Travel Log #6

June 24, 2009

When I was eleven years old, I went on a class trip across Georgia and Tennessee. I loved all of it, but the part that stuck in my mind the most was a visit to this fairy land, where gnomes ran free inside deep caverns between small canyons of rock so narrow it is hard to imagine fitting through. I have been looking for this fairy tale place for eleven years. In my ordinary fashion, I forgot its name. I also remember an underground waterfall and a place so high, the clouds stretched below me for miles and miles without my feet leaving the ground.

Two weeks ago, I finally found it again, without going anywhere. It's Lookout Mountain. I found it in a book. It was described exactly the way I remembered it through the eyes of my eleven-year-old self. The place from which you can see seven states, and Ruby Falls. Finding this place, finally, actually took the breath out of me. I'd been looking for so long and trying to describe it to people--with no luck--I thought I'd just imagined it. But no worries: it is a real place and gods congregate there. At least according to Neil Gaiman. So much for discovery.

I leave for England in a week and another place I've been dreaming of. I'm going to visit friends and family. Then, there's Germany and the Leo Baeck program. Then, Luxembourg. I can't wait to get back to Luxembourg. It's shown up in my dreams constantly for the past two years. I take that as a sign of it calling me back.

Things with Israel are still up in the air, apparently, but we'll know soon enough, I suppose. Less than two weeks. It's frustrating. At the crucial moment, no one at OTZMA answers their phones. As for the money, I've been holding fundraisers. The goodwill trickles in but will most likely have to be saved up and reserved for next year. I have already begun researching other programs, mainly for credit. "For credit" equals student loan deferral without a hassle. Either way, I'll get there soon.

I have begun another book, The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. It is yet another tale revolving around the vampire. Not the cheezy kind like the Twilight nonsense. The legitimate, analysis-worthy kind. I still remember Bram Stoker's Dracula, studied through a post-colonial lens. The only book that ever gave me nightmares in my life. It was my first encounter with post-colonialism. I fell in love with it. Yes, me and always falling in love with ideas. Who knew I would end up with Rushdie and Butler? Who knows who I'll end up with next? To me, it was a mythology, an allegory, a tale woven from threads of truth to tell us a real story about ourselves, with a fairy tale element. It gave us a reflection of ourselves. The vampire haunts us as do many other creatures and tales born of a mythology.

But everything is a myth and myth is what we dream and what we breathe. It is what we live for, and more often, what we are willing to die for. Never underestimate the power of fiction--once it becomes myth, it might as well be fact and truth. A good friend recently said all of this quite eloquently: "The best way to know a people is to know what they dream of, and what they dream up..." Precisely. This is the reason I concern myself with mythos: fables, fiction, all kinds of fairy tales--to know a people intimately is to know what they dream and to have the knowledge and the ability to dream it with them. How else can one enter a dialogue and exit it effectively? Dream. Return to a beginning that may never have been, save in the imagination. In the end, time is experience and experience a distortion offered up to us by the imagination. Life really is but a dream.

Dreams, though, are not worth dying for. Nothing is. If it is worth dying for then it is not worth living for and I concern myself with life. Mediation, after all, is conducted between the living in the hopes of preserving life and improving its quality. This is not to say that I wouldn't die for a cause. I would, gladly, as long as I went out living fiercely and sincerely--as long as that cause is rooted in life. As long as I died without having sacrificed my dignity.

Do not make the mistake of falling victim to myth as absolute reality--at least acknowledge that even the myth is a myth. Then, you will not be fooled into believing that something man-made, collectively though it may be, is larger than life. Sure, we are powerful, but only as powerful as our dreams. I hope, more than anything else, that we, the human race, do not come to find ourselves at an end because we let those dreams and the reality we created around them go to waste.