Free Fall into Atitlan

Hola a todos,

I was doing some random gmail search a few moments ago, and came upon this piece of writing I sent us all early last year. I read it, and I liked some parts a lot, surprisingly.
Let me know what you think...

Time has passed since our lives' paths diverged. Since that moment we've been making our own trails.

To those we know, we're lost. To our own perception, off somewhere in the wilderness of the place we think we know: our modern world.

It's like we all began to run when we last saw each other. A full speed race forward, through the same forest, in a similar direction.

We lose our breathes and slow down to a stop.

We turn around to see the ground we just covered, and do our best to hold still. And there, dizzy from running we imagine, look for, even listen for the people who are closest to what we consider our soul.

We wonder how far away the others have gone, and how close they may be.

As our senses adapt back to stillness, our breathing persists, our dilated pupils take in more light , our sweat sensitizes our skin.a

We hear silence amidst the movement of the trees' leaves and a distant singing bird.

This gaze in silence allows us to know the place we've stopped to the best of our ability. And at that moment our imagination asks questions about the others.

Where are you all? How far away have you ventured from me? How close is where you are to where I am? How fast are you running and can you stop?

Then you move on to imagine them having a similar moment somewhere nearby, but out of sight. Out of sight but still on the tree-covered rolling hills into which we were released the day we said goodbye to Guate.

You feel like yelling to break their silence.

You imagine how fast their hearts are beating, how they've made out from the run, what's on their minds and what's going on in their brains.

I imagine you each bursting through the door of your family house, your dorm or residence, and turning onto the road that connects you with what you occupy your hours with.

All around you, the real, the real, the real. Your world pumps with to do's, worries, introspections, anticipations, deadlines, self-images, images of others, things you look forward to. Your world is permeated by snippets of your best friends in your mind, in people you meet. Your world is attacked by pictures of the outside world of politics, economic catastrophes, mind-numbing shards of a broken civilization we euphemize as "social problems."

These things all float in and out of your awareness, engulfing you with what collectively fills your conscious mind in your everyday life.

Real, real, real, you mold your image of the real, the everyday the outside world with everything you arbitrarily label as real. A way of acting, a way of working, a way of being social, a way of buying groceries, a way of making money, a way of planning your next steps. For me, the irony is that the more real all of this feels, the more unsure you feel about its nature, the more unsure you are of its concrete existence. The more you question its validity, its natural qualities, its humanness.

Oh my, we begin to find how incredibly odd real things are. How incredibly arbitrary, how incredibly contingent the way things happen to be in our lives and in the world.

In light of this, we see how potentially boundless our lives are, but while rejoicing in this feeling of freedom we're reminded of how easy it is to fall into complacency.

It's startling how etched in stone our past and future lives' general trajectory can feel at times.

This street we walk down that makes up this real world is there. Cement, stop signs, some trees, people walking buy, the local businesses. It's there and it doesn't change. The laws that govern how it works are understood in our heads. Their details are formed in our heads. We create this real world in which the tall buildings seem to topple over us from both sides, and the demands of the everyday seem to surround us as if in the air. We ourselves beg reality to suffocate us.

We snap back into our minds from this muse… As we walk down the streets our conscious mind becomes too conscious of the presence of its unconscious, and we lose weight, and float up, high. Higher, higher above your street and towards the south. Your town or city gets further away. You feel the coolness of a cloud envelope you as you lose sight of the surface of the earth. You smell no trace of the refuse of our modern mode of production up here. You are in solitude, free from "reality." Your inner body bursts with a sunshine as you're relived of that weight and its intricate detailed distortion of your human-ness.

You blast out of the clouds, you look back. The sun. As you move through empty atmosphere, the sun beats upon you. So far from the shelter of your tall buildings, your homes, the bodies of your lovers, the still trees, your blankets, your grocery store.

So far from all that has made you what you are; all that's sealed within the emotion you know as comfort.

Before your rational mind has time to catch up with your wandering will, you fall.

Screaming from the inside out you lose the height you gained in a freefall. You fall, you fall, you fall.

