JACK SULLIVAN
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NOTES ON TRAVEL
The drive through empty city streets. Sodium vapor lights. The highway’s quiet hum. Pulling into the terminal. Standing in the security line.
Waiting, waiting.
Coffee from a sleepy eyed vendor. Soulless TV magazine and overpriced headphones. The feeling grows.
Where are all these people going, you wonder. The sun hasn’t risen, but already Everybody’s leaving.
Everybody knows.
Checking their phones,
Studying news reports on high-up flat-screens,
Watching news reports from places
Far, far away.
Everything everywhere seems so within reach.
And then,
The boarding gate calls your name.
You’re late again –
No more waiting.
*
Why does one travel?
Escape, I suppose. Or:
*
George Santanaya writes, Locomotion – the privilege of animals – is perhaps key to
intelligence.
Or so I thought.
How many hours spent complaining about my perfectly acceptable, middle-class
// okay, upper middle-class // suburban town?
Only a short ride from Chicago, I acted as if I came from Wyoming farm country.
I couldn’t imagine why anyone would stay in the Midwest // emphasis mine // where everyone seemed to be Catholic, white, or Republican //
Usually all three. The world happened elsewhere // the six o’clock
news // or the movies.
Even before I could remember, I began to plot my escape.
*
Beguiled and terrified
By the ghost-colored clouds
Causing the plane to shake
You turn to your seat-mate
And smile,
To show you’re not afraid.
*
But Santanaya wasn’t talking about some queer kid’s desire to escape their surroundings: he described a basic evolutionary divide.
What separates us from other organisms is our ability to move on our own accord.
Seeds and plants cannot migrate, nor have they eyes or imagination by which to picture the neighbor lot by which chance has deprived them.
For individual plants it is a matter of living where they are, or not living at all.
*
Yet I remember standing outside with an older Korean woman one night, sharing a cigarette. She’s asking me where I’ve been, and I’m listing for her the places //
I had been to a lot of places, then.
I’m listing for her the places // and she’s giving me
This strange look.
I thought it was envy // but she may have been angry
// seeing as her hands had curled into fists.
She had a reputation for it // anger // Rikki if you’re reading // do you remember that one time at that bar? //
And I wondering if// if I said something // something wrong // feeling fear //
but also // excitement
I have no idea how she’s going to respond.
When I finish my list she asks
Why were you in such a rush
To leave home?
– Home // she says // as though I don’t understand the concept–
I don’t understand,
I tell her
Why people wouldn’t want to see the world?
She laughs
BITTER
And says
At least you had the choice.
*
Where have I been?:
[London]
[Germany]
[France]
[China]
[Cambodia]
Where would I like to go?:
[Argentina]
[Malaysia]
[Taiwan]
[Japan]
Who’s going to stop me?:
[no one]
[no one]
[no one]
*
It was hard to explain to my parents what political geography was //
Probably because someone made it up.
Definition: the study of both the spatially uneven outcomes of political processes and the ways in which political processes are themselves affected by spatial structures.
How where you’re born fucks you up.
Once I left home I realized my desire to leave stemmed from something //
My ability to leave // period // stemmed from something too.
Something having to do // with how I was raised // what was available to me
And // more importantly // what was not.
*
As I wrote the above, I notice a fragment from my notebook:
TRAVEL = INCOMPLETENESS?
// What does that mean?!
*
John Berger: Poverty forces the hardest choices which almost lead to nothing.
Poverty is living with the almost.
*
When I taught in China, the most annoying thing
// were my students // supposed lack of
imagination.
Already great at English
// how many students in the US
mastered a second language? //
they would politely refuse
My entreaties
to consider studying
abroad //
or at the very least // live elsewhere
// than our sleepy district town
// on the outskirts of Chongqing.
At first I thought they were messing with me
// Denying their teacher
His Stand and Deliver moment //
But the more I took them aside after class,
The more I walked and shared a cigarette
As they made their way to the dorms,
The more I saw they were serious.
For example:
A student // English name Lisa // was the best.
Moon-faced girl with Harry-Potter glasses,
She spoke with a cut-glass British accent,
The rest of watching Pride and Prejudice too many times
// or so she told me.
She was top of my class, finishing exams and assignments in the blink of an eye, before turning around to help classmates with their work.
One day after class she waited // And with brisk efficiency handed me a box of sweets
She and some classmates had purchased.
You’re too skinny, she said.
I asked her if she’d walk me to my bus.
I remember the day
// the air was hot // and the sun
a crispy golden color. As we made our way
down the campus central thoroughfare, students raced past
on bikes,
Laughing, screaming, crying.
Did you ever think, I asked. Of studying abroad?
Sheepish, she looked at her hands, pretending to inspect her nails.
No, she said. Then she explained:
She was getting her degree to be a landscape architect.
