An overdue journey guided me briskly through relentless rain, my brown leather trainers soaked and weighted as I leapt across and into murky puddles. Sweet, charcoal smoke climbed upward and away from the burning embers of a determined grill, stolen from an awaiting chimney by heaving drafts, drenched and denied promises of broiled tomato, onion and za’tar.
I drew and held a tentative breath, passed the butcher with averted gaze, straining as a child when witness to his first paraplegic; a slaughtered, skinned body swayed heavily in segments from steel hooks. The butcher scraped a rubber broom across chipped, spotted tiles, pacing methodically in crimson splashed galoshes. Blood spilled onto the black asphalt in tides, swirled through a meandering spectrum of oily rainbows, and found the piled beaches of a construction site. It pulled at the powdery dunes of unmixed cement and wandered lazily on, a brown, silted concoction, between crowded steel bars, briefly floating the rotting skins of discarded vegetables and an empty cigarette pack before disappearing beneath the road.
I pulled the collar of my wool coat around my neck and peered upward through a thin, stinging veil to a dimly lighted window. Cinderblock walls, pocked by Israeli guns, shown dark grey as they slowly absorbed a days old storm. I wrenched my hands from dewy pockets and pushed through the metal door, punctured and ironic, its sharp, rusting bullet holes inviting the chill fury behind me.
I ascended a narrow corridor towards the blaring explosions of an Egyptian action movie and collapsed unto a crushed velvet cushion. In the corner, an elderly man stroked his wiry, metallic beard and kneeled eastward upon a faded rug. Next to me, a boy with Coke bottle glasses squinted intently at a television mounted high on the wall, secretly anticipating the change of channel and hippie-era Speed Racer cartoons during commercial breaks, impossibly tiny feet hanging motionless from his perch on the couch’s edge.
Three cracked mirrors reflected a disguised man, a foreigner’s face hidden beneath squalid black shrubbery, neglected tan curls protruding from beneath a stretched winter cap. I waited, a stranger unto myself, until beckoned to the stiff rose leather of a motorized chair, my dingy jeans wiping oily hair from its surface.
It is here that the ritual and clanship of men transcend nations. This fraternity of artisans lifts itself from the currents of three worlds, pauses solely on its universal day of rest, and invites only those who know the way as Tuesdays dawn.
He scanned the crowded counter. Scissors, an oversized comb, a brush, thick with shorn black hair, a towel to drape over his shoulder, its worn cloth drenched with heavy shaving cream and subtle after shave.
Trust is releasing Western vanities to the mercy of Eastern considerations, without the luxury of language, bound beneath nylon and vicars’ stretched white paper.
It is letting a declared enemy of state brush through your dusty hair; pull through tangles and examine moles cautiously; advise you as a doctor with the concurrence of waiting patrons; cut through American brown amidst Palestinian black; grasp your jaw and tilt your head with rough, steady hands; examine, evaluate, strategize; touch you prone; set a razor blade to your throat and deftly scrape away self neglect; return you to a vaguely familiar self. It is trust that opens wide the heart, without the longing of expectation.
“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” --Paolo Freire
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Friday, February 9, 2007
Peaceful Warrior
Mark,
What can I say? It's not that I haven't thought of you, and often. But I didn't have the tools or the time to track you down. Funny, since all it took was google. From what I've read of your projects on the internet, you've completely redefined yourself....or maybe I never knew the real you, if there is such a thing for anyone. With your good looks and your athlete's confident charm, you must present quite a paradox to the activist community. Did you know I became fairly immersed in campus activism after I got back from Ireland?
You'll forgive me for making assumptions, but college seems to have been an especially tumultuous time for both of us, each trying to make all the bits and pieces of our fractured lives make sense, trying to integrate them into a single, coherant narrative, engaged in our own way in that fabled search for the "integrated self." Though Tim's impact on our lives ultimately had different results, I think you'll agree his magic was that he showed us, perhaps unknowingly, that there is another possibility for the self, what might be called the “inconsistent self.”
