Embark

less bandwidth?

Embark. It sounds so biblical, doesn’t it? Like you are about to board Noah’s ark. Like you are about to go on a journey of indeterminate length. Like you are being told by God to travel in this direction and you’re not allowed to ask any questions why and you can only hope to one day understand its relevance. I guess that’s how I feel today. Like I am about to embark on a venture whose significance I will only know in looking back on my life many years from now. For now, that’s enough carry-on to take with me.

By tonight, you see, I will be in Big Sky country. I will have two weeks to do whatever I like in a remote and dramatic part of the country where I know no one and where I will be pretty much left alone. For two weeks I will be on paid vacation as an artist and I will have to figure out how to act the part. Packing my bags at the last minute, I frantically tried to find the few books I have read about this part of the country: a collection of short stories by Annie Proulx, now made famous by the movie about two cowboys in love, and Michael Dorris’ first novel, A Yellow Raft In Blue Water. I found neither, so I elected to take with me two books—besides the novel I am in the midst of finishing—my tried and true collection of poems by Mary Oliver and a Norton anthology of the Twentieth Century’s best short stories. That outta keep me busy.

Other tools I bring with me: my laptop, a hard drive, two video cameras, a tripod, one digital camera, one Holga, one blow-up doll, a pair of scissors, some Elmer’s glue, a sewing kit, a red shirt, and seven photographs of a teenage boy acting out various teenage fantasies. Alas, I have no scanner so I can’t show you any of those, but I can describe them. The photos I found in a suitcase that was full of my high-school ephemera. And yet, the boy looks completely unfamiliar to me. Did I have a pen pal? Was this someone I dated briefly? A secret admirer? Were they simply some photos I swiped out of someone else’s locker? I never found the note or letters to go with the photos. They are snapshots, taken in one of those 70’s luxury apartments, the kind of apartments with mirrored closets, gold-flecked walls and a kitchen-counter bar.

In photo number one he stands chin-up with a wine glass in his hand, cheering the camera. In number two he is playing guitar, rock-star style. In another he looks suavely and seductively at the camera, a black silk shirt buttoned to the top. Yet another, he is a blurred figure in the midst of a karate kick. In the final shot, taken in profile, he wields a gun, pointing it like a television cop both arms together, legs poised for action. In looking at them, I keep asking myself what was it this boy was trying to convey to me? What impression was he hoping to make? Which version of masculinity appealed to my adolescent self? And beneath it all, who was he really?

Not too long ago, a man told me that I had the kind of face he would never get bored of looking at. Ironically, this was a man I neither fell in love with nor whom fell in love with me. But it is one of those things I carry with me. One of those things I bring out and turn around on the dark and lonely nights. I have never read the play, Long Days Journey Into Night. But it was the play Eugene O-Neill lived his entire life to write. It was the play he wrote after which he made his wife promise not to produce until twenty-five years after his death—and that it never be performed (she waited three). A play he wrote at the end of his career, after already winning Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize and a house on the beach and three wives. It is a play—autobiographical—in the day of a life of a family penned together in the prison of their home. A play in which each character has its own black nightmare of a secret to share. It is a play about who we are and how we are and the terrible and beautiful things we mean to each other.

An excerpt:

I was on The Squarehead, square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason. It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.

We are all alone and brave and singular and fleeting and liars and dreamers and bitter and breathing. You and I, we are the same. And we are all just waiting for that moment when our airplane leaves the ground.