The Sacred Journey

Just after 10:00pm on a Sunday night here in SoCal, and I am ruminating on an excellent weekend. It was an extremely difficult week at the Buffalo Center, and they just seem to keep coming. We have two more weeks until commencement, and things should begin to settle down for me the. I am on an eleven-month contract, but as anyone knows, summer is a special time of year at a university, especially one, like mine, that does not have a summer term. Life moves much more slowly, albeit less interestingly because students are not around. I may just make it for two more weeks, especially if I can have a day like today now and then.

Today was set up by yesterday and the day before. I had dinner Friday night with Weg Hagen, the Vineyardist and Winemaker at Clos Pepe Vineyards in the Santa Rita Hills near Santa Barbara, California. Wes makes mostly Pinot Noir, and if you have seen the film Sideways, you should know that Wes was making Pinot before the film made it popular to drink. I sat along with some twenty local vintners and listened to Wes expound on the glories of wine. He is one of the most interesting cats I have met in this most interesting place, and I wish I had a video of him standing at the table explaining everything from the biology to the mythology of wine. It helps that he is a born teacher, fueled with passion for his craft and able to talk eloquently about any aspect of it. By the end of the evening, Wes had the good sense to stop talking because we all had experienced the “transcendence of the grape,” as he likes to call it, and no one was able to listen any more. Instead, we spoke loudly and passionately of our own theories of the universe, and the vintners tried to explain to me what oxidation was. Two of them even got in an argument about it, and I thought I was going to have to separate them.

Yesterday Wes was at the Buffalo Center to do a lesson in wine-tasting for the senior buffaloes, who graduate a week from Saturday. Once again, it was an outstanding lesson in wine, this time for neophytes like myself whose palate is able to tell Diet Pepsi from Diet Coke but not much else. We learned to detect various elements of wine, such as fruits, oaks, acids, and tannins. Then we brought out the second “flight” (aptly named), and learned to distinguish structure, bouquet, and (my favorite) “the somewhereness” of the wine, by which is meant the transparency afforded to the region of the grape wherein local elements such as soil and water come to foreground and fruits and acids fade into the background. Flight three was about heat (the alcohol level), entry, mid-palate, and finish. If this language sounds odd or even pretentious, it is, a bit, but Wes is good-natured enough to know that and to deconstruct himself even as he employs it. After the last flight, the buffaloes did their best to articulate their tasting experience, speaking well of finish, structure, bouquet, and acidity. Feeling a bit transcendent, I spoke thusly when asked about the third flight of wine that day: “I find number one the most seductive because she tells me that I can have her but I have to earn her.” Everyone fell silent for a moment then burst into laughter. There was a brief exchange about the “hotness” of Wilma Flintstone, initiated by me as I recall, during which I made some comment about her earrings being the element that distinguished her from Betty Rubble and indeed all other animated femme fatales. Needless to say, there was no fourth flight of tasting that day or we would have all been on the floor, but a good time was had by all.

I went home afterwards and finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is so good I will have to make a separate post on it. It was 10:30pm, and I was just ready to go to bed when Vivian texted me and asked me to join her and her parents at a local club. I had left her recital Friday night to go to the wine dinner, and Vivian had her parents in for it. She was glorious, as usual, and stunned everyone with her performance. I debated on whether or not to go and almost decided not to when I said, out loud, “Screw it. I’m going.” I walked downtown and found Vivien and her parents Al and Heather seated at a table in a bar that I had been in before but hardly recognized because it was now so full and loud. That is because it was karaoke night! Eventually, Monique showed up as well because where Vivian is, Monique is, and we all sat and enjoyed some beers on a Saturday night in Coolville. Vivian’s father told me he had lived in Alabama for ten years. “So did I,” I said, and I wondered about our experiences: a white college professor and an African American veteran in a state where the past hangs on everything like dampness. Vivian and her mother Heather said that they had sung karaoke earlier and that Al and I should do it. Once Vivian sets her mind to something, there is no point arguing, even though I have never sung in public before and karaoke would not be my choice of a debut. So I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to embarrass myself in a bar in Coolville, where I live. I looked at Al and said, “There’s only one song we can sing together.” “What’s that?” he asked. “Sweet Home Alabama,” I said smiling. The irony was too delicious, and Vivien jumped up and gave the DJ our names and the song. It took a long time for our turn to arrive, but when it did, we were ready. I took my Blue Moon and my new friend Al to the stage, and we belted out the song to the delight of the room. I even put in the extemporaneous phrase “Turn it up” that appears in the recorded version.

I have to say it was a blast. The crowd, made up of thirty-something Californians mostly, stood up at the opening rifts of the song. When Al and I started in with “Big wheels keep on turnin,” they were dancing and did not sit down until the end. I looked up at one point and saw one of the buffaloes looking at me from the bar. She had come in after me and didn’t know I was there, but her mouth dropped as she saw her director singing a Lynyrd Skynyrd song in a bar on a Saturday night. We finished up and the crowd roared its approval as Al and I went to our seats. Vivien, Monique, and Heather clapped us to the table, and my surprised student came up to me and hugged me in front of everyone. “That was awesome,” she said. “Well, at least it was loud,” I replied. Later Monique and Vivien would do Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” and everyone fell in love with them. It was a great ending to a wonderful day.

