If there is one domain, one dimension, one sector of human activity TODAY to which the surrealist gaze must turn itself, one place where it recognizes itself most desperately and where it must see that ALL IS LOST, obscurely, ruinously, without return, it is precisely in travel. Nothing has been more horribly and meticulously violated by the global capitalist spectacle, through the ubiquitous triumph of mass tourism. There is no area where its action has been more excruciatingly effective. Here every catastrophe has been thoroughly accomplished.

Tourism is the result of an irreversible change undergone by travel. This means that travel is now bastardized, prostituted, sold and recycled by a totalizing tourism, from now on and forever.

And more than that: it has become the privileged laboratory of mass mental corruption. There is no longer anything on earth which has not become the object, every day, and at all hours, of the effective attention of the manipulative media, constantly orienting and realigning a universal conformism of behavior; it manipulates the public as cooks do pasta—with enthusiastic and well-paid professionalism.

We can no longer count the television programs which offer new destinations, on all channels, with an enormous quantity of images and a perfect efficiency of advertising; new places to reach at all costs, and always with the correct tourist logic: guaranteed, proven, socially promising. The objective of assassinating, of rooting out the ‘elsewhere” from space has been achieved. SYSTEMATIC DISENCHANTMENT has spread to all corners of the Earth, enabled by the control of military and civilian satellites. Each point is observable from above and can be enlarged “with” technology, to an approximation of less than a meter.

Each trip is protected and remotely controlled by Google Maps and other even more ubiquitous applications, even anticipating a circular visual perspective of the sought-after place; this is represented in an alienated, cleaned, geometrized and plasticized way, with a perfect suppression of any “aura”. There is no sensitive place that has not been investigated—legendary or mythical places most relentlessly of all.

Everest is now an obscene dump of expensive garbage, and even the Yeti has, once and for all, lost hope of helping us understand anything about life through rare signs of its mysterious presence. Registrations for trekking in Nepal are all pre-booked for years in advance. The Pyramids are a new Disneyland with a beach on the Red Sea. Deadly motor rallies clog up desert tracks with a destructive waste of roaring engines. Lone oceanic sailors sign exclusive contracts with billionaire sponsors before leaving and agree to sign the trashy books that others are already writing for them upon their return.

The mythical places of literature and art have been cataloged, codified, institutionalized and recombined with investment in cultural tourism in order to squeeze them as much as possible to take advantage of “cultural resources.” Sporting and cultural routes, literary walks named after philosophers or poets enrich the menu of each self-respecting locale. And this is all the more aptly promoted when the administration is progressive.

The great locations of Surrealism, although hardly unorthodox, have also been unearthed by the mass public and already partly devastated. Soon guides will accompany groups of the curious along a “Breton path” or, if bored, along that of other “famous writers of the twentieth century”. Guided cultural tourism kills all forms of non-conformist passion in the bud.

“Alternative” or “far-flung” travel locations are now totally derisory. The Galapagos are shown on television every week on all timeslots. Without having been there, we now know Machu Picchu better than our own neighborhood. The Easter Island Moai have become pop icons, just like the Mona Lisa or Munch’s Scream, and they are used in comic caricatures, where they are made to speak witty nonsense.

Honeymoons in the Chiapas are offered on television, with the possibility of photographing the revolutionaries (so photogenic!). The Amazon, as well as the destruction of the forest and the enumerated extermination of the indigenous inhabitants could now be the subject of a successful video game. “Experiencing” Patagonia by bike is every retired employee’s dream.

The bicycle is far from being the symbol of a “green” mental revolution, it has become that of the social obligation of sport. We are hammered every day by these supposedly desirable images of acrobatic stupidities balancing on the sharpest, craggy cliffs and peaks. The mountain bike is proving to be a very effective tool for slaughtering the intelligence of individuals. You have to pour out the sweat and make images of it using the most beautiful places on Earth as silly backdrops in order to transmit videos by smartphone, submerging the web. Monstrous mass marathons periodically spring up in major metropolises.

