The Era of Tumblr

has come...

might still keep this anyway, but I am more likely found at http://lendmeyourliver.tumblr.com/

and also at ensemblebuadze.tumblr.com

I'm gone again! here I am

in Geneva, which it turns out, isn't a place I am all that fond of. But, for those curious, here's a tentative itinerary for this round of adventure.

June 2nd-7th: Tbilisi
June 7th-9th: Tkibuli
June 9th-21st: Pankisi
June 22nd - July 3rd: Mestia
July 3rd-6th: Sighnaghi
July 7th-9th: Istanbul
July 9th-12th: Trabzon
July 12th-13th: Batumi
July 13th-August 1st: Mestia
August 1st-2nd: Tbilisi
August 2nd-9th: Chambery
August 9th: NYC

We Were Searching For Ourselves in Each Other

It’s July 2010, and everyone is balmy in New York. I just moved into a huge apartment in Harlem with four guys I met under a year ago, and we still don’t have a couch. It’s a Saturday afternoon. Two of us are home, trying to read without dripping too much sweat on the pages. The Anthology Film Archives calendar sits on a stool. Desperate to get out, I flip through it. Sergei Paradjanov. The Color of Pomegranates (1968). July 17: 7:15 pm. I know I’d heard the name before, and recall my aunt having a large illustrated volume with one word on the cover: Paradjanov. This seems reassuring enough. 

I awkwardly show the calendar to my roommate. I am not sure exactly how much we have in common. We decide to go. If anything, we can get Indian at Punjabi Deli afterwards. We are about ten minutes late.

A child dangles off a clock’s pendulum with an expression of amused stoicism on his face. The same child, a depiction of the eighteenth century troubadour poet Sayat Nova in his young age, climbs up a ladder to a roof covered in huge drying books. The pages flip and flutter like gigantic moth wings, revealing illuminated medieval manuscripts. Colored wool is thrown on silver platters, each drop of pigment loud and clear on the metallic surface.

My roommate and I look at each other, and realize that we are infected, even if we are not sure, not yet anyway, and maybe not ever, what exactly each step of this wild associative flight means. But we are willing to go with it.

The rhythm of a loom spinning white and red lace. One of six Sofiko Chiaurelis* holds a piece of red lace in front of her face. Another, this time male, tunes a kemenche. We were searching for ourselves in each other. The muse and the troubadour: sides of the same specter.

We exchange glances again, both of us filled with the sense that we’ve just stepped into something we don’t ever want to get out of. A man holds a peacock in his arms; the bird’s beak is in the man’s mouth.  A yet another Sofiko, on horseback in a silver frock and head dress shoots a gun silently into the air as Shen Khar Venakhi (famous Georgian polyphonic church hymn), non-diegetic, sounds in the background. 

What is this we are watching? How does it come together? Where can it take place? It is July 2010, but we’re in 18^th century dream-world Caucasus; it holds together because of the man whose inner world it strives to present and the man who presents it, unabashedly, confidently, in a frenzy that flows slowly and beautifully like the fabrics on the screen.

Sayat Nova (an adopted name that means “Master of Songs” in Persian), a celebrated troubadour (ashik), lived on the territory of Armenia and Georgia. Born in Tbilisi (akaTiflis). He composed hundreds of songs in Azerbaijani, Armenian, Georgian and Persian, still sung by traditional performers. Sayat Nova performed at the Georgian king’s court, and later became an ordained priest. He died in the Haghpat Monastery in Armenia.

A group of monks stands on stone steps sucking on pomegranates. They sound like carnivores. Two monks wash their feet. Two others carry them, piggy-back, to the grapes they are to start stomping.

Born in 1924 in Tbilisi, Georgia, to Armenian parents, Sergei Paradjanov grew up in the same city. He lived there, in the Ukraine, and in Armenia. Paradjanov died in 1990, making four feature-length movies that are available to the general public (he considered his early films constricted and bad). He was in the middle of his final project, titled A Confession, when he died.   

Aroutin chants the screen at a baptism. Some minutes later the Catholicos (head of Armenian Orthodox church) turns a glowing blue and falls dead. Sheep flock a small church with a cocktail-umbrella roof. The protagonist digs a grave.

