Writing the Shadow

I have been overwhelmed with work these last two months. As a result I haven't been keeping up this blog, though I've been reading weekly 32 student blogs. It seems clear that if I assign so many student blogs that I need to (and enjoy) reading, there's no time left for my own!   

I have to prioritize other writing over the blog, though, and I have managed in the last two months to revise the manuscript I've been working on for several years and send out to three possible publishers.  I also took on the editing of an anthology of essays and gave myself a deadline of a year and a half to get that done, which means I've been reading lots of essays outside of the ones I read for classes these last two months as well.  So there are other reasons I've let the blog slide a bit. 

Blogs do help me to clear my mind, though, and, like journals, are great places to explore new ideas.  I just finished reading, again, Ai's Vice: New and Selected Poems, which I assigned to my poetry class.   The poems I find myself--still--most drawn to are the most violent poems, the ones from her early books, Cruelty and Killing Floor, the ones in the voices of child molesters, murderers, etc.  Although the later poems, written as dramatic monologues in the voices of actual persons, may be just as well written, I'm not as interested in them.

Why is that?  I think it's because, for lots of reasons I won't go into here,  I'm drawn to the shadow, and by that I mean the word in the sense that Jung would have meant it.  My favorite holidays are Mardi Gras and Halloween because you get to pretend to be all the horrible things you have repressed during the year, and it's all in fun.   I hate Thanksgiving because it's so earnest and good and moral, at least on the surface.  No one wants to talk about the shadow of our massacre of the natives, we just want to thank God for all the good stuff.  I want to think about the bad stuff.  This is probably also why I'm drawn to the figure of Medusa as well as some of the more terrifying and powerful ancient goddess figures.  Medusa represents for me, a shadow self.  

I would like to develop a poetry writing exercise for my students that gets them to think about their shadow selves and culminates in a persona poem or dramatic monologue written in the voice of the shadow.  Since we are discussing Ai tonight, this would be a good opportunity to do some shadow writing.  The exercise might look something like this:

Writing the Shadow:

 the Persona and Dramatic Monologue Poem

I.  Some Definitions:

Persona (from Merriam Webster)

            1 : a character assumed by an author in a written work


            2 a plural personas [New Latin, from Latin] : an individual's social facade or  front that especially in the analytic psychology of C. G. Jung reflects the role in  life the individual is playing

            b : the personality that a person (as an actor or politician) projects in public             (image).


 

Dramatic Monologue (from A Glossary of Literary Terms, M. H. Abrams)

--A single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment […].

--This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.

 --The main principle controlling the poet's choice and formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker's temperament and character.

 Shadow

            a.  “The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know. “  Owning Your Own             Shadow:  Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, Robert Johnson

            b.  The shadow is “the personification of certain aspects of the unconscious personality… which…is the dark, unlived, and repressed side of the ego  complex.  ” Shadow and Evil in Fairytales, Marie-Louise Von Franz.

II.            Exploring your Shadow

            What is the nature of the face you project to the world?  What do you have to repress or hide in order to keep that face alive?  Imagine you are Dr. Jekyl  and Mr. Hyde.  What would your Mr. Hyde be like?  In the tale of Jekyl and  Hyde, Jekyl was a doctor who saved live, and Hyde was a murderer who took  lives. One could argue Hyde was Jekyl’s shadow. What might your shadow be?  Write a draft of a poem that is written in the voice of your shadow.  Do  not use the word shadow and do not refer to yourself.  This poem is writtenonly in the voice of the shadow.  Give it a title at the end that makes it a  person outside of yourself (see, for examples of titles, Ai and Christopher Davis persona poems).

In your poem make sure that you make clear the following:  What is the shadow’s world like?  What does it see and hear?  How does it speak?  Make sure the language sounds authentic. What does it know?  What does it do?  What does it feel or think?  What is the physical location of your shadow?  Give the shadow a strong sense of place that is more than just a setting (sights, smells, sounds with an eye toward showing the connection between the place and the shadow.  Remember that your shadow has been shaped by its place and culture. Yeats:   a poet's words have "to be wedded to the natural figures of his or her native landscape."

See this poem by Ai for an idea of how to work place and other  specific  details into a shadow poem such that the character is brought alive:

The Hitchhiker (from Vice:  New and Selected Poems, NY:  Norton, 1999)

The Arizona wind dries out my nostrils

and the head of the sidewalk burns my shoes,

as a woman drives up slowly.

I get in, grinning at a face I do not like,

but I slide my arm across the top of the seat

and rest it lightly against her shoulder.

We turn off into the desert,

then I reach inside my pocket and touch the switchblade.

 

We stop, and as she moves closer to me, my hands ache,

but somehow, I get the blade into her chest.

I think a song:  “Everybody needs somebody,

everybody needs somebody to love,”

as the black numerals 35 roll our of her right eye

inside one small tear.

Laughing, I snap my fingers.  Rape, murder, I got you

in the sight of my gun.

 

I move off toward the street.

My feet press down in it,

familiar with the hot, soft asphalt

that caresses them.

The sun slips down into its cradle behind the mountains

and it is hot, hotter than ever

and I like it.

 

 

Grass

When we moved into our house four years ago there was already an established bed of fountain grass (Pennisetum, also known as Feathertop) growing close to the front porch.  I planted another clump of it closer to the sidewalk because I love it so much.  In late summer and into the fall  it blooms, carrying spikes of fuzzy and feathery flowers that can double the size of the plant. I suppose it's called "fountain grass" because its structure is that of a fountain; the clump grows from a central area and the grass falls in a lovely curve outside of the center. 

Fountain grasses are interesting for lots of reasons--they offer striking contrast to flowers and other shrubbery, they have these provocative and irresistible spikey fronds that come out in late summer/fall, and they turn a gorgeous orange/beige color in the fall.   I appreciate all these qualities of fountain grass, and I especially appreciate that once they are established they need almost no care at all.  Both of mine are thriving though I do nothing for them.

Mostly I like fountain grass, though, because it is a hardy grass.  When I lived in the midwest, Iowa and Illinois, I fell in love with the hardy prairie grasses that dominate what is left of the prairies there, and in general I have come to appreciate hardiness in a plant over traditional beauty (more about this when I talk about the swamp rose in my front yard).  There's also something almost subversive in planting a grass in your yard that you never intend to cut. OK, well, I do cut it back in Spring to give the new growth room, but there's none of this constant trimming that most people do with grass:  I am in charge you will never seed or flower, not on my watch.

I live in an urban neighborhood so my lawn is very small.  When we do cut the grass it's with a rusty push mower.  Everywhere there is fountain grass, I don't need the mower, which pleases me.  I admire how strong it is--deep rooted, almost impossible to pull up, resistant to disease, at home almost anywhere, and yet it has a graceful, arching shape that feels like a kind of sacred perfection.  They are the sturdy angels of the plant world, and they are everything I would like to be as woman.

