Temporal Goods

I was burglared.

I am teaching Augustine's Confessions.

I am growing to think that there is something to Augustine's notion that we cannot set our hearts on things that can be lost. I think in one way or another, I've always tried to think several steps ahead in order to prevent myself from feeling real loss: if I don't get a grant, I can think there are people who I like who will be around at that time so I will gain the time spent with them; if my love doesn't work out, I won't have to deal with the things that were difficult; if my friends stop calling, I'll have more time to do my scholarship; if my parents don't affirm me, I won't have to be overwhelmed by holidays spent at home. I plan ahead like this, if this goes wrong and that goes wrong, I'll still be ok, there's a bright side to every loss.

I lost books when I moved down to the Rio Grande Valley and that started to make me sad. I always forget which books I lost so I go looking for one and it isn't there and I'm bereft once more. But there are libraries and tax refunds to fund book purchases so I was not too overwhelmed.

But over the weekend my laptop (and Jeff's) was stolen. I am sad for me and what I've lost and I'm sad for Jeff, maybe more sad for Jeff because in a more real sense than I, lost time by losing his machine. (new meaning to the term "time machine") It's the kind of loss that doesn't feel like it can be offset by any good thing that comes from not having what I had. (Does this mean there is no downside to owning a laptop?) Teaching Augustine this week (who startles me with his latent stoicism), I started thinking that maybe not desiring something that could be lost was the answer. But here's the rub: I really do care about my work and about the time it took me to do it and the time it will take me to recover it. I also care about Jeff's work and both of our continued sanity. Would we be less sad if we weren't so invested in our work that is on those machines? Perhaps, but I'm not sure we would be who we were, and frankly I think most people would consider it strange if we weren't upset by this loss. It's the oddest thing trying to recathect one's desire that has been invested in her work since her work is a part of her in a different way than one might think a lost love is. There's a real sense of something being broken off that needs to be reconstituted.

In the end, I'd rather be a lover of things, even lowly things, perhaps even beyond their proper due, than keep setting myself safety nets. So thanks Augustine, but I'm not sure I can do what you ask.

Today I'm back to work, at my school computer, more secure, perhaps, not much less invested in my work, rather annoyed that I can't reconstitute my edits of a week ago. People who say it's always better the second time around lie.

Born to Run

My calves hurt right now because I ran 7-miles yesterday. Up until now, I've never had painful calves from running 7 miles. But this run was different because I tried to implement the advice that Christopher McDougall stumbles across and shares with his reader in his new book, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. I'm not blaming him for my painful calves or for the fact that I found walking so difficult yesterday that my boyfriend, Jeff, told me that even though I looked funny he'd still be willing to be seen with me in the drugstore. Thanks babe! I'm excited to learn that there might be other ways to run that would take the pressure of a runner's knees so that she could run for a long time.

Here's the gist of the argument: western runners have been hoodwinked by the so-called technological advances of the running industry to think that they will run better the more their feet are separated from the surface on which they run. In fact, this seperation has led us to run in more painful ways than our bodies could ever sustain because we don't have to feel the immediate pain or pressure and so we sustain injuries that come in the wake of poor posture and poor form that our feet offer no resistance to because they don't feel the pain in the act of running. We need to learn to run almost as if we were barefoot. Let those shoes wear down. Don't buy new shoes for 5000 (instead of 500) miles, and you'll run like you were meant to: pronating, ultimately landing on the balls of your feet. The reason I had such pain in my calves is that my sneakers made it very difficult for me to do this so I ended up just not letting my heel strike at all and ran on the balls of my feet for seven miles and my calves were surprised with the work they had to do.

The most amazing thing that McDougall learns is that contrary to popular, medical and general running wisdom, running is not bad for you; you shouldn't have to quit at 40 from bum knees. In fact, human beings evolved to run! Not, as we have often heard, away from the possibility of running.

