(Note: This is the 4th part of a 4-part series.)
After bidding Greece a sleepy 4-in-the-morning goodbye and flying to Frankfurt, then to Riga, we boarded a moldy 1970’s bus that crawled slowly home, over the ice and snow, to Klaipeda. When we finally arrived after dark, we were famished and exhausted, so Scott and I dropped Rory off at a pizza joint to rest and proceeded home to deliver the luggage. Slipping along the unsalted crusts of ice that somehow pass for sidewalks, we passed the bus stop where we wait each morning, now that it is winter, behind the shuddering plexiglass. We passed the square where you can still see the base of a statue that used to be Stalin. We crossed the bridge over the lagoon where now, in the morning, sack-shaped lumps of hunched backs dip their fishing poles through the ice. And we passed into Old Town, with its tall, close buildings in earthy pastels, its cobblestone streets smothered in a half meter of snow, its graceful lampposts, its antiquated signs. All of these things were so expected that, despite the ice and snow and the bitter cold, we felt a jolt of joy and comfort. After the adventurous uncertainties of balmy Greece, we were again in a place where we knew how to ask for directions, where to buy food, and how and where and when to catch the bus. We were in a place where we had a cozy apartment with a refrigerator, stove, and washing machine. A shower for life-sized people. A familiar bed. We were coming back to two meaningful jobs and a close community of friends. Somehow, at some point, this had become our home. Later, over thin, flaccid slices of Lithuanian pizza that hung from our hands like wet laundry, I said a quiet prayer of thanks: thanks that we were home, and that home was a good, albeit slightly foreign, place to be.
The semester is now in full swing, and, as such, my all-out pleasure seeking has taken a back seat. My pleasure now, for these next four months, must be primarily taken in duty, in the purpose of my work. I am teaching two heavy sections of Research Writing, both of which meet every afternoon, and a class called “Special Topics: Current Events” where my students and I are using English to explore difficult issues like racism, gender roles, homelessness, and the effects of war on children.
This class is a difficult one for me to teach. At certain points in my planning, as I have been researching my topic, I have even broken down crying. News has never been an easy thing for me to digest. It is something I approach with a sense of duty and depart from with a sense of despair. I wholeheartedly agree with Charles Baudelaire, who was “unable to understand how a person of honor could take a newspaper in his or her hands without a shudder of disgust.” And so in the course of this class I have been asking myself the following question: Is it really our duty as human beings to examine these things unflinchingly? Are we, in addition to the labor of our chosen work, also supposed to know, even perhaps to dwell on, the hideous events of this world? And how, if we do this, could we ever possibly live a joyful life? In his “Eight Weeks to Optimal Health,” Dr. Andrew Weil goes so far as to prescribe what he calls “news fasts,” or entire days, even weeks, without listening to or reading the news, the implication being that it boosts mental health tremendously. I agree that sitting on depressing facts and statistics like Eeyore will get you nowhere. However, I think that Dr. Weil also implies that we can do nothing, and so we should not burden ourselves with all of that disturbing information.
The real temptation here is to do what I have often done: to embrace a false sense of powerlessness. I have wanted to be exempt from obligation and discomfort. Of course there is nothing that I can do; I already have enough on my plate. In order to experience any pleasure, in order to possess any happiness, I must turn a blind eye.
Yes, to some degree, I am powerless. I cannot feed everyone, nor can I single-handedly bring peace to Afghanistan. I cannot prevent children from being sold into the sex-trade or ensure that every woman is allowed the same level of education as a man. I, Michelle Webster-Hein, cannot heal the world. But I can pick up food at the grocery store to give to the woman who sits in the snow across the street. I can feed a child in Haiti for a month with the same money that it costs to buy a nice dinner out. I can volunteer with a literacy organization and teach someone to read. I can make donations in people’s names instead of buying them more shit that they don’t want or need. And I can examine my own thoughts and assumptions; I can confront my own ignorance and my own misattributed blame.
That’s why the harrowing experience of facing these things is important. That’s why the pain we feel in the face of all that pain is important. It is important because it provokes in us a deeply human response. We cannot simply stand by and let injustice be without doing something, something, however small. But unless we face it, we simply do not know. And, not knowing, we are incapable of being moved to our own small yet significant actions.
A week ago, my current events class watched a video on child soldiers in Uganda. One boy in the video, in order to save his own life, was forced by a paramilitary group to kill his own mother. At first, of course, he refused. But then he was told that his captors were going to kill them both if he didn’t comply. So he did. He beat his mother to death with a stick. As a result, he was given a place to sleep and a gun. A community in which he was protected. Food. Water.
How can we react in the face of that? Well, first we can give it our time and our thoughts. We can talk about it, react to it. We can give it the meditations of our hearts, which are also, I believe, prayers.
So we had a discussion. The students first expressed their reactions: sadness, horror, disbelief, anger. Then the discussion naturally turned to solutions, to grasping at something that could be done. So we talked about how this could be stopped. Some students talked about punishing the people who forced the boy to commit this act, insisting that they should be killed, hanged maybe, or tortured, or shot. But then another student in the back also mentioned how those very men who forced the child to kill his own mother were probably themselves, long before, forced to do similar things. And so, as a class, we were reminded together of the everlasting and often overlooked tragedy: If we had known those who commit cruelties before they committed those acts, when they were on the receiving end of those cruelties, those very people would be objects of our compassion rather than victims of our wrath. Realizations like this, I believe, change us at our core. They make us uneasy with simplistic solutions. They change our crude black vs. white to a spectrum of gray. These realizations teach us that ignorance is not exactly bliss but that cowardly ignorance is instead a shallow and temporal pleasure. All of this calls to mind a Franciscan benediction:
“May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart. May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace. May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.”
I do not know how this discussion will affect my students. I do not know if their capacity for compassion has greatly grown or if their behavior will change at all as a result. But that is not my responsibility. As a teacher, it is often more important to raise questions rather than provide answers. I must then trust the inquietude of the human soul to ramble and grapple and learn. And I myself, of course, must also continue to ramble and grapple and learn as I strive to live “deep within my heart.”
Two weekends ago, Scott and I took a break from our work and went with some friends to a sauna on the Baltic Sea. Under my thick coat, multiple sweaters, and thermal body suit, I wore my swimsuit, the neck strings sticking out ridiculously above my scarf. In the sauna, we disrobed and took our seats next to all the elderly Lithuanian men in Speedos snapped tight below their hairy, glistening bellies. The sauna was so hot that it fried the insides of our noses and frizzled our hair. We waited until we had halfway melted and our faces were splotched in angry red patches. Then we jumped up and ran out the door and across the beach. Under my feet, I could feel the sloping hills of ice and sand. Before my will weakened, I scrambled onto the ice shelf and stripped off my socks. Then I stepped into the sea and began to run. When the freezing water reached midway up my thighs, I dove headlong. In my brain there was an explosion of light. My body burst into one of those antiquated comic book pictures: a throbbing red and orange “BAM! POW!” I came up gasping. My lungs seized. My skin burned. I was certain that my feet and the bottoms of my legs were going to crack and shatter into a million pieces. I sprinted back to the sauna, certain that I would instantly become deathly ill. Once I got inside, though, I realized that I was still alive, very alive, even. So I did it again. And again.
This is how life finds us, how joy finds us, not in the muted middle ground of sustained comfort, but at the edge of the precipice. We cannot truly know warmth without the cold, joy without the sorrow, light without the dark.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Saturday, 23 January 2010
Stay Hungry, Part 3
(Note: This is the 3rd part of a 4-part series.)
