“Vivaldo dreamed he was running, running, running, through a country he had always known, but could not now remember, a rocky country.” – from ‘Another Country’, by James Baldwin.
I am writing this in a rocky country, another country, to which I arrived three days ago, to visit dear friends who I had not seen for a long time. I, like many of you, have been reading from the Cheuse Center’s Baldwin100-Reads calendar, and I have reached the end of our summer read ‘Another Country’.
Reading Vivaldo’s dream, I feel all of us have been in history’s places before, in countries we have always known, but cannot now remember—we are, as we live today, the children of the cacophony of all our pasts.
Today, August 2nd, is James Baldwin’s birthday. He would have been a hundred today. In the summer of 2023, we conceived to celebrate a year of Baldwin Feb 2024-Feb 2025, offering seasonal reads. Now, a year later, we are in the second part of public programs; looking forward to the opening of ‘Nothing Personal’, an artistic exhibition of Avedon and Baldwin’s book, at Gillespie Gallery on August 9th at 5pm, and a staged reading of ‘Blues for Mister Charlie’ at 7pm, in the Theater Space at George Mason’s Fairfax campus.
With so much Baldwin in my life, you’d think I’d be tired of him. I am not. For to go deep is to feel a sense of accomplishment, to feel substantial. There are some writers who it is worthwhile to spend your life with—they become that friend who you long to see on other people’s shelves. When you read them, like time with friends, you cannot wait to see how the next years will unfold, how you will each grow old in parallel in different countries, and sometimes together, in the same house.
On Tuesday, I was reading Baldwin on an airplane, flying from London to Dubrovnik. Going over Europe, I felt I was tipping my hat to Jimmy, especially the parts of his work set in France, with the Olympics running and vaulting beneath us, noting the opening ceremony’s playful, erotic display of French love. ‘Giovanni’s Room’ came to mind, but also Eric, in ‘Another Country’, playing dress up in his Alabama house, in his mother’s closet. In the opening ceremony, the closet was suddenly open, until the door was shut abruptly, for privacy. It felt like Baldwin was one of the godfathers of this French extravaganza!
As I traveled in other countries, I sensed again the heft of Europe, how big and far everything seems, yet layered so close. In London, Roman ruins lie nestled in the shadow of the 11th century city, with wildflower gardens, tended with seeming nonchalance. In Rochester, the Romans, followed by the Normans, bring back my memory of walking the routes of the crusades across the Tuscan countryside in Italy. The armies moving, the languages mixing, the forests burning, the forts rising, the cities forming and falling over three thousand years.
In Croatia, where I am now, in a once remote part of the Dalmatian coast, you can hear the Italian cadence in the language—this country being for many years, part of the Republic of Venice and across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. The Greeks are close enough but they did not really settle this part of the Adriatic Sea.
Hundreds of islands sit solidly in the sea around us with stone beaches. It is a rocky country, the one I am in now, which made me embark on this birthday musing, upon reading the beginning of Vivaldo’s dream. Vivaldo is just one of many characters seeking the country of the self in ‘Another Country’.
Walking through old village houses in Janjina, Croatia, many intact, and many in ruin, with roofs caved in, our friends’ dog Lucy encounters a cat with white stockinged feet, who struts right up to Lucy, and stares her down, as the dog cowers and slips away. We happen on evening mass in the church in Croatian, and as we listen through the doorway I learn that the people are Catholic, mostly.
In this country you can hear jackals howling from the hills. A cuckoo clock like sound sings out every few seconds from a local owl. Walking through the village, I encounter figs and pomegranates, both dearest childhood fruits from the country of my beginnings, India. But also fruit of my ancestors in Persia.
In the middle of the novel, Vivaldo reflects on the unexamined life. And this feels like the deepest country, within us, that unexamined place. “The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present…his world would open up before him.” To find this country, this other place, is the journey to find oneself.
If “Love was a country he knew nothing about,” it is both in oneself that this alien country lies, and also outside, for we find it so hard to do the work over years to love each other, for I am human and you are too, and even while receiving no slight or ill intent, we get bored and angry, and we lose ourselves. To keep returning to that authentic place, that country within us, each of us must do the work, and the work is hard and it is sometimes ordinary.
Courage is easy for an armchair whatever-you-would-like-to-call-me but it is necessary—the courage to live. And it is not that we lack courage, like Rufus in the novel, that makes us not live, but more to say that those of us who go on living, we need courage. We must have it. I think that is what this semester of teaching will be about for me. Not that we can teach courage. But we can ask each other to seek it in ourselves, to find it, to keep it. Like Churchill said, “Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.”
It is in those moments of fidelity to ourselves we come to find our country, our craft, voice, witness. It often is terrifying to be true, as it is for all the characters in the novel. In Book 3 Baldwin quotes Shakespeare (the sonnet appears below). I also hope that “summer’s honey breath” holds out for me, against “the wrackful siege of batt’ring days”.
‘The word’ is written by great writers, and like friends forever, who bare their human soul, we contain within us the miracle of humanity. This year the center gives you Baldwin, but as we go, we will venture out together to read other writers to add to your reading bags, that in ‘black ink’ may still ‘shine bright’.
Until next time, do your work, make space for public, community life and as Alan Cheuse said, read, write and love, as much as you can. He passed July 31st, 2015, and because of him, and his hope to have us open up into the world with the travel fellowships, we celebrate life in another country, the life of you, your self, a more complete life within.
Sonnet 65: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
***
Leeya Mehta is the Director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. She is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her poetry collections are The Towers of Silence, and A Story of the World Before the Fence of which Tim Seibles, former Poet Laureate of Virginia, writes, “is a lush, lyrical study of memory and history.” In 2022 her work has been anthologized in the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets and in Future Work, an anthology of contemporary Indian writers from Red Hen Press. At the Center, she is inspired by the legacy of Alan Cheuse, who said, “Fiction, like poetry, works at its best when it brings together emotion as well as idea, passion as well as characters in the illusory unfolding we call time. When it works close to the timing of the human pulse, to the flow of our blood, the beat of our heart.”
August 02, 2024