Eye Level

The body

From the very beginning of Eye Level, Jennie Xie was seducing my imagination with the idea of embodiment. The embodiment of the self, the bodies that we make up collectively, the bodies of nature and time that we inhabit. The grey area between the mind and the body. What is a body anyway? 

“The root of this self denial is long

All those years I was spared of seeing myself though myself”- Epistle

It feels as if Jennie Xie was trying to answer these questions, and did so by highlighting the almost mundane oddities that we experience on a day to day basis. By observing the actions of the body with detachment from the self, it truly makes one reflect on the active participation that we may or may not have in our body's experience. 

“Every now and then

A thought rips into being-

Most relations with the self are facsimile”- Deja Vu

It often seems like the themes that I read about are reflected in, or predetermined by my actions. Maybe it its just that reading about said themes forces me to notice them in the world around me. This semester has, for me, very much been about acceptance of my existence in my skin. I have found myself dissacoiting often, and not giving myself the time to learn about and take care of my shell, exoskeleton, of navigating the spaces in, outside of, and in between my corporal form.

 Simply existing in society requires constant exposure to the perception of others. Our level of success in this world is completely determined by how others perceive us, and so often, we try to become those perceptions of ourselves. 

“Yet I know we can hold more in us than we do because the body is without core”- Solitude Study

This book reminded me of the moist film gathered on my upper lip on a humid day at home. It reminded be of the coolness of coconut water, rushing down my gull. 

It reminded me of late night rides on overcrowded buses. The repetition of being human. Of moving. Inside and outside of the body. 

Talking to strangers. Falling in love with places, smells, foods. 

“I let everyone who entered my life enter through me”- Origin Story

I think it is so important to take a step back and view the body as an idea, rather than a physical manifestation. We are as we see ourselves. We know our bodies, not because we see it in a mirror, but because we know the events that it has had to survive through. To listen to he body is to listen to self. To understand that duality exists in everything, even ourselves, is to understand the differences between the self and the body. 

“Self consciousness anticipates an excess of seeing. its incessancy.”  Visual Orders

Whereas - Late response

The jerking of sentences in this collection forces the reader to engage with the text with more caution. It. Catches. You. At. Each. Word. Similarly to the ways unfair treaties enforced by the U.S. government on Native communities were tools created to keep native tribes in cycles of poverty and violence.

Sentences end abruptly but the poems keep going. Soldier continues to write these poems and challenge the language of these treaties and the empty apologizes that followed.

“Whereas Native Peoples are [             ] people with a deep and abiding [  ] in the [ ] , and for millennia Native Peoples have maintained a powerful

[          ] connection to this land, as evidenced by their [          ] and legends;

Whereas the Federal Government condemned the [          ], [ ], and [ ] of Native Peoples and endeavored to assimilate them by such policies as the redistribution of land under the Act of February 8, 1887 (25 U.S.C. 331; 24 Stat. 388, chapter 119) (commonly known as the “General Allotment Act”),”

The placement of brackets and space in this poem in particular brings to life the emptiness of apologize. You can feel the dismissal of these communities experiences and traumas. Even after “apology” they are not allowed to heal. So does that make it a real apology? Soldier is explicit with her writing. Explicit because she doesn't hold back anything. She creates the space and pauses to show how it is choking to have to voice histories that have been silenced an erased for centuries. Histories of her people that continue to be experienced in this way because of government intervention and neglect. Soldier does not allow you to neglect her voice and voices of her communities with her writings. She brings these narratives to life. Specify in Two, when we see a Native mother experiencing complications with her baby that later lead to a miscarriage because of government neglect to provide medical resources to Native people. Soldier does not hold back the “blood”, it seeps through the pages. Her language is saturated with this pain. It seeps through, even through the brackets.

Eye Level

**Grief really threw me for a loop y'all. I write these and forget to post them.

I feel the heavy loneliness that seeps through the work. It feels like molasses. Slow moving, deliberate.

