In the interstices of my daily life, I always look through my notebooks that I keep in my bag. These aren't the Moleskines that so many people who write keep. They're spiral-bound, college-ruled, completely throwaway, and are as filled with idle doodles and grocery lists as they are with intentional writing.
Looking back, I realize just how much I've been writing so much about the idea of home: what it has meant to me and what it means to the general populace. Is it an idea that can even be defined? Or is it one of those concepts, like love, that perpetually floats on the edge of definition. We can think of examples, we can use other definitions to touch on aspects of the idea, but we can't actually nail it down.
That concept, that word is so loaded. Some people know where their home is in the world. They were born somewhere and never left, or they arrived in some city and stayed and stayed. But I'm always searching for someplace that nurtures me, as if I'm a tropical plant that needs a specific soil pH and a specific mineral profile to thrive.
When I write, I like to think about the big questions of space, dialectic, the city, the meaning of Enlightenment. I don't write about the couch I'm sitting on, the weather, the coffee I'm drinking. I write my ideas down, and stare at the world around me. I am sitting in a planetarium, focused on the stars above me, not the seat where I am lying prone.
But this apartment, where I've lived for a year and a half-- longer than anywhere else I've lived since leaving my parents' house-- is the home base for all of these explorations. I sleep in this bed, I read the newspaper under this afghan.
It took a while for me to truly feel like I was living in this apartment instead of merely occupying it. My roommate had lived here far longer, and initially-- as all roommates and sublets feel-- I felt like a houseguest rather than a resident. This was her furniture, these were her books. I knew where the glasses were kept and I washed them after I was finished with them, but this was just what any good houseguest did.
But slowly I came to inhabit it. I acquired things. I got a rice steamer and a food processor and an expensive coffee maker, a desk, a floor lamp. I filled the cabinets with spices and the liquor cabinet with whiskey. Every day, I repeated banal actions, brushing my teeth and baking bread, filling trash cans with used Q-Tips and pencil shavings.
I became familiar with the walks around the neighborhood. Each contour became familiar, the precise gradient of each hill, the time it took to walk to the coffee shop or the grocery store. I waved to the neighbors when they were out smoking cigarettes on their patio, and waited for the bus with the same several people.
And I fell in love with the view over Lake Washington towards the Cascade Mountains. At sunset, I looked out at neighborhoods on distant hills. Somewhere, I imagined, on that hill, there was a girl at a cafe looking up from her book and staring back in my direction. Our gazes met each other and we never knew it.
When I leave this apartment, I will give up the things I own. I'll sell the nice things and give away the cheap things. My posters will come down off the bedroom wall, leaving rectangular outlines in the accumulated dust. My books on the shelves will disappear. The paper towels I bought will get used up, the hair I left in the drain unplugged and thrown out. My imprint on the apartment will get fainter and fainter until it becomes indiscernible. New people will move in, with their own lives and their own things and their own stories of what happened in this exact space.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Memory and Intent
A recent instance of déjà vu: I step out of the shower and into my cold livingroom. The ashen Northwest winter light comes in through dusty windows.
There is something in the tone and the granulation of the paint in my apartment. I am momentarily transported to someplace I think I remember, a house somewhere back in the neighborhood I grew up in. I can almost hear a Chicago Cubs game playing on a chipped, sea-green radio, almost feel my bare feet sinking into worn, scratchy carpeting, almost smell instant mashed potatoes and gravy and the stale coffee left over from that morning.
Déjà vu doesn't transport me to the places I've loved, or to any place that I've traveled. It takes me to early childhood, to quiet towns in the American grain belt. In my conscious memory I remember hiking on the Italian coast and summer evenings drinking beer on patios. In my unconscious memory, all I can see are switchyards and blacktop roads cutting through cornfields.
The one exception is musical memory. When I have a specific memory of a piece of music, it has nothing to do with a momentous event. It doesn't send me to anywhere important. In the age of the MP3, recorded music is what we use to fill in our lives, and it occupies our commutes, our long, lonely drives, the hours we spent cleaning our houses. When we find a piece of music evocative of a certain moment, we think of light, of color, of wind coming through an open window.
When we listen to a song and remember our associations with it, we are not remembering the actual associations. Every time we listen to that song, we overlay a new set of experiences onto the memories we want to hold on to, and we become more and more distant from our own memories. That memory-picture becomes blurred, filled in with white noise. It's when you can't remember the name of a song, when you think you'll never hear it again, that your memory will remain pure.
