of syntax and other mechanisms

And I, so weak in language! And a child of words! In examination of a student, do we not observe the slow progression, the shy world divulging itself? Or is this not the purpose of our study? Many have said to me that the smelter of immergence programs in the States cannot compare to the hard steeling of a time within the borders of this nation. And what comparison can I make?

The final summer exams peak their heads and cast rays down the long land. And where are we? We (and I say this off of my mind and the minds of others with whom I’ve spoken) have learned much and nothing. If the essence of education should find anything at its heart, I would imagine it to be humility. I note the bare contrast between the comfort (if not the ease) of my speech now and the unease I knew the night those rubber wheels nipped the tarmac. That is to say, in the eyes of my fellow students there has been a two month smiling. Though with those that have studied the language long, there has been a pervading ease, in those of us that are children to it, a confidence slowly wells.

But how then can I say we have learned nothing? I say that (though it has been long known) in every act of learning the chief part is a learning of the void. That is, for every piece we know, we know its boundaries. At beyond each boundary is a new fog that dances in the skin.

A Russian lock system is complex. When you arrive at a Russian lock system, key in hand, you must open the door to enjoy the comforts therein. Perhaps you have already pressed some small yellow circle to the reader, and the brown metal door opens to a staircase before you. You have climbed the stairs, dirty as they are. And you are at a lock system.

There are always three or more locks. The bronze key is in the lock and it turns seven hundred twenty degrees to the left. Now there is a flat rectangle of a screwdriver that pushes in. The bolt clicks and another door waits behind. It too awaits a screwdriver. Soon you will be home! And click! you are home. It is a small apartment, but it is most certainly a home. There is a gas stove that licks at matches when chai-desires request of you. There is space for your exhaustion. There is a toilet, there is a shower and sink that share the same nozzle.

Once you are comfortable on your yellow couch and watching kanal kultura, it occurs to you that every apartment must be thus flung open. Scrambling to open the building, you learn of another building nearby. And neighbors upon neighbors. All neighbors must be known, and all apartments! You run through the dark and bright streets of Petersburg with every key that can be found, and then beyond Petersburg.

We want to be native, but know that we cannot. That is, with the sinews of our hands and minds our striving is for the perfection of language that is owned by the man walking in the dust of the street. But it is beyond us, those of us not born unto it. But it is so near we might almost run it through our dusty fingers like a fifty kopeck piece and a grey bus receipt.

a new mode of brevity, wherein we can play word games late into the night, until our language leaves us for a better host

then i heard a shriek


a shriek from a child
it started

i thought
water water boil-
ing and i ran

into intimacy

but the gasflames blue
tendered
the little things

skin

and was off
like that

dog o' ver ill eaze

on sunday i purchased the film война и мир. that is, in english, war and the world. rather, that is war and peace. war and peace is the title. have you heard of it? i did once, but it fell out of my mouth like cabbage.



















this film, though, o! the director is Sergei Bondarchuk (Сергей Бондарчук). him i had never heard of so he had no chance at becoming cabbage enwrapping dense chopped beef with onions, or here they are called luke (лук), which is also the name for a bow, which i haven't seen here, but the kind that shoots arrows, which i have! a dour-faced man with some dour air about him was carrying arrows like a baby in his arms on sunday when this occurred. they were nestled and not at all threatening as the had no heads, dour-faced or no.

but i purchased this film. it is based on a book by a man that was called the lion son of nikolai tall'st-toy and clearly, the russian naming system is complex and not open to direct translation, but i think i understand enough to get by, so long as this lion son keeps his pen away from me and uses it to play darts with the likeness or effigy of another man named Naples-Leon.

well, some academy had good things to say about this dvd in the '60s, and though i don't trust persons generally from the '60s, i have on occasion, and on this occasion i did.

but of essentials, i want you to hear what was told to me, which is, namely, that if we adjust for inflation (which neither i nor you know how so to do), this film would cost $700 million dollars today, and that is certainly beyond my means, but if you are interested in becoming an investor, let me know and i will email you under the alias of african royalty and give you my paypal account number, and this epic will be greenlighted this very eve!

