Two poems from Layli Long Soldier’s book especially touched me, one about her daughter and the other her father. I remember feeling ashamed that it was the two most personal, and perhaps least narratively innovative ones, as if that indicated I didn’t care for either “writing” or “social change”. It was not until reading Boyer’s Undying that I was reminded that we ultimately care about things because we care. Ultimately political action and writing are done because someone wants to, not for compelled by some operating logic of disinterested justice or beauty. I was reminded of James Baldwin’s often quoted line: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer”. For a long time I’ve been thinking about what it means to be honest. Layli Long Soldier’s poems felt honest in their narration. I wonder if it has something to do with Long Soldier writing about the experiences a while after they took place, so the time makes honesty easier. In any case, I felt the honesty of intention is crucial for both effectuating social change and producing impactful writing.

My question is how to write with an audience? How does writing and calls for change reach beyond people already paying attention?

When watching the Bread and Puppet theatre, I find myself initially engaged. But as the performance jump from one issue to another, albeit related thematically and in the root of their problems, I found it slightly difficult to stay focused. I also grew slightly skeptical of the point of compiling all of these issues into one performance. Even though all theatre and all art, one might say, touches on a multivarious host of questions, there’s usually a focal point.

In the Brecht essay, he situated the lack of total, “self-surrendering” empathy in Chinese theatre. I think perhaps another angle to look at this from is a redefining of empathy, instead of “identifying” but allowing oneself to be moved. As he said, the degree of removal makes the audience retain their sense of self, and even the artist is well-aware he is performing something else. No one is imagining oneself as the hero or heroine. Rather, they allow themselves to be moved by the story of another. It is a “feeling with” that doesn’t venture into filling the interior of the other with an self-sentimentalizing imagination. I think this outline of empathy is better temporary, merely mental imagination of being another person because that can easily be translated into self-pity. If empathy is going to mobilize people, people need to allow themselves to be moved by others.

Process Notes: I was going to write a pamphlet on how to know if you are a lesbian, but then I checked the Super Tuesday polls and subsequent discussions on Sanders and socialism and was reminded of the fervent declaration made by other candidates on their loyalty to capitalism. Gender equality and feminism, but more importantly feminist movements are often discussed as if they can only survive in a “liberal” environment, so I wanted to do something that offends that aesthetic. Originally the plan was to put Mao’s quote on one side and his face the other, but then I realized people are probably not going to be familiar with his saying and the language betrays its origin from outside the contemporary feminist movement.

Paradoxically, painting this was a really soothing process that quelled some of my anger. It’s making me think artists catharsis like theatre is political in their message but also in how they help its participants work though sentiments.

I was surprised by, despite using scientific vocabulary, Boyer borrowed substantially and developed from literary and philosophical writings. Instead of telling a linear narrative, the book is almost pieced together with connected treatises interrogating cancer and her experience in fragments: specimens of the object of cancer each subjected to the dissection of an instrument she develops. It is almost as if she is establishing another form of science rooted in rigors of thought. On many occasions, her book reads like ethnography, less like a memoir. Unlike Agee, riddled with ethical and moral entanglements of studying another, Boyer’s study of herself as a “we”. As Sontag wrote, this we is between the too concrete and too abstract, but gives one really the liberty and agency to think.

Regardless of the cold tone, she nonetheless delivers turbulence of emotion with her writing. On page 29, she writes of her friend who drove to help get her diagnosis at lunch. At the end, Boyer matter-of-factly notes:”She then went back to work.” This sentence did a lot for me. It allows the reader to soak in the complex emotions without trying to capture a part by making sentimentalizing, imperfect descriptions. The silence and space it leaves also mirrors the actual situation; like she quoted from Audre Laurde in the Prologue, this was the space of silence around it. And she is not filling it up with pink noise.

I wasn’t sure whether or not to take the free masks.

A black and white sign asks anyone who has a fever or cold symptoms to put one on. I am here for an STI checkup.

But a tanned white woman tucked away in the far corner, next to the magazine was staring. Her pouting lips are ready to devour. And a Chinese-looking guy just sneezed ferociously on the left row of seats and he sat slouching like a blob. But there’s another masked east Asian girl with puffy, tired eyes.

Too many variables! I scream internally. Precautions and over protection. Political representation. Fear, of not just the virus but also being exposed as naïve, wrong, to have felt safe. What my mom said the doctor said when she went to the hospital for her back pain, at the onset of SARS: “Are you an idiot?”