I slept until noon today, the first time I have done so since my twenties, and it felt wonderful. I did nothing but work on a web site for St. Mary of Virginia, read the LA Times, and watch Reno 911. Later Monique and Vivien came over, and we scrounged through my refrigerator to see what we could cook. I whipped up some linguini with sausage that was to die for, the first time I have really cooked in months, and we all had a bottle of Pinot Noir in honor of Wes and the weekend. We watched Broken English with Parker Posey and now they are reading while I write about my excellent day.

I will go back to work tomorrow, and the same problems and joys will be there. I will be exhausted by the end of the week, and I will long for some time just to myself, and I will not be able to have it because the next two weeks are insane and packed from morning until evening. Even so, when I have a moment between meetings or crises, I will stop and think of the glories of Pinot Noir, the hotness of Wilma Flintstone, and the simple pleasures of food, wine, and friends on a spring evening. And it will be enough to get me through.

I rented Into the Wild this weekend on iTunes, and I have just watched it for the second time now. It is a story that speaks to me in many ways. For one, Christopher McCandless, the young man who trekked into the wild of Alaska after tramping his way across the United States, was a student at Emory while I was there. I did not teach him, but we were in the same space at the same time, so we must have literally crossed paths at some point. I also read the book many years ago when it first came out, and I was struck by the courage and beauty of this young man. I am sorry I did not get to know him because I think, like many others who met him, I would have liked him immensely. I remember reading the first versions of the story by Jon Krakauer in Outside Magazine and being impressed with the man and the story. There was a recent article in Outside about Sean Penn trying to get the film made, and the difficulties he had with the parents being willing to tell the story. I admire them too. They are depicted in a harsh but apparently realistic light in the film, and I would have been reluctant as well. The film also is shot beautifully and includes many scenes from California, some from nearby like Anza-Borrego and the Salton Sea.

But of course the main reason I like the film is that a twenty-three year old gave away his money, his car, and walked into the wild, earning money as he needed it and making friends all along the backroads and cities of America. The courage this takes can be seen in our initial reaction to the idea: we may think it romantic but unrealistic and even crazy. American literature is full of the longing to be free of the societal structures that imprison us, and we know we are complicit in our own slavery. But there’s rarely anyone who is willing to reject the security that our imprisonment affords us. Chris McCandless did, and whatever you might think of him and his parents, you cannot argue that he did not act on his beliefs and gave everything for them.

We have such a short life on this planet, and we are so lucky to be here. It seems a tragedy not to live our lives and to sell them to someone in exchange for knowing where our next meal comes from or where we are going to sleep tonight. One of Thoreau’s most famous lines is that we “live lives of quiet desperation,” and he knew that desperation was born of a desire for freedom and a lack of courage to fulfill that desire. I have been thinking a lot about freedom of late and how we exchange it for an idea that our lives relatively unchanging and predictable. But we are always surprised when we are reminded that life is anything but unchanging and predictable. Loss pervades our lives, and we deceive ourselves when we forget that. All the more reason to live while we are alive, here and now. That doesn’t mean we become hedonists and live for our own pleasure at the expense of others. It means that we live for ourselves and own our choices, recognizing that others live here as well, and it all is sacred and magical and short.

Today I sing the song of Chris McCandless, a fellow Emory graduate, a fellow traveler, and a man who lived his life well.

One of the many advantages of being single and a wanderer is that you can be up and gone without much preparation. There are no schedules to coordinate, no dogs to feed, no permissions to obtain. Already this year I have been to Boston, New Mexico and Arizona, Guatemala, and just this week another road trip to northern California. You might think that so much traveling in the first four months of the year would slake my thirst for the road. Just the opposite has happened, in fact. I want to travel more. And I will. I hope to return to Joshua Tree for a backpacking trip with students next weekend, and then I have a trip to Europe with St. Judy of Ohio, her daughter, and granddaughter.

During one of our many conversations last year, I asked Judy why she did not travel more. She is retired, interested in the world, and has the means to travel. When she told me that she had always wanted to go to England, I asked her why she hadn’t. She said that she didn’t feel comfortable getting around in another country. I said, “Hell, I’ve been there many times and driven all around the UK. I’ll go with you and drive if you like.” And it was done. Her daughter and granddaughter are anglophiles and especially love the nineteenth-century worlds created by the Brontës and Jane Austen. That’s actually my least-favorite literature (though Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is pretty good), but I am happy to facilitate my family’s foray into British culture. (For what it’s worth, I like the bookends to those Victorian writers: the Romantics before them and the Modernists after them.) So I will leave a day early this June so that I can meet them at Heathrow, then we will spend the next two weeks in London, the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands, and the East, with a side trip to Paris through the Chunnel on the Eurostar. They will return to the states, but I will stay and return to the continent where I will bum around Europe. I’ve always wanted to see Greece and Italy, and I wouldn’t mind visiting Prague, Copenhagen, and Oslo. Who knows where I will end up? Maybe Istanbul or St. Petersburg.

