Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Our talk was free that evening, our tongues – which had yearned for long sentences and stories – well lubricated by white wine, and we went to bed late.

  The next morning over breakfast in our hotel, Aleksandra – that was this angry woman’s name – leaned in over the croissants and said:

  ‘The true God is an animal. He’s in animals, so close that we don’t notice. Every day God sacrifices himself for us, dying over and over, feeding us with his body, clothing us in his skin, allowing us to test our medicines on him so that we might live longer and better. Thus does he show his affection, bestow on us his friendship and love.’

  I froze, staring at her mouth, shaken not so much by this revelation as by the tone in which she said it – so serene. And by the knife that glinted as it spread layers of butter over the fluffy insides of her croissant, back and forth, methodical, relentless.

  ‘You can find the proof in Ghent.’

  She extracted a postcard from her hodge-podge bag and tossed it onto my plate.

  I picked it up and tried to glean some meaning in the proliferation of details; I might need a magnifying glass to do that, though.

  ‘Anyone can see it,’ said Aleksandra. ‘In the middle of the city there’s a cathedral, and there, on the altar, you’ll see an enormous, beautiful painting. In it there are fields, a green plain somewhere outside of the city, and in that meadow there is an ordinary elevation. Right here,’ and she pointed with the tip of her knife, ‘here is the Animal in the form of a white lamb, exalted.’

  I did recognize the painting. I’d seen it a number of times in different reproductions. Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

  ‘His true identity was discovered – his bright luminous figure draws the gaze, causes heads to bow before his divine majesty,’ she said, pointing at the lamb with her knife. ‘And you can see how from just about everywhere there is a procession flowing towards him – those are all these people coming to pay tribute to him, to gaze upon this humblest, humiliated God. Here, look at how the rulers of countries are making their way up towards him, emperors and kings, churches, parliaments, political parties, guilds; there are mothers and children, elderly folk and teenage girls…’

  ‘Why do you do this?’ I asked.

  ‘For obvious reasons,’ she replied. ‘I want to write an exhaustive volume that leaves out no crime, from the dawn of the world to our time. It will be humanity’s confessions.’

  She had already gathered the excerpts from ancient Greek literature.

  GUIDEBOOKS

  Describing something is like using it – it destroys; the colours wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear. This applies most of all to places. Enormous damage has been done by travel literature – a veritable scourge, an epidemic. Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet; published in editions numbering in the millions, in many languages, they have debilitated places, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours. Even I, in my youthful naiveté, once took a shot at the description of places. But when I would go back to those descriptions later, when I’d try to take a deep breath and allow their intense presence to choke me up all over again, when I’d try to listen in on their murmurings, I was always in for a shock. The truth is terrible: describing is destroying.

  Which is why you have to be very careful. It’s better not to use names: avoid, conceal, take great caution in giving out addresses, so as not to encourage anyone to make their own pilgrimage. After all, what would they find there? A dead place, dust, like the dried-out core of an apple. The Clinical Syndromes (aforementioned) also includes the so-called Paris Syndrome, which largely ails Japanese tourists who visit Paris. It is characterized by shock and by a number of physical symptoms like shortness of breath, heart palpitations, sweating, and arousal. Occasionally there are hallucinations. Then sedatives are administered, and a retreat to the home is recommended. Such disturbances can be explained by the discrepancy between the pilgrims’ expectations and the reality of Paris, which bears no resemblance to the city described in guidebooks, films and television.

  NEW ATHENS

  No book ages quite so quickly as a guidebook, which is in fact quite the blessing for the guidebook industry. In my own travels I have remained faithful to two books which I refer to above all others, in spite of their age, because they were written with real passion, and a genuine desire to portray the world.

  The first was written in Poland in the early eighteenth century. Around the same time, other essays written in the Enlightenment West may have been more successful, but none possesses as much charm as this one. Its author was a Catholic priest named Benedykt Chmielowski who hailed from Volhynia (a region now shared by Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus). He was a kind of Josephus cloaked in a provincial fog, a Herodotus on the outermost outskirts of the world. I suspect he might have suffered from the same syndrome I did although unlike me he never actually left his home.

  In a chapter with the lengthy title of ‘On other strange and wonderful persons of the world: That is, Anacepholus, alias Headless, or Cynocephalus, alias Dog-Headed; and on other persons of curious form’, he writes:

