Depression/Coincidence/Travel

Not long after reading the news of Claude Levy-Strauss' death yesterday, I came to a passage in Ryszard Kapusciniski's book "The Soccer War" that reminded me of how ideas coincide (for me, not in a Jungian sense, but rather in that sense that grows out of lots and lots of reading coupled with coincidence):

"In Lagos, when I was ill, I read through Tristes Tropiques. Claude Levi-Srauss has been staying in the Brazilian jungles, carrying out ethnographic research among the Indian tribes. He is running into difficulties and resistance from the Indians; he is discouraged and exhausted.

Above all, he asks himself questions. Why has he come here? With what hopes or what objectives? Is this a normal occupation like any other profession, the only difference being that the office of laboratory is separated from the practitioner's home by a distance of several thousand kilometres? Or does it result from a more radical choice, which implies that the anthropologist is calling into question the system in which he was born and brought up? It was now nearly five years since I had left France and interrupted my university career. . . . . By whom or by what had I been impelled to disrupt the normal course of my existence? . . . Did my decision express a deep-seated incompatibility with my social setting so that, whatever happened, I would inevitably live in a state of ever greater estrangement from it? Through a remarkable paradox, my life of adventure, instead of opening up a new world to me, had the effect rather of bringing me back to the old one, and the world I had been looking for disintegrated in my grasp. . . . Travelling through regions upon which few eyes had gazed, sharing the existence of communities whose poverty was the price -- paid in the first instance by them -- for my being able to go back thousands of years in time, I was no longer fully aware of either world. What came to me were fleeting visions of the french countryside I had cut myself off from, or snatches of music and poetry which were the most conventional expressions of a culture which I must convince myself I had renounced, if I were not to belie the direction I had given to my life. 

Kapuscinski writes about his own depression, about depression that befalls him in the tropics: "the depression torments you and you try to free yourself of it. But the requisite strength is not born in a moment. It takes time to accumulate it in sufficient quantity to overcome the depression. You drink beer and wait for that blessed moment. . . . Describe other behaviour from periods of depression. Physiological changes in chronic states: the slumber of cortical cells, the numbness in the fingertips, the loss of sensitivity to solours and the general dulling of vision, the transient loss of hearing. There would be a lot to say."

And, as I experience every year at about this time of severely shortened days, depression isn't only a tropical event. I fight it with exercise and diet and light and, of course I drink beer and wait for that blessed moment. And I'm tormented by the culture I left behind even as I came back, and I'm haunted by the PBS interviewer who asked me about academic freedom at BYU and commented: "Princeton, Vanderbilt, BYU, UVSC -- I've never seen an academic career in such precipitous decline!" And I answered then, and I answer now in the midst of my doubts and sorrows: "Yes, and every step was carefully chosen."

The Tragic Intensity of Europe

What's it like to be a Foreigner? This question was first raised forcefully in my mind by a film I saw in Germany with my friend Zarko Radakovic. It is called "The Foreigner" and was directed by Amos Poe. I've been thinking about it ever since.

One product of that thinking appeared in November of 2008 as Vampiri / Razumni recnik (Vampires / A Reasonable Dictionary), published in Serbian in Belgrade. The first half is Zarko's, the second mine. We write each in his own language. We converse in German. Zarko grew up in Communist Yugoslavia, I in the Mormon West. We were born to be foreigners in each other's world. My name "Scott" even means "vermin" in his language.

And yet, Zarko and I have been friends for almost thirty years. The friendship has made me into a different person than I would have been otherwise. It has changed me, piece by piece, thought by thought, atom by atom, experience by experience, and so have the years.

The photos at the end of our second book contrast starkly with the photos from our first book: Repetions: Travels into the Landscape of a Novel(ist), published in Belgrade in 1994.

And those photos were preceded by an earlier one, taken by Zarko's wife Zorica in their apartment in Tuebingen. We're reading identical copies of Peter Handke's novel Repetition, which was the catalyst for our journey into the novel's landscape -- what is now Slovenia, but at that time still part of Yugoslavia.

Things change, and in those changes we make our lives.

About the time our second book appeared, Zarko also edited a remarkable text in Germany, an edition of Schreibheft: Zeitschrift fuer Literature, a German literary magazine. Along with Austrian writer Peter Handke, Zarko produced a volume of literature from Serbia, translated into German and titled “The Tragic Intensity of Europe.”

