Volšovy

On Wednesday, when we visited Kadov, the sun was shining.  The day before and every day since, it has been raining in Sušice and apparently, all over the Czech Republic.  Vladka sent me an email saying that the sun came out for my visit.

Do you recognize, when you meet someone for the fist time, something in the eyes that is deeper than color or kindness? Like God, I suppose, for those who call the spirit God.

Last night, I met Marie Hrečínová Prodanová, an incredible woman who is the Castelanka at the castle in Volšovy, about 2 km from Sušice. She welcomed us to a gathering organized by one of our hosts, Roman Makerlík. Steve had visited Volševy with Roman on Tuesday night, while I was teaching Helena, Roman's wife, and several other Czechs in my first-ever ELL writing class.

Our lovely potluck gathering included six of our students and many of our Czech hosts.  I made a fruit salad and Steve made a green salad with tuna.  Marie provided several varieties of čaj (tea) and coffee.  Families brought home-made dishes that can best be described as Czech pizza (which Pavlína made) and spanikopita (which Helena made) and the BEST little kolačichs, prepared by Radka.  These are wee pastries made with plum preserves and cottage cheese and soaked in buttered rum, rolled in sugar.  You cannot imagine how good they tasted and how much I suffered through the night for my indulgence.

From our arrival, the students were involved with our Czech friends, translating stories, playing chess, taking photos, and playing with the children.  I am so impressed with this group of Americans, proof that we are not all hamburgers and guns.

Marie and her family have been renovating the state-owned Volšovy castle, which dates back to the 12^th century, since 2001. In the mid 19th century, the castle was occupied by a count and countess who eventually bequeathed it to the Catholic Church, and became a nunnery.  

From what I understand, the castle housed an orphanage until the onset of communism, under which it became an army barracks.  The soldiers sacked the place.  It was abandoned until Maria and her family began the restoration.  

The castle and its gardens now serve as a community center. The organization hosts art and theater workshops and offers the sleeping quarters to anyone who wants to stay. One wing is a nightly homeless shelter (Sušice has approximately 10 homeless people).

I spent last night in one of the castle’s beautifully renovated dorm rooms with Jay, David, and Emily, three of our American students, and my sweet Czech friends, Pavlína and Aleš. (It seems to be an adventure that Czechs enjoy, visiting a new place and spending the night.) 

I met Pavlína last year and was adopted by her family.  She calls me her “Mom”, which is odd because I’m Z’s mom, but I’ve begun to accept that designation—I represent for her something good about America, which in all its irony, gives me a bittersweet gladness.  Aleš has been part of Project “New Eyes” since the first year in 2007. 

Aleš and Pavlína met a week ago during Dne Sušice through Brian and Sindra and are now one of the cutest couples ever.  Steve teased them about spending their honeymoon in Salt Lake City.  

After suffering an hour with a painful tooth, I slept well and hard.

David planned to catch a 6:00 am bus back to Chanovice and I heard him leave the room around 5:30.  Then he came back in and told me that we were locked in the castle.  By 8:00, we were all ready to leave, but there was no way out.  Finally, I knocked on the door of Maria’s apartment.  A big dog started barking and she came out to unlock the door for us, still groggy from sleep. 

We called Steve to pick us up, but when he found us on the road, I decided to just walk back with Aleš and Pavlína. 

They turned off the river path to go to Pavlína’s house and I kept walking into town.  A drop-in Czech writing class was scheduled for 9 am in the radnice, but no one showed.  I called Tomaš and he and Jana met Steve and me for breakfast at Fialka.  Another delightful morning of language discussion ensued and then I came back to Tomaše’s apartment where I have been writing and laundering and pondering God.

In all of these beautiful Czech eyes—Vladka, Pavlína, Maria, Tomaše, Radka, Helena, Roman, Aleš—I see God, spirit, love.

Steve was giving Tomaš a hard time for not providing me with a working dvd player and meals every day.  “What are you giving her?” he asked.

“We love her,” Tomaš said, that mischievous smile working as he echoed Steve’s words back to him, “I thought it was all about the relationships.” 

