Up a Mountain or Into a Hole

When Paul Bowles first visited Tangier in the summer of 1931, it was, he said, only in search of “rest, a lark, a one-summer stand.” Thirty years later, Leonard Cohen was looking for something more when he followed in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lawrence Durrell, and others to the already famous artist’s retreat of Hydra in the spring of 1960: a place not only in which to write, but also a place where he might become a writer. From the age of 11, until he traveled there in his late 20s, Bruce Chatwin fantasized about Timbuktu, “a mythical city in a Never-Never Land,” as he described it, “an antipodean mirage, a symbol for the back of beyond.” The Timbuktu in his mind, a metonym for the furthest reach, was so potent, Chatwin said, that if a man has traveled there, “He has gone away indefinitely, and probably will not return.”

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Escapism is perhaps central to all artists’ myths, to all art, and to all of our existences—surely we all have our own Tangiers, our Hydras, our Timbuktus? This fantasy of removal, of wanting to get away from the routine, the mundane, animates all of our lives and is packaged by not a few industries who ask us to imagine what if we might, for a time, set down the mask we wear in our day-to-day lives. And for so many of us, this process of retreat—whether to make art or to un-make ourselves—is ongoing, cyclical. A pushing and pulling between the civilization in which we live and the wilds where we can un-do our lives to begin anew, becoming someone who is in better shape, better at Spanish, better in love, a better painter.

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In a sense, knowing and describing ourselves, labeling ourselves with snowflake-specificity, is our entire mission. These days, we sell ourselves as unique in a crowded marketplace, no matter what it is that we do. Refining and performing our identities has become our entire mission, the marketing of our personal brands, our career. Who can blame us, then, for wanting a vacation from having to be ourselves?

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“We’re all on Boogie Street,” Cohen once said of our daily lives. “And we believe that we leave it from time to time. We go up a mountain or into a hole. But most of the time we’re hustling on Boogie Street one way or another.”

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Everything we do on Boogie Street is to survive, to make a living, make rent, make do. And everything we fantasize about is the unmaking of these things. A renunciation of the identity we have constructed back home, of our responsibilities, the contortionist characters we play in the workplace, the various expectations we place on our lives and the performance we put on in their pursuit. The place on which we settle our fixation, our fantasy for fleeing, can be any old oasis of our imagining. Whether it i a rocky island in Greece or a dusty capital in the desert. The details are almost immaterial—be it a wellness retreat in Costa Rica or, say, Ibiza for the opposite of
that—because we know it to be unreal, in the sense that the retreat itself is a step outside of the demands of reality. (Witness, for example, the post-escape stories on Instagram that communicate some version of “back to reality.”)

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But then what makes us think that our workaday lives back home, as well as the identities we inhabit there, are any more real? It’s worth wondering, too, what happens when we begin to bring our Boogie Streets to Timbuktu, or vice versa. We fabricate our Never-Never Lands into three dimensions, as Donald Judd did in Marfa, Texas. Can a retreat still be a retreat if we live there full time, as Bowles did in Tangier? Is an escape still an escape if we set up a residence there, as Cohen did on Hydra? Or do we always need to be escaping for something more, something further, something else?

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One place I run—and run away—to is a wonderful artist retreat, in Taos, New Mexico. The town where Agnes Martin worked for a time, where Dennis Hopper fled from Hollywood while making The Last Movie [1971], and not far from where Georgia O’Keeffe built her own escape. It is a blissful place of peace in the high desert, wreathed in red rock canyons, and, in the fall, with snow-capped mountains. The first time I came to the artist retreat in Taos, full of ambition and all of the Boogie Street bravado, I finished a novel in three months. The second time I came, my plans came unglued, and I put away the project I’d intended to work on to instead figure out who I wanted to be going forward. A third visit followed, during which time I picked up a new and different medium, wanting to spend more time taking pictures than writing. And as I write this now, I am settling in for my fourth session beneath the sacred Taos mountain, this time with no plans at all, not even an idea of returning to the world. I hope to, instead, hide out from the worries of the world, the demands of living, and, of course, from myself. For a while, anyway. I expect that, in the end, he will find me there. Our selves find us everywhere.