In France, we call them  Les gens du voyage. It's the politically correct term for all itinerant people. But among themselves they are known as the Tsiganes or Manouches. You may know them by other names. The Romani. The gypsies.
They arrived in Angers a week ago.
When I first saw the horde of white RV's which had descended upon the rugby field turning it, in one night, from a peaceful oasis of green to a clamouring trailor park, I was at a loss. Was it a festival? An unauthorized family reunion? "No," my French friend assured me. "It's les gens du voyage (the travelling folk). I think you in English call them gypsies."
I was consumed by curiosity. Nay, even that is an understatement. I was frantic, squirming, on fire with curiosity. I craned my neck about in passable imitation of a giraffe every time I could think of an excuse to stroll by the encampment. I watched the children frisking about at the edge of the field, their dark eyes flashing, the long black hair of the girls swinging in braids or flowing loose, the women gliding through the caravan with their brightly colored head scarves, the men in grimy t-shirts, their teeth gleaming white from brown, stubbly faces, boys standing around a tent, challenging and magnetic in sleek dark leather jackets.
I wanted to know more.
At night, I lay awake imagining pretexts for beginning conversations in my broken French, the questions, the hundreds of questions, which I would ask. The answers which I might or might not be able to understand.
But no such pretext arose. So I bombarded my French friend with questions instead, though he had no way of knowing the answers.

How many are there?
Where do they come from?
Where are they going?
How do they earn money?
What do they eat?
Where do the live in winter?
How are the children schooled?
Are the caravans made up of family groups? How big are most caravans? Do they intermarry with Tsiganes from other caravans? Do they ever marry outsiders and bring them into the people?
Do they always make the same circuit? Do the same groups come through the same cities every year?
Do they like this life? Are they happy? Do they ever settle down, and could they, if they wanted?

One afternoon, from my open window, I heard music coming from the encampment. A guitarist, and singing- sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. The voices were rich and beautiful, the melodies alternately haunting and lively. My curiosity was at boiling point, unbearable. With half an hour before I had to meet a friend, I threw on my coat, grabbed my keys, and marched off towards the gypsy camp.
I didn't know what to expect. I had vague visions of dancing, fortune telling, and colorfully garbed women, drawn from various literary and film stereotypes of the Romani people.
That is not what I found.
At the center of the encampment rose a large, blue striped tent. A few men of boys loitered at its open door, the collars of their jackets pulled up against the misting rain. And now that I could hear clearly the words of the song they were singing, I realized that it was a hymn. The colorful tent was the home of services held by Light and Life, a French gypsy ministry and the gypsy church which traveled with the caravan.
My friend and I attended two of their evening services, and for days, all afternoon, music and speeches were carried from the field to my window, a lively background to everyday life.

As the gypsies began to leave, and green spaces opened up once more in what had formerly been our rugby field, I was haunted by an unformed sadness and regret. They carried their whole world with them to Angers, and remained carefully detached from us- civil, but serenely indifferent to cultivating long term connections. What good is it to begin a life anywhere, when you belong both everywhere and nowhere? They planted no flowers, built no houses, introduced themselves to no neighbors. One day, inexplicably, a few chairs, a table, some laundry on the line, and some chattering children and their puppy would be whisked back into one of the trailers, and it would vanish around a bend of the street, leaving only a muddy rectangle and trampled grass in it's wake. Often a new trailer, new children, and dogs, and laundry would appear to take it's place. They were among us, but not of us- they left Angers the way the wind leaves branches as it passes through. The way ocean currents leave coral on their way to the deeper waters. The way international students return home at the end of a semester.

I was grieved, because watching les Gens du Voyage- the travelling people- I realized that I was one of them.  As spring gives way to summer here in France, my heart aches with an appalling ache. The springtime, the wonder of May and April belonged to me, enchanted me, beguiled me. The summer, I have no part in. June first will find me in Missouri once more.. And I want to see Missouri, want to be with family and friends again, to conduct life in a familiar language on familiar terms. But I don't want to leave Angers. The inexorable necessity of leaving Angers, and all I love in Angers, is (forgive the cliche, friends) breaking my heart.

When I think of France during the coming years, what will I remember? Green fields and little villages seen from the train. A sunset watched joyously from a bluff above the lake. A heron picking his solitary way along the edge of the water at twilight. Roses, roses, everywhere a wealth of roses pouring over walls and fences in the May sunshine. Wisteria dripping from every arbor. Warm light on worn plastered walls, the sun slanting along narrow cobbled streets and alleys. Pain au chocolat with friends in the afternoon. The wonder of two hands meeting and clinging together in unreserved understanding- a caress within a caress. The glorious, unapologetic greasiness of kebab and chips. The moonlit silence of the city at night as we walked home, or the riotous clamor and fairy tale lighting of the city center each evening. The blue, blue waters of la Maine flanked by banks of richest green, or at dusk, a magical mirror of reflections when the rainbow bridge is illuminated. Little dogs mincing obediently after their owners in every street, seen in smug repose at every corner cafe.
The rich inflections of the French language murmuring all around us- at the supermarket, in the classroom, in the bus.
My photos, my short, clumsy sentences, all the words in every language I study are inadequate to tell you this story, the story of this semester in all of its light and color and fragrance, in all of its sound and sensation, in its loneliness and camaraderie, its music and its silence.
The world doesn't give us the freedom to stay where we wish to stay, or go where we wish to go. To occupy two spaces at once is only another of the impossible dreams which men have dreamed since man's beginning. I know there's no profit in dreaming so foolishly thus, but my head is lost in it, fogged with it anyway. Angers is a garden with high walls too steep for climbing, and reality exists outside of these walls, is only heard in a muted clamour of traffic which finds its way in to linger bleakly among the lushness of the flower beds.
Like the gypsies, I came to Angers only to leave it. My caravan moves out toward the open road in less than three days. Yet unlike the gypsies I am bound here by cords which frighten me with their intensity. The French historically failed in their grapples with the Anglais, and in all their imperial ambitions, but in a dazzling blitzkrieg campaign, France has conquered me. I return to the Land of the Free in a shackled, colonial condition, utterly bouleversed by la douceur angevin. But when will I see again the blue slate roofs of Anjou, hear again the strident  French sirens, breathe in once more the heady fragrance of their honeysuckle and roses? Gypsy-like, I can only tell you, 'Je ne sais pas'.

