The Noble Impermanence of Waystations
2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/utopianstudies.34.3.0570
ISSN2154-9648
Autores ResumoIn the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (ABIA), adjacent to Gate 14, a screen announces that boarding to Equestria is ON TIME. The description below this announcement includes transport “through a portal to a parallel dimension” and a “harmonious sparkly” atmosphere. An attractive destination. Esquestria’s capital, Canterlot, offers castles, dragons, and, of course, ponies. As the heart of the My Little Pony universe, Canterlot boasts a fantastical utopia. Gate ∞, as it is called (because its erstwhile home, Gate 13, is an unlucky number), imaginatively whisks weary travelers away to other fantastical destinations. Using a commonplace ticket machine or kiosk, travelers answer a series of whimsical questions and receive a ticket to a utopian destination that the machine has personally matched to the traveler for their mythical utopia. Doesn’t everyone want to go to lands of unicorns, ponies, or other such magic?The installation titled “Interimaginary Departures” draws upon 120 destinations drawn from various media, literature, and games, including Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Wizard of Oz.1 Even the carpet is inspired by the rabbits of Watership Down. Artist Janet Zweig describes her art installation as designed to “create generative situations in public settings” and Gate ∞ does invite possibility as it is situated in a portal askew to the portals of the real in the terminal. Gate ∞ boldly crosses a border wall at 7 degrees (fig. 1, p. 572), heightening the boundaries between the real and the unreal. The chairs, a trashcan, and a book are caught between worlds, a wall slicing through them. Although Zweig cites China Mieville’s The City and the City (2009) as inspiration for her art installation, for me, the juxtaposition of the “interimaginary” and the real calls to mind Olga Tokarczuk’s book Flights (2007).2 While Zweig’s kiosk personally recommends Equestria (fig. 2, p. 573), ABIA is itself merely a waystation on my own trip between Texas and Rome.Tom McAllister’s review of Flights in the Washington Post describes the book as “beautifully fragmented,” not unlike Zweig’s “Interimaginary Departures” which relies on structural fragmentation of a space to exemplify the interposition of the imaginary and the real.3 This book captivated me from the first strange narrative when I tried to read it several years ago. However, I found it difficult to finish the first time as the stories in each section (there are no chapters) moved rapidly from one place, person, idea, and time to the next. McAllister says that “the disconnectedness is part of the point; they are fragments of people’s lives, a patchwork of personal experience, secondhand observation and imagination. Each story appears, draws our attention and then fades as the narrator finds her way to a new hotel, a new airport.” Perhaps the disconnectedness is the point, but I have found that Tokarczuk also infuses the sections with a sense that “there exists in the world’s coordinate system a perfect point where time and space reach an agreement” (4). Like Zweig’s “Interimaginary Departures,” that agreement is found in movement and the waystations toward that right time and place.I settle into my seat next to my two daughters. Our flight will land in Rome at 8:00 am tomorrow. I have prepared them for what this means for our bodies. Jet lag is no joke. We shuffle our things around, air pods in the seat pocket in front of us, our bags tucked into the overhead bins. I take out my book and open it to the first page as my girls turn on the tv screens nestled in the seat in front of them. “Here I am” it says in bold letters at the top of the first page of Tokarczuk’s book. The narrator announces their presence (here) with the imperative of existence (I am). I take out my pen as is my habit, but it falls to the side as I read the first story. No need to annotate. Just be. Here, I am. The opening story describes the narrator at “a few years old” sitting in a windowsill in a dark house staring at the open courtyard outside the window. It is a gentle story that opens with dusk and closes as the light fades on the child in the window reflecting on the evening that is “the limit of the world” (2). As the plane takes off, I enter the next section: “The World in Your Head.” I find another reflective moment, this one with a more mature narrator who is taking their first trip walking through fields.I am taking my daughters on their first international trip. The narrator and I are in cahoots. This narrator comes upon a river, and I look over, straining to see a river out of the window of the plane. I have chosen the aisle seat so that my younger daughter will be able to watch the surface of the earth move beneath her. I follow the narrator along the river’s embankment as our plane rises toward our cruising altitude. “A thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest,” I read (4). “Change will always be a nobler thing than permanence” (4). Tokarczuk has captured my attention on this second read through her book. Is it not change that has brought me to this moment with my middle-aged body and the young adult bodies of my daughters? Am I inhabiting a noble impermanence? The narrator answers to say, “that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity” (4). A comforting thought. If I stay on this plane, circling the earth, will my children remain in motion with me for eternity? Will I remain suspended in the utopian existence of interimaginary departure?Monarch butterflies are the only butterflies that migrate round-trip like birds. This migration is not fully understood, but scientists believe that the earth’s gravitational pull and the movement of the sun share in