Journaling

I'm on the coach from St. Anne's college to Stratford, sitting next to a sleeping student when I detect the pull of two opposing impulses. I can nap, or I can write. Certainly, the hum of the tires hitting the pavement seems to invite sleep, but in this sunny moment as the English fields whir silently by I feel drawn to put pen to paper. As others are either sleeping or reading (as evidence of either last night's amusements or tomorrow's deadlines) I switch off my iPod and search for my journal with a listless indolence reminding me of putting my socks on as a boy, one at a time. In the distance grey black clouds crown the sunny scene, stationary while grasses and trees whiz by. In such a moment I cannot help but feel removed, out-of-body, seeing from the outside-in. I do feel like writing.

Maybe the impulse has something to do with the constant forward motion. I remember the last time I felt this way I was gliding at about 400 mph through the clouds above Salt Lake City, watching the Wasatch front—jagged mountains that once framed my world and shielded it from the outside—flatten, from above.

“What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?”

From thirty thousand feet, roads, streams, buildings, and tiny shimmering windshields all passed underneath, before the quilted crops of Nebraska and Iowa. The image seemed to imbibe my own emotion at the time, so I wrote a little, trying to capture the moment. Salt Lake was miles behind.

“That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,”

I wrote in my handy travel-journal, a leather-bound gift from a few years back, itself a sort of time-capsule. The last time I had used it, before misplacing it on some bookshelf in Utah, was the first time I had used it, freshman year. So as the coach now carries me through the English countryside I write hoping to exhaust the pages as soon as possible, that I might never again have to so frequently turn past my shabby poetry and sermonizing Christian-isms.

“Happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.”

So I’ve heard journaling is supposed to be a sort of ordering process—a way of sorting through experiences, organizing them, arranging them, so that one day you can look back and see the narrative of your life, saying “Ah, so that’s how it all went.” But for me this cannot have proven further from the truth. Friends email me, “Where have you been, what have you seen?” and I consult the itinerary to differentiate the cathedrals, and make a list. But this isn’t how I experience life—in lists or linear, analytic patterns—but rather by impression. And that’s what I think will endure to me, a few images or moments here and there, both the quirky and meaningful. To put it differently, I find it easier to think of my life (and hence my journal) as a collection of poetry rather than a novel. I think that’s the nature of being a character rather than the author.

I can think of one very strange memory that I have yet to approach in writing (apart from “Saw Glenn in Cambridge, met Romanians, played their accordion and ate weird soup”) or even in thought (other than chuckling and marveling at it). Perhaps I haven’t decided what to make of it. Gentle Cambridge, a nice contrast to London, seemed to be a very balanced place—feeling genteel yet not pompous, historical yet not touristy, active net not crowded, spread-out yet intimate. The sun dipping into the trees on the horizon spilled that surreal sunset-glow through the city; and every building beamed one golden hue. Walking beneath the old oak trees and across the Cam, the place seemed to me the quintessential college town, the perfect place to meet up with an old friend. So I strolled down the thoroughly English-sounding “Sidgwick Avenue,” a dozen names of great dead men still reverberating in my mind, toward “Hawthorne house” (another aptly-named place, owned by the American Wheaton College).

Turning onto the gravel path I passed a foreign-looking couple—a stout ruddy-cheeked woman with her lanky husband slinking along beside her. Apparently they were also headed to the Hawthorne house, though I only realized this as they followed me in through the front door. Between glancing awkwardly from my smiling friend to these intruders I noticed a few desktop computers some scattered paper, and a rather thick book: Principles of Sedimentology and Stratigraphy. A real page-turner, I’ve heard. The foreign man was now conversing with my friend in what sounded like Germanic-Spanish.

Pedro and Elena, Glenn told me, were travelers from Romania. They had worked as grape-pickers in Spain—arduous work, they claimed, but they learned Spanish in the process. This was the only way of communicating with us. When their employer cheated them out of several months’ wages they were forced to find work elsewhere. So, following some poor advice they headed to Cambridge in search of employment. Still jobless, they met the Wheaton geology group through a local church and were now ‘squatting’ in the Hawthorne house for a few days. Some of the geology students who had taken Spanish acted as interpreters. Meanwhile Dr. Clark’s wife was desperately trying to help them find jobs (and hence their way out of the house).

When I arrived they were just returning from the market, Elena carrying her groceries into the kitchen and Pedro his battered accordion. I think he had been playing for tips. I had hoped to find some nice Cambridge restaurant where I could enjoy dinner and a conversation with my friend, but these two had other plans. Elena was already busy chopping things in the kitchen. They were going to make us some sort of Romanian soup, Glenn translated. As unenthusiastic I was about soup, we really had no choice but to accept the gesture. So we all sat down at the dinner table.

