EMBODIED SPACE

This Christmas story is not pleasant (in our limited view) and I have related it to only a few people and usually not in much detail. Some people from my hometown in Kentucky (Central City) who knew Theda Jarvis do not know the story (just two weeks ago I informed a few of them), as she moved from there in the 1960s.

Mrs. Jarvis, who was my mother-in-law, and whose eldest daughter dated my older brother, and who had been my seventh-grade teacher (when that eldest daughter was killed in a car wreck a month before graduating high school), and who was a friend of my mom, and with whom I spent several boughs-of-holly Christmases, was murdered on Christmas Eve, 1990. If my mom was scheduled to become the angel in charge of quietistic contemplation (she died young: age 63), Mrs. Jarvis would be head of the heavenly Department of Selfless Giving. A lifelong, devout Christian, she was all about giving, and placed it in fervent action. In fact, at her moment of death, she was loading her gifts for friends and family in front of a shopping mall and on her way over to her other daughter's house to spend with grandkids. 

 One of the tragedies of a life ended early (in our limited view) is the potential interaction that does not happen. My daughter, Mrs. Jarvis' unmet granddaughter, has grown up (now almost 16) with no grandparents. I have no doubt that Mrs. Jarvis would have moved here to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to help raise her newest grandchild. And what a positive influence she would have been! Still teaching, perhaps in her 40th year, including as a music teacher, she would have made all the difference in a child's life. My daughter Sanjina Marie cannot know the misfortune of a vacuum that could be filled only by a grandmom of Mrs. Jarvis' selfless, giving qualities.

 I recall her singing O Holy Night onstage at her church, perhaps the Christmas before her death. The second stanza goes, "So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming...." If the essential message of the Christmas story is that of a Guiding Light, then the story I have related, which turns tragedy into some ultimate triumph for us to see through the tears, helps show us the way. Mrs. Jarvis fervently lived as a light sweetly gleaming.

At the University of Kentucky, I was privileged to be selected in the second crop of walk-ons, in 1965-66, to play on the freshman basketball team, after three scholarship players became ineligible. At 6'2" and never a guard in high school, I actually got some playing time at forward.

I got to go on the road trip to Knoxville, that year, the year when the varsity was labeled "Rupp's Runts," led by first-team All-America and later NBA coach Pat Riley, Louie Dampier, and Larry Conley, and ranked number one in the country. For the sports-minded, you might understand when I say that that anointed team performed--no, it was more like soared--as a unity of poetry-in-motion. (There's a Hollywood movie about the 1966 Wildcats and their loss to Texas Western.) The game at Tennesse was, of course, the only regular-season game U.K. lost. I remember the U.T. arena seemed strangely underlighted. Perhaps that prefigured the dark and mournful bus ride back to Lexington.

I used to take a long time showering after practice, so I met Coach Adolph Rupp twice as he was waiting for his driver at the side door of Memorial Coliseum. Coach Rupp apparently, as I saw once, got physical therapy from someone, possibly one of the trainers, so he stayed late, at least some evenings. He was quite friendly and talkative (in his high-pitched voice) and I was incredulous that he--a living legend in my mind--bothered to speak to the nobody-me at all. He appeared to me as a giant falcon, with his aquiline, beak of a nose, soaring above the rest of us, but always capable of descending for a quick swoop on the flesh of mere mortals. Luckily, he was well fed (and friendly!) when I met him.

I would say we are ontologically correct to sometimes wonder, as we all do, whether we are simply a figment of our imagination. Indeed, I say that we are always active in our own self-creation. Instead of the Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum--"I think, therefore I am"--which posits an Ego, an I who is a priori  (presupposed), I would say, Placebo, ergo sum--I hallucinate myself into being. The perennial problem, of course, is just who is this "I" who we all think exists?

Stay tuned: I'm working on it. Ha! Meanwhile, "I" "am" here.

