Travel, Travellers, Inside, Outsiders and Fainting Canaries

Oceane goes to Finland

In Tibor Fischer’s Voyage to the End of the Room, Oceane, who lives alone in London, tells us that she’s taking a trip to Finland. She goes down the stairs of her apartment to the living room, and there is Finland. It is served. There is a traditional meal of reindeer tartare, fish and potatoes, there are three hapless travellers who are entertained by this unique enterprise in the world of tourism. There is alcohol and conversation, the kind of cultural exchange that you can expect under the circumstances (it’s all lakes and forests, forests and lakes), and the single man makes a sorry attempt at hitting on her.

It’s uncomfortable, unsatisfying and unpleasant at moments. There’s something mysteriously frustrating about it. It’s a lot like travel. And who’s to say that this is not travel, after all? Oceane is collecting the paraphernalia of it, without actually doing it, yes. But you can go a thousand miles and not move further than your childhood friend’s views on life inside your head. Physical distance is relative, subjective, and possibly irrelevant.

What’s interesting to me, is that an experience that is bought and paid for and home delivered and micro-managed to the point of fitting within a single room can come so very close to the real thing. Almost like it is the real thing.

Not to piss on travel and all

Of course it’s not all discomfort and haphazard conversation. It’s also finding things, like a stone, a porch, a tiny landing pad hugging the edge of a mountainside, a friend, an alien, a place of perfect refuge. It’s all the buzzwords (probably). The most oft-used one – discovery, seems a lot less relevant to me, because you can make exciting discoveries in a potted plant (a surprise slug) or a trail of ants on your bedroom wall (where the hell are they going?).

It’s useful to admit that travel isn’t all pretty, though. There are bouts of absolute loneliness and fear. Big hopes of connection dashed by derailed conversations. Physical threats and shadow-spots that make you freeze on a bright sunny day by the sea. There’s the tide that creeps up in the night when you sleep, there are gangs that take over the streets of an unknown neighbourhood where you’re the only one who doesn’t speak the code.

There are languages you don’t speak and people who don’t like you even before they meet you. There are a million things that don’t get photographed, because they’re just not pretty.

I go down the road

When I was a child, I had a fantasy which played on repeat, a thousand times over, in a thousand variations, every time I sat in the back seat of a car. I would pick a road, any road we passed, and imagine myself walking down it. I was a pragmatic fantasist, so the road was never completely safe or secure. Sometimes it rained. Sometimes it was a dark and stormy night and I walked in the company of flashes of lightning. Mostly, these roads were abandoned. Sometimes I needed to be rescued. Sometimes I was the rescuer. I was pretty much silent throughout, because I never seemed to have much to say. None of these fantasies had endings, happy or sad. They drifted off at the point when I could no longer construct encounters, shelters or hope. They started again, when I found another nice, juicy, lonely road, preferably with a lot of trees.

Escapist

I don’t know when I picked up the word escapism, or how it reached me at a pretty young age, but I knew for the longest time that fantasy was escapism, and that these fantasies were an extreme form of escapism. I didn’t think about what escapism implied.

Later, as an adult, I thought of these as travel fantasies.

Something like the real thing

In AS Byatt’s story Cold, Princess Fiammarosa was a fragile baby. So she was cuddled, warmed, loved, petted, spoilt. She was also sleepy, all the time. She couldn’t help herself. She’d fall asleep in class, she’d watch games go by, she’d accept but never really respond to things. Then, one night, a window happened to be left unlocked in her room. She went over to close it, and felt the chill of an icy winter outside. She woke up. Stepping out into the snow, she felt the first shock of being alive.

And that was it. She was a hothouse flower grown in the wrong temperature. All she needed was to be cold. She was revived from a short lifetime of sleep by an accident and a few manic days of discovery. She became a person, her feet touched the ground. She was a little less loved, when she became herself. As we all are. But she wasn’t a sleepy vapid smiling princess anymore.

