five

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything during the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

For the first time since I got here, I had what I can only call a sensation of being at home. It was a few days ago, and I don’t know if it was the growing feeling of spring that seems to be creeping into everyone or some kind of odd spiritual/mental acclimation, but the feeling of warm water over my hands as I washed the dishes gave me this odd sense of a pleasant emptiness – rather, not emptiness, but instead some kind of permeability, as if everything ran through me without any kind of resistance. Sentimentality abounds. I’ve begun to notice again just how beautiful this place is. It’s also sad – I’m going to miss it like hell when I have to go.
Maybe it was the influence of a fresh pair of eyes – having someone to lead around not only gives you their contagious excitement, but also reminds you, forces you to remember, what aspects of the place are most significant.
Depressing thought – maybe, when I return here one beautiful day, nothing will be the same. We have a strangely-made group, one that was luckily forced into extreme proximity immediately on arriving here, one that moreover has interests in common, and are bound even more tightly by the fact that we are all foreigners. This may not be the same when I come back. I like the experience, the feeling of living as a foreigner in a group of foreigners, the whole expatriate thing. We are this odd, fantastic, exotic group with our own practically-secret language and ways, our jokes, our references. Maybe the aforementioned book has a lot to do with these musings. Who knows.

More later. Tired.

three

So… the past few weeks. My birthday. A lot remains to be said, and to be left unsaid.

First, the past few weeks. I found a place to walk while looking for a bookstore. I forgot how much I like seeing the occasional plant in the overwhelming attraction that the city has for me. But here it was green, there was white sunlight, crumbling stone, and cars whose tires looked as though they were fused into the street. Pictures, doctored and otherwise, follow:

Rain was falling, but I couldn’t feel it on my skin. It hit the sun, turned clear and shining, and then splashed on the ground. I was tired and thirsty and walked through the park. One of my more memorable days.

My birthday. Those of you who know me will understand my… ambivalent attitude toward this kind of event. Just one thing: by the time Arthur Rimbaud was my age (21), he had stopped writing poetry. A feeling of perspective for me, for when I start to feel too grandiose. Still, I have to remind myself that it’s really not that bad. Emmanuel Kant didn’t write a significant book before he turned 60. I have some time.

My mind is at a turning point – I’ve eaten my fill of Apollo for the moment, and now I want to try my hand at wine and frenzy, at music, and at dancing. I don’t want to become a caricature, someone whose teeth are atained with ink and who has a constant smell of death and the Middle Ages. This may make sense.

fragments

In the forest, frosted leaves show through the mist like half-vanished faces of remembered friends, and the greener-than-green grass peels my mood away, leaving only a certain tenderness – but all of this dissolves in the smile that you just sent toward me – a smile that seems to swim in future tears – tears, one of which is enough to make me drown.

second

On the beach, there lies the shell of the biggest hermit crab that ever lived – a shell (long devoid of proper occupant) in which misty-eyed children on the cusp of adulthood stroll, holding hands and staring at the pearly walls.

That’s all for now. Maybe more on this later.

second entry

It has occurred to me that it’s a little bit too easy to apportion blame and gratitude to a new place, if that’s where you find yourself – ideas and experiences that have nothing to do with location take on significance of placement. Unlike my previous experiences with travel, I have had to orient myself to St. Petersburg as somewhere to live and study, not as a nexus of new discoveries waiting to be made. As such, I find it slightly more difficult to be romantically infatuated. Maybe this is just a stage in my adjustment.

St. Isaac’s cathedral:

I honestly don’t know how I feel about this place. Khram Spas-Na-Krovi (Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood), was constructed in response to a distinctly political event with an eye toward creating a “classical” Russian church, but Isaakievsky Sobor seems even more political – the construction of St. Petersburg (with all the attempts to make Russia more European) being its founding event. The two could not be more different. Spas-Na-Krovi looks silly from the outside. The kitschy attempt to make it look like some idealized version of the past has led to the distinct impression that it’s just a big pile of ice cream, yet on the inside it has a terrible sense of significance. On the other hand, St. Isaac’s is unimaginably grand from the outside, yet on the inside it is obvious that it is a monument of a distinctly corporeal nature – Spas-Na-Krovi, despite its political symbols, retaining more of a spiritual character. I’m becoming pretentious.