Moments in Munich- Part 1, Easter

Munich's Olympiaberg, a grassy hill, curving and undulating like the coils of a sea monster up to a domed top, is one of the highest elevations in the city. Beneath the deceptively gentle slopes lie the jagged rubble and refuse of the city in wartime. At the end of the Second World War, the remains of bombed buildings and roads were heaped up here and covered mercifully with earth. A serene and lovely park now blossoms above the broken stones and twisted metal of a world in chaos. At the top, an aluminum cross stands as a memorial to the civilians killed in Munich during the war.
Before dawn on Easter Sunday, my first morning in Germany, I found myself climbing the sinuous track up the Olympiaberg, snow falling like sprays of white flowers, starring the ground and lighting in our hair. Moving all about me through the dim gray light were dark clad, bundled members of my friend's German congregation, huddled beneath black umbrellas. Fog flirted through the trees and along the curves of the hill. The air was damp, and mistily cold. I was assailed by a lingering suspicion that we were all insane.

When we reached the dome, we formed a shivering circle. Johannes, one of the young men from the church, brought out a tiny keyboard, which he managed to play with cold-stiffened fingers, keeping it partially sheltered from the still falling snow in its case.

And we sang.

The voices were frail- muffled by the snow and fog, quavered through chattering teeth. Below us, all around, the hill fell away until it melted into the sleeping city, shrouded in white. With the cross a stark silhouette in the mist beneath us, and the death and madness of a terribly recent nightmare rolling beneath us, we sang of life.

'Welch Gnad! Er stand auf vom Tod... Welch Gnad! Err kommt zurück...'

'What grace! He rose from the grave... What grace! He's coming again...'

'Er hat den Tod besiegt für alle Zeit. Der König lebt, preist ihn, der uns befreite! Er regiert in alle Ewig keit...'

'He has conquered Death for all time. The King lives, praise Him who freed us! He reigns over all eternity...'

Restlessness

There are people we love, because they are like windows. We do not so much look at them, as through them, into a world we have never imagined before.

Even the most dense and opaque acquaintance transforms, at moments, into a window of shocking clarity and rainbow radiance.

There are friends who remain with us for hours, unclouded, as panes of gleaming, translucent glass, fragile in their clarity. It is these people, whether we are bound up with them in passing for a few weeks, or able to cling to their society for months and years who make us feel that friendship is desirable, that solitude is unbearable. When we look away, back to the cold expanse of empty spaces and closed faces, where a man is a solid mass and not a kingdom of transparent adventure, we are lost, and disappointed, and afraid. Poverty stalks us in streets where richness blossomed. The reaction to the sensation of clear, easy freedom, is a sense of hopeless constraint, and this constraint is a weight tied to a drowning man, forcing our heads beneath the water. An infant cannot live without air after that first, sputtering breath- the surprise of expanding lungs.

I am dying for a world without walls or ceilings- standing in my room I stretch my arms to their farthest height and long to feel miles of empty space whirling above them. In solitude, I curse gravity. Something in me is buoyant, and crying out to leave the floor, to laugh at treetops from overhead, and streak past the clouds into the terrifying lostness of stars and circling planets.

To be free seems the most difficult thing in the world. Free, I hardly know from what, yet I feel suffocated, claustrophobic, pressed into the dark, heavy earth with an unyielding weight.

Music, beauty, poetry, the sky at every moment seem to be straining toward something. They make us feel like weeping, because they are all escape attempts, surging upward, and we can sense the barrier they strain against, like pitiful balloons striking a ceiling- my heart lifts, and swells, and almost bursts in me, yet I can go no further. I am matter, and weight, and feebly limited, and even lack the words, the voice, the power to express this intensity.

Something shouts to us 'Exult! Exult! Exult!', and our fragile exultation trails out into nothingness, is lost in empty space, swallowed up by a universe we cannot understand. And even as I fade into silence, feel the notes of each song and the letters of each word slipping away into a mysterious, far away rhythm of eternity, I cannot be silent.

Is this illusion then, what wind, and wide spaces, and the vulnerable, frighteningly beautiful glimpses a glass-like moment gives us into another human heart? Is it merely the highest pinnacle of reality, which leaves us longing, starving for more? Is it an echo, a reflection, of a reality we haven't found yet, can't reach, still dream of and strive toward relentlessly?

