the thing about circular journeys. by Talia Hope Levy
Photo credit: Thani Nineta
It’s a real nice thing, to close a journey in a circular way. Arriving here, somewhere stationary, if only for a few hours, in a pretty park with flowers all around. Coming back to life over a big breakfast at a typical cafe, while the sky battles clouds & rainstorms. Finally, as I smoke my triumphant cigarette, after coffee food juice, putting up my hair putting in my contacts turning my underwear inside out taking a shit & brushing my teeth... the sun wins the battle and it becomes a beautiful morning on the cusp of fall in Paris. Here, where I had first set foot on the continent, as summer was breathing her initial heavy breaths. Here, where nostalgia preserves the dense salon in which Gertrude Stein once swayed her pen through the night. The final destination of the infinite bus that took me here from Napoli.
& things ring abstract and constructed on this voyage, making me wonder more than ever if I do create my reality after all. Riding the first infinite bus with a kindred soul sitting next to me, as we revisit the fact that time & space are one & I wonder what that means, on an infinite bus. If this, then, is just a hole in the fabric, or the whole of the fabric.
& I have this feeling that the soul of this Mr. Vulcano is the same soul of every effeminate man that I’ve ever spoken with, or maybe the yin yang flip flop of myself, and the hairs raise on my arms and we both drift back into our solitary journeys.
& the little dog who runs beneath my feet at the cafe table this morning, choking & mutedly barking & shaking, hoping so desperately for breadcrumbs while her owner calls “Talia... Talia!”
& I call back, “elle est ici!” and “comment il-s’appelle, le chien?”, and she confirms that she is indeed Talia, which is my name, and the sky is still broiling wrestling, and a pair of chatty Italians sit down at the table next to me, and I float in a striated cloud of French & Italian & imagine that I can control the whole universe in this moment.
My last moment, before returning to the states. The moment where all the power of travel & stimulation & a woman’s cyclical energy murmur in a manner quite magical, right behind my earlobes.
Artist’s Statement
I grew up reading every book on my father’s bookshelf. He happened to have a proliferation of beatnik literature, and thus one of my first adult experiences came to be hitchhiking the California One with Dharma Bums in my pack.
As a woman born in the 90s, raised in a progressive college town, I am compelled to find a different voice to frame the same old stories. I believe that as writers we are writing the same epic tale over and over again, with our own flavor. I am searching for a distinctly feminine, rather optimistic voice to speak on current and future counterculture. Characters and tales that ponder the best way forward while they navigate a psychedelic, absurd, ornate world. Stories that fuse high fantasy with speculative fiction, transgressive fiction with philosophy. I write in response to stimuli, whether it’s the next chapter in our book that my friend just sent me, or the awake and observant state that I experience when I dwell in a foreign place.
the thing about circular journeys is an autobiographical note that I penned in my notebook upon arrival in Paris at the end of a 27 hour bus ride spent listening to Patti Smith’s audio books and reading Gertrude Stein’s biography.
Talia Hope Levy is a co-founder of the Rogue Writer’s Guild, has studied & practiced regenerative agriculture for the past ten years, and has been writing stories since she could write. Her work has appeared in the Guild’s zine collection, Slingshot, and Conjunction Press. She recently completed her first solo novel, and took part in two collectively-written books, all three of which are currently unreleased. She just settled down in Portland, OR this September after a three month stint learning languages and doing typewriter-street-poetry around Southern Europe.