“There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.”
–Pynchon, Against the Day, 768
Note: This post may not be finished.
My mile-a-minute internal monologue has recently, for reasons both obvious and unclear even to myself, taken the form of some kind of refracted mass-transit system; like a series of trains that are all at once the same train, split like infinitives, sliced up in time and allowed to continue as they have been—only now at once whole and divided, with multiple selves careening in unique but not unplanned trajectories along a single set of tracks that somehow slides away from itself into multiple pathways. These lines aren’t even straight (that would be enough to handle), but the refraction that occurs has split single thoughts into multiple loopy-ass mental jug handles, retaining a single identity yet spiraling off in weird directions as if genuinely split apart. Imagine, continuing the public transportation metaphor, you got onto the 34 trolley at 48th and Baltimore and found it taking you to about 16 different places in the city at once, and the entire time being fully cognizant of being both one’s own singular self and yet keenly aware of inhabiting multiple routes on an even crazier version of SEPTA than the one we find ourselves on every morning. To sum up: there’s a sort of fractiousness going on here that feels like someone surgically implanted a piece of Iceland Spar in my hypothalamus while I was dozing at my desk over the New York Times Asia section. As a result I find myself both keenly aware of and utterly distracted by, well, everything.
Among the other problems—and believe you me, I aspire to be a solutions-oriented individual, more on that in a second—is that the sort of latent dull nagging anxiety of place (and placelessness) that I usually carry around with me has become exaggerated enough of late for me to want to try and make some sense of it. I’ve written recently to certain online-interlocutors about the issues, themes and senses of the co-acts of coming and going. There’s a certain familiar and comforting circularity to this process. But there’s also, historically, been a problem or two with it, of the sort that feeds the bilocated internal weirdness referenced above, and which has given me cause for pause of late, and encouraged the identification of latent problems and attempt, through shear force of will, my powerful sense of spite (even against cosmic forces and internalized patterns) and the expenditure of largish amounts of cash, to breach the wall of and redirect. Or, at very least, I want to throw a nice wrench in my own “works.”
Eliade, in who’s historico-spiritual-temporal presence I will soon be, upon taking up residence at the University of Chicago, makes much of the eternal return to sacred and mythical life. Expanding on this, in an at-work-and-being-insubordinate sort of way, we can recontextualize the concept along the lines of an idea of return “to one’s own myths” that includes the mythologically physical and psychical world that we are always already creating for ourselves in the course of daily life. In recognizing this creative movement—the sculpting, playful nourishing and grafting/re-grafting of meaning onto the lifeworld—as a fundamental part of our existence, it is vital to recognize and indeed bring to the fore the “transitional” (I don’t think this term is accurate as you’ll see, but it works) space situated not between but on top of, in a grand and fantastic overlapping, the psychical and physical landscapes of our lives. Let me be clear: we do this to and with the world itself, in such a way that the physical world and our mental, spiritual and intellectual worlds (both personal and shared) are most strongly brought together, made whole, turned into (or revealed to be, depends on your perspective) a dynamic, complex singular space. This is in fact the space inhabited by life itself (well, we could make a distinction between bios and zoe here, and deploy that to further complicate what I’m talking about, but you get the idea), in our ongoing personal and interpersonal mythologization of that life. In mythologizing, we, I think, can engage in at least one form of uncleaving.
This liminal space that brings together the psychical and physical in the creation of personal myths, has an almost, or perhaps absolutely, medical significance in the sense that it is done, and must be done, because it sustains life. Maybe it’s a chicken-or-egg question, but the point is simply that we make much of the world around us, and we should, and in doing so we should revel in it, because we have to. Last night, around one in the morning or so, I was sitting on a bench just off the Walnut street bridge discussing just this issue with Brandon and Leslie, and in our rapid fire referencing of time-signals, the recent incident on the 42 bus and why I think bears have a profound reserve of architectural knowledge, I could almost look over and see the Penn stadium and the elevated train tracks illuminated both by the ambient lighting that the city deploys (and perhaps they do so to help further the process I’m talking about) and the large, clear, beautiful cloud of dynamic, personal/interpersonal meaning that hangs about the city. While sitting there, we tossed our coins in, burned our incense, so to speak, and made our contributions. It’s a practice I think about constantly, and it is comforting to know that this kind of meaning-making, especially as a form of play, combined with the self-heightened sense of mystery that one often generates in order to pad the field for meaning to lay down in comfortably, and the too-often ignored drive toward exploration that can come along with it all, is self-consciously shared by other scholars, around here and elsewhere.
