on the wild

i just finished watching the sean penn film, into the wild. the book is loosely based on the jon krakauer profile, first published as a series of articles in outsider magazine and then as a book. the story is so crazy poignant, i think, because the tragedy is that he does not live to learn what he ended up learning. the treagedy isn't that he made his mistake, i think. i think it's that he doesn't ever get to learn what he learned from making the mistake that he made.

by all accounts, mccandless was a good soul. an old wind. he was crazy and off the grid in the way we really should be if we were truly sensible. what is this whole thing anyway? what are we really doing anyway? i mean, don't you ever think that this whole thing really is screwed? i mean, we sit in rows and grids of things. i mean, not in actually rows and grids, but our styles, our interests, our friendships, our lives became made into grids and patterns and systems of emotions. anyway, i feel like his sotry call this whole thing. i mean, life is, in some sense, completely wacked.

krakauer also writes how he made a choice to try to conquer the stupidest hardest craziest obstacle he could. he told the story by way of disclaimer because he understood what mccandless set out to do. and i don't think that my trip out west, on my own, is exactly the same. i certainly did not climb the steepest mountain that had not been climbed. i did not set out to sustain myself apart from all society in the wilderness. i did set out to break from myself and from the world, to live, just live and meet experiences on the street that i didn't know about. i stayed at a friend's place for some time before they became also weary of me. but i do connect with what he wanted to do, with who he was, ith who he wanted to be.

the thing i cry most about when i cry about this story is that chris never was able to come back and see that he was crazy and see that he didn't fully understand how big we are and also how much bigger everything else is. that that bigger realy could just end everything else. that we are here, now, but he is not. that people, sometimes, just don't get that chance. that it just ends.

i know that people who know more about the wildnerness think he's more hurtful to the whole sense of wilderness and so on. but i just think there's real simple tragedy in his life. he was a good man. he was different. he wasn't perfect. but he did his thing and he ws only ever trying to be closer to himself, to his wilderness, to who he really was.

krakauer guesses that mccandless died from starvation from eating a misidentified seed. the poisonous seed accelerated starvation but the tragedy isn't just that he starved to deeath. it's not that he just died. in the end, he did come so much closer to himself, to his understanding of the world, to who he was and who he was not. it's not that he's a hero. and it's not that he's a villian.

the true tragedy, i think, is that he was just a young man that wanted to understand the world, to understand himself, and he lost and he lost and he never got to be whoever it is that he really wanted to be. it'sn ot that he was going to sell out. it's not that he wasn't. it's just that the tragedy is that he was on this path to just try to figure out what the real value of this all is anyway after all? what is the real value of this all after everything anyway?

i still wonder. i still wonder, what is the wild? i wonder, could i have gone further into the wild? i wonder, can i still go?