Understand

I have spent an entire week working on one abstract.
One bloody outline.
Of an argument that I just can't seem to lay out as a sweet logical little skeleton. Instead, the bones of the argument poke up every which way and every model collapses when I step back to take a look. And when I get so far inside my head I can hardly even bring myself to talk to other people for fear of shrieking at them. And I have somehow lost my confidence and become this O what if he doesn't like it person in relation to my supervisor, who is trying to help me find my way.

It's hard to imagine that doing practically nothing is so Hard. And I'm not dealing particularly well with the stress.

But I guess that’s why I’m here, after all. To learn how to do this kind of thinking, this kind of research—the effort to understand one another, from society to society, person to person, heart to heart. At the moment I want to say that it doesn't matter if we don't understand each other as long as we look after each other, and go running back to my development activist world—but how can we love each other if we do not understand one another? As I recall, we did some good and also some damage storming around where angels fear to tread. Maybe the damage would be lessened if we understood things a little better. Perhaps I am a bit of an intellectual after all. I am tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to write about why Khmer development workers are so ambivalent about change. And I am doing this because I want to understand.

And that reminded me of this quote by Baruch Spinoza that I used to bring myself back to in Cambodia, time and again, when living in another culture got hard:

Do not weep.
Do not wax indignant.
Understand.

I never followed it very well. I did a lot of weeping and a lot of waxing indignant. I still do. But I also have found myself on a journey that I think will never end--the journey to understand and then to translate that into writing--which is one kind of testimonio, bearing witness.

I need to see this world of academic writing as another kind of translation, another kind of testimonio, another search for understanding. Then it will perhaps become not only endurable, but a quest. And I like quests. Quests are exciting. Ride on, Quixote, to the endless line of windmills and the search for a life worth living! That sort of thing.

Mystics and the soul like a heavy bird

I keep forgetting to post this thing I wrote--I had promised to return to the little-known medieval mystic Mecthilde of Magdeburg and her bird-work.

Is she truly little-known? Well, we’re not talking about a woman of Hildegarde of Bingen’s status. I stand in straight-up awe of Hildegarde, Germanic warrior priestess, with her ciphers and her herbal remedies and her choral compositions (her Canticles of Ecstasy are still performed), dressing her nuns in white and marrying them to Christ in mystical bridal ceremonies, breathing down fire on corrupt bishops… Yet her visions and her writings are too bracing for me, I admit it. I prefer the soft mystics—Julian of Norwich in her hermit’s cell, seeing that all will be well… John of the Cross with his love poetry for God… And my dear St. Ephraim, who instead of sitting on a pillar like his Syrian counterparts, wrote theological hymns for a women’s choir… In case you’re wondering, on one of those many life paths we end up not taking, I would have studied Christian mystics. Instead, they are just old and strange friends, and I take license with their works.

Like Mecthilde. I’m forgotten all of her showings except the one that caught my imagination. She saw the undisciplined soul like a great heavy bird—like a kakapo, maybe, New Zealand’s flightless parrot, or the hapless dodo.
The soul wishes to reach the sun, that is, mystical union with the divine, but it is near pinioned by gravity. Its first efforts are feeble and slow. It is too heavy to fly, too weak to flap for long. An earth-bound bird of a soul. But if it struggles on, persevering, it gradually becomes stronger and lighter, until the day it is able to fly. And on and on, stronger and lighter, lighter and stronger, able to fly higher and higher until the day it finally reaches the sun and becomes one with God.

I think this is a brilliant image for the practice of spirituality. For the spiritual disciplines, to be catholic about it. I find any kind of spiritual effort terribly hard at first, be it contemplative prayer or lectio divina or fasting or silence or plain old-fashioned mercy. The soul, or the heart or the mind, does not find it easy to fly. And I don’t know that such flight is a linear path, like Mecthilde did, but I do know that such disciplines grow easier with time and feel nearly impossible after long neglect.

