Banana Yoshimoto and E.B. White Are in Our Heads

The following essay is a draft of an excerpt from my working manuscript.

“When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.” — Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake.

Albufeira, Portugal; 2014

In 2014, I wrote a blog post while on holiday in Portugal with my family. It was about a novel called The Lake by Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto, and I used it to explore the idea of “place” and how we both shed and attract certain elements of places where we live. It was my first time in the Algarve, yet I recall being so struck by this jumbled, yet vivid, fusion of places that I had already experienced: The fishing boats reminded me of the Pacific Northwest, the dry pine needles of central Oregon, the unique red rocks on the Algarve beaches of landlocked Sedona (that one was surprising), and the overall European seaside vibe of an Italian vacation when I was a teenager. And, really, doesn’t the smell of sunblock provide intense recollection for pretty much everyone?

Yet it was fleeting; nothing concrete allowed me to grasp and hang on. It was as if everything I felt about Portugal was a wisp, circling around my psyche. Picture a person in a cloud of fog, but the fog is a definitive notion of “this is what it means to live here.” Or, just picture me sort of sitting and staring into the distance, trying to let all the different emotions wash over me.

An emotion so fleeting, it’s hard to pin it down in concrete terms. Longing, tenuousness, a little something that might make you smirk while nonetheless feel despairing. Startlingly familiar, but unsure how to swim through unknown social gestures, standards, and expectations. When you have the opportunity to see different parts of the world — either due to moving or travel — you take bits and pieces of everywhere that’s left a mark on you before.

***

When my husband took a job in Dublin in 2011, his soon-to-be-colleagues told us we needed to watch the film Once. They also told us we needed to watch the rom-com Leap Year starring Amy Adams, but I suspect that was in order to get a cheeky dig in at Americans.

 Once left a mark on me.

 Two unnamed individuals (just “Girl” and “Guy”) meet during one of Guy’s evening busking sessions in center-city Dublin.

“Is that an established song?” Girl asks in her Czech accent.

No, Guy admits in his Irish accent. “Not an ‘established song.’ I wrote it.”

What unfolds is a strangely comforting relationship between the Czech-born “Girl,” who is living with her mother and young daughter (who herself is a somewhat surprising plot twist partway through the film) in Ireland, and the older-than-her “Guy,” who writes and performs music to — subconsciously — grapple with the death of his mother and the departure of his girlfriend to “London Town.” Although there are some undertones of romantic interest between the two, they are off-kilter and incongruent; when he expresses an interest in “hooking up,” she demurs. But as the film progresses, it is she who allows herself thoughts of romantic entanglement with Guy. On the one hand, it’s a very typical — and simple — “wrong place, wrong time” type of situation, but something about the film shows viewers that what they are each seeking in their own ways is a sense of “home” and that this can be an unnamable and bumbling process when the reason you’re seeking is that you are actually homesick. However, even if something is desired — or craved even — you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole, and in subtle and unspoken ways Girl and Guy experience a deep-seated understanding that each of them simply provides the other a mirror for better understanding what they might be missing.

At their most benign and simple selves, I believe what Girl and Guy are really trying to convey was a sense of homesickness. Although Girl speaks English, her mother does not. When she first brings Guy to the apartment she shares with her mother and daughter, Czech is spoken freely while Guy awkwardly stands by. Finally, Girl says, “Try to speak a little English, Mama.” Her mother smiles, shakes her head, and returns to her knitting with “No thank you.” A somewhat silly — yet nonetheless meaningful — act of defiance. Soon after, three young men from a neighboring apartment enter as they don’t have a television and have an agreement with Girl that they can watch Fair City every night in order to learn English: “How are you, man?” Laughs abound as they men imitate the colloquialisms of a language that is not yet theirs.

Ghost estate in Co. Wexford, Ireland; 2012

Viewers may not realize it, but Once is a real moment-in-time film. Written and directed by Irish filmmaker James Carney, Once takes its “Irishness” and throws it up in the air to rid itself of the easy charms of Leap Year. On its landing, viewers are treated with something that challenges the notions of a loud, cheerful, and “happy go lucky” population. This film was released in 2007, which was the tail end of the Celtic Tiger, a 20- year period of immense economic growth in this small nation that is roughly the size of South Carolina. Soon after Y2K, the Republic of Ireland was, shockingly, one of the richest nations in the world. This prosperity resulted not just in very “un-Irish” property development and an abundance of sports cars and posh shops, but a handful of years later, an extreme property bubble and subsequent number of foreclosed “ghost estates” (entire new neighborhoods full of unfinished houses) and a return to the age-old tradition of Irish people leaving their own country in order to find employment.

 A bit of a cluck, cluck, sigh envelopes many Irish people when they discuss their country’s economy. The day my family and I landed in Dublin on a red-eye flight — a good five years since the Celtic Tiger had wound down — we decided to power through the day lest we fall prey to jet lag. Our big excursion was on a Viking Tour — Dublin’s version of the now-ubiquitous amphibious bus tour — and our tour guide was quick to point out the Celtic Tiger-era glass-encased high-rise condo developments in Dublin’s Grand Canal Dock and explain, “This is not the Irish way to live.” I immediately understood that Ireland was grappling with who it was and that the Irish people, as well as people new to its shores like ourselves, would have a hard time pinning it down.

 Mind How You Settle?

