Pure grit

It's Yetta! 

Been paging through a lot of old photographs lately, not only admiring fashion (above, clearly a candidate for Advanced Style), but trying to just conceive of my past, my family's past. Not least, trying to understand what it means to travel to my great-grandmother Yetta's birth country.

This is becoming an exercise in necessary fictions - photos, other people's memories, all the stories we tell ourselves in order to live (quoth Joan Didion). I've found my own past, for example, involved a sailor suit straight off the Good Ship Lollypop:

Mostly, I am curious about the relation between past and place. Between memory and place - if our bodies "remember" places we've never seen.  What would such a connection to a country feel like?

Only in rare moments here can I feel truly connected to environment. Suburban Illinois does afford the odd swatch of prairie or wood, or baby deer sightings, but everything basically looks like everything else. The never-seen-yet-familiar becomes impossible as the actual earth's chewed up, raped by strip mall and subdivision. Familiar, but sterile and bland familiarity. Think Eliot's The Waste Land. 

Is it too grandiose a desire, for felt recognition in Ukraine, as in "this has always been in me"? I don't expect anything like Yetta ghosting my steps around Kyev. Nothing so simple or sentimental.

Perhaps it will come in language. As I begin to learn Ukrainian, I wonder what threads might bind the hard, involving-one's-entire-mouth consonants of Cyrillic languages, and the farmland and forests of Eastern Europe. 

Right now I'm reading a terrific book by Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. He connects the English language's development with its environment - wintry, wind-swept, difficult. Read a line of Old English and you know these were a sturdy folk: My favorite thus far, by Cynewulf, is "ic wordcraeftum waef," meaning "I wove my word-craft." 

The point of this digression (besides my new ambition to learn the grittiest of Anglo-Saxon poetry) is that place, and deep-felt connection to place, bears out a like lexicon. Myself a lover of gnarled Germanic words, I already feel a growing bond with Ukrainian - I mean, one of its letters is pronounced "shch"!! Can't wait to see how being there, walking the land, and growing in fluency will all relate, and how they'll influence my weaving of word-craft.

Oh, and T-minus 2 days until I leave for staging. Terror and excitement go without saying.  

Dust, lilac, and warm stone

"The easiest of Kiev's pasts to re-create in the imagination is the raucous commercial city of the pre-revolutionary sugar boom. The novelist Aleksandr Kuprin, writing in the 1910s, described a town full of stevedores and pilgrims, Jewish hawkers, German madams, down-at-heel Russian officers, students, card-players, cigar smoke and cheap champagne. Most of Kiev's surviving historic centre — ponderous opera house, cobbled boulevards and the extraordinary Chimera House, barnacled with frogs, deer and rhinoceroses, that advertised the city's first cement factory -- dates from then, and on summer evenings the streets still smell,as in Kuprin's day, of 'dust, lilac and warm stone'; riverboats whistle on the Dnieper and men drink kvass out of jam jars at little booths under the chestnut trees. A museum on Andriyivsky Uzviz, the helter-skelter lane that plunges down from Catherine II's rococo St Andrew's Church to Contract Square, once the site of a great annual fair, houses an atmospheric rag-bag of period ephemera: sepia photographs of uniformed cadets lounging against a studio balustrade, a pair of white suede gloves, a painted umbrella, ivory elephants, a stereoscope, a curlicued shop-till, a velvet opera cloak trimmed with ostrich feathers."

From Anna Reid's Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine. Photo, detail from Chimera House in Kyev.

Baaaaaa.

Let me sheepishly (yet very, very excitedly) sound the news: Luddite and booklover I ... am getting a Kindle.

In many ways I think e-readers are terrifying. I gather they distort much poetry, altering line lengths and all-around removing one from the tangible pleasures of reading (and by extension, the awareness of physicality, of being a body in the actual world made of live things, etc. etc.).

Practically speaking, however, I can pack no more than two pieces of luggage, up to 50 pounds each. That pretty much rules out my Norton anthology of poetry.

