Hello Everyone,
Right now as I write it is August 1st, the beginning of my second month as a Peace Corps Trainee (PCT) in Kyrgyzstan. Right now I and the other 59 volunteers are going through Pre Service Training (PST, Peace Corps uses tons of acronyms – we even got a list of important ones we should know by heart) which lasts until September 20th. On August 20th we will be told our permanent site placements, which is very exciting since it is there that we will be spending our two years as official Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs).
First I wanted to give a general idea of my schedule during PST. It changes week by week, but here are the basics of my weekdays:
6:30 AM: wake up, clean my water distiller and find water (if there is any) to prepare water for the next day. Study more Kyrgyz and eat breakfast (usually it’s either fried eggs with onions and sausage, Russian pancakes, or this delicious fried bread, which I and my language group members call funnel-cake-nan since it tastes just like what you find at county fairs, all served with my host family’s homemade apricot jam.).
7:45: I walk to my language instructors house and stare at the nearby mountains incredulous.
8:00-12:00: Kyrgyz language class. Some days we get a half an hour break, other days 10 minutes. It’s pretty intense.
12:00-1:30: I and my language group members eat at someone’s host family’s home. The Apas (host mothers) have a dueling lunch competition. If one Apa serves something one day that we really like, more than likely the next day’s Apa will try to outdo the day before’s. This definitely works to our advantage (who doesn’t like to be pampered from time to time?), and at one point we even had ice cream for dessert three days in a row.
1:30-3 or 4:00: Technical and Cross Culture Sessions. At these they teach us how to teach and how not to break social taboos and ruin your reputation in Kyrgyzstan.
4:00: I walk home, dragging my feet -- take a big lunch followed by 2 hour meetings on a 90 degree day and you’d be doing the same. When I get home I usually take a short nap, read, start working on Kyrgyz, talk with my host family, etc.
7, 8 or 9:00: Dinner time. I never know when it’s going to be, but usually by then I’m pretty hungry and it works out well since the food here is usually sumptuous.
10:30: Crash.
Like I said, this is a typical day. There are sometimes aberrations that can make my day more interesting. Take last Monday, for instance.
When I came out for breakfast (we eat outside under a canopy), my host family was hustling around, which is strange anytime of day (people aren’t in hurries here, usually). Turns out one of their dairy cows broke its leg, and they’re trying to figure out what to do with it. I headed off to class and on my way saw the cow looking quite unconcerned, sitting on the ground in her usual spot. Later that afternoon, before I walked in the door to my family’s compound after class, I heard a lot of people talking inside. Turns out I had to go around to the front door because the obstacle blocking my way to the house was the cow on it’s back with its chest cavity open and my host brother Maxsat up to his elbow in organs while my host mom and her brother are helping him scoop everything from poor Daisy into bowls and spare pails. This was at about 4:00. When I go in the front door I see my host brother’s wife chopping the liver and kidneys in the kitchen, and I assume we’ll have dinner on the way soon.
At 4:30 my host brother’s wife’s little brother, Kanibek, knocks on my door and tells me to come eat bread. I assumed it was the typical afternoon tea and bread snack, but when I came out there were 6 people, no one I knew except my Apa, sitting around the table chowing down on a plate containing about 7-8 pounds of fried cow liver and kidneys. Apparently my Apa was celebrating the cow’s death because though this put them out one dairy cow, they were really rolling in the cash by selling off parts of our freshly slaughtered friend. I sit down and introduce myself to all of the neighbors and family friends sitting next to me, and before I know it there’s a large glass of vodka being poured in front of me.
Now I must digress in order to describe the ethics of Kyrgyz hospitality. My working hypothesis is that Kyrgyz hospitality originates from Silk Road culture. The ancient trade route did, in fact, run straight through this country, bringing many weary merchants through its villages asking for bread and lodging. As then, when you sit down as a guest at a family’s house these days, it’s a big deal. They will push food at you until you are stuffed, and after that they will bring out the main course. This has happened often to many of us trainees. As you sit there, sipping your tea and spreading homemade jam on your nan (bread), your host family will insist that you are not doing tending to your food correctly. “Chai ich, nan je!” they will repeat over and over again. This is not our American method of asking “Would you like some more tea/bread?,” but rather the verbs in the imperative mood – literally they are commanding you to “drink your tea! Eat your bread!” Older PCVs here call this Kyrgyz behavior “aggressive hospitality.” It’s really overwhelming sometimes. It’s okay to refuse more food, but even saying this takes courage since you know your refusal will be met with very concerned looks from your host family, as if you were just on the brink of starvation and you haven’t yet eaten enough to get you through the next ten minutes. As one Peace Corps staff member put it, “they’ll look at you like you just shot their dog.” I think my family has adjusted well, and they understand that I don’t need to eat a huge meal every night. I’m comfortable saying no, but it’s hard sometimes to get the timing right in order to minimize their reactions. That said, tea and food are not the only substances governed by this aggressive hospitality. Vodka is too. When it is only men drinking, do not get involved. Their drinking sessions turn into something reminiscent of what you see in Clint Eastwood films and the whole “cowboy approach” to drinking. I think you know what I mean. Plus, their tolerance of alcohol exceeds anything I’ve seen. I saw one of my Ata’s (host father’s) friends drink an eight ounce glass of vodka like it was water, then another, all the while still speaking to me in perfectly coherent Russian. Fortunately my Ata does not drink a lot of vodka often, so I’ve avoided the pressure, though there are definitely encounters on the street that are difficult to escape (in the late morning and afternoon, not just at night). Friendly foreigners will be offered vodka frequently, and it’s usually in a spirit of hospitality, not just in the spirit of spirits (if you know what I mean). In summary, Kyrgyz rules of hospitality apply to vodka as well.
Back to the story. It’s 4:30 in the afternoon. I’m chewing on cow liver (even enjoying it). There’s a vodka glass (about 4 shots worth) sitting in front of me and my Apa begins to give a toast. I look at the half liter bottle and it says, in English, “Special Order Vodka.” After I drink it I’m wondering, “special order to where?” This stuff was not good. I chase it with some liver and feel a little bit better. But sure enough, ten minutes later it’s time for the next toast (it’s bad luck to drink without a toast). Thing is, once you open a bottle of vodka in Kyrgyzstan, the cap doesn’t go back on. Then I make one of the most embarrassing moves possible – I accidentally knock over my glass and spill my portion. I hung my head in shame and apologized. I really had not meant to do that, yet part of me was a little happy that I wouldn’t have to have more – I felt that I was doing just fine for 5:00 in the afternoon. But sure enough the others refill my glasses from theirs. Now there’s no way I can refuse it (my previous plan). These people are just too darn nice right at the point when I wished my Apa had sent me to my room without supper and without more vodka. We do our next toast, I load up on liver and kidney, say my “omin” (the customary “amen” you say at the end of a meal in this Islamic country where food seems as spiritual as it is dietary) and return to my room. I spend the next 4 hours reading Garcia Marquez and listening to Radiohead, hoping that #1 the liver and kidney was cooked well and won’t result in a midnight outhouse run (yes that’s a pun), and #2 that my stomach would stop churning from the vodka. I’ve had vodka in the states, but this was much rougher than anything I had had before.
