Antidote to oblivion

10 July 2015

With each departure, you return a little. This is the antidote: distance, nostalgia. You can’t forget, because you miss it too much.

The soul of an exile is always being ahead of yourself, far and away, towards. Never quite settled, never entirely belonging somewhere. You ‘branch out’, evade the quotidian. You’re half here, half there – like the clouds that are constantly on the move despite their apparent static position.

While you stay put, part of you is away. Like tango – calm waters at the surface, deep movements underneath; passion controlled. And then you travel – and your soul comes to life again. The wanderer – never entirely here or there. Always hungry for open horizons. Never quite still. Always hunting for the elusive beyond. Always following a deep call, only meant to be heard by him – the call of the horizon, the elsewhere. The look of nostalgia on his face – nostalgia for the future, as much as for paces passed by. Nostalgia in reverse.

He always comes alive on the move. Like the soul of the clouds.

The urge to leave is not an urge to abandon this here and now, but an urge to follow the elsewhere – further and further away, and beyond.

Just like tango – an understated passion. A fugue.

He comes to live on the highway. In search for an elusive tomorrow, elsewhere, he lives in a fleeting time rather than space. Becoming thinner and thinner – elusive self, opening up to a perpetual elsewhere – another place, another time, another. Humility – like a prayer.

He likes the anonymity of this otherness, and the strangeness of elsewhere. Detachment. Just praising the beauty of elsewhere as elsewhere – not a particular place, in famous surroundings. Just a straightforward openness – towards elsewhere. Whatever and wherever that might lead. Like the honesty of a blank page, elsewhere brings with it the sheer joy of an endless possibility of new landscapes, without the tyranny of any ‘points of attraction’.

The wanderer feeds on this otherness, it makes him free and tranquil – and alive. He grows into otherness. Not his ‘self’, just his openness. Freedom, peace, prayer. The spirit of elsewhere is sheer beauty without form or shape. The spirit of beauty is best captured elsewhere – always from a distance, in total freedom from attachments to self and any familiar places. Controlled passion is liberating. There is beauty in the anonymity of each leaf, lost in a deep forest, elsewhere.

The call of elsewhere is the voice of life.