In 2015, a partnership between Crosscare — an agency that provides services to refugees and migrants, among others — and the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs resulted in a project called Mind How You Go. Its aim was to provide a robust briefing of information that allowed Irish migrants to feel better equipped in their emigration journeys. Among other interesting statistical data, the study found that over 70% of Irish migrants felt “homesick” at least once a month. Nearly 15% of respondents claimed to feel homesick at least once per day.

Could an abruptly changing nation spur — at least in part — an even more acute sense of homesickness? It’s one thing to miss home but know that upon your return — whenever that may be — a familiarity will instantly win you back over. But what to make of a place that quickly starts feeling foreign, despite your citizenship?

Although this study and subsequent Mind How You Go website were released toward the end of our time in Ireland, the requirement for respondents was that they had to have emigrated after January 2009. In other words, they wanted to hear from post-Celtic Tiger migrants. Thus, this is the all-encompassing event that provided the backdrop to our own domicile in a country that kept releasing its homesick natives to Australia (nearly half of the respondents) to the UK (of course), to unexpected places like Kuwait and Qatar.

It felt only fair for me to really try to make sense of this place, to find my family’s center of gravity in Ireland when the most common question out of an Irish person’s mouth is “How are you settling?”

We go with what we know.

Like my experience relating to Portugal after reading Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake, my ability to grasp living in Ireland guided me to a valley of warm and familiar feelings coupled with sharp mountains of unrecognition. On the one hand, I met more people in Dublin from Seattle, my hometown, than I ever did in any other US city I lived in. (That’s thanks to multinational corporations such as Amazon, which found a tax-friendly home in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger.) And the rain…oh how the rain was comforting to a native Pacific Northwesterner. Yet I knew nothing — I didn’t know how many digits were in a local phone number, I couldn’t understand certain county accents, and navigating the labyrinth of paperwork for acquiring a PPS number, child benefit, a driving license (but first we had to take drivers ed all over again!), and a bank account was never-ending, laborious, and sometimes entirely indecipherable.

Toward the end of Once, Guy and Girl find themselves at a La Boheme-esque dinner party where revelers take turns singing traditional Irish music. It’s soulful, but more to the point, it’s music that resonates with people who can’t figure out a way to “settle.” By the film’s close, Guy has plans to move to London to reunite with his girlfriend, and Girl notes that she plans to reunite with her daughter’s Czech father — who, it turns, out is actually her husband. Viewers have no idea how it all ends.

Do any of us truly know what we want — or more to the point, where “home” might actually be?

In 2008, a song from Once (and composed and performed by co-stars Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, aka Guy and Girl) called Falling Slowly won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Its lyrics likely refer to a person, but to me they will always describe the feeling of not knowing, exactly, where you are:

I don’t know you but I want you

All the more for that

Words fall through me and always fool me

And I can’t react…

Take this sinking boat and point it home

We’ve still got time…

 ***

Maybe it’s the outboard motors.

In 1941, Harper’s Magazine published an essay by E.B. White called “Once More to the Lake.” Although it is White’s very specific account and reminiscence of the place where he vacationed as a child — Belgrade Lakes, Maine — his ability to illustrate the fine-tuned details of this location and provide a pitch-perfect rendering of how emotion can be wrapped up in setting feels universal. He writes, “It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves which lead back. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing.”

Via Boston Public Library

White is recounting the time that he first takes his son to the scene of so many of his own fond childhood memories. Right off the bat, he commingles fact with details that conjure feeling:

 “One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond's Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine.”

Ringworm and falling out of a canoe don’t necessarily sound appealing, but to White, these anecdotes simply add color and texture to what is overall a nice and pleasant place to him. That’s the thing: Descriptors and sketches can go either way — good or bad, nice or unpleasant, additive to a feeling of comfort or completely devoid of good vibes. All these things add to a “feeling” of a place, or as Yoshimoto would claim, “the placeness of a place.”

 Here are some examples of explicit sensory descriptors from “Once More to the Lake” that beckon a reader into White’s heavy nostalgia:

 “…splotches of dry, flaky manure.”

 “…how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen.”

 From a more esoteric angle, White offers up his take on trying to conjure — and then let others enter into — the way that a place makes him “feel.”

The lake feels inviting and steady: “This seemed an utterly enchanted sea, this lake you could leave to its own devices for a few hours and come back to, and find that it had not stirred, this constant and trustworthy body of water.”

The lake feels peaceful: “I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind which blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods. A few weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to go, for a week's fishing and to revisit old haunts.”

The lake feels otherworldly: “I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot…”

Inviting, steady, peaceful, and otherworldly: These are the qualities what we — what Guy, and Girl, and Irish migrants, and migrants to Ireland, and I — crave. And we’ll investigate every nook and cranny of wherever we find ourselves to uncover it.

Yet then something interesting happens to White. The sounds of “outboard motors” (aka speed boats) intrude on the stillness and quiet in addition to White’s pleasant memories.

 “There had been no years.”

 “…there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain—”

 “It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity and peace and goodness.”

But is that truly so? Or is it — perhaps — that the role of memory is what is “precious”? The “sound of outboard motors” is now, to White’s ears and sense of nostalgia, is what has changed. And what throws the idea of passing time into his resistant consciousness.

All of these people — certainly myself included — bemoaning how their homes have changed are perhaps affected by their own “outboard motor.” What is the one thing that zaps us into realizing that time has, actually, moved on and that maybe we can’t attain the steady grasp on a place that we so desperately crave?


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