Guildenstern

Someone once said that language is a dusty, warped window-pane.  The clear light of our thoughts is twisted.  We can never communicate perfectly.  I jest and you bleed.  You reconcile and I am offended.  If the human race ever dies, our gravestone will read, Why couldn’t they just listen to each other?

After I came back from Macedonia I started having nightmares.  I cannot completely describe them; but they always began in a familiar place, and ended in a twisted half-reality, and never could I spot exactly when it changed.  The worst of it was seeing it flicker into real life.  We were on the camping trip, and Socks and golden-hair were sitting by the fire.  (You see, when they got bored of erotic knifeplay with psycho and J, they would come to listen to my philisophical ramblings.)  By the light of the fire I saw golden-hair flicker, and for a moment she was one of the marble hunters, colorless except for their green eyes.  I blinked and she was herself again.

But now, Guildenstern is no longer plauged by nightmares!  I am free.  Dunno why.  This gives me no excuse at all to be up blogging at four in the morning.  I have the ever-so-slighest suspicion that it may have to do with all these coffee beans I’m chewing.

I was out walking this morning in Ohrid, in the old part of the city by the lake. And when I say old I mean old – people have been living around there since about 300 BC.  Walking in the oldest parts of the city can be tiring – countless centuries ago, Macedonians fearing attack had fortified the hilltop and gradually built downwards,  so central Ohrid is a maze of steep, twisting streets and stairways, not built for cars, but they go there anyway, whizzing by and forcing you to press yourself against the wall untill they pass.  It was quite exhausting, and, to fortify myself, I had aquired a bottle of the ineptly named Jaffa Nice Tea.

Anyway, I passed an old house. It was built of sun-baked mud, stone, and timber, which puts it at about 100 years of age. What caught my eye was a white sign posted on the door.   Zalna vest, it said – sorrowful news.  Spaca Makedonka pocina na 21 Avgust, 2002 godina, i ne ostavi zasegogas da zalime. Spasa Makedonka died on August 21st, 2002, and left us to mourn forever.

I looked through a small window set above the door – the glass pane was broken, and iron bars had been set in it.  All I could see was a brown curtain with white flowers printed on it; darkness, and a suggestion of dust.  It was easy to imaginethat no one had come to Spasa’s funeral; that no one mourned her; that no one noted her passing, save for the government official that had filled out the form letter and posted it on her door.  It was easy to imagine that she had died  alone, in this old, rotting house; that she had died knowing that she was alone.

This house, this crumbling mud and rotting wood, seemed to me to contain a melancholy so intense that it was inexpressible; to describe it would be to demean it.  I sat on the steps in front of the house for a good half hour, and then walked away, feeling a bit silly.  After all, I hadn’t even known her.

I couldn’t find trash can for the empty bottle, so, being the conscientious person I am, I had to carry it around for almost an hour.

The Air and Space Museum was a surreal landscape. Actually, to most people it probably wasn’t. But I was looking at it through not one filter, but two, both of which, by themselves, induced a state of subnormality, but together formed the monochrome superspace which spun dreamy patterns for me.
You see, photographers – well, this photographer – that is to say, me, or in this case, I suppose, it would be proper to say I… anyway, when photographers walk though a building, or a field, or a mountain pasture, or really any three-dimensional physical space, they are constantly navigating through it with their bodies, and their minds, at the same time, often in different directions, always looking for a better shot, for the best shot – perhaps a sweeping panorama, or a drop of water hanging from a spider’s leg, or a stalk of grass, or maybe a sweeping panorama with a stalk of grass in the foreground, framed by a spider with a drop of water on it’s leg; and maybe it would be better from over there, or maybe if I climbed that tree….yes, photographers, and artists in general, tend to see reality in a different way. And the Air and Space Museum, being filled with hundred-year-old-rockets and ICBMs, biplanes and Boeing 747s, had a tendency to fascinate and distract; in such an environment, I found it impossible to move in a straight line towards any location. Add to this the fact that I was extremely sleep deprived…have you ever gone for a few days without sleep? It is indeed a very strange experience. You see, we live our lives floating on a sea of information. At the very deepest levels, even when we sleep, we are aware that we are alive, that we breathe, that our hearts beat. On top of this is a complex tapestry of sights, smells, tastes, sounds and feelings; and these sensation are subjected to immediate analysis, and are cross-referenced in our memories, and that process brings to mind new sensations, and memories of sensations, and so on and so forth. Every second of every day of our lives, this complex machine that we call the self ticks away, with never a break in the current. Until we die, we never know true blackness. But we can come pretty close.
You see, when you don’t let your body sleep, it kind of freaks out on you. Your subconscious, or whatever it is that makes you tired, knows what it wants, and it’s going to get it, by god. The ego, the I, usually so firmly and constantly supported by a sea of data, is suddenly tap-dancing on a spiderweb; constantly falling through the gaps, into endless seconds of darkness. I stood in one place, and then…nothing….and then I stood in another place, a few feet away. All in all, it’s a damn good thing they were carting us everywhere in buses, because I was a tragic car accident waiting to happen.
So, what with the grouchy, dozing brain and the photographer’s roaming eye, it took me about half an hour of half-conscious spiralling to reach the doors. The minute I stepped outside, the wet D.C. heat hit me in the face with a sledgehammer. Someone said something, perhaps to me, but I didn’t hear. The last time I had been to Washington, it had been November, and it had been cold. From that moment on, I had fixed the nation’s capitol in my mind as a chilly, windy place, with all the reflecting pools frozen over. This heat was something I could never get used to. On the plus side, the feelings of melting onto the concrete like a randomly placed cube of Margarine did focus the mind. A bit.
“Hey, Simon!”
The voice! The voice that had hit me in the face with a sledgehammer. Or maybe it had spoken to me after I had been struck. Or before. Or maybe even during. What or whoever it was, it seemed to have found some shade. I decided to walk towards it.
“You ever heard of cowboy pinballing?”
Ah, it was Ned, from South Carolina. Neddie, we called him. Or at least, they called him. Neddie, that is. To sum up: they called him Neddie, and I did not, because most of the time I didn’t really call him, or anyone else, anything at all. Large groups of people, especially new people, scared me to death. The corroded machinery in my head ground and sparked for a few seconds. I decided to sit down on the steps where my group – ah, but we were supposed to call them families, weren’t we? – all right then, family – had taken up temporary residence.
“No. No, I haven’t. That might be the silliest thing that I have never heard of.” I was very proud of myself for constructing such a long sentence.
“Well, it’s like this,” began Ned in his amiable southern drawl, “you get a bunch of guys to stand in circles, and you get a bull. And you get the bull mad, and the last man standing in his circle wins.” He grinned. “Pretty cool, huh?”
Before I could be bothered to draft a reply, someone behind us, on the platform before the Museum, cleared his throat. I looked; there was a weathered black man standing there, with a small crowd around him. There was something about him that attracted one’s attention. I stood up to listen.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “My name is Brandon Haley. I am a Lance-Corporal in the Marines, but I have been out of work for four months. This is because, four months ago, I inflicted an injury on myself.” He drew back the long sleeve covering his left arm to reveal a knotted white scar a foot long, running from his wrist towards his elbow. “I will be going back to work in a month, but until then, I cannot pay my bills. Please, help me and my family.”
The crowd stood silent for at least a minute. Then, with some muttering, a man handed over a twenty dollar bill. More followed. “God bless,” he said, handing out thank-you cards. “Git er’ done. God bless you, sir, thank you.” A girl from my group handed him a few dollars, looking embarrassed. “Generosity ain’t never something to be ashamed of, missy,” he said, giving her a thank you card. “Git er’ done. God bless you all.” He walked away from the Museum, his shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets. On the bus ride back to campus, I fell asleep, and dreamed of fellow photographers who I would never have the courage to speak to.

