The institution most likely to cause me anxiety, panic, and dread is the airport. There are few places where I have to coordinate with such a vast array of people, machines, and schedules, which makes me especially fragile to the whims of luck. This web of potential misfortune looms in my consciousness from about three days out until I am taking off. When I am in the midst of a trip with multiple flights, this feeling never leaves.
Yet, the airport is a source of hope and a strange sort of calm. Falling through security into a busy departures hall, filled with the scent of burnt coffee and two dozen perfumes mixed together, I am awash with the sheer potentiality of it all. In a matter of hours the people in front of you will be scattered all across the globe. You too could scatter yourself in this place.
John Burnside, who died on May 29 at age 69, was a Scottish poet and writer. His childhood was dominated by his con-man father’s alcoholism and the family’s financial need to become Scottish migrants in England. Substance abuse followed him for some time. Eventually, though, he made it back to his home county of Fife to teach and write at St. Andrews. His work is often infused with the essence of this place, with his love for it.
But much of his poetry is also very dark, and much of this is about gaps in Burnside’s soul. “Suburbs”, for example, from his second collection Common Knowledge, is a scathing evaluation of suburbs and Burnside’s role in them:
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the realization dawns that I live in an invented place whose only purpose is avoidance, and what I would avoid, I carry with me, always.
His eighth collection, The Asylum Dance, is a fuller exploration of Burnside’s ambivalence about home. It is dominated by four long poems: “Ports”, “Settlements”, “Fields”, and “Roads”. The former two are about his adult life in Fife. From “Ports”:
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Whenever we think of home we come to this: the handful of birds and plants we know by name rain on the fishmonger’s window the walleyed plaice freckled with spots the colour of orangeade.
From “Settlements”
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— there's more to the making of home than I ever expected: a process of excavation, of finding something in myself to set against the chill of the other, the echo you do not hear, when I stop to listen, the stranger who wakes in the dark from a fetid dream of ditches and milt
The third poem in the cycle, “Fields”, is about ‘the cycle of life’ and his father’s working relationship with the land of Fife. Particularly haunting is the story of his father digging mass graves for the livestock of Fife when there was an outbreak of hand, foot, and mouth disease.
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When I was five or six —I can't recall— the land for miles and miles was sick with foot and mouth and grateful for the work my father travelled the length of the county digging pits for slaughtered herds [...] I stood in the kitchen and watched while my mother fixed him his tea amazed at how lonely he looked how suddenly tired a blur of unspoken hurt on his mouth and eyes
The word ‘wanderlust’ is a favorite of travel industry marketers, usually accompanied by tan, smiling young people with roller bags near a beach. The most literal translation is ‘a desire to hike’, but it has taken on a wider meaning: A longing for travel. The general—albeit more narrow—concept is associated with the German Romantics, whose central ideal was self-realization. Attached to this was the idea that solitude in nature was a particularly good setting for self-realization. Hiking took on an existential import as the setting for the writing of the novel that is one’s life.
While English adopted the word in the early 20th century, it did not exactly adopt the word’s philosophical connotations. Many early uses of the word in English were disparaging, characterizing flighty and unreliable people. Over time, it seems to me, it has taken on a light, airy meaning. Hence the fondness of travel industry marketers.
Burnside’s “Roads” is about the romantic ideal, accentuated by Octavio Paz’s Mexican existentialist variation. The poem is broken into five parts. Its epigraph, unlabeled, comes from Paz’s “Two Gardens” (Burnside quotes the original Spanish; I’ve included Eliot Weinberger’s English translation):
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transcurrir es suficiente, transcurrir es quedarse to pass through is enough, to pass through is to remain
The first three parts are self-contained—indeed, a version of the poem was published in the LRB that just contained the first three parts—and is about leaving and then coming home. The first part, called ‘Driving to Mirtiotissa’ (a beach on Corfu), starts with a familiar traveling experience: Gaining partial navigational understanding.
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We learned to avoid the village to drive through the olive groves evading children and dogs and old men with sodden voices calling to one another through the trees
It quickly turns more contemplative by channeling the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land.
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You were reading a book about angels the way they appear on the road to the unsuspecting wingless yet ringed with light they could pass for locals: men in boots and cotton shirts a girl in a printed dress beside a well and though we imagined we couldn't believe in such things if anything was there in that black light we knew it would be lost in no man's land
After more exquisitely haunting descriptions of Corfu, the theme of alienation returns.
