L'enthousiasme

Long time, no see! Have you lost weight? New haircut? I dunno, something's changed...

Oh, me? Not much. I successfully avoided posting about Charlie Hebdo. Plenty of people had more informed, thoughtful, poetic things to say than I did. Happy to let their collective impressions stand in for mine in lieu of contributing to the white noise.

Moving on. I spent what felt like all of January prepping for, taking, and recovering from exams. (That last stage is actually misleading, it took about .5 milliseconds and some wine/beer/coffee.) Anyway, it was two weeks of me failing practice exams and butting heads with my professor who was selective in when she could pretend to tolerate me. It was literally waking up, 5 hours of class, going home and spending a few hours with a text, and then a few more hours trying to tease logic from some essential grammatical concept that after 7 months I had failed to make a dent in. Good times.

Eventually, the dark morning came (dark because I woke up at around 6 am) when I rolled out of bed and onto the deserted streets of the quartier Latin, making my way for the somehow more deserted RER (suburban train). I rode that vessel out of the city to a testing center, which was, I believe, built based on a composite of the nightmares of college juniors taking the SATs. They didn't let us in the gates until about half an hour after our hopelessly lost professor told us to be there, and then we weren't let into the room until the very moment we were originally told the exam would start. Vive la France.

But, in the end, the exam was fair and I think it went fine, (and in the beginning I was too nervous about failing to care about the bureaucracy) so all was forgiven. 3 hours later I was free to cafe hop to my heart's content.

This was Saturday, and then Sunday I spent holed up in a cafe reviewing for my oral exam, the decided dark horse of the two. The scene: a professor who hates my Anglophone ways and a complete stranger posted behind a desk, ten pieces of paper with ten French texts scattered, face down. Me, the student, entering nervously, fearfully, selecting one from the tumult and after a few minutes of preparation rising from the ashes and delivering an eloquent, complete, correct response to an elementary question concerning the text. So, in short, a piece of cake. Laced with rat poison.

The preparation stage was only difficult or frustrating because as we prepared ourselves to discuss these texts, all of them, we knew that we would only have to discuss one. Meaning that roughly 90% of the work we were doing would be a complete waste in 24 hours. Not an impossible mental block to overcome, but also not a state that makes studying any easier.

So I went early, in hopes of getting it out of the way. I reread all the texts and the in class notes and my own summaries. Twice. I ended up going later than my originally scheduled time, but that didn't make much of a difference. I got into the room and my Americanness took over me. I greeted the procters and selected my text ("memoires d'une jeune fille rangee" de Simone de Beauvoir) as gregariously and warmly as I've ever done anything in my life. I set to work, outlining my argument, something esoteric about how Simone was writing about the sense of community in academia to make an argument for solidarity in 1950s French feminism, which is when the book was published. Blah blah blah. More successful as some moments than at others.

But, gosh darn it, I was enthusiastic about it. When I read my assigned selection aloud I adopted the voice of a PA announcer.  I made lots of eye contact and hand gestures and smiled more than was necessary. I talked about what I knew I needed to, but also what we had never discussed in class, meaning the facets of the texts that were genuinely interesting. I finished, having spoken too long to leave any time for questions, and the professors asked me a few questions about my plans. They offered some advice and summarized the general sense of my exam with a rollercoaster motion with their hands. Up and down. Great, then terrible. But, I was enthusiastic! And that counted for a lot. Their parting words were to hard my enthusiasm, to hold on to it. Whatever my other failings may be, this energy could curb them. A worthwhile trait.

Learning French has been exhausting and terrifying and incredible. This is about to get braggy, but it has really been the first time I've had to be bad at something. When you're learning a language, even when you're really good, you're bad. And I'm not that kind of bad, I'm just bad. And it is a shaking experience, but also thrilling. Throw off the bow lines and head straight for the iceberg my friend! I still have strong cravings for gold stars, but in general, being completely devoid of aptitude and skill has left me looser, calmer, and happier. C'est la vie! Que sera, sera! I don't know why why we want to say these sentiments in French, but there's certainly a strong link for me now.

In a language that is no rules and all exceptions, it has been liberating to fail. It has been fun to struggle. And it has been rewarding, not just in language learning but in settling into a new and different life, to remain enthusiastic.

The Body of Evidence

So this post is coming from a lot of different places, but the two sources that are easiest for you to access (and that I highly recommend) are the phenomenally creative and thought provoking novel The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt and the unprecedentedly engaging and entrancing podcast "Serial." These 2 projects came in to my life within a week of each other, just after Thanksgiving. They are...completely different. Like based on every superficial metric they have nothing in common, and I can't even imagine that the audience overlap is significant, but they do share this one important premise: Let's sit down and take everything, all the documents, and half-truths, and records, and opinions and articles and lay it out and see what story emerges, see which story is true. Which, when you think about it, is not so different than the way we live and edit our own lives. So as I've been devouring both of these projects and witnessing the accumulation of crap and subsequent purge that carries us from Christmas and through New Year's, I can't help but wonder...what kind of trace am I leaving? Am I leaving one? What do my objects say about me, and why does whatever they say seem to be so loud?

