global soul
By Wendy Cavenett
A few years ago, Pico Iyer found himself amongst the wooden houses of Japan reading the Buddhist “burning house” poems and contemplating life without possessions or a home. For the British-born Indian who moved to California as a boy, these were not unfamiliar thoughts; he had always considered himself homeless, a citizen of the world who experienced many cultures but ultimately belonged to none. In essence, the Global Soul.
“I had a useful peg for exploring all these issues when my house in California suddenly burnt down,” Iyer says, “and I literally woke up the next morning and realised that whatever I thought of as home has no connection whatsoever to a piece of soil. It really had to be something invisible that I carried around inside me.”
When his new home in California was destroyed by earthquake and flood, Iyer left America to live in the rural suburb of Nara in Japan. He likens the experience to an Old Testament parable, the classic “fire, flood, and migration” story.
“The words themselves, of exile and homelessness and travel, are old ones that speak to something intrinsic to the state of being human,” he writes in his latest book, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home.
A term coined by Iyer to describe the burgeoning population of mongrel citizens in the modern International Empire, the Global Soul’s “sense of home is not just divided, but scattered across the planet”. Yet it’s also a term he applies to the greater, world public.
“The impetus behind the book was also that more and more of us are obviously Global Souls because there’s so much migration in the world, and people have so many cultures inside them,” he says.
“And also my sense that home is slipping out from under one’s feet, even, for example, for someone who has lived all her life in Sydney: even if she is pretty rooted in her little neighbourhood, the city itself is changing so much that her sense of home is sort of up for grabs too as it would be if she were travelling around. That’s to say even people who aren’t travelling are affected by these huge movements swirling around them because it actually feels as if the cities are changing complexion very quickly.”
It is this modern sense of statelessness that draws the various essays together in The Global Soul; the psyche of the new post-millennial population revealed through a fascinating selection of subjects including the phenomena of LA International Airport, global business in Hong Kong, multi-culturalism in Canada, and Iyer’s ‘Alien Home’ in Japan.
“The sudden swell and ending of boundaries and the new mongrel world we’re entering essentially asks us the question, ‘Who are we?’ and forces us to define ourselves,” he says, “and that’s potentially a very good thing if we can come up with a good definition. But it can be a really vertiginous thing which is why in my book I have a lot of these scenes of people literally losing a sense of who they are, walking or travelling around so much or living so far from the traditional categories which gave them a very simple way of saying I’m an Australian, or I’m a Catholic or I’m part of this small town.
“The world’s becoming so fragmented and it’s coming to look so much like a computer screen with new data clicking over every nano-second, that in some ways, I think that quickens the hunger for stillness and rootedness. More and more of us now, very self-consciously, have to take measures to steady ourselves or address questions that before we would take for granted.”
Named as one of 100 visionaries worldwide “who could change your life” (along with Noam Chomsky and Vaclav Havel) by the Utne Reader in 1995, Iyer has spent a travel-filled life chronicling his experiences with the changing cultural mix. A contributor to Time since 1982, Iyer is regularly featured in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s and the Times of London. He is also the author of six books; one novel, Cuba and the Night (1995), and five non-fiction titles, Video Night In Kathmandu (1988) and The Lady and the Monk (1991) both reprinted more than 10 times.
“Even though I don’t consciously do it, nearly all my writing has to do with cultures talking and walking past one another or somehow overlapping,” he says. “How the sort of mating dance of cultures takes place on the level of surfaces. So for example, if you go to a Japanese baseball game, how Japan takes what’s American and makes it something partially Japanese and partially American, but also in The Global Soul, how it plays out internally in people who are multi-cultural, and in somebody like me who’s presumably inherited a bit of India and a bit of America and a bit of England while living in Japan, how I would try to make peace and order among all these different parts.
“I guess I’m an explorer of cultural mosaics and a travel writer only because from the time I was born, everywhere has been new to me; everywhere has been a foreign destination, even the place where I was born which was England.”
Far from being another meditation on the technological, political or economic aspects of our “global future”, Iyer’s book incorporates philosophical thought, social commentary and travel writing into a modern-day manifesto about identity, cultural confusion and the psychological effects of accelerated change.
The airport, long considered the perfect metaphor for such dizzying contemporary experiences (Brian Eno’s seminal ‘recorded sounds’ composition, Music For Airports, immediately comes to mind) is explored at length in the book’s second chapter. Although a resident of California since 1965, Iyer was educated in England and travelled back and forth from the US to the UK for more than a decade. He’s been on the move ever since, and it’s obvious that the airport has come to embody something of Iyer’s own homelessness.
“I calculated recently that I spend 40 days a year either in airports or airplanes,” Iyer says, “so the airport is a significant place where my life takes place. I think airports themselves are like geographic jetlag—they’re neither here nor there, they’re not home but they’re not really foreign either. They’re these strange in-between places.”