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though we guessed that the angel of roads or the panic of standstills was less than the weight of ourselves being lost or found
The second part, ‘Kidnapped,’ is about traveling with nowhere to go back to. In its middle is an italicized cutout in the voice of someone on the run—‘they were still on my scent’, it begins. It ends with an extortion of pure alienation from place.
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I'm travelling still: my name on a borrowed passport sleeping between the graves in an upland church foraging for eggs and spills of grain living caesura, less than the sum of my parts I'm waiting for the limbo of a life that goes without saying: a circle in the woods of mint and coal where someone has stopped before now to light a fire
This is one of the threats of wanderlust: That you lose a place to come back to; that you live caesura, in a break between meanings. Burnside quickly reaches a verdict about this threat for him.
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— almost but not quite right: illusion like the one who stays at home lost in the warmth of butter and cherry tea and wanting for nothing immune to the smell of fairgrounds
Part III, ‘Pilgrimage’, is about coming home. It is not optimistic, although I’d like to think it is written from the perspective of a tired wanderer who has finally made it back to a house with a lock that fits his key.
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illusory as all these journeys are: home after dark on a late bus or waiting alone at the station the platform light suddenly all there is for miles around ... there's nothing here to understand or claim nothing to grasp nothing to think of as true. ... I have driven this road too often and come too far losing the taste for home: its standing warmth the gravities and shifts we dwell upon
Home is easy. You know where everything goes, you’ve learned all of the navigational tricks. You know home so well that it stops being worth knowing. Despite this, reentering home after being a traveler can be jarring; it can cast doubt on both the traveling and being at home.
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— so when I reach the hollow of the stairs intruder on the dream you've shifted from I'm glad of the silence glad of the distance between us the blackness of the country roads I have smuggled in on my shirtsleeves the flavour of rain and nothingness ... — though speaking for myself I'd want to say this nothing is why I am out on a starless road learning the true extent of no man's land the night wind threading my eyes and nowhere to go.
Octavio Paz’s influences on “Roads” are many. The epigraph quoted above is from Paz’s “Two Gardens”, itself a poem about self-realization and wandering. While the epigraph are the only words from “Two Gardens” to appear in “Roads,” the formal structure of “Roads” mirrors the structure of “Two Gardens”.
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For his funeral, Chuang-tzu asked heaven for its lights, the wind for its cymbals. We asked the neem to marry us. A garden is not a place: it is a passage, a passion. We don't know where we're going, to pass through is enough, to pass through is to remain
Despite the obvious inspiration, Paz’s poem is more propitious. It is about becoming oneself as a preparation for death. It ends:
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The garden sinks. Now it is a name with no substance. The signs are erased: I watch clarity.
Part IV of “Roads” draws on a second Paz poem, and is written in memoriam of Paz. It draws its title from Paz’s “Ida Y Vuelta”, naturally translated as “Round Trip,” although Weinberger translates it as “Coming and Going”. While “Two Gardens” is expansive, “Ida Y Vuelta” is sparse. While “Two Gardens” is hopeful, “Ida Y Vuelta” is harsh. It is about the darksides of searching the world for meaning.
Burnside’s “Ida Y Vuelta” picks up the theme by synthesizing the progression of the first three parts. The problem with wanderlust at extreme doses is that it makes you a stranger everywhere while at the same time fueling your desire for a niche.
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How terror is always shifting between the glow of home and the chill of departure
Immediately following this stanza we get one of Paz’s (again, I’ll put the Spanish version used by Burnside, followed by the translation).
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Yo atravesé los arcos y los puentes, yo estaba vivo, en busca de la vida. I crossed through arches and over bridges, I was alive, in search of life
What follows this is the most brutal part of “Roads”. Burnside generalizes the problem from meaning-making via travel to meaning-making writ large (note the formal switch to match Paz’s “Ida Y Vuelta”).
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and love is something learned like dancing: knowing the steps but moving without desire in a partner's arms
Ouch. More Paz:
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Yo estaba vivo y vi muchos fantasmas, Todos de carne y hueso y todos ávidos I was alive and saw many ghosts, all made of flesh and bone, all of them greedy.
