Embarkation
by Meg Files

The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeking new
landscapes but in having
new eyes.  –Marcel Proust

We believe we are prepared for this
trip: all-terrain shoes, tiny clotheslines,
mesh-sided shirts, new underwear,
Columbia shorts, everything cute enough
for each other. At the Quito airport,
the driver holds a sign–Sally Jean
Susan Lee Margaret Kay–expecting
six instead of three with middle names.
At Guayllambamba we are given bumpy
green fruit with insides like cooked fish.
Each rod of flesh holds a long black
seed. We taste this chirimoya but not
the cuy (a pretty name for guinea pig).
The guide poses us at the equator, where
we weigh two pounds less. A day of calm
volcanoes, a trek past an outdoor mass–
Then sings my soul–to Peguche waterfall
where boys tumble below the celebrants,

 and we come to Guachala, oldest hacienda
in the country, where we need to be.
For dinner we are led past all others
to a small table behind a giant bread oven
as if the staff can see our weight of secrets.
We are brought wine. Ready to go
forward, we cast ourselves back–This
is what I saw, this is my sealed pain.
Here and here and here are our slick
black seeds, and we open our white grief
flesh and our eyes are washed new. Later
in my room I have a fire and Agua Mineral
(un milagro de la naturaleza). Outside
the wind in the eucalyptus is the ocean. Now
we sisters, doubled, and lighter, are prepared
to make our journey to the strange islands.

****

“Embarkation” is the first poem in Galapagos Triptych: Three Ways of Seeing the Galapagos Islands, a book of poetry, watercolor, and photography by author and poet Meg Files and her sisters, twins Sally Cullen, MD (photographer) and Susan Reimer, MD (water colorist).

The three write in the book’s foreward:

In the summer of 2005, three sisters set out for the Galapagos Islands, expecting adventure and amazement. The journey to the strange new worlds did indeed deliver awe but also provoked new personal and artistic insights.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes,” wrote Marcel Proust.

This collaborative book of watercolors, photographs and poems chronicles what the sisters’ new eyes discovered.

A sisters trip, Meg tells us, is a time for growing close, for seeing in a new way, but first comes what is loosened up after a hard day’s travel, and this may be as surprising to each as the bumpy insides of a strange fruit. So embarkation is a time to begin a moving forward but includes the opposite, a casting back.

Each sister has a way of having experienced the past. Now their three ways of seeing will move into the now and they, with their poems, paintings and photography, will be as sensing tentacles of the same organism. I envy them their journey to the Galapagos and the healed and doubled spirits they have for entering the years ahead. And I take a lesson from their endeavor, a lesson I think we can execute ourselves.

Creating With Many Parts of Oneself
The five sections of Galapagos Triptych include “Embarkation,” “Memory,” “The Wild,” “Origin of Species,” and “New Eyes.” Meg Files’ poems are rich with Charles’ Darwin’s observations, the tour guides’ language and her own thoughts and connections as she sees species unaware of humans and thinks about our place in the vaster world. The photographs do the work of placing us in the Galapagos, as if we, too, are having the trip, and the book’s watercolors are the texture of memories; they offer the internalization of the images one receives from nature.

As writers, we can emulate this artistic endeavor and grow from such emulation, whether our trip is to a neighboring town, a zoo where we live, our own neighborhood, the town where we grew up, or a city we are visiting.

What do we need to make a collaboration from the several ways we have of seeing? In place of Meg’s talented sisters, we’ll need the confidence to play as if–as if we are visual artists as well as writers (and many of you already know you are!). We’ll need a camera and some drawing or painting or collaging supplies in addition to our writer’s notebook. We’ll need to find a writer or historian or philospher or artist somehow connected to the environs we plan to visit. We’ll need to extract quotes we can use bounce our thoughts off of.

Here’s a sample idea:

I am going to San Francisco for a weekend soon. I will be visiting some friends and seeing a new building one of them worked on designing. If I were to take this trip on as the one for my own tryptech project, I’d have to find quotes that might be fruitful to me. I search on the Internet for quotes about San Francisco and find two in a row among the ones listed that inspire me. They are both from William Saroyan:

No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

I read down and I see these two in the list:

It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world. – Oscar Wilde

If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life. –William Saroyan

I know these quotes resonate with me because of the ideas in them about coming to life and dwelling in the immortal. My reason for going to the city and seeing the building is because they belong to the young woman who was my late son’s fiancé.

I want to maintain my connection with her and celebrate her ongoing life, and I want to feel my son’s presence through her. This is the subtext for my trip and I believe the quotes will find their way into the epigraphs of poems I write from the trip. I will take pictures of the buildings, the homes that are poems, according to Saroyan, I will look for my son coming toward me just as Meg and her sisters’ late mother comes to them in “Origin of Species,” one of Meg’s poems in Galapagos Triptych:

In the islands, our dead mother rides

the panga from boat to land with my sisters
and me. Pay attention, you girls. All
are extinct, unselected. And you, and we,
adapted, selected…

“Origin of Species” starts with an epigraph from Charles Darwin:

…both in space and time, we seem to
be brought somewhat near to that great
fact–that mystery of mysteries–the
first appearance of new beings on this earth.

I believe that if I look at my surroundings through the lens of the quotes I have collected, take photos and write notes and lines for poems or a personal essay, I will come home with a deepened experience of my trip, of my friends, of the young woman whose life I so treasure.

And what will my third medium be to fully model my creation after Meg and her sisters’ project? Maybe a collage of images of people going in and out of doorways. Maybe some sketches I’ll do from the photos I’ take in SF.

I am looking forward to seeing what happens when I fold three ways of seeing together.

Triptych. Trip-tick. Isn’t that what the Automobile Association of America gives its members who want help planning a trip?

To write well and understand my yearnings, insights and knowing, I will take this trip and rely on both “real” world information and inner world leaps of association to gather together meaningful images. My trip-tick, which includes quotes as spring boards to my writing, photographs and sketches or collages, will help me live triple: in the now, in the then and in the always.

Thank you Meg, Sally and Sue for a lovely trip through the Galapagos and for an inspiring idea.

For information on ordering the book, email Meg Files at megfiles@earthlink.net.