Scribblings with Green Chalk

Long time, no posting. I’ve been wondering how much time it takes for a ‘blog death’ to take effect. Hopefully, more than a few weeks away from the computer. I’ve been traveling and and trying to finish up some important school work, which didn’t leave time–nor any real desire–to keep up with blogging. So I was appreciating other things. Moreover, I was cut off from the internet for much of the time. And since there was no urgent work to be done on state (OK, school) level, I had no regrets.

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I don’t know exactly how it happened that I became obsessed with pictures of trees. It was probably something about my first visit to Ithaca, how the trees looked crusted with snow, how light fell. When I came back in the summer, a friend told me about woman who went to the gorge every day to take a picture of the same tree and trace how it slowly changed with the seasons.

Pictures of trees dominate in my Florida album. It’s been a long time since I lived near a forest, let alone in one, so those mornings in Florida, when I woke up to the sound of branches moving in the breeze and twigs snapping under squirrels’ paws, were more than photo opportunities. Those sounds could only be taken in memory (you can’t record the drowsiness or the morning chill that make them what they are). And the pictures themselves are nowhere near what it really is like. That’s the point in taking them.

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Doro let me have the last piece of her fabulous cherry pie. You are what you eat. I’m cherry pie.

Florida.

I got here at the end of one of the longest days in my life. After a string of trains and planes, beads of heterotopias.

It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Which always means your world, that is, mine.

*from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Florida.”

What’s wrong with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland?

When I first read it, which was a while ago, I didn’t give it a second thought. It seemed to be revolving smoothly, a well-oiled utopian music box. The structure appeared sound. As sound as a recipe: throw in the elements, concoct solutions, and pretend that it’s clear-cut mathematics. And then get an idiot to look at your equation. It took some shaking to realize that a few screws were loose in the story. I was the idiot looking at the equation.

There’s a mechanics of writing utopias and a mechanics of reading them. If you forget about the other one, you are the story’s dupe. This is no true forgetfulness but a combination of fear and laziness at the sight of a mathematical problem. You stare at the lines of numbers on a sheet and find yourself nodding, as they painlessly fly through your brain.

I have two crude pictures in my mind when I say “mechanics”: the author with measuring instruments, slowly putting the parts together and the reader, screwdriver in hand, bending over the work to dismantle it. Reading utopian fiction without a screwdriver is, to me, exactly like staring at an equation. It’s pointless. In the latter case you can merely say you like the shapes of the digits, in the former, that you’re intrigued by the author’s use of adjectives.

Utopias are planted in the author’s here and now. Unlike autobiographies and memoirs, though, they do not repeat that with every “I.” The sage leading you through non-place is that very same author that in a memoir is spanked by his or her mother, however. They’re showing you their own world with a twist: as if someone had cleaned all the streets, repaired all the clocks, made all the people kind and wise. Made all the people… Made all the people…–

Here is where Gilman’s music box gets stuck.–

Made all the people… white. Hear those screws rattle? I didn’t when I first read the novel. I put it away without a second thought. It was only when a teacher addressed the question of Herland’s whiteness in class that it sank in. Why did I miss it?

While it could be true that I have a gaping hole in my head through which intelligence, vitamins, and all the other wonderful undefined things escape, I would prefer to believe that there is still hope for me. My mistake was not to bring my screwdriver to the text. Or: I stared at the equation and didn’t try to solve it myself. You have to break into the utopia, because no utopia is a dream. Wrapped in neologisms, inventions, exotic moral concepts is the writer’s here and now, and as a reader you should feel its breath on your neck.

Read in isolation, every utopia is a pretty mechanism. It announces itself as a neutral solution tailored to humanity’s needs. You can read “neutral” and “humanity” from where you stand, you can take your all-inclusive formulation, but the writers were never where you are, they didn’t use your dictionaries. You find the utopia in their back yard. In their trash can, if they couldn’t afford a garden. In the streets they crossed during their daily walks, in the people they saw as the scum of the earth, in their prayer books, in their laundry baskets.

As entertaining as it might be, utopian fiction is never written solely for one’s friends and about one’s friends. It’s always a vision encompassing the world. My failure as a reader lay in my laziness to verbalize and follow up on these points: (a) Gilman’s world was never the same as mine, never had the same norms, (b) Gilman must have realized that not all people in the world were the same as her closest friends, because — if that were indeed the case — there would be no need for her to write a utopia.

