hermit in paris

The past five weeks in Paris have been surrounded by transport strikes, racial violence and student riots. Another transport strike is scheduled for tomorrow. But supposedly, the students have once again outnumbered the riot police at the university, so I shall brave the barricades for the sake of metafiction. If I can catch a train.

thanksgiving wishes

the day after thanksgiving, i find myself ensconced in my robin-egg blue apartment, reading george lamming's "the pleasures of exile." this was a title i chose from my pile of exam books primarily for its title, hoping to counteract the last conversation i had with my mom. while trying to share with her the sense of emotional alienation i was feeling, thinking of all the family back in new york, around the most inviting table which marie-hélène and micah had set, she said - in what i am hoping was a very tough love sort of wisdom: "well, i have already given you many warnings of exile..." and perhaps it is this line that i am trying to navigate: the line which inevitably draws together the multiplicity of the exilic experience - the hybridity and the isolation.

what does help to serve as a beacon during this navigation is this sort of email which i received from my advisor in bloomington: "...Just to say I'm thinking of you. Trust you didnt' forget Thanksgiving..., or Bloomington..., or a friend that loves you. I'll call soon..."

a buoy for which i am grateful

thanksgiving in paris

This is my second Thanksgiving spent in Paris. And with this cyclic repetition, I feel as if my life here is gaining some sort of primacy as opposed to a feeling of seasonal aberration. Last year, I had a very late Thanksgiving dinner in a 24-hour Parisian bar with my two favorite Buddhist lesbians who were visiting me from Chicago. This year’s celebrations involved drinking cranberry-flavored liquor before an evening of French comedic theater and Chinese food with my Italian lover.
Such moments of joy fill the hollows that are carved out by the suspicion (the fear?) that your life is elsewhere. Because in moments of so many family reunions, the panic that geography – that tricky shapeshifter – has foiled you once again, can be overpowering.
These moments (the ones in which you realize that the people you love are there while you are here) can make you remember, with a thud, that geography is not a metaphor. And while this lack of abstraction can be existentially troubling, the palpability of this displacement can be liberating. I have been dislocated from my own center of the world, and that world has been shifted from my center. But for this possibility of imagining different stories for myself, I am grateful.

the return

September was silent. No blog entries, but many exits – out of Florida, out of the summer, out of the state of suspension in which I was inhabiting. The ambiguity which thrived in that state (do I stay or do I go), has given way to something a little more concrete. At least in the sense that I am here. I am in Paris. I arrived a little over two weeks ago. I am again surrounded by all the cafés, the yellow mailboxes, the bridges. I love living in a city which is stitched together by so many bridges: 37 bridges in a city which covers an area of only 40 square miles, connecting the Right Bank to the Left Bank with all the islands in between. Bridges featured prominently in my own Parisian love story last year, and here's to hoping that this year, again, Paris will help me to stitch together all the various parts of myself into something as beautiful.

moonlight and periwinkles

I spent my evening swimming by the light of the full moon. Floating periwinkle blossoms brushed against my skin. It has been much cooler in Florida these past few days, which balances nicely with the subtle electricity that always simmers the night before a departure: Mom and I are driving four hours south to Miami tomorrow morning to process her immigration papers at the French Consulate. We will try to drown out the influence of any nefarious, French bureaucratic dramas by meeting an old friend at our favorite Miami restaurant, The Rusty Pelican, and swimming at South Beach. We are going so that she can renew her carte d’identité, her French identity card, which has to be done in person. Ever since marrying my American father and up until a naturalization process which she attempted to initiate at the start of the second Gulf war (fearing the anti-French sentiment that the freedom fries were heralding), she has vehemently refused to take American citizenship. This vehemence always confused me growing up since her love and appreciation for America has always been absolute: she loves the fact that strangers smile to each other on the street here as opposed to the French personal indifference; she loves knowing that 24-hour grocery stores here are always open instead of needing a lunar calendar to know the working hours of most French stores; she loves the ideal of American customer service whose goal it is to not, in comparison to French customer service, brutalize the customer. These small details of difference between the two countries are high-lighted in her constant cultural comparative analysis. This process is, of course, taken up in reverse whenever we are in France. “In America…” she will begin, whenever some vaguely sociological topic might come up, or not, in the conversation. I am sure that the constancy of the comparisons unconsciously led me, with the subtlety of a foghorn, to study comparative literature. There always had to be something that the current experience was compared against; a mirroring, a doubling, of any situation was always necessary in order to understand and appreciate.

And so in Miami tomorrow, at the French Consulate, she will continue shuttling between a documentary allegiance to a country she left 50 years ago and a lived love for a country that she will not claim for her own. She floats between these two worlds while I try to find direction among the periwinkles.

I choose Paris...

The end of August is coming soon. Tomorrow, school starts again in Bloomington. For everyone there, “next year” – meaning this 2007-2008 academic year – has already begun. This parallel life, this ghost life of mine, is continuing on without me. Because of this, my choice – although always heavily swaddled in abeyance and ambivalence (to go back for another year to teach in Paris, to not go back to Bloomington just quite yet) – has gained definitive weight. Now, I cannot go back to Bloomington – my teaching position has already been filled by someone else. That train has left the station. And I am not on it.

But when I am called upon to rationalize this decision, that definitive weight of my decision flounders into styrofoam. Why am I leaving again? And when that question is asked by someone for whom love is measured and manifested by presence – by my mother, whom I love in an overpowering way, who only wants me to stay – how do I verbalize to her this impulse to go, to keep going, to move beyond the known? How do I say that I want to hurl myself at different boundaries, to move past geography into something else – although that "else," I can hardly define?