Abnormal day #2 is not as abnormal as #1. Abnormal day #2 is more like abnormal meal #1 – cow stomach and intestines boiled and served with noodles, which is apparently a Kyrgyz delicacy. When I scoot up to the dinner table in Kyrgyzstan I have much reason to be excited. The main course is usually quite delicious, the vegetables are fresh from my family’s garden/small farm, and the omnipresent watermelon is unbelievable. This meal was a surprise. And it wasn’t even the fact that it was stomach and intestines that put me off, but the fact that there was no seasoning added, it was just straight up boiled, and so it tasted just like it smelled the day before when they slaughtered the cow and all of the innards were sitting in buckets and bowls in the kitchen. This meat wasn’t dressed up at all, and they looked exactly as you expect stomach and intestines to look (stomach lining, unless finely ground, still looks like stomach lining, and you can’t really confuse an intestine with anything else). After feeling bad that I couldn’t enjoy this Kyrgyz delicacy, I decided I needed to draw the line, say “I’m full” and “thank you.” I ate about a third of my heaping plate, and couldn’t go much further (the last couple bites required tea to wash them down with). Then I returned to my room, studied some Kyrgyz vocabulary, and had the fleeting idea that my stomach was feeling nervous and concerned for its own well being as it digested its bovine equivalent. I would like to know the rule in design that makes stomachs able to digest other stomachs.
Later that night when I went out to brush my teeth, my host brother Max was blasting the detached cow’s head, propped against a shed well, with a blow torch. When I finished brushing my teeth he was pouring hot water over it and scraping off the skin.
I didn’t even bother to ask.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
July 10, 2008
Hello to all!
This will be my first blog post as a Peace Corps Trainee in Kyrgyzstan. I’ve only been gone for a week as I write this, but it feels like I have a year’s worth of stuff to share. I flew to Philadelphia and stayed there July 3rd-5th at a hotel where we had staging. Staging is a general introduction to the Peace Corps, not country specific. We had meetings all day, both Thursday and Friday, in which we got filled in on the Peace Corps mission, their philosophy of development, and also got some basic training on the difficulties of being a foreigner in these foreign communities. The meetings were long, yet informative. I think everyone was itching to know more about Kyrgyzstan, and so though all of staging was pretty important before becoming a volunteer, a lot of us volunteers were sitting around with a lot of questions brewing. But I guess it’s better that we waited since you can’t talk about Kyrgyzstan without experiencing it first, from what I understand.
After flying out of New York’s JFK airport, we arrived in Istanbul for an 8 hour layover. I wasn’t planning to go into the city from the airport, but two much more well-traveled volunteers, Erin and Chelsea, convinced me to do it. I’m glad I did. Istanbul is a pretty amazing and beautiful city, and really easy to get around. We visited the Blue Mosque and walked through it, and got to at least the outside of Hagia Sophia, but the line to get in was pretty long, and it was expensive to get in, so we ate at an outdoor café instead.
We arrived in Bishkek, the capital city in the north of Kyrgyzstan, at 2:30 AM, and then were taken to the Issyk-Kol Hotel, a massive dilapidated soviet-style hotel on the outskirts of the city. The rooms were in alright shape, though I think my roommate, John, and I were lucky since we were one of the few volunteer’s whose doorknobs did not fall off when we tried to unlock the door. Since we arrived at night, we didn’t see much of the city until morning. And what an experience that was! I woke up at 7 the first morning, looked out my window and saw a bunch of gigantic mountains. I’ll take that experience again if I can get it. In Kyrgyz culture, bird nests on the outside of your house mean that your home is protected, so even at the hotel there were thousands of swallows’ nests all over the balconies. We left the door to our room’s balcony open all the time and the birds never flew into the room (my initial fear) as if the birds had some tacit agreement with the hotel management and guests. From our balcony we could see not only mountains, but also a bizarre soviet art park. What’s a soviet art park? I really can’t tell you. Picture a bunch of cubist soviet sculptures, abstract sidewalk design and a whole lot of concrete. But it was definitely a park. People living nearby were walking through it all evening. You could also climb up a 10 story tower/monument and get a better look at the city and the nearby mountains. The food at the hotel restaurant was pretty exceptional. Every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner was three or four courses with, of course, copious amounts of tea. At the hotel we began our health and safety, language and culture training sessions. These sessions will fill my time for the nest 10-11 weeks, so the three days at the hotel were just a foretaste.
After our third day of sessions, we had our host family matching ceremony. This was the really exciting moment when we get to go onto a stage and meet our host mothers for the first time, and then go home with them and meet the rest of their families. This took place in the city Kant, about 20 miles east of Bishkek. Kant is where all of the volunteers meet once a week (there are 62 of us total) on Wednesdays for general meetings. The rest of the week we are all spread out in neighboring villages according to our language groups. I am learning Kyrgyz, and I am right now living in a small village (about 2,000 people) outside the capital city. I have 4 other volunteers in my language group, and there’s another group of 5 living elsewhere in the same village. Six days a week we have 4 hours of language lessons from the morning to the early afternoon at our teacher, Nuyrjan’s house. Every day for lunch we eat at a different volunteer’s family’s house. I’m lucky to have such an awesome language group – Kristen, James, Joe and Jenna. We get along really well, and we all have senses of humor, so our time together is really enjoyable. It’s a relief to get together every morning and share our goofy stories that come from living with host families without speaking their language.
I’m considering myself extra lucky that I know some Russian, because that has really taken away the shock of living with a host family whose language is totally foreign. Everyone knows Russian in Kyrgyzstan, and everyone expects foreigners to speak Russian. Even our language teacher, who has good English, will accidentally start speaking to us in Russian during class. So I’m able to communicate pretty well with my family so far. I’m not sure, however, if my language teacher would approve. She tells me I shouldn’t speak Russian with my host family, only Kyrgyz. But that’s much easier said than done when I just started learning Kyrgyz two days ago and my host family uses Russian when I can’t understand them speaking Kyrgyz. Even my other peers said that their host families will consistently ask them if they know any Russian whenever they’re trying to communicate. But I’m excited to learn Kyrgyz. It’s much, much more simple than Russian, though it has some vowels that we don’t have in English that are hard for me to get used to pronouncing (like the German umlaut, and another vowel that sounds like saying “ewe” without moving your lips). Kyrgyz grammar is really fascinating, difficult in its own way, but easy in the grand spectrum of languages. More on that in another later post.
A sense of humor definitely goes a long way during this transition. Every Peace Corps in the world gets a medical handbook called “Where There Is No Doctor,” which is a health guidebook that offers suggestions for people living far from doctors and hospitals. It’s also meant to be used by foreign health care workers in remote villages who are new to western health care. It has a section on what superstitions/natural cures “work”, and which ones don’t “work.” I laughed for about ten minutes straight when I read one page: “If you have a strange sickness, do not blame a witch, do not go to a magic center, but ask for medical advice.”
I think that’s all I can fit in on this post. I will have to write about my host family later, which is probably best since I don’t have everyone’s name down quite yet (families in Kyrgyzstan stick together. Not only do the mother and father stay here, but their three sons, their wives and kids too. It’s busy.)
Everything is well so far. I am healthy and engaged with what I am doing. I hope everyone reading this is doing well.