Will this be enough travel for me? Likely not. For me, travel breeds more wanderlust. This week I drove up California 395 toward Tahoe, one of the great drives in America. Then I came down through the San Joaquin Valley, cutting over into Yosemite, King’s Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks. It was one of the great weeks and drives of many in my life, and I feel refreshed and invigorated–and ready to leave again. I dread the prospect of going back to the office for our four-week May Term. Students and the university are great, but I am dealing with some problems, and I would rather not. But I would be feeling the wanderlust regardless. Whitman: “I am restless and make others so.” Maybe St. Mary of New York was right: the road is my home.

The irony is that I am in an ideal situation in so many ways. I have a great job, financial stability, and a nice place to live. Moreover, I am five or six years away from being set for life: I would have tenure, a full professorship, and a year-long sabbatical during which I can travel and write. But that is precisely what worries me: I would be settled and would find it harder than ever to leave. My pattern seems to be that I reach for something wonderful (Prestigious University or Cool University), have the good fortune to grasp it, then move on. It’s almost as if reaching a geographical or spiritual place is enough, then I am ready to reach again. Academe is the least conducive realm to this type of thinking, and I’ve already changed jobs more than any other professor I know, and everything rational tells me to do my five years and settle in. I would resign as director of the Buffalo Center and simply teach my five classes a year, including travel classes. I would be set and could save some money toward retirement.

But there’s that voice:

I want to keep moving, and more than missing a chance to be “set” or to “settle,” I want not to miss the chance to be moving “forever alive, forever forward.” A psychologist might tell me I am running from something, and she might be right. I would be running from being or even feeling locked in. But I also like to think I am running to something: to freedom, to self-determination, to life.

These are random and idle thoughts on a warm Saturday afternoon in SoCal, after a week-long journey full of goodness and light. I’ll probably go to work on Monday, but if I don’t, look for me on the road, where I may just find a town and work in it until I am ready to move on. Or maybe I won’t come back from Europe and will find myself, like Odysseus, looking for home along the Mediterranean. Everything is possible. There are no endings or beginnings, only the road.

As I think of my several months away from blogging, I am reminded of the goddess Calypso in Homer’s Odyssey. She falls in love with the eponymous hero and keeps him on her island, disrupting his journey and hiding him from his friends and family. Odysseus is held captive to be a sexual slave to Calypso, and he pines for his home in Ithaca and for his wife Penelope, who has her own problems. Like most aspects of the Odyssey, the story has a number of layers. Calypso’s name itself is the Greek word for hidden or veiled, and her veiling of Odysseus serves to create more dramatic tension in an epic that is one dramatic scene leading to another. The unveiling or release of Odysseus, accomplished by that old trickster-god Hermes, allows the plot to move toward home, but the unveiling is not an easy thing either because Odysseus goes from a life of being cared for by a goddess to the tumultuous journey home. In fact the word for unveiling in Greek is apocalypse, which as we know has dramatic connotations.

I have not been held captive by a goddess, but I have been veiled for some months now. To go from an open-source life to a hidden one was not exactly my choice but was instead a matter of time and circumstance. My veiling included being hidden from my family and friends, who often called or wrote to check on me. Unlike Odysseus, I could be reached, but with some difficulty. Even now, I have a voicemail from burningsteady who castigates me for having such a cool phone and not using it. My Calypso was my job, which became increasingly demanding and less fun. There were crises and major tasks to perform, and they became my captor. Like Calypso, they offered the seduction of an exciting vocation in a beautiful place; like Odysseus, however, I was mourning my loss of freedom and seeing the pleasure of the work diminish in the light of larger losses, such as my life. The ping-pong table broke, and there was no more hanging out with students at night. These activities were supplanted by reports and tasks that kept me in a constant state of frustration and anxiety. Even a trip to Tennessee to see Milton, St. Mary of Virginia, burningsteady, Lane, and other companions, became a blur with little or no time to even catch up properly, much less reflect.

Calypso held Odysseus on her island for seven years, and after he finally escaped, she died of grief. Seven years. I told someone the other day that I would probably be director of the Buffalo Center for seven more years before I became a regular faculty member again. There is a certain symmetry there that is both delightful and troubling. This is the song of Calypso who holds us captive by giving us what we want.

Writing from the road in Hong Kong, Liz has posted a response to my “What’s Going On?” post on her blog. It’s an elegant and moving meditation on her own life’s journey and her ambivalence about home and the road. Reading it I feel like I’m in a cafe or diner that is well-known to me: that sense of between, settled but not home, on the road and imagining home, wanderlust, curiosity, fear, excitement, longing. She articulates it so well that I want to comment on some of the many insights she makes.

“I have lived my entire life waiting for the ‘what’s next’ that comes with being a student.”

