There and there again
Mihalis Eleftheriou, in his excellent teaching podcast Language Transfer, says that when we learn another language we are permitted and obliged to perceive and express the world in a new way. Each language has its idiosyncracies and pays attention to different things. In Spanish, the grammatically dubious me that we Brits use liberally does not really exist. Me is always I.
I am in Madrid for a whole four weeks. My previous ventures into the city were always too short, even the time that, as luck would have it, I arrived the same day that los campeones - la selección nacional de fútbol de España – were having their triple trophy parade. It was a gloriously hot day and the streets were lined. Los bomberos were spraying the crowd lazily with hoses from their fire engines, not to quench the revelry, but to prolong it.
Though my new gaff has been a source of much comfort, with walls so blank I’ve transformed them into new frontiers in my bid for self-exploration, Halifax itself has felt a little unyielding, an unripe plum not yet ready to cleave from its stone. No wonder, with caution continuing the globe over about how to mix the vectors that our bodies so easily become for this virus. I perceived an ache to travel again, had repeatedly mutating plans in my pocket for the time that I’d be able to travel and the prospect of Madrid popped up the same week I learned that my age group were eligible for vaccination. I expressed my interest.
Of all places, it was in a book about the global south that I found insight about my desire to experience other places. Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive – Women, Ecology and Development is a compelling denigration of scientific homogeneity and an appeal to re-centre the wisdom of the feminine principle – that is, a symbiotic relationship with the land for sustenance. Part of the appeal suggests that diversity and multiplicity strengthens all disciplines, all modes of thought, in contrast to the dominance of the prevailing norm of a controlling and violent scientific method, which brooks no insight from alternative approaches. Shiva writes:
I characterise modern western patriarchy’s special epistemological tradition of the ‘scientific revolution’ as ‘reductionist’ because it reduced the capacity of humans to know nature both by excluding other knowers and other ways of knowing.
And how is this about travel? After my walk, and reigniting a love for the land that bore me and shaped my imagination, I came to know travel not as a way to find a better place than Britain, replacing it as the place to be, but as a way of insisting that it is not the dominant model influencing my thoughts. Travelling – especially given my obligation to remain in the UK – is a way of enhancing my appreciation for both it and other parts of the world. Donna Haraway (and just imagine Haraway and Shiva in a hotel lobby) compels us to consider the thoughts that we think with and declares that we need new thoughts to think new things.
The relationship between permission and obligation seemed laced into my walks, springing off the spine of the Pennines. With the great permission to see things up close that are remote, to be part of a world removed from a network of roads and easy access comes the obligation to trust ones legs, there and back again.
When I returned to walled living, the first day I was flooded with doubt. What was I going to do for work? How was I going to breathe new life into these walls? How would I avoid slipping into old ways of days passing without leaving the flat? How could I possibly convince anyone to hire me? The second day, I caught up on a course I had started before leaving. The final session was about fit, an invitation to think about where in the world we feel most fitting, what experiences we have felt ennobled in. Out on my feet, unbound by physical or temporal structures, I’d felt free. It was like fit was a given, almost like Hogwart’s room of requirement – if you seek it, it will receive you.
When I shifted from thru-hiking to a series of circular walks, I came, too, into a new understanding of a Hobbit’s tale. One could argue that the moral of the story – there and back again – is that there is no going back. Frodo’s famous line at the Grey Havens (in the film adaptation) to explain his about-face to Sam is ‘we set out to save the Shire and we did. But not for me.’ Frodo’s former home can no longer hold all that he has seen and felt. Neither could it do for Bilbo, in the end. It doesn’t fit their new shapes. My walks were circular where I could make them because of an old distaste for retreading ground, but I’m glad some of them, by necessity, were there-and-back-agains. The path was never the same returning. Nor the views, nor the weather, nor the birds, nor the feeling. It is okay to beat a re-treat – we ourselves are new every moment we really open our eyes and pay attention.
It is enticing to think about fit in terms of comfort, especially if the metaphor suggests the sartorial to your mind. I’ve been permitting discomfort into my life much more – and this, too, is a perception. Sleeping in a tent is relatively comfortable, carrying a pack gets easier, squirming because the right words won’t come or the comprehension of another tongue can’t be found is a fleeting sensation. Whilst we all have thresholds of comfort that we aspire to, flauting those thresholds can yield new ones and may bring greater insight into what does fit. And whilst the story of the job I recently stepped away from is one of an overcoat that I shrank inside of, so it started to bury me, I still have the fabric and if I choose to, I can remodel it to enable greater movement and less weight.
Whether Halifax is a fit remains to be seen. I’ve grafted the ascent to Beacon Hill into my legs and have grown into Scarr Woods not as a vast expanse, but as a cosy nook. In Madrid so far, I’ve leaned heavily into the habit of siesta, am slowly making my way to a later hour for dining. I think less of Madrid in terms of fit and more in terms of what Mihalis says – what will Madrid permit and oblige me to perceive and express? And how, when I go there again, will Madrid fit into my abode in Halifax?
Whilst my feet walk new streets, my imagination ploughs new fields of opportunity, attempting to steer clear of the monocultures we’ve invested so heavily in as society. Shiva again:
Exploitation, manipulation, and the destruction of the life in nature can be a source of money and profits but neither can ever become a source of nature’s life and its life-supporting capacity.
My take: the wage I could be paid by entities that operate in a non-circular, unsustainable manner will not provide the life I (and humanity) need. Coming to know this is like learning new grammars. It permits and obliges me to perceive and express the world, myself, differently.
I have been writing these missives to you treasured few for some years now. I frequently tread old ground – our inability to return to any place, what home means, how to change our perspective and maybe our minds. These questions may be unanswerable, but still I try – just as this new tongue moment to moment feels unspeakable, pero yo intento. Me es yo ahora.