Bewildered Travel

The Sacred Quest for Confusion

Frederick J. Ruf

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813934266
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

Why do we travel? Ostensibly an act of leisure, travel finds us thrusting ourselves into jets flying miles above the earth, only to endure dislocations of time and space, foods and languages foreign to our body and mind, and encounters with strangers on whom we must suddenly depend. Travel is not merely a break from routine; it is its antithesis, a voluntary trading in of the security one feels at home for unpredictability and confusion. In Bewildered Travel Frederick Ruf argues that this confusion, which we might think of simply as a necessary evil, is in fact the very thing we are seeking when we leave home.

Ruf relates this quest for confusion to our religious behavior. Citing William James, who defined the religious as what enables us to "front life, " Ruf contends that the search for bewilderment allows us to point our craft into the wind and sail headlong into the storm rather than flee from it. This view challenges the Eliadean tradition that stresses religious ritual as a shield against the world's chaos. Ruf sees our departures from the familiar as a crucial component in a spiritual life, reminding us of the central role of pilgrimage in religion.

In addition to his own revealing experiences as a traveler, Ruf presents the reader with the journeys of a large and diverse assortment of notable Americans, including Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Mark Twain, Mary Oliver, and Walt Whitman. These accounts take us from the Middle East to the Philippines, India to Nicaragua, Mexico to Morocco--and, in one threatening instance, simply to the edge of the author's own neighborhood. "What gives value to travel is fear, " wrote Camus. This book illustrates the truth of that statement.

ONE Love of Ruptures

I WAS ONCE IN AGRA, IN INDIA, AND WALKING NOT FAR FROM my small hotel, the deep crimson of the Red Fort looming less than a quarter mile away. I’d only been in Agra for a few hours, and I wanted to get a feel for the place. Ahead I saw a crowd of people, and I walked over to see what they found so compelling. I easily looked through the people to what was on the ground in the center of the crowd—a woman with no hands and no feet, trying to eat. The light from that sight etched into my retina for a fraction of a second before I reeled away into the crowded streets, hoping that other sights would rub it away. They didn’t. Nothing has. The sight of such deprivation has lain like a wound in my memory. Every day in India had experiences that ruptured my accustomed surfaces, many of astonishing beauty or kindness and others like that corrosive sight, and yet I loved them all. And wherever I travel, I am seeking more disruption. What is there to love? That is the subject of this chapter and ultimately of this book.

At the beginning of one of his books of travel, Paul Bowles declares, “Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know.”¹ I wonder if everyone who reads that statement feels the same mixture of alarm and excitement as I do. I suspect that most people are as attached to the familiar as I am, as glad to arrive home in the afternoon or evening, and as happy that “home” is still homelike, with nothing radically changed.

I have moved many times in my life, and each time it was fairly wrenching. The most recent move was to the Washington suburbs, and it took at least two years before I felt like it was my town and that I was part of it. For those two years I felt that the neighbors were sizing me up, deciding whether to be neighborly, after all. I felt wary in the stores and on the streets, unable to let down my guard. Today it seems foolish because this town now feels so thoroughly like my home, but I’ve also been here seventeen years now. Bowles wants to be in an unfamiliar place? Not I. I want to be on friendly ground, among family, and in a town that I know. I want to live in a place that’s as familiar as possible, not ever more foreign, as seems to be true for Bowles.

That’s why I feel alarmed by Bowles’s statement—because the familiar is so hard to establish and can be taken away so easily. Soon after my family and I arrived in our town, a house a few streets away developed a gas leak that exploded. I drove past that house several times, horrified by the walls that had buckled out and fallen of the foundation. A year or two later, Washington was struck by violent thunderstorms with vertical winds of such power that hundreds of very large trees were blown down. When I finally reached home that day, I saw dozens of enormous oaks leaning on neighbors’ houses. They looked a bit as though they’d fainted and required some brief support, but for the splintered eaves and gaping roots displaying what opens up or rips when the familiar loses its stability.

