departures (6)

We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind. . . . Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations.

--Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), p. 92.

departures (5)

Nothing saps my vital energy and drains my joie de vivre more than people's inability to break the chains that bind them, to take risks, to reinvent themselves.

Emotional paralysis, self-delusion.

Hence the question returns ever so often: how to avoid yielding to terminal disenchantment and anguish when the malaise seems so insidious and all-pervading?

Yet there are times when you cannot but yield to weariness and sorrow -- and retreat from the world.

Because you have been skinned alive, left in raw flesh.

A temporary retreat, though. As when you sit in the dark, listening, listening, and one day something out there calls for you. It is the faintest of sounds, but you can perceive it only because you have inhabited silence for so long, been to the other shore of language, of life.


Illuminated by the shadow of the abyss that constricts your heart.

*       *       *

In fatigue one senses the fields of the world no longer supporting one's position, no longer sustaining one's movement and one's enterprises. In boredom the planes of the landscape lose their significance, the force of their presence; the paths become equivalent, lose their urgencies. One feels the emptiness that is in each thing, the abyss over which the paths scurry. Fatigue and boredom give way to apprehensiveness. In the emptiness of days, in insomniac nights, anxiety clenches the heart.


In this finding oneself adrift, supported by nothing, nothing to hold onto, one's life that still exists cleaves to itself. One comes to feel the heat and the pulse of one's potential for existence. One senses in oneself powers to feel things no one has yet felt, to perceive corners of the landscape hidden from others, to form thoughts no one has ever thought and fashion things no else can make, to pour one's kisses and caresses on minute and on grand things and on bodies no one has ever loved. The shadow of death that closes in illuminates these powers within oneself with its black light. One knows there are things out there that call for these powers.


Then, under the general and recurrent patterns of the common world, one catches sight of visions offered to one's own eyes alone, appeals made to one's own heart alone, tasks no one else sees, faces turned to one's caresses and surfaces turned to one's laughter and tears. They summon one, with an urgency that is illuminated by the shadow of the abyss that constricts one's heart. One will advance unto them, releasing one's forces for them. 


--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 232.

departures (4)

Max Ernst, Cage, Forest and Black Sun

it may not always be so;and i say
that if your lips,which i have loved,should touch
another's,and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart,as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know,or such
great writhing words as,uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be,i say if this should be-
you of my heart,send me a little word;
that i may go unto him,and take his hands,
saying,Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face,and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.


--e. e. cummings

.

departures (3)

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort which I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me.

Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.

But Jeanne, fear of madness, only the fear of madness will drive us out of the precincts of our solitude, out of the sacredness of our solitude. The fear of madness will burn down the walls of our secret house and send us out into the world seeking warm contact. Worlds self−made and self−nourished are so full of ghosts and monsters.

--Anais Nin, House of Incest.

*       *       *

Narcissism -- its seductions and pitfalls.

To be unable to love or take any genuine interest in anyone that is not a mirror image of oneself. The utter denial of otherness, difference, patience, tolerance, generosity, distance from oneself.

The first intimation of madness. 

And here too departure offers a forked path: whether you take yourself with you on the journey and remain the same, your self-hatred and self-destructive willfulness accompanying you like the shadow of death (a pointless journey nowhere); or you get rid of yourself to find yourself.

Rimbaud: Car je est un autre...

This is to say that you give up finding 'home' to observe home from a distance.

No purge, no escapism. Just going away to think, to feel alive.

Shatter the mirror, break the rotten 和 (wa)!

And only then may something astonishing happen, who knows.

departures (2)

You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

         --Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable.



Yes, a departure can be a recapitulation of personal and cultural history, and dissipate disgust with the all-familiar, as Eric J. Leed puts it in his superb The Mind of the Traveler.

Yet each departure is also the eternal reenactment of a deep injury: the loss of home, an imaginary home, away from which no one knows you, no one recognises you, no one confirms your being in their gaze.

Because their gaze is always set beyond you.

You are invisible, banished from the others' gaze. The original meaning of 'exile', precisely: a banished person.

Thus an exile proceeds from invisibility to invisibility. Once an exile, always an exile.

Unrecognised, you are always no longer 'there' -- you belong only in the place you long for.

And where is that? Where is the land of those who have fallen from the time and the gaze of others?

Alphonso Lingis calls it 'the community of those who have nothing in common'. Nothing in common except their fallenness, their vulnerability, their mortality. The cracked people.

And it is the necessary alienation of departure that brings you to them, that compels you to communicate, to establish some form of communion, even if at the risk of causing misunderstanding, fear of disclosure.

Blunders happen.

Because they are in pain, we are in pain. And pain isolates, sets adrift.

But recognition can happen, when you see the abyss beneath the mask, the half-hidden wounds in the flesh.


The night of his eyes.

