This post is either premature or far overdue (odd how both are terms of gestation), depending on, of course, the audience. I had this odd dream yesterday where I was talking to my Gertrude Stein Professor from this past semester about some sort of media art installation at a gallery about how much the piece relied on or provoked the subjectivity of the viewer. I'm not really sure what I was talking about but my ramblings about the effusiveness of the light and whatever I was saying sounded descriptively sound. Having just re-read Octet by David Foster Wallace (having existed as a handout not having been read for the past 5 years), my mind is just crawling to find something to quench this post-modern thirst. The story is not quite magical as I remember it being and so I am tempted to forswear reading anymore books I read during my most formative years lest everything lose its aura. I'm quite sick--and no, Six, I am not a hypochondriac--and came home early to nap while my co-workers play soccer at the Middle School I live by.
Ah, back to the title. Perhaps all who travel have at least one post about their nostos, and perhaps I had a brief aural moment so I am writing about what has already occurred. Talking to T this morning, for him last evening, I head the triumphant chorus of taxis (music concrete style) and then the palpable silence that lingers afterward. Ah, and then, and then---this string of police cars emerged, their sirens relentlessly adding to the ever voluminous cloud of noise pollution that is Manhattan.
I'm not homesick per se, but--haven't I learned anything from Sentimental Journey? Laurence Sterne (as cliche as it might sound, but please forgive this 225 year old novel) talks about the relationship between communication, travel and sentimental exchange. To gain, one must be willing to expend emotional currency, and yet I find that discourse seems to affront others. I'd like to break some light bulbs open, crush some glass and powder some tungsten under my sneakered feet. It's Seoul City and it's monsoon season. Like Odysseus, the waves and winds will deter me until another unspecified time, at least emotionally. The waves as words and the winds as carriers; here is my digital ash.
2 comments:
I think that a post-modern Sterne would find sentimental exchange, and in turn emotional currency, within silence and the lack of discourse -- through the personal communication between the traveler and the destination itself. That he would believe in discourse, but also solitude, internal contemplation, thoughtfulness, and semi-solipsistic blogging. (I kid, I kid, on that last one.)
Perhaps that's the reason why I like Salinger's "Wien, Wein", because I get this mental image of this tender-hearted person, drifting through city streets, baring her heart and trying to say hello to the city: buildings, streets, idiosyncratic fragments of culture (gum-stains, sewer stench, the orientation of people on the subway, and more), neon lights flickering in repeated patterns, the faraway sound of cars, the sodium streetlamps..
I hope you're speaking to Seoul, and that Seoul whispers back, sometimes, perhaps when walking on its sewered streets and you're crunching both lightbulbs and raindrops underfoot.
This song made me think of you.
Los Campesinos - You! Me! Dancing!
T
nostos! what is nostos!
solipsistic! that's quite a word. It should be used to describe me, said six in his typical solipsistic fashion.
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