Bunking down in Los Angeles International Airport, Iyer spins an incredible vision of this heady yet anonymous space with “all the comforts of home made impersonal”. He slips in the odd outrageous statistic (Did you know Dallas-Fort Worth International is larger than Manhattan, or that the leading cause of death at JFK is coronary?), enters the ethereality of jetlag, and reveals the incredible LA International Airport set-up that includes more than 50,000 employees, a fire station, airport police squad, a private hospital and a $10 million post office.
“Jetlag is both emotional and psychological,” he says, “a whole state of being that humans literally never knew until about 30 years ago. And when we do hear about jetlag, we tend to hear quite a lot about the physiological effects, but I suppose what really moved me to write this book was to address the kind of dream-life of globalisation or the emotional and psychological effects of all these things and jetlag is the perfect metaphor for that because it’s a fairly vertiginous and disconcerting state.”
As a person who acknowledges travel as the ‘seat of experience’, Iyer is concerned by the rise of virtual encounters in our lives, whether that’s talking with someone over the phone or internet, or watching TV and films.
“The illusion of knowledge is one of the great dangers of the present moment,” Iyer says. “Also the way that the small screens kind of get in the way of the big picture. I think there’s a greater importance in travelling than ever before because more and more people are getting the world in their homes through TV screens and computer screens and, in some ways, they’re even further removed from the streets outside them.
“We also seem to have less and less sense of past or history and a great excitement about the future, though of course it’s just as unknown as it always was, but we are much more dominated by the future now than we were even 15 to 20 years ago. It’s almost as if the future’s a very attractive stranger who appears at our doorstep and we throw our arms around her or him without really beginning to think who this person is and what it entails for us.”
So, what of the man who has spent the better part of a life-time exploring the Earth’s cultural fabric, someone who consistently ups and travels as easily as picking up the telephone; a person who remains estranged from any community, culture or country despite his love affair with human interaction and cultural contrasts? The answer is Iyer takes extreme measures to balance out his life—even a Global Soul needs some sense of rootedness and calm. When he’s not travelling, he can be found in his small two-bedroom apartment in Nara with his Japanese girlfriend and her two children, working on two books, living months in isolation. He even spends time at a Benedictine Hermitage in California where the only sound you hear for days are the pearling bells and the occasional spot of rain.
“Whatever is fundamental in us—whether it’s a family or faith or ourselves,” he concludes, “we probably don’t want that changed. So we need to define what should remain changeless before it becomes lost in the blur of everything that seems so exciting.”
> > >
This article originally appeared in Australian Style, in 2000. Since that time, Pico Iyer has released four books - Abandon: A Romance (2003), Sun After Dark: Flights Into The Foreign (2004), The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008) and The Man Within My Head (2012).
Between books, he still writes many articles each year!
> > >
By Wendy Cavenett
A few years ago, Pico Iyer found himself amongst the wooden houses of Japan reading the Buddhist “burning house” poems and contemplating life without possessions or a home. For the British-born Indian who moved to California as a boy, these were not unfamiliar thoughts; he had always considered himself homeless, a citizen of the world who experienced many cultures but ultimately belonged to none. In essence, the Global Soul.
“I had a useful peg for exploring all these issues when my house in California suddenly burnt down,” Iyer says, “and I literally woke up the next morning and realised that whatever I thought of as home has no connection whatsoever to a piece of soil. It really had to be something invisible that I carried around inside me.”
When his new home in California was destroyed by earthquake and flood, Iyer left America to live in the rural suburb of Nara in Japan. He likens the experience to an Old Testament parable, the classic “fire, flood, and migration” story.
“The words themselves, of exile and homelessness and travel, are old ones that speak to something intrinsic to the state of being human,” he writes in his latest book, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home.
A term coined by Iyer to describe the burgeoning population of mongrel citizens in the modern International Empire, the Global Soul’s “sense of home is not just divided, but scattered across the planet”. Yet it’s also a term he applies to the greater, world public.
“The impetus behind the book was also that more and more of us are obviously Global Souls because there’s so much migration in the world, and people have so many cultures inside them,” he says.
“And also my sense that home is slipping out from under one’s feet, even, for example, for someone who has lived all her life in Sydney: even if she is pretty rooted in her little neighbourhood, the city itself is changing so much that her sense of home is sort of up for grabs too as it would be if she were travelling around. That’s to say even people who aren’t travelling are affected by these huge movements swirling around them because it actually feels as if the cities are changing complexion very quickly.”
It is this modern sense of statelessness that draws the various essays together in The Global Soul; the psyche of the new post-millennial population revealed through a fascinating selection of subjects including the phenomena of LA International Airport, global business in Hong Kong, multi-culturalism in Canada, and Iyer’s ‘Alien Home’ in Japan.
“The sudden swell and ending of boundaries and the new mongrel world we’re entering essentially asks us the question, ‘Who are we?’ and forces us to define ourselves,” he says, “and that’s potentially a very good thing if we can come up with a good definition. But it can be a really vertiginous thing which is why in my book I have a lot of these scenes of people literally losing a sense of who they are, walking or travelling around so much or living so far from the traditional categories which gave them a very simple way of saying I’m an Australian, or I’m a Catholic or I’m part of this small town.
