Juan Carlos Otaño:

Impossible answer. If everything were known, all the charm would be lost.

Jason Abdelhadi:

I am finding, I think, distance—real distance—which the game design theorist Alexis Kennedy defines as the “sweet unfolding of possibilities”. Distance in its poetic aspect is a limited resource and seems to require a fair amount of novelty and a dissonance with habit to be really affecting and noticeable. Otherwise it’s just commuting. So really, it’s a horizon for possibilities. But it should be findable just anywhere, and there’s no reason to foreclose that possibility—it’s just that sometimes it isn’t. Maybe a remote location or the actual sense of distance travelled is a retroactive designation, and until you actually experience it in the crisis of the moment it’s just a wager.

Mattias Forshage:

The absence of home. Which makes it possible to envision, in mental or behavioral fragments, suggestions and exercises, things like freedom and untamed meaning. That said, you don’t need to go very far to find a remote location.

Steven Cline:
I am looking for a place to escape myself. (No, not to find myself, quite the opposite of that…) Wandering is a wrench thrown into the machine that is me the machine that is my life. It’s wobbly worker sabotage, self-inflicted. Direct action taken so that the well-worn, comfortable pathways might collapse, and receive the Marvelous New. When I was a child of 3, maybe 4 years old, I wandered off into the forest. For no discernible reason, with nothing but my collie dog for company. I don’t remember this at all, of course, none of it. Merely an old family story, told time and time again. My own “spirited away” moment. Hour after anxious hour had passed by for my parents. They had searched, called the police. And then suddenly there I was again, acting as though nothing had happened at all. Didn’t say much. Didn’t know much. Smiled. “Rip Van Winkled.” My real memory of the event is gone, but I always imagine it like this…I am standing utterly still in a clearing between trees. I am naked (I wasn’t naked) with my collie dog waiting nearby, protecting me. Her blue eyes are uncommonly wise. I am looking up at the sun, saying nothing, communicating with it on some subterranean, non-verbal frequency. The hours pass by in complete silence. And then, quite suddenly, I look away from the sun. I rouse myself, and walk back home.

And this is what I think I will find, way out there. In the gardens of chance, at the gateway of the unknown. I am looking for some kind of doorway…portal…wormhole…towards the Marvelous…towards the Other/Outside…towards that land which lies just beyond the reach of my own skull…

Michèle Bachelet
Out of my home, valiant and ready for heroic physical and cultural challenges, to this brewing of the unknown like an indecipherable menu from which I nevertheless order, that which is not my mother’s milk, and to the loves that open the doors of desirable mystery.

Periodically I put on this strange panoply of tourism like when, as a child, I made my raffia belt dance to become a vahine. It must be said that my notion of time is cyclical. Does the universe revolve around my navel? The opening to this other always seems promised to me like a carrot hanging from the North Star. As soon as I raise the anchor I spill my ink and my snorkeling trip is clouded with a thousand fireflies. Is it the dreams of primal forests that make me reek up the air?

I believe that my travels are more in search of another time than a geography. Hand me this car-free past, these beaches where men went to sea and women with nets in a beauty of accented scents, beaches of children’s hiding places at the bottom of the boats when the seafront was an unbuilt horizon, these coves that must now be sought far away on islands which will soon sink under the rising waters. I do not forget to face the gaze of the natives who our paid vacation relegates to servants of bunker hotels. Pull me towards these future megalopolises that I dreamed of, flying like superman over a Hong Kong that is not Chinese, and buildings with glass roofs from which we follow the course of the sun when it plunges towards the other hemisphere with alchemical reflections. But who sees if not me and my panting roots that whip me to be still the same, here or there, here and there.

And I travel in painting, from one canvas to another, I move forward without knowing anything, without a catalog, my risks are inglorious. I welcome other meetings there. I forget my fatigue.

Today, July 22, 2021, the Tokyo Olympic Games begin. The flags of the athlete delegations will march past empty chairs, as always.

Joël Gayraud

Transforming the world to make it worth roaming through
It has been so many years now that the sense of travel has been lost! The wanderings of Jean-Jacques by the roads of the Alps, the teams of Segalen through China, the crossing of the Halles at dusk, the continuous drift exalted by the Situationists seem hardly conceivable today. What struck the very idea of ​​travel with inanity is the assassination of cities, the mutilation of the countryside, the blight of the wild world. Who can seriously desire to go to the Roof of the World today knowing that they will stumble over the same beer cans that litter the sidewalks of their hometown? With a devastating momentum sweeping away merchant society, a new human type has taken shape who is both the agent and the victim of this regular rampage, the mass tourist. What predigested images of Venice they will have grazed, the cruise ship passenger who soon returns to their floating barn as high as a 30-story building! As for anyone who brazenly claims to deviate from the beaten track by setting off with their backpack to explore the depths of the deserts, they were annoyed to discover, in their much desired solitude, an old German hippie who has been camping there for ages. Mass tourism has explored everything, even in its apparently less gregarious forms. We’ve never traveled so much, but there have never been so few travelers.

