Chapter 29 "The Secret Agent Who Can't Sleep" - Adventure Travel with a Map

"As hot as hell, as black as sin, as sweet as love."—Let us first remember this Armenian saying, which is said to be used by them to describe a good cup of coffee. In this book, this saying is quoted The eighty-year-old Armenian grandmother who told us also said: "If the spoon doesn't stand upright in the cup, the coffee is too weak." drink! Do you remember what you said?Who knows, maybe one day you will be looking for a job in an advertising agency, and maybe a beverage company customer has a new coffee to launch-I mean, why do you have to find out what it is for? ?Some people collect stamps, some collect coins, some collect player cards, some collect books, and some collect girlfriends, etc. It is not difficult to hide a future, purely utilitarian purpose in the long time and thought of this collection process Well, if you want to hypnotize yourself that one day you will be successful with this thing, you can use it as a valid reason or a private dream.But apart from these wild thoughts, the collection itself still has a trunk with its own purpose. You just like it, especially the predestined feeling that it jumps out in front of your eyes in the popular category and dazzling variety of things. Not only but also prior to some kind of possessive desire, but a certain imagination is awakened by this thing at the first time, God is merciful, we are living in a real and boring world without imagination now, aren't we?

Walter Benjamin was a collector of rare things, of books, of good things said, and it is a pity that he never had time to write a book of quotes from the first word to the last composed of words. Collectors usually have a principle that is not necessarily self-conscious, and they are easily misunderstood or self-alienated as "curiosity hunting", a rather annoying behavior.Basically, what he seeks is always something that is heterogeneous, unique, or even directly remote in space and time, sustained by the curiosity of an unknown, vast world, so that it It can be seen as a kind of reverse travel, where the mountain goes to you instead of you to the mountain, a kind of magical teleportation that turns the world into a mustard seed.The collection is not only evidence of the real existence of the heterogeneous world, but also a substantial sample containing rich information. It is both the same and different from the things in the world you are familiar with before. The difference is not necessarily the constituent materials, just like a stamp is still paper. A coin is printed with colorful patterns or landscapes, and a coin is still an inert metal cast with a portrait of a human head and marked with words. The functions are actually the same and the same. The most interesting difference is that when it is so transparent that it looks already The same materials and functions that can’t find any new tricks can still be like this—the superposition of the same parts makes the different parts jump out and be understandable.Through this kind of collection, the world that you have hardened to the point of being the only one is turned around, and the kaleidoscope is like a completely new look.

A rare object from afar brings surprises of different ideas, different concerns, different perspectives and imaginations; the assortment of collections constitutes an entire possible world like a physical encyclopedia, showing some kind of attractive Exploring the remote frontier, and showing its vastness, depth and danger by difference, it can accommodate those strange ideas that are declared impossible by your only real world, and it seems to be actionable and practicable . Man has a sense of resurrection. Therefore, there is a critical point of static and dynamic waiting in the collector's life.In the beginning, he was a person who sat idle in his study, picking things up with tweezers and looking at things in different worlds with a magnifying glass, but the two worlds were always secretly replacing out of the corner of his eyes when he was concentrating and not looking up, just like the daytime inadvertently It turned into night, until that moment——Among the words I personally collected through reading, the best-spoken one is Zhu Tianxin's novel "Dream One Way".In the novel, the replacement of the two worlds is collected through dreaming again and again to construct a "new home" and "new town". It's nothing more than holding a speculation: one day, when it becomes clearer and clearer than your existing world, then maybe you will have to-change your mindset or should you say-this is the time when you can leave and go. "

The collector, here takes a step forward and becomes the actor. Anyone who reads novels can easily find that Bullock himself is probably a collector, right?It is clearer that Rodden Barr, the thief in his works, collects everything from books, paintings to coins. Matthew Scudder is a bit more cryptic about this, but he's the kind of guy who reads obituaries in the New York Times and reads the encyclopedias of the deaths of religious saints. Book, envious that they can find such a "colorful" variety of ways to die, in fact, the whole book is directly his death stamp album in New York City, isn't it?