the directional flight of the tiny creatures. Humans are migratory too, although we might resist this correlation to butterflies. The existential question of “where did we come from?” along with its partner “where are we going?” often lead to a stubborn refusal to move. Heaven, after all, is static. We long for stability, for consistency, and we associate that permanence with utopia. The desire for the place where time and space reach an agreement can cause a lifelong search for such a precise point of rest. Tokarczuk’s fragmented, genre-bending book offers a kind of waystation within the movements of the ideas and characters she charts through the narrative. She weaves together various “flights” into a constant state of motion. Yet she also offers waystations for the reader to inhabit. In her section “Airports,” the narrator argues that “it is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement” (55). The monarch knows this movement well. She cannot stay still, get comfortable. She must move on to the next destination in an eternal loop defined by seasons and biology. She also needs waystations.The U.S. Forest Service tracks the migratory patterns of the monarch and offers suggestions for planting milkweed to provide waystations for the monarch’s journey.4 The butterflies will land in fields of milkweed to feed and reproduce on their journey from Mexico to California. They roost in various trees over winter as they prepare for the northern summer trek to breed. Each generation of the monarch lays eggs in the north during the summer months and then dies. New generations hatch and make their way south, having never made the journey but somehow knowing the way, to overwinter by taking the path of their ancestors. Like pilgrims, the butterflies chart their destination via an invisible but well-worn path. How do they know how to get to where they need to go? I imagine these delicate winged creatures must have a biological desire, a sensor of sorts, that drives them toward the holy site embedded in their DNA. They return again and again to the destination of their predecessors. Bilbo’s there and back again, so to speak.I sit in the terminal looking at the streams of people exiting the jet bridge door.5 I open Flights to the section “Travel Psychology: Lectio Brevis I,” which begins with a small group gathered in the terminal of an airport to listen to a lecture (74). The group consists of various travelers on their way to various destinations who have taken advantage of the collection of chairs arranged toward a screen on the wall. The first speaker defines travel psychology as the study of “people in transit, persons in motion” in contrast to traditional psychology, “which has always investigated human being in a fixed context, in stability and stillness” (74). A person’s biology, birth order, family system, even personality is often perceived as permanent. The speaker goes on to describe desire as fundamental to travel psychology. Desire is itself a kind of movement, I think as the stream of people exiting the jet bridge thins out. “Desire in itself is empty,” the lecturer in Tokarczuk’s fictional airport goes on, “in other words it merely indicates direction, but never destination . . . the closer we get to them [destinations] the more enigmatic they become” (75).My oldest daughter began dreaming of Italy when she was six years old. Her desire focused specifically on riding a gondola in Venice (fig. 3, p. 575), the last stop on our trip. The destination always topped her list of things to do when she became an adult. I look over at her, now twenty-two years old, and resting her head on top of her sister’s, trying to get comfortable. We are hurtling through space and time now, going backwards from our point of origin, or rather toward.Airports operate as human waystations, temporary utopias with movement and order and chaos. To travel is to step out of context. When you sit in an airport, you are anonymous, separate. The conventions you live by slip away as you go through security, waving one last time at your stationary life. You are just another body in a line of bodies. The machine scans that body and grants you a pass through the portal into a realm of the material. Your identity does not have to be defined in an airport. You have an identification, a name, a number, but not an identity. The man next to you in rolled shirt sleeves with his laptop teetering on his legs. The woman pacing the aisles on the phone with her mother. They all—we all—carry our stories into the terminal, but we leave behind the pressure of living them. We are instead suspended in a different temporality in the terminal. Schedules in airports move at a different speed than the rest of the world. Both fast and slow. The planes outside the windows move in and out of the frame on a repeat loop. Seasoned travelers use this waystation to gather supplies like patience, wine, and silence. Even now with their earbuds tucked tightly in their lobes, the traveler sits in silence. Absent are the external voices. Get married. Have children. Change careers. Make dinner. Win the award. Make love. Make a life.The expectations here are clear: the system does not succumb to your will. Travelers must wait their turn. Tokarczuk describes the traveler’s time as “a lot of times in one, quite a wide array” (53). In her section titled “Everywhere and Nowhere,” she chronicles what she calls “island time, archipelagos of order in an ocean of chaos” (53). This time also disappears as the airplane ascends. Time in airports operates by clocks and itineraries. The artificial imposition of the order of time. Although everyone knows that order is a façade. Human bodies occupy the space of everywhere and nowhere. On occasion, someone will break the rules, disturb the order of the luggage on conveyor belts. A more-than-a-body demanding to be