at home abroad

Happy anniversary, Paris.

2011-09-27T15:37:00.002+02:00

In her essay "On the Contrary, Outside of It," Angela Ingram analyses geographical exile as more often a "getting away from than going to" a place.
With this intention, I came to Paris. Five years ago. To the day. It was a leaving, a leaping forth, from Bloomington, Indiana, where strewn behind me were several immolations of variously-attempted incarnations - a first version of me was as a graduate student in the Music School, then another Masters in the Comparative Literature Department, then, teaching assistant in the Gender Studies Department, finally, a self-styled hybrid of all-of-the-above as a tentative doctoral student. My ticket out was a teaching-exchange program designed to give me time to prepare for my doctoral qualifying exams (successful!) and write my dissertation (still wildly in the air...). Unfortunately, where my adviser's goals were proverbially pragmatic, mine were formulated less as actions items and more as mystical visions - something to do with enlightenment and actualization. I will leave the evaluative distinctions to later posts...
Armed with my French passport (thanks to my embassy-conscientious mother) and Lebanese birthplace, I was ready to be the American abroad, at least, somewhere in between. My patria was America, through my father, so it was through a reverse exmatriation that I returned to my mother's homeland.
Now, five years later, I am confronted with the task of living life less identified with the exodus and more fully rooted in the present. And in the interstices found between ambiguity and ambivalence, I can still uncover the promise of my Paris.

May your library desks and café table tops continue to support the dissertating journey...

(photo by Walter Bibikow)

Springtime in Paris

2011-03-15T17:48:00.008+01:00

It is my fifth spring in Paris.

Never one to be very good with chronology, it is still hard to believe that I have been here already so long. I still feel the vertigo of the recently arrived and am always a little surprised to feel the ground sure-footed beneath me. But hauled up from the depths, four journals do testify to the time spent here. Well or not - those are autumnal observations...

Reading the pages between the pastel-colored covers, each is carefully headed with dates and the locations of where each writing took place. They read like the code for a new function on google maps - a way to measure the emotional significance and biographical relevance of a geographical location.

In an entry dated from March 14, 2008 at Le Phare du Canal (appropriately, The Lighthouse on the Canal) during the days when I was living in the 11th arrondissement, I was taking notes on Guy Debord's idea of psychogeography which he described as the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals. Exploring the behavioral impact of this urban place, I can say - three apartments, countless cafés, several continents later - that choosing to make this city my home has been one of my best decisions.

Sending lilac-scented kisses from the heart of Paris,
C

instead

2010-08-10T00:37:00.001+02:00

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

2010-08-08T01:53:00.008+02:00

"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

2010-08-05T01:55:00.004+02:00

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

2010-07-24T01:11:00.002+02:00

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

2010-07-24T01:04:00.001+02:00

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

2010-06-11T12:12:00.003+02:00

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

2010-06-10T10:16:00.001+02:00

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

2010-06-09T11:56:00.004+02:00

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

2010-06-08T14:53:00.005+02:00

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

2010-05-25T18:38:00.000+02:00

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

2010-05-22T00:44:00.006+02:00

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

2010-05-20T21:46:00.000+02:00

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

2010-05-19T01:06:00.001+02:00

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...

2010-05-19T00:43:00.005+02:00

"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)

2010-05-18T18:08:00.000+02:00

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

2010-05-14T00:15:00.003+02:00

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

2010-04-05T21:06:00.010+02:00

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

2010-04-04T04:36:00.001+02:00

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

2010-04-03T02:10:00.001+02:00

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

2010-04-01T12:16:00.004+02:00

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

2010-04-01T09:17:00.004+02:00

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

2010-03-31T00:10:00.005+02:00

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

2010-03-30T19:17:00.000+02:00

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.

Ici, tout est calme

2009-08-08T00:32:00.000+02:00

In August, Paris is quiet. Everyone (those Parisians who can) has left the city. Every boulangerie in a three-block radius of my apartment has the familiar sign "Congée annuel," or the slight variation "Horaire estivale: Fermé." For the first few weeks of August, there is a sort of yeasty time-share agreement among bakers; not willing to let their neighbors starve, time-slots will be agreed upon and one boulangerie will usually be open on rotation. But for the last week or so of the month, even the iron-clad work ethic of the Sisyphean breadmakers falters. The sign is guiltily scotché to the glassdoor in the hasty départ to the seaside under the cover of night. The following morning, the remaining Parisians can be seen roaming the streets, gaunt and croissant-less, muttering under their smoky breaths that next year, yes, next year, they too shall go ailleurs, loin, très loin d'ici.

But I, on the other hand, already elsewhere in Paris, am filled with the marvel of learning that beautiful new word: estivale.

