Language & politics

For your interest, today's NYT article on Georgian schools and their push for native-speaking English teachers. I know virtually nothing about Georgia except that it is also in the former USSR and you cannot take a midnight train there from America, but it seems to bear remarkable similarity to Ukraine as far as this initiative is concerned. The voices of English teachers in the article also resembles my experience - shoddy textbooks, pupils who can barely eke out a sentence, etc.  

I'm currently a part of a huge, huge American invasion - more than 400 PC volunteers in Ukraine with even more shipping out in March. As in Georgia, the demand for English teachers is part of a push to Westernize and globalize Ukraine, and to distance it from Russia. 

As far as I can tell, though, the relationship between Ukrainians and the Russian language is far more complex than this article suggests of Georgia. I mean, the relationship between Ukrainians and all of Russia is complex. While Ukrainian is now the language of education and all state institutions, many people still speak Russian, including the current president. Lots of folks also (to my constant befuddlement) blur the two languages in a slurry of "Sergic." 

Language is political (duhhh). My colleague Svitlana was recently getting huffy about Russian speakers - "They think that everything Russian is better, and they look down on Ukrainian." And then sometimes when I speak Ukrainian, people look at me as if I'm putting on hoighty-toighty airs (although maybe that's because my language skills are still so stiff and unnatural).

Oy gevalt, I have no idea how to navigate these muddled waters, but I'm fascinated and will be writing more about this as my service continues. 

Inscapes

When the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins saw an ash cut down, he wrote that “there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of this world destroyed any more.” Inscapes is a word he made up. Or rather, cobbled-together between the Anglo-Saxon sceap – creation – and from instaepe – threshold.

A threshold of creation – what a weight of meaning to set on any place, right? And yet I find myself thinking about inscapes a lot on my scuttlings and creepings around the forest.

I came to a clearing a few weeks ago. There the forest gave way to scattered bracken, bedraggled clumps of squat and solitary bushes, dried grasses, snow. Across this place I could see the forest continue on – tall, solemn trees, ice silvering their darkness. They seemed together like a vast cloud rolling back.

I felt a pull on the back of my brain to an old feeling in me. One I associate with first encounters with great mystery in my childhood. Earliest I think, is the entranceway to the Philadelphia art museum. I looked up a long stair to the figure of Diana, drawing her bow. As in a temple, as in a forest (and they really are the same thing, temples and forests).

I could go on, trace my impressions back and bejewel them with purple Proustian adjectives. But how to make “threshold” moments intelligible? Most attempts can come off utterly pompous, self-indulgent, or just flat. Like whenever I go back to Philadelphia and see that my Diana is never so imposing, nor the stair so long, nor the hall so grand and dark as in my childhood imagination.

At the risk of more pomposity, I really do think that art is the threshold. Or maybe what it dreams itself to be. A space where made-things can look out on inarticulate creation.

Hopkins’ best poems have all this beauty and terror in them (from “I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes” plunging into “O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me / thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?”). And I think it is no accident that the word of creation, scaep, is so close to the word for poet, scop. Because what can you do at a threshold but try (small steps, but there) to cross?

More intimate moments with Baba Valentina

Today is fogged and dark and has me in a slow, “I am just going to watch The Piano and weep” mood, for which I blame the 7^th formers – savages, savages, barely even human – and their mangled, poorly written textbooks. Luckily, I have a baba who can always cheer me up.

There’s something about having all of your boundaries violated that just becomes an endless source of hilarity. I just have to accept whatever horrifying situation is at hand – today, for example, telling myself, “OK, this is happening right now, Baba V is taking her pants off to go pee,” in the bathroom where I had been brushing my teeth. Or a couple hours later, when she didn’t close the bathroom door and I blundered past. Well, she’s seen me naked as the day I was born, and a number of times at that, so I guess we’re even.