"The beauty or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things- the beauty, the memory of our own past- are a good image of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are NOT the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited." -C.S. Lewis

We all know as though by instinct, what it is to throw oneself in despair at an unyielding door. Every haunting glimpse of a window reminds me that I live behind walls, with walls before and behind, a maze of walls within walls, in which I am both victim and Minotaur, hunter and hunted, justice and courage, guilt and terror.

I feel as reckless and wild as April, eager to throw off every unwanted hamper. I want to dance with bare legs, and feel the wind sweeping over arms and face, tearing at my hair. I want to sing so that fine clear notes echo back to me from the rocky cliffs of slate to the blue, blue heavens. I want to lie in impossible stillness, unbreathing, on a low rock wall and look at explosive white pannacles of pear blossom against an infinite black night sky, lit to warm golden wonder by an ordinary street light while the crescent moon, a curl of liquid silver, swims in the corner of my vision.

I want to place my hands on the shoulders of a stranger in the street, and look into his eyes and past his face, until I understand the strangeness of it- that this warm, living unit of motion beside me is animated by a mystery invisible even to the most brilliant scientists, the most searching innovations of technology. We can trace, and graph, and measure the footsteps of an energy, a force we cannot comprehend. In history, they used to imagine that the soul could be found and weighed, and they were wrong. And after that, they began to believe that a thing which cannot be measured and weighed is nothing at all, and they were more wrong still. For it is only by this invisible, untraceable element that we exist as ourselves, that we are aware of the thing we cannot see. Enormous, and luminous it is, filling our vision and obscuring it, demanding to be seen and acknowledged, yet flitting just out of sight with diaphanous elfin speed. I look in my mirror, and I do not see myself, only an indication that my self is looking for my self, and it cannot find it- can't see past a plain face, masses of hair, and anxious blue eyes to discover the truth it is looking for- the iron ephemeral spirit which gives meaning to the face, to every face.

We are lost in one small place- tightly boxed in, yet wandering without cease.

I can only think that somehow, in a paradox I am blind to, this frantic thirst for freedom, and the infinite weight which stands between us are saying in two different languages, each only half understood, that to be free does not mean what I feel that it must, that in constraint is found a liberty of a different sort, that when my arms cease pulsing in their desire to be wings, perhaps only then will I discover the full magic of arms. That restlessness is only a poor, flimsy substitute for rest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrF814OnFQ4&feature=relmfu

Mad wonder and madcap wondering

The most astounding thing imaginable is to be alive. And being alive, we must surely be astonished from moment to moment, and then astonished again, no dazed, at our previous lack of astonishment.

Surprise is building on surprise here. Hair is awe-inspiring. Why should anyone have it? Or why should it be hair on people, and grass on lawns, and not the other way around? There's more mystery in a single blade of grass than in all the unsolved mysteries of history. Or rather not more mystery, because mystery, wonder, simply grows, expands on itself, defies our poor tongues and imaginations.

If we are not struck blind and dumb with wonder at every turn, then we were surely blind to begin with. Try to describe water, liquid in general, describe it for a people whose planet is devoid of liquid. It's so dazzlingly incomprehensible, untouchable, indefinable, the minute you step out of the rigid lines of your dull scientific vocabulary, you'll be utterly lost in stammering bewilderment. And that, only for water. You've not even begun to describe the world. Could you have imagined motion, or light, or music, had it never existed? A child- simple and intensely curious- knows more of the world than we do, and even at his most childlike, a child hasn't begun to know, because a lifetime is insufficient even for the exploration of one backyard.

'There is no freedom' years to me have whispered

We living, dying, choose from slavery

And slavery- our masked and silent masters

Stalk silent; still some soul-thirst drives us, goads us

To shriek out 'Freedom, freedom!' This eludes us,

To leave us begging, 'Freedom, or I die'

Yet no man wholly man is wholly free.

Chain merchants cry to me 'Throw off your chains!

Bind yourself now with cords of liberty!

Exchange a cell for dungeon and go free

My heart cruelly tied and struggling, frantic strains

Against a massive weight of Universe

Harsh voices in the mist and darkness shout

'This way lies soaring flight- beneath these stones!

Within these wings of lead- my mind is fire

And searing pain, in keenness of desire-

Somewhere shine stars- uninterrupted sky

There is a word, a world, where spring winds tear

In unfettered gladness through a swaying field

Into horizons constantly receding

Where orchards burst in furious shouts of white

Defiant blossoms shuddering into pink

Great whorls of life and sound and fragile freshness.

This gladly singing world still unexplored

And dazzling in its details- who can say

Why beauty heaps on beauty in this way?

And tiny veins race laughing through the leaves

To catch the glorious sun- the glow is swelling

Across reflecting waters- color, breath-

Full-charged with music- every bud is triumph

Each branch is clarion- ripples, wonder-

Feathers, grave miracles, and on a duck,

A million miraculous plumes

Make glossy neatness. Rumpled bark of trees.

My head is struck, and eyes half-blind with magic.

Small birds are flitting- who can say what holds them?

Nets of fine-spun silver strung from cloudbanks

They swing suspended, breath to breathless moment

Floating unfalling, graceful; every second

Atoms swirl in seeming-solid objects

Millions dancing in the page I write on

And vault in pert abandon through my ink.

The hidden laws of gravity continue-

Or seem to do so- when we speak of laws-

('The universe is ruled by this and that'

Scientists say with all the satisfaction

Rule-memorizers feel when spouting rules)-

I want to cry in fear- in joy and awe-

There is no law- this force which holds us living

Which shaped us from the shapeless, oscillating

And holds us shaped- poised on disintegration.

