En Route Read online

  ‘Evading the tyranny of the GPS, Engberg leads us off the beaten cyber-path on a delightful, thought-provoking—and at times very moving—analogue mystery tour of everything from Viking pilgrims to ancient orreries to the Vietnam War and the incipient perils of AI. Along the way, like some genius bowerbird, she lovingly curates a treasure-trove of eccentric historical, personal and sociological gems to reveal deep, enduring truths about the unholy union of the human soul and machines as well as the rich fruits to be had from losing one’s way. Engberg is a humane, generous guide. Most importantly, she reveals the real meaning of hygge.’

  Magda Szubanski

  Juliana Engberg is an award-winning and internationally recognised curator, cultural producer and writer. Most recently she was the program director for European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017 in Denmark. She has a reputation for creating groundbreaking, compelling and engaging multi-form festivals, visual arts projects, commissions, events and public engagement programs. Engberg is a professorial fellow at Monash University in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, and an adjunct professor at RMIT in the Faculty of Architecture and Design.

  Little Books on Big Ideas

  Paul Daley On Patriotism

  Tony Wheeler On Travel

  Germaine Greer On Rape

  Germaine Greer On Rage

  Fleur Anderson On Sleep

  Don Watson On Indignation

  Katharine Murphy On Disruption

  Sarah Ferguson On Mother

  Nikki Gemmell On Quiet

  Blanche d’Alpuget On Lust & Longing

  Leigh Sales On Doubt

  Barrie Kosky On Ecstasy

  David Malouf On Experience

  Malcolm Knox On Obsession

  Gay Bilson On Digestion

  Anne Summers On Luck

  Robert Dessaix On Humbug

  Julian Burnside On Privilege

  Elisabeth Wynhausen On Resilience

  Susan Johnson On Beauty

  Juliana

  Engberg

  En

  Route

  MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2018

  Text and map © Juliana Engberg, 2018

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2018

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Text design by Alice Graphics

  Cover design by Nada Backovic

  Author photograph by Kay Campbell

  Typeset by Typeskill

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  9780522874495 (paperback)

  9780522874501 (ebook)

  For Kay, the real-life navigator

  Contents

  En Route

  Acknowledgements

  GPS navigation systems are mostly useful. But not nearly as engaging and anthropologically interesting as the way we used to navigate. For instance, a while ago, when we were visiting a friend at the outer tip of the south-west corner of Ireland, a place so small it has no name except the appellation ‘near’, our helpful driving directions were heaven-sent, to say the least.

  Our route was not navigated by the use of stars, but described in statues and grottos. ‘Turn left,’ wrote our friend, ‘at the blue Virgin Mary, then go a few miles until you come to a white Virgin Mary, then turn right, go along a while more and then when you come to the Virgin Mary in the grotto turn left …’ In the end, and some fifteen Virgin Marys later, we entered a dirt track that led to our final manger. Hallelujah! as Leonard would say.

  If we had used the GPS it no doubt would have sent us along a magenta-highlighted route and occasionally picked out a McDonald’s or the nearest petrol station, but it would not have given rise to the amazing revelation of the immaculate Mary route; which, of course, says a great deal about Ireland, and our host, as well as allowing us to imagine the probable assistance the divine provided to toddling tipplers who, perchance, stared in amazement at the glowing mother as they swayed in an Irish night breeze over many millennia.

  Well, I say millennia, but that is perhaps a poetic concoction. The Marys situated on corners, in grottos, and on pedestals, popping up here, there and everywhere, dotting the Irish highways and byways, are more generally modern Marys than religious relics of times past. Most of these Marys materialised as a result of Ireland embracing, with a fervour unmatched by most nations, the Vatican’s year of the Marian. Marys galore were sculpted, ordered, painted and deposited by roadsides, on corners, in parks and randomly about to help keep the goodly folk of Ireland focused upon the divine and practise their faith.