A plane of primal blue approaches you in space, you approach it. You plunge into the waters of Lake Atitlan.

The waters that presenced your childhood match the wavelengths of the liquid in your system. The water takes you in and pads your landing. You float up to the surface slowly, observing the hundreds of bubbles. Your lack of air leads to anxiety. You reach the surface, breathe in, and look around. While you lie on your back, you feel you're as close to a home you'll ever be, as close to freedom as ever, the home base where you once said goodbye to with everything to lose, and the world to gain.

You're far from your puzzling "reality." You ask yourself, "how to speak of my "real" life and "real" world while aware of its dumbfounding contradictions, irrationality, its unsustainability, its insubstantiality. An array of "uns" and "ins" can be useful when you try to wrap your mind around your "reality."

Words that dissolve into the purity of the vivid blue sky. You lie on your back; a floating masterpiece of flesh, bones, organs, hair, skin and clothing. Your peripheral acknowledges four inverted volcanoes and a circle of mountains. Your ears hear silence, the hum of your own body, in sync with the tides of the lake. You begin to backstroke towards the shore.

You close your eyes, spin your chest towards the earth, and paddle your feet until you feel one dig into the muddy sand. You shift your weight, into it and your body emerges, wading through the water. You're back in your waters, back , striding thorough the waters of your culture, your home base, your childhood, your makeup.

On your next step, you feel your home's familiar floor beneath your feet. Your right foot is next, soon your body is clothed, your backpack is on, you look up, down the street, directly into the big building you once knew you had to walk to.

You close your eyes, regain presence, feel a smile creep across your face, and pick up your pace, that stride by stride develops into a sprint… The most intentional sprint you've every run.

luck

some people might call it luck, but after all, i dont think luck has anything to do with it. Luck is just an excuse for when something happens at the right time. its all about timing, and perseption. where you are and who you are is exactly where and who you are to be. control...control is an illusion we have, and something we would like to have in hand, but we don't. nothing is in control, everything is a whirlpool of mysterys and fantasies, beliefs ideas, thoughts, and movements and we just need to let loose...im acoustumbed to talk in ploural always saying we, but dont take it wrong, im not giving out some sort of universal truth here, its just ideas i want to share :)...plus i dont even believe in a universal truth it wouldnt be right to have it. back to luck...maybe it gets anoying but im not gana care, Pana, and our situation of upbringing, is sooooo, sooo, did i say so yet? different and unique from so many places in the world. we were pretty much, a first or ok, second generation if we count our parents as the first. being that, a second generation, is HUGE, who influenced us? who were our teachers? who brainwashed us? how and, was it on purpouse? on purpouse by whom. destiny is a nice idea, i believe we create our destiny, our paths arent made for us, yet its a controversy, couse if we have no control how can we create our own destiny? fact is we have no purpous of extance, but we have the idea that creates the illusion of freewill that makes us think that we do have control, and there by we make desitions everyday that stear us in a certain direction. a direction that i have no idea where it is. ive been meating all these people lately, theyre about my age, have jobs, are comming up in the workers comunity, making money, but with no ambition for discovery. maybe im wrong, but my theory is, theyre a lost generation with a social structure already built for them, not to think but to act, let the others think. i consider myself to be in the thinkers position, and i dont need the approval of a paper or mass to view me as such and "respect" me so that i can manipulate that, after all i believe in live and let live...

hurra to us =) i think we've come along way already, and the great thing is i cant see the end of any of our roads yet, at the contrary we are just at the start...

much love to yall thought it'd be cool to post something... = )

I love my school!
Today they had a show called the HADEMI, it's when all the 3rd year students of the HALO (study to be a gym teacher) do this demnostration of all they learn. Gymnastics, dancing, selfdefence all pourd into 2 amazing hours. it's what i love about the school. People enjoying life, enjoying the power of movement.
I would love to show you my life. Share some moments with you again, my dear friend. I would love to let you in, just for a while you know i'm happy.
I want to show you what happens when you open the door to the building. People running around in all types of sports clothes, some in jeans others more fancy. On the right you might have a group coming back from judo class, still all outfitted, down the flight of stairs in the eating area you have a couple practicing dance moves, some others juggling, learning to spin poi, doing a hand stand. It's a sort of circus.
I love it, i'm happy.
I'm going to do the HALO, the teaching study hopefully starting next year and i'll be one of those many juggling, practicing dance moves. so wish me luck

