Reflections from Suva Harbour, Fiji

Finally -- a podcast -- it's a raspy one, and it's quite rough... I'll probably re-record this in a few days.. but at least it's something! It has been an extremely weird experience to have lost my voice for so long...

I'm sitting at on a bench in Suva Harbour, in Fiji, and I'm enjoying the gorgeous view of lush, green mountains, sapphire blue waters, and fluffy white clouds. A rusty ship is moored in the harbour, and as I serenely gaze upon it, a warm, moist breeze picks up, a harbinger of afternoon rain.

The rusty ship is, most likely, nothing more than a fishing boat. My mind resists such a quotidian explanation. I want raw adventure. I imagine the hold filled with Chinese illegal aliens, each paying $20,000 for passage to America which involves, conveniently enough, a detour of a couple of years of indentured servitude on a farm or in a sweat shop. I imagine modern-day pirates catching some R&R in Fiji after some high-jinks in the Straits of Malacca. I think of containers crammed with counterfeit software and bootlegged DVDs. Actually, there is no end to the scenarios I can spin as I let my thoughts wander the back alleys of my mind.

I recently finished reading a very thought-provoking article, "Anthropological Epistemologies," by Nicholas Thomas, who has written extensively on the relations between history and anthropology, exchange theory, material culture, colonialism, and art, especially in the Pacific.

His basic argument is that anthropologists have been too quick to label, and that "culture" is not a fixed, stable thing. Further, he points out that it is almost impossible for an outsider to be objective -- he describes how risky it is for ethnographers to try to define a culture.

The ethnographer can be tripped up by his or her own biases, not to mention being "played" by the members of the culture, who may be promoting a fantasy of what their culture is, rather than what it really is. Thomas takes a look at the south Pacific -- how Europeans have tended to view the various cultures, and to ascribe meaning to the things they observe. He pointed out that they were easily seduced by a notion of the "exotic" -- and imposed their own beliefs and values on peoples and cultures they immediately kept apart as the "Other."

Actually, what Thomas is saying is nothing new. Travel literature and memoirs are filled with heightened "difference." The narratives gave rise to the notion of the "noble savage" (Bernal Diaz del Castillo's take on the Aztecs he observed in Mexico in 1517) which was hammered into other people's agendas (the Jesuits, the conquistadors, various waves of missionaries).

They also lead to the commodification of culture as something to consume when wanting an escape or an emotional boost. The wild tales of the explorers in the "New World" were bestsellers in Europe (leading to contemplative essays, such as Montaigne's "On Cannibals"), as were the numerous "I was captured by Indians" narratives a few hundred years later.

While there is literary merit in the narratives, as anthropological documents, they are amazingly harmful, in that they encourage dualistic thinking ("us" vs "them") and ignore the notion of a shared vision or set of values that allows the two groups to engage in the dynamic adjustment of human behavior that constitutes culture.

Other such narratives played up the exotic, almost to the point of fetishism. Lady Mary Wortley Montague's 18th-century accounts of being an English aristocratic titled lady in the midst of a Turkish bath, or *gasp* a harem, deliberately problematize gender relations (as she views them) in order to titillate her audience with thinly veiled ideas of bondage (the locked confines of the harem), mutilation and control (eunuchs), libido unchained (multiple wives, always available), subjugation (the role of women, dress codes).

Religion was made exotic as well. The French noblewoman, Alexandra David-Neel, wrote about following Tibetan Buddhist shamans in "Magic and Mystery in Tibet" at the turn of the 19th century. In upstate New York and New Hampshire in the early 1800s, Mary Marshall Dyer wrote numerous accounts of the weird practices of the Shakers in "Shakerism Exposed." Isabelle Eberhardt wrote about her quest to understand Sufism in "Oblivion Seekers." Eberhardt, who drowned in a flash flood in Algeria, after spending time dressed as a man, hanging out with kif smokers, seeking transcendance.