With Love,
Jonathan
July 12, 2008
Right now it’s Sunday morning, and Sundays are the weekend in Kyrgyzstan. Their work week is six days, and last night really felt like a weekend night. I went with my host family to their dacha (summer cottage) located in the mountains that lie about ten miles away. I didn’t know what was involved with going there, but I’m really glad I went. They never actually stay over night at the cottage, but it’s basically a way to get away for an afternoon and evening and have a barbeque. You didn’t know they have barbeques in Kyrgyzstan? Well they do, and they enjoy them just as much as we do in the states, except for one extra detail – the goat slaughter. I was just hanging around minding my own business, taking pictures of the mountains and watching my Apa (host mother) start a fire when my Ata (host father) and host brother walked in dragging a goat with its neck slit. I took it as an educational experience and my initiation into Kyrgyz culinary art. My host brother Max had that thing skinned in about 12 minutes, which seemed pretty quick. The only thing that was a little odd was when they cut into the chest cavity, the lungs decompressed (they must have still had air in them) and the goat made a strange wheezy exhalation sound for about a minute. But then my other host brother, Erlan, grilled shashlik (shishkabobs). It was all pretty delicious. We ate a bunch of watermelon, tomatoes and cucumbers with it. After dinner I rode with some of my family to a small lake that was further up in the mountains and we jumped in for a quick swim. The water was pretty cold, but it felt amazing. I couldn’t swim for too long because the altitude was really high and I could tell by my heart beat.
Now I’ll explain who I’m living with. My host Ata’s (father) name is Talai, and my host Apa’s (mother) name is Jumagul. They are in their 50’s or early 60’s (my guess: it’s rude in Kyrgyzstan to ask adults how old they are) and they have three sons. The youngest is Azat who is my age. He works for a bottled water company in the nearby city Tokmok, so I’ve only seen him once since I arrived. The second oldest is Max or Maxim. He is 25, and his wife, Nargiza and him have a one year old girl named Sadat, and Nargiza has another baby on the way soon. I always forget that she’s pregnant because she does just as much work as everyone in the family and rests the least often. Max knows some English, half of the words from studying it in school, half of the words from American rap music. It makes our conversations pretty entertaining (like instead of “Let’s go, Jonathan,” it’s “Come on everybody now, let’s go,” even if I’m the only one around). The oldest son is Erlan. He’s a police officer in Tokmok. He’s 28 years old, married, and has two daughters, Elina (2 or 3 yrs. old) and Medina (1 yr. old). Elina is pretty much the cutest kid ever. She walks around giggling all of the time and making faces at people. When I gave my host family some different chocolates as gifts, she claimed the bag of Reese’s Pieces as her own: I’m pretty sure she ate the entire bag herself. And then, with her face and hands covered in chocolate, she walked up to me and raised her two fists in the air and gave me a big smile and a loud scream as if she was celebrating her victory over foreign chocolate.
These are the main family members, but many times extended family members stop by for a meal or two and occasionally sleep here. Kaibek (9 yrs old), Max’s young brother in law, and Albina (10 yrs old), Erlan’s young sister in law are over often. I can tell that Apa and Ata are really happy, and if their children and grandchildren are always around, why wouldn’t they be. My Apa is really energetic and yet patient with me. She teaches me a lot of phrases in Kyrgyz, and she will tell me longer stories in Russian, yet she always stops after a sentence and asks if I understood. My Ata is a great guy. He likes to crack a lot of jokes. I go on beer walks with him (this is when we walk down the block, buy a bottle of beer at the Magazin (the omnipresent small stores in Kyrgyzstan), walk to the railroad station and then back again) most every evening after supper. One evening when we got back to the house their cows were still grazing in the backyard. I asked him if the cows spoke Russian, or if they spoke Kyrgyz. He responded that they not only speak both, but they know English as well, but they only talk in the mornings, never in the evening. Also, he insists on my need for a devushka in my life. Devushka is Russian for young lady. Every morning he asks me if I dreamt of a devushka. The funniest is when he says “Jasho Jakshi, tolka tebya devushki net,” which is a mix of Kyrgyz and Russian meaning “Life is great, except you have no young lady.” It gets me and his family cracking up quite a bit when he says it, which is often.
Today is Sunday, which means it’s banya/sauna day. This is the day when the sauna ritual is enacted by most families in Kyrgyzstan. I’ll wait to describe it since I will not have experienced it yet for another couple hours.
Until next time, be well.
Love
Jonathan
Hello to all!
This will be my first blog post as a Peace Corps Trainee in Kyrgyzstan. I’ve only been gone for a week as I write this, but it feels like I have a year’s worth of stuff to share. I flew to Philadelphia and stayed there July 3rd-5th at a hotel where we had staging. Staging is a general introduction to the Peace Corps, not country specific. We had meetings all day, both Thursday and Friday, in which we got filled in on the Peace Corps mission, their philosophy of development, and also got some basic training on the difficulties of being a foreigner in these foreign communities. The meetings were long, yet informative. I think everyone was itching to know more about Kyrgyzstan, and so though all of staging was pretty important before becoming a volunteer, a lot of us volunteers were sitting around with a lot of questions brewing. But I guess it’s better that we waited since you can’t talk about Kyrgyzstan without experiencing it first, from what I understand.
After flying out of New York’s JFK airport, we arrived in Istanbul for an 8 hour layover. I wasn’t planning to go into the city from the airport, but two much more well-traveled volunteers, Erin and Chelsea, convinced me to do it. I’m glad I did. Istanbul is a pretty amazing and beautiful city, and really easy to get around. We visited the Blue Mosque and walked through it, and got to at least the outside of Hagia Sophia, but the line to get in was pretty long, and it was expensive to get in, so we ate at an outdoor café instead.
We arrived in Bishkek, the capital city in the north of Kyrgyzstan, at 2:30 AM, and then were taken to the Issyk-Kol Hotel, a massive dilapidated soviet-style hotel on the outskirts of the city. The rooms were in alright shape, though I think my roommate, John, and I were lucky since we were one of the few volunteer’s whose doorknobs did not fall off when we tried to unlock the door. Since we arrived at night, we didn’t see much of the city until morning. And what an experience that was! I woke up at 7 the first morning, looked out my window and saw a bunch of gigantic mountains. I’ll take that experience again if I can get it. In Kyrgyz culture, bird nests on the outside of your house mean that your home is protected, so even at the hotel there were thousands of swallows’ nests all over the balconies. We left the door to our room’s balcony open all the time and the birds never flew into the room (my initial fear) as if the birds had some tacit agreement with the hotel management and guests. From our balcony we could see not only mountains, but also a bizarre soviet art park. What’s a soviet art park? I really can’t tell you. Picture a bunch of cubist soviet sculptures, abstract sidewalk design and a whole lot of concrete. But it was definitely a park. People living nearby were walking through it all evening. You could also climb up a 10 story tower/monument and get a better look at the city and the nearby mountains. The food at the hotel restaurant was pretty exceptional. Every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner was three or four courses with, of course, copious amounts of tea. At the hotel we began our health and safety, language and culture training sessions. These sessions will fill my time for the nest 10-11 weeks, so the three days at the hotel were just a foretaste.
