Alternating Travel

[squirmelia]

This week's tactic for adventures is: Experimental Travel.

The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel collects together details of experiments, such as travelling somewhere blindfolded, choosing a destination using a dice, or wearing a horse's head.

My first attempt at Alternating Travel (taking the first road on the right and then the road on the left, etc) was conducted inside the building where I live and ended abruptly when I found myself outside Flat 52.

Deciding to be a little more adventurous, I stepped outside and headed right and then left, right and then left. The first time I was unable to turn left, I found myself outside Southampton Central Station and watched a freight train go by. Next time someone wants directions from my house to the station, I'll easily be able to direct them!

After that, I cheated just a little to avoid dead ends and took a path instead of a road and discovered revealing messages on scraps of paper from other travellers, such as, "I feel that protocol will pay you from tomorrow". After getting into the true holiday spirit of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, travelling right and left, right and left, I eventually ended up back at my house, which was quite a coincidence really.

Comments

[jaimeee.livejournal.com]

i love lonely planet.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

The Experimental Travel guide I particularly enjoyed.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

hehe, I'll have to try that one day :o)

Be well,

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Indeed you must. If you end up at the station as well, I will start to wonder if there is some disturbingly secret strategy regarding the road layouts in Southampton.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

hehe :o) I'm sure I'll report back as soon as I've done it on my livejournal *nods* :o)

Presumably though I won't be able to get back to my own home from the station via the same strategy and will instead end up at yours.

Be well,

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Will you find sex (written on a lamp-post), drugs (cigarette butts) and rock 'n' roll (broken CD) also?

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

Presumably, unless you've been lieing to us about the rock and roll nature of this location :o)

Be well,

[remotepush.livejournal.com]

1. The Fool.

A young man, in whose dark hair a single strand of grey has recently appeared, decides to set out on a series of excursions suggested by the fall of the cards.

Complex rules will determine the direction of each journey. For instance, the suit being WANDS, he will only go North if the journey is take place in the second half of the year; or if the next card turned up is a Knight.

Equally intricate rules, whose algebraic clauses and counter clauses he intuits with each new cast of the cards, cover the choice of South, West and East; even of the clothes he will wear: but he will always travel by train. This decision is based on the relationship he has identified between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet cold room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical indicator boards at railway stations. This similarity rests, he is willing to admit, on a metaphor: for while the fall of the cards is – or seems – random, the sequence of destinations is – or seems – controlled.

To represent himself in this affair, the young man – or ‘Ephebe’ – has chosen THE FOOL. This card, therefore, will never turn up. He has subtracted it from the deck and keeps it beside him; each afternoon, as the light goes out of the room, it seems to fluoresce up at him from the table or the arm of his chair, more an event than a picture, we move forward through time by the deeply undercutting action of Desire. As THE FOOL steps continually off his cliff and into space so the Ephebe is always a presence attempting to fill the absence that has brought him forth. He is a wave tumbling constantly forward into each new moment, and his journeys are thus in every sense a trip. By following the journeys as they fall out, he believes, he will open for himself a fifth direction; and to help identify it he will bring back from each journey an object. These objects or donnes will eventually comprise both a ‘compass’ and a set of instructions for its use.

All the Ephebe’s journeys begin from London.

-The Horse Of Iron And How We Can Know It.
from Travel Arrangements
by M. John Harrison

[psychosynthesis.livejournal.com]

ahhhh... [sigh of ecstasy]

I once suggested this story to a person I disliked, in hopes it could clean his metaphysical clocks.

[remotepush.livejournal.com]

harrison is interesting, with each thing i read by him he seems to lose me more, but in such a fascinating manner

[almond-tiger.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a very interesting method. I've seen that book around - I should take a look.

[psychosynthesis.livejournal.com]

thank you so much for passing on this concept.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

i've been doing this in the east end of london lately, whenever i have a spare half hour and an A-Z in my pocket. There are a *lot* of plague pits and odd memorials in beautiful alleyways in the City and east end :)

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

i've done that sort of thing before, right then left etc, but it's not super interesting when there are just blocks and blocks and blocks. It's just, OK, going diagonal... But i think it'd be fun in less griddy places.

[eldritchreality.livejournal.com]

I like to wonder down those strange green paths that appear off perfectly normal seeming concrete jungles. The can often lead to strange places, or at least strange people.

I once met a lovely girl who'd climbed a tree because it was there and decided that she didn't want to come down again on one of these excursions.