We know, and can identify things, by what they are not. We know what light is because we have dark to compare it to. We know invisible things because there are visible things. We know what we aren't, and that leads us to the danger of what we are.

I think what we are meant to do here is be eye level with our world. Traveling through places, experiencing a deep sense of being by one's self through the world. Observing.

My favorite poem is "Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season". I marked it and read it over and over (evidence on the mac n cheese i accidentally dropped on the top corner of the page because I was trying to hold the book and bowl and eat at the same time). It is both a scream and a whisper. A daily life-blog and a diary. Nearly every section (divided by the dot) has at least one line that punches.

"It's not easy to measure your life in debts"

"My guilt goes off,

then returns, wilder.

For whom does it return?"

"It's not about the snare of need, though I forget why I came."

We are all walking along the line of remembering and forgetting. This book allows us both. 

Oceanic: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Oceanic: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Reflection by: Michelle Nicol 

The blue cover of the book and the title Oceanicreally helped set the tone of the book well for me.  The way that Nezhukumatathil, creates such vivid imagery as I read through the book was really amazing for my super visual brain. In the Self-Portrait as Scallopshe writes, “Let me see your shadow feather across my hundred blue eyes. I probably won’t even notice the sea stars circling around me ready to nibble and foam for days.” This is just one of the countless examples of some of the most visually creating descriptions I have ever read!  Reading through the book made seeing the child stepping out of a fire in the poem Bengal Tigerso effortless for me. The colors that burst out at me while I read was also something I found came very naturally, I saw lots and lots of blue, so many different references to the ocean and the water, waterfalls. I am in love with the ocean, so this made reading quite relaxing and brought me frequently to the safe space I visit when I do guided meditations with my therapist. 

Some of the poems stood out for other more triggering reasons such as the poem Two Moths.  I have read and reread this poem now quite a few times and it is just so heavy and very descriptive about the horrors that some children are subjected to, children who can never just enjoy what it is like to be a twelve-year-old.  As a mother of a teenager this poem really put my spirit in places of such deep gratitude, I get the joy of just being able to hold space for her daily melt downs due to a hair being misplaced while she lays down her edges.  The lines that stood out the most for me in this poem haunt me, and the format in which Nezhukumatathil chose to use really press down the severity, the hurt, the realness of these young girls’ trauma. “One hour- One hour- One hour. And if she cries afterward her older sister will cover it up. Will rim the waterline of her eyes” 

The diverse graphic images that each poem provided really varied and were unique to each poem, like in the poem The Pepper King Returns, she writes “his son winter soup full of potatoes and cumin, the boy will eat and eat and clink his spoon until you hear something like bells.” Not only can I picture the little boy in this poem eating some delicious soup, I can also smell the cumin and hear the bells in the background of my mind as a result of the words written on the page. In the poem Flowers at the Taj MahalNezhukumatathil writes, “I question you, poppy, paper-thin bloom and spindly rubber neck.” and I so easily can see everything that follows, from the poppy flower to the happy rats in cheese, to the shadows and the marbleizing wet eyes of the tourists.

I very much enjoyed reading this book, I one day hope to write I ways that allow such freedom away from the task of actually reading to understand and move in a direction with my own descriptions that can foster such freedom, and imagery with such a prevalence of truth.

