“Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, ‘I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.”
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Now that our revels are ended, the holiday celebrations and feasts, if one had them, just a dream melted into thin air, our hungers perhaps richly satiated temporarily or not, our visions project us into a new year in which we hope to realize in a not insubstantial way the images we see before the canvases of our inner eyes.
What can we do, how create the new when we are such stuff as dreams are made on?
To escape the period that ends every sentence, every year, every life, one only needs winged words to take flight, to shimmer in the ascending iridescent light.
My wanderlust has taken me to scores of countries, I imagine, glimmering destinations that have inflamed me with images of satisfaction, but I have never kept an exact count since numbers bore me and my imagination forbids it.
“To a child who is fond of maps and stamps / The universe is the size of his immense hunger,” wrote Charles Baudelaire in Le Voyage in 1859.
When I was young and collected stamps of all the exotic places that I hoped to visit, what did I know of desire? Then it seemed satiable, as when I finished one book after another, and placed them neatly on a shelf, as if to say, now that is done – for now. Now the books are different, so too each piece of edible writing that disappears out the backdoor of my days. Today, those tangible little colored stamps on Air Mail envelopes are rarely seen, and so young potential voyagers usually dream digitally as little is left to their imaginations. Their dreams are mass-produced, but their hunger is real. My hunger is still immense.
But the desire to travel, like all hunger, is only satisfied for a while. It is insatiable once it bites you. Every time you are on your way away, you wonder if this voyage will be the last one where you find what you are looking for, even when you don’t know what that is. You close your eyes, spin the globe, and place a finger to find where you might vacate the old for the new. You hope to return with photographs and memories, knowing secretly that they fade with your days. Perhaps you think you will be like Odysseus, who at the end of his Odyssey has just returned home after twenty years and killed all the suitors who have been hitting on his wife Penelope, but then he shockingly tells her that he must be off again for new wanderings: “Woman, we haven’t reached the end of our trials,” he says, as they then proceed to their great olive tree-trunked bed with its mighty roots. It is a short hot rest before he is off again.
Why? What is his destination? What are ours? Where are we all going?
“One morning we set out, our brains aflame, / Our hearts full of resentment and bitter desires, / And we go, following the rhythm of the wave, / Lulling our infinite on the finite of the seas:”
In 1946 the French poet, Jacques Prévert, asked an analogous question, one that haunts us still, as we contemplate the corpses piling up in Gaza and around the world, victims of ruthless smiling jackals with polished faces. His poem “Song in the Blood” asks, “There are great puddles of blood on the world/where’s it all going all this spilled blood/is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk . . . . No the earth doesn’t get drunk . . . . it turns and all living things set up a howl . . . . it doesn’t stop turning/ and the blood doesn’t stop running/ where’s it all going all this spilled blood/murder’s blood . . . war’s blood/misery’s blood . . . .”
When I was young and in the early years of my blooming, my blood running down another road, I would watch a television show called “Adventures in Paradise.” I would always watch it alone on a small television set that I had in my bedroom, won, as I recall, by some member of my large family on a TV game show. It starred a handsome actor named Gardner McKay, who would sail the South Pacific on his schooner Tiki, looking for romance and adventures in every port. My only memory of the shows is of the boat sailing the beautiful and exotic waters, accompanied by stirring music. These images kindled the romantic in me, some hunger that I could not then name. It was pure fantasy, of course, but it took me to places I had never been but thought enticingly fulfilling. Each show was a new stamp in motion, just as were the many movies I would attend by myself during my teen years that took me to Italy, France, Greece, Russia, and so many other places. But my hunger persisted.
Years later I would read an obituary of Gardner McKay in The New York Times where I learned that after a three-year run of the show, McKay refused to renew his contract with Twentieth Century Fox nor star in a movie with Marilyn Monroe, despite her personal pleas, because he hated the celebrity game where his photo had appeared on the cover of Life magazine as “a new Apollo.” He left for the Amazon rainforest where for two years he worked as an agronomist’s assistant, before moving to France and then Egypt, eventually settling back in the U.S.A. with his wife, where he became a writer. He was a Baudelaire who didn’t self-destruct.
