Beside the Point!

Yes, comrades: I am officially the owner of the cutest boots in Bay Area. And no, on this picture I am not really wearing any pants. It happens. Anyway, you can’t see much of my skin so no, it does not qualify as a ‘glam shot’. And I recall a summer day about ten years ago when I got home in the afternoon and told my mother: “Mother, today I saw the cutest heels and I’m in love!” My mother told me then that there will come a day when I’ll grow up and think other things – men, for example – more worthy of such emotions. My mother obviously did not think I’d go on and do serious things like graduate studies abroad, all the while still feeling giggly about a new pair of shoes…

Lyckliga slut

‘Glam shot’ from November 2006. Me in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The picture is in no way related to the poem below.

*

De enda ord jag aldrig sagt

när elden i dem tog fatt

försvann från pappret bort –

detta gamla förbannade hopp –

och kvar blev endast askan...

Drömmen om en annan

i den sista läsningen finns

och det jag av den minns.

Ensam vandrade jag hem till mig –

hela jag luktade precis som dig –

undrade länge om det ska gå

varför vägarna alltid leder isär

hur ofta man orkar älska så...

Och att allt jag tycks äga är

det jag skrivit

om alla vi som aldrig blivit

män jag kysst

och lukter som dröjer när det är tyst.

Ingen av historierna jag kan berätta

är mina helt, fullt, med rätta –

jag står frågande inför alla

viskar hur gör de andra

det känns som löven borde falla

som vi för varandra...

Ibland räcker det med en arm

att sova på, att hållas varm

att fångas upp i en annans famn

och höra hela världen i hans namn.

Jag har aldrig tillhört

för alla band jag förstört

när verklighet blir dröm –

förstås även tvärtom –

och livet en strid ström

är du också en av dem

fritagen ur tiden, löst från pakten

infogad i en fantasi som är sliten;

varje gång är jag lika liten

och du tar upp hela platsen

där jag inte räcker till

när du ligger tätt intill...

Jag vet inte hur man gör

när man en annan tillhör.

Jag har aldrig på något samlat

än minnen av alla gånger jag famlat

älskat, hoppats och råkat ramla...

Jag tror inte du skulle sett annorlunda ut

och inte heller tror jag på några lyckliga slut.

A Heroine of Our Time (fictional)

a short story by

Josefina

October 2010

Part I.

Our life is made of nothing but memories. For nothing else can we keep, nothing else can we ever own and nothing else makes us into to who we are like the places we’ve been and the people we’ve known. Or the books we’ve read.

Had he known when he saw her that this evening would remain with him for the rest of his life, maybe he would have acted differently. Maybe he wouldn’t have sought to catch her flickering eyes when she stood there all alone in that large, crowded room. Maybe he wouldn’t have made his way through the mass of people, asked her name and offered to refill her glass of red wine. Certainly he wouldn’t have let her walk away and disappear among the faceless pedestrians on the streets of San Francisco that early morning in October. A disappearance as irreversible and abrupt as her appearance.

The problem with memories is that we can travel back again and again, revisit them as often as we’d like, but nothing in them is changeable. The choice once made is always repeated; the fear once felt is never overcome. The weight of her warm head on his chest, the softness of her hair as he ran his fingers through it, the feeling of her toes against his legs – and this is all that belongs to him now…

On the evening of the conference’s first day – at the formal and rather fancy reception – she saw him long before he noticed her. As she watched him consumed in an animated discussion with two other male professors – all dressed in similar dark and strict suits – she guessed him to be almost ten years older than he was. Later she found this funny for she was often thought to be several years younger than she was. Indeed he thought she was but a student, until he saw her name on the program and realized they were in similar situations. If she were to pinpoint what about him it was that made her smile when he finally approached her, it would probably have been more the way he carried himself than the way he looked. There was an air of assurance about him. He had confidence stretching beyond his tall frame. His face displayed not that meek kindness common to so many men – capable of driving a woman straight to insanity – but the kind of thoughtfulness that comes from not always acting out of personal gain.

