{"id":251891,"date":"2024-01-08T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2024-01-08T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=251891"},"modified":"2024-01-05T05:36:21","modified_gmt":"2024-01-05T05:36:21","slug":"an-immense-hunger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/01\/an-immense-hunger\/","title":{"rendered":"An Immense Hunger"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cStanding there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, \u2018I don\u2019t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that\u2019s gone now. Memory is hunger.’\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1 Jan 2024<\/em> – Now that our revels are ended, the holiday celebrations and feasts, if one had them, just a dream melted into thin air, our hungers perhaps richly satiated temporarily or not, our visions project us into a new year in which we hope to realize in a not insubstantial way the images we see before the canvases of our inner eyes.<\/p>\n

What can we do, how create the new when we are such stuff as dreams are made on?<\/p>\n

To escape the period that ends every sentence, every year, every life, one only needs winged words to take flight, to shimmer in the ascending iridescent light.<\/p>\n

My wanderlust has taken me to scores of countries, I imagine, glimmering destinations that have inflamed me with images of satisfaction, but I have never kept an exact count since numbers bore me and my imagination forbids it.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo a child who is fond of maps and stamps \/ The universe is the size of his immense hunger,\u201d wrote Charles Baudelaire in Le Voyage <\/em>in 1859.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was young and collected stamps of all the exotic places that I hoped to visit, what did I know of desire?\u00a0 Then it seemed satiable, as when I finished one book after another, and placed them neatly on a shelf, as if to say, now that is done \u2013 for now. \u00a0Now the books are different, so too each piece of edible writing that disappears out the backdoor of my days. \u00a0Today, those tangible little colored stamps on Air Mail envelopes are rarely seen, and so young potential voyagers usually dream digitally as little is left to their imaginations. \u00a0Their dreams are mass-produced, but their hunger is real.\u00a0 My hunger is still immense.<\/p>\n

But the desire to travel, like all hunger, is only satisfied for a while.\u00a0 It is insatiable once it bites you.\u00a0 Every time you are on your way away, you wonder if this voyage will be the last one where you find what you are looking for, even when you don\u2019t know what that is.\u00a0 You close your eyes, spin the globe, and place a finger to find where you might vacate the old for the new.\u00a0 You hope to return with photographs and memories, knowing secretly that they fade with your days.\u00a0 Perhaps you think you will be like Odysseus, who at the end of his Odyssey<\/em> has just returned home after twenty years and killed all the suitors who have been hitting on his wife Penelope, but then he shockingly tells her that he must be off again for new wanderings: \u201cWoman, we haven\u2019t reached the end of our trials,\u201d he says, as they then proceed to their great olive tree-trunked bed with its mighty roots.\u00a0 It is a short hot rest before he is off again.<\/p>\n

Why?\u00a0 What is his destination?\u00a0 What are ours?\u00a0 Where are we all going?<\/p>\n

\u201cOne morning we set out, our brains aflame, \/ Our hearts full of resentment and bitter desires, \/ And we go, following the rhythm of the wave, \/ Lulling our infinite on the finite of the seas:\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1946 the French poet, Jacques Pr\u00e9vert, asked an analogous question, one that haunts us still, as we contemplate the corpses piling up in Gaza and around the world, victims of ruthless smiling jackals with polished faces.\u00a0 His poem \u201cSong in the Blood<\/em>\u201d asks,<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are great puddles of blood on the world\/where\u2019s it all going all this spilled blood\/is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk . . . . \u00a0No the earth doesn\u2019t get drunk . . . . it turns and all living things set up a howl . . . . it doesn\u2019t stop turning\/ and the blood doesn\u2019t stop running\/ where\u2019s it all going all this spilled blood\/murder\u2019s blood . . . war\u2019s blood\/misery\u2019s blood . . . .\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I was young and in the early years of my blooming, my blood running down another road, I would watch a television show called \u201cAdventures in Paradise.\u201d\u00a0 I would always watch it alone on a small television set that I had in my bedroom, won, as I recall, by some member of my large family on a TV game show.\u00a0 It starred a handsome actor named Gardner McKay, who would sail the South Pacific on his schooner Tiki, looking for romance and adventures in every port.\u00a0 My only memory of the shows is of the boat sailing the beautiful and exotic waters, accompanied by stirring music.\u00a0 These images kindled the romantic in me, some hunger that I could not then name.\u00a0 It was pure fantasy, of course, but it took me to places I had never been but thought enticingly fulfilling.\u00a0 Each show was a new stamp in motion, just as were the many movies I would attend by myself during my teen years that took me to Italy, France, Greece, Russia, and so many other places.\u00a0 But my hunger persisted.<\/p>\n

