Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

If you want to know something, you ask again and again. When many opinions run together they thicken to form a fact. Isn't that the essence of modern theoretical physics? So often it seems that every scientific principle has its counterpart in social behavior.

These five weeks have changed me already. My stomach has shrunk drastically, my blood has changed, my sweat glands are adapted to a different regime, my palate has altered and my muscles have certainly hardened, to speak only of physical changes. I have also had time to learn a confidence I never knew before, and surely my own confidence in the face of strangers must, in turn, increase their confidence in me. Then there is also the fact that I am proud of what I am doing. There is no denying it. I try to be modest, to say anyone could do it. But they don't, and I feel I have managed to pull off something special. It helps me to know that, as though I were plugged into a kind of power I did not know I had.

This is another reason why I am here: to experience (nothing less) the brotherhood of man. Imagine meeting these men in a London pub or an American diner. Impossible. They could never be there what they are here. They would be made small by the complexities, the paraphernalia that we have added to our lives, just as we are, although we have learned to pretend otherwise. I had to come here to realize the full stature of man; here outside a grass hut, on a rough wooden bench, with no noise, no crowds, no appointments, no axe to grind, no secret to conceal, all the space and time in the world, and my heart as translucent as the glass of tea in my hand.

I begin to understand that in Africa, somehow or other, there is always a way.

In Africa I began to see the human race, sometimes, as a cancerous growth so far out of equilibrium with its host, the earth, that it would inevitably bring about the destruction of both. Not an original thought, but it came to me repeatedly.

the fascination with which I watch myself come closer and closer to merge with the world around me, dipping first a toe, then a foot, then a limb. Although I am made of the same stuff as the world, it used to seem that I might as well have been born on an asteroid, so awkward and unnatural was my place in the scheme of things. I remember my clumsy efforts to simulate "normality," to win acceptance by any false pretense, and my desperate betrayals of my own nature to avoid detection. Then the gradual discovery (born, I think, out of some irreducible core) that others were twisting and cracking under the same strains, and that behind the apparent conformity of daily life was a world of "all things counter, original, spare, strange."

I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them.

For me this is a landscape and a time to bank up courage in a craven heart, to carry a greater fund of joy into the next cloud of sorrow, to learn even to love the sorrow for the pleasure it divides, like the black notes of a keyboard, or hunger between meals. Perhaps even to discover that pain and pleasure, since they cannot exist without each other, are really the same thing.

Clouds of silver and lead boiled above, speared like marshmallows on the slanting rays of a mid-morning sun.

Perhaps I was expecting the whole continent to come over the skyline in a simultaneous rush of cathedrals, revolutions, llamas and carnivals.

What I wanted to ask was, "How can I or anyone possibly live a good life amidst all this squalor and humidity and decay and indifference? Where is the point of it? What is there to lift up the heart and the spirit? What can an individual pit against the power of nature and the apathy of others? Where is the value that lasts?"

Was the whole "underdeveloped" world queuing up to be put through the sausage machine, to come out uniform and plump and covered in the same shiny plastic skin. It was not the first time I had seen the human condition in such mean and aimless terms. The same depressing vision had overwhelmed me in the slums of Tunis, the tin huts of Ethiopia, the shanties around Nairobi and the black township of Soweto. Try as I would to imagine a rosier future, I could see only ever-increasing numbers of people determined to seize on the resources of the earth and pervert them into greater and greater heaps of indestructible concrete and plastic ugliness, only to look and learn and retreat in penitent dismay before the next wave of "developing" citizens. And there seemed to be nothing that I or any individual could do that would make a jot of difference to the outcome. I met many who shared my pessimism, and some who felt personally insulted by it, but I never heard anyone propose a convincing alternative.

made a note that "magic was simply experiencing something for the first time." It occurred to me then that my purpose should be to increase the number of such moments until maybe, one day, everything could be magic.

So they were happy, of course, but their happiness had an unusual quality of clarity and depth, like a clear pool that invited others to jump in and share.

When there is a fear of hostility my mind is torn between two kinds of response; to lick `em or to join `em.

and I have come to believe firmly that what is going on in my mind is reflected in a thousand little ways by the way I behave towards others.

Anyway, there was a notion of manliness associated with weaponry that I could not understand. Guns seeme...

Most of the bends were concealed and I had a lot of anticipating to do, but that was all right. That also was what my journey was about, a sort of Zen meditation on reality. I went more slowly and appreciated it all the more.

So far, on my journey I had learned scrupulously to resist traveling as though to a destination. My entire philosophy depended on making the journey for its own sake, and rooting out expectations about the future. Traveling in this way, day by day, hour by hour, trying always to be aware of what was present and to hand, was what made the experience so richly rewarding. To travel with one's mind on some future event is futile and debilitating. Where concentration is needed to stay alive, it could also be disastrous.

For once I don't mind losing my dollar. That's how I like my corruption - honest.

All the dirty corners of life that I have got so used to south of the border have been swept clean.

