When I was young I was enamored with adventure stories. From Indiana Jones films to Phantom comics, I dreamed about hacking my way through the jungle, canoeing up the Amazon, walking through forgotten temples, and finding ancient treasures, all the while dodging pirates and assorted angry natives armed with bows and arrows. Which, of course, was the reason I had to carry a .45 in my fantasies. And maybe an AK 47, too. (I was never sure about that one - it seemed heavy and awkward even in my imagination.)
Of course, the irony was that a stone's throw outside my house was literally a real jungle, with real waterfalls and real tribes of natives armed with bows and arrows, but I preferred sitting inside my house, in a comfy armchair, and dreaming of the deserts and jungles I would someday traipse through. I suppose this was my first clue that deep down I have an aversion to sweat and mosquitoes, dirt under my fingernails and blisters and leeches on my feet which outweighs the vague "love of adventure."
The last three weeks I have lived in one of the most exotic and historical cities in the world. The alleys abound with photo opportunities, the bazaars and side-shops overflow with old brass antiques, and every neighborhood has tangible links to the past. A few days ago as my wife and I were walking toward the coast, I looked up at the old retaining wall we were winding our way around, and realized that this wall was the end of the hippodrome, the old race track, the colliseum of Constantinople. You would never know it now, as it has a cafe located at the bottom which stores unused umbrellas and ice-cream freezers in its arches, and the top has been filled in, and a school built on top of it. You would never know it, but there it was. I knew this was it, because I had seen it on TV two days before.
Ever since we had moved here, I have spent the days glued to the sofa, avidly watching hour after hour of National Geographic and the history channel. (Oh, and the Olympics, too.) And in those three weeks I have seen a number of documentaries on Istanbul. They feature the historical remains of the city, and tell the stories behind them. And I sit, enthralled, on my sofa, and watch, amazed, and stuff fried peanuts into my mouth, thinking, "Wow. How cool it would be to be there."
So, occasionally, after a few days of doing nothing, (usually at Cynthia's instigation,) we will venture outside to do something, like visit a fish market, or the archaeological museum. And every time I make it 20 yards outside the house, I am struck with an influx of energy, and a sense of the boundless opportunities a city like this presents, and an amazing sense of my own good fortune to live in such a beautiful place. Bustling and crowded and noisy and beautiful Istanbul.
The waiters of the restaurants stand outside, and greet you and beg you to "come inside, look at the menu? Excuse me, sir, can I give you my card? Maybe for later?"
The shoe-shine men carry their shoe-shine stands over their shoulders, and as they walk in front of you, they swing the stand just right so that the brush, hanging on the back, falls off at your feet. Then they walk on, oblivious. And you, if you are wise, smile, and also walk on.
The men in the bazaar invite you into their shops - "buy a pretty lamp, how about a carpet, best quality!" "We have soaps, to wash your body! My sponges are so good you will feel my fingers cleaning you, sir!" "The best Turkish delight, and sweets!"
Then there are the men who stand in the middle of the passageways with nothing more than a box and a board, or a cloth upon the ground. On it may be plastic toys from China, or simply socks. Or small flashlights. These sellers do not address individuals, or try to sell the features of their goods. Instead, in an ear-splitting, piercing voice, they constantly yell "Bir Lira, bir Lira, bir Lira!!!" ("One Lira, one Lira . . . ") on the assumption that where quality may lack, low price may yet compensate.
But of all the sellers, I prefer the vegetable markets. The sellers are a little more sedate, and spend most of their time helping customers. And the vegetables, oh, the vegetables and fruits, are stacked, arranged, and presented in a way I never witnessed in Poland. In Spain they might do it similarly, but not nearly so well. They create small works of art out of some of their stands. There are tomatoes in pyramids, and spices piled up in cones. There are pistachios, and figs, walnuts and grapes, (and you can taste them - don't ask, just reach out, and take one, pop it into your mouth, and look like you are thinking of buying. Then try another.) There are peaches piled high and avocadoes in rows. The fish sellers arrange their glistening wares on ice, and the olive sellers float theirs in glistening brine. The cheese sellers sell hard, aged cheeses, and fresh, crumbly white cheeses. My favorite is the salty string cheese, which I could munch on forever, but I know that obesity lies down that path.
And then there are all the countless bakeries, selling golden baklava, weighted down with dripping honey, layers upon layers of fine pastry and ground nuts, and glistening green pistachios crumbled across the top. Kofte shops sell small patties of a spiced red meat, halfway between a patty and a meatball, which you can buy and take home, or they will put into a large piece of bread, (half a loaf, in fact,) with tomatoes and lettuce, and off you go, munching away. The corn sellers also cry out the price, "One Lira, one lira!" for sweet corn, boiled or roasted, your choice, heavily salted, for just one Lira.
Cynthia recently solved the mystery of the orange balls for me. After seeing carts go by, loaded with small orange balls reminiscent of Cartman's cheesy poofs, I asked her if she had any insight into what it might be. She guessed peanuts. I guessed cheesy poofs. Later she bought some and we found they were indeed peanuts, coated in some breading, and fried into an obscene orange color. Mystery solved.
But the greatest mystery is posed by the small meat stands, which bring a literal meaning to the term "mystery meat." The most common is the Kebab, with a long, upright metal spit turning an enormous cone of sizzling meat in front of a stack of gas heaters. The chicken kebab is easy to recognize. The other may be beef, but is probably lamb. In one heated cabinet Cynthia noticed a pile of fried potatoes and small chunks of . . . lamb? We asked and a small boy told us, yes, it was lamb. Being a great fan of frying in general, and potatoes and meat in any form, we bought a sandwich of it, and I proceeded to consume half before realizing that politeness might dictate offering a small portion to the person who had brought it to my attention and suggested we buy it. She took her bite, and after some time I asked her if she would like another. No, thanks, she said. In her bite she had encountered a piece of liver. I considered this a one-off, and continued eating. After another bite or two, I felt an unmistakeable bitter greasiness on my tongue, and a taste in the back of my throat like bile, and I knew she was right. Suddenly all my taste buds were on edge, probing, exploring each bite. What had been a very pleasant sandwich became a slow exploration of a minefield. I felt like Homer Simpson, unable to enjoy his sandwich, and unable to put it down. As I neared the end of the sandwich I began feeling queasy, then downright nauseous.
I knew no bacteria could work that fast - anything that can make you sick 10 minutes after you ingest it must be a really potent one, so I chalked it up to either psychology, or my stomach just doesn't appreciate liver. We walked on for twenty minutes or so, with my stomach churning and my skin sweating and odd burps emerging, before as suddenly as it had come, it passed.
Which just goes to show - I may not have discovered ancient deserted temples, and I don't particularly like the jungle, buy I may have a small sense of adventure left in me, at least as far as meat products are concerned. And Istanbul is full of small culinary adventures just waiting for my intrepid intestines.
One particular adventure that still remains are the many small, wheeled carts I see, coals in the bottom, and a horizontal spit, on which what looks like one hundred slices of mini-bologna. They seem popular along beaches and in alleys and not so much in the shops. We are told these small slices are gut and organ material, and are best avoided. But the question remains whether we are going to take advice, or try it for ourselves.
I bet sooner or later we buy one.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The Bear is back!
My father got his Masters in leadership studies. I recall reading one of his projects which stated that one of the tasks of a leader was to "scan the horizon." The idea was that while the peons and grunts kept their nose to the grindstones, someone had to keep their head up, scanning around to see if grindstones were going out of fashion. Another writer, Stephen Covey, used the metaphor of the jungle - you can expend a lot of energy hacking your way through the jungle - you can display great teamwork, dedication and sacrifice. You can even make great progress. But if nobody climbs a tree to look around, you might be expending all that energy heading the wrong direction.
It would appear that while the Bush administration has been heavily haemorrhaging American blood, money, (to the tune of between 2 and 3 billion dollars a week,) and international goodwill into the sands of Iraq, a real enemy, a superpower villain, has been repositioning itself for another attempt to take over the world. The scenario lends itself so easily to comic book analogy: beaten beyond all point of being a threat, the villain lays gasping in the gutter. His evil army has been broken and scattered, and the villain's demise is imminent. Our superhero turns to the innocent, wide-eyed bystander and says something heroic, in a deep voice. When he turns back, where the villain lay is only a wet smear of blood, leading into the sewer grate. He has escaped! He lives to fight another day! Who knows when and where this dastardly villain will again emerge to threaten the lives and freedom of the citizens of our fair city?
Who is this frightful villain, you ask? Well, who was America's arch-nemesis?
"I know!" you say - "Osama Bin Laden!"
But no, unfortunately, Mr. Bin is just the latest in a series of villains who pop up for an issue or two and then disappear. Who was REALLY the arch-nemesis, for a long time?
I'll give you a hint: When the "leader of the free world," Bush Jr. met their current leader, Bush said "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul." Colin Powell later changed the quote, and responded, "I look into his eyes, and I see the KGB." (Incidentally, John McCain is now using Powell's uncredited line on the campaign trail.)
So after 50 years of fighting the cold war, when America stood as the sole remaining superpower, surveying the vast world, and wondering where and how to exert its vast power to do good, what was Russia doing? Well, they began by electing a drunk, and selling off all the large state business concerns to cronies. The cronies got right to work stealing all the aid money the west pumped into their investment infrastructure, and made off with it. Billions and billions of dollars and euros, gone! Gone? No, not gone! Invested in . . . the armed wing of their businesses. Suddenly "Russian Mafia" entered our vocabulary. Tough as nails, more motivated, more organized, and better armed than the amateurish family-run affair they have in Italy, the Russian mafia managed to get their fingers into everything in Russia.
As the state continued to sell off infrastructure to oligarchs, and the crime-bosses continued to grow in power and influence, the small businesses, so vital for the creation of a middle class, which is in turn so vital to a functioning democracy, were attacked on one side by a tax-code of byzantine complexity left over from communist times, which taxes at a rate of 120%, and by mob bosses demanding protection money on the other. Left with no money and two broken kneecaps, small Russian business decided to roll over and play dead. As their economy imploded, young people were left without jobs, and old people saw their already paltry pensions reduced further as the ruble lost value. What hurt even more, however, was the loss of international prestige, the loss of empire.
The old folks in question, you see, had seen a lot. They had lived through very dark times, when there was a constant external threat, willing to bomb your cities to rubble, and a constant internal threat, willing to torture you and condemn you to the gulag for expressing an opinion. Meanwhile, quotidian life consisted of standing in line for hours and hours to receive a paltry amount of shoddy quality goods, if you were lucky.
The reason for all this internal threat and external threat and poor quality goods was that, well, we are at war. In attempting to create conditions for equality for all and a workers paradise around the world, some resistance from the imperialist capitalist pigs could be expected. The ruling classes would never give up their exploitative stranglehold on the workers without a fight. Therefore, since we are at war, sacrifices must be made. That is why we don't have butter. That is why internal dissent cannot be allowed. Temporary sacrifices made, in the name of future victory. And in the meantime, just look at what an empire we already have massed at our side.
And that was the one consoling thought with which the worn-down Russian could console himself as he dropped off to sleep at night. We may be poor and harassed, but we are an empire. We are important. We may be forced to sacrifice, but the West thinks of us constantly, takes us into account, ponders our movements. We matter. When our ambassador clears his throat in the UN, every eastern bloc ambassador turns his head, and Germany begins to sweat.
Then, suddenly, that was gone. Overnight, the empire you gave so much for, sacrificed children and relatives to, suffered on behalf of, was gone, slipped away, in the course of a few months. The rot that underlay the whole system was suddenly exposed for all to see. They were left with nothing except the brief, ephemeral promise of prosperity and democracy like in the west. But instead the poverty and the bureaucracy continued, but now without order, and instead of one force who terrorized the population, multiple forces competed for the privilege.
A few people prospered, wildly. Most, left with nothing, their name a byword among the nations for a failed state, began to look for who to blame. In the end, they blamed the west, and began to invoke a mythical spirit of Slavic, Russian nationalism which was under attack. They counted democracy as a foreign scam perpetrated on them by the malignant powers of the west. An alien import, designed to sap the native strength of the Russian people, and make them soft and corrupt like the west.
The West! Their enemy before, their enemy now. One nationalist politician commented that Russia had opened a window on the west, and gone to sleep. When it woke up, it wondered why all the family was sick. It was time to close the windows of the Russian house. And article after article, from The Economist to TIME, documentary after documentary, and a continual stream of news stories say the same thing - Russia is suffering, Russia is angry, and Russia blames the west.
Enter Putin. A strong ruler for a strong Russia. A former KGB officer only in the sense that the KGB has ceased to exist under that designation. But once KGB, always KGB. He places KGB officers at every level of Russian government, and gives ex-KGB businessmen preferential treatment until Russia is once again a de facto KGB state, with the same paranoid outlook on the world, but with a new, more functional economic system. Internal dissent is actively put down. Non-sympathetic businessmen are railroaded, and jailed.
Meanwhile, the West has no reason to even think of Russia, occupied as it is with lines in the sands of the middle east. Russia sends a column into Serbia in the middle of the night, captures the airport, and demands a slice of Serbia to "monitor," and the west says nothing. Russia undertakes a war in Chechnya which it can ill afford, with disastrous humanitarian consequences for both the civilian population and the Russian recruits sent to fight it. In numerous cases, Chechen women end up giving Russian troops food out of compassion, since their corrupt commanders have sold their supplies on the black market for a profit. Journalists who report on the widescale tragedy attract the ire of the state, and Russia actively represses freedom of the media, with many journalists who spoke out about the state dying of random criminal attacks, and the west says nothing.
Russian state-sponsored agents enter the UK with radioactive materials, and poison a British, (albeit former Russian) citizen on British soil. In response the west makes large squawking sounds, and makes windy noises. In response, Russia closes down British council language schools and cultural centers. They don't need English language libraries anyway, thanks.
