Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
self and non-self and identity
For a good chunk of my life, I viewed myself as not just a self-sufficient but also self-contained entity. My parents didn't know quite what to do with me when we first moved to California, and absent any apparent baby-sitter, simply dropped me off at a bookstore for eight hours at a time. To this day I still have fond memories of that summer, when in lieu of actually purchasing any of Border's merchandise I instead "browsed" my way through their entire young adult section. I'd also made my first trans-Pacific flight alone at age nine (in hindsight not the wisest thing to do), and spent my summers away from home during my later middle school and early high school years. Looking back, some of my natural introverted tendencies can be traced back to these moments; situations in which I've had to keep myself occupied, in which I made do with my own mind in a foreign environment.
I don't think I'm unique in that I sometimes prefer solitude to crowds, or have a need to occasionally remove myself from the world at large. I think many of us have had fantasies of getting away from it all. But I think I always imagined myself as self-contained, a sort of human Swiss army knife - no instruction or supplemental material required. Easily uprooted and transplantable in any soil. And I understood theoretically what homesickness was, but it seemed grossly impractical - something that happened to other people. "Drop me off in a cabin by the woods," I'd say. "Give me some books and a hatchet, and you won't hear from me again."
In some ways, this trip is a test of that old belief. I'm on my own for a fair bit of my travels, with nothing but my own consciousness to keep me company. This is as close to Walden Pond* as I'll get for a while. Case in point: even as I'm writing this, the Swedish countryside is flashing by, deep green plains framed by distant woodland, a flood of black clouds pressing down from above - natural beauty that inspires a whole host of neurological pyrotechnics. The train is full of strangers, people I will never see again. And somewhere in the past, a ten-year old Hans sitting in a Borders is looking up from his book and grinning.
So I guess the old statement still holds true. I am still, technically, a self-contained entity, able to operate and function on my own. What's new is the existence of a "Yes, but."
Yes, I've proven I can fly solo, exist in a vacuum thank-you-very-much, but now I feel the weight of unspoken things, people, tugging gently at me from across the sea. In my two years of college, I've formed attachments, given out little pieces of myself to other people and received some pieces in return. Growing older means accumulating more things, both material and metaphysical. And separation from those things is a kind of emptiness. This is not a surprising discovery. It is in fact very well known, and quite universal. But it acts as a sort of caveat to my old statement - that yes I can Swiss-army-knife my way through life, but that I will now feel a deep unease at doing so.
So I think I've reached a kind of paradox. When I am at school, I am faced with unrelenting social stimuli - the kind of deluge that wears away at the psyche. Being around so many people, 24/7 will do that to you - will cause you both immeasurable happiness but also an undercurrent of unrest. And yet when I am on my own, the stimuli-silence is its own kind of unrelenting deluge. It is the emotional equivalent of having a phantom limb; an absence of people who have become part of you, who you've used as an emotional touchstone.
In the grand scheme of things, this is the type of high-flying abstract first-world problem that deserves its own class of salt, but still, it remains somewhat of a puzzle for me. I think I developed the fundamentals of who I am in reverse: first discovering who I was removed from other people, and then in college discovering who I was in relation to other people. And now the querying of the soul, the question of "who am I" oscillates between these two poles, trying to subsume both but never quite succeeding - the Swiss army knife having splintered into a set of good, honest kitchen utensils, ready for immediate use, for immediate usage by more than one pair of hands.
*People forget sometimes that Thoreau left Walden Pond every one or two days to go down to the village tavern and drink a few beers with his friends.
I don't think I'm unique in that I sometimes prefer solitude to crowds, or have a need to occasionally remove myself from the world at large. I think many of us have had fantasies of getting away from it all. But I think I always imagined myself as self-contained, a sort of human Swiss army knife - no instruction or supplemental material required. Easily uprooted and transplantable in any soil. And I understood theoretically what homesickness was, but it seemed grossly impractical - something that happened to other people. "Drop me off in a cabin by the woods," I'd say. "Give me some books and a hatchet, and you won't hear from me again."
In some ways, this trip is a test of that old belief. I'm on my own for a fair bit of my travels, with nothing but my own consciousness to keep me company. This is as close to Walden Pond* as I'll get for a while. Case in point: even as I'm writing this, the Swedish countryside is flashing by, deep green plains framed by distant woodland, a flood of black clouds pressing down from above - natural beauty that inspires a whole host of neurological pyrotechnics. The train is full of strangers, people I will never see again. And somewhere in the past, a ten-year old Hans sitting in a Borders is looking up from his book and grinning.
So I guess the old statement still holds true. I am still, technically, a self-contained entity, able to operate and function on my own. What's new is the existence of a "Yes, but."
