The Last Midnight

The book is heavy in my hand, a tangible reminder of why I am parting with it.

I had waited until my final day in Atlanta to receive it in the mail: Michael Cunningham's newest book, based, I am told, on Joyce rather than Woolf. The title, however, alludes to Andersen's Snow Queen, displayed prominently on a blue jacket with white flakes of snow (but perhaps ash). It was, I realized, the first book I read in Poland. The first week was spent on trams, learning to navigate the city (a laughable task in retrospect), and reading the chapters of this precious book which anchored me in a bizarre way to the familiarity and routines of a home where I no longer lived but yearned for, none the less. It allowed for the comforts of home, the memories of the ordinary to exist simultaneously in the chaos of novelty, the thrill of living in an entirely new place.

However, for the trek back to America, a hardcover book is a criminal luxury. Simply holding it I could feel the tinges of pain in my lower-back. Should I take this with me, I would have no resolve. I would rescue the Margaret Atwood novel, the Cormack McCarthy novel, the Brecht play. They would all make the journey tucked into my backpack. They had become, I realized, heavy burdens that were once enjoyed, cherished for the moments of enjoyment and entertainment they offered. They were like seashells issued from a beach, soaked in a bucket of bleach water to remove the smell of the ocean and toted the stretch of highway between Tampa and Gainesville as part of the annual Shook family pilgrimage to the Florida coast. Upon arrival, they would sit on a shelf in the garage, blanched, dead, and only nominally reminiscent of the ocean at all as they collected dust until being thrown out a few years later. These books, I decided, would be left for someone else to enjoy (or perhaps dislike and disregard in their own time).

I look out the window at the skyline. It is uninspired and dull against the iron-grey clouds that antedated a summer shower. The concept of summer is used lightly here. It is 61 degrees and I am in the same flannel and sweater that I wore in those early days of October. Small drops of rain shatter against the glass and I realize this will most likely be the last time I look at Poznan, wedged on a tram between the endless gray spiral of a reconstructed medieval city fortified by concrete apartments and other monuments to thrift and the perfectly angular Lake Malta, organized into rows for the easy of kayakers and rowers, the ghost of a winter ski slope jutting out in the distance.

*****
I am writing now from the twin bed of a modest, though tasteful, hotel room within view of the airport. The sky outside has turned ice-blue with the linger of a perpetual summer twilight which illuminates the late evening with a stubborn diligence. It seems as though I am waking from some sort of spell. The past months have flown while still creeping slowly. I had not anticipated their termination, realizing my time's swift conclusion casually, gazing at the year like sand in an hourglass, impossible to track but only visible in accumulation. I am prepared now to close the curtains, to release this year into space and have it dissolve into the cool summer air like the bronze chimes of vespers bells that I could hear from my bedroom, followed by the metal call of a trumpet, like the woodsmoke that lingered on cold evenings as I walked the dark sidewalk from the tram stop to my apartment, a distance I dismissed as irritatingly far, but also perfect for thinking and unwinding from the day's events.

In twelve hours, I will be on a plane, arching over the ocean back to the familiarity of home, of long-absent friends, of the eager family that must grow tired of my inability to remain.

In twelve hours, I will look down on the place from where I currently look upwards and say my final goodbyes to an unlikely home, a quiet place that managed to surprise me at every turn with its ghosts walking side-by-side with the living, the ones who look at their days as something infinite, uncountable, and filled with the promise of twilight morphing into tomorrow's sunrise.

It feels right and wrong at the same time.

With Love from Warsaw
06/21/2015

And Lots of Security

The door, I am told, was padded less for the occupants safety and more to muffle the sound of cries for help and the shrieking of those deranged from torture.

They were, however, in a basement, windows bricked, cool, almost chilly despite the radiating heat of a June afternoon pulsating outside. Inside the cell, a straightjacket hangs from the black-iron tooth of a coatrack (aggressive, jagged, and designed to disturb). The jacket, too, is black with sleeves extending across the room, levitating like some fearful ghost of victorian literature.

 I am taken aback, feeling suddenly sick. The English translations call the room "the grimiest" place in the building (this includes the room where executions were carried out and the showers which, despite running both hot and cold water, were always set to an extreme temperature for amusement). The layers above are less jarring. The building, an enormous municipal, neo-classical number still houses a functioning courthouse and other public offices. In fact, we made the mistake of walking into the courts before finding the appropriate entrance on the other side. Bricks in the wall contain the names of "martyrs" (those, for our purposes, killed by the KGB which used to operate within the building).  The offices are maintained to some degree to give visitors a vibe of what enormous destruction a single bureaucratic system was capable of.

This is another jarring moment of contrast. The neatness, the organization of the institution is apparent (though not necessarily highlighted). Offices were no doubt bright, efficient, and tidy. Rubber stamps gave endorsement or rejection. There were rooms for coats, heavy wooden desks, wardrobes, no doubt. Yet underneath, prisoners were housed, interrogated, and, sometimes, shot in the years of Stalinism just below the floorboards of these offices in a maze of concrete and metal.

The museum is not without politics. Some criticize the space as anti-communist propaganda, an almost violent-erotic display of NATO's vendetta against the USSR to the point of atoning the crimes of the NS (who killed many more people in this area). It is true that the focus is on the communists and with virtually no mentioning of the crimes of the NS (which is marked in a separate museum). Pictures are flashed in every room. Deportations. Mugshots. Smiling partisans. The whiteness of a forehead disrupted by a bullet hole and left as a warning to the politically sympathetic.

In Tallinn, a similar building was left unopened to the public, converted into apartments and recognizable only by the bricks that cover the basement windows, again designed to prevent the shrieking of the interrogated from disturbing those walking snow-blanketed streets.

I think, too, that the government of my own nation had the sense to torture far enough away where people walking to the grocery store wouldn't stumble upon it, keeping it far enough away for common citizens to think it necessary, blood spilt on the altar of safety and peace.

The only way to get reliable information, they tell themselves, gliding behind buggies through electric cool, looking at a thin layer of dust on a can of peaches.

I wonder as I leave what sorts of buildings out grandchildren in the United States will walk through one day, the abandoned temples of torture and interrogation, the palaces of private execution, cheered by the religious with their banners and picket-signs.

What instruments of torture, tools of dispelling subversion in the name of security, will greet them as they wander through cement halls, huddled against the draft of impossibly cold air and their own terrible heritage?

Die Vampire, Die

It is, roughly, a two and a half-hour ride from Bucharest to Brasov by train.

The station itself is the epitome of socialist-realism. The corridors are large, unsentimental, and entirely the same color. Efficiency is present with a subtle, vaguely sinister hint of the intimidating nationalism that so heavily defined the Socialist Republic of Romania. The corridors are deceptively large. It reminds me in many ways of the Piața Unirii (Unification Square, formerly the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism which doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely). This, too, is enormous in proportion while not looking especially large at initial glance. It features enormous fountains that spray typhoons of water into the air (still virtually useless against Bucharest’s infamous heat) and is close to the Palace of Parliament which, after the Pentagon, is the second largest building in the world. While walking in both of these areas, it becomes clear that the atmosphere is one of grandeur that seems to oppress more than impress. One’s steps are inadequate to propel forward motion and, despite one’s best effort, walking can provide the unsettling simulation of standing still.

The train itself is a slight improvement on the Polish Intercity Trains. The open compartments are considerably less stifling than the actual closing carriages on the ICE trains and outlets provide electricity (although there is no wifi). However, for this particular train voyage, wifi is unnecessary. Looking out the window as the flat areas around Bucharest begin to gain texture and character, forming the foothills of the Carpathians and, eventually, Transylvania’s iconic mountainous landscape. To say my interests are in anything but folklore and the supernatural would be untrue. My thoughts the entire ride center around werewolves, vampires, and the other spooky subjects of childhood fascination. Privately, I believe that they have good reason to associate this area with the supernatural. I am told that film-makers wishing to convey the Appalachian mountains now flock to Transylvania because it is still relatively free from human development. I think of Lon Cheney stumbling around as he turns into a werewolf (I know, I know, the film takes place in Wales), Count Dracula, Young Frankenstein, Rocky Horror, and Vasalisa stumbling through the forest with an illuminated skull providing her with just enough light to keep her from stumbling off a cliff and breaking her neck. Granted, many of these stories are not based in Romania. However, it makes a powerful commentary that Hollywood is so willing to provide this area with the moniker of the birthplace of horror and the supernatural.

