Gypsy Interludes: On Getting Lost

Even as adults, I think we all need playgrounds.

Islands of spontaneity, psychological sandpits, what Hakim Bey would call 'Temporary Autonomous Zones'. I'm not taking about mediated experience's via the entertainment, leisure and travel industry's, I mean autonomous, self organised and willful journeys of psycho-geographical experience.

These physical spaces act as catalyst's and swift nutrient injections for our souls. Places within relatively easy reach by car and train are the best- one to two and half hours to reach, but far enough away to experience a different ambiance, an otherness that generates fresh perspectives and also an examination of our selves and other peoples everyday life-worlds.

It is important that these places can be reached relatively quickly as there value lies in the sudden juxtaposition of two worlds within a single culture or country. The loss of your usual identity and the availability of masks if you prefer, or just the beautiful anonymity of being a pure observer, without constantly having your identity and historical baggage reflected back to you by every familiar face, building, sound, taste, touch, smell.

Both Proust and Samuel Beckett have talked of habit as being the great deadener, how we yearn to break the repetitive cycles of doing and being that we perform and are performed by in our tiny little corners of this big and colorful world.

To travel abroad is fantastic of course (Sometimes, depending on the individual ), and to backpack around the world for months on end can be the greatest of adventures and a superb intellectual and cultural 'open' university, but eventually - unless you plant roots somewhere - there is the return home to the parent culture. This return often involves a 'knuckling down' to the practicalities of what is termed normal life. For many this involves a job, career, mortgage, children and pension plan. So begins the inevitable nostalgia trawling back through those old gap year/holiday photo's, and the promises to yourself and others, that when the mortgage is paid off and the kids have left home, you can really begin to live again and read all those books, write that novel, paint those canvasses and finally explore Renaissance Florence with your other half.

Many people live like this and take it as normal, seeing travel as an international 'event', an escape to the sun for a fortnight a year, or the 'traveling' experience as something done when your young and relatively unbaggaged both mentally and physically. The problem with the annual holiday is that it often induces a certain amount of stress and anxiety. Its necessity for many as the once or twice yearly escape valve often generates anticipatory fears: 'We must enjoy this holiday, we deserve it, but what if, what if, what if??? The reward for nearly 50 weeks of work and its inevitable attendant stresses - fear of unemployment, competitiveness, mortgage re-payments and keeping up the 'normal' consumerist lifestyle - turns travel and a holiday in the sun into another product that must be consumed within a permitted time period and therefore is a hollow escape and never a true holiday from the self!

The ease of jet travel, the ability to 'hop on a plane' and find yourself in a soulless baggage lounge in some foreign country in a couple of hours is convenient for the inveterate traveler, it makes sense for the wanderer or professional who has to get to far flung places as quickly and as safely as possible. But Aeroplane travel isn't actually traveling, there is not the sense of movement or passage through geographical and psychological space as there is when you travel by car, train, bicycle or on foot. You never experience any really tangible change in the air temperature, scenery, architecture, smells, sounds - all those things that travellers of old took for granted - the sense of a journey, an adventure that would spawn wonderful and strange tales around the future fireplace.

Jet flights are flights from your experiencing self, there is no perceptual journey only a boredom of waiting and insipid distractions.

Your identity is opaque and un-porous in a plane, by necessity of altitude you have no sense of crossing physical borders, just the admittedly (if your lucky) often beautiful skyrama's and huge landmass's, the brief tranquilized dream period before your crude ejection into another culture via the alienating process of the arrival lounge.

The whole flight and hotel booking, passport and security processing ordeal tends to re-affirm your identity and personal and cultural history too, rather than being a minor inconvienience, it reminds you at all times of who you are and where you've come from. You are this named person, and are permitted to be here at this space and time - because you have this written and pictorial identity. You have been 'allowed' to enjoy yourself as long as that self is really you!

I'm not being totally negative, it is lovely to jet to a sunny and exciting climate sometimes - it can be a great spontaneous escape for a romantic couple for example, but what I'm advocating is a more personal journey of the self, or with just one other person.

I will often get a return train ticket to London or Oxford, it takes around two and half hours to get to London and just over an hour to get to Oxford from my town. I must admit to being a bit bookish, arty and a committed Flaneur.

I like to roam the ancient streets of these two great cities and be surrounded and sometimes intimidated by the ever present ghosts of the past. The anonymity of just buying a ticket without having to divulge your identity and then collapsing into the seat in anticipation of the journey is one of my little anticipatory pleasures - its so easy too. The shunt-swish of the train wheels, the surreal parallax views of changing countryside, hills and blue horizons, people's back gardens, citys and towns seen from a secret and unusual passage. Your imagination can roam in the rhythmic bubble of a train. I like those little old houses lost in the countryside and like to imagine all the people who have lived in them.

Suddenly, on that train you are nobody, a soul in transit, a nomad, a physical and psychic gypsy untethered to your former identity - you are out of the loop and a little bit lost, which can be quite wonderful!

I prefer to tell no one where I'm going too, like a secret holiday, a spontaneous shedding of 'me' and just dissolving in the experience of now . As Christopher Isherwood said: 'I is a camera', 'I' is the observing self lost in pure perception, relatively uncontaminated by the habitual stimulus that often surrounds him or her.

I the walker, the Flaneur, strolling along London's South Bank, lost in the colourful crowds, the seething mass of consciousness, drinking in the buzz and communality of the crowd, while simultaneously being not of the crowd, but just being the lone observer, a tiny boat bobbing on the surface of humanity and beautifully cast adrift. Occasionally I will dock in a quiet port, a small cafe or eat a sandwich in a park and then up anchor for a cultural interlude in a museum or gallery.

It is when I am alone and experiencing this that I can really dissolve and dilute myself into what is around me, I become a vessel for pure stimulus without the usual inhibitory, over sensitive personal ant-virus software kicking in. Even the bugs are interesting when viewed from the new me.

I advocate the spontaneous use of the Gypsy Interlude for everyone - even if only a couple of times a year. To lose one's normal identity and role for others even if just for a day or two. It is difficult and possibly dangerous for some to 'disappear' totally for a day or two alone I know, but compromises can be reached - I do take a mobile phone, but have it turned off and just check for calls ocassionally. But often for the relatively inexpensive price of a two hour train journey and a B&B if you wish to stay longer, you can give your weary soul an injection of pure living and throw away, for a little while at least, the old you and meditate on who you were, and who you want to be. Or just spend your entire life being a psychic gypsy like me.

Enjoy getting lost.