“But the true voyagers are only those who leave / Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, / They never turn aside from their fatality / And without knowing why they always say: ‘Let’s go!’”
In a fascinating essay, “On Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema,” written in 2012 and included in his new book, Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle, Jonathan Crary notes that Jean-Luc Godard, the French-Swiss filmmaker who died in 2022, maintained that Baudelaire’s poem, Le Voyage, anticipated cinema and its effects. “Its general evocation of the boredom and bitterness of experience in a flattened, disenchanted world,” writes Crary, “describes the conditions for new kinds of journeys or dislocations that can occur without movement in space, in its figuration of an apparitional screen on which images and memories are projected.”
Connecting the political history of the period from 1859 to today, it is necessary, maintains Crary, to view it as inseparable from “the intertwined history of the camera arts.” This analysis, which I think is very accurate, is not a call to despair; it is rather the opposite: “. . . Godard implies that each generation must wage its own battle against historical amnesia from the lived conditions of its unique historical vantage point, and that this struggle necessitates the remaking of the techniques and language available to it.”
Here we are today saturated with images, moving and still, a world where digital media, photographs and film in all their manifestations dominate most people’s consciousnesses. But the paradoxical mystery of this development, as Crary notes, is revealed in Godard’s film, Histoire(s) du cinema, wherein Baudelaire’s poem Le Voyage is continuously recited. As the film travels along, the poet’s words about the disillusionment of actual voyages is recited contrapuntally, as if to suggest that the most ancient of human arts – the poetic voice (“Sing in me, O Muse, and through me tell the story . . . . of that man . . . the wanderer”) – remains fundamental, even as technology develops new methods of image making and people travel through film.
One doesn’t have to share Godard’s view that Baudelaire’s poem was prophetically describing cinema to appreciate the rich possibilities of such a meditation at a time when the world seems entrenched in a media system that manipulates people’s minds in all directions simultaneously, carrying both meaning and its countermeaning, resulting in minds stuck at anchor, caught neurotically in dazed stasis.
“Godard’s larger suggestion here,” writes Crary, “is that the material basis for cinema, including projection, owes as much to the imaginative labor of poets and writers such as Baudelaire, Hugo, Zola, and Charles Cros as it does to any nineteenth-century traditions of applied science or mechanical bricolage.”
To escape the period that ends every sentence, every year, every life, one only needs winged words to take flight, to shimmer in the ascending iridescent light.
“We wish to voyage without steam and without sails! / To brighten the ennui of our prisons, / Make your memories, framed in their horizons, / Pass across our minds stretched like canvasses.”
So I sit here in a quiet room, not moving, yet moving still, traveling in words to an undiscovered country that I can’t see but hope will satisfy my immense hunger. We all have our ways but have a singular destiny. “And being nowhere can be anywhere,” as Baudelaire said, just as being somewhere can be everywhere.
“Must one depart? Remain? If you can stay, remain; / Leave, if you must. One runs, another hides / To elude the vigilant, fatal enemy,. / Time! There are, alas! those who rove without respite,”
So let Ernest Hemingway, who had one of his heroes, Jake Barnes, say nearly a hundred years ago, “Cheer up, all the countries look just like the moving pictures,” have the penultimate words, again from A Moveable Feast:
It was a wonderful meal at Michaud’s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid.
That makes two of us.
I’m reminded of Andrei Tarkovsky, who wrote about film as poetry, of how he incorporated his father’s poetry into his movies. It reinforces the Baudrillaire connection, poetry IS like film, I imagine ‘Man with a Movie Camera’, the juxtaposition of discontinuity, the dissolving of time and space, tells me film is poetry or at least has the possibility.
I have repeated problems with my comments being bounced out of your website although hoards seem to be able to use your site to view their opinions on everything from television to politics. I don’t understand.
Hi Elizabeth…well, you can watch videos of German Farmers protesting on a large scale with their tractors and fertilizer spreaders in the streets ! Great scenes and is necessary, unfortunately !