After our third day of sessions, we had our host family matching ceremony. This was the really exciting moment when we get to go onto a stage and meet our host mothers for the first time, and then go home with them and meet the rest of their families. This took place in the city Kant, about 20 miles east of Bishkek. Kant is where all of the volunteers meet once a week (there are 62 of us total) on Wednesdays for general meetings. The rest of the week we are all spread out in neighboring villages according to our language groups. I am learning Kyrgyz, and I am right now living in a small village (about 2,000 people) outside the capital city. I have 4 other volunteers in my language group, and there’s another group of 5 living elsewhere in the same village. Six days a week we have 4 hours of language lessons from the morning to the early afternoon at our teacher, Nuyrjan’s house. Every day for lunch we eat at a different volunteer’s family’s house. I’m lucky to have such an awesome language group – Kristen, James, Joe and Jenna. We get along really well, and we all have senses of humor, so our time together is really enjoyable. It’s a relief to get together every morning and share our goofy stories that come from living with host families without speaking their language.
I’m considering myself extra lucky that I know some Russian, because that has really taken away the shock of living with a host family whose language is totally foreign. Everyone knows Russian in Kyrgyzstan, and everyone expects foreigners to speak Russian. Even our language teacher, who has good English, will accidentally start speaking to us in Russian during class. So I’m able to communicate pretty well with my family so far. I’m not sure, however, if my language teacher would approve. She tells me I shouldn’t speak Russian with my host family, only Kyrgyz. But that’s much easier said than done when I just started learning Kyrgyz two days ago and my host family uses Russian when I can’t understand them speaking Kyrgyz. Even my other peers said that their host families will consistently ask them if they know any Russian whenever they’re trying to communicate. But I’m excited to learn Kyrgyz. It’s much, much more simple than Russian, though it has some vowels that we don’t have in English that are hard for me to get used to pronouncing (like the German umlaut, and another vowel that sounds like saying “ewe” without moving your lips). Kyrgyz grammar is really fascinating, difficult in its own way, but easy in the grand spectrum of languages. More on that in another later post.
A sense of humor definitely goes a long way during this transition. Every Peace Corps in the world gets a medical handbook called “Where There Is No Doctor,” which is a health guidebook that offers suggestions for people living far from doctors and hospitals. It’s also meant to be used by foreign health care workers in remote villages who are new to western health care. It has a section on what superstitions/natural cures “work”, and which ones don’t “work.” I laughed for about ten minutes straight when I read one page: “If you have a strange sickness, do not blame a witch, do not go to a magic center, but ask for medical advice.”
I think that’s all I can fit in on this post. I will have to write about my host family later, which is probably best since I don’t have everyone’s name down quite yet (families in Kyrgyzstan stick together. Not only do the mother and father stay here, but their three sons, their wives and kids too. It’s busy.)
Everything is well so far. I am healthy and engaged with what I am doing. I hope everyone reading this is doing well.
With Love,
Jonathan
July 12, 2008
Right now it’s Sunday morning, and Sundays are the weekend in Kyrgyzstan. Their work week is six days, and last night really felt like a weekend night. I went with my host family to their dacha (summer cottage) located in the mountains that lie about ten miles away. I didn’t know what was involved with going there, but I’m really glad I went. They never actually stay over night at the cottage, but it’s basically a way to get away for an afternoon and evening and have a barbeque. You didn’t know they have barbeques in Kyrgyzstan? Well they do, and they enjoy them just as much as we do in the states, except for one extra detail – the goat slaughter. I was just hanging around minding my own business, taking pictures of the mountains and watching my Apa (host mother) start a fire when my Ata (host father) and host brother walked in dragging a goat with its neck slit. I took it as an educational experience and my initiation into Kyrgyz culinary art. My host brother Max had that thing skinned in about 12 minutes, which seemed pretty quick. The only thing that was a little odd was when they cut into the chest cavity, the lungs decompressed (they must have still had air in them) and the goat made a strange wheezy exhalation sound for about a minute. But then my other host brother, Erlan, grilled shashlik (shishkabobs). It was all pretty delicious. We ate a bunch of watermelon, tomatoes and cucumbers with it. After dinner I rode with some of my family to a small lake that was further up in the mountains and we jumped in for a quick swim. The water was pretty cold, but it felt amazing. I couldn’t swim for too long because the altitude was really high and I could tell by my heart beat.
Now I’ll explain who I’m living with. My host Ata’s (father) name is Talai, and my host Apa’s (mother) name is Jumagul. They are in their 50’s or early 60’s (my guess: it’s rude in Kyrgyzstan to ask adults how old they are) and they have three sons. The youngest is Azat who is my age. He works for a bottled water company in the nearby city Tokmok, so I’ve only seen him once since I arrived. The second oldest is Max or Maxim. He is 25, and his wife, Nargiza and him have a one year old girl named Sadat, and Nargiza has another baby on the way soon. I always forget that she’s pregnant because she does just as much work as everyone in the family and rests the least often. Max knows some English, half of the words from studying it in school, half of the words from American rap music. It makes our conversations pretty entertaining (like instead of “Let’s go, Jonathan,” it’s “Come on everybody now, let’s go,” even if I’m the only one around). The oldest son is Erlan. He’s a police officer in Tokmok. He’s 28 years old, married, and has two daughters, Elina (2 or 3 yrs. old) and Medina (1 yr. old). Elina is pretty much the cutest kid ever. She walks around giggling all of the time and making faces at people. When I gave my host family some different chocolates as gifts, she claimed the bag of Reese’s Pieces as her own: I’m pretty sure she ate the entire bag herself. And then, with her face and hands covered in chocolate, she walked up to me and raised her two fists in the air and gave me a big smile and a loud scream as if she was celebrating her victory over foreign chocolate.
These are the main family members, but many times extended family members stop by for a meal or two and occasionally sleep here. Kaibek (9 yrs old), Max’s young brother in law, and Albina (10 yrs old), Erlan’s young sister in law are over often. I can tell that Apa and Ata are really happy, and if their children and grandchildren are always around, why wouldn’t they be. My Apa is really energetic and yet patient with me. She teaches me a lot of phrases in Kyrgyz, and she will tell me longer stories in Russian, yet she always stops after a sentence and asks if I understood. My Ata is a great guy. He likes to crack a lot of jokes. I go on beer walks with him (this is when we walk down the block, buy a bottle of beer at the Magazin (the omnipresent small stores in Kyrgyzstan), walk to the railroad station and then back again) most every evening after supper. One evening when we got back to the house their cows were still grazing in the backyard. I asked him if the cows spoke Russian, or if they spoke Kyrgyz. He responded that they not only speak both, but they know English as well, but they only talk in the mornings, never in the evening. Also, he insists on my need for a devushka in my life. Devushka is Russian for young lady. Every morning he asks me if I dreamt of a devushka. The funniest is when he says “Jasho Jakshi, tolka tebya devushki net,” which is a mix of Kyrgyz and Russian meaning “Life is great, except you have no young lady.” It gets me and his family cracking up quite a bit when he says it, which is often.
Today is Sunday, which means it’s banya/sauna day. This is the day when the sauna ritual is enacted by most families in Kyrgyzstan. I’ll wait to describe it since I will not have experienced it yet for another couple hours.
Until next time, be well.
