Chivi, a love song.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-yO1H_RtuDpMFFySDVUbFZ3bDQ/edit?usp=drive_web

Sunset Leaving Barcelona, September 22, 2013

Summer/Fall Culture Project 2013

Introduction to Project

Jenee` Crayne

             After three… now four… now eight weeks, damn now nine of culminating ever shifting ideas, reading many books and online journals (listed below), partaking in conversations and interviews, wondering how I am going to configure this project, doing a great deal of looking, listening, criticizing, enjoying, attempting to find God, desperately trying to zen out, realizing you cannot find god, being completely un-zen, eating, bitching, loving, attempting to write (but each time it all comes out either as drivel or pretentious bullshit), drinking, living on a cruise ship for five weeks: sleeping in a bed just bigger than a cot... with my man, sleeping in a room no bigger than a closet with no natural air or light, attempting to write, coveting other peoples windows for the first time, having lunch with four thousand other people on Mondays, thinking I am finally ready to configure this project, speaking atrociously in three languages, not understanding other people in at least five different languages, knowing how damn fortunate I am although I feel as if I live on a floating hell; attempting to write again, taking lots of photographs, being disgusted with people taking lots of photographs... including myself; living back on back on land, staying with a Spanish family, in apartments, a moldy studio, an old cloister, feeling what culture really is, communicating in four languages, feeling terrible that I have not yet configured this project, again attempting to write, understanding where god is, getting married to myself, being blessed by a German Cardinal, confessing for the first time and finding out that not living up to your potential is not a mortal sin and only gets you three hell Mary's, giving up trying to write, giving up the masterpiece, and ending up in a Tuscan Villa ; I no longer think I am ready to start configuring this project because this whole journey has been the configuration; arriving home and I just hope now that I can finally complete all the many pieces of writing I have attempted along the way.

            One of the reasons this project has been a challenge to configure, but because I did not have a syllabus given to me at the beginning of it. I also have not been given writing prompts each week. I have had to be my own prompter. This has been a challenge. At first, I likened it to the world outside of school where you do not have teachers presenting material to you and guiding you through the thought process of the material, but working life quite often has superiors laying out duties and responsibilities, too. At the newspaper I shoot for, I have an editor who gives me photo assignments. I also have clients, which come to me with specific photos they want me to take. Working life is not all that different from scholastic life, except hopefully you get paid.

            So, here with this project I have been feeling a bit out to sea, literally at times and figuratively, on how to pull all of this fragmented empirical data together into some sort of cohesive whole. Part of the project is the desire of how to tell the story of what it is like to live on a cruise ship and be a part of its culture for six weeks, through the eyes of an individual and collective perspective. What it is like to continuously port in a new amazing European city six days out of the week, but somehow feel cheated because you only have a few hours to experience the culture and beauty of it before you have to race back on the ship, because it will leave without you and your man will get fired. What it is like to live in the in between: I neither work on this ship nor am I vacationing on it. I feel somewhat like a stowaway, except that I do not have to hide...well not all of the time. How to write about all of this, without coming across like an asshole, has been my charge to myself.

            I keep failing at this charge, and my culture is partly to blame. I have felt that I to complete it all on my own, individually. I did not reach out to you for guidance, for some reason I thought I had to do it alone.

            Below was the outline I made for myself on week three. I have been working on completing it ever since. I will not be sending you my work in progress. I plan to have it completed before term two begins. I do apologize for being a victim of my culture and not sending you my work as I stumbled along.

Below is a basic outline (written on week three of nine) of the all the fragmented empirical data put together into some sort of cohesive whole:

A. The overall main goal:

1. Present and back up the idea that a Liberal Arts/Studies education is important in understanding the Collective Culture of Humans. This Cultural understanding helps us understand ourselves more fully and therefore helps us understand each other better, which hopefully will lead to recognize the fact that we are more similar that different.

a. Main Paper: How a Liberal Arts Education helps expand the individual   perspective.

