scattered

by: Phillip Barron - April 4th, 2007   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment
hatchet.jpg

I have a short story in the April issue of The Raleigh Hatchet. If you’re not already a reader, pick up a copy at Bean Traders or Francesca’s on Ninth St. It’s a great local rag.

I wrote an earlier version of the story for The Urban Hiker, which was one of the best collections of local writing. When I moved to Durham, this magazine helped me quickly get a sense of my community. The Urban Hiker stopped publication in December 2004; I don’t think it went under because of my submission, but I guess you never know.

Note: links download a pdf

 
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Industries of Cruelty

by: Phillip Barron - March 6th, 2007   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

Less than a week after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals employees in North Carolina faced charges of cruelty for performing anesthetized euthanasia on unwanted animals, then tossing them in dumpsters, the state’s council of commissioners had to vote on whether North Carolina’s method for disposing of unwanted citizens is properly antiseptic. While PETA’s employees were cleared of cruel and unusual behavior, it’s not clear whether the State’s death penalty will be.

For a state that condones such agricultural practices as crating pigs during breeding, forced insemination of dairy cattle to keep them lactating and debeaking chickens to bring charges of cruelty against PETA rings hollow. Nonetheless, the case focused unusual attention on an organization that sees itself as the champion of animal rights. While democratic governments ought to be the champions of their citizens’ right, the charges against the State of North Carolina aren’t flavored with the same twist of irony. Perhaps that’s because the State government has demonstrated its investment in cruelty, to both animals and people.

The singularity of the human species is ingrained in our minds from birth. One thing on which creationists and scientists can agree is that in the chain of being there is nothing else like us. Whether we descended from apes or gods, we’re special. Because of the implicit self-importance in that claim (that we, humans, are either the pinnacle of evolution or the chosen few), there is room in human consciousness (and conscience) for hierarchy. The room for hierarchy among species is what makes room for hierarchies within human society.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We could interpret our uniqueness as just a collection of attributes which says nothing about our relationship to other species. Or, if we are the pinnacle of evolution, we might see our place in the chain of being as benevolent care-takers of the earth. Instead, we interpret our phylogenetic achievements as the basis of a ranking system where we come out on top. We see ourselves as masters with dominion over all other species. Instead, we are superior, and our superiority justifies the degree to which we discount the interests of non-human animals.

The stratification of species with which we’re so comfortable creates room in our consciousness for treating people disparately based on their behavior. If people behave a certain way, if they violate norms or act objectionably, then those people forfeit their place in the chain of being, leaving them worthy only of the respect due to lesser animals.

Murder is unacceptable, whether it is carried out by an individual or the state. In either case, murders are often derivative of human imperfection. We refuse to accept that frustration, helplessness, panic, and other common feelings sometimes precipitate the most egregious interpersonal violence. And we refuse to admit that the death penalty is merely a legitimized form of retribution. Instead we say that the state is balancing the scales of justice while the incarcerated murderer is a deviant whose aberrant conduct is less than human. The state relies on its claim to superiority, which in this context is called authority, to distinguish its acts of killing as legitimate. Murderers are worthy only of our disrespect, marginalization, and dismissal. Since murderers have acted like animals, so the thinking goes, we can treat them like animals — locked in pens, waiting for slaughter.

Every way that the criminal justice system is unethical is mirrored in our industrial agricultural practices. Prisons are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated people whose executions are often botched. Factory farms are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated animals whose slaughters are often botched.

Some will resist the comparison between the prison industrial complex and the agro-industrial complex, but rejecting the comparison is premised on unfamiliarity with one or both of the industries. That we allow ourselves to be unfamiliar with our past and present industries of cruelty characterizes the limits of our compassion.

We would rather not know how hamburger is made, so not many of us visit factory farms. We would rather not know that we, a civilized people, have a death penalty, so we hold our executions at night and bury them deep in the bowels of labyrinthine cinder block structures.

Some say it’s time to move on and bury our sullied past in the wake of our progress. But the wake of progress smells more like diesel fumes in the wake of inmate transfer buses and is as blinding as the wake of feathers swirling behind poultry trucks.

The change has to begin somewhere. It’s exciting to see Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation spend time on bestseller lists. Perhaps these books can change our conception of food, challenge some of the policies that make factory farming profitable, or turn some hearts. They won’t do it alone, however. Our investments in cruelty are too tangled for any meaningful change to result from tackling symptoms instead of causes. We have to see that we will never treat cattle or hogs or chickens any better until we see that there’s something objectionable about the way we imprison people.

As these ideas percolate, perhaps we will be as discomforted by our habit or throwing away people and non-domestic animals as we were by PETA employees throwing away dogs and cats.

