CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

Next to me, as I write from the dining room table in the pre-dawn dark, sits parked a camper van. Let me try that again: a “camper van.”

Its main components: a small wooden wagon with side panels removed, atop which sits a large air compressor box tipped on its side, small windows sawed into it with dull crafting scissors and blue oil pastel scribbles on top. Inside, at present, there is nothing, because I did decide to turn it upwards and dangle the entire upper half of my body down into it yesterday, swinging and grasping like a fishing lure on a line to recover some nice blankets, a meditation pillow, and a few bits of thankfully dry food and several of the tiny plastic pegs that go into the light-bright toy, curse its soul.

The camper van goes on travels. We recommend that it not do so, but it does. It wends its way from one too-narrow channel of house to another, its driver becoming psychotically frustrated at each hold-up while we stop what we’re doing to go help stack chairs and nudge coffee tables and pull furniture out a few inches so the lumbering creation can make its usually ill-fated turns.

Then, when it comes to a place it deems “good for a campout” (always in a high-traffic spot), it stops.

Painstakingly, over many fraught or explosive exchanges, my two children (five-year-old twins) have finally mostly hashed out the accepted process for “going to bed in the camper van.” My daughter has mostly convinced her brother that because the box outstrips its wagon base in size by about 100%, it is necessary to place two small stools under the side and back overhangs before climbing in for a good night’s rest.

If, that is, one does not want to tumble onto the ground, with most of the camper van, inside its inviting but treacherous dark, hurting one’s butt and dreams (it is worth noting that her brother sends her in to do the sleeping for the night at each stop, generally forgoing it himself for undisclosed reasons).

She has repeated this uncomfortable crashing process enough times to become committed to the stool-propping method. The driver, on the other hand, sees such preparation as fussy; stopping to make further arrangements, beyond the lumbering phenomenon of his joy that already exists, is a marring scratch upon the face of his dream, which is one of seamless usage.

(Also, his dream involves an eventual “real smooth plywood” base extender nailed to the chassis, and “real glass windows,” which he will not brook his father denying, so we’ve had to ride Ye Olde Maybe for several days, hoping he will not press the point further.)

It is important, insofar as possible, not to crush people’s dreams.

“But what if the dreams are delusional?” one might reasonably ask. This is where it gets dicey.

A delusion tends to be defined basically as a belief that isn’t true.

Reader, I defy you to stand next to the 6:40am exclusively-muscle body of my son, clad in wrong-footed silver hologram dress-up heels and underwear only, hair sticking up in the back like the last stalks in a field that the combine missed and will now remain there for the rest of the winter and maybe for all time, and tell the light beaming from him, the glow pouring from him, the exquisite enchantment emanating like heat from a bonfire, that his camper van is a delusion.

You see, it is not untrue. The camper van is in fact a very true thing, perhaps truer than most of what we encounter in a day.

Acknowledged: it does have some kinks to work out on the material plane; there are features about it that are notably unideal, such as that it mostly doesn’t really work very well. But its glory, the marinade of its deep and bewitching promise, are … enough.

More than enough! The camper van sustains in a way that the pre-made, dad-assembled Christmas gift of a “market cafe stall” with tiny wooden vending machine and espresso station cannot, will never.

It is the very unruliness, the very unfinishedness, the very angular precariousness of the camper van that makes it so wholly, dimensionally tantalizing. In its incompletion and only-partial functionality lies its gravitational allure: it induces— it seduces— our utmost capacities with its perfect combination of capacity and need.

The camper van is not merely a toy, a thing to be used. It is an experience, an encounter to be had between the driver and the vehicle, in which the dream of its potential enters the driver, and this dream fulfills and sustains and fuels the driver’s consciousness in a way that the easy functionality of a completed object, a usable and working toy, absolutely could not. No, it’s not a thing. It’s an unfolding, a phenomenon.

And if, I argue, this phenomenon were even a few centimeters more functional than it is, the camper van would not be brewing up these conditions for life, wherein it becomes not an object for use but a partner for experience. The camper van becomes the fundamentally relational nature of consciousness.

Friends, I may go so far as to say that only the busted and pathetic, only the lopsided and innards-trailing, only the frayed and beleaguered and unfinished and bockety can enter so fully into this encounter, wherein potential is the honeyed bread, the dripping roast, the glowing produce, to stuff your fool face with.

See, if the damn thing worked better, we could merely drive it around for an hour or two, getting a quick hit of satisfaction from an expected and delivered action. But since the camper van needs our care, requires our hopes, induces our dreaming, seduces the fullness of our imagination (what greater gift to give a partner in experience than your imagination?), we not only can, but must suck the marrow out of the experience in order for it to exist at all. We must partner the camper van in this imperfect and delicious act of being

.So when my son announces, for the sixth or seventh time, that “we’re going to make a smooth plywood base and drill it in,” it’s not just because my husband and I are doormats to the extraordinary wills of our freakishly spirited children that my husband replies, “well, I think we have some plywood in the garage attic.”

Note that he does not say “yes absolutely, we’ll do it right now.” Neither does he say, “no buddy, that’s not going to work; it would be a little silly to put a plywood base on there and drill it to a cardboard box, which is already starting to sag and will be pulpily deceased by next week.”

No— his comment places him directly in the slipstream of my son’s dreaming, somewhere between fact and potential. He gives the child the gift of the brewing squint, that look on the contractor’s face that speaks of far-off tools and materials, the quiet, pulsing beginnings of a plan, the quietness and intimacy of which, the not-yet-known-ness of which, makes it all the more precious. (And exhausting, but that’s another essay.)

We live in a world that prizes the moment of the last nail going in, the finished thing, that which has been acquired, had, made into a given— far more than the process, and certainly far more than the tiny, galaxy-wide dream-spark that lights the process to its bright and troubled and life-saving flame.

I wanted to take a minute to bow in awe of this particular juncture, today, this place that lives upstream of product, and even process.

I wanted to honor the place/moment where/when potential takes us up into itself, and we catch glimpses of our own flashing, swimming body joining all its iterations in the current, every entity among us free and fast and indistinguishable from the others as we all press, with every molecule of our surface areas, forward into the rush, the phenomenon, the encounter, of the river.

Drive ye camper vans while ye may, friends. I think there might be some plywood in the garage. I’ll go look, so that you can stand up, right where you are, and go now to meet, and mingle with, the dream.