B. Minor Goals: (this list is a work in progress)

1. Culture Defined  (1. Short Reflection Essay).

2. Write about the culture of Cruise Ships from a perspective of an in-betweener (one who is neither working nor vacationing on a ship AKA- me):

a. The Great In-between: Jenee Crayne... Just Cruising (2. Short Reflection Essay).

b. Dante Descents Analogy of Hell: History of the Constant Good Time (Poem).

c. Yellow Cards and Then The Rest: The Great Divider (Poem and photo).

d. Likes, Dislikes, and Why They Keep Coming Back: Interviews with the Crew (Short Reflection Essay).

e. The Crew Bar: The Great Equalizer (Poem and Photo Montage).

f. The Symbol of a Window: Is It Day or Is It Night? (3. Reflection Essay and photo).

g. Finding Freedom in an Electric Car (Poem and Photo & Video Montage).

h. Chivi: a Love Song (Poem and Photo Montage).

4. Reflections on Culture experienced in the European Cities

a. Rome: Past Past, Distant Past, Past, Present, Future (Short Reflection Essay and Photo Montage).

b.  Uno, Duex, Tre: How Language brings us together and keep us apart, a personal perspective (Prose, Poem, Song, or Short Essay... not sure yet).

5. Write about how we are becoming second person observers of our lives because of photography:

a. Culture Snapped: How We Are Becoming Second Person Observers to our own Lives (4.Reflection Essay).

9. Photo Series

                  Shipscapes

                  Cobble Stones

C. Books I brought for the project:

1. Rome: Eyewitness Travel Guides (432 pages) (thanks Peggy)

2. History of God by: Karen Armstrong

3. Philosophy for Beginners by: Richard Osborne

4. About Looking by: John Berger

5. Physical Science in the Middle Ages by: Edward Grant

6. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo  Translated by: Stillman Drake

7. Simply Yoga by: Yolanda Pettinato

8. Time Magazine August 12, 2013 Articles of interest: The Child Free Life and Pope & Change

9. The Inferno by: Dante  Translated by: John Ciardi (Bought in  Firenze)

Other books that I might not get to:

9. The Great Transformation by: Karen Armstrong

10. Interior Castle by: St. Teresa of Avila

11. Dark Night of the Soul  by: St. John of the Cross

D. Online Journals

1. The Creature and The Culture by: WALTER SHEAR

2. From the Bible as Literature to Literature as Theology: A Theological Reading of Genesis as a Humanities Text  by: William Franke

3. Christianity, Identity, and Cultures: A Case Study by: Gerald A. Arbuckle

4. The Existence of God: Can It Be Demonstrated? by: LAWRENCE DEWAN

5.  Faith and Reason In An Age of Humanity 2.0: by: Steve Fuller

6. Chains of Dependency: On the Disenchantment and the Illusion of Being Free at Last (Part 2)  by: PAUL SMEYERS

7. The Value of the Humanities and Arts By: Michael Purdy

8.  Journeys in Poetry, Painting and Philosophy  by: EARL MACKENZIE

9. Developing a Conceptual Framework; Philosophy, Articulation, Alignment, and Coherence by: Jeanine M. Dell'Olio

10. SCIENCE OF RELIGION AND THEOLOGY: AN EXISTENTIAL APPROACH  by: George Karuvelil

11. ‘What is it, then, between us?’ 1 A Response to Two Responses BY :Natasha Synesiou

12. Online info about St. Cecilia

13. How Cruise Ships work by: Josh Briggs

14. Norwegian's Freestyle Monthly September 2013, Issue 55 (This is the Cruise Ship's monthly newsletter that it gives to all crew members).

