Preface

The idea was a simple idea with little behind it except a recognition, a self-knowing, that on a long set of aeroplane flights I was bound to write. It’s unpromising, of course, for there can be nothing more tedious than long flights overseas. And not just overseas. Being in a plane – especially a large plane – is a form of imprisonment, an actual incarceration. It’s not good behaviour they demand; it’s no behaviour at all they demand. What a kindness it would be if we were all anaesthetised. For these flights are without doubt misery.

Unbearable.

There are exceptions, of course, a flight once out of Athens to Sydney via Baghdad and Singapore. The Greeks, especially the young, were not to be bound by seating arrangements. We were ordered off the plane, everyone having been warned they must retain the seat allocated. ‘For security reasons’. Of course! We were ordered back on the plane, each of us having to claim our luggage, for a further check. The seating arrangements didn’t last two seconds. The whole flight was a social event.

Baghdad, I might tell you, presented a vast empty airstrip, entirely flat. The zone we’d had to deviate around to get there was the Israel-Lebanon sector. That was then. Singapore had a Concorde (that strange beast) parked on the tarmac, nose-down, like an insect of prey, a preying mantis, that would suck the lifeblood, the marrow, out of you in two split seconds. Not that there is any lack of personal mythology surrounding this mythic aircraft. A Franco-Vietnamese friend of mine worked on the navigation system back in the 1960s; and on the occasion of my one and only visit to Cologne Cathedral it was being set up with temporary seating for a memorial service devoted to victims of the Concorde crash at Charles de Gaulle. The German doctor who died was the personal physician of another of my friends.

Yes, I know myself well enough to know that I use writing to counteract the obliteration of travel, the prospect of it even, the active annihilation it enacts on one’s consciousness and sense of being. The flight is in a profound sense the flightless zone. Train travel can unleash the same desire to write. But with air travel it is less desire than need.

If this string of texts is boring then the phenomenon they are written against is tedium itself. My strategies in countering this are no doubt several. I am an inveterate observer, even with my bad eyesight. Maybe it even intensifies the desire to record. But what is one to say of those hours of impatience when the only thought is to arrive, or to get going? At such times the psyche will seize on anything. It is a desperate creature …

All these texts were handwritten. It has taken me two months to type them up. A little more, in fact, more like two and a half months. It is now the beginning of March and I have just managed to have them printed out. I have no true belief in their value – except that I have been assiduous. I’ve remained more or less true to the originals. Such as they are they are in general better than any tampering can improve. They are enough out of control that they may reveal something. They are essays in dealing with a crisis, the crisis of travel, the burden of being elsewhere, the crisis of being caught in a paroxysm of non-meaning in which there is nothing at stake except survival itself.

From a technical point of view they are written, more or less (how much of all this is more or less!), in the style of my performance pieces. This involves much repetition, slight shifts to lines already written, and a deliberative attempt to create space – a sense of spaciousness. It’s not necessarily largesse. A descent to the underworld? Well, maybe. There is no true dark river, just something feebly transparent.

I have taken the liberty of writing notes where I have thought to write them. I’m not sure they clarify anything, but they may produce a sort of subtext.

I regret that there is not more German and Polish and Slovakian and Korean in the text. This is just ignorance on my part. I once could read and write Korean but now it escapes me. How odd that we surrender things; how odd that the things we know or thought we know should languish and fade, and our competences desert us. Desirably we should be able to shift from language to language at will.

I learnt something on this trip: there are 11 time zones in Russia. This alone must make it wellnigh ungovernable. There is a lot to be said in favour of the ungovernable.

Sydney, 1 March 2010