wanderer
We were wanderers from the beginning. We knew every strand of tree for a hundred miles…the frontier was everywhere. We could always begin again.
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled.
Even after 40 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten.
The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood…
We invest far-off places with a certain romance.
This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by a natural selection as an essential element in our survival…
Your own life, or your band’s or your species might be owed to a restless few, drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas.”
—- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Reading Carl Sagan one morning in Sevilla, I wrote:
I am a sailor who has never been to sea. I see myself in wanderers of old, gruff men made for long journeys into sea and ice. Old white men, I know. I know. I see the strangeness of the connection.
But if I had read Shackleton’s non-existent mythic call for men to go off to sea,
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.1
If I had read it, I would have replied in person.
I would gone to that office in London, which I read that he set up having zero -I mean zero - in his bank account for the expedition to the Antarctic.
He had set up his office as if the funding was already there.
One way or another, he was going.
I would have gone to the office in person, and told him that I was up to the journey.
He would have agreed. Brown woman non-withstanding, he would have agreed.
One way or another, I was going.
The other men would scowl.
There would be a few fresh faced boys who would be kind, and one with eyes of grey, who would love me.
There would be an old timer, his face rough with winds of all the seas he had sailed. In him, I saw myself.
But I was really after the sea.
I would stand on the deck, at daybreak and sunset, lit by the immensity of it.
I would let it fill my gaze, feeling not small but connected to the wordless soundless spheres turning in a galaxy that senses there are other infinite galaxies nearby in which sailors - not as we imagine them because they are of another galaxy, made of other stars beyond our comprehension - those sailors who we could not imagine - they would stand on the decks of their own boats, on their own alien seas and long.
Rooted people root - they go down to earth.
And the youngest of our human species, who I call Europeans, they feared, longed and set sail on our planet, in this story - and their longing as wanderers speaks to me even as their history as colonizers has fragmented my story, broken a necessary root.
Strange Intimacy.
Every tree had its dryad
—- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, A Vision of the Human Future in Space
In Andalusia, the loudness of sound is calling my voice out.
The city - some days I cower in it. But almost everyday, I sing in it.
In the narrow streets, unevenly tiled, there are pockets of water here and there, made by women with mops and soapy buckets who clean the spaces outside their buildings and by dogs who urinate and by their owners who spray a disinfectant on the street after the dog is done.
On these narrow streets, with pockets of water, I make my way to flamenco classes or to the sessions of a new chorus I have joined, or to a cafe or to buy groceries.
I stride, slip, slide, sing bachpan ki mohabbat ko, or ya vienen bajando por las escaleras and there is a new tone in the voice, that comes from continuing to sing.
But some days, some seasons, I cannot stand so much cement, so many buildings, so many voices and last December that seeking led me to Ireland, to a poem you ma remember if you have been in a workshop with me, The Song of Amergin, first sung on a beach in Ballinskelligs.
I went there, to that beach. Going there opened up a new story. It happened suddenly but also it has been years in the making, and what is emerging is a new play, “the body becomes the poem” that connects this old song of the sea to the waves my grandmother liked to make with her hands:
my grandmother is calling me through the song of amergin
amergin kay nagmay say meri naani ki awaaz bulaati hai.
In the play, there will be an Urdu version of the Song of Amergin, translated by mother, Tanveer and my aunts, my khalas, Nilufer and Meenaz:
jo samundar mei havaa hai vo mei hoon
i am the wind on the sea
A play to be made in collaboration with artists from Ireland, a poet and speaker of Old Irish, a cellist who sounds waves, a sculptor of ancient boats, a visual artist who works with peat.
And just this month, I found out the the development of this play has been - gasp! - supported by a small grant from Culture Moves Europe
Funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Disclaimer: This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union}
It’s wild.
But grant or new grant, I was going to go.
That’s what I had told myself. Because the calling was such.
Every dream for a new play, a new creation, is wrought with such hope and longing.
And I get so frustrated sometimes with applications, with having to find the words to describe what is still in the dark, to start a voyage when the boat has not even been built!
But in this case, the words helped, and I am glad to have the dream described:
My project is about a deep longing that I feel many of us share to embody the wildness of the natural world. My inspiration is the ancient Irish poem, The Song of Amergin that I have loved for a decade. Texts/folklore say Amergin was a poet sailor of Spain who sailed to Waterville, Ireland and once on land, spoke a poem to quell a storm. “I am the wind on the sea” it begins and for some twenty lines, it identifies with all of nature.
The project will allow me to retrace the mythic journey of Amergin from Spain over sea (via ferry) to Ireland, to the very beach where he landed and to associated sites like the Standing Stones where, the stories say, his wife Scéne is buried. Somehow this story feels connected to my grandmother, how she loved to make waves with her hands, how she loved to sit and look at the sea. Really what I am after, what I am longing for is to explore creating plays in new ways - in nature, with other artists, with my feet on the land, sensing: what poetry, what choreography is this calling out in me?
So I am beginning to dream of wild green spaces.
Soon, I’ll share more.
But for now, just wanted to share the wandering, the wondering, the beauty of what words shaped on a page or a stage can inspire.
“Every tree had its dryad.”
I love that line. It’s a swoon-worthy line, if you ask me.
Are we the tree or the dryad or the memory of the tree or the forgetting of the dryad.
And by we mean some part of us that has forgotten, that also remembers.
These words of science made of poetry. Or poetry made of science. I still remember the feeling, without remembering the exact words, of Carl Sagan’s description of how the first humans saw the skies, it was in COSMOS.
The word, planet, he says, comes from the Greek word for wanderers.
As an ode to wandering, I share a poem I wrote called ferry which ends like this, aisa, así:
leaving arriving
on the
move there is nothingto love
but the sea
— Shebana en, Sevilla, June 1, 2023
