Blaming on His Boots the Fault of His Feet

A Sunday evening found me falling asleep outside a Tbilisi metro station, waiting for my taxi to fill up and get on its way. I don't remember the two hour drive east. I'm sure it was dangerous, and I'm sure the music was not to taste – gratuitously energized Eastern European pop or revamped bad hiphop. And yet I catch myself finding it catchy sometimes. Cringe, yes. Sometimes I’m lucky and get Georgian folk or old Russian rock.

I paid the driver in the red glow of taillights and walked the short dirt road, up to the metal gate of a house in which I had never slept, my huge backpack and guitar, and dogs barking somewhere nearby in the darkness.

I worked the corrupt lock contraption for a few frustrating minutes, and then was inside. The lights worked. Relief. Everything will be okay. My belongings in two big piles, on the couch, on the table, all where I’d dumped them eight days before. A dead mouse lay a few feet away.

Imagine this. A hundred or so foreigners scattered across a small country, and months later plucked up from their respective coordinates, thrown back into the same conference room, the same noisy dining hall, the same warm showers, reliable toilets, fast internet, and the same rows of beds, in that same compound where they'd first found themselves green off the plane. A remeshing of personalities after a very thorough shake up: disorientated, lost, rediscovered, broken, fixed, dark, light, up, down, and then back to the compound in Bazaleti.

And then, in Bazaleti, the constant sessions and classes all day, talking late into the night, playing guitar, not enough sleep, food and tables and notes to compare, and drama, and wine. And then, as if all of a sudden, I was standing alone beneath high ceilings, the first night in an empty house. It was quiet, dark outside, and I was exausted.

I moved heavily around the room, stopping with random recollections, staring off for a minute, forgetting what I was doing.

I was preparing to bathe myself. I poured the boiled water from an electric kettle. It was dark brown. I washed it out, reboiled, and soon was standing in my little bathroom in an old metal tub , my bucket and my sponge and a small shampoo tube kifed from a hotel room a few months before.

A few awkward minutes later I shivered out into the kitchen; a spider was twitchingly lowering itself from the ceiling in front of my face.

This was all nearly half a year ago. I've lived in this house since. I've walked back and forth from the nearby school. I've sat in the teacher's room. I've stood about classrooms. I've been at home, at my table, working. I've bought top ramen. I've bought raw beans and rice and potatoes with my last few lari. I've bought chacha in 20oz fanta bottles and mixed it with carbonated mineral water while watching Blackaddar. I've bought more wood than I thought I would ever need, and went through all of it, and bought more.

For a while I cooked on a crumbling concrete hotplate: a floppy metal spring that's coiled around a pattern of concrete fixtures. The end of the coil is twisted with wires that then plug directly into the wall. I cooked on it exclusively until one day with a huge spark it threw the breaker. Since then I've cooked on my pechi.

I've discovered that laundry is mostly getting soap into clothes, and then trying to get it out again. This is my current working theory. I've learned to simply soak my clothes in soapy water, then haul my basket down the road to the fresh spring water that comes out of a pipe. I shove it under and come back an hour or so later so the water’s running clear. Women tell me I'm certainly not a Georgain man. 

You live alone? the women say.

Yes.

And cook?

Yes, yes.

Really? What do you cook?

Soup, I say.

Of course. Soup! You just put things in it! They mime dropping things in a soup and nod and offer warm and somewhat sexist congratulations. Fair enough.

But it's been difficult to write a blog post all this time. It's almost never a good idea to post when feeling down. You end up trying to sound positive; every line full of forced optimism. The subtext becomes some sort of melodramatic stance of brave endurance and future-thinking, and when thrown out into the blogosphere it is the position you must now identify with, and hitherto maintain until further notice. The whole thing is self-conscious and it all inflates and takes up too much space. And then whatever changes might have happened and new insight discovered, these are lost beneath a ballooning posture and a brave and pained expression, hand on forehead.

Better to stoneface, and withdraw a little. Make one's reports infrequent, playful and a little cryptic. In the meantime, reorientate oneself, where one is at, what one's life is now. Study the variables. Avoid big changes. Don't be spontaneous. Seek company when needed and avoid it when it's too much. Try to be understanding before being understood. Avoid cynicism and optimism: both illusory; both ways of misrepresenting things in order to circumnavigate them. And always affirm life, which sometimes means saying yes to darkness and loneliness and embracing them before moving on.

So it's been hard sometimes. Because of the loneliness? No. I was expecting that. Because of a completely new life that leaves one disorientated and exhausted? Not really. I was expecting that too. What's the hardest thing? It's to show up, ready to persevere, to grit ones teeth and march forward, to push on when exhausted, to endure!, and on all this self-satisfied heroic mythmilk, then find only a bare room, an echo, and a mirror.

