I was far from pleased to be encountering compatriots in foreign lands. I pretended not to understand the sounds of my own language. I preferred to be anonymous. I watched them out of the corner of my eye and relished their unawareness of being understood. I observed them furtively, then disappeared.
A tired British man wistfully confessed to me he felt the same (‘I’m far from pleased when I encounter my compatriots in foreign lands’) as he drank yet another beer, watching clientele coming into the restaurant. I chatted with him for a bit, but we didn’t really have that much to say to another.
I finished my coffee and returned to where the lecture was, pretending I had to go soon, which I didn’t. I arrived in time for the last few discussions, as the determined lecturer woman was explaining something to the three listeners, those most enduring, gathered around her.
TRAVEL PSYCHOLOGY: CONCLUSION
‘We have seen, ladies and gentlemen, how selfhood has grown and gained a foothold, become increasingly distinct and affecting. Previously barely marked, prone to being blurred, subjugated to the collective. Imprisoned in the stays of roles, conventions, flattened in the press of traditions, subjugated to demands. Now it swells and annexes the world.
‘Once the gods were external, unavailable, from another world, and their apparent emissaries were angels and demons. But the human ego burst forth and swept the gods up and inside, furnished them a place somewhere between the hippocampus and the brain stem, between the pineal gland and Broca’s area. Only in this way can the gods survive – in the dark, quiet nooks of the human body, in the crevices of the brain, in the empty space between the synapses. This fascinating phenomenon is beginning to be studied by the fledgling discipline of travel psychotheology.
‘This growing process is more and more powerful – influencing reality is equally what we have invented and what we have not. Who else moves in the real? We know people who travel to Morocco through Bertolucci’s film, to Dublin through Joyce, to Tibet through a film about the Dalai Lama.
‘There is a certain well-known syndrome named after Stendhal in which one arrives in a place known from literature or art and experiences it so intensely that one grows weak or faints. There are those who boast they have discovered places totally unknown, and then we envy them for experiencing the truest reality even very fleetingly before that place, like all the rest, is absorbed by our minds.
‘Which is why we must ask, once more, insistently, the same question: where are they going, to what countries, to what places? Other countries have become an external complex, a knot of significations that a good topographical psychologist can unravel just like that, interpret on the spot.
‘Our task is to bring to you the idea of practical travel psychology and to encourage you to take advantage of our services. Don’t be afraid, ladies and gentlemen, of those quiet corners by the coffee machines, around the duty-free shops, those ad-hoc offices where analysis takes place quickly, discreetly, only occasionally disrupted, perhaps, by departure announcements. It’s just two chairs behind a screen with maps on it.
‘“So, you’re going to Peru?” the topographical psychoanalyst might ask you. It would be easy to confuse him with a cashier or the person working check-in. “So, Peru?”’
‘And he’ll do a short associative test with you, attentively watching which of the words turns out to be the end of the thread. It’s a short-term analysis, without any superfluous dragging out of the topic, without invoking that old holy grail of the mothers and fathers to blame. Over a single session we ought to be able to get it.
‘Peru, but to what end?’
THE TONGUE IS THE STRONGEST MUSCLE
There are countries out there where people speak English. But not like us – we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt.
How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures – even the buttons in the lift! – are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. They must have to write things down in special codes. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them – they are accessible to everyone and everything! I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something just for themselves.
SPEAK! SPEAK!
Inside and out, to oneself and to others, narrating every situation, naming every state; search for words, try them on, that shoe that will magically transform Cinderella into a princess. Move words around like the chips you place on numbers in roulette. Perhaps this will be the time? Perhaps we’ll win this one?
Speak, grab people’s sleeves, have them sit down across from us and listen. Then turn yourself into the listener for their ‘speak, speak’. Hasn’t it been said that I speak, therefore I am? One speaks, therefore one is?
Use all possible means for this, metaphors, parables, wavers, unfinished sentences; don’t be put off by the sentence breaking off halfway through, as though past the verb there suddenly yawned an abyss.
Do not leave any unexplained, unnarrated situations, any closed doors; kick them down with a curse, even the ones that lead to embarrassing and shameful hallways you would prefer to forget. Don’t be ashamed of any fall, of any sin. The narrated sin will be forgiven. The narrated life, saved. Is it not this that Saints Sigismund, Charles and James have taught us? He who has not mastered the art of speaking shall remain forever caught in a trap.
FROG AND BIRD
There are two points of view in the world: the frog’s perspective and bird’s eye view. Any point in between just leads to chaos.
Take the airport maps so beautifully drawn on airline brochures. Their meaning becomes clear only once one sees them from above, like the monumental Nazca Lines, created with flying creatures in mind – the modern airport in Sydney is shaped like an airplane, for example. A somewhat uninteresting, I find, concept – your plane landing on a plane. The way becomes the goal, and the instrument the result. The airport in Tokyo, on the other hand, in the shape of an enormous hieroglyphic, is perplexing. What sort of letter is it? We haven’t mastered the Japanese alphabet, we won’t know what our arrival means, with what word they greet us here. What do they stamp into our passport? A big question mark?
Similarly, Chinese airports bring to mind the local alphabet, you have to learn them, put them in order, create an anagram out of them – then perhaps they will reveal some unexpected wisdom of the journey. Or treat them like those sixty-four hexagrams from I Ching and then every landing will be a fortune. Hexagram 40. Xiè. Deliverance. Hexagram 36. Míng yí. Darkening of the Light. Hexagram 10. Lǚ. Treading. 17. Suí. Following. 24. Fù. Return. 30. Lí. Clinging.
But let’s give it a rest with this convoluted Eastern metaphysics, for which, apparently, we have a soft spot. Let us look at the airport in San Francisco, and now we have something familiar, something that inspires confidence, that makes us feel right at home: here we have a cross section of the spine. The round centre of the airport is the spinal cord, locked in a hard safe shell of individual ribs, and here, radiating out, the nerve roots from which depart the numbered gates, each complete with a sleeve leading to the plane.