Last Port of Call: Adrift in Search of 'The Thing'

Drifting occurs, for Roland Barthes (1915-1980), whenever he does not "respect the whole." Describing drifting as akin to bobbing around like a cork in the waves - motionless while all else swirls around you, bound to the world though only by a pivotal thread - what Barthes the ever-adventurous literary theorist wants to slip away from through drifting is "the sociolect" - that is, the social language into which we are born, through which we come to see the world and interact with it, and from which we very rarely get a break. For Barthes, traveling in Japan is his entry-point to the drift. Bobbing around in a language and culture he does not understand - can make neither heads nor tails of - the whole is denied him. Adrift in a sea of meaningless signs and symbols, abandoned by anything remotely resembling a common sense notion or a friendly cliche, what it all adds up to is beyond him, what it all actually means draws a blank. And so, for what seems like the very first time in a very long time - let's say, since he was a baby, peering around at a world composed of tiny details that did not yet add up to a whole, that had yet to be transcribed into sociolect - Barthes looks around him and sees things for what they are: just things. And Japan, through his eyes, becomes a wondrous place: sensuous and exquisite, all surface and no depth. A walk through Tokyo is like being immersed in a thousand haiku: each detail to which his eye is drawn is a "snap" that exists for itself and itself alone; the scape of the land recedes as the scope of the micro puffs and swells. It is a world of floating ephemera and for once, the drifters are the ones in the driver's seat. Drift, Drive, Thrift, Thrive...Their etymological roots go way back, entangled together in purposeful pursuit until somewhere along the way, mid-19th century to be precise, they part ways: Drift taking a detour, hitting the long and winding road and a seemingly aimless one at that; Drive,Thrift and Thrive pressing onward, expedience their mantra and arrival on their mind. But suddenly it's all changing, it's all drift, drift and drive. The drifters even have their own Starter's Kit (www.mythogeography.com) and the latter-day Situationists are taking over our cities, turning counter-tourism into the new soupe du jour. Tokyo, Paris, London, Montreal...It matters little whether the city is foreign or known to you. Barthes found his way out when language failed him but the drift doesn't end there: if you're getting on board the Debord train then any old urban straitjacket will do. Guy Debord (1931-1994) - drifting force behind the psychogeographical movement and a founding member of the Paris-based Situationist International group - couldn't stand the way advanced capitalist cities were turning their inhabitants into creatures of habit: trudging the same monotonous path between home, work and leisure on a day-in-day-out basis; navigating familiar streets as if on automatic pilot; using the terrain in precisely the way it was designed to be used by well-intentioned urban planners. Non! Non! Non! cried Debord. For where, in all of this predictability, was the encounter of "pure chance"? the "utterly new and authentic experience"? that "spontaneous exploration  of urban landscapes guided by aesthetic instinct" alone? Exactement! cried Debord. It was nulle part! And so, he led the way in evolving a method for moving through the city - the drift, the derive - that was attentive to its "zones of distinct psychic atmospheres," that picked up on how the ambiance could change dramatically from one section of a street to the next, that said pooey to Jiminy Cricket's insistence that you always let your conscience be your guide, that used as field guide your bodily impulses and repulses and your emotional ups and downs, that turned your average Sunday afternoon stroll into an act of pedestrian rebellion that was anything BUT pedestrian. But I digress. I drift. For in fact, where our salon evening actually started out - our last, as it happens, in this current series built around the trope of The Traveller - was light years ahead of Debord, of Barthes, of Crab Man mythogeographer Phil Smith teaching the art of walking sideways through his drift-driven (drive-driften?) heritage tours of England's national treasures. No, where it all started was with American-born poet Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. as she came to be more minimally known (1886-1961), and her creation, alongside Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, of a poetry movement called The Imagists. The year was 1913 and it all happened over a cuppa in the tea shop of the British Museum. As for the movement itself, it was short-lived - fizzling out just four years later as World War I raged on, and the hopes and dreams of a whole generation went up in smoke. But for a brief time, Imagism was synonymous with literary Modernism and H.D. Imagiste was the 'It' girl of poetry. What made the movement so important was its bare bones focus on The Thing - it's stripping away of all the flowery language and hyperbole that had come, courtesy of the Romantics, to define poetry, and its determination to evoke, in a few deft strokes of the pen, an image that stood in, stood for, stood up to The Thing itself. Which naturally, led us on a wild if drifting goose chase of The Thing in poetry, in philosophy, and OF COURSE (the point of it all!) in travel...Bringing us into dialogue with vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) whose advice, in a nutshell, was to get closer to The Thing through entering It (easier said than done, we concluded)...Providing the perfect segue to The Avon Lady whose door-to-door traveling salesmanship (sic) we transformed into a 21st Century counter-tourism drift, and her jingle - "Ding-Dong, Avon Calling!" - into a riff on the etymological roots of, of all things, Thing (from the Low German, Ding). Busy? You bet. A Parkour-style bounce across terrains as diverse as haiku-writing and mis-guided events planning and Bergsonian time travelling? Nobody ever said that going Adrift of an evening was going to be a walk in the park. Wishing you'd been here? Reflecting back upon where we had ventured in the course of this journey together - Afloat, Abroad, Astray, Alone and Adrift - we brought the series to a close with a nod towards the future: a Philosophy Club session entitled 'The Art of Losing' in the Autumn, and a new salon series kicking off in January 2015. So you can be here, when we're there...New members are always welcome, and if you live in the Montreal area and would like to join us, check out our website for contact details. If you don't live in the Montreal area, wine women and philosophy has a penchant for road trips. Again, see our website, where you will find details on how to go about organizing a one-off salon evening in the venue of your choice. We extend a heartfelt thank you to all our members, whose participation in this latest salon series has been exciting, inspiring and enriching. Below, you'll see a few of them crafting haikus...We'll be posting the fruits of their labour in the days to come.

