the global home, new jobs for pirates, and beirut chicken feet
It is necessary not to be "myself," still less to be "ourselves."
The city gives one the feeling of being at home.
We must take the feeling of being at home into exile.
We must be rooted in the absence of a place.
-Simone Weil
Walking beneath these Beirut buildings is like strolling through the mouth of an eccentric orthodontist, a picky fellow with big plans for each one of his teeth. He chose the decor for every individual bi-cuspid and incisor, eyeing them lazily in the mirror conjuring some sort of separate motif for the molars. Sometimes he finishes his work, other times half constructed dentures like temporary balconies sit side-by-side diamond studded braces rising up from the concrete sidewalks towering over the people in the taxi's and scooters and BMW's and Mercedes stirring the spit around, the inevitable invisible fauna that all cities have, as if looking at them from airplanes.
I made my first microscopic contribution to this rag-tag maw today. Woke up cold for the first time since we've been here, a single sheet, now an inadequate barrier between the elements and I, as well as the mosquitos. None-the-less, it got me going--sparking some sort of basic motivation in me. I was to meet Marina at AUB (American University of Beirut) like usual for lunch when from out of nowhere, maybe it was the bowel movement (it would become a theme of the day, the pasta we cooked last night with tap water resulting in something resembling chicken vindaloo), I lost the softest spot of my timidness when it comes to dealing with this city, the city that I've been trying to feel comfortable in once again. And for the record, let me say that it's not the plaque on the walls or the chicken foot I almost stepped on the other day that creates this disquiet, it's my dealings with people, it's always been my dealings with people, that's my problem, whether in the US or here. Sure, sometimes I'm spot on, other times fumbly bumbly, but the good interactions are harder and harder, and I take them harder, when I can't speak the language.
Point being, I found that occasional happiness that we all stumble upon from time-to-time among the brick-by-brick crumbling homes and architectually divine monoliths as I walked from Caracas, through the Hamra District and just as I passed a sign written in spray paint, a block from campus, which read "Music Store" with a mutually spray painted arrow pointing the way, that happiness transformed itself into a concrete business idea.
I entered the store, some sort of mantra about "not ever feeling at home anywhere so why should I be scared here?" ran through my head. It worked and my fear became courage as if my emotional battery is only positively and negatively charged, figure out how to flip it and I'm the opposite of the man you just saw.
Performing one of my personally celebrated setups, what most sane people like to call a "plan," I asked the man how much the cd's in his store cost. "8,000 lira," about 5 bucks. With mostly burned, yet current, mainstream hip-hop album covers staring back at me from the table, I took the next step, sure that he would say no, I asked him if he'd be interested in selling some "hip-hop mixtape cd's" that I'd made. Sure enough he denied me, so I thanked him, walked out of the store, went around the corner for a few minutes and headed back to his shop. Remembering that to make a joke, or sometimes smile in these precarious situations in Beirut leads to this disdain filled quietness on the part of the citizens, sometimes outright rudeness, so I remained stoic and offered that I bring him some "mixtape cd's" for free, and if they sold then we could work out some sort of deal afterwards for future cd's, as I have enough ammo for atleast 10 to 20 separate albums, maybe more now that I've been reunited with my 2 huge cases of music filled to the brim, living on the shelf in a friend's apartment through the war of this past summer. He agreed. Oh joyous day.
As I relished my new found love for this city and my place in it I began to have that feeling I had six months ago: at home when not at home, because there's really only been moments that I could call as such, or at most there have been specific rooms, not whole houses and certainly not entire cities. I thought about the book I've been reading, The Global Soul, Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, by Pico Iyer, a little appropriate I guess. He talks about this world, and these new citizens like himself who he considers "Global Souls," without what the "normal" world would call a true home, born in India to two Indian parents from separate regions speaking different languages, raised in Los Angeles and schooled in England, now spending his time between suburban, if not rural Japan and LA, but travelling the world as a "sometimes journalist."
He writes: ..."I began to wonder whether a new kind of being might be coming to light--a citizen of this International Empire--made up of fusions (and confusions) we had not seen before: a "Global Soul" in a less exalted (and more intimate, more vexed) sense than the Emersonian one. This creature could be a person who had grown up in many cultures all at once--and so lived in the cracks between them--or might be one who, though rooted in background, lived and worked on a globe that propelled him from tropic to snowstorm in three hours. She might have a name that gave away nothing about her nationality (a name like Kim, say, or Maya, or Tara), and she might have a porous sense of self that changed with her location. Even the most ageless human rites--scattering his father's ashes, or meeting the woman who might be his wife--he might find himself performing six thousand miles from the place he now called home."
"The key to this global soul, for Emerson, lay entirely in perception: it was not so much that man had been exiled from the Garden as that he has ceased to notice that it was all around him. In that sense, our shrinking world gave more and more of us a chance to see, in palpable, unanswerable ways, how much we had in common, and how much we could live, in the grand Emersonian way, beyond petty allegiances and labels, outside the reach of nation-states.....Yet the chance to rise to this higher sense of kinship was shadowed by the fact that more and more of what we seemed to share was on the merest surface, and global unity was most often defined in terms of common markets and linked networks; sometimes it could seem that the main force carrying the 'Novus Ordo Seclorum' around the world--our new order of man--was the dollar bill (on which that noble motto is inscribed above the Masonic Seal)."
So, as you can imagine I was quite taken aback when I received a phone call. You are now reading the blog of a mexican-american living in Beirut, the proud tudor of 2 Korean kids, and perhaps their father, the businessman.
