Travelling as sublimation?
I’ve been thinking about travel. I feel as if people are obsessed with travelling nowadays, and I’m wondering why. Most people I know, and people I don’t know but who share their desires on social media, seem to save up their money with the sole aim of travelling. That may be an exaggeration, but it might help point towards what I want to share here. Travelling has become the holy grail of our culture, the most valuable experience and the most valuable aim you can head towards (you and your money). There, let’s exaggerate it even more. Why is this happening? I can’t help feel a certain obsessiveness in it, and an unhealthiness, as if something were being hidden by it. One travels nowadays to seek a certain satisfaction, but I wonder what it is. The goal tends to be to have a “real experience”, to get away from mundane life. A trip seems to be an extended weekend, the nature of both moments is similar. Doesn’t it feel as if a trip is a culturally sanctioned form of “tripping”? Terence McKenna said that travelling was one of the most psychedelic experiences one could have without drugs, or at least, a sort of gateway drug to deeper states of psychedelia (here as in mind manifestation).
I agree with him, and travelling has been for me always a very psychedelic experience. One encounters the Other with great force, even when visiting shopping centres and cafes that are similar to those back home. Somehow, the uncanny valley nature of it all (it’s the same cafe, but it’s not by a small margin) also results in an encounter with the Other — sometimes even a stronger one! In any case, my job here is to critique this impulse as it manifests itself today, partly due to a sort of cynicism towards my own culture, and partly due to a dissatisfaction with my own hermit lifestyle. And here I feel that sarcasm can hide a lot of truth: truly, in order to balance out my hermit lifestyle, I want to confront my Shadow, the “traveller archetype”, to inspect how is it that my introversion leads me to feel so sour about all this. Where is the truth in the sourness? Where the delusion? Etc, etc.
So. I agree with McKenna. But I also agree with Alan Watts. Watts saw a trend in history whereby travel was speeding up, and speeding up, as if we could get to our destination fast enough. Trains get faster, aeroplanes appear, planes get faster, and so on. Yet, we are not satisfied with the speed of our travelling, we wish we were there already. And I think here is the clue: we wish we were there NOW. We don’t actually want to do anywhere else to have that experience. Our true desire is to transmute our current situation, our here and now, into something golden, shining and exciting, something not mundane. Or, in other words, we want our life to be valuable, to have meaning, but we want it NOW. I think this apparently greedy impulse is quite noble, it shows a certain repressed alchemical tendency in our culture. We want to transmute our life, but the only way we culturally know / allow ourselves to do so is by travelling, which acts as a sort of symbolic transmutation. Your here and now changes! Your here and now is now another country! But the question remains: is that what you wanted? I don’t mean this as cynically as it may seem, I really don’t know: is performing a symbolic act a step towards that goal, or is it a step backwards? A further repression of what you really wanted to do? I guess some *awareness* of the fact that you’re performing a symbolic act may help, and that’s probably where we enter the real of magic and the occult.
And yet we’re not going to talk about that yet. I want to continue the Alan Watts thing: we’re travelling faster and faster, so it seems like we’re not really enjoying the travelling per se, simply want to be there. Another strange piece of evidence for this is how most tourists (not all, but a sufficient amount for it to be obvious whenever you visit a city) tend to visit exactly those parts of the city that the people who live there never visit. They visit a sort of virtual twin of the city which has emerged to meet the desires of tourists. And what does it consist of? Generally, in my experience, of shopping centres, cafes, etc. Moreover, chains we have back at home, Starbucks and all others. You’re home, but you’re not home. Again, this is worthy of more study than it may seem. It’s easy to brush it away as an absurdity: tourists just want to visit their own home city, but in another city! Ah, but isn’t that fascinating in a way? It gives evidence to my thesis (if I can call it that) that today’s tourism doesn’t actually want to go there, it wants to go here. But our culture doesn’t show us how to “go here”! We are told we are “already here”, so there is no way of going towards it! But that’s what I could call introspection, meditation, or exploration of the inner world. I would say that the inner world is so, so repressed by culture that the only way it knows how to reach it is by symbolically re-enacting it in the form of another place, and uncanny version of the here. Even non-cafes, stuff that only exists in that city, such as museums, monuments, famous streets, etc, are only visited as virtual environments in my view. We go to them like the trainer goes to the Pokémon, to collect the “experience” of having been there, to catalogue it next to all the other famous places we’ve been to. Once that chore has been done, we can go back home. OK, I’m being too cynical here, I’m ignoring the aesthetic appreciation, the beauty in seeing new things. That is one of the great psychedelic aspects of it! And yes, it exists, it still exists, but I want to concentrate on all I feel distaste for, in an attempt to zero in on my Shadow, s’il vous plait!
OK. So, where were we. The inner world, yes. We want to visit the inner world, but we have no frame of reference for that, no mechanism for that. Precisely because it is not material in the conventional sense of the word, it enters into the real of the spiritual and the personal, instead of the objective and collectively sanctioned material facts of the outer world. After all, travel has become a spiritual path, I feel, in the fact that people see it as *the* most valuable thing one could do, it’s become a sort of meta-activity, above all others. One drinks coffee, one drives cars and has sex, but it is all done within a framework of “escape from the mundane”, or perpetual travel. Perhaps this is also a tendency towards nomadism emerging, which would corroborate McKenna’s archaic revival theory. Ah, but, a counterpoint: what about our use of aeroplanes as if they were buses? Our constant emission of toxic gas into the atmosphere? Travelling is becoming a new paradigm, but can it? Is it sustainable to travel to new countries every vacation, at every opportunity you get? Is this truly archaic, or perhaps a sort of true escapism, in the bad sense of the word, a lack of awareness of what we want and how we’re getting it (which seems to be at the root of most environmental problems I would say). OK, wait, let’s answer that parenthesis: at the root because of the aforementioned sublimation. We want spiritual experiences, a contact with the inner world, a union between the inner world and the outer world, and yet the only way we can think of doing that is via material means, i.e. expending material resources towards goals that can’t be satisfied with matter. It’s a waste of matter, then. Or maybe a learning experience through materialised symbol? Again, my eternal doubt. Ah! *dramatic pose*
Travelling, I feel, is becoming the only way our culture knows how to interact with “meaning”, meaningful experience. But if we don’t find a way of integrating some of that symbolic content, so that we can stop using up resources to project our dreams outward, we may be able to soothe the environment’s pain whilst simultaneously soothing our own frustration from the impossibility of satiation from sublimated desires! Wow! And that would be great, two birds with one stone (or were there even two birds to begin with?). Cheerio!