I guess I should be clear about this—this image isn’t about salvation, about flapping one’s way to God’s side on one’s own wings. This is about seeking communion, a life closer to God, a life in which there are no guarantees.
And to me that seeking means putting oneself in the way of the Spirit, in case that unpredictable wind happens to blow.
And it’s the seeking that I think is so hard at first for the soul, the lazy flightless soul that prefers to stay close to all the lovely worms and beetles in the rich earth.
And it’s the seeking that I think becomes easier the longer the soul tries to fly in such a way.
I think that God can blow any flightless bird off its feet.
But I’d rather be in the sky, learning to fly, looking for the faintest wind, not wanting to miss a moment.

Corner Store

I went to the corner store
all wild:
My hair unwashed,
shoulders draped in a Cambodian shawl,
wearing a sarong over sheepskin boots.
I went to the corner store
all wild
to buy a Diet Coke.
The store was full of unexpected men.
The recycling team, in their yellow reflective jackets,
had stopped their truck for a break.
They took one look at me
and nodded me to the front of the line.
Perhaps they thought I was ill,
or mad,
or a genius distracted.
I came back from the corner store
all wild
and looked in the mirror,
and laughed.

Resistance is Useless

I'm actually at the library. Next to me are three tomes:

• Anthropology Today, circa 1953
• Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge--I can't begin to tell you what that means and may not be able to explain even After reading the wretched thing
• Power and Knowledge

Thus go my 'breaks' from the office these days. But I'm listening to Gillian Welch and eating organic white chocolate. And writing a quick post. So life could be worse.

This post is about a new person in my life, six year-old Malika Bah. Malika means angel in Kiswahili. Malika is angelic occasionally, when she is sleepy. Most of the time she is fierce and energetic and playful, a little girl from Sierra Leone growing like a weed--she's always showing ankle beneath the edge of her trousers. Her mother is doing a PhD and raising two kids on her own here in Edinburgh. So sometimes Malika and I go on outings. I'm attempting to inculcate an interest in birds in her unsuspecting soul (see that bird? what kind of bird is that? Umm... It's a mute swan, remember? Keep your hands out so she can see that you don't have any bread and doesn't come over here...) so that she can become the 4th member of the Bad Birdwatchers of Cambodia when she is older--you've got to start 'em young.

On Saturday she and I and a new friend and her 2 year old daughter and 7 seven year old neice went to the Children's Museum together. There we established once and for all that the Children's Museum is not particularly interesting if one is 6 or 7 or 2. In hindsight, Malika was cross with me for making her share our time with some strangers. She and the 7 year old, another colt-like girl, took their sweet time warming up to each other. In the meantime, Malika engaged on a variety of boundary-pushing behaviors--demanding to leave, taking off suddenly without warning for another level of the museum on her own--in the historic capital of body-snatching, mind you! (There's nothing like being out with someone else's little girl in a big city to push me into a state of constant vigilance and nervous paranoia. Where's a beast-infested wilderness when you need one?) Why is this fun, she inquired to me, as we stared woefully at the vast array of old and mouldering dolls behind glass. Why indeed?

We gave it up and finally hit the streets. This is when I realized that children play in the same way in the city that I played in the bush as a child. They crawl under sandwich boards, sit on the dirty streets and slide around on shop windows, blithely ignoring the passersby. Malika and the other girl suddenly decided that they liked each other and took to walking backwards down the winding streets. By the time we reached the park, they were friends for life. It was a park with steep near-vertical sides, and I sat down with the Adults while the Children climbed up and sprinted down the sides. At some point all the shoes came off.

And then, forgetting what is was like to be 7, I told her without warning that we had to go immediately, as I had to get her home and then head off to another appointment. I essentially wrecked her world without warning. She was completely undone. I asked her to put her shoes on. The angel flat out refused. Fine, I said, and picked up her shoes in one hand, took her hand firmly in the other, and said our goodbyes. I then set off straight up the side of the hill, past the grass into a world of sticks and dirt. I don't want to go this way! the angel protested. Then put on your shoes, I suggested brightly. The angel fell silently defiant. She climbed through the sticks and the dirt while her evil guardian kept a guilty eye out for broken beer bottles. We reached the street. The angel remained defiant. We crossed the cobbled main road, stormed down the rough pavement all the long way to bus stop, the angel limping along from the rocks but keeping up. Finally at the bus stop, I resorted to the most awful adult threat of all--the threat of separation. If you don't obey me, I can't take you out, I said, hating myself. She went very silent and submitted to having the shoes put on.