Paris to the Moon

2009-08-05T10:56:00.000+02:00

I came to Paris almost three years ago now with my metamorphosis already mapped out: my triptych-plan was to become happy, to become a writer and to become rich. That is where my pragmaticism ended. Being one of Henry James' Americans, I believed that Paris was the celestial city; this is where those changes happen. And after several seasons spent here, I still believe that. A belief that has been challenged, though, has been on the nature of metamorphosis - is it the sudden shock of epiphany that leaves you blinded, newly-formed and crawling along a different road? Or is it Stendhal's idea of crystallization which necessitates a complex mixing of winters and salt-mines and negative experiences to create diamonds? Stendhal observes a leafless tree branch left in a salt-mine during the winter emerging as crystal-covered wand. He was trying to understand how love can alter the layers of vision - depending if one wanted to see rotten wood or shining light. I feel as if I have been wandering blindly in my own Parisian salt-mine, unsure of what it was I had wanted to find. So, doing what it is I always do in these situations, I went to Shakespeare & Co. to buy a book. On Marie-Hélène's recommendation, I bought Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik. I am hoping that by reading about Gopnik's Paris, I will learn how to talk about mine.

Give France a Chance, or "L'invitation (forcée) au voyage"

2009-04-12T17:04:00.000+02:00

It's been said that April is the cruelest month. The five CEOs of French companies who have been held captive in the last month might agree. French employees and union officials have evolved France's atavistic penchant for insurgency into the activity of bossnapping. Union spokespeople have said that these unfortunate measures had to be taken in response to announced staff cuts and plant closures. And it seems to be working: most French bossnappings have had the payoff of reduced layoffs or better severance packages. It is a new twist on the time-honored French tradition of striking and a general taking-to-the-streets. And as with all things French, it needs to be heavily steeped in the murky waters of paradox: the frustration of globalism directed at the singular head of the business monarchy. The poetic heaving of the brick-in-hand is significantly absent, bien sur, but at least Sarkozy might have to reconsider his comment: "These days, when there's a strike, no one notices." A recent BVA/Les Echos poll stated that 55% of French people believe that radical protest measures are justified, and 64% think actions like bossnapping should be depenalized because they constitute a last-gasp effort to avoid skyrocketing joblessness.

Cole Porter did once sing that 50 million Frenchmen cannot be wrong. Although I do also remember that Noël Coward musical: There is always something fishy about the French.

how to visualize joy

2009-01-27T11:11:00.001+01:00

nothing better

Democratic National Convention 2008 Denver, Colorado

2008-08-28T21:18:00.000+02:00

I came to Denver on Frontier Airlines yesterday to participate in the Democratic National Convention. At the Indianapolis airport as I was going through security, the TSA guard told me to convince him to vote for Barack Obama in the 5 minutes it took me to go through security. Seeing me in my Obama t-shirt and putting my copy of Audacity of Hope with my computer through the x-ray scanner, I suppose he thought that I might have a good idea of what to say; which, I have to say myself, I did. Telling me that his income definitely did not qualify him to benefit from the Bush-McCain tax plan, he assured me that Obama had his vote. As he was handing me back my shoes, we both intuitively realized that we had just had one of those serendipitous social moments that can be so magical when shared with a stranger. Refraining myself (with difficulty) from hugging him, I realized that the moment provided me with the perfect frame for understanding my past few months of volunteering for the campaign in Paris with Democrats Abroad, and the Obama office in Bloomington: this campaign has become personal for millions of people because it relies on dialogue and the person-to-person connection which comes only through grass-roots engagements.
It is strange - this feeling of living history, living this historical moment.
Getting ready with the city of Denver for Obama's acceptance speech on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's speech, we are all living the dream.
Yes.
We can.

Can you get in? Do you have the juice?

2008-08-27T21:18:00.000+02:00

In his latest "Carpetbagger at the Convention" video for The New York Times, David Carr addresses the camera:
"The game is access. Washington or here, can you get in? Do you have the juice?"

The specific access he is refering to at the moment is to the GQ/Maker's Mark after-party where journalists, advertiser's and lobbyists pundify about the day's events. But those journalists who do get through the door of these fancy post-convention events are not necessarily those who gather around the free beer spicket at the temporary shelter of the "New Media Tent." These two poles are an interesting way to visualize and think about the locations of the conversational center and periphery. Not just the geographical center of the Pepsi Center where the majority of the Democratic Convention activities are taking place, or the CNN Grill which is by invitation only, but the more abstract center where the intersection of power, access and affiliation intersect. Who gets to speak and from where are they speaking?

But even before asking after the the power dynamics which lie behind the enunciative act, it is important to go back to Carr's question: "Can you get in? Do you have the juice?" The hierarchy of passes which are being distributed for access to the Convention are byzantine in their intricacy: a green "Perimeter Pass" will get you through security to the outside of the Pepsi Center for a specific day, but not through the actual doors of the Pepsi Center itself. An orange "Arena Pass" will get you through the doors of the Convention Center, but not into any of the actual events; the lowly "Arena Pass" holder has to loiter self-consciously in the hallways while those who hold a coveted purple "Floor Pass" can traipse regally through the doors to actual seating inside the event. All of this is trumped, however, by the burgundy (and rarely-seen but often-discussed) "All Access Pass." And that sort of pass can get you things one can only dream of.

Carr, attempting comfort once he himself has already gotten in to the party states, "Once you get in, the party always stinks." But he does go on to say: "It's breaking through the door that matters."