The pandemic and its senseless restrictions will have had the merit of deflating the balloon of this morose locomotion for its millions of adepts. All these people who thought they were traveling and only paraded along predefined circuits were deprived of their periodic hobby for more than a year, and complied with it like the rest. They convert quickly and painlessly to travel on the surface of their screens, and have found certain advantages and comfort in two-dimensional transhumance with Netflix, sitting back on their sofa. For this kind of trip is none other than the truth of the trips that preceded it. We just hollowed out a few parameters.

And yet, we who never had the idea of ​​turning our backs on the Mona Lisa to pose next to her, we who let you fall from above when you step back to take your selfies – your skeletons accumulated at the foot of the cliffs already form a cheerful mound – a thirst for travel has never ceased to affect us. On the trail of dreams, sinuous white wyvern undulating in the heart of the forest of unpaired images, we slide in the snowy spell, carried away by phosphorescent sled dogs. These dogs with fiery manes, amber tails and silver pupils, more wolves than dogs and by their nature resistant to any domestication, these are words, words of yesteryear and every day, words of here and nowhere, words of caresses and words of tocsin, whose barks echo in the black woods and, echoed or reflected in abyss, merge with our most vast and secret aspirations. It is led by this allegorical team that we cross mirrors, destroy certainties, approach fortunate islands, adopt the universal babble of birds. Perpetual escapees from prison for bad reasons, we are the smugglers of thought. But don’t imagine that our fantastic rides are confined to the narrow walls of our skulls. They surge into social life through the underground channel of revolt. We travel through the federated time of insurrections of body and mind, where all encounters are possible. Reinventing travel will not happen by traveling through the space already given to us, but by turning it upside down. By bristling the streets with barricades, by overthrowing the Bastilles, by lighting the bonfires of the revolution.

Christopher K. Starr
TRAVEL? WHAT FOR?
What, then, is to be gained from going to foreign places where the people live outside of one’s familiar ways? Let us first set aside that travel is for kicks or vulgar entertainment, or just because one is bored with one’s homeland. Cruise ships and much travel literature (but not serious guidebooks) are designed for people who travel for that reason.

For me, the attraction in a visit to a foreign land must be at least one of three kinds: a) landscape, b) cultural (including political), c) biotic. In each of these, it is the unknown and unfamiliar that entices.

(a) I almost never travel by air if I can do it by land, especially by train. Riding the Trans-Siberian Railway west from Vladivostok, I never got tired of looking out the window at the passing landscapes of Siberia. One of my fellow passengers introduced me to the term простор (prostor), meaning spaciousness. This is central to the russian concept of landscape. Traveling extensively by boat in the Philippines is a similar experience, as we were never out of sight of at least one island, sometimes approaching a new one for the first time. One of my ambitions is to ride a camel in horizon-to-horizon desert in North Africa, treating the unfolding of each new scene with rapt expectation.

b) It is grand to be among people whose approach to everyday life is outside of the accustomed. It is a delight to encounter ways of doing things different from what I am used to, e.g. pointing with the lips, giving an eyebrow flash to mean “yes”, eating strange things with chopsticks, drinking palm wine. I am eager to get back to Cuba and Haiti, probably culturally the most interesting territories in the Western Hemisphere. And I would love to live for a time among Bedouins or african Pygmies. It would be a constant delight to listen to them string odd sounds together when they talk. In a strange land it is fun to interpret their incomprehensible utterances freely, but more than that is just listening to the people utilize sounds outside of my experience. It bears mention that I seldom go anywhere for the famous “sights”, as the emphasis is on getting inside ordinary life.

(c) In the course of 50 years as a biologist, I developed an extensive wish list of species (mostly animals) that I would like to see in their native habitats. I have had good success with some, such as both New World and Old World army ants, fungus-growing termites, both african and asian weaver ants, and macaws. Among those that remain to be seen are the aquatic spider Argyroneta aquatica and running giraffes. And I very much want to hear and smell a wild jaguar.

In all of these, I am very much open to fortuitous encounters, something of which train rides are especially productive. On a train in Italy I once had a fine conversation with a toothless beggar. When I was accosted by a prostitute on a street in Berlin I regretted that she was at work at the time, as I would have loved to quiz her on her daily life in commercial affection.

