She's So Heavy

Sunday 26 June 2011
Ferme de la Salamandre, Les Rives, France

In the words of Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things, it all goes back to “the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.”

Someone, somewhere, told me what I should love. Whom. Where. When. How. How much. Preferably an upstanding gentleman, close to my own age, English speaking (although a second language or a pleasant accent can hardly hurt), with a clean criminal record or a damn good explanation, perhaps with a family business to inherit or a boat off the coast of New England. No one told me what to do if I fell in love with a country, or the ruins of a fallen city from another epoch, or a dead author, or a woman, or a field of sunflowers. And no one told me what to do with joy.

Joy can be lonely. Back in the states, I could watch others experience it but when I ran through they scattered and the joy dispersed with them. Like pigeons on a square in Italy. So I took my joy hostage and stowed it in the overhead bin on a transatlantic flight.

At one point, I thought that I was only happy when I moved, traveled, ran. Alec evoked one of my most feared musical artists (i.e.: David Bowie, who was ruined for me by the movie Labyrinth) and designated my personal anthem as “Born to Run.” It’s a simple explanation, easily defended and rarely questioned. I have found that people are much more willing to believe that you are happy as a wandering vagabond than to accept that you are happy somewhere that happens to be far away from them.

There is a particular sentiment that I have when I travel abroad, but I haven’t quite succeeded in explaining it either to myself or to others when they ask what continually draws me back to France year after year. Rousseau, in the fourth book of his Confessions says it better than I perhaps can. He writes:

“ . . . l’éloignement de tout ce qui me fait sentir ma dépendance, de tout ce qui me rappelle à ma situation, tout cela dégage mon âme, me donne plus grande audace de penser, me jette en quelque sorte dans l’immensité des êtres pour les combiner, les choisir, me les approprier à mon gré, sans gêne et sans crainte.”

(A poor, modified translation: “Distancing myself from all that makes me feel dependant, from all that reminds me of my situation in life, engages my very soul, gives me greater audacity to think, throws me into the immensity of Beings to combine them, choose them, appropriate them to my liking, without care and without fear.”)

I deeply value something in that distance that Rousseau evokes, that perspective shift, that immense emptiness that forces me to reconsider who, what, and where I am. But it’s not the distance that matters the most; it is the joy that comes creeping up out of that void, surprising at first, but soft and delicious and profound once I let it penetrate my skin, the spaces between my toes, my eyelids, my fingernails. I lie flat on my back in the middle of a field of carrots. I allow myself to share and listen and learn about the people around me, and I love them even with the knowledge that I will leave them in a week, or a month, or at the end of the fleeting summer. I have begun to say yes. I walk instead of run. I float instead of swim. I read instead of work. I write instead of research. I eat my dessert, and my vegetables too. I drink my wine. An ocean away from the family and friends and land that I do love very much, I am happy. Je suis.

It’s not that French cuisine unquestionably trumps American food; it’s quite simply that we take the time to actually enjoy it here, dessert and wine and all. It’s not that the French landscape has so much more to offer than the sprawling geography of America; it’s that here I have the time explore it on foot instead of merely seeing it pass by the open window of a speeding car or under the shadow of an airplane far above. It’s not that the French language is more eloquent than the American tongue; it’s that I am forced to truly listen and engage with the words that stream into my ears and out of my mouth. It’s not that the technological difficulties of rural France (internet, cell phones, easily accessible cars or public transportation) make life simpler and thereby better than in America; it’s that in reconsidering my modes of communication and transportation, I am forced to build genuine, personal relationships with the people that surround me.

Three months ago, on a stage with lights and an audience, I said: “Qui suis-je, vous me demandez. Ben, je suis comme une copine en train de tromper mon amante. Ou bien, je suis comme une sale métèque, enterrée jusqu’aux chevilles au rivage étranger. Ou je suis comme la fille de parents divorcés, qui hurlent l’un à l’autre à travers des vitres opaques et fermées ; qui ne se comprendront jamais ; qui ne se réconcilieront jamais ; qui déversent en invectives un océan menaçant entre les deux. Et moi ? Moi je noie là-dedans. Oui, je m’y noie. Venez me cherchez avec un gilet de sauvetage. Mettez-le autour de mon cou comme la corde de potence. Sauvez-moi-en.’’

