I made my trip to Europe and what a trip it has been. It has not been what I expected. It has been more. I ask myself, self: what might you be thinking? And myself replies: too many things.
I began in Dusseldorf. I saw old friends, Bernd and Sigy. Gray now and looking like strange children with youthful smiles under weathered faces. I love them now more than I did then when first we met. They walk at a brisk pace. So brisk I can't keep up. I lumber with the gait of those living in tropical climates. They walk hurriedly desperate to outpace the cold. All those years ago in New York City's Lower East Side. I pushed Bernd, fully clothes, into a public pool. Sigy flirting with me and me too scared to let go of my sexuality. Now we are older and everything is let to pass in favour of the friendship that sustains years. The art of friendship. The friendship of art. The sudden reappearance of longevity that holds nothing and everything. This longevity allows instant simpatico. It affords a reemergence.
I ask for, and receive, The Little Boy, a sculpture from Bernd. He travels with me through Ireland and most nights I dream of where he will rest once I am back in Merida. I think the garden. I think the wall. I think propped up against a wall outside to stare at me. I think of Hesse's short story, Knulp. Unlike Knulp I understand my purpose. These later years I am no longer in conflict. I see my purpose. I seek out and find the ones that meant something. I go to them and relish. It is all for me and my growth but I see the transformation in others. I see how they look when we say goodbye at airports. I notice the hugs upon arrival and the different hugs upon departure. Everyone gets to change a gram or two; to the left, to the right. I want to return always but life is a funny thing. All life is individual but all life is the same in its hunger to be seen and understood. Knulp travels and Knulp wanted more, but Knulp was the best thing that could have happened in the lives of those he remembered and who remembered him. I am Knulp-like. God, the entity we ignore as instinct, converses with me daily and daily, like a saint, I am distracted by that which others can't see and which is true, only for me. I can see that time is coming to a close. Rather than try anew, a thing I find impossible, I instead go to the old and perfect it. I polish that which I feel a need to rub against. These old things are never shocked by my appearance. These familiar things accept greedily like given jewels. Those visions of light that I call friends; that blossomed and fell in other countries, along side me in time...They are my companions in my atlas, here on a cloud. I do not exist without my being parallel to their souls.
Bernd makes the comment that people who live in Ireland, though lovely and special, are people insular, oft to imagine the universe to be their invention. He says this as a thing particular to those that live on islands. I think of John Donne's poem, No Man Is An Island:
I think of my other old friend and I feel disconnected. I feel immense love but I feel nothing. The connection is the time and place we once shared. And then I look at all that she cherishes and nowhere do I see my reflection. I see lumps, logs, and the remarkably bland. Mostly, like all all those seeing love slip away, I fail to see myself in my true love's eyes. I am not longer there. I feel confused. I do not know why I don't care anymore. All I know is that I don't.
And I continue. Slouching towards Bethlehem trying to be reborn.
I waited for years to meet Joolz. She lumbers across the High Street in Oxford with a bike in hand and I see she is an older woman now. we search each other mildy worried that the 25 years of correspondence we have shared might have been false. My eyes follow the lines, etched in her face, that form smiles under her eyes where the sockets end and define her face. I notice how thick her blond mass of hair is. I am in awe of her height. I didn't imagine her this tall. She perseverates about things I can't stand to hold on to. I hold on longer, with her, for her, because I can see she is made happy helping. She plans her day around chanting nommyo ho renge kyo. I am on the toilet or just waking up, and suddenly I hear her voice seemingly frantic, giving way to something tonal that lodges in my ear like pockets of wind trapped against my eardrum. I feel a need to hold my head at an angle to balance the sound. We shop for food. She makes me look into the courtyards of every college in Oxford. I have seen one, I have seen them all. She goes to film women bike mechanics and thinks she can pass me off as Oprah as a joke. Too many white people seem to think I look like Oprah and rather than feel insulted it only confirms for me that identifying criminals across racial lines really might cause problems. It gives new meaning to me, for the phrase, "They all look alike". Do I look like Oprah because I have brown skin? (Mind you my shade of brown is 10 shades different than Oprah's). Because I enunciate my words? Why? Or do I look like Oprah because, like Oprah, there is something about my blackness that you feel comfortable around whereby other black people you don't? I don't look like Oprah. Black people never think I look like Oprah. Only white people do.
