Of beauty, iconography, and why everyone must feel sorry for me: Lviv, 3

Remembering Hecht’s “Venetian Vespers,” I am desperate for more. This section from his poem “Peripeteia” feels much in harmony with my current mind. In the silence before a play begins, he writes –

“Whether we like it or not, we are a crowd,
Foul-breathed, gum-chewing, fat with arrogance,
Passion, opinion, and appetite for blood.
But in that instant, which the mind protracts,
From dim to dark before the curtain rises,
Each of us is miraculously alone
In calm, invulnerable isolation,
Neither a neighbor nor a fellow but,
As at the beginning and end, a single soul,
With all the sweet and sour of loneliness.
I, as a connoisseur of loneliness,
Savor it richly, and set it down
In an endless umber landscape, a stubble field
Under a lilac, electric, storm-flushed sky,
Where, in companionship with worthless stones,
Mica-flecked, or at best some rusty quartz,
I stood in childhood, waiting for things to mend.
A useful discipline, perhaps. One that might lead
To solitary, self-denying work
That issues in something harmless, like a poem,
Governed by laws that stand for other laws,
Both of which aim, through kindred disciplines,
At the soul’s knowledge and habiliment.”  

…

I hardly know how to trust beauty anymore. This is the skepticism, possibly, of my generation, or of Americans generally? – some democratizing self-righteousness that attributes beauty to the uselessly ornate and frilly, to the “inaccessible,” or markers of class. I thought of this padding around Lviv’s history museum, in felt booties on the parquet floors. All Baroque excess: chandeliers reflecting light in crystal facets, in gold-framed mirrors; a chair shaped like a dragon, with its spine curving seductively to fit the seated person’s; the impassive, pale blue gaze of lily-skinned Polish gentry, ladies emerging from their gowns like Venus from foam. Beautiful uselessness.

To dismiss it, I know, would be some obvious pot-calling-the-kettle-blackery; poetry being that which “makes nothing happen.” But there must be beauty beyond mere things. More than an opiate. That which fires the blood.

And maybe (while I hate to step down from my self-constructed tower of snobbery) it must be slightly crude. The icons in Lviv, from about the 11th to 16th centuries in present-day Ukraine and Poland, were almost cartoonish in their simplicity. Flat space, arches and domes folded accordion-like together. Saints in bright pinks, oranges, tied to the rack. Infant Christs wrapped in gold, their brows hugely protuberant and mouths old-man-like, pursed and lined. In their starkness, the lack of realism, they at times allowed something else to come through those long faces. That something, or what struck me as possibly being so, was not divinity but humanness. In their huge, close-set eyes, deep brown beneath lined foreheads, there was gentleness, and quiet sorrow.

…

On the tram to the railway station, my way home from the city, the crowd of passengers crammed so tightly together I could not move. Struggling to pass my single hrevna bill up to the driver, I couldn’t manage to get my shoulder bag in front of me. By the time the crowd thinned out, a woman pointed to the bag – a large hole was cut out of its bottom, dropping coins and Chapstick everywhere. I tore through my things in horror, but it was too late. My wallet and camera were gone.

I must have looked a pathetic sight: choking back tears, clutching my destroyed bag as I tottered around the swerving tram. Just before we stopped at the station, a conductor made her rounds to check our tickets. Mine, I had been too distracted to punch correctly. She demanded the fine, 20 hreven. I tried to explain what had happened, that I was foreign and had been robbed, but her voice stayed flat and stern – 20 hreven. Finally I burst into furious tears, waved around a few crumpled bills from my pocket, and screamed, “Here! I have three hrevny! Do you want them?!” and ran off the tram (or I should say, to complete the picture, limped, because I'd somehow messed up my foot hopping around cobblestones).

On the train home, after I had finally gotten in touch with Peace Corps and my bank, I found out the bandit had withdrawn all the money from my Ukrainian account. All the money I’ve saved from working the past few months while spending as little as possible, living off root vegetables and rice, for nothing.

A young man across from me – a toothy, simpering thing – kept inviting me to drink beer with his friend. I declined and pulled my hoodie over my face, feigning sleep like possums. When night came I stayed up a long time. Restless, rancorous, hot in stiff sheets. The moon bobbed beside me, over the dark stretches of farm, the sudden yellow windows. Once a small river appeared and the moon streaked it, milkily.

