Motion Sickness

Considerations on modes and stages of travel

Part of the reinvention of travel should consider not just those “sunny destinations” towards which we strive, but also another fundamental aspect, the mode of travel itself. How could surrealists approach the experience of undergoing a long distance voyage? The journey will entail stages and inevitably some way of getting from A to B (or C, Q, X)…In looking at different modes, it quickly becomes a question both historically and for the potential that they have in defining a future surrealist view of long-distance motion. Are the known ways of getting around sufficient? Do we need to invent new ones to reinvent travel itself? Are there some that actually already exist but aren’t popularly recognized?

We could begin to assess the usuals: airplanes, boats, cars, trains etc. Criteria for assessment could for example involve that which surrealists tend to value highly in any experience. How likely will this mode open up the possibilities for a transformative journey, partially synonymous with poetic action? Things like cars, planes, boats, horses, and bikes could be questioned for their potential to hit certain expectations for an adventure. These could include potentials for dreaming (day or night), unpredictability, possibilities for collective experiences, encounters with others, encounters with situations and objects, degree of lack of restrictions (whether from police, or commercial coercion, or otherwise), romanticizing sensibility, chances for humor, danger, thrill, chances for erotic encounters, and so on. They could likewise also consider historical and mythological associations, although that already begins us down the path of nostalgia. Weighed against everything would be the likelihood of those highly unfavourable interventions by the state, police, commercial and travel authorities, border guards, and other repressive mechanisms, including simply an everyday traveler’s pragmatism, focused on speed and comfort. Summing up the possibilities, we might then be able to say which has more potential for a poetic experience: car or bi-plane? Horse or paddle-boat? Etc.

Table 1. Common means of transport, tentatively ranked for integrative surrealist potential as the average of a personal score assigned by Mormyrid editors on a 1-7 scale.

*Due to Freud’s metaphor for free-association (VL)

As we can see, assessments were relatively uncontroversial among the editors. Standard deviations are generally low, but there are clearly larger differences in distributing the low scores than the high ones (standard deviations generally lower in the higher part of the list).

But then the problem: once any of those aspects are fixed and are considered to “always deliver”, doesn’t that quickly and perilously turn into mere “adventure tourism”? At which point we feel an urge to look outside the regulated modes and consider more erratic methods. Walking above all, but also falling, jumping, dancing (appendix E), or some eccentric method involving accoutrements, or crazy inventions and vehicles (appendix B). The exceptions start to look more exciting. What if the reinvention of travel asks us to devise a strange new constraint, ritual, or game every time we depart? We can use the secrets of analogy, automatism and paranoia to build our own idiosyncratic or collective vehicles.

The sense of motion itself, and consequently a relationship to time, will vary highly with different approaches. Do we want slow journeys, full of reflection, pauses and opportunities to veer off-track? Or perhaps we want fast and crazy adventures, sudden jolts that throw us out of our own minds for a brief but invigorating span? Perhaps in striving for both we above all want to look for opportunities to invert the expectations of speed, play the fast parts slow and the slow parts fast. It is a question of whether displacement through time or displacement through space should be emphasized.

And then, from that angle, most travel remains inhuman. The consideration of travel from a non-human perspective is full of exactly the kind of lessons for the imagination and the body that can break us out of everyday patterns. What would it mean to approach the aquatic, benthic motion of nudibranchs, octopuses, starfish, etc., indeed, the original idea of “walking” as it develops along the bottom of the sea. Echo-location and the flight of bats. Butterfly migrations (Appendix G). What would it mean to draw lessons, analogies, or even to mimic the migration of a certain bird or insect?

Then there are the common “stages” of traveling that could be considered. The conception of a voyage is not an irrelevant part of it, and the plan, complete with researched itineraries or not (appendix A), crazy treasure maps, or even just hopes and expectations to be dashed or subverted—all of these form a powerful imaginative exercise and even comprise a Nougéan “thought as prelude to action”. The “choice” of what to do, consider, or what to leave up to chance before departing is among the most potentially surrealist aspects of travel. Duchamp flips a coin and determines where to go based on the result. Indeed, the very choice to travel itself may be enough in certain cases to really make it so.

