Poetic Sundays: Lot's Wife

Back to the Polish poetry today with my favorite poem by Nobel-winner Wislawa Szymborska, who is, by all accounts, a lovely lady who I sadly did not get to meet due to smoking bans on airplanes (the trans-Atlantic flight was too long for her, and she refused the invitation to visit Boston while I was in school there). Alas, because I think her work is quite delightful, and I am not sure how much she reads and speaks these days anywhere (she lives in Poland still).

So here goes--co-translated by Stanislaw Baranczak, a brilliant poet in his own right and the husband of my beloved Polish teacher in college:

Lot's Wife
By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now--every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on,
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It's possible I fell facing the city.

Nearing the end

Quick update: my apartment is empty. It's pretty sad. No working computer at home, and there is nowhere to plug the DVD player in (only one plug by the TV, and the welcome kit doesn't have a power strip) so my entertainment has been reduced to watching reruns of The Nanny. Which is actually sort of amazing. They are at the point late in the series when the tension is growing and Mr. Sheffield is getting closer and closer to proposing. Hey, I'm into it.

I've also learned to appreciate So You Think You Can Dance, caught the second half of Slumdog Millionaire (always great), and watched endless World Cup highlight reels. I have at least been faithfully watching the U.S. games and will definitely be awake way too late tomorrow watching the U.S.-Ghana game.

And of course, more importantly, I've been spending lots of time enjoying all the wonderful friends I've made here before I fly off. This is both fun and serves the useful purpose of keeping me from being bored at home, staving off the day when Fran Drescher's voice starts to grate more than it did before and I actually tire of catching half-movies and shots of goals I never watched the first time around.

Moving day update

James takes aim at my pile of handbags; I bemoan having chosen a career that limits the boundaries of my shoe collection.

My morning: stare at the royal blue-and-white polka-dotted platform espadrilles. Can I live without them for an entire year? Horror rises within me despite the fact that I think I've worn them once in the past two years and maybe twice ever. Also, since I've been in Bangladesh, where time, for fashion purposes, has pretty much stopped, I am guessing that my polka-dotted platform espadrilles would merely gain me funny looks back in the U.S. Repeat with any number of items from my wardrobe.

Poetic Sundays: On the Road to the Sea

Another long one that I will link to instead of post in its entirety: Charlotte Mew, "On the Road to the Sea." She wrote around the turn of the century, and Virginia Woolf quite admired her, but no one seems to read her today. Well, I am doing my little part to change that.

Some of my favorite stanzas for your enjoyment--I love how the poem seems so quaint but with an edge:

We passed each other, turned and stopped for half an hour, then went our way,
I who make other women smile did not make you--
But no man can move mountains in a day.
So this hard thing is yet to do.

But first I want your life:--before I die I want to see
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes,
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,
Yet on brown fields there lies
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies
And in grey sea?
I want what world there is behind your eyes,
I want your life and you will not give it me.

Now, if I look, I see you walking down the years,
Young, and through August fields--a face, a thought, a swinging dream
perched on a stile--;
I would have liked (so vile we are!) to have taught you tears
But most to have made you smile.
To-day is not enough or yesterday: God sees it all--
Your length on sunny lawns, the wakeful rainy nights--; tell me--;
(how vain to ask), but it is not a question--just a call--;
Show me then, only your notched inches climbing up the garden wall,
I like you best when you are small.

So go on, click on the link! And don't say I didn't do my part for the appreciation of under-appreciated female poets.

Not. Handling. This. Well. At all.

Ugh. The movers come tomorrow, and today I am working to sort out our two years worth of junk top to bottom... partly with the aim of getting rid of junk we don't need, and partly to sort our air freight (up to 450 lbs. that comes to us in DC) from our main shipment (which we wave bye-bye to until Beijing over a year from now).

I am sort of paranoid about waste and buying duplicate items... this is sort of an inevitable fate in the Foreign Service, but I fight anyway. So I've dutifully made sure to include things like office supplies, bottles of spices, and the rest of that Costco tub of Q-tips, just to make sure I don't have to buy things I already own. Yes, I am crazy. Will it be under 450 lbs? That we shall see.

