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Title: Overcoming Tourism
Author: Hakim Bey
Language: en
Topics: travel, commodification
Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/tourism

Hakim Bey

Overcoming Tourism

In the Old Days tourism didn’t exist. Gypsies, Tinkers and other true

nomads even now roam about their worlds at will, but no one would

therefore think of calling them «tourists».

Tourism is an invention of the 19^(th) century—a period of history which

sometimes seems to have stretched out to unnatural length. In many ways,

we are still living in the 19^(th) century.

The tourist seeks out Culture because—in our world—culture has

disappeared into the maw of the Spectacle culture has been torn down and

replaced with a Mall or a talkshow—because our education is nothing but

a preparation for a lifetime of work and consumption-because we

ourselves have ceased to create. Even though tourists appear to be

physically present in Nature or Culture, in effect one might call them

ghosts haunting ruins, lacking all bodily presence. They’re not really

there, but rather move through a mind-scape, an abstraction («Nature»,

«Culture»), collecting images rather than experience. All too frequently

their vacations are taken in the midst of other peoples’ misery and even

add to that misery.

Recently several people were assassinated in Egypt just for being

tourists. Behold …. the Future. Tourism and terrorism:—just what is the

difference?

Of the three archaic reasons for travel—call them «war», «trade», and

«pilgrimage»—which one gave birth to tourism? Some would automatically

answer that it must be pilgrimage. The pilgrim goes «there» to see, the

pilgrim normally brings back some souvenir; the pilgrim takes «time off»

from daily life; the pilgrim has nonmaterial goals. In this way, the

pilgrim foreshadows the tourist.

But the pilgrim undergoes a shift of consciousness, and for the pilgrim

that shift is real. Pilgrimage is a form of initiation, and initiation

is an opening to other forms of cognition.

We can detect something of the real difference between pilgrim and

tourist, however, by comparing their effects on the places they visit.

Changes in a place—a city, a shrine, a forest—may be subtle, but at

least they can be observed. The state of the soul may be a matter for

conjecture, but perhaps we can say something about the state of the

social.

Pilgrimage sites like Mecca may serve as great bazaars for trade and

they may even serve as centers of production, (like the silk industry of

Benares)—but their primary «product» is baraka or maria. These words

(one Arabic, one Polynesian) are usually translated as «blessing», but

they also carry a freight of other meanings.

The wandering dervish who sleeps at a shrine in order to dream of a dead

saint (one of the «People of the Tombs») seeks initiation or advancement

on the spiritual path, a mother who brings a sick child to Lourdes seeks

healing; a childless woman in Morocco hopes the Marabout will make her

fertile if she ties a rag to the old tree growing out of the grave; the

traveller to Mecca yearns for the very center of the Faith, and as the

caravans come within sight of the Holy City the hajji calls out

«Labbaïka Allabumma!» «I am here, O Lord!»

All these motives are summed up by the word baraka, which sometimes

seems to be a palpable substance, measurable in terms of increased

charisma or «luck». The shrine produces baraka. And the pilgrim takes it

away. But blessing is a product of the Imagination—and thus no matter

how many pilgrims take it away there’s always more. In fact, the more

they take, the more blessing the shrine can produce (because a popular

shrine grows with every answered prayer).

To say that baraka is «imaginal» is not to call it «unreal». It’s real

enough to those who feel it. But spiritual goods do not follow the rules

of supply and demand like material goods. The more demand for spiritual

goods, the more supply. The production of baraka is infinite.

By contrast, the tourist desires not baraka but cultural difference. The

pilgrim we might say—leaves the «secular space» of home and travels to

the «sacred space» of the shrine in order to experience the difference

between secular and sacred. But this difference remains intangible,

subtle, invisible to the «profane» gaze, spiritual, imaginal. Cultural

difference however is measurable, apparent, visible, material, economic,

social.

The imagination of the capitalist «first world» is exhausted. It cannot

imagine anything different. So the tourist leaves the homogenous space

of «home» for the heterogenous space of «foreign climes» not to receive

a «blessing» but simply to admire the picturesque, the mere view or

snapshot of difference, to see the difference.

The tourist consumes difference.

