2002-07-21 - 6:37 p.m.

In Archaeology of the Holy Land this past spring, I argued—and convinced myself, at least—that sites become holy because an event of some significance took place at them. How else is meaning ascribed to sites, except through narrative?

It is now 13 months since I started this diary, and at this moment, I’m at approximately the place I was when that happened. The same physical place, I mean—the Leeta House, where I lived for two months last summer, and where I’m currently staying thanks to the hospitality of Blackbird, Pav, and Fish. In other aspects, I’m light years from where I was a year ago; in some, I’m in the same place, and likely will be no matter where I transport myself physically.

The screen walls of the porch where I’ve set up still have the discolored spirals and swirls that Daniel and I put on it last year. Daniel stayed on the couch of this house last night. During the party he materialized, driving up on his motorcycle. But while the party would likely make for the most interesting narrative, I’m going to take this temporal opportunity to provide a point of—dare I say it—perspective.

“Landscapes were meant to seen and experienced. Accordingly, historical archaeologists often conceptualize landscapes as a medium of communication that symbolically expresses status or other roles” (Rotman and Nassaney 1997: 42). I think of this quote, wish was in an analysis of 19th century backyards in Michigan, when trying to make sense out of my rapture with this backyard. The Leeta House has an enormous yard, with 50-feet high pine trees providing canopy, large bushes and small trees framing the sides, and the rear of the yard extends upwards with overgrown weeds, vines climbing fences, and more huge trees hundreds of feet in the distance. One aspect I like about this arrangement is the overgrown far third of the backyard; since last year it’s reminded me of Mark Leone’s article, with its analysis of the “wilderness garden” that makes up the far third of the William Paca garden.

Or maybe the Leeta backyard is aesthetically pleasing because it provides a wide view of potential predators and prey, a positive feedback that provided an evolutionary advantage to early humans. Or maybe, to take the popular explanation, it’s just pretty.

Actually, I believe I like the backyard because its “prettiness” gives me a starting point to launch my over-active analytic process.

That process, while always present, is starting to affect not only my thought about the world, but this diary as well. Considering, as I’ve stated previously, that the pieces of writing I call “entries” are among the most valued pieces of writing I’ve done and that I value my writing more than almost any other aspect of myself, the diary is a powerful index of what matters to me.

I started this, I told myself, as an experiment to affect and compete with all the diaryland kids, many of whom were old friends of mine I’d fallen out of touch with. Yet when I quickly became captivated with it, I formulated a plan for action, as no worthwhile writing can take without planning: I said that most interesting entries consist of stories about interesting things that happened to the writer, journalistically rendered with literary tools fully deployed. Accordingly, Hunter S. Thompson became my inspiration, and he proved appropriate for the events that followed.

Yet in the past year I’ve read very little literature, and now I find myself more concerned with finding sufficient anthropological tools, methods and thoughts to make sense of the world around me. This concern has given me an animated thought process, yet the narrative of my thoughts grows harder and harder—frustratingly, because most of my anthropology instruction came with the premise that journalistic narrative can convey ethnographical knowledge as well, if not better, than dull analytics. I argued as much in an essay I posted here.

The most significant development of late has been my enrapture with Marxism. I didn’t plan this; I wrote several papers for Maria disparaging Marxist sympathizers who let their preordained premises color their analysis. Yet reading the article that I posted previously (in an entry that actually accidentally got left incomplete) I realized that the analysis of this “avowed socialist” didn’t just apply to archaeologists, but also to journalism, and he hit the nail right on the head regarding why I won’t be able to get a decent job in journalism when I graduate. A little legwork on the Internet confirmed this applicability.

In order to seamlessly integrate class consciousness into narratives, tremendous more work in theory and practice will be necessary, and given my own postmodern standards for macro-narratives, the process may never be complete.

Nevertheless, I think that my increasing everyday engagement with anthropology has enriched my everyday life more than it’s disparaged it. I think that I’ve gained some powerful insights into what goes on around me, particularly the issues of body language, non-verbal communication, and proxemics In my mid-teens, I read a newspaper article that described the fate of children who fail to pick up non-verbal communication as children, and it describe my experiences to a hilt: a systematic failure to relate to other children. Yep, that’s me. It even described the reactions of parents, which is usually to think the children aren’t exerting enough effort to make friends, and to encourage them accordingly, leading to more social awkwardness.

So I appreciate my newfound social perception, even if conducted on an explicit, conscious level that isn’t as useful as the natural kind.

