You say goodbye, and I say hello

I wrote before about the death of one of my former professors; I’m back in Paris now, which meant I was able to attend her memorial service yesterday, on what would have been her birthday, in one of the rooms that used to be part hers. She would come in — tiny, blonde, often in a red coat and usually dragging a wheeled suitcase — say, “Okay,” and then lecture for ninety minutes, without ever once looking at her notes.

I loved hearing people talk about her. They all said the same things — she was brilliant, she had a terrifying reputation but was a genuinely kind person, she held everyone up to rigidly (but not impossibly) high standards. One of her colleagues, another of my former professors and still a dear friend, said that he was so happy that he was able to teach with her and not be graded by her! I was crying by then, but that phrase made me laugh out loud.

I wish I’d known her better, or at least longer; even so, something about her death has made me deeply sad and I notice her absence on campus and in my life, somehow. Forces of nature don’t go missing; but she has.

A couple of strange things about funerals (or rather, memorials), and this one in particular: (1) I always feel incredibly hungry afterwards. It’s probably just a desire to remind myself that I am still alive, but I devoured two glasses of grapefruit juice, half a pain suisse, and some kind of strange lemon poppyseed cookie right after the service, and in a way this was also part of saying goodbye. (2) This service gave me a chance to see several people I hadn’t seen yet since arriving in Paris, very dear people, old friends, old professors, etc. Having to greet old friends on the occasion of someone’s death is very odd — there’s a slight awkwardness at the joy of it, but the joy is also intensified by the reminder of its fragility.

Afterwards my very dear friend Lily and I spent a long time on the Champs de Mars (the park near campus and directly in front of the Eiffel Tower), catching up and processing each other’s lives, talking about our old and new homes, old and new relationships, and ending up, as always, with Virginia Woolf.

And all of this was, in a symbolic and particularly poignant way, representative of my first two weeks in Paris: made up of goodbyes and hellos.

I’m just starting my MA and realizing (as usual) that I don’t know ANYTHING, that academically I am pulled in about fifty-seven different (and opposite) directions, but that everything is exciting and thrilling, I love my professors, my classmates are v. interesting, intelligent, and fun, and Paris seems like a brand-new city, not at all like it was two years ago, except for the quality of the pastries, which is and always has been exceptional.

Not that anything particular has changed about Paris; minor things only; but I have changed, and all things are ready, if our minds be so.

Death, oh baby ...

... you know that dying is fine, but maybe,

I wouldn’t like death if death were good,

Not even if death were good.

Things that are making me think about death:

1) One of my favorite professors, Feliz Eda Burhan, died last week; she was an amazing woman — a brilliant scholar and teacher. She was demanding and always v. critical of my writing (and I loved her for it). “This is good,” she would write on my essays, “but I know you can do better.”

A classmate of mine wrote to me to inform me of her death; she said that Professor Burhan had “passed away.” That’s what everybody said about her, actually: she passed away. I’ve always found this an incredibly strange phrase; I preferred the way another of my friends put it: that Professor Burhan had come to inhabit one of her own phrases, the “absence of presence and the presence of absence.” She is not here, but she has not passed away. In her absence is presence.

2) Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Mahler was obsessed with death his entire career, but he was particularly afraid of the curse of the ninth — to which, in fact, he ultimately succumbed. As he was writing the Ninth, his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter suddenly died of scarlet fever; he himself was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition; WWI was rapidly approaching. So the symphony became his farewell to life — his own, and that of his entire world’s. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold — I was thinking of this line as I listened, especially during the third movement when the cracks in the structure are revealed and everything indeed begins to crumble. The second and third movements are intense and twisted, carnivalesque, ridiculous and sinister at the same time; the first and fourth are movements of the body: the symphony begins with an irregular pulse, a hesitant arrhythmia, and the final movement ends in much the same way; it is the heart-beat slowing down.

Herbert von Karajan said that this symphony is “music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity.”

I highly recommend both the program notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda from the performance I attended (the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the incomparable Marin Alsop), and the essay “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” by Lewis Thomas. It’s rather apocalyptic, but so is the symphony.

3) These recently-declassified photos from Hiroshima, 1945:

This one reminds me of the human body, a spine or a rib cage.

It makes your nose itchy

What to do? I am no longer in Taiwan; Lauren is no longer in the U.K. So our claim to be an east/west blog is now rather suspect. We apologize for our (now unintentionally) deceptive title; we might change it later, but maybe not. We are both exploring miniature limbos and reading Deleuze at the minute.

…

How was Taiwan? We’ll have to start with Henry Miller. He was thinking about firecrackers and the Fourth of July:

One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterward, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odor and the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.

(from Tropic of Cancer, whose namesake bisects the island of Formosa exactly)

…

In fact, I have two Taiwans. One of them is densely populated, like Taipei, with everyone I knew there: my students; my fellow teachers; the street vendors who grew to memorize our faces and our unvarying orders; and my friends, whom I love so much, who are the reason it was wonderful. This Taiwan speaks Chinglish; it is young and energetic and in a constant state of delight. It exists in the hundred tiny and often nameless streets where we spent our nights meandering, eating, getting lost, laughing, and usually eating again. This Taiwan I feel I could fold up and carry with me wherever I go.

At certain times — the Lantern Festival in Pingxi; daybreak in Ali Shan — this Taiwan brushes up against the other one. The other one, my other Taiwan, is Miller’s China, the one that has infiltrated my veins and settled under my skin. This one is quiet, like a Chinese ghost. Its landscape is the Taiwanese mountains, which are insubstantial piles of green, damp and breathing. It is old and vast. It is not sad. It is this Taiwan that makes me, now that I am back in America, look over my shoulder, for a ghost with long feet.

…

Dame Margot Fonteyn says, “Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.”

For every American tree, there is one in Asia. Whenever I sneeze or sleep, somewhere in Asia you are brushing your teeth or tying your shoes.