Sycamore

The tree that I look out at every day from my porch, the tree that is mostly likely about 80 years old and shades both the porch and the house, is a Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis, family Platanacae).  It is one of the largest broadleaved trees in the state, and its massive trunk is wider than most other trees one finds in Pennsylvania.  It's also known as American Sycamore, American Plane Tree or Buttonball Tree (for the buttonball-like fruit)  There are 10 species of sycamore, and this is one of three that can be found in the U.S.   It's native to Pennsylvania, and it's said that there are sycamores here that date back to the days of William Penn.  They grow rapidly, and I have read that they can reach 70 feet in the first 20 years.

The leaves look something like the leaves of a Maple tree, triangular, triangular, prominent veins, but seem to me to be smaller than Maple leaves.  You find this tree planted a lot as a landscape or park tree; today my husband and I went to a fair in Mellon Park, and the first tree we saw was a sycamore.  What's most distinctive about them, though, is their peeling bark, which has a unique "camouflage" quality to it, as you can see a bit in the photo above.  I haven't been able to find out why the bark peels like this; it would seem logical that it is to discourage predators, insects or others, who might want to bore into the heart of tree or hide underneath its bark.  When I walk the dog each day, I often will stop at this tree as we get started and pull off a section of the bark that I'll carry with me during my walk, turning it over as I would a page, looking deep into its patterns as if they were poems.  

I'm interested not only in the natural history of trees, but in their mythology.  As I sit on my porch, mid-afternoon, on a cool fall day, I can feel a breeze, I can see the leaves of the tree moving in the wind, and I also hear the melody of the wind chimes that hang from the porch ceiling, and the motors of cars passing by a half a block away on Penn Avenue.  A small reminder of the ways in which nature and culture almost always exist in intimate relation.

I like to come out on this porch to think and to write when the weather is good, and my husband and I also come out after dinner to eat ice cream and do crossword puzzles in the evening.  When I really want to think or reflect, though,  I stop whatever it is I'm reading or writing, and look up at the tree as if it had some answers for me.  Or maybe just because it seems to be the wisest thing around, certainly the oldest.  

In Egyptian mythology sycamores were associated with the goddesses Nut, Hathor and Isis, each of whom carried the epithet "Lady of the Sycamore."  Trees are often considered sacred in ancient religions because they seem to be connectors between the underworld and the heavens:  their roots reached to the underworld while they branches brushed the heavens.  Those that lost their leaves in winter seemed to die and be reborn in spring, thus many trees are associated with birth and resurrection.  

Trees also provide nurturance. I love the Egypitan image above in which a tree is suckling a human.

I know that I feel nurtured and comforted by this tree.  When I'm sad, lonely or feeling hopeless, a strong, massive tree reminds me of longevity, of what it takes to survive--both roots and ambitious striving upward as well as a doggedness, a quality of not-giving-upness.

Soon this tree will lose its leaves, but its fruit will remain until spring when it will provide a feast for birds.

My Front Porch

I've asked students in my Nature and Environmental Writing class to keep a blog about a special place, and I'm committed to doing that myself for the fall.  

The place I've chosen is my front porch, which looks out on my front lawn as well as has a view onto much of the rest of my neighborhood. I live in Bloomfield, a few houses off of Penn Avenue.  I can see, from my porch, the store/gas station we call the "ghetto store" because we used to think it was a haven for drug dealers (more about that in a later post), and my neighbor's homes and yards, (more about those later, too).  Most importantly, though, I see my front yard.  There is a large shade tree with very interesting peeling bark that is probably about 75 years old.  It keeps the house cool in summer.  I have looked up the name of this tree many times and I keep forgetting it, but I will look it up again for my next post, and maybe this time I'll remember it.  

In  my yard is also a wild swamp rose, which I planted two years ago.  It is a large, hardy rose bush that hardly looks like a rose bush because of its graceful, arching branches.  In summer it will bloom once, fragile small roses with a fragrance of sweet lemon and rose.  There are two large fountain grasses that are just getting ready to put out their beautiful feathery fans, three azalea bushes, two foxglove plants in bloom.  Poison ivy that I keep pulling, Boston Ivy that also threatens to take over.  A couple other plants I haven't identified yet, that my neighbor has planted.  I'd like to spend at least some of these posts lingering over each living thing in my yard, doing some research on each one and learning more about it.

Porches are really a Pittsburgh thing, and I love mine.  I have a wicker swing and a daybed on my porch so I can sit out here as often as I like.  Potted plants surround me on the porch, spider plants of different colors, an umbrella plant, a philodendron, begonias and some petunias.  I can hear the neighbors' dogs barking, can hear the girls on their cell phone next door, and a man waddles, maybe stoned, down the street.  We live in a mixed neighborhood, right on the edge between a "good" area an a "bad" area, and it makes for lots of interesting sites sometimes.

I can hear the bells of the church around the corner telling me it's time to stop for now.

Paying Attention

I've come to feel that almost everything we fail at we fail because of the quality of attention we have paid to the thing in our lives at which we are failing.  

Because there is a disconnect, sometimes, between what we say we want and the amount of attention we are willing to give to the thing we say we want, we find ourselves in a constant state of desiring and failing at achieving the thing we say we desire.  Losing weight, for example, and maintaining that weight loss takes an almost radical, obsessive and unending kind of attention to life style that few are able to muster.  So too, writing demands a special quality of attention.  It's not enough to say I want to write, and here's the few hours a week I'm going to write.  I think you have to create a lifestyle of writing; every choice you make has to contribute towards nurturing your life as a writer, and it has to be a priority--in the way that losing weight might have to be a priority if that's what you wanted--in order for it to happen regularly and successfully.

I recently visited Eden Hall Farms, the gorgeous 388 farm that Chatham University owns.  For years before Chatham took over the farm (last year) the area was not managed or attended to in any significant way with respect to animal populations.  For a while there was deer hunting, which meant the bucks in the herd were severely reduced.  Then the hunting stopped.  Because the farm is surrounded by suburban growth (including homes, a school and a golf course), the deer population is trapped in this relative island of wildness.  As a result they've become inbred and the population unbalanced.  It's estimated there's about 7 females for every male.  Because of the inbreeding the deer's antler presentations are sometimes odd; some have misshapen heads.  The coyote population is also huge because there's so many deer.  Attention needs to be paid to the deer in order to reach a more balanced situation.  I'm interested in the deer for lots of reasons, but in large part what draws me to this situation is that it is such a potent metaphor for what happens in any situation when you don't pay attention. 

In my darker moments I can see areas in my own life that I've let become unbalanced: the sick, uncontrolled deer are wandering around, wanting me to look at them, wanting me to take stock, look at them, really look at them,  give them my complete, utter, undivided attention.

She dealt her pretty words like Blades

I'm working on some poems that relate to tarot imagery, specifically the suit of swords, and was struck by this Dickinson poem I just rediscovered for myself: 

She dealt her pretty words like Blades --

How glittering they shone -- 

And every One unbared a Nerve

Or wantoned with a Bone --  

She never deemed -- she hurt -- 

That -- is not Steel's Affair --

A vulgar grimace in the Flesh -- 

How ill the Creatures bear -- 

To Ache is human -- not polite -- 

The Film upon the eye 

Mortality's old Custom -- 

Just locking up -- to Die.

----------

Lots of different ways of reading the poem, of course, but

I'm thinking about poetry as a blade, the words that cut

and slice, get to the bones of the matter, the painful

heart of things we often don't wish to see.  