seen. This prominent subjectivity injects you with a moment of awareness, a sense of existence in contrast to the visibility of another’s existence. That moment will cause you to look down at your book. To look away.And yet there are also moments of connection and kindness and generosity. A look in the eyes and a “where are you from?” And for a time, out of time, you will become a main character to someone. “Real life takes place in movement” (53). The loudspeaker announces your boarding call. It’s time to move and the main character role shifts to someone else. You move toward the door to the jet bridge and scan your ticket.The characters in Tokarczuk’s fragments move through various flights and in mysterious ways. The bodies of these figures take up significant space. In the middle of the book, we read about Philip Verheyen’s investigation into his phantom limb. The speculative historical narrative comes from his friend and student Willem Van Horssen. Verheyen takes up the obsessive study of his own amputated leg. He dissects it into minute pieces, discovers the Achilles tendon, and searches for the pain of his phantom limb. Horssen records a section of his teacher’s notes after his death. “I’ve spent my life traveling, into my own body,” Verheyen recounts, “I’ve prepared the most accurate maps” (211). Verheyen’s narrative describes the scientific undertaking of examining his own body searching for the source of his pain. He arrives then at the question: “what have I been looking for?” (211). In each fragmented section of Flights, the main character, the main body, goes off in search of something. Kunici for his wife and child, a woman caring for a son with a terminal illness, even Chopyn’s heart making its way home to Poland after his death. Tokarczuk suspends the narratives in various waystations, snapshots of human movement and desire.In one particularly poignant story, a woman reconnects with a lover who has long since been lost to time. He emails her details of a debilitating disease and asks her to come to him. She leaves Australia, her husband, and children, to fly to Poland on a mission of mercy. She has moved through time since their last meeting. She has grown up and made a life for herself on a continent far from her birthplace. Yet, she returns to this place at the request of the stranger with “whom [she] once had an intimate physical relationship” because “a certain kind of loyalty remains in effect” (282). As a biologist, the woman sees the ways in which “living organisms give themselves to one another, permit one another to make use of them” (286). She muses on the way that change is the only thing that remains constant. She goes to the man, her one-time lover, and helps him toward his final destination. Her movement is not so much an escape from her current reality, rather her movement is toward an interimaginary departure.The tour starts at St. Mark’s Square just one block from the water bus. We walk toward an open ice cream shop window to get gelato, feeling the exhilaration of finally arriving in Venice. The three of us are hot, along with the other tourists crowding into place for pictures in the heat of July. We wander through the narrow streets to find our tour guide and the others who will join us on the gondola ride. Each gondola carries five people so we will join strangers on our tour of the canals.Gondolas have become a symbol of Venice but only as a tourist attraction. In the Venetian lagoon, motorized boats are the most popular form of transportation. Our gondolier, an attractive man in his thirties, stands at the stern with one oar and skillfully guides us through the narrow canals. Away from St. Mark’s Square the canals are quiet, and we are lucky to miss the congestion of gondola traffic. The gondolier points out the Mozart residence and answers our peppered questions about the industry of gondolas. The profession requires significant apprenticeship, and we smile in admiration.I look at my daughter, her blonde hair lifting from her back in the breeze, her face turned toward the sea beyond the lagoon. The fulfillment of her dream takes residence in her expression. She closes her eyes for a moment to soak it in. My younger daughter positions herself for a picture, chatters with the gondolier, and I watch her from my seat in the middle of the boat. We are all smiling: “that smile of theirs holds—or so it strikes us—a kind of promise that perhaps we will be born anew now, this time in the right time and the right place” (403). The thing about the right time and place is that its arrival often indicates the right time and place for a change.The day after we returned home, beleaguered by that darn jet lag, my twenty-two-year-old daughter experienced her own flight. Her movement across Italy, propelled by her childhood dreams, led her to her own interimaginary departure. In the space of one week, she moved, registered for classes, and began looking for a new job. Tokarczuk’s visceral movements came alive for me as my now-adult child took flight. Her dream of riding a gondola in Venice became the engine for new dreams, new possibilities along our pilgrimage to the next right time and place. Watching her embrace these changes in her life inspired me to look for my own interimaginary departures. As their mother, I stand apart from my growing children, allowing them space for their desires to lead to their next departure. My goal has been, for more than twenty years, to be there rather than be toward. In some ways, motherhood is its own waystation, but like all waystations the time must come to move on. Perhaps waystations are always ultimately the only right times and places as our real lives exist in the movement from one waystation to another. Tokarczuk, and my daughter, remind me to welcome the next opportunity to fly.
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