I really like Joolz. Her constant struggle to be real and present in her own life is charming. Charming sounds insulting. It's heartbreaking. When you see people in their frailty, in their innocence, there is a moment in time, a fraction of a second, whereby you have the unique chance to be fully in love with another human being. If you can see this window and remember it, you keep yourself human and humane.
I arrive in Dublin ill-er than ill. I lay in bed sweating, not remembering one moment from another. On day seven I am talked into being hosted by Andrew and despite his warmth and kindness I am not well enough to be in his home. I need a hotel room. I am freezing. I didn't bring a towel and I can't see one to beg off of him. He lives in two rooms with five steps and I am terrified of falling. But I find myself unable to really gather the strength to leave. I am just too ill and cold. Cold and ill, fluctuating between two types of misery. Simply going to the bathroom causes me misery. I wait longer than necessary to pee desperately thinking instead of ways to control my bladder so I don't have to leave the warmth of my bed. Of course I always fail as solutions to this sort of dilemma are non existent.
Michael comes to vist me and takes me around Dublin. We go here and there and eventually arrive at The Gravedigger's Pub. This is a memorable name for sure, and as we enter, I am reminded of Joni Mitchell's song lyrics from The Sire of Sorrow, read in part:
I ask for, and receive, The Little Boy, a sculpture from Bernd. He travels with me through Ireland and most nights I dream of where he will rest once I am back in Merida. I think the garden. I think the wall. I think propped up against a wall outside to stare at me. I think of Hesse's short story, Knulp. Unlike Knulp I understand my purpose. These later years I am no longer in conflict. I see my purpose. I seek out and find the ones that meant something. I go to them and relish. It is all for me and my growth but I see the transformation in others. I see how they look when we say goodbye at airports. I notice the hugs upon arrival and the different hugs upon departure. Everyone gets to change a gram or two; to the left, to the right. I want to return always but life is a funny thing. All life is individual but all life is the same in its hunger to be seen and understood. Knulp travels and Knulp wanted more, but Knulp was the best thing that could have happened in the lives of those he remembered and who remembered him. I am Knulp-like. God, the entity we ignore as instinct, converses with me daily and daily, like a saint, I am distracted by that which others can't see and which is true, only for me. I can see that time is coming to a close. Rather than try anew, a thing I find impossible, I instead go to the old and perfect it. I polish that which I feel a need to rub against. These old things are never shocked by my appearance. These familiar things accept greedily like given jewels. Those visions of light that I call friends; that blossomed and fell in other countries, along side me in time...They are my companions in my atlas, here on a cloud. I do not exist without my being parallel to their souls.
Bernd makes the comment that people who live in Ireland, though lovely and special, are people insular, oft to imagine the universe to be their invention. He says this as a thing particular to those that live on islands. I think of John Donne's poem, No Man Is An Island:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
And I continue. Slouching towards Bethlehem trying to be reborn.
I really like Joolz. Her constant struggle to be real and present in her own life is charming. Charming sounds insulting. It's heartbreaking. When you see people in their frailty, in their innocence, there is a moment in time, a fraction of a second, whereby you have the unique chance to be fully in love with another human being. If you can see this window and remember it, you keep yourself human and humane.
I arrive in Dublin ill-er than ill. I lay in bed sweating, not remembering one moment from another. On day seven I am talked into being hosted by Andrew and despite his warmth and kindness I am not well enough to be in his home. I need a hotel room. I am freezing. I didn't bring a towel and I can't see one to beg off of him. He lives in two rooms with five steps and I am terrified of falling. But I find myself unable to really gather the strength to leave. I am just too ill and cold. Cold and ill, fluctuating between two types of misery. Simply going to the bathroom causes me misery. I wait longer than necessary to pee desperately thinking instead of ways to control my bladder so I don't have to leave the warmth of my bed. Of course I always fail as solutions to this sort of dilemma are non existent.