Dear Peeps,

Here's another piece of watered down philosophical writing that I'd like to hear your responses to. It don't think it's necessary to have read Hegel in order to think about the ideas. And I've gotten in this bad habit of writing things with my own student voice that would't be acceptable to a lot of teachers, but i feel like this is one of the only ways to make writing accessible to myself and more realistic or tied to the ground. Academia seems to have its head up its own ass, and can't see that what's actually happening in human experience is indescribable and will never have anything to do with their ideas or even care about their ideas. That having been said, academia is helpful for some things. Maybe it just needs a little more humility. I hope this is humble enough.

Ryan D. Chaney

CCII

Benjamin Fogarty

3/16/10

Response to Hegel's "Introduction to the Philosophy of History"

It's difficult to judge thinkers as individuals living the same human experience we all are and living within communities of people, as we all are, and use our understanding of their experience (from our own) in order to understand and critique their ideas. The problem is that, by virtue of their being “philosophy,” the ideas take on a complex life of their own, and exist autonomously of the thinker him/herself. They are forced to exist without the thinker. Here lies a central paradox; How can a thinker conceive of an idea or set of ideas and claim that they stand on their own, autonomous and anchored in the cosmological realm of possibility. Hegel tried to give his "History of Philosophy" a machine-like life that not only existed, but served as canonical pillars holding up the structure and hegemony of reason, an force that exists independently of anything outside of its own laws and conclusions.

This might well be why we still mention the importance of the society and context in which the thinkers thought and wrote. More and more, however, that aspect is being de-emphasized by teachers and students who want take-home packages of “knowledge” that outlast the specific thinker. (Reminds us of CC and Lit. Hum, two Columbia requirements). It's not sexy to learn historical facts about an old white man's life who no longer lives, and nobody will bear it, much less pay for it. Nevertheless, this is where, quite possibly, the keys to figuring out weird thinkers like Hegel and their impacts are being lost. Maybe Hegel's “Introduction to History” is one big performative creation.

It's easy to get into an epistemological fist-fight with Hegel and argue that it's quite evident that humans aren't rational beings. One could take it further and argue that he either sheltered himself from the outside world of difference and contingency, or he ignored the irrational behavior of his closest acquaintances and community.

If we grant Hegel this axiomatic premise and believe that he speaks of a structure of reason outside of our individual subjective capacity - one which limits our capacity to see clearly, understand or participate in this higher realm of reason - only then can we move forth. Only then can we see whether reason actualizes "itself" in the world, or whether "it" is actualized selectively by those who benefit from it.

Reason has long been used as a tool for domination. The master is careful to craft the slave's self-consciousness through habitus, in order to make the slave realize his distance from the objective universal that the master's authority is there to impose. It can be extrapolated from the master/slave, onto higher levels of relations, such tribe/state and citizen/state. The problem Hegel didn't see was that at this level, the state, if not democratic, will always exist to further it's own survival, and if democratic, will, also for its own survival, stoop down to populism and simplistic utilitarianism.

