I was reading on the bus to Kuala Lumpur. It’s only a few days ago, but I don’t remember much. Travel writing to me is about demonstrating how changing your environment confronts you with, and bounces you against, your own inner limits. Instead of you you read me. There’s nothing there, no epiphany, no resurrection, no deliverance. There’s just a stark stream of impressions, never pausing for our comfort, never relenting for our senses. We don’t redeem when we travel, we jolt in our existence. Sometimes it makes us shine, sometimes it makes us matte.
Bounce and jolt, oscillate perhaps, jerk. I like language – what a luck English is a foreign tongue so there, too, I can remain a traveller. That’s it, streams of thought, and that’s why I have separated this from my personal blog. This writing is, like the traveling itself, is therapy more than exploration and “dedemption” (the steady disillusionment vis-a-vis redemption) rather than salvation. It is, still, codifying in words what I know cannot be said but what might be – felt.
The bus arrived late in KL since the driver went back to pick up more passengers. A businessman from Iran was rightfully angry because he feared to miss his flight to Doha. To me, the bus was just a cocoon zooming over the smooth highway enabling me to turn the pages of my electronic book without nauseating. I had been instructed where to go in KL, and my host was coming to pick me up. I had to use somebody’s phone because the payphone didn’t work (the fact that they still have them on some subway stations in downtown KL should amaze the younger generation). It made me realize I am – and want to be – depending on the kindness of strangers. Because kindness is something nice, and not in the last place for the purveyor of it.
I had a wonderful time with my host, who was a learned man of Chinese descent with knowledge that in many a subject blissfully surpassed mine. We had wonderful conversations about climate change, collaborative consumption, the demise of capitalism. Very contented I went to sleep in the room he showed me, only to worry if I hadn’t been to candid and too dissenting to my host, who was almost twice my age.
In the morning he smiled when I brought it up, saying he had been westernized and the traditional respect the elders thing was a relic of the past. It was me, who had been orientalized during my stay in Korea.
He simultaneously hosted two Venezuelan woman, mother and daughter, so I came to chat about the post-Chavez era in their country. It was nice to speak Spanish again. We wanted to go out for a drink, but ended up having some nasi – the way yours truly always ends up, humbling himself and basking in the illusion that he learned something from it – but they liked it. It was an Islamic place, so we could forget about those beers.
Kuala Lumpur is booming. I was here three years ago, and they have built extensively in the central city since. It is not always easy to stay in touch with my resentment of fossil burning growth, and sometimes I need to suppress a wow. But I know what we’re up against (see my resistance blog if you’re curious how I try to help save the world).
Chilling shopping malls, filled with apparel brands and other things nobody needs. The sense of luxury, of reward for the meaningless toil in high-rise office buildings. I usually enter when I see a shopping mall, out of curiosity, and to see all the things that I don’t need to buy (for now, forced consumption is still far away, but we’ll get there when this civilization is on its deathbed). And to feel like I understand something of the world and what at its core comprises the auto-destruction of our species.
I had plans to hitchhike, but since I’d find a couch surfer and hence an appointment, I took a bus up to Penang.