That which is Not Quite Homesickness.
Nov. 15th, 2005 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aquabeanIt occurs to me to wonder whether it is, in fact, a legitimate thing to say that one misses places one has never actually been.
In a phone call with Wayne she made the comment that the sense of dissatisfaction with life she and I have both on occasion experienced could be traced back to being a Precocious Reader (PR) and that if one "started too early" it would lead to problems later in life. Wayne spoke of the sensation that she is "waiting for the old man to come in and tell me where to go." I have to say, I think she might be on to something.
Bear, too, has mentioned a similar sentiment. "I want to save the world and almost die, but make it." My sister's observation differs in the sense that she makes specific mention of wanting to "save the world," but otherwise she agrees in every way with a theory Wayne and I developed some time ago.
The Fast Door Theory (FDT) holds that should any of us ever be able to open a solid, at least mostly opaque, door quickly enough we would not necessarily find that the door opened onto the corresponding portion of reality. All things become possible through these means, and while it is remarkably similar to the Wrong Door Theory (WDT), FDT is grounded in the fact that the door opener would have to be making a concerted effort to open the door with the required speed for a temporal shift to take place. The WDT finds its basis in chance, since one would never be able to know or guess when one might open a door at random and find that the room or location on the other side is not the one to which the door had opened in the past.
Whichever theory you subscribe to, both serve as the stepping stone to Great Adventure. Which is what I think I'm missing.
Far too many mornings begin with my opening my eyes, struggling not to throw off the grogginess of sleep, but rather the sensation that I have woken up in the wrong place. Certainly we all have dreams in which we return to places from our childhood, or spots we visited once, but I speak of the overriding sense that the home, the bed you have just opened your eyes to is wrong.
This disconcerting experience can most often be combatted by the judicious application of Escapist Media, whether in print of or photographic form. On occasion though, the usual means of Grounding does nothing to help, and does, in fact, make the situation worse. It's at these times that PRs will find themselves considering, with actual seriousness, either the FDT or WDT, or both. The question then becomes what to do to cure this particular malady, and whether or not it is, in fact, something that needs curing.
Trying to explain that should thirteen small men be waiting for me in my apartment this evening when I get home because they need a fourteenth I would be totally unsurprised, is rather harder than one might imagine. Because, I'm not, for all that it sounds like I am, crazy. I don't see little people, or hear voices. Animals don't talk to me, and I have yet to accidentally set a snake on anyone I know. What I actually believe is that, despite all that I've done and all that I've lived through, none of my experiences have succeeded in completely smothering the small part of me that Believes In Things. And it is from this Belief that theories like FDT and WDT spring-- all of them standing as stepping stones to the unquenchable desire for Adventure.
It's something that could probably be very easily mistaken for homesickness, but the lack of any concrete place in which to ground the sense of longing. It's here that the actual ability to explain the situation breaks down. Because, sure, most individuals can understand the desire to save the world, or be a super hero, but it's something they experience in passing, a fancy attributed to childhood and then left there. How do you tell someone that you would actually be thrilled to have your closet door open to another world? That, your overriding emotion in that moment would not be "wow" so much as "I knew it!"
Read too many books and you realize that just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't out there. The coming of your twenty-fifth becomes, if only peripherally, slightly nerve racking for being a number when Things Happen. Whether it's hope or fear, the feeling remains, a hole in the fabric of your life you stuff with papers and photos and the occasional slip of someone else's experience. But none of this can be tested on a small scale. Some theories take a lifetime to prove or disavow and as someone who's hardly on the brink of things, I've come to a decision.
January 2011, I'm leaving for a year long trip around the world.
In the mean time I'm going to find an apartment with a lot more closets and doors.
In a phone call with Wayne she made the comment that the sense of dissatisfaction with life she and I have both on occasion experienced could be traced back to being a Precocious Reader (PR) and that if one "started too early" it would lead to problems later in life. Wayne spoke of the sensation that she is "waiting for the old man to come in and tell me where to go." I have to say, I think she might be on to something.
