Nomad Codes

with the body. Unlike tourism, which is the prolongation of imperialist colonialism, the kind of travel I propose is a prolongation of the heretical margin. Every once in a while tourists are converted into travelers. They notice that besides the image of otherness that they’re paying for there is a reality of otherness that they fall in love with. They’re attracted to it, even erotically, and they walk out the tour bus and into the world.
    1994

SAMPLING PARADISE

    Goa Trance

    It’s one hour past midnight, and the jungle throbs with techno. The tropical breeze off the Arabian Sea is warm and wet. I stuff a wad of rupees into the outstretched palm of the auto-rickshaw taxi driver, and head toward the noise. I’m 350 kilometers south of Bombay, in India’s coastal state of Goa, and I’m about to hit a rave.
    The forest clearing swarms with bohemian backpackers and European hipsters strutting their cyberdelic stuff: holographic sneakers, flared fractal jeans, floppy Dr. Seuss hats stitched with the mirrored cloth of Rajasthan. The freaks gyrate around junky speaker stacks, soaking up the interstellar trance beats like they earlier soaked up the sun. A lithe Japanese girl dances by with a glowing plastic jewel affixed to her third eye, giving me and everyone else she encounters an omnivorous grin. An old Indian beggar passes through the crowd, the black lights turning his turban the color of moonlit bone.
    The DJ booth lies at the edge of the clearing, set beneath low-hanging trees and cordoned off with bamboo. A large middle-aged hippie with white-boy dreads and a bearded, sun-burnt face stands behind the mixing table, pushing buttons and slapping DATs into two small decks wired through a pint-size mixer powered by a generator hidden in the bushes behind. Alongside stacks of black-matte cassettes stands a candle, a smoldering stick of incense, and a small devotional portrait of the Hindu yogi Shiva Shankar, sitting in the half-lotus position on a tiger skin.
    “That’s Gil,” says one of the Indian locals mobbing the techno-shrine. “He’s one of the best.”
    I had already heard about Gil from Genesis P. Orridge, who had filled me in earlier on the technofreak legacy of late-’60s London clubs like Middle Earth and UFO. “The basic premise was smoke and light shows, large quantities of ecstatic chemicals, and dancing like a dervish to accentuate your artificially induced mental state to a point that was equal to and integrated with an ecstatic religious state.” When the scene decayed, the heaviest psychedelic warriors split, taking their musical alchemy with them. Some went to the Spanish island of Ibiza, while the more esoteric heads went east. Though Gil was from San Francisco, he had trodden a similar path. “You have to find him”, Genesis told me. “He’s one of the links.”
    But Gil is too lost in his craft to talk, and I merge back into pulsing psychedelic bardo of the dance floor. I’ve never seen people move like this: at the edge of their bodies, ceaselessly flowing, like Deadheads bonedancing in overdrive. Disembodied vocal samples float through the air like ghosts, triggering mindfucks left and right: “There are doors.” “The last generation.” “Everybody online?”
    Craving touch-down, I head for Goa’s gypsy version of a chill-out room. In an adjacent field, local village women have laid out rows of straw mats and piled them high with fruit and cigarettes and bubbling pots of chai. Scores of freaks flop out on the mats, smoking copiously by the light of kerosene lamps and sipping syrupy brew from scalding glasses.
    I plop down next to a crowd of Brits. Pete is in pajama pants and an open vest, his aristocratic Tory features oddly framed by long scraggly hair. Hunched next to him is Steve, a skinny blond twentysomething rolling a spliff.
    “Have you seen The Time Machine ?” Steve asks me. “There’s this noise that the Morlocks use to call the Eloi underground. That’s exactly how it was five years ago when my friends and I first came to Goa. We heard this booming rhythm in the distance. We didn’t know where the fuck we were, but we just crashed through the jungle with our torches. The sound was calling us. I got real paranoid that there was some alien intelligence directing the computers, like the Morlocks, summoning us to a place where they were gonna eat our souls.”
    Pete nods as if nothing his friend says could surprise him. “My first party, I just got the