Kusinga rugaba, kusinga wombecha

I've made this point many times, but it still astonishes me when I stop and think about how many great friends I have.  I just made it back from a few days in Sunapee, New Hampshire where my wonderful friends Kathy and Phil Seiler had rented a house for the week.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be a logistically tricky time of the season so a couple folks had to bail at the last moment, but we still enjoyed the convivial excellence of the Seilers, Kerry Noonan, and the vast majority of the Brandenburg-Vespa clan.  There was swimming and kayaking (apparently designed to irreparably destroy what's left of my shoulder), board games, and tons of great food.  All of that paled in comparison to the wonderful friendship.  The competition was dominated by the young Joey, who won most of the board games while simultaneously destroying the entire population of the earth with a parasite on his mobile.

Clearly you can't even begin to think about celebrating summer and friendship and America without stopping for ice cream.  From left to right: Kathy Seiler, Sarah Vespa, Maria Vespa, Cyndi Brandenburg, some dude, Joey Vespa.

And you can't expect to just stay at someone's house without earning your keep.  Here's a picture of some cruelly dilapidated old man cooking breakfast. I was ably assisted by Cyndi.  Initially I had proposed a sort of cook-off challenge between the two of us, but I was struggling with one of my wretched cluster headaches so we simplified the challenge: use as many of the things left in the refrigerator as possible.

We had an unexpected visitor, but luckily we had made enough breakfast for the Secret Service agents.

My Years With Proust - Day 524

  And yet when, on the following day, Bloch sent me the photograph of his cousin Esther, I made haste to forward it to Aime.  And at the same moment I remembered that Albertine had that morning refused me a pleasure which might indeed have tired her.  Was that in order to reserve it for someone else, this afternoon, perhaps?  For whom?  Jealousy is thus endless, for even if the beloved, by dying for instance. can no longer provoke it by her actions, it may happen that memories subsequent to any event suddenly materialise and behave in our minds as though they too were events, memories which hitherto we had never explored, which had seemed to us unimportant, and to which our own reflexion upon them is sufficient, without any external factors, to give a new and terrible meaning.  There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to be alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even though she is dead.  And so we ought not to fear in love, as in every life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone - and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 81-82

In some ways this is simply another Proustian exegesis on the folly of jealousy, although it's one of my favorite ones for a couple reasons.  First off, I'd love to know exactly what this action entails: "And at the same moment I remembered that Albertine had that morning refused me a pleasure which might indeed have tired her." My interest in this is not simply prurient (well, at least not entirely simply prurient) because his fascination with Albertine's sex life, and whether or not she's having sex with a man or a woman, provides a window onto his personal motives and desires and manias.  He follows it up immediately by asking: "Was that in order to reserve it for someone else, this afternoon, perhaps?  For whom?"  While there is some universality to sexual acts, there are others that are more specifically situated inside gender lines (although as I'm writing these words I'm already starting to talk myself out of them, mainly because I'm usually suspicious of the purely binary in matters of sexual desire and performance).  What did he ask of her which she declined, which she would have then been perfectly willing to perform in the afternoon?  It seems to move us away from his manic jealousy in regards to her more sapphic desires, and bring us back to more ecumenical jealousy (I hope I'm the first and last person to ever use that ugly turn of phrase).  What's interesting/sad/maddening is that Proust understands the folly of his jealousy, and he says in a resigned fashion, "Jealousy is thus endless  . .", not simply because it's pointless but also because it never ends, which brings us to the other reason I like this section so much.  Proust is clearly dropping hints of future tragedies.  Within a couple sentences he tells us that "Jealousy is thus endless, for even if the beloved, by dying, for instance, can no longer provoke it by her actions . . ." and "There is no need for there to be two fo you, it is enough to be alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even thought she is dead."  [SPOILER ALERT]  Somehow, he still manages to end on a happier note, or at least a slightly more sanguine one, when he concludes: "And so we ought not to fear in love, as in every life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone - and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret."  In the end we always have the past, even if we haven't figured out what it even means yet.

My Years With Proust - Day 523

Besides, love is an incurable malady, like those diathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 80

If Proust wrote Valentine Day cards.

I've seen Proust quoted for any number of things - including the introduction of my never to be finished manuscript of my never to be published book - but I don't think I've ever seen him quoted in any sappy romance settings.  It's not simply that Proust is often depressing as hell, but, more importantly, I think it's because he's trying to make sense of love and desire, and that tends to make bad popular culture fodder.

My Years With Proust - Day 522

   I had promised Albertine that, if I did not go out with her, I would settle down to work.  But in the morning, just as if, taking advantage of our being asleep, the house had miraculously flown, I awoke in different weather beneath another clime.  We do not begin to work as soon as we disembark in a strange country to the conditions of which we have to adapt ourselves.  And each day was for me a different country.  How could I even recognise my indolence itself, under the novel forms which it assumed? . . .