But the production of cultural difference is not infinite. It is not

«merely» imaginal. It is rooted in language, landscape, architecture,

custom, taste, smell. It is very physical. The more it is used up or

taken away, the less remains. The social can produce just so much

«meaning», just so much difference. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Over the centuries perhaps a given sacred place attracted millions of

pilgrims—and yet somehow despite all the gazing and admiring and praying

and souvenirbuying, this place retained its meaning. And now—after 20 or

30 years of tourism—that meaning has been lost. Where did it go? How did

this happen?

Tourism’s real roots do not lie in pilgrimage (or even in «fair» trade),

but in war. Rape and pillage were the original forms of tourism, or

rather, the first tourists followed directly in the wake of war, like

human vultures picking over battlefield carnage for imaginary booty—for

images.

Tourism arose as a symptom of an Imperialism that was total—economic,

political, and spiritual.

What’s really amazing is that so few tourists have been murdered by such

a meagre handful of terrorists. Perhaps a secret complicity exists

between these mirror-image foes. Both are displaced people, cut loose

from all mooring, drifting in a sea of images. The terrorist act exists

only in the image of the act without CNN, there survives only a spasm of

meaningless cruelty. And the tourist’s act exists only in the images of

that act, the snapshots and souvenirs; otherwise nothing remains but the

dunning letters of credit-card companies and a residue of «free mileage»

from some foundering airline. The terrorist and the tourist are perhaps

the most alienated of all the products of post-imperial capitalism. An

abyss of images separates them from the objects of their desire. In a

strange way they are twins.

Nothing ever really touches the life of the tourist. Every act of the

tourist is mediated. Anyone who’s ever witnessed a phalanx of Americans

or a busload of Japanese advancing on some ruin or ritual must have

noticed that even their collective gaze is mediated by the medium of the

camera’s multifaceted eye, and that the multiplicity of cameras,

videocams, and recorders forms a complex of shiny clicking scales in an

armor of pure mediation. Nothing organic penetrates this insectoid

carapace which serves as both protective critic and predatory mandible,

snapping up images, images, images. At its most extreme this mediation

takes the form of the guided tour, in which every image is interpreted

by a licensed expert, a psychopomp or guide of the Dead, a virtual

Virgil in the Inferno of meaninglessness—a minor functionary of the

Central Discourse and its metaphysics of appropriation—a pimp of

fleshless ecstasies.

The real place of the tourist is not the site of the exotic, but rather

the no-place place (literally the «utopia») of median space, liminal

space, inbetween space—the space of travel itself, the industrial

abstraction of the airport, or the machine-dimension of plane or bus.

So the tourist and the terrorist—those twin ghosts of the airports of

abstraction—suffer an identical hunger for the authentic. But the

authentic recedes whenever they approach it. Cameras and guns stand in

the way of that moment of love which is the hidden dream of every

terrorist and tourist. To their secret misery, all they can do is

destroy. The tourist destroys meaning, and the terrorist destroys the

tourist.

Tourism is the apotheosis and quintessence of «Commodity Fetishism.» It

is the ultimate Cargo Cult—the worship of «goods» that will never

arrive, because they have been exalted, raised to glory, deified,

worshipped and absorbed, all on the plane of pure spirit, beyond the

stench of mortality (or morality).

You buy tourism you get nothing but images. Tourism, like Virtual

Reality, is a form of Gnosis, of body-hatred and body-transcendence. The

ultimate tourist «trip» will take place in Cyberspace, and it will be.

CyberGnosis SM_

a trip to paranirvana

and back,

in the comfort of your

very own

«workstation.»

Jack in,

leave Earth

behind!

The modest goal of this little book is to address the individual

traveler who has decided to resist tourism.

Even though we may find it impossible in the end to «purify» ourselves

and our travel from every last taint and trace of tourism, we still feel

that improvement may be possible.

Not only do we disdain tourism for its vulgarity and its injustice, and

therefore wish to avoid any contamination (conscious or unconscious) by

its viral virulency we also lavish to understand travel as an act of

reciprocity rather than alienation. In other words, we don’t wish merely

to avoid the negativities of tourism, but even more to achieve positive

travel, which we envision as a productive and mutually enhancing

relation between self and other, guest and host a form of cross-cultural

synergy in which the whole exceeds the sum of parts.

