Author: sarah

615 washington street

IMGP2848.JPG Some first impressions from my new house. I’m still waiting for Leta to send me the house description as i found it on craigs’ list, it’s quite impressive, at least it impressed me. But at this moment Leta has other things on her mind: she is leaving for Sacramento, the capital, tomorrow early morning, to take her qualifying exams after 10 years of study of Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Once i get the description i’ll include it here, so come back to this entry if you want to read it.

And then i should slowly begin to get my head around these cooperative living arrangements here in Santa Cruz. I did interviews in two places: Chavez House, which is one of the two student co-ops (part of NASCO, www.nasco.coop) in town, and then the “30 something” semi-coop where i’m now. The reflections of course already started with the decision to look for a collective living situation, and then the need to chose between them (or still decide to go for another living arrangement…), as they both wanted to have me. And for sure i’ll be reflecting more on this as i’m now part of the house on Washington street.

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But for now, i’m enjoying the beauty of this craftsmanship house, and my veranda room (6 windows!) next to the kitchen. And Rutvica’s poetry card that was awaiting me here, Summer. Steeped in flowers. Yes, they say that nature blooms amazingly here in spring and summer…

teresa

meanwhile i should still be writing but i’m reading a bit of teresa of avila (admit that the image of her, the book and the pen is amazing!), and see how she announces her writings:

“I really think I have little to say that I have not already said in other books which I have been commanded to write; indeed I am afraid that I shall do little but repeat myself, for I write as mechanically as birds taught to speak, which, knowing nothing but what is taught them and what they hear, repeat the same things again and again. If the Lord wishes me to say anything new, His Majesty will teach it me or be pleased to recall to my memory what I have said on former occasions; and I should be quite satisfied with this, for my memory is so bad that I should be delighted if I could manage to write down a few of the things which people have considered well said, so that they should not be lost. If the Lord should not grant me as much as this, I shall still be the better for having tried, even if this writing under obedience tires me and makes my head worse, and if no one finds what I say of any profit.”
(Teresa of Avila, 1577, Interior Castle)

it has all been said before, i don’t really remember what it’s all about, i should have written it down when i was talking to a friend and explaining it so well, nobody is going read this anyway, and it’s giving me a headache. already back then…

jacuzzi requiem

“Due to cold weather, hurricanes, and short supplies, natural gas costs in California are increasing as much as 40% this winter.” This is what our PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric Company) bill says. It’s true – at least we can personally testify that the part about cold weather and the increasing prices is very very true. The bill doesn’t really mention anything about energy and geo-politics, unlike the president in his last state of the union (“America is addicted to oil”, which we can also testify as very true if car-use is anything to go by.)

Anyway, our ecological reflexes (shaped in europe, they turn out to be very different from ecological reflexes here, where many people make a point of going to the organic supermarket, but then use the car to do so) made us decide to turn off the jacuzzi in the garden, cause surely to keep the water temperature so high must cost a fortune in terms of energy. First maría waited for me to arrive so i could try it out, then we said let’s wait till the end of january so we can clearly see the difference between the january and the february bill (and then you never know, it might turn out to be reasonable…), then came february with a little outburst of spring and all of a sudden we used the jacuzzi a lot more, and now it’s march and i’m leaving the house, and the jacuzzi is still there. Ah, goodbye jacuzzi, very fond memories of you remain. And of the beautiful relaxed (who would have guessed, but yes…) afternoon maría and me spend there, until we were fish, before my moving out.

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ps – these are pictures from earlier warmer days, what maría is doing there would be very dangerous now…

la santa

teresa.JPG This last week has revolved around writing, chapters for two books and a conference paper. I haven’t been so immersed in writing since that summer of 2004, when the dissertation needed to be brought to an end. The anxiety of then has left, but still the process feels familiar: a kind of possession of the mind by how to string together thoughts and words and images and arguments and sentences till something emerges that flows with the need or desire that urged the writing of a particular piece in the first place. A possession which takes me into the writing bubble, with concentration for air and intensity for time. Stepping outside of the bubble means that, in no time, the writing oxygen disappears. Being inside the bubble means that the world around me fades a bit away. Except if there is someone to write with, and now there is Maggie. But basically i’ve been seriously neglecting friends and dear ones these days – even you, dear readers of this blog. And then there’s the body. Sacrificing of sleep, forgetting to eat – all indications of the mind’s concentration. And if all of this sounds like suffering, then let me assure that it is precisely that. Writing has always been suffering, i haven’t been able to do it in a different way.

And then there was Giulia on the phone today. And as i described the mechanism of these writing trips, all of a sudden it became clear to us: suffering, transcendence of the body, sacrificing the body to the spirit, in order to touch a piece of truth – it is all about holiness! Sto facendo la santa.