Russia plants a flag under the North Pole, and claims it, (and the oil that may be there) for the Russian state - and the west glances briefly at it, having been attracted by the word "oil." (Incidentally, it now turns out the Russians may have placed the flag in the wrong spot. But if no one is paying attention anyway, it hardly matters.)
Russia begins to take umbrage to its former dominions chumming up with the west. Ukraine and Georgia reject politicians sponsored by Russia, who act as sock-puppets for the Kremlin, and elect pro-western governments in an act as dangerous as any violent revolution. Russia literally attempts to poison the Ukrainian pro-western contender, and the west says nothing. Russia encourages separatist sentiment in breakaway regions in the nations around it, and the west says nothing. It is when these countries apply for NATO membership that the gloves come off.
When Georgia squirmed its way out from under the Russian thumb, two regions tried to test the limits of their new-found freedom, and in a chain of reasoning that works only in the logical vortex of the Balkans, figured that the smaller their eventual state, the more free everyone would be. Russia immediately took up the cause of the breakaway regions, and insisted that Russian "peacekeepers" enter South Ossetia, (North Ossetia remains in Russia proper,) to prevent further civil war. (Odd how civil war is so distasteful to the Russians if it occurs anywhere that doesn't further their interests.) Once there, they proceeded to install Russian politicians in high-level positions, issue Russian passports to all South Ossetians who wanted one, (just in case,) and kindly allowed the breakaway province to use the Russian ruble as its currency, (just for now.) The sum effect of these actions was to suddenly create thousands of newly-minted Russian citizens in South Ossetia, so that when Georgia made a move to retake the province in question, Russia had to protect its "citizens."
Swedish Foreign minister Carl Bildt stated: "And we have reason to remember how Hitler used this very doctrine little more than half a century ago to undermine and attack substantial parts of central Europe." Which invites us to another comparison between the rise of a nationalist Germany, and the rise of Russian nationalism today. When Hitler demanded Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland and Poland, the west followed a consistent doctrine of energetic hand-wringing followed by formally granting him what he had de facto taken, lest we be led into confrontation. The doctrine of appeasement, as it came to be known, led us into World War II. Many historians believe, (in accordance with the doctrine of "a stitch in time saves nine") that an early confrontation with Hitler would have been the far less costly option.
Many pundits like to say that "On 9-11, the world changed." It didn't. We finally looked up from our plates to see what had changed long ago. And while the US is now absorbed in its latest short-sighted view of the world, the new global conflict is taking shape. We tried appeasing Hitler. We tried ignoring Bin Laden. A combination of these two tried-and-true doctrines with Russia would be nothing less than lethal.
It would appear that while the Bush administration has been heavily haemorrhaging American blood, money, (to the tune of between 2 and 3 billion dollars a week,) and international goodwill into the sands of Iraq, a real enemy, a superpower villain, has been repositioning itself for another attempt to take over the world. The scenario lends itself so easily to comic book analogy: beaten beyond all point of being a threat, the villain lays gasping in the gutter. His evil army has been broken and scattered, and the villain's demise is imminent. Our superhero turns to the innocent, wide-eyed bystander and says something heroic, in a deep voice. When he turns back, where the villain lay is only a wet smear of blood, leading into the sewer grate. He has escaped! He lives to fight another day! Who knows when and where this dastardly villain will again emerge to threaten the lives and freedom of the citizens of our fair city?
Who is this frightful villain, you ask? Well, who was America's arch-nemesis?
"I know!" you say - "Osama Bin Laden!"
But no, unfortunately, Mr. Bin is just the latest in a series of villains who pop up for an issue or two and then disappear. Who was REALLY the arch-nemesis, for a long time?
I'll give you a hint: When the "leader of the free world," Bush Jr. met their current leader, Bush said "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul." Colin Powell later changed the quote, and responded, "I look into his eyes, and I see the KGB." (Incidentally, John McCain is now using Powell's uncredited line on the campaign trail.)
So after 50 years of fighting the cold war, when America stood as the sole remaining superpower, surveying the vast world, and wondering where and how to exert its vast power to do good, what was Russia doing? Well, they began by electing a drunk, and selling off all the large state business concerns to cronies. The cronies got right to work stealing all the aid money the west pumped into their investment infrastructure, and made off with it. Billions and billions of dollars and euros, gone! Gone? No, not gone! Invested in . . . the armed wing of their businesses. Suddenly "Russian Mafia" entered our vocabulary. Tough as nails, more motivated, more organized, and better armed than the amateurish family-run affair they have in Italy, the Russian mafia managed to get their fingers into everything in Russia.
As the state continued to sell off infrastructure to oligarchs, and the crime-bosses continued to grow in power and influence, the small businesses, so vital for the creation of a middle class, which is in turn so vital to a functioning democracy, were attacked on one side by a tax-code of byzantine complexity left over from communist times, which taxes at a rate of 120%, and by mob bosses demanding protection money on the other. Left with no money and two broken kneecaps, small Russian business decided to roll over and play dead. As their economy imploded, young people were left without jobs, and old people saw their already paltry pensions reduced further as the ruble lost value. What hurt even more, however, was the loss of international prestige, the loss of empire.
The old folks in question, you see, had seen a lot. They had lived through very dark times, when there was a constant external threat, willing to bomb your cities to rubble, and a constant internal threat, willing to torture you and condemn you to the gulag for expressing an opinion. Meanwhile, quotidian life consisted of standing in line for hours and hours to receive a paltry amount of shoddy quality goods, if you were lucky.
The reason for all this internal threat and external threat and poor quality goods was that, well, we are at war. In attempting to create conditions for equality for all and a workers paradise around the world, some resistance from the imperialist capitalist pigs could be expected. The ruling classes would never give up their exploitative stranglehold on the workers without a fight. Therefore, since we are at war, sacrifices must be made. That is why we don't have butter. That is why internal dissent cannot be allowed. Temporary sacrifices made, in the name of future victory. And in the meantime, just look at what an empire we already have massed at our side.
And that was the one consoling thought with which the worn-down Russian could console himself as he dropped off to sleep at night. We may be poor and harassed, but we are an empire. We are important. We may be forced to sacrifice, but the West thinks of us constantly, takes us into account, ponders our movements. We matter. When our ambassador clears his throat in the UN, every eastern bloc ambassador turns his head, and Germany begins to sweat.
Then, suddenly, that was gone. Overnight, the empire you gave so much for, sacrificed children and relatives to, suffered on behalf of, was gone, slipped away, in the course of a few months. The rot that underlay the whole system was suddenly exposed for all to see. They were left with nothing except the brief, ephemeral promise of prosperity and democracy like in the west. But instead the poverty and the bureaucracy continued, but now without order, and instead of one force who terrorized the population, multiple forces competed for the privilege.
A few people prospered, wildly. Most, left with nothing, their name a byword among the nations for a failed state, began to look for who to blame. In the end, they blamed the west, and began to invoke a mythical spirit of Slavic, Russian nationalism which was under attack. They counted democracy as a foreign scam perpetrated on them by the malignant powers of the west. An alien import, designed to sap the native strength of the Russian people, and make them soft and corrupt like the west.
The West! Their enemy before, their enemy now. One nationalist politician commented that Russia had opened a window on the west, and gone to sleep. When it woke up, it wondered why all the family was sick. It was time to close the windows of the Russian house. And article after article, from The Economist to TIME, documentary after documentary, and a continual stream of news stories say the same thing - Russia is suffering, Russia is angry, and Russia blames the west.
Enter Putin. A strong ruler for a strong Russia. A former KGB officer only in the sense that the KGB has ceased to exist under that designation. But once KGB, always KGB. He places KGB officers at every level of Russian government, and gives ex-KGB businessmen preferential treatment until Russia is once again a de facto KGB state, with the same paranoid outlook on the world, but with a new, more functional economic system. Internal dissent is actively put down. Non-sympathetic businessmen are railroaded, and jailed.
Meanwhile, the West has no reason to even think of Russia, occupied as it is with lines in the sands of the middle east. Russia sends a column into Serbia in the middle of the night, captures the airport, and demands a slice of Serbia to "monitor," and the west says nothing. Russia undertakes a war in Chechnya which it can ill afford, with disastrous humanitarian consequences for both the civilian population and the Russian recruits sent to fight it. In numerous cases, Chechen women end up giving Russian troops food out of compassion, since their corrupt commanders have sold their supplies on the black market for a profit. Journalists who report on the widescale tragedy attract the ire of the state, and Russia actively represses freedom of the media, with many journalists who spoke out about the state dying of random criminal attacks, and the west says nothing.
Russian state-sponsored agents enter the UK with radioactive materials, and poison a British, (albeit former Russian) citizen on British soil. In response the west makes large squawking sounds, and makes windy noises. In response, Russia closes down British council language schools and cultural centers. They don't need English language libraries anyway, thanks.
Russia plants a flag under the North Pole, and claims it, (and the oil that may be there) for the Russian state - and the west glances briefly at it, having been attracted by the word "oil." (Incidentally, it now turns out the Russians may have placed the flag in the wrong spot. But if no one is paying attention anyway, it hardly matters.)
Russia begins to take umbrage to its former dominions chumming up with the west. Ukraine and Georgia reject politicians sponsored by Russia, who act as sock-puppets for the Kremlin, and elect pro-western governments in an act as dangerous as any violent revolution. Russia literally attempts to poison the Ukrainian pro-western contender, and the west says nothing. Russia encourages separatist sentiment in breakaway regions in the nations around it, and the west says nothing. It is when these countries apply for NATO membership that the gloves come off.
When Georgia squirmed its way out from under the Russian thumb, two regions tried to test the limits of their new-found freedom, and in a chain of reasoning that works only in the logical vortex of the Balkans, figured that the smaller their eventual state, the more free everyone would be. Russia immediately took up the cause of the breakaway regions, and insisted that Russian "peacekeepers" enter South Ossetia, (North Ossetia remains in Russia proper,) to prevent further civil war. (Odd how civil war is so distasteful to the Russians if it occurs anywhere that doesn't further their interests.) Once there, they proceeded to install Russian politicians in high-level positions, issue Russian passports to all South Ossetians who wanted one, (just in case,) and kindly allowed the breakaway province to use the Russian ruble as its currency, (just for now.) The sum effect of these actions was to suddenly create thousands of newly-minted Russian citizens in South Ossetia, so that when Georgia made a move to retake the province in question, Russia had to protect its "citizens."
Swedish Foreign minister Carl Bildt stated: "And we have reason to remember how Hitler used this very doctrine little more than half a century ago to undermine and attack substantial parts of central Europe." Which invites us to another comparison between the rise of a nationalist Germany, and the rise of Russian nationalism today. When Hitler demanded Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland and Poland, the west followed a consistent doctrine of energetic hand-wringing followed by formally granting him what he had de facto taken, lest we be led into confrontation. The doctrine of appeasement, as it came to be known, led us into World War II. Many historians believe, (in accordance with the doctrine of "a stitch in time saves nine") that an early confrontation with Hitler would have been the far less costly option.
Many pundits like to say that "On 9-11, the world changed." It didn't. We finally looked up from our plates to see what had changed long ago. And while the US is now absorbed in its latest short-sighted view of the world, the new global conflict is taking shape. We tried appeasing Hitler. We tried ignoring Bin Laden. A combination of these two tried-and-true doctrines with Russia would be nothing less than lethal.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Between Church and State
Yesterday while sitting in a shaded second-story cafe overlooking a busy intersection and drinking a cold, oddly watery beer, I noticed the headquarters of the "ak" party across the way. Since the small village of Sariyer wasn't offering up anything more entertaining, I looked up what the "A" and the "K" stood for - Adalet ve Kalkinma - Justice and Development. The ak party was created from the remnants of a banned Islamic party, and after reforming and redefining, nevertheless finds itself (or has positioned itself) squarely in the middle of the debate over religion vs. secularism in the state, and consequently is now again defending itself against legal action seeking to ban the party.
Aaah, Church and State. Like "Nature vs. Nurture," these three words immediately sum up a world of polemical charge and counter-charge, of opinion laced lightly with fact, and a debate on values delivered with vitriol. And like terrorism, it takes only the slightest act to prompt a whirlwind media frenzy; a student wishes to wear a headscarf in a school in France, a stewardess wishes to wear a small crucifix while she works. The latest? A schoolgirl in Britain wished to wear a simple metal bracelet, one of the five signs of being a Sikh. Millions of pounds sterling later, the courts have overruled the school, stating she is entitled to display a symbol of her religion, even if jewelery is forbidden to all the other children. Equality, it would seem, has to take a back seat once religion enters the room.
In the past few years I have moved from one Catholic country to another, and am now living in a state which is desperately trying to find the balance between secularism and accommodation for its religious population. Turkey's population is overwhelmingly Muslim. Yet secularism is enshrined in their constitution and laws as one of their foundational precepts. When Ataturk, (Father of the Turks,) founded the modern state of Turkey, he attempted to westernize everything in reach. The alphabet was thrown out, and a new, slightly adapted western alphabet was brought in. Traditional men's headgear (the fez,) was outlawed. And as for a woman wearing a head-covering in school or a govt. building, forget it.
Today, this is the central debate being fought in the newspapers and cafes across the country. The ruling party, elected in transparent and fair elections, is a Muslim party, under whose rule, by all accounts, the economy has prospered greatly, yet because of its religious views, may see itself banned. What is it about religion that is considered so insidious, so frightful, that otherwise well-respected political parties find themselves fighting for their life in court, or intimidated by generals who publicly contemplate a coup? What is so frightening about a piece of cloth over the head, or a bangle on the arm of a girl, that we would put her in the same category as one who brings a gun to school, and deprive her of the right to receive an education?