  Of course, there was also an unfocused moment when in the 1980s reports of visions, movement and talking from the Mary statues grabbed the ardent in a grip of hysteria that attracted worldwide attention. Perhaps a little too much. ‘Visions schmizzons,’ said the Vatican, ‘we’ll be having none of that Irish jiggin’ and such. Cease and desist immediately with the miracle malarkey; people will be tinkin’ we’re raving lunatics.’ Or edicts to that effect.

  So perturbing was this situation that scientists were enlisted to find a reason for this misapparition; to wit, they suggested dramatic backlighting and optical blurring from staring too long at the divine representation had caused an optic oscillation in some folk’s eyes, which created the impression of movement. Whether a tipple or two was involved or not is but conjecture; however, my imagining is not too far off the plot—only fanciful in a calendar sense by a few millennia or so.

  Although, it should be mentioned, such sightings in Ireland are not entirely modern. The apparition at Our Lady of Knock shrine in County Mayo, back in 1879, displayed not only a gleaming, incandescent vision of the Blessed Virgin, but a good gathering of appearances in the forms of St John, St Joseph, attending angels and the Lord Jesus Christ. At that time the sightings were considered genuine and trustworthy, and were embraced somewhat enthusiastically by the powers that be for their mystical pull upon the population post–potato famine.

  You’re probably wondering if it was this phenomenon that gave rise to ‘knock knock’ jokes, but that was more likely attributable to the porter in Shakespeare’s Macbeth—‘Knock, knock! Who’s there, in the other devil’s name’—another apparitional turn altogether.

  By the by, if you were female, Catholic, Irish (or even not) and born in the Marian year—1954—you probably had a pretty good chance of being named Mary or Marian, and if your parents were super devout, a combo Mary Marian or Marian Mary, even the holy trifecta, Mary Marion Margaret. The year 1954 was dedicated to all things Mariological and included pilgrimages (no doubt assisted by statues), cultural events and many sermons. A big hello! to all the MMs out there.

  But where was I? Ah yes (as Beckett would say), that’s right. The GPS. It’s good at getting you there, but not necessarily at letting you enjoy the trip. It is hell-bent on taking you on the most expedient route, assuming you are in some desperate post-modernist rush to the end game. The GPS, I am convinced, is in cahoots with the freeway systems, tollways and autobahns, but not so much the byways and side ways that make travelling seem like journeying.

  Personally, I like to meander. While not int
repid in a Man vs Wild way (although I am a sucker for a survivor program, since you never know when you might need to notice broken twigs as a sign of the presence of person-eating animals, or how to fashion a water-catching vessel from a leaf), I am nevertheless a curious sojourner. Even in the hugely urbanised, well-trodden tracks of an inner metropolis or on the genteel routes of picturesque destinations, there are discoveries to be made and questions to be answered about things happened upon by chance.

  It’s not just about finding new places. It’s about thinking new thoughts and discovering things. Meandering is both a physical and mental wandering—a reverie of sorts, that takes you on unexpected twists and turns and opens the gateway to many musings.

  While I am comforted by the precision of the GPS, when I can, I also embrace the detour and the moments when one strays slightly offpiste. For sure, the GPS pretty much guarantees finding the way, while also providing you with approximate arrival times and distance-to-travel data, but it has sort of squeezed the air out of the enterprise of adventuring forth.

  An extension of the screen, computer life and gadget assistant, the GPS locks you into a grid. It is stubbornly on task. Just like ‘finding your way’ has become ‘wayfinding’ in contemporary parlance. We are now organised by municipal signs that tell us where to go, how to get there and where not to tread, corralling us into neat precincts and spaces created by ‘place making’. A kind of nanny state navigation; an overworked synthetic experience.

  In reality, wayward-finding is far more entertaining. With so many things keeping you locked in and on track, it’s important not to lose your desire lines in life. The inner maverick that lurks inside the enabled, safely delivered, certified, sanitised, arrived-on-schedule self sometimes yearns to just get lost, go up the goat trail, explore the dirt path or take a side alley … just to see what’s there. I love the GPS, but I also welcome the glitch as a gift.