“I, as a connoisseur of loneliness.” It must bear itself out into something of value.

A Bad-Girl Interlude - Lviv, 2

On the train ride west, I couldn’t stop staring at the family across the compartment: a teenaged girl, her mother, and some female relative, perhaps an aunt. The mother was nondescript and talked continuously, from what I could gather, of high prices of things. The daughter, to whom this conversation was hopelessly banal, slumped and rolled her glitter-rimmed eyes. Her clothes were tight with pockets full of cigarettes as conspicuous as her large, theatrical sighs – which were I suppose for my benefit, out of that desperate mortifying feeling that comes with being a teenager and being seen having parents. Her aunt was an enormously overweight woman whose bulk was made more ridiculous by a very pink, very floral polyester frock. They all ate chicken. Then the train car would not stop reeking of chicken. I watched the teenaged girl eat chicken with fascination and repulsion: how she arched her fingers over each slice as a large bird curls its talons, how her glossy lips made little smacking sounds as they pared the bones clean.

After her mother had fallen asleep, the girl slipped down from her bunk and out the train car at a station, probably for a smoke. A young man, who had been sitting in the next area of bunks down the car, also walked out. Neither returned for a long while, and it crossed my mind that perhaps the train had left without them. Then, maybe a half hour later, the two made their way down the aisle, his mouth nuzzling her neck. They kissed and returned to their separate bunks. 

"I look and look..." - Lviv journal, part 1

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, he describes a city in which travelers look at postcards of the same streets and squares, expected to admire the “lost grace” of the past. Of these places, “It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.”

Lviv – city of cobblestone and Grecian fountains, of cafes and accordion players in red-trimmed vests – produces similar sensations in its nostalgia, amnesia, absence.

Most un-Ukrainian of Ukrainian cities, it is (not coincidentally) the loveliest. The Austrians and Poles ruled the area for long periods, evident in the narrow streets of orderly, pastel-colored buildings with curling balconies. I shuttled between east and west, past and present: wandering from Rynok square, where leather-jacketed hipsters smoke and make out in front of worn stone angels, Christs, bare-breasted women; then into little Ukrainian produkty where mucus-eyed old men down vodka shots and buttered bread with sardines or pickles; or the tourist market brilliant with nesting dolls, painted eggs, Cossack maces, blouses embroidered in red and blue and flapping in the wind.

My plan had been to hunt down the Golden Rose, ruins of a 15^th century synagogue. According to an early 20^th century census, Lviv’s population was one quarter Jewish. Now, after waves of pogroms and the second world war, there’s hardly any Jews left. Searching the construction site – aluminum cordoning off the entire area so that I couldn’t even glimpse the ruins – I felt this loss stronger than ever. All I could find was the birthplace of Sacher-Masoch, author of the S&M fantasy Venus in Furs. Teenagers snapped pictures standing with his statue, which held aloft shackles. Next door was a chocolate shop with a large glass window where children watched bakers decorate cakes in frosted tendrils.

I felt similarly bizarre in the museum of religious history, where I found a small section devoted to Judaism. Nineteenth century Torahs, a few menorahs, folksy paintings of village Sabbaths, and an old wooden matzoh-making machine with a single piece of matzoh on top. In the back of the museum, I wandered into a concert: A hunched, black-haired, black-clad women pounded on organ keys. The opera singer, whose eyeliner I could see from the back, quavered her red lips around each note.

Later, on a crammed marshutka bus I saw a WWII monument dedicated to the Jews killed. It was a twisted symbol of pain. All angles, a man raised his arms up in a tortured “Why?”

I can say I felt sorrow and loss in these moments, and it is true. But more accurate to say I realized the loss of what was never mine. Despite my family’s history in this country, I have little attachment to my Jewish-Ukrainian ancestry. For this, I can’t blame my parents, who raised me Christian (which didn’t exactly “take,” either). I can’t even blame our white-washing, homogenizing American culture, so easily prey to historical amnesia. It is, I think, the irreconcilable gap that will always separate us from the past.

