Power and pleasure, quenching the thirst for life

What is the itch and thrill of travel? Do you have to travel far to feel it? Is it “escapism”, a pleasing sensation at being in a new and unknown place, with context and personal history limited, a blank slate, a potential start over? Is it the lure of discovery and surprise? Enlightenment and other answers? Conquest? Riches? Sex? Knowledge? Fear of missing out? A checklist? Does it mimic the colonial notion of leisure and satisfy a theatrical sense of status? Or is it just a relief from the day to day drudgery?

I think there is an innate human amazement at the diversity of life on our earth, patterns repeated and recognized, and patterns broken. The desire for new information is a genetic key to human survival, humanity itself defined and maintained by the accumulation of knowledge. Fire, wheel, spice, iphone.

For some insight, look at two epic tales of travel. Don Quixote, out of the western world published in the 17th century, follows a hero who has apparently read too many romance novels and sets out to heroically find his imaginary maiden. The Journey to the West (aka Monkey: A folk tale of China), out of the East, written and published from an oral tradition of a hundred years earlier in the 16th century, tells the story of one monk and three mythical characters who set out to India to retrieve Buddhist manuscripts to bring back to China. They give us some historical, and fictional, hints as to the lure of travel, and that these exist as historical stories at all shows how important travel is, this desire to discover the unknown is, to our imaginations.

Modern human history could probably be seen largely from the lens of seeking pleasure, knowledge and power, along with base-level survival and population movements, like escaping famine. In a certain light, just as with the romance-novel deluded hero Don Quixote, present day society is stuck in the myth of the heroic individual, a world with winners and losers, where powers are recognized or ignored, rewarded or condemned based on societal values of the moment. In the Journey to the West we see a group, a multi-creature organism, the proverbial ‘band of heroes’, organized to achieve a quest for knowledge to benefit society, with the desire for power probably not too far behind. Either way, travel is associated with heroism. And either way, there’s fun, adventure and danger to be had along the way.

In the end, the stories are who we are. A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World, a written version of Northwest American indigenous oral stories, the stories describe a people, and a place where the lines are blurred; time, space, animal and human. Traveling is both practical and mythical, allegorical and real at the same time.

Knowing ourselves in their entirety, knowing that our relationship to where we are is reciprocal, what effect we have in the world in consumption, waste and action, is the key to limiting ones transgression onto others. In a modern world, many of us live in cities with processes that support us that are seemingly invisible. Wish-cycling, toilet flushing, waste magically disappears. Have you ever seen a diagram of the tubes that support Manhattan? Let alone the bridges and tunnels. Upper West side apartment buildings of the early 20th Century sported pneumatic tubes for mail and other communications, a simple and early template for the world we live in now.

So what quenches our thirst for life? That feeling often comes from expressing power; physical, emotional, social, financial, etc. The satisfaction of ‘skill’, of status, of natural physical superiority, of intellectual superiority. Powers are good, they push us forward and help us survive, but what are the parameters of power? When one infringes on others. Powers can be expressed with a consciousness of this, most of they are expressed without.

Next Post: The most mundane trip