crossing

The day to cross the Mississipi. The bridge is down on the 80 and a gentleman with a pleasant toothless smile sits at the last rest stop before the river to help travelers who are confused by the detour. He sits and reads a book with cowboys. He knocks on my window and generously insists I come with him into the little rest area house so he can show me where we are on a map.
Iowa
on the verge of east.

The day gives some resistance.
Road and mind traffic.

nebraska, flat line

Destination Lincoln. The snow makes the day feel out of time. Black coffee, the flat of white covered grain or when you can see a light storm stretched out to the horizon, the weight of it, straight road, backtrack to I-80, the weight and non-stop of it. Don't close your eyes when you're driving. Snow or sleet or rain or the afternoon or a gas station in the middle of nowhere with the keys locked in the car standing in the freezing in flip flops because you can't feel the gas with your toes when you wear shoes, and even though they are too small, you can slip the shoes against the souls of your feet that like to feel themselves against the accelerator and you can set the pump to automatically feed gas into your engine while you reach over the seat to look for the perfect object to leave behind. It's already the case that the door is locked and you put the gas pump back in its little hanger so it can rest.

A man who works in the gas station wants to help. He bends a coathook like he's giving my car an abortion, jimmies the window away from the frame and tries to catch the lock inside with the handle. The lock won't turn. He calls a locksmith.The locksmith has to consult a book and I think, man, I am here in the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold and this guy has no idea what he's doing. He keeps having to pull out different tools because the lock won't turn. After, maybe an hour, he tries, out of complete frustration, to turn the lock the opposite way. And of course, the door opens. I told him to turn the lock the wrong way. That's why it took so long out in the cold. I'm fascinated by my arrogance. What is it in me that doesn't trust that people in a strange place have their own knowledge?

I've been listening to Toni Morrison's A Mercy.

All I do in Los Angeles is drive around and listen to Toni Morrison and wonder what could be the purpose of living. I've been thinking about her much because when I graduated from undergrad in May of 2001, she was the commencement speaker. It really stuck with me because she talked to us for real. She told us, the eager, hungover 21 year old crowd in plastic white gowns ready for beginning, we were inheriting a broken world. And that it wasn't our job to save it; just don't hurt it anymore. And I've been thinking much the last 10 years what that looks like. The generation charged with keeping very still. I think it has something to do with compassion (like this - If it's not apathy, not turning away, it suggests an impossible compassion. How can one be present to broken-ness in helplessness? In vulnerability? As if there were another way to be present...) but I'm not sure.

Her writing is hard and hypnotic and sad, an in-the-body sad. she writes around holes. And after listening to her writing, I hear something uglier and unbearable in her request that I didn't see before. Because I think I've been carrying around this feeling like "don't hurt it anymore" becomes a kind of saving, but in her writing, the release is more complicated. Like Beloved where the bottomless needy thing is not defeated or free at the end of the book. The characters survive her, but she is still, still in the river. She could come back. She needs to come back. She has a remembering that is needed. And the forgetting of her is a violence. There is no not-hurting in the world. For what, then, does one live? And her writing feels like a spending time with this question in the direction of greater complexity that comes with intimate relationships and away from answers.

So, this book, A Mercy, is set in colonial America. The project involves showing an America that might not have happened. A messier time where everyone was an entrepreneur trying to pull something off - how to grow food in an unfamiliar soil, what crops would make you rich if you had a lot of land, making a family with unfamiliar people... it could not work out. It could so easily not have happened at all. It also involves writing a world where the concept of slavery becomes separate from race - the lived reality of white indentured servants- who do not have the piece of paper that says when their service is complete, of women who are wived, of a free black man's accusation to a young slave woman who loves him that she is a slave because she has come to know herself as a slave in her mind. In the world of this book, slavery is an oil slick surface coating everything and there are perpetrators and victims but there is no freedom. The concept - slavery - some kind of sad thing - with its own life and power - some kind of sad thing - cannot be contained in a person. Only it is sad.

I visit Lincoln. I have coffee at the quirky and quality coffee shop, The Mill, with my CalArts classmate Joel Egger, who is working to start a for-profit arts and eating place in and for Lincoln. Responding to the need for sustainable and local art making. Stay tuned for greatness...

In the parking lot on my way out, I get a phone call from the woman who I met in the Denver art museum. She's driving this way and we agree to split a hotel room and stay up til 3 talking about our books on tape and Israel. She lived there as a teenager and she says there is a church, one building, that at least 5 different religious groups consider a holy site so everyday the church is a house for a different worships. Same house. So much room for god.

what are you calling the world?