but also essential is to remember that there are over 120,000 extras for this film and it is over 400 minutes, which is substantial if you (i) drink a gallon of coffee, (ii) cannot pause the film, (iii) have to pay 16 rubles to use any bathroom in the country, but you don't have 16 rubles, all you have is 16 kopecks and you suddenly fear all the worst, that you will be lost to speculative history like Tycho Brahe and the world and your family will disown you for your 16 kopeck poverty, but then you remember "it's no shame to poor", and that's so true: we have come to an agreement you and i.

the market in narration

many apologies for the shortcomings of posts. that they come so short and so few, et cetera. the homework here has teeth, and also my two arms vised within. and so, without much rambling, a short post.

i went to the market. it was a market something like a haymarket. it was once used for the purposes of selling hay, so that horses could be fed as the fable once said. it wasn't a fable was it? where am i? i am in a market. a tall building, with struts strutting along the ceiling. it isn't open air, that is out back, but here, there is a market also. small, miniscule cucumbers deserving of all the diminutive suffixes that can be given them. and ruddy tomatoes also.

i like to see the fish lined up behind glass, all at attention, even if they aren't breathing water anymore. they are comatose in their cold-aired containers. look! they look with the same eyes at me, and their ode de fish still swims in the air as it ever did in the gulf. one of the fish glistened with sweat along his cheek, and i thought maybe he was a foreigner, but maybe it was cold and he just had a cold chill, like the kind you had a year ago when you thought maybe someone you love might die, and what would you do or feel then?

there is a candy store here also.

and outside, out back, that is, behind the big building of which we previously spoke, more stalls! more vegetables! more fruits to horde and fill cheeks!

here the ground in peppered with bits of paper and some sprigs and some lettuce. people are talking quickly, the pace has increased. the space has decreased, especially when carts go by with wooden crates so recently holding fresh within their little cavities. it is nice. they foretell my intentions and the intentions of other shoppers.

i buy some tomatoes. here, they are called pomidori, but i still think of them as tomatoes sometimes. they are red and in the middle. not too big, maam! what is the proper form of address? the plural you is all. or tell me! show me! this language is said to be direct and i forward that to you by way of writing. here is one reason more for the love of it.

--how much are the tomatoes for half a kilogram?
--thirty.
--i will take them.
--for you, thirty dollars.

and now, my accent has given me away. she knows that i am american and i know that she is russian, and we joke about it, because she has a friend that lives in america and she knows thirty dollars is a lot of money for half a kilo, and thirty rubles is fair, because although she knows by my twitches of voice i am american, she also really cherishes people that try to learn her language. it is a complement she takes to heart, and moulders when she returns home.

she gives her cat a white bowl with white cream, pets it twice, and thinks about the confused american trying to buy pomidori, even though he thinks they are called tomatoes.

also, i bought apricots. the man invited me to taste one to test the quality, but i thought maybe i should, but i didn't. the story turned out well in the end, because he also was payed for his solid and upright merchandise.

sometime before going to the market, i bought a coffee at macdonald's. it is the only place that has coffee that has slipped through a filter. unless you think about espresso. espresso goes through a filter, too, but then is added to water, and that is still not like coffee at home, not like coffee at home at all.

life and language

Russian language and life is a wisp, a zephyr. Something emitting a faint glow as one looks east from the States. We know it is there, that it thrives, that it grows and alters over there. But it is wholly elusive until one comes over here. After some number of years of study in the States, one learns some phonetics, vocabulary, the right syntax for “to have”. And then that aggregate of knowledge burns away in the presence of the real thing overshadowing what previously seemed substantial. Russian is no longer about the proper use of который, but about a polite way to ask for the счёт, to get directions to дом 40, to refuse that final блин so that one's stomach doesn't joyfully rupture.

One of our first duties was to find the university campus. A friend from the program approached a woman on the street to ask directions. Even this, one of the most basic interactions, found him stumbling over soft signs and forgetting words in the mist of the rain. What is at stake during an oral examination in Russian? A few percentage points. In Russia, at the least, it is your dignity. And that, for the joy of being here, is easily surrendered.

During orientation, my residence director recounted his first visit to Petersburg. As the plane descended, he had every expectation that the Petersburg weather would be wet. The buildings would be enveloped in shade. The only light would be the diffusion of sunlight through clouds persisting throughout the day and the night. Fifty meters, fourty, twenty, ten meters above the ground, all was fog. And for my residence director, it was the same on the ground. And for me it was the same. The weather was the same the next day and the next.