  …there is a Nation known as Blemij, which Isidorus calls Lemnios, where men have the figure and the symmetry of our ilk, yet whole heads they have not, rather only faces in the centre of their breasts… Pliny the Elder, meanwhile, that great researcher of the natural world, not only confirms the selfsame sentiment de Acephalis, alias of headless persons, but also situates their close relatives, the Troglodytes, in Ethiopia, a Swart Country. Much of this knowledge these Authors derive from the Momentum of Saint Augustine, oculatis Testis [that is, eye witness], regarding peregrinations in that Country (being Bishop of African Hippo not overly removed thence) and sowing the semina [seeds] of the Holy Christian faith, as he mentions directly in his Sermon in Eremo [in the Desert] to the Augustinian Brotherhood, which he had founded himself: “… I was already Bishop of Hippo, when I went into Ethiopia with some servants of Christ there to preach the Gospel. In this country we saw many men and women without heads, who had two great eyes in their breasts; while the rest of their appendages were akin to our own…” Solinus, that Author invoked so many times already, writes that in the Indian mountains there are people with dogs’ heads and voices, alias barking. Marcus Polus, who surveyed India, asserts that on the Isle of Angamen there are people with dogs’ heads and dogs’ teeth; this is corroborated by Odoricus Aelianus (lib. 10), who situates such people in the deserts and the Forests of Egypt. These human monsters Pliny calls Cynanalogos, while Aulus Gellius and Isidonus call them Cynocephalus, i.e., canine heads…. Prince Mikołay Radziwiłł in his Peregrinations (Third Epistle) admits that he had with him two Cynocephali, that is, persons with canine heads, and that he further imported them to Europe.

  Tandem oritur questio [This ultimately begs the question]: Are such monstrous Persons capaces [able] to be saved? Saint Augustine, Oraculum of Hippo, responds thus, that man, wherever he may be born, so long as he be good, and wise, having wisdom in his soul, even diverging from us in form, colour, voice, bearing, has inevitably descended from the first human forebear, Adam, and is thus capax for salvation.

  The other one is Melville’s Moby Dick.

  Though if you can just check Wikipedia from time to time, that’s also perfectly sufficient.

  WIKIPEDIA

  As far as I can tell, this is mankind’s most honest cognitive project. It is frank about the fact that all the information we have about the world comes straight out of our own heads, like Athena out of Zeus’s. People bring to Wikipedia everything they know. If the project succeeds, then this encyclopaedia undergoing perpetual renewal will be the greatest wonder of the world. It has everything we know in it – every thing, definition, event, and problem our brains have worked on; we shall cite sources, provide links. And so we will start to stitch together our version of the world, be able to bundle up the globe in ou
r own story. It will hold everything. Let’s get to work! Let everyone write even just a sentence on whatever it is they know best.

  Sometimes I start to doubt that it will work. After all, what it has in it can only be what we can put into words – what we have words for. And in that sense, it wouldn’t be able to hold everything at all.

  We should have some other collection of knowledge, then, to balance that one out – its inverse, its inner lining, everything we don’t know, all the things that can’t be captured in any index, can’t be handled by any search engine. For the vastness of these contents cannot be traversed from word to word – you have to step in between the words, into the unfathomable abysses between ideas. With every step we’ll slip and fall.

  It would appear the only option is to get in even deeper.

  Matter and anti-matter.

  Information and anti-information.

  CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, PICK UP YOUR PENS!

  Jasmine, the nice Muslim woman I’d spent the whole evening talking to, was telling me about her project: she wanted to encourage everyone in her country to write books. She had noticed that you don’t need very much in order to write a book – a bit of free time after work, not even a computer. Any such intrepid person might end up writing a bestseller – then their efforts would be rewarded by social advancement. It’s the best way of getting out of poverty, she said. If only we all read each other’s books, she sighed. She’d founded a forum on the internet. Apparently it already had several hundred members.

  I love the of idea of reading books as a brotherly, sisterly moral obligation to one’s people.

  TRAVEL PSYCHOLOGY: LECTIO BREVIS I

  At airports over the past few months I’ve come across some scholars who, amidst the din of travel, between departure announcements and boarding calls, organize little lectures. One of them explained to me that it was part of a worldwide (or perhaps EU-wide) educational outreach programme. So at some point I decided to linger in view of the screen in the waiting area and the small group of curious listeners.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ began a young woman, nervously adjusting her colourful scarf, while her companion, a man in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, prepared the screen that was hanging on the wall. ‘Travel psychology studies people in transit, persons in motion, and thus situates itself in opposition to traditional psychology, which has always investigated the human being in a fixed context, in stability and stillness – for example, through the prism of his or her biological constitution, family relationships, social situations, and so forth. In travel psychology, these factors are of secondary, not primary importance.

  ‘If we wish to catalogue humankind in a convincing way, we can do so only by placing people in some sort of motion, moving from one place towards another. The fact of the repeated emergence of so many unconvincing descriptions of the stable, fixed person appears to call into question the existence of a self, understood non-relationally. This has meant that for some time in travel psychology there have been certain prevailing voices claiming that there can be no other psychology besides travel psychology.’

  The little cluster of listeners shuffled restlessly. A vociferous group of tall men distinguished by their sports team’s colourful scarves – a clan of fans – had just passed by. At the same time, there were still people coming up to us, intrigued by the screen on the wall and by the two rows of chairs set out. They would sit down for a moment on their way between gates or in between wandering around the airport shops. Evident on many of their faces was exhaustion and disorientation in time: you could tell they’d be glad to take just a little nap, and they must not have been aware that around the next corner there was a comfortable waiting room with armchairs you could sleep in. Several travellers had stood up when the woman began talking. A very young couple was standing locked in an embrace, listening with rapt attention as they tenderly stroked each other’s backs.