The landscape certainly lends itself to it. The hills go quickly from rolling and lush to blunt, jagged, and dangerous. The forests are still dense, occasionally broken by the white shock of a small cemetery with ice-colored tombstones and a small shrine to an Orthodox Saint. Wooden churches, homes of the Romanian Orthodox Church still dot the country-side and occasionally, a bearded man in a black cassock stands in front of one sweeping or perhaps just enjoying the afternoon sunshine which glows warm off of the jade-green hills. A man gets on the train at one of the stops, using a wooden cane to ensure he won’t bump into anything. His eyes are covered with dark glasses and he holds small icons of the Virgin. These icons are somewhat new to me, vastly different from the Catholic depictions of Madonna and the Christ Child. Jesus here looks entirely grown, simply miniature, Mary’s face and contour give her a somber, vaguely forlorn expression, and both are surrounded by clouds of starlight. Though I cannot understand much of what he says, I gather he’s selling them for two lei each.

What does, however, strike me is the shocking juxtaposition of the train stations along the railroad in the backdrop of the Carpathians. The wildness, the dangerous untamable geography of the area is somewhat undermined by socialist-realist stations: over-sized marble halls with large concrete courtyards. Within these courtyards are often concrete picnic tables and the faint contour of clover and weeds subversively growing through the cracks in the cement, a signifier that maintaining these areas is not necessarily a priority. The geometry and order of these buildings seems almost comical. Behind one such station, a man and his dog heard copper-red cows down the road towards a pasture for grazing. Further ahead, a teenage girl leads grey, ash-colored sheep towards a stream (not to be confused with the tumbling mountain river encased in concrete and polluted with plastic bags and tires). The juxtaposition of tradition and now-neglected modernization, a superimposed infrastructure of balance that, upon the collapse of an ideology, now seems grotesque and out-of-place in the rugged naturalism of the area.

The Brasov train station is, of course, designed in a similar style. It is large, angular, with vaulted ceilings, excessive natural lighting, and filthy floors whose last cleaning may have antedated Perestroika. The town is known for its retention of some semblance of old-Transylvanian charm: lots of Orthodox churches dating back to the middle-ages, an old town straight from Vampire Hollywood film-making. The streets are still flooded with chocolate-brown water from a large thunderstorm which has left the air heavy, wet, and stinking of ozone. This, however, is not my final destination. With some difficulty, I locate the second bus-station, an unceremonious, depressive little affair some 5km away from the Brasov station. The bus that will take me to Bran is a relic. It is dust-brown inside with seats upholstered in textured carpet. Crosses and icons hang from suction cups on the windshield and the driver plays nothing but ABBA the entire drive. There is no air conditioning, leaving the compartment smelling stale with wet feet from those who had just stepped out of the rain. A banner hangs from the rear-view mirror that says in dirty, faded fabric: Romania.

Bran itself is a town that has a keen sense of where its bread is buttered. The Bran Castle rests prominently on a hill, again providing a strange entanglement of the classical with modernized infrastructures (roads, themed restaurants, tourist stalls). The castle itself is notable for possibly being the source of Dracula’s Castle in Stoker’s infamous epistolary novel. It seems disappointing in some ways. In the novel as well as in Nosferatu (the best adaptation of the text despite being legally distinct from it), the concept of isolation, fear, and remoteness seem intertwined. Hutter is dumped suspiciously and fearfully by a coachman who will go no further in the dark towards Orlok’s castle. When the symphony of terror begins to warm, Hutter is miles away from anyone, subject to bloodlust and sexual advances from the grotesque Count. Should he scream, he would be unheard, and, even if he were, superstition and self-preservation would prevent the villagers from intervention. Here, however, Hutter would not need to bother shouting. He could simply walk down a hill and wait for the next coach while enjoying a short-stack and coffee at the nearest restaurant. Furthermore, the castle itself maintains little interest in legend. There is, as it turns out, no conclusive proof that Stoker was even aware of the castle’s existence when he wrote the novel. It is more famous in documented terms for being restored by Queen Marie of Romania (an offspring of Victoria). However, the whole system operates under the unfortunate assumption that tourists are intrinsically more interested in Romanian history and the architectural end-game of inbreeding between the Crown Heads of Europe than in vampires.

The stalls beneath the castle (and the gift-shop itself) still sell vampire mementos, trinkets such as mugs and metal icons of Vlad III (which can be found across Romania). There are, also, exact replicas of the icon the blind man had been peddling on the train. These, however, cost 5 lei. I wait for the bus which will take me back to Brasov and, in turn, Bucharest when I notice the spectacular view of the hills in the distance. I attempt for eight minutes to capture a photograph, a visual representation of the daunting natural beauty of the area, the land devastated during the War, the land rebuilt with concrete and marble, the land synonymous with terror and threats that do not make themselves known until it is too late. However, it is impossible to capture one without buildings, telephone wires, or the grey scars of concrete roads shouting louder and rising higher than the peeks of distant mountains.

I Didn't Know What Time It Was

Today marks one month left in Poland.

My one regret is not watching more Netflix.

The Sun Won't Set

8 o'clock. Twilight.


How the hell am I going to get 9 months of living into one suitcase?

9 months is enough time to make a baby. If I were in delicate condition on my first jour in Poland, that fetus would be at 8 months. It would have been considered a person in Oklahoma for 7 and a half months. That is 8 months of cold nights, missed trams, fruit that went bad before I ate it. Lost keys in cabs in Warsaw, realizing I'd worn twin holes in my best shoes.

 5 months ago, I had been horrified to see the sun setting at 3:30.

It is now 9 o'clock and it's still perfectly light. The daylight has melted admittedly into more neutral tones, leaving the sky pale blue with splashes of orange and a delicate pink the color of powdered pink lemonade. It's almost diabetic. Those precious 5 and a half hours of daylight were not free. Those were the result of working well into the dark teaching writing courses, dreading the wait for the dram in the cold, spending lonely tram rides back to almost the last stop on the route by reading Emily Dickinson, wondering what her opinions might be on American politics and culture.
Would Emily Dickinson watch Orange is the New Black? I made such a mental note to myself once as I stared at the burning yellow lightbulbs bounce clumsily off of an almost- frozen Lake Malta while the street car sat, perfectly snug and motionless while a pileup of trams in front of it brought the tracks to a standstill. By that point, we had gained an additional hour and a half of light in the day.

By March, I had come to accept the turbulence of weather. I still carried around a thick knitted jacket, debating on whether I would take it back with me to the states or leave it in a charity bin. It would be absurdly oversized on most people and would, more practically, make a nice home for a destitute warren of rabbits. However, they will go wanting. It is making the trek with me across the ocean next month back to the United States where it will remain packed and worthless until November (11 months after I first bought it in Munich, when the days had just begun to drastically shorten). However, it was in late March that the days once again began to expand. I thawed from the dark, depressing days of January when I was unable to appreciate much due to homesickness, cold, and a few fleeting hours of sun a day. I spent those mostly indoors where I didn't need the damn jacket anyway.

