Again, I am writing this from Kunming. It is now well after the time I
actually wrote the following journal. If you are reading this travel blog
looking only for information about traveling, I'll save you some time and let
you know that the following blog is nothing more than the incoherent mumblings
of a man at sea. There is no advice or information
about traveling here. For those of you reading
to see what kind of crazy ramblings I have come up with this time, feel free to
continue. And your comments are welcome.
Especially if they are intended to berate
me.
Day two:
Another day spent at sea. On the purely intellectual level I can
understand Sartre’s concept in No Exit that hell is other people, but when it
comes right down to it, I love people too much to take much faith in it. I’ve only known the people on this boat for
just over 24 hours, and already I feel sad that tomorrow morning we will all be
getting off the ship and going on our separate ways. I have met a number of wonderful people here;
two girls from England who are on a 7 month trip around the world, two Italians
and a guy from Sweden who are studying business at a University in Beijing, and
a New Zealander who has been a ski instructor in Japan for the past few seasons
who is on his way to his brother’s wedding in China.
Today was a day of playing scrabble and
card drinking games, of lounging about the boat and reading, of writing in the
late hours of the night and of course constantly thinking about Kanae, as well
as what lies ahead. It is starting to
sink in that I have left Japan for
good, and that I am standing at the Gates of the road that leads to the rest of
my life. Today was a strange day;
strange in both how quickly and how slowly time passes with only the company of
other people as distraction.
And while I found myself secretly wishing
for the boat to run aground so I could have the opportunity to spend more time
with these people, I also recognize that after a number of hours or weeks or
years we would begin to despise each other, to hold each other responsible for
our shared isolation, and thus, to wish for nothing more than a moment
alone.
Fortunately I was able to get that tonight,
standing on the bow of the ship and watching the stars while underneath my feet
the ocean of sound droned on. Today was,
in a way, not worth much mention. But
perhaps in a deeper, more profound way, today taught me that insanity is not a separate
entity; not a creature that lurks outside of ourselves, but perhaps, like the
sea, insanity is simply a constant. And
this could be the truth behind No Exit; that even though the tagline seems to
be “Hell is other people,” the truth behind it is that Hell is oneself, or
rather how one chooses to look at the world.
And so perhaps insanity, or Hell is something that is always there, as
is its opposite, but something we must choose to accept, if not to pass if we
are to cross from this plane to the next.
The reason for all of this boring pseudo-philosophical
garbage deals with some kind of hallucination I had at sea, really more of an
optical illusion, a mere trick of the eyes, but something that set me to
thinking nonetheless. Today I watched
the stains on the green of our deck spiral into themselves and attempt to
swallow themselves whole, only to return to the place they had been before
gaining the capability of locomotion in the first place. It answered the questions I have had so many
times before this (mostly while bumbling along on some plane of existence
parallel to our own, similar, but not quite exactly the world we are used to). “Is it possible for the human eye to experience
this kind of inexplicable movement,” I used to wonder. Basically, “Do people hallucinate who are not
either on drugs or schizophrenic?” Is it
only a dream, or are the molecules of this piece of solid mass actually swimming? Is it the object that is changing, or are the
instruments of my eyes faulty?
These are only some of the things that an
expanse of water coupled with a steady rocking of the boat and a few beers
after the sun goes down can lead to. I
don’t have too much to say tonight and so I find that I am talking again
without saying much of anything so for tonight I will bid you adieu. Tomorrow: Shanghai.