There were times when I felt hints of another city, now dead, named Lviv, revealing itself in phantasms. (“I look and look / As if I could be saved simply by looking,” Anthony Hecht writes.) At evening, warm gold light filtered down over the stones. It strung along the tram wires, as if the wires were the light itself, connecting all the curving streets in its gossamer. Pigeons flew up in a sudden wind, beating wings, and they, too, seemed to be pieces of the wind – or of this rare exultation that comes, bursts in a body, and passes through. 

But it's OUR useless peasant tongue.

The following excerpts from Anna Reid’s Borderland refer to the Ukrainian language’s debated, degraded status. The first details critics’ responses to Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, whose verses my students now recite in a sing-song drone, whose statue you'll see in thousands of towns across the country.  

“Russian reviewers praised Shevchenko’s talent, but regretted that it should be put to work on a useless peasant tongue. Ukrainian was ‘artificial,’ ‘dead,’ ‘a joke and a whim.’ It was incomprehensible that writers should ‘occupy themselves with such stupidities.’ […] Shevchenko had his reply ready:

… If you want to sing

For money and glory,

Then you must sing about Matriosha

And Parasha, and subjects

Like the sultans, parquet floors, spurs,

That’s where glory lies. But

He sings – ‘The blue sea is playing.’

While he himself is crying. Behind

Him stands a whole crowd,

All in peasant coats …”

These lines are typical Shevchenko – particularly the singing minstrel, or kobzar, who is often blind. Rainer Maria Rilke also became attached to the same figure during his travels as a young man through Eastern Europe. (I haven’t read much of The Book of Pictures, but I understand he rhapsodizes about Kiev’s golden domes, kobzars at the bandura, monks, and lots of medieval Kievan Rus nostalgia.)

This next excerpt interests me now that I’m leaving for Lviv tomorrow, where people are supposedly very proud of their Ukrainian. I’ll have to be more careful not to let Russian slang slip out. Also am interested in difference between "correct" language and dialect (and it is Power which defines the difference).

“There are also variations between the Russian-influenced Ukrainian of the central provinces and the Polish-influenced Ukrainian of Galicia, anathematized under the Soviets as not Ukrainian at all, but a bastard form of Polish. A Ukrainian friend brought up near Lviv remembers being told at school that ‘the language we were talking was improper, very bad, incorrect, some kind of dialect … and that somewhere there is this correct Ukrainian language, but somehow different – not the language we were talking of course.’”

It's a tie

HORRIFYING THINGS I have seen today:

1. On a slope of hill by the railroad tracks, the severed, lolling-mouthed head of a dog. His teeth were bared. I’d seen the rest of his body on the tracks before while waiting for trains, a soft blurred darkness like an eraser mark.

2. Also dog-related. One dog was sticking it to another dog as the latter tried to waddle away. Then two other dogs stood on their hind legs and HELD IT DOWN as the first dog was raping it. AHHHHHHH.

And now for adorable, precious things I have seen today:

1. Crocuses coming up in the forest!!!

2. I looked out the window and saw on top of our garage, a little black-and-white cat! He was sitting there like he was the king.

While writing this, I thought of another precious moment to break the tie:

Valentina asked me if I was excited to go to Kiev tomorrow. I said yes, but that I was nervous to address all those people. (I didn’t tell her exactly what my presentation was about, for obvious reasons.) She said, “Yes, of course, but” and here she stuck her fist in the air “YOU WILL SHOW THEM!” 

Some blogging about my slogging

It’s a good thing, I guess, that I haven’t written much here lately. I’ve heard it said, “If you aren’t exhausted at the end of every day, you aren’t doing your job as a volunteer.” So I guess I’m doing my job, for once.

I realize I haven’t written much about my actual job, either. Probably because it hasn’t yet yielded great fodder for pert, blogable observations.

Here’s what I do: Every day I try to see what I can get away with. This often involves throwing around a tiny purple bunny rabbit as we practice vocabulary words. (When the kids finally get sick of that rabbit, I’M EFFED!!!) As I teach, Svitlana sits in the back, often rolling her eyes, scribbling marks for each student.

Oh, that’s one thing that makes me want to vomit in terror: marks. Pupils receive a numerical grade for every class, between 1 and 12, based on some set of criteria which no one has ever really explained to me. I imagine Svitlana thinking darkly, “I don’t like your DUMB FACE, IGOR. You get a 2.”