I traveled first to Vattakanal, a village off Kodaikanal, where a lot of hippies were tripping. Neither name was familiar to me, and I was non-committal about the trip, when the tickets were booked. But the night before I left, I didn’t sleep. Like someone cold princess inside me woke up in anticipation. I didn’t sleep through most of that trip. It was autumn in Kodaikanal, rainy days and cold nights. I woke up after about three hours of sleep to wait for the dawn. And I watched it alone, from a porch, every morning. I couldn’t wait.

I don’t know why or how. I just remember the first midnight, following Anna, my host, down a path into a forest, everything shrouded by mist, the mountains like sleepy ghosts, no moon, water trickling under my feet, and thinking I’m not afraid! I thought I was afraid of the dark. It seems funny now, to imagine you’re afraid of something, to not know. But it happens.

I was awake. The fantasy and the reality-state had collided, come together, and I could be, for once, present.

Travellers, tourists, nomads, migrants, refugees and bad attempts at constructing hierarchies

I thought being a traveller was better than being a tourist. I thought vacations were worse than tourism. I thought that being a nomad was better than being a traveler. I didn’t understand the world of migrants and refugees because I didn’t stay committed to escape or to any single place long enough to be either. But even in my limited experience I did learn snobbery. It comes with the baggy pants or whatever it was you were wearing.

Ironically, I stopped being a traveler very soon after my first trip. Meaning, the thing itself stopped being a reason for movement (maybe this was a good thing, because the biggest problem with snobbery is that it makes you fucking boring). Instead, I traveled for work. I traveled to be in residencies, I traveled for a relationship, I traveled to be a human statue on the street, I traveled to make videos for performances. I traveled for festivals. Once a year, I traveled to take a holiday – arriving at the bottom-most rung of my former travel-hierarchy. I spent this holiday on the beach, returning to Gokarna like a homing pigeon. For a little while, I forgot about my old notions of who was what and why.

A long time ago, a tiresome person wore a T-shirt that said that she was not an immigrant, not a refugee, but a traveller. This is another kind of hierarchy, an even more stupid one. It makes a different negotiation of purity – one that imagines that necessity is impure, that the desire to escape is somehow more worthy than the need to escape.

Because, let’s admit it, finally, we’re all escaping

The spectrum of reasons for escape. We can sort them by colour:

This is not a hierarchy. Just varying degrees of urgency. It’s more useful to find a common thread than a ladder. Also, I’m older now.

Speaking of which…

Why talk of travel now? Now, in the time of the Great Shutdown? When the world has stopped moving? When almost all borders are closed, most airports shut down, a huge number of us barely have the choice of stepping out of our own homes. The Indian Railways, which I thought would survive the apocalypse – more than that, would save people from the apocalypse, has stopped, completely. Passenger flights are grounded. The thousand other ways you can get around – cabs, autos, ships, boats, buses, vans – everything barred. Cruise liners, merchant ships, anything that didn’t make it before curfew date – floating. Cut adrift.

Now, more than any other time in my life, I’m actually thinking about travel. I trusted mobility as the answer to a lot of problems. In every place I’ve travelled to, I’ve looked for ways to leave, almost immediately, almost instinctively. The possibility of escaping it was central to my experience of any place.

Now, when I think about that escape-spectrum, one thing is clear: the yellows, oranges and reds have been cast adrift. There’s some guilt about this, but for the most part, anyone who talks about travel now can go fuck themselves, as far as the world is concerned.

Stay home

They said to the world. The problem is, that ‘home’ isn’t as simple as the smallness of the word seems to imply. Home wasn’t necessarily made of walls, for a lot of people. It was a corner or a pillar or a pile of boxes for many. It was a thing bombarded and destroyed for others. It was a place of threat, to the life, sanity, health and well-being of millions. It was a big black dog with pointy teeth. It was an unreal thing. It was a shadow-place. It was a prison. It was a place where you could starve slowly. It was a place where you simply didn’t fit. It was a place where you didn’t belong. It was a million things that a lucky few forgot, when they gladly broadcast that stay home message to their internet-world.

