A Little Piece of History

May 24, 2008

Goodness me: I've never heard thunder so loud. One is certainly warned of an oncoming deluge here. Perhaps a macrocosmic echo of my heartbeat, trying to sneak my belongings onto the third floor of this building without being noticed, and scared witless with it. Mind over matter sometimes.

More in progress...

Much has happened, with much improvement, over the past three months. Perhaps after Charles I, I'm growing to accept the new order. However, precisely like that new order, it does not come without its drawbacks. It doesn't really stop the rollercoaster existence that comes with trying to settle in somewhere new. It took me a good year to settle into Bristol, and that was without the problems of moving abroad. A summary as concise as possible, much like the conference paper, would be nice, and I will not remember everything at once, but writing will be the only way to solve this, and perhaps lay some heavy burdens to rest.

Back at the beginning of April, I presented a paper at the Origins Conference in Fribourg, on Marvell's 'Publication Dilemma' in the company of textual scholar Professor A.S.G. Edwards and Oxford Shakespeare editor Professor Gary Taylor. I will save details for Royal_Arbor, but it was a rich experience, and great to meet many of the other people working in medieval and early modern literature across Switzerland. The benefits of a relatively tight circle were apparent when knowledge of this paper brought interest from Professor Anthony Mortimer, Penguin translator of Petrarch, who was completing a paper on Cromwell's elegies. Not that my paper could help in any way, and it did go to show how thought on inventive titles could, in the academic world, be disconcertingly counterproductive, but otherwise very useful to get feedback on the subject area. The paper: condensed, condensed, and condensed further, was a little piece of early modern history.

That conference turned out to have another gloss in the silver lining. My pending homelessness was turning into a distressing and occasionally tear-releasing concern. It's easy to feel very alone in this city because you need to be a survivor. Switzerland, as I have learned, is far from the all-welcoming, 'neutral' entity that it may otherwise be portrayed as. More and more headlines are creeping out about the Swiss' fierce defence of their own sovereignty, and only because this seems more and more right-wing given the libertarian EU for one, and with traditionally conservative governments distancing themselves from the right-wing 'radicals' like the UK's BNP for another. With that, perhaps I had felt somewhat betrayed by the job description for the place. Of course, no job description is quick to highlight the negatives, but a city with as stringent a property crisis as exists here - it is worth mentioning how difficult it can be to get any kind of accommodation at all. The middle of April would see me homeless. How quickly the four months passed since moving into the rather fetching little 'ghetto' area of Blanche - a little piece of very recent history.

A rescue was in sight, thanks to Petya, a colleague working on Medieval literature (coincidentally, working on a text edited by Elizabeth Archibald, the head of department at Bristol while I was there). A friend of hers was looking for a replacement tenant for her brother, who I was then invited to go and visit. I made a fleeting visit to the very pleasant surroundings of Champel to meet the very enthusiastic and welcoming Mr Marin Yonchev, who showed me around his delightful little studio. Expensive enough for what it is - but in the great lottery of Geneva, this would be absolutely ideal. It did not take me very long at all to agree to take the place; helped along by Marin's good humour and French worse than mine. He was leaving for England, to help along his music career. It was then I was to be starstruck in learning of this fine chap's credentials, as Bulgarian Fame/Star Academy winner in 2005. Such competitions get vilified quite easily, but Marin is a national icon and has an enormous fanbase back in Bulgaria, and he was planning to head home to take part in a huge concert at the beginning of June. There stands a glistening piece of Bulgarian history.




There was no escaping this rather messy accommodation situation until Marin was ready to leave in Mid-May, and with the term and my teaching still very much in freeflow, it was a surreal European travelling adventure, living with syrendelalune for much of the week (for which I remain extremely thankful), and an unexpected return to the Geneva hostel for mid-week evenings when I needed to be over here. There is something wonderfully special about returning home to the UK at the end of a short and intensive mid-week stay in Geneva: leaving my office at the very click of 4pm on Thursday, and breaking the dusk at Elm Park, east London. Perhaps it reminded me of the day return jaunts to Edinburgh - living the hard way. Glamorous, by plane, perhaps, but a novelty which still wears off, and with the summer approaching, I was struggling to get the mid-week accommodation I needed, and had to call upon the help of Martin, Dr. Leer, who I stayed with for my first months here. I'm not sure if there is a great deal more insecure than troubled living arrangements, but the view from Martin's attic penthouse terrace is one of the best Geneva can offer, one which melts troubles away, consigning them to their own piece of insignificant history.

With some perseverance, I was able to catch up with Marin a few times as the time came to negotiate moving in, and it was part of a very welcome few weeks. The semester had been quite a long one, with my course on Marvell being perhaps a little too dense, a little too intense, purely because of my own overambitious desire to make it perfect. My idea of completeness was far beyond what it necessarily needed to be. With that, the semester had been about the heavy preparations for the aforementioned conference for starters, and then simply trying to negotiating living on a week-by-week basis. I dropped an inhibition or two and met the charming Marin a few times for a beer or two. I enjoyed his company very much, and wish I had known him a lot longer. It was even, during that time, that I tried to talk about my journal, and found it so difficult to explain how I use it and what I talk about - as any kind of genre at all. But I revelled in how easily it was to connect with my new, albeit famous, friend here. I was learning more about the experience of travelling abroad in search of something, with Marin registered at the famous Conservatoire de Musique in Geneva, and wishing to further his musical spectrum in the UK. Eventually, I found my way into this happy studio in the middle of May, hoping very much that my new friend and I will cross paths again in the future, and not that he becomes barely a piece of history in this minute little life of mine.

I conclude here with a sad thought; not to override the overall triumph of the story (if a narrative can be formed), but because it does cast its poignant shadow over me still. It followed me happily through different countries, survived countless transport miles, and grew to hold a dear part of me in different media. My external hard-disk was four years old, when the simplest and most inept little accident brought it to a swift and merciful end. For sure, my well-intended attempts to resuscitate only facilitated its demise. The sense of loss was a completely numbing one. Not only did my music vanish, with almost all of the CDs back at home (which I was not sure when I would next be visiting), but other things too: most Knightmare (and RPG) related items, and various special sentimentia that will likely never be recovered; music that was borrowed, has been passed on, or otherwise old recordings from friends or time-specific material. If I may, I will quote from an article by an old friend of mine, the excellent Al Allday:

On the train platform on the way home I got chatting to a teenage girl heading into town for a night out. She said she liked my clothes. Then she offered to suck me off. It’s one of those stories you couldn’t make up.

Did I not feel something similar? Here I was, embarking on a meaningful article for our magazine, Noted, about how, despite amassing an estimated quarter of a million words in journals over the past five years, I talk so little of my love for music, and yet when I come to do so, I go and destroy the crown jewel, the source, the compendium; it showed me the true feeling behind my writing in the raw absence that I never wanted to find. This seemed like a coincidence, a story, that I could not possibly invent. I kept as rational a head as I could while a companion of four years died, and much that meant so much to me disappeared. Almost every day for the six weeks since this has happened, I remind myself of something else consigned to a piece of history, and now nothing more. Ironically enough, it has been my LiveJournal that has partly come to my aid. The first time I archived this place, I decided to accumulate all of the songs that had featured in the 'Current Music' to that point (October 2005), and they have sat, virtually unused, on my laptop. I love, as I lose; I celebrate, as I mourn; I discover - only more that is missing; and I express here, therefore, as I have done enough times that each marginal extra threatens a diminishing return, a look to a piece of the future that is found, shaped, and governed by a little piece of history.

Saying my piece to make my peace: an old adage of mine that has not lost its power, and which strikes with more relevance and resonance than ever.