On the way back home it’s getting dark and I’m walking by la casa de los colque. They were here before this place started becoming barrio. They’re the only family that still works the land, the chacras. The house is all unfinished block and concrete and shit just falling apart. Some of windows are taped up sheets of plastic. Then my eye catches this glint and I see them again in a little storage area: rows and rows and rows of soccer trophies.
commodified thinking
So many people seem to look at things almost exclusively in the context of their perceived value as commodity or resource.
For example, they’ll say things like “Siesta Key is considered one of the 5 most beautiful beaches in the US.”
This is something my mom has said often.
She doesn’t say “I love Siesta Key,” or anything else that reveals her emotions about the place, but just repeats “Siesta Key is considered one of the 5 most beautiful beaches in the world,” like an advertisement.
[I almost wrote, "She doesn't say 'I love Siesta Key,' or anything else that reveals her relationship with the place," but I feel like the way she says that actually does reveal her "relationship." As opposed to demonstrating an emotional dependence developed over time (my own simplified definition of a relationship) it shows that "how she feels" about the place is more a mental construct "frozen in time," created out of her motivation for moving there and her need for social reinforcement that moving there was a good choice.]
I often do the same thing.
When I lived in Seattle, oftentimes I told people more or less “Seattle is good because you have easy access to the mountains.”
Like the way my mom talks about Siesta Key, by focusing on “access to the mountains,” I was effectively obscuring my actual relationship to the place, reducing it to a single abstraction.
Here’s another example:
In one of Lola Akinmade’s recent posts, a woman said: “I’ve just been back from The Gambia. . .Desperately poor country. Desperate. . .But they’ve got 500 species of birds!”
All three of these cases show how people tend to think about things in the context of their value, or their perceived value, even if they are abstractions, such as the “beauty” of a beach or the “proximity” of a wilderness area, or in terms of their “resources” such “500 species of birds.”
I feel like all of this represents a kind of “commodified” thinking similar to the commodification described in Marxist economic theory: “economic value is assigned to something not previously considered in economic terms; for example, an idea, identity or gender. . . ”
I feel like commodified thinking leads to negative situations.
These negative situations are created out of the following cause / effect pattern:
1. Commodified thinker isolates whatever is being “valued” from its temporal, historical, and cultural, and environmental context.
2. The thinker then knowing or unknowingly overlooks or ignores potentially fundamental relationships between what is being “valued” or looked at as a resource and those things’ (a) existence vis-à-vis their “place” or “role” in the environment, (b) their evolution over time, and (c) their potential development / destruction in the future.
I feel like commodified thinking is a way of insulating yourself from certain realities.
It is also seems like a way of “framing” reality or shaping it for your own purpose / advantage.
Commodified thinking is a byproduct of (a) growing up in a society that has traditionally viewed the natural world in terms of resources or something to be “managed,” combined with (b) attempting to do what is in one’s self-interest as it applies to that society.
Commodified thinking has origins in Western thought, leading back to Reductionism, beginning in Ancient Greece.
The opposite of commodified thinking is thinking about something in terms of its relationships to everything else.
This is also known as Holism.
An example of holism: Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” [this example is from Wikipedia].
Usually I feel alienated however, by writing or journals associated with the word “holistic.”
I feel like there is a paradox in that only through describing what happens in one place to one person can you effectively “show” the relationships / truths that can be interpreted or “seen” everywhere.
This is how I define whether or not something has literary value, and it tends to be a “guiding principle” when deciding what to read, what to write, what to publish.
Which all takes me back to the beginning, and makes me wonder if that isn’t just another form of commodified thinking.
friday fragment
At Monarch K-8 the teachers used to have “jeans Fridays.”
It was the only day of the week I wore my nice pants.
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![near Rio Espolon, Futalefu, Chile [photo Laura Berhnhein]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2748/4380802396_0bd196f952_b.jpg "near rio espolon, Futalefu, Chile")
short story excerpt
I’m writing a short story in the form of an interview. It’s fiction. Here’s an excerpt:
Much of your work is built around juxtapositions, a classic example being the story “C-130.” How did this style evolve?
My earliest story attempts were rip-offs of Amy Hempel. I’d take her stories and then rewrite them using different settings, different situations, but basically just copying the way her characters’ motivations / emotional states “saturated” every line. They were terrible.
“C-130” was an experiment in using this same concept, only exporting the subtext from characters’ interactions and dialogue to the associations a reader would create in his or her mind through various juxtapositions. It was a way of writing “cinematically.”
In Argentina we have all these Ford Falcons. They were the vehicles used by the militares during the disappearances. But it’s not like after the dictatorship ended these cars went away. They’re all over the country, sold from one person to the next. I was traveling through Patagonia–a little town called Esquel–and I saw a Ford Falcon driven by this old campesino. So I just started inventing the history of this car. Each little scene–the mechanics assembling it in Buenos Aires, the militar driving it home and then taking his wife for a ride, the officers putting blindfolded prisoners in the backseat, the vehicle being sold, then sold again in a different province, and then sold again to this campesino and him using it to drive up into the mountains each day–I “saw” all this suddenly and wrote it and it felt different than the Hempel style. I didn’t think about it this way at the time but the whole structure is really a way of leveraging dramatic irony. The reader always knows more than the characters.
