travel notes '23

 In the City of Nightly Horsemen, people like to party amidst the ruins that resulted from one of the great wars of the last century. I crawled through the city’s crumbling remains of a once uncompromising attempt of order and I lost my place along linear time.

Nearly 80 percent of this place was destroyed in battles, yet beauty does not fail to shine through the evidence of its destruction, to be marveled at by travelers from all over the world. An energy permeates even through the cracks of its infrastructure. The scars are not concealed but instead celebrated. I wondered: could it be that, like me, this city no longer wishes to be fixed nor unbroken? 

In the absence of a stable government, with a hijacked right to cultural identity by recurring hegemonic forces, a group of pupils have started a movement towards the discovery of what it means to be of this place if not determined by rulers. Hand-in-hand with futurist generosities, and the possibility that fictions can hold more truth than something factually called history. Simultaneously realizing while inventing. They found a source of hope in overcoming the impacts of colonization by exploring the unique qualities of their language, as a chosen people of alien dissent, and laughing at the course of their shitty faith to announce their victory over its oppressive forces. 

By day 3 of being in the New Capital of the Land of Everything Nice, I thought I would crack under the pressures of its regimentations. Not a single action was conducted out of order. Human activity had never looked so mechanized to me. I was hyper aware of all of my movements so as to not disrupt this place’s consistency of perfection. Then, in a secluded underground tunnel I arrived at a place with freaks even crazier than the ones I had met in communities that were more apparently expressive. Not knowing a word in each other’s language, we succeeded in communicating through the pouring of drinks and bizarre abstractions of our bodies on the dance floor. 

In the nearby City of Tradition, I saw a contradiction to my previous interpretation of this land’s relationship to order. Staring at the arrangement of stones in a garden for contemplation, I recognized a pattern that I thought could only be attributed to the hands of entropy or someone with an extremely heightened sense of intuition. Five islands of varying sizes, each with different arrangements of boulders on them, were floating within a neatly delineated rectangular frame. The islands were thoughtfully contoured by smaller pebbles, orienting my attention towards the inherent perfection of their imperfection. I saw this relationship repeat throughout this city’s composition. It was my first encounter with such a fine tuned balance between human will and the universe’s chaotic tendencies. In a wooden table, the intentional cuts performed by human hands highlighted the complexity of the existing movements in the material’s grain, which further complicated the presence of the human precision. It was here I learned that any scar or rupture presents an opportunity to learn a new order if approached with an accepting consciousness. 

When I arrived at the Port of Cedars, I was worried I would not make it past customs from the looks on everyone's faces when they clocked my passport. However, my anxieties quickly vanished at the sound of the signature tri-lingual greeting from my hosts. A unique blend of the native, the colonizer, and the contemporary influencer tongue. Wars and conflicts were not something of the last century, but instead always on the brink, combined with the pressures from the neighboring frictions. There was a shortage of nearly everything I took for granted back on the land I was visiting from, but I was surprised to learn of the efficiency that is obtainable in circumstances of limitation. Driving was the only means of transportation, but a complete free for all. One does not sit behind the wheel when they are given a piece of paper that grants them permission to, but when they have learned to operate the vehicle and are ready to take full responsibility for the consequences they may face by putting their bodies into such a position, with the understanding of the commonality between them and the people they share the road with. There was not enough electricity to keep the traffic lights running, nor people to repaint the pavement markings, but the system of driving functioned and I felt secure within it. The Port of Cedars’ ruins were still in the making and conversations were saturated with a general disillusionment about the land’s fate, but I saw an inspiring amount of strength in its people’s resourcefulness and insistence on delicious food regardless of scarcity. 

The City of River Proportions was by far the most similar to the City I was visiting from, agreeing with the notion of their ancestral lineage. For this reason, I felt like I had very little in common with it, but this did not prevent me from becoming completely infatuated with it. It was large but not as dense, fast but a little slower, cold but cozy. I came here to study, so the majority of my time was spent in libraries, laboratories, among other educational environments. I was struck by the kind of questions I heard pupils formulate and the general population’s belief in the potential in the study of MMM. However, when I made remarks on these observations to the natives, they all said that this was a fading quality of their culture and that they imagine it would be lost within a matter of just a few years. I could not help but think that for a society as chronically depressed and humorously so, this could not be true. If it were the case, it would have happened long ago, but then again, I was just a visitor. Still, whatever “remained” in their trust in the study of MMM invigorated my own exploration of it. The rarity of beautifully weathered days made me take on their mostly domestic lifestyle, allowing me to dig myself a cave where I could explore ideas at my own pace, unadulterated by external roars and pressures of deadlines. Of course when I returned to the land I was visiting from I was mutilated and overgrown and had to be pruned by the test of my discoveries on the inhibitors of the Great Rhizomatic Hivemind. 

On this trip, I did not make it back to my home city in the land of Golden Wheat and Blue Skies as I planned to, at least not yet. The air was open only to missiles and drones and I had not perfected talking in my newly acquired mother tongue. But this adventure enriched my vision and gave me a sense of the great amount of difference and diversity there is within the span of a single planet. Today, my return to the motherland is imminent, right around the corner, though an arrival at governance by peaceful liberty, will, and wishes, may be further away. Still, from my position of relative safety, I prepare for the state that the magicians are working so hard at moving us towards. Without an ounce of hope left within me, I am drawing up a plan for a new School of MMM, inspired by what I have learned here in the Great Rhizomatic Hivemind. My obsessive question: How does a land, as do people, determine its relationship to all of its freshly acquired ruins?