But it is the door itself which is worthy of investigation and asking how much passing its threshold changes the things that are said.

Orlando International Airport

2008-08-19T00:54:00.000+02:00

A step ahead of Fay, my sister and I fly from Orlando to Atlanta and Bloomington, respectively. A birthday weekend brought us all together - to celebrate in the humidity of a tropical Florida summer, among the songs of the tree frogs. McCaine was also here today, doing whatever it is that he does. Obama arrives in Orlando tomorrow. Lawn signs sprouting up on our neighborhood lawns clearly demarcate loyalties long foresworn or sympaticos shared. Following these faux polls, the signs are so far evenly split. Although it is only the pretty blue signs that arouse a final burst of energy as we go round the last bend on our daily jog, my sister and I screaming "YES WE CAN!"

firefly fascinations

2008-07-20T06:17:00.000+02:00

So, I have been reading about fireflies. There are many things about them that I did not know. Things like the Indiana State Government was seriously considering making the firefly the official State Insect, but the Legislature never got around to voting on the issue (the firefly is the official State Insect of Pennsylvania, however). Like the light production of fireflies (technically called bioluminescence, which is such a great word) is much more efficient than the human lightbulb. Whereas 90% of firefly energy used to create light is converted into visible light; an incandescent electric bulb can convert only 10 percent of total energy used into visible light, and the remainder is emitted as heat. Like the Ifugaos of the Ifugao Province in the Philippines believe that the firefly can either be a harbinger of death or mean that there is a wild pig in a nearby field. Or in Japan, the firefly was once believed to be the souls of dead kamikaze pilots. Also in Japan, the firefly is under threat of extinction because of industrial pollution, urbanization as well as poaching. Apparently, firefly "rustlers" have been trapping fireflies and selling them to hotels and restaurants during summer firefly festivals. According to Japan Times, "Warning signs denouncing insect thieves have been erected and teams of volunteers have been mounting nightly patrols to ward them away from Fussa's Firefly Park, where tens of thousands of people converge every summer for the firefly festival."

In light of firefly regeneration, I found the following passage from the book "Encountering the Dharma" by Richard Hughes Seager very comforting:

"Buddhist elements in Soka education are also evident in small ways - in the emphasis placed on opposing militarism and creating peace; in a schoolwide campaign against bullying; in the way harmony and helpfulness pervade the ideals of the school. More striking is the effort by students to reestablish the firefly population in the region, which had been devastated by agribusiness and industrial pollution. "They go into fields to collect fireflies, care for them in our culture house, then hatch eggs and feed the babies," Matsuda says, clearly pleased by the success of this program. "They hatch one hundred thousand each year because the survival rate is only two percent." Such activities reflect both the Buddhist value of interdependence and the hands-on pedagogy of Makiguchi, he tells me. "Students learn how precious life is, see how much effort it takes to have even a single firefly in the beautiful, natural environment. They understand how a single life depends on the ecosystem." He laughs warmly as he recalls broaching the subject with Ikeda. "He thought I should do it and appointed me chair of the Fireflies Committee!""

In Mayan mythology, the firefly was known as the "queen of stars," since the firefly was thought to carry light from the stars.

I sit on the porch tonight, drinking my organic wine from Argentina, watching these amazing creatures fly low to the ground, emitting magical green lights, heavy under the weight they carry of so many souls and so many stars.

returns

2008-07-18T06:40:00.000+02:00

I have come back to the town where my life started to change. Bloomington. I feel connected to an emotional flow here like nowhere else. I feel more like myself instead of feeling like a tortoise watching a street parade. In Bloomington, there is a confluence of all the selves that have coalesced into the Paris-me, the real-me. But here, the past, present and future seem to be linked in a way both historical and transcendent. The flotilla of fireflies outside my window, accompanying me on my evening jogs, give me the buzz to say such sorts of nostalgia-glossed things.

I am lost in the oscillation between the elation of being in such a beautiful place surrounded by all my long-lost friends (Austen, Brontë, Woolf) and the fear that this project is never going to finish (preparing for my PhD exams).

I do know that the stasis that was turning my soul septic has been dissipated by the little green lights of the fireflies - each one telling me to go. To start. To begin. Being.

welcome to the fun house

2008-03-06T10:16:00.000+01:00

In my unofficial status as a café sociologist and streetwalking ethnologist of this complicated and surprising country, I am prone to grand and baseless pronouncements which I feel comfortable stating unequivocally. Such as: every café and brasserie in Paris is decorated in the same fashion: mirrors on every wall. And it is not only in the fancy cafés where very small dogs accompany very old ladies; it is also in the shadier varieties in which very old men play the French LOTO and Euromillions (I have, as of late, been trying to insinuate myself into this specific subculture. The increase of eagerness in my new venture is directly proportional to the decreasing status of my bank account. Next blog? Anyone?). In a society in which direct contact is thought of as untoward and a sign of bad education, the elliptical glancing which the mirror makes possible is a convenient option for the curious café goer.
The café provides that third place as safe haven if astronomical Parisian real-estate has sequestered you into a "studio" or co-habitation. As the favorite Parisian third place, the café is attractive as long as it is tied to its own displacement. The statistical increase of cafés on street intersections and in the vicinities of train stations, bus stops and metro exits promises to provide this sensation of transience where nothing will be stable and no one will hold you accountable. Every signal emitted in a mirror-clad café comes back with the same questioning glance with which it was produced. Everything becomes a mirror image of itself and of something else. Whatever un/conscious anxieties propelled you to this non-place are unexpectedly attenuated by the sheer multiplication of images supplied by the mirrors. Identity and destination can be comfortably lost in such numbers.

not word-of-the-damned but...