Some facts: Human beings are the only running mammals whose oxygen capacity is separated from their stride. So while most animals must breathe than stride, and so have only one breath per stride, human beings can have several breaths per stride. With better oxygen, comes longer endurance for running. Furthermore, the human cooling mechanism is not attached to our breathing mechanism but to sweat. So we can continue to run without overheating as long as we sweat, while other animals must stop or they will become overheated. It appears that for this reason human beings can run an animal to death as the Bushmen of Kalahari and the Indians of Tarahumari are known to do.
Also, unlike walking animals, human beings have what all running mammals share in common: our calves are connected to our feet with the Achilles' tendon. Animals that have evolved to walk do not have this connection.
Human beings get faster every year starting at age 19 and then peak at 27. But they don't return to the age 19 pace until 64 years old! We are able to maintain a running life for that entire time.
Strangely, running that enabled us to hunt down antelope and kudu required thinking like the animal, empathizing with the animal, becoming like the animal in order to predict future action: visualization, empathy, abstract thinking, forward projections -- the mental activities that create causal connections in the mind where we, unlike other animals who don't have to strategize to run down their prey, had to learn to connect dots not just in the world but in our minds, between that which did not or at least not yet exist in the world. So running led us to think well, and we run to develop our capacity to think well.

I'm taken by this as my calves can testify, but I'm also nonplussed. I run almost everyday. I can get on board with running better and more like our feet are intended to move, taking in the shocks by striking midfoot and rolling over to the balls of our feet, easy and light on our feet, changing our stride. But I don't hunt down my prey. I don't even have a running path very close to me that is seriously off-road. Can only ultra-runners on mountain passes achieve this relation to running? Am I doomed to fall short of my end if I can't run the way that my body has evolved for me to be able to run?

I'll have more to say about this subject soon when I see whether I can maintain this form, whether I can run like this in sneakers, whether I can run like this when I speed train, and what this had to do with how I live. Stay tuned.

Bordering on Boorish

I just read today in the Houston Chronicle that the Brownsville city commissioners are permitting the US Government to build the so-called border wall along the Rio Grande as it passes through Brownsville.  The city is hoping to maintain future possibilities of developing the riverfront nonetheless.  The federal government will remove the "fence" -- which in the places I have seen it is a series of closely aligned 10-foot high poles -- when the city comes up with money to create something less obtrusive such as a levee.  There is concern which seems like the obvious concern to me that this temporary fence will become permanent.   You can link to the article through the title to this post.  Warning: Some pretty obnoxious xenophobic reader comments.  See the Brownsville Herald article here.

It's not just that this is bad for Brownsville which had hoped to use the waterfront for a place for community gathering, sure it'd involve some development, but Brownsville needs that and the mayor seems to be concerned about city planning which I'm beginning to think is a rare thing in the RGV.  I'm frustrated that the Obama Administration insists on the continuing to build this wall, sometimes called the Wall of Death.  In the primary debates, both Obama and Clinton backed off their support for the wall.  Clinton talks specifically about the absurdity of the Brownsville wall last February.  Immediately after the election, there was expectation in the border regions that the wall would actually be removed by the new administration, and this appears to be another instance of lack of change.  It's not just that the wall won't work but as we are facing in the case of Brownsville, promises to undo what the federal government does are difficult to believe.  It's frustrating to feel like we have the best possible administration we could and yet nothing can be done about this.  Whither hope?

McAllen

Some people have been asking me since I moved to the McAllen / Edinburg area of Texas what it is like to live where I live.  I try to describe it as best I can, but you might be interested to know that McAllen has made the news a number of times in the last couple months.  

Check out this link to the New Yorker article on healthcare.  Also see this article from the Economist on the poorest part of Texas (Hidalgo County, where I live).

