Bewildered Travel: The Sacred Quest for Confusion

1. Love of Ruptures

i was once in agra, in india, and walking not far from my small hotel, the deep crimson of the Red Fort looming less than a quarter mile away. I’d only been in Agra for a few hours, and I wanted to get a feel for the place. Ahead I saw a crowd of people, and I walked over to see what they found so compelling. I easily looked through the people to what was on the ground in the center of the crowd—a woman with no hands and no feet, trying to eat. The light from that sight etched into my retina for a fraction of a second before I reeled away into the crowded streets, hoping that other sights would rub it away. They didn’t. Nothing has. The sight of such deprivation has lain like a wound in my memory. Every day in India had experiences that ruptured my accustomed surfaces, many of astonishing beauty or kindness and others like that corrosive sight, and yet I loved them all. And wherever I travel, I am seeking more disruption. What is there to • 5 O N E Love of Ruptures love? That is the subject of this chapter and ultimately of this book. At the beginning of one of his books of travel, Paul Bowles declares , “Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as di=erent as possible from the places I already know.”1 I wonder if everyone who reads that statement feels the same mixture of alarm and excitement as I do. I suspect that most people are as attached to the familiar as I am, as glad to arrive home in the afternoon or evening, and as happy that “home” is still homelike, with nothing radically changed. I have moved many times in my life, and each time it was fairly wrenching. The most recent move was to the Washington suburbs, and it took at least two years before I felt like it was my town and that I was part of it. For those two years I felt that the neighbors were sizing me up, deciding whether to be neighborly, after all. I felt wary in the stores and on the streets, unable to let down my guard. Today it seems foolish because this town now feels so thoroughly like my home, but I’ve also been here seventeen years now. Bowles wants to be in an unfamiliar place? Not I. I want to be on friendly ground, among family, and in a town that I know. I want to live in a place that’s as familiar as possible, not ever more foreign, as seems to be true for Bowles. That’s why I feel alarmed by Bowles’s statement—because the familiar is so hard to establish and can be taken away so easily. Soon after my family and I arrived in our town, a house a few streets away developed a gas leak that exploded. I drove past that house several times, horri>ed by the walls that had buckled out and fallen o= the foundation. A year or two later, Washington was struck by violent thunderstorms with vertical winds of such power that hundreds of very large trees were blown down. When I >nally reached home that day, I saw dozens of enormous oaks leaning on neighbors’ houses. They looked a bit as though they’d fainted and required some brief support, but for the splintered eaves and gaping roots displaying what opens up or rips when the familiar loses its stability. For those reasons and more, as soon as my car clears the top 6 • bewildered travel of the hill across from my home, I check for the signs of whatever might have disturbed the familiar—gas or lightning, the collapse of a chestnut oak, or the bursting of a pipe. Yes, I want home to be as familiar as possible. I want the kids to run and give me a hug. I want to be able to >nd the book I’m currently reading . I want the usual schedule of soccer games and maybe a drink with friends on my porch. But Paul Bowles appears to want none of it. So why does Paul Bowles want a place to be as di=erent as possible—and why does that prospect paradoxically attract me? Consider...