2008-03-05T15:55:00.000+01:00

I am trying not to see any connections between Anu Garg's choice for today's "A.Word.A.Day" dystopia and the scary Ohio news (added to the unexpected in the results of yesterday's primaries). According to The New York Times: "Ms. Brunner said that in Clermont and Summit Counties, paper ballots ran out mostly due to a large number of independent and Republican voters crossing over to vote in the Democratic primary. In both counties, only the Democratic ballots ran out."

I am trying to avoid the long, slow slide into paranoia of Republican trickeries.

Instead, I am re-reading Obama's remarks in San Antonio: "We say; we hope; we believe – yes we can."

snowBound

2008-01-17T22:53:00.000+01:00

I am on board the Paris-Zurich train for a weekend of snow and ski. The bunny hill and ski instructor will probably feature prominently in the next few days seeing as this will be my first time skiing. Growing up in Florida, skiing always seemed like such a terribly exotic (and privileged) thing to do. And wearing my recently-purchased ski goggles around the house the past few days still made it feel that way. But I love how strange I feel when I say “I am going skiing.” Before time and repetition erode and render mundane the mystery of existence, I want to experience as many new things as possible. So off I go. To ski. To watch water metamorphose into snow. I will navigate the beginner course with the 5-year olds. I hope that it will help me to begin to measure the distance between ocean and snow.

strings of epiphanies

2008-01-16T04:28:00.000+01:00

I'm a new soul I came to this strange world hoping I could learn a bit about how to give and take. But since I came here felt the joy and the fear finding myself making every possible mistake - "new soul," yael naim.

I think that marketing groups have me in mind when constructing their cunning campaigns to instigate overpowering waves of lust for whichever coveted item is being mythologized: I saw the ad for the new macbook air. I fell in love. I went to the itunes stores to download the song to my new ipod nano (then youtubed the video to my video ipod). I am now completely convinced (programmed) that the only thing that yael naim and I need to safeguard ourselves from every possible mistake is a new macbook air. I do. I really believe this. I also do know that this hysteria will ebb in a few days, when I stop soundtracking all my Parisian peregrinations to this song. But for now, I am going to ride this string of lights. Just a little bit longer; just as long as it takes for me to realize that these mistakes I think that I am making are actually not mistakes. They are just me re-framing...that silence that I think is fear is only that wonderful moment when the walls fall down.

hermit in paris

2007-12-12T01:49:00.000+01:00

The past five weeks in Paris have been surrounded by transport strikes, racial violence and student riots. Another transport strike is scheduled for tomorrow. But supposedly, the students have once again outnumbered the riot police at the university, so I shall brave the barricades for the sake of metafiction. If I can catch a train.

thanksgiving wishes

2007-11-23T18:24:00.000+01:00

the day after thanksgiving, i find myself ensconced in my robin-egg blue apartment, reading george lamming's "the pleasures of exile." this was a title i chose from my pile of exam books primarily for its title, hoping to counteract the last conversation i had with my mom. while trying to share with her the sense of emotional alienation i was feeling, thinking of all the family back in new york, around the most inviting table which marie-hélène and micah had set, she said - in what i am hoping was a very tough love sort of wisdom: "well, i have already given you many warnings of exile..." and perhaps it is this line that i am trying to navigate: the line which inevitably draws together the multiplicity of the exilic experience - the hybridity and the isolation.

what does help to serve as a beacon during this navigation is this sort of email which i received from my advisor in bloomington: "...Just to say I'm thinking of you. Trust you didnt' forget Thanksgiving..., or Bloomington..., or a friend that loves you. I'll call soon..."

a buoy for which i am grateful

thanksgiving in paris

2007-11-23T04:11:00.000+01:00

This is my second Thanksgiving spent in Paris. And with this cyclic repetition, I feel as if my life here is gaining some sort of primacy as opposed to a feeling of seasonal aberration. Last year, I had a very late Thanksgiving dinner in a 24-hour Parisian bar with my two favorite Buddhist lesbians who were visiting me from Chicago. This year’s celebrations involved drinking cranberry-flavored liquor before an evening of French comedic theater and Chinese food with my Italian lover.
Such moments of joy fill the hollows that are carved out by the suspicion (the fear?) that your life is elsewhere. Because in moments of so many family reunions, the panic that geography – that tricky shapeshifter – has foiled you once again, can be overpowering.
These moments (the ones in which you realize that the people you love are there while you are here) can make you remember, with a thud, that geography is not a metaphor. And while this lack of abstraction can be existentially troubling, the palpability of this displacement can be liberating. I have been dislocated from my own center of the world, and that world has been shifted from my center. But for this possibility of imagining different stories for myself, I am grateful.