  Marcella, as we named our Italian GPS assistant back in 2013, was prone to lapses of concentration when it came to finding small hill towns in the Salerno province of Campania. Try as she might, and we suspected with a little grappa under her belt, she sent us on circuitous, mountainous ways in search of Ravello—a pretty little vertiginous spot where legendary assignations between the famous occurred, not least the ‘Donna Misteriosa’, Greta Garbo, who, contra to the usual myth, didn’t want to be alone but instead wished to linger a little with Maestro Leopold Stokowski on the lofty, classically inspired Terrazza dell’Infinito of the Villa Cimbrone.

  The villa, a romantic hodgepodge of Italianate architectural styles resembling a combination of Leonardo da Vinci–type loggia, Venetian gothic and medieval cloisters —the full turret and temple set—was, during the twentieth century, a tempting seclusion for numerous creative souls, including self-described ‘puritanical’ poet TS Eliot, and proto-hipster, full-bearded, Freudian-inspired biographer Lytton Strachey who, less puritanical, was no doubt in pursuit of a delectable state of mind as well as dusky experiences.

  Other guests were Winston Churchill, who did nicely light-filled paintings of the wisteria-festooned pergola; Vita Sackville-West, probably at the invitation of her lover, Violet Trefusis, the suspected daughter of the eccentric 2nd Baron Grimthorpe, Ernest Beckett, who renovated the villa; numerous luminous literati of the Bloomsbury set, including Virginia Woolf; as well as the reticent observer EM Forster, who liked a room with a view but never wrote about the particularly spectacular melt of Tyrrhenian Sea and sky that makes it seem as if you have ascended to a celestial, liquious heaven atop the Ravello peak.

  Forster did, however, write The Story of a Panic about a southern Italian valley and an eerie encounter with a wind that agitates the finger pines and torments the grasses to conjure the metaphoric sexual awakening of his character, the restless Eustace, who is compelled towards the ‘clumsy, impertinent fisher-lad’, Gennaro. Forster’s Ravello, rather than gleaming or melting, is a disquieting, restless premonition of homosexual love. This story of phallic panic he reworked later into A Room with a View—but that was set in Florence and was mostly heterosexual.

  Anyway, when finally we were perched, Italian Job–like, on the edge of the dizzying cliff of our own panicky valley, with no real room to manoeuvre, we decided to sack Marcella and try for the road signs instead. Twenty-nine three-point turns later, and off the ledge, we made our way by the old-fashioned method.

  Nevertheless, and sort of enabled by Miss Marcella, we did see the splendours of Campania stretched out before us, and also marvelled at the height of the donkey trail that had suddenly halted; and we no doubt amused the driver of the old, pale green Piaggio Ape van that tootled along the winding path while we zigzagged back and forth and up and down the steep hills for several hours.

  (The Piaggio is a little wonder, by the way. With just three wheels it has great steering for those hilly parts and enough grunt to chug its way up and down the sinuous bits. ‘Ape’, meaning ‘bee’ in Italian, is an apt name for this tiny worker truck with no frills and flexibility, and its admirable ambling pace insists that you slow down. A gift compared with the frantic pace Marcella and her legion want from their captive pilots.)

  The southern Italian hill system is tricky terrain. And in fairness, GPS coordinates can only do so much. Inevitably things change on the terra firma. Occasionally the cosmic-positioned satellite lags behind the evidentially empirical evidence. New systems and roundabouts are often unplotted, roadworks appear out of the asphalt, and strange impromptu deviations due to marathons and other fanatic sports events intervene. There is any number of roadblocks upon which our device might stumble.

  In the middle of Denmark near the township of Silkeborg, for instance, where a recent hefty tax funded investment in new roads and contemporary freeway barriers made from corten steel (a homage to Australian architects Wood Marsh, we think) has created a new traffic system, our GPS friend, Bodil, has satellite conniptions.

