“Journey’s are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships, or trains.” This segment from The Art of Travel retrospectively rings true to my personal experiences with traveling. One of the things that is most attractive to me about long drives and flights on planes is becoming freely and carelessly absorbed in thought while traveling from Point A to Point B. When driving through familiar landscapes and spotting landmarks previously seen, I can’t help but succumb to an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. Just like a familiar smell, a landmark or a specific place can open up a flood gate of memories for me. Often times, these sights can bring me back to the exact time and place in my life during which I had once discovered them. While driving past the scattered groups of windmills in California’s Palm Desert, I recall childhood memories of daydreaming in the backseat of my mom’s car while songs from a Beach Boys cassette tape blare through the stereo. As described in The Art of Travel, engaging another activity while in motion does indeed enhance the experience of that activity. For me, listening to music has been a constant in all of my travels. I feel that the music listening in tandem with traveling has always had a profound affect on me. I can experience my imagination infinitely unfold when listening to music while out walking, driving, or flying on an airplane. As a kid, I felt inclined to draw whatever it was I hearing or feeling in the music at that time. However, these days I find myself thinking about my own music creatively and critically. While on Spring break, I went home to Southern California and was left without a car or other means of transportation for getting around the city. Although feeling inconvenienced by the circumstance, I reveled at the opportunity to put on my headphones and have to walk everywhere I wanted to go. I walked between my parents’ houses and my girlfriend’s house almost everyday; racking up about 20 miles in total over the course of the week. I listened to music from my cellphone throughout all of my walks and along the way plotted all of the music I wanted to make as soon I got to the nearest guitar. This combined experience of traveling, sightseeing, and music listening and making is what I’m looking forward to most in my upcoming trip to New Orleans.

Response to week 1
The Art Of Travel (Alain de Botton)

I was strikingly amazed so far not just by this book’s individuality, but also by the way it resonated with some of my own experiences and questions. “If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another country, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.” (p.90) This relates so much to traveling and the thoughts im having twards travels, espeacially when I am travelling by myself. I had always found that the reality of travel, when I was actually present to it, had little to do with my expectations of what it would bring, this is why I don’t want to go into a new place with expectaions that may have been influenced by my own culture and thoughts. I want to be able to take something new away from this ecpericenc, as well as come back a new person. We all base our lives on steriotypes ans statisics based on certain actions with in our lives. And I’ve always marveled at how trips are often reduced by so many people to a few “critical moments” and “photographic highlights” that as de Botton says, “lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.” For most of us, the ending place, and perhaps a few incidents on the way, are what we most remember; the time it takes to plan for traveling itself is seldom remembered or talked about. People like to represent there travels to ourselves and others almost like the travel books we read. Here is one of the ways the author describes it:
“A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply ‘journey through an afternoon’. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties revolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might he. We look back out at the field, It continues to rain.
At last the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops, A fly lands on the window. And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence ‘he journeyed through the afternoon.’” And, of course, Botton hasn’t even talked about the many actions that these events happen in our thoughts and emotions, as well as the often dull and heavy sensations they arouse in our bodies. For example, I took a trip to Orange Walk Belize anf throught prosses of this all, I had to save money, in fact at points in planning I was scared and afraid that I wouldn’t have the opertunity, but I kept my head up and continue. Finally it reached the moment where it was time to go, all I could think about was how different everything was going to be compared to Wyoming!! Entering the plain was the most intense thing I had ever experience, I was nervous, excite, and could not stop imagining what everything was going to be like, but at the same time I was actually comparing what it was going to be like in my head to my experiences that I had in Wyoming because that’s all I really new. When I got there I would say I did really feel far away from home, this place felt just as close to home as home did.
“We are all of us, without ever having any say in the matter, scattered at birth by the wind onto various countries, but like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances.” (p.98) This quote really hits home for me, why, well I cant help but to think that there is so much truth to living in this one sentence. We as humanity don’t realize that there is so much basic human nature that is happening all around us and all over the world. Things we have in common, growing up, attraction, sounds, love, hate, ect. All these examples live with in every human and culture, so why wouldn’t we be able to bond and understand in some way. I think we all are different but we focus so much on how much we don’t connect with others, that we forget that there are so many other options to bond from.

