The Knowable Earth tempts us with her destinations. And yet some of us stay put, as undesiring as possible, to travel the unknowable heavens. What makes us such housemice?
You know how you said, Andorra was the place to be -
I wondered why. Has it to do with picking something up or dropping something off, or however it goes with what you know about the place or know not much at all, since it might not want you to?
Knew a chap once who knew a bank there who wanted to know very little about his assets - the way he liked it.
This dude (and I choose my word carefully) had prozac for a life and money for a god. The camel dick's mission was to retire at fifty, somewhere in the sun, with beaches and bars that would make all the SADness go away. Until then he made do with pills. He popped an extra prozac/a day, after his first kid was born and got a divorce when the second one turned out to have Down's. I think he is still (at sixty) a stumbling insomniac counting out the darkness in his countinghouse.
You are not likely to share the same faith.
but you probably, too, are not one for letting the System screw you over and grind you down.
I asked the you in my head if you would still be such an ardent crusader if you had all the cash you could ever need? Or would it take dissolving money altogether: solving the world's collective main worry before one could live worry free? I suppose so: the disgruntled poor know how to lay their hands on pitchforks.
I am asking, of course, what holds us back to go wherever the fancy takes us?
I am apt to doubt - in the pluralis majestatis - we fancy much of anything anymore.
I think you probably have plenty to be getting on with where you are right now.
I am thinking of the millions of tourists going places right now. What is that all about really?
Spending a lot of money, seeing a lot of ....? New things? New people? Better things? Nicer people?
Taking themselves and their spouses and whining bambinos with them wherever they go; or just their backpacks; to make it happen.
What exactly?
To escape the rut. How did they fall into one in the first place? To what will they return, after a fortnight, or a couple of months or a year abroad with a broader mind?
And when the kids leave home will we want to go around the world again? My parents did. My mother keeps on suggesting new places of interest, but she never fails to come back disappointed (I think she only really liked Iran; maybe to encourage my sister who is a Farsi translator but otherwise chronically suicidal).
But that doesn't stop her from having a conversation and speaking out of turn - your answers, after all, are all slow in coming.
Would having money running like water every time you turned on the tap, change anything fundamental for her?
Would it stop the struggle and the strife?
That is to ask: would she stop living the life she has and change her style?
She was happy to answer that. She sees no reason not to carry on as she has been for the past 30 odd years or more.
No, make that 50: when was I not I?
There is no shoving me off the barricade;
or alteration that can be made to my passions without stripping me pathetically butt-naked and burning every garment in my wardrobe:
every thread that hangs off my frame has been stitched on to save time
that otherwise might go to waste on things like…
well, offal (defunct organs testifying to disorganisation).
<This is Brit Fellon's Fence. Mine is a pile of firewood.
While we are well-off in life and its line does not intersect the headline and leaves the heartline to run its line straight across the mounds of Mercury to Jupiter without causing collisions, it's best to stay in the saddle and overview your ranch from there.
which betrays - quite possibly none too graciously - how fundamentally woman I am with little extra (modernity) added on. She who bears one new potential close to her heart better than he does the promise to refurbish the whole world.
No woman bears a son (or a Plan) vicariously. Or she cannot be called a decent mother (earth-guardian).
Yet many mother-in-laws in particular do, I have noticed, surveying the mothers of sons (which I am barely). They seem to hope through them to be part of something bigger. I am looking at the majority of countries in this world.... We have a long way to go before we can hope for free men, sons born free, boosted, indeed, to make a difference! But only if they so originally think to do so.
Mothers as enablers. Husbands as enablers. What bearing do these thoughts have on being financially able to travel as much or as little as you would like? As always, everything in my noisy head is interlinked: one giganormous airport. Indirectly, all this (holiday) travelling will show us all something yet: one big bottom line conclusion has still to come. This piece, like all my other pieces, muses on freedom.
I used to struggle with the meaning of life. (So maybe I was sixteen, once, afterall?),
It works well for start-ups and pop-ups and Up-With-People (an international, touring youth performance-initiative for gap-year students back in the eighties).
But I think I’ve outgrown it.
I sometimes wish I had joined an Ashram when it wouldn’t have been hysterical to do so. Although, I always thought it was a little bit of a hypocritical cop out. Another mini society; how likely was that to succeed?
I hear Andy Barlow (Lamb) lives half the year in Goa, not in an Ashram methinks. So, they still harbour semi-hippies there, I guess. If considerably affluent ones. Did make me file the Immaculate Conception Church in Panaji, Goa, under "want to visit". Another project I'll never finish: evaluating the very act of pinning what I pinned over the course of a number of years. I have no intention of visiting a single one, that much is quite clear to this little housemouse.
Ashes Sitoula; Pashupatinath, Kathmandu
You will love the tag/description given for Maria Dolores Vazques’s, photo above, of Soldeu, Bordes d'Envalira, Andorra: “Trees on hill during daytime”. If THAT’s a hill… and where do the trees go at nighttime?