The nerves connecting the eardrum and the brain can send signals in both directions. Consequently, remembered music can be heard by the ear, as clearly as if it was coming from a speaker. The songs of my life nag me in bed late at night, and I feel as if I can hear the world spinning.
So many of the things we remember are very discrete and practical-- we need to remember what to buy at the grocery store, or the name of a co-worker's child. Maybe we remember some commonly held fact like the name of the Vice President of the United States.
What interests me far more is the memory that is unintentional, the moments when you are suddenly struck by something long-forgotten, when memories collide, when memories supersede your current reality. Déjà vu ends. I am standing in my livingroom, unmistakably here and now. A bit of sun shines on a far hill, and I can hear the cat meowing outside my window.
There is something in the tone and the granulation of the paint in my apartment. I am momentarily transported to someplace I think I remember, a house somewhere back in the neighborhood I grew up in. I can almost hear a Chicago Cubs game playing on a chipped, sea-green radio, almost feel my bare feet sinking into worn, scratchy carpeting, almost smell instant mashed potatoes and gravy and the stale coffee left over from that morning.
Déjà vu doesn't transport me to the places I've loved, or to any place that I've traveled. It takes me to early childhood, to quiet towns in the American grain belt. In my conscious memory I remember hiking on the Italian coast and summer evenings drinking beer on patios. In my unconscious memory, all I can see are switchyards and blacktop roads cutting through cornfields.
The one exception is musical memory. When I have a specific memory of a piece of music, it has nothing to do with a momentous event. It doesn't send me to anywhere important. In the age of the MP3, recorded music is what we use to fill in our lives, and it occupies our commutes, our long, lonely drives, the hours we spent cleaning our houses. When we find a piece of music evocative of a certain moment, we think of light, of color, of wind coming through an open window.
When we listen to a song and remember our associations with it, we are not remembering the actual associations. Every time we listen to that song, we overlay a new set of experiences onto the memories we want to hold on to, and we become more and more distant from our own memories. That memory-picture becomes blurred, filled in with white noise. It's when you can't remember the name of a song, when you think you'll never hear it again, that your memory will remain pure.
The nerves connecting the eardrum and the brain can send signals in both directions. Consequently, remembered music can be heard by the ear, as clearly as if it was coming from a speaker. The songs of my life nag me in bed late at night, and I feel as if I can hear the world spinning.
So many of the things we remember are very discrete and practical-- we need to remember what to buy at the grocery store, or the name of a co-worker's child. Maybe we remember some commonly held fact like the name of the Vice President of the United States.
What interests me far more is the memory that is unintentional, the moments when you are suddenly struck by something long-forgotten, when memories collide, when memories supersede your current reality. Déjà vu ends. I am standing in my livingroom, unmistakably here and now. A bit of sun shines on a far hill, and I can hear the cat meowing outside my window.
Monday, November 21, 2011
On Pike & Boren
Four pillars stand on the corner of Pike Street and Boren Avenue, on the Western edge of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. In the summer, gutter punk kids hang out there, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, busking for quarters.
Until the '60s, these columns held up the entrance of Plymouth Congregational Church, demolished when I-5 was built They have been left as remnants of an older, more innocent Seattle, a quiet Victorian seaside town that only exists today in faded photographs. Stripped of their Ionic capitals, they jut out of the Earth. It is a monument without memory, a footnote to a glittering young city.
The skyline has become the symbol of the American city, the Protestant work ethic translated into an image. It is the glossy picture on the cover of every tourist brochure, of every Chamber of Commerce booklet.
Approach closer. At night in downtown Seattle, you see empty office buildings glowing with cold fluorescent light, crackheads muttering to themselves on street corners, the homeless Indians, the secure entrances with triple-sheets of plate glass, rough concrete walls, loading docks. The contradictions of the city are made apparent.
In ancient ruins, the monuments have been cleansed of their contradictions. We only have sphinxes and palladia, the glories of the past. In the 19th Century, the Brits built fake Roman ruins on the manicured grounds of their estates, an attempt to transpose a nostalgia for the halcyon days of Greece and Rome to their own provincial, petty aristocracy.