I didn’t ask myself about the exact shape of Gilman’s world and the “others” of that world. Yet there is more to utopia than the explicitly named. Men are just one kind of others. The rest was wiped out from the text, but you see them, if you go deeper into the world where Gilman wrote Herland. It was a world before anyone even mentioned “colorblindness.” Skin color organized life, space, and labor. However distraught at times, Gilman must have seen those hierarchies and divisions. And it’s not against them that she put down her prescription. Was it ignorance on her behalf or intended erasure?

I have no idea whether she read any literature by people of color, and if she did, where she put it within her intellectual space. Did she hate, did she turn a blind eye to whatever didn’t directly concern her? Whatever her true attitude, the fact is that the parthogenesis in Herland eliminates not only sex and all the boys but also black women, the black girls Gilman saw — not an imagined people from a distant country — the black women around her.

This is no simple elision and surely not an oversight. By comparison, Mickiewicz didn’t leave out Jews from his imagined pastoral homeland. The plot of Pan Tadeusz would collapse without Jankiel, but Herland stands proudly on its one leg. Until you rattle the music box, that is.

In the novella Péplum, Amélie Nothomb mocks utopian simplifications. She has a messenger from a glorious future elaborate on how it turned out so glorious for “mankind.” Evasive at first, the messenger confesses to the narrator/Nothomb how wealth and equality was won through blowing up the poor south. That is where the story gets going. There is no such moment of insight in Herland and though this could be put down to the different era (Nothomb wrote her book at the end of the twentieth century, Gilman in its first half), Gilman is stuck with the messenger in the simplicity of her solutions. The virgin wombs of her amazons swallow black girls.

Without ironic disclaimers, without footnotes, blackness is written out of existence. Gilman’s is not a whiteness that arrives with a thump, like in the ending of Poe’s Pym, but one that sits quietly. But only until it’s opened up. Then it becomes obvious why and how a “forgetful” utopian vision has come to create one of the many splits between feminisms. Is Herland a case of ladylike backstabbing?

Regardless of intentions and the culprit’s lucidity, there is a body in the room. Herland rattles on.

Tonight I was at the HCA to help out with our americanist contribution to the Long Night of Academia. We had lots and lots of kitsch decorations: red-white-and-blue bells, ribbons, and flags, of course, flags. And hot dogs, muffins, and marshmallows. After three hours of giving out marshmallows as prizes in the US quiz, I got more than bored with them.

It’s funny to think, though, that it takes so little to represent a place or an idea. What we had there tonight was cliché to the extreme. And it worked. On some level, those simplifications simply do their job. Without denying diversity, there is always place for the almost too straightforward in any grand thought and in any country.

On top of my favorites’ list of those straightforward elements of American life are the mailboxes (I just found a website of a firm manufacturing them in Germany, so I’m not the only fan). In Europe, they’re mostly unnoticeable. Not to mention, smaller. In the States, they’re like separate actors in the landscape. It’s endearing how out-of-place they look. If I tried to condense my memories of Ithaca into a single image, it would be that of a baffled deer nuzzling a mailbox.

But quite apart from my favorites’ list, beyond my liking and not liking, is the US flag. It’s everywhere. In Europe, you can see national flags on courthouses, city halls, or on national holidays. More and more often they’re accompanied by the flag of the EU. I personally have a problem with how the American landcape is cluttered with flagpoles. Is it due to some inexpressible yet profound need to connect with the symbol? Perhaps it’s something that I cannot grasp because, coming from Central Europe, I have an inherent fear of nationalism? Let it be a proof of my discomfort that after a few hours I just had to get rid of the picture of a flagpole I took in NYC from the blog header. Too uncanny for my taste.

On the other hand, I like it how the flag is used and abused. People tear up and stain thousands of them every day, since they’re on napkins, paper cups, T-shirts.

There’s a whole lot of them in the HCA trash tonight.

If you wanted to know about the Democrat-Republican debate in Heidelberg, you should have been there in that huge crowd. I didn’t feel like suffocating in there and the Republican was late anyway.

She should not have refused to kiss her lover the next morning using the silly excuse that “kisses are intimate.” Immediately we saw the face of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman sliding over hers like a mask in a bank robbery, borrowed where it wasn’t needed. She probably shouldn’t have played with the yellow bandana either, because the rag failed to be her story’s falcon. But the doses of naivety were necessary. After all, it wasn’t Shakespeare retold by simply adding non-European cast. The allusions to Faulkner didn’t make the girl Quentin Compson’s Caddy as she lightly leaped off the pedestal (got out of the car and started walking towards the city).

