The Psychology of the Traveler

Siena, by Marta Steele

Being gone, the distance ravels round and arms,

What may be, is…

I wrote many years ago in Greece, a summer of self-styled odyssey-ing and self-conscious imitation of Ezra Pound’s educated wandering around Europe; note the affection of a dangling participle, symptomatic of my extreme but self-conscious and purposefully displaced stupor and disorientation. Sitting there in Syntagma Square (Athens’s answer to Time Square, especially on New Year’s Eve) that day in 1975, baking in the midsummer heat when all sensible people were at home taking siestas (an art form I eschewed the entire summer according to the “keep your eyes open when you’re en voyage” principle), I realized that I could tell anyone back home absolutely anything I wanted to and they’d have no way on earth to verify it. As a matter of fact, little fabrication turned out to be necessary, but the black hole of possibility opened up to me that day; moreover: anything that occurred there, even purchasing a loaf of packaged bread (an act of sacrilege where there are so many wonderful bakeries) takes on exotic overtones. From this mellow perspective, I think of the time I realized that no church could turn me away, nor synagogue, and exploited that possibility to the fullest. I always justify this sort of “travel” as a writer, an identity that has opened all sorts of windows for me. We are confined by so many useless preconceptions that so limit our perspectives. Traveling… helps.

Venice, by Marta Steele

I travel far more tamely these days than I used to, but I still enjoy the ways to and from places far more than BEING THERE. Go figure that one. The climb up Mt. Olympus was so exquisite, the actual summit so boring, bare, colorless. A stone surface and a little stand with a sign-in book and a lackadaisical Greek flag. The wit of the day was someone else, a German who had earlier queried in this book, “Where are the gods?” I could think of nothing to top that but did wonder to myself how they would ever have chosen this place, but of course they can create paradise of any wilderness and may have been inhabiting that same plain on a different dimension, laughing at our bewilderment. I never rule out that scientific likelihood, especially in the context of discussions of how limited our five senses really are. As much as we see, how little it must be compared to the ultimate realities, whatever they are. In my earlier adulthood (my college years), I also greatly preferred the ways en route anywhere, but then, because my destiny was such a huge question mark, a behemoth burden, that I was always greatly relieved at the chance to hand over, at least for a few hours, that wretched weight to someone else. In airplanes I was particularly helpless and therefore least responsible for my fate - what a relief, even for a nervous flier. Later, in my wanderings around Greece, for instance, the question evolved more abstractly into contrasted stillness and motion, with motion the greatly preferred alternative. Perhaps beneath the road to the museum I knew the earth held so much more than whatever we’ve already discovered; perhaps I preferred the outdoors to the silence of the glass cases and polished floors; perhaps my imagination was more fired by nature than culture…who knows? As much as I wanted to be anywhere, getting there was always a letdown and I myself was let down at my own disappointed arrivals always. Why couldn’t I be happier to arrive?

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