Alright alright it took a while, but I finally have my selection of pictures from my spring break or Semana Santa travels. They involved a beach, Montañita, which isn’t pictured, because it was really populated and I was afraid of my camera getting stolen while swimming. I then went to Machala very briefly, stayed in a hotel for one night. The next stop was a couple days in Vilcabamba, Ecuador’s very own Valley of Longevity, where inhabitants are said to be 150+ years old. Then it was up north to the third-largest city in Ecuador, Cuenca, a beautiful colonial town with a great cultural feel. The picture on the right was done by a Cuencan artist. I then made quick stops in Riobamba, Cajabamba (too small to have a Wiki link), and Latacunga. Check out the pictures on my Flickr page, you can just click on the column on the right side. Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, not sure if anyone is reading any more since I’ve not written in quite some time. I apologize for that. Anyway, if you are reading, you will see that I have 3 small poems here for you to read. Hopefully I can bring back my readership with some more posts!

1

My home is an umbrella full of wine.
I invite people over,
they think I’m an alcoholic,
but I just like the way it feels on my feet.

2

There is a circle in the sand
and I can’t step inside.
Really, it is no circle, but an orange.
I cannot eat it, it is rotten.
So I put it on the floor, and step on it.
Problem solved.

3

I think the word “bye” will
soon be replaced with the word “buy,”
so that when you are leaving a friend,
they will be subtly encouraging you to spend money.
My advice:
Only hang out with people that say “see you later.”

Here is the Final Version:

In the political discourse of today’s United States, nobody is saying anything. Whether we are watching TV news media, reading the New York Times, or talking to a buddy, we are exposed to the near-mathematically calculated game of exchange. “How many times can we use ‘freedom’ without overdoing it? Would it be outdated or effective to call our opponent a ‘communist?’ Is ‘progressive’ a positive or negative word right now?” Or even in more every-day discussion: “this is just another typical leftist/conservative/liberal argument.” We might get more complicated: “Stop with your neo-con/neo-liberal/socialist/hyper-capitalist ranting.” But these exchanges do not affect our lives. This language is not created out of a human need or desire to describe or answer – it only lives within the structure of the word game. If we continue to argue within these boundaries, we will never be able to escape them. We are stuck using the same words and describing the same things. Continuing to use these absurdities prevents us from challenging and criticizing the undesirable world we live in, because we are fundamentally using its language. George Orwell identified this a while ago in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language (excuse the anachronistic masculine language),

“A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.”

This piece is an effort to figure out how we can get out of this cycle.

Where does this hollow blabbering originate? We, as the willers of language, have allowed these words to pass by without nuance or criticism. What once signified that we have the power to remake the world anew now evokes little more than images of crazed college students hurling Molotov Cocktails at police: ‘Revolution.’ We once used ‘Progressive’ to demonstrate that the world we live in does not have to be accepted as is. It is now just as ideologically limited as the conservatism it once fought. ‘Freedom’ was once a disagreement between differing conceptions. Now we all share in its lack of meaning.

So how can we overcome the empty talk and start discussing our political lives in a way that inspires action? The traditional method used to combat the buzz-game is the establishment of a view that is “unbiased.” The trend in political discussion today is to appeal to a sort of objective, supra-worldly lexicon. The doctrine here is that it is better to be accurate, fair, and balanced before opinionated, controversial, and critical. However, this understanding results in inapplicable language. Such umbrella terminology is so wide that it fails to describe anything at all, when the reality of our lives shows that some of us get wet while others don’t. The key to fruitful discussion is admittance of bias and difference that will allow us to describe particular political realities.

Take a look at this shot from a CNN debate over the role of the Latino vote in the upcoming beaten-to-death-for-2-years-now race for the ’08 presidency

Both of these poor political analysts are trapped in boxes from which they cannot escape. ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are asserted here as absolute terms with clear boundaries. Asserted as a comprehensive representation of political views.