Yes, I've proven I can fly solo, exist in a vacuum thank-you-very-much, but now I feel the weight of unspoken things, people, tugging gently at me from across the sea. In my two years of college, I've formed attachments, given out little pieces of myself to other people and received some pieces in return. Growing older means accumulating more things, both material and metaphysical. And separation from those things is a kind of emptiness. This is not a surprising discovery. It is in fact very well known, and quite universal. But it acts as a sort of caveat to my old statement - that yes I can Swiss-army-knife my way through life, but that I will now feel a deep unease at doing so.
So I think I've reached a kind of paradox. When I am at school, I am faced with unrelenting social stimuli - the kind of deluge that wears away at the psyche. Being around so many people, 24/7 will do that to you - will cause you both immeasurable happiness but also an undercurrent of unrest. And yet when I am on my own, the stimuli-silence is its own kind of unrelenting deluge. It is the emotional equivalent of having a phantom limb; an absence of people who have become part of you, who you've used as an emotional touchstone.
In the grand scheme of things, this is the type of high-flying abstract first-world problem that deserves its own class of salt, but still, it remains somewhat of a puzzle for me. I think I developed the fundamentals of who I am in reverse: first discovering who I was removed from other people, and then in college discovering who I was in relation to other people. And now the querying of the soul, the question of "who am I" oscillates between these two poles, trying to subsume both but never quite succeeding - the Swiss army knife having splintered into a set of good, honest kitchen utensils, ready for immediate use, for immediate usage by more than one pair of hands.
*People forget sometimes that Thoreau left Walden Pond every one or two days to go down to the village tavern and drink a few beers with his friends.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
for the love of comma
The Hofbrauhaus is massive, a kind of giant temple dedicated to beer-drinking - rows upon rows of tables stretch off into the distance like wooden pews, and the air vibrates with the sort of human rumble more commonly associated with really intense sporting events or 1970's political rallies - basically the type of atmosphere you'd expect from an establishment whose sole purpose for the past four hundred years has been to get its patrons mind-bogglingly drunk. Beer here is served by the liter in tankards that, judging from the amount of abuse they go through, look like they're made out of military-grade Pyrex glass. These are carried eight (sometimes ten) at a time by traditionally garbed waitresses, 90% of whom are tall, blond, and almost absurdly well-endowed, such that you can't help but wonder at the level of finesse that must be involved for an establishment like this to tiptoe around anti-discrimination laws.
This writer would also like to posit, after healthy sampling, that said beer is really fucking good.
Germany is playing Greece in the EuroCup on the night that we arrive, and like every other place in Munich the Hofbrauhaus is on edge in a vague, fanatic sort of way, and its only through sheer outrageous luck that we're able to secure a table that has a clear view of the screen. Halfway into my potato salad Germany scores a goal (one of four that night), and the resulting physical shockwave actually explodes the fork out of my hand like a tugboat being hit by a depth charge. The only other things that will be said about the rest of the night are that soccer enthusiasm is, understandably, quite contagious, and that one-liter serving sizes should be made an international standard.
Chronologically, the next place we visit is Dakau, but I'm going to skip over that because I still can't formulate my thoughts on it, and because any attempt on my part to describe it feels almost obscenely inadequate.
After Dakau we head back to the center of Munich and attempt to find what's been described to us as a Bohemian artist colony. But it turns out that we're all hungry, and take so many detours trying to find a suitably tasty/cheap restaurant during the next hour that we make almost no progress at all towards our destination. We do however take a walking tour, led by a somewhat austere but ultimately large-hearted English woman, that winds through the city and ends up becoming hands-down the best history lesson I've experienced in my fourteen years of education. This isn't very surprising - if you did the same tour two times a day, seven days a week for three and a half years straight (and your ability to pay rent depended on how aggressively interesting you were) you'd be damn good at it too - but to someone like me whose own conversational coherency has a half-life of approximately 8 minutes, the ability to make people give you money by literally talking at them seems magical and suspiciously occultish.
Munich is also a draw for stag parties ("It's classier than Amsterdam," one man tells me), and during the course of the day we actually come across four such groups; roving packs of men with matching T-shirts and an air of desperation, as if they can see middle-age on the horizon and are paddling away frantically in the opposite direction. Where this gets interesting is later in the night, in a beer garden, when two males from the stag party next to us migrate over and start hitting on the girls in our group so hard that it becomes almost a joke to watch, some sort of staged production.
