Nomad Codes

joining a scientific expedition, visiting your relatives for the holidays. There’s traveling in an army, which certainly is a very special way of moving across the face of the earth. All of these are different psychic modes.
    Travel for travel’s sake is something very special. To be free and to learn are the only goals for the pure traveler. You’ve got to be strong, and keep your psyche polished and bright and open and ready to engage. If you look on travel not just as something that’s happening to you but as something that you’re doing, it requires the spiritual will the Sufis call himmah . You have to be aware of yourself as this free-floating zone unto yourself. You can give it a spiritual interpretation if you want, but it’s incredibly real. Because it’s really you in that hotel suffering from Montezuma’s revenge. It’s not an idea of you or a simulacrum of you. It’s really your body there on the line—or at least on the toilet.
    All this recalls the work of Hakim Bey, an intimate colleague of Wilson best known for his notion of the “temporary autonomous zone.” As a surprisingly virulent concept/buzzword, the T.A.Z. has spread through the computer underground to Time magazine to the hippies at the Rainbow Gathering. Bey praises Wilson’s contribution to Islam’s anarchic spirituality, and Bey should know—he served as the court poet in a small sultanate in western Pakistan until an anarchist bombing incident forced him to flee to the U.S., where he now splits his time between New Jersey and a hotel in Chinatown. Reached at his Airstream in the Jersey wilds, Bey compares Wilson’s take on spiritual travel to the T.A.Z.:
    Part of travel is running away as well as running towards. It’s no terrible thing to run away from something if that thing is trying to destroy you, like the Empire of Work. In travel you are a kind of floating zone. You’ve got your whole little life with you in a suitcase. You become this bubble inside the cosmos running around, and you can make it autonomous or you can make it enslavement to misery depending on how much psychic energy you have.
    For Wilson, there are tricks to travel.
    The people I met on the road who were really getting something out of it would be people who would settle down in Jakarta for a year and study batik. They had a love affair, and that’s the difference. The tourist’s not in love with any of this stuff.
    Another trick is to avoid places that have lost their aura by being mechanically reproduced through the medium of tourism, by fifty years of Cook tours and American Express and cameraclicking. All those things vampirically suck the life out of difference, or suck the difference out of the Other. Just going to obscure places makes a lot of sense, even if the big famous temples aren’t there. I encourage people to go to busy Third World ports and industrial cities where tourists never go because there’s nothing to see. There you often find traditional life far better preserved than the Disney World version of the exotic Orient that you’re gonna buy for a tour.

    Though this reliance on “authenticity” may strike some as the kind of naiveté vaporized by today’s critical theorists, Wilson does not fear postmodern skepticism. “Baudrillard’s a smart guy but he’s a terrible traveler. His writings on America make that very clear. He seems to see only the ironies that he expected to see.” When Wilson talks about authenticity he doesn’t mean pure unmediated experience. “It’s not at all the pure that I’m interested in. It’s the Real, and everyday life is the arena of the Real.” Wilson speaks of the Real not only as a Sufi might speak of it, but as an cultural interventionist who remains in fierce, and no doubt romantic, opposition to the nihilistic metaphysics of the spectacle.
    It’s only now that we’ve reached the abyss of mediation that new paths appear. Of course they were always there, and actually involve a lot of archaic models. Travel plays a really important role in all this. It plays the opposite role of tourism, which nonetheless exists in a strange sort of dialog with travel, which goes along with travel at the same time and sometimes seems to actually become it. Tourism is a kind of travel that deconstructs difference. The kind of travel I’m talking about is to experience difference. It’s something you do with the body—and probably ultimately the only really meaningful things you do are