Before your eyes start to glaze over and I lose you, just try to understand that this is simply my agonized attempt to understand what happened to us, to me, to Tim. Beginning in Ireland, I think we three underwent a paradigm shift, a shift that would eventually be called, at least in Tim's case, “sick,” delusional, and even dangerous. What made this shift possible? It was the validation we offered each other, helping each other see that we shouldn't be anxious, depressed, or disgusted when we found a multitude of interests and potential selves.
If Tim had lived, I think he would have been a broad thinker and doer, but would his ideas and his life have impacted us with the same magnitude? If he had lived, there would be somebody who had witnessed a beginning, who implicitly understood me at a time I didn't understand anything, let alone myself. So what’s tragic is that Tim knew what I believe now to be my idealized, albeit germinal self, and that self is lost forever. What's even more tragic, I'm realizing now, is that I've never been able to wrap my head around your struggle, and we've lost the time together that might have produced some powerful moments. Why didn't we combine our strengths then, or even go to each other for comfort, to grieve? But that's water under the bridge, impossible to recapture now... and here you are, under your own power, you've done it. You've cast aside fear and taken a bold step into nothingness, with only an ideal, and hope, and maybe a little faith in the goodness of man. What surprises me is that I'm not skeptical at all.
It doesn't matter to me how much money you raise for your charities, or how many people you draw to a screening of your DVD (which I just ordered), it doesn't even matter to me why you're doing what you're doing. What I'm saying is I'm proud of you...not just for what you're doing, but HOW you're doing it, with such clarity and vision and purposeful drive. Of course, given what I know of you now, it almost pains me to have to tell you that I'm in the military, but if you've been in contact with anyone from the group you already know what I've been doing. Why the miltary, which is so fundamentally wrong for me? Again, I suppose it doesn't really matter why. I've now become jaded and I have to give it one more year...what really matter's is what I do after.
So please don't disappear again. Don't get shot again. And for god sake don't go to Baghdad. Or is that me succumbing to fear? As you must surely know by now, there's fear, and then there's healthy awareness of our own fragility....basically, I hope you'll be wise enough to watch your ass. If you're wondering, I'm stationed in England now, an easy hop over to Ireland. I was just there in Dublin for the new year, looked for Tim's tree at Glencree one afternoon, but couldn't find it....Aeveen was also out of town. If you're on this side of the Atlantic again, let me know and I'll do what I can to meet up with you. And you know you have a place to stay, whether I'm home or not. Be well, be strong.
-Kris
Kris,
In some place, I’ve been waiting for your words for a long time. I well know the need to make sense of what happened to us in Ireland. Tim’s death, and the time I spent with his family in Woodstock, accelerated me. I never felt anger about his suicide, though I grieved for so long. In many ways, I am still grieving. I wonder if he hadn’t killed himself, and brought me into his family, if I might have succumbed to a similar fate.
Tim, uncontainable and dangerous, flooded my senses, an opiate quickening, blinding me with rage I’d never known. We prowled Dublin, drunk with possibility and risk, searching for someone to fight. We found only ourselves. We exchanged fists and bruises for hours, dancing in the cold rain, slamming our knuckles into each other, laughing out as we shattered.
When I returned home, I fell forward into myself. I am lucky to have survived those next few years. I battled anyone who would oblidge me. I never won, I never wanted to. I wanted the fury of strangers to knock through my walls, crack my grinning mouth, crush me, burn me to ashes and leave behind only the essence. I sobbed heavy, private tears as I waded into the icy waters of the surging creek, searching for Tim amidst a current that should surely have swept me away. I destroyed what was around me, reflections of a self I wanted to transcend. There was no peace in it.
I nearly dropped out of school. I forced myself through an innocuous and false world I no longer believed in. I lived for Tim with the solitary hope of making him proud. I carried his great weight upon me. When I finally collapsed in exhaustion and loneliness, it was his quiet chuckle and calm reassurance I heard through the dull and enduring clamour of our memories.
