In Which Nearly Everything Has An Expiration Date

Something There

by CATHALEEN CHEN

I live on the top floor of, supposedly, the oldest building in town.

It is a modest place — two bedrooms, creaky floors and the narrowest kitchen you can imagine. A long hallway leads to the bedrooms, shared among the three of us, and adjacent to the dining room is a disproportionately vast living room, the quintessence of my domestic tendencies.

The size of maybe a small dive bar, my living room is a perfect square space of tan hardwood and Ikea furniture (both of my roommates happen to be Swedish, but that’s just a very blonde and button-nosed coincidence). On the far right, French doors open up to a balcony that overlooks a courtyard. When I stand out there on a temperate autumn night, three stories up with dim but majestic stars above, I feel like I rule the world.

The living room walls are a wedding cake shade of off-white, with built-in shelves on the left and a fully functional fireplace. I’ve never actually used it, but I like that I could. The mantelpiece is cluttered with trinkets — old books, a One Step Rainbow Land Polaroid camera, a Grace Jones record cover, Klimt’s Water Serpents II reprinted on canvas (Ikea, of course), and the empty bottles of certain beverages to remind visitors that yes, though my place is thoughtfully decorated, it is still a college apartment and that in this thoughtfully decorated college apartment, we like to have fun.

And we do. My roommate recently put up a poster of John Belushi from Animal House, the one in which he wears the iconic “college” sweatshirt and an expression of simultaneous awe and disgust. The poster is strategically placed so that Belushi’s impenetrable gaze falls on our couch — a stiff, brown futon that’s currently missing a leg — where we spend about 80 percent of our time when conscious. Belushi’s glance is misdirected, however, because his bemusement is unwarranted. At worst, he’d witness a raunchy game of truth or dare amidst smoke and booze, slurred secrets and all — maybe rated R in extreme cases, but only for language.

Most of the time, we’re as tame as college students could be. In the daytime, the room is fantastically well lit. On Sunday afternoons, it’s the loveliest place to do schoolwork or, I’d imagine, for a fat house cat to nap.

But it’s all the more charming after dark. Without an overhead light, we use lamps, candles and Christmas lights that accidentally create the perfect séance every night. There must be something about the color of the floor and the walls that complements the yellow lights against the darkness outside, because the room, along with everything in it, glows.

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When I first moved in a summer and half ago, I had to live alone in the barely furnished apartment for almost a month. For some silly reason that I can’t remember now, I had a lot of trouble setting up the internet. Finally, AT&T came to install their service one day, but left before I got home from work. It happened to be an exceptionally drab day but it got worse when I found that the internet still didn’t work. And after two hours of angry 1-800-number calls, I collapsed on the hardwood floor and burst into tears.

That was the first night I cried here. And hell, I sobbed.

The next week, my roommates moved in, the couch arrived from Target.com and all was well in the household. To christen the apartment together, we lit an entire bag of tea lights in the living room and drank wine in our pajamas — the first night of many to come.

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Instead of stuffing myself into marshmallow goose down for the four relentless months of Chicago winter, I spent the first part of 2013 in Washington, D.C. There, I saw Beyoncé lip sync at the inauguration. I witnessed Hilary Clinton cry at a Senate meeting. I ran into Ted Cruz right before he starred in Rand Paul’s filibuster, which we endearingly nicknamed the “filiblizzard.” But most bizarre of all, I felt homesick. Homesick for not my home in Pennsylvania, but for this one in Evanston.

Historically speaking, homesickness for a specific residence is a rare sentiment for me. The longest I had ever lived in one piece of property was eight years, and that was the first eight years of my life, in China. Then I moved to Morgantown, West Virginia, where my parents and I relocated to different houses twice. After the ol’ Mountaineers, we moved to Grove City, Pennsylvania, where we also relocated twice. And then at Northwestern, I lived in a dorm for a year, and finally, I moved here, on the top floor of the oldest building in town.

When I was in D.C., my heart was in the living room of this apartment, eating macaroons with my roommates and listening to Grace Jones on vinyl.

When I came back in April, my roommates threw me a surprise party. I came home one Friday afternoon to find balloons, champagne and a dozen familiar faces lurking in my living room. Surprise, they yelled. I was confused and happy and it was bliss.

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Last Thursday, I caught one of my roommates — we’ll call him Blonnor for the sake of anonymity — on the balcony at 3 a.m., after I heard a splattering sound while brushing my teeth. When I walked into the living room, he turned around and said, “I aimed for the trees.” I found out the next day that it was a lousy attempt.

On most nights though, nothing really happens here.