He never pretended to have fallen for anything but her looks.

If he seemed confident because of what he had done, did and was capable of doing, then her confidence came from knowing she didn’t have to do anything to achieve the same effect. At least she would never let it slip or show that the creation of conventional beauty was just that: created.

Later the same evening he told her that she looked like a painting naked.

She had laughed for a long time before asking: “What kind of painting? I hope you don’t mean Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’? There are many different paintings…”

While tracing his fingertips over the slight emergence of her ribs and down along her stomach, he really couldn’t say…

After being introduced properly to each other – without uttering last names – after making polite conversation over several glasses of red wine and after the big room had become less and less crowded; after all of this she said: “I think the best thing a girl can ever get is a man with a beard. You know God thinks you’ve done something right in life if at some point you are rewarded with a bearded man.”

He laughed. Never before had a woman interpreted his facial hair as a sign of divine intervention. She said it even though she knew men are fragile. To her it was an invitation for him to play with her. She giggled, she flipped her hair, she slightly touched his elbow – wondering if he’d join the act…

Outside it was raining when they left campus together. It had been dark for hours already. He placed his arm around her waist and she snuggled close enough for her head to rest against his shoulder. The streets were empty save fallen, brown leaves.

“If I were your wife, then I would only talk to others about you as ‘professor X’, or maybe ‘doctor X’, but never would I speak of you by using your first name. I would place you on a pedestal, so high above myself, as if you were much bigger than me… and not only physically, but even metaphysically. I would adore you. I would respect you. I would turn your person, your life and your works into a myth,” she said.

And he hadn’t kissed her. Not even once.

She continued:

“You’d be just as you are now and I would remain exactly the same. I’d be your pretty, little wife: silly, sweet and always wearing flowing skirts. You would be my serious, brilliant husband: older, wiser and always wearing stiff shirts.” She paused, stopped walking and looked up at him. “We’d have famous scholars over for dinner – for by then you and I will also be famous scholars and they will be our friends – and you would deliver excellent commentary on current events and I’d provide the bubbly comic relief. And after they’ve gone, we will be all alone with each other in our library.” He put his right hand gently along her left cheek. She placed her hand on top of it. Smiled. “Yes, we have a library. You sit down in your chair, light a cigarette as I fetch one of Pasternak’s poetry collections, sit down in your lap… You put on your reading glasses before taking the book from me, before we start reading it aloud to each other. You start reciting a random poem and I finish it.”

“You finish my sentences also?” he asked.

She didn’t say. She only laughed.

He put his left hand gently along her right cheek. She turned her face up against his. The orange glow of a nearby street light glittered in her eyes and made her hair glimmer as if caught on fire. She stood on her tiptoes. Then he closed his eyes. They kissed. And she understood he would never know the sensational feeling of all those small hairs touching her tender skin…

“I have to take you home now,” he said.

She would have answered, had he not kissed her again.

“To my home,” he clarified. “For as of yet, we do not own a shared library…”

He unlocked the door, dropped the key on the table and quickly turned around. There she was: standing in the door, leaning against its frame and looking like a tiny goddess with those long strands of wet hair framing her flushed cheeks. He grabbed her, lifted her up and carried her to the bed. She giggled. They hadn’t even taken off their coats or shoes yet… While he unbuttoned all her buttons, relieving all her different body parts of their respective coverage, she said: “But most likely that is not what it is going to be like…”

He looked up: “You will never be my wife?”

She smiled: “It will be the opposite. And because of it our future will come to nothing. It simply won’t be if you’re not better than me.”

If he had actually been as old as he looked – with another ten years of experience on his broad shoulders – maybe at this point he would have said something. He didn’t. The following morning – that very same early morning in October when they parted ways on Market Street – he watched her disappear. All that he keeps, all that he can own now is the memory of once having been mistaken for capable of playing a better man.

In her rendition of the same recollection she always concludes that whereas most men can grow a beard, few can handle a heroine of our time.