This language operates as if we can all agree on its meaning. The debaters are careful to not mention anything the least bit controversial – no opinions are exchanged whatsoever. They are appealing to a political language that does not leave room for disagreement. Tony Harris, on the left (literally speaking, his politics are in every way indiscernible), wears a knowing smirk and turns the floor to the other debater after a certain amount of time. This unbiased mediator says even less than the nothing his debaters are spouting.

But what relationship does this lack of controversy have to the above-mentioned objective political lexicon? For when we are appealing to something objective, something agreed upon, we are free from really explaining, understanding, or in this case, defining it. We don’t explain the table right in front of us, we say “look at the table.” In this way, via objectivity, we are exempt from nuanced definition. George Orwell’s identification of this trend hasn’t apparently done much to help us prevent it. Even in 1946, he demonstrated that “prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” Using the notion that this tacking together can apply to language is like pulling the plug on our already ailing political system. Ideas cannot be pointed to. They must be understood and expressed. The political culture we live in would like to say, “Look at the freedom.”

Strive for democracy, fight for equality, struggle against oppression, challenge hate, enforce accountability, advocate honesty, foster awareness. As advocates of social change and justice, we feel like these phrases mean something to us but don’t have any real effect on our actions. We have not been exercising our will as human beings, as havers-of-discussions, to create a lexicon that has real implications on the real world. Words should have the goal of inspiring action, not prolonging debate.

What do we want the world to look like, what is in the way of that potentiality, and what do we have to do to get there? These are the real questions, to be answered with the language that is most appropriate, not simply that which we are accustomed to hearing and using. If we desire social betterment, let us create a vocabulary that describes and defends it. I have chosen ‘describe’ for its allusion to language, and ‘defend’ for its allusion to physical action. The lexicon should do both. Let us reopen the channels of conversation, of discussion, in order to inspire action. Next time you are watching CNN, reading the New York Times, or even having a discussion, refuse the bullshit. It’s not getting us anywhere.

Kant imagined and advocated a world in which each person was considered and treated as an “end.” He called this the “Kingdom of Ends” (he was always a sucker for epic names, I mean it doesn’t get much more bold than Critique of Pure Reason). In this Kingdom of Ends, each and every life would be considered an end in itself, rather than a means to something else. Thus, none cane be used as slaves, none can be cheated; their lives must be respected as ultimate goals.

Herbert Marcuse also puts this nicely in his famous New Left text One-Dimensional Man: “Life as a means is qualitatively different from life as an end.” And I’ve been thinking about this. Are our lives carried out for the sake of something else? Should they be? What does it mean to live your life as a life? Or to treat others’ lives as lives?

It seems to me that this requires contextualization, a stressing of process over product. The Hegelian idea of the seed never realizing its reality until it grows into a tree and dies, the idea that the world is not “what is?” but “what has been and what is happening?” still holds its magical quality. But I think Kant was too tied up in his enlightenment rationality, his political liberalism, to understand what he was saying. Sure, nobody should be the means to another, nobody should be a sacrifice, but for what reason does “means” imply this sadistic individualism, a relation of one to another only?

To me, a life should be a means: a means to the creation of the human world. What would our lives be like in the Kingdom of Ends? Who would we love? What language would we speak? No, that is not the human world. The human world is an infinitely changing aggregate of potentiality. Each human life is simultaneously a past and a future. This does not end. We cannot treat lives as ends, because lives do not end.

What does this world look like? Quito buses have two employees, in East Lansing there is one. The human world looks like the former. The latter lives his life, is treated as an end in himself. “We don’t want to exploit you. We will give you a job, pay you, we want you to live your own life, and live it well.” The East Lansing bus driver is limited to an existence as an end. It’s not bad, he does live his own life, and lives it well, but he can never be a means to the creation of the human world. He does not realize that any of the day’s events he might go home to tell necessarily involved the lives of others.
–“Big accident today on Grand River.”
–“Anyone hurt?
–“Don’t think so.”
–“Lucky then.”
–“Yeah, guess so.”

