Pandemic poetry reading

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (John Donne)

// queue pandemic-like soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVN1B-tUpgs

A while ago I read a book in which a pandemic had struck the world, engulfing it in darkness. The survivors made do with a new art of living – of loneliness, trauma, new savage geography in shocked readjustment or the imagined mythical past of electricity and instant connections in a mankind so large the post-pandemic born brain could not comprehend the sheer numbers. A beacon of light and quirkiness is the traveling theatre troupe, whose people carry both musical instruments and weapons, scavenge for costumes from abandoned homes, and become one in name and function with their instruments. Both loving each other with scant desperation and hating the suffocation of the other’s infinite-seeming presence, all discomfort is made away in resurrecting Shakespeare plays for whatever settlements are still peaceful and familiar enough to hear and welcome them.

Yes, yes, the theme is old: art in the midst of tragedy, literature as a balm for the soul. The interconnectedness and the sublime of it all.

Tonight fate struck in a round email: come to the pandemic poetry night and hear fragments of journals, poems, impressions, from 17th century until today. Our very own station eleven in the new Asian-style courtyard of the transcultural studies library; half-empty seats sprinkled between round stone pieces on a floor that looks like a go board.

Transcultural, transnational, transcendent, this evening. I am confined within a small group of lovely strangers, almost friends. The four friends I excited insufficiently for this occasion ultimately all back out (why hear about the pandemic yet again? on purpose?) and I slither inside like a clandestine late-comer to a party of which I’m barely putting the pieces together.

Lucky me, literature needs no context. No context at all.

While I crink my neck looking around for a possibly late friend, the first German participant reads from her pandemic diary. I feel old yet young, reminded of high-school literary circles. The young woman starts on a personal note but quickly delves into climate change and the realization of our impact on earth and our interconectedness as species, so that it reads like a Spiegel editorial, passionate as it may be. The moral conscience of a privileged German youth overrides the need for personal confession and turns it toward the social message. “Be grateful for your privilege, repair what you have broken.” The second journal, of a Chinese woman, relates with humor her return home, to the strict Hong Kong, the nervousness of demanding check-ins, test centers and quarantine hotel rooms; the well-known tribulation of expat parents, jumping from worry to excitement, to worry again. Inappropriate, endearing comments showing their lack of knowledge of the environment you move in daily. I smirk at her criticism of Europe with its technically-malfunctioning airports as a continent of ineffectual colonizers. Yes, please.

The poems become more and more moving, from the God-centered 17th century one, a Chinese poem by a Wuhan author caught in the devastatingly dark isolation, to a danish poem which jumps from emotion to emotion in a postmodern, disjointed, disfiguring way, and evokes pain in me with a beautiful sway: “Someone ate a small, fluffy bat in China and it changed the world” and “I walk the paths of infection to a home full of darkness“.

Students signal each other and joke with familiarity, supportive teachers hold the event together and even share their own experiences. For one of them, Corona has a long history, since 2000 until now, when in his Beijing-centered youth it meant isolation and fear, in recent times it meant his family could stay together instead of working and living 600 km apart. Their son was better acquainted with his parents’ Chinese culture because of the abundance of family time spent together. As he shows us the son’s cartoons of a Chinese literary classic, he praises the positive side effect of the pandemic, reconnecting with each other and reevaluating one’s life.

I am surrounded by strangers and their thoughts and feelings. Distant, yet personal. Comfortably lonely, though not truly alone.

I realized though, I never put into words what I felt these last years. Or rather, I spoke too much and then too little, like a mumbling old lady with foggy vision and trembling knees, I just wished for it to end and for the longed-for comfort of ordinary days and fears.

Here is my pandemic memory:

Day 1, 2, 3, … 15, I am afraid it’s all ending like this, sudden like a bad movie plot, plot-twisting predictably shocking. I also laugh at youtube videos ridiculing the pandemic angst and my boss scoffs at the idea of staying at home if one has cold symptoms. This covid fright will be over before it began and it’s not worth mentioning.

Day 15 to 30, well into March, home office crackdown everywhere, lock-downs and panic, noodles and toilet paper become precious commodity goods. I pay 7 euros for toilet paper and think, if this isn’t the pandemic then what is? I walk through the gardens of Heidelberg castle and need to cry at its emptiness and lack of people. It’s like all distopian novels I ever read and there have been quite of few. I want to scream and shout and be paralyzed and inefficient – why should any life go on in such chaos. All I ever wanted was normal, the semblance of normal, normalness wrapping me like an old comfortable blanket. Old, boring me, I must have liked my normal predictableness after all.

Day 31 to indefinite later… I don’t deliver a translation project, all conferences and classes canceled, barely have any work to do. Every stepping out of the house seems like a moral or immoral decision. PhD research is a dream from far away times as my neurons crave brain candy books with predictable plots. Oh, the normalcy of mediocrity. Don’t give me good art, don’t give me catharsis, don’t pull me out of my cocoon. I will surround myself with all basic things, familiar and dear, an isle of me, me, me, my thoughts protected and suppressed.

The backside of the coin – discovering the databases of corona cases in the world, sorted by John Hopkins, RKI and a prestigious Romanian university. Reading more sciency- articles than ever before. Speculating and worrying. Each new ten thousand cases a tragedy. Somewhere people are dying, families are grieving, cases go unreported, governments are lying, the sickness has no end, we will all carry it around the world like never before, go surfing, go skying, go go go, just go, global citizen, you don’t want your own company, cannot be alone in a room with your thoughts. You want the new and unexplored, the trendy, the instagram influencers, the palm trees and the coconuts, selfies atop abysses. The world can’t just stop unless it’s made to. You just can’t stop. Your privileges are your god-given human rights and you just have to take that vacation, meet those friends, cheat on that covid testing, try to bribe that airport employee. We are all indeed interconnected in stupidity.

I am angry and I yell. I yell at people laughing about irresponsible corona deaths. I yell at the Germanness of selber schuld. I yell at family, at parents who don’t stay put and go out of the house three times a day to buy bagels. “It’s only a half-hour walk,” they say, but half an hour is more than enough, you could get sick and die and I won’t be there to hold you. Your time is precious, is precious to me, you are precious to me, why did I ever want to go away and live a life with love expressed cibernetically. Was it worth it, if it all ends like this? If a plague can strike, so much more can a heart attack, a car, a random virus or disease. Why I am here and not there, why why why?

The agony of the successful Romanian expatriate. The price you pay for the comfort you get, always a sacrifice either way, the world has grown too big and tempting, and I won’t, I won’t, I won’t just stay by the hearth, love my family and disappoint them with my clipped wings in a Romanian society. I will soar high and alone.

Nothing is worth anything. Corona has taught me that or frightened me into believing it.

Then there is a certain loneliness of the shared Corona experience. Yes, we sneakily celebrate birthdays, or take a walk on empty streets with a visinata sour cherry vodka and share high-school memories. Yes, corona memes may bring a smile and corona articles are shared with the quickness of previous tabloid news or gossip. Yes, this pandemic hit in the age of instant connections and I am thankful for companionship. But each friend, each relative has been struck differently and at some point withdrew within. Together aloof. Aloof together. No one can honestly put into words their feelings of corona, yes nobody can understand anybody anyway, but corona, this massive, subtle beast, just short of being truly fatal and frightening, it makes an x-ray of our lives, of our families, of our treatment of the planet, of our comfortableness with ourselves and with each other. It demolishes relationships and builds them back up, unveils the true conspiracy quacks of the extended family, deconspires the reckless friends who party too much, the petty work-givers and work-takers, the hypocrisy of government and big corporations, big pharma, big, big, big, everyone supporting the economy but not really the little guy, the little woman. We’re all judging and judged and doing our best, but actually also failing pretty miserably.

So, so alone. Like never before and never again.

Truly? Is this without precedent?

The dolphins are swimming in Venice waters again and I think, well, actually, nothing will ever be truly better, nothing will ever truly change, no lessons truly learned in Corona. We’ll go back to 8 hour useless desk jobs and transits, no home office for you, you untrustworthy employee, why should you sit at home and rob me of the right to assert my authority over you. We will not spare the planet, we will stream movies as much as we can, fly as much as we can, drive as much as we can, I am the globe-trotter, the thirsty millennial, the trendy successful youth, the world is my oyster and new experiences the ultimate high. My time is more precious than the planet, I’d rather 1 hour flight than 4 hour train ride, my appetite is not to be curbed by anything. Let the animals die, the skies darken and the planet suffer. Corona will pass but I will remain, vice-king of vices, it all, it all pertains to me and me alone.

Nothing will truly be learned, nothing will change, the tragedy is maybe not even as big as other human tragedies. But that just means the world remains as it was – a comforting thought. We limp along, skimp over our issues, accidentally do something good now and again. We holpern and stolpern, and stolpern and holpern. Corona will not defeat us, we have bigger disasters planned.

I am overcome with the guilt of being. Anxiety multiplies, it doubles and triples in itself, goes ambitiously exponential, just like the virus steadily ravaging the world. Not too loud, but always there. Not shocking and obvious, bland enough to be minimized, walked over.

