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writer, since all his experience is writing in potentia” (27).
There is a reinvigoration that occurs after a writer takes a holiday (from journeying). The physical writing is fresh, but it is never very far from the mind. Writing occurs and often changes or becomes different when self-discipline is removed from the context of the writer’s personal, emotional or social life.
A Train Ride to Russia in 2007 (2015)
Transient populations roll by and roll on, sideways, somewhat and partially slanted and always in the upper right corner of my eye, where the sun peaks in the morning and sheds its light through moving windows, pa(i)ned and streaked glass that glows with the coming of heat and clearer uncertainty. No longer arctic—the chill is suffocated by a distance and vaulting horizon, insurmountable and without permission, it glows and rises like the daze of the day(s) to come.
The reawakened eye explodes into new vision. After taking a pill, a minor slumber, and then I’m jolted into sudden awareness by the tittering tracks beneath the train, and behold, a sight; we’re heading east. The night has passed in a kind of sobriety when I contemplate the fact that now I have this new way of seeing things. The cabin/room comes to life, illuminated by a new-fangled light. I’m sitting up, while the others in the room are asleep in the same space, but the momentum of the train and the tracks and the grind and progressive swagger and sway projects us onwards.
A different headspace now: the one I was seeking, but I’m always surprised when it ignites, as it seems to come after a dreary, sleepy delirium of some sort. A dream from which I don’t think I will wake but then I do, and I’m in another dream inspired by a distorted kind of reality. My eyes now fully open and wandering, I stand up, reach for the door of the cabin and step out into the corridor where more light is shining through—I am looking left and right, and I shuffle my feet a little more steadily, carefully.
I muster up a modicum of grace as I sway to and fro, walking down the corridor towards the rear of the train. I can see from a few metres away, through the small circular porthole in the back door of this last train carriage that there are two fellows, still awake from the night just passed, in the breaking dawn of the day, sharing a cigarette and some conversation, discussing sweet nothings in the sincerity of the morning and the sleeplessness and tiredness that can make us honest sometimes, if only in grimly expression.
I step outside to greet them with my unusual stance, feeling rather peculiar with my new diluted vision. I’m hunched a little as they look at me and roll on with their stammering chat, the last of the beer and vodka, lukewarm and nearly empty in their hands as they take a small sip and a little toke now and then, both of which are going to have an infinitesimal effect in the aftermath of the night just now officially concluded with the heavy rise of a new sun over that vaulting horizon, demanding some kind of rigour and stamina from us ignoble folk who continue to defy convention as we travel towards a new and unknown (to us anyway) east. We believe we are pioneers as we stutter and stammer and take the journey for granted, but we (or I) definitely feel here in the moment, now, more so than I ever have before.
The pill, a sleeping tablet for insomniacs, produced in me a kind of effect that was so difficult to understand and comprehend at the time, a giddily distilled sense of experience, two-pronged in its psychological manifestation; I believed I was in a constant state of déjà vu, whilst experiencing and remembering life and what was going on around me concurrently.
One of the fellows outside, neither of whom I knew, asked me something about what they’d just been discussing, to which I retorted that I didn’t know or that I knew nothing, and proceeded to comment on his shoes, which I claimed I knew everything about.
I knew everything about them because he’d just told me about them after I’d asked him. But because the medication, was causing me to recall and experience in the now, simultaneously, I was confused about what was happening and what had already just happened. They both looked at me puzzled also, and I, still hunched and perplexed and amazed at my own ability to predict the … now, dismissed both of them with a wave of the hand that rudely motioned the smoke from their cigarette away from the small space between us. The wisp of cloud dissipated quickly, as did the conversation, and any mutual interest or understanding we had established.
I looked away, back towards the east. They stalled for a moment and after a short while continued on with their sweet nothings. All three of us out there on the rear balcony of the train were too delirious, either from the night, the booze, or our state of medicated or prophetic exhaustion, to care about courtesy or social sincerity at that point in time. No, it was more anti-social than anything. I knew I was waving at and into people’s personal space, dispersing the smoke between bodies, a hunchback in a world apart.
Nevertheless, the east shone with sudden clarity in the midst of this entire anti-climactic ruckus. The train curved left, and I was able to see the glow of the east with much more instilled potency. It was a new primordial world, where I couldn’t see beyond the horizon or even beyond the front of the train due to the compacted darkness and shadows of the land. There was no way of seeing the beyond. The world was covered in black and blue. The clickety clack was the only noise I paid attention to. I was remembering and experiencing this at the same time. The horizon stopped us from seeing into the future as we simultaneously moved towards it. All conversations stopped here before they began and were understood and comprehended before a singular utterance was made, or at least it felt this way to me. Everything was coming and going, moving forward and standing still, being seen and being ejected out from the horizon back towards us as we gazed in perplexity and fondness towards it, all in the motion of the moving tracks that we rocked and rolled and swayed over and over again. We existed in the abysmal infinity mirrors beneath our feet, caught in the motion of an unchanging and unremitting Doppler effect.
Déjà Vu Delirium (2013)
Dean Moriarty, in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), once said, “the thing that bound us all together in this world was invisible” (191). What was it, though—this invisible “thing”? What was he saying? What was he thinking? The potential for the justification or explanation of this concept is manifold: the intrigue, the intuition, the naivety, stupidity or obliviousness. A benzedrine-fuelled madness stimulated his systematic conceptions of ‘time’ and ‘it’ and other tangible or intangible concepts. He was a fool, a holy man, a con artist, a goof and a kicker in the constant tireless and reckless pursuit of kicks. How can this statement be trusted then? What faith or divinity or reality can be accepted in this notion of all notions, if at all a notion? This grand statement of grandeur. “Look no further! The answer is here!” someone (I) sarcastically mimicked and mocked in the background of the dreary soulless landscape. Moriarty’s enthusiastic, yet vague comment in turn, and in all fairness, requires a similarly obscure answer.
Travelling tirelessly is an attempt to conquer something, anything, all things perhaps. In any case, the horizon itself is one thing that subscribes to many of these attributes and elements. Constantly unfolding and receding and revealing and reigniting sparks of energy as we propel ourselves forward into it or from it or alongside it. We struggle to surmount it, overcome it, know it, beat it, bear it, to encapsulate everything and gain the cumulative knowledge that both drives us and that we drive ourselves upon. To digress, in an attempt to gain a sense of transgression—to do so at any cost. Coast to coast, take my hand into your hand. And beat on racing forwards and onwards. Doubt. There is doubt. What will be the repercussions of reservation? What is the mirror to this story? What is the opposite of exalted exhaustion and moving for the sake of motion? Deep-seated fulfilment from experience, ownership of doubt, ownership of transcendence, in one way or another. To see and experience the world simultaneously. Well, that’s obvious … Stilnox (the sleeping tablet). Déjà vu delirium. Enough said. But no, this is something slightly different. The world is spherical. No doubt about it. Stop putting faith in the horizon then. Just because your natural vision and the horizon somehow together are barring you from what you want to see. You can’t own them simultaneously in some kind of naïve omniscient and omnipresent synchronisation. And so, hence, doubt. Consequences of reservation and doubt will follow on.