Journeys are the midwives of thought, the action, reflection, and experience of helping bring another reality into this world. On a journey or trip, we come back feeling different or changed somehow. Things aren’t always as we “imagined” them back in our homeland and we may find where we are go are not as we have thought. This isn’t necessarily good or bad; it just is. Journeys are the midwives of thought, while we travel we are giving birth to new consciousness within ourselves. The journey isn’t the consciousness, but the assistant helping our new perspectives shape and take form.

While returning from a place we sometimes find ourselves remembering how much time we spent thinking about being in the place we are now returned from.

There are a million thing I need to do to get ready for this trip, and one of them (one that I think is the most important to me getting the most out of my travels and really growing from this trip) is to prepare myself mentally for what is to come. Alain de Botton does a wonderful job in his book, The art of Travel of reminding me that it’s not necessarily the place I’m going to that will have such a great impact on my life but the way I treat the trip itself. While preparing myself for a trip to Paris, It’s been hard not to create these huge expectations of what it will be like and how this incredibly romantic city will change my life forever just because it is the romantic city that it is. I have dreamed of this for years and built up in my mind what it will be like to walk the old cobblestone streets and experience the Parisian culture. How romantic it will be and how much it will change me. But unless I am in the right state of mind while i’m actually there, I won’t take hardly anything away from this trip and I could possibly have a pretty lame time. De Botton gives us in each chapter of The art of Travel, tools for helping us truly see and feel the spaces we inhabit as we travel.

Expectation is the bane of all travel, and the downfall of all relationships really. (And what are we put of this earth for if not to build beautiful relationships with other human beings? So we better figure out how to make them work.) Expectation is what allows our ego to overshadow love and understanding. If I expect Paris to be a certain way, and when I get there and it’s not that way, I will be disappointed because my ego won’t allow for any understanding of why Paris isn’t that way. But If I just desire for Paris to be a certain way without any expectation of it fulfilling my every desire I will be able to just be present and just enjoy the way things are. I’ll allow for differences in what way I viewed the city before I’m actually there to become something much more beautiful.

My biggest expectation at this moment is that everything will be perfect and beautiful in Paris and I will never have a moment of let down or unhappiness. That just isn’t a realistic view of anyplace in the world. No matter how beautiful or romantic. “We are sad at home and blame the weather or the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own either underwrite our joy or condemn us to misery. This explains why people are happy even in Winnipeg and unhappy even in Tahiti” (The art of Travel). It’s not the city itself that will make me happy, but the way I interact with the city. If I chose to not interact with the city and not allow it to teach me I could find myself with a “strong wish to remain in bed and take the next flight home” (The art of Travel).

Looking forward to this trip I hope to allow this journey to open me up to some wonderful internal conversation. De Botton says in his book, “Journeys are the midwives of thought. A great desire of mine is to be sitting at some quaint cafe on a Parisian street corner and have a new and wonderful thought or idea pop into my head. Weather that be an interesting melody or chord progression to use in my music, or some philosophical idea I am reading about in one of my texts to just make sense. What would be really great is that though my travels I would be able to understand or come up with something I would be able to share with you through this blog and though my life and relationships when I get home. I am traveling to this city to try and better understand what makes it’s music unique. Sure I could do a bunch of reading and listening here in my bedroom in Olympia and gain a good understanding of what makes the sound of Paris so unique. But I believe, as well as De Botton, that it’s the journey and the experience of actually being in that place that will stimulate my mind to help me better understand Parisian music.

Seeking a better view by Ronex Ahimbisibwe

“Carriage, take me with you!  Ship, steal me away from here!  Take me far away.  Here the mud is made of our tears!” (Baudelaire qtd. in Botton 46)

Whenever we put ourselves in new places or circumstances we expose ourselves to new ways of thinking. We provide ourselves with the opportunity to look at things from a new perspective. The first chapter of The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton is titled ‘On Anticipation’. I have spent the last several months anticipating this trip to Kampala. De Botton writes that “we are familiar with the notion that the reality of travel is not what we anticipate. The pessimistic school, of which des Esseintes might be an honorary patron, therefore argues that reality mus always be disappointing. It may be truer and more rewarding to suggest that it is primarily different” (Botton 11). I hope that this difference between my expectations and reality will help me to develop new ways of looking at the world.