I have unintentionally been lost a great many times, and the first realization is always accompanied by a rush of joy. “Oh yeah, I’m lost. This is so grand.” In time I am obliged to un-lose myself, but not before reveling in the lostness of my situation. The reason for this is simple. When one is lost in a strange place, one is more in that place than when one knows the way. The place surrounds one close and intimately, so that one is much more a part of it.

Stuart Inman

Eternal Return Ticket

This enquiry asks very necessary questions. These are questions about, not just travel, but freedom, movement, space, and clearly not just our physical bounds and the breaching of them, but new constraints on our mental freedom. This is a subject I have been considering for some time, hence the title of my blog, The Space That Remains, which predates the current pandemic by about a year. The title was adapted from a title by Giorgio Agamben who I have frequently found to be a profoundly relevant thinker for our time. His Homo Sacer project considered the reduction of our lives and our freedoms to ‘bare life’, the suspension of rights in a ‘state of exception’ that becomes, in the current phrase I seem to hear every day, ‘the new normal’.

In his latest work, Where Are We Now? which functions both as addendum to Homo Sacer and as an on the spot critique to the emerging situation, he suggests that regardless of the nature of the pandemic and of absurd conspiracy theories, those who hold power are not likely to relinquish all control of the social that they currently have in their grasp, and the degree of our social unfreedom will increase. Furthermore, as the constraints of lockdown diminish, we may not even notice our loss of freedom until we try to exercise it, so unused to being out among each other will we be. An example is a bill going through Parliament which would limit the right to protest, and as too much of the opposition to the bill seems half-hearted, we may well see it become law.

So, what should the task of the surrealists be in relation to our freedom to move and act in accordance with desire? We can’t simply abdicate our social freedom and insist on the inner journey, any more than we can pretend that having total freedom of the public realm exists if everybody thinks and acts the same. The outer journey is the inner journey and vice versa and the degree of freedom we possess exists in direct relation to our ability to articulate it in both inner and outer realms, or, to coin a classic surrealist phrase, in our ability to make the vessels communicate.

As soon as our actions can be seen to have an effect on the social realm, we will find oppressive forces breathing down our necks. We are likely to need to be careful and to be brave. I can’t imagine the degree to which this might be necessary; I can only hope that the long term loss of freedom might be slight.

I think the single most relevant aspect of travel for a surrealist is inwardness. By this I mean that, while the imaginary journey is already inward, we need to recognise that a journey out in the world is also a journey inward, to our own heart of darkness. I’d like to suggest that a corollary to this might be to find in imaginary journeys a concrete and outer double, the two creating a sort of Moebius ribbon that is both inner and outer.

Because we surrealists are also a community, our travels along the inner and outer spaces of our existence need also to develop a new kind of intersubjectivity, to break down the miserable myth of the isolated self, to find points of agreement in our inner lives and new kinds of agreement on action and vision. Communication of experience is the key to intersubjectivity, the forms of travel; however they take place, spun between individual minds, creating a shared mesh of experience. Through this movement, from the outside in, and inside, out again, between one and many, remaining a moving target, or under camouflage, perhaps we can retain a modicum of security in which we can dream, and enact, a better world, and an indictment of the one that exists.

Juan Carlos Otaño:

From the compulsion to repetition, of having to make a bed. Servitude that is death.

Jason Abdelhadi:

Habit, mostly, and its social-economic enablers. And maybe more generally, being known. There is a real joy in being in a forest on a foreign continent without anyone’s knowledge about your exact location.

Mattias Forshage:

Being me. The more adventure-like the journey, the less I have to keep up the old well-known personality configuration and all its accumulated preferences, tasks, interests and relationships. The chores and professional tasks of that identity are just among its most striking aspects, and some may be the very pretexts for travelling whereas others it will be possible to put aside on the hatrack.

If I travel, I feel most comfortable if I am being kept busy with exploring the new place and its possibilities (and the modes of interacting with travelling company, if any) at least for several days before I have to “come down” and check my email and start continuing any old series of notes. I was always rather horrified when some people insisted on calling home every day, to their family or partner or best friend, that seemed to me to be quite contrary to the undertaking of travelling. Did they really want to go around as mere embassies of themselves?

It is in this way that surrealist games and explorations (and hopefully sensual pleasure) may be equivalent of travelling, you abandon your civil identity and it fades back into a generator of suggestions like so many other instances, while you become a generalised sense organ on legs; similar to the bloodhound or hawkmoth of poetry.

Juan Carlos Otaño:

Under certain conditions the imagination is like the water cycle, and 5 unavoidable stages are fulfilled in it: Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation, Circulation and Transport.

Jason Abdelhadi:

When it isn’t exhausted, it’s inexhaustive. Or maybe, irregularly inexhaustive.