This piece originally appeared at OpEdNews.com and was published as an Op-Ed in the Herald Sun under the title “Institutionalizing Cruelty to Animals.”

 
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Gender Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty System

by: Phillip Barron - December 18th, 2006   Filed under: Uncategorized 3 Comments

Abstract: Although the demographics on male versus female death-row prisoners suggest that males are the criminal justice system’s primary targets, I argue that the system also discriminates against women. Utilizing contemporary feminist theories of gender, I argue that female prisoners are punished primarily for violating norms of gender correctness.

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new category — published works

by: Phillip Barron - December 18th, 2006   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

In an effort to better organize my site, I’ve created a new category of posts — published works. Posts in this category will be links to other websites or, when I have permission, reproductions of texts that I’ve published elsewhere.

 
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Piotr Sommer – Between Them

by: Phillip Barron - May 18th, 2005   Filed under: Uncategorized

Originally published in the News of the National Humanities Center

Poetry, says Piotr Sommer (2004-05 Hurford Family Fellow at the National Humanities Center), is the “basic cognitive instrument” by which he measures life, “almost a way to deal with the misunderstandings and miscommunications of the world.”

Editor of the Warsaw-based journal Literatura na Swiecie, Sommer divides his time between writing poetry, writing about poetry, and translating Anglo-American poetry into his native Polish. Literatura na Swiecie gathers together foreign literature into Polish translations, most often but not always contemporary literature. Sommer translates the journal’s title as “somewhere between ‘Literature in the World’ and ‘World Literature.’” To Sommer, the “somewhere between” symbolizes that even simple cultural concepts do not translate comfortably.

Through Literatura na Swiecie, Sommer is responsible for introducing or reacquainting Polish readers with such luminaries as Jacques Derrida and John Cage. A 1986 issue of Literatura na Swiecie on the New York Poets has been cited as perhaps the single most influential collection of American poetry on the Polish literary community.

Sommer has published two books during his residence at the Center and is spending his fellowship working on two others. Continued (Wesleyan University Press, 2005), his first book-length collection of poetry translated into English, gathers poems from his previous Polish publications. Po Stykach (Slowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2005) is a collection of his essays on Polish and Anglo-American poetry and on the art of translation.

In Polish, Sommer explains, ‘po stykach’ is a “concise slangy phrase, so rich that I really cannot translate it into English in one phrase. It suggests doing something along delicate lines, which can be lines of contact or lines of argument. It contains the concept of borderlines as well. And also a sense of touch—in Polish, ‘styk’ means touch.”

His current projects include a book-length examination of the influence of twentieth-century American poets such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and Charles Reznikoff on contemporary poets in Poland. He’s also finishing a Polish-translation anthology of American poets he’s “been excited by in the last twenty years.”

A poet who writes and a poet who translates, he claims, are different people. “Writing poetry in your own language, you both control it and let it behave the way it wants to behave,” he explains. “You can allow it quite a bit of pleasure and freedom. You can even let it outpace you.” A translating poet, on the other hand, doesn’t want to give the foreign text a lesson, or correct the author’s voice. “You study the original, see what you can do with it, and find a way to bring things into your own language,” Sommer says.

When translating, he continues, “you must be prepared to take into account every single ingredient that works for the desired result in your language, to find the multiple levels of meaning, beginning with, let’s say, such a basic unit as the sentence.” Being careful, however, he cautions, “doesn’t exclude freedom in the new language, naturally, because the result still must be beautiful. And because the new language doesn’t have to—or sometimes cannot—behave like the original.”

It takes tremendous effort but also serendipity for a poem to translate well into another language, Sommer notes. Between double meanings and colloquial expressions, translating is a process that constantly asks the question, “How much can we stretch our syntax and still keep it beautiful in our language?” Finally, Sommer adds wistfully, a thoughtful translator also must be willing to accept that something beautiful in one language may not be possible in another.

UPDATE: Recordings of Piotr Sommer reading his own poetry in Polish and in English translation are now up at PennSound.

 
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SSpots of Time

by: Phillip Barron - November 12th, 2004   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

Phillip Barron
Originally published by BikeReader.

Sweet are those moments when all your skills converge and you clear a technical section with more grace than you thought possible. That’s what I call flow. Others call it groovin’ or dialed-in. “’Spots of time’ was the phrase Wordsworth used for such moments,” says Appalachian writer Ron Rash, “but the poet’s words were no better than mine because what I felt was beyond any words that had ever been used before. You need a new language.” I hope you’ve experienced what I’m talking about. It’s a rush like no other. In the mountain bike community, there are as many reasons to ride as there are riders. It took 15 years of mountain biking and the experience of single-speed mountain biking for me to realize explicitly what I’d known only implicitly all along: to me, finding flow is my reason to ride.