Mao, Mau-Mauing and States of Emergency

So I was trying to think of a fancy title that played on Mao and Mau-Mauing and I went to wikipedia to look up the Mau-Mau Uprising and learned that it was an uprising by disgruntled Kenyans of the central highlands whose land was repeatedly taken from them by European settlers and there was no equitable avenue by which native grievances against settlers could be addressed. Having stolen their land, the settlers allowed the natives to work the land yet they had no real rights to the land even as the settlers encouraged longer and longer work weeks and days. These tenant farmers grew disaffected and left the highlands for Nairobi and in Nairobi began forming groups to seek political redress for wrongs and ultimately, Kenyan independence. Gaining power and challenging those they called British collaborators, the Mau-Maus, as the rebels were called, became a real threat to British rule and yup, you guessed it, a State of Emergency was declared on October 20, 1952. The state of emergency led to increased violence, duh, on the part of both the state and the rebels. This situation eventually led to the war of liberation with the rebels fighting as the Land and Freedom Army, since those were the two issues that prompted the resistance of the highlanders. Both the government and the Kenyans got more and more violent, attacked civilians and led to general chaos for some time in the early 50s until resolution that led to increased control both of land and political life by the Kenyans. In the end 32 settlers were said to have died and over 10,000 Kenyans.

The Mau-Maus were severely tortured by the British but they were violent to civilians as well, to the point where it seemed difficult to distinguish. When Tom Wolfe used the phrase Mau-Mauing he meant that those seeking handouts at a program in San Francisco did so with menacing tactics.

Which brings me to Mao. Slavoj Zizek says in his introduction to his edition of Mao speeches and letters that ultimately, the synthesis of capitalism and communism in the Mao-ist sense led to the worst and perhaps ideal capitalist state, where only in the context of communism, does capitalism, as described by Marx in its late stages finds the proper milieu in which to thrive.
Sizek writes:

So, ironically, this is the 'synthesis' of capitalism and communism in Mao's sense: in a unique example of the poetic justice of history, it was capitalism which 'synthesized' with Maoist communism. The key news from China over the last years is the emergency of large-scale workers' movements, protesting against the work conditions which are the price for China rapidly becoming the world's foremost manufacturing site, and the brutal way the authorities cracked down on it -- a new proof, if one is still needed, that China is today the ideal capitalist state: freedom for capital, with the state doing the 'dirty job' of controlling the workers. China as the emerging superpower of the twenty-first century thus seems to embody a new kind of capitalism: disregard for ecological consequences, repression of workers' rights, everything subordinated to the ruthless drive to develop and become the new superpower. (Slavoj Zizek presents Mao, On Practice and Contradiction, 18)

Capitalism is the new Mao-Mao.

Beyond Home and Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson, the contemporary author of some of the truest fiction I've read in the last five years, Gilead, Home, and Housekeeping, wrote a jarring and Calvinistically optimistic collection of essays called The Death of Adam. I recommend picking it up and not reading it all at once. I leave you one quote with which I resonated:

"I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and and we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it. I miss civilization, and I want it back."

Indeed.

States of Emergency or As the Swine Flew

This flu is weird. It started with pigs, they say, but you can't really get it from pigs anymore. In Israel, they call it the Mexico flu so that people who get it aren't considered unkosher. Which is weird because I thought kosher was about food so I don't think the Israeli's are considered with the kosherness of infected human bodies. In my area, along the border, schools have been shut down for ten days even though there are no known cases in the area. We are about 650 miles from Mexico City. The epicenter of the flu in NYC is a well-to-do Catholic preparatory school. There are signs all over my university encouraging handwashing. And over the last week, the World Health Organization has raised the epidemic level from 3 to 4 to 5 and now there is talk of raising it to 6 with 1,000 cases reported worldwide.

I've been thinking how much the swine flu encourages us to think in terms of constant state of emergency. The terrorist alert is at orange all the time, and now there is a pandemic, and the state of emergency has come to be the norm. This doesn't really heighten anyone's awareness of alertness. I was at an airport last weekend and I went to get food and then to the atm and then to my gate and at my gate realized I had left my suitcase at the food line. Racing back the food line, as the p.a. system was encouraging passengers to report unattended luggage, I was relieved to find that no one was concerned or alerted by by suitcase that stood in line as if waiting to be served. I'm not saying that this state of emergency problem is a problem because no one is alert, because I don't think people can handle so much alertness. But I'm not saying that we should keep from such states in order that people be really alert when the need to be. But rather that states of emergency have extended beyond luggage to our actual bodies, washing our hands and so forth. And it almost seems like the bio-politicians are prophets.