I am sure tomorrow will be crazy because anything of this nature is crazy in Bangladesh. This country with 150 million people and not that many jobs is perennially overstaffed. Which means that tomorrow an army of packers will descend upon our apartment, and it will be all we can do to stop them from packing trash out of the trashcans. (Yes, this really happens quite regularly in Foreign Service moves.)

In other news, I made the news! :) Other other news: I finally finished Orhan Pamuk's Snow, with time to spare. It got more and more bizarre as it went on... but it was definitely more readable than My Name is Red.

Final countdown

Gahhhhhhhhhhhh supposed to be culling. Was supposed to be culling all week. In fact, culled nothing but my shoes, which I in fact culled quite viciously. But there is so much more to be done.

I apologize now for being the worst blogger ever over the next few weeks... when James leaves (in only a few days sniff!), so will go the only working computer in our house (mine functions, except for the small fact that the screen won't light up... I've had like ten people tell me to just plug in a monitor, but sadly don't have one of those lying around).

Also in a race against to clock to finish Orhan Pamuk's Snow since I don't want to carry a hardcover with me. I'm on page 283 out of 425... what do you think my chances are? I'm going to carry it everywhere starting now, I think, and read on every car trip.

Also, awoke with several nasty spider bites this morning. The idea of spiders lurking in my bed that I can't see is (understandably, I think) terrifying.

Also, after twice being asked to regale groups here with my best Bangladesh stories, I realized I need to come up with something funny, sweet, and inspirational all at once so I stop inspiring long awkward silences. Any ideas?

Poetic Sundays: The Cloud of Unknowing

Something fun and contemporary--I especially appreciate Christopher Edgar's poems for the way they draw on the whole world. Plus, they're funny. The final lines are my favorite.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Is not a cloud at all
But a wall colored so efficiently
It seems to be an alley of trees
Some believe this cul de sac
Can be approached from every angle
While others consider it merely a frontage road
To the remnants of summer, the disused
Anchorage inside the spiral jetty. But we
Have seen this cloud, you and I have,
Just before we set out to martinize the infidel
It was there, somewhere in the Sahara,
Hovering above an Italian restaurant
Perched on the edge of a depression. White-tunicked
Waiters with jet-black hair served us cannelloni
And Chianti yet at the same time did not
Serve us cannelloni and Chianti–but then
We were at sea as we always were in those times
On a ferry yes the Dover ferry
Everyone was heaving
Patches of sawdust everywhere on deck
Always followed by the cloud
The sun came out but it was still raining
North of Leningrad the tramline ends
We trudge through acres of mud between
Grim apartment blocks in a colorless landscape
Day for night whistling in the sleet
The mud becomes woods, beyond the woods
We finally reach the little wooden village on the far side of a hill–
Bent-bark roofs as in the poem–with a little
Orthodox church, a bit like St.-Cloud
From a distance this is Old Russia I think
We meet the priest whom I like
Immediately we parted as old friends–
Never saw him again. Funny, like the
Facial expressions of the father and son
Pickpocket team in the Mexico City subway
June rush hour you all of a sudden turn to
Shake their hands "¡Que pasa?!" They looked
As if they had seen a ghost
Probably like my own face when I lost my passport
In a dream. I was in Heathrow and hung my coat
On the convenient too convenient rack outside the duty-free shops
The Pakistani woman at the gate was very helpful
But could not help me. For some reason
I was interested only in which languages she spoke
The truth was all I wanted was for her
To say Urdu, which she did.

-Christopher Edgar

Thoughts, ramblings, bits, pieces

I do want to point out, incidentally, that while the Trincomalee War Cemetery I wrote about in my last post is from World War II, my rant about World War I sprung out of the Rupert Brooke quote, written during the first World War. I would hate you to think I was the single worst student of British history and literature of all time for my lack of ability to keep the wars straight.