We’d like to know if travel can be carried out according to a secret

economy of baraka, whereby not only the shrine but also the pilgrims

themselves have «blessings» to bestow.

Before the Age of the Commodity, we know, there was an Age of the Gift,

of reciprocity, of giving and receiving. We learned this from the tales

of certain travelers, who found remnants of the world of the Gift among

certain tribes, in the form of potlach or ritual exchange, and recorded

their observations of such strange practises.

Not long ago there still existed a custom among South Sea islanders of

travelling vast distances by outrigger canoe, without compass or

sextant, in order to exchange valuable and useless presents (ceremonial

art-objects rich in mana) from island to island in a complex pattern of

overlapping reciprocities.

We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have

been taken over by the Commodity—even though the networks of convivial

reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map—even though tourism seems

to have triumphed—even so—we continue to suspect that other pathways

still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps

even «secret»—pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of

the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free-spirits, known only to the

geomantic guerillas of the art of travel.

As a matter of fact, we don’t just «suspect» it. We know it. We know

there exists an art of travel.

Perhaps the greatest and subtlest practitioners of the art of travel

were the sufis, the mystics of Islam. Before the age of passports,

immunisations, airlines and other impediments to free travel, the sufis

wandered footloose in a world where borders tended to be more permeable

than nowadays, thanks to the transnationalism of Islam and the cultural

unity of Dar al-Islam, the Islamic world.

The great medieval Moslem travelers, like Ibn Battuta and Naser Khusraw,

have left accounts of vast journeys—Persia to Egypt, or even Morocco to

China—which never set foot outside a landscape of deserts, camels,

caravanserais, bazaars, and piety. Someone always spoke Arabic, however

badly, and Islamic culture permeated the remotest backwaters, however

superficially. Reading the tales of Sinbad the sailor (from the 1001

Nights) gives us the impression of a world where even the terra

incognita was still despite all marvels and oddities—somehow familiar,

somehow Islamic. Within this unity, which was not yet a uniformity, the

sufis formed a special class of travelers. Not warriors, not merchants,

and not quite ordinary pilgrims either, the dervishes represent a

spiritualization of pure nomadism.

According to the Koran, God’s Wide Earth and everything in it are

«sacred». not only as divine creations but also because the material

world is full of «waymarks» or signs of divine reality, Moreover, Islam

itself s is born between two journeys, Mohammad’s hijra or «Flight» from

Mecca to Medina, and his hajj, or return voyage. The hajj is the

movement toward the origin and center for every Moslem even today, and

the annual Pilgrimage has played a vital role not just in the religious

unity of Islam but also in its cultural unity.

Mohammad himself exemplifies every kind of travel in Islam:—his youth

with the Meccan caravans of Summer and Winter, as a merchant; his

campaigns as a warrior his triumph as a humble pilgrim. Although an

urban leader he is also the prophet of the Bedouin and himself a kind of

nomad, a «sojourner»—an «orphan». From this perspective travel can

almost be seen as a sacrament. Every religion sanctifies travel to some

degree, but Islam is virtually unimaginable without it.

The Prophet said, «Seek knowledge, even as far as China». From the

beginning Islam lifts travel above all «mundane» utilitarianism and

gives it an epistemological or even gnostic dimension. «The jewel that

never leaves the mine is never polished», says the sufi Saadi. To

«educate» is to «lead outside», to give the pupil a perspective beyond

parochiality and mere subjectivity.

Some sufis may have done all their traveling in the Imaginal World of

archetypal dreams and visions, but vast numbers of them took the

Prophet’s exhortations quite literally. Even today dervishes wander over

the entire Islamic world—but as late as the 19^(th) century they

wandered in veritable hordes, hundreds or even thousands at a time, and

covered vast distances. All in search of knowledge.

Unofficially there existed two basic types of wandering sufi: the

«gentleman-scholar» type, and the mendicant dervish. The former category

includes Ibn Battuta (who collected sufi initiations the way some

occidental gentlemen once collected masonic degrees); and on a much more

serious level—the «Greatest Shaykh» Ibn Arabi, who meandered slowly

through the 13^(th) century from his native Spain, across North Africa

through Egypt to Mecca, and finally to Damascus.