It is in this darker, more desperate moment, when I am ready to convert any sign to symbol, that I read about the oak and hickory forests. These forests are slowly creeping northward over the east coast from their position 15,000 years ago after the last ice age. Granted, these forests are moving at glacial speed, which is really the only kind of speed I can understand. They move only a few inches per year over successive generations of trees. They are responding to climate change and water levels. But still, they are moving.

When I think of a sturdy, traveling oak tree – such a beautiful image allows me to imagine that distance is not betrayal, departure is not death, and even forests migrate.

Earl

In Sitka, because they are fond of them,
People have named the seals. Every seal
is named Earl because they are killed one
after another by the orca, the killer
whale; seal bodies tossed left and right
into the air. "At least he didn't get
Earl," someone says. And sure enough,
after a time, that same friendly,
bewhiskered face bobs to the surface.
It's Earl again. Well, how else are you
to live except by denial, by some
palatable fiction, some little song to
sing while the inevitable, the black and
white blindsiding fact, comes hurtling
toward you out of the deep?

by Louis Jenkins

think of the long trip home

"I have woven a parachute out of everything broken." - William Stafford

From now on, I am going to take all my broken bits and turn myself into a mosaic. I am going to use my doubled vision not for dizziness, but for depth. A many-dimensioned, beautiful mosaic.

“What is the point of nostalgia?”

This past week while I was in Bloomington, I felt like an emotional archaeologist as I was going through all the old photo albums, books, journals and letters which I have stored at Akiko’s apartment while I am “away in France.”

In my personal history, Akiko’s apartment is on a ley line. Archaeologically (in the United Kingdom), ley lines are lines which link ancient landmarks and places of worship, believed to follow the course of former routes and popularly associated with mystical phenomena. As my life splits off to multiple destinations, this apartment is a vital hub among my routes, bringing together my various selves.

Under the pretense of “arranging things to go into storage,” I tried to sift through layers of “stuff,” accumulations of my past, wondering what would slip into the emotional junkyard and what would safely land in this present life. But really, Akiko and I mainly reminisced over plum wine, excavating old stories and memories of our past years together. While I have the easy tendency to slide into a weepy glorification of the past, Akiko can efficiently reign it all in with the challenging, yet compassionate, question: “What is the point of nostalgia?”

And what is the point of nostalgia, really? Of course, the funnest, and perhaps easiest, way for me to answer these thornier questions is always etymologically. The word nostalgia can be traced through multiple linguistic traditions: it comes from the Greek nostos, meaning the return home; it also comes from the Old English genesan, which means to survive; as well as from the Sanskrit nasate, which means he approaches. While we generally understand it today as the state of being homesick, it seems that these various histories could lend a thickening and deeper resonance to the word. While our general definition usually means a longing for home, its strange juxtaposition of the words home and sick always made me wonder if it could also mean just sick of being home.

All of which perhaps gets me no closer to answering Akiko’s question. But writing this at the closing of this day – August 13 – her question carries a greater weight than it did during last week’s wine-soaked evenings. Tonight is the 3rd anniversary of Micah’s kidnapping in Iraq. It is when I think of Micah in the enclosure in the marshes of Iraq, then I can understand the point of nostalgia. With the passing of August 13th into August 14th, he lived the Sanskrit definition he approaches, because he was one day closer to the Greek definition of returning home. Most courageously, he survives.

Welcome home.

returns and rejoicings

My week in Bloomington is coming to a close. I have come for two weddings, a tête-à-tête with my director of graduate studies, and a more general rooting around my old network to find clues for what comes next.

I am at the point in my PhD that I have to decide what shall effectively provide the scaffolding for my foreseeable future: my qualifying exams. I have to come up with a list of 300-plus books which will form the basis for two days of written and oral exams. Confronted with the shaming gaps in my reading and subsequent blinding ignorance, it makes for an existentially uncomfortable process. So uncomfortable, in fact, that it births the realization that graduate school existence resembles a prolonged adolescence or reads like a bad translation of the Gallic wars. We become so acquainted with the well-worn ruse of self-sabotage due to living in such splendid isolation and interminable uncertainty that we actually imagine the rest of the world lives like this too. It is always a strange awakening to realize that other people do find a well-adjusted joy in quantifiable measures of success like a year-round paycheck, stable relationships and regular schedules. But graduate students seem to enjoy cultivating emotional extremism so much more, although it only manages to garner situational intimacy and small shipwrecks…

All frothy statements which get me no closer to the construction of my exams lists (which doubles as the composition of my life). But I do know that my return to Bloomington, my retour au sources, has brought me one step closer, my network of rhizomes providing the necessary emotional nutrition.

ceremonies of departure

On the eve of yet another departure, I find myself wondering about the ceremonies of departure. In moments of leave-taking, what are the appropriate gestures? What is the etiquette of farewell? Even with Wikipedia's help, I am unable to come up with anything other than the lyrics to a Moody Blues song. And so I wonder: why aren't there any ritualized gestures to say good-bye?

In my family, taking someone to the airport is never a casual affair. We would never think of a drive-by drop-off at the curb in which hasty embraces are foreshortened by impatient taxis carrying desperately late travelers or minivans full of Senegalese soccer players. In the pre-9/11 days, our passenger would always be accompanied to the gate by the entire family and attended to till they disappeared into the plane. Even after, we could still be seen hopping up and down hysterically, waving and screaming: "WE LOVE YOU! SEE YOU SOON! CALL AS SOON AS YOU GET IN! WE MISS YOU ALREADY!" just in case we could still be heard or our pilgrim might want to run out for an extra hug (which would not-that-rarely happen).

