Philosophy, Travel, and Place

Philosophy, Travel, and Place

Ron Scapp · Brian Seitz Editors

Philosophy, Travel, and Place Being in Transit

Editors Ron Scapp College of Mount Saint Vincent New York, NY, USA

Brian Seitz Babson College Babson Park, MA, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-98224-3 ISBN 978-3-319-98225-0  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954965 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Ashley Sandberg/EyeEm Cover design by Akihiro Nakayama This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

Introducing Being in Transit 1 Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz

2

Long Distances: Tourating, Travel, and the Ethics of Tourism 7 Mary C. Rawlinson

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Thinking in Transit 51 Megan Craig and Edward S. Casey

4

Reclamation and Reconciliation 69 bell hooks

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Bad Dog 79 Alphonso Lingis

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Walking the Way: Transforming Being in Transit 87 Jason M. Wirth

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Home Schooling: Philosophy Without Travel 99 Nickolas Pappas

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Contents

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The Night-Traveler: Theories of Nocturnal Time, Space, Movement 113 Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

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Walking in Wild Emptiness: A Zen Phenomenology 129 Brian Shūdō Schroeder

10 Moving Wolves 151 Thomas Thorp 11 Nietzsche vagabundus or, the Good European in transitu 169 David Farrell Krell 12 Trans-Scapes Transitions in Transit 189 Irene J. Klaver 13 The Commute: The Bend in Progress, Reproduction on The Road 209 Robin Truth Goodman 14 The Privilege of the Open Road 223 James Penha 15 American Travel Encounters with Fascist Italy 227 David Aliano 16 Flicking the Switch 261 Ron Anteroinen 17 Homo Viator: Knowledge of the Earth and Theory of the World in the Age of the First Transatlantic Voyages 265 Peter Carravetta Index 289

Notes

on

Contributors

David Aliano is an Associate Professor of Italian and History and is the Chair of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City. He earned his Ph.D. and M.Phil. degrees at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and received his B.A. degree from Fordham University. His research specializes in transnational Italian identity, politics, and culture. He is the author of Mussolini’s National Project in Argentina (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012). He has also published peer-reviewed articles in the Ethnic Studies Review (2010), French Colonial History (2008), Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe (2006), and Altreitalie (2005). Ron Anteroinen is a visual fine artist and graphic designer living in New York City. Peter Carravetta  is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. He has published several books, including Prefaces to the Diaphora. Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity (Purdue UP, 1991), Del Postmoderno. Critica e cultura in America all’alba del duemila (Bompiani, 2009), and The Elusive Hermes. Method, Discourse, Interpreting (Davies Group Publishing, 2013). Founding editor of DIFFERENTIA review of italian thought (1986–1999, viewable on https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia/), and translator of G. Vattimo & P. A. Rovatti’s Weak Thought (SUNY P, 2012), he is vii

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also a poet, author of The Sun and Other Things (Guernica, 1998), and The Other Lives (Guernica, 2014). He has been Fulbright and Visiting Professor in Madrid/Complutense, Paris/8, Nanjing, Saint Petersburg and Rome/2. He is presently working on a book on Humanism in the post-humanist age. Edward S. Casey  is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook. Past president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), he is the author of ten books on topics ranging from imagination and memory to place and space. Most recently, he has published The World at Glance and The World on Edge—two periphenomenological investigations. He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled Peripheral Emotions. Megan Craig is an artist and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, where she teaches course in Aesthetics, Phenomenology, and twentieth century continental philosophy. Her research interests include color, synesthesia, autism, psychoanalysis, and embodiment. She is the author of Levinas and James: Towards a Pragmatic Phenomenology (Indiana University Press, 2010) and is currently at work on a book on Levinas, Derrida, and palliative care in America. Her paintings, installations, performances, and public works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Robin Truth Goodman is Professor and Associate Chair of English at Florida State University. Her publications include: Promissory Notes: The Literary Conditions of Debt (Lever Press, forthcoming); Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (Routledge, 2017); Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (edited collection; Cambridge University Press, 2016); Gender Work: Feminism After Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2013); Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public: Women and the “Re-privatization” of Labor (Palgrave, 2010); Policing Narratives and the State of Terror (SUNY Press, 2009); World, Class, Women: Global Literature, Education, and Feminism (Routledge, 2004); Strange Love: Or, How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (co-written with Kenneth J. Saltman; Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); and Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). She is the editor of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of twenty-first Century Feminist Theory and Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism also from Bloomsbury.

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Irene J. Klaver is Professor in Philosophy at the University of North Texas and Director of the Philosophy of Water Project. She works at the interface of social-political and cultural dimensions of water, with a special interest in urban rivers. Currently she is finalizing a book about the Trinity River in North Texas (Texas A&M University Press) and working on a monograph on Meandering, River Spheres and New Urbanism. Klaver has been Water and Culture Advisor for UNESCO and Co-Director of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy. She co-edited the UNESCO book Water, Cultural Diversity & Global Environmental Change and co-directed the documentary The New Frontier: Sustainable Ranching in the American West and parts of River Planet. David Farrell Krell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor of German Studies at Brown University. His philosophical work focuses on the areas of early Greek thought, German Romanticism and Idealism, and contemporary European thought. His most recent scholarly books include Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks (SUNY Press, 2015), The Cudgel and the Caress: Reflections on Cruelty and Tenderness (forthcoming from SUNY), and The Sea: A Philosophical Encounter (forthcoming from Bloomsbury). He has also published a number of short stories and three novels. Alphonso Lingis  is an American philosopher, writer and translator, currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, existentialism, modern philosophy, and ethics. Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College. His focus is upon tracking currents of experimental thought in the Middle East and the West, with particular attention to exploring the concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, extremism, mania, disappearance, and apocalyptic writing. He has published six books to date, including: The Chaotic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Inflictions (Continuum, 2012), The Radical Unspoken (Routledge, 2013), and Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian (SUNY, 2015). His latest work on madness, titled Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-In-Delirium, will be released with Urbanomic/ Sequence and MIT Press in 2019. He is also the co-editor of the

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Suspensions book series with Bloomsbury, and co-founder of the fifth (Dis)Appearance Lab (www.5dal.com). Nickolas Pappas  teaches at the City University of New York, where he is head of the Program in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center and City College. He has written Guidebook to Plato’s Republic, now in three editions (Routledge, 1995, 2004, 2013); The Nietzsche Disappointment: Reckoning with Nietzsche’s Unkept Promises on Origins and Outcomes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Politics and Philosophy in Plato’s Menexenus, with Mark Zelcer (Routledge, 2015); The Philosopher’s New Clothes: The Theaetetus, the Academy, and Philosophy’s Turn against Fashion (Routledge, 2016). He works mainly in the areas of ancient philosophy and aesthetics. James Penha is a native New Yorker who has lived for the past quarter-century in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his LGBTQ+ stories appear in the 2017 and 2018 anthologies of both the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival and the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival while his dystopian poem “2020” is part of the 2017 Not My President anthology. His essay “It’s Been a Long Time Coming” was featured in The New York Times “Modern Love” column in April 2016. Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Mary C. Rawlinson is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy and an Affiliated Faculty in Art History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. Rawlinson’s publications include Just Life: bioethics and the future of sexual difference (Columbia University Press, 2016), Engaging the World: Thinking After Irigaray (SUNY, 2016), The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics (Routledge, 2016), Labor and Global Justice (Lexington, 2014), Global Food, Global Justice (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), Thinking with Irigaray (SUNY, 2011), and Derrida and Feminism (Routledge, 1997), as well as articles on Hegel, Proust, literature and ethics, bioethics, and contemporary French philosophy. Rawlinson was the founding editor of IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (2006–2016) and Co-founder and Co-director of The Irigaray Circle (2007–2017). In 2018 she was appointed Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London.

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Ron Scapp  is the founding Director of the Graduate Program in Urban and Multicultural Education at College of Mount Saint Vincent, The Bronx, where he is also a Professor of humanities and teacher education. He is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous books on education, politics and culture. Brian Shūdō Schroeder is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Director of Religious Studies at Rochester Institute of Technology. He has published widely on Contemporary European Philosophy, The History of Philosophy, Environmental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, The Kyoto School, Social and Political Philosophy, and The Philosophy of Religion. He is co-editor with Silvia Benso of the SUNY Press Series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Currently an associate officer of the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle and an executive committee member of the Society for Italian Philosophy, Schroeder is formerly Co-director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Co-director and Chair of the board of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, director of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, and executive committee member of the Nietzsche Society. He is also an ordained Sōtō Zen priest and the Buddhist chaplain at RIT, where he guides the Idunno Zen Community. Brian Seitz is Professor of Philosophy at Babson College. He is the author, co-author, and co-editor of many books and articles on philosophy and culture. Thomas Thorp  is Professor of Philosophy at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. In addition to essays on Homer and Greek political thought several recent publications have drawn from fieldwork conducted in areas where wolves have returned, the Yellowstone area and the Savoie region of France. He is co-author, with Brian Setiz, of The Iroquois and the Athenians: a Political Ontology. bell hooks  is an American author, feminist, and social activist. The name “bell hooks” is derived from that of her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. The focus of hooks’ writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published over 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality,

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mass media, and feminism. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Jason M. Wirth is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics, Ecological Philosophy, and Africana Philosophy. His recent books include Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY, 2017), A Monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things, Fordham 2016), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY, 2015), The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time (SUNY, 2003), the co-edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder), Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana, 2011), and The Barbarian Principle: MerleauPonty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature (SUNY, 2013). He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. His forthcoming manuscript is called Nietzsche and Other Buddhas (Indiana, 2019) and he is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well as one on indigenous space.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 12.1

Cleopatra’s Barge, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas We had dinner at one of Venice’s canals when we saw it coming: slow-gliding giant, moving with iron precision, steely temporality Fig. 12.2 Bicycling along the IJ Boulevard, we saw the Brilliance of the Seas docked in the Cruise Terminal, dwarfing all the buildings around it Fig. 12.3 On our way to see a movie, we explored the new neighborhood around the Film Museum the EYE and found ourselves in a Venetian themed enclave Fig. 12.4 Driving along wind-swept farm road 2520 in south Texas, we encountered the first TRANSMIGRANTES sign, forlorn in the new millennium Fig. 12.5 We slowly drove into the CATS lot, a large lot run by men from Guatemala Fig. 12.6 Transmigrantes, the gleaners of transit, in transit: towing used cars behind their own cars, all the way back to Guatemala Fig. 12.7 We were right at Anzaldúa’s herida abierta, the open wound of the closed-fenced US–Mexican border Fig. 12.8 The Rio Grande visible through the ‘controlled burnt’ thickets in Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. We witnessed the creation of control through exposure

11 194 195 195 198 199 200 200 202

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Fig. 12.9 Fig. 12.10

Tijuana: where the wall walks into the waters of the Pacific Ocean 202 At the US side we saw a desolate territory, controlled space, mocked by countless loud seagulls. At the Mexican side we saw people enjoying the beach 203

CHAPTER 1

Introducing Being in Transit Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz

“The sedentary life is the real sin against the holy spirit.” Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

That we find ourselves running to, fleeing from or otherwise commuting between here and there poses problems that most philosophers have so far and for the most part seemed to neglect. We, however, are moved by this reality, one in which the distinction between nomadism and globalism, and between choice and necessity becomes somewhat obscure, if still clearly determined while arguably equally clearly indeterminate, whether an expression of the postmodern condition or the consequence of modernity, or the extended, and typically gratuitous and vicious, ­exigencies of race, class, and gender. Everyone on this expansive planet experiences what could be characterized as micro-transits, typically routine and often mundane forms of movement, the type embodied in the daily circuit to and from work, even if it entails simply walking—but an act that gets complicated if one

R. Scapp  College of Mount Saint Vincent, New York, NY, USA B. Seitz (*)  Babson College, Babson Park, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_1

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is walking away from, for instance, genocide, a trajectory, then, toward the only hope of survival. And then there are longitudinal time-zone transits and latitudinal north–south transits, which often detach and sometimes violently disrupt people from their routine and land them somewhere else, somewhere different from where they started, somewhere frequently problematized, problematic, and dangerous, a dislocation breeding alienation, on the part of both the dislocated and the inhabitants already in place. For example, the many refugees who are detained by government agencies such as ICE in towns and cities across the United States, and the very residence of those towns and cities where they are detained. This is an interruption of the very transit that both the refugees, now detainees, and the locals, who feel put upon, if not threaten, desperately wish would resume as quickly as possible. Here, we are thinking about the dislocation and alienation experienced by the many hundreds of thousands Syrians who have been forced to flee their homes and homeland, forced, that is, to move, frequently these days into sinking boats. At a time when we have experienced the expression of national outrage, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment that led to Brexit, to the election of Donald Trump, to more walls, and then to the ever growing expansion of China’s influence with its attention to ethnic populations within and adjacent to its borders, pivot to the resurgence of Putin’s Russia and its “recovery” of historical peoples and the enhanced monitoring of the movement of populations; we have also witnessed, however fully cognizant or not we might be of it, the continued moving and removal of capital around the world—so the question of motion is not just the tragedy of desperate human bodies, but also the pathways of material wealth, intensified by the obscure dynamics of cryptocurrencies. And yet, and as if in a parallel universe, bourgeois bodies are simultaneously moving about, to and fro, within the always precarious and tentative comfort and assumed security of their privileged travel. These bodies are not necessarily unaware of those many other some-bodies being bombarded, pushed and forced out of their homes and homelands. Nevertheless, these passengers are apparently not moved enough by those misfortuned transients (our term—as distinct from those “passengers” who are delayed or have a flight canceled) to stop their routines, even if disrupted; the former’s normal everyday movements to and from where they imagine themselves that they need to be, more often than not someplace only reachable by air, unlike their dislocated counterparts walking their way out of the hell that was their home into the various alternate versions of hell that are not their home.

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The reality of being on the ground for refugees and travelers is obviously as different and differentiating as it could possibly be. One group is traversing the land and the sea, negotiating borders, not knowing what to expect at every phase, with every step. The other group is moving along, as usual, not really traveling so much as simply getting around by sitting in machines, sedentary casualties of the technology. What is usual is often experienced as routine, that is, as expected, even demanded, the very disposition of privileged mobility, possibly constituting a new nobility or social class, certainly constituting a new mobility. Thus, for those bodies practiced in their routine of coming and going, the phrase “ground transportation”—busses, trains, taxis, cars—is a direct reference to security, to the concourse, and lofting above the air to the relatively seamless systems of movement in which, secured if not quite actually safe, inhabitants of the global city, of the World City, now reside and move about in, unlike their unfortunate counterparts who find themselves out of sorts, out of their routines, and moving only to secure the possibility of another day, fortune granting—not unlike the much publicized caravan moving its way through Mexico to the US border that the Trump administration deemed as emblematic of all that is wrong with US immigration policy and international law regarding asylum seeking refugees. At the same time, not that long ago, it was a very long boat ride, for the rich, migrants, and slaves alike. Although now many of us, with most of us traveling in “economy,” just watch a film or two, which on an experiential level means, paradoxically, that it’s not really about movement at all but, as Paul Virilio has observed in Open Sky, a peculiar form of stasis: we move while sitting in machines. One might pass through an airport bar, an anomalous, impervious, and typically anonymous space given that it is devoid of normal local repeat or familiar customers, a pub that is not a true public house, a pub that is not a pub, even if one might rub elbows with strangers there. This is not to deny that there are in fact regulars, business travelers, who do come through airports weekly, but only an elite of these folks who frequent the various airline lounges are known on sight by the staff, including the bartenders—think here of George Clooney’s character in Up In The Air. At some other end of the spectrum are the “Irish pubs” that install themselves in all sorts of places, including in airports—an anemic gesture toward travel of a different sort, ultimately not that different from the recreations offered to visitors at Disney’s Epcot Center and various other places. So even in the ebb and flow of temporary or transient clients coming and going, dispersed throughout an airport and

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elsewhere, there are those who find themselves at a place where at least someone knows their name—or at least recognizes and acknowledges their frequent flyer number!—even if it is probably a far cry from the greeting one gets upon entering a genuinely local drinking hole, a proper pub. But now we’re ready or forced to take flight. Go to the gate and board the plane! Most modern, technologized, and otherwise privileged travelers typically experience the airplane as a machine of transport, a mere instrument. But once in a while, the plane transcends instrumentality à la Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” and provides a vista of revelation that bursts through the limitations of the various instrumental formations of understanding. Lofting up from Denver, heading north, breaking through the clouds, and catching an exhilarating glimpse of Yellowstone Lake before the approach into Bozeman’s Gallatin Airport. Descending into an endless expanse of green surrounding Roberts Airport in Liberia, descending over the Thames on the approach into London Heathrow—spectacular!—or, toward St. Petersburg, the approach into Pulkovo, again breaking through the clouds, coming down over the heights just outside of the glorious city, the very heights behind which, just yesterday, Nazi artillery pounded the city for 900 days, or now on a plane out of Aleppo, originally scheduled to leave Damascus, due to “turbulence on the ground.” The instrument typically just has most of us anticipate the baggage carousel and some destination on the ground. But sometimes, between the blurs, it facilitates moments or points of contact and connection with the past, a rich and sometimes beautiful and sometimes violent present and then an ambiguous future—a motion of an entirely different order: nostalgia, anxiety, hope, and resignation (depending on your inclinations, your destinations past, present, and… future). Some of us fly away from and fly away to in order to disappear and reappear—for business, pleasure, adventure, and many other motives and necessities. But assumed in our comings and goings is a presumption of our not disappearing while traveling, and of having the luxury of returning when we desire, an option that can quickly get negated by natural disasters (e.g. volcanic activities, extreme weather), intentional catastrophes (war) or a hastily imposed travel ban (however ­temporarily enforced). The conditions of such mobility and immobility, therefore, are far from within our control, and never will be. A moment’s thought to various recent crashes and more specifically and dramatically to the

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dematerialization of Malaysia Airline Flight 370 sends us anxiously wondering if “we might just disappear.” The revelation is that if the plane is an instrument, it can also be an instrument of death (unlike the Titanic and the Hindenburg, 9/11 changed travel forever). Pushing further, air travel is a mode of revelation, one that includes and yet also extends beyond the view down from up above, and the inherent superiority that so often accompanies such a perspective. All of this demands a rethinking of the instrumentality of flying as such, and traveling to our doom in particular, despite or perhaps modeling the fact that, as Al Lingis notes in his book, Death Bound Subjectivity, we are all already always traveling toward death. We are fascinated simultaneously by our access to get anywhere quickly and by the very possibility of being gone forever, which is our universal path and destination. The plethora of magazines, newspaper sections, entire television shows, websites, and even scholarly journals dedicated to “travel” indicate the scope, extent, and intensity of interest, concern, and fascination with coming and going, of being and not being here and there: to and from home, work, vacation, along with or paralleled by experiences of emigration, immigration, relocation, and dislocation. Some get to enjoy travel, while many more are forced to move because of floods, warfare, genocide, and poverty… Each day, around the world, people commute, flee, return and reconsider where they are and want or need to be. Motility, as Bruce Chapman elegantly argued in Songlines, has been one of our consistent species traits for eons—and may want us to reconfigure and rethink race, ethnicity, migration, and habituation—but the speed, scale, intensity, and frequency of our movements these days have extended and accelerated the transformation of who we are and are becoming, are moving toward. The existential question, “Who am I?” gets recalibrated, “Where am I, where have I been, and where am I going?” One’s place in the world is a perennial consideration; but today it becomes a point of departure or return in a manner not experienced by those who have come and gone before us. Finding our way around today with the aid of Sat Nav, of GPS, in our phones, with Uber, Lyft, and other overlapping and interwoven technologies and transportation corporations that allow us to be identified, located, picked up, and dropped off all add another experience of time and space. We anticipate points of punctuation, points of reference that give and change the meaning of our lives (our food, our language, our currency)—and yet

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the impulse for continuity remains strong and influential—how many Sheratons, Westins, Hiltons, Marriotts around the world promise the more or less same contextless level of service, the same quality and style, the effect of which is something like being nowhere in particular: some often find themselves in exactly the same place despite being thousands of miles from home. Many others find themselves alienated, dislocated and unsafe at home!—consider efforts and movements such as Black Lives Matters and Red Nation documenting, acknowledging, confronting, and addressing the very restricted mobility of citizens that encounter obstacles, impasses, and death for moving about in the wrong place, in the wrong way and at the wrong time—how you move and where you move has always been complicated; sadly, for some almost any move can be, and often is, their last move, for it is more frequently than not countered by an act of permanent removal. Movement is a condition of the arc of human subjectivity, of ancient history and contemporary life. Philosophy, Travel and Place: Being in Transit continues the exploration of themes either neglected or devalued by others working in the field of philosophy and culture. Following the four collections we have previously published—Eating Culture; Etiquette; Fashion Statements; and Living with Class—Philosophy, Travel and Place will consider the domain of travel from the broadest and most diverse of philosophical perspectives. In being in transit, we are considering the possibilities of the very real material impact of being able to move or stay put, as well as being forced to go or prevented from leaving. Our time in transit, our being in transit, and our time at rest, that is, specifically being “here” and not going some place other, whether by choice or edict, has always been at issue, always been at play (and has always been in motion, if you will), for our species. Now, we would like to pause for a moment, and move the philosophical discussion forward, to move it in a direction that has, as far as we can tell, for too long has been stalled at a place we need to move on from, if philosophy is to remain vibrant and significant to those of us still attempting to find our way. In short, we move about because of desire, because of necessity, because of ourselves, and because of others. But, the fact remains (that is to say, stays put), we move for better and for worse, and because not moving and not being allowed to move only can occur with the context of our being in transit, one way or another.

CHAPTER 2

Long Distances: Tourating, Travel, and the Ethics of Tourism Mary C. Rawlinson

In Invisible Cities Italo Calvino writes, …the form of things can be discerned better at a distance.1

Addressing the ethics of tourism immediately situates the reader in a zone of privilege. The host country must enjoy enough security and infrastructure to attract and sustain tourism, while the tourist must enjoy enough security, mobility, and leisure to be able to indulge in travel for pleasure or as an end in itself. In 2015, there were 1.23 billion international tourist arrivals, and tourism generated receipts of $1.26 trillion globally.2 That same year, 65 million people were made refugees by war, civil conflict, or persecution,3 and another 21.5 million were displaced by climate change.4 More than 21 million people are trafficked annually for labour

M. C. Rawlinson (*)  Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_2

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(16 million) or for sex (5 million). Trafficking produces profits of $150 billion a year, 66% from sexual exploitation.5 Some 3–4 million migrants are smuggled each year, generating in excess of $6.75 billion in profits.6 Millions of humans are on the move both within and across borders in an effort to escape poverty and violence.7 Many “undocumented” humans are deported, forcibly removed from the places they have chosen to live. Some humans are stuck in transit in migrant camps, effectively homeless. To be in transit as a tourist because you choose to be marks an extreme privilege over the millions of humans displaced by violence, climate catastrophe, genocide, poverty, war, or deportation. States with long histories of conflict, like Colombia, Lebanon, or Vietnam, develop thriving tourism industries as violence subsides, security returns, and infrastructures are improved and sustained.8 The development of the tourism industry is regularly coupled with the production of new narratives of identity and the creation of new sites of memory and history. Might an ethics of tourism identify practices that would serve local security, global mobility, and universal leisure, or the opportunity for each and all—local and tourist alike—to pursue happiness? Industrial tourism is often associated with the degradation of place and the homogenization of culture. It regularly substitutes fabricated spaces and pre-packaged experiences for an encounter with indigenous cultures that might provide the traveller with new perspectives on herself and her own place of departure. Proust, conversely, offers a philosophy of travel that promises not the same experience everywhere, but to make places seem as foreign and as far apart as possible, each retaining or developing its own specificity, history, memory, and identity. Might such travel address the collapse of the real and the effacement of distance in the instantaneous, which has been diagnosed by Baudrillard as threatening the very possibility of identity and self-representation in our time? Might an ethics of tourism promote cultural difference and sustain the specificity of place, while preserving and enhancing the distances and differences that sustain both self-knowledge and any meaningful encounter with the other?

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Places in Transit: Disposability, Specularization, Homogenization Writing in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd muses: Paris, Vegas—I’m strolling down a cobblestone street, beneath a cloud-speckled Paris sky. Past Le Village Buffet, Napoleon’s cigar and cognac lounge, past Parcage … Let the real Parisians treat the casino with amused disdain. I think it’s positively magnifique to stand on the Lido and see the Eiffel Tower rising along the banks of Lake Como. Call it globalization.9

Touristic spaces like the Las Vegas Strip and Disneyland demonstrate the disposability of place. They champion the power of industrial tourism to appropriate and repackage culture and place into a thoroughly artificial touristic experience. Culture becomes a specularized object of consumption, rather than an element of life, while the forces of global capital homogenize experience to maximize security and wealth, at the same time degrading the specificity of place. Paris exists all over the world in its icons: the French bistro, the Tour Eiffel key fob, the beret, the Mona Lisa refrigerator magnet. Paris can be recreated in Las Vegas only because its iconography proves universally legible. Its disposability, however, finds a counterforce in the city’s historical and material ballast. The preservation of a human scale within the rigid boundary of the Périphérique, the pervasive and durable infrastructure of food that determines social relations and daily routines, the extensive and accessible public spaces, and the sedimentation of history in the built environment sustain the specificity of Paris, despite fast food and other homogenizing forces of global capital, at the same time that these features generate Paris’s unique iconography and disposability. Paris may be the disposable city, but its social and cultural ballast provide effective resistance to the erasure of place under global capital.10 Among the most visited cities in the world with more than 20 million visitors annually, Paris has incorporated tourism as an economic engine without losing its specificity of place. Unlike Venice or Vienna, which have been identified by UNESCO as endangered by tourism and development, Paris remains relatively unfazed by its absorption of global capital.11 As Luc Sante remarks,

10  M. C. RAWLINSON The city’s principal constituent matter is accrued time. The place is lousy with it. Not everyone is happy about this, since the past is burdensome and ungovernable and never accords with totalizing ideologies or unified design theories or schemes for maximizing profit. The faceless residential and commercial units that conceal large parts of working-class Paris were imposed over the last half-century for reasons that include the wish to extinguish an unruly past. History is always in the gun sights of planners and developers, and of reactionaries, who in the absence of a convenient past are content to invent one, winding their fantasies around some factual nugget suitably distant and fogged by legend. Official appropriations of history … always gravitate toward the theme park.12

The past—materialized everywhere in buildings, streets, food and wine, art, parks, and other public spaces—provides an infrastructure for the present and future that enables Paris to maintain its distinct identity against the uniformity of place instituted by the circulation of global capital. Despite its disposability, Paris remains indifferent to its appropriation by industrial tourism in Paris Las Vegas. The elegant majesty of the Tour Eiffel, always a surprise to the tourist who expects a mere convention, remains undiminished by the half-size replica on top of Paris Las Vegas, just as its beauty remains indifferent to the millions of key fobs and little tower souvenirs sold every year at all the major Parisian monuments. Not all places prove so durable under the influence of global capital. Across the street from Paris Las Vegas, Caesars Palace displaces both space and time to evoke an ancient Rome more akin to cinema than history. Just as Paris is disposed all over the world through its emblems, so too the Caesars Palace resort resituates Rome in Las Vegas by deploying its conventionalized iconography: marble columns, togas, and a “garden of the gods” replete with Roman lions, centurions, and nymphs. Guests can party on Cleopatra’s Barge, “an ornate replica of the graceful craft that transported the royalty of Egypt on the Nile River in the time of Julius Caesar.”13 The barge, located in the basement of the resort, sits in a tiny artificial lagoon and provides the dance floor of the bar. It is reached from the surrounding tables and chairs on “dry land” by a small gangplank. The barge little resembles the “gilded vessel with purple sails” described by Plutarch and Shakespeare, for the only thing gilded here is Cleopatra herself. She provides the prow of the boat, a bare-breasted woman in something like a hula girl’s skirt, adorned with jewellery that makes a vague reference to the neck collars and armbands of ancient Egypt, all topped incongruously with what appears to be a lotus blossom. The tourist

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Fig. 2.1  Cleopatra’s Barge, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas

industry includes Cleopatra’s breasts among the “10 things you can rub for good luck in Las Vegas.”14 A survey of posts on Yelp and TripAdvisor indicates that Cleopatra’s breasts endure almost constant rubbing by men, so that the gilding on her breasts has worn off (Fig. 2.1). The barge replicates no historical place or time. Rather, it cathects the images of power and voluptuous excess purveyed in films like Spartacus (1960) and Cleopatra (1963) during a period in which Roman-themed films constituted their own genre. More recent television series, such as I, Claudius (1976) and Rome (2005) reinforced this image of ancient Rome as a site of ruthless power, lascivious sex, and unfettered gluttony. Caesars Palace is not Caesar’s Palace, because its developer Jay Sarno did not want to imply that there was only one Caesar at this palace; rather, every tourist was to be made to feel like a powerful Caesar.15

12  M. C. RAWLINSON

All Las Vegas resorts offer buffets that are displays of excess, but Caesars Palace celebrates that excess with the Bacchanal Buffet. Many Las Vegas signatures have been “luxe-ified” in recent years, including the classic buffet—at least at Caesars Palace. After a $17 million renovation in 2012, the iconic hotel’s buffet was reborn and changed the landscape all over town. The glamorous and gluttonous buffet encouraged grand, Roman-style feasting, yet set in a chic interior by powerhouse designers Super Potato.16

Caesars Palace pioneered the strategy of creating an aura of power supplemented by lascivious sexuality and an excess of food and drink as the optimal environment to stimulate gambling or risk-taking. The resort also markets a “Roman Wedding”: The authentic experience and ambiance of a true Roman wedding can be yours at Romano. Roman down to the smallest detail, the unique setting of Romano will transport your guests to the eternal city.17

Caesars Palace effectively effaces the distance and difference between the Nevadan desert and the Eternal City. Without leaving Las Vegas, your guests will be transported to Rome. Rome has been displaced twice: first, by the images from popular culture in which the resort trades, and then, by the resort itself, which collapses the distance of the foreign place and appropriates it to the resort culture of fantasy, excess, and risk.18 Across the street from Caesars Palace and not far from Paris, the Venetian Las Vegas staked its reputation on authenticity, marketing itself as if it were Venice. On the resort’s website the header “Renaissance Venice in Las Vegas” is followed by a brief history of the founding of the city of Venice, La Serenissima—not of the Venetian resort. The resort promises repeatedly that its guests will be visiting Venice: Just taking a stroll through the Italian-inspired archways and stonework transports you right into the heart of Venice, Italy. The Renaissance yielded incredible frescos, sculptures, and architecture that tell the remarkable history of the Venetian artisans and their creations that are sights to behold.19

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The resort markets itself by erasing the difference between the fake and the real, sliding directly from a sentence referring to the resort to a description of the city of Venice. Repeatedly the resort positions its replicas of the Campanile, the Bridge of Sighs, or St. Mark’s Square as if they were the originals in Venice—as if in seeing them the tourist is in Venice seeing “the real thing.” In the resort “these historic sites are on display.” The resort emphasizes that its frescoes and other “works of art” were created by “famous Italian artists,” while it continually elides the difference between the resort and the city of Venice. Perhaps the most iconic of all the landmarks of The Venetian Las Vegas, the Campanile Tower has a long and glorious history. One of the most famous events to take place in the Tower was Galileo demonstrating his new invention, a telescope, to the Doge of Venice.

Here the elision occurs in a single sentence, and the appropriation is reinforced by a second sentence that relocates an actual historical event in the “iconic landmark” of the Venetian Resort. While the Campanile in Venice does, indeed, have a long and glorious history, the Venetian Las Vegas does not, nor was it the site of Galileo’s demonstration of the telescope. The resort aggressively erases the difference between the real and the fake to convince the tourist of the validity of his experience and to engage him in a culture of “extravagance.” The resort explicitly urges the tourist to treat the Campanile, the gondola, and other faux features as photo ops or occasions for Instagram posts, so that he can validate the authenticity of his experience and package it as social capital for circulation upon return to his point of origin. The validity of the resort experience renders the real city of Venice superfluous. The resort transforms the historic structures and great works of art of La Serenissima into marketing opportunities: the Campanile is wrapped in a huge promotional banner for global entertainment such as Phantom of the Opera, while the architectural features of the Doge’s Palace are interrupted by large banners proclaiming “Grand Canal Shoppes [sic],” “Exciting Gaming,” and “Luxury Hotel Suites.” In marketing itself, the resort continually appropriates the history and cultural patrimony of Venice to establish its atmosphere of “extravagance,” collapsing the distances of time and space and flattening Venice into the immediacy of the homogenous resort space.

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Though Venice does not offer the wealth of disposable icons to be found in Paris, it finds a ready symbol in the gondola, and the Venetian capitalizes on the gondola as the centrepiece of the resort experience. The resort offers both indoor and outdoor rides in an “authentic Venetian gondola,” deemed “the most romantic thing to do in Las Vegas” by USA Today. The twelve-minute indoor ride circles Saint Mark’s Square, which has been rendered as a shopping mall, so that the experience is one of being conveyed on a short boat tour of the usual collection of high-end global luxury brands. As it takes place in an entirely artificial space, under the arc of an artificial, cloud-flecked blue sky, the indoor ride has nothing in common with an actual gondola ride in Venice. The flattened perspectives and entirely uniform light lack any of the perspectival play of water and light that is the essence of the aqueous city. No waves lap and rock the gondola. No scent of the sea confirms the maritime identity of Venice; rather, the familiar scents of the perfume and global food sold nearby reinforce the mall experience. The somewhat shorter outdoor ride circles a small lagoon near the Strip, the main thoroughfare of touristic Las Vegas. Though this ride at least offers light and air, it also integrates the sound of automobile traffic into the experience, thus directly contradicting the essentially aqueous identity of Venice.20 At the end of the ride, the tourist can buy a picture of himself to put into circulation on social media as social capital, validating his visit to Venice. The resort, following a Disney strategy, captures the far horizon of the tourist’s experience, so that nothing intrudes to disrupt the themed space and its carefully staged marketing opportunities. The tourist industry aims not “to release tourists into the lifespace of their destination— the ‘real world,’ available everywhere, always open, and free of charge,” but to appropriate the real and to represent it within the precincts of a manufactured fantasy that commercializes experience and makes it profitable for the resort.21 Ironically, Venice, Italy itself is unable to profit so directly from its beauty and fame. Indeed, the hordes of tourist that visit year round, often arriving for day trips on mammoth cruise ships, threaten to destroy the very beauty that made Venice famous and a tourist destination in the first place.22 The porous boundaries and non-homogenous, striated space of the real Venice make it difficult to commodify every experience, however assiduously industrial tourism tries to “package” the city so that it only confirms and conforms to what the tourist already knows.23 These tours, like the resort experiences, include photo opportunities in the

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familiar postcard views to validate the tourist’s experience and to provide cultural capital upon his return to his point of origin. The experience of the foreign proves less important than circulating images of the place as an acquired property for the tourist’s agenda and social media presence. The distinctive spatiality and temporality of Venice, however, unfolds in multiple and evolving perspectives that exceed the commodified views. However prepackaged the tour, Venice regularly transgresses its boundaries, so that tourists can be surprised and caused to wonder. Perhaps Venice deploys a power of disruption, a capacity to displace habit and expectation, and a possibility of novelty. Perhaps a traveller in Venice might take home not the expected, but something altogether different. Perhaps in learning about Venice, she might learn something about herself.

Proust’s Venice: On the Difference Between Touration and Travel The resort attempts to collapse distances so as to make the foreign familiar and to package culture to maximize profit. It promotes an experience best described as touration, the creation of a standardized experience that can be marketed anywhere. As Dean MacCannell remarks in his classic work The Tourist, Every ‘destination’ is increasingly commodified, packaged and marketed. It is possible to make travel and hotel arrangements for any destination from any place on earth. There is equally a drive to try to break the connection between sightseeing and the specificity of place, to contain sightseeing as a generic entertainment and manufactured fantasy that can be delivered to any place.24

Eliding the difference between the fake and the real, creating a seamless, smooth, thoroughly monetized experience, reassuring the tourist of the validity of his experience through photo ops and souvenirs, industrialized tourism, like the Vegas resorts, insulates the tourist from the specificity of place and the learning, surprise, and wonder that it might evoke. It mediates between the tourist and the “lifespace,” focusing on a capitalized experience and profitable consumption.25 The aim of touration is not so much the novel experience of cultural difference as it is the confirmation of expectation and the acquisition of cultural capital: what the tourist takes away are the photos and souvenirs that corroborate what the resort or packaged tour promised.

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Describing an altogether different form of tourism, Proust insists that the purpose of travel is not to bring places closer together, but to drive them farther apart. Travel offers the possibility of disrupting habit and routine in such a way as to open opportunities for both knowledge and joy. In his account of Venice in À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s narrator identifies three distinctive features of La Serenissima. First, Venice itself is a work of art. There “it is works of art, things of priceless beauty, that are entrusted with the task of giving us our impressions of everyday life.”26 For this reason, the most ordinary activities and errands have a triple significance: “the simplest social coming and going assumed at the same time the form and the charm of a visit to a museum and a trip on the sea.”27 The city uniquely couples a maritime identity with aesthetic glory. Second, Venice offers an unparalleled play of light, water, and perspective that has made the city not only a work of art in itself, but also a consistent subject for Anglo-European painting.28 Because the Grand Canal turns back on itself and the canali and small rii form a maze, a gondola ride through the city reveals constantly shifting perspectives and a depth of layers in which nautical and terrestrial elements constantly seem to exchange places. Elstir, the painter who plays a key role in the narrator’s aesthetic education, compares his own fascination with regattas to paintings by Veronese or Carpaccio of the festivities of Venice: … because of the nature of the city in which they painted, those festivities were to a great extent aquatic … The ships were massive, built like pieces of architecture, and seemed almost amphibious, like lesser Venices set in the heart of the greater …You couldn’t tell where the land finished and the water began, what was still the palace or already the ship, the caravel, the galley, the Bucentaur.29

For Elstir, as for his primary prototype, the painter J. M. W. Turner, Venice provides an education in the play of light and water, as well as in the depths and illusions created by the intercalation of terrestrial and marine elements—effects that are not unique to Venice but are maximized there due to its aquatic setting. A harbour at the border of land and sea will exhibit these effects, as in Turner’s paintings of the harbours of Dieppe or Cologne, but Venice arises in the middle of a lagoon and continually confounds expectations based on the dichotomies of

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land and sea. Its aqueous atmosphere confuses the distinctions between stone, air or light, and water.30 Just as the phenomenological philosopher must suspend the habits of everydayness, working through the utilities of reason and the prejudices of fixed beliefs to see the forms of experience undergirding convention, so too in the realm of sensation Elstir’s canvases achieve “a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented.”31 The intercalation of stone, light, and water that comprises the distinctive identity of Venice disrupts quotidian perception and puts the traveller in touch with an originary dimension of sensation, where nothing is seen on its own but only in its relation to its other. The traveller is forced to think, to sort out the complex of differences and identities in which anything and everything appears. The narrator, visiting Elstir’s studio, notes the recurrence in Elstir’s work of a “metaphor” of land and sea that “suppressed all demarcation between them.”32 For Proust this metaphor stimulates thought and imagination, as the viewer sorts out perspectives, depths, and reflections. And, it constitutes the “powerful unity” of Elstir’s work, his individuating style. Venice provokes thought, imagination, and creativity. Its meandering waterways stimulate curiosity and confound expectations. Calvino extols Venice’s “favorable mental climate” and the way its “special geometry sparks imagination to travel unaccustomed paths.”33 In Venice the narrator of the Recherche continually finds himself somewhere other than where he expected to be, confronted by some unanticipated wonder of light, water, air, and stone. Venice proves elemental, a metamorphic medium of existence that interrupts quotidian interests and habits. The third unique feature of Venice concerns its unusual temporality. While Venice may appear to exist in the present, in fact, it embodies vast temporal depths, intrusions, and fractures. Proust reflects on the columns of San Marco and San Teodoro, brought to Venice from the city of Tyre in 1099 at the command of the Doge and some years later, after the engineering issues were addressed, situated at the edge of the Piazzetta San Marco, against a view across the water of the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, the Giudecca, and the Chiesa di San Giorgio Maggiore.34 While the columns may seem to the tourist to be with him in his contemporary moment, the traveller, prepared by image and history, experiences them as an irruption into the present of temporal depth and a displaced world.35

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The built environment of La Serenissima invokes not only the long history of Venice itself, but also the histories and cultures of the lands and peoples enveloped by the maritime Republic’s trade and conquest. The columns—which form the city’s gate of entry for the arriving ­traveller—and the city itself embody the military and mercantile power of the maritime Republic, as well as its commitment to aesthetic excellence as a means of projecting that power. Like the whole of the city’s built environment, the columns exhibit the distinctly Venetian style of bricolage: the creation of beautiful signs of power by reassembling the Republic’s plunder on its own terms. The column of San Teodoro combines a Greek head with a Roman torso and a crocodile of disputed— but definitely later—origin, all atop a column from Syria, or perhaps Persia, or even China.36 Every beauty of the Republic reflects the city’s distinctly nautical power, as well as its geographical and cultural reach. Unlike pastiche, Venetian bricolage does not involve the imitation of earlier styles or forms; rather, in bricolage the Venetians created anew with the materials at hand. The city comprises, like Proust’s Recherche, a “whole of just these parts,” singular in its identity and consistent in its style, yet produced thorough the absorption of contingently acquired elements. Extoling the “force with which Venice acts on the imagination,” Calvino remarks that Venice’s “pluridimensional human environment” constitutes a bulwark against effacement and sameness: “the extraordinary effect of Venice is truly diversification in the extreme, non-uniformity in a homogeneous experience.”37 The rest of the world—for the Venetians saw no reason to limit their reach—served as a great storehouse of material elements from which the city would be constructed, at once European and oriental, of stone but aqueous and ever ready to set sail. Thus, it is perhaps not accidental that Venice’s most famous son should have been one of history’s greatest travellers.

Interrogating the Real: Marco Polo In Radical Alterity Jean Baudrillard writes: In the end, the only voyage is the one made in relation to the Other, be it an individual or a culture.38

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Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities explores, on the one hand, the possibility of the survival of a diversity of places and cultures against the homogenizing tide of global capital, and, on the other hand, the impossibility of self-knowledge except in relation to the alien or foreign. The text is constructed as a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Marco Polo has travelled the vast expanses of the Khan’s empire in order to return with a report that would give the Khan definitive knowledge of his diverse domains, each defined by a different logic, order, and atmosphere. Set within the architecture of their dialogue, a series of Baudelairian prose poems recounts the elemental differences of successive cities. Esmeralda, like Venice, is a “city of water,” where the shortest distance between two points “is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional routes [which] increase further for those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry land.”39 Esmeralda’s diversity spares its inhabitants from boredom: “The most fixed and calm lives in Esmeralda are spent without any repetition.” Eutropia is a “city of multiple cities.” When its inhabitants “feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relative, his house and his life …,” the inhabitants decamp and move to the next city “waiting for them, empty and good as new.”40 Clarice, not unlike Venice, has been constructed and reconstructed, so that “shards of the original splendor” are preserved “under glass bells” or “locked in display cases”—not because they are useful, but “because people wanted to reconstruct through them a city of which no one knew anything now.”41 Each city embodies an irreducibly specific atmosphere, so that the differences among them are elemental, rather than of degree. Yet, the dialogue between Polo and Kublai Khan calls into question all of the traveller’s reports and the very possibility of knowledge or of telling the truth. Unlike the ambassadors who visit the Khan from his conquered domains and speak to him in the indecipherable tongues of their homelands, Marco Polo is himself a foreigner in all the places he visits, so that “a different communication was established between him and the emperor.”42 At first, given Marco Polo’s ignorance of the Tartar language, he communicates with the Khan only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks—ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes—which he arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the missions on which Kublai sent him, the ingenious

20  M. C. RAWLINSON foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret: one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into a net; another city by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its teeth green with mold, clenching a round white pearl.43

The performances prove inscrutable to the Khan: it was unclear if Marco Polo was relating an adventure of his own or an event from the city’s own history. Perhaps, his display was only “a charade to indicate a name.”44 Still, the Khan finds Marco Polo’s “logogriphs” to be the most effective means of evoking his empire. Even after Polo learns the Tartar language, as well as “the national idioms and tribal dialects,” so that his accounts become “the most precise and detailed that the Khan could wish,” the Khan continues to understand his reports in terms of the original “emblem” in which Marco Polo had first presented the city. Wistfully, the Khan asks Polo, if, on the day when he knows all the emblems, will he then possess his empire? “And, the Venetian answered: Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”45 Rather than possessing his empire, the Khan is possessed by it, by the impossibility of ever knowing it, except through the images and motifs of the traveller. While the other ambassadors relate to the Khan facts that might happen anywhere—famines, conspiracies, the discovery of a new turquoise mine—only the Venetian conveys the distinctive atmosphere and order that distinguish one place from another. “The description of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.”46 Indeed, when Marco Polo learns the Khan’s language and begins to make more conventional reports of monuments, flora and fauna, customs, and so on, “communication between them was less happy than in the past.”47 Eventually, Marco Polo returns to the language of “logogriphs” and “emblems” to supplement the inadequacy of the lists provided by words. The Khan imagines that his empire is like a game of chess and that he might conquer its unruly diversity through mastering the “rules of the game.” “… the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.”48 Yet, the diversity of cities cannot be reduced to an algorithm that would allow the Khan to possess them in advance, to know them without traversing the specificity of their atmospheres, smells, light, sounds, and routines. The “invisible order that sustains cities,” the “rules

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that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the season, and then how they sadden and fall into ruin” do not prescribe or transcend their irreducible and incalculable variety, which cannot be anticipated as physical events are anticipated by a law of physics. The knowledge and joy of the traveller cannot be articulated in lists of monuments or customs, for they are inextricably bound up with distance and memory. Travelling to distant and exotic cities, the traveller rediscovers his own home. … the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.49

Only by leaving Venice and seeing it at a distance, from the foreignness of these other places, does Marco Polo come to know the place from which he set sail. Yet, this knowledge is not merely of a passed present, but of a past “that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey.”50 The traveller discovers in each new place other futures that might have been for him, as well as the past that he has left behind, a past that is not fixed but reconstellated from each new perspective. “Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unexpected places.”51 “Elsewhere” the traveller discovers both the past that is no longer his or a past that is reconfigured anew and the futures that were never “achieved.” “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”52 Knowledge consists not so much in the acquisition of information as in the loss of what the traveller thought she knew; but, the experience is not merely nugatory, for the past is not merely lost but reconfigured, just as the future is not merely effaced but reoriented. Late in their conversation, Kublai Khan remarks that there is one city of which Marco Polo has never spoken: Venice. Polo proves decidedly reluctant to do so: “Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”53 Like Proust, Calvino fears the sacrifice of memory and the sensuous impression to the conventional language of habit, interest, and communication. Words come to substitute for experience, as the

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Instagram postings and photo ops substitute for any real engagement with a foreign place. The programme and plan of the tourist forestall the chance encounter that both Proust and Calvino value as a source of truth. Only the unexpected can dislodge the conventional algorithm that would allow everything to be anticipated as a mere instance of a general form. Even the preparations of the traveller—the biographies and histories she has read, the images she has studied, her dreams and imagination—serve only as conditions to be exceeded by the sensuous specificity of place. Yet, Marco Polo has spoken only of Venice. “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice … To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice.”54 Every traveller starts somewhere, and the truth of the voyage lies in the distance she has travelled and the perspectives unfolded along the way. Most commentators on Invisible Cities identify Venice with the aqueous city of Esmeralda, but it is the city of Irene that embodies Polo’s relation to his port of departure. “Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach it, it changes.”55 Much to the Khan’s consternation, Polo does not speak of Irene as it appears “from within,” but only as it is revealed through the motions of the traveller’s changing perspectives in time and space. Irene constantly alters, just as the past and future are reconstellated through the traveller’s shifting perspectives. Polo muses that while every city “deserves a name: perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names, perhaps I have only spoken of Irene.”56 Wherever he travels, Polo takes with him the horizon of Venice, against which everything else appears.57 Towards the end of Invisible Cities, a series of sinister cities appears in which the distances and differences that support identity and knowledge have been effaced. If on arriving in Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses.58

Polo, like a contemporary traveller, finds the same signs, the same goods on display, the same hotel that might be anywhere. Under global capital, the differences and diversity that made shifting perspectives possible, that gave rise to unexpected, unanticipated knowledge and joy, have been effaced.59 Striking an apocalyptic tone, Calvino wonders if it is no longer possible to experience the foreign, because the foreign no longer exists.

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“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”60

The city of Cecilia was once surrounded by verdant grazing lands, each with its own distinct character: the Meadow between the Cliffs, the Green Slope, the Shadowed Grass. Marco Polo, who had visited Cecilia many years earlier, finds himself one day lost “among rows of identical houses.”61 When he asks a passerby where he might be, he recognizes the goatherd he had met on his earlier visit, who tells him he is again in Cecilia. In disbelief, Marco Polo protests that he must be somewhere altogether different, “far far away from Cecilia.” The goatherd replies, “The places have mingled … Cecilia is everywhere.” Urban and suburban sprawl, facilitated by the automobile, have devoured the countryside and produced one vast continuous, homogeneous space. “Here, once upon a time,” the goatherd remarks sadly, “there must have been the Meadow of the Low Sage. My goats recognize the grass on the traffic island.”62 The proliferation of the automobile and the spread of global goods and brands effaces the specificity of place and the differences and distances that support ­identity, knowledge, and joy.63 With heartbreaking inaccuracy, Calvino predicts the demise of the automobile—not an irrational proposition given its unsustainable impact on the environment—and the proliferation of cities like Venice that are not predicated on it. “I believe in the future of the aquatic city, in a world populated by countless Venices.”64 Like a variety of contemporary urbanists including Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, Kevin Lynch, and Françoise Choay, Venice was for Calvino the ideal city: The layout of this Italian city was prized due to its principal icastic traffic way (the Canal Grande), its divisions into sestrieri, sections that reproduce the city in miniature and offer the maximum potential for human encounters and interactions, and the fact that everything is within walking distance of its center. Whereas ‘golden Venice’ was, at the close of the Middle Ages, the city that towered above all others in Europe due to its handsomeness and wealth … modern urbanism’s biggest mistake was its failure to imitate Venice’s layout, which had universal applications … Most significantly, Venice’s layout was not a static design frozen in time and absolute, but rather, open to change and unified in spite of its complex ordering.65

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Of course, Calvino was wrong. The world is not “full of Venices” exploiting novel forms of transport supporting intense human interaction. In spite of his meditations on cities like Los Angeles, “without beginning or end,” he did not foresee the explosion of cities like Beijing, Bangkok, or Rio de Janeiro, choked by traffic and smog, where the inhabitants, instead of living together in joy, spend much of their time in transit from one commercialized transaction to another. The Khan fears that the future tends inexorably toward the “infernal city”: Yahooland, a city of coarse and filthy people,66 or Enoch,67 established by the murderous brother, or Butua, plundered and raped for gold by colonialists, or Babylon, city of the mother of harlots and the abominations of the earth.68 If Venice, city of the imagination, knowledge, difference, and joy, has been replaced by the toxic fumes of the automobile and the generic experiences of global capital, has the real already elapsed and any possibility of discovery been extinguished?

The Return of the Real In Invisible Cities Italo Calvino writes: The inferno of the living is not something that will be: if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.69

No one has gone further in questioning the status of the real than Jean Baudrillard. Across multiple texts, from his early works on simulation to his last works on the agony of power, Baudrillard announces the death of the real. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.70

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The real has been superseded, Baudrillard argues, by “screens” and “circuits of communication.”71 Screens are “superficial” and incapable of conveying the specificity of a “particular time and place.” Baudrillard links the “totalization” of capital with a “totalization” of history; this double gesture has eliminated the very undecidability and irreducible singularity of life that made the rhetoric and material strategies of freedom, representation, and liberation possible. Whereas domination gave rise to history as the story of the slave reclaiming his freedom, Baudrillard diagnoses a new form of power exerted upon the past, present, and future: hegemony exercises an internal “deterrence” that discredits in advance any historical reference and transforms reality into “parody, mockery, or masquerade.”72 Reality is swamped by infinite flows of information and media to the point that it becomes merely virtual. At the same time, forms of representation cease to function: they are swamped by “various forms of manipulation and parallel networks,” as well as vast sums of money and the intimate complicities of corporate wealth and traditional democratic institutions.73 The homogenous tide of global capital sweeps aside differences of value and identity and overwhelms information and representation, erasing the difference between true and false, at the same time that it produces dams of privilege and concentrates wealth. This “catastrophe” involves not only political representation, but also the very ability of an individual human to achieve some interiority or self-representation. “After the sacrifice of value, after the sacrifice of representation, after the sacrifice of reality, the West is now characterized by the deliberate sacrifice of everything through which a human being keeps some value in his or her own eyes.”74 Not only are all values subject to the same parodic and mimetic forces, but also the drama of desire and fulfilment in which the Western self is born has collapsed into the instantaneous. Communication, information, and commerce all occur at top speed, optimally with no delay at all. Culture can be instantly downloaded. Experiences are immediately reified and distributed on digital media. Digital speed effaces the gap between desire and fulfilment, the very space of identity, agency, and narrative. This liquidation of reality and identity facilitates and maintains a moral callus sufficient to protect privilege against the spectacle of the others’ suffering. Whole populations are disposed of without outrage, as the collateral damage of the war industry, or as the capitalized bodies of sex trafficking, or as the invisible, delegitimized, and abused bodies

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of farm workers, or as the shrink-wrapped and sanitized meat that leaves no trace of the other animals who are victims of industrialized meat production. Under the liquidation of value, nothing commands respect or resists commercialization and deregulation. Nothing looks back. Baudrillard links this crisis of value, representation, identity, and reality to “the West’s” dominance of “the Other” through the imposition of supposedly universal values that are, in fact, specifically its own: “In the name of universals, the West imposes its political and economic models on the entire world along with its principle of technical rationality.”75 Western universalism exports its politics and economics under a cancerous illusion of “unlimited growth and prosperity” that masks the real austerity of life under global capital. This new colonialism of the virtual thrives under globalization, subjecting whole populations without the military investments and state bureaucracy formerly required. At the same time, this universalism envelops the Other and others in the myth of “whiteness.”76 The undifferentiated, totalized universal of Man imposes whiteness as the zero degree of experience. Every other figure becomes a special case, an exception, a variation, or a degradation. Whiteness, without colour or distinction, nonetheless absorbs all difference without differentiation. All difference can be assimilated without loss in the narrative of the One, Man, the white man, the white AngloEuropean man of property—the hegemonic generic form. The “white terror” of hegemony under global capital installs as universal what was originally a “cultural singularity” of the Western narrative of mastery and slavery: discrimination.77 “The Universal is not for everyone. Only discrimination is universal.”78 The fiction of the generic subject Man—the fiction of an indifferent universal applied everywhere— authorizes and installs systems of discrimination and criteria of qualification. It produces not only the exclusionary spaces of refugee camps and immigration detention facilities, but also the heterogeneous spaces of the Persian Gulf’s luxury condominiums or Western “gentrification,” in which “the deepest misery and enclaves of luxury coexist in the same geographic space.” At the same time, this fiction continues to sustain the hierarchies of gender and race established under sovereignty.79 Under biopower or hegemony, desire, imagination, the individual, reality, history, and rational value—as well as the universal itself—have passed into “obsolescence.” The horizon of our era, Baudrillard insists, is the

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“obsolescence of humanity and its values.”80 The myth of the state of nature and the identification of right with property and security have reduced life to a commodity and collapsed the distances and differences by which the specificity of place and identity are sustained. Against this dark closure of history, Baudrillard speculates a very limited future. In the age of the screen, the articulation of a particular time and place is impossible. The screen “makes everything circulate in one space, without depth, where all the objects must be able to follow one after the other without slowing down or stopping the circuit.”81 Whereas works of art once had the power to “interrupt something, to arrest the gaze, to arrest contemplation,” in the age of the screen and instantaneous communication a work of art “no longer has any privilege as a singular object breaking through this type of circuit, of interrupting the circuit.”82 One has only five minutes to regard the Mona Lisa; then, “you have to move on.” The mass consumption of art, its commercialization, and marketability, produces its banalization, Baudrillard insists, and divests it of its power to evoke wonder and joy. Perhaps, however, Baudrillard underestimates both the force of art and the impingement of the real. In his diagnosis of the banalization of life and the evacuation of the imagination, Baudrillard clarifies that … when we say that reality has disappeared, the point is not that it has disappeared physically, but that it has disappeared metaphysically. Reality continues to exist; it is its principle that is dead.83

Yet, the reality principle includes not only the deferrals and delays that are essential to identity, to the formation of the ego according to Freud, which might be short circuited in the era of instantaneous communication and gratification, but also “motor action,” that is, the body as a force among other material forces.84 In proclaiming the death of reality, Baudrillard ignores both the agency of the body and the efficacy of sensuous experience in disrupting the ubiquity of the screen and the “technical saturation of life.”85 “The ego,” as Freud argues, “is first and foremost a bodily ego,” an effect of the body surface as it interacts with material reality, as it negotiates the difference between inside and outside, fantasy or dream and the real impingement of the sensuous.86 The body

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invokes its own truth. The runner may exaggerate and pretend, even to herself, that she is running forty miles a week rather than the twenty she actually covers, but when the race comes the body will impose its truth. As the site of a history of affects, the body can disrupt the quotidian routines of convention, as it does when it is suddenly overwhelmed by the return of grief or trauma. Of the involuntary memories that appear in Proust’s Recherche, the most important is not that of the famous madeleine, nor the succession of memories that appears late in the text to provide the key to the creation of the work of art, but the memory of his deceased grandmother, which comes to the narrator entirely unbidden on his second visit to Balbec, as he bends over to tie his shoes just as she had done for him on their original visit together.87 This kinesthetic memory floods him with the greatest sorrow and the greatest joy. Prior to this point, the narrator has been capable only of conventionalized signs of grief, the stock motifs of mourning that might be articulated by anyone for anyone—“I am so sorry for your loss”; “Thank you for your condolences.” In this involuntary body memory, however, the narrator experiences again his grandmother “at the depth at which she was lodged within him.” There arises within him the self that he was in her presence. The body memory provokes the most profound sadness, because he experiences her absolute absence in the difference between his memory of her and her actual presence. At the same time, the body memory evokes the most profound joy, because he has “found her again.” His voluntary memories of her—of what she said, of what she did, and so on—do not have the power to convey the immediacy of her atmosphere or the self that existed in relation to her. Just as Marco Polo’s lists of monuments or events fail to convey the reality of a city, while his performative emblems make it possible for the Khan to “wander through them” by conveying each city’s defining element, so too voluntary memory yields only flat convention, while involuntary memory, which is always produced by the contingency of a sensuous encounter, opens up temporal depths and facilitates the return of the past “as it was never given before.”88 The body proves more illuminating than voluntary thought. In its susceptibility to the contingencies of sensation, the body offers the possibility of disrupting convention and the interests and utilities of the voluntary intellect.

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It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture [the past]: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile [because the voluntary intellect recalls only the ‘lists’ of the scene of the past, not its atmosphere or element]. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of [voluntary] intellect, in some material object (in the sensation that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling.89

The body’s susceptibility to the disruptive surprises of the sensuous answers to what Baudrillard names our “most fervent hope”: … that rational sequences of events will unravel every now and again and be replaced, if only for a short time, by an unprecedented sequence of a different order, an extraordinary, apparently predestined build-up of events, in which things which have until then been artificially kept apart will suddenly appear not to occur randomly, but to be converging, spontaneously and with equal intensity, by the very fact of their being interconnected. Our world would not be bearable without this innate power of détournement, this ‘strange attraction,’ this radicality originating elsewhere—originating in the object (for radicality comes now not from the subject, but from the object).90

Through the unexpected assault of the sensuous, we can be turned away from the homogeneous, flat space of global capital, instantaneous communication, and conventionalized experience, and turned toward the affective history that lies within each of us. In proclaiming the death of the real, Baudrillard appears to make the same mistake that the narrator of the Recherche made in his first visit to Balbec Cathedral. Proust’s narrator could not understand how the cathedral, the object of a long history of study and imagination, could exist contemporaneously with the point of his walking stick. Only later, in contemplating the columns of San Teodoro and San Marco in the Piazzetta San Marco, does the narrator come to understand the way material objects embody not only their own histories, but also the temporal depths that they have inscribed within us. A time has now come when, remembering the baptistery of St. Mark’s— contemplating the waters of the Jordan in which St. John immerses Christ, while the gondola awaited us at the landing-stage of the Piazzetta—it is no longer a matter of indifference to me that, beside me in that cool

30  M. C. RAWLINSON penumbra, there should have been a woman draped in her mourning with the respectful and enthusiastic fervor of the old woman in Carpaccio’s St. Ursula in the Accademia, and that that woman, with her red cheeks and sad eyes and in her black veils, whom nothing can ever remove from that softly lit sanctuary of St. Mark’s where I am always sure to find her because she has her place reserved there as immutably as a mosaic, should be my mother.91

As his grandmother is inextricably woven into his experience of Balbec, the narrator’s mother cannot be separated from his experience of Venice. Her loving presence and the self he can be only in relation to her forever infuse his memory of the paintings and stones of Venice. Venice cannot be captured in a list of monuments or historical events but only in the temporal depth at which it is lodged within him, forever embellished by their shared imagination, the books, and images that have prepared them for their visit, and by their mutual experience, which is no longer one of disappointment, as in the first visit to Balbec, but of excess and wonder. A certain Moorish arch will always be particularly precious to the narrator because it framed his view of his mother as she studied her Ruskin in preparation for their visit to the baptistery.92 Calvino, consciously or unconsciously, echoes Proust’s analysis of the temporal depth of the present: If, of two arcades, one continues to seem more joyous, it is because thirty years ago a girl went by there, with broad, embroidered sleeves, or else it is only because that arcade catches the light at a certain hour like that other arcade, you cannot recall where.93

Instead of the selfies and Instagram posts that confirm for the tourist that he has seen what the tour prescribed, the traveller acquires memories of place that speak of a foreign clime and hour and of a self that exists not in the flatness of an instantaneous present, nor in the immediacy of the virtual, nor in the global circuits of communication without delay, but in the motion that traverses temporal depths. Focused on the perception of objects and the conventional utilities associated with them, we nevertheless remain susceptible to the intrusions of the sensuous quality and the memories and images that return with them.

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Baudrillard can only declare the death of reality and the banalization of art by disregarding and discounting the sensuous and its efficacy of dislodging quotidian perception. In the flat world of screens and the infinite flux of the instantaneous, sensuous experience, as well as the cities and works of art disclosed in it, provides a point of resistance, because “an hour is not merely an hour but a vase full of sights and sounds and the memories [and images] that envelop us with them.”94 Sensation yields not a flat present, but temporal depth and a history of imagination. Sensuous impressions are no more reducible to an algorithm or generic law than are cities: I noticed cursorily that the differences which exist between every one of our real impressions—differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much resemblance to the reality—derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at any one epoch of our life was surrounded by, and coloured by the reflection of, things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of them for its own rational purposes, things however, in the midst of which—here the pink reflection of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; there the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs—the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand sealed vessels, each one of them filled with things of a colour, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different from one another, vessels moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.95

Works of art may, no doubt, be commercialized, commodified, and subjected to banalization, but this occurs only for a voluntary intelligence that mistakes the opportunity provided by cities or art as one of understanding, rather than transformation. Approached at the level of the sensuous, apart from the tourist’s lists of what is supposed to be observed and catalogued as social capital, cities and works of art resist the homogenizing effects of globalization and its circuits of communication to insist

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on the irreducibility of worlds. They provide just that “spontaneous convergence” of what has been “artificially kept apart” for which Baudrillard longs, at the same time that they intensify and sustain the distinctness of different identities. And I observed that for the work of art which I now, though I had not yet reached a conscious resolution, felt myself ready to undertake, the distinctness of different events would entail very considerable difficulties. For I should have to execute the successive parts of my work in a succession of different materials; what would be suitable for mornings by the sea or afternoons in Venice would be quite wrong if I wanted to depict those evenings at Rivebelle when, in the dining room that opened on to the garden, the heat began to resolve into fragments and sink back into the ground, while a sunset glimmer still illuminated the roses on the walls of the restaurant and the last water-colours of the day were still visible in the sky—this would be a new and distinct material, of a transparency and a sonority that were special, compact, cold after warmth, rose-pink.96

The tourist seeks only what he already knows and always finds the same thing. He finds comfort in the same hotel, the same global food and global brands, the same commodified experiences of culture. One “heritage village,” theme park, or resort is very much like the other. In the city of Phyllis, “millions of eyes look up at windows, bridges, capers, and they might be scanning a blank page,” for in every city they see the same thing.97 The tourist seeks not disruption and difference, but confirmation and capital for the flux of social media. The traveller, on the other hand, reflects the etymology of the verb: she is ready for labour, strife, even torment, as an opening to the wonder and joy of the foreign and of the self that has, through convention and commodification, become alien to her. “Many are the cities like Phyllis, which elude the gaze of all, except the man who catches them by surprise.”98 The traveller can “catch a place by surprise” and actually see its distinguishing difference only because she does not follow the prescribed tour, because she is herself ever ready to be surprised, because she finds the place, not in a list of monuments or events, but in its smells and sounds, in details like an “embroidered sleeve” or a “ray of light.” An attunement to the sensuous, an unknowing, an openness to the unexpected offer the traveller a salvation from the death of reality and the effacement of difference under global capital.99

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Travel or the Ethics of Tourism: Bali and Bhutan In the temple we ask for a blessing and at a hotel we ask for money. —Budi, Balinese guide Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities: As for the character of Andria’s inhabitants, two virtues are worth mentioning: self-confidence and prudence. Convinced that every innovation in the city influences the sky’s patterns, before taking any decision they calculate the risks and advantages for themselves and for the city and for all worlds.100

Bali might seem to embody the central contradiction of cultural t­ourism: the culture that draws tourists—which tourism would be used to sustain—is itself corrupted and irretrievably altered by being marketed as a touristic product. Indeed, the very idea of the transformation of an indigenous culture into a “touristic culture” was developed by Michel Picard specifically in relation to Bali.101 In his landmark study, Picard analyzes how a living culture becomes a marketable object for its own people, offered to the foreign tourist for a price. The Balinese, however, had already objectified their culture. Bali’s theatre depends on the role of the panasar, who offers jocular and biting critiques of the antique characters of the Hindu legends, relating them to contemporary events. Picard himself notes that the panasar provides the Balinese with a constantly renewed commentary on their society, “endowing it with that specific reflexive character which observers find so intriguing.”102 Moreover, the rituals, dances, songs, and shadow plays of the Balinese were already objects of observation long before the advent of tourists. As Artaud observes, “the Balinese have realized, with the utmost rigor, the idea of pure theatre, where everything, conception and realization alike, has value, has existence only in proportion to its degree of objectification on the stage.”103 The Balinese understand these performances to be observed by the gods and occasions for self-critique so that the issue is not the objectification of the culture, but the effect of offering the performance to the tourist’s gaze. The Balinese have succeeded in confining tourism to particular sites, while much of the island remains undisturbed. Highways were constructed to funnel tourists away from the cultural heartland, directly from Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar to the resort area

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of Kuta Beach, formerly uninhabited and developed specifically for the tourist trade. Development around the cultural centre of Ubud and the east and north coasts is strictly regulated, both in terms of the architecture of the resorts and hotels and in regard to the investments that the tourist trade must make in local cultural activities. The Balinese are almost unparalleled in the strategies they have developed for harvesting tourists to serve their cultural performances. On my first visit to Bali in 1998, I attended a rare performance of the Calon Arong in a remote village. The barong, a holy animal often compared to the lion, forms part of the patrimony of each village.104 In the Calon Arong, the barong defeats the witch Rangda, a performance that must be repeated time and again, to preserve the harmony of the village.105 The whole village attends the performance, standing to one side, while a few chairs have been put out in front for the handful of tourists in attendance, who have paid a modest fee that will be used to clothe dancers, purchase instruments, or repair and preserve the barong. The performance in the unadorned village courtyard proves completely enthralling, and at the end, I hope to talk to some of the villagers, as well as the dancers and musicians, but I find myself abruptly hurried off with a rudeness uncharacteristic of the unfailingly polite Balinese. Just as I was trundled off, I saw a light come on in the temple at the far end of the village. There was the real barong, who, because of the spiritually compromising performance before the tourists, now required propitiation. The whole village knelt, palms pressed together at the forehead, venerating the true barong.106 Artaud anticipates Baudrillard’s proclamation of the “death of reality” and the impossibility of differentiated identity in the age of screens, instantaneous communication, and the homogenizing force of global capital. To treat the “exhaustion” and “demoralization” of Anglo-European culture, Artaud prescribes “lessons in spirituality from the Balinese theatre.”107 While Western culture produces “philosophical systems” that “do not have the capacity to support life,” Bali offers a “culture-in-action.”108 Whereas Western science and philosophy “work relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known, to the quotidian and ordinary,”109 thus producing the “asphyxiating atmosphere in which we live without possible escape or remedy,”110 Balinese theatre translates ideas into a sensuous performance that continuously surprises and dislocates the viewer, despite its repetition of ancient forms. Given the role of the panasar and the intense sensuality of these forms, even the Balinese find themselves

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surprised and renewed. The performances attack the spectator, not merely with words, but in every register of meaning and across the spectrum of sensuous experience. Balinese theatre has the power, as Artaud avers, “not to define thoughts, but to cause thinking … [to] entice the mind to take profound and efficacious attitudes toward it from its own point of view,” whether of the traveller or the Balinese themselves.111 The tourist who confines himself to the resorts of Kuta Beach will find, no doubt, only the well-marketed tropical paradise offered by the tourist industry, but the traveller will find herself vulnerable to an alien spirituality that challenges and reorients her “own point of view.” Bhutan provides an even more challenging perspective on the effacement of difference and identity in the age of the screen, instantaneous communication, and the homogenizing force of global capital. The kingdom was closed to foreign travel until 1974, and currently, just over 100,000 foreign visitors are admitted annually (to be compared with Bhutan’s current population of about 650,000). The state practices a “low impact, high yield” tourism. Visitors are required to spend $200– 250 per day, depending on the season. Development is strictly regulated in accord with sustainable environmental practices. Currently, Bhutan is the only carbon-negative nation in the world, and its constitution mandates the preservation of 60% of its land area as forest. Health care and education through high school are free. Famously, the government bases its decisions and policies, not on the calculation of GNP, but on the assessment of any action on GNH: Gross National Happiness. The four pillars of this unique development strategy include good governance, sustainable development, cultural preservation, and environmental conservation. The secretary of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Commission, Karma Tshiteem, explains that the usual measures of development are inadequate because they are “biased mainly to the material.” Development should be guided by other values: “psychological well-being,” “community vitality, which is about recognizing human relationships as fundamental to meaning and happiness in life,” “culture and tradition as fundamental to identity,” and “time use—the most precious of commodities.”112 The Bhutanese practice an unparalleled scepticism regarding conventional international measures of prosperity and well-being, which typically focus only on economic indicators and statistical trends. The Bhutanese prefer strategies of evaluation that prioritize good government, sustainability, environmental protection, and cultural preservation.