*       *       *

To see the sensibility, susceptibility, vulnerability of another is to see not the inner diagrams but the substance of the body. It is to see the opaque skin, lassitude and torpor, into which the expressions form and vanish. It is to see the night of eyes, on which the forms of the world leave no trace. It is to see the spasms of pain that agitate the substance of the flesh, the tremblings of pleasure that die away. It is to see wrinkles and wounds.
In pain the other sinks back into his or her body, into prostration that already delivers him or her to the death in the world. The flesh in pain is anything but an object; sensibility, subjectivity fill it, with a terrible evidence. This evidence is turned imperatively to me, more pressing than the evolution of the planet and the anonymous enterprises in the humanized map laid out on it, more urgent than the tasks my own death has addressed to me. It is not in elaborating a common language and reason, in collaborating in transpersonal enterprises, that the human community takes form. It is in going to rejoin those who, fallen from the time of personal and collective history, have to go on when nothing is possible or promised.


--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 235-36.

departures (1)

Thus it is that every country to which you have grown accustomed holds a spell over you.

--Diodorus Siculus

In every parting there is a latent germ of madness.

--Goethe

And yet you cannot avoid the thought of departure, its implications, its divisions, its whirlwind of emotions.

Has it ever been otherwise?

An end and a beginning. A loss and a gain. What you leave behind, what you take with you.

What will be born.

Breaking with a past, projecting a future. Stripping off the accommodating self, redefining contours, recovering freedom, hope (even if only temporarily).

But this is only in hindsight. At the moment of departure, what weighs heavily is separation -- from once beloved others, from things that once defined you and forever changed you. Places, people.

Something breaks that will never again be joined.

A primal departure. One of those moments when you see life from the viewpoint of death, our mortality: the thought that I will never see that person again, that place again -- until I die, until you die.

That it will be too late, when you remember and regret.


No consolation for this, no hindsight.

.

la donna è mobile...

La donna è mobile
Qual piuma al vento,
Muta d'accento — e di pensiero.
Sempre un amabile,
Leggiadro viso,
In pianto o in riso, — è menzognero.

È sempre misero
Chi a lei s'affida,
Chi le confida — mal cauto il cuore!

      --The Duke of Mantua in Verdi's Rigoletto.

(Woman is fickle
Like a feather in the wind,
She changes her voice — and her mind.
Always sweet,
Lovely face,
In tears or in laughter — a liar.
Always miserable
Is he who trusts her,
He who confides in her — his unwary heart!)

*       *      *

In time of departures, thinking of arrivals.

Anticipating, musing, imagining.

Because the moment of arrival -- home, or somewhere that creates ties between you and a place you may come to call 'home' -- is so much more heartening and full of promise, despite everything.

Yet all these comings and goings, as well as the comments from friends on my unabated willingness to keep in transit, return me to the thought ever so often. The archetypal image of Man's mobility and Woman's immobility, and how this crucially configures the sexual relations between them in departure and arrival.

Travel is eroticised through and through.

He travels far and wide -- and he arrives, conquers, penetrates a stable female ground: home, an island, a walled garden, an interior, bounded space.

Security.

He departs again -- or desires to, because she keeps him within, confines, devours him, Calypso-like, Circe-like.

Captivity, fear.

Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus und Kalypso, 1883.

"She wants you to be her prisoner,
She wishes to have your body
For herself, not even your heart
To be free."
"Surely," he answered,
I agree, I've no objections.
I want to be her prisoner."
"And so you'll be, by this hand
I lay on your shoulder"
......................
And so she led him off,
Worrying him a bit . . . and giving him hints 
Of the prison he was going to.
What lover escapes his prison?
She was right, calling it a prison:
Whoever's in love is no longer free.

--Chretien de Troyes, Ywain: The Knight of the Lion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 59-60.


Double standards, the usual story. Bah.

But what if she is the one who travels unbounded? The established order is disrupted, reversed, moral suspicion arises -- hers is the nightflight of the witch, fantasy travel.

Danger, fear.

Wherever she arrives, she is not welcomed.


And thus the journey continues.

back in limbo (2)

We had the experience but missed the meaning...
--T. S. Eliot, 'The Dry Salvages', l. 93.


Such a relief to be back, as usual. Yet impossible at the same time to avoid a sense of desolation and heartbreak.

As usual.

The feeling overhelmed me once again this morning as the plane was making its slow descent over the bay, and the drifting ships, the neat configuration of the land, the general drabness of the houses gradually took shape. All so orderly, predictable, depthless.

Remote.

Japan is the strangest of non-places indeed, giving you a numbing sense of security, which the recent catastrophe has proved to be fragile, way too fragile after all.

Over the years, this amorphous existence benumbs you to a point when you no longer feel the ground beneath your feet, while constantly reminding you that groundedness and depth are the things you most long for - and will never find here.

Never.

You long to leave, but something holds you back, somehow.

And thus you long and linger, year after year - and life goes by.

Even though the moment of truth eventually arrives when you are compelled to break the impasse and leave for good, you remain clueless as to why this impasse should have ever existed from the outset.

