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Thor's Travel Notes |
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Thor's Travel Notes |
The stuff in these Travel Notes really is raw material. That is, anything approaching art in their expression is purely accidental. If they have a narrative structure, it is the simple flow of time passing. You will search in vain for a plot, for brave beginnings, or for endings which bring more closure than going to bed with cold toes. In fact, looking at this material with a distant eye, its only unifying theme is often the gloomy catalogue of one cheap hotel room after another. My excuse for posting it on the net is that a) you just might find some occasional useful comment on a place you are heading for, and b) lodged up there in cyberspace, I can mine it myself for writing ideas from anywhere on the planet, without dragging around a library.
Most of the existing Travel Notes actually apply to summer and winter trips which I undertook through China in 2000. These are a day by day slog, and will be added progressively as I get around to typing them up. There's also a snippet from Cambodia, and other oddments are likely to appear in the months or years ahead. I particularly want to get down diary notes from my first great adventure, overland from Sydney to London through Asia in 1971, but the material is buried in boxes elsewhere right now, so might be years coming.
And now some noble self-justification ....
Why write at all? One of the paradoxes of writing is that it typically takes longer to describe an event on paper than to actually do it. James Joyce certainly did not write Ulysses in the twenty-four hours of a Dubliner's life he purports to encapsulate. It is a seeming paradox because we persist with the idea that crafted language is no more than a representation of events. If that were true, then no one would read more than bus timetables. But a lived event, in the end, has more to do with quantum theory than sweat. That is, it becomes real, significant, even stimulating, purely because some alert mind is observing and shaping it.
With five billion or more conscious human minds out there, our existence should be humming with excitement. Now maybe I've missed something, but a half century of close watching has persuaded me that the 24 hour cinescreen running past the eyes of those five billion people is, overwhelmingly, barely registered on their minds. They mostly have dull lives, not so much because the routine of existence is often dull, but because their brains have not seized upon whatever comes to hand and fashioned a symphony of the imagination. My struggle and my joy is to create such a symphony, gradually, working and reworking raw perception until a resonance is found. I am no Joyce, my reservoir of talent is fragile, but in the struggle to write, however crudely, I become more alive than blunt animal senses could ever grasp.
Thor
Busan, South Korea
September 2001
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1. Introduction / 2.Traveler on a Leash or a Free Spirit?: A
fake interview / 3. Cambodian snippet (1996) /
4. Memories of Afghanistan
(1972) / 5. Letter from East
Timor (1972) / 6. Background
Information on Papua New Guinea / 7.
Expedition to Snake River, PNG /
China, winter 2000 : 1.
Flying to Kunming /
2.
Kunming by Shanks-Pony / 3. Kunming Cycle / 4. Journey to Dali /
to be continued ..
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