As in all other situations requiring stressful decisions, I stopped thinking about it. I focused on staring at the culprit. They have a customized stand for dispensing masks! Capitalism works wonders. Why are these masks yellow? They’re usually blue. Aren’t they usually blue? Does this mean they ran out of blue ones already? Are they actually hiding something?

There’s an unopened box laying casually on a side table. It’s sold out everywhere, even at Target.

Finally, it’s my turn to check-in. She asked if I have fevers or have coughed recently, I said no. Then she had to repeat Wuhan twice before I caught what she was saying. No, I have not been at all, I answered.

Wuhan is a very masculine name; she softened its edges with slurpy American sounds—I thought as I waited again, anxiously monitoring my fellow patients. Every string of cough detonated like a round of grenades in my heart. But as a proud commander, I put up nonchalant faces and continuously convince myself of safety by scrolling through Facebook. See! They’re making memes about this.

A nurse came, casually called out a Chinese name that wasn’t mine. And then another.

There are moments you realize something extraordinary you’ve thought about and drilled for is actually happening, like that time when our apartment caught on fire from a cabbage. It feels like the beginning of a snowstorm. You detect little things of white falling down, but as you put a finger on it, it dissolves into nothing: you can never quite tell if this is reality flooding in, or another practice of imagining. Only when your limbs are frozen and it’s too late to run, can you know for sure.

I told myself it was just the flu, but bemasked myself either way. A while later someone called me. I followed her past a plastic construct protruding from the wall, some pipes circulating the air. This must be the quarantine space. Next to it on a chair sits a girl dozed off, a thin mask covering half of a slightly reddened face, draped over with sleek black hair. She woke up, lazily shook her shoulders with knotted brows. She coughed, ah, like drums beating on my fragile aorta.

Survival in the time of authoritarian rule sometimes means tweeting Epstein was murdered, and hoping horoscopes possess subversive powers. But always it means weighing one’s own eyes above lips fat from conceit. I know there were many more dead because I have seen the dead uncounted. But how do you know if this is one of the ghosts?

Surely not in America, I kept saying—there can be no shadows in the land shinning from coast to coast—but surely that’s what America would like you to think. Have I become an advertisement-infused buffalo, or do I stink of “third-world” superstition?

Two tubes of blood and half a bottle of pee later, I quickened my steps and fled from this narrow corridor of questions—with a box of masks and a bottle of hand sanitizer in my bag, just in case.

Note: I’m not sure how much of this writing contrasts the scientific and the humanistic perspective, or relates to my quarter-long endeavor. I had difficulty recalling a specific scientific diagnosis, or otherwise lacked solid memory that I dared to write about the diagnosis. But I particularly wanted to write about this because, first of all, the experience still worries me; it is slightly funny in a somewhat sad way; and it reveals the vulnerability in of my (our) belief in science when it is entwined with politics and our own life and death.

My dear mother:
I hope this letter finds you well.
Forgive me for not knowing how else to begin writing, especially something that is to be touched by your eyes. You must know the noises that start our phone calls are rarely broken connections, but our inability to be the way we were.
Last summer when I was at home we rarely spoke, although we talked and talked and talked—or rather you talked, I listened; and then you sat quietly as I tried to reciprocate the phrases. Somehow the greatest use of Aristotle and Foucault was that they were your favorite men and we can speak through them for hours, over cilantro-scented dinners, across swaying subway rides. But as you piled up the plates, I held our glass kitchen door with pursed lips. If knowledge brings light, then those dead letters shined like cold blue light of a suburban diner, washing back wordless friction till the doors are closed.
I had forgotten why you came into my room the morning of my flight, but you fell asleep quietly. Hours later I still couldn’t bring myself to wake you. Every night you’d scream for hours in your dreams: screams that moved between accusations and beseeching and howling and whimper, dreams that started before I left and came back and left again. That morning you breathed so softly in growing light. It was when I put the covers over your waist that I saw your flattened toes.
You used to sit on the edge of my bed, knifing translucent peels off the soles of your feet. I have wide peasants’ feet, you lament. Flat, fat, ugly, squarish from carrying in danzi through paddies fields, propping up weight that injured your neck for life. On lucky days there were prickly straw shoes. Mostly it’s bare skin gripping onto slipping mud. My feet are ruined by hard labor, you sigh, not like elegant Shanghainese ladies’ feet, slender, elegant, white and smooth, nursed by milk and maids.
Rubbing my soles, you’d tell me that I am not like you. I must pay attention to what you couldn’t. You say I must never lift heavy weight—leave textbooks at home and ask men to put up the luggage. You say I am not born into your hunger, casual wrinkles, shriveled spine and jeweless skin: you say to remember the luxury that was not yours. Use it play it and find a man unlike my father.
I thought about that when I had to walk on the grass to my friend boathouse while she laughed, moving across the path of broken seashell effortlessly. My friend, whom you and father called a “noble woman” and a “pure American”, sported thick calluses from roaming Cohasset wilderness barefoot, wearing heels to bar mitzvahs, climbing rocks leading up to a mansion she points out as “the OG Adams family estate”. Flattened square toes served her well.
Did you know that your wounds didn’t—couldn’t bleed on someone who was never hurt? Can’t you see the unscarred move through pain, elation, growth and death—without gathering rust? Do you know that in my veins aches still your running blood?
I am sorry I have disappointed you. I’m sorry about my rounded waist and unkept hair. I’m sorry I couldn’t introduce you to more white friends when you visit. But more than anything I’m sorry when I pulled the sheets over your frail frame I thought again and again: I cannot become a woman like you. I cannot be a woman like you.
I know this letter will never reach you. You shouldn’t read it anyways—roundabout sentences put together in another language is the only way I can write about you. To you, I still haven’t found a way of speaking. But here it is, this, because you are forgetting words, names, peoples and places. Before the page runs blank I want to say, somewhere to something, that I miss you, very much dearly.
Your daughter
 