Day Trip

Steve, Lucy, Vladka and the Foal
The yearling and the pony who wanted to eat my purse
Katka with the Shaggy Arabian mare

Prachatice
Vimperk

Today Steve and I took an auto tour of some nearby towns.  We stopped briefly in Vimperk and then ate lunch in Prachatice.  We had stumbled upon this beautiful town last year.   Like Sušice, Prachatice calls itself the "Gateway to the Šumava".  Both Vimperk and Prachatice had primarily German populations before WWII, which is reflected in their architecture.

We had coffee in Volyně, a smaller town with what I would call a round, rather than a square. 

Finally, we landed in Kadov,  where I rejoiced in reuniting with Vladka and her family. Vladka was wearing the necklace I gave her last year and told me she never takes it off.  After a pivo and čaj (beer and tea) and tasty treats prepared by Vladka's daughter, Katka, we walked with both of them to Lucy's place to see her horses. She has Shetland ponies and "Shaggy Arabians", both of whom had yearlings and foals.  

As we walked through the field, they came galloping over a little rise toward us.  The sun was low in the afternoon sky.  Here words are not adequate to represent the beauty of that moment.  They greeted us, dipping their faces toward ours.  The shetlands leaned up against me, searching out any possible apples I may've been hiding.  I wished I had some to offer, but all the horses were content with scratches and petting.  The foal nipped my thigh. 

I will be headed back to Kadov after the program ends and I look forward to a few days of village life with the good people there.

Czech Word

The most common word in the Czech language is "tak", which means so or well. 

 

first day of PNE '09

Yesterday kicked off the Project with the opening "party" at the Socalovna.  It had rained through the night and continued through the morning.  When we emerged, the sun had, too, in a blue sky that complemented the orange-ish tone of Sušice.  

My camera died on Easter, so it will be awhile before I can post any new pictures, but here is one from last year (for the flavor).

on sestinas, angelica, and then what?

Something got me thinking about sestinas which led me back to thinking about Craig Arnold.

Apparently, he fell down the incline and is presumed dead. Now his last day's web writings keep recurring to me. His discussion of ashitaba, or angelica as we know it, explains that the plant he'd previously found floating in his soup is from the same family as anise, cilantro, and Queen Anne's Lace. And hemlock.

Earlier in the day, he alludes to the danger of the volcano itself, later of being drawn to this danger. The larger context of the quote I posted last week has him saving the life of a "mongoose or weasel", but not his "own".

I noticed that Craig was bound home On April 26, when he updated his facebook status. This was really the first time I'd paid attention to what he was doing in Japan. What I've tried to say about reading his blog can't describe the impression it has made. I am humbled to be reintroduced to the poet in this moment.

May you never be sad again, Craig Arnold.

I remember Craig's fascination with and skill for writing in form, which rather anti-climatically brings me back to the sestina. I believe that in the late 90's there was a general reviving embrace of meter and rhyme, while simultaneously, poets of the language school persuasion continued to articulate an altogether unstructured relationship to words.

Time passes. I am stuck in my own days' patterns. I have retrained my brain to look for evidence, for the persuasive buildup to that oh-so-unsatisfying conclusion.

Words are everything and nothing. Ashes. Dust. But then, umbellifer!

Elizabeth Bishop's famous "Sestina" still gets to me. Today I found another by Albert Goldbarth. This seemed a fitting poem to discover the day of my departure, which will be an unraveling and a suture. Good night.

Sestina: As There Are Support Groups, There Are Support Words

The name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore
could not please the ears of a traveller more than hearing
the words “nitrogen,” “oxidation of iron” and “hygrometer.”
—Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century scientist-explorer

by Albert Goldbarth

When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire,
one longs to hear the cry “Hygrometer!
Fresh hygrometer for sale!” Yes, and when the fair
sex sidles close and coyly murmurs “nitrogen”
into a burly masculine ear, I guarantee you: the translation
is very easy. The allurements of a local siren,

whispering the kind of patois a traveler like Lord Byron
favors, never fail to comfort, and to reassure,
evoking pleasant memories of one’s own beloved hygrometer
at home, kept fresh in Cosmoline and camphor
and awaiting one’s rearrival back in his native xenon and nitrogen.
Without these occasional reminiscences, any translation

