Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

Fogged

...and everything else

0710
Asleep at 0030 and awake again at 0500; I’m not sleeping much lately, or consistently when I do sleep. A lot of tossing and turning. The insomnia is back, and is certainly, this time, a result of stress. I do keep an eye on my arm, though, constantly monitoring it. It’s been sore the last few weeks, but nothing that a few advil won’t control. It’s just a few more advil than I’ve needed before. The quarter is wearing on me, physically and emotionally.

Perhaps it’s the cumulative nights of lack of sleep, but the world is both crisp and shrouded this morning. There is a cold crispness to the lines of buildings, trains, and the metallic. The lights are refracting in golden orange prisms. But at the same time, the world is draped in a misting, dove-grey fog that occasionally takes on metallic silver when wrapping itself around objects. It softens what would be a very harsh morning, and creates a different kind of beauty. There is wonder, potential in the fog. Hints of something different, better, miraculous, marvelous, just around the corner.

It makes me sad to think that there isn’t. It makes rueful smiles and thoughts of cynicism, and wondering where my good cheer went. And I remember that I was able to relax for a few hours yesterday, in the company of a friend, and that good cheer reasserted itself, along with my more characteristic calmness.

I’m wound too tight.

I hope that email sent last night, combined with several days “off”, will also allow my mental rubber bands to relax. Physically, I’m going to see what I can do with a hefty dose of prednisone — literally relax those chest muscles, and see if it forces the rest of me to relax as well.

I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like to lately. Largely, I’ve been caught in mental whyloops and known it — what’s the point in reiterating what has already been reiterated, somewhat to the death? The horse is dead, rotted, decomposed, and has turned into detritus, and is still being kicked. Maybe it’s time to dance, instead.

0827
A thin line of darker grey on the horizon is the only indication of division between fog and water, with the occasional ship looming and suspended in the ether. When the grey glints mercury I doubletake; was that water, metal, or something in the air? If it weren’t for that subtle line and those glints, there would simply cease to be, beyond the winter brown grass and cliffs.

We’re quickly approaching the small area between Tacoma and Olympia that calls to me whenever the train takes us by; small houses tucked against a slightly crumbling cliff, water lapping against the posts keeping them elevated. It looks secluded, quiet; a tiny neighborhood of people opting to live on the very edge of earth, looking to the water and across it in their daily life. I romanticize them, imagining that they must be people who feel the surge of the tide in their blood, the moon waxing and waning a physical force upon them. I want to be among them, only today, I wonder — do I?

And then suddenly, Ketron Island erupts out of the fog, verdant and gold, the water a brilliant reflective blue. The fog roils and parts and pulls itself back from the land, blown away by the coming day.

The Function of Monument

...and everything else, Autumn 05, CHID 390 - PF, The Revenge!

We trust or not based on prior events; our experiences from the past shape our expectations of the future and tell us what is safe, what can be trusted. Time and trust are inextricably linked. Time and monuments Young defines monuments as “a subset of memorials: the material objects, sculptures, and installations used to memorialize a person or thing.” are also inextricably linked, for monuments funtion in conjunction with memory in an attempt to externalize a collective memory of an event. Are monuments then an attempt to rebuild a fractured trust, so that options once again limit themselves into a realm in which we can navigate? This appears to be an idea worth exploring.

Monuments rarely go up to a person, but instead to an idea the person embodies, or to an event or moment in time; in all cases, they function as remembrance. Elizabeth Grosz would likely see monuments as an effort to stop time, remove it from our conscious-ness stream, and freeze something in perpetuity. (For that matter, Young and the counter-monument artists would likely agree as well.) Is this functional remembrance a form of reasserting our options of trust on the future, so that we’re not paralized animals in oncoming headlights? It’s an intriguing idea, especially when combined with both concepts of Holocaust monuments and spontaneous roadside memorials.

The Holocaust monuments universally proclaim that “we will never forget” – do we need stone to make sure we will never forget? Young says that “once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember.” Young. The Texture of Memory, pp 5. I wonder if it’s really a desire to expunge the internal memory, or if it is a desire to have a general, collective memory to repair a basic faith in the human condition, in humanity itself. If we place a monument swearing we will never forget an atrocity in a general public place, we are publically confirming our [societal] unanimous condemnation of the atrocity that occured, declaring it abherant to humankind Sadly, the evidence of history suggests otherwise., and something that we will vigilantly prevent from occuring again. The end result of this is to reanchor trust that has been violated by violence, and to once again narrow down options for the future and have that trust-filter in place that allows us to make decisions.

The same sort of reaffirmation of the goodness of life itself and reinstallation of the trust-filter can be seen in spontaneous roadside memorials which I suspect Young would call spontaneous roadside monuments, which seem to function as a spontaneous gathering of people who need to affirm that what occured was not normal, was cruel and unusual and outside the realm of the norm. Instead of simply reaffirming their faith, their trust, in fellow humans, they attempt to reaffirm their faith in life itself. This seems especially true with those that exist individually; that is, the places where people are remembered for car accidents that killed only themselves (and/or their passengers – in other words, no one external to the moving vehicle injured). The place of death becomes a point of rupture in the survivors ability to categorize the past and understand the future. Trust in the very fabric of existence – of being able to get in a car or even walk out the front door – becomes shaky. But by creating a monument, one that exists outside the memorial of the grave-site, the survivors are declaring that what happened was outside the norm, a statistical anomaly that they will not allow to overcome them or their basic faith in the world.

In both cases, large and small, we can see monuments functioning as a way to heal the trust that people need to have, be that trust with one another or trust in life, living, the universe itself. Monuments become a way to acknowledge the unspeakable by moving them to a realm of unusual and denying the violence that is actually common to living. By doing so, people regain control of their ability to manage what would be, without the ability to filter via trust, the almost incomprehensible flood of life.

Flood

...and everything else

The brown mountain still looms large over UCRiverside this morning, but once that one has passed perspective shifts and snaps and the mountains are “just like home” – so long as you locate home in the Bay Area in the 80s and 90s. They are almost comforting in their familiarity, but the strange feelings they bring up linger.

The flight home is a sequence of memories. We follow the spine of the Sierra Nevadas, and I recognize and count off place after place after place, that I’ve been, that are rich with memory, that wish to be overwritten. I wonder if it will ever stop feeling like a raw wound? I see Mono Lake, the pass to the High Country of Yosemite, a good chunk of Yosemite itself, in all its glacier-carved glory. It’s even possible to see Bodie, and I can’t decide whether I feel fond, or sad, or both. So I just lean against the window and watch pages from the book of my life pass by.

There’s 50. Lake Tahoe. I can see the Sacramento valley over the mountains, spreading out in a broad and flat plane. 80. Donner Lake. Pyramid Lake. Lassen. Whatever the name of that long, long lake on the road between Lassen and Gerlach is, where we discovered the way around checkpoints, and found dark side roads… The Black Rock Desert. Shasta. Crater Lake, clear blue and perfectly flat and reflective. Mount St. Helens. Bits of the Pacific Ocean peaking out from yonder mountains and clouds; is that the beach where I nearly tipped the car? It must be…

Click, flip. Click, flip. The whirring of a mental camera and map, pulling up memories, threads, stories, feelings and images. A three hour flood, that only shuts down when we descend and pause in an 800 foot thick fog bank. There, in the silent grey, I simply appreciate the aesthetics of the fog, unattached and unencumbered by such thick memory.