notes from the road (September)
"I have hope , but I am unsure whether I am to act on it or not. If I act, there is the possibility of gain, but a greater possibility of loss. The sweetness of hope will last only until I take action, at which point it will vanish. I force my mind to realize this."
-What He’s Poised To Do by Ben Greenman
““I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented... The furor of passion, the despair of idealism that you can’t attain.”
For a romantic (Catherine's definition of the romantic, not the other kind used to label those who insist on beauty in life), what people call "growing up" is so incredibly defeating. Michael Cunningham once described a character in his novel as someone who would give up the world in exchange for his ideas of it, that he'd rather hold on to the idea of love rather than near its reality. He wrote a short story too about a poet who ends up choosing the poem about the woman instead of the woman herself. Certain people understand the need, the life-sustaining need, for the idea of the thing instead of the thing itself, and how much importance it can hold, how it can make all the difference between a person deciding to stay and participant in life or to withdraw completely from it. The romantic's life depends on beauty, the belief in it, the confirmation of it, the quantity and consistency of it. So when a romantic does the thing she's dreamt of doing, or enters the thing she's talked of trying, it's almost suicidal, artistically suicidal, because it's the idea of the thing that sustains her, the reality of it all feels like one long deprivation.
When I began filmmaking, it drove me crazy to see how little of that time as a filmmaker was spent with a camera and how much of it was spent with spreadsheets and awful producers, daunting equipment, and long long hours of nothing on set. When I moved in my van (which is very very different from traveling in it, something I am slowly and painfully learning), I was hurt to find out how exhausting it could be, how incredibly dirty you can become and how tired of being dirty you can get, how tiring it was to lay half awake for most of the night, listening, watching, how fed up you can get of peeing in a bucket, eating crappy food, feeling so cramped, and the endless endless searching for a safe place to stop before it got dark, and never feeling like any place is really safe enough. You get tired of feeling like a heavy and odd guest at the few friends you stopped to stay with. You overdo it with cleaning and cooking in their houses while you're there because you want to feel that the exchange is balanced but you end up just leaving, thinking that it's easier than dealing with the constant measurements. I wish I can just say this honestly somewhere, more than anything in life, I've hated, just hated finding out that something, a relationship, a lifestyle, a place, wasn't what I imagined it to be. It's the simplest, most common, and earliest disappointment in life, and the one I can't ever seem to reckon with. I wouldn't share this out loud with anyone because I wouldn't be able to stand their reply. I insist on beauty, every hour on the road, every step of the artistic process, every moment in love.
Why not? Why are those who insist on beauty so defeated and the ones who accept the lack of it, and participate in the lack of it, rewarded for it? They're rewarded in the absence of disappointment. Accept no beauty, receive no beauty, offer no beauty, and life thanks you for it. Simple customers who pass through life with shrugged shoulders and indifferent gazes. They seem to suffer the less. And life, as if it were an employee working the register, seems grateful for the indifference. Easy customers that don't demand anything. She loves them. And then I come along with a long list and questions, and life is irritated, brash, exasperated. It feels that way. It could be that none of this is true. But I know nothing of what's true, only how it feels. And very simply, I wanted this to be a beautiful journey and if it sounds childish, at least it's the most honest thing I could say.
"I can change who I am to get love. I can be any woman you want. They are all in me."
-You Resemble Me
But there's more. When it begins to become unbearable, truly unbearable and exhausting, when I've spent the whole night awake because I'd woken up to a group of men banging on my van and spraying the side with paint, when I've spent the last I have fixing up another issue in this old, tired van, when I've spent the night sleeping, or trying to, in a seedy port, when I've just run away from a place that was meant to be the place I finally can rest and work in for a month before heading Southwest, afterwards, always, the ugliness is punctured by moments of sharp beauty. It's the only thing that sustains me. It's what keeps me in love with the road, in love with movement, a dreamer, one stubborn, damned dreamer and believer of beauty. It's the spoon of medicine shoved into my mouth just as I'm about to say the hell with this.
[9/17] I'd been doing it all wrong. The way I moved, how often I moved. I was letting the highway and the tangled strands of time (the way time becomes on the road) decide where I was going, how long I'd stay, which was never long at all. I was replicating what I'd left behind, continuing a war I'd begun in D.C with cities, the past, and the chaos of wanting everything at once. The long coast of Michigan and the endless driving between towns taught me this. As a traveler, I felt more like a loose strand of paper in the wind. I wanted to be the paper set beneath a writer's hand, full of intention. I could move, in her pocket, in her bags, but I wanted to move with purpose, and, maybe not move so much at all. I thought because my home could move that it had to move often. But no, maybe the wheels are always there, harboring the prospect of movement, offering comfort to someone seeking home while fearing the rootedness of it. It's there, offering a possibility, a promise. But I felt that to stop moving meant failure. Stillness parts through the chaos and presents space, and I feared what might happen in this space. What if a sense of comfort poured through and it felt too good to leave? I drive with this terror of what love for a place might do to me. It might mean that I stay, and in staying, I risk breaking a promise, but to whom? I'd promised to travel, to risk it all for freedom, to exchange for its sake everything worthwhile in my life. Finding safety in one place feels like infidelity. And yet I touched its borders, many times, by Lake Michingan, the St. Lawrence River, Lake Champlain, Lake Cayuga, and by so many other bodies of water I've moved through and lived by. I felt its warmth and loved the feeling of it, then hated myself for loving it. The artist in me craves a harbor with a lit lamp by the window, the sound of water, animals, a fire, a vast room filled with cameras and canvas and fabrics. The traveler in me feels a craving for this kind of space too but resists it. To give in to the artist's needs in me feels like surrender, but has surrender always been bad, and hasn't it spared life before?
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