The Travel Bug

It’s got a word, dromomania, a compulsion to travel, which Rimbaud certainly had, and Kerouac, whose adventures on the road became famous, more than famous, became a way of life. I’ve had it briefly. It occurred when I was lost. It was a form of escape, but that’s just the surface, the enamel that gives it easy definition, a shiny explanation, the nacreous hues of lenience, the graciousness of distance. Going somewhere gives you a purpose, but a very vague one, the vague promise of renewal, of finding elsewhere what you’ve been able to find in your current location. But the real kick for me was the hypnosis induced by driving a car long distances at a time. Getting so inured to the rhythms of the highway that it gets into your viscera, your cells, and when it stops, when the car brakes and the engine is turned off and you get out of the car, the world for a few minutes truly seems wondrous. Things come into focus. The sound of the lid on an ice machine, a door slamming, wind in a row of poplars, creak of a postcard rack, even the sunlight hitting the granite of a bank or courthouse seems pronounced, beatific, full of grace. 

Now it’s just the opposite. I don’t like to go anywhere. I like to go for a run, the longer the distance the better, but I don’t like getting into a car. I don’t like being anywhere but home. Close to the kitchen. Close to the bathroom. Close to furniture. Places to lie down. Be it a carpeted floor or an old couch. I like inertia. I like quiescence. Stillness. Rest. Idleness. Repose. Because I’m old. I’m done with goals. Done with destinations. I’m ready to surrender. Ready to go. Ready for the big journey. The one that brought me here in the first place. And will take me away when the time has come. And all behind me like the froth at the stern of a boat. A wake.

There are the travels one does in the mind. Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn.” Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage. Just about any book you can grab from a shelf and dive into headfirst will take you somewhere. These voyages become more fulfilling than actual voyages. Though this is not to dismiss actual voyages. Being elsewhere is always stimulating. But discovering countries and landscapes inside you is a potent and remarkable discovery. It might not be up there with weightlessness, but it’s a close second. The brain becomes a fuselage. A forsythia in the window sill becomes a universe. Is a universe. There’s a universe in everything. There’s even a universe in the universe. How far out you go is entirely up to you. You’re the astronaut. And the alien.

Williams talks about a classmate in anatomy class dropping a human brain from a third floor window onto an organ grinder. He doesn’t describe the grinder’s reaction, which I would have to assume would be one of surprise. We all look for cause and effect when confronted with a mystery. What is it about my playing that induced the heavens to drop a brain on me? Is there a message for me in this? Or were there medical students laughing from above? Like I say: open a book and you don’t know where you’ll be traveling to. The body likes being still, but the brain can’t wait to get going. Grind some music out of an organ. Squeeze the sky until it rains. Rains brains. Sweeps across ocean waves in a fury of spindrift & wind. And opens a door to Xanadu.