Needless to say, there is nothing wrong with fantasy, or extreme imagination. In fact, the quest for the exotic can bring people together, through mutual fascination, desire, and wish-fulfilment. What becomes problematic is the tendency to see things through myth-colored glasses, and to operate under too many false assumptions. Jane Austen's novel, Northanger Abbey, illustrates what happens when a young woman, totally addicted to the lurid gothic romances (replete with demons, ghosts, vampires, and other creatures of the night), starts to process all of her experiences through that perspective. It makes for great comedy -- especially a comedy of errors -- but in real life, it leads to unfortunate policy decisions.

Nicholas Thomas does not have a "magic bullet" or an "innoculation" for distorted thinking. He argues that anthropologists should simply be more aware of how they think, and when they are becoming victim of their own assumptions, fantasies, or beliefs.

The rain clouds are starting to come in over the harbor at Suva. A thin Fijian man approaches me, a smile on his face. He has a bundle of hand-carved wooden swords under his arm. "Where are you from, Lady?"

"New York," I blurt out, unconsciously. The look on his face gives me pause and brings me back to the present. I realize it works both ways. He has just as many fantasies and misconceptions about appearances as I. Of course, I don't make it any easier for him, with my bleached blonde hair, my rumpled and sweaty khaki pants, my sunburned American face.

"The market is that way. I can take you," he said.

"No thanks. My husband is waiting for me in the hotel." I gesture to the hotel across the street. "I'm late."

I walk quickly toward the hotel, enter it and poke around the gift shop. Of course, there is no husband, but it was the first thing that popped into my head. I exit, flag a cab, and return to where I am staying.

Anthopological epistemologies. In action.

From Major League Baseball Hero to Homelessness: Can We Blame Little Leagues?

Nathan Leslie's novel, Van Boyle, explores the life of a former major league baseball player who ultimately becomes homeless and completely destitute.  What happened?  

Van's story warns against raising children whose entire identity rests on performance in any single domain. When that domain ends (through injury, aging, or simply moving on), they're left with nothing. The competitive drive exhibited in sports didn't help Van because it was fundamentally fear-based, not curiosity or joy-based.

The novel's bleakest suggestion: our culture's obsession with youth sports isn't really about children's development. It's about parents' anxiety about their children's future economic viability in an increasingly precarious system. We're training children to be productive workers, not whole humans.

So maybe the question isn't whether to sign kids up for athletics, but whether one is doing it to teach them their worth depends on outperforming others—or to give them opportunities for joy, community, physical engagement, and learning that failure isn't catastrophic. Van needed the latter and got the former, with tragic results.

The Myth of Transferable Athletic Drive

Van is unable to transfer baseball motivation to other domains. That fact cuts to something crucial the novel is interrogating. This is where Van Boyle becomes a devastating critique of youth sports mythology.

Van's "drive" in baseball wasn't healthy motivation—it was trauma response. His father's abuse conditioned him to perform or face violence. The batting cage became his "refuge" not because he loved the game organically, but because it was the only place he received conditional approval. His compulsive practice (lifting weights at 5:30 AM, swinging weighted bats 200 times nightly) reads less like discipline and more like survival mechanism.

When baseball ends, he has nothing because the drive was never his—it was his father's, internalized. The novel suggests that athletic "discipline" built on fear, shame, and conditional love doesn't transfer to healthy adult functioning. It produces people who can perform narrow tasks under specific conditions but collapse when those structures disappear.

Youth Sports: Can They Hurt Kids? 

The novel doesn't suggest that sports are inherently harmful—but it does suggest we should examine why and how we're using them. The "sports build character for capitalism's competition" narrative is exactly what Van Boyle interrogates and finds wanting.

Consider what Van actually learned from baseball:

• Your worth is measured by performance metrics
• Love and approval are conditional on success
• Injury/failure means worthlessness
• You are only valuable when productive
• Vulnerability is weakness
• Asking for help is shameful

These aren't "life lessons"—they're  ideology dressed as virtue. They're particularly toxic because they prepared Van for nothing except more performance anxiety. When he couldn't perform, he self-destructed.

