Fragments of Feeling

A married friend, whose husband had months before asked for their divorce, once told me that she had never felt a sense of intimacy with him. But she still loved him.

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Is it wrong to write about someone else's feelings? I don't know.

-Feelings are real, her words.

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From encounters, I have learned that other cultures have a different dynamics of emotion from my own. An example at the broader level: shame is more prominent than guilt as an emotional driver in many Japanese cultures. But even entering the space of another family, one can feel sometimes the push and pull of repeated emotional positions, forces that have shaped the personalities of the family for years.

This is most evidently true for the very young, who depend day-by-day on their parent's or carer's favour. Each of us is born with some emotions more than others; but the particular emotions we have are shaped interpersonally.

If I write of someone else's feelings, I also write about how other's feelings have shaped myself and how my feelings have shaped others.

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I encountered a Czech couple in a hostel in Budapest once.

After a brief discussion with the Czech man, his partner said "I thought you weren't going to speak English on this trip." I had violated an unspoken rule.

I can't remember the context, but ironically I was telling him about Wordsworth - how in The Prelude, Wordsworth had been alienated by the city state and saw reconnecting with nature as the means to heal the violations of reason, and in particular, the kind of city violence unleashed by the French Revolution. This violence had caused a severe crisis in Wordsworth's personal life.

The Czech man replied that there were few such refuges, far from the urbanised world, in Europe anymore.

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I love cities. When I was young, I could not connect with Seamus Heaney and other nature poets I associated with the dominant poetic style of the 1990s. I have changed; but when the English countryside votes Brexit, tears rise in my heart.

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I don't know if I have ever met a person who accepts everyone. There are lines that cannot be crossed. 

If this is true for everyone, then we can say that each of us operates an unspoken set of rules. We have personal laws. We become angry or panic or react negatively when our laws are broken. 

Emily wanted a fairly predictable life. This summer I couldn't, or didn't, offer it to her.

Foolishly I presumed she would put up with the volatility.

Of the powers outside our control, there were three chief catalysts: the weather, my work and a seething anti-immigrant popular mood. May and June were the most miserable months of the year, weather-wise. My room flooded five times. My work hours went up and down like a yo-yo (mostly they were up). Then Brexit, and the appointment of Theresa May by default, our least favourite politician whose immigration policies had mostly kept us apart for more than ten months.

There were other big problems too, but I would rather not get into them. Suffice to say, the story I had been telling her and she had been telling herself about how moving to London would be better for her manifestly broke down when confronted with reality (a reality that could hardly be more badly timed).

I kept trying to make Emily happier, despite what was going wrong, by doing fun things on the weekend, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. But in doing so, I kept falling behind on practical decisions - wedding-related, or other aspects of personal life. And in between all this, I lost sight of the intimate side of our relationship, the world between us that had kept us together for five years.

That was the most frightening thing  - the sense that the various pressures around me had removed an essential part of myself, and which Emily would at one point confirm was the person she had fallen in love with. Then in July the most frightening thing was the breakup of our relationship.

Emily was faced with moving away from her country, her friends and her family. That's a lot of emotional bonds, and in retrospect I completely ignored this huge part of her emotional reality. I reasoned she was an intelligent woman who had made an intelligent decision and was blind to the fact that she was losing a lot of what made her feel great.

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Love needs vision to succeed.

A lover needs to recognise their lover's emotional realities, and even maintain some of their lover's fictions, or lose the loving bond. A marriage is no mere contract; a good husband or wife keeps their spouse's love in play and prioritises their lover's emotions. And, in different ways, I and Emily gave up before we got there.

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I came to emphasise in my mind that human beings have emotional realities, not easily sensible from their physical selves, while tutoring Keats' narrative poems. Keats plays tricks with both his characters and his reader's emotions in such a way as to reveal 

how the emotional reality of a person can be massively at variance with how physically they appear or seem; 

how interdependent our perceptions are with our emotions; and 

how manipulable our emotions and perceptions are. 

For our emotions are full of fictions - even, perhaps especially, the person who considers themself a 'realist'.

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The memory of Emily's love is falling away now. Mostly the past six months have been kind to me - family and friends gathered to support me, a few weeks after our breakup I went on a delightful holiday, then came back and joined a team at work that I greatly enjoy working with, I've been to lots of fun events - parties, gigs, plays, etc.

When I remember the source of my loneliness, it can bring sudden pangs of grief, but these seem to happen less and less now. I'm writing this piece partly so that I have something to look back at, to remember not to forget next time: -  that I only see fragments of feelings in others, which especially needs to be remembered for those I are most close to.

I feel ready to move on.

Family History 7: The Windmill

To be human is to be creative. Every day we must actively engage with a reality recalcitrant to our dreams and desires. Reconciling reality with our desires requires imagination and effort. Furthermore we must deal with others whose dreams may find the reality of your actions and opinions inconvenient.

The most celebrated embodiment of this contradiction in Western literature is Don Quixote, the knight of La Mancha who decided to imagine his reality as if it were his dream chivalric vision. [I confess to having only read a few passages.] Most famously, he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants.

For most of us this is just comic entertainment, just part of our European mental furniture about idealism and reality. But for some, this stirs greater imaginative feats… as it did for my grandfather (my dad’s father). In his book, The Long Winding Path, he wrote:

“One day he came across the biography of Miguel de Cervantes and on the front page of the book was a windmill.  Well, thought the boy, maybe the ironic windmill, of Don Quixote, can be put to such practical use as the production of electricity for such down to earth purposes as the lighting of homes and streets and making industrial production.  He discussed his ideas with his tutor, the engineer, and they came to the conclusion that the only way to demonstrate the idea was for the boy to put it all on paper, both in memoranda as well as in the design of the windmill, with detailed drawings.  The engineer promised to check both and voice his frank criticism as well as, if merited, his approval.  The project however, should be entirely the boy’s – from concept to execution, first on paper and, if possible later in erection of at least one such windmill.  They went into the project with the enthusiasm that the young possess. He wrote feverishly the memorandum based on climatic and meteorological data he found in that well stocked library.  This data was not too extensive.  In the Land of Israel, just recently taken over by the British, their predecessors hardly kept any such information.  Next, he went into the design of his windmill.  He has never done anything of this sort.  He therefore, did what actually amounted to pencil sketches, at first of what he conceived as the main parts and then the windmill as a whole.  When he was done, he showed it to his friend, the engineer, who examined it very carefully.  “Well”, he said, “this will not pass an engineering test, but it has all the elements for working drawings and for erection instruction” and he looked with admiring amusement at this fourteen year old.  “I suggest that you now show it to our new neighbour, the one on the other side of your plot.  He is a high school Principal and he may have some comments of his own”.”

In my imagination, what happens next is that the high school Principal encourages my grandfather to actually build the windmill, and they do. But when I return to the text, I realize that my imagination has erred,       - though what really happens is just as revolutionary for my family’s fortunes as if the windmill had been built.

Having shown his plans to the Principal, the Principal decides to take my grandfather out of agricultural school (he works on a farm with my great-grandmother; his father having died 5 years or more earlier in Alexandria). He offers my grandfather a full scholarship, as the school is far beyond my family’s means. My grandfather goes to the Principal’s Commercial high school where he receives a much better education. This education prepares my grandfather with the practical skills he would use throughout the varied entrepreneurial ventures that he would later undertake. Thus a better education radically improves his prospects.

The critic in me sees another important theme emerging in this passage. On the one hand, I see the emergent interest in engineering, electricity and power generation. Slightly earlier he writes

“And then he came across works on electricity.  He couldn’t comprehend it all…. after a couple of months he knew enough [from talking with his engineer neighbor] to imagine something about electricity and electric motors In the course of these discussions, he discovered the fact of the “prevailing winds” and their constancy, and he concluded that these winds, very reliable in that country, could be harnessed to create electricity if only a method could be adopted.  These thoughts kept at him constantly.”

After high school he would work for the Electric Power Corporation as a trainee to “help plan and construct electric power facilities.” Later in life, he would own and run a factory that produced the batteries that powered aircraft.

On the other hand, I see his interest in climate and meteorology – the invisible forces that govern the air around us. During the Second World War, he would fly aircraft to help the US government work out the weather when undertaking air missions.

Both of these powerful, seen-at-second-hand forces – electricity and air movements – would thus shape his life. He could merge the palpable and the impalpable to generate practical, tangible projects; make the visible from the invisible; and imagine some of the practical and yet historical forces necessary to make his family’s desire for a Zion in British Palestine a reality.

But his life was also littered with failures – from failing to secure funds in the US for a navy for the Haganah in his late teens/early twenties; to losing his entire business on a promise given by an Israeli minister; to filing for bankruptcy on a later entrepreneurial project involving construction late on in his life.

Part 3 to come – the windmill- the boom and bust of the risk-taker, the spinning fortunes of the ambitious; the cycles of family history.

