Irreconcilable Distances, Permeable Boundaries, Overlapping Memories

October 18, 2021

International travel in the age of aeronautics is best represented by the travel montages in Indiana Jones movies. In these scenes, a red line is steadily drawn across a sparse map, connecting points in a way wholly independent of time or real space, while vague, translucent images of trains, planes and automobiles flutter across the screen. A person on a commercial airplane tracks their progress via a similar although much less aesthetically appealing motion-graphic, before emerging several hours later in a location so distant and foreign from where they began that it seems impossible to accept that both places exist on the same Earth.

Travelling, in this way, is a journey into unreality. Many of the objects from the real world are instantly recognizable in the new: there are cars, buildings, people, forks and knives and plates, but they have a different quality than they had at home. Here in the world of the traveler, these objects exist wholly independent of all else. At home, all the buildings and people reflect memories, or, more often, they reflect nothing, being totally subsumed by habit. A building one passes every day is no longer a building; it fully camouflages into the background and becomes simply a Part of the World. But a building in Paris or a building in Tokyo sticks out; it confidently proclaims its independent existence. It whispers in one's ear of all the possibilities contained within its walls.

When I think back on all the places I have been, there is no sense that Phoenix is located between Mexico and my hometown, or that Fresno is accessible via highway from Seattle. Every location exists as a silo, as a vacuum-sealed set of memories starring a version or versions of myself that can never have been anywhere else. What I mean is that they are sealed in time. The me that visited Seattle could not hop in a car and meet up with the me that visited Fresno. My Seattle and My Fresno do not even exist in the same Universe, let alone the same planet.

In the same way, My Japan, that strange, surreal world I inhabited for just under six months in the winter of 2015/16, does not coincide with the geographical entity known as Japan. A map of the world hangs in my hallway, and I can trace with my finger the passage across the Pacific Ocean that connects my current location and the geographical entity known as Japan. I could hypothetically hop on a plane tomorrow and be there. But My Japan is lost; I can only travel there via my memory, whose time table is as inconsistent and unreliable as a forgotten country-side bus. I could wait for hours and see no sight of it; other times, it overtakes me on the way somewhere else, and whisks me away.

But let me return to this hypothetical plane-hop that takes me across the Pacific Ocean. I say that I could go to Japan, but this is simply a figure of speech. Because as soon as I enter that flying tube, my home disappears, the Pacific Ocean disappears, the whole Map of the World becomes what it truly is: a ridiculous abstraction. I would not, in this hypothetical scenario, be going to Japan at all. I would appear in Japan, my brain awash with fuzzy memories of a spacious room filled with green chairs, a corridor suspended in mid-air, a small screen showing the acclaimed movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I would appear in Japan disheveled, dislocated, discombobulated. A friend would come and direct me on to a train, and it would occur to me that it is true what Plato says, that we do not learn anything new but simply remember ideas from a previous life, as people pass by speaking a language that for some incomprehensible reason I feel that I can understand. By the time I reach the train, the transition is complete, the transition that began the moment my keys twisted in the lock of my apartment door one million miles away. I am no longer anywhere; I am simply Here.

This being Here is what is so elusive in our everyday life. So rarely are we ever truly Here when we are wrapped up in the vicissitudes of eating, breathing and sleeping. Our minds are caught up in what happened, what is going to happen, we feel as if we exist in a liminal space between the events of yesterday and the day to come, between how our last Event went and how our next Event is going to go, whether that event is a party or simply the looming eventuality that we will have to, once again, take a trip to the grocery store. It seems to require a flying tube, or at least a rectangular box on a long road, for us to ever approach the state of being that truly fulfills the word Here. Here is nowhere else. It is nothing else. It is no other time. It is just Here.

And yet this Here often gains much of its power from a strong correspondence to our imagination. Paris did not impress me on its own merits; judging it by the external stimuli that reached my brain, it is no more or less appealing than anywhere else. But as the city of Proust, of Zola, of Hugo, a city containing within it the monuments of Napoleon and the infrastructure of the Second Empire, it struck me in a way that no other city ever has. Paris had existed within me for years as a fantasy, and it existed as a place that I would never, ever go, not from a lack of desire, but from its sheer impossibility. How could I possibly go somewhere that exists only in a book? And so to be transported, transplanted directly into the midst of it was like a dream -- I mean a real, night-time, unconscious dream.