Athens is a place where the pursuit of pleasure is tangible. Everything is raw and spinning and pulsing and heaving. If you stand still on the cracked concrete, the whole world twirls around you, and if you move down the streets, it moves with you and against you. The wagons tumbling with green purple orange red vegetables parked on corners. The carts of fresh pretzels speckled with sesame seeds. Smells of roasting meat and baking pastries and sweat smoke coffee sewer whirl in eddies. Flocks of prostitutes with jumbled angles of elbows knees stilettos cigarettes and profusions of feathery curves scatter and gather at street corners like tropical birds in rhythm with the cop patrols. Gangs of motorcycles grumble at each traffic light and take off in a roar. Noises wash you: buses whooshing, people shouting, music humping, children squealing, horns blasting. Passing radios drum out the soft Greek language percussion. Graffiti reads you past the reeking market alleys of hanging meat, past the trains of side shops shuttered in steel and the clumps of stray exhausted dogs, through the endless maze of main streets that spill out into teeming squares that siphon into side streets off of side streets off of side streets strewn with litter and benches and rotting oranges, and then up past the millions of orange trees and the rickety stores stacked on stores stacked on stores and up to the distant glimpses of ancient pillars that rise eternal and up to sky always watching, to sky always the still, diaphanous blue of a watchful eye.
In the midst of all this swirling passion and freedom, I was going to have fun, but first I had to figure out what sorts of things I wanted to do, and, as a recovering fundamentalist, this is no easy task.
I’ve often feared discovering my true desires, and I think this springs from a deep-seated fear of human nature. At the Baptist church I attended growing up, we were reminded weekly of how inherently evil human beings are. This knowledge, strengthened by that nagging consequence of burning in hell forever, motivated me to mistrust any and all of my natural inclinations. In other words, it caused me to actually feel uncomfortable when I was feeling comfortable. To, when joy knocked on the door, squint suspiciously through the peephole, assume it was selling one-way tickets to a fiery afterlife, and leave it out in the cold to freeze. This fear, coupled with a Protestant Work Ethic (the obligation to prove, through constant toil, that you’re really not going to hell), wrapped a double chord around my joy’s neck and pulled hard. I was relieved years later to find that she was not dead, just weak and sickly and understandably pissed.
I’m writing about pleasure today, but I’m going off on a joy tangent because pleasure and joy are closely connected. It takes a lot of time and effort to revive joy, to strip off all of those layers we have smothered it under all these years, and it’s impossible to do this all at once. So instead of trying to climb Mount Everest, I’m hiking little foothills. I am trying to coax my authentic self out through the small things I have denied it for so long, much as you would coax an abused animal out of hiding with enticing scraps of food.
Now, I don’t mean that I’m going to do whatever I want to do. As Paul reminds me when he writes to the Corinthians, “You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is good for you. You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is beneficial.” We must seek wisdom in order to discriminate between what a theology professor here calls “doggy freedom”, or that frenzied state a dog exhibits when it’s let out of its cage, and the freedom that builds up. It is in this discrimination that joy can be our North Star, our guiding light. The things we believe will give us the greatest lasting joy are the things to which God is beckoning us. Being drawn along by joy is quite different from being dragged along by fear. And it’s a hell of a lot more fun, too.
In Athens, I was heartened to discover that the things I truly wanted to do were all good, wholesome, interesting things. I didn’t want to hook up with a Greek demigod or take breaks from drunken, scantily-clad booty dancing to do keg stands of Mythos, Greece’s national beer. I didn’t want to chain-smoke cigarettes or get wasted on the pot that Scott was offered several times by a cast of shady characters. (Rory and I attributed this to Scott’s long hair, plaid shirt, remarkable thinness, and repeated use of the words “dude” and “totally”.) I didn’t even want to stay up late double-checking my Facebook account. No, I should have known, after all these years of idealizing Anne of Green Gables and Elizabeth Bennet, not to be afraid.
I wanted to wake early and walk the streets just hearing and feeling and smelling and seeing everything I possibly could. I wanted to pick armfuls of oranges from the trees that grew everywhere and sneak them back to our room. I wanted to make best friends, Lassie-style, with one of the stray dogs that hung out in Syntagma Square.
Happily, the other things I wanted to do were things that Scott and Rory wanted to do as well. We wanted to see the Acropolis, of course, and Haidan’s Library, and the Theatre of Dionysus, and the Temple of Zeus. We wanted to visit at least seven museums, attend the opera, take a tour through the countryside to visit Poseidon’s Temple, and dip our feet in the Mediterranean Sea. And, of course, we wanted to eat everything.
After our big budget blow on day one, we were trying to reign in our expenses. Thankfully, we discovered a restaurant close to our hotel that was appropriately called Joy’s. I only saw one of these places, so I’m hoping that I don’t discover, upon publishing this post, that it’s the equivalent of a Greek McDonald’s. Joy’s had every traditional Greek dish I had ever known, plus it was cheap and delicious. Scott, Rory, and I made it our home away from home and ate there nearly every day. We were hoping to develop a camaraderie with the staff, but they always seemed vaguely annoyed by our presence, so instead of saying goodbye on our final night, we just stuffed our bellies and rolled out the door.
A couple of times, we splurged on more expensive fare: heaping salads with whole blocks of feta cheese, pasta tossed in creamy tomato sauces, smoked salmon with mango and capers, steak and Guinness pie, baklava drizzled in honey. We felt especially honored on these occasions because both times the waiter brought out three shots to finish off the meal, compliments of the house. We didn’t realize this was standard until later, so we probably seemed ludicrously grateful.
We wore ourselves out stay-hungry style seeing nearly everything we wanted to see and doing nearly everything we wanted to do. We missed a couple of museums because of the holiday schedule, the opera because of the prices, and dipping our feet in the Mediterranean Sea because getting down there would have meant falling from a dangerous precipice (read: dying).
On one of our last days in Greece, we were making our way back to our hotel after much delighted exploration when we heard blaring music and joyful shouts coming from an alleyway. Rory, in his hell-bent pursuit to experience everything, wanted to investigate. Scott, the cautious voice of our trio, thought it wasn’t such a good idea. I, being the yin to Scott’s yang, had already decided that nothing Scott worried about could ever possibly come true. So Scott was outvoted 2 to 1, and investigate we did.
Down the alleyway was, literally, a hole in the wall, and this hole in the wall had been transformed into a bar. The bar was stuffed with about 15 sopping drunk Grecians who were still sober enough to realize they had guests and, being Greeks, they had to show those guests a good time. The beer began to flow. I say flow because I mean flow. The woman who was trying to pour us drinks was so generous (and drunk) that she poured about twice as much as would fit in each glass. The beer flooded the counter that had been built into the alley’s wall and made a river down to the drain. As I was lamenting the loss of the beer, a white disk sailed past the corner of my eye and broke into sharp shards on the floor beside me. I looked up just in time to step back and miss being boomeranged by another glass Frisbee, then another. I realized then that the bartender was lobbing plates over the counter. I had no idea, at that time, that breaking plates is something that Greeks reserve the right to do for pretty much any reason, so at the time I assumed the man to be either angry, crazy, or both. But then, despite his evident fury, his patrons began to dance on the broken glass. One woman with a feisty temper, a haggard face, and a wizened pair of teeth, began gyrating wildly on the shards as though possessed by Bacchus. A man with Gumby limbs and hair balding in the pattern of Wolverine from the X-Men came out in the alley to dance too, but his dance was more of a slow robot. This was probably because the broken ceramic pieces had the effect, when you stepped on them, of turning into spontaneous roller skates. The feisty woman danced with Rory, then a reluctant Scott, then Rory again, and she punctuated these dances by squeezing their faces with both hands and planting kisses on their cheeks, throwing a couple of glances in my direction to see if I minded. Meanwhile, ACDC came on the radio, and a middle-aged Bob Dylan in a Sex Pistols t-shirt played air guitar with an all-consuming passion while his friend screamed “ACDC!” over and over into an air microphone. The wizened-tooth woman, who had become a sort of itinerant hostess, decided that now we should switch to half liter glasses of straight whiskey instead of beer, just to get the party started. At that point we decided that, regrettably, it was time to go.
I thought of our hostess throughout that evening, as she had been so far gone before the sun was even close to setting. On my morning walk the next day, I decided to check out the alley again, just to make sure it actually existed and that no one was sleeping on the alleyway floor. When I passed, I did a double-take. The woman, our hostess, at 8:00 in the morning, was (still? already?) belly-up to the bar with a glass of beer, engaged in a heated debate with someone on the other side of the counter.