But I have had enough fights with enough boyfriends to know that this is not traditional. Even so, my heart never fails to sink when the moment of departure is treated lightly. For me, at the moment of the backward glance, I need to see someone standing there, seeing me off - I need a physicality to ground me emotionally as the plane lifts off. I need that moment to be witnessed - that through this departure, I am being splintered, fragmented and reformed.

Rituals, just like superstitions, are meant to comfort us when confronted with the unknown. A departure is the promise of an exponentialization, a parallel world beginning as your old world continues without you. Just because it happens so frequently in our increasingly-globalized world does not mean that a departure is no less deserving a sacrament than a baptism or marriage or funeral. In all of those other occasions, we are aware of and sensitive to the transitional nature of our lives, the reality that our positions and self-definitions can shift with acrobatic ease.

So far, the most comforting thing that I have learned about departures is the Bengali phrase for good-bye, which is "I am coming."

"the inherent insincerity of organized rites of passage"*

I have been trying to come up with a seamless way to re-enter the blogosphere, seeing as my last actual entry was posted many months ago. Should I comment on the absence? Should I let the silence speak for itself and continue posting as if there was no significance to the silence? Was there significance to the silence? Is silence significant in writing? And what, exactly, would that sound like? On and on these questions continued, letting me spiral further from the relevance of writing into an ambiguous place of non-writing.

Because of course, a return from silence carries with it a tacit expectation that some sort of wonderful, transformative moment was had - an emergence from the subterranean would seem motivated by a special alchemy between darkness and vision, a spark shooting you upward towards the conversation...

But I don't know if between the months of May and now I can say that I have been transformed. I do know that the things that have happened have touched me: Tante Monique died on May 9, I traveled to Ireland and crossed the Atlantic, I witnessed a regime change in my adopted country, I continued to fall in love, I taught students who made me realize how much I love doing what I do. But what qualifies, really, as that epiphany, that spark, which allows everything to be illuminated? If anything, shouldn't death and love and Paris be on top of the list? But, of course, it is not simply the experience which is transformative, but it is the manipulation of that experience which contributes to the texturing of a soul, which pushes experience past pure event into metamorphosis...

I am in Florida now. Since teaching is now done for this academic year, I left Paris a few days ago to spend some time in Winter Park to "study for my PhD exams," which is the simplest, most legitimate-sounding reason I can offer inquisitive neighbors (and myself). I am hoping that the sunshine will coax my moments of experience into bursts of illumination, further evidence that all truth is nomadic.

*stolen from my favorite line of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated"

the road to ithaca

when you will take the journey back to ithaca
hope that the journey will last
that it will be full of adventures and full of experiences.
the laestrygonians and the cyclops,
the furies of poseidon - do not fear them.
you will not find them on your way
if your thoughts remain serene, if only pure emotions brush against your soul and your body.

the laestrygonians and the cyclops,
the violence of poseidon, you will not see them
if you hide them within yourself or unless your soul makes them appear before you.

hope that the journey will last.
that many will be the summer mornings where, with such fervor and such delight,
you will come upon unknown ports!
stop at phoenician stalls
to aquire beautiful things:
mother-of-pearl, coral, amber and ebony
and all sorts of intoxicating perfumes.
visit also the many cities of egypt
in order to gain knowledge, to initiate yourself at the sides of the sages.
and especially, do not forget ithaca.
to arrive there is your only goal.
but do not hurry your journey,
prolong it as long as possible
and reach the island only once you are old,
rich in all your experiences from your travels.
you will no longer need ithaca to fulfill you.
it was ithaca that allowed you this beautiful voyage.

without it, you would never have left.
it has nothing left to give you.
and as poor as it seems to you now, it has not
deceived you.
wise and full of your new knowledge
you will have understood what the ithacans signifiy.

- by constantin cavafy

emotional cartography

By leaving the States, by coming to France, my idea was to try to forge a new relationship with departure. Departures have traditionally devastated, while not always reconfiguring, my sense of self. Departure has therefore become a trope with which I try to narrate my own psychological ruptures. While this idea was excellently simple in theory, it is actually more messily destabilizing than I had planned. Since my arrival in Paris, I have been grasping for the appropriate words, prepositions, to be my metaphorical placeholders in this new place. How can I locate myself in the relentless drift and general idleness which is the flip side of idealizing the exilic condition? But today, instead, on a hot afternoon of teaching sun-lusty, French students, I long for clean, noun-verb-adjective type of declarative statements.

In the NYC subway, Jeremy Rotsztain installed the most amazing machine that I have ever imagined: a machine to map the mood of a public space. As he writes on his website: “We observed the movement of people through the Canal Street subway station in New York City, a "non-place" where ten subway lines (N, R, W, Q, 4, 5, 6, J, M, Z) intersect, and trains come and go in twenty different directions. This station welcomes people from all areas of NYC: people come and go from Queens, Brooklyn, uptown and downtown. They enter and exit the station from Chinatown…Our installation is constructed throughout the space: it has kiosks on all of the twenty platforms and in the long empty hallway that goes between two of the trains. At each of the kiosks, commuters will be able to leave their mark on the station by pressing one of four buttons indicating their mood (in a rush, in love, happy, lost).” I am wishing that today I could find such an installation in the Paris subway - a machine that could provide me with my precise emotional cartography: I am hot, I am lost, I am in love...

