Picture the World. On Travel, Memory, Time and Why to Go Anywhere.
- Aria, Crescendo
Take Off in C Major. Il cuore rallenta, la testa cammina..* Heartbeats slow down as the mind walks on. The landing gear loses contact with the runway tarmac and a hundred thousand horsepower thrusts welded iron wings trough an aerodynamic stream, launching us into thin air. A gentle push back into the chair, and the ground below recedes into familiar abstraction; a map becomes visible. As elementary as it might seem to us now, some of our civilization's sharpest minds, such as Plato, Newton and Leonardo, never got to see it from this vantage point - yet they contributed profoundly to our vision of the world. What would they have made of it?
Most of us take an interest in picturing the world in one way or another, to keep a piece of it or just have a look around, to smell the wind of somewhere else, oxygen a dream or gather a brief notion of how Here may appear from There. In fact, we do not need to go very far to do this. Taking an alternative road home from work one day may change our perspective on things more than catching a flight to the other side of the globe would. Perspective is everything, and altering it every once in a while seems healthy enough.
A fair part of my life has been about traveling: for work, pleasure or seemingly no apparent reason at all. The returns are many, some surprising while others expected; from the exciting discovery of the familiar in a new light to the gracious feeling of homecoming in foreign cities. The tension and release of our everyday music, the beat of the tracks and the scent of past ages feed the curiosity of the traveling mind. That, and a grain of restlessness.
There was a time when traveling involved great physical difficulties. Human kind has been on its way for about 70 000 years, along generally cumbersome trails. Our species has evolved within the range of nomadism and settlement, hunter-gatherer societies and cultivation, steps forward - like mastering fire and later, using wheels - have changed the conditions of life radically. Through stages of progress like the agricultural, scientific and industrial revolutions, going places has been both simplified and necessary. With the US Defense Department project A.R.P.A.Net becoming operational in 1969, and later evolving into what we commonly know as the Internet, means of sharing information have perhaps taken the biggest step forward since Gutenberg's printing press of the 15th century. Still though, where do we think we're going, and what will we be able to make of it once we are there? The world we live in, with its cars, phones, commercials, political elections and so forth, has indeed changed since Stone Age, arguably a lot more than we have as biological beings. We can stay at home or live like nomads, have our cake and eat it too. Or can we?
Embracing modern day offerings of realizing our dreams, we can check boxes on the wish list in a way unthinkable just two generations ago. Few places on the planet are truly difficult to reach today, and change came fast. Napoleon Bonaparte's early 19th century equestrian armies would not have moved significantly faster across the European continent than those of Julius Caesar, more than eighteen hundred years earlier. Yet, by the time of Napoleon's demise on the island of Saint Helena in 1821, arrangements were being made in England for the world's first steam locomotive-driven public railway to be built between Stockton and Darlington. The ensuing spread of railroad tracks across Europe involved the establishment of time zones and synchronizing of clocks, connecting cities within and between countries. Things have kept moving since.
Geography no longer imposes the major hindrance to viewing the world as we know it, yet the mental distance between x and y still has to be covered. The challenge is to make sense of what we see and to attain a personal experience by drawing a line through the sediments of time, from natural beauty - to ourselves. Jabbering guide books, apps and bucket lists will not be of much help here, as the bits and pieces that make the allure of a city or landscape need to settle in the eye of the beholder more than anywhere else.
Cheap flights and paved roads into what used to be the most inaccessible grey zones on the map will take us most anywhere, but the experience of these places lies within ourselves, our interest and our emotional investment. The restless traveler brushing through 1000 years of artistic development and human endeavor with a jaded sigh, has missed the point. Sights and places are not set in a clear hierarchy, nor are they separate or all the same. Rather, they are interconnected. A fragment of one thing will be the key to understanding another, and so it goes.
* * *
Most journeys commence long before they take place, and they never really end. Memories from early age linger in the back of our minds and ripen into movement later in life. The ambulatory spirit of the traveler is constantly looking for new entries, exits, and places in the future that will confirm or question the past. It is a game of expectations, and ultimately, of distance and time - ponderous entities that we know surprisingly little about without inventions like kilometers, miles and minutes to aid our comprehension.