The answer may lie in a word mentioned previously - equality. All democracies aspire to equality before the law for all members of their society. Though in practice rarely achieved, (since the economically empowered enjoy an advantage the lower classes can almost never attain, from education to employment opportunities to the ability to hire professional specialists to extract you from the consequences of your misdeeds,) the simple aspiration, by sheer nobility of concept, and the guiding light it provides for our societies, can never be deserted, no matter how short we may fall in application. Like the UN, though it may fall so egregiously short in practicality as to invite ridicule, the abandonment of the concept represents such a renunciation of something we hold so precious, and the acknowledgement of the inevitability of the triumph of the darker side of man, that futilely clutching the inadequate life-preserver we have is currently judged wiser than letting go and sliding into the darkened depths beneath our still kicking legs.
Equality is enshrined in the American declaration of independence, and on every coin in the French Republic. Without it a democracy loses its "demo," and becomes simply a "cracy," from which our world already suffers an excess. In short, it loses its raison d'etre. So what is the problem with religion?
Religion is inherently unequal. By virtue of its claim to reveal absolute truth, it relegates other beliefs to a secondary, or lesser, status. It says, "I know truth - you do not." Equality, therefore, is mutually exclusive with a religion of absolutes. You are among those who are enlightened, or redeemed, or chosen, or you are not. You are ultimately working for the long-term betterment of the world in accordance with divine principles, or you are, to a greater or lesser degree impeding said work, or at the very least cluttering up the way. Hardly the stuff of equality.
The solution, no doubt, lies in a balance. On the one hand, people must be given the freedom to observe their beliefs, as much in the public as in the private sphere. On the other, we cannot allow for one group, by govt. funds distributed, or laws enacted, to enjoy a privileged status over other groups. Nor, paradoxically, can we afford to observe a ridiculous over-equality, with a baby Krishna and baby Mohammed occupying the manger next the baby Christ in a nativity scene. Such preposterousness is more offensive to most than the original offense could ever be. Nor should we retreat from all public signs of any religious tradition or observance, by removing all Christmas trees from airports, or prohibiting all jewelery lest someone wear a symbol.
By and large, on an individual level, people need to get over themselves. Not every symbol worn by an individual heralds the downfall of society. And no doubt each decision handed down by the courts will displease many on a given side - ideally, a just decision will displease many on both sides. Like most difficult paths, each decision must be taken with due consideration and patience, for as we all know, nothing worthwhile is easy. Between Church and State may be between the Devil and the deep blue sea - but it has to be navigated, all the same.
Aaah, Church and State. Like "Nature vs. Nurture," these three words immediately sum up a world of polemical charge and counter-charge, of opinion laced lightly with fact, and a debate on values delivered with vitriol. And like terrorism, it takes only the slightest act to prompt a whirlwind media frenzy; a student wishes to wear a headscarf in a school in France, a stewardess wishes to wear a small crucifix while she works. The latest? A schoolgirl in Britain wished to wear a simple metal bracelet, one of the five signs of being a Sikh. Millions of pounds sterling later, the courts have overruled the school, stating she is entitled to display a symbol of her religion, even if jewelery is forbidden to all the other children. Equality, it would seem, has to take a back seat once religion enters the room.
In the past few years I have moved from one Catholic country to another, and am now living in a state which is desperately trying to find the balance between secularism and accommodation for its religious population. Turkey's population is overwhelmingly Muslim. Yet secularism is enshrined in their constitution and laws as one of their foundational precepts. When Ataturk, (Father of the Turks,) founded the modern state of Turkey, he attempted to westernize everything in reach. The alphabet was thrown out, and a new, slightly adapted western alphabet was brought in. Traditional men's headgear (the fez,) was outlawed. And as for a woman wearing a head-covering in school or a govt. building, forget it.
Today, this is the central debate being fought in the newspapers and cafes across the country. The ruling party, elected in transparent and fair elections, is a Muslim party, under whose rule, by all accounts, the economy has prospered greatly, yet because of its religious views, may see itself banned. What is it about religion that is considered so insidious, so frightful, that otherwise well-respected political parties find themselves fighting for their life in court, or intimidated by generals who publicly contemplate a coup? What is so frightening about a piece of cloth over the head, or a bangle on the arm of a girl, that we would put her in the same category as one who brings a gun to school, and deprive her of the right to receive an education?
The answer may lie in a word mentioned previously - equality. All democracies aspire to equality before the law for all members of their society. Though in practice rarely achieved, (since the economically empowered enjoy an advantage the lower classes can almost never attain, from education to employment opportunities to the ability to hire professional specialists to extract you from the consequences of your misdeeds,) the simple aspiration, by sheer nobility of concept, and the guiding light it provides for our societies, can never be deserted, no matter how short we may fall in application. Like the UN, though it may fall so egregiously short in practicality as to invite ridicule, the abandonment of the concept represents such a renunciation of something we hold so precious, and the acknowledgement of the inevitability of the triumph of the darker side of man, that futilely clutching the inadequate life-preserver we have is currently judged wiser than letting go and sliding into the darkened depths beneath our still kicking legs.
Equality is enshrined in the American declaration of independence, and on every coin in the French Republic. Without it a democracy loses its "demo," and becomes simply a "cracy," from which our world already suffers an excess. In short, it loses its raison d'etre. So what is the problem with religion?
Religion is inherently unequal. By virtue of its claim to reveal absolute truth, it relegates other beliefs to a secondary, or lesser, status. It says, "I know truth - you do not." Equality, therefore, is mutually exclusive with a religion of absolutes. You are among those who are enlightened, or redeemed, or chosen, or you are not. You are ultimately working for the long-term betterment of the world in accordance with divine principles, or you are, to a greater or lesser degree impeding said work, or at the very least cluttering up the way. Hardly the stuff of equality.
The solution, no doubt, lies in a balance. On the one hand, people must be given the freedom to observe their beliefs, as much in the public as in the private sphere. On the other, we cannot allow for one group, by govt. funds distributed, or laws enacted, to enjoy a privileged status over other groups. Nor, paradoxically, can we afford to observe a ridiculous over-equality, with a baby Krishna and baby Mohammed occupying the manger next the baby Christ in a nativity scene. Such preposterousness is more offensive to most than the original offense could ever be. Nor should we retreat from all public signs of any religious tradition or observance, by removing all Christmas trees from airports, or prohibiting all jewelery lest someone wear a symbol.
By and large, on an individual level, people need to get over themselves. Not every symbol worn by an individual heralds the downfall of society. And no doubt each decision handed down by the courts will displease many on a given side - ideally, a just decision will displease many on both sides. Like most difficult paths, each decision must be taken with due consideration and patience, for as we all know, nothing worthwhile is easy. Between Church and State may be between the Devil and the deep blue sea - but it has to be navigated, all the same.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Moving Pains
Moving is a time of turmoil - to say as much is to understate the obvious. There are dates and deadlines to work around - when you get the electricity shut off, when the phone stops working, when the landlord will inspect the apartment, or (show up and tell you he doesn't have time to inspect the apartment, so you can't get your deposit back. Sorry.) Then there are the boxes to pack, and ship, (and how will we get the boxes from the house to the post office? Will they fit in a taxi? Shall we call a truck? How does one do that in a language you don't speak?)
Moving from one country to another only adds to the factors that could go wrong. What language should the forms be filled out in? (Kind of a moot point since I don't speak either.) How much taxes and customs duty are they going to charge me for simply bringing in my possessions? If I write down everything that is in the package, will this tempt someone to help themselves? If I don't write everything down, can I get in trouble for undeclared items? What about insurance - how specific do I need to be? (fortunately the space provided is 3 lines long, allowing for about 6 words maximum, so once again - a bit of a moot point.) But where / how will we live till our blankets and bowls arrive?
Once you have turned the key, and boarded the bus for the airport, the move briefly takes on the appearance of a regular jaunt out of the country. Bags and books and carry-ons. Bus to hostel to bed to breakfast to train to bus to airport to check in to security to sit to wait to read to bus to airplane. This is probably the most relaxing time of the whole move, since it is the only time in which all your mistakes have already been made, and now you have nothing to do except suffer the consequences. For the first time in about 2 months, there are no pressing decisions to make which will most likely deprive you of hundreds of dollars if you pick the wrong option. Unless, of course, your airline goes on strike. Which ours did. But nevermind.
When you arrive at your destination, and go airplane to bus to immigration to baggage (side-trip to duty-free) to customs to taxi to friend's apartment to unpack the bags and books and carry-ons, to sit silently on the couch and stare at the darkened television screen and think - it is almost over. Almost over. Almost over. Soon, soon, the boxes will come, there will be some hassle, yes, the boxes will come, and then there will be some hassle about moving them, but then, then I will be done, and then I will have a home again, and then it will all seem worth it, and then I will have succeeded, I will have finished what I started 6, 7, months ago. Then it will be finished. And you drink your drink and you think your think and you crawl into bed and sleep the sleep of the just.
But you shouldn't. Because what you don't know, and for 3 more blessed days won't know, is that all your precious boxes, each of them bigger than you, and loaded with the detritus of a materialistic life lived on the run, loaded with accumulated crap of varying utility, expense, and sentimental value, each and every one of those boxes that you labored over and packed to within grams of the maximum weight allowed, and then covered in postal regulation brown paper, and taped firmly and fixed a curse on the lid of each one, promising to those who would trespass here such affliction that would make Tutankhamen's tomb look like an invitation to Disneyland, each and every one of your boxes is now winging its way to the wrong address, destined to be delivered (or not,) to an abandoned building down the road.
Moving from one country to another only adds to the factors that could go wrong. What language should the forms be filled out in? (Kind of a moot point since I don't speak either.) How much taxes and customs duty are they going to charge me for simply bringing in my possessions? If I write down everything that is in the package, will this tempt someone to help themselves? If I don't write everything down, can I get in trouble for undeclared items? What about insurance - how specific do I need to be? (fortunately the space provided is 3 lines long, allowing for about 6 words maximum, so once again - a bit of a moot point.) But where / how will we live till our blankets and bowls arrive?
Once you have turned the key, and boarded the bus for the airport, the move briefly takes on the appearance of a regular jaunt out of the country. Bags and books and carry-ons. Bus to hostel to bed to breakfast to train to bus to airport to check in to security to sit to wait to read to bus to airplane. This is probably the most relaxing time of the whole move, since it is the only time in which all your mistakes have already been made, and now you have nothing to do except suffer the consequences. For the first time in about 2 months, there are no pressing decisions to make which will most likely deprive you of hundreds of dollars if you pick the wrong option. Unless, of course, your airline goes on strike. Which ours did. But nevermind.
When you arrive at your destination, and go airplane to bus to immigration to baggage (side-trip to duty-free) to customs to taxi to friend's apartment to unpack the bags and books and carry-ons, to sit silently on the couch and stare at the darkened television screen and think - it is almost over. Almost over. Almost over. Soon, soon, the boxes will come, there will be some hassle, yes, the boxes will come, and then there will be some hassle about moving them, but then, then I will be done, and then I will have a home again, and then it will all seem worth it, and then I will have succeeded, I will have finished what I started 6, 7, months ago. Then it will be finished. And you drink your drink and you think your think and you crawl into bed and sleep the sleep of the just.
But you shouldn't. Because what you don't know, and for 3 more blessed days won't know, is that all your precious boxes, each of them bigger than you, and loaded with the detritus of a materialistic life lived on the run, loaded with accumulated crap of varying utility, expense, and sentimental value, each and every one of those boxes that you labored over and packed to within grams of the maximum weight allowed, and then covered in postal regulation brown paper, and taped firmly and fixed a curse on the lid of each one, promising to those who would trespass here such affliction that would make Tutankhamen's tomb look like an invitation to Disneyland, each and every one of your boxes is now winging its way to the wrong address, destined to be delivered (or not,) to an abandoned building down the road.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
This morning the call to prayer went out from the minarets in Istanbul, and woke me briefly. As I rolled over, before sinking back into a rum-soaked sleep, my only thought was, "We have done it. We have finally arrived in Istanbul."
Yesterday morning it was the din of the Krakow bus station which woke me, and the first thing I saw, hanging across the room, was a foto of the great wall of China, sinously wending its way over umpteen sepia hills into the sepia distance, and a saying attributed to Lao Tzu - "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
My father once had a sermon entitled "How do you eat an elephant?" Lest I keep you in suspense too long, the answer was "Bite by bite." I didn't find it very funny at the time, but I suppose son's rarely find their father's sermons very scintillating. I am of course, grateful that he has become more interesting as I have aged.
The message which underlies both of these sayings is that large things are composed of so many small things in combination. Do the small things, and in time you will have done much.
Moving to Istanbul was in every way an elephant, and in order to eat the bitterest parts first, we began at the tail, since every one knows that the finest steaks on an elephant are found in the trunk. (I suppose it has to do with all the work that the trunk has to do - that and the fact that it is round and can be cut into plate-sized steaks which have two holes in them is just too cool - my favorite thing to do is to put it on my face so I can see through the two holes and then use my best whispery-anguished Haley Joel Osment voice to say "I see elephant boogers.") But I digress.
I mentally divided our "move to Istanbul" project into 3 phases.
1. Find jobs.
2a. Get paperwork (work visa for Turkey, etc.) and
2b. pack/ship our belongings, and
2c. leave the European Union.
3. Live cheaply in Istanbul for 3 weeks till our university-provided apartment opens up.
There were a lot of factors that influencing each step which had to be juggled and balanced. For example, we had to move out of our apt. in Poland before August 1st, so our boxes had to be sent prior to that. The boxes will take 1-2 weeks to arrive. We cannot move into our apt. until Aug. 20th, and we cannot send boxes to the university until we are there to pick them up - sooooo, we had to find a apt. to stay at for 3 weeks, where we could receive a ton of boxes.
Another example is our work visas. Before we could apply for our work visas, we had to recieve a letter from the Turkish ministry of education. This in itself was a surprise, as we were not informed of this step till me had already made plans to leave the country, and close our accounts. Thus we were to be left without employment, and without internet, while we waited in our apartment, (which we were lucky to be able to keep,) for this letter to arrive. We would then take this precious gem of bureacratic excreta to the embassy of the country in which we are legal residents. We were told that this letter would take a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks after a couple of weeks, we noticed that our window of legal residency in Poland was quickly drawing to a close, which would, legally, make the letter in question pointless once we had recieved it, as we would no longer be allowed to apply to this embassy. These, among other similar situations, produced a low-level of constant apprehension, tension, which caused us to chew the insides of our cheeks at night, and snap at each other over nothing. How to resolve a million small problems at once, and in time.