She also articulates, in this poem, the essential duality of 

the sword as symbol, that it is both a weapon and a tool. 

An instrument of pain, but also a metaphor for analysis, 

the cutting necessary to see.

"She never deemed--she hurt--/That--is not Steel's 

affair--," swords are intellect, air, they are not useful

in the world of feelings, you don't use a sword, either

literally or metaphorically, if you're afraid you might

hurt someone. Something you have to put aside 

when you put on the costume of the queen of swords.

She seems to sympathize, if we read the poem with 

an ironic tone, with those hurt by word-blades; 

society, she suggests, has no tolerance for those 

who hurt and own their hurts in public. Better, 

in this society of swords, to lock ourselves up 

(in a real or imagined coffin?) and "die."

So interesting, too, though it has nothing to do 

with the poem, in which she uses the word

"blades" instead of "swords," how the word 

word is buried in the word sword.

Bridge of Flowers, Shelbourne Falls, MA

Some images from the Bridge of Flowers.  

I'm thinking of Emily Dickinson:  

I tend my flowers for thee, 

Bright Absentee!

My Fuschzia's Coral Seams

Rip--while the Sower--dreams--

Geraniums--tint--and spot--

Low Daisies --dot--

My Cactus--splits her Beard--

To show her throat--

.....

Jim Harrison

Since I'm at a writer's retreat primarily to work on a new collection of poems, I've also been reading poetry as well.  Just finished Jim Harrison's In Search of Small Gods (Copper Canyon, 2009).  It's not a perfect book, but perfection is not what one looks for from Harrison. 

Sometimes it feels more like prose than poetry--there are quite a few very long prose poems in the book that I felt got more of their energy from prose than from poetry.  Too, sometimes he wanders very far afield and one loses a sense of where the poem is, as if he started with one thought then was interrupted and decided to go with the interruption.  It's always interesting, but some of the pieces feel like they could have done with another level of revisioning.  

Having said that, I LOVE this book.  There are some real gems in the midst of the prose stuff, and a gruff and tender and soul-searching, nature loving spirit underneath it all.  Here's an excerpt from the first poem, "I Believe":

I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake

in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools,

the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic,

used tires, taverns, saloons, bars, gallons of red wine,

abandoned farmhouses, stunted lilac groves,

gravel roads that end, brush piles, thickets . . . .

What I love about Harrison is that he never takes himself too seriously, and he is generous and unpolitical about what he loves.  Too often 'nature poets' bore us with their serious and often sterile separation of nature from the wilds of the human spirit.  Not so Harrison, who loves used tires as well as thunderstorms, wounded things like stunted lilac groves as well as things that are not so good for the environment (used tires) or the spirit (gallons of red wine).  I love the ending to this poem as well; in typical Harrison fashion he reminds us of how he fits in with all this--nature is never just nature without us in it:

. . . the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see

from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling

to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.

Also see 'The Quarter" here, one of my very favorite poems from the book:

http://queenmab31.blogspot.com/2008/05/todays-poem-meditation-on-quarter-by.html

Emily Dickinson

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I recently visited Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst as well as her grave, and have been rereading her work.  Aside from the very real chill I got, deep in my bones, at being in the place where she was born and died and spent much of her life, I was stunned to actually experience something of what her gardens would have been like.  I have always loved her poetry, but I hadn't realized how much of a gardener she was, and how much of her understanding of poetry and indeed the world outside of poetry was dominated by the flora and fauna of her gardens.   Rereading her poems I see flowers and insects and epiphanies based on flowers and insects everywhere!  And her excitement about the smallest member of her garden is infectious! Who cannot read 10 of her poems in a row and not start using exclamation marks!  I do not think I have ever read another poet who brings such intensity and ecstasy to flowers.  I just finished a book called Emily Dickinson's Gardens: A celebration of a poet and a gardener (Marta McDowell) that I highly recommend for those interested both in her poetry and her gardens.  There is enough information in this book, along with a nice selection of poems, for you to reconstruct an Emily Dickinson garden.

I also forked out over $100 for the Franklin The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, which contains all the variants of her poems, those she herself made as well as those later editors made.  It is endlessly fascinating to see how the change of just a word or two can transform the meanings of a line or indeed an entire poem.

Yesterday I visited the incredible Bridge of Flowers in Shelbourne Falls, MA.  It is a bridge across a river that has been planted with flowers for almost 80 years.  I will post photos later.  I was deeply moved, in an odd way, by this bridge, which is kept up by volunteers, and which is astonishingly beautiful, with over 500 kinds of flowers on it, and which is simply there, a gorgeous shock of color and richness spanning the distance between two towns.  It costs nothing to cross it, though donations are welcome. When I think of all the dark things our race is capable of, it's hopeful to find this little bridge of flowers, like a poem of brightness, an Emily Dickinson poem, maybe, a poem of love to the world of flowers.

Osprey

Osprey nest from the Atchafalaya Basin. These are huge nests that can survive the kinds of winds most houses in Louisiana cannot. There's a juvenile in the nest who apparently can't yet fly. The mother tried to lure us away whenever we got close by flying over the water and dragging her foot as if she were hurt. Osprey are widespread over the world and are also known as sea hawks. They eat primarily fish, and usually nest in a very high tree (or telephone pole . . . . ). We saw this osprey nest in summer 2009, but we also saw the same nest, same parent birds the last time we visited. My friend Greg (google him: Greg Guirard) usually takes me to see this nest everytime we visit.

I've spent so much time at the Atchafalya, and have hardly written any poems about it although I've written quite a lot in Swamp Songs. Maybe a book of poems focused on that area would be a good project for me now. Starting with osprey.

Missing

My first serious romance as a young girl was with a guy named Loren (Chip) Kerr.  He was the only person I "went steady" with in high school, and we were also engaged for a short period when we both started college.  We grew apart, broke up, got back together, broke up again, and I have not seen him for over 30 years.  My mother would keep me up to date with him, though, as she sometimes saw him in the grocery store near her in New Orleans.  Once he was with two young children, his.  He had married, she said.  He was still doing roofing work, she said.  He looked good, she said.  Still had nice legs, she said.  

The last time I visited my mother we drove down West End Blvd where he used to live with his grandmother in a big Victorian home.  The house had been destroyed in Katrina and a new, smaller bungalow stood in its place.  I remembered the nights I'd throw pebbles at his window on the third floor for him to come out--we didn't want to wake his grandmother.  No more third story now.  A few blocks down on the same street, another house I'd lived in myself a few years later during my twenties,  also destroyed, gone.  

For some reason this morning I was thinking about Chip and googled him, wondering what he was doing after all these years.  The only thing I could find was a post from  his father September 15, 2005 saying that he was missing after Katrina.  Nothing else after that.  There was no email address or other contact information.

I remember him as a strong, darkly handsome guy with lots of spirit who took on ambitious projects:  rebuilding engines, working in the hot hot Louisiana sun on roofs with his uncle.  He helped me pick out my first car, a used Triumph, and when it threw a rod a week later he towed it to his grandmother's house, worked for months to save the money I'd spent to buy it, and finally  gave it to me, telling me he'd found a buyer for it.  It was much later that I got it out of him that the money was actually his. 