SPORT has raped recreational tourism, a poor and strange creature, itself a metamorphic mutation of travel. A new, widespread form of mass delusion has emerged. The goddess Adrenaline, continually evoked with sacred fear, trampled on Venus and took her place. Great all-around equipment is needlessly made available to the common person and it swells like an ever-expanding bladder, a monstrous market for multinational logos.

So much desolation without mercy has liquidated and made grotesque the myth of adventure at all latitudes and longitudes of planet Earth – and even outside of it – a myth paradoxically born of the positivist imagination, but remaining very popular during several successive generations of readers of Jules Verne’s novels until the middle of the 20th century. Poor Captain Nemo!
The journeys we have indeed witnessed in recent years are the repeated and dramatic ones of hundreds of thousands of MIGRANTS. The “adventure” of these horrific and tormented, often macabre journeys, is undesirable for all. With the antihuman inversion of its true and mythical meaning, “adventure” has become today for so many human beings an agonizing episode and an account of tortures undergone, amidst general indifference, by those who dare to assert their desire and their freedom or even more simply to defend their survival.

Everywhere threatening and tragic BORDERS are multiplying and reinforcing themselves (and the internment camps which flout all dignity by striving to stultify existence).

This is the true face of the small, obscene, infamous REALITY that the dominant culture wants to impose on everyone as a fatal necessity and a perpetual condemnation.

Then came COVID-19.

There is nothing more to geographically “explore”. Every place on Earth has been discovered and extinguished for human desire. Others would have to be sought in places so impervious and isolated that they would be almost impossible to reach without resorting to the selfsame destructive resources of capitalist technology.

Can surrealism surrender in the face of the fatalistic observation of this “objective force” of REALITY? Never, by definition. Its horizon can only be that of revolt, of revolutionary desire and utopia, of the founding “need” of the marvelous, despite everything and AGAINST everything. It is impossible to give up a single one of the expectations that the surrealist gaze projects onto Space.
For the year 2016, I predicted that a great and wonderful and still unknown pre-Columbian civilization would be discovered by chance in the Andes, hidden in the bowels of the mountains. It was the projection of an invincible hope, that of a great revenge of desire. So let’s see what to take advantage of? We have a deep will to physically travel in TIME as well as in Space. In the future, to project ourselves into Harmony by emerging from the barbarism of civilization. Visit in flesh and blood the past, all the past that fascinates and interests us.

As soon as I have simply understood – and therefore found – the Philosopher’s Stone, what will be restored to me, among many other lost faculties, will be the ability of physically traveling through time.

We have all the imaginary resources left to our disposal. In the vast and inexhaustible space of imaginary travel, there are still MYSTERIOUS ISLANDS unmarked on maps, undiscovered by spy satellites. There remains for us the great treasure of imaginary journeys discovered by the highest literature, which opens up horizons to adventure in all its plenitude, and to the most astonishing explorations of worlds, countries, peoples, times and individuals.

This will continue to point us to the more surprisingly familiar elsewhere of feelings of deja-vu, lost in our own imagination or memory. This is what happens, for example, in the exquisite writing of Jacques Abeille’s incredible “Cycle of the Lands”.
But there is still a possibility for us to experience the only type of material travel capable of cutting through and bypassing all the obligatory directions of tourism permitted and codified by authorized guides. It is the journey that frees – in a direct relationship between traveler and places – RECIPROCAL treasures of enchantment, by listening to the signs connecting as yet unknown spaces to the subjective expectation of our meeting. This is still the case, for example, with Portugal, scrutinized by Miguel Pérez Corrales in the manner of the rhabdomancers. To love in order to understand, to accept even the tiniest unknowns of the objective case.

Finally, and at the highest level, we have POETRY itself, great poetry. I am thinking of the “Borders of the inhabited world” of Alexandre Pierrepont, which delivers to us (and as Guy Girard wrote) “all the places of Faerie and the coronation of another civilization which, in order to be reached, first of all requires language to recover its functions of invocation and of prediction”.