Mattias Forshage:

Imagination is probably inexhaustive, but I certainly don’t think it is absolutely autonomous from circumstances. New or changing circumstances will encourage the imagination, sometimes by forcing it to interpretations and a certain sense of reconciliations, sometimes by seductively replanting it in a new atmosphere, sometimes by just boosting the tempo and the quantity and emotional impact of the associations. Or not, it might keep you busy with trivial difficulties.

Juan Carlos Otaño:

Without a doubt. And because Secret Societies practice it, it is available to everyone.

Jason Abdelhadi:

If it’s immediately available it’s also perfectly delayable, for effect. But then we are specialists in sabotaging the availability of the nearby despite our conscious intentions, and so it is often a big game to surprise ourselves with the immediacy of something through complex detours.

Mattias Forshage:

No. When I was young I might have believed that this gives me a moral obligation to stay behind and wait, but later I realised the point of failed experiments.

Juan Carlos Otaño:

Not in all kinds, but only in those instructed by desire.

Jason Abdelhadi:

They may happen anywhere, but there’s something to be said for boosting their chances by choosing an unfamiliar location where everything, with a little luck, and for a limited time, can seem like a fortuitous encounter.

Mattias Forshage:

No, and thus by travelling I will expose myself to the possibility of other ones which will be no less (and admittedly not necessarily more) potentially important than the ones bumped into without travelling. It is a matter of mathemathics, and we should not have to discuss mathematics.

Juan Carlos Otaño:

To the extent that I can retain the capacity for receptivity.

Jason Abdelhadi:

Probably not all that well, especially because I have a tendency to research and attempt to frame it from a few different angles before I even get there. It’s very easy to overemphasize trivialities and exceptions and so it’s probably safer to bracket the whole question of characterizing a cultural context if it’s not needed.

Mattias Forshage:

It varies, which is not really a problem. Exploring the new circumstances is always partly about making some kind of sense of local living conditions, understanding how it is possible to have a life there, both very materially and in terms of cultural peculiarities. Getting one’s head around it anthropologically, historically, politically, climate-wise, nurturement-wise, and accommodating one’s body to it are probably natural parts of the process. What creates a network of meaning around the experience is the gradually revealing of this while at the same time (wherever possible) maintaining to appreciate the awkwardness, incoherences and brilliant absurdities that may perhaps be visible mainly from an external viewpoint, to keep revealing its irrationality from another viewpoint than stubborn prejudicedness or sense of superiority. Prejudice and projection are not moral faults that need to be condemned and should motivate abstention from reaching out, they are rather fickle psychological patterns among others that can be exposed and brought out on the table as elements among others in the mutual playful exploration.

Juan Carlos Otaño:

“Life is too short for chess.” (Lord Byron).

Jason Abdelhadi:

It is absolutely good entertainment! I think from ancient and medieval era travel literature I can assume people have always enjoyed entertaining the possibilities for another kind of life. Entertainment can come from entertaining options.

Mattias Forshage:

Oh probably, but I’m not much concerned with entertainment.

Juan Carlos Otaño:

Providing ink and paper.

Jason Abdelhadi:

Of course this is important to consider, but just as difficult to find the right networks in certain contexts. But depending on one’s temptations it may end up objectively preferable to remain a “mere tourist”. I have a tendency to overdo it when given the chance… One time while visiting London I caught wind of an unfolding protest on the news that I wanted to join. I frantically ran around but couldn’t find it anywhere, and ended up running through tourist areas confusedly, areas I had been avoiding but funnily enough ended up running through against my better intentions. The disorientation was nice anyway.

Mattias Forshage:

It varies, but it is always a relevant question. You might arrive with a mission, but it might not be relevant once there. Meeting people and sharing experiences might be enough, but it might also invite further involvement.

Juan Carlos Otaño:

Only with other exchanges, and never with money, can unusual experiences be gained.

Jason Abdelhadi:

If one is paying one has to a certain degree bought into a previously structured experience (by someone, some corporation, or some museum etc). So the question is how unusual it really can be given that limitation. But if it is, it is!

Mattias Forshage:

Yes it does, but only to a certain extent. When I was young I might have ultraradically claimed that it is the opposite of an unusual experience, but nowadays I don’t believe that imagination follows morality that obediently. Just one step less directly, you habitually have to pay for transport and equipment when you seek out your own experiences too. It might just boil down to the old question of whether everything is tainted in capitalism. If it is, it still doesn’t settle it. I mean, sure, I would believe that when paid experiences become more specific and more frequent in a person’s life they will also have a clear tendency to become more of commodities or mere entertainment and less of significant experiences. But the sphere of unusual experiences is never strictly determined, it’s always up to chance effects, negotiations and a generalised availability. This is how there is still such a thing as poetry.