Ibn Arabi actually left accounts of his search for saints and adventures

on the road, which could be pieced together from his voluminous writings

to form a kind of rihla or «travel text» (a recognised genre of Islamic

literature) or autobiography. Ordinary scholars travelled in search of

rare texts on theology or jurisprudence, but Ibn Arabi sought only the

highest secrets of esotericism and the loftiest «openings» into the

world of divine illumination, for him every «journey to the outer

horizons» was also a «journey to the inner horizons» of spiritual

psychology and gnosis.

On the visions he experienced in Mecca alone he wrote a 12volume work

(The Meccan Revelations), and he has also left us precious sketches of

hundreds of his contemporaries, from the greatest philosophers of the

age to humble dervishes and «madmen», anonymous women saints and «Hidden

Masters». Ibn Arabi enjoyed a special relation with Khezr, the immortal

and unknown prophet, the «Green Man», who sometimes appears to wandering

sufis in distress, to rescue them from the desert, or to initiate them.

Khezr, in a sense, can be called the patron saint of the travelling

dervishes—and the prototype. (He first appears in the Koran as a

mysterious wanderer and companion of Moses in the desert.)

Christianity once included a few orders of wandering mendicants (in fact

St. Francis organised one after meeting with dervishes in the Holy Land,

who may have bestowed upon him a «cloak of initiation»—the famous

patchwork robe he was wearing when he returned to Italy)—but Islam

spawned dozens, perhaps hundreds of such orders.

As Sufism crystallised from the loose spontaneity of early days to an

institution with rules and grades, «travel for knowledge» was also

regularised and organised. Elaborate handbooks of duties for dervishes

were produced which included methods for turning travel into a very

specific form of meditation. The whole Sufi «path» itself was symbolised

in terms of intentional travel.

In some cases itineraries were fixed (e.g.,the Hajj); other involved

waiting for «signs» to appear, coincidences, intuitions, «adventures»

such as those which inspired the travels of the Arthurian knights. Some

orders limited the time spent in any one place to 40 days; others made a

rule of never sleeping twice in the same place. The strict orders, such

as the Naqshbandis, turned travel into a kind of full-time choreography,

in which every movement was preordained and designed to enhance

consciousness.

By contrast, the more heterodox orders (such as the Qalandars) adopted a

«rule» of total spontaneity and abandon—«permanent unemployment» as one

of them called it—an insouciance of bohemian proportions—a «droppingout»

at once both scandalous and completely traditional. Colorfully dressed,

carrying their begging bowls, axes, and standards, addicted to music and

dance, carefree and cheerful (sometimes to the point of

«blameworthiness»!), orders such as the Nematollahis of 19^(th) century

Persia grew to proportions that alarmed both sultans and

theologians—many dervishes were executed for «heresy». Today the true

Qalandars survive mostly in India, where their lapses from orthodoxy

include a fondness for hemp and a sincere hatred of work. Some are

charlatans, some are simply bums—but a suprizing number of them seem to

be people of attainment …. how can I put it? …. people of

self-realization, marked by a distinct aura of grace, or baraka.

All the different types of sub travel we’ve described are united by

certain shared vital structural forces. One such force might be called a

«magical» worldview, a sense of life that rejects the «merely» random

for a reality of signs and wonders, of meaningful coincidences and

«unveilings». As anyone who’s ever tried it will testify, intentional

travel immediately opens one up to this «magical» influence.

A psychologist might explain this phenomenon (either with awe or with

reductionist disdain) as «subjective» ; while the pious believer would

take it quite literally. From the sun point of view neither

interpretation rules out the other, nor suffices in itself, to explain

away the marvels of the Path. In sufism, the «objective» and the

«subjective» are not considered opposites, but complements. From the

point of view of the two-dimensional thinker (whether scientific or

religious) such paradoxology smacks of the forbidden.

