The Departed

I have been here before: above the earth, but carrying with me the bodily inflection of a hangover, which persists as an after-effect of an event now thousands of miles away. Despite this distance, the body—my body—has become the carrier of a series of barely registered events. A shadowline of obscurity. I grimace with each re-experienced and re-awoken moment. Voids in memory, filled in by black ale. Hangovers of distant events are infinitely melancholy in this way: they point to the unresolvability of time. Of course, I am aware of this pre-emptive disquiet before it occurs: in the Missoula bar, amongst strangers, who are bearing their souls to me. There it is! Bearing their souls to me, intimately and unguarded. Perhaps I will never speak to them again; perhaps less even see them once more. And yet—. After the plane departs from the landing strip in the midst of mountains, the people, their friends, the existence which is a world, and the tales they have told me with enthusiasm and concern will suddenly cease to exist, as though exiled to another world. The intimacy loses its presence. This, too, I am aware of in the Missoula bar.

Homesickness. A sudden pang for the grey diffidence of Britain. The world of grizzly bears and mountains presses down in its otherness. The talk—becomes white noise. Enough of conversation. Soon after, I am somewhat struck, as occasionally happens, by a nostalgia for the image of Inspector Morse. Further than that, in the remoteness of my presence, I am anchored by the crystalline sobriety of Morse’s face: the image cutting across the dark wood and wilderness of the bar.

Fatigue, no doubt. Fatigue of movement, fatigue of academia and its side-effects. A desire for quiet, a desire for solitude, a desire to write and not speak. Today, I am looking out toward the white horizon of clouds above and patches of isolated land below. Somewhere over Pennsylvania, perhaps. Further travel and exchanges loom ahead: commitments, events, etc. But for now, in this pocket of the sky—a sparsely populated DC9-30—there is some respite in the hovering presence of a world in which memory and conversation is only scarcely accessible.