Alone Again, Naturally...

The world of pop does a real trick on us when it comes to the company of one.  From Eric Carmen's bleating "All by Myself, don't wanna be, all by myself, anymore," to Pink Floyd's haunting appeal from the abyss, "Is there anybody out there?", to Harry Nillson's plaintive assessment of the single life - "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do" - you don't have to know much about popular music to know that in the world of pop, going solo is the big no-no. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), as far as I know, never wrote any songs. But as we discovered last Thursday when we came together for the fourth evening in our current salon series revolving around The Traveller, this brilliant political thinker might have had a thing or two to say to Eric, Floyd and Harry. To Eric: The fact that you are by yourself only confirms that there is another self sitting there beside you, so regardless of what ya wanna be, fella, one thing ya ain't is all alone. To Pink Floyd: Forget the anybody out there, it's the anybody in here - right here inside of you, jumping up and down and trying to get your attention so as to engage you in scintillating "soundless dialogue" - who is going to provide you with the whatever to get you through the night. To Harry: One, in actual fact, is the one and only number that is never lonely and you would know this, Harry, if among the things you'd ever do was to think!

It is widely acknowledged that Hannah Arendt never minced her words. At the same time, her insistence that mere 'thoughtlessness' lay at the root of those catastrophic crimes committed against humanity within totalitarian regimes such as Nazism left people irate and divided: creating a storm of controversy that would have done Socrates, who likened the very activity of thinking to a 'subversive wind,' proud; scandalizing her friends and foe alike in an era where people were scrambling to make sense of the horrors of the holocaust. Nobody was in the mood for a reasoned argument that concluded in a 'banality of evil' verdict. What the situation demanded was a smoking gun - not the smoldering curl of grey emanating from the ponderous Arendt's ever-present cigarette. In short, a simple 'failure to think' struck many as a grossly inadequate explanation for the evil underlying those horrors, and for the men behind them. Not surprisingly, it is Arendt's 1963 study of one of the masterminds of the so-called Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, that has continued to preoccupy her critics and made her into the household name that few political theorists ever become - especially not female ones. The recent release of Margarethe von Trotta's film based on Arendt's coverage of Eichmann's trial, entitled Hannah Arendt (2013), has brought both Arendt and this particular episode in a lifetime's worth of stellar philosophical work back into focus yet again.