If we take Asian Americans to be a ‘model minority’ – well-educated, staying out of trouble, quiet – then we should think of this movie as something made with a magnifying glass. The quotes and mis-quotes would then help us see what would otherwise be doubly invisible, because it is a story about Asian American women.

There are few things that are as translucent as girls trained in meekness. Their fingers pick through heaps of trash and no one comes to their aid. Joy Dietrich’s movie doesn’t scream about this, it simply says this is the case. We see a girl picking through garbage when everyone else is asleep, a college student in both pre-law and pre-med whose perfect body is no comfort but yet another duty, and finally the protagonist who refuses to be her brother’s incestuous fantasy and turns back. The keepers of their stories, the white landlady and the demanding parents who say volumes with meaningful pauses, cannot be slain like dragons. Years of silencing cannot be likened to a dragon and therefore a brave knight is absolutely out of place. When the protagonist’s brother appears at her door trying to play that role, his quest slowly dissipates into a drive around New Jersey. It’s up to Jenny to end it and head back to what she left behind. There are no songs of triumph in this picture, just a mix CD playing in the car during Jenny’s unfinished escape. Listening to it, she is not daydreaming about romantic fulfillment but figuring out a way to speak in and to the world. By that time she knows she will have to learn to speak for herself rather than let Joe guard their story and carry it off into the fields surrounding the road. She’s a photographer, not a model.

Beatrice is the model. She is also the meek girl eventually found dead in the bathtub, because she does not manage to break out of the canvas on which others projected their fantasies of her. Quite literally, in the beginning of the story, Dietrich has her posing as one living element in a painting of fields stretching towards a lonely farm. She plays a crawling invalid, thus prefiguring that she will be trapped in that momentary pose for the rest of the movie. Her demanding parents and abusive boyfriend make her crawl from one form of perfection to another. In the end, her stunning beauty, undeniable intelligence, and dedication are meaningless. She is ridiculous standing on the parapet in a silk nightgown as if she were slipping into yet another familiar role even when considering suicide. When Jenny pulls her corpse out of the bathtub, the pretty dress and lightly smudged make-up cake the person who suffocated underneath. A person who didn’t know herself and in her textbooks, which she read out loud, didn’t find a way to speak her self. Beatrice’s death is not meant as a mere warning. We are aware that there was a person underneath the make-up. Her suicide is the dotted i of her presence; it’s the only outlet for the otherwise incessantly curbed will. The banality of her death and the borrowing involved in the story are necessary. In her white nightgown moment on the parapet, Beatrice refers us to the cliché image of Emily Dickinson.* If you can recall a line or two, you can hang on to them as hints at the story which Beatrice – an unfulfilled creative writer – cannot tell. The poem she does leave as her suicide note is neither good nor enlightening and, to my mind, could have been left out just like the clumsy allusion to Pretty Woman.

The girls in Tie a Yellow Ribbon do not speak magic spells or start revolutions with declarations full of fire. The act of speaking is here practical and concrete. Towards the end of the movie Beatrice and Jenny’s neighbor finally plucks up courage to talk back to the landlady who made her sort the garbage. Jenny calls her foster mother whom she hadn’t talked to in years. After much consideration, they put together sentences through which they can become actors and not recipients of their own story. Does this sound like a description of a cheap assertiveness course? It should not. Dietrich’s juggling with banality brings us to a place where banality matters. The patterns of everyday become no less real because of their familiarity or similarity to random novels or movies. Just because so much has been written about identity search, feminism, depression, doesn’t mean that all is resolved. On the contrary, the seemingly resolved slips back into invisibility. Although this is not the age of sentimental heroines, meek girls drown in bathtubs, as quietly beautiful as when they were still alive.

I do not quite understand why the title is Tie a Yellow Ribbon, maybe because for me the motif of the bandana misfired. The German title, Die Koreanerin, makes even less sense to me, because although the main character is Korean American, the two other girls are of Japanese (I think) and Chinese descent, and the bonding of these three women lies at the heart of the tale. It is where the connecting and disconnecting that Jenny repeatedly mentions takes on a different form.

It would be misguided to liken it to male bonding as presented in, for instance, Moby Dick. It’s not a myth but one of those unseen, untold everyday affairs. My friend Junyoung (who happens to be a Korean New Yorker like Dietrich’s Jenny) made me realize this when she told me about a movie called Take Care of My Cat. “There are no movies about single women in their twenties,” she said. “They begin to exist in popular imagination when they turn thirty. Before that, they are always presented in relation to men in their environment.” I have been coming back to her point ever since. With Tie a Yellow Ribbon I found my tentative response.