The bus came. It wasn't the right bus, she said tearfully. It would do, I said, and dragged her on it. While I was paying, she escaped and went and pitifully tried to hide in the back of the bus by curling up between two seats. I sat down next to her. She wouldn't speak to me. I didn't speak to her. We sat in perfect silence for about 15 minutes.

Then she spoke. I'm very tired, she said. I'll bet, I said. She lay down with her head in my lap and sucked her thumb all the way home.

I let her linger over a lovely tomcat on the way to her door as a kind of penance on my part.

Religious People

I went and saw Deepa Mehta’s Water last week, the last film in her elements trilogy. These films have made Mehta many enemies and many admirers. I fall firmly in the admirers camp. If I can someday do with words what she does with film, I will die happy. Water is a beautiful and shocking and heart-wrenching film set in India in 1938, not one for the faint of heart. But one of the things that struck me most about it was that everybody in it was a believer, a member of a religion. All Hindus. Except Gandhi, who gets portrayed as if he’d given up the pursuit of God for the pursuit of truth, which I take some issue with... But that aside, everybody is Hindu. And some of them are innocent, and some have blood on their hands. Some are cruel and hypocritical and others devout and earnest. Some are merciful and some are calculating. Some serve their faith and others use it for their own gratification. One of the most spiritual characters in the film is a young widow who used as a whore by high-ranking Brahmins—despite everything, she manages to keep hold of her faith, until love and despair undoes her.

Mehta is braver than I in her decision to have this enormous panoply of religious characters, some good, some bad. I noticed some time ago that everyone—well, almost everyone, in my Sudan novel believed in God. But some of them are awful people. And this gave me a long and unresolved pause, which I think stems from a heretofore unexplored concern that, as a Christian, I should not have Bad Christian Characters. That if I am to have Christians in my writing, I should only write about ‘good’ Christians--devout Christians, or at least ones with reasonably sound theology. But this seems to me now to be foolish. Mehta had the courage to hint that Hindus, devout or otherwise, are still just people. And so are Christians—just people, a motley crowd of people—some of us well-meaning, some of us loving and merciful people, and some of us downright wicked. And it would be nice if God turned up and knocked all of us wicked and hypocritical Christians off our horses like He did for Paul and demanded, What are you doing to my people? But God doesn't always do this. God seems to largely let us get on with it, for better or for worse.

And that, I suppose, is what I like to write about--how we get on with it, for better or for worse.

What if?

My wolf poem appears quite Jungian, look at this quote of his:

But what if I should discover that the very enemy himself is within me,
that I am the enemy who must be loved--
what then?

Houses and houses and houses

I have to move by the middle of July. This is my own fault. I have a flat and a kind flatmate, but I promised another friend that we would find a place together. This is proving difficult, but I have already given my notice. So I must move. I hate moving house. I hate it more than anything else that I can think of, and yet I do it, over and over.

One dark day in Cambodia a couple of years ago, the day when I came closer to despair than I have ever come, I found myself crying, I want to go home over and over again. Drying my tears, I pondered this rather absurd statement. What was it that I wanted? Where was my home? Was I just reverting back to the early misery of boarding school? Did I mean that cold stone mansion in Limuru with its kingly garden and endless fields of brilliant green tea, our first home in Kenya, the one I left for the dormitory with its linoleum floor and antiseptic bathrooms? Was Sudan home? If it ever was, it certainly isn't now.

The fact of the matter is that I don't think I have ever had a home. I've just had houses. Places I've lived with people I've loved. Houses and houses and houses. I'll revisit this, but for today I wanted to post a piece I wrote about two houses in Cambodia--well, ostensibly it's about houses. It's truly about looking for home.

