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."