A Different Framework for Youth Activities

If a parent is reconsidering youth sports, perhaps the question isn't sports vs. no sports, but: what values will structure the experience? Some considerations the novel might suggest:

What the novel warns against:

• Activities valued solely for college applications/future economic advantage
• Performance measured only by winning/metrics
• Worth tied to ability/achievement
• Competition as preparation for "the real world" 
• Using activities to build "toughness" or "grit"

What might be healthier:

• Activities chosen for intrinsic enjoyment
• Emphasis on cooperation, creativity, problem-solving
• Value placed on effort and growth, not outcomes
• Recognition that rest, play, and "unproductive" time have worth
• Teaching that failure is information, not identity
• Modeling that asking for help is strength

The novel suggests Van needed experiences that taught him he had inherent worth—that he mattered beyond what he could do. Baseball taught the opposite. It made him exceptional at one thing while stunting his emotional development everywhere else.

Tornado Watch: Slaughterville, Oklahoma

by susan smith nash, ph.d.  -- The air weighs like wet wool against Slaughterville's throat this afternoon, and somewhere Vallejo's black heralds are stirring in the anvil top, their dark wings folded into the supercell's architecture of destruction. Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes—there are blows in life so strong they strip meaning from the meteorological lexicon, leaving only the ineffable patterns of mesocyclonic rotation that computers can only partially model, divine designs for which we have no vocabulary.

photo by susan smith nash

She stands in the middle of Hartshorne's wheat field where the cross timbers meet the tallgrass prairie, surrounded by post oak and blackjack whose gnarled branches have weathered a century of Oklahoma storms. The little bluestem and switchgrass bend in the freshening wind, and somewhere near the fence line, purple coneflowers and Indian paintbrush nod like they know what's coming. Above, the mammatus clouds hang like inverted anvils, each bulbous formation a negation of what clouds should do—droop instead of rise, like defeated syntax in a sky that has forgotten its grammar.

The supercell towers forty thousand feet into the stratosphere, its anvil head spreading like a blacksmith's hammer against the jet stream. The mesocyclone wraps tighter, and she can see the wall cloud lowering, pregnant with rotation. Cumulonimbus castellanus builds into cumulonimbus capillatus, the ice crystals streaming away like hair in a hurricane, while the rear flank downdraft cuts through the forward flank with surgical precision.

Here, where the grocer Slaughter once sold provisions to settlers, the storm speaks only honest language: wind shear, updraft, downdraft, hail formation in the supercooled environment above the freezing level. The National Severe Storms Laboratory sits gutted now in Norman, its brightest minds scattered like debris after politicians came with their fear of syllables. Climate—the word that emptied buildings because it dared suggest the world might be changing.

The hail core approaches with its cargo of ice stones born in violent updrafts, cycling through freezing layers until they grow heavy enough to fall. Lightning flickers inside the cumulonimbus like synapses firing in a giant's brain, each stroke a pathway between positive and negative charge. She should run, but there's nowhere to go.

As the funnel cloud begins its descent, she thinks of Revson—how she chose financial security over love, chose the safe path over the one that made her heart race like this storm makes the atmosphere race. In her youth, she had wielded existentialist philosophy like armor against disappointment, quoting Sartre and Camus to justify her retreat from feeling. The absurd became her refuge, nothingness her shield against the surges of optimism that always seemed to curdle into heartbreak. She had told herself it was practical, mature, intellectually honest. "Es tan brusco el desengaño"—the disillusionment is so brutal, as Neruda knew in his darkest residences on earth. She had built her life like a shelter against uncertainty, but here in this field with the funnel cloud bearing down, she understands the futility of safety as philosophy.  Will the funnels make it to the ground as full-fledged tornadoes? 

photo by susan smith nash

The cross timbers ecosystem spreads around her—post oak mottes giving way to tallgrass prairie where buffalo once moved like living weather. Eastern meadowlarks sing the old songs, their voices lost in the increasing wind. The mammatus clouds gathered then dissipated like accusations, reminding her that all her careful planning, her rejection of love for security, means nothing when the sky decides to fall.

