Schwartz - On a Voyage to an Untamed Land
[Update & Reflection]

"Put me on a ship that is sinking
on a voyage to an untamed land..."
-- from Don't Take Your Love Away by V.A.S.T.

1. My hoped for trip to Jerusalem may be postponed again due to my duties as a volunteer worker. Will see, will see...
2. Good news!!! I am getting quite chummy with some nice Palestinian workers here in the village -- enjoying many nights in the haze of a nargila. One of them has offered to take me into the West Bank. He used to take the village's volunteers there all the time, though he advises that there are areas I might not want to visit right now, for obvious reasons. Thus, I may be able to go to Ramallah, the current Palestinian capitol as soon as next weekend! (Both Israel and Palestine claim Jerusalem as their capitol. Specifically, "United Jerusalem," which includes all parts of the city, Israeli settlements and the Arab counties annexed to the municipality after the '67 war, is claimed by Israel, while East Jerusalem is claimed by Palestine. I'm not sure if Palestina also lays claim to the Old City, which was part of East Jerusalem when Jordan controlled that half of the city.)
3. Many congrats to Ben for his successful sojourn to and back from China!
4. Working on a new short story, to be entitled "Promised Lands." It's about a young man, named Joey Traveler, who leaps out of a window from one the Twin Towers (gruesome, I know) only to awaken in an alternate reality where the towers collapsed in 1993, and September 11th marked a bio-chemo-nuclear war between the US and its opponents. In this world he is called "Chameleon" (or as one character phrases it, "world-traveler, skin-jumper"), a chief of a tribe called the "Townmen," people who fled New York State's urban areas to the Adirondacks seeking a legendary "Promised Land." The Townmen are at war with those who live in the wilderness, called the "Greenmen," who are led by a mysterious figure called "Allat" or "the Goddess."

Since I'm on the topic of my stories, lately I've been asking myself, 'Shouldn't I be exploring the physical world rather than the imaginative world?' When I asked this question, I forgot the original ideal for which I even embarked on this journey: I call that ideal "the Theonaut," literally, "god-traveler," a new kind of explorer. You see, until we go to outer space or the deep oceans, all the great physical frontiers -- that is, those that would be open to me, a non-geneticist -- have been mapped and settled. There are no geographic Timbuktus for which to seek anymore. ...But there remain frontiers of the psyche: the imaginative, emotional and spiritual shades of the private self, which comprise the internal psyche, and the cultural, political and moral shades of the public self and the historical self of humanity, which comprise the external and universal psyches. I am here seeking to explorer and push outward all these frontiers: the internal through my craft as a writer of stories and reflections, and the external through my physical wanderings, studies, activism and, inshallah, as a journalist.

Sometimes the desires to explore internally and explore externally conflict, as they are conflicting right now. When inspiration strikes me for a story, essay or article, I find that I must write it immediately or greatly risk never writing -- but the same is true when I am inspired to go to a place. For instance, when I was in Philadelphia, bland city though it was, there was still much to do, see, experience, but I spent most of it locked in my college because I never acted on my impulses.

Ah well, at least these are the worries with which I am faced. I could be threatened with starvation, which I am not; I could be threatened with martial excess or suicide bombs... well, I am, actually. But fickle fortune has smiled on me so far to provide me with a life with enough time and resources to reflect.