Incarnation, Part 1: Clocked

I love basketball. I'm not very good at it, but I love it nevertheless.

Part of me wants to take this opportunity to wax rhapsodic on the importance of seeking out opportunities to fail, and to fail spectacularly. But mostly, I just want to talk about scars and, more importantly, bodies.

I'm an academic. My days are spent lost between the covers of a book or poring over mountains of ungraded essays. I spend long hours debating the merits of Bahktin's heteroglossia or helping students recognize the difference between a iamb and an anapest. It's heady stuff, a cephalic feast, and yet at the end of the day I often have very little to show for my efforts other than the scraps and bones of half-gnawed metaphors and some stale prepositions. I live in the abstract, floating from idea to idea, and I've come to realize just how much I miss my body.

This is why I love basketball so much. I'm not good enough to play it with my head. For me, it's all elbows and sweat. I don't think (a truth to which I'm sure my teammates will attest). I'm the guy who remembers to pick but forgets to roll. No, I just go out there and run around. If they pass me the ball, I shoot. If not, I run around some more. Occasionally I'll set a screen on one of my own teammates. Like I said, I don't play with my head.

But that's why it's so cool that I got clocked. Loose ball on the floor. I dive. Other guy dives. Elbows and eybrows meet. Blood flows. He falls all over himself apologizing, and though I'm a little dazed, I'm just thinking how freaking awesome it is that I'm actually bleeding. I don't get to bleed nearly as often as I'd like, and now here it is, dripping on the freethrow line, leaving little red inkblots on the court. One of them looks like my mother. Someone drives me to the ER.

And so I'll have a scar, a little one, hiding in my eyebrow like a shy housecat. It's my red badge of courage, a tiny reminder of a life lived fully, at least temporarily.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a sentimental advocate for "sucking the marrow out of life," a stance popular with Hollywood teachers and starry eyed English majors. Thoreau's injunction to live deliberately is sound, and yet it does not follow that all passions ought to be pursued with the same monomaniacial devotion. Nor do I endorse the testosterone fueled faith so disturbingly promoted in John Ethridge's Wild at Heart. If you haven't read it, don't. Ethridge attempts to make the case that American masuclinity is God's design for all men, that climbing mountains and shooting things and dragging women back to the cave by their hair (I am only slightly exaggerating) are all part and parcel of being made in God's image, that had Jesus been born today, he would have ended the sermon on the mount by BASE jumping off the top.

But this I do believe: our bodies are good. We're meant to use them. We're supposed to eat and drink. We're made to stand up and run and trip over things and skin our knees. This strange assembly of flesh and bone is made to jump and squat, to throw, to cry, to have sex, to type, to dance, to sleep. Though God gave us minds of incomprehensible depth and complexity, he also gave us bodies, bodies which are no less sacred than our most precious incorporeal creeds and beliefs, bodies which both house the soul and are the soul. The Platonic dualism that divides the body in two, condemning the flesh while exalting the spirit, is, for lack of a better word, dumb. Even Yoda, wise and wrinkled as he is, falls prey to this line of thought. In his desperate attempts explain the Force to Luke (who is, by the way, just about as obtuse as Jesus' disciples were), he finally grabs him by the arm and says "Luminous beings are we, not his crude matter." It's unsettling: nobody can mangle theology like a muppet can mangle theology.

Anyhow, although we proclaim the glory of God through what we think and say, the truth is that we could probably just shut up and let the wonder of the human body do the talking for us. Walt Whitman's ode to the human form, I Sing the Body Electric, confesses this to be true:

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists;
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—dress does not hide him;
The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel;
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more;
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side... If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood untainted; And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is beautiful as the most beautiful face....

My scar, therefore, is not a celebration of my hyper-masculinity. It doesn't make me bad ass or dangerous. It doesn't mean that I've lived deeply or that I've, heaven help us, seized the day. It just means that I lived deliberately and fully, with body and mind. And when I go to bed at night, I think about the science fiction that I love, about the projected futures in which we've evolved into pure energy, finally free from the shackles of flesh. And right before I drift away, I think scandalous thoughts, heretical thoughts, unforgivable thoughts. Just this once, I think, I hope they got it wrong.

Russia, Part 1: Packing

"The trouble with you," says my wife, "is that you don't plan ahead."

This is where she and I disagree. Let me give you an example.

I leave for Moscow in six days. That means I have roughly five and a half days before I need to pack. To me, this is self-evident, an a priori conclusion. It's a simple syllogism:

1) packing consists of tossing clothes and stuff in a bag
2) it will take me roughly ten minutes to put my clothes and stuff in a bag.
3) I don't leave for six more days
4) Therefore, I don't even need to think about packing until Friday afternoon (from 1, 2, and 3) and if I want to watch A-Team reruns all afternoon I will be perfectly justified in doing so.