Registers of Illuminated Villages: Tarfia Faizullah

Registers of Illuminated Villages: Tarfia Faizullah 

Reflection by: Michelle Nicol 

I woke up early this morning 4.7.2019, I fell asleep after I finished Tarfia Faizullah’s book, not right after I was done reading but soon after.  I needed some reflection time, so I decided to journal, which I am grateful for now after having the poems creep into my dreams.  When I picked up the book, I was a bit mislead by the title I thought the book would be more of an origin story/ which actually now that this writing is being transcribed onto the computer a few weeks later. Reading of the grief from her sisters’ loss, spoke so directly to the grief and pain I still feel surrounding my mother’s death and now I enough time has passed where putting these thoughts on a page is actually something I have gained enough strength to do.  My heart burst wide open while I read through the words of the poems in this book, it has taken me some time to sew my heart back together. The string I used is still very thin and yet the expressions Tarfia Faizullah uses in her poems spoke to my pain immediately pulling out my insomniac tomorrows past thoughts and blended them with all of the yesterday’s future wishes. It was upheaving for me to read the lines on page 26, “… the night the wind blew backward, and exactly seven poppies grew from the mouth of her corpse I tried to cuddle. I then began to count the number of times my insomniac friend said the word tomorrow” “I was fat before, and fat after.” So much of this speaks to my sadness and sorrow, the constant despair which lives inside my bones and body which will never leave.  The poems that followed only continued to pull the safety blanket from off of my fat bodied skin. Within the words of 100 bells I yet again see me, all of me, I wanted to drift away with the night…my sister died. He raped me. They beat me. I fell until the doorknob went silent.

With the hundreds upon hundreds of cities and towns and villages lost how many souls get rebirthed into the roots of the tall standing trees I stare at the dirt wishing my past would sprout out and become visible again to the naked eye.  If only I knew where exactly I came from, the memories that I once had, that they once knew are gone far away somewhere off in the sky, blue.  Not even a second thought, the blacked-out pages and the dark ink bleed through the word that sit on the other side of the page. Soliloquies From The Village Of The Orphans And Widows, How do they go on from after such devastation? “ I was told I should say no and taught to say yes- so everyday its’s okay that jumps out of my throat” “ But there was no one but me at the gateway” (55) The black page from the next part of the book bleeds to the back side and the word which are describing these events, these realities, these emotions only just begin to scratch the surface of what lies within the darkness.  “What is meant by the word recovery” (64) you are still below the ground, an infinite autumn Your dresses still hang in the closet unworn and untouched. “I can’t help but speak for fear the voice I’ll hear is my own” (76). Maybe my eyes and my experiences are all that I can see through the words in her powerful work published on the pages in her book.  I was moved in ways I have trouble putting into an expression here on this page.  Tarfia Faizullah spoke to me in ways that only my emotions could hear, the courage and strength it must have taken her to create such amazing works of art truly make me humbled to have had the opportunity to have read.  This book by far stands out so meaningfully to me, emotions were accessed while reading that I would have preferred to have kept hidden away and instead here is my attempt to share them anyway.  

Grief was what got me writing from the very start so many years ago, after a while the parts of my heart that were in too much pain grew cold and got hidden away. Decompression and process time found themselves the morning after I read this book. I cried deeply on a 5am walk because my mind was restless, and parts of my pain were awakened after years and years of being pushed down and stuffed away. I am forever changed after reading this, Mother “I woke alone.  I had been dreaming of cat-sized blood ant’s in my blood’s homeland, of women who undrape wet and green fields from their torsos. Mother, it was cold. What used to be my arm ached…Mother: the napping tree in the village inside of me. You folded me back into fifths, lay me in my sweet acorn cradle. You wrapped my favorite blanket, a black leaf, around me.” (87) I do not remember my mother any more, 20 years in August is how long she has been gone, I have known her dead longer than I knew her alive.  When she died I lost huge parts of myself that I will never regain, or maybe I never lost any of that and the pain are just the blackened out dark pages of my life. The life that followed her death is my daughter, in her eyes the life I once knew fly’s higher each moment and every second of each and every day. She is my hidden register of astonishment, my very own shell garden.

Eye Level: Jenny Xie

From the very first page of the book to the last page of the book I was overly excited and very much engaged.  With each word I read and each page I turned I found myself exclaiming fuck yes, snapping in relatability and endlessly underlining practically the entire book!  “Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground?”  Can it, it sure feels that I spend most of my days floating in thin air waiting and hoping to catch my breath, take a seat, unwind from the constant chaos of my day to day life.  Being rooted…is that something that is possible at all in this world we live in, aren’t we all being pushed and pulled in different directions at all time throughout our lives or is this just something I struggle with alone in the solitude which lies within my own thoughts.  Am I just a lonely traveler with nowhere to arrive to?  

