instead

of reading le monde, i am reading le new york times.

instead of writing my dissertation, i am reading about daphne merkin's struggle with her work avoidance and its contextual depression.

but what makes it all worth it is her quotation of writer and psychoanalyst adam phillips: “psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.”

brilliance.

gravity and grace

"it is necessary to uproot oneself. to cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it everyday"
-- simone weil

reading weil's "gravity and grace" on a saturday afternoon, blanket-covered and couch-supported, i am wondering about the splinters from these trees that we carry. carrying her cross was a task that weil did in solitude, a solitary seeker of god's grace, avoiding the comforts of community.

uprooted. cut.

how to use this image of her spiritual pilgrimage to drain the desolation i projected unto these two scenes i witnessed yesterday?

an old lady, sophisticated and lucid, whose loneliness was luminous around her, had attached to the gates of the jardin du luxembourg, above the dusty-green metallic folding chair in which she was sitting, a sign with spidery script: "parlez-moi" ("talk to me")...

as i was running around the jardin des plantes and great mosque in early afternoon, around every loop of my self-created track, i watched a moroccan man dressed in his ceremonial djellaba, ready for friday prayers, seated in the bench facing the mosque with unread book in lap, standing up and sitting down, but never getting the courage to go in...

i am reading weil's book like a map to find an answer to how it is that she transforms solitude into her path to god. in "gravity and grace," she writes: "this is how we have union with god - by not being able to approach him. distance is the soul of beauty."

i am in awe of, and troubled by, this single forest on her back which is her communing rod to the divine. this has always been the splinter, the thorn, that i constantly worry and cannot let alone - how distance, and the solitude that it implies, can contain both what is sublime and what is terrorizing. and i confess that i do not understand, so i will continue reading...

weil also quotes a poem from st. john of the cross:

“What is grace” I asked God.
And He said,
“All that happens.”

i need to continue reading...

an even later night

the apartment once nestling with visitors from various cities and continents is stilled from its frenzy. in just a few days, i was the trusty ferryman to air and rails. the luxury of having so many of the people that i love in one place, the same one, the epicenter of my heart, has spoiled me. i am betrayed by my melancholy which is dissonant with the glory which is paris in august - the warbling green of the poplars along the river Seine like so many rustling books, the unsuspected magic of the Eiffel Towers' lights strong enough to iron away my carefully-constructed urbanity, the simplicity of a dusk-covering walk while the limestone buildings gloam from golden to opal.

all this glory which was shared so recently with family - these remarkable people which karma has allowed me to travel this life together. the decision to compose this moment of my life abroad, away, is one which has gifted me with magic - or at least awakened me to magic. but it has also stretched the circle which i have to retrace in order to find my steps back home a little further. the distance is dizzying. and in the quietness of moments like this, i fear of tipping, of falling over. the fragility of being upside down. but perhaps, unlike other trees, i could have my roots up in the air. instead of being rooted in the earth, i could be rooted in the sky. displaced but not placeless.

late night

shared with friends visiting and family meeting - all for the first time. all in my apartment. not much space left. from new york and florida and italy to paris - all of this happening which would not have been imaginable even a short time ago. i feel so grateful and so tired. full of goodness and the gratitude of. still wishing that i can find myself amdist this all.

here's hoping...

xoc

via MH

The Journey, by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

in barcelona, watching

the france-uruguay match at an irish pub, molly's fair city, with GL and a german seismologist working in napoli.
among my small tribe, many sides to be chosen: do i wistfully wrap myself in a french flag or proudly proclaim my love with an obama tshirt or go with the tried-and-true, italian style?
what constitutes loyalty when it comes to questions of nationality or identity? is it the life we have been given through parents and their geography or is it the love we have chosen that decides which side of the stadium we sit? is it their blood or is it our heart? if national borders can be redrawn, created or destroyed through wars and backroom treaties, i believe we should drag our passports and our pens across those man-made scars delineating our countries, recognizing that there is something deeper than those borders, something that they don't want us to find out, something stronger to connect to in each other if only we stopped being distracted by all the pretty colors on all the little banners.

