Days like this, part 2

Before you read this post, please read part 1, below, which is about the act of traveling. Done? Okay, good. Now we can move from journeys to destinations. Or rather interim destinations which are themselves waypoints in the larger journey.

I've stayed in three towns so far -- Eustis, Decatur, and Paducah. No two are anything like each other. My camera is full of Sunday's pictures from bucolic Eustis and its neighbor Mt. Dora, both rural communities in central Florida where tractor supply shops are cultural hubs. Those pictures mostly do not do the area justice. The horizon over Lake Dora, for instance, is far more beautiful than a camera can capture, at least in the hands of an amateur. But here are a couple snapshots that did turn out well.


Snap! The great heron of Eustis, commemorated in fountain statuary. Does it represent ibis-headed Thoth and my symbolic entry into the underworld of my own psyche? No, it's just a bird, but thank you for giving me so much credit. That's downtown Eustis in the background. That's all of downtown Eustis.


Snap! Olivia's Cafe, Eustis hotspot and beacon for open mic night devotees. My hostess Alex and I were entertained by live performers on the cramped stage in front of the bar more or less throughout our evening in the cafe. I sipped ginger peach tea that you taste with the roof of your mouth instead of your tongue -- you have to taste it to understand -- and taught Alex chess.


Snap! Here she is after her narrow defeat. During the early game both of my bishops got exchanged for both of her knights, leading to fun situations where she learned the potency of her long-range alternate-color bishops as well as that of my leaping, forking knights. I think bishops are probably her favorite piece now.


Snap! Alex with her favorite chicken -- one of many her family farms. She also has a dog, two cats, a beehive, and a cockatiel. All are adorable, even the bees. Alex says her dad fancies himself a "gentleman farmer" (though he's actually an accountant). Whether that's just his fancy or not, the hens' brown eggs are real, and they are delicious. Bubbles the cockatiel also lays eggs, but I guess you don't eat cockatiel eggs. Alex worries about Bubbles depleting her calcium.


Snap! The roof of the Donnelly House, a sightseeing spot (and Masonic lodge) on the National Register of Historic Places. The Masons are big in central Florida, apparently. I think of the Masons the way I think of the Mafia -- once influential, now moribund -- but in Mt. Dora, at least, being a Mason (Masonry?) is still a way of life for some. These are the things you learn when you have a host.


Snap! The Mt. Dora historical museum, once used as a combination firehouse and jail. One jail cell is visible in the back right. (I have a picture of myself in jail, too.) That hand-cranked record player still works. I got a personal tour by virtue of Alex's serendipitous employment with this very museum, which is normally closed on Sundays.

Things I didn't get pictures of: the church sign in Mt. Dora reading "Life is fragile. Handle with prayer." The alpacas farmed down the street from Alex's house. The moment when Alex presented me with an extremely comfortable belt, whose infinitely adjustable metal buckle is helping to hold my pants up even now. (I swear to God those pants fit when I packed them. They got looser as the day went on until I could hardly stand up.) The aging, slightly awkward guy who ran a roadside boiled peanut stand -- another cultural phenomenon I had no consciousness of until Eustis. And much else. It's amazing how much Alex and I crammed into my short time in Eustis!

Next post: the other waypoints!

Change comes from within

No real change on the practical front today. This week's been spent dealing with exigencies and, when the exigencies have died down enough for me to notice I'm stressed out, destressing with a jigsaw puzzle. So this seems like as good a time as any to talk about the pertinence to my trip of what is probably the best-selling novel you've never heard of (at least of the last century of Western literature): a Brazilian story called The Alchemist.

I know! I hadn't heard of it either until a few months ago. But Wikipedia says it's sold more copies than The Da Vinci Code and has been translated into sixtysome languages from the originial Portuguese. Mind you, I was suspicious; I had heard that the book was as much philosophy and self-help as literary fiction, so I was afraid that The Alchemist would turn out to be the unholy offspring of The Secret and Atlas Shrugged, a ridiculous pseudo-religious tract disguised by a thin veneer of plot.

And in a way that's what it is... but it turns out to be pretty darned good anyway. Atlas Shrugged and The Secret are each annoying because they beat you over the head with their dogmas of moralism and magical thinking respectively; The Alchemist, on the other hand, is basically just a self-conscious folk tale, as though Joseph Campbell had sat down to write a novella illustrating the point of the hero myth. What's most central to the story is the idea of a "personal legend." It's not quite the same thing as a destiny, though it's close; it's more like a dream specific to you, the pinnacle of your potential in your own mind, which you can reach or not depending on whether you can muster the courage to face the obstacles that await you, the strength to overcome them, and the wisdom to learn from them. There is a pseudo-religious gloss on all of it, but I take it in the spirit of the folk tale; after all, perhaps it's true that when a person has the courage to accept the call to the journey and sets his sights on achieving his "legend," the world takes on a new significance that could almost be called religious.