It wasn’t what she wanted, but the pay was good.
Her parents owned a farm several towns over
And she thought she might use her degree
To help them renovate.
// then she would design state parks.
But your English is too good, I said // for some reason // frantic // Don’t you want to go some place
Where you can use it?
She laughed and looked at me
As though I were her student
And not the other way around.
Who says I’m not going to use it?
*
The study of
Spatially uneven outcomes of
Political processes
And the ways in which
Politically processes
Are themselves affected
By spatial structures.
*
Why did I want to move away from my family?:
[because I could]
[because they didn’t need me]
[Because they raised me //
To feel I should]
*
Good: grief.
The root of my avoidance.
It creeps forward, inch by inch
The second I touch new ground,
Feet unsteady, lungs
Wavering, I wonder
What I’ll lose
From this adventure.
What I’ll be
Where I’m going.
*
Berger again, on the dissident Israeli architect Eyal Weizman:
[He] has pointed out… that… territorial domination begins
in the drawings of district planners and architects.
The violences begins
Long before the violence of tanks. He talks
Of a ‘politics of verticality’
Whereby the defeated even
When ‘at home’ are literally being
OVERSEEN UNDERMINED
// emphasis mine.
*
I think of all the ways
Travel is hindered:
By borders and checkpoints,
Men with guns
Landmines.
Cities flooded with blood. Bombs blowing up buildings
So the landscape changes
Irrevocably
Laws that harass,
Economies broken, too.
You’d
Know nothing
About this.
// If you didn’t watch TV.
When people look at a map,
They see nothing.
// just ink.
*
Is a map just ink? my friend Grau writes
In the corner of the page.
No, I reply // annoyed // while realizing
I still don’t know // what a map really is.
*
Think of the picture you took, the orphanage in Cambodia. Your arm around that small boy’s shoulder. His teeth are whiter than yours, eyes gleaming.
His parents have passed // no one says how // and he’s come here to live out his youth // cleaning in the kitchen // going to school on off-days. While you wait for the photographer to fix your position, he asks you about yourself. He wants to know where you live. And as soon as you say where // America! //
He starts to scream
TAKE ME WITH YOU
TAKE ME WITH YOU
PLEASE
The picture is taken before he starts crying. Your driver pulls you away, hissing, You’re going to be late for your plane. So you let him
Peel you from the kid, who collapses
On the ground, and watches
As someone who could have been // something
In another life //
Flees the scene
Looking like an ass.
*
Good picture, though.
On Facebook: 43 likes!
*
Santanaya again: Intelligence is a venture inconceivably daring and wonderfully successful; it is an attempt, and a victorious attempt, to be in two places at once.
*
But who’d willingly cleave themselves?
Me, I suppose // Suppose // that word again.
I moved away from home because I found nothing there. My entire youth was spent wanting: wanting to escape a religion // Catholicism // that everyone practiced // and taught them to hate me
Wanting to escape the young men // some of whom // I was in love with // but would never love me //
Most of whom support people // who taught them to hate me //
A good number of them // way too many // becoming cops
Wanting to escape schools that taught // mainly // state sanctioned hate //
Which I learned when I studied // political geography // could be a form // of violence
THAT’S THEM
These books said
// different people // different place // different time //
Everything based around BEING OTHER
While they proudly proclaimed:
THIS IS US
Present // eternal // forever
But it wasn’t just this Manichean macro story I reacted against – it was the everyday, too.
// Most people I grew up with still live within a twenty mile radius.
// They hang out together, go to bars, and take trips.
// Some // ok a lot // married each other!
There is something to be said for the continuity, the deep forging of relationships. It’s a privilege to which most people respond. Yet when you spend your life around people who look like you, talk like you, think like you, then the possibilities for change are slim.
And I wanted nothing more than change: change my body, change my mind.
*
Which returns me to that note:
TRAVEL = INCOMPLETENESS?
// Important idea, Grau writes.
But maybe phrase this less literally?
// That’s why I titled the essay NOTES, I respond.
A full-proof escape plan.
Yet it’s not always finding something // it’s returning to something // too.
// You’re doing it again, Grau writes.
// What? I ask.
// Show, don’t tell, they reply.
*
The other day I was having coffee with my roommate. We talked about her boyfriend, a Palestinan theater artist seeking asylum in Austria. For some reason, which she understandably kept private, he felt unsafe in Palestine and fled in the middle of the night.
When my roommate first heard, she panicked: she had been ready to uproot her life in New York and move to Jersaleum to be with him.
Now she wasn’t so sure. Citizenship in Austria wasn’t certain. The process was complex, immense. If he got denied, she wondered, where would he go?
For now though, her boyfriend couldn’t go anywhere. He lived in a halfway house with other refugees seeking asylum. For the better part of the year he had been living three to a room, sharing space with religious clerics and drug addicts // or so my roommate said.