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In 2008, Bhutan prepared to join the World Trade Organization. Initial assessments based largely on economic factors commanded a strong majority in the GNH Commission; however, after a thorough analysis of the impact of membership on GNH, the vote completely reversed.113 Apparently, the overriding consideration proved to be the necessity as a member state of allowing global fast food outlets into the country. Given the effects of the intrusion of global fast food chains in countries like Indonesia and Mexico—spiking rates of obesity and obesity-related diseases, the displacement of local farmers and undermining of local food economies, the disruption of indigenous forms of social life built around the infrastructure of food, and the environmental degradation associated with commodity farming—one can only marvel at the wisdom of the Bhutanese in the face of the siren song of global capitalism.114 No doubt, it is not accidental that both the Balinese and the Bhutanese, like the inhabitants of the city of Andria described by Marco Polo, view themselves as responsible not only for their own happiness and the happiness of their communities, but for the welfare of the whole world. In addition to dozens of annual festivals and ceremonies tied to the lunar cycle, the Balinese undertake the elaborate festival of Eka Dasa Rudra once every hundred years—or as urgencies require. Through living, humans put the universe out of kilter, and its balance and order must regularly be restored. The Balinese embrace this rebalancing as their distinctive responsibility, carried out through the rituals, ceremonies, and performances of the Eka Dasa Rudra. Similarly, the Bhutanese understand themselves as providing a model to counter the thoroughly monetized relationships of global capital, both relationships among humans and to other animals and to the earth. Perhaps the Balinese and the Bhutanese embody those virtues of self-confidence and prudence that made the inhabitants of the city of Andria capable of embracing their responsibility “for themselves and for the city and for all worlds.” Ethics and political philosophy typically criticize tourism as a form of exploitation: in the pursuit of pleasure and entertainment, wealthier societies inflict both cultural and environmental degradation upon more fragile, economically dependent communities. Tourism, it is argued, commodifies culture, alienating local populations from their own heritage, while overtaxing developing infrastructures and delicate ecosystems. Tourism appears to be the continuation of colonialism by other means.

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Yet, the values essential to travel—security, mobility, and leisure— are precisely those on which liberty and happiness depend. Unlike the resorts of Las Vegas, Bali and Bhutan exemplify the resistance of place to commodification and homogenization. Perhaps Venice, too, in spite of the prepackaged tours and the damaging effects of industrial tourism on the culture and the environment, still exceeds the logic of capital. Perhaps the city’s ruling powers will learn from the examples of Bali and Bhutan to subordinate the calculations of capital to its glorious aesthetic heritage and unique maritime identity, at the same time that it benefits from the traveller’s coin. And, perhaps in these places, unlike in the managed, thoroughly monetized and prepackaged environments of Las Vegas, a traveller may find herself surprised and provoked to wonder about who she is and where she has come from. And perhaps she may find joy in the unexpected excess of the place over her own ideas and knowledge. … seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.115

Notes





1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 88. 2. UN World Tourism Organization, “International Tourist Arrivals up 4% Reach a Record 1.2 Billion in 2015,” January 18, 2016, http://media. unwto.org/press-release/2016-01-18/international-tourist-arrivals4-reach-record-12-billion-2015. 3.  Phillip Connor and Jens Manuel Krogstad, “Key Facts About the World’s Refugees,” Pew Research Center: Fact Tank (Blog), October 5, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/05/key-factsabout-the-worlds-refugees/. See also, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2016,” 2016, https:// www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/2016_Global_ Report_on_Trafficking_in_Persons.pdf. 4.  UNHCR: UN Refugee Agency, “Frequently Asked Questions on Climate Change and Disaster Displacement,” November 6, 2016, http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/latest/2016/11/581f52dc4/frequently-asked-questions-climate-change-disaster-displacement.html.

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5.  International Labour Organization, “New ILO Global Estimate of Forced Labour: 20.9 Million Victims,” News, June 1, 2012, http:// www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/news/WCMS_182109/ lang--en/index.htm. 6. UN Office on Drugs and Crime, “Smuggling of Migrants: The Harsh Search for a Better Life,” Transnational Organized Crime, accessed February 13, 2018, https://www.unodc.org/toc/en/crimes/migrantsmuggling.html. 7.  Clionadh Raleigh, “The Search for Safety: The Effects of Conflict, Poverty, and Ecological Influences on Migration in the Developing World,” Global Environmental Change 21 (2011), https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.08.008. 8.  See, e.g., Sebastian Modak, “How Colombia, Once Consumed by Violence, Became Your Next Destination,” Condé Nast Traveler, November 9, 2017, https://www.cntraveler.com/story/how-colombiao n c e - c o n s u m e d - b y - v i o l e n c e - b e c a m e - y o u r- n e x t - d e s t i n a t i o n . Acknowledging its history of violence, Colombia’s Tourism Board launched a marketing campaign built around the theme that “El riesgo es que te quieras quedar.” [The risk is that you’ll want to stay.] According to the World Bank, in Lebanon “tourism, a vital source of revenue has dropped in recent years to near zero,” due to the “spillover” from the conflict in Syria. World Bank, “Lebanon Bears the Brunt of the Economic and Social Spillovers of the Syrian Conflict,” World Bank, September 24, 2013, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/ feature/2013/09/24/lebanon-bears-the-brunt-of-the-economic-andsocial-spillovers-of-the-syrian-conflict. The government of Vietnam has identified tourism as a key factor in the long-term growth and development of its economy. In 1993 the country hosted 515,000 tourists; in 2001 the number jumped to 2.3 million. Scott Laderman writes, “by the dawn of the 21st century, the one-time divided state wracked by decades of brutal warfare had emerged as one of the most booming destinations on the planet,” in “From the Vietnam War to the ‘War on Terror,’” in Tourism and War, ed. Richard Butler and Wantanee Suntikul (London: Routledge, 2013). Laderman makes clear the connection between the development of touristic sites and touristic narratives, on the one hand, and the post-war reconstruction of national identity and civil society, as well as the economy, on the other. Between 2010 and 2015, tourism to Vietnam increased 9.5%. In 2015 tourism accounted for 14% of Vietnam’s GDP and 11.2% of its total employment. World Travel & Tourism Council, “Travel and Tourism: Economic Impact 2015 Vietnam” (World Travel & Tourism Council, 2016), https://www.wttc.org/-/media/files/reports/economic-impactresearch/countries-2015/vietnam2015.pdf.

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9.  Maureen Dowd, “Liberties; Viva Las Vegas,” The New York Times, September 5, 1999, Sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes. com/1999/09/05/opinion/liberties-viva-las-vegas.html. 10. For a fuller account of Paris’s “disposable aura,” see Mary C. Rawlinson, “Toward an Ethics of Place: A Philosophical Analysis of Cultural Tourism,” International Studies in Philosophy 38, no. 2 (2006): 141–158. 11. See UNESCO, “Historic Centre of Vienna Inscribed on List of World Heritage in Danger,” UNESCO, July 6, 2017, https://en.unesco.org/ news/historic-centre-vienna-inscribed-list-world-heritage-danger, and Lisa Gerard-Sharp, “Venice World Heritage Status Under Threat,” The Guardian, May 26, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/ may/26/venice-tourists-cruise-ships-pollution-italy-biennale. 12. Luc Sante, The Other Paris (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2015). 13. “Cleopatra’s Barge—Caesars Palace,” Caesars Palace, accessed February 13, 2018, https://www.caesars.com/caesars-palace/things-to-do/ cleopatras-barge. 14. Scott Roeben, “10 Things You Can Rub for Good Luck in Las Vegas Without Getting Arrested,” Vital Vegas Blog (Blog), August 5, 2014, https://vitalvegas.com/10-things-can-rub-good-luck-las-vegaswithout-getting-arrested/. 15. Paul W. Papa, It Happened in Las Vegas: Remarkable Events That Shaped History (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2009), p. 92. 16.  “10 Reasons Why Bacchanal Still Reigns as the Best Buffet in Las Vegas,” Las Vegas Blog (Blog), July 8, 2014, http://blog.caesars.com/ las-vegas/las-vegas-hotels/caesars-palace/10-reasons-bacchanal-stillreigns-best-buffet-las-vegas/. 17. “Las Vegas Wedding Venues—Caesars Palace,” Caesars Palace, accessed February 13, 2018, https://www.caesars.com/caesars-palace/thingsto-do/weddings/locations. The resort also offers a “Tuscan wedding” in “a fairytale setting with the romance and charm of Old World Tuscany.” 18. At the other end of the Las Vegas Strip, Luxor Las Vegas appropriates the images of ancient Egypt from films like The Mummy (1999) and Cleopatra (1963), while next door to Caesars Palace, The Mirage and Treasure Island trade on the images and codes of the South Seas, as well as the genre of pirate films, to develop their own brands of excitement, excess, and mania to stimulate gambling and risk-taking. The resorts regularly trade on the fantastic images of cinema as a substitute for reality. 19. “The Venetian Las Vegas | Art and Architecture,” The Venetian Las Vegas, accessed December 6, 2017, https://www.venetian.com/resort/ explore-the-venetian/art-and-architecture.html.

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20. The 10- to 12-minute gondola rides at the Venetian cost $29 per person for a boat shared by four or $116 for a private gondola. The charge for five photos is $60, plus $44 for a digital link. “The Venetian Las Vegas | Gondola Rides,” The Venetian Las Vegas, accessed December 6, 2018, https://www.venetian.com/resort/attractions/gondola-rides.html. In contrast, the Tourist Board of the city of Venice, Italy lists the price for a thirty-minute private gondola ride at about $29. Unlike on an actual gondola ride in Venice, at The Venetian Las Vegas one travels in a circle in a homogenous space. There is no possibility of the unfolding of unexpected perspectives, as the boat tours the globalized mall space or veers outside for a view of the Strip. 21. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 144. 22.  Gerard-Sharp, “Venice World Heritage Status Under Threat.” The “mega” cruise ships dwarf the scale of Venice—many are taller than the dome of San Marco—while polluting the lagoon and creating damaging wakes. At the same time, Venice’s local population, currently about 45 thousand, is dwindling, overrun by more than 30 million visitors a year. The Venetian authorities have been reluctant to institute any regulations to protect and sustain the city at the expense of cheap tourism dollars. Only very recently, after UNESCO threatened to add Venice to its list of endangered heritage sites, has the city adopted policies to restrict tourism and promote the welfare of locals. Cecilia Rodriguez, “Blacklisting Venice to Save It from Too Many Tourists and Too Few Venetians,” Forbes, May 29, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ ceciliarodriguez/2017/05/29/blacklisting-venice-to-save-it-from-toomany-tourists-and-too-few-venetians/. 23. Efforts to institute a ticket-entry system, which would effectively market the city like a theme park, have been resisted by local businesses. Recently the city authorities announced plans to establish a ticket-entry system for the Piazza San Marco to reduce crowding. Julia Buckley, “Venice Planning to Charge Entry to Its Historic City Centre,” The Independent, May 2, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/ news-and-advice/venice-piazza-san-marco-fee-charges-cost-introduction-city-centre-luigi-brugnaro-dario-franceschini-a7714166.html. 24. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 25.  Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, p. 146. The author analyses the difference between “lifespace” and touristic space. Through an analysis of “cultural heritage” sites, she shows how industrial tourism—what I am calling ‘touration’—replaces the real with the fake, substituting for the indigenous a fabricated touristic product. Rather than visiting actual villages

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(in Polynesia or Australia), tourists visit “model villages,” where the experience has been thoroughly monetized and the inhabitants, though perhaps connected to the culture, are essentially actors. As KirshenblattGimblett notes, it is ironic that these financially productive “heritage sites” generally arise at the same time that the culture as a living practice teeters on the verge of extinction. Through industrial tourism, a “way of life becomes a ‘heritage.’” 26. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V, the Fugitive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1993), p. 848. 27. Ibid., p. 853. 28. It is also an exemplar in aesthetic theory. See, e.g., John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1851), which was a major influence on Proust. Part of the wonder that Proust’s narrator and his mother enjoy on their visit to Venice derives from comparing their experience to all the associations they have brought with them through their knowledge of Venice in its images in art, literature, and philosophy. The tourist is prepared by the market; the traveller, by her reading and study. Here I am concentrating on the difference between the sensuous experience of the city of Venice, captured in painting, and the resort experience. 29. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1992), pp. 652–653. 30. See, for example, J. M. W. Turner, Venice-Maria Della Salute, 1844, Oil paint on canvas, 613 × 921  mm, 1844, Tate (http://www.tate.org.uk/ art/artworks/turner-venice-maria-della-salute-n00539), which exhibits the confusion of water, light, air, and stone that typifies Turner’s Venetian paintings. 31. Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 566. 32. Ibid., p. 567. 33.  Italo Calvino, “Venezia: Archetipo e utopia della città acquatica,” in Saggi 2 (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), translated by Letizia Modena and quoted in Letizia Modena, Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness (New York: Routledge, 2011). 34. Replicas of the columns stand at the entrance to the Venetian Las Vegas overlooking the Strip. The statue of San Teodoro in Venice is also a replica, further complicating the confusion of the fake and the real. The original was removed to the Doge’s Palace for preservation. Even the famous Campanile of Venice is not ‘original.’ Erected in the 12th century, it was first rebuilt in the 16th. In 1902, the tower collapsed, and it was reconstructed stone by stone, “com’era, dov’era”—“as it was, where

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it was.” Not only the difference between the Venetian Las Vegas and La Serenissima calls into question the distinction between the fake and the real: Venice herself was constantly being rebuilt. Sometimes the old is effaced to make way for the new, as the Church of San Teodoro was absorbed by the Basilica di San Marco and the Doge’s Palace; sometimes the old is reconstructed “as it was, where it was.” Venice embodies a palimpsest of time, so that it is difficult to identify any feature as ‘original.’ 35. Early on in his apprenticeship, the narrator of the Recherche is disappointed by his first visit to the cathedral at Balbec, for which he had been prepared by reading, images, and imagination. He finds it troubling that the cathedral should compete for his attention “with the point of his walking stick.” He does not yet understand that, while the cathedral might seem to exist in the present, it is in fact the embodiment of a “great theological poem” spanning centuries. 36.  The provenance of the columns is as difficult to pin down as their history. 37. Ibid., p. 101. 38. Radical Alterity, trans. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), p. 60. 39. Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 88. 40. Ibid., p. 64. 41. Ibid., p. 107. 42. Ibid., p. 21. 43. Ibid., pp. 21–22. 44. Ibid., p. 22. 45. Ibid., p. 23. 46. Ibid., p. 37. 47. Ibid., p. 39. 48. Ibid., p. 121. 49. Ibid., p. 28. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., p. 29. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., p. 87. 54. Ibid., p. 86. 55. Ibid., p. 125. 56. Ibid. 57. In reflecting on his first trip to America in 1970, Baudrillard reports that his experience of this voyage completely altered his relation to his own past and his own point of origin. “I had the revelation that I was entering the period of the rest of my life from another point of view, in

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a state of complete irony with respect to what had gone before.” Jean Baudrillard, “Forget Baudrillard,” in Baudrillard Live, ed. Mike Gane (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 107. 58. Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 128. Baudrillard comments on flying as a kind of “deterritorialization.” In place of an encounter with the foreign, there is only “circulation”: “the flight itself is a destination … [in which] you cannot discover anything other than the abstract, formal universe of speed, space, and time.” Flying creates a pure “absence,” in which “you are no longer responsible for anything, including your own death.” In the age of the airplane and the automobile, both the relation to the other and to oneself is anonymized, deterritorialized, and no longer subject to the specificity of place, but only to the “transfer-machine.” Jean Baudrillard, Radical Alterity, pp. 84–86. 59. Nothing exemplifies this better than the convention hotel. Attending the same conference in a different location year after year, the tourist finds it almost impossible to remember which city the Marriott or Hyatt was in. The ubiquity of global food chains further erases the differences of place that can provoke a shift of perspectives to dislodge convention and habit and make way for knowledge and joy. 60. Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 128. 61. Ibid., p. 153. 62. Ibid. 63. The phenomenon of sprawl and its effacement of place are evident in the efforts by the UN and other institutions to calculate populations. The UN uses several criteria—city limits, metropolitan area, and greater urban area—each with a different result. In one calculation, the population of New York City includes Newark, New Jersey, because of the continuous urban sprawl even across state lines. See UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population Prospects,” Methodology of the UN Population Estimates and Projections (New York: United Nations, 2017), https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/ Files/WPP2017_Methodology.pdf. 64. Calvino, “Venezia,” quoted in Modena, Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness, p. 160. 65. Modena, Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness, pp. 81–82. 66. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1992), pp. 167–176. 67. Genesis 4: 14–17. 68. Revelations 17: 5–6. 69. Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 148. 70. Jean Baudrillard, Mass, Identity, Architecture: Architectural Writings of Jean Baudrillard (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2003), p. 80.

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71. Baudrillard, Radical Alterity, p. 147. 72. Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010), p. 50. 73. Ibid., p. 49. In the 2012 US presidential election, the two parties, the two candidates, and their supporters spent more than $2 billion. The recent Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (October 2013) continues to facilitate the influence of wealth in democratic representation. This trend began with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (October 2009) in which, by a five to four vote, the Court characterized corporate campaign contributions as free speech protected by the First Amendment. In keeping with the thoroughgoing irony of our time, “The system [even, the system of laws] doesn’t care a fig for laws; it unleashes deregulation in every domain” (ibid.). The law “cannibalizes” itself. 74. Ibid., p. 67. 75. Ibid., p. 66. Irigaray makes a similar point. See Luce Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two (London: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 159: “We know what the relationship is between industrialization, capitalism, and slavery. We also know the limits of industrialization with regard to employment, yet we go on involving other countries in this process and, in this way, win a few more years for an economic regime whose blind alleys should be all too obvious to us. In my view, it would be fairer politically speaking to encourage a form of economic development that was appropriate to the environment and culture of a country, in other words to promote economic diversity rather than imposing a single and inevitably competitive model.” 76.  Baudrillard gives a more extensive analysis of “whiteness” in Jean Baudrillard, Carnival and Cannibal, trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2010). 77. Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, p. 52. 78.  Ibid., p. 106. Baudrillard adduces as evidence the various walls that are constructed to protect the democratic space from the Other: the wall constructed along the US–Mexico border or the wall that separates Israelis from Palestinians. These walls function inversely from the Berlin Wall or the razor wire of migrant camps. Whereas the dominated wanted to escape the contained space of the ghetto or Iron Curtain, the discriminated want to get in, to the places of “unlimited growth and prosperity.” 79. Ibid., pp. 52–53. 80. Ibid., pp. 86–87.

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81.  Jean Baudrillard, “The Work of Art in the Electronic Age,” in Baudrillard Live, ed. Mike Gane (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 147. 82. Ibid. 83. Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), p. 18. 84. Sigmund Freud, “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams,” in The Standard Edition to the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), p. 219. See also, J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, “Reality-Testing,” in The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1988), pp. 382–383. For a definitive analysis of Freud’s thinking on the body and reality, see Edward S. Casey, “Freud’s Theory of Reality: A Critical Account,” The Review of Metaphysics 25, no. 4 (1972): 659–690. 85. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, p. 19. 86. “The ego … is not merely a surface entity but is itself the projection of a surface.” Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), p. 16. 87. The narrator recounts his first visit to Balbec with his grandmother in Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1992), pp. 299–308. Her “resurrection” occurs on his second visit to Balbec, in Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1993), pp. 210–216. 88. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. I, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1992), p. 64. Involuntary memory occurs when the body encounters a sensation that is identical to one experienced in the past. It depends not on an association of objects, but on an identity of sensuous qualities. The aural identity between the clink of a spoon against a plate at the matinée of the Princesse de Guermantes and the clink of the railwayman’s hammer on the little seaside train returns the narrator to Balbec. In the same way, the narrator is returned to Venice when he teeters on two uneven paving stones in the courtyard of the Hotel de Guermantes, for he experiences just the same kinesthetic sensation that impressed him as he approached the baptistery of St. Mark’s with his mother. 89. Ibid., pp. 59–60. 90. Baudrillard, Mass, Identity, Architecture, p. 130. 91. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V, the Fugitive, p. 876.

46  M. C. RAWLINSON 92. Ibid., p. 847. 93. Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 91. 94. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VI, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1993), p. 289. 95. Ibid., pp. 260–261, my emphasis. 96. Ibid., pp. 261–262, my emphasis. 97. Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 91. 98. Ibid. 99. Please do not think, dear reader, that I am what Baudrillard calls a “reality fundamentalist.” Quite the contrary, I do not deny the confusion of the fake and the real or the instantaneity of circuits of communication under global capital. Nor do I indulge any nostalgia for the fiction of a “real” that would be unambiguously “original” and “in-itself.” Quite the contrary, with Proust and Calvino, I recognize that the “real” has always been subject to revision, suffused with memory and imagination. But the real is not and never has been reducible to the perception of objects, the calculation of utilities, or the laws of reason. Cities and works of art have always attested to an excess of the real over all attempts by reason, convention, and capital to domesticate and contain it. 100. Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 136. 101. Michel Picard, Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture, trans. Diana Darling (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 1996). 102. Michel Picard, “‘Cultural Tourism’ in Bali: Cultural Performances as Tourist Attraction,” Indonesia, no. 49 (April 1990), p. 54. 103. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 53, emphasis original. 104. Literally, the barong is a costume worn by two male dancers, one for the head and one for the tail. 105. It is important to note that this is not a classic Western struggle between good and evil. Both characters are necessary: it is the drama itself, not the Barong’s victory, that is sacred. 106. It is worth noting that virtually every cultural artefact in Bali is regularly refurbished or remade, even the temples themselves and their sacred statues. While a temple may be said to date from the tenth century, it is unlikely that any of its stonework is that old. They are composed of friable sandstone and regularly reconstructed, like the campanile of Venice, “as it was, where it was.” This continual renewal proves metaphysically untroubling to the Balinese, for whom there is no doubt about the “reality” of the temple or barong. 107. Ibid., p. 56. 108. Ibid., p. 8.



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109. Ibid., p. 77. 110. Ibid., p. 74. 111. Ibid., p. 69, emphasis original. 112. Quoted in Madeleine Drexler, A Splendid Isolation: Lessons on Happiness from the Kingdom of Bhutan (Thimphu: National Institute for Zorig Chusum, 2014), p. 27. 113. Ibid., p. 27. The preliminary vote was 19–5 in favor; the final vote, 19–5 against. 114. See, e.g., Andrew Jacobs and Matt Richtel, “A Nasty, NAFTA-Related Surprise: Mexico’s Soaring Obesity,” The New York Times, December 11, 2017, Sec. Health, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/ health/obesity-mexico-nafta.html. See also, Christiane Rudert, “The Effects of an Unregulated Fast Food Industry on Nutrition in Asia,” UNICEF East Asia & Pacific (Blog), August 26, 2014, https://blogs. unicef.org/east-asia-pacific/the-effects-of-unregulated-fast-food/. The Bhutanese influence can be seen in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Better Life Index and its motto: There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics. See Drexler, A Splendid Isolation, p. 39. 115. Marco Polo’s final words to Kublai Khan. Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 165.

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48  M. C. RAWLINSON Calvino, Italo. 1974. Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Casey, Edward S. 1972. Freud’s Theory of Reality: A Critical Account. The Review of Metaphysics 25 (4): 659–690. Cleopatra’s Barge—Caesars Palace. n.d. Caesars Palace. Accessed February 13, 2018. https://www.caesars.com/caesars-palace/things-to-do/cleopatras-barge. Connor, Phillip, and Jens Manuel Krogstad. 2016. Key Facts About the World’s Refugees. Pew Research Center: Fact Tank (Blog), October 5, 2016. http://www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/05/key-facts-about-the-worlds-refugees/. Dowd, Maureen. 1999. Liberties; Viva Las Vegas. The New York Times, September 5, 1999, Sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes. com/1999/09/05/opinion/liberties-viva-las-vegas.html. Drexler, Madeleine. 2014. A Splendid Isolation: Lessons on Happiness from the Kingdom of Bhutan. Thimphu: National Institute for Zorig Chusum. Freud, Sigmund. 1960. The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. ———. 1994. A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams. In The Standard Edition to the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press. Gerard-Sharp, Lisa. 2017. Venice World Heritage Status Under Threat. The Guardian, May 26, 2017. http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/ may/26/venice-tourists-cruise-ships-pollution-italy-biennale. International Labour Organization. 2012. New ILO Global Estimate of Forced Labour: 20.9 Million Victims. News, June 1, 2012. http://www.ilo.org/ global/topics/forced-labour/news/WCMS_182109/lang–en/index.htm. Irigaray, Luce. 2000. Democracy Begins Between Two. London: Athlone Press. Jacobs, Andrew, and Matt Richtel. 2017. A Nasty, NAFTA-Related Surprise: Mexico’s Soaring Obesity. The New York Times, December 11, 2017, Sec. Health. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/health/obesity-mexico-nafta.html. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laderman, Scott. 2013. From the Vietnam War to the ‘War on Terror’. In Tourism and War, ed. Richard Butler and Wantanee Suntikul. London: Routledge. Laplanche, J., and J. B. Pontalis. 1988. Reality-Testing. In The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Karnac Books and The Institute of Psychoanalysis. Las Vegas Wedding Venues—Caesars Palace. n.d. Caesars Palace. Accessed February 13, 2018. https://www.caesars.com/caesars-palace/things-to-do/ weddings/locations. MacCannell, Dean. 1999. The Tourist. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Modak, Sebastian. 2017. How Colombia, Once Consumed by Violence, Became Your Next Destination. Condé Nast Traveler, November 9, 2017. https:// www.cntraveler.com/story/how-colombia-once-consumed-by-violencebecame-your-next-destination. Modena, Letizia. 2011. Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness. New York: Routledge. Papa, Paul W. 2009. It Happened in Las Vegas: Remarkable Events That Shaped History. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press. Picard, Michel. 1990. ‘Cultural Tourism’ in Bali: Cultural Performances as Tourist Attraction. Indonesia 49 (April): 37–74. ———. 1996. Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture, trans. Diana Darling. Singapore: Archipelago Press. Proust, Marcel. 1992a. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. I, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Modern Library. ———. 1992b. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Modern Library. ———. 1993a. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Modern Library. ———. 1993b. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V, the Fugitive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Modern Library. ———. 1993c. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VI, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Modern Library. Raleigh, Clionadh. 2011. The Search for Safety: The Effects of Conflict, Poverty, and Ecological Influences on Migration in the Developing World. Global Environmental Change 21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. gloenvcha.2011.08.008. Rawlinson, Mary C. 2006. Toward an Ethics of Place: A Philosophical Analysis of Cultural Tourism. International Studies in Philosophy 38 (2): 141–158. Rodriguez, Cecilia. 2017. Blacklisting Venice to Save It from Too Many Tourists and Too Few Venetians. Forbes, May 29, 2017. https://www.forbes. com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2017/05/29/blacklisting-venice-to-saveit-from-too-many-tourists-and-too-few-venetians/. Roeben, Scott. 2014. 10 Things You Can Rub for Good Luck in Las Vegas Without Getting Arrested. Vital Vegas Blog (Blog), August 5, 2014. https://vitalvegas. com/10-things-can-rub-good-luck-las-vegas-without-getting-arrested/. Rudert, Christiane. 2014. The Effects of an Unregulated Fast Food Industry on Nutrition in Asia. UNICEF East Asia & Pacific (Blog), August 26, 2014. https://blogs.unicef.org/east-asia-pacific/the-effects-of-unregulatedfast-food/. Ruskin, John. 1851. The Stones of Venice, 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Sante, Luc. 2015. The Other Paris. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux.

50  M. C. RAWLINSON Swift, Jonathan. 1992. Gulliver’s Travels. London: Wordsworth Editions. The Venetian Las Vegas | Art and Architecture. n.d. The Venetian Las Vegas. Accessed December 6, 2017. https://www.venetian.com/resort/explorethe-venetian/art-and-architecture.html. The Venetian Las Vegas | Gondola Rides. n.d. The Venetian Las Vegas. Accessed December 6, 2018. https://www.venetian.com/resort/attractions/gondola-rides.html. Turner, J. M. W. 1844. Venice-Maria Della Salute. Oil paint on canvas. Tate, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-venice-maria-della-salute-n00539. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2017. World Population Prospects. Methodology of the UN Population Estimates and Projections. New York: United Nations. https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/ Files/WPP2017_Methodology.pdf. UNESCO. 2017. Historic Centre of Vienna Inscribed on List of World Heritage in Danger. UNESCO, July 6, 2017. https://en.unesco.org/news/ historic-centre-vienna-inscribed-list-world-heritage-danger. UNHCR: UN Refugee Agency. 2016. Frequently Asked Questions on Climate Change and Disaster Displacement, November 6, 2016. http://www.unhcr. org/en-us/news/latest/2016/11/581f52dc4/frequently-asked-questions-climate-change-disaster-displacement.html. UN Office on Drugs and Crime. 2016. Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2016. https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/2016_ Global_Report_on_Trafficking_in_Persons.pdf. ———. n.d. Smuggling of Migrants: The Harsh Search for a Better Life. Transnational Organized Crime. Accessed February 13, 2018. https://www. unodc.org/toc/en/crimes/migrant-smuggling.html. UN World Tourism Organization. 2016. International Tourist Arrivals up 4% Reach a Record 1.2 Billion in 2015. Press Release, http://media. unwto.org/press-release/2016-01-18/international-tourist-arrivals-4reach-record-12-billion-2015. World Bank. 2013. Lebanon Bears the Brunt of the Economic and Social Spillovers of the Syrian Conflict. World Bank, September 24, 2013. http:// www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/09/24/lebanon-bears-thebrunt-of-the-economic-and-social-spillovers-of-the-syrian-conflict. World Travel & Tourism Council. 2016. Travel and Tourism: Economic Impact 2015 Vietnam. World Travel & Tourism Council. https://www.wttc.org/-/media/ files/reports/economic-impact-research/countries-2015/vietnam2015.pdf.

CHAPTER 3

Thinking in Transit Megan Craig and Edward S. Casey

A customary view of doing philosophy imagines it to happen in the ­sedentary space of the philosopher’s study, where the solitary thinker operates in a private and privileged space: Leibniz in his easy chair writing to everyone and sundry; Kant self-sequestered at home, except for his obsessively punctual daily walks; Kierkegaard writing while standing at an elevated desk. Until recently, it was customary for philosophers to undertake their most serious writing at long tables in research libraries, or else in assigned cubicles. Such practices betray the assumption that the philosopher’s body should be as immobile as possible, so that his or her mind can spring into action on its own, undistracted by the distractive situations into which the moving body takes us. But there are other paradigmatic ways to do philosophy: Plato walked with his interlocutors outside the city walls in the Phaedrus; members of Aristotle’s Lyceum were called “Peripatetics,” and the ancient Stoics strolled through the spacious porches of the Stoa as they discussed philosophy together in earnest: in this latter case, the very building was constructed to facilitate doing philosophy while walking.1 So too in Heidelberg an entire path, the Philosophenweg, has been consecrated to philosophizing while perambulating. Heidegger had it both ways: he M. Craig (*) · E. S. Casey  SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_3

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wrote in his study at home in Freiberg and in the solitude of his isolated Hütte; but he also undertook with others “conversations on country paths,” and he strongly recommended “thinking on forest trails.” There is an entire tradition of ruminating on challenging issues while outside walking, as we observe in thinkers as different as Freud (who took a Spaziergang each noon around the Vienna Ringstrasse as he thought through challenges in his practice), Thoreau (who claimed to have his best thoughts while on extensive afternoon walks outside Concord), or Martha Nussbaum (who begins each day with a ninety-minute run followed by an hour of singing).2 These various ambulatory practices re-locate thinking from the private study or public library to the open worlds of urban life or surrounding nature. Their basic premise seems to be this: put the body into motion, and productive thinking is much more likely to come than if one remains confined, motionless, in one’s study or the library. The moving body generates lively thoughts. This is doubtless often the case.3 The two authors of this essay, however, have been struck by a different kind of experience, one in which their bodies are not moving themselves—as in concerted walking or striding—but are nevertheless in motion. This occurs when one’s body moves, not by one’s own effort or volition, but by way of the vehicle in which it is situated. In each case, despite conspicuous differences in the vehicle in question, philosophical thinking has been strikingly facilitated—sometimes initiated in the first place, but more commonly carried forward.

Convergent Experiences In conversations over the years, we have expressed to one another a preference for a nomadic academic life and for the feeling of being transported that has become entwined with our philosophical thinking. Neither of us thinks or writes in the same, solitary office or room each day; neither practices rituals of concentration we admire so much from Virginia Wolff to Annie Dillard.4 Our philosophical lives have necessitated lighter baggage (a backpack or rolling bag) and look messier, more erratic, and closer to Kerouac’s On the Road than to any Cartesian meditations or other icons of stationary philosophical reflection. Nonetheless, we are convinced that the thinking that transpires in transit could not be conjured or reproduced in the fixed receptacle of any building or room— though we both have recourse to such spaces to elaborate, edit, and

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rework. This has led us to consider the intricacies of thinking-in-motion and to ask ourselves: what are the features of a thinking that is motivated and supported by transit and suspended between destinations? One author (EC) commuted by automobile between Long Island and Connecticut over a period of twenty years. When he was engaged in writing an article or a book, he would routinely record his thoughts on a hand-held tape recorder, often speaking into it for more than an hour at a time. Eventually, he would listen to the recording, and would type out the more promising thoughts when life and leisure allowed. At first, this practice was taken up to alleviate the routine character of the road trip. But gradually, he came to realize that some of his very best thinking occurred in this unlikely situation—not just when alone with his thoughts (this much is foreseeable) but in a car moving on the fast lane at night, sometimes under difficult road conditions. He never questioned the practice or even wondered why it was working—not until a casual conversation with his colleague, the co-author of this essay. For the other author (MC), the bulk of her philosophical writing of the last decade has taken place aboard the Bridgeport Port Jefferson Ferry, crossing from Connecticut to Long Island (or the reverse).5 When the Grand Republic isn’t pitching in rough waves, MC can spread out at a table or on a bench on the upper deck and feel the movement of the ship cutting through water. Being propelled in this way lends itself to writing freely, as if ideas can spill out to the rhythm or speed of the crossing. The trip takes exactly one hour and fifteen minutes from shore to shore, enough time to draft 4–12 pages (long hand). All sorts of aquatic metaphors are appropriate to these circumstances, not only James’s “stream of thought,” but also the flow, tides, waves, cusps, storms, shallows and depths of ideas. Flotsam and jetsam also play their part. The feeling that things are moving has always been a crucial part of her writing process, and she has found that boats (and often trains) provide a foundational sense of happening that satisfies both the quest for motion and the need for some degree of communal space. As a result of the vagaries and demands of commuting, MC has returned to writing, as she did in high school, long hand on a legal pad, returning the practice to her hands and the physical labor she associates with drawing, painting, weeding, digging and other manual farm work she knows from childhood. Writing longhand reminds her of the materiality of thought, its grit and gravity. Her hands are sometimes marked with the ink smearing on the page, which seems like a more honest trace of a

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day’s work than the clean hands one has at the end of a day of typing.6 Later, probably late at night when her children are sleeping, she types the pages into a neat, digital document. But the first pass remains defiantly fluid and untamed, written by hand to the din of other people and the steady chug of some forward-moving vessel. What seems to matter most in both cases as here briefly recounted is the basic fact of being in motion, even if—in fact, especially if—the motion is not that generated by walking or running. When this condition obtains, these two philosophers find that thoughts emerge autogenously as it were: thoughts pertinent to a philosophical issue or question with which they are concerned in other contexts (e.g., teaching, speaking at a conference, philosophical writing of various sorts). The convergence of these experiences leads them to ask: What is going on here? How are we to understand a thinking that emerges in conditions of the kind just described? What is it to be thinking in transit?

Moving, Being Transported, Bodies We start with observing that at play in thinking in transit are at least three basic factors: movement, transport, and body. Let us consider movement first. Hobbes maintained that “thought is quick.”7 Kant regarded the concepts of understanding as creatures of “spontaneity.”8 Bergson attributed to élan vital a moving force that animates thought as well as life overall. Each of these very different philosophers points to a distinctive aspect of one basic phenomenon: thinking, pre-eminently philosophical thinking, is an activity whose natural nisus is movement: either its own or borrowed. Such movement is predominantly psychical in character; it takes place in one’s mind. This is to reflect the original meaning of psychein, a word that signifies a form of motion whose exemplary form is breathing: a ceaseless movement of air in and out of the lungs of living organisms. The thinking that happens in transit is the mental equivalent of such physiologically specified breathing as two-fold: the thinker breathes her thoughts in and out. In the particular cases exemplified by the authors’ experiences, such pulmonary thinking is facilitated by vehicles that are themselves in movement: the car and the ferry (and by extension the train or the plane). The kinetics of thinking is supported by the physical dynamics of the carriers in which it is situated. The thinking is enhanced by taking the motion of these carriers on loan as it were: they not only depend on it

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for reaching their destinations and for safety purposes, they take over the actual motion as offering physical support for psychical actions of thinking. Not just this but they do so as exemplary instances of movement that is comparatively uninhibited: e.g., gliding over water, driving over highways. It’s as if the physical kinematics of vehicular travel on smooth surfaces sets the stage for uninhibited philosophical thinking by providing exemplary instances of what it is like to sail across, or drive upon, supportive surfaces. We might say that the basic vehicular motion is taken over for other purposes: in this case, for thinking new thoughts or thinking out previous thoughts more clearly. The propulsions of such motion, effortlessly experienced from below, are borrowed so as to be put to use elsewhere: as if it were a matter of motion-on-loan, just as we take in air on loan as it were from the circumambient biosphere, returning it there upon breathing out. In such a circumstance, one does not run out of breath—as can happen when running—but is induced to take calm and steady breaths. Once in the automobile or on the boat, the physical motion of the vehicle is quite literally under-taken; the mind’s motion follows forth. There is something elemental about thinking in transit, given that thinking itself is a transitional and transporting activity. Traveling (by choice and alone—crucially this does not apply to traveling with small children, other dependents, or being forced to travel against one’s will) lends itself to daydreaming, whether on a train as you stare out the window or high above the world in the seat of a plane. The ground moves beneath you, the things of your life and your past can recede. The rhythm of your heartbeat begins to mesh with the rhythm of whatever machinery carries you along. To be carried is unusual as an adult, once one is too heavy and cumbersome to fit in the crook of an arm or to be hoisted overhead. Cars, boats, trains, planes offer a reprieve of weight, and the experience of momentum at uniform speed (a radically democratizing gesture) provides a special occasion for thinking while being carried. Perhaps they allow for thinking like a child again, prior to the recognition of one’s own mass. Closely related to movement is a second factor at play in thinking in transit: transport. In the circumstances to which we point, not only is there movement in space and time—an effortless movement analogous to involuntary breathing—but this is a movement that is transported. It is carried across a trajectory by a vehicle specifically designed to move bodies efficiently on earth or at sea. Such transported movement

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contrasts with movement that we ourselves generate directly, as with walking and running. These latter—as we know from Thoreau and from MC’s own experience—clear one’s head and generate new ideas.9 But they differ from our paradigmatic cases in that they are not transported by a moving vehicle. What the latter provides is the special opportunity not only to think—common to all the instances just mentioned—but to think while being carried by a vehicle on which one relies for producing comparatively carefree motion. Not needing to attend to the waves or the curves in the road, the writer is able to pursue the path of her own thinking. Born up by the fact of being transported, the thinker, in the best of cases, releases genuinely new thoughts: the transportation engenders transport. Vehicular transportation on earth or sea, welling up from below, invites unanticipated thoughts in one’s head up above. (In between is the moving hand, to which we shall return shortly.) Transported movement allows one to undertake new thinking and to pursue existing thinking further. In either case, a factor of spontaneity is evident—where “spontaneous” signifies its original sense of ‘self-generated’, something whose momentum stems from within its own resources, its own domain. This is just what one experiences in thoughtin-transit: thoughts seem to emerge on their own—from we know not where. They do so with a special élan or vital force whose ultimate source is unknown to us: an “active force” in Nietzsche’s sense of the term—which means that they come through us rather than being locatable as either outside us or inside us. We pick up the drift and carry forward the force: the force of thought. Such forceful thought is in effect transiting us—where the “trans-” root signifies ‘across’ or ‘through’. As if taking its clue from the literal physical motion of the car or boat, by moving across us it moves us: moves us to think differently, even if not always or necessarily better. In this way thought is enacted and re-enacted in its very genesis. A third factor in the psychogenesis of thought is the body—the lived, moving body. It is the silent partner of thinking, its covert companion as it were. The living body of the thinker subtends thought even as it is undergirded by the mechanical body of the ferry or the automobile. Not only does this body (quite literally) enliven thought by way of ­breathing and moving; it partners with it in more subtle ways as well: e.g., by positioning the thinker in a place where there is just enough comfort (but not too much!) for productive thinking to occur, by being a nondistracting presence that stabilizes the person thinking even as it makes

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thinking possible. In particular, it provides the hands for inscription— located between the head where thought as neurological event happens and the feet that might, in other circumstances, walk or run. We return to inscription below, but here we underline what is indispensable to it: a lived body that can move its parts appropriately on the instigation of thought. Thinking in transit, if it is not to disappear in the ephemera of traceless cogitation, calls for bodily actions that bring thoughts to a format that can be re-accessed on other occasions.10 Movement/Transport/Body: a basic triad that is eminently in play when thinking occurs in the transition from one thought to another across the space of an interval that spans the distance between a point of departure and a destination. Thought is generated from within a moving vehicle in both of the concrete experiences that instigated this essay: riding in a ferry over water, driving a car on a paved highway. More broadly considered, the generation comes not only from within a moving automobile or ferry but also from within these as themselves moving on the earth that underlies every part of these situations. The earth is the ultimate ground of the motion lent to thought by temporary vehicles in which we are situated as we move from one place to another: say, from New Haven to Stony Brook or the reverse. Motion occurs upon the earth as mega-vehicle as well as by means of the particular vehicles that transport us from one place to another. This is so even if we do not attend expressly to either kind of motion. (Indeed, we are not normally aware of the earth as itself in motion: for a person located anywhere on the earth, “the earth [itself] does not move,” as Husserl observed.11 Nevertheless, its rotation underlies and makes possible the movement of material vehicles over its surface and thus of the thought that occurs in them.) If thought is indeed “quick,” this has much to do with the fact that, though it emerges in the context of physically specifiable factors (vehicular motion; neurological activity) whose precise velocity can be determined with the proper instruments, thought itself proceeds at a tempo that cannot be calculated in any standard chronometric units—neither in minutes nor seconds or hours. A given thought happens all at once: im selben Augenblick in Husserl’s phrase. As a consequence, the thinker generates thoughts whose rate of occurrence defies exact measure. These thoughts are undeniably ensconced in the bodies of their thinkers, and supported by such concrete carriers as boats and cars and airplanes.12 Indeed, it is the very facticity of such vehicles, their physicality and measurability, that

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undergirds the sudden release of a flock of im-measurable thoughts. The paradox is that despite the very bulk of such vehicles—a bulk that enables their objective measurement as well as their physical momentum—they make possible acts of thinking that, as sheerly psychical, know no quantum, submit to no standard measures, but live by a force and momentum all their own. The process of the in-psychation of body, movement, and transport knows no bounds.

Inscription Ideas and thinking may seem bound to the head, but the head cannot think alone. The variety of thinking examined here pertains to movement across and between locations provided by vessels that relieve our bodies of the exertion they would otherwise need to propel themselves. Allowed to be at rest, the body nonetheless continues its circuits of blood and air, intake and outtake, along with a repertoire of micro-movements from blinks to shivers. The bodily movements typical of thinking in transit are local and intense rather than far flung and uninhibited (there simply isn’t space to run or to dance), but they contribute to a deliberate orchestration of powers needed to capture or record thinking within a narrow space. The head alone might be able to think, but it could never think in transit. For that one needs the whole body and a method for marking or notation. One striking difference between the two accounts of thinking-in-transit we have articulated is that EC describes a process of vocalization and thinking aloud, while MC recounts a process of silent hand-writing. Both practices, however, entail the externalization of thought or its materialization, either sonically or graphically. The act of recording seems crucial to the kind of experience we are describing. Plenty of thinking transpires all the time without any outward manifestation, but we have discovered that a special form of thinking takes place when we are carried or ferried by a vehicle that assumes motion on our behalf. For EC, much like Willem De Kooning seeking “glimpses” for future paintings out the window of a speeding vehicle in Long Island, thoughts congealed in special proximity while driving, as if the vehicle itself lent momentum to thinking aloud.13 Rather than allow the dissipation of thought into soliloquy or silence (allowing it to remain ethereal), EC captured these vocalized “glimpses” in a taped format that simultaneously recorded the ambient sounds of the drive. The resulting tapes (if one could listen to

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them) might resemble clinical records of psychoanalysis, philosophical mix tapes, or sociological field notes. For MC, the variable pitch of a boat and its rocking motion mobilize the gesture of hand-writing, like a shot both announcing and physically jolting the body for the start of a race. The act of inscribing thoughts changes the character of what one is doing from a meditative reverie to a disciplined practice of enunciation.14 It is almost as if the ­mechanical vehicle (boat or car) in its strict organization of moving parts contributes to the effort of spitting out the words, while the background noise and clamor of the vessel help to diffuse and disperse the deafening silence so often characteristic of concerted thinking and writing. Either way, whether audibly recorded or silently inscribed, thought undergoes a transubstantiation, taking on a form that remains tangible, pliable, and subject to later scrutiny. The form of thinking we are here exploring cannot be divorced from our variable rituals of inscription, for the rituals themselves provide the vehicle for thinking to travel further. The tapes and notes are themselves cars and ferries carrying thinking onward, over different terrain, and in directions it might otherwise not be able to go. The rituals of speaking and writing also indicate a deliberate attitude with respect to repetitive routes, which become engrained and predictable in their invariability day after day, year after year. Like Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “habit body,” these routes make innovation itself possible. Thinking is an adventure, and it has the power to reanimate and transfigure the most banal situations. When thinking is conjoined with regular practices of inscription, it not only frees one from the physical parameters of the here and now, it provides a record of those escapes that can become the basis for future thought travel. It might seem, between EC’s practice of speaking and MC’s practice of writing, one has the contours of a classical argument between speech and writing (voice and document), harking back to Plato’s Phaedrus and the Myth of Theuth, the ancient god of letters and other arts. Socrates recounts the story of Theuth delivering various gifts to Thamus, the king of Egypt. When he unveils his letters, Thamus admits they are wondrous, but rejects them, saying “If people learn them it will make their souls forgetful through lack of exercising their memory. They’ll put their trust in the external marks of writing instead of using their own internal capacity for remembering on their own.”15 Socrates, adopting Thamus’s suspicion, goes on to compare writing to painting: “In a way Phaedrus,

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writing has a strange character, which is similar to that of painting, actually. Painting’s creations stand there as though they were alive, but if you ask them anything, they maintain a quite solemn silence” (Plato 1993: 132). From Socrates’s perspective, writing threatens not only memory but the liveliness of dialogue and the spoken word. In contemporary philosophy, Levinas takes over much of the Socratic suspicion about writing, prioritizing discourse, voice, and the face to face, while attempting to write texts that retain the openness of spoken dialogue. Derrida, meanwhile, celebrates the text and the mysterious powers of writing and reading.16 Grafting EC and MC onto an ancient quarrel, EC’s auditory recordings seem to align with the Socrates/Levinas favoring of speech, while MC’s written pages align more closely with the Plato/Derrida devotion to the text. But things are not so simply divided into such neat dualities. The disparate technologies employed by both EC and MC, the car and boat as well as the tape recorder, the cassette, the pen and the paper, coalesce into a set of tools that facilitate the transport, prolongation, and preservation of otherwise disembodied thoughts into fleshed out prose. In both cases, moreover, the prose itself is eventually published in print (or is intended to be such). The differences between speech and writing that might appear stark in another context soften when viewed through the lens of thinking-in-transit. One cannot always choose the vehicle for thought, just as one cannot always choose the vehicle for travel, despite the best laid plans. In transit one often makes do with whatever means are at hand. EC had to keep his hands on the wheel, but within the close quarters of the driver’s seat he found a new range of motion and reach through his voice—as if the agitation and upwelling of thinking find whatever means necessary to move and to manifest. This serves as a valuable reminder of the many forms thinking can take: audio, visual, tactile, monolithic, discreet…. This is not to mention that the physical/ material conditions of thinking-in-transit often contribute to experimentation and risks one would not ordinarily take. In the end, no one form of thought holds any innate privilege or place above the others. The drive to preserve an idea, to give it some (however minimal) form, is a basic drive toward exteriority and a world held in common with others. Whether spoken or written, sung, played, painted, danced, filmed, etched, sprayed, embroidered, cast, scrubbed, or dripped, the impulse is toward the securing of thought in a form that might someday stand up on its own and thereby “stand its ground.”

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Inscription describes a process by which thinking-in-transit acquires a precarious materiality, melding the body of the thinker with the tools or equipment at his or her disposal. The recordings and writings stand halfway between the subject who first enunciated the words and the objects, the records, that come to house them like temporary shelters. Neither sturdy nor resistant to decay, the tape and paper remain fragile and prone to erasure—to wrinkling, burning, ripping, or being over-written. They are like our own bodies, strong and weak at once, sites of sedimented deposit and creative evolution. While Freud thought of writing as the literal subscription (Niederschrift) of “memory traces,” the spoken records generated by EC and written records generated by MC bear the residue of persons who are simultaneously present and absent in the traces. Habits of inscription; writing on, in, over, or into, help one to grope a way out of confined spaces, ruts, and routines.

In the Milieu Thought assumes new forms when the thinker is carried by a movement that does not originate with her or himself. The gestures of inscription we have described above begin as provocations to movement (to speak or to write) that borrow momentum and cadence from the vehicles that carry us. We think to the rhythms of countless gears. Inscription of various kinds transforms those rhythms into audible sounds and visual marks, which also borrow some of their materiality from the atmosphere and medium of one’s surroundings: the slick, dark highway, the undulating sea. Thinking-in-transit reminds one of the degree to which thought takes on the environment of its surroundings, as cloth assumes the scent of a campfire. Untethered to any definitive or final place, thinking-in-transit acquires a uniquely nomadic atmosphere and installs itself in flow-like, aquatic, fluid, or mobile mediums: words tumbling out into the air or settling into inky waves across a page. Two philosophers most articulate about the nomadic potential for thought are Deleuze and Guattari, who, in the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus, advocate the unrooted structure of a “canal-rhizome” book as they proclaim, “Never send down roots, or plant them, however difficult it may be to avoid reverting to old procedures” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25). There are those who seize on the sense of transgression, risk, rebellion, and speed in Deleuze and Guattari, but we are more interested in their descriptions of the middle (milieu)

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and the difficulty of staying in the middle, whether a middle speed (a temporal middle) or a middle position (a spatial middle). There is also a psychic middle, that zone of presence between memory and forgetting that is so difficult to describe or to inhabit. Deleuze and Guattari associate the middle with what it means to practice “pragmatics,” a form of thinking that “know[s] how to move between things, establish[es] a logic of the AND, overthrow[s] ontology, do[es] away with foundations, nullif[ies] beginnings and endings” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 28). In the aesthetic realm, Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon helps one appreciate the middle ground; that part of a picture plane that neither recedes into the deep space of an undifferentiated background nor encroaches and spills over into the near space of the viewer. The middle ground occupies a shallow, delicate place. Holding a picture there requires extraordinary restraint and poise. Middles are relevant to the topic of thinking-in-transit (middle space, middle speed, middle time, mid-life, Middle Passage even) because thinking itself seems to require being in the middle, or in the midst. Traveling puts one literally between places, but the vehicles also suspend the traveler over the road, over the sea. One finds oneself hovering beyond solid ground, and this proves fertile, if fleeting, terrain for thinking in a way that is less burdened with roots and gravity. It provides occasions for what Deleuze and Guattari consider genuinely rhizomatic thought. The sensible qualities of the surroundings also contribute to a feeling of being marginally associated or together with others en route—the passing lights of cars on the highway, the chatter of passengers and TV screens on the ferry. Rather than function as distractions to be silenced or avoided, the world of sensory interruptions characteristic of transportation (and far more drastically in public transportation), become structural features of the kind of thinking we are interested in investigating. For both authors, the din of public spaces plays a crucial role in facilitating a feeling of precarious solidarity that helps to anchor, animate, and ground thinking in the realities of lived experience. One finds oneself alongside others, not in the leveled Mit-sein (being-with) of Heidegger’s world, but in what Deleuze and Guattari identify with a milieu and being one of a pack (as opposed to being one among a stratified mass): “I am on the edge of a crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or a foot. I know that the periphery is the only place that I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd.

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This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 32–33). Elsewhere they write of the milieu: “It’s not easy to see things from the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below…” (ibid., 25). If movement/transport/body form a triad constitutive of thinking, inscription and milieu describe the enmeshment of thought with its surroundings and the situation of a thinker who is always at the mercy of a moving world. Thoughts sometimes acquire an outward form through practices of inscription that give them bodies on loan, small rafts to bear them onward until they are capsized, jump ship, sink or swim. One strategy for resisting the rigidity of thought and reengaging the dynamism of life is to simply let oneself be carried forward by some other means: to board a train or a boat or a plane, to drive a car. The destination is insignificant. What matters is finding places and practices that facilitate thinking while feeling oneself being in the midst, and then having some strategies for staying there, balancing with a thought, for as long as possible, without rushing toward any conclusion. Being-in-the-midst could entail concerted exercises and physical motion, anything from the Greek’s concerted communal pacing to Rousseau’s solitary walking, or it might include micro movements, spiritual exercises, and psychic efforts invisible to the naked eye. What matters is the suspension of the thinker between the near and far shores of thought—staying in the middle—where thinking might begin to wander and coalesce, marginally, in unpredictable ways.

Final Free-Floating Thoughts Thoughts might come in a stream or a train—ebbing or inching their way forward or back, tightly or loosely bound. If it is true that being in transit is conducive to, connected with, and sometimes even crucial for thinking, either propelled by one’s own force or carried by someone or something else, then why is the image of the stationary, solitary writer/thinker still so prevalent? Why do we send our students off to write as if sending them into isolation booths and sensory deprivation chambers? What are computers and hand held devices doing to further fix us in place? What will happen to a generation of children in the United States who are no longer learning handwriting or cursive script, which has been replaced by typing in preparation for computer-based standardized tests?

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The mythic images of thinking are daunting and austere: Rodin’s immense Thinker bent over in tortured contemplation. A pernicious either/or between the vita contemplativa or the vita activa fuels the conception of the philosopher as a physically unwell savant tethered to his desk or reduced to a brain in a vat. But thinking creatively happens more often in the open than in concerted bouts of staring at a page or a screen: John Dewey liked to write while on a New York City bus. Those who write know this from experience, from endless hours of groping for the right word or thought, only to have it flit by unannounced some time later in an open place after we’ve given up all hope. Ideas want air and a little bit of abandon. One need not take a job hours from home, as both of us have done, to discover the possibilities for thinking in transit.17 As Emerson knew, “Traveling is a fool’s paradise….my Giant goes with me wherever I go” (Emerson 1981: 160). Deleuze and Guattari too, those thinkers of nomadism and the smooth spaces of deserts and oceans that can never be demarcated for settlement, value “voyages in place” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 532). Echoing Emerson, they write: “To think is to voyage” (532), but they emphasize the difference between the far-flung escapes of touristic travel (and touristic thinking) and the intensity of local investigation (and deep thought). They associate the former with a flamboyant quest for adventure (an “educational, memorial, cultural, Goethean journey” [532]), while the latter relates to subtle forms of experimentation and a capacity to stay in one place. Contrary to what one would expect, the true nomads, they insist, “do not move.” This means that nomadism is something very different from a perpetual trek and shifting existence. Nomadism stands for the possibility of being in transit wherever one is. In the contemporary world of refugees surging across borders and being endlessly detained in camps that have become permanent holding grounds for millions of displaced people, Deleuze and Guattari’s romance with the “true nomads” can sound naive or cruel. Any discussion of thinking in transit must also take into account those forced to travel, to commute, to make unchosen real-life transitions, and to move—all of those for whom rest, rootedness, and stillness represent impossible luxuries. At the end of the day, one also needs a bed. We write in transition from one place to another, but the transit relies on having a home and a base from which to depart and to which to return. Without those

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reassuring shores, the thinking/writing life as we have here described it would be something else entirely. Thinking seems to be helped by being carried, and part of what carries us is the prospect of a place to retire and recover when the journey is over. Even the most far-out thinking needs a measure of stabilitas loci, stability of place, just as much as it needs the invigorations and jolt of the road or the sea (as well as the shock of life and the din of others). Thinking that thinks the new by sprouting new rhizomatic shoots sways suspended between shores of the familiar and the smooth spaces of heterogeneous cogitation, where we are transported to thought while moving on land or over water, writing or talking it down on the way.

Notes







1.  Unfortunately, a stress on thinking-while-walking connects too easily with an ancient obsession with physical strength, proportionality, rationality and ability, which overlooks the variety of bodies, abilities, movement, and thinking possible in the world. If one builds a school around walking together, there is not much room for bodies who do not share the same form, style, or pace of movement. It is a small step from the association between walking and thinking to a denial of the potential for thinking for those who cannot (can no longer, or cannot yet) walk. Thinking, rather than requiring locomotion, seems to be a crucial form of movement definitive of life itself. Aristotle himself said that thinking “consists in being moved” (Aristotle 1993: 6 [408 b7]). He adds that this movement is “due to soul” (Ibid.), and indeed thinking cannot always be seen, measured, or determined from the outside, and it does not depend on a body capable of literally walking or otherwise physically moving itself. 2. Aviv, “The Philosopher of Feelings,” 2016. 3.  Rebecca Solnit’s voluminous book Wanderlust explores this thesis in exquisite detail, citing numerous cases in point. Also see Santayana’s essay “The Philosophy of Travel,” in which he states: “locomotion— the privilege of animals—is perhaps the key to intelligence” (Santayana 1968: 5). 4. Dillard writes, “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark…. ‘The beginning of wisdom,’ according to a West African proverb, ‘is to get you a roof’” (Dillard 1989: 26–27). 5. While MC will focus on the account of ferry for this text, the commute has also included transportation by bicycle, car, and train—each with

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their distinctive challenges and opportunities—all of them relevant to thinking-in-transit. 6. Imagine Descartes writing his Meditations with quill and ink, the words smudging and dripping, his hands and white dressing gown splattered with ink by the end of the last meditation—a striking counterpoint to his famously “clear and distinct” ideas. 7. Hobbes (1962: 29). 8. Kant (1965: 92–93). 9. Running, rather than walking, has played a significant role in MC’s thinking. Although an account was included in early drafts of this work, it requires separate elaboration in relation to breathing, the generation of ideas, and experimentation with limits. 10. The authors transmitted their thoughts for this essay in accessible Word documents that represented the precipitation of thinking done separately for the most part but made shareable by way of email transmissions. 11. Husserl (1934: 238–250). 12. One author (EC) sketched out a rough draft of parts of this essay while on an airplane from Hawaii to California. The other (MC) drafted first thoughts on the ferry and the train to NYC. 13. For de Kooning’s self-description as a “slipping glimpster” see Stevens and Swan (2004: 571); as well as Casey’s own discussion of this phrase in Casey (2007: 8, 14). 14. This is what Julia Kristeva associates with the transition from instinctual operation to practice: “a transformation of natural and social resistances, limitations, and stagnations—if and only if it enters into the code of linguistic and social communication” (Kristeva 2002: 31). 15. Phaedrus 275a (Plato 1993: 132). 16. We use these figures merely as representative of a trend, while acknowledging the nuance of each of their positions relating to speech and writing. Derrida writes, “Everything happens as if the Western concept of language (in terms of what, beyond its plurivocity and beyond the tight and problematic opposition of speech [parole] and language [langue], attaches it in general to phonematic or glossematic production, to language, to voice [vowel], to hearing, to sound and breath, to speech) revealed itself today as the guise or disguise of a primary writing….” (Derrida 2016: 7). 17. We have examined the positive effects of such travel here, but further thinking should be devoted to the negative effects of transit and the physical/emotional toll on oneself and others.

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Works Cited Aristotle. 1993. De Anima: Books II and III, trans. D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aviv, Rachel. 2016. The Philosopher of Feelings. The New Yorker, July 25, 2016. Casey, Edward S. 2007. The World at a Glance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 2016. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Dillard, Annie. 1989. The Writing Life. New York: Harper Perennial. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1981. The Portable Emerson. New York: Penguin. Hobbes, Thomas. 1962. The Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Husserl, Edmund. 1934. Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature, trans. F. Kersten. In Husserl: The Shorter Works, ed. P. McCormick and F. Elliston. South Bend: Notre Dame Press, 1981. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2002. The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver. New York: Columbia University Press. Plato. 1993. Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, trans. William S. Cobb. New York: State University of New York Press. Santayana, George. 1968. The Birth of Reason and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Stevens, Mark, and Annalyn Swan. 2004. De Kooning: An American Master. New York: Knopf.

