My Morningless Mornings by Stefany Anne Golberg

Author:Stefany Anne Golberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Published: 2020-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Have you noticed how you can wake in the morning surrounded by people and they can’t ever know where you’ve been? Last night, I disappeared for hours—did you see me go? But in the morning, I returned. Here I am, I say, I’ve come back, listen, but the trip falls to pieces in words. How many people can surround us when we meet the day, and still when we wake we wake alone. There we are, millions of us in every city there is, lying in our bedclothes at the end of the journey, our private flight back from space, unable to tell each other.

Loren Eiseley once wrote about the seeker of prophetic visions. He wrote that, in all religious thought, no matter how archaic, the seeker of visions must go apart from family and friends, and live for a while in the wilderness. Perhaps the seeker must travel to some unique and sacred place. The world is fantastic, wrote Eiseley, and has been fantastic for so long. We just take the queerness for granted. We rush around like Mad Hatters upon our peculiar errands, all the time imagining our surroundings to be dull and ourselves quite ordinary creatures. Actually, there is nothing in the world to encourage this idea, wrote Eiseley, but such is the mind of man. So we find it necessary, from time to time, to send emissaries into the wild, hoping they will reappear and tell us of the great events in store for us that will resuscitate our “waning taste for life.” The newspaper, the internet, the radio, the television—none of these will give us the information we crave. Only a person, gone away, can tell us. The right sort of searcher will come back from a pilgrimage and present us with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about.

The classic pilgrim travels in search of enlightenment or holiness, like the journey to Mecca, or Santiago de Compostela, or Varanasi. In the writings of Thomas Merton is a different account, however, a singular form of pilgrimage carried out by sixth-century Celtic monks. These pilgrims no longer followed a specific path to Jerusalem or some designated holy site. Instead, they walked a path to no-place. In this era, the era of peregrinatio, pilgrimage was self-imposed exile. The Celtic monks became outcasts by choice. They set off to unknown places, often to a forlorn island, without any goal other than to go. Sometimes the monks would land on an island of seabirds; other times the destination was not isolated but filled with natives speaking queer words, and this consummated the pilgrims’ alienation. It was not a monument, or a sacred body of water, or a destiny to fulfill, but the lack of any goal that made the peregrinatio significant. The “going forth into strange lands” was not a summons to seekers hoping to secure the message.

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