Another force underlying all forms of intentional travel can be

described by the Arabic word adab. On one level adab simply means «good

manners» and in the case of travel these manners are based on the

ancient customs of desert nomads, for whom both wandering and

hospitality are sacred acts. In this sense the dervish shares both the

privileges and the responsibilities of the guest.

Bedouin hospitality is a clear survival of the primordial economy of the

Gift—a relation of reciprocity. The wanderer must be taken in (the

dervish must be fed)—but thereby the wanderer assumes a role prescribed

by ancient custom—and must give back something to the host. For the

bedouin this relation is almost a form of clientage:—the breaking of

bread and sharing of salt constitute a sort of kinship. Gratitude is not

a sufficient response to such generosity. The traveler must consent to a

temporary adoption—anything less would offend against adab.

Islamic society retains at least a sentimental attachment to these

rules, and thus creates a special niche for the dervish, that of the

full-time guest. The dervish returns the gifts of society with the gift

of baraka. In ordinary pilgrimage the traveler receives baraka from a

place, but the dervish reverses the flow and brings baraka to a place.

The sufi may think of himself (or herself) as a permanent pilgrim—but to

the ordinary stay-at-home people of the mundane world the sufi is a kind

of perambulatory shrine.

Now tourism in its very structure breaks the reciprocity of host and

guest. In English, a «host» may have either guests or parasites. The

tourist is a parasite for no amount of money can pay for hospitality.

The true traveler is a guest and thus serves a very real function, even

today, in societies where the ideals of hospitality have not yet faded

from the «collective mentality». To be a host, in such societies, is a

meritorious act. Therefore, to be a guest is also to give merit.

The modern traveler who grasps the simple spirit of this relation will

be forgiven many lapses in the intricate ritual of adab (how many cups

of coffee? Where to put one’s feet? How to be entertaining? How to show

gratitude? etc.) peculiar to a specific culture. And if one bothers to

master a few of the traditional forms of adab, and to deploy them with

heartfelt sincerity, then both guest and host will gain more than they

put into the relation and this more is the unmistakable sign of the

presence of the Gift.

Another level of meaning of the word adab connects it with culture

(since culture can be seen as the sum of all manners and customs); in

modern usage the Department of «Arts and Letters» at a University would

be called Adabiyyat. To have adab in this sense is to be «polished»

(like that well-traveled gem)—but this has nothing necessarily to do

with «fine arts» or literacy or being a cityslicker or even being

«cultured». It is a matter of the «heart».

«Adab» is sometimes given as a one-word definition of schism. But

insincere manners (ta ‘arof in Persian) and insincere culture alike are

shunned by the sufi—«There is no ta’arof in Tasssawuf [Sufism]», as the

dervishes say; ..Darvishi» is an adjectival synonym for informality, the

laid-back quality of the people of Heart—and for spontaneous adab, so to

speak. The true guest and host never make an obvious effort to fulfil

the «rules» of reciprocity—they may follow the ritual scrupulously, or

they many bend the forms creatively, but in either case they will give

their actions a depth of sincerity that manifests as natural grace. Adab

is a kind of love.

A complement of this «technique» (or «Zen») of human relations can be

found in the sufi manner of relating to the world in general. The

«mundane» world—of social deceit and negativity, of usurious emotions

inauthentic consciousness («mauvaise conscience»), boorishness,

ill-will, inattention, blind reaction, false spectacle, empty discourse,

etc. etc.—all this no longer holds any interest for the traveling

dervish. But those who say that the dervish has abandoned «this world»

«God’s Wide Earth»—would be mistaken.

The dervish is not a Gnostic Dualist who hates the biosphere (which

certainly includes the imagination and the emotions, as well as «matter»

itself). The early Moslem ascetics certainly closed themselves off from

everything. When Rabiah, the woman saint of Basra, was urged to come out

of her house and «witness the wonders of God’s creation», she replied,

«Come into the house and see them», i.e., come into the heart of

contemplation of the oneness which is above the manyness of reality.

«Contraction» and «Expansion» are both sufi terms for spiritual states.

Rabiah was manifesting Contraction: a kind of sacred melancholia which

has been metaphorized as the «Caravan of Winter», of return to Mecca

(the center, the heart), of inferiority, and of ascesis or self-denial.

