You, in the plural, unlost

In the Jackson Street metro station, a woman shoved coin after coin into the machine. It spat them out as she muttered, furrowed in frustration. “Do you need help?” a man asked. She had put almost 30 dollars on the card and still had a fistful of coins. “Tak, tak, tak, tak,” she chattered at him, pressing buttons without understanding—yes, yes.  

“Вибачте, що ви хочете зробити?” I asked—what do you want to do? She turned and smiled and launched into rapid-fire Ukrainian. I stammered. The words were there—I felt them gathering on the other side of my mind, past English, past dark not-words. Before I could drag them into form, a CTA worker strode over. “You can’t use pennies,” she said and vended the card with authoritative movements. The woman ran up the stairs before I could speak, calling back, “Sank you!”

On the El, underground lights reflected between windows in dizzying streams. The woman shifted shape as I thought of her, became Valentina—lost and breathless in Chicago, needing my help but left alone. The women were like figures in dreams, when they take on faces of the dead, or look on you in judgment.

…

When I dream in Ukrainian, I do not communicate so much as yell at or express some antagonism toward others. Several months ago I drew back from a friend, alarmed at his desire for greater closeness. In a dream, I addressed him with ви: the formal, plural you for which we have no equivalent. “Why do you say ви? Why not ти?” his dream-self demanded, pained.

In the spaces between you and ви and ти, translation refracts. Often instead of a straight line linking one word with another, translation must navigate such thorns as cultural connotations, history and, thorniest of all, emotions. In Anna Karenina, the lovers Anna and Vronsky revert to French, more comfortable with vous than the unbearable stiffness of Russian’s вы, or ты and its dangerous intimacy.  

But with only so many words, imaginary ones may become necessary. Constructed languages, or conlangs, are fascinating not only for their bizarre inventiveness (think Klingon, Elvish, Esperanto, and so on), but also for what they reveal about their creator’s desires. That is, what gaps the creator seeks to repair.

Take Láadan, designed as a feminist language by Suzette Hader Elgin. She intended to open more possibilities for emotion in language, which is, she argued, too cramped by logic and “male” ways of thinking.

As Láadan evokes a now-defunct era in feminism, a quick scan of its dictionary reveals such forehead-smackingly goofy entries such as abathede, or clitoris, a compound of “fragrant” and “jewel.” I also snorted at a verb meaning “to menstruate joyfully,” until I remembered the particular joy of getting one’s period soon after sex and thus being less pregnant.

But Láadan is interesting in that its speakers must define both speech act and the feeling in which the act’s intended; for example, “In fear, I ask”, “In teaching, I command” or “In love, I say as a promise.” Of course, this equation, logic/feeling = male/female, is a centuries-old and regressive one. Let’s set aside the intended “feminization” of such constructs and ask, what would it mean to define the feelings behind our words as we utter them?

Then again, what if my fear is not your fear, my love not your love? What if I don’t want to know what I feel, or can’t know? Each word would fold into itself like a Möbius strip, untranslatable, never linking with another. Or it would self-destruct.

…

In W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the title character finds his words falling apart in his hands. This alienation, he learns, is a result of his inability to deal with the past—with his parents’ probable deaths in the Holocaust. “I could see no connections anymore,” he says, “the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-gray trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame.”  

Later in the novel, he researches the ghetto Terezin, where his mother had been interned. Long lists of elaborate, twisted compounds describe its administration: Barackenbestandteillager, Zusatzkostenberechnungsschein. The words both revealed and enacted the inhuman treatment of some sixty thousand Jews in the ghetto.

In the years after the war, poet Paul Celan tried to rectify or reckon with the German language’s misuses and perversions. According to Celan, who lost his parents to the death camps, his poetry translated “German into German.”

“Reachable,” he said, “near and unlost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, unlost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, ‘enriched’ by all this.”

Poetry always totters on the brink of death. The words stare into mute space, the whiteness closes in along the margins and blows its snow between stanzas. I believe in the power of poems, not to “deal with” death, whatever that might mean, but to cast lines into its depths. Maybe lines with tin-can-telephones attached to them. I keep talking into my end, hoping someone picks up the other.

…

In the months since my return, I have not been able to call the people I know in Ukraine. Every time I think to log into Skype and check in with Svitlana, Valentina, or one of my former pupils, something sticks in my mind like an obstruction to the throat. In guilt, I say as a promise, I will not forget them. In fear, I ask, how can I not forget? In love, I ask, how can you love someone you never really knew?

In my dream, I am in a city, maybe Lviv or Dnipropetrovs’k, chasing after someone who has left me far behind. I can only propel myself crouched on a wooden board with wheels, such as the legless use while they beg. I come finally to a large plaza encircled by grand white buildings in Classical style. There is a carnival with many people shrieking laughter on a merry-go-round, and I would ask them for directions but don’t remember how.

