Travel reflections

Seattle's light rail, which I frequently praise, has let me down with respect to my trip tomorrow morning to the airport.  The rails are being modified over the weekend, to allow a connection with the new line, under construction, that will tie Seattle to the suburbs east of Lake Washington.  No rail traffic through downtown, which means I'd have to make connections with a shuttle bus, carrying heavy luggage, and then a second connection back on to the rail.

Instead, I'll do it the old fashioned way, and take an airport shuttle.  Unfortunately, this means making an earlier start, so I'm off to bed now.

But first -- I've been reading portions of Paul Fussell's book Abroad, about travel writing between the world wars.  He points out that much of what we consider travel literature from that period is actually collections of essays on various topics, tied together by the author's travels.  Essays, as such, back then like now, were unmarketable.  But travel was popular.  Thus, writers churned out essays with enough travel thrown in to help the medicine go down.

I realize, of course, that much of my writing about my travels follows that course precisely.  And nonapologetically.  To do otherwise, would be simply to write a diary of what I saw and did, without reflection.  You'd be better off reading a Rough Guide.  Travel invites -- even forces -- reflection on what one sees, on what one feels, on what one's philosophy and beliefs might be and how new experiences reinforce those beliefs or cause them to be reconsidered. 

If they didn't, you might as well avoid the discomfort of travel and simply buy a picture book.

If I weren't in a hurry to get to bed, I'd develop this thought more eloquently.  Instead, I'll rely on Fussell's reflections on the reflections of another author, Samuel Hynes.

What distinguishes the travel books of the 30's from earlier classics ... is the way, Hynes says, these writers between the wars "turned their travels into interior journeys and parables of their times, making landscape and incident -- the factual materials of reportage -- do the work of symbol and myth -- the materials of fable."   And since the journey is "the most insistent of thirties metaphors, one might say that the travel books simply act out, in the real world, the basic trope of the generation."  Acting out a trope, like perceiving the metaphor lodging always in the literal, is the essential act of  poetry.  It is also the essential act of both traveling and writing about it.

Heady stuff, and not much of my travel writing (or maybe even my travel experience) lives up to it.  But I do try to blend my exterior observations with my interior reflections -- the continuing, unconscious work of the introvert.

I doubt if my summary of my trip to Chiang Mai will be much more than a summary of a diary.  But I'll try to more consciously "act out the trope of our generation" in some of my travel writings in the future.  (But don't call me on it!)

Return to Chiang Mai

School assembly honoring
Loy Krathong (festival of lights)
November 22, 2018

October is upon us in the Northwest Corner.  Just a week or so ago, I was strolling about  in shirtsleeves, a warm sun at my back.  Today -- the last few days, actually -- we've had intermittent rain, highs around 50, and lows down into the upper 30s. 

Odd, this seems to happen every year about this time.

But for me, I will escape temporarily from the seeming certainties of nature's cycles.  I fly to Chiang Mai, Thailand, on Saturday.  To Chiang Mai where the highs, day after day, are in the low 90s and the lows in the low 70s.  A bit of rain forecast this coming week, at least, in what must be the tail end of the summer monsoons.  I return to Seattle on Halloween evening.

This will be the third straight autumn that I've spent two or three weeks visiting my nephew Denny in Chiang Mai.  As mentioned  in earlier postings, Denny has been teaching sixth grade at an international school.  This year, the school is expanding to seventh grade, on its way to becoming an integrated elementary/high school, and Denny, besides teaching, will be working to develop a new curriculum for the new grades. 

Denny's dad lives with him in Chiang Mai, after retiring as a physician in Sonoma, California, and Denny has also been joined by his fiancée from Sonoma.  My sister -- Denny's mother -- will also be visiting at roughly the same time as will I.  In other words, my family is forming its own little expat community in Chiang Mai.

Clearly, my visit will be more a family gathering than a tourist-oriented excursion.  I'll be living at Denny's house, which is in the semi-rural suburbs of Chiang Mai.  As last year, I've been promised a bicycle for transportation, which is ideal for that area.  Some or all of us may also venture away from Chiang Mai for a little exploration -- maybe by car into the highlands near the Burmese border, or by train to Bangkok.  Nothing definite has been planned; sometimes it's fun not to know what's going to happen, to just go with the flow.

Either way, you'll hear about it once I return.  I may get one more posting in on this blog before Saturday -- or I may not -- but I did want to let my legions of fans know where I'm going and why this blog will suddenly go silent until my return at the first of November. 

At the first of November.  When I'll return to Seattle, and can safely expect the local weather to have deteriorated even further as we edge into winter.

Veni, vidi, relinquavi

If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).
--President Donald Trump (10-7-2019)

Translated into normal presidential language -- "If Turkey should respond to the withdrawal of American troops in an unacceptable manner, the American government will respond with severe economic sanctions."

Note the difference between warning about an American response, and Mr. Trump's characteristic talent for making it all about himself.  As though Turkey would be offending him personally, and he, in his infinite wisdom, would personally destroy the Turkish economy.  There are other disturbing aspects about the President's tweet today, but his repeated use of the pronoun "I" is what catches my eye.

L'etat c'est moi.