Why do they call it Weltschmerz? What I feel is exactly that no man is an island, any man’s death diminishes me. Corona deaths that were avoidable, did not need to happen; I feel them all and none. I think of the sea of grief left behind, every man and woman or non-binary non-identifying person has someone who loves them and will miss them. What pain for them to feel, amidst such random catastrophe. And if someone dies and is not missed, is that not also the biggest of tragedies? The failed connection, the missed opportunity. Those deaths are not statistics, even when they climb in the millions. They are preventable and did not have to happen like this. I am sad for all and what useless emotion on my side. I would be the first eaten by zombies, too busy contemplating the tragedy to go grab a gun and fight like hell.

What a terrifying thought of one’s own uselessness. Yes, Weltschmerz. But the world has no pain. The world is massive and indifferent. We just limp along attributing meaning.

I stay silent and bury my head in regency romances. Such pain, such panic is toxic. I do not contribute with my empathy. Like an echo chamber reflecting all pain, told and untold, I feel I am a plague of un-wellness.

Recent pandemic days: the tourist buses are back, the case numbers are sinking here and there, growing other where. Open-air concerts, open bagel shops, vaccines all around, people are smiling and laughing; it’s as if corona never was.

I forget my mask sometimes and wonder – how could this not have become even more ingrained? One year suffices to make and unmake habits. A great sigh lives within me and waits for the opportune moment: in months or years I will say, I will think – there was such a thing as corona. Something was bound to happen to me, the 90s kid, spared of communism, wars and diseases. Something was bound to massively interrupt my life and now it has and now it is over.

The astonishing speed with which we accept comfort and happiness. The well-being as status quo. Yes, I shall think, there was such a thing as corona, but now it is over. The crazy times are gone, now I can live as before.

I will welcome the memory-erasing normal. Yes, this is me. The normal.

A Bashful And Conquering Ordeal: ABACO Orchestra Auditions

Chin up. Back straight. Violin firmly positioned between left shoulder and my chin, and the bow held in delicate, fluid balance in my right hand, with spidery fingers caressing it at hopefully equal intervals. I reach towards the strings already trembling with anticipation and I can hear my breath before beginning.

Today is another day of preparation for the ABACO Orchestra auditions, the best, most famous and most dynamic amateur orchestra I have ever heard of.

I navigate Sarasate’s piece backwards and forwards, I use every trick in the good ol’ “violin book”, from repeating notes 4,3,2 times at a fast speed, playing with whimsical rhythms that stress each time a different note, playing isolated groups of notes as fast as I can to see where it all comes crumbling down. And always, eternally practicing every jump between positions hundreds of times, from sudden movements, to long meowing slides from one note to the other, sniffing the outcome, researching the particular spot on the string like a scout on a reconnaissance mission. I mean to chase every ounce of self-doubt and fear out of me with endless repetition towards the absolute certainty a musical conscience such as mine can achieve.

At last it is the day of auditions. Self-doubt creeps in in the form of hunger, stress, insecurities and fear of failure. I wish I never grew to know the fear of failure – that crumbling sadness which cloaks you and whispers in your ear with melancholy about the futility of all your attempts. Why look yourself in the mirror again, to see your imperfections, when you could be left with a hazy, lukewarm self-image that can morph accordingly into fantasies or complacency. This time though, I’m not alone and I let myself be encouraged and walk high to the place of my musical trial.

The inner garden of university is engulfed in the towering statures of tall, dark trees, and in between them hang street lanterns that spread a poetic, mysterious light on the leaves and the buildings around them. There is even a round pavilion with a conic rooftop where I would like to sit and be still and think vague things which are actually feelings more than thoughts. I think childishly that I’m like in a valley of elves of the Lord of the Rings and I’m glad I’m here and going to play with all my might.

Inside the poetry is replaced by strong, bright electric lights as I find a room to “warm up” in. My fingers don’t listen to me, my hands seem frozen against all precautions and my bad mood is back and reigning like a queen. I might almost stomp my foot in protest of my mistakes, if I hadn’t a shred of dignity left. I warm up gradually, but only truly become my best self when I’m joined by another violin player there for the audition, who in his self assurance is playing so loud as to offer me unwittingly the cover of anonymity which my shy self so desperately desires. I hear his high notes, played with a beautiful vibrato, but often off-key. I somehow still think he’s better than me. Even though earlier, encouraged by warm smiles and devotion of my loved one with me, I was playing truly free and reaching frightening speed and dexterity, so that people stopped before the door to gaze through the window at this violin playing girl…guarded by her devoted more-than-friend-looking man blocking the door psychologically with his arched back and seeming ignorance of everyone else around them. My rival questions me extensively with a critical gaze during tiny breaks on what pieces I’m playing and if I’m from Russia (?) and if I’m a professional. Now that’s an… encouragement.

Soon I enter the audition room, populated by a jury of five musicians, who all smile welcoming me, while also with the rapture of their own accomplishments dancing on their faces. I present myself and thank them for the invitation to play tonight and soon I start the fragment I chose from Sarasate. My hands still tremble, even though I’m in relative control of myself and don’t play anything falsely or let my hand drop against the violin or my bow jump naughtily on strings I didn’t intend to touch in that particular second. The echo of the chamber bears me higher and higher as the melody is shaped more firmly and boldly by my fingers. I reach a climax in a very rapid succession of notes, deeply submerged in the music I forget to be afraid of the passage or to note to myself if I made any mistakes. For the first time in my life, I just played.

By the time I reach the slow piece I am trembling less, and my violin resonates with the grave sadness of C. Porumbescu’s ballad, my emotional masterpiece I could play in my sleep. We then arrange in a trio and play something from sight-reading, and at first I’m overcome by a newfound nervousness and forget how to count the time to 1, 2, 3, 4 and am completely out of sync with the others in a short time. Someone from the jury stops us and ardently pleads that we begin again, and this time I shyly ask for a verbal indication of the tempo before beginning. I am attentive and well-synchronized and before I know it, the beautiful melody of the viola and cello makes me forget again the context of my trial, and I play freely, beautifully, vibrating cheerfully and wholly, and even jumping my bow in spicatto in a playful manner in the appropriate places. I wish I could stay here and play, I wish they would take me. We finish and I shyly retreat to leave the room while mumbling thanks, but I’m called back with interest and moderate praise like “super!” and “nice!” and asked to talk about myself for a bit. I think I come across as banal and much too willing for a new orchestra experience and probably also extremely shy.

My M. greets me at the door on my way out, his face lighted by excitement and expectation. For the first time again tonight, I am speechless and let myself be guided gently home by a warm hand squeezing my own, floating on the streets of Munich in a dreamy daze of wonder, that I lived to play like this and have unforgettable memories. My heart beats still fast in my tightened chest, anchoring me to the ground with the nervousness of moments past, but it lightens slowly like a fog being dissipated by a luminous sense of contentment.

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A busy day later, in the silence of my apartment I receive the neutral refusal email, politely phrased with thanks and delight at my participation in the auditions. Shock, shame, anger, self-pity, regret, a smaller wave of shock. Repeat cycle. The sense of grumbling fear, like a monster arising from a pit of darkness inside, whispering into a yell that failure is the truth and success the exception. But then, I gather up what’s left of my dignity and inquire about the reasons of the refusal and the possibility of a new try next semester, to which I receive convincingly encouraging answers. I whine inwardly and feel my bruised pride and mean to say: ‘to hell with all of it!’, but a tiny voice, mocking and pacifying me all the same, whispers in the corners of my consciousness: ‘you know you’ll heal and try again by next semester’.  I may, in time, learn to be grateful to Failure, this most unforgiving and most honest teacher of them all.

The Flixbus Philosopher

The night is towering over me, shadows and lights casting their cloaks alternatively. I am alone, looking for my place of residence for the night, as I’ve done countless times before, in so many travels, so many nights, it seems. It’s been a while since I’ve been scared though. New complications arise in the form of construction sites on my way, and when my GPS says to turn left I only see a dark sandy street, hardly a street at all, with a portion completely deprived of street light and I instinctively go: No way, Google, no!  Oh Maria, what have you gotten yourself into this time?

As I tentatively find my way to my temporary home, the words of my most recent acquaintance resonate in my head to a degree of confounded amusement. Felix, the Flixbus driver. It seems like days ago I boarded a Flixbus to a city far, far away, and was spotted by the driver to be a fellow Romanian – due, no doubt, to my charcoal-sounding name, unmasking me for all my co-nationals to see. He invited me to come up front and sit by him, but I thought it was more a form of greeting than anything else and was absorbed in a book for the most of the first 3-4 hours. Finally closing it I notice the plight of all the passengers: no electricity and no internet on this bus. I felt nauseated because of the reading and went outside to breathe some fresh air. I had to make three steps left and right trying to avoid the smoke from the cigarettes of other passengers.  Unintentionally, I ran into the driver, who once again, with some degree of emphasis, invited-begged me to come to the front of the bus and maybe exchange some stories. He’s bored with his partner, another Romanian driver, they know all of each other’s stories from driving all day long together. While I think of that which M. has diagnosed from his Romanian teacher at the university as the ‘emotional blackmail’ of Romanians, this tiny confession and the pleading voice do the trick: I pack my bags and come to the front, where the other driver smiles at me warmly and shy, like certain older men whose experience didn’t quite catch up with their years. I sit on the ‘partner’s seat’ and get the full view of our ride. Sweet! Or is it?

