Looking To Georgia

I’ve wound up writing splinters of Christmas card this morning — we’re still in the Latin Twelve — but this isn’t it. This is from November, the 4th; it’s an oddball spitball and went back in the drawer. Given how things have played out and where America’s eyes are turned this week, and the fact I woke up early enough for a little morning figuring and some post-coffee spontaneity, I’ve figured I might as well just post it, even if it’s practically history already; certain parts may even be more relevant now than they were when I wrote them; who knows what purpose these things serve or might serve. I am deeply in love with the home I was born in. Love letters have strange ways of mattering; if only because what we’re writing to will matter so much to us.

Looking Away

I’m writing this blind, so to speak. I’ve just been to the police; stations in the actual city center, whether the old town or its immediate rings, have all inexplicably been closed, but conveniently for me there’s one immediately at the tram stop I take to go take my favorite stroll. I’m writing this with a view across and down, just barely, to the Schloss Giebichenstein, a painfully romantic Romanesque half-ruin of a thing. Eichendorff, one of the greatest unremembered German poets (you could argue — either point), had a particular fondness of the place, which anyone even slightly familiar with his lyrics will understand immediately on encountering it. It’s gorgeous in all seasons, but autumn packs a wallop. There’s a veritable sea of copperhead waves for it to roll among and emerge from.

I’m writing this at — I have a clear view to the massive slateblack face and gold numerals of the castle tower’s clock — just after two on Wednesday afternoon, the fourth. I’m writing this blind in the sense of having no access to the Styx of information and conversation and conjecture drowning through the world just now, my trip to the Kurallee police having been occasioned by the theft of my phone. The pleasantly ferret-faced plain-clothed officer who processed my attempt at a report did hesitate before asking me about the new president I may or may not be promised through the glass. I give a small performative shudder and shuttle of my head and upper body.

“Don’t know yet?”

“We know it’s close.” I explain the whole home’s-turned-into-the-battleground-state thing, and leave out the part about how Coca Cola’s from there. “If it’s clear by tonight in Georgia it’ll all be clear by tonight. All done. I’m praying.”

“But who are you praying for?”

I try not to show how much personal offense I take at this. Having spent most of my halakhically adult life abroad, both in countries that would consider themselves too civilized for a simpering authoritarian imp and in countries struggling to take full breaths under the lard-assed bully weight of one full on their national chest, I do not easily comprehend or respect, most especially not by those I normally agree with or hold respect for, any degree of electoral support for the president Trump’s proven himself to be. I’d like to imagine you can tell I wouldn’t actively support him; I believe this is the most extreme political stance I’ve ever found myself holding, and if direct I hope it is not misunderstood. If you are on the dull end of my dead horse on this then you likely (and like me) are already used to the concept of loving a sinner but not the sin, so I trust I don’t need to expect any much blowback from my bluntness. In any event, in consequence (in retrospect, I realize), I don’t quite ever answer him directly.

“I don’t know what another four years would even look like. I don’t even know what the next four days will look like if it doesn’t clear up by today.” Officer Ferret nods. I tell him this feels like the worst-case scenario, nearly, and everyone in the little arrangement behind the glass is watching and listening, and I fluster a little bit more and mumble something about how crazy it is and say hey, thanks though for asking, ahaha!, and we exchange little niceties of body language and I rush my way out and towards the pretty cobbled street where the leaves are already all down.

I stayed up late last night on a Zoom chat with a screen full anxious faces I mostly don’t know, until it became clear Florida wasn’t going to give me cause for early morning celebration and I gave myself up to fitful sleep and on-the-nose nightmares. There was blood and probably a Super Target and I woke up pathetically nauseous to check the live map I had open on the laptop screen beside my bed, where it normally never is, and which didn’t help. My sister wrote soon to put nausea in perspective, and maybe helped mildly. Still. I was checking the results obsessively today until noon, at which point I decided I needed the walk and fresh air and sunshine and stolen phone report behind me. So, last I know, sitting here scrawling this out with increasingly numbing fingers, ideal view over gold and lime and last emerald across to the roofs and bare rocks of the Giebichenstein, is that Georgia, my Georgia, my copperhead glistening rhododendron live oak moss and pine barren Georgia, hill creek and blue-misted mountain and swamp-drunk Georgia, is somewhere held right at the cusp of spitting humanity’s old endless urge towards self-ruin right in the eye. It may have gone and done so already. And that’s BEAUTIFUL.

