Power On

Any trip, when not reduced to a simple movement in space coerced by banal and too often unavoidable necessities, turns out to have an initiatory dimension. And unless you behave like a pilgrim of some first or final cause, a devotee of some belief – religious or not – this dimension offers the feeling of experiencing the world in a symbolic efflorescence, superimposing the thousand accidents of reality on subterranean inclinations of the heart and the mind; it first flourishes only unconsciously before manifesting itself by disturbing signals, the feelings of deja vu and objective chance. The spirit of the traveler, thus awakened, can then take hold of the poem of the world, an unfinished poem, which our predecessors may have called surreality; when Victor Segalen, from a still imperial China, lived an experience of the diverse.

Initiation: itinerant, itinerary. Where we want to go, that place where we feel more or less confusedly called towards is paradoxically, to use the title of a fine book by André Dhôtel, the land where we never arrive. There where all these initiatory trips, indeed, all these departures towards some paradise all the more unforgettable as they were imaginary, the Atlantids and the kingdoms of the Queen of Sheba or of Prester John, the Penghai islands and the mountains at the top of the world where, we still tell children, dragons live… We certainly preserve the memory of all these trips, as long as they feed our imaginations to the point of daring to affirm that we are also their points of arrival: Marco Polo is finally resting in our dreams, waiting for a postcard from his old friend Phileas Fogg.

But the possibility of travel today? When entire populations of morons indulge in the adulterated joys of tourism, now somewhat tarnished by the covid-19 epidemic and subsequent anxieties, when those monsters with a human face that are appointed billionaires wallow in the expected benefits of space tourism, when the maps of treasure island have been replaced by satellite geolocation applications available on an electronic prosthesis that every good citizen believes themselves obliged to have in their pocket, which unlike those of Rimbaud, will never be perforated – neither by shadow, nor azure -? The journey begins when you get out of bed in the morning, every morning if you stay awake and then during daily wanderings. Some archaic trace remains, identifiable in the unexpected moments of conjunction between the imaginary and the real, hearkening back to the wanderings to which our prehistoric ancestors delivered themselves for thousands and thousands of years. All then were nomads, as the Australian aborigines or the Inuit still were a few decades ago, and as some Roma persist in being, despite the misery inherent in their stubborn wanderings in our post-industrial latitudes. I guarantee that some immemorial remains have nevertheless stayed with us, remnants of the continual displacements that they all experienced, migrating across landscapes from hunting ground to hunting ground under skies which have never since been so starry, such as we were able to conceive of them imperfectly to our urban understanding, or of the trail songs of the peoples of the Alcheringa. It is this psychic nomadism that is the mark of poetic thought in its opposition to rational thought, increasingly dominant as it reduces the world to a binary language made up of sequences of ones and zeros.

A psychic nomadism which can certainly choose to appear, as it did for Baudelaire, under the veil of nostalgia for distant islands. But this disposition of mind inherited from romanticism also revealed to him that the winds that give tropical palms their odalisque sway could also blow, as if inadvertently, in the sage groves of the Luxembourg Gardens. Just as moments of waking life can be confused with dream images, the near and the far can be intertwined, places from here and there: the first condition of a change of scenery is paradoxically to be able to recognize in a distant country secret analogies with the place where one comes from. The strangeness of this reveals a dimension which had remained mysterious until then, which in turn exalts the differences with the distant land, and thereby accuses us of being truly and freely elsewhere. This feeling does not happen without inducing a most fertile disorder, which leads us to note deep down inside a qualitative transformation of our being-in-the-world, to extend the feeling of one’s own identity to the awareness of a virtuality hitherto ignored. The famous “I is another” thus gives itself to be understood and to be lived, as also relieved from its neurotic burden what Ernst Bloch calls “not-yet-being”.

When in 1992, the Paris surrealists proposed to their foreign comrades to sign an international declaration vigorously denouncing the official celebrations of the fifth centenary of the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus, which text developed from a canvas of our Argentinian friend Silvia Guiard and which was published in the second issue of the International Surrealist Bulletin, it needed a hard-hitting title. One of us proposed for this a quote from André Breton taken from the Prolegomena to a third manifesto of surrealism or not, a quote taken from a pocket edition of the Manifestos, which included a magnificent misprint that we did not notice until too late! This is how the international declaration was titled “1492 – 1992, As Long as Tourists Replace Seers (voyants)”, while Breton opposed the latter to voyeurs! The conquistadors can certainly be accused of worse crimes than that of voyeurism; on the other hand, today’s travelers, followers of mass tourism, who take their bellies to the four corners of the world, often like to savor the unhealthy joys of contemplating, and hardly far from their hotel, the miserable lives of the natives: there you have it, the opportunity for beautiful photos to flood so-called social networks!

Seer, traveler: the poetic quest, since modernity, has taken turns, and often intertwines, between these two avenues of access to knowledge through the ordeal of a still unknown beauty. To the Prose of the Trans-Siberian and the little Jeanne de France by Cendrars Michaux responded with Journey to Grande Garabagne: the first, an unrepentant traveler, crossed (but some doubt that he really did) a Siberia infested with convicts while the second, in internal exile after a few disappointing trips, preserved both the idea of ​​pursuing these and of hoping for too much from his infrapsychic explorations: beware of prison, and beware of any confinement, and this either in the outer or in the inner world!

However, it is not a question of determining, following Pascal’s footsteps, that all our misfortune would come from what we do not know how to sit quietly, in our bedroom. The neighbors are noisy anyway, and through the window I can see, without much effort, for example, Tibet. It is true that I have on various occasions, and at different times in my life, dreamed that I was traveling in that country. Byproducts of reading, in my childhood, Tintin in Tibet, and later the books of Alexandra David-Néel? But I have never been there before. Nevertheless one evening in the spring of 2016, staying in China in Guizhou province, while I lingered to watch the sunset over the mountains, I thought that Lhasa was in fact, as the crow flies, only five or six hundred kilometers away. An imaginary journey within the real journey, as if the latter had no other interest than to serve as a springboard for awakened dreams. The test of reality as soon as it escapes all routine, happily gives free passage to the solicitations of the imagination, accentuated of course by listening to a foreign language, the discovery of different customs, the renewal of desires beyond the desirable. On my second trip to China, this time to Guangzi Province, a few degrees below the Tropic of Cancer, I watched from the parking lot of our hotel, the effervescent starry night. A hotel guest came to share my contemplation and in Chinese he named me the main constellations, words that I tried to repeat after him to remember them, while I found, somehow, their equivalent name in French. It seemed to me then that these stars shone with a different brightness, to have been named in this beautiful foreign language, a brightness doubtless testifying to this unexpected exchange, like a two-part poem.

Brief was the original harmony between heaven and earth, as between the macrocosm and the human microcosm, and as between the conscious and the unconscious; the subject of surrealism, which persists in exalting the brilliant intuitions of Fourier, manifests the potentialities of a recovered harmony, in the semblance of the mythical lost powers of the psyche that automatism, according to Breton, allows to revive in poetic and playful rituals. This desirable harmony is like the reverse of this inverted world, it is revealed in the experience of the marvelous which places each of us, in facing the shadow of time, where the distance between travel and clairvoyance is abolished.

July 18, 2021

Guy Girard, “the nomadic mountain”