CHAPTER 4

Reclamation and Reconciliation bell hooks

Although I had been raised to think of myself as a southerner, it was not until I lived away from my native state of Kentucky that I began to think about the geography of north and south. That thinking led me to consider the history of the African-American farmer in the United States. Coming from a long legacy of farmers, from rural America, when I left the state, I was initially consistently puzzled by the way in which black experience was named and talked about in college and university settings. It was always the experience of black people living in large urban cities who defined black identity. No one paid any attention to the lives of rural black folks. No matter that before the 1900s ninety percent of all black people lived in the agrarian South. In the depths of our psychohistory we have spent many years being agrarian, being at home on the earth, working the land. Cities are not our organic home. We are not an organically city people. Even though the men and women in my family history farmed, living off the land, I was not raised to be a farmer or a farmer’s wife. My hands failed at quilting, at growing things. I could not do much with the needle or the plow. I would never follow aunts, uncles, nephews, and cousins into the tobacco fields. I would not work on the loosening floor.

b. hooks (*)  Berea, KY, USA © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_4

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The hard, down and dirty work of harvesting tobacco would not determine my way of life. My destiny, the old folks constantly told me was different. They had seen it in dreams. In the stillness of the night they had spoken with god; the divine let them know my fate. While they could not tell me the nature of that fate, they were confident that it would be revealed. My elders encouraged me to accept all that was awaiting me, to claim it. Even if claiming it meant I had to leave my home, my native place. “Jesus,” they would tell me, “had to turn away from mother and father and make his own way. And was it not also my destiny to follow in the path of Jesus.” Even though I had left the land, left my old grandfathers sharecropping, plowing massa’s field just as though plantation culture had never come to an end or sometimes plowing the plots of land, the small farms that were their very own to do with as they wanted, I was taught to see myself as a custodian of the land. Daddy Jerry taught me to cherish land. From him I learned to see nature, our natural environment as a force caring for the exploited and oppressed black folk living in the culture of white supremacy. Nature was there to teach the limitations of humankind, white and black. Nature was there to show us god, to give us the mystery and the promise. These were Daddy Jerry’s lessons to me, as he lifted me onto a mule, as we walked the rows and rows of planted crops talking together. It was sheer good fortune that I was allowed to walk hand in hand with strong black men who cared for me body and soul, men of the Kentucky backwoods, of the country. Men who would never think of hurting any living thing. These black men were gentle and full of hope. They were men who planted, who hunted, who harvested. They shared their bounty. As I take a critical look at what black males have collectively become in this nation, defeated and despairing, I recognize the psychic genocide that took place when black men were uprooted from their agrarian legacy to work in the industrialized North. Working the land, nurturing life, caring for crops and animals, had given black men of the past a place to dream and hope beyond race and racism, beyond oppressive and cruel white power. More often than not black females worked alongside farming black men, sometimes working in the fields (there was no money for hiring workers) but most times creating homeplace. In my grandmother’s kitchen, soap was made, butter was churned,

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animals were skinned, crops were canned. Meat hung from the hooks in the dark pantry and potatoes were stored in baskets. Growing up, this dark place held the fruits of hard work and positive labor. It was the symbol of self-determination and survival. There is so little written about these agrarian black folks and the culture of belonging they created. It is my destiny, my fate to remember them, to be one of the voices telling their story. We have forgotten the black farmer, both the farmer of the past, and those last remaining invisible farmers who still work the land. It has been in the interest of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to hide and erase their story. For they are the ancestors who gave to black folk from slavery on into reconstruction an oppositional consciousness, ways to think about life that could enable one to have positive self-esteem even in the midst of harsh and brutal circumstances. Their legacy of self-determination and hard work was a living challenge to the racist stereotype that claimed blacks were lazy and unwilling to work independently without white supervision. Black mail writer Ernest Gaines recalls the spirit of these agrarian visionaries in his novel, A Gathering of Old Men, as he also evokes the recognition that their legacy threatened those in power and as a consequence was marked for erasure. Remembering the folks who worked the land his character Johnny exclaims, “…They are trying to get rid of all proof that black people ever farmed this land with plows and mules – like if they had nothing from the starten but motor machines…Mama and Papa worked too hard in these same fields. They mama and they papa worked too hard, too hard to have that tractor just come in that graveyard and destroy all proof that they ever was.” Within imperialist white supremacist capitalist culture in the United States there has been a concentrated effort to bury the history of the black farmer. Yet somewhere in deeds recorded, in court records, in oral history, and in rare existing written studies is the powerful truth of our agrarian legacy as African-Americans. In that history is also the story of racist white folks engaged in acts of terrorism chasing black folk off the land, destroying our homeplace. That story of modern colonialism is now being told. Recent front page articles in the Lexington, Kentucky, newspaper, the Herald-Leader, highlighted the historical assaults on black landowners. In a section titled “Reside of A Racist Past” Elliot Jaspin’s article, “Left Out of History Books,”

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tells readers that “Beginning in 1864 and continuing for about 60 years whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions, driving thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities ­lily-white.” Black farmers, working their small farms, were often a prime target for white folks who wanted more land. In my family, land was lost during hard times. Farming was looked down upon by the black elites active in racial uplift who had no more respect for agriculture than their affluent white counterparts. Contempt for the poor black farmer had become widespread in the latter part of the nineteenth century as black people begin to desire affluence. W. E. B. DuBois’ vision of the talented tenth did not include farmers. Despite his internalized racism Booker T. Washington was the black male leader who understood the importance of land ownership, of our agrarian roots. He understood that knowing how to live off the land was one way to be self-determining. While he was misguided in thinking that white paternalism was useful and benevolent, he remains one of the historical champions of the black farmer. He understood the value and importance of land ownership, of agriculture. The elite did not favor Washington’s focus on vocational training. They did not value his work with Native Americans nor his lifelong concern for the fate of poor black folk. In his autobiography, Up from Slavery, Washington urged black folks to choose self-reliance: “Go out and be a center, a life-giving center, as it were, to a whole community, when the opportunity comes, when you may give life where there is no life, hope where there is no hope, power where there is no power. Begin in a humble way, and work to build up institutions that will put black people on their feet.” Agriculture was one arena where Washington saw black folks excelling. Working the land was one place where he could see black folks creating a culture of belonging. In Rebalancing the World Carol Lee Flinders cites these characteristics of a culture of belonging—“intimate connection with the land to which one belongs, empathetic relationship to animals, self-restraint, custodial conservatism, deliberateness, balance, clarity, honesty, generosity, egalitarianism, mutuality, affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, and openness to Spirit.” These core values of belonging were not taught to me by teachers and professors. Certainly in graduate school and beyond it was the culture of enterprise that mattered, what we were taught would determine our success in life. At no point in my liberal arts education was farming ever mentioned. When I first went to college and named Kentucky as my native state, laughter was often the response.

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Stereotypes about Kentucky, about hillbillies and the like were the norm. No one talked about the Kentucky I knew most intimately. No one mentioned black farmers at Stanford University in my classes. Everywhere I journeyed the world of environmental activism was characterized by racial and class apartheid. In those locations no one ever assumed that black folks cared about land, about the fate of the earth. Meanwhile in the small town Kentucky world of mu upbringing the elders were dying and the young had no interest in farming, in land. The organic gardens, the animals raised both in the country on farms and in city limits that were a way of life for my grandparents were a legacy no one wanted to preserve. And the bounty their labor brought to our impoverished and needy world was soon forgotten. Wherever I lived I made an effort to grow vegetables, even if just in pots, to garden as a tribute to the elders and the agrarian traditions they held to be sacred and as a way to hold on to those traditions. Like my maternal and paternal grandparents, I wanted to be self-reliant, too live simply. My father’s father had worked land in the country, sharecropping. From him I learned much about farming and rural life. My maternal grandparents lived in city limits as though they were living in the country. They all believed in the dignity of labor. They all taught that the earth was sacred. No one talked about the earth as our mother. They did not divide the world into the neat dualistic categories that are common strategies both in reformist feminist movement and in environmental activism. The earth, they taught me, like all of nature, could be life giving but it could also threaten and take life, hence the need for respect for the power of one’s natural habitat. Both grandparents owned land. Like Booker T. Washington, they understood that black folks who had their “forty acres and a mule” or even just their one acre could sustain their lives by growing food, by creating shelter that was not mortgaged. Baba and Daddy Gus, my maternal grandparents, were radically opposed to any notion of social and racial uplift that meant black folks would lead us away from respect for the land, that would lead us to imitate the social mores of affluent whites. They understood the way white supremacy and its concomitant racial hierarchies led to the dehumanization of black life. To them it was important to create one’s own culture—a culture of belonging rooted in the earth. And in this way they shared a common belief system with that of anarchist poo white folks. Lots of poor Kentuckians black and white never embraced the renegade beliefs of the backwoods. But for those po’ folks who did, they lived with a different

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set of values. And contrary to negative stereotypes those oppositional ways of thinking, those different values were more often than not life sustaining. In Dreaming the Dark feminist activist Starhawk shares this powerful insight: “When we really understand that the earth is alive, and know ourselves as part of that life, we are called to live our lives with integrity, to make our actions match our beliefs, to take responsibility for creating what we would have manifest, to do the work of healing.” These were the values taught to me by my agrarian ancestors. It is their wisdom that informs my efforts to call attention to the restorative nature of our relationship to nature. Collective healing for black folks in the diaspora can happen only as we remember in ways that move us to action our agrarian past. Individual black folk who live in rural communities, who live on land, who are committed to living simply, must make our voices heard. Healing begins with self-determination in relation to the body that is the earth and the body that is our flesh. Most black people live in ways that threaten to shorten our life, eating fast foods, suffering from illnesses that could be prevented with proper nutrition and exercise. My ancestors were chain smokers, mostly rolling their own smokes from tobacco grown locally and many were hard drinkers on the weekends. Yet they ate right, worked hard, and exercised every day. Most of them lived past seventy. We have yet to have movements for black self-determination that focus on our relation to nature and the role natural environments can play in resistance struggle. As the diverse histories of black farmers are uncovered, we will begin to document and learn. Many voices from the past tell us about agriculture and farming in autobiographical work that may on the surface offer no hint that there is documentation of our agrarian history contained within those pages. Anthropologist Carol Stack offers information about black farmers in Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South, explaining: “After the Civil War, beginning with no capital or equity of any kind, freedmen began working to assemble parcels of land. By 1920 more than 900,000 black Americans, all but a handful of them in the South, were classified as farm operators, representing about 20 percent of southern farmers…Onefourth of black farmers were true landowners, controlling a total of 15 million acres of farmland.” Stack documents the way in which black folks struggled and worked to own land, even if that land was simply a small farm, averaging, Stack reports, “one-third the acreage of white farms.”

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Reading the autobiography of an African-American midwife in the deep South whose family lived off the land and were able to live well during hard times served as a catalyst compelling me to think and write about growing up in rural southern culture. Much of what we hear about that past is framed around discussion of racist exploitation and oppression. Little is written about the joy black folks experienced living in harmony with nature. In her new book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, Alice Walker recalls, “I remember distinctly the joy I witnessed on the faces of my parents and grandparents as they savored the sweet odor of spring soil or the fresh liveliness of wind.” It is because we remember to joy that we call each other to accountability in reclaiming that space of agency where we know we are more that our pain, where we experience our interdependency, our oneness with all life. Alice Walker contends: “Looking about at the wreck and ruin of America, which all our forced, unpaid labor over five centuries was unable to avert, we cannot help wanting our people who have suffered so grievously and held the faith so long, to as last experience lives of freedom, lives of joy. And so those of us chosen by Life to blaze different trails than the ones forced on our ancestors have explored the known universe in search of that which brings the most peace, self-acceptance and liberation. We have found much to inspire us in Nature. In the sheer persistence and wonder of Creation itself.” Reclaiming the inspiration and intention of our ancestors who acknowledged the sacredness of the earth, its power to stand as witness is vital to our contemporary survival. Again and again in slave narratives we read about black folks taking to the hills in search of freedom, moving into deep wilderness to share their sorrow with the natural habitat. We read about ways they found solace in wild things. It is no wonder that in childhood I was taught to recite scripture reminding me that nature could be an ally in all efforts to heal and renew the spirit. Listening to the words of the psalmist explaining: “I will lift up my eyes until the hills from whence cometh my help.” Seeking healing I have necessarily returned to the Kentucky hills of my childhood, to familiar rural landscapes. It is impossible to live in the Kentucky of today and not feel sorrow about all that humans have done to decimate and destroy this land. And yet even as we grieve we must allow our sorrow to lead us into redemptive ecological activism. For me that takes myriad forms—most immediately acquiring land that will not be developed, renewing my commitment to living simply, to growing

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things. I cherish that bumper sticker that wisely reminds us “to live simply so that others may simply live.” Now past the age of the fifty, I return to a Kentucky where my elderly parents live. I see the beautiful neighborhoods of my childhood, the carefully tended lawns, the amazing flower gardens making even the poorest shack a place of beauty, turned into genocidal war zones as drugs destroy the heart of the community. Addiction is not about relatedness. And so it takes us away from community, from the appropriate nurturing of mind, body, and spirit. To heal our collective spiritual body the very ground we live on must be reclaimed. Significantly in his essay, “The Body and the Earth,” Wendell Bery shares this vital insight: “The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think about bodily health as compatible with spiritual confusion, or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or an impoverished soil.” Our visionary agrarian ancestors understood this. Tragically the power of dominator culture to dehumanize more often than not takes precedence over our collective will to humanize. Contemporary black folks who embrace victimhood as the defining ethos of their life surrender their agency. This surrender cannot be blamed on white folks. In more dire straits, slavery and the years thereafter, black folks found ways to nurture life sustaining values. They used their imagination. The created. We must remember that wisdom to resist falling into collective despair. We must, both individually and collectively, dare to critically examine our current relationship to the earth, to nature, to ecosystems and to local global environments. When I examined my relationship to the rural world that I grew up in, it was clear to me that I needed to rekindle the custodial relationship to land that was a defining characteristic of my Kentucky kin. I grew up in a rural area where many black elders owned lank. Some were rewarded by white employers for faithful service with the gift of an acre of two. That was often especially the case with individual black male sharecroppers who developed co-equal bonds with white bosses. Obviously, this was not the norm, but it is meaningful to register that folk can choose to move beyond the estrangement produced by exploitation and oppression to create bonds of community. Even though black farmers were more than fifty percent of the farming population as late as 1964, by 1982 farm ownership among black southerners declined. Stack offers this explanation: “As American agriculture consolidated and shook out

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the many poor people in its ranks, black farms went under at six times the rate of white farms. In county after county in every southern state, land that had been in black families for generations fell into the hands of white people.” And more importantly white folks who acquired land cheap, especially land previously owned by black folks, were not willing to sell land to black folk even for high prices. Years ago I came home to my native place to give a lecture. During the question and answer time I spoke about the white supremacy that is still pervasive when it comes to the issue of land ownership in Kentucky. Calling attention to the fact that white Kentuckians were often willing to sell land to white folks coming from other states rather than sell land to Kentucky black folks. In some cases black folks may have come from families who for generations worked white-owned land, but when that land came up for sale their offers were refused. Certainly the black Appalachian experience has always been contested by folks who either know little about Kentucky or refuse to accept the diversity of that history and the true stories of diversity in these hills. Not far from where I live in Madison County, a black man who has lived there all his life pleads with white folks to purchase land for him, and he will pay them cash. Often those rare individual black folks who purchase farm land or land in the hills find themselves paying more than their white counterparts would pay. In the old days, after slavery and reconstruction, this was called the “race tax”—“you can get it but you gotta pay more.” Your paying more reassures the racist white seller that white supremacy is still the order of the day for the white folks have shown they are smarter. When I first purchased land in the Kentucky hills, I was first a silent partner with a white male friend. We did not know whether or not the owner of the property would have been prejudiced against black folks, but we chose not to openly disclose our partnership until all transactions were completed. Many of my white friends and acquaintances who own land in the Kentucky hills are gay yet their gayness is not initially visible, and shared whiteness makes it possible for them to move into areas that remain closed to black folk because of prejudice. Liberal and progressive white folks who think it “cool” to buy land next to neighbors that are openly racist rarely understand that by doing so they are acting in collusion with the perpetuation of white supremacy. I like to imagine a time when the progressive non-black folks who own hundreds and hundreds of acres will sell small lots to black people, to diverse groups of people so

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that we might all live in beloved communities which honor difference. M. Scott Peck introduced his book, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, with the powerful insight that: “In and through community is the salvation of the world.” By definition, he tells us, community is inclusive. Writing about the issue of race in The Hidden Wound published in 1969 and then again in the 1988 afterward, Wendell Berry reminds us that issues of freedom and prosperity cannot be separated from “the issue of the health of the land,” that “the psychic wound of racism had resulted inevitably in wounds in the land, the country itself.” My own deep wounds, the traumas of my Kentucky childhood are marked by the meeting place of family dysfunction and the disorder produced by dominator thinking and practice, the combined effect of racism, sexism, and class elitism. When I left Kentucky I hoped to leave behind the paid of these wounds. That pain stayed with me until I began to do the work of wholeness, of moving from love into greater understanding of self and community. It is love that has led me to return home, to the Kentucky hills of my childhood where I felt the greatest sense of being one with nature, of being free. In those moments I always knew that I was more than my pain. Returning to Kentucky, doing my part to be accountable to my native place, enables me to keep a sublime hold on life. Every day I look out at Kentucky hills. They are a constant reminder of human limitations and human possibilities. Much hurt has been done to these Kentucky hills and yet they survive. Despite devastation, and the attempts by erring humans to destroy these hills, this earth, they will remain. They will witness our demise. There is a divinity here, a holy spirit that promises reconciliation.

CHAPTER 5

Bad Dog Alphonso Lingis

Ken is an academic too; he teaches education theory at a university in another city. He’s into critical theory—Paulo Freire, Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Henry Giroux, Slavoj Zizek, that kind of thing. Thing about academics, you get the whole summer to make contact with reality, learn something. This time we talked about Mongolia. “Mongolia was a Soviet satellite with military installations. I had looked into it once,” I said; “couldn’t get a tourist visa.”

A. Lingis (*)  Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_5

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“Shamans,” he came up with. “A shaman falls into a spell, maybe with a little help from our green and yellow friends, becomes a wolverine, a leopard, an eagle. It happens in Haiti, Nigeria, Bali, among the native Americans. But the word “shaman” comes from the shamanism of Siberia and Mongolia.” In fact Ken is allergic to religion, spiritism, animism, fetishism. None of that would stand up against critical theory. “Tartars,” I said. “In Lithuania the Mongols are called Tartars. Some Lithuanians told me my old man looked like he had some Tartar blood in him.” Ken is a big guy, strong as a horse, and he told me once that there was some talk in his family of Cossacks that raped in the area of Central Europe where his family came from. “In the Altaï mountains in the I think far east of Mongolia,” Ken had read on some Web site, “there’s a population of nomadic Kazakhs. It is only one theory,” he said, “that the Cossacks are related to the Kazakhs.” So we took the flight from Ulaanbaatar to Bayan Olgii, in the Altaï Mountains in the far west of Mongolia. At the airport we met a departing British NGO worker who said that bubonic plague had killed two people in the region and that the province would be closed to outsiders, quarantined, as soon the bureaucracy got all its papers stamped. “It happens regularly,” he told us. “The virus is in the marmots. When they come out of hibernation at the end of winter, wolves and people hunt them for food.” In the fourteenth century the Mongols brought that virus to Europe and a third of the population died. The Black Death. We asked the innkeeper if he knew someone with a vehicle who could take us for a round in the area. Shortly a young man came to our room, identifying himself as the English teacher at the high school here. He explained the nomads do not speak English and we would need a translator. The price would depend on how much gas would be used and what the driver wanted. He said he understood how visitors are distrustful of nomads in Mongolia, they think that once out in the distances they could be taken advantage of. He said he would write up a contract detailing what we would receive for the price; we would all sign it. He left to go locate a vehicle and driver. Ken said, “I’m going to visit this dude’s school. I bet they are ready to go charter, run the place for profit.” “We could give them some brochures, direct them to some websites,” I said. “Do something useful on a trip for once.”

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The innkeeper had a boy take us to a small mud brick house on the edge of town where we met Canat. He threw sheepskins over a bench along the wall, invited us to sit and served us tea. He was small and lean, a boyish body with quick movements; on his oval face his dark eyes remained impenetrable as he grinned or laughed showing perfect teeth. His nose was long and thin like the beak of a bird of prey. He said he could take us, tomorrow if we wanted. He pointed to a four-wheel drive outside whose cracked windshield swirled glints from the setting sun. He spoke rapidly in stumbling English, throwing in Russian words instead of slowing down to fish for the English. Often the rush of mismatched words seized up, and he fell back and yukked. I realized how much I wanted to spend the next week in the radius of his black eyes and sizzling energy. I glanced at Ken who nodded. We left at dawn. The four-wheel drive, of Russian make, which looked to me like a Jeep though less stylish, lurched across rocky slopes and sloshed through rivers. Canat relaxed expansively when we were far in the mountains and sighed with pleasure at the sight of the sweeping valleys that came into view as the jeepovich heaved over a mountain ridge. He sang songs in Kazakh, looked at us and laughed. The snows had retreated up and on the mountain flanks were scattered herds of horses, Bactrian camels, sheep and goats, and always two or three men or boys accompanying them. “Look at those horses,” Ken turned to me. “This, dude, is where it all started. The herdsmen who as the last Ice Age was melting down drove their herds northward and pushed the peoples up north yet more northward and over the Bering Strait to dribble down into our American hemisphere. These are the horses on which the warrior-nomads thundered westward to push and shove the Teutonic barbarians who overran and trashed the Roman Empire.” Remembering my old man’s mastodonic work horses, these horses looked like ponies to me. “On these horses the hordes of Chinggis Khan raced over to Korea, across China, down to Java, over to Hungary. Closing off the Silk Road and forcing the silk-coveting and spice-hungry Europeans to their boats to circumnavigate the Cape of Good Hope to overrun India and Indonesia and cross the Atlantic to plunder the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca.” “And rape. Rape during slack moments of history,” I muttered lest Canat caught that. Canat told us the Kazakhs here were the Dzuuz clan. Mostly it was enough to look at the treeless mountains, the people, their gear, and

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their animals to catch on the patterns and rhythms of activity. As a kid I spent whole days hanging out with the cattle and horses in the pastures. Canat knew everyone we saw, and each time stopped to exchange news and gossip. Ken asked how he knew English. “In Moscow,” he said. “When I finished high school I was picked out to go to the Soviet Union and study engineering. After two years they had me specialize in nuclear engineering.” “And you worked there as a nuclear engineer?” “Lots of places. We never knew where they were. We would be seated in cargo planes where we couldn’t look out the windows. When we got out there was no town, just a base camp.” So he had been at the launch centers in the last days of the thermonuclear arms race. When the US and Soviet Union had stockpiled enough thermonuclear weapons to destroy a Hiroshima-sized city every day for the next 550 years. (When I taught ethics I used to bring that up.) I had never even been in the army and looked at him as somebody out of a Star Wars movie. Couldn’t even think of a question to ask him about those weapons or about the scenarios they rehearsed for their use. I wondered if he might have been in Cuba during the missile crisis. “When the Soviet Union broke up,” he said, “the foreigners in the military were sent home. My military education was useless in Ulaanbaatar, but I did know Russian and English and passable Chinese, and got jobs, you know with export-import companies.” “Now you are staying here?” Ken asked. “After two years, I came back here. I am staying here.” “You transport stuff with this four-wheel drive?” “Yeah, the meat and skins the nomads have to sell. To Ulaanbaatar. Or to Siberia.” Siberia–that was a place I heard talk of a lot when I was a kid. Under the Czar, when my old man grew up there, troublemaking Lithuanians would be shipped off to Siberia. He had left Lithuania, crossing into East Prussia hidden in a hay wagon, in order to avoid being drafted into the Czarist army. The émigrés that came over after the war would tell of troublemakers being shipped to Siberia under the Soviets. Canat swung the vehicle around rocks, improvising charges into mountains that looked impervious to motorized vehicles. I thought he must have driven military vehicles across terrains as forbidding. Ken asked, “Are you still in touch with the Russians military specialists you had been teamed up with?”

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“Yeah,” he said. “We get together. They call me Bad Dog,” he laughed, then he barked. “I go to Moscow once or twice a year. I can drive there in four or five days.” At day’s end, we came to a ger camp. “Ger” is the word you use: “yurt” is a Russian word and not used by the Kazakhs or the Mongols. A ger, we saw, is some 15 feet in diameter; the circular wall is made of a wooden lattice frame that can be collapsed together for transport, the roof made of 90–110 spokes like a Chinese umbrella, the whole covered with felt made of wool pounded into sheets. Inside, the ground was covered with carpets, the walls with embroidered hangings in bright reds, purples, greens, and yellows. There were intricately carved chests. There was a Buddhist shrine veiled with the smoke of incense sticks. A low table was immediately covered with salted milk tea, breads, cheeses, curds, and pastries for us. Soon the ger was crowded with people, each addressing us ceremonious words of greeting we did not understand. Chunks of dried dung were lit in the iron stove in the center with a chimney pipe that extended up and out, pots of rice were cooked, lamb or goat stewed. We can tell nothing of our wanderings and encounters, but they, regularly refreshed with glasses of fermented mare’s milk, recount, shout, laugh. A young man played a stringed instrument rather like a mandolin. They were still drinking fermented mare’s milk and telling tales when sleep overtook us. In the chill morning the sheep, goats, and horses were milked. The sheep and goat milk will be made into cheeses; the mare’s milk fermented to drink. Then the animals went off to graze and we climbed into Tovarich Jeep. Ken and Canat talk cars. Ken has had 19 cars since he got his driver’s license, on average a car every six months. Bought on the cheap, no purebreds, so he knows every engine part that can blister, buckle, burst, blast. Ken starts talking about buying a Russian motorcycle and driving across Kazakhstan with Canat. In the late afternoon of the third day, we approached a group of four ger on the side of a robust stream. Canat told us his wife’s parents were here. He said his father-in-law had been the Communist governor of the province. They greeted us, and a young woman with them at once spread a low table with salted milk tea, breads, curds, cheeses. On the wall there was a painting of Lenin and a framed photo of the governor and his wife in formal Mongol dress. I asked the old man if he had been to the Soviet Union. Canat translated. Yes, he had, a number of

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times. He had also been to Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. I said my parents had come from Lithuania. Ken asked what he thought of the government in Mongolia now. “Things change,” he said. “There are good things and there are bad things. Things do not stay the same.” I asked him if this is where they live now. “In the summer,” he said. “In the winter we go down to the lower valleys where there is grazing for the animals.” When Canat made signs of leaving, I asked if I could take a photo of them. The old man opened a chest and took out a formal Mongol coat and waist sash, as his wife put on an embroidered shawl. They sat together and Canat and the young woman stood behind them, posed for a very formal picture. That night we drove on higher. In the morning, we watched Aralbai, his wife, and his two adolescent sons milk the flocks and send them off to graze and wander. Aralbai returned to the ger, opened a chest and took out a white shirt, black trousers, and a long black coat with silver buttons. He fastened a broad belt of silver. Finally he put on a hat made, Canat murmured to us, of the tails of fifty mink. We followed him outside to a stone corral on the flank of the mountain nearby where an eagle stood on a stump. She was tethered, we saw, with a stout cord fastened to one leg. Aralbai approached her, put on a leather sleeve and glove, untied the cord from her leg and she stepped on his hand. Canat translated his answers to my questions. The eagles are taken young from the cliff nests. It is female golden eagles that are taken, for they are the stronger hunters. A hawk is also kept and trained as a falcon; it will bring back hares and marmots to feed the eagle. When winter comes and the animals are in new thick fur, the hunters mount their horses and climb the mountains to release the eagles who soar over the mountains and return with foxes, lynx, even wolves. Eagles live 40 or 50 years; after ten years the hunters release their eagles into nature so that they can find mates and reproduce. The eagle hunters wear this dress and these hats made of the tails of fifty mink. There are about two hundred of them in the Altaï Mountains. Aralbai held the eagle on his arm and gazed expressionless and long in the distances. In that gaze I saw the fierce intent, patience, and love of the high mountains of the eagle. Then he shouted and raised his arm and the eagle spread her wings and plunged upward into the sky. She rose higher in spirals until I could hardly see her in the whiteout of the sky.

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After some twenty minutes she was overhead and then dove down, talons stretched for Aralbai’s arm. The eagle’s eyes were dark and impenetrable and her black beak edged with gold gleamed like a dagger. Ken, who grew up and lives in a city, stood well back from her. Aralbai gave me a thick leather glove and sleeve and passed the eagle to me. She gripped my sleeved arm with her talons; I felt she weighed 20 pounds; I propped up my arm with my other arm. I felt her fierce heart beating for the mountains and the skies. She turned her yellow eyes on me. She relaxed her talons so that they did not cut into the glove. After awhile she opened her wings, they spread wider than I am tall, but she did not crouch to dive skyward. I loosened my arm and stroked her tail, then her wings, then her head. When we left Aralbai looked long at me in the eyes and held my hand. Canat told me he had said, “Come back in winter, when the animals are in fur.”

CHAPTER 6

Walking the Way: Transforming Being in Transit Jason M. Wirth

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? —Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1862) Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más; caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.1 —Antonio Machado, Proverbios y cantares 29, Campos de Castilla (1912)

For Stewart E. Wirth, who long knew these things Where are we going that we are in such a hurry? I am writing this in an age in which the distance between states, provinces, nations, and continents is often informally measured by the time that it takes to journey by airplane from one to another. What began

J. M. Wirth (*)  Seattle University, Seattle, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_6

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as the exhilarating advent of ready contact with far-flung peoples and locales has helped exacerbate the shrinking of the earth’s biological and cultural diversity into the monocultural trap of a global village. Transnational corporations extend their reach, US-inspired fast food dominates the global diet, and exotic cultures are re-packaged as quaint tourist attractions for global consumption. Meanwhile traffic congestion snarls the roads of most of the world’s cities and airport security and late or canceled flights on cramped airplanes provide counter evidence that flying has improved our lives. According to the industry magazine Wards Auto, the number of vehicles in the world reached one billion in 2010 and continues to rise steeply. This was double the amount of vehicles from only 24 years earlier.2 With vehicles come roads and the world continues to be paved over, leveling the earth to an increasingly human scale. The internet and social media, once the promise of the free flow of decentralized news and creativity, have also fostered the rapid dissemination of fake news and allowed Google, Amazon, Facebook, Bing, and a few other giants to become gatekeepers of knowledge on a historically unprecedented scale. Information has never spread so quickly and efficiently yet so monolithically and perniciously. The global explosion of refugee camps attests that transit for the poor and vulnerable remains often involuntary and traumatic. Lurking in the background of these rapid watershed developments is the calamitously unfolding earth-wide ecological emergency. Being in transit on an earth increasingly remade to accord with human and capitalist interests describes an ever larger aspect of our being-in-the(global) world. In acknowledging this, my point is not to catalogue the talking points of a reactionary response. Increased proximity has brought about many human goods. “Exchange is oxygen,” Aimé Césaire rightly claimed in 1955.3 Yet just as Césaire claimed that the problem of colonialism was not the fact of contact but rather the manner of contact, I would also like to raise some concerns about the manner of contact (with each other and the earth itself) that being in transit currently entails. Our “being in transit” contains both great possibilities and catastrophes. Resistance to the latter should not be confused with reaction. In a 1969 broadsheet distributed without charge entitled “Four Changes,” the poet, philosopher, and activist Gary Snyder, writing under his Zen Dharma name Chōfū (Listen to the Wind), claimed that the change begins first in “our own heads.”4 This aspect of the transformation of “being in transit” is the concern of this essay. ***

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Taking up the second of the four changes, pollution (the other three being population, consumption, and transformation), Chōfū Snyder argues that: We are fouling our air and water, and living in noise and filth that no “animal” would tolerate, while advertising and politicians try and tell us that we have never had it so good. The dependence of the modern governments on this kind of untruth leads to shameful mind pollution: mass media and most school education. (TI, 94)

Strikingly, Snyder’s “transformative” actions include the intentional practice of walking in a manner that opposes its public image as a quaint remnant of superseded old ways. Once upon a time our ancestors walked because they had little other choice. It is quite something else to elect to walk in a world of over a billion automobiles. Exhorting us to “use less cars,” Snyder advocates ride sharing and hitchhiking, but also rediscovering the transformative power of walking as a practice: “Also—a step toward the new world—walk more; look for the best routes through beautiful countryside for long distance walking trips: San Francisco to Los Angeles down the Coast Range, for example” (TI, 95). The reigning form of locomotion up and down the west coast of Turtle Island is now the dramatically congested Interstate 5, which connects one traffic snarled urban sprawl to another. In the sixties it largely replaced the old US Route 99, which had connected Calexico, California (on the Mexican border) to Blaine, Washington (on the border of British Columbia). A large part of US 99 in turn, however, generally tracked the route of the ancient Siskiyou Trail, which connected California’s Central Valley to the northern reaches of Oregon’s Willamette Valley near Portland. Settler colonialists used it for trapping, hunting, and trading, but they had appropriated it from a network of ancient indigenous walking paths. This world of perambulation had largely disappeared in the industrialized world by 1969 and was under threat everywhere else. Snyder’s counsel now sounds all the more prophetic as the situation has continued to deteriorate precipitously. Snyder conceded over twenty-five years later that “the apprehension that we felt in 1969 has not abated”: Many of the larger mammals face extinction, and all manner of species are endangered. Natural habitat (“raw land”) is fragmented and then destroyed (“developed”). The world’s forests are being relentlessly

90  J. M. WIRTH logged by multinational corporations. Air, water, and soil are all in worse shape. Population continues to climb, and even if it were a world of perfect economic and social justice, I would argue that ecological justice calls for fewer people. The few remaining traditional people with place-based sustainable economies are driven into urban slums and cultural suicide. The quality of life for everyone everywhere has gone down, what with resurgent nationalism, racism, violence both random and organized, and increasing social and economic inequality. There are whole nations for whom daily life is an ongoing disaster.5

Never have we moved more yet walked less. The Siskiyou Trail is gone, and walking does not robustly belong to the practice of being human but rather to the activity of optional virtues like hiking. Now “our expeditions are but tours” Thoreau lamented in 1862.6 What hope does walking have in clearing our own heads and responding to the catastrophic dimensions of being in transit? Just as Heidegger argued that the problem of technology had little to do with the fact of machines but rather with a mode of being in the world in which the domineering and all-pervasive human subject cannot come into question, the catastrophic dimension of being in transit has little to do with the fact of planes, trains, and automobiles—there are many ways in which they are or at least can be valuable. It has more to do with a certain mind set in which the practice of electively walking is not somehow indicative of humanity’s rootedness in the earth. In an essay written at the end of his life, and despite what Rebecca Solnit characterized as its “preaching” and “sermonizing,”7 Thoreau’s Walking still succeeds in raising the alarm and does not shy from debunking the misperception that walking is an innocent activity: Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand!

For Thoreau, a tame earth is a boring and predictable earth, populated by lives of quiet desperation and the reign of official consciousness—“all good things are wild and free” (W, 42). He was already cognizant of what was being lost long before the acceleration of industrialization by what Snyder called “energy slaves,” that is, fossil fuels as the new form of

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slave labor that extends our domination to an unprecedented degree and “throws a whole society off keel into excess, confusion, and addiction.”8 What to do about the mounting cheapness of an increasingly monocultural world? Thoreau’s response is nothing short of calling for a new “people” who emerge from what would now be stigmatized as eco-terrorism: reversing the movement of progress by letting the forest stand while destroying some of our domestic improvements (“burning the fences”). In Edward Abbey’s 1975 classic, The Monkey Wrench Gang,9 the widowed Dr. A. K. Sarvis and his young paramour Bonnie Abzug subject the billboards of the desert Southwest to “all-cleansing fire, all-purifying flame” (MWG, 10). They eventually meet up with George Hayduke and the jack Mormon polygamist Seldom Seen Smith to engage in a counterattack against the industrial destruction of the earth. Like the book’s inspiration, the mythical Ned Ludd, they sabotage machines not as evils in themselves, but as forerunners of an omnivorous industrial mindset. Although these modern Luddites strive to “keep it like it was” (MW, 82), their interventions were neither reactionary nor nostalgic. They drive their vehicles to their sabotage operations. “Dr. Sarvis told his comrades about a great Englishman named Ned. Ned Ludd. They called him a lunatic but he saw the enemy clearly. Saw what was coming and acted directly” (MW, 68). (Ned Ludd legendarily destroyed knitting frames and became the symbol of the British workers’ sabotage of the mechanical harbingers of industrialization until they were brutally crushed by the government in 1812.) In Abbey’s eyes, the neo-Luddite Monkey Wrench Gang clearly sees through the self-delusion of progress. Progress is, as Thoreau said of the telegraph in the second chapter of Walden (“Where I Lived and What I Lived For”), “improved means to unimproved ends.” We are getting better and better at doing the same old stupid things. In reflecting on why he drinks beer while driving in order to measure the distances between locations in the amount of six packs that he consumes in transit (e.g., “Phoenix to New York, thirty-five six packs”), Hayduke ponders the relationship between time and space in the age of being in transit. Time is at war with space. Time is relative, said Heraclitus a long time ago, and distance a function of velocity. Since the ultimate goal of transport technology is the annihilation of space, the compression of all Being into one pure point, it follows that six packs help. Speed is the ultimate drug and rockets run on alcohol. (MWG, 18)

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In a way, Hayduke is supremely honest: if we are drunkenly annihilating space, we may as well actually drink beer. At the risk of too much abstraction, it may be worthwhile to sketch the manner in which time is attacking space. The first step would not be to blame time as such. Time must first become “time,” that is, it must be converted from the impermanence and dynamism of all beings—what Dōgen, the great Kamakura period Zen Master and philosopher, memorably called uji, time-being, that time is the emptiness of being, its lack of self-same identity. Time becomes “time,” however, when it is abstracted into an infinite iteration of conventional units of measurement, e.g., seconds, minutes, hours, six packs of beer. There must then be something to measure, and this demands that we convert time-being into beings in time, that is, into entities that begin, endure, and eventually perish over a given span of time. Entities are themselves, have their own being, throughout the span of their existence. The key to the success of this illusion is first and foremost to imagine that one’s own being persists in time. Time is not the becoming of my being anew, but rather the persistence of my identity through time. As such, I conclude that life is short, that time is fleeting, and that I need to seize the day and cram as much as I can into the brevity of my life. Space appears external to me, as resisting the urgency of my need to appropriate it and make it my own before it is too late. Since space contests the finite span of the ego and thwarts its appropriative desires, it must be transformed into places that it can quickly and efficiently traverse. Velocity measures the rate of appropriation. The faster I go, the more I get. The ultimate logic of such velocity is the “compression of all Being into one pure point.” Such “time” consumes space, overcoming its resistance and converting it into “time”: the less space there is, the more “time” there is. Transit requires fewer and fewer six packs as space offers less and less resistance. Yet one might ask: where are we going that we are in such a hurry? From whence the urgent need to compress space in order to maximize the velocity of transit? How did we become so convinced that we all had a destination, that knowing it was obvious, and that it justified the neutralization of the wild into the negative space between where we are and where we are going? Given that the price of utterly re-engineering the earth to accommodate our headlong dash into whatever destinations supposedly justify the urgency of this “progress” is the increasingly likely

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ecological devastation of the earth as a place that sustains human flourishing, is this not a form of madness? Dr. Sarvis thought so. “The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life … Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness … Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal” (MWG, 63). Just as wilderness healed the wounds of John Muir’s ascetic Christian upbringing and liberated Thoreau from the quiet despair of hyperregulation, we still seek “psychiatric refuge” in the wild places of our commons (public lands). Yet these lands are shrinking all over the world as capitalist systems continue to subject the earth to the pillage of what Marx called “primitive accumulation.” There is no faster route to shrinking space than by privatizing it and then engineering the negative space between all of the private islands of property with efficient roads. Thoreau’s “mass of men” who “lead lives of quiet desperation” in the opening chapter of Walden implicitly return in Walking as those “who have confined themselves to the highway” (W, 8). Walking defies this minimization and gives space its due. From this perspective, it is no longer the antiquated, that is, slow, teleological transit from one’s present station to a foreordained destination. Walking is the practice of human living without an overarching mission or destination. Thoreau feared that the way that is made in its walking would be vanquished by the desperation of official roads and efficient modes of transportation. This would be the time “when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds” (W, 20). The practice of walking contests the reduction of the earth to property. As the climate emergency demonstrates, the earth agrees with Thoreau and is now in the process of practicing eminent domain. It is we who belong to earth, not the other way around. Walking is a practice of belonging. Within five years of its appearance, The Monkey Wrench Gang and its determined neo-Luddite saboteurs directly inspired the creation of the Earth First! movement and its infamous acts of sabotage (or ecotage). I would argue that civil disobedience is a more compassionate and effective response than ecotage and that it better resists being neutralized as domestic terrorism. The cultivation of a practice of walking is after all a kind of civil disobedience. Earth First! has increasingly realized a more non-violent strategy in their own way. That being said, we should

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not forget that even ecotage is not a violent interruption of the benign march of civilization and the unsullied good of progress. Whether one fights non-violently or violently, one is contesting an unfathomably violent assault on both the earth and the human imagination (progress as the assault that gives rise to an increasingly boring and tame earth populated by quietly desperate boors). It is to take a stand against the insanity of progress. It is not as if this madness has at least succeed—as advertised—in making us freer, if by that we minimally mean that the war on space has actually succeeded in freeing up time. In the sixties, the Japanese coined a neologism, karōshi, “overwork death,” to describe occupational sudden mortality. (The South Koreans and Chinese now call it gwarosa and guolaosi, respectively.) Super-commuting (i.e., commutes of ninety minutes or more) is on the rise and we work harder and harder, madly rushing all over the place, as if this was somehow either necessary or desirable. As Rebecca Solnit explains: The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them. (WHW, 10)

The progress marked by the madness of our being in transit obscures what the California poet Robinson Jeffers in the preface to The Double Axe (1948) called Inhumanism, which shifts the emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.10

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In Melville’s Moby-Dick, one of the most searching examinations of the American madness, Captain Ahab, humiliated by the grandeur of the white whale that took his leg, the loneliness of a life spent largely unnoticed at sea, the anonymity of death, and the vast uncontrollable sovereignty of the sea, was driven to the insane mission of subjugating the leviathan. Ahab “piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down” (chapter 41, Moby Dick). As Charles Olson memorably phrases it, in Ahab there is nothing but hate, “huge and fixed upon the imperceptible,” a “solipsism which brings down a world.”11 This is the madness of our humanism, the violence of our self-absorbed speciesism. Our bellicose rush to cultivate the earth also gives rise to a second form of speed: our urgent desire to flee what we have made. Milan Kundera’s comic masterpiece, Slowness, begins with a motorcyclist driving at breakneck speed because it made him forget himself, “noncorporeal, non-material, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.”12 Our rush to remake the earth in our image gives rise to the rush to get away from it all, to hasten to our happy place, whether it is Walt Disney World or a far-flung exotic locale, which in this scenario become the same kind of place. To reiterate: the obsessive velocity of being in transit has nothing essential to do with the fact of transit. The practicing of walking is a metaphor and can be practiced even by those who cannot physically walk. International travel, which can broaden our horizons dramatically and salubriously, can be a part of a practice of walking. The problem is rather genealogical: what is expressed or what is working itself out in the quiet desperation of being in transit? Why do we confuse the need to cultivate some parts of our selves and our bioregions with the harried ambition to put everyone and everything at our disposal? As Thoreau presciently reflected, “I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more that I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest” (W, 48). Although it might be overly idealistic to conclude that Thoreau was also implicitly advocating for women, he at least admits that he suspects that women absolutely cannot “stand” being confined to the house (W, 10). The same could be said of all vulnerable and exploited peoples. (Who appropriates the earth and which peoples

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are thereby appropriated? Hyper-cultivation is not an equal opportunity anxiety.) Nonetheless, however imperfectly articulated, Thoreau strived in his person and in his world to keep some of the wild (within and without) as it was. As he found his peregrinations inclined westward to the wild promise of what at the time was not yet cultivated, I cannot help remembering that Thoreau wrote this essay at the very end of his life when the journey to the wild west also suggested the journey toward death, toward a future that absolutely resists cultivation. Is not our hurry to appropriate the earth somehow connected to our dishonesty about death? Meanwhile we suck up the earth as if it and we are in infinite supply and then we rush to get away from what we have made by taking a vacation or otherwise intoxicating ourselves. Five years after Walking appeared, a young John Muir “set forth … gentle and free”13 from Indianapolis and walked a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico. He used a compass to make his way silently through Indianapolis until he found a road heading south. He spoke nothing of grand motivations or heroic adventures. His plan was “simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest” (TMW, 1–2). Reminiscent of the way that Thoreau’s Walking does not concern itself with the Civil War raging during the time of its composition, as Muir traverses the American South, savaged by the Civil War and beset by the chaos of Reconstruction, he is most interested in botany. Although he notices that the “negroes” are “extremely polite” and now “paid seven to ten dollars a month” (TMW, 52–53), such observations have the same bemused but detached impartiality as his copious botanical observations. “Between Thompson and Augusta I found many new and beautiful grasses …” (TMW, 54). This is not to downplay racism or the gravity of life in the Reconstruction South or to defend Muir, but rather to emphasize an aspect of the practice of walking at the dawn of the age of being in transit. We now all imagine that we know where we are going and where everyone else should be going. Of course, such knowledge is sometimes critical, but it is also important to know the Muir who loved trees, flowers, and grasses for their own sake as he traversed lands and rivers that are now in ecological crisis. Muir’s Florida, for example, was “so watery

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and vine-tied that pathless wanderings are not easily possible in any direction” (TMW, 89). He had to follow the railroad tracks, but in so doing, he gazed “into the mysterious forest, Nature’s own. It is impossible to write the dimmest picture of plant grandeur so redundant, unfathomable” (TMW, 90). It is now difficult to imagine that such forests once characterized many parts of Florida. Efficient anthropocentric travel corridors and massive human populations have largely vanquished inhumanist grandeur. Walking the earth without a destination, wayfaring without a way except for the one made by wayfaring itself, evokes one of our oldest and most cherished images of the practice of walking: adhering to Dao, 道. The Way is not the way from here to there and it moves without destination and as such demands not the will to progress but rather the awakening of mindfulness. This is in part what Snyder has in mind when he speaks of the practice of the wild. Walking names not the fact of walking or the need to sometime walk or even the elective pleasure of taking a walk. It names a manner of being in transit as the practice of the wild (the latter itself also one of Snyder’s translations of 道). David Robertson characterized what he dubbed Snyder’s “hiking”— what we are here calling less ambiguously the practice of walking—as a “way of furthering a political, social, and spiritual revolution. … The essential nature of things is not an Aristotelian plot nor a Hegelian dialectic, and does not lead to a goal. Therefore, it cannot be the object of a quest, as for the grail.”14 Life has no ultimate task and requires no grail to fulfill it. It is already full. This is not to discount compassionate intervention or striving for justice. These too belong to the fullness of time-being (uji) and express our gratitude for the walking of the Way. Snyder translates the famous opening line of the Dao De Jing to distinguish wayfaring from progress: “The way that can be followed (‘wayed’) is not the constant way,” which for Snyder says: “A path that can be followed is not a spiritual path.”15 Snyder calls this path the “wilderness. There is a ‘going’ but no goer, no destination, only the whole field” (PW, 162). As such, it requires overcoming our anxiety before death and the stinginess of the mad dash toward progress at all costs and by any (desperate) means necessary. As Dōgen wrote in the fascicle “Bodaisatta Shi Shōhō [The Bodhisattva’s Four Methods of Guidance]”: “making a living and producing things can be nothing other than giving. To leave flowers to the wind, to leave birds to the seasons, are also acts of giving.”16

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Notes







1. “Wayfarer, your footprints are the way and nothing more; wayfarer, there is no way, the way is made by walking” (my translation). 2. John Sousanis, “World Vehicle Population Tops 1 Billion Units,” Wards Auto, August 15, 2011. 3. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 11. 4. Editions that proliferated starting in 1969 include the beautiful broadside that Noel Young printed for the Unicorn Book Shop in November 1969. The text was reprinted in Turtle Island (New York: New Direction, 1974) and remains readily available in this format. Henceforth TI. 5. Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds: New and Selected Prose (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995), p. 46. 6.  Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1862) (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1992), p. 6. Henceforth W. 7. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York and London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 122. Henceforth WHW. 8. Gary Snyder, The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016), p. 28. 9. Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) (New York and London: Harper Perennial, 2006). Henceforth MWG. 10. Robinson Jeffers, The Double Axe and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1948), p. vii. 11. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (1947) (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 73. 12. Slowness [La lenteur] (1995), trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 2. 13. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, ed. William Frederic Badè (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), p. 1. Henceforth TMW. Although Muir took his thousand-mile walk in 1867, his account of it was not published until 1916, almost two years after his death. 14. Quoted in Solnit, WHW, 146. 15. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (1990) (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010), p. 161. Henceforth PW. 16. Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010), p. 474.

CHAPTER 7

Home Schooling: Philosophy Without Travel Nickolas Pappas

If you fear not when your life will end, but that you might never have begun to live according to nature, you will … cease being a stranger in your homeland. Marcus Aurelius.1

“Before You Die” What is a place to go before you die? If this question arose in a philosophical dialogue, with Socrates ­asking Euthyphro such a thing, Euthyphro might have begun by answering “Delphi” or “Crete,” and Socrates would have to say that’s not what he was asking. “You tell me the names of some places to go. I want to know: What makes a place a place to go before you die?” I will take the Socratic form of the question for my own. The reason to ask is that classifying destinations in such terms is one of the ways we equate traveling with learning; and just what traveling might have to do with learning is my topic. “Do this before you die” in N. Pappas (*)  City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_7

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other contexts is advice meant to keep you alive. Quit smoking, exercise, have this surgery done before you die; which is a way of saying to have the surgery done, etc., in order that you might live. Said the way “Stop smoking” is said, “See Mexico City before you die” suggests that the visit will have life-imparting force. Am I taking a common phrase too much to heart? But the command to do things and go places is so often presented along with those three little words that they must be saying something. And given that everything you do, every foreign land you visit, and so on, is what you do and visit while alive, the phrase can’t be sorting among places you must go to. The purpose is not to separate cities to visit before death from the ones you can go to any time after that. The phrase is a metaphor.—Fine. But a metaphor for what? I admit that by speaking generally I have let some of the saying’s flavor evaporate. It’s often not simply “Go to Egypt, Paris, Waterloo” but “See” them. If you can you will see the world. At least see the pyramids. See Angkor Wat. Take in knowledge about these places; learn something. In other words, human life is about learning. The language of excursions and racing against the deadline does not entice me as it may entice other people, but a goodhearted wish for human happiness lies behind that terminology, and a suitably traditional thought about the characteristic human life and the desire to know.

Life Is a Journey The maniacal interest in travel that inspires lists of destinations to reach before dying is also at work behind a commoner, innocuous-looking saying. Suppose we don’t ask what “Life is a journey” tells us about life, as the sentence purports to do—that you change as you grow, etc.—and let ourselves wonder what it implies about journeys. If life is a journey, what do we call a hike through Alaska? You may want to say that life’s status as a journey makes this particular trip a distillation of life’s essence. By the same reasoning, if you find human society theatrical, and human exchanges masked or rehearsed, the theater may appeal to you as human life’s silhouette or cameo. But the analogy can work in the opposite direction. When Socrates says to Phaedrus that sexually abstemious lovers are the true winning athletes, calling the challenge to pass life chastely “truly Olympian,”2 Plato is giving his readers a reason not to care about the regular Olympics. Those competitions are all very well in their place, but philosophers know about a kind of training that athletic training can’t compare to.3

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I suspect that the idea of life as a journey originated in cultures in which some members went on journeys—men seeking food—while others, say the women, stayed home. If I stayed behind and heard from our people’s best raconteurs what the trip had been like, I might find a reason to say that a lot had been happening at home, too. We have stories of our own. And if stories begin as journeys, or on account of journeys, then what takes place at home could also be understood as travel. It’s possible to have adventures without venturing. If we can recognize the dignity and wisdom of stay-at-homes without having to imagine them traveling through life; now that people who do not roam on a hunt no longer have to redescribe gardening and sewing as a kind of cross-country hunt; you might say that the metaphor of life as travel no longer performs that commendable task for which it was invented, and maybe isn’t doing anything useful at all. “And yet (the answering voice might say) I want to acknowledge the experience that goes into human life. They say ‘See Seville and die’ because it’s good to see and learn. When you realize how much more you understand than you did as a child, it’s natural to visualize that expansion in your knowledge as a distance between the child and you, hence a distance you have traveled, hence as if on a journey”. This is maybe not the voice of common sense but something even better: a voice that knows it is pointless to imagine serious talk without metaphors, despite the risk of those metaphors’ going wrong now and then. Let’s not forget that metaphors don’t go wrong the way bombs do. Can’t we all be civilized?

A Stranger Rides into Town: For Example— In keeping with the old tendency that favors active over passive, Euthyphro agrees that carrying comes before and causes the state of being carried. Loving causes (is logically prior to) the state of being in love.4 And maybe I’m making such a point of resisting the thought of life as travel because it lavishes its attention on the one who goes—the active one—remaining incurious about the condition or state or experience of being traveled to. Whether life’s peregrinations render every person a pilgrim a fortiori, or they imply that only pilgrims really count as persons, active travel (literal, spiritual, or existential) accounts for the learning that human beings prize.

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If there can be no being-traveled-to without a prior fact of travel that is its cause, it still does not follow from this logical priority that the traveler’s understanding of the encounter is more fundamental to human experience, although a long-standing association between travel and narrative has encouraged us to see the traveler as the one who learns. That inclination is clear in our culture’s defining document of travel. The tales Odysseus tells the Phaeacians may end with the ones being visited changing: Cyclops blinded in his cave, Calypso heartbroken in hers. But the tales do not depict and rarely so much as invite you to imagine the visited land’s confrontation with itself. “What if we’ve been wrong all this time?” The Sirens don’t wonder such a thing; Circe doesn’t, nor Scylla. As for the lotus eaters, I assume that they forgot about Odysseus’s men as soon as the men had left. The exception among Odysseus’s hosts, and this is more like an invitation to imagine than a narration, is the last trip he takes. It is the one he will take after the Odyssey ends. On a compelling recent interpretation, it is the trip that blocks off all rival traditions of the “Odysseus slept here” variety, for it explains how it could come to pass that he had no further adventures.5 The Odysseus lore is being prohibited from growing. Odysseus will make his last journey with an oar in his hand, walking so far inland that someone asks him about that peculiar winnowing fan he’s carrying. They don’t know ships in this landlocked place, because they don’t know the sea, and they eat their food without salt. Odysseus will plant his oar in that place and establish the worship of Poseidon, the god who thwarted his return with those long detours. Once he has satisfied that god he can go back to Ithaca and Penelope and stay there.6 If they don’t recognize the oar in his hand, those inlanders will not know much about travelers. By comparison most of the people Odysseus reported on to Alcinous knew exactly what a sailor is. Sailors were their bread and butter, or would be if these people knew what bread was. For the inlanders also differ from Sirens, lotus eaters, and Odysseus’s other impediments to returning home, in practicing agriculture. Until he reaches the Phaeacians he does not see wheat being grown.7 The people of the inland might not recognize oars, but tools for threshing wheat are their point of reference. In other words, they stay put. They have a home and a settled way of life that you would not call a journey. And it is into this settled life that Odysseus intrudes, with a message they can scarcely absorb.

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“Poseidon,” he says, but they haven’t heard that name. “He’s the god of the sea,” he says. What’s the sea? “Great salt water.” What is salt? In order to carry out his mandate and earn himself peaceful long life, Odysseus will have to use all his shrewdness in communicating with the inlanders. Telling his usual stories is out of the question, for they are tales of sailing and being tormented by Poseidon. To the landlocked farmers he comes to, the explicatory conversation he does develop will open up new possibilities about transportation, diet, worship, and the map of the earth. The encounter will leave Odysseus as he was and ready to return to Ithaca, governing without further mythic experiences. It will bring the inlanders into another world. They learn by being traveled to, in this episode that lies beyond the narrative reach of the Odyssey as Achilles’ death lies after the Iliad’s end. If the Greek world listened to the Iliad to understand the untold tale of how their greatest heroes could have been destroyed, perhaps the Odyssey’s untold episode performed a similar task of informing the present, as a time in which learning takes place through conversation with a radically different visitor (which might mean: a philosopher).

Anacharsis Lucian of Samosata wrote in Greek but among Romans, during the Imperial period and amid the process, now called Romanization, through which the disparate peoples who made up the Empire assimilated their practices and mythologies to Roman ones. In this context Lucian pictured a legendary unassimilated foreigner visiting the old preclassical Athens of Solon. It is Anacharsis the Scythian, not a farmer but someone who did travel from far inland. Herodotus made the Scythians one of the wild populations outside Greek territory. Even in that early depiction they could be curious about Greek culture. One of their kings, Scylas, found opportunities to walk around in Greek clothes, although he overstepped the bounds of proper curiosity when he also started to practice Dionysian rites in his homeland.8 The story evidently became a prototype for later tales of the backwoods foreigner arriving to behold Greek (and then Roman) culture with surprise.

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Lucian has Anacharsis drop in on an Athenian gymnasium. He finds people stripping as if to bathe, and then not bathing. They oil themselves and then wrestle. They fight, in other words, as if they were angry, although he sees the same combatants behaving like friends. Nudity ought to serve the purpose of getting clean and here it does not; wrestling ought to serve the purpose of beating down an enemy. What madness has taken over these people, Anacharsis asks his host the Athenian sage Solon.9 Lucian plays the scene for laughs, but not at the barbarian’s expense. Anacharsis is not here to learn but to show the locals that they have something to learn about themselves. What Anacharsis finds confusing should perplex a Roman too. In the time of Lucian, Rome had adopted some Greek athletic practices, although Romans still questioned some of its manifestations, like the ubiquitous Greek nudity.10 The foreign observer lets a Roman interrogate what had been unquestioned trappings of civilization. In recent decades Anacharsis was a model for Jed Clampett, from The Beverly Hillbillies, especially when that series followed its founding premise of satirizing affluent American life.11 Sometimes episodes got easier laughs by ogling rural culture (as the Greeks would ridicule foreigners, very much including the Scythians), but when The Beverly Hillbillies stuck to its motivating impulse it made Jed an exotic and wise observer like Anacharsis. Jed’s wisdom came out in his country sayings: “happier than an itchy pig against a rail fence,” etc. He and his family moved from their dirt farm to Beverly Hills, where they reacted to the status symbols of 1960s America as Anacharsis reacted to classical Athens. The pool table must be a fancy eating table, because who would build such a well-appointed piece of furniture and then not eat on it? In such fantasies of the arriving observer, what had previously gone unnoticed now calls for explanation. Even when the visitor requests information, it is the locals who learn, at least in the way that philosophy makes you learn, namely not by producing news or facts, but by problematizing what had been considered news and facts. The visiting foreigner plays Socrates, which is not a surprise considering the moments in which Socrates, despite never having left Athens, plays a visiting foreigner—at his trial, for instance, preparing the jurors for a presentation they might consider uncouth. “I’m a stranger to the way people talk here [in court]. If I were a real foreigner, you would forgive me for talking with the voice and the manner I was bred to, so please do the same with the way I talk now.”12

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Here and elsewhere Plato has Socrates using the exotic (to Athenians) Egyptian oath “by the dog,” apparently referring to Anubis.13 We know Socrates is not a stranger to these parts, but he likes to impersonate one. He tells Theaetetus, “You may have heard I am atopôtatos” (and yes, Theaetetus has heard that),14 and although the word means “most eccentric” or “very strange,” it translates literally into “most out of place,” extremely not in one’s topos “place,” as if because taken far from home. Socrates’ uncanniness consisted in his ability to present himself among his fellow Athenians as if a stranger (here like the cave’s escaped prisoner when returning). He inspired later philosophical gestures that called for imagining literal outsiders, not in the belief that people elsewhere philosophize as people at home do not, but in truer fashion suspecting that people can philosophize at home only upon being traveled to; letting the stranger discover them.

Modern Philosophy An apparent foreigner enters the Meditations before Descartes tells of his first day sitting down to write. In a foreword, actually a “letter of dedication” to ecclesiastical authorities, Descartes explains why he should set about to prove God’s existence and goodness, when faithful Christians trust in such things without proof.15 Think of the “infidels [infidelibus],” Descartes’ preface says in reply to such objections. He does not specify which ones he means but sounds as if he is referring to those who live outside Christendom. Rigorous philosophizing therefore means opening one’s principles to doubt as they might be doubted by an unbeliever of the sort who had never been exposed to religion. Kant’s foreigner actually comes to Paris. Trying (in Critique of Judgment) to explain the relationship between judgments of beauty and assessments of the worth of existing things, Kant quotes an Iroquois chief in Paris. The chief expresses no admiration for the architecture in Paris but much prefers the Parisian restaurants.16 In this example, which Kant may be revising from a diplomatic mission that Iroquois leaders took to France in 1666, we hear the European’s frustration over how to justify aesthetic claims. The construction of Paris presupposed (or so Kant would say) disinterested reflection on a beauty that is independent of gratification. How will an argument justify that kind of reflection to someone who after all is right to like

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French food? Here we were with food but also much more, and now it strikes us that what is more than that might have no grounding. Here too it is not travel but being traveled to that inspires philosophizing about that which otherwise had always been done this way. Foreign visitors make more oblique appearances in the writings of other modern philosophers, but it is remarkable how consistently they work as a challenge to what had been accepted without challenge. So Locke, to pick only one example, mocks the Scholastic definition of motion by picturing a Dutchman’s offering that definition when asked what the word “beweeginge” meant.17 Hume raises the stakes from the contrivances of culture (Greek gymnastics, Parisian architecture) to what had been considered fundamentally natural. You might have believed that the relationship between cause and effect holds between objects in nature, and heedless of a culture’s teachings. Hume asks about the causal relation as a meeker skeptic might ask about table etiquette. “Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world”—an Anacharsis washed ashore when he’d been heading somewhere else; or a visitor from further away than Scythia—“he would, indeed,” Hume says, “immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another; but he would not be able to discover anything further. He would not, at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect.”18 This unexpected guest would not see a causal force passing from the earlier event to the later one. We can’t even say where he would have to go if he got it into his head (and put it on his list) to see the causal force before he died. Hume’s visitor is the type who’d be called a “man from Mars” in later centuries. With a little bit of science fiction we can expand his example and picture, or we think we’re picturing, the ultimate outsider to everything we can call our culture, and grounds for challenging that culture. Already Nietzsche, writing one century after Hume, has the basis of science fiction available to him. While Zarathustra rejoins human society as an archaic figure, the story of his latter-day experiences bears some resemblance to the modern genre of science fiction, as mapped out by Verne and Wells, that came into existence while Nietzsche was writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The “telephone to the beyond [ein Telephon des Jenseits]” in one passage from Genealogy of Morals Essay has a flavor of

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science fiction to it; so does Nietzsche’s remark, in that same book, that as seen from a distant heavenly body, the Majuskel Schrift “big writing” of human existence would be gelesen, would be read, to say that our planet is essentially ascetic.19 On Nietzsche’s variation of the man from Mars, extraterrestrials don’t even have to come to Earth and ask why we deny our own bodily natures as we do. They can watch us from their world and detect what Earthlings have not even realized was there to be detected. Nietzsche’s preface to the Genealogy of Morals describes reading that is ruminative: close-up and slow.20 In this thought of a distant planet, reading seems to call for backing away to see what the big letters say. Whether or not there is a traveler someplace to come and view the homeland, and whether or not that person actually packs up and comes to Paris, those invitations to argument all cast their homes as places vulnerable to being visited and in need of being seen in a way that locals can’t see them. The examples I’ve cited can be brought together in different terms. None of them characterize life (understood as a time or process of learning) as a journey. It’s too bad that “Life is a journey” has the tightness it does; banal as that sentiment is, it works as a sentence in a way that “Life is a staying at home to be traveled to” never will.

Future Visitors My favorite example of an outsider’s coming upon the nearby and obvious appears in a historian rather than a philosopher, although you would have to call it philosophical. It hints, as I think Hume’s suddenly arriving visitor does, at one meaning such outsiders can have. The historian is Thucydides, known for reducing the past to be described to the brief time of a couple of decades, with occasional flashes ahead to later centuries. His work is humanity’s “possession for all time,” Thucydides says in one moment of visualizing the distant future. He itemizes the symptoms of the horrible plague in Athens so that it can be recognized if it returns, again assuming that future doctors will be reading his work. This focus on the future may help to explain the value Thucydides places on accurate prediction, which in turn accounts for the deadpan hints of disbelief when he reports his fellow Athenians’ rush to consult oracles. The future is what you want, all right, but that is no way to discover it.21

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When Thucydides compares Athenian and Spartan power he sizes up the distant future remarkably. Someday—“much time from now”—people observing what’s left of both cities will infer from the magnificent temples in Athens that it commanded Greece. At Sparta they will see humble ruins. Yet Sparta controlled much more of Greece than Athens did.22 Thucydides is positing that Athens and Sparta will both crumble eventually; that the marble temples will last the longest; that observers in that future time will come to examine what remains; that they will infer political puissance from architectural magnificence. That is not a bad look ahead. And the look back that Thucydides pictures in that far future time is not meant as a rebuke to future archaeologists. He is taking Athenian vanity to task, for constructing a showpiece that promises imperial rule without the army or the alliances that a city would have to possess to manage such rule. “Look around you, Athenians. This is going to look impressive. It’s your own fault that it isn’t.” The appeal to an outsider in Thucydides complicates my examples of being traveled to by locating the observer not only in another country or another solar system but also in a different time. You might take the variation to disqualify the Thucydides passage from the others I have been considering. Or do we call it a different genre of appeal to observers? But what Thucydides says about future observers offers another way of understanding Hume’s postulated “person” with the power of reason who is “brought on a sudden into this world.” Instead of washing ashore from Scythia and Iroquois territory, suppose this person come from the future too, and brought into this world with the suddenness of birth. One image of the traveler to whom the world suddenly owes an explanation is the child. “Why do people fight?” “What is work?” I find partial precedent for introducing the child or baby at this point in an article by Irwin Edman, ninety years ago, that begins by laying out a taxonomy of philosophy’s proverbial impartial observers.23 Adam is maximally innocent, the Baby adaptable, the Man from Mars detached. “Perhaps if one could combine innocence, plasticity, and detachment, one might begin to be a philosopher,” Edman says,24 because he is pinning down the impulse to philosophy as I am doing. His Adam, a “noble savage,”25 is Anacharsis or Kant’s Iroquois, or could be if Edman were to picture Adam’s arrival among us. And what he says about the Man from Mars combines Hume and Nietzsche, for (as Edman says) that extraterrestrial “would see, as few human beings can, that physics is, after all, human, that it is a selective structure of operations, just as morals is a selective organon of desires.”26

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Edman’s Baby brings a different kind of innocence into philosophy, being a figure who is bound to be educated. But perhaps in emphasizing the infant’s plasticity Edman overlooks the sudden drama of its arrival. In this sense babies are travelers more than Martians or primitives are. Babies have to come to us. Wittgenstein already observed, in his reflections on Augustine, how closely our idea of a child can resemble our idea of a traveler from a foreign country. Augustine’s Confessions looked back on the way he acquired language, and Wittgenstein begins the Philosophical Investigations disassembling that simple account to see how much it entails.27 The mechanics of learning to speak as Augustine narrates the process seem to presuppose that the child begins with its word-­meanings ready and only needs to learn the words to use for them; as if we should say not “The child is learning to speak” but “The child is learning English.”28 And Wittgenstein says—hence my reason for including this example—that Augustine has described the child as if it had arrived from another country.29 There is no need to sentimentalize children’s questions. Many of them are requests for information (“How do they make concrete?”) and a lot are confused or mere pretenses of questions. But at times the child represents a demand that the world justifies itself. As the story imagines a child not an adult who sees that the emperor is naked, it can be a child that sees events following each other without inventing causation as their explanation, or who lacks a sense of God’s existence. There is more than one way to match the saga of travel and adventure without claiming that an adventure is taking place at home. The complement or alternative to traveling in order to learn is not the unspecified act of staying at home to be visited but that of giving birth. Almost everyone who has watched a child grow, speaks of the intermingling of teaching and learning that adults experience. They teach the child but also feel the sting of childish questions—when there is no answer, or when the answer calls for more explanation than a child can hear, or when the answer chagrins the existing world. Here is where I find Edman not to have investigated the infant far enough. I share his sense that we understand Baby alongside other observers. But his calling the child “radically educable” takes up only one side of adults’ experiences with children, their teaching, and omits their having to learn. On Edman’s reading, the Baby “is no philosopher at all. He is merely that chastity of intellectual innocence out of which he will be seduced ere long. For he is all too soon initiated into categories from

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which he will find it impossible to escape.”30 Edman is describing a peculiar kind of young human who never raises questions about the categories that adults have stopped thinking about. Augustine may have gone too far in making the language-learning child resemble an arrival from another place where they speak another language, but at least his distortion of childhood does justice to the way that adults experience children, and therefore I suspect the way that philosophical adults incorporate children into their examples, as if that place from which children came is not the kingdom of nonbeing but a world in its own right that will be hearing a report about this one. Suppose I am right (it was no more than a hypothesis) to guess that life as travel began in the claim by ranging hunters to have discovered living in their travels, together with the counter-claim that such ranging has its equivalent in domestic life, that the effort of remaining alive at home feels like a voyage. Then life as travel claims for all human beings an experience that had belonged exclusively to half the species, or really to the right-aged, free, fit, sharp-eyed fraction of that half. Then staying at home to be traveled to finds its most concrete example in giving birth, rounding out the non-male experience in another way. And when the inquisitive rebuke of an infant shares the effort of understanding with the parent—the one who can be instructed in the act of teaching—then philosophy appears to arise in the act of being formed by the one you formed. It hardly needs to be said that you do this before you die. But as with any powerful philosophizing, such learning gives the impression of being, no less paradoxically, a thing to do before you start to live.



Notes



1. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.1.2. Translation my own. 2. Plato, Phaedrus, 256b5. 3. See the same comparison in Plato, Laws, 840b. In Platonic spirit Paul plays down the self-discipline of an athlete (agônizomenos) compared to that of the Christian running the race of holiness. “They run in order to receive a perishable [phtharton] crown, but we for an imperishable one”: 1 Corinthians 9.25. Precisely because all life amounts to a race, literal races lose significance. 4. Plato, Euthyphro, 10b. 5. On the function of this story to foreclose other uses of Odysseus see J. Marks, Zeus in the Odyssey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially Chapter Four.

