elan vital

Last night at 3am, a realization wrenched me from sleep that encapsulates much of my recent existential unease...

Life-force (or "elan vital" in French) is what pushes people to strive for exemplarity, to make contributions beyond our immediate spheres of influence. Everyone is born with it as a natural mode-of-being.

I was conditioned while growing up to mold this elan vital into a buffer zone against my dad, who constantly provokes until he gets a reaction that keeps him at the center of attention. As a result, I never truly developed the ability to invoke it as necessary, and not just in response to negative pressure. Even though I excelled at school and threw myself into the creative outlets of music and writing, my drive was motored by the anxiety of needing to transcend my domestic condition. Once I left home for the first time to attend graduate school in Los Angeles, the game continued to play itself out, provoked only by phantom presuppositions.

So here I am...six years and counting, feet sinking in the mud. My most recent ex left me awe-stricken and envious with his ability to exactly realize his visions (in writing, in his case) time and again, undeterred by contraindications. Another close friend of mine is similarly situated; I think such people get so used to the seas parting for their every assertion that, after a time, tit becomes difficult for them to walk in other peoples' shoes. But, despite my frustration whenever empathy eludes them, one delectable fact remains: when we communicate, my response is to enact the truths I hold as self-evident. I am a moth at their searchlights, aglow with the ideals that we share.

Now I face a crossroads -- a fledgling teacher in the dissertation phase -- where I have to derive warmth from my own incandescence. Full-time spiritual work beckons me. Without the ability to express our elans vitales openly and to their fullest, we remain prisoners of others' agendas at the expense of dream fulfillment, lulled into half-hearted efforts by that familiar refrain echoing past dampening childhoods as a regular sounding of our public environs: that our quotidian possibilities are limited.

Arizona

Flying over a Martian landscape
of desert's design,
as weathered as a canyon bottom,
or mesa top,
yet no more lacking direction
than the steady compass
of a place I once called Home.
Its grains of dust whisper past
a salty reminder
that we are all bound to drift,
longing and lost,
into its lair
to discorporate into atomic kinship
with only rivulets of grace
left to chase.

american christmas - 12/21/04

I used to be intolerant of people who declare these times anachronistic to their personal visions of the world, particularly those who embrace cryogenics and virtual realities as temporary escapes from the “problem” of their society. Waiting for my annual flight to Dallas to visit my family for Christmas, however, I am about filled to bursting with empathy, for everyone. Having the right name, look, and income has never felt so viscerally to me like holding a straight flush as at the close of 2004, the Golden Age of Bush’s America.

My father, generous once again with the frequent flyer miles, booked me on an American Airlines flight, scheduled to depart at 9:10am. My boyfriend and I arrived precisely at 8:10, at which point I dragged my bags to the line at curbside check-in. In my anxiety over putting behind me as quickly as possible close quarters, slow-moving lines, and an empty wallet, my e-ticket privileges slipped my mind. If I had remembered, I wouldn’t have rammed smack into a bureaucratic snafu, the unpleasant surprise that awaited every harried holiday traveler: bags checked past 40 minutes before take-off would not be boarded onto the plane. The elderly porter wearily broke the news that I would have to rebook. “Rebook???”

I was directed to a line that snaked approximately ¼ of a mile outdoors, filled with international travelers (who must be there at least 2 hrs. before their departure) and other shellshocked domestics. Dividing the length of the line by the number of personnel at the counter, I calculated no less than a two-hour wait. After storming the e-ticket line while deep in the throes of denial, I entered this cattle call at 8:45, reaching the counter just past noon. I was determined to map pleasure onto this vast expanse of time, to assuage my intense irritation at a system gone awry, by turning to my Discman and my eighth-grade source of sonic solace, Songs From The Big Chair by Tears For Fears. It also lightened the dead air of my mood to witness the elated German couple standing in front of me, executing salsa moves to the music emanating from the I-Pod earphones they passed back and forth between them. Elated to be going home, it turns out. After the 45-minute duration of my CD, I turned to DJ Shadow, then the Future Soundtrack of America, before reaching the threshold of the building. “It won’t be long now” -- I returned the Discman to my messenger bag. At this point, I heard the British accent of the young woman behind me, talking with her friend about the growing improbability of making their flight. This friend responded in broad strokes, brightly commiserating with those around her even in her frustration. I felt glad that there was someone like her in the line.

Once inside, we entered a winding maze of three long lines -- not as long as the one outside but excruciating in their defiance of my utopian expectations. After nearing the end of the first line, I put my headphones back on -- “Fuck it, this is ridiculous.” Joy had left the German couple; they now looked worried. As we inched along that indoor labyrinth, as the minutes inched closer to my father’s unwitting departure to DFW Airport to pick me up, I sized up potential cell phone donors. We entered the final stretch on our last legs, and the foreigners ahead of and behind me began comparing notes. After being told repeatedly by personnel that there was nothing she could do (like be moved ahead in the line?), the Australian woman’s friend had long ago missed her connecting flight to NYC and was now hoping just to make it home to Sweden by Christmas Day. The German woman realized that her flight left in 20 minutes -- then 10 minutes -- while still 20 minutes away from reaching the counter. She turned to me in disbelief. What could I say? I was merely Dallas-bound, not the one in danger of missing Christmas with her terminally-ill grandmother, thousands of miles away. Her husband proclaimed his intent to file a class-action suit against the airline, and for one effervescent moment, we were galvanized. Then, just as quickly, we parted ways. On my way to the gates, I glanced back at them one last time and silently cheered on their suggestions to the woman at the counter of logical alternatives to the half-empty flights and incensed customers. Unbeknownst to me, I was headed for seven hours of stand-by purgatory.