Three months later, a translation: “Who am I, you ask me. Well, I’m like a girlfriend cheating on her lover. Or I’m like a dirty immigrant buried up to my ankles on a foreign shore. Or I’m like the daughter of divorced parents who scream at one another through opaque and closed windows; who will never understand one another; who will never reconcile their differences; whose insults gape like a menacing ocean between the two of them. And me? I drown in their angry sea. Come search for me with a lifesaver. Put it around my neck like the executioner’s cord. Save me from it.”

I refuse to drown anymore in the ocean that perpetually separates me from home, regardless of the continent I find myself on. It is time that I reconcile my two identities, my two lives, my summers and my winters. I can’t continue like this, condensing my life to airport regulation size and compacting my joy to three months a year, thousands of miles and an ocean away from whatever I am supposed to call home.

* * *

At this morning’s Café Philo—a monthly round table philosophy discussion group hosted here at the farm—we decided to take a Promenade Philo instead of sitting around the picnic tables under the tilleul tree. We spent a few hours discussing the human experience of movement via walking and examined how mobility influences society, for better or for worse. We were enjoying a picnic of pâté végétal, fourgasse, and chocolate fudge cake when the question of travel came up. The discussion leader, a local philosopher named François, invoked the provocative image of traveling across the American Great Plains. I know from personal experience that driving across Nebraska (especially in a car without air conditioning) oftentimes seems like a complete void of motion. The utter lack of distinguished landscapes and the featureless horizon make all motion seem illusionary, as if the car were stationary and the flat, straight road were just an endless conveyor belt going in circles around the globe but arriving nowhere. Even on a map, the car hardly appears to move. The state of Nebraska seems to stretch once you’re inside its borders, prohibiting you from leaving, from reaching the other side. That empty space seems to break all ties with civilization, with the people that wait for news back home, with the eventual destination shimmering on the Pacific on the other side of the Nebraska plains and the Nevada desert and the California mountains. America! Whither goest thou in thy shiny car in the night?

In my three years of traveling abroad, I have felt in many ways like that car traveling at 75mph on a pin-straight path through the endless expanses of Nebraska. I search for the words to explain my experiences here in France but I find none in a horizon too wide and too beautiful to describe. To my friends and family back home in America, my movement often seems illusionary, fleeting, as if I am fleeing their reality and plunging myself into a territory that a map or a photograph or a letter can never quite capture, and I can never quite leave.

Please, leave me at peace with my joy. With my love. With my cicadas and wine and sunflowers and poppies and mountains and olives and goat cheese. With my tongue too sweet to taste. With my afternoon Cezanne sun that will shine over America six hours from now. With my coffee and sugar and tiny spoons. With my loneliness sometimes, and my fear. With the waves and the salt of the Atlantic that I know from both shores.

I love you all. I miss you. I think of you often. Steph, I wish we could bake key lime pie in our brand new kitchen. Alex, I wish we smoke hookah and eat cheese and drink wine on our porch. Rachel, I wish I could take a swim to the other side of Dow Lake with you. Alec, I wish you could teach me how to throw a football. Adam, I wish we could climb a roof and look at the stars like we used to. Jesse, I wish we could drink ginger beer on Radar Hill and wander the Ridges until we’re lost under the new moon. Jess, I wish we could drive to a cemetery or a new state or a tiny Appalachian town and talk everything out. Mama, I wish I were around to pick blueberries and grapes and zucchinis and beans with you. Dad, I wish we could go for a bike ride and stop for ice cream. Ben, I wish I could go for a motorcycle ride to someplace new with you. Athens, your hills shimmer under the humidity of southern Ohio humidity. Kidron, your wheat fields turn golden and your sweet corn tassels burst with or without me.

And I wish you could all be here with me, to go for walks in the mountains, to sell vegetables at a farmer’s market, to swim in the Drac river, to drink wine and fruity beer around a bonfire, to weed onions and pick black currents, to talk philosophy over fresh salad at lunch, to sleep in a caravan and wake up with a view of the Alps, to deliver bread to local food co-ops in Grenoble, to meet the people that I know, to see the towns that I cherish, to share this part of the world that somehow feels like my own. To love what I have come to love.

She’s so heavy, France, just like love, liberty, choice. She weighs an ocean.