After that revelation the poor body deserved a treat and i went into our jacuzzi. My first time in the rain. Light was slowly retreating from a very grey sky (à la belge…), rendering the branches of the tree of protection in our garden even more crooked and impressive in the back-light. A confused hummingbird came to a split-of-a-second stop in between two branches above my head – could it have mistaken our tree for a hummingbird-tree? – before it disappeared as fast as it had come.

cartoons

stopislamophobie.jpg My thoughts kept on taking me to Borgerhout today, where dear friends were (ah, those 9 hours of time difference so difficult to manage…) creating and inventing their resistance against the declarations of war started by the Danish right-wing newspapers. As Donna said the other day: “Do you believe this is an issue of the freedom of press? I don’t believe it for a second. And I am bewildered at how many dear colleagues in Europe draw upon anti-migrant rhetorics, in a way and to an extent that would be unthinkable here in the U.S., and we all know how racist the U.S. is.”

The feminist power of dislocating the debate, dislocating the framework of war, and starting to prepare the grounds to talk and relate in a different way. “Because in the current macho-discussions our voices remain unheard, and because we’re not exactely planning to wait till they listen to us, we are organizing our own meeting.”
I can imagine them/you so-well in ‘t Werkhuys, i hail them/you, and hope to hear more about this beautiful meeting soon.
Continue reading “cartoons”

left hand of god

lefthand.jpg Rabbi Michael Lerner was in town this evening to talk about the project inspiring his new book. The project is all about Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right. Since after the student revolts of the 1960s, in which he was very implicated, Lerner and friends are asking why society has been moving to the right in an on-going investigation (interviewing more than 10.000 people over the last 35 years). Their findings: there’s a spiritual crisis in the United States and only the right is addressing it.

He explains: many people spend a good amout of their time at work, or on their way to work, or being educated or trained for a job, and the values that shape those places are competition and individualism. And while many people are unhappy with the situation and feel it’s a waste of time, of their life, they also feel that there is not much that can be changed – this is ‘the real world’. A world where other possible values and beliefs count less and where one is made to forget about the other as an embodiment of the sacred. Through naming the spiritual crisis, the right offers people some kind of recognition for things they experience. They also offer their usual solution of turning to the demeaned ‘other’ of society to blame. At the same time the right is the champion of self-interest and materialism, but it gets away with that contradiction because the left is unable to speak to the spiritual crisis. For the left spirituality or religion is either understood as new age flackery or as a codeword for sexism, racism or homophobia. But the left doesn’t have any intellectual categories that capture and speak to the realm of spirit.

What Lerner proposes, is a new bottom-line in which love, care, ecological responsibility, awe and radical amazement at the universe are central. Which subsequently radically questions capitalism and its notions of productivity, efficiency and rationality (what would those mean if love, care and ecological responsibility are taken into account?). The need to create a language that articulates different left-wing struggles together in a wider vision in which love, care and generosity are central. That implies, he insisted, that the left gets over its religiofobia. Remaining convinced that the others around us are stupid, irrational and backward, is not exactely going to get a broken left wing very far…

The Veterans Memorial Building was packed and the audience loved Lerner. J’ai bien aimé ce qu’il a dit, mais il y quand-même une question de style, qui me pouse à penser plus profondément aux différences entre ici et ‘back home’ (which by now has come to mean a peculiar configuation and selection of spaces in Europe, Maria a déjà suggeré qu’il faut demander à Harrisson de faire une carte de ‘mon’ Europe), surtout que tout le domaine de la réligion et spiritualité et la question de la sécularité et laicité est quand-même un marqeur de différence entre ces deux espaces. A suivre…

movements Tikkun | Network of Spiritual Progressives
articles Hostile Takeover: Theocracy in America

where’s the love?

Valentine has been all over the place ever since i arrived here in january. Red everywhere (mostly in shops of course), hearts, announcement of activities… i was sure i’d be ranting about love and capitalism and consumerism in this space today, but that was before we joined the Student Worker Coalition for Justice (SWCJ). Now i can write you about love and justice. SWCJ joined the AFSCEME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) union in a rally today to demand higher wages for the custodians cleaning and taking care of the campus. Where’s the love drew attention to the fact that wages of custodians on campus are less than in neighboring colleges, that these are not living wages at all, and that the university has a lot to account for with the scandal about manager’s wages and corruption plus the raise in tuition fees. (of course, the state and federal goverments also have a lot to account for, with the cuts in money for education – that wasn’t really mentioned). A big broken heart with messages from custodians and students was given to a representative of the Chancellor.

