What I’m posting for tonight– having not touched it in over two years– is an essay I wrote for a collection that I don’t think is going to happen. I was going to do a final revision of it before the collection sort of fell to the wayside, but I chose not to. Interestingly enough, I wrote this draft during the worst part of my first job assignment, after I’d received a piece of particularly condescending feedback from a mentor at the end of a 10 hour day of Saturday voluntary extra teaching. I think that general emotional feeling peppers the draft.
I think I’m going to re-use the opening, because I really like it (and if you don’t, eh– don’t tell me. Let me have a moment with it), but I doubt the rest of it will ever go anywhere else. It started life as the final project for the first class of my PhD, turned in to a professor who was a last-minute substitution for one of the people I had chosen to be on my dissertation committee, a person who told me that digital rhetoric wasn’t a thing and that rhetoricians don’t study games. So… it comes from a place of identity confusion.
I can’t decide if it’s any good, but I put enough of myself into it that I’d like for at least a small audience to read it. And if that collection ever resurfaces, I’ll just withdraw it (or delete this post and let them use it). I’m thinking that with the lack of communication for two years the collection is dead in the water.
I hope you enjoy tonight’s story.
—
Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
-Charles Dickens
Nobody’s Home: A Rhetorical Collage
By Phillip Michael Alexander
–@–
I was born, gasping and blue, into the same beautiful world as you.
For 36 years I have lingered there, a thread in the web that weaves the story that surrounds us all. When asked “where are you from, little blue one?” I can answer only with what I have told you already. I was born into the same beautiful world as you. My mother made me out of dust and rain. Her mother carried fire in thick plumes of smoke across the water on her back. Her mother is that same beautiful world that so many years ago you and I burst into, gasping, blue, screaming for a human connection.
And so I say “welcome home.”
–@–
My name is Phillip Michael Alexander. I tell you that because it’s important, in a story, to know your protagonist and all your key players. But back before that was my name, I was born into a tiny one bedroom apartment in a bad neighborhood in a small town called Richmond, in the state of Indiana, a city known almost exclusively for housing an RV dealership owned by a man named Raper. We left that apartment for a small house in the projects when I was about four-months-old. My mother and I were kicked out of that house by my father when I was three. This set off a string of years wherein we lived in places like an unfinished basement under my “grandmother’s” house, in an apartment with no heat missing a window with a strange Polish national who needed roomies, in a trailer that had more rats in it than floor space, and then finally in a drab but by comparison luxurious farmhouse when my mother re-married. I was eight when we moved into that house.
We lived in the farm house for five years, then the poison pill of a balloon payment in my parent’s mortgage caused us to lose it. We went back to living in the unfinished basement while I finished my high school education. We’d find a new house during the time I was an undergraduate, but two years into that experience my step-father would leave the picture, and since he left as if he’d just had a fire sale, my mother and I were evicted. We moved then to a dilapidated shack in a little hide-a-town called Milton, IN, the first place I’d ever pay my own rent. And from there I’d move even more frequently as we found better deals or as I changed universities or now jobs, hopping here there and everywhere, usually not carrying much more by way of belongings than could be packed into the back of a car. Even now, living in a lovely three bedroom, I have scarcely any furniture or belongings.
That is the life I’ve known. I do not share such stories hoping that anyone will show me pity or somehow respect my street cred, as I know so many have had it far, far worse. There has always, no matter how shabby, been a roof above my head, and there has always been food to eat, and there have always been stories to tell. But when asked about “home,” I have to react in a way that others might find strange. I recall a discussion, when I was at that moment that we all hit somewhere along in our education, and I wasn’t quite sure I’d finish. Someone said to me “you can always go back home.”
I locked eyes with that person, and I said “this is home.”
–@–
In “Rhetorics of Survivance,” Malea Powell starts:
This is a story.
In Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko offers some advice about stories: “They aren’t just entertainment. / Don’t be fooled. / They are all we have, you see, / all we have to fight off illness and death”; stories are carried in the body, in the belly where they live and grow (2). Stories are “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response”; they have the power to make, re-make, un-make the world (Vizenor, Fugitive 15).