   I followed his example, and did as I had always done since my first resolution to become a writer, which I had made long ago, but which seemed to me to date from yesterday, because I was regarded each intervening day as non-existent.  I treated this day in a similar fashion, allowing its showers of rain and bursts of sunshine to pass without doing anything, and vowing that I would begin to work next day.  But then I was no longer the same man beneath a cloudless sky; the golden note of the bells contained, like honey, not only light but the sensation of light (and also the sickly savour of preserved fruits, because at Combray it had often loitered like a wasp over our cleared dinner-table)

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 76-78

There are many times during my trek through Remembrance of Things Past when I've felt great kinship with Marcel, and, sadly, this is one of them.  It's difficult to think of someone who wrote this massive novel, and other works, and thousands of personal letters, as someone who struggled to write, but if we're to believe Proust then it is true.  In the end he blames his indolence and his lack of focus, and I can certainly appreciate that comment.  I've been working, clumsily and haphazardly, on this book on the epics for years, and even though I've written a lot I haven't written nearly as much as I should have.  Yes, it would certainly help if I didn't take on these travel courses (although they are utterly transformative for the students, and, truthfully, a hell of a lot of fun) or projects like hosting online music discussions or spending a couple years reading Proust and commenting upon it or being so active on Twitter, but I think it's more than that.  I think I am just intellectually lazy, and it's depressing/humbling to think what I might have accomplished in my career if I were not so, to borrow a favorite word from Proust, indolent.  My father always beat it into my head that I was about the laziest kid in the world, and it well be that he was more than a bit of a prophet.  It's especially frustrating because as I think about the next few years of my life the most obvious path would be to write; it's the natural crossroads where my fading energy and desire for teaching meets my increasing knowledge and broadened perspective.  Still, I am so embarrassingly unproductive.I wish I had a better answer, and a less depressing one.

The Jinn Bicycle Thief

Yes, only in Zanzibar can you take off on a beautiful bike ride through fields and villages, featuring a stop for fresh coconuts and blood oranges along the way - and still find time to visit not one but two Muslim holy men. I'll have more to stay about the stop for fresh fruit later, and I've already posted about our trip bare-footed to the back of the dark, slick, bat-filled cave. We were supposed to visit a female mganga, but at the last minute that fell through, so instead we dropped by to see Mr. Mahomet.  Fortunately when we arrived he was seeing a patient, who was possessed by a troublesome jinn.  To remove the jinn Mr. Mahomet had to bring an even more powerful jinn into his body, and this included some guttural growls and painful contortions, and in the end the young man was cured.  Obviously, the ceremony was carried out in Swahili, but we were able to receive brief translations along the way. In my faith we're told to believe in the seen and the unseen, and this includes jinn.  They are supposed to have been created from smokeless fire.  Some are good and some are bad, and apparently I have a very demanding jinn (according to another mganga) that requires the annual sacrifice of a camel (but more on that later). All of these visits with wganga are fascinating to me, and it shows the syncretic nature of Islam; clearly, this is not the form of the faith that would be practiced in Saudi Arabia (although even there belief in jinn is very common).

It was a beautiful day for a bike ride, with the only incident was yours truly sliding out of control in mud puddle and crashing, but somehow finding the only patch of soft land in the midst of jagged rocks.  By all rights I should have ended up with a broken arm, but I only received a bruised ego.

Mr. Mahomet examining the young man to determined what sort of jinn was possessing him, which would determine the level of treatment.

Mr. Mahomet exhausted at the end of the ceremony.  I don't know why I like this picture so much, but I do and I suspect it will end up on the wall of my office.

After the possession ceremony we were invited to go into the next room and participate in the ceremony.

Mr. Mahomet's office.

 There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, that are dreamt of in your philosphy.

Found Footage

When you raised your son on countless bad horror movies, and the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes that ridiculed/celebrated them, and Michael Weldon's The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film and The Psychotronic Video Guide, these are the types of texts that you get:

"There's a famous abandoned insane asylum about three hours from here in Waltham, MA.  Want to go down there and make a terrible 'found footage' Netflix movie?"

I made many mistakes as a parent, but this is not one of them.

The golden age MST 3000 with Joel.  "Iowa State College - the high school after high school."

Required reading for anyone who claims to be civilized.

Well, ditto, obviously.

My Years With Proust - Day 521

   Sweet, gay, innocent moments to all appearance, and yet moments in which there gathers the unsuspected possibility of disaster, which makes the amorous life the most precarious of all, that in which the unpredictable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls after the most radiant moments, whereupon, without having the heart or the will to draw a lesson from our misfortune, we set to work at once to rebuild upon the slopes of the crater from which nothing but catastrophe can emerge.  I was as carefree as everyone who imagines that his happiness will last.  It is precisely because this tenderness has been necessary to give birth to pain - and will return moreover at intervals to calm it - that men can be sincere with each other, and even with themselves, when they pride themselves on a woman's lovingness, although, taking things all in all, at the unavowed to the rest of the world, or revealed unintentionally by questions and inquiries, a painful disquiet.  But this could not have come to birth without the preliminary tenderness, which even afterwards is intermittently necessary to make the pain bearable and to avoid ruptures; and concealment of the secret hell that a life shared with the woman in question really is, to the point of parading an allegedly tender intimacy, expresses a genuine point of view, a universal process of cause and effect, one of the modes whereby the production of grief and pain is rendered possible.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 75

I feel that this passage exists somewhere between the Drive-By Truckers' Women Without Whiskey, Neil Young's Barstool Blues, and Percy Sledge's When a Man Loves a Woman.

Proust reflects upon the inevitability of pain in any relationship with a woman, but also, concomitantly, the inevitability of wisdom. Months ago we talked about the fact that in the happiest moment there lurked beneath the surface the unexpected cataclysmic disaster.  If anything he's now more certain of heartbreak, made more cruel that it is hidden by blissful moments: "Sweet, gay, innocent moments to all appearance, and yet moments in which there gathers the unsuspected possibility of disaster, which makes the amorous life the most precarious of all, that in which the unpredictable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls after the most radiant moments . . ."  If men were honest with themselves, and each other, they'd admit that this was the reality of all things, although they usually aren't - at least this is self-evident to Proust. As I once had a character say in a rightfully discarded novel, "Sadly, knowledge brings pain, but, thankfully, pain brings knowledge."