eye

Grassroots blues festival-- dancing with well-dressed old men, somber little boys. Catfish and beer outa the can. Cultural tourism, bratty whites. I requested 'let's get it on,' and they played it immediately, a guy in a three-piece bright red suit, with shoes and tie to match. Sang to me, and everything. I felt I ought to take this as a sign, the unreality of that moment where all seems centered on you, however fleeting. Singer singing to me. Whole band looking at me, smiling, winking, pointing cocked fingers. Girl... Dancing barefoot on grass. If you can call it that, because I'm a terrible dancer-- no sense of rhythm. Perfect pitch, zero rhythm. It made piano lessons hell, my steely teacher's jaw clenched, face fixed with the certainty that my rhythmic incompetency was deliberate. She was wrong, though-- I was terrified of her and would have never dreamed of practicing anything resembling civil disobedience, however noble. So she would make me play it over again. And again. And again. Tuesday afternoons from 3:30 til 4:30 were dreaded all week long, the time its self was spent in a haze of terror and bewilderment, and if my mother, who would be off running errands in her Volvo station wagon, were even a minute late, I would despair. What was it she was punishing me for? When she did arrive she would talk to the piano teacher, which I would tolerate as it meant I was temporarily forgotten, though still in the presence of the torturer, the instruments were at least down the hall. However sweet it felt to stare out the window speeding away from that awful place, always in the back of my mind there loomed next Tuesday, and the one after that, stretching on infinitely, relentlessly, without mercy. This instilled in me a sense of morbid fatalism which may or may not be realistic-- the idea that one thing you can always depend on is more pain.
What are piano lessons to poverty, to the oppression of an entire race? What I experienced yesterday made no sense to me-- those with every reason to fear and hate, with every excuse to be twisted and damaged by the unchecked bigotry that surrounds them-- black people, alive in a way I've rarely seen.
No point reading Heidegger and imaging what it would be like to be fully engaged. You don't have to if you already are. Which makes me think, that since he wrote it, he wasn't.
Children, we are here to learn.