So what's so hard is feeling superfluous. A sense of loss and waste. And lack of options. Why did this school request a volunteer, and then not want to work with me? What were they thinking? Did they not realize it wasn’t just a funding source to capture out of habit, but that a real person was coming? Why would a counterpart teacher openly confess to me that the teachers never wanted a volunteer in the first place? - a unilateral act on the school director’s part. In way of apology? Out of embarrassment perhaps? Or irritably, in hopes I will stop trying? I came all this way, I want to tell them.

I came all this way. The last volunteer established an English resource center, with a laptop that was soon appropriated by the director and taken home (one of two laptops this happened to actually, the other part of some USAid program donation last semester.) Several years ago a room was remodeled on a grant to become an English room. Since then it’s become the director’s and secretary’s office. My director has a sort of naughty child thing about her. Has the naive American put it together yet? But, oh yes, she knows what's she's done, overly friendly and fertive, tst tst, Zoya Zoya. But does he know? What does he know? Such is the guilty conscience. And so, it was with a mix of regret, disgust, irony, and relief, and on the advice of PC staff, that I recently abandoned the writing of my grant to have a nurse room funded. The school doesn't know yet, and I don’t think I ought to tell them. They would surely cool towards me even more.

Best to leave it there, not talk about too much. One reason, the more talk, the more folk will want to chalk it up to attitude and self, “…blaming on his boots the fault of his feet,” as Vladamir says of Estragon.  To dismiss someone's experience as the result of lack of character is easier than extending even a chilly recognition. I just think you should snap out of it, one friend told me.  I’d prefer a shrug thank you. Still, I've done good work here though, outside my site, working with other volunteers, creating resources for other folk, an adult English class in another village.

And here, in my village, I sometimes am overcome with an almost hysterical energy, to try to do everything, grants and classes and clubs,  to overcome all through sheer force of will! Crazy crazy. And I always come back here, and wake up here, and it’s hard. It’s like a solid dark entity is roosting on your organs. Hot and organic. It begins spinning like a like small black planet in darkness, and it spreads out like an oil spill, filling up your chest cavity, pushing aside your lungs, and then it turns into a demented ransacking rodent.

And in time you have to face it. You girdle it, leash and collar it in, clench down the choke ball, yank it hard into the backroom, and tie it to a pipe embedded in concrete. It can thrash about and bleat; it can be quite annoying, but is well-contained in this man before you, this well-postured specimen, save for an occasional sharp intake of breath, like the baby just kicked. Or a subtle strain in the eyes. Or long, hyperbolic blog posts.

One finds oneself watching oneself "getting worse," lapsing into self-neglect. Keeping a clean living space and maintaining personal hygiene takes quite a bit more effort in a village anyway. It is certainly more time consuming, bucket baths, and sweeping, and food preparation. It takes sheer will to force oneself up to get up and start, but once you've managed, it gets easier.

A sense of self-respect must be maintained. Force dignity upon yourself. Don't live a certain way, no matter how you feel. Force your head up when it hangs, and look in the eye everyone. What is paramount to the idea of making the world a better place? Pity and charity, no. Dignity is the essential factor, for oneself and for others.  And for oneself first, for practical reasons, plank-removing reasons.

Is it worth it, being here? I find myself wondering that less often than you’d think. If ever I decided to leave it would be something I just would know, I would one day find myself knowing. Not a conclusion rationally arrived it. Still, I don't think I would leave.

And transcendent experiences occur throughout difficult stretches of life.

I was walking home from the NGO I teach at twice a week. Good lessons by the way, and good people. They always make me coffee. They speak no English and yet we communicate well because we like and appreciate each other and want to work together. I enter the NGO tense and self-conscious after the school, and by the time I leave I've come back, I remember who I am and feel a warm sense of worth. See Ryan, it's not you ol' boy! It's not all your fault! Because no matter how counterintuitive, it still always feels like it's something I did wrong. But then I'm suddenly myself again, all this from being shown some genuine friendliness and appreciation. (Who knew I defined myself so much by circumstance? I had no idea.)

Anyway, I was walking home when it all came into focus and everything was in its right place. It was early evening. People moved, and were talking, and children weaving down the road on their bikes, and it all followed and flowed, with the earth in its great slow rotation and rushing silently through space, and I was a mere instance here, listening to the sound of my breath, my footfalls on a dirt road, and found that the only sense to be found in all of this is in what lay about you when you look up. Yes, all very cliché now, but these are mere reflections  here, in text-form. The quality of the transcendent experience is quite different than what one babbles on about afterward: a series of moments of death and life and beauty and acceptance and letting go.

I think I'll go hiking this weekend with Lucky to carry my stuff.