I made it to Denver.

I'm visiting my friend Steve Kelly. He's a Buddhist priest in the process of converting to Judaism. The local rabbi gave him a list of instructions - what being Jewish looks like. The first thing on the list was to support the nation-state of Israel's right to exist. I'm not trying to argue that Israel has no right to exist. That feels heartless. What does supporting a nation-state's right to exist look like, thousands of miles away in a Denver studio? What does it have to do with the work of finding god? One thing I imagine: it could be a metaphor that you believe there is a space in the world for you, your people, god.

I've been listening in the car, to a lecture series on 20th century democracy. The woman - I don't remember her name, blonde, she lectures somewhere near San Diego and there's this canned clapping that starts each of the lectures that puzzles me every time I hear it - she says that the nation state as the standard for political unit became institutionalized in a new way at the end of WW1 in the Paris Peace Talks (Here, the Charter for the League of Nations was ratified because Wilson believed, "A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.") This was in January 1919. She says that close following this meeting, April 1919, there was a large demonstration for independence in India where a British commander ordered soldiers to fire point blank into the crowd until the bullets ran out, the Amritsar massacre. She says a gesture of recognizing self-determining nation-state as sanctified next to a gesture of denying the right to express the desire for nation through extreme brutality - colors the lived experience of this word (nation) in the 20th century. The promise and the denial on the same breath.

Is there space for all of it?

We journey to the Denver Museum of Modern Art. The museum has an exhibit on Africa where they are looking at ways of re-framing Africa as a place in the world intimately connected to the US. Their curatorial strategies include placing artifacts in unconventional cases - they don't feel like looking through a window, they are shaped to create a feeling of vertigo - like the object inside is hurtling at you. They include artist names or "artist unknown" for all pieces. Art by someone who makes art. Not natural history. They have chairs where you can sit and listen to African music or American music influenced by African music (jazz, gospel...) while you spend time with art. They have a video on the rituals involved in making - some piece - what is it- ruining. story. ah! - also, they have contemporary pieces next to older pieces - like the one in the photo above - a tapestry constructed out of the tops of liquor bottles. On the whole, a useful project respectfully executed. Although to be honest, I think a little tame in its demonstration of interconnectedness. It's still a little African room in a giant modern art museum.

A woman overhears us deliberating on restaurants for dinner and asks for a recommendation. Turns out she too is driving across the country - from SF to DC. We exchange cards. Maybe we will meet again.

We go to Blockbuster which is selling bags of candy in the form of fake blood and we rent a movie with Keanu Reeves about good and evil and saving the world and it snows. It snows in May.

After Wendover

After Wendover, driving. Pure and simple. Until the rain starts. Snow in the elevation. Or hail. I can't see. I can't see the white lanes on the roads. I pull over. I drive. I pull over. I drive. Finally, I stop in a rest area. It's freezing. The little thermometer in my car says so. I have a car full of things. I have blankets.

In the truck stop, I sleep fitfully. There are two other cars here and a line of trucks. When I wake up again and again in the night, they comfort me. Each time I wake up, I see the face of someone I know and a feeling - yes, you can love this person. And I dream, I dream that I am traveling on this summer trip to Rwanda with my teacher and he asks - are you ready? Are you sure you can do this? Something about this question has never occurred to me before. Not, are you willing? Yes. Yes. I'm willing. Can you do it? I run my mind through the dramaturgy of the trip. Different ways to be still with a memory that is very sad. Or letting in room, more room, to see everything alive now: politics, economy, entrepreneurs, delicious food, bus rides. A cacophony of presence. In the dream I don't want to answer this question, which is a dead give away for the answer: no. No.
As if I am not able to be alive.

What is that?

Trucks parked still in fog. Truckers sleep. Cold.

King talks about this. At a time when he was receiving death threats and reckoning with prioritizing his vocation or his life. He talks about how we can strive with our selves towards a thing - being part of a particular family, or ending racial injustice in America - and we can want it the way we want breathing, it can be the substance of our hearts, and still we never touch it with our hands. I do not understand what to do with the size of this disappointment. King says, inability to live, contained in life. Not a thing that pulls you out of it. King says thank god we have hearts to put something beautiful in.

Only...


At the dirt of dawn before the sun, before the real dawn, I am driving to Denver.

Center for Land Use Interpretation, or how I learned to love the land

Woke up.
Discovered a mountain white and blinding out the window. Surprise!
Mountain!
(It looked bigger in person.)