This turgor pressure of the universe

Grand, wild, creator God- this King of Romance

Lord of astonishment, I breathe and feel

Each breath as a surprise.

In all my desperate, night-weeping soul-pain

Doubt, existential days, wanderings in blackness

And suffocating fear- the empty hours

Stone blind and brain-sick, exhausting stubbornness

In radiant melody Your strange world calls me.

Where beauty is as great as mystery.

The sunset lights the lake in reddish gold.

I touch this tree.

Song-struck and struggling in surmise, delight...

Blame it on Angers...

I don't actually have a blog post, and I'm not likely to for weeks. ( :-O ) What I have are perhaps seven partial blog posts, pages of notes, fragments of poetry, etc... dawdling in my drafts folder, and wandering in between history notes.

So, you'll have to make do with what there is, and there isn't much. You can blame it on Angers, if you like. There's so much to see, and hear, and learn, and think about, and question here, that I can't seem to finish one idea before beginning on twenty new ones. My brain's bursting... If you're still reading after this disclaimer, courage! I hope you'll be able to make sense of the jumble. Each unit will be separated by spaces and quotation marks, which may or may not be entirely ineffective.

'I came this morning to the field where we would play together at cowboys.

Hero and gun-slinger, a rustler stalked by a knight in bandanna and spurs.

But nothing was left of our games there.

Only our two hats beside each other.

My white sombrero, dark with the grime of earth and years.

Your black hat bleaching mercifully grey in the winter sun.'

'Always the sense- that haunting sense which lingers

The world's a spinning toy,

And time-

And time like water, slipping through your fingers...'

"This kind of artificial emotional cushioning can't make you feel better; it only can make you forget that you don't. The world's in a haze of pain, and it's searching not for doctors, but painkillers.

Because sometimes, the only way to straighten and heal a broken limb is to wrench, and break it again. A deep infection must be lanced and drained. Our fear of pain drives us forever to pain, leaves us in pain.

The world would hate us, then, because the hard, real core of the Gospel cuts through the fog of drugged forgetting and lays bare the hurt- demands that it hurt, and hurt again to the very extremity of the agonized death of it's own self-love.

Like a child thrashing against the surgeon with his probing fingers and fearful knife, like the terrified dog which sinks its teeth into the too-knowing hand of the veterinarian, the world is cowering away from the excruciating pain of the truth. We fear the cure more than the disease.

There's space to hide in the universe- miles and miles for running. But the disease, the disease is fatal. We cannot evade death by masking its hideousness, by singing to drown out the noise of its approaching...

The cavity of rebellion will rot relentlessly until every tooth is destroyed. But the corruption of the heart is not dragged to healing as simply as a shrill, resisting child is carried to the dreaded dentist and his drill. Heaven help us if we dull the aching with distractions...'

"Ignorance itself is not a crime, but smug, indifferent, arrogant ignorance; the cheerful, cow-like resistance to questioning and seeking, the self-satisfied conviction of 'correctness', when never for a moment did they listen to a word from the opposition, or try to understand the other perspectives- or even base the forming of their formless views on more than hearsay, and pleasantries, and the opinions of others equally misinformed- this invincible, comfortable, saccharine, unbearable ignorance, how easy it is to despise it! It's so hard to be patient with those who are wrong stubbornly, but without intelligence or conviction.

And yet- I've certainly been guilty of such lazy, shoddy thinking myself...

Why do only some people in the world feel this restless, ceaseless knowledge-hunger and curiosity- this fire to know... nearly everything? At risk of falling into clichés, I feel like I've lived always like a bird in a cage, fierce and frantic to escape, silent, because all of the other birds seem so very happy to be fluttering lamely behind bars. The few people who are different, who can't be satisfied so easily, what makes the change? Is it simply a matter of creation and design? In that case, a sick disgust for the thoughtless who ignore beauty and play with learning as a sulky child plays with his spinach- it must be prideful and unfair. Can one hate the blind for their poor taste in art? Or the deaf for a lack of musical appreciation? Is the world crammed with shallow and dull minds by nature, or by choice? It seems that the history of the human race is the history of man's tremendous creativity in idiocy and atrocity. As much as I'd love to like humanity, there's no way around the conviction that our existence is generally a black stain on the universe.

Faced with this world, with such questions, the cramped little pond of thehomeschoolers- the very haven which gave me time and freedom to think and read for myself- is a nightmare kingdom of triviality. We argue heatedly about the minor, subjective questions- skirt and short length in inches, the proper tightness of jeans, the exact regulations for physical contact, the most correct method of courtship, dancing, studying, the 'acceptable' styles of music, the 'best' church (in the most minor, minor detalia) - and outside the high walls of our garden, while we dispute makeup and hairstyles, movie standards and social rules, Homer is singing, and Shakespeare is being performed, and Hemingway is writing, and Socrates is crying questions like a madman in the streets. And the world is dying, and being reborn, and the seasons are passing, and new and old music is crashing all around in astonishing melodies (but they can't know it, poor fools, they've covered their ears). I've seen such strange things blandly taken for granted; the pro-life coldly indifferent to their government's destruction of innocent life abroad, the members of an unearthly, eternal kingdom shouting brutal, simplistic anthems in lusty patriotism, cluttering their lives (as I do my own!) with ludicrous, superfluous luxury. I've seen some who claim to follow a Way of gentleness, humility, and love, carelessly, callously cruel to animals, blind to injustices committed against those who 'aren't like us'. Some, also, who claim to love a rational, intelligent God, who despise thought and knowledge. So much of the kindness, curiosity, humbleness, patience, humor, and wit I've met in my life has come from the unbelievers, the doubting, the faithless...