But I know with a fatalism which I am quickly internalizing from the French, that this Parisian subway - a system which operates within the French cultural logic of interminable uncertainty and excessive laxity - will never welcome an Emotional Cartography machine. The paperwork for its installation will be burned in the bonfires of the latest riots. Instead, I am going to have to continue hunting for that perfect preposition which allows for a constant shuttling between, and encapsulating of, the feelings of belonging inside, outside and nowhere.

emotional rhizomes

Another beloved vacation cycle for the French is about to begin. There are two weeks off coming up for les vacances de printemps or les vacances de Paques (known either as spring vacation or Easter holiday, depending how naïve you are about the French government’s insistent avowals “We are a secular state, nom de Dieu!”). As people are preparing to depart for their various subsidized destinations, I wonder about the emotional organization of my next two weeks away from the rigors of this teaching job. For the first time ever (since recent and not-so-recent configurations), my family arrangement will be geographically complete as we all descend upon Annonay. We are meeting to spend time with Tante Monique. Today, my mom arrives from Florida. Cousins will be arriving from Lyon and Paris. My sister arrives tomorrow from Boston. Micah comes on Friday from New York. (I will be meeting him at Charles de Gaulle, the Paris airport – since my sister said that he was going to put a sign around his neck which said “GARE DE LYON,” unsure of how to navigate the tricky steps involved in finding one’s way to Annonay – and we will make our way down together). The pretext for the occasion of this visit are these holidays – Easter and the time away from work for which the Catholic Church has paid. But the only member of our spiritually-eclectic troupe who will be sincerely attending Easter Sunday mass will be my mom, although we will accompany her out of our sense of tradition and solidarity. (“I don’t have to go, do I?” Micah asks with his unique blend of etiquette and horror)…

As I shop around Paris for my new Easter Sunday dress, I wonder about my own departure from the Church. While I know with instinctual certainty that this Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin which I have been practicing for the past seven years is the best thing for my life, I have a nostalgic ache for what the Catholic Church does best – ritual and ceremony: they have days of observation and days of obligation, the saint-a-day celebrations, the meditative stillness of Lent’s 40 days, the 4-weeks of Advent’s quiet anticipation. Time is measured and qualified, understood and experienced, through the parsing of this liturgical calendar. There is some easy comfort, in which I delight(ed), in knowing that each moment is imbued with historical and religious meaning, that each day is graced with significance.

This is, of course, very much in contrast to Buddhism’s more interiorized approach.

The etymology of religion is religos, Latin which means “to tie together again, to bind and hold together.”

In the absence of the Church’s ceremony (as a lapsed Catholic and assiduous Buddhist), what is the timeline which holds me together? Having strayed from the traditional observations of time and worship which I had grown accustomed to with my thirteen years of Catholic school, how do I find meaning in my accumulation of days and celebrate the love that fills them? What can I use as my (etymological) religion? What is the thing that binds me, that holds me together, that makes me whole?

I know, with fierce immediacy and burning certainty, that the things which tie me to myself and hold me together are my heart centers. These heart centers that hold me together are my family, those pulse points that fill my own. They are not only my nuclear family, but also my extended and urban family – these friends who have become part of my chosen tribe, those whose hearts fell into an easy and karmic rhythm with my own and we have never looked back. But through life and all the adventures it proposes, these heart centers have been geographically flung in all directions: they are throbbing in New York and San Francisco, Winter Park and Annonay, Bloomington and Saitama, Paris and London, Beirut and Madison…

Love is usually defined and understood through geography – you stay near those that you love. Geography is the parameter, the barometer, the gauge through which love is measured. Physical proximity is the easiest, or at least the most common, proof of love.

So, how to prove love, then, when geography is not the first, or easiest, answer? What happens when your emotional geographies are fragmented, scattered like butterflies – éparpiller –throughout the world?

It usually feels like the most satisfying solution is just to damn and condemn the difficulties of distance, to scream and cry about the seeming unfairness and inflexibility of the time-space continuum – that sticky continuum that extracts jet-lag and outrageous VISA bills for lengthy, international phone calls and emergency plane tickets from love. But how can love be celebrated, instead, within this fragmentation of distance?

I decide that I will take example on the iris. For me, there is no more evocative or beautiful flower. It was my father’s favorite flower. (This tidbit of information is one of the few facts with which I have managed to fill the ghost of his memory – that and the fact that he loved Japanese food, and all things Japanese, that he loved telling jokes and teasing my mom...). The wild iris – uncultivated – grows independently from its fellow irises at the edges of water, ponds, lakes. But if you try to pick one, you discover that it does not grow from an expected root but from a rhizome, a sort of umbilical chord that runs beneath the surface – covering the distance of dirt and earth – to reappear in another iris sometimes several meters away. So while their grouping appears haphazard, isolated or solitary, there is actually an underground network which binds one iris to another. These wild irises exist in an infinite network of rhizomes, circulating and sharing their food and water supply in these arteries of subterranean support.

In its wild, uncultivated state, the iris is the perfect metaphor for love in exilic communities. With its interconnected roots, it does not live in the traditional bunching of flowers with their mad company of color, but instead are less-visibly connected at the most vital, basic, profound level.

There is a strength and beauty in the distance between them.