It is hard for me to pinpoint exactly what my expectations for this journey are. Even though I am extremely excited about the trip and my project, I am not sure how I am going to feel when I get there. The fact that I am returning to the place I was born after so many years also presents its own set of expectations, anticipations and questions. How will what I see compare to my limited memories? How will my visions and preconceptions of Uganda match with the reality?

There is also the chance that I will arrive and be faced with the same questions de Botton asked himself in Madrid: “What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?” (Botton 106). However, l am hopeful that I will be able to avoid sinking too far into those anxieties by arriving, as de Botton suggests, with specific questions and curiosities in mind.

To illustrate this idea, de Botton tells the story of Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian naturalist and explorer. Humboldt traveled to South America deepen his understanding of the natural world. De Botton proposes that Humboldt didn’t have to deal with such questions because “everywhere he went, his mission was unambiguous: to discover facts and to carry out experiments towards that end” (Botton 106). De Botton also tells the story of Humboldt’s excitement upon discovering a fly at an altitude of 16,600 feet on Mount Chimborazo in Peru. De Botton writes that “Humboldt’s excitement testifies to the importance of having the right question to ask of the world” (Botton 117). I hope that throughout the process of planning for my own research and exploration I have found questions to ask that provoke a similar sense of excitement and eagerness to that which inspired Humboldt on his travels.

Another section in The Art of Travel is titled ‘On the Exotic.’ The word exotic has often made me slightly uncomfortable (although this is dependent upon the context of its usage). It is often used in a way that creates a sense of otherness among people. De Botton’s description of his time spent in Amsterdam explains some of the reasons we may find differences between other cultures and our own particularity exciting. One of his arguments is that “what we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home” (Botton 77). This concept of the ‘exotic’ appeals to me as a way to help improve the global society by taking note of what systems work in certain areas and looking for way they might be adapted to work in other environments. However, there are other ways in which the idea of the ‘exotic’ can be potentially damaging.

In The Teeth May Smile But the Heart Does Not Forget, Andrew Rice tells the story of John Hanning Speke who is considered the first European to arrive in Kampala. He explains that Speke “returned to Victorian London to describe the exotic kingdom to a fascinated public. Soon after, the first Protestant and Catholic missionaries arrived, and they quickly set about dividing the Baganda along sectarian lines, competing to win converts away from indigenous beliefs and Islam, which had arrived via trade routes a generation or so before” (Rice 8). Here the idea of the ‘exotic’ was used in way that promoted colonialism and the imposition of the explorer’s religion. While my own project doesn’t have potential ramifications on quite the same scale, I still believe it is important to be mindful of how I both engage in and present my work. Keeping these ideas in mind I believe this journey will expose me to a multitude of new and inspiring ideas.

Works Cited:

Botton, Alain De. The Art of Travel. New York: Pantheon, 2002. Print.

Rice, Andrew. The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda. New York: Metropolitan /Henry Holt, 2009. Print.

“Journey’s are the midwives of thought.”

-Alain de Botton

The Art of Travel is an easy read. Alain de Botton’s writing style draws me in and moves quickly enough to keep me attentive. Flitting between his own travels and the travels of historical figures, Botton showcases his unique take on things which I find to be both insightful and thought provoking. The above quote, for example, is something that I find really intriguing. To a certain extent, I agree with Botton. The mind wanders without any kind of pressure when we occupy it with something like staring out a train window.

However, I disagree with what he writes on page fifty-six: “It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insistes that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are” (56). This quote, I think, gets at what Botton is really driving at. That a person living in comfort can become numb. It’s easy to lose touch, fall into routines, and takes things for granted. I agree with Botton in recognizing the importance of fighting the lethargic grip of comfort, but I don’t agree with him after that point. He seems to blame the domestic setting for making life mundane, and favors travel as an avenue for escaping that trap. I don’t think that we are any less our “true selves” for closing ourselves off to the beauty in things we’ve come to expect. I do think we do ourselves a great disservice in not appreciating our own lives. My thoughts on this subject remind me of a screenplay I read freshman year here at TESC, My Dinner with André. In the following clip from the movie, Wallace Shawn tackles this topic of boredom with André Gregory.

Click here to view the embedded video.

