Adam Rubinstein's Blog

So… turns out between terribly ambiguous domain transfer instructions from Google and GoDaddy, and my own misestimations, the blog will be moving at an unspecified time between tonight and next week. Additionally, I've just discovered I'll have to re-style the site once it goes up, so pardon the appearance of things if they look a little wacky. I'm on it.

Finally.It looks like by a combination of factors (I shake my fist at you, Google) I'll be moving this guy to Wordpress this week. I've also seen a substantial change in my personal life, of which I'm not prepared to divulge details to the internet just yet. (If it's not clear, advances in my personal life, as with most regions of my life, intimately affect my process.) This means 100% of my bloggy energies are going into the migration. So here's a complex question I've been wrestling with the last several years – for you to chew on until the blog returns in its fancy new suit, Friday.

I'm a spiritually amorphous Jew-by-birth, and spend a lot of time reading about and pondering indigenous spiritual modes. Do any of these characterizations apply to your practices?
Guilt won't answer your questions. Are you hiding something, as with waiting/living for "progress"?Spiritual openness remains spiritual openness.Humans are meaning-makers. Define your own personal mythology.Consider with this line of thinking a few notes from Jill Milroy, an aboriginal professor I've seen/heard speak several times:

Being indigenous means recognizing all people are indigenous to a place, means finding your original place. 

Country, as a mother, never forgets where you are. You may never find it again in this existence, but you will find it again.

Being in a different country means you will still be loved by that mother, but you're adopted, in a fundamentally different relationship. And you must respect the biological children's relationship to their country.

And further:

Science is only relevant to your own stories. Everyone is indigenous, but not everyone is practicing or living in their own country. 

Progress, 'the best is yet to come' is a dangerous view. To an aboriginal view, the best thing that could happen is the Dreaming, which is already happening.

 I think she's got extraordinarily strong, intuitive points. You?

This is my finger. Those are indeed the offending implements that caused the bandage. As there won't be a poem this weekend – it'd be impossible to keep my thought flow on my typewriter – I'll probably be slowing the blog for a week, too. Or maybe this'll force me to become more axiomatic here. Let's try it now:

Watch closely the path of your blade.
Yeah, feels better already. See you next week, y'all.

Let's see if there ain't a poem under these city-debilitating 2".

There ain't. This weekend after all.

Something big is happening in the sister's section, bolstered by events described in her brothers' versions. In a way, it's mirroring what I was talking about last week. A convergence of the most surreal, faith-requiring moments in all three texts. This is transforming from merely fun to write into necessary in the larger web of events. And fuck, if that's not a relief.

Next time you read something that seems to require you overhaul your disbelief, remember: the author may have engaged the same faith, wondering for months – or years – where the story was leading her.

In other news, the other night I realized what each of the speakers represents, thematically. (That came entirely out of the recent discussion of estuaries, so thanks gang.) Seeing the sister as a "composed voice to the ocean" has helped me understand her role: she embodies the redemption I was waxing about at the new year.

Also, she writes in prose. Which, oddly, makes this no more of a novel.

Toward the end of Pat's book, Weetamoo has some hard concerns about writing, itself. Young Metacom has learned to write the figure A. He pronounces it for her, and explains the white men's utility in writing – and the Indian need, therefore, to be conversant in it. I had to stop reading a while after I saw her response:

…What if, whenever we wanted a story, we could just reach out and read it from a paper, instead of waiting for the right time and place and the right storyteller to tell it to us?

As it is with us now, when we learn a story, we must hear it again and and again, and repeat it to ourselves, until it can never be forgotten.1

Without training, it's exclusionary.I'd never thought of writing as a bastardization. But I'll tell you, for all its obvious, near-invaluable features, she's got a hell of a point. Let's turn the kaleidoscope and sort this out.

Do you read music? I've heard the argument that the invention of modern notation was an attempt to commodify music. Recordings hadn't yet been imagined, and short of a band of musicians to play at your will, written music was an ingenious, if possibly evil, form of property. Abstract it a step further, and you've got a deed: a paper, intrinsically meaningless, which references something meaningful. Nevermind the semiotics, you insatiable philosophs, cause Weetamoo's got a devastating point just for you (last two lines):

Also, when we are told a story, we usually hear it when we are gathered together, so it enters into all our hearts at the same time. If we only read the story alone by ourselves, written in Coat-man marks, we would not have to share it, or commit it to memory. It would just be a thing on a paper page that could be burned or trampled and lost, not something that will always live on because it is a part of us as a people.2

The introduction of transactions and agreements that could exist outside the memories of those who made them must have been threatening. Add to that that the stories on which a people depends to define itself could also be abstracted, and you've got got threats on land and cultural identity. Though I'm sure Metacom and the many who joined him had a lot of reasons, I could see justification in going to war over that alone. The basic English proposition by the early 1670s appears to have been: we're taking your land and culture, by turning agreements into curious drawings, with which we will justify everything. If you intend to preserve your culture, much less your land, you're going to have to use the tools of ours. Writing = game over for the Wampanoag.