Now I take a better look at the driver, while I’m being grilled on my personal life. I’m somewhat tired of trying to unwind the tentacles of my chaotic plans to explain them to loved ones, friends or strangers and doubt my own credibility while telling it. I also get the familiar feeling of being a ‘walnut in a wall’, standing out completely and unequivocally, each time I meet other Romanians. Most of the time I feel the luxury of my own lifestyle, not having been driven to Germany by material needs, but by…intellectual ones. Other times I feel like I’m still childish and unsuccessful, compared to some of the Romanian elites and scholarship holders or career people I meet. The harder they climb on the ladder out of Romania, the more they seem to want to climb and show you their ascent. I am stuck perpetually in the middle, it seems.

The driver’s voice is deep and comforting and has in it a degree of authority and the semblance of wisdom ready to be delivered in advice and pronunciations on life and society. He praises my ‘success’ so far and makes a point to say that anyone could have studied and received scholarships but they didn’t. I think about how not everyone gets an equal start in life or emotional support so technically speaking that’s not really true. But as in so many occasions I swallow my words – disagreement is pointless. I’m slightly more worried by the fact that the driver very frequently makes eye contact with me and at some point in the middle of an argument even extends his hand while saying his name, a proper, normal introduction, except for the fact that we’re at the front of a bus full of people. Felix. Felix is a bald man, wearing a white, immaculate shirt and jeans, pretty upstanding for your normal Flixbus driver, with a bit of a tummy, but an otherwise strong demeanor and an intent gaze. He’s insulted by my formal Romanian and asks if I think he’s that old. I point to him that it’s more due to his grave, advice giving voice and he reveals that’s a learned trait on the job of a bus driver – calming people down and being the face of authority. I find out the name of the other driver in their interactions – he’s Filip. Filip doesn’t speak German, he came here 5 months ago after a single phone call with Felix, whom he didn’t know, but who nonetheless promised him a job and gave him assurances. So they’ve been driving together ever since. Felix and Filip, Filip and Felix, the flixbus drivers. Might be the start of a comic series.

The conversations goes back and forth over Romanian politics, communism, Germany and corruption, Romanian and German ways of life, relationships and anything in between. As the evening progresses I find out that Felix is from a village near Timisoara, that he misses the simple and warm people, that he hates it in Germany, but wouldn’t really move elsewhere – except South America for its people (but it’s dangerous! – I say), but as long as Germany would take care of him when he’s old and grey and keep him in a pension and health benefits after his hard work, that’s most important. I give him the latest statistics from Der Spiegel on Germany’s poverty rate, but we both agree it’s still a galaxy away from Romania. He tells me of his school and high-school, familiar stories of the astonishingly low level of education in some of Romania’s school, not the top-notch, and of his coming to Germany.

In most of my interactions with Romanians in Germany the thing that makes me chuckle the most is their general dislike of Germans and Germany. Most of them haven’t been outright discriminated, but a wave of antipathy sweeps through them all the same: Germans are supposed to be cheap, cold and generally lifeless or humorless. What such Romanians usually have in common is that they live in a tightly bound smaller Romanian group or community and sometimes don’t speak German very well. I am usually shrouded in embarrassment a little due to my own conditions – I’ve made German friends, I’ve fallen in love. I used to say similar things before, but it’s hard to propagate stereotypes when you have exceptions roaming about you all day long. Damn me, I’ve met me some funny Germans!

But Felix tops all the other disgruntled Romanians. From the starboard of the Flixship he decrees: the German has invented corruption! “All the wrongs in Romania, he says, I thought they were because of communism, but now I know, they were brought by the German!” At this point I’m too amused to be shocked. I tell him I know about German ‘corruption’, like their double-stance on all matters ecology – outright big promoter and recycler, but then most car manufacturers falsify their data about carbon emissions of the cars, and politicians are practically lobbying for the auto industry. But then I say, the “German” still has the power to be outraged about corruption, there are mechanisms in place to fix the system and they often work when cases are discovered. He is adamant. I ask him for examples or stories, I ask to be enlightened. One of the things he tells me is how German companies employ Romanians in fabrics but refuse to allow them to become qualified workers through training like an “Ausbildung”, but pay them all their life as “unqualified workers” so as to profit. Ok, this sounds plausible and I’ve never thought of it before. Other anecdotes come from his time as a driver: how he witnessed border policemen being bribed by ‘two green coffees’, which he translates for me as 200 Euros. How he was told stories by policemen accepting large sums of money from drug dealers, wordlessly leaving the room after taking the stack of the table.

But the funniest anecdote, sprinkled with bits of Romanian wisdom, regards the health insurance system of Germany: private vs. state insurance. He tells of his operation where he was made to wait a long time and scheduled to have it in a month, although he was in great pain. He thought to himself, hell, I come from Romania, I know how this goes – he went to the store and bought 4 Lindt chocolates for the nurses, one for the doctor and a large bottle of whisky. The nurses received the chocolates happily, while saying: “Oh, you shouldn’t have!”, he was immediately introduced to the doctor after his gift wrapping had been spotted, the doctor was glad of the whisky, told about his Friday dinner plans with guests (Our Romanian is muttering to himself now – ‘I really don’t care how you use it, just take a look at me’) and he was scheduled for an operation the next week. More chocolates and whisky followed, the waiting time grew ever shorter until the final gift-giving which granted Felix a doctor’s notice for a 4-week paid medical leave. Thus, my fellow Romanian means to educate me in the true Germany.

Sometimes he contradicts me regardless of what I say, like when discussing the health system in Romania – I name him our most recent scandals and describe them to him: disinfectants and Dr. Burnei. He disagrees when I say I don’t know how German people would live in Romania, he disagrees when I’m unsure of ever going back to live there again. He disagrees about pretty much anything and after a while I understand we’re in a battle of wits. I’m having outright fun now, although I really shouldn’t. He aims to crumble my naiveté once again by his description of German tolerance in all matters of physical love – he finds them abhorrent and quotes to me stories of very ‘open’ relationships and general…promiscuity. General east European skepticism and mistrust of any outright freedom or non-Christian orientations…. I counterattack and ask him if he knows we’re the country with the highest number of adolescent mothers, due surely to the lack of corresponding education in schools? He puts that on poverty. He also stresses we shouldn’t blame the government for all our problems, that if everybody wanted to change the situation would be bettered – no more bribery and so on. But then, I tease him, you also went and bought the whisky. I then complain about Romanian intolerance, how we react to the #metoo trend by practicing victim-blaming or laughing about it. I refer him to the most famous assault case from a couple of years ago, where the victim had an ‘apparent’ bad reputation in the village and was afterwards harassed and received death threats and couldn’t get out of the house, because she had ruined the reputation of seven fine boys. He proceeds in a case of further victim blaming and tells me how the girls in such villages are, he knew a couple of them too, and it was her fault too. I say her reputation and the deed are completely separate and have nothing to do with each other. I point to my violin and say, if someone stole it, I would be careless, but someone would still be the thief, and the bigger problem is that of the thief. He reacts emphatically and panicked and looks at the violin the moment I pronounce the word and expresses care if I really did put it close to me.

At some point he reveals his age – just a year older than me. I’m more amused than ever and try to keep the conversation light, but in some weird turn of the subject he seems keen to convince me that German-Romanian relationships are doomed, because Germans don’t see the world as ‘we’ do, they’re only after money and bettering their social position (so are Romanians, I say, they’re just not that good at it). There’s something that escapes language too, about these Germans, which he tries to name and fails, like a faulty trait of their being which makes them fundamentally incompatible, you would say, as he sighs and stumbles across beginnings of sentences. But then, his voice again escapes his true age as he gravely says to me: “mark my words, if you have a family here with a German, you will never ever go back to Romania and make it your home.” (Didn’t you just tell me how Germans are happy to live in Romania, being paid German salaries, they find it so great?)  If he weren’t so cautious, you would think this was a drawn-out intelligent way to make a pass at me through conversation and nothing else – I may give off a signal that any outright attempts would be refuted.

And so, in a couple of hours, my introduction into the true Germany has steadily begun and remains to be completed by experience. The driver has taken a back seat now and Filip is driving, occasionally braking suddenly and releasing a string of swearwords so authentic it definitely warms my heart to hear them. Felix apologizes for the ‘academic’ comments. Filip also curses a passeneger in Romanian, when the passenger asks how long the break in the station is, but Filip the Romanian doesn’t have patience after hearing this question for a thousand time and insults the passenger to me, saying how they can’t figure out for themselves that the bus will just leave when all the passengers are boarded! Oh well, you know, fellow passenger of 6-7 hours on a bus, buying food and stretching your legs are not an option. Filip asks repeatedly if I don’t have any YouTube videos of my playing the violin and tells me about his passion for classical music, because of its effect on the…endocrinal gland that helps him sleep. Say what you will about Romanians and their prejudices, most encounters with them are priceless.

I know I’ve been another story in a string of passengers, as Felix tells me, he’s spoken with Romanian writers, actors, teaching assistants in biology departments, prostitutes and genius kids admitted to Harvard. Our Flixbus philosopher appears to me a veritable, perpetually moving inn-keeper of the olden times, at the starboard of many journeys of others through the night across the cold, intolerable Germany, thirsting for stories of his own people. As I get down the bus he asks for my phone number and I gave to him, only to receive his. I wonder if I’ll ever use it. The streets have come to an end and I am, again, ‘home.’