One thing I like about the morning is that you realize mountains and also you realize all the stupid things you did the day before. I think I sent an email to everyone on this summer trip to East Africa listserv about how King has me thinking about racism as the opposite of experimentation. He's responding to the "separate but equal" slogan that clothed the inequality of racial segregation. The guy who reads it has such delight quoting King's "There is no such thing as separate but equal." Which, I think, King follows through to question the concept of "separate" (and especially its associations with race in America). He is clearly not naive in recognizing differences of lived experience, but I think he had deep questions for institutionalizing practices that divided people growing out of separate water fountains, separate schools, out of the time at the airport where he was asked to sit alone in his own section because everyone else on the plane was white and it made him sad. Against that, he's proposing a well-organized and awkward anarchy. A kind of figuring out, from the historically shaped truth of where you are in the moment, how to be present to others and how to work collectively toward a greater good. Something beautiful about the size of that work... you could spend your life on that.

Anyway, I'm so glad I can be the inarticulate white girl sharing theories on racism via email to a listserv. King talks about meeting Kennedy running for president and he remarks that Kennedy was intellectually invested in civil rights, but not yet emotionally invested. I think it's useful to be curious. But it's not the only way to engage the world. What is the system of power that helps me to feel comfortable to impulsively share my unformed and not felt through ideas? Anyway, am of no use.

I am trying to change the subject in my mind so I put on a CD in the car that Jubilith gave me by Ada Mendoza. She's an experimental guitarist who, in this record, uses popular songs as places to hang out in, take wrong turns, stop at historic markers, admire vistas. An inspiration for travelers at how to move playfully.

I am driving to Wendover, Utah. A small town across the border and a timezone from Wendover, Nevada and the home of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. It's an old school operation " Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived." They have a center in Wendover for artist residencies and it happens to be that two artists are beginning residency this afternoon and founder Matt Coolidge has graciously invited me to accompany the tour.

My afternoon at CLUI could be a novel. Am taken up by the place and by Matt Coolidge's pervasive personableness and his patience for complicated connectedness.

According to Matt, tumbleweed is actually Russian.

CLUI's main residences are located next to a big hanger where they held the planes that test dropped replicas of the atomic bombs before dropping the real bombs. Apparently, this is something that happens here. There is a fake German town designed by Eric Mendelsohn, apparently a famous architect! no relation - somewhere in Utah, built for practice bombing Germany in WW2.

Wendover, Nevada has a casino and an airport where the casinos fly people in - from Salt Lake City - and buses them to the airport. As if nowhere. Nowhere run by workers from Mexico.

The airport has so many flights for the casinos that they got a whole lot of money from the government and they built a museum. In the museum is the most accurate model of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki made over the course of 10 years in the spare time of a truckdriver. And he took it to a convention and had the original pilots sign it. And something interesting here is that it's a document of camaraderie - a moment where these men celebrated their doing a thing together, and having it acknowledged in this personal way by the truck driver. It feels like a weird moment to walk into, given the sad thing, given the towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the people who lived in them. I also feel the people in the museum/airport office are so friendly. I hope they like me/us and give us the key to go exploring on their land.

CLUI has a residence inside military land. This one is hardcore with a compost toilet and a special bike to ride to pick up water. This is where my friends Jen Hofer and Rob Ray stayed and made some art. Once there was a residency that coincided with an army practice - for a thing, that I don't remember and so am ruining the story - and the military gave them clearance to hold an artist residency in the space anyway, saying I understand you have a job. And we have a job. Just don't go any higher than 10 feet off the ground cause you'll get fried by radio waves.

The land is beautiful. Salt hard and blank. And used for target practice.

I am skipping the part about the real fake plane from ConAir, the Russian housing units full of abandoned artifacts for the men who came over to inspect nuclear disarmament, the bunkers, the strip joint that served alcohol next to the strip joint that had full nudity and the window between them, even the salt flats themselves, the miles of white nothing that don't look like distance and a rose petal lying by itself on the salt.

It's getting late, but Matt pulls up into a pot ash processing plant. The plant pumps water full of pot ash out of the salt flats and brings it here. We drive where we're not supposed to, down a small road, up a small dirt hill that levels out onto - not what I expected. Thin blue aqua as far as the eye can see, cut by a dirt road. Inside aqua, the growing grey of the clouds. I never imagined industry as ... beautiful.

It reminds me, at the start of the day, we pass a truck full of copper ore - bound to China, Matt tells us. He knows the route it takes too and the amount of round trips this particular truck makes every day from the mine to the train, was it? Sara, a documentary photographer who likes to take pictures of paintball parks, comments about the ravaging of the world. Of standing inside the hole of a copper mine. The shocking ugliness of hole. Sure, Matt says, but you like wiring, right? You like electricity? The shock of that hole, yes, but think of how much copper comes out and what it can do. And perhaps the shock itself is a gift. An aesthetic experience true to the world in which we live.