If I am ever forced to give marks, I will just draw a smiley face or write “Tiger!” or “Yellow.”

In any case, I’m trying to make lessons as communicative and comprehensive while still covering material in our dumb-ass books. Often I’ll write out dialogs and cut them up, then have the kids re-arrange them, then practice the parts. I also have an enormous mountain of visual aids; I try to teach vocab using pictures rather than direct translation whenever I can.

Sadly, I will never be totally satisfied with my lessons, because I am not Sidney Poitier in To Sir With Love.

I’m traveling a lot in the next two weeks. I’m going to Lviv for spring break and am hoping for many depressing museums of Jewish history, and also cafes which are actual cafes and not just bars in disguise. And this Wednesday I’m hauling my big gay self to Chernihiv, near Kiev, to give a presentation to Peace Corps staff about improving training for gay volunteers – how to address issues they face (e.g. if you come out, people WILL LYNCH YOU), how to create “Safe Spaces” during training. This is going to be so awkward and great. I’m so excited. I’m going to wear my new thrift-store tweed jacket with elbow patches.

The thing is, though, I really just like being home. Every day Baba V and I love each other more and more. The other day she gave me a huge red apple and said, “See how pretty it is – like you!” and looked at me so, so lovingly. And then later when I was taking a bath she just popped in and scrubbed all the skin off my back.

So I guess this is a gender studies blog now.

There is a secret door in my room. My table pushes up against it, a black iron square. Not until last week did I think it could be a door. To my great excitement, I found it opened up into a long dark spiderwebbed shaft – a stove for heating in the old days? I want to fill it full of secrets.

I am becoming very interested in secrecy. For more on this, I turn to The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

I recently read Wilde’s novel for the first time, and I wonder at my wasted years of not referencing it in every gender studies class I ever took. Wilde himself embodies a now-stock figure of the homosexual, both in his charisma and in the infamous sodomy trial. The latter, in its Foucaultian flexing of power, not only involved a Starr-report-esque salivation over Wilde’s private life, but helped give a name to “the love that dare not speak its name.”

The novel also creates this figure of the homosexual. We find our dissipated, kind-of-gay-ish society dandies with their rapier one-liners (“Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner”). Dorian himself is adored by (/probably/definitely sleeps with) both sexes, not least by the man who paints his portrait with such obsessive love.

As for the closet – oh my God, hello, death shroud drawn over his portrait’s decay. As if prefiguring the link between homosexuality and disease, which would provide endless fodder for homophobic HIV/AIDS news coverage (and for my undergraduate thesis), the ever-more-disgusting portrait evokes a heady mixture of decadent sexuality, secrecy, and death. Sorry, I know that was all one sentence.

So far, this is all pretty obvious. What’s really getting me is, Dorian not only represents the homosexual, but Narcissus. Moreover, a Narcissus whose self-love is fueled by, and projected onto, books.

As he reads of a young Frenchman’s sensual adventures, Dorian begins his descent into sin: “There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. […] It was a poisonous book.”

Sounds good to me! And then there’s this:

“There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvelous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.”

So do we love literature because we love ourselves, and long to see our reflections in books? Does literature spur on self-love as we identify with characters and their desires, and take on their desires as our own? To disastrous results, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary both saw themselves as characters in romance novels. The men involved in their adulteries, their reality, hardly matter – what matters is the dream of oneself.

Compared to these heterosexual fantasies, the sexuality implied in Dorian Gray is far more aberrant. But it’s not useful to ask whether literary characters are really “gay.” A more interesting question, I think, is this: In literature and our consumption of it, how do the respective channels of desire and identification (already hard to differentiate in “real” life!) intermingle and merge? Why is this also so often a secretive, deliciously dangerous, even deadly process? Or: How is reading like and not like whacking off?

I could go on. For now I won’t (you’re welcome). I’ll just direct you to Todd Hayne’s glitterlicious film Velvet Goldmine, which I now realize is constantly referencing and winking at Wilde. Toward the climax(!), Christian Bale masturbates to a picture of a glam rock star (“Maxwell Demon” / basically Ziggy Stardust) who he’s been lusting after and trying to emulate. As he masturbates, he simulates Maxwell Demon’s position, spread out on his side like an odalisque.

It’s a solitary pleasure, secret, confused – and when we read, not unlike our own.