Anyway, I just played squash, which I started recently. I was all flattering myself and thinking how this may be the first sport I took to pretty naturally, and that maybe I'm not so completely devoid of athletic skill as I always thought. But then I remembered that, unlike tennis, I have never seen what good squash-playing looks like. YouTube has enlightened me... yeah, real squash moves a lot faster. I still suck at everything. It's official.

Whatever, I enjoy it. And I am feeling in a relatively peppy mood--things are looking up this week, not nearly as grim as what I'd thought, so while things still aren't going quite according to plan, we're optimistic.

Before we pack everything up next week (movers! gah!), one shot of our new elephant box sitting in its new home, on top of a pile of Elle Decors:


I am in purge mode now. Everything that is not essential must go. Of course, this is what will really happen: I will make loud statements about purge mode; James will complain the stuff is mostly mine anyway; I will continue talking loudly about purge mode; sometime late at night next Saturday I'll start going through things; I won't have touched most stuff by the time the movers arrive on Monday; the stuff will get packed up, and I will again talk about purging it once it all arrives in Beijing.

Good thing our weight allowance is obscene for two people so we don't really have to throw anything away... and if James joins the Foreign Service, we'll have double. Amazing.

Sri Lanka: PART III

Okay, back to the Sri Lanka grind, hee hee. The beach! The beach at Uppuveli (right outside Trincomalee--a bit of a grim city) is AMAZING--all the lush tropical beauty of the Southeast Asian beaches with the clear blue and super calm water of the Caribbean. Um, sign me up anytime. Obligatory we-were-at-the-beach-and-you-weren't shots:


Tip: if you go to Uppuveli beach, definitely hit the Italian restaurant at the Palm Beach guesthouse, run by a couple of charming Italian hippies who've lived on the beach there for ages.

Trinco itself wasn't the most thrilling city, though we made a good faith effort to see the sites there. I did, I will admit, have one of those self-conscious I-am-so-moved-look-how-pure-and-beautiful-my-emotions-are moments at the Trincomalee War Cemetery, home to graves of Allied troops. It's easy to be blown away by how young they all were, and then when a headstone contains a quote from that great romanticizer of war, Rupert Brooke, it's just not even fair: "There's some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England." (Can you tell I studied British history and literature in college? Have I ever told you about how WWI is my favorite war of all time? Don't get me started.)

Okay, forget parentheticals, I'm officially going off on this tangent: WWI is the most sad and beautifully tragic war because no one knew what they were fighting for and they all died but before they did they wrote great literature about it. (As did those left behind and watching the after-effects; see Woolf, Virginia.)

Do you want to know my second favorite war? That would be the English Civil War, because half the battles involved a bunch of guy prancing about a field and no one dying. Plus, it inspired the Oliver Cromwell song. It's sort of the polar opposite war.

But perhaps the gravestone that affected me the most: that of a young army nurse, which said, "A short but tremendously useful life."

Wow. Tremendously useful? At first it almost seems like an insult--useful? Like she was some tool of others? But then I thought about it--I am not sure I am useful to anyone. So perhaps this was a very high compliment.

Okay, let's just hit Kandy in one post, shall we? Trudge on forward, if you will. I didn't love Kandy, but perhaps I was just not feeling the crowds, there at the Temple of the Tooth (the most holy Buddhist site in Sri Lanka) for Vesak (the biggest Buddhist holiday). But there were lights and elephants wearing outfits, so who can argue with that?


And on the way back to Colombo, we stopped at the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage, of the aforeposted baby elephant feeding. Yay. More elephant, 'cause ya' can't argue with that:


Okay, and off we went! We met up with delightful friends in Kuala Lumpur on the way out and did some quick Peter Hoe Evolution shopping and had great food and drink, so what more can you ask for in less than 24 hours?

Things we make to use up mangoes

This time we made mango muffins. They were not quite as good as the mango pancakes, but still delicious.

Dinner tonight: Corn and spinach egg-drop soup. Yum. Eaten by candlelight because our generator stopped working.

