From the Archives, March 10, 2003: HEARTSICK

Use everything in your life to deepen your art
says Stanislavsky.
If it hurts,
write it. If it burns
speak it. If it numbs and deadens,
if you cannot hold it
in your body, move
and breathe, breathe
and move, write it,
write it, write it.

I touch walls and sweaters
and keyboards
as if they bruise easily.
I do not want to be touched
in these charred and sizzling days
when all flesh
is frangible.

Killing killing killing killing:
repeated enough it sounds almost
beautiful.

We are a peaceful people
he said, and now titanium-jawed
parasites swarm over language;
who can restore its meaning?

This rock I lay my spine against
is 12 million years old. Depleted
uranium remains radioactive
for billions of years.

The earth has existed 4.6
billion years.
Listen, she says
microscopic daughter
of a tiny raging species:
in the breath before
all stories die, listen
I will tell you how it was
before the destroyers.


Yesterday evening, I tried to summon words, courage, conviction, energy to keep acting. The only protest I could envisage was to sit on the pavement and cry, to grieve in public. Then I read this article, by Paul Loeb:

”I recently asked former UN High Commissioner of Human Rights (and Irish President) Mary Robinson how citizens could resist this bullying politics. The Bush administration had just forced Robinson out of her job for questioning the United States’ exclusion of Afghan detainees from the standard protections given prisoners of war. “People need the courage to stand up for what they believe,” Robinson said. “If I’d backed down just because the US is the most powerful nation in the world, it would have sacrificed all the moral credibility of my office. By standing up, I preserved it. You have to keep standing up even if it’s hard. You have to be willing to pay the costs.”

Many of us have fought for a more humane world for a long while. It’s daunting to face an administration so intent on handing over every aspect of American life, and indeed of the planet, to small groups of wealthy men like themselves. But we also never know when history may turn--and when our efforts to stem the tide of destructive actions may spark a resurgence of conscience, commitment, and hope. If we reach deeply enough into our reservoirs of courage and vision, keep asking the hard questions, and keep connecting with our fellow citizens, there’s no telling what we can eventually create.”

So I went home and made a big cardboard poster to hang around my neck. It says: WAR = $1 BILLION / DAY. BRING OUR MONEY HOME. I painted $1 BILLION and MONEY gold, and my creativity flowed back. I attached a small American flag and a sticker that says “Miracles Through Action”, and my sense of humor rose from the grave. I wanted a sign that nobody, whatever their political views, could automatically tune out. A sign that everyone could engage with and think about. Who could object to a flag-waving patriot walking the streets, wanting American taxes to serve Americans? Who could fail to wonder whether, for $1 billion a day, they could figure out how to take out Saddam without bombing anyone?

I wore the sign to work, on the BART, up the escalator, in the elevators. I wore it walking the streets downtown. I got thumbs up, and thank yous. I got people falling into step beside me to tell me their thoughts and unanswered questions. I got LOTS of looks. I got, “Mmm-hmms” and “You tell them, sister!” and silent sideways flickers of approval, barely noticeable nods. I got far more support than I’d imagined, as well as a couple of side benefits. More eye-contact and smiles from seriously cute people than I’ve ever had downtown (creative protest is great for your flirting skills). More connection and energy than I’ve ever imbibed on my daily commute. I looked at people I never normally see. I saw how frightened we are. How tired. How sad and beautiful and infinitely precious.

All of which is to say: don’t give in. Don’t let grief silence you. Whatever gives you life – food, color, music, paint, people – harness it to action for the world YOU want to live in. Keep believing it’s possible.

Above all – don’t wait to feel hope before you act. ACT – and I promise hope, energy and joy will follow. If nothing else gets you out there, dress up and tell yourself you’re going flirting – with a protest sign. We never know when history may turn.

Children of Uganda

is an internationally touring dance company of young performers, aged 6 - 22, all of whom have lost one or both parents to AIDS.

I saw their show at Yerba Buena in San Francisco in February. Read my review / critique on this week's Pambazuka News.

Naissance

Poem I wrote over 5 years ago, on Mt. Kilimanjaro, shortly after 9/11, for someone on the other side of the world from me.


NAISSANCE
Kilimanjaro Day 4. Kibo Hut, 7pm

Today I saw a mountain exhale cloud
the way a baobab exhales heat
in mid-afternoon savannah. I saw
cloud mist rise
from the face of Mawenzi, swirl
and settle, fatten, condense
to ponderous cumulus.

And I thought how you
would enter the mind of the cloud, hear
the conversations of particles, know
the intricate dances
of droplet and gas. Beloved, today
I saw a mountain give birth to a cloud
and the joy in my eyes was my eyes
seeing it for you.

Today clouds stood still as silence
below me. I looked down
at clouds
shading their own shadows
on the mountain. I saw
the canopy world half-way
between me and the plains. I watched
the birth and afternoon prime
of clouds, how they gave birth
to shadow, how shadow
lay on mountain, how
the mountain
spoke the clouds.

let there be hell

I was in my CPA's office this afternoon. He's originally from Jordan. He told me about the son of a close friend of his, also from Jordan, who was just killed in Iraq. 19 years old, born and raised in America, recruited from high school by the US military.

