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.