Paradjanov spent years in Gulags, accused of pretty much everything from bribery to then-illegal in the USSR homosexuality. The Color of Pomegranates was banned by the Soviet government, and Paradjanov could not make another film until 1984. While imprisoned, Paradjanov made drawings, dolls, collages from whatever he could find. When he was released, but still not allowed to make films, he continued these pursuits. Most of his art, alongside with some furnishings from his apartment in Tbilisi lives in the Paradjanov house-museum in Yerevan.

A memory of childhood: the young Sayat Nova runs around with lavash bread hanging from his forearms.

Each frame is a carefully designed, brilliantly explosive tableau of color and texture. We want these clothes, we say. We want these sounds. We want a nautilus shell to cover one breast and not the other.

A final Sofiko stands over the middle-aged Sayat Nova. She wears a lavish green and gold garment, a wreath crowning her head of blond hair, a rooster perched on her shoulder, and spills wine onto the chest of the poet, dressed in a white linen tunic.

When we get home, we look up everything we can about Paradjanov. I buy The Color of Pomegranates. We rent Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, his 1964 film set in the Ukraine, and based on Ukrainian folklore. We steal a DVD with the other two films, The Legend of Surami Fortress, and Ashik Kerib, from somebody’s house. We don’t even feel guilty. We watch these films multiple times. I start wearing brighter clothes, long, flowing, patterned dresses in particular. Everything both of us know of Armenia and Georgia comes out. We buy books about Paradjanov, look up people he influenced, was influenced by. My 90-year old Georgian grandmother gets harassed almost daily for recipes and pronunciation advice. I get every CD of Georgian and Armenian traditional music I can possibly find. And yet, this is all not enough: we are sharing an obsession, but no matter what we read, look at, watch, we are too far away.

Neither of us has any money, but I’ve got a car. I sell the car. We buy two plane tickets for November 18^th-28^th, to Yerevan.

It seems nobody has thought this through. Some friends think we’re crazy, especially me. But we go. And we go to the Paradjanov museum in Yerevan, and then take a night train to Tbilisi, and amble about with no plan at all, and we go and meet relatives I have in the town of Tqibuli, and somehow, despite the fact that neither Georgia nor Armenia are anything like the movie, not now – and of course we expected this – I am changed by the experience of following this through. Somehow, this entire journey becomes a Paradjanov movie – less lavish, less bright and intricate, but I feel something impish in me come out, something brazen and dedicated. I write poems that could not have happened before. They are the only ones to get published.

I wonder if this is just a phase. After all, a movie is a movie. A director, however influential and insane, is a director. A year goes by. Both of us move out of the apartment in Harlem, to different boroughs. I spend my summer in a tent in Transylvania, digging up potsherds. I come back and go to the Russian store on 181^st street and meet a woman who works there, who was Paradjanov’s neighbor in Tbilisi; this woman has my name. And it is clear that this is not going anywhere. No place, no person has grown more true.

In November 2011, I find myself applying to PhD programs in Anthropology to focus on the Caucasus. This hardly follows a 2-year-old MFA in Poetry. I cannot possibly get in, I think. To get myself through the waiting game, my now former roommate and I start subtitling an old (Soviet) Georgian film, co-starring Paradjanov’s favorite Sofiko Chiaureli.

In midwinter, I find three prints I’d bought and forgotten all about in a notebook: two stills from Pomegranates, and a photo of Paradjanov himself. I take that as a good sign. I am right to.

It’s true, of course, that Armenia has claimed Paradjanov more so than Georgia has, and my focus, in the end, is the latter. But that’s not the point here: Paradjanov's films take the collective mythology of the Caucasus and bring it alive, without drawing borders. I think of the patterns, colors, music, language in these movies, and realize that all this was around me for years, since birth perhaps. But it took Paradjanov to wake me up to it. He has that effect on people, it seems, the effect of bringing out the origins, the mixtures we are all composed of, the imagination we had as children and perhaps have repressed. His films show that it is not at all a necessity to stick to some accepted notion of adulthood at all times. He gives us the time not to.

I may be naïve to place so much significance on one Saturday afternoon, on one film, on one dead man, but I will take naivety, if it rids me of staleness.

White doves flutter and flip over lit candles on a stone floor of a cellar. A mason finishes one of the walls. Sayat Nova stands in the cellar. Sing! Sing! says the mason. Sing! Sing! Die, he says.