E. Ports of Call

1. Barcelona (Spain)

a. Montserrat

2. Napoli (Italy)

a. Mt. Vesuvius (NO)

b. Pompeii

c. Hot Springs

3. Roma (Italy)

a. Civitavecchia

4. Livorno  (Italy)

a. Pisa

b. Firenze

c. Lucca (cooking school)

d. Cinque Terra (NO)

5. Marseille   (France)

b. Avignon

c. Mary Mag Church ??(NO)

6. Mallorca   (Spain)

a. Palma

c. Port de Solier

Cruise Ship Culture, Me, and The Void: Part One

                                                  

 In-between,  August 26, 2013

                              Cruise Ship Culture, The Void, and Me: Part One (unfinished)

         Somewhere between the existential duality of working and vacationing, I find myself alive. I exist in the in-between. Though I belong, because I am human, I do not belong because I am neither working on this ship nor vacationing on it. It is kind of the ship to allow this in-between state for certain people to belong un-be-longingly to.

         Present time: 22:00, Monday August 26, 2013; Sea Day. Crew Quarters, Deck 6 of 19. On the other side of this small cabin wall there is a very large stage where people are acting out the human ability of absurdity. Just on the other side of this very small cabin wall is an audience sitting in theater seats watching this reenactment of their absurdity, to their faces. The music penetrates the extremely small cabin wall, although the visuals do not. (I have seen this show before, so the visuals are stored in my memory.) Sound is more transient, transcendental, mobile, and therefore perhaps more powerful that visual representation, but we covet sight more. We are image-making creatures, as Cassie Lipowitz said last term, and we're dependent on those created visuals to comprehend our existence. Sound waves are too abstract for us to digest alone.

         I am sitting on a very small bed, although bigger than a cot that I share with my man Jay, in my underwear listening to the performance. The audience does not have any perception of my existence here eavesdropping on their entertainment. I do not exist to them. It is a strange sensation knowing that I am butted up against a huge theater right now. That if for some reason the illusion that is this cabin wall were to disappear, I would become revealed and I would be more out of place and absurd than the performers running around the stage with blue paint on their faces, drumming glow in the dark liquid into the air, and spitting marshmallows at each other. Is it then that God is just sitting on the other side of an illusory wall too? The drums and base traverse the space with spectacular results, their wave lengths are longer and more spread apart, they are able to travel through the environment, like a camel through the desert. Or maybe not a camel, but they make it to me and pass through this little cabin into the next with ease. I exist just as less to the sound waves as to the audience sitting to my left. I am an unseen audience.

                                                           A Very Small Bed, August 26, 2013
            It is in this void that I reside for the next month.  I am a phantom on this ship; I actually do not belong. I have been welcomed, but it is a gesture of generosity to someone else, not me. This generosity has been extended to Jay and therefore it has become my generosity as well. He is working right now, same as the performers and musicians on the other side of the cabin wall. I am not working, at least not for any entity on the ship except for myself.

         I read, watch, wonder, write, and attempt to culminate some cohesive notion on what to make of my project. But, I am not on vacation like the audience, and I am not working like the performers. I exist between the existential dualism of this ship. I am not even like the mold that resides in the carpets which surround us all: this place has become its permeate home. It has come to belong here due to the nature of the environment. At around 5000 vacationers a week for the better part of the year compounded by three years of sailing, just think about those figures and footsteps for a moment. How many times have these toilets been flushed with their hoarking vacuous sound as it violently sucks and chocks the waste down?

         In some way we all feel the presence of existing in this void when we cease to be distracted from it. It has just been illuminated for me right now. The curtain as been pulled aside and it just sits there allowing me to fully admire its beauty, horrendously beautiful the void is. It is allowing me this view for some reason that I am not fully aware of right now, but it does not halt my stare. The performers are enacting a part of the show where music is not required. It gives me the impression that I am alone again, but I know that not to be true, although I feel the illusion to be true. How do you trust yourself when even right inside of you this experience of existential dualism resides? The base has begun to growl again and we are together again. Me, the performers, the audience, the cabin wall are all bound together in this space of human recollection and complexity.

(To be continued...)

