Au Café de la Mairie (5-08-2008)

Les yeux ouverts on voit tout. Mais on en voit si peu.
Un demi et une cigarette de tabac aromatisé se marrient bien un jour d'Août que je vis pleinement en chemise noire. Je me retrouve à nouveau sur la place St Sulpice - jadis je la voyait de la fontaine, ou du banc où j'attachait mes rollers. Maintenant c'est du café de la mairie que je m'en rappelle, où s'entrelacent les vers d'un poême écrit il y a quelques années et les souvenirs de nombreuses demi heures que j'y ai passé. Amours fictifs et camaraderies vécues. C'est en quelque sorte un résumé.
J'en arrive à penser qu'on n'est pas plus sérieux à 24 qu'à dix-sept, en platanes qu'en tilleuls. C'est de surcroît une bien déchirante selection qu'exerce le passage du temps; voyant tout compte fait si peu de ce que l'on voit, ce fleuve s'octroie aussi une part de ce qu'on a vraiment vécu, et nos histoires intimes se trouvent être tout aussi poreuses que les publiques. Il est si difficile de parler avec certitude des derniers siècles du second millénaire en Palestine! Il est si difficile de parler abvec certitude de la semaine passée! Où est-elle donc passée? La roche béante avale bien vite ce fleuve du temps, et les sous-terrains inconscients de l'Histoire agissent bien plus qu'ils ne parlent.
(Nous admettons que la spacialization du temps pose quelques problèmes, mais permettons nous cette inexactitude le temps d'une rêverie)
L'Histoire, c'est cette géologie spirituelle qui s'accumule sur sa soeur matérielle. Elle a comme moteur ce fleuve colossal, le Temps, qui est nourri et se tresse d'autant de tributaires qu'il-y-a eu d'êtres humains. Ses matériaux, ce sont le sens, le vrai, le faux, la douleur, les émotions, les sens, les illusions, les convictions. C'est une toison indéfinie qui existe de témoignages et de bouche-à-oreilles. Ils la refont sans cesse. A-t-elle une vraie forme? Est-elle ponctuée de mouvements, d'évènements cosmiques? Qui nous le dira?

le-Bigs

As I monotoned my way through a slew of scanning this morning - pottery drawings for a certain ceramically prolific excavation I work for - suddenly my music genome radio station was all silence.

and a pepper grinder.

and a base line.

and a conga.

Buenvenidos, Senor Santana. A which point I kicked the desk over, tore up the inked transparency paper, and began gyrating in a latin frenzy throughout the museum, knocking over, among others, a copper tablet from Nuzi, a few vintage field photographs (various archaeo-celebrities ho-humming about something on the ground, beyond the picture frame), and an egyptian doorjamb from the temple of Amun at Karnak (which required a particularly vigorous twist which seems to have thrown my hip out of socket again).
Then I decided mondays aren't always so bad.

The library feels empty again

There's nothing like a conversation with a loved one in which you cloak your actual cares and worries under a layer of babble about academic business. There's a rough form of hypocrisy to it that makes me a bit sick to my stomach.
Another cycle in life; as vulnerability and fragility develop, so too the deposits which bury the impulses best suited to resolve them. In this manner a healthy mind is dependent on a constant archaeological labor. Its absence results in the fossilization of these vulnerabilities (attractive to emotional miners of all sorts) or, in the best (albeit painful) instances, in regular seismic activity which forces such strata to the surface.

Doesn't it seem futile, then, to return to a treatise on settlement differentiation? Something about the moment makes me hope that, returning to the pages I left to write this, I will find in them overriding chaos. It seems unlikely, but I would find a strange relief in reading that, as the Capetian dynasty consolidated it's economic hegemony on feudal France, everything suddenly went terribly wrong and the West European countryside was devasted by a godzillic Auroch. Perhaps it could be the unthinkable offspring of a meteoric impact in the Atlas Mountains.

L'automne, quand tombent les coeurs

High gear instantaneously as I got back to Cambridge.

In addition to a full semester of courses I've become the happy co-progenitor of a potential survey in Nor'eastern Jordan, where the roads are few and the smugglers many (that's the hearsay): A happy encounter with a previously un-deciphered rock-carving this summer left a chum in the good graces of some folks over there... Said folks said "come on back next summer," and so he's going back and I guess I'll be in the hand-luggage. The intention is to manufacture some kind of epigraphy/archaeology hybrid. So far things are looking up.
Along with that I've picked up a few lecturing spots at the museum, part of a program for educating our volunteer tour-guides. So experience teaching. And some jitters. And the nagging thought: "why am I doing this as I attempt to learn Ugaritic?" (Ugaritic, by the way, kicks ass)
Usually followed by another thought which is not really an articulated thought, but rather something like this.