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Where’s the love action. Got Valentine’s Love or Exploitation?
Did you know that UC custodians make two dollars less than custodians at Cabrillo college and Montery State?
And, UC custodians earn wages that could not meet basic needs for a single adult with a child.
Also, student fees have gone up by 8-10%.
And what is the Chancellor doing about the rampant corruption amongst UC administrators.
Let’s have a happy valentine’s day by demanding that the Chancellor start implementing some justice and start paying a living wage to the workers on campus.

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Même s’il n’y avait pas beaucoup de monde, l’alliance entre les gardiens et les étudiants était beau et fort. N’empêche que une manif dans ce campus au milieu de la forêt m’a fait une drôle d’impression… Inevitablement j’ai du penser aux mots de Kristy – que cette université a été construit (avec le “mauvais example” de Berkeley en tête) de telle manière que la possibilité de révoltes soit reduite. Maria a fait un peu de recherche, et apparement c’est plus compliqué que ca, mais reste qu’il n’y ait pas vraiment de centre, pas de “coeur” au campus et que pour la manif on a marché de la bibliothèque jusqu’au batiment du recteur (un peu caché dans la forêt) avec seulement les redwoods comme nos témoins.

where i was from

didion3.JPG Before i left, my father gave me Joan Didion’s book on her homeland California. I began reading it on the plane to San Francisco now more than a month ago, continued some of it on the Greyhound bus to San Francisco two weeks ago, and finished it last week here in Santa Cruz. I’ve been reading it in an attempt to understand more of the soul of this place, and there seems to be a very similar impulse in Didion’s writing. Her starting point is the story of her ancestors moving west – a family history which parallels that of the United States. Going west, the belief in starting all over again.

“Two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes, the cutting clear which was to have redeemed them all.” This was the crossing story as origin myth, the official history as I had learned it.

Didion revisits these pioneer myths and their American mystique – her writing moves slowly making their dark sides palpable, dissecting underlying notions of “clean cuts”, freedom, individualism and greed. More from book her later on, for now this thought about the break, the cut, and its promise of a new world:

From what exactely was “the break” or “the void” or “the cutting clean” to have redeemed them? From their Scotch-Irish genes? From the idealization that had alchemized the luckless of Wales and Scotland and Ireland into classless western yeomen? From the confusions that led both Jack London and The Valley of the New Moon‘s Saxon Brown to claim the special rights they believed due to them as “old American stock”? Or were they to have been redeemed from the break itself, the “cutting clean”, “the void”?

the gardener

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It’s usually dark outside when i jot down something for this blog.

As i wrote this week to a part of my brussels family, it works like this:

j’ai commencé un petit blog, au début j’étais un peu incomfortable avec l’idée que ce soit quelque chose que les autres gens lisent, mais tout doucement cette idée commence à me plaire. souvent c’est le soir avant de dormir que j’écrive quelque chose qui me passe dans la tête, qui me préoccupe, sur lequel j’ai fait une petite recherche pour comprendre un peu mieux cet environnement social. et ce sont toujours des moments dans lesquels je pense avec beaucoup d’intensité à tout(/s) ce(s) monde(s) ‘back home’. le soir avant de dormir, c’est comme une petite prière, non?

But now i’m writing you while bathing in the sunlight of this beautiful sunday afternoon. This is how our garden looks like when we’re doing all the housework. And i was the gardener this morning, clearing and preparing a piece of earth for the prairie flower seeds Maria will sow soon.

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feminist mafias

Quelle bonheur hier soir, sheer happiness, the dinner with our new friends Berna and Feza. He’s a maths professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, she’s a graduate student in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz writing her dissertation on Nurcu (in Turkey). Good food and good music (Kardes Turkuler, Aynur, Crossing the Brigde…) and much more to share, including the feeling (at least for three of us, pauvre Maria…) of not “earthing” (a literal translation of the beautiful flemish expression “aarden”) in this place. The way the public sphere is done (or rather not done, undone, broken, eaten away…), the reign of individualism… A grand theory in the making: it’s all the fault of protestantism (remember how they are to blame for capitalism as well?). And by coincidence this slightly crude and perhaps not totally fair hypothesis maps precisely on the fault-line between the places where i’ve managed to make homes thus far and where not… Oh well, what a relief to laugh it all away in good company. Which holds the promise of another kind of home, with a shared laughing away of what makes a space so difficult to inhabit.

connections.JPG All of this embedded in another coincidence which isn’t one. The Connections, la famille, la Cosa Nostra – feminist style. Berna found the beautiful house near the ocean through meeting Bettina in Santa Cruz and realising that they had been together at IFU. In the information project area, meaning we had some friends in common (Isabel, Seda,… ). Soon after that we elaborated on the Amargi connection (Pinar, Yesim,… ). Then came the NOISE summerschool connection (Meyda…). Feminist mafias of some kind. To new friendships and old connections.