Spring has sprung, and another season comes without me having heard any definitive news of how your research is going. Along with this comes a parallel irony: for the first time in weeks it is snowing in New York.
With each passing day I assume your opus grows and becomes more multiform and magnificent. After all, every day you are blessed with 18 hours of waking experience 'in country' as they say. That must equal at least a page or two of prose per diem. You aren't like Virgil, only writing 3 lines a day; no, I think when you get home you'll need several surplus suitcases to fill with your easily thousands of pages of single typed manuscript.
An idea: instead of just writing about Zanzibar and letting your opus speak of a single, independent place only in the context of itself, you should walk home (of course taking a boat/plane to cross water masses), and as you travel home you keep writing your social anthropology so that the reader not only gets to know Zanzibar as an island but it's relationship with other places. Anyone can describe a place, but any place is next to another place, which is next to another place, which ultimately is where I am. To imagine the slow, barely perceptible gradations, the gentlest differentiation of customs, of handshakes, of smiles, of sex, to feel the change in language not between Swahili and Afrikaans and Chewa, but between Swahili at this longitude and Swahili at that longitude, now that is something! Give it a thought, Iqbal!
Speaking of social anthropology, I'm currently reading Mary Ann Evans (who was actually a man). It's a pretty good, spacious, democratic 19th century novel. It's funny because the narrator is always pointing out hypocrisies and ironies and the many foibles of her characters, and it's quite funny, but the characters never seem to notice just how funny they are. It's like a fish not knowing what water is: they are so subsumed by irony and gentle absurdity that they can't even see it. Luckily we aren't like that!
-Robert de Saint-Loup
P.S. Enclosed is a re-production of a painting of Mary Ann Evans in rather unconvincing drag.
1 comment:
yes...a spring snow...i thought of mishima's book
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