get real

This trip to France that I just came back from was sort of unlike any trip I've ever taken before. I keep saying that to people but I have yet to express exactly what the difference was. I tried it in the previous blog entry but didn't quite hit upon it -- perhaps that was because I was still over there and didn't have any distance at all yet on the experience. Here's another try.

Disregarding how incredibly restful and relaxing the trip was (and it certainly, certainly was), there was also something sort of pensive and introspective about it, but in a way unlike the pensiveness and introspectiveness I'm used to. That's the difference! I've been on many a trip in the past four years that has prompted me to think about my life. These trips have prompted me to write (for pages and pages) in my journal about where I've been headed and what I've learned.

I didn't open my journal once during this trip.

I didn't have any impulse to write an email to someone detailing everything that was happening to me and analyzing its significance.

What has happened exactly? Why did this trip feel so weirdly (and wonderfully!) cut off from the rest of my life?

The amazing thing about all of this was that it was not summarizable into a little nugget, a moral for me to interpret for myself and assimiliate into "the next stage" of my life, as most of my recent traveling experiences have been. There was something sort of dark and ambiguous and (dare I say it?) mature about it, as if I'd grown up. Moved beyond summaries.

I don't know if any of this is making sense. It's only starting to come together for me as I write this. My life is moving in a lot of different directions right now and I think my experience of this trip reflects that. I've returned home to some big decisions: Where will I live once I move from Menno House? How long will I stay in my job? How much do I really want a relationship and who with? I'm of two minds about all of these issues. I know what I used to think about them and I also know how recent experience has slightly altered those assumptions. How tiny collisions with reality have made me question what I thought to be true, what I had planned out for myself as my life.

Because everything before this past year, all of those journal entries and manifestoes I wrote were essentially utopian. They were ideal visions culled from books. Ideas gestated in a period of leisure known as my "academic years." But since the fall of 2003 (during which time I have not taken a vacation, until this past week), there's been nothing utopian about what I've been doing. It's been about compromise; about saying, "Hey, I dreamed up all that stuff while I had time and space to dream but now I actually have to do it." And as much as I railed against consumerism in all its many forms, I still have taken on a new-found fondness for buying new clothes. And as much as I remain committed to peace and justice through my writing and my occupation, I've also started missing church more often. And as much as I still see myself as a radical, anti-commercial artist, I also recognize the benefits of networking to establish some kind of traditional theatrical credibility. In other words, things are never really gonna be all one way. As Susan Sontag has said, "The very nature of thinking is but."

I wrote a play this past year, since I started working my job, called Charity, and it took me a long time to write and it's different from my other plays. In some ways, it's more cynical about the world. It invetsigates the truth behind various ideals and in the end it sort of concludes on a note of ambiguity as to whether they can survive in this world. My other plays had "messages," as much as I tried to hide them, but this one is more of an investiagtion. I'm trying to work something out. The process of living through 2004 has made me question a lot of things, most of all my own assumptions about what I believe in, and how I see the world. And that's all for the better. Questions can only make our beliefs more meaningful, right? If they withstand that test?

I just came back from a reading of an older play of mine, called Three Days in the Tomb, which a lot of people have found to be somewhat polemical and message driven. I thought it was a very good reading and it really struck me as I sat through it that there was far too much in the script of me giving the message and giving it again, unchanged. Seen in the light of all that 2004 has taught me, Three Days seems restricted to me, caught inside its own ideological intentions. It feels very "conservative" to be saying that, like I'm T.S. Eliot or somebody telling you that political art is less worthy than something created for purely aesthetic reasons. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that it's harder for me to think in messages these days and that's good. I'm gonna start re-working the play soon and expanding all of those contradictions. Yes, but--

Does this make me a "realist" now? Is that what I'm saying? Have I switched from Dorothy Day to Condi Rice? I don't think so. But I guess I have learned that Dorothy's followers (of which I'm still one) could learn something from the way that Condi sees the world. Without ever having to deny their values. They have to acknowledge that there's always going to be a but.

What does this have to do with a trip to France? If you can figure out all of this connections, then I should probably marry you -- or pay you. I hope people post comments on this blog entry because it's only starting to make sense to me and I wonder what others feel.

I'm back from a trip that had a huge effect on me and I'm not prepared to say what it was. But.

There's gonna be a lot more of this.