 Quite apart from this substantial body of work, what has perhaps been lost along the way - and this is something that von Trotta's film does, to its credit, emphasize - is just how seriously Arendt took thinking, and just how far she was from considering thoughtlessness to be something 'mere'...A failure to think something 'simple.' For Arendt, thinking was a dangerous activity - especially dangerous to totalitarian regimes, to the few violently enforcing those regimes, and to the masses silently going along with them. In thinking and thinking alone, for Arendt, lay the necessity to stand up, stand against, stand without others, when all of the rest of the world had gone mad. For thinking, in Arendt's book - and she wrote one specifically all about it - is the one activity where you have to go it alone but are always in good company. Which meant that some Arendt-style thinking seemed like a highly fitting place to begin our exploration of what it means to travel solo. 

We set off with a poem - Denise Levertov's A Woman Alone. Not so much food for thought, this, as a prompt to real-time thinking: 30 seconds...A minute...90 seconds...; and then, after this experience of the Arendtian "soundless dialogue," of the Socratic "travelling through words," a stint of auto-ethnography aimed at enhancing our understanding of ourselves as thinkers. What is thinking? we asked ourselves. What does thinking feel like? Where are we when we think? And, what makes for better thinking? - actually doing it or writing down our thoughts about it? Leaving behind Levertov's "Oh blessed Solitude" in order to share our observations first in pairs, and then as a larger group, we proceeded to trouble the idea of what we had previously taken to be a unity (me working by myself) and a duality (me working with another) in the context of a plurality (the group interacting as a whole).

Indeed, if we were to buy into Hannah Arendt's conception of the thinking ego and her contention that we only truly think when we are on our own, then the duality was actually me by myself - the "two-in-one," as Arendt terms it -  whereas the unity was the unthinking me, no longer by myself but plunked down among all those other unthinking unities in the realm of sociability, in the social whirl of Appearances. Suddenly, it seemed preferable to be a garrulous two-in-one than a member of the chattering classes. Suddenly, absent-mindedness was the new black : a quick absenting of the mind from the lonely crowd so that me and my old pal, Myself, could engage in some heavy duty dialogical reasoning; a totally cool respite, this absent-mindedness, from the cacophony of common-sense opinions and tired old cliches circulating out there when folks get together and exchange what they think are thoughts but in fact are only re-cycled knowledges; a kind of coffee break for the mind, this temporal absenting of one's One from all those other nattering Ones, only broken when somebody snaps their fingers, breaks into my "thinker's solitude" - into "the inner duality of my two-in-one" - and, as Arendt would have it, "Changes me back into a One again."

Much of Arendt's thinking around thinking is drawn from the ancients: from Socrates and Aristotle and Cicero, to name just a few. And some of it is drawn from 19th Century Kant: picking up on his distinction between an ability to reason or speculate (vernunft) and the application of intellect to the problem at hand (verstand); seeing in the former the impetus that results in thinking and with it, a search for meaning, and seeing in the latter an attachment to knowledge and with it, the evolution of common-sense notions and the affirmation of truths. If Arendt aligns herself firmly on the side of Kant's vernunft when it comes to the activity that not only enhances life (Aristotle) but without which, there is no life (Socrates), she also acknowledges that you need a busload of verstand to get by. At the same time, she considers the comfort Cicero finds in hopping aboard a "thought-train" in order to escape the harshness of the world that surrounds him only part of the equation. Thinking demands a withdrawal, yes, and is not in the business of producing what today we would call a 'deliverable' - this much Arendt knew. But what she also knew is that for all that thinking isn't concerned with leaving something tangible behind, and for all that yesterday's thought can and should be re-thunk today and tomorrow and forever after, thinking must still serve as a fertile training ground for that day when the harshness gets too much and a thoughtful response to a catastrophic situation is required. Arendt, after all, was a Jewish-German intellectual coming of age in precisely such a moment: taking up refugee status in Paris after fleeing from Germany in 1933; leaving France in 1941 and escaping to the US on an illegal visa.

And this, perhaps, is where Arendt succeeds best: catapulting the ideas of these wise old men into a very real and critical 20th century context; insisting that everyone, not just the "philosopher kings" (Plato) or "professional thinkers" (Kant), must be prepared to turn their minds to thinking, must apply themselves to an activity traditionally reserved for philosophers alone. For though the activity of thinking isn't a political action in itself, it is thinkers - walking one way while everybody else walks the other, finding themselves 'outed' by their very conspicuousness during unthinking times - who could make all the difference between 'the unthinkable' happening again, or not. 

