Why are you here, part II

Following up on a previous iteration...

Why are you here, why this city, why this program, why this [insert variable] etcetera...questions posed often to me lately as variations on: peaceful inquisition, niceties of making acquaintance that constitute, nonetheless, a prodding…undergirded by, further thoughts of, why did you not stay in the place where you are from, which must be so much more [adjective]...where, well, wouldn't you be happier wait why weren't you happy there, versus here where...Anything might happen 

or may very well not.

and I respond, in turn, by indicating that here there is indeed A Lot to do, I enumerate this Lot, I give different versions of it in explanation, I am always tripping over reasons, descriptions to explain Myself, adding that, where I am from there is really too much, a gauche too muchness of yes, things to see but primarily, ways to be seen,  involving an exaggerated straining to the point where they became, for me, ways to Not be seen, or maybe I even say, if I am feeling especially proximate and confessional, where I am from I was never seen as myself, somehow it is easier to be Other here than it was back there to be myself, isn't that funny...ha ha.

In these exchanges are questions inside questions and answers inside answers and all concern the vagaries of belonging and the presumptions we have around the state of...what it looks like to embrace and to partake of a place without a definitive pre-concept for how your budding relations will culminate; to be, still, Discovery Mode-ing and to anchor in this openness with a cool trust in the eventuality of a desired outcome. And with, too, a basic will-to-adventure and to being lost and pointed at, having to continuously re-remember your direction and arriving at the gates, towering or squat, to rap on the doorless window or is it a windowless door, hoping to be let in and to get to work. 

What I find most amusing about this template of informational, also quite existential back-and-forth baked into every new conversation and encounter is that I am asked for my Why well in advance of its organic resolution, as if I have not traveled to said context expressly to find it, the Why I imagine sitting with hands cupping cheeks, stranded somewhere along the highway of here-to-there, waiting for me to drive by and pick it up, en route to our next station. It's always seemed quite natural to me to learn about the decisions I make by making them, to be guided towards particular sites and approaches and people and slowly then do their roles in some larger scheme come into view. While that sensibility perhaps challenges normative expectations of how life works, a rhythm of...with action and belief, revelation...certainly befits an artist, suits me even on days when I do not think I am one, or a very good one...and so, suits me now. 

In this empirics we have the knowledge, too, that doubt is co-creative, hence Doubting Thomas, hence their rhetorical fingers in my wounds, hence mine in theirs, for it must be an aspect of me that has materialized, or made myself susceptible to, "doubting" discussions, perhaps as to maintain one foot out (back home, back there), or one foot in the reflective, the hypothetical...if the judgements of the external world are designed to activate your self judgements (matching pictures), and to get to you as they accumulate, a barrage, all at once, it remains that only you determine their relevance. I have had other travels, moves that defied logic or convention but after a while since, and resting in the assuredness of origin in between, the Justification game again needs some adjusting to...I had forgotten this form of self-definition instantiated by clawing at territorial validity, by claiming one's Right to be transiting existence in general, to be at school on earth, earth-school, taking notes.

images: Maria Schneider in The Passenger  (1975).