Earl

In Sitka, because they are fond of them,
People have named the seals. Every seal
is named Earl because they are killed one
after another by the orca, the killer
whale; seal bodies tossed left and right
into the air. "At least he didn't get
Earl," someone says. And sure enough,
after a time, that same friendly,
bewhiskered face bobs to the surface.
It's Earl again. Well, how else are you
to live except by denial, by some
palatable fiction, some little song to
sing while the inevitable, the black and
white blindsiding fact, comes hurtling
toward you out of the deep?

by Louis Jenkins

think of the long trip home

"I have woven a parachute out of everything broken." - William Stafford

From now on, I am going to take all my broken bits and turn myself into a mosaic. I am going to use my doubled vision not for dizziness, but for depth. A many-dimensioned, beautiful mosaic.

“What is the point of nostalgia?”

This past week while I was in Bloomington, I felt like an emotional archaeologist as I was going through all the old photo albums, books, journals and letters which I have stored at Akiko’s apartment while I am “away in France.”

In my personal history, Akiko’s apartment is on a ley line. Archaeologically (in the United Kingdom), ley lines are lines which link ancient landmarks and places of worship, believed to follow the course of former routes and popularly associated with mystical phenomena. As my life splits off to multiple destinations, this apartment is a vital hub among my routes, bringing together my various selves.

Under the pretense of “arranging things to go into storage,” I tried to sift through layers of “stuff,” accumulations of my past, wondering what would slip into the emotional junkyard and what would safely land in this present life. But really, Akiko and I mainly reminisced over plum wine, excavating old stories and memories of our past years together. While I have the easy tendency to slide into a weepy glorification of the past, Akiko can efficiently reign it all in with the challenging, yet compassionate, question: “What is the point of nostalgia?”

And what is the point of nostalgia, really? Of course, the funnest, and perhaps easiest, way for me to answer these thornier questions is always etymologically. The word nostalgia can be traced through multiple linguistic traditions: it comes from the Greek nostos, meaning the return home; it also comes from the Old English genesan, which means to survive; as well as from the Sanskrit nasate, which means he approaches. While we generally understand it today as the state of being homesick, it seems that these various histories could lend a thickening and deeper resonance to the word. While our general definition usually means a longing for home, its strange juxtaposition of the words home and sick always made me wonder if it could also mean just sick of being home.

All of which perhaps gets me no closer to answering Akiko’s question. But writing this at the closing of this day – August 13 – her question carries a greater weight than it did during last week’s wine-soaked evenings. Tonight is the 3rd anniversary of Micah’s kidnapping in Iraq. It is when I think of Micah in the enclosure in the marshes of Iraq, then I can understand the point of nostalgia. With the passing of August 13th into August 14th, he lived the Sanskrit definition he approaches, because he was one day closer to the Greek definition of returning home. Most courageously, he survives.

Welcome home.

returns and rejoicings

My week in Bloomington is coming to a close. I have come for two weddings, a tête-à-tête with my director of graduate studies, and a more general rooting around my old network to find clues for what comes next.

I am at the point in my PhD that I have to decide what shall effectively provide the scaffolding for my foreseeable future: my qualifying exams. I have to come up with a list of 300-plus books which will form the basis for two days of written and oral exams. Confronted with the shaming gaps in my reading and subsequent blinding ignorance, it makes for an existentially uncomfortable process. So uncomfortable, in fact, that it births the realization that graduate school existence resembles a prolonged adolescence or reads like a bad translation of the Gallic wars. We become so acquainted with the well-worn ruse of self-sabotage due to living in such splendid isolation and interminable uncertainty that we actually imagine the rest of the world lives like this too. It is always a strange awakening to realize that other people do find a well-adjusted joy in quantifiable measures of success like a year-round paycheck, stable relationships and regular schedules. But graduate students seem to enjoy cultivating emotional extremism so much more, although it only manages to garner situational intimacy and small shipwrecks…

All frothy statements which get me no closer to the construction of my exams lists (which doubles as the composition of my life). But I do know that my return to Bloomington, my retour au sources, has brought me one step closer, my network of rhizomes providing the necessary emotional nutrition.

ceremonies of departure

On the eve of yet another departure, I find myself wondering about the ceremonies of departure. In moments of leave-taking, what are the appropriate gestures? What is the etiquette of farewell? Even with Wikipedia's help, I am unable to come up with anything other than the lyrics to a Moody Blues song. And so I wonder: why aren't there any ritualized gestures to say good-bye?

In my family, taking someone to the airport is never a casual affair. We would never think of a drive-by drop-off at the curb in which hasty embraces are foreshortened by impatient taxis carrying desperately late travelers or minivans full of Senegalese soccer players. In the pre-9/11 days, our passenger would always be accompanied to the gate by the entire family and attended to till they disappeared into the plane. Even after, we could still be seen hopping up and down hysterically, waving and screaming: "WE LOVE YOU! SEE YOU SOON! CALL AS SOON AS YOU GET IN! WE MISS YOU ALREADY!" just in case we could still be heard or our pilgrim might want to run out for an extra hug (which would not-that-rarely happen).

But I have had enough fights with enough boyfriends to know that this is not traditional. Even so, my heart never fails to sink when the moment of departure is treated lightly. For me, at the moment of the backward glance, I need to see someone standing there, seeing me off - I need a physicality to ground me emotionally as the plane lifts off. I need that moment to be witnessed - that through this departure, I am being splintered, fragmented and reformed.

Rituals, just like superstitions, are meant to comfort us when confronted with the unknown. A departure is the promise of an exponentialization, a parallel world beginning as your old world continues without you. Just because it happens so frequently in our increasingly-globalized world does not mean that a departure is no less deserving a sacrament than a baptism or marriage or funeral. In all of those other occasions, we are aware of and sensitive to the transitional nature of our lives, the reality that our positions and self-definitions can shift with acrobatic ease.

So far, the most comforting thing that I have learned about departures is the Bengali phrase for good-bye, which is "I am coming."

"the inherent insincerity of organized rites of passage"*

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

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