In Limbo

Guess what! I'm stuck! At home, at least, but stuck nonetheless.

After spending the entire afternoon at the Burlington airport waiting for the thunderstorms to clear, the powers-that-be finally decided to give up on delaying my connecting flight to JFK and just cancel it all together. They gave me a brand new ticket for a flight leaving tomorrow morning. Oh, and the BEST part? I now have a SIX HOUR layover in New York.

I honestly cannot remember the last time I flew without a hitch. Maybe I never have. The airline gods don't smile on me, but based on the stories I heard from fellow fliers today, it seems they don't smile on anybody. The morning flight to JFK was also canceled today, due to mechanical problems; you can imagine how inflamed the folks were who've been trying to get out of Vermont since 7:00 am and now have to wait another night. Let's just cross our fingers that the sky stays clear long enough for me to get in the air.

A million thanks to Tina for the intrepid shuttling today in the face of thunder and lightning, wind and rain.

It's odd being here. I had myself prepared myself psychologically to be sleeping on a plane tonight (not that I ever really sleep on planes) and dealing with time zones and trains and languages-other-than-English tomorrow. But instead I'm here, making dinner and tea as usual, playing with Puppy (who was so excited to see me, little does he know...), and being more aimless and lazy than ever, because I'm in airline limbo!

On the bright side, I did find this really cool lobster-shaped magnet on the sidewalk outside the airport. Poor dear, he's missing one of his antennae.

Scattered Mush

Overnight flight takes off in six hours. The reality of where I'm going and what I'm doing hasn't soaked in yet. Or else I'm so fully saturated, after thinking about and planning this endeavor for more than a year, that all of this is just the next natural step.

Milo put some cute little claw-holes in one wall of my tent (clever me, pitching it in his yard), so I patched those last night. Cleaned out my foul-smelling water bottles. Did a final load of laundry. All I've got left to do is jot down some last-minute addresses.

The following website offers a thorough stage-by-stage description (in Spanish) of the route I'll be taking:

http://caminodesantiago.consumer.es/los-caminos-de-santiago/del-norte/

I keep getting questions about what I'll be reading this summer, what books I'm taking. Due to their weight, I won't be taking any full physical books--although I have a list of about two dozen that I wish I were reading right now--except for a beautiful Moleskine journal that Jeanette gave me to fill up. In place of books, I have pages and pages of poems that I've copied out. I have a couple dozen altogether. Why such a conservative selection? My plan is to memorize as many as I can. Most of them are pretty short. Good traveling poems.

Poets come in clusters for me--I go through phases, anywhere from a few months to a year or two, during which I end up completely immersed in the work of one or two writers in particular. In high school, it was Frank O'Hara and Theodore Roethke; then Bertolt Brecht (yes, the poems) and Walt Whitman; in college, my biggies were Wendell Berry and Adrienne Rich; these days, it's Rainer Maria Rilke and Tomas Tranströmer. Rilke possesses perhaps the richest, lushest, most articulate spirituality of any human being I can think of. And Tranströmer, whose language is sweetly spare and worldly (a much better candidate for translation than Rilke), provides a perfect counterpoint to Rilke's loftiness. Here's a Tranströmer poem, translated by Robert Bly:

From March '79

Being tired of people who come with words, but no speech,
I made my way to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The pages free of handwriting stretched out on all sides!
I came upon the tracks of reindeer in the snow.
Speech but no words.

To be honest, I didn't stumble upon this one all by myself. David Abram uses it as an epigram to one chapter in his lovely book, The Spell of the Sensuous, which I re-read last month because I've been thinking a lot about language in the nonhuman (more-than-human) world. Birdsong, bee-dances, dogs leaving little messages for one another at the base of trees. In other translations of "March '79," the word language is used instead of speech. At first, I liked that Bly chose speech instead, as it evokes the physical act of conversation. However, today I'm leaning back toward a preference for language, which also evokes the corporeal aspect of our words--language comes from the tongue. But it also comes from Latin, and I suspect Bly was opting for the Germanic. Even so, language has broader connotations; speech, to me, still feels bound in the way words is. I guess that's the Adrienne Rich in me: each of us has his or her own speech--or voice--but I'm still dreaming of a common language.

