What kind of movement is mine?
Here we go again (II) A wanderer attempts an essay on movement, travel and search
II. What kind of movement is mine
I have moved across a hundred and thirty-five countries over four decades without ever naming what kind of movement it was. The words were there. Vagabond, Tourist etc. I used them loosely, without examining them. It is only in trying to write this essay that I understood most of them do not fit. Also that I might have started as a fairly ordinary tourist looking to escape the grey Danish summer but over the years have developed into something else. In this way, travel itself has changed me.
Machado’s wayfarer stands above every category of traveller. It says nothing about destination or origin. Only that movement itself has become life’s primary reality.
Octavio Paz (in “El laberinto de la soledad”) asked a fundamental question for the traveller: “… What is he searching for? Perhaps he searches for his destiny? Perhaps his destiny is to search.”
For years I called myself a vagabond. It seemed the obvious word. I pour myself a cup of coffee and write the word. It seemed the obvious word, but sitting there inert on the page, it seems not to fit. The vagabond once was somewhere and is now nowhere, displaced and dispossessed, because staying is no longer possible. I was never displaced. I have a passport that opens most doors, credit cards that work in every ATM and people, who would have taken me in at any moment, I presume. There is a kind of melancholy in the vagabond. Of course like most of us, I carry a “baggage” of broken relationships, a family etc. But I carry them mostly with gratitude. The ones that really broke my heart, and there have been a few, I am deeply grateful. It is a blessing to have been touched that much even though it has hurt immensely and sometimes it has taken years to find my feet again. But the melancholy of the vagabond isn’t quite my condition.
What about the nomad, so famously in focus by B. Chatwin, who argued that “The normal life is the nomadic lifestyle”. For Chatwin, travel meant much more than simply moving from one place to another. It is a journey of self-discovery and a means to quench the thirst of the nomadic soul. In his view, the act of traveling, displacement, is where the true essence of life is revealed. Still, the nomad usually moves between known points depending on pastures and the season or where the tribe has always gone. The movement is structured and with a purpose, embedded in community and traditions. The nomad is never really lost and thus fully exposed in my view.
For the pilgrim, the arrival at the sacred destination is everything. Unlike the nomad, the pilgrim has no inherited route, it is a conscious choice where to go. The travel and the road is not of importance. Unlike the vagabond, the pilgrim moves by choice rather than by necessity. The tourist is the pilgrim stripped of the sacred. The tourist moves toward destinations that promise experience, novelty etc. They return home confirmed in who they already were.
The exile moves because they have to like the vagabond, but carries something that the vagabond does not always carry. The consciousness of a specific home that cannot be returned to. Related is the migrant, the most important traveller demographically in our times, that moves out of economic necessity, fleeing war and destruction etc. It is necessity dressed as choice. The explorer goes out to map and investigate and add to our knowledge about our world. I never brought anything back except for the memorabilia I keep in a plastic bag and these notes. The explorer’s motive was never mine.
The seeker, then, the most seductive. The wanderer of German Romanticism or the Westerners I have met in the holy cities of India and Nepal, who have been stranded there since the 1970s. The seeker travels in order to become and to find the awakening, the truth, the self that staying put could not reach. I have travelled in order to be. The seeker is on a pilgrimage in disguise. The stray is on no pilgrimage at all.
The stray overlaps with some of these, but stands apart. It has no lost home like the vagabond, no acute longing for return like the exile, no sacred destination like the pilgrim or itinerary like the tourist. No inherited route like the nomad. The stray simply moves because moving is its nature. It does not carry an origin story, no community to answer to, no destination to reach. It navigates by instinct. I write the word and something shifts, this is closer.
I eventually realised that I had been using the wrong word. I had called myself a vagabond for years. Maybe it was true. Every word seemed to capture one part of my movement and lose another.
Yet, if I was forced to choose a name and categorise myself, it would be a stray with the shadow of a vagabond. It appears to me as the closest language can come to something that cannot quite be named.
