A week into social distancing, March 16 2020, I wrote: "A thousand years ago, it was last Monday."
Those first seven days felt so strange, filled with a physical stillness amidst what seemed like endless change. That Monday was supposed to have marked the second half of the semester with a return to campus. Instead, Spring Break had been extended so that courses could be reconfigured for 'remote synchronous learning': extra time to plan how classes could meet at the original times even though everybody was now scattered across space.
Looking ahead from that point (really, working frantically on setting things up in real time) to resuming without returning; to picking up not literally 'where' we'd left off but only virtually; to meeting with students not in person but, oddly, still face-to-face--all of that emphasized the strangeness of 'sheltering in place.' And of course that feeling has only deepened over the six weeks since.
That feeling, when any 'same old thing' becomes strange, is 'the uncanny': when something should be recognizable but isn't; or vice versa, when something you have no business knowing seems familiar. It's a core feeling of genres like 'weird fiction' and horror (etymologically 'when your hair stands up,' Latin)' And so it's extremely disturbing when, not fiction, but real life feels that way, like déjà vu, only more so: a glitch in the Matrix.
In this post, I focus on a particular source of that feeling for me: staying in one place when I know--from years of learning--that I should be traveling. I dearly love to, a function of moving several times as a kid, of going to college and university away, of being a visiting professor for years now, of having friends in different cities and countries. My 'home' is several separate places, and I live 'there' across the year: seasonal migrations of the heart.
So it feels strange, uncanny, to be in just one place. I'm lucky that it's lovely, bright and with an energizing calm. But it's not _also_ Alameda to see my brother and his family, Boulder and my beloved pine-tree'd foothills back 'home,' Omaha where I was born and used to visit my mother and her husband (they live in San Antonio, now, too), Paris where Jenny and I most recently traveled ... It's a central part of my life, but it's not _all_.
[Yes, it is the same cat.]
Since it's _my_ place, though, it's filled with books, and those in turn with evocations of other places and times. They're 'moving': emotive, inner motion as a substitute when travel isn't possible. And so for the past seven weeks--so far--I've drawn on decades of 'traveling' by reading. Here I discuss just a few of the examples that, recently, have 'moved' me most: "ghost cabins, abandoned," as I'll call them for a certain reason below (to be explained).
Jorge Eduardo Eielson's Habitacion en Roma (Room in Rome)
The first place I truly visited alone was Rome. I started studying ancient languages late, my sophomore year, and so it wasn't until graduate school that I finally got to go: a six-week program through the American Academy. All of us lived in "the Centro," a dormitory in Monteverde Vecchio used during the academic year by the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, in the summer for our program in Roman antiquities:
Like many, I *loved* it. Our days went to trips to sites in the city and the region, Lazio (ancient Latium), and--it's cliché but true--the ancient world came alive. The surprisingly northern light through the pines (my students are often floored to learn that Rome is north of Boston), a strikingly different scent to automobile fumes, the special kind of tired--worn and glowing--from exploring in the heat ... And of course speaking Italian: Lo amavo!
That was twenty years ago this summer, and since then I've been back only once, for two days (part of a longer vacation with family to sites around the Mediterranean). Reading, I visit more often, especially yearly teaching of ancient Latin authors as well as more recent work set in la città eternale. Earlier this spring, I happened upon a mid-20th-century example from Eielson, whose description here also echoes aspects of present experience:
[Click here for a recording of these stanzas read aloud.]
Is it possible to know how long you've slept, when you wake to uncanny sameness? That existential question is by way of asking, if we're different when we travel, how are we differently different when we can't?
Historically I'm not a coffee-drinker, but of course I drank it cuando a Roma, confounding bariste by asking, hopefully, for decaffeinato. More recently, thanks to Jenny, I've been cultivating a knowledge of coffee and--no surprise for anyone who knows me--a love of the rich system of signs, like a language, constituted by roasts, devices, processes, grinds ...
Langston Hughes, "Montmartre," and Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Métro"
Regular readers will know that, in December, for our first real trip together, Jenny and I spent a week in Paris. I won't repeat here everything I've said about that time already; the posts can be found working backwards from this one.
But I'll say again, as we said to each other on the plane out of Charles de Gaulle, it was the single best week of my life so far. We stayed in a sixth-floor walk-up in Montmartre, thanks to a transit strike we walked everywhere, I spoke a lot of French: it felt like home.
Of course I returned with many books, and Jenny has got me more. A collection of poems about Paris have helped to keep a part of me there, letting me live part-time as a sort of flâneur of the mind. Like garrulous regulars at a café, they talk with each other, too. Here is a snippet of imagistic conversation between Hughes, who lived in Montmartre for a time, and Pound:
[Click here for a recording of these two poems read aloud.]
Tomas Tranströmer, Skiss i Oktober (Sketch in October)
Often in this strange, motionless spring, I've found comfort in thinking about travel in other seasons. If "April is the cruelest month," then perhaps October is kindest--so long as, like me, you find kindness in bracing wind, in leaves rain-darkened as on Pound's "wet bough," in the tang--not bitter but sweet like the color of copper--of winter ... That month and season have an intrinsic sense of motion I find lacking in spring even in the best of time.
And so an interlude, a fantasy of sorts, with a poem making vivid a feeling of being in a place I haven't been--but whose sense of season seems like home to me. Here then is a short lyric from Tranströmer, whose spirit and central image seem to capture what it's like to be--uncannily--both adrift and becalmed (English translation by Patty Crane):
[Click here for a recording of the poem read aloud.]
Not least in light of that startling, haunted final line, we are of course also the tugboat: we are a thing whose purpose is motion, if of a workaday kind, made immobile. That may be good for poetry or other art--the boat is far more picturesque when rusted, a lamp insofar as it does not glow or go--but, again, strange for the heart.
Luis Alberto Urrea, "Song of Praise" (from The Tijuana Book of the Dead)
Finally in this little literary travelogue, the place I miss the most, most of the time: Colorado, the state that is most of all my home. I like to say that, constitutionally, having been born in Nebraska and raised mostly in Colorado, I'm from "the Great Plains and the Front Range." And there is something about the country's grand, expansive midsection that speaks to me ...
But then there are the mountains literally around my home, the windy swathes of pines and the splendid silvery aspen groves, with dry clear air and bright, multicolored lichen on the tumbled stones ...
[From the dirt road winding up a mountain to my family home; no filter.]
It's the place I see when I close my eyes; the place, when I see it, that opens my heart. And so I was moved--transported, really--to find it evoked so beautifully in Urrea's amazing Book of the Dead:
[Click here for a recording of the poem read aloud.]
I know that "light of the Rockies." (So did John Denver.) As I sit here in San Antonio, sheltering in place and, for likely a long time to come, very unlikely to go, it's deeply moving to find other places I love called into linguistic being by other writers. Reading them, I can 'travel' in a way, at least emoting, and so get something of the seasonal migrations among the many spaces I love but have had to let lie fallow, like Urrea's "ghost cabins, abandoned."
... although I like to think that, in those places' abstract hearts, I haunt them still!
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