Twisted Tongues

(1)

Russian is one of those languages (like Arabic, Dutch, Frisian, and Turkish) that I thought I’d pick up while disappointed with my progress speaking French or English.  One of the magical things about this blog is that my posts seem to be read only in the Russian Federation.  With all of the comments that I’ve been receiving in Russian, the old language skill is both coming in handy and noticeably old.  And, it comes about just when I was thinking that I should brush up my French before travelling to Paris to visit a friend who recently took a job there.  Or, thinking about brushing up on Dutch for a quick nip to Amsterdam, and, to better spot Daniel Defoe’s inside jokes while analyzing Robinson Crusoe.  Or, … Turkish, because it seems a marketable compliment here in the United Kingdom.

There seems to be a natural ebb and flow directing my desire to twist my tongue around another language.  They usually take the form of a conspiracy of events.  To the average eye and well-balanced mind, they look coincidental. Take, for example, events associated with three days of recent conference meetings.  

First, there was the presentation by the Russian information scientist from New York State.  Her accent was thick in the fashion of Natasha Fatale, the femme-fatale of the The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.  To think of her now, I realize that her fashion was rather that of Natasha as well.  During a break, she’d later confess to me: “Since moving from Rossija, I find I must take the cream in my coffee.”  ”Me too”, I admitted.  I was thinking of my first coffee, of the little foothold of little Bavaria in the foothills of south-western Ohio where I grew up.  ”Of course”, she qualified her statement, “not when I am at home.”   This was almost one of those odd dating moments, when the terribly mundane seems charged if not flushed.  Almost in unison, the two of us amused the other with the confidence that “it’s so much richer there” where we can grind the darkest of beans to the finest of grinds for the deepest of flavours.  What better reason to brush up my Russian?

Then, the next day, there was the presentation on the oral history project in Russia.  Its work product was mounted in St. Petersburg and mirrored in London.  Not too fine a point was put on the past.  The oral histories documented the Stalinist past.  And, the St. Petersburg master web-site was now defunct.  Federal security police took it down with the near-Stalinist of claims that it was promoting “subversive elements”.  The security police literally brought the computer hardware down to a waiting car and drove it away.  I wonder what a server gives up when sat down in a dark room with a light shining into its face plate?  I shouldn’t make light of this intrusion on the digital lives that were snuffed out as a result.  But, as a projector’s light focused samples of the British mirror on the auditorium’s screen, the bits of holographic Russian seemed to decode themselves for me.  I found myself reading them as though they might have been English.  This was a puzzling moment.  Puzzling, the way a foreign movie is puzzling after twenty-five minutes or so when you realize that the actors are not speaking English and, yet, you comprehend every word that they’ve just said.  Puzzling, the way subtitles puzzle when they’ve performed their magic.  Smoke and mirrors after the fashion of the light beams splattered up against the screen.  It was another sign.  ”LEARN to Speak and Read RUSSIAN”, it said.

And finally, while riding the train home from London to Cambridge each evening, I pulled my notebook from its pouch.  I’d noticed before scrawling a few lines in hopes of bringing the day to a close that, during the boring presentations, I’d been attempting a few lines of poetry in English, albeit using a proto-Cyrillic script.   Бог тро́ицу лю́бит!  (God likes a trinity!)

[Post-script: on my last return from London, I caught a bit of what was on the tele: "Cambridge Spies"  A mini-series about the lives of young Cambridge graduates who go to work in London, spying for the Soviet Union.  На Бо́га наде́йся, а сам не плоша́й.  What's the English expression: "Trust in God, but lock your car!"  I took this as reason to avoid thinking of Russian further.]

[Secondary post-script: the morning's news carries a story almost all but snuffed out by the mysterious crash of a commuter jet in Buffalo, New York.  Boris Berezovsky has accused Vladimir Putin, now Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, of using "dirty money" to control British companies.  Who knows what to believe anymore.  Russian money keeps Iceland afloat. Chinese money banks on a recovery in the U.S.A.  And, money from the United Arab Emirates keeps Manchester United, England's premier Premier League team, well ... it keeps it premier.  Maybe Nikita Khrushchev, if not Stalin, was right about the Western democracies.  Maybe it is high time to learn Chinese and brush up on both Arabic and Russian.]

(2)

Travel between Cambridge and London wasn’t all that bad.  Fifty-four minutes is enough time to read a newspaper, or, edit a document in my computer, or, take in the landscape.   On my first day in, I saw a full-moon rise with sunrise giving chase.  The farm fields were still white with snow.  And, crude white windsocks in East Anglia’s fields betrayed Easterly winds, meaning that the weather would soon change.   Even the grey stations that the 7:45 Express Train passed without other notice seemed to swell with a soft reddish glow, the rouge of a child in from play out in the cold.    I suppose that, over time, I’d even learn to sleep through stops and magically awaken at my own.

