ANYWHERE BUT HERE
I'm feeling okay this morning
And you know
We're on a road to paradise
Here we go, here we go
We're on a ride to nowhere
Come on inside
Taking that ride to nowhere
We'll take that ride
Talking Heads, “Road to Nowhere” (1985)
In the classic Talking Heads-song, David Byrne sings of movement, of being on the road to somewhere else, anywhere but here. The main focus of the song is not the destination (only vaguely described as “nowhere”) but the journey itself.
To think of travelling as a form of liberation is an ancient theme. In all times, the question of what lies behind the horizon has occupied people’s thoughts, wondering what the world is like in other places or even points in time.
Equally a question of curiosity and s longing for escape from the monotony of everyday routines, the thought of leaving (rather than of arriving) has been on the minds of generations of people, wondering what would happen if they stepped out of their current lives and into – something else, somewhere else.
The post-war “beat generation” was shaped by the dramatic and lifechanging events brought on by World War II.
A generation of young men (and sometimes women) had fought abroad, defending their country while being geographically displaced, often becoming physically and psychologically scarred in the process.
When returning to the US, they found it difficult to adjust to being back to living with their families, in the small rural towns they once came from.
The name “beat” can be read in many ways, both as being tired and worn out, but also as a musical beat, a rhythmic kind of movement.
In 1952, John Clellon Holmes published a novel called “Go”, outlining the restlessness and will to travel from one place to another that defined this subculture.
A general sense of restlessness is different from wanting to travel to a particular place: instead, it is about wanting to be anywhere but here – where being “on the go” is what matters the most.
Most famous of all writings by the beat generation is Jack Kerouac’s On the road, published in 1957 and chronicling Kerouac’s many aimless travels across the country.
In the last years of the 1940s, after the end of the war, Kerouac travelled extensively while also taking notes of where he went and what he did.
Inspired by a letter from his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac decided to also let the form of his prose reflect the feeling of movement and to take the shape of written,
improvised jazz, which was the music that came to most define this lifestyle. In this way, the text itself is fluid and changing, similar to the destination-less travels it outlines.
The beat generation’s fixation on travelling as a way of escaping being in one place is not exclusive to them. Also in American western movies, the trope is exceedingly common, signified most often by the hero travelling into the sunset at the end of the movie.
The end begins with a journey, where the destination is not known. In this way, the western movies echo what the Persian poet Rumi wrote, many hundred years earlier, on the topic of wanting to ride into the sunset and of finding the end of the road:
“How can there be an end? When the sun sets or the moon goes down, it looks like the end. It seems like a sunset, but in reality, it is dawn.”
What Rumi suggested is what the beat generation also eventually discovered. No true journey has an end. Instead, we tend to move from one experience to another, from one point in time to the next, as part of a never-ending continuum.