Not to say that Tranströmer and Rilke are my only poets right now. I'm always spending time with a few others on the side. So I'm bringing as well a few by Gary Snyder, Seamus Heaney, Antonio Machado, Octavio Paz, Wendell Berry, and Paul Muldoon. I'm on a bit of a guilt trip about not including any women, but I'm not reading any women poets at the moment.

All right, back to the more earthly concerns of laundry and breakfast.

Caminante

I can't stop thinking about that Antonio Machado proverbio (or is it a cantar?):

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.

In English, roughly, off the cuff:

Walker, your footprints are
the road, and nothing more;
Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking the road is made,
and when one turns, looking back,
one sees the path that one
will never again set foot upon.
Walker, there is no road
save for foam trails on the sea.

Inevitable, eh? I can never decide, when I read Proverbios y Cantares, whether I'm left feeling darker or lighter. There's a hopelessness--"there is no road..."--a sense of loss, but not quite loss, or not a painful one... a shedding, perhaps? The road is something we leave behind us. Every act of creation is an act of leave-taking. To give something, anything, to the world, we first have to learn to let go. So there's the answer, I suppose: I feel lighter, not heavier.

No one has ever said they didn't pack enough. But we all have bits and pieces we wish we'd left behind.

What, Pray Tell, Is a Pedestrienne?

Several months ago, I picked up a book, entitled The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson, as a birthday present for my mother. She hasn't read it yet, but I gobbled it down in a matter of days. It's a delightful book, one of the better birthday presents I've given in recent memory. And it was Nicholson who introduced me to the pedestriennes. In Chapter 3, "Eccentrics, Obsessives, Artists," Nicholson discusses the professional walking phenomenon that took the world by storm during the 1870s.

For a brief period in the nineteenth century female walking was a serious sport and a serious business. Large crowds turned out to watch, and successful women earned a great deal of money. Even so, it was an activity that had something sleazy and daring about it: pedestriennes weren't much better than actresses. It was only a passing fad, however. It was superseded in due course by the more exciting, and even more daring, sport of female bicycle riding, and some of the successful female walkers made an easy transition from two feet to two wheels. (76)

Now, the pedestriennes' undertakings were decidedly not your typical walk in the park. Nicholson describes at length the exploits of professional walkers, both male and female. The most famous, perhaps, is Captain Richard Barclay, a Scot, who set out to walk 1000 miles in 1000 consecutive hours--and did so in 1859, on a set course of a single mile in Newmarket, Suffolk. Several women in the States followed suit twenty years later, and took to walking record-setting numbers of quarter-miles in quarter-hours. Exilda La Chapelle (which, for the record, is a wonderful name) walked 3000 quarter-miles in 3000 consecutive quarter-hours. Not only is that a lot of walking, it's a lot of walking without sleeping. Pretty hardcore. For more hardcore walking women, this is a very nice timeline:

http://www.runtheplanet.com/resources/historical/womens-history.asp

And for a more detailed social and political history of pedestriennes, read this 1999 paper by Dahn Shaulis (who also happens to be quite an excellent poet):

http://planetultramarathon.wordpress.com/2007/08/19/

As enjoyable as Nicholson's writing is, The Lost Art of Walking's primary concern is just that: the art of walking. Although he's a treasure trove of historical curiosity (the works of sculptor Richard Long, a conference of psychogeographers in Manhattan, the story Werner Herzog's midwinter walk from Munich to Paris in order to visit actress Lotte Eisner whom he had heard was on her deathbed), Nicholson is not too interested in examining the politics and ideology of walking. Shaulis' article does a much more thorough job of that.

I suppose walking will always be a more political act for women than for men. There are added risks involved, and added stigma to overcome. You have no idea how many people say to me, with great shock, "You're walking alone?" Not just when I'm out overnight, either: even on dayhikes, people are surprised to see a woman alone in the woods. I wonder why people don't react with the same sort of surprise and anxiety when I walk alone in, say, Burlington. Would they worry if I were walking alone on the streets of Manhattan?