I didn’t know what to think, besides admiring her passion and stamina. I started to wonder how she and people like her fit in to the Stay Hungry philosophy. Maybe she was always hungry, but not on purpose, always trying to satiate that hunger with things that could never truly satisfy it, things that, in the end, would destroy her. We all have a hole inside of us, a nagging hole, a gaping hole that we try to fill with so many things: alcohol, food, work, TV, self-righteousness, the admiration of others. Earlier in my life, I would constantly entertain myself so that I could not feel it there, and later I would escape into drunken oblivions so that I could not feel it there. I spent my teenage years trying to fill it with dogma, trying to convince myself that I was right and others were wrong, to convince myself that on the day God drew the line, I would be in. And recently, I’ve shoveled the hole full with hours upon hours of work, work, work. But now, in a moment of quiet and contemplative freedom, I discover that, when you sit with that emptiness there in front of you, when you just sit with it, it fills itself up as every opening does when exposed: with fresh air, shadow, and light.
Athens is a place where the pursuit of pleasure is tangible. Everything is raw and spinning and pulsing and heaving. If you stand still on the cracked concrete, the whole world twirls around you, and if you move down the streets, it moves with you and against you. The wagons tumbling with green purple orange red vegetables parked on corners. The carts of fresh pretzels speckled with sesame seeds. Smells of roasting meat and baking pastries and sweat smoke coffee sewer whirl in eddies. Flocks of prostitutes with jumbled angles of elbows knees stilettos cigarettes and profusions of feathery curves scatter and gather at street corners like tropical birds in rhythm with the cop patrols. Gangs of motorcycles grumble at each traffic light and take off in a roar. Noises wash you: buses whooshing, people shouting, music humping, children squealing, horns blasting. Passing radios drum out the soft Greek language percussion. Graffiti reads you past the reeking market alleys of hanging meat, past the trains of side shops shuttered in steel and the clumps of stray exhausted dogs, through the endless maze of main streets that spill out into teeming squares that siphon into side streets off of side streets off of side streets strewn with litter and benches and rotting oranges, and then up past the millions of orange trees and the rickety stores stacked on stores stacked on stores and up to the distant glimpses of ancient pillars that rise eternal and up to sky always watching, to sky always the still, diaphanous blue of a watchful eye.
In the midst of all this swirling passion and freedom, I was going to have fun, but first I had to figure out what sorts of things I wanted to do, and, as a recovering fundamentalist, this is no easy task.
I’ve often feared discovering my true desires, and I think this springs from a deep-seated fear of human nature. At the Baptist church I attended growing up, we were reminded weekly of how inherently evil human beings are. This knowledge, strengthened by that nagging consequence of burning in hell forever, motivated me to mistrust any and all of my natural inclinations. In other words, it caused me to actually feel uncomfortable when I was feeling comfortable. To, when joy knocked on the door, squint suspiciously through the peephole, assume it was selling one-way tickets to a fiery afterlife, and leave it out in the cold to freeze. This fear, coupled with a Protestant Work Ethic (the obligation to prove, through constant toil, that you’re really not going to hell), wrapped a double chord around my joy’s neck and pulled hard. I was relieved years later to find that she was not dead, just weak and sickly and understandably pissed.
I’m writing about pleasure today, but I’m going off on a joy tangent because pleasure and joy are closely connected. It takes a lot of time and effort to revive joy, to strip off all of those layers we have smothered it under all these years, and it’s impossible to do this all at once. So instead of trying to climb Mount Everest, I’m hiking little foothills. I am trying to coax my authentic self out through the small things I have denied it for so long, much as you would coax an abused animal out of hiding with enticing scraps of food.
Now, I don’t mean that I’m going to do whatever I want to do. As Paul reminds me when he writes to the Corinthians, “You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is good for you. You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is beneficial.” We must seek wisdom in order to discriminate between what a theology professor here calls “doggy freedom”, or that frenzied state a dog exhibits when it’s let out of its cage, and the freedom that builds up. It is in this discrimination that joy can be our North Star, our guiding light. The things we believe will give us the greatest lasting joy are the things to which God is beckoning us. Being drawn along by joy is quite different from being dragged along by fear. And it’s a hell of a lot more fun, too.
In Athens, I was heartened to discover that the things I truly wanted to do were all good, wholesome, interesting things. I didn’t want to hook up with a Greek demigod or take breaks from drunken, scantily-clad booty dancing to do keg stands of Mythos, Greece’s national beer. I didn’t want to chain-smoke cigarettes or get wasted on the pot that Scott was offered several times by a cast of shady characters. (Rory and I attributed this to Scott’s long hair, plaid shirt, remarkable thinness, and repeated use of the words “dude” and “totally”.) I didn’t even want to stay up late double-checking my Facebook account. No, I should have known, after all these years of idealizing Anne of Green Gables and Elizabeth Bennet, not to be afraid.
I wanted to wake early and walk the streets just hearing and feeling and smelling and seeing everything I possibly could. I wanted to pick armfuls of oranges from the trees that grew everywhere and sneak them back to our room. I wanted to make best friends, Lassie-style, with one of the stray dogs that hung out in Syntagma Square.
Happily, the other things I wanted to do were things that Scott and Rory wanted to do as well. We wanted to see the Acropolis, of course, and Haidan’s Library, and the Theatre of Dionysus, and the Temple of Zeus. We wanted to visit at least seven museums, attend the opera, take a tour through the countryside to visit Poseidon’s Temple, and dip our feet in the Mediterranean Sea. And, of course, we wanted to eat everything.
After our big budget blow on day one, we were trying to reign in our expenses. Thankfully, we discovered a restaurant close to our hotel that was appropriately called Joy’s. I only saw one of these places, so I’m hoping that I don’t discover, upon publishing this post, that it’s the equivalent of a Greek McDonald’s. Joy’s had every traditional Greek dish I had ever known, plus it was cheap and delicious. Scott, Rory, and I made it our home away from home and ate there nearly every day. We were hoping to develop a camaraderie with the staff, but they always seemed vaguely annoyed by our presence, so instead of saying goodbye on our final night, we just stuffed our bellies and rolled out the door.
A couple of times, we splurged on more expensive fare: heaping salads with whole blocks of feta cheese, pasta tossed in creamy tomato sauces, smoked salmon with mango and capers, steak and Guinness pie, baklava drizzled in honey. We felt especially honored on these occasions because both times the waiter brought out three shots to finish off the meal, compliments of the house. We didn’t realize this was standard until later, so we probably seemed ludicrously grateful.
We wore ourselves out stay-hungry style seeing nearly everything we wanted to see and doing nearly everything we wanted to do. We missed a couple of museums because of the holiday schedule, the opera because of the prices, and dipping our feet in the Mediterranean Sea because getting down there would have meant falling from a dangerous precipice (read: dying).
On one of our last days in Greece, we were making our way back to our hotel after much delighted exploration when we heard blaring music and joyful shouts coming from an alleyway. Rory, in his hell-bent pursuit to experience everything, wanted to investigate. Scott, the cautious voice of our trio, thought it wasn’t such a good idea. I, being the yin to Scott’s yang, had already decided that nothing Scott worried about could ever possibly come true. So Scott was outvoted 2 to 1, and investigate we did.
