a travelogue

The streets have worn my shoes to pieces-- the soles are detaching and I can see the dusty underbits of the leather. I look down at my feet, walking, and see pieces of the toe sticking out like tongues to lick up the scent of the street. It should smell like rain, if the common wisdom is to be believed, but it hasn't rained here yet, and the yellow-pink floral umbrella I bought despite my better conscience has only made two appearances. Some people told me the Brits dress in black, but I tried to set them straight-- the French, they wear black, and as the British hat the French, have named half the country after Waterloo, it seems doubtful that they would deign to sport the same colorscape. When the tube stops at Camden, I break protocol and stare at people-- bright pink dreds, a young man in tweed with magenta socks, a fellow with gages I want to stick my fingers through. Would that be a sexual gesture, here? I don't know who to ask.

The tube is what's worn the thread down in my boots, the twenty minute walk on pavement bubbled and cracked by trees' roots. "Sheperd's Hill"-- and I wonder if sheep lived here before me, the sheep I yearn to see here, in pastures, but not in the heart of a London strewn with bits of napkins and newspapers, five blocks' walk to a rubbish bin. Five blocks of feeling ridiculous, holding a hollow coffee sleeve in your hand, five blocks of looking at your grip and wondering if maybe half a sip is still left; sucking at air. No one hears the vacuum but you, me.

The waitstaff in cafes, restaurants, are at first puzzled then pleased at the American accent: a latte comes with three complimentary cookies on the side; a second plate of complimentary chips with that sandwich. It's because you're a nice American, a Brit tells you, a not-obese-and-rude American. Against the grain, you are. Smile back, say thank you for the vote of confidence. "Excess generosity," the American-style tipping is called. No more than ten percent at the most, and even then-- usually it's included. You are left with the options of feeling a) like a miser or b) like a performative yuppie. If given extra free food, choose b.

Do not smile at people who are not waitstaff; they do not appreciate it, you will not get an extra cookie or tart. If you open your mouth to say something with your American tongue, it is less offensive. Even though your "a" 's sound hard to you, and your mouth is a wide tunnel, gaping, those sounds are white flags waving. You are one sturdy olive branch of ignorance.

I have not, in fact, read Henry Miller, but the quote was beautiful.  I love how the metaphor also has the inferred expectation of birth as well.  I've been scribbling phrases down in my class notebooks for a couple days now and I finally have written up a draft of this...thing? Its not a poem, not a story.  Not sure what it is really. A reflection, perhaps? Don't judge, it is just a draft, but I want to get it out there, release it, and hopefully find some healing in the release. :)


         There is this moment, a moment of simultaneous realization and dumbfounded silence when you discover that the material with which you have built your world is glass, not steel, and that it is cracking, cracking.  Water is seeping in, first in thick droplets pushed through the slightest of breaks and then flooding, rushing in.  In the moment of fracture, there is panic.  You desperately grasp at what is crumbling, clutch at the fragments and try to force the sharp edges of your world back together.  You search for the foundation, but nothing substantial endures. 
       Centuries later, if they were to uncover the remains, they would find a deep burial mound.  Layers of hardened clay and concrete.  When, finally, they burst through the casing, they would be shocked to discover moisture.  Not just droplets and trickles but a flood, surging against the walls.  The discovery would spark controversy, as most important discoveries do.
The headline of the local newspaper later would read:
In the excavation of the human heart, there is found only water and sand.



I'm not entirely happy with it, but I figured I'd break the ice and be the person to first stick my neck out there with personal creation. :D 

I just started reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

A paragraph:

"It was only this morning that I became conscious again of this physical Paris of which I have been unaware for weeks. Perhaps it is because the book has begun to grow inside me. I am carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the streets big with child and the cops escort me across the street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle awkwardly; my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world"

I love this metaphor for having some idea for a book or a story and carrying it around with you like a fetus. Wonderful.

Have either of you read Henry Miller? He's a vulgar guy apparently, but after having a love affair with Bukowski's work for a few months I'm desensitized in a fantastic way.

Quote

"For even after I had looked through the gate that has been left ajar, had seen what was on the other side and had succumbed to the temptation of opening the gate itself, I had never imagined that I would find myself, like the heroes of A Thousand and One Nights, confronted by an infinite number of doors, and that every door concealed behind it additional doors. Through the gate of fantasy, I had entered into the tunnels and secret places of the past, and in my imagination the partition between what there is and what was hidden had already fallen. And now I find that what I had imagined to have been only a web woven upon the warp of reality with the woof of fantasy was no longer obedient to its maker, that the net of memory that had been cast had caught the fisherman."

- Arabesques, Anton Shammas