The Hermitage

Best. Place. In. The. World. Free for students, regardless of nationality :). I spent 4 1/2 hours there and barely finished walking through the ancient sculpture and Egyptian sections. “Abraham’s Sacrifice” and “Return of the Prodigal Son” in the same room? Yes please.

Although, in front of “The Return of the Prodigal Son” the lights are angled in such a way as to create glare on the painting if you stand too close. Intimate relationships are discouraged.

A Certain Person

There once was a certain person.

And here is my first problem – I would like to tell you at what point along life’s journey this person was, and I would like especially to say, “This person was old, young, or middle-aged,” but this is impossible to say, since how is one meant to judge the relative age of a person? These days, one would say of a twenty-year-old car that it was old, but, for a person (for some strange reason) we would consider this to be still young. Also, there are some who are called “old” at twenty, and there are others who remain “young”, or at least, infantile, at the age of sixty! I suppose it must be, as Plato said, that words must have definite meanings in order to be proper names for things and attributes, but I can’t find one anywhere. I suppose that I could tell, in scientific terms, how many revolutions of the earth it has been since this person’s birth, but, as it is a lady, this may be indelicate.

Perhaps it’s better not to talk about this at all.

Fragment:

I walk through silent autumn streets, yet there is music, still, that plods on needle hooves across my heated nerves.

First post – Sept. 2, 2010 – a kind of introduction

This is meant as a kind of log of my semester studying abroad in St. Petersburg. The reason that this is here and not in a notebook festering in the bottom of my bag is that several people expressed an interest in seeing how I fared while here.

I will be updating this when and if I have something to say. Most of it will be culled from a notebook that is performing an aforementioned act in an aforementioned place, with the most glaring of stupidities omitted. As such, it is fairly fragmentary and not all of the format “today I went to such-and-such a place, saw such-and-such, it was fairly such-and-such.” Although I can’t claim yet that it’s going to be a lot more interesting than that. It will, quite possibly, make no sense at all. Bear with me. I am trying to be as honest as I can, and sincerity is one of the worst starting points for this kind of thing. Although not all of this is true.

First fragment:

When I arrived, I was afraid to move. I couldn’t make out every ripple that my body made, but was over-conscious that those around me could. I tried, as best as I could, to shrink back into myself – not exactly a new attempt for me. Now, after a period of some days, I have begun to stretch again – to assume, to prefer, and, while still afraid of appearing too recognizably foreign to strangers, the realization has sunk in that I cannot, that it is no longer necessary to blend in entirely. After all, we all occasionally step on another living thing.

Second fragment:

Jesus Pantokrator – literally “Jesus the all-powerful” – a style of depicting Christ in the Orthodox iconographic tradition that seems to abandon humanization – Jesus is a stern, patriarchal, but also infinitely resigned and sorrowful. Rather, it seems as though human emotions are completely absent – they are, instead, all around, in the faces of others. There is this type of seriousness even on the face on the infant Jesus – his mother and father approach him with fear and trembling.Third fragment:

The river had flooded, and we squished around a city whose trees were made of stone in a haze of suspended water and influenza. I saw him, the little man, I saw him before anybody else, but thought him so boring that I could not give him further thought.

He began at the sleeve, glancing around in fear. He proceeded up the arm, then in an obscure lack-of-pattern over his round torso, proceeded with legs, left and right, and finally his head – tiny, with the obligatory glasses and greasy comb-over.

You see, those were the days when it became necessary to regularly have something to eat.

***

That’s all for now.