Down the alleyway was, literally, a hole in the wall, and this hole in the wall had been transformed into a bar. The bar was stuffed with about 15 sopping drunk Grecians who were still sober enough to realize they had guests and, being Greeks, they had to show those guests a good time. The beer began to flow. I say flow because I mean flow. The woman who was trying to pour us drinks was so generous (and drunk) that she poured about twice as much as would fit in each glass. The beer flooded the counter that had been built into the alley’s wall and made a river down to the drain. As I was lamenting the loss of the beer, a white disk sailed past the corner of my eye and broke into sharp shards on the floor beside me. I looked up just in time to step back and miss being boomeranged by another glass Frisbee, then another. I realized then that the bartender was lobbing plates over the counter. I had no idea, at that time, that breaking plates is something that Greeks reserve the right to do for pretty much any reason, so at the time I assumed the man to be either angry, crazy, or both. But then, despite his evident fury, his patrons began to dance on the broken glass. One woman with a feisty temper, a haggard face, and a wizened pair of teeth, began gyrating wildly on the shards as though possessed by Bacchus. A man with Gumby limbs and hair balding in the pattern of Wolverine from the X-Men came out in the alley to dance too, but his dance was more of a slow robot. This was probably because the broken ceramic pieces had the effect, when you stepped on them, of turning into spontaneous roller skates. The feisty woman danced with Rory, then a reluctant Scott, then Rory again, and she punctuated these dances by squeezing their faces with both hands and planting kisses on their cheeks, throwing a couple of glances in my direction to see if I minded. Meanwhile, ACDC came on the radio, and a middle-aged Bob Dylan in a Sex Pistols t-shirt played air guitar with an all-consuming passion while his friend screamed “ACDC!” over and over into an air microphone. The wizened-tooth woman, who had become a sort of itinerant hostess, decided that now we should switch to half liter glasses of straight whiskey instead of beer, just to get the party started. At that point we decided that, regrettably, it was time to go.
I thought of our hostess throughout that evening, as she had been so far gone before the sun was even close to setting. On my morning walk the next day, I decided to check out the alley again, just to make sure it actually existed and that no one was sleeping on the alleyway floor. When I passed, I did a double-take. The woman, our hostess, at 8:00 in the morning, was (still? already?) belly-up to the bar with a glass of beer, engaged in a heated debate with someone on the other side of the counter.
I didn’t know what to think, besides admiring her passion and stamina. I started to wonder how she and people like her fit in to the Stay Hungry philosophy. Maybe she was always hungry, but not on purpose, always trying to satiate that hunger with things that could never truly satisfy it, things that, in the end, would destroy her. We all have a hole inside of us, a nagging hole, a gaping hole that we try to fill with so many things: alcohol, food, work, TV, self-righteousness, the admiration of others. Earlier in my life, I would constantly entertain myself so that I could not feel it there, and later I would escape into drunken oblivions so that I could not feel it there. I spent my teenage years trying to fill it with dogma, trying to convince myself that I was right and others were wrong, to convince myself that on the day God drew the line, I would be in. And recently, I’ve shoveled the hole full with hours upon hours of work, work, work. But now, in a moment of quiet and contemplative freedom, I discover that, when you sit with that emptiness there in front of you, when you just sit with it, it fills itself up as every opening does when exposed: with fresh air, shadow, and light.
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Stay Hungry, Part 2
(Note: This is the 2nd part of a 4-part series.)
On our very first day in Greece, I was reminded of the immutable truth that pleasure is most intense when it follows a very unpleasurable turn of events. We arrived in Greece after midnight, having purchased the cheapest flights we could find, and hailed a cab to take us to our hotel, which I thought I had booked. The cab driver rounded the 23 Euros on his meter up to 30 because we had luggage, luggage that he had watched us stack in the trunk and that, afterwards, he had handed to us with much unnecessary huffing and puffing. We reluctantly paid the bill and drug our bags up the steps, comforting ourselves out loud that we had at least found an affordable triple room to make up for that extra expenditure. We were then greeted at the front desk by two handsome teenage boys who insisted that, no, we had no reservation, but they could provide us with two separate rooms for the equivalent of $170 US dollars. I was livid. First the cab driver, now these guys. Was Greece conspiring against us?
Of course, we had no choice. We were on the outskirts of a new city in the middle of the night with no option for travel save disingenuous taxi drivers, so Rory and I plopped down our money with much unnecessary huffing and puffing, and we all climbed the eternal stairway to our rooms.
One thing I had resolved to do on this trip was to ask myself regularly what I wanted to do. When I sat down in bed to explore that option in my journal, the answer was, “I want to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick. And hey, while I’m at it, throw the taxi driver in there, too.” Yes, I am sorry to report that that was exactly what I wrote. In my defense, they were sickeningly smug and seemed to take great delight in our misfortunes. Still, although the fantasy intrigued me and although I had given myself permission to actually do the things I wanted to do, I could find no hockey stick, and I had never been athletic anyway. In addition to these things, I often praised the wisdom of nonviolence and would not be able to bear, on my future tirades, Scott reminding me, “but remember when you tried to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick?” So I decided that the next day, after a good night’s rest, I would return to the desk and recommend that they try smoked piggy ears at the earliest possible convenience. Then I rolled over and fell asleep.
The next morning rose bright and blue with that skin-tingling feeling that comes from being near a great body of water. I felt much less homicidal, even after trying to take a shower in a stall that was apparently designed for emaciated hobbits. We packed and breakfasted and turned our attention to the challenge at hand. Somehow we had to get downtown and find an affordable hotel. This involved many foreign things we hadn’t researched before: how to get bus tickets, how to figure out which bus to take, where to get the bus to stop, how to get the bus to stop, etc.
I’ll spare you the details of how we accomplished these things. It’s enough to know that it involved hopping a bus illegally because we couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets and then riding up and down 50 escalators until we figured out the metro system. About 4 hours later, we were still wandering the streets of downtown Athens with luggage that had somehow doubled in weight when a portly old Grecian recognized our vapid gazes and led us down a narrow side street to meet his good friend who was, of course, a travel agent. Enter the enigmatic Ulysses.
I don’t like being a suspicious person, but Greece had not exactly put its best foot forward, so we were anxiously waiting for this charismatic character to rip us off in some new and unexpected way. At the same time, we were so exhausted that we wanted to sit in his comfortable chairs for as long as possible. So Ulysses proceeded to weave his web of enticements until, hypnotized and fatigued, we caved, paid him for a very affordable week’s stay at the Hotel Moka, and left with explicit instructions as to how to find it.
We successfully found the metro stop, then the street, but when we located the precise spot where he had promised we would find said “very nice place,” Hotel Moka was simply not there. We circled the block once, then twice. Nothing. Nothing at all.
In all my paranoia, I assumed that we’d been had and that Hotel Moka didn’t even exist. Scott, in all his paranoia, took it a step further and assumed that, when we returned to the travel agency to confront Ulysses (I at the front with my hockey stick), we would find nothing more than an abandoned cavern with one remaining poster of Greece’s islands fluttering on the wall. Rory insisted (a bit naively, we thought) that setting up an entire travel agency just to trick 3 tourists and make 350 Euros would be a very labor-intensive way of making a profit. Little did he know. The only thing left to do was to find a bench and then wait to die.
Of course, it turns out that we were a block off, that Ulysses, the little trickster, had marked the wrong location and that we should have followed the address he had given us instead. We found Hotel Moka, discovered that our payment had indeed gone through, and began praising Ulysses for all of his kindness and foresight. How like the great Ulysses he truly was! How deserving of his name!
Then came the pleasure that only comes from a torrent of relief. We were in the center of downtown Athens in an affordable hotel, one block down from the most savory gyros and the richest and flakiest pastries I had ever known. It was going to be a lovely week after all.
On our very first day in Greece, I was reminded of the immutable truth that pleasure is most intense when it follows a very unpleasurable turn of events. We arrived in Greece after midnight, having purchased the cheapest flights we could find, and hailed a cab to take us to our hotel, which I thought I had booked. The cab driver rounded the 23 Euros on his meter up to 30 because we had luggage, luggage that he had watched us stack in the trunk and that, afterwards, he had handed to us with much unnecessary huffing and puffing. We reluctantly paid the bill and drug our bags up the steps, comforting ourselves out loud that we had at least found an affordable triple room to make up for that extra expenditure. We were then greeted at the front desk by two handsome teenage boys who insisted that, no, we had no reservation, but they could provide us with two separate rooms for the equivalent of $170 US dollars. I was livid. First the cab driver, now these guys. Was Greece conspiring against us?
Of course, we had no choice. We were on the outskirts of a new city in the middle of the night with no option for travel save disingenuous taxi drivers, so Rory and I plopped down our money with much unnecessary huffing and puffing, and we all climbed the eternal stairway to our rooms.
