The Semantics of Travel
I suppose definitions are like mathematical models: they simplify complex ideas.
In 1967, legendary mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (of the famed Mandelbrot set) published a seminal paper: "How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension".
The basic idea was that upon increasingly closer inspection of the British coastline, a definitive accounting of its total length becomes all the more challenging.
Apart from putting fractals at the forefront of mathematical thought, the geographic issue holds a semantic appeal. How do you measure anything, definitely, let alone something fluid and dynamic?
How do you identify borders? And how do you identify someone traveling along those borders?
Working in the media around 2015, these questions about wandering identities weren’t merely philosophical fodder: real people were dying on makeshift boats trying to make their way into Europe.
In February 2022 people started fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
How do you identify these people when you try to tell parts of their story? Is refugee the right word? Migrant? Asylum seeker?
Naming is a political act, and it is also a legal one: misrepresenting a group can be costly in terms of complaints and legal action. And a footnote can be as damaging as any headline.
Out of Eden
One great source of inspiration is National Geographic reporter Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk.
In his decade-long, 24,000 mile foot journey around the world, the award-winning reporter retraces the steps of our ancestors as they walked across and out of Africa, slowly colonizing a now-connected world.
His initial insight? Flying from one region to another makes you miss important parts of the story you want to cover. So he walks. His quest for grand universal truths reveals ideas about interconnectedness, borders, climate change and tribal lines.
Upon reading a previous newsletter entry, a friend of mine sent me a long interview with Québec intellectual Serge Bouchard, where the thinker dismisses air travel as a globalizing americanization of the world.
Getting in a plane and landing somewhere else, he argues, is the opposite of travel.
Bouchard, who was recently mis-identified as a First Nations writer by ChatGPT, argues that a Westerner can never really know a Bangkok citizen. It would take forty years of immersion to understand the Other’s reality.
The Tourist
In a sense I agree with the observation, as I feel an immense distance with the locals I brush up against in Singapore Hawker Centres.
Unless I’ve spent my life with the family working inside the busy kitchen cube, speaking the language, understanding the nuances of tone and worship, tasting the specific textures of their meals, and squatting alongside them, there’s no real way I can connect with them, is there?
I don’t know. When I go up to a vendor, and ask if they can open the beer I bought at another stall, and they jokingly tell me it’s going to be $5 to $10, I feel like for a second I have laughed at a joke I’ve heard everywhere I’ve been.
And when I see line-dancing in front of a buddhist temple, I am reminded of the line-dancing in the French countryside and in the rural regions of Québec.
In between housesits we are experiencing a life that resembles that of the Tourist, an ambidextrous creature that contributes to the local economy but also has an appropriating and trivializing impact on the culture.
In Koh Lanta, Thailand, as in Medora, North Dakota, the tourist’s money reshapes the natural landscape into a sanitized theme park, and the region’s success transforms it ever and ever further from its original appeal.
In Singapore though, the tourist is an almost invisible part of the landscape, as the bustling streets are lined with people of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, while complementary and competing gods coexist in a financial mecca of food and order.
Be Like Water My Friend
As a writer and journalist with a new fondness for math and physics, I am somewhat obsessed by definitions.
An axiom is a basic, undeniably obvious fact upon which you can build a mathematical edifice, like Euclid of Alexandria has done in his Elements, published around 300 BCE.
Force is mass times acceleration. Mass is the resistance a body of matter offers to change in its speed or position upon the application of a force. Acceleration is a change in velocity over time.
Life is obviously messier, and defining ideas often leads us back to the coastline problem.
Masha Gessen’s The New Yorker interview offers interesting insight concerning fixed identities in the context of trans issues. A 7-year old girl is not a biological woman in the same sense as that same person when turning 50.
Reading the Tao also offers interesting cues about identity, where Wu Wei, the notion of flow, action in non-action, is a recurring theme, along with Eternity, Humility, The Way, and the famous Yin Yang.
A thousand years later, iconic film-star Bruce Lee offers similar advice for success in life: “Be like water, my friend.”
And maybe it’s the water that defines and shapes the coastline, not the land.
Ok, this hits home, Joseph: “it’s the water that defines and shapes the coastline, not the land.” The note on Paul’s decision to walk because he misses part of the story when he flies also stood out.