A famous quote by T. S. Eliot, part of a poem in his Four Quartets, has stuck in my mind for years because I realize very personally its meaning, and informs some of my thinking about the geographic imagination. The latter I define simply as how we see the world and our place in it. I have altered his poem to read thusly:

   We shall not cease from [self-]exploration
   And the end of all our [mental]exploring
   Will be to arrive where we started
   and know the place[--and ourselves--]for the first time.

As we come to understand ourselves in relation to the local places where we dwell and the globalized world in which we increasingly inhabit, we will come to know ourselves to that degree. 

Humans today are englobed (or ensphered) intellects, hopefully rooted to a particular place, and also aware of the world as a whole, as a unity. We are thus "glocal" (local and global) cosmopolitans, mindfully dwelling in a place and responsibly inhabiting, living on, the globe.  

The future is not

what it used to be.

The past will not be

what it was.

The present looks both ways

and decides.

Can anyone here tell me what happened to my ol' friend John?

John lived from 1917 to 22 November 1963 with a great deal of verve and humor and intelligence. I had read his book, Profiles in Courage, in early high school, so I knew that he was an intellectual force, or rather that he himself respected intelligence and the courageous belief that the human mind could devise solutions to problems. John had courage.

He also introduced me, because he read them, to a new author, Ian Fleming and his fictional British spy, James Bond. John had style.

 I can tell you where I was that afternoon at around 1 p.m. on a Friday when our school principal announced that John was dead. I was in the school library with my girlfriend, Diann Wright. She can tell you that I presciently said to her that we would always remember where we were at that laden moment. Because at that instant, the world changed and we changed. We had to live thereafter in a heavier world feeling vacant without John. John had presence.

Can you tell me where he's gone? 

John has gone to hearts everywhere. Those hearts can only hope to emulate his courage, style, and presence.

The diasporics and nomadics of the world share a new sense of global space, but, also, a concomitant placelessness. In fact, I believe nearly everyone in the world does today to some degree. From the "global souls" written about by Pico Iyer to the stay-at-"homes" (with "home" now a contested term) who experience telepresence while viewing their TVs which show event-spaces around the world--we all now have some expansive sense of global space while feeling the alienation of placelessness.

Yet, as the world globalizes--and because of it--people feel the need for a renewed sense of place: The need for attachment and rootedness to a place to counter the deracinated global sense of space. Using the term "glocalization," which indicates the interweaving of localities into larger economic spaces, I call the cognition of the continuum from local to global spaces, "glocal spatial cognition." We live in spaces from local to global.

In the case of bloggers--those who maintain a presence in their own blog sites, including ones such as MySpace--we create cybernetic space, to afford us some identity and sense of "home." Further, our cyberspatial presence also is partly defined by our presence in "real" space wherever we live. Indeed, we who have our own blogs are creating some sense of home--albeit, partly cybernetic and partly "real."

The computer and "real" space are now interwoven--we live at "home" with the machine. Thus, "home" itself is now cyborgian. So is our spatial cognition.

in one part of the world,

it can eventually cause

a butterfly in another.

(Thanks to Edward Lorenz: Chaos Theory)

Back to my teaching career: I will continue to teach as long as it is (relatively) fun and I think I have something to contribute. Since I grew up as a printer's devil in my father's newspaper office, in Central City, Kentucky, a job that I began around age six, and one that kept me covered in ink--anything after that would be seen as a better way to work for a living. I remember being smeared nearly completely over my adolescent body with black, greasy, probably poisonous, large and small streaks of newsprint ink. Back then, in the era of "dirty news-type," I was the Dickensian picture of a blackened child-laborer, who crawled under the large rumbling, hissing press to gather up any pieces of ink-covered newsprint that had fallen there. All work after that would be considered a relief. I think I'll continue teaching.