One thing I had resolved to do on this trip was to ask myself regularly what I wanted to do. When I sat down in bed to explore that option in my journal, the answer was, “I want to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick. And hey, while I’m at it, throw the taxi driver in there, too.” Yes, I am sorry to report that that was exactly what I wrote. In my defense, they were sickeningly smug and seemed to take great delight in our misfortunes. Still, although the fantasy intrigued me and although I had given myself permission to actually do the things I wanted to do, I could find no hockey stick, and I had never been athletic anyway. In addition to these things, I often praised the wisdom of nonviolence and would not be able to bear, on my future tirades, Scott reminding me, “but remember when you tried to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick?” So I decided that the next day, after a good night’s rest, I would return to the desk and recommend that they try smoked piggy ears at the earliest possible convenience. Then I rolled over and fell asleep.
The next morning rose bright and blue with that skin-tingling feeling that comes from being near a great body of water. I felt much less homicidal, even after trying to take a shower in a stall that was apparently designed for emaciated hobbits. We packed and breakfasted and turned our attention to the challenge at hand. Somehow we had to get downtown and find an affordable hotel. This involved many foreign things we hadn’t researched before: how to get bus tickets, how to figure out which bus to take, where to get the bus to stop, how to get the bus to stop, etc.
I’ll spare you the details of how we accomplished these things. It’s enough to know that it involved hopping a bus illegally because we couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets and then riding up and down 50 escalators until we figured out the metro system. About 4 hours later, we were still wandering the streets of downtown Athens with luggage that had somehow doubled in weight when a portly old Grecian recognized our vapid gazes and led us down a narrow side street to meet his good friend who was, of course, a travel agent. Enter the enigmatic Ulysses.
I don’t like being a suspicious person, but Greece had not exactly put its best foot forward, so we were anxiously waiting for this charismatic character to rip us off in some new and unexpected way. At the same time, we were so exhausted that we wanted to sit in his comfortable chairs for as long as possible. So Ulysses proceeded to weave his web of enticements until, hypnotized and fatigued, we caved, paid him for a very affordable week’s stay at the Hotel Moka, and left with explicit instructions as to how to find it.
We successfully found the metro stop, then the street, but when we located the precise spot where he had promised we would find said “very nice place,” Hotel Moka was simply not there. We circled the block once, then twice. Nothing. Nothing at all.
In all my paranoia, I assumed that we’d been had and that Hotel Moka didn’t even exist. Scott, in all his paranoia, took it a step further and assumed that, when we returned to the travel agency to confront Ulysses (I at the front with my hockey stick), we would find nothing more than an abandoned cavern with one remaining poster of Greece’s islands fluttering on the wall. Rory insisted (a bit naively, we thought) that setting up an entire travel agency just to trick 3 tourists and make 350 Euros would be a very labor-intensive way of making a profit. Little did he know. The only thing left to do was to find a bench and then wait to die.
Of course, it turns out that we were a block off, that Ulysses, the little trickster, had marked the wrong location and that we should have followed the address he had given us instead. We found Hotel Moka, discovered that our payment had indeed gone through, and began praising Ulysses for all of his kindness and foresight. How like the great Ulysses he truly was! How deserving of his name!
Then came the pleasure that only comes from a torrent of relief. We were in the center of downtown Athens in an affordable hotel, one block down from the most savory gyros and the richest and flakiest pastries I had ever known. It was going to be a lovely week after all.
Saturday, 9 January 2010
Stay Hungry, Part 1
(Note: This is the 1st entry in a 4-part series.)
I have recently enjoyed the book “Eat Pray Love,” and, although one of my friends warns that you must be at least 47 years old to read it and I am only 29, I have found a burst of inspiration which will, I think, give a good angle on our wild and woolly winter break. In her memoir, Elizabeth Gilbert has an entire four months to pursue pleasure for its own sake across the landscape of Italy. She wrote so engagingly of these experiences that I wanted to do the same thing, albeit on a much smaller scale (3 weeks to her 12) and a less provocative one (2 weeks of frost-bitten tundra as opposed to, well, ITALY.) Still, to be fair, we did make it to Greece, plus I was not compelled to give up sex like she was, so I guess we’re even.
First off, pleasure of pleasures, my brother Rory has spent the last three weeks with us and, as I write this, is hovering somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, hopefully on a comfortable chair which is also in an airplane which is also flying. We are already missing him enormously. (To comfort ourselves, we have been yawning loudly, and then following it up with an apathetic “shit,” just to feel like he’s still here.)
Secondly, on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we were surrounded by the love and warmth of new friends: our endlessly hospitable neighbor and friend Geri (who makes a mean pot of soup, coffee, eggnog, spiced wine, and probably anything else that comes in a pot) and a few other groovy women from the university (who despite their youth can bake like uber-grannies). Thanks to them and to Rory’s visit, our Lithuanian Christmas actually felt like Christmas. The bad part was that, because it felt just like Christmas, I did what I do every Christmas: I gorged myself within an inch of participating as a blimp in the New Year’s Day Parade. Only I would not be a floating blimp. I would be a tipsy blimp that gets dragged behind the truck and eventually explodes like a garbage bag full of vegetable soup.
I don’t know why I do this, but I think it has something to do with a misplaced pursuit of pleasure. The problem is, it doesn’t please me; it makes me miserable. It could be that Christmas brings with it so many idealized expectations-love and peace and joy and the hope that, for one day at least, we will all experience a sense of rest and fulfillment. I guess as a recovering fundamentalist and Midwesterner, I take the “fulfillment” part too literally and promptly belly up to the 24-hour saturated sugar-salt-fat buffet. But it’s more than that. I think it has to do with the dualistic nature of my thinking.
It’s a pretty common phenomenon to separate our concepts into two columns: hate vs. love, black vs. white, right vs. wrong, etc. It’s a quick and easy way of stating one’s views and coming to a fragile understanding on a subject. The problem is, of course, that reality is not that simple. Case in point: me listlessly devouring a Christmas feast (and Christmas cocktails) for four, then realizing how horrible I felt, and then continuing. You see, sometimes I still struggle to understand that there are options beyond asceticism vs. libertinism, binge vs. purge, and tee totaling vs. walking into doorjambs and making embarrassing jokes that I will regret later in a hazy reminiscence. (Note to concerned parental figures: I am not, nor ever will be, either bulimic or alcoholic.)
This dichotomizing happens most notably with my concepts of work and leisure. Now, first I should say that I adore my work, especially the work that I am doing here in Lithuania. However, I still have this nagging belief that because work is challenging, difficult, unpleasant, and rigid (even though it’s not), vacation should be the opposite: an effortless, easy, pleasure-filled free-for-all. Unfortunately, this usually translates to me force-feeding all of the lesser parts of my nature until I end up resembling a skinny female Jabba the Hutt who takes up her fleshy residence on the couch and refuses to budge.
Having realized this tendency once again, I resolved to do things differently this vacation. Rather than surrender to a 3-week-long state of collapse, I would seek that evasive middle road that I usually only encounter in passing, while I am ricocheting from one extreme to another.
Rory’s visit helped. Despite the ice and snowdrifts and bitter, bitter wind, he was determined to take in everything he possibly could during his time here, and I, his loving sister and hostess, necessarily took part as well. Together we wandered through the outdoor sculpture park snapping photos until we lost all feeling in our appendages. One day we rose at 6 to take a 7 am ferry across the lagoon and hop a freezing bus down to Nida, a quaint fishing village near Kaliningrad. We attended a show at the Dolphinarium on the spit. We traveled to Palanga and visited the Amber Museum, then walked the streets with steaming cups of hot beer and wine. We sampled all of the other Lithuanian delights as well: kepta duona (fried rye bread with cheese, mayonnaise, and garlic), cepelinai (meat-stuffed potato dumplings), Svyturys Baltas (the local beer), koldunai (yet another meat-stuffed dumpling creation), karstas sokoladas (Lithuanian hot chocolate, which is like a cup straight from Willy Wonka’s chocolate river), and smoked piggy ears, which I would not recommend even to my mortal enemy.
During our outdoor adventures, I was struck chiefly by one thought: I AM COLD. And I mean COLD. We don’t have a car, and bus stops are far apart, so even if you use public transportation, you still have to walk a lot. Also, many places, especially buses, are poorly heated, so when you are inside them, you can still see your breath freeze. Your frozen fingers and toes only go from numb to aching, never from numb to warm.