It’s also terrifying. It’s very easy to imagine the Great Spittoon encouraging Georgia towards violence against itself. Like any good beautiful drunk Georgia teeters forever on the brink or thin bridge between mystic prophetic saintliness and a whole slew of self-destructions. And that in the normal moments; when a body makes a choice it’s so uncertain in arriving at — and as much as I have trouble understanding a Trump vote of any one man or woman it’s somehow more understandably a fraught and difficult choice for Georgia, as a place, as a community, as a corpus, as a Georgia of all its pasts and people and peoples and hoped-for futures, trying desperately to work out how to Be Georgia best for all of Georgia and all of its parts, still with this human albatross of itself around its neck and a guilt it can’t quite admit to enough to atone for entirely –when a body like that makes a choice that feels this difficult for it, an outsider has a good chance of breaking that body down, that mind, spirit and soul, to make it doubt, to bring an agony and harm upon itself. That’s a genuine danger for Georgia tomorrow. Maybe even today. Maybe even already.

I stayed up late as last night last not quite four years ago, at least for the pointless purpose of watching numbers roll in. I didn’t for the 2016 elections; I was off wandering and couldn’t have, and woke up to the news instead. I was living in Tbilisi in February of 2017, in a different Georgia, and was following up incorrect information about where, in a rugby-mad city of over a million, one might find a television on all night that could tune to the Super Bowl. I’d received permission, bemused, to stay out late, but spent the first three quarters racing between false leads, snapping up hints of wifi for the score as I went, from shuttered cafes my phone had learnt to connect to. It was freezing, of course, and I finally slouched up to the flat to tune in to the rest of our inevitable, glorious, long-awaited victory on internet radio. Even Germans in this unknown inland harbor city I’m living in now know how that went; I’ve had two different strangers here ask me at meeting if 28 was my lucky number, which, you know, is rude, but also a strangely specific way to give me grief for that.

I stand by my reckoning then; that was the most important football match of my lifetime. The chance for Atlanta — Blank’s Atlanta, Julio’s Atlanta, our Atlanta — to deliver so soon after inauguration a sporting symbolic rebuke to Trump and his words, Trump and his smirking implications, to Trump and his careless friends and his so-called Patriots — would have been a historic moment like no other. Even when history doesn’t quite catch, the moment the teeth pass can often be worth remembering.

The South’s had something to say a long time, and it’s worth that turning to rote, so do keep on repeating it. It only becomes more true. And a long time goes back to its beginning. The best rebuke to Trump had to come from the part of America he is least capable of understanding. He cannot grasp the immediate and real and he cannot grasp the intense unmappable truth of myth. If Georgia is delivering that rebuke right now — I have moved to the river, below the high castle on its cliff, as the sun’d slipped and left me too cold where I was, and slipping further now paints the river and sky and close bare trees and Kröllwitz bridge like home — if Georgia is delivering that rebuke right now, as I scrawl this out blind and anxious and hopeful and very, very cold, what can anyone say except it had to be? And if it isn’t quite, still, it seems the teeth are close enough already that history has to hear their passing again. Sometimes what doesn’t actually happen can be what matters, if that’s what we make it — and then though, of course, that’s a something we do make happen. It’s an impressively beautiful moment, to not know but sit hoping beneath a bronzed halfdisk of sky and someone else’s crumbled thousand-year old given thing, and know, know that your homeland is making more myth of itself.

Granted, I am a proven optimist. It’s a hell of a way to spin a stolen cell phone.