Here Tanner collects an interesting collection of small revolutionary dissenting groups around the world, including the Panhellenic Friendship Society, the Silician Armenian Revival League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Gaelic National Society, the Flat Earth Society of England, the Macedonian League of Friendship, ILO, Libertarian Union, Croatian Freedom Association, Spanish National Labor Organization, Union Committee Against Fluorination, Serbian Brotherhood, International Stantafate Fraternity, Nazdoya Fedlovka , and the Lithuanian Army in Exile.According to Tanner himself, "I'm interested in hopeless targets... Ordinary bureaucrats and police officers obviously don't understand how attractive it is to dedicate themselves to a hopeless target. A group of about three hundred people scattered around the world people who are wholeheartedly pursuing a hopeless dream - like the independence of Wales from the United Kingdom - you either think it's heartbreakingly wonderful, or you scoff and think that this small group of people Just crazy freaks." This eccentric collecting habit has made Tanner one of the most hated people in the New York City postman, because he will always receive hundreds of promotional pamphlets from every strange corner of the world at a time. Give him the whole bag.

In addition, Tanner also collects languages. Except for the Basque language in northern Spain that has always wanted to separate, which has always troubled him, he is proficient in almost as many languages ​​as the dissident cliques he belongs to and keeps pace.Language is not only the key to open every heterogeneous world, but also naturally brings the way of thinking, perspective and value sequence of the world it comes from. This is an effect that any scholar who studies language knows.In the book, when Tanner saw the Irish land planning to escape on the plane being escorted, what he said was, "I didn't expect it to be so green here. There is a green everywhere, divided by piled stone walls into different lime greens. , bright chartreuse and forest green, gray roads winding like thin ribbons over green patchwork quilts. There is a misty body of water—the Chanon estuary? Green everywhere, endless stretches Greenery. I was overlooking the land and an unusual thing happened to me. Almost immediately I started thinking with a thick Irish accent. Almost immediately I became Irish, a member of the Brotherhood of the Irish Republic. We The place I’m about to arrive in is my sphere of influence, and Mustafa has no chance of winning.”

For these two strange collection habits of Tanner, the writer Bullock gave them an almost credible but no more magical reason, that is, Tanner is a sleepless person and cannot fall asleep (so the CIA investigators after the fact did not know about him. Not the slightest threat during fatigue interrogation), because he was hit in the head by shell fragments during the Korean War when he was young, so his sleep center was damaged, so much so that since he was eighteen years old, he has been using yoga for about an hour a day instead of normal Humans get about eight hours of sleep.In other words, every day of his life is almost a long, uncompromising 24-hour day, so he has a lot of time that is so abundant that it is already boring to fill up, completely and universally suffering from time in urban life. People with poverty have different rhythms, just like the wanderer in Benjamin's mouth, so his posture in handling life is also completely different, "useless" revolutionary groups and their goals, "useless" language. "Useless", but the fragmented information and knowledge passed on secretly are still picked up, sorted and stored by him one by one like the garbage discarded by people in the metropolis. The wonderful thing is that Tanner actually found A subsistence industry, that is, writing papers and reports for Columbia University or New York University students, and even being a shooter for exams, is almost ironic.

I think that's where the real paradox lies.The metropolis has the densest population, the fiercest competition for survival, the most urgent pace of life, the most realistic and ruthless people, and these most extreme places have been elevated to symbolic places of eternal bondage (not those who have fully realized life, and those who have not fully realized but People who have money and leisure, when they strive for freedom and individuality, must they escape from it first?), but it is often the only place where they can live in the only gap where they have freedom and rebellion. Levi-Strauss accurately grasped half a century ago Up to this point, what he launched at that time was New York.He thought New York was a place with "holes" everywhere, like Alice's mirror or a tree hole, connected to a certain unimaginable country.

Is it true?Probably.The Met has always been the heart of the first rebellion, including movements that rebel against itself, name it, and vilify it, such as the left-wing lower class, the green, the vegetarian masquerade, and even the Like the local literature movement that became popular in Taiwan twenty years ago, it usually started in big cities and found their allies here.In fact, the big cities did more than that, not only gave birth to them, supported them, promoted them, but also protected them when they were young, and contained them when they failed and fled, just as before 1848. Like Paris, the "capital of the world" (to borrow Benjamin's expression), or London, which after 1848 had almost no place on the Continent.

Then there is New York, especially after the success of the Red Revolution after World War II. A man like Tanner is pure New York. It is hard to imagine that there is any other place on earth so strange and so generous that it could support such an inexplicable collector like him. Novelist Graham Green has a book about his travels to Liberia, an African country named after freedom, when he was young. It is called "Traveling Without a Map". This is an ancient way of traveling and an ancient way of understanding the world and its The way of things—man directly arrives at the first scene of life.Directly facing objects and a certain part of the physical world, directly touching, the generation of concepts is a later thing. It will not appear until people touch each object, through comparison, filtration, capture and crystallization of common phases. .The word "by analogy" in Chinese faithfully remembers the process of the transformation from object to concept: touch—classification—and then thinking gains a certain horizontal leap ability, from heavy to light and free, glowing with a The color of joy of knowing.