What they have going for them is cockiness, an English accent, and what's obviously a lot of experience picking up girls. What's against them is heavy-handedness, and the slip-up that one of them is married (not a determent on flirting with other woman, apparently), which for me sours the entire affair in the same way seeing what goes into killing my meat will kill my appetite. The girls enjoyed it though - it's understandably flattering to be the object of attention and I assume it was a refreshing change from college guys who are, after all, still amateurish at times - and they stayed there for a long while after I left.
What I think about in retrospect is the double nature of that exchange, the way it seemed on the surface to be an entirely funny and smiling and human interaction, but had such marked tragic subtext that at the turn of every sentence I felt an unease in the soul I usually reserve for existentialist phases in my life. I can approach it on several levels:
1) that this is somewhat disturbing to me because what I normally associate as something joyful (marriage) has become a cause of dread in the groom's entourage, the spur for them to quite literally regress and act like horny middle-schoolers going through puberty, basically causing the exact opposite of a wake-up-call, a sort of emotional poverty.
2) that I've become fluent enough in status theory to be wary about these sort of overt exchanges, clinically removed from it the same way a surgeon is able to look at a leg and see bunches of muscle and tendon and bone instead of a leg, and have been struggling to just go-with-the-flow so to speak and not intellectualize it and get all heady, but at the same time realizing that this struggle has been throwing me off on this whole business of existing.
3) that I'm on some level I'm judging this transaction when I should perhaps just let it be, and get down from my ivory tower and stop thinking so much and just sort of interact on gut instinct right? that maybe there's been a little too much liberal-arts education in my drinking water and that its insulating me from the "real world," whatever that means. And that, you know, perhaps this determined immaturity is the whole point of stag parties, and is something I'll process and enjoy come whatever number of years from now.
And of course all of these things happen at the speed of thought and while all this is going on I'm also enjoying my beer and mammoth-sized pretzel and taking in the crowd and the soccer game and the feel of gravel beneath my shoes etc., but nonetheless this unconscious parallel processing whirs away, and stores these mental Rubik's cubes safely in the back of the mind for the inevitable long train rides ahead, when the rain drips sideways down the windows and the remembering self starts sorting this primordial blob into small neat piles and pulls out the string and starts wandering down that labyrinth again, solving away.
This writer would also like to posit, after healthy sampling, that said beer is really fucking good.
Germany is playing Greece in the EuroCup on the night that we arrive, and like every other place in Munich the Hofbrauhaus is on edge in a vague, fanatic sort of way, and its only through sheer outrageous luck that we're able to secure a table that has a clear view of the screen. Halfway into my potato salad Germany scores a goal (one of four that night), and the resulting physical shockwave actually explodes the fork out of my hand like a tugboat being hit by a depth charge. The only other things that will be said about the rest of the night are that soccer enthusiasm is, understandably, quite contagious, and that one-liter serving sizes should be made an international standard.
Chronologically, the next place we visit is Dakau, but I'm going to skip over that because I still can't formulate my thoughts on it, and because any attempt on my part to describe it feels almost obscenely inadequate.
After Dakau we head back to the center of Munich and attempt to find what's been described to us as a Bohemian artist colony. But it turns out that we're all hungry, and take so many detours trying to find a suitably tasty/cheap restaurant during the next hour that we make almost no progress at all towards our destination. We do however take a walking tour, led by a somewhat austere but ultimately large-hearted English woman, that winds through the city and ends up becoming hands-down the best history lesson I've experienced in my fourteen years of education. This isn't very surprising - if you did the same tour two times a day, seven days a week for three and a half years straight (and your ability to pay rent depended on how aggressively interesting you were) you'd be damn good at it too - but to someone like me whose own conversational coherency has a half-life of approximately 8 minutes, the ability to make people give you money by literally talking at them seems magical and suspiciously occultish.
Munich is also a draw for stag parties ("It's classier than Amsterdam," one man tells me), and during the course of the day we actually come across four such groups; roving packs of men with matching T-shirts and an air of desperation, as if they can see middle-age on the horizon and are paddling away frantically in the opposite direction. Where this gets interesting is later in the night, in a beer garden, when two males from the stag party next to us migrate over and start hitting on the girls in our group so hard that it becomes almost a joke to watch, some sort of staged production.
What they have going for them is cockiness, an English accent, and what's obviously a lot of experience picking up girls. What's against them is heavy-handedness, and the slip-up that one of them is married (not a determent on flirting with other woman, apparently), which for me sours the entire affair in the same way seeing what goes into killing my meat will kill my appetite. The girls enjoyed it though - it's understandably flattering to be the object of attention and I assume it was a refreshing change from college guys who are, after all, still amateurish at times - and they stayed there for a long while after I left.