Another problem with giving Hegel the benefit of the doubt, is its vast similarity to Christian religious doctrine. On a first reading, it seemed as if Hegel had to perform a leap of faith in order to get beyond his problematic premises. Similar to Christianity, he describes the course of history as destined to perfect itself over time until human passions are kept at bay by universal principles. In Christianity, God's existence is destined to save humanity from its own doom by showing them the transcendental, or divine - which is like the Platonic form, always better and higher then human faculty, but still elusively accessible to it. In addition, history's being guided by rational "spirit," sounds a lot like history being influenced by the hand of God. This is an idea that has proved nefarious throughout colonialism, into imperialism, and now strongly into liberal "free market" Capitalism. Hegel argues that the rational spirit becomes conscious of itself through its subjective aspect. This reminds me of the idea of the believer coming into contact with the truth of God through the bible. To Hegel, the more in line with reason, the closer to the universal. To Christian doctrine, the more in line with God's ways, the closer you are to being at one with God (at[one]ment). In addition, Hegel talks about how the individual becomes improved through self-negation, eerily similar to Christian notions of asceticism and sacrifice for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Following this logic, it leads me to conclude that Hegel espoused the following: as part of the self-perfecting nature of the rational spirit of history, it has been ordained that subjective individuals hindered by human passions be enslaved by masters (the state) who have a better/higher notion of the objective universal, actualizable through enlightenment, and most importantly reason. This means that the enslavement that gives the slave self-consciousness in regard to the master, is the same force, or spirit, that will lead to ultimate universal perfection, where self-consciousness is achieved by all humans.

It seems, today, in the age of reason and a peak of enlightenment, Hegel's “Philosophy of History” served as a seminal performative, which, along with other works like Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations,” Hobbes “Leviathan,” Kant's “Groundwork,” Burke's “Reflections,” Rousseau's “Social Contract,” and Mill's “On Liberty” lead to universal reason's “self”-realization in the world.

To me, it sounds like Hegel had to have lacked self-consciousness - an awareness of the way his own human experience was unfolding - in order to so assuredly posit such problematic and axiomatic ideas. Maybe he thought that it was the only way out left to man: to live in chains, for the better good. Maybe he thought that it all actually works that way. Or, maybe he just did it to fuck with us.

the man on the moon

Long before we know ourselves,
Our paths are already set in stone.
Some may never figure out their purpose in life,
And some will.
There are a lot of us who are caught up in this hell we all live in,
Content with being blinded by rules and judgment.
We live in a world where it's more okay to follow than to lead.
In this world being a leader is trouble for the system we are all accustomed to.
Being a leader in this day and age is being a threat.
Not many people stood up against the system we all call life,
But toward the end of our first ten years into the millennium we heard a voice.
A voice who was speaking to us from the underground for some time.
A voice who spoke of vulnerabilities and other human emotions and issues never before heard so vividly and honest.
This is the story of a young man who not only believed in himself,
But his dreams too.
This is the story of The Man On The Moon.

Feminism

Dear all,

Thanks for allowing me to subject you to my thoughts on feminism. A good part of it is jargon that has to do with the piece of writing by Mary Wollstonecraft and the content of the class.

I haven't posted in forever so here goes. The link for the piece: https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Abv7vmrys1SgZGc0NmMyc2dfMTM5Y3IzZGhjbjY&hl=en

On another note, part of the reason I haven't posted is because I've began to loathe my own writing. It's strange and hopefully I'll get over it soon.

I hope all is well in your lives. If it's not, let me know.

Cheers,

Benji

Benjamin Fogarty

Wollstonecraft Response

Ryan D. Chaney

3/1/10

Third-wave Feminism's Curse: Socio-economically liberal notions of equality and freedom

Wollstonecraft’s arguments for equality have painted a clear picture of patriarchal tendencies in western society's history. It seems hard to debate the notion that there has been visible progress in gender equality since the days she wrote her vindication, yet in practice it's possible to see how the problem has been disguised in what seems to be a play of language. At the root, they are the exact same inequalities, but have been transformed into what seem to be advances. Today it's not a question of social inequality: women are looked at as the same as men in line to pay, at the restaurant and at the workplace. It's a question of a lack of freedom to escape the expectations that come with being a woman privately (as individuals), while being forced to be like men publically. This is most marked in socio-economics, where women, to date in America, still attempt to prove that they can work as much as men and limit themselves to meager vacation time when pregnant. Women are equal to men, but chained to being “woman” in man's demented terms.