Love
Jonathan
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Inaugrual Peace Corps Post
voices to voices, lip to lip
i swear (to noone everyone) constitutes
undying; or whatever this and that petal confutes…
to exist being a peculiar form of sleep
what’s beyond logic happens beneath will;
nor can these moments be translated: i say
that even after April
by God there is no excuse for May
--bring forth your flowers and machinery: sculpture and prose
flowers guess and miss
machinery is the more accurate, yes
it delivers the goods, Heaven knows
(yet are we mindful, though not as yet awake,
of ourselves which shout and cling, being
for a little while and which easily break
in spite of the best overseeing)
i mean that the blond absence of any program
except last and always and first to live
makes unimportant what i and you believe;
not for philosophy does this rose give a damn…
bring on your fireworks, which are a mixed
splendor of piston and pistil; very well
provided an instant may be fixed
so that it will not rub, like any other pastel.
(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?
each dream nascitur, is not made…)
why then to Hell with that: the other; this,
since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid.
-e.e. cummings
On Thursday July 3rd, two weeks from tomorrow, I depart for my big adventure of teaching English for the Peace Corps in the Kyrgyz Republic (a.k.a. Kyrgyzstan). As the time seems to be rapidly approaching, I thought I should make an inaugural “Peace Corps Post” to designate this page as my official Peace Corps blog.
Here are the details: I will leave July 3rd from Minneapolis to Philadelphia and spend the 3rd, 4th and 5th there during staging – the Peace Corps name for our pre-service orientation. On the 5th I and the other 30-50 volunteers leaving for Kyrgyzstan will fly out of New York City, change planes in Istanbul, Turkey and arrive in Bishkek, the capital city in the north of Kyrgyzstan. We will then begin our pre-service training (PST) in and around the capital city (near a neighboring city called Kant), and we’ll be there until mid-September when we will be assigned our permanent post for our two years of service.
I know that I will be living with a host family during PST, and then with a different family for at least my first three months at post. After my first 6 months in Kyrgyzstan I will get to decide whether I want to continue living with my host family or if I want to rent my own apartment. My life until mid-September is fairly well planned out: I will spend 6-8 hours Monday through Saturday in intensive culture, job and language training. I’m fairly certain that I will be learning Kyrgyz, the native Turkic language of the Kyrgyz people, during PST. Since I took two years of Russian at Gustavus, I doubt that the Peace Corps office will have me learning Russian during this time. Learning Kyrgyz will be my number one task since it is much more conducive for building strong connections in Kyrgyz communities if you speak their language. Knowing Russian, however, will be my initial way of buffering the huge adaptations that will be required of me during the first few months (most everyone knows Russian in Kyrgyzstan, but not everyone who knows Russian knows Kyrgyz). I hope I will be able to use and study both languages equally wherever I am placed for the duration of my service, but time will tell if this will be the case.
The last two and a half weeks since graduating from Gustavus have been wonderful. I’ve spent them unpacking, repacking, relaxing, reflecting and spending time with friends and family. The highlights so far have been getting to go on big bike rides with my dad, road tripping to Chicago with Oaks and Law to see Iron Maiden live, seeing Mark Kozelek play at the Varsity Theatre with Michelle, and going up to Grandpa and Gay’s cabin with my family and Michelle for a weekend. Other than this, I’ve had to do a lot of shopping in preparation for being in Kyrgyzstan and for having a job that requires a more professional dress than my casual college student wardrobe.
I don’t know if I’ll be posting much on here before my departure, so let me end by saying how important each and every one of you who are reading this blog are to me. Sharing my experiences, photos and (possibly) videos while abroad will really help me feel connected with everyone back home whom I care about. Depending on how available internet is where I will be living, I may not be able to check email more than once a week (possibly less, possibly more). If I may make a request, please don’t hesitate to send me emails or leave messages/comments on my blog. Even if I can’t respond quickly, please know that your words will mean so much to me while I’m over there, probably even more than I anticipate right now.
I’d also like to thank the people who have helped me immensely in getting to this point. Thanks to Phil Bryant, Will Freiert and Oaks for writing letters of recommendation during my application process. Thanks to Prof. Crnkovic and Prof. Rosenflanz for sharing their wealth of knowledge about Central Asia and of the Russian language with me. Thanks to all of my best friends (you know who you are) for our conversations and your support regarding this decision. And a huge thanks to my family for their wise advice and supportive conversations throughout the last few months. This opportunity would not be viable for me without any single one of you. Thank you.
Am I nervous about this, or excited? You tell me. I am so excited to go to Kyrgyzstan, to learn Kyrgyz and to speak Russian, to become a teacher. I am nervous for all the reasons that leaving home can strain the heart strings. I have little fear of the departure itself – it’s the return that intimidates me, since it’s then when I’ll realize how much life has happened since my departure, both for myself and for those who surround me right now. It seems to me that volunteering for the Peace Corps merely intensifies all of the normal feelings that come to everyone, anywhere: the excitement for the future coupled with a fear of losing the people and places that are apart of us now.
But for now I’ll let sleeping dogs lie, since “the thing perhaps is / to eat flowers and not to be afraid.”
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
The Nowhere Self: How the Self, Which Usually Experiences Itself as Living Nowhere, is Surprised to Find that it Lives Somewhere
"On the Johnny Carson Show, it always happens that when Carson or one of his guests mentions the name of an American city, there is applause from those audience members who live in this city. The applause is of a particular character, startled and immediate, as if the applauders cannot help themselves.
Such a response is understandable if one hails from a hamlet like Abita Springs, Louisiana, and Carson mentioned Abita Springs. But the applause also occurs at the mention of New York or Chicago.
Question: Do Chicagoans in Burbank, California, applaud at the mention of the word Chicago
A) Because they are proud of Chicago?
B) Because they are boosters, Chamber of Commerce types, who appreciate a plug, much as a toothpaste manufacturer would appreciate Carson mentioning Colgate?
C) Because a person, particularly a passive audience member who finds himself in Burbank, California, feels himself so dislocated, so detached from a particular coordinate in space and time, so ghostly, that the very mention of such a coordinate is enough to startle him into action?
(check one)
Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and a dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. You make enough money and move to a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: "Brooklyn 9.6 light-years." Explain your emotion."
-Walker Percy, "Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book"
Such a response is understandable if one hails from a hamlet like Abita Springs, Louisiana, and Carson mentioned Abita Springs. But the applause also occurs at the mention of New York or Chicago.
Question: Do Chicagoans in Burbank, California, applaud at the mention of the word Chicago
A) Because they are proud of Chicago?
B) Because they are boosters, Chamber of Commerce types, who appreciate a plug, much as a toothpaste manufacturer would appreciate Carson mentioning Colgate?
C) Because a person, particularly a passive audience member who finds himself in Burbank, California, feels himself so dislocated, so detached from a particular coordinate in space and time, so ghostly, that the very mention of such a coordinate is enough to startle him into action?
(check one)
Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and a dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. You make enough money and move to a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: "Brooklyn 9.6 light-years." Explain your emotion."
-Walker Percy, "Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book"
Saturday, May 3, 2008
"I feel you oh so near
when morning doves appear..." -Sun Kil Moon
Well, I knew I hadn't updated my posts in a while, but I hadn't realized it had been two whole months...Man, how time flies.