There are no doubt other vocations that lend themselves to these passages from one thing to another, but being a student is a unique way to organize your life. First of all, you get to frame your journey as a vocational objective for those who may not understand or appreciate what you are doing. Saying it’s about school means you get something of a pass, though if you’re studying religion or the other humanities, you can expect some more questions, like “What are you going to do with that?” Here you have the option of doing the vocational dance or being more ambiguous. The first will end the conversation; the second will extend it into places you may not want to go. The vocational dance response would sound something like this: “Well, actually, a degree in the humanities provides much-needed skills for working in the twenty-first century global economy: analysis, interpretation, communication, and adaptability.” In addition to being true, the vocational dance will tell your listener that you’ve thought about what you’re doing and have some rationale for it–even if you haven’t and you don’t. Ambiguity, on the other hand, typically means that you’re going to get more questions. Saying things like “Well, I’m just not through learning” is likely to get you more inquiries and perhaps even a lecture, especially if you are younger and female. I’ve found that using an apt quotation is a wonderful response to questions about “what’s next” for a student. Give your interlocutor Whitman or Lao Tzu or Jackson Browne, and you’ve done two things: you’ve directed the conversation to more literary or philosophical spaces, and you’ve issued an invitation for deeper and more meaningful dialogue. Fellow travelers will engage; those who are just making conversation will not.

But there’s something more to that “what’s next” of being a student: it really is a journey, perhaps the oldest one we know. It is a journey with knowledge or–if you’re really lucky–wisdom at the end. And I don’t just mean the content knowledge of the discipline you are studying; I mean the knowledge of the journey itself, the wisdom that comes from venturing away from home. The etymological roots of the word education imply that there is a journey involved, a movement from one place to another, so the “what’s next” for a student has implications in all kinds of realms from the vocational to the sacred.

“But even there, in the joy of learning, it wasn’t long before I began longing for more than papers and books, and desired real-life experiences. I wanted to be on the other side of the book – I wanted people to read my stories – and knew that wouldn’t happen while I was still in school.”

I’ll let Walt respond to this one.

Now I reëxamine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds, and along the landscape and flowing currents.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to move somewhere not knowing how long I’ll be there. Or even the possibility of never leaving that place. What does that feel like?”

That last question is the one that makes wanderers be up and gone. It’s not that others who have the gift of being home don’t ask that question. It’s that for those afflicted with wanderlust, it’s not enough to ask. We have to find out. Of course we don’t explore every possibility that presents itself to our imagination, but we do have to explore some of them. We live, then, with this constant sense of otherness. On the road we wonder what home would be like; at home we long for the road. From certain psychological perspectives, it’s a recipe for unhappiness. But being a wanderer isn’t so much about being happy; rather, it’s about encountering divine things. Walt again:

Allons! whoever you are, come travel with me!

Traveling with me, you find what never tires.

The earth never tires;
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first—Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first;
Be not discouraged—keep on—there are divine things, well envelop’d;
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Walt intimates something else important here: the idea of tirelessness. If there was a single adjective that describes contemporary Americans, it might well be tired. We are tired from work, then we’re tired from being off work, and we’re tired of being tired. In the realm of the sacred, I would say that our exhaustion symbolizes our depletion of meaningful myths and rituals to live by. I don’t want to be the conservative romantic here and reflect back to a golden age when we had meaningful myths and rituals; I doubt we ever did. But that doesn’t really matter because we don’t have them now. As I think about the times I have been exhausted, they almost always have to do with following a script that is alien to me, one that I know at some level doesn’t work, but I keep playing my role as if it does. Alienation is the stuff of our lives, but there is alienation that makes us tired because we know better and alienation that makes us energized because we want to know more. If it’s fair to call Liz’s ambiguity and ambivalence alienation as well, then hers is the latter.

“But the thought, the very idea of living in one place without an end date, it absolutely baffles me. At the same time, I find myself beginning to CRAVE that. Long for it. Imagine what it would be like. And I wonder, will I ever find out?”

What a lovely ending to a lovely post. A prayer of longing, of desire, of home. But it is also a prayer of the road because it is a prayer of the imagination, of possibility, of openness and uncertainty. Will you ever find out, my friend? I think you will because you have imagined it.

“We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves… The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.” ~N. Scott Momaday

“You seem to engage better with students than faculty. Is that fair to say?” That was the assessment of my outgoing associate director of the Buffalo Center on his last day a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. He’s right of course, but that doesn’t mean I don’t engage well with faculty. It simply means that I have more student friends than faculty friends. But the colleagues who are my friends are some of my closest friends: St. Mary of Virginia, Scout, Milton to name a few. I seem to know immediately when I’ve met one of these colleagues who is going to be a longtime friend, and it happened here in Boston, most serendipitously, with Roger and Eileen.