At Sukhothai, I wandered among crumbling laterite stupas and elegantly carved Buddhas. On the bone-dry plains of Central Thailand, all that was left were pools and palaces, temples and throne halls. Gone were the ordinary rice farmers and laborers, the Lao slaves, the lepers, the broken backs and crushed arms, the purges and burnings. We have only traces of ancient majesty, the serenity of the dharma-king.
So much of the modern skyline is made of glass and steel. With North American weather, it seems likely that they will fold and crumble. All that will remain of Seattle's Washington Mutual Tower, Space Needle, and Columbia Center will be fragments. They will dissolve into silica and ferric oxide.
This isn't a bad thing. Albert Speer famously designed his Nazi halls to decay beautifully, to evoke the romantic sensibility of future poets. There's a sick fatalism in that, a sort of cultural refusal to consider present realities, a privileging of the mythic over the real.
I walk past the pillars again. The sun is setting behind the Olympic Mountains. What is beautiful and valuable about a city isn't the monuments it builds, the narratives it tells itself. It is transient moments like this, when light and color and shadow seem perfectly harmonized. The dark shape of a ship, loaded with cargo bound for Asia, cuts across the still water of the sound. I wait for a moment and stare, breathing in the cold air, before walking back up the hill to go have a slice of pizza and a drink.
Until the '60s, these columns held up the entrance of Plymouth Congregational Church, demolished when I-5 was built They have been left as remnants of an older, more innocent Seattle, a quiet Victorian seaside town that only exists today in faded photographs. Stripped of their Ionic capitals, they jut out of the Earth. It is a monument without memory, a footnote to a glittering young city.
The skyline has become the symbol of the American city, the Protestant work ethic translated into an image. It is the glossy picture on the cover of every tourist brochure, of every Chamber of Commerce booklet.
Approach closer. At night in downtown Seattle, you see empty office buildings glowing with cold fluorescent light, crackheads muttering to themselves on street corners, the homeless Indians, the secure entrances with triple-sheets of plate glass, rough concrete walls, loading docks. The contradictions of the city are made apparent.
In ancient ruins, the monuments have been cleansed of their contradictions. We only have sphinxes and palladia, the glories of the past. In the 19th Century, the Brits built fake Roman ruins on the manicured grounds of their estates, an attempt to transpose a nostalgia for the halcyon days of Greece and Rome to their own provincial, petty aristocracy.
At Sukhothai, I wandered among crumbling laterite stupas and elegantly carved Buddhas. On the bone-dry plains of Central Thailand, all that was left were pools and palaces, temples and throne halls. Gone were the ordinary rice farmers and laborers, the Lao slaves, the lepers, the broken backs and crushed arms, the purges and burnings. We have only traces of ancient majesty, the serenity of the dharma-king.
So much of the modern skyline is made of glass and steel. With North American weather, it seems likely that they will fold and crumble. All that will remain of Seattle's Washington Mutual Tower, Space Needle, and Columbia Center will be fragments. They will dissolve into silica and ferric oxide.
This isn't a bad thing. Albert Speer famously designed his Nazi halls to decay beautifully, to evoke the romantic sensibility of future poets. There's a sick fatalism in that, a sort of cultural refusal to consider present realities, a privileging of the mythic over the real.
I walk past the pillars again. The sun is setting behind the Olympic Mountains. What is beautiful and valuable about a city isn't the monuments it builds, the narratives it tells itself. It is transient moments like this, when light and color and shadow seem perfectly harmonized. The dark shape of a ship, loaded with cargo bound for Asia, cuts across the still water of the sound. I wait for a moment and stare, breathing in the cold air, before walking back up the hill to go have a slice of pizza and a drink.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Linguistic Reality
Maybe a year ago, I experienced a horror at what seemed to be a complete slippage between my language and my thoughts. I became convinced that my words for emotional states and abstract concepts were ultimately flawed. The way I used them seemed different than the way everyone else did. I felt, momentarily, that my voice had been stolen. When I rode the bus home every day, I floated, unsure of my own world, among strangers.
It's not like most of our words have a concrete, permanent meaning. There is at least some degree of arbitrariness in what we speak. It reminds me of that lovely quote by Wittgenstein:
"Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."
For whatever reason, I've met a lot of linguists in the past couple years. And so many of them have this sort of autistic relationship to the world. It's as if linguistics is their own way of discovering human society. They take interpersonal communication-- something so subtle and difficult and loaded and impressionistic-- and change it into a precise scientific reduction. Everything is parsed into phonemes and morphemes, syntax and semantics. Positive science is the barrier they erect against the maelstrom of social reality.
