Wanderlust
Not just
the National Geographic
version,
with facts about farming
and
topographic
features.
More like a
Food
Network come-to-life
from 2-D HDTV to 3-D eat-some-exotic-chicken-dish in
Tuscany
feast.
Wanderlust
is as different from travel
as cogitation is from rumination:
Sterile intellectual analysis
yields
to sustained reflection…
More than that, to intimate digestion.
Nor is it indiscriminately satiating endless
gluttonous urges in a wicked world.
Wanderlust is savoring – sparingly, subtly:
sensing
the warmth of the hearth
listening as the crackling blaze gives way
to silent glowing embers
smelling cherry blend as it wafts from a
well-seasoned pipe in the left hand
tasting the afterglow of a delicate
thimble of cognac in the right
while
watching the light play on droplets lingering in the snifter;
Or,
feeling
the breeze kiss a cheek
while
moseying through a distant forest
where
the birdsong is at once familiar yet altogether new
and
the earthy smell of pine floods the nostrils
as
a hint of wild honeysuckle teases the tongue.
Wanderlust does not appear in the catalogue of seven
sins that lead to death.
Far greater a sin, by dampening deep desire,
never to fully live.
Wanderlust is
a
therapeutic yearning;
an
itching of the spirit.
And the role of roots is not to hold back the
blossoms, but
to
fuel the ascent that someday
takes
wing on the winds of the morning
to sail without a map
beyond
the sunset
and the seasons.
– Tim McLemore
16 February 2014
_______________________________________________________________________
Wanderlust: the Back Story
A love of lifelong learning has led me
back to the classroom, as a student in the Master of Liberal Studies program at
SMU.
The degree design is flexible, which means
I gravitate toward, well, whatever interests me at any given time. And that
usually means reading and writing – minus anything resembling ‘rithmetic.
So it is that I have landed in a course
titled Creativity: Historical and
Personal.
And thus I found myself spending a
pleasant Sunday afternoon on the west patio of my apartment working on a
somewhat open-ended assignment.
It began as a group exercise in class,
where the instructor, Gary D. Swaim, elicited random words of various kinds
from the students. We then pared down lists of words from several categories
until we were left with five haphazard selections:
Tuscany, cogitate, mosey, wicked,
sparingly.
The first assignment immediately ensued:
write “something” (no genre specified) – on the spot – that employs all five
terms. My classmates produced some brilliant essays and creative stories in the
15 minutes or so that were allotted for the exercise. For some reason, my brain
insisted that I should attempt to employ all five terms in as brief a literary
creation as possible.
That led to my first attempt – a limerick,
of all things:
A wicked old
woman from Tuscany
who tended to
cogitate – sparingly,
just moseyed along
‘til she fell headlong
in her own
fiendish web of spaghetti.
Professor
Swaim, who is familiar with my work from a previous course, confessed he was
relieved that the location name selected by the class was “Tuscany” and not
“Nantucket.”
I tried again. But once hokey poetry gets
sucked into your psyche…
Is it wicked
of me
To cogitate
so frequently
On Tuscany,
beautiful Tuscany?
I would do so
sparingly,
But my
thoughts always mosey
To Tuscany,
beautiful Tuscany!
Clearly, more work was in order. Inspired
by a section called “Toppling,” as found in one of our texts ("Zig-Zag," by Keith Sawyer, 135-141),
our task for the following week was first to create free associations
consisting of five words based on each of the original five words compiled by
the class. We then were to write a longer piece (with more time for creativity
and editing) based on the original five words. I believe the idea is that the
free associations will insinuate themselves into the literary endeavor in
creative ways.
• Tuscany
led me to think of a chicken dish in
an Italian restaurant, which led me to the cackle
sound that chickens make, which led
me to the word crackle, which brought
to mind a crackling fire and a hearth.
• Cogitate
led me regurgitate and ingurgitate, which brought to mind ruminate and then cow. I’ve always loved the image of a cow chewing the cud and,
after a period of digestion in one of several stomachs, returning the food back
to the mouth for more chewing, rumination
– a longstanding expression for
reflecting on (chewing on, digesting) a thought or idea at some length.
• Mosey led
me to wander, then to wilderness, forest, and birdsong:
“When through the woods, and forest glades
I wander,
and hear the birds sing sweetly in the
trees…”
(Stuart Hine, How Great Thou Art)
• Wicked led
me in quick succession to witch, bitch,
rich, and itch. (Of the five
terms, “itch” seemed the least likely to bear any poetic fruit.)
• Sparingly,
in the context of having overeaten (to my regret) Saturday evening, led me to dine, which then led me to coffee (somewhat inexplicably, since I
don’t drink coffee), which led me (also inexplicably – but hey, it’s free
association!) to depression (regret
at overeating? or my propensity to sullenness when hungry?), which led me to therapeutic (another term that seemed at
the outset surely to be a throwaway, of no conceivable use to me in this
context). That, in turn, recalled one of my favorite therapeutic activities: gardening.
A review of the freshly-completed creative
exercise scribbled across a page in my notebook left me thinking of my favorite
term in the mix: “wander.” Which reminded me of a word I have long enjoyed, but
never utilized in my writing: Wanderlust.
I avoided the temptation to research any
definitions, and posthaste began an attempt to express what I find fascinating
about Wanderlust.
The poem elucidates the difference I
perceive between literal travel and the somewhat spiritual impelling that Wanderlust connotes for me, in large
measure by playing off the contrasts between “cogitation” and “rumination.” It
did not feel complete without a gardening image, which at first seemed slightly
antithetical to the concept of Wanderlust
but finally became the culmination of this fanciful exercise in creativity.
Neches River at the Anderson County Line, near Cuney, Texas. Thanksgiving Day at sunrise, 2013.
