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| Teapata's Crossings | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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The ancient polynesians spread across the pacific reaching as far east as Hawaii and Easter Island in canoes, using the patterns of the waves, the birds and the stars, with no maps or coordinates.
My great-grandfather William Teapata Deane had an outrigger canoe but he left his home in Tahiti in a ship in search of adventure, he got America. We can do better. I have circled the globe in a series of metal and glass capsules. In an airplane if you fall asleep you wake up on another continent, suddenly assaulted with foreign sights and smells, stifling humidity or arctic cold. There is little between the departure lounge and the baggage pick-up unless you are fortunate enough to fly over high mountains. All points between disappear or are reduced to ant-like dots. The distance is being taken out of space, and the adventure out of travel. When the polynesians crossed the pacific in canoes or the Mongolians crossed Eurasia on horses they had to notice the changes in weather and landscape, they couldn't sleep through the journey. They had to cope with peoples with whom they shared no common language, in a time when money didn't reduce people to a common denominator. The thousand micro-knowledges of nomadic science give traveling the challenge that along with chance gives birth to all adventure. Now, in many far-flung places, with money in pocket but not a word of the local language one can secure a bed and a meal even where there is no hotel or restaurant. (Though in some places like Mongolia or Northern Pakistan hospitality has survived the money economy.) Now the traveler fills her head with visa requirements, train schedules and the location of internet cafes. This kind of nomadic knowledge is no science; one is oblivious to wave patterns and screened from the stars with a layer of smoke.  In this fragmented world which appears to paradoxically tick to one clock some people try to close the distance of alienation by praying to the god of authenticity, buying native clothes in Guatemala, drinking snake's blood in China. Others rejoice in post-modernity, cell phone conversations in toilets, bean pies in Mc-Donald's in Beijing. Others worship both and wait for the horse drawn cart to pass the skyscraper before taking a photo. The world is still a composite of cultural space-times: the equation of the global capitalist economy wants to impose itself everywhere, but it hasn't yet, not fully. So some tell their tales with an emphasis on the hyper-modern: meanwhile in front of that air-conditioned Mc-Donald's where everything's just a 'little' different there's an ashen faced man driving a coal filled cart that they don't tell you about. Others will tell tales of staying with families in isolated villages and leave out the part about the TV that was so loud that it kept them awake at night. People need to dream of pristine places, even if they only exist in their head to be able to cope with returning to the rush of work. There is no need to invent these models of purity: the world is not one big styrofoam to-go packet with disposable chopsticks yet. The question is: how do we prevent it from becoming one? Some people have put the distance back into space by cycling or walking across continents. Others have put the adventure back into life by refusing to tick to the rhythm of the work-clock, by evading the clutches of the equation-makers who are turning the world into one styrofoam dump. Instead of rent and bills some stare at the stars at night, and others dwell in previously abandoned buildings that they have made their own, lit with electricity they pirated from the city. Then there are the ticketless travelers who don't know when and if they'll get there but they have fun everywhere in-between. These people cross the line of imposed scarcity by freeing their time and finding a space, hovering just beyond the lines drawn by the equation-makers. The challenge of staying beyond those lines is a complex nomadic science in a world that is lined with borders instead of crossed by canoes. Nomadic sciences are the skills and mentalities that make crossing possible. By climbing over the walls of domestic habit and jumping into the unknown one crosses into a world of chance, where adventure is reborn. Their equation reduces us to numbers: numbers abide by mathematical laws, numbers are points within a system of coordinates. The ancient polynesians crossed the seas without written maps or the coordinates of longitude and latitude. The crossing of our space-time will not begin in a departure lounge. The crossing of taboos, of laws, and of boundaries is not the passing between two points on a line, it has no coordinates.  Traditional Navigation in the Western Pacific To find out about Tatsuyos's trip sailing around the world go to Tatsuyo's Page Or Ray and Jardine's trip sailing around the world Or Sailing Around the World Alone Click here for an account of a trip to Raiatea, the island where William Teapata Deane was born Click to subscribe to the Anarchy and Gender list |  I just returned from Beijing.In hopeful preparation for the Beijing 2008 Olympic games, the city is being greenified: with paint. On a cold fall day in Tienanmen I looked down to see grass that was a little too green. I looked closer to realize that it was none other than paint. In the Northern Capital I live not far from the sounds of constant demolition. This page will include writings from various crossings: squatting in Barcelona, drinking tea in the park at 3 AM in Istanbul after the earthquake...as well as "Putting the Distance Back into Space" which is about people we've met along the way who travel their own pace like Claude Marthaler who we met in Tibet, he was cylcling Asia then and he's cycling Africa now. Go toThe Yak Site to find out where he is now. About Camping in Mongolia"Do they have land like this in America, that isn't owned?" Anger at the State: Observations of the Turkish Earthquake "[In Nomadic science]...if there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations, differential equations irreducible to the algebraic form and inseperable from a sensible intuition and variation. They seize or determine singularities in the matter, instead of constituting a general form." Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology  |
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"In perplexity I turned back through the pages of the Altas at random, shut my eyes, and let the point of the compass fall on the page. It fell on Milan, in Northern Italy. Adjusting my compass to the right scale I drew a circle which had Milan in its centre and 1200 miles as its radius. ...Puzzling over this circle, I tried a little experiment. With my limited knowledge, I tried to imagine an event, any event that might occur near the periphery of that circle (or indeed much nearer)--Stockholm, Dublin, Casablanca, Alexandria, Istanbul, Kiev, any city in any direction at all--I tried to imagine an event that might happen in any of those places which would bring the people of Milan pouring out into the streets. I tried hard but I could think of none.None, that is, other than war. It seemed to me that within this circle there were only states and citizens; there were no people at all. When I turned back to my first circle I was struck with wonder that there had really been a time, not so long ago, when people, sensible people, of good intention, had thought that all maps were the same, that there was a special enchantment in lines; I had to remind myself that they were not to be blamed for believing that there was something admirable in moving violence to the borders and dealing with it through science and factories, for that was the pattern of the world. They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from one another like the shifting tectonic plates of a prehistoric Gondwanaland..." The Shadow Lines--Amitav Ghosh |
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