Of terminals & departure
“He wanders toward the promised land. That is to say: he moves from one place to another, and dreams
continually of stopping. And because this desire to stop is what haunts him, is what counts most for him, he does not stop...
He is never going anywhere. And yet he is always going. Invisible to himself, he gives himself up to the drift of his own body, as if he could follow the trail of what refuses to lead him. And by the blindness of the way he has chosen, against himself, in spite of himself, with its veerings, detours, and circlings back, his step, always one step in front of nowhere, invents the road he has taken. It is his road, and his alone...
And the farther he travels from his starting place, the greater his doubt grows. His doubt goes with him, like breath, like his breathing between each step — fitful, oppressive — so that no true rhythm, no one pace, can be held. And the farther his doubt goes with him, the nearer he feels to the source of that doubt, so that in the end it is the sheer distance between him and what he has left behind that allows him to see what is behind him: what he is not and might have been... for the fact remains that he has left all this behind, and in all these things, now consigned to absence, to the longing born of absence, he might once have found himself, fulfilled himself, by following the one law given to him, to remain, and which he now transgresses by leaving...
For even though he lingers, he is incapable of rooting himself. No pause conjures a place. But this too he knows. For what he wants is what he does not want.”
Every poem is a departure, embracing the truth of contradiction, that one can hold both the desire to fall, and the longing for ground. My experience as a woman who lived on the road for years, who moved often without ever understanding what compelled me to leave, and what compelled me to stay in certain places longer than I intended to, taught me the willing and unwilling intention behind our movement, how the tide of our life has never stayed faithful to any rhythm, and the sincere beauty of that.
We are in our writing as we are in our lives as we are on the road. I have witnessed this in myself and I have witnessed it in many others. Our rhythm echoes across layers of our life. For once, in reading this passage, I came across the words that explained what others and I mistook as the self-defeating impermanence of life. Reading this walked me to that nameless source guiding this strange, opposing motion of my life - this quality of opposition I was trying to correct - it was, after all, what I needed most in the composition of the unwritten poem.
I have lived in my bones that desire to stop, to pause at a yellow lamp and extend that terminal into a life that ended the contradictions. When Paul Auster writes “he…dreams continually of stopping” and that because it is what “haunts” him the most, he does not, I could sense a response from a deep place within me answering, “yes, me too.” It makes me wonder of the times we wish to stop in the writing, and outside the writing, and when the writing refuses to shape itself into a final destination. I think of “that promised land” and the longing to abandon, but Kafka (who is the one being described in this passage) understands that to stop would mean to leave something as un-abandonable as breath. To leave life itself unfinished.
“He is never going anywhere and yet he is always going.” This sentence has been a deep source of humiliation for me as a writer, as a woman, as a traveler. You have written so much, packed your bags and boxes so many times, lived many stories, many loves, your whole life has felt like one, endless motion and yet, when you arrive into the stillness, it is as if you have not gone anywhere at all. “No pause conjures a place” You look down at your hands, and they are empty. You ask, how can both be true: that I have moved and built and studied and loved and labored and, and that I have not done any of these things too?
While reading this I came across a passage I had written in my journal while on the road last year:
"It scares me to think the journey may be all in my mind, and that outside this body no movement happens. Or a false one. It is possible to stand in the same soil miles away. I don’t know how but it is. You take a plane to run away from the farm, and you look down at your foot eight hours away and there’s the same farm and across the street is the same man carrying’s your father’s beard, his tilt, the whole painful shape of him.. " [summer 2025]
There is something enormously powerful and relieving in the encounter of myself in Auster’s words. “His doubt goes with him, like breath.” It is how we write into a poem, every word is a breath of doubt, distancing us from where we began, from the ground of our certainties, moving further and further away from the solidity of our intention. In another passage Auster speaks about how one must earn his death, and I think we earn it with our doubt. In entering the doubt, in writing into the abyss of not knowing, of contradicting the urge for arrival by writing away from it and towards another. Both arrivals are true, the one we begin with and the one we live towards but one is written for us and the other is written by us. And forever we sway between the comfort of the written and the desire for autonomous composition. Forever I live between the desire to sink into the words of another writer and the disturbing howl that refuses to allow me to leave my own words unrecorded. “For what he wants is what he does not want.” To remain outside the poem, and to enter the unpromising journey of writing into the impossibility of arrival. Into an end that may devour us. It is what we accept for having the freedom to decide our departure. To become the hunger we write against, where the most intimate truth lies.