* Sofiko Chiaureli was a famous Georgian actress; she appeared in three of Paradjanov’s films.

A Childhood in Translation

         We were sitting under a tree in Prospect Park, much past dusk, with a poorly hidden bottle of red wine: the two of us, my friend Spencer and I.  As the wine buzz grew stronger, the topics of conversation took the all-too-predictable turn for more “serious” – we returned to things we’d given up on speaking of in our previous, more sober states. Spencer, a youthful lad from Colorado, declared to me that I would become a truly mature person when I accepted Russia. Accepted it as a part of me, as a place to call home. He proceeded to speak of my life there as something that gives me almost an advantage, creatively and otherwise, something, as he put it, he can not and will not ever know or be able to fully grasp, even if he studied the place.  He was starting to sound almost jealous.

The other world I have, he claimed – one that comes out when my parents call me on the phone for the twelfth time in two hours and I finally answer – was a thing of beauty, and I was to embrace it and appreciate it. On the surface, this sounds exactly right. What Spencer was saying is valid and could be found in the Immigrant Handbook, if one existed (hey, it probably does) under “Accepting Your Past”. The truth is, having moved from Moscow to Tucson, Arizona at fourteen, I’ve had the past eleven years to try accepting the whole Russia business. I went from a devastating sadness and refusal to start over to stern denial of its existence and complete immersion in American pop culture. When a relative told me I’d have a strong accent for the rest of my life and would never be able to write poetry in English because well, fourteen is pretty late to move, I threw Russia away altogether, and took all the necessary steps to get an MFA in poetry (who said spite wasn’t good motivation?). I lied to my classmates for the first month, both about my age, and my place of origin (I pretended to be from Arizona (duh) and Seattle, where I’d spent one summer).  Then came the time to confront, start speaking about the place, remembering it, watching Russian films. I even took a translation class. Finally, in 2010, nine and a half years after moving, I went back. For a whole ten hours. Nothing important occurred in that time, no epiphanies or revelations struck me: it was, after all a layover on the way to Georgia: I was jetlagged as all hell and much more interested in getting pictures of myself and my travel buddy with a voodoo doll and baby rattle in front of St. Basil’s cathedral. 

But when Spencer brought up the “old country”, and mentioned these two worlds I supposedly inhabit, my first thought was that however well-versed I am in my current homeland’s history and culture, I will never know what it’s like to be born and raised in Colorado. I will never know what it’s like to go to Burger King in a car when you are six. I will never know what growing up in a house feels like, or watching Spongebob Squarepants as a kid, or going to a baseball game with my dad. And while these utterly clichéd Americanisms may not be a source of deep longing, they are experiences just as valid as mine, and ones I have never had. Spencer won’t know a childhood in Moscow, it’s true, and it seems compelling to him precisely for that reason. I will never know a childhood in Colorado, and you know what? Frequently enough, that sounds compelling to me too. It sounds nice to have an easy answer to the “where are you from?” question, without always feeling like I am lying. Neither of us will ever grow up in Brooklyn, where we both live now. We know the heterogeneous only by association, and will either fear it or idolize it. In truth, I find it nearly unbelievable, and somewhat funny that my entirely ordinary Russian-Jewish immigration tale is at all interesting to people, especially here in New York, where we’re a dime a dozen. Maybe it isn’t actually interesting at all and people are just being polite, but that’s beside the point. Spencer remarked that I have a much better idea of what his early years might’ve been like than he does of mine; I can picture them simply by living in this country and watching other people grow up. And that’s true enough, but we could easily be even if he were to hang out in Moscow for a decade.

But then there was something else: try as I might, I will never outlive the cultural and linguistic split I exist in. Any time I tell a story from my childhood, which as my friends and I get a little older, has been happening more and more frequently, I am inevitably translating it. Transposing it, substituting cultural terms with ones familiar to those around me. By this particular juncture, there are very few things I don’t already have an English version of. These versions get so good, in fact, that I start believing them over the originals, only to remind myself that they are even more fictitious than the actual memories themselves, which come primarily in image-form and can never be represented verbally. At the same time, whenever I speak to my family members, in Russian, and try telling them about my days, I end up having to go through almost the exact same process, but in reverse, and with slightly fewer alterations when it comes to cultural references (globalization is cool that way).