This seemed like a good moment to introduce four intrepid women who emerged in the Modernist Moment around which this series has been organized, and who, by virtue of their inability to blend into the crowd - to just follow the rules and go with the flow - also became game-changers in their respective fields. Loners all in one way or another, and innovators too, we were curious to examine their lives and experiences in light of Arendt's "two-in-one" theory of aloneness, as well as to learn what we could from them about travelling not so much mindfully, as thoughtfully, around this lonely planet. To recap ever so briefly...

Elizabeth Jane Cochrane aka Nellie Bly (1864-1922) was an American journalist who, in her own words, "was too impatient to work at the usual duties assigned women on newspapers." This impatience drove Nellie to set off solo around the world in 1889, determined to beat the 80 day record for circling the globe set by Jules Verne's fictional character, Phileas Fogg. Nellie did it in 72, earning herself the title of "most famous woman in the world" for a fleeting 15 minutes of fame. 

Centenarian Freya Stark (1893-1993) was the sickly child of cosmopolitan European parents who traveled the world through books, exchanging the confines of her sick room for the life of an explorer of distant lands and a writer of exquisite travel prose when she struck adulthood. She embraced solitude, and was an aficionado of the unknown. In her own words: "To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea what is in store for you..." 

The name Hortense Powdermaker (1900-1970) is a marvelous one, though sadly the woman behind the name is not widely known today, and neither are the significant contributions that she made to the field of anthropology. A reading of Hortense's autobiographical account of her experiences in the field - Stranger and Friend (1966)- reveals a woman who was way ahead of her time when it came to reflecting on the role of the ethnographer engaged in field work in general, and on what it took to ride that tenuous line between participant and observer more specifically. What is clear is that this American-born academic who wrote eloquently about the sheer panic of finding herself alone in a hut on an island in the South Pacific, also marched to her own drum: "Long before I ever heard of anthropology, I was being conditioned for the role of stepping in and out of society...As a child, I did not accept the norms of my upper-middle and middle-class German-Jewish background."

Finally, there is Margaret Mead (1901-1978) - also an American anthropologist, though one who has stood the test of time and remains familiar to us. In her autobiography, she speaks of having been trained from a young age to observe: she was handed a pen and notebook and asked to keep a detailed account of her younger siblings' growth and progress. She also attracted a fair amount of attention in her life: in large part, because of her unconventional attitudes towards sexuality and relationships, and her openness about her non-conformist ways. She also knew what it was to be excluded, yet wisely transformed these setbacks into important learning experiences: "Knowing nothing of the concerns with dress and social success becoming standard for the American sorority girl of my generation, and considered unfit for membership in a sorority, I was a social outcast at DePaux...What particularly offended me as the year wore on was the lack of loyalty that rejection engendered among the unchosen." 

Suffice to say that when it came to reviewing the ins and outs of being a travelling 'two-in-one' in both the company of strangers and the company of one's self, the lives of these four remarkable women provided us with food for thought aplenty. Coming up next in the final session of this series: a poetic venture into unfettered travel as we cast ourselves Adrift. 

Astray in the City: No Sex Please, We're Brightish

The theme was 'Astray' and into this mêlée strolled a colourful array of tropes and personas and archetypes that begged our attention, that fired our imagination. It was just another Thursday evening in the city and the usual crowd had assembled: philosopher queens, all, and brave too; making their way through the darkening streets, navigating snow banks and Tory think tanks and jay-walking fines and no-trespassing  signs and all the other trappings of the striated urban landscape, of the readable metropolis, so as to salonize, sororitize, prioritize tactics over didactics, orthotics over robotics, and asking where, when, how, what, and why no female figures of pedestrian rhetoric out there roaming free through 19th Century Gay Paree, Home of Modernity, save those who're turning tricks and even they, though Making Do, don't get a pass into coyote school, trickster cool, and - like their hobo sisters this side of the ocean, cookin' and hookin' in the jungle, ridin' the rails in their spare time just to make a dime - end up slipping between the cracks of history, on their backs which means no heroics for these stoics, no leisurely amble into perambulatory folklore, just stuck out there on the sidewalk as their flâneur and hobo brethren snuck their way into enlightened parlour talk.

