I have been very tired again, recently. This occurs more frequently the longer I have been traveling, and it saps the energy I have to explore, and also to reflect and write about those explorations.
It is okay, though. One doesn't always have to get it right the first time. Fortunately, one sometimes doesn't have to get it right at all.
Still, at the moment, I worry that I am not traveling "correctly." I fear that I have become a sort of cliché - inescapably, a Western tourist, and one who may not be looking for "typical" experiences, but who is nevertheless looking for new and exciting locations to deliver unto me some sort of revelation or forced transformation. This is how I look back on my self-indulgent post complaining that I have not stumbled into romance on this trip. I can hope, but I can't expect. To expect is to fall into the delusion that the world is a theme park that is there to provide entertainment and catharsis to me. I do not really believe this, and I don't think I expected even in the throes of my depressed disappointment recently, but I want to make clear to myself and anyone observing me that I don't believe the world owes me. What will be will be. I maintain, though, that I am entitled to my feelings and desires.
Beyond that, my worry extends to how I write about my traveling - when I look back on my private journal, and my public posts, it seems so disorderly, so inadequate. The words fail to convey the depth of what I have felt and experienced, and sometimes the words are not only not resonant enough but seem to echo in the wrong ways. The "dirty Roma" posts, for instance: it feels disrespectful, mundane, offensive, but that is not what I wanted at all - on the contrary, I revered my time in Roma and wanted to find a new and unexpected way to sing its praises.
And I worry about whomever might be reading (which, if statistics are any indicator, is a pretty small audience and thus something I worry about far more than is warranted), and whether I have offended, bored, or otherwise disenchanted readers. I feel a keen desire to be heard, to hear responses, to have an effect - this by contrast with my stated intention to write just for myself. I guess that I cannot escape my desire to engage by means of my writing.
But again, it is all okay. Intentions and outcomes need not be neat and orderly, nor perfectly-executed. Perhaps I will revisit all of this and write it again. Perhaps this is just the first of many versions - of traveling, of writing about traveling, of being transformed by the traveling and the writing about traveling - and eventually I will produce a version - or be produced during a process outside of my control - that I am happy (or happy enough) with, that seems to pay due respect to the people and places I have visited, that does justice to what I desire and am capable of giving (to the world and to myself). Perhaps the eventual audience of all of this will be totally different from the current audience, or maybe the audience will be just the same. Maybe my labors are irrelevant to the grander narrative of humanity, maybe they have a modest purpose, maybe they have no purpose now but will have one later. I have no control over any of this except to identify what I feel driven to do, and then to figure out a way to fulfill that drive. Both the parts inside and outside my control are all part of the journey.
[added 2017/07/15]
As Anne Lamott has observed, writing starts with shitty first drafts. So with everything in life. When we are born we don't know how to speak, not even how to eat. We observe parents and siblings, neighbors, even animals. We go to schools. Everything happens for the first time, and usually badly. If we are lucky, we do things badly many times before we do them well - and this is lucky because it means we have been given grace and resources to fail until we can do well.
Today as I walked around London, I reflected on how poorly my fantasies match reality. This is good, though - without fantasy, reality would stagnate. Without reality, fantasy could quickly spiral out of control and cause all sorts of damage. The two realms challenge one another, improve one another. Fantasy and reality are twin shitty first drafts which we must constantly compare against one another, constantly revise. The conversation between these two should never stop. Reality needs fantasy to enrich it and improve it. Fantasy needs reality to sober it a little bit.
[end 2017/07/15 addition]
As far as my European travels, this particular phase of my adventure is almost over. Here is what I hope to chronicle in the next week or so:
- Venezia
- Athens
- A smorgasbord of places and stray thoughts I have not yet attended to, such as Portovenere, Hercolana and/or Pompeii, maybe the Palace of Knossos, a bit more about Crete, Tintern Abbey, Stonehenge.
In the meantime, I have been counseling myself about the approaching "end" of my travels to remember that I am only completing the opening chapter of a much longer volume. Contrary to the anxieties I expressed recently, whatever I return to (geographically, identity-wise, and in other ways) I will be returning along a different vector, with an altered perspective and a different destination in mind. This means that the adventure does not die, is not burned and sealed in an urn and forgotten in darkness once my feet touch the ground of my homeland again. No, I will continue to travel - there, here, elsewhere - I only wait to see what shape that adventure will take, and hope to influence that shape in some fruitful way.
No comments:
Post a Comment