Table 2. Examples of sessile travellers.

Once one has chosen and left the gate behind, the different gaps that occur while one is engaged in traveling fill up the majority of actual time. Every aspect of travel that includes a possible “wait”, whether in a terminal, bus stop, or other liminal space has at least some inherent potential to exist outside of normal time. Such moments are typically considered boring and desirable to suppress with distractions (movies, games, food, shopping). And indeed in commercial modes of travel the opportunity for these boring moments are engineered explicitly to get us to buy things or behave a certain way. But to the diligent, they can also be breeding grounds for adventure and atmosphere and pickpockets and most importantly, when not obliterated by virtual pabulum meant to erase the sense of adventure, a freedom from the constraints of everyday life (for an excellent consideration of this topic, see on the icecrawler blog: “Bats and transit (variation about games) (2011)”. If one is attentive, rather than comatose, there can be many opportunities for surprise. Isn’t this the time to start dreaming, listening, jotting down automatic phrases and snatches of overheard conversation, or simply associating and interpreting the phenomena of transit as they occur?

Another thing that comes up is the distinction between active and passive travel, pilots vs passengers etc. Is one preferable? To be a driver is to have control over the direction, the speed, the regularity, to be able to stop at any time, turn around, change one’s mind, react. On the other hand, the passenger has the advantage of reflection, of a more nuanced attention, of an abandonment of preference or influence and a total surrendering to external possibilities. In the surrealist spirit of resolving those contradictory dichotomies, how does one resolve the passenger and the pilot? Maybe the surrealist is seeking something that allows a simultaneous experience of both, an auto-pilot or to become the “backseat driver”. Walking here perhaps comes closest to delivering this sense of automatic self-propulsion.

Table 3. Pairs of cities known to have been juxtaposed in surrealist games

There is the question of collective travel. Obviously there is a lot to prefer in the pooling of physical and psychic resources when reaching out for poetic destinations. The possibilities for organized poetry can conceptually be increased many times (appendix E) or even by circumstances driven by the stranger end of survival and commercial motives given the right circumstances (appendix D). The mobile egregore is a happy egregore, really a campaign. But it’s also true that the logistics involved in organizing more people also tends to bring with it a diminishing of chances for quick decisions, spur of the moment changes, attentiveness to surroundings and anonymity. The answer is probably that collective motion with the right group is preferable, but allowing for bifurcations, split-ups, recombinations and individual explorations, in the hopes of constituting an actual collective experience. Traveling with surrealists tends at its best to allow for these chance occurrences to magnify their significance, and everyone treats it like a game with no fixed outcome.

Table 4. Pre-surrealist walkers

There is the tricky question of the “arrival”. In certain modes of travel, the psychology of arriving will be quite dramatic, or lacklustre, or mysterious. A plane could swoop around and around for an hour or more, prolonging the excitement of arrival. Or a train might pull in slowly and dramatically into some iconic station. Possibly one could determine the point of arrival in a strange place at the moment one begins to make judgments and draw conclusions about it based on the sensations one is experiencing. The reinvention of travel will favour the emphasizing of an arrival—a time for wide eyes and hasty conclusions, for maximum hopes and excitement, but also a time for extremely drastic mistakes, misunderstandings, disorientations and difficulties. If one has the tendency to arrive early and pack light, the time in-between arrival and “check-in” to one’s accommodation can and should be preciously maximized for some exploring in a homeless state. It may even be the way to set challenges, themes or riddles that will haunt the entire journey.