Roger has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. I love physicists. They are some of the best thinkers on the planet, so much so that they are also critical of the very method they use. C. S. Lewis once said that when the theologians get to where they are going, they will find the physicists already there. I first met Roger when we were both wide-eyed and new at Prestigious University here in Boston. It was an orientation meeting for part-time instructors. We were both full-time, but we were so eager to get involved we decided to attend the part-timers’ orientation. I remember him wearing a tie, and I was in a jacket wondering if I should have worn a tie. The dean introduced us, and somehow we both knew that we were going to be friends at that moment. His office was around the corner from mine, so we had a lot of opportunities to interact. Roger is a mathematician and approaches problems in an orderly way that is born of the scientific method. But he’s also incredibly creative and open to new ways of looking at things. I am not a mathematician and approach problems in an aesthetic, philosophical, or literary way, but I can also practice the scientific method and appreciate it for what it can do, especially in terms of technology. Only a week or so into my job at PU, I knew I was becoming friends with one of the most brilliant people I had ever met. This was going to be fun. Then, one day Roger came around the corner and said “Can I ask you a favor?” I said, “Sure, what’s up?” He said, without any hint of irony, “Can you tell me how to work my voice mail?” I knew then that we were an excellent complement to each other. We came to have lunch every week at the home of the Stolen Lame Beer Glass, and our discussions ranged from grading (I hate it; Roger loves it) to teaching (we both love it and are good at it) to administration (he’s so good at it he doesn’t do it anymore). We both came to rely on these weekly meetings for their therapeutic value as well as their genuine fun. There was much laughter and silliness, and I loved punching philosophical holes in Roger’s elegantly constructed theories, while Roger loved forcing me to answer questions without resorting to metaphors or other literary maneuvers. I remember having a real problem early on and telling Roger about it. His response was “Let’s meet at the pub, and you can explain again how I don’t exist.”

Eileen I met later, at new faculty orientation, I believe, when we had a lovely evening in the presidential suite at PU and ended up looking at the lights of the city and contemplating our good fortune. Eileen is equally brilliant and is one of the best writers I know. She is the author of an important biography of a major British writer, and she knows about everything from history to maps. Eileen likes to present a tough exterior, and I have no doubt she can kick your ass, but I also know that she is kind and generous and full of light. She is, at times, mother, sister, colleague, friend, and confidant to me, and I trust her judgement. Our first real interaction was when I asked her to teach a course with me in the online program I administered at PU. She was both terrified and intrigued, and I knew her innate curiosity would win out. It did, and she ended up being one of the best teachers in the program and still maintains contact with some of the students she taught, even though they never met. Eileen is a dedicated reader of this blog as well, and when she and Roger visited me in Coolville, she would point as we drove around and say things like “Oh, is that the coffee shop?” or “Is that where you saw the coyote?” Roger didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, but I felt like I was leading her on a tour of my life which she had known only through this blog, and I guess that’s exactly what I was doing after all. Tonight she asks me about the difficulties I’ve been alluding to of late here, and I tell her everything. She has seen all of this coming and gives me her usual wise perspective on it all. They are both tired and have to work tomorrow, but they stay up later than they should to take care of their wayfaring friend.

After midnight in Boston, and I lie on their pull-out couch in their new apartment. I feel loved and welcome here, and as Eileen is found of saying, I’m family to them. I hear the T go by outside, an old and familiar sound that evokes memories of excitement and bone-chilling cold all wrapped together. Tomorrow I will see St. Judy, and if Lane and Mary were here, I could walk up to their place. A feeling of contentment rises in me as I consider how this city and my friends here have come to mean so much to me, and I wonder how I got so lucky. It is a place of great pain and sorrow, and Boston doesn’t apologize for any of it. She’s a hard city, one that can be rude and cold, but she is also seductive and will pull you in before you know it. Patty Griffin knows both the pain and seduction.

Boston
Patty Griffin

I went back to Boston
Back to the city you’re lost in
I went back to the place without you, facing the stone

. . .

Went walking in Boston
Over a bridge I used to walk on
I was looking for my heart
That I’d flung into that sea of stone, stone

. . .

You came all that way
Looking for the sky
And got a slap in the face
You had a desperate need to be loved
You just got put in that place
You better know your place, boy

Some things try and try
And they never fly
And they never fly
You reach up from the waves
And find that you’re only waving goodbye
Only waving
You’re only waving
You’re only waving
You’re only waving goodbye
Goodbye

Things never flew for me here, and I do seem to be always waving goodbye, but with friends like Roger, Eileen, Judy, Kay, Mary, Lane, and others, I think I’ll also still be waving hello, as I did tonight in Logan Airport when I saw my friend Roger waiting for me with a smile.

I wonder what Walt Whitman would think of an airport. I sit in Atlanta, as I have so many times in my life, waiting for a plane, and I imagine the Good, Gray Poet strolling up and down the wide aisles, his beard long and unkempt, that hat he wears late in his life sitting easily on his large head. He would see, as I do, the “democratic masses,” and while I see the worst of us, I can’t help but think he would see the best. He always does. Apart from being amazed and delighted and the technologies that allow us to communicate so easily and effectively and to travel with such speed and relative comfort, I think Walt would be thrilled to have access to so many people at once. I see him approaching travelers and asking them their destinations along with why they are traveling. I see him ignore the discomfort he creates in our–after all–conversative selves, choosing instead to celebrate and sing our courage to fly on these damn machines and the spirit of travel that emboldens us. I see him marvel at this American Self that he foresaw in so many ways, and I imagine him adjusting his perceptions as he begins to see the shadow self that emerges from our collective ennui. My vision of Walt Whitman is an echo of Allen Ginsberg’s, who imagines him not in an airport but in a supermarket in California.