Oceane herself said, home can never be a place, only a person. 

Outside

For many people, the arrival of a deadly invisible threat seemed to be something of a relief. The words stay home were welcome. Possibly because somewhere inside, they always knew that the world was dangerous, deadly, full of invisible threats. Outside was uncontrolled, inside was controlled. Finland could be served, but it could also be thrown out when it got too grabby.

They’re right. The world is everything they imagined it to be. Contagion has always been present. People have always been a risk and a prayer. The ones who’re afraid that they might be the cause of harm, they’re right too. They have been. We all have been. There was always an invisible link that we missed, a thing we carried that was benign to us and a threat to someone else. 

A long-held belief has been given validation.

Inside

A lifetime ago, Anna taught me how to make a bed. You have to smooth out the wrinkles, she said, because last night’s energy gets trapped in there. 

People often mistake a controlled environment for a safe environment. At this time, houses, apartment blocks and housing complexes have turned into closely guarded fortresses. Now that the boundaries between inside and outside are established so clearly, the trapped energy indoors gets stuck, congealed. Concretised into the notion that inside is pure, clean, free from contagion. Outside is dirty, polluted, impure, infectious.

This way, there be monsters.

Outsiders

People who weren’t close to home, couldn’t walk or drive when they heard the announcement. People who’d left home, who’d traveled far. People who didn’t have the money or the resources or even an available train to go home. People who were rendered homeless by the stayhome order.

Looked upon now, with pity/heartbreak/empathy/suspicion/anger/hostility/despair. Looked at from inside.

Canaries

This includes me. Those who have, maybe not a home, but something like it, i.e. are not walking a few hundred miles as we speak. A certain kind of canary that faints at the smell of an unknown, an invisible threat in the air. That experiences a sense of loss that is way bigger than can be explained, or contained, by a ‘temporary shutdown.’

Autonomy, a thing that is not easy to hold onto in the best of times, is not a small loss. There’s no temporary transfer of autonomy that we know of, in the history of humanity. This way also, there be monsters. Worst of all, there is no escape.

The ark

Imagine that Noah’s ark is a paid-by-cabin cruise liner. The world shrinks into a single floating functioning entity. If you’ve booked, if you got yourself a cabin or even a dorm or a hammock, if you made your reservations in time, you’re ok. If you had no way of getting there, you’re fucked. If you had been slipping in and out of that system, all these years, if you’d given up certainty, for say, autonomy, then you’re left hovering on the decks, wondering whether to jump or to wait to be pushed.

Captive-activities

At times like these, the yoga-people always step in with a practise. Practise acceptance, they say.

However, when they tell you to practise acceptance, they actually mean practise non-acceptance. Don’t look at the fine print. Don’t even look at the print. Don’t look at anything. Instead, construct a little fantasy. Tell yourself that it’s true. Accept little things, like not being able to go out for a drink, or missing your favourite cafe. Don’t accept the real loss. Don’t even look at it.

This seems to me a pretty ineffectual way of using a practice that is, in fact, so much about presence.

There is, however, one exercise from yoga that I go back to often now, that is a much more honest expression of my reality. It goes like this:

When I do this exercise, these two things always amaze me:

1. How easy it is to stop your breath. Seems like the easiest thing in the world, at this moment.

2. How, on that long hold without air, your body tries its best, not to escape, but to stay in position. To keep your back straight, to keep your arms up, to keep your legs firmly crossed, to keep your eyes focussed on your thumbs.

This shaking keeps me steady, says Theodore Roethke in The Waking. A little mantra. In this long wait between the exhale and the next inhale, all the effort you’re making is not so much to breathe, or even to stay alive, as to hold this position with integrity.

For some reason, this great compression, the pitch-blackness of it, that absolute attention to holding onto nothing – it’s a little like waking up from a great sleep, stepping out into the icy cold, and feeling this great surge of nothing more than a will to live, racing through your veins.

Author: Priyadarshini John