Please send me your translation - I can't have enough of you in my hands.
— Franz Kafka to Milena
In this relationship, where the miles between them were travelled more often in words than caresses, the act of unsealing an envelope was equivalent to unbuttoning a blouse, and holding one of her letters was like stroking her hips.
— Maïa Hruska, Kafkaesque
Or: an inventory of the blur between continents.
1. The usual turbulence of winging it. At one point over the Atlantic, I learned that Milena J. would send her handwritten drafts to Franz Kafka for commentary as she translated him. And Franz would reply with annotations.
2. At no point did I sleep more than an hour, particularly after eating a horrible chicken-like substance which I had chosen over the ravioli on the airplane menu.
3. Whiskey did not reduce my insomnia, so I mulled my notebooks, and reconsidered Simone Weil’s definition of liberty as the ability to choose. One could argue that Americans (like other citizens of late capitalist democracies) have freedom without liberty, or freedom without the ethical commitment that making a choice involves. When we explain or justify our choices on the basis of choices made by others, and then refer to those choices as a ‘reason’, falling back on social conventions as moral guidelines, parroting the market values sold to us by corporate culture, we wind up with the performance of choice. Performance can be more or less rigorous; more or less believable; more or less consistent— but it begs the question it cannot answer. Acting free, or performing consumerist freedom, is not a choice, exactly. More like the performance of chicken.
4. We landed on July 4th, and had two days to see the city before setting off towards Normandy. This meant that I saw almost zero humans who live in Paris, as my time was not quite mine (though we did get to share a meal with Tino and David). I didn’t even get to visit Shakespeare and Company, which was rumored to feature a copy of My Heresies on a small table!
5. I took photos, collected words, scribbled fragments on paper and wrists… while juggling the part of life known as “mothering”. No one else in my family speaks French, so there was quite a bit of translation involved— which I enjoy, admittedly, that messy entanglement with language.
6. Despite the hurry, my serpents met me in the margins, beginning with an allegory of prudence in the Paris metro stop near the Louvre, where Thibault Poissant’s two-faced statue, La Prudence, sits — noseless — holding a mirror that has been encircled by a serpent. A hand and a snake.
6. Long long ago, according to Greek mythology, the world was ruled by the Titans. During the Age of the Titans, different species were still permitted to mate and breed across the line that demarcated. This age permitted the creation of monsters, for the Monstrous is the familiar made slightly different, mixed with the impossible. The minotaur and the unicorn and the donkey, the centaurs, the hybrids, the beastly– all resulted from sex and carnality across borders and lines. Desire bred the beasts in us. At the time, only friends (and friendships) existed, but the gods grew suspicious and angry. They watched the world from Mount Olympus and decided that desire had the power to create, a power that rivaled their own.
7. Listened to Vincent Delerm’s pink album at night. Felt “serious like a boy of 13,” to quote Clarice Lispector, “serious like an open mouth singing.”
8. Dreamt of a dance that could only be undertaken by footnotes. Woke up and returned to recent favorite.
*
Claude Lelouch’s film, “La Vie, l’Amour, la Mort” (1969)
Maia Hruska, Kafkaesque translated by Sam Taylor (Harper Collins)
Marcel Pagnol, La Gloire de mon Pere (which I found in a little free library in Paris)
Matthew Abbott, “On Not Loving Everyone”
Max Reger, Modulation
Paul Verlaine’s love letters from during the war
Thibault Poissant, La Prudence
Vincent Delerm, “La vie la mort l’amour”