A Short Meditation on Movement
It took Odysseus 10 years to find his way back home, to Ithica. The rumors were that he was lost at sea, blown off course by inclement weather, maybe even gripped by an undefined desire. He navigated by sight and sound. East and West, North and South – these directions, our phantom limbs, meant nothing to him. Or, more accurately, their absence literally meant the world; an entirely different geography – a landscape of islands, seas, and fomenting senses. Mythological geographies, we think, but are ours any less so?
Every week, I board the train from London Kings Cross to Newcastle. A fleeting thought: If, after the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men had also boarded a train, like the soldiers leaving the front in 1917, overhanging the carriages like decaying grapes left on the vines, how long would his journey had taken? Would he find his way back at all? What would he find on the way beyond the predictability of each subsequent station, and the telegraph poles marking out the way to oblivion?
A train cannot be blown off course, like a ship. Does this mean that a modern day Odyssey is, what philosophers might call, a categorical impossibility? Speed needed straight lines and predictability of destinations. The relentless motion forward, into the vanishing point of the blurred landscape, skimming over the glistening rails like Odysseus the waves of the Aegean Sea came with a new anxiety. Whereas sea faring assumed an unknown risk as a discomforting possibility, the mapped trajectory of rail lines also made the potential disasters tangible before their fulfillment. This is why travelling by train aroused such a horror, triggering a range of psychological distress signals. Medical practice aiming to counteract maladies born of speed and transition became a technique of distance management, measuring intervals that placed us further or brought one closer to the always promised but hardly attainable condition of ‘normality’ and rest. Freud’s psychoanalysis was simply the climax of such a trajectory.
The emotional scale measuring forms of migration – personal, cultural, and political – still defines our current existential horizon, maintaining what seems to be an inexpugnable ‘sense of ourselves’. But the distress triggered by displacement runs deeper. If we could imagine dipping into the abyss of time’s amnesia for a moment, we would probably feel the roughness of the desert, our progress measured by shifting grains of sand, each after each, and then onward until exhaustion sets in and we find temporary respite, an oasis, or sink deeper into the dunes of hopelessness. These shifting topographies aroused by the desire to move forward, searching out ‘the promised land’ in as yet undefined form, paradoxically attempted to outrun movement by traversing ever further, spurned on by the promise of a settlement, of stopping the search, arresting all motion. But stopping is one thing, knowing when things have run their course, is another. History is riddled with false paralysis of movements, seizures, final stands, holding forts in the name of a proclamation that a subdued reality is the proof for the immemorial geography of origins.
If there is one historical constant, you might even call it an origin, it is precisely that of transition and movement. Philosophy itself, at least in its ‘Western’ rendition was born of displacement. Who was Socrates, if not a stranger, a non-citizen, a traveler, a vagabond, perhaps even a refugee, with no possessions, no permanent settlement? The accusation of corrupting the youth of Athens was always a matter of passage and the consequence of precisely setting everything in motion, including in the end, the political architecture of the city-state – its moral and religious fabric. That challenge could not have gone unanswered, just as Socrates’ unwillingness to mount a defense was not an act of futility, but a fundamental acknowledgment of how thinking can only proceed by fleeing the false certainty of enclosures. Motion cannot be denied, it can only be embraced or ignored – and ignorance was the counter-accusation thrown in the face of the Athenian citizen, like sand into the eyes of the one who thinks he might conquer the desert. In the end, Socrates’ death sentence, which by all accounts he was given the opportunity to escape by doing what he has always done, packing up and leaving, setting out on the road again, was a self-imposed consequence of refusing to do so (perhaps for the first time in his life), and staying. Stasis is the absolute zero condition of life, since even death is a type of motion. Hermeneutics, this cryptic word for constant and relentless interpretation, is possible only by maintaining movement. The winged feet of Hermes, the divine messenger, lift up the lids of all communicating vessels just enough, for foreign elements to enter. And if we are to believe the ancient reports, Odysseus was Hermes’ most famous relative.
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