I was never looking backwards after something I had lost, the past travels with and alongside me. While I am always looking towards the horizon, I am not moving away from my people, but I move with them. I am, and perhaps have always been, closer to a stray with a shadow of a vagabond. A shadow that follows me in the light. Memories, obligations, gratitude and grief, things that cast a shadow and provide an anchor that ensure that I am not completely drifting. They don’t define my movement, but neither are they left behind.
When my son was born I decided the travelling was over or at least I had to scale back. I asked to relocate from my job-position that involved monthly week-long stays in the Caribbean to a position that involved less travel. A life was beginning that would need me in one place. For a while it worked. And then, after some time, the pull returned. As a thought but also as something physical. The suitcase on the shelf began to speak.
This has happened more than once. There have been other moments when I told myself the movement was done. Illness that forced me into stillness. Work that required stability. Relationships that would have been better served by me staying. Each time I meant the decision and each time the compulsion returned. I have never been able to answer it with a permanent no.
The stray is not a chosen identity. It is what I have become, or maybe what I have always been. I have managed to shape the compulsion into something like a discipline. To ritualise the suitcase. To honour the departure as a practice. To carry my people with me on the road rather than moving away from them. The compulsion beneath is what the discipline is responding to.
There are those who return home and write about the home itself, these are people like Bill Bryson and also the later writings of Bruce Chatwin. Return “home”, defined as a physical and geographical location with GPS coordinates, that they return to after having travelled to the “outside”. They return home and the internal territory and see all the small details in every object of domestic life that they have just taken for granted for many years with the eyes and a mindset that have been trained observing strange objects in foreign places. They have stopped moving externally.
I am not there yet. The suitcase remains open, the plastic bag stays sealed, and the road is still in front of me.
On Travel
What is travel actually? The taxonomy above assumed an answer.
The dictionary says: movement from one place to another. By that account the commuter travels, the refugee travels, the holiday-maker travels. The category is purely physical and tells you almost nothing about what the movement means.
A better definition adds otherness. Travel is movement into the unfamiliar. The commuter no longer counts. The tourist barely does.
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The learner encounters otherness in order to assimilate it, to make it familiar and part of an intelligible world. The traveller encounters otherness not necessarily with that ambition. The learner brings the unfamiliar home. The traveller, at least in the kind of movement I describe here, remains in the interval at least for a while. One asks: “What is this? How can I understand it? Where does it fit? The other says: “I don’t yet know what this is. I can remain here without resolving it.” In a sense, the traveller lets the foreign remain foreign at least for a while.
There is a familiar way of thinking about travel. It is the moment the “mask”, our social roles and culturally embedded behaviour and expectations, which we are wearing every day, no longer works because the surroundings are unfamiliar and we are stepping out in the unknown more or less naked. Perhaps this is why travel has such peculiar effects.
I used to find this line of thought convincing, but less so today. It assumes that there is a more true “me” behind the mask.
More modestly, I do expect travel to remove some of the coordinates by which we ordinarily locate ourselves. At home, whatever that is, much of what we do requires no thought. We know how to behave, when to speak, what a gesture means, what is expected of us and what we can expect in return. We also know, more or less, who we are in relation to other people.
Elsewhere in the foreign some of that knowledge becomes useless. The signals are different or I might have difficulties in reading them. Status travels badly, and habit becomes less reliable. In other words, I have to pay attention again.
Perhaps this is why travel can resemble a rite of passage that never quite ends. Not because I become more myself when I leave, but because for a while I am less certain what that self is supposed to be. Among strangers in a distant place, that uncertainty can sometimes feel easier than the familiar choreography of a Danish weekend.
Maybe travel is not a separate category at all. Every human eventually encounters something that destabilises and unsettles the coordinates by which they have understood themselves and the world. The grieving widow encounters it. The new parent encounters it. The serious reader encounters it. The dying person encounters it. The traveller is no different. Grief, death and love know no borders. What geographical displacement adds is the fact that the surrounding world also becomes unfamiliar.