“I have no reason to live” said David one Saturday afternoon when they met on the beach.  “Well, ‘create’ a reason” said the boy.  “You must aim for the ‘impossible’ and you make it possible.  That will give you reason to live until the end of your days”.

Love in the Stars

The Chilean desert is one of the best places in the world to view the stars. From there you can see not only the rings of Saturn (using a good telescope), but also Andromeda - the galaxy closest to the Milky Way. This is only possible in the Southern Hemisphere.
    Viewing these spaces, you contemplate the hundreds of billions of stars that make up each galaxy, and our infinitesimal place within the universe. ‘Really, we are nothing’ said my guide to the local landscape the Lunar Valley, ‘Maybe as a whole, as the human race we are something; but as individuals we do not amount to much.’
    His comments related both to the stars and to the hundreds of millions of years it took to forge the grand rock formations that were the subject of his tour. Everything about this region suggests a scale that surpasses human understanding. ‘To the Andean people who lived here before the Spaniards came, this landscape was not very important, it was just where they lived.’ Here too is scale.
    Five centuries have passed and while the unique cunza language of the former locals has gone (all but a few words, and no understanding of the grammar), a few forms of non-spoken language have persisted. The grandparents still perform rituals that have been going on for centuries. At the beginning of spring, at Pachamama festival, they and their children direct their energies to mother earth so that the earth will work with them for a good harvest (yes there are crops in the region). Yes, from a scientific perspective it is pointless, but from a human perspective it is not without worth - it honors a continuity with their ancestors, and it renews the relationship which each of us has with the ground beneath our feet.
    My guide was complaining that the next generation were watching the same cartoons as everyone else in the world (when I visited the supposedly isolated village of Iruya in Northwest Argentina, a cafe was showing the Simpsons). The rituals were appearing in their textbooks and they showed little interest in keeping with them. The past was becoming another story like the one I have been telling you.
    (TV and the internet are far more stimulating. Why are you reading this?)
    Tourists like myself come away with a different story - did you know that southern Bolivia, northwest Argentina, the Atacama desert are rich with a concentrated diversity of fabulous landscapes? Our eyes feast on the light of the sun as it shimmers across the rainbow-colored mountains, salt lakes, subtropical forests, sand dunes, etc, etc. We want to have our cake and eat it - see the place but also hope that the locals retain their traditions. We embody the millennia-old tension between continuity and advancement.
    Is it an advance that so many people appreciate this landscape in a way the locals did not notice? In New Zealand I was told by many - you get used to it and you don’t notice the beauty anymore. New Zealand is working hard to restore the ecology of its fjord lands and its mountain peaks (a sign on Ben Lomond asked visitors to forcibly tear out any wilding trees that they saw shooting up - they’re a European invader) and also selling jet-fuelled adventures up glaciers (‘It’ll be the highlight of your trip.’) Everywhere, everywhere I travelled I saw this contradiction.
    What you really learn from traveling through five continents in five weeks is:
    a) There’s always more to see.
    b) You’re a tiny fleck in the vast sea of humanity.

But a) and b) are hard to reconcile. The children want more Simpsons, more Spongebob, the elders and the nostalgist visitors want to retain the uniqueness of different locales on our planet. ‘They’re destroying what makes people want to come to their region in the first place’ (one fellow traveller told me about south-east Asia). One traveller to another: ’Did you get to Lombok? I didn’t like Bali either - too crowded with tourists - but Lombok was really something.’ Me, overhearing: ‘Isn’t this happening the world over? The place that was good to visit becomes overrun, like gentrification in the cities’ ‘Yes, and trip advisor is making it worse’ ‘It’s accelerating.’
    Unlike the stars which retain their distance, and are governed by unchangeable laws, we are constantly changing our path, following the feedback loop left by guides and other tourists to improve our experience, and rewriting our story to make it better. We tend to think of our selves as the epicenter of our universe with the lives of others appearing as a constellation around our own.
    For many of us, changes to this constellation are an inherent feature of modern life. Long gone are the days when we lived in a persistent community living out the same rituals and habits year after year, under the same stars.  Instead we tend to anchor our lives in love - the aspiration to form a binary star with another person whose mutual orbit with one’s self will become the stable centre of a family. This will in turn become the basis of future generations.    
    Thus, through love, we become a little bit more than nothing; we become a little bit closer to the permanence of the stars.

