There was supposed to be an entry about Spring Break, and about London. The draft post is sitting there in probably its fourth incarnation now. It’s still sitting there because it’s not saying what I want it to say.
Instead, the words kept being about something else. Like, say, Ithaca by Constantine P. Cavafy.
Ithaca was shared with me by a very good friend some dozen years ago. Under what context I forget now. But to this day, whenever I set foot in a new part of the world I think to myself, hah, I made it. In Ithaca, these would’ve been my Phoenician markets and Egyptian cities… But more and more, the last line of the poem makes me think different: “that you should understand already what these Ithacas mean”.
These Ithacas? What’s with the plural? Hm… So, change of perspective in recent years — I no longer think of Ithaca as a someday-someplace thing. Ithaca is when I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb– no wait, wrong reality. Oh yea, Ithaca is when I learned to stop worrying about what others thought you were supposed to be doing.
If I did what others thought I was supposed to do I would have more than likely, to say nothing of where I’d be living and what kind of job I’d be holding down, be visiting the Tower of London in a theme park in Shenzhen; I wouldn’t be in London, looking at the Tower of London and getting drenched, while walking Tower Bridge, in a storm that was so quick and fierce it felt like getting sandblasted. How can one even begin to compare the experience of that to seeing a facsimile completely removed from context in a different continent?
My mother has an anecdote she likes to bore us with every so often: her scrooge-like bosshad once declared, “No need to travel lah, watch tv can already.” To which she responded (very wittyly too, she would tell you), “Ya lah, you also no need to eat lah, see pictures can already.”
Pictures, images, and miniatures only tell you so much of the story. The rest is for you to write your own. This entry is 3 months late. With any luck, the rest of this summer will be more productive for fatuitous thoughts, and more Ithacas to follow.
