_ Here from There
published in Ribot (Los Angeles) 5 (1997)
How can I know which memory is really mine? Certain books, certain music, experienced in my life have convinced me that I did not just grow up on both coasts of the United States as the "facts" would have it. I have also been a schoolboy in the French provinces, wandered in and out of love through the streets of Paris at the time of the Popular Front (or was it the early '50s), ridden my horse out on the endless pampa, driven through the romantic and shadowy districts of Buenos Aires to pick up my fiancée at her rooming house. I do not know how I got here from there, that doesn't matter: it is enough that I wake up each morning, that I slip the same old shoes onto my feet and walk out the door.
Perhaps history, which is packed into the sidewalk before me as surely as the rock and cement, is no more than the age-old question of borders: who or what set them down at a given place or time, who fought over them, who wanted to get in or out, and who lived so far within or beyond said border that they almost did not know it was there. How we live with and against our borders. Or simply, how we learn to recognize ourselves, a process that never ends.
published in Ribot (Los Angeles) 5 (1997)
How can I know which memory is really mine? Certain books, certain music, experienced in my life have convinced me that I did not just grow up on both coasts of the United States as the "facts" would have it. I have also been a schoolboy in the French provinces, wandered in and out of love through the streets of Paris at the time of the Popular Front (or was it the early '50s), ridden my horse out on the endless pampa, driven through the romantic and shadowy districts of Buenos Aires to pick up my fiancée at her rooming house. I do not know how I got here from there, that doesn't matter: it is enough that I wake up each morning, that I slip the same old shoes onto my feet and walk out the door.
Perhaps history, which is packed into the sidewalk before me as surely as the rock and cement, is no more than the age-old question of borders: who or what set them down at a given place or time, who fought over them, who wanted to get in or out, and who lived so far within or beyond said border that they almost did not know it was there. How we live with and against our borders. Or simply, how we learn to recognize ourselves, a process that never ends.