London, at King’s Cross, in the morning, is a bustle.  It is as though there is a massive complex of conveyor belts beneath the pavement.  A seamless The Jetsons.  The area is a confluence of trains.  The great Eastern land lines bring passengers in from Anglia as well as regions further North.  This mass is fed down the waterfall of steps and (de-)escalators into the subterranean world of the Tube.  And, though most people are packed away to more distant reaches of the London environs, a teaming mass is still left to the streets of King’s Cross.  Here too, just beyond the Tube station, is St. Pancras station, home to the EuroStar, the high-speed train linking London to Paris.  In a winter morning’s light, the new station’s grand glass walls seem another form of waterfall.  It is the kind of waterfall behind which there is a secret cave where lay buried treasure.

Cambridge, on returning at night, is swallowed by the dark within not less than twenty-five paces of the station.  This measure of the distance between London and Cambridge is immense.  And, yet after a night’s rest, waking to Cambridge seems princely.  There is little that is neat about Cambridge, particularly in Winter, but even amidst its bustle, it feels peaceful.  

Today, Parker’s Piece was an idle in a painterly sense: action caught in still life.  The weather alone promised to freeze it in motion.  Indeed, a snow-storm not an hour later would try its best to do so, but it would fail.  Among those amidst the storm: mothers strolling their babies in prams.  Surely, this must be an English means of building immunity to seasonal disease.  And, each pram was covered in plastic, of the kind that my grandmother used to cover her couch: thick but crystal clear.  Inside, each baby was a kind of precious jewel, a miracle.  How they survive being covered in plastic, I think, might be the miracle.  How did the baby’s breath not fog the plastic?  Did the baby draw any breaths?   Still, in London, the only things being moved about in this manner by wheels were the suitcases that people here in the U.K. drag about as a means to transport goods.  Baby : Dry-goods.  Life form : Still life.   Before I discovered delivery, I used to use a big wheeled suitcase, myself, to drag groceries home from the supermarket.  Nothing teaches one better how to consume less than having to literally drag it home. And, nothing else makes one wish more that this cargo would grow to walk on its own two legs. At least, for the contents of the prams, the likelihood of wish fulfilment seems high.

Back on Parker’s Piece, also braving the cold: the local football and rugby teams.  The footballers pretence of not noticing the storm, despite their footballer’s short, was belied by their intensified play.  The field grew more chaotic with each passing second and every falling flake of snow.  If anyone didn’t notice the storm, it was the members of the ruby team.  They might have been ice as they stood awaiting play wearing only rugby kit: short-sleeve shirts and rugby shorts.  Rugby shorts, by the way, are shorter than football shorts.  They look like the men’s boxer-briefs style of beachwear that one sees along the Red-neck Riviera of Pensacola, Florida - where if that beach weren’t so solidly within socially conservative Republican territory, one might think these bathers gay.  One young Rugby lad, probably trying to hot-up all the young, pram-pushing mothers, could even be seen stripping-off on the Piece and changing into his uniform.  As he argued with another lad, he stood there nearly naked from the time I first passed the field on my way to the Market at 15:30 (3:30 p.m.) until my home-bound return with a quickly cooling loaf of fresh baked bread at 16:10 (4:10 p.m.).

On a day such as this, the sight of young skin leaves no tongue wagging.  It reminded me of my trip to Cambridge after landing at Gatwick airport, south of London.  Along the way, as we travelled into East Anglia, a feral piglet crossed the path of my taxi.  ”Around here,” the driver instructed me, “that passes for a black cat.  We should say a prayer, mate.”  Feral pigs, of course, have dense coats usually of black fur.  It is only domesticated pigs that appear to be all pink fleshy skin.  In London, King’s Cross courses with dark two and three piece suits.   On second thought, the rugby player reminded me of the salmon cutlets that I’d pulled from the freezer for dinner.  I’d left them defrosting on kitchen counter. I had to hurry home.

The cold in the air confounds everything.

(3)

Here was to have been a discussion of the corporate body in American and British English.  I’ll have to let that twist in the wind.  It’s past my bed time.

Incidental Realities

"The majority of correspondence that we receive on this topic," were the first words I heard when channel surfing recently, after moving to the United Kingdom. It was a voice from the States that had seemed to follow me here. Sally Jesse Raphael was summarizing the statistics of alienation. "Four of five people," she said, "suspect that they were adopted, displaced at birth, or ..." were otherwise apart from the family that claims them. I am one of those people.

When I was eighteen, I sent my parents a postcard from a long trip to France. "Home is where the heart is," I wrote, "and, I feel so at home here." My mother would tell me, not long after my return, that she feared I would not come back. She had been aware of my isolation. I was forever, effortlessly seeming to prove my differences from my siblings.