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6.  When Odysseus visits the underworld, the shade of Tiresias tells him to make this journey: Homer, Odyssey, 11.121–133. When Odysseus has reestablished himself on Ithaca he announces his intention to do as Tiresias said: Homer, Odyssey, 23.269–281. 7.  Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Land and Sacrifice in the Odyssey: A Study of Religious and Mythical Meanings,” in The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 15–38. 8. Herodotus, Histories, 4.78.4, 4.79.1 9. Lucian, Anacharsis. 10. See Nigel B. Crowther, “Nudity and Morality: Athletics in Italy,” The Classical Journal 76, no. 2 (1980–1981): 119–123. 11.  Television series, 1962–1971, created by Paul Henning, produced by Filmways Television for the CBS Television Network. 12. Plato, Apology, 17e–18a. 13. Plato, Apology, 21e; Charmides, 172e; Gorgias, 461a, 466c, 482b; Lysis, 211e; Phaedo, 99a; Phaedrus, 228b; Republic, 3.399e, 8.567d, 9.592a. 14. Plato, Theaetetus, 149a. 15. Descartes Meditations, dedication addressed to Sapientissimis Clarissimisque Viris Sacrae Facultatis Theologiae Parisiensis Decano & Doctoribus, i.e. to the dean and doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology in Paris. 16. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §2. 17. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III.iv.8. 18. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section V “Sceptical Solution of These Doubts,” Part I, §35. 19. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: telephone to the beyond, Third Essay, §5; “big writing,” Third Essay, §11. 20. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface, §8. 21. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War: possession for all time, 1.22.4; symptoms of plague, 2.48.3; Athenians’ consulting oracles, 2.8.2, 2.21.3. 22. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 1.10.2. 23. Irwin Edman, “Adam, the Baby, and the Man from Mars,” The Journal of Philosophy 23 (1926): 449–459. 24. Edman, 450. 25. Edman, 453. 26. Edman, 458. 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §1. 28. Stanley Cavell used this example in conversation. 29. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §32. 30. Edman, 454.

CHAPTER 8

The Night-Traveler: Theories of Nocturnal Time, Space, Movement Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

Philosophies of night should rightly commence from an awareness of the night-travelers, those who master patterns of nocturnal movement and intricately choreograph their infiltrations or escapes around the hours of mass oblivion. Many conceptual figures rise to the imagination, each with their own techniques, ambitions, and sensorial orchestrations of the dark intervals: The Thief’s Night; The Runaway’s Night; The Harlot’s Night; The Drunkard’s Night; The Insomniac’s Night; The Revolutionary’s Night; The Lunatic’s Night; The Sorcerer’s Night. All must learn to motion while others fall still; all must grow restless while others stay at rest. This exploration of the phenomenological-experiential domains of the night-traveler will revolve around two distinct works. Case 1: B018 Nightclub in Beirut, Lebanon (architect: Bernard Khoury, 1998). Situated in a bombed-out, devastated district of the city known as “The Quarantaine” (named after old quarantine sites for foreigners arriving from the nearby port), it later formed the grounds for Armenian, Kurdish, and Palestinian refugee camps cleansed during the

J. B. Mohaghegh (*)  Babson College, Babson Park, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_8

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country’s Civil War. Today, this nightclub is placed underground in the ominous shape of a bunker with a large retractable metallic roof that opens and closes each hour past midnight. So it is that several morphologies of the night-traveler intersect here, both past and present: those of the old boat-passengers once placed under enforced isolation; those of the exiles displaced from occupied homelands; those of the marauding sectarian factions who patrolled city streets each night, opportunistically equating darkness with ideology and blood; those of the slaughtered minorities, who traversed into non-being before the death squads; and lastly, those of our era’s night-revelers, who summon themselves to this strange place over and again like a doomsday ritual. Case 2: Film/Photographic Installation titled In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (artists: Larissa Sansour/Soren Lind, Palestine, 2016). This visual work stages a fictive dialogue between a rebel leader and a psychoanalyst interlocutor, the former charged with “narrative terrorism” for planting false relics in the earth to establish invented histories for a coming people. Hence these two figures—the hooded insurgent and the invisible interrogator—maneuver back and forth tactically across questions of myth, memory, legacy, and power. Here all four concepts are reduced to deceptive art forms, as futuristic images of desolation loom across the screen. So it is that several morphologies of the night-traveler intersect here as well: those of a militant storyteller transmitting forged messages to descending generations (time-travel 1); those of phantom ancestors and phantom offspring who bind together the strands of a liar’s tale (time-travel 2); those of an imprisoned radical pacing through remote, shadow-laced rooms while cross-examined by a recurring voice, an inquisitor obsessed with her origins in criminal warfare (time-travel 3).

Night-Travel and Time There are many intricate temporalities woven into the steps of Club B018’s night-traveler: from restive inception to exhaustive aftermath, from the pandemonium moment of encounter to the air of futile return. B018 is a music club, a place of nocturnal survival.1

I. To start from the bookends of this nocturnal movement, there are the macro-temporal experiences of entering and exiting which allow the club two separate, mysterious powers: (1) to seal

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the night-traveler within its own sovereign cube of unworldly time; (2) to then mercilessly release its guests back into the time of the Real (last call). These are complex practices aligned with emergent dusk and dawn, respectively: first we witness the hyper-anticipatory nervous system of the arrivals, waiting in line outside with rigid postures; then we witness the closing-time eviction, embodied in the slackened torsos of the leaving crowd that resemble zombies staggering into the gray sunlight. Thus the once-ancient, nocturnal roles of the lamplighter and the lighthouse-keeper have been translated into their postmodern counterparts of the club manager (who turns artificial light switches to formally inaugurate the nighttime) and the doorman (who scans oncoming presences from near and far). Like all stationed guardians, they literally open and close the gates to a certain exclusive timescape. II. The next temporal stratum to consider happens inside the club itself, that of the inner-middle experience of the “night out” which passes like an impressionistic sky (liquid or vaporous, and without demarcation). They close their eyes; they sway, gesticulate, smile; they drink refined liquors; they feign loss of control. But this is neither transcendent time nor transgressive time; like all decadent modalities, there lies a bitter undercurrent beneath the surface of play; this is why they stage their reverie amid the blast debris of the filthiest district in the city, the gesture itself harboring an element of spite. It is not transgressive because of the non-hierarchical awareness that their entire collective existence is but a mark of evil ruination; it is not transcendent because the slum is the true face of the city. What we get instead is an end-of-the-world show; the time-step of a plague dance. III. This brings us to our final temporal amalgamation, one that alchemically mixes both the ghost’s time and the survivor’s time. Let’s not forget that this supposed display of the hedonistic present is physically built on the remains of refugee camps liquidated during civil war just one generation prior. Our nocturnal architect, however, has gone to lengths not to conceal the bullet-ridden apparitions of this obscenity but rather to encase it in the very walls and ground that swallow his patrons each night. The club itself is therefore a blunt force instrument of enunciation of this killing affair; its inexorable electronic beats are pure death rattle. The music funnels back only to the catastrophic imagination; the structure indulges the haunted mind to its nth degree, at once appearing to blend survivor’s guilt with the survivor’s addictive

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rush of invincibility. And yet the club’s time-game goes even further: for while survival is based on a temporal assumption of the closure of violence (requiring a concept of the elapsed event), this sunken enclosure beneath the earth channels all adrenaline into the disclosure of but one simple fact: that no one made it out alive (the war is not over). Yes, there is an error that took place here, and it remains the decried site of error-making. Hence the night-travelers do not raise their glasses in denial; they raise their glasses in recognition of the ever-violating decades, a celebration of the unforgivable. Night-Travel and Time In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain introduces its own cauldron of temporal trespasses, those that stretch from primeval wastelands to post-apocalyptic futurities in order to ask us this: How does one establish an immemorial bloodline from the vantage of extinction? This place was always a barely functioning dystopia…deeper into the apocalypse, an accelerated microcosm. It disappears little by little.2

I. The first temporality presented is that of a worn-down fighter confronting the near-erasure of her race. She is a boatwoman rowing against impossible currents; the waters of genocidal certainty close in around her, leaving only a rare semblance of what might be called failed revolutionary time. Here time reflects an age of mutual disappearance, and with it the enclaves of an extinguishing present that could not be saved. Her people slip gradually into the open mouth of impermanence— persecuted, transient, unrescued—thereby comprising the formless jawline of lost instances. II. The second temporality uncovered is that of the non-traumatic recounting of a sister’s murder, for which our dissenter narrator describes her as a pure scapegoat (“No, in her they saw everyone and everything”). Thus the enemy formations perceived this young girl only through her dangerous potentiality, the next molecules of resistance gestating in her miniature frame, and thus leading us into what might be called paranoiac time: that is, a timeframe based on frantic narratives of suspicion, guilt, and pre-emptive punishment. There are no trace-

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remnants of innocence, not even within the child’s body/gaze; all must be taken down, turned into a dire example. Even the unborn is classified a threat-in-waiting. III. The final temporality noted is that of terroristic time, though here undertaken as a slow wager across long stretches of civilizational transition. She manipulates destiny; she creates chimeric antiquity for those deprived of name and land. Whereas most terroristic endeavors seize upon temporal blasts of suddenness (surprise, ambush, detonation), this narrative-archaeological version of a woman burrowing crude emblems beneath the dirt in order to win future successors their titles, rights, and authenticity plays into the temporal vastness of the unforeseen (all that is known is that others will come). Thus political consciousness plunges into the den of cutthroat fantasy images, far-removed from absolute truths and closer to visionary delirium, where it belongs, as the contemporaneous becomes increasingly extemporaneous and the historical becomes strategically cosmological. Only the great dissembler, the falsifier, and the pretender can avenge the marred present, willing geologically-layered illusion upon illusion so as to leave behind a telescopic inheritance.

Night-Travel and Space To understand the spatial dynamics of our first night-traveler typology, one must make a careful inventory of the architectonic features of the B018 spectacle: notably, that of the sector, the staircase, the rooftop, the lot, the tomb, and the target. The opening of the roof exposes the club to the world above and reveals the cityscape as an urban backdrop to the patrons below. Its closing translates a voluntary disappearance, a gesture of recess. The building is encircled by concrete and tarmac rings. The automobiles’ circular travel around the club and the concentric parking spots frame the building in a carousel formation.3

I. Sector. We must first remember that we are standing in The Quarantaine, a neighborhood originally synonymous with segregation, rejection, stigma, and the millennial fear of the outsideras-disease. Half a century later, it becomes the abyssal ground for a

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lethal purging of refugees at the hands of extremist circles, betraying once-sacred oaths of sanctuary and asylum in the name of cruel gods. Thus the site remains scarred by its previous operational logic; half-camp, half-ruin. Today, however, the quarantine sector is known for housing two sensorially-unwanted industries: that of the garbage facilities and the slaughterhouses. Thus the area’s perimeter is met always with the wafting odor of animal blood and refuse. It is a place of residual funk, where the dirty work of the city’s everydayness gets done off the radar. The trash collector, the butcher: these are the true kings of this domain into which our nightclub-travelers wander. (SideNote: Just adjacent to the site, not far beyond a few half-condemned buildings, is the ever-idealized presence of the ocean; hence the sound of lapping waves, the smell of salt water, and the vistas of the north Mediterranean coastline commingle at close distance. Consequently, one wonders: Is it wrong for boundless space to be teasingly located at the foot of a carceral/shantytown/killing field?) II. Staircase. There is a clear infernal dimension to the staircase that takes one into B018, like all ladders reaching into subterranean depth, as if the existential cost of the banquet, feast, festival, and masquerade were that of stepping into Hell itself. More precisely, though, the lowered concrete staircase acts to conjure reminiscence of the old bombardments, when the city sirens and alarms would announce oncoming air strikes. State of siege; fire raining from smoke-invaded skies. In such instances, one runs instinctually downward for shelter—into the barricade, the trench, the capsule, the chamber—and the club diabolically preserves this impulse, carving visitors into a gesture of emergency confinement. III. Rooftop. The architect tells us that his buildings are “devices,” and so we ask what creative stealth is served by a massive metallic roof and its hourly hydraulic retractions. What mechanistic cunning is embedded into this immense contraption that at once protects and exposes the night-travelers to the urban squalor around them? This intermittent ­revelation signaled by the creaking of steel parts is the antithesis of ­ escapism; the convertible ceiling disallows one from surrendering oneself too completely to the antigravity feeling of the dance and its floating sonic palpitations. It abruptly restores one to the awareness of space-as-armament; not an escape, but rather a sinister tribute to the inescapable (a few seconds delayed).

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IV. Lot. There is a carnivalesque aspect to the makeshift parking lot which sits on top of the actual club space, like a sculpture garden of abandoned machines placed together in odd striations. This is the “carousel formation” of which the architect speaks. And yet the exceptional stillness of their painted aluminum bodies also gives off a funereal quality, something closer to fossilized bones, as if now deprived of their rightful owners in the wake of an epochal dystopia, leaving only a cemetery or museum of technological archaisms. Is the lot therefore the perfect spatiality of obsolescence, a simulacrum for our surrounding chaos (no driver at the wheel)? On the other hand, one can also read a dark aristocratic atmosphere into the above-ground lot, almost like the parked carriages of a secret society at a secured estate in the woods. An esoteric portal, then, for those dabbling in passwords, occultism, or forbidden knowledge. V. Tomb. To what extent is the club’s physical submergence several meters below ground an attempt to transfer its patrons into a mass grave (note its corridors are termed “airlock spaces”)? To what extent are these night-travelers participating in the sly brutality of an architect’s desire to bury them alive? At the front end, we have a DJ’s platform raised up to resemble a colorful altar (though merely caricaturing the absent sacrosanct), and above our heads the corroded roof now seemingly functions as an overhanging coffin-lid. Indeed, the architect speaks further of a certain “macabre aura” to his design, meaning perhaps the very black-humor absurdity that accompanies such night-gatherings: namely, the luxury of slightest fortune through which some have persisted semi-breathing amid the many mounds of an otherwise exterminative modernity.4 And yet this half-life does not sit well with them, the night-travelers; hence they come to B018 to finish the job. A quest for finality itself, once and for all: the compound of a suicide cult. VI. Target. From an aerial perspective, the club’s architectural blueprint resembles nothing less than the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle, such that all visitors stray into the fatal universe of the target. The structure therefore finds itself at the epicenter of a bad aesthetic omniscience, its inhabitants unified beneath the bull’s-eye and the malevolent will of a draftsman-turned-marksman. And when spit back out eventually into the bleak dawn of 7:00 a.m., they physiologically exemplify this assault (of the hunter’s night): the once-fashionable re-emerge looking i­ll-fashioned, victims of a becoming-unbeautiful…their hair disheveled, their cosmetics

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streaking, their clothes stained by promises of false excess. They are no longer elite, but rather exude profanation; they stagger gracelessly and perplexed like the first human beings, or someone shot through multiple limbs, or something larval and half-blind. The target has therefore escorted them either toward pure infancy or pure terminality, their exceptionalism/identity forfeited underground. They all look alike now beneath a weak sun, recollecting for us the expression “dead ringers” often mistakenly attributed to the practice of placing a bell cord in fresh tombs just in case the subject was mistakenly interred while comatose/sleeping so that they could rouse others to unbury them (thus the properly-ascribed expression, “saved by the bell”).5 But salvation does not make rounds to The Quarantaine, and so the final bell-toll of B018 does nothing but send its consumers reeling into vampiric vulnerability, hyper-sensitive to certain forms of light, touch, and sound, so dead inside as to attain accursed immortality, and thereby paying the fair price of a night’s thirst…the disgraceful reminders of creation’s mistake. Night-Travel and Space To understand the spatial dynamics of our second night-traveler typology, one must make a careful inventory of the architectonic features at work in the filmmaker’s piece: notably, that of the continual oscillation between desert (as colonized infinity) and darkness (as hostile reflection). It gets dark early here in the desert. There’s no artificial lighting for miles. But you are no longer in the desert, remember?6

I. Desert (horizon). The first image of the film is an eerie shot of several interplanetary trailers parked in rows across some frontier outworld, each one gradually hovering then departing the red sands. Their exodus-into-flight returns us to the simplicity of scorched-earth terrain contrasted against a dim-lit sky, leading us to recognize our preliminary spatial checkpoint as that of an occupied horizon (infiltration of clouds, mist, untouched ridges). All subsequent images to follow will be appropriately horizontal, i.e. caught within the compulsive horizontality of conquest and territoriality: the mapmaker’s latitudinal web; the imperialist’s drive toward universality and world-making.

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II. Darkness (locked room). We are then transported elsewhere, into a closed darkroom where our narrator (the rebel leader) makes her way with calm audible steps toward the watcher’s vantage. The space is locked, forming an echo-chamber; the darkness around her creates a tight ethereal border, forcing her to walk in linear, spotlighted strides. She herself is a white-hooded figure, until raising her eyes to meet ours, a hollow-point encounter with faciality/gazing for which she holds the perceptual advantage. She wins the stare-down easily: for she knows why she is there, and we do not; furthermore, she knows exactly what side she is on, her chosen stance and belonging, while we remain clueless to where we stand in this narrative (accomplice, conspirator, traitor, ally, adversary?). III. Desert (the oasis). We shift instantly into a memory/photograph of an oasis with two young girls in traditional Arabic clothing at the center; to their right, two bearded nomadic men sitting cross-legged on the ground; to their left, the gray-tinged specters of three potential westerners. As we approach a close-up of the two girls’ faces, their gowns (kaftans) turn increasingly crimson and then indigo; each inhales deeply and opens eyes in slight amazement, as if shaken awake from a dream or resurrected. Necromantic touch: they look around themselves uncomfortably, as if sensing the total defamiliarization of this once-familiar setting, in wondrous realization that their home is no longer theirs. This is complemented by the later image of the hooded rebel (presumably one of the former youths) now standing in the same spot holding a shovel before a giant hole, and surrounded by uniformed colonial officers (weapons across shoulders), the native men and adolescents since eviscerated from the scene. Her little sister’s grave, or an excavation site; meant to hide collaterally damaged bodies or to extract valued resources? Either way, it is now the space of voluminous betrayal. IV. Darkness (salt table; deathbed). We return to the darkroom that somehow navigates between claustrophobic moodscapes (fear of enclosure) and claustromaniacal moodscapes (love of enclosure). For while the psychoanalyst’s interview proves grueling, it also illuminates the broader impasse resting before the game’s opponents: no, our militant protagonist is not broken down, challenged, or coerced into confessional surrender; rather, her answers drift forward with an air of trivial explanation of the unfathomable (the other will never understand this). As if to render an accurate phenomenological manifestation

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of this triviality, we then find a recurring image of what appear as salt piles strewn across the table like scaled-down, miniscule mountains. The hooded insurgent suspends herself awhile above the fragile granular formations, only later to confirm that the table’s salt heaps in fact comprise a subtle fabric; she reclines beneath it, draped in the delicate linen cloth of the region’s dead, reminding us that only the child/ animal plays mimetically at sleep or death. Thus the psychoanalyst rightly observes that “You were talking about being buried as part of your own fiction,” to which she responds “Right. I often picture myself draped in cloth on my deathbed…becoming my own civilization’s Shroud of Turin.”7 Thus the space of the salt table becomes the space of the deathbed. V. Desert (the elders; the rains; the towers). There are several visions of colossal desert landscapes that hereafter advance in harsh succession, two of which fall under a similar classification: the first is of an aged tribal woman with pipe and headdress staring outward as wisps of smoke blow mournfully around her; the second is of an aged tribal man with white beard, turban, and maroon robe peering into the camera lens while encircled by tents and parachuting bombs. These are the elders, those casualties of forsaken/razed spaces now condemned to images of an ethnographic façade (photographs of communal grimness). Both possess an almost sage-like composure, aware of the disaster to befall their kind (“in times of quiet, we once again cease to exist”). The next image is of our hooded rebel standing in an open field beneath falling shards of porcelain, for which she constructs the following pronouncement: “Sometimes I dream of porcelain falling from the sky, like ceramic rain. At first it’s only a few pieces falling slowly like autumn leaves. I’m in it, silently enjoying it. But then the volume increases, and it’s a porcelain monsoon, like a biblical plague.”8 There is an initial pleasure to the glass-rain particles, a mild ecstatic potential that then goes too far (into celestial disturbance), becomes an unbearable flood of solidity as space turns sharp, scabrous, fragmentary. She shields herself against the brittle downpour, clasps ears and head while unable to block out the acoustic attack of shattering pieces. Such is the affective mosaic of the Unstoppable (here as spatial paragon). Lastly in this sequence, we find a captivating image of the earth littered with endless shells, plates, and stones. As the camera motions

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skyward, we see the fractal path leading toward the silhouettes of a faraway city with jagged towers and spires. Indeed, the new metropolises will ravage all past worlds, prompting us to speculate after a crucial repercussion: Will the former savage (ignorant of civilization) now become the barbarian (nemesis of civilization)? Solitary space hereafter transforms into combative space. VI. Darkness (the hole). Cellars of horrific recovery (of what should remain irrecuperable). Here we watch the hooded rebel’s recurring nightmare: she is standing above the cavernous hole to find her little sister huddled at the bottom, clutching knees to chest, trembling against the full pressure of the cylinder (density of the nothing). But this is not the true source of horror; it is the vacant mental lapse that brings overwhelming fright, for she remembers nothing. This hole is the very isle of a child’s amnesia, where forgetting itself takes on a viscous materiality: “She does not recognize me. She cannot communicate with the future.”9 Space as oblivion spell. VII. Desert (circus; anti-feast). The final two desert images concerning us are themselves examples of visual finality. The first picture is that of a Ferris wheel making its gentle rotations in the middle of nowhere, a ticket booth stationed randomly at its side; it is the carriage of a universal miscarriage, the ride of cyclical annihilation and annihilative cyclicality. Twilight, barrenness, aridity, and a lone circus amusement: such a likeness of apocalyptic saturnalia (too-late spatiality), a last game and merriment before the end of all things. The second image is the actual closing picture of the film itself: it depicts a clear imitation of the last supper, our now saint-like rebel flanked by seated missionaries and colonial overlords. But what does this portrait signify here, less a pre-crucifixion rite of commemoration (among disciples) than a symbol of martyrological infection (against enemies)? Does she mean to devour these world-historical raiders (eating alive) or to afflict their species (contaminating throughout)? The chalices and white trays serve mostly emptiness save a few indistinguishable droplets and slices (of blood, flesh?). Either way, the anti-feast delivers its retributive message without mistake: that this reception will take eternal residence in their veins (final dromological phase: intravenous travel), entering bloodstreams without redemptive intent; perhaps instead, her sacrifice will form the corrosive alcohol of livers or acidic bile of spleens. Insurrectionary night; space of toxicity, fifth-column trickery, assassin’s motive.10

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Epilogue: Night-Travel and the Last Movement The dividing line between “pleasure” and “release from pain” grows murky in the entertainment quarters, and it grows equally murky in the areas of collective revenge. Hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, or whether they indeed form a regenerative loop that fuses euphoria, spite, and an inhuman will to disappearance. On the one side, there are the night-travelers of intoxication who engage in a club’s weekly ceremony of showmanship, expenditure, and energetic squandering. Their movements are those of flailing bodies and pseudo-orgiastic overlap amid rhythms pounding from the center of the earth. On the other side, there are the night-travelers of fatigue and insularity, those who live in dunes of chronic war and therefore discipline themselves in the elaborate practice of riot, sedition, sabotage, and treason. Their movements are those of fatalistic slowness, pensive shuffling, or still-life paralysis, and then devious subversion. The drunkard’s dance illustrates the nothingness in excess; the rebel’s strike illustrates the excess in nothingness. The first hides its poverty in a theater display of the euphonious (flagrant sound) and the diaphanous (flagrant light); the second hides its rich vitality in the silence, long pauses, and constrictions of a torture chamber or burned village. One feigns iconographic writhing; one feigns dreadful immobility. But both are expert performativities of the night-traveler; both require a profound alignment with nocturnality and dark power in order to cross safely; and both produce their own low-laying trances, the time space when enchantment and disenchantment fall into seamless explosivity.

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Concept Map (of the Night-Traveler)

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B018 Night Club. Beirut, Lebanon (Architect: Bernard Khoury; Built 1998). © DW5 BERNARD KHOURY—Photo by IEVA SAUDARGAITE

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In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, film, 29 minutes, Larissa Sansour/Soren Lind, 2016.

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Notes

1. Bernard Khoury (architect). B018. Beirut, Lebanon (1998). http://www. bernardkhoury.com/project.php?id=127. 2. Larissa Sansour/Soren Lind (filmmakers). In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (film, 2016). http://www.larissasansour.com/ Future.html. 3. Bernard Khoury (architect). B018. Beirut, Lebanon (1998). http://www. bernardkhoury.com/project.php?id=127. 4. Bernard Khoury (architect). B018. Beirut, Lebanon (1998). http://www. bernardkhoury.com/project.php?id=127. 5. The term “dead ringers” derives more accurately from an old practice of fraud in horse-racing, which prompts one to add another conceptual personage to the mix of nocturnal experience: The Horseman’s Night. 6. Larissa Sansour/Soren Lind (filmmakers). In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (film, 2016). http://www.larissasansour.com/ Future.html. 7. Larissa Sansour/Soren Lind (filmmakers). In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (film, 2016). http://www.larissasansour.com/ Future.html. 8. Larissa Sansour/Soren Lind (filmmakers). In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (film, 2016). http://www.larissasansour.com/ Future.html. 9. Larissa Sansour/Soren Lind (filmmakers). In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (film, 2016). http://www.larissasansour.com/ Future.html. 10. Is the implication here that totalitarian systems remain optimally uninoculated against the imperceptible travel of certain images, stories, and rumors (counter-scourge)…especially those traded by night?

CHAPTER 9

Walking in Wild Emptiness: A Zen Phenomenology Brian Shūdō Schroeder

The mountains, the rivers, the earth—where are they to be found? —Yunmen Wenyan, in Blue Cliff Record1 We learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination. —Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild2 Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. … In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac3 The practice of the Wild begins with who we are, which is how we practice where we are right now. —Jason M. Wirth, Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth4

B. S. Schroeder (*)  Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_9

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Moving Between Walking Mountains and the Open Sky Being in transit is always a matter of being-between. Usually it is the case that one is between a point of departure and a point of arrival. One can, however, also move without a discernible beginning or end, whether spatially, temporally, physically, or psychologically. This is possible from the perspective of the Buddhist concept of dependent origination (Sk. pratītyasamutpāda).5 This ontological principle is not confined to abstract laws of causality; it applies to the very nature of existence and identity. From this standpoint, there is no first cause from which all things emerge. Moreover, dependent origination repudiates any assertion of the independence of objects or subjects as well as their permanence and stability as such. In the form of Buddhism known as Zen, the “great matter” of life is the relation between birth and death. It is between these two fundamental events that the human being is situated and moves. We neither choose the moment of our birth nor, in most instances, the moment of our death; though, even if the latter choice is made, preceding it there is always a time of not knowing that moment. In that being-between we are bound to the great Earth, to nature, to the elemental. By and large, we do not know how to just be human beings. We sometimes react and respond to the awesome power of nature by attempting to assume through our technologies the mantle of the gods and thus try to bend nature to our will. Or sometimes we become passively reactive and do not engage nature as participating natural beings. Either way, we are outside the flow of dao (Ch. 道), usually translated as “the way,” or what Gary Snyder refers to as the wild, which comes very close to being how the Chinese define the term Dao, the way of Great Nature: eluding analysis, beyond categories, self-organizing, self-informing, playful, surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent, complete, orderly, unmediated, freely manifesting, self-authenticating, self-willed, complex, quite simple. Both empty and real at the same time. In some cases we might call it sacred. It is not far from the Buddhist term Dharma with its original senses of forming and firming.6

These senses of being simultaneously empty and real, of forming and firming, find expression in a famous Chinese Chan (Zen) poem,7 which says that in the beginning there were mountains and waters (and here

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the reference is literally to things, to mountains and waters as forms, not as metaphors), but then in the great awareness and experience of emptiness (Sk. śūnyatā; Ch. wu 無)8 there are no mountains and waters. This leads to the realization—perhaps for the first time—that there are mountains and waters and this is all that they are. In other words, there is no separation from mountains and waters from which we have much to learn from them; and yet, we are neither mountains nor waters. This difference is critical and is set against the simplistic, commonplace, modern Western interpretation that “being Zen” is somehow about being one with everything. The meaning of this poem does not lend itself to simply rational explanation; rather, it is more like a kōan.9 Aldo Leopold wrote about “thinking like a mountain.” This enigmatic declaration is also perhaps best approached as a kōan. What does Leopold mean? What does it mean to be human? What can we learn from mountains? Addressing these questions, the thirteenth-century Zen master and philosopher Eihei Dōgen brings to our attention the thought of the between. According to him, if you doubt that mountains are walking then you do not know your own walking. And if we do not know something as basic, as fundamental to our being as walking, then we really cannot say that we have any clear idea about what it means to be a human being. Dōgen is not saying that if mountains doubt their own walking then they do not know that humans are walking. There is a clear distinction that he is making between humans and other beings, which puts him squarely in line with the vast majority of Western thinkers. What does it mean for mountains and waters, that is, the natural elements, to be what they are? How does this affect the activity of being human? Dōgen pushes against the idea that the interconnectedness of all things, or dependent origination, means that we as human beings are the same as all other things. We cannot simply assume, therefore, that what we see as water is the same as what a fish, a frog, or an aquatic bird, for instance, sees as water. Neither can we know how water is to itself. To illustrate this, in the fascicle “Mountains and Waters Sutra” (Sansuikyō 山水經) in his masterwork Shōbōgenzō (正法眼蔵; Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), Dōgen uses the example of the palace or pavilion.10 To the fish, water is their palace, their place, their realm. More than that, it is their karma. Dōgen’s point is that our own human realm, our own palatial spatiality (though perhaps placiality is the better operative term), is precisely to think in-between various realms of beings, both like and unlike ourselves. It is our

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responsibility, or again, our karma, to be able to think about the relation between realms, which is to say, places, and the many beings that inhabit and dwell within and between those places. This is precisely what makes the human being different from other species—and why awakening or enlightenment is possible only for human beings. One is awakened to being able to think as well as move between the multiple spaces that make up the natural world, which also includes the conceptual world. This is a deep insight of Zen, though by no means exclusive to it. At the beginning of the “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” Dōgen writes the following lines, which have the ring of a kōan: “Mountains do not lack the characteristics [or virtues] of mountains. Therefore, they always abide in ease and always walk. … Mountains’ walking [that is, the activity of the walking of mountains] is just like human walking. Accordingly, do no doubt mountains’ walking even though it does not look the same as human walking.”11 The Japanese word translated as “characteristics” is kudoku (功 德), which can also be rendered as “virtues.” The toku (德) in kudoku is the translation of the Chinese word de (德), which means variously “inherent character,” “excellence,” “inner power,” “integrity,” or “virtue.” It is similar to the Greek word arēte, although the specific human moral sense of virtue connoted by this term is not so prevalent in the Chinese, or at least in the Daoist, use of the term. This is the same word one finds in the title of what is arguably the most famous work in Daoism, the Daodejing (道德經; The Classic [or Book] of the Way and Its Virtue [or Power]). The toku of the mountain is precisely its characteristic; it is the expression of its excellence. In other words, a mountain is not doing anything other than what it is supposed to be doing. From the start, Dōgen adjures, learn from the mountain not to be other than what you are. In the middle of the “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” Dōgen makes his strongest case against the view that Zen is irrational, that it is about just doing what comes naturally without being completely aware or fully understanding what one is doing, that is, just tapping into some instinctual animal aspect of being human. He criticizes his fellow monks and Zen practitioners who would argue that statements about mountains walking or traveling on water are illogical. But, he says, such statements “are only illogical for them, not for Buddha ancestors.”12 The Buddha ancestors are those who see the nature of reality with an awakened mind, with a true “Dharma eye.” Several lines later, Dōgen notes that even if it is beyond understanding in the end, it is not there—it is here. In

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other words, this “beyond understanding” is not pre-logical; rather, it is post-logical. In the end, those who make this criticism are simply off the mark. Drawing on the insights of earlier masters, in the Shōbōgenzō fascicle “The Mind Itself is Buddha” (Sokushin Zebutsu 即心是佛), Dōgen teaches that mind and Buddha are one and the same. But what exactly is “mind?” Dōgen provides us with a precise answer. He writes that in response to master Guishan Lingyu’s query, “What is the wondrous clear mind?” Yangshan Huiji replied, “I say it is mountains, rivers, and the earth; it is the sun, the moon, and stars.” Dōgen continues with this commentary: What is said here is not more, not less. Mountains, rivers, and earth mind are just mountains, rivers and the earth. There are no extra waves or sprays [in this mind]. The sun, the moon, and stars mind is just the sun, the moon, and the stars. There is no extra fog or mist. The coming and going of birth and death mind is just the coming and going of birth and death. There is no extra delusion or enlightenment.13

Phenomena are simply as they are. This is true also for human beings. Understanding this is being awakened to the realization that mind itself is Buddha. Buddha-nature is impermanence and interconnectedness. Thus, what it means to be human is always to be in relation to something, to some other, and to ourselves. We learn from the mountains, but we are not the mountains. It means being open to the perspective of the other, in this case, that of the mountain, though we can say more generally that it means being open to the space occupied by the elemental. It also means to be open to one’s own limitations. Dōgen is not discussing the abstractions of emptiness and form in the “Mountains and Waters Sutra”; rather, he is talking about mountains and waters, that is, the elemental. This is similar to the twentiethcentury Kyoto School philosopher Nishitani Keiji’s14 observation that the sky (sora) is the visible manifestation of emptiness, or what can also be translated here as “void” (kū) (both are written with the same character in Japanese: 空).15 In other words, this is about as close as we can get to the elemental itself: the open—which is to say, the empty— sky. It is to this standpoint that John Sallis leads us when he writes in the Prologue to The Return to Nature: “Since the things of nature are encompassed by various elements—and always by Earth and sky—they

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can be apprehended in the fullness of their appearance only if they show themselves within their elemental setting, only if an openness to the elements belongs intrinsically to their apprehension.”16 We know what the elements are even though we have never seen them; what we see are manifestations of the elements or particular beings that participate, or are disclosed, in the showing forth, what the Greeks called the phaínestai, of the elemental. Sallis characterizes the elemental as “gigantic,” even “monstrous,” and writes, “no other elemental is as openly encompassing as the sky.”17 The empty or open sky elicits a sense of the emptiness of Mahāyāna Buddhism, that is, a fundamental originary interconnectedness (Sk. pratītyasamutpāda) of all beings and things both sentient and non-sentient. Alphonso Lingis captures this sense in his beautiful and haunting book, Dangerous Emotions: We live our lives on the surface of the planet, among things we can detach and manipulate; we live under the sky. The sky is without surface, without shape, without inner structure, ungraspable. We see in the sky the sovereign realm of chance. The sky is also a bond uniting us to all who breathe under its expanse, uniting us to all who are born and shall be born under that sky …18

Under the empty sky we are all bound together; and stated karmically, there is no action that is independent of other actions. We move in-between the interconnectedness of all things in the openness of emptiness.

Moving Between the Spatial and the Temporal In Country Path Conversations,19 which is in many respects a critique of his earlier thinking in Being and Time,20 Heidegger directs us toward the concept of die Gegnet, “the open region,” wherein horizons are surrounded or encompassed but not necessarily encased since that would limit the open region, in which case it would no longer be open. Therefore, the matter becomes not that of transcendentally positing the horizon, but rather of moving toward, Heidegger writes, “an indwelling releasement [inständige Gelassenheit] to the worlding of the world.”21 This indwelling is a listening, a corresponding with that to, or in, which we belong.

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In moving away from his earlier language of ontological transcendence and toward that of indwelling, Heidegger employs the language of the “step back” in order to get back to where we already are in the first place, not to transcend and arrive at an entirely new and different place. For instance, the present reader is likely sitting in a room or some sheltered space, thus sharing not only that physical location but also the space of language and thought. And yet, the reader is also already in nature. We do not need to travel to some remote area to be in nature. There is a paradox here: While we may be there already, if we do not dwell in that being there already, then we are not actually quite there already. Dōgen observes that one can be somewhere and yet not aware that one is there. This is what he calls “actualizing the fundamental point,”22 and one of the ways to understand that is to be fully where one is in the moment. The horizon of the beginning sections of Being and Time is temporality, which is a way of exploding the encasement of the spatial model. At the end of this work, however, Heidegger seems unable to make the move fully from the Zeitlichkeit des Daseins to the Temporalität des Seins because the temporality of being would encompass the temporality of Dasein. Now, perhaps Heidegger is unable because we keep falling back into the spatial image. Another difficulty is that this attempt is a move toward an encapsulating, enclosing model, which would limit the temporality of being. Could it be that the way out is by way of another temporalized sense of dwelling? What is interesting is that Heidegger then moves from temporality to another spatial model, namely, die Lichtung, the “clearing” or “lighting,” which is his corresponding concept to the Platonic chōra (space; region; location). This turn toward the spatial, which is always for Heidegger primarily a turn toward place (Ort), reaches a culmination in the 1969 Le Thor Seminar where we encounter the phrase “topology of being.”23 Still, there seems to be a consistent thread throughout his writing that the question concerns the temporalization of the spatial. Yet in his 1962 lecture, “On Time and Being,” Heidegger argues that the ground is neither temporal nor spatial. Indeed, what proves to be most elusive, most ambiguous, is the very concept of Grund. In a move that captures this ambiguity, Sallis writes, “The case of the sky makes it especially evident that elementals are intimately linked to space and time, though they are neither simply spatial nor temporal.”24 The question then for both Heidegger and Sallis concerns the status of the between. What is it that

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fills this place between the spatial and the temporal, if in fact it can be filled? Or perhaps better put, what is it that moves between the spatial and the temporal?

Releasing the Open Region of Dao There are two senses of the word open in Heidegger: the open region, which is so radical in its openness that it is closed to us, and the horizon, which, because it is a closure, is open. Heidegger’s use of this distinction is ambiguous at times, and this is also the case with the notion of the Lichtung. The example he gives is a clearing in the forest, an opening that allows us to move freely about and see the forest with the perspective of distance thus enabling us to make sense of our placiality. But the clearing in the forest is the horizon. The forest itself is the open region precisely because of its openness, because it has no boundary, no limit, no péras, as the Greeks termed it. The forest is not open to us; it is closed because of its radical openness. It is like the feeling one has in the middle of the desert where the surrounding openness leaves one without a sense of bearing, so that the only focal point is the immediate space that one is in. One is disoriented because there is no horizon. There is in a sense no world because there are no fixed reference points. It is paradoxically a claustrophobic infinite expanse, but with infinite understood also as in-the-finite. There is a horizon within the open region. Both world (Welt) and earth (Erde), terms whose meaning Heidegger distinguishes in his seminal essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,”25 are horizons in the open region. We are always dwelling within horizons. But how are these horizons established? That is the question of the difference between, on the one hand, existence understood in terms of willing, and on the other in terms of non-willing, or what Meister Eckhart names Gelassenheit. How are our habitations established within nature? In one sense, it is all within nature. We can dwell willfully, that is, try to bend nature and the horizon to our own sense of what is “in each case mine” (je mein),26 and thus set up the landmarks that will delimit the horizon; or we can dwell in a different way, one that walks like and with the mountains, one that flows like and with the waters of Dao. The open region contains that from which it also draws. The open region in which we always are exceeds us, and therefore withdraws from our grasp. This is a withdrawing of the will as transcendental positing

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of horizon. This is the transcendental thinking of Being and Time that Heidegger is trying to think beyond in Contributions to Philosophy27 and, more radically so, in Country Path Conversations. We posit a horizon so that we can think of ourselves as human, understand the human itself, but then we need to understand that positing, and so we establish another horizon in which that will make sense. Thus, all we will get are these horizons encased in one another. We therefore have to change our mode of thinking: Instead of the transcendental positing of horizon, which will always be anthropocentric and thus tied to the will, we need to think in terms of indwelling to the open region. This is what is meant by the word Gelassenheit. Unfortunately, Gelassenheit is often erroneously construed as a radical passivity, in the sense of just doing nothing. The translation of Gelassenheit as “letting-be” implies a sense of both activity and passivity; the letting in letting-be is the middle voice. Heidegger makes it clear though that this is not the correct understanding: Gelassenheit is outside the domain of passivity and activity.28 Gelassenheit is perhaps better translated as “releasement” since this implies this condition of being outside. The parallels between Gelassenheit and the Daoist concept of wu wei ( 無爲; non-doing or non-action), which also is often wrongly interpreted as a radical passivity, are worth noting. More accurately, wu wei is wei wu wei, that is, doing non-doing. This is the activity of dao, which is “originally perfect and all pervading,” as Dōgen writes in the opening line of his earliest circulated writing, Fukanzazengi (普勧坐禅儀; “Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen”).29 Heidegger was familiar with the ancient Chinese word dao even in his earlier thinking although it does not appear, to my knowledge, until the third of three lectures given in 1957–1958 under the title “The Nature of Language.” Heidegger is at once both close and yet distant in ascertaining its meaning. He seems to ignore the very first line of Laozi’s Daodejing—“Dao that can be named is not Dao”—and displays his fidelity to the Greek lexicon when he writes: Dao could be the way that gives all ways, the very source of our power to think what reason, mind, meaning, lógos properly mean to say—properly, by their proper nature. Perhaps the mystery of mysteries of thoughtful Saying conceals itself in the word “way,” Dao, if only we let these names return to what they leave unspoken, if only we are capable of this, to allow them to do so. All is way.30

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This passage merits considerably more time to its exegesis than I will give it here; for now I wish only to bring to our attention the phrase “if only we let these names return to what they leave unspoken, if only we are capable of this …” The temptation for Western humanism is to define our own essence. Heidegger recognizes this as tantamount to a type of infinite regress and seeks to point out the limitation of this way of thinking. This is played out in the dialogue “A Triadic Conversation” in Country Path Conversations. One finds here still a desire for humanism, though not for the old type of humanism, but rather for a humanism that actually grasps the problematic of the human. The questions that confront us then are: Where are we doing this? And who are we doing this? So, when Dōgen writes about mountains walking, or about Zen practice, this is the activity of no activity, wei wu wei. This is the meaning of his fundamental idea regarding zazen, the heart of his Zen practice— namely, non-thinking (hi-shiryō 非思量), which is between thinking and not thinking, in a place that is not a place. In his own way, Dōgen is attempting to enact, not just think, this return to what names leave unspoken. This return, this non-thinking, we can also call Gelassenheit. It is remarkable that Dōgen and Eckhart developed these very similar concepts only a few decades apart from one another, and that it was not until about the same time in the twentieth century that they resurfaced again in both Germany and Japan in the thinking of Heidegger and the Kyoto School, respectively.

Mountains Practicing Walking Dōgen writes: “Know that mountains are not the realm of human beings or the realm of heavenly beings. Do not view mountains from the standard of human thought. If you do not judge mountains’ flowing by the human understanding of flowing, you will not doubt mountains flowing and not flowing.”31 What is meant here by flowing? One perspective is that this is what is meant by mountains mountain-ing, that is, being a process and not simply a thing or object. This is what Dōgen means when he describes the walking of mountains: mountains simply being mountains, doing their thing. But this notion of flowing becomes complicated by the fact that the language of flowing or walking is Dōgen’s attempt to talk about time. This is not to say that there is a mountain walking or doing something else over a span of time; rather, the walking is that the mountain becomes a mountain ever anew. It is not matter of a

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mountain doing something, or of changing spatially; time is now mountain. Therefore, it is really more a matter of discontinuity rather than continuity. Dōgen is specifically denying that time is simply a matter of measuring continuity. It is important to note that the one of the kanji that Dōgen uses for “walking” is the same character that means “practice” (gyō 行), so mountains walking is actually the same as mountains practicing being mountains, just as waters flowing is waters practicing being waters. Mountains and waters are always doing their practice, but human beings, well, not so much. So, one’s palace—that is, one’s place—is where one finds one’s practice. Dōgen did not frame it exactly in that way but this is basically the meaning. The act of walking is in many respects a constant instability. With each step one takes, one is constantly in the process of falling over, and yet one does not; it is a constant movement of destabilizing and restabilizing, a process of repeated movement that is a form of continuity even though there is discontinuity in it. To put it another way there is a continuity of controlled instability at play here. With that in mind, the now of the mountain walking is not simply to be understood as the mountain staying in place, but rather that the mountain is continually placing itself in the process, or put differently, the numerous places of process give the mountain its walking movement. If the foot just remained a foot it could not walk; it has to not be the foot in order to become the foot in order to walk. So, too, does the mountain (or any of the elementals) have to not be the mountain (in the sense of being a fixed object) in order to become the mountain that is teeming with multiple places filled with innumerable processes and life forms interacting to make the mountain truly a mountain. The emptiness that keeps the form of the foot, or the form of the mountain, is what makes it possible for the foot, or the mountain, to walk, otherwise it would be stuck in its form. This is because each step is an event. But is continuity the correct or rather fundamental term that should be thought here? Let us recall David Hume’s reflections on causation. Hume says that we always only infer causality, and the concepts of continuity and identity are really the result of our experience of contiguity and resemblance. Therefore, every step is a separate event and we are only making sense of it or holding it together by observing the succession of events in some way that is not truly capturing in thought what is actually occurring. The mountain seems to be temporally continuous, slow

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moving on one level and, if not, seemingly immovable; yet we know, of course, that the mountain is anything but that. Those who have lived on or near mountains know that they are wildly unpredictable and ever-changing in terms of climate, vegetation, movement of animal, bird, and insect life. In general, however, we do not see that and therefore do not really see our own relationship to the mountain. In Buddhist parlance, it is a matter of Dharma dwelling stages. If one puts the aspect of continuity back into it and falls back into a form of substance metaphysics, one winds up doing away with history. It is because of this now-ness that, from a Buddhist perspective, things can be seen as genuinely historical, that is, as events. This is in part what Dōgen means by “flow” (ryū 流), which bears resemblance to Alfred North Whitehead’s understanding of process or Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of event. Although Deleuze identifies Hume as a fellow nomadic thinker, we need to move beyond Hume here insofar as this is not simply a matter of how we conjoin ideas or sense impressions. The mountain is not simply sticking thoughts and impressions together; the mountain is its own happening, its own event. This is what Dōgen is getting at with his notion of “time-being” (uji 有時). This brings to mind Immanuel Kant, who radically transforms the concept of substance by interpreting it in terms of duration rather than as the Ding an sich. No longer is it possible to think simply in terms of object metaphysics; rather, the matter is all about time, the event. Dōgen was also grappling with a similar perspective some five-hundred years earlier. What then is the form of substance that we are left with? It is the process in the now-moment (nikon 而今); the now occurring as a succession of nows, as the instant continually recurring—not as the identical but rather, as Deleuze brilliantly notes, as itself: “The repetition in the eternal return is the same, but the same in so far as it is said uniquely of difference and the different.”32

Time-Being and the Continuity of Discontinuity One way of thinking about mountains is as the form, or the identity, of the mountain, but Dōgen wants to say that a mountain cannot be a mountain simply by being a mountain. A mountain can only be a mountain through emptiness, by walking, in the same way that a foot cannot walk if it is just a foot; it has to have emptiness. And when Dōgen refers to water, he does not simply mean actual water as in a stream or a lake,

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which is the only the form. The water in question is beyond any actual water. As emptiness, both mountains and waters flow. In this sense, flow and continuity are more or less the same in meaning, if by continuity one means something other than a substance that does not change but rather persists. Mountains and waters may be millions of years old but they have been flowing for that long also. And yet, mountains and waters are not simply just mountains and waters. There is also “the watery elemental of mountain-practice, and the earth elemental of ocean-practice.”33 Place and activity are intertwined and everchanging. A thing cannot be itself simply by being itself. This is the “logic of sokuhi” (sokuhi no ronri 即非 の論理), the logic of is and is not. Nishida Kitarō, considered by many Japan’s first original modern philosopher, takes up the same problematic and develops the logic of the “continuity of discontinuity” (hirenzoku no renzoku 非連続の連続),34 which for him is all that there is. Without change, nothing remains the same; things have to change in order to be. This allows for the newness of existence, which is also a conditioning by the past. Nishida is working with Western logic and trying to push it as far as possible so that he winds up with the purposely paradoxical phrase continuity of discontinuity, but this is because he is not thinking in terms of process, or of what Dōgen calls “passage” (kyōryaku 経歴).35 If all one has is a continuity or, conversely, a discontinuity of essentially atomistic now-moments, then one is driven to paradox along the lines of, say, Zeno. The other option is to think of flow in terms of the now-moments that both cut off and not cut off from past and future, so in a way Dōgen is also making a move similar to that of Nishida. Dōgen writes that one has a now-moment (nikon) that both contains its past and its future and is cut off from its past and future. But then he says that we can also think about this in terms of flow, which he links to practice. This paradox, expressed by thinkers such as Zeno, Nagarjuna, and Nishida, is not found only in Western metaphysics, which tends toward isolating things and concepts into discrete moments, resulting in a disconnect with experience or reality. What we find in Zeno, Nagarjuna, Dōgen, and Nishida is a different intent, an effort to push us toward the limitations of language. The now-moment in time-being (uji) is the sense that the entire moment of exertion of the now is interpenetrating. In other words, in the midst of all that is happening, how far can one penetrate, move into, that moment? This becomes the place that is the between of being and

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time. This now-moment acquires a depth or thickness; it becomes pregnant with possibility, much in the sense that chōra is pregnant with the prefiguration of the elementals. The progression of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō fascicle “The Time Being” (Uji 有時) moves from the critique of seeing time as simply passing by (which is not the same as flowing) to the standpoint of nikon, and then back to flow. This means that flow can only really be grasped together with the now-moment, or perhaps from within that now-moment, which is the between of a false sense of flow and the actual sense of beingtime as flow. Stated differently, nikon can perhaps be interpreted as the between of form and emptiness. I say perhaps because this is the point of difficulty in Dōgen’s text, namely, how to understand the relation between the now-moment and flow. How does this reflection on flow and the continuity of discontinuity relate to dwelling? Stated otherwise, how does this translate into praxis, whether as dwelling or as a new disposition or mood? Dōgen’s texts are embedded in a wider field of praxis of which there are other equally important practices. Although focused principally on zazen, there is nevertheless a place in the Zen of Dōgen for the kōan, which is a means to drive one to a new disposition and relationship with the limits of language and rational thinking. This is the point of the passage in the “Mountains and Waters Sutra” where he criticizes those “bald-headed fellows” who regard statements such as mountains walking as illogical and meaningless. One needs to go through human thinking to the point where Zen practice exceeds the philosophy of Zen. But there is no shortcut; continual practice is demanded for a breakthrough. The eternally recurring flow of uji is emptiness (Sk. śūnyatā; kū 空). This is the moment of realization that being (ū 有) and non-being (mu 無), having and not having, are one and the same as Buddha-nature. Even more radically, there is nothing before or after, beneath or above Buddhanature—including Buddha-nature itself. “From Dōgen’s standpoint,” writes Masao Abe, “there is absolutely nothing behind or beyond Being, time, and thinking—even a so-called Buddha-nature or Ereignis. … This absolute nothingness is not apart from Dōgen’s Self. Rather, for Dōgen, this absolute nothingness is the true Self, and the true Self is this absolute nothingness.”36 In realizing the interconnectedness of all things, the flowing or “passageless passage” (kyōryaku), as Abe paradoxically translates it, of uji moves beyond, or rather incorporates, both the reversibility and irreversibility of time. Dōgen describes it in the following way:

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The time being has a characteristic of flowing. So-called today flows into tomorrow, today flows into yesterday, yesterday flows into today. And today flows into today, tomorrow flows into tomorrow. Because flowing is a characteristic of time, moments of past and present do not overlap or line up side by side. … self and other are already time.37

In the present, the past is fully taken up, and yet it is simultaneously negated in its emptiness so that there is always and only the present. This is the case also with futurity. As being-time fills out the moment the future is actualized but being empty of form it immediately recedes into the past so that it no longer remains the future. In this way, past, present, and future flow together, eternally recurring in the here and now of life. To grasp this flow is not to measure it but rather to experience it in the present or right now (nikon). But since the here and now is never present in any lasting sense, it is a continual dying. This is why, for Dōgen, living and dying is one and the same. To grasp this with one’s entire being is to awaken to the great matter of birth-anddeath. The “great death” (daishi 大死) of ego-selfhood is both the releasement from and the total immersion in the ever-flowing transient impermanence of being-time. The great death is the actualization of the standpoint of absolute nothingness, which is possible only from the standpoint of neither/nor—neither death nor life—because only thus is the absolute nothingness of the self and of existence in general able to avoid being grounded as a self-identity. In Buddhism, enlightenment or awakening is affirming that the ground of being is bottomless, in other words, empty of form and endless in being-time. All moments are the flow itself, which is to say, impermanent Buddha-nature eternally recurring.38 The intertwining, or chiasm,39 to draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s rich term, of living and dying as a non-dual whole is expressed in Dōgen’s concept of uji. Time permeates being and being permeates time. Dōgen writes, “For the time being here means time itself is being, and all being is time.”40 This is analogous to Heidegger’s proposition in On Time and Being that “Being means the same as presencing [Anwesen]. … the present, together with past and future, forms the character of time. Being is determined as presence by time.”41 Dōgen differs from Heidegger, however, in not asserting the priority of time over being. Time and being form a complete and fundamental interpermeation. From the Buddhist perspective of the non-substantiality,

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impermanence, and interconnectedness of all things, there is no distinct identity given to either time or being. This is why uji is alternately translated as meaning both “being-time” and “time-being.” So, although they come from very different times and contexts, Dōgen and Heidegger arrive at the same standpoint: being and time are inseparable and time constitutes the essence of what it means to exist. This is why Dōgen states, “Time is not separate from you, and as you are present, time does not go away.”42

Being Between Human and Animal, Life and Death In the northwest corner of Yellowstone Park, outside the boundary of the official entrance, there is a small, seldom used path that follows the Gallatin River. Besides the occasional adventurous angler willing to compete with the bears that frequent the area, one finds there few human beings. If one is willing to camp there under the stars, an entirely new world is revealed, a veritable open region. Montana is not called the Big Sky Country for nothing, and its emptiness is an endless parade of cloud formations, dancing hues of color, punctuated by the appearance now and then of godlike avian beings. Under the night sky, the emptiness of space becomes alive with the ageless celestial lightshow that relatively few living in the industrially developed world will ever see. The emptiness of the sky is not the nothingness normally associated by the metaphysically conditioned Western mind with mere absence; it manifests rather a sense of both fullness or suchness (Sk. tathātā) and emptiness (Sk. śūnyatā), which simultaneously occur at every moment. The overfull emptiness of the sky serves to amplify the sounds of a world itself just awakening, one for the most part silent and invisible during the daylight. It is within the closed horizon of the nocturnal sky, if fortune smiles, that the eerie yet rapturous howling of the Gallatin wolf pack can be heard. Such an experience throws one’s body back into a more primitive state, tense with the excitement that attends the primal animal fear of the unknown. In these rare moments, one truly does become-other, as Deleuze and Félix Guattari write; the sense of personal conscious selfhood dissolves in the awakening of one’s repressed alter identity. Alone, lying close to a fire kept burning throughout the night, one is acutely aware of the myriad sounds of running water, sizzling wood,

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broken twigs, rustling grass, and the exchanges of wolf cries and howls in the distance. Not possessing the keenness of perception to know exactly from where those howls originate, we all-too-human-animals prick our ears in an effort to discern one from another, taking in the midnight air through distended nostrils as if to unconsciously recover what had been largely repressed for millennia. “When a human animal comes to inhabit other animals’ territory with them, or even inhabit their bodies as they his,” writes Lingis, “the movements released by the excess energies in his body are composed with the differentials, directions, rhythms, and speeds of their bodies.”43 The lupine music continues for some time, then abruptly halts. No longer feeling fully human at this moment and unable to sleep, one realizes perhaps mounting sexual arousal that both surprises and delights, charged by emotions now raw and on edge, by the body tingling with exhilaration at the intangible sense of vague danger brought on by an extreme awareness of vulnerability. “Is not the force our emotions that of the other animals?” asks Lingis.44 Elsewhere, he observes: “Today, in our internet world where everything is reduced to digitally coded messages, images, and simulacra instantaneously transmitted from one animal to another, it is in our passions for the other animals that we learn all the rites and sorceries, the torrid and teasing presence, and the ceremonious delays, of eroticism.”45 Rising at the crack of dawn, even with little sleep, one feels fully awakened (but not in the mundane sense of just having woke from sleep)—alive—because of the proximity of death. One’s senses, mind, and spirit soar like the hawk over the mountains, trees, and waters, between earth and the open, empty sky. Standing naked to bathe in a nearby pool of water fed by a cold mountain stream, the primal energies of life are all that seem to matter at the moment. The mountains also wake and continue their glacial-paced walking, as do all the life-entities, sentient and non-sentient, that walk with and between the mountains and the open sky. In such moments, one moves between the life energies in their myriad manifestations— physical, intellectual, emotional, affective, spiritual—that give form to the emptiness within which we all dwell. Being fully in the nowmoment is dwelling and being in transit between the empty fullness and full emptiness of life.

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Notes





1. Yunmen Wenyan, Blue Cliff Record, trans. Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary with foreword by Taizan Maezumi Roshi (Boston: Shambhala, 2005), p. 343. 2. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 98. 3. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), pp. 137, 141. 4. Jason M. Wirth, Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), p. 69. 5. All non-European words will be in Japanese unless indicated otherwise, in which case the following abbreviations will be used: Ch. for Chinese; Sk. for Sanskrit. 6. Snyder, p. 10. 7. This poem, written by the Tang dynasty Chan master Qingyuan Weixan is found in The Compendium of Five Lamps (Ch. Wudeng Huiyuan 五燈 會元), compiled during the Song dynasty by Puji. It is quoted and discussed in Masao Abe, Zen and Western Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1985), pp. 4–5; also see Wirth, p. 9, for further commentary on this. 8. Classical Chinese and Japanese characters will be used throughout this essay. See also note 15. 9. Kōan is a Japanese term for a narrative, question, or statement that challenges conventional thinking because of its generally paradoxical nature. It is used in Zen practice to help the practitioner break through the strictures of purely rational thinking in order to free the mind of conceptual attachments. It helps to produce what in Zen is referred to as the Great Doubt, which is a stage toward reaching enlightenment or awakening. I discuss the kōan at greater length, with respect to the relation between the human and non-human in my “What Is the Trace of the Original Face? Levinas, Buddhism, and the Mystery of Animality,” in Face to Face with Animals: Levinas and the Animal Question, eds. Peter Atterton and Tamra Wright (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019). 10. Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s “Shobo Genzo”, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi, vol. 1 (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010), p. 159. 11. Ibid., p. 154. 12. Ibid., p. 157.

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13. Ibid., p. 46. The discuss the relation between mind and Buddha in my “On Shushōgi Paragraph 31,” in Engaging Dōgen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening, eds. Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Shūdō Brian Schroeder, and Kanpū Bret W. Davis (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016), pp. 185–192. The traditional account of this exchange between Guishan and Yangshan is as follows (cited in The Five Houses of Zen, trans. Thomas Cleary [Boston and London: Shambhala, 1997], pp. 25–26): Kuei-shan [Guishan] asked Yang-shan [Yangshan], ‘How do you understand the immaculate mind?’ Yang-shan replied, ‘Mountains, rivers, and plains; sun, moon, and stars.’ Kuei-shan said, ‘You only get the phenomena.’ Yang-shan rejoined, ‘What did you just ask about?’ Kuei-shan said, ‘The immaculate mind.’ Yang-shan asked, ‘Is it appropriate to call it phenomena?’ Kuei-shan said, ‘You’re right.’

14. Japanese names are written in the Japanese order of family name first, followed by given name (e.g., Nishitani Keiji), except when authors have used the Western name order for their publications in Western languages, in which case the surname will be rendered in small upper-case letters (e.g., Masao Abe, Shigeru Taguchi, Kazuaki Tanahashi). 15. The reader will note that the Japanese kanji 空 (kū) is used to translate “emptiness” whereas the Chinese character 無 (wu) was employed earlier. The reason is for this probably has to do with an early translation decision that was made to distinguish the Buddhist conception of emptiness from the Daoist conception. The kanji 無 (mu) is generally translated variously as “nothingness,” “nothing,” “non-existence,” “no,” “without.” Wu can also have the same meaning depending on the context. 16. John Sallis, The Return to Nature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 2. 17. Ibid., pp. 78–79. 18. Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 114. 19. Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010). 20. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised with a foreword Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).

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21. Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, p. 99. For an in-depth analysis of this, as well as the related concept of die Gegnet, which significantly inform my own treatment here of Heidegger, see Bret W. Davis, “Returning the World to Nature: Heidegger’s Turn from a Transcendental-Horizonal Projection of World to an Indwelling Releasement to the Open-Region,” Continental Philosophy Review 47, nos. 3–4 (2014): 373–397. 22. See Dōgen, “The Presencing of Truth: Dōgen’s Genjōkōan,” in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, trans. Bret W. Davis and eds. William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 251–259; also, cf. Dogen, “Actualizing the Fundamental Point,” in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, pp. 29–33. 23. See Martin Heidegger, “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 35–63. 24. Sallis, The Return of Nature, p. 78. 25. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). See also Kelly Oliver, Earth & World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 111–161, for an extended treatment of these concepts in Heidegger. 26. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 112. 27. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012). 28. See Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to “Gelassenheit” (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), for a full engagement on this concept. 29. Dōgen, Fukanzazengi (Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen), in Engaging Dōgen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening, eds. Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Shūdō Brian Schroeder, and Kanpū Bret W. Davis (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016), pp. 195–198. 30. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 92; translation modified. 31. Dogen, “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 163. 32. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 300–301; italics in the original. I develop the similar yet different conceptions of eternal recurrence in Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Nishitani, and Tanabe Hajime with respect to Dōgen in my “Recurrence and the Great Death: A Transcontinental Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and Japanese Philosophy, eds. Shigeru Taguchi and Andrea Altobrando (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019).

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33. Elizabeth Sikes, personal correspondence with me, February 12, 2018. 34. Nishida Kitarō, Place and Dialectic, trans. John W. M. Krummel and Shigenori Nagatomo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 108, 121. Nishida borrows this phrase from Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki. 35. Dogen, “The Time Being,” in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 106. 36. Masao Abe, A Study of Dōgen: His Philosophy and Religion, ed. Steven Heine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 144. 37. Dogen, “The Time Being,” in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, pp. 106– 107. For an analysis of flow in Dogen, see Kevin Schilbrack, “Metaphysics in Dōgen,” Philosophy East and West 50, no. 1 (January 2000): 37–40. 38. On the relation between the great death and flow, see my “Recurrence and the Great Death: A Transcontinental Phenomenology.” 39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 130–155. 40. Dogen, “The Time Being,” in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 104. 41. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 2. 42. Dogen, “The Time Being,” in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 106. 43. Lingis, p. 56. 44. Ibid., p. 36. 45. Ibid., p. 39.



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CHAPTER 10

Moving Wolves Thomas Thorp

Sic transit mundus

In a valley that is home to a tributary of the Yellowstone River inside the northern boundaries of the Park, an arctically cold February morning, just below the confluence of Cache Creek and the Lamar River, and when I first saw her I mistook her for a coyote.

The Grey Wolf You Will Meet at Dawn The grey wolf you meet in the wild is not the pumped-up superhero of legend and screen. Too many of the images we are offered of them are, in fact, photographs taken of wolves living in one of the rescue centers, private zoos really, whose number seems to multiply along with the public’s interest in wolves, an interest that continues to grow as wolves have begun to reinhabit regions of western Europe and the United States where once they had been extirpated. These rescued wolves live well-managed lives. In exchange for being fed, their freedom of movement is restricted. And thus, in the critical sense of the word, they have ceased being wolves. T. Thorp (*)  Saint Xavier University, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_10

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To be a wolf is to live the profoundly organized, deeply intelligent life of a “social” predator—a creature who must coordinate its movements with regard to the landscape conditions, with regard to the available prey, and to other wolves and any competing predators. The logic at work in the well-managed life of a captive wolf guards so little resemblance to the deep intelligence of the wild wolf that the comparison has the power to disclose a great deal indeed about what it means for anything “to be” what it is. Wolves in the wild are lean, even rangy, relatively unkempt and, in the hours either side of dawn they will often appear where you do not expect them, materializing phantom-like out of the dawn from over a ridge; even when they happen to be at rest wild wolves are always scenting (both taking in and emitting scents) which means they are always becoming, always incorporating and altering their environment. To be a wolf is to be engaged in this daily process of becoming, and in that sense wolves are always on the move. In the hours either side of dawn the wild wolves of the Yellowstone will probably be on the move in the more mundane sense that Aristotle terms “local motion” by which we mean they are moving from here to there. Except that for the wolf there is no clear line between the two: to move in these characteristic ways is at the same time to become a wolf. The wolf that crossed my path that February morning stood still for a moment on the ridge above the trail—mimicking to my novice eye the form of a coyote—before moving quickly down and across my path, giving me an impassive sideward sniff and glance, then disappearing down the slope to my right toward the wooded river bottom. It was when I saw her move that I knew her to be a wolf.

Is What It Is Not On the one hand, of course, being has always been thought in terms of motion or movement. It was Aristotle who explained that for any actually existing being (matter with a specific form), “to be” is to be in motion, where by motion he meant change, and where by change he meant, paradigmatically, the work [energeia] that is the coming into actuality [entelecheia] of any potentiality.1 What this means is that in a quite literal sense any particular being always is what it is not. What anything is at a given moment is what it is becoming but is not (yet). Being, in other words, is fundamentally mysterious in the sense that what it means to be, is to be what one is not.2

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This notion of being is mysterious on the one hand for the apparently mundane reason that most of those who are responsible for explaining it, academic philosophers, would have a difficult time telling you what the question of being amounts to. Indeed only twenty-five years ago in the English-speaking world of academic philosophy the vast majority of philosophers would have simply dismissed the problem out of hand as an outmoded way of talking about things that had been surpassed already by the time of the scientific revolution. Practicing philosophers, however, can’t do without the problem any longer. And yet the mysterious features of the problem of being do not disappear even under careful examination, they seem rather to proliferate. If the fact that being is becoming means that anything is what it is not, it also means that the source or origin—the “being”—of anything that we encounter in the world is not itself something that can appear. Being is not the sort of thing you can grasp and examine because it quickly turns on you, disappears and then reappears where it was not. Being is not the sort of thing you can grasp and examine because while to speak of being is to direct one’s attention to whatever it is that makes things appear in the world, what makes appearances possible is not something that can appear. What makes appearances possible does not itself appear. What makes things come into being is not itself a being. What makes human experience possible is not itself something available to that same sort of experience. If “experience” is that act humans perform through which things in the world appear to us as such, experience is not some “thing” I experience. But it is also not merely the sum of my experiences; rather it is of course a capacity or potentiality to experience things. So too for the question of being (for these formulations are certainly not arbitrarily parallel) being is not to be understood as that hidden source or origin of things (some sort of hidden “thing” that we cannot see for some reason)—try to resist thinking of the “being” of the wolf as some mysterious hidden “property” that all wolves have in common—rather we would do better to think of being as the mystery itself. Being is the problem that faces us, the beings who are human, when we experience anything: a wolf on a cold morning that I mistook for a coyote. The problem, and it is a human problem, is that in order to experience or know any particular being or thing I must supplement my experience—of the wolf in this case—with an additional conceptual affirmation that takes this form: “it is a wolf.” And (more of the mystery

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here) the additional or supplementary moment in which I affirm the being of what I observe comes not after I see something but it comes first, it is the very condition itself of my being able (as a human) to see anything. I don’t first see something and then quickly conceptualize it; rather I could not see anything at all were I not affirming the “it is” schematically ahead of time or, better, outside of time. To perceive or experience anything is to take it “as” the sort of thing it is. When scientists study the wolf they do indeed first make observations prior to systematically developing hypotheses which they then test with more observations before proffering anything like a finding much less a conclusion. Even though we are not practicing scientists we all have a general understanding of how that process works. Why must the philosopher’s questions about the same things (wolves, for example) be so convoluted? What possible reason could the philosopher have for proposing a different account of observation, experience, perception and the acquisition of knowledge?