A Supermarket in California
by Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked

down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking

at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon

fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at

night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!

–and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking

among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?

What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,

and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy

tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the

cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.

Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and

feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade

to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-

biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America

did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a

smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of

Lethe?

Today Walt’s beard points toward Boston, as do I. It is my second trip in three weeks, and once again I am called by the Andover Saint to help her at her new college. It is, of course, a bit of a racket since she equally wants to see me and connect me with my east coast friends, especially herself. But tonight belongs to Roger and Eileen, who seem to have forgiven me for sleeping through my flight on Sunday and welcome me for one evening instead of three. Anna says that my mistake was a sign that I needed to bring in the new year in my new home instead of my old one. I like that explanation a lot, especially since it diminishes the doofus factor somewhat. In fact she called me at 9pm last night with a cheerful “Happy New Year!” I respond in kind, surprised that my former student has nothing better to do than to call her professor and friend. “You know, it’s only 9pm in California, right?” “Oh shit,” she says, “I didn’t think of that. Call me when it’s midnight in California.” “Really?” I say, not quite believing her. “Absolutely,” she says, “I want to hear you say it from California, your new home.” So I do, and it’s 3am in DC, but my twenty-year-old friend is, of course, still awake and partying. She hands the phone to a guy named Will and says “This is my friend Aristaeus I was telling you about. Talk to him for a while.” Will and I speak for a moment, awkwardly, and then he puts Anna back on the phone. “Sweetie, I have to go, but I’ll call you back,” she tells me. “Don’t worry about it,” I say, “Happy New Year and be safe.” And she is gone.

Now I am off to a party at a colleague’s house. She had said to dress up, so I decide to wear the tux I bought a few months ago. The thing about buying a tux is that you look for events where you can wear it, and there aren’t that many, so I will take this rare opportunity. It is a strange evening, and I arrive back home at 1:30 am. I am too wired to sleep, and I have to get up at 5:00. I consider staying awake, but eventually the tiredness overtakes me, and I drop off. I awake at 5:00 and turn the alarm off–and go back to sleep. Something jars me back awake at 5:19am, and I jump up and get dressed and ready to go. I almost overslept again. What’s going on?

Arriving in Atlanta, I find that St. Mary of Virginia has nominated me for consideration of the Best New Writing on the Web, a project of TBR Books in England. LitLov mentions my “Aftershock” post among the others. Looks like the new year is starting well. Flight 680 is now ready for boarding to Boston, and so I will return to the place where my journey began nearly one year ago. Another circle of motion. I pray that it will be done in beauty.

Apart from being a great song by the great Marvin Gaye, it is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. I got the wanderlust and hit the road to the Grand Canyon only to find myself alienated and lonely. I come back for a day here in Coolville where all is quiet and lovely, and I’m supposed to head to Boston this morning to the warm embrace of the great companions. My flight is the one I usually take: 6:50am to Atlanta. I set the alarm for 5:00 am and wake up at 7:30. What’s going on? Immediately, I get on the phone and arrange to get on the next flight, leaving at 11:50 am. Delta tells me that it is no problem, as long as I cough up $300. I tell them I just overslept and want to be put on the next flight. Jane tells me that if I call back three hours or less before the flight, I can make the change for $50. “Thank you Jane,” I say, and go back to bed. I wake up at 9:00 am and cheerfully ask to be put on the next flight. “I’m sorry,” Patrick says, “but those flights are full.” He checks later flights, and they are full. He checks tomorrow’s flights, and they are full. I ask him about New Year’s Day. “Yes,” he says cheerfully, “I can get you the same flights you have with only a $75 change penalty. “Okay,” I say, sad that I will not be with Roger and Eileen for New Years Eve in Boston, but thinking that this will give me a chance to get some work done, the work that I can’t seem to bring myself to do whether I am in the Grand Canyon or my living room. I call Roger and tell him the news and that I am a doofus. “You said it; I didn’t,” he replies helpfully. What’s going on?

Okay, the work part is not hard to figure out. The last weeks at the Buffalo Center were the most intense work experience I have ever had, and that was at the end of the most intense semester I have ever had. The work was good work; there was just an enormous amount of it, and as I mentioned before, I threw myself into in a way that left me empty. My desire to work over break is to ameliorate the next semester by starting ahead rather than behind, but that desire is countered, I suspect, by the desire to just chill. The latter desire is winning out. I think that’s okay. The next semester has to be better if only because I make it so by taking control of my calendar, and it won’t be my first as director of the Buffalo Center. I know some things now and have my feet under me. I’ve connected with the students in a terrific way, and no one seems to think the Center is going down under my watch.