Is Lover's Lanes a personal legend? Sure it is. It's a journey of the hero in the best Campbellian sense, as I suggested yesterday: a dangerous voyage with uncertain risks and rewards, which in the end must be undertaken not to gain anything in particular but for its own sake. I'm following my bliss -- or at least I hope this will prove to be my bliss. It might be better to say I'm following my gut. And while I doubt I'll find the secret to eternal life along the way as the medieval alchemists hoped, I might at least find the secret to living well.

A Song of Air and Fire

I was talking about Lover's Lanes with my dad the other night. He understood the part about wanting to travel, but wasn't sure why I wanted to collect love stories. Why do you need a theme?, he asked.

Really there are two answers to that question, but I can sum them both up with one diversion into Tarot. There are four suits in a Tarot deck, two feminine and two masculine. The masculine suits are Rods and Swords. (If you're not sure why these are masculine suits, consider enrolling in a course on Freud.) Rods and Swords embody two different ways of "being a man." Rods are about energy, adventure, even animalism, like the magic wand of a magician; their element is fire, and they show it in their passion and love of novelty. These are the mountain climbers, the bungee jumpers. These are the guys who pick up and drive across the country to collect love stories on a moment's notice.

But I'm not a Rod. I'm a Sword. Swords are about finesse and careful consideration. They approach life with the perfectionism and discipline of a fencer honing his craft. Curiosity, sure -- but in contrast with the exuberant experiential curiosity of a Rod, a Sword's curiosity is intellectual and is about patterns rather than experiences. Swords are the suit of air -- not in the sense of freedom but in the sense of coolness and living on a higher plane than the brute material. Swords think; Rods act.

But Swords are also the suit most prone to make problems for itself. I certainly have. I think too much. It makes me anxious and depressed. I insist too much on everything going according to plan; I have trouble living in the moment. I am a Sword, but I am broken.

The first reason I'm collecting love stories, not just traveling, is that I'm a Sword. I need structure. I need to have a reason for what I'm doing, a purpose guiding my blade (or my Honda). What's more, the act of studying or cataloguing anything, like love, appeals to the Sword in me. It makes me more willing to do something Rodlike, like go on an adventure.

Which is good, because motive number two for collecting love stories -- and the trip as a whole, really -- is to become more comfortable with my Rod side. The future is a terrifying place sometimes. If I could just approach it with the anticipation and glee of a Rod rather than the skepticism and defensiveness of a Sword, maybe I'd have less trouble facing it. And maybe, if nothing else comes of my journey, maybe I'll learn that not knowing what town I'll be in tomorrow night or when I'll find my next willing subject or even whether my voyage will succeed -- in short, the uncertainty of the future -- is cause, not for panic, but for excitement!

Plus I just really want to hear people's love stories. There's that too.

Civic duty

Fifteen minutes ago I liked the name "Honda Civic" almost as little as "Honda Fit." Civic is such a stuffy word. It makes you think of the drab buildings where they hold traffic court. Or paying your taxes. It is not a good name for a car.

But then -- soaking in the spa and staring at the moon, which cliched as it sounds is when I get all my craziest ideas -- I thought about the root of the word. Civic is from civilization. Civilization is just a bunch of people and the relationships between them. My journey is about one particular type of those relationships, so my journey is intimately tied to civilization.

And that in turn got me thinking about Freud. That son of a bitch wrote a little book called "Civilization and Its Discontents" decades ago. I read it last year. Part of his idea, this half-crazy genius of the psyche, is that what's most basic in us are the creative and destructive impulses, and that part of the creative impulse is the libido. So we all want to go out there and find someone to focus our libido on. The problem is that we need food and water and other stuff, and if we try to take care of all of that on our own we don't have much time left for sex/cuddling. We form civilizations to help make it easier to satisfy our biological needs so we can devote the remainder of our time to our libidinal ones. But now there's a new problem: civilization requires upkeep (we go to work), which requires time, which again is time we're not spending having sex/cuddling. What's more, that damn destructive impulse keeps threatening to tear everything down. So civilization requires us to restrain our destructive impulse, which is where Freud got the idea of the superego. And that superego polices all kinds of things, including our attitudes towards our own relationships.

The point is that civilization, for Freud, is all about relationships. Civilization is why we can devote time to our relationships, and it's also the principal reason relationships are so complicated. Which touches me, in spite of Freud's pedantry about the whole thing. And I bet a lot of the stories I hear on this trip will have as much to do with the civilization their characters live in as with the characters themselves.

So now I am thrilled that I may be making my journey in a Honda Civic and hope my own superego agrees that it's the right car for the trip.