What I think about in retrospect is the double nature of that exchange, the way it seemed on the surface to be an entirely funny and smiling and human interaction, but had such marked tragic subtext that at the turn of every sentence I felt an unease in the soul I usually reserve for existentialist phases in my life. I can approach it on several levels:
1) that this is somewhat disturbing to me because what I normally associate as something joyful (marriage) has become a cause of dread in the groom's entourage, the spur for them to quite literally regress and act like horny middle-schoolers going through puberty, basically causing the exact opposite of a wake-up-call, a sort of emotional poverty.
2) that I've become fluent enough in status theory to be wary about these sort of overt exchanges, clinically removed from it the same way a surgeon is able to look at a leg and see bunches of muscle and tendon and bone instead of a leg, and have been struggling to just go-with-the-flow so to speak and not intellectualize it and get all heady, but at the same time realizing that this struggle has been throwing me off on this whole business of existing.
3) that I'm on some level I'm judging this transaction when I should perhaps just let it be, and get down from my ivory tower and stop thinking so much and just sort of interact on gut instinct right? that maybe there's been a little too much liberal-arts education in my drinking water and that its insulating me from the "real world," whatever that means. And that, you know, perhaps this determined immaturity is the whole point of stag parties, and is something I'll process and enjoy come whatever number of years from now.
And of course all of these things happen at the speed of thought and while all this is going on I'm also enjoying my beer and mammoth-sized pretzel and taking in the crowd and the soccer game and the feel of gravel beneath my shoes etc., but nonetheless this unconscious parallel processing whirs away, and stores these mental Rubik's cubes safely in the back of the mind for the inevitable long train rides ahead, when the rain drips sideways down the windows and the remembering self starts sorting this primordial blob into small neat piles and pulls out the string and starts wandering down that labyrinth again, solving away.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
the irretrievability of lived time
the end of this post goes off the philosophical deep-end in an ADD sort of plot twist and bears no relation to its beginning
Everyone I've met thus far in Germany has been able to speak at least passable English, a kind of multilingualism that makes me feel embarrassed for my own country - as if this fact somehow singly confirms the American stereotype that we've been too busy watching Home Shopping Network to bother learning about the existence of other countries.
"Do you speak English?" I'll ask almost apologetically. And almost invariably in response: "Yes! What is it?"
On Saturday we leave for Stuttgart to get away from pretty much already being away from it all, and I emerge from the train station to see a picturesque city center with gleaming fountains and neatly fitted cobblestones. Eurozone crisis be damned; Germany seems to be doing pretty alright for itself: an H&M sprawled across a block, a clothing store called Kult whose color scheme is composed entirely of red and black, small creameries selling gelato at a felonious 2 euro a scoop, a boulevard positively bristling with middle-aged couples and roving packs of teens. I look back at the train station, and on top of the tower where a national flag would normally be, I see a Mercedes Benz sigil soaring triumphantly instead, revolving slowly against the sun like a giant stick of schwarma meat.
One moment unsettles me: a balloon artist in full clown regalia leaning against the wall, one hand casually thumbing an iPhone, the other dangling an idly-smoking cigarette. His eyes flicker up at me, and for a second I tense up - I recognize the same dead look I see in grocery store cashiers or bus drivers: the utter lack of processing power of a mind atrophied by endless monotony, terrifying to a college-aged student like me because it might be contagious, because ten years and a student loan ago that balloon artist might once have stood where I stand.
I also don't like clowns very much.
We head to the Mercedes Benz museum, a modern-looking building all steel and blue glass, the misshapen egg of a Godzilla-sized nightingale. When I step inside I realize that the entire structure is hollow and dome-shaped, dimly lit and rising up for six floors to draw your eye towards the ceiling, which some clever architect has managed to sculpt in the shape of the Mercedes Benz star. It's like the dome in St. Paul's Cathedral, I find myself thinking, and not at all ugly - except the object of worship here is the Engine and its chosen messiah: Petroleum.
A pair of retro-looking elevators take us to the top, and for the next two hours I walk along a carefully-designed downwards spiral, curiosities on every corner practically grabbing me by the lapels. The first model of a car engine is crudely simple, almost enough so that I imagine I could understand its mechanics if i squint my eyes the right way, turned it inside out somehow and -
- huh. I paused in the middle of that sentence and went out for dinner (the Maultaschen was excellent, thank you) and came back a few hours later, intending to start up again but getting caught by the internet in the same way a shopping addict will go out to buy groceries but wake up two hours later in Macy's jeans section. And during my mental jean-fitting time, I watched this.*
"Do you ever feel like you do things even though they're really not that enjoyable just to collect the memory? I do. Often. But what do we do with those memories? We optimize for remembering but we spend so much less time remembering than experiencing. Like that trip I took to Europe. I spent 3 months experiencing but since then I've probably only spent the equivalent of a day or two remembering it. I wonder if I would have done that trip differently if I didn't care what I remembered about it."
