It is a particularly brilliant November 1, which of course is at odds with the very meaning of the day, heralding for those of the northern hemisphere the coming of winter and for me New Years. November 1 is my personal New Years. I sit here, with the mass of my life flowing through my consciousness, all those gorgeous elements, Irish, Minnesotan, French, German. I am Northern European through and through. I have nothing of the exotic green and little flashes of lurid color that characterizes this place. It is all alien to me. This is all about land. If this were Iceland I could be at home. But in this backwards, menacingly and disorientingly bizarre place, no. No.
But let’s drag this back again to the possible payback of living in a state of perpetual disorientation, a state of physical and psychological exile. Such a life fills one with a permanent sense of anger, but maybe a productive anger. A refusal to accept anything and a belligerent attitude towards everything. We exiles are eternally vigilant, with adrenalin coursing endlessly through our circulatory systems.
Living in exile forces one to confront and consolidate one’s own mythology. I have re-established contact with the endless Wim Wenders sky of the Midwest, the trip across, across, across what exactly? The limitless space of the plains. Catching a glimpse on the horizon of the bright lights of a city. I have reclaimed the prairies, which used to seem like an endless rugburn. I have also embraced the sorrow of my national past, the absolute horror of the crimes we perpetrated. I have integrated slavery into the narrative of our past, which means that I have recognized how absolutely irreconcilable our foundational values of freedom are with the reality of what we did and continue to do. I will not back down on that. But in recognizing the falseness of the social compact I have listened again to the voices of the founding fathers, and I feel their distress as they hit up against that intransigent Southern-white-guy block ready to defend slavery to the end. I hate and love in equal measure Thomas Jefferson, planter, elitist, true hypocrite, pretending to be a man of the people. His black-white vision of morality, mistrust of government, stubborn desire to dismantle, his dirty politics; and yet, his despairing fear to look at where his ideology led because the result was too horrific, nothing less than the end of everything. He held on, like we do sometimes, to civilization, because we just have too much to lose. I despise his modern counterparts with every breath in my body, and yet I understand their obsessive need to turn their eyes away. And just as I hate them, I love John Adams, despite his need for approval, even as I love the contingent of American ready to fight oppression of all kinds, because after all who is going to do good unless they are petted and fed approval?
In exile I have come to appreciate the intelligence and deplore the populism of us in a way that I could not have otherwise. I have a safe place here from which to utterly loathe vulgarity.
In exile I have a place to develop as a scholar. There is trade-off here; I am surrounded by mediocrity unrelieved by the flashes of brilliance one finds at home. But I have time. Mediocre myself, I need to be around brilliance to develop ideas. But without the time afforded by this easy easy culture, I would not have developed at all. Maybe the paradoxes are clearer, too.
And, finally, being here keeps me on the move, physically, which is the necessary correlative of mentally. I have to travel more, much more, than I would otherwise, and with every trip comes a portion of knowledge.