Of course, the irrefutable nature of my logic does not move my wife. She shakes her head, giving me the same look she usually reserves for incompetent waiters and the Bush administration.

"The problem with your 'logic'," she says, making those little sarcastic quotation marks with her fingers, "is that it's based on a set of false premises."

I try to interrupt, mostly out a sense of self-preservation, but she holds up a finger and I stop, mostly out of a greater sense of self-preservation.

"In the first place, packing consists of so much more than 'tossing clothes and stuff in a bag.' Seriously, were you raised by wolves? Packing is an art, a transcendent activity. A well-packed bag speaks of the frailty and the nobility of the human condition. To toss some clothes in a bag and call it 'packing' is like tossing notes on a page and calling it 'music.'"

"That's me," I say, slowly backing out of range, "the Schoenberg of the suitcase."

She glares at me. "You can call yourself the Pollack of the Purse for all I care. It doesn't change the fact that you don't know how to pack."

She then goes on to assail my my second premise, claiming that although I can, indeed, throw random clothes into a bag in under ten minutes, I have utterly failed to account for the estimated two hours it takes to unpack those clothes, find the clothes I should have packed in the first place, wash them, iron them, and then repack the bag. I point out that since she is actually the one who does the unpacking, finding, washing, ironing, and repacking, it does only take me, in the most literal sense, ten minutes to pack.

This is not a wise thing to say.

There's no backtracking, so we both go our separate ways to cool down for a bit. She goes outside and tends to her garden. I stare in the bathroom mirror and wonder when my stubble began turning gray. I owe her an apology. I don't mean to take her for granted. When she comes back inside I'll tell her so. And in the end I will choose quality over speed, beauty over pragmatism. I will allow my wife to sculpt my luggage as she sculpts me, grinding down the rough edges and smoothing out the stupid parts. Because the simple fact is that she's really good at packing and I'm not, just like I'm really good at killing spiders and she's really good at standing on the dining room table and screaming. We each have our gifts. Neither of us can do it by ourselves. Learning this is one of the keys to a long, happy marriage.

So, you see, I am planning ahead, after all.

Russia, Part 2: Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Bought My Ticket

Shots. Five of them. In the arm.

I wasn't prepared for that.

It's not that I'm squeamish, or that I have a low pain threshold. It's just that that's a lot of shots, man. I suggest that maybe I could get some of them later; check myself into a little Russian clinic, disinfect the injection site with some Stolichnaya, and submit myself to the large but capable hands of Olga, the rather mannish Siberian nurse.

My doctor gives me a sidelong glance as he lays out the syringes.

"The Russian medical system oscillates between modern and medieval," he says. He chooses a syringe and frowns at it. "You never know what you're going to get. Now take off your shirt."

"But don't you think," I say as I disrobe,"that it's worth giving it a try? I mean, peristroika, glastnost, all that?"

He thwacks the syringe with his finger. "That was twenty years ago. Hold still."

So still I hold, betrayed by a country that can export cultural gold like Dostoyevsky and Yakov Smirnov and yet apparently not provide a tetnus booster. I am about to wax rhapsodic on the technological innovation of Sputnik when Dr. Cahn launches the first of five rockets into my arm.
I mutter and curse. I smite him with my eyes. I harbor evil feelings towards him. All the while, little Chernobyls are melting down in my tricep.

"Isn't there a pill for this?" I hiss, sending him as much bad mojo as I can muster.

He drops the empty syringe with a satisfied sigh and reaches for another. "Consider it pure joy, my brother. Now, for the love of God, stop squirming and hold still."

Yeah, right. Pure joy my приклад.

Russia, Part 3: The International Language

The lady sitting in front of me is yelling at me in Russian. I can’t understand most of what she’s saying, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the meal I just dumped on her head.

Let me put this in some context.

I’m somewhere over the Baltic Sea, halfway between London and Moscow. Dave, my traveling companion, is sitting to my right. He’s about my age, a social-studies teacher from the Poulsbo area, and he’s sound asleep with his mouth hanging slightly open. To my left is a young Chinese guy. He’s very cool: iPod, hipster glasses, Abercrombie wardrobe. He’s also asleep, but he’s cool enough to keep his mouth closed.