I think too of the shoes, the brown pleather moccasins. I had purchased them after losing one of my green boating shoes (ironically) to two feet of brown mud on the banks of the Potomac River. Those shoes had been troopers. They survived being chewed on by a dog, months of standing in front of a classroom while I pleaded with students to see the significance of "A Doll's House" (most of them didn't). In the end, I left the river that day with one shoe. The other, as far as I know, is still encased in mud and river-water somewhere in suburban Washington. I bought these brown moccasins which I wore today later that afternoon after being delighted to find something in my size and not made of leather. I noticed they contained a hole in Sarajevo walking back to the car (whose driver had been unwilling to drive down the hill in the snow) from the Olympic ruins. Ski slopes hid in the distance like titanic ghosts (gigantic and ludicrously difficult to see for something so large) behind the dominating fog of falling snow. The terrain was perfectly round, smothered in a solid foot of snow, the slate icon shouted out the words in chemical orange, looking grave-like against the pines and elements, "Sarajevo, 1984." As I took my first picture, I noticed my foot felt wet. It was a total reversal of the day I bought the shoes. The heat of Virginia in May was replaced with Bosnian winter and yet my shoes fared no better. My black sock soaked up the melting ice, chilling my foot instantly. I kept the shoes, wearing them out further on dry days, experiencing the expansion of daylight nestled firmly in their well-worn, broken-in familiarity that can only come from a truly excellent pair of shoes. However, as I glance at them across the room (still illuminated at 9:00 even though I haven't turned on any electric lights in the room), I realize that they have reached the end of their days. They will be disposed of (I sound like Ayn Rand).  I'm now of the green shoes (similarly worn-out and comfortable) and how it had been an unwelcome sacrifice to lose them while boating.
I had wanted to berry pick that day.

The rest that remains to be sorted is a collection of papers. Meaningless receipts, post-cards, ticket-stubs from museums, ballets, the opera. Sketches drawn too hastily and disregarded. Letters written to those I love, confessing what I could never imagine confessing, expressing how the thought of them made my stomach ache from recognizing the void brought on by their absence, reeling from the accusation that I was an abandoner, someone who would sooner leave what he loved than face stillness in his life.
These, too, will be disposed of. However, the shoes are a considerably harder loss.

In one month, I have read, there will be six hours of darkness in the span of 24 hours. I will likely both go to sleep and wake up in light. However, the space will grow increasingly empty as I fill suitcases and backpacks with what I will carry back to the states. Fewer shadows will be cast against the walls by pre-mature morning. Such, however, seems to be the progression of things. The days expand.

The sky has turned into a total blueness now.
Sunset approaches.

The Night That Goldman Spoke at Union Square

Emma Goldman, July 9th, 1917: It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom.  It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice which drives the political offender to his act.  To condemn him means to be blind to the causes which make him.  I can no more do it, nor have I the right to, than the physician who were to condemn the patient for his disease.  You and I and all of us who remain indifferent to the crimes of poverty, of war, of human degradation, are equally responsible for the act committed by the political offender.  May I therefore be permitted to say, in the words of a great teacher:  “He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”  Does that mean advocating violence?  You might as well accuse Jesus of advocating prostitution, because He took the part of the prostitute, Mary Magdalene.

Livestream:

11:01am: Exit domicile.
*notices red and white flag fluttering from building*

That's odd. It must be understood that patriotism has taken different forms here. In the United States, the barrage of stars and stripes, the symphony of tasteful primary colors which have become cliche in Americana are common, not to be missed. Americans, by and large, are willing to express their patriotism visually because it is simpler. An act as basic, as common as waving the American flag is, in itself, innately political. Similarly, defacing the flag becomes a rallying cry of the right wing, willing to say (without detecting the irony) that men and women died for that flag. The flag assumes its own identity as something to be paraded and protected like a prize-winning poodle. To help me illustrate this point, please welcome Ms. Edith Bouvier Beale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_0IhqWd6fE

It's nothing uncommon. However, I have seen more flags today than I have in 7 months of living in Poland. It's unsurprising. The third of the month is Constitution Day. Today, however, marks something different: Worker's Day.

On July 9, 1917, Goldman spoke to a jury which sought to imprison her under charges of "inducing persons not to register," citing the quotation above in her argument. A tireless advocate for women, workers, and birth control, Goldman was, in simple terms, a threat. Privately, I believe the US government had good reason to be afraid. Workers had just shot the capitalists in Russia, toppling a dynasty, and were working towards the formation of the USSR. Workers in Manhattan, contrary to popular media, had not always been so content to take money for work. When women seamstresses went on strike, they were beaten by police, attacked by hired prostitutes, and tossed around with little concern. Goldman appeared in a purple dress and, through use of cool rhetoric and common sense, advocated that the principles of Americanism and common decency protected her right to distribute anarchist pamphlets and newspapers to the workers.

The jury disagreed. She would then serve two years in prison alongside Kate O'Hare, a fellow socialist.

11:10
Nothing seems to be open (Workers' Day) and yet I needed soap to do laundry and some olive oil to use to cook dinner. The air has turned cold again. A liquor store stands open, four men smoke cigarettes in the doorway.

December 21, 1919
Goldman sits in the New York Port of Embarkation. She has not been told when or where she is going and reflects privately on the cowardly and secretive nature of the whole affair. She would, she realize, be taken from this land, the melting pot, the land of opportunity for those who did not need it. Her work would end. New speakers would rise from the cesspool of American capitalism to challenge the norms of treatment, to advocate for better pay, better hours, and more humane conditions. Perhaps there was a chill as she walked, step by step, towards Soviet Russia on boat called the Soviet Ark.

She would return later, prior to the war. She would speak favorably of Franklin Roosevelt. Before her death, she would suffer a stroke rendering her incapable of speech. She died silent, capable of hearing, capable of sight, but unable to utter a sound.

The cartoons would say "good riddance."

11:33
I find an open store. A woman stands behind the counter, surrounded by boxes, loaves of bread wrapped in plastic, oranges still packed in crates. She speaks no English and I see no machine that would take credit cards.

I return home empty-handed.

Excited and Scared

I’m riding on the train from Newcastle to Edinburgh, having presented research on the impact of Civil War death on popular literature of the time. My nerves have not entirely calmed from the anxiety of academic presentation. You all know what I’m talking about. There is no one to blame but yourself. You signed up, you printed the damn thing, and now it’s just a simple mater of reading it. In the present, however, there is only the lingering dampness of sheer terror at public speaking to a room in which you can see everyone’s  face, and a series of visual cliches rolling beside my window. I shall, for lack of anything better to do, relay these images as faithfully as possible.

On either side are rolling green pastures, fields turned, with blood-warm soil churning around with what has been dried and stomped upon. Some are emerald green, dappled with bushes sprouting goldenrod flowers (it seems impossibly cold for these), populated by sheep, wooly, hearty, and exploitable. I think for a moment of Animal Farm. The chorus of ovine simpletons chanting “four legs good, two legs bad” (I recall hearing that “Beasts of England” went to the tune of “Darling Clementine”).  I remember wondering in my core when I read that book whether or not they almost deserved it. Did their stupidity warrant Jones? Did it warrant Napoleon? But then I realize it’s all an allegory, a metaphysical speculation. In reality, sheep do not talk, nor learn to read (in a moment of consistency with metaphor). These creatures seem content to walk across green meadows, followed by lively lambs with frost-colored skin who skip with hearty foot and breath salt-air from the sea between bites of clovers. 

The moment, I decide, reminds me more of James Harriet (a remnant of the Shook family pilgrimages to Orlando, always accompanied in a vaguely Chaucerian sense by the tales of veterinary science and mayhem that seemed to follow James and Helen Harriet on a day to day basis). In retrospect, I might have preferred The Pardoner’s Tale to Harriet. At any rate, the metaphor was easier. 

In the distance, the sky seems to battle between a blue cosmos the shade of an easter egg and colonies of slate-grey. I imagine these titans have produced some rain. There is an animation to them, the lines which seem to absolve them of definite shape are at work. 

In front of them, a rainbow has formed, neatly touching from hill to hill as a sea the color of iron splashes against the white sands. A woman walks in a brown coat and high rubber boots, leading a horse, pausing for a moment to catch her breath (or perhaps to look off into the abyss of ocean that separates her from a continent). The water looks deep and cold, with the wind blowing sprays of salt-water off of its crests.  It’s the first time I’ve thought of the ocean as poisonous. 

I feel very strongly about setting a scene. Is it vital that you see the rows of trees (still naked from a northern winter)? Perhaps not. However, to skip them would be inauthentic, excluding a narrative’s Emerald City (I leave for Ireland in the morning). 