"Sólo la muerte es vida"—only death is life, Neruda wrote from his residence in loneliness. She realizes now that her safety was its own kind of death, a slow suffocation of possibility. The mesocyclone tightens its spiral dance, honest in its destruction, while she had spent years lying to herself about what mattered. These are the patterns that touch something immortal in human experience—what Plato called the soul's remembrance of eternal forms, the recognition of perfect beauty glimpsed through imperfect shadows. Standing here, she feels that ancient stirring, the soul's acknowledgment of its true home in the realm of pure being. These are the patterns that touch something immortal in human experience—what Plato called the soul's remembrance of eternal forms, the recognition of perfect beauty glimpsed through imperfect shadows. Standing here, she feels that ancient stirring, the soul's acknowledgment of its true home in the realm of pure being.

The wall cloud lowers further, and she can hear the freight-train roar building. The funnel may touch down soon, somewhere in this field where she stands with nowhere to run, finally understanding that the storm inside her heart was always more dangerous than any weather. The heralds—black and beautiful and bearing down—remind her that some truths cannot be avoided, some realities refuse to be planned away.

 

video by susan smith nash

The wall cloud spins faster now, and suddenly—impossibly—she feels it: a shocking surge of overwhelming joy. Not despite the danger, but because of it. The beauty of the storm's terrible architecture, the honesty of its destruction, the way the light slants gold through the hail shaft—all of it crashes over her like revelation. Her existentialist defenses crumble before this moment of pure being, this anamnesis of what the soul has always known: that beauty arrives in whatever form it chooses, even wrapped in funnel clouds and the memory of love abandoned. The storm becomes her teacher, showing her the eternal forms through temporal destruction.

In this suspended moment as the funnel lowers, then jumps back up again, Slaughterville holds its breath, and she knows that all her careful constructions of safety were just another kind of mammatus cloud—beautiful inversions of what should be, hanging heavily in the sky looking like big fat marshmallows about to fall, fall into grace. 

photo by susan smith nash

Prose poem / contemplation by Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. 

Video Performance of Chucky’s Hunch by Rochelle Owens - The Tenderness of the Snake and the Porcupine

When Rochelle Owens’s play, Chucky’s Hunch, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1981, critics lauded what they expressed as a tour-de-force performance by the actor playing Chucky, and they took the plot at face value.  The play, which is a long dramatic monologue by an aging man triggered by the news that the second of his three ex-wives has won the lottery, takes the audience into a fascinating psychological odyssey.  On the face of it, the play is simply about the embittered rantings of a failed Abstract Expressionist artist whose grandiose plans took him nowhere except into penury and bad health, as he lives with his 85-year-old mother somewhere in upstate New York.  He reads his letters to Elly, his ex-wife, to the audience, and in doing so, expresses a range of thoughts and feelings, ranging from rageful recriminations to sentimental recounting of the times that he and Elly spent together, and his observations of her behavior. The narrative is a straightforward epistolary one, punctuated by a framed tale (The Snake and the Porcupine).  

Chucky's Hunch is featured in this anthology.

However, when looking more closely at the structure of the play, and then relating it to her other works, particularly her long poems, it becomes clear that the structure is one of repetition and interweaving, just as she has done in her brilliant “Black Chalk,” “Patterns of Animus” and “The Aardvark Venus.”  As in those poems and others, there is an apocalyptic intensity that envelopes the reader with a sense of creeping horror at observing the protagonist’s existential nihilism that insists on destructive behavior and an ineluctable journey toward self-erasure. It is good to note that one can read the play for free via the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/wordplays200perf/mode/2up) although it is necessary to create an account and borrow it online.

The release of a video version in 2024, with Charles Berliner as Chucky, music by Marcia Kravis, video editing by Ellen Reynolds, and produced by Rochelle Owens, enables the audience to see a darker and more intimate version (https://youtu.be/OZdRLyXTNbI?si=F5wzMoBLzhhjwnYu).  As a narrator, Chucky could not possibly be more unreliable.  He flings words like the Abstract Expressionist flings paint, and it is necessary for the reader to find the patterns that make the deeper meaning, which is not really about Elly and her perceived slights to Chucky, but more about fatal “dances” (like the fabled Tarantella) of those who fall in love with each other, and in their dance of love, they toy with the parallels between love and death. Eros is held up as a life force in popular culture, but for Owens, Eros gives way to Thanatos, and the death-drive animates the various love dances / erotic tarantellas that weave in and out of the play. 

