The Relativity of Life and Death

You will grow old.

Here and now, I feel the weight

Of your limber, youthful body

As it rests upon my hip

Where you have and will have lain,

This night and many others.

A girl and her book and her cat:

We are like a picture,

Or a daydream of a single girl life

That is single yet not lonely.

And even so,

Though just now we are both fine,

I see your brevity and know

A tiny shock of sorrow

For the moment that will come.

Thought Bubble

Walking side by side--facing forward, not each other, because a gaze is an open door and it's not time to go inside yet. The funny thing about doors: they don't always lead where you think they're going to. One reason why I like these huge lenses that conceal/reveal simultaneously is that they might help me look out or they might reflect either of us back in. We're always separated by a pane of glass, though which one is the prisoner and which the imprisoned is unclear. Maybe it doesn't matter. After all, we can still walk forward.

And now what? Is it briskly cold, to the point where the points of icy breeze pinprick the red burst of blood to rise in my windburnt cheeks? Is it warming in a foreshadowing of spring, so that you take off your coat and throw it over your arm before we've gone too far? Are we going to go too far? The line shifts when it's anchored in a relative term, and I am uncertain as to where it can be found this time around.

Uncertainty. And never a lot of words. I like the textures you bring to the moment and how you give it shape around you. You may occupy this space--not because you've claimed it, but because I find that you fit it so well. Ah, but there I've gone again, the flighty of mind and heart.

Let's skip all the other context. Inside of time or outside of time, it really doesn't matter. It'll be the same, either way. Where we are is here. I look forward to it.

Without Borderlines

In Henry Shue's book Basic Rights, he frames solutions to problems of global justice in the modern language of human rights. At the bare minimum, everyone has an inalienable right to enjoy (read: actually experience) the basic necessities that allow them to continue to exist. Some philosophers and political scientists extend these rights further and say that a distinction between the narrow "basic" rights and the broader "human" rights (to freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, etc.) is a false dichotomy. They would argue that the minimum is all that is necessary for full physical and mental flourishing. They have a point, insofar as a life where you are free from physical harm but filled with terror or perpetually thwarted in pursuit of non-state-sanctioned intellectual quests would be quite disappointing in its own way. But let us simply take the basic rights, for they are somewhat more difficult to quibble with. (A utilitarian would take a completely different approach to the problem, one that likely does not refer to rights at all, which might actually make them better able to provide a coherent transition from basic rights to the full complement, but they have other important criticisms to deal with.)

According to Shue, there are two basic rights: 1) subsistence rights, or rights to food and water; and 2) security rights, which are rights to be free from physical violation, injury, or violence. He begins his book with a concern for rejecting the idea that the former is "positive," or calling for specific action--we should feed the hungry--and the latter is "negative," or calling for personal restraint only--do harm to no one. He urges that both rights are positive, demanding that those with the power to do so are morally obligated to ensure not only that people are fed, but that they are safe.**

This is an interesting spin, given that it seems like our aid programs concentrate much more on the "safe" problem of feeding those who are starving. Some do address the physical well-being of their recipients, usually through medical relief--preventive, routine, or through post-disaster trauma care. However, doctors are usually not simultaneously equipped to physically protect their patients from further harm. 

I think a large part of it stems from the fact that we can go and take pictures with adorable, if frail children to celebrate our generosity, but nobody wants to go into a war zone. Because--and this seems to be the most critical point to me--to ensure that others are able to enjoy their basic right to physical security from harm, we have to lay down our own claim to that same right and deliberately take some of the risks of their situation upon ourselves. 

Here, of course, is where it becomes infinitely more complicated, and I can't and don't deny that. It is always one thing to say that someone, by mere dint of being human, deserves to go to sleep at night without fear of mortal harm. It is another thing to act against the Bashar Assads or the Boko Harams of the world. Arguably, it is less difficult to deal with the systematic harassment of black men in the U.S., which all of American history encapsulates as an ongoing bloody tragedy. But here I think it is fair to make this one us vs. them comparison: while we should never reduce the security claims of people in developing nations on the grounds that "they're used to violence and turmoil," we do have more agency and internal influence to alter systems in our country of citizenship than we have in, say, Syria. There diplomacy becomes all the more important, because we do not want our political activities to result in further individual loss.

Perhaps the hardest part is that I absolutely do not want to advocate going to war. I'm deeply sympathetic with the pacifism of my Mennonite forebears, whether they developed a systematic justification for it or not, and I think that nonviolence is one of the great untried solutions to so many of our problems. It definitely requires playing a long, patient, and oft-times barren game, but I cannot believe that violence solves violence. Communities heal. War destroys--not just once, but a hundred times over, as it stirs up resentments, encourages rivalries, facilitates the further production and circulation of weapons, and trains young men (and young women) for a life in which their skill set is dominating, inspiring fear, and killing other people. So how, then, do we carefully, responsibly mobilize at grassroots and national levels to protect others' rights to physical security?