…

To say you to anyone is no small gesture. It establishes a relationship, as tenuously as English allows us to do so, between that you and the I who wields it. And to communicate anything means to bridge a gap. A gap between the thing and its expression, between the speaker and another. A gap as wide as oceans, wide as death.

Last weekend I visited my grandmother’s house in Philadelphia. She had a photograph on the table I’d never seen before. Three women and a young girl, the central woman seated with a stern, thin face. The girl in her lap had very small buttons along her shoes, which inspired in me a sudden tenderness. Standing behind them, two women, maybe my age or a little younger.

The young woman to the right, my grandmother told me, was her mother, Yetta Lischensky. The picture was taken, I assume, around 10 years after the family’s migration from Kiev. Yetta has a solid face with a flicker of good-humor. I like the face.

Even in English, I never truly feel like my grandmother and I speak the same language, so I listened very closely as she talked about her mother. “When the Cossacks came by the house, she would hide under the table,” she said. She talked about the sister who was left behind, wheelchair-bound from polio. She followed them to America, but at Ellis Island was sent back to Ukraine, where she died of starvation. The mother, that haggard-looking woman in the chair, only lived to her 40s.“She worked herself to death,” my grandmother said.

I may not have earned the right to speak to you, you who came so far and who suffered. I walked the streets of your city; on long bus rides I passed villages you might have lived in, might have died in had you stayed. I saw monuments to you-in-the-plural which mean to stand for the horror into which you-in-the-plural were dragged and there silenced. I say you, Yetta Lischensky, I say you unlost, and I say I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry.   

The Wheel

Ten turkeys pace the school courtyard, wobbling blue fossils of heads, gurgling mutinously. They ruffle as I pass and begin to follow me. Perhaps in recognition: Lately I’m full of hot feathers. My insides whirl and squawk.

I’ll be home in three weeks. In the forest, boughs mix their wind-blown susurrus with distant boxcars, a promise or warning— chass-chass-chass-chass— час, the word for time.

 …

For the Anglo-Saxons, time was not about progress but a looping process. You see how wyrd (fate) weaves poems like Beowulf, how its intricate patterns hoop and hasp together. Such a structure expresses “the recurrence of human behavior,” Peter Ackroyd writes, “and the circularity of time as the thread of words crosses and recrosses itself in endless weaves and knots.” The great wheel spins its thread around and in it everyone’s bound.

A pleasing metaphor, but no longer a live one. Who uses spinning wheels anymore? For myself, I’ve never had patience to make things or mend them. 

My mother is good at sewing. She’s good at divination, too. A fruitful years is ahead, she tells me, and I’m inclined to believe her; as an astrologer, she speaks with the authority of the entire universe behind her.
Part heavenly bodies, part choice taken to a radical extent, my mother has a personal mythology about destiny—all souls choose the body in which they’ll be born. “I’m so glad,” she’ll say at times, “your soul chose this body, so that I could be your mom.”

The sentiment used to frustrate me. My intelligent, sensible mother, rationalizing the “why” of human existence with such crude strokes! Really, it was worse than organized religion. Older and less dismissive, I see in her mythology a metaphor: Nothing happens to a person that she did not choose. Not perhaps that she chooses a life laid out before her, but in that she’s always the sum of accumulated choices.

It doesn’t follow, though, that these choices were made with purpose or direction. If one can’t explain or trace them all, how can one account for the soul they’ve made?

…

“Must all things swing round again for ever? Or how can one escape from the Wheel?” Imprisonment within a circular concept of time is, Robert Graves writes in The White Goddess, “the main problem of paganism.” Samson tied to the corn-mill (a symbol in Greek philosophy, Graves tells us, for the revolving heavens) “resolved the problem magnificently by pulling down both posts of the temple so that the roof collapsed upon everyone.”

Submission and destruction seem the only choices available to those “hooped within the great wheel of necessity,” as Seamus Heaney refers to Beowulf’s characters. Within this wheel your actions are both meaningless and meaningful. As an individual—say, as a shoemaker—you mean little. But your life assumes a place among the greater order. Your father was a shoemaker, your son will be a shoemaker, the circle rolls on.

Then Christ comes and bends time into a line. Under the new order, an individual’s options may not change in any substantial or material way (making shoes still blows). Yet he gains, in Christ’s redemptive love, a greater sense of being an individual. Time for him is linear in that his soul—no longer ensnared in the wheel’s indifferent spokes—may progress, aspire heavenward. As Paul writes, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” His position in a larger social or cosmic order is immaterial—the prize is the soul’s perfection.

But Christianity doesn’t exactly liberate the soul. Rather, it replaces the burden of eternal revolutions with a new one—the burden of free choice.    

