Almost, but not yet: Waiting for Transformation

When I was in college, I used to write alot. Much more than I do now. :) Several times I used a form called a "braided" essay. It is where you take three, four, or more seperate "strands" of story and disjunctively place them one after the next in an incongruent order that is eventually braided together somehow in the end (through use of common theme, idea, phrases, etc.) I wrote the following braided essay a little over a year ago. It's about the idea of waiting and longing... it is a lengthy essay (you might get tired of waiting and longing for it to end :) ). Feel free to skim over or not read at all. I just thought it would be fun to post something a little different.

Almost, but not yet.

May 2, 2006 - The Painting Studio, Western Washington University, 10:05 p.m.

The painting studio is by far the frowziest space on campus. Splashes of paint litter the tiled floors and walls and I can’t really tell what color the room is. Students display uninhibited creativity by cluttering the walls and easels with charcoal drawings and bold expressions of their freedom of speech. Lost artwork posters are tacked throughout the room.

If anyone is familiar with the whereabouts of a large painting and paint brushes marked with the name Liliana Franz, I am interested in retrieving them. The values of these items extend beyond the monetary. Thank you.

What is it that makes art so valuable? I watch Christie to find out. Sometimes I come to the studio two or three nights a week to watch. I bring my journal or a poetry chapbook, melt into a paint-covered stool and stare. The tautness of Christie’s brush breaks and frays as she presses mustard colored paint into the canvas. She tilts her head and erratically splashes the board, forcefully rocking the easel with each move. I think she is painting trees, though they could be clouds. It doesn’t matter which. Her head tilt shows that she knows where it’s going and that’s all that matters. She longs for the finish, the final product that is far off but promised to come. I breathe the rancidly pleasant paint fumes and tilt my head also to stare in anticipation.

Morning thoughts on the porch, 6:51 a.m.

Yesterday I heard of new word, sehnsucht. Sehnsucht is a German word meaning something of a teary longing. “A special kind of longing . . . surrounded by a misty indefiniteness which seems essential to its very nature . . . At times one sees it clearly, at other times it seems to recede before one's eyes . . . Thus, the exploring of this mystery has turned out to be a quest in itself.” There is no English word quite like sehnsucht. The closest we can get is nostalgia, which in no way fully encompasses the same power of emotion. C.S. Lewis refers to sehnsucht as joy. A joy that is “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” There is indeed some strange joy in the longing, in the waiting. Knowing what awaits exerts a sense of yearning and desire that cannot be extinguished and places you into the realm of constant transition. I like to think I’ve known this teary longing. At times, I know it everyday.

Reflections on Traveling

I have traveled to Rameswaram, India—the southernmost tip of the continent, an island set somewhere between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. A jewel of land floating in the Indian Ocean and the home to no one with white skin. I was “foreigner”, a novelty to roadside vendors and a monster to children. I wanted to strip a layer of brown skin off a pedestrian and cover my paleness. I longed to blend.

Three months after living as “foreigner” I somehow transformed. Tying and folding saris around my body each morning became regular and ritualistic. The skin had peeled off all of my fingers from eating hot curries with my right hand. Even my movements adapted. I stopped looking men in the eyes, I bobbed and twisted my head side to side to say “yes”. I was a Tamil Nadu lady wrapped in a ghostish disguise. Sarojam, a highly respected plump woman in her late sixties, pulled me aside. “You not like other Americans” she said as we paced slowly through the market, stopping in front of a hanging bunch of bananas. “You are special American. You become like Indian.” Her words were reviving. I had become an Indian to her. I had transitioned and I belonged.

May 11, 2006 4:15pm, St. Joseph’s Hospital Emergency Room

I can see a strange stain on the ceiling tiles above me. Its shape looks like Mickey Mouse’s head, and it is preoccupying me while I lay flat on my hospital bed in a backless robe waiting for X-rays on account of an injured neck. My roommate, Kelli, and I were just rear ended three times by an elderly man with dementia. The police told us the man was ninety years old. At the scene of the accident, Bob the tow truck driver tapped the back of my roommates Dodge Neon with his fist and asked what happened. I told him, “A hit and run. They think it was an old man with dementia.”