Can poetry grow old? An evening at the Munich Lyrik Kabinett

The autumn sun has set completely over the busy, student-packed streets around Munich’s LMU University while I pace myself steadily, but hastily in my traditional almost-late-but-maybe-also-just-in-time fashion towards the Lyrik Kabinett. I hate to admit it, but I’m nervous to go there. I ache for culture, events, new people, the literary scene of this great modern city. But hey, the lonely poetry pilgrim may still be well-received as a newcomer to a dying species.

I am led by street signs into an inner street, where the building of the “kabinett” is, with large windows allowing me to see the cozily lit room of this night’s poetry reading. A gentle, nice German lady gives me my entrance ticket and is delighted by my question about acquiring a yearly member’s pass. I receive a form to fill and decide that I’ll give my verdict at the end of the evening.

My tardiness costs me a seat in a neutral area of the room, as all the front seats are reserved and there are only two open seats in the back. I notice there are seats for people from a publishing house and get a weird sense of pride – this is a publishing-house-worthy event! My excitement descends to a state of restless resignation at grasping the medium age of the participants among the grey hairs and clothes. I am overly conscious of my schoolgirl outfit, with jeans and a sweater, and my book bag on my shoulder, partly due to a washing machine malfunction in my building. In trying to reach a seat I apparently vex an elderly lady on my right by not dropping my bag in my hand, before passing before her. I apologize immediately, aware of my bad manners, but that doesn’t please her as she continues to chastize me: “Das hätten Sie doch wissen sollen” – the round-away German way of saying “you should have known better.” I apologize again but I´m surprised to notice that I do not feel so ashamed as I should, and suspect I´m partly thrilled at being chastised by a lady so annoyed by my mere presence, that she gazes with utmost hate in my direction. It´s a change in my day to day monotony for sure. And I don´t hold it against her… with her grey stockings, her checkered skirt and stubby shoes that have witnessed the passing of decades, her manner speaks to me of solitude and impatience, a sense of malcontent that has ripened across the years as if it were set in stone. I cannot take offense at her.

To my left is a very relaxed gentleman, owner of a respectable quantity of grey hair himself, sitting with his legs crossed, and smacking his lips for his own pleasure, like chewing the inside of his mouth. I hate that sound. I gaze across the room, waiting for the poetry reading to start. It’s 8 o’clock sharp and many Germans are demonstratively checking their clocks. “It does not do”, they’re saying. I see many elderly people, walking monuments to already deceased elements of fashion, predatory possessing the room, and I feel that most of the people are Germans, by their mannerisms, their hair, their expressions. How often do foreigners reach a sufficient level of German for this reading, and if they do, how many of them are interested? Even I with my newly acquired C2 in my pocket feel unsure and clutch childishly to my German-English dictionary app.  I feel like an intruder. But then, someone approaches the microphone.

The person whom I believe to be the director of the Lyrik Kabinett offers a short introduction to today’s reading, by referencing the poet, Christoph Meckel, and previous readings at the Lyrik Kabinett. After which he jovially introduces the moderator for the evening, Wolfgang Metz, who likewise attempts to say a few words about our poet. However, they are united in the attempt to please the literary inclinations of the main guest, by not trying to explain his work before it is read, so we are left with vague descriptions in laudatory tones. As a non-connoisseur I regret the choice and am amused by it at the same time (The ghost of Foucault smirks content in the background, mumbling “the author is dead”). My M. would like it. I’m constantly curious about the present literary figures in Germany, the way I don’t know who the main literary critics are (or how exactly to find out), who the trendy writers are, the newcomers, the poets, the modern ‘classics’, so I have my Google friend ready to search for their names for as much information as possible. In a creepy way maybe, I find out that W. Metz is a Lektor / an editor at Carl Hanser Publishing House, that he studied music theory and art, and received a prestigious prize for his translation of the works of Simone Weil. I admit that researching people online when you meet them is a backlash of modern comfort, but it makes me smile to think that it was maybe his translation that I read many years ago in Berlin, when my faith was losing the battle with me, and hanging on to me through the quirky writings of S. Weil.  The poet has arrived on the stage, helped and sustained at both his elbows when walking up the stairs. He begins reading, and I have my app prepared to search meticulously for every unknown poetic, obscure word when the lady to my right, after multiple gazes in my direction, verifying if this teenager can’t last without her facebook for 5 minutes, finally cracks and says loudly to me, that my cellphone is bothering her immensely, that that light is just destroying her vision, she just can’t enjoy anything because of it. She says it so loud before I stack the cellphone back in my bag, I’m sure everyone heard it. Bye bye dictionary. It’s just me and my German now.

The poet, our main figure and guest for the evening, is an 82 year old dignified man, accompanied by his wife, who is greeted almost as cordially as he is. He explains what a poem is, a narrative, long poetry piece, usually ‘telling’ something (Erzaehlung). He announces, in an elderly fashion, that he reads slowly and carefully, and it will take him an hour to read his poem (he wasn’t kidding!). I sense some unpleasant shifts in the chairs around me, but also the general devoted attention. I tried researching the poet as much as I could before coming, without actually buying one of his poetry volumes. He won numerous prizes (Including one called the Rilke prize) and was an inhabitant of East Berlin, whose poetry was of a cynical, melancholic nature, even against the more enthusiastic movements of Berlin youth in the 60’s. I try listening to his poem, connecting these 2-3 phrases to the next 2-3 phrases, keeping in mind the overall structure, preparing myself for the hour-long recital and internal battle of literary criticism. I am reminded of his editor’s joke, that for him even to listen to a short poem is a challenge, an endeavor, an “Anstrengung”. I am almost always tormented by the question of “what is literature?” when reading or listening something… to me some works are literature through their structure, their complex message like a network of allusions to other movements and traits, other are literature through the sheer beauty of words, a unique, personal style, portraying the word in a peculiar light, an echo of a feeling, a shade of an image. Others, the masterpieces, combine both ways of being and leave us breathless. And then there are the imitations of literature, the ‘there but not quite there’, the intermingling of literary sequences with cliches, the spark of personality among imitations of others, the once beautiful message, adorned with universally known images, the unfinished journey to originality and relevance, the regret of incompleteness.

The three parts of the poem speak of the journey of a couple, between seas and mountains, flying above them, being at the shore of a river, the feeling of love, of helplessness, of ignorance (“we don’t know nothing”), a few poetic lines about the meaning of a name, how it can’t be taken away, only given, or rarely stolen or borrowed, how it belongs to gods and higher beings. Intersected in the verses are postmodern references to parking places, consumer culture, epitomized in the metaphor of a corpse of a god, in whose eyes and nostrils shops were built, malls, and tourist agencies, and hotels, the industry flourished on his body until he was unrecognizable. Meanwhile the perspective from he/she changes to “I” in childhood memories, a jumbled up mixture of thoughts and images, seeking a cathartic dissolution in the death of the loved one, whose corpse is heavy but carried as if being weightless, across valleys and seas, and then the journey being continued by ‘he’ alone, until the ghost of the loved one comes calling him to take him away. My mind wonders unwillingly to the inspiration of the poem, a dead lover in the past, or the fear of death in the present. I could never read poems of a lost love with my loved one beside me, but I suppose artists are only artists when they defeat their self-censorship.

I look at the faces around me, some checking their watches, some pulling out the volume from their bags, maybe checking to see how much longer until the poem ends. I wonder if we’re all pretending to enjoy it, to pay attention, how much rapture is actually involved in the business of culture, and how much companionship-seeking. The elderly lady next to me is fidgeting too, but the glances in my direction have decreased. I feel lonely in my thoughts, like many other times in contradiction to my surrounding. This poem is to me nothing but a mixing up of favorite motifs and cliches, a work of clear prose, only rarely interrupted by a repetition of a word, pausing the flow of the work, like a remnant of poetry and rhythm, a pale ghost of lyricism, without a coherent vision or message, like gathering up all that remains in a fridge and making a pizza with it. I have the sense of being ashamed of my thoughts, but luckily they are too unimportant to ever bother someone.

I feel lost in the sea of ‘germany’-ness, the whole ‘gemuetlichkeit’ (“warm cordiality”, comfort) of their mannerisms, the rounded atmosphere where almost nothing disturbs, words echoing against each other in perfect, sense-numbing harmony, even in its sadness, the language of the poem rolls of the tongue plumply, each word as if wearing heavy boots announcing its beginning and ending… The poet himself, in his advanced age and dignity, keeps smacking his lips so close to the microphone, one can almost hear the puddle of saliva around his tongue at the end of each sentences, after drinking a glass of water, I try to concentrate on his words but sometimes all I hear is the plitch-platch of old age. There is charisma and there is art, but I believe after tonight that there is no sublime between earthly people, in our banal humaneness. If we had met Eminescu or Creanga in our Romania, or Goethe in Germany, maybe we would have hated their mannerism, their looks, their manner of speaking. Why, oh why can’t I see the genie of this one living poet before me, winner of so many prizes, and at current the receiver of fierce applause?

