Reflections on living abroad part 1

I.

A shift between two poles occurs, I think, too suddenly for us to glimpse the change. We might ask how to catch ourselves in transition, to look at our(cell)ves mutating through a microscope. But in that very looking we are already estranged – made strange by the force required to step outside – such that we have no choice but to contend with a constant duality of being: a here and a there; a now and a then; a beginning, intermissions with their own starts and finishes, and an end.

            The act of narrativization, I have come to understand, requires bearing an end. Narrative always holds, simultaneously, a now and a then. A now and end. A promise that, like the psychoanalytic notion of mourning, promises both the end of grief and more grief to come. Like an auditory illusion that conveys a sense of progression through repetition, narrative compels us cyclically towards more narrative. This constant and concurrent doing and undoing commands us to seek meaning in the repetitious, to believe that, somehow, cells have actually mutated, poles have actually shifted, progress has actually been made. Even if we cannot glimpse the change, to not believe in the poles, the frames of reference that make movements of the self appear evident, would be to commit ontological suicide.

II.

I moved into a loft apartment in Carpentras, France on a day when the heat was heavy. Sweat dripped down my neck as my landlord (who was kind enough to speak to me slowly in French so I could practice, even though she spoke perfect English) explained to me things I didn’t understand, and then I signed a lease that I had pretended to read. The first night I slept in a skinny, twin-sized bed in the heat, a feast for mosquitos who came in through the screen-less, open windows.

I had been to Europe three times before. The first time to Italy, when I was eighteen. The trip was a high-school graduation gift from my Uncle. While he slept in our hotel room, I went out to buy cigarettes and smoke on a curb in Rome. I didn’t like that particular taste of freedom, so I left the pack of Marlboros and the lighter I’d bought on a low wall on my way back to the hotel.

In Florence, on that same trip, I met up with a friend from high school who happened to be there. We bought beers and cigars and climbed to Piazzale Michelangelo. I got sick and threw up the beer in the Arno river on the way down.

I did touristy things as well, like speeding through the Uffizi by myself. I liked art, but I didn’t and don’t particularly like being a lonesome tourist. I only really remember looking at Botticelli’s Venus behind a pack of other tourists, our collective presence rendering Venus’s spectacular birth both erotic and exotic.

For some reason that I’ve never been able to identify, I have always preferred Alexandre Cabanel’s nineteenth century Birth of Venus more. Perhaps because in Cabanel’s version, Venus’s hands are not covering her body. Unlike Botticelli, Cabanel has no interest in narrative. Venus has become landscape, her body spread out like a mountain range, a permanent fixture on the sea, with seemingly no interest in being washed ashore and clothed. Her body is open to the male gaze, but she is also looking back.

Perhaps it is simply that Cabanel’s Venus offers more nudity, more sex, for hungry spectators.

Perhaps I would simply rather be Cabanel’s Venus than Botticelli’s.

I can’t decide.

I never felt strange in Italy, or in the other two times I went to Europe to visit girlfriends who were studying abroad. I liked being there and looking in on the world as if it were an aquarium, and I liked the feeling of anonymity, though illusory, that tourism grants most easily to white American men.

            But a strangeness does persist in my current tour of Europe. Lacking anonymity, I now frequently must give accounts of myself: where I came from, where I’m going, for how long, why I’m here. And because I can only answer these questions in fragments, in the barest sense that language grants to reality, or that it connects with what is real, I can only render myself, whether I like it or not, strange.

            Strange, or estranged. Language is sticky and it resonates, but it can also be loose and hard, like sand. Language has two departments: the communicative and the affective. Though perhaps there are more, meandering through the institution that is language I find myself almost always in one or both departments. In the communicative, which is mostly where I am when I speak French, language is a structure of signs that hold meanings; those meanings are more-or-less clear and definite. The communicative department gives us language as logic, it makes language mean something specific, and it enables us to convey what we need in precise terms. In the affective department, language is not concerned with precise terms, but with the echoes and sounds of signs when they are uttered. Though we begin in the affective department, we do not return until we have learned how to navigate the communicative, or how to wield them together.

            In the communicative, language is knowledge; in the affective, language is pleasure.

III.

In Brussels I am thinking about André Bazin.

He believed, in 1960, that film could renew our ability to love.

In Brussels I am also looking at paintings by René Magritte.

I feel sorry for Magritte, because it seems we can no longer take him seriously.

In Amsterdam we saw red illuminated windows with no women inside.

There is something about the prematurity of light,

the light of a cinema projector on a closed curtain,

that tells us something about what's real.

In Bruges we saw a horse pissing,

which, if you haven’t seen it, is revelatory,

right next to a fountain of a horse spewing water from its mouth.

I don’t know if Magritte could have captured that irony,

but I know that he put horse bells in his paintings for a reason;

I just don’t know the reason.

This is not a pipe because it’s paint, sure;

but paint has a history too,

its reasons.

Were we teaching ourselves to love by going to these places?

Did stepping momentarily outside the comfort of the familiar

reinvigorate our desire to see the contours of familiar places through

a set of eyes that had just been sitting in a dark theater

looking at projections

and not being able to tell the difference?