There's a good memoir, In Beauty May She Walk by Leslie Mass, about what it means to be a woman alone on the Appalachian Trail. It gets a bit "inspirational" at times, a bit Oprah for my taste, but posesses a good deal of wisdom nonetheless. Let it be known that I haven't cracked the cover of a single Camino memoir yet, and don't plan to until I finish (I do welcome recommendations!). I had hardly read a word of backpacking literature when I set out on the Long Trail last summer, but when I got back, I was desperate for books to read, for words that would help me make sense of my experience. Experience first, theory later.

In Keeping with the Theme of Being and Doing

I just read this essay by a writer named Tess Gallagher called “The Poem as Time Machine,” published in 1979. She has this paragraph that really fascinates me, although I’m not sure I entirely agree with her:

It may be that the poem is an anachronism of being-oriented impulses. It is an anachronism because it reminds us ironically that we stand at the point of all possibilities yet feel helpless before the collapse of the future-sustaining emblems of our lives. This has reduced us to life in an instantaneous “now.” The time of the poem answers this more and more by allowing an expansion of the “now.” It allows consequence to disparate and contradictory elements in life. The “I,” reduced to insignificance in most spheres of contemporary society, is again able to inhabit a small arena of its own making. It returns us, from the captivities of what we do and make, to what we are. (115)

The “future-sustaining emblems” to which Gallagher is referring are those symbols of stability, those structures such as marriage, family, and career that we have traditionally deemed significant and used to define ourselves—and which we are now losing. And the “the point of all possibilities” is Gallagher’s term for how time works in a poem:

the point at which anything that has happened to me, or any past that I can encourage to enrich my own vision, is allowed to intersect with a present moment, as in a creation, as in a poem. And its regrets or expectations or promises or failures or any suppositions I can bring to it may give significance to this moment that is the language moving in and out of my life and my life as it meets and enters the lives of others. (107)

So the poem helps us to inhabit the moment, not just pass through it into the next one. It gets back to trees, too: deeply rooted, stretching outward and upward, and eternally here. The tree can’t help but fully inhabit every moment. And that inhabitance, for us humans, is not a matter of eliminating regrets and failures and promises and expectations (and self-criticisms and hesitations), but of incorporating them—realizing their significance without turning them into idols, without becoming fearful or worshipful of our personal affects (I’m getting all Spinoza here). Writing a poem is about carving out a space for the “I,” with all its impurities and flaws, to inhabit.

I like all of that and find it almost satisfying. But I still think that “what we do and make” is at least as important as “what we are.” In poetry and in life more broadly. Because poems are something we make, concrete objects as far as I’m concerned, requiring labor like anything else, I’m troubled by the notion of our words existing on some separate plane of pure being removed from doing. And I suspect that isn’t even what Gallagher is after; she herself describes how language moves in and out of life. And I like idea of the poem as a sanctuary: the “small arena” one makes in which to cultivate the “now.” What really bothers me is that one line: “the captivities of what we do and make.” Do we really spend enough time genuinely doing and making things to be held captive by them? I think our captivity as a society has more to do with a lack of doing and making.

So often, the tasks with which we are burdened—in school, at work—are not integral. Genuine doing and making—growing and harvesting plants, building shelter, making clothes, clearing trails—are, like the crafting of a poem, ways of expanding the “now,” of bringing together those “disparate and contradictory elements in life” and allowing them consequence and meaning. This has to do with the meditative aspect of repeated motions, but also with the thought and care and skill involved. We spend so little time accomplishing necessary tasks, doing our own work. What I want is more of a recognition that poetry, writing it and reading it, is not a purely inward process, not entirely a process of the “I” but something more worldly, more expansive, more engaged, and more corporeal. “All forms will pass, matter alone remain”—from Wendell Berry’s translation of a poem by Pierre Ronsard. If poetry were pure form, that line would be terribly sad, fruitless and futile, a sort of “Why bother to write?” The line survives precisely because there is some matter at the heart of the poem, some craft, some consequence.

Gallagher is right to say that we ache for consequence, and that poetry can help to satisfy that ache; but her explanation of the origin of our ache is off. Being and doing need not be a case of either/or. In truth, we need more of both; and in any act of creation, we find both wrapped up with one another. What I want to work out is not how to keep doing from subsuming being, or vice versa, but how the two sustain each other—how each gives the other—gives our lives—meaning.