When we arrive back at the base. It is already 5pm. Maybe 6. I get confused because of the time switch. I am meant to be in Denver, 10 hours away, tomorrow morning, and I'm excited to do something hard and to be here. I'm excited to be nowhere.

Day 3: fake money, real snow, Nevada

So, my grandmother cooks delicious pancakes for breakfast. Thin, like crepes. The kind my father cooked every sunday when I was growing up.
580. Birmingham. Thin windy cave like road in Berkeley. A eulogy. Martin Luther King Blvd. I park and my friend Jubilith gets out of the car in front of me where she has been practicing a speech for tomorrow when her company, Theater of Yugen, opens for a visiting Japanese Noh performance. We are early and I, by pure coincidence have parked behind her. We sit in Jubilith's car like teenagers discovering freedom at the lightening speed of technological progress in a midcentury melodrama, even though we are not.

Then, the Tibetan teahouse. The religious have set up stalls of delicious food - mango sticky rice, papaya salad, pad thai, roasted squash, curries, an overwhelm of food. The monks and nuns cannot handle money so you have to trade your money for special coins to pay for the food. And then all the guests sit together on benches and broad tables in the middle of the courtyard and talk about going away.

The Sierra Mountains, mist, is that snow? yes that's snow. the mountain top. on the mountain top. Decent into night. The night. Flat night. Asher calls, my brother. Parked on the pitchdark shoulder of the highway with a bad connection. We are struggling with our dad getting remarried because it confuses our sense of family - how to maintain a relationship with our mom who is so still and a relationship with our dad who is moving, moving. How do we relate to both of them? There are no cars here on the nighttime highway in Nevada so it feels safe.

Driving.

I splurge for a motel 6 a few hours from Wendover.

Day 2

grapevine
mlk
livermore

oneonta to el paso to 50th street to figueroa to the 110S to the 5N past Santa Clarita into the grapevine.

Last week, I went to an installation at LA's Center for Land Use Interpretation that outlined histories and points of interest along the grapevine, reclaiming transition as a space to be, not just a space to pass through. In the ribbon between the north and south bound 5, paintball. Here's where the ruin of the old and considerably more windy road intersects with the present highway. The white pipes for water bound for the desert of Los Angeles sliding up the flammable grass hills. There's a sense in the inherited myth of the American roadtrip that one is setting out alone and into another time. Into a past rootedness or a free future. But Coolidge proposes the grapevine is a designed space for passing through, like LAX. Another place, with a human history. Not a no-place...here is Grover...here is hills with dry grass the wind bends...here is solitude that I carry inside myself...

On this trip, I plan to listen to these books on tape: an autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., a series of lectures on the struggle over democracy in the 20th century, Toni Morrison's A Mercy. Central question: what does the word nation mean to you, emily?

The grapevine empties out into a straight line pointing a hazy north. It moves me that King has an essential belief in the dignity of people, all people. The sense I get from his description of his work in organizing in Montgomery, in Selma, in Birmingham, in Memphis is that he has fallen deeply in love with the event of a community, a people, engaged in a remarkable act of self-discovery. He's directing, in a paraphrase of his words, an act of standing up - because no one can walk on your back unless your back is bent. He talks about standing in the church in Montgomery where the community decided on the bus boycott to protest segregated seating - and that the feeling in that room - the faces looking back at him, decided faces - that no historian or sociologist would ever be able to describe what it felt like to be in that room. Some living thing and King had fallen in love.

a sign for peaches, the hills on the right fall away, soon the smell of cow shit

King mentions more than once the image of faces in crowds. He has this one story where he's in this meeting with some intractable business men - where? I think Birmingham?- and they go out for a lunch break and standing outside the building are a sea of strong faces, backs straight, meeting their gaze. Undismissable. The business community come back from lunch ready to negotiate and one man says "Well, we ought to be able to work something out."

The shock I experience hearing this story makes me notice a readiness in my mind to paint people without political power into a strict position of victim-hood, as without agency. It has something to do with my understanding of individuality, (which is?) . King's work suggests another way of framing action and agency, a collective action, that I am interested in...

King says, "The kingdom of god is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis that reconciles the truths of both."I don't understand. What is the truth of collective enterprise? What is the kingdom of god? I don't really have a picture for this. Maybe not a place without problems. Maybe a space where god is.

in the black of coffee, night; Gandhi's hand full of salt

Where are you?