Still sad. But am trying to become resolute. If only I knew what my resolution was...

Poetic Sundays: The Castaway

A poem that I've long considered very beautiful is "The Castaway," by William Cowper. I have loved 20th-century poetry throughout my career as a reader, but it took until college to really appreciate the classics. To us, Cowper seems about as old-school as they come, but in his time he was revolutionary. I am not sure why. All I know is that I have always found the last stanza of his poem "The Castaway" (linked since it's rather long) hauntingly beautiful:

No voice divine the storm allayed,

No light propitious shone;

When, snatched from all effectual aid,

We perished, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

See, the poem is about a man washed overboard on a ship who eventually drowns. And in the last stanza is Cowper saying that his situation is similar to this man's, but worse. And this is because Cowper seriously believed he had been personally singled out for eternal damnation. His Wikipedia page says he "took refuge" in evangelical Christianity, but it hardly seems like much of a refuge in his case.

Anyway, a bit random, but I still think it's amazingly beautiful, and with a tinge of crazy, which I can't resist.

Sri Lanka: PART II

So we said goodbye to the lovely Katy and met our driver, the inscrutable Udagama. His English was... idiosyncratic. However, on the very first day, he did introduce me to my new favorite food ever: pineapple slices sprinkled with salt and chili powder. Seriously amazing.

Also on the very first day, we got extremely lost trying to find our hotel outside Dambulla, in the Cultural Triangle. We were exhausted once we arrived, so we ate and collapsed into bed. Only to awake and find this:

Infinity pool what what?

And climb this:

Thanks for modeling, James!

And on the way, we were greeted by these lovely ladies:


We also visited the Dambulla Cave Temple, of which this is my favorite photo--the caves are so eccentric looking:


And Polunnaruwa, one of the ancient capitals of Sri Lanka. Oddest thing that happened there: we were in the Polunnaruwa Museum, and there was a guy pouring sand on the floor. We stared at him, and he stared back at us, like how dare we stare at him when he's just trying to do his job? James is convinced the man was a crazy; I, on the other hand, have lived in South Asia just long enough to believe that there is a man whose job it is, for whatever reason, to pour sand on the museum floor.

All that culture can wear a girl out! Don't worry, we hit the beach next.

Sri Lanka: PART I

Nothing like making it a multi-part series to keep you all coming back for more... mwahahaha!

We arrived in Colombo, and it was great to see Katy and peer jealously into rooms of her apartment and think about how normal it looked and how not filled with ugly tile or cabinets it was. Anyway, we got past that part and went sightseeing. Probably my favorite photo is this one from Gangaramaya, a huge sprawling mishmash of a Buddhist temple--I love the monk's robes hanging to dry:


Plus, we appreciated the quality of the restaurants and shopping in Colombo--I especially loved a store called Paradise Road. Pure fabulosity. Great Italian food, too, which was kind of a continuing theme of our trip to Sri Lanka... lots of Italians seem to have up and moved there and opened restaurants, and I both envy and applaud their decisions.

Anyway, all good things must come to an end... next up, the road to Dambulla and the Cultural Triangle.

Don't worry, be happy

So after my last update... life got way, way worse. Let's just say that our plans didn't just go off track; someone blew up the rails.

On the plus side, I made the most amazing mango pancakes this morning. I am grasping at straws here. Tasty, delicious straws.

More good things (I'm smiling! Big smile! If I smile big enough everything will be better!): Zadie Smith's White Teeth was absolutely hilarious. I am not convinced it's actually a good book (maybe it is, who knows), but I laughed the entire time I read it.

And one more big happy serene creature (I don't mean me, though I am trying to cut back on the butter chicken and nan) to cheer us up:


Speaking of which, I still need to post about our vacation! I totally loved Sri Lanka and would highly, highly recommend it. This shot is from Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage, where $2 and change lets you feed a baby elephant a bottle of milk (which lasts, like, three seconds as they suck it down at an amazing speed).