Many friends are away, going away or just back from holidays - I must say I have no temptation to rush off to warm countries to get away from it all; my last proper holiday was in the summer of 2014 (North Wales), my last winter holiday in early 2011 (Beskid Wyspowy).
I have no desire to visit the Far East or Africa or Latin America. The spirit of the America I have yearned for in a past-life way has long evaporated (David Bowie's prescient lyrics to This is Not America were written 35 years ago). I get strong flashbacks whenever I read about rural USA in the 1950s, but today, I'm expecting it's turned into uniform landscape of malls and intersections. Scandinavia... maybe, but I'm not feeling any great drive to go there.
No, I'm happy enough shuttling between Warsaw and London and deepening my knowledge of my homelands, usually on business but sometimes in my spare time. (Business and leisure overlap, I work in my free time, I enjoy my work.) Asceticism in the sense of living a simple life, unadorned by display through fineries, though in a large, clean, comfortable house, is my way.
For me, the concept of qualia, and qualia memory (or more specifically memory of qualia I have experienced) is crucial. Those unbidden flashbacks that capture the essence of spirit of place and time are a deep part of me, a spiritual part. I am going about my daily routine when suddenly I feel exactly as I did the moment I was there, another time, another place. That road coming down the hill from the woods, somewhere west of Henley on Thames, the scented pines and dunes above Stella Plage, the spire of a church solitary against a flat Mazovian horizon at harvest time.
Such flashbacks are so precious to me - they are unique to me (the phenomenon itself isn't, but the content of the flashbacks are); they are what makes me different to everyone else. We can all agree to the weight of this desk, the processing power of this laptop, the amount of tea in my mug - but we have no insight, whatever, into each others' consciousness. How I see the blue of the sky may differ from how you see it. Or he or she sees it. Or may be the same - we have no way of knowing.
You go abroad, you come back, money's spent, what's left? Memories and snapshots - and that's all. Over the years a scattered memory image of places you've visited overlap. All-inclusive beach holidays that could have been in Tunisia, Thailand or the Dominican Republic blur into one; that's not my thing. "I'm going to rest," you may say - this fails to move me. Spirit of place must be meaningful, personal; in this respect I am more Cat than Dog.
As the recent past fades, we turn to history. I can summon up a spirit of the age here and there - Victorian and Edwardian England, fin de siècle France, the Pripet Marshes a long while back, medieval monasteries - and that flashback to India, the Raj. Some combinations of time and place are stronger than others, some don't resonate at all.
Sticking to where I know will strengthen and focus future flashbacks to two countries, two geographies in time.
To quote William Wordsworth "For oft when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood/They flash upon that inward eye/That is the bliss of solitude" - the first serious poem I learned by heart, 50 years ago, and that line keeps coming back. I know full well what Wordsworth meant.
This time last year:
Tamka and Smolna in black & white
This time three years ago:
15 years under one roof
This time five years ago:
Białystok: Ipswich of the East
This time six years ago:
Sadness at the death of Tadeusz Mosz
This time seven years ago:
Interpreting vs. translating vs. explaining
This time eight years ago:
More than just an Iluzjon
This time nine years ago:
Oldschool photochallenge
This time ten years ago:
Warsaw's wonderful nooks and crannies
This time 11 years ago:
Viaduct to the airport at ul. Poleczki almost ready
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4 comments:
Me neither. With several friends venturing far away, I am not tempted to go any further than to Medditerenean Sea coast
Qualia being what they are, the content of yours is not directly accessible to me, nor mine to yours, but the form is familiar, as are your musings on travel, and the interrelatedness of the two.
The last real holiday I was on was in 2001. I’ve traveled often between Warsaw and rural Kent since and before, though. The last few years however have seen me leave Warsaw on Thursday or Friday for rural Lubelszczyzna, where I was born, and return to Warsaw on Sunday evenings. I care for my mum and work in the 14-“ar” garden surrounding it.
I have mixed feelings about traveling to distant lands too and when my three-time-a-year holidaying students tell me of their absolutely necessary peregrinations “to get away from it all”, trotting out the familiar guff about travel broadening their horizons, I respond - with a mixture of disdain and envy - that there are interesting places in my head I haven’t been to yet, and for that I don’t have to leave my armchair. The whole truth is more complicated, of course: being self-employed and a carer I have to order my priorities differently.
But there are places I’d like to go to, again, in my life, and there is a reason. I remember a chance conversation with a woman, in the spot before me in a queue for the tills in a Dover supermarket, 19 years ago. One thing led to another and I said I was just about to depart for a few weeks to South Africa, for the first time in my life. Herself a visitor to SA in the past, she said my most “sensational” experience upon landing would be “the land smell”, which I would remember for the rest of my life. Pressed to elaborate, she steadfastly but whimsically refused.
I had been familiar with the concept of land smell from my American literature class, reading accounts of the European settlers in North America. So I expected to be swept off my feet by the smell of jacarandas, bougainvillea, knobwood, mopane and marula trees, etc. Instead, my senses were assaulted by muck. Muck mixed with earth. Just as fast though, the assault turned into reconciliation, ineffable flashbacks haunting my mind for months and years to come. I stayed at a lodge on the edge of Kruger Park.
The first ten years of my life were spent on a farm in Lubelszczyzna, with no running water in the house and plenty of muck in the farmyard. I had internalized that smell to the point where I took no notice of it. Life on the African savannah or bushveld is a fulfillment of a ritual familiar to farm life and rural existence anywhere - a ritual of mating, eating and excreting. It is what happens and what people talk about.
(Continued in the next post)
@Student SGH - Med - Spain, Portugal,but far from any crowds. I've been to the Iberian peninsula five times and appreciate it. But no beach holidays for me.
@Jacek Koba:"there are interesting places in my head I haven’t been to yet, and for that I don’t have to leave my armchair" So true. Last night I had a long and complex dream in which there was another planet close enough to Earth for mankind to have started colonising several decades ago. I was commuting between the two - but the Presidential elections in the US were on in the background - Trump vs Buttigeig. We can travel to wherever we want to in our imaginations.
I'm reminded of Wittgenstein's statement (I paraphrase) that one's ability to think is proportional to one's vocabulary. Perhaps the experienced that you describe depend upon a measure of imagination?
The alternative, trying to satiate oneself with experience (or, indeed, television) requires little imagination. Just think of holiday selfies in each of which the subject is seated in another bar with another drink.
I must admit that, right now, I would quite like to be somewhere warm. (But, not wanting to struggle through airports, I shall wear warmer clothes. Then my cat will clamber upon my lap, something that couldn't happen if I were to travel.)
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