I think of the events of the week. One week ago, I was in Berlin, thinking of passover, and all the colors I would dye my hair if I lived there. Two nights ago, I was standing in the vaults of a bridge, hearing of the people who dwelled within them, eating oysters in the dark and tossing their shells without much concern for hygiene. I was told, too, of the amount of money one could get for the body of a healthy male (with no signs of sickness or trauma). 

Rocks quarried from an old volcano were insufficient, it was discovered, to keep out water. 

We walked, too, through a graveyard dating back to the 1500s. We stand alongside graves topped with acorns, cavernous mausoleums that remained locked without explanation as to what is being kept out or in.

Yesterday at this time, I was underground in a quadrant of the city that had been covered for the sake of progress (an impressive building covers it now). We hear of families visited by doctors clad in leather cloaks and bird-beak masks stuffed with herbs to keep out sickness, a white flag signifying to all who walked by that sickness dwelled within (better than the rumors that the ill were bricked in and left to die without transmitting the disease). We hear the tale of a man who spent the last moments of his life surrounded by a murder of crows, soot-black and unholy, drawing closer with each step he took. We see doors that must remained closed because the wallpaper was saturated with Arsenic (a specialty of the Victorian time). It is, perhaps, most unnerving to walk in places that once hosted life, once were too crowded to move, that now sat empty, entered only by those who are looking for a good scare. 

The World You Never Thought to Explore

There are few things quite as wonderful as a guest.

This is a fact as universally acknowledged as more popular assertions perpetuated by Ms. Austen.

After 6 months of dividing life between Poland and America, my dear friend Tory Johnson visited me for a week of fun and games.

I am notoriously awful at playing host. Ask any of the prospective Mercerians from North Hall High School who visited me. They will tell you about my lackluster ability to talk up things that have become common.

Sample dialogue includes:
-"And what is this?"
-"Oh. It's the quad."
-"It's beautiful."
-"Yeah, I guess."

Even now, Poznan has become base camp, ordinary, and unremarkable (to me). It's a beautiful, historical city. However, existing somewhere long enough for the loveliness, the novelty to fade causes an attitude of indifference that one can only have when showing the place s/he lives off to someone who has never been there. I struggle to think of what one must see versus what one could see. There is the gorgeous town square, the Baroque churches, the vast public spaces where the modern and the classical blends against the medieval like patches of earth viewed from an airplane, cafes with sipping chocolate, pierogi... How could it fill a day?

However, the following two days were something of a Jolly Holiday with 76 trombones. It felt wonderful to have someone from the states visit, the excitement of showing them around places that are new to them, seeing spaces as if they were brand new...getting kissed on the head by a stranger probably asking for drug money, and the satisfaction of not totally screwing up someone's time in Poland.

From there we went to Warsaw, staying in the Old Town and walking around the streets that have hosted John Paul II, Chopin, and Marie Curie (the trifecta of must-know Polish historical figures). We enjoyed warm weather. We ate in a restaurant that looked like it had been drawn in sharpie and searched through antiques for pins, medals, and posters. From there, we went to the Jewish Museum, cramming over 1000 years of history into 4 hours. Exhausted, tired, but entirely satisfied, we schlepped our way to Lublin, Mary, spinach tarts, and my first non-undergraduate conference.

The wonderful thing about all of this was that I, too, was able to experience new things in Poland. The delight of learning about a place you'd dismissed as familiar is incomparable, even more so when you are discovering it side-by-side with a devoted old friend.

 I mean, who else would quote Disney on top of the Palace of Culture and Science?

Every Day a Little Death

Marie Curie 

for Danielle 

I am, for reasons I do not know, quite anxious to take her picture. 

Bitter iron woman, cast in meal, pockets filled, I imagine, with the elements

that would eviscerate her. 

She clutches no prizes (though she won a gold medal in gymnasium) and holds

at her side her precious journals, today stowed away, still lethal to the touch. 

The statue does not, regrettably, convey the loss of a husband, the loss of a god, or fainting from hunger when she forwent sustenance to sustain her studies. 

I had once been told that there exists film of her preparing her meals while conducting

research with highly radioactive materials, her hands still contaminated with uranium. I 

imagined the plate and its contents as acid green, chemical and inedible-looking as she

ate, unaware that the would would call her brave, essential enough to preserve in metal and print, dressed in the blue wedding dress that she would wear in her laboratories. 

“The greatest woman humanity has ever produced,” she would be called. Tourists would stand in the streets of Warsaw to photograph the vaulted halls where she once lifted her first test-tube.

Indeed, she might think, unknowingly dying slowly with each step she took, that such a distinction is quite a burden. 

Color and Light

Part I

“It just seems so touristy,” she stated, probably unaware that anyone else in the room could understand her.

I wait for the irony to dawn on her. She’s in an amber shop in the Gdansk Old Town and is concerned that the shop is too heavily designed to cater to tourists. However, it doesn’t sink in. 

“Don’t YOU think it’s a little touristy?” she repeats, waiting for her male companion to agree.

I stand close-by, perhaps drawn by their English, gazing at a rack of immaculate amber rosaries with little silver crucifixes. The weather has just turned warm and the stones remind me of sunlight. I struggle to resist a childish impulse to touch them, to create enough energy to get them clack against each other. Antique and transparent, there is something undeniable in their beauty, a simplicity that I usually feel rosaries lack. Realistically, the amber (if it is real) supersedes the crucifix, the idea of the crucifix, and religion in general. Millions of years of hardening has turned tree resin into this: a piece of jewelry that brings one closer to God by grasping something almost as old, nearly as infinite as prayers dissolve like ringing bells in the cosmos above a chapel.

For a moment, I’m almost fooled.

She does have a point. The shop is overtly designed to cater to those with access to disposable income and poor impulse control. However, I’m baffled to think of who would buy some of these items. From the ceiling hangs an amber chandelier, garish, gauche, and bordello. Beyond bordello. It has all the good taste of some Wild Western Saloon with a promiscuous name like “The Birdcage” or “The Dusty Rose,” the kind of place that ensures everything can be bought with the right amount of money and subtlety. I imagine for a moment trying to bring it back to the states, filling the space in my suitcase for an amber light piece, ghastly but somehow lovely in its unabashed confidence, its whiskey-colored unexpectedness. There would be odd looks from customs agents, shrugs, and laughs on my end as I lugged it back home where it would no doubt hang in a closet that I’d never open again.

Nearby, there are tiffany lamps with panes alternating between mother-of-pearl and amber, illuminated from the inside, filling the room with a burnt-red glow that makes me grateful for the thaw from winter.

The woman finally tires of his silence and walks out the door.

The man looks around, and, although he sees me, slips an amber rosary into his pocket.

He winks and follows her out into the white light of three o’clock.

Part II

I’ve always distrusted churches.

Particularly, I’ve always distrusted opulent churches. The layers of paint, flake gold, and deep caverns stained by colored glass seem subversive, designed to keep people from noticing something quite obvious.

To their credit, size and color are effectively distracting.
I’ve seen churches house everything from fingers of saints (Budapest), the arm of a thief (Prague), and even stone grottos (Washington). None of these surprises were welcome. Decadence and body parts, like size and color, can hide anything if you are clever enough with their placement.

However, this was one church that seemed unwilling to hide a thing.

The building had, I am told, been destroyed in the War (what hadn’t been?). The towers served as chimneys for the fires inside the chapel, melting bricks, and collapsing a ceiling. It seems improbable now. The vaulted arches seem absurdly high, threatening, and difficult to look at. A dull-colored crucifix dominates the sanctuary. The pews are wooden and the walls are ghost-white. The windows are clear, spilling sunshine in erect pools across the room and revealing whatever there is to see. There are, of course, alters, shrines, and presumably monuments to saints, and the departed. An astronomical clock stands in the corner, saints and stars combined in one magnificent piece of machinery.

There’s nothing left to be illuminated and it makes me anxious to leave.

I exit through a side door, overwhelmed by the honesty a building can have when no one bothers to color it in.