the return

2007-10-02T00:51:00.000+02:00

September was silent. No blog entries, but many exits – out of Florida, out of the summer, out of the state of suspension in which I was inhabiting. The ambiguity which thrived in that state (do I stay or do I go), has given way to something a little more concrete. At least in the sense that I am here. I am in Paris. I arrived a little over two weeks ago. I am again surrounded by all the cafés, the yellow mailboxes, the bridges. I love living in a city which is stitched together by so many bridges: 37 bridges in a city which covers an area of only 40 square miles, connecting the Right Bank to the Left Bank with all the islands in between. Bridges featured prominently in my own Parisian love story last year, and here's to hoping that this year, again, Paris will help me to stitch together all the various parts of myself into something as beautiful.

moonlight and periwinkles

2007-08-29T07:53:00.000+02:00

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...

2007-08-27T09:43:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-22T10:57:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-17T08:06:00.000+02:00

"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?”

2007-08-14T05:45:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-09T05:15:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-01T07:22:00.000+02:00

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."

"the inherent insincerity of organized rites of passage"*

2007-07-23T04:24:00.000+02:00

I have been trying to come up with a seamless way to re-enter the blogosphere, seeing as my last actual entry was posted many months ago. Should I comment on the absence? Should I let the silence speak for itself and continue posting as if there was no significance to the silence? Was there significance to the silence? Is silence significant in writing? And what, exactly, would that sound like? On and on these questions continued, letting me spiral further from the relevance of writing into an ambiguous place of non-writing.

Because of course, a return from silence carries with it a tacit expectation that some sort of wonderful, transformative moment was had - an emergence from the subterranean would seem motivated by a special alchemy between darkness and vision, a spark shooting you upward towards the conversation...

But I don't know if between the months of May and now I can say that I have been transformed. I do know that the things that have happened have touched me: Tante Monique died on May 9, I traveled to Ireland and crossed the Atlantic, I witnessed a regime change in my adopted country, I continued to fall in love, I taught students who made me realize how much I love doing what I do. But what qualifies, really, as that epiphany, that spark, which allows everything to be illuminated? If anything, shouldn't death and love and Paris be on top of the list? But, of course, it is not simply the experience which is transformative, but it is the manipulation of that experience which contributes to the texturing of a soul, which pushes experience past pure event into metamorphosis...

I am in Florida now. Since teaching is now done for this academic year, I left Paris a few days ago to spend some time in Winter Park to "study for my PhD exams," which is the simplest, most legitimate-sounding reason I can offer inquisitive neighbors (and myself). I am hoping that the sunshine will coax my moments of experience into bursts of illumination, further evidence that all truth is nomadic.

*stolen from my favorite line of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated"

the road to ithaca

2007-05-08T17:06:00.000+02:00

when you will take the journey back to ithaca
hope that the journey will last
that it will be full of adventures and full of experiences.
the laestrygonians and the cyclops,
the furies of poseidon - do not fear them.
you will not find them on your way
if your thoughts remain serene, if only pure emotions brush against your soul and your body.

the laestrygonians and the cyclops,
the violence of poseidon, you will not see them
if you hide them within yourself or unless your soul makes them appear before you.

hope that the journey will last.
that many will be the summer mornings where, with such fervor and such delight,
you will come upon unknown ports!
stop at phoenician stalls
to aquire beautiful things:
mother-of-pearl, coral, amber and ebony
and all sorts of intoxicating perfumes.
visit also the many cities of egypt
in order to gain knowledge, to initiate yourself at the sides of the sages.
and especially, do not forget ithaca.
to arrive there is your only goal.
but do not hurry your journey,
prolong it as long as possible
and reach the island only once you are old,
rich in all your experiences from your travels.
you will no longer need ithaca to fulfill you.
it was ithaca that allowed you this beautiful voyage.

without it, you would never have left.
it has nothing left to give you.
and as poor as it seems to you now, it has not
deceived you.
wise and full of your new knowledge
you will have understood what the ithacans signifiy.

- by constantin cavafy

emotional cartography

2007-04-26T14:37:00.000+02:00

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

2007-04-06T02:23:00.000+02:00

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.

Gare de Lyon, Paris

2007-03-20T14:09:00.001+01:00

I am going back to Annonay for the second time in three days. I am going to see Tante Monique, she is in the hospital. Tante is French for aunt, she is my mother’s 85-year-old sister. (One of the effects of my mom’s decision to have children at the non-traditional age of 43 is that many of our relatives are older, much older. The question of mortality – with its attendant non-negotiables of sickness, old age and death – has been more present for my sister and I than many of our friends growing up, friends whose mothers had children in their 20s. But this choice of my mother – to have children “later” – is one that I celebrate, one that I am emulating. Before my mom became a mother, she lived on three continents, participated in United Nations peace-keeping operations in the Middle East, learned different languages by living in their countries, bought fabulous clothes hand-made for her by various designers. All these amazing experiences informed her mothering. Her parenting techniques have always been unique and exceptional. Unfortunately, my sister and I perceived them – with our desperate desires of just fitting-in while growing up in America – as insane and inexplicable. But with the modicum of hard-won objectivity we have gained through our mutual therapies and experiences, we realize now that we would not trade our childhoods for anything).

