Little Rock 16.5.05: There and Back Again--Old Skin, Itchy Selves

I need to bring this travel narrative to a close. I keep thinking of things I want to say in it, then I don’t take time to do so. Up early again due to the jet lag; we haven’t slept past 5 A.M. since our return, and are going to bed before 9 each night. Past two days, I’ve taken long, stuporous naps in the afternoon.

So, the trip is over and done with, and I’m back, but betwixt and between, neither fully here nor there. My old life and old comforts (and old certainties) slip around me like a skin whose contours are very well-known. But the skin is also confining.

One should come back from a journey different. It’s a theme as old as the Odyssey. And not just different as in bearing gifts or trophies to demonstrate to envious friends that you have been “there”: different in some essential human way.

I know all the clichés, and they’re as true as any cliché is true: travel broadens; we see things differently and realize our perspective is limited and culturally determined; we encounter cultural artifacts that transform heart and mind.

But for me, this trip needs to mean more. I feel stuck. Yet something in the trip made it all “better”—the grand tour as 19th-century cure for nervous prostration. What is that something.

In part, it’s the chance to live as a different person, an unknown entity, someone without a past, drifting dreamily through days and nights. All the more so when you’re in a foreign country speaking a foreign language. As Rilke says, to learn other tongues is to assume other, new souls.

This experience renews, precisely because it does take you out of your skin. I feel a renewed sympathy for other human beings against whom I’ve been bumping blind in the night, a resumed sense of all they mean to me. I feel a renewed civility, a willingness to engage in the small rituals that ease the discomfort of human encounters—hello, pleased to meet you; thank you, how lovely, etc. One cannot travel without assuming that persona—at least, not travel successfully. One should bring something of it back.

Travel also reduces life to its bare essentials much as a retreat does. At least, a certain kind of travel does this. Where shall we get food? How shall we ask for it? We need it to fuel our bodies as we walk. And you do have to walk: to buy bread, to mail a letter; to obtain stationery. What comes easily in the everyday—what is already at hand—is obtained as you travel at a certain cost. It demands effort.

Travel is about fulfilling basic needs—for food, shelter, warmth, human companionship. It’s about relearning basic steps: Wieviel kostet das? How much is 2 € in $? Let me remember: does halb neun mean 8:30 or 9:30?

It is good, if sometimes very uncomfortable, to have to deal with such bedrock realities of everyday life. Travel can burst the oh-so-insulating bourgeois bubble.

But then there’s the self at the end—the itchy, irascible self you began the journey with, glowering and pouting and expecting you to pick it back up. To my shame, I always do. I’ve never been able to integrate that new self I become briefly and gloriously as I travel, and the self I always seem to carry around with me.

I feel I’m waiting, as always, for the summons. When will it come? And will it take me away from Little Rock, where things feel stifling?

On the other hand, there’s that deep need for once to dig my heels in and stick it out, to have a pied à terre. I’m betwixt and between two powerful currents here.

As I am with the quandary—always there—of choosing Narcissus or Goldmund, the aesthetic or the politically engaged. Both are powerful impulses. I don’t know how to decide between (or balance?) them.

Belmont, North Carolina 11.1.94: None So Blind as Those That See

And back in Belmont. As the crossed-out absurdity* indicates, jet-lagged to the max. We got up at 4:15 A.M., which didn’t help matters, and are now sitting in front of the fire.

Maybe it’s good that this travel journal held a few pages to complete after our return—a chance to stitch together the experience of the trip with the life I go on living, we go on living.

The “experience of the trip”—shorthand for what? Lots of disparate experiences, and none of them so earth-shattering that they lifted me out of the ordinary.

In fact, maybe the trip is directing my attention to something re: the life I’ve been living for a long time—i.e., that it’s monochromatic, fear-encapsulated, emotionally bottomed-out.

I’m not sure, exactly, that I walk the arid plain of depression. It feels more like walking one step at a time, with no signposts, because there is no other way. Have to go on living, and the only way to live is to live, one day and one step at a time.

And that’s how the trip to Germany was—one step at a time, many of them in places I wouldn’t have chosen. The grace of the ordinary is the phrase that leaps to mind now.

The rare ordinariness of friendship: how strange to have made the friendship of W. and K., R. and C., and perhaps now of M. and W. That totally unanticipated chain of events that brings people together, even across the globe. How extraordinarily kind all of them were to us, so that now our lives have boundaries permeable to former strangers, and even across time and space, our dreams and sorrows—even our material resources; they were so generous to us—flow together.