It's but the latest of recent bizarre statements from the President.  Claiming that the Speaker of the House was guilty of treason.  Calling for her "impeachment," as well as the "impeachment" of the chairman of the committee investigating Mr. Trump himself, and the "impeachment" of a senator from his own party.  Denouncing a teenage girl who has moved the world by campaigning against global warming.  And admitting that he committed what most would agree were impeachable offenses, but asserting they weren't.

The President is a graduate of Wharton Business School at Penn, although with grades that must remain forever secret.  Even if he barely graduated, he did graduate.  His ignorance of the Constitution and the political process seems strange, and his inability to work with people with ideas different from his own seems peculiar in a man educated in one of the best business schools in the nation.

Even if his peculiarities of spelling and grammar are part of the Twitter idiom, they seem odd in a person with at least a high school education who is trying to appeal to countrymen who speak more conventionally.

And Trump seems to be getting stranger and stranger as the threat of his impeachment increases.  It occurs to me that he may be cracking up, or breaking down, or falling apart.

But maybe not.  Maybe he's still planning ahead.  Maybe he realizes that, at this point, he can no longer avoid impeachment in the House, even if his loyalists in the Senate will refuse to convict him.  Maybe he doesn't want to be the third President in history to be impeached, especially on the basis not only of collusion with foreign powers, but on the less explicitly stated bases of incompetence, lack of leadership ability, traits showing weakness (or absence) of character, and serious personality disorders.

Maybe he wants to be persuaded to resign.  To resign not because of his guilt or stupidity, but because of an onset of mental illness, however temporary, over which he has no control, for which he has no personal blame.  After a period of rest and relaxation at Mar-a-Lago, and "treatment" by a friendly therapist, he can return to the business world, restored to vigor and mental health.  The world for which he was educated.  The art of the deal, deals among businessmen who respect each other.  The owner of great skyscrapers and well-plotted golf courses.  Casinos.  Resorts designed for the rich and tasteless.

Or, he could return to the work that really got him to where he is now.  Reality television.  Firing young people on national television who have risked just this very humiliation, in exchange for the hopes of fame and money.  The talent and love that he has carried with him to the presidency -- dismissing underlings with scorn and humiliation.

Let's look into it.  Maybe we can make a deal.

St. Francis

Statue by Beniamino Bufano

It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.

--St. Francis of Assisi

Jorge Mario Bergoglio and I have one very small feature in common.  Upon being confirmed as a youth, I chose St. Francis as my patron, and on being elected pope, Bergoglio chose the name "Francis" for his papal name.  Not "Pope Ignatius," as one might have expected of the first Jesuit pope, but the name of the founder of the Franciscan Order.

Today is the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi, and on this day I sometimes blog some observation about his life.  Today, I merely offer the quotation above, as a summary of his life.  He reminded his followers that, while religious exhortation and argument may at times be useful, the best sermon a preacher can offer is the example of his own life. 

Unsettling, because it's so much easier to tell folks to "do as I say, not as I do."  But as Pope Francis himself has exhorted his flock,

Take action! Live life to the full! And when others see the witness you give, they may ask: why do you live this way?

Easier said than done, but St. Francis would have agreed.  He would have insisted that the effort was worth making.

Party on, dudes

In Seattle, the air is cooler and the skies darker.  Summer is ending, but still lingers in the green leaves of the trees, leaves touched only in places by shades of yellow, depleted only rarely by falling from the trees.  October has arrived, gradually and gently.

Happy Halloween!

What, you exclaim?  Halloween is still another four weeks!. 

Ah, my child, like me you are of the old school.  When I was a kid, Halloween was a day, not a season.  It was foreshadowed a day or two before October 31 itself, when our mother brought home a pumpkin (yes, just one!) for us to hollow out and cut into a face.  And admittedly, there were two or three years when I attended a Halloween party, the weekend before Halloween, at my grandmother's country club, proudly swooping around in my Batman costume -- but if the party was early, it was simply to avoid keeping the young ones up late on a school night.

The night itself was observed by trick or treating, and a family fire in the fireplace in front of which we ate hot dogs and other junk food.  The trick or treating was for kids, of course.  By, say, 14 you would be embarrassed to go from door to door, unless you were assisting a younger sibling.

The idea of an adult attending an adult Halloween Party would have been preposterous -- like gathering for cocktails on swings at a play park.

And that was it.  When the last hot dog was eaten, the holiday was over.

Now, of course, Halloween is an entire season -- in my neighborhood, the first yard decorations began going up two weeks ago.  Thanksgiving is still a more prestigious holiday, perhaps -- a legal holiday, two days off of work or school.  But in the extent and intensity of its preparations, Halloween is now easily ahead of Thanksgiving, and is creeping up on Christmas.

In fact, Thanksgiving may be suffering "holiday exhaustion" from being squeezed at either end by the Halloween and Christmas extravaganzas.  How else explain the lamentable tendency for guests at Thanksgiving dinners to spring up, even before dessert, and rush downtown to get an early start on their Friday Eve Christmas shopping.  The Pilgrim Fathers would weep.

In effect, the Nation now celebrates a continuous orgy of holiday celebrations, from late September until the final whistle of the Super Bowl in January.  This leaves out Martin Luther King Day, but all that boring talk about civil rights is a downer -- and it's hard to think of appropriate house decorations.

So, as I began, Happy Halloween.  Happy Autumn Festival.  Let's party with increasing frenzy, as the days, week by week, grow shorter and darker.  And let's ignore thoughts of any disturbing metaphors.