small change

of flights

A curious thing happens to me between going through security and boarding a plane. No longer home and not yet at my destination, I become slightly unhinged. Not in my mind, mind you, but in habits of thinking about who I might be. In practical (and plain) terms, this means that I will buy magazines and books (and at a premium price imposed by the last bookstands before take-off too) I wouldn't allow myself to even look at on account of the image of myself as “serious” – reader or writer. And so it was on my last foray into the wider world, some 10 days ago when I went off to see my older son in Washington, DC. Which means that I finally got to read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

Sure, I raced through it, and without carrying the excess baggage of my reader's guilt over following Gilbert on a journey of self discovery made so public (not to mention handsomely profitable). Her style is deceptively breezy and balmy, making the read a pleasure of its own. Her prose sparkles and is soft and comfortable, like the leather seat in first class, making for a cushy journey into the exotic, but still pleasant, landscapes of worlds that are likely to be a lot more unglamorous, unconformable, and even inhospitable to travelers who lack the ease of making friends, with people or words. But I don't mean to belittle Gilbert's book. Below that ease and comfort she seems to possess with words, I see the mastery, the greasy, sweaty, and decidedly unglamorous work, of the writer who had to tame the amorphous (and, at times, dangerous) beast of the subject with the expert whip of language. While others reading this book may be dreaming of tracing Gilbert's spiritual unfolding in spaces that lure one with as much of the scared as they do with the sensual, I find myself more in the category of the pigs trained to sniff for truffles. Only what I am after is the morsel of morel that pushes through the loam of language. And which can make the meal of memoir, well (sorry for the string of alliterations) memorable.

While I trusted Gilbert as a writer, and gave myself readily over for transport by her language, I had a harder time with the spiritual landscapes of the journey. Gilbert, though she makes the point that the better part of spiritual enlightenment, like writing, is about showing up for the work, and then getting down to it, makes of transcendence (or even its attempt) into a chat over a perfectly brewed venti with God in the latest bucolic spiritual Starbucks outpost. Like a friend said in a recent tweet over the subject, there something too facile about Gilbert's spiritual experiences, at least as she presents them, because they tend to come across as “how EG got her groove back.” And, the way I see it, even if this has never been Gilbert's intention – not to mention, her actual spiritual experience – there is something of the aura of glib reproducibility of her experience by every earnest reader of this book, who, means permitting, could retrace Gilbert's steps, much like an fitness routine, to get the same glowing results.

In my spiritual evolution, such as it is, language is the weakest link, fraying and breaking apart the strands that weave the heart of Yoga: the settling of the mind into silence. I did try to write about my spiritual explorations before, but I soon realized that my mind was a blunt tool, lacking not only the finesse to recognize the indescribable in the depths of silence, but also in its brute force to hammer away until it could provoke an echo, not realizing that this sound is of its own making.

A for traveling far to find oneself at home in the universe, I have my doubts. Coincidentally (OK, may be not so coincidentally, if you happen to subscribe to the idea that there are no accidents in the universe), as I took a break from writing this post, I read Simon Winchester's review of Carl Hoffman's Lunatic Express in today's The Wall Street Journal. From what I gather, Hoffman's year-long journey by the nightmarish methods of travel the majority of human beings all over the world endure while they get from place to place (an imperative of the new global reality), may well be the perfect antidote to reading Gilbert's “Eat, Pray, Love,” both as a travelogue and as spiritual discovery.

Well then, maybe on Mr. Winchester's suggestion, I will pick up a copy at an airport, as I am unhoming myself in the limbo between security and boarding the plane so that I can glimpse what's it like to be at home nowhere.

"the beginning of terror"

"More and more in my life and in my work I am guided by the effort to correct our old repressions, which have removed and gradually estranged from us the mysteries out of whose abundance our lives might become truly infinite. It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Life -- and we know nothing else -- isn't life itself dreadful? But as soon as we acknowledge its dreadfulness (not as opponents: what kind of match could we be for it?), but somehow with a confidence that this very dreadfulness may be something completely ours, though something that is just now too great, too vast, too incomprehensible for our learning hearts -- as soon as we accept life's most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it (i.e. from our Too-much!) -- then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us and, at this cost, will be ours. Whoever does not, sometime or other give his full consent, his full joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed, this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it -- this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus."

--Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Norris-Crouy, April 12, 1923.

I've been rereading the Duino Elegies, as a companion piece to Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, since Ghosh lets his narrative lull here and there over the deeper pools of Rilke's poetry for us to glimpse into the depths, be it of tides or skies, so that we can learn something, along with the characters, about the act of seeing. At least a decade must have gone by since I last read Rilke. Back then, it was as if I were in conversation with his poems, each reading yet another surprising elaboration of something that might have come up in an earlier read.

But in the course of these past years, lived with little poetry in mind or soul, Rilke's words have faded for me, not so much into oblivion, as into a foreign language. Or perhaps this business of aging has left me a little deaf to the higher notes in the song of Orpheus so that instead of listening to the voice of the poet in the elegies, I must turn to the words of the exegesis of Rilke the "scholar" to see and grasp a little of what once so so obvious to me.

transcendent grammar

The sun is about to set and I realize that I lost this day. A Monday, too, which sets the tone for the week. It's not what I planned, but so be it. Well, to be truthful, I was lost to the day as I kept on reading Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. Most of last night was also lost by me to this book. Now my head is filled Atwood's gardeners, romping through the compost of ideas gleaned from the strange world she created out of the bits and pieces of the one in we already live in.

There is one passage in the novel that is likely to stay with me, like a refrain, long after the plot and characters will sink into the silent swamp in which the books I read live on airlessly, hoping for rescue in the small craft of conversations:

“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I'll be dead,” you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said; it's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water.”

--from The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood

trans-littoral

I just finished reading Magda Szabó's Katalin Street. Seems to me that much has been lost in this translation, though I don't think I have read the original itself, which was published while I still lived in Budapest. Perhaps I did read it in Hungarian – I was an avid reader of new fiction in those days, and this would have been very new in many ways back then. Right up my alley – pun intended. But nothing in this English version of the novel rang familiar. In fact, even English itself somehow became a foreign language to me as I tried to hack through the thick sentences littered with pronouns whose referents became ever more elusive with each sub clause.

Of course, the remedy is simple, at least in theory: go read the book in Hungarian, as it was meant to be read. But here is the rub: I haven't read Hungarian literature in decades. Reading it in Hungarian would be even more difficult for me these days, if not downright incomprehensible. Yes, it's a shame, but it's what is: life on Katalin Street.

What language, if any, can bridge the lost original and the incomprehensible translation?