At every step, at every stage, we found ourselves surrounded with more questions, to which only the petty gods of beauracracy could answer for us. Unfortunately the small gods of beauracracy will frequently let their phones ring for 10 minutes straight before telling you to call their "call center," and 15 calls later you will find out that really, no one knows anything. Yes, definitely, someone should know something, but really, that someone wouldn't be us.
The main problem with this scenario, of course, is that when you arrive at the embassy, the prim authoritarian fortuitiously located behind thick plate glass will indeed believe she knows something, and it might in no way resemble what you would wish her to know. Nor will she come out from behind the glass so you might instruct her in the ways of righteousness, and shooting her is right out, since the glass is probably bullet-proof, and furthermore you had to pass through a metal detector and open all your bags in a tiny room, observed by a man through another thick plate-glass window, (and he wasn't coming out, either,) before you were even allowed into this room. The one weapon you are left with is your smile. Well, and your whiney-voice, if you think it will help. Oh, and oodles of cash. Except we don't have oodles, we have piddles. And we really need to keep our piddles.
In the end, however, the smiles and bowing and a small offering of $78 left upon the alter propitiated the small gods, and after 7 hours of waiting, they blessed us with 2 small sheets of green paper, glued into our little blue books. A week later I was lying in a bed in a hostel in Krakow, across the street from the bus station, listening to the chimes before the announcements which no longer meant anything to me. I would never ride those busses again.
The week inbetween had been yet another slow-motion panic. A near daily mailing of boxes, cleaning, calling, making appointments, and finding papers. Our boxes were weighed and our suitcases were weighed and re-weighed, and judged ok, then later simply estimated to be too heavy, then on the day of judgement found to be lighter than necessary. Our bank accounts were closed, our Zloty converted to Euros, our Euros converted to Lira, our dollars held like limp green fish in our hands while we pondered how long we could hold this worthless currency, on hopes it might regain some value. Papers were signed, our landlord endured for one last time as he told us he didn't have time to inspect the cleaned (and subtly re-painted in places) apartment, despite our meeting him at the time he requested. Last suppers were had with friends, and on the day of our departure, the last meeting with our employer.
Where we were informed that the past month she had been avoiding us because she was hurt, angry even, so we may have noticed that this month she was a bit "distant." I declined to point out that since in the normal course of events she did not speak to us for months at a time, her increased distance during this frenetic time in our lives had, somehow, boggle-the-mind-though-it-may, passed unnoticed by us.
The cause was a poster, posted on a restaurant door. A friend of ours, hearing that we were to be without income over the month of July, had put up a poster advertising our services. The idea had not been ours, nor the placing of the poster, nor the wording. We had been informed of it, and had not objected, had even thanked her, as it was a great kindness on her part, and furthermore, I have long been of the opinion that if someone has the energy to take the initiative in something, the world should shut up and get out of the way.
In the event, as August is a vacation month, we receieved but a few calls from it, none of which resulted in a single class. The offense, however, was in the wording. And the offense, it seems, was not lessened by the fact that we had not initiated nor contributed to said poster. It was a question of loyalty, and we had been found wanting.
As I sat there, listening to my employers sighs of crushing disappointment, I thought back over the trips to the post office, the calls handled in a language I don't speak, trying to get a taxi big enough for the boxes, the amount of time spent packing, the rolls and rolls of tape and brown paper (postal regulations!) we had bought, the hours spent on the bus and train, the night in Warsaw, the standing, supplicating, of the gods of the embassy, the endless calls to the embassy in Warsaw, and in D.C., the visits to the doctor's office, the giving away of the things that were still useful, the throwing away of so much that was not, the selling of a few items, the endless running and running and tension and lists of it all, and then I thought of the bus ride still ahead of me, the plane trip, the showing of the doctor's report to the border guard, and the consequent explanation, all of which would happen today and tomorrow before I could relax again.
I didn't interrupt her. I sat there, thinking my thoughts, pretending to listen. I kept my eyes focused on her, my head nodding slowly, dutifully, as I softly shifted my weight on the sofa, and silently farted.
Yesterday morning it was the din of the Krakow bus station which woke me, and the first thing I saw, hanging across the room, was a foto of the great wall of China, sinously wending its way over umpteen sepia hills into the sepia distance, and a saying attributed to Lao Tzu - "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
My father once had a sermon entitled "How do you eat an elephant?" Lest I keep you in suspense too long, the answer was "Bite by bite." I didn't find it very funny at the time, but I suppose son's rarely find their father's sermons very scintillating. I am of course, grateful that he has become more interesting as I have aged.
The message which underlies both of these sayings is that large things are composed of so many small things in combination. Do the small things, and in time you will have done much.
Moving to Istanbul was in every way an elephant, and in order to eat the bitterest parts first, we began at the tail, since every one knows that the finest steaks on an elephant are found in the trunk. (I suppose it has to do with all the work that the trunk has to do - that and the fact that it is round and can be cut into plate-sized steaks which have two holes in them is just too cool - my favorite thing to do is to put it on my face so I can see through the two holes and then use my best whispery-anguished Haley Joel Osment voice to say "I see elephant boogers.") But I digress.
I mentally divided our "move to Istanbul" project into 3 phases.
1. Find jobs.
2a. Get paperwork (work visa for Turkey, etc.) and
2b. pack/ship our belongings, and
2c. leave the European Union.
3. Live cheaply in Istanbul for 3 weeks till our university-provided apartment opens up.
There were a lot of factors that influencing each step which had to be juggled and balanced. For example, we had to move out of our apt. in Poland before August 1st, so our boxes had to be sent prior to that. The boxes will take 1-2 weeks to arrive. We cannot move into our apt. until Aug. 20th, and we cannot send boxes to the university until we are there to pick them up - sooooo, we had to find a apt. to stay at for 3 weeks, where we could receive a ton of boxes.
Another example is our work visas. Before we could apply for our work visas, we had to recieve a letter from the Turkish ministry of education. This in itself was a surprise, as we were not informed of this step till me had already made plans to leave the country, and close our accounts. Thus we were to be left without employment, and without internet, while we waited in our apartment, (which we were lucky to be able to keep,) for this letter to arrive. We would then take this precious gem of bureacratic excreta to the embassy of the country in which we are legal residents. We were told that this letter would take a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks after a couple of weeks, we noticed that our window of legal residency in Poland was quickly drawing to a close, which would, legally, make the letter in question pointless once we had recieved it, as we would no longer be allowed to apply to this embassy. These, among other similar situations, produced a low-level of constant apprehension, tension, which caused us to chew the insides of our cheeks at night, and snap at each other over nothing. How to resolve a million small problems at once, and in time.
At every step, at every stage, we found ourselves surrounded with more questions, to which only the petty gods of beauracracy could answer for us. Unfortunately the small gods of beauracracy will frequently let their phones ring for 10 minutes straight before telling you to call their "call center," and 15 calls later you will find out that really, no one knows anything. Yes, definitely, someone should know something, but really, that someone wouldn't be us.
The main problem with this scenario, of course, is that when you arrive at the embassy, the prim authoritarian fortuitiously located behind thick plate glass will indeed believe she knows something, and it might in no way resemble what you would wish her to know. Nor will she come out from behind the glass so you might instruct her in the ways of righteousness, and shooting her is right out, since the glass is probably bullet-proof, and furthermore you had to pass through a metal detector and open all your bags in a tiny room, observed by a man through another thick plate-glass window, (and he wasn't coming out, either,) before you were even allowed into this room. The one weapon you are left with is your smile. Well, and your whiney-voice, if you think it will help. Oh, and oodles of cash. Except we don't have oodles, we have piddles. And we really need to keep our piddles.
In the end, however, the smiles and bowing and a small offering of $78 left upon the alter propitiated the small gods, and after 7 hours of waiting, they blessed us with 2 small sheets of green paper, glued into our little blue books. A week later I was lying in a bed in a hostel in Krakow, across the street from the bus station, listening to the chimes before the announcements which no longer meant anything to me. I would never ride those busses again.
The week inbetween had been yet another slow-motion panic. A near daily mailing of boxes, cleaning, calling, making appointments, and finding papers. Our boxes were weighed and our suitcases were weighed and re-weighed, and judged ok, then later simply estimated to be too heavy, then on the day of judgement found to be lighter than necessary. Our bank accounts were closed, our Zloty converted to Euros, our Euros converted to Lira, our dollars held like limp green fish in our hands while we pondered how long we could hold this worthless currency, on hopes it might regain some value. Papers were signed, our landlord endured for one last time as he told us he didn't have time to inspect the cleaned (and subtly re-painted in places) apartment, despite our meeting him at the time he requested. Last suppers were had with friends, and on the day of our departure, the last meeting with our employer.
Where we were informed that the past month she had been avoiding us because she was hurt, angry even, so we may have noticed that this month she was a bit "distant." I declined to point out that since in the normal course of events she did not speak to us for months at a time, her increased distance during this frenetic time in our lives had, somehow, boggle-the-mind-though-it-may, passed unnoticed by us.
The cause was a poster, posted on a restaurant door. A friend of ours, hearing that we were to be without income over the month of July, had put up a poster advertising our services. The idea had not been ours, nor the placing of the poster, nor the wording. We had been informed of it, and had not objected, had even thanked her, as it was a great kindness on her part, and furthermore, I have long been of the opinion that if someone has the energy to take the initiative in something, the world should shut up and get out of the way.
In the event, as August is a vacation month, we receieved but a few calls from it, none of which resulted in a single class. The offense, however, was in the wording. And the offense, it seems, was not lessened by the fact that we had not initiated nor contributed to said poster. It was a question of loyalty, and we had been found wanting.
As I sat there, listening to my employers sighs of crushing disappointment, I thought back over the trips to the post office, the calls handled in a language I don't speak, trying to get a taxi big enough for the boxes, the amount of time spent packing, the rolls and rolls of tape and brown paper (postal regulations!) we had bought, the hours spent on the bus and train, the night in Warsaw, the standing, supplicating, of the gods of the embassy, the endless calls to the embassy in Warsaw, and in D.C., the visits to the doctor's office, the giving away of the things that were still useful, the throwing away of so much that was not, the selling of a few items, the endless running and running and tension and lists of it all, and then I thought of the bus ride still ahead of me, the plane trip, the showing of the doctor's report to the border guard, and the consequent explanation, all of which would happen today and tomorrow before I could relax again.
I didn't interrupt her. I sat there, thinking my thoughts, pretending to listen. I kept my eyes focused on her, my head nodding slowly, dutifully, as I softly shifted my weight on the sofa, and silently farted.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The things you gave your life to broken . . .
"If you can bear to see the truth you've spoken
twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
and stoop, and build 'em up with worn out tools.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss . . . "
Rudyard Kipling must have known a thing or two about life. Though not the greatest writer to ever tread the earth, I sometimes suspect the literary world sells him short - perhaps it is because I, like he, grew up between two cultures, linked to both and identified with neither, that I see in his writings things which I suspect go unnoticed by many readers.
Or, maybe I am just biased in his favor because of this poem. Aside from The Jungle Book, "If" may be Kipling's best-known piece of writing. Although I like it now, my first impulse, years ago, was simple rejection. My 7th grade English teacher handed it out and told us all that we were going to memorize it. As I was, at that time, beginning to define the limits of my own personal sovereignty by delineating what I would and would not do, and as I had a particular aversion to dwarfish, red-haired teachers, I decided that this was one thing I would not be doing. After all, it was difficult, probably nearly impossible, and furthermore, stupid.
I must have thought of something cleverly biting to say about the poem, as I can think of no other reason that informing my father that I was not going to do it should have seemed like a smart idea. He asked for it, and then read it over. I remember him sitting at the kitchen table, legs crossed, head bowed over the piece of paper as he read it. He stayed there for a long time. Far longer than I thought necessary.
When he looked up he fixed me with a gimlet eye that only a chicken could approximate for cold, rapacious intensity. It was the look which usually indicated that simply by standing there I was treading a piano-wires thickness away from a death that would surely involve a periodic slow strangulation with my own intestines as a warm-up to actual dismemberment. I guessed the stupidity of the poem had not met his expectation.
My father told me 1. I was going to do it, and 2. He was going to to memorize it with me. He also said that someday I might like it. I doubted this greatly, but was simply grateful that the conversation was brief, and made no mention of the various uses of forks and pliers. My father worked with me, and eventually I did memorize it. And then I forgot it.
Fast forward 20 years and I am working in a greeting card factory over the Xmas break. My job was to load paper into one side of the printing press, then walk around the other side, wait a few minutes, and unload the printed cards back into the box from which they came, and repeat. I was so bored I wished to shoot myself. Many of my university acquaintances had family to go see, a lot of them had enough money that the little bastards didn't have to work, and it is no exaggeration to say that I pitied myself a fair bit.
The clankety-clank-clankety-clank-hiss-clankety-clank-clankety-clank-hiss of the printing press went on for long enough that I found myself in my boredom chanting nonsense to myself, and out of the repetitive chanting the poem, long forgotten, started emerging in bits and snatches. For a few days I worked on reassembling the poem, remembering every day more and more. And slowly, I began to see my current position in a much different light. It didn't matter that some kids got to be lazy and have everything handed to them. It didn't matter that some people had somewhere to go for the holidays. What mattered is how I acted in what I did, and there was a nobility to be found in this experience, if it was approached correctly.