I’m in the middle, and I am wide awake. I wish this weren’t the case. I have tried using my tray table as a pillow, but it smells like fish. I think about leaning over and putting my head on Dave’s shoulder, but he twitches in his sleep, and probably wouldn’t make a very comfortable pillow. I briefly consider the hip Chinese guy but I quickly realize that the same rules that apply to high-school apply to Aeroflot: you don’t snuggle with your social superiors.

I’m about to resign myself to a sleepless flight, but then the stewardess comes by with dinner and it all looks so Slavic that I decide to eat. I have my choice of lamb or fish, and because the two look positively indistinguishable I just point to one. I’m pretty sure I’ve chosen the fish. I’m not sure though, because as the stewardess hands me my tray Dave twitches in his sleep, elbowing me in the ribs, and I drop my dinner on the head of the woman sitting in front of me.

This is when the yelling starts.

My one year of college Russian is limited to such useful phrases as, “I see the brown dog,” and , “What time is it in Minsk?” Nevertheless, it’s quite clear to me what she is saying. I smile weakly and try to help dab the tarter sauce from her hair.

It’s going to be a great trip.

Bikes and Books, Part 1: Hamlet

The two most important tools any motorcycle restorer must have:

1) a good socket set
2) a sledgehammer

I was prepared for the former, but the latter caught me by surprise.

Let me back up a bit. A few months ago I decided to restore a 1975 Honda 550/four. Like most foolish endeavors, this one has its genesis in a desperate attempt to impress a woman. My wife has a weakness for guys on bikes; I have a weakness for my wife. Put the two together and you end up with me in the (unheated) garage on a cold December afternoon trying to coax a rusty swingarm axle out of its socket.

Reasoning was to no avail, but I have three kids so I'm used to that. I tried to yank it out with a pipe wrench but it was so rusted that whenever I pulled or twisted the swing arm moved up and down as well.

After lubricating the axle with a few choice and very well-oiled words, I stopped to regroup. I'm not a mechanic. I'm not mechanical. I'm not even mechanic-ish. I'm the guy who opens the hood of the car and says, "Yup...that looks about right," nods a few times, scratches himself authoritatively, and goes back inside, forgetting to shut the hood or turn off the car. Without a manual, a clear set of operating instructions, I'm lucky to toast a piece of bread.

This must be how Hamlet feels after his father is murdered. Faced with a daunting task, a task for which he has no training and no natural inclination, he's left to fend for himself, a reluctant immigrant to the dark land of revenge. Though he's savvy enough to recognize the diseased state of this new world, he's seemingly powerless to change it. He knows he ought to avenge his father with speed and dexterity, that this is what sons do, and yet he cannot seem to stir himself out of his lethargy. This, by Elizabethan standards, is most unusual, and Hamlet himself bemoans his own unnatural response:

"How stand I then
that have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
excitements of my reason and my blood,
and let all sleep?"

And as I sat there in my garage, swearing at my motorcycle but actually doing nothing, I couldn't help but notice the uncomfortable parallels between myself and the Prince of Denmark. It would be so easy to postpone, to wait until I have just the right tools or just the right weather. But I don't want my enterprises of great pitch and moment to lose the name of action. I don't want to find myself on the stage of my life surrounded by the corpses of my supporting cast.

So I took a cue from Laertes, put a little poison on the end of my sledgehammer, and proceeded to beat the tar out of my swingarm.

"The time," I said, "The time
(WHAM!)
is out of joint. O cursed spite,
that ever I was born
(WHAM!)
to set it right."

It worked. The axle grudgingly slid from its lair and the swingarm collapsed to the ground, silent and still in defeat. I whooped and hollered until I saw all the rust, rust that I will have to clean, rust that will eat away at both my bike and my schedule.

Out, out, damned spot.

Bikes and Books, Part 2: Frankenstein

There's very little left of my bike now. At least, there's very little left of my bike that's actually on my bike. There's a lot left of my bike, and it's scattered across the garage: the engine is nestled up next to the deep freeze; the carburetor is hiding behind a few old cans of paint; ziploc bags of more or less accurately labeled nuts and bolts cover every other surface like rusty manna, little sacks of greasy grace.

Of course, it's one thing to disassemble. It's quite another to put it all back together.

This is where Mary Shelley comes in. As an eighteen year old she crafted what could be considered the most famous book on reassembly ever written. Frankenstein is part morality tale, part Gothic romance, part good old fashioned ghost story.

By modern standards it's fairly tame. Victor Frankenstein refuses to go into details concerning the creation of his magnum opus, his patchwork person. He doesn't regale us with tales of crypt robbing or of "resurrection men." There are no gruesome surgeries, no electrodes, no hunchbacks drooling for lightening. In fact, the most tantalizing detail Frankenstein offers is to note that he has to make his creation over-large because his hands are too small to perform the delicate operations needed to attach limb to torso, vessel to vessel.

