Covid diary Sept 18

  The west is burning. For a few days earlier this week the sky here, all these states and miles away, was a weird haze. I think I was coughing. But I’ve had sinus allergy stuff since March. Hard to say if the smoke in the sky from the other side of the country has made things worse. Hard to say it hasn’t. Consumed with this pandemic and constantly battling the lies of T., climate catastrophe has fallen from the headlines. Regulations and policies to combat the crisis have been reversed, deleted, destroyed. Recognition of how the changing climate is hurting the world’s most vulnerable the fastest. Like covid, inequity is an accelerant, fuel on the fire already burning, has been burning. T. is an accelerant, but not the cause. And when he’s gone—hopefully right out of office and directly into jail—the root causes of climate catastrophe and the unnecessary extent of the death and damage caused by covid won’t go away. We (American history, contemporary society, post WWII Republicans, unchecked capitalism etc. etc.) created T. and the racist culture that exalts him. 

Ibrim Kendi says education isn’t necessarily the solution (or lack of education necessarily the problem): 

“We have been taught that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, lead to racist policies,” Kendi said. “If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then your solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion. But of course … the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural.” Self-interest drives racist policies that benefit that self-interest. When the policies are challenged because they produce inequalities, racist ideas spring up to justify those policies. Hate flows freely from there. 

… 

“We can understand this very simply with slavery. I’m enslaving people because I want to make money. Abolitionists are resisting me, so I’m going to convince Americans that these people should be enslaved because they’re black, and then people will start believing those ideas: that these people are so barbaric, that they need to be enslaved, or that they are so childlike that they need to be enslaved.” 

But the failings in our educational systems have contributed. People who haven’t learned better—through formal education or through personal relationships and first-hand experiential learning—are especially susceptible to being convinced of the stories that perpetuate racial inferiority, the stories manufactured to justify the behavior/policies/practices of racial oppression and inequality. T. is doing this right now in the stories he tells—amplified by the world of right- wing media—about law and order and the largely peaceful BLM protests, in his new patriotic education plan, etc. His followers are ignorant and hateful but they also want to hold on to their own white power, socially at least, even if they don’t have any economic power. The owners of big oil and non-renewable everything corporations convinced us all for years to worship the causes of our own destruction. Powerful messaging indeed, profiting billions for a few while we all have helped the burning right along. Turns out even recycling has mostly been a lie, created by the plastic-makers, to keep us all in line. And we fell for it even when we should have known better. 

Though, like Frederick Douglass personally knowing and feeling the violent effects of slavery and his learning to read and write the historical, structural, economic racism that fueled the system—and armed with this knowledge working to dismantle that system—we need better history taught in schools, more critical literacies. People of all races and colors and backgrounds can learn how to dismantle ignorance and policies, and many have and continue to learn and act, even if some forever Trumpers are just a newly labeled group of the same old leaders and followers violently holding on to their white privilege and power—those who have the money convincing those who don’t to pretend they have power even if their only power is hate.

 

Covid diary Sept 15

 Two years ago today we went to a large pet adoption event in the parking lot at the Detroit zoo and adopted Marci. We walked around the whole place checking out all of the shelter dogs, and she was among the last who caught our attention, at the end of our first circle around, sitting quietly in her cage. After meeting a few other dogs, we got her story, got her out of the cage, and then adopted her and brought her home. And now it’s like she’s never not been here.

 

Right now she’s laying on the chair by the open front window of my office. I don’t know why she only discovered this chair a few days ago, but lately she regularly settles in there while I’m at the computer. She’s grown used to us being home and around all day long, or taking her in the car on short and long trips, and tends to stay close and pay attention whenever I’m moving around the house or somehow slip outside without her. If we’re going to spend any considerable time away, I think, we’re going to have to work up to it so she doesn’t have a serious panic attack and totally freak out.

 

Also today the grad students are on strike. It's now into the second week. Some Ann Arbor lecturers and TT faculty are striking with them too and even some from Dearborn and Flint. Many RAs have also walked out of the dorms, demanding more testing and safer conditions. And now dining workers and other groups on campus are joining in and ramping up the pressure. It’s true, we’re in a global pandemic that no one has ever had to navigate before. And so maybe leaders don’t entirely know the best ways to proceed. But the U. is the wealthiest public U. and has top-world experts in every field. There have been many conversations and information from all kinds of public health and other experts. There is no reason for the U. to be doing as poor a job as it is doing in terms of subjecting students, faculty, staff, and the community to the spread of this virus. And it hardly included any of them in reopening plans and conversations. The administration, in fact, tried to hide a report from its own committee that warned that it was dangerous to reopen to the extent planned, and that it was unethical to do so and put people in danger. Add to all that the racial justice demands and problematic history of policing on campus. Grad students are demanding police reform in funding and practice. And if all of this ever ends, those graduating grad students will enter a world radically changed and with likely fewer job opportunities, students in the dorms will go out into the local community and go back to their families and many will bring the virus, since their age group is known to silently spread if not actually contract the virus, and the world will not return exactly to how it was.