No answers. But damn, do I ever want to know the answer to that question.

**It has been a while since I read Shue closely, so my apologies if I have misrepresented his position in any way. That being said, I don't think anything that I have said is too far afield of his work.

The Parable of the Ower

I have this bad habit of reading six books simultaneously, because my tastes vary wildly with my moods. Also, I like to read stupidly dense books, and so I have to actually be mentally alert to read them, which means that I'm always detouring into something easier, usually fictional... You get the idea. For example, I'm currently racing through the omnibus edition of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, walking through David Copperfield, meandering through Seeing Like a State, and occasionally eyeing Culture and Imperialism with a look of mild interest.

"Ah, but that's only 4!" you exclaim triumphantly, because you're a smart ass math whiz. Well, congratulations. That's because, a) I overstated slightly, and b) I'm not done yet. Also, c) the omnibus edition of HHGG is like five books, so it should count for more than one, even if I'm not reading them all at once. Just saying. And d) I usually read at least one longform piece per day, so we should probably just round up to 7 and call it a day.

Right. So then I got my hands on an ebook version of David Graeber's book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and, hyperbolically speaking, I threw all the other books out the window. I like economics, sort of. That is to say, I'm interested in several fields that economics happens to be important to, such as: Marxism, global aid, and my future. But when we actually get down to brass tacks, I don't like economics, because I think it's a dry, reductionistic way of looking at vivid, highly complex, real world relations that are frequently altered--or even, dare I say, damaged--by their contact with the abstract quantifications of modern economists. I'm also just bitter, because the number of potential students at Penn who unselfconsciously patronized the humanities by saying they wanted to "major in economics, but minor in [actually fun, interesting, and deeply human subject]"... sorry, sentence got too complicated. Basically, there were too many of them. I mean, great for them, because they want jobs and that's important too. But please, let's not sell our souls too eagerly.

Graeber, however, is not writing as an economist. He is writing as an anthropologist who does a much better job of expressing my concerns about the role of economics in modern life. I'm not that far into it, but he's totally shredding up the economic myth of barter as the original system of exchange, and I'm a fan of this activity. Plus, it's generally really well written and informative. I'd sass this hoopy frood--he definitely knows where his towel is at.

There's a reason why I'm mentioning the book, aside from the fact that I have pledged to write something today and every day for the next... 22 days. God... But hey, who's counting? For the past few days, I've been cobbling together a meet up discussion on ethical theories to guide our efforts for global justice. My source text is Onora O'Neil's "Rights, Obligations and World Hunger" (In every relevant heading in this essay, she uses the Oxford comma, but not in the title. WHYYYYYY???), in which she argues for what she sees as a much older conception of justice, beginning from obligations rather than human rights. This might not sound like a huge difference, and I'm still not entirely convinced that it is, but part of her reasoning is that the responsibility for action should not be on the bearer of the right, as an often powerless claimant making demands of the powerful. Rather, action should naturally proceed from those who are obligated to do so, where their obligation arises in part from the mere fact of their ability to do anything. (I might be embroidering this last part ever so slightly, but it's the only way I could resolve the "ought" =/= "can" dilemma.)

Early in Debt, Graeber talks about the difference between a debt and an obligation. Basically, the former comes down to a matter of quantification. Or, alternatively, an obligation is an unquantifiable debt. This isn't really a revolutionary thought, except that I personally don't find the word "obligation" to have the impact of the word "debt"--something Graeber himself touches on obliquely when he notes that debt has an impersonal, moral force to it. "One must pay one's debts" is a truism that even a bleeding heart liberal could parrot with a straight face.

If I transfer my associations with debts to my conception of obligations, I am left in a rather more uncomfortable position than when I started off. Whatever my own ethical theory for understanding global aid might be, I have not personally acted as if it were anything but a charitable act--that is, something that is good and praiseworthy to do, but not something that I am required to do. What if I brought that mentality to the table? Suddenly, the intensity of Peter Singer's arguments about getting the best possible paying job that you can and donating most of your income to charity... kind of make sense. Because if this is something that I owe my fellow human beings, then I don't get to think about whether I want to do it or not. And that's a pretty sobering little epiphany.