Michael comes to vist me and takes me around Dublin. We go here and there and eventually arrive at The Gravedigger's Pub. This is a memorable name for sure, and as we enter, I am reminded of Joni Mitchell's song lyrics from The Sire of Sorrow, read in part:
Already on a bed of sighs and screams,
And still you torture me with visions
You give me terrifying dreams!
Better I was carried from the womb straight to the grave.
I see the diggers waiting, they're leaning on their spades.
The pub is a virtual funeral parlour and everything a person could want in their fantasies of Irish pubs. It is quiet in there. People talk in whispers as though the dead are laid out nearby and they are, as the pub sits adjacent to the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. No TV's or music are heard playing, and this is one aspect of the pub that gives it a different feeling. Only talking is allowed. The actual name outside, hanging over the door, is John Kavanagh, but it is known and referred to as the former. The walls, the furniture, the floors are all of wood. Nothing is fancy, nothing is ornamental. A man with Down Syndrome mans the bar on the evening I attend pouring Guinness and chatting while the the first half of the Guinness settles awaiting the Guinness top off. Locals converse and laugh naturally with him. I wish this were my local and I lament the fact that such places do not exist near my present life. This is a place I might wander to, on occasion, were it to be found in my neighborhood. Years ago Margaret took me to a pub in The Bronx, the name now forgotten, which is the closest to this that I can remember. She will perhaps read this essay and, laugh, for the last time I was with Margaret, we stood outside this Bronx Pub and she made reference to it. She will know.
I could lay in bed suffering like only Catholics can or I could rent a car and take off to explore Ireland, consumption-like feelings, or not. I rented the car.
I headed to Belfast to Kym's house. Kym was to be my host through the Couchsurfing project. I arrived and sat with herself and immediately us comforting in to one another like old friends. we talked about men, marriage, couch surfing guests, palm trees growing in Ireland, her washing machine and dryer, (we kind of talked about that a lot), food, her children, Belfast politics (no, I don't fully understand) (but it was very interesting to listen to her son, a young white man, talk about growing up under that nonsense with the same lamentation that can be heard in the voices of African Americans and others that have suffered under oppression). He had eyebrows that Elizabeth Taylor would have envied and eyes to match. The entire family had rosy cheeks, the rose spreading in blotches that made their faces look fresh, alive and full of a life spent near the sea. I envied those cheeks. These were the cheeks that through the centuries other people have spent much time pinching their faces to obtain. Natural beauty can never be surpassed.
Kym's two youngest children, the wee one's, gave me a joy I rarely experience with other people's children. They had a confidence that is rare in children. They had mind's that were rarer still. They were responsible, rough and tumble. One gapped-toothed and endearing with a smile that made you want to dive in, the other sublime and methodical who will hopefully grow keeping the boys on edge rather than the other way around. They snuggled close and made me laugh. We played games and asked one another "what if" questions, all before the fire that was kept jabbed and aglow by Kym. I felt happy with them and if truth be told I didn't want to leave. Having lost many days with the fever, I felt driven to keep going. I needed to see the sea and those cliffs. I wanted to wrap woollens close to me as I channeled Mary Kate Danaher. I wondered what park bench I might sit on and watch Adam and Paul for an afternoon; I hoped for a run-in with Brenda Fricker.
I continued North West and watched myself plod along on the GPS, keeping to the left, and feeling, besides ill, violently happy and independent. Most places I stopped I was queried if I was traveling alone. Everyone was surprised and everyone well impressed. Myself, at times, felt alone and wished I had had the company of another to yak at. Sitting silent at a table, eating alone, really only makes me more aware of other diners. I see others talking. I can only make the jaw move through a solid chew. I am performing a function; others seem to be having fun. Next time, I will perfect this traveling thing I do.