Twice as Upset as in Town

Warsaw: February 2nd

11:41pm

I’ve just finished Wild and started on Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother on the train ride from Poznan to Warsaw. I had slept in this hotel two nights ago. Everything seemed familiar in a place that was still unfamiliar. I unpack and repack my bag, glancing at the patchwork of color on the bed (yet it still seemed to be all grey and brown). Tomorrow marks the beginning of two weeks trekking across southern Europe, the secret place that was no secret to anyone. It is a place I never thought I needed. I always imagined my time in Europe being spent in the cliche places (snapchats in bookstores in London that I’d conned myself into thinking were “underground,” sipping coffee in the Latin Quarter, visiting a beach in Malmo if I felt especially saucy). Yet here I was making the concerted effort to avoid what I had expected and venture into the unknown (and substantially cheaper) hard, jagged underbelly of the European continent.

Istanbul
February 3- 6

“Air Serbia.” The name sounded austere. It brought to mind something unfriendly sounded. However, for the moment, it was a stepping stone to Istanbul (reference the song and I’ll slap you silly). We arrived in the late afternoon, somewhat overwhelmed with a) the fact that it was after 5 and still daylight was present, b) the fact that the outside temperature was in the 50s, and c) that we’d actually gone and done it. We were in Istanbul. Is-tan-bul.

****

Spending three days wandering this city offered a whirlwind of everything one could possibly find interesting. The areas by the river smelled like cooking fish, each little shop offered its own scent (from heater fluid to moth balls to keep carpets hole-free), sounds of conversations from street cafes, the calls of shop keepers eager to make a sale, and the general hubbub of any city occupied the ears. Beyond anything else, it was just one hell of a sight. The domes of colossal mosques, titanic in stature but somehow smooth and common as a rising moon, poked about the hill. One of them had to be the Haiga Sophia, one had to be the Blue Mosque. Other than that, we were willing to gamble a bit. 

****

We eventually saw both: the yellow-gold insides of the Haiga Sophia, the mosaics of Christianity existing side-by-side with the iconic names of former sultans dominating the ceiling. Despite the history of the building, it felt devoid of religion, more like a large hall than a former church/ mosque. The Blue Mosque offered something slightly different; a colossal and imposing building from the outside, the inside seemed impossibly small when compared to the gargantuan structure we’d just fawned over like obvious tourists. There was a rush, an imminent flood of those who used the building for prayer as opposed to photo ops. We left the building to discover that it had started raining. 

****
“Come here. We have what you’re looking for.”

I somehow doubted it. Market places are notorious for never quite having exactly what you’re looking for (despite having everything else). The irony did not escape me. “The Grand Bazaar,” the infamous indoor complex where one could legitimately buy most things (leather, jewelry, fabric, metal work). I doubted it because I was unsure of what I was looking for and just relied on knowing it when I saw it. It was like shopping for groceries when you haven’t eaten yet: walking clumsily through a maze of stalls marked by carpets or colored glass orbs (with signs forbidding pictures) and not having the foggiest idea of what the hell it is that you want and whether or not it is something that can be bought.

Sofia, Bulgaria
February 7-9

It’s not going to win any awards for being a beauty queen.

But I love you anyway, Sofia.

Sarajevo:

February 9-12

Smoke Break Near Sarajevo

I had been told to look for scars, remnants of loss that poured from the granite and pine

like melting ice. Yet snow had covered the mountains and left everything that would hold it soft and round. A group of women smoke cigarettes and speak about children and music and what they would like for lunch, their ashes and frozen breath blending with the dust of an afternoon shower. Inside, a man sharpens a knife to a rhythm too perfect to be calculated. The blanche of snow is broken by two cows, copper colored chest deep in whiteness, moving like leviathans 

through a path chopped away specifically for them. With the exception of them, the entire world is stationary:their movement, their wine-stain muscles polluting the stillness of fallen snow with clouds of angry vapor pouring from their nostrils.Their faces are covered with black cloths to prevent them from seeing where they are going, pulled tightly by a small boy who knows his job is to deceive what trusts him(I’m told it would be humane until the last second, with no more suffering than necessary). Would seeing truly stop them? Who could blame them if it wouldn’t?

****
Sarajevo took me for a ride. It bills itself as the city that began and ended a century (an especially terrible century). I had heard the name in history class in two contexts: Franz Ferdinand and the Bosnian War (which I had seen on the news). The words I process fly around the air like vultures over a carcass:

Don’t Let them Kill Us

*Muslim woman uses her veil to cover her Jewish neighbor’s yellow star* 1941

“They exchanged security, economics, and stability for democracy. Now they just want to trade back”

Welcome to Hell

I have gangrene. Do you know what gangrene is? (we’re both helpless to stop him from exposing his leg to us).

But the thing of it is, it wasn’t hell. This city had twice influenced the world in a way that altered everything (could the first war have been prevented?). It existed as any place does after conflict and trauma. Virtually every building, I have read, shows signs of damage from a war 20 years ago. A few miles away, Olympic venues sink passively into snow, silently waiting for their return from obscurity. A soccer field sprouts gravestones.

Yet the city offers such life, such beauty. There are bars and cafes, an old movie theatre now filled with cigarette smoke and amber beer bottles. If it is the city that began and ended a century, it is a commentary indeed that this place represents the ability of human beings to survive terrible decades and still look forward to another hundred years.

****
Sarajevo Jewish Cemetery

I have been told in broken English

of the men who sat here, viewing

the people carrying loaves of bread

and jugs of water through a scope. 

The slabs that hid them, where they

rested and cooled the hot steel of 

a discharged gun, are etched deep

with the names of those who left

before times grew too desperate,

owing nothing to the living nor the

dead. Equally deep is the spatter of 

bullet holes, volleyed back in an effort

to cross the street without running. 

Snowflakes begin to fall, carpeting the

stillness of a February afternoon

with secrets, ashes, and broken 

promises and it is hard to believe

that this place so ordinary, this

place of rest could disguise what

was most feared, could give refuge to

the early days of Armageddon, could

muffle out the cries of the final hours

of a terrible century. 

“Where will you hide,”

I think to myself, letting my bare hands turn

red as they rest in the snow, “when one day

they come for you?”



Zagreb, Croatia
February 12-13.

Someone has painted two finch heads over the faces of two people on a concrete wall.

Somewhere else, a crane with a gun for a head pukes breakfast into the wet beaks of little winged pistols.

Trippy street art and sweethearts who help you to your hostel.

You should see it sometime.

Budapest, Hungary

February 13-16

There are lions on the bridge, a castle on the hill. I’m told people still come here because they think the water will heal them. Yet not far away, sixty lead shoes without owners rest on the river bank.

 I try absinthe for the first time and secretly wish I’d ordered water. 

Home again.
February 16. 

At the Ballet

Watching Midsummer in the Warsaw National Theatre.

I have read that in 1945, the building was in ruins. The space, now temple-like and massive, the picture of culture and the principles of Soviet Realistic architecture, was a husk, an edifice that had to be destroyed to be rebuilt.

The years that followed were mandated by the government. The plays performed must comply with the principles of Socialist Realism, political works which advanced the message of communism in ways that depicted daily life as it happened. In a way, the building still remained a husk, compromised by politics, but deciding that compromised art was better than nothing.

Yet there are no traces of it on the stage now. The decidedly unrealistic ballet, crafted after Shakespeare's own fair handiwork, tells a familiar story without sound.

It's true I never truly cared for ballet. I dreaded field trips (at least one a year) to watch well-known stories that could be told in 10 minutes dragged out into two and half hour sagas before me. I remember being 10 years old and watching Beauty and the Beast from the balcony of opulent, decaying Pierce Auditorium. The building smelled haunted and velvety and was decorated in a bright shade of "whorehouse pink," I'd come to decide in later years. This was the decadence of the Reconstruction- era south, where good taste went to die. And we, the heirs to theatres draped with red velvet seats, stained glass, gold paint, and orgiastic depictions of Greco-Romans in leisure, are forced to sit and watch things we can appreciate in theory but also find disinteresting.