Love-Death Dance 1:  Chucky and Elly.  Chucky reminisces about his time with Elly and the items of clothing he purchased for her. Their life together was something he now views with a combination of sweetness and bitterness, a relatable pain for anyone reflecting on failed relationships of the past.  Images of a bright-white smile framed by carmine-red lipsticked lips further eroticize the narrative. 

Love-Death Dance 2:  Characterized as an impecunious and unmotivated bum, Chucky mooches off his 85-year-old mother, who horrifies him with the relations she has with Chester, her 82-year-old boyfriend.  Depicted in graphic terms, the discordant notion of a couple approaching death carrying on as though they were teenagers is deeply unsettling to Chucky. 

Love-Death Dance 3:  Mother and son have a close relationship, one fraught with contradictions. Chucky describes how he chews his mother’s food for her as an Eskimo mother would chew food for her baby, which may seem potentially kind-hearted except that she lost her teeth because he hit her. 

Love-Death Dance 4:  Chucky’s only friend is his dog.  The dog was killed, however, because it came between the amorous and deadly contortions of a porcupine and a snake.  Their passion killed not only Chucky’s only living friend, but also each other.  As a female voice narrates the frame-tale, images of a snake about to strike and a young porcupine fill the screen. 

Love-Death Dance 5:  Chucky’s tarantella with his own mind starts at the beginning of the play, and it weaves in and out of a kaleidoscope of emotions.  They take him around in colorful, expressive effusions of emotion and reminiscences, but ultimately, the audience sees him as on a path to madness.  When he disappears without a trace, the tarantella takes its final frenzied spin.  The impressions are emphasized by the juxtaposition of images of seagulls feeding on trash piles. 

Chucky complains that Elly never answers his letters, and he resents the fact that she is not only surviving, but is prospering, thanks to winning the lottery. She has gone on to live and thrive in the modern, changing world.  Chucky’s world is one that resonates with medieval times – with echoes of the earthiness of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the resignation of Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, and the aleatory movements of the Wheel of Fortune. The still photos and collages in the film form a backdrop behind the performer, and they resonate with the words, not so much depictions but visual metaphors. The soundtrack, featuring sombre music, seagull cries, and more. 

In the end, Chucky psychologically juxtaposes himself in a final dance with the memory of the successful Elly, and in that final dance, he generates more self-destructive energy and pathos, leaving the audience staring into the “filthy maw” of an oblivion of one’s own devising, forged from the dances of “love-death” which left him with little more than shame and regret about his life. And thus Chucky hits home.  Chucky is Everyman. 

---Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. 

Marcel Duchamp, Leonardo da Vinci, and Challenging Aesthetic Traditions of Art

By putting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, Duchamp, along with the Futurists and the DaDaists of the early 20th century, questioned the authority of the elite and the prevailing dominant groups in society to set the rules about what can be considered "art" or "high culture."  This questioning had started in the 19th century, with the Realists daring to challenge the established conventions by putting poor people (the gleaners, for example) on a large canvas - a size reserved for "historical" scenes -- heroic or religious.  The Impressionists continued the interrogation of tradition (and the hegemony of "royal societies" and other organizations to dictate what was considered to be "good" or "real." 

 

What I think is a bit ironic of the public's reaction to Duchamp's questioning of the dominant culture's stranglehold on "taste" and "beauty" and what it means for something to be considered "art" is that Leonardo himself was an iconoclast and not a paragon or the apotheosis of conservative, elitist ideas about art, and the appropriate subjects of art.  

 

If you take a close look at his famous painting, "The Last Supper," you will see significant deviations from earlier work, say, from medieval times.  Through his placement of Jesus, the disciples, the sacraments, etc. and his use of light and color, he is incorporating Renaissance and humanist values, moving away from the rigid iconography of the medieval cosmology (derived from strict, hierarchical relations).  If you want to see the perfect illustration of a medieval mindset, and notions of hierarchy (and hence legitimacy), think of the Great Chain of Being, or the layers in Dante's Inferno (and similarly, the rounds in Purgatory and Paradise). 

