One fundamental key to success in Travel is of course attentiveness. We call it «paying attention» in English & «prêter attention» in French (in Arabic, however, one gives attention) suggesting that we're as stingy with our attentiveness as we are with our money. Quite often it seems that no one is «paying attention», that everyone is hoarding their consciousness - what? saving it for a rainy day?-and damping down the fires of awareness lest all available fuel be consumed in a single holocaust of unbearable knowing.

This model of consciousness seems suspiciously «Capitalist» however - as if indeed our attention were a limited resource, once spent forever irrecoverable. A usury of perception now appears: - we demand interest on our payment­of­attention, as if it were a loan rather than an expense. Or as if our consciousness were threatened by an entropic «heat­death», against which the best defense must consist of a dull mediocre trance­state of grudging half­attention - a miserliness of psychic resources - a refusalto notice the unexpected or to savour the miraculousness of the ordinary - a lack of generosity. But what if we treated our perceptions as gifts rather than payments? What if we gave our attention instead of paying it? According to the law of reciprocity, the gift is returned with a gift - there is no expenditure, no scarcity, no debt against Capital, no penury, no punishment for giving our attention away, and no end to the potentiality of attentiveness.

Our consciousness is not a commodity, nor is it a contractual agreement between the Cartesian ego and the abyss of Nothingness, nor is it simply a function of some meat­machine with a limited warranty. True, eventually we wear out and break. In a certain sense the hoarding of our energies makes sense-we «save» ourselves for the truly important moments, the break­throughs, the «peak experiences».

But if we picture ourselves as shallow coin­purses - if we barricade the «doors of perception» like fearful peasants at the howling of boreal wolves - if we never «pay attention» - how will we recognise the approach and advent of those precious moments, those openings?

We need a model of cognition that emphasises the «magic» of reciprocity: - to give attention is to receive attention, as if the universe in some mysterious way responds to our cognition with an influx of effortless grace. If we convinced ourselves that attentiveness follows a rule of «synergy» rather than a law of depletion, we might begin to overcome in ourselves the banal mundanity of quotidian inattention, and open ourselves to «higher states.»

In any case, the fact remains that unless we learn to cultivate such states, travel will never amount to more than tourism. And for those of us who are not already adepts at the Zen of travel, the cultivation of these states does indeed demand an initial expenditure of energy. We have inhibitions to repress, hesitations to conquer, habits of introversion or bookishness to break, anxieties to sublimate. Our third­rate stay­at­home consciousness seems safe and cozy compared to the dangers and discomforts of the Road with its eternal novelty, its constant demands on our attention. «Fear of freedom» poisons our unconscious, despite our conscious desire for freedom in travel. The art we're seeking seldom occurs as a natural talent. It must be cultivated ­ practised ­ perfected. We must summon up the will for intentional travel.

It's a truism to complain that difference is disappearing from the world - and it's true, too. But it's sometimes amazing to discover how resilient and organic the different can be. Even in America, land of Malls and tv's, regional differences not only survive but mutate and thrive in the interstices, in the cracks that criss-cross the monolith, beneath the notice of the Media Gaze, invisible even to the local bourgeoisie. If all the world is becoming one­dimensional, we need to look between the dimensions.

I think of travel as fractal in nature. It takes place off the map­as­text, outside the official Consensus, like those hidden and embedded patterns that nestle within the infinite bifurcations of non­linear equations in the strange world of chaos mathematics. In truth the world has not been completely mapped, because people and their everyday lives have been excluded from the map, or treated as «faceless statistics», or forgotten. In the fractal dimensions of unofficial reality all human beings - and even a great many «places» - remain unique and different. «Pure» and «unspoiled»? Maybe not. Maybe nobody and nowhere was ever really pure. Purity is a will­o­the­wisp, and perhaps even a dangerous form of totalitarianism. Life is gloriously impure. Life drifts.

In the 1950's the French Situationists developed a technique for travel which they called the derive, the «drift.» They were disgusted with themselves for never leaving the usual ruts and pathways of their habit­driven lives; they realised they'd never even seen Paris. They began to carry out structureless random expeditions through the city, hiking or sauntering by day, drinking by night, opening up their own tight little world into a terra incognita of slums, suburbs, gardens, and adventures. They became revolutionary versions of Baudelaire's famous flaneur, the idle stroller, the displaced subject of urban capitalism. Their aimless wandering became insurrectionary praxis.

And now, something remains possible - aimless wandering, the sacred drift. Travel cannot be confined to the permissable (and deadening) gaze of the tourist, for whom the whole world is inert, a lump of picturesqueness, waiting to be consumed - because the whole question of permission is an illusion. We can issue our own travel permits. We can allow ourselves to participate, to experience the world as a living relation not as a themepark. We carry within ourselves the hearts of travelers, and we don't need any experts to define and limit our more­than­fractal complexities, to «interpret» for us, to «guide» us, to mediate our experience for us, to sell us back the images of our desires.

The sacred drift is born again. Keep it secret.