This morning I reread some of the stories, several of the essays. I don't read Serbian, so this volume is a precious window into Zarko's world, into the intellectual and artistic universe made up of writers he knows whose world has so radically changed over a decade and a half -- the time between our books, our photos.

Zarko's essay “View from Zemun”

 begins with these lines:

Three decades have passed since I left the Balkans. The place from which I emigrated at the end of the Seventies was called Yugoslavia. Tito was still in power.

Settled in Germany, I immediately began to preserve my Yugoslavian past: driven by “homesickness” and by the almost animal need to return repeatedly – but never for long.

            If I had worries of any kind in the first years of emigration, they usually had to do with the uncertain success of a sports team. Never could I have imagined the destruction that would begin in the early Nineties, for I grew up with the good-natured ignorance that assumed that this country would never fall apart.

Zarko's essay is about the Serbian writer Igor Marojevic, a younger writer who fled the chaos of civil war to live in Barcelona, but returned to Serbia after four years. “Why didn’t you stay in Barcelona?” Zarko asks him. “I was afraid I would forget the language, he said – an answer only a writer can give.”

            Those are the words that remain from the conversation with Igo Marojevic in a dark Belgrade café, smoking cigarettes, drinking black coffee, visualizing with no illusions; in a café with a view in the direction of the Danube and Zemun, the place where Marojevic has lived since returning from emigration, the place I have left, because I remain an emigrant.

Because, Zarko might as well have said, because I have forgotten my language. Because I am not a writer. 

Although that is implied, with all its tragic implications, it's not true. Zarko lives in his language, the language that used to be Serbo-Croatian and that has become Serbian. He writes in it, book after book: Pogled, Knifer, Emigracija, Tuebingen, Ponavljanje, and Vampiri. He translates into it: a dozen important and sometimes big books by Peter Handke. 

And he returns to his country often, although he doesn't stay long. His last visit, with his partner Anne, he explained in a postcard, was for the sake of "Sophie." He meant, of course, his grandaughter. And he meant, I'm certain, for the sake of wisdom, of language, of self.

The Schreibheft issue contains any number of tragically intense stories, stories of emigrants become foreigners. One, by Dragan Aleksic, will have to stand for the rest:

The Heart Full of Rain

When I was a young man, I wrote a book whose hero says at one point: I want to go anywhere, I want to be silent, I don't want anyone to know anything about me. There, far away, I will cry and have only a single wish: to return. 

Twenty years later, at a mature age, as an emigrant to America, driven to windy Ohio, I listen in the evenings to my small sons who, before falling asleep, cry for our old house and our city. Later, sleeping, they smile and speak -- in English.

I am silent, with no connection to my fate.

I feel nothing.

I grieve for no thing.

I call nothing into memory.

I am not like the hero of my first novel.

I do not cry.

I do not want to return.

. . . But my heart is full of rain.

(2007, English translation mine, from the German of Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann)  

Equinoctial Thoughts

It's a little over a week till the autumnal equinox, but the sun is now rising in the notch to the south of the mountain to the east of us, having climbed, since June 21, up and over the mountain from the notch on its northern end, and with the storm blowing in today, the sky is dark and the windchimes busy.

Yesterday, cleaning up a pit I had lined with douglas fir posts left over from building our house, I decided to stand them in a line marking the summer solstice. If you look along the posts in this photo, you can locate the spot on Lake Mountain where the sun quits moving north, stands still for an instant (sol-stice), and then moves south for the winter.

Why does that matter to me? I suppose it matters for the same reason it mattered to everyone who has marked the solstice, whether through standing stones, marks inside rock formations, or whatever means. We are affected by movements of the sun. Short days mean, for me, a return to more depressive moods. I compensate for that, at best, with thoughts of backcountry skiing.

The wind will blow my posts over, balanced on their ends as they are, the seasons will progress as they always have, and I, now in my 60th year, will follow the seasons as long as I can and then follow the posts.

Following up, Comparing dinners

Our dinner tonight was from the Bombay House, leftovers from Friday's party for Integrated Studies faculty and staff. This guy was browsing on oak leaves at the same time. I would have invited him in to sample the IPA I was quaffing, but thought that the invitation might spoil the moment.