Being 10, I found everything inappropriate to be hysterical. When I was told the ballet wasn't over, that it was just intermission, I remember thinking "oh shit" in my head. It surprised me that I'd even thought of the word. I spent the second half of the ballet thinking it every few minutes, biting my lip to suppress giggles. I'd stare at my friends, almost shocked that they didn't also find it funny before realizing that they couldn't hear what was going on in my head.

I replayed this scene as I sat in the Warsaw National Theatre watching Midsummer. Yet I couldn't laugh this time. Not only because this ballet was impeccably done, but also because I was preoccupied with inconsistency of it all. The ballet was a stark contrast to realism that went into reconstructing the destroyed theatre. It relished in the obscenities of the imagination, the hilarity of untempered magic interfering disastrously with humanity. Yet, similarly, what was real (two separate wars that left a people in ruin, the suppression of culture in favor of political agendas) could likewise wreak such (and even greater) torment on the mere mortals below.

In a way, art is something that survives inevitably. The stage is truly less important and the lines between realism and the fantastic are easily blurred.

Back to Life, Back to Sense

The past month has been a whirlwind of travel from Poland to the US, from the US to Germany, from Germany back to Poland, and now...stillness.

It's so interesting how we (at least I) don't appreciate stillness, the sensation that the ground is solid under my feet until after I've been living like I don't belong anywhere. I've read of customs from various cultures that seem to obsess over ensuring that a body and soul BELONG somewhere. I have read of tribes where the umbilical chord is tied in a bag and worn around the neck for the entirety of one's days on earth. Losing this talisman is catastrophic. It's a loss of self, a loss of heritage, a loss of belonging. Similarly, and perhaps more familiarly, I have read of mirrors being covered when a person dies to ensure the soul moves on and does not remain trapped in a place where s/he doesn't belong.

It's so interesting to consider the associations we have between calmness and comfort. For the first time in a month, I feel entirely calm. I have nothing looming, no major travel, no obligations beyond the ordinary. It is a stillness that I treasure entirely. I am not the kind of person who needs covered mirrors or leather sacks full of discarded body parts to feel a sense of belonging. I crave only stillness, the luxury of a moment to write, the prospect of scribbling a poem or sketching something in thick black ink. It's an assurance of selfhood and it's entirely wonderful.

I've spent the past few weeks readjusting to cold and dark. I don't think I'll ever fully trust a 4:30 sky that's full of stars (more accurately, a 4:30 sky that would be full of stars without a smog of black clouds that seem especially grim against a night sky). The cold hasn't truly been that terrible. Every person I've met here has dismissed complaints of the weather with a swipe of the hand and an anecdote about winters past where there was REAL cold and one could not ensure that his/her hot water would work 24 hours a day. This may be true. I may be the benefactor of a meteorological oddity that has kept temperatures hovering slightly above freezing and warding off serious snow. However, regardless of my fortune, I'll enjoy the return of warm rays of sunshine and I can't help it if I think so.

As for other updates, I've returned to an especially haunting image that captivated my attention one of my first days in Poland. I was walking down the street and passed a bakery which contained two gigantic loaves of (artificial) bread. Seriously. These were the size of layer cakes. However, some unfortunate little bird was hoodwinked by them, wandered inside, and became trapped behind a layer of glass. He flailed and flailed against it, growing visibly more panicked, and shedding feathers across the loaf. I recalled, at this point, the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba during one of their visits. The Queen decided to test Solomon's wisdom by placing a real flower in a room of artificial ones (paper? glass?) and challenging the king to find the actual flower. It honestly seems like a pointless test. I don't understand inconsistent mandates about the importance of proof in biblical contexts. The rules are confusing. Anyway, Solomon opened the window and bee flew in, going to the only real flower in the room. Realistically, it was the bee that was talented, not Solomon. However, it pointed to some nonsensical "sixth sense" animals may have about knowing what's real from what's replication. This bird, however, received no such instinct and he continued to beat his wings against the glass. Eventually, he was shooed out but not before creating a truly spectacular image. I've struggled with how to recreate the image in writing and settled on a poem attached below.

I swear I never meant to be the kind of person who posts his/her poetry on a blog. It's like the guy at the party who brings his guitar despite no one asking him to do so. "Oh look. Jimmy brought a guitar...See that? He's here...with his guitar! OH! He's playing it now. I'm shocked he knows how to play Blackbird... on his guitar."

However, it was moment I couldn't get out of my head. It was a perfect personification of chaos against order, the turbulence of the natural world against our best attempts at...well, stillness.

"Ovens"
I read of the unwed sisters

who, I am told, would climb

onto the ovens as they cooked

bread, waiting to be filled

as soft brown loaves took

form beneath them.

In desperation, they recalled all

of their good deeds, remembering

the coins tossed to beggars,

the last bite of supper slipped

into the wet jaws of a stray.

I think again of these women,

with their ordinary wishes 

as I stare at cakes glazed like

frost on a window above

heartier loaves with nuts 

and seeds baked inside. 

At the window, a bird has

been fooled by subversive

bread, plastic and glued 

together to tempt the hungry.

I, too, have been tricked

by such a promise, I 

realize as I watch two hands 

fold around the erect wings of 

the bird as he smashes against

a pane of glass, hurt by the 

betrayal of what he loved

and what he need to survive. 

He is tossed on the streets 

and pauses for a moment, 

tilting his head as he regrets

his desire and his stupidity. 

Perhaps, I realize, there

 are those of us better suited

to perch on the ovens

rather than to flail against

what we cannot see.

The Lies Ill-Concealed

There was a woman, as I read, named Eleanore Baur who made it her mission each year at Christmas to visit the inmates at Dachau with cookies and cigarettes. She became known as Sister Pia. An especially devoted and early member of the National Socialist movement, Baur is the only woman involved in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and was rewarded for her early loyalty to the Third Reich with a villa in Dachau and considerable influence in the camp, of which she was the appointed "welfare sister."

Here the story becomes more specific. Her visits were always marked by long, patriotic speeches in which she reprimanded prisoners for hurting the Fuehrer's heart by not being social, productive members of society. Furthermore, she exerted considerable influence in the camps. She could select "pets" and "favorites" who she would request work at her villa on projects that ranged from cleaning, cooking, renovations, to reported sexual abuse. While she never directly harmed anyone, her influence could be used to tremendous personal advantage or disadvantage. She survived the war, served a brief sentence, and then lived out her days in her villa, reinstated with her rank and pension.

I stumbled across this brief but disturbing biography while scouring Dachau's archives. A far cry from the rich, decorous splendor of Munich and it's garland-decked alleys and towering Christmas trees, the area around the Dachau concentration camp is flat, sterile, and cold. A mist hovered slightly in the air and the sun-less sky matched the greyness of the area.

I would also visit the Munich Stadtmuseum while in town and examine the exhibit specifically dedicated to the rise of the Nazis in Munich, examining propaganda, artifacts, and more information about the early momentum of National Socialism. Yet for the moment, the history of the location was almost tangible, an invisible exhibit that was none-the-less present and occupied a space more in the head than in the physical realm.

My goal was simple and complex at the same time. Dachau was designed for political and social prisoners such as communists, homosexuals, clergy, Soviet POWs,  politicians and resistance fighters. The turbulent history of Germany and Europe after 1945 left complicated legacies for these groups. Communists and homosexuals especially did not enjoy sudden popularity in West Germany (or East Germany for that matter) after the war. In fact, homosexuality's criminalization continued in Germany well into the 1970s, excluding homosexual prisoners from being involved with memorials dedicated to inmates' experiences at Dachau. My curiosity focused on how the persecution and brutality of these "political" groups was taught in Europe during a time where said groups still did not enjoy sympathy or popular opinion.

My initial examinations of books from the Dachau archives gave a chilling but comprehensive overview of Holocaust education shortly after the end of the war. Students described teachers staring at their shoes, sweating and panicked when talking about the NS period. There was tangible discomfort for both educators and the students who secretly wanted to know what their teachers had done during the war. However, political groups were somewhat excluded in from this dialogue. Homosexuals were not included in the 1968 camp memorial as homosexuality was still criminalized during that time. Some students protested the exclusion of former prisoners from now-communist nations from participation in the commemoration, an action which some western media outlets interpreted as Neo-Nazism.