Strange world of upside-downs and colors blending in the mist...

And when I die, I beg that it should be with feet worn to the bone with walking beside the stumbling and helpless, and with relentless running after the tangled thread that leads through the labyrinth of my questioning. A heart fully satisfied that, however little was accomplished, it was done with passion and conviction; that seeking neither to lead or to follow, I went where I must go. And finally, because this conviction was founded on eternity and not myself, because though I am utterly unable to fulfill the rigorous demands of my conscience, I belong to a God who, in perfect holiness and fidelity, fulfilled it for me- fully in his own mysterious blood and infinite agony- my own life and death, the existence of mankind- the beauty and suffering, fury and joy of the universe, are not without final meaning.

What a horror existence is if this meaning is not present.

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

-Vaclav Havel

The lullaby game

When I was three years old my parents moved from the little A-frame house my father built in Columbia, Missouri to a remodeled garage on my grandparents' Pleasant Hill farm.

That move was hard on our family, though I remember little about it. Aside from two or three vague memories, all I know about the transition comes from the stories my mother told me later.

Living in that tiny remodeled garage with an infant, a toddler, and a pre-schooler was hard on my mother, as well. I don't remember that, either.

But I remember a corner of the bedroom my brothers and I shared. I remember a crib piled with quilts and too many stuffed animals. I remember a worn beige carpet, stained and overdue to be vacuumed, Alexander's dark blue eyes wide and serious above his snub baby nose and pacifier. I remember a nightlight casting a soft little glow in our room each night, and I remember what it was like to curl in my father's arms while he sang to us.

Not even my parents could tell you exactly when the singing began. I suppose it didn't begin at all. My father is a man who sings. From the moment they knew I existed, as a tiny, squirming creature cradled in my mother's womb, it was only natural that some of his songs should have been for me.

Some of them were songs that are sung to children. 'Over in the Meadow', 'The Gunnywolf song'. But mostly, my father left the children's songs to my mother. The things my father sang were strange, and haunting, and mysterious. Songs that no one would ever dream of as lullabies. Before I knew what they meant, I was in love with these songs.

I remember my father as he was those nights- boyishly dark haired and handsome, laughing and warm as the three of us crowded against his knees like eager puppies. We would sit on the floor, on the awful beige carpet, in the soft golden shadows of the nightlight, and each of us would choose a song. There were stories as well, on especially good evenings.

But those songs, those songs, where did they come from? I never began to ask myself until recently.

Because he loved the old musicals, he would sing to us from those. I remember his fine, rich tenor voice crooning 'Wouldn't it be Loverly?', and 'Sunrise, Sunset' .

'Sunrise, sunset

Sunrise, sunset

Quickly fly the years;

One season following another,

Laden with happiness and tears.'

"Someday, Shalucie bug, I'll sing it at your wedding. My little girl is growing so fast."

Folk music, rebellious music came to us as well, laden with hidden messages. 'Waltzin' Matilda', 'Charlie on the MTA', 'You Can Close Your Eyes'.

'Listen children to a story, that was written long ago

'Bout a people on a mountain, and the valley folk below

On the mountain was a treasure, buried deep beneath a stone

And the valley people swore they'd have it for their very own...'

'When I was a young man I carried my pack

And lived the free life of a rover

From the Murray's green basin to the dusty outback

I waltzed my matildas all over.

But in 1914 my country said 'Son,

Tis time to stop ramblin' there's work to be done'

They gave me a tin hat and gave me a gun

And sent me away to the war...'

I always felt like crying when we came to the end of the song, and the legless old man watched his elderly comrades hobbling along in the parade:

'And the young people asked 'What are they marchin' for?

And I asked meself the same question.'

It was not for so many years that I came to understand the significance of the singer's question. But the question, and the answer, and the bloody beaches of Suvla bay were a part of who I was long before that.

One that I remember most clearly (yet there were so many that are woven into me as tightly as threads in a well-made Persian carpet) is an old, wistful anti-war tune.

'Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the flowers gone?

Picked by young girls, every one

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?...'

I begged for this song again and again. As a three year old, and four year old, and even twelve year old, I couldn't put into words what spoke to me in the lyrics. I hadn't the faintest idea what it was that the girls, and the boys, and the soldiers were never learning. I couldn't explain the comfort I pulled from the song's full circle- from flowers, to soldiers, to graveyard, and flowers again. I only knew that it was true, even before I knew what it was I was knowing.

Looking back, I realize that everything I became as an individual, everything I value and respect, all the strange and unorthodox opinions I formed :-P began with the songs my father sang to me. I find the core of our relationship in those memories as well. My love and admiration for him, longing to please him, were born in the warm circle of his arm around me, the flickering halo of the night light, the incomprehensible magic of his voice:

'And if you smile and you say 'Well things were different back then'

Well you have to remember, they were only just men.

There's a lesson for the learning for the likes of you and me.

Just have a little faith and you'll see.'

'Well the sun is slowly sinkin' down

And the moon is rising

And this old world will still keep turnin' round

And I still love you, I still love you.'