And as She Moves That winter day, years ago, was my first sighting of a wolf in the wild and, as I say, I initially mistook her for a coyote, until I saw her move. I had seen wolves before, or felt that I had done so, because I had from time to time joined in the groups of wolf-watchers who each winter gather near their vehicles along the only road in Yellowstone Park still open through the snow, the narrow two-lane road that runs from the northern entrance at Gardiner over into Lamar valley where after briefly leaving the Park the road soon butts up against impassable snow in the passes beyond and turns back upon itself. But seeing a wolf through a high-powered scope is not the same as encountering one alone on a skitrail and on the move. In her initial stance she appears almost bow-legged, partly as a result of her slimmed down chest—it is a runner’s body—but also because the wolf stands on her toes. Especially in the winter when the ground is covered in snow she moves, as it were, on the tips of her toes. The wide digits of the paw are even further inflected by seasonally heavier fur growth between the pads, allowing the digit pads to spread on contact, resulting in a skimming movement across the surface of the snow, the paws padding along in a steady rhythm so efficient that the upper haunches appear almost to be still.

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Wolves are of course capable of various patterns of movement: walking, trotting, loping, and galloping. What the track patterns left in the snow tell you is what the wolf was doing, what she was up to. For the most part the wolves of the Yellowstone are covering ground. In this particular landscape they have to define and defend large hunting territories, which means both covering the land in search of game and defending it from other wolves. This work translates into a need to be in transit, which requires an efficient low-energy gait, one in which the impression made by the hind paws will fall more or less into the track made by the departing front paw, or near to it at any rate. When they slow to a walk, there is often a telltale circling pattern as the wolf cautiously investigates a scent or approaches an active site.3 Where do we detect the problem of being and becoming in the wolf’s gait? There is, again, no single characteristic gait of the wolf because the wolf is defined by its movements and its movements are determined by the wolf’s territory, which is to say by the type of ecosystem and the corresponding types of prey on a given landscape. So tight is the bond between the wolf and her terroir that wolves are in fact more properly classified by ecotype than by genotype. In a quite literal sense, wolves become the land. To be a wolf means to become a wolf and this is not simply a metaphysical claim but is, rather, part of the explanation for their remarkable range.4 The fact that wolves are so bound to the particular characteristics of their land, so closely defined by the immediate conditions of their environment—capable of altering their species-defining phenotype in response to it—means, paradoxically, that the wolf can live almost anywhere. So closely defined is she by her immediate surroundings that she can adapt to new surroundings. It is only one short step, one that naturalists need not take with us, to the realization that in one very important sense there is no such thing as a wolf. To think of the being of the wolf as some sort of property of a wolf, or even of every wolf, is to fail to understand what it means to be a wolf. It is tempting to believe that as we learn more about how the wolf lives and moves we are learning more about the “being” of the wolf, more about what it means to be a wolf. This is a temptation we should struggle to resist. Indeed it is with the aim of resisting that temptation to posit “wolf being” that I’ve constructed this essay around a double provocation. I’m going to contend both that the wolf is without world and that the wolf is without being.

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I call these “provocations” because I am fully aware that in denying being and world of the wolf I am running counter to virtually all of the philosophical efforts that are working to bring us closer to an appreciation of nature and of its wildness. Suffice it to say that I agree with the impulse but believe that the philosophizing about animals and nature has nearly all of it gone in exactly the wrong direction. We do not accommodate the wolf, nor teach ourselves to care for nature, by bringing the wolf into our world. My suggestion, and my thesis if you will, is that every attempt to erase the line between humans and animals mimics in its fundamental logic and replicates in its fundamental tendencies the treatment afforded the wolf by the natural sciences. But the wolf we meet through the sciences is a rescued wolf, either a “managed” wolf on public lands or a wolf in a zoo. What it means to be a wolf is to be a wild wolf, to move in the ways that wolves move, and the sciences can help us to document these movements but cannot tell us what they mean. So it matters a great deal that we understand what it might mean to speak of the “being” of the wolf. And yet just as the naturalist grasps the wolf by collaring her and rendering her an object of human knowledge so too do the environmental philosophers, who protest against the objectivizing tendency of the natural sciences, replicate that same gesture when they generously invite the wild wolf to join a “world” and a sense of “being” that happens to be entirely foreign to them. In order to rethink this contemporary problem of the difference between humans and animals I propose that we take a moment to recall and to review the most basic features of the venerable problem of being and becoming. But rather than lose ourselves in the philosophical undergrowth that is metaphysics I suggest we try instead to examine this problem (for the two problems are of course one and the same) by thinking about the way that wolves move, both in the sense of the way they move across the land and in the movement that is their “becoming.”

Within Her Pack The wolf’s way of becoming is “socially” mediated because wolves pursue prey in cooperation with other members of the “pack.” Both the provision of nutrition (individual sustenance) and even usually the opportunity to mate (species sustenance) require that the wolf integrate herself into what we imprecisely and misleadingly refer to as a pack.

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A wolf pack is in fact nearly always a single breeding pair, their offspring, alongside some of their own siblings, plus perhaps an occasional adopted outsider. At its full strength a pack comprises several generations of the breeding pair’s own offspring. There is little point to trying to avoid the term “pack,” as long as we understand what it means and what it means is that the pack is a nuclear family stablized for a few seasons around a pair of wolves that assert—often with only partial success—their exclusive right to mate within the pack.5 In addition to correcting the general understanding of the term “pack” recent research has also taught us to question the popular notion of the “alpha” male and female. The term is now generally considered to be misleading. Observations in the Yellowstone confirm the extent to which hierarchical status is indeed conferred upon the mating pair through the enforcement of ritualized gestures of submission. But this recognition of the “alpha” pair’s right to mate is socially mediated and it is the opportunity openly to breed more so than any proscribed leading role in the actual hunt that defines the hierarchical nature of the wolf’s social relations. Because the wolf’s movements (local movement from here to there) are mediated through hierarchical social relations to other wolves in the pack as well as to outsiders, and to other packs or loners, the wolf’s local movements are inseparably bound up with her movements in the genetic sense, that is to say her process of becoming the wolf she will be. This suggests that the line between specific local movements and the wolf’s growth or development is useful but artificial. Any line drawn between what drives an individual wolf to move and what defines a critter as a wolf is a representation less of the ways of the wolf than it is a product of our modes of conceptual analysis. But if that line between local movement and generic or genetic processes is erased then what we tend to want to call the wolf’s “being” (its ordered movement toward the achievement of its biological drives) is also put into question. The wolf’s way of becoming seems to be dispersed across the dynamics of pack hierarchies that are grounded in breeding restrictions (genetics) but that comprise individual wolf identity (socialization). To say that the wolf is dispersed is to contest first of all any notion that there is a universal nature of “the wolf” beyond the particular wolves. But it is also to contest any nominalism, any suggestion that the wolf is nothing apart from or more than the sum of individual wolves. Saying that the wolf is dispersed means that to be a wolf is to be distended across the highly

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ordered but ephemeral differences between wolves, between wolves in a particular pack, and between different packs. Whatever it might refer to, the wolf’s being is neither a property of each individual wolf nor a universal feature of all wolves. But if we were to take seriously the proposition that the being of the wolf—what it means to be a wolf—is neither the property of any wolf nor the sum of the ways of the wolves in their interactions this would lead us to the suggestion that it is precisely the differences between wolves that serves as the medium that sustains wolf ways. Take as an example the social interactions required to pursue game. Largely as a result of the tremendously increased opportunities to observe wolves made possible by the reintroduction of Canadian wolves into the open landscape of Yellowstone National Park in the early 1990’s, we now know that successfully feeding themselves requires and rewards quick and often remarkably radical adaptations in the hunting behavior of wolves. The released wolves must eat, but wolves hunt successfully as a pack, so the pack must hunt, but both the terrain and the available prey are new (in the case of introduced wolves or in the case of migrating wolves pushed into new territory). What is required is something like innovation. It is as if the distention of the hunting process across the social-family (the pack) permits a more rapid learning curve than could possibly be achieved by any single individual in a limited time. But neither is this sort of rapid adaptation and innovation a result of the “many minds are better than one” proposition. It is not as though each wolf retains or remembers a piece of the puzzle and then they put the pieces together. Rather, I suggest it is precisely the reorientation of familiar activities expressed through the differentiation itself that is definitive. The key to shifting our focus from positive models of knowledge to the power of differences is that a social role is defined only in relation to and as different from another social role. These differences are not mute or empty gaps but are instead the fleshy medium through which wolf ways are negotiated. To play a role is not to follow a script but is to be ready to innovatively respond to the innovative activities of others. When Canadian wolves were introduced into the foreign landscape of Yellowstone National Park, they were attracted first to the open wellwatered grassy valleys that supported populations of lazy grazing elk. But as those bottomlands were occupied wolves seeking territory to support new packs (wolves driven by new opportunities for mating) moved into the higher plateaus. Contrary to the predictions of the naturalists who

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managed the wolf reintroduction, the wolves demonstrated both an unexpectedly rapid and a pack-specific ability to “teach themselves” to hunt new game. Instead of migrating from their territory to follow winter migrations of elk, two packs quickly taught themselves the dangerous and difficult art of pursuing bison in heavy snow.6 Clearly this level of radically fluid adaptation can’t be a matter of “learning” if what we mean by learning is the passing along to others of a new discovery. First, there is nobody from whom to learn, no wolf who “remembers” how to take down bison and, second, because there simply is not time enough for learning: a pack can survive for a time by scavenging but they must manage to make a kill in less time than it would take to “teach” themselves how to bring down a bison in heavy snow. The adaptive process can be explained if instead of an “archive” notion of recollection and learning we attend instead to the raw acceleration that can occur if we were to distend the wolf’s “being” across the members of the pack, and beyond that into an entire landscape of differences: conflicts, accommodations, threats, challenges and pleasures. Again, it is not to something like the sum or combined intelligence of many wolves that I’m appealing here, but literally to the multiplication of differences that are generated principally within the socially constructed hierarchies that define the pack. Being, on this model, would reside in those differences, which now become the source of wolf activity, difference and repetition serving as the medium of the driving forces that are so often misunderstood as instincts. This is too broad and substantial a claim to pursue in this setting, but the fundamental point is simple enough. Even at the level of its gait and its patterns of movement the wolf is embedded in a sensuous environment that calls the pack to move and to act as a social unit; and given our basic and unexamined presuppositions regarding beings and their movement we are strongly inclined to affirm a purposiveness to these interactions. We are inclined to view them, in short, as modes of cooperation toward an end. And then, again quite naturally, we begin to notice that the wolf is not such a foreign being but shares with us a complex of behaviors carried out within a common world and characterized by virtues of cooperation and strategic forethought. And then it is only a step or two to viewing the wolves as our cousins and attributing to them the power to teach us lessons about how to live in peace with the natural world. This is, again, a tendency toward magnanimity in the name of tolerance or inclusion that we ought to resist.

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A Phantom Scent The philosophers who have begun to take seriously again the problem of being are often also philosophers who think and write about the place of the human in nature. Philosophers too are concerned about, and thus concern themselves with, the manifestly destructive and deeply pathological practices of modern economies. And as they begin again to “practice” philosophy by taking up these extramural concerns they will be inclined to commence by attempting to overthrow the traditional metaphysical (or in fact ontological) distinctions between humans and other animals. If only it could be shown and affirmed (the argument goes) that humans are in our “being” connected essentially to all other forms of being then, it would seem, we would also learn thereby to be concerned about those other beings and, consequently, gain wisdom in the ways of our own being. It is a deeply attractive proposition. The twentieth-­ century philosopher who taught us the most about what it might mean to think, again, about being was Martin Heidegger. And although he devoted all of his philosophical work to the problem of being, he wrote on only a few occasions about animals. Heidegger’s most infamous pronouncement regarding animals was to write that in contrast to the being of humans (Dasein) other animals are in this respect impoverished. The wolf, according to Heidegger’s pronouncement, is without world, or nearly so. This is not the place to engage in even a cursory discussion of the considerable secondary literature that has been spawned by this remark, nor even to read the passage carefully as it deserves in the light of Heidegger’s lengthier considerations of the same basic question in his lecture course of 1929–1930, but I can safely say that nearly all of the commentaries addressing Heidegger’s claim presume to admonish him for being unwilling to throw off the old prejudice that divides humans from animals. Heidegger’s casual readers and contemporary critics will have progressed beyond the prejudice that humans are superior to other animals.7 But rejecting claims to human superiority, whatever that might mean, does not require nor does it justify erasing the line itself. The wolf moves through a world, which following Heidegger I contend is not properly speaking a “world” at all. If I break from Heidegger—and this is no substantive break but merely a matter of emphasis—it is with his use of the term Weltamt, world-impoverished. As Heidegger well knows it is, rather, the human way that is impoverished.

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The human, simply in order to make perceptual judgments must posit “being” which is to say we must posit a world as the necessary horizon against which the human ways of going/aiming/acting might stand forth. This extra step we must take is the indication of a logos or language-based form of knowledge and it is the mark of an ontological impoverishment. The wolf I encountered that day crossed the ski trail and quickly disappeared down the ridge and in doing so she introduced me to the wolf’s worldlessness in a way I had not seen it before and have not forgotten since. It had not snowed for just over a week when I arrived in early February. Which certainly does not mean there was no snow on the ground. Quite the contrary, the view to the northeast where your gaze is paused and elevated by the looming peaks of the “Bears,” the Beartooth range, and the view to the west, running down along the wide valley floor toward the junction with the Yellowstone river, was a tableau of winter white; the deep snow a testament to the half-dozen heavy winter snowstorms of the prior months. But there had been no fresh snowfall in well over a week. And as a result of that recent paucity of snowfall when my eyes followed the wolf I caught a glimpse, an insight of sorts, into the worldlessness of the wolf. Across an expanse of land as far as my weak human eyesight would permit, there were signs: tracks, prints, hundreds of them and all of them more or less clearly preserved in the frozen surface snow. Not a few tracks as one might see often enough at this season in the Park but a virtual Times Square of crisscrossing pathways of animal prints preserved in the snow. I took in, for just an instant, a clear though spectral impression of each and every critter who had passed by in the previous ten days, how quickly they were moving, whether or not they had stopped to scoop away the snow or altered course or suddenly leapt high and broke into a run. What I “saw” in other words, and for just an instant, was the way the wolf moves. The wolf does not take in its surroundings by capturing the world in a series of present snapshots of sight. The wolf, rather, exists in a river of scents. While no doubt true, the oft-repeated claim that a wolf’s sense of smell is at least 100 times more acute than that of a human misses the fundamental point. The snout of a wolf houses approximately 200 million olfactory cells. And an olfactory cell is probably better understood as a form of touch than as analogous to sight or hearing. This is because unlike the sense of sight the sense of smell involves direct

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biochemical transmission. To smell a given scent is to incorporate the chemicals comprising that scent into one’s own body. Smells are sensed by sensory neurons in the lining of the nose, called the olfactory epithelium. There is nothing comparable to this in the case of sight. Nothing at all in the light photons that strike the eye is coded, chemically or otherwise, to indicate the sort of thing that is being seen. Sight surveys, scent invades. Sight oversees a world. Scent, and also sign (tracks or scat) are not images of anything; they are actual material traces of the individual critter, the one who passed by this morning, or two days ago. The chemoreception that is the key to olfaction or smell involves a direct chemical activation of a receptor cell. In fact the manner in which smell involves active incorporation of environmental chemicals (odorants) into the cells of the creature who is taking in these smells is attested by the fact that in vertebrate animals the mucus that overlays the epithelium of the nasal cavity contains, in addition to the molecules responsible for binding the odor molecule to the receptors, a healthy presence of antibodies. The antibodies are necessary because in the case of smell the olfactory system involves direct biochemical contact to the brain.8 Wolves (and other canines) not only have the astonishing ability to make out specific smells from more than a mile away—they can track prey and indeed outflank prey that they have not sighted—they can and do sense the presence of critters who have passed by many hours before. In other words making ones way in a world of scent involves highly specific and refined forms of “perception” both across space (distance) and time. But scent does not require the medium of space/time. Scent is conceptless. Scent is without horizon because it need not be conceptualized as such. The wolf need not conceptualize a world, she is, rather, touched by phantoms. What we should now be able to notice is that what is entirely superfluous to the wolf-way is the precise dynamic that is absolutely definitive of “knowledge.” For if we employ the term properly what the word knowledge refers to is a precise set of burdens that define the human way of being through knowing. It is a human predicament that in order to know anything I must submit it to two and precisely two delimitations: it must be in exactly one place at any given time, and I must represent to myself that I am knowing it. The scent-phantoms through which the wolf moves are at one and the same time here (there are material traces here) and not here (there is no need to confine the scent-sign to any given “thing” and indeed to do so would be to blunt the motivating power of the scent trail).

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The human must make anything “present” in order to know it. To know it, in other words, I must transform it into an object of knowledge, into a being, literally into an “it is.” To take it in, to know it “as” this or that is just another way of saying that upon locating it in a specific grid of space/time I must take it “as” the sort of thing that it is. These are the first two elements of conceptual knowledge, namely the restriction of the sense experience under the conditions that define any possible intuition (space and time) and the determination of that specific point of space/time through the categories that I employ to understand what I’m seeing (concepts). But it is the human being, the being burdened with logos—reason or language—who must “understand” what is seen simply in order to see it, and who must therefore posit “beings” within a “world.” In the wolf’s way there is no need for this particular complex laboring dance. Unburdened by these appalling demands, the wolf moves across a landscape populated by what, to us, could only be described as ghosts or phantoms. A ghost is the sort of being that defies the most basic act of delimitation that constitutes our human way of knowing. The ghost is both here and at the same time not here. For the wolf, the ghost is both the critter “I” would prey upon (except that there is no need to appeal to an “I”) and at the same time (except that there is no need for this delimitation) I am the ghost.9 The ghost is at one and the same time its intention to evade becoming prey and its imperative to expose itself to predation in order to move and to seek its own prey, its own forms of nutrition. The fact that the pronouns in the prior sentence slip back and forth from referencing one being to another is an attempt, here, to indicate the possibility of highly attuned and intelligent interactions with nature, but without any need to posit a series of discreet things. Here’s the point (lest we be accused once again of lapsing into metaphysical reveries) the wolf need never posit the thing we call “a coyote” (that particular schematism of the conceptual package we identify as “that coyote”) in order to be fully “aware” that this particular and pesky coyote passed by. Human knowing is disabled by our reliance upon sight, and as a result our comprehension of meaning is equally narrow, equally likely to fall into the confusion of meaning with knowledge and of knowledge with sight of the object. The wolf on the other hand is not bound by the peculiar epistemological triptych (sight, knowledge, object) that defines our world. The wolf lives in a river of scent.

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This Difference • In order simply to propel oneself purposefully through the landscape the human being must first posit a world, which world is a not merely a container for the objects that we can encounter but is the condition of their coherence as such. • In order to encounter anything at all, the human must take it, or mistake it, for an object and all that we mean here by object is that any thing, in order to be a thing we might know, cannot be at one and the same time in two places. • In order to comprehend anything we must first of all understand it “as” this or that sort of thing and this requires that in order to understand, we humans must posit a world, a world in which things might “be” for us. But since in order to understand anything I must first of all take it to be this or that sort of thing, it follows that in order to understand I must misunderstand. What I know is the phenomenon. But the phenomenon, finally, is not the wild wolf. To have to understand something in order to perceive it is inevitably and originally to misunderstand it. My representation of this critter “as” the thing that it is, is not the thing it is. Being is what it is not. By way of contrast, two fundamental features of the river of scent: • Scent requires no world because it requires no object and it requires no object because unlike the world-positing senses of hearing and of sight there is no “faculty” of smell, rather scent is the thing itself, the chemical trace taken up into the cells of the receptive critter. Smell is closer to nourishment than it is to understanding in that I need not cognize the object but am directly incorporating it biochemically. • Nearly all mammals with the exception of the human being are equipped with two systems of smell, one of them is primarily devoted to detecting and incorporating pheromones.10 My conclusion, then, is that humans are indeed quite different from wolves in this precise regard that wolves are without world and are without being. This is a difference that must be understood not as a claim to species superiority but, rather, as a scar, the sign of a wound not fully healed, as an evolutionary and ontological flaw in the human mode of

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being. Human beings must “posit” being in order to know, grasp, experience, judge and move purposively through “the” world. And this means that human “being” is marked by the ontological difference between beings (things) and the “being” of those things. Humans are, in short, afflicted by their recourse to being, and to speak of being in this way is to say that in order to move through their posited world humans must take aim, they must posit “purposes” and “goals” which means of course that they must write algorithms and develop rubrics and assess their productions. Wolves do not. The order of ontological difference (along with all that it affords the human in the ways of technological manipulation and self-delusion) is the mark not of the superior status of the human being but rather, of a profound human defect.11 I have to represent anything I see “as” this or that sort of thing (Concepts) simply in order to see it in the first place, which means that what I “see” in any act of sensible cognition is the representation of that thing (Intuitions). And what holds together this work of grasping and knowing is the unique human burden that is the determination of ends. To determine one’s “end” in the fullest sense is to determine not only how to live—how to stay alive—but to determine how to live on the basis of having determined what a worthy human life ought to look like (Cognition, Morality, Judgment).

To Which She Is Indifferent But is any of this true? Is the wolf without language and thus excused from the three-fold work of intuition, conceptualization, and judgment, which constitute the “being” that humans must artificially attach to the things of the world? What of the wolf’s howl? Doesn’t the wolf’s howl indicate a conceptual communication that abides within the gap that I’ve assigned here exclusively to humans, exclusively to humans because of their recourse to language? Isn’t the wolf’s howl also language in this sense? In the human order the pause or gap that invites the howl must be represented in order to be. A howl that represents something “as” this or that is language. Humans are not, of course, limited to the representation of physical objects so a human howl can represent something in the gap or it can represent the gap itself, thus allowing the human howl to posit an end or objective: something that is not, but ought to be. Or to put the matter another way, the human howl might be hypothetical or it

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might be categorical. But here’s the important point—since a whole lot of what I’ve just said amounts to tribal howls between those who trade in the history of philosophy signaling others of the same tribe—the original condition of the howl is the same as the original condition of the logos. But the wolf’s howl is not language. The wolf’s howl is every bit as true and nuanced a communication as any sentence shared between two human beings. But the wolf is a being in common. Humans must create the Common and we call it politics. We engage in politics because we have to determine how we ought to live. And we must determine how we ought to live not because we have been torn away from some sort of natural wisdom inherent in Nature but because we are, through our recourse to logos, torn away from each other. We are beings who misunderstand ourselves because in order simply to understand we must, finally, reify or posit even ourselves. Everything humans do aims at some good, goal, or end.12 Without positing an “end” the human critter cannot even move. The wolf moves without positing and evaluating ends. The original condition of the sign, whether the spoken logos or the howl, is not a bond of some sort cutting across all of nature and its beings, but it is, rather, a radically enabling void. Being and World are the human responses to that void. We render the void, the nothingness, habitable by means of our judgments.13 The grey wolf (critter/being) stands in no need of judgment. The grey wolf is the void, and abides it, senses the currents within it, without any need to indicate, without any need to represent, without any need to “know”. The grey wolf abides within the nothing without transforming it, as you and I must do, into something. We are the ones who speak and indicate and reify the world (reify: to transform everything into a “thing”) and we do so because we cannot abide the true silence. And here of course as I attempt to formulate this final difference between wolves and humans, language fails me. There is no silence for the wolf since to speak of silence is already to comprehend the open void as the absence of words or things. Only a being who must represent anything “as” a thing can take the Open to be silence, only a being who must speak can remain silent. The wolf need not. The wolf that was moving across the Yellowstone valley on that cold day in February was not traversing a world, because to exist in a world is to posit a world, and the only being who must affirm a world simply in order to move through it is the being who is burdened by logos, which is to say by the need to locate things in space and time and to

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determine goals, purposes, ends. To attempt to include the wolf in that way of being is in an important sense (out of a misplaced fear of speciesism or the desire to affirm the essential oneness of being) to degrade the wolf. She needs no matrix of space-time; she need posit no purpose. The wolf is without world. It is only in the case of the being burdened by logos that world emerges. World arises from the sundering of being and nothing. Being is always, then, its own double.14 Being is the representation of beings as such. The human, in short, must represent anything as this or that, must assign being to anything and everything, must domesticate the grey wolf, but the wolf is wild. The wolf is without being.

Notes



1. Aristotle considers local motion to be a specific case of the more general notion of motion as a thing’s coming to be. 2. Joe Sachs, our finest living interpreter of Aristotle, makes the basic point as clearly as it can be made: http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-mot/. 3.  Jim Halfpenny and Tracy D. Furman, Tracking Wolves: The Basics (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2010). 4. “Originally, the Grey Wolf was the world’s most widely distributed mammal.” Mech and Boitani, “International Union for the Conservation of Nature,” 2010, http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/3746/0. 5. Or, since wolves do not assert “rights” it would be better to put it this way: the alpha pair occupy the role of breeders, to the exclusion of others who do not occupy that role. This does not mean that others do not mate—if they can get away with it they certainly do—but the pack functions well only if these roles exist and are recognized, even if often only in the breach. See: Deborah Smith et al., “Is Incest Common in Gray Wolf Packs?” Behavorial Ecology 8 (1997): 384–391. 6.  Douglas W. Smith et  al., “Wolf-Bison Interactions in Yellowstone National Park,” Journal of Mammology 81 (2000): 1128–1135. 7. There is a deep (as opposed to a casual) scholarship on Heidegger’s work that certainly does not make this mistaken reading, does not reduce Heidegger’s analysis of animality by rendering and reducing it to the vocabulary of contemporary political slogans concerning animal rights. It would include the various efforts made by Derrida to read and comprehend Heidegger on the question of “gender” (Geschlecht) as well as the commentaries by Nancy, Krell, and a few others. Unfortunately these deep readings constitute a secondary literature that is almost entirely hermetic, which is to say that it is comprehensible only to the initiated.

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8. Richard L. Doty, Handbook of Olfaction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), p. 425; Mark F. Bear et al., Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain (Philadelphia: LWW, 2006), pp. 265–275, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Olfaction, with relevant sources. 9. The two parentheses attempt to show that the basic categories of thought are falling away without in the least disabling the wolf’s contact with and nuanced comprehension of its world, without ever having to posit a world. 10. Paul A. Moore, The Hidden Power of Smell (Springer, 2015). As two of the past century’s greatest philosophers, Nietzsche and Freud, each noted, our sexual lives would probably be less politically wrought had we not lost, in assuming our upright posture, the capacity to be moved directly by pheromones. 11. It is also to say however that humans—who abide within the difference beween any being and its “being”—are burdened not only with the structure of theoretical knowledge and its twin, technologized thinking, but they are for the very same reason required to have recourse to the work of reason in its practical employment (the determination of what counts as a worthy form of life). 12. See Brian Seitz and Thomas Thorp, The Iroquois and the Athenians: A Political Ontology (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), pp. 25–29. 13. It is Hannah Arendt (in The Concept of History) who reminds us that the human is the only creature for whom the continued survival of the species fails to satisfy the goals or ends of any individual of that species. The human being is a historical rather than a species-being because each individual human being defines herself in the light of her individual objectives, loves, and regrets. The human being wants to be remembered after death not through the mere distribution of her genetic material and its preservation in subsequent generations but through the deathless acknowledgement of her individuality through memory and heroic song. Any who might disclaim Arendt’s analysis as befitting only a classical or heroic age—or a Romantic exhumation of a classical trope—need only consult YouTube or take note of the manner in which the ubiquity of cellphone videography has encouraged humans to attempt to heroize and preserve every mundane moment of their lives. 14. See Brian Seitz, Intersubjectivity and the Double: Troubled Matters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

CHAPTER 11

Nietzsche vagabundus or, the Good European in transitu David Farrell Krell

While reviewing a volume of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte, not a task that I relished, I came across a note on Nietzsche and Rilke. Whereas the bulk of Heidegger’s notes on Nietzsche from the year 1948 were quite positive—for Nietzsche was about to emerge from the prisonhouse of metaphysics to which Heidegger had earlier confined him in order to become the first “star witness” in Heidegger’s lecture course Was heißt Denken?—this note was quite negative. Here is an excerpt from that note: Landschaft. Nietzsche brauchte das Engadin, die Mitte zwischen Finnland und Italien; brauchte die Bucht von Rapallo mit dem Vorgebirge Portofino… Das alles ist noch Not und Notwendigkeit der Metaphysik, ist aufständisches Wollen des Produktiven, ist noch Geniehaft und auf das Schaffen gerichtet—ist noch Zerren und Fortriß der Subjektität—ist, trotz aller landschaftlichen Natur: Historie und Historizismus—gewollter, gesuchter—; darum in dieser Gestalt das Verfänglichste.1

D. F. Krell (*)  DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_11

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Let me attempt a translation, then a quick commentary: Landscape. – Nietzsche needed the Engadin, the midpoint between Finland and Italy; he needed the Bay of Rapallo, with its promontory Portofino. … All of that remains a need and necessity of metaphysics; it is a rebellious willing of the productive; it is still bound up with genius and it aims to be efficacious—it still shows the strain and the mad dash of subjecticity; — it is, in spite of the natural landscape involved, a history and a historicism that are willed, sought after—; therefore, in this form, it is the most fatal entanglement.

Recall Heidegger’s other hero, Hölderlin, not mentioned here, but who had a special relation to travel within Europe, a relation Heidegger always seems to forget, since he, Heidegger, has no relation to travel or to living abroad, his militant domesticity being his most fatal entanglement. Whenever Heidegger fears and dislikes something he calls it “metaphysics,” and here he reduces Nietzsche once again to “metaphysics,” as he does when he interprets will to power as the eternal recurrence of the industrial turbine. Heidegger is surely right when he says that for Nietzsche travel, landscape, and cityscape are all about work, all about thinking and writing. Yet is such Schaffen “productivity”? Is it “efficacious”? Nietzsche’s endless search for the right places at the propitious times, while indeed “rebellious,” is a tearing ahead in desperate search of health, health sufficient to permit the thinking and writing. Is this Cartesian “subjecticity”? Only if the cogito is chronically ill. Is this “genius”? To be sure. Yet for Heidegger that word means the cosmopolitan Goethe, and Heidegger scorns Goethe as much as he worships Hölderlin—a certain Hölderlin, very much Heidegger’s own Hölderlin. Nietzsche, as we know, admires and is capable of emulating both Goethe and Hölderlin. Perhaps most mysterious is Heidegger’s reduction of Nietzsche’s search for the places conducive to health and work to Historie and even Historizismus, which are always his names for what has no Geschichte or Geschick, that is, for what is mere academic or scholarly curiosity, mere culture industry, mere distraction. To be sure, Nietzsche as traveler is constantly “entangled”: he needs both the sea and the mountains and he never knows which way to go; he winds up in Sils in June to find a meter of new fallen snow; he gets on the wrong train in Savona and returns to Genoa, where he just came from; even if he can find the right train he is ill for days after each journey. Most often, especially in the 1880s, he is alone when he travels. And you know

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how it is: when one gets lost while traveling with a companion it’s called an adventure; when one gets lost while traveling alone it’s called getting lost. Such entanglements would strike us as pathological—they certainly are painful—except for the fact that Nietzsche’s thinking is so spurred and so inspired by the places he seeks and, after considerable effort and suffering, finally finds. Would it not have been easier for him to stay at home and do battle at his desk against Subjektität? By contrast, to repeat, Heidegger is remarkably ill-traveled. Contrast his and Hölderlin’s student years. Heidegger’s longest journey is from Meßkirch to Freiburg. And, to go right to the extreme, imagine Heidegger later on in his life walking with Hölderlin from Nürtingen to Strasbourg on his way to Bordeaux in the dead of winter, traversing the Rhine at Strasbourg, taking a series of post coaches to Besançon, Beaune, and Lyon, then crossing the Auvergne into the Gironde. Imagine him then walking home with Hölderlin four months later, from Bordeaux, via Tours, Orléans, and Paris, where Hölderlin visits the Louvre, trudging thence all the way to Strasbourg and eventually to Stuttgart. How lost Heidegger would have been, how utterly helpless, even with a companion! Heidegger travels only as an old man, wearing a funny hat against the sun, and with his wife there to make sure he doesn’t get lost. Heidegger never returns to his homeland because he never really leaves it. And because he never leaves it, in spite of the brief trips to Thor and to Greece, not to mention the wartime sojourn at a weather station in Verdun, Europe means nothing to him—Europe and its wealth of landscapes, languages, and literatures, its cultures and cuisines and, yes, its sundry peoples. The Black Notebooks are the place to see what sorts of entanglements one gets caught in when not only travel but, more importantly, the day-to-day living in a foreign country are missing from a life. My theme and thesis in this essay, which involves not so much the travel as the day-to-day dwelling in a foreign culture, is that Nietzsche is the good European at least in part because of his life’s entanglements in places other than home. My further theme and thesis is that the best of thinking is nurtured by other places, other languages, other peoples—as Derrida would say, by l’autre, le tout autre. If my beginning with Heidegger is inauspicious, and it is, let me begin again—with Herman Melville. After the failure of his novels Moby-Dick and Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, Melville tried to lecture, after the manner of Emerson, in order to earn a bit of money. He was a terrible failure at lecturing, but his last effort was on the theme of “Traveling,” and there

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are some lines from his lecture that I want to cite, even if my theme is not so much travel but residence in the foreign. Melville says, by way of understatement, that among its other benefits travel gives us the chance to “get rid of a few prejudices,” and he offers some examples: The native of Norway who goes to Naples, finds the climate so delicious as almost to counterbalance the miseries of government. The Spanish Matador, who devoutly believes in the proverb, “Cruel as a Turk,” goes to Turkey, sees that people kind to all animals; sees docile horses, never balky, gentle, obedient, exceedingly intelligent, yet never beaten, and comes home to his bull-fights with a very different impression of his own humanity. The stock-broker goes to Thessalonica and finds Infidels more honest than Christians; the teetotaler finds a country in France where all drink and no one gets drunk; the prejudiced against color finds several hundred millions of people of all shades of color, and all degrees of intellect, rank and social worth, generals, judges, priests and kings, and learns to give up his foolish prejudice.2

Melville’s biographer, Hershel Parker, who cites this lecture, observes in particular Melville’s “lifelong horror at the way cartmen in Manhattan beat their horses and literally worked them to death.”3 At the risk of taking too much time with horses, allow me a final reference to Melville on the dignity of brutes in general and horses in particular. In his 1849 novel, Redburn, the narrator says: There are unknown worlds of knowledge in brutes; and whenever you mark a horse, or a dog, with a peculiarly mild, calm, deep-seated eye, be sure he is an Aristotle or a Kant, tranquilly speculating upon the mysteries in man. No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses. They see through us at a glance. And after all, what is a horse, but a species of four-footed dumb man, in a leathern overall, who happens to live upon oats, and toils for his masters, half-requited or abused, like the biped hewers of wood and drawers of water? But there is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities. As for those majestic, magisterial truck-horses of the docks, I would as soon think of striking a judge on the bench, as to lay violent hand upon their holy hides. (197)

This reminds us both of Raskolnikov’s childhood memory of the peasant who beats his horse to death and Nietzsche’s letter to Reinhart von Seydlitz of May 13, 1888, concerning the cynical drayman who

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abuses his horse (KSAB 8:314).4 It also reminds us of Turin and of Nietzsche’s legendary experience with the beaten horse. These final days in Turin seem to show us a very brittle Nietzsche, one who condemns various European dignitaries to a firing squad. Yet we often forget the reason for the brittleness. Among the very final notes are these: “Dass man eine solche Auslese der Kraft und Jugend und Macht nachher vor die Kanonen stellt, ist Wahnsinn. … [E]s giebt noch andere Mittel, die Physiologie zu Ehren zu bringen, als durch Lazarethe. … Kurz und gut, sehr gut sogar: nachdem der alte Gott abgeschafft ist, bin ich bereit, die Welt zu regieren. …” (KSA 13: 645–646).5 “To take such a select crop of youth and energy and power and put it in front of cannons—that is madness.… [T]here are other means than military hospitals to serve physiology honorably. … In brief, and to say it well, indeed very well: now that the old God has been eliminated, I am prepared to rule the world.…” We will be forced to return to Europe’s military hospitals in a moment. Meanwhile, the chance to get rid of a few prejudices, yes, this might have benefited Heidegger. But also the chance to gain insight into a thousand things he did not know and could not have known by staying at home. Heidegger himself had to admit the wisdom of Hölderlin’s letter to von Böhlendorff: we do not recognize the gifts into which we are born, much less do we employ those gifts freely, unless we go out into the foreign. And not in a tour bus, but walking there, walking and then working, studying, enjoying, thinking, writing, living in transit and transition. Getting rid of a few prejudices along the way, yes, but also seeing things, my dear Horatio, that we have not dreamt of in our philosophy of being. Is it not true that the one thing every European scholar and academic can affirm and bless are those wonderful programs that enable their students to study in a foreign country, and is there anything that causes more worry than the fact that curricula and Studienordnungen are becoming so regimented that students are having more and more trouble taking advantage of those great programs? If European universities fail to grant the Erasmus program the time such a program needs, they will wind up being characters in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, this we know. It is a privilege for me to reflect on Nietzsche as The Good European. That is the title of a book, now out of print in its German edition, but still in print in English, that I wrote with a photographer-friend, Donald Bates, back in the early 1990s.6 The book itself is very beautiful, with

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hundreds of photographs, many in color, some archival and some contemporary, with many—though certainly not all—of Nietzsche’s astute and inspiring remarks about the places of his inspiration, his work sites, as Don and I called them. A word about how the book came to be organized, or how it organized itself. There are only four chapters. The first two are chronological, more or less, whereas the third and fourth deal with Nietzsche’s experiences in, on, and with mountains and oceans. More or less chronological, because the first chapter combines “Beginnings and Ends,” inasmuch Nietzsche’s life begins and ends in a narrow corridor of central Europe. Mountains and seas. Can we pick apart Nietzsche’s writings and sniff out whether the air is piney or saline? It is never a question in the book of finding some sort of one-to-one correspondence between the places in which Nietzsche wrote and the results of his writing. Mountains and perspectivism, the sea and a sometimes storm-tossed, sometimes placid and serene set of observations? One is constantly tempted to draw such correspondences, but the book is fortunately more concerned to present Nietzsche’s own quite various estimates of what “his” places did for him. Never was there a thinker less convinced that he was thinking sub specie aeternitatis. Even the eternity of the ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen adhered to a pyramidal boulder near Surlej with a remarkably comfortable cleft in it for a moment of repose in transitu. If it was not a question of one-to-one correspondences, however, it was surely a matter of seeing how important it was to Nietzsche’s thinking and writing to have moved considerably about Europe. Not merely to travel here and there—his vagabondage is not about tourism—but to live and work there. To discover his task in parts unknown. Yet not only the resulting book, The Good European, was beautiful, if I may say so. It was the experience of traveling to these places and writing the book that for me and for Don Bates was so rewarding. As to whether or not Heidegger would adjudge that adventure “metaphysical,” because “productive,” I am perfectly indifferent. Allow me to reminisce a bit about both the journeys and the writing of the book. Its epigraph, which also gave us the book’s title, was from a letter Nietzsche wrote in Sils-Maria to his mother back in Naumburg. With the gentlest irony he informed his mother on August 17, 1886: “Denn, wenn ich auch ein schlechter Deutscher sein sollte—jedenfalls bin ich ein sehr guter Europäer.” “For, even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.” He underscored for her those last three words.

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Let me say something about Naumburg, and the nearby Röcken and Schulpforta, in the “eastern” part of today’s united Germany. The Wall had come down four or five years before our visit, but there was still a sense that one was in the East. The two things I remember most about the people we talked to and who helped us find the places we were looking for, were, first, the local pride they took in Nietzsche—the astonishing amount of information they possessed about Nietzsche and their admiration of him—and, second, their willingness to take time to show us about and to put us in touch with people who knew even more about Nietzsche and these places. Apparent in these conversations was also what I will call, not soziales Denken, which seems too much a slogan, but soziale Selbstverständlichkeiten, “obvious social responsibilities.” It was clear that while there was much to criticize about East Germany, there was a sense that the important things in life—health care, the education of children, musical and artistic culture—were matters of common cause. As that sense dies in Germany today, with the country becoming more and more Americanized in the worst possible ways, I have a certain nostalgia for the people of the former East. How welcoming was the pastor at Röcken, opening her home to us and pointing out things about the house and gardens we never could have known—Nietzsche’s view of the former cemetery from the bedroom window that was most likely his. And how uncanny to be in the church where Josephchen was snatched away by the ghost of his dead father. How supportive, some days later, were the staff at the Jena psychiatric clinic, even though they asked us to be careful not to disturb the patients. And how terrible it was to walk those halls and then later to read some of Nietzsche’s childhood writing—for example, this, while on an excursion near Jena during his fourteenth year: “Da drang ein greller Schrei uns zu Ohren; es kam aus dem nahen Irrenhause. Inniger schlossen sich unsre Hände zusammen; uns war als berühre uns ein böser Geist mit beängstigenden Fittigen” (F 1:143).7 “Then a shrill scream pierced our ears. It came from the lunatic asylum nearby. Our hands locked more tightly. It was as though an evil spirit had touched us with frightful, flitting wings.” Saxony could have become Nietzsche’s Schwabenland, the eastern Schwarzwald which Heidegger took to be the omphalos of the Abendland, but it did not. Already Naumburg and Pforta, especially Pforta, but then also Leipzig, opened up a larger world to Nietzsche and expanded his horizons. The move to Basel was an incomparably giant step, and, on holiday from Basel, another giant step—the Maderan Valley

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southeast of Lucerne, stretching northeast from Amsteg in Kanton Uri, not far from Sankt Gotthard. Almost every year since the early 1990s I have managed to spend a week in this breathtaking place, often with my children, all of us so grateful to Nietzsche and to Johannes Brahms for having discovered it for us. As one ascends the valley alongside the roaring Chärstellenbach, the Windgällen range rises to the left. The rock is so silvery that one confuses it with Parnassus and thinks of both Apollo and Dionysus, but especially the latter, since it was here in the Maderanertal that Nietzsche wrote “Die Dionysische Weltanschauung”: “[E]s ist der rechte Moment und der rechte Ort, um Ungesehenes zu sehen; jetzt schläft Pan, jetzt is der Himmel der unbewegte Hintergrund einer Glorie, jetzt blüht der Tag. … Dies ist eine ganz verzauberte Welt, die Natur feiert ihr Versöhnungsfest mit dem Menschen” (KSA 1:558– 559). “[I]t is the right moment and the right place to see things as yet unseen. Now Pan sleeps, now the sky is the undisturbed backdrop to a gloria, now the day blossoms. … It is an utterly enchanted world: nature celebrates her feast of reconciliation with humanity.” From this festival of reconciliation Nietzsche went immediately to the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War—and its Lazarethen. These places of terrible slaughter, a foretaste of the wars of the twentieth century, were one of the keys to Nietzsche’s becoming perforce the good European. The Wagners had hoped he would fight on the French side. But partly to preserve his Swiss neutrality, he became a medic on the Prussian side. A Feldpostbrief to Carl von Gersdorff tells us, “… eine Zeitlang hörte ich einen nie endenwollenden Klagelaut” (KSAB 3:149), “for some time I heard a cry of lamentation that never wanted to end.” When Don and I returned to the Nietzsche-Archive in Weimar we found among the photographs Nietzsche kept with him until the end of his life that of a handsome young man, identity unknown. Eventually I was able to identify him—Kurt Flemming was his name—as one of the Pforta students killed during the War. He was not a particularly close friend of Nietzsche’s at Pforta, but Nietzsche kept the photo. I recall a reviewer of the book criticizing it for introducing useless details, and Kurt Flemming was his example. Don Bates and I did not feel that the mourned dead were useless details. Nor would any good European ever feel such a thing. I took it to be an important symptom of the importance of place in Nietzsche’s work when I noticed the difference between Nietzsche’s treatment of the wisdom of Silenus before and after his presence on the battlefield. In “The Dionysian Worldview,” written in the magnificent

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Maderan Valley, Silenus’s words on the absurdity of human existence appear in two lines. In the revised text of December, written while Nietzsche was recuperating from diphtheria and dysentery he contracted in Lorraine (Lothringen), note how Silenus’s words to Croesus have expanded in both breadth and depth: Elende Eintagsbrut der Mühsal und der Noth, was thut ihr mir Gewalt an, dass ich sage, was nicht zu erfahren, euch dienlicher ist. Denn in Unkenntnis des eigenen Elends verstreicht euer Leben am leidlosesten. Wer einmal ein Mensch ist, der kann überhaupt nicht das Allervortrefflichste werden, und er kann gar keinen Antheil haben am Wesen des Besten. Das Allervorzüglichste wäre also für euch sammt und sonders, Männer wie Weiber, gar nicht geboren zu werden. Das Nächstbeste jedoch—nachdem ihr geboren worden, möglichst bald zu sterben. (KSA 1:588; cf. 560 and 35) Wretched, ephemeral brood of toil and calamity, why do you do me violence, so that I might tell you what it is more useful for you not to know? For in ignorance of your own misery your life will advance with the least suffering. As soon as one has become a human being, one cannot in any way become what is most excellent, one can have no share in the essence of the best. The most excellent thing for you—all of you, men and women alike—would be not to have been born at all. The next best thing, however, after you have been born, is to die as quickly as possible.

One might rightly object that this elaboration of Silenus’s dire wisdom has less to do with place than with the war itself, which could have been experienced almost anywhere, and this objection is valid. It is just that I did not feel the force of Silenus’s wisdom until I was standing on a field near Mars la Tour bursting with thousands of red poppies, bloodred poppies; my friend Don Bates and I stood transfixed for some time there, and we were silent, as the flowers were silent. One of Nietzsche’s many Kur experiences was in Steinabad bei Bonndorf in the Black Forest. Not Heidegger’s Black Forest; Nietzsche’s Black Forest. To go there, a brief trip from my own village, was particularly moving for me. Nietzsche’s letters from Steinabad, written during the summer of 1875, have always been among my favorites. In them he struggles with his relationship with Richard and Cosima Wagner— and above all with Bayreuth—as he works on his fourth Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.” But allow me to move farther away from home, both Nietzsche’s and my own. Because of course

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Don and I had to follow him across the Alps to Genoa, Portofino, Rapallo, Ruta, and on to Sorrento, and then later to Rome, Venice, Nice, and Turin. The months that Nietzsche spent in Sorrento at the Villa Rubinacci, from late October 1876 to May 1877, were among the happiest of his life. I often think of him—the later author of Der Antichrist—during the evenings reading with his friends in the Villa Rubinacci both the French moralists and the New Testament, with Nietzsche himself offering expert commentary on the latter. But the story I want to tell, believing it has to do with good Europeanism, is a rather silly one about our own search for the Villa. Don and I stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of Sorrento and asked the attendant if he knew where it might be. He said we should ask his father, who was sitting at a desk inside the station. The old man nodded and told us exactly how to get there; he gave us the new name of the street, which, he said, used to be called the Via Rubinacci. We hopped back into the car and turned up the now renamed street, driving fairly far, until I was no longer sure whether we were on the right track. A group of three elderly folks, a man and two women, were chatting by the roadside. We stopped, and in my superlative Italian I asked, “Excuse me, but did this street used to be called the Via Rubinacci?” At which the old man turned, scowled, and screamed at me, as irate as any old man I have ever encountered, “No! No! It is still called the Via Rubinacci!!!” After this chastising, one of the women offered to take us to the Villa, today a daycare center and kindergarten, and not so easy to find. We parked our car and the old woman guided us there. She was wearing very spiffy sneakers, so that Don and I from then on referred to her as Our Lady of the Sneakers. As we walked, she told us all about how, yes, Professor Nietzsche had spent a very important year there at the Villa Rubinacci. And this is the point of my silly story. What makes a good European, I believe, is this local pride, a pride that cultivates aspects of the past, preserving them through oral transmission. And it is not a nationalistic pride, not a pride that compares itself to someone else’s detriment; rather, it is an entirely positive appreciation, one that, in this case, has taken the trouble to learn at least a little bit about “Professor Nietzsche in Italy.” We found the same pride and cultivation of local history at the “Tre Garofani,” where Nietzsche stayed while at Recoaro in the Dolomites. And we found the same pride in Naumburg when we went to the Pinder residence—“Ach, ja, darüber hat meine Mutter immer wieder erzählt!” said the shopkeeper. “My mother told us about all that over and over

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again.” Even though I had researched Nietzsche’s letters and works very carefully, there were a thousand things I did not know and could not have known until we made the journey and were able to talk with the locals. Naturally, all this oral culture could be flawed; no historian would trust it entirely. Some would reject it out of hand as merely anecdotal. But that would be a mistake. There is something about the good European that cherishes memory, memory more than fantasy or empty braggadocio. I say this as a born-and-bred American, one whose nation takes pride in its capacity for immediate oblivion. Oblivion explains a lot about our foreign policy and also about much of our domestic life— for example, our failure to control the proliferation of guns. Natives of Europe may smile at Don’s and my celebration of the memorious Europeans—since Europeans are also skeptical and self-critical. But skepticism and self-criticism are not our strengths, either. No, I believe I will insist on my thesis: in numberless small corners of the European continent you will find people—many of them very old people, I’ll admit— who remember details of someone or something that stirs pride in them. And they sit you down, offer you a glass of wine, and they talk. But I seem to have forgotten about Nietzsche meanwhile! What about his experiences? My answer unfortunately involves the fact that I have earned for myself a terrible reputation: I am known—if I am known at all—as a “soft Nietzschean.” That means that I do not stress “the blond beast” in my work, even if I try to pay close attention to Nietzsche’s texts on European nihilism. It also means that even if I admire Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist it is because Nietzsche knows how to distinguish between “the Redeemer-type” and the “Paulus-type.” What I mean is this: the more familiar one becomes with Nietzsche as the one who dwells in the foreign, the more one is struck by the little things about him, the gentle things, even the tender things: Nietzsche taking time to talk with Gian Dürisch about the hoof-and-mouth disease (die Seuche) that is threatening Dürisch’s oxen precisely at hay harvest time. This is the Nietzsche who keeps a photograph, not only of his dead schoolmate, but also of Carlotta, his landlady at Salita delle Battistine no. 8 in Genoa, the Nietzsche who is loved to the end by the gentle Franz Overbeck. It is the Nietzsche portrayed so movingly by Meta von Salis and Resa von Schirnhofer, perhaps especially by the former, Meta von Salis, who was a native of Marschlins, near the Maloja Pass, so that the Engadin was her territory. Allow me to cite her testimony concerning Nietzsche in Sils, even if its rhetoric seems to us quite florid:

180  D. F. KRELL Für mich ist Nietzsche mit Sils so unzertrennbar verknüpft, wie Heraklit mit dem Heiligtum der Göttin bei Ephesus. Es war sein optimum im Norden.… In die schweigende Gebirgswelt des Ober-Engadins, in die farben- und formensatte Umgebung des sauberen Sils-Maria, wo der Duft des nahen Südens wie eine Verheissung über den beiden Zacken des Piz Badile zu schweben scheint, ist der einsamste, stolzeste und zarteste Mann unseres Jahrhunderts in sein angestammtes Reich eingetreten, wie ein in der Verbannung geborener Königssohn.8 For me, Nietzsche is as bound up with Sils as Heraclitus of Ephesus was with the sacred precincts of the goddess. In the northerly countries, it was his optimum.… In the silent, mountainous world of the Upper Engadin, in the pristine environment of Sils-Maria, so replete with colors and shapes, where the fragrances of the nearby south seem to hover over the two peaks of the Piz Badile like a promise, the loneliest, proudest, and most tender man of our century entered into his inherited kingdom, like a prince born in exile.

This is the Nietzsche of Zärtlichkeit—vagabundus, yes, but also tener, as the Latin says: “tender.” Meta von Salis stresses it more than once: hers is the Nietzsche who never despised the common folk and the “simple things” he met on his path: “Er selber war zart, leicht verletzlich, zur Versöhnung bereit, voll Scheu Andere zu verletzen: seine Aufgabe verlangte Härte, verbot die Compomisse, brachte ihm und Anderen Schmerz und Bitterniss.”9 “He himself was tender, vulnerable, ready for reconciliation, shy about offending others, whereas his task demanded hardness, forbade compromise, and brought himself and others pain and bitterness.” Not long after he completed his Genealogie der Moral Nietzsche confessed to Köselitz that he suffered most from his “chronic vulnerability,” and also from his own reaction to it, namely, “ein Exceß von Härte” (KSAB 8:239). Yet it is not the vulnerability or even the suffering of Nietzsche the traveler that stays with me, although the suffering is immense. What stays with me is his interest in the people and things he saw when he dwelled abroad, even if it be the market woman of Turin who always saved her best grapes for Professor Nietzsche. Sometimes I think that Nietzsche, had he lived to a healthy old age, would on occasion have been like the old signor who barked at me on the Via Rubinacci—do not forget, it is still the Via Rubinacci!—but also very much like Our Lady of the Sneakers, who took the time to take us to the Villa and to tell us everything she knew about it and its distinguished visitor.

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It is embarrassing to be a soft Nietzschean, of course. Nietzsche is the thinker of genealogy, the genealogy of our ascetic ideals; he was delighted to have his books, among them Jenseits von Gut und Böse, compared to dynamite. Yet as hard and as harsh as Nietzsche can be, it is always for the sake of a life that is fragile. There are two aspects of this “soft” Nietzsche that I would like to stress: first, Nietzsche’s recognition of how important friendship and love, and being loved, are to a life; second, his recognition of the double-bind of the need for both fitting companionship and radical solitude. Evidence of the first, the need for love, comes from his letter to Marie Baumgartner, written in Steinabad during that summer of 1875 mentioned earlier: Sie müssen nicht glauben, dass ich je in meinem Leben durch Liebe verwöhnt worden sei, ich glaube, Sie haben mir’s auch angemerkt. Etwas Resignirtes trage ich von der frühesten Kindheit in dieser Beziehung mit mir herum. Aber es mag sein, dass ich es nie besser verdient habe. Jetzt nun habe ich es besser, das ist kein Zweifel! Ich erstaune mitunter mehr darüber als dass ich mich freue, es ist mir so neu. (KSAB 5:95) You mustn’t believe that I was ever in my life spoiled by an excess of love. I believe you have noticed this fact about me, too. In this regard I bear traces of resignation, ever since my earliest childhood. Yet it may be that I never deserved anything better. Now, however, I do have it better, no doubt about it! Sometimes I am astonished by it even more than I take joy in it, it is so new to me.

This feeling is not restricted to the women who were willing to mother him. When Nietzsche is on his way to Lugano in May 1877, arriving at the Swiss border after a difficult journey, he is assisted by a porter, who goes out of his way to help him. Nietzsche writes, “Der Mann sorgte so gut für mich, so väterlich lief er hin und her—alle Väter sind etwas Ungeschicktes—endlich war alles bei einander und ich fuhr nach Lugano weiter” (KSAB 5:237). “The man took such good care of me, running here and there in true paternal fashion—all fathers are somewhat awkward—that in the end all my things were gathered together and I traveled on to Lugano.” The aside—“all fathers are somewhat awkward”—has always struck me as an insight. My son confirms it for me over and over again. One might object that Nietzsche could have garnered this insight anywhere, but I would reply that when one is in transit, especially alone, sometimes quite desperate for assistance, such insights are more likely to occur.

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Evidence of the second, the double-bind of the need for both companionship and radical solitude, appears in a letter written in May 1885 from Venice. Venice is a good city to be lonely in, especially if one was close to Wagner, who died there. Nietzsche writes to his sister on the eve of her wedding, which of course he will not attend. Perhaps the most potent impact of Nietzsche’s endless wandering and his dwelling in the foreign is a sense of the radical solitude of his thinking and writing, as though the remoteness of foreign places had invaded his closest self: Das Gefühl, dass es bei mir etwas sehr Fernes und Fremdes gebe, das meine Worte andere Farben haben als dieselben Worte in andern Menschen, dass es bei mir viel bunten Vordergrund giebt, welcher täuscht—genau dieses Gefühl, das mir neuerdings von verschiedenen Seiten bezeugt wird, ist immer noch der feinste Grad von “Verständnis”, den ich bisher gefunden habe. Alles, was ich bisher geschrieben habe, ist Vordergrund; für mich selber geht es erst immer mit den Gedankenstrichen los. (KSAB 7:52–53) The feeling that there is something utterly remote and foreign about me, that my words take on different tones in the mouths of others, that there is a great deal of colorful foreground in me that deceives—precisely this feeling, corroborated recently on various fronts, is really the very sharpest degree of “understanding” I have found until now. Everything I have written prior to this is foreground; for me it all starts with the hiatuses.

Not long after Nietzsche resigns his Basel professorship and begins his life as a Wanderer, he begins to compose those sketches that belong to that second division of the second part of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, which bears the title, Der Wanderer und sein Schatten. Yet even before this second part we find Nietzsche’s self-definition as a wanderer. No doubt it is passages like the following that later inspire Gilles Deleuze to conceive of himself as a nomad, and of philosophic thinking as fundamentally nomadic. Menschliches Part One, number 638, titled “Der Wanderer,” opens in this way: Wer nur einigermassen zur Freiheit der Vernunft gekommen ist, kann sich auf Erden nicht anders fühlen, denn als Wanderer, — wenn auch nicht als Reisender nach einem letzten Ziele: denn dieses giebt es nicht. Wohl aber will er zusehen und die Augen dafür offen haben, was Alles in der Welt eigentlich vorgeht; desshalb darf er sein Herz nicht allzufest an

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alles Einzelne anhängen; es muss in ihm selber etwas Wanderndes sein, das seine Freude an dem Wechsel und der Vergänglichkeit habe. (KSA 362–363) Whoever has attained even the slightest freedom of reason cannot but feel like a wanderer on Earth—though not like a traveler who heads for a final goal, inasmuch as there is no such thing. By contrast, the wanderer will take a good look, will have an open eye for the way everything in the world actually transpires; for that reason the wanderer cannot let his heart grow too attached to any particular thing; the wanderer’s heart must itself be a wanderer, taking its joy in change and transiency.

The impact on his work, the impact of Nietzsche’s constant traveling and living out of a trunk, as of his endless hiking, is what he called his “accursed telegram style” (KSAB 5:461). Think for example of his Wanderer, which first bore the title “St. Moritzer Gedanken-Gänge,” “Thought-Paths of St. Moritz.” The manuscript, if one can call it that, consists of six notebooks that Nietzsche carried with him on his walks, filling them with pencil scratchings. Perhaps one could call the style of the Wanderer and His Shadow a “peripatetic style”: trenchant, pointed, lively and lean, well-paced throughout. Nietzsche would prefer that we call it a Gratwanderer Stil, and we recall his desire, “to climb as high as any thinker has ever been able to climb, into pure Alpine, glacial air” (KSA 5:381). Yet we also remember that the sun shining on snow and ice made those heights impossible for Nietzsche. He had to be satisfied with walks around Silvaplana and Silsersee, with an occasional glance up to the massive Mount Corvatsch. In any case, I wonder if this style might be contrasted with a very different style from almost the same time, one that unfolds at the sea near Genoa, one we will listen to in a moment. Before we leave den Wanderer und seinen Schatten, however, allow me to cite one of the longer aphorisms, part of a series of political reflections that surprise us both by their length and their tendency. The following aphorism asks the question, “Whether possession of property can be brought into conformity with justice.” Here is Nietzsche’s reply, and I invite my German friends to present it to the Democratic National Committee or to the Vorstand der SPD for comment: Damit der Besitz fürderhin mehr Vertrauen einflösse und moralischer werde, halte man alle Arbeitswege zum kleinen Vermögen offen, aber verhindere die mühelose, die plötzliche Bereicherung; man ziehe all Zweige des Transports und Handels, welche der Anhäufung grosser Vermögen

184  D. F. KRELL günstig sind, also namentlich den Geldhandel, aus den Händen der Privten und Privatgesellschaften—und betrachte ebenso die Zuviel- wie die NichtsBesitzer als gemeingefährliche Wesen. (KSA 2:681) In order that from now on more confidence may flow into the possession of property, and in order that such possession become more morally justifiable, one should open all the paths of labor that lead to a small amount of wealth, but one should hinder all effortless and sudden enrichment. One should withdraw all the branches of transportation and commerce that are favorable to the hoarding of massive amounts of wealth, and thus too banking and finance, from the hands of private individuals and private corporations. Thus one would learn to see that both the one who owns too much and the one who owns nothing are a danger to the community.

Sometimes I weary of hearing about Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism” or his political “conservatism.” That noise you hear in the background is the Vorstand der SPD calling the police. When we see what the American and German banks alike are doing to Greece and Spain—precisely those banks that are perpetually on trial because of their very bad practices and very good lawyers—we have to wonder whether Nietzsche, as usual, is right. In general, I believe that he would observe, were he here today, that even if the external enemies of Europe, formerly its colonial victims, pose an unheard of threat to Europe’s internal security, the great enemies are so internal to it that one might be justified in speaking of Europe’s autoimmune disease. But let me abandon such dire topics, which lie well beyond my competence, and return to my much softer theme. Nietzsche’s sense of self is intimately related to his places—those domestic places of his birth and demise, and those alien places of his best work, work done either in the mountains or at the sea, or perhaps precisely there where the mountains collapse directly into the sea. The dangerous places, he called them: “Ich will keine Erkenntnis mehr ohne Gefahr: immer sei das tückische Meer oder das erbarmungslose Hochgebirge um den Forschenden.”10 “I no longer any kind of insight without danger: let the treacherous sea or the merciless mountain heights surround the researcher.” That treacherous and fickle sea, in this case the sea south of Genoa, is celebrated by Nietzsche in Ecce homo as the birthplace of Morgenröte. The book itself he pictures lying on a rock and drinking up the seaside sun. For Nietzsche the Bay of Genoa is the place “wo ich allein war und

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noch mit dem Meere Heimlichkeiten hatte” (KSA 6:329). I love this phrase, Heimlichkeiten mit dem Meere, and I took pains to translate it, finally using more than one word to do so, hence cheating a bit: the fourth chapter of The Good European is called “Intimate Converse with the Sea.” When the sea is treacherous, we hear Nietzsche writing in The Gay Science, number 60, in this stormy style: Habe ich noch Ohren? Bin ich nur noch Ohr und Nichts weiter mehr? Hier stehe ich inmitten des Brandes der Brandung, deren weisse Flammen bis zu meinem Fusse heraufzüngeln: — von allen Seiten heult, droht, schreit, schrillt es auf mich zu, während in der tiefsten Tiefe der alte Erderschütterer seine Arie singt, dumpf wie ein brüllender Stier.… Da, plötzlich, wie aus dem Nichts geboren, erscheint vor dem Thore dieses höllischen Labyrinthes, nur wenige Klafter weit entfernt, – ein grosses Segelschiff, schweigsam wie ein Gespenst dahergleitend.… (KSA 3:424) Do I still have ears? Am I only an ear and nothing more? Here I stand in the midst of the furious surf [inmitten des Brandes der Brandung, literally, in the midst of the surf’s fire], whose white flames lick their way up to my feet: — on every side it howls, threatens, screams shrilly at me, while in the deepest depths the old Earth-shaker sings his aria like a deep-voiced bellowing bull.… Then, suddenly, as though born out of nothing, appears beyond the gateway of this hellish labyrinth, only a few leagues away—a great sailing ship gliding along as silent as a ghost.

I will stop citing at this point, out of awe and anxiety: you all remember that sailing ship—es sind die Frauen. “It’s the women.” And yet the sea, as Melville many times observed, can be uncannily serene, as gentle as an Ave Maria—not that Maria is altogether unconnected with the women. Nevertheless, this maritime moment Nietzsche calls “the grand silence.” From Morgenröte: Im grossen Schweigen. – Hier ist das Meer, hier können wir der Stadt vergessen. Zwar lärmen eben jetzt noch ihre Glocken das Ave Maria— es ist jener düstere und thörichte, aber süsse Lärm am Kreuzwege von Tag und Nacht—, aber nur noch einen Augenblick! Jetzt schweigt Alles! Das Meer liegt bleich und glänzend da, es kann nicht reden. Der Himmel spielt sein ewiges stummes Abendspiel mit rothen, gelben, grünen Farben, er kann nicht reden. Die kleinen Klippen und Felsenbänder, welche in’s Meer hineinlaufen, wie um den Ort zu finden, wo es am einsamsten ist, sie können alle nicht reden. Diese ungeheure Stummheit, die uns plötzlich überfällt, ist schön und grausenhaft, das Herz schwillt dabei.… Das

186  D. F. KRELL Sprechen, ja das Denken wird mir verhasst: höre ich denn nicht hinter jedem Worte den Irrthum, die Einbildung, den Wahngeist lachen? … Oh Meer! Oh Abend! Ihr seid schlimme Lehrmeister! Ihr lehrt den Menschen aufhören, Mensch zu sein! Soll er sich euch hingeben? Soll er werden, wie ihr es jetzt sind, bleich, glänzend, stumm, ungeheuer, über sich selber ruhend? Über sich selber erhaben? (KSA 3:259–260) In the great silence. — Here is the sea; here we can forget the city. True, the bells are still noisily tolling their Ave Maria—it is that lugubrious and foolish yet sweet sound at the crossroads of day and night—but it lasts only a moment! Now all is silent! The sea lies there, pale and shimmering, and it cannot speak. The sky puts on its evening mime, forever mute, with red, yellow, and green colors, and it cannot speak. The low-lying cliffs and the rows of boulders that march into the sea as though in order to find the place that is loneliest, none of them can speak. The vast taciturnity that suddenly befalls us is beautiful and terrifying, our hearts swell with it.… Speech, and even thought, are despicable to me: Do I not hear behind every word of mine the raucous laughter of error, hallucination, and the spirit of delusion? … Oh, sea! Oh, eventide! You are treacherous mentors! You instruct human beings to cease being human! Should they give in to you? Should they become as you are now, pale, shimmering, mute, monstrous, resting contentedly upon themselves? Elevated sublimely beyond themselves?

At the outset we heard Heidegger complain, rather oddly, that in spite of Nietzsche’s love of landscape it is always Historie and even Historizismus that guide him to his places. The response, of course, is that it is not Historie but Geschichte that calls Nietzsche, a Geschichte that for Nietzsche is far more intricate and multifaceted than Heidegger’s repetitive and compulsive Seynsgeschichte. And history, as Geschichte and Geschick, calls on Nietzsche to dwell elsewhere and otherwise, in order to hone his skills and find his destiny in transitu. He writes: Wohin man reisen muss. – Die unmittelbare Selbstbeobachtung reicht nicht lange aus, um sich kennen zu lernen: wir brauchen Geschichte, denn die Vergangenheit strömt in hundert Wellen in uns fort; wir selber sind ja Nichts als Das, was wir in jedem Augenblick von diesem Fortströmen empfinden. Auch hier sogar, wenn wir in den Fluss unseres anscheinend eigensten und persönlichsten Wesens hinabsteigen wollen, gilt Heraklit’s Satz: man steigt nicht zweimal in den selben Fluss. – Das ist eine Weisheit, die allmählich zwar altbacken geworden, aber trotzdem eben so kräftig und nahrhaft geblieben ist, wie sie es je war: ebenso wie

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jene, dass, um Geschichte zu verstehen, man die lebendigen Überreste geschichtlicher Epochen aufsuchen müsse, — dass man reisen müsse, wie Altvater Herodot reiste, zu Nationen.… Es leben sehr wahrscheinlich die letzten drei Jahrhunderte in allen ihren Culturfärbungen und –Strahlenbrechungen auch in unserer Nähe noch fort: sie wollen nur entdeckt werden.… Wer nach langer Übung in dieser Kunst des Reisens, zum hundertäugigen Argos geworden ist, der wird seine Io—ich meine sein ego—endlich überall hinbegleiten und in Aegypten und Griechenland, Byzanz und Rom, Frankreich und Deutschland, in der Zeit der wandernden oder der festsitzenden Völker, in Renaissance und Reformation, in Heimat und Fremde, ja in Meer, Wald, Pflanze und Gebirge, die ReiseAbenteuer dieses werdenden und verwandelten ego wieder entdecken. (KSA 2:477–478) Where one must travel. — Direct self-observation does not by any means suffice for self-knowledge. We need history, inasmuch as the past wells up in us in hundreds of ways. Indeed, we ourselves are nothing other than what we sense at each instant of that onward flow. For even when we wish to go down to the stream of our apparently ownmost, our most personal essence, Heraclitus’s statement holds true: one does not step twice into the same river. — The maxim has by now grown stale; yet it is as nourishing and energizing as ever. So too is the maxim that in order to understand history one must search for the living remnants of historical epochs—and do so by traveling, as the venerable Herodotus traveled to sundry nations.… It is quite probable that the last three centuries, in all the hues and refracted colors of their civilization, live on, quite close to us: they only have to be discovered.… Whoever after long practice has become a hundred-eyed Argos in this art of traveling will finally rejoin his Io—I mean his ego—everywhere, and will rediscover in Egypt and Greece, in Byzantium and Rome, in France and Germany, in the periods of the migratory or the sedentary peoples, in the Renaissance and Reformation, in one’s own homeland and abroad, and indeed in the sea, the forest, the vegetation, and the mountains the travel-adventure of this transformative and evolving ego.

Even if both Heidegger and Freud have taught us to be shy about the word ego, we have the sense that for Nietzsche that word and the thing it names have expanded beyond recognition thanks to those hundredfold waves of history seen and felt in dozens of places across Europe. May I cite one last time Melville’s lecture on “Traveling”? “Travel to a large and generous nature is as a new birth. Its legitimate tendency is to teach profound personal humility, while it enlarges the

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sphere of comprehensive benevolence till it includes the whole human race” (9:423). The need to dwell in the foreign, which is more than “landscape,” does not arise from the metaphysics of subjecticity. It is a response to the call of beyng—the call of beyng to every good European who is struggling today with the further task of becoming a thinking inhabitant of world and earth.

Notes





1. Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948). Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe: Band 97, ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann Verlag, 2015), pp. 439–440. 2. Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860. The Writings of Herman Melville. The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, vol. 9 (Evanston and Chicago, 1987), p. 422. 3. Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 2002), 2:10. 4. That is, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 8 vols. (Berlin and Munich: Walter de Gruyhter and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), 8:314. 5. That is, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. (Berlin and Munich: Walter de Gruyter and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 13:645–646. 6. David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997); the German edition, now out of print, was published by the Knesebeck Verlag (Munich, 2000). 7. That is, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frühe Schriften, eds. Hans Joachim Mette et al., 5 vols. (Berlin and Munich: Walter de Gruyhter and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 1:143. 8. Cited in Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche Biographie, 3 vols. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981), 2:480. 9. Cited by Curt Paul Janz, 2:530. 10. Cited by Curt Paul Janz, 2:43.

CHAPTER 12

Trans-Scapes Transitions in Transit Irene J. Klaver

It is easy enough to turn to a dictionary or to an online etymology and see that “transit” has its roots in Latin: trans (across) plus ire (to go;). How though are we to think deeply about the subtleties of “trans” in a world where people are in transit for fear of their lives; where products are routinely in trans-oceanic transit; where medications can be delivered transdermally; we can use a website to plan when we can see International Space Station lunar and solar transit events. How might we think of states of change over time/space when they are immediately obvious—driving away from a hurricane or a forest fire; and when they are not so obvious—indigenous people attempting to do what they have always done where they have always done it, only to find some other governing body claims hegemony? Here I lay out a small cluster of provocations that lay out a landscape through which to meander, engaging here with insights, there with complexities, eventually to have carved a pattern of understanding rather than to have simply transitioned from one state to some predetermined goal state. Being in transit is predicated upon boundaries, that is, on demarcations in space and time. How these demarcations take place, and how I. J. Klaver (*)  University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_12

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they are experienced—if at all—depend on many factors. Boundaries are places of demarcation and separation but also of transition, translation, transaction, transgression, and transformation. The prefix “trans-” in all these cases denotes a meeting, encounter, a crossing, a situation of being with, of going beyond, across (Klaver 2007).

Shorebirds: Earth in Transit Shorebirds are the world’s greatest travelers. Some species migrate from the North Pole to the South Pole and back, trans-border, trans-oceanic, trans-continental. According to recent research (2018) of John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and Nathan Senner, a scientist who conducts research on migratory shorebirds, precisely those world travelers are facing a “No. 1 conservation crisis facing birds in the world today”: Climate change, coastal development, the destruction of wetlands and hunting are all culprits. And because these birds depend for their survival, as we do, on the shorelines of oceans, estuaries, rivers, lakes, lagoons, and marshes, their declines point to a systemic crisis…

Along with disappearing shorelines, estuaries, lagoons, and marshes, a deeper transition is taking place: the increasing disappearance of opportunities for transition. Fitzpatrick and Senner: The global collapse of migratory shorebird populations is much more than a calamity facing a group of exquisitely evolved birds. It also tells us that our global network of aquatic systems is fraying. If water is the world’s lifeblood and aquatic systems are its connective tissue, then the decline of the planet’s most spectacular global travelers signals a systemic illness that demands our attention and action.

Meandering: Thinking in Transition Much of the twentieth century was founded on positivist, goal-oriented thinking. Rivers were “straightened” in order to accommodate scheduling of goods and people in transit. The engagement of the river water and its contents with the various strata of rock and sand, and trees, and beaver dams, and farmers, and build-up of sediment was all set aside. What mattered most was transit from here to there with regularity and

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speed. Linearity has been the privileged paradigm of progress and its leading model of efficiency; its concomitant mindset has been teleological or goal-oriented. Meandering, convoluted and seemingly undirected, is seen as not just the opposite of efficiency, but as being in its way, synonymous with aimless wandering, ambling along a winding path, and rambling through long-winded arguments.1 Meandering refers to the sinuous movement of a river flowing through—hence creating—a landscape. Because of the complexity of this sinuosity, meandering also stands as a symbol for non-deterministic systems. Furthermore, meandering has a deep past and is etymologically rooted in an actual river, the Meander or Maeander—now Büyük Menderes—River in Anatolia, Turkey (Klaver 2016, 2017, 2018). Revaluing meandering has a train of effects on a variety of concepts and practices. Meandering as a metaphor for a different sort of thinking is founded in and summarizes the non-deterministic models used in many fields of science that were once the hallmark of linear, positivist thinking. Meandering allows for ambiguity and hybridity, for that which cannot easily be measured, which does not want to be measured, or determined in scheduled time tables. In that sense, meandering makes room for thinking in terms of spheres, including the notion of riversphere, which covers the less quantifiable multidimensional aspects of rivers. Meandering proceeds covering more ground, percolating into deeper depths, listening to more voices, foregrounding the specificity of being what it is when and where it is observed. Meandering makes room for the slow and for the workings of the material realm not ruled by strict structures. It facilitates a slow ontology, a slow epistemology, and a slow ethics. Taking time to be, to learn, to know, to judge. The activity of meandering can be characterized as a process of sedimentation and reactivation, which is a slower process than water running through a concrete channel. However, speed from A to B is not necessarily the only mark of efficiency. Meandering takes more factors into consideration, and therefore is able to respond with more versatility and from a broader set of perspectives. Meandering facilitates a different way of thinking about efficiency, acknowledging that it might be more efficient in the long term to take more time and explore possibilities, just as a river does when it meanders through a basin. More than control, exploration drives innovation. Meandering as a method, as a mental strategy, privileges exploration; it is a messy process, learning from mistakes, and following contingent relations. Many human practices develop in sinuous

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ways: learning through failing, honing a skill, building experience, facing unexpected challenges, starting anew. Meandering foregrounds the searching in the notion of research. Meandering invokes a model of engineering in terms of ingenuity, a bricolage, and tinkering that acknowledges and interacts with various kinds of knowledge and expertise, that is capable of adjusting itself to local situations and demands. Hapgood speaks to the transition from positivist and goal oriented thinking to non-deterministic, contingent, and emergent thinking. He brings the notion of transit into play when he describes the first phase of engineering design as a “metaphorical traversal through solution space,” in which “failure, imagination, and stuckness” are part of the transition from problem to acceptable solution (Hapgood 1993: 96). Meandering may seem to be a slower process than the straight line of progress; yet this is only the case for the simply defined objective. Meandering proceeds by covering more ground, percolating into deeper depths, listening to the murmurs of more voices, being what it is when and where it is observed. The story-arc of the Meander River, one of the most important rivers of ancient Greece, gives us a vivid long view of a river in relation to humans; giving passage to great armies (Xerxes, Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great), bearing witness to the beginnings of philosophy (Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus of Ephesus), confounding lawyers and geographers, and all but disappearing from the cultural imagination. The Meander River no longer functions as a major Mediterranean corridor of transit, but the notion of meandering has reemerged as valuable. Meandering is not a symbol for closure but one of ongoing change and exchange, of identities that shift over time, a wet ontology of flux (see Klaver 2016, 2017, 2018).

Translation: Overcoming Authenticity Translation is the beginning of understanding, the shadow of thought, inviting further thinking. Translation reveals a transitional quality of thinking. It facilitates transitions, connections, relations, opening new ways of understanding, shedding new light on situations. It is predicated upon an ontology of being with, an epistemology of knowing with. Ilan Stavans mentions that according to Jorge Luis Borges “the original was unfaithful to the translation.” The original keeps us stuck in an ideal of authenticity. Judith Butler (1996) emphasizes a similar

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sentiment: the danger of no translation is domestication (52). As does Homi Bhabha (1995): “Culture… as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational” (49).

Tourism in Transit—Cities in Transit In his poetic Invisible Cities (1974), Italo Calvino’s protagonist, the young Venetian Marco Polo, has become Kublai Khan’s favorite ambassador. He is the only one who translates cities of old Mongol emperor’s vast empire into lively everyday worlds. Where other ambassadors give numerical and economic accounts of places, Marco Polo describes in detail how the scent of the rain on the road mixes with the dim lights of lanterns. Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing. (6–7)

The traveler tells the Khan about all the cities he knows, but the emperor is still unsatisfied. “There is still one of which you never speak. … Venice.” The Venetian smiles. “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” Kublai is impatient: why don’t you mention it then? “Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.” (Calvino 1974: 86–87)

More than 700 years later the city seems to have lost itself. It has been spoken about too much: taken over by mass tourism. According to Andrea Carandini, the head of the Italian Environment Fund, Venice is being crushed by mass tourism. “Venice now has a third of the inhabitants that it did in the eighteenth century—just 50,000—yet it receives 30 million tourists a year. It is unsustainable. If things continue like this, the city will die” (McKenna 2016). Venice and its lagoon are on UNESCO’s world heritage list. The world heritage committee threatened to place the city on the list of endangered heritage sites if Venice would not move toward

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the “prohibition of the largest ships and tankers” by February 2017 (McKenna 2016). In August 2017, I visited the 2017 Venice Biennale. We had dinner at one of Venice’s canals when we saw it coming: a slow-moving giant. The cruise ship’s colossal, sharp-edged body, quietly cleaved the waters of the canal, consuming the picturesque horizon, eating house after house, cathedral after palace, silently, no crunching. Moving with iron precision, steely temporality (Fig. 12.1). Amsterdam, the Venice of the North is suffering from a similar tourist overdose. By mid-2016, the city had attracted so many tourists that it decided to suspend marketing for a while. Alderman Ollongren (for the Economy) stated explicitly “the goal is to slow down the growth” (Couzy 2016). In 2018 the city has plans to move its cruise terminal from the center of town at the major water ways the IJ behind the Central Station closer to the harbor (Fig. 12.2). Venice is still an example for Amsterdam. In the midst of its newest high-end urban river development at the IJ, one of the signs for street name invokes: “LIDOSTRAAT waterfrontontwikkeling in Venetie” (LIDO STREET waterfront development in Venice IJK). In the background, we see the Film Museum the EYE, one the pearls of the IJ development (Fig. 12.3).

Fig. 12.1  We had dinner at one of Venice’s canals when we saw it coming: slow-gliding giant, moving with iron precision, steely temporality

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Fig. 12.2  Bicycling along the IJ Boulevard, we saw the Brilliance of the Seas docked in the Cruise Terminal, dwarfing all the buildings around it

Fig. 12.3  On our way to see a movie, we explored the new neighborhood around the Film Museum the EYE and found ourselves in a Venetian themed enclave

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Travel and tourism has become “a behemoth, capable of doing great good and great damage. It is an $8tn industry. It is the largest employer on Earth: one in 11 people works in tourism and travel” (Becker 2017). With tourism, with globalization, mobility studies have taken off, studying multiple models of flow—not just flows of water, but flows of people, capital, luggage, tourists, money, exchanges, and experiences.

Stuck: Not in Transit Here I put forth a portion of a piece on being stuck that I composed for a dance performance.2 The dance emerged from the experiences of the dancers who had experienced physical abuse and how they were “stuck” until they could bear no more. The words are presented here as they were in the performance. Stuck. We get stuck. Stuck in mud; more likely stuck in traffic. Stuck in a situation. Stuck at our job. Stuck in thinking. Stuck in writing. Stuck in irony. Stuck in authenticity. Humans are not the only ones to get stuck. Animals get stuck. Some of them, with us. Pets, farm animals, wild animals when we build traps, walls, fences, undermine their habitats. Things get stuck. Processes, relations, connections, aspirations, politics. Water gets stuck behind a dam. Stuck, entails a lack. Lack of movement, of creativity, of inspiration, of opportunity, possibility, capacity. Stuck is stasis. At the bottom of Dante’s Hell, Inferno’s lowest circle, lies a large frozen lake. Hell is not fire, Hell is ice. No transformation, no transition, but being encased in ice. Being stuck is the worst. One is not just stuck. One gets stuck. Being stuck reveals a process of becoming. One does not just get stuck overnight. It takes time to get stuck. Painful time. Time of diminishing possibilities. Being stuck is political. There is not an equal distribution of being stuck. Women are more often stuck. Contemporary feminist philosopher Sarah Ahmed (2017) calls the breaking point in a situation of being stuck: “snap.” When you don’t take it, when you can’t take any more of it, what happens? The moment of not taking it is so often understood as losing it. When a snap is registered as the origin of violence, the one who snaps is deemed violent. She snaps. You can hear the snap in the sound of her voice. Sharp,

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brittle, loud; perhaps it is like the volume has suddenly been turned up, for no reason; the quietness that surrounds her ceases when she speaks, her voice cutting the atmosphere, registering as loss of something; a nicer atmosphere, a gentler mood. And then: violence is assumed to originate with her. A feminist politics might insist on renaming actions as reactions; we need to show how her snap is not the starting point.

Snapping as a first breaking of the ice, a finding of the narrow passage of a flow, a transition. In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa, shows us the force of a “new mestizas” breaking down barriers of being stuck in dualistic gender roles, and in colonial exploitations. Anzaldúa translates her experience of growing up in borderlands (physical, psychological, sexual, spiritual borderlands), in the Rio Grande Valley in what is now Texas, but was Mexico, into “a new language—the language of the Borderlands.” It is a “switching of ‘codes’” a “bastard language,” a mixture of history, poetry, stories (Anzaldúa 2012, Preface to the First Edition). In one of her poems she meets a woman from a nearly extinct tribe the Kumeyaay, by “a stream amidst the gushing water.” At the end of the poem she brings us back in the “now,” where the mountains are stuck in fire and real estate (Anzaldúa 2012, 204–205): Her name was Til’pu, meaning Roadrunner. …. There’s a forest fire in the Cuyamaca Peaks, a sign: 4 Parcels For Sale, the Indians locked up in reservations and Til’pu behind glass in the museum.

Locked up. Divided up. Burnt. Stuck. Poetry, snapping. Various strategies to find the river, the movement of flow, the complexity of meandering. A river meanders: shapes, and is shaped by all it meets. Meandering is a river’s situation: the ongoing transit of sedimentation and reactivation. Water picks up silt and soil and logs and rocks. Water deposits silt and soil and logs and rocks. A river transforms the land. The land transforms the river. In order to find the flows, we need poetry, rivers, dance…snapping.

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Borderlands in Transit The Rio Grande Valley forms the ecotone between the Rio Grande River and the Gulf of Mexico. The landscape has long been a nexus for wildlife, including migratory bird species from South America to Alaska, a breeding ground for sea turtles, and home to many species listed by federal agencies as threatened and endangered—including the ocelot (Resendiz et al. 2017). Only after the Mexican–American War (1846– 1848) the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo became the new boundary between the United States and Mexico. Gloria Anzaldúa: “The US–Mexican border es un herida abierta (is an open wound, IK) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa 2012: 25). We drove through the borderlands, through Anzaldúa’s country. The wounds have become more intricate, insidious. TRANSMIGRANTES NUEVO MILENIO said the forlorn sign along wind-swept farm road 2520 in south Texas. Transmigrantes in the new millennium (Fig. 12.4). We drove from San Benito, Resaca City, home of Narciso Martínez, the father of conjunto music, and Freddy Fender, to Los Indios, a bordertown in Cameron County, Texas. Along Route 281 more and more signs popped up, mentioning Transmigrantes, customs brokers. That

Fig. 12.4  Driving along wind-swept farm road 2520 in south Texas, we encountered the first TRANSMIGRANTES sign, forlorn in the new millennium

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part of Route 281 is officially called Military Hwy. The US–Mexico border is a militarized zone. Transmigrantes are the gleaners of transit, in transit. They buy used goods in the United States to be sold in Central America. Tucked against the border fence are lots full with used cars, car parts, and buses—the most desirable items. They are only allowed to cross the border—the Rio Grande—at the “Free Trade International Bridge” at Los Indios, to start their perilous journey along designated highways, subject to robberies and bribes to highway police, used cars towed behind their own cars (Figs. 12.5, 12.6, and 12.7). The region depends on international business. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994. Tariffs were eliminated progressively and all duties and quantitative restrictions, with the exception of those on a limited number of agricultural products traded with Canada, were eliminated by 2008. Within years the traditionally agricultural area sprouted radically new crops: sprawling industrial districts of maquiladores at the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and shiny new distribution centers at the US side. In 2005 the US Congress began enacting legislation for building a physical fence along the US–Mexico border. The proposed “border wall” sought to fence a total of 700 out of the 1954 miles of the international

Fig. 12.5  We slowly drove into the CATS lot, a large lot run by men from Guatemala

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Fig. 12.6  Transmigrantes, the gleaners of transit, in transit: towing used cars behind their own cars, all the way back to Guatemala

Fig. 12.7  We were right at Anzaldúa’s herida abierta, the open wound of the closed-fenced US–Mexican border

boundary between Mexico and the United States (Resendiz et al. 2017). As of January 8, 2010 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deemed the construction of the border fence complete, however the

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new Trump administration set out to finish the wall. One of the battle grounds became the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, a tiny sanctuary revealing a glimpse of how the Rio Grande ecosystem once looked like. Being federal land the area would not have to go through lengthy eminent domain hearing. Local and environmental groups protested. The preserve is a major stop for migratory birds, provides habitat for ocelots, endangered Texas tortoises and snakes to cross the river to find higher ground in case of flooding. The border wall did not come. The spending bill, the House approved March 2018, banned the construction of the wall. When we visited the preserve in August that year, we saw a new approach to disciplining the area. The vegetation close to the Rio Grande was burnt. Initially I thought naively that it had been a prescribed burn for environmental restoration. Tools and new native plant pots dotted the area. However, they were all small plants or medium sized. Nothing like the bushy vegetation. And suddenly we understood. We were witnessing the construction of a soft wall. An area of controlled visibility. No one who would cross the river here, could hide in the thick vegetation. Silent we walked on along the long path of “environmental restoration” (Fig. 12.8). The most photographed part of the border fence is at the very other side of the continent where the wall walks into the Pacific Ocean. The US side is desolate territory, controlled space. The Mexican side people are enjoying the beach (Figs. 12.9 and 12.10). At this place artist Ana Teresa Fernández stationed her project to “erase the border”: Fernández’s set an enormous ladder against the border wall separating Playas de Tijuana from San Diego’s Border Field State park painting the bars a pale powdery blue. For a woman born in Mexico, the border is a powerful symbol. Projecting a future in the north, Ana Teresa Fernández’s own journey—crossing the Tijuana-San Diego border to study and build her career—mirrors the route north taken by millions of women who have come from southern and central Mexico to work in the maquiladoras and make a better life for themselves and their families. Thus, the border is a site of utopian possibility. Yet, at the same time the border wall is an aggressive reminder of the violent subjugation of Mexico through the instruments of NAFTA and the Merida Initiative and resulting drug war. (http://anateresafernandez. com/borrando-la-barda-tijuana-mexico/)

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Fig. 12.8  The Rio Grande visible through the ‘controlled burnt’ thickets in Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. We witnessed the creation of control through exposure

Fig. 12.9  Tijuana: where the wall walks into the waters of the Pacific Ocean

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Fig. 12.10  At the US side we saw a desolate territory, controlled space, mocked by countless loud seagulls. At the Mexican side we saw people enjoying the beach

In 2018 there are worldwide more than 77 border walls or fences. That is 70 more than at the end of World War II. According to Wendy Brown (2010): 21st century walls are no longer defenses against international invasions by other state powers, but responses to transnational economic, social, and religious flows that do not have the force of political sovereignty behind them. (81)

Migrants in Transit March 14, 2016, Kate Gilmore, Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights gives a keynote address at an event organized by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), co-sponsored by the Governments of Mexico and Greece. The task for the delegates is to come to resolutions to improve the human rights situation of migrants in transit. Their situation is the most precarious and perilous:

204  I. J. KLAVER Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, … During the course of last year, more than 5,000 people perished along migratory routes around the world. Hundreds more have lost their lives this year. And further uncounted thousands suffer serious injuries, deprivation of liberty, xenophobic abuse and attacks and life threatening discrimination as they move. … Let me be clear; this is a human rights crisis. Yet because the victims are marginalised and poor, because they do not share the citizenship of the countries through which they are transiting, they are largely invisible or worse, seen as security threats and a danger to receiving communities. … In using the word ‘migrant’ our intention is not to exclude refugees or other more precisely defined legal categories of persons such as victims of trafficking but rather to use a neutral umbrella term for a group of people who have in common a lack of citizenship attachment to their host country. In addition to persecution and conflict, today the reasons for ‘non-voluntary’ movement include extreme poverty, discrimination, lack of access to education, health and decent work, violence, gender inequality, the wide-ranging consequences of climate change and environmental degradation and separation from family.

Transitions That night it was my turn to keep watch. After suffering for years from a skin disease, my father was finally dying. His eyes were closed, his breath worked heavily through his hollow body: flesh withered away, bones left, barely covered by raw open skin. I slept lightly. Awakened by his feverish movements, I found him lying across the bed, almost falling off, without strength to move back. I took him in my arms. There we stood. Silent, in the darkness of the night. One body, just as we stood thirty years ago, me in his arms. In the early morning, eyes closed, his voice, hoarse from far deep, whispered for water. I moistened his chapped lips, his dry tongue. That was enough. I laid him on his right side, to spare his bed-sored back. His left arm bent over his body, the hand with the long fingers lying quietly on the white sheet before him.

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A few hours later the hand started to move in a slow circular pattern. My mother whispered: “He is about to die.” She knew this hand, she had seen people dying. We all followed the hand, moving slow circles over the white sheet, trying to hold on to something, to grasp, or better, to sense the surface, the circles on the water, which the stone leaves behind when it sinks down. Since my father’s transition, my mother has left us too. We were all there when she died. Her hand did not make circles on the sheet. The young new nurse had administered the morphine too fast, instead of inserting the dose slowly. Mom’s hand used to wave at us when we left from visiting her. Waving all the way till we turned the corner of her street. Standing on her tiny balcony she waved many goodbyes. Even from the window of her little apartment in her newfound home on the second floor of the elderly facility for Alzheimer patients, she waved till we turned the corner. All aunts and uncles, her whole generation of our large extended family, and all the people we called uncle and aunt—her friends—were gone. She was the last one left, the only one still with us, and she became everyone’s mother, Materfamilias. Nieces and nephews visited her to hear stories from long ago, when they were kids. Most of them were there to say a last farewell that summer day in July when we cremated her. We all went to her favorite place for a drink, for some food, for more stories. We had a good time. Our traditions for marking this ultimate human transition, our being with and learning from those who make the transition before us, our coping with loss, enlighten us with an understanding of the paradoxes of transitions, of not being stuck. They make us aware of those in transit who have lost their homes; those creatures who have lost the feeding grounds of their traditional flyways. They make us aware of that which might be gained and lost in transit. Acknowledgements   My gratitude to my travel companions: Rosalva Resendiz, Cathy Ragland, and Roberto De Souza along the Rio Grande Valley; Elana Zilberg and Stephanie Kane at the Tijuana-San Diego border; Daniel Bhozkov in Venice; Ton Dekker in Amsterdam; Mary Lynn Babcock and Brian O’Connor in Denton, TX. Photographs are made by Irene J. Klaver during these transitions in 2017 and 2018.

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Notes 1. This section is based upon my writings about meandering, especially on Klaver (2018), which itself is rooted in Klaver (2016, 2017). 2.  “Through the Narrow Door,” Faculty Dance Concert 2018. Artistic Director Dr. Mary Lynn Babcock. Choreography Dr. Mary Lynn Babcock, in collaboration with and performance by Whitney Geldon. Composer: Brittany Padilla, Narative: Irene J. Klaver. University of North Texas, Denton, TX. February 8–11, 2018.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Becker, Elizabeth. 2017. Only Governments Can Stem the Tide of Tourism Sweeping the Globe. The Guardian, August 5. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2017/aug/05/only-governments-can-stem-tide-oftourism-sweeping-the-globe. Accessed April 15, 2018. Bhabha, Homi. 1995. Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate. In The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman. New York: Routledge. Brown, Wendy. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books. Butler, Judith. 1996. Universality in Culture. In For Love of the Country, Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, ed. Joshua Cohen. Boston: Beacon Press. Calvino, Italo. 1974 [1972]. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company and A Harvest Book. Couzy, Michiel. 2016. Amsterdam gaat toerisme beteugelen door strengere toetsing nieuwe hotels. Het Parool, January 9. http://www.parool. nl/parool/nl/5/POLITIEK/article/detail/4221093/2016/01/09/ Amsterdam-gaat-toerisme-beteugelen-door-strengere-toetsing-nieuwe-hotels. dhtml/. Accessed August 15, 2017. Fitzpatrick, John W., and Nathan R. Senner. 2018. Shorebirds, the World’s Greatest: Travelers, Face Extinction. New York Times, April 27. https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/27/opinion/shorebirds-extinction-climate-change.html. Gilmore, Kate. 2016. “Migrants in Transit” Keynote Address the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). h t t p : / / w w w. o h c h r. o r g / E N / N e w s E v e n t s / P a g e s / D i s p l a y N e w s . aspx?NewsID=18485&LangID=E. Hapgood, Fred. 1993. Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and the Technical. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

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Klaver, Irene J. 2007. Boundaries on the Edge. In Boundary Explorations in Ecological Theory and Practice, ed. Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine, 113–133. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2016. Re-Rivering Environmental Imagination: Meander Movement and Merleau-Ponty. In Nature and Experience: Phenomenological Approaches to the Environment, ed. Bryan E. Bannon, 113–127. London: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2017. Indeterminacy in Place: Rivers as Bridge and Meandering as Metaphor. In Phenomenology and Place, ed. Janet Donohoe, 209–225. London: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2018. Meandering and Riversphere: The Potential of Paradox. Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 11. http://editions.lib.umn. edu/openrivers/article/meandering-and-riversphere-the-potential-of-paradox/. McKenna, Josephine. 2016. The Telegraph, July 15. https://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/2016/07/15/un-threatens-to-place-venice-on-endangered-listunless-italy-ban/. Accessed April 15, 2018. Rajchman, John. 1995. Introduction: The Question of Identity. In The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman. New York: Routledge. Resendiz, Ramon, Rosalva Resendiz, and Irene J. Klaver. 2017. Colonialism and Imperialism: Indigenous Resistance on the U.S./Mexico Border. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 16: 15–33. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). 2016. United Nations Human Rights Report. Situations of Migrants in Transit. Stavans, Ilan. 1996. An Interview with Fernando del Paso. Review of Contemporary Fiction 16 (1) (Spring).

CHAPTER 13

The Commute: The Bend in Progress, Reproduction on The Road Robin Truth Goodman

One form of travel that nobody would claim as their favorite is the commute. In its mundanity, it lacks the exoticism and excitement usually expected with movements across space and experience in an era of globalization. The commute is caught in cycles of repetition and necessity; it is almost never associated with desire or adventure. Commuting is usually considered non-time or empty time, a time outside of narration, even sometimes outside of experience. Yet, commuting—as the passage between work and home, between public and private life, between production and reproduction—can tell us about identities in transition.

Parts of this chapter are taken from my book Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt, to be published in 2019 by Lever Press. R. T. Goodman (*)  Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_13

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Marx considers the passage to and from work as a problem for capital, a waste of time that is taken out of capital’s control of the worker’s time in production (the working day) and is struggled over. During the commute, the worker, says Marx, claims back his time of life, shifting from giving his time over to the commodity, first, to, then, reproducing himself for the next day of work. In a postcolonial context, this translates into the in-between time: between the time of the local and the modern, between the time of the gods and the time of technology— the time where the local culture encounters the culture of capital, and the worker experiences both simultaneously, often in conflict but sometimes not. Today, we can talk about the end of the commute, where, in the industrialized West, the commute is often replaced with forms of “travel” to work that are not embodied and that do not carve out a span of time or a movement in space, where the commute as a moment of friction between the surplus owed to capital and the needs of a space apart has been, at least in part, set awash by virtual travel and sometimes completely circumvented. The end of commuting looks different, however, in different places, where productive economies have shifted over to financial extraction and debt. In today’s regimes of austerity, where the role of the state in development has been challenged by policies of deregulation and public sector dismantling demanded by global loaning institutions, worker reproduction has little interest for capital, and the commute, threatening as a horror film or absurd like a comedy, can appear as the site of its collapse. This chapter is about Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s 1965 play The Road as a play about commuting. In particular, I argue that The Road takes up commuting as a moment of transition between the working day and the day without work, between the hope of progress and the despair of deindustrialization, between production and anti-production, or the breakdown of the machine in the space of reproduction.1 The play is critical of the postcolonial state for its failures to deliver on the road to prosperity, and, at the same time, it presents the coming-apart of old paradigms of progress through work and gives a sense of their replacement by a metaphysics of indebtedness, or sacrifice to the gods. The Road magnifies the marginal social situation of Nigeria’s drivers (touts) that becomes the dominant paradigm of global labor under a later era of financial globalization. The Road thus stands at the crux between local and global culture, between nostalgia for old class alliances and archaic ritualistic practices on the one hand and, on the other,

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a recognition of new forms of global accumulation. The appearance of gods on stage can be said to be both a manifestation of local beliefs in opposition to modernization and the effect of a rise in global forces of inequality and dispossession.2 I argue that the framing of Soyinka’s critique of the postcolonial state points toward the beginning of a global unraveling of the conditions that make possible the reproduction of work under modernity’s call. The Road tells a story about the relationship between dead capital and living labor on the road to progress, in a floundering developing state. The state comes across as comical in the form of a Professor with outof-place habits preaching spiritualism in the Word while turned away from those in his immediate service, his eyes to the sky. Dressed in Victorian tails and bearing old newspapers and garbage, the Professor comes on stage bearing a sign that says “BEND” that he stole from off the road. “BEND” is a descriptor of the road—the material apparatus underlying productive motion and progress. The sign “BEND” is sacred, we see, because—besides giving directions on the road—it gives the Professor the ability to confer death.3 Once the sign is removed from the road, commuters no longer are certain of their way—they roll straight forward, toward death. Alluding to reproduction, the sign “BEND” divides living labor from dead capital—those workers inside the productive machine, licensed to work by the Professor (who issues counterfeit work licenses), from those bodies piled up by the side of the road spilling out goods to be sold with the mythological spirit of death, Ogun, dancing around in a mask.4 The Professor oversees the collection of commodities from off the strewn bodies on the road and resells them, so the sacrificial bodies of these former commuters are turned into corrupted, nonproductive machines, or dead labor for exchange. The word “BEND” thus pivots, opening up a spiritual, sacrificial communication with the gods as a sign of technological advancement, development, and rising worker well-being—or reproduction—which its removal closes down. The Road can be said to take place in the wreckage of industrialization. The set of The Road is crammed with the broken refuse of past production, in the “rubble of worn tyres, hubs, twisted bumpers etc” (152). In fact, not only the debris but also the drivers themselves are remainders of production’s past. Though some of the critics attribute inauthenticity to Soyinka’s work in that he stages village life, pantheism, and superstition as proving the regressive character of African culture (more on this below), industrialism is here what really parades as the outmoded and

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irrecoverable recent past. Not only the props but also the stage characters themselves are relics remaining in the dustbin of history, the refuse of progress at the crossroads of globalization. In Nigeria, “[t]outs,” explains Enoch Okpara, “can be defined as free-lance workers at railway stations, airports, ferry points, and especially motor-parks, who undertake the self-imposed responsibility of recruiting and organizing passengers who wish to travel by road, and for this work they receive a fee, or more appropriately, a ‘commission’, that is generally paid by the drivers of the vehicles just before their departure. All the owners are private entrepreneurs, who both compete and collaborate with one another to provide road transport for the public” (327). Okpara goes on to talk about the rise in this form of labor as resulting from a lack of investment in public transportation and a privatization, de-unionization, and deregulation of such services (329). The popularity of such employment is the result of the “non-existent opportunities of employment in manufacturing” (331). The Road is a tragic satire taking place on the wreckage of Third World industrial capitalism.5 Living at the usually unremarkable side of the collapsing road of development, the play’s commuters are the precursors of what will become neoliberalism’s dispossessed: they are caught absurdly in a cycle of reproduction while the conditions of reproduction are in ruins. The Road can be considered within a shift in the tendencies of Soyinka’s oeuvre: this change becomes particularly pronounced during the Nigerian Civil War (also known as the Biafran War), which goes from 1967–1970, and Soyinka’s consequent incarceration,6 but already in The Road, Soyinka surrenders the guarded optimism about decolonization evident in his earlier plays to a skepticism about the postcolonial moment. Unlike some of his later and better-known plays, The Road is not a cross-section of village life as it intersects directly with colonial or modern culture, foreign impositions, or systems of domination; it also does not pose an African spiritual unity against the fragmentation of experience and the compartmentalism demanded by Western technology and rationality, as Geoffrey Hunt alleges is characteristic of Soyinka’s “nostalgia for the security of traditional values” (71) as a “response to the loss of a well-ordered universe” (70) before neocolonialism.7 The mythological, ritualistic universe of the African gods is, in The Road, anything but a sweet ordering that suggests a longing for a disappearing past; rather, it is replete with constant mechanical accidents that cause disorder and rupture at every turn. The Road is an urban play that takes place at a traffic intersection, where modern technology and local mythological figures quite literally dance around each other in perpetual interaction.

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The commute comes to stand for the promise and defeat of the postcolonial project. Mass commuting suggests a passage toward productivity, but The Road—unprotected by its directional markers—ends that passage with death. As The Road continues to merge local deities into the commodity’s declining promise of progress, the commute appears as a debt owed to capital-gods and never completely paid, a demand that the drivers hand over their lives to the road like Marx’s workers hand over their lives to the commodity. In the context of the crisis in development that the postcolonial critique elicits, the commute takes narrative shape as a debt of development to the productive machine. The commuters’ lives are sacrificed because production no longer has a need to invest in the reproduction of the worker. From the perspective of neoliberalism looking back, when the gods fade away to be replaced by austerity and financialization, we can see in this commute the beginnings of the debt crisis.

Dance with the Devil The Road is, more or less, a rewriting of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (c. 1592–1593) through Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (c. 1953) in the context of Africa. It thereby unites the metaphysics of Marlow’s devilish contract with Vladimir and Estragon’s anticipation of death’s arrival in a bleak and miserable deindustrializing landscape. It takes place in two acts, each one anticipating work to begin again while expecting an arrival that will change everything through redemption. Entering in Victorian tails and top hat, the Professor, like Lucky, with a chair and bundles on his back, announces, like Pozzo, the dawn and the passage of time through the day. Unlike in Godot, however, but like in Faustus, the long-awaited visitor, the speechless mask of death (or false head in Faustus),8 does arrive, only to create even more celebration, drumbeats, and mayhem by introducing the “power…[of] the knowledge of death” (228). Just as Mephistopheles collects Lucifer’s debt, the Professor collects the debt to the road.9 While Faustus presents Faustus’ death as a repayment to the gods for his enjoyment of a life on credit—“I writ them a bill with mine own blood,” admits Faustus, “the date is expired; this time is the time, and he will fetch me” (55)—The Road ends with an insistence on the impossibility of satisfying the gods by returning one’s borrowed life to the road.

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The plotline of owing a debt to the devil has a varied history, and of course Soyinka is not the first writer to weave it through an economic narrative. In his conclusion to his book The Consumer Society, Jean Baudrillard treats it as central to understanding the social alienation induced in modern commodity culture. For Baudrillard, the Faustus story imagines the subject or soul who has lost his image “hounded to his death by it in real life” (189). Rather than the loss of the image turning into a silly game of chase, in the modern experience of alienation the image “takes its revenge” (189): it “haunts us” (189) just as “social labour power, which, once sold, returns, through the whole social cycle of the commodity, to dispossess us of the meaning of labour itself” (190). The modern devil reflects us back to ourselves shadowed antagonistically by the social need that constantly troubles. Baudrillard goes on to highlight a transition at the time of his writing (leading into the 1970s), when instead of being haunted and pursued by the image that we have sold of ourselves, we are absorbed in the signs of an impossible Affluence, vanishing into the mirror and united with the devil ourselves. Written a bit earlier and in a different geopolitical context, Soyinka’s version relies on the devil blocking these commuters from absorption into even the image of Affluence because the road on which such a course is pursued is strewn with the ruins of Affluence’s promised construction.

Authenticity I read The Road as constructing the preliminary contours of a Third World literature of global debt, of an understanding of the world in debt’s terms where the reproductive end of the productive cycle has become less of a problem for capital. Yet, the criticism on Soyinka has not been particularly concerned with how his work sits at the crux of a new phase of global capitalism or how he recognizes the fallout of productive disinvestment and the failing redistributive, reproductive, and infrastructure policies of the postcolonial state. Much of the criticism on Soyinka, instead, debates whether he is “authentically” African, on the one hand, or, on the other, echoing imperialist sensibilities. This debate dovetails with a debate about whether Soyinka’s treatment of the gods is a glorification of a pre-colonial or pre-modern past to answer present problems, or whether it is a projection of a more equitable future, a future of renewal. Geoffrey Hunt is most vituperative in his dismissal:

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Soyinka’s readership is largely a dispirited foreign bourgeoisie either seeking the exotic or displaying guilt feelings for colonialism and racism. The irony that Soyinka’s readership is precisely his target of attack is merely the reflection of the greater irony that his class is dependent economically on the foreign bourgeoisie which nationalism demands that it rebels against. (74)

Some of this controversy arises out of Soyinka’s response to the Négritude movement initiated by Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal in the 1930s. Rejecting any diagnosis of African inferiority, the project of Négritude was to create a unity of African culture based on emotion and sensibility that would contrast with European reason though not be subordinated to it. Though Soyinka was at first partial to Négritude, he soon changed his mind, famously quipping, “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces” (as cited in Feuser, 557). Yet, even with his rejection of Négritude, Soyinka has himself declared that “the artist labors from an inbuilt, intuitive responsibility not only to himself, but to his roots (1997: 353) and that the “artist has always functioned in African society as the recorder of mores and experience of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time” (1997: 356). Indeed, Soyinka was at the forefront of bringing African literatures into the curricula of African universities along with revitalizing African religions in the face of Christian and Muslim dominance. Soyinka also very clearly insists, “When ideological relations begin to deny, both theoretically and in action, the reality of a cultural entity which we define as the African world while asserting theirs even to the extent of inviting the African world to sublimate its existence in theirs, we must begin to look seriously into their political motivation” (1976: xi). The problem for the criticism, especially for the criticism that takes Négritude as its guidepost, might be in trying to define “Africa” singularly and essentially. Other critics have understood Soyinka’s focus on African identity as progressive rather than regressive, oriented toward teasing out mythological elements in African cultures that may offer political alternatives. Critics such as Odun Balogun read Soyinka as turning away from the regressiveness of a nationalism based on race, as he saw in Négritude, and embracing in its stead a vision of socialism specific to the context (207). Willfried F. Feuser contests that “there is early evidence… of his grappling with a value system in which the main criterion is Africanness” (563), and he shows the closeness of Soyinka’s cultural references to the

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cultural, artistic, linguistic, religious, and sociopolitical traditions of the Yoruba. Whereas Geoffrey Hunt understands Soyinka’s romanticism as a response to his “class alliance, class-ambivalence and severe cultural location” (65) due to the uncertain allegiances of his middle-class position, Biodun Jeyifro reads the metaphysical violence of Soyinka’s plays as eruptions of “an undeclared, ‘hidden’ class warfare, the more bitter because it is unconscious and implosive” (13). The class conflict, he proposes, is due to a rapid urbanization devoid of an accompanying acceleration in industrialization, leading to the rise of a population left behind by development—an “‘uprooted’ ‘reserve army of labour’” (14)—that The Road showcases.

Collision The Road recognizes, within the context of African religion, a population that is coming to be at the ultimate end of a beleaguered modernity. It spiritualizes the afterlife of work through presenting a set of unregulated conditions that incapacitate work alongside a group of drivers who introduce death into the transport of workers to productive sites. While the death dirge mounts over the ruins of a prior industrial age, the touts are the dead space of industrial labor. “How can anyone buy a uniform when he hasn’t got a job?” asks Samson, and Salubi responds, “Go mind your own business you jobless tout” (152). Work licenses are negotiated as debt, even when forged. “Do you think not enough people die here that you must come and threaten me with death?” Professor asks Salubi who beseeches him for a license. “You spurious spew. You instrument of mortgage. You unlicensed appendage of the steering wheel” (184). Overlaying the commute are the gods of pending death demanding payback, seconding as loan sharks: “So the dead are now your bank managers?” (182) asks the Professor, when he learns that Samson has promised to pay his fees from the money buried in the churchyard. The gods inherit the power of the dead labor of the past that denies the tout his right to future possession and his immortality. The gods serve not as a sign of cultural regression but rather as the living spirit of the dying machine, the life force that outlives the machine’s demise, its future. The Road is a reenactment of an African death ritual over the corpse of Western technology. The play starts in a roadside shack, under the sign “AKSIDENT STORE – ALL PART AVAILEBUL” (151) and next to a church with a graveyard. It is six

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o’clock in the morning, and the touts are waking up, talking about work. There is an everydayness here, suggesting that the process of waking up for work is cyclical, daily, ceremonial, even sacred. Though the direct reference to restarting the day is clearly to the endless return to the work that awaits—“Every self-respecting tout is already in the motor park badgering passengers,” says Samson (153)— the temporal cyclicality is ritualistic, as the touts lapse into biblical citations, elegiac proverbs, Yoruba incantations, imitations of church oratory, mystical allusions, and call-and-response rhythms. The demise of industrialization is the physical sign of social polarization and inequality in The Road. Though the dominance of the gods suggests that the inequality is spiritual or metaphysical, the industrial ruins physically take over the stage. The roadside shack is the collection point for the junk left behind by those who die on the road, never getting to work. The play’s action weaves between the broken and abandoned parts that had once crushed travelers: “As his grumbling gets in stride,” reads the stage directions for Kotonu’s onstage defecation, “Kotonu returns with an armful of motor parts, an old shoe, a cap etc. Goes into the mammy-waggon stall through hidden entrance upstage. He can be heard occasionally but he tries to move silently. Occasionally he lifts up the top-half tarpaulin covering and pushes out an object” (165). The life of the workers is surrounded and dwarfed by technology, even through their excretions. The question for them is not if they will be killed but what kind of machine will run them down and sell their parts. “If you gonna be killed by a car, you don’t wanna be killed by a Volkswagen. You wanra Limousine, a Ponriac or something like that” (172). The inequality between the gods of the dead-machines and the drivers is overwhelming, made visible on stage by the machine wreckage mounting up in piles in the shop. The Professor enters the stage bearing the road sign BEND with which he can alter the physical territory, the terrain of production. As production calls the worker into social being, the commute is the human response to the gods’ call. The Road recognizes, as Phillips observes, “the gods’ incompletion and loneliness without humans” (150), a loneliness to be met with a project “to build a road between gods and humans” (150). The ritualistic language and the modern language of transport, work, and profit intertwine: “If I go chop the life so tey God so jealous me, And if he take jealousy kill me I will go start bus service between heaven and hell,” says Samson, and Salubi

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rejoins, “Sometimes na aeroplane or helicopter den go take travel for Paradise” (155). The gods invite humans to an impossible communication, a commute, and the project of building it destroys its potential. The Professor treats the road sign as divine power, a weapon against the devil’s armies, a sacred communication that he found growing by the side of the road, “almost a miracle” (157). By plucking the word out of the earth, the Professor can literally change what travelers see when they come around the curve, causing them to deviate in a sacrificial collision. The removal of the sign signals the end of the gods’ desire for human interaction, the shutting-down of their call to the rituals of work. The Road expresses an awareness that national production is unable to fuel the forward movement of progress as represented in the commute: the postcolonial state, like the commuters, came upon a curve on the road to progress that it could not mediate and, instead, it crashed and surrendered the remains to thieves and thugs. Yet, instead of taking up solely a political critique, The Road submits that the power of anti-production is mythological, that is, unidentifiable within human scale, unreachable, overwhelming. The sacredness of the word attributes to the Professor’s power a metaphysical inequality, a permanent dispossession beyond any earthly reparation. By removing the sign, the Professor also usurps the drivers’ ability to confer meaning on the future through participating in the building up of the social world in production. Impersonating the Professor mockingly, Samson imitates postcolonial power by spewing petty insults on Salubi, declaring that his physical depravity, his farting, and bad breath, make him suitable for promotion. “One of these days,” says Salubi, “I will find out where he hides the money” (164), but he never does. “Go on, you are sacked” (158), returns Samson. The postcolonial state is thus mocked as an absurd imitation of a promise. The Road critiques liberalism by exposing the promise of economic vitalization under the shepherdship of the postcolonial state as a sham. Today, the distant gods have been replaced by the distant bankers, financiers, and the power elite who strip the unemployed of their reproductive infrastructure the way the Professor commands that the drivers strip the road. In one sense, the gods prefigure a financial power of accumulation that has no use of territory or human flourishing but only of authority. With production and so reproduction diminishing as the

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predominant site of profit expansion, a new type of human waste substitutes for the commuter, a type of human waste that Zygmunt Bauman locates in the unemployed masses found in refugee and immigrant camps in Europe and racialized inner-city ghettos in the United States, the “dumping ground [for those for whom] the surrounding society has no economic or political use” (81) and are abandoned to “the nowhereland of non-humanity” (80). The Road provides a critique of the postcolonial state that is prescient, in fact, a critique of the postcolonial state that offers a sense of its ending to be nudging toward the throes of neoliberal anti-production. The commute, however, tells a possibly different story of play, pleasure, and jest at the intersection, a possible bending away from reproducing technological modernity in the nonconforming merriment of the African gods.

Notes 1.  Remark Deleuze and Guatarri, defining “anti-production,” “Desiringmachines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down” (8). 2. In Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka writes, “Economics and power have always played a large part in the championing of new deities through human history. The struggle for authority in early human society with its prize of material advantages, social prestige and the establishment of an elite has been nowhere so intensely marked as in the function of religion, perpetuating itself in repressive orthodoxies, countered by equally determined schisms” (12). 3. “I have a new wonder to show you… a madness where a motor-car throws itself against a tree – Gbram! And showers of crystal flying on broken souls… They died, all three of them, crucified on rigid branches” (158). The sign gives the Professor control over the future, which he can take away. This ability is tied to signification and redemption. 4.  “Breathe like the road, be even like the road itself” (229), the dying Professor gasps as the mask of death, Ogun, spirals and spasms wildly, possessed. Soyinka’s interpretation of the god Ogun, of death and taxi drivers, is more complicated than my own metaphoric use. I am taking Ogun to represent the source of indebtedness, in some ways linked to economies of imperialism and dead capital but also to technological progress. On the other hand, Soyinka admires Ogun for his status as a god who became embodied, descended to the human world, and was engaged in human

220  R. T. GOODMAN interactions: “He came down decked in palm fronds and was crowned king. In war after war he led his men to victory. Then,… the trickster god left a gourd of palm wine for the thirsty deity. Ogun found it exceptionally delicious and drained the gourd to the dregs… Ogun is the embodiment of challenge, the Promethean instinct in man, constantly at the service of society for its full self-realisation… Ogun’s action did not take place in a vacuum. His venture was necessarily a drama of individual stress, yet even his moment of individuation was communicant, one which enabled the other gods to share, whose end-in-view was no less than a strengthening of the communal psyche” (1976: 29–30). One hears here echoes not only of Jesus and obviously Prometheus but also, perhaps more fundamentally, of Zarathustra. For Soyinka, Ogun is not only between the spiritual and the physical, not only between gods and humans, but also a type of cultural bridge, a sign of the complementary that exists between mythologies and cultures, where each culture is unique and also possessing shared features with “a common humanity” (1976: xii). 5. The choice of the term “Third World” is very deliberate here—I don’t intend it to refer to a nonaligned Cold War entity subordinated to a conflict between superpowers or a pretechnological region playing catch-up in a world of technological progress, though I realize that those types of meanings have been granted to the term historically and criticized appropriately as racist, primitivist, and supremacist. Rather, what I mean by “Third World” is a particular structural position within the geopolitical globe that, in a world systems sense and because of its continued disempowerment through histories of colonial relationships, is vulnerable to exploitation in current schemes of economic accumulation. 6. Balogun writes, “Soyinka’s evolution from a nationalist writer espousing the bourgeois philosophy of ‘pure art’ into a committed writer inspired by socialist ideals occurred in the second half of the 1960s and was generously commented upon by liberal and radical critics alike” (507). 7.  “For Soyinka Western science constricts and compartmentalizes reality whereas ‘African metaphysics’ sees no contradiction between modern technology and the gods” (78). 8. The connection between capital and death-monsters was noted by Marx. 9. As K. J. Phillips remarks, “Soyinka criticizes the Faustian drive in order to exorcise the Western Faustus from Africa. But then, surprisingly, he salvages a portion of that drive by insisting it has always characterized his favorite god of the Yoruba pantheon, Ogun” (140), the god of death and taxidrivers.

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Works Cited Balogun, F. Odun. 1988. Wole Soyinka and the Literary Aesthetic of African Socialism. Black Literature Forum 22 (3) (Autumn): 503–530. Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths & Structures. London: Sage. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Feuser, Willfried F. 1988. Wole Soyinka: The Problem of Authenticity. Black American Literature Forum 22 (3) (Autumn): 555–575. Hunt, Geoffrey. 1988. Two African Aesthetics: Soyinka vs. Cabral. In Marxism and African Literature, ed. Georg M. Gugelberger, 64–93. London: Currey. Jeyifro, Biodun. 1985. The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama. London: New Beacon Books. Marlowe, Christopher. 1616. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, ed. Rev. Alexander Dyce. Newgate: John Wright. Okpara, Enoch E. 1988. The Rôle of Touts in Passenger Transport in Nigeria. The Journal of Modern African Studies 26 (2): 327–335. Phillips, K.J. 1990. Exorcising Faustus from Africa: Wole Soyinka’s ‘The Road’. Comparative Literature Studies 27 (2): 140–157. Soyinka, Wole. 1973. Collected Plays I. Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1976. Myth, Literature and the African World. London, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. The Writer in an African State. Transition 75 (76): 350–356.

CHAPTER 14

The Privilege of the Open Road James Penha

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. —from “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman

With what extraordinary ease—and thoughtlessness—did I give up life in the United States for a peripatetic expatriate existence! Having stepped out of the closet and a marriage, I had already forsaken hometown New York City for a new life in a highfalutin administrative position at a Detroit university. But without Broadway, without MoMA, without Lincoln Center, without Washington Square, without Cafe Un Deux Trois, I might as well have been in … in … Jakarta, Indonesia or Hong Kong! And so when I saw one Sunday in my apartment a New York Times Section 4 advertisement searching for a Ph.D. to chair the English Department at the Hong Kong International School, I dabbed with blotting paper my c.v., its ink still damp from the application to Detroit where I was only a month into my tenure, and sent it off to … China? Britain and the PRC had recently agreed on a handover of Hong Kong, I recalled vaguely, and so I headed to the University library to find out in J. Penha (*)  South Tangerang, Indonesia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_14

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just what country I was hoping to work and, as well, to research what an international school was anyway! I also spent time with James Moffett’s Teaching the Universe of Discourse to familiarize myself with trending secondary-school pedagogy inasmuch as I hadn’t taught English at the high school level for more than a decade. I crammed well enough to pass my interview with the Hong Kong Headmaster in his room at an International School Recruiting Fair in Boston where he and dozens of other school administrators met with thousands of American educators looking to teach in every major city—and many towns and countries unknown to me—of the world. With only a few suitcases of clothes in hand and my precious trove of literary and professional books in a corner of ship’s container, I was, before the start of the next academic year, off to Hong Kong. The Sino-British Joint Declaration had been signed in 1984, two years before I arrived in the crown colony. It would be eleven years before the One Country/Two Systems would take effect in Chinese Hong Kong. By then, I would be long gone from the British Empire’s last remaining jewel. At first, the skyscrapers and waterways of Hong Kong charmed me; I felt curiously at home in Gotham by the South China Sea. As an expat teacher, I was well-paid and provided with rent-free flats, first in the midst of the bustling Stanley Market and then overlooking scenic Tai Tam Bay. No wonder so many of my colleagues would remain at Hong Kong International School for decades. But the city-state’s dedication to business rather than to the arts, its metro-plasticity crafted by the British atop an archipelago devoid of an indigenous population or culture soon bored and then depressed me despite the privilege of being the Head of an English Department serving the scions of Hong Kong tycoons and Western corporate executives. The only sustaining joy of Hong Kong for me was its accessibility—on every holiday period and often on long weekends—to Macau, Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, China itself, and Indonesia. It was on that latter nation’s isle of Bali that I serendipitously met the Sumatran man with whom, I determined, I needed to live. In those early days of the 1990s it was impossible for us to consider a home in the United States. I would have to move to Ferdy’s country. Over the next two years, I departed Hong Kong for a university teaching job back in New York City and, on vacations, rented myself out as an express-mail courier to gain free airfare to visit Ferdy in Bali.

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But my main task was to research, apply to, visit, and interview for postings at international schools in Indonesia. Finally, I landed a position at one of the premier such institutions in Southeast Asia, Jakarta International School. I would have accepted a job there on a subsistence wage in order to be with my lover, but JIS bestowed on expat teachers a handsome tax-free salary, an automobile, and free housing into which Ferdy moved with me. In too many ways, that was the last best and easiest move Ferdy and I would ever make. I had become used to trotting the globe with abandon, my US passport a sesame opening doors at almost every border. How different it is, I discovered, for an Indonesian citizen. How different it is, I discovered, for a person of color. How different it is, I discovered, for a Muslim. Philosophically and politically, I had always railed against white privilege and the maltreatment of minorities in the United States. But until I lived and traveled and empathized with my partner, I never felt the brutal distinctions, small and large, in the treatment of people like me as opposed to people like him. Small … like the need for Ferdy to apply well ahead of time at an embassy for a visa to European countries an American can choose on a whim to enter. Small like the extra minutes it takes for Ferdy to pass through even Asian immigration stations compared to the seconds it takes me. Small like the not-always-subtle turning at airports of soldiers with firearms towards Ferdy rather than in my direction. Small, in contrast, like the attentiveness granted to me at hotels and restaurants while the staff ignores Ferdy. Small like the accusation by a Manhattan salesperson, as Ferdy and I together exited her electronics store, that Ferdy had shoplifted an item, and so only he had to be embarrassed, searched, and only grudgingly begged for his pardon. Small like breakfasting in a Queens diner as the waitress and my own Aunt rail in Trumpist concert against immigrants, “coloreds,” and, especially, Muslims. Maybe not so small. Not when such incidents accrete trip after trip, rip after rip, far and near, decade after decade. Of course, compared to the millions of migrants and asylum-seekers who risk everything to seek refuge, Ferdy is fortunate. Even during the decade after 9-11 when on our annual visits to America, Ferdy, like all Indonesians and most Muslims, was swept off the immigration lines and sequestered away from me at JFK for an hour or so of “secondary” interrogation, he was fortunate not to be sent to a holding cell

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or Guantanamo or returned to his home country. Very fortunate … although it never seemed that way to him or to me until, set free, Ferdy would appear perspiring at the baggage carousel. Fortunate. I am more than fortunate. I am privileged, and so, at least for now I should not need to worry about traveling to the United States … alone. But I am not alone nor wish to travel anywhere in that condition. My real privilege is to have someone to love. This other, my privilege by dint of pallor, religion, and nationality is a shame. And the more the current administration in Washington honors my privilege to the exclusion of others, the less likely I will dare to bring Ferdy home to America anytime soon. The ideal privilege of the open road is what Whitman goes on to describe in his Song: Still here I carry my old delicious burdens, I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go, I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them, I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.

CHAPTER 15

American Travel Encounters with Fascist Italy David Aliano

In 1921, the Italy America Society sent 165 American students to Italy to commemorate the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death. It was the first official trip to Italy by American students since the end of the world war. Written by Irwin Smith, the resulting travel narrative of the student trip provides an American travel perspective of an Italy already in transition and anxious to affirm a new identity.1 The young Americans met the King as well as the Pope, commented on the “singular and awesome beauty” of the Palatine Hill in Rome and visited “whatever is of interest to the average visitor” in Florence; they completed the purpose of their visit dedicating a plaque at the Tomb of Dante in Ravenna and returned home, “full of vivid impressions of the New Italy, full of grateful remembrance of the boundless hospitality extended to them by the Italian government and people.”2 Their voyage, the travel book it produced, and the Italian press it received were one of the first of many interactions Americans and Italians would have within the pages of travel writing published in the United States about Italy during the interwar years. The early impressions penned by Irwin Smith show an D. Aliano (*)  College of Mount Saint Vincent, New York City, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_15

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American openness to reconsider long-held ideas about Italy as well as an Italian anxiety to demonstrate a new modern identity and a new place in the world on the eve of fascism’s takeover. This chapter looks at Italy’s interactions with American travelers and American traveler interactions with Italy and the way they together envisioned and reenvisioned the ‘new Italy’ of the Italian fascist regime during the interwar years. The focus is on one moment in time in which a government proclaimed to the world a new identity which influenced and was influenced by the perceptions of American travelers in a dynamic and shifting dialogue played out in the pages of Italian propaganda and popular American travel writing. Through an analysis of these transnational travel interactions, this chapter evaluates both the efficacy of government propaganda to challenge long-held ideas about its nation’s character as well as the power of existing narratives to incorporate change. It is a but a fragment of a longer conversation on travel and identity between Italy and America. Propaganda and the remaking of Italy’s image both at home and abroad was central to Mussolini’s fascist regime. Mussolini proclaimed a ‘new Italy,’ regenerated by the fascist revolution. From Luce newsreels and films, radio broadcasts of Mussolini’s famed balcony speeches, and varied print media; to public works, social initiatives, and cultural activities, the regime’s fascist image was projected everywhere, near and far, both in Italy and abroad. Much has been written and debated by scholars on the Italian fascist cultural agenda and the new, at times conflicting, fascist identities it articulated in its many and varied forms of propaganda as it searched for consensus at home.3 Scholars have similarly traced the regime’s propaganda initiatives abroad which targeted the Italian American community and captured the wider American public’s imagination.4 This chapter limits its focus narrowly to this identity as articulated through American travel encounters with fascist Italy. Encounters which were mediated both by the regime’s tourist propaganda as well as by long-established images of Italy which existed within the Englishlanguage literary tradition. Tourism and popular travel writing are the key points of contact in this dialogue between cultures: a contested space filled by expectations, assumptions, and projected self-images. The study of tourism as its own field of inquiry initially focused on its economic impact as well as on the practices of the travel and hospitality industries. Inspired by the now classic theoretical studies on tourism by Dean MacCannell, John Urry, and Jonas Larsen, more and

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more scholars have begun to take seriously the sociological and cultural aspects of tourism in the twentieth century and the role of tourist propaganda in shaping personal and collective identities.5 As John K. Walton recounts in his edited volume, Histories of Tourism, historians though relatively late in turning to this burgeoning field of inquiry have begun to make significant contributions to debates within the field.6 In just the past few years an Italian scholarly journal devoted to tourism: Storia del turismo has been published, along with new historical works on the history of tourism in Italy by Annunziata Berrino, Storia del turismo in Italia (2011) and Andrea Jelardi, Storia del viaggio e del turismo in Italia (2012).7 Influenced by the theoretical works of Edward Said and Mary Louise Pratt, who each developed innovative interpretative frameworks for the study of travel writing in colonial contexts, many European historians are now using tourism in general and travel writing in particular as a new way to examine national cultures and identities. Pratt’s “contact perspective” which “emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other” is a particularly useful way to understand the nature of the American travel encounters with Italy discussed here by demonstrating how travel experiences and direct interactions influence and are influenced by travel writing.8 Understood in this context, Rudy Kosher writes that guidebooks play a key role in Pratt’s ‘contact zones’ since they are “a significant cultural artifact, indeed a product of, and a mediator in such interactions.”9 For Kosher, it is “a text marked by travel cultures from which tourist-readers derived meaning and ideological orientation.”10 This chapter accordingly interprets travel experiences as a contact point between the Italian government’s recast national identity and American traveler interactions with this ‘new Italy,’ as mediated by guidebooks and travel writing to Italy. Charles Burdett, in Journeys Through Fascism: Italian Travel Writing Between the Wars (2007), explores the theoretical questions of travel and identity posed here by examining how Italian travel writing offered key insight into the nature of fascism, its ideology, and the way in which the regime’s propaganda influenced Italian thought as seen through Italian travelers within Italy and abroad.11 Although also showing the role of travel writing in shaping national discourse, unlike Burdett’s Italian travelers who reflected on their own identity, the American travel writers examined in this chapter instead encountered fascist Italian culture as foreigners. Their direct travel experiences were additionally informed

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by a long tradition of English and American narratives about Italy. In this context, Stephanie Malia Hom’s recent and important contribution, The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (2015), is especially relevant. Her work incorporates the latest theories in the field into an original, highly suggestive interpretation of the history of tourism in Italy from its origins into the twenty-first century. Through the lens of texts, practice, and spaces, she advances the idea of a “destination Italy” created by mass tourism.12 Hom’s section on texts in particular highlights the role of guidebooks, both American as well as Italian, in creating Italy in the “touristic imaginary.” Accordingly, these texts: “detail myriad Italian sense-scapes that tourists can experience, and, in doing so, guidebooks succeed in constructing the very reality that they appear to describe.”13 As Hom explains, “the rhetorical figurations of il dolce far niente, la dolce vita, and il bel paese delineate Italy as a touristic imaginary and transform it into both a commodity and a stage for unhindered consumption.”14 The American travel writers examined in this chapter provide examples illustrating the rhetorical figurations that Hom identifies, while at the same time it questions the continuity of these tropes by showing how fascist Italian propaganda disrupted existing narratives and proposed counter-narratives to the travelers’ fixed image of Italy. It asks what happens when the American ‘tourist imaginary’ is confronted by a political regime consciously projecting change: a new and modern identity, an Italy on the move which held out the potential to disrupt, revise, and rewrite national narratives. Taina Syrjämaa, in her comprehensive analysis of all of the Italian government’s various tourist propaganda initiatives, Visitez L’Italie: Italian State Tourist Propaganda Abroad 1919–1943: Administrative Structure and Practical Realization (1997), highlights the interwar years as the key moment in which the Italian state developed its modern tourism apparatus and consciously projected an Italian national image for foreign tourists.15 She notes, along with other scholars writing on the period, that the Italian state tourism bureaucracy grew as the government expanded its influence over the once private tourist sector, sometimes collaborating and sometimes in conflict with competing public and private agencies.16 Out of all this restructuring, Syrjämaa argues that there was a consistent and sophisticated messaging in the tourist propaganda. She concludes that the overall image of Italy in the many varied forms of Italian state tourism propaganda met the expectations many foreign tourists already had of Italy, while at the same time, the regime tried to

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replace the specific image of an impoverished and backward Italy with one of a modern and advancing Italy.17 The focus of this chapter is on what happened to this Italian tourist bureau’s unique version of the ‘new Italy’ when it was in the hands of American travel writers. On how the direct experiences of American travel writers in fascist Italy, together with the traditional Italy tropes in the Anglo-American literary tradition, interacted with fascist Italy’s projected self-image. What follows is an example of an interactive dynamic very much like the ones which suggest according to Pratt, “connections from travel writing to forms of knowledge and expression that interact or intersect with it.”18 It is in fact the interactions themselves and points of contact between competing discourses and lived experiences which frames this analysis. If ever there was a moment in which political changes reshaping a nation could find its way into existing American travel discourse, it was fascist Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. American encounters with fascist Italy and its travel propaganda mattered and altered Italy’s image within the pages of popular American travel writing. New pages were written into the American travel narrative of Italy, changes which incorporated the writers’ own variation of the ‘new Italy’ propagandized by the regime as well as their travel experiences. Though meaningful, these interactions did not, however, have the power to fully rewrite the existing narratives. The story which follows is therefore a telling example of both the potential and the limits of travel encounters to rethink national identities and their image abroad.