I had sought alchemy but found a cell of madness and self-doubt. The fear I believed abandoned in Derry was in fact now bearing sharply through the raw, vulnerable skin of a trembling body. It was this fear alone, when everything else had crumbled and fallen, which remained to embrace. It was this that brought me to Palestine.
For three hours in the West Bank I was invincible. I stood beneath a 30-caliber machine gun, firing over my head with ferocious and gross neglect. I walked shoulder to shoulder with the strongest people I have ever known, a mere child in their presence, cast not into the shadows of their unfaltering steps, but bolstered as a pillar amongst them.
In this place, fear rips through from the center, flies outward and away without pausing to reconcile, leaves you breathless and faint. It pits the greatest of self against the least, and in the end, reveals itself an illusion. I watched a soldier take aim, and I watched as he pulled his trigger. I watched as bullets seared through a two-year-old child and his three-year-old sister. I watched as the blood poured from their eyes, their ears and their noses. I watched as my invincible self walked briskly away from me, turned back for a final, yawning look into my wide eyes, wink and fade to the other side, Tim’s side.
I rose from ashes at that moment, destroyed and renewed. Indeed, I have not arrived, merely ventured, and my steps are sure. With each moment, the world’s definitions of me slip from my heart and the possibilities of who I will be rise in their place. I am a better man than I was, but only a fragment of what I will become. What I have learned from Tim is that time is not short, the body not delicate. It is our sight that is short, our hearts that are delicate. The three of us will again meet on this path he gifted us, of that I am certain, and I will follow it with great appreciation, to Glencree.
Your friend,
Mark
What can I say? It's not that I haven't thought of you, and often. But I didn't have the tools or the time to track you down. Funny, since all it took was google. From what I've read of your projects on the internet, you've completely redefined yourself....or maybe I never knew the real you, if there is such a thing for anyone. With your good looks and your athlete's confident charm, you must present quite a paradox to the activist community. Did you know I became fairly immersed in campus activism after I got back from Ireland?
You'll forgive me for making assumptions, but college seems to have been an especially tumultuous time for both of us, each trying to make all the bits and pieces of our fractured lives make sense, trying to integrate them into a single, coherant narrative, engaged in our own way in that fabled search for the "integrated self." Though Tim's impact on our lives ultimately had different results, I think you'll agree his magic was that he showed us, perhaps unknowingly, that there is another possibility for the self, what might be called the “inconsistent self.”
Before your eyes start to glaze over and I lose you, just try to understand that this is simply my agonized attempt to understand what happened to us, to me, to Tim. Beginning in Ireland, I think we three underwent a paradigm shift, a shift that would eventually be called, at least in Tim's case, “sick,” delusional, and even dangerous. What made this shift possible? It was the validation we offered each other, helping each other see that we shouldn't be anxious, depressed, or disgusted when we found a multitude of interests and potential selves.
If Tim had lived, I think he would have been a broad thinker and doer, but would his ideas and his life have impacted us with the same magnitude? If he had lived, there would be somebody who had witnessed a beginning, who implicitly understood me at a time I didn't understand anything, let alone myself. So what’s tragic is that Tim knew what I believe now to be my idealized, albeit germinal self, and that self is lost forever. What's even more tragic, I'm realizing now, is that I've never been able to wrap my head around your struggle, and we've lost the time together that might have produced some powerful moments. Why didn't we combine our strengths then, or even go to each other for comfort, to grieve? But that's water under the bridge, impossible to recapture now... and here you are, under your own power, you've done it. You've cast aside fear and taken a bold step into nothingness, with only an ideal, and hope, and maybe a little faith in the goodness of man. What surprises me is that I'm not skeptical at all.