Pedro smiled and thanked “Lord Jesus God Dios Senior Jesus.” I guessed it was his only way of using the superlative, to string the names together; he was either very religious or just pandering to us Christians. As he prayed, in the silences I tried to keep my eyes shut, and wondered, Is this providence, us all being here together? Is God here, ‘in the waiting?’ The prayer was over.

Under Elena’s expectant stare, I slurped up the pork-spine soup with feigned relish and nodded my head as if to say, “Yes, this is good!” One of the geology students, a ‘missionary kid,’ seemed particularly expert at this, so I tried to imitate him. They were pleased, but I could never seem to fully appease them; the more I ate, the more they expectantly gave me. I didn’t know whether it was polite (in American, English, Spanish, let alone Romanian culture) to refuse such a gesture, so I accepted bowl after bowl until there was none left. I stretched and patted my stomach with approval. I think it was a nice touch.

I snap the lid on my pen and overhear a conversation two seats behind me. We’re actually going to Warrick Castle first. Thoughts of the stone castle keep remind me of Tintern Abbey, so I turn back a few pages.

As our coach rounded the bends through the leafy Wye, and I caught glimpses here and there of that roofless stone Tintern Abbey, the thought of writing a reflective paper was a distant second priority. I had always felt a draw to, or a kinship with Wordsworth’s poetry, with it’s exaltation of nature as a source of inspiration. I too have found myself moved to contemplation by the splendor of a landscape, though more often from some secluded Wasatch Mountain path. Tintern Abbey was a familiar poem, but I nevertheless was quite thrilled to experience the place as Wordsworth experienced it—to see it as he saw it, and more importantly, to feel it as he felt it.

After bypassing the t-shirts and coffee mugs in the gift shop, I caught my first up close view. The lofty edifice, cold stone thrust in bleak contrast to the gloomy sky, did not at first seem to invite solitude. Yet as it was my goal to follow Wordsworth, I (almost unconsciously) deviated from the group, choosing to absorb the image of the place from the outside first. Amidst the knee-high ruins surrounding the abbey, I came across various explanatory plaques: “here the monks’ day room, there the kitchen, here the refectory, there the latrine,” and on and on, with exact dates of every structural adaptation. Here I was taking in the scripture of the place, only to be interrupted by an irrelevant footnote. So I continued with slow, thoughtful steps and resumed my walk. My thoughts turned not to the monk’s abbey, or to History’s abbey, but to a place made sacred by one man’s poem.

Once inside I found a seat on a mossy cold stone. Trying to ‘drink it all in,’ I watched as the stone pillars morphed in the changing light, and fancied one of the flapping white pigeons to be a dove. Yet with its grassy floors and ceiling of sky the place seemed less of a Christian abbey and more a temple to nature, a romantic’s ideal church. The tranquility of the scene, though inviting reflection, nevertheless seemed to still my thoughts with one calm emotion. For a few moments, I enjoyed that peaceful mood similar to the calm of a Sabbath day spent in rest. A female student’s voice soon broke the silence, warning me that ‘the group is leaving for the bridge,’ so I hurriedly scribbled down a few lines of shabby verse before scuttling off. Maybe even crude poetry might preserve more than any 3x5.

Viewing Tintern from further away, I could naturally better discern its physical context as Wordsworth saw it—framed left and right by the secluded cliffs, below by the rolling waters, above by the misty sky, and all around by green. As the verses of Tintern Abbey were read, I found myself once again in the world of the poem. This time, however, I wasn’t sitting in dormitory chair. This time, the heavy load of “all this unintelligible world”—of worry and doubt—had indeed been lightened. Thus I shared with Wordsworth not only the immediate view of the Wye, but also the memory of a meaningful ‘Tintern experience,’ albeit only a few minutes ago.

I close the journal and put my headphones back on. That was a good conclusion, I think. Billy Corgan croons into my ear, “And you know you’re never sure. But you’re sure you could be right. And the embers never fade in your city by the lake. The place where you were born. Believe, believe in me, believe. Believe in the resolute urgency of now. And if you believe there’s not a chance tonight… Tonight, so bright. Tonight.” The song reminds me of a time before the journal, my ‘thoughtless youth’ (as Wordsworth would call it) when I seemed to live in one moment, without reflection or worry. When

         “Time held me green and dying

       Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

Now I remember my own ‘Fern Hill,’ the grassy back yard, the garden, the tree I climbed before it was cut down, and I wonder how to make sense of ‘conscious’ life—memory, inspiration, hope, the mundane, and always the feeling that I am more and more forgetting and being forgotten. Countless writers and artists to whom I don’t even dare compare myself—they are dead and forgotten. Why bother, then? To preserve a memory? To be remembered? No. “For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within.” I have no answer for that question, other than that I cannot help but sing, or at other times that “In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er / Like coarsest clothes against the cold.”