Lecture:

In Chinese there is a word, 环肥燕瘦. It is one of those phrases grounded in historical reference. Huan refers to Yang Yuhuan, a woman famous for her ample figure. The next character fei means fat, describing Yang Yuhuan. Yan is short for Zhao Feiyan, another legendary beauty. She was so thin that it was said when she was dancing outside, people had to hold down her skirts so she fly away. As you can guess, shou means skinny, describing the second lady. Taken together, this phrase is taken to mean that different women, fat or thin, have their sorts of beauty.

From a purely sociological perspective, it can also be understood to say that differencing historical eras produce varying aesthetics. Embedded in the idea that opposing ideals of beauty exists is an acknowledgement that our most intimate tastes and desires is more a of a follower of shifting forms of society, rather manifestation of an eternal divine. Eclecticism must be historically informed and honest toward sentimentalities.

What is unchanging, however, is the entwined existence between the beautiful and the powerful. It is difficult to parse out the temporality in this pairing. Is something desired because is it on a pedestal, or does our submission to its charms endow it with power? I guess that’s why philosophers have opted to name the whole judgement aesthetics.

In contemporary United States, there seem to be two kinds of competing aesthetics. There’s the aesthetic of opulence, hip hop abundance, and ballroom realness. Contrapoints on Youtube dissected in an excellent video. On the other hand, there’s sweatpants and Patagonia, casual luxury. It is the aesthetics of loving your body, natural skin, “candid” Instagram posts with no filter.

Contrapoints explains this, following Paul Fussell’s book, as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant modesty. Class teaches people to not flaunt their wealth. Yet I would say this is precisely how wealth is revealed in this society, where being on the margins means carrying generational trauma and inheriting the wounds of centuries. To be at home in one’s own skin means home not a place yet to be built.

To go back to the phrase. Even though aesthetic relativism is embedded in Chinese poetics, it is indisputable that women still require themselves to follow the standard of our times. Knowledge itself does not subvert power. It is then not a question of how but with what we construct a home to be comfortable in.

Notes:
In both writing the lecture and the letter, I find myself writing things irrelevant to the point I want to talk about, as if insisting to give my more humanity by providing more context. It is easier to allow myself to do that with the letter because it is addressed to someone, but it was almost impossible to begin the lecture without an imagined audience. I thought, after reading Ruskin’s letter, that the letter would lend more confidence to be didactive, but the intimate recipient of my letter only compounded the resistance to be directly critical.

At first, when reading through the Diction chapter, I wasn’t sure how much of the poems are related to each other besides all acting around experiments with language. The question as to whether I should read the work as a book or as a compilation of pieces hovered above my mind.

Reading the Whereas section, seeing some of the words be used in the longer sentences, I was appreciative of the exploratory definitions she laid out before. Even without remembering precisely what was written before or going back to refresh my memory, I felt the words embedded in the overall reading.

Dana Hall. Dana Hell.

Did you know they call us the dana call girls–What’s a call girl? The girl ya call when ya lonely, gurl.

Tradition. Extraditions.

