|
This has been a summer of train travel. Mostly going back and forth to visit Dusty in Michigan, who is building sets on a film for a few months, and back to Chicago again. It leaves at 6pm from Union Station and comes back at 6am. I know where to put my bike (behind the trash can in the cafe car). I know to take a seat on the left hand side of the car to get the best view of the lake. The Hiawatha line takes me up to Milwaukee to see Claire; I bring my dollar-bin eggplant and zucchini, we take long walks and I make her laugh when I tell the ridiculous story about how I lost my phone for one night. Her wine reminds me of communion in the chapel in Italy. I take the Metra train out to the suburbs to catch Penny and Flo’s last softball game, which ended in tears and Burger King in the parking lot. Living by the rhythms of a rail schedule, you lean into the suspension and acceleration of time. I am able to finish whole books on these trips, jumping timelines and cruising in parallel landscapes. I do not, however, ever really know which one I myself am in. Initially, in my plans for this summer, I imagined that I would stay with Dusty most of the time. But his work days are 12 hours and I miss the colors of my rugs and washing (and forgetting about) my dishtowels and the brick wall outside my bedroom window. And generally a space of my own. When I’m traveling, I often suspend the few routines I have, opting to flow with someone else’s. Though I’m finding that with age it becomes harder to do. So I’ve taken to going to Michigan for shorter times instead. A few weeks ago, I spent the whole weekend confined to my bedroom as it’s the only room that has AC. My imagination has had to do cartwheels around what the room can be. Resting place, working place, boredom place, horny place. I was enacting a one-woman play about someone away from her partner, in heat, all of her “friends” preoccupied for the weekend and completely unable to figure out how the fuck to get her AC unit into her bedroom without fully slicing her fingers open. (Note: absolutely do not make a vinaigrette after shredding your fingers to bits). I finally gave up on installing the AC and succumbed to watching a stack of DVDs in my sweltering living room until I forced myself to get up and get a poke bowl down the street. Sometimes, I am just not so independent of a girl. You have a hard time with solitude, Dusty texts. I answer that it always surprises me. I realize that while I relish being left alone, I have hardly any moments where I am truly alone. I need to create my own rhythms, a paralyzing task. I don’t have a dog or a kid, which are both sounding really nice right about now, and I have a hard time remembering the house plants. So I re-arranged one of our rooms and let myself take a long walk for no reason and took 3 showers in one day. We’ll see how long it lasts. I started reading about making kites. I can often feel untethered. And all of these feelings of listlessness, a delicate sense of time, wrapped in the frenetic energy and grief of exactly now doesn’t always pair well with a whiplash vision of the future, eroding. My work is remote, vaporous, digital, time-zone-less. I used to have work that required my body. That required other people’s bodies. Sweet liquids shaken and mixed, poured, cleaned, repeat. It was set to a clock. In and out time. My time zone may not be your time zone, don’t feel obligated to answer this email if it is not your working time! Hey - just checking - did you get my email? Did you get my email? Can we chat? Can I give you a call? Is tomorrow okay? Is next week okay? Is next month okay? Is never okay and can we dissolve together in crumbling residue? Yeah, sure, okay. I melt into the fabric of my couch. I feel like I don’t move for days. Chin tucked into chest in the worst kind of spinal arrangement possible, until I’m told time has passed because it fades to black, and then soft light comes in again. Oh, I have also been talking out loud to myself more. Good god. Talking to god is talking to myself is talking to god, I guess. —- A bottle of homemade cherry liquor from Croatia, 2006, is sitting at the bottom of my cedar cabinet. I pillaged it from my grandmother’s liquor cabinet New Year’s Eve, 2021. While making espresso martinis, I found it with a handwritten label that said “Makarska, 2006”. She told me it was from her father’s family in Croatia, when we all visited together that first time. I asked if I could take some home. “Sure, honey, what do I care!” So I poured a bit into an empty wine bottle and squirreled it away, handwriting my own label: višnejvača bašković, makarska 2006. The bottle has lived on my shelf for four years now. It’s moved houses with us three times: Long Beach, Berkeley, Chicago. I’ve shared from it exactly two times, in a swept up moment. I have since forgotten it, like a treasure left to rot. The other day, while pulling out some Malört (that precious liquor that rarely ever gets spared a pour for visitors coming to our house) I noticed the cherry liquor looked nearly all gone! There was a half an inch left below the red ring now sugar-crusted on the inside. It had evaporated with every millisecond of neglect. It hadn’t occurred to me that