stasis/status

Here and there folks have been asking about this, believe it or not. Well this aside, it is a dead document as far as I'm concerned. I would be hard-pressed to imagine writing anything in here; that mindset has burnt off like early morning fog, probably for the best. In my way, I am coping with winter here. Also with tea, scotch, and an infuriating girl...okay, maybe things haven't changed that much after all! At least I have a job. Na schla, journal.*

*(I miss it miss it miss it!)

And I blushed with recognition at every word it said:

I know, I know. Michael Ondaatje, from an old favorite of mine, his memoir Running in the Family:

The thalagoya [a giant Ceylonese monitor] has a rasping tongue that "catches" and hooks objects. There is a myth that if a child is given thalagoya tongue to eat he will become brilliantly articulate, will always speak beautifully, and in his speech be able to "catch" and collect wonderful, humorous information.
...
My father, who was well aware of the legend, suggested we eat some when we were in the Ambalantota resthouse. One had just been killed there, having fallen through the roof. All the children hid screaming in the bathroom until it was time to leave.

It's funny to think about language like this, all hooks & catches, as though we're all to be nabbed like so many sea turtle hatchlings (reading lately is of Sri Lanka and Costa Rica, see); but we are, I suppose, or anyway it is pretty to think so. Pretty or vital, maybe, for me.

And so I think of this song from John's Daytrotter session, think of letters I have sent & have not sent. Is this the only reason we use words? for hooking & catching? It would be nice to believe that no, it is not - but I do not rightly know. If there were a thalagoya before me now, I would pay a tremendous price for that gift. These are maddening days, & I find myself increasingly unable to explain just what has gone on in the past twenty-odd years of my life.

So why am I writing this here? After I swore I was done? That other person who I spent this whole blog quoting remembers this - "Saint Thomas [says] we may pray for all those things we are not forbidden to want." If this has not been the tongue of a thalagoya, perhaps I can convince you that at the very least it has been some kind of prayer wheel, both a tool of wanting & an idol to all the silly desires that make up our short, crazed lives. Our eyes dim at the altar of such riotous, uncounted beauty.

"I mean, it broke what wasn't broken in there already:"

You know, I thought that last entry was a good place to quit, but all ya'll keep clicking, which I guess is the Internet 2.0 equivalent of an encore, hey? So anyway. Sort of a strange day. America tomorrow, job interview next week, a story of questionable quality being published in a respected literary journal sometime this summer. None of that is much worth talking about. Instead I will post the last section of the paper for my mountain class. I hope that it will make sense to you, as much as these past three and a half months can make sense, as much as anything we can find to tell ourselves in this short cycle of seasons we call our lives will make sense before, in our last lighted days, we find some comfort in concluding that that which we called "sense" is as much a construct of language as those things we sought to attribute to it. This was, more or less, the subject of my essay:

In May I come again and find Petřin Hill utterly changed. Everywhere the low ferns and flowering trees are exploding into blossom, and those once-uninterrupted views of the castle and of the two towns below it are now observed by the green of leaves, the blues and reds and yellows of budding flowers and the rushes of color from the flying birds, titmice and blackbirds lured by the scent of all this new weather, chased by the dogs whose winter dominance over the hill is again being challenged. Standing on the footbridge above the funicular track, heavy branches lean into my field of vision; I do not know if it is the leaves that have bent the branch, some sudden snowfall arrived before I had, or if this yearning is all on the part of the branch – if it, too, is stretching forward in search of a better view of this season-tugged beauty.

These things are not a surprise, not to anyone who has been paying attention, but to know a thing is there is not the same as to see it. Walking along a tree-tunneled Petřin path, I noticed a small green leaf floating down from the sky. I passed it by. A few meters later I came upon the same sight. This time I moved up next to it – no leaf at all, a green caterpillar was writhing there in mid-air, dancing to some arrhythmic, unknowable song; perhaps the same song hidden from me at Mácha’s Lake weeks before. I knew, I knew I knew, that it was hanging from a bit of silk, that it had come down from one of those overhanging trees shading the mid-morning sun from the path. But I could not see it, not for the life of me, not for all the molting, dancing caterpillars on all of Prague’s hills. Dillard spends an entire chapter of her narrative on “seeing.” No wonder: I saw five more caterpillars hanging from that same dangerous height just that morning, on just that path. What do you suppose we have eyes for, then?
*
In a letter to a friend, Thoreau wrote:

If you have been to the top of Mt. Washington, let me ask, what did you find
there?…Going up there and being blown on is nothing. We never do much climbing
while we are there, but we eat our luncheon very much as at home. It is after we
get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain
say? What did the mountain do?