I sit on my couch that is missing a leg, supported by a stack of old Vogues instead, and I read. Buttery lights flicker around me, emitting an illusory heat that glazes my skin. I look to my left and there’s Blonnor, also reading or writing or playing a Chopin prelude on the keyboard. If it storms outside, I’d open the balcony door, and the symphony of thunder and rain would accompany his melody. It would be one of those nondescript moments in time that eventually, inevitably disappears from memory because of its bareness. What remains is a familiar comfort, a visceral sort of nostalgia that could only be kindled by an unsuspected scent or a haunting refrain. That is what makes this living room perfect — these lights, the Klimt and my Scandinavian companions — the loveliness of a fleeting moment. From the tea lights to the Belushi poster in its exact placement on the wall, everything here has an expiration date.

But when that day comes, I hope my heart remains on the top floor of the oldest building in town, even if the details become hazy.

Cathaleen Chen is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her twitter here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Chopin and wormholes.

"So Says I (live at Third Man Records)" - The Shins (mp3)

"The Rifle's Spiral (live at Third Man Records)" - The Shins (mp3)

In Which We Profit Entirely By Conjecture

Wormholes

by CATHALEEN CHEN

I believe in quantum physics, kind of. I don’t study it and I certainly can’t prove it, but like Christians in a casino or a child in a buffet line, I muse its most attractive theories.

Wormholes, for instance, are tunnels of negative space energy that link sets of any two points in the universe. The conjecture of Stephen Hawking and a handful of science fiction writers, wormholes can be visualized as a funnel between a two-dimensional surface that folds over a third dimension, allowing the two ends of the funnel to be however infinitely apart, yet connected. Black holes, the nihilist version of wormholes, have funnels with only one end that eventually tapers into nothingness.

Admittedly, I had to Google “wormhole” for its technical definition. I used to snooze through physics class except for when my teacher, a young, lanky Christian, born and raised in western Pennsylvania, would use words like “spacetime” and “exotic matter” to describe phenomena that he attributed to God.

Maybe it was Mr. Gardner’s sermon-like cadence or maybe I so desperately want to grasp onto some sort of cosmic enlightenment, but the notion of wormholes and dark matter stuck with me. At first they were just nice ideas to cogitate, theories with which to coyly embellish a conversation and to speak of with a tinge of irony. But certain things in life have a way of popping up and then disappearing, and as I encounter more and more strange, arbitrary happenings, I’m now willing to accept the mysteries of life as mysteries of the cosmos.

by vija celmins

Now consider this: I am a 20-year-old Chinese immigrant, a soon-to-be first generation American citizen and the daughter of a scientist. Having spent the first eight years of my life in Communist China — i.e., modern China — I didn’t have a conventional childhood.

In the first grade, my classmates and I were indoctrinated as junior comrades of the Party. We were sanctioned to wear red ribbons around our necks, which I thought at the time was to commemorate Mao Zedong’s favorite color.  In the second grade, I participated in a school-wide campaign against superstition and religion. The principal recited Marx over the intercom.

In the third grade, I found myself scrutinized by inquisitive faces, some with yellow hair and blue eyes, like the Chinese imitation Barbies I used to own. This was in Morgantown, West Virginia, where I spent my next five years learning about the English language, Harry Potter, chicken nuggets, the Beatles and eventually, about god.

I guess God could’ve been an easy fix for the perpetual cultural quandaries that ensued in my adolescence. If Chinese counterfeit Barbies had yellow hair and blue eyes, why didn’t I? And how could I have let my parents eat spaghetti with chopsticks in front of my friends?

by vija celmins

But I was the daughter of a scientist, a communist expatriate scientist for that matter. I was never sold on god. I had science and Marx, and I’d rather not elucidate upon the latter, though it’s probably in my blood.

Out of my white, baptized group of friends, I think I was the first to board the bandwagon of existential doubt (I was later reaffirmed by my uncanny keenness for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). They’ve caught on by now, of course. We are twenty-somethings, after all. But all of this — the communists, the angst, the James Joyce — leads me back to the notion of wormholes, black holes and dark matter.

Let’s, for a moment, forget about the grandiosity of existence. Forget about life and death and the meaning of it all. Let’s look at the little luxury of poetry and of language, a practical and tangible thing. For all intents and purposes, let’s consider it matter, because it exists in ink on paper and thus, it exists in some sort of fathomable sphere. Different languages, then, are the different states of matter and each meaning is like an element on the periodic table — it can differ in form but never in essence.