Nonetheless, relief flows in the air as the poem ends, followed by an abrupt ending of the whole event, with people retreating to a glass of the famous German “Sekt”, that is, but isn’t champagne. The lady next to me suddenly turns warmly to me and thanks me cordially for putting away my cellphone so quickly, revealing a completely other image of herself, kind and benevolent, after she had decided I’m maybe a good kid after all. I apologize again and again and say that I hope she could enjoy the evening after all. At this she informs me she was a colleague of the poet at the “academy” 30 years ago, that his drawings are at least as good as his poems, and how she appreciated the work so much, being so “modern” but also like a fairy tale, carrying you peacefully and dreamily away. I keep nodding and smiling and agreeing – a contradiction is unthinkable, and that leads to her quickly wishing me a nice evening and walking away. I almost regret it, I would have wanted to drink a coffee with the lady and hear about times from 30 years ago and the “academy” and all these rich lives being lived in Germany before my time here. About anything really.

I hastily buy my membership pass and “evacuate” the building, after glancing quickly at a compact group of 5 German youths, no doubt students of Germanistik or something. With an institution that withered the test of time, like the Lyrik Kabinett, there’s bound to be a next time. Slow beginnings, slow beginnings.

 

 

 

 

 

A not so tragic…Exile

So I’ve been thinking.

In a week from now, it will be a year since I came back from Japan. It seems like so much longer than that. Sometimes it even seems as if it never happened at all. Other, more self-conscious times, I sigh with the relief of those continuously bathed in comfort and familiarity, as if I’m still returning from a long exile. By living in yet another exile.

Oh I know, exile is not the politically correct term for it. It’s selfish and childish and disrespectful to history. But how else to describe the sense of unfulfilled longing and the never-quite-being at home? Without the semblance of a higher purpose to one’s momentary sadness, it all just succumbs to a pile of ice-cream shaped self-pity. Sometimes I cannot help being strangely envious of the heroes of my literary research: the naive and thoughtless Urashima, leaving the land of paradise under the sea just to see his home once again, but then never finding it again, just as he knew it. And my current focus, the irreparably sincere and morally unforgiving dissident to the communist regime – Paul Goma – who only chose exile when forced to do so. Hmmm, maybe I should overcome my own in-adequateness – then I’ll at least vary my research!

But then, melancholy is so frowned upon nowadays. Best leave it to poets and soul singers. So, in honor of my upcoming 1 year anniversary from the Return from Japan, here are three of my funniest moments:

***

Being an odd turtle (I know, the term is odd bird…) If my Berlin Eramus experience has taught me anything – don’t settle for classes for exchange students – go find your own way! Work hard and suffer. Yeah!… Moving on – of course I signed up for Japanese Literature classes and seminaries, in Japanese. Being totally in over my head 🙂 . Upon further inspection of the description of a particular class, I realize I’m probably definitely not going to keep up with Japanese students reading excerpts of a novel each session (the memorable Kirikirijin by Inoue Hisashi!). I go to the teacher and attempt to gracefully, but shamefully withdraw from the class, in Japanese. He laughs and his words make me feel as if I’ve been reassuringly patted on the shoulder: “Don’t worry, they’re all Chinese anyway!” (Disclaimer: Chinese people can read/understand Japanese kanji effortlessly). Ha ha ha… what a relief!

***

Fast forward to the class. The teacher’s good humor is refreshing and makes me question my stereotyped image of Japanese people. But then, I stand out like a walnut on the wall (ca nuca-n perete)  like we Romanians say, being the only non-Asian foreigner there. The teacher decides to make me a special study case – after all, they’ve never seen anybody from Romania! The whole class is then obliged to perform the self-introductory Japanese torture speech called jiko shokai for me, the new one.  The foreigner. One by one, they rise, their emotions burst controlled in the 2-3 expected phrases, streaming turbulently like a river, upstream and downstream, they bow respectfully before me while I try to maintain a sober poker face. I give up after the 7th person. Foreigners are allowed to smile and laugh right? But then, I gradually start to fit in as the attention of everyone is distracted by, oh my, a tardy student! A boy comes running into the classroom, the look of shame towering over his features, apologies come out from him with his last breath and then his expression becomes perplexed. He sees me, he sees everybody, he feels the strangely funny-formal atmosphere, he is informed he has to do a jiko shokai. He understands at once, makes one bow before me. He proceeds with much more detail than his colleagues, never having heard the pattern – in 1-2 minutes I find out his name, his major, his hometown, his hobbies, and I’m respectfully greeted and yoroshiku-ed. He sits down in the polite laughter of everyone else. Just as I’m about to be invited to illustrate Romanian greetings on the blackboard, yet another student almost jumps through the door pushed open. A girl. Out of breath, ragged, yet distinctly self-assured. She too senses the situation, is sentenced to jiko shokai and proceeds. At length. In detail. With exuberance. Almost no trace left of her polite and slightly fake display of tardiness-shame. With each powerfully voiced phrase the class bursts more into laughter, like a crescendo in a Tschaikowsky concert. Or a well-choreographed sit-com. She goes beyond saying her name, her major, her hometown, her hobby, the university club she participates in, her age, her previous classes at the university, the instrument that she plays. The laughter is contagious and liberating. At some point she notices she is the breaker of patterns and takes only a little bow and sits down at the back of the class. Then I proceed to rehearse the pronunciation of Romanian ‘Good day!’ with about 30 Chinese people in Japan. Bună ziua!

***

Fast-forward to the after-storm. My laptop is toast after an adventure on the tiny blue bicycle during a storm. I agonize about not being able to write properly. My keyboard is still taking a bubble bath. After weeks of trying to fix it, a linguistic culture shock finding the Japanese word for screwdriver (sucureeeewww-dooo-rai-baaaaa), 4-5 very expensive, different screwdrivers filling out my shelves, and still, there is a last nail left on the back of the keyboard that won’t come out. It attaches it to the elderly, traumatized mother-laptop. At the peak of my frustration, after 2 weeks, I take the laptop in my hands, on my bicycle to the hardware store where I bought all the  sucureeeewww-dooo-rai-baaaaa. I’m a regular customer now, a Stammkunde, a client fidel, and most of all, an honored okyaku-sama. After I explain my problem to two very confused, impeccably polite Japanese gentlemen, one of them takes my laptop ceremoniously in his hand, goes back with it in the office behind the counter. A few minutes pass, they come out frustrated and walk my laptop formally in a diagonal through the store the size of Kaufland. I’m made to wait, but not long. This is still Japan. After a couple of minutes, the elderly man comes back, frustrated and with gray hair like a grizzly bear, growing all the greyer for the ordeal I put him through, he hands me my laptop, and then proceeds to bow to 45 degrees with his palms outstretched, on them a tiny ruin of a nail. “I’m sorry madam, but you won’t be able to use this nail from now on”, he says, in illustrious keigo – Japanese polite language.  I try my best not to laugh, as I’m both very embarrassed and very excited. My feminism only gets me so far – even they had problems with the nail! But then, I try to curtsy subtly while taking the nail, and feel again, as if I’m on another planet entirely.

***

Going home on my blue bike, across a very steep hill and an even steeper down slide, the wind cursing through my hear, the echoes of loneliness chased away, I laugh content and happy at the crazy Japan, the crazy me. I don’t even suspect the adventures to come, but the tiny moment in itself is enough. I will never forget the ceremonial nail-giving bow and the chastising expression crowning it. One look at my still somewhat-new keyboard suffices to remember it every time.

The Psychology of the C2 German Certificate Candidate

The clock is ticking on a Saturday morning with a fury, as my mind races towards yet another language certificate exam. I wish I could say my steps are also rapidly succeeding each other and carrying me self-assuredly towards the building of the place of my torture for the next 5-6 hours. But alas, in good ol’ fashioned tradition I have barely slept the night before and feel myself floating through the air with effort like in a dream, barely directing my body towards its destination, relying more on memory than on actual space-time orientation. Great way to go take an exam, Maria! You sure haven’t changed a bit.

As I approach the Gasteig, cultural center of Munich and incidentally the concert hall of the philharmonic orchestra, I can’t decide if I like the building or not. Imposing, of an unfortunate shade of brown, yet adorned with cafes and trees and with a whiff of culture-brewing libraries, I navigate it with pleasure and hesitation to find the exam room. It’s so early in the morning, I finally got to know how a warm chocolate croissant a la Munich tastes like and can feel it going damp in my bag. Students and grownups flock towards the exams and as I reach my class I feel as unsure as a zombie who just woke up to realize he overslept through the apocalypse and everyone surrounding him has turned back to normal.

