TOURISTS (Preface)

I wrote a poem many years ago called The Guest. It was unique in many ways in that I don’t normally write poems but felt moved enough for some strange reason to write that one. It started auspiciously enough, I came into the world and the trumpets blew, but was followed immediately by, she smacked I cried they looked at me — my feet, my hands, my face, the eyes that see.

I’m telling you all of this because it has a lot to do with the title of the book you’re about to read, along with the concept behind it. The idea of the poem is that after the baby’s birth, the fledgling leaves the hospital in a taxi, and from the back seat observes the world outside, the taxi came and away I went the meter would run till my money was spent, the driver was silent within my brain steering the body through the love, hate and pain.

It was absurd of course, but I loved it, particularly as the poem began to confront the big issue of the point of this transitory existence,  from the back seat I saw many die, fighting for breath save the earthly tie. 

I must have imagined the baby then, to be a passenger of sorts, just as a baby is when carried in its mother’s womb. But the taxi in the poem went beyond the outskirts of that phantasmagorical city, to the top of a mountain,  to view the great battles from a sanctuary cove. And from that point on, the notion of being a guest, instead of a passenger, was introduced, as the baby looks down upon life from the summit of an imaginary mountain, to be a guest I knew was right, to gaze with wonder at the starry night.

The transition from passenger to guest, I no doubt conceived as a form of evolution from the non-thinking embryo to the conscious individual who needs a working philosophy to cope with the daunting concept of a life that leads inevitably to death. And not so much that but how to live a life positively and happily, while deflecting the spectre of the lurking void. 

As I was getting near to finishing this book I started thinking about a title and remembered the poem I’d written before. Guests, seemed good, but when the idea of embryos as a cover for the book came to me, there seemed to be something wrong with the title staring back at me from above the yin-yang, embryonic model of the proposed cover. I couldn’t grasp what was wrong with it at the time, so I went on with my work and put the title on the back-burner. 

Time is a constant, the underlying theme. I had that clear from the beginning. It is what the three women have in common; it’s what we’ve all got in common. It drives everything, defines goals, is the cutting edge. But to be more specific this book is about fractions of time, about turning points and reactions to them. About core decisions and coping with what suddenly or subtly confronts. 

I have always felt that the positive flow of life depends on the negotiating of impasses that inevitably appear. There may be as few as four or five in the course of a life, or more than likely more, and their resolution or failure to do so lets life flow or stagnate, allows the long wave to be caught or drags the swimmer under.

I finished the book but it remained without a title. Guests was close, but close enough wasn’t good enough. I just let everything sit and let it come without being forced. When I did that I realised that guests for the most part are invited, and that embryos come into this world alone, and leave it, as the beings they have become, in the same way.  There is no party, there is no plan. There’s just the trip for as long as it lasts. The passengers, who had become guests, had suddenly been transformed into tourists!

The three women in TOURISTS are fictitious, but I have no doubt that in three small corners of this world, similar characters with similar problems exist. They represent three different generations, because impasses can appear at any time, and they live on three different continents to better draw the universality of the theme. 

There is a great difference between tourists staring at a landmark or those staring at themselves; between tourists defined by a passport or those who are not bound by frontiers of any kind, between tourists who structure but a month of their life to observe something different and those whose entire life experience is devoted to that purpose.