BEING HERE AND NOT BEING HERE
Again I am in two places at once, and today suddenly in three places at once. This happened before to me before leaving for Greece six months ago, I was neither here nor there, and now it is happening again. This morning it happened even more strongly with the addition of London where I am going in May after Paris. I just booked an Airbnb in a row house in Stratford, a part of London. After booking you find out your exact address and looke on Google maps to see where you are going. Nelly is the woman who rents out two rooms of her house at 58 Devenay Road. I know nothing about Nelly except that people who have stayed there like her and that pink is her favorite color.
But this post is not about where I am going to stay even though I will show photographs of the place, it is about what it feels like to be in three places at once and wondering how much you can extend this feeling to being in two places at once, living here and being dead in no place.
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Right now I am sitting in my home of thirty years with a view out across the Swannanoa Valley with objects that attracted Kathe and me all around me, including lots of photographs of Kathe and other family members. This is our place. I feel centered here. But at the same time I have seen photographs of the Airbnb in Montmartre where Susie and I will stay for a month and can imagine myself there. The closer I get to being there the more something seems to shift and the more real that place becomes and until suddenly it begins to feel odd that I am still here. The place where I have been centered for 30 years begins to seem a little unreal even while still here. And today I’m beginning to imagine being in London because I just signed up for an Airbnb. I can see the pink house from the outside and look up and down the street and see the pink furniture in the living room and see what the back yard with comfortable and chairs looks like. I can begin to feel myself being there rather than being here.
There is nothing remarkable in any of this. It happens to everyone, I’m sure, when you or I go from one place to another. There is an intuitive, unconscious shifting within us as whatever is driving us from within prepares us for the next step, always looking ahead and anticipating so that it won’t be caught off guard. It is not something that I am deciding to do, it is something that is happening to me.
We move through life intuively looking ahead to protect ourselves and to anticipate things that will bring delight. And of course the biggest dislocation, the biggest shift is when we leave life itself, when we die. At this point that inner, unconscious drive keeps looking ahead. It is almost impossible to imagine a world without you or me in it. So we anticipate a life after death, in heaven or by being reborn. It is almost equally hard to accept the death of someone close to us. The presence of the person continues to be with us. We know they aren’t here but we simply can’t believe it. We, I, can’t imagine a world without Kathe. I see her photograph and she is here. I know she is not still alive, but I don’t believe it. She feels very much alive to me.
I’m not sure how these feelings of my being here and not being here, of being in Paris or being in London, or being in all three places at the same time fit with my being here on earth and not being here on earth, or Kathe being on earth or not being on earth. I can feel myself in three places at once but I can’t believe that Kathe and I are in two places at once, here and not here. I can’t believe that I am one of the living dead, the living not yet dead, or the dead living, the emptiness that was once a person.
So I’ll settle for amusing myself with the rather pleasant feeling of being in three places at once for a day or two, until I begin to be in Paris and then in London and then back here again and let this thought go, for a while anyway, until it forces itself on me again.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 