I absolutely loved how many of the word used created images for me, the word brighteningin PHNOM PENH DIPYCH: WET SEASON allowed my brain to lighten the book and room in which I was sitting in while I read that poem.  Words that describe rain which also force my mind to utilize other senses such as smell, touch and hearing; “Rainwater mars the tin roof” “Water growing out of water.”  The theme that I watched out for very closely while I read Jenny Xie’s poems was that of the eye’s, being seen, how other people’s gazes have the tendency to become part of who we are, I guess I should speak more for myself with that last statement. Eyes, sight, looking at objects at oneself and examining what one sees are all throughout the beautifully written words on every page of the book.  Some of my favorites which spoke to me the loudest are as follows, “no visible evidence” “I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight” “Seeing the collars of this city open I wish for higher meaning and its histrionics to cease.” “The stench making me look hard at everything.” “I am protective of what eyes cannot pray open. The unannounced. The infinite places within language to hide.” “I can shake out the imprint of my body on the sheets each morning. Harder to shake out of my mind” 

I seriously want to go on and on and yet instead I will take a long pause with Visual Orders, this poem is, everything!  I just fell in love with this entire poem!!  I read it and see so much of the insides of the poem as well as the outsides of it, the contrast with self and self is so incredible within the lines of this piece!  “Harvest the eyes from the ocular cavities. Complete in themselves: a pair of globes with their own meridians. What atrophies without the tending of a gaze? The visible object constituted by sight. But where to spend one’s sight, a soft currency? To be profligate in taking in the outer world is to shortchange the interior one.” OH, MY FU****** GOD!!!  I just want to continue copying down this Entire poem, every single time I read it I get so much more from it then the time before.  This poem pulls at so many emotions, so many of my life experiences, “The seductions of seeing ensure there is that which remains unseen. Evading visibility is its own fortune. If to behold is to possess, to be looked upon is to be fixed in another’s sight, static and immutable.” I feel so seen within these words.  So much of my life I walk around feeling hidden, misunderstood, invisible, this poem makes my heart feel like it finally has eyes, eyes that can look directly into your eyes without needing to look away, eyes that can walk around the rest of the poems in this book saying hello with my head held high, eyes free from the shame in which my eyesight impresses on me.  Having read this my disembodied eye cannot be confined to the skin and to what it holds captive, it no longer has to be unseen against my own will and denied a reflection to be locked out of itself! 

The poem MELANCHOLIA also spoke to me in such amazing ways!  First I read it all the way through, then I read it again, but only the parts that are in italics and then I read it a third time without the italics, and of course I read it again all the way through, “slow and fast, fast and slow.” “All of my eye’s mistakes. And what were they? Level” I felt like this poem was an interview with the self, self vs self, internal vs external, seen and unseen, inside and outside. “I spin through my life again” I read the words again and again and as I do I am reminded of the ways in which my days look the same most of time, the routines of cuddling with my daughter first thing in the morning, telling her to get her shoes on 5 to many times, so that we can sit in traffic, car after car, day after day, week after week, year after year. As I drive on the freeway so much of my life just goes unseen, unheard, over and over here I am. 

Eye Level and the Self is a Fiction

I've been waiting for my thoughts to settle
but to no avail...
my mind is like swift moving water
murky with the disturbed sediment.