When you were growing up you suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was kept from you. Others seemed to know what they were doing… If you ever go into psychoanalysis, you will insist that the primal scene is not the encounter of parents in coitus: it takes the shape of a ring of schoolchildren, like Indians surrounding a wagon train, laughing with malice, pointing their vicious little fingers to insist upon your otherness. The scene repeats itself across schoolyards across the county. Not until college, when everyone started fresh, did you begin to pick up the tricks of winning friends and influencing people. Although you became adept [note—I didn’t], you also felt that you were exercising an acquired skill, something that came naturally to others. You succeeded in faking everyone out, and never quite lost the fear that you would eventually be discovered a fraud, an impostor in the social circle. Which is just about how you feel now. Even now, as you puff yourself up with tales of high adventure in magazine publishing, you can see Elaine’s [the date’s] eyes wandering out over the room, leaving you behind” (1984: 47).

There’s one other topic I want to address with the benefit of the perspective of the Leeta House, and I think that everything I’ve said leads up to it some sense. When we were discussing Marxism at the field school, the associate director mentioned, when the discussion began to wander beyond Marx, that it didn’t really matter, because “all of these theorists are dealing with the same problem.” That problem—I said, haltingly. He nodded. Whether through ownership of the means of production, homogeny, or panopticism—or anything. It’s the problem of being human. Of being here.

That said, it’s necessary to grapple with it a little more specifically, and there’s no more specific forum to approach the problem of being human—specifically, an upper-middle class white New College kid with ambiguous sexuality and esoteric education—than in a New College-affiliated diary.

Which makes this entire experiment so interesting. The experiment, that is, of a collection personal diaries published in this new medium, the Internet, giving a group of people with place and background in common a textual forum for communication. Of course, it’s popular to conduct analysis based on worth as a person and worth as a writer, but that misses the profound social implications of this.

Which brings me to the last—last to mention and most recent—development of my time at the Leeta House. As I mentioned at the start, I’m staying here thanks to the hospitality of Pav, Fish and Blackbird. It’s like with the field school, in which I’d read the works of Mark Leone, this distinguished and well-known anthropologist who existed for me as an abstract name on these articles that are important to me, and then with a few moves over less then two weeks, there he is. He’s manifest in front of me, we’re in the William Paca Garden. In hindsight, I can narrate this as an grand narrative leading up to this moment, when in reality my presence is a mixture of chance and luck combined with a few right decisions—and many wrong ones, ironically enough.

Yet, as the annales school would say, these events of history couldn’t exist without the underlying structures supporting them—Marxist structures, if you so desire, and Braudel did when formulating it. Anyway, a similar process kicked in when I walked into the Leeta House almost a week ago. After my adventures in Maryland, I drove for 20 hours and walked into both the site of my previous summer’s adventures and into a site that acquired its significance through a more postmodern process.

For the past week I’ve had the opportunity to test a profound and almost new dynamic. It’s proved too short a time and I haven’t really taken it, but it’s worth exploring here. I thought of this excerpt:

10/31/01 - Halloween is for masks

red diaper baby: oh, don't even talk to me about *******.

bird: why not?

rdb: mmmmmnnnn.

bird: what? you don't like her?

rdb: I dislike her aesthetic.

bird: her aesthetic.

rdb: she's so... pretentious. it's everything that's bad about "indie." it's the indie-est indie. I hate everything indie.

bird: mmm.

rdb: and her diary. or, as I like to call them, the "I took a shit today" sites.

bird: what?!

rdb: online diaries. they are so pretentious.

bird: why? don't you have a prurient interest in the minute details of the lives of others?

rdb: no.

bird: but you've read them.

rdb: shut up. I haven't read them in a while. just the new college diary ring. it's funny.

bird: why?

rdb: it's like, all these indie kids. they all go to parties and smoke pot, and they're all there at the party together but they don't talk to each other, and then they go home and write about everything they were thinking in their diaries. and they all read each other's diaries, so they all know what each other were thinking at the party. but they don't talk about it. and... enghhhh.

bird: who is this?

rdb: I don't know who any of the people are. except *******. and ***** has a diary. I know that.

bird: oh.

rdb: and I know that YOU have a diary.

bird: oh. really. and why is that?

rdb: well, cuz ehhhhhveryone has one, don't they? (laugh)

bird: heh. yeah.