 

So what could possibly have been subversive about Leonardo’s “La Gioconda / The Mona Lisa” at the time he painted it? First, let’s take a look at what Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the silk merchant and the mother of his five children, known now as La Gioconda, is wearing. It was the norm for a wealthy man who was commissioning a painting of his wife to make sure she was adorned with all the best family jewels and pearls in their possession.  After all, this painting was intended to document their prosperity and well-being. So, let’s take a look. Do you see any jeweled hair pieces, dangling pearl and garnet earrings, bejeweled necklaces, rings, or bracelets? No. Neither do I.  Do you see fancy furs, fur trimming, plush velvets, or fancy gold embroidery?  No. Neither do I.

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (image from Wikipedia)

Finally, where is Lisa Gherardini, La Gioconda, sitting?  She’s not in a palatial garden in front of an elaborate fountain, and nor is she in a room or an alcove where you might see ponderous Doric columns suggesting she is in a palazzo or a large villa. Instead, she is seated in front of a landscape so complicated that it seems to be a dreamscape or even something from a medieval notion of reality, even something you might imagine as a part of Dante’s Purgatory – winding roads requiring the presence of a virtuous woman, Beatrice, to guide you to eventual portals of Paradise.

 

Wives were to be the repositories of virtue in the Renaissance household.  As such, they needed to behave in a certain way. Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti asserted that young women should maintain self-restraint and a “grave demeanor.”  Mona Lisa’s smile flies in the face of that admonition.

 

Nor is the Mona Lisa beautiful.  Beauty was related to virtue, following not only Greek ideals, but also those of Petrarch and other Renaissance writers.  The woman’s beauty was assumed to lift a man up and unite him with the sphere of all beauty and perfection, which was God. La Gianconda has regular features, but she looks nothing like the paintings of other Renaissance artists, such as Botticelli, whose paintings of “A Young Woman” and of Aphrodite rising from the sea, perfectly represent the kind of transcendent beauty capable of lifting up the mind and spirit of a man and achieving unity with the divine sphere (and the source of divine knowledge, the making of intuitive knowledge).

 

So, the Mona Lisa’s smile is subversive, and her plain looks do not elevate. In that sense Leonardo subverts the notion of what kind of emotion a painting of a woman is supposed to elicit – either a serious regard for the embodiment of virtue, or a vertiginous flight of the mind to ideas of eternal, divine beauty, and by extension, knowledge and understanding.

 

How is the Mona Lisa posing?  She is not seen in profile or looking straight on to the painter or viewer. Instead, one shoulder is ahead of the other, and she’s seen in three-quarter view. This pose, new in the Renaissance era, draws the eye in, and makes the subject seem more approachable. The Mona Lisa was one of the first to have the sitter relaxing with her hand resting on her arm, which is on the arm of a chair.

 

There is a rare intimacy in the portrait, to the point that it is almost as though she is asking you to talk to her, and also accompany her as she takes you though life’s winding pathways, depicted in the fantastical landscape behind her.

A Conversation with Rochelle Owens about Patterns of Animus (2022)

Audio Recording of interview with Rochelle Owens over Patterns of Animus: http://www.zenzebra.net/audio/rochelle-2022-12-07.mp3 

Rochelle Owens:  Patterns of Animus

Speaking to Rochelle Owens is always a pleasure because she sheds insight on her work and discusses some of the themes and philosophical constructs that animate it.

Welcome to an interview with Owens, where she reads from her new long poem, “Patterns of Animus,” and chats with Susan Nash about her work and interests now and in the past. “Patterns of Animus” appears in her collection of the same name, which also contains a series of essays written about her earlier work. To purchase Patterns of Animus or to read free on Kindle, click here.

A Conversation with Rochelle Owens on The Aardvark Venus (2020)

 Audio Recording:  http://www.zenzebra.net/audio/rochelle-2022-12-08.mp3

Rochelle Owens has been writing and publishing poetry since the early 1960s, and now her early work is available together with recent work (from 2020) in a single volume, The Aardvark Venus: Selected Poems 1961 - 2020. 

Welcome to an interview with Rochelle Owens, who chats with Susan Nash about her work, the philosophical ideas that have influenced her. 

To purchase a perfect-bound paper copy, or to read it on Kindle, please click here. 

The Aardvark Venus, by Rochelle Owens