barcelona bound

continental border crossings.
cocktails of architectural alchemy.
the possibilities of a new city.
i have never been here before.
i want to dance flamenco down its streets, learning the steps from the sensual curves of the modernista buildings.
i want to be transformed.

directions

My hotel is in front of the airport in Nice, and directly behind it, the sea. I arrived here on Sunday, after a Buddhist conference in Marseille. The days since the conference have been spent finishing the semester's grading and responding to the desperate student emails with the hotel's dependably aleatoric wifi connection: a plane takes off and the connection ceases. I don't know if those of my students who are tardy in submitting their final papers would see that as a good metaphor for their attempts at communication. The thing is, I am so close in age to them, I understand their situations too well, so it is very hard for me not to be compassionate of their initiatory dramas and nascent tragedies. And so, together, we perform the dance that has been unfolding between professor and student with the seasons of every semester gone past, adding our own steps, leading each other towards a more delicate calibration of mind to heart.

itinerant buddhism part four: mont sainte-victoire, marseille

Paris to Marseille: 670 kilometers. Ryan Bingham: repeat. Sun roof: open. I am on my way down south for a Buddhist conference, a pilgrimage that I have been doing since I arrived in France almost three years ago; this will be my fourth visit. This time, I am going as support staff, in charge of cleaning and general management. I felt a need to be of service, to provide a tactile proof of my gratitude for all that this mystic place has given me over the years.

The retreat center is near Aix-en-Provence, at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain that Cézanne painted over 60 times. The mountain, with its rugged, geometric shapes, inspired his use of bold blocks of color to create the new spatial effect of "flat-depth." Cézanne's rhythm of light gradations and differentiation within this ruggedness creates a paradox of subtlety and beauty that, in painting and in reality, provides that spark - that squeezing of the heart that is a reminder of shared humanity.

My own memento mori came late in the conference, Saturday, past midnight. Dinner cleanup was finally over and we were sitting on the wooden steps, feet relaxing in the dewy grass, when across the top of the mountain came a comet, slow-moving and stardust-leaving, so seemingly close that both us and the mountain felt illuminated by its fire.

changing and unchanging things

This evening, between the aleatoric raindrops, we scootered to the Musée Marmottan for a nocturne musicale - a musical evening - to celebrate women painters at the time of Proust. Amid the many Monets downstairs, we listened to the trinity of vocalists singing Fauré against the rain outside.

The museum is near La Muette, a neighborhood so named because of the hunting lodge where King Henry IV would bring his falcons every year to molt, muer, to shed their feathers. Listening to the unintentional duet of music and weather, I wondered what the opposite of molting would be. Doctors tell us that our bodies change every seven years and physicists say that atomic particles are moving at the speed of three billion something per second. But the heart, on the contrary, retains and accumulates everything, layer upon layer growing around everything it remembers - as in the creation of a pearl, when a mollusk grows successive and overlapping layers of nacre around a foreign object which has transformed its soft tissue.

My heart grew an annual ring, another layer of love last night. Post concert and post rain, we picniced at the Pont des Arts, in the same spot where my past successive Parisian years celebrated enormous changes.

Happy Anniversary, GL

itinerant buddhist: part one

lucky lotus, brooklyn
I have been thinking a lot about pilgrimages lately - of leaving home for a place that is sacred. In the ceremonial departure, there is the recognition that the holy is not to be found here - but only in the movement outwards can it be captured. It is through motion, through the effort carved out of distance, that the olive branch from Gethsemane, the water from the Jordan, can be brought back home.

Although I have always firmly maintained that geography is irrelevant, that location has nothing to do with spiritual transformation, I have spent the past few weeks in travel - across to the New World (my old home) and in the Old Country (my new home). These crossings of continents have begun to weave together disparate parts of myself. The travels have been motivated by a desire to spend as much time as possible in Lama Marut's presence, a Sanskrit scholar and Buddhist teacher - in Brooklyn, then Paris and finally in Munich.

