japan day 1

After all my talk about the failure of Korea's restoration/preservation projects, i've been a bit nervous about Japan... I mean, Japan holds such a large place in our mythification of Asia that I'm not sure if one can truly remove themselves from the experienced knowledge that they're seeing JAPAN. Will i be able to "objectively judge" (i.e. judge from my subjective aesthetic values) what i see? Or will i be so psyched about how cool Japan is that i'll just fawn away, much like a reporter covering the Obama campaign? (i try hard to keep my material fresh and topical, fyi.)

SO, with that out of the way, i will say that Dazaifu certainly felt a lot more authentic than almost anything in Korea.



Maybe it was the plum blossoms? Or is it a stone vs wood thing? Or maybe its just a "this ain't Korea so Hell Yeah" sort of thing.

One clear difference is the quality/style of things you can buy around the shrines. In Korea the stalls around historical sights were limited to street food and children's toys like battle axes and squeaky hammers. Random.
But in Dazaifu there were stores with enormous beautiful 3000 dollar hand carved wooden sculptures. There were hand made tea pots and intricate tiny cloth dioramas depicting traditional Japanese life. And these weren't kitsch or tchotchke or anything... at least i can't imagine a handcrafted doll the size of my thumb, meant for a home shrine and costing 45 dollars, being considered 'kitsch.'
In Korea, I found the lack of anything worth buying with a 'cultural personality' strange, but i didn't really hold it against the place. I'm ready to do that now.

Also, Japan has this:


btw, that giant Luke Skywalker riding the Tauntaun is only $29... ebay anyone?

on decay

I'm still struggling to understand the disconnect between my awareness of Korea's "beauty" and my complete lack of appreciation for it.

I'm ready to give up on some grand explanation, and instead focus on the details... (small differences, if you will.)

1.

Something is wrong when i can't tell the difference between a modern bathroom...

...and the ancient palace complex it is meant to "compliment."

Thanks, but no thanks. I can see the same thing at Epcot. (which i have. its actually kind of interesting.)

When you juxtapose the True Past with a modern duplicate, you complicate matters of authenticity and value. And unless we're dealing with something truly awe-inspiring and unique (like the pyramids or the alps), authenticity is really all that something old has to offer.

When you build a bathroom as beautiful as the adjacent site, you're just reminding me that the site itself isn't unique.
And once you negate the mystique of uniqueness, you point out the secret that any encounter with the Ancient is illusionary, and is inevitably wrapped in the historical process that has carried it to the present...

2.

When you erase decay, you undo meaning.

Decay is an inevitable and important part of historical sites. It is the scars and beauty marks that separate man from mannequin, real from reproduction.

But in Korea, decay at historical sights is viewed with the same disdain as decay in the home - an embarrassing blemish that distracts from the 'true' beauty and significance of the site in question.

But Travel is not about recapturing the past the way it once existed, that's what time travel is for. Travel is about viewing a process, a continuous and eternal cycle of growth and decay.
Sometimes we travel to see the breadth of the process as it has effected one site. Turkey is a remarkable layering of cultures spilling over each other, a living museum to the triumphs and failures of both the West and the Middle East. Other times we travel to see a single point in the decay/growth cycle. We see a modern technophile Japan or a starving Cairo, and our own lives serve as the reference to 'normalcy.'

Because in the end, travel is ultimately about understanding the old as it relates to us now.

In Egypt they leave one Past in the context of the many Pasts that followed. Statues remain toppled, ancient graffiti is ubiquitous. And it is this accumulation of pasts that gives meaning to Places, that makes them historic. But in Korea one Past is singled out and preserved to the detriment of all others. Cultural sites have been swept clean of narrative, of the inevitable expansions and re-appropriations that history has wrought.

Would (could?) Shelly have written Ozymandias if the Egyptian government had restored or removed all the fallen statues? Could we ever understand our own place in history if all we saw of the past was it's leaders desired projections of excellence?

All This doesn't mean you should leave the 5000 year old layer of grime over king Tut's golden crown. It just means you shouldn't confuse the 'Past as an object' with the 'Past as a narrative'. We may delight in viewing the Past's objects - but truth, beauty, and meaning inevitably come from observing it's narrative...



I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

How travel made me less liberal.

I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but haven't really found the right way to approach it...
This pretty much sums it up I guess.
But yeah, before I lived in Egypt I was perfectly happy to give it not just the Benefit of the Doubt, but really much more; I wrote my thesis on Islam as an "alternative and cohesive telos and worldview."
And yet... after 7 months in Egypt I couldn't believe how disillusioned I felt. I've touched on it before... how everyone middle class just wanted to get the hell out of there. How it felt like the clash between "Islam and the West" was based on the fact that they desired literally everything Western, which led to a natural problem with the "Islam" part. (not the religion per se, but the economic, political, and cultural stagnation that because of the holistic nature of Islam, is hard to attribute to anything other than Islam, or it's deterioration due to Western influences.)

I went to Egypt open-minded, and I left with the same opinion that a lot of egyptians have:
(to quote an Egyptian i was particularly fond of )
"Egypt is fucked"

So how does one deal with the fact that liberalism is better served by theorizing than by experience? Would i have been a better "scholar" if I'd stayed at home?

Speaking to people who study the Middle East from afar, i literally feel tainted by experience.

That last post was whiny and inarticulate, so let me try again...

In Korea i feel nothing,
like when you kiss someone and it means nothing
Korea is kissing me
(or I'm kissing it)
and i feel nothing
and it makes me question love [of traveling].

There is i think a very strong connection between these two impossible mysteries of life - love and travel - but it feels like so much more has been written about the former than the later. Or more specifically, I've read about understanding love through its loss, but never about travel in the same way.

What does it mean to 'lose' Travel?
Will I chase Travel as the girlfriend you feel drifting away...
I have been infatuated with girls, only to discover at a kiss that my heart had decided otherwise. but travel has always been purer. Even the insects that tainted egypt did little to dampen the underlying impulse...

Meta-travel writing always seems to focus on the difference between the 'tourist' and the 'traveler'. (a Traveler moves because of passion towards uncomfortability and the Unknown, whereas a tourist moves to justify and reify his pre-existing beliefs, while Relaxing in the process.)

This is easy stuff, and makes for good back-patting and pedantics, but it strikes me as both condescending and juvenile. Like when you're 13 and the world is miserable except for you; because you and you alone know the true meaning of love: Surely those fat complacent yuppies down the street only think they know love - just as the cargo-shorts-wearing tourists only think they've seen Egypt.

But suddenly this all feels besides the point. In this congratulatory dualism each side is defined and appreciated as static and recognizable. (although admitedly it is congratulatory only to the intellecutal half.)
In Korea i am neither tourist nor traveler - I am not sheltered and insular, but nor am I challenged by the Other; the preconceptions I've had to re-exam are called forth by an emptiness that i recognize only through comparisons to other travel experiences; they are internal and epiphenominal.

Is there a dialectic approach to travel? I mean one that addresses the traveler as individual, and not in some Edward Said-ian cultural context? Will someone please write one for me?

loss of innocence?

I went to Geoje island this weekend...


um...
I am slightly overwhelmed by just how underwhelmed i am by korea, if that makes any sense at all. Objectively, it is beautiful. And not just run-of-the-mill beautiful, but actually pretty 'stunning.'
But it doesn't do it for me. I love traveling, but what korea has taught me is that i only love traveling under very specific conditions. From what i can gather, i must be either
a) impossibly lonely (oman)
b) impossibly broke (europe)
c) impossibly uncomfortable (egypt)

In Korea, i am none of these things, or at least not realistically any of these things.

So i'm going to quote a book i haven't read since 5th grade, but thanks to amazon, i was able to find instantly... (also, wtf is with having quotes from kids books in my head)

"But this isn't how it works," Brian said. "it isn't this smooth and easy. You don't just fly in and get set on a perfect lake and have all the food you want and have it all come this easy. It isn't real."
Derek leaned back, put his hands in back of his head, and looked at Brian.
"there's not a thing to make it rough... nothing wrong. In a real situation, like when I was here before, there were things wrong - going wrong. The plane didn't land and set me on the shore. It crashed. A man was dead. I was hurt. I didn't know anything. Nothing at all. I was, maybe, close to death an now we're out here going la-de-da, I've got a fish; la-de-da, there are some more berries."
'Tension." Derek said. "It lacks tension."

so this is obviously more dramatic than my situation, but it seems relevant to me...

whatever. here are some more pictures that feel like they were taken by someone else...

As a firm believer in the underlying orthopraxis of just about everything, i'm trying to start some new routines to get past the insane everything-ical funk that was my life in egypt.


a new blog seems like a good start.

I don't really know what to say about my time in Egypt. For example:
What do I do with a fairly large photo series of the weekly car crashes that i witnessed outside of my house?

A facebook photo album is i think unnecessarily morbid, but after being so thoroughly desensitized to the whole thing, a picture like this seems worth sharing. The man in the lower right stays fairly still as the larger crowd ebbs and flows...
i hated the way egyptians were always peaking in visible anger, and i suppose it's a reflection of how disenchanted i became that this man's hesitation is such an unusual and important image for me. whatever.

the first post is always the hardest.