Thanks, Joseph, you just proved my point. Rant on.
Elizabeth…,You are welcome….and don’t give up. “not only has man accepted his enslavement, he has even become proud of his enslavement…and this is a terrible thing”
Fuck you, Joseph and God help you.
Joseph, good luck. Sort of sorry for previous sort of harsh reply, I hope you are well meaning, even about your odd post re German farmers.
Hi Elizabeth….I was simply saying if you cannot post here for some reason, in the mean time, you can check what is happening in Germany. Apparently the german government has angered the farmers, the people who grow food. A symptom of global insanity. Even though I feel that’s an important issue, I recommended that since It’s possible it might be more important than here. I can also understand your disappointment from not be able to express yourself for whatever reason. I liked your harsh reply. This site is lacking real human energy. Sorry Ed.
Joseph, you’re okay. I should not have posted anything on this site because it is truly a conflict of interest. Rant on, bro. I am sorry. (Sort of … )
It is the hunger that we want to escape.
It is the hunger for God.
Mark McL…I can empathize with you, how you feel. A ‘decider’ , a ‘savior’, a ‘leader’ is how we have been enslaved for a very long time…., (made) dependent upon others to lead us in place of mutual, non-hierarchical relationships.
Colonizers want to control everything and especially humans ! I have no magical answers….,
I think we need to transcend our fears and start having conversations about our common experiences and feelings. Not easy !
There are households here in the complex where I live that own 2 or 3 cars, some of which are hardly (if ever) driven. You are right that there are better things to spend money on – especially when one is on a fixed income. This household has one vehicle and that is certainly enough. There are times when I wish I could drive somewhere on my own (but cannot because the car is too big… I’m not comfortable with it), but these times are very rare.
For me, spending time basking in the sun by the pool causes such reveries. The warmth on my skin, the sound of the birds and the wind in the trees allows my mind to wander where it will…
So drive somewhere in your too-large vehicle. You may find “such reveries” in new places.
A hunger and feeling, I suspect, that haunts many. Some sort of existential gravitational force moving us through the story of our life, still looking for home. Is there a buried knowledge about the mechanics of an incarnation and the nature of time that keeps us looking forward, towards some unnamed completion? The reductionist paradigm we currently inhabit leaves little room for such considerations.
The spirit of Adam Troy invokes a thoughtful internal space from long ago.
Four months into a nine month stay in a tiny French village in the countryside and all of these questions of time, and hunger, and travel have become a part of daily reverie. To move from endless freeway hours by car in Southern California to life lived completely on foot has been a strange sort of liberation. A liberation from the kaleidoscopic almost hallucinatory speed and anonymity of California freeway “life” to something on a human scale. The same “scale” my body remembers from childhood – “travel” – conducted by putting one foot in front of the other foot. The rhythm and daily ritual of walking rather than riding in a car has gradually cleared my mind of much of the chaos and debris of “24/7”.
As a child one of my favorite movies was the early science fiction film “The Time Machine.” The hero travels far into the future to find the dystopia that awaits. I appreciated your quote from Crary – “Godard implies that each generation must wage its own battle against historical amnesia . . .” Strangely life in this tiny village is a time machine in reverse – one that takes me back, and only back in time. The perfect antidote for “historical amnesia.” From the memorials to the dead of both World Wars, to the medieval church carvings from the period when Cathars were slaughtered for their thought crimes, to far back in the neolithic where vibrant cave painting remind us who we really are and where we really come from – the travel is always back, back in time.
Your recollections of the television show from our childhood “Adventures in Paradise” made me smile Ed. I remember it also – though before reading your words it had long been forgotten. In a strange sense this interlude in life lived, “on foot,” away from the speed and noise of the modern world, immersed in a vast history that simply doesn’t even exist consciously in the U.S., is as close to “paradise” as I could ask for. I love this “time machine” I can discover on foot.