You have to admit that that piece of food for thought has a freakish sense of timing, as if the universe has all of a sudden decided to start harassing me with highly specific symbolism, subtlety be damned. I'm also particularly vulnerable to this type of philosophical labyrinth because of an old obsession with the psychological present - basically the idea that we're conscious for very little of our life, and are instead on a sort of neural autopilot, backseat drivers to our own consciousness - and the fact that right at that moment, before I watched the video, I was in the process of meticulously recording the memory of my past weekend at Stuttgart in overwrought prose, faithfully retracing my steps so that my remembering self would have fodder to burn - exactly the activity Ze ends up talking about.
And in fact this sort of memory record-keeping is fairly standard for me, and arises out of my fear of forgetting, forgetting being the next closest thing to oblivion and the mind's slow circling of the drain (question: if you don't remember an experience, is it as if that experience might as well never have happened? God knows I don't remember a smidge from the vast majority of my classes, let alone the books I've read or the conversations I've had. Is it as if I had never taken the class? Read the book? Lived?) and I in response have over the years attempted to nail down the passings of the days onto the page.
Observe a typical Hans Gao diary entry, taken from the archives:
10/02/11
Geol field trip, rocks bedding, time flashing by, crumpling sheets of land and erosion, donuts, Jan is one of those people/professors I want to impress.
Gano street tunnel, waiting for Emma's laundry, Maddy walking with us a bit (need to spend more time with her/catch up), off the road, a small hole, and the sounds of dripping, a walking stick to lean against the ground, pools of water - don't fall in, walking on top of the the rail tracks, a balancing act, singing echoing in the tunnel, darkness held at bay, the songs reverberating, stalactites and white calcium underfoot overhead, complete dark, complete dark, graffiti on the walls, spray paint, the pinprick of light behind us receding walking walking walking, approaching the end, a ray of light hitting the ground, outside the door a real world separated by a thin layer and that's it.
HealthLeads get-together, the words running into each other, awkward, walking back with Kirsten and detouring at Starbucks, the warmth of good company, going to see Doctor Who finale at Andrew's, Swab coming in with nothing but boxers and a trenchcoat, end, SciLi studying.
Because the grim truth of why we take pictures and write in journals and save our old emails is to stave off the void of forgetting, Even as we approach the Eiffel Tower, we automatically reach for our cameras - we want to capture this moment - prove that it existed, pin it down so that even though we may forget how the wind felt on our faces and the way the hum of the crowd drowned out any single conversation or the way the Tower seemed to reach up and graze the dome of the sky with a single long sweeping hand (you swear it was alive that the Tower was vibrating you couldn't believe that this was man-made and not man-grown) even though we may forget all that, we can look at this photograph in the future and say: "I didn't imagine it. My memory is blurry, but here is a moment of clarity, and if you hold it up to the light you can almost see through it, to the essence of that moment itself."
And so even as we're there in front of the Tower, our experiencing self is shoved to the background; we're busy optimizing for our remembering self, taking pictures, anticipating looking back - anticipating the remembrance at the expense of experiencing what we will later strive to remember.
So what if we spent less time worrying about forgetting - just accepted it as human, inevitable, the logical consequence of the transience of the human mind - and absolved ourselves of all guilt, and just experienced? Didn't take any photos and didn't spend hours meticulously placing one word after another in the optimal way that would aid remembrance, and instead just stood there, beneath the Eiffel tower, felt the minute wind upon the face and lived completely and utterly in the moment, in the present, in the (wait for it) psychological present? And after it was time to leave, just left, left that moment in the past with the knowledge that there were a million other moments equal to it in transcendence and purity - in fact one was happening right now, are you paying attention? - and if we remembered it, we remembered it; and if not, well that's just the way things worked in this universe.
It's the irreversibility of lived time, the irretrievability of lived time that frightens me. But I've been coming to learn that this is in fact perfectly normal, is actually universal and supremely human and basically just comes with the territory of having a soul. And in fact I write as much to interpret as to remember, as much to make sense of my emotions at the time, to pull out the dangling thread and unravel what seems like a seamless surface that resists comprehension, to create order out of what appears to be constant white noise.
So in fact the rest of this blog post would have ended thus: the Mercedes-Benz museum was great. Later in the metro I ended up trapped in an elevator with eleven other people. It was for a good length of time, and the experience was not without a twinge of hysteria, as our breath fogged up the glass and the box got hotter. We ended up prying the door open.
And that's the end of it. There's no takeaway message here, other than perhaps to experience the fuck out of the moment, and to remember not to worry about remembering too much. To not let remembering get in the way of experiencing.