He was quiet and somehow not of this world despite his work with the physical world.  He attended the U.S. Naval Academy, but hated the authoritarianism of it, and left after a year.  He kept a photo of me in his hat, he said, but the seniors would ask to look at the photo and would say things like you think she's waiting for you?  Ha!  Chip was the first man I ever loved, the first man I ever slept with, the first I ever allowed to touch me.  It is disturbing to think he might have died in Katrina.  

I hope someone has found him.  

The Sage of Cups

The Sage or King of Cups in a tarot deck is an ambivalent figure, always hiding something.  He usually represents someone in Art or Law.  It is said that he is uncomfortable in his own suit--a water suit--because at base his soul is fiery.  But though he's become a master of the suit of cups, he is always pretending.  He could be a figure that has repressed his own dreams in order to succeed in the world materially.  He's very good at what he does:  advising others, healing disputes, directing others.  He is the consummate diplomat, a respected leader, although he also has a fiery temper that sometimes surfaces. 

I like to think of the Sage of Cups, which is what this figure is called in the World Spirit tarot deck,  as an artist who has taken on a larger role that involves administration--a poet who has become the Poet Laureate, a writer who directs the NEA (or serves as an MFA program head!), an artist who runs a press or nonprofit.  Maybe he's a teacher, a literary translator, an editor of an anthology:  the idea is that the essential, inner directed work of the writer or artist is turned outward to help others.

I understand the ambivalence of this figure only too well.  I am in love with the compassion he shows to others, his generosity, his willingness to share what he has learned.  But I fear his own creative fire has been reduced to a pilot light that burns, but not brightly enough to sustain the fire he needs to for his own spirit.  The image of the Sage of Cups invites us to think about the balance of fire and water we might need to find in our own lives.  

Crawfish Boil at my sister's house in New Orleans, May 2009.  The cracking and peeling and sucking of the heads went on for hours.  Mmmmmm!

Finding Time and Strength to Write

Well, I lied about taking a break from the blog.  I'm thinking a lot these days about writing and how to structure my own life such that I nurture my writing life.  Since I've become a director of an MFA program (4 years ago), I've found it increasingly difficult to find the time I once was able to find for writing.  It's not just the time that the job takes, it's the fact that I can't leave it at the university.  It haunts me at home and in my dream life, and there's always something that needs to be done, or some small crisis that needs attending. 

Part of this is my own personality, of course.  I'm something of a perfectionist, and I really care about my program and students.  Building a program is not unlike writing a book, except that you are creating a space for others to flourish again and again, not just the one time they read the book.  These last four years have been rewarding in the sense that I feel I've been giving back some of what I've gotten from the world.   And I'm a pretty good administrator.

But positions like the one I have should be rotated, I think, especially if you want the writer who is in the position to stay alive.  I'm beginning to feel that I need to rotate out for a little while.  

Aside from the issues of free time  anyone might feel in a job that demands a lot of your energy, both intellectual and emotional, another issue for me is simple organization.  Sometimes the best way for me to get a poem or essay written is to put it on a To-Do list and make sure it finds a place in my calendar.  In fact, this is the best advice I could give to someone stuggling with finding the time to write:  put it in your calendar.  No matter how busy you are you, you can always find an hour to write, and if you schedule it when your body and mind are sharpest--for me it's the morning--you give yourself a better chance that you'll write something good.

Sharing your life with someone can also affect the kind of energy you bring to writing. When I lived alone it was easy to get up in the morning, grab my coffee, journal or laptop, and spend the first hour or so of the day writing before any other concerns infected the spirit of writing.  But now that I'm married to a journalist who likes to sit in bed with me in the morning and read his email and check out the international newspapers online, I find myself doing that--reading email and checking the news headlines--for about an hour instead of spending that time writing.   For my husband it's a shared time of bonding, and I feel that too and would hate to lose it--we do talk in the midst of sending emails and checking the news.  But it's also lost time for me because I do have to leave and go to the office to do administrative work, so I've lost that hour of creative work.  He's a freelancer and when I'm off to work he stays home and writes, and since he's a journalist, his searching of the newspapers is relevant.  Not always so for me.

Finally, there is the issue of what to write and what's worth writing about.  There can be times when you order yourself to write, when you write it on a calendar, you put it on your to-do list (Write that Brazil poem this Saturday!!!!) or when you negotiate hard-won space and time with your partner only to find that nothing comes, that nothing seems worth writing about, that nothing seems to inspire you. Then, I think, it's time to get at the root of the problem.  

People talk about "writer's block," but I think feeling stymied or paralyzed with writing is a side-effect of something else.  If you order yourself to write and you don't do it, well, it's like trying to stop drinking cold turkey without trying to understand the spiritual desires and other needs that drove you to drink in the first place.  

So an important step in trying to identify what's causing a slow-down in writing is to think about what's missing in your life.  If a poem or a story or essay is like a plant--let's make it a rose bush--what does it take to make it flourish?  Sun, just enough, water, just enough, good soil.  

When you are having trouble writing ask yourself about your sun, your water and your soil. And remember that we are all different and have different needs.  What are your needs?

For me it's time, space and the freedom and tools to explore what really matters in my life and the world.  And sometimes the news, email, facebook, it's all too much information, too much communication.  I still believe that the best writing gets done in a space of utter aloneness.

Maybe we don't need to "keep up" with everything--see Pico Iyer's comments on this in "The Joy of Less" :

 http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/?em

Poetry

I've decided to take a break from the blog for a bit in the summer to work on some poems.  I'm finding the need to work in the poetic form.  Although nonfiction is just as creative in many ways, there is something about the ability of poetry to incorporate wild or random elements that draws me to it.  There's also not the demand for literal truth that can seem oppressive after a while.  

Poetry has a smaller audience, but it has always seemed to me a great art form for spiritual growth and investigation.  

I've been working a little bit with a new tarot card deck (thus the previous post on the Eight of Swords) and have the idea to write some poems riffing off of certain cards and landscapes for a book. I'd also like to experiment with different voices in poems.  Next term I'm teaching a poetry workshop that will focus on persona poems and revisionist myth and fairytale poems, and it will be fun writing along with the students.  Maybe we'll use tarot cards as well!

The Eight of Swords

I am walking through an utterly destroyed landscape, a forest of trees and swords.  The trees are dead, and branches and swords lie on the ground.  Only an owl, a snake and a bat are alive.  If I could see them I would be happy, but I can' see anything.  Someone has blindfolded and bound me.  My feet hurt because I'm walking on swords.  I am aching all over, but I want to find my way out.  The moon seems full of energy but I cannot see it either.  I will have to listen to the snake, the bat  and the owl, creatures of the night, to find my way out.   I am determined that hurt, hurting, blind and bound, I will make my way out. 

It could be that a hurricane has come through this place.

Letting my Hair Go Gray

For the last year I have been letting my hair "grow out."  No more highlights, no more trying to hide the fact that my beautiful brown hair is turning gray.  While this decision has had a positive effect on my pocketbook (chemical hair treatments at a good salon can run $150 per treatment  if you get a cut and style as well), it's not been easy.