A Heroine of Our Time (factual)

Stages of how to brainstorm kick-ass topics about Lermontov’s novel “A Hero of Our Time” for a final paper in a class on Russian romanticism at University of California, Berkeley. Observances made of a study room in Main Stacks on October 24^th 2010.

Stage I: the graduate student displays excitement.

Stage II: the graduate student gets frustrated and bangs her head in the table. Repeated times.

Stage III: the graduate student falls deeper and deeper into despair.

Stage IV: Eureka! The graduate students – the ‘heroine of our time’ had to get a little help from a good friend and fellow comrade, of course – have brainstormed awesome topics for two papers that will receive nothing less than an A. Or so help us God!

The week that went past contained two moments of “Oh my, this is a first!”. Already on Tuesday did I start to feel like some sort of sleazy sickness was sneaking up on me, but it wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon that I actually realized that I had caught a cold. How does one catch a cold in California? That was what most of my friends in Russia and family members in Sweden wanted to know. Well, believe it or not, but also here we have the season called ‘fall’, and in addition to this we have plenty of people sniveling and spreading various viruses around in public spaces. I woke up on Thursday thinking I should not go to class. But as I had already spent the entire evening before preparing a very good presentation on rhythm in Bely’s “Petersburg”, I felt like I had to go and just try my best to survive the three hours that our seminar on Russian modernism usually lasts. And because I know I always frown upon people coming to class when they’re sick and endangering everyone else in the room with their contagious diseases, I sat in the very back of the room and didn’t touch anyone or anything. On Thursday evening I did nothing but stayed home, while curing myself with tons of medicine and even – I know, oh the horror! – watching a movie on my computer. I haven’t watched anything since I first came to Berkeley in the middle of August. Not a movie, not even a TV-show. Would you believe me if I said I just haven’t had the time? That yet I have never had a freaking free evening when there’s simply been NOTHING else to do? Okay, so I don’t study all the time. That’s true. But when I don’t study I go to church or go to the grocery store or wash my clothes [and get into an argument with the dryer every time] or go running or hang out with my friends at the International House. Or if I have an entire evening to spend on nothing, then I enjoy spending it with an occasional man…

The best moments of my life from the past couple of weeks can sadly not be chronicled here, out in the open on my blog. Why? you wonder. Because this might actually be something. Or nothing and I’m going to throw in the towel, start writing op-eds for my hometown’s biggest paper about how I can never get it right with men. I’d pitch it to my editor as “The Chronicles of a Chronically Single Woman”. I have spent a lot of time thinking lately about how to actually meet someone, how to get to the point where you’re officially ‘dating’ [has that ever happened to ANYONE?!], and about how people keep getting themselves into all these romantic relationships when I don’t even know how to put the subtle message across to a man that I’m into him and that – hint, hint – maybe he should address that. How do people do it? How do people meet each other and decide to become ‘boyfriend & girlfriend’? And how do people later take the next terrifying step and get married? I am mesmerized, baffled and exceedingly concerned. I never know what to say to a man that I like. And I’ve thought a lot lately about how I’ve actually never liked a man before in my life like that, and never been the one to ‘initiate’ anything… Up until this moment in my life I’ve never got to choose anyone. I’ve never been the one to pick. But I think I’ve lived long enough now, that I’m old and experienced enough – heck, I’m a graduate student! seriously! – to make such mature decisions as what man I’d like to go out with.

If I had spent a little less time lately pondering the handsome men of Berkeley that may or may not consent to taking me out and showing me a good time, I might not have got a B on my midterm paper in Russian romanticism. I know! My first B in higher education. I can also not believe it. I was crushed. I was devastated. But for some reason there’s always a silver lining: after getting that B on Friday, I made friends with another girl in my class who also got a B on her paper and we went out, had dinner, drank wine, then got to a bar where we had whiskey, ranted and planned our imminent academic vengeance. I booked a study room in the Main Stacks for this Sunday afternoon. And the rest is, as they say, history – or at least meticulously recorded in the photographs above.