Long before that on warm summers' nights, my brothers would join my father on the front porch. An earphone connected them via their transistor radios to the Reds game, whether downtown or away. Being there was as mandatory as was tossing ball before the sun went down. My escape, then, came in the form of a shortwave radio. After initially listening in on a game I didn't understand, I tuned in at first to English Canadian and British broadcasts and, later, to Quebecois and French. I'd become a traveler, if the only thing that connected me to far off places were the clear skies that carried the signals.

Unlike travelers who make their way in planes, on trains and long-distance buses, I was becoming a solitary traveler. The voices I heard on the radio were the first signs of intelligent life a the universe beyond that in which I lived.

Later, as I began to travel in planes or by train, I found that I'd learned to hear the silences amid conversations. And, as I began carrying a camera with me, even in densely populated cities, I began to notices that I was seeing the spaces between the people. In those few instances where a photograph recorded the presence of another person, I was capturing them in their own solitary states where I felt I'd intruded or from behind, as though they'd already left the moment to me and me alone.

My own sense of reserve, if not of reservation, more recently leaves me traveling populated places with a camera that can be concealed. The resulting images, taken without the aid of view finder, aimlessly focused, usually behind me on subjects even I haven't seen, have begun to suggest a world of everyday introspections, seemingly separated within a common space. I've begun to look at them as "found" photographs, incidental realities.

DEPARTURE

 

Awaiting the departure of my plane from the Port-au-Prince airport. I'd been separated from the Haitian travellers and made to wait in the Diplomatic Lounge. There I placed my camera atop the bar and clicked away aimlessly. In the mirror, it seemed to reflect upon a conversation's pause, a still life with human subjects. It was one of those moments in which the camera seemed an intruder.

A VISION IN PORT-AU-PRINCE

I had come to Port-au-Prince, Haiti on work. It had been a fair walk back to my hotel from the National Archives. Evenings of boredom between work days was often spent photographing the hotel's ceiling fans. It had become a joke among my colleagues: "portrait of a ceiling fan, number 43". When I thought I'd prove that my aimless methods could capture something else, I was shocked to discover that the camera found the ceiling fan nonetheless.

RESTAURANT ARC EN CIEL -
THE RAINBOW ROOM

I set the camera on the table and pressed the button.  Though the open-air restaurant not far from the centre of Port-au-Prince was crowded, those of us eating there to disappear in the taking of the image, leaving only the resaurant workers to their tasks.

THREE WOMEN, TURNED

Most visitors to Aruba go to the beach. I sought out the isolation of the Alto Vista Chapel in the north-western desert. Finding that I wasn't alone in seeking solitude, I decided to allow the camera to photograph the view as I waited for the other tourists to leave. While I held the camera behind my back, taking images without intent, the camera found these three women making their own isolation, forming their own solitary contemplations.

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE

Once inside the Alta Vista Chapel (Aruba), I discovered that I was still not alone. Others were there, in prayer.  And, I felt it disrespectful of them to photograph. I hung the camera to my side, and allowed photographs of the space behind me. The floor seemed to describe the aspirations of my father's religion. The doors seemed both to reflect and belie those aspirations.

TROUGH

Again, I'd set out for another location on Aruba that I though would led itself to isolation. When I arrived the Donkey Sanctuary was a solitary place. But no sooner had I taken the cap off of my camera, a bus of tourists arrived. As I lowered my camera, finder still at the ready, the camera captured a world divided between natural forms and man made lines. The interjection of granny-smith-apple green seemed to suggest that the man made was forcing itself upon nature.

RESEARCHER

I had come to London with a visitor who was interested in seeing the mineral collections at the Museum of Natural History. I find myself bored inside museums, I'd rather look at the museum building itself. The building, more than its collections, express purpose. Here, my camera found the perfect sense of purpose within the building.

THE RED HAIRED WOMAN IN ORANGE LIGHT

She had been intently examining the Museum of Natural History collections when I first saw her. Yet, when my camera saw her, it was as she passed from one room to another, alone and in sympathetic light.

THE HUSBAND

A husband goes shopping with his wife. The idea of lingerie may even turn him on. But, once he in the store, he's bored out of his mind for wont of a living model. My camera finds that a husband who follows his wife to the museum may be equally bored. And, so still, he might be one of the camera's specimens.

THE RED LIGHT

Crossing a busy intersection, my camera seems to find the only people who cannot be seen, those closed away in their cars, stopped cold in their tracks.

WAITING

With a queue stretching out the door, it's hard to imagine being in a fast-food restaurant and finding oneself entirely alone. Actually, this is often where I find myself. In that sense, it was surprising to see that my camera had somehow managed to take a self-portrait.