It doesn't matter to me how much money you raise for your charities, or how many people you draw to a screening of your DVD (which I just ordered), it doesn't even matter to me why you're doing what you're doing. What I'm saying is I'm proud of you...not just for what you're doing, but HOW you're doing it, with such clarity and vision and purposeful drive. Of course, given what I know of you now, it almost pains me to have to tell you that I'm in the military, but if you've been in contact with anyone from the group you already know what I've been doing. Why the miltary, which is so fundamentally wrong for me? Again, I suppose it doesn't really matter why. I've now become jaded and I have to give it one more year...what really matter's is what I do after.
So please don't disappear again. Don't get shot again. And for god sake don't go to Baghdad. Or is that me succumbing to fear? As you must surely know by now, there's fear, and then there's healthy awareness of our own fragility....basically, I hope you'll be wise enough to watch your ass. If you're wondering, I'm stationed in England now, an easy hop over to Ireland. I was just there in Dublin for the new year, looked for Tim's tree at Glencree one afternoon, but couldn't find it....Aeveen was also out of town. If you're on this side of the Atlantic again, let me know and I'll do what I can to meet up with you. And you know you have a place to stay, whether I'm home or not. Be well, be strong.
-Kris
Kris,
In some place, I’ve been waiting for your words for a long time. I well know the need to make sense of what happened to us in Ireland. Tim’s death, and the time I spent with his family in Woodstock, accelerated me. I never felt anger about his suicide, though I grieved for so long. In many ways, I am still grieving. I wonder if he hadn’t killed himself, and brought me into his family, if I might have succumbed to a similar fate.
Tim, uncontainable and dangerous, flooded my senses, an opiate quickening, blinding me with rage I’d never known. We prowled Dublin, drunk with possibility and risk, searching for someone to fight. We found only ourselves. We exchanged fists and bruises for hours, dancing in the cold rain, slamming our knuckles into each other, laughing out as we shattered.
When I returned home, I fell forward into myself. I am lucky to have survived those next few years. I battled anyone who would oblidge me. I never won, I never wanted to. I wanted the fury of strangers to knock through my walls, crack my grinning mouth, crush me, burn me to ashes and leave behind only the essence. I sobbed heavy, private tears as I waded into the icy waters of the surging creek, searching for Tim amidst a current that should surely have swept me away. I destroyed what was around me, reflections of a self I wanted to transcend. There was no peace in it.
I nearly dropped out of school. I forced myself through an innocuous and false world I no longer believed in. I lived for Tim with the solitary hope of making him proud. I carried his great weight upon me. When I finally collapsed in exhaustion and loneliness, it was his quiet chuckle and calm reassurance I heard through the dull and enduring clamour of our memories.
I had sought alchemy but found a cell of madness and self-doubt. The fear I believed abandoned in Derry was in fact now bearing sharply through the raw, vulnerable skin of a trembling body. It was this fear alone, when everything else had crumbled and fallen, which remained to embrace. It was this that brought me to Palestine.
For three hours in the West Bank I was invincible. I stood beneath a 30-caliber machine gun, firing over my head with ferocious and gross neglect. I walked shoulder to shoulder with the strongest people I have ever known, a mere child in their presence, cast not into the shadows of their unfaltering steps, but bolstered as a pillar amongst them.
In this place, fear rips through from the center, flies outward and away without pausing to reconcile, leaves you breathless and faint. It pits the greatest of self against the least, and in the end, reveals itself an illusion. I watched a soldier take aim, and I watched as he pulled his trigger. I watched as bullets seared through a two-year-old child and his three-year-old sister. I watched as the blood poured from their eyes, their ears and their noses. I watched as my invincible self walked briskly away from me, turned back for a final, yawning look into my wide eyes, wink and fade to the other side, Tim’s side.
I rose from ashes at that moment, destroyed and renewed. Indeed, I have not arrived, merely ventured, and my steps are sure. With each moment, the world’s definitions of me slip from my heart and the possibilities of who I will be rise in their place. I am a better man than I was, but only a fragment of what I will become. What I have learned from Tim is that time is not short, the body not delicate. It is our sight that is short, our hearts that are delicate. The three of us will again meet on this path he gifted us, of that I am certain, and I will follow it with great appreciation, to Glencree.