In our walk through the sculpture park, Rory mentioned the phrase “stay hungry,” which I mistakenly attributed to a German philosopher instead of its true source: a Twisted Sister album with a demented man on the cover profanely licking a giant bone. (Sorry, Grandma.)
I’m glad that I didn’t know about this album cover because this phrase, for me anyway, does hold some wisdom. It reminds me that living fully (i.e. pleasurably) demands a certain level of discomfort. It also reminds me that we disengage from life when we invest all of our time and resources in avoiding any such discomfort. Children know this instinctively when they freeze their little butts off in the snow for the sheer joy of play, but as adults we often forget. Despite the impending frostbite, I repeated this phrase over and over to myself, making it my new mantra. “Stay hungry, stay cold. Stay hungry, stay cold.” Of course, I was hoping that, once we made it to Greece, pleasure would flow in brimming rivers of milk and honey. As usual, I was the slightest bit off.
I have recently enjoyed the book “Eat Pray Love,” and, although one of my friends warns that you must be at least 47 years old to read it and I am only 29, I have found a burst of inspiration which will, I think, give a good angle on our wild and woolly winter break. In her memoir, Elizabeth Gilbert has an entire four months to pursue pleasure for its own sake across the landscape of Italy. She wrote so engagingly of these experiences that I wanted to do the same thing, albeit on a much smaller scale (3 weeks to her 12) and a less provocative one (2 weeks of frost-bitten tundra as opposed to, well, ITALY.) Still, to be fair, we did make it to Greece, plus I was not compelled to give up sex like she was, so I guess we’re even.
First off, pleasure of pleasures, my brother Rory has spent the last three weeks with us and, as I write this, is hovering somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, hopefully on a comfortable chair which is also in an airplane which is also flying. We are already missing him enormously. (To comfort ourselves, we have been yawning loudly, and then following it up with an apathetic “shit,” just to feel like he’s still here.)
Secondly, on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we were surrounded by the love and warmth of new friends: our endlessly hospitable neighbor and friend Geri (who makes a mean pot of soup, coffee, eggnog, spiced wine, and probably anything else that comes in a pot) and a few other groovy women from the university (who despite their youth can bake like uber-grannies). Thanks to them and to Rory’s visit, our Lithuanian Christmas actually felt like Christmas. The bad part was that, because it felt just like Christmas, I did what I do every Christmas: I gorged myself within an inch of participating as a blimp in the New Year’s Day Parade. Only I would not be a floating blimp. I would be a tipsy blimp that gets dragged behind the truck and eventually explodes like a garbage bag full of vegetable soup.
I don’t know why I do this, but I think it has something to do with a misplaced pursuit of pleasure. The problem is, it doesn’t please me; it makes me miserable. It could be that Christmas brings with it so many idealized expectations-love and peace and joy and the hope that, for one day at least, we will all experience a sense of rest and fulfillment. I guess as a recovering fundamentalist and Midwesterner, I take the “fulfillment” part too literally and promptly belly up to the 24-hour saturated sugar-salt-fat buffet. But it’s more than that. I think it has to do with the dualistic nature of my thinking.
It’s a pretty common phenomenon to separate our concepts into two columns: hate vs. love, black vs. white, right vs. wrong, etc. It’s a quick and easy way of stating one’s views and coming to a fragile understanding on a subject. The problem is, of course, that reality is not that simple. Case in point: me listlessly devouring a Christmas feast (and Christmas cocktails) for four, then realizing how horrible I felt, and then continuing. You see, sometimes I still struggle to understand that there are options beyond asceticism vs. libertinism, binge vs. purge, and tee totaling vs. walking into doorjambs and making embarrassing jokes that I will regret later in a hazy reminiscence. (Note to concerned parental figures: I am not, nor ever will be, either bulimic or alcoholic.)
This dichotomizing happens most notably with my concepts of work and leisure. Now, first I should say that I adore my work, especially the work that I am doing here in Lithuania. However, I still have this nagging belief that because work is challenging, difficult, unpleasant, and rigid (even though it’s not), vacation should be the opposite: an effortless, easy, pleasure-filled free-for-all. Unfortunately, this usually translates to me force-feeding all of the lesser parts of my nature until I end up resembling a skinny female Jabba the Hutt who takes up her fleshy residence on the couch and refuses to budge.
Having realized this tendency once again, I resolved to do things differently this vacation. Rather than surrender to a 3-week-long state of collapse, I would seek that evasive middle road that I usually only encounter in passing, while I am ricocheting from one extreme to another.
Rory’s visit helped. Despite the ice and snowdrifts and bitter, bitter wind, he was determined to take in everything he possibly could during his time here, and I, his loving sister and hostess, necessarily took part as well. Together we wandered through the outdoor sculpture park snapping photos until we lost all feeling in our appendages. One day we rose at 6 to take a 7 am ferry across the lagoon and hop a freezing bus down to Nida, a quaint fishing village near Kaliningrad. We attended a show at the Dolphinarium on the spit. We traveled to Palanga and visited the Amber Museum, then walked the streets with steaming cups of hot beer and wine. We sampled all of the other Lithuanian delights as well: kepta duona (fried rye bread with cheese, mayonnaise, and garlic), cepelinai (meat-stuffed potato dumplings), Svyturys Baltas (the local beer), koldunai (yet another meat-stuffed dumpling creation), karstas sokoladas (Lithuanian hot chocolate, which is like a cup straight from Willy Wonka’s chocolate river), and smoked piggy ears, which I would not recommend even to my mortal enemy.
During our outdoor adventures, I was struck chiefly by one thought: I AM COLD. And I mean COLD. We don’t have a car, and bus stops are far apart, so even if you use public transportation, you still have to walk a lot. Also, many places, especially buses, are poorly heated, so when you are inside them, you can still see your breath freeze. Your frozen fingers and toes only go from numb to aching, never from numb to warm.
In our walk through the sculpture park, Rory mentioned the phrase “stay hungry,” which I mistakenly attributed to a German philosopher instead of its true source: a Twisted Sister album with a demented man on the cover profanely licking a giant bone. (Sorry, Grandma.)
I’m glad that I didn’t know about this album cover because this phrase, for me anyway, does hold some wisdom. It reminds me that living fully (i.e. pleasurably) demands a certain level of discomfort. It also reminds me that we disengage from life when we invest all of our time and resources in avoiding any such discomfort. Children know this instinctively when they freeze their little butts off in the snow for the sheer joy of play, but as adults we often forget. Despite the impending frostbite, I repeated this phrase over and over to myself, making it my new mantra. “Stay hungry, stay cold. Stay hungry, stay cold.” Of course, I was hoping that, once we made it to Greece, pleasure would flow in brimming rivers of milk and honey. As usual, I was the slightest bit off.
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Prisoners of Hope
Tomorrow begins finals week. The tree limbs are now bare. The wind blows interminably, spinning tumbleweeds of trash across the open squares. It rains most days and nights. The sun rises by 9, sets by 5. There is a dusting of snow.
These, as Anne Lammott says, are “desert days.” The darkness, the coldness, the never-shining sun. These are the days through which we trudge with a transcendent sense of purpose, if not joy and hope. These are the days when we look around and are amazed that somehow we are still moving forward.
In the mornings, I rise at 5 and boil water for coffee, read and pray and write, then sit in the darkness for a while and try my best to simply breathe in and out and feel my feet on the cold, wood floor. In the mornings, the storm of the day is just outside the door, and I am inside, wrapping myself in layers, preparing myself as well as I can for opening that door and being whisked off in a stream of movement from which I cannot stand apart. I pray to God that I will be able to find my feet as I am carried along.
People say that the season of Advent is a season of anticipation, of expectation, which to me has always sounded strange. How are we supposed to anticipate something that has already happened? Are we to manufacture feelings that, in effect, place us in a different time? Are we to trick ourselves? Or to pretend? Are we to expect something that, despite two thousand years of regurgitated expectation, has still not happened? Mary, in the Magnificat, sings, “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” My initial reaction is simply, “No, God hasn’t.” At least not that I can see.