Like all babas, she’s very concerned that I get enough to eat. I am pretty sure that I could eat an entire ham in front of Baba V and she would still furrow and fret and proffer yet more grease-sodden potatoes at me. After asking me five times if I wanted to eat more apples today, she came into my room with a plateful, repeating, “Eat apples, eat apples.” (Ukrainian and Russian don't have the equivalents of "the" or "is," and their terseness usually terrify me into obeying whatever command's been issued me. And who was I kidding, of COURSE I was going to eat the apples!)

She also informed me that if I don’t eat meat, or at least fish, I will get tuberculosis. She is going to buy fish for me at the market so that I do not get tuberculosis. I know what this means. It means I am going to have to cook something with a face. They sell FISH WITH FACES at the market. I will look it in the EYE as I peel the flesh from its millions of tiny pale bones. At least if my TB vaccine somehow falters, she's got me covered - after all, Baba knows best.

I am eating an apple as I write this

Shame on my greed! Of course, the day after my last entry, I find a bag stuffed with two dozen apples in my office. A girl in sixth form left it. I have no idea how – it is probably half her weight. She is so, so tiny, and always wears a furry white vest. I imagine her as a baby fox burrowing into the snow. Oh my God, the cuteness.

As further proof that everyone knows everything about everyone in a village, it’s now common knowledge that I love apples. Viktoria, who teaches Ukrainian, is always giving me some from her garden, along with carrots, beets, even a pumpkin once. She joked that I would work in her garden in return, but I will take her up on it. I can’t wait for spring and wet ground and planting things. But I write this as a woman who has killed several plants in her day, including a cactus, so maybe Viktoria doesn’t want me gardening after all.  

Baba Valentina seems to be under the impression that no one in America has ever SEEN an apple before. That is probably what I’d think, too, if I were her and I witnessed my apple consumption. She asked me recently, “Will your family visit, my daughter?” (She’s taken to calling me “my daughter,” which I like because it has a certain ring to it of a wise old Asian man.) I told her yes, they’re planning to come in June, and she became very excited and said, “There will be so many apples for them to eat!”

So, my Americans, begin making your travel arrangements to visit me now. If you come to Bogdanivka, you will witness the warmth and hospitality of the Ukrainian people, and eat as many apples as you wish.

Appetites

I feel so cosmopolitan, seeing this New York Times article highlighting cabbage's many virtues. I bet those yuppies would be sooooo jealous of me, who luxuriates in cabbage every night. 

Eating in the Ukrainian winter isn't as bad as I'd anticipated. You just have to be creative. My favorite breakfast is pumpkin kashka. You shred some pumpkin and cook it with milk, adding cinnamon and raisins. I like to add apples and honey, too.

I do feel, though, that I'm not getting enough protein. Last week I walked past a man carving up a cow in his driveway. Knife to hoof, he dangled a white haunch to the pavement, where blood pooled very bright against the snow. Cats gathered to lap it, bawling. 

I think about that when I feel like mewling and slaking a bloodlust against the ice. Also I think about Ovid's description of Hunger in Metamorphoses, this Gollum-like creature "in a stony wasteland... plucking with nail and tooth at the scanty herbage." It's not just hunger for food. This week I was dissatisfied with everything, desired everything - as if Hunger herself had clamped her lips to my mouth and started sucking.

Today, to be fair, was beautiful, even if completely covered in ice. Hardly a wasteland - the birches, silver branches pouring down, look like fountains startled in the middle of falling.

Supermarkets & other Molochs

Somewhere under florescent lights in California, Allen Ginsberg is waddling with an electrocuted expression after Walt Whitman’s specter. Both Biblical and irreverent, the poem’s been in my head: “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”

Miles from both of them, I, their little fag-hag sister, fought my way past fur-coated holiday shoppers in Kirovograd, clutching my cabbage. Now that I’m used to the village shops no bigger than my bedroom, a supermarket feels like Satan’s circus. I was in everyone’s way. Two women nearly knocked me over, one in a fur coat dyed bright pink, the other bright blue. I wanted to cry and crack up – the absurdity! – these women waddling furious, Teletubbies on the attack!