André’s character is a little eccentric, but Wally’s speech has always resonated with me. I do think that traveling can be a way of waking yourself up. For example, John Luther Adams, a modern composer mentioned in an earlier reading,  fell in love with and moved to Alaska, a place which has helped inspire many of his compositions. According to him, you should “find where you belong – musically, geographically, spiritually – and ground your life there” (John Luther Adams). I do however think that traveling can be just as stifling as not. Botton himself addresses the disconnect between reality and fantasy that is often associated with vacations throughout the first chapter, and that kind of disconnect is fundamentally not dissimilar from the numbness of the mundane.

How do we combat boredom then? Botton actually goes on to provide an answer I agree with by refining the idea of travel to exploration. Using Alexander von Humboldt’s life as an example, Botton explains the importance of curiosity. “Curiosity,” he writes, “might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions” (116). I realized after reading this that my goal for this upcoming study was to reignite my curiosity regarding music. I think that breaking down what curiosity into questions branching from the fundamental is a thorough and efficient way of understanding it. I’m also reminded that, while I want to realize my own philosophy regarding music, art, and humanity, I must first comprehend why I want to  better understand those topics in the first place. By fueling our desire to know “we may reach that stage where we are bored by nothing” (Botton, 116).

Before I begin to unravel the layers of questions to find the roots of my curiosity, I think it’s fair to address some of the things which have recently piqued my interest. This week we’ve touched on foreign music, something which offers a world of new possibilities to me. To me, the sounds produced by foreign instruments are exotic and enticing, and the structures inherent in the songs they play are largely unknown to me. I loved immersing myself in the African rhythms of the workshop today, and am keen on learning more about the Gamelan music mentioned in the Soundscapes reading. I am, however, aware that I can’t stretch myself too thin. There’s a great deal left for me to learn about western traditional music (in fact there’s infinitely many more things I could learn about it), and I intend on keeping that as the focus of my study. I am, however, intent on setting aside some time to learn more about Japanese traditional music. Perhaps I’ll find some answers in the Yashiro Japanese garden here in Olympia, but, hopefully, I’ll find more questions.

Work Cited:

Adams, John L. “Winter Music.” Interview by Molly Sheridan. John Luther Adams. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.johnlutheradams.com/interview/newmusicbox.html>.

Botton, Alain De. The Art of Travel. New York: Pantheon, 2002. Print.

My Dinner with André. Screenplay by Wallace Shawn and André Gregory. Perf. Wallace Shawn and André Gregory. My Dinner with André. YouTube, n.d. Web.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay addresses sounds, settings and significances in The Art of Travel and I can’t help but think about what these words will mean to me after traveling to Paris.

In Paris, with the help of Shelemay, I see my setting as the front desk of my hotel and the hotel neighborhood.  I am trying to imagine what sounds I will hear.  According to Shelemay, a setting encompasses multiple contexts-“a city, a concert hall, a park, a home-in which music is conceived, created, transmitted, performed and remembered”.  She states that “most communities today are complex environments that include both distinctive local elements and music traditions from elsewhere”.  As Shelemay says, “since music is more than just sound, we take into account the broad sweep of history and the events of social life”.  Given her description of setting I have to re-think my Paris setting.  At this point I can only speculate about the sounds that are heard around and near my hotel and wonder about their origin.

Alain de Botton found that a setting is not always a house, neighborhood or city.  It can sometimes be a mode of transportation like a train or a plane.  People used to get a feeling of belonging (de Botton refers to this as fellow-feeling) from being part of a community but nowadays we acquire this feeling from wandering, traveling.  “Journeys are the midwives of thought.”  Travel causes one to have thoughts that are not usual.  He says, “The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life.”  When we travel we can allow ourselves to reach beyond our familiar habits.

We know highlife is a sound in Accra, Ghana made from the music that was brought to the country by sailors from other countries.  These sea chanteys and folk songs didn’t just spread through Accra, but all of Ghana.  Perhaps the exoticism of music from a community far away is part of the reason that Ghanaian music has incorporated such a wide variety of sounds from other cultures.  de Botton says; “What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.”   I imagine that being on the Gold Coast would have been an unusual opportunity to nearly experience travel to foreign countries.

Maybe, the most common sound heard in Ghana is the language of Twi.  This is the language of the Akan peoples who constitute about half of Ghana.  Music in Ghana is used as a language to relay a message or to tell a story.  The lyrics of some songs change to tell different stories although, non-vocal music also tells a story.

