Offal: Spoils of Immigration
The human mind, like the earth, is the sum of its pastures and deserts. The water of imagination, like the water of oceans, rivers, lakes, falls, and springs, irrigates both fertility and erosion, creation and destruction.
Verdancy of pastures knows water integrally; the barrenness of deserts knows water as the thirst for it.
Untethered animals wander in grazing. Birds of flight seek feed wherever feed may be found. Once the appetite of an animal or bird is satisfied, wandering and seeking ends; the creature’s instinct, its survival, has been essentially satisfied, albeit temporarily.
The human mind, therein the imagination, is rarely, if ever, satisfied and even when temporarily so, dubiously so. The mind, no matter how elemental or elevated, rational or irrational, intuitively knows that there is more to being human than survival and more to survival than existence.
Quite often the “location” – physical, cultural, familial, or otherwise – in which a person is born is unsupportive of survival in the material sense and/or in the sense of nourishment to the inner landscape of one’s spirit and intellect.
When such incompatibility is recognized as self-knowledge in the midst of objective ignorance, then the incompatibility is to be trusted and rectified; however, when the incompatibility is not inwardly based but incited through external promptings (self-ignorance in the midst of objective knowledge) then the incompatibility is less or not at all to be trusted, and any action toward rectification may be considered suspect in being foolishly or treacherously motivated.
The Promised Land, wherever and whatever it may be to one or more persons and however distant (a neighborhood away or oceans away), is often more promising in the imagination of an already wandering and thus susceptible mind than in the reality of location.
News, and much more travels fast, and to the mind that perceives itself to be in a desert, literally or metaphorically or both, news of water becomes as replenishing to the imagination as water itself is to the body. Hence, the lure of immigration can be like the bait in a trap ensnaring not only individual wanderers and seekers but the very beast of humanity composed of all of us within the boundaries of continents, nations, and ourselves.
Whether the mind alone or with body (or bodies) migrates or ultimately immigrates in hope and search of betterment, the true Promised Land can only be inhabited through satisfaction, and where is that but in oneself wherever one may be?
Sometimes migration to another place, a presumably greener pasture, finally does secure longed-for satisfaction. Sometimes one person’s greener pasture is another person’s more barren desert. Sometimes someplace is no place and the search either ends with resignation or endures with perverse satisfaction.
The Promised Land is never a place that people are in but is in the persons who define the people in any place. The Promised Land indeed exists and can not only be discovered and inhabited but in fact created from any place already or from anyplace else, even in the midst of its own destruction, a cannibalism in which the beast of humanity butchers and consumes itself, its collected cultures and diversities, in order to sustain its pursuit of spoils that only spoil the natural individual and collective pursuit of betterment by untainted standards.
– Mary Jo Magar –