When you're younger, language seems like a matter of precise terms. You're learning new words constantly, and they all have a meaning. In school, you learn the rules of grammar and spelling, synonyms and antonyms. But as you get older, that linguistic certainty is shaken. Suddenly, there is context, history, questionable definitions. There is the exhilaration and the terror of discovering one's own subjectivity.
I suppose I'm trying to determine my relationship to my words because I've been trying, over the past year or so, to make my living as a writer of some kind or another. And to a certain degree I've succeeded. I've had more or less steady writing work. But as my current contract draws to a close, I have to wonder "is everything going to turn out OK?"
For me, reading and writing is the nearest thing I've ever had to a religion. In school, the point of reading was, for the most part, a vital part of some quest for knowledge/truth/etc. But outside of a life as a student, I stopped reading books to learn more about the world. Instead it became, above all else, a form of therapy.
At the twilight of the Roman Empire, the fallen Senator Boethius sat in his jail cell, contemplating Aristotle and Cicero. The important thing wasn't the conveyed knowledge. It was that a great idea can ameliorate the boredom and the loneliness and the meaninglessness of day-to-day life.
My coffee is getting cold and it's starting to rain. But then, after five minutes in front of a Russian novel, I pass into a world mediated by someone else's language, and everything dissolves into light.
It's not like most of our words have a concrete, permanent meaning. There is at least some degree of arbitrariness in what we speak. It reminds me of that lovely quote by Wittgenstein:
"Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."
For whatever reason, I've met a lot of linguists in the past couple years. And so many of them have this sort of autistic relationship to the world. It's as if linguistics is their own way of discovering human society. They take interpersonal communication-- something so subtle and difficult and loaded and impressionistic-- and change it into a precise scientific reduction. Everything is parsed into phonemes and morphemes, syntax and semantics. Positive science is the barrier they erect against the maelstrom of social reality.
When you're younger, language seems like a matter of precise terms. You're learning new words constantly, and they all have a meaning. In school, you learn the rules of grammar and spelling, synonyms and antonyms. But as you get older, that linguistic certainty is shaken. Suddenly, there is context, history, questionable definitions. There is the exhilaration and the terror of discovering one's own subjectivity.
I suppose I'm trying to determine my relationship to my words because I've been trying, over the past year or so, to make my living as a writer of some kind or another. And to a certain degree I've succeeded. I've had more or less steady writing work. But as my current contract draws to a close, I have to wonder "is everything going to turn out OK?"
For me, reading and writing is the nearest thing I've ever had to a religion. In school, the point of reading was, for the most part, a vital part of some quest for knowledge/truth/etc. But outside of a life as a student, I stopped reading books to learn more about the world. Instead it became, above all else, a form of therapy.
At the twilight of the Roman Empire, the fallen Senator Boethius sat in his jail cell, contemplating Aristotle and Cicero. The important thing wasn't the conveyed knowledge. It was that a great idea can ameliorate the boredom and the loneliness and the meaninglessness of day-to-day life.
My coffee is getting cold and it's starting to rain. But then, after five minutes in front of a Russian novel, I pass into a world mediated by someone else's language, and everything dissolves into light.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
The Rainbow
I've been taking the bus home every day across Lake Washington, along the curvilinear form of the Evergreen Point Bridge. It floats on pontoons for most of its span, and you spend most of the ride seeming to skim the surface, gray water meeting gray skies.
The sun barely peeks out from the light rain, and suddenly a rainbow is refracted over Laurelhurst. You see the hilly neighborhood through it, and the paint on each house is slightly modified by some point on the natural spectrum.
It is in these fleeting occasions, when the shape of the city is suddenly, briefly transformed, that you come to look on a place as you never perceived it before. Through the veil, something you see every day explodes with new life. Suddenly, minute details become obvious-- an A-frame on a hillside, a row of poplar trees-- and every time you pass by them now, you notice them. The experience of a place becomes permanently altered by a single moment. The rainbow isn't just an optical effect. It is a catalyst of perceptive transformation.
When I see somewhere for the first time, I automatically transfix it my mind as the "natural" appearance of a place. It is my first clear vision of what that place is. Maybe it will change gradually and imperceptibly. Maybe it will change overnight, suddenly destroyed. But either way, when we notice it again, after an absence, we are staring at the remnants of what was there before. Maybe it was someplace you cherished-- it could have been the spot where you had your first kiss, the backyard where you lost your first tooth. When we look back on a place, it is all caught up in nostalgia and sentiment.
