"I strike the eye..."

On Wednesday I will be in Germany. This summer I do not stop moving, and it is a good place to be in, no-place, en route and always a little dirty, dazed. I sleep on many trains. This has the unfortunate effect of never being quite prepared for the places in which I wake up. I’ve forgotten German. Even simple sentences require a monumental effort of memory, first English to Ukrainian, then Ukrainian to German. All I have is an untranslated copy of Rilke’s The Book of Hours. I imagine myself flipping through it wildly in the airport. Guard: “Where are your documents?” Me: “Uh… ‘You must change your life!’”

Everyone survived Camp GLOW. Girls were empowered, feel-goodery and fun enjoyed by all. In all seriousness, I do like working with young people, especially such smart, engaged ones as these. It invigorates, makes me feel less of a 50-year-old. I even got to teach a poetry workshop. We read Anne Carson’s “Father’s Own Blue Cardigan” and Adrienne Rich’s “Song.” I think, despite the language barrier, poetry is useful for ESL students. In Ukrainian classrooms poetry is all sing-song regurgitation. They do not pay each word the inspection it demands.

I want to tell you more about this campsite. Not to whine about my discomfort; rather, because I am fascinated with the miserable people who run that miserable little dump. The manager, Andre, lied often. Before our camp, another group of PCVs had run a camp dealing with environmental issues. Andre had agreed to give their students a mini-environmental project to conduct around the campsite, something like composting. Instead, he made some campers help chop down young saplings in the forest and build him a fence. Well, such is Ukraine, the country of burning trash piles.

His campsite is pretty, but is slowly going to bog. The outdoor showers have nowhere to drain, so their spray collects in muddy puddles. Every evening this attracts mosquitoes, which descend in huge numbers like a corrupted air, flutter inside our ears, devoured us. The rooms felt dirty. We slept on rusty springs, which sagged when sat on with a humiliated creak.
Some relief we found at the river. It too was dirty, thick with furry moss and tentacled blossoms, but cool. I liked to tread water and watch the reeds. Once a boy came to the water. He splashed at everyone, letting out strange, high-pitched squeals, flinging bits of algae or spreading it over his fingers. His eyebrows wagged at me. Squealing, squealing. His mouth opened very wide and was full of teeth.

One evening there was a wedding party. They were very drunk. So too was the campsite staff. One man, who did not seem to know how to put on his shirt correctly (forever flapping from his back, cape-like, his slack white chest open), many times approached our girls, even after our director Stephanie many times told him not to. The next morning, Andre’s wife scolded Stephanie: “Tell your girls to be nice to our staff, smile, and say hello.” She was also drunk at the time. She had a fleshy face with a small doll’s features inside of it: red mouth, eyebrows shaved off and skinny ones penciled on.

If I had any mind for plot I’d write these people into a short story. I fear writing fiction might be too painful an exercise. My mind either fastens on details or it abstracts. It can’t take in the whole, real sweep of a day; it ignores how conversations actually sound and wants only language glorified or perverted or twisted inside-out. It turns bodies into signs. I must work harder. Reading Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and I, too, itch to make something out of London in 1666, that year numbered for the Beast – when comets boded the plague and flames to come; when necromancers and astrologers hawked quack elixirs until they themselves erupted in dreaded buboes; when houses of the sick were marked and, horribly, sealed. I can never want for more world, I just don’t know how to make it into something else.

Reading selections of Virginia Woolf’s diary now. She is a chimera of passion and composure, good humor and sharp edge. It is a delight, too, to watch the novels as clouds taking shape, to see her as not yet canon and still sniped at by critics: “I strike the eye; and elderly gentlemen in particular get annoyed.” I do not think I could do anything she could not do better, but maybe I will strike in my own way. “For I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist.”