Cliché has it that the outer journey has a corresponding inner movement, an enrichment and progress without which the hours, days and distances covered would be a mere inconvenience. To travel is to step out of the self, to venture out and return with a stronger sense of where we are than we had before. Whether it means going to distant lands or getting to know the neighboring town, does not really matter. Hard as it is to step into the same river twice, returning from a journey with a refreshed mind, we might find ourselves more at home than ever before. Things are the same, yet irreversibly changed, because we have changed. Going places endows us with stories to tell and a sense of orientation in the world. Stand still, and you might get lost.
It has been said about music that it has the ability to lift us out of ourselves and return us to a different, more profound inner place. Art, literature and travel seem to offer a similar effect. It comes as no surprise that the pursuit of travel is prominent in our scriptures and legends of old, like the narrative dialogue between Prince Arjuna and Krishna of the Bhagavad-Gita, Saint Christopher carrying little Jesus across the river or the Biblical Exodus, to name a few. In the younger among Abrahamic traditions, a journey from Mecca to Medina marks the beginning of a new calendar.
Homer and Herodotus put a long lasting breath of traveling spirit into Western literature, and in times when traveling the land without royal, professional or religious duties to fulfill was regarded illicit vagrancy, the early pilgrims made for legitimate vagabonds on their quest for holy sites stretching from the Jordan River to Santiago de Compostela. Merchants and explorers such as the Polo brothers and masters of the sea have - for better or for worse - created the world as we know it with their far away findings, interpretations and misjudgments.
When J.W. Goethe's storming travel Drang and grand homecoming diaries of his Italienische Reise were published in 1816-1817, it spurred and confirmed a Northern European upper class fascination with the Grand Tour and cultural treasures of the South. British scientist Fox Talbut was a pioneering photographer when he, trying to capture the beauty of the North Italian lakes in 1833 by means of salted paper and a camera obscura, used the new technique he later explained in The Pencil of Nature. Jules Verne would look ever further, and changed the perspective on fictionalized travel in the late 19th century with his bold venture to the centre of the Earth, and world wide ballooning, inspiring explorers of all kinds from Rimbaud to Gagarin.
New means of transportation kept shifting relations between time and distance, further fictionalized and dreamed in C.S. Lewis' wardrobe leading into Narnia, the imaginary world in which visitors would find that more time passed than on Earth, however not at a fixed rate. Notably, this was written just a decade prior to the first man being sent into space. So then, if time was related to gravity and movement, what would happen once we escape the gravity of Planet Earth to venture out of its orbit? How would Standard Time, established just a century earlier, apply to high noon on the moon? Is an hour really an hour, and how long is Now? When trains were first introduced, warning fingers were raised that traveling at such a speed would cause mental disorder, transporting our bodies too fast from one place to another for the mind to adjust. Perspectives change, as do our memories of the past and our view of the future. To the seafarers of the 15th century, the ocean and its eventual limits must have appeared just as overwhelming and inconceivable as outer space does to us.
As we go traveling, we usually don't have to worry about gravity or time being significantly different at our destination. A watch, some local currency, valid visas and a reasonable stock of Imodium will usually do. However in hindsight, how often does a week on the road appear to represent the same amount of time as a week at home? Time flies, though seemingly at varying speed. To a child, a week represents a mind-numbing amount of time, whereas the same seven days will pass in a flash in the mind of the adult. The perception of time is, like most things, dependent on our perspective and the amount of time that we can remember, hence relate to. As we travel, time is reset and we find ourselves in an alternative micro time count within the larger chronology of our lives. A day of discoveries in cozy bustling Yerevan will appear as a significant chunk of time if you have only two previous days of enjoying the city to relate it to. Time assumes a higher density, more things than usual will be new to us, and we see things for the very first time. Like a child, we experience the world being created every day.
The concept of time has also undergone changes from a more structural point of view. Throughout the European Middle Ages, time was associated with our spiritual duties, as the Latin word hora, or 'hour', was synonymous with time for prayer. The ancient Romans, long before that, had divided the day into hour-like entities, and counting them from getting up in the morning would eventually lead to the sixth waking hour of the day - Sesto, or Siesta. Time for a nap. With the lucrative wool trade, early banking and grand scale cathedral building of Renaissance Florence, dividing the hours into sixty minutes á sixty seconds, became the custom. Times were a-changing and life got faster.