A Chinese lady around 50 years old (but possessing the fortunate appearance of perpetual youth granted to many Asian people) is particularly chatty and childishly swings her legs on the chair she is sitting on. I note that most of the people taking the C2 exam have been living in Germany for the past 10-20 years or are native speakers who need a certificate of German for some reason. I feel overly conscious about my east-european accent and my drowsiness makes me forget basic conversational phrases. But then I sigh inwardly with relief, as a girl next to me speaks in a heavy accent and wonders aloud on the structure of the ‘speaking’ portion of the test. I think to myself, hey, I’m not the only one here who doesn’t sound like a German! But then my joy quickly evaporates as the girl from Poland finally realizes she is in front of the wrong classroom, lets out a girlish laugh and jumps embarrassed out of her chair to go find the B2 classroom, deserting me to linger in my insecurities like in a puddle of rainwater. It wasn’t always there, it won’t always be there, but at the moment it feels as tremendous as a flood, soaking my clothes, my skin, my very soul. Come back, childish girl from Poland, don’t leave me here alone! I like your accent! If only the exam tax weren’t so high…

I relay my thoughts to the Chinese lady and make her laugh, only to then proceed to review a few notes and idioms which might still come in handy. I notice my reviewing makes the lady uncomfortable, as she also pulls out some papers, only to pretend to go through them until brushing them aside and bouncing her feet impatiently, with a certain childish charm. Her expression abounds with laughter and serenity, the time for reviewing has passed, nothing could every improve or change the results now and all she wants to do is chat with people, enjoy the society of youngsters and the chance to express herself in her vivid manner, before the seriousness of the exam silences us all.

With curiosity I gaze upon the rest of the participants. Two German girls chat in a corner with open books on their laps, obviously not paying them attention. One of the girls, blue-eyed with German blond hair, presents herself as a ‘Munchnerin”, which is for me much more than being German. “I come from Munich, I have lived here all my life, Munich-culture and vocabulary is ingrained in me, much more than just being German, I also identify with this specific region” – her words seem to whisper in my ears. The ridiculousness of trying to take the same exam as native speakers makes me shiver.

Other girls boast of their lack of preparedness and the spontaneous, yet well-thought sort of competition before an exam ensues: who has studied the least? A hard contestant is an Italian girl, whose accent is noticeable, but whose body language speaks of anything other than unpreparedness and hesitation. It’s an amusing sight for sure, the boastful display of ‘failure’ and ‘shyness’ of the over-confident people. With a stoutly built body, a hand on her hip and sound vocal chords to shout her lack of confidence in an Italian-German, the figure of the unprepared candidate makes the corners of my mouth twitch in amusement. Should this all be a game we play, an intellectual poker, sizing everybody up while bluffing about one’s level of preparation? I’m too tired or too old to play.

I don’t believe of course that reading my notes now would actually make a difference. It calms me down like a mantra, like warming up exercises before a violin concert, just to get me in the mood for grueling hours of questions. The few men among us on the other hand are aggressively silent and shy, fervently reviewing notes or just sunk in their own consciousness, too far away to chat like mere worldly mortals.

Alas, the gates are open! I have taken exams in different countries, but I can’t remember a German way of dealing with preparations such as checking identification and distributing the exam leaflets. It’s efficient and punctual as expected. Though our supervisor is a retired male teacher who cannot answer any questions without deferring to the younger, more perky blonde teacher. I ask a question and realize immediately afterwards that I used a verb wrong. Man, I will never be fluent in German. The level of concentration required is mind-boggling. I spend the most part of the exam irritated because I am given the impression that the male teacher will conduct the ‘speaking’ part of the exam with each of us. Dressed in a dark blue shirt, with glasses hanging on the tip of his nose, his look is suspicious of us all, mistrusting and superior, the kind of teacher who believes the top grade belongs to God, the immediately following is earned only by the teacher, and the 3rd best can be achieved by the student. I suspect women are also only entitled to the 4th possible grade. I wonder at my own prejudices and try to imagine the teacher in a sympathetic circumstance, with a granddaughter on his knees or young and in love, but then he answers a question in an unpleasant tone of voice and my thoughts are erased instantly. What am I thinking of, anyway….

I peruse the reading part feeling as if my brain has never been so strained… reading words I should understand at once two or more times, as if one were putting together a puzzle with pieces which are constantly changing their form. The questions are… a bit insolent… In a paragraph about an European consciousness or EU-citizens, supra-national democracy and nation-state, you are supposed to circle the right answer. Does the author wish – one would distance himself from nationalist thinking? One would develop an European consciousness? One would have a common ideal of democracy? Really now, they are all more or less alike and all accurate for some parts of the text.

Hearing- and writing-related parts of the test go by quickly, and I have a break before speaking while I take a stroll to the nearby bookstore and buy myself “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” for 3 Euro in a Penguin books edition. Enough with it, enough people have asked me mockingly if I’ve read it. It’s a classic, it’s high time I read it. And I really like English-speaking Penguin books… By the time I have to complete the ‘speaking’ portion I’m more or less awake and not that nervous anymore.

The subject I choose for the discussion are elite universities vs. tiny universities – which should be financially supported? I launch into a plea for the continued development of elite universities, citing their role in society and communication in the academic fields and research, their being an example for all the rest, and how the system should maybe be made so that there is more communication between elite universities and small universities. I give numerous examples from Romania and Germany and I become so passionate on the topic that I forget I’m on an exam. I babble and have to rephrase my sentences repeatedly when I realized I messed up a der die das. The exam doesn’t actually matter anymore, I just want to convince this tough lady in front of me how important high standards are at a university and how badly a country without elite universities fares. At some point I am politely and coldly dismissed from the exam. My 10 speaking minutes are up. I rise in shock and mumble something resembling thanks and before I know it I’m out the door. It only later occurs to me, the university where the exam takes place, Volkshochschule Munchen, is probably tiny and doesn’t have much funding. I may have unknowingly offended my exam teachers… Oh well… I’m amused enough about it to turn it into an anecdote for my family, only to receive a reassuring phone call from my mother, that surely, that lady was just frustrated, she wanted to deochi you, to cast evil thoughts of envy upon you, don’t you think about it, it’s over now, it’s only naturally they’re upset and you might have hit a nerve and she might lower your grade because of it… I try to take back my anecdote and explain to my mother that German teachers are professional and don’t lower a grade because of a perceived impression and I’m not worried about incurring the ‘evil eye’ of deochi upon me. I really do have complete trust that only my language abilities will be considered. Sometimes Romania really seems like a lifetime and a planet away from Germany, having always to explain that here nobody is out to get you or to treat you unfairly, as to ease a personal day-to-day frustration just for a little bit through the mistreatment of unfortunate you.

I sigh relieved and with regret when released from the exam. I spot the other candidates dispersing in different directions. I wish I had learned more, and at the same time it somehow doesn’t matter anymore. I can’t remember how many such exams I’ve written, in English, German, French and Japanese… From the sure-of-himself candidate, the carefree candidate, the boasting-of-his-own-unpreparedness candidate, the candidate who quits halfway through the exam because he doesn’t feel prepared enough, the old lady trying to concentrate to get all the answers right, who checks them one more time while holding her answer sheet in the air before the outstretched hand of the teacher who came to collect it, the shy candidate too nervous to speak, and the mixture of a slightly smiling, talking zombie, still reviewing her notes and musing on a meta-level about the many exams taken and their psychology… we’re all there because of different reasons and ambitions, yet subjected to the same torture, harboring secret hopes and thoughts… Sometimes I wish I knew how the others fared in the exam and what they can do with the results. Can it really get you a job as a teacher of German, a call center operator or a PR person? Or a scholarship for a PhD?

I also slightly wish I had concentrated more on the exam instead of thinking in a dreamy state how I would like to remember all the details and write them down and share them. So many months reading and writing academic papers and theses, secluded and melancholy, an exam with different people with different behaviors amuses me beyond the scope of the endeavor… Something to live through, something to write about! Maybe experience is in the end more valuable than knowledge. A not-so-comforting thought to keep me company while awaiting the results of the Goethe C2 Proficiency exam.

The even more fond memory of a romantic stroll afterwards, through the streets around Sendlinger Tor, in the Viktualienmarkt and in the imperial gardens in Munich… Exploring bookshops, wishing one could buy a book only to receive it as a gift with a tiny hidden letter in it, buying egg liquor and the best soft ice cream of whole Munich, with the hand of the loved one resting happily on my shoulder… Memories to love, from a dreamy tiredness, at peace with having tried one’s best and still being deserving of happiness… If I could have this feeling every time, I would surely write the C2 exam again and again and again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hiroshima, mon amour

井の中の蛙大海を知らず

“A frog in a well cannot conceive of the great ocean.”

Orientation day. I arrive one day later than everybody else and carry all my transcontinental luggage from the airport with me, having been reminded by a gracious German colleague, that, coming from Tubingen University, I also stand for German punctuality. My oh my. In Japan, above all. So here I am, a good hour before the orientation starts, in the bus to the Hiroshima University, sleepy and dizzy, adorned with bags like a Christmas tree, and about to get off at the wrong station when a kind gentleman stops me and tells me: “If you’re going to the orientation for exchange students, get off at the next station”. So does he and he leads the way to the building of the orientation seminar, while he proceeds to also inform me that he is none other than the director of the Hiroshima University Study Abroad program. HUSA, as we came to be called. I look around at the grey buildings surrounded by many trees and patches of nature and try to get used to the idea of spending the next 10 months here. In a very Maria-typical entrance in this new life, a part of my mind can’t help whispering to me: “I can’t believe you came to Japan, at the end of the world. You’ve done lots of crazy things in your life, lady, but this tops them all” :).