In spite of my doubts, these past few weeks have overflowed with preparation for the birth of our Lord and, of course, for the end of our semester. My dear students have finished their final essays, which I will grade this afternoon with much disquieted concern. They have performed their final interviews and taken their major English proficiency examination. Next week they will take their final exams, after which most of them will hop on trains and buses and planes that take them, finally, home. Some of them have soared and some have faltered, but each of them has earnestly tried and improved and each of them, however wayward, has burrowed their way into my heart.
This month also saw the production of LCC’s annual Christmas play. It ended with a chorus of staff and faculty singing, with high-pitched uncertainty (especially for me, a reluctantly recruited soprano), the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah”. At the end, we led the crowd out both doors to the entrance of the center, where the sounds of our voices bounced like points of light, singing an old spiritual that bears new relevance in Eastern Europe, “Freedom, oh freedom, Freedom, freedom is coming, Oh yes I know…” We clapped, and we danced, and we sang until our voices were tired. When we had finished, I couldn’t help but feel a sense that returns to me often despite myself, an almost giddy joy for which I have always been grateful but which I have never been able to pin down with logic.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in response to a comment once that he sounded like an optimist, said “No, no. I am not an optimist, I am a prisoner of hope – it is quite different, because, you see, [for an] optimist when things don’t go well, they want to give up. But I and other people who are prisoners of hope are able to say that this is a world where ultimately justice will prevail.”
On the way home from the Christmas play, Scott pointed out the window of the bus. “Look,” he said. “They turned the Christmas lights on.” All down the central street, the lamp posts sparkled. From some of them, trumpets erupted into cornucopias of stars. I was reminded, as I always am when I see Christmas lights strung along the streets of a city, of the nights in the hospital when I was fifteen, after the car accident, when I would sneak over to the window with my IV tree and look out onto the town below. In Jackson, there were not stars, but angels with their trumpets, angels leaning out and up, ready to announce something good to anyone who cared to listen. And here in Lithuania, just as when I was fifteen, I had that uncanny sense of joy and peace and hope moving in the darkness: joy that I was simply alive, and peace and hope that, in all of the darkest currents, God is molding something beautiful.
These, as Anne Lammott says, are “desert days.” The darkness, the coldness, the never-shining sun. These are the days through which we trudge with a transcendent sense of purpose, if not joy and hope. These are the days when we look around and are amazed that somehow we are still moving forward.
In the mornings, I rise at 5 and boil water for coffee, read and pray and write, then sit in the darkness for a while and try my best to simply breathe in and out and feel my feet on the cold, wood floor. In the mornings, the storm of the day is just outside the door, and I am inside, wrapping myself in layers, preparing myself as well as I can for opening that door and being whisked off in a stream of movement from which I cannot stand apart. I pray to God that I will be able to find my feet as I am carried along.
People say that the season of Advent is a season of anticipation, of expectation, which to me has always sounded strange. How are we supposed to anticipate something that has already happened? Are we to manufacture feelings that, in effect, place us in a different time? Are we to trick ourselves? Or to pretend? Are we to expect something that, despite two thousand years of regurgitated expectation, has still not happened? Mary, in the Magnificat, sings, “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” My initial reaction is simply, “No, God hasn’t.” At least not that I can see.
In spite of my doubts, these past few weeks have overflowed with preparation for the birth of our Lord and, of course, for the end of our semester. My dear students have finished their final essays, which I will grade this afternoon with much disquieted concern. They have performed their final interviews and taken their major English proficiency examination. Next week they will take their final exams, after which most of them will hop on trains and buses and planes that take them, finally, home. Some of them have soared and some have faltered, but each of them has earnestly tried and improved and each of them, however wayward, has burrowed their way into my heart.
This month also saw the production of LCC’s annual Christmas play. It ended with a chorus of staff and faculty singing, with high-pitched uncertainty (especially for me, a reluctantly recruited soprano), the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah”. At the end, we led the crowd out both doors to the entrance of the center, where the sounds of our voices bounced like points of light, singing an old spiritual that bears new relevance in Eastern Europe, “Freedom, oh freedom, Freedom, freedom is coming, Oh yes I know…” We clapped, and we danced, and we sang until our voices were tired. When we had finished, I couldn’t help but feel a sense that returns to me often despite myself, an almost giddy joy for which I have always been grateful but which I have never been able to pin down with logic.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in response to a comment once that he sounded like an optimist, said “No, no. I am not an optimist, I am a prisoner of hope – it is quite different, because, you see, [for an] optimist when things don’t go well, they want to give up. But I and other people who are prisoners of hope are able to say that this is a world where ultimately justice will prevail.”
On the way home from the Christmas play, Scott pointed out the window of the bus. “Look,” he said. “They turned the Christmas lights on.” All down the central street, the lamp posts sparkled. From some of them, trumpets erupted into cornucopias of stars. I was reminded, as I always am when I see Christmas lights strung along the streets of a city, of the nights in the hospital when I was fifteen, after the car accident, when I would sneak over to the window with my IV tree and look out onto the town below. In Jackson, there were not stars, but angels with their trumpets, angels leaning out and up, ready to announce something good to anyone who cared to listen. And here in Lithuania, just as when I was fifteen, I had that uncanny sense of joy and peace and hope moving in the darkness: joy that I was simply alive, and peace and hope that, in all of the darkest currents, God is molding something beautiful.
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Out of Context
(Warning: I wrote this entry in a bout of culture shock. In my quest to be honest about my experiences, I have put Lithuania forth in an unflattering light. Please take this as what it is: not a commentary on Lithuania or its people but simply the ravings of a spoiled American out of context.)
I’m sorry, Lithuania. It’s not me; it’s you. Your buses stink, your people are rude, and your food, for those who actually eat anything in this godforsaken place, is enough to turn Cindy Crawford into a potato-shaped babushka. Let’s take these complaints one at a time.
Culture Shock Item #1: The Lithuanian Buses
Some smell like toilets, some like locker rooms, and the best like ancient attics drenched in diesel fuel. If you ride them after 7:00 am, you have to stand in the aisle and hold on to a greasy pole overhead while natives, mostly elderly women who have eaten too many potatoes, shove past, even though there is never any space in the back of the bus either. As they heave themselves forward, they knock me, my school bag, and all of the parts I am not supposed to rub up against people up against people. I imagine shouting, as I am thrust again and again into my wincing bus-mates, “This is what you get for sitting down!” Just when you think that it can’t get any worse, the bus police climb aboard.
If you think that “bus police” sounds like the equivalent of a Midwestern mall cop, think again. They may be all older women, and they may look all puckered and sweet, but if you don’t have a ticket, they will swarm around you with their little billy clubs and they will take your non-ticket-toting ass down. They will whisk you off to a van with shaded windows where they commit unspeakable acts of God-knows-what, but I’m sure it involves a scene like in Roald Dahl’s “Witches.” Another slippery thing about bus police: you never know when they’re going to show up. One minute you’re just minding your own business trying not to breathe through your nose and the next they’re invading the aisles in a spontaneous rendition of Charlie’s Angels meets the Golden Girls.
My first run-in with the bus police didn’t go so hot. I was standing at the back exit waiting to hop off at the next stop when the bus driver pulled over and failed to open the back door. At such moments, my Lithuanian abandons me, so instead of calmly requesting the driver to open the door, I began pounding excitedly on the Plexi-glass with my fists and yelling the Lithuanian equivalent of “Please! Please!” in a hysterical voice. It was only then that I realized we had been infiltrated, that I was trapped, and that in my present position of banging and shouting maniacally, I looked the slightest bit guilty. I then decided to confirm this by plunging around in the folds of my clothing for my ticket as though I were being attacked by a cloud of bees.