When I first approached Xie's writing I was intimidated...
Awed by the order of it
the clarity of her thoughts
the brevity of her expression
which states so eloquently that which is so challenging for me to be able to focus on

Xie's poem TO BE A GOOD BUDDIST IS ENSNAREMENT
fills me with wonder and speaks to both my spirit and galloping mind
"In order to stop resisting, I must not attempt to stop resisting...
Nothing can surprise
Clarity is just questioning having eaten its fill."

it was when I found The Self is a Fiction: Jenny Xie Interviewed by Miriam Rhamani  that I finally found an entry to this collection (Yes, I later discovered that our wise professor had included it in our syllabus-but what can I say-)
I resonated so deeply with this conversation between friends, colleagues, peers- they shared the bound of their educational setting,internships of  teaching English in China of being persons of color.. the feminine or the intersectionality of "femininist gaze." I started seeing patterns which emerged-the themes- I reflected on what might the experience of returning to China to teach English been like for Xie..what was it have been like to move here as a child...how this may be echoed in her works

I also found myself curious about Xie's experience spending seasons in Phnom Penh- and the work began to reveal itself to me. I have traveled most of my life-which in my case meant I was a stranger when I arrived and only slightly less strange when I departed-
but there is luxury to be found in this solitude...as no one knows you, temporarily you may find yourself...to spend time with yourself...and to see yourself outside of the context by which you may have been framed by those around you...by the image of familial or social norms you either adopt or resist...rereading her travel poems uncovered more and more facets of her ability and shown a light in the dark, dusty corners of  self.

I also really enjoyed Jenny Xie's notes on her poems, pg. 79...they led me on an amazing journey but I'll share that with you all on Thursday ;)

Cataloging Is Not Passive

As soon as I stumbled across a line in an interview with BOMB magazine, I knew what I’d been trying to crystallize. Xie says, “Observing is never a passive absorption of visual stimuli. The eye amplifies and tames; it heightens and erases.”


I kept wondering how and why these poems landed the way they did, if many of them felt like lists. Observations. I think I’d been operating under the assumption that listing was not digesting, but it really, really is.


If we were to make meaning of every atom of stimuli that we encounter, our brains would fizzle and smoke into nothingness. What stands out is important. In Xie’s poetry, I trust the intuition of image.


I wanted to engage with her poetry via writing a poem of my own… I’ll admit it’s a bit of a challenge to not use images as a pivot for that inward reality, but here we go… There is a certain liberation AND constraint in allowing myself to just notice details that speak with a meaning I have not contrived from the start.

Nourish

Chicken cutlets on the counter

It’s possible I’m projecting

plastic cutting boards

traffic passing

as myself in motion.

But here I am

an unwavering pool

of afternoons, garlic

and something sour

constantly edging

forgetting how a blade

finds the hand, a regular north star

how this streaked window

dazzles only at certain angles

Loneliness From the Outside-In

This book cracked something open for me. I'm going to use this blog post to try and articulate it, but I have a feeling it may not want to be extracted with the pliers of language quite yet... so I'm going to let this be messy!

I'm fascinated by how Jenny Xie blurs the relationship between the outside and inside worlds: "The mind resides both inside and out," she writes in "Rootless." This statement comes to mean many things over the course of the collection, but what I'll latch onto for now is the way that the mind (and the self) is shaped by the world around it.

The Phnom Penh Diptychs illustrate this state so gorgeously. Wet Season in particular is a collage of the external world - a bustling city dizzied by capitalism, "new money," and tourism - with only the barest of clues as to the speaker's personal predicament. We learn that she writes ad copy and infer that she is not from this city, merely biding her time: "I'm still where I am, in conditions of low visibility. / Why not wait until I've waited why out?" There are some other words and phrases that linger in the mind like "lonesomeness," "I am transparent," "you could say moving here was a kind of hiding," but these are only the bones of the poem. The flesh of the poem is in the brief glimpses it offers into the outside world "And now that the daylight turns viscous, a new wife buckles limbs / with a foreign lover at the Himawari Hotel"; "Someone sweeps thick cockroaches from the floor, someone orders oysters on ice."

These glimpses into the chaotic and unstable world around the speaker form the flesh of the poem. They give it a body. And this body can't be so easily distinguished from the "I" of the speaker. This poem in particular has made me think about how we can tell the story of a self through the story of a city. (Call-back to Natalie Scenters-Zapico as well....)

One of the other stand-out poems for me was "Inwardly," particularly the second and third stanzas:

                                          We have language for what is within reach
                                                    but not the mutable form behind it.