And not even the song you listen to like a mantra in these trying times provides an answer. It just adds to the mystery.

Which is fine.

*       *       *

Can't let it be
When least expected there she is
Gone the time and space that separates us

And I'm not safe
I think I need a second skin
No, I'm not safe

World citizen
World citizen


I want to travel by night

Across the steppes and over seas
I want to understand the cost
Of everything that's lost
I want to pronounce all their names correctly

World citizen
World citizen
I won't be disappointed
I won't be

She doesn't laugh
We've gone from comedy to commerce
And she doesn't feel the ground she walks upon


I turn away

And I'm not sleeping well at night
And while I know this isn't right
What can you do?


--David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto, World Citizen - I Won't Be Disappointed.

women on the move

And the journey continues, with the most interesting discoveries and insights cropping up on the way:

The historian Eric J. Leed acknowledges the constitutive masculinity of travel when he argues that, 'from the time of Gilgamesh,' journeying has served as 'the medium of traditional male immortalities,' enabling men to imagine escape from death by the 'crossing' of space and the 'record[ing]' of adventures 'in bricks, books, and stories.' He even labels this travel, which provides men the opportunity to achieve notable distinction through self-defining experience far from home, 'spermatic' travel.

Ever in the process of becoming 'men,' travellers affirm their masculinity through purposes, activities, behaviors, dispositions, perspectives, and bodily movements displayed on the road, and through the narratives of travel that they return home to the sending culture. Thus, travel functions as a defining area of agency. We cannot imagine Odysseus without his travels, or Aeneas, or the knights of the Round Table, or Columbus, Captain Cook, Boswell, Byron, or Loti, or, closer to our own times, Jack Kerouac. Nor can we imagine them without their travel narratives. These narratives of travel can be read as journey myths 'project[ing],' as Richard Slotkin suggests of myths generally, 'models of good and heroic behavior that reinforce the values of ideology, and affirm as good the distribution of authority and power that ideology rationalizes.'


Leed contrasts the masculine logic of mobility with the logic of 'sessility'. To be 'sessile,' in botanical terms, is to be permanently planted, tenaciously fixed, utterly immobile. It is, in a sense, to remain always 'at home,' which has been the traditional locale assigned to women. What Judith Butler describes as 'the domain of socially instituted norms,' through which gender identity and gendered relationships get reiterated in everyday occasions, secures the domestication of a woman through protocols of proper femininity that tether her to home and thus to a requisite sessility. But she is not just resident in the home. As Karen R. Lawrence observes in Penelope Voyages, 'She in effect is home itself, for the female body is traditionally associated with earth, shelter, enclosure.' Whatever particular women may be doing in their everyday lives, the idea of woman as 'earth, shelter, enclosure,' as 'home,' persists, anchoring femininity, weighing it down, fixing it as a compass point [my note: an idea that is deeply - and depressingly - entrenched in Japanese culture and language]. Moreover, the 'home' that is identified as feminine, feminized, and equated with woman becomes that which must be left behind in the pursuit of agency. This 'stifling home,' Meaghan Morris observes so tellingly, has been precisely 'the place from which the voyage begins and to which, in the end, it returns.'

Yet, even though travel has generally been associated with men and masculine prerogatives, even though it has functioned as a domain of constitutive masculinity, women have always been and continue to be on the move. They climb aboard sailing vessels, or pull themselves onto horses, or grab a walking stick and set out along rutted paths, or rush to make a train. If traveling, being on the road, makes a man a man - and makes masculinity and its power visible - what does it make a woman, who is at once subject as home and subject at home? What does it make for a particular woman to gain access to this defining arena of agency in the West?


--Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. ix-x.


The journey continues...

===================
Image: Isabella L. Bird, the intrepid Victorian traveller, in Tibet at the end of the 19th century.

(source: http://seducedbyhistory.blogspot.com/2010/10/isabella-bird-victorian-lady-world.html)

jumping to conclusions (2)

Often on a trip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly colored unreality of foreigness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don't belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you're strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.

Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisible - the usual condition of the older traveler - is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveler isn't in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel's slow tempo.

Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your traveling life and not feel like a specter. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the east train.


Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 2.

jumping to conclusions (1)

On the eve of another trip, the first of a series planned for this month, I find myself re-reading Theroux - and agreeing with him all the way:

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Muncheausen syndrome.

Of course, it's much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where's the book in that? . . .

Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 1.

Lucky ghosts

It's true that travel is the saddest of pleasures, the long-distance overland blues. But I also thought what I'd kept fretting about throughout my trip, like a mantra of vexation building in my head, words I never wrote. Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people's. [...] Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation. Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is aging and all that we have lost. Politicians are always inferior to their citizens. No one on earth is well governed. Is there hope? Yes. Most people I'd met, in chance encounters, were strangers who helped me on my way. And we lucky ghosts can travel wherever we want. The going is still good, because arrivals are departures.

Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 496.