I have long respected that Malea opens her work with the note that it is, indeed, a story. When I tell people I’m half-Cherokee, they often ask what I am sure to them is a hilarious question (yes, fellow Paleface, I will laugh at your joke!): “which half?” To explain the fracture caused by being mixed-blood and raised in a world that even now barely understands what that means would be a dramatic digression from my point, which is to say what I am trying to address here is the Cherokee half of me, which we’ll say for now is the left side of my brain, which explains much if you’ve been paying attention.
If challenged, I would claim that my home is a story, just as Malea’s work is a story, just as everything around us, drenched in meaning and dripping with signification, is an element in a story. The sad truth of it is that if there was a home for my people—my Cherokee half and my mother’s unknown-but-based-on-broken-memories-and-genetic-indicators likewise Native American half—it has long been taken and revised. And if I had to claim a home from the places were I grew up we’d need darts and a really large board, and the odds that there’d be anything of meaning where the point tore flesh are ever-so-slight.
No, I can’t take you to my home. I can’t show you my home. But I can tell you my home. You’re already here.
–@–
My mother used to tell me this story.
When I start an anecdote like that, people tend to expect to hear something about wolves or spiders or nature or great warriors with tomahawks—seriously, someone said to me “will there be a tomahawk in this story?”—but not what is coming. You see my mother is a storyteller, but she’s also a savvy rhetor. She knew her audience. And a three-year-old Phill Alexander, even if he was starting to ask pressing questions, didn’t want to hear about spiders that carried fire on their back.
The story, which had numerous small revisions and permutations over time, went a little something like this. There was this fellow, his name was Chrono the Time Stealer, who was leaping back and forth through time, changing reality and messing up people’s lives. I realized, months ago, that JJ Abrams stole my mother’s story for the FOX series Fringe, but I doubt we can get residuals. Because Chrono was such a problem, the Super Friends (audience awareness!) came to stop him, but using his dastardly powers he’d move them several days into the future and yank them back to the present, so they were now tired and weak from hunger. That’s when our hero burst onto the scene, and lil’ Phill would quickly cook up a batch of his patented hot dogs—it would be much later when I’d learn to cook food that wasn’t meat in tubes—to feed the Super Friends and save the day.
As far as stories go, it’s not my mother’s best. Were we to sit around the campfire, it’s not the one I’d pick to represent her to you. Even if, years later, a Sci-Fi show did basically steal its premise. But that story is maybe the most valuable piece of my childhood. Wherever we were, whatever was happening, if we had to live for a week in someone’s sun porch while looking for a new home, or if we had to live in the car, that story would surround me in comfort and warmth. It’s the greatest home I’ve ever known.
–@–
Several years ago, on a typical day while wandering aimlessly about my apartment trying to fight off writer’s fatigue, I came to the shocking realization that I narrate my own life, like some sort of mundane TV re-run. It’s the same old story.
It was a dark and stormy night. I walked into the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator to find I had but a single can of Pepsi. I walked to the computer, almost tripping on the web of cords and cables. I sat. I checked my email. I read. Everything was still.
I came by this honestly. My mother sings her way around the house, or tells the dog what she’s doing. Being the next generation, I had to be too cool to be sing-songy, and since the dog I busy taking testimonial from Mom, I just talk to my other half. I’m pretty sure it’d be whatever part of me that is white that sits and listens to my narration. White people love a good narrator. I mean have you seen How I Met Your Mother? There’s no reason for Bob Saget to be the later-in-life adult voice of an adult actor, but we still admire the framing of his life as a story being told by a voice that, if I understand the film trick, either is us, or is sitting next to us annoying his kids. It is profoundly American to have a little Saget narration in your life.
When I sit to write, I daydream about the lives I see outside my window. The squirrels and the birds, the cars thundering down Grand River. At that time I lived in a modest but quite charming apartment just off Grand River Avenue in Okemos, MI. My patio there was home to a rather rotund, often quite imposing black squirrel.
I recall the day when I first discovered him, a breed apart from the normal, familiar cinnamon squirrels, there on my patio nibbling thoughtfully on an acorn. I couldn’t help but find him majestic. He looked up at me, his head cocked slightly to the left. Our eyes locked for a moment, a showdown between intense black and earthy green. He was on my back porch, but I was in his world.
–@–
In “Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau wrote:
… New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts.
Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its
previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of
paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a
universe that is constantly exploding… (p. 157)
Here, de Certeau builds a concept of “city” which is based on a contemporaneous sense of use and practice. A few pages later he elaborates the three things that “construct” this city:
The ‘city’ …is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation. First, the production of its own space … rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it; Second, the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions… Third and finally, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it… all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects. (p. 159)
So within de Certeau’s system, a “city” is based on the production of its own space, as it is self-defined, the production of a synchronic system (having a history and a contemporary moment—existence in time/space), and it needs to have a “thingness.”
Home, likewise, depends on a three-fold operation, the first being the production of a home space. Being a rather large man, finding spaces in which I fit comfortably has, even since my younger days, been a bit of a challenge. Beds are too short. Chairs are too small. Airplane seats, I mean what’s the deal with airplane seats? But once said space is developed, the home begins. What is called for next is time/space, a period of “being” for which home is home. And lastly, of course, home has to have a bit of thingness.
In that way, I have been at home in the backs of vehicles, in that unfinished basement where I grew up without being able to stand up straight, in hotel rooms before conference presentations, in offices before teaching, here, there, and everywhere. If I can weave my story, I can, at least for a moment, be at home, though home has to stay in such a state that if I have to run with it, it won’t burden me too overmuch. Practical and practiced, brought into being through its use.
I once told an irate high school teacher she couldn’t send me home because I was already there.
–@–
While reading an older, radically different draft of this essay, my friend Michael pointed out to me that the black squirrel isn’t REALLY black. He’s gray. Michael checked into this once, consulting the Michigan Department of Wildlife. Michael, you see, is nearly as much of a nerd as I am, asks probably just as many questions, and always has better answers. I both love and secretly envy that.
I wanted to see the exact language, though I knew Michael was right. You don’t just make something like that up. And so:
Black squirrels are thought to be a color phase of the gray squirrel and are not considered a separate species. Both black and gray squirrels can be born in one litter, but the black strain is the dominant one when they interbreed. As with gray squirrels, black squirrels do not hibernate even during the harshest winters. The black squirrel’s coat is unusually thick and glossy which helps in repelling water and the dark color of their fur helps in absorbing the sunlight, keeping them warm throughout the winter.
He looks black.
I wonder if he’d be offended if I told him he was gray, or if he’d be proud. You just never hear much about gray pride.
–@–
My mother, her whole life a craftsperson and at one point a master seamstress, took up a new art several years ago, when we were evicted after her second divorce, something to make our gloomy little shack feel more like we actually existed there. She restores Norwegian troll dolls, which she then either sells on eBay to support her hobby or adds to her collection. Some might find it off that a fifty-something collects the same toys she collected as a child, but one glance at the action figures that litter my computer desk—okay, my computer coffee table, since I don’t actually have a desk in my new place— serves as a reminder about glass houses and black kettles and other clichés that my instructors have told me not to invoke in text no matter how appropriate they might be.
It’s odd, over the years, how Mom’s developed these sort of living-leather fingertips. I can vividly remember the first time she made a mistake with the Xacto knife and the consequent hour of clean- up, the general fright, the overwhelming fear that comes from that much blood being spilled on a coffee table –the same one that is now my “desk,”—and the lengthy discussion about Tetnus shots and how clean a hobby knife actually is. You could apparently eat off one, but I really don’t recommend that. There’s probably still a white line scarring the middle of Mom’s thumb pad. It’s the thumb she broke as a child, the one that pops out of socket and can lay across her palm as if it was meant to disappear when she closed her hand, the one that has freaked me out since I was a little kid.
She has no fingerprints. It’s strange.
She names the dolls she creates, giving them short backstories so that when she sells them, she can create a little certificate of authenticity with the name and a poem—the story they take to their new owner, their new life. Their stories are as varied as their looks, identities drawn from a life of observation and of entertaining, challenging, and probably sometimes begrudgingly “handling” life with a child who is as stubborn as the day is long and as curious as the sun is bright.
I wanted to both support her and be a part of her hobby, so I started collecting troll horses. I name the horses, and mine get voices and attitudes to go with their new names, so they can sit around and tell stories or do little skits for my amusement. Sometimes when mom is working I’ll converse—as one of the horses, of course— with whatever she’s restoring at the time, her printless fingers gliding across the surface of a face, through woolen hair, over glass eyes.