There is still a clear difference between the role a woman has to play in American society and that a man does, although it's disguised behind a veil of social “equality.” This is what could be considered a liberal social and economic point of view. Rousseau proposed an equality of a sort that enables and emphasizes freedom. Following his logic that equality leads to freedom, women should have the freedom to act as they will. The problem is that the idea of what it means to be a woman is constructed by a male-dominated patriarchal society. Women gaining equality in liberal society has only come to mean that they are now free to try to occupy the same positions in society that men do. They are free to try to be like men. The newly acquired freedom leads women who know of the historically unequal male/female relationship to act unnaturally in the name of exerting their womanhood and establishing equality. They're never emancipated, however, from the heavy expectation on women to behave like women (i.e. feminine, sensitive, caring, motherly, beautiful, soft-spoken, hospitable). In the USA, equality is alive and well in the politically correct discourse of corporations, politics and common knowledge, but not in practice. In practice, in the name of equality, women are supposed to fit neatly into a predetermined female role (color associations, dress codes, behavioral codes, aesthetic codes), such that they seem to have freedom to be “feminine,” when in reality they are being robbed of any robust notion of freedom. This is where second wave feminism went wrong, however, it's been two decades and Americans still haven't realized that there's a third wave. Our inability to see through the watered down liberal notion of equality (amongst many other things) is precisely what's killing the third wave.

Being feminist today is still portrayed as women trying to take the power from men. This notion doesn't encourage a fundamental change in gender relations and male-dominated politics. Economically, women are socialized into unequal positions reinforced by both men an women who participate in that society. A middle class American woman would be indignant if she weren't allowed to wear female clothing to the work place. If a woman diverges from her expected role, she will suffer tremendous psychological suffering and be socially shunned. In this sense, women clamor for their own unfreedom in the name of equality of petty a-political freedom of choice and expression. This turns what seems to be freedom into its disguised opposite that reinforces itself with the very subjects it chains. Wollstonecraft would roll over in her grave.

Men need to accept that women don't want to be men, that's why they're women. They don't need to be “equal” to men. Equality only brings women down to the pitiful level of gender and power relations constructed around the “man” in American society. Women need to stop painstakingly avoiding the opposites of freedom, equality and emancipation in relation to men. They need to stop reacting to the terms that neoliberals leave behind for them and decide where they want these now empty terms to take them.

Last to consider is the tremendous potential of women to bring about structural changes in culture, society, politics and economics. There is much at stake in liberal society for women to continue being women. Behind this idea is the preservation of the institution of the family, part and parcel of the economy sustaining the liberal project. It would be as simple as escaping the stigma easily attached to the obstructive notion of feminism as unfeminine, which proves to be immensely difficult. In liberalism, just as the notion of equality is perverted, the barriers that seem the smallest are actually the biggest, and those that seem the biggest might actually be the smallest.

In conclusion, check it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oftOCN1jkNo&feature=player_embedded

Boxes

I'm moving and packing. Packing because I’m moving I suppose. So far I have 3 bags with clothes, 2 boxes FULL of books, 1/2 a box with shoes and still some stuff to go.
It's an odd feeling moving. They say it's a traumatic experience. So far I’ve stressed about money, stressed about my key cause it didn't want to double lock my door and now I’m melancholic because I have to go. I never thought I’d fill up around 6 boxes/bags in a year and a half. Never thought I’d build up memories that quickly here. And I’m only talking about the material things now.
I'm slowly packing my emotional ones. Counting the meals that I’ll still have with my aunt and uncle. The times I hear them downstairs. I'm going to miss the TV criticism. The eating on the couch, the comforting. I'm going to miss the books. This house is full of them. French, Spanish, German, English and Dutch. It's better than the Pana library. I'm going to miss my aunts cooking, the desserts, and the neatness of the kitchen. I'm definitely going to long for the Guatemalan things tucked away in corners, the tastes of other cultures in others. The coffee after dinner and the tea at 10.
I'm putting my memories in boxes, metal, waterproof, fire proof and hopefully Alzheimer’s proof. I'm locking up the smells, the sounds and the smiles. But thankfully it's not good bye.

I'm happy to have my own place, but that's another story for another time.