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The sermon for Sept. 18, 2004 is: time-lapsed (part 1) 5:31 a.m. Before I went away -- before I had even started packing my suitcases, I was already smugly making notes on how I would describe this trip -- that is, notes on my upcoming transformation and growth during what I had grandiosely thought would be A Sentimental Journey -- a return, after many years (in some cases decades), to the bright and lovely places whose landscape paintings are so prominently featured on the dark walls of my heart's little holy grotto. I was going to spend a sustained interval of time in an actual activity, a quantifiably teleological something -- I was going to be touring the planet that I had once upon a time majestically and heedlessly tramped all over (heedlessly, because I was young and self-obsessed; majestically, because I was young and self-obsessed); and this time, older wiser me announced from the onset, I will try to notice what I am doing, and open myself to the experience, and make this little jaunt a journey. A visionquest. A voyage of discovery. As an affirmation of my resolve and a pledge that contrary to appearances I wasn't running away but in fact running to (though what or where that destination was was as hazy to pinpoint as what or where I was starting from), I had bought a handsome sketchbook and inscribed on its first page, JONATHAN'S VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY: AN ACCOUNT OF HIS TRAVELS THROUGHOUT THE ANTIPODES, THE BARBARY COAST, AND THE EUROPEAN UNION, ALONG WITH HIS IMPRESSIONS OF THE NATIVES, CUSTOMS, FOOD, INCIDENTS, AND HIS PERSONAL GROWTH THEREBY. It was a very good beginning, I thought, to a part of my life that actually seemed on the verge of bearing some promise. Traveling about; seeing new trees and new stars and new landscapes; touching exotic things like gazelles, icebergs, Vegemite, Danish genitals, tulips in Bergen Op Zoom; and generally being in motion seemed to me an excellent way to force self-discovery on oneself. Hell, travel had done lifechanging things for Jack Kerouac and the Grateful Dead and Phish and the Mercury astronauts -- not to mention some wise Argonauts of my own acquaintance, like Conrad, Christopher Mann, Rebecca Brewster, Judith Wentzien, J...* Fact check: truthfully, I modelled my hopes for travel after E.M. Forster novels, especially A Room With A View, where Victorian Englishfolk holiday in a sunny clime and subsquently defrost and evolve wonderfully. And truthfully, I didn't write the Laurence Sterne-like title page I just claimed I had written on my sketchbook's first page. What I'd written was far more maudlin, but indicative of my state of mind then: it's the last line from Rilke's poem, "Archaic Torso of Apollo": Much of my time before I left was spent daydreaming. My life was going to change. I knew it. It may not change as eventfully or momentously as the lives of the Clark family on their trips to WallyWorld, Europe and Las Vegas** in the moving trilogy of National Lampoon's Vacation films; but something would happen. I spent my time in that time in a state of incomprehensible certainty of the bright future, something that I'm usually philosophically disinclined to believe in (certainty, brightness, future) -- because of Heisenberg, poststructuralism, historical dialecticalism, what have you. (But certainly Heisenberg, Hibert and Hegel went on vacation, right? like, all three of them, together, to Tijuana?) I dreamed the days, I wrote notes on what I'd write. The morning of my departure, I finally got around to packing my suitcases. And... Left. And... Came back. There and back again: like Samwise Gamgee (who also had a life-changing experience on his first international trip). Well, my life did not change. The fact that it didn't -- the fact that, despite my campaign promises to make this a working vacation, to actively learn from my experiences, allow them to affect me, something, I had in true presidential form merely vacated -- did not even occur to me until just now, while I was watching TV. I travelled the world the same as I travel through my life, as a tourist, taking snapshots and learning interesting trivia (in Buenos Aires, for example, you cannot expect to get a taco or a burrito everywhere -- just because Argentines speak Spanish is not enough of a basis to expect Mexican food) and bits of foreign languages ("Geg upp!" is what Swedish girls shriek when you attack them unexpectedly; Japanese girls say, "Hen desu ka!") and compiling the experiences in life, the encounters and exchanges with other human beings, into funny anecdotes that you can write for your diary (as in, for example, when I asked these three amazingly beautiful and opinionated cousins of mine [disquietingly beautiful, disturbingly related] in Adelaide what New Zealand was like; and after a few rancourous, derisive false starts trying to convey the contempt these Australians had for Middle Earth, one of my cousins summed it up as "Exactly the same way you Yanks hate Canada." Which was a surprise to me, since I didn't know we Yanks hated Canada. I asked him why we Yanks hate Canada, which surprised him. "Oh, come on,," said he, "haven't you seen the South Park movie?", and immediately commenced siinging the Midnight Oil cover of "Blame Canada!" My Canuckagnosia is proof conclusive of my essentially political cluelessness and disenfranchisement). The places that I had anticipated would resonate most resoundingly with ringing meaning were the places of my childhood -- those parts of the Earth that are still burning somewhere in my fiery remembering, where no one has died and no one ever will -- revealed themselves upon arrival as only places: the details are there, but the deathlessness has gone. Take a picture; it'll last longer. Most contemptibly... ah, fuck it: there's no use in writing more about my failure. For this is a failure, this travelling, this searching, this life. What point is there in writing this down...? Nevertheless: Visby -- and indeed, much of Planet Earth -- is very pretty, this time of year. *I should do a full disclosure and admit that I've never actually read Kerouac or have gone to a Dead Phish show; but from what other people have told me, they say good things about travel.
 
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