Fast-forward almost two months and some mini-crises in the form of lack of internet, bureaucratic mind-flooding, finding a new place to live and moving out of the dorm, due to some original, yet inartistic decorations of the walls and floor, and some uninvited, tiny, black guests, who under normal circumstances would inhabit the kitchen and sneak bits of food, but who, nevertheless, were gracious enough to also pay me a visit :D. They must have thought, like most people do, that Japan offers a great deal of loneliness to its foreign visitors. It might be so, mostly because of the great language barrier for most people, but then, loneliness tends to be a personal problem or even choice as well.

But there also many beautiful things here – among them, for me, ramen and my blue bicycle! I love it so much, that, if it were possible I would have it shipped by ferry to Romania. Or Germany. A bit confused about the country of origin right now hehe. The latest adventure happened on the bicycle though, on the 20 minute long stretch towards home through a persistent storm that stubbornly penetrated my backpack and ruined the keyboard of my laptop. Ordering a new keyboard and finding the right screwdriver (speaking of words you think you’ll never need in Japanese…) and replacing it myself took a while hehe…So, in short, that’s why the prolonged silence. Add to that recent tragedies like the fire in Bucharest that left 56 people dead and the terror attack in Paris (and those in Beirut, and Nigeria, and…), which make any other thought or post seem utterly irrelevant. I read news articles and notice also light bits and pieces of information, and wonder how people can write about anything else or be concerned about anything else. It is almost shocking to see that the world moves on, and to remember that it would always move on. But then, what would be the alternative? In the end, I suppose, life triumphs over death simply through the act of living on.

There are also mysterious coincidences in the world. A couple of weeks ago I was with some friends in a town called Takehara, famous for a lights festival, where they carved beautiful shapes in bamboo wood (abundant in the area) and lit them up at sunset, while the women of the town performed a dance in the traditional neighborhood of the town, with houses well-preserved since 1850, and their typical, beautiful Japanese gardens. As evening came and the lanterns were lit, everything was engulfed in their magic, that bore for me an almost crushing melancholy. At the same time in Romania hundreds of candles were lit in remembrance and prayer for the dead and wounded in the fire at the club in Bucharest. I thought it strange that I would be at the other end of the world and get to see such a beautiful scenery, and yet it was in my mind also dedicated to them. The world shone once more in all its beauty almost only for the souls who were departing it, it seemed. I should think, or hope, that life and death abide by no geography…and neither do our feelings.

If anything, these past weeks and months in Japan, thinking about the Japanese culture, but also more about events happening in the world, have taught me that my ‘wisdom’ is very, very limited, if not nonexistent. Try as I might, I do not find answers for the world’s problems, or at least, not even for the Japanese language hehe. I usually remember with a smile what my Japanese studies teacher at the Bucharest university used to tell us, regarding our knowledge of the Japanese language: “A frog in a well cannot conceive of the great ocean”. What used to be a daunting tease at our expense, implying that we have no clue of the complexity of the Japanese language (a fact of which I’m more convinced with each day lived in Japan) is now maybe a  well-illustrated reminder of our shortsightedness as individuals. I wish we were different, and that the world were a better place. Until then, take comfort in beauty…and love.

The Right to be Remembered

“The past is a different country; they do things differently there.”

(L. P. Hartley)

//soundtrack: garland procession song

I always knew memory is subjective. But, strangely, it is possible that I never actually realized that the subjectivity lies not only in the choice of the memories we keep, but also in our way of remembering past events, past people, past hopes, wishes, love. It may be that time itself casts a poetic haze upon our memories, and they themselves bear the imprint of our minds, our personality – it is never a ‘simple’ memory, without a particular feeling, or a specific value to us, including the random things we remember, such as our favorite ice-cream during childhood, a T-shirt we wore when we received a particular piece of news, a book we didn’t like, a single verse from a song. Maybe there isn’t as great a master of aesthetics as human memory, whether the aesthetic pertains to the realm of beauty, splendor, delicacy, or to the one of sadness and grotesque (like by Baudelaire).

So, as nights here get warmer and warmer, under the full moon and a perfume of summer, I remember. I remember days and evenings spent in Maieru, the village of my grandmother and the gentle, archaic, warm, cheerful cradle of my childhood. But more than that, I remember my grandmother. She was perhaps not a perfect person, but imperfection is a form of freedom, by any case. More than that, she was wonderfully humane, in the best sense the word can receive.

I remember the afternoon it rained so hard and loud, we spent it in the kitchen, I, my cousins and her, baking doughnuts shaped like an 8 – some were even wrinkly, like old, tired aunts, and the powdered sugar snowed upon them with Romanian generosity. Some bore still a mantel of oil from the frying pan on them – we didn’t mind; we ate them and we liked them just the same. The cat went in and out of the kitchen, with a haughty, self-assured air and a kingly indifference to our mundane happiness. But hers was a hard life as well, of catching mouses and eating now and again scraps from the table; she was not petted and adored, but tolerated in response only to how well she did her job, and not to the softness of her fur.

Standing outside with my grandmother, gazing at the infinite sky, which held majestically more stars than I had ever seen or could perceive, I gave in to my literary tendencies and asked my grandmother, seeking to create one of those ‘movie moments’, “why grandmother, do you ever look at the night sky … and wonder?”. My grandmother shrugged her shoulders in a casual attitude and replied: ‘why yes, I look at it now and again, when I want to know how the weather is going to be tomorrow’. Well, someone stamp ‘city girl’ on my forehead, for I suddenly realized how artificial and manufactured my relationship with nature is – like with an aesthetic product, to be admired from a distance at a rare opportunity, and as a pretext for idle philosophizing. Not part of natural life as it is, but object of disconnected analysis. My oh my.

But my grandmother had plenty of wisdom and poetic moments as well, and an unbeatable humor that seemed to come from the marrow of life itself. The sparkle in her eyes, as she read people beyond their words and gestures, and saw them in a good or a not-so-good light, according to how they were. But she had the understanding of old age, which so many lack, that meant that she never judged anyone and the most of a negative opinion she could feel was a bland or a sharp irony now and again, and more often a feeling of sadness for a lost person. She had the genuine, unintentional kindness, which nowadays (or forever back) some people try to learn and simulate, through education or religion. Always welcoming a passerby with a bowl of soup or a kind word, and being, although in her own home, in a world of constant flux of information, friendship, family, a world of caring for people.

The days she taught me to spin and to knit, or to make mamaliga, the Romanian dish young girls have to know how to make perfectly, so that they would be allowed to marry (not sure I passed the test though 🙂 ). Planting potatoes, knitting onions, eating strawberries from the garden, gathering hay, taking the eggs from the chickens and being happy about it like a kid on Christmas morning. Making jam. Me being completely exhausted at the end of a busy domestic day, and she being still up and running and with ideas of ten other things to do yet. The constant cooking. Her longing for climbing the hills of Maieru again. Her world of magic, tradition and faith.

And often the quietly sitting and knitting socks (for thou should never be idle) and listening to her stories, with the words pouring and unraveling out or her mind as softly as the wool came untied from the ball of yarn. Her world was one perhaps unperturbed by troubled thoughts and anxious analysis of existence, and other cultures, questions of life and hard decisions, yet still she could withstand any question I ventured to ask, any problem or sorrow I may have voiced. For those questions for which there is no answer, she knew to give a warm look and a soothing caress with her wrinkled, warm hands, which made one think of the thousands of breads kneaded and taken to church on Sundays. Maybe towards the end, life itself became a dough that she knead and formed to her understanding into a magnificently warm, generous bread. She had no fear. Just peace, and hope, and joy at having richly lived, all that was given to her to live.

The world is forever a stranger place, where nowadays people fight for the right to be forgotten. Well, as far away in the world as my eyes can see, and as long and powerful as my heart can beat, I will always remember you, mămucă.

The Wind of Change

“All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.”

(E. A. Poe)

As a young girl I remember discovering literature as a collection of stories – not without an irony, Disney’s children’s books, White Fang, fairy tales, Marry Poppins (that seemed so complicated at the time!), Fran the Polar Bear… The stories seemed so real to me, as if the worlds they described truly existed in some other place, behind the thin curtain of imagination. Out of such a proximity to their magic, I remember asking my father if the characters in a book knew they were the creations of an author, captive to his will and ingrained in his story-telling? And if they did not know, could we also, my dad and I, be only characters in someone else’s story? And not know it? How frightening. My father did not understand the question. I don’t blame him, I doubt I understood it myself very well and I would even doubt now, being the skeptic that I am, that I could have asked such a question, were it not for the sense of confusion and surprise I felt so powerfully back then, wondering what is the nature of a story, or of our story specifically – and are we its captives, are there multiple stories, like books in a library, shelves after shelves, never knowing of another’s existence, or is the whole wide world simply divided by a firm, black line, devoid of poetry and hope, on one side ‘reality’ and on the other ‘imagination’?

