Date sent: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 02:02:31 -0800 (PST) From: Dahra Latham Subject: Snowy day To: johnny at charm.net Send reply to: johnny at charm.net Hmmm. It isn't really a snowy day, it just was supposed to be, and now it's raining instead. This is a good thing: no-one in Seattle (including me) has a clue how to drive in snow. Best for it to stay up in the mountains, so we can watch it sparkle but don't have to watch each other skid through red lights. Last of my fall-quarter finals was today. I think all my tests went well, but now I am feeling sad and tired. It seems that all the people I care most to stay close to are deeply cut off from this activity--- cut off at the point where it crosses over -- what? -- over from the drama or the diversion of talking about justice to the actual daily question of how we can live together in peace. Most of my friends are artists, in one sense or another. My new roomate writes, and draws stories, and plays the guitar. There is a little constellation of film-and-theater people that I know, and Monday I'm going down to San Francisco to visit a tech writer whose running critique of popular music and TV is so nuanced as to be art in its own right. All of these people's money-earning activities are either completely distinct from their real lives---- just something to pay for paint, get it done and forget it---- or weird quasi-volunteer things that let them work in their field as long as they also get money from home. I, of course, am me: taxi drivers assure me that I'm an artist too. I know what impulses I have, to never do anything again but balance colors, and I know that people who don't care about Shakespeare will never feel like real friends to me. This tribe is my only possible home. Also, I go and stand around at their parties, and look at their interestingly blunt-cut hair and their skillful makeup, and I could (OK, I do) cry. There are thirty people in the room, and the only ones I feel comfortable talking to are the children under five, and there's this incredibly beautiful fish in a bowl and no-one but me sees it, or seems to, and it's all about some language of insider status that I can't even make myself want to understand. And I begin to wonder if I should be angry at people for calling me an artist, because what that seems to mean is that you care about kindness, and openness to beauty, and compassion, the way, if you were an actor assigned to play a doctor, you would care about understanding medicine. Just enough so that you can pronounce the words: nothing that would take energy away from the cultivation of a perfect surface. Nothing that might let in the question: what are we doing here, chatting each other up about the history of cinematography, when the most common cause of death among children this age (point to the toddler in ruby slippers) is colic from tainted drinking water? Who imagines that you can close the door on that question and keep a whole self to make art with? I tried, before I came out here to live in Seattle, to leave this behind. I tried to accept that, if I want to work for a better world, I simply have to live in the company of ugly, brutal people--- the scarred and the scalded, the longtime crusaders whose minds bubble constantly with their own unrewarded deserving, here and there, blessedly, someone who is just humble and simple and good---- and who has the strength to tolerate my intellect, even though it's a useless drain to them. But no-where anyone who can share my delight in poetry. I thought, you know, when I was in school I had friends, and maybe I can just live on that from now on. And what I found out is that if I try to do that, I'll die. Which might be a defensible trade, if it did the downtrodden any good, but it wouldn't--- that's just another way of using people as stage properties. So here I am, back among the blessed, and training to be powerful among them. It's crazy, the way people react when I tell them I'm in law school. A year ago, if I met a stranger, I would say---- oh, I work at AAA. I answer the phone, and I teach new phone operators how to calm people down when their cars are broken. And I make jewelry. What do you do? And already the person's eyes are glazing slightly. . . pigeonhole # 376-d, plain women with low-status jobs. Next item? . . . Now, I have the same conversation---- oh, I'm in law school. And I make jewelry. And the answer is--- Oh, really? Did you make that ring you're wearing? What kind of practice are you going into? How can I answer? They're talking to an hallucination. I'm going to take this degree, and I'm going to pass the bar and figure out a way to spend half my time on pro bono work without actually starving ---- how little I can spend on clothes and cars, and still be seen as a real professional, and something about this huge mass of debt I'm accepting, and do I ever really expect to retire, or own anything?--- and I'm going to live in the city, where there are people who care about art, and most of them are going to look at me with automatic contempt, because I am engaged in this vulgar business of caring what happens. And I am never in a million years going to be someone you should talk to because you feel my social status matches your own. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. http://shopping.yahoo.com/