“The world’s becoming so fragmented and it’s coming to look so much like a computer screen with new data clicking over every nano-second, that in some ways, I think that quickens the hunger for stillness and rootedness. More and more of us now, very self-consciously, have to take measures to steady ourselves or address questions that before we would take for granted.”
Named as one of 100 visionaries worldwide “who could change your life” (along with Noam Chomsky and Vaclav Havel) by the Utne Reader in 1995, Iyer has spent a travel-filled life chronicling his experiences with the changing cultural mix. A contributor to Time since 1982, Iyer is regularly featured in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s and the Times of London. He is also the author of six books; one novel, Cuba and the Night (1995), and five non-fiction titles, Video Night In Kathmandu (1988) and The Lady and the Monk (1991) both reprinted more than 10 times.
“Even though I don’t consciously do it, nearly all my writing has to do with cultures talking and walking past one another or somehow overlapping,” he says. “How the sort of mating dance of cultures takes place on the level of surfaces. So for example, if you go to a Japanese baseball game, how Japan takes what’s American and makes it something partially Japanese and partially American, but also in The Global Soul, how it plays out internally in people who are multi-cultural, and in somebody like me who’s presumably inherited a bit of India and a bit of America and a bit of England while living in Japan, how I would try to make peace and order among all these different parts.
“I guess I’m an explorer of cultural mosaics and a travel writer only because from the time I was born, everywhere has been new to me; everywhere has been a foreign destination, even the place where I was born which was England.”
Far from being another meditation on the technological, political or economic aspects of our “global future”, Iyer’s book incorporates philosophical thought, social commentary and travel writing into a modern-day manifesto about identity, cultural confusion and the psychological effects of accelerated change.
The airport, long considered the perfect metaphor for such dizzying contemporary experiences (Brian Eno’s seminal ‘recorded sounds’ composition, Music For Airports, immediately comes to mind) is explored at length in the book’s second chapter. Although a resident of California since 1965, Iyer was educated in England and travelled back and forth from the US to the UK for more than a decade. He’s been on the move ever since, and it’s obvious that the airport has come to embody something of Iyer’s own homelessness.“I calculated recently that I spend 40 days a year either in airports or airplanes,” Iyer says, “so the airport is a significant place where my life takes place. I think airports themselves are like geographic jetlag—they’re neither here nor there, they’re not home but they’re not really foreign either. They’re these strange in-between places.”
Bunking down in Los Angeles International Airport, Iyer spins an incredible vision of this heady yet anonymous space with “all the comforts of home made impersonal”. He slips in the odd outrageous statistic (Did you know Dallas-Fort Worth International is larger than Manhattan, or that the leading cause of death at JFK is coronary?), enters the ethereality of jetlag, and reveals the incredible LA International Airport set-up that includes more than 50,000 employees, a fire station, airport police squad, a private hospital and a $10 million post office.
“Jetlag is both emotional and psychological,” he says, “a whole state of being that humans literally never knew until about 30 years ago. And when we do hear about jetlag, we tend to hear quite a lot about the physiological effects, but I suppose what really moved me to write this book was to address the kind of dream-life of globalisation or the emotional and psychological effects of all these things and jetlag is the perfect metaphor for that because it’s a fairly vertiginous and disconcerting state.”
As a person who acknowledges travel as the ‘seat of experience’, Iyer is concerned by the rise of virtual encounters in our lives, whether that’s talking with someone over the phone or internet, or watching TV and films.
“The illusion of knowledge is one of the great dangers of the present moment,” Iyer says. “Also the way that the small screens kind of get in the way of the big picture. I think there’s a greater importance in travelling than ever before because more and more people are getting the world in their homes through TV screens and computer screens and, in some ways, they’re even further removed from the streets outside them.
“We also seem to have less and less sense of past or history and a great excitement about the future, though of course it’s just as unknown as it always was, but we are much more dominated by the future now than we were even 15 to 20 years ago. It’s almost as if the future’s a very attractive stranger who appears at our doorstep and we throw our arms around her or him without really beginning to think who this person is and what it entails for us.”
So, what of the man who has spent the better part of a life-time exploring the Earth’s cultural fabric, someone who consistently ups and travels as easily as picking up the telephone; a person who remains estranged from any community, culture or country despite his love affair with human interaction and cultural contrasts? The answer is Iyer takes extreme measures to balance out his life—even a Global Soul needs some sense of rootedness and calm. When he’s not travelling, he can be found in his small two-bedroom apartment in Nara with his Japanese girlfriend and her two children, working on two books, living months in isolation. He even spends time at a Benedictine Hermitage in California where the only sound you hear for days are the pearling bells and the occasional spot of rain.
“Whatever is fundamental in us—whether it’s a family or faith or ourselves,” he concludes, “we probably don’t want that changed. So we need to define what should remain changeless before it becomes lost in the blur of everything that seems so exciting.”
> > >
This article originally appeared in Australian Style, in 2000. Since that time, Pico Iyer has released four books - Abandon: A Romance (2003), Sun After Dark: Flights Into The Foreign (2004), The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008) and The Man Within My Head (2012).
Between books, he still writes many articles each year!
> > >
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