Another thing: There is this incredible sense of ease. The moment I crossed the border I felt safe. Why? I didn't feel unsafe before. Not at all. I think the explanation is that here I don't even need to think about it. I can afford to stop thinking. Look at the road surface, for example. It is perfect. Not just this bit, but the next bit too, and all the way to Los Angeles. I can count on it. I don't have to worry that around the corner it will turn suddenly to dirt, or drop me into a pothole. I can almost afford to take my eyes off the road; only habit keeps them there, a useful habit I shall need again later. And everyone speaks my language. I don't have to think about making myself understood. "What's the best way to L.A.? Is it through Tucson?" "That's right." So easy!

I'm so tuned in to body language and inflections that I hardly need words, but having the words too is so relaxing.

All the pretty girls at their stylish mahogany veneer desks smiled very nicely at me, but as the minutes passed my bright eyes glazed over. I wasn't making contact. In spite of all the niceness, I knew they couldn't really grasp who or what I was, and maybe, even, they were too preoccupied with other matters to care.

I had everything I had been dreaming of for months. Starched linen. Room service. Steak, lobster, mutton, cold white wine, coffee, unlimited hot water, not a cockroach to be seen. Sitting there alone I found it all quite meaningless.

I went for a walk around the extensive premises, through lobby and patio, past pool and fountain, bakery and book shop and saw that same nice smile everywhere I went, and written in the eyes just as plainly the words "Otherwise Engaged."

I thought maybe I was among particularly stuffy and provincial people, so I set out on the bike to find the real Los Angeles. I never found it.

These first days had a profound effect. I felt completely lost, as though I had been whisked away from the earth in my sleep one night and deposited among humanoids in a simulated earth city.

I arrived there still smelling the smell of sweat and stale urine, of unruly growth and open decay. I was used to faces that showed the imprint of emotion, the stamp of excess. I was accustomed to things being old, worn down, chipped, scratched, scuffed and patched, but real. Where I had been, people and things were forced to show the real stuff they were made of, because the superficial could not survive the battering it got. I was used to the sound of life, roars of laughter, shouts of anger, whi...

For several days I remained a total alien, and out of this alienation grew a feeling of tremendous outrage against the senseless extravagance of it all.

It was entirely a matter of perspective. To a Southern Californian, his life-style and standard no doubt seemed like the least he could get by on. To me it seemed preposterous and sick. I wandered through supermarkets and along "shopping malls" disgusted and obsessed by the naked drive to sell and consume frivolities.

Waves of vivid aroma reinforced my joy at being back on the land again, and I had to recognize the craving I had created in myself for landscape and space.

men told

looking out at the sea of faces with the confidence of a superstar. It is something I learned to do, like overcoming vertigo. First I was scared to death, then completely at ease. There is no middle way. Now I am quite relaxed.

I'm riding awkwardly through a thicket of experience, still shaky from the flight to Europe. After three years on the move I can't mend my fences so fast. I hover between confidence and a sense of great loss, trying to understand the meaning of what has happened. It seems to me that my trials should have been over after Penang. My first days in Madras should have been the beginning of a final and marvelous chapter in India, full of discovery, significance and spiritual satisfaction. That is how I would have written it, but I have lost the strength to sustain the illusion and reality has tripped me up. I feel as foolish as if I had slipped on a banana peel.

Have I really been on a long flight from reality, trying to give meaning to something that was meaningless?

I passed through pubs, offices, restaurants, supermarkets, stifled by the boredom of it, but with not...

I felt the failure was mine, that if I had properly understood my experience in Africa, America, Asia, I should be able to apply it to people in trouble with the cost of...

How could a fish describe water?

Throughout the journey, as I rode through so many landscapes, passed through so many lives, forming impressions, holding them and developing them, had I just been wallowing in illusions?

Just to be carrying the consciousness of so much at the same time seemed to me to be miraculous, as though I were observing the earth from some far-off point, Mount Olympus, perhaps, or a planet.

They seemed so close to enlightenment, as though at any moment they might stumble over it and explode into consciousness. Their curiosity is extreme. They experiment with any unfamiliar object, a coin, a hat, a piece of paper, just as a human baby does, pulling it, rubbing it, sticking it in their ears, hitting it against other things. And nothing comes of it. To be so close, yet never to pierce the veil...

I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with, prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and picking it up again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized and frustrated by it but always unable to make sense of it.

I was astonished by my confidence with strangers. Often I was able to talk to them immediately as though we had always known each other. For a long time I had been training myself to want nothing from othe...

The journey continued, as it always had, with this close interweaving of action and reflection. I ate, slept, cursed, smiled, rode, stopped for gas, a...

I could still recall where I had been and slept and what I had done on every single day of travel...

I wondered whether it might be beyond my capacity to hold so much experience in consc...

The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world. The real danger was death by exposure.

synthesizing, analyzing, fantasizing, refining and revising my ideas and observations.

Wanting