So to be as subversive as possible, I vow to download only the mustiest of tomes! LIKE THIS!:

The stairs they strode
streaming redly;
at dark doorways
they dinned and hammered;
into halls of Atli
hewed a pathway;
rushed in roaring,
reeking-handed.

OH EM GEE, J. R. R. Tolkien translated The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun - the Norse myth on which the Germanic Nibelungenlied was based - ??? And I can download it to my Kindle??? So much alliterative verse, blood and darkness and gold, mead halls, and Valkyries - all MINE???

Yes, friends. And then I will feel like this:



(Arthur Rackham, from Der Ring des Nibelungen)

Welcome, friends & fiends; also, FAQs

Hello, hello! - clearing throat - DOBREE DENN - I think this means "hello" in Ukrainian but your guess is as good as mine, because I'm in America for two more weeks and my accent still sounds like Borat's.

For the next 27 months, I'll be checking in here whenever I can (yes, Ukraine does have internet, and probably also houses and roads and food), sharing topics of interest from my Peace Corps service with you. By "you" I mean "my mom and maybe 2 other people," but whoever you may be - welcome!

There's not much to report as of now, of course. My preparation has mostly involved a) feeling every feeling that exists, b) shoving the feelings waaaay down to the pit of my stomach, c) eatings SUNDAES, d) having a stomachache, e) staring at the Ukraine Peace Corps facebook group and rapidly spiraling spiraling spiraling because everyone seems more prepared than I am. In that order.

But now I'd like to take time now to answer a few questions that you, dear reader, might have about my service.

What will you be doing in Ukraine?
I'll teach English as a foreign language to secondary school. The first three months, from late September to mid-December, I train with other PC volunteers, then we're unleashed to our new communities.

Weren't you going to be in Morocco or Jordan or something? Why Ukraine?
The answer to this question usually involves me slapping my forehead and muttering "bureaucracies!" and "medical forms." I lost my spot in the North Africa PC group, but they were able to fit me in to the Ukraine group leaving later the same month.

Coincidentally, my great-grandmother Yetta emigrated from Ukraine in 1912. I don't know how she'd feel about me going there since her family - persecuted as Jews and starving - fled that country. But I don't think there's that much anti-Semitism in Ukraine anymore (probably because there are no Jews left to hate). And I have to think the universe had a hand in this "coincidence," as it always does.

Why? Just... Why? Why are you doing this?
I really never know how to answer that without sounding unbearably earnest. What's more precious than an aspiring poet returning to the country of her ancestry? Correct answers = "calling oneself a poet under any circumstances," or, "any Jonathan Safron Foer book," or "listening to Sufjan Stevens and crying." (OK, so I just did that last one. BIG DEAL. Also, I actually do still like Everything is Illuminated. BIG DEAL. Actually, JSF and Sufjan look very similar - aaaaand I've never seen them both in the same room at once. Think about it.)

Seriously, now: I've planned to join PC since I was 16. My curiosity and desire for experience are ravenous, I am terrified of boredom. Always I'm preoccupied with language - the thorns of its rules and inconsistencies, its elasticity depending on usage and context, its facets of beauty. In teaching English, I want to learn how to better manipulate my own language, and also how to better communicate.

The hardest lesson to learn, I think - how to be a person with other people. How to be authentic to your own personhood - but flexible enough to learn from them, even when we are all so strange and solitary among each other. I am no longer interested in Rilke's ideal of the solitary artist's soul, of lonely pleas to the angel. Now is the time for collisions, border-transgressions, transmutations.

What is this term "bluestocking" you are always bandying & blogging about?
I'm glad you asked! It is a somewhat pejorative term for a woman with literary leanings. The bluestocking is "the most odious character in society ... she sinks wherever she is placed, like the yolk of an egg, to the bottom, and carries the filth with her." - William Hazlitt, who obviously didn't know how to appreciate a female intellectual, nor the charms of colored hosiery.