Imagined Nation

05/29/06

Call it what you want
the placating drone of monotonous voices,
of repeat and repeat and repeat,
rhetoric replete like cascading tomes of
hate hate hate

Call it what you want
a war, a slaughter, an invasion
of persuasion, a coercive
combination of minds that bend
for more to blood to spend
an empty recitation of the mantra
of democratization

The moans of ringing phones
of hands, of questions
mothers tears shatter the monotone
in staccato sobs that pierce
cool, clean night air and take
babies in arms

Those bringers of arms
marching macabre of unified uniforms
so alike, indistinguished lock step
locked breath, bullet proof vests and chests
heave when babies are not bulletproof

Grave diggers for bags of bones, for tombs that are filled,
as tears fall, as words become dull
and drown the pierce through the heart as blood spills,
as from lips as condolences,
as respite for a soldiers number of kills,
and well-wishing patrons of the imagined nation
offer just cause through the seething of their
black blood, the virus of the infected,
the moral of their invective.

The parceled, compacted, contracted
lies, the simple words, flourish of flies, rhetoric
of the right
of the mighty morality of destruction
of the seduction of reconstruction
the betrayal of the silent night.

In folds of feeble diatribes, swaddled
in the veins of the righteous unrighteous
the imbibed morality of criminality
the justification for annihilation
of babies born on the wrong side
of the imagined nation. 

When we were old

When I was older I decided that manacles are not in fashion. I tried to slough off the chains of the hegemony of union politics. This history saw streets of disgruntled graduate students begging for change, drinking caramel macciatos, wearing designer knowledge and prada flip-flops. They sobbed, in staccato stutters, that they wanted everyone to know just how much their sprightly thoughts are worth. When I was older I made a nest of discarded philosophies, insulating my home with the pages of my favorite leftists. It sure was cold that winter with only radical, fractured philosophies, arguing dissenters, and dunce caps to provide shelter from the storms.

When I was old I knew that knowledge was commodified: the neoliberal, knowledge economy was a political wet dream from which we cannot seem to wake up. But yet, within it we could slice and slip into the institution through the (relative) autonomy of teaching: talk day after day on the state of the educational nation. It sure was difficult to teach, talk, experiment with thought separated from the space that makes it possible. When I was older I smashed my soap-box and became a riverbank preacher/teacher. When is it time to wake up from these histories? If I were younger would I ask Gramsci, Foucault and Bourdieu to dance round my unionist fire? Would I think that the revolution is coming? For now, the union chains seem far too tight.  

Musing in the morning on beginnings

If I were to connect today, this moment, with another in time, I would call back to song-filled days in our commune of the creative, belligerent, undone, brilliant, cast of musing few. We sat singing, playing, writing furiously; passionate to transcend just that moment to get to the next resonant enlightenment. Questioning the social, philosophical, humanist, neoconservative/liberal state(s) we found ourselves in, we strove to push through the cloud of textbook misdirection and parroting petrification. Late in high school life changed. Trying to do Plato and his wall proud, before we knew his name, we asked questions we couldn't answer knowing something was not right with the world we knew.

It was a small place, on a main street, in a small town. Central, yet never so. We went the world over, never leaving a few rooms. No phone, a payphone around the corner was were I would call home, a sometimes distraught mother answering with numerous questions I couldn't answer in all truth. My heart now breaks for all those small deceptions. But, it was our time to make way for histories of the future. 

And here we are. So, for clarity's sake, who is "our" and "we" anyway?  We were a small band of bonded high school despots, on the fringes and in the middle all at once, we worked at being the fringe, working the margins into and out of line with the so-called "mainstream" stream of right(wrong)-wing currents that threatened our marginal shores. KRC, JB, HC, KE, and me, and of course the roving few who entered the fray with us for our very brief time in those rooms. It was love, laughter, anger, angst: a struggling becoming that yearned for substantiation. 

That time, made histories in this future: a re-membering of activated notes, harmonies that register shocks and resonate as KRC plays guitar in the morning. And, is the muse again. Twelve years (give-or-take) separates those days from these, yet I feel them through the years and their accretions of memory, composed of loving happiness and frustrated despair, as though they were a moment ago.   

I now think I found a trace of where I wanted to go with life in those rooms with our chosen few. I didn't know it then. Nearing a decade in post-secondary school has occasioned some time for reflection and attribution. I can re-member those those days as an aspect of the montage of moments that made my eyes anthropological, before disciplinging gave them legitimacy.  

Anthropology, for me anyway, is poised as the arbiter of subtle revolutions, the modest catalyst seeking to open up ways of seeing, exposing the accretion of sedimented knowledge, the striated space, allowing for the lines of flight that follow from chance paths taken when the uncanny rocks our worlds.

This is a blog about my journey in and through anthropology. Welcome.