For those reasons and more, as soon as my car clears the top of the hill across from my home, I check for the signs of whatever might have disturbed the familiar—gas or lightning, the collapse of a chestnut oak, or the bursting of a pipe. Yes, I want home to be as familiar as possible. I want the kids to run and give me a hug. I want to be able to ind the book I’m currently reading. I want the usual schedule of soccer games and maybe a drink with friends on my porch. But Paul Bowles appears to want none of it.

So why does Paul Bowles want a place to be as different as possible—and why does that prospect paradoxically attract me?

Consider this story: Three young Americans arrive in North Africa just after the end of World War II. It’s an odd time to travel, just as millions of others around the globe are heading home after years of being refugees or combatants. These three wandered in South America during the war, and now, as though in search of landscapes that are even farther away as well as desolate and scarred, they arrive at the North African port. They seem determined to be refugees and to be ever more homeless. They travel, they say, in order to reject what’s not to their liking, and they quickly shun nearly all they encounter, people and places. They stay in no town long, but quickly move on.

One, of course, is the leader, the instigator, and his name, ironically, is Port. Even he hesitates as soon as they stand on the dock. He finds himself wanting to stay on the ship and go on to Istanbul, a place less remote, but he doesn’t. With a kind of fatality, they travel into the interior, into greater and greater emptiness and strangeness until Port is dead and his wife, Kit, is enslaved, and one alone, as the saying goes, returns to tell the tale. “The difference between something and nothing is nothing,” Port remarks enigmatically but ominously.² They have insisted on leaving any place that resembles “something” and moving on toward a very inhospitable nothing.

These are the events in The Sheltering Sky, a book that has attracted readers by the millions. Bernardo Bertolucci made it into a very successful film. Why? Why don’t readers reject it outright—shun it, ignore it? It has sold millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages. It has been called the greatest novel of the postwar period. What is its attraction?

Why, in fact, is there an entire tradition of American travel writers who try to get lost and who seek the strange? I should make my grandest claim clear from the start: in spite of what I have said—quite sincerely—about the importance of home and of the familiar, bewilderment has a powerful fascination for us. It’s in Bowles and Henry Miller, in Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, in the poets Mary Oliver, James Merrill, and Jack Gilbert, in such present-day travelers as Susan Brind Morrow, Mary Morris, and Diane Johnson, and in the philosopher Alphonso Lingis. But most importantly, it has been pervasive among Americans generally over the past hundred-odd years. It’s in most of us. Just like Bowles, we are fascinated with the quest for higher and higher degrees of strangeness, for the circles farther and farther from home. And we search for bewilderment ourselves. I think we crave it. I call it the love of ruptures.

Orientation

This book about travel and its love of ruptures is a religious study, and since that may be an odd perspective for many, I want to explain it. To put it simply, if we want to understand how travel functions so crucially for us, we need to look at its role in our lives. We need to see how travel and our love of its ruptures provide us with orientation in our lives, and that is a topic for a religious study.

We are accustomed to two attitudes toward religion: advocacy and avoidance. If we are religious, our attitude is seldom lukewarm or dispassionate. Religion is said to present ultimates, and those ultimates are demanding. They are thought to be absolutes so they ground, they justify and require. The religious position against abortion or capital punishment, or against racism, or for justice or sexual purity tolerates little if any compromise. Religion is thought of not as a mere surface phenomenon; it comes from the depths, and depths are commanding. We sacrifice to the deeps, casting in the superficial, letting it fall and break, even bleed if it is living. Mere temporal values like comfort or pleasure or even reason must be sacrificed to the depths. Even that which we value most must be sacrificed: love and those we love. If it is really God, then even Isaac, our own child. Emerson admired his great-great-grandfather Rev. Samuel Moody, whose words could “command and compel.” He was a man who would drag his parishioners out of a tavern or denounce them as sinners if they dared to walk out of his church.³

Such strong and often single-minded determination makes others uneasy. We’ve all been at social gatherings where the easy conversation hits a rock of religious conviction, and we try to move on past without anything being bruised and some roll their eyes. We look elsewhere in the room for conviviality for there is none on that unshifting place. Political values, artistic ones, community—everything can break against religious conviction and, hence, it is avoided. If we have religious convictions ourselves, then rock knocks against rock. Ancient truths echo to equally ancient ones.

