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.