But the questioning stops at the end. “Anyone hurt?” Anyone sad? Why weren’t they focusing on the road? Were they drunk? In a hurry? Just stupid? Did they just realize they actually loved the person they just broke up with? Were they convinced that if they drove fast enough and with enough conviction, the car would fly? What is our world without these stories?

The Quito bus driver knows this world, and knows it well. He has a partner. The money-taking, destination-shouting, sign-changing auxiliary bus maverick. The two talk constantly The bus driver goes home with a much different story to tell.
–“Andrés estuvo diciéndome que tu madre está enferma.”
–“Ay, ¿que pasó?”
–“Creen que cáncer pulmonar. Ella fuma montón. Él me dijo que ella nunca fumaba hasta su esposo murió hace veinte años, y desde entonces, siempre tiene un tobaco.”
–“Pobrecita. ¿Que dijiste a él?”
–“No mucho, no sabía que decir. Solo le escuchaba.”
–“Pobrecita.”
–“Pobrecita, si.”

(Translation)
–“Andrés was telling me that his mother is sick.”
–“Oh no, what happened?”
–“They think it’s lung cancer. She smokes a ton. He told me she never smoked until her husband died twenty years ago, and since then, she always has a cigarette.”
–“Poor thing. What did you say to him?”
–“Nothing much, I didn’t know what to say. I just listened to him.”
–“Poor thing.”
–“Yeah, poor thing.”

And that is our world. An interaction between potentialities rather than a collection of realities. When we treat people’s lives as ends, as real rather than potential, product rather than process, this world is lost. There are no new stories to tell. Only old memories with weird changes over time and an alienation from the events they describe.

I want to live in the human world, where my life story is important to strangers and theirs to me. A world where feelings are valuable and exposed and described, not hidden. There is no physical thing in the way of that goal. Let me tell you a story about myself. Tell me a story about yourself. Welcome to the world.

Hey everyone, sorry I haven’t posted in a little while. I have put up a bunch of new pictures from some traveling I did to the beach and so on, I put up the ones I like the most. Check them out, toss up some comments if you like. I will be writing something more soon, I’ve got a few ideas. In the mean time, though, my amateur photography skills can replace my amateur writing skills. You can see small previews of the most recent 10 on the right side of this page, and if you click you will be transported via internet technology to my flickr account. Have fun.

Also, I have here a nice little video of some foosball, played by my host brother Fernando and our friend Gabriel. We were playing in our hotel on the beach, overlooking the water.

In the Spanish language, the words for “to wait” and “to hope” are one in the same: “esperar.” I think this might explain a lot of the cultural differences found here.

‘Esperar’ comes from the Latin “sperāre” which means “hope” and has no mention of waiting. In English, ‘wait’ and ‘hope’ are drastically different. While hoping usually involves waiting, its implications are much more grandiose: we ‘hope’ for a miracle, we ‘wait’ for the bus. The first instance of ‘wait’ shows up in the English language c.1200, while the temporal origins of ‘hope’ are not as well known, which implies it came earlier. It is known, however, that both words come from Germanic roots.

The time frame here seems to be important. In 1200, the English- and German-speaking worlds started to do a lot of hoping. In the heart of the crusades, it was important to draw a distinction between the waiting of every day, natural life and the hope of eternal redemption. There was nothing much to wait for in the life of the crusader or crusadee, in fact, life on earth was rather painful, and was purposely construed as such by the church. But there was plenty to hope for, as any of us at all familiar with Christianity (as I barely am) know. Eternal happiness, harmony, absence of hope. Nothing to hope for, it’s all at your fingertips (of which you have none you intangible angel, you). So it was necessary to describe the way in which, even though there was nothing to ‘wait’ for, your life totally sucked, there was much to ‘hope’ for.