I have learned. I have learned, among other things that I am, “Lud, ama positivno lud.” I have also learned that if you don’t sleep, you can’t get hung over; and I have learned how to stand still. Orce said, “Simon, ti ke bides sniperist. Ke te pratat u voyska ta pukas peperutki.”

This morning, we are going into Washington to visit the Capitol building, and,  presumably because of this,  we have all been reminded to dress nicely;  in this case, the word ‘nicely’ instead of meaning  ‘In a manner which is nice’,  means,  ‘Wear a suit.’

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable request.  But let us drill down a bit.  Why,  exactly,  are suits considered nice clothing?  Why not pink jumpsuits,  or five foot tall orange hats?  These things may sound ridiculous, but a very large coloured hat as a mode of dress is no more arbitrary, capricious,  or absurd than tying a strip fabric around your neck.  There is no underlying,  fundamental logic to what are and what are not fancy clothes; what we have is a ruleset vomited out upon the shores of modern society by the rough, semirandom social brownian motion of the past.

Is it reasonable, then, to demand, for no real reason, and without logical justification, that people wear certain things at certain times and places?  Again, at first glance to this question would also be a clear ‘yes.’  But bear with me as we examine this as well.

The purpose of human civilization is to enforce rules which prevent us from harming each other, and which promote a peaceful and prosperous society, while allowing individual citizens the maximum allowable amount of freedoms.  Any rules or guidelines which do not fulfill any of these goals are to be considered unreasonable, tyrannical, and unnecessary. 

What, exactly, does the practice of requiring people to wear suits accomplish?  Does it lower the crime rate?  Does it feed the hungry, or stop crimes before they happen?  Not only does it not do any of these things, it curtails to freedom of the people; the freedom to not wear an impromptu silk noose. 

tl;dr:  wtf?  Seriously, wtf?

I have been thinking, for a long time now, about the state of our schools, the state of our educational system, and what this means for the future of our nation and of our democracy.  Now, for the first time, I have began to consider how it will affect journalism.

At the present time, public schools discourage critical thinking.  Students are given homework that consists of worksheets; these work sheets require that the student look through his book, find the answer, and copy it out on to his paper, without thinking about or really considering any of the information that passes through their heads.  This system will,  if it proceeds unchecked,  as it has,  produce a generation of people who not only do not want to, but do not know how to think critically or logically. 

What kind of reporting will this new generation want?  Will this mass of people who have been systematically taught to be shallow desire thoughtful, accurate commentaries about current events?  Or will they want sound bites about celebrities turned drug addicts? 

The answer to the question is obvious – famous coke fiends will be prefferable to a analysis of the hidden agendas behind a newly passed law.  This is a major problem,  and you,  as journalists of the future, cannot give in to the demand for shallow,  vapid infotainment.  There will be a choice for you to make in the future;  a choice between profitable reporting and reporting that adds value to society.  It’s in your hands.

In the entrance hall of the Capitol right now.  We have to wait a half-hour for our tour,  so,  there being no benches or other comfort-facilitating devices available,  some of us decided to sit against the wall.  After about five minutes,  a security guard walked past and told us,  “You can’t sit down, gotta stand up.”  And then  she walked away.  I don’t care who you are; it is rude to bark nonsensical orders at people and then saunter away without providing an explanation.