While the Russian-English translation is somewhat enjoyable-- I frequently choose the “funniest” words, point out certain incongruencies, create mystical worlds for my friends to momentarily inhabit – the English-Russian process often feels like an unnecessary drag. Either my family members are familiar with the current trends, or they haven’t a clue as to what I’m talking about because it is only the current stuff that they know – they have far too much catching up to do to understand that Seinfeld reference.  It is almost as if I fail at making my life seem interesting; or maybe I have been infected with my own exaggerated otherness, and that is why I do such a brilliant job at having no Russian friends: I am afraid, perhaps, that their translations of our pasts are too different from mine, and we would argue over them until perhaps, we would agree that in the end, it all amounts to legends, gospels from each family’s point of view. Both translation processes often feel like lying; I wonder if creating these unintentional falsehoods makes me a better writer or simply a more careful one –– after all, all I am trying to do is get closer to the original, make it possible for all these people to share a foreign experience… And I wonder if I have a somewhat difficult time trusting people because it’s hard to imagine someone carrying on without going through the same process.

And so I hate it, this circumstantial history I can take no credit for; I hate it often because it becomes the focus of conversation, because it seems to define the way I am perceived, because I cannot allow it to be the most interesting thing about me because I had so little control over it. Yet, the thought of another me, an Eastern one, living back in Moscow … is terrifying, as is the thought of having nothing to translate.

I think that perhaps we are all of us constantly caught in translation. The degrees vary, of course, but all stories we tell are nothing but transposed simulacra of an original that exists only in one mind’s eye. Sure, when Spencer tells me of his younger years, of which I am not a part, he doesn’t have to translate from a different language, but he has to adjust the hues and shades and shadows, equalize the regional terms with respect to ones I might know. Just like I draw an old photograph from memory, so does he. I am grateful to know another language, and the experience of moving has changed me forever. But the everyday things, I think, are much more similar for Spencer and I than one would imagine. The split I mentioned earlier, it exists for everyone because none of us go through the years unchanged. Not all are as lucky as I am, I suppose, to be able to point their finger at the exact moment of rupture. Maybe accepting Russia for me means accepting having to lie, and the only thing that comforts me in it is that we all have to lie about the places we’re from, inevitably.  Maybe Russia for me lives in a place of make-believe, existing within my current surroundings, and that is where it should stay.

I’ve moved too many times now to know what to say when asked where I am from. I feel that one must have a strong emotional connection to a place in order to grant it that status. I have decided that I am, forever, from whichever place I happen to inhabit at the moment of answering. Maybe that’s cowardly. But maybe that’s the only thing that somehow feels much less like lying. And so, dear Spencer, this is the best I can do for now. I can promise to spend some time in Moscow, perhaps next year. I’ve deemed it necessary. But I quite doubt it will feel anything like home. 

It's been a long, long, long time.

It is perhaps time for a revival. Though my blogging skills remain basic at best, I have got to get back into the habit, at least somewhat. I have my summer journey mostly planned out. It will look like this:


View Summer 2012 in a larger map

New York ---> Tbilisi ---> Zugdidi ---> Mestia, Svaneti; I will be helping at Nino's Guesthouse ---> Zugdidi ---> Tbilisi ---> New York

Dates: May 11th - July 3rd.

part 3, dirt

In most ways, things are coming. Some to ends, some to something else.

I finally read all of Frank O'Hara's Second Avenue, and loved it, and I will do it again.
  
Currently reading: Shot'a Rustaveli's great epic poem, The Knight in a Panther's [or Tiger's] Skin
The Cantos are coming up next. At least some of them.

Things move.

GRE ---> check.

PhD school in Georgians is becoming more and more of a thing.
I am writing a statement of purpose, even.

I am also a librarian now.
This is, to me, unsettling. In fact, I am hoping to go there and see what is happening because, apparently, Saakashvili is trying to make Svaneti a super tourist destination. This is bound to bring forth significant, probably irreversible changes. I am refraining from a value judgment. I just want to get there.

It is always scary to me, inevitably scary, when roads get constructed, hotels built, people shipped over for an exotic time in a remote part of the world. Why are we to simplify everything so much that so little authenticity remains? Why must we put our comfort above all else? Why must we be fine flying for ten hours, only to desire the same commodities as our homes provide, the same foods, air, drinks... how many times have I seen this happen? It will never stop, will it?

Project coming along. Should be done in something like two weeks.