Not only are the three girls dogged by the stereotype of the meek Asian woman but, because of their age, they lack the privilege of experience. Speaking therefore means in their case breaking not just the cultural taboo but entering a gray area between experience and innocence. Which is to say, disappearing. However, through their bond they escape invisibility as they see one another. While I am not denying that it is a movie about identity and about problems facing Asian Americans, problems I may not be fully grasping, not being touched by them, I think that this aspect is equally significant. I am impressed by Dietrich’s ability to give those twenty-year-olds voices and bodies. Throughout the story she lets the audience know that she could easily make her characters slip into ready-made roles. But even with one girl drowned, she didn’t make them a threesome of amateur Ophelias. There is a story within, between, and beyond the borrowing.

*I would like to thank Asia for hissing “Emily Dickinson” into my ear during that scene.

The differences have to be slight. Tiny displacements, changes of scale. I pick up a carton of milk from the fridge and get an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling that everything around me has grown and is stealthily continuing to expand. As for the blueberries — the berries were chalk-like, too. This has, of course, nothing to do with taste. They could seem like a mathematician’s joke; they are larger here. Thick dots.

I am having a great time. My ruminations on kitchen themes seem like research, watching fireflies is a serious study of nature. I think about the first naturalists who came to theNew World and named so many plants and animals after the European species that appeared to them similar — only to discover that there is more than meets the eye. I feel like I can appreciate such kind of misunderstanding.

Back in Ithaca after a few months to enjoy the contrast with winter as I saw it here. I’m counting on those small everyday slips and modest revelations. I do identify to some extent with Zuko, the cat, who gets lost immediately after he steps out of the house but nevertheless tries to get out.

Debbie told me that the Spanish words for blueberry and cranberry make little sense in Latin America. Not only are the fruits fairly unknown, but the names seem to describe nothing. I cannot remember what those words were and I feel that old sense of annoyance that I do not understand. I wish that I could understand that lack of understanding. I looked up “health” in the online Welsh dictionary today and remembered how much fun it was to play with my ignorance, collecting new words like glass balls or souvenir magnets. I wonder what counting blueberries would be like if the word “blueberry” made no sense. And I wonder if Bishop knew about the linguistic confusion when she was writing the poem. Was that in Brazil? Is there any dilemma in Portuguese? If those questions appear silly to you, please remember that I started with amazement at milk cartons. This is as far as I want to go — not straying from the fridge. Here’s the deepest thought that came to me: words like to go for a walk away from the concepts, as the blueberry/cranberry example shows. Or blackberries. Either way, it’s all about fruit.

Not profound or particularly moving — but this is my clearest thought tonight and an argument as good as the sound of certain clogs in a certain country. I last saw fireflies years ago. In a different kind of dusk, in different grass, in different trees. They flickered differently. As I’m falling asleep over this (it’s hours past my original bedtime) I wonder about the taste of blueberries. It’s all about research, of course. All of it EB’s fault. Once you start asking questions, they do not want to stop coming. Regardless of their possible stupidity.

He could not resist a city called Boat so far inland.

I remember reading a few years ago about Lynch’s visit to Łódź and how he took thousands of photos of old tenement houses and abandoned factory buildings. Film journalists held their breath, hoping the images would yield inspiration that would yield a movie. It seemed like everything was in place, just the story missing — Łódź, the home of Polish film industry with a partly unremembered past, seemed perched in expectation. The city’s name is feminine; a woman in trouble, a boat pulled ridiculously far inland. Of course it exists beyond and apart from personification. The buildings from the photographs have new tenants or waste away quietly. No one knows the names of their pre-war Jewish landlords anymore. Anecdotes of old days at the film school hang in the air, half-repeated. And both the quotidian and the solemn mar the delicate process of making things up. If all is too obvious and too serious, there can be no story. Think of the human eye and its blind spot. If you take too much for granted, your blind spot expands.

Does the ability to see lie in undoing habits of thought and sight? I wouldn’t want to put this forward as some kind of grand rule, I think it depends on what you want to see. I was not interested in guessing the names of particular streets. In fact, I’ve never been to Łódź. I wanted to see images of the place pared to what Lynch found useful. I wanted glimpses that could diminish my blind spot.