  The confusion causes such stress that she has to take time out for stretches that resemble the Danish national lunch break. We envision she has gone off for a rye and herring open sandwich and possibly a little aquavit to calm her frayed nerves before she returns to recommence duties closer to the town of Viborg. Too bad if Viborg is not your intended destination.

  Methinks Bodil might be channelling her namesake Queen Boedil, wife to Erik the Good of Denmark, who in Viborg announced his intention to go a-pilgrimming after the Game of Thrones–type incident that culminated in several of his best men being murdered at a feasting event in his dining hall.

  How this journey to the holy land would have helped get the hygge back I’m not sure, and neither did his subjects know, so they pleaded for him to reconsider. Despite their heartfelt petitions he plugged on with a large entourage across the bleak territories of Russia and down through Constantinople, only to fall ill on the island of Cyprus, where he was Good no more.

  Queen Boedil, determined to complete the holy mission, buried him in the town of Pafos and pushed on to Jerusalem, where she, too, was struck down and met her resting place at the Mount of Olives. The Mr and Mrs Goods were the quintessence of what my father used to call ‘blown-away Danes’—a vast tribe encompassing most of the redheaded world and, in particular, the Scottish.

  Now there is some speculation that syphilis was the cause of the Goods’ demise, which is a little ironic. The Danes being famously frank about sex and such were more concerned about Erik’s speeching abilities and were encouraged by his robust stature, strength and alcoholic stamina, so a bit of hanky-panky and a few illegitimate offspring could not diminish his status as Good, but probably only enhanced it. Meaning, I guess, Erik the Good at it. At any rate, he was better than his predecessor, Olaf (the) Hunger, who had presided over a reign plagued by famine. Yes, Hunger.

  Possibly inspired by Good’s pious intent, Viborg is these days being touted as an important marker in the ever-extending pilgrim routes that appear to have captured the imagination of spiritual seekers and
a growing legion of two-stick-wielding walkers who have ditched Winnebagos in favour of a more outward-bound progression in their retirement years.

  Equipped with their carbon-fibre trekking poles, hip-alignment assured, and aided by technically enhanced bio-joints, scientifically designed cross trainers and sports leisure attire that combines khaki and lycra, these herds of hiking nation groups (especially Germanic and Nordic) are appearing all over continental Europe.

  Like a moving amoeba they venture forth at the crack of dawn, chattering away in excitable languages, to tread in the paths of history, creating arterial terrain routes resembling a dye-enhanced angiogram image. Or, more often than not, the beaten tracks they move along have been created by strategically tethering the evangelical enterprise to the experience economy, with a bit of dubious history thrown in for good measure.

  The people who have plotted the GPS track for the Danish Jutland pilgrimage trail, as an example, seem to have thrown all historical accuracy to the winds and have decided to herd people longitudinally instead of latitudinally, avoiding Erik’s actual journey, which moved decidedly east. Truth be told, if old Erik had had use of a GPS he might have reconsidered his route, if not his determination to venture forth. The GPS knows the better way via Berlin, Prague, Austria and Romania and cuts twenty-four hours off the journey by car, but possibly not by Viking boat, and over land and seas with horses and carts and a begrudging royal ensemble.

  The rise of walking, hiking, pilgrimages and marathon excursions is undoubtedly a pact between smart gadgets, fit-for-life philosophy and the recent Eat Pray Love, Into the Wild and Tracks films that have tapped into the nostalgically inspired find-yourself-through-solitary-challenges phenomenon, or the trend of walking and gathering in groups.

  In addition to your helpful GPS shepherd, Heidi the mountaineer, who guides you on your way, you now have the aid of heart, step, pulse-rate, energy-consumption data monitored by your phone or watch gadget, helping you to reach the nirvana step-count of ‘10 000 per day’! Going on pilgrimages delivers spiritual uplift with scenic views and health benefits from a good cardiac workout.