But there is something travel does that sets it apart.
It removes the audience and the setting at the same time.
The grieving widow is unmasked in the rooms where the deceased lived, surrounded by people who knew the relationship. The new parent is unmasked at home. The reader is unmasked in their own chair. The mask falls, but the world that sustained it remains. Travel removes both at once. The familiar mirrors, the familiar objects and the familiar audience disappear. What remains is not necessarily a truer self, but just a self with fewer navigation coordinates.
During a six month round-the-world journey with my girlfriend that had taken us across Asia, the Pacific and Latin America, we had our final stop along the sunny coast of Venezuela. It was before mobile phones became ubiquitous. During one of our regular check-ins my girlfriend called her sister from a telephone booth and was told that I should call my mother.
I called home immediately. My grandmother had died. Growing up, she had been very much my anchor. She used to run a small village grocery store, the last independent shop before the supermarket chains took over. It was my second home. Every day after school, I walked straight to her house for lunch. It was also there I earned my first salary delivering bags of groceries by bicycle.
I found a small rather ordinary looking church in the Venezuelan village. It was built in a modern minimalist style with simple raw surfaces of concrete. There were no stained glass and little of the decoration, that I had come to associate with churches in Latin America.
I bought a few candles and sat down on the concrete floor in the church. I was completely alone. I lit the candles and just sat there the whole day, staring at the flickering lights and crying. At night, I returned to the run down hostel, where we were staying. I barely slept and returned to the church the following morning.
The grief seemed almost physical at times, as though I couldn’t be in my own body.
On the third day, I had no more tears left. I let the candles burn out before leaving the church.
I cannot explain why the grief was so overwhelming, or why it felt so much greater at that distance.
— — — — -
One might ask what keeps all this movement in the physical world from becoming a centrifugal scattering of the self. I have realised that I am not moving away from my people. I am moving with them. The bond feels stronger from the ghost-like conversations I have on the road with my father, mother, sister, son, and friends, triggered by a certain smell or a resemblance in a foreign market. You are actually never alone on the road. The shadow of the vagabond is where history lives.
Anthropologists might recognise this as resembling the liminal phase of a rite of passage: separation from the familiar, suspension of normal rules, the stripped-down self in a threshold state, but the third phase, reincorporation, never completely arrives. The traveller does not quite come back as a new and settled self. Another departure is already lined up. The traveller keeps on returning to the liminal middle.
According to Carlos Fuentes, Don Quixote, the main character in Cervantes’ novel from 1605 defines the start of modernity. The “Modern” being defined by the fracture between the self and the world. In the modern world we are all orphans of a lost certainty. After Cervantes, the traveller no longer moves through a world whose meaning is already given. The road becomes a place of questions rather than confirmations.
Don Quixote is perhaps the first visionary wanderer. He moves toward a reality that he insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, exists. His shrine is his own imagination. Every windmill he charges is a declaration of faith, the world he sees is more real and vivid than the world others see. When he is finally brought home, and returns to his former self, he quickly dies.
Octavio Paz believed that the fundamental human condition is solitude. Loneliness is social, solitude is ontological. It is the irreducible fact that each consciousness is sealed within itself, unable to fully transmit its interior to another. We are each alone in a way that no amount of love ultimately repairs. The encounter between one consciousness and another is not a boundary that can be crossed, but an interval that can be inhabited. You can approach the other, but you cannot cross over into their consciousness. Every genuine encounter therefore takes place across an irreducible distance. Travel did not create that distance. It simply became the practice through which I encountered it again and again.
My life has gradually become the deliberate, repeated encounter with displacement, otherness and the dissolution of certainty. The hundred and thirty-five countries are evidence of the practice.
I have more or less found a name for my movement in the process of writing this. But in the process other questions have quietly taken its place.
I know that travel became my practice. I know that repeated departures have changed me though I don’t know exactly how. I still do not know why movement more than any other practice became the one through which I kept engaging with the world.