That recognition is, I suppose, the core of the trip experience. I have friends in many places, and they’re truly a gift to me. Even in the arid, dark place in which I walk—especially in this place—I must not forget this.

I come home a bit soul-rested, then, but also afraid. I’m afraid of so many things—of losing my sense of gratitude for all I’ve been given, of being crushed under routine and drudgery, of not seeing any point to my life here and now, of losing focus and becoming scattered, of sudden death, of losing Steve and not being able to cope, of continuing to live with Steve as we now live (so often quarrelsome or in stunned silence), of not seeing any doors open.

I’m also afraid of attempting to make changes in my life—losing weight, maintaining a daily schedule, reading more, studying German—that will help me onto the peach and health I’ve experienced on this trip. I know myself so well, how readily I relapse and then bitterly reproach myself for failing to live up to my goals.

At the bottom of it all—letting go. A journey is always letting go, of routine, certain comforts, one’s protective walls, obsessions and work, control of one’s schedule and environment. And since life itself is a journey to the ultimate letting go that faces us all, whether we want it or not, the puzzle is that we ever imagine we can live any other way except the way of letting go.

Ordinary grace and letting go—two phrases that run through my head over and over today, as I face resumption of my “old” life, and look back on the trip. The mystics say that life is full of grace. I’m yet to be convinced, but I do see grace at work in some rather “ordinary” ways in my life. The mystics also say that our failure to see is linked to our failure to let go.

For me, the problem is knowing how to let go. When we came to North Carolina, it seemed very important to have a comfortable house in a middle-class neighborhood. It seemed so because so much of our lives up that point had been a relinquishment we had not chosen, and one whose privations gradually ate into our sense of self-worth. We had begun to feel we deserved the crumbs from the table (the crumbs alone), and the kicks with which our generous benefactors dispensed the crumbs.

To face losing this house, the life we lead here, is very hard, then. It’s facing the resumption of that old life in which we had to accept that this is what queers must expect, since queers don’t count.

Maybe we ought to look at what has happened as a certain freeing from expectations that continue to be too small, however. The cliché—it’s a big world. To be in Germany is to see that in manifold ways. In such a big world, there’s surely a place for us, and that place may be more deeply satisfying and rich than any we’ve yet dreamt of.

That’s the point of letting go in mystical writing, I reckon—to learn to see that one’s preoccupations have been so misplaced, so focused on what is less rewarding and enriching. The life responsive to grace is not a life of dull self-obliteration, but of receptivity, celebration, grateful sharing of one’s blessings with others.

This is what’s hard for me. I haven’t learned to dance a certain dance, in which joy and sorrow, rage and resurrection, can interplay in my life. I don’t know how to be both light-handed and aware of my riches, to celebrate life in the midst of pain. Which is to say that I’m not the supple wild artist I’d like to be—an artist any saint is—but a dull, plodding, plebian creature who only dabbles in the creative and spiritual life.

In the last analysis, to be more than that, we have to let go even (especially?) of our hard-won virtues. These count as little in God’s eyes as our vices—perhaps less, because they have the greater potential to be hindrances to the life of grateful receptivity.

None so blind as those who see. One of the gifts of a trip such as that we’ve just taken is that one learns how very illusory one’s pretense to see clearly has been. The problem is not so much faulty vision; it’s locking into limited vision, as if that’s all there is. The world’s a big place. There are all kinds of people out there, all kinds of possibility, all kinds of ways of seeing, construing the world, thinking about it.

And now I must listen, to prepare myself for whatever immersion in that wide world will beckon me, when it’s time for me to be called to the next decisive step on my journey. To learn to listen well—there’s a focus of attention not unworthy of my thought, my life, in these days after the trip.

* I had inadvertently written Toronto, where we went to graduate school.

Over the Atlantic 4.1.99: Flying and Going...Where?

The final pages of this journal, but I have no finality in me—i.e., no summative wisdom or insight. Over the Atlantic now, en route to Atlanta, having slept little in the night, because unable to sleep on the plane.