…

If life recurred endlessly, as in Nietzsche’s eternal return, we could measure the effects of one choice against all possible effects, all possible worlds. Living only once, we’re at the mercy of chance, of choices made blindly and imperfectly.

The “lightness” of a one-time-around life makes up the central problem of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At one point in the novel, the lovers Tereza and Tomas discuss a friend of the latter’s. If she hadn’t fallen in love with Tomas, Tereza says, she almost certainly would have fallen in love with the friend.

It shocks Tomas to realize no necessity led Tereza to him. She could have just as easily loved another man. “Necessity knows no magic formulae—they are all left to chance,” Kundera writes. “If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.”

…

Freedom of choice and individuality make up the foundation of liberal democracy. As Ukraine has transitioned to a democratic society, these values have fueled (at least in theory) changes to education. In English lessons, for example, teachers have increasingly opted for more classroom discussion, rather than rote memorization and regurgitation.

Whether my pupils would master English or not, I believed two years ago, mattered less than their ability to make a cogent argument and to analyze the opinions of others. Any ancient Roman citizen—well-versed in the trivium of rhetoric, grammar and logic—would tell you these skills are essential not just to personal development but to democracy.

To learn how to express an opinion, however, one first must have an opinion to express. Throughout my service, I’ve reached hair-pulling-out, alcoholism-inducing levels of frustrations with my comatose pupils. Naturally inclined toward hyperbole and gloom, I often forget the motivated kids, all the surprising moments, and focus only on my failures, on their apathy.

There’s Zhennya, whose response to “What will you do for fall break?” was “Play with dick” (his lack of articles or possessive pronouns generating, perhaps, a moment of ambiguous queerdom) or Vitallic’s blow-job faces from the back row. There’s the tween girls, dressed like tragic baby prostitutes, who allow their fear of uncoolness to cow them into silence and feigned stupidity. There’s countless others whose names I always forget because they never speak except to spit out a “ Suka!” in my direction, whose range of expression is limited to a single SMS as their thumbs worry at cell phones. The old order gone, they have no given roles ahead of them; from the new order, they have taken only individualism and consumption.* 

Discipline’s not the problem now; I’ve learned how to brush off the small humiliations, to let out a dry remark in Ukrainian and dispel tension in class. What kills me is, their apathy becomes my own.

Two summers ago, not rooted in my work, not compelled in any one direction, I almost went home. I’m glad I didn’t. But in low moments, my staying here seems less an active choice, more an inability to think of something better to choose.

I have said that action was, in pre-Christian societies, meaningless on an individual level, only meaningful to the larger whole. Does it follow that, for modern society, action inverts? That is, unbound from the wheel, free to pursue her own inclinations, the individual’s choices pullulate infinitely and without necessity. And so, without meaning; the line of time tilts to a vertiginous drop.

…

The lady in the bra department spoke very softly. She interjected “dear” between every few words and looked at us in an abstracted though gentle way. My mother told her I was headed to Peace Corps in a few weeks. “You’re a humanitarian, dear,” the woman said. I had been shifting my weight from one foot to the other; bra departments make me nervous out of adolescent PTSD. “No,” I said, “I’m not.” 

This autumn brings final gatherings with other volunteers. With them comes the tacit expectation that we’ll sum up, weigh, and hold our experiences within phrases. “What are you going to do next?” we ask, whether in benign curiosity or to measure our plans against another’s. We also ask because we believe in that “next”: that each life stage builds on the last, logically progressing towards—something.

Raking together two years, I can’t sum up nor remember the original necessity which compelled me to come here. I get a conversation, nine years ago in my parents’ basement, with a friend who talked about joining Peace Corps when he got older, and myself in love with the friend, with service and purpose.

I would like to think myself more human with time if not humanitarian but am mostly a beast of need and impulse. The friend passed away and sometimes I forget him. “Do you feel grown-up after these years?” I asked Avital. No, she said—“I feel aged.”   

…

My first summer in Ukraine I memorized “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot’s leaden dirge of modernist paralysis. My choice was somewhat masochistic, as I couldn’t read these lines without bursting into tears: I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have waited and listened and watched, and sometimes grown bitter and closed myself, but I don’t consider anything wasted. I don’t despair for the future. My generation, so my mother’s divined from positions of planets in the late ‘80s, is destined “to make order out of chaos.” As I saw off my compatriots this month, I could have believed them capable of conquering anything—their light, their aliveness.

How to free oneself from time? The Orphics engraved their solution to gold tablets, tied to the throats of their dead. It was written there the reminder “to refuse to drink the water of cypress-shaded Lethe,” Robert Graves writes, “however thirsty one might be,” and so escape another cycle on the earth. Not to forget what their lives were.