And all might not be lost for me in the end, after all – for on Friday evening I’m going out. For drinks. With a man…

Berkeley Time

Actually it is an official term: ‘Berkeley Time’ means that everything starts ten minutes later than indicated. I’m not sure that’s exactly what was expressed through the clocks pictured above [and it has already been fixed, sadly – for it was good meta-temporal fun while it lasted!].

Apocalyptic Time

In my previous post I asked rhetorically “What would Tatiana do?” [the leading lady of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”]. This afternoon in downtown San Francisco I found evidence that more people turn to Russian literature for sound advice about life.

A view of campus as seen from above, i.e. Berkeley’s ‘phallic symbol’ [ehm, Sather Tower].

Good to know.

…and at the same time somewhere in northern California, it is still blue skies and sunshine every single day with temperatures around 25 degrees Celsius. But it is strange, don’t you think, that the weather here has been approximately the same ever since I first came here in the middle of August, being as it is now already well into October? And ‘they’ [people I know] keep telling me that fall will come – eventually – but as of yet there are no signs of any apocalyptic time anywhere. Living in Berkeley is living without time. There is no time here for nothing changes in nature but constantly it all remains the same – a sort of eternal early European summer or late Russian spring prevails. Living in Russia was living constantly in [fear of] apocalyptic time; you know, the kind of time that has a beginning and an end simultaneously as well as no sense of the present being different from neither past nor future. All times are concurrently spinning around you and time can move both sideways and backwards, just as long as it doesn’t move forward slowly, steadily like a straight line. Apocalyptic time can be stressful, but you get used to it after a couple of years, and then you can employ it to your advantage. Here there’s no sense of time existing at all. We have different times of the day; eat breakfast in the morning and dinner in the evening, also we celebrate the seven days of the week by calling them by their distinct names, but other than this – what is time anyway? So there’s definitely a feeling of wanting to only live while in Berkeley. Something that for me was difficult at first for I come from a tradition – as well as loaded with fresh experiences of apocalyptic time – where one constantly needs to perform, where there has to be movement forward, things need to be accomplished and over and done with in order for them to be behind and something else to appear up ahead. I think one of the greatest lessons I have learned so far at Berkeley is the importance of only living. I don’t think about the big, scary, long-term things ahead of me – for I spent many years thinking about them before this – but here, I live in the now. The work load in graduate school is, of course, quite insane, so all of the above should in no way be seen as “ah, so Josefina is just hanging out, wearing her ‘daisy dukes and bikinis on top’, soaking up the Californian sun”, but rather that because the classes are so intense and demanding here, I have to always consciously make the time for life every day.

And because there is so much to do, so much to read [that in fact I have to make my own reading schedule so as to manage all the independent reading demanded for classes during the week – how else to consume some 1000 pages in seven days?], so much new information to take in, so many new people to develop friendships with, so many cute boys and handsome men to flirt with [my God, sometimes I feel like I’ve just been released from an all-girls boarding school and can’t even be civil about my bubbly excitement with the sheer amount of the opposite sex surrounding me] – I have had to make several tough decisions regarding my life. The truth is that you can’t be ‘half-way’ into graduate school, you can’t see it as something you do ‘on the side’, or something you do like ‘eh, why not’, for to be in graduate school means to be serious about your future career. Graduate school can be an awesome adventure, but it consumes all of you – and the work and concentration it takes turned out to be more than I ever suspected. There have been times during the past two months when I have asked myself if this is really what I want, what I want to do with my time and my life, if there aren’t other things I could apply myself to better. But every time I arrive at one and the same conclusion: this is it. When will I ever again get the opportunity to study at such a prestigious university? Not likely ever again, comrades. And often when I find studying here too difficult, too hard, too demanding and when my professors do not fail to point out stupid mistakes made [by me], I think of my grandmother [on my mother’s side]; that this is the kind of thing she would have loved. She would’ve loved the way they teach literature here – as would probably every literary woman on earth, including my mother. But none of them got to go Berkeley; as a matter of fact no one in my family before me even got so much as a Master’s – let alone get accepted to graduate school! So I think of that when I’m spending my Saturdays in the library doing research, when I’m running up in the Berkeley hills, when I’m flirting myself stupid with innocent males…

I quit my job as a professional blogger during the past week. First of all, I don’t have the time. Secondly, I don’t need the money. And thirdly, I know this is the time in my life when I am ready to write something entirely else.