In the check-out line I watched a young couple load their groceries onto the conveyor belt. A fat pomegranate, glossy peppers and tomatoes, wine, chocolate. They were attractive, well-dressed. All I could think was, in the world are pretty clothes and good food and they are not mine. The spoiled child of myself beat its fists.

This happens when I go into cities. I just got back from a couple nights at my friend’s place in Oleksandriia. Watching all the high fashion click past, I was all want. So easy to forget – I could probably buy my village with like, my working-at-the-bakery money. And yet an insane amount of my daydreams consist of Me Looking Great and Being Looked At. JFK must be spinning in his grave.

Before I left America I couldn’t wait to scrub it off me – those same self-important, self-conscious impulses I saw and hated. New York was so many pretty people drinking too much, spending too much. I sickened on it! I let everyone know I had sickened on it! Oh endless cycle of consumption, I know why you have such allure. It is not just things, not just pleasures. You become so brilliant, lording it and posturing in bars and parties late at night. You are the hero in an old book, romantic and sad.

Reading Ginsberg, too, reminded of how shitty America can be, and of how much I miss its own familiar kind of shittiness.

Last night, my friend and I watched Howl, the film based on Ginsberg’s writing of the poem and the subsequent obscenity trial. This movie is not an alive movie. It is a flat, slick, cheap thing wound up and chattering like plastic teeth.

What really gets me is, so much of it fetishizes the act of poetry writing. The smoke and booze and typewriter clacking and brooding and masturbation of it. Oh God and all those preening “angel-headed hipsters” in the cafes, far less starving hysterical naked than an Urban Outfitters ad.

And I like Ginsberg, and I like him much more when he’s lonely, queer and quietly disgruntled in the grocery store. Not this shiny James Franco incarnation who struts and bloviates.

Poems aren’t about the poet, even when they are. And this I have to remember in my “me wantee” moments. Fashion, vanity – moot! My body is moot! I am the space through which the world streams. To be so lonely I disappear even inside my “I.” To be all eye. These things. 

Lost and unlost

You must walk a while down the train tracks, going to school from my house. When mist settles in, you hear the train long before you see it. The whistle sets your nerves in motion. Then lights down the tracks, burning through fog, and then, hulking and hammering, the gray apparition of boxcars. Sparks of wheels and wet steel smell. You want to run beside it like every barking, snapping creature.  

On fog-days everything’s heavy in mystery. So is the road you must take. My first day walking to school by myself, I took the wrong one. Picking over archipelagos of mudded road between puddles, I didn’t notice I was lost. (I think I was distracted by the line of four sleeping cats all sitting on a fence and how ridiculously cute they looked.) And then I was really, really lost. The road ended at the wrong side of the forest.

It is called the Black Forest. Inside, I’m told, is a lake called the Black Lake. This makes me think that beside the lake rests Baba Yaga’s house, clanking its bones and spinning on its chicken feet. I thought about her as I stood and looked haplessly at the stalled road, and the mist closing in. Maybe I had died. Maybe a dead deer would rise swollen from the lake and tell me riddles.

A man in camo rode past on his bike. Figuring he was headed to the military base next to school, I ran after him shouting for help. He stopped and stared in what was probably horror. My coat flapped open, my hair hung heavy with mist-water and sweat. I explained my predicament in horrible Ukrainian. He pointed the way silently and rode on.

When I arrived at school and explained, Svitlana, the other English teacher, laughed at me. She told the other teachers and they also laughed with their indulgent, “how do you solve a problem like Maria?”-type clucking. I am a giant child and am constantly petted, coddled, led around.

It makes me obstinate. So much so, I begin to believe one day I shall discover that I was actually Baba Yaga the whole time. And with my witch wings I’ll fly away.