Revisiting Europe

I'm scheduled to give a paper at an the international conference of a Law and Society academic organization. I'm talking about Langston Hughes's political poems, especially the ones he wrote about specific issues, in some cases even specific legal cases, such as one involving a House of Representatives member named Arthur Mitchell, who sued railroad companies because of their Jim Crow rules, and who prevailed ultimately at the Supreme Court level. I think I may be the only literary scholar amongst social scientists; that should be interesting.

The conference is in Berlin. The last time I was there was in 1981, and of course to visit what was East Berlin, I had to go through checkpoints, return to West Berlin within a short span of time, and buy a certain number of East German deutschmarks. Now the wall is down, Germany is united (although I'm sure issues remained to be worked out), and the Cold War has seemingly been replaced by something as constant but nebulous and as easy to manipulate, politically: "the War on Terror." Obviously, terrorists who want to harm the U.S. exist, but at the same time, I think politicians like Cheney have a worldview that somehow requires, needs, a bifurcated world. But I'll leave this to the Law and Society folk.

On a more routine level, something called the Chunnel exists now--a highway under the English Channel. When I traveled from London to Mainz (Germany, where I was to teach for a year at Gutenberg University) in one very long day, I took a small ship from Dover to Ostend, and virtually everyone but me and a young Irish woman got terribly seasick because the waters were so rough. It was quite a spectacle. Of course, she and I didn't really know why we didn't get sick; something to do with our inner ears. I think at one point we just looked at each other and shrugged.

Here's hoping all goes well with my journey from the U.S. to Berlin via Amsterdam, and here's hoping all goes well with your travels. In the meantime, here's a poem remembering the channel-crossing some 26+ years ago:

Channel-Crossing

Irish Girl sat on a crate,
topside. Cigarette-smoke
out of her mouth joined
English-Channel mist.
American Me stood beside
her oafishly. Everyone else
but a bemused British crew
was puking. A man threw up
into the wind. Wet, pink
pebbles flew our way.
Below-decks, a danse-macabre
of vomiters staggered,
careened. Irish Girl and I
didn’t know why we
weren’t ill from the heaving,
pitching barrel of a boat. Her
smoke smelled fine. I
made her laugh, once only,
can’t remember how. Her
eyes were dark blue,
her hair dark brown but
with secret plans to become
red. This was when
the Tunnel was still
a Jungian blueprint beneath
the ocean. We docked, Ostend.
Irish Girl took a train
different from mine. A
widening channel of years
later, I do hope she’s alive,
never been sea-sick, and
laughing.