Fast forward 7 years, and I had a private student in Valencia, Spain. He and his family had come to Spain from Argentina, because the economy in Argentina had crashed enough times, and wiped out their savings enough times that they had decided to start a new life. He left his job as a lawyer in Argentina, and was now working occasional work as a night security guard, trying to support his family at the age of 50, struggling to make ends meet, living in a tiny dark apartment, but still managing to take English lessons because they were important to him. I watched Julio and Marta's struggle for months, saw in the unspoken lines around his stories the scrimping that was going on - how he and his wife worked to hide from their daughter the truth of the situation. At around the same time I told them Cyn and I were leaving Spain, he announced to me that they were, too. The savings would soon be tapped out, and they had to go back. I felt so bad for them, to have tried so bravely, and in a sense, failed.
The last time I saw him he gave me a present. It was a piece of paper, of nice stock, longer than normal, rolled up with a ribbon around it. When I unrolled it, it was a pretty script in Spanish. It took me a while to realize that he had given me the poem IF. He said this poem was a beautiful poem, which meant a lot to him.
I can understand why. It speaks of winning and losing and struggle, and how nobility lies not in these things, but in HOW you win and lose and struggle. What I hadn't realized, all those years ago when my father was reading the poem, was that he and my mother had just come through the most difficult struggle of their lives. They had exerted so much effort, on so many fronts, trying to do the correct thing against the odds, and in return, had been told they were failures. They were unfit. What I didn't understand in those days, when I watched my father come home from his job as a carpenter, and sit at the empty table in his workboots and flannel shirt, and night after night silently contemplate his own cracked and skinned hands, was that he was, in his heart, a failure. He had tried, and was trying, but had ended up, after so much effort, in limbo - in a place he didn't want to be, in a job he didn't want to do, watching the years slide by, not knowing where to go.
When Cynthia and I came to Poland, it was for one reason - to get graduate degrees. The money we were making was small, the amount deducted every month for the degree was high. The amount left was barely enough to live on. When we heard that the director of the program was going to be in our town for Thanksgiving, Cynthia volunteered our kitchen and dining room to host the dinner. I stayed dressed in my best, in order to make a good impression when he arrived. It must have succeeded, because a full day and a half later, as he left, he tentatively offered to let us manage the site, in return for one free tuition.
Eventually our responsibilities expanded. In addition to managing all the logistical concerns for the particular site, I took over the admissions process, screening the candidates who wanted to join our program. Cynthia began to do all the liaising with the college in the states. Although our compensation was increased commensurate with our responsibilities, at a certain point we stopped doing it for the financial compensation, and began to do it because we cared. We believed in the vision of this program. The idea that we could serve others, people like us, who had made their lives abroad, and wanted to advance in their careers, yet couldn't afford to uproot their lives and go back to the states to pay for a graduate degree there.
Because we saw ourselves as serving a larger goal, of providing good opportunities for people, we really devoted ourselves to the task. We put in long hours. When we stopped to figure it up, the financial compensation, much appreciated and very needed in our budget, came to no more than minimum wage due to the sheer number of hours we put into the projects. We tried to strengthen the organization, developing best practices and good policies to insure long-term success. We tried to both minimize our financial risk, and introduce a new level of transparency and honesty with the students. We wanted them to know they were important, and that we cared about them.
In return, some said thank you. One class bought us a bottle of vodka. Other's offered to pay us if we split the organization up, and stole it out from under the director. Other's created small tornadoes of intrigue by suggesting that someone was greedily profiting off the students, who were being taken advantage of. The ingratitude and mob-like mentality of any group always amazes me, and has taught me that I should be one who goes out of his way to express gratitude to others, and that I should never expect a group to conform to the rules of reasonable and appropriate behavior we would expect of individuals.
I don't mean to whine here. Some of the students I will remember forever for their decency and kindness - their sheer solid character. I have met some gems, whom I will treasure appropriately. But largely, much of the education I received in this program has been from the schemers and complainers. To them I owe a larger debt of thanks. They have taught me that working overtime for a pittance on someone's behalf is no reason to expect they won't expect more. Temper tantrums on the part of others must be excused. A single sardonic response on my part should never be allowed. As an appointed leader, I must always bring to the table the highest standards of behavior and personal responsibility.
As I said, my wife and I truly bought into the vision of this organization. We gave of ourselves to it. We did everything we could for it, and last Sunday, agreed to let it die.
The program has had difficulty for some time in attracting a sufficient amount of students. We always considered this a marketing matter, and so tried to explore new avenues of making ourselves more visible. These obviously cost more money, which moved us into a precarious situation. We tried starting up a second program, and due to an unfortunate combination of a late start in marketing and a few people pulling out late in the game, ended up under-attended. When a few people who attended later reneged on paying, our position went from precarious to a shade of red. Eventually we recognized the inevitable.
We tried, and hard. We loved it, and it has done something good for a number of students. Every student who graduated while we were working for this organization we count as a success story to our credit. Yet in the end, if not enough people apply, if the balance sheet tips closer and closer to the red, if in the end people do not value what they have received enough to pay for it, if after all the hours and hours of work, it is no closer to being sustainable than before, then perhaps you are not helping people as much as you once thought. If so, you must let it go.
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise: --Rudyard Kipling
twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
and stoop, and build 'em up with worn out tools.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss . . . "
Rudyard Kipling must have known a thing or two about life. Though not the greatest writer to ever tread the earth, I sometimes suspect the literary world sells him short - perhaps it is because I, like he, grew up between two cultures, linked to both and identified with neither, that I see in his writings things which I suspect go unnoticed by many readers.
Or, maybe I am just biased in his favor because of this poem. Aside from The Jungle Book, "If" may be Kipling's best-known piece of writing. Although I like it now, my first impulse, years ago, was simple rejection. My 7th grade English teacher handed it out and told us all that we were going to memorize it. As I was, at that time, beginning to define the limits of my own personal sovereignty by delineating what I would and would not do, and as I had a particular aversion to dwarfish, red-haired teachers, I decided that this was one thing I would not be doing. After all, it was difficult, probably nearly impossible, and furthermore, stupid.
I must have thought of something cleverly biting to say about the poem, as I can think of no other reason that informing my father that I was not going to do it should have seemed like a smart idea. He asked for it, and then read it over. I remember him sitting at the kitchen table, legs crossed, head bowed over the piece of paper as he read it. He stayed there for a long time. Far longer than I thought necessary.
When he looked up he fixed me with a gimlet eye that only a chicken could approximate for cold, rapacious intensity. It was the look which usually indicated that simply by standing there I was treading a piano-wires thickness away from a death that would surely involve a periodic slow strangulation with my own intestines as a warm-up to actual dismemberment. I guessed the stupidity of the poem had not met his expectation.
My father told me 1. I was going to do it, and 2. He was going to to memorize it with me. He also said that someday I might like it. I doubted this greatly, but was simply grateful that the conversation was brief, and made no mention of the various uses of forks and pliers. My father worked with me, and eventually I did memorize it. And then I forgot it.
Fast forward 20 years and I am working in a greeting card factory over the Xmas break. My job was to load paper into one side of the printing press, then walk around the other side, wait a few minutes, and unload the printed cards back into the box from which they came, and repeat. I was so bored I wished to shoot myself. Many of my university acquaintances had family to go see, a lot of them had enough money that the little bastards didn't have to work, and it is no exaggeration to say that I pitied myself a fair bit.
The clankety-clank-clankety-clank-hiss-clankety-clank-clankety-clank-hiss of the printing press went on for long enough that I found myself in my boredom chanting nonsense to myself, and out of the repetitive chanting the poem, long forgotten, started emerging in bits and snatches. For a few days I worked on reassembling the poem, remembering every day more and more. And slowly, I began to see my current position in a much different light. It didn't matter that some kids got to be lazy and have everything handed to them. It didn't matter that some people had somewhere to go for the holidays. What mattered is how I acted in what I did, and there was a nobility to be found in this experience, if it was approached correctly.
Fast forward 7 years, and I had a private student in Valencia, Spain. He and his family had come to Spain from Argentina, because the economy in Argentina had crashed enough times, and wiped out their savings enough times that they had decided to start a new life. He left his job as a lawyer in Argentina, and was now working occasional work as a night security guard, trying to support his family at the age of 50, struggling to make ends meet, living in a tiny dark apartment, but still managing to take English lessons because they were important to him. I watched Julio and Marta's struggle for months, saw in the unspoken lines around his stories the scrimping that was going on - how he and his wife worked to hide from their daughter the truth of the situation. At around the same time I told them Cyn and I were leaving Spain, he announced to me that they were, too. The savings would soon be tapped out, and they had to go back. I felt so bad for them, to have tried so bravely, and in a sense, failed.
The last time I saw him he gave me a present. It was a piece of paper, of nice stock, longer than normal, rolled up with a ribbon around it. When I unrolled it, it was a pretty script in Spanish. It took me a while to realize that he had given me the poem IF. He said this poem was a beautiful poem, which meant a lot to him.
I can understand why. It speaks of winning and losing and struggle, and how nobility lies not in these things, but in HOW you win and lose and struggle. What I hadn't realized, all those years ago when my father was reading the poem, was that he and my mother had just come through the most difficult struggle of their lives. They had exerted so much effort, on so many fronts, trying to do the correct thing against the odds, and in return, had been told they were failures. They were unfit. What I didn't understand in those days, when I watched my father come home from his job as a carpenter, and sit at the empty table in his workboots and flannel shirt, and night after night silently contemplate his own cracked and skinned hands, was that he was, in his heart, a failure. He had tried, and was trying, but had ended up, after so much effort, in limbo - in a place he didn't want to be, in a job he didn't want to do, watching the years slide by, not knowing where to go.
When Cynthia and I came to Poland, it was for one reason - to get graduate degrees. The money we were making was small, the amount deducted every month for the degree was high. The amount left was barely enough to live on. When we heard that the director of the program was going to be in our town for Thanksgiving, Cynthia volunteered our kitchen and dining room to host the dinner. I stayed dressed in my best, in order to make a good impression when he arrived. It must have succeeded, because a full day and a half later, as he left, he tentatively offered to let us manage the site, in return for one free tuition.
Eventually our responsibilities expanded. In addition to managing all the logistical concerns for the particular site, I took over the admissions process, screening the candidates who wanted to join our program. Cynthia began to do all the liaising with the college in the states. Although our compensation was increased commensurate with our responsibilities, at a certain point we stopped doing it for the financial compensation, and began to do it because we cared. We believed in the vision of this program. The idea that we could serve others, people like us, who had made their lives abroad, and wanted to advance in their careers, yet couldn't afford to uproot their lives and go back to the states to pay for a graduate degree there.
Because we saw ourselves as serving a larger goal, of providing good opportunities for people, we really devoted ourselves to the task. We put in long hours. When we stopped to figure it up, the financial compensation, much appreciated and very needed in our budget, came to no more than minimum wage due to the sheer number of hours we put into the projects. We tried to strengthen the organization, developing best practices and good policies to insure long-term success. We tried to both minimize our financial risk, and introduce a new level of transparency and honesty with the students. We wanted them to know they were important, and that we cared about them.
In return, some said thank you. One class bought us a bottle of vodka. Other's offered to pay us if we split the organization up, and stole it out from under the director. Other's created small tornadoes of intrigue by suggesting that someone was greedily profiting off the students, who were being taken advantage of. The ingratitude and mob-like mentality of any group always amazes me, and has taught me that I should be one who goes out of his way to express gratitude to others, and that I should never expect a group to conform to the rules of reasonable and appropriate behavior we would expect of individuals.
I don't mean to whine here. Some of the students I will remember forever for their decency and kindness - their sheer solid character. I have met some gems, whom I will treasure appropriately. But largely, much of the education I received in this program has been from the schemers and complainers. To them I owe a larger debt of thanks. They have taught me that working overtime for a pittance on someone's behalf is no reason to expect they won't expect more. Temper tantrums on the part of others must be excused. A single sardonic response on my part should never be allowed. As an appointed leader, I must always bring to the table the highest standards of behavior and personal responsibility.
As I said, my wife and I truly bought into the vision of this organization. We gave of ourselves to it. We did everything we could for it, and last Sunday, agreed to let it die.
The program has had difficulty for some time in attracting a sufficient amount of students. We always considered this a marketing matter, and so tried to explore new avenues of making ourselves more visible. These obviously cost more money, which moved us into a precarious situation. We tried starting up a second program, and due to an unfortunate combination of a late start in marketing and a few people pulling out late in the game, ended up under-attended. When a few people who attended later reneged on paying, our position went from precarious to a shade of red. Eventually we recognized the inevitable.
We tried, and hard. We loved it, and it has done something good for a number of students. Every student who graduated while we were working for this organization we count as a success story to our credit. Yet in the end, if not enough people apply, if the balance sheet tips closer and closer to the red, if in the end people do not value what they have received enough to pay for it, if after all the hours and hours of work, it is no closer to being sustainable than before, then perhaps you are not helping people as much as you once thought. If so, you must let it go.
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
Saturday, May 10, 2008
The tears of children
The measure of a great teacher is not in the test grades of his students, or the supposed "learning" which accumulates like so much cotton-wool between the synapses of their brains, or even in the future achievements or happiness of your students. The measure of a great teacher is in how many students cry on the last day.
Or cry in general, really. I am not going to be so picky as to just limit it to the last day. I try to begin prepping my students to cry early on in the year, letting them know that far from being unacceptable to cry in class, it gives me great joy when they do so, and sometimes is the only proper response to my behaviour as a teacher. I ask them periodically if they would like to cry, and if the response is negative I will sometimes go further and ask what I might be able to do to change that. Furthermore, I tell them, that the tears of children are precious. So if they are going to cry, please let me know right before, and I will give them a glass jar to catch the tears in. Voodoo doesn't just require dolls, you know. And virgin's tears go for extra!