She was not a world-hating Dualist, nor even a moralistic flesh-hating

puritan. She was simply manifesting a certain specific kind of grace.

The wandering dervish however manifests a state more typical of Islam in

its most exuberant energies. He indeed seeks Expansion, spiritual joy

based on the sheer multiplicity of the divine generosity in material

creation. (Ibn Arabi has an amusing «proof» that this world is the best

world—for, if it were not, then God would be ungenerous—which is absurd.

Q.E.D.) In order to appreciate the multiple way-marks of the Wide Earth

precisely as the unfolding of this generosity, the sufi cultivates what

might be called the theophanic gaze:— the opening of the «Eye of the

Heart» to the experience of certain places, objects people, events as

locations of the «shining-through» of divine Light.

The dervish travels, so to speak, both in the material world and in the

«World of Imagination» simultaneously. But for the eye of the heart

these worlds interpenetrate at certain points. One might say that they

mutually reveal or «unveil» each other. Ultimately, they are «one»—and

only our state of tranced inattention, our mundane consciousness,

prevents us from experiencing this «deep» identity at every moment. The

purpose of intentional travel, with its «adventures» and its uprooting

of habits, is to shake loose the dervish from all the trance-effects of

ordinariness. Travel, in other words, is meant to induce a certain state

of consciousness or «spiritual state»—that of Expansion.

For the wanderer, each person one meets might act as an «angel», each

shrine one visits may unlock some initiatic dream, each experience of

Nature may vibrate with the presence of some «spirit of place». Indeed,

even the mundane and ordinary may suddenly be seen as numinous (as in

the great travel haiku of the Japanese Zen poet Basho)—a face in the

crowd at a railway station, crows on telephone wires, sunlight in a

puddle….

Obviously one doesn’t need to travel to experience this state. But

travel can be used—that is, an art of travel can be acquired—to maximise

the chances for attaining such a state. It is a moving meditation, like

the Taoist martial arts. The Caravan of Summer moved outward, out of

Mecca, to the rich trading lands of Syria and Yemen. Likewise the

dervish is «moving out» (it’s always «moving day»), heading forth,

taking off, on «perpetual holiday» as one poet expressed it, with an

open Heart, an attentive eye (and other senses), and a yearning for

Meaning, a thirst for knowledge. One must remain alert, since anything

might suddenly unveil itself as a sign. This sounds like a kind of

«paranoia» —although «metanoia» might be a better term and indeed one

finds «madmen» amongst the dervishes, «attracted ones», overpowered by

divine influxions, lost in the Light. In the Orient the insane are often

cared for and admired as helpless saints, because «mental illness» may

sometimes appear as a symptom of too much holiness rather than too

little «reason». Hemp’s popularity amongst the dervishes can be

attributed to its power to induce a kind of intuitive attentiveness

which constitutes a controllable insanity: —herbal metanoia. But travel

in itself can intoxicate the heart with the beauty of theophanic

presence. It’s a question of practise—the polishing of the jewel—removal

of moss from the rolling stone.

In the old days (which are still going on in some remote parts of the

East) Islam thought of itself as a whole world, a wide world, a space

with great latitude within which Islam embraced the whole of society and

nature. This latitude appeared on the social level as tolerance. There

was room enough, even for such marginal groups as mad wandering

dervishes. Sufism itself or at least its austere orthodox and «sober»

aspect—occupied a central position in the cultural discourse. «Everyone»

understood intentional travel by analogy with the Hail—everyone

understood the dervishes, even if they disapproved.

Nowadays however Islam views itself as a partial world, surrounded by

unbelief and hostility, and suffering internal ruptures of every sort.

Since the 19^(th) century Islam has lost its global consciousness and

sense of its own wideness and completeness. No longer therefore can

Islam easily find a place for every marginalized individual and group

within a pattern of tolerance and social order. The dervishes now appear

as an intolerable difference in society. Every Moslem must now be the

same, united against all outsiders, and struck from the same prototype.

