“Not all those who wander are lost” – Gandalf
At its best, wandering may be an accord with paradox, a willingness for the world’s infinite particulars to be refracted into ten thousand contextualized meanings, none necessarily less true than the others–, even in contradiction.
One can wander with one’s feet, an amble, saunter or stroll without any preconceived destination. An improvisation. An inquiry. A dance. Some aliveness.
And one can amble this way in thought and through the many-faceted prism of language and perception.
The best use of poetry and philosophy is wandering. And there can be no wandering without an assent to the possibility of becoming lost. There is no real thought without risk. Dawn may come and swallow dusk. Or the reverse. One never knows how it will turn out. Pack sandwiches and apples.
No word tends so strongly as “politics” to put an end to ambling. It’s a frozen, hardened, heavy, opaque word, in that it tends to lack translucence. Light does not move with or through it so easily for us. We think we know what it means. But we don’t even know how to get lost with it. To get lost with it is a learned skill. Half of the skill development here is simply not knowing.
Imagine for a moment that you don’t really know what politics is. That’s a start.
What politics actually is and what it is imagined to be are radically different things.
Not that it is a thing, such as an object — hardened, encrusted, heavy, opaque, like death itself. Unmoving, unable to wander. Lacking aliveness. Going nowhere.
Personified politics is a half awake, half blind man in a prison cell which isn’t locked. He never checks to see if the door will swing. (It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.)
Oh, wait, no. It don’t mean a thing if it swings upon trying.
The old Indian man trapped an elephant this way. First with a heavy chain, then with a heavy rope, then a light rope. The elephant circumambulated the stake at the center. Then the old Indian man used a light thread, the sort one would use to sew on a button. But round and round the elephant went. So the old Indian man took away even the thread, but still the elephant circled his stake. The elephant was sleepwalking!
Such is our common relationship to “politics”. Politics hasn’t had a fresh breath in millennia. He wanders round in circles, going nowhere.
We have forgotten that every politics is an ethos.
We have bought the lie that all things are public or private.
Nothing is shared. We enclosed the elephant and pulled the iron bar door behind us.
Bread and water and circuses.
How are we to begin to get properly lost?
A sign hangs over the prison gate, reading “Public & Private”.
In the darkest hour of night I showed up and altered that sign.
Now it reads “Public, Private, Communal”.
Now the communal has a voice! The door swings open. The prisoners are as free as they wish to be.
An ethos has an idea, a story, a direction to wander in, something worth committing to — freedom.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with one word.
