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[usernamenumber]

So here I am in Maui.

I'm a bit annoyed that the person sitting next to me on the plane, who over the course of our six hour flight took numerous opportunities to suggest things I should do during my stay, decided not to interrupt my reading as we descended into Honolulu. It wasn't until I overheard the person behind us positing that perhaps they dyed the ocean to get it that color that I looked down and caught the last minute or so of Honolulu's coastline. I have never seen a city sprawl so much. And yet, indeed I've also never seen water so beautiful. It really does look dyed. Needless to say I put the book away for (most of) the half-hour hop to Maui

And yet since my arrival, despite the pristine beauty and my hapiness in seeing so much of the land still undeveloped, I can't get past fact that I'm basking in the last remnants of the age of overt colonialism. In college, heiligekuh and I read "From a Native Daughter" by Huanani Kay Trask and vowed never to support the tourist trade in Hawai'i by visiting there. We've both been since. I didn't even bother looking up counter-arguments to Trask's book with which to rationalize the trip. The opportunity arose and I took it. So much for conviction. Of course, since then I've thought a lot about rationalizations: One could simply accept the refusal by Hawai'i's deposed queen to accept back her ill-taken sovereignety when it was offered by the US government as the population's collective nod of assent to have hotels and condos dot their shores. Or one could simply observe that, right or wrong, things are the way they are and that if Trask's dream of Hawai'i for Hawaians were to come true today it would amount to little more than a policy of apartheid against members of the non-native population who have now lived here for generations.

And yet I couldn't escape wondering whether every "Aloha!" and "Mahalo!" was the sign of a proud culture maintaining its identity in the face of integration: in other words, the perfect win-win colonization, or the trivialities of a beaten culture reduced to selling its self to keep up in a new world where their homes and identities are all they have left to sell.

And with that on my mind, I took a walk.

I walked along the beach away from the crowds, barefoot across the rough volcanic rocks, until I reached a place I could pretend was remote, equidistant between two hotel beaches with my back to the walled-off garden area in between. I let the tide come in over my feet, my calves, my knees. I thought about how I wished Elizabeth was here to share the experience with but at the same time felt keenly aware of how much I wanted to be alone. I don't think of myself as a very solitary person and yet at times like these, gripped by the overly-poetic brooding I now associate with exhaustion and depression, I take great solice reveling in my melancholy, surrendering to bullshit freshman philosophy:

"From how far away has this water come? How much else has it touched?"

"What do I mean by 'this water'? Isn't it all water? A calmly seething, inconceivable volume of molecules all arranged just-so?"

"Isn't that also what the Universe is?"

"Isn't it amazing how some of the molecule-soup washes around the 'me' sub-soup, while the rest prevents it from sinking into earthsoup, dissipating or floating away?

Isn't it amazing how these stones that I lift with my toes and release all float/fall within the soup: twisting and turning chaotically within the context of an orderly and inenevitable fall?"

"I wish I was a chemist so I could pretend that I understood this."

Yeah, man. Deep. (have another clove)

And so, here I am sitting in my hotel room, the windows drawn and the sun setting outside. I feel calm, lonely and intensely antisocial all at the same time. No doubt I need some sleep. It's been a hard week, this last. Every day I got home from teaching around five, then worked on one of my four other projects until midnight or two am. But they're all done now and management, recognizing this fact, has said that I'll get to be a "man of leisure" (read: work one full-time job instead of two) for a while. I guess this is a good a place to start as any.

--Brad

Addendum: Outside at dusk. Bare feet. Wind in hair. Birds in trees. It does feel good.

Comments

[ongaku-spirit.livejournal.com]

Hey Brad =)