In saying all this, my goal (aside from talking about myself) is twofold: 1) to specifically identify this general activity, and to celebrate it, and 2) to strongly emphasize the importance of all of the ingredients: imagination and the physical world. It’s the latter of the latter, the physical world as palate and raw-material for meaning-making play (I hope the use of the term play is here taken in the profound sense, with full knowledge and awareness of the central role of play in the lives of mammals) that brings me to write this now, and to relate it to my own psychic life. Hey, I believe in theory being personal, and practical.
I mentioned above my plan for a calculated, spite-fueled (well, what isn’t these days?) internal strike on the mult-versal noodle soup in my brains currently, and for me travel, the gobbling up of new landscapes ripe for ever-more-interesting acts of hyperbolic personal-mythological grandeur, has long played a central role (through this process, among other things) of bringing me, appropriately, back down to earth. (In the most literal sense possible, if we read it that way). However, perhaps even more fundamental for me than my well-publicized need, and I mean that in the clinical sense, for the peripatetic in general, is the role played by the specific acts of coming and going, as mentioned above. I think that is because it is in times of coming, going, and coming back to a place that the mythologizing process is or at least can be at its most potent. One’s ability to “make much” kind of licks its lips at the prospect of leaving for a new place, or returning, especially after a long time, to a landscape laden with meaning and memory. Especially, again, if some time has passed, you can, and we often do, get the added bonus of our memories taking on the spirit and mood of the hagiographic, and nothing beats that for making a big deal out of things. It’s like cheese: you leave it alone a while, it gets a little fuzzy but the impact is all the more potent for it. Certain places are like this for me: a piazza in Napoli, a hostel’s second floor walkway under a bare light bulb in Sarajevo, a corner and station exit I’m told has since changed in Tokyo, long stretches of Route 101 in Northern California, the donut joint & the minor league ball field in Arcata; you get the idea. I wrote recently about Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia as being a current place of living personal myth and memory, and as an aside it is fascinating to be able to identify this process in its slower forms as it happens in real time.
In opposition to all this (the return to already mythologized landscapes, this rethought Eliadian return to “one’s own myths”) is, pressingly right now, one of a handful of things I’ve loosely described in the past as “the story of my life.” There are multiple “stories of my life,” but we are focusing on this one right now. I recently (ok, yesterday) realized that this is not any kind of actual story of my life, but rather a story that I have been telling myself for some time now, and which I think also contributes (or has in the past) to the fragmentation already referenced a number of times in this letter (to you!). Anyway, the structure this story takes is as follows: I go somewhere new, be there, live there, etc, and as my departure from a given locale nears, my relationships there, with people and with the place, increase exponentially in substance. Invariably, I meet ever-greater numbers of good people, and engage in ever-more-intense conversations spanning ranges of issues. I begin to feel that really, I have made friends, good ones, friends I want to keep. And then, in the most profound anti-climax, my ticket (usually a plane ticket), is up, and I am on my way home—going. From there, given the personal and economic realities of the world, I find myself knowing that in fact, despite the glow of the place behind me, I will not be coming back, my friendships take on the form of either cryogenic or cybernetic extensions of themselves via an abrupt transformation into an entirely digital medium, with all the drawbacks that entails. And don’t get me wrong, thank god for the internet, without it so many people would become so much more quickly and so much more completely lost to us.
But see, these last few lines illustrate my point in a way: this narrative, not of coming and going, but of going and never coming back, and of friendship lived in perpetual suspension, is really convincing. So much so that I take it to heart and assume that it is real. The thing I realized yesterday is that, like almost all traps, this has been a prison of my own fatalistic making, and its contribution to the refracted senses of spatial confusion that I can and often do feel, is simply me fucking with myself. I’m no psychoanalyst, so I won’t bother coming up with reasons that would probably be wrong anyway.
Let’s stick with present and future and forget past now: description and prescription are the order of the moment, the day, the month and the year.
As Ghostface once put it, “I’m back now, and I’m’a smash all that bullshit.”
The moral, though not the conclusion of all this? 28 days until I’m back in Tokyo. Why? Because I can.