Drums and their music are shared by different Ghanaian ethnic groups.   The best known shared drum, the atumpan, is associated with the Akan people.  These large, goblet-shaped drums are used by chiefs and for state occasions.  They have a single drumhead attached by wire to a flexible round frame made of bamboo and secured to the body of the drum by laces tied to protruding tuning pegs.  Even though these drums are probably made from local materials I wouldn’t classify them as idiophones because they are a drum and probably has a stretched membrane.

The atumpan drum is actually made as a set of two drums but played by one person.  The significance of these male and female drums sets is said to reflect the interdependence of men and women in Akan society.

Highlife, for a time, fell out of style in Ghana but is still popular and important for engagements, weddings, and christenings at nightclubs, and on the radio.  This music is so important to Ghana that it is supported by the military.  The sound of highlife comes from Accra being part of The Gold Coast.  The culturally diverse setting brought together a wide array of musical traditions from Their Gold Coast, Europe and the New World.

There are many celebrations in Ghana in which the music is central to its meaning.  There are celebrations for the successful harvest of the Ga people who survived the famine of the area of Nigeria.  Songs tell the story of their migration and harvest.  There are other social issues that are expressed through their music, as well.  Funerals in Ghana are elaborate and celebrated by most of Ghana.  These funerals are supported by associations and are viewed by the public.

It seems that the people of Ghana have taken sounds they’ve heard from around the world and used them to their liking.  I hope that I can feel like I am part of Paris and yet when I return home be able to use what I have experienced in my own environment.  de Botton make me consider what I will do after Paris.  He said; “Travel twists our curiosity according to a superficial geographical logic, as superficial as if a university course were to prescribe books according to their size rather than subject matter.”  This cracks me up.

From Rai

Like a drop of colored water on to white porous paper, ethnomusicology starts in a place you’d think it’d start. With music, of corse, but as soon as that drop absorbes in to the page, the music you focus on soon too bleeds out and stretches beyond what you thought, like a blind star of fortune with individual reaching rays. And as you dwell deeper and become more submerged you find there’s far more going on then just music.

To the people of Accura in Ghana their music and dance are a sacred force that move and breathe with each other. To them the drums sing and have a language they know and understand. Its more then just communicating to the dancer where they are on the beat but the actual pitches have words and phrases associated with the phrases from the drums.  In the PDF “Soundscapes” from Kay Kaufman Shelemay, its talked about a certain drum, the Atumpan. This drum is in a goblet form (as Shelemay puts it) and it is built in pairs of two, one male and one female to reflect the strength of the relationship between men and women in the Akan culture. In this way the music is heard and felt on multiple levels of emotion and knowledge.

“If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of the quest-in all its ardour and paradoxes-than our travels.” Allan de Bottom “The Art of Travel”. If our lives are dominated by this search and if the means of this happiness we seek is through travel, I wonder how and if the people Accura found their happiness… There land was found in the fifteenth century and since has been visited, colonized, and liberated. But it has been impacted significantly since the Ga people first found it. And it continues to change and become more and more and one day soon it will be like an American city like Boston.

In reading “the Art of Travel” I have been putting my forehead to the grinding stone to try and make connections and find glimpses into what I should (or shouldn’t) be doing on my travels to New Orleans. Page sixty seven in the book starts the chapter of  the Exoitc, and in it de Bottom talks about the Strange vs. the Familiar, his example is of a directions sign in an Amsterdam airport and how the sign was a strange color yellow, and how if the sign had been made in his home land or some other different place it would be yet a different sign, but only so slightly as to keep it similar but slightly dissimilar as well. This made me think of the drum maker in Ghana, and how he uses local materials; local seashells, metals, leathers, and most importantly the woods used and how if this same drum was made here in the pacific north west or back east in Boston, down south in Florida or New Orleans across the pacific in Hawaii, would it be the same drum, granted no two drums are the same but could it behave, talk, look, feel, Sound like the same drum he made in Ghana, or even would a Ghanaian drum maker even recognize it as the same membranophone?

I say through travel you can find happiness, wether it’s a travel on the physical plane or a travel back through time in a traditional folk song battered on the old drums from a time before your grand parents roamed the earth you can find something somewhere what ever it is, and find happiness in it. In ethnomusicology you take a broad look at what makes things happen with in the music and if you keep focused on the big picture and don’t let your self get diluted in the bullshit happiness will run in a circular motion.