A meeting of the furtively purposeful and the defiantly purposeless, this third in our series revolving around The Traveller. A clash of migratory imperative and impervious meandering, this exploration of going astray in more ways than one. If our locomotive focus shifted between walking the city and taking the train, our communal task for the evening lay in reclaiming the streets and railway tracks (and all ports of call in-between) for the loitering female traveller. In part, this called for a delinking: foregrounding astray's adventuresome 13th Century etymological origins of "wandering far from home" and underplaying the moralizing overtones the word had picked up by the 14th Century, so that to take a risk, to stray off the beaten path, could be just that...Not some deviation from the path of rectitude. In part, this called for some sensible footwear: to quote a cross-dressing George Sand circa 1831, "With those little iron-shod heels I was solid on the pavement…I flew from one end of Paris to the other."; to quote Nancy Sinatra circa 1966, "These boots are made for walking." For the most part, though, what it called for was a cascade of what Walter Benjamin terms "thought fragments," and a group of hard-thinking women to pick their way through them. Here, then, a mapping of last Thursday's terrain. As Nancy would say to those boots of hers, "Start walkin’!"

Port Bou…The Pearl Diver…Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)…Le Flâneur...Idler…Purposeful… Aimless…Whimsy…Drilling…Excavating…Bibliomania…Thought Fragments…Marcel Proust…The Arcades Project…Baron Haussmann’s Paris… Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) ...The Practice of Everyday Life…Places versus Spaces…Strategies vs Tactics…”Making Do”…”The true picture of the past flits by, and only the flâneur who idly strolls by receives the message” (Hannah Arendt)…Strollology…The Hobo…”Migration is mortality by another name, the itch we can’t scratch” (Emma Donoghue)…Nomads…Loitering…Margins… Stowaways …Runaways… “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isaiah, 53:6)…Vagabonds …Vagrants …Drifters…The Journey of Natty Gan…Tourist Union #63…Mulligan Stew…Docandoberry …Modernity…Flânerie…Stream of Consciousness…Lounger…Loafer…Man of Leisure…The Urban Explorer…The Lonely Crowd…Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)…”We will never arrive anywhere if we identify as a starting point” (Rosi Braidotti)…Janet Wolff’s Invisible Flâneuse…Fugitive…Transient…The Dandy…The Tramp…The Bum… “Botanizing on the Asphalt”…Constantin Guys…The Stranger…The Potential Wanderer…George Sand in 1831: “My clothes feared nothing!”…Subjects of the Gaze…The Passing Encounter…Fleeting … Ephemeral…City-dweller…SHOCK!...Public Sphere…Private Sphere…The Songlines…”Let continents do their worst – they split, they clash – but the birds’ flight path is what it always was. Every heartbeat, every contracting muscle, is a chronicle” (Ruth Padel)…Zugunruhe…The Anonymous Encounter…Ridin’ the Rods…Fringes…Jungles…Spatializing Place…Practiced Place…Proper…Poaching from the Dominant Culture… “But what it wins it cannot keep”… homo-bonis…Migratory Workers…Restless Times… “To walk is to lack a place” (Michel de Certeau)…To walk: Old English wealcan: “to toss, roll”…and wealcian: : “to roll up, curl, muffle up” from Old Norse valka: “to drag about” and Old High German walchan, “to knead”…

Happy International Women's Day to all our members and friends!...The Huffington Post has obviously been following our latest wwp salon series!!!

10 Travel Quotes By Women That'll Inspire You For International Women's Day

The Huffington Post Canada  |  Posted: 03/07/2014 6:06 pm EST  |  Updated: 03/07/2014 6:59 pm EST

4

19

1

0

GET CANADA TRAVEL NEWSLETTERS:

SUBSCRIBE

FOLLOW:

Inspirational Travel Quotes, Inspiring Travel Quotes, International Women Day, International Women's Day, Quotes About Travel, Quotes For Travel, Quotes On Travel, Travel Quotes, Womens Day Quotes, Womens Quotes About Travel, Womens Travel Quotes, Canada Travel News

Ever since 1975, International Women's Day — a day to celebrate the achievements of women around the world — has come with an accompanying theme. Come Saturday, March 8, the world will look to commemorate this year's theme of "inspiring change" and challenge the status quo for the betterment of female equality.