If we see that place over and over again, our picture of it conforms to its new reality. That old image is contorted until it is nothing but a Vaseline-smeared trace of what it once was. When we recall it, we see flickers of light, but it ultimately recedes back into darkness.
My old preschool was torn down sometime in the past several years, and the last time I was back in my ville natale, I walked down the gravel alley that ran behind the lot where it once stood. For the first time in 20 years, I saw a power line along the alley disappear behind a huge oak tree. When I last saw it, I was standing in a pea gravel yard in a T-shirt, and shorts, staring up at the adult world, at the dusty Impalas and Caprice Classics the teachers drove, their grilles at eye level. The shade of the oak tree marked the end of the known world. Beyond, was a sun-dappled yard I would never set foot in.
Some day, I'd like to go to all the places I've ever inhabited, seeing what's changed, what's remained static. Having examined the scope of my life through the places I've lived, I can say I saw the timeline of my life made manifest in space. I can say who I was and who I am. When I come back to the place where I live now, I will see that a crack in the paint has appeared, and a cobwebbed bookshelf has been cleaned, new carpeting put down. But the light that hits the kitchen on wintry Sunday mornings will remain.
The sun barely peeks out from the light rain, and suddenly a rainbow is refracted over Laurelhurst. You see the hilly neighborhood through it, and the paint on each house is slightly modified by some point on the natural spectrum.
It is in these fleeting occasions, when the shape of the city is suddenly, briefly transformed, that you come to look on a place as you never perceived it before. Through the veil, something you see every day explodes with new life. Suddenly, minute details become obvious-- an A-frame on a hillside, a row of poplar trees-- and every time you pass by them now, you notice them. The experience of a place becomes permanently altered by a single moment. The rainbow isn't just an optical effect. It is a catalyst of perceptive transformation.
When I see somewhere for the first time, I automatically transfix it my mind as the "natural" appearance of a place. It is my first clear vision of what that place is. Maybe it will change gradually and imperceptibly. Maybe it will change overnight, suddenly destroyed. But either way, when we notice it again, after an absence, we are staring at the remnants of what was there before. Maybe it was someplace you cherished-- it could have been the spot where you had your first kiss, the backyard where you lost your first tooth. When we look back on a place, it is all caught up in nostalgia and sentiment.
If we see that place over and over again, our picture of it conforms to its new reality. That old image is contorted until it is nothing but a Vaseline-smeared trace of what it once was. When we recall it, we see flickers of light, but it ultimately recedes back into darkness.
My old preschool was torn down sometime in the past several years, and the last time I was back in my ville natale, I walked down the gravel alley that ran behind the lot where it once stood. For the first time in 20 years, I saw a power line along the alley disappear behind a huge oak tree. When I last saw it, I was standing in a pea gravel yard in a T-shirt, and shorts, staring up at the adult world, at the dusty Impalas and Caprice Classics the teachers drove, their grilles at eye level. The shade of the oak tree marked the end of the known world. Beyond, was a sun-dappled yard I would never set foot in.
Some day, I'd like to go to all the places I've ever inhabited, seeing what's changed, what's remained static. Having examined the scope of my life through the places I've lived, I can say I saw the timeline of my life made manifest in space. I can say who I was and who I am. When I come back to the place where I live now, I will see that a crack in the paint has appeared, and a cobwebbed bookshelf has been cleaned, new carpeting put down. But the light that hits the kitchen on wintry Sunday mornings will remain.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Color Video
I was sent a video of a lazy Sunday afternoon in Germany, 1937: carnival rides and wheat fields, men drinking beer at the picnic table, couples waltzing outdoors.
We've all seen the images of National Socialism in black and white: the videos of Hitler's speeches before lit torches, Leni Riefenstahl's rapturous shots of parades crossing the Brandenburg Gate.
But it was only when I saw them in color that they really took on a human shape. The swastika flag banners billow in the wind as buses cross in front of them. Those ordinary people heiling cease to look like fascist automatons, and start to look like the Midwesterners I grew up with. It is in this color-soaked reality in real time that fascism becomes apparent for what it is: an ideology that ordinary people willingly took into their hearts. While we've all been told that the potential for evil lies within all of us, it takes a striking image for us to really feel that. Roland Barthes said that the existence of slavery was never real to him until he saw a snapshot of a slave market. There is no veil of history, there is only shocking immediacy.
