Tumbling & Building

I feel like I ought to write again in order to prevent the last post from staying at the top for too long. I don't disagree with it or dislike it, but I feel like it may give a false representation of the weblog as a whole. As to where to go from here, well, that gets a little messy.

Part of the reason I have not been posting is because the concerns of moving to Flagstaff, AZ have been high priority and thoroughly distracting. I have gone days and likely weeks without looking at my computer, which has its perks, but also means I haven't been writing. I am not one who has an easy time moving. I feel only lightly attached to most to my goods--clothing, computer, books, notebooks, phone, movies--but when it comes to ruling out some for travel, I am pretty bad at it. I can live out of a backpack for weeks on end--which I manage to do in wintertime travels--and have pared down my toiletries to the minimum. This endeavor to move to Flagstaff comes with different expectations. I want to build a place for myself there, a place to welcome others into and to share some of those artifacts of myself with others.

When I consider a place to dwell--not just inhabit or live in, but to dwell--it is a place with those books and films that I represent or partially embody something about myself. When I lend someone The Fall or Labyrinths or Swamp Thing Volume 1, I simultaneously prepare myself for the conversations concerning those items. The Fall describes these beautiful dreamworld locales, places that actually do exist, but take on their own surreal, brilliant qualities once you start telling yourself the story of having been to those places; I feel that I have shared in the filming locations in The Fall in my own way. Labyrinths has, more so than religious and nonfiction philosophical texts, challenged my conception of the world, the narrative that describes the world to myself; Jorge Luis Borges isn't just telling stories to elucidate and entertain, but to suggest an alternative position of oneself in the world. As for Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, it marks part of my life adjacent to when I started reading Borges as well as my earnest introduction to comics, but more seriously forced me to consider how we tell stories, not just in text and images, but in film, gaming, and song.

(Spoiler Alert for Ghostworld ahead.) A very large part of me wants to either limit the things I bring or cut them out altogether. In Daniel Clowes Ghostworld, Enid dreams of leaving home with nothing but a valise of clothes and a hat. The plot eventually drives her--more explicitly in the film than in the graphic novel--to make just such a move, but her own will is exercised out of desperation and not out of willful independence. In Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Adrian Tomine also describes a character retrospecting on her move to a new place and her attempt to recreate herself, to be someone new but she does not deny herself her idiosyncratic loves (such as an erotic attachment to the smell of old books) that become painful neuroses following a split romance. If one is to allow these stories to lean on one another, the suggestion is that Enid will remain Enid wherever her bus takes her, inexcusably. The aspiration remains, the way that I read it anyway, that she will be herself in a more unabashed way, that being herself will not be a splinter in her life elsewhere. (Of course, Clowes and Tomine, if either were to write the story, would likely deny their protagonists just such an opportunity for successful personal recreation.)

Whether it was going off to school or coming back from it, or the two academic trips abroad, I took the opportunity to be myself in a different way. From this vantage, I can't say that I was more or less myself than before, only that I was myself in distinct ways. Imagine seeing the sun from Earth; it has its comfortable size, brilliant but not awful hue, the warm but not usually offensive rays. Now, consider the view from another planet in the solar system. From Mercury, the sun is immense and blinding, ruthless and unkind, dominating the sky in Mercury's slow revolution. From the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, the sun is a bright but cold star in the sky, the sky itself claimed by the mother planets just an astronomical skip away; it is a minor but clearly present character in the sky, something like a social acquaintance rather than a parent. From the far reaches of the solar system, the sun is just an especially bright star in the sky, similar to Mars or Venus as seen from Earth, its light and heat so dissipated as to be negligible.

In each case, one still sees the same sun, the star that gives heat, light, and life to our small blue orb. Nevertheless, one cannot help but feel the character of that nuclear furnace manifests itself distinctly from each point of view. From these extreme perspectives, the differences can be profound, even disturbing. Rarely do we view our acquaintances, neighbors, friends, and family from such radically diverse locations, but the metaphor holds; just because someone describes him/herself differently does not mean that the person is acting dishonestly to him/herself. In those occasions when someone is in close, viewing the flaws, fractures and gems of who we are, we may be able to understand that diversity of personality, that flexibility of persona infinitely more than we can from the usual familiar or familial distances.

Generally speaking, I have very little difficulty welcoming people closer to my orbit. I find excitement and joy with that tight revolution around another person, romantic or amiable. Though they are not me, the artifacts I take with me are stepping stones, asteroids, signposts to guide new people closer to me. The process is frustrating and mildly dangerous, the way littered with misplaced books and films, a distraught face and tightened heart, a wasted night or tardy date. Those risks need not toughen the skin or line the face when they can allow us closer to ourselves, allow us to appreciate the potency of temperament, passion, confusion, uncertainty. I collect the artifacts of myself so that when I enter a new place I can enter it with the notion of, "the more you have, the more you have to give away."