Arkansawyer

So sometimes verbalizing what you want has a quick effect (or seems to) in clarifying what you can and cannot do. Sometimes your thoughts get clearer and quicker (maybe something you did) and sometimes events and circumstances constrain your choices (probably nothing you did) and sometimes of course that clarifying effect doesn’t arrive.

But suppose it does.

Suppose that you get the double-barrel treatment, with some level of personal insight coming coincidentally at the same time as fresh circumstances, and suppose what you think you can or cannot do changes. You might think you could now do a certain thing, or that you could not do this other thing, but it comes down to a change in your capacities.

So when your world starts to change and you start to change with it, what changes about your dreams?

No, I don’t think those are quite the correct lyrics, but that’s how I remember the song.

For the first time in memory, I didn’t make New Year’s resolutions. So often they’re trivial or unattainable, and by this time of the year, forgotten.

So this time, instead of resolutions, I’m going to write dreams.

• I want to play music again. Maybe bass guitar, but what really I want is to get another saxophone and form a marching band. My models are Fela Kuti-Ransom, and Brave Combo, and the bands of New Orleans (who need no introduction from me). From personal witness, having marched behind Brave Combo three times when they left the stage and went to the street to climax a show, I can tell you that music taken into hands and carried from person to person is unbeatable. From records and stories, I know how Fela’s murdered mother’s coffin was carried through machine gun fire and delivered horns blazing to Head of State.

  I want to be part of a marching band that that makes no statement other than its presence at an event and the music they there make. I want that statement to be as unequivocal as a cry for justice, as organic as a cry of feedback, and as mysterious as a cry of a baby at birth.

• I want my professional life to include the creation of one thing that will serve as a force of liberation and of control reversed running from the bottom up to the top. I want to want to work on this to exhaustion, to want to give of myself as I gave of myself as I did when I first believed that the world could be a beautiful place and that people were capable of working together to make that beautiful place. I want my life to be transformed by my profession and my life thus transformed in turn to transform the world. I know that most transformations are tiny and unnoticeable and I want not to be deterred by knowing just how small the steps we all take are.

  I want to combine some or all of distributed processing, identity and reputation systems, text mining, geocoding, not-necessarily structured data taken from arbitrary and ad hoc sources, and any other thing at hand needed to accomplish a design I’ve been imagining for years, and to do it soon enough to be fully useful.

• I want to return to a full appreciation of the pleasures both solitary and social of the senses and the body and the mind. I want my body to be in sufficiently good shape to act upon and enjoy the world and the people around me and my mind to be properly set and prepared to commit those actions and to seize that enjoyment. I want that ecstasy of action to suffuse all my life. I want to feel again from inside myself the possession of a powerful idea–a sound, a song, a system, a demand, a desire–and to feel that idea’s possession of me for a period of time. I want an idea to take a life of its own and escape my exclusive control.




• I want my life to be one piece, even if the connections and linkages among its constituent parts can only be fully visible to me. I want not to cut my various selves–my artistic self, my intellectual self, my animal self, my professional self, my citizen self–apart and I want not to abandon any of them.

There. Some of my dreams.

Today on International Women’s Day, my mother, Golda Belle Watson Adams, turns ninety years old.

Like the women James Wimberly describes in this lovely post, my mother helped win the war for the Allies. While my father was in Burma, she and my Aunt Mary built planes at the McDonnell-Douglas airplane plant in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Like the women Wimberly writes about, their opportunities to aid the war effort were limited by their gender.

This did not stop them.

My Aunt Mary, who was an inspector, decided one day that she wanted to be a final inspector. This was the most prestigious and most responsible of all the inspecting jobs, as the final inspector was the last line of defense against mistakes and errors before the plane went out the hangar to combat. None of the final inspectors were women.

The man in charge of the inspectors was amused by my Aunt Mary’s persistence. One day, he said that he’d let her and another woman take the training to become final inspectors. Not that they had any chance of passing it, he said–lots of men washed out–but they could give it a shot. It’d make them better at their old jobs when they went back to them.

My Aunt Mary got the high score on the final exam and became the first woman final inspector in the plant.

Now that generation is passing. My Uncle Grant died last year, my Aunts Mary and Martha and Nancy all died within a year of each other three years back. My Uncle Paul died in the seventies–a shock to us all. My Uncle Searl, who will be ninety-seven on March 22nd was just released from the hospital into a nursing home, weakened by influenza and probably no longer able to live on his own. My Uncle Roosevelt, a survivor of Bataan and forty-three months in Japanese prison camps, may not ever make the trip home to Arkansas from California again. My mother lives quietly with my father (and there’s a story in him), seldom leaving home.

Once upon a time, they saved the world.

It’s from 6:00 till 8:00 PM tonight, March 6, 2008, at Philander Smith College. I plan to attend and, if I can get WiFi, I’ll live blog it.