I can’t sum up. But I store up fragments, not coherent nor ordered but mine. Barren platforms, the train’s nauseous florescence. Valentina’s strawberries. Poems about boars. That time on my way to a conference when, in my blazer and pencil skirt, profoundly hungover, I crouched in the Kyiv University subway station and vomited. All the bawdy bawling speech we exchanged in bars and winter streets, loud and not caring, what was said and lost to be remembered again. My knee’s purple scar. Snow.

…
*The opposing relationship between circular time/communality and linear time/individualism is not quite as clear-cut as I’ve made it seem here. The “old order” for Ukraine may not have been an individualist one, but of course, it was not same worldview as that of Beowulf or the ancient Greeks. The concept of time within fascism and communism, these regimes that ravaged Eastern Europe in the 20^th century, was entirely linear, their doctrines future-oriented. Louis Menand, in a recent book review, writes that these regimes “regarded the present as a temporary stage in history’s unfolding, and the fantastic unrealizability of what was to be—pure Germanness, or the classless society—made what merely was something only to be destroyed or overcome. Everything was expendable.” 

'To make this place another.'

Railway timetables, the imagination’s aphrodisiac. In Remembrance of Things Past, one from Paris to Balbec provides the young narrator with fantasy to feed on. He pores over the pastoral names, conjures the destination as a savage, wind-ravaged, medieval coast. Once he finally sees Balbec, the dream explodes—the beach is sunny, touristy, prosaic.

Reality without fantasy is impossible. I don’t mean impossible as in unbearable; they’re locked together, each engenders the other. In the coming years, Proust’s narrator would impregnate Balbec with yet another dream: on the shore, Albertine.

My first months in Ukraine, I listened often to Mozart’s Prague symphony. The strings held—if I can, like Proust, trace a memory to its essence—a golden, autumnal melancholy. In them, alleys and balconies in evening, a Europe clinging to lost grandeur with dignity.

So I summoned grand images, maybe as a respite from my surroundings—also in decay, but without, it seemed, dignity or romance. I summoned Milan Kundera’s Prague—Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being climbing Petrin Hill: “On her way up, she paused several times to look back: below her she saw the towers and bridges; the saints were shaking their fists and lifting their stone eyes to the clouds. It was the most beautiful city in the world.”

This summer, Mozart in my head again, I looked for that city. My friend Maggie put me up for a week and squired me around. Now, some people will tell you Prague’s become a Disneyfied parody of itself, a kitsch-littered tourist hell. This isn’t wholly untrue. But like anywhere else, you have to know where to look. Rather, how to look.

“Look up,” Maggie told me—past chain stores and boutiques’ sanitized sameness, past knick-knacks and tourists sloshing beers—up, where an older Prague abides in stone. Art deco’s angular geometry, elongated female figures, demons and cherubs. And then the astronomical clock: dark-gold rings on rings like celestial spheres, emblazoned with Zodiac signs. Bells rang the hour while wooden saints and hermits scrolled through tower windows, as they have for hundreds of years.

My visit coincided with the gay pride parade. We walked with Maggie’s various expatriate friends, including adorably plaid and beardy Indiana boys (Midwest, yet again, is best). Giant balloons bounded up ahead. One of them accidentally fell down a subway staircase (I imagined it bowling over herds of gray-faced, Kafka-esque bureaucrats on their commute). In our incongruous, abundant mass—flags and signs, peacock plumes and glitter eyelashes, smells of beer and sweat running down face-paint—we streamed beneath that medieval, somber splendor.

At night I became obnoxious. Meaning, Maggie introduced me to Becherovka, booze which tasted like Christmas and provoked me to recitations of Yeats and Ukrainian folk songs in bars. Also, to kissing Indiana boys. On the MOUTH. I think I humped a lamppost. OK, I definitely humped a lamppost, then stepped in dogshit, then swore loudly and excessively as Maggie crouched down laughing on the pavement.

In all these moments, the city’s intricate system of cobblestone alleys formed a riotous, sensual net in which I tangled. It reflected my desire and returned it. But one night, the sun went down in Maggie’s windows. Cathedral spires and the theater’s gold roof blackened against those bloody streaks. It hurt me; it looked like somebody else’s photograph, and so not mine.  

…

The dream is to say, I have never seen this before. In the hostel in Estonia, I already knew everyone. They slung around names of cities they’d seen in an international dick-measuring contest, they over-shared at the bar, they used the word “faggot” unironically.  Natalie and I drank beers with them by the port, in mist and rain and post-Soviet gloom. Nowhere, I began to think, could offer anything new.

Still, there’s nothing, not even the drab disappointments of modernity, that Lady Gaga can’t fix. It was for her we’d come to Tallinn. Say what you will, Gaga’s always intrigued me with her drag performance of glittery femininity and her possibly Freemason imagery.

