This is one anniversary I’d completely forgotten about until I typed the date. I have lost all sympathy, as apparently has the rest of the world. I still feel for the families and friends, but not for the country. It’s pretty apparent to everyone, except to about 55% of the Americans (thankfully, down 20% from a few months ago), that those in power have manipulated and squandered the world’s sympathy, turning the events two years ago into an imaginary mandate to strong arm the world at a cost many times greater than the worst estimates.

I didn’t intend to write about politics when I sat down, didn’t really intend to write about anything in particular. I just wanted to allow some time to see what would come out of my fingertips if they were given some exercise. Funny how I consider language to come out of the fingertips and not the mouth, but it’s true: words that come out though the mouth are ephemeral, soon forgotten, not so carefully weighed as those that first see the light of day on paper. C. and I talked about this yesterday, about how statistics show that most people in the world today are visual learners. How far must visual learners have lagged behind the auditory and tactile learners up until a few hundred years ago! Further back in history, before textbooks and computer screens, before diagrams and advertising, people considered brilliant need not have seen something in print to remember it, would have remembered it after one hearing, and the masses of visual learners would have wondered where such crispness of mind originated. Thus the technology of the day decides what sort of person is considered excellent. The only way the future IT guys of the human race could maintain their pasty white pallor was to hang out in the darkness at the back of the cave debating the best arrangements of sticks for various types of fires. Where have all the wicker weavers gone, all the craftsmen of obscure and obsolete trades? Plastering, my friend Chris always said, is a dead art in Chicago, and he meant in the world. His grandfather, a Swedish immigrant, had been a plasterer in Chicago, had plastered half the ceilings in the city, he said in his typically exaggerated manner, but I got the point. Nobody plasters anymore. It’s a craft that the current aesthetic economy simply cannot support, or so I thought. Plastering is alive and well in the Czech Republic, or at least in Brno. All of the buildings around town are brick and stucco. You never see bare brick, except in the scars left on the neighbors when a building is torn down. Granted, the newer ones have much less elaborate ornamentation than the old ones, but when the old ones get renovated all the plasterwork gets reapplied in all its former splendor. Our landlady seems to have been doing quite a bit of renovation lately. We are probably seeing the tail end of the process that split her single-family house into a house with room for two tenants in separate units. The last thing to be attended to is the replastering of the outside. The men in royal blue overalls showed up yesterday with the traditional tools of the trade and began at about 7:15 in the morning to turn the huge pile of sand in the front yard into the outside of a house.

It’s evening here, and the landlady and the television jack installation guy are in our tiny apartment in the basement. We have gotten over the self-consciousness of our horrible Czech with the landlady—pointing madly and gesturing, pantomiming with all sorts of ridiculous gestures—but when new people arrive, especially men for some reason, we become embarrassed again. I really can’t wait for this Czech class to begin. I know that we won’t become that much more fluent in only a year, but I can already feel what little Czech I did know from our three weeks of lessons in Plzen slipping away as we meet more English speakers and spend more time at the faculty with our impressively English-fluent colleagues. The class will be good, because I do want to learn Czech, I do want to be able to conduct basic conversations with folks, talk to them, stumble my way through a conversation by asking in Czech what word would fill in the hole in my vocabulary. It’s a wonderful opportunity to learn this language: studying it while living in the only country in the world where it is spoken. And as distant as my Czech ancestry is—and I especially feel its distance when I am asked by people at the faculty about the details (“Oh, my mother’s grandparents left Bohemia for the States as children in the 1880s, so really I’m more fourth than third generation, and really only a quarter Czech”)—I still feel like I am paying homage to my lineage in the only way I can. What else is my lineage? My dad was adopted into what is now my family name; he never knew his real father, who split when he was six months old. I’m as much Scottish as I am Czech, from my dad’s mother’s side, but I would never call myself Scottish, unless of course I went there, I suppose. My mom’s family, as unenthused as I was about them when I was growing up, are at least the family who stayed close. Hell, my dad only thought once a year or so to call his brother, who lived not three miles from our house the whole time. So where’s my lineage? It flows out from that piece of land in southern Indiana where my mom’s brothers have trailer homes, where they have lived since 1950 after leaving the immigrant neighborhood in Chicago, where my mom lived until she left home at 15 to escape her abusive father, and I must own all of that now with pride. And since my mom’s aunt Rose took the last memories of my grandmother’s generation to the grave with her a couple of years ago, and my mom’s death leaves only four of the seven second-generationers, I can pay homage to my lineage by spending some time here and learning at least some of the language and culture, not to keep it alive in the family, because really it is long dead, but to renew it, to reconnect with whatever we would have called roots, roots which were severed and withered during the twentieth century, when so much was severed and so much withered, when the world was torn apart and re-sewn so many times that the fabric began to fall apart. This is why I was so pissed off when a new acquaintance of ours, upon hearing my explanation for being here, dismissed it by saying ”oh, doin’ the roots thing, huh?” I don’t really care how many other doin’-the-roots-thingers have passed through your life in the ten years you’ve been in Brno, man, but I’m doing something here and I’d appreciate not being interrupted.