When my mother wonders how her daughter became a firebrand, a rebel, a pacifist, a dreamer, and a fierce independent, she can remember the crooning melodies that floated from our room each night, and my humming as I played with my toys- remember how I memorized every word of each song as the years passed, until, when my father faltered or stumbled over the lyrics, I was able to carry us along.

In our own ways, though perhaps to different degrees, my two brothers and I are both shaped deeply by my father's singing. His strange, surprising lullabies made windows for us into worlds and ideas our childhood friends never encountered. Being on the other side of an ocean makes these memories come back vividly, as I miss him more than I ever have in my life.

I've been thinking about this all day, because I just learned a song which reminds me of my father. A song which one day, should I have children of my own, I will sing to them in the cozy shadow of a crib. Because even if it takes them half their lives to learn what it means, I want words like this to be burning like golden seeds in their hearts from the beginning, waiting to blossom in that far away time known as 'when I grow up'.

If you'd rather hear it for yourself, here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbwQXVcbkU0

(I have a feeling that my father used to listen to Pete Seeger. Something about their singing feels alike, though I can't pinpoint the similarity.)

Die gedanken sind frei
My thoughts freely flower
Die gedanken sind frei
My thoughts give me power
No scholar can map them
No hunter can trap them
No man can deny:
Die gedanken sind frei

I think as I please
And this gives me pleasure
My conscience decrees
This right I must treasure
My thoughts will not cater
To duke or dictator
No man can deny:
Die gedanken sind frei

Tyrants can take me
And throw me in prison
My thoughts will burst forth
Like blossoms in season
Foundations may crumble
And structures may tumble
But free men shall cry:
'Die gedanken sind frei!'

The Foreign Illusion

• • • I think, perhaps, it is safe to say that there is one quality all true travelers have in common. We are searching for something. Even when we least know what this something is that calls to us, this siren song of nebulous longing, we are driven by hunger for it, by questioning, by irrepressible curiosity. Is it around the next bend? In the next city? The next state? In China? In England? In France? Against all reason we feel that in blind ignorance we can find it, that we will stumble upon it unknowing if we only go far enough. There is a lost piece of ourselves, a gaping emptiness that is unsatisfied. So we search the eyes of foreign visitors and the pages of foreign books, and the soul-hunger, the isolation gnaws and remains unsatisfied. Somewhere in the world It is, and when we find this unknown we will have fullness. Fullness, sereneness, and life. I think I've seen the essence of this seeking sense expressed most beautifully, most sensitively, throughout the works of C.S. Lewis.

      
      

      "

      "We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness..."
      
      

      "It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."

      
      

      "All joy...emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."

      
      

      He doesn't simply make me want to go to a place I have searched for and never found, he makes me believe that such a place exists. This is, for all of us who love Narnia, the crux of the matter. We are hungry for a world where we can be completely, as ourselves, knowing fully who we are, and being fully known. Lewis, in his own longing for this, had a magical gift for expressing it and evoking it in all his writings. One feels that there are worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds which travelers may find, and that the thing one seeks is waiting in them.
      But the doors leading from our world into the other worlds are rare and hard to find. And so, we wander into crowded cities in Asia, and fertile plains in Africa, and conical huts, and tree houses on stilts, and jungles and floodplains and coastal cliffs, and we look for the thing we do not know.
      If we are dedicated, we study the languages, and if we study and progress with enough talent and passion, we are at last able to express our wanting and our lacking in new and lilting tongues. But there is only disappointment to be found along this way. Because they answer us, and we find that there, on the other side of the ocean, they are failing in the same, wistful quest. We may learn from one another, but we cannot find the country we searched for, the country where everything is whole, where the scattered pieces of what we are come together, where beauty is a comprehended reality and not a glimpse that haunts and beckons. It does not exist in this world. Yet we are thirsty for membership in it.
      If we cannot find it, we will imagine it and pine for it. If it does not exist, we will die wanting it. It if has never been thought of, we will instinctively invent it. We will cling to the image, the idea of our true country against all probability and disappointment.
      "I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."
      
      
      A conversation with a new friend in France drove this idea home to me last night. We were discussing, each, our dissatisfaction with our home countries, our desire to travel, to speak with people from around the world, to learn new languages and bury ourselves in new cultures. Home seemed hopelessly constrained, pedestrian, narrow-minded, and dull. But being foreign to each other, we were each fiercely curious about the other's country and culture. France is a riddle to me, a mystery fascinating and strange. For him, the U.S. is equally unfamiliar and fascinating. We're both 'enthousiastes' about China. He said:
      
      
      "I think it's an illusion, but ...

    • I mean

    • our own country seeming boring must be an illusion

    • but I can't help feeling that ...

    I'm a stranger to no one ... I meet somebody, he listens to me a few minuts and then is convinced he knows who I am ...
    I've never felt this way with foreign people ...

• • i'm sure it's not the only thing I have in mind

• but although I'm trying

  • I can't express the rest

  • France is boring to me ...

  • And living here forever would eventually result in a total sadness ...

  • As I am dying, I would think that I haven't lived 1/1098070789796676 of what I could have lived ..."

