After work. . .

I step outside into the middle of a group of young people, Indigenous. A girl of twelve or thirteen (though she looks older. her clothes make her look older. the pain on her face makes her look older) stares down a boy, pubescent and gangling.

"At least let me slap you." Her brown eyes are fire with angry tears.

He looks back defiant, trying on that gangster slouch, but his cracked voice betrays him. "What? Its not like I murdered you."

Her voice is calm. Cold. "I don't give a fuck about murder. When you kill someone, they're dead. When you raped me, you took everything from me." Her friends stand protectively around her, stony faced.

This isn't some petty preteen dispute I have walked into. This is Real Fucking Life.

I want to help. I want to tell her she's a hero for confronting her assailant, calling him out, demanding some sort of justice. I want to tell her that he hasn't taken everything from her -- the fire in her eyes proves it. I want to hug her, because this isn't something that any girl should go through.

I don't do any of these things. I keep walking to my bus, past a pair of cops who are aggressively interrogating a black man who affably insists he has done no wrong. As I wait for my bus, the girl and her friends approach the police. The police have no time for her.

No white knights there. But then, I'm not convinced white knights are the champions this world needs. I tell myself this, maybe because it excuses me from having to be one.

I sit on the bus and I can feel my whiteness on me like soap scum. White is clean, they taught us. Brown is dirty. Black is sin.

Little white people teach little white lies.

White is just the shit we scrub on ourselves to erase the blood on our hands. White is the talcum powder we tap out daintily to cover up our own colonial stink.

I am conscious of this scum on me constantly, the false cleanliness, the baby powder scent of privilege.

White is like mildew, clinging to a rotted out social construct that has so long been secure in its predominance that it doesn't realize it is caving in on itself.

I can feel that whiteness hanging off of everything around me, making the air thick, making my lungs burn. I watch it snaking, smothering, stifling, like smoke. In that group of Indigenous teenagers, whiteness hung like a shadow or a puppeteer behind a screen, pulling the strings of trauma that led to violence that led to beautiful brown eyes shining with angry tears.

No, there is no room for heroism from white knights. Not when white knights keep colored civilians pinned, squirming and bleeding on the lance.

I don't know what to do.

I don't know what to do.

I do nothing, and I hate my whiteness more.

Ferroelectric mixed media mayhem?

This is what I started with : a diagram of how ferroelectricity works that I didn't really try to understand. Base image courtesy University of Cambridge DoITPoMS Mathur, Shawl et al http://www.doitpoms.ac.uk/tlplib/ferroelectrics/printall.php

Then I made this on Gimp: 

Then I printed out the Gimp work and made this:

Which should have been fine, except I'd just been reading a piece on handwritten mixed media art journals. So I cut the fucker up: 

Don't feel too badly for it though. As the blue note on the front says: "Talking is just masturbation without the mess." So are most (read: all) of my artistic endeavors. 

 

Which makes blogging them pornographic?

Princess Ilse

Today's art project, at the suggestion of Stew: a double sided scroll telling a tale in collage.

The scroll is based on a German tale about the Princess Ilse, who, through her own pride,becomes lost and separated from her family and friends and wanders through the woods, falling prey to witches and devils before escaping to discover the value of hard work and the beauties of nature.

The full story can be read here at the International Children's Digital Library. 

The scroll is a duct-tape base, layered over with printed excerpts from the story book, various mountainous naturey clippings, parchment paper, marker, watercolor and acrylic -- and a WHOLE lot of mod podge. 

Raver Chick

In Stew's words: heh heh . . .Stevie had a creative. 

Terror and Grief

Have been thinking a lot lately about the recent attacks on Paris and the way people from all around the world have responded to it. Watching social media feeds, listening to people talk, following the news coverage, responses have ranged from a violent backlash against the Syrian refugees and Muslims in general, to a redoubled determination to reach out to and provide aid for those same people.

What struck me hardest was the hate. In the days following the attack, and even now over a week later, the degree of hate being spewed across my Facebook page rattled me. The hate--hate directed not at Islamic radicals, but at all Muslims and particularly those fleeing the same types of radicals who orchestrated the attack in Paris--shook me even deeper than the attacks themselves. Because what we should be fearing isn't refugees, or Muslims, or terrorists. What we (humanity) should fear is extreme hatred, no matter what form it takes, or who it's directed at. Responding to an act of extreme hatred with extreme hatred is self-defeating. Hate begets hate. And that's not just some hippy-dippy love-your-fellow-man theory--that's something that has been demonstrated in history again and again.

In trying to understand this outpouring of (in many cases misdirected) hate I am now framing peoples' reactions to the horrifying attack within the context of grief. When faced with a tragedy, it is natural to grieve, and when grieving, it is natural to go through the five stages of shock and denial, anger, depression and detachment, dialogue and bargaining, and acceptance. What I would like to think is that at least some of what I was seeing drift across my newsfeeds was not hate for the sake of hate, but a natural phase in the cycle of grief--the shock, denial, and anger that one goes through when grappling with the loss of life.  I would like to think that a portion of these expressions of hate were expressions of the anger of grief, and therefore a necessary part of the process in moving towards acceptance, and something more positive.

Of course, the question then becomes is it possible to authentically grieve for people you did not know? Can you grieve when the loss is not personally your own? Does the cycle of grief still apply? I think so, though my feeling is that that cycle is significantly abbreviated for those of us not directly touched by a tragedy.

In the end, I suppose it might not matter whether the hateful words people speak and the actions they commit in the wake of November 13ths attacks stem from a place of grief, or from a place of actual hatred. The damage done is the same. But for me--grief, I can understand. I can forgive things said and done in grief. I cannot find it in me, however, to forgive anything stemming from pure unthinking hate.

To leave on a note of hope, and healing:

Another prairie sunset

Brutalizing paper with crayon this time:

Takakkaw Falls

Felt like brutalizing a piece of paper with a pencil this evening:

Not really meant to be an accurate representation, but I used the image on the right as inspiration