Fatfoot

A man on a bus with a bucket of dark berries folded his hands and they were stained blue. The hands were square and sausage-fingered, and some blue patches were more purple or pink like sunset, with the darkest blue around his nails. These, hands that deserve a painting of themselves.

Last week, out west near Lutsk with some friends, we swam in a river. Less swam than were carried, the current cool and gentle arms. Cows stood at the bank, us scrambling up the mud, and cranes in the trees. Later at my friend’s house, one white crane came to the door. Someone said it was a good luck sign. The visitor spread enormous wings laced in black.

I write from a campsite in eastern Ukraine, where I’m preparing for a girl’s camp with a few other volunteers. Today we set out from the woods into town. The road, straight and white, vibrated with heat. A truck pulled over and we got in the back, where three workmen sat on benches. One’s huge bare belly shook as the wheels drove into ditches. His face was shiny, he asked question after question and his friends laughed. One laughed so hard, him a skinny one shirtless in overalls and tattooed in vague Asian calligraphy, and his eyes went red with tears. We didn’t understand much beyond, “Do you have a husband?” We said yes.

The other PCVs here are such positive, extroverted people, I don’t know how to talk to them. Everything that comes out my mouth is lame and depressing. “I don’t really like team sports. Or any games, really.” Or, “Actually, I can’t ride a bike very well.” Now I am hiding in my cabin because my bug-bite-ravaged foot has become grotesquely swollen. I am Fatfoot. I hate camp.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Svitlana. I’d prepared a great deal of flashcards for the GRE in English Literature. I told her that I take a lot of pleasure in memorizing who wrote what, and what makes a sonnet Italian or English, or what “hexameter” is, and so on. Her response was typically Svitlanish: “I have come to think recently that people who read many books do not know how to live in the real world.”

Well, duh. Thanks Svitlana. I guess that’s why I’m the camp Quasimodo. Maybe I should jump on the next truck of workmen. Where they are headed must be the world.

I’ve written about this before, the relationship between the “real world” and the imagination – a relationship far too interesting to be so tersely dismissed. There are, I’m convinced, as many realities as there are people. Everyone experiences a world shaped by culture, by memory, by imagination. Even if we agree, OK, there’s some objective foundation to the world that is a real world – well, without art, that world’d be worthless.

Writers don’t need to be redeemed for their impracticality. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” That’s Milton, Svitlana. Put that in your borscht and eat it.