Fawning around

Woke up this morning to see quick movements outside. Fawns chasing one another through the oakbrush, bounding, darting, whirling around their more serious mothers. Four does, six fawns. Two fawns left their playmates and headed (literally) into their mother, butting her udder for some liquid breakfast. One of their little friends, whose mother was, perhaps, on a quicker weaning program, nosed around the activity, hoping for a sip too, but of course the doe would have none of that. She started to lead the whole bunch across the street into a denser stand of brush, but was turned back by a woman walking her little black dog and grey goat. (I'm not making this up.) At that point I got this photo (click for a larger view):

A few minutes later, on the other side of the house, Lyn pointed out this buck, browsing through the meadow.

[enhanced just hours later by Don LaVange, using whatever magic he uses]

And finally, on the lower deck, we found proof of the desirability of our full, bushy sweet basil, its leaves almost ready for a fine weekend pesto, but now making at least one of those fawns or does or bucks happy this fine morning.

Fugue + State: Brian Evenson

There are musical fugues and psychological fugues. Brian Evenson's polyphonic new book of psychological short stories, Fugue State, adds the literary fugue to the list.

The psychological fugue state is characterized by a loss of identity, by a wandering away from who one was into another, amnesic state. The musical fugue states a theme and then revoices it contrapuntally. Evenson's stories take the psychological meaning ("I had, Bentham claimed, fallen into a sort of fugue state, in which the world moved past me more and more rapidly, a kind of blur englobing me at every instant. And yet he had never, so he confided to Arnaud, felt either disoriented or confused. Yes, admittedly, during this period he had no clear idea of his own name. . . ." -- from the title story), and over the course of nineteen variations play with and examine the theme in various voices, voices disjunct from themselves as early as the first sentence of the story:

"Years later, she was still calling her sister, trying to understand what exactly had happened."

"For some days now, I have felt myself to be pursued by my second ex-wife."

"There came a certain point, in his speech, in his confrontation with others, in his smattering with the world, that Hecker realized something was wrong"

"I have been ordered to write an honest accounting of how I became a Midwestern Jesus and the subsequent disastrous events thereby accruing, events for which, I am willing to admit, I am at least partly to blame."

"In the end, suffering and not knowing what else to do, I left her abruptly and without warning, taking only the clothes on my back."

"I'd read once, in what book I no longer recall, a phrase that for no apparent reason came to haunt me."

"In retrospect, it was easy for her to see it had been a mistake to have sex with a mime."

"Clearly the method of elucidation I employed in my report did not satisfy the administration, and thus I am at a loss as to know how to proceed."

"Late in the year, during a trip to the Tyrol, the sky so gray throughout the day that he felt himself to be living in a perpetual twilight, Bauer lost confidence in his ability to work with plaster."

"It was a freak accident, a wire snapping off the load and whipping back to slash across his face, breaking his nose, tearing open both his eyes."

"On the night of 12 October, I was compelled for reasons I still find quite difficult to explain to kill one Alfons Kuylers, esteemed dealer in imported goods of a specialty nature, my mentor, my master in the art of philosophical paradox, my tutor in all things theological."

"Toward evening, well before Traub expected it, came a notable transformation in the face."

Traub and Bauer are characters in a similar story. Several of the stories are set in post-apocalyptic times. The loss of language or family or resemblance ("He no longer resembled me") is common to all the stories. In short, voices reporting from fugue states make up a literary fugue the likes of which I have never read or heard.

Art by Zak Sally, including an illustration for each story and a full graphic "illustration"/depiction/visual thinking of the story "Dread," add another eyevoice to the polyphony.

Conundrum, Quandary, and Paradox

This week Lyn and I were in Breckenridge, Colorado for a reunion of her family. One day several of us climbed Quandary Peak, 14,265 feet and just across the Blue River from where we were staying. As my photo shows, we weren't the only ones on the peak that day.

The outing reminded me of a climb my son Ben reported a couple of years ago, another Colorado mountain with a philosophical name: Conundrum Peak. When I looked it up on the internet, I found the following photo and description:

Located near Aspen, CO, USA, Conundrum Peak reaches 14,060 feet, however, it is not an "official" CO 14ers since it does not rise the magic 300 feet above the connecting saddle with Castle. Subpeak or not, it is a worthwhile climb in its own right and can easily be done together with Castle Peak.

I figured that I might now have bragging rights. 

More importantly, Ben's climb of Conundrum led to an exchange of emails between us that we called "The Father/Son Conundrum." Perhaps we can initiate a second volume now, something like "Qualifying Our Quandaries," to be followed by a third volume, also named after a Colorado place: "The Purpose of Paradox."