Global Nomads and TCKS- 22: What we are left with

Here I describe the legacy of the global nomad childhood for me:

What I have taken away from this itinerant childhood: a learning stance; the confusing but deep conviction that there are multiple truths and that mine is not the only one; a wish to honor others and not impose on them. Most of all, a NEED for other cultures: for the smell of fish markets, for the sound of Japanese, for the smell of batik, for the bong of a temple bell, for the suck on my boot of a wet Dutch field, for the smell of airplanes, for the sprawl of a transit lounge, for the taste of sticky Japanese rice, for the texture of a reed mat, for the sight of thatched rooftops against clean blue sky, for the ocean that sails me to a new place.

What have you taken away from your nomadic childhood? What do you want to keep? What do you want to discard? Where do you want to go, to be, from here?  Bring some of it back here.

 Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood 

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Global Nomads and TCKS- 21: The compulsion to depart

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Edward Said

Edward Said on the many contradictory feelings and penchants of the global nomad: the fear of abandonment and the compulsion to abandon, the pain of departure and the compulsion to leave, the habit of packing as if one will never return to a place

The underlying motifs for me have been the emergence of a second self buried for a very long time beneath a surface of often expertly acquired and wielded social characteristics belonging to the self my paren­ts tried to construct, the “Edward” I speak of intermittently, and how an extraordinarily increasing number of departures have unsettled my life from its earliest beginnings. To me, nothing more painful and para­doxically sought after characterizes my life than the many displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environments that have kept me in motion all these years. Thirteen years ago I wrote in After the Last Sky that when I travel I always take too much with me, and that even a trip downtown requires the packing of a briefcase stocked with items disproportionately larger in size and number than the actual period of the trip. Analyzing this, I concluded that I had a secret but ineradicable fear of not returning. What I’ve since discovered is that despite this fear I fabricate occasions for departure, thus giving rise to the fear voluntar­ily. The two seem absolutely necessary to my rhythm of life and have intensified dramatically during the period I’ve been ill. I say to myself: if you don’t take this trip, don’t prove your mobility and indulge your fear of being lost, don’t override the normal rhythms of domestic now, you certainly will not be able to do it in the near future. I also experience the anxious moodiness of travel (la mélancolie des paquebots, as Flaubert calls it, Bahnhofsstimmung  in German) along with envy for those who stay behind, whom I see on my return, their faces unshad­owed by dislocation or what seems to be enforced mobility, happy with their families, draped in a comfortable suit and raincoat, there  for all to see. Something about the invisibility of the departed, his being missing and perhaps missed, in addition to the intense, repetitious, and predict­able sense of banishment that takes you away from all that you know and can take comfort in, makes you feel the need to leave because of some prior but self-created logic, and a sense of rapture. In all cases, though, the great fear is that departure is the state of being abandoned even though it is you who leave.

 Out of Place: A Memoir

Life Notes: Rupture and Repair

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Lee Smollen, Life Notes, Phillip Ball, Roger Penrose

“Civilization and Nature” by Maud Taber-Thomas

“The intensity of the conflict between parent and child isn’t what matters.  The emotions can be very intense.  What matters is the repair afterward.”  The professor said this one day during an infant development class I took in graduate school.  That notion about rupture and repair has stuck with me, and I have relied on it, and in my experience, it has held up most of the time.  Emotional heat has caring behind it, and so long as that emotional warmth is expressed, too, into the efforts at repairing a fracture afterward, often the temporary break results in a stronger bond.  I can summon more than one occasion with my children, young, larger, and fully grown, when, fed up at their messes—they are both artists who make great, spreading projects—I burst out at them.  “You guys have to clean up or I’ll go crazy!”  I always stifled my mess-frustration past a point when it could be calmly conveyed.  After their furious, fuming tidyings-up, and my lurking about feeling guilty about my vehemence—and conciliatory hugs all round when the room was, to all parties’ relief, clear and spacious and ready for new messes—there would often be smiles as bursting and full of warmth as my explosion had been, and good-natured chats around cookies and milky tea to boot.

Recently I listened to a program on BBC’s The Forum, a show that features a “Sixty Second Idea to Change the World.”  This round, the idea, put forth by Phillip Ball, was: “Make mending an art form: encourage and celebrate the skills of mending in everyday life.”  The English science writer explained, “I’m thinking we can learn from the ancient art of mending broken ceramics in Japan, where the mend is seen as an opportunity to make the broken object even more beautiful, in some cases by picking out the network of glue in gold powder.” Mending, he said, ought to be regarded as an important life skill to be taught to children.  Most important of all is to “remove the stigma of repair.”  Mending ought to be seen as an art form, and mended clothes, rather than regarded as scruffy, should be “as welcome in the boardroom as the workshop.”

Ball’s fellow panelist, physicist Lee Smollen recalled a summer at Oxford when he studied with the mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose.  Often their chats took place in the college commons where the staff kept “a cache of broken teacups” because Roger Penrose liked to mend them.  While the young physicist and the older one chatted, the older man carefully pieced and glued the china cups.

Global Nomads and TCKS- 20: A new language releases us

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Alice Kaplan

Alice Kaplan on the pleasure of living in and speaking another language, in this case, French.  A new language can release us—to desire different thing, to claim new body parts, to become adult…

“It was not what France gave you but what it did not take away from you that was important”: Gertrude Stein pub­lished that line in Paris France in 1940, the year her adopted country caved in to the Nazis.

I’ve been willing to overlook in French culture what I wouldn’t accept in my own, for the privilege of living in translation.