    
    
    I'll let you make your own interpretation of this. I think it can stand alone. But for we travelers, the journey becomes our identity. We are seeking a homeland that is not an illusion. We are seeking the new, and the strange, and beyond that, the familiar- the known, but not-known that our hearts cry out towards. We are seeking, driven to continue and continue seeking, to be understood. We want to be heard, and seen, and known, and so pant after this achievement across the world, never coming nearer to the understanding we desire. No two human beings can meet and comprehend each other in this way. No such completeness is waiting in exotic buildings, customs, and foods. It is a quixotic, sterile quest, true and lovely only in the sense that we are questing, as we were created to do.
    
    
    "For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come" (Hebrews 13)
    
    
    Lewis chimes in again:
    
    
    "If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally."
    In the end, then, the choice is our own. This hunger I feel will not be abated by France, nor will it be satisfied by China. My appetite must be developed to meet this truth, or for me, as for so many travelers, beauty will never be more than grief, and new beauties but the repetition of disappointment. The emptiness of my own homeland, and the rich opportunity of foreign life are equally illusions. But the illusion is not about these. The illusion is about myself. Until I am complete in the city that is to come, 'hidden with Christ in God', I am complete nowhere. And staying in this incompleteness forever, never loosing my stubborn pride and accepting the kingdom which has been found for me, is what will result in total sadness. Not life in the midwest, or in France, or in China. Everywhere, the world is infected with the same disease. A visa cannot carry you to the cure.

Bon Dimanche!

This morning Hannah and I walked to a cathedralesque church about half an hour from the dorms to attend service. We weren't precisely sure what denomination we were visiting, but the moment we stepped inside, it became clear that our hosts were Catholic. So, I've officially participated in my first Catholic church service.

What I didn't expect, was the beauty of it all. I've always been puzzled by the draw the Catholic church has for many Protestant artists and intellectuals. Although I respect my Catholic friends, many of their beliefs strike me as un-biblical and superstitious, and their traditions suffocatingly restrictive. And yet, as we walked into the church, I was stunned. The interior was ancient and ornate, with a high, peaked ceiling, and exquisite carving and decoration. The lower walls were paneled in dark, heavy wood, and the floor was of worn sandy flagstones. Seated on frail wooden chairs with wicker seats, a sea of elderly worshipers stretched out ahead of us. Neat, white haired women huddled into their dark coats and scarves, while stoop-shouldered, mild-faced men leaned protectively beside them. One young couple knelt on the stone floor in front of their seats, dark heads bowed. A small boy, one of only two or three young people in the room, squirmed impatiently beside his grandmother. At the front, a few nuns could be glimpsed, scattered here and there, serenely veiled in dusky blue. At a little lectern, dwarfed by the massive height of the ceiling, a frail man in a crimson jacket was singing.

I wish I could describe the music.

His lone voice was rich and sweet, quavering a little with age, filling the room to the last shadowy corner and dizzying height. Below and around his voice, like water flowing, the strong, low chords of the organ began to move, so natural and soft one hardly noticed them at first. And I felt as though some great, towering and enormous music were moving the universe. When the choir joined, it was like drowning in beauty and solemnity. The chapel was hushed, and filled with singing in the same moment. If a wine, aged and mellow could be a song, then this was the sound of wine. It was light, but not the light of a garish day in the sun. It was like the light that shone in little glows of color from the exquisite stained glass windows. It was like a dusty sunbeam falling from a hayloft into the soft, shrouded interior of a barn.

The rest of the service passed, divided between bursting ecstasies of song, clear resonant voices reading Scripture passages, the murmured, measured responses of the congregation, and the occasional moment of deep stillness. The chapel breathed in its silences. One could almost hear the cold air seeping everywhere from the icy stone walls and floor. My heart wouldn't stop pounding and swelling with the music. I could feel something ancient, and strong, and indomitably powerful as the resounding notes poured around me, in the high clear solo of a flute, piercingly sweet and bright, which cried throughout the room in a wild climax. And all about us, now standing, now sitting, now shuffling in a sort of march to take communion, were the elderly parishioners, fragile and obdurate and grave. If a nation can have a soul, then I feel as though I've glimpsed the soul of France. If a nation can have a soul, then I came near enough this morning to touch it.

I understand now, the majesty and allure the Catholic church holds for non-Catholics. And I can't wait for next Sunday, to go back.

Reaching the familiar unknown

When I was packing to leave to France a few weeks ago, the question which troubled me most was this: Which books should I bring? Under ordinary circumstances, I drag three orange crates of books to school with me at the beginning of the semester, and keep bringing more from home every time I go back to visit. (For the record, I always regret this when I'm moving home at the end)

Airline travel is not designed for this sort of bibliophilic extravagance.

In the end, aside from a hefty assortment of French language resources, all I brought was my Chinese-English Bible, my beginner's Mandarin phrasebook, and 4 thin paperback volumes of poetry: Kipling, Wilde, WWI British Poets, and a concise anthology of best-loved poems- books I've been thumbing through tirelessly since high school. (Tragically, Christina Rossetti, Browning, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins didn't quite make the cut.)

My idea was that 1. Unlike a novel, poems can be read over and over again. They're efficient and accessible. 2. There's no way I can get by re-reading these already half-memorized volumes of poetry for five months. Eventually I'll be starved into reading almost exclusively in French out of sheer desperation. (this has already begun)

But one other force was at work. The little huddle of English books on my shelf are filled with lines that have shaped and defined me as a person. Between their increasingly limp covers, I saw my own emotions- loves, hatreds, fears, joys, ideals spring to life, hardened into words I could return to again and again. When I encountered them for the first time, it was an almost physical shock; raw feeling taking form and clothing itself in language. And I knew in each of those moments that I wanted more than anything to tame words like that, to whirl them, and woo them, and capture them on the page so that reality became doubly real, preserved in neat lines of magical printed symbols. Because in the poetry I love most, I didn't find something new. I found something I'd known all along, and never known how to express. It was the familiar, the recognizable, that haunted me, called to me. Sometimes, things leapt out at me which I didn't fully understand until years later. Kipling's 'The Vampire' was like that. I memorized stanzas of it, and then, several years afterward, in a quiet flash of clarity, it slipped into place as neatly as the missing piece of a puzzle.