Unfortunately, I feel as though I have failed in one of my classes, and egregiously so. Throughout the whole year they have manifested a stubborn and rebellious cheeriness that just rankles me to no end. Despite the fact that I refer to them alternately as "children" and "evil children" they refuse to acknowledge being insulted. Though I use their names in the example sentences, and place them in the most embarrassing of "hypothetical situations" involving Michael Jackson and his monkey, I have not had a single complaint registered with the head of the school. I have even stooped to shooting them with a rubber dart pistol in hopes of inducing feelings of victimhood, and still have not generated the necessary angst and broken hopelessness one would expect from a group of teenagers subjected to a relentless barrage of withering criticism and absurdly petty demands from an arbitrary dictator of a teacher.
In their defense, though, it would appear that my methods were, perhaps, ill-advised. The reactions to being shot with the rubber suction-cup darts, for example, was often to smile sweetly, and place the dart in their pocket. Such passive-aggressivity should have indicated to me earlier that a change of method was called for. Not that all the responses were passive-aggressive. One student stole the pistol and in a fair feat of marksmanship, shot me in the back of the head while I was writing at the board. I have also been on the receiving end of at least one thrown pencil, (why do they think things thrown at them in rage need to be thrown back?) which left a mark on my shirt, and, I need not say, a spurt of dark joy in my heart.
If this violence had been the rule, I think I would have been able to successfully adapt my methods and break their wills sooner. But the outbursts of violence were rare, and the intervening period would see gifts of, for example, chocolate, or a box of cookies on teacher's day. Sometimes when a student went to the ice cream shop before class, they would pick up an extra goody for me. All of this had the end result of confusing my strategy, as it made it difficult to judge the effect my teaching was having on them. Contrary to exhibiting signs of weakness and depression, they seemed to draw strength from the class.
It is not as though I didn't try to change my methods - I did. Partway through the second semester, I realized that other teachers had already calloused these students by taking ostensibly useful and interesting information and presenting it in the most mind-numbingly boring and useless ways, ruthlesssly stamping out any possible spark of interest or applicability to their lives by focusing in on the most pointless and trifling detail while ignoring the larger conceptual picture. These teachers had really outdone themselves by utilizing the most outdated, soul-crushing and joyless methods of teaching. Moreover, the students were independently boosting their endurance by subjecting themselves to long hours of study at home, independently, as well as arising early in the morning, taking extra classes of language, dance, or subject specific tutoring on the side, and staying up late at night to do their homework.
Once I realised this, I knew that if I were going to leave a dent on these children's souls, I would have to make it past the good-humored armor, the patience and endurance they had developed over the years. I would need to get them to let down their guard, and then, when they were unsuspecting, I could savagely destroy whatever personal confidence or joy was left cowering in some obscure, darkened corner of their frail little hearts.
The idea was actually suggested to my by suggestopedia, and one of my student's journals. If you have never read about the language learning method known as suggestopedia, and would like to take a nostalgic trip down the weirdness that was the 60's and 70's, I cannot recommend highly enough doing some research on suggestopedia. Any language-learning method whose founder begins his webpage with "Suggestopedia is a science for developing . . . non-hypnotic methods for teaching / learning languages" ranks pretty high in my book. Furthermore, if you are going to be a lingual-psycho-learning guru, Lozanov is a GREAT name to go with this hairstyle. (Note picture.)
The student's (obviously selfishly-motivated) suggestion was that the only way this class could be improved was to bring cookies to the class, and give them to the students. As suggestopedia, (a NON-hypnotic method of teaching, it should be noted,) recommends creating a pleasant atmosphere for the students, by utilizing art, music, (this I had been doing since much earlier in the year,) soft colors and generally a warm and fuzzy demeanor in the classroom in order to lower their affective barriers, I recognized that my best hope for getting these children to break down crying by the end of the year was to soften them with treats, thus lowering their barriers, and then hit them with the abuse.
Thus began the campaign of random cookies. It had to occur at random intervals, because tests on chickens have revealed that positive reinforcement at random intervals had a greater effect on behavior than a consistent, predictable reinforcement. As I try to conduct my classes with an eye toward scientific method, I randomized not only the days on which cookie-reinforcement would be used, but also the stage in the class at which the cookies would be produced. Furthermore, the role the cookies played would also be varied. Sometimes the cookies were freely distributed to all. Other times they were given to students whose answers were particularly good. Once, when the students had not done their homework, I simply stood in front of them and ate "their" cookies for them. On an unrelated topic, it should be noted that the students showed a preference for jelly-filled cookies over simple butter ones. Chocolate, sadly, cannot be accounted for as a factor, since it was present to a greater or lesser degree in all the cookies.
As a corollary to my strategy of random cookies, I would also periodically buy a small cup of hot-chocolate for a student who appeared to be depressed. The hope was that buy buoying their spirits at their most vulnerable moments, they might be less prepared for the neglect and cold-hearted criticism that would ensue, and thus I could more easily bring them to tears when I turned on them.
Yet somehow, as the end of the year looms over us, all my careful preparations have been for naught. It would seem that the treats and the music have been effective in lowering their barriers, but have also instilled the children with a persistent belief that, contrary to all evidence and my outright assurances to the contrary, that I am fond of them. Of course, being the shallow little bastards that they are, this somehow translates into greater feelings of self-worth (ie- the "teacher likes me, ergo, I am likeable" fallacy, which totally disregards the supremely reasonable and rather self-evident possibility that A. that it is all a malicious plot to cause you pain and suffering in the end, or, B that IF the teacher did like you, the teacher's judgment is quite likely unsound to begin with.)
And thus it is that once again, yet another year draws to its conclusion, and a nagging sense of failure tugs at my heart as I bid goodbye to a still resilient, cheerful, hard-working and intelligent bunch of students. I will not forget them ever, even if every time I think of them it is with some regret over tears left un-shed.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Would'cha? In Lodz?
Lodz cannot be typed on this keyboard, or if it can, I don't know how. What is lacking is a tilted bar across the upright of the L, which would change it from "Lowh-duhz" to "Woodge."
A number of Polish cities are currently running ads on BBC to attract tourism and business. Some fall quite flat - others are just a bit corny. One which I am afraid was particularly effective was one which repeatedly asks "Would you - like to see Poland's longest street of bars and clubs? Would you - like to visit a famous film school?" Would you be surprised how it's pronounced? You Lodz!"
What so pleased me about this ad was that it took what I had thought of as the city's most crippling attribute - the fact that the pronunciation of the name bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the spelling, and focused exclusively on it till you would probably forget your own mother's name first. And now that I have been there, I can assure you the name is not their biggest problem in marketing the city.
Woodge (Lodz) is Poland's second largest city. When a long weekend arrived recently, we cast about for somewhere to go, and eventually decided, most likely under the influence of this ad, to to to Woodge (Lodz.) Along with our friends Peter and Rachel, we reserved rooms, and bought tickets from Krakow to Warsaw, Warsaw to Lodz.
What we noticed immediately upon arriving in Krakow is that EVERYBODY was headed somewhere for holiday. The highways were choked going out of the city. The line to buy tickets in the train station was 16 people deep. Even the city buses were crammed full of people lugging huge back packs. When we finally got our tickets to Warsaw, however, and went to the platform, we found that despite all the travel apparently going on, apparently no one was headed our direction. When we arrived in Warsaw and finally found our way to the platform for Lodz, we began to suspect we might be the only people going to Lodz this weekend.
Our first impression of Lodz, as we departed the station, was post-communist depression. The buildings were gray, blocky, concrete, with a good layer of soot and dirt to hold them up. At the entrance to the park facing the train station what appeared to be a junkie prostitute was having a desperately wheedling conversation with two men. I say appeared to be because firstly, the way women dress here in general makes it hard to separate the prostitutes from the honest women, and secondly, I have always been particularly poor at discerning ladies of the night. It is usually only after I have had a 2-hour dinner while admiring the night-life on the street that it occurs to me as odd that there are women who have not moved from their regularly spaced intervals along the street in all the time I have been watching.
As we walked toward our hotel, we passed a few nicer, newer buildings, but the general impression of dank and unkempt persisted. We made it past "Poland's longest street of shops and bars," which did strike us as nice, and then continued on the 5 blocks or so to our hotel.
A few blocks away from our hotel we were approaching a group of 3 young men drinking unsteadily on their feet when Cynthia decided to go back turn back and buy some water in a shop we had just passed. This somehow attracted the eye of the most heavy-set hooligan, who began barking at us as we walked away. As we waited out on the street Peter and I remarked to each other that since we resembled his cousins neither by smell nor appearance, he might feel threatened and might therefore be barking to mark his territory. Or it could be a display brought on by the appearance of females from outside his band, meant to impress them with his prowess. When the ladies in question at last finished their purchases we walked past the young males in question, who confirmed our suspicions by emitting a musky odour and shouting aggressively in my face as I walked past. It was a true "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" moment, and I could have wished for nothing other than a pair of khaki shorts and a silver-haired Marlon Perkins calling me "Jim" to make the moment complete.
A number of Polish cities are currently running ads on BBC to attract tourism and business. Some fall quite flat - others are just a bit corny. One which I am afraid was particularly effective was one which repeatedly asks "Would you - like to see Poland's longest street of bars and clubs? Would you - like to visit a famous film school?" Would you be surprised how it's pronounced? You Lodz!"
What so pleased me about this ad was that it took what I had thought of as the city's most crippling attribute - the fact that the pronunciation of the name bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the spelling, and focused exclusively on it till you would probably forget your own mother's name first. And now that I have been there, I can assure you the name is not their biggest problem in marketing the city.
Woodge (Lodz) is Poland's second largest city. When a long weekend arrived recently, we cast about for somewhere to go, and eventually decided, most likely under the influence of this ad, to to to Woodge (Lodz.) Along with our friends Peter and Rachel, we reserved rooms, and bought tickets from Krakow to Warsaw, Warsaw to Lodz.
What we noticed immediately upon arriving in Krakow is that EVERYBODY was headed somewhere for holiday. The highways were choked going out of the city. The line to buy tickets in the train station was 16 people deep. Even the city buses were crammed full of people lugging huge back packs. When we finally got our tickets to Warsaw, however, and went to the platform, we found that despite all the travel apparently going on, apparently no one was headed our direction. When we arrived in Warsaw and finally found our way to the platform for Lodz, we began to suspect we might be the only people going to Lodz this weekend.
Our first impression of Lodz, as we departed the station, was post-communist depression. The buildings were gray, blocky, concrete, with a good layer of soot and dirt to hold them up. At the entrance to the park facing the train station what appeared to be a junkie prostitute was having a desperately wheedling conversation with two men. I say appeared to be because firstly, the way women dress here in general makes it hard to separate the prostitutes from the honest women, and secondly, I have always been particularly poor at discerning ladies of the night. It is usually only after I have had a 2-hour dinner while admiring the night-life on the street that it occurs to me as odd that there are women who have not moved from their regularly spaced intervals along the street in all the time I have been watching.
As we walked toward our hotel, we passed a few nicer, newer buildings, but the general impression of dank and unkempt persisted. We made it past "Poland's longest street of shops and bars," which did strike us as nice, and then continued on the 5 blocks or so to our hotel.
A few blocks away from our hotel we were approaching a group of 3 young men drinking unsteadily on their feet when Cynthia decided to go back turn back and buy some water in a shop we had just passed. This somehow attracted the eye of the most heavy-set hooligan, who began barking at us as we walked away. As we waited out on the street Peter and I remarked to each other that since we resembled his cousins neither by smell nor appearance, he might feel threatened and might therefore be barking to mark his territory. Or it could be a display brought on by the appearance of females from outside his band, meant to impress them with his prowess. When the ladies in question at last finished their purchases we walked past the young males in question, who confirmed our suspicions by emitting a musky odour and shouting aggressively in my face as I walked past. It was a true "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" moment, and I could have wished for nothing other than a pair of khaki shorts and a silver-haired Marlon Perkins calling me "Jim" to make the moment complete.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Big. Brutal. Belt.
While in Ukraine, I was compelled to make a few purchases. Obviously I had to buy cigarettes. Why obviously? Well, let's do the math. in England, a pack of cigarettes can set you back 7 pounds, which at this point is 14 dollars. In the US a pack of Marlboros is probably about 7 dollars. In France it's 5.30 Euros, Spain was around 4 Euros, which comes in right at $6.30, due to the dilapidated state of today's US dollar.
But moving East, things begin to shift. A pack of Marlboro's in Poland comes in at 7.35 zloty, (3.33 USD,) which is eminently more reasonable. And in Ukraine the same brand sells for 5 Hryvna, which works out to 2.21 zloty. Working our way backwards to the west, that 5 Hryvna is about $1, or 64 Euro CENTS. In British Pounds, it makes it all the way down to 50 cents. And, oddly enough, they aren't even the same cigarettes we get in Poland. The Marlboros in Poland are mixed and packed in Poland. The Marlboros which are bought in Western Europe are mixed and packed in Zurich, Switzerland, and are thought to be of a higher quality. Due to some quirk which only a lawyer in trade relations could explain, the Ukrainian cigarettes sold for .64 Euro cents are brought in from Switzerland, rather than neighboring Poland. So, all that to say that an investment in tobacco seemed like the sensible thing to do.
As did the purchase of vodka. Before we had even come to Poland, people had gone on and on about Polish vodka. Poles themselves mentioned it as one of the advantages to be enjoyed while living in their country. "The best vodka in the world!" they frequently opined. The truth, however, is either that vodka is preferred to be rather gassy, rough on the throat, and not very complex in flavor, or Polish mid-range vodkas really come in as, well, just average. By following a strict nightly regimen, I have drunk an astonishing number of different vodkas now, including higher range vodkas, and I am willing to concede that Chopin is indeed a fine vodka, and worth waxing eloquent about. It is flavorful, full, round, complex, smooth, crisp, sweet, and clean. It is everything a person might love about vodka with none of the accompanying punishment. But at a cost of half the average monthly salary, it surely ought to be.