The map is also a later product of this process. Its perspective is imitating God, watching the land from the top of the bird's-eye view, and using lines and symbols to delete the messy physical details, so as to record the shape of the land concisely and overall. appearance.But such a place in the small world cannot be reached by human beings for a long time. There are no aircraft, no artificial satellites, and the travelers who stick to the surface can only complete small pieces like a puzzle, just like Chekhov's The book "Sakhalin Travel Notes" narrates such a passage: just to find out whether Sakhalin (that is, Sakhalin Island), the cold island in the far east of Russia, is an island or a peninsula, and whether it has some It took hundreds of years for one place to connect the Eurasian continent, and it was completed by wave after wave of travelers and explorers who ventured to sail or trek deep on the island and speculate. Didn't Robinson Robinson who lived alone on a deserted island in Defoe's works do similar things?He tried to sail around the coastline with a self-made canoe, and took a shotgun and food and grass to find his way and climbed with his feet. Finally, he believed in despair that he was indeed thrown onto an isolated island by the storm of fate. Such a journey of map making, today we can still see the remaining footprints on the surviving old-fashioned hand-painted maps, including undeleted real objects, usually the alien beasts on the distant continent, or the sea exposed in the waves of the ocean. A half-length giant whale; there are four-sided borders that cannot be reached by two feet and can only be filled by imagination, usually painted with unconquerable mountains or rivers that block the way; and if you compare Today's accurate satellite aerial maps, it is easy to find that even in the more familiar range of basic activities, the old old maps are still full of gaps, blanks, and errors everywhere, which means that there are unknowns and blanks everywhere. On the contrary, today, when the map is basically completed accurately, our order has been completely reversed. Now we have the map before traveling, or even, only the map without travel, just like children living in the city. It took countless drawings and photos to see a hairy, frisky chicken. The story of Ivan Tanner is just such a modern and urban style. It is not a travel without a map, but an adventure story in which the concept precedes the entity and the map precedes the action. The reason why such an adventure story is possible is that The key difference is that Tanner's map is not abstract and purely symbolic. His peculiar map is assembled piece by piece from the objects he collected, especially the small groups and languages ​​of the dissident revolution. It makes his experience extraordinary like an unbelievable adult fairy tale, but it is convincing that there are indeed such places, such words, such people, such thoughts and dreams in this world. The maps used by ordinary people today are too clean, so clean that there is no trace of danger left. You see, the vast ocean like a fickle woman is only a piece of uniform, soft blue. If you are not happy, people seem to be able to step over in a few strides without getting your feet wet; similarly, the high mountains are just ocher and green, with roads and mountain trails with gray or black lines running through them, hiding dead ends, Deep valleys, cliffs, falling rocks, storms, avalanches, birds and beasts, and everything that may be hostile.That's right, the world has indeed become smaller and safer compared to human capabilities and equipment, but it's not so small or so safe, is it?To be fair, this shrinkage and safety is partly true, but partly just an illusion brought about by the map, and travel in action is still dangerous in varying degrees, just as we still know people who travel at random Accidental death in a distant and strange country is common, but this does not constitute an adventure story, it can only be an unfortunate news story, because it has only danger and no imagination. If there is a map first without actually carrying a bag and putting it into action, today's map may be difficult to even imagine an adventure story.Names like Reykjavik, Murmansk, Madagascar, Titicaca, Hindu Kush, Taklamakan, Buenos Aires, Galapagos, etc. will only take us back to our high school days The drowsy afternoon geography class has become a pure sound noun that you have to formulate to memorize, and you can confuse it with a little hesitation or overthinking. My high school geography teacher once humbly suggested that we might as well record him with a tape recorder. A lecture, "Listen to it when you have insomnia, and I guarantee that you will fall asleep as you are now within three minutes." The liberal master Miller Jr. called it "sleeping mediocrity" a hundred years ago. —Of course, he was talking about the basic social situation under a democratic system, but it’s the same. To make these names, these symbols alive, you must give them physical content, give them memory, whether it is personal or other or collective - we try to give examples, Murmansk and the familiar Beckham Manchester, the European football powerhouse that has just left, has alliteration, echoing east and west on the map, but it is the only warm and ice-free port in the frozen Arctic Circle; Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, The "sacred land of the north" that William Miles said is also the mysterious island that the Argentine blind poet Borges yearned for, "Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia on land have all forgotten all