In Brooklyn, my initiatory Lama moment - with MH, I had my first flush of feeling that right now is enough - no grasping, but let this moment last forever.

Farewell

a poem Agha Shahid Ali

At a certain point I lost track of you.
They make a desolation and call it peace.
when you left even the stones were buried:
the defenceless would have no weapons.

When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks,
who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes?
O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished,
who weighs the hairs on the jeweller's balance?
They make a desolation and call it peace.
Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

My memory is again in the way of your history.
Army convoys all night like desert caravans:
In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved- all
winter- its crushed fennel.
We can't ask them: Are you done with the world?

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other's
reflections.

Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are found like this
centuries later in this country
I have stitched to your shadow?

In this country we step out with doors in our arms
Children run out with windows in their arms.
You drag it behind you in lit corridors.
if the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.

At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed to perfect me.
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.

The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.
It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
if it had pity on me.

If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't
have happened in the world?

I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive.You can't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.

There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible in the world

There is no Frigate like a Book (1286)

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

Emily Dickinson

Emily says that "There is No Frigate Like a Book" but still...

"Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know."
–Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky, desert explorer, Morocco expatriate (read while on the Paris métro, not going to the desert)

take nothing but pictures
leave nothing but footprints
kill nothing but time
(sign seen at the Northeast Lighthouse in Trinidad, where the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea meet)

we travel

in order to find the tangible signs of beauty. if they are not reflections of what we thought, we can hopefully learn how to feel.

on the in-between rocks

From Marrakesh to the sea by bus!
Essaouira is the goal - the coastal town that done good in the 1st century BCE by providing the purple dye that was so sought after for the Imperial Roman Senatorial togas. This dye is created by processing the spiky snails and purple shells that live near the Essaouiran coast and the Iles Purpuraires. The authentic method of creating this specific shade of purple remains, to this day, a secret shared only between master and apprentice.

The snails and shells are also secretive in their location in the intertidal rocks. I was not quite sure what "intertidal rocks" were - finding out that they are a part of the littoral zone, the shifting space that appears at low tide and is underwater at high tide. (What the littoral zone is, however, has no single definition. Where it begins and ends and the subregions that it can include is argued over by Navy commanders and marine biologists.) But the littoral drift creates a microclimate for the snails who have adapted to their ever-moving home. Wikipedia goes on to share that this harsh environment "supports typically unique types of organisms."

It seems inspiring to me that these snails - these unique organisms who have managed to avoid overt commercialization after their Roman exploitation, have managed to survive throughout the centuries in such volatile conditions.

Essauouira is full of metaphors of what we do in order to survive. My favorite story is of the architect for Essaouira's city walls: Théodore Cornut, a French mathematician and military architect of the 18th century. He was captured and enslaved, obtaining his freedom only when he had finished designing and building, with the help of his fellow prisoners, the port walls commissioned by Sidi Mohamed ben Abdallah. Incidentally, in an interesting commentary on karmic colonialistic correlations, he used the same blueprints which he had used when building Saint-Malo, the walled port city of Brittany in Northern France.

Through these travels though - from bus to books to so many different places - I am hoping to shift from survival to joy.

the intangible nature of joy

The morning train brought me to Marrakesh. I was eager to finally arrive, mainly due to the word-of-mouth I heard that the person who has fully experienced the city is given the honorary Marrakeshi title of bahja, joyous one. Which led me to wondering: what does joy look like? what does a truly joyous person resemble? what does that even really feel like? I have been reading both the Lotus Sutra and the Yoga Sutra and feel that I have at least a theoretical appreciation for their differentiation between relative and absolute happiness, between pleasure and joy, but I feel a still petulant demanding of wanting to see the real thing. And so I was pointed in the direction of the square Djemaa el Fna, the heart of Marrakesh, in the center of the medina, the old town.