...I lived for a time in a tiny walled villa with a fairytale garden: pots of floating lotus flowers lined the courtyard, a pomello tree hung her heavy thick-skinned green fruit over the verandah, bamboo rustled along the walls. I lived for a time with an Englishwoman in that precious villa, but I could not stay there. I could not breathe in the miniature rooms of the house; I could not bear our gated and guarded street where I knew none of our neighbors except for our shrewd landlady and her fragile spinster sister who worked as our maid. Sokhay came with the house. She worked for both houses; we paid her a salary, her sister’s contribution was room and board and a life of indentured service. Sokhay’s voice was always apologetic. She stroked our arms like someone petting a cat, desperate to please, and cringed each time she erred as if we might cuff her on the side of the head. One day she announced her engagement to a naturalized French Khmer machinist looking for a wife. She had never met this man, who remained in France, sending a family member to arrange the match instead. She was forty years of age and I had assumed that her relatives had resigned themselves to her unmarried state. I asked why she had agreed to the proposal and she told me that she would rather take the chance of life at this stranger's side than continue to live in her sister's home. She spoke French, after all.

Her niece had been married three months earlier in a stunningly expensive wedding in a great hall. Thousands of dollars had been spent and the bride had appeared in two guises: first as a princess of Angkor, draped with gilt and gold, and secondly as a Western bride in a floor-length white satin gown, a filmy veil, small white flowers woven in her long dark hair. But for the girl’s aunt no such effort was made. She was a traveling bride, leaving the nation and continent of her birth for a marriage and life to a stranger in a far off land. Her dowry consisted of two suitcases and a great package of dried fish made by her sister. I sat under their porch and watched the landlady scale, debone and slice a basket of fish that were transformed into fans of peach-colored flesh still joined at the tail, to be marinated and dried. My flatmate was indignant about the whole affair; I more resigned. Did she want to go? I inquired. Oh yes, she said. Maybe it will be better. She did not speak a word of French, and I squeezed her arm in concern and we gave her an envelope full of money and then she was gone.

I left soon after Sokhay did. I wanted to live alone near my office in the city. I moved to a cement and tile apartment, a single long suffocating rectangle on the second floor. My new landlords were dentists. A placard of an enormous set of hand-painted gums hung outside our gate to advertise their services; a small crowd usually waited on stone benches inside our compound. Their office stood across the cement compound from the apartments; the surgery had an uncurtained window facing the stairs. My landlady did most of the surgery. When I crossed the courtyard she was often bent over a patient seated in a black reclining chair. She would stop probing in the patient’s wide open mouth and wave a bloody gloved hand. I would wave back.

My apartment had a set of inner stairs to the roof of the building. I thought I would have this roof to myself, but the landlord’s Chinese parents had a longstanding claim. They had a key to the padlock on the back door. Each evening they slowly ascended the outside stairs to my home, passed through my spare kitchen, and climbed the inner steps to the roof. On the roof they had strung mosquito nets and hammocks, rigged up a fluorescent light with a long extension cord, and arranged a series of cots and wooden krays. Each morning they descended, their flip-flops slapping against the tiled floor, swept the stairs with a straw broom and left the door unlocked. I begged and pleaded to no avail. They were not accustomed to locking doors. They trusted in the barred gate and three German Shepherds who tore about the compound barking every night and slammed their huge furry bodies against the constraining bars of their cage in a frenzy whenever I passed by.

The apartment had white walls and a high ceiling, but all its windows faced west. The house was a furnace. I gave up entirely on sleeping in its stifling confines and moved up to the roof with the Chinese grandparents and whichever members of the extended family were visiting. I slept in my sarong beneath a single cotton sheet and a synthetic plaid blanket on a spare kray. They listened to their radio and rocked the grandchildren in hammocks; I read novels; we all relished the wind blowing across the roofs of the city. I lay awake longer than my Cambodian companions did at night and rose an hour later at six o’clock in the morning. After half a year I awoke one morning and found myself again. Who were these strangers lying under the thin veil of a mosquito net not two feet away from my own supine body? Why was I living in a furnace with a perpetual stream of unknown relatives tromping through my house, some of whom persisted in using my tiny bathroom? Why was I living in a compound with three dogs I despised, whose barking interrupted all my dreaming? I had never hung a single painting on the wall nor bothered to change the ugly curtains. I had lived there in a dream and when I awoke I swung open the doors and left.