Travel and Games and the Unsung Places in the Brain. by risa
Travelling while reading about nomads is strange.
I first read Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines in high school when my boyfriend at the time slipped it to me with a knowing smile. It was the kind of thing he knew I’d like.
I read chapters of The Songlines again in my first year as an MA student when the prof who was to become my thesis advisor put them in our course pack for The History of Communication. Professor Buxton was interested in the shape of the culture that communicated history, religion and geography in walking song. And we were both fascinated by the idea that the notes of the Australian Aboriginals’ Songs might mark out the highs and lows and lulling stretches of their terrain as well as contain the entire detailed history of their Ancestors and the ways our world was made.
Now, today, I am sitting outside on the weathered porch of a lovely and love-filled home in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, and I can hear kids yelling and laughing from the school across the way, and I am a very long way from my cold Canadian home and I have spent all morning curled around The Songlines yet again.
On page 162 of this Penguin edition from 1988 Chatwin says:
“My two most recent notebooks were crammed with jottings taken in South Africa, where I had examined, at first hand, certain evidence of the origin of our species. What I had learned there – together with what I now knew about the Songlines – seemed to confirm the conjecture I had toyed with for so long: that Natural Selection has designed us – from the structure of our brain cells to the structure of our big toe – for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert.
If this were so; if the desert (the desert that I saw stretched wide and dry beneath me as I flew over America and down to California) if the desert were home; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert – then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal’s imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings in a prison.”
I don’t know that I would find comfort in a prison, but then I am not an imaginary man. I do know that the desert, the few times I’ve been deep enough into its edges to imagine it stretching out around me endlessly, opens up long pathways and wide, unknown, uncontrolled horizons in my brain. In the forest, in the desert or on certain stretches of beach where you can only think about the ocean and the sand, my thinking is overwhelmed and gratefully awed and though I have no cultural history of ancestor worship I do feel vague personalities hovering around me. Maybe they are old forces from my old and sometimes strong and sometimes shattered networks of family. Or maybe they are other possible versions of me- the selves that I could be without all my accumulated style and habits and the ubiquitous assumptions of my society.
I’ve written before about writing and approaching writing with a moving methodology, and I’ve even dabbled a bit (inspired by Meagan Morris who was inspired by Derrida) with the idea of a pedestrian methodology- one that walks slowly up to and around a story or a site of inquiry and sketches the questions and tensions one finds along the way. This is also like a rhizome methodolgy- one that moves like beach grass or moss above and then back underground in unexpected but naturally interwoven progressions, and perhaps manages to shake for a while the strong hold of those old assumptions. The idea is that with this kind of movement you might find places in yourself that have been quiet for so long they were forgotten.
On page 164 Chatwin quotes a Moorish proverb that says “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.”
My passing thought here at first is a playful, personal questionning: wondering if a ‘she’ who does not travel is as bereft in this kind of knowing as a ‘he’.
And then I start to think more concretely about the things I learn about the value of humans when I travel. About how strangers flip suddenly into kindnesses, and alternately how good performances reveal their cracks and cruelties and quivering doubts eventually under the travel strain. And how so many layers of simplified assumptions that have been buried quietly beneath the patterns of my daily experience get shaken out by the astonishing variety of un-summarizable detail and uniqueness in the world of people I hadn’t met yet.
According to Chatwin (and so many smart others) travel, especially foot travel, is the fundamental process of becoming that all of our more modern practices play at, or refer back to. For example, last night we were playing games. A small gang of Canadian ex-pats who now live in LA came over to Jess and Joe’s place and we laughed and drank wine and played games that made us sculpt and guess at eachothers personalities and try to remember bit of high and low cultural histories. After the guests had left, we three sat around and talked briefly about how easily a ‘games night’ can fail. How strange and difficult-to-love sides of people can come out under the pressure of competition. How in games people reveal themselves- for good or bad- in new ways.
So, in this small way, games are like the road. They push us down certain pathways (in loops of tasks and steps printed in bright colours on a board, for example.) They provide the framework for certain encounters, and once we start on them we feel drawn toward the finish even though we are getting tired and quiet, and even beginning to feel burdened by a certain silly but real strain. These are pale versions of great old wandering epics, but they aren’t meant to replace them, only to offer us a training ground, and access to the deep and unexplored places in our brains. Or maybe they are only more examples of distraction- of the ways we have of sedating and entertaining ourselves so as to hide from the fundamental longing that would draw us back out to the road or the dusty pathways. Not that this is bad or weak. Not that games or entertainment or even, sometimes, sedation, aren’t exactly what we need to give pause to the buzz that we’ve accumulated and created.
But the challenge we might try to remember as we slip in and out of of our many small sedations and deviations is this: to open ourselves to the wells of astonishing sweetness and strangely familiar newness that accompany each and every trip. To allow ourselves to see the gaps and margins and variations that mutter through the numbing habits of the day to day. To see the stories we are in the midst of instead of just the stories we are fed, and to embrace the chances we get to change.
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