Wanderlust

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.