my desire to preserve would cause it to slowly disappear. Why was I so insistent on taking it? It tasted like cough medicine and thick communion wine. It didn’t hold my own memories, though it reminded me of some. I think: Should we be so concerned about where we came from at all? When I asked if he ever thought about his ancestors, my friend Paul said simply: It doesn’t inform me. I think about my ancestors a medium-amount, certainly less than Lizzy who actively channels them. I’ve been trying to pull on the threads in my own line. But I am consciously selective. I choose the family branches I linger on. I have been trying to piece together fragments of what was before, before, before. It’s the great American orientation towards identity, I guess? We are the forever adopted children, conquerors, migrants, slaves and refugees. Who are our real grandmothers? What landscapes are actually etched in our memories? What is ours, what is theirs? Where do we belong? And how are we intruding? How many timelines have we jumped? What’s the plot again? I can trace ancestors who came here fleeing war. I can also just as easily trace ancestors who came voluntarily on the very first ship of settlers. Conquering land that wasn’t theirs, a righteous entitlement. I am deeply American in that I am a fabric of so many narratives that have spit me out on these salty shores of million dollar Real Estates with shit-covered sidewalks. I think about the values of immigrant communities, how they’re often frozen in time - placed exactly in the moment they left. When they go back home, they become appalled at the girls wearing jeans, they don’t understand the slang. They want to return to the future-past. I saw this crystallized in the strange Dutch-American Christian values that made up most of the families at my high school, that made up the spine of myself. The Dutch-American was now its own subset of traditions, steeped in olie bollen and puritanical flavors. Going back to these grandmotherlands I recognized little in the values my grandparents held so tightly and insistently. In Holland, I found god to be dead and church buildings empty, and in Croatia communism was an ever-present ghost. Life had moved on without them. “The world has aged. God has aged. Monotheism is an old recipe, and that’s why fanatics have taken over. By repeating ad infinitum the sacred texts they emptied of their substance. God’s youthfulness has disappeared. He was immense and He shrunk. They’re trying to give him back His wings, but these are not taking off. An airplane bombing the hell out of a city is younger than God. Hiroshima is younger too. Look! I am forced to love planes, speed, terror.” Masters of the Eclipse, Etel Adnan, 2009
I stopped looking at social media during the wildfires in California in January of this year. Really, that’s the land of my ancestors, living and near-dead. Three generations on both sides already. Am I allowed to love it? To hate it? To claim it as the place that shaped me? Even though it is piled on top of the bones of so many others? The Firsts. Instead, I start becoming obsessed with reading about its ecological history. “Mediterranean regions like Los Angeles tend to have greater topographical complexity than humid regions because they have more ‘information’ in the form of catastrophic environmental history embedded in them,” Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear, 1998
I wonder if that’s why I’m drawn to the damp of the Midwest. I don’t have to contend with all of the information seeping out from the arid rocks. Humanity’s, and my own small histories. I don’t think I’d like the Midwest as much if it didn’t stay warm at night, my sister says. I agree.
I read a piece years ago I think about often, in Noēma, about some women in Mexico City suffering from “geological sickness”. Deep time, it’s sometimes called. They experienced this after living through one of the most significant earthquakes in Mexico City that occurred September 19, 2017. The other most notable earthquake there happened on the exact same date in 1985. One of these women described that “for her, the earthquake never really ended.” She has a variety of health issues: losing a lot of weight, dizzy spells and long bouts of insomnia. Other signs the anthropologist noticed was that those affected were often not able to sleep in their apartment alone or they felt they had to sleep with shoes on. These people, mostly women, are called tocada, “touched”. The actual “illness” is disputed, as are most things that carry something too close to mysticism, or truth. Or maybe to do with women. The idea is that when the earthquake occurred, it released a preserved moment in time, a physical event affecting a mental state. Mexico City used to be in the middle of a sea, there used to be a lake, and now it’s been drained. Now some who had experienced it are forever tethered to that particular moment and all that it held in its fictile archives. The woman tracks the crack in her wall that is slowly growing. The building is arching and suspended, just like her. She is now the fractured building, reverberating a history, or maybe precisely the present. Feet planted on either side of the ever-widening fault line.