Livermore, CA. I visit my grandparents. We go out for sushi and I learn that they designed some of their own furniture - one is a coffee table mosaic of Mt. Fuji that they made by hand when they lived in Hiroshima. We watch the 1944 film To Have and To Have Not where an American loner learns to stand up for a cause (in an echo of America's decision to enter global politics in WW2) and the nation learns to love Lauren Bacall. I sleep sound in a couch full of mice.

Mt. Washington, Los Angeles

Day 1

Packing. Planet Aid. Jewish Summer Camps.

The goal is to fit everything I own in the back of my Subaru and drive to Connecticut. The day has dissolved into a river of tasks. To put in boxes. To lean heavy box against pelvis and carry down buoyant wood stairs to car. To go to bank. To Western Union deposit to Uganda. To drop off two bags of clothes to GoodWill.

They are mom's clothes. I took them home from CT, where they hang familiarly in my closet. I don't wear them. I put them in white plastic bags and load them in the car. I have googled a local goodwill. Only when I drive there, I find a boarded up building. 20 minutes from the day of tasks. I have to race home to sell my book shelf. On my way, I pass a yellow bin with "Planet Aid" painted on. Thank goodness. I pull over the car. I open the trunk, I pull out the garbage bags full of clothes. I dump them in the aid bin. I drive away. It is strange to me that I have just sent clothes to the "developing world" in a way that looked and felt like throwing away garbage.

I know that aid can be problematic. While it can meet immediate need, donated clothing also can take work away from local clothing makers and sustain a cycle of dependency. And, on a personal level, I wonder what small affect it has on the psyche to be wearing used clothing from another culture. Not even looking at the back narrative of colonization, but just the slight remove of purpose from function. I don't know.

I had this dream over the summer on the bus from Kigali to Uganda where, in the dream, so many people had died and their clothes were all being removed to give away and in the dream there was something sad about the break in continuity. That the people who inherit these clothes won't know anything about the lives that once filled them. The clothes are rendered impersonal. So, I suppose it is my own sadness that I attend to after throwing bags of my mother's clothes in the Planet Aid bin. My own sadness as I prepare to drive home.

This trip is prep for a project that I am doing in Uganda. A play that wrestles with foreign aid and the politics that keep us from seeing each other as human. By my partner in graduate crime, Uganda playwright Deborah Asiimwe.

Deborah asked me last year what does "nation" mean to you? I was trying to articulate why go to Uganda now - they have a presidential election coming up. It's contentious. The same man Museveni has been in power for 25 years. Political opposition grows. Tension between indigenous nation autonomy and state autonomy grows. Implications of corruption. Worries over whether the elections will be fair. I imply, well, democracy is at stake here. Can Uganda have a leadership turnover through the voting booth? Deborah bristles at the unspoken concern that Uganda will become another failed nation-state in Africa.

She writes:
What happens when over 40 nations (the ones popularly known as "tribes") are forced to merge into one "nation" under a system of governance that is unfamiliar? Can one really call that a nation? What happens to the smaller nations that find themselves under the mighty foot of the bigger nations? What does the word "nation" mean to you, Emily?

It's a good question.

Meanwhile, packing. Putting things in my car somehow seems to take all day. The whole of it. My neighbor walks by and voices his concern about leaving this car full of things on the street all night. He offers me to leave the car in his carport. We get to talking. He's a photographer. He tells me about an exhibit he's working on. Photographs of abandoned Jewish summer camps. He's interested in the sadness in these spaces - reminiscent of the impact of AIDS on the joy-of-life gay community in the 80s. And he says that the photographs often evoke, in a way he didn't intend, associations with Nazi concentration camps. He wonders, what does it mean that this one sad image - genocide - is layered into all other images of loss in the Jewish consciousness now?

Meanwhile, packing. My stuff doesn't fit in the car. I have one of those heroic epiphanies that climax coming of age movies, which in itself is not a big deal. That's just the rhythm of my thinking. I'm working on some serious geometry problems in the inside of my car and I remember this one box mom had in her room where she kept "valuable things". Travelers checks. A fancy rock. And the program for her play that I directed when I was in college. Why is this image in my mind now? And I thought, it's not the things that she cared for. It's me. And it's writing. The work of creating. How do you care for that?

Sometimes the only thing you can do is make space.

There's something I think that bears looking closer at... something about the work of creating continuity and the danger of symbols that make loss visible can also - you can mistake them for the living thing. Maybe it's a good thing for clothes to become impersonal. Maybe the personal is something... not so visible.