For Wordsworth, spots were key moments in his life; they formed remarkably vivid memories. He talks about the compression of time, the heightened senses, the feeling of being inside something important. He experienced spots most consistently in nature, and although many call his experiences mystical Wordsworth denied any supernatural element to these moments. Rather, they are about as grounded in this earth as you can get.

I ride to find that state of flow in the woods. This doesn’t mean that I ride slowly or on flat trails. There is a state of grace that a rider can achieve while riding over roots and rocks, through rollercoasters and bowls, over logs and logstacks, and all the while maintain speed. Flow is possible on a technical trail – it’s just harder to find. But, the difficulty reaching it is what makes it so rewarding. It’s about dabbing less, stepping out of the pedals as little as possible. It’s about accepting what comes around the corner. It’s about loving the challenge of the trail laid out before me.

In a state of flow I briefly forget that my bike and I are two separate things. I forget that I am a clumsy bi-ped who can’t move gracefully down a mountain without help. I forget that it shouldn’t be possible to travel this fast over roots, rocks, twists, and turns. I move so smoothly, so instinctively that it is difficult to say that I am responsible for my movements, since no deliberate act of will could fit so harmoniously into the environment. When in flow, I’m not totally in control of my actions. There’s something else going on, something more than me, a bike, and a path. It’s as though the three merge temporarily. Flow never lasts long – usually no longer than a few seconds at a time. But these moments, scattered throughout a two hour ride, convey a lifetime of experience.

The lifetime, the wisdom of these moments is what interests me most. Nietzsche took moments like these as evidence that the there is no end-point at which history is aiming. He knew, because he experienced moments of clarity where all the wisdom of eternity seemed within reach, that the present contains within it everything we need to find meaning in the world. “The world is complete and reaches its finality at each and every moment. What could ten more years teach that the past ten were unable to teach!” I don’t know about history’s aims or universal meanings, but I do know that the compression of time in these moments is something special.

These moments are wise in the sense that every spot of time or moment of flow has taught me something. I’ve learned some new skill or that I’m capable of something I’d not experienced before. Compressed time isn’t the same as time slowed down. Time slows down when you fall. You know you’ve lost your balance, you know you’re past that critical point where you could have caught yourself, you know you’re going to slam your shoulder into that rock. It all happens in slow motion, maybe because your mind is working twice as fast as normal.

Compressed time isn’t slow – if anything, it’s sped up. Maybe this is where we recover the time that slows down when we fall. Nor are spots of time or sessions of flow inevitable. When you fall, the crunch of the shoulder to the rock is inevitable; every thought that races through your mind before the crunch just delays what is guaranteed. Falling, no matter how drawn out, has a clear end. You see it coming.

But a spot of time is different; experiencing one is not guaranteed. Nor is it clear, while you’re in one, how long it will last or even whether it will end. When you’re in a spot of time, you aren’t conscious of anything else – not even the fact that you’re in it. You realize what just happened only when it’s all over.

More than irregular, spots of time are also elusive. I never experience one when I try to. I know I’m more likely to experience one in the saddle of my single-speed than in front of a glowing computer monitor, but that’s about it.

Before going single, I had my own ideas what to expect: tougher climbs; more cautious, thoughtful riding; keeping the momentum. What I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly I felt freed from thinking about speeds and gears. My first few single-speed rides were experiences in liberation. I was focusing on the trail, not on the bike. I’m very comfortable with my bike – I’ve had it for four years, I have probably 6,000 off-road miles on it, and I’ve ridden it up and down the East Coast. But as a single-speed is the first time that the bike moves like it is an extension of me and not just a machine I manipulate. As a geared bike, at best, I just manipulated it well. Now, before turns or hills, I spend my time picking my lines, not my gears. Keeping momentum on climbs is a challenge of a different sort, though not as difficult as I expected.

Some people insist that a spot of time is something experienced in stillness. That clarity is something you achieve through meditation, cross-legged on the floor staring at a candle flame. Maybe. Like Wordsworth and Rash, I meditate in motion. There is a stillness, a calm, within flow, but it is more spiritual than physical. The urge to mountain bike comes from the soul. Riding in the woods is a spiritual experience, but not a religious or even a mystical one. Like Wordsworth, I’ve found greater solace in staying firmly planted on dirt.

Standing on dirt with me, Norman Maclean says of the elusive nature of these moments that “poets talk about ‘spots of time,’ but it is really [fly] fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.”

——
Notes:
Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Untimely Meditations (Thoughts Out of Season Parts I and II). Translated by Anthony Ludovici and Adrian Collins.

Rash, Ron. Saints at the River: A Novel. New York : H. Holt, 2004.

 
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