Moving out of dormitories and into real-people housing is also a benefit for my general psychological health, and a giant leap in the direction of convincing myself that I am a mildly functional human being. Our landlord was a champ today and changed the shower curtain. Now that I put it into words, though, I'm not sure when changing shower curtains fell into the landlord's purview. Perhaps he takes the name very very seriously and considers petroleum and associated by-products as his responsibility.

I grew my hair out this summer.
I'm pretty pleased about that.
and: Vox DA5. 'nough said. But I'll say more anyways - I'll be ramping that bad boy up with my Squire stratocaster come saturday. (it's only after writing about this that I was inspired to add the hypertext link earlier in the email)(c'est bête mais il fallait y penser)

Mardi 29 Juillet

Bought some pants, a shirt, some empty notebooks down near St Germain after a bit of coffee at the Cafe de la Mairie on St Sulpice. There's been a lovely warm breeze through the city the last few days, which this morning effectively cleared away a sordid mood which had afflicted me since my return, sunday evening, from a good friend's wedding down near Avignon. No doubt, that the wedding was so excellent as to require a bit of physical recuperation may have had its part to play in said mood (the neck part of the physical, in particular, was in need of attention from the body-particles).While I'm just beginning the 'summer' part of my summer (in this we find that the author still relates to seasons from a predominantly juvenile anchor) I've begun thinking towards an amusing task for the fall - exploring what kind of analogy might be drawn between the arrival of the Israelite tribes in Palestine ca 1300-1200 B.C. on one hand, and the Arab conquest of Palestine in 635-637 A.D. on the other. The topic (for a seminar paper) emerged from a conversation with my advisor and it's been floating in Lake semi-conscious since late June. Accordingly, as I got back to Paris I wandered through a few bookstores and poked at texts relating to the events of the 7th century since I'm completely unfamiliar with them. This brought me to some excellent shops (again, near st Sulpice) where I found some old publications of sites like Tello (Ah, vulture Stela, you taunt us once again!). The kind with wax paper over the cover.
as far as my above analogy goes, it looks like it may be a bit of a stretch to get it to fly... The originally intriguing fact was that of tribes emerging from the Saudi peninsula bearing monotheism and rapidly rallying local Levantine peoples to their cause. Of course, the contexts are so radically different...
On verra.

Just finished our first week of excavations here at Ashkelon. We're kicking back here in the hallway at the Gane Dan. That's our hotel, and 'we' is me and a bunch of folks from the dig. I've been making them listen to Led zeppelin for the last half hour, and now we've moved away from that because apparently not everyone can handle excellent music.
The excavations are going smoothly, and I'm getting used to the different modalities of supervisory work (about 4 volunteers work directly beneath me, hierarchically speaking)(If we're excavating a pit, then sometimes they excavate beneath me, spatially speaking)(and if they ever make terrible jokes, then I usually consider those beneath me, qualitatively speaking). Clearly, I have yet to bleed myself completely of the paper on polysemy that I wrote a few weeks ago. (bring more leeches!)
Surprisingly, we had a fantastic discovery in our first two days of digging. As we took down a few balks we discovered a cypro-minoan stamp seal, another indication that this script was used to write the language spoken by the philistines. (since the script has yet to be deciphered, we're not sure what language that was, exactly. probably something like pig latin).
I've been trying to make theoretically responsible decisions during excavation, were precision and rigorous collection sometimes give way to exhaustion and the irritation at having to write up (yet another) MC tag. (Material Culture - anything man-made or man-modified that's not architecture). It's also been a good experience to be confronted with a square under my control, and therefore to face the task of creating, in light of past excavation, research questions to guide my digging over the next few weeks. (although it's not really up to me, since there are broader interests in play...). Right now I'm looking at a large Late Bronze (~1300 bc) outdoor surface, like a courtyard, with evidence of grain processing activities (large pits, work platforms, grindstones). The area is cut by a large Egyptian wall (~1250-1200) and so I'd like to take that thing out to have a clear view of everything beneath it (sampling a tell with squares is restricted enough, it gets a little ridiculous when you limit yourself even further), but I may have to wait on that.
As usual, I'll be heading up to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem sometime in the next few weeks to visit a few friends coming through town (B, G, R, J...maybe M?). If you're in the country and I know you, and you read this, send me a message or something.
Time to go scrub some pottery.

no subject

About to hit NY with the back of my hand. ("back..of the hand.." 2:35-2:44).
I'll be heading out to Israel in just 3 days now. At which point I will also hit tell Ashkelon with the back of my hand. (and a pick).
In the meantime I've settled into that lifestyle which makes up that delightful fraction of a grad student's career: doing nothing. While the reader may be inclined to think and then suggest that I must, in fact, still do something (I mean geez, he's still alive, right?), I am adamant: nothing. Deal with it, reader.

For those more inclined towards the anxious, wide-eyed, intellectual-hopes-and-fears kind of posts, I have no doubt those will find their way back here in due time. It's hard to be existential all the time. It's even harder to be not-existential all the time. I suppose we can only hope that I'll be near a laptop when it strikes.