A Season of Wonderlust: The morality of irresponsibility

Have I really been back for almost two weeks? My awareness is distended, straddling an ocean, split again to span a whole continent, divided in five to occupy several nations at once. My body is thus lankier than normal, joints loosened and dilated as if I had spent time on a rack, eyes widened by bright, interrogative light, my mind severed by the demands of this interview from cogent routines. Yet somehow the flesh is not encumbered, nor especially painful or awkward under my supervision. If there are chains, I don’t quite sense them yet. Likewise the mind has not ceased to function, I simply do not recognize its functioning right now as well as I normally do. I float, but not as if driven there by torment and escapism, not disembodied. Perhaps superembodied?

I yearn, wistfully. I am like someone recently freed from chastity, trembling in the morning to a universe of newly-memorable sensations, like a dreaming dog whose legs and jaws reenact an afternoon loose in a wood redolent with rodents, I sigh the way a semicircle of chairs sighs (with longing for and relief from ritual exorcism and repossession of knowledge) after the professorial asses rise, their owners having granted some wrung-browed student their mortarboard.

I dream of successes I want to revisit and make more successful, or upon which I want to build grander or simply different successes, and to which I want to build archways, garden paths, staircases so that others can visit, inspiring and inspired to yet other successes. Achievements of thought, feeling, experience, accumulations of learning and wisdom, architectures and syntaxes that lift and reveal.

From the profane to the profound, there are so many things I still want to chronicle, even consecrate. Waiting in bus stations. Using squat toilets. Navigating dense and sometimes irritating pedestrian herds. The countless unreached treasures witnessed from behind windows: coquettish towns perched atop rock promontories, leaning still and silent as I willed myself, unsuccessfully, to memorize their receding profiles, mountain ranges and valleys that strolled past in a flood of epochal color and contours, sea views that often transfixed my hand halfway to my camera. And how much did I miss when I would fall asleep in the rocking, multi-jointed crook of a train’s arm?

The list goes on - museums I visited. Streets I walked. Painted walls, painted people, conversations enjoined or overheard, all of these spontaneous, still-accreting works of organic art.

I discover, in this new form of wakefulness, in this new sort of sleep that I sleep, that once the journey, or the project, begins, it must never end. Sometimes we carry it alone, sometimes together, sometimes we join up the respective pieces we enjoyed custody of, sometimes we dismember them for new purposes, sometimes - and at last, inevitably - we hand the project off to others, but always we must keep it alive. To borrow the words of poet Czeslaw Milosz, this is one way “to celebrate our tiny, tiny my-ness.” In my view, to share this my-ness, to let it flourish in mutual goodwill and custody, is one of the best celebrations.

Currently I face the question of what to do next. There is an easy answer, and a multitude of less-obvious answers, and of the latter category, I suspect that most come with assorted new questions. I prefer to arrange a response of this type: one that makes new demands and offers new enrichments, rather than reinforcing an enfeebled pattern that can’t have much life left in it.

Some may observe extravagance in the way I am leading my life right now. I share this suspicion, but rather than denying that I am exercising privilege, let us just admit it and suggest that yes, it is a party - yes, I am eating, drinking, and making merry, and more of us should experience this. More of us can enjoy this. Here is my will to celebrate, here is what I want to build and share: we should not emerge from misery simply as a momentary respite that temporarily yanks our well-being away from the brink of despair, only in order to rebury ourselves, to reincorporate into a mutated pattern of life that shames and punishes and extorts.

No: I am celebrating for my own sake, of course, but I also hope to celebrate for the sake of others, I hope to help discover whatever is the shape of this work in progress, for my eyes to stumble into seeing whatever path our spirits are blindly putting our feet upon, to lend my hands to a project of supplying greater material and spiritual plenty to the people around us. That is the celebration, that is the conviction, and I feel an almost moral imperative to resist standard compliance to what my society would ask of me. I resist because it is asking something else, more quietly but far more urgently: it is asking for rescue.

Some snapshot memories, as-yet unremarked in this blog