"And it isn't the shame and it isn't the blame

That stings like a white hot brand,

It's coming to know that she never knew why

(Seeing at last she could never know why)

And never could understand."

Or Alice Meynell's 'Summer in England, 1914'

"And while this rose made round her cup,

The armies died convulsed; and when

This chaste young silver sun went up

Softly, a thousand shattered men,

One wet corruption, heaped the plain,

After a league-long throb of pain."

I always remember Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, my high school sweethearts as well. There was something in the grim, heart-haunted music of a forgotten war that shouted to the fiercely earnest and hopelessly confused sixteen year old girl I was.

"But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning."

"By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever mourns in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears."

Wilde's 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' is full of new things at every reading, quick flashing turns of beauty and rage and bitterness.

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word...."

"I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every wandering cloud that trailed

Its ravelled fleeces by."

I've always imagined that all over the world there are things which in some way uniquely belong to certain people. For one man it might be the clean lines of a little cathedral in Germany, for another, a certain row of willow trees leaning over a blue-sky lake on a daffodil-fluttering March day. And you might wait five years, or forty, or a lifetime to meet the things that are yours- the climax of a little-known symphony, a line in a book that springs at you like a crouching tiger, and never know what you're waiting for. But sooner or later, sight by sight, sound by sound, word and smell and feeling, they come to you one at a time. And when they come, you know, you recognize them and catch your breath, and halt for a moment of flame and desire and serenity that crystallizes into joy. It is the familiarity that is strange- blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh crying to you from the unknown, like seeing your face in a mirror for the first time, like seeing the prints of your own feet etched deeply into a path you've never walked before.

Sometimes, they are only a glimpse, then gone. At others, they remain to be cherished and pondered. For this reason I carted this thin stack of English poetry to the other side of the world with me, and, perhaps, at core, it is the same thing that drew me here in the first place, the same thing that drove me to study French so relentlessly and illogically for almost three years.

Coming from the New World to the Old World, which is new to me, I am in a constant state of discovery. Because history is the most eternally new thing in the world, never ceasing to grow, never losing its freshness. I'm here, in part, to learn what I already know, to remember what I've never forgotten. Adventure begins like this. Education begins with adventure.

Thunder of an 'age-old anvil'

"Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing-"- Hopkins

Today, like every day, is history. But today is the kind of history that is printed in textbooks and which college students study as part of the cause and effect leading up to colossal events; the kind of history one does not see every day of the year. Today, news of Kim Jong Il's death was released, plunging North Korea into frantic grief, and the world into frantic trepidation. This announcement has struck the pond of world events like a well-aimed pebble. It is too soon to tell, yet, how far the ripples will go, or when they will strike the shore.
One little ripple which a Chinese friend showed me on Facebook today is this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSWN6Qj98lw.
For me, it is the most poignant sight of the year. As I watched, I suddenly realized that the most tragic love, most tragic faith, is that which is utterly misplaced. Men who cry out in despair to deaf idols are not merely guilty of sin, they are the great voice of hopelessness in the universe, they are the blackest depth of soundless grief revolving in the bleakest cell of unapproachable pain. And so, I found myself weeping with this people. An oppressor, torturer, and madman tore terrifying tears today from his people. Not the usual tears of hunger, of fear, of injustice, of pain, of loss which have haunted North Korea for so long, but strange, unnatural tears. Dignified Asian men of solemn ages and high position are here seen sobbing and convulsing before the nation like little children. As I watched the writhing mob, it were as though every woman wept for her child, every man for his beloved, every child for his parents. My heart is still shaking; the emotion, the rawness of it, clawed at me from the screen as the video played.

God have mercy on this people, for they are "...a people plundered and looted, all of them trapped in pits or hidden away in prisons. They have become plunder, with no one to rescue them; they have been made loot, with no one to say, 'Send them back.'" (Isaiah 42:22)

In only a week we will celebrate the coming to earth of God in the flesh, of the King of eternity who throws off the slavery of the heart and soul, and beckons the world into the kingdom of light. In only a week, well fed and surrounded safely by all we love, we will sing with smug satisfaction the soaring hymns of hope and joy. And while we sing, and eat, and laugh, Korea mourns. While we marvel at the glorious mercy of God, North Korea is dying in starved, brutal ignorance. While we luxuriate in 'holiday cheer' the few people of that nation blessed with the knowledge of, and faith in, Christ, are laying down their lives in starkly joyous surrender, 'That the Lamb who was slain might have the full reward of His suffering.'

May God have mercy not on North Korea only, may God have mercy on us, the sleeping church. My own callousness is hideous to me, my selfishness more than I can bear.

Today, like every day, is a solemn one in the history of the world. Tomorrow, still, is an undiscovered treasure in our hands. Faced with this great and terrible world, swaying in the agony of its pain, how will we live? How must I live my daily life?