the stories about gods ", Borges thought that the memory of the gods can only be sealed in Iceland, the amiable country of giants; Tikka, you can tell from the sound of the dialect, and has long competed with Lake Baikal in the south of Siberia, Russia, for the deepest place in the world. The title of the lake, but of course it is far more profound and mysterious than Baikal. It is located in the high place of the Antilles Mountains, and it is connected with the magical Mayan civilization that flies away like the shadow of the sun in human history. It makes people feel palpitating ;Hindu Kush, there are too many stories of adventurers, including Alexander the Great who crossed it and never returned. Whimsical liars, they thought that they would become the king of Eurasia, but unexpectedly became gods, but in the end they still fell from the deep valley of 7,000 meters and returned to the bones of mortals, together with the crown that Alexander did not take away in the past ... And language is the sea of ​​collective memory. Charlemagne said that if you have another language, you also have another soul. Ivan Tanner, during the countless sleepless nights in New York where he could not fall asleep, collected such different souls one after another, which became another map of the world, another passport, another A passphrase that opens a mysterious door, which guides him to another path unknown to the world, freely passing through one country after another, in fact, we can probably go to countries if we have money and leisure.It's just that the route is different, the landscape is different, and the life and death allies of the underground organization he collected at the same time are completely different local guides. They are responsible for receiving him, protecting him, escorting him to the next stop, and pointing him to things And the things explained are completely different. If we draw it from the map, the itinerary looks like this: Turkey - Ireland - Spain - France - Italy - Slovenia - Croatia - Serbia - Kosovo - Macedonia - Bulgaria - Turkey. Of course, this is not the so-called 12-day, 11-country luxury super travel that we are familiar with, nor Sophia Cathedral, Spanish bullfighting, Versailles Palace, and four-star and three-star hotels.Tanner’s means of transportation included walking, bicycles, smugglers’ donkey carts, and even stolen police cars. He crossed the French-Italian border with a vise that cut barbed wire. What greeted him in Macedonia was a bloody revolution without saying anything , He shot and killed someone, declined the prime ministership of the new country, and most likely left the local rebels with a myth of an American hero who fell from heaven and a son with the blood of Charisma.In Bulgaria, he joined a left-handed association that was so mysterious that it was only known to be spread all over the world, added another collection, and so on. This is of course a myth, in today's disenchanted world where no myths have been produced for a long time.But how lonely we modern urbanites are, aren't we?Occasionally, you won't feel worried, and you will catch a glimpse of a dim and tenacious star in the corner of the skyline of the dimly red building, right?In fact, we have not become omniscient, we do not have answers to everything, the great mystery of life still surrounds us just like our ancestors surrounded us not long ago, the difference is that we withdraw our curiosity, no Looking up easily again, we cancel the question and give up the search for the answer with a kind of worldly despair, don't we? How many years does a high mountain have to exist before it can turn into a sea?How many times does a man have to turn his head to pretend he doesn't see it?The poet who sang with no end half a century ago said, the answer, the answer lies in the boundless wind. Mythology is not born to directly address those big questions that are meditative, transcendent, and the ultimate mystery of life, and of course it is not the kind of pretense that pretends to be a conceptual answer to understand people.Mythology is far more humble and practical than religion. It stays at the first scene of life, lovingly collects every small and unsolvable mystery around people, and when a smarter person appears (mythology often directly shows this person’s Calling) or ourselves to become wiser, it preserves and weaves together the puzzles that would otherwise bewilder and torment us, detach from isolated islands of individual minds, and become universal, portable, Communicable, negotiable, and relatable.Myth is thus always like a string of beads of a beautiful mystery, both a question and a show to others (Benjamin said, before you seek advice from others, you must first be able to tell it. The loneliness of modern man lies in We always don’t know how to tell our confusion), and therefore, the myth is not the answer, it is more like seeking the answer, looking for someone who knows the answer. Journey, an adventure story, nothing wrong, a trip with only a strange broken map. Even better, in mythology, the original abstract puzzle is always endowed with a material entity, which is the golden fleece, the legendary treasures of King Solomon, and a pure blue bird flying over the rainbow , It is a cool river of arrows gushing out of the earth, of course, more often it is just gold, simple, real, worldly, but heavy and eternal, always shining and dazzling. Ivan Tanner's adventure travel started from a pile of gold. The Armenians in the past generously threw their lives but were stingy with the buried gold. Someone must dig it out and make it see the light of day again, right?