The “return”—possibly demotivating, or bittersweet, or a relief, or just tiredness. An extended mythological odyssey of annoyances and delays, or a sweet homecoming to a less risky way of acting? One has presumably either had enough or been compelled by external forces to give up the chase and return to normalcy. The reinvention of travel should not concede here, and should demand an appropriately unforced capacity to return only when the clock strikes the right moment, when one feels sufficiently full-up, altered, poetically charged. The return is then not a return to normalcy, but only appears as such—in fact it is the moment of smuggling. The sneaking-in of contraband ideas, facts, behaviours, the infectious potential of a transformative poetic experience to spill over the safe world “at home”. There are only ever departures.

Appendices – Containing some haphazard and cryptic lessons for future travelers

A – No Itinerary Needed

Among less well known approaches to foot journeying is that of the 19th century Genevan cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer, who wrote several volumes of his “zig zag voyages”. Every summer he was given charge of a certain class of pupils at the Swiss school he taught at and permitted to take them on a great walking adventure across the Alps and into neighboring lands. He describes his philosophy of collective travel on foot as follows:

But it’s not enough that a travel itinerary be well thought out; certainly we find so many people who, in spending months to plot out every step of their excursion in order to assure in advance all the pre-conditions of pleasure, agreeableness, and comfortable amenity, are nevertheless so cruelly disappointed, sometimes, mortally bored in the midst of all this, yawning monstrously while nestled in the bosom of their pleasures—which are nevertheless done, served hot and on time? No doubt! Everyone would enjoy themselves, the rich especially, if we could prepare pleasure ahead of time, pay it a salary and assign it a schedule. But it does not work like that. There is nothing so free, so independent as this Proteus; nothing over which force of will, rank, or gold, has so little power; nothing which is so resistant to being chained down, or put in reserve; nothing on which we count on so little in ahead; or which so quickly takes off and leaves you. It flees from preparation, vanity, egoism; and whoever wants to nail it down, even if for one day only, is building a house of cards; and it’s for that reason that it belongs to nobody and everybody, that it shows up where we don’t expect it, and, against all convenience, does not show up at the party where it’s the guest of honour. We nevertheless can’t deny that certain conditions are more favourable to its chances of appearing. When it comes to travel, if the tourists are young, and if walking, movement, curiosity animate their bodies and minds, and if above all nothing isolates them, and each makes the well-being and contentment of everyone else their own business, and if this results in considerations, favours or reciprocal sacrifice, in such a way that good humor is everywhere and heart is among the troop, oh! then pleasure is quite near, it is there, in the group itself; it gets used to them and doesn’t leave; and neither rain, nor good weather, nor cliffs, nor plains, nor harpies, nor kangaroos, can chase it away. Grand thoughts come from the heart, it’s said: and pleasure, where does it come from? From the heart also. It alone animates, grows, reheats, colours… and that’s why it’s not enough to plan a travel itinerary; and that’s why you can yawn, yawn to the point of dislocating your jaw, in the midst of the most soft and comfy, or in the bosom of the most exquisite, recreations.

The mobile tree for resting under, from Voyage à Gènes (1834) by Rodolphe Töpffer

B – Take the pram less traveled by

In 1908, a mysterious “Man in the Iron Mask” appeared with a pram and a helmet from which he couldn’t see, in Cornwall, under which circumstances he would attempt to walk around the world and find a wife along the way. All this, it was claimed, on a bet to win £20,000 from JP Morgan himself. Although it turned out to be a hoax, the idea itself has astounding poetic implications. The impediment or poetic restriction seems to give us a lot in exchange for efficiency and speed.

C – Travel by dance

In February of 1599, the Elizabethan actor William Kempe morris-danced from London to Norwich. He wrote about this bizarre bit of self-promotion in his text Nine Daies Wonder, full of adventures and weird encounters, including fights, cut-purses, encounters with friends old and new, mud, potholes, throngs of watchers, harangues against ballad-makers and many other wonderful moments:

From Ilford, by Moone-shine, I set forward, dauncing within a quarter of a myle of Romford; where, in the highway, two strong Iades (hauing belike some great quarrell to me vnknowne) were beating and byting either of other; and such through Gods help was my good hap, that I escaped their hoofes, both being raysed with their fore feete ouer my head, like two Smithes ouer an Anuyle.