I get to Westport and I refuse to move for three days. I need to sleep. I feel a sheerness of exhaustion. I just feel sheer. I try and answer emails from home and they are just getting crazier with each successive one. I attempt to write again to make things clearer, kinder. I fill sentences with words meant to soothe. It goes over like genocide. I ponder Knulp through this all and it is then that I draw myself back and upright and see I am not the one, being far away from home, that could possibly be construed as sinister. I have written things clearly. I have asked relevant questions. I have shared my ponderations. I have received silence or bile, nothing in between. I then remember that asserted boundaries can drive some people to homicide. And if not homicide, since one might not be able to get their grasping hands around your neck, then E-mails that require a printing out so one can rotate the paper to see if another angle will make anything more sensible or shed better light. I go back to bed. I sit out back at the hotel listening to the birds. I find myself laughing at a certain cat that looks like Groucho Marx. I return to bed.
I feel ready to drive back to Dublin unable to make it physically to Galway. I need a real bed with someone to talk to, so I return to Michael. He is a quiet, tender man, slightly pigeon toed, that has a similar look in the face that Frank McCourt had. No matter how gray the hair, one sees a little boy. I am desperate to frolic through Ireland but my body revolts at 9.30 each evening plunging me into bed like duvets and pillows are the source of cures for the incurable.
I fly out of Dublin and land at Gatwick and I am met by Silas. I have no memory of how we met 15 years ago over the internet. He tells me it was by accident. Yahoo giving him my email, my answering his short note, us both discovering we were not on the same continent. Thus a friendship forms. Silas is from Zimbabwe, an inventor, a painter, a guitar player, a writer, a speaker of three languages. dyslexic, focused in a manner similar to me. We return to Hastings where he lives, in his Citroen 2CV, bumping along, gabbing, like two hippies, laughing inside a mechanical turtle.
All the levers needed to operate this car suddenly cause me to christen it Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang. We both giggle long and hard over this. Levers jut out from the floor, the dashboard and I look around for things on the ceiling. Every lever requires constant attention - nothing snaps back into place. I marvel at his ability to operate this car. He tells me that when he drives it to France women blow kisses at him and people wave with joy. I feel like I am in a box of adventure with fun windows from which to gaze out at the world. I feel giddy. He is easy to be with this Zimbabwean. He is attentive leaving cough syrup for me next to cereal boxes lined up for my breakfast. He writes, I write, we gab and I doze on and off again, still fighting my maladies. He asks me if I am heterozygous. I have no idea but I am sure the word is much too clinical a word to apply to me. When he steps away from the room I google this word and accidentally discover that Alexandre Dumas was bi-racial. I learn the concept of 'heterozygous' but still can't make the connection of how it might pertain to me. Then I do a google search of 'heterozygous and race' and voila. In the past, when I try to explain to people that race is an artificial construct, it falls into the ears of people whose faces look lost. Like you have revealed to them that they are adopted. We can't let go of these boxes. We can't let go of these historical placements that allow us to feed our imaginary egos, keeping us in artificial places of superiority. The almost universal request, requirement, and belief that one should 'stay put' in ones assigned (not by me) box, seems to only be a requirement for the ruling class. When one tries to apply these requirements to the ruling class, they go bonkers. Over and over I can see that if we as a society don't read and get things stretched intellectually we will absolutely never change a thing. If cultural studies means nothing to you, if you have no interest in knowing why you believe what you believe, if you have to ask if Black people all have the same accent as the ones in your neighborhood, even if they come from another continent, then we are in huge trouble.
When Hastings is past midnight I go to the shore to smoke one of my last fags. The traffic has ceased and this is what I hear: A soft slush, like the first wash cycle of the washing machine with an occasional spouting from a whale's imaginary blow hole. The water slushes forward enticing one to approach. It is jet in the sky. I am bound for home yet I long to linger.