You don't even necessarily have to see the evidence of a historical event to feel the reality of it in a video artifact. Seang Dy sings in the wedding, a warbling voice from a lost world. You stare into the faces of dozens of people who were almost certainly murdered a few years later. They sip their champagne, blissfully unaware of their fates.
The Internet makes it so much easier to sort through odd pieces of audio and video from other worlds: Syrian pop music, North Korean propaganda, Nigerian cinema, old photos of a long-dead '80s Lower East Side Bohemia, home movies from Mississippi in the '50s. These fragments and ephemera-- memories of individual people, memories of families, memories of towns, memories of whole cultures-- have found some kind of new life, or at least a stay on their execution, on the web.
You find these things through links from websites, links from friends, links from other videos, links from Google searches, links from Youtube searches, intentional searches, accidental searches, misspellings, serendipity. You wade through countless awful viral videos and talentless hacks' terrible covers of songs you like and trollish comments to find gems scattered in the trash heap of the collective consciousness.
I've always had that tendency to pore through the volumes of cultural history, hunting down the weird, the arcane, the baffling, and the shocking. I don't especially care about most new books that come out, I have no desire to keep up with the latest raved-about writer-- all I wanna do is find something transcendent. Fuck Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers. I wanna read about people selling human body parts on the Russian steppes during the reign of Czar Nicholas I. Each found piece of media isn't just a pop song or a snapshot. It's a portal to another world, another set of lives, another set of mores, a radically different experience connected to you by a thin thread of common humanity.
It follows then, that our cultures, our lives, our memories have the potential to leave this kind of imprint after they're gone, with wildly different effects on different people. When someone finds a picture of me in a box in 50 years, what will they see? What meanings, what connections lie in the notes I scribble on bookmarks? And at what date will the last vestige of my being be an unremembered image?
We've all seen the images of National Socialism in black and white: the videos of Hitler's speeches before lit torches, Leni Riefenstahl's rapturous shots of parades crossing the Brandenburg Gate.
But it was only when I saw them in color that they really took on a human shape. The swastika flag banners billow in the wind as buses cross in front of them. Those ordinary people heiling cease to look like fascist automatons, and start to look like the Midwesterners I grew up with. It is in this color-soaked reality in real time that fascism becomes apparent for what it is: an ideology that ordinary people willingly took into their hearts. While we've all been told that the potential for evil lies within all of us, it takes a striking image for us to really feel that. Roland Barthes said that the existence of slavery was never real to him until he saw a snapshot of a slave market. There is no veil of history, there is only shocking immediacy.
You don't even necessarily have to see the evidence of a historical event to feel the reality of it in a video artifact. Seang Dy sings in the wedding, a warbling voice from a lost world. You stare into the faces of dozens of people who were almost certainly murdered a few years later. They sip their champagne, blissfully unaware of their fates.
The Internet makes it so much easier to sort through odd pieces of audio and video from other worlds: Syrian pop music, North Korean propaganda, Nigerian cinema, old photos of a long-dead '80s Lower East Side Bohemia, home movies from Mississippi in the '50s. These fragments and ephemera-- memories of individual people, memories of families, memories of towns, memories of whole cultures-- have found some kind of new life, or at least a stay on their execution, on the web.
You find these things through links from websites, links from friends, links from other videos, links from Google searches, links from Youtube searches, intentional searches, accidental searches, misspellings, serendipity. You wade through countless awful viral videos and talentless hacks' terrible covers of songs you like and trollish comments to find gems scattered in the trash heap of the collective consciousness.
I've always had that tendency to pore through the volumes of cultural history, hunting down the weird, the arcane, the baffling, and the shocking. I don't especially care about most new books that come out, I have no desire to keep up with the latest raved-about writer-- all I wanna do is find something transcendent. Fuck Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers. I wanna read about people selling human body parts on the Russian steppes during the reign of Czar Nicholas I. Each found piece of media isn't just a pop song or a snapshot. It's a portal to another world, another set of lives, another set of mores, a radically different experience connected to you by a thin thread of common humanity.
It follows then, that our cultures, our lives, our memories have the potential to leave this kind of imprint after they're gone, with wildly different effects on different people. When someone finds a picture of me in a box in 50 years, what will they see? What meanings, what connections lie in the notes I scribble on bookmarks? And at what date will the last vestige of my being be an unremembered image?
