People talk about trips, whether external (to India, Greenland, Grand Canyon, Firenze, money saved, money spent, money transmuted into memories) or internal (that drug, this mantra, a song like a sprung pinball, a good night’s sleep). Whether one type is more powerful than the other is hard to say. It is easy to say that these stories supply a measure of reality to these people, illuminating their starting point and their path away from it to their present location. These stories gauge growth. They also—and this will come clear if you have ever been placed in a room with more than one of them, where a throat might be cleared and an aporia lobbed into the space between, I doubt you’re interested but...—both conceal and lay bare the fear on the part of the teller that if they do not describe themselves thusly, no one will ever know how far they extend, outward or inward. Are they correct to believe this? A bird in the corner squawks out an answer that must have been intoned hundreds of times by the old man who owns the house. “It is impossible to guess what people know about one another,” the bird says. He adds after a pause that he also wants a cracker.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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