There's no getting around the fact that I look older with gray hair, even though I love the way it's streaked in the front, almost as though I'd been hit by lightening.  I would love for the gray to be utterly white, then I'd like like the bride of Frankenstein or at least Susan Sontag.   I look at photos of Terry Tempest Williams a lot for inspiration: she's let her hair go completely white, and she can't be much older than I am (54).  

And that's the point, really, to look older.  I don't want to be one of those women forever wanting to look younger than what they are, forgetting that we have a responsibility as the elders in our communities.  If we neglect mentoring younger women, if we want to be like them and not models for them, to whom will they turn when they begin to age and need to find positive role models? 

Still, when I recently traveled to Brazil with 10 beautiful young women about the age my son is, I felt keenly my age and how I had moved on to another country not only literally, but emotionally.

The translator who accompanied us on the trip is around my age, and we had lots of great conversations about aging.  She is Brazilian, but has chosen to live in the U.S. even though most of her family is still in Brazil.  She said this is because a woman past menopause is "nothing" in traditional Brazilian society.  People just don't look at you if you are older, she said.  Both she and Rita, the woman with the dreadlocks in the previous post (who is also around my age) dye their hair for this reason.  It's one thing for Rita, who is black and comes from a favela and still has the accent of someone who comes from a favela, to be discriminated against because of race and class, but it's quite another to be discriminated against because of age.  

It's inspiring to me that the situation is quite different in the Candemble religion as well as in the quilombo communities we visited in Brazil.  There, the oldest women in the village are honored and asked regularly for their blessings.  It is clearly a matriarchy, and I felt empowered to be among so many beautiful and wise older women.  I could see, from my students' journals that they perceived in very powerful ways, the beauty of these women (in the photos from my post yesterday).  

I am happy to be employed by a university that has a woman for a president, a woman for a vice president, and women in many of the powerful positions on campus.  Every day, when I walk our campus, I can feel that I am appreciated, that I matter, that every gray hair I earn will be respected here.  I just wish that I didn't  have to stay on my campus or go to a remote quilombo in Brazil to feel honored as an older woman in this culture.

Women with Gris Gris: Brazil

I recently returned from a trip to Salvador, Brazil with students. One of the things that struck me the most while there were the women we met, especially the older women.

While there we visited a quilombo, a rural village founded originally by runaway slaves and in the case of the community we visited, the Engenho de Ponte community, also the site of a Candomble house.   The woman to the left is a rezadeira, or healer for the community who demonstrated to us how she makes her various syrups and potions, and gave us a taste of her syrup.  She struck me as incredibly beautiful and wise, and I struggled to capture that beauty in this photo.  

Both shy and strong in her knowledge, she reminded me a bit of my now gone grandmother.  

The woman in the middle at the top was the mother and leader of one of the villages in the community.  She is 94.  We sat on her porch while she told us stories of how the village came to be, of dreams and visitations from spirits.  She is the keeper and teller of stories for the community.  Earlier, when we had gathered together with members of the community in a circle and asked for blessings from whatever god or spirit we cared to, the children and members of this woman's village asked for her blessings.  It was then I knew I was in a truly foreign country.  My own family and culture honors traditional youth and beauty so much that honoring and asking for blessings from an elder would never happen.

The woman at the top left was the "mother" of the Candomble house, Mama Giovani, and is responsible for the spiritual life of the members of her community.  I found her story to be inspirational as well: she left the village to become a teacher, but returned because she was needed and felt a call. She said it wasn't easy to return, but her large and generous presence and spirit filled every space she walked. 

Finally there was Rita, the director of the Bahia Street project we visited (top right, dreadlocks).  Born in a favela herself, a practioner of Candomble, she has risen to become the director of a non-profit organization that focuses on helping young girls escape the cycle of poverty and violence that awaits many of those born in favelas  in Salvador.

This post is mostly about getting these photos up--trying to figure out how to post photos.  I will write more about what struck a chord in me with respect to these women in my next post.

Oyster Po ' Boys

Such a warm and beautifully rare sunny day yesterday in Pittsburgh! 

I've been planning a trip to New Orleans to visit my mother, and my thoughts have turned to spring in Louisiana and the great spring feasts we have of crawfish and crab and shrimp and, of course, our beloved oyster.  I love oysters any way and all ways--raw, baked in the shell with or without topping, sauteed, chopped and mixed into dressing, cooked into a gumbo, but my favorite and most sinful way to have them is fried on a loaf of French bread, a few sprinkles of Tobasco and ketchup, shredded lettuce and fresh Creole tomato slices, sliced pickles, a cold beer to wash it all down.  We call this creation an oyster "po'boy."  The oysters are battered and fried so they're brown and crispy on the outside and hot but just barely cooked on the inside.  Louisiana French bread has a flaky crust and an airy center.  The crust is so flaky, in fact, that you cannot eat a po'boy without getting crumbs all over you and this is part of the joy of it.  If you order a po'boy you'll also be asked if you want it "dressed," which means do you want it with lettuce, tomato, pickle, mayo.  Be careful how you answer this question.    Don't say you'd prefer it naked if you don't want it dressed. Just say you want it plain or without anything.

My father, who often stayed out after work drinking and carousing, would sometimes buy my mother a po'boy on his way home.   He'd give it to her as he stumbled in, warm and wrapped in butcher paper, a sort of peace offering.  For the longest time I thought of this as  a unique and somewhat touching story about my family--my mother loved po'boys. But Jay Harlow, in his book The Art of the Sandwich, suggests that the etymology of  po'boy is from the French pour boire (peace offering),  and that men (lots of men, not just my father) would often come home from a night out bringing the po'boy as a peace offering.  So that it seems to be a cultural phenomenon, not something particular to my family.

There are lots of other speculations about where the expression po'boy  came from, including that it was a sandwich served to poor working men, but I like this explanation the best because it fits my family story so well.

I like to think of my mother sitting in the kitchen as a young wife and mother, her anger at my young, drunk father who is already in bed subsiding as she opens the butcher paper and finds a warm po'boy waiting for her, already cut in two.  I imagine her grabbing the tabasco bottle that was always on the kitchen table, sprinking some drops on the oysters, maybe some lemon and ketchup, her mouth salivating, and biting into it, the crumbs falling all over her nightgown, the glorious mixture of the crusty bread, the crisp fried oysters, the shredded lettuce and tomatoes and pickles blessing her throat, the hot sauce reminding her of my father, and maybe as she eats she thinks of him and how he'd sit outside the house during oyster season with a sack of them, naked from the waist up, using a knife to cut open their shells, so like a woman's sex, if a woman's sex could be petrified, stabbing the flesh and eating them off the tip of the knife cold and sweet and salty.  

Maybe she'd forgive him, maybe not, maybe the oysters worked their gris gris on her and she'd slide into bed next to him when she was done, full, pouty, but feeling just  a little bit sexy.  He'd be snoring, his back turned to her, but she'd lie next to him, press her now rounded, full of oyster po'boy stomach against his back and sleep.

The best oyster po'boy I ever had was at Salvos in Belle Chasse, Louisiana.  Hole in the wall working class deli and restaurant. Very noisy, very cheap:  heavenly. 