D – Travel by circus

The great era of the traveling circus, especially in North America, was one of the most powerfully affecting itinerant movements in the history of popular culture. It was an era of travel rife with adventures and bizarre moments and dangers and accidents and fires and frauds and fights. But also the circus itself in its very motive aspect became a self-mythologizing vehicle:

The circus, to the villagers and the farmers, was an unending cause of wonder and curiosity. Strange reports floated ahead and behind the circus—and, for the most part, were believed. The exact size of the coming wonder was a subject for animated discussion… When a circus proved to be smaller than the popular estimate, it was said to have split or divided, one section going to some other “small” place. As these rumors were never contradicted by the showmen they spread rapidly and the circus became near kin to some fabulous, hydra-headed sea serpent—a creature which has a habit of taking on more heads and bristling manes every time it is seen.

-W.C. Coup, Sawdust & Spangles: Stories & Secrets of the Circus

E – Traveling with the Harmonious Army:

The utopian plotter Charles Fourier invented for the era of Harmony a wonderful corollary for human expeditionary tendency that negates the horrors of military excursions into an erotic and poetic capability. In the future, humanity organizes itself in accordance with the pleasure principle and turns all known institutions and activities on their heads. Thus in Fourierist Harmony, traveling becomes a campaign of voluptuous sensual growth and creativity:

“Variety was to be the essence of Phalansterian life, and many individuals would have amorous needs and penchants which could not be gratified within the compass of a single community. There would consequently be a great deal of movement and travel in the new order. Bands of adventurers, troubadours, and knights errant would traverse the globe, sometimes in the company of the industrial armies and sometimes by themselves, in search of pleasures and companions unobtainable in their own localities. People subject to extremely rare manias, that is, “perversions,” would meet regularly at international convocations which would be pilgrimages as sacred for them “as the journey to Mecca is for Muslims.”

In this atmosphere of ceaseless movement, total strangers were constantly encountering one another and forming new relationships. To make these encounters as rewarding as possible, the amorous hierarchy of each Phalanx had to make elaborate preparations to entertain the hordes of visitors. The tasks of these officials included the organization of festivals and various sorts of orgies, but their most important duty was the administration of an elaborate system of erotic personality matching.

The task of matching the visitors with appropriate partners would be facilitated by the compilation of a card file which would identify the passional types and amorous proclivities of each of the members of the Phalanx. Travelers, too, would carry papers indicating their individual needs and penchants. Since there was a little of the Butterfly in everyone, a traveler might have immediate needs and momentary inclinations at variance with the basic configuration of his passions. Thus everyone would undergo periodic interviews in order to ascertain his libidinal needs of the moment.”

-Jonathan Beecher, “Introduction” in The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. pp 62-63.

F – Travel by mail

Snail mail can be a kind of travel too. At its best, you are sending a little physical token of yourself to someone far away, who you can’t reach normally. Many strange and wonderful anecdotes and gags exist of people mailing themselves as a package too.

In a similar vein, at a certain point in 18th-19th century England an early option of cross-country travel became available: to sit along with the mail coach in one of a limited number of passenger seats. More of a historical moment in the history of travel than a currently accessible option. Still its apparent qualities of open-air sociability, just the right speed, and identification with the most thrilling historical news-stories of the day (as the sort of means by which word traveled of big events, often causing people to hail them for news as they passed), all give it a romantic panache. Thomas de Quincey describes it rapturously thus:

The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity,—not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence: as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience…But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On this system the word was not magna loquimur, as upon railways, but vivimus. Yes, “magna vivimus”; we do not make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs, we realise our grandeurs in act, and in the very experience of life. The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement…

G – Dodging the invisible mountain

One recent example that made the popular science circles cite monarch butterflies who, flying southwards from Canada to Mexico, make a significant and seemingly pointless detour. Apparently they somehow “remember” an ancient mountain in the middle of Lake Superior that hasn’t existed for millennia.