from nation to nation, tongue to tongue, becomes a translation
difficult to sustain. I think of my grandmother: “We're not hirin’
today” “Go away” “Dumb Jew”—her share
of the language that greeted her here in the land of alien hygrometer
and freedom, where she was only one more funny-skirted for-
eigner yearning to hear a lulling Hungarian nitrogen

hum her to sleep. Eventually, of course, the American nitrogen
sufficed. Her daughter could speak, in free translation,
both uranium and argon; and her granddaughter gigs with Fire ’n
Ice, a skinhead punk-grunge group that performs in sheer
black nighties and clown wigs—she plays mean electric hygrometer
in the first set and then, for a twofer,

(very American, that) plays paper-and-comb. Far
out. She’s so fluent in various World Wide Webbery that nitrogen
in a thousand different inflections is her birthright, and almost any translation,
mind to mind, gender to gender, is second nature. “I earn
my keep, I party, I sleep” is her motto. Though she’s for-
tunate in having a lover who’s CEO at Hygrometer,

Potassium, Klein & Wong: it helps to pay the “hygrometer
man” when he knocks at the door. I won’t say that they fear
this guy exactly, but he’s a major badass nitrogen-
sucking cyberwired ninja-kicking shitheel (or, translation:
call him Sir). It makes one pine for a land where the birds all choir in
sweetly trilling melodies on a flower-scented shore,

and a translation sings all night. Row gen-
tly toward it. The tender forests sigh, and the soft whirr
of the hygrometer promises oxidation of iron.

Albert Goldbarth, “Sestina: As There Are Support Groups, There Are Support Words” from Saving Lives. Copyright © 2001 by Albert Goldbarth. Reprinted with the permission of The Ohio State University Press, www.ohiostatepress.org.

Source: Saving Lives (Ohio University Press, 2001)

one week minus one day

Heading back to the Czech Republic in less than a week and I am mighty nervous tonight. In fact the last few days have been unusually anxiety-ridden. I suppose several factors contribute to this state of mind. Since grading was one, I will breathe out as I am finished (save one portfolio) with that task.

The one portfolio and its author are additional factors, but I am responsible for neither.

Another, and much more subtle factor is the disappearance of Craig Arnold. Days before his scheduled return from Japan, he went hiking on a small volcanic island called Kuchino-erabu-shima. He has been missing since April 26.

Craig and I were in graduate school at the same time and recently have been facebook friends, though other than noticing his updates, I have not communicated directly with him.

His disappearance is eerie. Awful for so many who are close to him. There has been a huge outpouring of support to continue the search after Japanese officials had called it off. Apparently, today there was reason for "cautious optimism".

This from the facebook page, Find Craig Arnold

5/7 3:51pm EST: Officials on Kuchino-erabu report that the search team from 1SRG spent all day yesterday following Craig's trail. They believe they have identified where Craig's tracks end at a steep incline. The team believes that Craig went down that incline but they do not believe it would necessarily be a fatal fall. Thanks to the Fund to Find Craig Arnold and the support of both U.S. and Japanese authorities, the family has been able to re-engage some of the original search team and at least one of the Fulbright volunteers on the island and they will rejoin the search today, coordinating with 1SRG, to try to determine if Craig is somewhere near that incline, and/or where his trail leads from there. We are cautiously but determinedly optimistic, and we are overwhelmed with gratitude to the search team, the local Japanese authorities, the Fulbright volunteers, and all those who have been contributing so generously to this effort as it continues.

Breathe out again.

Kinda.

So, I'm going to take a long bike ride this weekend. And I'm going to a bon voyage party tomorrow night with many of my favorite people.

I will keep thinking about Craig's last posts on Volacano Pilgrim

Danger has a way of cutting through melancholy, the real fear blinding you to the fear dimly imagined. If you could only always just escape death, you would never be sad again.

“The aim is to listen and learn about the struggles, the resistance and rebel movements, support them and bind them together to build a national anti-capitalist, leftist program.”

~Subcomandante Marcos