But that’s not how language works. Human communication does not follow the conservation of mass and energy. Take the Chinese word, 亲人, or “tsing ren.” The most direct translation in English would be “relative” or “kin.” But that’s far off from the literal meaning of the Chinese word, which in essence, means someone who is close to the heart. The essence of the word, therefore, disappears through translation — the same way matter disappears into the singularity of a black hole.

Likewise, emotions can be contextualized as matter or energy. Anger, apathy and happiness — among the infinite palette of human emotions — can be traced to a specific part of the insular cortex, i.e. the left side of the brain, induced by a specific sequence of nerves and receptors. Feelings, at the very least, are energies we utilize. But when a certain mental sensation is channeled into something else — say, a jog around the neighborhood, an act of revenge, a personal essay — its existence transcends the human body and recalibrates on another medium, separate yet connected to its origin in the mind.

by vija celmins

On the other hand, emotional energy without an outlet eventually dissipates and ceases to exist entirely.  In certain cases, caffeine might be a good remedy. But some, if not most, feelings fade, and nothing can change that. Not even caffeine can make love forever. Shakespeare knew that, though I didn’t believe him until I was 16 and on the receiving end of lost affections, adrift in the relentless gravitational pull of a black hole. I was the end of the funnel.

When we lose something in life, we’re told to let go. In order to grieve, we must eventually accept the dearth of a being that used to be. We quote Vonnegut and buy posters that say “live and let love” to hang on bare walls. We put up and put out. It goes against the circle of life, in which everything is supposed to be connected. And then at some point down the road, we must accept that Mufasa was wrong and that not everything exists in the paradigm of a beginning, middle and an end that leads to new beginnings.

It seems to me that the universe is full of contractions — of conservative Christian physics teachers, of irreconcilable languages and of parents who eat Italian pasta with chopsticks. I hear the universe is also constantly expanding, perpetually mobile, like a haphazard middle school dance with which the only way to keep up is to accept the fact that it’s supposed to be awkward and random and at times, tender. This, I believe.

A few months ago, I was reading 1984 on my commute to work. It was a typical rush hour El ride until I noticed that the lady standing over me was also reading 1984. It would’ve been a regular, serendipitous coincidence if it weren’t for the fact that she was holding the very same Signet Classic paperback edition, published 1950. Mine was a literary artifact that I borrowed from my roommate, who received it as a birthday present from his sister in 2004. To put this in context, there are more than 450 English editions of Orwell’s masterpiece, nearly 800,000 El passengers each weekday and approximately 145 different El stops in Chicago.  I’m not really sure what it meant or if it means anything at all. But in that moment, I was reminded of a particular day in AP Physics. I had woken up just in time before the class was dismissed to see Mr. Gardner drawing a worm poking out of a black circle on the white board.

“There are things in physics I can’t really explain,” he said, dotting two little eyes on the worm. And then the bell rang.

Cathaleen Chen is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her twitter here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Chopin.

"The Old and the Young" - Midlake (mp3)

"This Weight" - Midlake (mp3)

In Which Chopin and George Sand Briefly Thrill Each Other

A Seduction

by CATHALEEN CHEN

Frédéric Chopin and George Sand met in a Parisian salon, where Chopin dueted with his musical contemporary and uncredited wingman, Franz Liszt, while Sand smoked a cigar. It’s rumored that as Chopin played the ivory keys with his frail, ivory fingers, Sand stood beside him, enthralled. When he finished, she leaned down and kissed him on the mouth without saying a word.

For ten years, they were a celebrity couple of turn-of-the-century pre-Victorian Paris, among the intellectual circle of Liszt and Eugene Delacroix. They epitomized romance of the Romantic era — passionate, tumultuous and hauntingly sad, much like the melody of a Chopin Mazurka.

Two years after their last, but only, breakup, Chopin died before he could turn 40. They say it was heartbreak, exacerbating a life-long battle with tuberculosis. But his life had always been tarnished by sickness and deep emotionality, which — on a morose and incidental level — guaranteed perpetual inspiration.

Born into an aristocratic family in Warsaw in 1810, Chopin was hailed as a prodigy by age 7.  It was his older sister Ludwika who taught his first piano lesson and his younger sister Emilia whose death at 14 invoked his penchant for dark, ambivalent refrains. Their father died of the same disease in 1844.

He was an expatriate, living in Paris for the last 18 years of his short virtuoso life, though it was Poland that eventually adopted his Military Polonaise as a sort of unofficial Polish anthem. A reticent and delicate man, Chopin was an obsessive artist with a chronic cough, a dubious match for the fiery Sand.

Six years before Chopin, George Sand was born Amandine Aurore Lucille Dupin. Her family had distant relations to Louis XVI and Louis XVIII. By the time she met Chopin, she already harbored the reputation as the most notorious woman in Europe.