Tonight we played in yet another concert. Only two short music pieces, out of the repertoire we performed in our orchestral trip to Bologna, where we were joined by young students of the academic orchestra there. The whole evening had a sense of deja vu to it, but ironically the one thing that marked the difference between the two concerts was exactly our own familiarity with the scene enfolding before our eyes. Everybody took their places trying to stifle a smile, there was a surety and a confidence to our postures and gestures, given the diminished role we played in tonight’s concert, and the fact that we had played the same pieces not so long ago. Still, I was melancholic and restless. For some of the orchestra, like the concertmaster, tonight was the last performance together. The conductor gave her the bouquet of flowers he received at the end, and we clapped for her especially as well, and it crossed my mind what kind of deep and unspoken tribute we tried to give, being the only ones in the concert hall who knew or cared that she will not be coming back to the orchestra after this concert. A friend from the viola section also sends me a knowing, saluting smile, worn by her warm and wise features, with a nod of her head, and I also remember – she too will not be playing with us any longer. Give or take a few months, I too will no longer be part of the orchestra.

I’ve visited many cities already, studied more or less briefly at a range of universities (Bucharest, Berlin, Bayreuth, Tokyo – Meiji University, Tubingen, Kogakkan in Ise – and next year, Hiroshima!), played with various musical groups and met friends from a lot of countries. In the end, I am far more glad I had the chance to live through all of it and have so many beautiful experiences, than I am saddened by their passing, one by one, into the realms of mere memory. Still, almost like the magical wanderer-woman in the movie Chocolat, I feel in me the wind of change again and I grow weary of its tireless curiosity and ever-lasting seeking of answers, wisdom, love.

Myriads of flowers and trees have blossomed in my ‘village’, that comes alive after every winter, as if nature had thought it to be its last and is now surprised of how much life it still possesses and deigns to celebrate it ostentatiously. Some flowers speak to me of beloved ones, blackbirds with their orange beak and loud chirping carry back to me the laughter of earlier days of love in Bucharest, on my way home I get lost in thoughts and memories while the perfume of the air besots the senses, as life itself demands to be danced with and conquered and proclaimed with love, impatience. Time is a playful master of us all, unyielding, unbending, only listening to the delightful, frightful, contumacious torrent of our emotions.

The wind of change is calling hungrily.

Sapere aude.

Ise Stories. This is not Goodbye

Hello hello, my lovely readers,

I hope you haven’t given up on me already! I have been pretty sick and tired, and when the cough finally went away (welcome ice-cream!), nostalgia inevitably came over me in full force. I kept postponing this blog post (or procrastinating as we young folk tend to do), and then I realized it was because I do not want to write a last Ise Story. Not writing anything anymore sounded like an equally bad idea, so I decided simply that this isn’t a last Ise Story. If I have learned anything about life in my few years of existence, it is that it never loses the power to surprise you. I am sure, in one way or another, we will meet again, my Ise companions and I (already feels like ‘the fellowship of the ring’ 🙂 ), Japanese and Western altogether, and every time we discover something new or come to understand something old about Ise, it will be as if the stories keep rewriting themselves in our hearts. There is never truly an end to this story, as long as we remember it.

First, I had promised an explanation about the connection between Bushido and Shinto. One of the courses I particularly enjoyed was about Bushido, the world-famous samurai code, which however did not accurately reflect the historical reality of the time about which it was written (Sengoku era, 1467-1603), by Nitobe Inazō in 1900. The teacher explained (if I understood correctly) that in that age a series of colonization of territories had begun, which the Europeans justified based on the fact that the countries they conquered lacked civilization and morals and, as such, were unable to govern themselves. Bushido was thus meant to be an official moral code, with original values deeply rooted in the Japanese culture. It was like a prearranged evidence of a civilized country if you will. Our sensei talked about how certain traditions promoted in the book, like junshi, which means ‘following someone in suicide’ (like the way a samurai would commit seppuku after the death of his general), were actually strongly condemned in the time of the samurai, because of the Confucian influences, that regarded suicide as a barbaric, uncivilized act and strictly prohibited it. He also named Takeda Shingen as an example of a brave, renowned warrior and a brilliant military mind. With the aid of my friend google, I came to realize that the famous movie Kagemusha, The Shadow Warrior, by Akira Kurosawa, is also loosely based on him. According to our teacher, the ethics of Takeda Shingen stated that ‘not losing was the most important’, and that throwing yourself into battle without evaluating the circumstances was not heroic. One was responsible for one’s subordinates and a true warrior did not wish for anyone to die. One must never forget the value of life itself. Part of me contemplates the possibility of such an interpretation being more wishful-thinking than anything else, but in the end, no matter how the ‘code of the samurai’ originated, the fact of its being enforced remains and it was followed wholeheartedly by many Japanese warriors even continuing to the second world war (see the movie Letters from Iwo Jima on the subject). Every time I breach the subject of ideologies or faith, religions, I remind myself of what I think is a wise saying:

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions, each of which absolves us of our responsibility for thinking.” – Henri Poincare

Another interesting aspect of Bushido described to us was that, in contrast to the term buyu, which designated bravery and military prowess, Bushido came from the provinces and comprised traditions which were life-oriented, opposite to the cultural aesthetics of the court, centered on noh theater, dancing, waka poetry. The warriors (bushi) fought to protect their lands and not for absolute, abstract values like freedom or righteousness. Also, Bushido is said to have originated in the mountains, where the warriors would worship a kami, most often Hachiman, the kami of archery and war, as their duty, and in exchange they would be entitled to administrate the lands pertaining to the shrine of the kami. Some say, this is how Shinto priests came to be. Signs of this development could be found in the banners of the samurai, where the wooden stick is said to be actually a tamagushi, a branch of the sacred Sakaki tree of Shinto, which signified the presence of the deity (probably similar to the way Christians would bear crosses in battle?). Our teacher speculated that remnants of the banners could be depicted in the tradition of Koinobori, children’s (or boys’) day on the 5th of May, when each house hangs carp-shaped wind-socks on their roof, representing the number of children in the family.

                    

Since, sadly, my memories are not as fresh anymore, I will only name some of our last adventures in Ise. We also went on a boat trip, after our journey to Nara and Kyoto, and discussed Ise as seen from the sea, and visited some other museums and shrines. Particularly beautiful was for my nature-loving, childish heart, an almost 400 years old tree. Also, we got to see a workshop for knife-sharpening and many tiny other shops, one of which was full of dusty tea pots and various other very old objects, and a traditional, wood-based fire stove, like a labyrinth of memories, also decorated at one window with a shimenawa Shinto rope – apparently the kami can be invited to almost any place our hearts hold dear. The boys were particularly excited and wanted to come back to that house, while my ever-present fear of spiders rendered me a bit more skeptical. I did enjoy the familiarity and closeness we felt towards the Japanese we met, by being allowed to see and take part in their simple life, a day of honne, rather than tatemae. 

One other day was dedicated to the history and practice of tea ceremony. Being a hopeless, sometimes inattentive, klutz myself, unblessed by the grace so present in the Japanese people, I must confess I normally do not have much patience with the idea of an authentic, 4-hour long tea ceremony, endured in meditative silence in the seiza position, with every gesture ritualized, having been repeated years in a row until perfection was reached. However, I did delight in imagining how in older times people would take part in a tea ceremony and have to bow in order to enter the tea pavilion, which signified that for those hours every participant was equal to those surrounding him. It seems indeed as if, in theory, time and rank, and the distance between people is suspended, or at least reshaped according to a ritual of beauty and peace. Needless to say, our own ritual of preparing tea for one another was unceremoniously interrupted by laughter or careful glances at our cups of matcha tea and stoic attempts to drink it gracefully and politely, while trying not to think about our feet inevitably falling asleep.

Slowly, but nervously, we reached the day of our presentations, which occurred blissfully uneventful. I enjoyed the presentations of everyone, juggling between serious research themes and more personal, funny experiences in Ise. I like to think I was not nervous, calm as a rock as I usually appear to be, but alas, apparently as I started speaking my voice trembled and I sometimes forgot words or thoughts – having stubbornly decided against reading my speech from paper. It seems, no matter how hard I objectively convince myself, there are harder things in life to face than a presentation before people you respect and appreciate so much, my personality betrays me into shyness and being overcome by emotions. It all turned out alright in the end, and we were quite merry at our farewell party, with our Japanese teachers, students, and with each other. Maybe the most beautiful part of the evening was, for me, when we received our (yet another) parting gift, which included a bell from the Inner Shrine, as I had bought for my friends as souvenirs on the third day, and later wished one for myself too and searched everywhere else during the three weeks and couldn’t find one. My friends started shouting “Maria, Maria, look in the bag, look what we got!”. I laughed so happy and then only slightly embarrassed as I explained to the people at my table why everybody was telling me so cheerfully to look at the bell. It is indeed all the more beautiful, since now it was also a gift for me, of my own :).

The parting day was bittersweet and lingered lightly in our thoughts like spring showers under a bright sun, the way such goodbyes tend to do. Speeches were held, tears were shed, laughter also irrupted between them, we exchanged souvenirs from our countries yet again and started our journey home. I somehow feel that words are not enough to express my gratitude, because what was given to us was far more than a series of lectures, visits to shrines and temples and other cities, ‘food and shelter’ like for the pilgrims of old. The kindness, generosity, patience, wisdom and care with which we were treated surpassed any of our expectations and what would have been considered necessary or appropriate in such study programs. It was a wonderful insight into the Japanese culture and into the hearts of Japanese people and I am very glad and grateful to have taken part in this journey, one of the few, authentic, wonderful experiences that make life irreversibly special. Thank you so, so much.