Thinking about France again and the long journey over the sea.
Thinking about that cafe in Paris’ Red Light, drawing in my journal while the rain thrum-thrum-thrummed the rooftops. I never was an artist ’til Paris.
Even though the goats gruff thought they would be happier on the other side of the bridge, they too had their fears. The troll is their anxiety, their doubts trying to keep them from moving past the wall of the “city”. Marianne spoke often of the outsiders, the rebels. She spoke of the rebel in each of us, and of transformations, and journeys. That’s what those goats went to become, rebels on the other side of the fence. They defeated their troll as if it were the only troll in the world, and the story goes that the grass really WAS greener over there, and it would lead you to believe that that’s where they stayed the rest of their days, content to chew the verdage.
But once you’ve defeated a troll, conquered your fears and gone past your limits, just once! Once you’ve become an outsider, you can never go back. Stepping outside the walls, they begin to expand. If you don’t keep moving “out”, soon you’ll find the walls have enclosed you in their warm embrace again … warm like a stagnant pool in the summer, like a fake smile, like the tourist season.
Paris was way beyond my boundaries. It was the island around which walls could not be built. It was a continuous call for “la revolution!” and a conflagration demanding the candle be burned from both ends.
After France, even the US was strange, outside comfort. And so, one of the best summers I ever spent, an outsider in a world I knew well, an observer distant from my surroundings. Myself, surrounded by France, still lingering on a balcony over La Place de la Baleine watching the american tourists below that had brought their comfort with them.
Being an outsider is not just where you go, it’s how you go and what you take with you for the journey. Those tourists were never outsiders … their normalcy never became an object for their own rebellious contempt. And then, maybe I wasn’t, either. But I learned one thing. One thing at least. Being an outsider doesn’t make you happy. Those who have been outsiders, and have since gone back to ways of comfort, their memories of being outsiders may bring them happiness. Those who stay outside, those terminal rebels … I think they rarely find happiness.
I guess that in this story, there is no moral.