Burnside replies:
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or how a life can never quite be seen in this measure of rain a bruise of kisses seeping to the bone and waiting there to flower as a word
Part V, ‘Eternal Return,’ is about the shape of Burnside’s personal wanderlust. It starts with our last Paz.
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Yo estaba vivo y fui a buscar la muerte. I was alive and went in search of death.
What follows is an explosion of description of the struggle to make meaning.
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— an algebra a science of goodbyes somewhere beyond the absence implicit in grammar: lost and found. The road or the town's last street when they worked all afternoon to build a fairground men in boots and cotton shirts rigging a world of candy-floss and diesel and setting it alight so I could dream of running away becoming the competent son you would never imagine.
Burnside’s trigger is a hallmark the world over of summer disillusionment. The traveling fair, pulling into town when it’s too hot and people have grown bored of it. Its very essence an exercise in failed travel—just one field after another, one set of people willing it to be more than it is after another.
With this we start on poem’s final turn, where Burnside confronts his wanderlust more directly.
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there are times coming home when everything seems richer for my absence: car parks around the airport perfectly ordered the crowd at the gate with labels or startled joy for the newly arrived …. Stop moving and another life begins: the motion of the tide conceals the caress of erosion or how the beginning of autumn is quietly gloved in August the first bright sugars turning to gold in locust trees and false acacias.
Perhaps home is not so bad. In contrast to part III, here the familiarity of home provides satisfactory understanding. And perhaps home plays a different role in the writing of our stories. To stop moving is necessary to prepare for death—Paz would agree. Of course, here this is precisely the threat to Burnside, and for most of us. As Beauvoir quipped, ‘for every man his death is an accident.’ Or Don Draper’s reverse corollary: ‘We don’t know how long it will last, but we know it always has a bad ending.’
This brings us around the final turn and into the very direct confession of an ending.
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I've wanted so many lives such otherness and so much less than anything we have: some garden of broken stones and aquilegias a shoal of angel fish in makeshift graves unscheduled stops in no man's land or Tulsa and yet forgive me this: I never really mastered coming home skilled in that childhood-for-years of travelling light forgive me: I still can't resist the sound of a fair in the distance the new-crushed grass those sixties songs the heat of the machines I still can't resist the girls on the promenade walking the front in lipstick and brand-new hairdos the boys from the caravan parks come out to stand in the bars all night like their father's ghosts sullen and proud and as lost in the world they inherit as stray dogs or mink and forgive me that I cannot leave or stay that I'm only a moment away from being unseen forgive me being not the man I seem not lost or found but somewhere in between.
Travel, for Burnside, is an attempt to fill a gap, a gap that he glimpses when the diesel hangs in the heavy summer air and the county’s young people flock in an attempt to manufacturer some fun. Where one lives doesn’t always feel like a true home, with a spot carved out in one’s exact shape. The wider world can take on a shimmer in one’s imagination; it can appear ripe with meaning. Wanderlust is the drive to see if this shimmer is the result of trick lighting.
This shimmer is a promise and a threat. Paz focuses on the promise in “Two Gardens,” Burnside the threat. As Paz says at the very beginning:
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A house, a garden, are not places: they spin, they come and go. Their apparitions open another space in space, another time in time.
To find the meaning wanderlust pushes us towards is to self-realize in the Romantics’ sense. Once we discover that meaning, we take it with us. Burnside doesn’t disagree, exactly. He does not deny that he encounters angels. The threat—or one threat—is that the lust involved in wanderlust is unquenchable. And the shimmer is contrastive: With each new shine, the place where one lives grows duller, the people content with it more deluded:
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illusion like the one who stays at home
This is how life’s great values work. Their possession is not guaranteed yet their siren call is irresistible. Even when you get them, you can’t predict their effects. Wanderlust is but a special case of our drive to weave ourselves into the world’s value. Its object is place and its internal logic can seem twisted. It seems to push us to make our homes where we know we can’t. Burnside will never be from Corfu and Paz never from Dehli.
This needn’t be the logic of wanderlust. It pushes you not to make a home in the foreign, but to spread the boundaries of yourself to incorporate the wonders of the world. If this goes wrong, you are alienated from everywhere. If it goes right, you create another space in space, another time in time.
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