“Semetra?”

“No…dementia.”

“Did you say Semetra?”

“D-i-m-e-n-t-i-a” I replied slowly in my irritated yet somewhat patient tone.

“Hmm, Semetra. Must be a Toyota.”

I rolled my eyes and laughed a little under my breath remembering the moment. There was some slight stitch of humor in the evening, despite the totaled car, sore neck, and the hot coffee that is cooling and drying on my legs after being flung across my jeans.

A male nurse makes a “knock-knock” noise then enters our enclosed personal space to open the yellow curtain separating Kelli and I. The room has fifteen or twenty segmented rooms, each closed but not soundproof. Two or three curtains away I hear a woman with hives letting out short desperate cries of pain in Spanish. Me duelen los brazos. Through the curtain to my right, there is snoring and gargling that sounds like a blocked garbage disposal. Minutes later I hear urine pelting against the tin of a bedpan. The air begins to smell potent and abrupt pains swell and shrink in my head and chest. I question just when we’ll be able to leave the discomfort of the emergency room and drive home.

An hour passes and I doze in and out of a sleepish dream until I hear a man weeping and sniffing in short perpetual breaths. He is wheeled flat on a gurney into the curtained room across from me. It is strange to hear a man crying so loudly and with such inhibition. Accompanying him is an elderly man with a deep grainy smoker’s voice. He sounds like he is overweight and probably seventy or eighty years old. There is no way of telling, but based on sound I’m sure my guess is near accurate. I can hear the motorish humming of his words, “Just breathe. Just breathe. Come on now, breathe.” I assume the man is dying by the sound of his cry. It is an eerie, untamable cry. A cry that is through with this world. A longer listen through the curtain and I find out he isn’t actually dying, but dying is what he is after. He is suicidal. As each minute passes I find out more. He is twenty nine years old. He is a homosexual and he and his boyfriend just had a nasty break up. He was evicted from his home this morning for overdue rent payments. The nurse keeps asking questions. How long have you been depressed? How have you attempted to end your life? I hate that I can hear every question and answer, but with the curtains there is no way to block the sound. I feel like I am overly invasive and at the same time obligated to help. All I can do is pray, so I whisper prayers for him quietly hoping they will transcend the curtains and bring him some sense of hope. “Sometimes I just feel like if I end it all there will be something better. At least then I could keep some of my dignity” I hear him say. His voice echoes longing. A longing for something far beyond this world. A longing to transition into something new, to escape from the here and now. He gropes for a doorless land of fulfillment and relief. Fulfillment cannot be found in premature death. Or can it? Could he, just like me, be longing for the promise of something greater? I find myself longing too.

More thoughts on the porch, 7:38 a.m.

William Wordsworth thought that sehnsucht was simply a present feeling and beyond explanation. That it was a type of "sweet melancholy" which seems to have no cause. I disagree. The sehnsucht I have experienced has obvious cause. It is a yearning that awakens my desire for something greater, something I don’t know yet. It reminds me that, even in my greatest moments of fulfillment and joy, I am still in transition.

More Reflections on Traveling

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” –C.S. Lewis

In nine weeks I will be in Nairobi, Kenya. Once again my white skin will stand bright against a palette of dark browns. Once again I will wish I could connect, wish I could belong. But for now, I am in Bellingham, Washington. Though not a cultural minority, sometimes I still feel a “foreigner”. I have been a foreigner ever since I flew home from India. There is something strange that happens when you leave your country for another country then return home. Your country is no longer home. There is an awakened, uneasy feeling—a suspension beyond citizenship to any one place. I am not an Indian, but I am no longer American. In nine weeks, I will not be Kenyan either. I wait for my true citizenship.

May 2, 2006 - The Painting Studio, Western Washington University, 10:58 p.m.

I ask Christie why she is painting a green colored man. “It’s just under painting” she says. “Eventually he’ll look normal.” I squint my eyes and try to imagine what’s to come, but now it’s impossible. All I can see are blobs of green and orange and the slight outline of a man’s backside. The paint itself seems overly eager to become something. It waits for its transformation.