On another note, I think I’ve started collecting dresses. Or only buying dresses whenever the opportunity presents itself. Well, if the weather is always going to be great, then I might as well celebrate it by wearing lovely, flowing, curve-hugging dresses?

What would Tatiana do?

Minnen av det som var nyss;

tårar blandas i en sista kyss –

fast du borde bett mig gå

sov jag över ändå.

Var det dina färger som brann;

att vi är så olika varann –

som fick mig smeka orden

skrivna på andra sidan jorden?

Som Tatiana läste Onegin läste jag dig;

fann allt du kan bespara mig –

är bläck du strött längsmed kanten

innan du för mig ut till branten.

This Sunday was an excellent Sunday: I went to the Norwegian church in San Francisco in the morning, where I had agreed to meet up with this Swedish pastor slash Dostoevsky scholar [my ‘old’ university in Russia – Ural State University – published his book on Dostoevsky in a Russian translation this spring; I’m sure there’s a post about it somewhere around here on the blog] who is currently visiting the United States together with his wife to do some guest-lecturing and the like. I hadn’t met his wife before. She’s very nice. And he is very nice, too, of course, but this I’ve been aware for several years because a) I have met him many times in Russia and even translated for him at a conference there once; b) he has read my articles in Sweden for years and even knew who I was before we met [given that I had read his book on Dostoevsky long before we actually met, too]; and c) we agree on so many things that there is hardly any need for us to discuss these things. And sometimes it is pleasant to be in that kind of agreement that hardly needs to be expressed for it to be mutually understood. Through him and his wife today I also got acquainted with some other interesting people – four couples of Swedish immigrants living in the Bay Area [all six of them belong to the same generation born in the late 1930s] – and after church they invited me to come with them to a very nice restaurant to have late lunch/early dinner together. It was a lot of fun. I like old people. And the funny thing is that old people like me as well.

Last Sunday was a horrible Sunday. I was on my way to church in the morning, taking the BART [short for ‘Bay Area Rapid Transportation’; a sort of subway that stretches over the entire Bay Area and gets you from Berkeley to San Francisco in about 20 minutes], and on one of the stops in Oakland I noticed that this strange guy who just got on was looking at me weirdly and intensely. He was staring in an exceedingly unpleasant manner, comrades. I wasn’t born yesterday; I know what kind of creeps this world of ours is full of. And because I wasn’t born yesterday, I have developed a highly advanced intuition that helps me discover danger before danger has discovered me, and figure out a way to deal with it long before there’s anything to deal with. Some might call me paranoid; in my opinion, if you haven’t walked as much as a mile in my high heels then you shouldn’t say a word and don’t call me anything, thank you. Right before my stop in downtown San Francisco I looked around and I noticed that the guy was suddenly gone. And so I got off, thinking to myself that nothing’s going to happen. The moment I reached street level, though, there he was walking right in front of me. I realized he must have switched cars so that he could see where I got off without me paying attention to it. Sneaky bastard! The guy was pretty big – much bigger than me at least – and so I decided not to take any chances with him – because I don’t let people touch me lightly, especially not those who clearly have too much of a physical upper hand – and not to simply think naively to myself: “Hmm, this must probably just have been his stop, too”. I switched sidewalks in the middle of the street. This was on an early Sunday morning in San Francisco’s financial district and the one time that I would’ve liked to have people around – there was no one. It was only the two of us. He switched sidewalks too and walked right ahead of me again. So I stopped, walked back a couple of steps and then turned into another block, away from this street. I looked back. He was still following me. Damn it! I searched for people around me, just for someone walking past, an arm I could’ve grab a hold of and say: “I’m being stalked! Pretend you know me and let me walk with you!” But, of course, there was nobody. And this creep was still following me. So I switched streets again and again. I started running. I waited for a while, then I ran for a while again and for a couple of minutes I thought I had finally shaken him off. Then I noticed him standing further ahead up on Columbus and looking around, as if searching for me. Damn it! I decided that my only hope so as not to get sexually assaulted this Sunday – who knew what his plan was anyway?! – and get to church in time was to get lost in the crowd – the only crowd at this early time of day in the area – of Chinatown. And I ran through Chinatown, on purpose switching streets randomly all the time, then up one of the hills and arrived at church from an entire different direction than I usually do. I was soaked in sweat and shaking. And asking myself over and over again: “Do we really need men?!” I am not sure we do, as a matter of fact. How many women do you see stalking innocent young men on their way to church on Sunday mornings? Have you ever heard of it? First of all, this kind of behavior is absolutely pointless. There was really no point for him to behave like that. What did he think he was going to get out of it? Out of me? Okay, so what if I hadn’t been as experienced with creeps as I am? What would’ve happened if I would’ve simply thought him being on the same street as me – time after time again – a pure coincidence? What if I hadn’t been as smart as I am? What if I would’ve been the one to take my chances? In general I think all men who behave like this should be castrated on the spot by by-standing women. I am very much for using the ‘immediate justice’ that has put in practice in some African countries for cases like this. Castrate the creeps straight there on the street and then leave them to bleed to death. No mercy! This is one girl who has had it with sexual harassment related to public transportation – first there was only collective ‘feeling up’ on the bus – and the guys always look like they have no idea what I’m talking about when I tell them to move away and could you please remove your hand from my thigh, yeah, that’s my thigh right there – and now we have stalking innocent church-goers around the BART.