In the world of travel, change is underway, with the global travel market made up by 64 per cent of women, according to 2013 data from Intrepid Travel. Women are also a driving force when it comes to business travel, with half of female business travellers holding 85 per cent of the purchasing power, according to CNN. It's also estimated that 80 per cent of all business travel decisions are made by women.

Solo female travel has also changed. In a poll of travel agents, an estimated 59 per cent saw an increase in female travel clients travelling by themselves now compared to 10 years ago.

And yet, despite the evolution of the female traveller, there are still barriers. Instances of blatant of sexism directed not only to women who travel, but work in the travel, tourism and aviation industry is still very much alive. The threat of sexual violence and abuse is still prevalent in certain countries that even governments continue to encourage women to ware fake wedding rings to discourage unwanted attention.

It's clear there's still work to be done, but the signs are positive. Inspiration and change in the realm of travel won't come by staying home. To commemorate this year's theme, the Huffington Post Canada Travel looked back to the past at some of the earliest female travellers, writers, and activists as a source of future inspiration for all women. Here are our picks:

• 1
  
• 2
  
• 3
  
• 4
  
• 5
  
• 6
  
• 7
  
• 8
  
• 9
  
• 10
  

An Epistemological Equation of Sorts: Home + Away = Abroad?

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start...But whereas Julie Andrews and her curtain-clad charges got the ball rolling with do-re-me,  we here at wwp used the window itself to parlay our way into this, the second, session of our current salon series devoted to The Traveller: seeing, in Henri Matisse's 1922 painting, Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window, an interesting juxtaposition of the private world of Home and the public world of Away; sensing, in that liminal blue line between chintzy interior and Nice's Promenade des Anglais, an appropriate place to situate the evening's exploration of that hazy lofty unplace called Abroad.

For if the last session - our maiden voyage - found us far out beyond those sailboats, afloat on the sparkling blue sea, this session - like a homing pigeon - took us back to the place from whence we'd come. First, though, we had to sit a spell on the threshold: using that space of neither here, neither there, to hash out the relationship between our point of origin and the spot where we had currently washed up on shore; tightrope-walking our way through the elsewhere and "elsewhen"  (Greg Wise) of home if only to test the strength of its safety net, if only to push the limits of its pull on us. And indeed 'home,' as viewed from this borderlands vantage point, shook off those cozy cliches faster than you can shake out a welcome mat. Home Sweet Home? Hearth and Home? Home as - bless old Pliny the Elder (AD 23 - AD 79) - where the heart is? Well, let's just say that home as "dilemmatic space" (Bonnie Honig) better describes the image that captured our hearts, that gave us plenty to write home about, as we grappled with the question of what really keeps those home fires burning. If the answers to the latter were diverse, ranging from creatively nesting to continually negotiating those "little tactics of the habitat" (Michel Foucault) to consciously transforming the unhappy home of yesterday into today's site of active resistance, our task of unpacking this not-so-cozy-concept-after-all was aided by shifting the focus away from home as place to home-making as action.

Suddenly, we had some momentum: no longer location, location, location but locomotion (!), we were touching base with our post-structuralist meanderings of several months back; no longer restrained by domus, reduced to stasis, we were finding a way to make ourselves more at home with home by both circulating within it and venturing from it on a Deleuze-Guattarian "thread of a tune." Aha! - so Julie Andrews hadn't been left behind after all. Here we were, whistling while we (house)worked and all the time, unbeknownst to ourselves, we were territorializing - birdlike - our surroundings, we were weaving self and environs into one. But also, we were singing out, spinning out, a transportable soundscape - one that couldn't be left at home, just stashed under a pot plant along with emergency key and instructions for feeding the cat, when we pulled the front door shut and set off on our travels. And here, quite possibly, we hit upon the crux of the matter: the difficulty of ever entirely leaving home; the fact that when you pack up that old kit bag of yours, your troubles do indeed go with you. So much, we thought, for Pico Iyer's assertion that the pessimist at home can morph into an optimist abroad. Home, it seemed, wasn't quite so easy to shake off as all that. Home, for all the self-imposed "disorienting" we might engage in so as to live more "deliberately," more vitally, while actually in our home (David Henry Thoreau) was proving to be a tenacious old beast when it came to striking out for Abroad.