Of course Moslems have always «imitated» the Prophet and viewed his

image as the norm—and this has acted as a powerful unifying force for

style and substance within Dar alIslam. But «nowadays» the puritans and

reformers have forgotten that this «imitation» was not directed only at

an early-medieval Meccan merchant named Mohammad but also at the insan

alkamil (the «Perfect Man» or «Universal Human»), an ideal of inclusion

rather than exclusion, an ideal of integral culture, not an attitude of

purity in peril, not xenophobia disguised as piety, not totalitarianism,

not reaction.

The dervish is persecuted nowadays in most of the Islamic world.

Puritanism always embraces the most atrocious aspects of modernism in

its crusade to strip the Faith of «medieval accretions» such as popular

sufism. And surely the way of the wandering dervish cannot thrive in a

world of airplanes and oil-wells, of nationalist/chauvinist hostilities

(and thus of impenetrable borders), and of a puritanism which suspects

all difference as a threat. This puritanism has triumphed not only in

the East, but rather closer to home as well. It is seen in the «time

discipline» of modern tooLate-Capitalism, and in the porous rigidity of

consumerist hyperconformity, as well as in the bigoted reaction and

sex-hysteria of the «Christian Right». Where in all this can we find

room for the poetic (and parasitic!) life of Aimless Wandering—the life

of Chuang Tzu (who coined this slogan) and his Taoist progeny—the life

of Saint Francis and his shoeless devotees—the life of (for example) Nur

All Shah Isfahani, a 19^(th) century sufi poet who was executed in Iran

for the awful heresy of meandering-dervishism?

Here is the flip side of the «problem of tourism»:—the problem of the

disappearance of «aimless wandering». Possibly the two are directly

related, so that the more tourism becomes possible, the more dervishism

becomes impossible. In fact, we might well ask if this little essay on

the delightful life of the dervish possesses the least bit of relevance

for the contemporary world. Can this knowledge help us to overcome

tourism, even within our own consciousness and life? Or is it merely an

exercize in nostalgia for lost possibilities—a futile indulgence in

romanticism?

Well, yes and no. Sure, I confess I’m hopelessly romantic about the form

of the dervish life, to the extent that for a while I turned my back on

the mundane world and followed it myself. Because of course, it hasn’t

really disappeared. Decadent yes—but not gone forever. What little I

know about travel I learned in those few years—I owe a debt to «medieval

accretions» I can never pay—and I’ll never regret my «escapism» for a

single moment. BUT—I don’t consider the form of dervishism to be the

answer to the «problem of tourism.» The form has lost most of its

efficacy. There’s no point in trying to «preserve» it (as if it were a

pickle, or a lab specimen)—there’s nothing quite so pathetic as mere

«survival».

But: beneath the charming outer forms of dervishism lies the conceptual

matrix, so to speak, which we’ve called intentional travel. On this

point we should suffer no embarrassment about «nostalgia». We have asked

ourselves whether or not we desire a means to discover the art of

travel, whether we want and will to overcome «the inner tourist», the

false consciousness which screens us from the experience of the Wide

World’s way-marks. The way of the dervish (or of the Taoist, the

Franciscan, etc.) interests us—finally—only to the extent that it can

provide us with a key—not THE Key, perhaps—but .... a key. And of

course—it does.

One fundamental key to success in Travel is of course attentiveness. We

call it «paying attention» in English & «prêter attention» in French (in

Arabic, however, one gives attention) suggesting that we’re as stingy

with our attentiveness as we are with our money. Quite often it seems

that no one is «paying attention», that everyone is hoarding their

consciousness—what? saving it for a rainy day?—and damping down the

fires of awareness lest all available fuel be consumed in a single

holocaust of unbearable knowing.

This model of consciousness seems suspiciously «Capitalist» however—as

if indeed our attention were a limited resource, once spent forever

irrecoverable. A usury of perception now appears:—we demand interest on

our payment-of-attention, as if it were a loan rather than an expense.

Or as if our consciousness were threatened by an entropic «heat-death»,

against which the best defense must consist of a dull mediocre

trance-state of grudging half-attention—a miserliness of psychic

resources—a refusalto notice the unexpected or to savour the

miraculousness of the ordinary—a lack of generosity.

But what if we treated our perceptions as gifts rather than payments?