I pack my suite case and tuck away the sounds of the water layered amid sweaters and lachrymosity.
I continued North West and watched myself plod along on the GPS, keeping to the left, and feeling, besides ill, violently happy and independent. Most places I stopped I was queried if I was traveling alone. Everyone was surprised and everyone well impressed. Myself, at times, felt alone and wished I had had the company of another to yak at. Sitting silent at a table, eating alone, really only makes me more aware of other diners. I see others talking. I can only make the jaw move through a solid chew. I am performing a function; others seem to be having fun. Next time, I will perfect this traveling thing I do.
I get to Westport and I refuse to move for three days. I need to sleep. I feel a sheerness of exhaustion. I just feel sheer. I try and answer emails from home and they are just getting crazier with each successive one. I attempt to write again to make things clearer, kinder. I fill sentences with words meant to soothe. It goes over like genocide. I ponder Knulp through this all and it is then that I draw myself back and upright and see I am not the one, being far away from home, that could possibly be construed as sinister. I have written things clearly. I have asked relevant questions. I have shared my ponderations. I have received silence or bile, nothing in between. I then remember that asserted boundaries can drive some people to homicide. And if not homicide, since one might not be able to get their grasping hands around your neck, then E-mails that require a printing out so one can rotate the paper to see if another angle will make anything more sensible or shed better light. I go back to bed. I sit out back at the hotel listening to the birds. I find myself laughing at a certain cat that looks like Groucho Marx. I return to bed.
I feel ready to drive back to Dublin unable to make it physically to Galway. I need a real bed with someone to talk to, so I return to Michael. He is a quiet, tender man, slightly pigeon toed, that has a similar look in the face that Frank McCourt had. No matter how gray the hair, one sees a little boy. I am desperate to frolic through Ireland but my body revolts at 9.30 each evening plunging me into bed like duvets and pillows are the source of cures for the incurable.
All the levers needed to operate this car suddenly cause me to christen it Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang. We both giggle long and hard over this. Levers jut out from the floor, the dashboard and I look around for things on the ceiling. Every lever requires constant attention - nothing snaps back into place. I marvel at his ability to operate this car. He tells me that when he drives it to France women blow kisses at him and people wave with joy. I feel like I am in a box of adventure with fun windows from which to gaze out at the world. I feel giddy. He is easy to be with this Zimbabwean. He is attentive leaving cough syrup for me next to cereal boxes lined up for my breakfast. He writes, I write, we gab and I doze on and off again, still fighting my maladies. He asks me if I am heterozygous. I have no idea but I am sure the word is much too clinical a word to apply to me. When he steps away from the room I google this word and accidentally discover that Alexandre Dumas was bi-racial. I learn the concept of 'heterozygous' but still can't make the connection of how it might pertain to me. Then I do a google search of 'heterozygous and race' and voila. In the past, when I try to explain to people that race is an artificial construct, it falls into the ears of people whose faces look lost. Like you have revealed to them that they are adopted. We can't let go of these boxes. We can't let go of these historical placements that allow us to feed our imaginary egos, keeping us in artificial places of superiority. The almost universal request, requirement, and belief that one should 'stay put' in ones assigned (not by me) box, seems to only be a requirement for the ruling class. When one tries to apply these requirements to the ruling class, they go bonkers. Over and over I can see that if we as a society don't read and get things stretched intellectually we will absolutely never change a thing. If cultural studies means nothing to you, if you have no interest in knowing why you believe what you believe, if you have to ask if Black people all have the same accent as the ones in your neighborhood, even if they come from another continent, then we are in huge trouble.
When Hastings is past midnight I go to the shore to smoke one of my last fags. The traffic has ceased and this is what I hear: A soft slush, like the first wash cycle of the washing machine with an occasional spouting from a whale's imaginary blow hole. The water slushes forward enticing one to approach. It is jet in the sky. I am bound for home yet I long to linger.
I pack my suite case and tuck away the sounds of the water layered amid sweaters and lachrymosity.
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