Endings

I've spent this semester thinking and writing about playing a video game, and I think I've now come to the place where I want to stop the actual playing and focus more on reworking these blog posts into essays.  So I think most of my future blogs will focus on other issues that are engaging me right now, including, most recently, travel.  

Last night I attended the Marjane Satrapi talk in Pittsburgh and was moved and entertained by Marjane's presence: her sense of groundedness, her sense of humor, her pragmatism and honesty.  I saw in her some qualities that I sometimes find in myself when I'm at my best, and seeing her on the stage gave me a renewed sense of of self in an odd way.  Her discussion about comic books reminded me a bit of video games.  In the same way people want to call a comic book a "graphic novel" because they're embarrassed to be caught reading comic books, so are academic types often embarrassed to admit they play video games, although both comic books and video games are simply new forms to deliver both information and stories.

I was also interested in a stray comment she made about what she is writing about now.  She talked about working on a movie and said something like, "It's about Iran because that's what I know, it's what I am, what I know best."  She doesn't seem to feel like she has to move on to something else, that, for better or worse this is her subject.  I have felt that way about my family, about Louisiana, that this is what I know best, but have also felt the need to break away from that, and this experiment with writing about WoW is one attempt to do just that.  As much as I have enjoyed the freedom to think and write about playing this game, and as much as I do believe I'll generate some interesting essays about it, writing about the game feels a bit empty somehow not thick enough, not layered enough, because of course, no matter how much you bring to it, it's not reality.  There's no blood when you kill in WoW, and if there were I probably wouldn't play it.  I know lots of games where there's lot of fake blood when you kill, but it's fake and you know it.  There are no smells, no real animals, no real land, no real water, no real food, and even the colors and impressive landscapes seem one-dimensional.  What I've learned is that there are real relationships that can develop between people in these games, though, and perhaps that's one of the attractions of the online games.

I've recently had an awful thing happen, so awful I can't even write about it in this blog (although I will, in time).  It involved a betrayal on the part of a colleague and friend, a betrayal that also damaged someone for whom I have responsibility.  I've spent the weekend depressed and sad and knowing that I can never count on this person again, and that my own work for the next year will be in some sense doubled because of this betrayal. An ending.

Although I'm sad about the betrayal and a little sad that I'm moving into a new stage of the video game writing project, both are endings that imply a new start, the excitement of new essays possibly published in print form (I still get excited, after all these years, by the prospect of publication), and a new shape to my own work because of this betrayal.  I remember that when the winds of Katrina knocked down the huge oaks I loved in a forest in Algiers, the space in the forest canopy allowed some of the stunted oaks and other saplings that were hanging out in the dark, to shoot up into the light, double their size and girth in less than a year. Something lost, something gained, my mother used to say. 

A death, a birth.  A loss, a  rich soil for planting  new seeds whose hulls will break open in the dark, their green fingers clutch through  dirt, reaching for sun.  

Haunted by the Past

I have now played through the transformative moment for the Death Knights (called DKs in the game) where they turn away from the dark side and embrace the light.  How this happens is not as interesting to me as how the past follows the DKs in the game.  Initially, when they enter any city the citizens throw things at them, spit on them, call them names, taunt them because of their shameful past.  Eventually this stops as the DK starts to work for the "good."   The game goes on just as it would for any other high level character, for the most part, except that the DK character has a very swift horse, exceptional (blue) armor and a very cool way to zoom back to her home no matter where she is in the world.   She could almost forget that she was ever working for the evil one.  And it seems as if the game wants you to forget.  But I can't.

I feel ashamed when I play the DK character.  I remember only too well what that character did. Although the character has a swifter mount and way cooler armor than any of my other characters, it feels to me that the armor and mount was not earned in an honorable way, so I have mixed feelings about it.  The DK is still profiting from her evil (she hasn't given away the mount or the armor),  just like those CEOs who in the recent news have received huge bonuses for plunging the stock market into the abyss, so she, like them, is still to be despised.  

I haven't deleted the DK character, but I haven't played it for while.  I've chosen to create another character, a Troll Priest, who has weak armor, a slow, lolling gait, and skills that focus on healing.  She's very slow, and has to use her skills at healing herself to survive in any fight. She has to be more resourceful than a DK and can avoid fights by screaming at attackers and scaring them away so that she can run away.  And I am leisurely playing that character for now.

I just returned (in real life) from southern Mexico  where I travelled for two weeks on a delayed honeymoon with my husband (more about this in a future post).  I rarely thought about WoW; the landscape of the Sierra Madres and the culture of Mexico was so compelling I didn't have much time or desire to think of anything else, especially a fantasy landscape.  But I picked it up again when I returned.  Television has become so boring to me; except for the news I could happily never watch another TV show, but my husband does like to watch TV for a couple hours each night before going to bed.  So while he's watching TV, I'll play this game for R&R, unless I have papers to grade or books to read for the classes I'm teaching.  

We had the poet Alicia Ostriker, someone I've known personally for about 20 years,  to visit at Chatham last week, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to catch up with her.  We had engough time talking that I began to tell her a little bit about my playing of this game and my desire to write a book or series of essays related to the playing of the game.  She seemed to agree that the experiences were interesting, but at one point asked  "So are you addicted to this game?"  

Of course I said no.  I play about an hour a day, I said.  But this reminds me of the alcoholic who says she isn't an alcoholic, only has two drinks a day (forgetting to mention the times she has three or four or sometimes passes out).  Sometimes I play more than an hour, especially on the weekends.  And I think about it a lot, although in all honesty I am obsessive about anything I plan to write about seriously, so this is no different.  But the real truth is that I have thought a lot about addiction;  I've written about drug and alcohol addiction extensively in my poetry and essays (both my brothers, my aunt and father died early of drugs or alcohol), and I have thought all along playing this game that it would be useful for me to explore why and how video game addiction occurs, and to try to write about it.  Since I came close myself to falling to the same addictions my father and brothers fell to, but survived to tell about it, I figured I might have the strength to survive this and write in a compassionate way about the desire to play these games such that those of use who don't play (and especially mothers and fathers) have a first-hand account from someone who's been there.  

But just as I'm haunted by the past actions of the DK figure, I'm haunted by my own past and the past of my brothers and father.  I feel that darkness in my fingers when I move my characters around the screen, when I furtively look at the clock to see how long I've been playing, when I rush upstairs to play after work or when Teake leaves to go to the store.  I'm playing with fire, and my fingers know it.

The Dark Side

The Lich King expansion for WoW offers players the opportunity to create a "Death Knight" character and to work as a high level assistant for the Lich King, who very much resembles Darth Vader.  The head piece that the Death Knight characters start out with, a cowl that shades part of the face resembles that worn by Darth Sidious, a Dark Lord of the Sith and perhaps the most evil of the characters in the Star Wars saga.  