The biggest news for me as of now is that I've officially accepted my Peace Corps invitation to teach English for two years in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan (also called the Kyrgyz Republic), beginning July 3rd, 2008. I'm very excited for this opportunity: I know that it will present many difficulties, and that those difficulties will be repaid with rich rewards. I will graduate on June 1st from Gustavus, and then have the month of June to relax, recap, and repack before I begin this new phase of my life, one that is to have quite an impact on the years that follow. I could not be more happy with my destined country: Kyrgyzstan has a rich, ancient culture; a people formerly of nomadic Turkish/Mongolian tribes who were mostly industrialized by the Soviets in the 20th Century. In Kyrgyzstan there is Islam, and there is Orthodox Christianity; there is eastern mysticism, and there is post-Soviet materialism co-existing. It will be an enriching culture experience for me, right in the vein of my interests and curiosities.
The Peace Corps ordeal will deserve a longer post in the near future. Right now I'm dedicated to enjoying my final weeks living on the hill at Gustavus in St. Peter. Biggest news in that vein is that I've begun to go for bike rides again. This was a big step for me, since I'd not biked since my debilitating accident last August when I broke my arm. My first ride was three weeks ago, and it was really hard to get back on that proverbial horse: for my first five miles I kept getting flashbacks of my crash, but after that I loosened up and remembered why I like biking so much: you get to see more and breathe more fresh air than running, and it offers such a sense of freedom. It's really hard to beat.
I took my bike on the Minnesota River Trail in Mankato, heading for 9 miles in one direction, and 9 on the return trip. It felt great. I did it all in an hour, which was even more thrilling. I had been doing some training in the athletic center here at Gustavus (most of all so that I'd be able to keep up with my dad on bike rides this summer), and it really paid off. The Mankato ride was great; cruising right along the river on one of the first beautiful spring days we had in April. I stopped off halfway to eat some dried fruit on the river bank, listened to the water flowing, and wondered how it could get much better. Oh yeah...maybe if my dad was there too.
Since then I've gone on a couple rides out West of campus on the country roads; they're well paved with little traffic. I'd say they're perfect for riding if it wasn't for the apocalyptic wind that comes blowing in off the plains at times. My first ride went smoothly; my second was brutal - 15 minutes to go six miles out, and 45 minutes to come back with a head wind. But it was worth it. After that ride I think I ate an entire half pound of Easter ham.
Since then they've been pretty normal rides; not too strong of a wind, just a little resistance here and there. But at this time of year, this part of Minnesota smells like dirt, the farmers tilling the earth, pitching the gutteral scent of mineral rich soil into the air to fill my nostrels. It also does not get much better than this.
That is all for now. This blog could become my official obligatory Peace Corps blog, so there could be some juicy bits to appear here soon. Until next time, be well, and God bless.
Слава Отцу и Сыну и Святому Духу, и ныне и присно и во веки веков. Амень.
J
when morning doves appear..." -Sun Kil Moon
Well, I knew I hadn't updated my posts in a while, but I hadn't realized it had been two whole months...Man, how time flies.
The biggest news for me as of now is that I've officially accepted my Peace Corps invitation to teach English for two years in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan (also called the Kyrgyz Republic), beginning July 3rd, 2008. I'm very excited for this opportunity: I know that it will present many difficulties, and that those difficulties will be repaid with rich rewards. I will graduate on June 1st from Gustavus, and then have the month of June to relax, recap, and repack before I begin this new phase of my life, one that is to have quite an impact on the years that follow. I could not be more happy with my destined country: Kyrgyzstan has a rich, ancient culture; a people formerly of nomadic Turkish/Mongolian tribes who were mostly industrialized by the Soviets in the 20th Century. In Kyrgyzstan there is Islam, and there is Orthodox Christianity; there is eastern mysticism, and there is post-Soviet materialism co-existing. It will be an enriching culture experience for me, right in the vein of my interests and curiosities.
The Peace Corps ordeal will deserve a longer post in the near future. Right now I'm dedicated to enjoying my final weeks living on the hill at Gustavus in St. Peter. Biggest news in that vein is that I've begun to go for bike rides again. This was a big step for me, since I'd not biked since my debilitating accident last August when I broke my arm. My first ride was three weeks ago, and it was really hard to get back on that proverbial horse: for my first five miles I kept getting flashbacks of my crash, but after that I loosened up and remembered why I like biking so much: you get to see more and breathe more fresh air than running, and it offers such a sense of freedom. It's really hard to beat.
I took my bike on the Minnesota River Trail in Mankato, heading for 9 miles in one direction, and 9 on the return trip. It felt great. I did it all in an hour, which was even more thrilling. I had been doing some training in the athletic center here at Gustavus (most of all so that I'd be able to keep up with my dad on bike rides this summer), and it really paid off. The Mankato ride was great; cruising right along the river on one of the first beautiful spring days we had in April. I stopped off halfway to eat some dried fruit on the river bank, listened to the water flowing, and wondered how it could get much better. Oh yeah...maybe if my dad was there too.
Since then I've gone on a couple rides out West of campus on the country roads; they're well paved with little traffic. I'd say they're perfect for riding if it wasn't for the apocalyptic wind that comes blowing in off the plains at times. My first ride went smoothly; my second was brutal - 15 minutes to go six miles out, and 45 minutes to come back with a head wind. But it was worth it. After that ride I think I ate an entire half pound of Easter ham.
Since then they've been pretty normal rides; not too strong of a wind, just a little resistance here and there. But at this time of year, this part of Minnesota smells like dirt, the farmers tilling the earth, pitching the gutteral scent of mineral rich soil into the air to fill my nostrels. It also does not get much better than this.
That is all for now. This blog could become my official obligatory Peace Corps blog, so there could be some juicy bits to appear here soon. Until next time, be well, and God bless.
Слава Отцу и Сыну и Святому Духу, и ныне и присно и во веки веков. Амень.
J
Friday, February 8, 2008
Russian Poetry
It's strange how during the semesters I seem to forget my natural tendencies when unoccupied. I imagine I can be just as productive as I am during school, though able to take time to relax. This never seems to work out exactly as I expect because my melancholy is given plenty of space to move in. This feels like a burden at first, until I realize that it's only when I have let the blues sink in a bit that my brain and my heart really come alive again. I won't describe this further, only as an explanation for the rest of this post. It takes a lot of time before I can get in the mood to write things that I've been thinking about fragmentedly for months. So below is a poem analysis I have been working on of a poem by the Russian Areseniy Tarkovsky, father of the filmmaker. I have no delusions that it will be interesting to anyone at all, but of course I figure it doesn't hurt to 'publish' it, rather than keep it all to myself. Besides, I should like to prove that I haven't spent the last few weeks solely eating pancakes and indulging in irreverant pop music.
Вот и лето прошло,
Словно и не бывало.
На пригреве тепло.
Только этого мало.
Всё, что сбыться могло,
Мне, как лист пятипалый,
Прямо в руки легло.
Только этого мало.
Понапрасну ни зло,
Ни добро не пропало,
Всё горело светло.
Только этого мало.
Жизнь брала под крыло,
Берегла и спасала.
Мне и вправду везло.
Только этого мало.
Листьев не обожгло,
Веток не обломало...
День промыт, как стекло.
Только этого мало.
Summer came and went,
Like it never happened.
It was warm in its nourishment.
Only that’s not enough.
