The Past Is Our Present

Today, as you know, I attended California Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera's poetry reading in Atherton. I wish more of you had been able to attend. He embraced multiculturalism, bilingualism, and gender equality through his poetry and his stories. He was a delight. He said two things that really struck me: 1. The past is our present and 2. Stories are important. What does it mean to say that our past is our present? For Herrera, it means that we (as individuals, a community, a culture, a world) are the product of those who have come before us and all that we have experienced. On the one hand that seems obvious. I am who I am now because of the culmination of my life experiences, many of which were influenced or informed by my immediate family and ancestors. But, to be honest, I am not usually cognizant of this fact. Why does Herrera insist that stories are important? He gave the example of his interviews with the first Chicana poets in modern New Mexico; these interviews allowed him to see these women as totalities, not just "the cute little old lady" we often see in pictures. Their stories are who they are.

So, these two things stuck with me on my drive home today. Angelou's text is perhaps the perfect embodiment of these ideas. I selected her memoir because it is one that not only helps us connect to another time (place and culture as well), but to ourselves. Your responses to her writing earlier this week solidified this idea for me. We tend to see ourselves in her work, even if our experiences have been very different. We identify with her loss of voice, her loss of agency, her family dysfunctions, the racism/ sexism she has encountered, etc, and if not, we still respond to her work because it feels true and authentic. Does her work educate us about her life and the south in the mid 20th century? Sure, but that only matters if we find ourselves there as well. Her experience is part of our collective past and her story is what illuminates aspects of our present. I think you'll see that Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried will serve a similar purpose, albeit in a very different time and place.

Lastly, on my way home, I thought of my great-grandmother. She lived to be in her late 90s and I had her for almost forty years. Even with all that time, I still did not ask her to tell her story nearly often enough. There is so much I do not know and now never will.

Cats Rule the Internet

So, what did I encounter in my Facebook feed today? The perfect confluence of the four articles we discussed this week: http://beckittns.tumblr.com/
It is a tumblr devoted to cats captioned by quotes from Irish author Samuel Beckett. For example, the one from 9/11/14 is a picture of a cat hanging from the blinds, completely limp after having given up on trying to escape. The caption: Nothing to be done. Another features the following dialogue: "It hurts?" "Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!" The accompanying picture shows a cat standing on the victorian collar of a large dog, smooshing the collar into the dog's face It's funny, thoughtful, and distracting all at the same time.
Is Daly right in saying that my time spent on this tumblr feed is a colossal waste of time? Probably. Is it pathetic that the person (and tumblr) who made this feed wants popularity so much that a pop up reminding me to follow appears every minute or so? Perhaps. Is Williams right that focusing my energies on this feed is distracting me from the real news of the day? Most certainly. But the internet (and social media specifically) are not only tools of democracy and communication; they are also here to entertain.
And, well, cats.