Writing: I keep returning to it, but not doing it. It’s not just lack of time and the disorder of my life; it’s also (primarily?) the quandary of what to write about. That quandary concerns both subject matter in general and genre. I know I’m not a poet, though I admire poets above all other writers, and would dearly love to be one. I seem to have had (very) small success as a theological writer. I feel I have a novel somewhere in me, perhaps, though have little idea of a focus for it.

Meanwhile, I’m less and less interested in keeping a journal, or in analyzing myself or my life. I feel . . . weak . . . as I’ve never felt before, weak and on my way to old age, without much of anything to show for my life.

Dreams of salvation dance through my brain. I’ve lived in this seemingly nowhere space for a long time, now—too long. What can make life better, I wonder?

Helsinki, 16.10.92: Angels Watching Over

9:40 A.M., New York time: writing this aboard flight from Helsinki to New York . . . .

After dinner, simply paced the airport, waiting for the board to show my flight. I went to the information window to see if I needed to do anything about the customs declaration form, which I had lost. The young girl there spoke French, and kindly went and got me a new form, which I filled out and realized I’d done wrong, so I went to tell her that and she got another for me. As we walked, we conversed in French.

When my flight was called, I went to customs and there met a Finn who was extraordinarily kind and nice—another of those angels that have been with me on my journey. I have his card—his name was Kyösti S. I told him I was worried re: the fact I didn’t have my original customs form, and asked if it would be a problem. He smiled and said nothing, but a Finn ahead said, “Yes, it is a problem,” and then something in Finnish re: Russkies. Another man offered the same—“Yes, it’s a problem.”

Then I asked if the customs people might detain me and cause me to lose my flight, and a man behind, also Finnish, said, “That’s not their concern.”

But when I went through, the young blond woman, rather pretty, said after I explained, “Go on, it’s okay.” Kyösti had waited for me, beckoned, and said, “Come on, let’s go.” He had a kind face—youngish looking, brown hair, blue eyes, a nice smile—though in his 50s and a grandfather.

After customs we went to duty free, then he stood with me, helped me on the plane, told me of a store in Helsinki called Stockmann’s. He drew a map. He helped me board the plane, always beckoning me ahead of him, as a guardian.

On the plane, I was next to a large blond Finnish woman who works in Moscow, rather taciturn. During the flight, Kyösti came back to find me and give me the in-flight magazine with a map of Helsinki.

Got to hotel okay, and in comparison with Moscow, it was like paradise—clean, quiet, functional, efficient, circumspectly beautiful, as things Scandinavian are. I showered, called to tell Steve I was in Helsinki, and had a glass of vodka . . . .

Went down for breakfast, which was like the most delicious meal I’ve ever seen: bowls of plain and raspberry yogurt, granola, oat bran, other cereals, a bowl of large raspberries in juice, bowls of apples and oranges, sliced honeydew melon, 4 or 4 types of bread, including slice-your-own dark flat bread rolls, eggs marked 6 and 8 minutes, platters of sliced meats and cheeses, bowls of jam, butter, coffee, tea, milk, and cream. All was extraordinarily neat and incredibly good.

After breakfast, I checked out . . . walked more, checked in, and got onto the plane. We’re now en route: I feel absolutely awful. The only bright spot has been meeting another Finn who was very nice—a broad, sympathetic face. He, too, gave me his card. He’s en route to L.A.

My resolves for all to be radically different waver, come and go—mostly because where I’ve been for so long is simply unimaginable. I don’t lack resolve, if that word means determination: it will be different, because I can simply not continue to live as I do now . . . .

But imagination’s the problem. How? How to proceed? Where to go with the resolve? Where I can’t go is either back to miserable self-reproach and hopeless mere hanging on. Nor can I continue in a frivolous holding pattern in which I fritter time and energy while I avoid bringing together the two very disparate aspects of my life that have so long been held in soul-splitting tension. Only connect, E.M. Forster says—and now is time.

What I desperately need is the ability to live one moment, one step at a time. If this horrible trip has taught me anything, it’s that. And surely that was what yesterday was all about. Would I even be here now, if I hadn’t gone step by step?

Chard, Somerset, 11.5.06: Angels Unawares and Hairy Men on Motorcycles

Lessons for pilgrims: in the Tree of Life, our roots are forever intertwined. Last night, Steve and I turned on t.v. It was a BBC cooking show, two large hairy men who explore places on motorcycle.

They were in Chiapas, which is where Steve was headed when he met me. A reminder that what may have seemed a diversion on his pilgrimage became our shared pilgrimage.