In fact, many Soviets (who had been under strict instruction not to surrender) returned back to the USSR after the war to face accusations of collaboration and face even more prison time. Yet such information is uncommon in American Holocaust education. While the Jewish population of Europe suffered catastrophic losses, many other groups are ignored when discussing Nazi brutality.

I left the archives with answered questions, unanswered questions, and plethora of new, more complicated questions that buzzed around my head like frozen rain. I walked into the mist of late-afternoon, thinking of Sister Pia, and lines of prisoners, each with a narrative that may perhaps be lost in the recesses of time.

Smoke! Smoke!

Mid-December at the Salzburg Christmas Market.

I am greeted instantly by the sharp, illicit smoke of frankincense, resting, smoldering like stolen jewels in bronze platters. It is a stubborn scent, the scent of festivity and atonement (or was myrrh meant to symbolize sorrow?) that hovers almost toxic in the crisp cool of mountain air. It contrasts with what the sweet musk of dry hay in the plastic manger, the caramelized decay of roasted nuts, the lingering sour of hot wine. I think of easter, of those Episcopal services where I would hold my nose not to breathe in the incense swung throughout the sanctuary like a wrecking ball.  “Some things,” I would tell my self, “are best left uncleaned.” 

Here too, I gaze around the mustard-yellow walls of old money fallen from power, a house left like a gutted palace to remind all of lost opulence, discarded with the same casual approach as an other loss that went unnoticed until it was too late. The shutters are open, lined on the inside with the sheen of synthetic metal paper, dominated by black numbers, marking the day of the month. The sky fades from an almost chemical blue to the dark of early evening and, for a moment, there is the syzygy of primary color, the fire-hot red ornaments tossed on trees and illuminated by melting candles, the lemon-ripe house, and the cold blue of a dying day’s sky. “This is such a thing,” I realize,”that needs no purification. The fumes are a waste of fire.”

I am told, however, that it is truly only the blend of myrrh and frankincense that can cleanse. One on its own yields no reaction. Yet this fact seems lost. The flow of bank notes continues without interruption as the shoppers tuck away their goods and inhale strong, deep breaths of burning frankincense, hoping it will keep them absolved for another year. 

Don't Tell Mama

Simply put, I fell in love with Prague. It's nobody's fault. I was born this way. We are in love and are getting married.

An exaggeration? Perhaps. But not by much. I spent a weekend in Prague on a whim and picked exactly the right time to be there. Between Christmas decorations, the wonderfully seductive smell of hot wine and cooking smoke, and the overall surrealist vibe, there was little not to love. I spent the better part of the weekend walking through the mazes of the old town. It was almost reminiscent of the fabled labyrinth. Despite my best attempts, I never seemed to follow the same route twice to get places. The streets twist and turn in a maze of Goliathan buildings that ooze age and good taste. Yet, it seemed delightful surprises rather than a malevolent bull-man figure was lurking behind every corner. I'm perhaps too comfortable with just showing pictures. However, I have no choice here. Describing the wonderful and invigorating time I had would be insufficient. I spent a few hours watching Jan Svankmajer films on loop in the modern art museum then went to see the Christmas market officially open. I wandered through the Old Jewish Cemetery and examined buildings of historical significance in both Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution all in the same weekend. It happened in such a blur that I'm quite happy that I took so many pictures.

Frankly, I distrust memory.

Mein damen und herren, madames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen...I am pleased to present you with...Prague, a city in pictures (and comments from me).

So this building stood out to me as something to photograph. It reminded me of what a building might look like if Edward Gorey converted to Christianity and started sketching on buildings. 

This is the building where the Golem is supposedly hidden. There's no way to get into the attic (where the Golem allegedly is) but previous expeditions into the attic (including a Nazi who supposedly climbed in and never came out) have not yielded any proof that there's really a Golem hidden there. It's a pity. Who couldn't use a big, strong Jewish man lying around the house?

Kafka statue. You'll notice it's sitting on top of a mosaic of the infamous "monstrous vermin."

Death and a Turk on the Astronomical clock. Apparently white Christians could not be associated with sin in the Middle Ages. Go figure. 

Giant faceless babies at the modern art museum. 

Old Jewish Cemetery. The graves are 12 layers deep and over 150,000 bodies are buried here.

The World Won't End

This month has been something of a whirlwind. I could go into a long, overly detailed explanation...so I will. I spent the first part of the month traveling to Warsaw, Berlin and Norway (you can read more about this in my previous post. Two days after I returned from Berlin (on a Wednesday), I was in Krakow with a few other of my darling Fulbright family visiting Auschwitz. The general consensus seemed to be that we all knew it was a place that needed to be visited and none of us wanted to visit it alone. So we bundled in our coats against a wet November chill and rode in the comfort of a minibus to the site synonymous with unimaginable atrocity. To be quite candid, I'm not sure how I felt. I expected to feel more than I did. There was something simultaneous sickening and numbing about the entire experience. The two emotions were unsettlingly able to exist inside me for a few hours without dulling the other. There were some rooms which evoked remarkable disgust (such as a room full of human hair, a separate one filled with artificial limbs stolen from murdered inmates, and countless others). The impact was jarring. It was like looking at the lives of people you don't know in individual pieces, as if the material objects that represent their existence were organized and compartmentalized behind glass. The absurdity of the Holocaust, the lack of logic behind it, was evident. This is where the numbing came in. It was like looking at a surgery on screen. There was something quite real about it but also a comfortable barrier of historical distance that allows it to exist simultaneously as something existing in the same state of reality in which history dwells. This post will be shorter. It's almost like the monument to Loss mentioned in Memoirs of a Geisha. An artist builds a monument to loss with one word on it. However, the word is scratched off because when one experiences loss, it cannot be read, only felt. There's not much I can do to explain the complexities that I'm still feeling from this particular visit. Words are painfully inadequate.
 

Maybe This Time

"Closure. She's looking for closure."

One especially astute young student made that comment when my class was discussing "Forgiving Dr. Mengele" (a documentary discussing the decision of one Eva Mozes Kor to forgive the demented experiments to which she was subjected as a Mengele twin during the Holocaust). This moment seemed to encapsulate the entire topic of Holocaust literature that I had just covered with my sophomore English students. Wasn't Vladek Spiegelman looking for some sort of closure when he burned Anya's diaries? Wasn't Art himself seeking closure for the life he experienced in the shadows of his parents' mutual trauma and mixed ability to cope with the prospect of survival? Perhaps Simon Wiesenthal too was seeking some form of closure when he asked his reader if they would forgive a dying Nazi. As I learned this previous week, Jan Karski was unable to find closure as a Righteous Gentile. He spent his life torn between his invaluable services towards exposing the brutality of racism in the National Socialist regime and the gnawing sensation that he could have done more.

Times are marginally different. The number of Holocaust survivors dwindles. There are monuments to the Holocaust that simple read out the names of the deceased. Picture a room made of mirrors reflecting the light of a single candle that, in the labyrinth of obsidian panels, multiplies to millions and is entirely silent except for the listing of names of murdered children. The names become almost anonymous, as indistinguishable as the candles staring back in the cosmos of a single space. We have the luxury of memory rather than witnessing. Yet perhaps this luxury has done more damage than it has provided closure.

As an educator, I feel it is my duty to ensure that young people are educated about the past (chiefly as it is expressed through literature). However, these people are the heirs to a planet that has seen war and hatred manifest as genocide countless times in its history. We remember what has happened but are gutless, neutered to any actual response until after the damage is done. Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Serbia, Cambodia. The deceased are then added to the list of names that increasingly lose their meaning. We seek closure but this, like a candle in a mirror, is a reflection. It cannot be touched, let alone achieved.

It is this philosophy which motivates me to study how the world teaches the next generation about what previous generations have done. The past week, while certainly filled with happy, memorable moments with my fellow Fulbrighters, also was designed to help me expand, reflect upon, and conceptualize my understanding of an education that espouses social justice and the earnest belief that the world can be repaired with the proper tools. It is the search for these tools that took me to three distinct locations, each offering its own unique methodology for preserving memory, confronting the present, and paving the path to improvement for the future.