Non sequitur: Dave Eggers has aso cued me in on what I think has been my biggest difficulty with writing since I ever first tried it: self-consciousness. He was so in your face about it because he realized what I have long suspected: it’s impossible to escape self-consciousness. Or maybe he only agreed with me, for he is certainly not the first author to address the problem of who the narrator should be. And I agree with him: experience is the only authentic thing. Only the individual and unique sequence of moments is real. Everything else, and I mean everything else, is derivative, muted, matte, a shadow, a fiction, a phantom, nothing. Whenever I put myself in a position to try to describe experience, or a story derived from experience, I immediately run into that problem. The experience is an infinite range of meanings, and all the writing down of it does is remove most of the possibilities. The writing down of it closes it off in time, tells it from the present backward, assumes that enough distance has passed since the events being described that they can now be told and analyzed with enough hindsight to put them in their proper context. It closes off the future possibilities. You cannot write while you are still experiencing the thing, because you have to go home and sit down at your god-damned computer and put the words in sequential order, paint little pictures. So when it’s done, then you go to your computer—or your spiral notebook or microcassette recorder—and then you put the words in the right order like a good boy, and you try to convince someone else of how it was to be there. But if he had been there, just like you were, then you wouldn’t have to tell it, you wouldn’t have to put the words in any order at all, because he would already know. And sure, at that point, go ahead and compare the experience. Clearly not everyone in the same circumstance has the same reaction, pulls the same threads out of the tapestry. It’s the drawing of the experience for one who was not there that I see as the impossible task. And that’s where I have something to learn from the straight-up storyteller, because Andrew Wright, fine fella that he is, made me feel like I had been there. Dave Eggers, despite all the self-consciousness, also made me feel like I was there. It’s not impossible. It just demands patience and diligence.

I’ve just finished reading Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Amazing. A little weak in some parts, a little directionless in some, but hey, he warned me at the beginning that it would be so. Plenty of disclaimers throughout the book. Does that make it alright? It’s funny. As a critic, I read that book and say, “Oh, transparent plot mechanism here. Weak dialogue there. Too much profanity and italics covering up for lack of substance here. Not enough revision there. Etc.” And, hey, he’d reply, it’s non-fiction. What do you want? Yet it still amazed me. All the criticism of thinking too much about thinking too much in the most self-conscious book ever written. C. and I talked about it for a long time at the restaurant the other day while we were waiting for Andrew Wright to speak. He’s a professional storyteller, originally from England, now living in Hungary. He was really good. The interesting thing about that sequence of events—first the talking, almost arguing at times, about what it means for a novel to be absolutely autobiographical, even to a fault, even when it interferes, followed soon thereafter by a storyteller who decides that on that night he will only tell stories from his own life, no old standards, no traditional tales. Just stories about himself and his friends, interesting people he has met, a man with a generator (well, being a Brit, his word was ’dynamo’), for instance, attached to the rear wheel of his bicycle, who rides an out-of-town loop from the park to the top of the hill five times, just long and far enough to hear the Friday evening radio theater productions on his old transistor radio.

C. and I arrived late. We couldn’t find the building at first, realized at the last minute that it was across town from the building where the rest of the TEFL conference was being held. We ran to the tram, got off in a neighborhood we’d never before seen, and wandered up the hill and through the looming 1940s communist postmodern architecture of the university dorms, atop a hill with a view of all the neon in town and the paneláky, rushed in through an echoing hallway that looked like a horrible hospital waiting room and toward a room where, once we arrived, we realized that our loud and echoing footsteps had made listening difficult for the entire audience sitting on collapsible chairs around a man we couldn’t see. The room was illuminated by one gooseneck lamp aimed at the faux wood paneling behind the storytelling man, steadier and less distracting than the fire circle which I’m sure was its model, or at least its inspiration. It looked spur of the moment—he could have spoken, and everyone could have sat more comfortably, in the lecture hall not 20 feet away—but the effect of the light and the togetherness and spontaneity was tangible. We felt his stories, felt that something real and true was filtering into us through the dim light, that we, an audience who had never met, were somehow united by this experience, had been through it together, and we all left smiling, tired and ready for bed. It was not too heavy, no ridiculous irony or melancholy sentiments: just an old guy who had known some interesting folks in his day and knew how to pace his retelling, which words to choose, when to pause in a completely uncalculated way long enough that our minds would start wandering just where he hoped they would.