In Greek mythology, Iris is the goddess of the rainbow, which she used to travel down to earth with messages from the gods and to transport women's souls to the underworld. This rainbow, her medium of travel, was the link between the heavens and the earth, connecting humanity with the gods. She is often depicted with wings on her shoulders. It was in celebration of her role of linking these different worlds that the Greeks would plant purple irises on the graves of women.
The irises on these graves would flower on the liminal boundary between life and death. Linking these two most distant worlds, the iris would continue in its work of transforming distance into a thing of beauty.

Within its iridescence, I have found the structure of my own religion. As the rhizomes bridge the distance between one wild iris and the next, the spaces between me and my heart centers (thanks to the perspective of distance) do not so much resemble heedless fragmentation as an organic mosaic of love – my emotinoal rhizomes are nourishing me across the distance and holding me together.

Gare de Lyon, Paris

I am going back to Annonay for the second time in three days. I am going to see Tante Monique, she is in the hospital. Tante is French for aunt, she is my mother’s 85-year-old sister. (One of the effects of my mom’s decision to have children at the non-traditional age of 43 is that many of our relatives are older, much older. The question of mortality – with its attendant non-negotiables of sickness, old age and death – has been more present for my sister and I than many of our friends growing up, friends whose mothers had children in their 20s. But this choice of my mother – to have children “later” – is one that I celebrate, one that I am emulating. Before my mom became a mother, she lived on three continents, participated in United Nations peace-keeping operations in the Middle East, learned different languages by living in their countries, bought fabulous clothes hand-made for her by various designers. All these amazing experiences informed her mothering. Her parenting techniques have always been unique and exceptional. Unfortunately, my sister and I perceived them – with our desperate desires of just fitting-in while growing up in America – as insane and inexplicable. But with the modicum of hard-won objectivity we have gained through our mutual therapies and experiences, we realize now that we would not trade our childhoods for anything).

This journey back to Annonay from Paris is a multi-stepped affair; one that is a sequence of metro-train-bus-taxi, ending with a walk across the bridge of the River Deume. Although exhausting, I appreciate the intricacy of this itinerary since it affords me the opportunity to compose myself. This is the aunt who would organize elaborate, month-long summer road trips, zooming us through France every year. Thanks to her indefatigable, truck-driver instincts, we criss-crossed the roads of France – staying in the smallest hotels in the obscurest villages, stopping at oyster museums and strawberry festivals along the way. As we reminisced in her hospital room, she reminds me that during a visit to the cathedral in Bourges when I was 12, I told her I wanted to get married there. I had totally forgotten, both the cathedral and that I had ever said that. But it is thanks to her profound curiosity and energy for always, always learning that I even have a link to France, that I have an understanding of this part of my genetic inheritance.

One of my favorite links with her is linguistic – (she has always done this for us, but she has stepped up the intensity once I told her of my decision to come live in Paris) – she is always cataloging French idioms and expressions. She meticulously types up lists of French expressions with their etymologies, meanings and translations. She always says, rightfully so, that these are the hardest parts of a language to learn – the obscure phrase which operates with a delicate alchemy of pop culture, history and French collective memory. Understanding them, she tells me, will lend me cultural currency and legitimacy. I have to enter fully into the language, she tells me, not to be content to rest at French’s threshold. Thanks to her lists, I can nod empathetically when someone complains about a hair being in the soup or feet in the plate – or laugh appropriately when someone refers to the worm in the cauliflower. Even this past Sunday, when the doctor came by her hospital room, he mentioned the need to see events à l’optique. In answer to my confused face, she said gently “I will add that to your list, don’t worry.”

During my telephone call to her Sunday night – letting her know that I had arrived safely in Paris – she apologizes for being too weak to type up the latest list she is working on. But she tells me that to view events à l’optique is to remember the relevant, to understand what is most important. It is thanks to her that I am slowly learning to live my life this way.

spring equinox

Paris is beginning to spring. Eight more days to make it official, of course, but this morning has that brightness that makes the miracle of tulips and jonquils seem inevitable. There is nothing like watching the seasons turn over each other to make you feel at home in your newly adopted city.

It makes me think of Persephone – that goddess of spring, of returns, of reunions. Persephone, whose kidnapping by Hades (the god of the underworld) caused her mother, Demeter (the goddess of the earth and its harvests), to grieve so desperately that the earth slid into the quiet of winter. Not knowing where her daughter was being held hostage, Demeter journeyed the earth, searching for her everywhere with Hecate (the goddess of the crossroads). The earth waited in its winter. In response to the people’s hunger and cold, Zeus forced Hades to release Persephone. But before handing her over to Hermes (the god of boundaries and the travelers who cross them) who had come to guide her back to earth, Hades tricked her into eating four pomegranate seeds. Hades had stipulated that Persephone would be released only if she had not eaten anything during her ordeal. The four seeds she did eat obligated her to return to the underworld for four months of each year. When Persephone finally did return to earth, spring marked the end of Demeter’s grieving.

Persephone’s story – with its attendant explanations of the cyclical nature of love and grief – sounds a resonance with the potential for transformations with which spring seduces us each year.

visitations and progressions: bloomington, indiana lake lemon

Today, on my last day in Indiana, Akiko and I went Sunday driving. We went to Lake Lemon, where we had gone several summers before. The lake was still frozen over in the center, although its icy edges were disappearing because of the progression towards spring. Akiko said: “Nature is moving forward to spring – that means that this is the time that we must also move forward to the next stage of our life.” We have not yet figured out what that next stage is going to be, but it was breakthrough enough to know that we have to have movement forward.

