Weather-vane

I really shouldn't be a travel writer.

I'm realizing now how useless this blog will be to any baby Light Fellows (and Greenberg Scholars-- represent!) who happen to stumble upon it via the forum. I definitely creeped on some veteran blogs during the chaos of the application process, found all the commentary on academics and student life really helpful. I've totally failed to provide any of that, which makes me think I should do a round-up post sometime soon. Just not tonight.

I also start almost all my sentences with "I", which must be really annoying. That, and my bottomless love of navel-gazing. What I've provided you with (Dear imagined Reader!) is not so much a tour of Harbin via the transportive power of the Written Word, but rather a tour of the dream-mists and wildflower angsts inside my head.

Dream-mists. Wildflower angsts. What. Even I don't know what I'm talking about sometimes.

I'm not actually as bitter, as emotive as I might come across in these posts-- still the same ossified heart, the deep glassy moods like Lake Baikal, just couched in all this maudlin metaphor. Sometimes I feel so disingenuous, like I'm affecting this performance of sensitivity or something. So then I backtrack, reel in the rhetoric, qualify it into a even-dictioned moderation that better befits my emotional obtuseness. Which is also kind of annoying, all this pomo baring of the device.

Of course I remember that curve Kelly and Erica showed us. Mine is flattened out-- the little bumps I can meditate (literally or metaphorically) away.

But sometimes I catch myself watching myself in this stupid, unproductive way-- marking the driftings of my mind the way the wind is marked by a weather-vane. It's interesting. Despite all my avowed faith in mental self-discipline, I instinctively view everything I think, feel, believe as external forces, no more under my control than that gathering of dark clouds in the distance portending rain. When I ask myself whether I believe in God, or love, or Palestine's right to self-determination, I can take my answer and construct some clumsy, ill-informed justifications around it. But to find the answer, I use this inarticulate I-Ching mechanism, studying my own emotive drift with augury intent.

This is the mystic in me. It's hard to explain. A lot of the time I don't actually think in words, but in this rush of images accompanied by sensations of recognition or confusion-- there's nothing more frustrating than the feeling of really knowing something I can't articulate.

None of this explicitly relates to Harbin-- these are just little inanities I happen to have realized while I'm here. Maybe this is a side effect of the language pledge. I'm starting to realize how deeply I distrust language as a vehicle for the communication of anything truly worthwhile-- this, even though I love words, hope to be able to use them with something approaching grace one day. I think this is the secret Taoist inside me, who didn't understand the Dao De Jing, but nevertheless views with creeping contempt any Way that can be shoved inside the tiny box that is language. And so I grow increasingly uncomfortable with the rhetoric of transcendence. Which should provide much fodder for self-directed irritation, considering the undisciplined way I use big words.

I've been detecting other subtle shifts in my... Weltanschauung. Like how I've started identifying as Manchu, inexplicably, making me the Chinese equivalent of your blue-eyed blond who calls himself Cherokee on the basis of one ancient great-grandfather. My father's ancestors rode in with Nurhaci, if I understand right, under the Plain Red Banner-- all that's left of the Manchu warrior in this pampered daughter of the suburbs is my insistent stoicism, I guess. I feel kind of cheap, claiming that heritage without the language, but that's not my fault-- only fifty old guys in some village really speak Manchu anymore. Someday, if I really have a lot of time on my hands, I think I'll find someone to teach it to me.

Or maybe this is just one of those phases, a brief bout of collegiate hyperpostcolonialism.

And another thing-- I've started romanticizing Texas. Not just the grassroots-activism-and-indie-rock eco-urban beat of Austin but all of it-- the sunbeaten rocks and megachurches and even that imaginary line cleaving that western corner from the rest of the state, dividing Mountain Time from Central. These are things I've never experienced, obviously, so I can only lay claim on them the way I lay claim to being a Manchu. Probably this is my own fauxetic, emotionally distant brand of homesickness.