This does not mean that I have somehow blotted out my ethical and emotional connection to the current misery, the genocide in Gaza, the daily routinized invisible suffering of so many around the globe. Only that when immersed here in this tiny village not in months, or years, or decades, or centuries, but in millennia of the history of such collective suffering – “war’s blood / misery’s blood” – spilled endlessly and for endless “reasons” – that my perspective broadens, and I’m left unrooted, unmoored, and I find myself truly – “lost in time.” It is a revelation to realize that the “space” between Cro-Magnon time and WWII can be covered – “by foot.”
Thank you for more thought provoking writing Ed. Your words are always treasured and inspiring.
What a realist, truthful comment of yours about the differences between walking and using vehicles for transportation. I own a Chevrolet Impala 2010, but I don’t use it much, because gas prices are too expensive. And since i am an avid critical thinker like most critical thinkers of real-reality, i have jumped to the conclusion that cars, vehicles, are really one of the main causes of the economic destruction of people, of lowering living standards. Because the money used on gas, car insurances, repair costs, fines etc. would be better invested if it was invested in good high protein foods and other things that increase living standards. There is also a book about walking called Philosophy of Walking that claims that most great philosophers used walking in order to increase creativity https://fs.blog/a-philosophy-of-walking/
I really don’t understand how can most people be addicted to vehicles, to cars so much, when traffic jams and cars, vehicles cause a lot of problems for people, specially economic problems
Since we need a radical change in this world, I think that we also need a radical change in the way people travel and transport themselves from one place to another
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Thank you Knoxville Christian for your comments. I believe the way we think is due to the mostly standardized information provided to citizens from a very young age…as while still in the womb as well. This information, this indoctrination, this feeling of being normal/comfortable because everyone is thinking and doing the same thing for the most part is why we all do very stupid things every single day. We have normalized stupid ! A good memory does not represent real understanding. And then there is the illusion that some people represent us citizens with impeccable integrity. Gadgets, lies, sports, TV, internet, cars, motorcycles, environments destroyed and sold as tourist attractions and so forth substitute for blood and guts human substance, real human relations and our understanding of our place among the natural world that we happily destroy so we can buy widgets and new tires for our cars and without asking; where did the rubber go? (check out the information on toxic tire dust) It’s just like the very fine dust that comes from rubbing wood across very fine sandpaper. This tire dust goes into the soil, the air, into water systems! And who are our teachers? I don’t know any. I have never known a real teacher. Why don’t we know ourselves very well and in our relationship to the natural world instead of this man-made disaster that is accompanied by a horrible political soap opera followed by the destruction of what we need to survive…war after war. By the way, I’m just as stupid as anyone else ! We need to talk, have real conversations and figure out how we can become awakened, flush the false information out and introduce Knowledge and understanding !
You are more stupid than most, Joseph. Sorry you never had a decent teacher — male or female.
Hello, again Edward, what a great article with a lot truth about this trip, this existence we call life. I leave you with a writing from Nietzsche sent to one of his friend Overbeck, which is related to this specific article:
“My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from “capsizing”! Let us then continue our voyage—each for the other’s sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun—what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather!” -November 14, 1881: Letter from Friedrich Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck.
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Hello Edward Curtin again, thanks for this article. And my comment is again about John F. Kennedy and some dogmatic closed-minded historians who I think write articles in the website Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/ They claim that the US government only overthrows, kills or tries to destroy socialist workers-states, they claim that if government of the world is not a workers-state, the US government and CIA won’t kill their leader. Or if a US president is not marxist, the CIA won’t kill him (what a lack of scientific historical thinking) because a US president, or president of another country can be a nationalist-state-capitalist reformist (like Allende, Hugo Chavez, Maduro, Juan Bosch, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi etc) and the US government still will try to overthrow and-or kill him. Like the USA gov. did to those rulers I mentioned. The overthrow and-or murder of those Allende, Hugo Chavez, Bosch, Hussein etc is already a historical proof that CIA-US government kills rulers who are not pure marxists. I don’t understand why the people of Counterpunch are so dogmatic and closed-minded. Noam Chomsky is like that too