53 Thresholds.
On October 27th, in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death, Roland Barthes wrote: “As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.” He noted the way time had shifted.
Brandon Shimoda wrote by honoring “the grave on the wall,” and paying tribute to his loved ones by enacting the Japanese rituals in which their spirits could have recognized themselves:
There are, traditionally, two graves: the burial grave and the ritual grave. The burial grave is where the dead are buried. The ritual grave is where the living go to visit the dead. Sometimes these graves are the same. Sometimes not. The ritual grave could be divided: where the dead were born, where the dead died, anywhere, in whatever form, the dead may be perceived and remembered. An altar in the house of the living, a stone in a graveyard, a painting in an alcove, a book.[1]
Two graves involve multiple thresholds.
[Since my mother’s sudden death, all the world is connected across time and space in the reflected place of her. The Romanian rituals assume shape in the gaping silence that capitalist death relies upon, the planned obsolescence, the non-productive attentions of grief outsourced to therapists. At the risk of repeating myself, I must add that there is not enough money on the planet to survive what the U.S. does to its ghosts.]
In a different book, at the confluence where two rivers meet the Danube, Reiner Kunze waits for Mireille Gansel, his translator, in a borderland that becomes home after he is forced to flee the German Democratic Republic because of words, verbs, that inconvenient relationship with words known as poetry.
As Gansel wrote of the Kunze in Translation as Transhumance:
On this borderland, he dug and planted one of the fragile sequoia sapling that his friend Alexander Graf Von Faber-Castell had brought back with him from Canada, dreaming they would grow into trees that would defy all temporal and spatial borders for a thousand years, acting both as witness to the enduring power of nature and as resistance to insane human threats. On this same borderland, the poet planted a young linden tree with broad leaves, the variety that soars like a canopy and for centuries has sheltered the memory of so many legends and songs and an entire part of the life of the ordinary people of his country.
Like any poet building a home outside their homeland, Kunze planted a linden on the borderland between the past and the present.
What grows in the shade around the transplanted linden sapling is a hybrid temporality, a presence that resembles the hybridity of the transplanted poet.
In botany, “transplanting” is the process of moving a fully germinated seedling (or mature plant) and replanting it in a permanent location for the growing season.
My mother explained transplanting as she moved a blackberry shrub closer to the house. “You, me, and your father are transplants,” she said, “but your little sister is a seed.”
“What does this mean?”
“It means that it is harder for me, you, and your father to thrive in this soil—because we were made in a different soil, and we will always compare this soil to some memory of the first soil. But your little sister was born in this soil—she was planted here, as a seed, when I gave birth to her. This land is her land.”
During that summer of death and rebirth in Romania, my mother made plans which she kept secret. Telling us of these plans might have made it more difficult to pass Customs; my sister and I would have been tempted to answer the men with guns by telling the truth. But my mother was not interested in the sort of truth-telling which occurred at the armed borders of nation-states. A coerced truth, to her, was a form of surreality.
Rolled into a pair of socks in my suitcase: my mother’s secret plum seeds.
The plum tree crosses borders, legends, administrative regimes. It returns as a seed in my mother’s hand, a plum tree seed she planted in the front yard, a landmark in the Romanian Republic of Alabama where Romanian is the official language and cabbage is gospel and humans sleep with the ghosts of all ancestors.
My sister and I watched it grow from the front window. After school, there were days when I laid beneath the tree and spoke to my invisible namesake, the other Alina, the grandmother who sucked plums down to the seed. Grandmothers love to hear about the vagaries of a school day. Even dead grandmothers want to be imagined and addressed.
When translating Kunze’s poems, Gansel “learned the accents of an interior language” which she defined as “a language of poetry experienced and shared at the source itself, the very place where it is under threat.” Language is the thing we keep losing. Gansel’s description of translation maps onto the unnameable parts of my body, beginning with the child who is trying to translate the tree in her native country. In the republic without citizens. In the language I am losing. In the transplanted body which can never be a native plant. In the yard of the house I cannot visit, currently occupied by the Texan. It is this threat I am trying to translate. Which begins in a tree that grew from a seed smuggled past Customs officials in a small plastic suitcase.[2]
A tree is a conspiracy between hope and longing. A linden. An almond. A plum. An orchard of uncanny green things sprung from what hands buried deep in the soil of displacements.
The disease of chronic twilight descends when the linden’s shadow wanders beneath the skirts of the hundred-foot magnolia tree. Once a year, the Romanians pool the tuica[3] they smuggled from their homeland, and drink enough to smother the porch in horas.
The poetry recitations begin. The karaoke mic changes hands. The child cannot forget the light stabbing Doamna Mitoseru’s dress like ice picks, the tremor in Doamna’s voice wrapping itself around Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” the infection of accents; the adults sighing as they stare at one another in Romanian, in shards of broken English, in slim strokes of moonlight divided by tree limbs they are crazy for lying, and crazy for trying, and crazy for leaving you.