Learning French and learning to think, learning to desire, is all mixed up in my head, until I can’t tell the difference. French is what released me from the cool complacency of the R Resisters, made me want, and like wanting, unbut­toned me and sent me packing. French demands my obe­dience, gives me permission to try too hard, to squinch up my face to make the words sound right. French houses words like “existentialism” that connote abstract thinking, difficulties to which I can get the key. And body parts which I can claim. French got me away from my family and taught me how to talk. Made me an adult. And the whole drama of it is in that “r,” how deep in my throat, how different it feels.

French Lessons: A Memoir

Global Nomads and TCKS- 19: The wish to hold places still

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Andre Aciman

Some thoughts from Andre Aciman on the global nomad’s wish for past places not to have changed.  Here he reflects on a return to Paris:

When I returned twenty years later, with my wife, the city had hardly changed. I still remembered the station names; the café on Avenue Victor Hugo was the same; and the shop on the Faubourg Saint Honoré where my grandmother had bought me a tie was still there, except much bigger and filled with Japanese tourists. The Victor Hugo movie theater had disappeared. In the old cafe around the corner, we ordered 2 café creme and a ham sandwich each.

Avenue Georges Mandel was quiet in the early evening. As we neared the corner where Aunt Elsa had lived, her building suddenly came into view.

I pointed upstairs and showed my wife the window from which Aunt Elsa had thrown her husband’s pipe on New Year’s Eve to make a wish. I showed her the building nearby where Maria Callas had lived. They had spoken in Greek to her, corrected her Greek once.

We took pictures. Of the building. Of me standing in front of the building. Of her taking pictures of me standing in front of the building. She asked again which floor they had lived on. The fifth, I said. We looked up. The windows of Aunt Elsa’s studio were unlit and the shutters drawn. Of course they’re unlit, no one’s home, I thought to myself. They’ve been dead for twenty years! But then, the apartment couldn’t have stayed empty for so many years; surely it belonged to someone else. I seemed to recall that Vili himself had sold it. Still, what if it had never changed hands in all these years, if nothing had changed, if no one had even picked up the fork or touched the cardigan Aunt Elsa let fall before being rushed to the hospital on the night she died? What if her furniture and her china and her clothes and everything she hoarded throughout her life kept vigil for her and remained forever and only hers by dint of the life she had spun around them?

And for a moment I thought that this might also be true of the apartment on Rue Thebes, that after sixty years with us it could never belong to anyone else and would be forever ours. I wanted to think that it, too, remained exactly the way we left it, that no one cried or quarreled there, that dust collected in the corners, that children were never allowed to scream as they sprinted past the junk room where Flora loved, Vili wept, and Latifa died.

 Out of Egypt: A Memoir

On Writing: Creativity and the Will

Many of my students fret about not having enough will power, enough will to bring their creative work into being.  Others worry about the idleness that creative writing seems to require.  They find that “unproductive” mental wandering hard to justify, when they ought, rather, to be accomplishing something.

Here are some thoughts on the will and creativity from Lewis Hyde, author of the fascinating book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.  Hyde’s perspectives should help writers who question their right to the free-floating suspension that seems necessary to their creative work.  They may also invite writers to hold at bay traditional American notions about, and emphasis on, willpower and productivity.  The will is so powerful and domineering, Hyde proposes, that it actually endangers creativity.  We all know how dictatorial is the call to task-completion, while the call to create has a gentle voice.

Hyde writes:

There are at least two phases in the completion of a work of art, one in which the will is suspended and another in which it is active.  The suspension is primary.  It is when the will is slack that we feel moved or we are struck by an event, intuition, or image.  The materia must begin to flow before it can be worked, and not only is the will powerless to initiate that flow, but it actually seems to interfere, for artists have traditionally used devices—drugs, fasting, trances, sleep deprivation, dancing—to suspend the will so that something “other” may come forward.  When the material finally appears, it is usually in a jumble, personally moving, perhaps, but not much use to someone else—not, at any rate, a work of art.  There are exceptions, but the initial formulation of a work is rarely satisfactory—satisfactory, I mean, to the imagination itself, for, like a person who must struggle to say what he means, the imagination stutters toward the clear articulation of its feeling.  The will has the power to carry the material back to the imagination and contain it while it is re-formed.  The will does not create the “germinating image” of the work, nor does it give the work its form, but it does provide the energy and the directed attention called for by a dialogue with the imagination.   

In this next passage, Hyde refers to virtu.  This he calls as an organizing force in art “corresponding to that which has given swansdown its beauty.”

There are times when the will should be suspended, Hyde says:

 …For when the will dominates, there is no gap through which grace may enter, no break in the ordered stride for error to escape, no way by which a barren prince may receive the virtu of his people, and for an artist, no moment of receptiveness which the engendering images may come forward.

Any artist who develops the will risks its hegemony.  If he is at all wary of that sympathy by which we become receptive to things beyond the self, he may not encourage the will to abandon its position when its powers are exhausted.  Willpower has a tendency to usurp the functions of imagination, particularly in a man in a patriarchy…when the will works in isolation, it turns of necessity to dictionary studies, syntactical tricks, intellectual formulae, memory, history, and convention—any course of material, that is, which can imitate the fruits of the imagination without actually allowing them to emerge…The will knows about survival and endurance; it can direct attention and energy; it can finish things.  But we cannot remember a tune or a dream on willpower.  We cannot stay awake on willpower.   Will may direct virtu but it cannot bring it into the world. The will by itself cannot heal the soul.  It cannot create.