He
was the best person I knew who never actually existed—the avatar I
couldn’t become, my alter ego, my patron saint or, if you like, my spirit
guide. They’re all metaphors; pick one. I think you’ll also have someone
like him—not him, of course, not likely, but like him—if you don’t
already. I’ve seen your imagination up close. You’re a bright child. You
have a strong, wandering mind.
He wasn’t my
imaginary friend. That’s a particular talent I never had. Some children
can manage the whole creation. They can generate a friend entirely to
their satisfaction. A few of them go on to create enormous narratives,
even epics around those friends. The Bronte sisters, so I’ve read,
co-created their own imaginary civilization, and I’ve encountered cases
of similar, endless works in progress by both children and adults. Some
of them are locked, inscrutable kingdoms, accessible only to their
authors. I suspect the Voynich Manuscript of being one. There’s
even a lively debate among researchers about how healthy these imaginary
worlds are, when and if they ever go too far.
My
imagination could never go far enough. It knew where it longed to go,
the kind of character it wanted to be in its undiscovered world, but it
couldn’t get close without props, the wonder tales and fantasies already
written out by others. And although those could be entrancing, could absorb the
weeks and hours, they were never quite sufficient. My imagination
wanted to go, really go, to get lost on its own, to wander indefinitely,
but like the little kid trying to run away from home only to hide out
for a few hours and then sheepishly come back for dinner, my imagination
never escaped as far as it imagined it would.
The
figure I wanted to be was the Wanderer, which was either ironic or obvious, or both,
given I could hardly walk. From an early age, I had an exact notion of
his core mythology, what I wanted him to do, what I wanted myself, as
him, to do. He was to set out as a solitary figure, stoic and
resourceful, exploring or exiled in a dark, mysterious world. His world
was a dream world, as I thought of it, taken seriously.
Literal
dreams, that is, have a number of features that have fascinated me since
I was quite young. They can be brightly lit up close or momentarily
display brilliantly illuminated landscapes, but there’s almost always a
surrounding dark. I expect that’s because the sleeping brain is
generating the world of the dream and to fill out all the edges with
brightly lit detail is too much work. So dreams tend to shadows, for a
start. Also, and perhaps for the same reason, in a dream it’s impossible
to read much text. There are books and signs, but they’re generally
illegible or meaningless except for a few phrases occasionally, gnomic utterances. There’s
not as much talking in dreams as in waking life. And dreams are
notoriously unpredictable in progress, with characters blurring into
each other, laws of society and physics flaunted, and wholly unexpected
events. This last aspect is the one most overemphasized in popular
depictions of dreams as wildly hallucinatory and fantastically rococo parades,
when actual dreams, as far as I remember them, are more often moody, dim, and simply strange. The moodiness
mostly stems from another feature of dreaming, the staggeringly strong
emotions in them, both delightful and frightful, often attached to
happenings that, when described upon waking, seem trivial. How many
times have you had a profound nightmare that seemed a bit silly when you
told it to someone, or a dreamed a profound insight that you woke to
realize was banal? All these things intrigued me. I wanted to be able to
explore, awake, the world of dreams.
Besides
the obvious problem, given that one’s brain doesn’t perform dreams well
when it’s awake, this longing of mine ran up against the dilemma that
one aspect of dream wandering I desperately wanted for my fantasy
Wanderer and/as myself was exactly the element of surprise. And when one
invents one’s own surprises, well . . . It felt a bit like opening all
the windows of a haunted house amusement ride one morning to let in the
sunlight while touching up the paint on the motorized skeletons. Eerie,
maybe, even in the light, a little weird, but work to do and hardly
fantastic anymore.
So I looked for the
experience of the Wanderer prefabricated for me in books. There are
countless wanderers in stories, and they come in many, often overlapping
forms—the pilgrim, the simpleton, the exile, the marked man, the chosen
one, the monk, the naturalist, the tracker, the ghost, the flâneur.
There are wanderers, imaginary and historical, so famous and distinctive
that they can only even be described by their proper names: Odysseus,
Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Childe Harold, Xuanzang.
But
although I enjoyed my vicarious adventures with all of these and
fiercely admired a few of them, especially the more heroic, solitary,
fictional ones, it was always the label “Wanderer” itself that most
powerfully appealed to me and most thoroughly disappointed me. I was
thrilled one day in high school to find a volume on the library shelves
with a brooding cover illustration of an empty path into a dark forest,
titled The Wanderer, by Alain-Fournier. That evening, I was so
eager to read it that I passed on the excitement of watching a World
Series game with the rest of my dorm and slipped down to the quiet
basement instead to be alone with my mysterious adventure. It was a good
tale, as I remember, complete with teenagers, romance, magic, and an
ancient estate. But the story wasn’t really about The Wanderer, or even much wandering per se, and when I saw that the original French title had been Le Grand Meaulnes, I felt swindled. For that I had missed a great baseball game.
I
was more thrilled still, as a freshman in college, fortunate to find
myself in Professor Margaret Doody’s survey of early and Medieval
English literature, when I spotted a thousand-year old Anglo Saxon poem titled
“The Wanderer” on our syllabus. Doody was the sort of professor who
started the semester by launching straight into a booming recitation of
the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, in Middle English, without introductions for either herself or us. That night in my room, I skipped over the more familiar assignment in Beowulf, as fascinating to me as it was, to go first to “The Wanderer” poem.
This
was more what I had dreamed of dreaming myself, at least initially: the exile
with trouble in mind, no one to confide in, wandering among the ruins of
a lost world. But the poem was a lyrical lament, curiously static
despite the scope of it, and moved swiftly to a coda of consolation in
faith, without any narrated events. Then I spotted in the copious
footnotes that the original manuscript had no title. “The Wanderer” was
just a title awarded it by an early nineteenth-century translator, and
no less a myth-making scholar than J.R.R. Tolkien himself, revered among
my peers, had complained a century later, campaigning to get the
title changed to “The Exile’s Lament,” which surely fit better, but without
success. Great poem, to be sure, but so much for that.
I'm much older and more jaded now. I know that many of the paths in these woods lead nowhere and that there are false signposts everywhere. There
are “Wanderer” titles and characters scattered all over pop culture, just for starters. Comic book heroes, doo wop songs, gunslingers, “Young Adult”
fictions. None that I’ve yet run into comes very close to the character I’ve
sought out all my life. You may discover one day that this holds true for your own dream avatar, whoever that might turn out to be.
For now, my Wanderer stands, a silhouette and a shadow, on a path
through the great and growing forest, washed in moonlight, waiting for me to join
him. A moth flutters by his ear. He turns and starts walking. I try to
imagine what will happen to him, but he walks too quickly for me, and in
a moment he disappears.
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