I say disease because longing—and its cousin, nostalgia—is increasingly theorized in relation to regressive thinking, or the rustle of hair as Lot’s wife turns to look back at the space and time she is leaving. Sodom and Gomorrah.
And because this conception of nostalgia is punitive to immigrants—because it enforces and encourages assimilation, erasure of roots, and the end of first languages—I want to offer a distinction.
An apostle for longing has her own reasons for writing against nostalgia. Like a good plum brandy, nostalgia can ruin the body that ingests too much. But here, have a sip, taste the roots—”Nostos-algia” comes from the Greek meaning return + pain: “the pain that drives you to return”; the pain we fondle in order to flesh out our emotional spectrum, or to gauge how belonging binds us to certain memories; the memories in which we belonged. This relationship between longing and belonging is the bolt on so many secrets.
And maybe all unremembered joy is dishonest. Maybe staying in touch with a time-space is what memory bequeaths to its disciples. I say disciples because memory is a sort of discipline, an attention to fragments, bones, and detritus that must be developed against the culture.
This intimate relationship with memory makes nostalgia integral to the story we tell about ourselves in a cultural context. It offers an idyll or a “homeland” from which to construct identity and assert our preferences and values.[4] In a rootless world, there is nothing more definitive than developing a relationship with our roots. And yet, this nostalgia for an imagined homeland, this hunger for a golden age, cannot avoid creating an imagined past—and cultural amnesia.
Theorist Svetlana Boym distinguished between two types of nostalgia: “restorative nostalgia,” which looks to the past as a golden age and seeks to restore it, and “reflective nostalgia,” which mourns the impossibility of return while re-imagining longing as an act of radical re-visioning. In The Future of Nostalgia, Boym defined contemporary nostalgia as “a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return” and “for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values”:
It could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the Edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them.
This yearning for signs coexists with a need for clarity. And clarity is what fascist politics offers. It does so by presenting the mind with a manipulated seriality that seems inevitable and leads to glory. This linear seriality, a false prophet of similitudes, is what exile admonishes against, what it almost prevents.
By virtue of never belonging, one understands that belonging is illusory, a temporal construction which cannot exist in a globalized world. And yet, one mourns it; one imagines it as an unrealizable ideal.
Imagining is the marrow of Svetlana Boym’s theories on nostalgia, and it informs her call for a reflective nostalgia that settles no place, that requires no drawing of boundaries or war to map it:
Modern nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that the universality of longing can make us more empathetic toward fellow humans, yet the moment we try to repair “longing” with a particular “belonging”—the apprehension of loss with a rediscovery of identity and especially of a national community and a unique and pure homeland—we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding. Álgos (longing) is what we share, yet nóstos (the return home) is what divides us. It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unelected nostalgia breeds monsters. Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition.
The danger of consuming the nostalgia sold to us by others is that its consent is manufactured by humans who seek to use it for power. The writer must read the images for their absences and scan the documents for their speculative fictions. The “unthoughts” are part of this critical thinking.[5]
Mireille Gansel uses nostalgia reflectively in Translation as Transhumance, which takes its title from the paths trodden by shepherds across centuries. In Gansel’s words, as translated by Ros Schwartz, transhumance is “the long, slow, movement of the flocks to distant places, in search of the greenest pastures, the low plains in winter and the high plains in summer.”
Transhumance invokes “all the ancient routes that have witnessed and counters and exchanges in all dialects.” These paths resemble languages, or the points of confluence where languages spill into each other and contaminate lexicons, leaving footprints in the slope of the mountain.
“The ancient routes that have witnessed.” This line gives me goosebumps. What have the trails seen? What do the trees know?
- Brandon Shimoda, The Grave on the Wall (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017) ↵
- Don Mee Choi is near; I can feel her presence in the belief that each object deserves translation, each seed carried over a border has earned its deformation, each bird has a migration tangling with what it has seen. ↵
- A home-brewed plum brandy common to most households in Romania. ↵
- My daughter reminds me that cis-gender females aren’t born with an affinity for pink, but love of pink becomes part of the story they tell about themselves in a culture that markets pink as an objective correlative of femininity. ↵
- Boym offers an alternative form, or a "a tradition of critical reflection on the modern condition that incorporates nostalgia" which she calls the 'off-modern." In Boym's words: "The adverb “off” confuses our sense of direction; it makes us explore side-shadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress; it allows us to take a detour from the deterministic narrative of 20th‑century history. Off-modernism offered a critique of both the modern fascination with newness, and the no less modern reinvention of tradition. In the off-modern tradition, reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together." See her entry for "Nostalgia" in the Atlas of Transformation. ↵