TOURIST

Among the world’s fastest-growing industries, tourism is perhaps the most ephemeral. It is today a vast enterprise stretching into virtually all corners of the globe and beyond, requiring costly material infrastructures serving a largely immaterial purpose. Airplane terminals, train stations and bus stops have long ceased to serve transportation alone. Instead, they have been elevated to a higher calling, more noble and grand, as portals of self-actualization ⎯ thresholds after which desire is boundless, and our projections are granted the freedom we have always known them to be worthy of.  The pull of tourism is ignited by a timeless gesture, by the poetry of imagining oneself elsewhere and the hope against hope that this elsewhere will transcend the limits of the body and self. It is a kind of choreography ⎯ to move, and in turn, be moved. But this motion, while a steadfast affirmation of being alive, of existing in the present, is also a condemning to death ⎯ the cost of the world is the world; there is no retaining without relinquishing. Perhaps tourism, so closely linked to desire, is also structured like language. If naming something requires binding it, even killing it in order to establish ourselves as separate, then to truly see the world is to see it become invisible to you, to become helplessly implicated in the disappearance of what is utmost vital. Isn’t the camera, tourism’s principle tool, an all too impotent and tragic invention, preying on our penchant to long for the irrevocably lost? Looking to capture the fleeting, we are robbed of even the benevolent possibility of forgetting what is no longer in front of us.  The tourist goes out into the world seeking the world, and finds the echo of a song sung only to itself. A beach is not a beach, but an example of one. A croissant is not a croissant, it is an example of one. Each a suggestion, a nod to something that feels primordial, but has long ceased to exist, if it ever did. We read them in their constellations as important idioms forming a tapestry of the world as we believe it to have been, a world we can’t help ourselves from seeking, but find static and eternalized in amber. Life is not lived until the signs of the world converge, until it is super-lived during our travels, when our conviction in the infinite is justified and true, and every sunset contains the promise of salvation.