Propaedeutic Valedictory

“I am superstitious about going ‘back’ to places, anyway: they have changed; you have changed; even the weather may have changed.” -- Elizabeth Bishop


Ray Dickey: I’m thinking of a day maybe ten years ago. We were either rolling silverware at the beginning of the shift or eating something we’d convinced the kitchen to make for us at the end of it. And you, always talking, always slipping me secret notes in the middle of a rush (“This night has opened my eyes,” “I wish my face was Harun’s bicycle seat,” “I can’t begin to explain how consumed I am by thoughts of death,”), had instigated some hot pontificating amongst the 5 or 6 of us on the subject of moving. Someone was about to leave or someone had just come back. I’d only been back from Japan for a few months and was still sort of angry all the time about my forced return. You: “Well my grandma always says, ‘Wherever you go, there you are’.” You said it with sassy backwoods-bitty cadence, and we all laughed. We laughed because we were too young and worldly to take cliches or grandmas seriously. A few months later, you were gone to NewYork. Living in a dump on the lower east side with chickens on the roof and cat shit in the stairwell. A famous director filmed a scene in your bedroom that was supposed to take place in a crack house. The Australian girl who lived with you painted the claw foot tub in the middle of the kitchen gold. I came to visit. More people moved to New York. I visited more. More people started moving to San Francisco. I visited them more. I always came home. I’m still here.

I stayed for the master’s. I stayed for the Phd. Now I’m almost finished and it’s becoming something fulsome and narcissistic to stay. I like my native’s attachment to the weather and the sidewalks and the easiness of direction. I like knowing exactly what color of green the oak leaves will be in March. I like that my nose catches the wisteria or the azaleas or the mimosa blossoms before I see them. I like the morning susurrations of my ‘where the wild things are’ back yard with its confusion of palm trees and oaks and wild fern and bamboo, with a big magnolia in the middle. I like my students. I like my routine.

But even my parents are becoming concerned with my profligate Emily Dickinsoning –my queer indefinite academicking. I suppose it’s time to go. So I’m coming to New York, Ray. I wonder if I’ll find you? I wonder if you still have the same boyfriend and if you ever wear that mint green Mister Rogers cardigan anymore? My prospective roommates ask, “Why New York? Why now?” Maybe they expect a rational answer. I don’t have one. No job, no place to live yet. The least cliché response I can think of? I want things to be difficult for a while. A different kind of difficult. Or maybe, it’s become too difficult to stay again. To renew another lease. To train a new batch of waiters. To say goodbye to another round of graduates. Going can’t be as hard as staying anymore. The weather actually has changed. It’s April and there’s no rain.

Nonetheless, I hear my re-found wanderlust being indicted by my favorite song on the new CocoRosie album: “Everybody wants to go to Japan” – a gorgeous exposition of your grandma’s cliché, Ray. The song begins with its own little bromide: “Life is like a roller coaster,” but quickly moves into a set of allegations. Hipster cosmopoliticking is implicated by the gauche popularity of silly, strange, otherwordly, exotic yet obviously interesting, obviously for interesting people, Japan. To the persistent American frontier fantasies of California ("everybody wants to go to"), to the problematic tourism of Jamaica ("everyone wants to go"), to the economic tourism of Iraq ("everyone wants to go to Iraq but once they go they don’t come back"), CocoRosie has something to say: "everybody, just hold hands."

A primal, howling operatic midpoint is softly woven into “Japan’s” progressive delicate clanging like a flashback or a Wizard of Oz dream sequence. The song begins with that signature Japanese sound: some iconic koto-like strumming. Then comes a reedy, sing-along, thumping, dub for morning television hugeness punctuated with typewriter keys or chomping children’s scissors and the occasional canned animal moaning that sounds as if it were recorded in an abbatoir. This is what the beautiful, painful contradiction of the American hipster sounds like: CocoRosie has subsituted a cauldron for the melting pot. This song is a native’s spell. It is a defensive, holistic, honest, complicit apology/embrace.

There’s a Japanese word, “mi-ha,” that means something like the American slang usage of “cheesy.” It means to like something that’s too popular, something so iconically cliché that it is not cool anymore. A Japanese friend told me that foreigners studying the Tale of Genji was “mi-ha.” CocoRosie seems to think that Japan is sort of mi-ha. I’ve stayed in Florida because I thought forced migration was mi-ha. And yet, “Japan” is a circus of beauty. It is unstoppable, repetitive, and profound. In its clutch, "actual" Japan stands in for postmodern identity hopping and capitalist identity tourism and the axiomatic American pursuit of the permanent dissatisfaction and unattainability of ‘grass is greener’ longing.

When i lived in Japan i often told my friends that none of what was happening seemed real. Real was Florida; Japan had no consequences. i was only twenty and my foreigner's sense of parallax hadn't set in yet. My Japanese boyfriend told me i sounded like Chang-Tzu, and told me about the butterfly. He bought me a little cloisonne butterfly to remind me i was actually in Japan -- it was not a dream. i thought maybe i was in love. A few months later an older Japanese man took me and another American girl for hanami -- for cherry blossom viewing. During the course of the afternoon he decided to tell us the story of Chang-Tzu dreaming about the butterfly and asked us if we ever felt that way while we were away from home? i see, i thought. One can catch that good old Kafka feeling even in Japan. i suspected my boyfriend of consulting some how to snow American girls handbook. i worried my whole existence might be mi-ha. But here's the rub: i was really happy regardless of the answer.

I dreamed I was a butterfly
buffeted about my meadow
with tired wings
and memories of leaf-eating
before wrapping myself in silk to sleep.

I awoke as Chang-Tzu
under silk sheets
and ready for breakfast
on my windriven mountain.
but wait.

Am I Chang-Tzu
dreaming I am a butterfly
or
am I a butterfly dreaming
I am Chang-Tzu?

Let me sleep on it.