Natalie and I prepared by dressing like … well, sort of like very fancy whores. From space! Or from Eastern Europe. As we stood on a street corner consulting a map (as if, I imagined, looking for our way home to Whore Planet), a group of Russian men ran over, yelling, “ Devchonky!—Girls! Are you lost?” Space whores, it would seem, are the Russians’ girls-next-door.

The concert offered me everything I like: Spectacle! Soap bubbles! A mechanical horse and moving castle! Girls in glittery bikinis writhing on a motorcycle (which also was a piano?)! Half-clad man-dancers making out with each other! Black Jesus! We danced our asses off, unfazed by the stoic immobility of surrounding Estonian tweens.

Yet at spectacle’s center, there’s the threat of emptiness. “Born This Way” makes me uncomfortable, its be-yourself feel-goodery suddenly hollow when trussed in various incongruous props (fake guns, meat, violent space-opera choreography). In that lack, I substituted my own swell of nostalgia: dancing with Christopher to “Bad Romance,” when everyone at the bar stopped to stare. 

…

I’ve dreamed America for two years. This winter I’ll apply to MFA programs in poetry. I don’t know where I will be in a year; this makes my situation romantic.

The map on my wall feeds this romance. No country but America has such a motley assortment of city names, sonorous and borrowed or invented. I’ve charted the polysyllabic, sibilant music of Tallahassee, Tuscaloosa, and the European aspirations of Athens or Oxford or cities with “-polis” slapped on the end. Today I rode the electric train, and in passing forests I saw marshes along the Mississippi, four years ago, driving to New Orleans. A heron had lighted on a bare tree in water. “This staunchless wound,” Susan Sontag writes, “the great longing for another place. To make this place another.”

On a night train this month, a man in my wagon took a dislike to me. He already reeked of beer when he boarded at 9 p.m.; by midnight he slumped, seated on the edge of my cot, slurring loud and vaguely sexual insults. I moved to the end of the car and sat up until we reached my village at 2 a.m., sick with exhaustion and fear, listening to the Walkmen. Snow is still falling, I’m almost home, I’ll see you in the new year. I wanted to cry, because I saw, as I always do, Chicago in winter—a friend silhouetted against his apartment windows, waving to me on the street. Hands in my pockets, the street lamps and snow. 

If I sound precious about my nostalgia, writing here on fantasy, it’s because fantasy is so often born from nostalgia. Maybe it’s not the never-before-seen city we long for, but an impossible city, impossible for belonging to the past. Because of this, I understand now that the Prague symphony will one day remind me not of a Prague I invented, but rather of afternoon walks in my village, a gold-painted statue of Lenin in gold light, a goat by a ruined wall, chestnut trees. So too that Walkmen album will bring me back to trains full of sleeping people, the half-awake hour of steel and loneliness.

As I jumped down from the train, clouds swirled around the moon. There were so many stars. I stumbled under that cold, vertiginous sea, almost home but not yet.

Fame monster

Shameless self-promotion: I just got a poem published for the first time in a REAL LIVE literary journal! You can read it here if you like.

You're welcome, world.

Dolphin-torn, gong-tormented

Facing the shore, naked men all stand the same way: hands on hips, legs apart, their sea-shriveled cocks outthrust. Alex bends into the tide as it slaps his genitals—“I fuck the sea!” he yells.

His skin is very tan, draped in thin gold bracelets and rings, his teeth very white. My friend and I swim out with him to a craggy rock. Again and again he dives and surfaces with fistfuls of clams, gathered from along the rock’s edge. Weeds and dime-sized jellyfish gleam on their shells. One he smashes open in his palm. He shows us its pale, vaginal center, then slurps it down raw.

My traveling companion, a gay man, has a talent for attracting men like Alex—young, handsome, sexually ambiguous. During the day he wanders the “gay sex forest” above the nude beach (less forest, more condom-littered shrubbery) while I swim and swig a wine bottle. The night before we went to a gay club in Odessa. An acquaintance of his (somewhat doddering, goggle-eyed, with a head like an egg) tried, repeatedly and without success, to ensnare him in the dark room—a series of winding corridors in the back, with walls soft-padded like an enormous intestine. When illuminated with a cell phone, they revealed a splatter of stale cum.

Eventually my friend visited the room with someone else, leaving the eggish acquaintance mooning in the karaoke room. I sat beside him and a beautiful man who wore a cigarette-dangling sneer. The karaoke machine scrolled Russian lyrics over incongruous films of Asian women giving massages, or of whales. “Where did he go?” the forlorn one kept asking. The other let out a strident laugh and proceeded to make snide comments about everyone in the club. He turned to me—“Ponyemayesh, podruga?” You get it, girlfriend?—then, without waiting for an answer, “Girlfriend gets it.” Through an opening in the wall, a leathery old man had his hand down his jeans. “You have a cigarette?” The man paused his masturbation to pass one to the beautiful boy.  