                                                              Or else, why write.


I'm sick of peering at the ego.
No, my ego's tired of peering at me--

It's she who awakens me into being

So it goes: the seer mistaken for the seen


What do we think we are looking at and how do we know that it is outside of ourselves? What is the interior of a gaze and how can we put language to it? I also keep thinking about the final lines from "Tending": "Water pulls off the blindfold. / Draws forth what's been planted." How can language serve as water that draws forth "the mutable form" that has already been planted?

But this is the aspect that most affected me about Xie's writing: how it is both so personal and so abstracted; so able to assume an intellectual distance and yet so intimate. Reading the interview with her, I'll admit I was a little disappointed that the experiences mentioned in her poems are not strictly autobiographical that she is instead crafting a very deliberate character (and set of characters). I had felt such an affinity with the speaker (who I naively believed to be the author) and her rootlessness & sense of displacement & longing, so to discover it was a fiction was initially a disappointment. But thinking about it more, I'm so admiring of how Xie manages to achieve both this intimacy and this distance that allows for a kind of intellectual rigor & wisdom. So much of the time I write in present-tense, first-person and focus so much purely on sensations and the shaping of experiences directly on my body, and I'm curious about how allowing more of this incisive and reflective narration might allow for multiple forms of knowing & meaning & voice to emerge in my writing.

seeing with Eye Level

In reading “Eye Level” by Jenny Xie, I really felt the heavy, slow-motion loneliness that radiated from many of the poems. The feeling of looking inward, of sitting on a train alone for a long time.

The form of “Melancholia” is very strange. Two voices seem to talk to each other, one asking italic question - “And then?”, “how so?” - and the other offering matter-of-fact answers - “Slow and fast, fast and slow” (52). The call and response feels so eerie. Is there really more than one speaker, or is this an internal dialogue of sorts? Phrases like “I pry open the crooked jaw” certainly don’t help ease tension. And then, the poem closes with “What points the finger? /All of my eye’s mistakes./ And what were they? / Level” (52). Not only does this poem include an allusion to the title of the work - which I always assume is somehow important or central if the author lifted it out of countless options for the title - this seems to hint at a central theme, the fault in seeing. “Visual Orders” is another poem that tackles the subject of sight. One stanza reads:

“The seductions of seeing ensure there is that which remains unseen. Evading / visibility in its own fortune. If to behold is to possess, to be looked upon is to / be fixed in another’s sight, static and immutable” (47).

Whenever something is visible, that means that there are also things that are invisible. To look at something is to “possess” it, so to be looked at… the speaker suggests that being looked at is not quite to be possessed, but to have a “static” perhaps reductive image of oneself permanently sealed away in someone else's sight. This idea is especially interesting to me coming from a writer, a poet. Reading this made me reconsider everything I had read so far, the paintings that Xie had painted in my head through her words. So many of her poems felt like diaries to me, like travelogue. From Phnom Penh, to the island of Corfu, to Manhattan’s Chinatown. I had felt transported to these places, but now I remember that I was only seeing through Xie’s eyes, through her point of view.

This passage also reminded me a bit of our closing remarks from last class. It’s complicated to select works because when you are seeing (or reading) one story, of course there are going to be stories unread, unseen. This theme was set up right from the beginning, with the Antonio Machado quote after the table of contents; “The eye you see is not / an eye because you see it; / it is an eye because it sees you”. The things we look at are not always just objects, oftentimes they look right back at us.

I very much enjoyed all of the strange details, moody descriptions in Xie’s writing.

“On the night train / cherries wrapped / in newspaper crackle red” (50). Or, from “Chinatown Diptych” , “there’s no logic to melons and spring onions exchanging hands” [...] “I lean into the throat of summer. / Perched above these streets with whom I share verbs and adjectives” (37). Eye Level gave me the vibe of a very seasoned seer. Someone comfortable with watching, traveling, noticing, and being alone.