Though it is a rather simple and obvious analysis, life in Russia is like its weather. Precisely as you've read about it, and not at all as you've read. Though that simple rain persisted for days, I found myself eager for it, calmly learning it like the intricacies of the metro. I was glad to feel the dampness of my socks as I passed Kazanskii Sobor, moving with the flocks of tourists down Nevskii. Something quickened in me when from unsmiling lips came mingling streams of breath and smoke. Or the first time a бабушка yelled at me because my large backpack was taking too much space on the bus. Or when people would approach me on the street and ask directions, assuming that I knew where I was and were I was going.

So, this is about language and not at all about language. If language is that thing that lies in books that lie on shelves and ask nothing of us, then how is it relevant to us? If language is that thing that awaits and provokes our response, be it lying in the pages of a book or in the live circuitry of a man on the street, then how can we refuse it? How can I write the taste of the language as I fumble to talk politics with my professor? It is fresh on my palate, and I have no words for it.

I submitted this as a partial requirement for the scholarship I received. That is why words are capitalized.

A block away from the dormitories, Kazanskii Sobor.















By a canal.















Kittens.

and the last of dc

oi. already off schedule am i? am i? i have no sense of time anymore. this, i will try to explain.

we last left off on sunday two sundays ago. too long ago. there was the holocaust museum. after, we (my father and i) went to pca church plant in washington proper by the name of grace dc. though the specifics remain fuzzily in my head, i recall that the church started five years ago. my guess is that they had one hundred congregants for each year. they met in the spacious hull of a baptist church by the name of calvary. in the evening. the piano was planted firmly to the front of the guitarists, who were sitting, and the music preferred ccm, but there was a distinct presbyterian air about it (somehow i think concluding with “i’ll fly away” has a presbyterian air, thank you very much, grace). since the church has connections with redeemer presbyterian in new york, it was a little keller colored, but that’s fine in my book. the sermon was about this:



















thank you, Lord, that it was not about this:


















o! that i could remember more! it was about the fall and how much more? o! that the bland reading of genesis obscures the God that eagerly designs and maintains communions among men and Himself by determining the law against some small bits of fruit a gross and arbitrary demand by some roving and eagerly vindictive tyrant.

the point is that, as was said, that the number of capital crimes in eden was maximal. how many tiers or stages of rebellion were viable? what was a little rebellion to perfection? by grace death came late to adam and sooner than not will be undone. any break of communion divided this creator and his work, and what responsibility has a creator to a work that unperfects itself? only the demands of a gracious spirit, and praise be to God! that it is so.

the next day we went to the smithsonian museum of american history and the museum of art. they were pretty and pretty big. the most interesting exhibit of the american history museum was that grand old flag. you know the one? that inspired the national anthem? it is paper thin and thoroughly large. the lights are dimmed so as to protect it from photons. what i found interesting was that it was privately owned through most of 1800’s. the family cut up bits of it and gave it away as gifts. some people used their bits as placemats and napkins. that is a lie.

the museum of art was in good shape. it had a photo exhibit. one of the photos was a photo of a statue of casimir pulanski. if you know sufjan stevens, then you know casimir pulaski, or at least you know a song about a day in honor of him. he is riding a horse (also a statue). though you don’t need to know sufjan stevens or casimir pulaski to be okay in my book, you should really get to know one or the other. you don’t need to know them personally, though that would be thoroughly stupendous to me (and probably you).

here is coke quilting the world.



















here is me looking very shifty.



















here is a stupendous piano that i would sell my liver for, though it is slighty used.

the plan

in brief: i had orientation today. i'll be writing the next few posts regarding my stay in washington on the plane (leaving tomorrow at 5 post meridian).

since the program is immersive, like an oily stew or a pool of холодец, it is recommended that i refrain from english, and the internet, and facebook most especially, that i might partake most fully in this immersion. this is wise. so, i will rarely be online, and will do my best to update regularly wednesday and sunday.

until then, friends.

oh, and here is холодец (khaladyets):

to washington then he came

to the district of columbia then we came. anticipating some two days of orientation before russia proper, my father and i had two days and an evening wherein we bonded over microbrews, tapas, brick oven pizza, art, et cetera.

