As I sit in the Thunderbird 18, from Kanazawa to Kyoto, lulled by the gorgeous rhymths of the train, I get back to thinking about the question of Why One Travels. If one of my fundamental theories is correct, then we do whatever we do for one or more of the following reasons: Utility, Pleasure and Signalling. It is easier to understand the signalling aspect of travel (Oh! look at us we're so worldly and well-travelled) and the pleasure aspect (Being able to get away from the routines and responsilibites, the thrill of seeing new sites and trying new things, the freedom, atleast in theory, that your open day allows) but, being the amateur evolutionist that I am, it is the component of utility that most intrigues me. I want all these sights and smells and sounds and tastes to do something to me, to somehow transform me for the better, to inspire me, to give me memories and data for me to look back later in life and marvel at what all I've managed to see/ do. Understandably though I don't know what the end result should look like. It is, in a way, a pilgrimage only that you're not visiting a shrine with a list of wishes but are going for darshan, to see and marvel and let the deity shower its blessings on you. Its absolutely fascinating, all that we do without enquiring, let alone discovering, what motivates our actions.
Travel in itself is such a rich metaphor, actually a microcosm, for life itself that it seems little wonder that so many storytellers love portraying journeys. There are moments when I want to get super busy and 'extract' and stuff my mind with as many sights and sounds as I can that I can then use to weave into stories for an audience when I get back home. Other times I want to use the unregimented nature of these days to take a breather and think a bit about my own life and projects I want to work on etc. And there are times when I want to zoom out and just look at the narrative of my own life, and how far I've come in the, especially, last 2 years. Travel used to create immense melancholy inside me- I'd just be overawed at the size and complexity of the world, and how I'd never be able to learn even about a tiny part of it. In the last couple of years though I've started enjoying it a lot more- I'm already making plans to visit Hungary and Czechia this time next year. Ofcourse a part of it is simply how I've changed from being lost a lot in my head to shfiting the focus to more sensual and material pleasures- less theory, more practice as it were. I've replaced guilt with a shrug so that helps too. I definitely read and research less, and strive less to know- This is an aspect I don't appreciate as much but its helping my mental health immensely. Most importantly, I'm not seeking, beseeching answers (clarity & consistency) from life as I used to. Part of it is middle-aged laziness and just walking with the tribe and forsaking some of the individualist streak, part of it is genuine happiness with my activities and dividing life into projects (with all the faults and limitations of that approach) instead of travelling with the big, convoluted, shape-shifting mess in my head, and part of it is something akin to resignation but not that negative- more to do with understanding and accepting my own smallness but not letting it turn into fatalism. I suppose all this is a roundabout way of saying I'm in that state of my life where I'm mentally, emotionally, physically comfortable (ofcourse there are bad days but they're few) and with the intertia has set in a comforting certainty in ones assumptions and priors. Which, when I think about it, makes me slightly nervous and wary because for the first time in years I'm not being somewhat-paranoid and taking my eye off the ball more and more, and I know this is the exact time (as the prophecies in myths tell us) when the black swan event will hit me. I don't know if my act of not letting that knowledge affect me too much is hubris or intelligence.
Tokyo was an absolute blast- the scale of the city is absolutely jaw-dropping. After 4 busy days of ramen eating and 20km-a-day walking and art-gallery-and-museum hopping and street kart driving and sovenir shopping and day trip to Mt. Fuji and bullet train riding and seeing manga-and-anime shops and visiting the Imperial Palace, it was a good respite to spend a much more relaxed day in Kanazawa. Now, onto Kyoto which I'm excited about but put one way I'm content with the trip already- it has been pucca paisa-vasool (I wish there was a less cringe-inducing replacement to that phrase). The Fuji day trip was sort of disappointing reminding us in its commercialisation a lot of the Blue Mountains Park. The mountain itself, despite being only partially visible, was a sight to behold and the Shinkansen onward journey was good fun. But the multi-phased journey, that went on and on for about 3 hours didn’t seem worth it. Having said that, we’d still have been unhappy if on a 15-day Japan trip we wouldn’t have seen Fuji. So dammed either way. But I guess, going back to the long-journeys-are-microcosms thought, not only is some disappointment inevitable but also desirable. Or maybe they're the lies we tell ourselves to make life more manageable which, again, when you think about it, is probably not a bad thing at all.
I've been documenting the journey with a lot of my 15-second-ish clips that I hope to turn into a film when I get back. By manipulating and working with that material, by aesthetically and interestingly decontextualising those images and sounds, I hope to reveal and communicate a certain part of travel which is about still going through time, as always, but that's spedup or slowed down owing to the newer experiences. One of the interesting things that’s happened to me over the last few months, since the seed of day night day night started to germinate in my head, has been how useful shooting/ writing are to focusing one’s consciousness. I used to think that by engaging in capture meant missing out on a certain kind of expansive pure experience but now I’m beginning to understand how it has its uses, in forcing one to focus on what’s in the frame. It must be said though that what film gives it also takes away. What it provides in spatial context, in the immediacy of being, it takes away in temporal context- material, spiritual, and mythical. Film forces you to see out but I'm not sure if at the cost of seeing in. I'm also logging places and tracing paths on maps because that too will provide a different view into the trip. Finally, because neither of those will provide the most direct access to the thoughts swirling in my head which admittedly are quite few - the medium has changed the fuckin' message - I'm blogging. Now, because my primary focus is on images, I'm not asking interesting questions of history, culture, socioeconomics but spending more time in trying to the capture the sensual experience. I'm both relieved with the lack of incessant chatter in my head and also missing the interesting (atleast for myself) questions and theories that pop up.
No comments:
Post a Comment