I was told that the best way to arrive at the square was through the Street of the Olive (derb al zitoun, derb meaning alley). The name of the square means Assembly of the Dead in Arabic and it is an area which is used equally by Marrakeshis and tourists. It has been listed as a UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage. Local activists concerned about the preservation of their traditions achieved this international recognition in 2001 in order to preserve their cultural space. The idea of an intangible space being, first, recognized and even protected, is a powerful thing. UNESCO's Proclamation acknowledges the mysterious alchemy that is born from such intangibles as space and music and dance. In the dedication speech, Juan Goytisolo tried to concretize the invisible: "The spectacle of Djemaa el Fna is repeated daily and each day it is different. Everything changes – voices, sounds, gestures, the public which sees, listens, smells, tastes, touches. The oral tradition is framed by one much vaster – that we can call intangible. The Square, as a physical space, shelters a rich oral and intangible tradition."

To date, a total of 90 Masterpieces from 70 countries have been named, none of which are, interestingly, in the United States. But Italy has Sardinian Pastoral Songs and Sicilian Puppet Theatre. Costa Rica has oxherding and oxcart traditions. Both Uruguay and Argentina share the tango. India has the tradition of Vedic chanting and Croatia has two-part singing and playing in the Istrian scale.

For me, one of the most fascinating things about the square Djemaa el Fna is another intangible – its name: Assembly of the Dead. Walking amidst the stalls, in my head, a two-part chant began to create a steady rhythm; with a profound understanding of what death is, an answer of how joy feels can surely be found – everything changes, nothing remains the same, but the beauty is always there to be shared.

again and again

The last morning in Casablanca before the train to Marrakesh found us at our now-traditional café, The Casablanca (of course), for coffee and the freshly-squeezed mélange of orange, grapefruit and mango. Its walls are covered with the ubiquitous portraits of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, as well as an oddly-placed Edward Hopper print (Nighthawks, of course). The café has nothing to do with the film, with no piano in sight, only hawking gestures towards the idea of the film, as well as the strongest coffee in town.

Yesterday found us at the Jewish Museum, the only museum in Casablanca, which is also the only Jewish museum in the Islamic world. It is an exploration of the balance that does not always come from tolerance, survival and oppression. The museum is committed to salvaging the monuments and synagogues which are the vestigal testaments to the 2,000 years of Moroccan Jewish history. It follows the fluctuations in history of Jews in Morocco, from a once-thriving population in the hundreds of thousands to less than 12,000 today. It gives voice to the Jews who were first welcomed in Morocco after they were driven out of Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1496, through the period of Moulay Rashid, the Moroccan leader united the separate parts of Morocco into a single state, but tore down the synagogues in the 17th century. It documents the mass exodus of Moroccan Jews who left for Israel after its creation, fleeing the after-effects of the colonialist Nazi-controlled French Vichy government. The museum speaks of tragedy, but it also speaks of the richness and hybridity of the Rabbinic and Talmudic literatures, philosophy and poetry in so many languages: Arabic, Berber, Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, French, and English.

The museum is on the outskirts of town, the liminal edges of the city. The only way of reaching it is with a taxi, the driver asking us why we would want to go there. Even the voyage of getting there, the short twenty minutes through the various neighborhoods which serve as Morocco's economic and business hubs, was almost as informative as the museum itself. The layers of the changing town were echoed in the ornamental birds that sat on the edges of the ancient, traditional Moroccan Hannukah candles that through the years have now morphed into crescent moons.

nightflight to casablanca

We landed after midnight. The heat of the April night was as disorienting as the vision of the mythic Casablancan runways. The first sight out of the palm-fronded airport was the minaret of the Hassan II Mosque - the tallest building in the country and the highest minaret in the world. King Hassan wanted the mosque to be built on the rocky Casablancan coast, citing the Quranic verse that God's throne is built on the water. In tonight's moonlight, it emerges from the Atlantic Ocean a marbled and glorious vision. The $800 million building is built with all local Moroccan materials, except for the glass chandeliers which are from Venice, another spiritual city also built on water.

At night, a green laser shines a beam from the top of the minaret towards Mecca, to point the way to God. The precision of that light leaves little room for doubt of a spiritual home.