Years later I would read an obituary of Gardner McKay in The New York Times<\/em> where I learned that after a three-year run of the show, McKay refused to renew his contract with Twentieth Century Fox nor star in a movie with Marilyn Monroe, despite her personal pleas, because he hated the celebrity game where his photo had appeared on the cover of Life magazine as \u201ca new Apollo.\u201d\u00a0 He left for the Amazon rainforest where for two years he worked as an agronomist\u2019s assistant, before moving to France and then Egypt, eventually settling back in the U.S.A. with his wife, where he became a writer.\u00a0 He was a Baudelaire who didn\u2019t self-destruct.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the true voyagers are only those who leave \/ Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, \/ They never turn aside from their fatality \/ And without knowing why they always say: \u2018Let\u2019s go!\u2019\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a fascinating essay, \u201cOn Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s Histoire(s) du cinema,\u201d written in 2012 and included in his new book, Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle<\/em>, Jonathan Crary notes that Jean-Luc Godard, the French-Swiss filmmaker who died in 2022, maintained that Baudelaire\u2019s poem, Le Voyage<\/em>, anticipated cinema and its effects. \u201cIts general evocation of the boredom and bitterness of experience in a flattened, disenchanted world,\u201d writes Crary, \u201cdescribes the conditions for new kinds of journeys or dislocations that can occur without movement in space, in its figuration of an apparitional screen on which images and memories are projected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Connecting the political history of the period from 1859 to today, it is necessary, maintains Crary, to view it as inseparable from \u201cthe intertwined history of the camera arts.\u201d\u00a0 This analysis, which I think is very accurate, is not a call to despair; it is rather the opposite: \u201c. . . Godard implies that each generation must wage its own battle against historical amnesia from the lived conditions of its unique historical vantage point, and that this struggle necessitates the remaking of the techniques and language available to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here we are today saturated with images, moving and still, a world where digital media, photographs and film in all their manifestations dominate most people\u2019s consciousnesses.\u00a0 But the paradoxical mystery of this development, as Crary notes, is revealed in Godard\u2019s film, Histoire(s) du cinema,<\/em> wherein Baudelaire\u2019s poem Le Voyage<\/em> is continuously recited.\u00a0 As the film travels along, the poet\u2019s words about the disillusionment of actual voyages is recited contrapuntally, as if to suggest that the most ancient of human arts \u2013 the poetic voice (\u201cSing in me, O Muse, and through me tell the story . . . . of that man . . . the wanderer\u201d) \u2013 remains fundamental, even as technology develops new methods of image making and people travel through film.<\/p>\n

One doesn\u2019t have to share Godard\u2019s view that Baudelaire\u2019s poem was prophetically describing cinema to appreciate the rich possibilities of such a meditation at a time when the world seems entrenched in a media system that manipulates people\u2019s minds in all directions simultaneously, carrying both meaning and its countermeaning, resulting in minds stuck at anchor, caught neurotically in dazed stasis.<\/p>\n

\u201cGodard\u2019s larger suggestion here,\u201d writes Crary, \u201cis that the material basis for cinema, including projection, owes as much to the imaginative labor of poets and writers such as Baudelaire, Hugo, Zola, and Charles Cros as it does to any nineteenth-century traditions of applied science or mechanical bricolage.\u201d<\/p>\n

To escape the period that ends every sentence, every year, every life, one only needs winged words to take flight, to shimmer in the ascending iridescent light.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wish to voyage without steam and without sails! \/ To brighten the ennui of our prisons, \/ Make your memories, framed in their horizons, \/ Pass across our minds stretched like canvasses.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

So I sit here in a quiet room, not moving, yet moving still, traveling in words to an undiscovered country that I can\u2019t see but hope will satisfy my immense hunger.\u00a0 We all have our ways but have a singular destiny.\u00a0 \u201cAnd being nowhere can be anywhere,\u201d as Baudelaire said, just as being somewhere can be everywhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cMust one depart? Remain? If you can stay, remain; \/ Leave, if you must. One runs, another hides \/ To elude the vigilant, fatal enemy,. \/ Time! There are, alas! those who rove without respite,\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

So let Ernest Hemingway, who had one of his heroes, Jake Barnes, say nearly a hundred years ago, \u201cCheer up, all the countries look just like the moving pictures,\u201d have the penultimate words, again from A Moveable Feast<\/em>:<\/p>\n

It was a wonderful meal at Michaud\u2019s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That makes two of us.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Edward Curtin, Ph.D. <\/em>is a widely published author and a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>.<\/em> His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/em><\/a> – email: <\/em>edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1 Jan 2024 – What can we do, how create the new when we are such stuff as dreams are made on? To escape the period that ends every sentence, every year, every life, one only needs winged words to take flight, to shimmer in the ascending iridescent light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1966,642],"class_list":["post-251891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-hunger","tag-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":251893,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251891\/revisions\/251893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}