Title : Portraits of a Travel Experience, or There and Back Again . . .
link : Portraits of a Travel Experience, or There and Back Again . . .
Portraits of a Travel Experience, or There and Back Again . . .
Reader Eleonore, whom I've had the pleasure of spending a few hours with, once in Berlin, once in Munich, commented on my last post that she, too, keeps a journal while travelling. Like me, she "sticks tickets, postcards, labels, tourist brochures, etc., on the pages of a notebook, with some comments." And also like me, she finds that if she does "not finish it on the way, it will stay fragmentary in most cases, because after coming home, "normal" everyday life swallows me up."
Yes! To that I have to say a resounding "YES!"
This week, I've been "swallowed up" trying to re-establish a fitness routine -- oh, the sore muscles! -- and hunting the Christmas boxes out of storage, deciding what kind of decoration is feasible and appropriate to the condo. I've shopped for the kids' Christmas gifts -- books, as usual -- and we've done something with the Littles three afternoon-evenings so far, with a daycare seasonal "concert/recital" this afternoon. . . All of which has been absolutely delightful (the time with the Littles, especially, not so much the sore muscles!).
But I'm quite determined that this trip -- which, after all, was about maintaining and creating some space about and for me as Solo Traveler rather than as a Retired Senior or as Nana or Matriarch (potentially swallowed up by family!) -- not remain fragmentary in my journals. Actually, my concern is perhaps not so much that it not remain fragmentary, because what we recover from the past through memory is always necessarily just that. But I don't want to compartmentalize my trip, to pack the ephemera into a box, eventually to erase the (several?) hundred photos I've taken, to allow the whole experience to be quite so easily effaced (and part of me with it. . . one meaning of "efface," I see, is "to make oneself appear insignificant or inconspicuous." Turns out I really, really don't want to do that!
Nor, however, do I want to be stuck reliving the trip while life goes on around me here. I made a promise to myself about that while I was away, that I would pull the trip into my life here, use it as inspiration for enriching my creative life. I promised myself that I would make time back home to finish my journal account of the trip; that I'd sort through the paper ephemera and glue into my books whatever seemed significant and let go of the rest (a mini Marie Kondo project -- I'll show gratitude, first, to whatever gets sorted into the recycling basket); and that I'll go through my too-many-photos thoughtfully, pausing to remember precisely what moved me to snap each one. After that, I'll delete most of the photos, but I suspect before I do I'll add a few notes to my journal. Artists I want to find out more about, streets I'd like to get back to, dinners whose sequence of courses I want to remember. . .
I know there's got to be a difference between what I want to recall for myself and what you'll be interested in reading about here. I've been doing some thinking about how to strike that balance between the general and the particular when it comes to talking or writing about travel. Next week, I'd like to share some of that thinking in terms of the way a trip (or a portion of it, a visit to a particular city along the way, for example) shapes itself, the way it materializes out of, and against, the research, the preparation we've made for it. The way that shaping can show us our priorities OR the way those priorities yield -- too easily? pragmatically? happily? -- to circumstances "on the ground."
For now, as my day will soon be "swallowed up" by a Creative Morning and a DayCare Afternoon, I'm sharing some images from a wonderful exhibition I took in last month at Scotland's National Portrait Gallery, an exhibition of exemplary paintings from Victoria Crowe's decades-spanning career as a portraitist. I find the three preparatory sketches for Crowe's portrait of the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, the intimacy of her focus on his cardigan, absolutely mesmerising. Compellingly intimate and revelatory. And fragmentary. The importance of the fragment, the effort, the attention paid to detail. The beauty, the undeniable beauty of those fragmentary studies. . .
I bought the exhibition catalogue (as I tend to do, as long as the weight isn't too much for my carry-on), but have yet to make enough time to sit down and read through the introductory essay, although I have thumbed through the pages again, stopping at favourite portraits. I'm not going to put it away on the book shelves until I do. For now, it will stay on my writing table as a prompt. . . .
But speaking of "prompt," if I'm going to be, for my event this morning, I'd better pack up. . .