1. Warsaw, Jan Karski Conference.

For those of you who do not know, Jan Karski is (arguably) Poland's most famous Righteous Gentile (an honor bestowed by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for those who took personal risks to help Jews in the Holocaust without seeking any sort of monetary compensation or religious conversion in return). This was a man who spent his entire life after the Second World War haunted largely by his belief that he had not done enough. Responsibility was a vital component of his character and it was this sense of civic duty which motivated his life. While there were many Righteous Among the Nations as well as countless others who acted with compassion during an amoral time, there is something especially compelling about the question of ethics in moments where ethics seem unimportant at best and a weakness at worst. Visitors to the conference included colleagues of Karski's from Georgetown University, artists, historians, government officials, and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Questions flew, many of them about who we blame for the Holocaust in Poland. Finally, one especially disgruntled speaker stated plainly, "Who do we blame? The ones who did the killing."

I coupled this conference with a visit to Warsaw's Jewish Museum. As I walked through the exhibits which traced the history of the Jewish people from the middle ages to the contemporary time, there were several questions which rooted rapidly in my mind. Primarily, how can I as an educator ensure that questions of ethics and morality are not sideswiped for the sake of time or convenience? I think back to discussions about ethics and capitalism in Brecht or dialogue about gang violence in Romeo and Juliet. Is there something missing in American education when it comes to ethics? Too often we like to handle children with the care and sensitivity of an Easter egg. We refrain from posing difficult or challenging questions out of concern for "sensitivity" or the fear that students might say things we just don't want to hear. Flatly, if this is the course that American education continues to take, it is doing its children a disservice. It seems that a proper education would indeed instill a fundamental criticism for historical ethics and include substantial dialogue about how we can foster our own sense of ethical existence. This, in turn, would produce some sense of responsibility, a trait modeled by the countless Righteous Among the Nations who proved that ethics are not meant to hide during turbulent times.

2. Norway

Norway's history during the Second World War is somewhat less devastating and complex than Poland's. Norway, like Poland, fought fiercely against Nazi occupation. Both hosted bold and dedicated resistance movements. However, unlike Poland, significantly more of Norway's Jewish population survived. There are a plethora of historical reasons for this. Neutral and Allied territories (such as Sweden and the UK) were much closer to Norway. Despite this, however, many Jews were killed in Norway as part of the Holocaust.

What is perhaps more noteworthy of my time in Norway is the focus on Norway's place as one of the world's most tolerant nations. This tolerance was largely the purpose of my visit. After making contacts with and establishing an interview with the Rafto Foundation (a  Norwegian human rights advocacy group in Bergen), my questions as they related to education were informed by the Foundation's educational workshops on Democracy, Discrimination, and War/Dehumanization. The group advocates a dialogue-based approach to learning about these three components of human rights discussion.

Dialogue and discussion are indeed essential parts of learning about catastrophic events and finding solutions for situations of injustice. My time in Norway expanded my understanding of social justice education largely due to its focus on the future. While the events of the past do play a significant part of our understanding of the present and future, without a clearly defined concept of what must be prevented, a knowledge of the past does little good. Furthermore, this concept must be the result of democracy and dialogue. People must work together to act as a shield against human rights abuses as a coalition rather than courageous individuals.

3. Berlin

This was perhaps the hardest part of my project thus far. I am German. My heritage is firmly rooted in this nation that has been the cradle for culture, art, and science for thousands of years. I am enormously proud of this heritage. Dadaism, Beethoven, Hildegard, Goethe, Bach.... But I digress. It's no secret a shadow still hangs over Germany due to the events of the Second World War despite the fact that most of today's German population was not alive for these events, let alone collaborative in them. However, there seems to be an unspoken rule that people constantly view Germany with Nazism in the back of their minds. While I plan to visit Germany multiple times and experience the culture that walks hand in hand with my heritage, I must, regrettably, dedicate a large part of this post to Holocaust discussion since that was the focus of my trip and my Make it Happen project.

Few nations today can boast the tolerance and liberalism that Germany represents. I looked forward to visiting Berlin for weeks, despite the historical irony that a queer Jew would look at Berlin as a safe-haven. I thought about the vibrant Weimar LGBT underground scene including film, magazines and music that heralded Berlin as an LGBT Mecca in the 1920s. I spent my senior year researching this period and I craved something of this liberal, open environment as if it were something I could purchase in a shop as soon as I got there.

Berlin proved to be all I could want in terms of a diverse and open-minded city. Walking through Berlin was an almost electrifying experience. The streets were lined with illuminated orbs that symbolized the fallen Wall. People from all walks of life paraded the streets to commemorate the day that East and West Germany began the process of reunification. Some might say it is truly Germany's best age. The economy is booming, its education is free and of high quality, and it has become a beacon of open-mindedness. This stems from, in large part, the frankness of Germany's confrontation with its own past.

Germans today bear no responsibility for the events of the Second World War. Yet it is not an uncommon thought when one sees older Germans to silently wonder, "Where were you in 1933?" It However, Germany's cities (including the vibrant Berlin)  is saturated with monuments to the victims of the war (including Romani people, Communists, Jehova's Witnesses, LGBT people, and people with disabilities). One such monument is the compelling and humbling monument to Europe's murdered Jews. With a design based on Prague's Jewish cemetery, the monument seems to represent chaos and order existing simultaneously. The large concrete blocks feature uneven tops but perfectly gridded alleyways between them. While walking through this space, a tight and distressing claustrophobia seems to set in. One longs for the openness that exists outside of the guts of this sterile labyrinth. The effect of this was quite impactful. The experience lent itself to reflection about its purpose both as a historical commemoration and as a work of art.

Similarly impactful was the Berlin Jewish Museum. This featured a room where a robotic arm writes the Torah at the same pace as a human would. It is a jarring, almost disturbing image. The sterility of the mechanical arm as it writes the fluid, lively hebrew on a seemingly infinite scroll of paper took getting used to, to say the least. There was a room in this building (concrete, lacking in climate control or lighting, 26 meters high). This room is called the Holocaust tower and is designed to exemplify the void left in German Jewish life by the Holocaust. I had been battling an ear infection for several days before I entered this room. Looking up caused vertigo. To speak the truth, looking anywhere but straight ahead caused vertigo. However, as I looked up into the cold darkness of this tower, my head began to spin for medical reasons. I pinned myself in a corner and continued to look up as the room twisted in my vision like a tilt-a-whirl. The other two people in the room stared at me slightly and then left quickly. God only knows what they thought was happening. The void, however, was demonstrated perfectly despite my inability to get it to sit still.

The progress that Germany has made is undeniable. It's history has been broken down into pieces that you can purchase on the street (like the Young Pioneers friendship pin I purchased from a man for 4 euro or the remnants Berlin Wall that has been cracked and crushed into souvenirs by tourists. Its history seems to be a melting pot where nothing melts. Yet a vibrant nation and rich culture have endured. It is a nation honest with its history but also entirely active in ensuring that the atrocities of the World War are public and thoroughly depicted.

How many other nations can claim such a response to a previous inhumanity? Certainly not the United States. When I was taught Civil Rights, the pictures were always of Martin Luther King, Jr speaking in front of the Lincoln Monument. Occasionally one might see a photograph of a "whites only" sign. I certainly didn't see the pictures of teenagers being doused by fire hoses. Images of hot coffee being poured on students sitting at segregated lunch counters were censored from the mix. Indeed, America's own genocide against the First Nation people is glossed over or presented in the cheery false-balance of the Indian Wars or the First Thanksgiving.

It all blends together into an essential question of how we teach children responsibility to prevent injustice. Furthermore, how can we unite children across the world to partner together to advocate human rights?

It was in Berlin that I rounded off my reflections about where my plans for social justice education must go.

I won't share them here because they are still shapes held only in soft clay and perhaps it is best that they stay only somewhat formed for the time being. I'm not looking for closure just yet.

All my love.
K.