So. Here we are. Meditations on consumerism, capitalism, and the illusion of self-growth, in short,  the importance of stuff. How we accumulate it. How we let it go. How it becomes important. (Note: I will not answer all of these questions, at least not today. For today, the questions are enough.)

Monday night, actually on my way home from my book club discussion of The Blazing World, I lost my class ring. I have been wearing it on my left index finger, and even there it was a little loose. But I've been wearing it nearly every day since graduation, and especially during my year of underemployment it was a totem, a touchstone, a reminder that I had once been well, and with a little time, I could be well again. I have a, I guess you'd call it a tick, where I twist my ring by dragging my thumb through the space between my middle and pointer fingers. So as i was setting down my stuff on my desk and I was absently mangling my fingers, I quickly realized that my ring was gone.

My mind actually jumped almost immediately to Serial, because in one of the early episodes Sarah discusses our inability to recount details from our day. A pain stabbed my chest and I thought to myself, could I retrace my steps? could I remember exactly which bridges I had crossed and allys I had taken? My instinct was "nearly," but slowly pacing cobblestones in the dark of half midnight was not a proposition that particularly interested me, especially considering the futility of such an undertaking. I called the bar. I told my landlord. I tried to move on.

I tell this story mostly because I was surprised at how upset I was. Having so little going on right now I feel pretty centered, but losing that ring was like a stabbing. And maybe it was because I've been investing less in worldly possessions (emotionally and economically) that the loss of that petite scrap of metal hurt. Before I had cared for everything a little bit, and here I was left with a hole in my heart because I had transferred that interest to a very few objects, without losing any passion in the transfer. But, self criticism aside, everywhere I went and everything I read I was receiving the same message: Stuff matters!
Money might not buy happiness, but it does buy something, lots of things actually, and all those big and little things add up to something significant.

At the British Museum there is a piece entitled "Cradle to Grave" on display near the American tapestries by Susie Freeman, Dr. Liz Lee, and David Critchley, a trio otherwise known as Pharmacopoeia. It's a burlap quilt of sorts, really a blister pack that runs the length of a gallery, fashioned of a loose mesh and protected by a glass box. And upon closer inspection there are actually two streamers, side by side, loaded in a gridded and orderly fashion with pills. A man's and a woman's medical history. On display is not only every pill they've required over the course of their life, for reasons ranging from hay fever to birth control to pre-natal vitamins to heart attacks, but also personal trinkets, including family photos and 3rd place canoeing medals and etc etc. The idea being, there's more to wellness than the medicine, there's the personal stuff too. And to represent that sphere, there are actual objects, which on their own mean very little but hold the wight of very much.

In fact, it's not just this installation. The entire museum, all museums really, are glorified warehouses. We're looking at things, collections of objects that once meant so much that by extension they still meant something today. We don't save the coffins of every culture, partly because so many of them have disappeared or disintegrated, but also because sometimes we don't care. But the sarcophagi hanging out in the British Museum tell a different story. It was an empire with the means to preserve its own history, it was a rise and fall that the British were interested in, that they felt was somehow part of their legacy, and by means of archaeological work did actually become part of Britain's identity. And now tourists from the entire world can come to put finger prints on glass boxes that protect these incredibly old objects.

Now for contrast, cut to my room: desk with a Pisa-esque pile of folders and notebooks; 1-3 item receipts litter my desk; water glasses and half full mugs; a stack of one pound coins; paper flowers falling out of reused wine bottles. Swivel to my book shelf: piles of acquired souvenirs for family and friends, soaps shaped and scented like macrons, prints from boquanistas; books from expats who have already moved on to their next exotic locale; french children's books; my very own Larousse; and the notebooks, both completely empty and completely full, from courses finished and trips completed. And swivel, tight shot on that closet, undoubtedly the fewest pairs of shoes I've lived with since infancy, and I doubt that even as a newborn I had so few articles of clothing in my possession.

So here I am, amid my objects. No placquards or glass cases for tourists to mark with fingerprints. There are some bangles from Jaipur, and a postcard of Georgia O'Keefe on the back of a motor-cycle. There are colored pencils and a brand new pair of brown boots that I'm in love with. And all these things mean nothing. And everything. If the building burned down tonight in a fire, what would I miss? My journal. I could never replace that. But otherwise...

And yet, my sense of permanence is attributed almost fully to this...stuff. My very own piles of papers and projects in progress. That, and getting to fill out my french phone number and address on forms, that's when I feel like "wow, I actually live her. I have a life here." So it all means essentially nothing, but at the same time it means essentially everything. Is it my capitalist upbringing? Do communists feel less defined by their possessions, I wonder? Hard to say. But regardless of how important or impermanent my suitcase sized life is, it's here. And right now, it feels like my Larousse and my Petit Marseillais soap say everything you need to know about me. Oh, well that and my class ring, which in the end was found by a neighbor in the foyer and was graciously returned to my landlady who graciously returned it to an ecstatic American. So, maybe it's ok to be loosely defined by our possessions. To be honest, I don't hate the story my stuff is telling right now. That can't be a bad sign.