I am never more comfortable, even as an adult, than I am watching my mother work. I could sit for hours, falling asleep on the couch, regardless of the circumstances of my life at the time. Or the location of the couch. Or the nature of the work. Just watching her hands dart here and there, watching as something was formed from nothing, or new from old. It is beautiful in a way that even my words are weak to describe.
–@–
Mixed blood scholar Resa Crane Bizarro, who is both a hero of mine and is someone who once responded to a Facebook post I made about fashion underwear, resulting in the reddest face I have ever had, wrote:
For my family and, thus, for me, becoming “civilized” Indians resulted in a loss of explicit, public connection to our traditional ways and a loss of identity and rhetorical power as Indians; the federal government saw relinquishing cultural practices and traditional ways as a means of civilizing the “savages,” making them acceptable, productive members of the dominant society (i.e., making them “white”) (Bizarro, p. 66).
Bizarro’s reflections on the seeming erasure—or lack of permission to be— of mixed bloods strikes the core of my unpredictable early life. The things I didn’t understand were the direct result of this same situation. My mother tried to walk both paths: she taught me traditions and beliefs from “our” people while making sure that I was “white” enough that I could survive an all-white school. I passed. For a long, long time. I still do in many circumstances, as people quickly associate the guy who studies all the technology, is knee deep in video games, and who considers The Matrix a canonical text to be deeply “white.”
–@–
This is the scene where you’re on-screen Ted and I get to be Bob Saget.
One cold November day when you were seven or eight, your elementary had to close for a day because the water main under the building burst. At the time your mother and you were living with your grandmother—who it turns out isn’t your grandmother but is actually a rather cruel woman who only let you live in the basement because her husband, your not-grandfather, loved your mom, presumably because she was the child of someone he was in the war with—so Mom thought it best to spend the day somewhere other than Richmond, someplace more welcoming than, you know, “home.”
There was this toy store in Dayton, Ohio, about a half an hour away, called Children’s Palace. The “palace” element was limited to a few concrete turrets stuck to what was otherwise a warehouse, but the place was packed with toys, usually clearance and discount. It was next to a mall with a huge food court—a mall that has since been so ravaged by gang violence that it has closed, and a mall where one night your friend Rod almost got himself shot because he made fun of a gang member’s afro-pick, leaving you to negotiate an awkward peace based on you being quite large and your friend not knowing any better—so the trip over there usually meant relatively cheap food and fun. It was comforting to be there. It was a home away from home as the cliché reads.
That day at Children’s Palace you found a Daredevil action figure you didn’t even know existed. He was, in a word, awesome. He wasn’t on clearance, but Mom couldn’t say no. You decided he needed to hit the food court with you. I was already writing his story.
On the way back to Richmond, you drove into what locals would later call a blizzard, though it wasn’t really a blizzard, though maybe it was, since the definition of a blizzard is nebulous and seems to have a lot to do with wind. It was bad, however, the worst snow you’d seen in your life. Of course you were just a child, so who knows if it was as bad as it seemed. You had to pull over at one point, you’ll remember, because Mom couldn’t continue on the path. It was what you now know as a “white out,” though Mom didn’t have the words for it.
You’ve been lost.
Your mom said that all she was worried about was getting you home safe.
But you told Daredevil, clutched in your warm, pudgy little paws, that it didn’t matter. You were home.
–@–
Dear Michigan Department of Wildlife,
It’s me, Phill Alexander. I’ve been over here chasing my tail, and I was wondering if you could tell me what color squirrel I am. I’m not a white squirrel, but I’m not a red squirrel, either. I really don’t want to be a pink squirrel, as I’m not the premiere scholar on color theory but I believe that’d probably, generally, mean something other than that a red squirrel got a little white on it.
Here’s what I know about the species: I do not hibernate even during the harshest winters, including that one a couple of years back where I came out of class and there was a six inch thick sheet of ice on my car, so I had to chip my way into it so I could drive. My coat is unusually thick and sort of blubbery which helps in repelling water and other human beings, in some cases. The dark blue color of my hoodie helps in absorbing the sunlight, keeping me warm throughout the winter.
Please get back to me, as I’m trying to figure out how to tell people what I am. I’m hoping that’ll make it easier for me to keep it real.
Stay Pure, Michigan,
-Phill
–@–
Jean Baudrillard wrote:
It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.