I also have had jobs shoveling asphalt onto summer heat-shimmering roads and dead half-rotted dogs off them in Muhlenberg County, Ky.; laying sod while yanking fingernails in Louisville, Ky.; selling men's apparel to surly customers at a clothing store in Lexington, Ky.; building houses as a general laborer in Napa Valley, Calif.; collecting Douglas fir cones from the tops of very tall swaying trees near Mt. Shasta, Calif.; landscaping and harvesting avocados in San Luis Obispo, Calif.; child-caring for two brats of a music-industry executive in Malibu, Calif.; and schlepping luggage as a bellman at a hotel in Biloxi, Miss. I also caught fierce non-cooperative NASA rhesus monkeys, injecting them with knock-out sedatives, in order to clean their wounds in a basement of the Chandler Medical Center in Lexington, Ky.

So, you see that after all these grievous jobs, teaching is a relief. Eating newsprint ink, sodding, hammering, shoveling fetid dead dogs, and injecting fanged monkeys were never considered as vocations. I'll keep on teaching.

Our stories of our parents are about all we have left. I wish I could return Our Town-like for one day and not be nearly unconscious as I was growing up, caring only about my small, little-league-baseball world, and truly see for a while who our parents were and realize their extraordinary worth.

If either of your parents were around the Neapolitan (Italy) area during the war, they  probably had fear for their very lives, when bombing lit up the night skies, but also hope for future freedom, as did almost all Italians when Allied Forces were liberating Italy. They might have been nearby for additional pyrotechnics when Mount Vesuvius erupted, in March 1944, as bombers flew past. (I have seen the photos.) Perhaps your dad was in the 88th Division, which first gathered in North Africa, the first draftee division to see combat when it entered the Italian Campaign. Or perhaps he had already fought with the Fifth Army, which saw heavy fighting in North Africa and Sicily before landing on the Tyrrhenian Sea Coast for the slogging up-the-peninsula campaign.

I really have little basis for imagining the horrific circumstances of those crucial and strategic times and places. All I now know is that we owe them--that stoic generation. The least we can do is to remember, as we enjoy the fireworks of freedom that they helped ensure would continue until this very day.

I agree that periodic or even continual rebirth is called for, but I'd say the rebirthing must be about becoming more of one's self, not a rebirth "as something not one's self." The renewal must emerge out of the essence of who one is, what one's historical narrative has led one to. Then, it is not a new mask one puts on but another layer one takes off to reveal the new face of current existence. 

Today, I become more of who I have always been "striving" to become for this very moment, whether or not I knew teleologically there was a certain time-space I was going. The process is inexorable. I never presciently knew--still don't--where I was going. But, I shall continue to become I.

The famous epitaph on Yeats' mausoleum reads bleakly, "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!"

Mine might read, "Cast a warm, assenting eye/ On life, even death./ Horseman, pass by with resolve/ With recognition of who you are!"

MediaMatters was being much too generous when it labeled as "obtuse" E. D. Hill's recent use of the word "terrorist" on Fox Network in relation to the Obamas. Obtuse means dull, insensitive, stupid, difficult to understand. Hill's words, however, are manifestly understandable. It seems to me they must be seen as calculated effort to sow frightful word-images in the minds of Americans. Think of it: a professional TV commentator does not make a slip of the tongue on the order of saying "terrorist," when speaking of a presidential candidate.

This was no less intentional than Sean Hannity--another Fox Network entertainer-propagandist--keeping alive through a couple of news cycles the false story about the supposed use of the word "Whitey" by Michelle Obama. Fox and Hannity unconscionably claim it was just covering the story about a "rumor," a rumor they were reasonably sure was false--there was never ANY evidence--because the rumor machine about the Obamas has been working overtime for some time now. Yet, they kept alive a lie. Thus, Fox Network must be understood as a prime cog in the anti-Obama rumor machine.

Prepare yourselves America: What we have seen so far is just the warm-up to the juggernaut Swiftboating of the Obamas. Those of us who understand this must keep struggling for truth to find its way into the civic forum. Otherwise, Fox, Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh will rumor us and slip-of-the-tongue us into another administration of barbarity and--I can use this word with verity now--obtuseness.   

Like individual solitary galaxies

in the vast blackness of space

some floating in shiny gold spirals

some floating like shimmery green amorphous amoebas

some floating in sparkly purple clusters

some shredded by galactic collisions with ragged ends

all waiting to unravel at the end of time.