*ze frank being of those of the rare people/artists/writers who resonates with me consistently. Others include DFW (let's play a game - it's called "can you spot this post's hidden DFW reference?") and Roger Ebert.
Everyone I've met thus far in Germany has been able to speak at least passable English, a kind of multilingualism that makes me feel embarrassed for my own country - as if this fact somehow singly confirms the American stereotype that we've been too busy watching Home Shopping Network to bother learning about the existence of other countries.
"Do you speak English?" I'll ask almost apologetically. And almost invariably in response: "Yes! What is it?"
On Saturday we leave for Stuttgart to get away from pretty much already being away from it all, and I emerge from the train station to see a picturesque city center with gleaming fountains and neatly fitted cobblestones. Eurozone crisis be damned; Germany seems to be doing pretty alright for itself: an H&M sprawled across a block, a clothing store called Kult whose color scheme is composed entirely of red and black, small creameries selling gelato at a felonious 2 euro a scoop, a boulevard positively bristling with middle-aged couples and roving packs of teens. I look back at the train station, and on top of the tower where a national flag would normally be, I see a Mercedes Benz sigil soaring triumphantly instead, revolving slowly against the sun like a giant stick of schwarma meat.
One moment unsettles me: a balloon artist in full clown regalia leaning against the wall, one hand casually thumbing an iPhone, the other dangling an idly-smoking cigarette. His eyes flicker up at me, and for a second I tense up - I recognize the same dead look I see in grocery store cashiers or bus drivers: the utter lack of processing power of a mind atrophied by endless monotony, terrifying to a college-aged student like me because it might be contagious, because ten years and a student loan ago that balloon artist might once have stood where I stand.
I also don't like clowns very much.
We head to the Mercedes Benz museum, a modern-looking building all steel and blue glass, the misshapen egg of a Godzilla-sized nightingale. When I step inside I realize that the entire structure is hollow and dome-shaped, dimly lit and rising up for six floors to draw your eye towards the ceiling, which some clever architect has managed to sculpt in the shape of the Mercedes Benz star. It's like the dome in St. Paul's Cathedral, I find myself thinking, and not at all ugly - except the object of worship here is the Engine and its chosen messiah: Petroleum.
A pair of retro-looking elevators take us to the top, and for the next two hours I walk along a carefully-designed downwards spiral, curiosities on every corner practically grabbing me by the lapels. The first model of a car engine is crudely simple, almost enough so that I imagine I could understand its mechanics if i squint my eyes the right way, turned it inside out somehow and -
- huh. I paused in the middle of that sentence and went out for dinner (the Maultaschen was excellent, thank you) and came back a few hours later, intending to start up again but getting caught by the internet in the same way a shopping addict will go out to buy groceries but wake up two hours later in Macy's jeans section. And during my mental jean-fitting time, I watched this.*
"Do you ever feel like you do things even though they're really not that enjoyable just to collect the memory? I do. Often. But what do we do with those memories? We optimize for remembering but we spend so much less time remembering than experiencing. Like that trip I took to Europe. I spent 3 months experiencing but since then I've probably only spent the equivalent of a day or two remembering it. I wonder if I would have done that trip differently if I didn't care what I remembered about it."
You have to admit that that piece of food for thought has a freakish sense of timing, as if the universe has all of a sudden decided to start harassing me with highly specific symbolism, subtlety be damned. I'm also particularly vulnerable to this type of philosophical labyrinth because of an old obsession with the psychological present - basically the idea that we're conscious for very little of our life, and are instead on a sort of neural autopilot, backseat drivers to our own consciousness - and the fact that right at that moment, before I watched the video, I was in the process of meticulously recording the memory of my past weekend at Stuttgart in overwrought prose, faithfully retracing my steps so that my remembering self would have fodder to burn - exactly the activity Ze ends up talking about.
And in fact this sort of memory record-keeping is fairly standard for me, and arises out of my fear of forgetting, forgetting being the next closest thing to oblivion and the mind's slow circling of the drain (question: if you don't remember an experience, is it as if that experience might as well never have happened? God knows I don't remember a smidge from the vast majority of my classes, let alone the books I've read or the conversations I've had. Is it as if I had never taken the class? Read the book? Lived?) and I in response have over the years attempted to nail down the passings of the days onto the page.
Observe a typical Hans Gao diary entry, taken from the archives:
10/02/11
Geol field trip, rocks bedding, time flashing by, crumpling sheets of land and erosion, donuts, Jan is one of those people/professors I want to impress.
