Off the L

I never thought I'd live off the L. It’s such a buzz-kill of a train, truly, a gray line across the MTA map that only just traverses 14th St in Manhattan and stretches into North Brooklyn and beyond but is inconvenient to much of Brooklyn and Queens. I always thought of the L train as the hipster-mobile, the gateway to all the “coolness” in Williamsburg, a sense of coolness which then migrated to East Williamsburg, then Bushwick, then god-knows-where and what and how. Who needs any of that? I thought. Whenever anyone would want to hang out off the L it was problematic, annoying, rare. I had built a really good Brooklyn life without it. And now here I am, for the last three months now--here we are--off the L, at the border of Bushwick and Ridgewood, of Brooklyn and Queens where Lee has been living for the past couple years.

What is this place? So many of the young (renters? white ppl?) around seem young and very cool, very styled and also dressed down. There are warehouses with climbing walls, with beer breweries, with a great yoga studio I really love, with dingy bars and cafes, and also with dance clubs and sex clubs I hear and hear about. There are motels, there are dingy bars and cafes. There are parks and teenagers and crinkled soda cans and floating empty plastic bags and weed-smell wafting through the streets. There are babies and families and parties that go on throughout the day and night when the weather is nice. There are cats and small dogs and big dogs. There are flowers and bushes and fences and trees. There are grocery stores and flower shops and hair salons and abandoned buildings and so much good street art. Bad street art too. There is amazing pizza and Thai food and coffee and gas stations and bakeries. There is a huge huge cemetery with Star-of-David gravestones and Arabic-scripted gravestones and Jesus-emblazoned gravestones and Chinese gravestones and if you look towards Manhattan’s skyline from there the right way (Ridgewood does have a “ridge” in it after all) you can see the skyline as a backdrop against all sorts of gravestones, this cemetery where apparently Harry Houdini is buried by a big park with a swampy reservoir full of screaming birds, the park set off, bisected by one of those falling-apart NYC highways.

I’ve been alone in Lee’s neighborhood for three weeks without him, a new girl, exploring her neighborhood, and so now it is a little more my own. Lee just got back from Uganda and Tanzania with so many images and stories to share from so far away. As we talk, or as we are quiet, we listen to records with music from Indonesia, from Mali, from California. Here, I watch the news from Lebanon, watch a revolution that might really be revolutionary, thinking how far away I am. Here, at the edges of these neighborhoods—maybe it feels a little like we live in the in-between, stuck inside the seams of where this place meets that—there is the quiet violence of gentrification, the boom of base late into the early morning hours, the revving of motors, the cat-calls and stare-downs. There are kind smiles and costumed children. And there is the peace of being recognized by the old people on the stoop, by the guy at the slice shop, the peace of being spoken to kindly every once in a while by the young men I pass every day. There is peace at my desk as the world exists on the other side of the glass. I hear lots of conversations out the window—hear all sorts of English and Spanish and yesterday I even caught some Egyptian Arabic. Here we will have Nepali food for a welcome-home dinner and before that sit in a new cafe built into an ancient bar that’s been lovingly restored. This is far away from most everywhere, and everywhere is far away from here. 

Re-configuring Home

After six months living and traveling in places foreign to me, coming home to Virginia, to Brooklyn, has felt so strange, so good, so necessary. It feels both like being frozen, a bug in the hundreds-of-years amber of August, and also somehow at the same time there is this feeling of constant movement--there is no sitting still; I am a bug avoiding death by moving constantly before my short, short life is done.

I am remembering "home", reimagining it, being Mojo's caretaker again, moving him and me to a new home with Lee, remembering what it's like to pass time when I do not have a destination in mind, when I am not constantly translating, or trying something new, or... We have been going to "new" places like Asbury Park and the US Open. And yes, that can feel even more faraway than where I was; I am trying not to forget my travels, even though it feels like it's been forever ago that I was away. I am thankful for the words I wrote to mark some of those moments, the conversations I had. I am re-scrambling my mind into new/old rhythms, recalling my strange relationship with my nationality, these places, delighting in the familiar and forgotten joys of it, marking new intentions, accepting old patterns.

And now here we are—far away and close as ever—the last weekend of summer.

Bloody and Beautiful

Following my weeks in Madrid, my meanderings in Spain were guided by exploring the most famous Andalucían cities—Cordoba, Seville, Granada—and punctuated by visits with old friends who had ended up nearby—in wildest Portugal, in Alcala, in Oliva. Although not Top Ten destinations, these latter settings added to my thinking about Moorish history in Iberia and Islam too, to my understanding of life here and now in this faraway place, to my love quotient (and to my growing suspicion that my life has not progressed in a line, that a life flows in currents and eddies that circle, then crisscross and multiply, creating a particular and ever-changing shape).