“C-130” and pretty much all the stories in that collection use the same “template.” I grew up in Marietta, Georgia, which is the suburbs of Atlanta. There was a plant there–Lockheed Dobbins–that produced the C-130 airplanes used all over the world, including by Fuerza Aerea Argentina to throw desaparecidos into the Rio de la Plata. I saw a kid skateboarding one day in Marietta. He stopped for a second and watched as a C-130 flew really low–it was landing at Lockheed–and I just started seeing that story–the kid, the plane, the pilot, the same pilot but 20 years earlier delivering the plane to Argentina, the kid just being born, a young Argentine couple with their newborn.
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what i did for the first 40 minutes on a Saturday morning after an earthquake that i didn’t know about
woke up around 9. made coffee. put on deerhunter playlist. washed dishes. thought about how deerhunter was from marietta. felt like i wasn’t fully awake. worked on the computer some. remembered lau told me to wake her up at 9:15. went to wake her up and saw her in bed nursing layla. went back to the kitchen and started toasting bread. looked at the computer. looked outside. felt like i wasn’t ‘anywhere.’ talked to lau about the visitors that were supposed to come over. told her i’d set up the tent in the backyard for the kids to play in but i needed to find a stick for it. went outside wearing flip flops and carrying a machete. walked down the road towards our land. looked at the ridgeline and felt like i was ‘walking on the earth.’ nodded to a gaucho driving a tractor. passed a place where the tractor had just mowed. looked at the roads cut into the valley and thought ‘i hate how cities are formed.’ picked up a willow branch that had been trimmed under the power lines. hacked off the knots and extra branches with the machete and started walking back. stopped at the field and looked at hawks waiting for mice and thought different things. started walking again. thought about an email conversation i had with a friend from high school and how we were both from marietta but now i was in argentina and he was in uganda. went back down our street and saw our neighbor’s dog sam had come home. listened to lau talk about how an earthquake had hit last night and sam had come back just after the earthquake. thought ‘how could we have slept through it?’ remembered then how i’d had strange dreams.
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el paisano
I was out working on the land.
A middle aged man rode up on a 4-wheeler.
He was looking for horses that had gotten loose.
“Do you ever see horses out here?” he asked.
“Yes, but I haven’t seen them out here in a week.”
The man nodded. He was standing up on the footpegs of his 4-wheeler and looking around.
“There’s a paisano that keeps his horses out here,” I said. “But I haven’t seen him in a week.”
The man said gracias and then rode off.
Afterward I thought about how I said these things in Spanish.
Hay un paisano que tiene caballos aqui.
I thought about the word paisano.
I thought about how I could say this word in Spanish and it had these different connotations that were somewhat but not exactly like “peasant” or “farmer,” and that there was nothing derogatory about these connotations, but instead they seemed to exist outside of positivity or negativity as if when you said paisano it was just like saying “a man” or “a tree.”
Un paisano.
I thought about how words in English seem “infected” by connotations and associations.
I think of certain things beyond just “white” and “man” when I hear or read or say “white man.”
I think of certain things beyond just “black and “man” when I hear or read or say “black man.”
Describing someone by his or her physical features is culturally accepted in Latin America. You can call someone “gordo” or “flaco” (which is how I’m often addressed by someone who doesn’t know me, “che, flaco” or “che, loco”) or “negro” or “moreno.”
None of this is insulting.
In Spanish you can totally say “hey, did you see a big fat black dude a couple minutes ago?”
You can “see you later fatty,” to your wife, in public, without it sounding negative.
As I went back to work on the land I kept thinking about how this is a more natural and freer way to think and talk.
And I kept thinking how there must be (or have been) even more natural and freer ways to think and talk that either exist or have existed someplace and in some point in time.
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what i did yesterday starting 3 hrs. before sundown
walked to the land with layla.
set up mid.
put blanket in the shade.
hung out with layla in the shade looking at view of piltriquitrón.
photo by laura bernhein
started digging postholes.
looked at position of sun.
took off shirt.
kept digging then rested
photo by laura bernhein
looked back at layla sitting on the blanket by the mid and felt and thought and visualized several things at once including this scene in mexico when lau and i had just met:
photo by laura bernhein
repeated loudly: ‘the mid has been deployed!’ until i heard layla shout: ‘middipoy!’
photo by laura bernhein
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poem to be anthologized in book about the holy land ’situation’
just received an email saying one of my poems, ‘memories of the wailing wall’ is going to be anthologized in a book with the working title before god closes his hand: poets respond to the holy land ’situation.’
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bradford cox performing ‘walkabout’