I am not the sort of person who cleans out her pockets on a regular basis, so when I reached for my ticket, I dislodged a linty nest of yes, bus tickets, but also store receipts, gum wrappers, bobby pins, grocery lists, and, somehow, the head of a broken potato peeler, which, though it did look vaguely threatening, didn’t stand a chance against their faithful clubs. After trembling through the scrunched wad like a woman condemned to die, I handed over the five tickets that looked the newest and prepared for the worst. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the tickets must have matched because the woman rolled her eyes (either a universal gesture of annoyance or a secret signal to the others that they’d have to jump me later), handed my tickets back, and went on to sweetly accost her next victim.
Culture Shock Item #2: The Lithuanian People
I am grateful to the bus police for one thing: They at least confirm that I exist. Other times I walk through this city and I could swear I’m invisible. Doors close in my face, people walk right in front of me and then stop, and pushing a shopping cart through the supermarket is like playing a virtual reality version of Atari’s Frogger. Yes, I know I’m supposed to be tolerant and understanding and blah blah blah, but at this point I’m just going to be honest: If one more person gouges me in the gut with a shopping cart, I’m going to look that person right in the eye, scream “AT-SI-PRA-SAU!” (EX-CUSE ME!) and gouge right back!
Culture Shock Item #3: The Lithuanian Food
I was reading an article about culture shock and discovered that one tell-tale stage is when you become fixated on food from your own culture. Lithuania doesn’t do much to help its cause, let me tell you. If Lithuanians were what they ate, this city would be full of gray meat torsos walking around on potato legs with dumpling arms and sour cream dollop heads. Because I am now completely obsessed with American food, I have been cooking more. However, this doesn’t work so well because I still have to buy the ingredients at Lithuanian grocery stores. Last night I baked corn bread. I imagined my mother’s fluffy golden cornbread clouds steaming with melted butter. Instead the texture resembled yellow Play-Do that’s been left out all night with the lid off. I’ve been so desperate to taste America I even went as far as making chili. Scott, bless his poor American heart, has been speaking about hamburgers like old, dead friends, and he’s even gone so far as to microwave hot dogs, which he’s then cut up and added to macaroni noodles in a powdered cheese sauce. I’m watching him go slowly insane, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Considering all of this, it’s really no surprise what came next. Some would say it was only a matter of time.
I’m sorry, Lithuania. It’s not me; it’s you. Your buses stink, your people are rude, and your food, for those who actually eat anything in this godforsaken place, is enough to turn Cindy Crawford into a potato-shaped babushka. Let’s take these complaints one at a time.
Culture Shock Item #1: The Lithuanian Buses
Some smell like toilets, some like locker rooms, and the best like ancient attics drenched in diesel fuel. If you ride them after 7:00 am, you have to stand in the aisle and hold on to a greasy pole overhead while natives, mostly elderly women who have eaten too many potatoes, shove past, even though there is never any space in the back of the bus either. As they heave themselves forward, they knock me, my school bag, and all of the parts I am not supposed to rub up against people up against people. I imagine shouting, as I am thrust again and again into my wincing bus-mates, “This is what you get for sitting down!” Just when you think that it can’t get any worse, the bus police climb aboard.
If you think that “bus police” sounds like the equivalent of a Midwestern mall cop, think again. They may be all older women, and they may look all puckered and sweet, but if you don’t have a ticket, they will swarm around you with their little billy clubs and they will take your non-ticket-toting ass down. They will whisk you off to a van with shaded windows where they commit unspeakable acts of God-knows-what, but I’m sure it involves a scene like in Roald Dahl’s “Witches.” Another slippery thing about bus police: you never know when they’re going to show up. One minute you’re just minding your own business trying not to breathe through your nose and the next they’re invading the aisles in a spontaneous rendition of Charlie’s Angels meets the Golden Girls.
My first run-in with the bus police didn’t go so hot. I was standing at the back exit waiting to hop off at the next stop when the bus driver pulled over and failed to open the back door. At such moments, my Lithuanian abandons me, so instead of calmly requesting the driver to open the door, I began pounding excitedly on the Plexi-glass with my fists and yelling the Lithuanian equivalent of “Please! Please!” in a hysterical voice. It was only then that I realized we had been infiltrated, that I was trapped, and that in my present position of banging and shouting maniacally, I looked the slightest bit guilty. I then decided to confirm this by plunging around in the folds of my clothing for my ticket as though I were being attacked by a cloud of bees.
I am not the sort of person who cleans out her pockets on a regular basis, so when I reached for my ticket, I dislodged a linty nest of yes, bus tickets, but also store receipts, gum wrappers, bobby pins, grocery lists, and, somehow, the head of a broken potato peeler, which, though it did look vaguely threatening, didn’t stand a chance against their faithful clubs. After trembling through the scrunched wad like a woman condemned to die, I handed over the five tickets that looked the newest and prepared for the worst. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the tickets must have matched because the woman rolled her eyes (either a universal gesture of annoyance or a secret signal to the others that they’d have to jump me later), handed my tickets back, and went on to sweetly accost her next victim.
Culture Shock Item #2: The Lithuanian People
I am grateful to the bus police for one thing: They at least confirm that I exist. Other times I walk through this city and I could swear I’m invisible. Doors close in my face, people walk right in front of me and then stop, and pushing a shopping cart through the supermarket is like playing a virtual reality version of Atari’s Frogger. Yes, I know I’m supposed to be tolerant and understanding and blah blah blah, but at this point I’m just going to be honest: If one more person gouges me in the gut with a shopping cart, I’m going to look that person right in the eye, scream “AT-SI-PRA-SAU!” (EX-CUSE ME!) and gouge right back!
Culture Shock Item #3: The Lithuanian Food
I was reading an article about culture shock and discovered that one tell-tale stage is when you become fixated on food from your own culture. Lithuania doesn’t do much to help its cause, let me tell you. If Lithuanians were what they ate, this city would be full of gray meat torsos walking around on potato legs with dumpling arms and sour cream dollop heads. Because I am now completely obsessed with American food, I have been cooking more. However, this doesn’t work so well because I still have to buy the ingredients at Lithuanian grocery stores. Last night I baked corn bread. I imagined my mother’s fluffy golden cornbread clouds steaming with melted butter. Instead the texture resembled yellow Play-Do that’s been left out all night with the lid off. I’ve been so desperate to taste America I even went as far as making chili. Scott, bless his poor American heart, has been speaking about hamburgers like old, dead friends, and he’s even gone so far as to microwave hot dogs, which he’s then cut up and added to macaroni noodles in a powdered cheese sauce. I’m watching him go slowly insane, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Considering all of this, it’s really no surprise what came next. Some would say it was only a matter of time.
That’s right. We went to McDonald’s. And what’s more, we relished each and every bite. Because at McDonald’s, a Big Mac is always a Big Mac and fries are always fries and the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, although here it’s called the McRoyal, still contains enough saturated fat to clog a small artery. Afterwards, we felt both more dead and more alive. As we waddled back to the bus stop, we promised each other that we’d never do that again. At least not until Thanksgiving.
Sunday, 25 October 2009
The Anointing
I have been anointed in oil
by the bus that
runs too close to
the sidewalk on Manto
Gatve not only
oil but also
rain and whatever
the rain washed off
blood
perfume
piss
beer
smoke
in New York City I
once watched a man
bend back his head and
close his eyes and
smile and
take the whole sky in his arms and
spin
he smelled like I do
now
all of life is an
anointing all of life
is atoms suspended
in air my professor
said there is always
a chance however
small that you could
walk through a wall
there is also a chance
that the curtain of water
will pass right
through you
it’s enough to draw
the tongue from out
the mouth like
a dagger enough
to split you inside
out to throw back
your wings drenched
in blessing and
dance
by the bus that
runs too close to
the sidewalk on Manto
Gatve not only
oil but also
rain and whatever
the rain washed off
blood
perfume
piss
beer
smoke
in New York City I
once watched a man
bend back his head and
close his eyes and
smile and
take the whole sky in his arms and
spin
he smelled like I do
now
all of life is an
anointing all of life
is atoms suspended
in air my professor
said there is always
a chance however
small that you could
walk through a wall
there is also a chance
that the curtain of water
will pass right
through you
it’s enough to draw
the tongue from out
the mouth like
a dagger enough
to split you inside
out to throw back
your wings drenched
in blessing and
dance
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