(Image from Dream Videophile)

The reason why we fear and revere dream logic is its ability to make things visible through series of improbable juxtapositions. My homemade dream method consisted not only in having David Lynch show me Łódź. I saw INLAND EMPIRE in Vienna, till the last moment not sure whether to expect German dubbing (luckily, the movie was subtitled). How strange the opening dialogue must have sounded to the majority of the audience. The white letters faded into the black and white picture, so it must have been difficult to follow. A piece of exotica. Or a piece of home. If you allow it to be both, it becomes a tightly sewn lining to the California scenes. Not a backdrop nor an alternative dimension. For what could be more bizarre than that which is so familiar you cease to notice it? As the emotions of the character she is playing sift into Nikki Grace’s consciousness, the now of the Polish girl watching Rabbits collapses into pre-war Łódź. The desolate Californian suburbia winds up in a Polish street in the middle of winter.

I am not trying to crack any kind of code, only saying that the unfamiliar always has its inverse: there is someone to whom it is domesticated. When I saw Leon Niemczyk in one of the scenes, a chill went up my spine. I’m afraid that for everyone in my generation he will always remain Golarz Filip from Akademia Pana Kleksa, the enchanting and terrifying children’s movie that seized our imagination. It comes in here, that cold and unlikely fright, whether anyone told Lynch about it or not. There’s Cyrk Zalewski, which I saw at least twice before I was big enough to disapprove of the circus. The question rozumiesz?, repeated several times, seems ironically turned towards itself. It means “do you understand?” but it marks the failure to communicate. It is funny to think that the first word I knew for understanding is meant here as opaque noise. And even when the noise is heard and comprehended it means little. You may know Polish but how can you locate the referents of the deictic terms? Where is “here”? When is “now”? Who is the “he” that did something to the “you”?

These are just glimpses, and for many viewers they will never exist as part of the movie. I looked at several reviews — American and Polish — curious about what others have identified as meaningful, what they dismissed, and what their blind spots blotted out. Common to most of the reviews was a thirst for coherence and a focus on what to their authors was the more immediate context. American reviewers placed the inland empire in California, as their sense of direction told them, and mentioned the Polish scenes and actors fleetingly. Someone identified the neighbor who visits Nikki Grace in one of the first scenes as a Russian. I don’t know why — perhaps on the assumption that all Slavic people are Russian “by default,” unless specified otherwise. Polish reviews were sparse and I did not find the insights I counted on. The three hours strain the attention span and allow for picking and choosing. I’d be interested to see what others pull out for close inspection, setting aside cries for logic.

an idea stolen from Marianne Moore, of course. The word sounds both more open and more focused than ‘thoughts’ or ‘meditations.’ It captures a sense of distance between the thing and the thinking mind, which only gets hold of the thing in passing, borrowing it for a moment, and letting go. I realize as I write this that borrowing and stealing can be interchangeable without an ironic undertone. Perhaps, we do steal the object of our thought from the world and, when we replace it, it is slightly used?… I can’t resist a quote. Costello calls Moore “a kleptomaniac of the mind”:

Moore was a compulsive reader and note-taker, copying out verbatim in her tiny scrawl page after page of others’ observations — more than a dozen volumes during her career. [...] At the back of every diary, Moore kept a personal index — these volumes were compendiums of the represented world, resources she could draw on in creating an individual reality.

I find such meticulousness endearing. But while not everyone is interested in cataloging observations and turning them into art, everyone revels in having them. I say ‘everyone’ and immediately my thoughts go to a text and an incident that put my generalization into question. The text is Agnieszka Salska’s article on Moore in which she considers the title Observations as an expression of Moore’s Americanness. The incident is my stolen observation, in my notebook, that is, here. A few weeks ago I was waiting for a friend in front of Stephansdom. There was a group of American tourists — five or six ladies in their fifties — that had just come out of the cathedral. They were in the midst of a rather heated debate about politics. Only the exclamations reached me, so I’m not even sure what their views were. But I heard the ending very clearly. One of the ladies, apparently annoyed with the direction the discussion was heading, said in an authoritative tone that everybody is entitled to their own opinion in America, bacause that’s what America is about. I fought the compulsion to ask her about it. Instead, I asked Denise — as a sociologist and an American — if she thinks there is something distinctly national about having and expressing opinions and observations. Denise was very cautious about this idea and actual freedom of speech. Our brief exchange made me wonder about yet another aspect of the issue: why do we like to label and arrange our observations so much? When I think of 1980s’ Po(e)land and family gatherings, the first thing that comes to my mind is how my relatives enjoyed arguing about politics. It was a completely different country, no one mentioned freedom of speech, yet they all claimed the right to express their views. Was the enjoyment they derived from their observations any different just because they would attribute it to “Polish subversiveness”? I don’t know. Maybe this is the point where observations get too close to the thinking mind and change into convictions.