Your friend,
Mark
Sunday, February 4, 2007
A letter to Parents & Teachers
Dear Parents and Teachers,
"It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." Anne Frank - July 15, 1944
Her voice was uncontainable. From an attic, as the lights of her captive world flickered and conceded darkness, she preserved her single, beautiful perspective. Its worth is irrefutable, though simple, told through the trembling hand of a fourteen-year-old girl. We would not deny that though her journal lacked the insights of scholars or the repudiation of the Gestapo, it remains in fact an invaluable window into her era.
In our era, we often walk with trepidation into understanding the confusing and heartbreaking world. We shy from topics that challenge our beliefs and burden our confidence. Our sources must be objective, our teachers non-committal, our news balanced. We grasp for “both sides of the story” during minute segments afforded in clipped articles and Katie Couric’s nightly world debriefing.
If a young Rwandan had penned Anne’s diary during that country’s genocide, would her words not possess the same merit? If it had been written by Yolanda King, would we demand of those pages the white voices of Jim Crowe’s South lest her journal be deemed unbalanced and her point of view tainted?
Anne Frank offered the perspective she was capable of providing, her own. Through her words we are gifted the history, love and hope of an individual person. We do not search for “the other side” because her poetry inspires in us the understanding that there were in fact millions of perspectives all around her, striving, struggling, being extinguished. Her life could not be inscribed upon a side of a coin, flipped over to reveal the faces of her tormentors, or those who stood by as her essence was stolen.
During a talk I recently gave to a group of high school students, I asked them to identify someone they know for certain to be biased.
“Ok,” I began, “How about Osama bin Laden?”
“Definitely,” they agreed.
“Can you prove it?”
“He hates America, he’s responsible for 9/11.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s common fact,” they scoffed, “Everyone knows that.”
“Have you ever met him?” I asked, “How did you discover it was him?”
“Watch the news,” someone chided.
“Ok, fair and balanced. We’re looking for evidence. Let’s say we get all our information about Osama from Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Is Bill biased?
“Yea,” a few young Democrats laughed, “He loves Bush.” Thoughtfully, a boy added, “It’s clear what he believes about things - abortion, the war in Iraq, terrorism…”
“And that helps you to identify his bias?”
“Sure.”
“So you know things about him, what he thinks, how he feels…What did O’Reilly have for breakfast this morning?” I asked. “I had two cups of coffee, by the way. Can you think of someone else’s bias you might have more evidence of?”
“How about you?” a young Republican erupted.
I winked. “You’re so right and you’re almost there.”
“You’re saying I’m biased?!” he grimaced, his discovery not relieving his frustration.
“I’m saying you know more about yourself than anyone else,” I encouraged. “You have more evidence of your own bias than any other source of information you could ever find. It’s your eyes and your ears you are learning through, and a lifetime worth of experience is how you integrate what you encounter. But that means you’re also the most qualified person in the world to evaluate that bias. Your’s is the only voice on the planet for which you have everything you need to critically analyze. You know where you spent Christmas Eve three years ago and you know what you’re going to do Friday night. Can you tell me the same about Wolf Blitzer?”
Bias need not be a four-letter word. Bias is simply the culmination of our experiences and a pre-consolidation of our understanding. No politician, reporter or teacher is exempt from their perspective, and rightly so. Be wary of the person who claims to possess a coin with the world engraved into opposing halves. Listen with caution when a reporter tells the story of another’s life without giving pause to reconcile you to his own.
As educators, we retain a remarkable possibility, an exercise in honesty, to teach not facts to be remembered, but perspectives to be questioned. If we are to bestow anything, let it be the facility of our students to doubt us, to disagree with what we know and to discover their own truths.
Our endeavor is a risky one. Our method seems absurd and impractical. Our discoveries will be wrought with the discomfort of allowing our beliefs to be challenged and limited by the constraints of our own senses. Rightly so.