And I cannot help but think of my own travels in the Czech Republic this way. Is it enough that I went? I suppose that no, it is not enough. But I do not know how it is that I should come to climb this mountain, if I should even be so lucky as to find it.

But let’s say I do find it, that I climb it and come back to find my life changed, having climbed this spiritual mountain to match the physical one. What words will I use to describe this journey? Should I be describing it at all?

Thoreau wants to know what the mountain said, what it did; or at least, he claims he does. But I do not believe him. No, I think the real trick comes before, to come down from that mountain, physical or spiritual, and ask those questions. Whether you answer in your own words or those of someone else does not matter so much; indeed, it doesn’t matter if you answer at all. The thing is to ask.

And we need words for that. We can climb all the mountains we want, until we are blue in the face and bone-thin from exhaustion, but unless there is a way for us to articulate that mountain to ourselves, all we will really have succeeded in doing is getting ourselves blown on. Landscape can exist without humans, and language cannot – but man cannot exist in landscape without language. This is the first mountain we climb, the first journey we make; it is the one that allows all others.

"There's no light anywhere, and nothing left to burn:"

These past few days I have been thinking a lot about ephemerality and this experience. With apologies to Mr. Brodsky there on the right, I am not so convinced that memories can be all that is left to me from these days. I lost my camera on Friday (with some 200 un-uploaded photos) and of course this is sad in its own way, but it is sadder to think that in time everything I have done here will be similarly obliterated. Already, the some 150 journal pages I've entered in the past three months are separating from the binding. Though a boy here named Eric (not to be confused with real Eric) was kind enough to point out that it just looks like I had used the journal a lot (hey), whatever positive connotations this has are nevertheless balanced out by the physical reality, the real landscape to the imagined; Marilynne Robinson: "It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall."

Nothing new, nothing new. "It's familiar, but not too familiar (and not too not-familiar)," says a songwriter I do not quote so often, for fear of drawing funny looks on the street, but he is singing about me, you know? It is all but decided that I will not be returning to Pittsburgh for any kind of living in any kind of future, and it is better this way, better to go somewhere where I can lie and lie and lie about my time in Europe, where I can use this steady deterioration of evidence to my advantage (I have had some success with this kind of dishonesty in the recent past, as some of you may know). And where there are jobs and pretty girls worth my trouble, obviously, but that must be everywhere but Pittsburgh, say?

So let's say there is nothing left to burn, then. Let's call this the last blog entry (no Prague pictures left, anyway!) and start this slow and pleasant process of forgetting. I am not one for forgetting, myself, but maybe this will be one thing left to learn here, in this city so sure of its ability to always remember.

So I got this email from the director of my program, ostensibly about "culture shock" on returning to America. Bitch please, I got all this from Leslie Pitt Abroad before I left. But there was this one part that made me laugh. Can you even imagine why?:

Family and friends may show less interest in your stories and experiences than
you expect. This may make you feel lonely, misunderstood, or unappreciated.

Less interest in my stories? Gasp! You guys are all still interested in my stories, right? I mean, you like to hear me talk about the snow-white pigeon I saw today, or how the sun reflecting off the bust of Franz Kafka in the square the bears his name actually made it look, just for a moment, a little bit like Kafka, or the boys I saw in the same square sitting on the ground drawing fantastic palaces and castles in sketchbooks...right?

i know we don't talk much, but you're such a good talker:

This morning on the tram I noticed an attractive young lady studying what appeared to be a workbook in the Czech language. "How interesting," I said to myself, "perhaps I will peek over her shoulder a bit more." Upon doing so, I found that only half of the workbook was in Czech. The other half, it turns out, was in Swedish. That's right, friends, she was teaching herself Swedish. Goodness, I don't even know what I could say to someone in that situation. "Kanske ar jag kar I dig," I suppose. Thanks, Jens.

don't mention lost coastlines, where nothing actually seen has been mapped or outlined:

Oh, I actually do have a cute little blog here, don't I? Well, not for much longer; three weeks left on the Continent. How shall I celebrate? Today I celebrated by making a pretend syllabus for a class I want to teach when I grow up. Earlier this week I made a list of all the things in life I "like" (you were all lumped into the category of "pretty girls." Yeah, even the boys.) in the hopes of, gosh let's say "mapping" them to potential jobs. My suitemate suggested this means I should be a party-planner, then asked me how my breakdown was going:

"Oh yeah, I am breaking down these interests!"
"..."
"You didn't mean that kind of breakdown, did you?"

I hope do some kind of meet & greet with the Pitt Study Abroad folks when I get back so I can explain all of these things to them. I am really good at explaining things; I left that off my list. Be right back!