Sojourners

I've had a recurring dream for years:  I am going through airport security when, inexplicably, my life's possessions spring free from their baggage, an endless stream of toothbrushes, underwear, boots, books, diapers and what-nots subjected to individual x-ray surveillance, an ungovernable mess on the other side as fellow travelers look on with impatience mounting toward rage.  Toddlers (mine) break loose on the periphery of dream consciousness as I make a futile effort to re-dress myself and gather everything.

In the latest version, sometime recently, we are on a bus en route to an airport, or other terminal, when a kindly bus driver offers an infinite supply of Legos to our boys.  Soon the floor of the bus is littered with millions of Lego pieces sliding this way and that as the bus careens around corners.  Without warning, the driver announces our arrival at the terminal.  We must collect all the pieces and get off this very minute, or miss our connection.  Outside, horns bear down on our delay.

This is not going according to plan.  After months of painstaking design after years of waiting to renovate, it seems we are selling our Brooklyn house instead, on the road once more.  And so my dream returns with an updated vengeance.  (We had not yet entered the Lego Stage of life when the dream first appeared in Los Angeles years ago!)   My sister informs me that we are perfect candidates for an HGTV reality show entitled "Love It or Leave It." Is there a category for both -- love it and leave it?

It is an economic decision, my left brain states with Republican certainty.  It is a leap into the unknown, my right brain whispers with Democratic honesty.  My grandfather said decisions about your home should be kept separate from investment decisions.  He lived in an era when many people with 30-year mortgages actually paid them off while still living in the house.  But he would also say (with Republican certainty) that it's time to move on, that our growing boys need room to stretch.  My grandfather was a master of timing, largely because he looked the future straight in the eye without flinching and planned accordingly.  I need to study his example now.

A warm little body crawled into my bed sometime in the madrugada this morning.  My half-lit brain began to play back images of our life on Howard Place, flickering like an 8mm movie.  Walking into the picture were two strangers.  They already love it, or the idea of what it will be, as I loved it on first sight seven years ago.  They are planning the paint they will use to cover our crazy murals everywhere, erasing us.  I happened to hear Garrison Keeler read this poem on the Writers' Almanac this morning:

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw.  The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked in white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

- Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano"

The sudden about-face to sell happened during the festival of Sukkot, when our rickety huts are meant to remind us of the harvest bounty, in spirit as much as from the earth, even -- or maybe especially -- in the midst of exile.  Like the chuppah wedding canopy, the sukkah must be built to be temporary and allow a view of the stars through the roof.  Home is made up of the people within guided by the lights above, not the structure without, I thought this morning as little toes wiggled under my tummy seeking the warmth of mommy and daddy, wherever we are.

It's taken me six years to read 284 pages of Aviva Zornberg's Genesis, reading a page or two a night since I barely understand any of it, and yet I'm addicted.  She makes these ancient stories read like self-help texts to me, all the more reliable for their endurance and resistance to too obvious interpretation. I've been into Jacob recently, when he's making his way back from his twenty years' sojourn in the land of Laban.  According to Rashi according to Zornberg (wow, I'm putting myself out here), "Jacob would like to settle his life, to find some measure of tranquility after all his troubles.  One might even say that is characteristic of righteous people to yearn for such a 'settling,' a clarification of the turbulences and anguish of life.  But God rebuffs this yearning, in a tone of strange sarcasm: 'Is it not enough?'" (243)   Jacob "wants to compose a whole world of his own... a cognitive and aesthestic ambition to see history resolved, sojournings over, in this world." (247)

But God offers a "counternarrative"...  Instead of peace, Jacob suffers extraordinary pain and dislocation at the supposed dismemberment of his beloved son, Joseph, the fulfillment of anxious premonitions he's suffered his entire life.  Anxiety, grief, the troubling of the spirit are all parts of being human, and "to seek peace prematurely is to beg off from reality... a profound disqualification from the human project."  (259)  In her last piece of magic, Zornberg puts this dismal picture of existence back together in the hopeful human process of "re-membering" against the dismemberment of experience, as Jacob must do when he discovers Joseph to be alive.  "There is, it seems, a painful law that obtains in this world -- particularly painful for the righteous who would like to retain memory intact, to be loyal to all of life as it was experienced." (278)  And in her final triumph (for me!), Zornberg draws on a 19th c. Hasidic writer, the Ishbitzer, to conclude that "Jacob's desire for a stable, coherent reading of his own experience, based on cognitive certainty and moral scrupulousness (which the Ishbitzer calls 'fear' and 'humility,' respectively), is countered by God's insistence on the tragic nature of existence in this world...  In this world, what is most needed is not fear, which deprives man of initiative beneath the sleepless eyes of God, but love -- the capacity to act in a world where absolute clarity is not obtainable."  And shortly thereafter, "God turns Jacob's quest away from philosophy, from the search for certainties, to the world of poetry.  Poetic language is the loving act of the human being, who seeks to redescribe his reality, in the midst of, and against, teruf." (279)

Got that?  I'm not sure I understand one bit of it.  But I love it nonetheless, and her interpretations somehow imbue our little journey with a hint of cosmic relevance, or at least resonance.

The other day the boys and I read Eric Carle's A Home for Hermit Crab in which the protagonist discovers he's grown too big to return to his shell.  He seeks a new, bigger one, but finds it drab, so he wanders the ocean floor inviting sea anemones, starfish, barnacles and sea grass to help decorate his home.  By the time he's done, he has grown not only a home but a neighborhood.  In the meanwhile, however, he has outgrown his shell yet again.  He is bereft until he finds a sweet little hermit crab who promises to take good care of both his shell and his friends.  ("Mommy, why are you crying?" my boys ask at this point in the story.)  In the end, the hermit crab finds a bigger drab shell and sets off once again to re-decorate with new friends discovered on the way.

Maybe this is going according to plan, just not my plan.  I think I'm down with that, if it qualifies me for the human project.  Just let me know if you hear of any bigger shells going on the market...