Wednesday, February 14, 2007

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.

Friday, February 9, 2007

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...

Sunday, February 4, 2007

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.

Friday, February 2, 2007

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.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

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: