Backdoor Diplomats
a 'from the archives' bootleg version: a case for curiosity as a tool to help us be better humans
I am heading out on a trip and have realized it is really a pilgrimage; pilgrimage being the subject of the metaphysical. I am chasing curiosities and emotions rather than thread counts and Michelin stars.
I am beginning the pilgrimage in an airport terminal. What French anthropologist Marc Augé referred to as “Non-place: an anthropological space of transience where human beings remain anonymous, and that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places" in their anthropological definition.” Bleak I know, but there can be an empty feel to an airport. There is also a human beauty, like that opening scene in Love Actually. There is freedom in the anonymity. There used to be cellular freedom being on a plane, it was one of the last places where cell phones and internet didn’t work, but that has all changed.
Things feel a bit wobbly these days with place, with borders, and ideas of citizenship and country, distinctions of geography and commerce. A friend reminded me of the importance of travel in times like these, if anything, as a small tool of diplomacy and humanness, to remind both oneself and those one comes into contact with that we are much more similar than we are different. The friend asked me to revise an old post, to bring it back to the surface like a bootleg version of an original so here it is. There are some edits, changed some of the verse, but the chorus remains in light.
I have always been attracted to the worn, to patina, to rusty, and to rotten things. Whether it be architecture (Havana, Yangon), fashion (a good pair of old jeans, or used leather boots), or even food (dry-aged steaks, pickle, fermentation – which when you boil it down is rot, tasty, tasty rot…). And as a child from the south, humidity, the great instigator in speeding up both life and death, has always sent my head spinning into worlds of dream and magic, worlds of Borges, Faulkner, and Burroughs. Hot climates produce good music, spice, plant life, as well as madness and disease, and I think this constant contradiction is what makes me love moving about this globe. There is a noise I associate with heat and fever, and I am not sure if it’s real or from distortions of memory. It could be from something as simple as the cicada, that strange insect that emerges from the ground, periodically, in the hot humid months, and rages against the known world with its vibrations. That same noise and temperature brings on an overexposed fragility in me that is dreamlike and dehydrated. I was an asthmatic child so there were times when I was in a trance with little oxygen, feverish and in a surreal state of mind in which I’d hear the noise, and I have since felt it in deserts and swamps, like rapture.
My first few hours in Asia were a long layover in Kuala Lumpur on my way to China, jet-lagged, young, scared, excited. And mind-blown. Being jet-lagged is the perfect mind-state for a first time in Asia – it makes all the sense in the world that there is a physical response to moving through the world too fast, that your body has to take time to catch up to your geography. Jet lag just fits.
As soon as I landed in Kuala Lumpur, and walked off the plane into the wall of heat and wet, the smell and feel rocked me. It’s a moment I shall never forget, and have been chasing in all of my travels ever since.
I spent a lot of time in China in the early 2000’s, trying to make up for an overly euro-centric upbringing. I knew there was a world I’d overlooked, and hadn’t been taught about in school, a missing hemisphere. I’d read books like Ernst Gombrich’s History of Art which ignored the “East” side of the globe, attended the University of Georgia’s Philosophy department which had no eastern philosophy program…. Faced with the choice of German or Greek, I picked Greek and studied Aristotle. But when my formal education finished, I ran to the missing parts on my map to find out what was there.
I lived in Taiwan for a bit, then got a job in southern China and stayed there for the better part of 7 years, before heading to Peru and Ireland (other blank parts of my map). My relationship with China was complicated – there is fascination and curiosity, frustration and confusion, and plenty that I still don’t understand. So I have spent more time in my adult life working on the puzzle that is China than any other place.
I was confused at the issues before I went and only after going and seeing for myself, smelling the smells, hearing the sounds, feeling the vibe of the place, only then did I come to some sort of a beginning to understanding. And this is really what I am talking about.
The process of setting up a trip usually starts the same; a spark of an idea, an interest, a curiosity. It sparks the armchair looking up of various lists and reviews of a place/country/hotel in books, magazines, social media sites. This step helps give a foundation and inspiration, but can be dangerously full of reduction and fiction. The next step is talking to people who are from there or who have lived there or have been there, telling them what you are interested in and what advice or introductions they might have. But all this is set up, limited; it is the going that is the goal.
I have always felt that travel is, or can be, a kind of backdoor diplomacy. And that as long as it is safe, going to a place to see it for yourself and to interact with people and place is the best way to judge for yourself what might be there. Of course flying into a war zone is not a good idea. But going to places that are on the fringes of being understood or misunderstood, takes the going and talking and laughing and crying with the people in those places. It allows for relating and communing rather than consuming and feeding. There are moments of euphoria and moments of stillness, both intrinsically valuable to understanding. These aren’t vacations, these are a dialectic, and it is an activity we are losing the capacity for; attention and patience. There are many reasons for the loss of these skills, and that isn’t what I am talking about here. I am talking about what we can do to get better, a technique through a certain way of travel and curious openness, diplomatic, and slow, and indirect.