About the same time, the convention of perspective was established in the arts, considering and highlighting the view of the beholder rather than the inalterable visual message we see beaming out of medieval representations of the world. The idea of an individual reality, dependent on the physical position of the person perceiving an image, became the norm to Renaissance painters. With a few strokes of the brush, this view would bring people from the 15th century a lot closer to our days.
* * *
Traveling for pleasure is a luxury enjoyed by many. With all the nuisances of queuing for a bus ticket in the sweltering heat of Nairobi, maundering in far off sierras with a nascent headache or losing your luggage at Fiumicino Airport, it is a way to gain new perspectives, to get an insight of the self through others, breaking new ground and to marvel at the magnificent spectacle of a thundering landscape, towering mountains and the timeless peace and fury of the oceans. There is a radically humanizing quality to these gifts and with the aimless determination of the traveler, we can learn how to think with our eyes and to notice the curious events that keep hitting anyone who maintains an open mind.
This applies to the well known wonders of the world as well as the unsung places. The luring attraction of movement can be just as present at a gas station along the way as on a celebrated mountain top. To learn is to conquer, and the fact that the ordinary does not surprise us, doesn't mean that we have understood it.
Sunny holidays or investigative expeditions of discovery; we are tourists in one way or another. The word may have assumed less flattering associations over the years, but tourism is the commodity for sale. We buy it, enjoy it and become a part of it, though in doing so, we can choose to be more or less mindful of where we are going and how to honor the place we're in. Crass exoticism, over-romanticizing and exploitation will block the view and ultimately make it hard for anyone involved to truly benefit from traveling in the long run.
Many fabulous sights around the world have lost their harmony as a result of less considerate tourism and ruthless exploitation. In part, this is caused by travelers following the short lists and top tens of things to see and do, chasing the same thing in a mass search for the unique rather than taking the time to consider what actually takes one's fancy. Individual preference is indeed more diverse than the billboards want to make us believe.
A lot more than our leisure is at stake here. Grand scale commercialism as well as political correctness tend to dictate the dissolution of differences. Things, places and people are expected to be the same - and reasonable as it is from a constitutional point of view, everything is not the same. We, places we go to and things we see are different from one another, and these differences make it all worthwhile. Borders are to be crossed rather than ignored. By observing differences, we can find patches of common ground that actually mean something.
Mass movements of conformity in world wide travel can turn the most intriguing places on Earth into uniform tourist kindergartens, but go somewhere unexpected, and you might extract a genuine experience. Look around, choose your own ground, and listen to the pulse reverberating through like the rolling hum of a tuning fork. Losing our individual perspective would be like undoing the work of the Renaissance masters, leading us back to a far less accommodating place in time.
* * *
We are, however, not all equally fortunate. Some of the most striking travel accounts are those of great hardship, fear and desperate necessity. The prospect of most travels has been survival in one way or another, search for food and shelter, refuge from danger or downright compulsion. From the early emigration of Sapiens out of Africa to the furious expansion of Europe, slavery and colonialism, to today's migratory roads, there is a decidedly dark side to human mobility.
These tales have also found their way into literature, with prominent contributions such as Vilhelm Moberg's magnificent fictional mid-19th century emigration tale of impoverished Scandinavian farmers bound for Minnesota, and Fabrizio Gatti's haunting documentary account on the realities of those who cross the Sahara and Mediterranean today in search for a better life.
The involuntary journeys are the ones that have brought about the most radical changes, just as our great inventions and ideas tend to be sprung out of dire need, shortage or mere mishaps. The leisure traveler plays a subordinate role in the grand scheme of things, but the pursuit and philosophy of going places, the confluence of vision and understanding for the other can change the world too - and does so, all the time.
Browsing through the daily newsfeed can leave us with a sinister impression that the world is a dangerous place worth staying away from, a Hobbesian struggle between all, with disaster lurking behind every corner. This picture is not entirely false, though it fails to cover the story. Many conflicts in the world portrayed as unsolvable or eternal are in fact far from it if scrutinized more closely. Aggression feeds on fear and frustration, short-sightedness and the assumption that the interests of a few combatants reflect the interests of the many.