Oliva is a Mediterranean town south of Valencia and where my dear friend Ana grew up. We cemented our bond in Richmond and she lives in Texas now (comes to stay with me in New York often to get her art fix when going to or coming from Spain) but Ana is very much of Oliva and to spend three days with her there, hosted by her sweet sweet mother, was an exquisite treat—of swimming each day in the sea, big beautiful lunches made of motherly love, leisurely siestas, hearing stories of a childhood bursting with siblings and cousins and friends. And we visited some of the settings where those stories played out—the terraced citrus groves spread across the landscapes between towns, an old house up on the hill with a sprawling garden, an old-fashioned flat in the middle of the old part of the new city with photographs of so many past lives, close by towns with ancient houses perched up on mountains now populated by foreigners. Scent of jasmine, cold marble underneath my bare feet, sherbet colors of the sun setting across the sea, images of childhood: so much in Oliva echoed my experience in my mother’s own Mediterranean town, hundreds of miles away, in Lebanon. And of course so much was different.

Amazing that Ana’s uncle agreed to take us on a walking tour of Oliva’s somewhat forgotten old city, where Ana translated his Valencian (a dialect of Catalan) as he pointed out the remnants of the walls that divided the Christians from the Muslims and the Jews during the inquisition and before the expulsion, gestured towards now-dry wells that signaled the complex systems Moors had devised to bring water from mountain springs and down to sea level, reminded us this grandest cathedral was once a mosque, showed us how the grand Catalan palace that had still stood here when his father was a boy had been destroyed, divided; most impressive and visible now was a window in the Mudejar style that had been removed from that disappeared building and placed in the façade of a new building, one last sliver for all to see.

Amazing that I don’t think I’d ever seen and might never again see a Mediterranean sunset so bloody and beautiful as I did my last night with Ana in her Oliva...

Walking in Spirals

Mostly, I have thought of form as linear, as three-part—beginning, middle, and ending, perhaps, or introduction, problem, resolution—but as I have been traveling and thinking and writing these past few months, as I reconsider narrative form again and again (and particularly after reading MEANDER, SPIRAL, EXPLODE by Jane Alison earlier this spring, a book on rethinking form through nature) I am beginning to experience the relationship of physical form to narrative form, and the linear has spiraled out to become other things. Spirals. Seashells, galaxies, hurricanes, blossoms—all these shapes have a center that binds, and a dissipation outwards, expanding forever, perhaps. And, with all this on my mind, and perhaps also in my bones, I have come to think about my own wanderings in reverse; as I trace an edge then move towards a center, an origin, I can find a way to understand a place, as I explore it.

I began to see the possibilities in edge-to-center movement when I asked a friend in Shanghai about how best to approach Beijing’s gargantuan Forbidden City; her answer: “Everyone goes to the middle, the big buildings. I started at the edges; no crowds, and the most interesting stuff was there anyway.” When I traveled there, her voice came to me, following me on my way around the ancient palace complex and leading me slowly towards the crowded garden at its heart, then out again, marveling at my ability to flit through the mass, to find peace in the edges. And before that, when Lee first came to hang out in China with me, I sensed his knew this thing about the edges from the very first (of many, many) Buddhist temple we went to together, as I followed him first around the perimeters of the space and then finally to the grandest Buddhas in the center. There was something about saving the golden gods until the end, and then, finally, turning away, that made the excursion feel complete, whole. We repeated this pattern again and again throughout our China adventure. And as I have brought this form with me to Spain too, I have come to see that the center of a wandering functions based on what you have heard is the center, but of it always turns out to be something else.

In Cordoba, for example, the Mezquita, which was a 5-minute walk from my AirBnB was to be my center, my target, my last stop, and so initially I only walked around its gigantic stone walls, going on my first morning there to Medinat Zahra, the ruins of an Ummayad city a few miles out of town. This was an auspicious beginning, a scorching hot day, the ruins not much to see but a lot to imagine. Then back in town I continued meandering around the Old City’s twisty lanes, including stopping at the synagogue (one of only three left in Spain, I was told, after the two I had seen in Toledo), down many more twisty streets, and then finally through the orange-tree filled courtyard and into the Mezquita, a vast marble-floored building full of row upon row of majestic arches. In one corner, there were ruins from when the space was a Visigothic church, and, along one wall, archways ornamented with intricately carved calligraphy, the mihrab. What was in the center in the square of this space? A main cathedral. The story being that the Catholics reclaimed the building from the Muslims. That they had been meant to be there all along. That part of the construction had an opulence that didn’t match the rest, the mishmash of both was gorgeous, fascinating, and strange. But was it the center of my journey? No. I ended up going back the next morning and getting one of the limited tickets to climb to the top of the tower, where church bells now chime, where the izaan had once been sung by the muezzin and I also sat for a very long time in the courtyard under the arches, counting all the languages I heard from all the tourists passing by me… The center is me and not me. The center is the thing we make and remake by seeking it…