inlooking #012: Sixteen sweet essays
20230323: journaling, journeying, journeyman
I was traveling last week. But first things first: My essay on "It’s My Life", the Talk Talk song, has made it through the first and second rounds of March Fadness, and is into the Sweet Sixteen. (Hooray!) You know what that means: It’s time to vote. You have til tomorrow morning to show your support. You can do that on the web, and again on Twitter, at the Tweet below.
Voting, right
Looking German
Traveling, journaling
Two vintage typewriters
Not uncomplicated layers
A psychogeographical evening
Vote with your votes
Go and vote! I need all the support I can get. Three-quarters of the field has by now been eliminated, which means all sixteen remaining essays are killers. (It’s wild to think that mine has gotten as far as it has!) I have a tough match today: I’m up against Nena’s 99 Luftballons, which has gotten a terrific essay from Janet Dale. I like my song and my essay better (of course I do), but it’s going to be a hard fight. That just means you all have to vote as hard as you can! Thanks for getting us this far, regardless.
We had the Talk Talk video last time, so I’m giving you Nena below. It’s a great song—plus the band has such a fantastically 1980s German look. Enjoy.
And if you haven’t been following the tournament too closely (which why would you be?), you can check out all sixteen of the Sweet Sixteen essays at the following links:
Read Don DeLillo’s White Noise with me in April
A Writers Grotto book club, 6 Wednesdays, starting April 19
In other news…
I was on a reporting trip recently, and it put me in mind of the weird liminal experience that is such travel, the way one is present and not-present at the same time, concentrating so fiercely on the sights and sounds around you, but in the service of a time and place that has yet to materialize (i.e., the writing and editing and publication of a story, in a magazine).
I am mostly off Twitter these days, unless it’s to get information on floods and road closures in our little rural town, or to promote classes I’m teaching or essays I’ve written (see above), and I suspect I’ll be off it altogether before too much more time passes. But there was a time when it was something like a journal, and this most recent trip reminded me of a reporting trip from 2017, when I’d found the time while waiting for a flight to muse about the nature of reporting trips.
SFO had a typewriter exhibit going at the time…
It goes on like this for about a dozen more Tweets, nothing too profound, just a journeyman journalist musing on the “tiny Hero’s Journey” that is embarking on the quest for a story.
And but so now I’ve come and gone on another of these quests, and so what? Well, it remains the case that it’s an experience of heightened sensitivity, of everything being just that much more vivid, in a certain way. But one strange thing about this trip was the fact that soon after I arrived, I spent the night in a place that was itself removed from the world around—I spent the night underground—so that when I returned from that trip-within-a-trip, I was emerging not into the world I knew but into a world in which I was already at one remove. The reemergence itself was an odd experience, made only odder by “returning” to a place that was no return at all.
Home is where?
One begins to see how too much of this could alienate a person from their own life, and there was a time when I was away from home more than I was at home—at which point, what does it even mean to be home? If I hang my hat more often elsewhere, is it home at all? My then-girlfriend lived an ocean away, then—was that, where my heart was then, home?
To complicate matters, there’s something about a reporting trip’s liminality (clumsy term, but a term) that stays with you once you’re back home—it has to, in order for you to do your job. It’s not enough (obviously) to jot down some notes and quotes while you’re away, then arrange them into a semblance of a story and shoot them off to your editor. In order to do your impressions justice, there’s a way in which some part of you has to remain abroad, so to speak. You have to be able to bring to mind the experience of being in this other place—this other physical place, and this other place of mind you inhabited while you were there—so that you can bring that experience to the mind of others.
This can be a tricky act—difficult not just for you, but also for the people around you (I’m looking at you, my long-suffering wife 😍). You can’t let that other place get too far away, or you won’t be able to evoke it on the page. Yet you have to find a way to be present in your life.
Not uncomplicated
I find there are layers and layers to this, and very often they are not uncomplicated. Take this week, for instance. My life is very different now from when I used to travel so much—it is comparatively very stable. My family has a definite home, and there is not a lot of uncertainty about where it is and how it works. Even so, when I finally did return home from this most recent trip, things there were quickly disrupted. I landed Monday night. Tuesday was a day of howling winds and dumping rain, of saying hello to my children and hustling them off to school, of getting reacquainted with my wife, who had been on a trip of her own immediately before my trip. The kids came home, dinner was had, they were bathed and put to bed.
And then the power went out, and I was again—with my family this time—thrust into another alternative place, a place of storms and emergencies and the kind of extreme weather that has seen us waterlogged and powerless (in many senses) so often before, and very recently, so that it was necessary for me to be very present for all this—out before dawn to hook up the generator, exploring which roads were open, which were flooded, which were blocked by trees, did the cars have gas? could we get where we needed to go? which neighbors needed help? etc. And all this even as, in the back of my mind, I still held space for the places I’d so recently returned from.
The flooding wasn’t too serious (this time). The power was out for only a day (which was much better than the week it was out for last time). We got, for the most part, where we needed to go. But even as we were fully present for this experience of being together again, again amidst upheaval, I think a part of us stayed behind—still in the places we’d so recently been, still in a world in which we weren’t dealing with emergencies so often, still here and there across the many places of our lives. It’s not that we’re diminished by this; when we leave a part of ourselves behind in this way, we move forward in expansion, not diminishment. We are enriched. Before long, we come to contain multitudes.
Maybe I only see it this way because I’m starting to get Old. Or maybe I’m feeling especially psychogeographic this evening. I only wanted to write something about travel, about doing journalism, about emerging from the darkness and coming up to the high desert, then flying home into the storm. It may all come to have a sharper point, at some point. Or perhaps all it adds up to is why I do this kind of journalism at all. I give you my 2017 self:
Til next time,
Wallace
March Fadness is a simple game: Sixty-four writers pen essays for six rounds of voting and at the end, the Germans always win.