 

The clouds have filled in the sky like a haze. It was beautiful and clear sun earlier in the day. These good-weather September days are hard to come by and won’t last long. A bit of evening sun though glows through onto the neighbor’s bright orange and pink wildflowers which seem nostalgic for a summer they’ve barely known. The neighbor told me they pulled out old, mostly weeds, from those only somewhat contained beds in the front yard, and then threw in some wildflower mix bags of seeds. Our own fall flowers have also filled in in the front yard, but I can’t see them from here outside and under my front window. After to much dryness, the daisies are blooming again. A huge spread of deep red mums is just starting to turn into flowers from the buds. And large sedums dominate the front beds and mix with assertively spread black-eyed Susans along the driveway. Lots of other continuing summer and early fall colors, including goldenrods and other spindly spreaders have popped out all over the neighborhood.

 

Flowers are like taking a break. Sometimes I try to focus on them hard. To see a yard full all at once. Take in the patches and layers. The way textures and shapes fill in the outside spaces. Earlier in the summer, walking with my aunt, she told me her neighborhood didn’t have a lot of peonies, maybe because they grow a bit large and wild, that in that Ann Arbor neighborhood the yards are more neat more tidy. Our Ypsi yards, some of them, are kind of wild. Less delineation between species and types. More openness to falling out of boundaries or expectations. I think Ann Arbor used to be more like this, maybe parts of it still are. Maybe yard art can be a creative lesson, in paying attention, in cultivating beauty.

It's Still April

... and although we are ordered to stay at home, spring breaks through occasionally... there was snow on the ground this morning, but the sun is trying to warm things up a little. We'll move beyond 40 degrees in the next days like we did a few days earlier. The flowers are starting to fill in, here and there. And because we're shut in, and the weather's turning, so many people are out walking, running, riding... so many dogs and kids. It's nice to see. Sometimes I wonder what all of those so many more people than I usually see do when there's not a stay-at-home order. Parents with kids probably have other activities and things that keep them busy. Dog owners have jobs and more tightly knit schedules. So in a way it's a nice break, for some. If for a moment it's possible to forget the terrible. If only for a quick moment to rest away from knowing what others who don't have this break, who have the virus, who are caring for others who have the virus, who are staffing the auto repair shops and grocery stores so some of us can be at home... what they are dealing with now, and the fear that we all have about how long this will last, how many we will lose, what life will look like on the other side.


April is also poetry month. And here, I offer some pieces that are not exactly poetry but that are born of poetry in a way, from a project-in-process about another simultaneous and related kind of continuing catastrophe...

Geology is a mode of accumulation, on the one hand, and of dispossession, on the other, depending on which side of the color line you end up on … [we must] resist framing this epoch [Anthropocene]  as a “new” condition that forgets its histories of oppression and dispossession...

--Yusoff Black Anthropocene (3)

*

If I looked different and was still myself I would want to do things in the world, go places, experience the quiet and calm that being away from traffic noise in particular can offer. As the climate apocalypse heats up literally and figuratively, we will all eventually have to fight for spaces out of the way in the woods, near the water, fighting off everyone from everywhere else coming here, to the great lakes state, great lakes great times, because it will be the best place to live out the climate disaster years in peace, and by then we might be out of the resources needed to perpetuate the noise anyhow, won’t be able to drive cars, run machines, industry will slow to a halt. And it might get crowded, the rural spaces diversify, conversations turn to everyday survival, movement slackened. I think about how it might get real quiet, without the blast of progress barreling forward, a turn back to simple humanity, something to look forward to, the quiet of the apocalypse.

*

In campaign season advertisements roar, shout, clamor. TV, radio, internet cacophony. Billboards, mail flyers, my computer with the sound on mute shouts images, headlines, memes, ads purporting, contradicting, claiming, promising, fear-mongering. Millions and millions spent on accumulating environmental and cultural catastrophe instead of just spending the money to fix anything except military, border walls, and corporate tax breaks. Maybe one of them will fix something. If we could have a moment of true silence to get us there.

*

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, once said: “There’s a simple rule. You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.” Luntz has been active on many (dis)information campaigns and is the author of the book, Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say It’s What People Hear.