A Puppy and a Poem

The greatest challenge, it turns out, might be tearing myself away from this place. And here's why. His name is Milo, he's been with my family for a week and a half, and will be ten weeks old tomorrow. The photograph does not do him justice. For some more unbearable cuteness, go to YouTube and watch a fawning proud-parent video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE2MABtzxoU&feature=player_embedded

Milo is not much of a walker yet, but hopefully he'll figure out that the road isn't too scary, the leash not too uncomfortable, and new places not too terrible. For now, his favorite pastimes are hiding in the tall grass, napping in the sun, and wrasslin' with anyone who will get down on the ground with him.

One can't help but feel a bit of separation anxiety every time one leaves home without this little fellow. (My mother has her fingers crossed that she'll win the lottery so she can quit her job and stay home with him all the time.) If I can barely tear myself away for an afternoon, how am I going to manage six whole weeks? He'll be well taken care of; younger brothers (fellow puppies?) Aaron and Colin are on summer vacation, so Milo will have no shortage of playmates and guardians. I just don't want to think about how much growing he will have done by the time I get back... Honestly, though, I'll be happy when he's a bit more grown up. His legs need to get a little longer and we need to build up his confidence about new places before he can go on hikes with his people. For now, we're still working on teaching him that the car is not a bad place to be.

Do I have any non-puppy-related thoughts right now? Perhaps. I am hard at work memorizing poems, a habit I've fallen out of over the past year or two. I promised myself when I walked the Long Trail last year that I would recite poetry to myself as I walked, but that fell utterly through the cracks. This time around, I'm getting serious. I have several pages of shortish poems by other people (Rilke, Gary Snyder, Seamus Heaney) as warm-ups, and I'll bring some of my own stuff, too. Here's my first effort, a little one by Snyder:

There are those who like to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work

And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.

There are those who do both,
they drink tea.

I'm fairly certain I fall into the latter category. Tea is the only thing I can't seem to go a day without lately. The beverage of choice for folks who can't decide whether they are do-ers or be-ers.

Earth and Sky: First Camino Meditation

Traveling at Home

Even in a country you know by heart
it's hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
Can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

--Wendell Berry

To learn a new land through the feet. To have sun hit the skin at a different angle. To watch stars emerge from different, unanticipated parts of the sky. People ask me why I'm going to Spain and this is the best answer I can give. So, this Camino de Santiago, this Way of Saint James: Is it about the journey? the destination? Is it about adventure? self-discovery? discipline? sanctuary? Yes to all of these, and no. The art of going: maybe that's all I'm after.

I've been thinking about pilgrimage for a long time; once I get an idea in my head, I'm not one to let it go easily. The Camino de Santiago is rich with metaphor. Saint James was a martyr, his body said to have been miraculously transported to and interred in northwestern Spain, where he preached. Centuries later the hermit Pelayo was led by a star to Santiago's tomb. And to this day we walk to the Field of Stars, Compostela, seeking...something.

James and his brother John were known together as the boanerges, the sons of thunder. Fiery spirits, troublemakers, the thunder-boys make appearances throughout mythology: Castor and Pollux for the Greeks; Magni and Modi, Thor's sons in Norse mythology; similar deities show up in Cherokee myths; according to Peruvian belief, every set of twins is born of thunder and lightning.

I find myself thinking of the thunderbirds who show up in many Native American mythologies, and then of peregrine falcons (thus named during the middle ages when they were captured not as fledglings straight from the nest, but in flight on their migratory "pilgrimage"). There is something awesome and almost incredible about migrating birds of prey; all bird migrations hold some special power, but especially those of raptors...

For most birds, migration is a leap of blind faith, an instinctive urge over which they have no real control. The curlew does not "know," in a conscious sense, that coconut palms and placid atolls await it in Tonga or Fiji--it can sense only an urgency to fly in a certain direction for a certain length of time, following a path graven in its genes and marked by the stars. --Scott Weidensaul, Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds

And so we're back at stars, el campo de stelle. I wonder if we humans don't share some of those migratory instincts. Give all the sociopolitical, psychospiritual explanations you want; perhaps the basic longing is for the going. Evolution: "to make intent of accident." We go where we're drawn. We keep what works.