Traveling

→ Saying this, I think that the comfort of sailing in ships has changed enormously.
→ Now, it is a nice experience to be at sea. Seafaring, therefore, lost a bit of the mystique surrounding it, it’s not what it used to be in the past. It’s not much of a thing any more to sail on the ocean. There are cruise ships now, offering ocean crossing as an experience.

M.M.Do you travel a lot?

Fantasies about the ocean are timeless – let me recall just one from 500 years ago, and that’s from Francois Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Throughout this book, there’s mention of many sea voyages to strange and far-flung islands. For instance, in the last part of the book during one such a sea voyage, the ships crew were, I quote: “Feasting and speechifying and telling nice little stories, Pantagruel suddenly jumped to his feet and took a look around him. ‘Can you hear something comrades?’ he asked. ‘I seem to hear people talking in the air. But I can’t see anything. Listen”.

While traveling around the Pacific Ocean, I recall going out from the coast and finding rogue [theme:waves]] breaking in the middle of nowhere, and also places where the sea and the sky blend into each other becoming one big blue screen. Much like Derek Jarmen’s last film called Blue. Just the voice and a vast color blue: open seas and cloudless skies.

Recently I went on two sailing voyages on the North Sea from Ostende. It was with my partner’s parents who have a small yacht and they took us out for a few hours to drift on the sea in the sweltering summer heat. This was only the second time I’d ever been on such a boat and it was really a fantastic experience. Like being in a Paul Klee painting, the shape and the motion of the sails and all the other elements that go into being pushed along by the wind seem so simple yet are also so fascinatingly rich and poetic.

I always travel from Naples to Palermo on the ferry when I can. This is an absolutely fantastic voyage and one that Raymond Roussel made to his sad Sicilian end. Leaving Naples, heading towards Palermo, or returning from Palermo to Naples, this voyage evokes a great wealth of associations and anticipatory thoughts that ferment and bubble away during the overnight sea journey.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.

On an intellectual level, I would say the most important element is traveling:
the forced traveling of African populations , but also things circulating across the Atlantic ocean.

Historians mention how ideas + cultures have been traveling around. How news of the French + English revolutions influenced the sailors. The movement within the ocean seems to suggest the futility of national boundaries.