Let’s imagine you live in a flat. It’s nice, warm and cosy, you’ve got a toilet and a refrigerator, a warm bed (even a hot-water bottle, perhaps), and, as it should be, thy home is thy castle. You should be very happy, but deep inside you feel a strange unease. Then one day, under some inexplicable urge, you decide to cross the Atlantic on your own. It’s inexplicable, but it’s not unusual: people have been crisscrossing the Atlantic for ages.
Your urge to leave your flat is so strong that you cannot care to save some money to build yourself a decent ship and to take your domestic paradise on board. Therefore, you’ll only have one small boat. There’ll be no fridge. Definitely, no toilet. You will battered by the weather, and your boat will never be as cosy as your flat. At times you’ll be cold (or, adversely, very hot), and, most importantly, you will be all alone. There’ll be no beloved, no parents, no best friend who lives next door. Who knows, maybe your network will not support the signal? Or, if worst comes to worst, you’ll drop your phone into the water? No pets. Your radio signal will be interrupted, there’ll be no TV, and a book or two you take with you will not entertain you. Your boat will turn into a deserted island.
But you will see. Before, your world has always had its boundaries. How often do you look up to the sky? On your journey, there will be nowhere to hide from this enormous space that seems to originate directly from the ocean’s depths. And what about the water, indeed? Unless you take frequent vacations, the only water that you use regularly is for washing hands and taking a bath. And on your boat you will be surrounded by the vast territory of water, underneath which there is a totally different, unknown world.
This journey will make you re-evaluate things. For once, you will have but one thing in your possession: your life. Your boat may be crushed by storm, you may drop your tangible possessions in the water, or they may be blown by the wind. The only thing that remains truly yours will be your life, and for this possession you will fight till the end. But what is it – your life?
It is often believed there are two most important things that deserve thinking about – the meaning of life and the meaning of death, and no doubt you will have thought about these before you leave your homeland. Now, sailing between two enormities, celestial and oceanic, you will constantly have these thoughts on your mind. You will understand that finding a definition to a word comes through experiencing it. On this journey you-in-the-flat will die for good, but you-at-sea will be born. The two exist in one person, and this person is you, and, as far as your physical existence goes, you’re still alive. Can you be alive, if one part of you has died? Have the new you entered the next plain of being? Is this what life and death are about – going from one level of existence to another? Or are they not?
See, how many big questions you’ll have to ask yourself on that journey, before you get to the other side of the ocean and stand on the shore. This ground may not be native, or stable, or the one you expected to land upon. But under your soils there will be some solid ground, and to know where we stand is something we always seek to establish. You’ll hide your boat from the view, so nobody recognises you as a foreigner, and will start a new life in a new place, until you begin to feel it’s time to leave your hut and to set your sail again.
Jan 19 – Aug 23, 2007
There are certain thoughts that get written or even jotted down and are then forgotten, which is what happened to this text, as I literally forgot about it and have only just found. This is but an allegory. The flat represents both “the idols of the cave” and “the idols of the market place”, to use Baconian terminology. It is a set of beliefs imposed on us by the environment in which we were born, brought up and educated, where we continue to live and work, and which language we use. The journey on a boat is a metaphor for extreme and ultimate break of ties with the “flat”, but this is obviously a metaphysical journey. The contemplative nature of “being-at-sea” may suggest one can jump on the “boat” while still living in the “flat”. One thing I am wholeheartedly for is learning about foreign cultures by interacting with people of those cultures in their native language. But one doesn’t have to cross the Atlantic, and there is no “right” direction, in which to cross it. Gauguin went to Madagascar from France; H. Miller left America for Europe. The Atlantic Ocean is only there to highlight the difficulty and length of the journey, which continues even after one has reached the destination.