How to play jazz piano. Bake mandel bread. Worship leaves. Evaluate jewels. Teach ESL. Find diamonds in the garbage heap. Skip around the neighborhood. My parents perfected certain life skills not found in textbooks, and they let us watch them take it to the max.
My father was playing music until about two weeks before he made his cosmic transition—making notecards of his favorite tunes in black ink, the titles underlined in red. My mother was still taking mental inventory of her jewelry collection as she lay dying in a hospital room in Sarasota. She was obsessed with getting home to sort through it. She never made it home, but we told her not to worry. And we’re still sorting.
To learn to do anything—playing, baking, worshipping, evaluating, finding, skipping, traveling, sorting—as if “playing, intensely, respectfully, joyfully,” that’s an epiphany, writes William Finnegan in his surf memoir, Barbarian Days. I’m not sure, though, that I ever stuck long enough with anything—writing, teaching, traveling, playing guitar, whatever it was my heart thought it wanted—to actually know the depths of a lifelong practice.
Perhaps travel, in the widest sense of the word, is the practice I know best: to walk through the green doors and see what’s on the other side. In that sense, I’ve developed an internal shorthand over the years to enter and leave worlds with the notion that empathy “rests on a paradox,” knowing there’s only so much overlap between self and other. Travel is the gap between these two states.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt writes: “An act of enlarged mentality, thinking about the world from views other than your own, means that one trains their imagination to go visiting.”
Speaking of anthropology, I was adopted once by a group who called themselves scholars and schooled me in their ways of “making the strange familiar.” I edited anthropology essays for a scholarly online magazine. When I started the job, I nervously explained to this group that I had always lived an “anthropology-adjacent” life, that I was “anthro-curious” in my approach. But I’d never earn their full approval—and then the magazine was shuttered.
Those steeped in the study of all things human also have their blind spots and their rules—ones not so closely studied under the magnifying glass of class privilege and powerful vocabularies.
I continue to go visiting, as metaphor and road trip, albeit in smaller sips these days. These are attempts at distancing myself from myself in order to get a little closer, is all, and then I usually write about it. The snippets are objects and subjects, a collage of what’s collected in the mind’s eye. Sometimes they become what others might call art—other passages are just waves that recede back into the mind’s ocean, and that’s a wrap!
All joking aside, I think there’s an anthropologist in all of us if we listen for the one within that asks questions of the world and our place in it. You can study how it works for decades and still not know the word for please and thank you in any language but your own. Moral righteousness in this regard may shield us from actually seeing the world unfolding in real time, beyond the boundaries of books and bargains with the academy.
The best assignment at Harvard—observe the moon for 30 days and keep a journal, thanks to Eleanor Duckworth. I am still studying the moon, with manic yearning on occasion to speak with some authority about the stars. This knowing is felt but not seen, I admit, but it was my devotion to that assignment that made me believe I could look closely at the moon and somehow know it.
I lived on islands with lore that loomed large over the horizon, making it feel sometimes like I would always be the interloper with a camera and a pen. But a few chance encounters with elders made me realize that I would leave this place full of grace and a trove of wisdom from the sages who had survived so much hardship—how did they live through the turning of the century, colonial catastrophe, pulverizing poverty?
The elders crooned and lamented; they rebelled and reveled; they painted and documented. Haji Gora Haji. Bi Kidude. Makame Faki. John Baptist da Silva. They slipped through the halls of revolution with their eyes wide open and made it known what they’d seen, felt, and remembered.
Transit Slips, #16
My father was playing music until about two weeks before he made his cosmic transition—making notecards of his favorite tunes in black ink, the titles underlined in red. My mother was still taking mental inventory of her jewelry collection as she lay dying in a hospital room in Sarasota. She was obsessed with getting home to sort through it. She never made it home, but we told her not to worry. And we’re still sorting.
To learn to do anything—playing, baking, worshipping, evaluating, finding, skipping, traveling, sorting—as if “playing, intensely, respectfully, joyfully,” that’s an epiphany, writes William Finnegan in his surf memoir, Barbarian Days. I’m not sure, though, that I ever stuck long enough with anything—writing, teaching, traveling, playing guitar, whatever it was my heart thought it wanted—to actually know the depths of a lifelong practice.
Perhaps travel, in the widest sense of the word, is the practice I know best: to walk through the green doors and see what’s on the other side. In that sense, I’ve developed an internal shorthand over the years to enter and leave worlds with the notion that empathy “rests on a paradox,” knowing there’s only so much overlap between self and other. Travel is the gap between these two states.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt writes: “An act of enlarged mentality, thinking about the world from views other than your own, means that one trains their imagination to go visiting.”
Speaking of anthropology, I was adopted once by a group who called themselves scholars and schooled me in their ways of “making the strange familiar.” I edited anthropology essays for a scholarly online magazine. When I started the job, I nervously explained to this group that I had always lived an “anthropology-adjacent” life, that I was “anthro-curious” in my approach. But I’d never earn their full approval—and then the magazine was shuttered.
Those steeped in the study of all things human also have their blind spots and their rules—ones not so closely studied under the magnifying glass of class privilege and powerful vocabularies.
I continue to go visiting, as metaphor and road trip, albeit in smaller sips these days. These are attempts at distancing myself from myself in order to get a little closer, is all, and then I usually write about it. The snippets are objects and subjects, a collage of what’s collected in the mind’s eye. Sometimes they become what others might call art—other passages are just waves that recede back into the mind’s ocean, and that’s a wrap!
All joking aside, I think there’s an anthropologist in all of us if we listen for the one within that asks questions of the world and our place in it. You can study how it works for decades and still not know the word for please and thank you in any language but your own. Moral righteousness in this regard may shield us from actually seeing the world unfolding in real time, beyond the boundaries of books and bargains with the academy.
The best assignment at Harvard—observe the moon for 30 days and keep a journal, thanks to Eleanor Duckworth. I am still studying the moon, with manic yearning on occasion to speak with some authority about the stars. This knowing is felt but not seen, I admit, but it was my devotion to that assignment that made me believe I could look closely at the moon and somehow know it.
I lived on islands with lore that loomed large over the horizon, making it feel sometimes like I would always be the interloper with a camera and a pen. But a few chance encounters with elders made me realize that I would leave this place full of grace and a trove of wisdom from the sages who had survived so much hardship—how did they live through the turning of the century, colonial catastrophe, pulverizing poverty?
The elders crooned and lamented; they rebelled and reveled; they painted and documented. Haji Gora Haji. Bi Kidude. Makame Faki. John Baptist da Silva. They slipped through the halls of revolution with their eyes wide open and made it known what they’d seen, felt, and remembered.
Transit Slips, #16