The city gives one the feeling of being at home.
We must take the feeling of being at home into exile.
We must be rooted in the absence of a place.
-Simone Weil
Walking beneath these Beirut buildings is like strolling through the mouth of an eccentric orthodontist, a picky fellow with big plans for each one of his teeth. He chose the decor for every individual bi-cuspid and incisor, eyeing them lazily in the mirror conjuring some sort of separate motif for the molars. Sometimes he finishes his work, other times half constructed dentures like temporary balconies sit side-by-side diamond studded braces rising up from the concrete sidewalks towering over the people in the taxi's and scooters and BMW's and Mercedes stirring the spit around, the inevitable invisible fauna that all cities have, as if looking at them from airplanes.
I made my first microscopic contribution to this rag-tag maw today. Woke up cold for the first time since we've been here, a single sheet, now an inadequate barrier between the elements and I, as well as the mosquitos. None-the-less, it got me going--sparking some sort of basic motivation in me. I was to meet Marina at AUB (American University of Beirut) like usual for lunch when from out of nowhere, maybe it was the bowel movement (it would become a theme of the day, the pasta we cooked last night with tap water resulting in something resembling chicken vindaloo), I lost the softest spot of my timidness when it comes to dealing with this city, the city that I've been trying to feel comfortable in once again. And for the record, let me say that it's not the plaque on the walls or the chicken foot I almost stepped on the other day that creates this disquiet, it's my dealings with people, it's always been my dealings with people, that's my problem, whether in the US or here. Sure, sometimes I'm spot on, other times fumbly bumbly, but the good interactions are harder and harder, and I take them harder, when I can't speak the language.
Point being, I found that occasional happiness that we all stumble upon from time-to-time among the brick-by-brick crumbling homes and architectually divine monoliths as I walked from Caracas, through the Hamra District and just as I passed a sign written in spray paint, a block from campus, which read "Music Store" with a mutually spray painted arrow pointing the way, that happiness transformed itself into a concrete business idea.
I entered the store, some sort of mantra about "not ever feeling at home anywhere so why should I be scared here?" ran through my head. It worked and my fear became courage as if my emotional battery is only positively and negatively charged, figure out how to flip it and I'm the opposite of the man you just saw.
Performing one of my personally celebrated setups, what most sane people like to call a "plan," I asked the man how much the cd's in his store cost. "8,000 lira," about 5 bucks. With mostly burned, yet current, mainstream hip-hop album covers staring back at me from the table, I took the next step, sure that he would say no, I asked him if he'd be interested in selling some "hip-hop mixtape cd's" that I'd made. Sure enough he denied me, so I thanked him, walked out of the store, went around the corner for a few minutes and headed back to his shop. Remembering that to make a joke, or sometimes smile in these precarious situations in Beirut leads to this disdain filled quietness on the part of the citizens, sometimes outright rudeness, so I remained stoic and offered that I bring him some "mixtape cd's" for free, and if they sold then we could work out some sort of deal afterwards for future cd's, as I have enough ammo for atleast 10 to 20 separate albums, maybe more now that I've been reunited with my 2 huge cases of music filled to the brim, living on the shelf in a friend's apartment through the war of this past summer. He agreed. Oh joyous day.
As I relished my new found love for this city and my place in it I began to have that feeling I had six months ago: at home when not at home, because there's really only been moments that I could call as such, or at most there have been specific rooms, not whole houses and certainly not entire cities. I thought about the book I've been reading, The Global Soul, Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, by Pico Iyer, a little appropriate I guess. He talks about this world, and these new citizens like himself who he considers "Global Souls," without what the "normal" world would call a true home, born in India to two Indian parents from separate regions speaking different languages, raised in Los Angeles and schooled in England, now spending his time between suburban, if not rural Japan and LA, but travelling the world as a "sometimes journalist."
He writes: ..."I began to wonder whether a new kind of being might be coming to light--a citizen of this International Empire--made up of fusions (and confusions) we had not seen before: a "Global Soul" in a less exalted (and more intimate, more vexed) sense than the Emersonian one. This creature could be a person who had grown up in many cultures all at once--and so lived in the cracks between them--or might be one who, though rooted in background, lived and worked on a globe that propelled him from tropic to snowstorm in three hours. She might have a name that gave away nothing about her nationality (a name like Kim, say, or Maya, or Tara), and she might have a porous sense of self that changed with her location. Even the most ageless human rites--scattering his father's ashes, or meeting the woman who might be his wife--he might find himself performing six thousand miles from the place he now called home."
"The key to this global soul, for Emerson, lay entirely in perception: it was not so much that man had been exiled from the Garden as that he has ceased to notice that it was all around him. In that sense, our shrinking world gave more and more of us a chance to see, in palpable, unanswerable ways, how much we had in common, and how much we could live, in the grand Emersonian way, beyond petty allegiances and labels, outside the reach of nation-states.....Yet the chance to rise to this higher sense of kinship was shadowed by the fact that more and more of what we seemed to share was on the merest surface, and global unity was most often defined in terms of common markets and linked networks; sometimes it could seem that the main force carrying the 'Novus Ordo Seclorum' around the world--our new order of man--was the dollar bill (on which that noble motto is inscribed above the Masonic Seal)."
So, as you can imagine I was quite taken aback when I received a phone call. You are now reading the blog of a mexican-american living in Beirut, the proud tudor of 2 Korean kids, and perhaps their father, the businessman.
posted by miguella guerilla at 7:06 PM
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