Every pilgrimage illuminates for us the pilgrimage we’re on in our lives. All the lessons we learn on any one pilgrimage stand us in good stead on our life pilgrimage. To wit:

Grace comes from unexpected quarters and pops up in unexpected places. Who’d have thought, as we set out for T., that we’d meet M. and I., and discover we have so much in common—retired teachers, years spent caring for declining parents, a shared interest in the history of their house?

The agent of grace—the angel unawares—may look very different from what we imagine an angel to be. On any pilgrimage, there are graced moments when we meet extraordinarily kind and helpful people—some of them ones we’d not approach, just judging from their exterior.

Only to discover that in the Tree of Life, our roots are intertwined: we have something in common with them, no matter how distant or alien they seem . . . .

And we must be prepared to discover that we ourselves may, on pilgrimage, become conveyors of grace to others, unexpectedly. That is perhaps for me the hardest lesson for all.

Canterbury, 29.4.06: Pilgrimage and the Whole Grab-Bag Selft

Calling a trip a pilgrimage has this advantage: it frees one to let happen what will happen. I like that sense of freedom, of not having to decide from day to day what I should see and do.

Ironically, if one considers a pilgrimage a response to God’s guiding hand, it’s freedom one is giving up. One remains open, supple, disponible, responsive to a will transcending one’s own.

I’m not sure if—for a long time!—I’ve believed in that kind of puppet-master God pulling all the strings. Such a God is always male, and always a tyrant.

The only variation in these puppet-master theologies is whether they tyrant is benign or, well, tyrannical . . . .

Yet I’m loath to give up the idea that God guides us. Amazing things happen, “coincidences.” Doors open. Injustice is reversed. Flowers spring forth in the unlikeliest places.

I picture the God accomplishing this (with us) as a more feminine force, weaving the woof on the warp of our freedom. And with leading strings of love . . . .

Surrounded as I write this in Atlanta airport by a bevy of soldiers, all in camouflage. Where are they going? ON the flight from Little Rock, a soldier in regular clothes told Steve he’s headed to Puerto Rico “to help our boys down there.”

Why? Is something we don’t know going on “down there”? Is Bush’s response to his plummeting poll numbers going to be to beef up military presence in Latin America—in other words, while mouthing support for illegal immigrants, cynically to exploit our fear of contamination at the borders (Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger is so enlightening on that point).

Things—our culture—seem more militarized than I ever recall. And yet we’re not at war—not in the engrossing sense of World War II, in which the whole nation was involved.

The military presence is especially pronounced in every airport we go to. Again, entry points, orifices: a symbolic gesture to remind us to remain on guard, to remember that we now need Big Papa (God’s emissary) to guard and protect us.

The flight here: horrendous. Steve said he can’t remember being on one so bad in a long time. I don’t think I can ever recall such a flight. It made turbulence and rough air sound like warm milk beside a hot toddy.

Things feel apocalyptic now. People look . . . odd—either messengers sent to pass on a cryptic warning, or menacing watchers.

Of course, I realize this has much to do with my mental state. If so, what does that state (and what it opens me to) portend for pilgrimage?

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Somewhere in the Atlantic approaching England. I’ve slept little and fitfully, but what sleep I got was at least moderately refreshing.

Why pilgrimage now? Why me? At one level, the answer is obvious. I just am not who I was a few years ago.

Which is to say, not sure who I am . . . . Aging, moving to death, yes.

I’ve been through a wreck. I lived. I’m not quite the same, though.

I’ve had lesions detected in my lungs. They’re apparently benign. But. They’re there, and what do they mean? Intimations of mortality?

Above all, we’re facing a move I absolutely don’t want to make. And yet everything tells me I should do so.

If nothing else, “my” life is hardly in my control. And I need guidance, strength, clarity.

Pilgrimage has to be about a lot more. Pilgrims who set off on the road to Canterbury in the middle ages, for instance: just as I do, they surely brought a whole grab bag full of petitions and thanksgivings along with them.

They brought their whole grab-bag self, rejoicing, muttering, praying, cursing, scratching, farting, kneeling.

If Chaucer tells us anything, he certainly tells us that. He tells us they went a-pilgrimage as much for a change of pace, and of scenery, as for pious adventure.

And who knows what they found along the way, each of them? And what I’ll find?