Gano street tunnel, waiting for Emma's laundry, Maddy walking with us a bit (need to spend more time with her/catch up), off the road, a small hole, and the sounds of dripping, a walking stick to lean against the ground, pools of water - don't fall in, walking on top of the the rail tracks, a balancing act, singing echoing in the tunnel, darkness held at bay, the songs reverberating, stalactites and white calcium underfoot overhead, complete dark, complete dark, graffiti on the walls, spray paint, the pinprick of light behind us receding walking walking walking, approaching the end, a ray of light hitting the ground, outside the door a real world separated by a thin layer and that's it.
HealthLeads get-together, the words running into each other, awkward, walking back with Kirsten and detouring at Starbucks, the warmth of good company, going to see Doctor Who finale at Andrew's, Swab coming in with nothing but boxers and a trenchcoat, end, SciLi studying.
Because the grim truth of why we take pictures and write in journals and save our old emails is to stave off the void of forgetting, Even as we approach the Eiffel Tower, we automatically reach for our cameras - we want to capture this moment - prove that it existed, pin it down so that even though we may forget how the wind felt on our faces and the way the hum of the crowd drowned out any single conversation or the way the Tower seemed to reach up and graze the dome of the sky with a single long sweeping hand (you swear it was alive that the Tower was vibrating you couldn't believe that this was man-made and not man-grown) even though we may forget all that, we can look at this photograph in the future and say: "I didn't imagine it. My memory is blurry, but here is a moment of clarity, and if you hold it up to the light you can almost see through it, to the essence of that moment itself."
And so even as we're there in front of the Tower, our experiencing self is shoved to the background; we're busy optimizing for our remembering self, taking pictures, anticipating looking back - anticipating the remembrance at the expense of experiencing what we will later strive to remember.
So what if we spent less time worrying about forgetting - just accepted it as human, inevitable, the logical consequence of the transience of the human mind - and absolved ourselves of all guilt, and just experienced? Didn't take any photos and didn't spend hours meticulously placing one word after another in the optimal way that would aid remembrance, and instead just stood there, beneath the Eiffel tower, felt the minute wind upon the face and lived completely and utterly in the moment, in the present, in the (wait for it) psychological present? And after it was time to leave, just left, left that moment in the past with the knowledge that there were a million other moments equal to it in transcendence and purity - in fact one was happening right now, are you paying attention? - and if we remembered it, we remembered it; and if not, well that's just the way things worked in this universe.
It's the irreversibility of lived time, the irretrievability of lived time that frightens me. But I've been coming to learn that this is in fact perfectly normal, is actually universal and supremely human and basically just comes with the territory of having a soul. And in fact I write as much to interpret as to remember, as much to make sense of my emotions at the time, to pull out the dangling thread and unravel what seems like a seamless surface that resists comprehension, to create order out of what appears to be constant white noise.
So in fact the rest of this blog post would have ended thus: the Mercedes-Benz museum was great. Later in the metro I ended up trapped in an elevator with eleven other people. It was for a good length of time, and the experience was not without a twinge of hysteria, as our breath fogged up the glass and the box got hotter. We ended up prying the door open.
And that's the end of it. There's no takeaway message here, other than perhaps to experience the fuck out of the moment, and to remember not to worry about remembering too much. To not let remembering get in the way of experiencing.
*ze frank being of those of the rare people/artists/writers who resonates with me consistently. Others include DFW (let's play a game - it's called "can you spot this post's hidden DFW reference?") and Roger Ebert.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
resumption
Writing on the road is its unique form of procrastination. There's always something else you think you should be doing - talking to locals, figuring out the train schedule, drinking in the sights, drinking, or at the very least taking a nap. Sleep is a type of currency on the road usually in shorter supply than the actual thing. But I've settled down in Tuebingen for a while now and really, if I let this absence go on any longer I should just stop kidding myself that I'm keeping a blog, and use the webspace to post cute animal videos instead.
Tuebingen is small town nestled in the hills. The single river that cuts through it is the smaller, more romantic younger sibling of the Seine, and I swear, if you look up the word "quaint" in any dictionary, you'll find Tuebingen listed there, third down, right under "attractively old-fashioned."
I arrive early in the morning, my train packed full of students drunkenly catching the first ride home after a heavy night of partying at Stuttgart, a larger, more night-life friendly city. For a moment the scene is so familiar I might as well have been back at Brown: scantily clad girls with short skirts and sore feet, their male counterparts all nice shirts and casual indifference, broken when one of them groans as we exit a tunnel and into the light, pulling his hood doggedly over his eyes.
I'm cocooned by an eerie silence as I leave the station, the town still asleep, the roads free of cars and noise. After two weeks of being in big cities, the sudden stillness comes as a psychic shock, as if for the past fourteen days I'd been walking headlong against 40-mile-an-hour winds - teeth clenched, body tilted forward at seventy degrees - only to suddenly fall forward as all the winds die down at once, complete and utter silence stretching to the horizon in every direction around me.