Seeing that green light from the airport made me remember reading about a different green light shining from the end of another dock. My favorite book growing up in Florida had been The Great Gatsby. The first copy I ever had was my Dad's. The only physical souvenirs we have of our father is his library; every book of his was stamped with his name and his Army number. I remember the first summer I read it, fueled by the Floridian heat to an even stronger loathing of peninsula's the sandy coast. I had never felt at home amid the shifting sands of sinkholes (Florida has more sinkholes than any other state in the country) or unstable water tables. I had never felt that stability which comes from a sure sense of home. I had always wanted to ask my Dad if he had felt the same sort of drifting feeling as Nick Carraway, if that is what made him hitchhike across America before volunteering to fight in Europe in WWII, or go work in Korea or move to Lebanon where I would later be born.

The next day, as I felt the Mosque's heated floor made of glass beneath my knees, providing a perfect view of the sea below, I knew that I was experiencing the Atlantic Ocean from the other side. The only prayer I could repeat to myself, over and over: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

On Anticipation

In his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton writes: "If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardor and paradoxes - than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival."

I am leaving for Casablanca tonight, and then the desert. It is cold here in Paris, on this first morning of April, and it is hard to imagine the radical change in location that is about to happen. Maybe it is our Icarian fears that allow us to be distracted by the pragmatics of travel (where and when and for how long) instead of facing the why of going. The enormity of our hubris, of flying so close to the sun, forces our gaze downward to the glow of the computer screen as we hunt and type for the cheapest fares and fewest connections. The magic of being rekindled is delayed as we plan for the car park. But what would happen if we were required to answer questions beyond the practical? What if Easy Jet, in addition to asking for my passport number, asked me what I was hoping for by walking off into the desert? Did I think that their orange plastic seats would help guide me to a transformation? Would they provide a refund if I returned no wiser?

But first, I have to run to class to read Life After God with my Sorbonne students and finish packing and then get my glasses fixed before buying some French wine for our nostalgic Parisian host who has moved to the medina.

from paris to brooklyn, via casablanca

Springtime still finds me in Paris, continuing to teach literature at the Sorbonne, while working on my PhD on the literature of exile. Celebrating the solstice is not enough here in France, I have learned. The Spring Semester also brings with it a week of ski vacation and a week of Easter vacation, which sandwich another oddly-timed week of "winter" vacation. I happily ask no questions of their scholastic chronology and eagerly leave town.
The end of April will find me in Brooklyn, luxuriating in all things sororal and Lama Marut. Before that, though, it is off to Casablanca. Unrelatedly, but always with that great magic of bookstore synchronicity, I am reading Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. She is a Moroccan author living in California where she got her PhD in linguistics, after having studied in Rabat and London. I came across her first book par hazard, after having read an article she had written in Le Monde. She was writing in response to their journalistic treatment of fifteen Moroccan immigrants who had drowned while crossing the Straits of Gibraltar on a fishing boat. The news received slight mention at the bottom of their online page. In her article, Lalami discusses how the Monde article was the catalyst for her book, how her only way of coping was through the transmutation of tragedy into fiction. In the Lonely Planet guide on Morocco which I am reading, it states, understatedly, that Lalami "explores the promise and trauma of emigration."

this is what change looks like

Spring Solstice brought with her the blossoms, my birthday and Obama's health care bill. For me, a happy trinity. Triads have expanding harmonic frequencies which seem to offer forever unfolding possibilities, resonances of newness which are emboldening and exciting. The sustained effort of a bleak winter is rewarded by red berries and yellow daffodils. Transformation is no longer a metaphor. If it worked for Persephone, it can work for me.
As I begin my new year, I feel the need of a metamorphosis. In his remarks after the approval of the bill, Obama spoke to us about the possibilities that can occur when we rise above the weight of our politics. He said that "We did not fear our future - we shaped it." With a change in tense, I have found the mantra that I can chant as I decide to finally depart from my inverno, my long winter. This past summer in Italy, we drove past Lago d'Averno, the lake 10 miles west of Naples. For the ancient Romans it was the protection for the nearby cave which was the formal entrance to the underworld. I would like to go back there now to fling all the battered baggages for Charon to ferry away.