I know how he feels. My knuckles tell the tale of my attempts to unscrew the clamps holding carburetor to the air box. The Honda corporation either uses very small robots or Oompa-Loompas to put these things together. Or maybe Lilliputians.

Anyhow, the details of Frankenstein's operations are shrouded in mystery and only elucidated by imagination. That's as it should be, though, because the true horror of the tale is lost on most readers today. We look for the blood and the gore, the ooze, the hacking of limbs, the cruel and incessant dehumanization of the victim, what one critic calls "torture porn." The true horror of Frankenstein, though, is the idea of pure science, of science without moral or communal responsibility, of science divorced from any purpose other than self-aggrandizement. Victor Frankenstein builds his monster out of the spare parts of humanity simply because he can.

I'm looking around me now, looking at the bags of parts, looking at the heart of my beast rotting near the freezer, looking at the filters and manifolds of inhalation and exhalation, looking at the pipes and tubing of circulation, the rigid skeleton of the frame, the wires that carry the pulsing current all throughout the body. I, too, am hoping for a spark, hoping that this curious ball of metal and packing grease will become much more than the sum of its parts. Rebuilding a motorcycle is just a little bit like playing God. In this way, I am very much like Victor Frankenstein.

Of course, I very much doubt that my motorcycle will throttle my wife (throttle - Get it? Ha!) if I don't ride it often enough.

Bikes and Books, Part 3: Jane Eyre

This is my son, Lucas. He's five and completely ferocious. He's as rough and tumble as they come, the action star of the preschool set. There are many things he doesn't understand. For example, he's a little shaky on cause and effect. He's not yet managed to make the connection between putting jello in the bathtub and having a time out. He also doesn't understand the designated hitter. And I could start an entirely new blog on what he doesn't understand about women (although at last count he was engaged to three girls in his class, so maybe he's figuring something out).

But hear me when I say this: Lucas gets motorcycles.

I don't mean that he understands the ins and outs of sprockets and gears and torque. He doesn't know a thing about checking compression or balancing tires. But he knows that motorcycles are loud, and he knows that they're fast. He knows that twisting the accelerator doesn't just open up the throttle, but that it opens up adventure and possibility. Lucas knows that a motorcycle can take you places you've never been, and that when the engine throbs beneath you it's like the beating of your own heart. He knows that on a motorcycle the road before him will be shiny and smooth and endless, peeling off into the sunset like a great white ribbon.

Jane Eyre knows this, too. At eighteen she's ready to set out on her own, to leave the only world she's ever known behind her. It's an archetypal transition, one familiar to Luke Skywalker, Huck Finn, Odysseus, Moses, and countless other heroes. Jane looks out her window, sees the hills on the horizon, and her soul cries out:

"My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks. It was those I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seem prison-ground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between two. How I longed to follow it farther!"

Jane's longing is part of literary (and human) tradition, though in 1847, when Jane Eyre was published, women were neither expected nor encouraged to voice such typically masculine desire. Gender roles were fairly rigid, though as the Victorian era progressed social structures that had been considered immutable began to dissolve. In one of the most striking passages in the book, Jane herself gives voice to the once unthinkable notion that women might want more out of life than "making puddings" or "knitting stockings:"

"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action, and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot...Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer...."

By allowing Jane to speak her innermost desires, her yearning for something more than domestic tranquility, Charlotte Brontë takes a poor, plain, and proud governess and inserts her smack dab in the middle of a literary tradition that has been more or less exclusively reserved for men. She makes Jane a human being, no more, no less. Because this desire, this tidal wave inside us thundering towards a distant shore, is part of what it means to be human. We all feel it, in one way or another. Emerson notes that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation." But Jane Eyre doesn't. She chooses, instead, the route chosen by Tennyson's Ulysses, who forgoes tranquility, opting rather "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

And when I look at my son on my motorcycle, I see Jane Eyre, eyes blazing, stepping on the carriage to Thornfield, heading for a new life, a new love, towards heartbreak and misery, towards joy and restoration, towards an indescribable future that's just over the horizon. I see him, like Jane, defiant and strong and yet at the same time, somehow fragile and timid, too little to get on or off the motorcycle by himself. He's such a contradiction, such a crazy nest of boy and man. And that, too, is part of being human. Even Jane, for all her fears of being domesticated, chooses to spend her life caring for the man she loves.

So hear me when I say this: Charlotte Brontë gets motorcycles.