| Sunday, April 20, 2008 4:02PM | | | | a time for departure | Posted By: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti
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| Tags: detour, departure, editorial, sadi ranson, pen, | Tennessee Williams said, “There is a time in life for departure even when there is no place to go.”
It’s a slippery statement but at this juncture, I can relate in that I feel a need for departure – be it from a relationship or place – it is a departure all the same. The scary thing about departure is that you don’t know where it leads, as Williams says. You know where you were, or you think you know here you were or perhaps you did and now it has been changed, dare I say edited, revised, history rewritten? This happens: people can be conveniently revisionist when it suits, and this hurts. They will take years of a shared history and with one mark of a red-pen and a red swoop erase the whole thing as if it never happened at all. They do this as a way of saying “you never have met” (Reference Bob Dylan: “I Don’t Believe You” who tells us, “I said it’s easily done, you just pick anyone and just act you never have met….” Clearly he too had his run-ins with the type.)
But departure – departure is a strong word because it means leaving. It is a verb. It is an action. It means you actually physically or emotionally or both actually divorce yourself from a situation, place, state, person, and you divest certain symbols of their meaning such that the place from which you depart becomes not the fertile land that it once was, but you too, in order to make the leaving less painful, revise and leave in you past a vast tundra with endless horizons and in it, there is you and a whipping wind and the person who once was but is no more (or not as you once saw anyway; now a stranger – the known now then foreign, this is the nature of estrangement.)
From this place you must both depart. It is barren of all that it once was. You have both emptied it now. Who started it is really unimportant. The fact is, one of you did, and no matter which one did, both hearts are heavy, both hearts feel the whipping wind. Both may deny any involvement or entanglement to save face; in fact, such is often the case – after all, this is part and parcel of the divesting, “There never was anything…” Thus, philosophically, if a thing never was, how then can it hurt?
It cannot. It’s a neat trick, but emotionally, it’s not that simple. This is no more than simple denial. It works for a while, maybe even years, but it wears and wears under the heart is whittled bone thin or until it ceases to exist at all, making it impossible to love or empathize.
This is departure. This is a time in our life. And it may recur again and again, depending on your life and circumstance. But again, Williams “There is a time in life for departure even when there is no place to go.” The second is the tricky part. We know about the departure. We all know that we have to go. But where? It’s the where that keeps us bound and afraid and in a state of stuck. How to get there from here?
I never used to think I was good at reading maps, yet somehow, I navigated all through the Peripherique through central Paris , which is quite tricky during rush-hour. Sure, I know, big deal. But that’s besides the point anyway. The main point is that there is never just one way to get anywhere. These days, I keep seeing signs that say Caution, Detour, Dangerous Turn, Stop!, Bridge Closed or the finality of Dead End… Imagine that! Caution! Children at Play.
In the end, it all comes down to you, the navigator. The Map is there for the reading, but yes, there will be obstacles and maps are notoriously wrong and roads ever-changing. Usually, the answer is the simplest. You see an obstacle and you think, “Climb,” when I say Why not just walk around? So why not take the long meandering path?
I don’t know where it goes either. I don’t even know I go alone. I’m prepared either way, I suppose. What choice anyhow? It would be nice to have a hand to hold, someone who really cared to help me get from here to there, but perhaps some roads you need to walk alone.
There are no cautionary signs here. No signs at all. Not even a detour. Just a route so small that it’s off the map, a tensile thin trail, you find precisely because you are so lost.
Thanks for listening,
s.r.p. | | |
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2 Comments | Add a Comment |
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| 5-31-08 9:43PM: s said...
how lives intersect - strange... glad though. I hope it helped.
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| 4-23-08 4:20PM: r1da said...
Thank you for this. It came just at the right time.
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