She was a Marxist and a cross-dresser, a raging feminist by today’s standards. It was at the height of her literary career when she permanently adopted a male pseudonym. Chopin, sickly and conservative, could never call her by a name as masculine as George, instead opting for the softer Aurore. When they met, Sand was already a devoted mother of two, a political activist and a lusty man-eater — mostly of younger men. Biographers would later characterize Sand as the manipulative seductress of Chopin. But he, the same sickly, wishy-washy 27-year-old musical poet, indeed became the love of her life. And it’s true that he didn’t always reciprocate those feelings. It was Sand who had asked Liszt to set up their meeting, while Chopin initially dreaded the “repellant woman,” as he had written to a friend. “Is she really a woman? I am inclined to doubt it,” he continued.  

At the time, Chopin was involved with the Polish Maria Wodzínska. Well-groomed and presumably very vanilla, Wodzínska was engaged to the pianist until their matrimonial plans somehow fell through. In sensible and convenient timing, Sand swooped in and swept him away.

According to Liszt’s lofty biography of Chopin, the composer put off meeting Sand until he possibly couldn’t. On their first encounter in that dimly lit salon, Sand won him over as easily as history dictates. Both being patrons of art, Chopin was impressed by Sand’s capacity for music — namely, his music.

By the summer of 1838, they were in an amorous and often scandalized love affair. He would play her his new pieces as she nurtured his precarious health. Not to mention, she introduced a new sexual energy in his life. In the following winter, the two embarked on a vacation to Majorca, a Mediterranean island off the eastern coast of Spain. It turned out to be the most troublesome vacation ever, as Chopin fell deathly sick amidst an unaccommodating local culture. The weather was colder than expected, and at one point, the couple, along with Sand’s two children, was evicted after the landlord discovered Chopin’s symptoms of consumption.

For months, Sand cared for the feeble Chopin. She would cook and clean during the day, and write well into the night. When he finally recovered, they returned to Sand’s home in Nohant, where they would spend every summer until 1842.

In Nohant, a quaint town in Central France, they entertained guests and worked on their respective repertoires. It was there that Chopin composed some of his best work, including his B minor Sonata, the Op. 55 Nocturnes and the Op. 56 Mazurkas. As his health continued to fail, their relationship eventually became mostly platonic. A testament to her devotion, Sand — despite her history of intense sexuality and a track record of casual hookups — stayed with Chopin.

But the relationship suffered as Sand grew impatient with Chopin’s ailing health and temperaments. Aggravated by financial pressures and Sand’s now-mature and manipulative daughter Solange, their tensions prevailed. Sand wrote in a letter, “Chopin is the most inconstant of men. There is nothing permanent about him but his cough.” Even worse, in her 1846 novel Lucrezia Floriani, Sand created a male character as an obvious foil of Chopin, but embodying only his despicable attributes: temperamental, jealous and at times, cruel. They had their last fight in 1847, resulting in permanent estrangement. It was a social ordeal, and between polarized friends and an utter lack of closure, they both convinced themselves that neither loved each other anymore.

Chopin held his last recital the following year in Paris, and in the summer of 1849, he fell too sick to compose. In perpetual bed rest, Chopin asked his stream of visitors about Sand, while she did exactly the same in a letter to his sister Ludwika, who refused to answer. He died that September, with Ludwika at his side.  Sand did not attend the funeral, and his heart and belongings was taken back to Poland. Among his items was a lock of hair in an enveloped embroidered with “G.F.” — George/ Frédéric.

Years before their split, Delacroix had begun a portrait of the young couple.  The painting remained unfinished in Delacroix’s studio until his death in 1863, when, for some godforsaken reason, it was cut in half and sold as individual portraits of Sand and Chopin, two great ­— but separately regarded — romantics. One half is a headshot of Chopin, in which he looks into the distance. Sand’s other half shows her upper body with her head turned down to her left. Her face is soft, unfocused and her mouth slightly agape, a strange pose for a 19th century portrait.

When put together, the two canvases depict a domestic scene in which Sand sits by Chopin’s side as he plays the piano. Like the first time they met, Sand is enthralled, captured as almost uncharacteristically feminine. But the portraits, split and cropped, are now separated by the 800 miles between the Louvre and Copenhagen’s Ordrupgaard Museum — perhaps forever out of context, a dissonance irrevocable by melody. 

Cathaleen Chen is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her twitter here.

"Prelude Op. 28 No. 9 in E" - Chopin (mp3)

"Sonata Op. 35 No. 2 in B flat minor" - Chopin (mp3)