Eye level

Find here: past, language, future, present, lessons.
Find here: history, yearning and movement.
Find here a vulnerability to tell truth about leaning all the ways to disguise truth- study here, time; & acknowledge the honesty of it passing.

Jenny Xie’s Eye Level reminded me of the immediate credibility I lend to a writer when I personally witness and relate to their honesty and vulnerability on the page. Throughout the work I found myself meditating on the pieces where Jenny exposed her relationship to writing. Beginning at an early age   (even when I was young, I loved peering at faces in films. The pleasure of watching and of not being watched) , Jenny highlights the beginning of her relationship with writing did  not come with the introduction of a pen or pencil,but rather with the weight of old memories resting upon her; memory sticks like cartliage to the meat of those with the most words. She allows us to see how memory and  experience of the outside world sit with in her body a misfortune can swell for a long long time in the mind and as she is introduced to writing how she uses the process,  like a river, to have such heaviness flow outside of her. However, Jenny does not romanticize this process or the reality of being a poet; Throughout the text there are a few pieces where we are invited to the other side, to see a bit of the tournament with in oneself when holding all these memories, these writings, this desire to write, and the blurred lines between all of those; let there be no braiding of words. I want a spare mouth. I am protective of what eyes cannot pet open. The unannounced. The infinite places within language to hide.
Throughout the text we go everywhere with Jenny, we experience all of the things around her she immediately puts us in scene by creating landscapes of sounds, people, fragrances and visual tapestries she sews before our very eyes on the page. This made me think about the places we all go as individuals, how we all carry collections of the places we have been with us. Xie's perspective brought to light the difference between writers and everyone else for me, and how we decide to make space our lives for these truths and landscapes- funny, the way we come to understand a place by wanting to escape it.


Also- EXIT, EVE  is absolutely incredible, great way to close the middle section and begin the final pages. My favorite poem of the collection!!!!

Thank you Jenny Xie

Different perspective at different levels

“Funny, the way we come to understand a place by wanting to escape it” ( 29).

    Jenny Xie’s Eye level would have been the book of my dreams when I was traveling Asia by myself five years ago. A lot of her themes ( observation, truth seeking, identity, travel, loneliness, place and perspective) connect so much with me now but very much so in what I was looking for as a 27 year old Diné girl going through her twentieth identity and cultural crisis. I was looking for how I fit in this world and also searching for place, place of self, place of identity, place of calm, place of spirit, place of observation, the list went on and on as to why I was traveling and why I left my job and my hometown. The first quote above is something I feel like I hear and read in different styles from countless traveling blogs and quotes I used to subscribe to, it never gets old to me because there is so much truth to it.
    I read Eye level while I was on a plane from Oakland to Phoenix to visit my partner and my family. My partner and I took a day trip yesterday to visit my family and grandma in northern Arizona. It was easter Sunday so most stores were closed. We went to a museum to see a poem of mine hung on the walls with other Indigenous poets for poetry month. I mainly went to show my grandma the poem because the poem was about her. She had to travel 3 hours to meet me in my hometown. While I waited for her my partner and I went on a nature hike though the forest, we sat for awhile and talked. I was telling him how I worked so hard to get out of this town and this place that has caused me so much distress because of their treatment towards native american  people. But it was funny because as we were sitting there and while I was holding his hand watching the trees blow in the wind, I said to him, “As much as I couldn’t stand this town, I do love the trees and the wind here.” Every time I find a minute or two of peace in my hometown I savor it, I remember it because it is very rare, it makes me remember my bitterness didn’t eat me alive. With this simple quote, once you leave a place you’ve been wanting to escape your whole life you do come to an understanding with it or at least a few minutes of piece with the inner turmoil of wanting to leave or escape. I always thought I knew my hometown and cultural and having that feeling of wanting to escape and once I did I always find my land and culture calling me back. These days when I hear it, I have started listening and I have starting coming back with less anger and confusion in my heart. I had to travel to see a different perspective of who I am and where I come from.

“She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level” ( 73).