The religious depths are thought to be something extraordinary, the arduous and rare, the supernatural, the transcendent. Poet Mary Oliver says that the spiritual and artistic take place only in the extraordinary, never indoors, never among comforts.⁴ We think it must involve a God beyond all thought or an event of transhistorical value or a place that is the absolute center. Uniqueness, “beyond-ness,” “utter-ness” are thought to be where the really religious lies.

I would like to suggest that we step back and focus on what these absolutes do—and to suggest that their function is not so extraordinary at all but extremely common: they provide humans with orientation in their lives. In fact, that function is so basic that all humans have it. Orientation is so ordinary that we don’t realize how crucial it is, like gravity, and like gravity it keeps us on the ground.

Its value became vivid to me when I taught high school and had a student who seemed to be chronically disoriented in the spatial sense. We go to the supermarket—or to the kitchen, for that matter—and find it without needing to search because we have spatial orientation. We don’t even need to think. And if there is a more difficult place to find, a place we go to less commonly, our orientation gets us there, too. Where’s Joanna’s basketball game this evening? How do I get to Sligo Middle School? Oh, yes, out University and then, somewhere past Colesville Road, a left, then a ways beyond Sligo Creek Parkway on the right. We do it with compass directions—north, south, east, west—or with landmarks or major routes. However it is done, orientation in our surroundings is crucial to our functioning. Ultimately, it keeps us alive since we need to find not only basketball games but our dinners and our homes.

My student, David, was tall, awkward, slightly befuddled, somewhat unkempt, utterly sincere—and quite thoroughly disoriented. He could not manage to find my PE class from the locker room—a sixty-second walk down a driveway, across a field, and through some trees to the football field. Twenty minutes into the PE period, David would wander up. He’d found us, I think, by trial and error. It’s possible, I’m sure, that David spent the twenty minutes hanging out by the parking lot, smoking cigarettes, or that he hated playing touch football and just stayed in the locker room as long as he could, but I don’t think so. He was just chronically lost.

On a field trip to Amish Country, the ninth grade and I sat on a bus outside the hotel for a long time, waiting for David. I went upstairs—not a complicated route—and found him between his door and the elevator, walking in circles, unable to begin the journey of just sixty feet. I think he lacked the critical ability to imagine how to move from here to there. I sometimes wonder what’s become of him. I hope there’s someone who helps him find his way to work and then back home. For without spatial orientation—well, potentially we could die. Without it, we don’t eat and don’t have shelter. Without it, we can’t move far from home, and our physical surroundings are constantly foreign and strange.

But far more crucial than spatial orientation is orientation in our lives—is having a sense of how we get where we’re going in our lives. For we’re going somewhere in our lives, and we require a sense of direction to move there, wherever “there” is. I think back to when I was about five, the middle child of three, living in a borough of New York, my father a teacher of music and my mother exiled from the South. What brought me from there to here? How did I find my way to the courses I teach every week, to the family in the Washington suburbs, to the PC on which I’m writing this book? There are numberless external factors, of course—just as there were for David those mornings in Connecticut—but there is also a sense of orientation that I possessed that helped direct my choices and bring me here.

In order to be oriented either in the spatial or the “life” sense, we need to have an answer to three questions: Who are we? Where are we? And where are we going? The answers to those questions will determine our orientation. Each of them is a vast question with no single answer for any individual. We never formulate answers explicitly. But we do have a complex of senses of who and where we are and where we’re going, complexes that are in constant motion, just as a gyroscope is, and that, perhaps, provide us with direction in a similar way.