Yet the house had finally emptied, and the boyfriend had a room to himself. The woman who ran the house brought him from the countryside into the city, where he was able to visit cinemas, theaters, cafes. But my roommate was still worried. They had not seen each other for several years, and she wondered when she got there Would we still have a connection?
Not knowing how to answer this – the details of the situation were, and still are, a bit mind-boggling – I did what I always do when I’m nervous // make a joke. I told them they should be excited to be together again, in a private room, so they could – you know // giggity-giggity.
My roommate’s eyes glazed over, and I could see she played out each ending to the situation in her head. And then she said, with a weary sigh more fit for a morning commute than // this.
You’re right, she said. I suppose we should be grateful.
Small victories.
*
Suppose // that word again.
*
Santayana // at length // on the sedentary human:
While you sit,
or while you kneel
eyes closed or fixed upon
Some vacancy, the mind lapses into dreams // images remote and miscellaneous
are merged into the haze of memory //
You revert to the vegatative state, voluminous and helpless.
Thinking while you walk,
on the contrary, keeps you alert //
your thoughts // though following a single path through the labyrinth // reveal real things
in real order.
‘Real things in real order.’
The world is not as you thought it was, but the world as is.
The full picture.
Or a return to a state of fullness.
I traveled to find different ways of living, to feel comfortable with my self, but who’s to say my student Lisa hadn’t traveled?
Who’s to say university itself wasn’t some sort of adventure, and she had a destination in mind
I would never notice?
Who’s to say the people I grew up with hadn’t traveled, hadn’t tried to see the world,
in their own way?
Even if they wound up only having moved a twenty mile difference?
Even if my roommate’s boyfriend hadn’t chosen to travel, wouldn’t his leaving bring him back to a certain sort of safety, back to the person he loved once again?
I understand now it’s not the distance that matters,
but the act of leaving,
movement.
Away from something, sure, but more often towards.
Santanya posits that a sign of evolutionary intelligence is human and animal capacity to hold two environments in their head at the same time, to adapt to or discern which suits them best.
To find ourselves // home // regardless.
*
Regardless of what? Grau writes.
*
Goodbye home,
You think.
But by the time you’ve gone,
It’s past. Turned to memory,
A simulacrum. Everything is,
If you think hard enough.
Your kitchen chair, or
The dirt between your fingers
Never the same.
What was, has been, and will never
Again. Though
Why wait, when there’s so much
Waiting, waiting.
*
To finish, a funny story:
*
The woman is asking where I’ve been. We’re ten // no maybe eleven // drinks in //
And she’s asking where I’ve been, before ignoring my answer
And describing a time she and her boyfriend // doing coke in the bathroom // went on
safari in Argentina.
Or was it the Amazon? I can’t tell // her accent is thick // my eyelids are getting heavy.
They’d eaten bad fish the night before,
Raw as a condomless dick, she keeps saying.
When they woke in the morning, both had to shit.
But there was no time, there was no time, she tells me. Their bus had to go. The other
passengers were angry // the other passengers were waiting // the other passengers stuck their
heads out the window and screamed Get a move on in their supermarket shelf of languages.
So what did you do, I ask. Did you go to the bathroom?
Of course, she replies, sipping her drink. I went all over the lobby floor.
A torrent of watery shit followed her as she sprinted toward the bus, like a finger dragged the globe.
Were the other passengers grossed out?, I said. Angry?
No.
I couldn’t understand why. Almost immediately I imagine the smell, less fishy than
flesh-like, filling the hallways and lobby, saturating the walls and plants.
I wanted to tell the woman she was disgusting.
They were used to it, says the woman, pleased with herself. Most had had an accident like that.
I’m sure.
Besides, they wanted to see the sunrise.
Apparently wherever they were // Argentina? //The Amazon?
// had a famous sunrise
// As though one could be better than all the rest! // but she
explains //
The night-air // cool and soft like silk //grows unbelievably
heavy.
The trees // which stood silent like shadows throughout the
night // BURST with life,
Creatures skittering up and down their body //
rainbow-colored birds singing from branches.
And the sky // that dusty purple thing // is suddenly lit ablaze.
Purple,
then red,
then blue, the woman says.
Full combustion.
But aren’t you still sick at this point? I say.
Don’t you smell?
// I can’t imagine clocking something beautiful
with a stinky, crying American behind you. Alas– //
It was worth it, the woman says. It was totally worth it.
And the other passengers?
Their minds were elsewhere.
Then, with a wicked grin: For a moment.
Jack Sullivan is a writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY. He is a lapsed Catholic, pretentious cinephile, and lover of frozen cocktails. Some of his poems can be found in Yes Poetry, Ghost City Review, and Thimble Lit.