Sunday, September 18, 2011
The Burmese Harp
I spent the night in and watched an old Japanese movie, The Burmese Harp from 1956. The war has ended. A Japanese soldier, saved by a monk, stays behind on the baking plains of Lower Burma and dons monastic robes, burying the dead and praying for the foreigners who died in that distant land. The director, Kon Ichikawa, lets the story tell itself without words, through meaningful looks, songs, and flying birds, and above all through the Burmese landscape: endless red clay plains, great silty rivers, decrepit reclining Buddhas, and crumbling limestone mountains.
The skies are turning steely, and I'm living in a pale, icy city, thinking of a sunny land wreathed in incense that I once occupied. Thinking of an old Morrissey song. Every day is like Sunday, every day is silent and gray.
I'd like to think I've chosen where I live. But I'm not sure that I have. But then again, I don't know that I don't belong here. Wherever I've lived, I've been looking for something that seems like home, someplace I can wrap myself in like a blanket.
Our sense of being home is probably a product of our daily routines and patterns, but it's also an accumulation of the fleeting joys that deviate from the daily routine, the little unplanned moments that somehow carry deep resonance. Walking down the street to the store, past rows and rows of identical World War I-era bungalows, ragged palm trees, rusted-out Volvos. And then a weak light pierces the clouds. You pick a blackberry from a bush growing on the margin of the freeway, and it is warmed by the Sun, a whole summer's worth of photosynthetic energy compressed into a dark, sweet taste.
In Thai, the word for home is บ้าน, pronounced "ban," the same word for "village" and "place." All conception of space is made of concentric circles radiating out from a single point. The French have concepts like "patrie" and "chez ____," which have the sort of deep-seated nostalgia, cultural ownership, and Gaullist conservatism I've come to expect from academic French.
By most measures, my home should be the town I grew up in, where I spent the first 17 years of my life. But it isn't. I try to envision it as home, and I come up empty. I've been there twice in the past three and a half years-- that's not a home, that's a distant remembrance.
Every place I have inhabited has come to be occupied by my doppelgangers, individual lives, with their own jobs and friends and hopes and day-to-day routines and worries. They are linked by a continuum of common memory, but I myself, the repository for that memory, seem to occupy none of them.
Somewhere, far away from here, far away from there, I am sitting quietly in a small box deep under the surface of the Earth, staring at nothing, endlessly cycling through the fragments of memory, recalling them, combining them, trying to make sense of them.
The skies are turning steely, and I'm living in a pale, icy city, thinking of a sunny land wreathed in incense that I once occupied. Thinking of an old Morrissey song. Every day is like Sunday, every day is silent and gray.
I'd like to think I've chosen where I live. But I'm not sure that I have. But then again, I don't know that I don't belong here. Wherever I've lived, I've been looking for something that seems like home, someplace I can wrap myself in like a blanket.
Our sense of being home is probably a product of our daily routines and patterns, but it's also an accumulation of the fleeting joys that deviate from the daily routine, the little unplanned moments that somehow carry deep resonance. Walking down the street to the store, past rows and rows of identical World War I-era bungalows, ragged palm trees, rusted-out Volvos. And then a weak light pierces the clouds. You pick a blackberry from a bush growing on the margin of the freeway, and it is warmed by the Sun, a whole summer's worth of photosynthetic energy compressed into a dark, sweet taste.
In Thai, the word for home is บ้าน, pronounced "ban," the same word for "village" and "place." All conception of space is made of concentric circles radiating out from a single point. The French have concepts like "patrie" and "chez ____," which have the sort of deep-seated nostalgia, cultural ownership, and Gaullist conservatism I've come to expect from academic French.
By most measures, my home should be the town I grew up in, where I spent the first 17 years of my life. But it isn't. I try to envision it as home, and I come up empty. I've been there twice in the past three and a half years-- that's not a home, that's a distant remembrance.
Every place I have inhabited has come to be occupied by my doppelgangers, individual lives, with their own jobs and friends and hopes and day-to-day routines and worries. They are linked by a continuum of common memory, but I myself, the repository for that memory, seem to occupy none of them.
Somewhere, far away from here, far away from there, I am sitting quietly in a small box deep under the surface of the Earth, staring at nothing, endlessly cycling through the fragments of memory, recalling them, combining them, trying to make sense of them.
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