on the morning of sunday the thirtieth we went to new york avenue presbyterian church of the pcusa species. the music was traditional (oh! how i miss bach preludes!) and it preferred strong liturgy, and the people kind and predominantly septuagenaric, and how i wish the sermon had been like this:
















instead, it was more like this:
















it was an anecdote about a cancered man and the hope and comfort that may come through conversation. well...that is true enough. but when a sermon is on romans eight and its title "cross-talk", i had such a fervor in me that therein would be talk about the cross, and markedly less fervor ‘bout talk ‘cross the room. for though i surely believe that words have a quality to them, a chance and capacity to comfort, yet how sure or useful is comfort without foundation? i do not wish to dwell on nyapc, for the people were kind and as good as anyone. but i only mean to note that a confusion is subtexted. the message is hope and justice and inclusion (praise be to God for these), but the liturgy makes claims of exclusion immediately thereafter. how are these not in contradiction? can i has a conceptual analysis?

in the afternoon we walked. there was the white house (on the curb nearby there was a protest, and further down there was a game of roller hockey). walked by the washington monument (bigger than it is in film). we went to the holocaust museum.

though it is hard to conceive of that which is spectacular and sobering, the holocaust museum is these. it asks somber reflection on history as well as begs response (a portion of it is dedicated to contemporary instances of genocide and conflict between ethnic groups). here, the museum, like a good text, acts holistically, that is to say, it does not divide intellectual/emotional or historical/ethical.

three interesting moments:

first, even at the very beginning: the pictures taken by american and russian soliders of piles of bodies hurriedly burned at the end of the war. across the horizontal plane a gradient of immolation: at one end charred bones, some with seared flesh, and some entirely corpse. how could one do this to another? if one’s life or livelihood were at stake, would it be any easier? though with all rhetorical boldness i wish to say no, it is a question i hope i never need answer. the german soldiers were men like me. how thin are the walls of my belief, of my love?

second, how glad i was to read about the resistance and rescue that did take place. though the papacy and the state church of germany are often and rightfully criticized for snuggling nazism, the accounts of resistance (peaceful and not) within underground churches in germany are a good attestation to one who loves the church for all its flaws. may it ever be that Christ demonstrates his love in the love of his people, even when their institutions fail.

third, the artifacts. there is a room in the museum full of discarded shoes from men and women that went to the ovens. it is not the sight of these raggedy pieces of leather and rubber giving me pause. it is their smell. must and decay fills the room. these shoes once held flesh and dirt, they stretched and constricted some toes. and those toes are gone to the flame, but the rubber remains.

why, soma?

why this? though the communions between blogs and myself have so often been torrid (no, i do mean tumultuous), the efficiency of this medium overflows my concerns and lack in determination. here, those that read these words shall find that i am fine and oh so fine in saint petersburg over the summer months. that is june and july. are there not other means? there are, but i am loathe to everything but speech, and even that is loathe to me.

every careful act of communication should be considered conversation, aided by the imagination, else the depth and ethical demand upon the reader will not be whole. this is a meeting between you and i, but in lieu of coffee and a table, we share a sallow phosphorescence.

is this the lambent soma? the body behind the glow? yes and there is more. but that may become clear anon. until then, welcome.

lambent red star

supple branches have pierced
spaces and snatched the chill

and if the violent provocations
of supple redound into further spaces,

then the boats will hope sink-
ing into their heavens of mire.

mires lend into each other similarly,
although this remains a metaphor.

this connection is the grit of things and
the things adhere, one onto the subtle

furs of a cat and then the ursine heavens.
and when her feet are caught in it.

linear equations too have imputed her with
wistfulness, that most dangerous constellation.

slushes run along grates in solemnity
as the people aghast in the red star.

splashes of red color us as mars
lilting in neptune’s orbit and wake.

is she aghast?
she has assailed all conscious bulwarks.

she believes that by morose features she will be within
the frost of liquids freely intermingle, that is all.

is that all?
what remains to be seen is a fair analysis of “solemnity.”

he is reminded of her spaces and his.
the spaces of her body tarry, then jubilate when objects

pass into sight: a pair of needles, used, a jar, new, a new
jar of oranges suspended in the warm viscous.