The time had come, we decided, to hit the road and give those homespun tentacles a run for their money. First, we considered the three camps into which Paul Fussell divides those who go Abroad: the traveller (the age of which, according to Fussell, is "dead"); the tourist (who is apt to ask of anyone encountered en route, "Where are you from?"); and the anti-tourist (who is apt to answer the tourist's well-meaning question with a vague and disdainful, "Hmmmm...I spend a lot of time Abroad."). Examining each of these tropes, we delved into the "Golden Age of Travel" as experienced by those with sufficient means between the two world wars, and as conveyed through high-brow modernist travel literature.

Next, we divided ourselves into groups - Sojourners, Globe-trotters, Ex-pats, and Jet-setters - so as to explore the various ways that these folks, through time, have engaged with the extended stay "abroad" or the proverbial 'grand tour' "overseas." Selecting a suitable carrying case and then packing it for these various entities was one of the ways we got to know each of them better. Subjecting those same entities to an arduous questionnaire - Where is 'abroad'?; Does the idea of going abroad suggest slow travel?; Who goes abroad these days?; How might 'a move abroad' be considered 'a tactical evasion'? (thank you, Ian McEwan!) - resulted in some important insights into the tactics used by each of these groups to negotiate the terrain between Home and Away whilst Abroad. Linking these insights to questions we had collectively put together during our first session together, we were able to draw on these particular travelling 'types' to flesh out whether it is better to arrive at our destination with or without prior knowledge of it, whether organized travel affords us greater freedom or lesser freedom than 'disorganized' travel, and the role played by our senses as we immerse ourselves in foreign climes.

As for what comes home with us after we've been away, we'll give Francis Bacon (1561-1626) - known as 'the great empiricist' and 'father' of the scientific method - the final florid word on this issue:

 "Let us only prick in some flowers, of that we hath learned abroad, into the customs of our own country."

Er....right. What's more, it's easy to see why he's also credited with having introduced into philosophy the art of inductive reasoning. Poor old Bacon, though...He died of pneumonia after scrabbling about in the cold while attempting to prick - in those days, the word meant 'plant' - snow into the interior of a recently butchered chicken in order to test out freezing as a method for preserving meat. The experiment was a success...The same could hardly be said of Bacon. As the old saying goes, and as we Canadians know all too well thanks to our own powers of induction: "A good woolly hat - never leave home without one!"

Afloat with "The Traveller" : Of Voyages, Ships and Seas

Last Thursday evening, a group of intrepid women with inquiring minds braved the icy cold weather front currently assailing Montreal to join us for the launch of our 2014 Winter/Spring Salon Series. Organized around the trope of The Traveller, each of the forthcoming sessions devoted to this archetypal figure will set her in motion through a specific travel-related action, which in turn is linked to a means and a medium for getting her (and us) from A to B. On this particular evening, the action that was keeping our minds alert and our armchair travelling bodies afloat was voyaging; the means a ship; and our medium of choice, the sea. Enter Virginia Woolf with her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). Ten or so years in the making and endlessly revised even after its initial publication, what better way to set the scene for this latest wine women and philosophy escapade than Woolf's painstakingly crafted and exquisitely observed account of a young woman's voyage towards self-discovery. That the protagonist's rite of passage into the ways of society and the wiles of its most privileged players begins during a sea-passage between England and South America is no accident: metaphors - those stand-in 'carriers' of meaning that borrow their name from a method of transport in ancient Greece - figure prominently in Woolf's writing; even Woolf's chosen title, The Voyage Out, would go on to have a life beyond her novel, coming to mean the first or pivotal work of any author - the work upon which, metaphorically speaking, that author had cut her writerly teeth!

