Love at the Oxford Union

Duz, Naya, and I got decked out last night, took a taxi to Tom Gate, dined at Christ Church, then went to the Oxford Union Society & I secured two guest passes, & after drinks in the private fancy-shmancy bar we went to find a seat for the evening's debate only to find that the listed event had been a spoof to protect Courtney Love from the masses.  She walked in like a rock star & spoke for the next two hours.  I don't feel like posting a critique of her intellect as I mainly walked away feeling sad for an overly rocked life that has left behind a very tired woman without custody for her daughter, still missing the man she quite loves & as she alluded to in the beginning of her speech, I wish she could have attended Oxford instead because the framework of her mind would have flourished as I think she has the archways of genius, though now they've been fairly crushed and just need structural support to keep the whole place from caving in.

I feel the same gap, listening to Courtney Love trying to speak of Ovid and Virgil with prowess though ending up clumsily grasping at it before Classicist students, as I did watching the film Precious.  The resounding question in my mind is why some are so supported while others are so destroyed.  It's uncomfortable to look at anytime, but it is particularly uncomfortable when faced with the crevasse from the upper rotunda of the Oxford Union.  I'd like to make a move, however, that we (and by 'we', perhaps I mean 'I' but really I mean we) abolish any quibbling, tired phrases such as "We are so lucky compared to--" or "I'm so grateful to live where I do/have the opportunities I've had/etc."  These phrases don't do what they seem to--feeling luck/gratitude does not equal presence, it actually in large part equals putting distance so that the crevasse becomes so wide one can no longer even see what it is that the unlucky are doing over there.  It stands in (disguised) as a phrase of thanks for one's own life, but it comes across much more loudly as a justification of why there will be no thorough investigation into those who we are ever so grateful we are not like.  

Will we forever have a class system with elaborate ways of convincing ourselves that it just is as it is, some of us are lucky, and some of us are not?  We've taken quite small steps since the Middle ages, since the Victorian era if the surface differences are seen as such, particularly if we are willing to see the world as not solely composed of that which we allow our gaze to settle on, but see that it is composed of the masses we regularly steer our gaze away from.  

Poverty-mind, according to Pema Chodren, is having a mind that will feel poverty no matter the circumstance & she says that one could be in a quagmire of rape and dire poverty without poverty-mind. There is some truth there, but there is also some averting of the gaze, because I don't know that Pema will ever convince this poverty-mind that my listening to Pema recordings peacefully, well-fed, well-educated, safe will ever help a woman being raped in the Congo, for instance.  But when I get tired of attempting to gaze across the crevasse, I certainly like Pema to pet my mind and tell me I don't have to worry about the others' poverty or poverty-minds, & just should attend to my own.  I think Pema vs. Courtney Love or the Precious protagonist vs. an Oxford student represent the disturbing crevasse that remains gapped and uncrossable, the ancient crevasse that allowed slaves and slaveholders, the very same one.

It seems about time for a major revolution again to me.

The mourning dove outside my window concurs.

Naya just woke up.  Going to start the day.