberantly dead turkey. Cranberry sauce and stuffing and more cranberry sauce; green bean casserole the dogs ogle with eyes big as tea cups. Pies and pudding and homemade whipped cream. And no prison guard this year - she traveled for the holiday to some other dimension of time called South Carolina.

I jest. South Carolina is a place, I am sure, that actually exists within this dimension. It is merely a truism that I have difficult imagining any place save this prison. I might read of faraway locales but to me they are dreams. Vast ephemeral kingdoms; entire Carolinas of bejeweled mountains, oceans, forests shadowed by a haze of disbelief.

I digress.

There are some who scoff, etcetera, etcetera, and I who is made rageful no lenger by les fêtes d'hiver. Please do not become fussy; we are moving from Middle English to French and back to English - such is the quivering sort of joy that takes hold my heart.

We are a culture of excess, a world, even, of excess. Where one has not "made it" until certain measures are met, but then, how lovely these brief weeks where we might think of other things. It is the moral of every holiday story that we should care for each other, not material objects, and yes, I see you rolling those beautiful eyes of yours, most everyone knows this, and knowing it does nothing change; however!

There is in that seedling inchoate transformation.

And what better metaphor, reader, than a seedling shooting its green-self past and through dark soil, past and through doubt and fear, even past and through my personification of a seedling; ridiculous, miraculous.

The prison guard many Carolinas away, dogs' mouths saliva thick, glowing incandescent lights in green, blue, red, yellow. Lines of people, of course, in malls and big box stores, and the sadness of that truth; its smallness, the meanness in their eyes.

I saw a video of shoppers at a Wal-Mart fighting each other for new phones of some sort. What is it about a steep discount (or even semi-deep, subtle-deep, pseudo-deep) that whirls brains to frenzy? That quickens ferocity? 

And why did this video not send me to bed for days? Why did it not compel me to despair?

I cannot say except to say this: the seedling growing green, wild, shooting roots like spider webbing; dreams I have of fragmenting vision; blacknesses and whitenesses that fill and fill and fill me to bursting; a shade of purple so pale as to be nearly white; the spinning of my own treacherous heart at the hope for connection; the way I am moved to tears that you, reader, persist in reading this, my ranting, my idiocy.

The feeling I have that although I cannot push a pin into that which makes my life meaningful; despite the fact that there is no logical fact I can name; there is not biological evidence I can display; I am regardless a kind of cup and the cup that I am is one that is full to the brim and over-filling, running over, gathering speed and charging through the dark into the greater darkness inside of which we are all cradled.

I need see only the barest echo of starlight and I am transported. This, reader, is where we are, and what an unspeakable joy that fills me.

What abiding sadness. To know you and not. Hold you and not. Communicate and not. And yet, the fact that we have the ability to try and to fail and to try and to fail; the potential to meet, finally, that-which-is-of-us; that this potential hums in our quiescent bodies; this gratifies me.

It lets me look up into vast skies of every color. Allows me to feel love.

And, okay, to try to stay on track here, reader, I feel these things in les fêtes d'hiver. It is true. In all of them. Even in our distressingly consumerist culture there is, at the very heart of everything, a single drop of the immensity of life. Of joy. 

Of every whirring thing springing to life. Germination. That which is itself and also its opposite. Burgeoning. Time lapse videos of flowers unfurling. The infinity of stars that crowd the sky. Our own bodies: fractals. 

And you reading this. Sipping coffee. Checking your phone. The infinite within you.

Everything else: artifice.

Happy Thanksgiving, Love Luco

Good day to you or good night - I will not assume to know when you are reading this. Today, as I write, it is Thanksgiving day. Thanksgiving: the quintessentially American holiday; we over-eat and then eat more (and note that much of what we eat has been brutalized in ways "Consider the Lobster" does not brush against lightly with even the barest of fingertips), and then we stay up late to stand in lines inside our tents (and I do not know about you, but I am struck by the visual parallel between the OWS movement and the lines of people waiting for the doors of the mall to open like Abraham waiting for god to stay his hand); we wait inside our tents so that we can purchase things we do not need and will not appreciate (and, of course, most of these goods are produced by people who we consume in similar ways to the turkeys). 

I say we, but I mean you.

What I mean to say is, even if I wanted to do these things (I am not ready to speculate on what various joys and despairs might take over me as I walked down aisle after aisle of electronics, clothing, toys, and home goods), I can not. The prison guard a) will not let me out of this prison and b) does not eat meat.

She does not eat meat?

What is this? "Quorn Turk'y Roast?" I will say only this: here is one food that I do not necessarily covet. Globular fake meat. Yum. And I would like to note that this fake meat is not vegan, so does this indicate that she cares less for cows and chickens? The turkey is to be spared, but, hey! Cows and chickens are jerks? (On a related note, abuses at a factory chicken egg producer have been noted in recent press. Here is an article: ABC News on chicken abuse)

I am speaking rather tongue in cheek, in case you could not tell, and I am not really one to speak here. I love meat. I would eat copious amounts of it if the prison guard would let me. I simply do not like the idea of avoiding confrontation with reality.

Apologies for my digression.Please note that I do not mean to suggest these problems are your fault or even the prison guard's fault (although let not this statement indicate her innocence in other affairs!), but I do believe we as living creatures must face difficult truths.

In an essay titled "Some Proximity to Darkness," from David Griffith's book A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America he writes: "Pain destroys language, such that the person is negated and the world surrounding them is slowly 'unmade,' discounted. If we think of the photos and images of the violated and tortured [he is speaking specifically of the Abu Ghraib photographs here, but his ideas can be applied to images like these in general] in this way, as memorializing the negation of humanity and the incremental undoing of the world, then we are closer to understanding the stakes of bearing witness. There is no closure when we look away, only unremitting pain and anguish" (83). 

So let us look at the tradition we celebrate and how we celebrate it. Let us remember the genocide that shaped our past and continues to shape us today. Let us look at what we eat with an unflinching honesty. Let us work to understand the world in which we live; the power we allow corporations and the corrupt to have over us. Let us grapple with the OWS movement and the ways in which it has been "dealt with" by the police and the government. Let us, as we stand in line or huddle in our tents, acknowledge the privileges we are  granted based on race, ethnicity, sex, location, species. 

And let us try to begin to understand the suffering of the poorest who toil and become ill and love each other and fight and die and who create the goods we are encouraged to buy tonight and tomorrow.

I am not saying that I have an answer or a plan of action. I am a cat. Living my own imprisoned life is, for me, an already arduous task.

And I know the same is true for you. You have a family. Work. Responsibilities. It is more likely than not that very many people depend upon you. 

But we should not allow our focus to remain so steadily pointed to our own lives. We need to look up and around us and see what is happening in our world. We need to look up even if only for a moment.

Even if only to immediately then drop our faces in shame and despair.