Sincerely,
mark turner
Founder, Research Journalism Initiative
"It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." Anne Frank - July 15, 1944
Her voice was uncontainable. From an attic, as the lights of her captive world flickered and conceded darkness, she preserved her single, beautiful perspective. Its worth is irrefutable, though simple, told through the trembling hand of a fourteen-year-old girl. We would not deny that though her journal lacked the insights of scholars or the repudiation of the Gestapo, it remains in fact an invaluable window into her era.
In our era, we often walk with trepidation into understanding the confusing and heartbreaking world. We shy from topics that challenge our beliefs and burden our confidence. Our sources must be objective, our teachers non-committal, our news balanced. We grasp for “both sides of the story” during minute segments afforded in clipped articles and Katie Couric’s nightly world debriefing.
If a young Rwandan had penned Anne’s diary during that country’s genocide, would her words not possess the same merit? If it had been written by Yolanda King, would we demand of those pages the white voices of Jim Crowe’s South lest her journal be deemed unbalanced and her point of view tainted?
Anne Frank offered the perspective she was capable of providing, her own. Through her words we are gifted the history, love and hope of an individual person. We do not search for “the other side” because her poetry inspires in us the understanding that there were in fact millions of perspectives all around her, striving, struggling, being extinguished. Her life could not be inscribed upon a side of a coin, flipped over to reveal the faces of her tormentors, or those who stood by as her essence was stolen.
During a talk I recently gave to a group of high school students, I asked them to identify someone they know for certain to be biased.
“Ok,” I began, “How about Osama bin Laden?”
“Definitely,” they agreed.
“Can you prove it?”
“He hates America, he’s responsible for 9/11.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s common fact,” they scoffed, “Everyone knows that.”
“Have you ever met him?” I asked, “How did you discover it was him?”
“Watch the news,” someone chided.
“Ok, fair and balanced. We’re looking for evidence. Let’s say we get all our information about Osama from Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Is Bill biased?
“Yea,” a few young Democrats laughed, “He loves Bush.” Thoughtfully, a boy added, “It’s clear what he believes about things - abortion, the war in Iraq, terrorism…”
“And that helps you to identify his bias?”
“Sure.”
“So you know things about him, what he thinks, how he feels…What did O’Reilly have for breakfast this morning?” I asked. “I had two cups of coffee, by the way. Can you think of someone else’s bias you might have more evidence of?”
“How about you?” a young Republican erupted.
I winked. “You’re so right and you’re almost there.”
“You’re saying I’m biased?!” he grimaced, his discovery not relieving his frustration.
“I’m saying you know more about yourself than anyone else,” I encouraged. “You have more evidence of your own bias than any other source of information you could ever find. It’s your eyes and your ears you are learning through, and a lifetime worth of experience is how you integrate what you encounter. But that means you’re also the most qualified person in the world to evaluate that bias. Your’s is the only voice on the planet for which you have everything you need to critically analyze. You know where you spent Christmas Eve three years ago and you know what you’re going to do Friday night. Can you tell me the same about Wolf Blitzer?”
Bias need not be a four-letter word. Bias is simply the culmination of our experiences and a pre-consolidation of our understanding. No politician, reporter or teacher is exempt from their perspective, and rightly so. Be wary of the person who claims to possess a coin with the world engraved into opposing halves. Listen with caution when a reporter tells the story of another’s life without giving pause to reconcile you to his own.
As educators, we retain a remarkable possibility, an exercise in honesty, to teach not facts to be remembered, but perspectives to be questioned. If we are to bestow anything, let it be the facility of our students to doubt us, to disagree with what we know and to discover their own truths.
Our endeavor is a risky one. Our method seems absurd and impractical. Our discoveries will be wrought with the discomfort of allowing our beliefs to be challenged and limited by the constraints of our own senses. Rightly so.
Sincerely,
mark turner
Founder, Research Journalism Initiative
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