This journey back to Annonay from Paris is a multi-stepped affair; one that is a sequence of metro-train-bus-taxi, ending with a walk across the bridge of the River Deume. Although exhausting, I appreciate the intricacy of this itinerary since it affords me the opportunity to compose myself. This is the aunt who would organize elaborate, month-long summer road trips, zooming us through France every year. Thanks to her indefatigable, truck-driver instincts, we criss-crossed the roads of France – staying in the smallest hotels in the obscurest villages, stopping at oyster museums and strawberry festivals along the way. As we reminisced in her hospital room, she reminds me that during a visit to the cathedral in Bourges when I was 12, I told her I wanted to get married there. I had totally forgotten, both the cathedral and that I had ever said that. But it is thanks to her profound curiosity and energy for always, always learning that I even have a link to France, that I have an understanding of this part of my genetic inheritance.

One of my favorite links with her is linguistic – (she has always done this for us, but she has stepped up the intensity once I told her of my decision to come live in Paris) – she is always cataloging French idioms and expressions. She meticulously types up lists of French expressions with their etymologies, meanings and translations. She always says, rightfully so, that these are the hardest parts of a language to learn – the obscure phrase which operates with a delicate alchemy of pop culture, history and French collective memory. Understanding them, she tells me, will lend me cultural currency and legitimacy. I have to enter fully into the language, she tells me, not to be content to rest at French’s threshold. Thanks to her lists, I can nod empathetically when someone complains about a hair being in the soup or feet in the plate – or laugh appropriately when someone refers to the worm in the cauliflower. Even this past Sunday, when the doctor came by her hospital room, he mentioned the need to see events à l’optique. In answer to my confused face, she said gently “I will add that to your list, don’t worry.”

During my telephone call to her Sunday night – letting her know that I had arrived safely in Paris – she apologizes for being too weak to type up the latest list she is working on. But she tells me that to view events à l’optique is to remember the relevant, to understand what is most important. It is thanks to her that I am slowly learning to live my life this way.

spring equinox

2007-03-13T14:03:00.000+01:00

Paris is beginning to spring. Eight more days to make it official, of course, but this morning has that brightness that makes the miracle of tulips and jonquils seem inevitable. There is nothing like watching the seasons turn over each other to make you feel at home in your newly adopted city.

It makes me think of Persephone – that goddess of spring, of returns, of reunions. Persephone, whose kidnapping by Hades (the god of the underworld) caused her mother, Demeter (the goddess of the earth and its harvests), to grieve so desperately that the earth slid into the quiet of winter. Not knowing where her daughter was being held hostage, Demeter journeyed the earth, searching for her everywhere with Hecate (the goddess of the crossroads). The earth waited in its winter. In response to the people’s hunger and cold, Zeus forced Hades to release Persephone. But before handing her over to Hermes (the god of boundaries and the travelers who cross them) who had come to guide her back to earth, Hades tricked her into eating four pomegranate seeds. Hades had stipulated that Persephone would be released only if she had not eaten anything during her ordeal. The four seeds she did eat obligated her to return to the underworld for four months of each year. When Persephone finally did return to earth, spring marked the end of Demeter’s grieving.

Persephone’s story – with its attendant explanations of the cyclical nature of love and grief – sounds a resonance with the potential for transformations with which spring seduces us each year.

visitations and progressions: bloomington, indiana lake lemon

2007-03-06T11:56:00.000+01:00

Today, on my last day in Indiana, Akiko and I went Sunday driving. We went to Lake Lemon, where we had gone several summers before. The lake was still frozen over in the center, although its icy edges were disappearing because of the progression towards spring. Akiko said: “Nature is moving forward to spring – that means that this is the time that we must also move forward to the next stage of our life.” We have not yet figured out what that next stage is going to be, but it was breakthrough enough to know that we have to have movement forward.

Grief can lull us into a stasis, a frozen silence, when confronted with the enormity of loss. It is an almost-impossible effort to enunciate its effects – to verbalize how specifically it fills the void of what was sundered. In his essay “The Poet,” Ralph W. Emerson writes that the quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze. To metamorphize grief into elegy, to revolutionize loss into value, is to know how to navigate tenderly, with respectful care, these icy floats upon which we need to sit for a while before we can even think of being lured back to the shore – where, as Elizabeth Bishop writes – “love will unexpectedly appear over & over again.”

Detroit International Airport

2007-03-01T20:00:00.000+01:00

It is snowing tonight in Detroit, where I fly in for my connecting flight to Indianapolis. I left Paris this morning in order to come to Indiana to be with Akiko. She has recently returned to Indiana from Japan, where her mother just passed away. I am arriving as a pilgrim of grief, knowing that the gesture of my movement here might be the main thing I am accomplishing. I am led more by love than by reason, knowing that I have nothing more concrete than presence to offer.

