Subject: Cynicism from the Road
From: The Laughing Man (the_laughing_man@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Feb 14 2000 - 12:40:49 EST
...or How to survive dinner when travelling
Dearest Fishes,
What is it about travelling that makes living so tedious and yet so
extremely intense? It is no coincidence all these road-movies cluster on us,
from Tolkien to Thelma & Louise, from Swift to Richard Ford. And the Catcher
in the midst of them all. My three weeks of pond-absence have been one of
travelling. To the twilight zones of business seminars, lecture halls and
ski resorts. My sweaty hands grabbing OH-film, wyteboard pens, wine glasses,
sauna buckets and snow-boards; all with the same feeling of being outside
the world, floating.
In surroundings like those I almost cease to exist: my eyes are only camera
lenses, my head is just a tape recorder. On Record or on Play. I notice
people's faces turning read from wine or is it synthetic freedom, listen to
the staccato of conversations among strangers or semi-strangers around
buffets tables. Relived from normal duty of every day living, my mind may
contemplate on the receptionist's work for hours if I want to, from my chair
ten feet away. A dollhouse full of freedom. But then there are the
obligatory dollhouse dinners: big tables full of nothing to talk about.
What conversations we have in these dollhouses of grown up people. When
Proust/The Narrator tells about a favorite writer of his, Bergotte, he tries
to put the finger on why some people find conversing with him hard. It is,
he says, because the writer in a conversation concentrates on the new, the
essence of the subject, leaving out the common ground. But it is in the
common ground most of us start, establishing a foundation making it possible
to talk about this new aspect, this essence we try to reach. Leaving that
out and we do not follow: then "the essence" sounds exaggerated, mono
dimensional; wrong. Like when someone questions the "fact" that there is
snow on Kilimanjaro without telling us from what perspective he or she
questions that.
Among the strangers and semi-strangers of resorts, Proust's favorite writer
would have hell. You realize there is hardly any common ground at all. It
doesn't matter if the guy next to you turns out to be a homophobic, a nazi
or the kindest person you've met (or maybe all of the above), because the
only thing you can talk about is the weather. The weather disguised to the
latest train catastrophe or the high entrance fee to the Jacuzzi - or the
lack of fee to the Jacuzzi. Or how it is never, never too late in life to
try snowboarding, whatever they say. But the weather all the same.
Everything else requires too much build up time, time you don't have.
What you have to do, if you don't settle for that comfortably numb-feeling
you can always get from the warm food and the wine and that one look from
that beautiful girl there must always be in every resort; what you have to
do is start telling and collecting stories. Stories are the only thing you
can get out of the dollhouse of resorts, of business seminars, of sitting
around people of whom you don't really care.
Before dinner, fill that brown bag of yours with stories of your own. Things
that have happened to you to your friends and things that has almost
happened to you but you wish they had. The best ones are the ones you can
make happen on this very resort. Someone you met that told you the most
terrific story in the local bar, that woman in a red ski dress you bumped in
downhill. They are perfect for starters, small teasing stories that don't
make too much noise. Save those Jungle Jim ones for later.
The next thing you know you have your dinner neighbor, that large heavy
middle aged business man with too big a nose - who started out telling you
some unbelievably boring story about some company merging - telling you he
used to be a doorman at the coolest place in Stockholm in the late 70's,
before the war when the Yugoslavs took over, and snorted cocaine with Bjorn
Borg (ok, maybe he said partied); and of how effective a Danish skull is
when a man pulls a knife at you (a real life story turning the fat guy into
a Robert Mitchum before my eyes, saying to his son after taking his gun and
hitting him hard: "When you pull a gun, kill a man"). There is no real risk
with a Danish skull, he says, because most people don't really want to kill
you. Most people are kind. Really.
Call me a tabloid story addict, but this is the way I stay alive when I
travel. Now I'm back home. With a bunch of stories in my brown bag I traded
for my own. And back in the pond, with people I can talk Salinger to the
Bergotte way.
/TLM
Glad not having to cross that Chinese-French border again for a while
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