Missions and Quests

All my conscious life (since I ran off one Saturday morning in childhood in instinctive response to the bell of the ice-cream cart on a distant neighborhood street) I have felt the irresistible urge of quests—going in search of essential missing parts of myself, my story, in far-off places.

Since that first occasion, the objects of my quests have changed, but I have been continually roaming, like Tennyson’s wistful Ulysses, with a hungry heart—falling in love with distant things and places.

It’s all to do with longing and belonging.  Things that belong to me, in some mysterious primordial or premonitory way, that I long to have back and must go out in search of. 

This quote from Dewey tells it perfectly:

The epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins.  There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it that belong to it de jure, if not de facto; that must, that is, be taken possession of if life is to continue.

     (John Dewey, Art as Experience)

Often, I’ve learned, the going is itself your reward, more than the external object that set it off—which sometimes isn’t obtained after all.  You don’t always come out where you expected or wanted—at times indeed far from it; but if you let the journey take you, as it will, often as not you end with something more genuinely yours than if everything had gone accordingly to plan.  The Venice you find under a freak snowstorm is more miraculous than that in the glossy travel brochures.  And if Venice is full, completo, and you have to go perhaps to Ferrara instead . . . Who has after all been to Ferrara besides you?  What of the blue bottle you find in a window there, or the castle of the Medicis showing itself for a moment through a sudden opening in a red brick wall?

Of course the real desire wasn’t the ice-cream itself, to have ice-cream, but in the almost gypsy travels of the cart down neighboring but namelessly foreign streets where I’d never been before—oh maybe in the car, passing, passively, but never by myself and of my own volition (which was the strangest thing of all about that day, to find that in myself, that waywardness, the child who had always been unquestioningly obedient), on an otherwise ordinary Saturday morning while my father was shaving as usual in the confines of the little back bathroom and my mother was at the grocery store or delivering altar flowers or someplace, ordinary too.

I went off then just as unquestioningly to give myself up to the urgent dangerous promise of the bell, the unbearable mysteries of dry-ice, magically smoking, the intricacies of ice crystal formations, like stalactites in a cavern, aching cold in summer, hoary as Merlin, hoar-frosted—oh, but why bother explaining?  As I didn’t, however much trouble I was in.  It was, simply, forever, irresistible.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, San Juan Capistrano Mission