I have purchased 4 different Ukrainian vodkas. All of them, without exception, were in the lower end of the scale. To give a sense of scale, properly distorted by the currency exchange rate, the vodka we often drink in Poland, providing the best intersection between thrift and pleasure, costs about 35 zloty for a half liter. The vodkas I purchased in Ukraine at 14 Hryvna came in just over 6 zloty for a half liter, and were FAR superior.
Speaking of which, I would like to say here that Smirnoff and Absolut are absolute crap. You people are getting suckered. I would like to stress that I am not making unfounded assertions here. As someone who drinks vodka on a near-nightly basis, I have a fair foundation of experience to draw upon. And these vodkas were all smooth, flavorful, crisp, light, and left you with less of a hangover. Even if you disregarded the fact that these bottles of vodka cost under 3 American dollars, they were a brilliant value. All of which to say that, in addition to cigarettes, I HAD to buy a couple bottles of vodka while there.
Unfortunately, by the time I got around to buying up my mandatory reserves, I only had a tiny bit of money left. Why? Well, in short, I am a sucker for open air markets. And L'viv, like most Eastern European towns, has one - one block away from the main drag. What's to be had there? Not a lot, really, unless you go in for hand-painted wooden easter eggs, lace, traditional costumes, old soviet helmets, wooden swords and shields for kids, sheepskins, old decorative pieces of brass stripped out of houses, a brass bust of Stalin, matchbook covers commemorating/glorifying the Nazi attack on Stalingrad, (yeah, I didn't really get that one, either,) house slippers made out of sheepskin, Soviet medals and pins, wooden Russian matryoshka dolls, old metal lighters, military fur hats, old coins, paintings, canes, jewelery, strings of wooden beads, old military belt buckles, scratched old silverware, and on and on and on.
The metal matchbox covers with large swastikas and tanks overlooking Stalingrad gave me pause - I mean, they can't be so old as to have been made by the German soldiers themselves, and if not, who the hell would be glorifying that side of the losing struggle at this late date, and furthermore, how had they found their way here, where public opinion doubtlessly falls on the Soviet side of that struggle? Oddly enough, though, there is a fair resurgence in Russia itself, and among other ex-Soviet countries of neo-nazi babblings. It may seem strange that a people regarded by Hitler as nearly sub-human, and who suffered terribly at Nazi hands, should now be sporting his symbols, and espousing his views. (Slightly edited, of course.) I suppose it just shows that the more abused a people are, the more they suffer, the more twisted their minds become, until the strength of their tormentor becomes quite attractive, and they would wish to co-opt it's strength by adopting its symbols. Or, Nazism is just that attractive to simpletons everywhere. Or Russians are just born with a need to suffer. Take your pick.
I tried on the big furry hats. While fun, I couldn't escape the thought that it would be one more useless lunk of crap, and furry crap, that I would lug around the globe with me. I knew I had to buy a set of Russian dolls for my nieces - that went without saying. I knew my wife would like a scarf - but then I saw the belt buckles.
Brass, curved, a huge star stamped into it, with the hammer and sickle inside two circles at the center of the star, rays emanating outward from it. The perfect example of ideological use of symbolism. - the implements of the workers, rays shooting out from them to remind us of the sun, which gives us light, and life, set within the communist star. All captured in a glowing brass, heavy and crude enough to beat the life out of a buffalo with.
I had to have one of those. I asked at various stalls and found that they were all nearly the same price, and reasonably so - about 5 bucks - which, mind you, in Ukraine is enough to purchase a month's supply of cigarettes. I could choose between the matte grey, the rubberised painted green, but I knew it had to be the brass - only brass put the symbolism in its proper context, made it come alive, glorified it, and with our present-day historical hindsight, gave us pause to consider the folly of totalitarian systems bent on changing the world.
I shopped up and down the market. I looked at many of them, and found a problem - when you turned it over and looked at the fastening mechanism, the tooth (which should enter the belt hole) was so large, so wide, that it would never fit into a normal belt hole. Either you would have to grind a hole in your belt that you could stick your index finger through, or grind down the tooth of the belt buckle. Unfortunately, the metal itself was so thick that you would never be able to cut it down to an appropriate size without a power saw, or an electric grinder, neither of which I happen to have in my flat back in Poland.
Then I found him. The one guy in the market selling not just buckles, but the belts to go along with. After a bit of haggling he removed the long, beautifully grained, worn and scratched leather strap from one buckle, and threaded it onto another.
Which was how I found out how the damn contraptions worked. The female end of the belt was non-adjustable, and consisted of a single heavy staple which had been fired through the belt about 1 cm back from the end, then both tips bent back, the belt end folded over them, and crudely stitched in place. All the adjustment happened at the buckle end, where you pull it through the buckle till is of the appropriate size, and voila!
Or not. I am wearing this belt as I write this. The sizing mechanism needs adjustment about once every two or three days, as it constantly slips. And I can scarcely convey to you how much that delights me. This belt is the symbol of a system took mass-production at its word, and practically tried to mass-produce the human spirit. This buckle, a mass produced lunk of brass, intended to be worn by the the system's enforcers, the soldier, captures perfectly the heaviness, the crudeness, which accompanied every aspect of the communist system. The simple utility, the thickness of the metal, the uncomfortably tight curve of the buckle which juts the star out into unlikely prominence, (while the edges push backward into you at an unnatural angle.) The crude stitching is so poorly done one wonders if it was done by hand or machine, either seeming equally unlikely. And above all, the fact that it doesn't even work properly. I see wave after wave of grey-coated, fur-topped soldiers, tilted forward at a run, charging the bastions of the capitalist oppressors, one hand raised in the archetypal clenched fist, the other pulling up the poor bastard's trousers.
Which is really what it comes down to. Communism was not a system designed to fit man. Man was meant to be a cog fit roughly into the gears of communism.
In the end I paid much more for this belt than perhaps I had to. I wanted the leather belt to go along with the buckle, money was cheap, and the attraction of having a buckle I could use to open bottles or possibly re-tread a tank was just too much. I can't really wear it out of the house here. I don't suppose I would get beaten, but in any given room there is probably at least one person whose grandfather was disappeared by the NKVD, or someone whose father had to run to the west while the old grandmother disassembled the printing press and buried it in the garden. I have talked with people who recall sitting under the kitchen table as small children while the state police overturned the house for the 14th time. Or those who, out riding bikes in the country come across Russian tanks and soldiers whose presence the government was denying, while on the radio they spoke of impending martial law.
No, I may not get to ever wear it outside the house, but it nevertheless delights me to no end to see the gear of yesterday's soldier sold today to a gawking western tourist.
Monday, March 17, 2008
L'vovin L'viva Loca!
I just returned from Ukraine last night. Specifically, Lviv. A year and a half ago Cynthia and I made a mad dash to L'viv, a midnight run bookended by a trip to Auschwitz on on end and a journey onward to Opole afterwards. At that time we had only been in Poland for a few days, and had very little idea of Poland. As things can only be accurately judged in relation to the things around them, we emerged with interesting memories of L'viv, but our conception of L'viv, what we thought of it, and by extension, Ukraine, was not very clear.
So when the opportunity arrived to make another trip there, it seemed like a grand idea. Our entry to Poland had been marked with a trip to L'viv, which had left a certain impression of what lay to our east. To make another voyage east now, a few months before leaving, would allow me to weigh my previous impressions with newer, hopefully more balanced impressions, having lived in this corner of the world for a longer period. Furthermore, this time I would be accompanied by a couple of friends, and a tour guide would show us some of the more remarkable sights, which my wife and I had certainly missed on our first trip.
Our first trip had left me with the impression that Ukraine was largely comparable to a public housing project. You could see that it had been built with great hopes, and that it still was the scene of many hopes and dreams, where a million small dramas played themselves out with all the tenderness and tragedy of a million King Lear's every day, yet the first and last and foremost impression was one of dilapidation, ruin, poverty, desperation and the persistent yet subtle waft of urine. So what would this trip bring?
The last time we crossed the border it was in the dead of night, with all the fogginess of perception that goes along with it. This time was at mid-day. Going from the Polish side, the differences were evident immediately. Directly upon leaving the border post, the fields were suddenly uneven, unkempt, very muddy, with trash strewn across them. In point of fact, there was solid, uninterrupted stream of rubbish in the ditch on either side for kilometres at a time, in addition to the frequent sprinkling of debris throughout the muddy fields. There was water standing everywhere - in the fields were large puddles, on the side of the road where people waited for busses were puddles and mud and standing water which had to be negotiated, and all across the road were puddles and potholes. It was as though the science of drainage had yet to be discovered, even in towns and villages.
I had never noticed, as the absence of something is not particularly noticeable, how clean the fields in Poland were, nor the fact that they were not uneven, muddy, and filled with water. I found this interesting - I had assumed that Polish fields were naturally as they were, but since JUST over the border this was not true, I have to now think that some sort of engineering has been going on here for some time which moves the water out of the fields. All of which makes perfect sense, now that I take the time to consider it.
I spoke of the roads - the roads in Poland never impressed me by their luxuriousness. By no means have I seen anything equivalent to our 4 lane divided highways. But just across the border these simple 2 lane highways turn into a pot-holed, broken, bumpy country lane that most US counties would be ashamed to call their own. Our bus driver literally drove half over the white line to avoid the holes along the edge, and pulled back into our lane as necessary to allow oncoming traffic past.
We were not even out of the border post when the Polish man in front of me whipped out his camera-phone and began compulsively snapping photos of everything he saw - the horse-drawn carts clip-clopping alongside the highway, the worn-down, depressed looking grandmas shuffling alongside the road laden with bags in either hand, the church smaller than my living room, the chickens roaming in people's front yards. The comments and behavior exhibited by some of the Polish people made me feel as though they were enjoying a little bit of a sense of superiority in what their country had managed to do. By all accounts Poland itself bore many resemblances to what I am describing here when communism fell, though perhaps not going to such extremes in so many areas.
So when the opportunity arrived to make another trip there, it seemed like a grand idea. Our entry to Poland had been marked with a trip to L'viv, which had left a certain impression of what lay to our east. To make another voyage east now, a few months before leaving, would allow me to weigh my previous impressions with newer, hopefully more balanced impressions, having lived in this corner of the world for a longer period. Furthermore, this time I would be accompanied by a couple of friends, and a tour guide would show us some of the more remarkable sights, which my wife and I had certainly missed on our first trip.
Our first trip had left me with the impression that Ukraine was largely comparable to a public housing project. You could see that it had been built with great hopes, and that it still was the scene of many hopes and dreams, where a million small dramas played themselves out with all the tenderness and tragedy of a million King Lear's every day, yet the first and last and foremost impression was one of dilapidation, ruin, poverty, desperation and the persistent yet subtle waft of urine. So what would this trip bring?
The last time we crossed the border it was in the dead of night, with all the fogginess of perception that goes along with it. This time was at mid-day. Going from the Polish side, the differences were evident immediately. Directly upon leaving the border post, the fields were suddenly uneven, unkempt, very muddy, with trash strewn across them. In point of fact, there was solid, uninterrupted stream of rubbish in the ditch on either side for kilometres at a time, in addition to the frequent sprinkling of debris throughout the muddy fields. There was water standing everywhere - in the fields were large puddles, on the side of the road where people waited for busses were puddles and mud and standing water which had to be negotiated, and all across the road were puddles and potholes. It was as though the science of drainage had yet to be discovered, even in towns and villages.
I had never noticed, as the absence of something is not particularly noticeable, how clean the fields in Poland were, nor the fact that they were not uneven, muddy, and filled with water. I found this interesting - I had assumed that Polish fields were naturally as they were, but since JUST over the border this was not true, I have to now think that some sort of engineering has been going on here for some time which moves the water out of the fields. All of which makes perfect sense, now that I take the time to consider it.
I spoke of the roads - the roads in Poland never impressed me by their luxuriousness. By no means have I seen anything equivalent to our 4 lane divided highways. But just across the border these simple 2 lane highways turn into a pot-holed, broken, bumpy country lane that most US counties would be ashamed to call their own. Our bus driver literally drove half over the white line to avoid the holes along the edge, and pulled back into our lane as necessary to allow oncoming traffic past.
We were not even out of the border post when the Polish man in front of me whipped out his camera-phone and began compulsively snapping photos of everything he saw - the horse-drawn carts clip-clopping alongside the highway, the worn-down, depressed looking grandmas shuffling alongside the road laden with bags in either hand, the church smaller than my living room, the chickens roaming in people's front yards. The comments and behavior exhibited by some of the Polish people made me feel as though they were enjoying a little bit of a sense of superiority in what their country had managed to do. By all accounts Poland itself bore many resemblances to what I am describing here when communism fell, though perhaps not going to such extremes in so many areas.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
A house divided
I felt dizzy, disoriented, weakened, and somewhat removed from myself. Though I stood right in a thronging mass of people, no one paid any attention to me at all. The crowd parted to the left and right of me like waters, and joined seamlessly together again on the other side.
I took a few tottering steps back toward the train station, and though I could feel my head clear a little bit I got stabbing aches in my heart and gut. I almost fell as I turned back around, and there she was, holding onto my arm.
She was the 1950's vintage Eastern European babcia. The top of her head came only to my chest, and she looked up at me without expression from a ruddy, whiskered, deeply lined face set in the middle of a floral kerchief pinned over her hair. A shapeless, non-descript blue work-smock covered her from her neck to her black rubber gum-boots.
She pulled my arm and guided me over to the side of the wayfare, where the homeless and young miscreants were sitting in rows on a short wall. When they saw her coming they moved aside. Even the young thug, who'd been yelling at his lads scurried quickly out of the way, and the group of them made off for other parts.
It wasn't as though there was something in particular about her that repulsed me. She didn't smell, as so many older, poorer people in that part of the world do. It wasn't the flat sheen, the greasy-worn texture of her house-dress that bothered me, because I was dirtier than that. 5 months on the road had seen to that. It wasn't the shabbiness, or anything I could put my finger on, but her physical proximity seemed to project a poverty, a memory of suffering that enveloped me in a sick-sweet odour the nose would never detect but that stuck to the back of my throat like a milk-scum. I would have pulled free from her stubby, thick-fingered grasp and walked away, but I was too weak to do so.