The first time I read Baudrillard, I was pretty sure I was incapable of understanding dense theory. I felt like someone just hit me in the head with a sock full of quarters and took my lunch money. But over time, his work has come to be of tremendous value to me as a scholar as I try to sketch out an understanding of how we exist, form communities and do work in virtual spaces.
The second time I read it, I finally understood why The Matrix is so good and the sequels are so lacking; the idea is genius, and obvious, but also spellbinding and as close to magic as an academic is probably going to get. We think we know what is real, but real is gone, daddy, gone. There is no real. All that we know are symbols, signs, and simulations, representations of the real in various shapes and forms. Our world is not our world, in that we do not see the world as it is. We see the simulations, constructions. Of things. Of people. Of home. Of everything. This allows our memory and desire to sift into the gaps, making that which we cannot really see “real.”
I grew up with comic books, with cartoons, with toys I spoke to, with an absent father and an absent family. I’ve had to fill in my share of gaps. My mind, like most human minds, is a pattern recognizing, symbol utilizing system. I’m like a video game console, only with a chubby face and fifty-percent more sarcasm. Carl Rogers claimed that very early in life we learn to complete images in our minds. We know, for example, that if Phill steps behind the door, and all we can see is a Phill head, there’s still a Phill back there. We complete him, even as we are unaware of the “real” Phill’s spatial positioning. We complete things because we know how they should look, we re-cognize things (‘that’s a family!’ ‘that’s a dude!’ ‘that’s text!’) and we complete the parts we cannot see.
That’s what I do. I look at things that we can’t see all of—I believe Bruno Latour and his set call them black boxes, not to be confused with the things in airplanes—and I try to figure out the story that rounds out the random bits of stimuli. I make up lives for my toys, I talk to myself, I think, and I write, and I push boundaries, and ask questions, and I get things wrong, and so I ask sarcastic questions, and I fall down, but I get up, and I pass out from exhaustion, and I rage, and I cry, and I celebrate, and I laugh, and I get up. The story doesn’t end. Not yet. There’s more to be said, to be known, more to be added. More rising, more falling. And it’s as real as it is, but at the same time it will never be “real” for you the way it is for me. You can never see me, and I never you. We are simulations. But you can hear my story, can help me write, can remind me when I forget details, can help me punch up the lacking points. You can listen and tell, you can be in the story. That much can be “real.”
And in the end, that’s what it’s all about. We all want to understand. We want to feel at home, to be at home. We want to share something, to be part of the story, to be thought of and remembered, missed and oft quoted. We want to belong, to have a place slated for us, a role that we are meant to fit in a play that entertains. At the end of a long day, or after trials and tribulations in a new place, we want to go to that place. We want to go home.
Just a week or so ago after a long Monday night class, a student asked me what I was going to do. I told him I had a date with my DVR and a frozen dinner. Such is the Bond-like narrative of my early professional life. He said “have a good drive home.”
He left the room, and for a moment I sat at the teacher’s station in front of an enormous Apple monitor, looking out over the ring of computer stations and the now empty, dimly lit conference table in front of the projector screen. I thought for a second—one of those seconds where for a moment your story is not an anecdote but a full-on feature film, and all those things you’ve accomplished and people you’ve known come cascading through your mind’s eye—about what it meant to be Dr. Phill Alexander, about all the steps that little Philly, the son of the go-nowhere father without even his GED, born into poverty in a little Midwestern town, had to take. I thought of all the classrooms I’d been in, all the courses, all the writing, all the reading, all the sharing. All the stories. All the fights. The webs, the skittering from place to place. I thought about how no matter where I laid my head I always had my ideas, my words, how even in the times when I feel my worst there’s a story to be told. I took a deep breath, threw my head back, and had to smile. I am blessed, as I get to share this story with you.
“Oh, Maximillian,” he just might have heard me almost whisper as he stepped out the door, “we were both born, gasping, into this beautiful, beautiful world. I am home.”
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U Mich, 1994.
Bizarro, Reza Crane. “Shooting our Last Arrow: Developing a Rhetoric of Identity for Unenrolled American Indians,” College English, 67.1, Sept. 2004.
De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the city” in During, S (Ed). The cultural studies reader (3rd ed). New York: Routledge, 1993: pp. 156-163.
Powell, Malea. “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing,” College Composition and Communication,53.3, Feb. 2002.