Flights

TRAVEL PSYCHOLOGY: LECTIO BREVIS II

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ began the woman, this time quite young, wearing army boots, her hair pinned up in a way I found amusing; she must have been fresh out of her master’s programme. ‘As we have said in previous lectures – which perhaps you have had a chance to listen to at one of the airports or train stations participating in this project – we experience time and space in a manner that is primarily unconscious. These are not categories we could call objective, or external. Our sense of space results from our ability to move. Our sense of time, meanwhile, is due to being biological individuals undergoing distinct and changing states. Time is thus nothing other than the flow of changes.

‘Place as an aspect of space pauses time. It is the momentary detainment of our perception on a configuration of objects. It is, in contradistinction to time, a static notion.

‘Understood thus, human time is divided into stages, as movement through space is broken up by place-pauses. Such pauses anchor us within the flow of time. A person who is sleeping and loses any sense of the place in which he or she currently is also loses all sense of time. The more pauses in space, and the more places we experience therefore, the more time elapses subjectively. We often refer to separate stages of time as episodes. They have no consequences, interrupting time without becoming part of it. They are self-contained occurrences, each starting from scratch; each beginning and each end is absolute. Not a single episode is to be continued, you might say.’

By now there was some movement in the first row, as in the murmuring of the announcements about passengers urgently requested someone here had recognized their name and was hurrying to gather carry-ons and duty-free sacks, jostling past their neighbours in that scramble. In a panic I checked my own boarding pass again, losing the thread of the lecture; it was a struggle to get back into this woman’s disquisition as she now embarked upon travel psychology’s practical side. She must have sensed we’d had enough of the strange and complicated theory.

‘Practical travel psychology investigates the metaphorical meaning of places. Just take a look at those screens with destinations on them. Have you ever stopped to think about what “Iceland” means? And what are the “United States”? What sort of response do you find within yourself when you pronounce those names? Asking yourself this type of question is particularly helpful in topographical psychoanalysis, where getting to the deeper meaning of places leads to deciphering the so-called itinerarium – the particular route of the traveller, that is, the deeper reason for his journey.

‘Topographical or travel psychoanalysis does not, despite surface similarities, pose the same question as immigration officials: what did you come here for? Our question raises issues of sense and meaning. In essence, one becomes what one participates in. In other words, I am what I look at.

‘And this was of course the reason behind the ancient pilgrimages. Striving towards – and reaching – a holy place would bestow holiness upon us, cleanse us of our sins. Does the same thing happen when we travel to unholy, sinful places? To sad and vacant places? Joyful, fruitful places?

‘And is it not so…’ continued the woman, but behind me two middle-aged couples were chatting in hushed voices, which for a moment seemed more interesting to me than the reflections of our lecturer.

I worked out quickly that it was two married couples exchanging impressions from their travels, one couple urging the other:

‘You have to go to Cuba – but the Cuba they’ve got now, under Fidel. When he dies, Cuba’s going to be the same as everywhere. But if you go right now you’ll see some incredible poverty – the kinds of cars they drive! You really have to get on it, though – apparently Fidel is pretty ill.’