this time, hopefully
i read this article in a café whilst in santiago de compostela, kind of appropriate since it's an old bastion of catholic influence. the end point of the camino de santiago. the supposed burial place of st james, though from what i've read of the story, it seems a little far-fetched. even for catholicism. but yeah, the article was in the local galician paper, about the protest over the weekend against gay marriage. for those who aren't aware, the spanish government legalised gay marriage this year. it's really weird, because in australia, there's not much for conservative twats to protest about. i mean, everyone knows that john howard will rule now until his death. and enough of the population seem cool with that to ensure that it happens. but i think if something did happen in australia, said conservative twats would have no idea what to do. like, this 'pro-family' rally had hundreds of thousands of people there. like holy fuck. and the article that i read had this really interesting slant to it, because it was talking about how the protests weren't, as some socialist queers were saying, about denying rights to homosexuals. they were happy to have gay rights. he was actually making this weird argument about the rights of the traditional family unit to assert it's rights as a unique form. he spoke about the 'families' out protesting as if gay marriage somehow violated the rights of children, not because gay people will adopt and molest children (though of course everyone knows that gay people are really just paedophiles in bright clothing), but almost as if queer marriage somehow impinged on the rights of children's relationships to their parents or something. it was a really strange trick that the writer was trying to use. of course, it's easy to say that it's absolute bullshit [because it is] but i don't know. it just struck me as really interesting because i have a feeling that it might be in this direction that the shortcomings of purely rights-based discourses might come to light. i don't know, i'll have to keep an eye on it, but i definitely think it's a strange one.
travel itinery: 4 days, including, burgos, sanitago de compostela, a coruña, gijón, santander, bilbao, and whatever those other little pueblos were in between.
learning silly little pieces of french in the back seat with a tiny little espagnole-française dictionary.
being sung towards sleep by the sweet lullabye of teeth carefully brushed right by my ear.
the unavoidable intoxication of watching unknown landscapes, all the same in their difference, through the mock death-throes of unkempt hairs from the seat in front.
feeling a fresh new language on my tongue as i drop words in every now and then: 'tout droit' until the lights. staring it down with eagerness saying, you, monsieur française, are next. and knowing that i'll enjoy letting the light whippedness of it fall off my tongue if i ever reach a point of playing with it properly. the same was as a enjoy the thick agility of the spanish tongue - referring to the fleshy thing, not the language - the way you have to keep your tongue real far back in your throat to be ready to strike at the rolled r's and the fat-as d's.
playing games of familiar comfort usually reserved for couples but fuck it, we're gonna play them none the less. for the soft warmth of hands if nothing more.
wandering alone at night when they've gone to bed in the hardly-any-light of a near-full-moon just slightly egged out of shape. bare foot on coastal rocks. flexing and jumping and using the fantastic grip of skin which had gone unused for so long.
falling into holes without language, trying hopelessly and without much real effort to pick up bits of rapid-fire french from the two seats in front. reminders that spanish still isn't a home. it's just a place for thoughts to hang out and wander through.
making people snap back into their mother tongue and musing about important questions like what sound do you make when you hurt yourself. and what sound dogs make.
reading garcía marquéz in spanish and not knowing whether to be happy that i more or less understand it or to be disappointed that i can't here the song of the prose. the closest i've come was liking this: la luna llena estaba llegando al centro del cielo y el mundo se veía como sumergido en aguas verdes [the full moon was arriving at the centre of the sky and the world looked submerged in green waters] (more or less, you know). but really what i was liking was submerged in green waters in english.
wind hammering in so hard that my right ear tremmored for ten minutes afterwards, and that fantastic paradox of being unable to breathe for all the air flying into your mouth.
why my internet connection is happy to go anywhere in the world except anywhere on the uts server? yet if it try to get into uts from other computers, they're happy to go there. and my computer used to happily make its way to uts sites. wha' happened? oh well, doesn't matter, i'm off on a road trip round the north on which i'm going to start editing my assignment. no really, i am.
so ever since i arrived in spain i've been thinking a lot about ideas of migration; of moving, of staying, moving through landscapes and deforming landscapes. and a large portion of that thinking and writing has been based on the massive differences between migration, and whatever the fuck it is that i'm doing here. clearly these thoughts are triggered by my being 'out of place' here. but the qualitative differences between my out of placedness and that of migrants is so huge that it continually blows my mind. i just spent the last hour chatting to a 17 yr old boliviana. it was another 'interview' for my assignment. though i only recorded the 'interview' part, which lasted about ten minutes, we talked much more after that. actually, i don't feel like writing more about this right now. the point is, that the usual points of reference in a conversation, the 'me too', the 'yeah, that's just like when i...' seemed grossly inadecuate. disingenuous really.
por qué estoy adictado a ella. no es que me haga sentir feliz y ligero - aunque eso hace. es porque me hace sentir pesado y triste. es por eso que cada vez vuelvo.
why i'm addicted to her. it's not because she makes me feel happy and light - though most of the time she does. it's because she makes me feel heavy and sad. that's what keeps me coming back every time.
i 'interviewed' some people from SOS Racismo today for my research project. As usual i had poorly prepared questions - ok, lets admit that i didn't actually write out my questions but rather 'had them in my head'. and so half the interview was me rambling in spanish, half hinting at the pseudo-deleuzian slant i'm trying to put on my assignment which came out sounding like, 'in what ways do you think migrants are a threat to society'. but then eventually we just started chatting about shit, immigration politics in australia, and when i told them about our detention centres they were like, yeah, the government's just built some in morroco. yeah, i said blushing with nationalist pride, australia set the example on that one. ah, sometimes it's nice to be reminded that your country is significant on the world stage when you're so far away from home.
so one of the things that i wanted to avoid bitching about in spain is their 'notorious bureacracy'. boring people who go to spain always tell you that in spain you'll find out what bureacracy really means. by that they're not talking about getting to the bottom of the parasitic and self-replicating nature of bureacracies [i think when i read naked lunch burroughs describes them as operating as a virus or something which aims only at it's continual reproduction]. they're just saying, oh, those silly spaniards, don't know how to run a country like we do over here in australia. i mean, they don't even distinguish between third world migrants and first world exchange students. one cue? crazy.
i once had some dream that i was in a country like russia. after the revolution. i don't remember the dream well, but everyone was starving. there was a shortage of more or less everything. except soldiers. they would march along the unpaved streets all day long, and they kept grabbing more and more new recruits, and then needed more resources to keep them going. and they were doing nothing, just marching. though i suppose eventually they'd have had to use their large army to suppress the starving peasants. then they'd need more recruits and more food to feed the army that had to bury the dea peasants. and to look after the plagues that come with more starving peasants [because of course what food was left had to go to the army, to bury the starving peasants]. i remember waking up fom this dream thinking that if i'd remembered it properly it surely would have been a perfect picture of bureacracy.
today i realised that there's another step in the progression of the verb esperar: to expect, to wait, to hope. it's desesperar: to despair.
'Kinship, informational networks, and transnational communities are in effect a form of social capital. As they develop, they can substantially reduce the risks that individual migrants must take in moving from one country to another, thereby stimulating international migration. States must then find a way to intervene in or break up the networks in order to reduce an individuals propensity to migrate'
Hollifield, J. 2000, 'The Politics of International Migration: How can we "Bring the State Back In"?' in Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, p. 147
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