Across the Atlantic
Walkabout — a cultural ritual for Australian Aborigines in which they “leave their work for a time and return to their native lifestyle in the outback… it acts as a kind of remedy when the duties and obligations of life cause one to lose track of his or her true self. To correct this, one leaves behind all possessions and starts walking. There’s no goal. It simply continues until one becomes whole again.”
And so, I’ve made it — to a pink house with white floorboards, the last of the Finnish sun pouring through a double layer of windows. After harboring the intention to come for so long, and finding good reason, always, to delay it further, I’ve come.
I stayed overnight in Helsinki and took the bus to Sysma on Saturday. We drove through a narrow road between rows of colored pine trees and staggered lakes. Halfway there, I thought to ask myself what on earth I thought I was doing, coming out to the middle of nowhere in Finland with years of collected drafts of writings that were only half legible, and nearly all useless, writings I’d written when the feeling was strong and relevant and now meant very little or nothing at all. And just as I’d run off to Scotland two years ago, believing it would all return to me there, here I was, again, running off to a colder country this time, half-believing the same thing but with more experience and pessimism this time to protect my writer’s heart from failure should I fail again…
When I let go, it comes, as it does now, easily, naturally, honestly. The writer comes when I don’t beg her to and stays far, far away when I begin to question whether she actually exists or not. Like God. The moment I start to question, to doubt, he’s as gone as a fleeting moment of happiness. But when I believe, I feel him easily on the road before me, on the colored surface of a fall lake and that still, fleeting moment when he brushes past my ear at the start of a long, aimless walk.
The moment I arrived, the last of part of my journey, the part that was consumed with finding the way here, left me. But I needed it stay, to hold my mind far from the work I knew was waiting for me. I needed the residency to be a longer way down the road, a bit harder and longer to find, not this sudden, easy arrival.
I stood before the door, looking through the windows. There was silence. I knocked. No one came to the door. I decided it was all a mistake, that the residency was a romantic idea someone had come up with a long time ago and had since failed to disuse and abandon. Except someone had stubbornly held on to the idea and found an easy way to revive it by offering me, a hungry, unlucky writer, some time here.
I wanted to walk right back to the parking lot where the bus had let me off (I was the only passenger here), and wait for the next one leaving tomorrow (there’s one bus a day to the city). I’m not sure why I insisted, despite my terror, why I stuck around by the door, wandering back and forth. I should have left. I didn’t. Then I saw someone passing by the windows and I knocked again. This time the door opened and a young German lady stood behind. I was sorry for having come. I felt as if she’d have preferred her time here alone.
A strong surge of loneliness followed me up the stairs and into the small room overlooking the quiet road in front of the villa. She had gone out for a walk, and I was left alone in the house. I wanted to cry, to talk with somebody. It was awful, but then, like every breakthrough in my travels, the loneliness, like an early morning Scottish fog, began to lift and I began to study where I’d arrived more curiously, more eagerly. What seemed like a random, mindless decision to come here began making all the sense to me, as every place I’ve arrived in does, with time. The German lady had lit candles in the evening, and I made coffee with the French press I’d found. I read over old drafts, decided which parts I would keep, which parts I’d put aside forever. It seemed right. Incredibly lonely, but right.
I just stood up, to take a break, and found a beautiful orange butterfly by the corner of the white trim window. She pulled her wings together tightly when I came near. I opened the window, but she wouldn’t move. I brought my finger over to her, to help her, and she unfurled her wings, but stayed rigid and stiff by the corner. I managed to bring my finger under her wing and perhaps from fear, she flew away, towards the green bush outside.
I’ve been thinking a lot of the past 5 years since I’ve graduated. It’s as if I use that spring of 2017 as a pretty marker of time against which I compare the rest of my life to, those long, 5 years that unfurled into a pile of drafts, travels, films, paintings, photographs, heartbreak, a series of four migrations, a search for home that goes on and on, a search for love that’s just as frustrating and unresolved. I think each time I get close to something important, a realization, a conclusion, a confrontation that —although deeply uncomfortable—may finally resolve something in me, I turn my gaze away and pretend that close encounter never happened. And then I wonder why I stay confused and stuck. I don’t allow for moments like that anymore. It hurts too much.