Everything that could come to fruition,
Like a five-fingered leaf,
Was laid straight into my hand.
Only that’s not enough.
Not in vain did evil,
Nor good disappear,
Light burned everything away.
Only that’s not enough.
Life took me under wing,
Guarded me and redeemed me.
It was so lucky for me.
Only that’s not enough.
The foliage was not scourged,
The branch was unharmed…
The day was sluiced clean, like glass.
Only that’s not enough.
-Arseniy Tarkvosky
Before diving into an interpretation of this poem, as with other Russian poems we must first consider the surface matters of its form. It is comprised of five four-line stanzas, following the rhyme pattern ABAB consistently throughout (not in my translation, unfortunately, but in the Russian). The first and third lines of each stanza end in masculine rhymes, while the second and fourth in feminine.
Keeping this in mind we can delve into the paradox which the poem reveals to us, the unifying tension between form and content. For without the last line of each stanza, the rhyme scheme would be stilted and the repetitive “Only that’s not enough” (Только этого мало) would not be there to tie all five stanzas together, thus leaving us with a more fragmented set of verses. But let us for the moment read the poem once again without the final line of each stanza. What we have is, I think, a thematically mirrored poem. Stanzas one and two work together, stanza three takes a turn, and stanzas three and four echo the first two, though effected by the cathartic third stanza.
In the first stanza, we have a light, pastoral sentiment: summer was here, it nourished me, but it passed too quickly. Nature gives and takes away. So far Keats and Wordsworth would nod approvingly. The next stanza moves us into fall: everything that grew during summer now is harvested, is reaped for our benefit. The inclusion of «five fingered leaf» is very important, since this poem itself is five-fingered (five stanzas long), written on leaves of paper. We now are not simply talking about nature, but also the art of poetry. The first stanza is thus not only about nature's summer, but the summertime of the soul, of warmth and happiness. Autumn brings its melancholy, and by the loss of summer we are given fodder by the muse of poetry, words of longing and remembered bliss.
The third stanza is our peripeteia, our turn or reversal: something ineffably catastrophic has happened. We can suppose it is winter, but Tarkovsky avoids terms to make this association. Instead, good and evil have disappeared and everything has been burned away. Cataclism, or merely a personal catharsis, who knows? But everything in the first two stanzas has disappeared. We start afresh after this stanza, unsure of the line between the pastoral and the spiritual from this point on. The fourth stanza answers our question, at least for now. The author has been saved by «life». But does he mean the green, lush life of stanzas one and two, or living, breathing human life? Has he found some solace in a human spiritual awakening, or simply shelter from nature's tumult? I think that he implies the former, since the verb used here, from the Russian спасать, meaning to save or redeem, has specifically relgious connotations. But this connotation merely introduces a tension in meaning. It comes from the Old Church Slavonic noun спасение, meaning «salvation». You still hear it in their church music. This connotation, however, I think the author evokes on purpose, only to give it a more earthly meaning. Life has redeemed him. But in the next line, he is merely the recipient of luck, of good fortune «везло». Life has picked him out haphazardly, and he feels gratitude for its nourishment. This reminds us, of course, of what summer did for him in the first stanza.
In the final stanza we are returned solely to the natural world. The trees are still standing, untorched and unbroken, the day is clear «like glass». Evidently the author has gone through some transformation, only to end up where he was in the first stanza. However, something has changed: he has become awakened, subconsciously to a different reality, the reality of redemption: if he meant спасать in the earthly sense, he now also understands its heavenly connotation.
I believe this awareness of the spiritual life is what gives us the cadence of «only that's not enough» at the end of each stanza. They are added because the author has realized the vanity of everything natural, the vanity of fortune and of the seasons and human emotion. Without the repetitive line, we would have, in a sense, a complete poem, replete with movement and imagery: it would be exactly a «five fingered leaf» that falls into our hands. With the cadence, however, the entire poem is reversed. It forces us to look not at what is in the poem, but rather what is absent from the poem. This realization becomes integral to the poem, inseparable from the ABAB rhyme scheme. To neglect the fourth line is to miss the whole point. The poem's entire meaning now hangs on whatever is missing from it. Luck, summer, warmth, light, nature and even poetry cannot satiate this void which the poet feels. So what would be enough?
My answer is this: the human will. In this poem the author is merely a passive recipient. There are no verbs which he is the agent of. In the Russian he is relegated to a recipient of action in the dative of the personal pronoun «мне», never the Я or 'I' of action, agency and control. What the repeating line deprives is the poem's natural vivacity, and replaces it with veracity. The poet builds the poem, lines 1-3 throughout, only to destroy it with line 4: the poem's form itself is a catharsis.
The poem is beautiful, as is nature: it has movement, beginnings and conclusions. But evidently it is not the answer to life's problems. «Only that's not enough» turns us away from the poem and its content towards a different philosophy, a different perspective on earthly matters: fortune cannot save you, and happiness fixed to this world is ultimately a lack of something else. Fulness in one sense is emptiness in another. One must act with one's will for true salvation. It will not be placed into our hands like good memories, friends, summer, food and shelter. The genius of th epoem is that this act of the will heralds into one's life a mirroring of nature's cycle of life, death and rebirth, the cycle of the poem. When one can choose, freely, to give up the life of this world, there then awaits a salvation that can satiate us, a redemption that is enough.
Вот и лето прошло,
Словно и не бывало.
На пригреве тепло.
Только этого мало.
Всё, что сбыться могло,
Мне, как лист пятипалый,
Прямо в руки легло.
Только этого мало.
Понапрасну ни зло,
Ни добро не пропало,
Всё горело светло.
Только этого мало.
Жизнь брала под крыло,
Берегла и спасала.
Мне и вправду везло.
Только этого мало.
Листьев не обожгло,
Веток не обломало...
День промыт, как стекло.
Только этого мало.
Summer came and went,
Like it never happened.
It was warm in its nourishment.
Only that’s not enough.
Everything that could come to fruition,
Like a five-fingered leaf,
Was laid straight into my hand.
Only that’s not enough.
Not in vain did evil,
Nor good disappear,
Light burned everything away.
Only that’s not enough.
Life took me under wing,
Guarded me and redeemed me.
It was so lucky for me.
Only that’s not enough.
The foliage was not scourged,
The branch was unharmed…
The day was sluiced clean, like glass.
Only that’s not enough.
-Arseniy Tarkvosky
Before diving into an interpretation of this poem, as with other Russian poems we must first consider the surface matters of its form. It is comprised of five four-line stanzas, following the rhyme pattern ABAB consistently throughout (not in my translation, unfortunately, but in the Russian). The first and third lines of each stanza end in masculine rhymes, while the second and fourth in feminine.
Keeping this in mind we can delve into the paradox which the poem reveals to us, the unifying tension between form and content. For without the last line of each stanza, the rhyme scheme would be stilted and the repetitive “Only that’s not enough” (Только этого мало) would not be there to tie all five stanzas together, thus leaving us with a more fragmented set of verses. But let us for the moment read the poem once again without the final line of each stanza. What we have is, I think, a thematically mirrored poem. Stanzas one and two work together, stanza three takes a turn, and stanzas three and four echo the first two, though effected by the cathartic third stanza.