It’s important that future generations keep an eye on the stars - that the word does not just degenerate to associations with celebrities and ratings. Though we no longer navigate by the stars, they help us gain perspective on our little place in the universe.

Escaping the Cemetery

The grave's a fine and private place

But none I think do there embrace.

                                                    -Marvell

Recoleta cemetery is a captivating yet strange place. This is partly why it's one of Buenos Aires's major sites. As a tour guide said earlier today, the cemetery encapsulates a certain aspect of the city - its mixture of elegance and shabbiness, arrogance and humility; its death-defying extravagence and vulgar populism; at times, its shifty psychology.

Not that it's the only cemetary with highly crafted mausoleums, but it seems to represent a particular irony. The irony is the uncanny gap between the grave's intention (to commemorate a person) and its effect. Like most tourists, I forget almost all the names within seconds of having seen each tomb; what lasts is an aesthetic impression that tells little about a person, or suggests a very different impression than was intended. The generals' tombs seemed particularly overblown and suggestive of an overly egotistical character, not of the careful judgement that characterises an effective general.

And these are not the only ghostly figures haunting the city. For example, there are still a number of monuments to Peron and Evita - two theatrical figures who used the political stage to enchant the masses and suppress dissent. To some extent, Evita brought 'social justice' to enhance her own ego - with some very positive effects (women's liberation; nurses; more universal education) and some very negative consequences. Any good student of the twentieth century should understand that the term 'social justice' has often been manipulated to enforce aggressive top-down control over society in the name of the people. The uncritical stance towards Evita suggests something very worrying and oppressive about the way the name of Peron is still used to manipulate and distract voters from deeper problems.

For me, another set of ghosts hover over the city. In 1905/6 my great-grandparents fled the pogroms and SDP movement in Russia and joined the Jewish Colony in Argentina, where my great-grandfather became a law lecturer. My grandfather was born on the road to Buenos Aires (he tells the story of 'how the crocodiles attended his birth' vividly in a book he wrote on his early life). Within a few years, my family would leave for Israel. But I can't help but think it was a propitious time to see Argentina - near the peak of its glory years, when its growth rivalled the US. Over a century later, that dream has faded into the nightmare of prolonged economic instability. My family at that time saw Argentina at close to its greatest success.

Then there is the ghostliness of being a tourist. I've felt this most acutely in the past few days due to having far fewer companions than in Turkey, Japan or New Zealand. While many people have about as much English as I have Spanish (very basic), it's rare to find a fluent speaker or someone more comfortable in English than Spanish. Consequently I´ve felt more lonely in a place which thrives on company (hence the poem quotation above; another profound line that I think of is W.S. Graham: "this is always a record of me in you." 

'Record' suggesting not a direct communication, but a copy of a past inscription by me to you. The line comes from a lonely, remote place.)

After all, border control make it a condition of entering a country that your stay is temporary. Your existence as a tourist is supplementary to the ordinary inhabitants of that place. You are an observer who can take part to a limited extent but no more than is allowed by the length of your visa or your ability to adapt to the native approach to life. There is the pleasure of imagining the possibility of living in that country without the burden of having to adjust to that particular society's demands. It's very fun and I deeply appreciate the privilege of the experience. But in all the pleasure I also confront the fact that most of my activities have been done by thousands of tourists before me. I record in me my own version of other people's experiences. I can then relate that to someone else, such as you the reader. In a very different way to Graham, it is a record of me in you.

Buenos Aires is a strange place. For example, Palermo Viejo is a very funky area full of cafes, restaurants and bars, music and literature, drink and laughter. But in its clean, vibrant fun, it seems somehow hermetically sealed from the more down-at-heel side of Buenos Aires, the city of 13 million where many struggle to make a living. Like most tourists my main concern is profiting from the fun.

I find another line of poetry ringing:

I have learned not to look down

So much upon the damned.

Evita and Peron let in Adolf Eichmann, a man whose role in the intellectual life of the twentieth century encapsulates some of the deep paradoxes at the heart of Argentina. They let us Jews in too. Everybody´s welcome as long as they bring the dollar* and leave when we tell them to. No terrorists please.







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*Dollars are one of the shiftiest aspects of Argentina. The official rate is 9.09 pesos to the dollar; the blue dollar rate is 15 pesos to the dollar. Everyone recognises that the official rate is a convenient fudge that prevents economic chaos but it really makes one think about what money is and what makes it worth x rather than y. Just like many things in Buenos Aires, the value of the peso is not what it seems. Our guide today said: don't trust Argentinians, including me.