Like many things supposedly fun, such as team sports or children’s birthday parties, sex is not fun, per se. But in its most carnal and anonymous manifestations, at least it is honest. As a point of contrast, I worked at several camps this summer, and the high-schoolers there exchanged bedmates in an ever-revolving carousel of infantile fumbling. A new pixie-teen would cling to the boys during every night’s discotheque, all their throats blossoming dark hickies.

Why is teen sex so particularly gross? Maybe it’s old bitterness; at their age, my biggest vices were reading poems in math class or covertly rubbing against furniture. All that aside, I find their sexualities far more objectionable than, say, gay sex forest/dark room coupling.

The reason isn’t just sex, I think; rather, the sentimentality with which they imbue sex. Of course, I’m wildly generalizing, but young people, fed on rom-coms and Twilight, seem less DTF and more DTFL (down to fall in love). They’re the glass in which everything gross about modern romance is reflected, not darkly but dully.

On the nude beach, I bleed down my leg through a toilet paper wad, torn up where waves threw me against rocks below the surface. Slowly my skin burns and I get wine-drunk. Suddenly the sky goes purple and gray, then slits open into a storm. Up the beach there’s a large crevice in the rocks, and we crowd there for shelter: my friend and Alex and I and a homeless man, and a drunk Muscovite named Dmitri. “Oh my God, Alanis Morissette!” Dmitri yells, embracing me into his damp, cold chest. “I love your music!” 

The storm pounds the beach, releases itself in wind and hail. Large stones of it rap sharply against us through the cave opening. Curled in a puddle, mud- and blood-smeared, I shiver even as Dmitri wraps fleshy arms around me. The homeless man steals Dmitri’s cigarettes. When the hail subsides, Alex runs across the beach and dives in. His form bobs up, fine and gleaming in the spray—lashed by rain and the waves’ violent love.

Spring in the bride-basket of the world

As with all movies I saw hundreds of times as a kid, I grew desensitized to the true genius of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the best romp through pioneer days since the game “Oregon Trail.” But this May, as I watch the baby animals skitter among tulips and gang-bang each other, those showtunes of my youth (e.g. “Bless Your Beautiful Hide,” “Goin’ Courting,” and “Spring Spring Spring”) again waft through my head.

If you’ve never seen this gem of MGM musicals, here’s the run-down. Howard Keel stars as a bass-toned, toothy backwoodsman who brings home a wife, thus inspiring his strapping-yet-socially-awkward brothers to find women of their own. They go about this via a midnight raid of the town’s daughters, grabbing the unsuspecting brides-to-be out of windows and tossing them into a wagon.

Their menfolk pursue the girls, but after crossing a mountain pass, the brothers whoop and holler and let off their pistols, and cause an avalanche that blocks the pass! So, all winter, the girls gradually succumb to Stockholm Syndrome and by spring, they frolic with the brothers in a Technicolor pastoral.

What’s at work here isn’t just a 1950s brand of compulsory heterosexuality. Rather, having endured two winters in the rough-and-tumble backwoods of Ukraine, I realize the reason is – Spring. From its first warm breath it leeches your reason, then catalyzes all kinds of freakish behavior.

I participated in such vernal rites on a recent excursion to Kholodnee Yar. The grounds include a nunnery and also battle site from a short-lived Ukrainian independence struggle in 1918-22. To celebrate that battle’s anniversary, a whole-day affair was organized, replete with booming cannons and pompous speeches.

At the height of the afternoon’s heat, we gathered on a hillside. Not knowing why, or what was expected of me, I wove in the crowd: Cossacks swaggered, with sun-seared bellies hanging over sashes where they’d slung knives, long moustaches drooping, bald pates dangling stringy braids. A Belarusian contingent in huge black fur hats circled huge drums, pounding and chanting, “Bel-a-rus! Bel-a-rus!” (A decent chant, but only because it copies ours; everyone knows “U-S-A” is the best chant, drowning out all others.)

Other men were more casual, in typical summer gear (mesh or sans shirt, baggy capris revealing that awkward stretch of hairy calf). Among the women, I observed matronly cleavage further cleft into etched wrinkles and promptly slathered my collarbone in more sunscreen. A group of secondary-schoolers (incredibly fresh-faced, as if their faces were nubs of amputated limbs) waved flags and banners, singing patriotic ballads with the pure tones of eunuchs.

A blast of pistol fire rang out. In the valley, a handful of men, dressed as Cossacks and Bolsheviks, scampered around the scant shrubbery, crouching and shooting and pretending to die. As the sulfurous odor ribboned the crowd, they cheered. I thought, This is DUMB.

