Returning From Exile: One Year Later

May 30th marks the one year publication anniversary of my second poetry collection, Returning From Exile. Looking back on this book that spanned three years of my life, including the publication process, if I accomplished anything at all, it was to call attention to a primal facet of human nature; the need to go home. I don't not mean this literally, but rather in a figurative, poetic manner. Going home, or returning from exile in our case, means going home to oneself somehow. Returning From Exile was a work meant to meditate on the idea of finding oneself in a rapidly changing, ever faster paced world.

Naturally, the world has changed even more since I submitted Returning From Exile for publishing in mid 2023. None of my artistic writing had yet meditated on AI, the October 7th terror attack and the war that followed, nor the accelerating deterioration of the liberal democratic order that underpins western success of the last two centuries. I would submit that it is probably as easy, or easier still, to feel lost in today's world than that of Returning From Exile, a world reeling from that pandemic and the start of the Ukraine-Russia war. There is the unsettling premonition in the air that we are on the verge of those major watershed moments that will define the rest of the 21st century and beyond. Now, I stand as good or bad a chance as anyone else at predicting a world war but I must confess the whole thing has an odor to it. For one, the war in Europe is still raging, with no clear end in sight. The Middle East is an eternal flashpoint of course. Then there is the new India-Pakistan flashpoint and the ever simmering China-Taiwan crisis that could soon go hot. We live in a world of increasing peril, where the current liberal order in the west is in its greatest peril since the end of the Second World War eighty years ago.

And then there’s the matter of personal economics. Already, we see a mass of largely educated and impressive people pushed into the unemployment line. We live in the age of DoorDash-ing engineers, wondering what the point of all those all-nighters even was. And then there are the new American Prometheuses who breathed life into these Frankensteins we call Chat-GPT, Meta AI and so on. Do they wonder if they are the next to be weeded out by the synergy merchants we call executives in the name of “organizational efficiency”? Then there’s the industrial athletes who get eighty-sixed, axed, because they were just a tad too slow to unload their boxes or stack containers. Oh, the indignity of getting fired by the almighty algorithm rather than a fellow member of the human species. In the year 2025, we live in a world where the old conventional wisdom on building a career has effectively become obsolete. Before it was “go to school, get a job at a major tech firm and spend a thirty five to forty year career steadily climbing the ladder as high as your marketability (let us be honest now) will take you”. Today, you can consider yourself lucky if you have not yet been laid off a couple of times by the time your mid-life crisis hits.   

Where I am going with this is that in today’s world, it is perfectly reasonable to feel far from home, to feel in exile. One can be forgiven for feeling as if one just spent forty years aimlessly wandering the desert. Honestly, it feels like forty years of history have been crammed into the 2020’s thus far. That aimlessness, that sense of feeling far from home, is what Returning From Exile was meant to distill. This was a collection of poetry meant to make sense of a period in history that seems to move at warp speed, and with about as many twists as a Mexican or Turkish soap opera. And to make sense of that present, it looked into the past. From great rulers like Aethelstan in the 10th century who unified England to the shock art of the Viennese actionists in the 1960’s, history is full of two sorts of people; those who tried to make sense of their time, and those who dared to shape it by force. There were also those who did some of both, like David Bowie, whom I obliquely make references to in some poems within Returning From Exile. He of course made music that really crystallized the essence of the time in which he lived, but of course also did so much more, becoming one of the great trendsetters of the 1970’s, and still an important influence to musicians today. 

Another topic I wanted to explore in greater depth than previously was love. I wanted to make sense in some feeble way of the changing face of love in the 21st century. As I alluded to in my introduction to this section of the collection, it seems like love is growing cold in the 2020’s, with divorce rates skyrocketing and a higher percentage of 20-35 year olds remaining single than in previous generations. It is worth considering, however, that perhaps what drives that is a change in attitudes rather than the slow death of romantic love. Perhaps today’s young people prefer solitude to the quasi-solitude of a broken marriage. Perhaps the economic strain that predominantly affects the young and their future prospects also plays a role in foregoing the romantic rights of passage of old. And yet, everyone wants to love somehow, in some way. For these melancholy souls, it is expressed in those timid glances on the subway, the promising conversations that ultimately lead nowhere, and most interestingly, those promising conversations that never happened at all. In Returning From Exile, I wanted to capture the self-censorship and feeling of helplessness associated with the kind of romantic love that often goes incognito, the sort of thing you would expect to see in a Wong Kar-Wai film. I wanted to meditate on that fleeting touch of your true love’s hand, that moment of perfection remembered with both tenderness and pain. Perhaps, it was not even a physical touch, but a strange telekinetic connection, where the most complicated feelings remain unexpressed. Returning From Exile in some peculiar sense was an attempt to paint into words the picture of the subtle experience of love that leaves the lover deeply lost and in need of finding a way home to oneself.

And then, there is modern life as a whole. It moves quickly, and at the same time not at all. What do I mean by this? Well, consider what a day looks like for most of us. We bumble from urgency to urgency, knocked about to and from states of mild desperation to build careers with which we do not identify, and where purpose is debased into a mere corporate buzzword. We do much, but accomplish nothing. In the end, what is left is an automated, wholly predictable existence utterly disconnected with the essence of being human. What remains is a latent sense of being utterly lost in life, adrift, in search of a port to sail to. And so it is for this reason that the final part of Returning From Exile focuses on loneliness, disenfranchisement, and the generally transitory nature of life. I wanted to capture, to distill in these short pieces, the essence of the 21st century human experience. If I’ve had any success at all, I suspect a number of you readers will find yourselves reflected in this section particularly.  

All this being said though, for all the problems in the modern world, the point is, you can go home again. You can go home to yourself. You can return from exile. The cover art, elaborate as it is, has this simple message. The shining city on the hill is what you want it to be, the life you want, a sense of identity you’ve longed for after years of confusion, or in a historic sense, the land your fathers prayed for for two thousand years. The book is called Returning From Exile, not stuck in exile, because even in the deepest depths of the improbability of going home again, one must be stubborn enough to say “next year!”. The Soviet judges who sent Natan Sharansky to the gulag for nine years must have laughed when this tiny man declared “Next year in Jerusalem!”, with the stubbornness that characterized his ancestors. And yet, in 1986, next year became this year, and five years later, the police state that imprisoned him was reduced to an unhappy memory imprisoned in the confines of a history textbook. Yes, we may have our own mythical River Sambatyon to ford, as depicted in the cover art of Returning From Exile, in order to reach the Promised Land, but that’s why bridges are built, and I hope that if Returning From Exile proves to be anything at all, that it is a section of that bridge, or at least a humble truss, helping to hold the full structure together.