1989.

scânteia re-publishes the ‘jurnal national’ of 1989 every day this year. including the TV programme of the time, the photos and the anecdotes. great idea…

sinaia.

i think by now i have come to accept that ambivalent feelings towards this place (not sinaia in particular, those feelings are very straightforwardly beautiful – i mean the country/field/culture mainly) are going to linger with me.

i woke up to the sound of birds, and as i stepped on to the balcony, i remembered the air smell in the field, last september, as i first noticed that the summer had gone, irretrievably.

i slept really well both nights here. it is extremely quiet. and so far, i have not encountered the bear either. a few of the conference participants have, however, and it unsettles me. a few weeks ago, some people were killed this way in this very town. laughing it off may be one way of making it less scary.

mood-song.

Saptamana mare.

It is Holy Week. Scotland makes it almost unnoticeable. I remember last year’s feelings so very well that for a moment, I think my memory is not as bad as I often tend to assume.

Can I remind you of it? Here and here. Easter is just so much better in the Orthodox world.

where the wild storks go…

 I had completely forgotten about this place, and I remembered our amazement at which building the storks chose. Admittedly, not a very good picture, but you get the idea. )

Radical Doubt.

 Es ist nicht die Zeit für Ich-Geschichten. Und doch vollzieht sich das menschliche Leben oder verfehlt sich am einzelnen Ich, nirgends sonst. – Max Frisch  

When I first studied Romanian, I did not like it. I found it contained illogical, structural elements that duplicated meaning unnecessarily. I refused it for a moment. It was a silly thing to do, of course, and reflected my own reticence to dive and accept what I was getting myself into rather than some inherent property of the language itself.

I find something similar going on at this point of the PhD. I can very well approach it on a daily basis as studying more things, reading around, playing with the data, taking notes on chapter three, and being homesick, fieldsick, postfieldsick. I spend hours looking for literature that will constitute the vital improvement on my style. I then spend hours reading it in the wrong way. I write poems. I want to learn to knit. I dream. I seem to be creating something. I am happy when I can talk to other people about their research, and mostly, not about their research.

Importantly, though, I am very touchy about being pinned down on the thesis. I refuse anything that gets to close. It might just destroy my being. I have a form of radical doubt (of the kind that knocks you off your legs and makes you faint) towards the quality of the research I have completed in the field. I am unsure of my position on many things. I seem to be too uncritical or too critical. I find seminars difficult to handle because I do not find my work fitting in there, and interventions seem to be positioned, bridging, interested.  I do not get them, which makes me feel inadequate. I am more restrained than I remember myself being.  My name is Inhibition Taciturnity. I do not particularly like this in my being, but it is hard to let go of it at the moment.  

The question imposes itself: what am I afraid of?  

I feel it has to do with the situation’s many entanglements and how they affect my own personal social relations with people. And it seems to be about so much more than the thesis text. 

1. having to cut up an experience into a form that is not doing it any justice
2. this experience being so intimately caught up with one’s own [recent] sense of self makes it very hard to separate from the person that one is despite the use of distancing rhetoric
3. having the feeling that the most important things cannot be written about
4. having to put that represented half-life experience out there for scrutiny by standards that are not clear-cut, and knowing that most people will disagree with most or part of it, and possibly not enjoy it for this or other reasons

So I have all these questions bouncing off my stomach walls about how to do it so it makes sense. It is painful, and it constantly runs off ahead of itself and beyond itself. It is about my life as well as about the thesis. A pars pro toto pain. A kind of stomach-migraine-metonymy.  

How to write it down so people can taste and feel what it was like, even to some extent. How to marry that desire to concreteness and feeling with a propensity existing within me to go to the other extreme and overtheorise. How to make it work so that it is not just a thesis. How to write it so it is relevant to this world. How to.  

How to begin to explain to people what it felt like. How to be with people now and not just reduce current experience to the past, and drawing the past out in the form of a text. How to separate work from life when this seems, at times, the healthiest thing to do, and at other times it is not advisable, and fraught with conflict.  

How to go for walks to the beach in all this worrying and who to trust. How to make my personal life other than just fleeting glances at beauty. How to make it meaningful beyond getting this degree. 

I will take a journey today, see and learn some new things. Hopefully it will make me better. I put all the interrogation marks into my suitcase and will gently nudge them, during the train journey, to make them jump out of the window, and make themselves useful elsewhere.  

Homework: Read ‘The Thought-Fox’ by Ted Hughes. That’s what I want to do with my thesis, somehow…

Reliving. Memory, thou art a Funny Thing.

Given that I spend so much time at the moment with reliving fieldwork experiences through the – at times awfully concrete – recordings that I attempt to transcribe, I am made to think about memory. Some of these situations really made me laugh. When I re-listen to them, I just need to smile, and I am temporarily transported [in the older sense of the word] back there to the person I was speaking to.

One really funny thing I completely forgot about [I am the oblivious anthro with the worst memory] was the following situation. At the very beginning of my stay in Romania, I was still unsure about the direction of my topic and I got to know this guy who worked for a development cooperation agency.

He was German. We chatted for a long time, discussing various aspects of project culture, agriculture and associational initiatives (so-called Erzeugergemeinschaften, which is in itself a term that needs appreciation). He was a really sympathetic, smiley, helpful person.

 So towards the end of this discussion, his phone rings. He looks at it for a while, decides to answer it and says: 

-         Kann ich Dir in zwei Minuten zuruckrufen?  

I remember thinking, oh shit, how am I going to finish all I wanted to ask him in two minutes? He gets off the phone, and immediately says: 

-         Keine Sorge. Das sind rumaenische ‘zwei Minuten’. Wenn sie sagen doua minute, rufen sie normalerweise nach drei Stunden wieder an…  

And I couldn’t stop laughing. On the recording, you can hear it in my voice for the next five minutes. A bright tone added all of a sudden, probably making the little wrinkle next to my left eye that bit deeper.

An altogether wonderful moment in human communication inscribed there.  I hope that even though I forget these things as they happened, that somewhere, I carry them with me.  

Light Parody.

My office space looked so awfully bare, bar a funny Marjane Satrapi comic on how terrible life is for this green cat she draws ‘une pina colada, s’il vous plait’, and a story by Tahar Ben Jelloun called ‘Le dernier emigre’. Part of inhabiting a place involves making it your own, so I was looking through some pictures from Romania, to print them out and put them up.

I got a really big knot in my stomach and really did not want to continue with my day.

I suddenly understood why, on the weekend, among anthropologists and lots of talk about ‘truth’, ‘outreach’ and ’social effing constructionism’, I could not take anything seriously and was making fun out of everything, first and foremost my own research. Hello everyone, I’m researching cheese and power… to the general amusement of the group.

It seems, despite all the displayed mirth and felt happiness, I have not dealt with leaving the people there. Within the space of a month, my life has changed so much that I am not able to take in the consequences. This is why I laugh them off, with a hint of sarcasm observing everything that happens around me.

It is my way of grieving.