25 November 2007
Mia Vita Nuova?
[draft]
I arrived in Paris during a massive transit strike. The strange thing is that the first time I came to Paris almost two years ago exactly, I arrived during a transit strike. It was near Thanksgiving, then, too and the Champs Elysees was decorated for the approaching holidays. My first trip was for a holiday, this trip had something to do with making a new life for myself. Because, despite what reservations I may have about the culture and the country, I feel at home in France. No, I feel comfortable. I am, and will always be, an American. It was just difficult to feel comfortable being "home." Now, I am slightly nagged by guilt at feeling at home with being comfortable.
Like my first trip, that first transit strike was limited in its scope. It seemed to be more ennui, than anything else. The strike into which I had flown this time around, crippled Paris. For over a week, this meant that I was largely confined me to my sublet studio apartment in the 10th arrondissement of the still mostly alien city for over a week. When I did emerge from the studio, from which I was staging my survival search for housing, contacts and employment, the streets were congested with cars and air was filled with the roar and rumble of motorcycles and motored scooters that would have remained sheltered at home had the Metro been operating.
My decision to come to Paris was based on something stronger than a whim, less than a plan, but was tinged with desperation. After a long period abroad - a Fulbright fellowship to Poland, an artistic residency in the South of France - I struggled to readjust and regain my footing in the States. Since leaving Europe, I've talked to a great many "Fulbrighters," and Peace Corps volunteers who have echoed my sentiments, how differently they saw and felt about the United States upon their return. It wasn't that they no longer loved the country - they did, perhaps even more fervently than before - but, perhaps, they better understood America's place in the world and the cost at which the great ease of our lives come. It's an overwhelming feeling, but a natural one that those who had been returned long enough assured would eventually subside.
Still, I wasn't coping well with "eventually"; there was an immediacy for my desire to acclimate myself. Hindering my return was that I carried from Poland a case of post traumatic stress disorder with no immediate opportunity for respite. This, I attribute mostly to my own obstinacy and partly to more than a few depressing encounters with violent neo-fascists and a culture that fosters them. A native of the clustered Northeast, I returned there briefly, but afterwards I then moved on to an artistic residency in Montana that I had gotten over the summer.
Montana offered me so many things that New Jersey and New York - the places I'd grown into adulthood - could not at the time. Gentle people. Quiet. Privacy. Space. A staid and beautiful landscape. I've thought a lot about what made Montana and the Continental Divide different from the South of France and the Pyrenees where I spent time between Poland and my return to the US. My general description certainly applies to both, but it was in Montana where I again achieved clarity.
While I was in Montana, I received a mix CD from a friend with a song from the singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright, titled "Going to a Town." The song begins:
I'm going to a town that has already been burned down
I'm going to a place that is already been disgraced
I'm gonna see some folks who have already been let down.
I'm so tired of America
I'm gonna make it up for all of the Sunday Times
I'm gonna make it up for all of the nursery rhymes
They never really seem to want to tell the truth
I'm so tired of you America
I played that song on continuous loop at least 50 times over 2 days. It lullabyed me and was the soundtrack for my dreams. Then, one night, it occurred to me that I didn't have to wait for eventually. There was no reason to return to New York, to find what so many of my friends had - work that was inconsistent, that they disliked and which leeched away from their time to be creative.
It wasn't just the chaos of my return, or my beneficent solitude. It felt that either I, or the country had changed. Perhaps both, perhaps fundamentally. In spite of all its faults, I was always confident, that there were certain lines that America and its citizens wouldn't cross, much less step backwards toward. After all the countries that I've seen and people I've met, I believed that America and Americans were those most likely to make strides - sometimes too short, sometimes too long - to remain vigilant in their attempts to create a more just society.
But, I arrived back home to the Jena 6, to nooses being used to intimidate black professors at my own ivy league university. The lack of feminist uproar when only women of color were being denigrated. I bristled at the semantics of the evening news casts and the slant and cowardice of even the "liberal media", both of whom seemed to be capitulating to an agenda whose word choice seemed to be dictated by some gun, slightly off the margin. The will to riot and revolution had been slowly eroded and sapped of its vitality. But the angry and dangerous people - the people who hang those nooses on doors and from trees - I found them to be as angry and dangerous as ever - and suddenly less reticent.
Never, have I found a place which I could truly call home. Somewhere to which I could return and be peaceful, without the need for personal translation. One day, during my time in the South of France, I was shaving and felt my high cheekbones, which had always been cherubic and firm were softer and hung just a hair lower. I was to be 28 soon. While not old, I realized that I was not a baby anymore. The nomadic life that I lived, that I did not believe suited me, but I lived because I made a promise to myself some years ago when I decided to live a life centered around poetry, to wake up some place beautiful, could not go on forever - my urges towards a stable mailing address and (still beautiful) vista, partnership and the dream of a family, while not overwhelming grew ever stronger. It was time to find a new visionplace, time to search for home. As Wainwright sings in his refrain to "Going to a Town":
Making my own way home
Ain't gonna be alone
I got a life to lead America
I got a life to lead
I got a soul to feed
I got a dream to heed
And that's all I need
In a letter from my friend Emmanuelle, who moved for a time to Montreal, but will soon be returning to Paris, she praised my relocation and welcomed me to my new life. Mia vita nuova. We shall see, Emma, we shall see.