…Thoth presents his new invention, "writing," to King Thamus, telling Thamus that his new invention "will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians"…. King Thamus is skeptical of this new invention and rejects it as a tool of recollection rather than retained knowledge. He argues that the written word will infect the Egyptian people with fake knowledge as they will be able to attain facts and stories from an external source and will no longer be forced to mentally retain large quantities of knowledge themselves….3

Our letterforms look like they're overcompensating.So Plato's retelling the story to prove that speech is superior to writing, right? Thing is, Plato keeps using the word pharmakos to describe writing, which can be translated equally as "drug" or "medicine." Derrida uses this as a basis to argue that by Plato's own reasoning, writing can be proven superior to speech. Then, as is his thing, he "freezes" the argument, asserting neither is superior. Language itself is the problem, and the world should just go on about itself, best it can with that information.

Well. That certainly makes a mess of things. And in the way that if everything is a mess, everything's fine… well, it seems we're fine.

Certainly writing and speech each have their functions, but it raises a strange question our culture: why are we so obsessed with archiving? In the old days of humanity, time and retelling determined the relevance (survival) of stories. Think half of the canon would have survived without the archive of writing? And likewise, what if we'd come upon those stories only through storytellers? Like the end of Fahrenheit 451. Imagine books as something you went to see performed. Not a play, but a performance by an individual. Reading her book to you, from memory.

Makes me want to put words in front of folks again.

Hm. Hm.



1-2 Smith, Patricia Clark. Weetamoo: Heart of the Pocassets. New York: Scholastic. 2003.
3 Contains excerpts from Postman, Neil. Technopoly. New York: Vintage. 1992.

I encountered a word late last week I didn't know: estuary. It's got me thinking about the title of the sister's section. Initially I started calling it Tributary, as a kind of default title; almost a joke between Pat and me. It seemed appropriate – a joining of the other two sections – and reader Ben Bormann's point was so compellingly insightful I kept it.

But now there's some real competition. Let's looks at the definitions, courtesy of dictionary.com (which is careful enough for our purposes):

Tributaries.Tributary
–noun
1. a stream that flows to a larger stream or other body of water.
2. a person or nation that pays tribute in acknowledgment of subjugation or the like.
–adjective
3. (of a stream) flowing into a larger stream or other body of water.
4. furnishing subsidiary aid; contributory.
5. paying or required to pay tribute.
6. paid as tribute.
7. subject; subordinate: a tributary nation.

Estuary
–noun
1. that part of the mouth or lower course of a river in which the river's current meets the sea's tide.
2. an arm or inlet of the sea at the lower end of a river.

"Tributary" has the advantages of connecting any type of waterbody, such as a well and a pond (stretch with me). But it also carries the connotation of "subordinate" and "required to pay tribute," which are diametrically not the connotations I want plaguing the sister's section, considering she has only 1/3 of the first section – to two male voices. Tributaries, as Ben points out, change their "larger streams" subtly. I'm coming to think of them as a kind of riverine tai chi. And that's important here, too.

An Estuary.The "estuary," conversely, occurs at the end of the river. It's the river's final statement, and composed voice to the ocean. It also serves as the "inlet of the sea," a quiet, human-sustaining space. Figuratively, the sister's section could be an inlet of Saltwater, a modern reflection of it. Following this line of thought, this may not be a question I can answer until I've written (and rewritten) Saltwater well enough to fully understand it.

Tributary/Estuary isn't fleshed out yet, and aside from its narrative backbone, I haven't found its essence. It'll be fascinating to see where either name encourages it.

What's your take?

Do you ever worry that by indulging a glass of wine in the afternoon, the edge you're taking off is actually very important? Like, there goes your drive to finish anything at all, for the rest of the day?

I'm not quite sure what this forecasts.

But I am sure it's equal parts necessary and irrelevant.

The burdens of force-fitting lift when you realize who's who (and thus who's falling for whom). One degree shifts on the kaleidoscope; alignment; the six-month headache of extraneous characters was never there.

Chekhov's Gun: +1.

The burdens of force-fitting lift when you realize who's who. One degree shifts on the kaleidoscope and a six month headache was never there.