Visions and Revisions

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place; we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. We go to ourselves, travel to ourselves when the monotonous beat of the wheels brings us to a place where we have covered a stretch of our life, no matter how brief it may have been…

"It is an error, a nonsensical act of violence, when we concentrate on the here and now with the conviction of thus grasping the essential. What matters is to move surely and calmly, with the appropriate humor and the appropriate melancholy in the temporally and spatially expanded internal landscape that we are. Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either; they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursion in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become."

-Night Train to Lisbon

There were seven art majors the year I graduated from Reed; a very disparate group of talents and interests. I haven't contacted or run into any of them since leaving school. Shortly after interviewing for this job, I discovered through Facebook that one of them, Tessa, was also headed to the McMurdo galley, as a cook. Zounds. Two Studio Art Reedies '07 in Antarctica. You could say it's a small world; you could make some kind of observation about the parallels between the kinds of people who attend Reed and the kinds of people who want to go to Antarctica. But this isn't the first time I've experienced a recrossing of paths, so to me it feels less like a remarkable coincidence than a karmic slap in the face: Pay attention. This is important.

I admire Tessa enormously. Always have. She's lovely and clever and socially adept, doesn't seem to have to try at any of those things, bold and strong and independent, and a wonderful artist. At Reed she played rugby, coordinated Renn Fayre our junior year (a huge undertaking), and cultivated a large, lively circle of friends. Even in Reed's tiny art program I think we only managed to overlap classes once, but even if you didn't know Tessa, you knew of Tessa. I visited her studio occasionally, arrested by her beautiful work, and her murals pervaded the school. Her style is so different than mine ever was: organic and imaginative. She draws. And paints. And draws some more. To this day I envy how essential drawing is for her. It's just something she does, compulsively, instinctively, like breathing. She's evidently made a living off of her work for the last few years, and I'm the last person to assume it's been an easy road, but damn. She's making a living from her art! When she arrived during the second week of main body, she asked what I'd been working on since graduation, and I won't soon forget my embarrassment or the look on her face when I replied: nothing. I've done nothing.

As the offspring of two first-generation immigrants (her mother is Chinese and her father English; they met in Southern California and decided to stay), she claims to have inherited their wanderlust. Last summer Tessa broke up with her gentleman friend of some duration and bicycled, solo, across the country, from Seattle to California, the breadth of Texas and a post-hurricane South, then all the way north again to Peaks Island, Maine (of all places), where she crashed her bike and was forced by the damages to stop. On her return she held a solo show in Seattle called "Oh, That Sweet Unrest," a title borrowed from The Wind in the Willows. In her short time here, she's already put together a an Antarctic art project called "Under the Bed Gallery," drawing from talents both on and off the Ice. She's one of those people that make me want to stomp my foot and say, "Stop being so awesome! I can't keep up!" We hold so many tastes and interests in common, I see such strange parallels between our two lives, and the most peculiar thing is that we don't seem to have anything to say to each other. It was true in school, and for better or worse it seems still to be true.

I don't cultivate any convictions about gods or destinies, but for some time now I've wondered about Tessa's reappearance, the recrossing of our paths, and what on earth I'm meant to understand by it. Reading her blog, and eavesdropping on the whiteboard exchanges of Inspiring Quotations between she and Charissa, I've pondered.

Here it is, I think: she's going back. She's going home.

It's clear that it surprises her, too. She spent the better part of the year grappling with "that sweet unrest," and didn't expect to want to go home, but there it is. She has every reason to return to Seattle: a vibrant community of artists with similar interests, a "pretty amazing guy…that I think I'm going to spend the rest of my life with," a deep affection for the Pacific Northwest, and a strange, new longing for "a sense of place." And like just about everything else about Tessa, I admire and envy this about her. I'd love to be able to go home.

But I myself have no where--nor wish--to go back to. Anywhere.

I feel like I've been split in 2011. Divided. And it hurt. Something broke off and stayed behind, while I kept rolling along the only way I know how. Given the chance I wouldn't trade any of my decisions, neither the ones I made in good earnest consciousness nor the ones that seemed to be made for me, but it hurt to be split that way, decisively, right down to the quick, because it means that something---an alternate, viable form of myself---is gone.

Scorpions have to molt in order to grow, I suppose.

Charissa's Night Train to Lisbon quote, addressed to Tessa, cast the matter into sharp relief: this last year, more than any other I remember, I've carried around a haunting awareness of what else and who else I might have become.

Si's flying down to meet me in New Zealand in February. After a month of traveling with him, I'll head north again. We've reached the point in the season when we start asking each other what comes next, where're you headed? Are you coming back? Are you going home? Quite a few people have asked what I intend to do after my stint on the Ice, and I genuinely have no idea. I don't intend to come back; I don't intend to go back, either. Fairbanks isn't home. There is no home. I'm trying not to push too hard, since trying to force a plan only makes me worry. I never know what I'm doing next until suddenly I'm on my way.

I have no desire to go back, to tarry, to stop. I have no wish to recollect the pieces of myself that I left behind, to be haunted by the ghosts of possibilities that never manifested. I just have to keep going. And the terrifying truth, the one that's eaten me up this year, might be that this really is the story of my life.

haunt |hônt, hänt|
ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘frequent (a place)’): from Old French hanter, of Germanic origin; distantly related to home."

It might be that I'm never going home.