But what’s going on with missing my flight? I used to be a fan of psychological interpretations of these kinds of things, and there probably is one, but I think I was just tired and overslept. Like anyone, I was not looking forward to nine hours of flying and airports, but I have made this trip several times, and with the iPhone and the MacBook, it’s not hard at all. In fact, again, I thought I would work on the flight. But now I’ve missed New Year’s Eve in Boston with my dear friends, and I’m left here alone in Coolville. All the students and most of the faculty are gone, though I got an invitation to a party just today. I’m afraid to go because I will have to get up at 5:00 am the next day, but maybe I’ll go and just stay up all night. Some other colleagues just invited me to lunch tomorrow at the English pub in town, so maybe I’ll do that too. So I guess everything is okay, but I still wonder what’s going on.

It will be good to be back into the flow of the semester and around students and colleagues again. I just have to measure myself and not do everything that is on the schedule. I have a new staff member coming on the second week of January, so that will be helpful in some ways. Everything looks good for the spring; I’m just still recovering from the fall and from the year.

What a year. I began with loss in Boston, and I write at the end of the year with a full life in southern California. I have dear friends now on both coasts, and my work is the most meaningful it ever has been. My dear brother suffered a terrible loss but begins his own renaissance on January 7, the very day I suffered my loss this year. It is also the first day of the semester at Cool University. Synchronicity. I am closer to my family than ever before, and I am freer than I have ever been in my life. I can buy blue towels, be up and gone on a moment’s notice, and I’m spending the summer in Europe with St. Judy of Ohio and her daughter and granddaughter, then by myself for another month or so. Life is good.

Still, as we complete this circle of motion, I find myself sad and contemplative. I feel like I have found home, but I was seeing home as the end of the journey, and it is. The question that remains is: What is it the beginning of? Now that the circle is complete, what happens next? In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the problem of this stage of the journey very well, and it depicts my own feelings exactly. Coming back to the everyday world after experiencing a sacred journey is extremely difficult because your perspective is still being shaped by the journey and the wisdom found there, but there is no place for such things in the everyday world. People don’t understand your language and perspective on things and may even think you are weird. The sojourner now has to find how to live in this world, and he often suppresses his knowledge of the sacred to do so, or he can be up and gone again, creating another journey with a new home to seek. Whitman: “I am restless and make others so.” Of course finding a way to live in the world again is its own journey; it’s just not as dramatic or interesting. I realize that most people are just fine living in the everyday world and actually thrive in it, but I’m starting to realize that I’m never going to be one of those people. Does this mean I will be up and gone again? I hope not. I want to see what it means to live here in these mountains and be the director of the Buffalo Center. At the same time, I know not to predict the future; it just never works for me. This is, of course, still solstice thinking.

Another way of talking about this is to say that a new self–yet another one–is beginning to emerge, and what I am feeling are birth pains. Who am I if not the solitary traveler? What am I if I’m not on the road? What shape will my life take when I see my place here not as the sacred reward of a life-and-death battle but as something else? And what is that something else? And who am I? How interesting to be this old and have gone through this year and still not know the answer to that question. All shall be most well. The next circle of motion begins, and I remain in the Between. The Wallace Stevens poem that I posted this summer comes back to me, now in a different form with a slightly different reading, this time with weight on the words “unexplained” and “inexactness.”

Wallace Stevens - The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

To next year, a year lying and gazing at the sea where I can recognize my unique and solitary home.

I am struck by how odd I feel to be here again, one of the most sacred places on earth to me. At least it used to be. Now the solitary traveler, I find myself strangely unconnected to this space.  I look over the South Rim, some ten miles to the other side and over a chasm nearly a mile deep, and I remember welling up with tears on many such occasions, overcome by the sheer immensity and beauty of this expanse of absence. I see it now, but the feeling doesn’t come. What is here are tourists, and their conversations are predictable and boring. The men need to bring this thing under control by talking about dimensions, geology, or history. The women are content to look and listen but seem to be thinking about other things. Children are happy or upset and completely unaware of what they are seeing when they bother to look at it. The pieces of conversation I pick up are depressing. One father tells his young son that if he throws another snowball at him, he will stick it in his ear. A mother says to her son, “Oh, Powell, we should go to Powell point and take your picture there.” There seem to be as many Germans and Japanese as Americans here, but no one speaks to me today. A raven attacks a poodle who is wearing one of those dog sweaters. People laugh, and I do too because, well, it’s a poodle in a sweater, and it’s a raven. The juxtaposition is just too jarring, and the poodle deserved it. I tell all the ravens I see “nevermore,” but it’s not funny, to me or to them.