I find myself in an oddly meditative state. Off in the distance I hear the toll of church bells caught in the breeze, the notes drifting like poppy seeds. A single bus passes me by, empty but for its driver, and I watch it vanish around a corner
The hostel the university set us up with has a several hundred person capacity, and upon arrival I discover I've somehow ended up in a single with my own shower. After two weeks of learning how to lean into the discomfort of traveling, this is a godsend.
That's right, the climax of this post is me taking a shower. If you've ever lived out of a bag for an extended length of time you'll understand.
Tuebingen is small town nestled in the hills. The single river that cuts through it is the smaller, more romantic younger sibling of the Seine, and I swear, if you look up the word "quaint" in any dictionary, you'll find Tuebingen listed there, third down, right under "attractively old-fashioned."
I arrive early in the morning, my train packed full of students drunkenly catching the first ride home after a heavy night of partying at Stuttgart, a larger, more night-life friendly city. For a moment the scene is so familiar I might as well have been back at Brown: scantily clad girls with short skirts and sore feet, their male counterparts all nice shirts and casual indifference, broken when one of them groans as we exit a tunnel and into the light, pulling his hood doggedly over his eyes.
I'm cocooned by an eerie silence as I leave the station, the town still asleep, the roads free of cars and noise. After two weeks of being in big cities, the sudden stillness comes as a psychic shock, as if for the past fourteen days I'd been walking headlong against 40-mile-an-hour winds - teeth clenched, body tilted forward at seventy degrees - only to suddenly fall forward as all the winds die down at once, complete and utter silence stretching to the horizon in every direction around me.
I find myself in an oddly meditative state. Off in the distance I hear the toll of church bells caught in the breeze, the notes drifting like poppy seeds. A single bus passes me by, empty but for its driver, and I watch it vanish around a corner
The hostel the university set us up with has a several hundred person capacity, and upon arrival I discover I've somehow ended up in a single with my own shower. After two weeks of learning how to lean into the discomfort of traveling, this is a godsend.
That's right, the climax of this post is me taking a shower. If you've ever lived out of a bag for an extended length of time you'll understand.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
touch and go
In Paris, absolutely no wifi anywhere - will update once I settle down in Germany by Sunday!
Friday, June 1, 2012
the globe
Me: "so do you guys have any tickets left? what's playing?"
Lady: "Yes, of course! Timon of Athens just started, you're a bit late but can still catch it."
Me: "I… have never heard of Timons but - "
Lady: "Oh, and it's in German."
Me: *a beat*
Me: "eh…"
Lady: "You can always try our 7:30 show tonight though - it's A Comedy of Errors -"
Me: " - oh, I'll take that one then - "
Lady: " - which is in Persian."
Me: "oh."
Lady: "You don't happen to speak Persian do you?"
Me: "not… really?"
Lady: "Yeah. I guess that was sort of a long shot. Um. We don't have any English-speaking Shakespeare till next week on Tuesday. Would you like a brochure?"
So long story short, we ended up seeing Timon of Athens in German, which turned out to be fantastic. Of course we couldn't understand a word in the entire play (except for a part in the middle when Apemantus started dancing to "I Will Survive") but it was creative enough that it didn't matter.
And then there was the part where the Timon stripped completely naked, which we had a… unintentionally good view of. But thumbs up! Apparently the Globe is doing all of Shakespeare's plays in 6 weeks, each of them in a different language.
Lady: "Yes, of course! Timon of Athens just started, you're a bit late but can still catch it."
Me: "I… have never heard of Timons but - "
Lady: "Oh, and it's in German."
Me: *a beat*
Me: "eh…"
Lady: "You can always try our 7:30 show tonight though - it's A Comedy of Errors -"
Me: " - oh, I'll take that one then - "
Lady: " - which is in Persian."
Me: "oh."
Lady: "You don't happen to speak Persian do you?"
Me: "not… really?"
Lady: "Yeah. I guess that was sort of a long shot. Um. We don't have any English-speaking Shakespeare till next week on Tuesday. Would you like a brochure?"
So long story short, we ended up seeing Timon of Athens in German, which turned out to be fantastic. Of course we couldn't understand a word in the entire play (except for a part in the middle when Apemantus started dancing to "I Will Survive") but it was creative enough that it didn't matter.
And then there was the part where the Timon stripped completely naked, which we had a… unintentionally good view of. But thumbs up! Apparently the Globe is doing all of Shakespeare's plays in 6 weeks, each of them in a different language.
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