To be fair, I think I enjoyed Civil War Days at Naper Settlement, the fake 19^th century town inside my town. As a kid (probably around the same time I was watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) I volunteered there, pretending to be a kid having fun in the 19^th century. This involved a lot of mashing corn with a wooden block into “meal” (which was hard because the corn was like the fake corn in Thanksgiving decorations) and knocking a hoop around with a stick. So, I suppose I can’t remove the splinter from my neighbor’s eye until I remove the log from my own … and then dance on the log!!!!! (See: barn-raising dance number.)

After the day’s pomp had ended, everyone went off to the forest for picnicking and, of course, toasting to the glory of Ukraine and her heroes. Someone named Vlad poured me a generous shot of samahone (homemade vodka), shoved a pickle into my mouth, then tried to feed me porridge. Although I became immediately wasted after taking the shot (but only for about five minutes because I was really sweaty), I explained that I was perfectly capable of eating my own porridge. Vlad accepted this, but called me a “hippie” and invited me to listen to Jimi Hendrix at his house.

Drunk off my ass or no, I find myself increasingly susceptible to the wiles of Ukrainian males. In turn, they sense my pheromones, and act accordingly; another specimen of masculinity named Sergei also came a-prowling after this schoolmarmly sack of bones. Sergei might have been wearing camo capris and a T-shirt emblazoned with Taras Shevchenko’s face surrounded by guns, but his eyes were as brown and deep as twin pools of my current water supply. Daaaayum, Sergei, do you want a WIFE???  

I’m kind of being an asshole in this entry, so let me say, I actually have met a number of kind, intelligent, lovely Ukrainians. But I’d never date one. My Ukrainian and Russian skills just aren’t good enough to send sexy text messages (my #1 method of goin’ courting), or to express myself like an intelligent adult. At one point in conversation, I stopped understanding the words coming out of Sergei’s mouth and just smiled, mute and infantile. He said sympathetically, “Maybe this is too philosophical for you.”

Uggggggh. Sorry, guy, but in order to marry me, one must recognize and adore My Genius. Back to square one, mooning down the lilac-scented roads, waiting for a swarthy young buck to throw a bag over my head and whisk me away.

Wait a second, I forgot something: At my 11^th formers’ graduation party, my favorite pupil Radion asked me to slow-dance! OK, so he’s 9 years old and his head only comes up to my waist, but he let me spin him around. Radion, I’ll totally wait for you to grow up. Spring, after all, is the season of hope. 

Budapest & back again

From a day of trains and trains we came to a hostel in Budapest. An older American man greeted us – the manager, he said, thin-haired, slight, his teeth when he laughed gray. Generally I’m suspicious of older male American ex-pats in Europe. This is not without good reason.

As he checked us into the hostel, the man took on a tone of idle chit-chat inconsistent with his words, which grew over-share-y and disturbing: “I came to Budapest after my divorce… I was a whistle-blower, that’s why I had to leave, that company is after me… The owner here, he can tell you about a lot of clubs, but he doesn’t go to them. I do. I’ve been to all the gentlemen’s clubs. Sometimes, you know, young women go to them and you’d be surprised at what they do there!”

He grinned at one point and declared, “I’m the real Forrest Gump!” The gray-toothed laugh barked out again. “I don’t know where I’m running to, but I keep on running!”

Later the owner approached us about Forrest. He had come to Budapest with a lot of money several years ago, we were told, but spent it all on strippers and was now penniless. Recently the owner had discovered him stealing money (for more strippers) and fired him. Seeing as he had nowhere to go, the owner allowed him to sleep on the couch. He added, needlessly, that Forrest probably suffered from mental health issues.

(Why a hostel owner would want his guests to know that a slightly deranged gentleman’s club enthusiast slept just outside their door, I don’t know. But I might add that after our return home, the owner emailed my friends to request a good review on Hostelworld.com. The email included pictures of him pointing a gun at the camera, and then at his head, as if to say, “Give me a good rating or I’ll kill you / myself, HA HA!”)

In comparison, the other hostel guests seemed bland, or maybe just too German. We spent an afternoon with a few students: very cute and all about the same size and multi-ethnic, like dolls dipped in different colored paint. By “too German” I suppose I mean they were very civilized and easily shocked by tales of bucket baths, aggressive dogs/men, the usual grisly shtick. My friends and I exchanged looks of judgment and horror when one tossed a half-full water bottle into the trash, or when another, suffering from a cold, declined our scratchy brown Ukrainian toilet paper to blow his nose on. He wouldn’t go out with us that night, pleading sickness. “You just need to drink vodka,” I told him. “That’ll knock the cold right out of you.”

Maybe I spoke out of Stockholm Syndrome; more likely, self-satisfaction. The Peace Corps tendency to identify with Ukrainians is less a complex than a fallacy: We work and live together, share similar daily inconveniences, but our lives are not their lives. On the train home, Megan and I talked about Taras and Nadja. “They know that there’s a better life out there and that they’ll never have it,” she said. “They can’t just go off to Hungary for a week and spend 30 Euro on pants.”