Did you see Alicia’s Facebook post–of her suspension holiday in France? Rich white girls can enjoy anything. What was it for? I dunno, to show off and get likes right. I mean the suspension? Oh she brought a guy into the dorms.

Traditions play an important role in life at Dana Hall School, serving not only as symbols of the past, but also staples in the present.

Have you heard someone was trafficked into prostitution right behind Wheeler, like in the 80s? That’s insane. Someone was raped on the stairs in Wheeler too, like around that time. Yeah that one right by the proctor’s room. Everyone could hear it and nobody did anything.

Harbor cruise. Harbor Bruise.

Are they checking dress-code for Harbor Cruise? Yeah, before we get on the bus. It’s so unfair my arms are long. Anything summery is “shorter than my longest finger”.

I hear they’re lenient on seniors tho. we’ve earned it. Umm but Zoe’s skirt flew up when she was doing the ring tap.

Why do we have dress codes anyways? Like it’s all girls, who are we here to offend? Some of the male faculty say they are uncomfortable. Uncomfortable.

Have you seen Mr. Cook running in his shorts? Ewww. Men shouldn’t wear shorts that short.

Senior-Sophomore. See who can spend more.

Kat spent 200 dollars on candies. WTF. Isn’t there a limit to how much you can spend? That’s just for the poster candies. You can stuff as much candy into the locker as you want.

Mr. Eric Goodson:

“You guys have no idea what senior sophomore means–

when there was 10-12th grade only the sopho-mores are the youngest.

The girls are away from home for

the first time they see older,

smart, talented, beautiful, athletic,

seniors they write letter of affection

and seniors write back if they reciprocate

feeling on one weekend they sneak into the room of the younger girl and

cover it in candies.”

Revels. Rebels

I’m stealing as many crystal centerpieces as possible.

Midwinter, or S.P.R.E.A.D.  

Meredith’s mother, Ms. Julian: “What? You don’t even know how to kneel? During my time, they have the girls kneel on the floor like this if they recited the song wrong. I had to kneel like this all the way to lunch.”

shhhhhhhhhh

shhhhhhhhhhhh

shhhhhhhhh

The lacrosse team seniors took all the juniors on a car and drove them around campus last night. And nobody stopped them? Well yeah cuz they’re white day students. Didn’t they suspend the Korean girls? What did they do again? They told juniors to stand outside Whiteway until they can recite all the songs.

I’m taking this one to the grave.

Dancing in the moonlight

Chloe is watching.

Ms. Hanig:”The school has trouble finding teachers to drive the students from Shipley to the tunnel because everyone is afraid they’re going to end up in court one day and testify they were part of this.”

like a bridge over troubled water

silver sisters

Snitches got snitches

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh           Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh            Shhhhhhhhhhhh

Shhhhhhhhhh close your eyes and put your hand on the shoulders in front of you. Shhhhhh hold your breath as we scream into your ear in an dark endless tunnel. Shhhh catch your name in a fishbowl of names. Shh recite the poem or sit here

Stand up. Close your eyes. Don’t trip.

Shhhhhhhhhh walk over this table. Shhhhhh someone will hug you and crown you with a garland of rose. Shh it’s impolite to ask questions at the dinner table. Now we sing and recite the poem from many years ago. You’d think it’s beautiful.

Shhhh you think this is over? Shhhhhh now pretend to watch this movie while we stare at you Shhh walk to Bardwell following my dark dress and clinky heel. Be faced with your “friend” who pretends to not know you and recite! recite that poem written many years ago and have your eyes be blindfold.

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Open your eyes, accept your rose and then close it again.

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Open your eyes and see your senior kneeling in front of you with a box and in it your class ring glitter like gold because it is 200 dollars of gold.

She put the ring on your fingers and embrace you and you sit next to each other  watch a play she falls asleep on your shoulders

Now walk to the gym together sing on the way lie next to each other but not too close

Welcome to the sisterhood.

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Can’t I opt-out of this? Nah, you can’t just do anything after getting into college.

shhhhhhhhh it’s your time to shhhhhhhhhh

You might not want it but your Junior has been waiting for it! I know Sophia. She’s too smart for this. Okay let’s be real we gotta do it cuz we went through it too.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

As a senior, you’re allowed to use the archives now. Mr. Goodson can guide you through it.

Mr. Eric Goodson:

“SPREAD stands for Seniors Present

Rings, Entertainment, And Dinner.

