The Journey

The metaphor is as old as human consciousness though we were introduced to it through our religious heritage, first with the elderly nomadic Abram inexplicably waking up to the hope of siring a people as chronicled in the Torah, with its genesis co-opted by Christians to map the journey from beginning to end, enshrining time into human history.

Chaucer got Middle English into storytelling in The Canterbury Tales by the 14th century CE and we have latched on to the format ever since as a form of telling the truth.

The Hans’ insularity busted out West in the 16th century when the Buddhist Wu Cheng’en told of Xuanzang’s journey to India to retrieve some Sutras. The Sino mindset at the time, headed toward monotonous and disastrous homogeneity, got a shot of diversity by the wild adventures of a fallen shaved head and his equally fallen four super guides in The Journey to the West, or more popularly, The Monkey King.

Jules Verne’s hidden paradigm shifting in his Voyage au Centre de la Terre in 1864, a descent to the center of the planet, is often noted more as an early sci-fi rather than its revolutionary assault on the religious orthodoxy of the time that based earth science on the biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden. Geology presented a challenge to Church ecclesiology in the same way as Darwin’s 1843 Origin of the Specie made evolutionary biology an alternative image to creationist mythologies.

The story of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz came out at the turn of the 20th century, and with the economic depression of 1929, an inward looking America emerged. The German Hermann Hesse in 1932 picked up on the European fascination with Eastern mysticism in his Journey to the East, in which the internal struggle of the “protagonists” HH and Leo later captured the existentialist imagination of our post-WWI generation.

Hesse’s parade of Western civilizations’ notables got us riveted to our mental hammocks. His telling keeps company with Plato the dialogical philosopher with echoes of earlier math whiz Pythagoras of the theorem-fame. Mozart the classical composer chimes in with the colors of artist Paul Klee while Cervantes’ alter ego Don Quixote battles his windmills. Serialized Tristram Sandry meets up with modern poet Baudelaire and we are impressed with the company Hesse keeps.

Dubbed a musical fantasy with less depth but blaring the same message, Dorothy in her ruby shoes in the 1939 movie version of the Wizard of Oz novel (silver shoes in the novel) realized that the whirlwind journey with Toto never really left Kansas.

In fact, told stories in the last one thousand years was the subject of Joseph Campbell’s 1949 seminal non-fiction work on comparative mythology in the Hero of a Thousand Faces. The monomyth “hero”had similar features across time, and the democratization of the function would find lyrics in Mariah Carey’s Hero. S/he may be found in everyone, if we bother to look inside.

The point of a journey, our mystics now cry, is to awaken at the place where one started realizing that the place may be familiar but one can never really return home ever again. The journey in fact is the transformation that happens within.

Why would we want to belabor this point in a season of March’s Madness when one’s life journey is measured in terms of 20 minutes of fame should one’s team makes the final four on one’s efforts, or, on the last second theatrics of a 3-point hoop before the buzzer?

Projecting our concern to the literature of the civilization that shaped us, or to the current frenzy of fame and infamy from which we cannot escape as the Final Four weekend of collegiate basketball finally arrives, is certainly a roundabout way of raising how the 75K some residents of the CNMI actually view their journey in life?

Dichotomies, especially sharply defined ones, are always suspect, and though there is conceptual accuracy to the notion that the Western mind is led by the questions of “when” (history) and “why” (philosophy), and the Eastern brain hums to the role of “who” (socio-psych) and their location “where” (like my wealthy real estate acquaintances), it does not inform us why the folks up Capital Hill play with rules and regulations like they do, or why the robed justices decide where the wind needs to blow, nor why parents send their children to war.

It is, nevertheless, our image of our journey that determines our behavior. One who comes out of life’s gate a dejado (handicapped) like those of Augustine’s original-sin-Christianity, will act like one. With the prominence of the CNMI Hispanic culture of death where Christ forever remains crucified, sanctifying penance and martyrdom, conjugated to the Midwest Easter lily’d blond-haired blue-eyed Jesus swiftly ascended to the clouded land of an Other World, giving the self-righteous trigger-happy grunts rationale to nuke the bejeesus out of places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran to usher Armageddon, and we sense that the object lessons reflecting the reality factor of the human journey is missing all together in our lives. Abram joyfully went under his mound as Abraham of the Chosen Ones, but we suspect he still turns over in his grave.

Lent reveals the dark night of the soul, a good time to review once more the trajectory of our lives. Quo Vadis?

* * *

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) previously taught at San Vicente Elementary School on Saipan and is currently a guest lecturer at Shenyang Aerospace University in China.