By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reading Artem’s article about the relocation of his life from Russia to Hungary. To say the essay was well-written would be a tremendous understatement; the prose was exceptional. It must also have hit a nerve because I noticed that a lot of people responded. Maybe it is emblematic of the dislocated times we live in, all stuck together as in a crowded elevator on a shrunken planet.
The phrase ‘reinvent yourself’ has currency because it seems to provide what many of us eventually want: a ‘do-over’. Also, we now live in a world with little patience, and, although I might be in error here, I believe that, as we relinquish ourselves to our gadgets, we are setting ourselves up more and more for a massive identity crisis. The AI machines are absorbing the Human Self and making it their own. Or so I believe. What does this have to do with ‘Home’? Well, I think Home is indicative of some unassailable, undissolvable connection; it is where we can come from the rain. For some, it’s a mansion in Malibu; for others, it’s a barstool in Brooklyn. Mark Twain described ‘home’ as “the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in.” Well, not always.
I can relate to Artem, albeit in a different way. I come from America and never felt ‘forced’ to go anywhere else to escape my own government or a marauding army. Bombs were not falling from the sky and landing on my head. Yet, I knew I had to escape. Why? I take part of my explanation from the great writer James Baldwin, a black man and major player of the literary scene in the 1960s. He moved to Paris, and later he concluded that it was only from a distance that he came to fully understand his own country. For Baldwin, race was inevitably a huge issue. My own now many years away from the States has taught me how to more precisely explain (at least to myself) why I never felt at home in my own country. Like Baldwin, I guess. And, I suppose, as Artem came to feel when his country no longer seemed like his country.
Artem and I are very different in temperament, which makes our friendship all the more interesting and fertile. In short, he is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met, and his many talents far eclipse my own. I myself am ‘a bit of a poet’ – as I once heard an English drinking buddy describe me – and I mean to say that I possess about all the positives AND negatives that the term implies. In other words, nobody has lived more intensely than I have and retained their sanity; however, most avoid making the shambles of their lives that I did with my own a while back.
Artem is a tough Russian boy at heart (for all his urban manners and polite aspect) and he knows the street. He is anything but naive. I am naive. But I can smell and taste the street, and that is something different than just knowing its realities and dangers. I have guessed at ‘heaven’, but if I went there, I would look for and eventually find its slums. So in my imagination, I have always lived in a paradisiacal ghetto or no-man’s-land. Maybe the outdated term ‘divine decadence’ will suffice. But that’s my past, pre-workaholism.
As such, the ways that Artem and I might define ‘home’ are, I’ll bet, simultaneously much alike and very different. Artem makes sound decisions based on exhaustive calculation. I have always made haphazard choices when the impromptu choreography of the night started a riot between the angels and devils that were grappling in my mind. Artem is sane. In some significant ways, I am not.
I spent 10 years in Russia. I was at home there in a manner that I never felt at home in America. For all its endless opportunities, I always sensed a superficiality in America, a constant confusion of ‘image’ with ‘reality’, and indeed a plethora of carefully rehearsed emotions. In America, one should react appropriately – in public – and, most importantly, be seen doing it. Same with work. Showing up on time with a serious look on your face will often compensate for mediocre production. Act ‘professional’. America is also about consumption and for the Americans such implacable materialism is a serious business. Competition and status. Finishing second three times in a row makes you a ‘loser.’ So in America you want to be a ‘Winner’. I was a fuck-up.
At one point, I stopped being white and ‘became’ black.I started dating black women, learned to snap my fingers when I danced to the ‘soul music’, and, above all, ‘talk black’, as in ‘street’ talk. I got pretty good at it. I was rejecting my own staid, danceless, laughterless, seemingly fuckless people for a race for whom I felt great sympathy and emotional/physical attraction. My family was horrified. When anonymous phone calls started coming in at 2am threatening to blow up our house, my grandfather panicked and sent me packing off to Minnesota. That was Jim Crow America of the day, the Civil Rights Movement notwithstanding.
Eventually I moved to England and tried to become English. Back in America for the summer (I was attending the University of Bath), I even got laid a few times by American girls who thought I was a Brit and wanted to shag one of us. My Cockney accent improved as we undressed, But I wasn’t English, was I? Later in life, I fell madly in love with an Italian woman, and so I started voraciously learning the language. I got a teaching job in Rome and thought that I would soon be Italian. I was wrong. In Russia, I married a Russian woman, learned how things were done there, and totally bought into it. But I wasn’t Russian.
I wasn’t Black. I wasn’t English. I wasn’t Italian. I wasn’t Russian. And I didn’t want to be American. So what was I ? And where was home? ‘Home’ now is Varna, Bulgaria, but I am not trying to be Bulgarian. Too late for that.
So where has home been all these years? It has been in the shifting scenery of my head, the unreliable but always vivid panorama of my brain. The American author Thomas Wolfe wrote prolifically and two of his books are called Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. Notice that in both titles, home is not where you are, but where you want to be. Hmmm…
I want to be back in Bath, at the Ring o’ Bells drinking cider with my friends of that era – the 1970s. They’re all still young, you see – and they will never get old. I want to be in Claygate, in London, walking down the village street to that blue door where I would meet Susan, an English woman I had been on a plane from New York, befriended romantically, and went there that night knowing I would become her lover. I can still hear her on the stairs. Home is Morgantown, West Virginia, back in the 1950s when my grandparents would take me up in the hills to my great grandparents house for Christmas. My Mom would come from Martinsburg. Those people all reside now in various cemeteries, but none of them are dead. They exist in a wonderful, ineffable bubble in my mind, and I can join them just by closing my eyes. Indeed, the greatest gift of growing old – as I am – is visiting the shrines of the past and, in the blink of an eye, bringing them back to life.
For me, home is any bed I have gotten used to. Any kitchen I have learned to be comfortable in, drinking coffee or beer and listening to the radio.. You won’t ever feel this way in a 5-star hotel, but you can in a dingy loft somewhere in a backwater town or abstract city. The narrow streets, so unlike America, which can be found in Europe. Always the sense of mystery just around the corner, that woman disappearing from the balcony into the farther recesses of her rooms.
The illusory. The unobtainable. Looking at bright city lights from a distance, maybe from your own window, and wondering what in the world is going on behind all those windows. You know of course, but at the same time you will never know. So Home therefore is found in the limitless energy-filled magnetic field known as Sleep.Your mind works overtime there in a place of dreams and ultimate exploration. It is the nebulous video game of the soul, where old girlfriends come back to life, where you feel that fabulous shudder in your young arms when you hit the baseball squarely, when you go splashing in the ocean and watch while your faithful dog swims out to you, trusting you completely.
Budapest is an imaginary place. So is Russia and America. Many of us – you and me – have gone looking for these places. And indeed they await us as sites on the map with all their phantasmagoric images and wild promises. But they are real only if you find yourself in them…for a while…roaming around and looking for a kitchen and a bed that will gradually seem familiar when you go…home. And they become even more intensely felt when you leave them and remember the closing doors of the people of goodbye.
Artem, still saying hello to life, has magnificently described the act of becoming. Of course, he retains a reverence for times gone by and the country of his birth – Russia – where it happened. No doubt one day he will visit those places again. Will they seem the same? Not physically, The city planners will have demolished them. But mentally, yes. I think so. He will reconstruct them in his vivid mind as he knows they should be. In the later dreams of his life, he will become the ultimate architect.
