I found this while clearing space on my jump drive. I had completely forgotten about it. After rereading, I wonder if I should turn it into a poem. Any thoughts?
I am a wanderer. I have always known this. It has only been in recent years; however, that I have begun to wonder why I have such a strong desire to see the world. Is it because I spent the first half of my childhood moving with my military family? Or does it go back farther than that? Has this longing to see the world reached through time and space from some long forgotten ancestor? Or is it merely coded in the DNA of humanity? This intangible longing for something over the hill, past the mountains, and hidden in the depths of the sea.
Every couple of years the wanderer in me starts to feel nervous, anxious, and overwhelmed. I find myself unable to sit still or sleep peacefully. That is when I pick through old photo albums, reread old journals, and trace the worn pages of my travel books. Sometimes memories flood back so quickly that I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. I am caught off guard; tumbling like the waves of the Mediterranean on a clear June day.
It begins with walks in the green Tuscan fields forging a path to unearthed cities; then meanders through winding back streets emptying into beautiful Venetian piazzas alive with people and language; finally swirling through the metropolitan traffic of Rome to find the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon. My mind then tumbles gracefully over the Aegean Sea towards Greece; climbing the mountains of gods and oracles; hopping and skipping through the Greek Isles over to the land of Trojan horses and Constantine.
And then the heat fades. Swirling snow sticks to my hair as I board a boat in Nijmegen. I watch the boat as it slicks through the locks of the Rhine River crisscrossing between the lands of Napoleon and Luther. I am in the middle and, for once, it is a place I am comfortable with.
Then there are the places I have yet to discover: Scotland, Ireland, India, Russia, Peru, and Chile. The list is much longer. It grows with each passing year. The dreamer in me has not considered the practicalities of future trips. Do not ask me how, as a teacher, I will pay for them or when I will find the time. I refuse to cross a bridge I have not come to yet. For now, I let the wanderer in me dream peacefully of future travels and new adventures.
One way to approach this is what we call in the book the "expansion-contraction" mode of generating material. You already have quite a bit of information, a big palette. Now you may want to contract it down, cut away, create discontinuity. You have to surprise yourself into meaning, not come to the page with preformed ideas of where you're headed. At least that's the mode that I want to encourage in this class.
ReplyDeleteOften, with writing from our past, we may not feel like treating it so violently. That's fine. You can always put it aside. If you do, however, feel up to it, then begin not with sense but with music. Make sentences that contain discontinuous thought, strange juxtapositions, odd modifications. Frankensteinize a bit.