The diary as a refuge from travel porn
brevity, love, & presence in a time of incessant recommendations and lists
In the past, most of my writing here has been off-the-cuff. There are other posts I have started and written half-way, all the way, almost all the way. There’s a lot i don’t publish or see through. For a variety of reasons. This is one that just arrived in the flow of moment and demanded a finish in the same sitting.
I didn’t know if I wanted to publish this. I struggle with what is for personal, private reflection and what is for public sharing. The lines between are often blurred, especially as someone caught between a desire to share writing more broadly while at the same time possess a desire to cultivate a more precious and sturdy (and reliable, ha) contemplative writing and creative practice. This piece lands in the pile of reflection pieces, if we’re going to assign labels to pieces here, which I will do, now, for the sake of some clarity of intent, for new and old readers. Again, welcome. It’s no small thing to me that you’re here.
Everything feels vertiginous when you travel back home, back in time.
In the literal sense, I posses the distinct displeasure of experiencing real-life vertigo and its nauseating side-effects when I travel. I won’t get into details because I refuse to cement what I still hope and pray will disappear one of these days, but trust these words: vertigo will keep you spinning, even when you fight it — especially when you fight it. You must take the grossly humane and spiritual route — you have to surrender to its pull.
Traveling back home is also an act of surrendering. You’re portal-hopping, revisiting familiar and yet completely reconfigured vignettes crafted primarily by memory. Each encounter a pull of its own kind, of the gravitational level if it’s been some time and you and others and surroundings have also changed (or not). If you are like me and invested in pathways of self-knowledge acquisition and understanding, you might always feel that opportunities to surrender to who and what faces you appear often. In the most matter-of-fact way, I simply mean surrendering is a necessary evil — if not to enjoy your time and others, then to prevent yourself from going absolutely insane with fury, confusion, and the deepest of melancholies. It’s realizing things and then some.
It’s almost midnight where I am. This is the one rare moment in the past couple of weeks where my urge to write is met with an overdue moment of quiet, calm and spaciousness — sort of. The truth is that I’ve had a lot of downtime but that doesn’t always translate to moments of quiet or calm. Maybe you get what I mean. Anyway, it’s almost midnight. Now and here, I can pause. To write at midnight is to cast a spell with confidence instead of trepidation or rush.
Our elders hold the keys; we hold our elders
So, yes: I have spent the last several days in the company of my grandmother, who is in the midst of her own transformation. At 86, she has entered a new chapter of elderly life, set with its own unique challenges, a chunk of which can be linked to her dementia diagnosis. The changes are strange in that I watch my grandmother and another silent, foreign host collide, morphing into a new and yet not fully formed third entity. It’s like watching a see-saw in motion: One up moment enhances the highlights, your beliefs and comforts of what you know to be true about who a person is and the next downward pull, destabilizing said beliefs and understandings, squashing your illusions of a person and the circumstances, frozen in your fixed version of them from a reliable past — like a keepsake for posterity. The changing them, the one sat across from you, pulls you into the present and invites you to stay awhile.
I still see my grandmother because she is so wholly still the woman I know and love her to be: witty, a natural raconteur, the most precise and skilled grandeur in the kitchen, generous to the bone, sharp as ever, and hilarious. She continues to speak lucidly, like how she hates England and doesn’t understand why I live there or why I’d bother returning. “America is the greatest country on Earth. Everyone wants to come here. Why are you leaving?” This has been her tune for the past 4 going on 5 years I’ve been there, even when in school, and I’ve built up the necessary defenses to protect my peace of mind and standing my ground. But what’s standing your ground really when your aging grandmother is asking you, directly, to stay with her.
She speaks with oracle undertones and practically sings about the hardships and the miracles. Over time, I account that the good and the hard are sources of both pride and hurt. Now, I hear these same tales and stories with the same vivid details and passion, but there is a slight frequency change: I will hear them a handful of times over the course of day. I still listen with that sort of attention and passive alert in the way you do when an older relative tells that story about the time you were such a funny little kid. I’m never not amused by her stories in the manner in which she tells them. Patience arises as a natural response and checks my slightest fears. The focus is her, not me. I am witnessing her changes and in the midst of the sort of wonder of it all. The sadness pings.
I ground myself in this new reality, her everyday reality, with the understanding that time is precious, the present fleeting, and love as an eternal source and pathway to take when all else feels uncertain, challenging, scary, frustrating. Twice a child, once a man, she repeats. I stroke my grandmother’s head at night. Sometimes, like this evening, I stroke her head even after she’s fallen asleep. I thought I remember reading that touch was important for folks with dementia. Touch is important for all of us. With few family members and friends around her at this time, I also wondered when the last time my grandmother might’ve been graced with another hand holding hers.
I have been in a deep vessel of processing the past five or so weeks abroad, here visiting my family and my former lives, selves, old haunts and all. Each meeting with a fragment of my life from the first 20 years or so of life has suddenly inflamed my senses, unleashing nostalgia stored up over the years. And I never shy away from nostalgia; I bait her like the sentimental freak I am. My intensive, obsessive diary-keeping that has now spanned about two decades hosts my skeletons and reveries linked to nostalgia alone. Nostalgia and longing are never too far removed from one another, I believe.