During the plane’s descent bringing me closer back to home, I recognize the efficient anonymity of the hotel clusters which sprout around all American airports with the speedy tenacity of mold. From the distance the sky affords, these many Marriot Inns and Motor Lodges look about as substantial as Lego villages. With the plane descending into the familiar American landscape, I feel the downward pull of grief.

The journey of grieving and its signposts are familiar. Years ago, I took a Greyhound bus from Winter Park, Florida to Lost Valley, Oregon. Up till this point, the geography of the country had been mostly abstract for me. I saw the states fly by in the square patches of color from the bus window: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California… By focusing on the details of landscape alone, I was trying to still the hollow echoes of my first relationship dissolving, devolving into nothing more mundane than love disappearing. My decision to cover the entire width of the nation by bus was my attempt physicalize the magnitude of the pain I felt. While tinged with a tad of the dramatic and the hysteric, it was the only way that I could enunciate my grief. I found comfort in the name of my Greyhound destination: Lost Valley. It was a writer’s commune in Oregon where I decided to live for a while, staying in a cabin in exchange for cultivation of the organic zucchini patch.

With the death of her mother, another color is added to the spectrum of similarities between Akiko and I. When my father died, I was two years old. I was unable to verbalize my own experience of grief; I did not have the vocabulary to grasp what had happened to him. Since then, in a way, I have been lugging behind me the body of my father, covered in a shrouded silence. While I have no answers for Akiko, I am comforted by her questions. As we retrace all the familiar steps of our shared life in Bloomington, I cling with a certainty that it is the distance I have covered which will address a love so deep that I could not otherwise name.

In the meantime, I am stringing together my epiphanies like so many Christmas lights, pinpoints of illumination against a larger darkness.

spring semester

2007-02-14T16:50:00.000+01:00

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.

returns - to the selves

2007-02-09T16:31:00.000+01:00

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...

Inter-blog-ual referencing...

2007-02-04T18:04:00.000+01:00

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.

Fragments, Roman and otherwise...

2007-02-02T19:03:00.000+01:00

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.

channeling the zeug...

2007-02-01T23:18:00.000+01:00

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:

i believe...

2007-01-24T23:18:00.000+01:00

as my friend matt says, here is the best emergency poem ever written. as i course through paris, readying to leave it tomorrow for rome, i find myself incanting it quietly, continually...

another unpublished poem of elizabeth bishop

I believe:
that the steamship will support me on the water,
& that the aeroplane will conduct me over the mountain,
that perhaps I shall not die of cancer,
or in the poorhouse,
that eventually I shall see things in a better light,
that I shall continue to read and continue to write,
that I shall continue to laugh until I cry with a certain few
friends.
that love will unexpectedly appear over & over again,
that people will continue to do kind deeds that astound me.

transplantation is necessary for all growing things...

2007-01-24T22:51:00.000+01:00

I have come to Paris to become a writer, to become happy and to become rich. With these three reasons, I duplicate the motivations of most of the other new Parisians (are these not the reasons for moving not only to Paris, but to anywhere else?) As Hemingway writes: “Transplantation is necessary for all growing things.” So, I have decided to grow in Paris. It is a bargain I struck with the city before arriving: that if I am unstinting in my sweat and inky blood, its alchemy will do the rest. And as most other emotional refugees who drift towards Paris, I have not yet worked out any of the particulars of how this is actually going to happen. But I am not worried. If any of these things are ever going to happen (unbridled creativity, happiness, riches), they are going to happen here.

And if I were to judge from the 24-hour internet centers that are fueled entirely by homesickness (their keyboards slick with nostalgia – the ache of home) or the phone booths that are populated at the most uncomfortable hours of the night by the recently arrived (in hopes of reaching those that remained behind at a decent hour), I am still very much not alone.

As hard as the clichés of Paris and the Kafkian tendencies of French bureaucracy have tried to make Paris uncomfortable for the dreamy-eyed, it still exudes its mythic power over me, over us – its hopeful tribe. Here, I feel as if my most ordinary movements become balletic and that I communicate exclusively through human electricity. There is no compromise of friendly words or empty expressions. My expatriation to Paris, like love, is devastating and reconfiguring the self that I thought I knew. And that knowledge, after its bloody entrance, is made more scrutable. Paris can still be the metonym for joy; the idea of it seems to be built on an infrastructure of inexorability. If it were not for that, we would not be here, striking out for happiness – doing something so extravagant as to dream of these wild possibilities. It would appear unseemly anywhere else...

2007-01-21T17:56:00.000+01:00

you set off, sweetie (as you said), to the stars...
like a dream of skipping stones
or skipping sapphires, rather...

do not blame me if
i choose geography,
perhaps just because it's easy - ...

we imagine an horizon, and it hardens
into faultless definition: the horizon.
it begins to illustrate imagination...
dear, other things that we imagined
were not often so obliging.
still the horizon is unbroken.

elizabeth bishop, unpublished poem

First trip back to Annonay

2006-12-29T22:01:00.000+01:00

Gare de Lyon, Paris – late Thursday afternoon, 19 October 2006

I am on my way to Annonay. I am going home by an orange train, the TGV, the national rail system which is the pride of French civil engineering. TGV is short for train grande vitesse – train of grandly quickness, as I always tried to transliterate when I was little.