In Spain at this time, the situation was slightly yet importantly different. The Spanish, fighting their own battles of Reconquista (Reconquest) were more concerned with reclaiming land ruled by the Islamic Moors. Spain, with a history containing a milder Christian zeal, was fighting a land battle rather than angrily attempting to impose a particular religiosity. So the Spanish language never found it necessary to draw a distinction between ‘waiting’ and ‘hoping.’ Though the Spanish were not pleasant people at this time, it was at least never an assumption that there was nothing to wait for. The idea of life on Earth was never completely rejected as a pointless step toward salvation. You could wait while hoping, for something to happen in your current life, or in the world around you.

So here I am, an English-speaker in a Spanish-speaking country, and I seem to be the only one who is distinguishing these two terms (besides the other gringos or otherwise Westerners). I am 10 minutes early to class, I arrive exactly at or slightly later than the agreed upon time, when waiting for the bus I get jittery and constantly look for it to round the corner. It’s because I am the only one waiting. Everybody else is both waiting and hoping, a miracle of simultaneity that my brain can’t figure out.

In the US, perhaps in the “West,” we consider ‘waiting’ to be an empty, bland place to stand around until some predictable, particular event occurs. The notion of waiting implies that we know what we are waiting for. The bus, the mail, class, to exhale. This is a big flaw in our culture, as I see it. The idea that point A leads directly to point B and all empty spaces are automatically filled with this empty waiting, empty anticipation of points B/C/D/Etc. But here, in the world of waiting/hoping, the empty spaces are not boring hindrances of our plans. They are places of possibility. Here, point A seems to lead directly to point B, but the empty spaces are always filled with, in addition to waiting, the underlying hope we might be sent flying to point ! or point ↓ or to a land where points no longer exist.

Words say a lot about cultures. It is my sense that there is something important to be gained from this difference in language use. I have been trying to interpret moments of waiting, which normally frustrate me, as moments of possibility, of hope. I have been trying to find a happy medium between the boredom of waiting and the impossible grandiosity of hope. With this distinction intact, it is hard for me to discover things anew. It is hard to understand that empty spaces in time can be filled with exploration rather than anticipation.

I hope you have enjoyed this. Hope a minute to take it all in and… hope for it, BAM! Maybe it didn’t work. If this doesn’t make me famous, I’ll just become a hoper. I hear they make good tips.

The barriers of our world are many. Between any two individuals exist innumerable protections against human interaction. By human interaction, I mean recognition of the other. The ability to understand the situation in which another human exists. Seeing oneself in that person.

We know that this interaction requires proximity. We know it requires communication. We know it requires historical similarity, the ability to relate to past events. But to interpret these as barriers rather than, forgive the cheesy metaphor, doors, is problematic and prevalent.

While it is true that these divisions exist, our cultural attitude is to reify them, and give them more attention than they deserve.

Ultimately, of the requirements listed above, proximity, teamed with a bit of hard work, is all that is needed. Communication and historical meaning follow. Over time, if we remain close to another person, or another culture, communication becomes easier and we begin to have shared experiences. And thus we begin to understand one another.

This is the frustration and difficulty in the early stages of an extended stay in another place: the lack of mutual recognition. I have passed the first test in deciding to immerse myself in another culture, perhaps a naive decision. Naive because now I have to bear the discomfort of this absence of recognition until communication is possible.

Fernando, my host brother, and I, had a slightly awkward relationship. We only spoke in Spanish, which meant that our interaction was limited. However, since he is learning and practicing English, our relationship has taken on an unspoken precedent of Spanglish. And the mutuality of this dynamic has allowed us to find more of the necessary recognition. Even though our conversation remains limited, I am able to relate to his language struggle, and he to mine. Before, we existed in a sort of Master-Slave binary, in which he knew all of the answers and I was fighting to keep up and understand.

I feel very young here, like a kid who doesn’t know why all of the adults are laughing. Do you know that boy who repeats the same clever information about trains, or Star Wars, or Video Games in an attempt to relate to the dinner party-goers at his parents’ house? That boy is me. That is the exploration necessary to destroy the cultural and historical barriers. Memorize stock phrases that you may or may not understand, use the hell out of them, and listen really closely. Open ears and open mind, I tell myself.