* * * * * * * * * * *

It is 8:30 the following morning. I have a confirmed seat on a 10:40 flight. Lady Luck showed up yesterday afternoon in the guise of a compassionate flight attendant; we thought each other a secret handshake, and she allowed me to learn yet another lesson in the value of extreme timeliness. But I’ll be less likely to forget my encounter with the harsh reality that American Airlines re-presents “American” policies as the totalitarian policies of the Bush regime. I got to witness firsthand their effects on average middle-class people and non-Americans. I saw the privileged breeze through their checkpoints, while gifts of time, energy, and personal priorities were extracted from honest law-abiders with less economic capital. Americans have by and large regarded class differences as the emperor’s new clothes, but now they are too stark to keep up the ruse with any degree of credibility. They have become a crucial plot element of the present chapter of the story of our nation, entitled “To Each His Own” (you read right, my fellow feminists).

But when multimillion-dollar corporations are left to their own profit-mongering devices, few else have a chance to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. In Bush Country, those with colonizing motivations get rewarded and bestowed as the “fittest” for survival. Those with the same motivations in other countries, however, get designated as “terrorists” who must be yanked off the world stage. Our brand of local and global terrorism gets reasoned as justifiable because of the place of freedom in traditional American values: as long as we pay lip service to it, we can consider ourselves part of that esteemed lineage of Enlightenment activists -- Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke -- who fought for pluralist politics in the face of the Divine Right doctrine ideologically upholding Europe’s grand sweep of absolute monarchies. We must remember, however, the royal wannabes framing the Constitution (such as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) with their insistence that the practice of democracy be leavened with institutional and doctrinal support for capitalism. In such “virgin” territory as the newly-established United States, entrepreneurs could become the new monarchs. They have now, because democracy was never given a real chance in this country, save for the Great Depression when we caught a glimpse of what a socialist-oriented welfare state could accomplish (even with corporate trusts and crime rings lapping at its heels). During the 1930s, the Roosevelt Administration came up with creative solutions that allowed people to earn a living practicing their craft, whether they were artists, bricklayers, or farmers. Critique in song and laughs flourished, as did mass-media presentations of men and women as equals. Hard times brought out the best in us then, and they are again now: while fundamentalist activism admittedly abounds, large numbers of squeezed middle-classers, once buffered by the Clinton surplus, are learning to constructively and humanely take matters into their own hands by necessity, expanding their sense of possibility as agents who can effect change. And the creative redefinitions of “grassroots” by committed liberals are seemingly endless: MoveOn.Org’s reworking of campaign fundraising for the Internet Age, Air America’s carving out of a space for dissent in broadcasting, the assertion of First Amendment rights through blogging, the politicizing of Christmas posadas by Mexican immigrants in southern California as an allegory for the discrimination they face in housing and labor regulations.

Underwriting these moments of effervescence, this collective fire, is the compassion toward others that begins with self-compassion -- the unwavering belief that you, the reader, are workable and irreplaceable. At root, compassionate representation is individual; it then spreads outward into cooperative group formations, moving us beyond the violence of a politics of enclosure and its concomitant emotional responses of deplorability and laughability. The time is nigh for adopting the well-spoken “Christmas spirit” as a way of life.

A poem written 12/7/04...

Dignity --
warm condensed breath
in the winter atmosphere
I accepted from you.
Warmth arises from the face of a challenge that
leaves you cold and stranded
but at your best.
The glow brightened my face and kindled my hopes
for a future time and place
of sustenance.
We shared the same dream, it seems,
as you dragged against my ebbs
in confidence.
And the water stood waiting,
just shy of a tear,
for the next change in state
to take effect.

To get this party started, some recent thoughts about walking the talk...

Isn’t it just spouting ideology to verbally promote a Marxist “reality” when one cannot bring herself to go out of her way to help her comrades? It’s great to talk about where political systems break down and how they can be improved, but such talk is also an all-too-easy way to gloss over the disconnects between a person’s lifestyle and the ideals they articulate (or at least allude to in absentia).

In his Ph.D. thesis, social theorist Anthony McCann discusses a type of perception unique to the West -- one that drives the commodifying impulse -- that he terms “enclosure,” where intrapersonal and interpersonal relations proceed toward the end of eliminating uncertainty. Within such a worldview, not only are experiences other than one’s own objectified as peripheral and irrelevant, but each of one’s own experiences gets cordoned off from the others, unexamined holistically; as McCann puts it, “As long as the enclosing strategies of commodification dominate our experience, we are unlikely to personally, ethically challenge ourselves [bold added], nor personally, ethically challenge the negative effects of the dominant authoritative voices wherever we are.”

How can one relate humanely to others, then, if one is unwilling to integrate humanistic ideals into one’s mode-of-being, to where one is able to sacrifice comfort in some measure (embodied in “good” of the commodity) to the greater democratic good of community?

Something as obvious as political activism starts with simple gifts: doing things you don’t “have to” for people in need, things that involve looking someone in the face and shaking their hand. It starts with being there for and giving back to the loved ones we often take for granted. While virtual communities have begun to tap into their enormous democratic potential, they are no substitute for presence-based communities, and should unfold in tandem with them. We must never forget to interact with people as people, not merely as service providers, go-betweens, or “has-beens.”