The journal and diary are like twice removed second cousins, or something like that
I have written furiously in my diary as my own manner of capturing the sentiments, my own reliable travel companions. I use the word ‘diary’ instead of ‘journal’ here intentionally. Specifically when traveling, the intimacy and immediacy of the diary presents a landing deck, a checkpoint in a time of tremendous internal and external flight and movement — a time capsule of sort. The journal and the necessity of the journal — in recent associations (i.e., bullet journaling, manifesting journaling, visualizing journaling etc) — relies too heavily on the idea of productivity, goal-tracking, habit-monitoring, and other visualization and manifestation. The diary is fundamentally at odds with this mission.
A protector of privacy, a container for the interior, a log of sensory downloads and insights, the diary is inherently pure in its intent to reveal to none other than the Self — and that alone is rare, worthy, punk. In a culture that wants us to extract the highlights and must-sees of our travels to join the parade of influencer reveals and recommendations and lists curated by ‘tastemakers’, turning to the diary to notate and record, feels devotional and grand in a crucial way. In the most dramatic way, the diary gifts our soul a little unraveling space. But even if contemplative practice is not your speed, keeping a diary still offers something, if nothing more than to remind ourselves that what we experience is ours to experience first. To regain the pleasure and refocus the senses on the world around us. That this all means something should we decide to make some meaning of it. I don’t want to evangelize on about the benefits but merely give credo to a practice that has truly sustained my sense of awe, discovery and gratitude, creating a small, alternate version of reality when the outside world feels consistent to the algorithm powers that be — trite, unoriginal, dissociative, and fundamentally, fragmented from true reserves of beauty, presence and gratitude.
A writer I revere, Anais Niin, understood the magnitude of the diary and the quotidian. The iconcolastic literary and committed diarist notoriously penned and published an eponymous, gigantic text of her life writing. I lifted the below from an excerpt curated by one of my favorite writer-thinker-curators online. It’s a direct quote from Niin about the importance of the diary in her life:
Keeping a diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.
When I speak of the relationship between my diary and writing I do not intend to generalize as to the value of keeping a diary, or to advise anyone to do so, but merely to extract from this habit certain discoveries which can be easily transposed to other kinds of writing.
Of these the most important is naturalness and spontaneity. These elements sprung, I observed, from my freedom of selection: in the Diary I only wrote of what interested me genuinely, what I felt most strongly at the moment, and I found this fervor, this enthusiasm produced a vividness which often withered in the formal work. Improvisation, free association, obedience to mood, impulse, bought forth countless images, portraits, descriptions, impressionistic sketches, symphonic experiments, from which I could dip at any time for material.
The diary knows life is for the living
I have spent many hours of this trip letting my mind wander. Letting thoughts spill out onto the page. Airing out my emotions, finding ground for my roving feelings, letting them drip onto the page. Diary writing illuminates that well-worn but maybe underrated adage — life is for the living. However and whatever that living might look like in all the different seasons. Like leaving one home to visit another and finding yourself at impossible odds with the notions of home. Even this Substack is a little home! The ever-evolving blogosphere no stranger to the contemporary diarist. The learned and practiced art of making something out of the alleged, nothing. An active diary is proof of living — an instructor’s manual made up on the fly; it shines light on the exterior life but goes in with a shovel for the interior life. I know something extraordinary has happened because I have written it down. Even in knee-deep in a mood, I know the happening is worthwhile — worth something. And should we feel all the more compelled to write about this living thing , well, then, maybe we move a bit closer to that which is true and perhaps bigger than our one life. In the diary, an exercise of the personal and singular, we might find our salvation, the thread that ties together our place and the world, amongst the order of the cosmos, the chaos here on Earth.
And now for the finale. This piece wouldn’t be complete without my personal travel recommendation list, which more or less serve as reminders to myself, too.
FOOD: Whatever your grandmother decides to cook. I mean it. Just eat. Discard your hangups. Professing that you eat this or that or prefer this or that is not an actual marker of your growth or maturity that you believe you have cultivated separately from from the kid she raised and knows. You do not need to be firm in this department. Be soft, yield to her offerings. Learn how to cook a fried egg even though you don’t eat eggs and never have had a proper one but in the manner that she likes. Cook it perfectly. Slap on some toasted white bread and deliver to her. Watch her take a bite and say ‘perfect’.
SHOPPING: Your grandmother’s closet. This is not a drill. Collect, borrow, whatever. They are the real rare gems. And when you pull out different items, there is a story or recollection for almost every piece. And asking to borrow also extends a moment of connection
CULTURE: Watch the new Tyler Perry movie with your grandmother because she loves Tyler Perry. She has a very funny and concise and not-at-all PC rubric for what she will and won’t watch. When she asks where’s Madea?? Tell her this is one of his other films without Madea the character but you might still like it. Watch her watch the whole thing and smile in the end that she stayed awake and alert and amused throughout the whole watch, commentary and all. P.S. I’m not an uppity negro, as Tyler Perry himself calls them, so shout out to Tyler Perry…!
On a another note, I attended a ceremony at Lincoln Center celebrating James Baldwin’s centennial. It was such a random thing I stumbled upon. 100 years since his birth, and yet, his ghost haunts our waking lives, spiritually and… digitally. Speaking of porn, the proliferation of Baldwin’s words is a testament to his enduring and resonant legacy—also, naturally, a result of the wildfire nature of the internet. His life and his work emblematic of the constant struggle with the inner-outer strife of being a deeply involved human being while also an outsider, foreigner, at home and abroad.
We are all going and coming in one fashion or another, returning to the sites of love, where we find our old histories clinging on and new histories emerging. To come, to go, to return. I remind myself, what a blessing. Through grief and ache and changeability and mundane, still a blessing. Still a miracle.
& on a final note,
GOD IS LOVE
x
💞