Bear, too, has mentioned a similar sentiment. "I want to save the world and almost die, but make it." My sister's observation differs in the sense that she makes specific mention of wanting to "save the world," but otherwise she agrees in every way with a theory Wayne and I developed some time ago.
The Fast Door Theory (FDT) holds that should any of us ever be able to open a solid, at least mostly opaque, door quickly enough we would not necessarily find that the door opened onto the corresponding portion of reality. All things become possible through these means, and while it is remarkably similar to the Wrong Door Theory (WDT), FDT is grounded in the fact that the door opener would have to be making a concerted effort to open the door with the required speed for a temporal shift to take place. The WDT finds its basis in chance, since one would never be able to know or guess when one might open a door at random and find that the room or location on the other side is not the one to which the door had opened in the past.
Whichever theory you subscribe to, both serve as the stepping stone to Great Adventure. Which is what I think I'm missing.
Far too many mornings begin with my opening my eyes, struggling not to throw off the grogginess of sleep, but rather the sensation that I have woken up in the wrong place. Certainly we all have dreams in which we return to places from our childhood, or spots we visited once, but I speak of the overriding sense that the home, the bed you have just opened your eyes to is wrong.
This disconcerting experience can most often be combatted by the judicious application of Escapist Media, whether in print of or photographic form. On occasion though, the usual means of Grounding does nothing to help, and does, in fact, make the situation worse. It's at these times that PRs will find themselves considering, with actual seriousness, either the FDT or WDT, or both. The question then becomes what to do to cure this particular malady, and whether or not it is, in fact, something that needs curing.
Trying to explain that should thirteen small men be waiting for me in my apartment this evening when I get home because they need a fourteenth I would be totally unsurprised, is rather harder than one might imagine. Because, I'm not, for all that it sounds like I am, crazy. I don't see little people, or hear voices. Animals don't talk to me, and I have yet to accidentally set a snake on anyone I know. What I actually believe is that, despite all that I've done and all that I've lived through, none of my experiences have succeeded in completely smothering the small part of me that Believes In Things. And it is from this Belief that theories like FDT and WDT spring-- all of them standing as stepping stones to the unquenchable desire for Adventure.
It's something that could probably be very easily mistaken for homesickness, but the lack of any concrete place in which to ground the sense of longing. It's here that the actual ability to explain the situation breaks down. Because, sure, most individuals can understand the desire to save the world, or be a super hero, but it's something they experience in passing, a fancy attributed to childhood and then left there. How do you tell someone that you would actually be thrilled to have your closet door open to another world? That, your overriding emotion in that moment would not be "wow" so much as "I knew it!"
Read too many books and you realize that just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't out there. The coming of your twenty-fifth becomes, if only peripherally, slightly nerve racking for being a number when Things Happen. Whether it's hope or fear, the feeling remains, a hole in the fabric of your life you stuff with papers and photos and the occasional slip of someone else's experience. But none of this can be tested on a small scale. Some theories take a lifetime to prove or disavow and as someone who's hardly on the brink of things, I've come to a decision.
January 2011, I'm leaving for a year long trip around the world.
In the mean time I'm going to find an apartment with a lot more closets and doors.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-16 03:41 am (UTC)January 2011, I'm leaving for a year long trip around the world.
That is so incredibly cool that it's beyond words.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-16 07:43 am (UTC)Our 30th birdays are only a month apart and so, the month that I actually turn thirty, we're goin'. Have to start saving now, but we're doing it.
