Pre-
It was the arrival of my 55 liter osprey backpack (and packing cubes) a few days ago that got me to realize that I'll actually have to pack my next three months of living into it. I'm joining the summer backpacking Europe bandwagon, though of course my expedition will be exceptionally revelatory and epic and lofty, and enhancing to everyone with whom I cross paths. I don't have high expectations, I just exist on an intangible plane that is catered to fleeting ventures... seriously.
For years I've imagined walking El Camino, "the way," which began in the 9th century as a religious pilgrimage to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostello, the burial place of Saint James, located in the northwest region of Spain. It's evolved into a network of paths/trails through Spain and France that still all end up at this site. No longer religious for most pilgrims, it seems to have followed a trajectory kind of like that of crystals over the decades - gripping the attention of a certain breed of people who are looking for something.
I’m assuming that El Camino these days is filled with a bunch of hiking groups of retired buddies and well to do people in life crises and surely some pretentious young characters, but I just love the idea of a bunch of disparate tourists walking miles and miles for days just to sleep every night in junky hostels, all for absolutely no reason but to “achieve spiritual growth" or some ideal (and gaping?) imagining of camaraderie.
The whole thing makes me think of a bunch of meaning-affirming airplane trips: everyone kind of comically confined in something in order reach something else, pretty uncomfortable all the while, having intimate and ridiculous conversations with arbitrarily placed travel mates who will soon be gone with the wind. I'm not walking El Camino this summer (maybe I will do it some day), but it seems indeed a combination of movement and kind of interaction that really appeals to me -- maybe like the cocktail party of travel, if cocktail parties were always fantastic.
Brief background: the idea for this primarily lone trip started with an acute desire to get out of the states for the summer, then became a wish to find a picturesque arts internship in Berlin ideally paired with a restaurant gig of course, and then when that failed progressed into a trip that I labeled "absolute freedom." (I’ll take the time to include a preview: national substace of the first stop: port wine; the stars of the annual race I will attend in Siena: horses; the structure in which I will working and earning 10 euros per hour in cash “and more if I’m good and quick”: an Isle of Mull castle.) And since I will be writing regardless, and since I am one for aggregately incoherent publicity, I figure a blog sort of thing would be a good way to keep and share record of (some of) my activities, revelations etc. And please: comment!
It's almost time to consume myself with infinite fleetingness, infinite worlds. For a long time I've been taken by the idea of different sized infinities (inspired, I think, by the math-y fact of there being infinite numbers between any set of two numbers, but isn't the infinite set between 39 and 8320 larger than the set between 78 and 382?). This is how I'm thinking about all of these places at which I will arrive, in which I will bathe myself, and from which I will depart; everywhere a different size and nature of infinity, where I will encounter a tiny sample of its numbers.
Imminently: break out of the inside of a mountain range to walk on top of it instead -- feel air instead of think of it, be visible and yet so tiny, have the option to perform freedom rather than fester in miles of layers of things unseen by anyone...