My CPA said of the boy's father: It's like he swallowed a sword. He couldn't stop him from joining - they brainwashed him. He thought he was doing something big and wonderful. Just before he was killed, he wrote to his father: This makes no sense. I'm killing our brothers.

There were tears in my eyes as I listened. I don't believe in heaven or hell. But god, I want a hell. For Wolfowitz and Rove and Cheney and Rumsfeld. For Rice and Blair and Bush. For executives of Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, Halliburton, Bechtel, Kellog, Brown and Root. For all the thugs and gangsters who send other people's children out to die to fill their insatiable greed.

Window that made me smile in Neubau, Vienna

From the Archives, 2/1/03: Eros in the Real

I've just discovered the writing of Michael Ventura. Read his book, Letters At 3am (Essays on Endarkenment). Don't begin it, as I did, at 10pm on a weekday, because you may find, as I did, that you can't stop until 3am, and then you can't sleep until 6am, because your brain is shocked alive by the brilliant hard truths he lays out in language so succulent and precise it makes your body sing. You can find his columns on the web as well. Here's a taster, written during the Gulf War:

Patton had the depth to admit he loved war. Schwarzkopf pretends to hate it, but no one becomes so superbly skilled at, or devotes such a long and passionate life to, something he hates. Clearly he relishes what he's doing. This sense of profound fulfillment is the source of the presence he exudes – for no one who has seen him in these past weeks will forget him, or no matter how much one disagrees, will fail to be impressed. And yet there is this one evasion, this one fundamental corruption: he cannot, will not, now or ever, admit how thankful he is for this war, how profound and total is his fun.
From "Burner Of Eden" in Letters At 3am by Michael Ventura

Find the REAL eros this month; take your Valentine to the streets, the readings, the sites and the shows that remind us what it is to feel and think from our core.

Stay strong and joyful in the weeks ahead. Keep dreaming. Here's another Ventura quote:

We know now that our dreams are not going to come true. Are never going to come true. We have learned that our dreams are important not because they come true, but because they take you places you would never have otherwise gone, and teach you what you never guessed was there to learn.

there's a kind of tired

where a free-form ache floats through your body, never quite lands in one spot.

where you're twice as sensitive to cold and noise.

each call to make, each email to send, is a boulder to lift.

you tell yourself: jetlag.

you tell yourself: need to eat better, exercise more.

you tell yourself: no, you can't just give in and go to sleep. you have deadlines and deliverables.


green tea doesn't shake it.

pranayama, asanas, don't lift it.

your limbs go from heavy to disembodied to leaden, and back again.

you make yourself go for a walk, hoping to shake it off. the outrageous material abundance crammed into 100 metres of College Avenue makes you want to cry.

From the Archives, 1/26/03: REGIME CHANGE IN KENYA!!

Happy New Year! And despite the psychotic developments in US domestic and foreign policy, despite the clouds of destruction gathering like hungry muggers over the planet, I really mean it. I am FILLED with jubilation today – it's pouring out of my ears, dripping off my fingertips, shooting sparks out of my toes. Here's why.

Kenya's election results are rolling in. Mwai Kibaki, the presidential candidate fielded by the rainbow coalition of opposition parties, has so far won 65% of the vote. Titans of former single party rule have lost their seats. An unprecedented eleven women have been elected to parliament. The era of Daniel Arap Moi, and the ruling party KANU, who have plundered Kenya at will for 24 years, is over. And it's happening peacefully. My father's voice exults over the static on the long-distance phone: There was a time you didn't dare speak the words. Moi. Is. Going. The whole country has risen.

Without riots. Without military violence. Without coercion, terror, threats or intimidation. For Kenyans, this is the Berlin Wall coming down. This is a Florida recount where the truth prevails. This is a dream I never believed would materialize in my lifetime. All over the globe we are screaming, dancing, singing and embracing in front of our monitors, radios and TVs. We are sitting up all night watching results come in, tears of hope and renewed pride rolling down our faces; we are thanking all the gods, ancestors and spirits that sustain us.

For today, I am shedding my Cassandra cloak, and daring again to believe in possibilities. That change can happen. That people can unite to dismantle mighty forces of greed and corruption. That our joy and our faith will feed the work that needs to be done. In America, in Kenya, across the world. May it be so. Please may it be so.

My comments today:
3 years later, Kibaki has not delivered on his promise to root out corruption. On the contrary, members of his cabinet have engineered several gigantic scams to loot the country's coffers. But there is, nevertheless, a climate of openness, debate and challenge in Kenya that did not exist in the Moi years. Kenyans are demanding accountability and transparency from their government. The Kenyan arts scene has exploded with new voices and visions. There is a sense of hope, possibility, real exciting work happening in every arena.

blog silence

I'm going through a phase of silence with regard to blogging. Perhaps it's the natural follow-up to touring: my mind wants some privacy after 2 weeks of living and thinking in public.

It struck me that it would be interesting to fish up my earliest postings - the monthly newsletters I began sending out at the start of 2003. Several people have told me they'd like to go back and read earlier entries, but the format of this blog doesn't make it easy. So until new thoughts bubble up, welcome to The Shailja Retrospective :-)

If you read Italian............

You can check out the insider's on-the-spot report on my performance in Bellusco on the blog of Gio, Bellusco's postman, Arci activist, and all-round cool human being.