Writing About Writing

Since my aforementioned friend Dan asked me several questions about my creative process, I figured I'd make that today's post. Not least because my fingers are about to fall off and I exhausted most of my creative energy for the day by plotting out a discussion + my future. (Also, if I spend much more time typing at my computer and not playing with my cat, said cat will probably report me to PETA for neglect.)

Q: How do I come up with ideas?
A: For starters, I don't have a list stored somewhere of topics that I would like to write on eventually. Perhaps it is due to a lack of discipline on my part, but I find it extremely difficult to plan to write something at some distant future moment. In fact, I find it difficult to write with any destination whatsoever. More on that momentarily (...I don't think that was a contradiction. Not sure.).

Often you can kind of see what's motivating my subject from how I open. Today, for instance, I'm answering some questions, although a little more broadly than was asked of me. I once wrote a post about being surprised by grief that coagulated from a coworker's grandparent's death and my sudden inclination to eat honey butter. So there are some that are more spontaneous, contingent on what I've been reading, talking about, watching, etc., and others that are the result of several things coming together.

I will say that I occasionally jot down or otherwise take note of thoughts that occur to me at random, and sometimes I'll cull from those if they still interest me enough to write about them. But as I look back through my notes in my phone, it seems like these are meant to be complete thoughts in themselves and not something I'll develop into a longer piece.

Then there's my poetry. I dunno. That sort of appears from somewhere that I don't really look at too hard.

Q: Do I edit?
A: If by "edit" you mean, do I go through and rigorously check my structure, look for a controlling thesis, ensure that everything flows correctly, that sort of thing: no, I do not. If I'm worried that where I start and where I finish don't have enough breadcrumbs for someone else to follow me, or if the conclusion seems to be a million miles away from the introduction, then I may wade back in with a machete and do some serious plastic surgery. But that's pretty rare, in part, I think, because I am deliberately writing shorter pieces that can't get that far off topic. I do give every post a once or twice over to check my wording or rearrange sentences, because I am an overeducated, overdeveloped fetus (as a friend once affectionately told me) and I tend to write in an unnecessarily convoluted manner.

Let it be noted, however, that to get to this point where I don't feel it necessary to edit much, I have had to write a heck of a lot that did need to be edited. I am indeed overeducated. And I had some seriously good English teachers in middle school and high school. Also, I read a lot, and I am extremely comfortable expressing myself in writing. I probably should do more editing than I do, but I think I can scrape by okay as I have been doing (feel free to disagree), and for what is essentially a side project, I just can't be bothered. If you don't have a lot of experience writing or if you don't have a love affair with yourself like I do, then please, please do edit. It's totally worth taking the time to tweak and perfect, as long as you don't get so stuck in the process that you never hit post. As a wise friend once said... "Fuck it. Ship it." (Sorry, Grandma.)

Q: What do I need to get started?
A: Rarely: a destination. This is what I was saying earlier. I often start with a thought, start to spin it, and then see where it will take me. I feel like my conclusions are the weakest part of my writing--said every honest, self-reflective writing seminar student ever--but that's partly because what I'm doing here is not meant to be a presentation of a particular thought: it's me trying to see where I can go with something and you getting to find out where I ended up.

Q: When I write, do I frequently discard what I do?
A: Hmm. Yes, and no. Usually if I start to write something, I will finish writing... something. Not necessarily what I started writing or was planning to write. There are, however, several unpublished drafts lurking in my post stash. The former circumstance happens when I haven't thought through what I want to write, or I realize that I disagree with myself, so I have to change direction mid-stride. Since I usually just write on a whim (usually = always before this past week), I don't have the room to totally throw something in the trash. If I start it, I'll finish it, somehow. If I didn't finish or didn't publish something, it's probably because I was either trying to bring together two thoughts that just wouldn't fit and I gave up or else because I had to leave my computer to do something else mid-post and was, again, trying to do something too complicated for me to pick up the thought where I left off. It is pretty rare for me to discard anything wholesale though. I mean, I still have a box under my bed with my notebooks from middle school, and trust me, I was not writing stories or poetry that anyone would ever want to read.

Please note, that unless stated otherwise, everything I've said here applies to writing blog posts (and to some extent, poetry) only. My academic papers were a very different process, in part because the demands placed on me were external: when you have to dance to someone else's beat, you have to be more strategic. And honestly, I think that's just true of anything where you're trying to argue a particular point, or develop a story, or do anything in an intentional way, especially if you have to be conscious of your audience. This particular writing is very much for myself, which is why I might get a little weird if you come up to me in person and say, "So about that thing you wrote on your blog..." It's like you're reading my diary, you creep. Of course, I'm the one who makes it public, because I'm the exhibitionist to your creep. Whatever. As long as we both know where we stand.