“Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmellow pies,
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers,
That grow so incredibly high” Lennon & McCartney
You don’t have to drop acid to feel the childish thrill of traveling into unknown places. In Nigel Leask’s Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, he cites the work of Kames, who ”formulated the aesthetics of distance in terms of a rhetorical question which illustrates the dynamic relationship between curiosity and its cognates such as novelty, singularity, and wonder” (25). So, moving away from Bruno Latour, where the “mobility” of curious discoveries and collected objects is central to the purpose and context of scientific travel, Kames sees the retention of “distance” as essential to maintaining the allure of travel writing. Desire to forage among the new and fantastical could be a described as a circle of confabulation, a half-real half-conjured memory, a recurrent proclivity to seek new experiences valued for their ephemeral connection to remote lands and peoples. “Seeing” is believing, but seeing from a distance is conjuring too.
I can name all the places I’ve been that I think count as distant, and they are not many. For example, the closest I ever came to leaving the U.S. was a year in Hawaii, so I still harbor childish notions of what it means to travel and what I might find there. Rare and wonderful as the a Pacific island can be, the reality of day-to-day activities lets the some of the air out of those fanciful thoughts, but still bobbing and hobbling closer to the earth.
As a child I remember asking people from “distant” places like New York State what the birds, trees, and mountains looked like there. People seemed remarkably unimpressed with the question and not many offered anything more than “pretty much same as here, only some bigger, some smaller.” The best answer was about trees: “The branches of pine trees back East grow all curly, not straight like these.” I sat with that one for a long time. Twenty years or so later I went on a trip to the East coast and I see one of those twisted armed trees. The arms curled much more vigorously and energetically in my confabulated trees.
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2 comments:
Interesting bit at the end there. It does often seem as if imagination, especially as the result of memory can create a more vivid experience than the real thing. I wonder if that's what you've been getting at when you mention subjectivity in class- that the imagined at long distance will often times be exaggerated or at least imagined differently than how it really went down.
I agree with Amir -- interesting bit at the end there. It reminds me of the 8th grade Washington D.C. trip. I'm from Washington and so I was with a group of students from Olympia. We met a group of students from South Carolina. The S. Carolina students asked us if we had roads and electricity up in Washington, they imagined it as a huge forest. We laughed and asked them if they had dirt roads and lived on a plantation. Of course I doubt everyone was totally serious, but the point of conjuring and seeing from a distance based on a subjective position, I think, can be see in this anecdote as well as yours...
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