Snowbound: After “An Unguided Tour”

The vivid unknown, the naked ride home. How far from the beginning are we? When did we start to feel the wound? It was a long flight. I failed to notice the time. Hours on end - vertical pillars toppled like so many children’s blocks, colors in disarray. The sunset was red to the horizon and the sky an opaque blue turning darker with every turn. I’m a huge steering wheel, unguided by any human hand. I’m turning . . .

Turning, I noticed a flash of silver glint and then slice a sliver of black, straight through the view out the/my window. It was like that from time to time as things turned. Then we fell.

To the ground?

Yes.

Was there an awful crash?

No, something vivid wrapped itself around me with the turning and so the spiral was wide and long and slow as it should be, silent and soft, as it should be. But there was a clutter.

Did you say clutter? You seem to be muttering.

Clutter. I travel to find myself uncluttered, unfettered, upside down. So, I’ve had to keep moving.

Why do you have to be so obscure?

Through a glass darkly is a popular theme, didn’t you know, there’s a certain melancholy, but other than that it’s painless.

So, as I was saying I travel. And as it turns out, (there’s that turning again, its a mystery how that happens. What could be easier than moving from point to point, place to place, around and around?)

I didn’t say that exactly. You have to get naked. He used to bring me chocolate when we were like that. But I just remembered someone saying “I can’t love the past that’s trapped with my memory like a souvenir.” So it’s a matter simply of moving down the road now. My cats really know how to listen. I can tell. And they sleep; they really know how to sleep. I never slept on that trip I started to tell you about. I felt I was seeing snow all the time, for the first time. Everything was lit from the inside and everyday my bones were breaking with the vagueness of some weight I knew I couldn’t begin to bear, but I did.

Now you’re being dramatic. Give me a break.

What of it? I just did. I’ve been trying to tell you, that’s precisely when things began to break down. There were object lessons everywhere, and ruins and advice, and lingering and complaints, everywhere lands end and everything seemed like the end of the world. But this is not the end of the world. I think its safe to say that I wasn’t happy there.

What did you feel?

Regret that the trees were being cut down.

So you have a hazy vision of natural things? From too much indulgence in the nervous, metallic pleasures of the cities?

Yes. I told you. I fled. I took a trip to see beautiful things. Change of scenery. Change of heart. And do you know what?

What.

They’re still there.

Ah, but they won’t be there for long.

I know. That’s why I went. To say good-bye. Whenever I travel, it’s always to say goodbye.

Is this going to be a confessional?

No diagnostic, problematic, intimate, hermetic, instigating.

Why? Who was that so and so that you said you missed anyway? Was that just a farce?

No, not really. It does have to do with him and with me, with our bodies, with their particular orientation. We fit so well together I thought. He said it was true though that he feared some sort of devouring.

Hey, who do you think you are?

This spot. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to travel “not to accumulate treasures but to make them rarer.” It was in this spot that I began to notice omens. Voler, she said means to fly, but also means to steal. I’m a stowaway; I’ve been stolen away. This is the story of a vagabond, a gypsy, a murderer, a child. It’s the ancient architecture that gets me every time. To learn about infinite farewells. This act of traveling is like that. They say its like homelessness, a vivid unknown, and things do crash down in a clutter, but it’s noiseless. It’s a self-willed exile, the modern adventure for those of us left on our own.

Filtered December light tempts my memory with tainted souvenirs. I’m listening. Water flows through pipes and an airplane overhead hums. The room is cool, I smell toas. The cracked leather chair is draped with a pale orange, Indian print bedspread. Why this compulsion to record what one sees, hears, smells, touches, tastes? The taste of cool lime juice startles. When one loses oneself in the task of recording . . . it’s a matter of the same need whether one is a scientist or an artist. Both art and science mean: wanting to understand. Success or failure are unimportant.

Yesterday a dark haired woman wearing a red scarf caught my attention, like the red butterfly outside the window of an airplane long ago. There’s something about red, it reminds of some wound. These things are like omens. And then there were two white butterflies flying together, circling one another in a frenzied dance of flight against a gray blue sky.

Snowbound.

Soft gray shadows form silently on the atrium floor repeating the elongated grid pattern of glass that arches far above the lines of trains in the Frankfurt train station in January and the constant motion of people coming and going through doors that open and then close with the muffled bumps and the steady humming of voices echoes and bounces off glass, metal and marble, is suddenly broken by the clicking of shoes breaking through in a sharp staccato and a child’s voice bubbles to the surface with squeals of delight as she runs along the length of the crowded colonnade. The man sitting next to her is silent. They’ve been traveling together for three weeks now, the beginning of the journey lasted fifty-two hours and with no sleep. She felt like a child during the moments the plane lifted from the ground in mid-December. A red winged butterfly near the tip of the long flat, glistening metal wing that split the view of the blue sky out her window, seemed like an omen of some kind. She told him and he laughed. She was in love and she laughed.

On the train back from Stuttgart a man with a dark hat and a broad build watched her in her seat next to the silent man as she cried. He smiled, but she kept her head turned away from the man watching her. She felt the edge of her arm touching the arm of the hard, quiet man she had been traveling with, and willed the spot to take on a life of it’s own, to grow and hum and somehow make him feel her sitting there trying to remember the red winged butterfly; remember her laughing.

She thought the trip had been long enough and that there had been enough long walks on stone-covered ancient village streets with the moon gathering light each night until it was full. She thought that because they were both filling up on the same things, and sometimes wrapped together in what seemed to be a common language that they would keep talking. But that place that she felt on her arm touching him was just getting smaller and smaller and there was nothing to be done about it. So she tried to keep the songs in her head that kept coming in from somewhere long ago.

She watched shadows and snow falling and when after another day of no attempt at remembering on his part, and they were finally returning home, she saw a young woman smiling, sitting alone, gazing out the window of the plane they were boarding. So, she just sat next to the silent man in the train station in Frankfurt and watched soft gray shadows form silently on a stone floor. Suddenly a child’s voice bubbled to the surface of the steady hum of voices echoing off ancient architecture.

Slow motion, vanishing point, snowbound. Waiting for the dawn, rising with the awakening of fossil sounds, animal silence. Something vivid wrapped itself around me with the turning and so the spiral was wide and long and slow as it should be, silent and soft, as it should be. Spacious, aromatic, and smiling.

This is all very nice, but much too neat. There’s no character development. Who are these people anyway? Where is it you’ve been taking me? Why can’t you be more concrete, more linear?

These are traces that’s all, vague and obscure I know, just shapes and sounds. I know it’s annoying. If I could only remember something more definite I’d tell you about that, but there’s this amnesia. I didn’t ask for it. Sometimes all I can remember are these tainted souvenirs. It’s all a translation anyway, right? The original language is so, so impossible to understand, that’s why this is so difficult. I want to be able to just look at a map and know where I’ve been, where I’m going, but things become so confused. I didn’t bring enough clothes. I packed too much as usual, nothing I want to wear. I just have to remember, this isn’t the end of the world, even if the weather seems unbearable at times.