My exchange students and I had our last class together today, although they will be around town on internships until the end of August. We watched Eagle vs. Shark
I suspect my end to the session was a bit perfunctory (pretty much “thank you and goodbye”) but I did not want any emotions to run too high. This is the fourth year in which I have contributed to this programme and regular readers know a little of what it means to me, particularly in terms of the friendships and experiences it has brought me abroad.
Something like the students’ feelings of not wanting things to end quite so quickly was what I felt when I shot these low-res, low-quality videos on my camera this April, in Shibuya and Yokohama respectively. What I find in that part of the world, the students experience in inverse here: their hometown noise as exotic to me as my hometown quiet to them.
Seen in winter, when fewer than two months ago I was experiencing spring, this video looks to me like an animation–the balmy night as removed from my living room and oil column heater as screen pixels are from incandescent lights. That’s not to be sentimental nor sorry for myself, but rather to trace the way the passing of time is swift across happy times and strong memories.
It is a commonplace here that northern hemisphere visitors find the different timings of the seasons culturally and physically confusing, and equally a commonplace that locals find this tiresome. Something of that, however, I seem to have brought home with me from my last trip, at least as much as it seems impossible that my friends and I who recently shared spring are now heading in opposite seasonal directions, even as my exchange students add layer after layer of warm clothing with a stoicism impressive for people from better-insulated nations.
Or, as Ursula Bethell put it in a different medium:
When you wrote your letter it was April,
And you were glad that it was spring weather,
And that the sun shone out in turn with showers of rain.I write in waning May and it is autumn,
And I am glad that my chrysanthemums
Are tied up fast to strong posts,
So that the south winds cannot beat them down.[...] we say “How green it was in such and such an April,”
And, “Such and such an autumn was very golden,”
And, “Everything is for a very short time.” (“Response”, 1-7, 13-15)
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I love that Bethell poem. The whole opposite hemisphere fascinates.
I wanted to leave a comment on your prev. post about writing but will do it here. I have newly emerged from what was a two-year dry valley experience as far as writing goes, and the muse is sitting on my shoulder again it seems. It’s a cyclical thing I feel. Or maybe more like waves.
Wise words: when not just the will but the impulse is there, it feels like the most natural thing in the world, and when it recedes it seems it was a dream or an anomaly.
Of Bethell’s poems I like best her earliest ones–those that were originally in letters to her friends–and her memorials to Effie Pollen. There’s something wonderfully clinical about those early lyrics: a sense that her feelings are very tamped down, out of necessity.