There are obvious or hidden conflicts in everything, tensions to heed, avoid, or release if possible. Though with all our differences and discords, the most prevalent tendency among people around the world is peaceful acceptance, hospitality and friendliness without asking anything in return. There is no reason to be naïve, but people are generally nicer than they have to be. The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess used to claim that he could throw himself out of an airplane with a parachute just about anywhere in the world and expect to be treated well wherever he happened to land. I would recommend a brief consultation with the map before doing so, but Naess' view is a good start. It may seem easier to make a point by doing bad rather than by doing good, and whoever is angriest tends to get the biggest media coverage. Though in the long run, people wishing for a peaceful coexistence with their fellow man in the pursuit of happiness will widely outnumber those who do not.
* * *
I usually travel with a notebook, some paperbacks and a camera at hand, though facing the day unarmed can be just as rewarding. Times are ever-changing and what used to be printed paper, glass and steel may be substituted for pads and smartphones, but this is a superficial change rather than a substantive one. The visual quote of a photo or an eye-opening description of a place can change our direction, attract us to somewhere specific or make us see in retrospect why we even went there at all. We can read up on things one way or another, scan through the pictures, document the sights, or not. The rules of engagement are made up as you go. We can share our experiences or keep them to ourselves. The notion that something concerning us is at work somewhere else is what makes us get on that flight, train, bike or into our wandering boots.
The not-so-cheerful Portuguese writer Pessoa refers to literature as the most agreeable way of ignoring life, but the written word can very well bring us closer to it. Alongside the jet and combustion engine, literature is a highly effective means of closing in on a destination. Pessoa rarely traveled, as any sunset to him was the same, and a visit to the suburbs of his home town of Lisbon was no less intriguing than a trip to China. He was right in a way, pointing out that the sensation of freedom that travel can bring is in our mindset. Without it present, it hardly matters where we go.
A change in pressure is making itself known inside the cabin. Clouds dim the view and descending through the milky vapor, a sun swept surface of meadows, towns and coastlines appears in the patchy morning glow, like a Ruisdael painting. Cars and trains pulse through the landscape like cell streams through veins between the beating hearts of cities; bridges and canals like aortic valves and shadows stretching across the earthen tissue of the land.
Airborne in the opposite direction of the rotation of Planet Earth, the sunrise seeping into the cabin comes as something of a surprise. It is like a chronological transgression, entering the new day all too soon. We arrive at our destination and reset our clocks, winning or losing time. For instance, an evening flight from America arriving in the early morning at Sydney or Hong Kong will rob the traveler of an entire day, never to be lived anywhere.
I let go of the view for an instant and glance over at my neighbor's reading. Big, glossy prints of celestial bodies cover the pages, moonscapes and space-like spheres with craters and stardust halos floating in the dark galactic void. Is she catching a transfer? We fasten our seat belts, the book is closed and I notice the title, Microbiology, Cells and Bacteria: A New Perspective. Indeed. Patterns repeat themselves in curious ways and varying scale, and just as we think we know what we're looking at, it turns out to be something else, or similar to the unexpected.
Lennart Nilsson's endoscopic photographs of an embryo developing inside the womb were first published in the 1960's, around the same time as pictures taken by spacecrafts from around the moon would reach the press, allowing curious Earthlings to visualize what our planet looks like from afar. These pictures bear a striking resemblance and when presented, they changed the way people viewed life on a macro and micro level, big and small. Reality is portrayed in different ways and for various reasons. We generally accept Mercator's grid projection of the world as a true map of the earth, although we know the proportions have been distorted by the flat representation of a sphere. It is all wrong, yet the logic of longitudes and latitudes helps us to pinpoint a position more accurately than on a more exact representation of reality. The flat map has no horizon, nor any of the life and energy of the original, but it gives us a graspable view of the physical world. Structures, patterns, colors, smells and sounds surround us, like morse codes waiting to be heard, understood, put into context - or be regarded individually. They are similar to ourselves in that way, as we venture in and out of our every-day lives. The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer once wrote of an unexpected glade in the forest that can only be found by the wanderer gone astray. It is a place not mentioned in guidebooks, though it may well be what we remember most lucidly once back from our journey.
We occasionally come across these alien places that feel like home. For all its bulky physical mass, the world is the sum of what we know about it, and that sum is seemingly subject to change. We cannot see it all, let alone understand everything, but we can strengthen our grasp of what we see, thus enriching our lives with it.
* Kharakhané (A forza di essere vento) by Fabrizio De André Anime Salve (1996)