Need for a way (eng)

I don’t know when the need to travel arose for me. How I now (after many short trips and now, in the position of a two-month wanderer without a home) define for myself the need to change places (not home) — this need is constituted by various internal desires, the most important of which is the desire for purity.

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I would like to briefly outline the situation in which I live: I have given up my home, both voluntarily and involuntarily, for two months I have been moving around Europe in radical uncertainty: the vague fragile status of a student in Lithuania who does not study; the absence of a home even in Moscow (where I come from), the absence of any regular income at all (my freelancing consists of odd jobs somehow connected with creativity or teaching, but I will additionally emphasize that I know almost nothing). Behind me (the rear) is the philosophy department and a love for philosophy, a modest artistic background and the archive of my life, which I compile and structure while relaxing.

The question of the path for me is a complex question about the path itself and about home. On the path, it seems to me, we all merge with a certain flow and get to know the process of life itself: life flows and spreads out like a road. Time rarely exists on the path, paradoxically, because any discreteness is absent and in the very living of the path there is nothing but the purest, clearest and most direct living. This living does not require any cosmetics or decorations, living is exposed exactly as it is, and the traveler, riding and rushing, for the first time, it seems to me, truly lives: lives as was destined. Animals understand this very well. Not burdened by reflection, rupture, the notorious negation of the natural (forward to the idea!), they exist as is necessary, i.e. in movement, in which there is nothing but the act of movement itself; and the movement itself is not felt as such, since there is no distance from it and it is impossible to oppose it with anything: I am and it all somehow is. The path/path-travelling reminds me of good sex: there is no subjectivity (there is no me), there is only [general] enjoyment (on the path there is nothing except the experience itself, I merge for the first time inseparably with life; for the first time — since my entire biography dissolves on the path). There is an uncertain, fragile, risky wandering. A journey (no matter how long it may be), a tourist trip — something like a business trip, I am, as it were, a wanderer on a schedule. To be wandering without any support, learning the situationality of each (in the past) constant, to affirm the constant in what seemed spontaneous or situational at home — is not the same as being a tourist, a safe place to which one can return. In the second case, the house turns out to be simply a cradle, a bassinet, which was probably imposed on you by the standard daily flow (parents bought an apartment \ you rent something with a partner \ a certain city became home because of studies or work \ there is an understanding of yourself and your capabilities, etc.). An imposed house, for example, inherited (in a broad sense) is not the same thing as a house found and suffered through. Each person must build a home — and this saying points not so much to the physical construction of a dwelling, but to finding in a metaphysical sense your foundation, a haven, which is formed not through psychotherapeutic exercises, but through isolating from reality that in which you can radically assert yourself. Being groundless now, I find a home in unstable, uncertain places, people, situations, conversations. I believe that this is how a wanderer can rest: in relaxation from finding support that seems eternal for a moment. And it is eternity that can calm a wanderer. It (eternity) rarely reveals itself to a tourist or someone staying somewhere (for example, in an imposed house), because, despite all the cultural pathos, it is very easy to scare it off with an illiterate attitude, the established order of things and depravity (including depravity through asceticism). \Depravity: the measure can be violated only when the measure of the violation of the measure is realized.

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In my not very long life, I have encountered wanderers a limited number of times. Most often I heard about them from other people, or read their texts — this coexistence passes on the edge of joint modernity, we are somehow familiar (the air is almost the same everywhere). One of the wanderers with whom I am friends, D., taught me many things and one of them is the designation of gender within wandering through cleanliness. I am lucky to be a woman-nomad, since there are very few of us, women-nomads (in the conventional sense of nomadism, i.e. those who move in the environment) due to the conjuncture requiring arrangement: to create a home is a woman’s Home. Thus, realizing the fairy-tale male path (robber, pirate, vagabond, sage), I learn to feel for the specifically feminine in this field. D., wandering from city to city and finding peace in the implementation of specific tasks (to see the sunrise in a certain place, to sit on a bench in a certain city, to eat buckwheat porridge with certain people, etc.) showed me one of the main watersheds between the male and female: men can experience discomfort from cleanliness, while women come to the most healthy relationship with dirt (neurosis is removed). D., like many other wanderers I have encountered and read about, feel naked and vulnerable if they have a clean body; women, even on a journey, come to harmony with what concerns the cleanliness of the body and equally experience both dirt and cleanliness. When I travel, I stopped significantly valuing going to the shower (earlier it was an exceptional event with different shades and reasons for its exceptionality\now it is the joy of the fact of being able to wash, nothing more), but it has become extremely important for me to be clean and, what is important, naked. A woman is able to endure nudity (and nudity thanks to cleanliness\D., being clean, feels too naked) — often a woman in such a position accumulates a lot of confidence. This happens because it is a woman who is able to find strength in vulnerability, only she is able not to translate her pain into a perverted drama, but to prolong her hysteria directly: from pain to its direct expression. Nudity becomes armor, weakness — strength. A man accumulates dirt in the same way as he accumulates his discontent or illness (does not go to the doctor): holding on to everything guarantees him greater protection from the world, his pain and dirt on the body are his fortress.

