The Wandering

Distanced from partner Marsha and her daughter Matty by physical and psychic wanderings into geographic places, historical scenes, other lives… the narrator Blank dances solo with his unavoidable other, claiming to alert her to opaque parts of his nature and to her own: on clinging and running, victim and perpetrator, freedom and fundamentalism, splitting and taking responsibility… and on Samsara, the trivial endless recurrence. The Wandering is Blank’s ruminating travelogue, tainted-love diary, mythic karmic romance, meditation on being and becoming, conscience and commitment.

The Wandering presents a ‘spiritual seeker’ who ‘wants to  transcend his own ego’; and who, while escaping his domineering girlfriend Marsha (in Jungian terms a key anima figure) seeks to highlight her ‘complexes’ by composing for her a striking variety of factual, imaginative, geographic and metaphysical ruminations. Predictably, the more he evades the more he’s forced to engage with his own pretensions. Marsha, a failed soldier, alienated from her father, is gripped by the animus as perpetrator-victim complex, to be enacted on Blank and other ‘failed men’ in her life. Thereby, Blank addresses the anarchic teen daughter Matty, who, in a fight with the mother (as a negative anima figure) takes on ‘parental sins’ – suggesting there’s a chance for psychological progress between generations. Blank’s parallel iterations of he, Marsha and Matty in exotic scenes, other lives, ensures their entwined karma (unresolved psychic material) gets re-examined. Overall, this entertaining and ambitious text affirms that there can be no personal evolution without creatively engaging unconscious elements: in the present, in childhood, and through multiple incarnations. 

About the Author: 

Australian author, educator, director, composer and yoga teacher. His fiction and non-fiction works address core psychological and philosophic dilemmas.