I begin at home . . . . my earliest definition of place, identity of place, the landscape from which all my spatial descriptions, ideations, justifications and regional comparisons are taken. I am starting there – here – there because the issue about my returning, in this case subsequent to each of my international sojourns, seems to have been erroneously taken for granted. In saying that it also occurs to me to make clear to you that any suggestion I may have made about leaving home or that I left home was misstated for I believe now that one cannot ever fully disengage from home . . . . just as one is never completely free from a traumatic revelation.
If I did knowingly try to distance myself from the place of my home, it was not to say that I intended to sever the line that extends back – that line which may be called by so many names: leash, tether, perhaps the single invisible strand cast by a lone errant spider. In this case, this series of outreaches to distant destinations, where I have thrilled at the variety of experiential possibilities available to we who inhabit this planet and from where I have threatened each and every one of you that I would see you upon my return – I need to tell you that I never left. It never happened – none of it. You are of course by now entirely aware of this deception and I was content to reside in the dubious significance of my duplicity.
It turns out that a virtual excursion is no excursion. But less than that, because I began to believe my descriptive scenario of wanderlust, I had eventually to accept the growing and insidious awareness of a thickening of the tie that shows the way back to, and is anchored by, the place of my origin. The statement, “I had never left.” is not just a declaration about this moment but about all the moments that become part of that line which, when followed, (tenuously and uneasily, like an apprentice tightrope walker), carries me to the site I continue to reference – that which is at once material and illusory. While exploring the process of convincing myself (that is, looking from the point of view) that I am no longer of that place/time, I see now that I am more of it. In stepping out to virtually so many places, while at the same time reaching toward all of you – the you that I recently portrayed; I have become more aware that any place to be considered a home that I am leaving – and returning to – is just a replication – a false and shadowy simulation of my originary moment.
Thus, home becomes a name for a point in time, the beginning of my self – the site of my creation as well as its moment . . . . the place and time where I was placed. I think about this origination and about what awaits me upon my semantic return – a view of the anchor whose chain I have borne during a virtual lifetime of roving. I expect to see it solidly set in a shifting seabed. I anticipate things both memorable and unusual, and a connection, which rings with the fragrance of death. There is the conundrum – the binding to an unstable space that represents both beginning and end and can only be described in terms of a precarious memory. It – the unforgiving and pervasive ‘it’ – the nebulous name that is a substitution – placeholder – for a thing that has not yet arrived, in this case ‘it’ takes the place of the name of ‘home’ – is location independent, merely a moment, which has found a comfortable and secure niche in the territory of my consciousness. It commands the recognition that my return – any return (for as you know only too well by now, I have never gone) – is conditioned . . . . that is, it is territory without corporeal reference. The idea of home is simultaneously comforting and disappointing . . . . intimacy without desire (the open question regarding why one craves to return to an instance that resides in both near and distant memories, that one professes longing for and yet, at one’s root, is not expected to fulfill their need).
I have been on an expedition in search of the immediacy that this moment represents, which of course, continues to whiz by me – a series of instantaneities – gone before they are recognized, admired, sampled . . . . rejected. It is rejection that is missing; the ability to participate in a process – to be immersed such that I may revel in it as it circles me . . .. and then to let it go fulfilled in – no, it was not rejected – but was an experience meaningfully sampled . . . . savored, as in mutual recognition.
But that is also not fully it. My missing is driven by unsettledness . … derived from the anxiety that death might figure me out before I am able to myself. And the identification of home becomes a race against infinity – a process of stripping away time as if deliberating about suicide – the trophy of which is the realization that there is ultimately no satisfaction – that living is motivated by the idea of death, and that death occurs only in unconsciousness.
So the excitement of voyage and the unearthing of new understanding come to this – avoidance – like a “bad boy” in rebellion against stasis . . . . shadow boxing. Yet discovering is just that – not the confirmation of finding what one expects, but the acknowledgement that something truly new has appeared – that the definition of home has altered and that the now is accepted as being genuinely different from that originary occasion. Home and death . . . . bracketing one’s experience – containing one’s journey while at the same time, accompanying it . . . . “riding shotgun” . . . . the allies, which give depth to the irresolvable event . . . . congenial bedfellows.
So the big lie is here and exposed. Not only will I not be contacting you as I promised I would; I, in fact will not be returning. Not so much because I never left – as I dramatically confessed to you earlier – but because, surprisingly, the home I suggested I would return to no longer exists. In a way altogether different from how I originally presumed, I did leave . . . . I left virtually . . . . and through the process of so doing, home accompanied me. Home came along without my knowledge, approval – or my permission. It was the one of us that got to see new things, and it was the one that was able to savor and accommodate change. And when I was ready – after having so breathlessly gone nowhere – to return to ‘it’, home was not where I was used to it being. ‘It’ had moved, altered in a way that was no longer clearly recognizable.
Thus in this unanticipated and allegorical thesis about the idiosyncrasies of the familiar, I have once again found only uncertainty. Timelessness, brushes with the specter of death, explorations in search of the location of difference and home are crammed into the luggage of a perpetual voyage, the highlights of which I will relate to you . . . .