| Survey and biography. |
[30 Mar 2021|08:41am] |
All children are artists; the problem is
how to remain an artist once he grows up ( . )
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| Travel and the mystery of longing. |
[24 Jul 2009|06:07pm] |
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mood |
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Jet-lagged. |
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music |
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Beirut "Elephant Gun" |
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I always wanted to travel when I was younger. I loved reading books about grand voyages and adventures - Tom Sawyer, The Grapes of Wrath - even Lord of the Rings. It was clear early on, however, at least during the primary school years, that with the unsteady financial situation with the family (my father was a struggling lawyer for years with only two good suits, the rest a countryman's clothes), it would have to be something I only dreamed about. And I couldn't know for how long. It could be said that there was usually enough set aside for a short vacation, but that there were always those more important things to be paying for - at least, according to my father, who flew around a lot for his work. That money we could have used to take us to Paris or Rome was his emergency flight if he needed it. So I put up a map of the world near my bed and read about those places instead.
When each September came I could find my classmates sitting in a cluster talking loudly about their trips to the Americas during the summer holidays while we all waited for the teacher to arrive (I had always wanted to see the Americas upon watching Woody Allen's Manhattan on our old turn-dial television) or, in January, their Christmas-time jaunts to warm tropical islands while I sat by the fire to keep warm through the frosty English winter. Maybe it was the books I read or the stories I'd heard or the repetitious nature of the countryside, but there was always an anxious knot in my stomach waiting to be loosened on the day I'd find myself pulling my luggage up a rattling plank aboard a plane heading across the world or a boat to one of those tropical islands.
It was when I turned twelve years old that my father was given work on a murder case of the Yorkshire Ripper nature - one that would mark the beginning of a rise in his career. It wasn't too long later that his salary had turned to a fortune - that is, enough to "straighten me up into a decent man" at Eton. Little did he know, however, that I would arrive and discover the library: more books than I had ever seen or that the used books stores I had waited every week to visit in my youth could ever have provided. It was an endless richness of knowledge about the world that would turn me from dreamy to ambitious. I could read about every country to my fill. I could build a checklist in my head of all the marvelous landmarks I would one day see. And sure enough, when my last year had come and gone, I took some scholarships I had managed to earn with sweat and endless cups of coffee and left for Canada.
This was where I became aware of my adult freedom. Where I studied English and Art and worked in a dusty, messy apartment over a desk for all hours of the night until I had the money to live in better conditions than, perhaps, I ever had. After a few years and some sudden success, I could unravel that list I had made and actually begin using it.
I can't quite explain the sense of wonder and amazement I experience when gazing from a plane window even to this day, after years and years of checkmarks on the map. I've shared many train compartments and plane seats with many people of many backgrounds discussing where they would like to go - and while many have one city or landmark in particular they'd like to see in all the world, there are some I've met who would be content remaining in one place all their life, and some who will only travel for necessity, never for pleasure.
This struck me and made me wonder - as I suppose most things do. It hadn't even occurred to me before then that other people didn't want to see everything in the world like I did. What is it that makes a person curious, exactly? Perhaps, for me, it was the result of being stuck in a cramped little bedroom in the Oxford countryside with my supposed future rolled out across the wall nearby. Maybe I survived those long summer days and winter nights living through all of those characters I read about - if not clinging to the possibility that someday I'd make the money to do everything I dreamed of doing without much of a reason to hope. I even recall one sweltering afternoon in July lying on my back and gazing up at the map - wondering about Africa, China, Japan, Greece - and wondering where I'd go first and what I'd do and how it would all happen. I had grandiose dreams of visiting Casablanca one day in a crisp fedora, much in the Humphrey Bogart fashion with a briefcase, in need of water to cool off. Strolling into a swinging cafe with a pianist and a mixed crowd of mafia lords and elegant people. I thought I'd bicycle through Paris and every man would have a handlebar mustache or I'd walk around in New York and see something out of Guys and Dolls or West Side Story.
As much as I look back at my childhood and want to fret over the lost time spent doing chores around the yard and the house day after day and bicycling to and from the store a thousand times for the same old groceries, perhaps it was the deprivation of my fulfillment as a young boy that gave me such an insatiable hunger to discover all the wonders of the world today. Perhaps one learns how to appreciate and how to be curious best by agreeing to stand beneath the dangling carrot, as it were, and jump until that carrot has become more than a simple reward, but something one has wondered about, something one has cared about, something one has put longing into so much that it's become grand. Perhaps the patience and the determination and the hope that one day that reward will come are what turn something simple into something incredible. My father flew monthly from city to city for his work and always complained of the long hours in the seats and the waits in line - when the mere thought of going somewhere, the very miracle of being carried across the sky would be more than enough to make the time fly by, as it were, for me.
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| Memories of Oxford and human rule. |
[31 May 2009|06:01pm] |
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The mornings of my Oxford childhood, usually on days when my father's profession had taken him again some weekend, would begin with small, colourful breakfasts (toast with spreaded honey/milk from cows whose farmers had pinched my cheeks) and a hand-held walk at the side of one of my mother's many colourful dresses into the day markets. I remember the warm summers and the wavy, sweating gaps of time when I would sit on the cobblestone deep in town, watching the legs of grown-ups pass left and right while she was feeling oranges and pears to bag over political gossip with the mustached salesmen. During these mornings, these lulls between the changing scenery of the suits and shop corners, the sophisticated scent of a gentleman's cologne or a glimpse of a lady's woven hair would catch my attention and be enough to make me smile for the discoveries of my future, when these things would all eventually begin to make sense. When I would become a citizen of the world and a keeper of its peculiar, unwritten secrets and codes.
The people who I knew growing up were always curious, otherly things to me; sometimes as alien as book characters from worlds as deep and far away as Alice In Wonderland, from rabbit holes I could not fathom. The human rule of a woman's elegance and daintiness and a man's furrowed brow could only ever confuse me when I looked at the deer dashing in the fields, amused by us, it seemed, and entirely free of such odd laws. I could never understand the necessity but I was good and obedient and wore each and every brass cuff-link and necktie without a single verbal complaint (although I merited many a battering for the scowls I could not suppress). My Eton professors, too, could not understand my fits of whimsy. Why was I so unkempt? Why couldn't I keep my collar clean like the other good boys? They were the example to which I was meant to strive. Instead I took to the hills with books of Wordsworth poetry and In Search of Lost Time, and always with an open collar.
I can only attribute this removed feeling I have to spending much of my time when I was at home in the company of small animals in my garden rather than in the woods with the other red-cheeked boys my age whose fathers would take them hunting in tailored, clean fabrics. I would watch the wild looks in their eyes grow more and more fierce; it was a custom to bring a lad up, my father would tell me, to know he was superior to the trees that would build his home and the animals that would fill his plate. But I would return to the shade of those trees again and again for their comfort and gaze at the field hares and envy them - and also fear for them. And they would fear me before I could teach them that I meant them no harm. How peculiar it must be to a hare, I would think, watching us humans walk by with our high culture and suits and carefully parted hair.
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