Popular American Travel Writing to Italy During the Interwar Years Italy had long been a destination for British and American travelers. It was an obligatory stop on the Grand Tour for the eighteenth-century aristocratic youth and became one of the prime destinations for the early packaged travel tours of the American and British middle class.19 Italy was the inspiration for the romantic writers of the early nineteenth century; American pilgrims in Italy were the target of Mark Twain’s sharp wit by mid-century; and Italy was the dramatic backdrop for E. M. Forster’s British expats by the turn of the century. As such, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been the subject of much scholarship.20 There is, however, no better period for looking at changing travel perspectives, and new and dynamic interactions between the

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State and travelers than Italy during the interwar years: a period of uneasy transitions when the Italian government anxiously propagandized both at home and abroad a ‘new Italy’ renovated by fascism at the same time that modern mass tourism and modern forms of transportation were reshaping travel experiences. Paul Fussell famously describes the interwar period as “the final age of travel,” a time in which young literary travelers still boarded steamships and trains, roamed independently without prepackaged itineraries, and took pleasure in all the travel misadventures that awaited them along the way; the last age before commercialized mass tourism would forever change the travel experience.21 Many of these themes are indeed present in the popular travel writing examined here, although this chapter accepts a broader definition of the genre by considering a wide variety of material from American travel publications for popular audiences by both professional and amateur writers, personal narratives and tourist guidebooks alike.22 These writers each had their own unique style and incorporated personal reflection, opinions, and experiences with their travel commentary, very much in the spirit, if not of the literary stature, of Fussell’s travelers. The sampling of American publications on travel in Italy examined here—from guidebooks and personal travel narratives to children’s books and student travel accounts—are unapologetically subjective and idiosyncratic. In fact, the authors mock the authoritatively objective tone of the ubiquitous Baedecker guidebooks to Italy. First published in 1867, its handbook to central Italy was already in its sixteenth edition by 1930.23 These authors instead love to interject their own personal opinions into the account. That they do not aspire to objectivity and are highly impressionistic, provide a quite candid look at how American travelers viewed the ‘new Italy.’ The writers’ thoughts on Italian cuisine are especially telling of how personal taste informed their narratives. Arthur Milton, in Rome in Seven Days: A Guide for People in a Hurry (1924), so loved Roman cuisine that he gave highly detailed descriptions of each meal he ordered while in Rome: everything including antipasti, primi piatti, secondi piatti, contorni, and dolci, adding descriptions of each restaurant’s ambiance as well as the friendliness of the wait staff. He advised readers to avoid at all cost hotel restaurants with their standard and unexceptional continental fares and to seek instead picturesque trattorie frequented by the locals.24 Others were not so inclined. Helen Dean Fish, who included a stop

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to Italy in her sweeping European travelogue, An Invitation to Travel (1937), suggested instead that her readers should dine at the Embassy English Tea Room while in Rome “as a welcome relief from three solid dinners per day built upon macaroni and olive oil principles.”25 Throughout her time in Rome, she often returned to the tea room to enjoy her favorite lunch: “A fluffy omelet, flaky muffins, a crisp salad, and a delicate ham or tongue sandwich.”26 Although today our guidebooks are universal in their celebration of Italian cuisine, in the 1930s American tastes were only beginning to change. During the interwar years, there was also much disagreement over attitudes towards discount travel, a sign of tension during the transition from the older leisurely paced tours of wealthy and upper-middle class Americans, to the increasingly shorter and cheaper discount tourism of the masses. Clara E. Laughlin, in her 1928 edition of So You Are Going to Rome! And If I Were Going with You These Are the Things I Would Invite You to Do, spent some time on this topic in her preface. Laughlin, the author of numerous European guidebooks in her “So You Are Going to…” series, also operated her own travel agency in Chicago and wrote based on her experiences as well as those of her clients. She declared that, “Nobody in Europe that I know of wants to discourage a single American traveler. But they don’t want travelers who come over there with expectations of cheapness that cannot be realized. If you would set out to travel through America on a dollar or two a day, you may do it in Europe. But not otherwise!”27 She went on to admonish her readers for not tipping generously while in Italy and denounced the “Tons of wickedly misleading trash” which claimed that one “may travel and live comfortably in Europe on next to nothing.”28 Sydney A. Clark also wrote a popular series of 1930s travel guidebooks to European countries “…on $50.” As suggested by the titles in his series, Clark instead celebrated the bargains to be found in Europe, especially after the start of the depression. In Italy on $50 (1933), he declared, “Italy is beyond all doubt a paradise for the lean of purse. It has changed, as I have said, from an expensive to a very inexpensive country. Even its official booklets, hungry for tourist gold, stress this fact realizing that thousands of potential travelers can no longer travel at all unless they have heard the news.”29 For Clark, best of all of the changes he witnessed in Italy: “la mancia è abolita” [Tipping is abolished].30 The contrasting views of Laughlin and Clark, published five years apart, show both the different personal preferences of travel writers as well as very real changes in Italian travel after 1929.

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Much like Fussell’s British literary travelers, these writers also took pleasure in recounting their own personal misadventures. Irwin Smith delighted in recounting all of his students’ mishaps and hazards: from their initial steamship breaking down; to a storm which nearly capsized the ferry boat returning to Venice from Burano; to the story of his students’ use of the baggage nets on the trains as hammocks.31 Smith’s travel hazards are very much in the tradition of earlier nineteenth accounts of travel by sea and by rail. Hubbard Hutchison, in his guide, From Rome to Florence (1928) writing just seven years later, instead recounted an incident which is all too familiar to modern travelers. While driving through central Italy, he failed to stop at a railroad crossing at which point two “unscrupulous” Italian police officers with an air of “triumphant unrighteousness” issued him a 25 lire ticket. His indignant protest that the crossing was not properly marked met only with shrugs and smiles from the police, much to his consternation.32 In the 1920s, Americans began visiting Italy in significant numbers and actually outpaced British tourists. In 1925 the number of British and American visitors to Italy was about even: 190,664 and 191,993.33 The number of American visitors however steadily increased while the British number steadily declined so that by 1929 there were only 133,000 British visitors to Italy compared to 202,000 Americans. By 1929, American travelers had become the second largest group of foreign tourists overall after the Germans and they represented 16.5 percent of all foreigners visiting Italy.34 They were therefore especially targeted by the Italian government’s various propaganda materials and voices of American travel writers enjoyed a large and increasingly influential audience.

The New Italy Welcomes American Travelers The 1921 Italy America student tour was organized by the liberal Italian government and designed to showcase both Italy’s sacrifice in the Great War as well as its ascendant modernity. Italy’s experience in the First World War figured prominently in the narrative as the group visited battlefield sites along the alpine front, marveling at Italy’s “impossible feats of military engineering”; and met General Armando Diaz, Italy’s Commanderin-chief during the war, “a blood-quickening moment.”35 The trip also came at a time of acute political turmoil during fascism’s rise to power. A general strike and clashes between Fascists and Communists delayed

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the group’s travel from Rome to Florence.36 Anxious to use the trip to highlight the ‘new Italy’ of the postwar era, Italian newspapers called it “a decisive turning point” in American relations with Italy, explaining that, “Up to this time, even to the most cultured classes in America, Italy has been little more than an expression conveying migratory meaning, or a distant colorful nebula whose substantial entity they failed to understand” but “this is a moment in which to open a new page in the book of ItaloAmerican relations. From one side of the Atlantic to the other, the task requires not only living and youthful strength, but tempers and intelligences prepared actually to penetrate into customs and into hearts.”37 In 1934 at the height of the Italian fascist regime’s popularity at home and abroad, the government would again sponsor a group of American student travelers. This time ten high school and college students were accompanied by their professor, Peter Sammartino, who published a narrative documenting the students’ “unified impression of the old culture and the new movements.”38 Traveling with the expressed purpose of studying the ‘new Italy’ and the accomplishments of the Italian fascist regime, the itinerary was meticulously planned by the Italian government and the student group dutifully reported on everything the regime wanted it to see. The trip began in Naples with tours of its modern factories and its ambitious public works projects in the city, soon followed by a visit to the drained marshes around Rome and the new fascist cities of Littoria and Sabaudia with their rationalist architecture, of which Sammartino commented, “is entirely modernistic and one must get used to the flat roofs, and the predominating horizontal and vertical lines.” Though not a fan of the style, he concluded “Whatever one may think about the architecture, one must admire the outcome of this huge reclamation project.”39 They met Mussolini and toured all of fascism’s monuments in Rome, including the new Foro Mussolini. They stayed in the seaside summer camps at Cattolica, and at Campo Mussolini located in the alpine resort town of Cortina d’Ampezzo. They toured local Fascist Party headquarters, Balilla and Dopolavoro recreational centers, and the offices of various fascist organizations. They took a ‘moving’ group photograph in front of Mussolini’s birthplace in Predappio.40 The group otherwise followed the same itineraries of other American travelers and saw all the traditional attractions in Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan, marveling at ancient ruins and Renaissance architecture. Grateful for their visit, they bade a sad farewell to Italy, “a land of hospitality, awakening spirit, and pleasant associations.”41

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Both the 1921 and 1934 student travel accounts show an Italy anxious to take its place among the modern industrial nations of the world and demonstrate its material and moral progress, however, much had changed in the thirteen years separating the two trips. In those intervening years Benito Mussolini seized control over the government, dismantled the liberal state, and establish an authoritarian regime. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Italian fascist regime consolidated its power over the various institutions of the state, while making concerted efforts at political and cultural propaganda abroad through the newly formed Direzione degli Italiani all’Estero e Scuole (DIES) under the Italian Foreign Ministry and coordinated with the Ministry of Press and Propaganda and thereafter by the Ministry of Popular Culture—it was Piero Parini, the head of the DIES at the time, who welcomed Peter Sammartino’s students to Italy and personally introduced them to the Duce.42 The student travel accounts are unique in their direct interaction with the Italian government. The trips’ itineraries make perfectly clear the messages the liberal and fascist regimes attempted to transmit through the student travel experience. Most other American travel writers would have instead been exposed to other less direct forms of the ‘new Italy’: both while traveling within Italy to research their books as well as at home from newspaper inserts, newsreels and films, and propaganda published by the Italian government and pro-fascist Italian American organizations.43 American travelers’ experiences in fascist Italy were especially influenced and mediated by the tourist promotions and propaganda materials produced by the Ente Nazionale Industrie Turistiche (ENIT), a semi-governmental Italian state tourism bureau which was founded in 1919 with the task of monitoring, regulating, and promoting tourism to Italy. American travelers also made use of the services provided by the Compagnia Italiana per il Turismo (CIT), which took over the commercial aspects of the tourist sector in 1929.44 During the interwar years, the ENIT produced thousands of publications in multiple language editions: everything from glossy illustrated magazines, pamphlets and brochures, national, regional and thematic booklets, to hotel guides, maps, and railway information. To further promote tourism, the Italian government additionally offered railway discounts for tourists, petrol coupons for foreign motorists, hotel coupons, and travelers’ letters of credit. They even provided special government-sponsored rail and hotel discounts for honeymooners.45

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Many of the American travel writers referenced the special offers and tourist incentives provided by the Italian state through the ENIT. Sydney A. Clark was especially impressed by these initiatives. As the author of a guide for frugal travelers, he declared, “To be sure, nearly all countries nowadays want tourists but scarcely any does so much as Italy by way of practical demonstrations of her welcome.”46 He raved about the special offers and discounts being extended to tourists, highlighting no visa requirements for US citizens; free museum entry fees; hospitality; and in particular, railroad “ticket bargains which stir the pulse.”47 Both Hubbard Hutchinson and Clark praised the CIT and ENIT publications by name in their works. According to Clark, Hotels in Italy, is an “extremely useful booklet” and “as thorough and shipshape a job as even Germany could turn out, and what more can one say.”48 Clark was also well aware of the conscious campaign by the ENIT to recast and repackage Italian identity for the foreign traveler, “She wishes—one can sense at every turn—to exhibit what she has done and what she is doing… Official Italy is anxious to dissipate old impressions and create new ones and this it is certainly accomplishing.”49

Travel in Italy and Marketing the New Italy to Americans “A new magazine: This is the first issue of a new and unusual magazine published by the ‘ENIT,’ the Italian State Tourist Bureau.” So began an introductory letter by Romolo Angelone, the head of the Italian Tourist Information Office in New York that accompanied the inaugural issue of Travel in Italy in January 1933. Angelone went on to explain that the monthly magazine, “will be devoted to articles, illustrations, and news items of particular interest to Americans, especially our friends who have travelled to Italy and those who hope to do so soon.”50 Travel in Italy was published in four different editions: English, French, German, and Italian with each issue tailored to the countries in which it was sent. Between 1933–1936, the magazine featured vibrant cover art and glossy photographs throughout highlighting aspects of Italian culture and life, seasonal attractions, tourist news and travel information, and the accomplishments of the fascist regime. With a circulation of over 50,000 copies, historian Taina Syrjämaa stresses that “the role of this magazine in Italian tourist propaganda should not be underestimated.”51

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From its inaugural issue, Angelone made clear that the magazine would purposefully avoid mention of “the traditional attractions of Italy which form the subject matter of propaganda pamphlets, monographs, and handbooks,” but would instead, “seek to portray the aspects of Italian life that particularly interest foreigners.”52 The magazine indeed proved unusual in its content which together with this stated purpose affords us with the unique opportunity of examining how the ENIT sought to reshape in monthly installments the American tourist’s fixed image of Italy which had been created over the course of two centuries of travel. The themes that permeate each issue of the travel magazine also provide a clear illustration of the government’s anxieties and preoccupations of Italy’s perceived image abroad as well as projections of the ‘new Italy’ that they were helping to shape through their propaganda. The Italy produced in the pages of the various issues of Travel in Italy demonstrate a clear intent at disrupting some of the existing narratives American readers would have had of Italy. Although readers would have still found the familiar Italy of old: quaint hill towns, ancient ruins, medieval churches, and Renaissance masterpieces; they were now also presented with a new alternative Italy of stylishly dressed Italian models, snow-capped Alpine chalets, health spas and baths, and sun-drenched beach resorts: a land of youthful sport, recreation, and high society. The Italy it projected was racing towards the future: a land of electric lines, factories, rationalist architecture, new superhighways, and airplanes, in short, progress and modernity, a young Italy rejuvenated by the fascist revolution.53 Chic, vibrant, stylish, and avant-garde: this is the Italy that is being sold to the American tourist. It is this image of a new Italy that the ENIT writers expressly wanted to promote, for as they themselves explained, “The intense activity prevailing in Italy nowadays deserves to be better known because besides affording evidence of the most inexhaustible vitality of a young, genial, and ever progressing people it constitutes an added attraction to those who understand and love Italy.”54 In direct conversation with the long-held Anglo-American narrative of a romantically picturesque, yet poor and backward Italy; the writers of the ENIT draw an explicit contrast with the ‘new Italy’ of today. Mario Ramperti, for example, in his article, “One Hundred Thousand Brides and Bridegrooms in Italy” painted a vivid picture of Italy past and present: Where the young shepherd, shod in “coccie,” played on his reed pipe while tending his flocks surrounded by the picturesque ruins of the

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Appian Way or the gondolier spent his time serenading his blond inamorata lying in the sun heedless of flies on the deserted landing-stage, one sees today stadia and docks, electric plants, bridges, and express trains .… The new generation under the energetic and inspiring Fascist regime has now changed the aspect and life of the country, the “terre des morts” is now indeed the land of the living. New blood flows through the country’s youth55

Ramperti similarly challenged the stereotypical images of Italy inherited from the nineteenth-century travelers who had warned of a dark land of picturesque brigands and thieves, of a passionate yet primitive people, who are lazy as well as fatalistic after years of over-civilization followed by a long and steady decline.56 Ramperti instead proclaimed that the new Italian is hardworking and industrious, “Laziness is now unknown and discouragement has been overcome.” Criminal bands have likewise disappeared thanks to work of the fascist government, so much so, that now “the only brigand left today in Italy is cupid”57 The new and vibrant Italy of Ramperti is instead a land of lovers and discounted rail tickets. Another article which references the nineteenth-century travel to Italy in general and the Romantic writers in particular declared that “Today, instead, the traveler is amazed to see the extraordinary activity displayed by the local authorities and the amount of improvement work accomplished in the cities, the country, harbors, roads, monuments, and museums. This gigantic enterprise successfully undertaken and accomplished will pass down in history as one of the characteristic traits of Mussolini’s Italy.”58 Another article similarly highlighted one of Italy’s newest tourist attractions: the Autostrada. The author of the piece boasted that “by building the Autostrade, or speedways, [Italy] is once more in the vanguard of progress. Anyone who travels on Italian motor roads is struck with admiration by the boldness of conception in their planning.”59 There is indeed an unusual amount of enthusiasm for harbors, electric plants, and highways, not the typical tourist attractions. All of which is proof that its writers wanted to convince their readers that the timeless age-old Italy they had imagined is now changing, marching ever forward. In addition to the articles which attempted to dispel negative perceptions directly, the visual images of Italy as a land of youth, sport, recreation, and fashion also communicated a new Italy. Photographs of elegantly dressed models in the latest fashions highlight that: “Beauty of line, harmony of materials, colors, decoration, and originality of design are the principal elements that contribute to render Italian fashion

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distinctive and essentially national in character.”60 A young, tall, blond couple on skis looks out at Alpine slopes with the caption reading, “Winter sports centres abound to such a great extent it’s a hopeless task to enumerate all of them and much less sing their praise.”61 A young women in a towel is taking in a bath at the spa for, “Italy is rich in health resorts of all kinds, mineral waters, mud and steam all have miraculous properties.”62 And the cover of one issue shows a chic woman on a sailboat with an article inside describing how, “during the bathing season numerous sailing regattas, rowing races, and motorboat contests form a characteristic feature of the attractive sporting events and entertainments organized at every seaside resort.”63 Italy is also a land of sportsmen and pages are filled with pictures of all manner of sporting events from car, sailboat, and horse racing, to golf, tennis, and even fox hunting.64 Collectively, the image of smartly clad men on a fox hunt and sophisticated women on yachts communicate that Italians are the modern, affluent, and cosmopolitan counterparts of the American travelers visiting their shores. A modern Italian image which is nevertheless quite different from the regimented new men and women of the fascist regime found in non-tourist propaganda materials. A 1934 article entitled the “New Italy” linked the progress and modernity of the ‘new Italy’ directly to fascism: “to an unbiased Foreigner, with some knowledge of her history, Italy represents the spectacle of a nation still in the full development of its power…Italy’s unity was completed in Rome, but it was Fascism that brought about the reawakening of Rome’s national idea.”65 As was true in other Italian fascist propaganda of the time, Italian identity and fascist identity were inextricably linked by the author of this piece. The new identity being reshaped and packaged for foreign consumption should therefore also be understood in this context. Taina Syrjämaa argues that the ENIT, which was autonomous from the other propaganda offices of the fascist regime, offered little overt fascist political propaganda in its publications overall.66 That said, it is nevertheless quite prominently featured in the 1935–1936 issues of Travel in Italy.67 A look at how this travel magazine, speaking directly to American audiences, depicted the fascist regime therefore provides an especially insightful window into how the Italian government intended fascist Italy to be seen by American tourists. By the mid-thirties, more and more pages of Travel in Italy are filled with standard propaganda pieces on the March on Rome, the Balilla, Fascist Summer Camps, the Reclamation of the Pontine Marches, and

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the colonization of Libya.68 Many of these propaganda pieces are nearly identical to those found in other forms of fascist propaganda abroad.69 Mussolini also begins to figure prominently in the pages of Travel in Italy. In a photomontage of winter resorts, we find Benito Mussolini on skis; next to a photograph of women sunbathing in a seaside resort, we find Mussolini taking a swim, and Mussolini riding a horse: for after all in addition to a being Italy’s “foremost statesman” Mussolini is also Italy’s “foremost athlete.”70 Even a piece about the traditional Italian celebration of Carnival makes note that “As a result of the restoration of Italy’s youth brought about by Fascism, many old traditions and customs have been revived, including the gaiety and merriment that characterized the picturesque celebration of Carnival.”71 Soon after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, articles in the magazine became increasingly defensive in tone, its writers aware of the negative press Italy was receiving abroad. The new head of the Italian Tourist Information Office in New York, Goffredo Pantaleone, wrote a letter to Americans accompanying a 1935 issue of Travel in Italy which recommended that “Americans unfamiliar with the country’s progress and temperament would do well to let fellow American visitors now in Italy give first version” and went on to suggest that Americans should visit Italy so that they “will tell their neighbors of the real Italy uncovered by the smoke screen of propaganda sprayed from sources outside of Italy.”72 By 1936 the international situation worsened, and Travel in Italy again reassured American travelers that they are still welcome. Quoting from the New York Sun, the Travel News section boasted that the newspaper recommends Italy as a travel destination and quoted a Mrs. Ruth Sterling Frost who had just returned from Italy and affirmed that the “only sign of sanctions consisted in the high cost of petrol, but she added foreigners while in Italy are granted a special concession.”73 Similarly, the Tourist News section of the September 1936 issue celebrated a “new influx of American travelers to Europe,” boasting that “Italy, the favorite destination of most Americans, will derive a great advantage from this year’s tourist influx owing to improved travel services…not to mention the facilities granted to tourists and the conveniences now forming a distinguishing feature of travel in Italy, the only country in Europe where strikes and popular unrest are absolutely unknown.”74 This news item in one of the magazine’s final issues paired the image of the reassuringly familiar tourist-friendly Italy with a not-sosubtle allusion to fascism’s imprint on Italian society, a perfect example of the regime’s tourist Italy.

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We know that the widely distributed ENIT materials did find their way into the hands of American travel writers because they tell us so. To a greater or lesser extent, most of the American travelers of the period made use of materials provided by the ENIT and the CIT. For some simply the maps and schedules, relying more on Thomas Cook and American Express travel arrangements, while others cited all the various magazines, guides, and itineraries of the regime.75 Even the 1934 student group was provided with ENIT pamphlets, maps, and itineraries. That they make mention of the ENIT and other Italian government travel initiatives allows us to evaluate whether or not, and to what extent, the ‘new Italy’ propagandized by the regime altered their narratives.

The New Italy’s Material Improvement In addition to the changes within the Italian tourist industry, the wider changes to Italy brought on by Mussolini and celebrated in the pages of Travel in Italy did not go unnoticed. By the late 1920s–early 1930s most all American writers highlighted the material changes they saw taking place. As Clara E. Laughlin remarked, “I saw much progress; many changes in conditions. Where shall I begin, in telling you about them? First, I dare say, with conditions of travel.”76 She praised in particular those material changes that affected the travel experience, “Railroads are immensely improved: motoring is immensely improved, and becoming more and more general among travelers. And hotels are no less markedly better.”77 Arnold Wood, in his guidebook, High Spots of Sicily (1931), similarly characterized the new autostrade as “universally excellent” and declared that Italy now had “one of the best aviation services in Europe.”78 These infrastructural improvements were also noted in personal American travel narratives, for example, Charles S. Brooks, who recounted his family’s journey to Italy in An Italian Winter (1933), noted that “everywhere in Italy is reconstruction—old roads resurfaced and new highways built. The Amalfi drive, once rough, is a smooth as the pavement of a park.…New tunnels shorten railway journeys. There are great ships of unsurpassed magnificence, running at unprecedented speed from both continents of America. Power plants and machinery are of a magnitude that rival the works of Pittsburgh.”79 Even Lawrence S. Williams, in his Italian installment of the Robin and Jean children’s travel series, noted these improvements. As Robin and Jean’s father explained,

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“The new government is working hard to revive the glories of ancient Rome. New Railways, new factories, and many big power plants have been opened. Italy has very little coal, but there is plenty of water to make electricity.”80 In addition to infrastructure and transportation, the American writers focused especially on how the regime made Italy a cleaner and safer destination for tourists to visit, a theme most evident in travel accounts of the city of Naples. “How well I remember it of old,” reflected Clark, “Eddies of filth whirling in the main streets. Clouds of dust in dry weather, bogs of mud in wet. The little streets so foul that the bravest tourist’s nostrils could scarcely endure them. Today Naples is wellpaved and some of its most pestilential quarters have been cleaned out entirely.”81 And Laughlin enthusiastically declared: “Never have I seen such transformation as has taken place at Naples in the past few years. It is all but incredible. Great, broad, beautifully kept streets, as immaculate as Paris …. no longer may Naples be called a slack and slovenly beauty, indolent and indifferent. She is a marvel now. Among cities regenerate.”82 As his students passed through Italy in 1921, Irwin Smith could not help but comment on the poverty he had noticed in Italy. While passing through Burano he remarked: “dirty and forlorn, the final resting place of decrepit gondolas; scores upon scores of pitiful smiling little children…little children surrounded us at the door as we came out, dirty, undernourished little children.”83 Sammartino’s 1934 student travel account could not have been more different. In Milan, he noted the case popolari built by the government for the poor: “There is no suggestion of the slum atmosphere; rather they are very good looking apartments kept in a neat and trim appearance” and while visiting the “light and airy” dormitories of poor children spending the summer in Cattolica, “We noticed an orderliness about the boys and a splendid spirit of cooperation, certainly each boy will return to his home better in spirit and in health.”84 He later praised the fascist regime’s Opera nazionale per la protezione della maternità e dell’infanzia “which aims to raise healthy and sturdy children.”85 Sammartino’s account is just the image that the Italian regime would want Americans to see, yet, unlike Sammartino’s students who were purposefully traveling to study Italy’s new institutions, it was not the Italy most Americans had crossed the Atlantic to see, and was not the Italy many would see.

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“If you are bent upon picturesque squalor, and will hurry,” Laughlin advised, “you may yet see some in Italy.”86 Although the new electric railways and autostrade did enter into the American traveler experience and they did note that cities were cleaner, travel safer, and far fewer poor people were seen on the streets; these modern improvements did not change their attraction to the picturesque and eternal qualities of Italy. “Picturesque” rather than “modern” is the word found often in just about every guidebook and travel narrative. A romanticized view of the ‘picturesque’ qualities of an impoverished Italy persisted. Quite tellingly, Charles S. Brooks’ wife saw such images as a source of artistic inspiration: “Mary tried her hand at sketching. Her model for several mornings was a little boy who came from a native house of chickens and a goat. The lad’s dirty face and rags were perfect in their way.”87 It was the traditional folk aspects of Italian peasant life that captured the American tourist’s imagination most: women in their colorful peasant dresses going to a festa, Italian songs played on a mandolin, and lively tarantella dancing.88 While in Florence, Helen Dean Fish urged her readers to “Dine in the cellar of La Buca, picturesquely and deliciously, to the music of Italian folk songs well sung.”89 Hubbard Hutchinson’s account is likewise filled with colorful descriptions of ageless Italian archetypes, unchanged by the winds of history: the “young and dark” Italian peasant moving an ox-cart with an “unhurried gaze” and a “gorgeous operatic attitude”; the “children in varying degrees of nudity and dirt, piloted by a young Artemis with the most piercing black eyes and the carved spare look of great breeding which the Italian peasantry sometimes produces”; and an elderly peasant woman who in “one corner of her mouth humorously folded over long-toothless gums, a short black pipe.”90 One of the challenges to reshaping the American travel narrative was the simple fact that most Americans did not travel to Italy to be inspired by its modern culture and material accomplishments. They were instead in search of an escape from the industrial and modern life in America, a place far from the problems and anxieties of the fastpaced modern world. As Robert Medill McBride in his guidebook, The Hilltop Cities of Italy (1936), explained, “Loved because of their beautiful uselessness in the flood tide of modern industrial life, those falcon nests which we call the hill towns of Italy have a perennial appeal to all who feel that the world is too much with them. They are restful

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because they are not striving for anything.”91 Hutchinson was similarly enamored by the “drowsing tranquility” and “wistful peace” of central Italy’s landscapes, its crumbling churches, and “the beauty of forgotten things.”92 Because of this appeal writers oft-lamented modern changes. Fish echoed fellow-travel writer Maurice Hewlett in declaring that, “Florence should never have been distorted with tracks for tramways, poles for telegraph wires, and kerbed pavements,” and an American expatriate who Brooks encountered in his travels in northern Italy expressed her “disgust at a turbine plant nearby in the valley of the Adige” which “mars the fields of grapes.”93 Many Americans were disappointed by anything modern, new, and mundane. Captivated by the ghosts of Italy’s past, Hutchinson was attracted to the “fragile survivals of a great and utterly vanished civilization.”94 While in Siena he recounted that, “it seemed for one wild instant, that the past so vividly in our minds had leaped the barrier into materialization, and that we had fallen back, back through some broken gate of time, into the age of which we dreamed.”95 Brooks highlighted Taormina as an escape from life back home since in Taormina “the old seduction rules, and men sit in lazy comfort and call their idleness an occupation…the sunlight is their excuse…The ocean throws a strange driftwood on these easy shores—men and women who have turned their backs on the rigors of their snowy homelands who have headed the Siren’s sleepy call and dream a long siesta.”96 Beyond preserving the picturesque quality of the landscape, Americans were especially attracted the old image of picturesque Italians, poor and yet happy and carefree. To American writers, Italians, and especially Sicilians, fill a yearning for an idyllic simpler time, away from the stress and strain of modern industrial life. Arnold Wood captured this best: Sicilian people are happy, they toil hard, but never without a smile; their wants are few, their soil supports them; they love their home no matter how crude it may be; their children delight them; and just so long as that traditional fear, called superstition, and the contagious germ of jealousy are not inculcated into their veins, they will continue to be as happy, if not happier, than many others, who though worldly way far better off, are so affected with strife and struggle of living up to some false God, that their mere existence is like a crushed bird in the coils of a venomous asp.97

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Though positive overall, it is not the image of the ‘new’ Italians of the fascist era and is far from an image of a nation anxiously striving abroad for recognition as an equal to the other great modern industrial powers.

The New Italians of the New Italy Both Sydney A. Clark and Clara E. Laughlin were especially swayed by fascism’s moral transformation of Italians. Echoing very closely the message in fascist propaganda, Clark declared that, “The alertness and ambition of modern Italy fairly bowls one over. Lazying in the sun, the famed dolce far niente, is left nowadays, it seems, to us tourists, for Italy is far too absorbed in climbing toward its gleaming destiny, a phrase much in vogue… One can understand the new buildings, new roads, new ships of war or trade, even prompt railway service, but new character is something else again.”98 Clark adopted the old/new dichotomy of Italian propaganda by reflecting on his own personal experiences: “I knew, as a youth, Italia Vecchia, very lovable even then, but lazy and picturesquely dirty…. Its streets were malodorous, or let us say smelly. Its ambition was at a low ebb.”99 It was an Italy which for Clark no longer existed: “To those who have already visited Italy once or twice or a dozen times I would say, unless you have just seen Italia Nuova—you can scarcely imagine the changes that have taken place. Years of depression seem only to have spurred on new achievements.”100 If the ‘old’ Italians were lazy, dirty, and dishonest; the new Italians were now clean, honest, and industrious. Significantly, it is as much the ‘new’ Italian of the propaganda as it is the new Italian as seen through Clark’s direct travel experience in Italy. For Clark, apparently the most important quality of the new Italians was that, “Not once (please read this sentence several times) has an attempt be made to ‘do’ me, though I am a tourist of the tourists, caught red-Baedekered, at a time when tourists are few and money is scarce.”101 Laughlin also focused on honesty and criminality in highlighting the Italians’ transformed character. She remembered when robberies of tourists on trains was commonplace in the old Italy, recounting that they have all but ended thanks to Mussolini’s fascist regime.102 For Laughlin it is a sign of a transforming, though still incomplete change in Italian character: “Fascisti guards, in uniform and formidably armed, ride on every train, charged with maintaining safety and order…when respect for public and private property has become a habit, I dare say the ‘arsenals’

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will be removed.”103 Rather than simply replacing one fixed image of Italy with another, Laughlin captured an Italy in the process of remaking its image, remembering the start of this change in 1921 when: “we were just beginning then to be conscious of a movement called Fascism and what it hoped to do; but nothing except organization and some lively fighting had been accomplished.”104 Other travel writers took less notice of the new Italians of Mussolini’s Italy and peopled their accounts with the picturesque Italians of old. Brooks described the children in Sorrento whose “Italian nose can smell a small coin” from afar, and an elderly beggar in Taormina who would sing and dance for money.105 Hutchinson complained of “telegrams arriving three days late and the insolent stupidity of minor officials.”106 And Fish similarly warned travelers to Venice that its “aesthetic effect is likely to be marred by the mercenary spirit of the singers and your picturesque gondolier. The moon alone can be trusted not to ask for pourboires.”107 On the road in Sicily, Brooks ominously recounted that, “we passed dark men, clouded in black cloaks, riding head down upon their donkeys…they returned no waving hand and seemed to be brooding on the days of Maffia [sic]. They were dressed in comic opera—but of a tragic plot. Their scowl hated us.”108 Brooks went on to describe towns “filled with idle men who stand about the open squares and seem to listen for a signal” and quite shockingly declared “if, while at Taormina, we had read of the death of Mussolini in a morning paper we would have packed our bags at once and crossed to the mainland from this threatening region.”109 While praising Mussolini’s role in preserving law and order, Brooks was clearly unconvinced of fascism’s transformed Italians. Nor was Hutchinson, who described a dark and suspicious Italian populace in Cortona “watching us with dark commenting eyes, shyly.”110 These are not the cheerful blond and blue-eyed models oft-pictured in Travel in Italy, but instead the image of a dark-complexioned and shadowy Italian, long a stereotype in English and American literature. Nowhere to be found are images of the chic, modern, and active high-class lifestyles of Italians showcased in the ENIT’s Travel in Italy magazine. While Robin and Jean’s mother does tell her children that, “Today the Italians are as well dressed as anybody in Europe.”111 Sue Runyan’s drawings throughout the children’s book instead depicted scenes more reminiscent of Italy at the turn of the century: elderly peasant women in traditional dress carrying water on their heads; women dressed in traditional headscarves; disheveled gypsy street vendors; and

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mustachioed men with bowler hats selling their wares. These images of Italians are further sharpened by the stark contrast in the appearance of Robin and Jean, who are clean-cut and impeccably dressed children in modern 1930s outfits.112 Although modern changes are indeed mentioned, they account for less than eight of the 252 pages detailing Robin and Jean’s travels in Italy. The rest of the work presents instead the unmistakable image of the charming and quaint traditional Italy most Americans would have recognized from the past.

Benito Mussolini Transforms Italy “Over the heads of the crowd the children saw the procession enter the square” writes Lawrence S. Williams in Robin and Jean in Italy, “Riding on a beautiful white horse came Mussolini, leading his army of ‘black shirts.’”113 At one point or another there is a discussion of Mussolini the man and his fascist political regime. Their views reflected many of the wider American public attitudes towards Mussolini of the era.114 Laughlin, praised Mussolini for “glorifying industry and frugality” and for “creating a movement” which transformed Italians into “a marching singing army of Italian zeal for Italian prestige through Italian labor, sacrifice, devotion.” Undoubtedly moved by fascist narratives of Mussolini’s rise to power she declared, “Then up rose this man, and dramatized the idea, organized it, gave it romance and movement and color and song, made a crusade of it, a marching singing army of Italian zeal for Italian prestige through Italian labor, sacrifice, devotion.”115 It was also her own personal experiences, which reinforced her image of the dictator, affirming that “He was wise enough not to be dismayed when his movement began to have a few martyrs. I was there when young fascisti, shot down by Bolshevik internationalists, were being given martyrs funerals. And again the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the new cult.”116 On balance she concluded, “I do not see how history can ever discount the fact that he rose up, in the disorganization and discouragement and dishonor of the post-war days, and mobilized Italy for peace and prosperity even more zealously and effectively than she had been organized for war.”117 Robin and Jean’s father similarly tells his children that, “Mussolini has made over the army and the navy, has given new life to all kinds of business, and worked hard to make Italy a cleaner and happier place in which to live.”118 Clark credited Mussolini as the man solely responsible for the material and moral transformation of Italy, “my hat is off to Benito

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Mussolini for I have witnessed one of the rarest phenomena that this troubled planet can show: the complete rebuilding of a nation’s character by the driving force of one man. Frankly it has left me gasping.”119 Mussolini, for Clark, is every bit the mythical leader found in fascist propaganda. American travel writers were on the whole comfortable overlooking or discounting the authoritarian aspects of the regime. And yet, an underlying fear among travelers about a country ruled by a dictatorship appeared in many texts. Brooks, for example, warned Americans who are used to the freedom to openly discuss and criticize political leaders back home, “not to mention Italy’s dictator in company or on the street” explaining ominously that “We have heard much gossip as to the dangers of indiscretion under Fascist rule,” recounting rumors of “harsh and suspicious procedure” and “general espionage for despotic use.”120 In challenging this widespread rumor, John Gibbons, an English travel writer who turned his wit towards these American fears, recounted that after he had spoken publicly in Italy about Mussolini, “there were apparently no spies under the table and nothing happened” adding that, “I believe that the melodramatic terror of spydom of which so much has been written is largely rubbish.”121 But whether true or not, this fear cast a shadow over otherwise sunny depictions of life in fascist Italy and undercut their favorable evaluations of the regime. Perhaps more significant than the allusions to a vaguely threatening atmosphere inside a fascist dictatorship, is the fact that very little ink was actually spent on the man and his political movement, a stark contrast to the preeminence of his image in Italy at this time. Most works in fact devoted just a few paragraphs to Mussolini in volumes which were 200–300 pages in length; some even less. But for a passing reference to awakening one morning to “soldiers marching to La Giovinezza,” it would be impossible to know that Fish’s 1937 travelogue was written during the fascist period.122 Similarly, Hutchinson made but a fleeting reference to “fascisti in blacks and greens” in a crowd, with no mention at all of Mussolini.123 More typical were brief forays into a potentially meaningful political evaluation, cut short by conclusions like “Whatever may be the facts against him, it is certain on the surface Italy is much improved by Mussolini and that a traveler profits by his rule” and “Whatever may be history’s final judgement on Mussolini, he is today the tourist’s friend.”124

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Admiration for Mussolini was more of a superficial fascination. Catching a glimpse of the Duce became a new American tourist attraction in Italy. An attitude captured best by the always sardonic John Gibbons who cautioned that, “the principle of merely going to look at the Duce as one of the Sights of Europe is, I think, to be discouraged” and recounted the story of an American tourist who, “with infinite trouble obtained from the authorities the high favour of a personal interview with Signor Mussolini, and then at the interview he merely made a tick in his notebook and hurried off to catch the next train for Switzerland.”125 Peter Sammartino’s account of his students’ encounter with the Italian dictator sounds very much like Gibbons’ American tourist. Sammartino described the “great deal of excitement in the air” the day before the group met in person “the greatest man in Italian history, Benito Mussolini.” Although little is then recounted of the meeting itself or of Mussolini’s words to the group other than that: “Mussolini greeted us cordially and spoke briefly on what the culture of Italy had to offer us.”126 There is a limit to a student’s, and much more so a tourist’s, interest in a foreign nation’s politics, a fact which speaks to the limits of popular travel writing in penetrating in any deep sense the debates of the era. “Mussolini’s Rome, as a matter of fact, pervades the whole scene. You could not miss it if you would though it is much more apparent to those who knew the pre-fascist capital.” So declared Sydney Clark, clearly moved by the regime’s transformation of the city.127 Given that Rome was Mussolini’s capital, at the heart of the regime and surrounded by fascist architectural projects, how American travelers wrote about the city and its environs gives key insight into the extent to which fascism altered American tourist perceptions. For Clark, it was Littoria’s construction and the draining of marshlands outside of the city itself which best represented, “Rome’s impressive forward surge,” declaring, “As concrete (and stone and plaster) proof of Rome’s amazing new spirit I offer Littoria, which is the capital’s child, its newest child.”128 Clark’s visit to Littoria is, however, exceptional among the travel narratives. Few make mention of it, but if pressed, they would probably have shared John Gibbons’ simply-put sentiment about fascism’s celebrated accomplishment, “I myself know nothing about the drainage of marshes and care less.”129 For her part, Fish did not visit the newly drained marshes but instead remarked en route to Rome that “You can’t help but feel disappointed when you pass through the usual dingy city outskirts.”130 Most guidebooks recommended a detour to Tivoli and

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Hadrian’s Villa over a trip to Littoria—as did Fish who “went on a beautiful Sunday morning when peasants were on the road in gala dress and a roadside trattoria was decorated for fiesta.”131 Aside from Littoria, no other mention of the fascist regime’s new monuments and constructions in the city were mentioned. Clark himself follows the well-trod tourist itineraries of Rome and all of the writers highlighted the usual points of interest: the Capitoline Museum, the Colosseum, the Palatine Hill, the Roman Forum, the Baths of Caracalla, the Vatican and Rome’s main basilicas, the Spanish Steps, the fountain of Trevi, etc. With all of the art, history, and culture in Rome, a visit to any modern fascist buildings or areas of the city could not crack into the already overfilled itineraries of tourists. Even if they viewed the regime’s accomplishments favorably, these achievements were not enough to alter how they visited the city. Despite Mussolini’s efforts to remake Rome in his image, the universality of Rome’s heritage, shared by all members of western civilization, undercut its role as a symbol of fascism’s ‘new Italy.’ “For Rome is ours!” even Laughlin, an admirer of fascism, declared, “It is not just the Capital of United Italy; not just the Capital of Christendom; it is the Capital of what we are pleased to call Civilization—by which we mean the Western World. The only proper spirit in which to approach it is that of one coming into his own.”132 For most writers Rome remained the ‘Eternal City’ in which the past pervaded the present, as Brooks recounted during his stay, “If the ghosts of these eternal hills choose to walk at midnight, the procession would be of kings and captains, of tribunes of the old republic, of cardinals in faded scarlet and men in triple crowns. The redshirts of Garibaldi would march with Tarquin despots.”133 American travelers to Italy were inspired by the faded glory of its past and not its fascist present or future. “The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood, and Fire/ have dealt upon the seven-hill’d city’s pride/ she saw her glories star by star expire” declared Arthur Milton’s incorrigible uncle who never missed an opportunity to quote from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—so much so that by page twenty-four in the text Milton and his aunt felt the need to stop him midline.134 The Romantic writers were constant travel companions to nearly all of the American travelers discussed in this chapter. Bryon, Shelley, Keats, and Hawthorne all figure prominently. Most itineraries in Rome made little mention of modern points of interest in the city or of recent fascist accomplishments, but all of them recommended

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a stop at the Protestant Cemetery to visit the tombs of Shelley and Keats. Inspired by the Romantics, Fish recommended “After you have dreamed a while on one of the ancient stone seats overgrown with moss and wild flowers in the amphitheater, climb the hill with lovely views!”135 No matter how glossy and effective the Italian ENIT travel writers were, their magazines and guides had to share the bookshelf with the great Romantic writers with whom they simply could not compete. And it was not just works by Romantic poets that American travelers brought with them, but also ancient and recent works about Italy and the Italian people. Brooks carried with him everything from a book on Saint Francis to Norman Douglas’s South Wind. “On the mantel above the hearth were a file of Baedekers and Muirheads, Mommsen’s Rome and Symonds’s Italian histories, Merivale and the perambulating Augustus Hare, lives of Garibaldi and Julius Caesar, of Nero and Tiberius.”136 Helen Dean Fish often quoted English and American writers who had traveled before her. To describe Rome, she quoted Margaret Chanler in Roman Spring: “The great past is not dead in Rome. Rather does it at times make the present shadowy and ephemeral”; to lament the modernization of Florence, Maurice Hewlett, “A train of mules might pick its way between, a horseman or two, a file of infantry, Room would be made for an ox-team now and then, for a saint under his canopy and a dead man on his bier. This was the kind of traffic for which streets like Corso, Borgo SS Apostoli or Por Santa Maria were designed.”137 Significantly, it is quotes like these which reinforced the old image of the romantic and picturesque Italy and undercut the modern transformations showcased by the fascist regime. As was true of Rome and Florence, so too of Venice’s storied canals and alleyways. “At Florian’s one speculates whether Byron sat at this very table with Marianna, that wife of the Venetian merchant who was a good deal occupied with business” contemplated Brooks, “Thackeray, Landor, Browning, William Dean Howells, Wagner, Whistler—and a hundred other men of our dim acquaintance—may have hailed this waiter’s grandsire and ordered Benedictine.” For as Brooks concluded: “Most biographies of Europe and America have their Venetian chapters.”138 American travelers’ fixed ideas about Italy—whether from turn-ofthe-century guides, scholars of ancient Roman history, the Lives of the Saints, or from Romantic literature, created a powerful narrative which left little space on the bookshelf for the ‘new’ Italy remade by fascism and promoted in Italian tourist materials.

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Conclusion During the 1920s and 1930s, the Italian fascist government invested significant resources to reshape Italy in the eyes of foreign tourists. The image of Italy projected by the ENIT’S Travel in Italy in particular was the unique mixture of tourist industry marketing and fascist Italian propaganda. The Italy described in its pages was both a reaction to what it perceived to be Italy’s image in the imagination of American travelers as well as an anxious affirmation of its new identity and place in the world. No longer the ‘old Italy’ American travelers remembered from the past. It was the ‘new Italy’ materially and morally rejuvenated by Mussolini’s fascist regime. Each of the American travel books and tourist guidebooks responded in kind with their own impressions of fascism’s ‘new Italy’; as the interactions between American travel writers, fascist Italy, and Italian tourist propaganda altered Italy’s image. They noticed the material accomplishments of the Italian regime and credited Benito Mussolini with Italy’s dramatic transformations. By all accounts, the Italy of the 1930s was cleaner, safer, and more modern. That the fascist ‘new Italy’ heralded in Italian propaganda did succeed in penetrating American travel writing of the interwar years demonstrates that interactive discourses on identity can influence long-held perceptions of a nation. However, the examples provided here also show the limits of this exchange. Italy’s propaganda could not fully dislodge long-held American perceptions of Italy and Italian identity. Italy was just too well-known, its narratives too well-written, to be completely redefined. While Americans acknowledged a changing Italy, the fascist propaganda did not fundamentally rewrite the American travel narratives. In the hands of the American writers, the fascist ‘old’ versus ‘new’ dichotomy collapsed as fascist changes were instead simply folded into existing narratives. The result was a modern and changing fascist Italy of tomorrow that seamlessly coexisted with the timeless Italy of the past. In the end, both the continuities and especially the changes in the American travel narratives of the interwar years demonstrate that travel encounters are dynamic and interactive. Travel writers and political regimes do take an interest in one another and through travel can at times engage in a transnational discourse. Such was the case of American travel to Italy during the fascist period.

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1. Irwin Smith, The First Students’ Tour to Italy Under the Auspices of the Italy America Society: A History (New York: Italy America Society, 1921). 2. Smith, First Students’ Tour, pp. 3, 23. 3. See, for example, Philip Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: fascismo e mass media (Bari: Laterza, 1975); Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). See also D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2004) which looks particularly at the intersection between Mussolini’s cultural propaganda efforts and tourism at home through the use of medieval and renaissance architecture. 4.  See John Patrick Diggins’ classic work: Mussolini and Fascism the View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) for a comprehensive look at American public opinion on fascist Italy as well as Benjamin Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Opinion (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For a look at Italian fascist propaganda in the Italian American community see Philip Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy: Italian Americans and Fascism 1921–1929 (West Lafayette, IN: Bordighiera, 1999); and more recently Matteo Pretelli, La via fascista alla democrazia italiana: cultura e propaganda nelle communità italo-americane (Viterbo: Edizioni Sette Città, 2012). 5. For the most recent editions of their works see Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory on the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). First published in 1976 and John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), First published in 1990. 6. John K. Walton, ed., Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, and Conflict (Clevedon: Channel View, 2005). 7. Annunziata Berrino, Storia del turismo in Italia (Bologna: Mulino, 2011); Andrea Jelardi, Storia del viaggio e del turismo in Italia (Milano: Mursia, 2012). Lasansky’s aforementioned work, The Renaissance Perfected, is of note here as well since it makes an important contribution by linking Italian fascist architectural projects specifically to its tourism agenda in Italy. 

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8. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 9. Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 7. 10. Koshar, German Travel Cultures, p. 9. 11. Charles Burdett, Journeys Through Fascism: Italian Travel Writing Between the Wars (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). 12. Stephanie Malia Hom, The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), p. 9. 13. Hom, The Beautiful Country, p. 53. 14. Hom, The Beautiful Country, pp. 52–53. 15. Taina Syrjämaa, Visitez L’Italie: Italian State Tourist Propaganda Abroad 1919–1943: Administrative Structure and Practical Realization (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1997). 16. In addition to Syrjämaa, see also R. J. B. Bosworth, “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of a Totalitarian Culture,” Contemporary European History, 6, no. 1 (March 1997): 1–25; Berrrino, Storia del turismo in Italia, pp. 201–237; and Jelardi, Storia del viaggio e del turismo in Italia, pp. 188–302. 17. Syrjämaa, Visitez L’Italie, p. 353. 18. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 5. 19. Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel from 1750–1915 (London: Aurum Press, 1998). 20. See, for example, Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, op. cit.; Robert K. Martin, Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth Century Italy (University of Iowa Press, 2002); Catherine Waters, Michael Hollington, and John Jordan, eds., Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers (Cambridge Scholars, 2010); Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester University Press, 1999); and Alison Chapman and Jane Stable, eds., Unfolding the South: Nineteenth Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (Manchester University Press, 2003). 21. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travel Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. vii, 37–50. 22. For an excellent discussion on the debate over how to define travel literature, see Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 2011), Chapter 2. 23. Karl Baedecker, Rome and Central Italy: Handbook for Travellers, 16th ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedecker, 1930). 24. Arthur Milton, Rome in Seven Days: A Guide for People in a Hurry (New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1924), p. 21.

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25. Helen Dean Fish, An Invitation to Travel (New York: Ives Washburn, 1937), p. 192. 26. Fish, An Invitation to Travel, p. 192. 27. Clara E. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome! And If I Were Going with You These Are the Things I Would Invite You to Do (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928), p. xiv. 28. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. xi. 29.  Sydney A. Clark, Italy on $50 (New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1933), pp. 15–16. 30. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 7. 31. Smith, First Students’ Tour, p. 13. 32. Hubbard Hutchinson, From Rome to Florence (New York and London: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1928), p. 230. 33. Statistica del movimento turistico in Italia anno 1925 (Roma: ENIT, 1926). 34. Statistica del movimento turistico in Italia anno 1929 (Roma: ENIT, 1931). 35. Smith, First Students’ Tour, pp. 21, 37. 36. Smith, First Students’ Tour, pp. 10, 21. 37.  Il Marzocco, as translated and quoted by Smith, pp. 46–47. 38. Peter Sammartino, In the Land of the Immortals: An Account of the Trip of the 1934 Group of Winners of the Italian Government Awards to American High School and College Students (Jackson Heights, NY: 1934), pp. 7–8. 39. Sammartino, Land of the Immortals, p. 37. 40. Sammartino, Land of the Immortals, pp. 38–39, 60, 65–66. 41. Sammartino, Land of the Immortals, p. 77. 42. Sammartino, Land of the Immortals, p. 39. 43. See the aforementioned works by Diggins, Alpers, Cannistraro and Pretelli. 44. Taina Syrjämaa, Visitez L’Italie, pp. 162–164. 45. See Taina Syrjämaa, Visitez L’Italie, op.cit., for a detailed overview of all of these ENIT initiatives and publications. 46. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 8. 47. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 23. 48. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 42; Hutchinson, From Rome to Florence, p. 428. 49. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 8. 50. “News from Italian Tourist Information Office in New York,” January 1933. 51. Taina Syrjämaa, Visitez L’Italie, p. 216. 52. “News from Italian Tourist Information Office in New York,” January 1933. 53. Taina Syrjämaa in Visitez L’Italie, also notes these new themes and new images in the ENIT materials, but instead minimizes them, stressing instead that the older existing touristic image of Italy, of its art, history, and climate remained unchanged, pp. 258–259.

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54.  Travel in Italy, January 1933. 55. Mario Ramperti, “One Hundred Thousand Brides and Bridegrooms in Italy,” Travel in Italy, November 1934. 56. This is identified by Hom as the trope of “Il dolce far niente” which she traces over time in her work, The Beautiful Country. 57. Raperti, “One Hundred Thousand Brides…,” Travel in Italy, November 1934. 58.  “The Towns Improved the Country Reclaimed,” Travel in Italy, December 1934. 59. “Autostrade,” Travel in Italy, December 1934. 60.  Travel in Italy, August 1936. 61.  Travel in Italy, February 1936. 62.  Travel in Italy, October 1936. These themes in the propaganda are also noted in Syrjämaa, Visitez l’Italie, p. 201. 63.  Travel in Italy, July 1936. 64.  Travel in Italy, October 1936. 65. “The New Italy,” Travel in Italy, December 1934. 66. Syrjämaa, Visitez L’Italie, p. 353. 67.  Travel in Italy, 1935–1936. 68.  Travel in Italy, January–October 1936. 69. See for comparison an Italian fascist propaganda book published in New York: Scilla de Glauco, ed. La Nuova Italia, The New Italy (New York: Nikolas Press, 1939). 70.  Travel in Italy, January–October 1935. 71.  Travel in Italy, February 1936. 72. “News from Italian Tourist Information Office in New York,” July 1935. 73.  Travel in Italy, August 1936. 74.  Travel in Italy, September 1936. 75. For a look at the continued importance of Thomas Cook and Company in Italy see: Renata De Lorenzo, “Modelli europei e mondiali per il turismo italiano: la ‘Rivista di viaggi’ della Thomas Cook (1926–1938),” in Storia del turismo (Annale 2002, no. 3), pp. 55–93. 76. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, pp. vii–viii. 77. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, pp. vii–viii. 78. Arnold Wood, High Spots of Sicily (New York: Sears, 1931), pp. 15–16. 79. Charles S. Brooks, An Italian Winter (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1933), p. 97. 80. Lawrence S. Williams, Robin and Jean in Italy (New York: American Book Company, 1934), p. 87. 81. Clark, Italy on $50, pp. 5–6. 82. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. xvi. 83. Smith, First Students’ Tour, p. 32.

258  D. ALIANO 84. Sammartino, Land of the Immortals, pp. 60, 69. 85. Sammartino, Land of the Immortals, p. 72. 86. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. xv. 87. Brooks, Italian Winter, p. 180. 88. Brooks, Italian Winter, p. 151. 89. Fish, Invitation to Travel, p. 214. 90. Hubbard, From Rome to Florence, pp. 35, 244. 91. Robert Medill McBride, The Hilltop Cities of Italy (New York: Robert McBride and Company, 1936), p. xi. 92. Hutchinson, From Rome to Florence, p. 51. 93. Fish, Invitation to Travel, pp. 210–211 and Brooks, An Italian Winter, p. 94. 94. Hutchinson, From Rome to Florence, p. 78. 95. Hutchinson, From Rome to Florence, p. 315. 96. Brooks, Italian Winter, p. 160. 97. Wood, High Spots of Sicily, pp. 22–23. 98. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 4. 99. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 3. 100. Clark, Italy on $50, p. xii. 101. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 4. 102. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. viii. 103. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. viii. 104. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. vii. 105. Brooks, Italian Winter, p. 212. 106. Hutchinson, From Rome to Florence, p. 35. 107. Fish, Invitation to Travel, p. 217. 108. Brooks, Italian Winter, p. 164. 109. Brooks, Italian Winter, p. 164. 110. Hutchinson, From Rome to Florence, p. 35. 111. Williams, Robin and Jean in Italy, p. 57. 112. Williams, Robin and Jean in Italy, pp. 9, 129, 136, 158. 113. Williams, Robin and Jean in Italy, p. 87. 114. They are very much in line with the currents the American debate on fascism detailed by John Diggins in Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, op. cit. 115. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. 159. 116. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. 159. 117. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. 159. 118. Williams, Robin and Jean in Italy, p. 69. 119. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 6. 120. Brooks, Italian Winter, pp. 95–96.



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121. John Gibbons, Old Italy and New Mussoliniland (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933), p. 9. 122. Fish, Invitation to Travel, p. 202. 123. Hutchinson, From Rome to Florence, p. 114. 124. Brooks, Italian Winter, pp. 97–98. 125. Gibbons, The Old Italy and New Mussoliniland, p. 19. 126. Sammartino, Land of the Immortals, p. 39. 127. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 101. 128. Clark, Italy on $50, p. 128. 129. Gibbons, Old Italy and New Mussoliniland, p. 7. 130. Fish, Invitation to Travel, p. 190. 131. Fish, Invitation to Travel, p. 190. 132. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Rome, p. 66. 133. Brooks, Italian Winter, p. 120. 134. Milton, Rome in Seven Days, pp. 24, 55. 135. Fish, Invitation to Travel, p. 212. 136. Brooks, Italian Winter, p. 126. 137. Fish, Invitation to Travel, pp. 200, 211. 138. Brooks, Italian Winter, p. 345.

CHAPTER 16

Flicking the Switch Ron Anteroinen

In Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film drama, Round Midnight, legendary jazz saxophonist and self-destructive alcoholic Dale Turner tells a friend, “I’m going to Paris tonight.” Understanding that Dale is really running from his personal problems in New York, his friend replies, “What’s that going to fix? You know who’s going to be waiting for you at the airfield in Paris, don’t you? —You!” Am I also running from something when I leave home on vacation from work? And if so, exactly what it is that I am fleeing from? Further still, is my flight futile or necessary? I travel infrequently for two general reasons. One is that I’m an artist by vocation, and artists have a tendency to travel in their minds and through their work. For example, in an interview, Jackson Pollock mentioned that he had never been to Europe. When the interviewer asked if he would like to go abroad, Pollock replied, “No, I don’t see why the problems of modern painting can’t be solved as well here as elsewhere.” And I remember agreeing with the sentiment. My work has taken me to many exciting and exotic places that can’t be found on a map.

R. Anteroinen (*)  New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_16

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The other reason I don’t fly is financial. A trip requires money, but for me, it also requires unpaid days away from my job. I’m not a salaried employee, I’m the kind of worker becoming more and more common, a freelance “consultant.” So, I have no insurance benefits, sick leave or vacation leave. And I confess that, at some point while I’m away, I will also worry that the need for my services may be reassessed or that others may step into fill the gap in my absence making me redundant. This may seem paranoid on my part, but it isn’t uncommon in today’s workforce with the rise of the American “precariat.” My own travel has been limited to the United States. According to a report for the U.S. Travel Association by Oxford Economics, most Americans don’t venture far from home, so I’m typical in this respect. I needn’t go far, but I do desire to get away from home on top of taking time off from work. For myself and many others, only the exchange of familiar place with unfamiliar seems to flick the existential circuit breaker on the daily routine and stress that encompasses the lives of working people; breaking the grueling pattern just enough to give a respite, and making eventual return to the sameness of the everyday bearable. I need to replenish whatever it is that is used up in a life of work. But how does an environment less familiar enable that, and why is this needed? Why this flicking of the switch? Many critics of American society, such as Noam Chomsky and economist Richard Wolff, have pointed out that Americans believe they live in a democracy, but spend much of their lives working in a corporate environment that is top-down and inherently undemocratic. The majority of workers have no control over the corporations they work for, over what they produce and how the output of their labor is distributed, for example. But acquiring the essentials of life—food, clothing, and shelter— absolutely requires full time labor for wages. Although today it takes on average less than 10 hours to do the same work a worker did in 1950, adults employed full time report working an average of 47 hours per week, or nearly six days a week, according to Gallup. That’s about an hour and a half more than they reported a decade ago. And Professor Wolff would surely add that real wages have been declining for decades, despite the increase in worker production. The stresses of this everyday cycle slowly snowball. Does a vacation and change of scenery reshut a slowly opening curtain that is revealing the unobserved inner landscape of a life formed in such a social order?

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Brick, another troubled alcoholic in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, says that a drink for him is “like a switch, clickin’ off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there’s peace.” Why am I referencing alcoholics more than once in an article on work and travel? Because I could imagine a parallel need for workaholics to “turn the hot light off and the cool one on.” But certainly Americans aren’t all driven workaholics; it’s just that so many are expected to work, behave and talk as though they are. Even when they’re off from work they remain connected by the umbilicus of the Internet. So, invertedly, they need to flick the switch—not with more work or alcohol like the workaholic or alcoholic running from life—but with a change of pace and place: a change which assures them that life has something more to offer than the repeating microcosm of their everyday stresses, and an inexorable, changing world. In my own travels, as I fly out of JFK, my local airport, I find myself within a seemingly alternate, but parallel reality. It is one of those rare occasions that one cannot help but stand back and notice the shape of things as they have actually come to be. Before I can enter the shop lit airport as a monopolized consumer in a highly limited market of price-gouged food, drink, clothing and reading material, I must pass through airport security, armed police checking identification, palms being tested for explosive traces, electronic scans and frisks, and removal of shoes. People run this armed gauntlet as casually and without question as they would a drive in window at a fast food restaurant. However extreme or subtle, eventually anything can become the new normal for us. After all, this is the kind of place and social setup that used to be called “dystopia” in science fiction stories a few decades ago. I’ve become resigned to this at least as a present arrived. It is not a temporal bump on the highway, it is from here that things roll systemically forward. And wherever it all goes, under the current system, it will become part of what passes for normal life. Marshall McLuhan pointed out that, if you asked a fish what was the most prominent feature of its environment, probably the last thing it would say would be “water.” When he said that he was talking about media, but I see it as true for the economic/social condition we are born into that slowly—almost imperceptibly—mutates media, empire, capital and the hybrid embrace of these toward whatever amalgam history will finally cement.

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One can look at the past and wonder how societies accepted things such as slavery or feudalism. But it isn’t that hard to comprehend, those things were part of the present normal in their day. They were the stuff of the known world, societies people were born into and, although many people struggled against the oppressive structure of those societies in full realization, the majority simply strove to get from day to day within it as we do today. Today, according to Oxfam, half the world’s population— three and a half billion people—own no more than an elite few who could fit into one double decker bus. Seventy-five percent of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck and 80% are in debt. They may think about the growing inequality being fostered and dark rumblings certainly stir below. But for the moment, I think that they long—like Dale Turner in Round Midnight or Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—to flick the switch.

CHAPTER 17

Homo Viator: Knowledge of the Earth and Theory of the World in the Age of the First Transatlantic Voyages Peter Carravetta

He Travels on, and in his face his step

His gait, is one expression: every limb His look and bending figure; all bespeak A man who does not move with pain, but moves With thought. W. Wordsworth, “Old Man Tavelling”

I The question whether and how geography provides us with knowledge of the cosmos is an ancient one, and has informed every phase of the development of most civilizations we know.1 Is geography a “science,” a form of knowledge, linked to something pertaining to the earth in some guise? Starting from the truism that before we are human beings we are ineradicably biological, indeed physical, automobile entities, in the pages that

P. Carravetta (*)  Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_17

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follow I will keep in the background the general assumption that practice comes before theory and that, moreover, language is essentially an enabling interpersonal activity which provides both the substrate and the superstructure for all forms of human understanding. At this particular juncture in our sociohistorical memory we must be aware, and at least accept for the present journey, how the documented shift toward an abstracting, geometric, mathematical and finally logical view of the world has been, all along, a rhetorical one, that is to say, a political and social discursive construct  about the world (Carravetta 2012). Calling in “rhetorical” doesn’t mean it isn’t any the less “real.” Quite the contrary, discourse is what makes the earth and the world, and the transitions/connecting relations between them, intelligible, tangible, meaningful. And replete with consequences of epochal proportions. In The Elusive Hermes I have argued that rhetoric and method are the recto and verso of essentially the same process, as both aim, after lining up the proofs or arguments, at getting a result of sorts, or reaching an objective; their difference being more one of emphasis and application through specialized codification, than one predicated upon an intrinsic otherness which informed any paradigm shift. In the century that precedes Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes, method was an endlessly uncertain accumulation and hypothesizing of facts and figures which would not always square away with inherited theoretical frameworks (derived by and large from either Scripture or the Platonic strain of the Graeco-Roman tradition), and the fate of the emerging science depended entirely on how the new discourse was being articulated, by whom and where. The problem of Method gave rise at the same time to the need to rethink Theory.

II The period that extends from the 1450s to the 1650s AD has been appropriately called the Age of Discovery. Some have objected to the expression, and in my lifetime some characterized it as the Age of Mercantilism, or the Age of the Rise of Absolute Monarchies, or the Renaissance of classical learning, with overzealous postcolonial scholars rebranding it as the birth of Modern Colonialism (with some going as far as dubbing it the Age of Genocide). Clearly, trenchant arguments have been drawn up to foreground elements of truth in these views of what for expediency I will continue to call the Age of Discovery. How could it not be so, as we will see. But I want to stress the discovery part, and not in the naïve sense in which this expression presupposes that some Europeans discovered a “new” or “other” and uninhabited

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world—after all, for nearly a century before 1492, and even before going back to Alfonso X “El sabio” of Spain (whose Alfonsine Tables, Toledo 1252–1272, Columbus himself consulted in a 1483 edition), the general consensus was that “we, the Europeans” were going to try to connect with an already existing part of the earth, variously described as Cathay, or Cipango, or India, or in general some other part of eastern Asia not yet known, despite the longstanding Eastward overland routes. I mean discovery in the realistic sense in which a different or alternative sailing route was hypothesized based on observations, then projected both graphically and conceptually, so that previously unknown routes and destinations started being mapped, with far-reaching epistemological and ideological consequences besides the obvious commercial ones. Thus the philosophical question here is: how do we go from the known to the unknown? I offer a double answer: rhetorically, by projecting new topics, epistemologically, by devising new methods. Method comes from Greek meta-hodos, going along the way, furrowing a path to go forward. In practical terms: find a new route! But, can a method exist without an accompanying Theory? The notion derives from theoros, spectator, implying seeing and before that light, even containing the root for the word God [theos]? Can the specific new facts gathered during a voyage and being reported back to home base constitute new knowledge of the earth and, one way or the other, inform the XV & XVI century conception [i.e.: Theory] of the world? Now let us contextualize: from the point of view of the Europeans, these new methods, which required and thus entailed advances in geographical and astronomical knowledge, produced objective possibilities for societies (or for some people within those societies) to expand, as well as provide the often necessary conditions to migrate, for the less lucky, as part of the flux and exchange that demographic shifts create. In this context, though, we soon learn that people would need to alter, adapt, and rethink who they were, in short, in the process of discovering new lands and peoples, the same actors found themselves in the process of (re)discovering something about themselves, and their worldviews. Taking the word discovery etymologically, a new territory was disclosed to the perception of the seafarers, it was unveiled, brought to visitor’s attention, announcing a something/somewhere which, though it may have existed before and independently of the action of discovering, was unknown, ignored by those civilizations we call European. It makes us think of the conundrum of the tree that falls in the forest: if there is no one to see or hear it, did it ever happen? Of course, but like eclipses on Jupiter and supernovas

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exploding in Alpha Centauri, did they mean anything…for humans on earth? Did these cosmic events impact our knowledge of the earth? And more to our point, did they increase our understanding of the world/s we dwell in? Yes, but it is a matter of scale, of social relevance, of conscious perception that we are pursuing. Upon making contact with previously unknown people, Europeans might as well have thought (as some, indeed many, did in fact think!): I traveled over the perilous ocean sea to these shores and here you are: before I got here, you did not exist! Not a banal question at all (makes us think of Bishop Berkeley!)—for these people now exist for a given observer or group or political entity for the first time. For those who are the masters of Discourse, or the specific producers of the differentiated rhetorics, discovery—Eng.: Dis/cover, It.: s/coprire, Fr.: de/couvrir, Ger.: ent/decken), enables a two-pronged power relation and a legitimation for that power is established the moment these individuals or groups start talking about it. Or writing about it so that others can learn of what lies at the end of the journey, and determine that you and I exist. Except that it is I who attests and validates the fact that you are there, that you are at all. This double process of dis/covering is not ambiguous, is not undecidable, quite the contrary: it allows for Western discourse to say two things at the same time, both effective, meaning-bearing, and real.