I arrived in Paris during a massive transit strike. The strange thing is that the first time I came to Paris almost two years ago exactly, I arrived during a transit strike. It was near Thanksgiving, then, too and the Champs Elysees was decorated for the approaching holidays. My first trip was for a holiday, this trip had something to do with making a new life for myself. Because, despite what reservations I may have about the culture and the country, I feel at home in France. No, I feel comfortable. I am, and will always be, an American. It was just difficult to feel comfortable being "home." Now, I am slightly nagged by guilt at feeling at home with being comfortable.
Like my first trip, that first transit strike was limited in its scope. It seemed to be more ennui, than anything else. The strike into which I had flown this time around, crippled Paris. For over a week, this meant that I was largely confined me to my sublet studio apartment in the 10th arrondissement of the still mostly alien city for over a week. When I did emerge from the studio, from which I was staging my survival search for housing, contacts and employment, the streets were congested with cars and air was filled with the roar and rumble of motorcycles and motored scooters that would have remained sheltered at home had the Metro been operating.
My decision to come to Paris was based on something stronger than a whim, less than a plan, but was tinged with desperation. After a long period abroad - a Fulbright fellowship to Poland, an artistic residency in the South of France - I struggled to readjust and regain my footing in the States. Since leaving Europe, I've talked to a great many "Fulbrighters," and Peace Corps volunteers who have echoed my sentiments, how differently they saw and felt about the United States upon their return. It wasn't that they no longer loved the country - they did, perhaps even more fervently than before - but, perhaps, they better understood America's place in the world and the cost at which the great ease of our lives come. It's an overwhelming feeling, but a natural one that those who had been returned long enough assured would eventually subside.
Still, I wasn't coping well with "eventually"; there was an immediacy for my desire to acclimate myself. Hindering my return was that I carried from Poland a case of post traumatic stress disorder with no immediate opportunity for respite. This, I attribute mostly to my own obstinacy and partly to more than a few depressing encounters with violent neo-fascists and a culture that fosters them. A native of the clustered Northeast, I returned there briefly, but afterwards I then moved on to an artistic residency in Montana that I had gotten over the summer.
Montana offered me so many things that New Jersey and New York - the places I'd grown into adulthood - could not at the time. Gentle people. Quiet. Privacy. Space. A staid and beautiful landscape. I've thought a lot about what made Montana and the Continental Divide different from the South of France and the Pyrenees where I spent time between Poland and my return to the US. My general description certainly applies to both, but it was in Montana where I again achieved clarity.
While I was in Montana, I received a mix CD from a friend with a song from the singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright, titled "Going to a Town." The song begins:
I'm going to a town that has already been burned down
I'm going to a place that is already been disgraced
I'm gonna see some folks who have already been let down.
I'm so tired of America
I'm gonna make it up for all of the Sunday Times
I'm gonna make it up for all of the nursery rhymes
They never really seem to want to tell the truth
I'm so tired of you America
I played that song on continuous loop at least 50 times over 2 days. It lullabyed me and was the soundtrack for my dreams. Then, one night, it occurred to me that I didn't have to wait for eventually. There was no reason to return to New York, to find what so many of my friends had - work that was inconsistent, that they disliked and which leeched away from their time to be creative.
It wasn't just the chaos of my return, or my beneficent solitude. It felt that either I, or the country had changed. Perhaps both, perhaps fundamentally. In spite of all its faults, I was always confident, that there were certain lines that America and its citizens wouldn't cross, much less step backwards toward. After all the countries that I've seen and people I've met, I believed that America and Americans were those most likely to make strides - sometimes too short, sometimes too long - to remain vigilant in their attempts to create a more just society.
But, I arrived back home to the Jena 6, to nooses being used to intimidate black professors at my own ivy league university. The lack of feminist uproar when only women of color were being denigrated. I bristled at the semantics of the evening news casts and the slant and cowardice of even the "liberal media", both of whom seemed to be capitulating to an agenda whose word choice seemed to be dictated by some gun, slightly off the margin. The will to riot and revolution had been slowly eroded and sapped of its vitality. But the angry and dangerous people - the people who hang those nooses on doors and from trees - I found them to be as angry and dangerous as ever - and suddenly less reticent.
Never, have I found a place which I could truly call home. Somewhere to which I could return and be peaceful, without the need for personal translation. One day, during my time in the South of France, I was shaving and felt my high cheekbones, which had always been cherubic and firm were softer and hung just a hair lower. I was to be 28 soon. While not old, I realized that I was not a baby anymore. The nomadic life that I lived, that I did not believe suited me, but I lived because I made a promise to myself some years ago when I decided to live a life centered around poetry, to wake up some place beautiful, could not go on forever - my urges towards a stable mailing address and (still beautiful) vista, partnership and the dream of a family, while not overwhelming grew ever stronger. It was time to find a new visionplace, time to search for home. As Wainwright sings in his refrain to "Going to a Town":
Making my own way home
Ain't gonna be alone
I got a life to lead America
I got a life to lead
I got a soul to feed
I got a dream to heed
And that's all I need
In a letter from my friend Emmanuelle, who moved for a time to Montreal, but will soon be returning to Paris, she praised my relocation and welcomed me to my new life. Mia vita nuova. We shall see, Emma, we shall see.
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