Port of Call Disconnect

            

Leaving Napoli #1, August 22, 2013

Leaving Napoli #2, August 22, 2013

       When you enter a place for such a short period of time, you inevitably feel the separation, the distance, and the disconnect from the culture that resides there. You are in fact a stranger and this embodiment allows you access to the fact that we are in reality strangers to ourselves. When we remain in the safety and comfort of our own culture we are blind to the reality of our personal disconnect. As Walter Shear states in his essay that culture has engulfed us as a species, "so pervasive is its purview at present that much of the time culture succeeds in totally absorbing the human animal" (Shear p. 149). In this absorption we are blinded and do not face our estrangement to ourselves and life honestly. Clifford Geertz sums this thought up well when he says, " We are incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture" (Shear p. 148).

Full Moon Over Livorno #1, August 27, 2013

Full Moon Over Livorno #2, August 27, 2013

Full Moon Over Livorno #3, August 27, 2013

Self Portrait #1 

        I give myself this project and then I find myself not able to handle the responsibility of it. Maybe I do need someone to tell me what to write, what to think about, what to shoot, how to make money, and so forth. This could be why I am such a failure as a boss to myself. I cannot live up to what I want. I am dreading going home because I feel like I will just get stuck in my mundane life cycle and not live up to my potential, but I don't have the stamina for that anyway. I am a sloppy photographer. Like JC said, "When I’m on the boat I can't wait to get off, when I’m off the boat I can't wait to get on."1 I don't want to live like I want to be somewhere else anymore. I've been so crazy the last couple of days. I keep waiting to have something worth while come out of myself, but it does not. I'm pathetic right now. 

(This was written around week five)
(1. JC is a performer on the ship. She has taken 8 contracts so far.)

     Suicide does not need to result in the physical death of the body, suicide can also occur on a daily basis where the body survives but a part of the person dies. This is a reflection from reading the essay from Earl Mackenzie about his experiences, poetry, painting, and philosophical thoughts. He brings up Camu's Myth of Sisyphus. He tells how Camu regarded suicide as the only serious philosophical question, and how Camu chose a liberating revolt against absurdity in lieu of suicide (Mackenzie Journeys p. 52). I am on a quest for a liberating revolt against absurdity. Not just the absurdity of living on a cruise ship, but the absurdity of living a life of humanity. After reading this essay the realization that lowering oneself down into the absurdity blindly is an act of suicide. Small parts of you die of neglect, petty complaints, empty distractions, recycled words of unnecessary automatic emotions, drinks drunk to disarmer the destitute of going around the same route week after week.

     The visit to the Vatican Museum gently slashed through my complacent contempt for my situation at hand and gave me the opportunity to look myself in the eyes, look into my own eyes. Having 10,000 years of pieces of the human experience laid out for you to absorb simultaneously is a majestic undertaking and has the traction and leverage to lift you out of any funk. Nothing can touch you after that experience because you understand who you are, and you cease to need the comfort of idle clamor. (written on 9/18/13)

Self Portrait #2 Firenzia,  October 9, 2013

Vatican Museum, September 18, 2013

Through the cabin wall I hear them

the drums

the bass

the chatman stick.

They are working

I am writing words of frustration

words of envy

words that I am

ashamed of.

I never thought how

my life would go.

So why am I so

disappointed in it?

I want to hold on to the way

I felt at the Vatican Museum.

I felt like everything

when I usually feel like nothing.

I felt as if I was part of it all.

I felt as if I was ancient

in the most wonderful

and beautiful way.

I was the mummy and the rustic pots

unadorned in usefulness.

What an accomplishment

the pot.

How it changed the lives

of us all.

Just a pot

something to hold something else.

Are we that for each other?

Something to hold

and be held?

Those pots did not change

for 4000 years.

They remained of

form and function

in the most basic way.

A cell phone device computer changes

every quarter.

What more can it do for you?

It already makes you want more.

What more do you want?

I ask that to myself.

I'm afraid to go home

and still be the person I was

when I left.

(written 9/18/13)