Grief can lull us into a stasis, a frozen silence, when confronted with the enormity of loss. It is an almost-impossible effort to enunciate its effects – to verbalize how specifically it fills the void of what was sundered. In his essay “The Poet,” Ralph W. Emerson writes that the quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze. To metamorphize grief into elegy, to revolutionize loss into value, is to know how to navigate tenderly, with respectful care, these icy floats upon which we need to sit for a while before we can even think of being lured back to the shore – where, as Elizabeth Bishop writes – “love will unexpectedly appear over & over again.”

Detroit International Airport

It is snowing tonight in Detroit, where I fly in for my connecting flight to Indianapolis. I left Paris this morning in order to come to Indiana to be with Akiko. She has recently returned to Indiana from Japan, where her mother just passed away. I am arriving as a pilgrim of grief, knowing that the gesture of my movement here might be the main thing I am accomplishing. I am led more by love than by reason, knowing that I have nothing more concrete than presence to offer.

During the plane’s descent bringing me closer back to home, I recognize the efficient anonymity of the hotel clusters which sprout around all American airports with the speedy tenacity of mold. From the distance the sky affords, these many Marriot Inns and Motor Lodges look about as substantial as Lego villages. With the plane descending into the familiar American landscape, I feel the downward pull of grief.

The journey of grieving and its signposts are familiar. Years ago, I took a Greyhound bus from Winter Park, Florida to Lost Valley, Oregon. Up till this point, the geography of the country had been mostly abstract for me. I saw the states fly by in the square patches of color from the bus window: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California… By focusing on the details of landscape alone, I was trying to still the hollow echoes of my first relationship dissolving, devolving into nothing more mundane than love disappearing. My decision to cover the entire width of the nation by bus was my attempt physicalize the magnitude of the pain I felt. While tinged with a tad of the dramatic and the hysteric, it was the only way that I could enunciate my grief. I found comfort in the name of my Greyhound destination: Lost Valley. It was a writer’s commune in Oregon where I decided to live for a while, staying in a cabin in exchange for cultivation of the organic zucchini patch.

With the death of her mother, another color is added to the spectrum of similarities between Akiko and I. When my father died, I was two years old. I was unable to verbalize my own experience of grief; I did not have the vocabulary to grasp what had happened to him. Since then, in a way, I have been lugging behind me the body of my father, covered in a shrouded silence. While I have no answers for Akiko, I am comforted by her questions. As we retrace all the familiar steps of our shared life in Bloomington, I cling with a certainty that it is the distance I have covered which will address a love so deep that I could not otherwise name.

In the meantime, I am stringing together my epiphanies like so many Christmas lights, pinpoints of illumination against a larger darkness.

spring semester

And so another semester begins here within the French educational system. I surprised mostly myself at the full spectrum of my emotional experience last semester at the University of Paris. It began at the lowest octaves of abject terror and aversion to the unique oxymoron that is the French “organizational system,” rising to arpeggios of joy culminating in my most amazing students giving me roses during our pilgrimages to cafés fueled by Hemingway’s alcoholism at the end of the semester.

Maybe it was the blunt trauma to the head produced by my encounter with the Kafkian bureaucracy that is the university in France. It is a system which is run primarily with unfathomable, and gleefully unexplained, acronyms. The following is just a modest example:



Maybe it was the weight of my anticipatory riot gear. This was the place, it must be remembered, that just the year before had been incapacitated for weeks due to full-scale student riots, costing millions of euros in structural damage. But it sounds so poetic in French: les émeutes... Stories of fleeing teachers were shared in traumatized whispers that were more reminiscent of refugee camps than classrooms.

French academic calendars are always somewhat aleatory due to this phenomenon of the student body. There is the proud tradition of May ’68 to uphold…











Or maybe it was just the strangeness of doing something so personal as teaching in such a new and different place. Whatever it was, the experience of teaching – and therefore being more fully present in Paris – has been transformative. The fly-by-night pedagogical philosophy which the French seem to prefer has liberated me to engage in wildly discursive debates with my literature students, and therefore, also myself.

returns - to the selves

Since coming back to Paris from Rome, I have been thinking about the possibilities of living in the present moment, of trying to learn how to master the fraction of the second that lies before me – which is the only part of the present and the future that I can ever truly know. How to stop running (or hiding) from it and embrace it?

But instead of flinging my arms with abandon around this knowable nanosecond before me, I have always felt a compulsion, instead, to engage in a continual emotional traffic between places – between where I am but instead want to be, between where I am instead of where I feel I should be. I have always felt paralyzed by this ambivalence – feeling the pull of equal strength in more than one direction.

Which leads to an existentially irritating question – what am I trying to do here, right now? Writing here in this blog instead of being in Paris? Why do I continue to tease this ache of nostalgia, a word combining the meanings of ache and return (nostos)? And for what, exactly - for which place - am I aching?

I remember feeling a clang of recognition from which I am still vibrating – when I first read in André Aciman’s False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory: “The true site of nostalgia is therefore not a land, or two lands, but the loop and interminable traffic between these two lands…This eventually becomes the home, the spiritual home, the capital. Displacement as an abstract concept, becomes the tangible home.”