When the younger girl grow no longer too young

In the middle of the winter

before spring comes and one must graduate and share a ring

with a man, the seniors abduct the younger girl

off-campus with bottles of alcohol and

kneel with a ring and a rose

while the singles

will put on a not so lady-like show and cook

for the first time in their lifetime:

that’s why your dinner had to be pasta and tomato sauce.”

All guests must be hosted by a current student and they are expected to observe all Dana Hall rules, including rules prohibiting sexual activity of any kind on campus. We acknowledge that

same gender relationships that go beyond friendship exist,

and we place a certain degree of trust in our students. Any failure to respect these guidelines may result in disciplinary action.

https://www.danahall.org/student-life/traditions

Notes:

In all earnest, I chose this topic because I am short on time. Allison’s post inspired me. Even though much of my interest in social justice is shaped by high school, there’s an insistence on not examining, especially not writing about it. I also felt comfortable writing on this tradition because I’ve done research during high school, and feel more comfortable writing about something I lived through myself.

My biggest frustration is to make this piece coherent rather than a jumbled string of pieces. There are two things I am trying to achieve at the same time, namely recounting my experience and reinterpreting the language of official school website, as well as the student handbook. Now I realize perhaps I do want to write a traditional exposè that a friend of mine once planned to draft and send to her “contacts at the NYTimes”, to throw a grenade of vengeance belatedly detonated.

Hartman’s photography, especially the single portraits, strike me extremely dignified and noble. It is unusual for the focused lens to be so liberally spent on portraying a single individual that belongs to the “unimagined existence”–it is exactly the unimaged often blend into a crowd or a mob in the frame of the photographer. An air of importance comes being asked, and affording the time to stop, and look into the camera, to be portrayed not just documented.

Agee’s writing, simultaneously, pushes the depth of conception even further. In action and in conversation one cannot be forgetful of people’s stations and circumstances. Agee doesn’t sanitize habits or conditions, but the poetical form itself allows grace. Eulogies are often sung for conquerers and the successful, but to write so carefully and deliberately for what most people write away with numbers and academic jargons force the reader to see the subject in a different light. I

Don’t think about me when I’m gone. He commands, as elbows cross to drag the shirt off shoulders. Cotton is translucent at night, but he is the silhouette behind the translucence and he is a sunburnt image inside half-looking eyes. Wind blows moonlight across my barren chest. Coarse palms roll through the landscape of the night.

Yet—I thought of him often. At the first shadows of bloating doubt, inside the blank after “father’s name”. I thought about how scrupulously he leaves no trace—smoothing out the sheets, drawing up the curtains.

They never tell you—no one ever told me—the Pill is actually two separate pills. One for delivery, the other redemption.

First is mifepristone. A minuscule dot encapsulated—carried in expansive plastic. Could it be the pharmaceutical’s smirk?—their way of saying—that whatever you’re getting rid of—it too deserves the dignity—the dignity of excess, of books and crystals, Sunday rituals, flowers and crowns.

Flood runs red with the second pill. Walls, tunnels, scrapes and wholes—out you go—onto the carpet and porcelain floor—where the roommate finds soft legs and tears—and drag them into a bed hastily made.

I knew because there are teary Youtubers—telling a story “a while back”, “some years before”, “a long long time ago”.

Still, I nodded and blandly stood, when the man in white recited his medical book. Still, I smiled when he said it’s early and safe—don’t worry—you’ll recover soon.

I smiled as if I was awarded a golden star, for saving the day, for fixing a broken part. I am not disgraced, not broken, not down and out. As if I never wondered what he’d say, where the fuck he’d gone.

I shuffled through layers of tissues and drenched napkins, in hope for something special for all the pain. A disfigured shadow of what could have been—an emblem for double massacre—an another to testify, to cohabitate—the drilling, the tearing parts apart. Yet between the goo and the dripping peels, all I could find was my body, and my choice.

The sun weighs slyly in the horizon, shooting stealthy shadows into the tiny room—chamber of receding and beckoning pain. I wrap my arms around myself. Cold fingers roll through landscape of dusking grey, mapping a sacred territory where embers blaze.

Writing notes:

It took me a lot of reading over to smooth the rhythm of this “poetic prose” into one that flows somewhat naturally. The tempo I had in mind while writing doesn’t even always get picked up by me when I read it, so I added a lot of signs and punctuations for clarification. Also, I had to find a truce between precision/accuracy and lyrical grace. That was also slightly difficult. I found my self beginning to actually rhyme in the second half, but the more uniform, short pace comes off as almost cheerful, which doesn’t quite harmonize with the content. It was also challenging to adjudicate that.