But I’m stuck here, with all of it. And I migrate constantly between a surge of regret for the time that has passed that I can’t recover, and a deep, true feeling that I’ve done everything the way it needed to be done. I lived my life month by month, never assuming more time to come, another year, or years. It has been both the thing that has pushed me bravely and quickly towards everything I’ve wanted to do (and may have otherwise easily delayed forever), and the thing that has kept me from dedicating myself to anything long enough for me to carve an identity and certainty around it.
What if it’s time now to assume that there are many more years to come (or at least enough of them to do what it is I had meant to do), that I can now safely anchor myself to a chosen craft? But it would change everything for me.
It’s our last warm day here (this week), and I’ve been wanting to walk to the lake, to see more of this soundless town. I think I’ll write again in the evening. I guess I’ve always felt very guilty for the times I’ve set aside my writings to make way for my travels. The call to the road comes to my in cycles, and never in the form of a question I could leave unanswered. It’s more of an urgent demand, and sometimes, I wish writing would force itself on me the same way. They’re like a pair of siblings. One is shy, the other loud, insistent, and who, as a result, receives more, is heard more. Writing, like the shy child, waits for me to look its way, to walk towards it, to sit with it and gently ask it questions and wait for it to work through layers of silence before it answers. But the shy child is full of things the other child misses in his confidence, his loudness. In the end, both are loved, bother offer their parents a different gift.
***
I’ve come to work, but I’m not sure how long I will last here. It’s an empty town with empty streets; twice I’ve wondered into the wrong area and had residents rush out of their houses to tell me to leave. I’ve stopped half-way through gravel paths just because it gets so damn lonely out there by yourself and you wonder what’s the point of making it to the end all alone. But it is beautiful too. I’ve never seen fall like this before. One moment I’m stunned by the beauty of it all, the next I’m feeling sorry for myself for not having anyone to share it with.
Being here makes me miss the way I used to live in my mind, detached and apart from this world. I miss my fantasy, my made up world where writers drift through country roads, picking up verses from the towns they pass through, composing something magnificent on their own time, with no money but always something for the endless trail of coffee shops serving strong coffee, strangers who are tender and kind to writers, generous with their time, their own stories, and, when the time comes, years later, a collection of poems that gathers itself naturally in the hands of readers who were waiting without realizing they were waiting.
I believe every artist is in need of a fantasy; without it, this world can claw the dream out of us, and what’s art composed without a dream and an illusion that the world is somehow in need of this. Without this, with everything appearing too real, too serious, what sort of art, if any, is the body going to feel compelled to make? What muse would visit such a colorless, labored mind?
Anna Karenina, Prince of Tides, History of Love, Einstein’s Dreams, Bastard out of Carolina, Angela’s Ashes, Thorn Birds, Grapes of Wrath. What I remember, more than the story itself, is the feelings I had reading it and sitting there afterwards so stunned, vowing, as if to return the favor to the writer, to create something equally wrenching and painfully beautiful. It was the same when I saw Caramel, Caphernaum, Wings of Desire, The Great Beauty, Songs my Brother Taught Me… at the end of it, it’s just me sitting there, so stunned by what I had just seen and what it had made me feel. For days afterwards, that feeling would slowly give way to a promise I repeated over and over, no — it was more like a demand to find in myself, however impossible, some tiny ability that I can expand and stretch beyond its limits to make something so strong, so saturated with beauty that my audience would tremble in emotion the way I once did. There are films and novels and artwork you rise from and say, If I’ve lived only to see or read that, it’s enough for me. It can all end now. I am complete. Or, suddenly, in the abyss of your loneliness, you come across a film or novel or photograph and it feels as if, in that moment, your empty hand is held, your skin, gone so long without touch, has suddenly been touched, and there is someone sitting there at the other end of the bed, looking at you tenderly, the way you’ve always wanted to be looked at. That’s it. That’s the highest kind of art one could create, where, in our desire to be seen and heard and say something, we create something with its own pair of traveling eyes that goes around seeing all the others who wanted to be seen too.
***
Below is a collection of photographs from my travels through Sweden and Finland, and the places I’ve slept in. Always, when I travel, I am conflicted between the need to record, to capture, and to leave it all untouched. Some of the moments I recall most vividly I have no photographs or record of. And sometimes, like the bird of time everyone tries to catch in the novel, Einstein’s Dreams, some moments lose their beauty when I try to catch them and make them live on for a little bit longer. They are beautiful, I’ve learned, because they are fleeting. They are meant for me to step into, to lose myself in, briefly, and let go.