  The woman paused briefly, then started up again: ‘A fundamental concept in travel psychology is desire, which is what lends movement and direction to human beings as well as arousing in them an inclination towards something. Desire in itself is empty, in other words it merely indicates direction, but never destination; destinations, in any case, always remain phantasmagoric and unclear; the closer we get to them, the more enigmatic they become. By no means is it possible to ever actually attain a given destination, nor, in so doing, appease desire. This process of striving is best encapsulated in the preposition “towards”. Towards what?’

  Here the woman glanced out over her glasses and cast her pointed gaze about the audience, as though awaiting any form of confirmation that she was addressing the right group of people. This was not to the liking of the couple with two children in a pram, who exchanged a look and pushed their luggage onwards, moving down to take a gander at the imitation Rembrandt.

  ‘Travel psychology has not cut all ties with psychoanalysis…’ the woman continued, and I suddenly felt sorry for these young lecturers. They were talking to people who had wound up here by accident and who did not look particularly interested. I went over to the vending machine to get myself a cup of coffee, added a couple of sugar cubes, trying to revive myself, and by the time I returned, it was the man speaking instead.

  ‘…foundational idea,’ he was saying, ‘is constellationality, and right away the first claim of travel psychology: in life, unlike in studies (though in fact in scholarship, too, much gets overtaxed for the sake of order) there exists no philosophical primum. That means that it is impossible to build a consistent cause-and-effect course of argument or a narrative with events that succeed each other casuistically and follow from each other. That would merely be an approximation, in the same way that an approximation of the earth gives us a grid of latitude and longitude. When in reality, in order to reflect our experience more accurately, it would be necessary instead to assemble a whole, out of pieces of more or less the same size, placed concentrically on the same surface. Constellation, not sequencing, carries truth. This is why travel psychology envisions man in equivalently weighted situations, without trying to lend his life any – even approximate – continuity. Human life is comprised of situations. There is, of course, a certain inclination towards the repetition of behaviours. This repetition does not, however, mean that we should succumb in our imaginations to the appearance of any sort of consistent whole.’

  The man looked out over his glasses at his listeners, uneasy, no doubt wanting to ascertain whether they were actually listening. We were listening, attentively.

  At that moment a group of travellers with children ran past; they must have been late for their connecting flight. This unfocused us a little, we looked for a moment at their flushed red faces, their straw hats and souvenir drums and masks and shell necklaces. The man cleared his throat a few times to bring us back to order, gathering air into his lungs, but then looking back at us he let it out again and fell silent. He flipped through a few pages of his notes and finally said:

  ‘The history. Now a few sentences on the history of the field. It developed in the postwar years (in the fifties) out of airline psychology, which arose in conjunction with the growing number of airplane passengers. At first it dealt with the particular problems connected with passenger movement – the functions of task forces in emergency situations, the psychological dynamics of flight – then it expanded its area of interest in the direction of the organization of airports and hotels, the appropriation of new spaces, the multicultural aspects of travel. In time it branched out into distinct specializations, like psychogeography, psychotopology. Clinical branches came about…’

  I stopped listening. The lecture was too long. They ought to dispense this education in smaller doses.

  Instead I observed a man, poorly dressed, all rumpled, no doubt in the middle of a long journey. He had found someone’s black umbrella and proceeded to inspect it. But it turned out that the umbrella was unusable. Its wires were broken, and the black covering coul
dn’t be extended. Then, to my surprise, the man began to meticulously detach the umbrella’s covering from the rods and end-pieces, which took him some time. He did it fully concentrated, standing still amidst the flow of crowds of travellers. When he had finished, he folded up the material into a cube, placed it in his pocket, then disappeared into the stream of people.

  I turned then, and went on my way as well.

  THE RIGHT TIME AND PLACE

  Many people believe that there exists in the world’s coordinate system a perfect point where time and space reach an agreement. This may even be why these people travel, leaving their homes behind, hoping that even by moving around in a chaotic fashion they will increase their likelihood of happening upon this point. Landing at the right time in the right place – seizing the opportunity, grabbing the moment and not letting go – would mean the code to the safe had been cracked, the combination revealed, the truth exposed. No more being passed by, no more surfing coincidences, accidents and turns of fate. You don’t have to do anything – you just have to show up, sign in at that one single configuration of time and place. There you will find your great love, happiness, a winning lottery ticket or the revelation of the mystery everyone’s been killing themselves over in vain for all these years, or death. Sometimes in the morning one even has the impression that this moment is close by, that today might be the day it will arrive.

  INSTRUCTIONS

  I dreamed I was leafing through an American magazine with photographs of ponds and pools. I saw everything, detail by detail. The letters A, B and C described precisely every component part of the plans and outlines. I eagerly began reading an article entitled: ‘How to Build an Ocean: Instructions’.