*

Koch headquarters is in Wichita, Kansas. The state of Kansas held hearings on evolution. Whether to teach evolution in school or teach something else. The other side. Is there another side to evolution? Like is there another side to climate change? get opposing views to be fair. But the opposing views are totally made up. Or Leave stuff out. Or are only about religion, which isn’t part of public school curriculum. Or whatever. How did we get here? It’s like a Talking Heads song. Played on Kansas News. In reverse. Satanic messages. Like evolution. A backward big bang. Kochs love Kansas. Probably suicidal over the newest Kansas NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) that focus on fact-based, scientific processes and practices, and hands-on doing. The more people know the harder it is to control them.

from the Annotated Apocalypse Project

*

A girl, a planet, an apocalypse

Annie Dillard’s million tiny apocalypses

under the microscope, a lens into a world

Beckett’s nuclear arsenal of language

play

not play, I’m serious

Make a treaty, break it

the earth suffers

like dominoes: one species after another, or simultaneous

weather, and resources

Break it: the earth is where we live

like pigs in fragile houses

brick also crumbles

especially brick made in contemporary

capitalism: cheap ass shit

built to sell, decay, disperse like a cloud

cumulus raining into landfills

In January, a poem made from a list of words, an exercise

“progress is a comfortable disease” –e.e. cummings

good morning

imagine sweetness

a quick kisser

salted representability

a molecule of ocean

where blue, white, or

a prism

speckled mist

birds know the difference

those not extinct, that is

verbena swells

against grey feelings

a coffin, unannounced

teeth don’t decompose at the same

rate, squirrels thick for winter

layered over time

while species burn

progress, eating garbage like gulls

or gw bush, strumming a guitar and

painting, hobbies of mass destruction

ignorant bystanders still longing

for quaint catastrophes

who will save us

swallowing water

obedient descendants of this

evolutionary

detour

a December post - on weather, poetry, beauty

December

White light seen through

the season's double window

clouding the room reveals the roses'

week-old gift of petals bruised purple-black.

Dry paper falling on white cloth

seconds the white room's wonder

at cold sun flurried, crumbling stars

compacted underfoot: lattice

of fixed clarity, wintrish eidolon

half patience, half at prayer.

--Reginald Shepherd

from "Roman Year"

In restarting posting to this blog, I begin with a short poem, one section Shepherd's longer "Roman Year," a meditation on this time of year, of double windows, bruised flower petals, flurried cold sun, and seemingly crumbling stars... but like the beauty in the poem, what surrounds me in Dec. is not all purple-black; or purple -black is the beauty of it. It's raining, and dark, and is expected to rain all day. It's hard to get motivated when the sun only comes out once a week, or less. But the dog and I are comfortably listening to the steady subtle sound of drops out the window, biding our time until we can go out into the fresh near-winter air. We'll appreciate that, in our way, differently from warmer days, but getting in our blood nonetheless, and keeping us moving forward.

Also, this from Joy Harjo, in the NYT, a series on "beauty":

from editors:

"Humans have engaged with the concept of beauty for millennia, trying to define it while being defined by it.

Plato thought that merely contemplating beauty caused “the soul to grow wings.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found beauty in Raphael’s “The Transfiguration,” writing that “a calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart.” In “My Skin,” Lizzo sings:

“The most beautiful thing that you ever seen is even bigger than what we think it means.”

We asked a group of artists, scientists, writers and thinkers to answer this simple question: Why is beauty, however defined, so important in our lives? Here are their responses."

THE LIFE OF BEAUTY

The sung blessing of creation

Led her into the human story.

That was the first beauty.

Next beauty was the sound of her mother’s voice

Rippling the waters beneath the drumming skin

Of her birthing cocoon.

Next beauty the father with kindness in his hands

As he held the newborn against his breathing.

Next beauty the moon through the dark window

It was a rocking horse, a wish.

There were many beauties in this age

For everything was immensely itself:

Green greener than the impossibility of green,

the taste of wind after its slide through dew grass at dawn,

Or language running through a tangle of wordlessness in her

mouth.

She ate well of the next beauty.

Next beauty planted itself urgently beneath the warrior shrines.

Next was beauty beaded by her mother and pinned neatly

To hold back her hair.

Then how tendrils of fire longing grew into her, beautiful the flower

Between her legs as she became herself.

Do not forget this beauty she was told.

The story took her far away from beauty. In the tests of her living,

Beauty was often long from the reach of her mind and spirit.

When she forgot beauty, all was brutal.

But beauty always came to lift her up to stand again.

When it was beautiful all around and within,

She knew herself to be corn plant, moon, and sunrise.

Death is beautiful, she sang, as she left this story behind her.

Even her bones, said time.

Were tuned to beauty.

Joy Harjo is the United States poet laureate. She is the first Native American to hold the position.