I had known I was terminal for some time. No doctor had ever told me so, so I just stopped asking them. It was pretty obvious to me. When you go from feeling as strong as a bull to having tremors in your hands and aches and pains in so many places you can hardly keep them straight anymore, when you get winded walking from room to room, when picking up your briefcase makes you want to go back to bed, when you drop 20 pound in the course of 3 months, you don't need a doctor to tell you something is wrong.
After a while the sickness just becomes a fact, which you accept. The sickness makes you tired, lethargic, and maybe this is what allows us to accept the idea that we will die. No raging against the dying of the light here. I was content to let it go. It was just a question of how much time I had left to drag myself around before it finally blinked off.
With hardly the energy to eat breakfast, how I managed to leave home is a mystery, but they say as you lose things, the drives that remain inside you become clearer. And though I was fading out in many areas, one urge kept growing stronger.
It was photos in National Geographic, I think, that started it. Photos of city streets in Belorussia, or some satellite republic, of squat boxy cars parked at the base of old grey buildings, around which milled men in black leather jackets and ridiculous fur hats. I had to go.
Part of the motivation was a memory from high school. Her name was Marianne, and she came to our little town of cows and hay from the border of Moldova and Ukraine. Her coming had caused quite a stir amongst the male population of our high school, which her habit of wearing leather boots that came nearly to the knee did nothing to quell. I suppose outsiders, the exotic, the other, is always attractive to us, but high school boys are famous for being attracted to everything vaguely reminiscent of femininity up to and including door knobs, so it is not surprising that for the first two weeks of school the most consistently flogged topic of discussion in the boys changing room was exactly what kind of lacy things might be worn by Eastern European babes under their black skirts.
I should make clear here, because it is important - every boy I knew, and most I didn't, was hopelessly a-drool over Marianne. But I wasn't. Whether it was just my natural reticence to talk about girls in the vein the other guys seemed to, or the fact that I had a girlfriend around whom my earth moved, or the fact that she was certainly out of my league, I cannot say. But for me she was simply a willowy creature who never once swung her long blond hair around the way the American girls constantly did, who seemed to own an improbable number of black turtlenecks and whose approach and ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ was always marked by the click-click of the high heels of her knee-high boots. She was certainly beautiful, but nothing beyond that to me. I considered her little more part of my plane of existence than the poster my older brother had of Alyssa Milano.
Both she and I had study hall 5th period. I used the time to read - occasionally I did homework, but mostly I just read novels. Perhaps it was my obvious lack of interest, perhaps she knew what she was doing, I can't say, and perhaps even now I don't want to. Why she spoke to me I don't know. I found it shocking then, and even now I recall that first moment when she spoke to me as a small jewel of a moment that still makes my heart rise slightly in trembling nervousness.
What followed from that conversation was more conversation. And more. At night I could still see her eyes in front of me. She always held my gaze too long, and it made me nervous, twitchy, as though I'd had 3 cups of coffee. But I could not stop talking to her. After the very first meeting we talked through every study hall, non-stop, for months. I had never thought of myself as interesting before, but perhaps through the eyes of a foreigner I was.
In retrospect, I wonder now if I wasn't really that interesting, but rather I was the only guy who didn't seem sweaty-palmed at the thought of salivating down the front of her sweater. Marianne hadn't made a single friend amongst the girls, for obvious reasons, and between the boys hungrily watching her and the girls who unanimously hated her, she must have been very lonely.
Michelle, my girlfriend, found out within days of the first conversation. I explained to her with all the conviction that accompanies convenient truth - Marianne was a friend. We talked. That was it. And that truly was it. She might not have been happy about it, but she could hardly forbid me to talk to other people in the same room.
Maybe that was when it started. Maybe it started later. It is impossible to say exactly when the division began. I loved Michelle - we had been together for 2 years, which in high school terms is the equivalent of a 17 year marriage. She really was the glue that permeated and held together every aspect of my life. I woke in the morning thinking of her, and I saw every part of my day in relation to her. The walk to school was the part without Michelle. She would be waiting for me outside the homeroom, or occasionally inside. Homeroom she would doodle on my jeans, and then we were off together to the first two periods, which we shared. She would sit behind me, with her feet propped under my seat and I would let my hand go back behind my desk and wrap my fingers around her tan calf or ankle.
We spent every part of our days together that we could. Lunch we sat together, 3rd through 6th periods were defined in my mind by her absence. Sometimes in 4th period I would sit in a certain desk where I knew she would sit in 6th period, and I would scribble her a note on the desk. Afternoons we always spent together until her father made her take up sports so she would have some time away from me. It is fair to say that I spent the majority of my time thinking about her, and she was the prism through which I saw the world. She was my world.
As I said, it is impossible to say when the division began. It wasn't painful at all, at first. Just an odd tickle of a feeling, really. But sometime after Michelle asked me about Marianne and our conversations in study hall I became aware that while Marianne was talking to me, while she looked into my eyes, Michelle had left my mind. I realized one day as I was leaving the library that I had not thought of Michelle for the whole hour. It was a strange realization, especially when accompanied by the sudden rush of familiar longing and emotion that came when I did think of her. How could I love her so much on one side of the library door, and not have thought of her for an hour on the other?
I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it, but after a few months I couldn't help but be aware of it. Michelle was my very life outside of 5th period. But inside that library, in between those bookshelves, I had another existence. I wasn't the same person. Inside that library, as Marianne looked at me, day after day, hour after hour, I began to see myself through her eyes. I was no longer even the same person I was with Michelle. By her viewing me, I saw myself and I was transformed by what she saw. I became something new, something I had never known, something that was me, but was not me, because it existed in her, and only in this room.
I said things I would never have said. Thoughts came to me that were not mine, but were tinged by colors from a different world. I felt the division happening, and it did not hurt. It made me feel strange, when I realized I had two hearts beating inside of me, but it was a wild strangeness that pounded a new rythm, a new strength borne of being two people, and not just one. I sat differently, I began to speak differently. The words I used changed, as did my intonation. Like any communication between two people who know each other, our conversations developed a certain ebb and tide punctuated by slow intense silences in which we would look at each other, and during which, on the last day we were together, I took her hand.
It was the last day before exam week, and strange things always happened that week. I had never touched her before then, but it didn't surprise her at all when I did. Certain things have their moment, and when it is the moment it cannot be otherwise. She continued looking in my eyes as I held her hand, and then, laying down the pencil she had been toying with, she reached across the table, and put her other hand on my chest. She waited like that for long enough that I could feel rising in me what had been there a long time. The desire, the knowledge, the feeling that from now on the person who lived in this room would be the real me. As the desire rose, I reached out and touched her face. Her beautiful face that I had looked at for so long, and as I did so my two hearts leaped and quailed and her eyes drew suddenly narrow and she took her hand off my chest, and extracted her hand from mine.
She rummaged in her bag, and emerged with a small wooden box. I thought she was going to give me something, and later she did, but at that moment I must confess my mind was quite cloudy, and fogged by her in a way it had never been before. She opened the box, and inside, cradled on one side, was an egg. It was only when she placed it in my hands that I realized it was only the egg-shell. The feathery lightness and a tiny hole drilled in each end was the only evidence of the robbery that had taken place. In every other way it seemed perfectly whole.
She cupped her hands to her mouth, and in a gesture of infatuated mimicry, I did the same. She reached over and gently adjusted the egg so one hole rested just above my lower lip. I could smell her hands, and I wanted to grab them in mine. I felt the cool eggshell softly skimming my lip, and found myself staring at her lips, across the table.
"Now, blow." She said.
And I did. Without thinking, with a heart full of love and longing, perfectly divided and totally full I blew into the egg and it felt like when Jimmy Granger had kicked me in the stomach and when Joanna had held my hand in 2nd grade and when I had caught the look in Michelle's eyes as she arched around when I kissed the back of her neck. I don't know how long I blew into that egg, or if I took another breath that hour. I saw stars, and I felt sick with hurt and a desire and a love big enough to fill two worlds and she took the egg away from my mouth and placed it back in the box.
People were leaving, packing up their books and moving toward the doors. I did the same, the force of habit more powerful than my weak knees and a sudden sense of loss came over me and a strangeness descended between us as she walked ahead of me out the library door.
I didn't see her during exam week, nor anytime thereafter. When she walked out that door I didn't realize it was the last time I would see her. Perhaps if I had, I would have done something different. Perhaps not, as I remember feeling confused and awkward. As she walked away from me, her head held squarely up, her posture erect, those boots that were so incongruous in our country clicking away from me, I felt confused. I realized later it was the first time I had walked out of the library still thinking of Marianne, and not Michelle.
Michelle and I broke up at the end of that summer. Michelle never asked about someone now gone, and of course, I never told, for what was there to tell? But when we broke up, as I felt the rising hurt and indifference carrying us toward our breakup, sometimes for a split second I would speak differently, would see myself through foreign, strange eyes, and felt that Marianne was somehow still a part of me.
So it was that when I saw the pictures in National Geographic, they spoke to something wild and foreign, long dead or dormant within me, and knowing I would soon be dead myself, I quit my job and bought my ticket across the ocean.
I had always wanted to see Europe, and the cheapest flight was into Amsterdaam. I had never been a hippy, but having shed so much of the old, and having no new, I tried the hashish and found it helped to ease my pain, though it made the tremors worse. The tremors had got so bad one evening that I couldn't keep soup on spoon, and had to leave most of the bowl behind. I tried drinking it out of the bowl, but felt embarrassed. I wasn't very hungry these days anyway.
After Amsterdaam I went to Paris, then on to Munich, then Prague and Berlin, spending some days or sometimes weeks at each spot. I knew my money would run out, but it seemed as though my time would get there first, and I was ok with that. It became fixed in my mind that I had come here to die. The place it happened didn't matter much, but I generally drifted Eastward. I hit Gdansk, and then was turned back from Belarus by the steep visa fee, which forced me to turn south and go to Krakow.
The further I went, the clearer it became to me. I was moving toward Ukraine. The where didn't matter, and the only why I could find, deep inside me, was that I wanted to see where Marianne came from. I didn't know her town or village, but to see some of the sights she had seen, some of the sights I had felt in my heart when sitting with her, would be enough. We would have, after all these years, shared one thing more.
By the time I reached L'viv I had been travelling for 5 months, and I knew it would soon be over. I hoped the end would come on a sunny day, so I could stretch myself out on a park bench, or on the grass, and my last thoughts would be of the sun on my face, and that the world was not such a bad place, in the end.
The sun was shining when I slowly emerged from the tunnel into the crowd of people going this way and that and suddenly felt a numbness in my chest and a dizzy, slow disorientation.
When the old woman took my sleeve I wanted her to leave me alone, to let me die now, but she was stronger than me, her thick fingers telling of a life of grubbing for vegetables in the slick earth, and she led me to the small wall where I could sit, next to the grass, and I sat.
She looked around for a moment and then called to a well-dressed woman passing by. She came over, and talked with the old woman. Then she turned to me and addressed me in English.
"She says she has for you this thing," and as she said it the old woman produced an old plastic grocery bag, crumpled and dirty, and began untying it.
"I don't need anything," I said. "I will be fine, thank you." The old woman wasn't listening but was searching inside the bag, where there were a number of other plastic bags crumpled up.
Our translator was just beginning to translate this when, after a bit of feeling around the old woman produced a brilliantly painted easter egg, of the sort that old women sell to tourists for a dollar. I tried not to take it, because I was long past the point where I needed to buy souvenirs from impoverished grannies, but saying something to the younger woman, she forced it into my hand and I felt my heart move in and my guts churn in a paroxysm of fear.
"You very fool to give this." The woman's face was swimming in and out of focus as my stomach heaved and I felt a light sweat prickling my skin.
"She buyed this in the market, very much times ago. Is very bad for you what people do with."
I felt so close to vomiting and passing out at the same time that I feared I might do both. The egg inside my hand felt cool, and familiar as it had the first time, but strangely alive, and filled with a strange consciousness. The old woman made a disgusted sound, and took the egg from my hand, and in a hard, swift motion smashed it against my mouth. I gasped at the force of her slap, as I tasted a small squirt of blood from my weakened and fragile gums, and felt stale air slide past my teeth, and tasted the sweaty age of her hand.
I rolled over with a sudden urgency and strength that surprised me, and vomitted like I hadn't since college. I arched my back and heaved and then thrust my arms down to push my face out of the rising tide piling up beneath my face, a thick black and orange, foul smelling liquid that was nothing I had eaten but part of me. It went on in such a continuous stream that I wondered if I would ever get to take a breath, and when it stopped I gasped and it came heaving out again so strong that my back seized into a solid mass of sinews grating against each other and my asshole literally cramped. Then something hit the back of my throat, blocking everything, leaving me silently straining, writhing, open-mouthed. I had to open my mouth wider to let it out, but at that moment the old woman grabbed my head from behind, and poking and shoving her fingers into my mouth forced the mass back in, and down my throat.
She's killing me, I thought. I can't swallow, it won't fit. But I was wrong. The body can do anything it has to when life is at stake, and suddenly I wanted to live. I couldn't die now.
I swallowed and heaved and swallowed and heaved and choked on the fist-sized mass as I worked it, swallow by painful swallow, gasping, straining, back down my over-stretched esophagus till it came to reside next to my lungs, and I felt it settle.
I was covered in sweat, and strings of drool and blood ran from my chin to a pile of blood-black effluence on the ground. I watched in clinical abstraction as a gorgeous ruby droplet slid down a filament of black and then disappeared into the mess. I became aware that granny was still standing over my back, straddling me, one large gum-boot in each of my armpits. She stepped away from me, and then helped me to roll over, away from my mess. As I lay there, my heart racing, looking up at the sky, shaky with exertion and wonder, I realized that today I wasn't going to die.
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