I had bought False Papers at Shakespeare and Company this past October, a few days after I had arrived in Paris. Shakespeare’s is that little bookstore across the Seine, in front of Notre Dame, next to the best café in Paris, Café Panis. This bookstore is a place replete with public and personal mythology. It is the sister bookstore to City Lights in San Francisco. It is the bookstore which Sylvia Beach founded, originally a lending library which Hemingway at first avoided because he did not even have the money to borrow a book. Beach, in her tenderly tactful compassion, gave him not only a free membership but also free food. With her intuitive insight, she was also the person to first publish James Joyce’s Ulysses with her own funds and publishing press (practically bankrupting her) when the rest of the world was hostile in its attempts to silence his so-called obscenity. Although it can be easily and quickly scoffed because of its cheap inclusion in Ethan Hawke’s and Julie Delpy’s movie Before Sunset, and all the American tourists crawling about – speaking loudly while not reading anything. It also has infuriatingly outrageous prices (10 Euros for a USED Dover edition, which in the States costs $1. New. Seriously?), it is still and also the first place that I go whenever I am back in Paris.



During my first nights in Paris last October, I had finally found the gumption to scurry from my dubious and dank hotel near la Bastille. Unfortunately, it had taken me all day to carefully and cautiously coax out this strength to leave the confines of my room. I had begun to regard the seediness of the place and my fellow lodgers as familiar, and therefore safe, and it was now late. I knew I would have to pass the gauntlet of the way-too-friendly, completely unprofessional garde de nuit, who would always ask me to be his playing partner in Grand Theft Auto, or some other gracious American video game. Thankfully, this night, he was passed out next to his glaringly obvious brown bag. Also thankfully, Shakespeare’s is one of the few places in Paris that is open till midnight.


That night, I was like a junkie scanning the shelves frantically, looking for something to narcoticize me, to still the silence of arrival, to wrest me from the panic of my coming to Paris. There is always a certain jolt when catapulted into new time zones. It was, granted, a catapulsion which I had not really prepared for. I had lived a very itinerant lifestyle in Bloomington before leaving for Paris. My only focus has been finishing my Master’s paper on narratives of exile for my Comparative Literature degree. While writing and researching, I had been house-sitting multiple houses for months, subletting my apartment to unfortunately disreputable sorts in order to save on cash. My last few weeks in Bloomington, I had spent trying to store books and valuables with various loved ones and getting rid of so many old clothes and papers and memories so quickly that I felt like a molting snake on a time-lapse Discovery program. Slapping the few socks that I could still find into a ridiculously small bag had been the extent of my practical Parisian preparations.

So, I was looking for something preferably trashy and long-winded. Anita Shreve? Jonathan Franzen’s new memoir? As I was leaving with both, of course, I was stepping over the resident black cat (whom the booksellers pride on not naming) when another book caught my eye. Tripping over the cat, I reached to take a used copy of Aciman’s book from the shelf. It was by the door. In the autobiography section. It had the word memory on the cover. And exile. As I opened the front cover, it had more talismans which soothed me like incantations: Paris, Proust, nostalgia, Emily Dickinson, Italy, loneliness, wandering, Ulysses, departure, New York…


This was the slanted answer, speaking to my sense of displacement of being in Paris, making it concrete. In the first pages, Aciman writes about his return to his birthplace, Alexandria – a city which for him, expulsed as a Jew with his family in 1967 – is a shadow city, a city existing only in the memory and mythology of his family: “So this is Alexandra, I think, before shutting the window, feeling very much like Freud when, in his early forties, he had finally achieved his lifelong dream of visiting Athens, and, standing on the Acropolis, felt strangely disappointed, calling his numbness derealization.”

I had always wobbled shakily around the geographic centers which gave my family its own eclectic identity: France, Beirut, Vienna, Canada, Japan, Miami…

In a way, Paris had always been my shadow city – a place more abstract than real. In my head, it – along with all of France – belonged to my very French mother.

Beirut, my own birthplace, also felt like a shadow city. It belonged to my parent’s romance and immense vistas of majestic cedar trees and civil wars. It was in that Beirut apartment, the Casa Blanca, that my family had its very happy, but very short, tenure as a complete unit. After fleeing the civil war, my father died, and my mother began looping our now-triadic unit between the possibilities of France and the United States. Since we left Beirut when I was so young, it is swathed in my own un-remembered memories.

In a way, I was coming to Paris to hypostatize it, to treat something conceptual as if it were real.

I reached for Aciman’s book as I had reached for Paris – in a haphazard way, led by nothing more concrete than intuition – yet I felt like I had landed on it like my birthright. I had come back to my mother’s country as an apologetic American and a lapsed Frenchwoman. I had wanted to create with the fusion of these two adjectives something brilliant, but now that I was here, the traffic between these two adjectives was proving to be more congested than I had anticipated. Hence, these bloggable moments. They are my way of pulling off to the side of the highway to marvel at the collection of city lights before and behind me, becoming more real. Maybe that is what all writing is – a metabolization occurring on the page while the heart is busy looping in between its imagined shadow cities.


thank you, matt, for being such an integral part of my re-membering...

Inter-blog-ual referencing...

in hopes of gently urging back the voice of my favorite blogger, here is a cyber shout-out to marie-hélène who presently finds herself nestled in the middle of the new hampshire snows...in thanks of her constant inspiration...

she and micah are back at the macdowell arts colony for the month to work on their iraq documentary. (and it is to AMERICAN HOSTAGE that the oscar goes to for the best acknowledgment in a recent work of non-fiction "and thanks to the macdowell colony, because no one can hear you scream in the woods.")


as billy strayhorn would say: "always onwards and upwards."

mh: as you write history in your cabin by the fire, know that all my admiration and love is dancing around you in celebration...

Letter to N.Y. by Elizabeth Bishop
For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

--Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Fragments, Roman and otherwise...