But the urge rears itself: To take on authority, take on a tone of voice, in conversations with people who have never, will never see Ukraine, that implies, “You don’t know what it’s like.”

This tone, like most attitudes of authority, results from embarrassment. In this case, we affect being one who has struggled because we sense our privilege, an uncomfortable burden. No, not burden – maybe, lightness. Too little has been asked of us; on us, too little depends.

By us I mean not only PCVs, but those of us navigating our post-college years with varying levels of adequacy. There’s already a lot of internet handwringing about our individualism, our irresponsibility, our irony.* Some of this is unfair. Exploration and experimentation are no more selfish than the average office job. Still, I wonder: What is the difference between exploration and just dicking around?

…

Budapest presents its pleasures in many forms. One, at the Szechenyi baths, was that of Leda in an open courtyard. Her stone neck craned back, the swan curled around her thighs. Italian teenagers scuffled around the pools, grappled and cuffed each other’s long brown bodies. They couldn’t be quiet or stop touching each other. Inside, in steam rooms, large men sat in the sweat traversing folds of their bellies and triangular flaps of breasts.

Some people swam around a circular pool until it became a whirlpool. A plump older woman in a bathing cap swam into the current and let out a high-pitched whoop: “Ooooo-hooo-hooo-hooo!” She collided into everyone, grabbed hold of their arms, apologizing in very loud Russian.

At night we went to ruin bars. I mean ruin as in a noun, not a verb; in the decaying shells of bombed-out buildings, people in Budapest have assembled jumbles of chairs and tables and colored lights and screens projected with 1920s fashion show reels, and called them bars. We drank red wine mixed with Coca Cola (“borash cola”– classy, no?) under the no-roof of cold starry air.

The last day I walked a long time alone and ended on a bridge. I wanting to fling my voice out over it, like a woman throwing dirty bathwater out a window, like a Rilke poem about angels. My hair and skirt whipped in the wind and I felt immensely sad. Europe doesn’t need me. Its streets would receive my interpretation politely, but its stone eyes over church doors remain impassive. Travel begins to lose its sense of possibility or purpose. Still, there’s no choice but movement. Run Forrest, run.

…

To know the difference between exploration and dicking around, maybe we need to know the difference between production and creation. The former is geared toward function, efficiency, usefulness, and/or speed; the latter (at least ideally, or romantically) adheres to no such criteria.

It would take the length of like, five more blog entries to attempt an analysis of what it means to “be productive,” or the nature of “Work,” so I won’t strain your eyes or patience. However, I will say that the most all-consuming moments of creation, for me, are not romantic. I’ll be wearing jammies under my dress which smells like eggs or something weird, and Valentina will come in from working in the fields and ask me, “Are you sick?” I’ll say, “No, I’m working.” I say this and believe it, but in my ears it sounds defensive; my idea of work is not hers.

... 

My walks to and from school cross wide swaths of black fields where I’ll see whole families working. As they bend, their distant bodies are outlined in light, under low clouds.

The old women sit on their benches and watch me pass. But I no longer see the elderly couple across the street. Last spring, they often beckoned me over and wordlessly made room between them on the bench. It wasn’t really big enough for three, but I squeezed in and listened to their running commentary on passersby: “There goes Olga Petrovnya…” “There’s Sergei, where is he going? What is he doing?”

A few days ago, Valentina told me the woman had died. She had been working in the kitchen garden when it happened. God, I thought, these people. The older generations especially – they work their whole lives, they work until they die.

That is their reality, their necessity, and so I try to make sense of it as it is, without imbuing it with romance or tragedy. That’s the hardest, not to make it something else.

Once, I remember, last year I came home and the old man was standing motionless by the road, squinting. “Where is my wife?” he asked. “She went to the store. Did you see her?” I hadn’t, I said, then awkwardly moved toward my gate. “Where is my wife?” he repeated, blinking at the road that was empty.

…

*You may have read enough of such non-news to reach saturation, but Jake sent me this New Yorker piece that made me think a lot, and also made me angry. It’s framed as an article on declining marriage rates and then transitions into a piece on declining civic participation. Disinclination toward marriage and communal interaction might seem, reading this, two parallel outcomes of young America’s hyper-individualism. Such an argument is hetero-normative and gross and I don’t buy it.

As a refreshing alternative, I’ll recommend this piece Helenmary sent me, “On Learning a Trade.” It’s both complex and clearly written, and its thoughtful comments on work and privilege have been in my brain while writing this entry.

I don’t pretend to speak for our generation, seeing as a) I don’t actually contain multitudes, on a literal level, and b) I barely ever see any of y’all. Save me from solipsism: If you have ideas or opinions about these issues, you should definitely talk to me.