Happy Friday to you, and I hope you might find time over your weekend to leave me a comment or wave me a wave. . . tr
 |
| I was drawn back and back again to Victoria Crowe's portrait of her mother's friend Marion Pulford. Besides it being the attentive and aesthetically wonderful depiction of a woman in her senior years, I'm fascinated by the way she's captured a psychological complexity here -- an apparent ease of posture implied in the stillness but belied by the tension in mouth, brow, even the neck (which, poignantly, has shrunk so far from its collar. . . |
Yes! To that I have to say a resounding "YES!"
This week, I've been "swallowed up" trying to re-establish a fitness routine -- oh, the sore muscles! -- and hunting the Christmas boxes out of storage, deciding what kind of decoration is feasible and appropriate to the condo. I've shopped for the kids' Christmas gifts -- books, as usual -- and we've done something with the Littles three afternoon-evenings so far, with a daycare seasonal "concert/recital" this afternoon. . . All of which has been absolutely delightful (the time with the Littles, especially, not so much the sore muscles!).
But I'm quite determined that this trip -- which, after all, was about maintaining and creating some space about and for me as Solo Traveler rather than as a Retired Senior or as Nana or Matriarch (potentially swallowed up by family!) -- not remain fragmentary in my journals. Actually, my concern is perhaps not so much that it not remain fragmentary, because what we recover from the past through memory is always necessarily just that. But I don't want to compartmentalize my trip, to pack the ephemera into a box, eventually to erase the (several?) hundred photos I've taken, to allow the whole experience to be quite so easily effaced (and part of me with it. . . one meaning of "efface," I see, is "to make oneself appear insignificant or inconspicuous." Turns out I really, really don't want to do that!
Nor, however, do I want to be stuck reliving the trip while life goes on around me here. I made a promise to myself about that while I was away, that I would pull the trip into my life here, use it as inspiration for enriching my creative life. I promised myself that I would make time back home to finish my journal account of the trip; that I'd sort through the paper ephemera and glue into my books whatever seemed significant and let go of the rest (a mini Marie Kondo project -- I'll show gratitude, first, to whatever gets sorted into the recycling basket); and that I'll go through my too-many-photos thoughtfully, pausing to remember precisely what moved me to snap each one. After that, I'll delete most of the photos, but I suspect before I do I'll add a few notes to my journal. Artists I want to find out more about, streets I'd like to get back to, dinners whose sequence of courses I want to remember. . .
I know there's got to be a difference between what I want to recall for myself and what you'll be interested in reading about here. I've been doing some thinking about how to strike that balance between the general and the particular when it comes to talking or writing about travel. Next week, I'd like to share some of that thinking in terms of the way a trip (or a portion of it, a visit to a particular city along the way, for example) shapes itself, the way it materializes out of, and against, the research, the preparation we've made for it. The way that shaping can show us our priorities OR the way those priorities yield -- too easily? pragmatically? happily? -- to circumstances "on the ground."
For now, as my day will soon be "swallowed up" by a Creative Morning and a DayCare Afternoon, I'm sharing some images from a wonderful exhibition I took in last month at Scotland's National Portrait Gallery, an exhibition of exemplary paintings from Victoria Crowe's decades-spanning career as a portraitist. I find the three preparatory sketches for Crowe's portrait of the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, the intimacy of her focus on his cardigan, absolutely mesmerising. Compellingly intimate and revelatory. And fragmentary. The importance of the fragment, the effort, the attention paid to detail. The beauty, the undeniable beauty of those fragmentary studies. . .
I bought the exhibition catalogue (as I tend to do, as long as the weight isn't too much for my carry-on), but have yet to make enough time to sit down and read through the introductory essay, although I have thumbed through the pages again, stopping at favourite portraits. I'm not going to put it away on the book shelves until I do. For now, it will stay on my writing table as a prompt. . . .
But speaking of "prompt," if I'm going to be, for my event this morning, I'd better pack up. . .
Happy Friday to you, and I hope you might find time over your weekend to leave me a comment or wave me a wave. . . tr
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