Displacement Arc - No Exit Tourism

The only thing I have learned from traveling are the articles of convienance:

toilets, and the requisite papers

brand selectors

luggage with wheels

queing

and summary judgements that effect action (desired or not).

I have notes on most of the rest. I have difficulty reading those notes.

When the brains and politicos launched Pioneer (the satelite), they inscribed on a golden disk a shorthand for mankind and sent it out on a trajectory past Pluto. It was launched the year I was born and has a two million year mission. It cost 350 million dollars and the end goal was to point it at the star system Aldebaran (Arabic for "the follower") and hope for the best.

When I was 10, my grandmother paid to have a star named after me. As of today, NASA has no plans to send anything in my direction.

rendering

J

Now that my ear has exploded, I feel much better.

I've been teaching my classes from a book I read as an undergraduate called "Questions of Travel - Postmodern Discourses on Displacement". This was a book that gave me such a headache that I dropped the class and only made it to chapter 3. When I was back in the States, I sifted through a couple of boxes and found this next to my beloved copy of "World Cinema" (a compilation the most interesting of movies throughout the media). I was surprised that a book that made no sense before I had been anywhere was now holding many of the thoughts that have preoccupied my little brain since leaving Hollandia.

I think that I must be torturing my poor students, but torture is what I'm good at.

Today we discussed the meaning of travel. I concentrated on the differences and similarities between "exile" and "tourism". Making three rather complex chapters simple, I basically asked:

Why is it that tourism (which requires that the tourist becomes a 'stranger in a strange land') has many of the same aesthetic principles as exile (which also requires that a person becomes a 'stranger in a strange land'). It led to a halting, but interesting conversation about the nature of "home". I dug deeper (since they decided that the difference is that a tourist can return home, while an exile cannot) with the concept of nomadism and migrancy.

It's important to me, because I simply cannot answer the question of: "where is my home" but through the '80's song by Elvis Costello - "home is where the heart is".

The problem with that, is that I don't know where my heart is.

And so, I fall into the problem of "nostalgia'.

Nostalgia comes from the Greek:

nostos ‘a return home’
algos ‘a painful condition’

This is my slippery slope. The return home is a painful condition.

And so, I fear the other - homelessness. Not the capitalist rendition of "one car, one wife, one roof and a debt that kills you", but the indifference of traveling in circles.

Did you know that in the desert, a person will usually walk in circles because the foot that you lead with (for me, the left) strides longer than the other. No matter which direction you think you are going, your nature will generally lead you back to where you started. A person dies without landmarks.

Maybe this makes no sense in a country where every village, every city is well-marked and even choosing to be lost is nearly impossible.

I think that next week's classes will be about the "wilderness". The meaning of the wild in a planned economy.

Coming back, to China, has been different than I imagined (or, more to the truth - chose not to imagine). The funny thing about school is that it has diminished my ability to think. I used to spend such energy - "racing thoughts" - almost to madness, obsessing about the "I" of the the "this" that was the trajectory of my being. I fell into the luxury of entertaining that ego, distracting it with obligations, circumstances and the image of an interesting life (expat, student, artist... and later, "manager", arranger, conduit).