hooo.... big plans. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 12:54 am (UTC)You know, I don't really have fdt, but I've very much got my own streak of "need to save the world". Which occasionally causes me react irrationally to big traumatic events like the tsunami last year. I get so angry about it, like these were my people, mine, and how dare anyone hurt them, and I am going to cause mass amounts of pain to the people responsible- and that's were it kinda breaks down, because who, exactly, is responsible? Fate? The universe? Not anyone I could actually stop, at any rate. But it doesn't make me any less angry.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-16 03:57 pm (UTC)Except, instead of expecting there to be some place different behind a door (or inside a closet) I'm always anticipating something happening while I'm in transit. Especially when I'm walking through Central Park. Like someone is going to drop down out of a tree, or someone who looks weird will run up to me and pull me into a strange world of chases, swordfighting, giants, miracles, and magic. *sigh*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-16 05:01 pm (UTC)Yes. Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Back in high school (ugh, that's getting to be a long time ago), I had elaborate escape routes planned for the inevitable contingency that the school bus would crash, and the FDT would open and I'd be able to get out. And it didn't matter if the the world on the other side was the "right" one, so much as that it was one. Anywhere other than here.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-16 11:43 pm (UTC)2 - Our travel plans sound immeasurably cooler now that you've figured out what year it will be. Come on 2011!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 05:49 am (UTC)I was also a Precocious Reader and grew up believing in other worlds that sometimes share doors with ours. And as I learned more, I decided to believe in my own version of alternate universes and quantum variantions on reality, and the idea that anything that can be imagined strongly enough to invoke the holy "suspension of disbelief" *is* indeed as real as our own reality, somewhere, somehow. And that rule applies not only to other realities, but the idea that we can connect with those, even if dimly and imperfectly and impermanently, like looking through a window, or dreaming into each other's dreams, across realities....
Most of my fics are not stories I feel I "made up" but ones that the people we know as characters told me or showed me when I acknowledged that they might be real, somewhere and somehow (and in infinite quantum variations), and then invited them "into my head."
Definitely difficult to describe without worrying about sounding crazy. I still find myself second-guessing about posting this reply, even though it's something I *want* to share. But most of my fics are not stories I feel I "made up" but ones that the people we know as characters told me when I acknowledged that they might be real, somewhere and somehow, and then invited them "into my head."
Your 2011 trip around the world sounds awesome and inspiring. I hope you will still have your LJ so that you can tell us all about it as you travel. ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-19 09:08 pm (UTC)I don't subscribe to the FDT for the simple reason that I believe one's chance to see that 'other' behind the door is not dependent on the speed at which you open the door, but the purely binary status of the door as open/closed. So my theory's the ODT, Open Door Theory. If it's open, the 'other' goes away or is hidden or whatever, and you have the 'normal' behind-the-door contents. When it is closed, then the 'gate to the otherness' *is* there. Always. But I can never get there or be drawn into that because I have to open the door to get there - and as soon as it's open even a crack, it's gone.
Perhaps this means my belief is less a 'praciticable' belief than yours. Maybe knowing I'll never end up facing (have to face) the 'other' if my ODT *is* true is what makes it possible for me to believe it. *shrugs* I don't think that's the case, I think I really have a resilient belief in my ODT, but I also think I will never be able to really predict my actions at Very Important Moments till they actually happen.
Another thing - my ODT means I block myself out from the possibility of being drawn into any Narnia or Middle-Earth that exists behind my closed doors. So I've really got more of an observer's perspective on the issue; knowing that (a) it exists and (b) I'm not going to be part of it, subsequently means that I (c) am free to sit back and watch you FDT and WDT people with a storyteller's eye and keep my notepad handy to take notes, if I'm lucky enough to hear anything of the day that you get the door open fast enough, or misplaced enough.
I think in terms of pre-quest behavior and mentality, I'm really quite a Frodo Baggins. I don't dream of saving the world, I don't claim ownership or responsibility over its children, and I don't think that I'm cut out for greatness. I don't want to be a superhero because I expect I'd trip or fall out of the sky or something. Acutally, now that I stop to think about it? My closed door is very comfortable, thanks. I feel safe enough to put my back to it, and not worry anything will sneak out - again because of the complete binary nature of that 'gate to other' within it - and watch your FD's and WD's.
I guess I don't have a soul that needs Great Adventure after all. I wonder how much the having of an 'adventurer's soul' has to do with the having of 'bravery.'