Six days after arriving, I, like the Quiteños, seem to be accustomed to living at high altitude. Add it to the list, stock phrase: “¡Que lindo vivir en las montañas!” and listen to the answer. Now, we all live here. Most of us take the bus. Most go to the Rio Coca bus stop, I get off earlier. Proximity leads to shared experience, leads to historical meaning, leads to the understanding that where you come from, what you value, who you love, what you have seen, may not be the same for everyone. But, most importantly, that these people are not unavailable. Engage in proximity. The world is no melting pot where we sit and wait for the flames to get hot enough to mash everything together into homogeneity. The world is a small dish filled with oil and vinegar: more delicious when you make the effort to mix it up a bit, but ultimately different.

People with different languages, different experiences and different lives are always around. Live to learn.

The heart beats faster at high altitude.
More to see, more to worry about.
More to see, more to love.
Such are the preoccupations of the heart.

The air is thin because nobody need breathe there.
Already, an enormity of perspective takes it.

Behind me the piano is playing. But it is not being played. There is a faux elegance present. The invisible hands of technology play Beethoven while I drink the cheapest (overpriced) wine on the menu of this small, strange circular bar in the airport. The bar is made of something that looks like marble. I am eating a dish redundant in both name and practice: the Cheese Quesadilla. To my left, a gentleman is eating a Chicken Quesadilla, which, by the way, has a much different pronunciation. Imágine, por favor, que su hispano favorito esta diciendo: ”Quesadilla.” Por ejemplo, Antonia Banderas y su voz suave y seguro. ”Quesadilla.” Ahora, now, imagine Jeff Foxworthy: ”Chicken Quesadilla”. This is the difference in pronunciation.

The auto-piano perplexes and confounds. Travelers of all walks of life approach apprehensively. They see that they keys are pulled down from underneath rather than pushed from above. Many of them are obviously musicians, or even pianists. They recognize the tune, their family encourages them to sit down and play. They decline. The machine has protected itself from the dangers of spontaneity and unpredictability. ”Please, do not touch,” it requests. And we don´t.

One can see the difference in reaction to both the mechanical and the human pianist. Travelers do not know where to look. The usual places to watch: the pianists’ face and hands, are not available. Watching the keys pull themselves down is not an option; in fact, it is quite frightening. There is no ease to the playing, no uniformity of the piece consisting in the constant movements of hand and body. The term we have chosen for silent spaces in music, ”rests,” does not apply. Nothing is resting, it is stopping. In music, rests are often written to keep the piece within human ability. To allow the hand to ”rest” after long passages. The player piano finds such notions limiting. It can play 32nd note lines ad infinitum.

Yet, despite its abilities, its transcendence of the limits of human technicality, the player piano is met with little in the name of true praise. The ”listeners” do not listen, they stare. A smug look of appreciation, they are looking at something clever, like one of those visual puns. A picture of a human eye with a line above it, and above that, the word ‘’stand.” We smirk because we get the trick.

But the real thing to get is not the ”trick,” it is the secret. It is not that the machine uses a number of carefully designed gears and cogs and levers. It is that what we are listening to is beyond cogs. ”The Entertainer” plays, my water comes in a wine glass. The secret is that our lives require the existence of others. The secret is that the player piano did note write ”Pathetique,” Chopin did. Chopin felt compelled to write it for one reason or another, he did not stumble upon it. ”The Entertainer” is the player piano’s limit. As a world, we have moved to a place in which entertainment can replace meaning. We smirk because we get the trick (Eye Under Stand!) but rarely smile because we have revealed the secret. The player piano plays on, untouched. ”Please, do not touch.” And we don’t.

My ideal world: The cheapest wine on the menu, una Quesadilla, water in a cup, a little girl practicing the first 8 bars of ”Moonlight Sonata,” and her parents to talk to about how proud they are of her.

I’m off to a different concourse. The moving walkway. Stand on the right, walk on the left. What if I want to run?