There was an Italian sculptor, Pinuccio Sciola, who created incredible sound pieces carved, almost impossibly, out of rock. He would travel to South and Central America often, believing, as the Incas did, that stones hold the memory of the universe. The theory in this practice, informed by ancient beliefs, is that every rock sounds different because every material has a different memory. He quotes the Incas saying The stones are the spine of the world. Catacombs of clay, dust to dust, hardened encasements for memories, we are particles that disintegrate and inform the next churnings, feed the rumblings of the hot-bellied earth. “No place on Earth offers greater security to life and greater freedom from natural disasters than Southern California” - LA Times, 1934.
A shiny promise. All tangerine coastlines and purple mountains. A haven, a destination. A last frontier abruptly truncated. A reverse tsunami of concrete towers and faux-italiante mansions challenging the ticking power of the sea. —- When I was living in Berkeley I joined a Balkan women’s choir. The closer you get to the Black Sea, away from the Adriatic, the closer to the earth’s core the songs feel. The dissonance like the earth’s plates rubbing together, making you wonder - is this then: of then, from then, in past or future? Or is it now?
—----
My way of contending and understanding what is happening exactly now is to read missives from the past that have had time to sit and age. Instead of evaporating, they got more potent. During 2020 I started reading Croatian authors, reporting from the 90s and the turmoil of a former Yugoslavia. Fractured and fragile identities. Like maddened colts, shaky legs, deep seated anger and principles. Reading about Kosovo, then about Jerusalem. Artsakh, Armenia. Holy contested sites. And not exactly what to do, but rather observing, what was done. Same things. Resist, seek out coffee if possible, write on scraps of paper or wherever you can, fight, gather, get angry, dance, read, find love, resist. Slavenka Drakulić talks about going to a dinner at Harvard in 1991, in the midst of it all. It opens her book The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War: “The situation seems symbolic: in a rich people’s club, with soft background glissandos on the harp…coconut ice-cream decorated with raspberries and weak, decaffeinated coffee, my hosts nod their heads over the Balkan tragedy… Because the burden of the past - symbols, fears, national heroes, mythologies, folksongs, gestures, and looks, everything that makes up the irrational and, buried deep in our subconscious, threatens to erupt any day now - simply cannot be explained. I see the interest and concern on the faces of my friends being replaced by weariness and then resignation”.
—— Time feels like an accordion. Less linear, more foldings and unfoldings. Every few months I go back to California. It is the same, and it is slowly changing. I can pick things up exactly where I left them, and the flowers are always perfect and preserved in a perpetual spring, and yet there is always something to remind me that time has passed. Like a glitch; a variation in the timeloop. My nephew’s hair is longer and wilder, he knows more words, he is pronouncing my name more distinctly. I miss the way he used to say it. An aunt has passed away, no more remnants of sweet and low packets from her, no more Real Housewives blasting from her wall-sized TV. Dynamics are shifting. Steadily. I am the grandmother now trying to decipher new slang, ready to dismiss what’s new because I’m not familiar with it yet.
“Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the course of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetical to geometrical progression seems to have occurred”. - Queer, William S. Burroughs
It was the same coming back to Chicago after six years. I’ve now lived back here for exactly one year, and it has taken that year to feel somewhat settled back into place. Or rather, resigned to how it feels to live in any place. Like spacers preparing for your braces, slowly separating your teeth one from the other. It is sore at first, then you are either numb to it or have adapted. Or a house with its bones settling. My own body hasn’t released from the past years of wresting through my early 30s, teeth gritting, chest tight, spine prepared for a fight. Not quite relishing the sweet release that comes with age. The release I find in my brain more than in my body. I ache to stay in one place, but I am split in two, five, and seventeen. I am telling Ida my dilemmas. She says Humans are inherently nomadic, aren’t we? Are we? We are time-travelers; bended, shaped, warped, cells re-assembled and re-aligned, organs rearranged. Edward had said a few months ago that your cells actually regenerate every seven years. Is that true? Years ago when I was afraid all of my teeth were going to fall out, I read that the memory of your teeth has a delay of around 7 years. The caramels and teeth grinding and acid making its way back up through your throat will surface, even if you have changed your bad old habits. Am I making up the number 7? Am I willing it to be divine, to make sense as to why I feel so constantly re-assembled. They say when someone’s pregnant, their organs get like this, re-arranged. In fact, they say the child’s DNA stays within the mother’s. Shape shifting, time traveling, becoming new, staying the same. A womb; a portal. —---- The same grandmother with the cherry liquor once told me that balance was unachievable because things are always changing.
|