What if we gave our attention instead of paying it? According to the law

of reciprocity, the gift is returned with a gift—there is no

expenditure, no scarcity, no debt against Capital, no penury, no

punishment for giving our attention away, and no end to the potentiality

of attentiveness.

Our consciousness is not a commodity, nor is it a contractual agreement

between the Cartesian ego and the abyss of Nothingness, nor is it simply

a function of some meat-machine with a limited warranty. True,

eventually we wear out and break. In a certain sense the hoarding of our

energies makes sense—we «save» ourselves for the truly important

moments, the breakthroughs, the «peak experiences».

But if we picture ourselves as shallow coin-purses—if we barricade the

«doors of perception» like fearful peasants at the howling of boreal

wolves—if we never «pay attention»—how will we recognise the approach

and advent of those precious moments, those openings?

We need a model of cognition that emphasises the «magic» of

reciprocity:—to give attention is to receive attention, as if the

universe in some mysterious way responds to our cognition with an influx

of effortless grace. If we convinced ourselves that attentiveness

follows a rule of «synergy» rather than a law of depletion, we might

begin to overcome in ourselves the banal mundanity of quotidian

inattention, and open ourselves to «higher states.»

In any case, the fact remains that unless we learn to cultivate such

states, travel will never amount to more than tourism. And for those of

us who are not already adepts at the Zen of travel, the cultivation of

these states does indeed demand an initial expenditure of energy. We

have inhibitions to repress, hesitations to conquer, habits of

introversion or bookishness to break, anxieties to sublimate. Our

third-rate stay-at-home consciousness seems safe and cozy compared to

the dangers and discomforts of the Road with its eternal novelty, its

constant demands on our attention. «Fear of freedom» poisons our

unconscious, despite our conscious desire for freedom in travel. The art

we’re seeking seldom occurs as a natural talent. It must be cultivated

practised perfected. We must summon up the will for intentional travel.

It’s a truism to complain that difference is disappearing from the

world—and it’s true, too. But it’s sometimes amazing to discover how

resilient and organic the different can be. Even in America, land of

Malls and tv’s, regional differences not only survive but mutate and

thrive in the interstices, in the cracks that criss-cross the monolith,

beneath the notice of the Media Gaze, invisible even to the local

bourgeoisie. If all the world is becoming one-dimensional, we need to

look between the dimensions.

I think of travel as fractal in nature. It takes place off the

map-as-text, outside the official Consensus, like those hidden and

embedded patterns that nestle within the infinite bifurcations of

nonlinear equations in the strange world of chaos mathematics. In truth

the world has not been completely mapped, because people and their

everyday lives have been excluded from the map, or treated as «faceless

statistics», or forgotten. In the fractal dimensions of unofficial

reality all human beings—and even a great many «places»—remain unique

and different. «Pure» and «unspoiled»? Maybe not. Maybe nobody and

nowhere was ever really pure. Purity is a will-o-the-wisp, and perhaps

even a dangerous form of totalitarianism. Life is gloriously impure.

Life drifts.

In the 1950’s the French Situationists developed a technique for travel

which they called the derive, the «drift.» They were disgusted with

themselves for never leaving the usual ruts and pathways of their

habit-driven lives; they realised they’d never even seen Paris. They

began to carry out structureless random expeditions through the city,

hiking or sauntering by day, drinking by night, opening up their own

tight little world into a terra incognita of slums, suburbs, gardens,

and adventures. They became revolutionary versions of Baudelaire’s

famous flaneur, the idle stroller, the displaced subject of urban

capitalism. Their aimless wandering became insurrectionary praxis.

And now, something remains possible—aimless wandering, the sacred drift.

Travel cannot be confined to the permissable (and deadening) gaze of the

tourist, for whom the whole world is inert, a lump of picturesqueness,

waiting to be consumed—because the whole question of permission is an

illusion. We can issue our own travel permits. We can allow ourselves to

participate, to experience the world as a living relation not as a

theme-park. We carry within ourselves the hearts of travelers, and we

don’t need any experts to define and limit our more-than-fractal

complexities, to «interpret» for us, to «guide» us, to mediate our

experience for us, to sell us back the images of our desires.

The sacred drift is born again. Keep it secret.