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Neutralization of biography, which is inherent to the road, is the most important forced experiment that the subject should periodically do. It cannot be said that the destruction of biography (is it possible to dissolve oneself in eternity?) is an operation inherent only to a wanderer in the technical sense (movement in the environment). Several times I communicated with people with whom all my experience disappeared somewhere and I found myself in a complete loss when trying to answer a simple question. Probably, if I were asked if my name was really Polina and I was 27 years old, I would be just as lost, uncertainly noting, “I think so, I don’t remember exactly.” Destruction of biography is about the lack of support, and about the liquidation of oneself on the map of market relations, and about deep nomadism, bordering on the ontological layer. Perhaps it is not so difficult to renounce the ego under drugs, evaluating this as an exceptional and highly spiritual experience, but it is much more difficult to be in an unfriendly city (i.e. everywhere), unable to accurately remember your last name and the place where you were born in communication. In all this, as in wandering in general (even if this is an operation of movement through the environment), the most important point is uncertainty and the possibility (or impossibility) of living in it. I am not talking in any way about comfort, because comfort is an extremely ambiguous and complex thing; I am talking specifically about the ability to hold on where holding on is impossible, to find support in the lack of support, to find a haven for yourself where even “yourself” is impossible. In the Tarot there is a zero and a first arcana: the Fool — the one who has no foundation and because of this can play endlessly, without referring to anything except the game itself; and the Magician, the first arcana — the one who is so rooted in the self that he can subjugate not only the unconscious, but also matter. Thus, the discovery of confidence in the uncertain, the affirmation of support in a space in which support cannot exist, by analogy — to be at home with all the restless — is the kinship of the zero and first arcana, an exit as if to another style of existence, one where nothing and everything can exist simultaneously — this is the finding of a home.

There is a home that the environment has imposed on us — an apartment inherited, complexes, an opinion of ourselves formed on the basis of other people’s reviews, education, a personality structure nurtured by a psychoanalyst, etc.

There are different ways of acquiring different types of homes. There is an ontologically arranged home.

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Asceticism is a key element of wandering. In a friendly environment, an imposed home that clearly manifests itself through resignation to the established order of things, it is very easy to see the difference between asceticism and bourgeoism. A bourgeois is one who has resigned himself to the imposed order of things, one who has appropriated it and ascribed his name to it; a bourgeois refuses to create his own path in risk and fragility, to look for a real home and hope to find it. The wanderer is indefatigable in his search and thirst for fragility-uncertainty, while the bourgeois strives to stop in those lands to which he was assigned (without risking to set off on an authentic journey). Asceticism, as the leading element of wandering, is defined, of course, by simplicity. Asceticism is associated with a very clear feeling that what is consumed, experienced or used is given to the wanderer for the last time. Asceticism is not defined through abundance in this case, be it an abundance of products, people, events, rest, etc. Asceticism is not defined through bodily experiences: ate a lot of food and your stomach hurts (at first glance, this is not asceticism at all). Asceticism, being extremely simple, organizes itself in wandering through the already mentioned understanding that any cake eaten or party attended is given for the last time. The bourgeois, in contrast to the ascetic/wanderer, is capable of making a plan, is capable of accumulating not only things, but also impressions and tasks — everything that will be very difficult for him to part with, everything that is organized by internal fat. Thus, the bourgeois is ‘wrong’ in his understanding of home: for him, his junk, his fat — this is his fortress, although all the decoration of this crypt does not organize the home, but on the contrary, repels it, confirming the bourgeois even more in the position of resignation-to-the-established-order-of-things. \Bourgeois: leaving the cake to rot in the stomach, being afraid to part with it (it now belongs to me!) \Asceticism: I will never eat cake again in my life, I don’t even have a hope for it, so now I eat with pleasure \Bourgeois and asceticism: a man as someone who accumulates dirt and illness; a woman as someone who is washing for the last time \Dragonfly and Ant

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A woman is inclined to nomadism, since only she is capable of being a radical lover. Casanova "grabbed everything from the table" — took as many women as he wanted, sincerely promising each of them to stay with her forever (he was sure of it). Casanova was attached, he could always count on taking, grabbing, stealing something. A woman, being a radical lover, is inclined not to take, but to give. Even being the one who demands money, attention, i.e. supposedly equal payment, she still feels that she does not give enough, even if the whole world was thrown at her feet. There is a misunderstanding of what a woman gives in response to a man’s material goods: endless questions on the Internet about the ephemerality of the energy or happiness that women are supposed to give. I will not answer in detail the question of what a woman gives in response to gifts-objects, I will unobtrusively point out only that she gives everything.

A radical mistress is one who is unable to settle into a family, into a conventional home, into ordinary sensuality. A radical mistress is a nomad in the area of the world that constitutes and stabilizes the world itself: in Eros. The desire for a wedding and children, the desire for a nest for a radical mistress is a coquetry that she is incapable of seriously realizing.

A radical mistress wanders around the world and fuses together what she will never be able to possess, and especially will not want to possess.

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Returning to my leading desire, which determines my wandering, I will again point out that this desire is the desire for purity. Each time I find myself in a new place, in a new situation where I need to mold a “conventional home, ” i.e. a place in which my cozy everyday life will unfold, I find myself in a state of utmost clarity. I am addicted to this clarity like a drug: finding myself for the first time in a conventional dwelling (a shelter), but in the context of hopeless, aimless movement, experiencing the joy of a temporary stop, I experience a crystal understanding of myself and the world. I become forever naked.