Ghosts surround me. They are pleasant but, like all ghosts, they belong to the past. I remember meeting sixteen Buddhist monks in Mather Campground one year. We are still friends today, and they ended up living in the next town over from me in Massachusetts. Memories of students come back to me. Moonlit and midnight walks along  the South Rim Trail. Losing students after dark on every trip because they (always guys) had to try the Bright Angel Trail toward the river and never realized how long it would take, despite my warnings. That loneliness that descends with the darkness at the canyon, and the dread that comes upon you when you realize you are camping in the cold. It hurts to think about leaving the warmth of the lodge and other people and crawling into a tent in the snow. But this time I am in the Yavapai Lodge, not the Mather Campground. A man walking in front of me tells me that the wind chill is supposed to be minus twelve tonight, and I smile think of doing minus eight outside. Good memories, but they belong to another time and another person. I am glad I have come, but I will probably not return. One of the rules of the road: no backtracking. I resolve that further road trips will involve new paths and destinations

There is television in my room, and I am stunned by its power. I haven’t had television for many months, and the sheer magnetism of the thing surprises me. I grew up watching lots of television, like most of my generation, but now it seems like there is this strange creature in my room that I can’t stop looking at. Equally amazing is the ugliness of it. Go without television for seven months then watch it for an hour. You will likely be shocked, as I was, at how crass and creepy it is. Even good programming (I watched the film Friday Night Lights) is corrupted by the medium itself, becoming simply a longer commercial instead of a work itself. Of course I can’t turn it off either and end up going to sleep by it. I am happy to leave the Grand Canyon if only not to watch any more television.  And of course when I go to the restaurants and lodges I see the same commercialism that televisions breeds and feeds upon. The food is horrible, the clothing overpriced, and the atmosphere not unlike a Wal-Mart at a national monument. Why didn’t I see this before? I guess I must have, but the joy of being on the road with good company must have diminished the ugliness that I see now. The only escape is walking the South Rim Trail, which I do every day, most of the day.

I get up early on Friday, eager to leave the Grand Canyon, even though–remembering my love of this place–I have bought a year-round pass in anticipation of many returns. This trip doesn’t spoil the memories at all; in fact it makes them more precious, more meaningful. But allons. I decide to head down to Williams to eat at Old Smokey’s Pancake House, a trek I have made several times before. Backtracking still, but it’s too late to change now, and at least I have adjusted my expectations accordingly. It is as I remember it, and the pancake is as large as the large plate, and is delicious. One of the great joys of taking students on trips in the west was watching them encounter food they hadn’t seen before, and I remembered taking a photograph of one of these pancakes that Ethan had ordered. He was stunned by the proportions in the west. At the Uranium Cafe in Grants, New Mexico, the pancakes are even larger, and there are two of them. They’re free if you can eat them all, and our big guy on that trip, John, couldn’t do it.

South from Williams to Prescott, another one of my favorite places. It is, as the signs say, “Arizona’s Christmas City.” The Billy Jack films were shot here, and I have always loved this classic western town, even though I knew it was dressed up for the tourists. The ghost here is Sharon who stayed on for a while after her graduation from Prescott College but now lives in Tucson. Interestingly, I have an email from her now in my in-box. She hosted a group of us here once in her place on the outside of town. A rule of the blue highways traveler: you must give rest and comfort to travelers when they ask. We did, and she did. I need to use the bathroom, and instinctively I go to the east side of the courthouse where I know there is a bathroom. I even remember that it is unheated. It is a bit odd to have so much information about so many towns in America, but I have to admit I like it a lot. We are made of memories, and mine are made of towns and people I have met on the road. I pass a man standing on the courthouse square looking a bit lost. He calls out to me: “Sir, are you from Prescott?” Every time. Every damn time. Someone will ask me for directions. I have to admit I like this too, but I wonder what it is about me that makes people think 1) I know where I am and 2) I will them where they are. He is a nice gentleman in his sixties. “No, I’m not from here, but I know my way around. What can I do for you?” He is looking for the AAA office. That I don’t know. He has a vague memory of the address, a street that starts with a “C” or “K.” I pull out the iPhone, and say, “Let’s see if we can find it.” A few taps later, I click on the Google search result and the iPhone brings up the map application with the search results marked. We find it immediately. “Here it is,” I say. “Just turn right there on Gurley, and it becomes Route 69, then turn right and the next left.” “Is that one of them ithings?” he asks. I smile and say it is. “Where you from?” I ask him. “Orange County, California,” he says proudly, “but I’ve never been to Prescott before.” “I’ve been here a few times, but I’m from San Bernardino County, California,” I say. It sounds odd coming out of my mouth, and I let it linger in the air a while and contemplate the fact that I am now “from” southern California. We shake hands and the man thanks me. I feel that if we were to talk longer, we would be friends. Whitman: “What gives me to be free to a woman’s or man’s good-will? What gives them to be free to mine?”

South on Route 89 past Sharon’s old place and over the mountains toward southern California. Toward home. I go through Hope, Arizona, and a sign on the way out of town reads literally “Your Now Beyond Hope.” I think about stopping to photo the sign with its many layers of meaning, irony, and grammatical mistakes, but I decide it will be just another memory, just another story, just another ghost. Flannery O’Connor called the South “Christ-haunted.” For me it is the West, and my haunting is by ghosts who are all friendly, occasionally funny, and sometimes sacred.