I had a student once who was raised by her family to think that she was the nice one and her brother was the smart one. There’s quite an orientation provided by such a sense of identity. Many of us are told something similar, and it strongly influences us to make the “nice” choices, to choose the nice friends, to pursue a nice career. The effect on our orientation is subtle and pervasive. This particular student was involved in an awful tragedy. Her parents were zealous members of a religious sect and, in a test of faith, barricaded themselves in their home and fasted. After a number of days, my student realized that her brother was dying and insisted on getting help. Her parents asked her if she had faith in God. So she stayed—and her brother died. She was the nice one, she told me.

And what of the child who is told that he always screws up? The child who senses that it is up to her to keep her family happy? What of the child who is physically or sexually abused? The possibilities are endless, but everyone develops a sense—a number of senses—of who they are, and their movement through life is powerfully affected by that aspect of their orientation.

I had another student who wrote an essay about his mother’s devotion to a younger brother who lay dying of cancer over several years. The subtext of his essay was his own deprivation, as caring for the other son completely absorbed his mother, and my student’s own nourishment dried up. What became of his orientation in life? “Where” is he? In a world where mothers must leave their own sons for a more important commitment, a place without complaint, for who could begrudge a dying brother? Where is he going in his life? What decisions will he make? Who will he fall in love with? What sort of work will he do? Where will he be in five years, in ten, in twenty? I’m not suggesting a rigid determinism. There is not one orientation that results from a brother’s death. He might see all women as likely to withdraw their care, or he might realize how much care matters and pursue it instead of other attributes in a woman. But the orientation that is composed, in part, of his sense of “where” he is will shape where he “goes” in his life. It will create his orientation.

Religions have formed our orientations traditionally and historically. In fact, shaping orientation has been the most important function of a religion. It is religion that has told humans not only who they are but who they really are. They are children of God. They are made in God’s image. They are sinners. Religions talk of souls or the atman or about no atman. Religions have told humans where they are really: in a place of trial, a fallen world, a vale of tears. And religions have told humans where they are really going: the kingdom of God, the afterlife, salvation, damnation. As Jacques Barzun puts it, it made about as much sense in the European Middle Ages to ask what your faith was as asking today what your physics is.⁵ Faith—and its definite sense of who you were, where you were, and where you were going—determined a person’s orientation until recent centuries.

But at least for the past four centuries and perhaps for far longer, our orientations have been formed not simply from religions. And that is the importance of “ordinary” religion and what is sometimes called “implicit” religion. We need to be oriented no less today than previously, and what composes that orientation is more likely to be quite ordinary and often not even noticed. I’m reminded of what T. S. Eliot considered the religiously significant aspects of culture: he listed “Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century gothic churches and the music of Elgar.”⁶ The boiled cabbage is what I love, for there’s certainly nothing arduous or rare about it, nothing elevated, nothing ethereal, nothing transcendent. We are oriented by what’s on our table. Is it vegan? Venison we hunted ourselves? The meatloaf my mother perfected? What we take into our mouths may be religiously crucial. So might be a song, a photograph, a film. A ninth-grade English teacher invited to dinner who praised my sense of humor. My father’s strong defense of my mother when she was insulted by a store clerk. My sister lying in a St. Vincent’s Hospital and dying of leukemia. Those events orient me, telling me who I really am or really ought to be, and they function more powerfully than reciting the Baltimore Catechism in Saint Boniface Elementary School or Father Fee lifting the host at 9 a.m. Mass or the Stations of the Cross lining the little stone church in Sea Cliff, New York.

Needing and finding orientation is not remarkable. What constantly surprises me is how often we want to be disoriented, often when we leave home. Diane Johnson tells a story of tobogganing down an icy slope in Switzerland—at night. It’s incredibly stupid, of course, and she knows it but hurtles down that mountain anyway. It’s Europe—“cozy old Europe,” she calls it—so as close to home as Johnson can be without actually being home. Yet the place is still eerily strange (there are window displays of “sinister steel dental implements” and mock-stalkings by people in Mickey Mouse masks), and Johnson suggests that has something to do with her taking part in the crazy sledding adventure, very much against her better judgment. In the strange we d...