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.