In the first stanza, we have a light, pastoral sentiment: summer was here, it nourished me, but it passed too quickly. Nature gives and takes away. So far Keats and Wordsworth would nod approvingly. The next stanza moves us into fall: everything that grew during summer now is harvested, is reaped for our benefit. The inclusion of «five fingered leaf» is very important, since this poem itself is five-fingered (five stanzas long), written on leaves of paper. We now are not simply talking about nature, but also the art of poetry. The first stanza is thus not only about nature's summer, but the summertime of the soul, of warmth and happiness. Autumn brings its melancholy, and by the loss of summer we are given fodder by the muse of poetry, words of longing and remembered bliss.
The third stanza is our peripeteia, our turn or reversal: something ineffably catastrophic has happened. We can suppose it is winter, but Tarkovsky avoids terms to make this association. Instead, good and evil have disappeared and everything has been burned away. Cataclism, or merely a personal catharsis, who knows? But everything in the first two stanzas has disappeared. We start afresh after this stanza, unsure of the line between the pastoral and the spiritual from this point on. The fourth stanza answers our question, at least for now. The author has been saved by «life». But does he mean the green, lush life of stanzas one and two, or living, breathing human life? Has he found some solace in a human spiritual awakening, or simply shelter from nature's tumult? I think that he implies the former, since the verb used here, from the Russian спасать, meaning to save or redeem, has specifically relgious connotations. But this connotation merely introduces a tension in meaning. It comes from the Old Church Slavonic noun спасение, meaning «salvation». You still hear it in their church music. This connotation, however, I think the author evokes on purpose, only to give it a more earthly meaning. Life has redeemed him. But in the next line, he is merely the recipient of luck, of good fortune «везло». Life has picked him out haphazardly, and he feels gratitude for its nourishment. This reminds us, of course, of what summer did for him in the first stanza.
In the final stanza we are returned solely to the natural world. The trees are still standing, untorched and unbroken, the day is clear «like glass». Evidently the author has gone through some transformation, only to end up where he was in the first stanza. However, something has changed: he has become awakened, subconsciously to a different reality, the reality of redemption: if he meant спасать in the earthly sense, he now also understands its heavenly connotation.
I believe this awareness of the spiritual life is what gives us the cadence of «only that's not enough» at the end of each stanza. They are added because the author has realized the vanity of everything natural, the vanity of fortune and of the seasons and human emotion. Without the repetitive line, we would have, in a sense, a complete poem, replete with movement and imagery: it would be exactly a «five fingered leaf» that falls into our hands. With the cadence, however, the entire poem is reversed. It forces us to look not at what is in the poem, but rather what is absent from the poem. This realization becomes integral to the poem, inseparable from the ABAB rhyme scheme. To neglect the fourth line is to miss the whole point. The poem's entire meaning now hangs on whatever is missing from it. Luck, summer, warmth, light, nature and even poetry cannot satiate this void which the poet feels. So what would be enough?
My answer is this: the human will. In this poem the author is merely a passive recipient. There are no verbs which he is the agent of. In the Russian he is relegated to a recipient of action in the dative of the personal pronoun «мне», never the Я or 'I' of action, agency and control. What the repeating line deprives is the poem's natural vivacity, and replaces it with veracity. The poet builds the poem, lines 1-3 throughout, only to destroy it with line 4: the poem's form itself is a catharsis.
The poem is beautiful, as is nature: it has movement, beginnings and conclusions. But evidently it is not the answer to life's problems. «Only that's not enough» turns us away from the poem and its content towards a different philosophy, a different perspective on earthly matters: fortune cannot save you, and happiness fixed to this world is ultimately a lack of something else. Fulness in one sense is emptiness in another. One must act with one's will for true salvation. It will not be placed into our hands like good memories, friends, summer, food and shelter. The genius of th epoem is that this act of the will heralds into one's life a mirroring of nature's cycle of life, death and rebirth, the cycle of the poem. When one can choose, freely, to give up the life of this world, there then awaits a salvation that can satiate us, a redemption that is enough.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
If the world's at large, why should I remain...
Well it has been a largely successful break between semesters for me so far. I've spent the last three and a half weeks working at Gustavus as a Latin tutor, but have not been taking a class, allowing time for more racquetball, time with friends and frequent naps. The only downsides to my break have been #1 Crashing my friend's snowmobile into a tree, totaling it, and all of the lingering guilt over it, and #2 becoming the closest to broke I've been in my life, forcing me to sell my plasma in Mankato twice a week to pay for textbooks and gas. The upsides, though, have outweighed the financial cons: spending a weekend with good friends at a cabin (and being fully introduced to the Iron Maiden canon there), falling asleep watching Scrubs on 45 most nights, re-watching Tarkovsky movies that I didn't understand from the first viewing, time for lots of reading (The Crossing, The Education of Little Tree, Silence of the Grave, Collected Works of Florovsky volumes 3 & 4, Opium Season, Desert Solitaire, Love in the Time of Cholera), eating pancakes every other morning, getting to sub-teach the Latin class for a day, extra trips to see friends and family, and the exceptional fratern/soror-ity occurring daily around campus. I think, come a week and a half, I'll be refreshed enough to feel prepared to hit the books once again.
A week ago I finished two applications for possible post-graduation opportunities. One is for a federal government sponsored Critical Language Scholarship, which is an all expenses paid two-month trip to Russia to study Russian intensively. I met the applicant qualifications, so I went ahead and tried to produce a shining portfolio to attest to my previous language study. If I am accepted, I will be notified at the end of March, and the trip itself is from early June through early August. And, if accepted, I would most likely need to defer my Peace Corps acceptance (which hasn't actually happened yet, pending one vaccination that I don't have money for, cf. supra, concerning plasma donation). The other application was for a two year M.A. program in Early Christian Studies at Notre Dame in Indiana. I will find out about that at the end of February.
At this point, having diverse options for after graduation seems more important than deciding on one thing only, though this constantly puts my patience into use and my future-minded stomach at unease. I know, no doubt, that I always have the option of staying in the cities for a year, working (perhaps as a substitute teacher). It may be not just a great fallback plan, but, depending on how in debt I am come June, a stellar route to go.
I might be alone in this, but I really, really like the new JimmyEatWorld disc.
J.A.P. out.
A week ago I finished two applications for possible post-graduation opportunities. One is for a federal government sponsored Critical Language Scholarship, which is an all expenses paid two-month trip to Russia to study Russian intensively. I met the applicant qualifications, so I went ahead and tried to produce a shining portfolio to attest to my previous language study. If I am accepted, I will be notified at the end of March, and the trip itself is from early June through early August. And, if accepted, I would most likely need to defer my Peace Corps acceptance (which hasn't actually happened yet, pending one vaccination that I don't have money for, cf. supra, concerning plasma donation). The other application was for a two year M.A. program in Early Christian Studies at Notre Dame in Indiana. I will find out about that at the end of February.
At this point, having diverse options for after graduation seems more important than deciding on one thing only, though this constantly puts my patience into use and my future-minded stomach at unease. I know, no doubt, that I always have the option of staying in the cities for a year, working (perhaps as a substitute teacher). It may be not just a great fallback plan, but, depending on how in debt I am come June, a stellar route to go.
I might be alone in this, but I really, really like the new JimmyEatWorld disc.
J.A.P. out.
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