I am at a café in the train station, the Gare de Lyon. I feel the necessity of situating myself geographically – and what better place to do that than in a train station?
It is a station which is named for the south-western geographical region of France it is destined to serve. Trains rocket out of the Parisian station to their own particular southern towns, their tracks like mercury traveling up and down the heat of France.
I love this train station for its glamorous shabbiness. It is illuminated by enormous white clocks, their faces hanging as huge as moons. The ceilings are made of glass and wrought iron. This particular mixture lends a sense of clarity and weight to the moment of departure, the architectural acknowledgment that the act of travel should never be regarded casually. The café is strategically placed underneath the highly hung, automated announcement board, its little letters flipped over like heavenly Scrabble tiles. Its destinations are laid out like promises – I could go to Antwerp, Bruges, Barcelona, Milan... These trains are leaving in just a few moments. I already have my European passport and a bag full of stuff. The only thing that I am missing is guts…

I am on my way to Annonay for the first time since I have arrived in Paris from Bloomington, Indiana for my teaching fellowship at the University of Paris a few weeks ago. It is two hours south by train, and then one more hour by bus. I say home, although it is more my Mom’s hometown than it ever was for me. Annonay is a place that is well rehearsed in our family mythology as a place only to be escaped, to be given only the pitying backward glance as you flee like the proverbial bat. Well, pity made more sour by guilt (an especially-deadening cocktail whose alchemy is hard to resist).

My mom left Annonay when she was 18 to go to England, she wanted to be any place other than there. Annonay is a very small town in the department of Ardèche, minuscule even, in Midwestern France. With a population of under 17,000 Annonéens, its train station was eventually closed after the last war. It does still proudly celebrate, though, its status as the birthplace of the Montgolfier Brothers and Marc Seguin. The Montgolfier Brothers were the inventors of the hot air balloon. They proudly sent a duck, a sheep and a rooster into the air in a basket suspended underneath a taffeta balloon in front of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at Versailles. Before this very glamorous show, though, the two brothers worked valiantly on prototypes. There is still a low-lying balcony that is pointed out during the infrequent town tour which they would take turns jumping out of, tightly gripping a silk umbrella.

The other famous Annonèen, Marc Seguin, thought of the wire-cable suspension bridge and the tubular steam-engine. For the relevant anniversaries of these initial vauntings of gravity and stasis, there are elaborate recreations in full-period costumes, many of which my sister and I would take part.(San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge takes Seguin's models for its blueprint). Maybe being born in such a place – a cradle for so many movement-producing machines – could have been the only appropriate birth place for as restless a citizen as my mom.
But contrasting such a dynamic history, Annonay today is shrinking to a narrowness of darkened walls and empty shop windows. Its shutters close at early, unfriendly hours. The Annonéens mutter darkly, in ugly ways, of how their Saturday morning market is being envahie, invaded, by Turks and Algerians. Complaining about immigration takes the place of conversation and logical thought.

But it is in large part for Annonay that I have come back to France, continue to come back, deciding to take this fellowship in Paris knowing that Annonay would only be two hours away.
I have come back to where, for herself, Mom could not have left quickly enough. What am I trying to find here? A continual questing led Mom to Spain through England to the United States and eventually to my own birthplace in the Middle East, in Lebanon. Do I want to return here to see if there is a germinal explanation – to see if the place itself is reason for her flight? Or are there clues in the people that she left behind? She has often said that if she had stayed in Annonay, she would have died. She is still unable, or unwilling, to articulate exactly what it is about Annonay that still fills her with the zealous flight impulse of a pilgrim. She says to have stayed in Annonay would have been a martyr's death. When she would say this to me (with an amazing and enviable lack of self-censorship) when I was a little girl, I always wondered if she imagined this tower, the Tower of the Martyrs which clings to one of the seven hills that surround the town, as the only other available option to her flight.

As i return here in this strange palindrome of geography, i find myself shuttling between imagined shadow states and cities. As I spoke to Mom on the phone before I left Paris for Annonay, she said, too casually as if only just remembering, “Oh yes, this is the weekend you go.” She told me later how strange it was for her that her daughter would be returning to Annonay alone, without her, for the first time. Was she wondering the same things? That I would find out something? In our family, chronologies and timelines are seemingly always obscured by a defensive shrouding. I have done my best to maintain that proud family tradition. Sudden departures and unexplained absences are the best way to understand my mode of travel (yes, the erotics of absence is something that I am going to look in to).

But I feel that my return to Annonay is the beginning of a much-delayed dialogue, the start of finding answers to questions that before I could only ask parenthetically. I suppose that this is what I am doing by trying to write about my journey there, writing as process of translating (myself) outwards. It is not so much the arrival in Annonay which will provide the epiphany (the sudden, intuitive leap of understanding) as the process of getting there.