In the class on modernism that I’m currently taking we are being taught about the crisis in masculinity of the early 20th century. I think masculinity is very much still in crisis. It seems to me that masculinity has been going through this crisis ever since Nora up and left, saying plainly that she needs to become herself before she can take care of anyone else. When Nora set out into the world to discover herself she was entirely on the clear with what she wanted and what she was doing, and thus we’ve never had to go through any ‘crisis of femininity’. Even to think of such an occurrence among our sex is absurd! But men lost everything when they lost Nora. And instead of also discovering themselves – not saying this is true for everyone, but our modern culture is too soaked in this archetype of the pathetic, lonely, deserted man for it not to be true on at least some deeper, mythological level – they remained in that empty apartment, finding that they could no longer be men without the woman. And in order for the man to be a man there has to be a woman. And as she is often absent – for she’s busy out there in the world creating not only her own life, but also the life of the next generation and thus she cannot be bothered with the impatient and sad little man’s fragile feelings and/or feelings of fragility – she must be forced into presence. Most men stop at the making use of those puppy eyes and nothing but pity sex is what they succeeded in forcing out of the woman. Not that this is necessarily a good thing; but it is much better than the alternative.

I have often thought that Ibsen’s play was nothing but foreplay for the entire next century.

Often have I also thought to myself “What would Tatiana do?” and wondered if I would read Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” differently now – at the age of twenty-five – but I find that I don’t. I spent the entire day yesterday – Saturday – alone with myself and with Pushkin’s novel in verse… It was beautiful. Tatiana is still the same girl that I love and adore and deeply respect and sometimes I think to myself that perhaps Nora also asked herself “What would Tatiana do?” before walking out. And she walked out because she realized – of course, it must be so – that Tatiana would never have taken any of this crap. Already in the 1820’s Tatiana was a feminist long before there was such a concept. That was my first reading of it; I’m afraid it will also be my last – over and over and over again…

In other news I went out for beer with almost half of the graduate students at my department after classes on Friday. As we’re only about 20 graduate students that’s not that many and not too difficult to do. I love my new department. Sometimes I wish it wasn’t so much hard work. That’s why blogging cannot be done on a regular basis. Because most of the time I’m in the library, covered in books and papers and homework and… yes, the glorious life of a graduate student!

I’m not sure if I’m dating anyone at the moment. I’m not sure that I ever was?