Method

I don’t remember where , but I read that irony was part of the post modern consciousness because we had so much information we were at the point where everything had been done and you had read about it. Knowing that everything you were doing had been done by someone else (and probably recorded in a more interesting way) forces you to bring something new to your experience and that is often an ironic distance. You know and you need to show you know – thus ironic distancing.

This is overdone but there is a feeling for me, as a traveler, that someone has always been there before, seen things more originally, and written about it in a more clever and entertaining manner. This isn’t the humble statement at the beginning of the note – it is just always there, making you worry if your experience is real, new, or original. This thought must drive a lot of adventure travel efforts (see the back of “Outside Magazine”).

The good of this drive for originality is that some writers do force us to see the world in a different way but part of this is that they combine doing something new with seeing it in an original manner. They try, with greater or lesser degrees of success, to see through a child’s eyes.

We have all had the experience of a little kid asking a question like “can you hit the moon with a rock?” The adult laughs and explains in a level of detail matched to the current adult energy level. But there is a thought that starts. How far away is the moon? How old is it? How did it get there? What is it? We can certainly find the answers to those in a book, and some people know them all, but the question serves to remind us of the power of wonder. The same effect happens when you travel in the U.S. with an international visitor and they ask a question about something you take for granted. You are forced (if you have any imagination – more about that later) to see it through new eyes.

So my goal here is to try to record things without irony. As a modern resident of a western nation that will be impossible – and in some cases irony is the only possible way to talk about a thing (like certain aspects of Indonesian and American politics. I will also try to not write as if I know more than I do. As an academic that may be impossible as well.

So from now on I’m going to try (it will be impossible) to capture what I’m doing and seeing with a “child’s eye”. I’m sure I will drop into American irony but you are what you are.