What Eric's Trip Means To Me

Originally, Eric and I were planning to travel the world when we retired, despite the fact that I had uncertainty about a year in transit through foreign environments. My stomach is so weak that I always end up taking Cipro when I am abroad. Often, I  am clenched in anxiety that I will vomit in an inopportune spot—for instance-- in the middle of a long day bobbing on a ferry in the Mekong Delta, or in a shared taxi zooming through the unpaved alleys of Accra. Worse than that by far would be spumes of uncontrollable and shameful diarrhea soaking my stylish, linen travel pants, and no available toilet. All of these fears create a second reality, lurking ominously beneath the beautiful temples and exotic, spicy food. Will it happen? Will it? What if I end up in a hospital, an unsterilized IV dripping parasites into my vulnerable arm? No, I am not intrepid though I yearn to be! Often, when I finally board the airplane, I feel a sense of triumph, that I did not get sick, did not die, can see my home again. And yet, I do so love to travel. I cried when we stepped from the airplane onto the hot tarmac of Ghana’s international airport. I was finally in Africa! This ambivalence about travel is a conundrum that pains me.

Often, when I travel, I am mildly homesick, and miss the doggies, longing for their heavy heads on my thighs as I sleep, their fetid breath condensing on my pajamas during the night, dampening them but making me feel a deep sense of belonging and connection. When I wake during the night, I recognize the quality of the darkness as being specific to home, and can easily guess what time it is by the silence, or the blush of bruised purple permeating the early dawn light, letting me know that I am home, blessedly home, the three windows in the bedroom predictable and comforting.

I love my red chair, worn and reliable in the corner of the living room, and can travel inwards all day, soaring through the vast terrain of self without ever moving a muscle. Nonetheless, I applied for a sabbatical, to be abroad, with Eric, during the Spring 2020 school semester. I wanted to write about Southeast Asian artists in Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. My hope was to actually live in those countries rather than to visit, establishing a home and a routine and an immunity to street food, so that I could be at ease and let the beauty of other cultures saturate and uplift my tremulous soul.  I received the sabbatical, but then rejected it, lured by the unexpected opportunity of being the Chair of the Department of Visual Art instead. Why would I want to do that hellish job, rather than traveling? Certainly, it had to be more than the soothing proximity of the bathroom to the office I would inhabit. Why send Eric to journey alone, when I could have been with him? I didn’t understand my own choice. 

Thus, I have been trying to figure out what Eric’s trip means to me, because I chose to stay at home. He is home now too, after traveling from August 19th until December 19th. He went to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, the Republic of Georgia, Turkey, Hungary, Israel, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Portugal and Boston. Soon again, in February, he will leave to travel throughout Southeast Asia. Why am I not anguished to stay at home, doing a job anyone would deem banal? Why am I supportive of his wanderlust? What does he seek as he moves through space and time? What do I seek as I sit stock still, and write? These are questions that interest me, because in answering them, I may come into knowledge of myself as a middle-aged woman, and see a path forward through a thicket of uncertainty that has begun to thwart my belief in achievement and ambitious endeavor.

This year, I grappled with the fact that I am not a famous artist, nor shall I ever be. And Eric is not the CEO of a large company, nor shall he ever be. We are both younger siblings, conflict averse and sensitive. We are introverts, though Eric thinks that my bubbly persona is proof of an extroverted nature (it is not, though I do fear loneliness, more than any other feeling). We have each seen parents die, sitting by hospital beds in alienating and sterile rooms while they labored towards oblivion. We have grieved them, each in our own way, me, waking nightly for over a year with one word caught in my throat and hot tears pouring from my eyes, “Mama!” Eric, by going to the gym, and often driving mile after mile listening to podcasts, thinking about the meaning of things. Yet, neither of us knows the meaning of things. It is very hard to know anything at all, having seen a parent die, because seeing a parental corpse in a bed, devoid of some inchoate but now very absent animating spirit, forces the realization that one day that corpse will be you. So, what matters? What is of absolute value now?

At Yale, during the first scalding semester of study towards an M.F.A. in Painting, I took a survey of the Old Testament at the Divinity School. Three times a week, I walked uphill, up, up, above the tormented city of New Haven, riven as it was by racial tensions and economic disparity. I would stop to look at things that were beautiful—porticos on old buildings, red, sticky berries on ornamental autumn bushes. The school was painted white and the class took place in the airy chapel. I really loved that class, because it was about the meaning of things. It emphasized that fact that none of us know the meaning of things. That is why the Bible was written. To try to figure life out—through stories.

My teacher was a woman named Ellen Davis, and her lectures were riveting. She had a radical, literary and unconventional view of the world that suffused her scholarship on the Old Testament. On weekends, I studied for the class with my friend Ramon. We met in a McDonald’s in a part of New Haven that was mostly African-American and laughed and studied and argued and ate terrible hamburgers. He became a minister and moved back to Alabama. I stuck it out in art school and became an artist. I don’t know if the doubts that I felt about making art ever disrupted his vocation to be a preacher. I do know that I almost transferred to the divinity school but I didn’t have the nerve to do so, because my identity was merged with being a painter, because I was Jewish, because I wanted to be a famous artist and the Yale School of Art is a first step in realizing that spurious ambition.

Now, both of my parents, who cared so deeply about art, and were so ambivalent about Jewishness, are deceased, and I am free, in some ways, to explore other ways to be in the world. Yet, I do not know what I want. But I do know that when I am in the studio, and I have to make decisions, and destroy months of intensive labor to unify the whole of a composition, and rely solely on my imagination to lead me from a feeling to an action to an object, I know that at these times I am intrepid. Just as Eric is intrepid when he navigates a night train from Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan, alone in the world, but guided by a feeling that he has that he must do this act now, travel and see and think, before he is too old to absorb the potential that the world offers.

So, how do Eric and I want to be in the world, now that we are middle-aged, and in many ways, unremarkable (unless everyone is remarkable, which I would like to believe). Eric wants, I think, to notice everything. He looks closely at bridges and buildings and engines and art. He looks less closely at human faces, the gesture a hand makes in confessing a secret, the jolt of recognition on a dog’s face after a long time separated from its human. These are the things I notice. Eric wants to be present in sensual reality, to feel the wind from the bay, taste the scallop’s pure simplicity, to be present in the saline uplift of the Dead Sea. I think he wants to experience as much as he can, while he is here on planet earth, and to have that be enough to give his life meaning.

And what do I want, as I sit in my office and run an art department at a midwestern university? I am not sure. I do want to make learning about making art be accessible to all people, regardless of financial capacity. I do want to be kind and attentive to the soul of each human being who crosses my path, though it is difficult to do. But I also yearn to know more than what is tangible. I want to know what I am supposed to be doing here! And, for some reason, I feel I will find an answer to this unanswerable need more by sitting in my office at work, listening to the often tattered needs of other human beings, than by traveling to far-away kingdoms. I  know I am afraid to do what Eric is doing, and feel tremendously proud of him. But I also know that I too, am seeking something, am traveling. I just don’t know where, or how long I will be on the journey.