In order to create a Death Knight, you must have reached a level 55 character on the realm you are playing, as Death Knights start out at level 55.  You have to give up your other character, at least while you're playing the DK, so it seems, psychologically, that you have died and been reborn as a soulless, mindless death machine.  The Lich King gives you orders to kill wantonly and without conscious, at one point ordering you to kill a number of citizens who are unarmed and who tremble and beg for their lives when you approach them, citizens who do not strike back, for the most part, when you attack, wielding your glowing, runed sword.  The Lich King "whispers" to you in the chat box should you falter or think not to strike.  No mercy, he says, when a woman with several children begs for her life.   There is no light, only dark, he whispers.  In another scenario you are ordered to spread a plague to the miners working in a nearby mine.  The more you kill, the more rewards you get, and nowhere in the game have the rewards been greater: almost every quest in the early part of the Lich King nets you a rare piece of armor. 

Prior to Lich King there had been times when I found my character doing something morally reprehensible, something I would never have done in real life:  killing animals that were bordering on extinction in real life, for example.  Of course I've never killed anyone in real life, but in the game as long as there was a narration that justified it I didn't feel so bad about it.  It's just a game, after all.  But Lich King makes you do horrific things, over and over again, and I am finding it deeply disturbing.  The only reason I'm continuing to play is because a review I read of the game suggests that something huge happens and transforms the game, making the DKs more acceptable in some way.  I'm waiting for that something to happen, but I don't think I can last much longer.  

I do have the feeling that my character is being trained to love evil and relish killing.  Since the game has strict rules, it doesn't seem as if I have a choice if I want to keep playing a DK.  Obey or die.  But it gets easier, killing the helpless citizens, especially when the rewards are great. And that's disturbing as well.  I wonder if there are other games like this with the opportunity to play such great evil, and I wonder--to what end?  I have always known that I might reach a place in this game-playing where I would not, could not go, a place where the game ceased being a game and instead seemed to be infiltrating too deeply into my core self.  This is, of course, what parents and educators have all along feared with respect to these kinds of games. It's one thing to find yourself pitted against a powerful Dark Lord, but how to play one yourself, "for fun"?  

On the other hand, isn't this what fiction writers or actors have to do to get inside the heads of serial murderers or other evil creatures?  What did Doestoevsky have to do to create a character like the amoral Stavrogin (who rapes a little girl) in The Possessed?  How about Heath Ledger's portrayal of The Joker?  

The question for me:  is it valuable to ask the children who play video or computer games to actually play pure, unrepentant evil?  Is it valuable to teach them to savor or enjoy killing the helpless, to laugh at their pleas to spare them?  

Or am I afraid of the darkness that I sometimes find within myself, so afraid that I don't want to enter into a game space where I have to come too close to it?  The most horrifying thing my mother ever said to me:  We are all capable of anything, Sheryl.  Anything.

 

Peacemaker

My husband does not like video and computer games.  He does not like how they seem to have stolen his son (now my step son)  from him, he does not understand the hours and hours his son can sit in front of a computer screen, utterly absorbed, clicking and clicking at something his dad does not understand.  He thinks video and computer games are partly responsible for the lackluster performance his son has had in high school.  

He is right to be concerned, but I have also tried to get him to look at the games in a different way, to enter into the games such that he understands the attraction.  Keep your enemies close, I say to him.  I have not been successful.  Although he will come in my study and peek over my shoulder during my nightly hour of playing, I cannot get him to play a character himself in WoW, even though I have created a male warrior character called Teake, which I sometimes play. In a future post I want to write about what it feels like to play a male atavar, but not today.  

The other night, after our evening crossword puzzle, I could see he was in a generally happy mood, so I asked if he'd play a  "little bit" of the game "Peacemaker" with me.  Peacemaker is  a game designed by Israelis, Palestinians and Americans based on real life events that simulate the tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  Teake is, in real life, a journalist, and a Dutch citizen and is extremely interested in world affairs. 

In this game you have to choose between being the leader of the Palestinians or the Israelis, or you can let the computer choose for you. Since we had to share power (you can't play against a human player in the game), and since we could not agree on who we wanted to play, we let the computer choose for us:  the Palestinian leader.  

There are lots of things I could report to you about playing this game:  I could report to you, for example,  that there are not enough options in the game and  that it seems an impossible game to solve, and that these things probably reflect the way things are in real life. I could tell you that the graphics were not very interesting, but that the text was, and that one could learn a lot about the history of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict by playing the game, and these things are all true.  

But for me, what was most interesting was the dynamic that developed between Teake and me as we shared leadership and made decisions about what to do as the leader of the Palestinians. The first thing that became clear was that we could not agree on how to lead. Every time something happened that demanded a response (a suicide bomber, Israeli attack, etc.) Teake wanted to do one thing and I wanted to do something completely different. I don't know that there was a pattern early in the game--sometimes I wanted to build things to make our infrastructure better, sometimes he was the one wanting to build.  Sometimes I wanted to make a speech to the world and sometimes he was the one wanting to make a speech to the world.  All of the projects we wanted to do cost money, however, and we constantly ran into problems trying to get world leaders to loan us money for our various projects.  

We decided to take turns deciding how to respond, although each time we criticized the other's decisions.  I think we were trying to do what westerners would consider the "right" thing, but it seemed that everything we did was criticized by one faction or another, and our approval rating internally and with the international community continued to plummet as we kept trying to do the "right" thing:  help the poor, relocate refugees to better places, build better educational systems, appeal to the international community, etc.  We had avoided any escalation of violence, to no avail.  After an hour of play, we were losing big time.  "Losing" involves reaching a certain level of unhappiness with both the internal and the world community as reflected in real numbers.

Teake, I should mention, hates to lose.  

"Let's just start blowing things up," he finally says when it seems that none of our good-nik solutions are getting anywhere.  

Needless to say, we lost.  

We did come away from the game with some sense of how incredibly hard it is to govern and to share governance in such a volatile part of the world, although we sort of knew that already.   I don't know if Teake will want to play the game with me again or not.   I know, from playing other games, that there must be a strategy that lets you win, that we just have to figure it out. 

But I don't think Teake will want to do what I know we'll have to do again and again in order to win: lose and lose and lose and lose.

Playing the Enemy

Two factions dominate in W0W:  the Alliance and the Horde.  When you create a character you have to decide to which faction you want to belong.  On some level, the Alliance are the "good guys."  They include the beautiful-bodied humans and cerebral night elves, as opposed to the broken and bestial looking trolls, orcs and "undead" of the Horde, who seemed to me, at least initially, to clearly be the "bad guys."   Even the names of the two factions, Alliance and  Horde suggest that one is more organized than the other, the Alliance a group of like-minded, rational creatures, the Horde a swarm of less organized, warring factions.  If we were to make a comparison to real life, the Alliance might be seen as like the European Union or the United States, and the Horde might be interestingly compared to terrorist groups from Iraq, Afghanistan and the like.

Of course, good girl that I am, I wanted to play the Alliance.  I couldn't imagine at first why anyone would want to play the Horde.  Why would anyone intentionally want to play the "bad guys?"  I mumbled something about this to my step son, who looked at me quizzically, said "That's not what it's about at all," but wouldn't elaborate.  Later, when I suggested we do some questing together in the game he said "I'm Horde."  Alliance and Horde cannot quest together and indeed cannot even speak to each other in the game.  

