levi-strauss, nostalgia, deb oh, george harrison, beauty

Nostalgia is such a strange and gut-wrenching sensation, or impetus or a provocation of some latent desire. I suggested, during one of my classes (actually the first time I got up the courage to speak in one of my classes here) that the impetus for fieldwork, or the birth of anthropology and its desire to observe "premodern" man and society, as a desire to see the self in a mirror through which the ethnographer can examine himself, as the "noble savage", or whatnot, without the trappings of modern/Industrial Revolution/post Industrial Revolution, debris (can't think of a better word to end that sentence on). The obsession with the encounter with that which is vanishing, that part of mankind that remains "outside" of the modern world. Of course studying such a group involves an encounter that automatically makes the sacred profane. Overt academic talk aside, this moment really hit a chord within me. First of all, I finally had the balls to speak, as the yanqui, in my class, to point out an opinion that was not exactly where the class conversation was headed, so I was broaching another theme that I was deducing from the texts. I was stating that it was not just a cultural nostalgia that existed in the modern world, but that the very actors that went out and did their research were on some sort of journey on their own that could be read as having a personal search for origins as shaping a desire to find one's self in another, or to escape. Tristes Tropiques is one of my favorite books of all time, and there the narrative of voice of Levi-Strauss is not that of the cold researcher, but of someone in exile; a foreigner who is doing research, but also finds himself on a very personal journey, as he is, after all, not just a Frenchman, but a Jewish Frenchman who finds himself away from his home, looking at sunsets and pondering remembrance. His prose is so incredibly beautiful. How many books dedicate entire chapters to sunsets?

I am very far from home. I listen and look at so many things that my friends are doing in New York, especially those that are involved in art and music. My best friend from high school, Deborah Oh, just has a fantastic article written about her: http://www.in-color.net/index.php/article/deb_oh_up-and-coming_and_here_to_stay/
Upon reading the article, I realized that I haven't heard her sing for two years, don't know any of her compositions. I was listening to them tonight, and it was so strange to hear this voice, a voice I know so well, of someone I truly love, and to hear these words and notes...
One song I had heard before, which is a haunting one anyway, but truly got under my skin because of this maturity in her voice. I remember when Deb first started playing her compositions at Spence, and now I am here, in Buenos Aires, listening to this gorgeous person-gorgeous in every way-and I had this strange mix of feelings: distance and proximity.

In the last few days I have obsessively been watching the following youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utg9inWsSlI&feature=related
The two duets are beautiful. It's Paul Simon doing two acoustic pieces with George Harrison. There are multiple moments that I could go on and on about, but it would be too nerdy and boring and would lose this very thin and already weak line of thought I am pursuing. They do "Here Comes The Sun" first, which just hits me like sharp fine point in the heart. It is flooring in it's simplicity and the harmonizing of the voices is just so fresh and clear. The second song they do is "Homeward Bound". To make the connection between nostalgia and that song, or at least the experience of feeling a bit displaced from "home", or one of multiple homes, would be too obvious. I love George Harrison's voice, especially the verse that begins: "Every day's an endless stream of cigarettes and magazines...", and I love the chorus and how, after the arrow that is "Here Comes the Sun", the pain/beauty comes clear to me, because it is directed at people and a place and the experiences I have with these people and with my home city. I am so far away, I love so many of them that I haven't seen in almost two years, but many of them are still quite present in my life. It's not the same as being there, though. But I am on my own journey, too, which is here now. Am I looking for some mirror to see the "pure" me by distancing myself from the familiar?

Buenos Aires makes me feel nostalgic all of the time, which is one of its most powerful and magical qualities. How can I, as someone who is not from here, feel nostalgia? So many things do not relate to me, but I have made them have some relation to me in my mind, through making some emotional connection, a production on my part. I feel such strong emotions about the politics and culture of a place, of it's traditions...How did this happen? Besides my thesis, I am here on my own search, but I also realize, when I watch that youtube video 100 fucking times, that I do feel a displacement, a strange sense of closeness and distance simultaneously. I listen to Deborah and I hear this sexy woman's voice and I think of us being so silly together, and the goosebumps she gave me when would listen to her play for me when I was 16 and how it still has that effect, but this time its more spectral. I can't reach out and touch her, she is reduced to a sound that I can listen to as I do some other activity (although it was hard to use it as background music, I wanted to hear every word so that I could know her, because I don't want to stop knowing anybody I love).

I do feel very at home here, but at some point I will be homeward bound in the most nationalist sense of the term, but it will be more than that. It will be a complete re-adjustment and a coming home that goes beyond just geographical borders. It is a future that is not so close, but then again, "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" and time slips away, or rather escapes through the window while you're not looking. I want to stay on the same plane of time as my friends, I don't want us to feel changes so very differently, although that is inevitable.

I'm definitely not in exile. I am active (not that those in exile usually aren't) and I have very specific plans and goals. I want to do research, but after speaking in class, after watching and listening to moments that fill me with joy and bring me close to tears, I realize that I am doing a project that is much more profound, a project of disassembling; a dissembling that is a type of development. Me estoy desarmando y me estoy desarrollando. Desarmar es desarrollar. I am expanding and breathing and finding spaces and feeling close and distant and beauty and pain. One of the most hair-raising lines of Dylan is "beauty walks the razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine", which is preceded by the line: "I'm living in a foreign country, and I'm bound to cross the line". The first part (which I've written second), literally speaks to my situation and multiple and continual experiences of not being certain of where and how to be, the second part (which I wrote first), always has provoked a strong electric shock through my body. The image of the razor, sharpness, pain. Bob asserts that beauty walks that sharp edge, it's on a border, but it's already in a danger zone. He has a future goal of owning beauty as he is looking back, as the rest of "Shelter From the Storm" is a re-telling in the past tense. He ends his journey with the desire to "turn back the clock to when god and her were born"...we all want to go back, we all want to find what is behind hidden in some secret in the future; we want to find the fulfillment of the present, which aches due to a connection to the past, in the present. Nostalgia is a desire to travel through time, a desire accentuated through a short emotional journey that leaves us with a longing for some higher calling: art, expeditions that lead us to sunsets, cities with crazy taxi drivers.

Maya Angelou has a quote that says that most times we don't remember what people say or do, but how they make us feel. If anthropology is driven by some nostalgia, at least in its formative stages of the discipline, it is based on what we feel, what Claude Levi-Strauss felt when he related remembrance to the sunset. I remember how so many people I love make me feel, even when I hear them singing and know that I am just listening to a recording, or to see something so beautiful it does hurt in such a pleasurable way that you don't wan it to stop. Space is marking distance and proximity as one and the same and anthropology and George Harrison's voice singing about cigarettes are equivalent.