All to say that our own first voyage out in this series found us talking, in nautical terms, of many things -

Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings - 
And why the sea is boiling hot -

- but also, in a somewhat more practical vein, navigating our way through a number of individual and group exercises designed to shed poetic light on the workings of metaphor and generate insight into the relationship between freedom and voyaging. As we did this work, the etymological powers-that-be were busily getting on with their own unpacking: revealing the roots of the word 'voyage' to lie in the actual provisions (like food and money) that one takes on a long and arduous and (frequently) perilous journey; leaving us somewhat 'at sea' - that is, in a state of uncertainty or perplexity - with their announcement that the 'glamour' we associate with those dashing transatlantic cruises of yesteryear is, in fact, a very close cousin of that dry and unbending stickler for rules, 'grammar.' Delving back to a time before 'glamour' and 'grammar' went their separate ways, we saw how their shared denotation of 'scholarly learning' connoted, in those medieval times, all the magic and enchantment and casting of spells that we today associate more with a glitzy on-board romance than with the present subjunctive.

Forsaking the exigencies of the latter in favour of pragmatist philosopher William James' (1842-1910) somewhat more alluring concept of 'corporeal grammar,' we considered the difference between our bodies at home and our bodies en voyage. From the moment we are born, James argued, our bodies become encoded by and conditioned to a specific habitat, creating within us a range of habitual corporeal responses, prompting us to become creatures of habit more likely to seek out those encounters between self and environment that are recurring, hence familiar, than unexpected, hence jarring. Over time, a kind of bodily grammar - complete with its prescribed associations and requisite rules - sets in. We become corporeally able and re-actively 'correct': at one with our environment just so long as that environment remains consistent, does not significantly change.

Which is precisely the point where vitalist phenomenologist and sensuous travel writer Alphonso Lingis (b. 1933) steps in: urging us to shake up that corporeal grammar of ours; suggesting that a voyage to foreign climes is the perfect way to get the ball rolling. Travel, as Lingis argues, "bursts our world wide-open". In the process, we not only begin to "see with new eyes" à la Marcel Proust. We also shatter those affective circuits of which our body has become composed, and through which the passé and composé of our respective corporeal grammars just seem to end up inevitably together. Not only are we discovering new landscapes as we voyage into the unfamiliar; our bodies themselves become new landscapes, jarred into a reconfigured topography as the shock of the unknown makes us anew. To Andre Gide's admonition that we cannot discover new oceans unless we have the courage to lose sight of the shore, we add gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson's insistence that, rather than arriving at our final destination in a "pretty and well preserved body," the proof of a life well lived lies in "skidding in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: 'Wow! What a Ride!'"

So much for the Proustian return voyage - that remembrance of things past as one dips one's Madeleine into a cup of herbal tea and takes a tentative bite. And so much for Aldous Huxley's Brave New World pronouncement that boredom, when it all comes down to it, is the ultimate symbol of the "true" traveller's liberty. As we sailed on through the evening's proceedings, it was becoming increasingly clear that the philosophical journey that lies ahead of us is rife with contradictions - a point brought all the more home to us as, in the closing minutes of our maiden voyage together, we cast a wayward glance at Katherine Anne Porter's 'voyage out' novel, Ship of Fools (1962). Bouncing off Sebastian Brant's 15th Century story, Das Narrenschiff, and deeply moved by Hieronymous Bosch's painting of that self-same Ship of Fools, Porter gathered material for her book during a 26 day sea voyage that she took in 1931 from Mexico to Germany. Comparing the rampant antisemitism she witnessed aboard the ship to the wildly speculative 'reasoning' that led European communities during the Renaissance to herd up those villagers deemed to be insane, and send them out to sea in a ship with other 'fools' so as to be forever rid of them, Porter's main point was that a vessel afloat in the ocean could be seen as a microcosm of humanity - the passengers no better, no worse, than the 'fools' left back on shore.

If this latter reflection provides a fitting segue into next session's exploration of the tensions between home and away, those taking part in this session were left in no doubt that travelling - whether physically or philosophically - is not for the faint of heart. All to say, we worked hard. But then, given 'travel''s etymological origins - travail, as in 'work', and before that, 'an instrument of torture' (!) - what else would you expect? Sincere thanks go out to our existing members for bringing their friends along to give wwp a trial run, and we welcome all those who will be joining us as new members in 2014.