This is what Here is; it is to be in the midst of a dream. It is for the possibilities that usually occupy your idle imagination to become actual, and to appear before you. How can you have time to think of the ideas of yesterday or tomorrow, when the product of your thought has become corporeal and invited you to live within it? The blurring of the imaginary and the true, the conceived and the conceivable: this is the realm of travel. It can not be measured in miles or kilometres, because we do not travel on solid ground. We do not travel across space at all, nor time; what we do is break through a barrier erected in our minds. This barrier separates the everyday from the rare, the mundane from the exciting. These two worlds do not find it easy to intersect; thus the transitionary step, the liminal tube, is necessary.

This is why, during travel, even the mundane becomes interesting. The grocery store that I see, which, to a Japanese person living in that particular neighbourhood is as normal as the Save-on Foods down the street is to me, is given an infusion of Reality, a Reality beyond just being real, a Reality that contains within it the additional virtue of being significant. Every item is new, every sign is a puzzle; the items may as well be stocked completely at random for all I can tell of the organizational structure. All of this keeps me present in the Here.

When you are Here, a train ride next to a snoring man is not an inconvenience; it is an experience. When you are Here, no matter what track is playing on your iPod, it fits as a part of the scene. Being Here is a function of lucidity; it is being aware and not letting habit cloud your perceptions. We have eyes, but often we do not see; we fill in what we know with our memory, and fail to notice what is before us the whole time. We pass through much of life in such a daze, caught up in our thoughts, taking the world as a given, but often all it takes is a wrong turn to pass out of this life and into a dream. When you approach your home from an unfamiliar street, walk around to the back of the McDonalds, look up and see the ceiling of your workplace, and realize that your eyes have never focused on this particular image, you are experiencing the same lucidity that comes from crossing the Pacific Ocean.

Many times I have come across an intersection that triggers my memory in a certain way, and it feels like I could turn left and immediately be at my childhood home, or at my dorm room in Mito, or at a park that I remember visiting only once as a child. Something about the hue of the pavement, the feeling of the air, the rustling of the trees, makes me feel as if all of the world is connected in ways that don't correspond to the maps we draw. I had a dream last night that I was taking my wife to see the house of a friend I used to play with in school. We were walking along the street, and I was telling her of all the games we used to play there, the trees we used to climb, until finally we reach the driveway, and as we were walking up the path I saw through the window an unfamiliar living room. And I remembered, 'Of course; they moved. They moved fifteen years ago. This house whose path we are on, it's not the place I told you of. That place doesn't exist anymore.'

None of these places exist anymore. All these places that I think I know, and I think I have visited, they exist nowhere but in my mind. My Vancouver and My Japan, existing as they do in my life and in my dreams, are not separated by 7,445km, or an eleven-hour plane ride. On My Earth, they are neighbours. They are more than neighbours; they share the same space. The memories from each overlap, bleeding into each other, until it begins to feel as if I have lived all of my life in a single unending moment.

I can sit on my balcony and zoom through space and time like a Bodhisattva on a lotus leaf. If I close my eyes tight, I can return to the deck of my childhood home, brushing my hand against the rough, wooden floor as I lounge in a lawn chair. I can then get up, descend the rickety stairs down to the garden, where I feel beneath my feet the wet dewy grass that hid in the shadows until noon. And while I am there, someone opens the gate, and starts walking my way. I know them from somewhere, not from this garden or any other, but from a love I knew in a life I've lost, a life that sits in a grave next to the many other broken futures that make up my past. Because time is equally as illusory as space; it does not pass by in seconds and minutes, but stops, starts, moving this way and that, dividing our life into pieces that feel just as distant as My Fresno feels from My Seattle. You could say only two months went by between event A and event B, but I would not believe you — I could not believe you, for the man who experienced A was a different man than he who experienced B.

Measurements of time and space are objective facts. This objectivity is what makes them circumspect. We all agree, in an abstract way, that such and such distance is a mile, and such and such period is a minute, but for none of us does this agreement make such notions True. These objective facts do not correlate to our subjective experience. Our minds contain all places and all times at once. Deep down, we all know this. It is only because these places and these times are irreconcilable, because there is only one space and one time (i.e. objective reality) in which we can actually meet and communicate, that we consider our internal spaces and times secondary, less Real. When I meet you in a dream, I wake up with a new impression of you, an impression that I bring into my waking life, consciously or otherwise — an impression that affects our relationship. And yet we say that dreams are not Real. Time passes by; I exclaim, "It feels like we've been at this for an hour!" but some pedant with a digital watch declares that "It has only been twenty minutes," and we say that he is right, that his clock-confirmed arbitrary number is more Real than the arbitrary number that I pulled straight from my own heart!

But of course, if we all lived by our own heart, we would be alone, for no one can follow us to the places we can go, and no one can meet us in the times gone past.