Mostly, though, I developed feelings of personal affection because I value writing so highly. (I agree with what Michalson said in his paper-writing guidelines, that confused writing is the sign of a confused mind, and implicitly, vice-versa.) Moreover, in all my travails as writer and editor, I’ve come to think of writing as nothing more than personal communication—that the writer organizes and communicates thought, and transmits it from mind to mind. When the subject is existential angst—that ‘same problem,’ and so specifically close—both projected and received empathy.

Although, when it comes down to it, my fascination with online diaries comes from my desire to read writing with the closest relevance to me as possible, and Blackbird fulfilled that with the best prose.

All this happened against a background of the previous year, with all the struggles that entailed. I found out who this diarywriter is, and discovered that we had numerous social connections, although nothing came of it. Then, before this summer, that she would take up with Pav in the Leeta House, which was still my house in my brain. I barely remember how I got myself accepted to stay here.

So it was as profound an event as at the top of the William Paca Garden with Mark Leone to step into this House, where I’m sitting now, and to be confronted with have my inner thought process manifested in shapes and bodies.

This week has told me that there was something missing on my part—too many jokes that escaped me because I had to have them explained to me, too many moments where I was unprepared. I never really thought, although it was worth considering, that some sort of textual connection on my part would lead to a more personal—that is, physical and temporal—connection.

It’s a most peculiar, paradoxical interaction, like meeting up an old friend for the first time ever. How do you catch up when you know everything that would be shared in personal communication? Nothing to do but soak up the non-verbal aspects of the entire enterprise.

Of course, I didn’t need an explicit diary entry to report that it wasn’t appropriate to cut cocaine on the kitchen table in front of the gaze of the window. My primitive nonverbal communication knowledge told me of that easily enough. Yet the existence of the explicit message suggests something happening, something that could profoundly change the way that humans interact, in a way that’s either fantastic or terrifying.

But now, as I’ve said, I’m shifting away from competition and towards the realm of something different, towards my newfound affection for Marxism, which will doubtless further separate me in thought and text from everyone around me, stranger and friend. Another thought is worth mentioning, regarding the validity of anthropological though t for understanding the world around us. When the social sciences began to be codified around a hundred years ago, anthropology concerned itself with understanding the “other”—people so different from us that it was necessary to study them holistically. “Anthro”=”man,” “pology”=”study of.” Except now, the other isn’t located in the Kalahari Desert or Papua New Guinea; the other is the people on the same street, to in the next room.

Anyway, my enthusiasm drifts away from the literary and immediate, and to the justification of abstract principles, so I wonder what the future of this endeavor will be. As of now, I don’t have a plan.

Actually, the plan I have now is to leave this location, as I was asked to do at about this time when I first arrived. My original plan was to crash here until I look for an apartment, as I don’t have a place lined up for next year, but I realize that I’ll need roommates and no one’s looking right now. I did look at the spare room in the house of Regina and Cuteboy—wouldn’t that be great? But the plan I really want is to get a three-bedroom with Pav and Blackbird, to continue this fantastic experiment for the next year. But they’re cool to the idea, preferring to keep their promise to Fish that they would look for place together when they lose the Leeta House at the end of the summer.

So, lacking another place to stay, I’m going back to my mother’s house in Miami. Talk about a house ascribed with meaning though narrative. There’s a connotation I keep whenever I formulate the idea to go back to my mother’s house, and it comes from Things Fall Apart: That you go back to your mother’s house when you’re in defeat.

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age

2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3 Energy is Eternal Delight

At this moment, I’m plugged into my laptop--sensory immersion, in a darkened house with my eyes on the screen and headphones on my ears and my fingers on the keyboard, connecting me through a DSL line to the outside world. What else should be playing at this moment, except Pink Floyd? There is no pain you are receding / A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon. It’s funny, because this isn’t exactly the song that applies to me right now, but the theme of using drugs to dull the pain does apply to the guy in the next room.

I have a childhood memory of sitting on the sand of South (Miami) Beach, which is just north of the Port of Miami, and watching the ships sail off over the horizon. The memory has more significance than I realized, because one day my father got on a ship from the Port of Miami and sailed off into the world of maritime trade, never to see me. My parents divorce was finalized in February 1981, two months after I was born, and I can trace so many of my problems to that event. It’s just so goddamn stereotypical, the overbearing mother, the absent father. If there’s anything I hate or fear more, it’s becoming a stereotype.

Somehow I came across an anti-marxist comment in Lewis’s Formal Organization and State Power class that all Marxist agitators are malcontents with unhappy childhoods. Can’t disprove that with personal experience.

I’m not sure how to end this, so I'll fall back to the conclusion of my founding poem:

Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free: lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not!

For every thing that lives is Holy.

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