III In the key decades of Renaissance Humanism—roughly 1440s to the 1510s—geography did not exist as a science in the modern sense. That would take an ever-growing, continually enriched and complicated period of growth starting mainly in the XVII century, followed by the endless navigations and explorations of the XVIII century, and finally with the great codifications by the founders of the various National Geographical Societies throughout Europe and the Americas. These latter were spurred by the researches and reflections of the likes of Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Ritter, Vidal de la Blache, Friedrich Ratzel and others, the majority of whom were trained and steeped in the also recent disciplines of geology, physical geography, botany, chemistry, evolutionism (Mendoza 36). The growing positivist, spatializing, and ultimately quantitative geography that followed World War II eventually led to the near dissolution of the very discipline (Cloke 8–9), which was ultimately removed from academic offerings and bowdlerized in pop culture. A case can be made that environmental studies and ecological preoccupations will need to relaunch the study of geography, but it will

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be digital, space-age techno-human geography. The mere mortal traveling the surface of the planet has most recently tossed aside paper maps: Global Positioning Satellites can show us on handheld devices where we are and where we want to go… At the peak decades of Renaissance Humanism, the disciplines that commanded the master tropes or, differently worded, the referential paradigms, were, as is well known, theology, cosmology, and jurisprudence. And this must have been an extremely stimulating period, exciting, optimistic to some degree, albeit fraught with social uncertainties, shifting power centers, and endless regional wars. Historians remind us that the printing press was introduced, cannons and explosives start altering military ventures, and navigation makes some subtle but important gains. This is the age of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” and Pico della Mirandola’s “Dignity of Man” manifesto about individual people being able to exercise free will independently of the Supreme Being. Less than a generation later, we have Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More. The first major and truly scientific codification of the knowledge of the earth could not be long in coming, and we may say that it occurs in 1537 with the Mercator map, while six years later Nicholas Copernicus publishes his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). But now let us recall, that though developed already around 1514, Copernicus’ ideas met great resistance by established luminaries, themselves still grappling with Aristotelianism (if often filtered through Acquinas). In effect, historians of science tell us, he wasn’t that revolutionary, for the novelty consisted in retrofitting a Ptolemaic conception of a harmonious universe with new epicycles to account for accumulated observations that expanded on the Alfonsine tables. We should not ignore the power of what was the dominant, preexisting idea of Harmony at the time, against which anything we may label scientific or prescientific had to be matched. But though not yet a new theory, Copernicus had nonetheless planted the seed. It took another sixty years, with Johannes Kepler and then Galileo Galilei, to have the scientific community begin to rethink the entire organization of the physical universe. And formulate a new kind of harmony, a new model for the world. But, how naïve and facile to think of the history of our civilizations as linear progress, the way a dominant idea of historiography has done until very recently! The problem is, or rather was, that there is always a Torquemada or a Bellarmino behind the door waiting to (literally) nail the daring discoverer of new countries and planets, or propounders

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of unsavory ideas: the cases of Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno and Galileo himself ought to be emblematic reminders. Another huge obstacle was the heterogeneity of the languages and customs of the commercial hubs that have been identified as establishing subsystems of interconnecting economies, precursors to the modern world-system (Abu-Lughod 34, 48). It took a few decades to identify a perhaps still loosely understood yet common standard that was both trans-national and supra- or trans-(national)languages. Against this heterogeneous context, the questions remain: How do we decide that the discovery of a new land, implicitly requiring travel, is key to some scientific improvement in our understanding of our world, and what are the consequences of such a decision? How many factors are we allowing to have relevance in our historical assessment, or scientific hypotheses, or theoretical projections? How much were the actual explorers really responsible for determining the future of what was going to be called a “New World?”

IV The amount of geographical/navigation information collected by the 1470s was quite extensive, spearheaded by Henry the Navigator and subsequent Portuguese mariners who within a span of sixty years had located the Azores, the Canaries, the Capo Verde Island, and had reached along the coast of Africa as far down as the Gambia. By 1487, Bartholomew Diaz touched the Cape of Good Hope and would have gone beyond had not his crew forced him to turn back. But with Vasco da Gama’s voyages of 1497–1499, India was soon reachable by sea, breaking the thousands-of-years-old knowledge that these lands could only be reached by overland caravans. I will return to this further down. But some definitive, and soon troubling, “new” knowledge had emerged: first of all, Africa had a finite extension below the equator. This is a time when natural philosophers were trying to figure out the circumference of the earth, and were attempting to draw the precise location of longitudinal lines upon the globe. This pursuit, which took another three centuries to finalize, was really the Achilles’s heel of the seafaring explorers. To determine where they stood and in which direction they were going and for what distance, sea captains had to rely on a primitive sextant (called a theodolite), magnetic North, an hourglass, estimated speed, latitude (measured by graded charts which indicated the

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sun’s declination across the skies at different times of the year), and ultimately on their experience and good seafaring intuition. In a way, and few are willing to credit them for this, the explorers worked at the limit of human intellectual capability, where method (of gaining knowledge of the proper or best course) was evidently being pieced together literally as they proceeded under a constantly shifting and still mysterious, or at yet unmeasurable, cosmos. Their theoretical framework was not yet anchored on Newtonian celestial mechanics, but on what retrospectively is a confused amalgam of Ptolemaic cosmology deeply embedded into a Judeo-Christian conception of the whole universe. In Foucaldian terms, this was still a period in which epistemology relied on resemblance, not on representation, on symbols, not on signs as autonomous logical units. Resemblance bears a direct relationship to the perceiver’s inner symbolic universe or effective knowledge (whatever that might be), whereas representation is one step detached, for there is a system of conventional (in the sense of consciously agreed-upon) language codes, or notations, inserted in-between which presume a separate, and later called objective, formulation allowing to map out, by analogy, that same universe. It is the deepest paradox of our Modernity that a reliable, reproducible and eventually credible knowledge of our planet and therefore of our world was made possible only as we isolated, over a period of a century and a half, its empirical basis and translated it into logico-mathematical coordinates, in order for this knowledge to make sense, to function, ideally, independently of its ideological, religious, and existential parameters. This would have the most profound and lasting consequences until late Modernity.

V The explorers described places, but the information had to be situated within an overall theoretical conception of the earth which was still lacking. Initially, it had to conform to the one inherited from the late Middle Ages. The inspirer of Amerigo Vespucci and, in part, Christopher Columbus, Arturo Toscanelli, a secular humanist, grossly miscalculated the distance between Portugal and Cipango, but he had finally a vision, a projection necessarily open-ended, not yet a theory in the post-Renaissance sense, but a dim intuition that it could be done, that is, reach the East by going West. Columbus accepted and obviously defended this thesis. On the experiential, empirical level, till his

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death in 1507, Columbus believed he had discovered the outlying archipelagos of either Cipango or Cathay, and to him it was still only a question of further explorations to find the mainland! He was only 12,000 miles off the mark…but technical errors aside, what’s important is that he still believed, as we read in his letters to the Queen (see the narrative of his third voyage, “lands I have newly discovered and in which I fervently believe the earthly Paradise to lie…”), that he was on a prophetic mission. The story of how he broke down his name into an anagram he used for his signature to show that he felt he was the messenger of Christ is consistent with the belief in finding Eden. Paradoxically, then, Columbus’ was a pre-Modern mind. Not so differently were the beliefs of his childhood friend, co-patriot, and fellow emigré Jacobus Caboto, an explorer who having had for various reasons to leave Genoa for Milan and Venice, identified himself as a Venetian during his sojourns in Spain and finally England. It is known that when Cabot saw that his plans for a voyage under the sponsorship of either the King of Spain or the King of Portugal were not gaining traction, he opted to go to Bristol and appeal to Henry VII to get permission and support for his journey. He coaxed the backing also of the Bristol merchants, among whom figures a Richard Amerike, who turned out to be the main sponsor of the voyage across the Atlantic. However, sailing into the unknown is not a good business venture, so to diminish potential losses his bosses decided he could only use one ship, the Matthew, and in order to defray costs further the captain had to commit to catch cod, at the time a major staple, on the return trip. Cabot knew of Columbus’ first and second voyage, but he felt the way to Cathay was further North, this on the sheer basis of the rotundity of the earth. We should recall here that globes were beginning to circulate precisely at this time, with Berhaim’s 1492 globe serving as the model upon which to start etching the new coastlines described after each crossing. Cabot had acquired important knowledge from the direct experience of the Bristol shipwrights who had already, since 1480, landed past Ireland and gone as far North as Iceland and as far West as Greenland, and some believe even Labrador. The much-discussed Vinland map of 1440 clearly shows that northern fishing expeditions had touched on landmasses which could be either Greenland or Labrador. Now Columbus was well aware of Cabot’s northern seafaring experience, and trusted his information to be correct because he himself had voyaged not only all around the Mediterranean, and along the Western

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African coast to the Capo Verde Islands, but also up to Bristol on the Western coast of England, in 1477, reaching the Shetland Islands, and apparently even Iceland. No one then and since has ever questioned the superb navigational skill Columbus had acquired, and the few accidents that occurred in the Caribbean, including the beaching of the Santa Maria, were always caused either by storms or negligent personnel. The point remains whether he secretly used Cabot’s greater knowledge of the northern seas and the maps from his British friends to figure out possible routes across the Mare Oceanum. This was a time, in a way not unlike our own, where new information about generally unknown locations is jealously protected, suggesting that the actors in question understood it to be an instrument useful for bargaining purposes, for prestige, and to get a leg up on the competition. For above and beyond what either Columbus or Cabot wished to discover, there is no denying that they both aspired to some sort of recognition and reward—in Columbus’ case the short-lived title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies, in Cabot’s case a yearly pension that finally lifted him out of poverty and out of reach of creditors from three different countries. Such rewards were possible and much sought after, as they included the possibility of being conferred various kinds of noble titles and ultimately legitimacy and influence within the growing middle class. Typically these titles consisted of guaranteed emoluments by a political entity or a commercial enterprise socially and financially above the explorers. This in practice meant the Crowns of Portugal, Spain, and England, and the mercantile interests they dealt with. France and Holland come a few decades later. A case in point is offered by the controversy surrounding the famous Alberto Contino map of 1502, drawn on the basis of descriptions made by Juan De La Cosas, who was a major explorer, ship owner of Columbus’ “Santa Maria” (the one that was beached on Christmas eve, 1492), and the cartographer author of a mappa mundi (world map) derived from observations he made during his voyage with Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci on the latter’s second trans-Atlantic voyage in 1499. The mappa mundi is the first map that shows the coast of Southern Florida. This map was obviously treasured by Portuguese authorities, until somehow it was pilfered and used as the model for another famous map, the one by the Genoese Nicolo Caneiro in 1503– 1505, which by then shows a vague, grossly erroneous, but still recognizable continental Eastern seaboard. For context, let us recall that we

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have to wait until Giovanni da Verrazzano’s voyage of 1523–1524, during which he sailed into New York harbor, to get enough consistent information for a full coastal mapping that extends from Florida to Newfoundland; it was drawn actually by his brother Gerolamo (or Hyeronimus) in 1526–1527, first traced on the Maiollo (or Maggiolo) map of 1527, and engraved in the Robertus de Bailly globe of 1530 (The Ulpius globe is from 1540). Now, historians have asked, given the succession of expeditions in those years, why was Florida “officially” discovered by Ponce De Leon only in 1513, a year after Vespucci’s death. Why the delay? Why and when was knowledge of the discovery of the New World made and to whom was it so important? And does this knowledge have implications for the status, fate, understanding of the western homo viator?

VI A recent book by David Boyle, Toward the Setting Sun (2008) delves into the intrigues by the competing explorers. Boyle seems to respond to two other works, the first by Rodney Broome, Terra Incognita (2001), who makes the point that ultimately America was discovered by the British, i.e.: by an explorer sailing under the British flag, who happens to be that same expatriate born Giovanni Caboto of Genoa. Moreover, this supposedly was achieved thanks to the patronage of one investor and merchant and later mayor of Bristol named Richard Amerike, after whom Cabot presumably “named” the largest (by now considered “continental”) land mass he had described during his 1498 voyage to Nova Scotia. Boyle writes of a “race” across the Atlantic by weaving the lives of the three explorers, Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucci, since they knew one another well, and are recorded as having been, at one point, together in Seville, between Columbus’ 2nd and 3rd voyage, in 1497. But he takes pains to show that their lives and the understanding of what they considered the goal—the geographical-epistemological case, that is: that by navigating West you get to the East, a thought that presupposes from the start that the world we live in is anchored to the earth as a more or less spherical geological object—was subject to endless corrections and suppositions and modifications, based as they were directly on a constant stream (and by and large imprecise by today’s standards) of information gathered from other mariners and the first settlers who returned a year or more later. The problem here is that this information was uniquely

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understood as not making the cut to universally valid knowledge yet, it was immediately seen as “strange” and gave rise to all sorts of speculation. Most importantly, “earthworld were not thought separately, and a scientific method needed another century before becoming a fixture of geographical, astronomical and anthropological research. Nevertheless, the proto-scientific paradigms of knowledge (in a Kuhnian sense, whether of providential history or revealed law [Rubies 161]), were being shaken, but had not yet shifted. Indeed not only our three explorers, but other minds at the time, such as Leonardo, understood and were flustered by the realization that there existed no “standard” measurements over a spherical surface, there was no paragon to invoke, not yet even an algebra let alone calculus to provide the conceptual tools which guarantee an absolute reproducible or analogical translatable unit. The only thing they had to work with was the standardized league, and the notched degrees of north/south latitude on a quadrant or sextant. Help came through Vespucci’s third voyage when he sailed downward way below the equator, and began to describe and map out the presence of the Southern Cross, stars which, incidentally, were known to the Ancients but owing to the recession of the earth (it spins on an axis which wobbles, cutting a cone around the North Star and returning to its original point every 1500 years or so) had “disappeared” for centuries, becoming thus mythical objects. Nearly two hundred years earlier Dante describes them in Inferno 26, when Ulysses had sailed so far leftward from the Columns of Hercules that he got a glimpse of them, before drowning with his ship and his men. In brief, as noted above, the accepted worldview, the belief system of the period, was by and large still that of Ptolemy forcefully nested into a Christian theological centrality of man and earth as images of a metaphysical Truth that harked to an elusive God for explanations concerning origin, time, and the very possibility of knowing at all. That is why we said at the beginning that these men were developing methods of traveling and mapping the earth without a theory of the earth, for the earth was still a world, a mundus, not a terra. To return to Boyle, what we are made aware of, even more so than was possible through the earlier standard summa in the field, Samuel Eliot Morrison’s The European Discovery of America (1974), is what I call (inspired by developments in other disciplines), the contingency of history, and what in the end gives us reason to believe that national mythemes about appropriating the “first” discoverer of a continent, as well as being the discoverer of a scientific principle,

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are simply ideological constructs that have a limited shelf life, explainable though not always justifiable. They correspond metaphorically to the time one stays put at a particular bivouac before getting on the road. Again.

VII Let us expand on the two major voyage experiences, both of which are relevant to philosophy and history precisely owing to the impact the journeys had on developments in a number of social contexts. When, in late December 1495, the Florentine investor Gerardo Berardi (who had relocated in Seville) suddenly passed away, his partner and friend Amerigo Vespucci knew he had inherited responsibility for a tremendous debt—in part incurred from sponsoring Columbus’ voyages!—and he knew better than to expect he’d be paid back, because the news from the Caribbean was that no gold had been found (already some called Columbus “Admiral of the Mosquitoes”). Vespucci still managed to get four ships equipped for the next major transatlantic fleet, but bad weather nearly destroyed them, forcing the convoy back. Exhausted and depressed, he gave up the post, and terminated his responsibilities as Berardi’s executor. Meanwhile, Columbus came back in June 1496 to the reality that he no longer had his friends to back him up; he himself was already in deep crisis from the disastrous second voyage when he learned that the island of Isabella had been nearly destroyed and the crew he had left behind had gone haywire, some killing natives for sport. Columbus realized that he could no longer control who sailed where and when (which was part of his original 1492 contractual demand to be Commander of all future expeditions). He thus appealed to Ferdinand and Isabel once again first to explain why his second voyage was unsuccessful, and then how he planned to remedy that through a third voyage with a different game plan. But the royals were busy with a military expedition against Naples and new diplomatic marriages to buttress the Holy League against the French. Let us recall that in 1494 Charles VIII of the House of Valois had “descended” upon Italy, invited by the Milanese, who had their sights on Florence, and practically triggered the beginning of the end of “Italian” hegemony in the Mediterranean. The royals’ preoccupations included marriage of their daughter Juana to Philip of Burgundy, a union that eventually carried their line. And there was a parallel marriage of

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their son Juan to Philip’s sister Margherite of Austria, which was later to consign the crown of Castile and Aragon to the Hapsburg, with Charles V—the same king who sacked Rome in 1527—boasting the title of “Carlo quinto de Espaňa y primero de Austria.” In addition there was the marriage of their daughter Isabella to Manuel, the new King of Portugal. Columbus had to wait four months to be received by their Highnesses; and something told him that royal pecunia was scarce because one of the heir’s wedding saw 130 ships sail to go meet the new bride. From various sources we gather that initially Vespucci tried to help Columbus, though at the same time he was considering going back to Florence. It was not an easy decision. In Florence the scene was dominated by Girolamo Savonarola with his prophetic fire and brimstone speeches: member of a well-to-do family, if Vespucci came back he would have to take sides, which was not advisable at the moment. He also felt Columbus was getting out of hand with his ideas about discovering the land of the fabled Amazons. More technically, he advised his friend that if he wanted to find his way to Cathay from Hispaniola, he should consider voyaging south-southwest. Now how did Vespucci know this? It was “rumored” that the Portuguese had “heard” that if one did go southwest by south from “Columbus’ islands,” that is, the upper Antilles, they would find mainland. Perhaps it was spies that played upon the competitive pride of the royals of Portugal and Spain (which at this time means mainly Asturia, Aragon, and Castile). Historians speculate that they must have had this knowledge already when they renegotiated and ratified, with the blessings of Pope Alexander VI, the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which extended the division line between the then two superpowers by some 270 leagues further into the Atlantic, thus automatically including the northwest corner of future Brazil. But how did they know there was this large landmass jutting into the Atlantic in 1493? More than that, Vespucci, who had studied cosmology and cartography and after five years in Seville had acquired a sense of what the returning navigators were talking about, decided at this point that he should go see for himself what was happening “out there”. Hence his first of four crossings (though some historians hold it was only two crossings that he himself did). We have no detailed annotations of this trip, in the sense of a log such as Columbus and other captains kept. So Vespucci’s testimony is based on what he recalled in 1504, when he wrote the famous Mundus Novus, text based on a Letter to “gonfaloniere” (standard bearer) Pier

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Soderini, which recounts a presumed earlier letter written in 1497 upon returning from his first trip. Much debate surrounds this letter. But if it truly existed, the point here is that circumstance, chance, or occasione as Francesco Guicciardini would put it, made the scholar, or “theoretician,” Vespucci, who had never sailed until he was past forty, decide to go see firsthand these new strange lands, and try to figure out the method of determining what the actual route, if any, to Cathay could or would be. But another way of looking at this historiographic knot is that, as we will see, Vespucci basically sabotaged Columbus. The other example I would like to give is one revolving around the credit Vespucci gets for naming America, when the greater explorer, and the one who did in effect make the first crossing, and touched the continent at what is today Venezuela in his third voyage, was Columbus. Should not the new continent be named Columbia (as later an entire nation was, thanks to Francisco de Miranda, in 1812)? Columbus’ report on his third voyage was not printed until 1504, bearing the title Libretto de Tutta Navigatione. It was technical, meandering, dull. His later writing, Paesi Novamente Ritrovati, of 1507, is written in the same style, and as one historian observed, perhaps because it was meant for eyes of very Catholic rulers, he even had to hide or twist the truth somewhat of certain consequential social developments out of his control. Now it is true that Columbus described flora and fauna in more detail than most other explorers, except perhaps Pedro Alvarez Cabral, but he did not, for instance, describe the sexual mores of some of the indigenous peoples he encountered. This instead Vespucci did, and for a broader public, perhaps thinking of enlightened and curious noblemen back home in faraway Florence, now that Savonarola was gone and a semblance of order restored. In Mundus Novus he writes that the Brazilians “are so promiscuous, son cohabits with mother, brother with sister, and, in general, the women were very lustful, they apply a local poison to their man’s genitals to make them swell.” They were delighted to try their wiles on the newly arrived Christians. As much as the actual voyages were always dangerous, and in many instances the sponsors had to cajole or enlist as future “colonists” known criminals, jailbirds and vagabonds, the news that this other world, what Columbus had actually and perhaps unfortunately termed Otro mundo, offered such liberties and prospects of individual gain at a time when the Church was clamping down on heretics, the Inquisition was a real

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and feared specter behind everybody’s back, and most European societies were bracing for decades of religious strife, it was not only the scientists—the pre-Modern geographers, cosmographers, astronomers—who read this book, but high society nobles and intellectuals and, by the known trickle-down effect of the diffusion of ideas, the broader public at large, hungry to hear about this fabled, which in Vespucci’s title did not suggest the “beyond” but what was “new,” Mundus Novus.

VIII Vespucci’s little book did not speak about Columbus’ “Garden of Eden,” nor the lost world of Atlantis. Rather, it immediately established that it had nothing to do with all the already known and recounted strangeness of the East (recall that Marco Polo’s journeys had been circulating for nearly two centuries already) or the mysterious practices of the little known African societies (outside of Egypt and the coastal Maghreb, little will be known—to Europeans—about Africa until the XIX century). What was presented to Europeans was, under all aspects, a fourth world. And as such it appeared for all eyes to see in Martin Waldsemüller 1507 map, who names what was previously labeled “terra incognita” as “America” as a tribute to Vespucci; the map was printed in 1000 copies, and was huge, 12 panels, overall 8 × 4 feet. The text of the Four expeditions was printed with a long Preface, in reality a condensed tract, on the then state of the art in cosmography. Within a few years, forty editions of Mundus Novus in Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Flemish, even Czech, came out. “It is astonishing – writes Morrison, – that a young professor of geography in an obscure college at Saint Dié in Lorraine – Martin Waldsemüller – should have persuaded first Northern Europe and finally the whole world to name this New World America” (289). Yes, we can call it an “accident,” a fluke, a contingency. And it did show the power of the recently “invented” new medium, the printing press, that same technology that had matured over a half century and greatly increased the possibilities of the exchange of information to the point that it “forced” a rethinking of basic principles and methods. The press that was also responsible, ten years later, for the unexpected explosive circulation of Luther’s 95 Theses, and the beginning of the Reformation.

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IX Let us now ask the question again: who actually discovered America? We have to forego the case made about a Leif Erickson who landed in Vinland five centuries earlier, or of the near-contemporaneous Namibian or Mali crossings of the southern Atlantic. The Portuguese were interested in Columbus’ expedition to verify whether African canoes had indeed been seen in the lower island chains of the Antilles. These did not have an impact on “us,” the Euroamerican Moderns, there were no actual consequences, no new exchanges and meanings were generated, no lives were affected. So the question remains: who discovered America? To whom do we attribute this huge, indeed monstruous, credit, or honor? Would it be the first sailor, one Rodrigo, who howled “Tierra, Tierra” from the crow’s nest of the Pinta in the middle of the night, October 11, 1492? Would it be the Almirante of the fleet? Would it be the investor/merchant who made the loans and fitted the ships, some of them from the Florentine bankers, Medici included? Would it be the Crown, which gave permission to sail under its flag and stipulated that all lands discovered would have to be de jure realis property of Castilla y Aragon, besides a fifth of the actual booty? Who decides that a piece of land is… his/hers/theirs? What about those who had predicted that there would be land? Well, now with hindsight we can say they were all wrong: for nearly 75 years no one could convince himself or others that it was not the outcroppings of Asia they were landing on and settling in, but the archipelagos in the outskirts of a different coastline, of a different continent. True, Columbus had written, in October 1498, that “the land which God has newly given your Highnesses on this voyage must be reckoned continental in extent.” He had come into a bay enclosed by two difficult straits, near what is today Trinidad and Tobago. He probably did touch mainland, present-day Venezuela. He knew, because of the fresh water of the nearby estuary of the great river Orinoco, that he was in proximity of a huge landmass, not an island, but he persisted in believing that it had to be a part of that Cathay that even Marco Polo had not seen. The bellicose and antipatico Hojeda also claimed he was first to touch the continent. However, it was Vespucci, and this to his credit, who began to think that perhaps this was a continent to the point that he collected, organized, “processed” all the then known information and set out, in the next, his alleged third, but to some his second and last voyage, to prove that that was the case, when he landed further south, past the Amazon

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delta, and then, rounding present day Recife, went all the way down to present-day Rio de Janeiro and beyond. Presumably, he reached Patagonia, but he never mentions the Rio de La Plata, which he could not have missed if he hugged the coast as he says he did. As Colledge, Pagden, Rubies, and others have pointed out, the noteworthy thing is that Vespucci (and undoubtedly a few others around the same time) conjoins experience, derived from participation in the event, with the process of consciously selecting and organizing the information also furnished by others, to the point of creating an episteme, knowledge of the world as first and foremost as a diversified, heterogeneous geological/ geographical earth.

X What established this particular journey, or voyage, as foundational for a new knowledge, was the fact that Vespucci called it, “a New World…a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa; and, in addition, a climate milder and more delightful than any other region known to us.” And that is the reason why, according to most historians, he should get credit. No flora or fauna or typology of the natives matched any of the existing known or imagined reference points in the European scientific corpus of knowledge. This was an unexpected territory, indeed world, and one requiring that new names be invented, new maps drawn, new forms of discourse devised. In the first twenty years after Columbus, often the onslaught of information about these otherworldly peoples and places caused a sort of “panic” (Pagden 54). Soon enough, the challenges of definition and taxonomy surfaced to demand a rethinking of the known world. For over a century the problem of representing America constituted, at some level, “an attempt to resolve this tension between an appeal to authorial experience and the demands of the canon” (Pagden 56). A canon which was palpably under attack. In brief, the general proto-Paradigm was being shaken also directly or indirectly by the growing secularization launched by the XIV and XV century humanists, for despite the immediate attempts by Church authorities to Christianize the heathen, the lives and practices of the new people were clearly a threat to established dogma. In his Historia de las Indias (1527 and 1559) Las Casas describes how theologians started asking whether these natives were really people, as they doubted they possesses a soul. He debated Juan Ginés de Sepulveda in Valladolid in 1551, as the

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Counter-Reformation was picking up steam. Oviedo y Valdes, in his 1534 Historia general y natural de las Indias, did not have a high opinion of the natives, but wondered whether Christianizing them ought to occur in their language or in Spanish. But most settlers had no trouble grasping that these natives could easily be exploited for other ends. We could also go on into how, within a few decades, Europeans learned of new crops, such as potato and tomato and corn, and new diseases, such as syphilis, while the natives learned of the wheel, the horse, the dog, steel and gunpowder, and… smallpox. But to return to the question about the journey from the known to discover the unknown: to me it is not so much a scientific question as a sociopolitical and indeed a mythological question: America was discovered by a whole bunch of different people who harbored, necessarily, a variety of world-views at the local/personal level, and embodied a clutch of interests, with the economic one foremost, and who for the preceding forty years struggled to find new trading partners to the West, as the traditional commercial routes to and with the Eastern lands were long, overcrowded even, expensive. And now also very dangerous, as new empires took over. On this, not only Broome and Boyle but a host of scholars from different disciplines agree on the cruciality of the epochal and objectively describable event, the taking of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks. That is the date which spurs the most diversified agencies in Europe—the clergy, merchants, aristocrats, artisans, homeowners and basically everyone involved in any sort of commerce—to seek alternative routes to the East, especially once the Black Sea was closed. Genoa and Venice took a debilitating blow to their Mediterranean commercial and cultural hegemony. Yes, there was the religious concern that Christianity itself was “in danger of being overrun” by the advancing Ottoman Turks, and this did congeal a renewed sense of an “us versus them,” a “being European,” as Pius the II noted (local or regional differences notwithstanding), against being an Oriental or an Arab or a Turk; but it is the wheels of economics and the legitimizing power of Discourse which together first provide a venue for these superstructural ideas and point the compass elsewhere for homo viator. As for the identities of the explorers, there was no “Italy” back in 1500 that justifies our speaking of Columbus, Caboto, Vespucci as being “Italian explorers”: these are discursive retrojections heavily influenced by the ideologies and mythemes of XIX century nationalism. In reality there were several city-states and regional powers over the peninsula, and not

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yet a standard language, other than Latin. Moreover, as Braudel, McNeill, Wallerstein, and others have argued, in the sixteenth century, these individual travelers—navigators, explorers, conquerors, refugees, escapees, vagabonds, pirates, and scientists—were at the service of larger configurations, like empires and the nascent global trading networks that were exploding out of the confines of the “Mare Nostrum” and tracing commercial lines through or better over a constantly unfolding liquid world, both as refurbished earth and as reframed universe. They were rather individual with hybrid identities, with constructed selves anchored to realities of place, politics, and economics which saw them live in, learn the language of, and be subject to, a variety of sociopolitical configurations.

XI Two final thoughts. Some 15 years ago I wrote an essay on travel in which I reflected upon the use of the word-concept, or the idea, of travel as a master metaphor which has been appropriated by science and by philosophy (now in Carravetta 2017: 3–37). Words like pioneer, explorer, inventor, and locutions like finding the right way (i.e.: the right method), disclosing new horizons, march into unknown territory, chart unsounded seas, etc., became part of our everyday vocabulary. These locutions are common to a great many European languages, they establish a conceptual koine. What I would like to add to that, and perhaps stimulus for new research, is the fact that after these voyagers, in the aftermath of the Age of Discovery, we as Westerners begin to develop the sense that the journey is endless. Before 1492, the arché, or Master Trope, offered two possibilities: it was either Homeric, wherein the transit involved going out on a mission and then return, nostos, to Ithaca, or home. Or else it pointed to the Pilgrimage, the journey to a Sanctified locus in which some sort of revelation, purgation, or salvation was to be achieved, such as Santiago de Compostela, Jerusalem, Rome, Mecca, and others. After the XVI century, that is, at the beginning of Modernity, once the extent of the Americas were mapped to some recognizable degree, the journey no longer has a fixed destination. There are now countless faraway seas and deep hinterlands to explore, to dis/cover, to bring into the European exchange. Well into the XX century when at some point, in 1969, we ventured outside the planet, and changed everything all over again. But to stay with the Early Modern oecumene, humans will increasingly criss-cross the earth, the globe,

284  P. CARRAVETTA

defining and redefining the physical world while at the same time they turn with renewed vigor to the exploration of the mind, the critical consciousness that self-referentially grasps its being a relation requiring constant validation and legitimation, that necessary correlate to the outside reality as presented by geography and astronomy and then by the other sciences that followed. In fact, recent historiography prefers to speak rather of a plurality of worlds, insofar as the human interchange with circumscribed environments makes sense only regionally. A greater appreciation of the fact that multiculturalism and polyethnicity prevailed through the ages (McNeill 1985) and the dynamics of socio-economic subsystems that actually did connect people and lands unknown to one another (Wallerstein, Abu-Ludhod) upholds this view. The Novus is now constantly discovered and just as persistently pushed continually forward, with an almost dialectical necessity to let certain things slip away by making them irrelevant, superseded. In fact, we recall that modern subjectivity is borne out of the awareness that the origin is something forever behind, and the destination is forever a place to try to reach, though often with the self-awareness that it is not truly attainable (as in the case of theoretical projections, especially in astrophysics). Along the way, when do we stop and build Cathedrals and Monuments to Justice and Science, we devise a congealed representational rhetoric, called a logic, the backbone of modern epistemology, that gives us the assurance that the objects (both as substance and as ideation) are real, “objective” we typically say. Yet we are fully aware (or maybe not, as some still cling to Immutable Forms and Eternal Gods) that the whole can be uprooted, our mental cathedrals blown away, and even our family history erased each and every time a place is invaded, or stepped on by tyrannies, or suffer some natural disaster, or generally get radically altered when we are forced to move on, i.e., migrate (Carravetta 2017). We then essay to “save” whatever we can of the sense of the metamorphic self, the transitory being-in-this-worldat-this-time-and-place. But this is also part of knowledge understood as process, of an episteme that is rhetorically charged with the task of determining the known for a community in the face of a sea of unknowns, uncertainties, contingencies. Of course we have continued into the heart of Modernity to write histories and create new myths about our cherished values, we claim primacy over our neighbors and enemies, we vie for privilege over our own kin and kind, and of course, as Vico noted, we claim for our “nations” noble origins, especially with the rise of nationalism. And then we translate that ideal into perennial roots! when a look

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at a world historical map, and most books on migration and diasporas, would show that humans have always been in transit. Thus the ontic reality is that change, movement, traveling, go into shaping the mildly amorphous ontological constitution of humans, which can be summarized in this way: broadly understood as moving from place to place over even short segments of time, migration is the engine of history and the unstable yet authentic grounding of inter-subjectivity. We might say that at the very heart of Early Modernity there arises a hodoeporics, the constantly unsettling creativity and challenging narrative experience of the journeys themselves. And those are nontheologically endless, true to the ancient sentence, errare humanum est.

Note 1. An earlier, shorter version of this paper, with the title “Geography and Epistemology. The opening up of the Atlantic and the scientific revolution of the XVII century,” was presented at the Florence University for the Arts annual conference, dedicated to Florence in Italy and Abroad: From Vespucci to Contemporary Innovators, November 9, 2012.

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286  P. CARRAVETTA ———. 2012. The Elusive Hermes: Method, Discourse, Interpreting. Aurora, CO: Davies Group. ———. 2017. After Identity: Migration, Critique, Italian American Culture. New York: Bordighera. Cloke, Paul, Philip Crang, and Mark Goodwin (eds.). 2013. Introducing Human Geographies, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Columbus, Christopher. 1992. The Four Voyages. New York: Penguin. Crease, Robert. 2011. The World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement. New York: Norton. Cunliffe, Barry. 2002. The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek. New York: Walker. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage. Gale, Stephen, and Gunnar Olsson (eds.). 1979. Philosophy in Geography. London: Reidel. Galeano, Eduardo. 2003. Las venas abierta de America Latina. Madrid: siglo veintuno. Golledge, Reginald G. 1979. Reality, Process, and the Dialectical Relation Between Man and Environment. In Philosophy in Geography, ed. Gale and Olsson, 109–120. Dordrecht: Springer. Hakluyt, Richard. 1972. Voyages and Discoveries. Baltimore: Penguin. Jara, René, and Nicholas Spadaccini (eds.). 1993. 1492–1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, R.J. 1996. Paradigms and Revolution or Evolution? In Human Geography, ed. Agnew, 37–53. Oxford: Blackwell. Lattimore, Owen, and Eleanor (eds.). 1968. Silks, Spices and Empire. New York: Delacorte Press. Ley, Charles D. (ed.). 2000. Portuguese Voyages 1498–1663. London: Phoenix Press. Mancall, Peter C. 2006. Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery. New York: Oxford University Press. Marchand, B. 1979. Dialectics and Geography. In Philosophy in Geography, ed. Gale and Olsson, 237–267. Dordrecht: Springer. McNeill, William. 1980. The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1985. Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mendoza, Josefina G., Julio Munoz Jiménez, and Nicolás Ortega Cantero (eds.). 1994. El pensamiento geografico. Madrid: Alianza Universidad. Morison, Samuel Eliot. 1974. The European Discovery of America. The Southern Voyages 1492–1616. New York: Oxford University Press. Pagden, Anthony. 1993. European Encounters with the New World. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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———. 2003. Peoples and Empires. New York: Harcourt. Pigafetta, Antonio. 1995. The First Voyage Around the World: An Account of Magellan’s Expedition, ed. T.J. Cachey Jr. New York: Marsilio. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. 2007. Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology. Burlington: Ashgate. Taviani, Paolo E. 2000. Christopher Columbus, 3 vols. Roma: Italian Geographical Society. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1985. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. New York: HarperCollins. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: A Humanistic Perspective, ed. Agnew, 445–457. Vespucci, Amerigo. 1992. Letters from a New World. New York: Marsilio Publishers. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Wright, Ronald. 1992. Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Index

A Abbey, Edward, 91, 98 Achilles, 103, 270 Africa, 213, 215, 220, 270, 279, 281 African-American, 69, 75 Africans, 211, 212, 214–216, 219, 273, 279, 280 Age of Discovery, 266, 283 Age of Mercantilism, 266 Age of the Rise of Absolute Monarchies, 266 Ahmed, Sarah, 196 airport, 3, 4, 22, 23, 33, 80, 88, 263 airport security, 88, 263 Alaska, 100, 198 alcoholic, 261, 263 Aleppo, 4 alienation, 2, 214 Alighieri, Dante, 227 Altaï, 80, 84 America, 24, 42, 69, 75, 104, 198, 199, 225, 226, 228, 233–235, 242, 244, 252, 254, 258, 274, 275, 278–282

Americans, 71, 74, 227, 233, 234, 237, 241, 243–245, 248, 249, 253, 254, 262–264 Amerike, Richard, 272, 274 Angelone, Romolo, 237 Angkor Wat, 100 anthropocentric, 97, 137 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 197, 198 appearances, 106, 153 Arab, 282 Arabic, 121 architecture, 12, 16, 19, 34, 39, 41, 43, 45, 105, 106, 235, 238 Aristotle, 51, 65, 152, 167, 172 Armenian, 113 Artaud, Antonin, 46 artist, 201, 215, 261 Asian, 225 Athenians, 105, 107, 108, 111, 168 Athens, 103, 104, 107, 108 Atlantis, 279 Augustine, 109, 110 autostrade, 239, 242, 244, 257 Azores, 270

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0

289

290  Index B Bacon, Francis, 62 baggage, 4, 52, 226, 234 Bali, 33, 34, 37, 46, 80, 224 Balilla, 235, 240 Balinese, 33–36, 46 Balogun, Odun, 215 Bangkok, 24 Bates, Donald, 173 Baths of Caracalla, the, 251 Baudrillard, Jean, 18, 24, 43–45, 214 Bauman, Zygmunt, 219 Beckett, Samuel, 213 becoming, 5, 92, 119, 122, 152, 153, 155–157, 163, 173, 175, 176, 188, 196, 242, 262, 275 Beijing, 24 being, 153, 155–157, 159–161, 163, 165, 168 Beirut, 113, 126, 128 Berardi, Gerardo, 276 Berrino, Annunziata, 229, 254 Berry, Wendell, 78 Beverly Hillbillies, 104 Bhabha, Homi, 193 Bhutan, 33, 35–37, 47 Bhutanese, 35, 36, 47 bicycle, 65 Big Sky Country, 144 bison, 159, 167 de la Blache, Vidal, 268 black, 6, 30, 69–77, 81, 84, 85, 111, 119, 171, 244, 247, 248, 255, 282 Black Death, 80 Black Forest, 177 Black Lives Matter, 6 Blaine, 89 boats, 2, 53, 55, 57, 81 body, 27–29, 45, 51, 52, 54, 56–59, 61, 63, 65, 70, 74, 76, 81, 107, 117, 144, 145, 154, 162, 189, 194, 204

borders, 2, 3, 8, 64 Borges, Jorge Luis, 192 boundaries, 14, 15, 151, 189, 190 Bourdieu, Pierre, 79 Boyle, David, 274 Bozeman, 4 Brazil, 277 Brazilians, 278 Brexit, 2 Bristol, 272–274 Britain, 223 British Columbia, 89 Broadway, 223 Brooks, Charles S., 242, 244, 257 Bruno, Giordano, 270 bubonic plague, 80 Buddhism, 130, 134, 143 Buddhist, 83, 130, 140, 143, 147, 148 Bulgaria, 84 Burano, 234, 243 Burdett, Charles, 229, 255 business, 3, 4, 199, 216, 224, 248, 252, 272 busses, 3 Butler, Judith, 192 C Caboto, Jacobus, 272 Cabral, Pedro Alvarez, 278 Caesars Palace, 10–12, 39 Café Un Deux Trois, 223 Calexico, 89 California, 40, 66, 89, 94, 147, 254 Calvino, Italo, 19, 24, 33, 37, 41, 43, 193 Campo Mussolini, 235 Canada, 199 Canadian, 158 Canaries, 270 Cannibals, 44 Cape of Good Hope, 81, 270

Index

capital, 2, 9, 10, 13–15, 19, 22, 24–26, 29, 31, 32, 34–37, 46, 74, 196, 210, 211, 213, 214, 219, 220, 250, 251, 263 capitalist, 71, 88, 93 Capitoline Museum, the, 251 Capo Verde Islands, 273 Caribbean, 273, 276 cars, 3, 55, 57, 59, 62, 83, 89, 199 Cathay, 267, 272, 277, 278, 280 Cattolica, 235, 243 Césaire, Aimé, 88, 98 Chanler, Margaret, 252 Chapman, Bruce, 5 China, 2, 18, 81, 223, 224 Chinese, 82, 83, 94, 130, 132, 137, 146, 147, 224 Chōfū, 88, 89 Chomsky, Noam, 262 Christ, 29, 272 Christian, 93, 110, 215, 251, 271, 275 Cipango, 267, 271, 272 Clark, Sydney A., 233, 237, 246, 256 class, 1, 3, 6, 10, 73, 78, 210, 215, 216, 231, 233, 247, 254, 273 Cleopatra, 10, 11, 39 climate change, 7, 37, 190, 204 Clooney, George, 3 Colombia, 8, 38 Colosseum, the, 251 Columbus, Christopher, 271 commemoration, 123 commerce, 25, 184, 282 commercial, 10, 236, 267, 270, 273, 282, 283 commodify/commodification/commodity, 14, 27, 32, 36, 210, 211, 213, 214, 230 communication, 19–21, 25, 27, 29–31, 34, 35, 46, 66, 165, 166, 211, 218

  291

commute, 5, 64, 65, 209, 210, 213, 216–219 Connecticut, 53 consultant, 262 consumer, 214, 263 Contino, Alberto, 273 Copernicus, Nicholas, 269 Cortina d’Ampezzo, 235 Cortona, 247 De La Cosas, Juan, 273 Cossacks, 80 coyote, 151–154, 163 cryptocurrencies, 2 Cuba, 82 culture, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 18, 25, 32–37, 40, 41, 44, 46, 70–73, 75, 76, 102–104, 106, 170, 171, 175, 179, 193, 210–212, 214, 215, 220, 224, 229, 235, 237, 244, 250, 251, 254, 255, 268 D da Gama, Vasco, 270 Damascus, 4 dance, 10, 58, 115, 118, 124, 163, 196, 197, 206, 212, 213, 247 Dao, 97, 130, 136, 137 Dao De Jing, 97 da Vinci, Leonardo, 269 death, 5, 6, 24, 27, 29, 31, 32, 34, 43, 94–98, 100, 103, 114, 115, 122, 130, 133, 143–145, 148, 149, 168, 172, 211, 213, 214, 216, 219, 220, 227, 247, 272, 274 debt, 209, 210, 213, 214, 216, 264, 276 decolonization, 212 De Kooning, Willem, 58 Deleuze, Gilles, 140, 148, 182 deportation, 8 Derrida, Jacques, 60, 171

292  Index Descartes, René, 105, 266 desert, 12, 91, 120–123, 136 destiny, 70, 71, 117, 186, 246 Detroit, 223 Dewey, John, 64 Dharma, 88, 98, 130–132, 140, 146, 148, 149 Diaz, Bartholomew, 270 Diaz, General Armando, 234 difference, 8, 12, 13, 15, 24–28, 32, 35, 40–42, 58, 64, 78, 131, 136, 140, 148, 156, 159, 164–166, 168, 176, 266 Dillard, Annie, 52 disappearance, 116, 117, 124, 190 dislocation, 2, 5 Disney, 3, 14, 95 Disneyland, 9, 24 distance, 8, 12, 19, 21–23, 57, 87, 89, 91, 101, 118, 136, 145, 162, 270, 271 dog, 83, 105, 172, 282 Dōgen, 92, 131–133, 135, 137–144, 146–149 Dopolavoro, 235 double, 25, 46, 88, 94, 98, 155, 167, 168, 181, 182, 264, 267, 268 Douglas, Norman, 252 Dowd, Maureen, 9, 39 dromological, 123 Dubois, W.E.B., 72 dwelling, 135, 136, 140, 142, 145, 171, 182 dystopia, 116, 119, 263 E eagle, 80, 84, 85 earth, 15, 24, 36, 55–57, 69, 73–76, 78, 88, 90–97, 103, 107, 114, 116, 120, 122, 124, 130, 133, 136, 141, 145, 146, 148,

183, 185, 188, 190, 196, 218, 265–272, 274, 275, 281, 283 East Germany, 175 ecosystem, 155, 201 ecotype, 155 Edman, Irwin, 108, 111 Egypt, 10, 39, 59, 100, 187, 279 Egyptians, 105 elk, 158, 159 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 64, 171 emigration, 5 emptiness, 92, 123, 131, 133, 134, 139–145, 147 England, English, 230, 247, 252, 272, 273 environment, 9, 12, 18, 23, 37, 44, 61, 70, 152, 155, 159, 180, 193, 262, 263 Erasmus, Desiderius, 269 Erickson, Leif, 280 Estonia, 84 ethics, 7, 8, 33, 36, 39, 82, 98, 191 ethnicity, 5 Europe, 23, 80, 151, 170, 171, 173, 174, 179, 184, 187, 219, 233, 241, 242, 247, 250, 252, 261, 268, 279, 281, 282 European, 16, 18, 26, 34, 105, 146, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 185, 188, 215, 225, 229, 233, 255, 267, 275, 279, 281–283 Euthyphro, 99, 101, 110 expats, 231 experience, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12–15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 26, 27, 29–31, 35, 41, 42, 52, 55, 56, 58, 62, 64, 69, 75, 77, 101, 102, 109, 110, 115, 128, 131, 139, 141, 143, 144, 153, 154, 163, 165, 173, 174, 192, 197, 209, 212, 214, 215, 230, 232, 234, 236, 242, 244, 246, 271, 272, 281, 285

Index

F falling, 76, 122, 135, 139, 168, 204 family, 69, 72, 75, 78, 80, 104, 147, 157, 158, 204, 205, 242, 277, 284 farm, 26, 53, 74, 76, 77, 104, 196, 198 farmer, 69, 71, 72, 103 fascist, 227–231, 234–240, 243, 246, 248–253 political propaganda, 240 fences, 90, 91, 93, 196, 203 ferry, 53, 54, 56, 57, 62, 65, 66, 212, 234 Feuser, Willfried F., 215 financial, 210, 218, 262 finite, 92, 136, 270 Fish, Helen Dean, 232, 244, 252 fleeing, 1, 261 flights, 88 Flinders, Carol Lee, 72 Florence, 227, 234, 235, 244, 245, 252, 256, 258, 259, 276–278, 285 Florida, 96, 97, 273, 274 foreign, 8, 12, 15, 19, 21, 22, 30, 32, 33, 35, 43, 100, 104, 106, 109, 156, 158, 159, 171–173, 179, 182, 188, 212, 215, 230, 234, 236, 237, 240, 250, 253 foreign land, 100 Foro Mussolini, 235 Forster, E.M., 231 France, 105, 172, 187, 273 freelance, 262 Freiberg, 52 Freire, Paulo, 79 French, 9, 106, 176, 178, 237, 276, 279 frequent flyer, 4 Freud, Sigmund, 45

  293

Fussell, Paul, 232, 255 G Gaines, Ernest, 71 Galileo, 13, 266, 269, 270 Gallatin River, 144 Gambia, 270 Garden of Eden, 279 gender, 1, 26, 167, 197, 204 Genoa, 170, 178, 179, 183, 184, 272, 274, 282 genocide, 2, 5, 8, 70, 266 gentrification, 26 geography, 69, 255, 265, 268, 269, 279, 284, 285 Germany, 138, 175, 187, 237 Gibbons, John, 249, 250, 259 Giroux, Henry, 79 global, 3, 8–10, 13, 14, 19, 22–26, 29, 30, 32, 34–38, 43, 46, 76, 88, 190, 210, 211, 214, 283 globalism, 1 Global Positioning Satellites (GPS), 5, 269 god, 59, 70, 93, 102, 103, 105, 109, 173, 217, 219, 220, 245, 267, 275, 280 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 170 Gotham, 224 Grand Tour, the, 231, 255 Greece, 108, 171, 184, 187, 192, 203 Greek, 18, 63, 103, 104, 106, 111, 132, 137, 267 Greenland, 272 Gross National Happiness (GNH), 35, 36 ground, 3, 4, 32, 55, 57, 60, 62, 76, 83, 115, 117, 119, 121, 135, 143, 154, 155, 161, 191, 192, 198, 201, 219

294  Index Guantanamo, 226 Guattari, Félix, 144 Guicciardini, Francesco, 278

Hunt, Geoffrey, 212, 214, 216 Husserl, Edmund, 57 Hutchison, Hubbard, 234

H habit, 15, 16, 21, 43, 59, 246 Haiti, 80 Hall, Stuard, 79 Heathrow Airport, 4 Heidegger, Martin, 147–149, 160, 188 Heidelberg, 51 Henry the Navigator, 270 Hewlett, Maurice, 245, 252 hiking, 90, 97, 183 Hindenburg, 5 history, 6, 8–10, 12, 13, 17, 18, 20, 25–29, 31, 38, 39, 42, 69, 71, 74, 77, 81, 98, 140, 166, 168, 170, 178, 186, 187, 197, 212–214, 219, 229, 230, 239, 240, 244, 248–252, 254–256, 263, 269, 275, 276, 284, 285 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 170, 171, 173 Hom, Stephanie Malia, 230, 255 home, 2, 5, 6, 15, 21, 51, 52, 64, 69, 70, 74, 77, 78, 82, 101, 102, 105, 107, 109, 110, 121, 151, 171–173, 175, 177, 198, 205, 209, 224, 226–228, 232, 235, 236, 243, 245, 249, 261, 262, 267, 278, 283 homogenization, 8, 9, 37 Hong Kong, 223, 224 horizon, 14, 22, 26, 120, 134–137, 144, 161, 162, 194 hotels, 34, 225, 237, 242 humanism, 95, 138 Humboldt, Alexander von, 268 Hume, David, 139 Hungary, 81, 84

I ICE, 81, 183, 196, 197 Iceland, 272, 273 identity, 8, 10, 14, 16–18, 22, 23, 25–27, 34, 35, 37, 38, 43, 45, 69, 92, 120, 130, 139, 143, 144, 157, 176, 215, 227–230, 237, 240, 253, 254 Iliad, 103 immigration, 3, 5, 26, 225 India, 81, 267, 270 indigenous, 8, 33, 36, 40, 89, 189, 224, 278 Indonesia, 36, 46, 81, 223–225 industrialization, 44, 90, 91, 211, 216, 217 infinite, 25, 31, 92, 96, 136, 138, 250 information, 21, 25, 74, 88, 104, 109, 175, 236, 237, 241, 256, 257, 270–274, 279–281 insurance, 262 international, 3, 7, 33, 35, 37–39, 95, 148, 167, 189, 199, 203, 223–225, 241 Iroquois, 105, 108, 168 Italian American, 228, 236, 254 Italy, 12, 14, 40, 111, 170, 178, 227–259, 276, 282, 285 Italy America Society, 227, 254 Ithaca, 102, 103, 111, 283 J Jakarta, 223, 225 Japan, 138, 141 Jeffers, Robinson, 94, 98 Jelardi, Andrea, 229, 254

Index

  295

K Kant, Immanuel, 140 Kazakhs, 80, 81, 83 Kentucky, 69–73, 75–78 Kerouac, Jack, 52 Khan, Kublai, 19, 21, 47, 193 Kierkegaard, Søren, 51 Korea, 81 Kosher, Rudy, 229 Kundera, Milan, 95 Kurdish, 113 Kyoto, 133, 138

Lebanon, 8, 38, 113, 126, 128 Leibniz, Gottfried, 51 De Leon, Ponce, 274 Leopold, Aldo, 131, 146 Levinas, Immanuel, 60 Liberia, 4 Lincoln Center, 223 Lingis, Al, 5 Lithuania, 80, 82, 84 Lithuanians, 80, 82 Littoria, 235, 250, 251 Locke, John, 111 logos, 161, 163, 166, 167 London, 4, 38, 41, 43–45, 98, 146, 147, 188, 255, 256 Long Island, 53, 58 Lord Byron, 251 Los Angeles, 24, 42, 44, 89, 254 lounges, 3 Lucian, 103, 104, 111 Luddite, 91, 93

L labor, 29, 53, 71, 73, 75, 91, 184, 210–212, 216, 248, 262 Labrador, 272 land, 2, 3, 10, 16, 17, 19, 35, 65, 69–78, 89, 102, 111, 117, 155, 156, 161, 197, 201, 219, 235, 238–240, 256, 258, 259, 270, 274, 277, 280 language, 5, 19–21, 45, 66, 100, 109, 110, 135, 137, 138, 141, 142, 148, 161, 163, 165, 166, 197, 217, 228, 236, 266, 271, 282, 283 Larsen, Jonas, 228, 254 Las Vegas, 9–14, 37, 39–42 Latvia, 84 Laughlin, Clara E., 233, 242, 246, 256

M MacCannell, Dean, 15, 40, 228, 254 Machado, Antonio, 87 Malaysia, 5, 224 Manhattan, 172, 225 Marlowe, Christopher, 213 martyr, 248 martyrological, 123 Marx, Karl, 93, 210, 213 McBride, Robert Medill, 244, 258 McLuhan, Marshall, 263 Meander River, 192 meandering, 192 Melville, Herman, 171, 188 memory, 8, 21, 28, 30, 45, 46, 59–62, 65, 114, 121, 168, 172, 179, 193, 266 Mercator map, 269 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 143, 149

Jesus, 70, 220 Jeyifro, Biodun, 216 JFK, 225, 263 journey, 21, 64, 65, 87, 96, 100–102, 107, 111, 170, 171, 179, 181, 199, 201, 242, 266, 268, 272, 281–283

296  Index Mexico, 3, 36, 96, 197–199, 201, 203 Mexico City, 100 Middle Passage, 62 migration(s), 5, 159, 285 Milan, 41, 235, 243, 272 Milton, Arthur, 232, 251, 255 Ministry of Popular Culture, 236 Ministry of Press and Propaganda, 236 minorities, 114, 225 de Miranda, Francisco, 278 Mirandola, Pico della, 269 mobility, 3, 4, 6–8, 37, 196 Moffett, James, 224 MoMA, 223 Mongolia, 79, 80, 84 Mongols, 80, 83 monocultural, 88, 91 Montana, 144 Morrison, Samuel Eliot, 275 Moscow, 82, 83 motion, 2, 4, 6, 30, 52–60, 63, 106, 113, 152, 167, 211 mountains, 80–82, 84, 85, 122, 130– 133, 136, 138–142, 145–148, 170, 174, 184, 187, 197 movement, 1–3, 6, 53–58, 61, 63, 65, 73, 91, 93, 113, 114, 124, 139, 140, 151, 152, 154–157, 159, 191, 196, 197, 204, 210, 215, 218, 247–249, 285 moving, 2, 3, 5, 6, 51–54, 56, 57, 59, 63, 65, 75, 78, 130, 134, 135, 140, 152, 161, 166, 177, 194, 205, 235, 244, 285 Muir, John, 93, 96, 98 Mundus Novus, 277–279 Muslim, 215, 225 Mussolini, Benito, 236, 241, 248, 250, 253 N Nagarjuna, 141

Naples, 172, 235, 243, 276 nationality, 226 Native Americans, 72, 80 Nepal, 224 Newfoundland, 274 New Haven, 57, 255 Newtonian celestial mechanics, 271 New World, 89, 144, 270, 274, 279, 281 New York City, 43, 64, 223, 224 New York Times, 9, 39, 47, 223 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 188 Nigeria, 80, 210, 212 Night Club, 126 night-travel, 114, 116, 117, 120, 124 night-traveler, 113–115, 117, 120, 124, 125 Nishida, Kitarō, 141 nocturnal, 113–115, 128, 144 nomadism, 1, 64 nomads, 64, 80–82 Nussbaum, Martha, 52 O Odysseus, Odyssey, 102, 103 de Ojeda, Alonso, 273 Okpara, Enoch, 212 Olympian, 100 Olympics, 100 Oregon, 89 Other, the, 26, 266 Ottoman Turks, 282 Oxfam, 264 P package, 13–15, 163 Palestine, 114 Palatine Hill, the, 227, 251 Palestinians, 44 Pantaleone, Goffredo, 241 Parini, Piero, 236

Index

Paris, 9, 10, 12, 14, 39, 100, 105, 107, 111, 171, 243, 261 Parisians, 9 passage, 106, 108, 138, 141, 142, 160, 192, 197, 209, 210, 213 passengers, 2, 62, 114, 212, 217 paycheck, 264 Peck, M. Scott, 78 Peripatetic, 183, 223 Persia, 18 Persian Gulf, 26 Phaedrus, 51, 59, 66, 100, 110, 111 phenomenology, 148, 149 Philippines, 224 philosophers, 1, 51, 54, 61, 100, 106, 153, 156, 160, 168, 172, 270 philosophy, 6, 8, 34, 36, 39, 41, 51, 60, 65, 104, 105, 108–111, 137, 142, 147–149, 153, 160, 166, 173, 192, 220, 276, 283 Picard, Michel, 33, 46 Place, 2, 4–6, 8–15, 20–23, 25, 27, 30, 32, 37, 39, 43, 52–54, 56–58, 60–65, 70–72, 76–78, 80, 82, 90, 93–95, 98–103, 105, 109, 110, 114, 116, 118, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 149, 160, 162, 165, 171, 176, 177, 184, 186, 189, 190, 193, 201, 205, 211–213, 220, 228, 236, 242–244, 246, 248, 253, 262, 263, 283–285 plane, 4, 5, 54, 55, 62, 63 airplane, 4, 57, 87, 88, 238 Plato, 51, 59, 60, 100, 105, 110, 111 pleasure, 4, 7, 31, 36, 81, 97, 122, 124, 219, 232, 234, 255 poetry, 148, 197 Poland, 84 Pollock, Jackson, 261 Polo, Marco, 18–23, 28, 36, 47, 193, 279, 280

  297

Pope, 227, 277 Portland, 89 Portugal, 271–273, 277 Portuguese mariners, 270 Poseidon, 102, 103 poverty, 5, 8, 38, 124, 204, 243, 273 practice, 35, 41, 52, 53, 59, 62, 66, 78, 89, 90, 93, 95–98, 103, 120, 124, 128, 138, 139, 141, 142, 146–148, 160, 187, 230, 266, 273 Pratt, Mary Louise, 229, 255 Predappio, 235 predator, 152 prey, 81, 152, 155, 156, 158, 162, 163 privatization, 212 privilege, 7, 8, 25, 27, 60, 65, 173, 224, 226, 284 profit, 10, 14, 15, 80, 217, 219 progress, 91, 92, 94, 97, 191, 192, 210–213, 218–220, 236, 238–242, 269 Proust, Marcel, 41, 45, 46 Ptolemaic cosmology, 271 Pulkovo Airport, 4 Putin, Vladimir, 2 pyramids, 100 Q Queens, 225 R race, 1, 5, 26, 28, 59, 70, 77, 78, 82, 94, 95, 110, 116, 188, 215, 274 racism, 70, 72, 78, 90, 96, 215 Ramperti, Mario, 238, 257 Ratzel, Friedrich, 268 Ravenna, 227 reclamation, 235, 240

298  Index reconciliation, 78, 176, 180 Red Nation, 6 refugees, 3, 7, 37, 64, 118, 204, 283 region, 80, 122, 134–137, 144, 148, 199, 220, 247, 281 religion, 80, 105, 149, 216, 219, 226 Renaissance, 12, 187, 235, 238, 266, 268, 269, 271 Renaissance Humanism, 268, 269 representation, 8, 24–26, 44, 157, 164, 165, 167, 254, 271 restlessness, 113 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 169 Rio de Janeiro, 24, 281 Ritter, Carl, 268 rivers, 81, 96, 133, 146, 147, 190– 192, 197 road, 52, 53, 56, 62, 65, 81, 93, 96, 154, 193, 198, 210–214, 216–219, 226, 247, 251, 276 road trip, 53 Roberts Airport, 4 Robertson, david, 97 Rodin, Auguste, 64 Roman, 10–12, 18, 81, 103, 104, 232, 252, 255, 266 Roman Forum, the, 251 Romania, 84 Rome, 10–12, 104, 178, 187, 227, 232–235, 240, 243, 250–252, 255–259, 277, 283 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 63 routine, 1–3, 16, 53, 262 Russia, 2 Russian, 81–83 S Sabaudia, 235 Said, Edward, 229 sailors, 102 Saint Francis, 252

Sallis, John, 133, 147 Sammartino, Peter, 235, 236, 250, 256 San Francisco, 89, 146 Sante, Luc, 9, 39 Savonarola, Girolamo, 277 scent, 14, 31, 61, 155, 162–164, 193 Scent, 160 schooling, home, 99 Scythians, 103, 104 sea, 3, 14, 16, 17, 31, 32, 55, 56, 61, 62, 65, 95, 102, 103, 170, 174, 183–187, 198, 224, 234, 268, 270, 273, 282, 284 seafarers, 267 sedentary, 3, 51, 187 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 215 Seville, 101, 274, 276, 277 sex, 8, 11, 25 shamans, 80 Shetland Islands, 273 shorebirds, 190 Siberia, 80, 82 Sicilians, 245 sick leave, 262 sight, 3, 81, 161–164 Siskiyou Trail, 89, 90 sky, 3, 9, 14, 32, 33, 84, 115, 120, 122, 130, 133–135, 144, 145, 176, 186, 211 Smith, Irwin, 227, 234, 243, 254 Snyder, Gary, 88, 98, 130, 146 Socrates, 59, 60, 99, 100, 104, 105 Solnit, Rebecca, 65, 90, 94, 98 Solon, 103, 104 southerner, 69 Soviet Union, 82, 83 Soyinka, Wole, 210 space, 3, 5, 10, 13, 14, 22–27, 29, 37, 40, 43, 44, 51, 53, 55, 57, 58, 62, 75, 91–94, 98, 117–124, 133, 135, 136, 144, 162, 163,

Index

166, 167, 189, 192, 201, 209, 210, 216, 228, 252, 269 Spanish Steps, the, 251 Sparta, 108 Spartan, 108 Stack, Carol, 74 Starhawk, 74 Stoics, 51 Stony Brook, 57 St. Petersburg, 4 stuck, 8, 104, 139, 192, 196, 197, 205 Supreme Court, 44 Switzerland, 148, 250 Syria, 18, 38 Syrians, 2 Syrjämaa, Taina, 230, 237, 240, 255, 256 T Taiwan, 224 Taormina, 245, 247 Tartars, 80 Tavernier, Bernard, 261 taxis, 3 technology, 3, 4, 90, 91, 210, 212, 216, 217, 220, 279 temporal, 17, 28–31, 62, 114–117, 134–136, 217, 263 Thames, 4 thinking, 2, 35, 45, 52–66, 69, 72, 74, 78, 110, 131, 134, 137, 138, 140–142, 146, 153, 156, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 182, 188, 190–192, 196, 278 Thoreau, Henry David, 98 Thucydides, 107, 108, 111 time-zone, 2 Titanic, 5 Toscanelli, Arturo, 271 tour, 9, 10, 14, 15, 30, 32, 173, 177, 234, 254, 256, 257

  299

tourist, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13–15, 17, 22, 30–35, 37, 40, 41, 43, 46, 79, 88, 194, 228–230, 232, 233, 236–244, 246, 249–257 traffic, 14, 23, 24, 88, 89, 196, 212, 252 trains, 3, 53, 55, 90, 232, 234, 239, 246 Transatlantic, 276 transcendence, 135 transcontinental, 148, 149 transit, 2, 6, 8, 24, 52–55, 57, 58, 60–64, 88, 90–97, 130, 145, 155, 173, 181, 189, 190, 192, 193, 196–199, 203, 205, 283, 285 transitions, 189 translation, 98, 110, 132, 137, 147, 170, 190, 192, 193 transmigrantes, 198, 199 travel, 2–8, 15–17, 33, 35, 37, 38, 55, 59, 60, 64–66, 94, 95, 97, 100– 103, 106, 109, 110, 114, 117, 123, 128, 135, 170–172, 174, 187, 196, 209, 210, 212, 218, 226–247, 249–253, 255–259, 261–263, 270, 283 traveler, 38, 62, 102, 107–109, 170, 180, 183, 193, 228, 229, 233, 237, 239, 244, 249 Trevi Fountain, 251 Trump, Donald, 2 turbulence, 4 U Ulaanbaatar, 80, 82 UNESCO, 9, 39, 40, 193 United States, 63, 69, 71, 72, 151, 198–200, 219, 223–227, 262 universal, 5, 8, 23, 26, 93, 123, 157, 158, 233 Up In the Air, 3 Urry, John, 228, 254

300  Index V vacation/vacation leave, 262 vacation, 5, 96, 224, 261, 262 Vatican, the, 251 vehicle, 52, 55–60, 80, 82, 98 Venetian, 12–14, 18, 20, 39–42, 193, 252, 272 Venice, 9, 12–19, 21–24, 30, 32, 37, 39–42, 45, 46, 178, 182, 193, 194, 234, 235, 247, 252, 272, 282 Verrazzano, Giovanni da, 274 Vespucci, Amerigo, 271, 273, 276 vessel, 10, 54, 59 Vienna, 9, 39, 52 Vietnam, 8, 38, 224 Vinland, 272, 280 Virilio, Paul, 3 visitors, 3, 9, 35, 40, 80, 106, 107, 118, 119, 234, 241 W Waldsemüller, Martin, 279 Walker, Alice, 75 walking, 1, 2, 23, 29, 42, 51, 52, 54, 56, 63, 65, 66, 89, 90, 93, 95–98, 102, 130–132, 138–140, 145, 155, 171, 173 walls, 2, 32, 44, 51, 83, 115, 193, 196, 203 Walton, John K., 229, 254 wandering, 182, 191 war, 4, 7, 8, 25, 38, 74, 76, 82, 91, 94, 96, 111, 114–116, 124, 175–177, 180, 181, 184, 186, 198, 201, 203, 212, 220, 227, 234, 246, 248, 251, 268 warfare, 5, 38, 114, 216 Washington, Booker T., 72, 73 Washington, 72, 89, 98, 226 Washington Square, 223

water, 14, 16, 17, 19, 31, 32, 41, 53, 55, 57, 65, 76, 89, 90, 103, 118, 131, 132, 140, 141, 144, 145, 172, 190, 191, 194, 196, 197, 204, 205, 243, 247, 263, 280 way, 2, 3, 5, 6, 16, 17, 22, 23, 29, 41–45, 52, 53, 56, 59, 61–63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72–74, 92, 93, 96–98, 100–102, 104, 106–110, 121, 123, 130, 132, 135–143, 148, 153, 156, 157, 160–165, 167, 170–173, 177, 181–183, 185, 191, 205, 211, 218, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 237, 239, 242, 244, 245, 252, 267, 269, 271–273, 275, 277, 278, 281, 283–285 West, the, 25, 26, 89, 161, 282 Whitehead, Alfred North, 140 whiteness, 26, 44, 77 white privilege, 225 Whitman, Walt, 223, 226 wild, 75, 90, 92–94, 96–98, 103, 130, 146, 151, 152, 154, 156, 164, 167, 196, 245, 252 Willamette Valley, 89 Williams, Lawrence S., 242, 248, 257 Williams, Tennessee, 263 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 111 Wolff, Richard, 262 Wolff, Virginia, 52 wolves, 80, 84, 151–159, 162, 164–167 Wood, Arnold, 242, 245, 257 work, 1, 5, 15–17, 27, 28, 32, 34, 45, 53, 54, 62, 66, 69–72, 74, 78, 81, 94, 100, 106–108, 114, 118, 120, 132, 135, 136, 152, 155, 160, 165, 170, 174, 176, 179, 183, 184, 188, 201, 204, 209–214, 216–219, 224, 230, 239, 248, 261–263, 275

Index

workers, 26, 70, 91, 94, 211–213, 216, 217, 262 world, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 23, 24, 26, 29, 31, 35–40, 43, 55, 60, 62–65, 72, 73, 76, 78, 88–91, 93–96, 98, 100, 103, 106–111, 115, 117, 120, 123, 132, 134, 136, 144, 145, 148, 153, 155, 156, 159–168, 173, 175, 176, 180, 183, 188–190, 193, 198, 203, 204, 212, 214, 215, 218–220, 224, 227, 228, 234, 236, 244, 251, 253, 263, 264, 266–271, 273–275, 278, 279, 281–285 World City, 3 writing, 9, 51, 53, 54, 58–61, 65, 66, 78, 87, 88, 106, 107, 111, 135, 137, 170, 173–175, 182, 185,

  301

196, 214, 227–232, 234, 250, 253, 255, 268, 278 X xenophobia, 2 Y Yellowstone Park, 144, 154 Yellowstone River, 151, 161 Z Zen, 88, 92, 130–132, 138, 142, 146–148 Zeno, 141 Zizek, Slavoj, 79 zoos, 151