Last night, I came back home to Paris from Rome, from one eternal city to another. I fell asleep to the sight of the Eiffel Tower glittering from my hotel window – such an easy manifestation of the illumination I am seeking. The longing in me for Paris that I had been feeling while in Rome was made more pointed by the frame of the hotel, the celebrated refuge for the restless and the aimless.


The Eiffel Tower sparkles each hour on the hour for ten minutes, from dusk until 2 am (1am in winter). Its illuminations are composed of 335 projectors ranging from 150 to 1000 watts, equipped with sodium lamps shooting their beams upward from the inside of the monument's structure. They are operated by an automatically piloted computer program that assures their rotation sweep of 90° and a perfect synchronization of the double light beams, diametrically opposite to the other, pivoting around 360°. Each projector is equipped with a xenon 6000 watt lamp. When visibility is ideal, the beacon is visible from 80 kilometers away. It is activated each evening when the Tower lights up, and shuts down when the Tower does.

The only thing that I could think while watching such an awesome display was that I wished I could organize my love into such discrete time fragments. Instead of chronological purity, I am devoured by this desire for emotional absolutism, of always thinking in forever terms. And in Rome, a city which lends an easy credibility to such a phantasm – so many different time periods cohabitating with an anachronous simplicity – it seems almost possible. While there, in Rome, sitting on the sun-warmed stones of Saint Peter’s Square, I could only desire some sort of similar concretization of my own emotional pantheon. How could this specific moment, this feeling, last forever? How could I project this, myself, into an image, a possibility of the future? Would it be possible to weave together these present, momentary strands of myself into something, to somewhere, to hold me in the future?

As Diana pours out her genius into her MA pages, she tells me of the beauty of the etymology of the word refuge: now meaning protection and shelter; but coming from the Latin fugere, to flee, with re-fugere meaning to flee backwards, to go back to an original starting point. This desire for refuge – is it a flight to or from protection? This hope to find, or build, this pantheon (emotional and physical) which I seek, does it not just cement the binary, the logical fallacy, between home and exile – a binary that I have been trying, through living and writing, to deconstruct? This feeble lifting of a first stone towards a future – is it courage or cowardice? The only answer that sounds a resonance is Diana discussing Saint Augustine’s memory of flight – how do we know to remember the things that will change, transform, revolutionize us the most?

I do know, though, that the most important thing is writing – of any kind, letters arriving for me today from San Francisco and New York... This writing that sends out threads of love, of connection – threads with tensile strength strong enough to catch us in these tapestries of intimacy, yet fluid enough to allow for a return to the self. Always nostography – writing about return – returns to the self, to the memories that are sheltered there.

channeling the zeug...

the source of all love and wisdom...
Wafting on this feeling that all things have the substantiability of styrofoam, this cartoon sums it “all” up nicely, allowing me to avoid the landmine of taking anything too seriously:

i believe...

as my friend matt says, here is the best emergency poem ever written. as i course through paris, readying to leave it tomorrow for rome, i find myself incanting it quietly, continually...


another unpublished poem of elizabeth bishop

I believe:
that the steamship will support me on the water,
& that the aeroplane will conduct me over the mountain,
that perhaps I shall not die of cancer,
or in the poorhouse,
that eventually I shall see things in a better light,
that I shall continue to read and continue to write,
that I shall continue to laugh until I cry with a certain few
friends.
that love will unexpectedly appear over & over again,
that people will continue to do kind deeds that astound me.

transplantation is necessary for all growing things...

I have come to Paris to become a writer, to become happy and to become rich. With these three reasons, I duplicate the motivations of most of the other new Parisians (are these not the reasons for moving not only to Paris, but to anywhere else?) As Hemingway writes: “Transplantation is necessary for all growing things.” So, I have decided to grow in Paris. It is a bargain I struck with the city before arriving: that if I am unstinting in my sweat and inky blood, its alchemy will do the rest. And as most other emotional refugees who drift towards Paris, I have not yet worked out any of the particulars of how this is actually going to happen. But I am not worried. If any of these things are ever going to happen (unbridled creativity, happiness, riches), they are going to happen here.

And if I were to judge from the 24-hour internet centers that are fueled entirely by homesickness (their keyboards slick with nostalgia – the ache of home) or the phone booths that are populated at the most uncomfortable hours of the night by the recently arrived (in hopes of reaching those that remained behind at a decent hour), I am still very much not alone.

As hard as the clichés of Paris and the Kafkian tendencies of French bureaucracy have tried to make Paris uncomfortable for the dreamy-eyed, it still exudes its mythic power over me, over us – its hopeful tribe. Here, I feel as if my most ordinary movements become balletic and that I communicate exclusively through human electricity. There is no compromise of friendly words or empty expressions. My expatriation to Paris, like love, is devastating and reconfiguring the self that I thought I knew. And that knowledge, after its bloody entrance, is made more scrutable. Paris can still be the metonym for joy; the idea of it seems to be built on an infrastructure of inexorability. If it were not for that, we would not be here, striking out for happiness – doing something so extravagant as to dream of these wild possibilities. It would appear unseemly anywhere else...

you set off, sweetie (as you said), to the stars...
like a dream of skipping stones
or skipping sapphires, rather...

do not blame me if
i choose geography,
perhaps just because it's easy - ...

we imagine an horizon, and it hardens
into faultless definition: the horizon.
it begins to illustrate imagination...
dear, other things that we imagined
were not often so obliging.
still the horizon is unbroken.

elizabeth bishop, unpublished poem