It struck me then as an interesting way to think about teenage sons and the way they sometimes perceive their relationship with their parents:  we are the Alliance, they are the Horde.   Of course they would be interested in any kind of creature that fights viciously and passionately against the rules and limitations of society.  This is why the Hulk is so attractive, and many of the orcs in WoW, to pick one race resemble the Hulk:  their skin is dark green, their bodies stocky.  In addition they have fangs and wide, grimacing smiles, not unlike a Gorgon mask.

But there's more to than that.  After having played an Alliance character to a high level, I started the game over, this time playing a Horde character, a troll.  While the other Alliance characters I had played were beautiful in a Barbie-doll sort of way, there was no way to create a troll character that is anything but hideous.  Big-footed, big-nosed with tusks of varying sizes, they have blue or green skin and a pronounced slouch (humans and elves never slouch).  They don't run in loping, balanced cadence like humans or elves but rather have an awkward, lopsided gait.  Their speech and culture in the game mimic that of black Jamaican culture, which is a whole other subject I'll talk about another time.

Playing a troll character means transforming my mind set so that all the characters in the game I am used to seeing as enemies (and I killed lots of trolls as an elf) I now recognize as friends.  I am now able to enter all the enemy camps and home cities that I could not enter when I was identified as an Alliance character.  I hear different narratives--the other side of the story--if you will, from the Horde quest givers that justify whatever actions I might be asked to take against Alliance characters.  I find myself feeling compassion for this wounded, demonized group of characters.  I see things in the landscape that I hadn't seen before:  how most of the Alliance groups live in traditionally idyllic environment with trees and lakes and rivers, whereas the Horde lives in barren and wounded and destroyed environments.  Esther MacCallum-Stewart has pointed out in her excellent essay "War and Histories in World of Warcraft" (in Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader), the Horde "worship nature in all its forms" while the Alliance "are only happy with a conventional, fertile landscape that they have quickly industrialized." (43)  MacCallum-Stewart presents a nice analysis of the environments of the two groups and how those environments shape our perception of the two groups, pointing out that the Horde's cities reflect an "ability to creatively remodel terrain," while the Alliance cities are modeled after long established types of cities such as medieval castles and mountainside fortresses.

Many years ago I wrote my PhD dissertation on the figure of Medusa.  I was attracted to her because of the paradox inherent in the many versions of her stories: in one version it was her beauty that turned men to stone, in another it was the horror of her horrifying Gorgon face.  In yet another version it wasn't snakes but dreadlocks that crowned her head and she was the head of a tribe of Libyan female warriors.  I was also interested in thinking about why so many American female poets (like Sylvia Plath, May Sarton and Rachel Blau DuPlessis to name only a few) had written poems in the persona of Medusa and seemed to be attracted to her as a muse. As creative relief while writing the dissertation I began writing poems in the voice of Medusa. She became an actual muse for me, drawing me eventually away from the critical writing I would do in the dissertation and into another world:  the world of poetry.  I began to see something in her character that had the kind of creative agency that I can also see at work in some of the Horde races from WoW.  When you are not given the blessing (or curse) of a beautiful body and face you must rely on imagination and creativity to move successfully through the world.  It is the difference between the passive and beautiful Snow White, and the endlessly inventive and creative witch of a stepmother, as Gilbert and Guber point out in their classic work Madwoman in the Attic.

Free from any semblance of beauty or need to attract, on a physical level, a male, my Horde troll character lumbers through her destroyed environment, making things up as she goes along, first trying this and then that before succeeding.  Her cities feel more like communities and families than the Alliance cities do.  Merchants and quest givers call me "child" and dance when I come to them with a question.  When they speak they speak in an informal Jamaican dialect.  

At the very least playing the enemy has taught me once again that things are not always as they seem and that there are always two sides to a story, that truth is always complicated, and that the way we see the world is colored by our race and our assumed place in the world. It's not that I didn't know these things before, but I knew them intellectually, not in my body. Playing the game has allowed me to experience two sides of a conflict in a very physical way.  Getting a poem by heart, memorizing it, teaches us so much more about the bones and spirit of the poem than simply reading or analyzing it on the page does.  Same thing for playing music. You can read the notes or you can internalize a song or piece and play out of that internalization. So too does enacting, physically, the other teach us something that is perhaps more lasting about cultural understanding than simply reading about it.  

A group of American, Palestinian and Israeli students at Carnegie Mellon designed a serious video game called Peace Maker that is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is available commercially from the independent games publisher Manifesto Games.  The game allows you to play the leader of the either the Israelis or the Palestinians as you make decisions about situations that are taken from real-life events.  I've ordered the game but have yet to receive it. This is just one example of a serious game that could have extraordinary educational impact that has come out of the entertainment gaming industry.  For anyone interested in peace and video games, I'd recommend attending the upcoming CMU conference, 'The Future of Interactive Technology for Peace" April 2-3.  Google it.

For the Horde.

Killing Yourself in Cyberspace

Like most adults I know, I get up five mornings a week to work,  go to the grocery store a couple times a week, go to the movies a couple times a month, and also like most adults I know I've contemplated suicide once or twice in my life, looked at the gulf of meaninglessness and hopelessness and cruelty and violence and wanton destruction and depravity and corruption that sometimes seems to define life on earth (not to mention misery, sorrow, regret, terrifying acts of god,  and coming from a screwed up family). What's the use, who cares, why go on with it, we think.  But most of us sleep on it (sometimes after lots of wine or beer), wake up, and do continue.  We find, or create, a reason to go on.  We look, as they say, at the bright side of life.  Or, failing to find a bright side, we create one, or pretend there is one.  Especially if we have children we pretend there is one.  

But what if you just don't see a bright side.  What if you find yourself surrounded by people who seem to hate you, more, want to kill you?  Say you run away, you jump off a cliff into the ocean thinking to end it all, only to find yourself still alive.  The drop not as steep as you had thought, the water  kind.   Surrounded by cliffs, you'll never survive a swim half way around the world, so what do you do?  You really wanted to die.

You press the x key, which makes you sink to the bottom of the ocean and you wait there, very still.  

After a minute or so bubbles start coming from your mouth, you are choking, you are taking in water, your health is declining rapidly and in bright red letters:  -400, -800, -1500. It is alarming, but this is what you want.  You are watching yourself die. You are killing yourself. You make a final jerky move and then you're dead.  You've drowned yourself.

There are a couple of good reasons to kill your avatar or let yourself die in WoW.  You always resurrect in a graveyard near where you died, and sometimes if you are trying to get to a difficult place where there are lots of monsters, it's easier to kill yourself and resurrect in a graveyard that is nearer to the place you are trying to reach.  Another reason to kill yourself is if you have fallen into an ocean surrounded by cliffs and it will take you 45 minutes to swim to a place where you can safely climb out. It's quicker to kill yourself and start over.

It's just a game, right?  

Right. But I felt really creeped out watching myself purposely kill avatar recently.  It felt deeply unnatural, even though it was just a game, even though I knew I would resurrect.  In those minutes sitting there watching my avatar die I couldn't help but think of the people in my life who have killed themselves and never resurrected, and the others who threatened it but haven't yet gone through with it.  What perceived hatreds, what monsters, what cliffs too high, what love too lost, what hope too frayed, what waters too deep to keep that finger pressed on the x button, no resurrection in sight.