Motorcycle diaries

Perhaps I need to be a bit more introspective. Or circumspective. Just need to get a new perspective.

I've begun Jon Lee Anderson's interesting and authoritative biography of revolutionary leader and philosopher Che Guevara, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. So far I haven't gotten too deep into it; it's about 800 pages or so, and I've only read the first 70. Still, I've made it up to the point when Che decides to go off for a year with a friend riding throughout South America, during which he penned the legendary Motorcycle Diaries that offer a unique, first-person look at this remarkable figure of 20th-century history.

From what I've read thus far, it's hard to be awed by Che. As a youth, at least, he was fairly non-political. Not a-political, but just someone who preferred to remain aloof from actively practicing politics. You can see some of the events and experiences that would determine his later politicization, like the unique worldliness the Guevaras had for a family so ingratiated with Argentine society. But it's more striking to hear about how Che spent so much of his youth in a rather distant, bookish manner. Sure, he played rugby and sought physical challenges that would test his asthmatic condition. But he was very intellectual and well read. It's sort of like he's opting to do very little in terms of politics until he's had a chance to sort everything out for himself. Obviously he doesn't watch from the sidelines of history for long, but it seems like that period of detachment and development, of political maturation from afar, was much more important than jumping in with both feet. That process of discovery, I think, became central to the person he later became. Almost ascetically revolutionary, single-minded in objective like Lenin.

It has me longing again to undertake my own itinerant voyage, one where the journey proves more important than the destination or the stops along the way. I wonder if it's possible to have such an experience without embarking on a physical journey, if there's some sort of metaphysical traveling that can substitute.

I just keep feeling like I'm running into the same obstacles in this. I need time to undergo this kind of a process, and it's a luxury I don't really have. Always I have to worry about more mundane matters, like where I'm going to sleep or how I'm going to eat. And as much as I'd like to attribute that to the absence of an adequate social welfare state, or my misfortune to lack a wealthy benefactor or patron, it's just as much the result of my own psychology, of being incapable to chuck all the creature comforts and the aura of security I seek in life for the sake of something daring, something eminently risky, but with a reward unquantifiable.

It's not to say that I'm unhappy with my life, just that I feel some need to augment it with something truly out of the ordinary. But, I seem cursed by this need for material security. I think more and more that a powerful, if subconscious, attraction of the academic life is the very security that comes with tenure. Knowing that I'll not only have job security for life, but the means to live very comfortably, is definitely an integral component of the freedom that comes with the territory. I guess that makes sense, when you think about it. After all, I would argue that no one can be really free so long as they have the ever-present worry of where they're going to stay, how they're going to eat, what they're going to do if they get sick. Material security at least seems essential to have that sort of freedom.

And yet, I know this isn't absolutely true. There are plenty of examples of people like Che who just up and take off one day, without knowing where they're headed or how they'll make it through, but who never worry over such inconsequential matters. So maybe that's the key, to learn to overcome the psychological barriers that hinder such freedom and to have such perennial optimism that things will turn out in the end to make them turn out in the end.

I suppose I find myself meditating on this a lot lately because of my present position. I'm at a definite crossroads in my life. On the one hand, I did something extremely bold by just up and moving to Chicago without a lot of money to my name or much direction as to where exactly I was going. But at the same time, I knew (and still know) that I have enough people to call on in the event of dire straits to not need to worry too much. But I'm trying to resist that. I'm trying to overcome that dependency, to throw all caution out the window and let things come. I just wish that didn't mean simultaneously losing my ability to me particular, to wait for what I want instead of being forced to take whatever I can get just to make do. This sort of a cycle leaves me feeling trapped. I really just want the ability to take as much time off as I need to meditate and create, to indulge my whims and develop my latent abilities, to try to do something of consequence for myself. I'd love to have the freedom to do something ostentatious, outwardly stupid. To consume myself with an avocation so absurd and ill conceived as to give it impossible meaning. If, say, I decided I wanted to sculpt, despite having no training or aptitude for it. But if I had the time to really throw myself into it and give it all the attention and care and thought I could muster, I could create something intrinsically great by virtue of that effort. For it's not about objective standards of quality or taste, but by the subjective value -- the journey contained therein -- that such things can be judged.