Finisterre: there where all atheists know the journey must end. The end of the earth as we know it.
The Knowable Earth tempts us with her destinations. And yet some of us stay put, as undesiring as possible, to travel the unknowable heavens. What makes us such housemice?
You know how you said, Andorra was the place to be -
Más o menos; you know how it goes in poetry –
I wondered why. Has it to do with picking something up or dropping something off, or however it goes with what you know about the place or know not much at all, since it might not want you to?
Knew a chap once who knew a bank there who wanted to know very little about his assets - the way he liked it.
This dude (and I choose my word carefully) had prozac for a life and money for a god. The camel dick's mission was to retire at fifty, somewhere in the sun, with beaches and bars that would make all the SADness go away. Until then he made do with pills. He popped an extra prozac/a day, after his first kid was born and got a divorce when the second one turned out to have Down's. I think he is still (at sixty) a stumbling insomniac counting out the darkness in his countinghouse.
You are not likely to share the same faith.
but you probably, too, are not one for letting the System screw you over and grind you down.
I asked the you in my head if you would still be such an ardent crusader if you had all the cash you could ever need? Or would it take dissolving money altogether: solving the world's collective main worry before one could live worry free? I suppose so: the disgruntled poor know how to lay their hands on pitchforks.
I am asking, of course, what holds us back to go wherever the fancy takes us?
I am apt to doubt - in the pluralis majestatis - we fancy much of anything anymore.
I think you probably have plenty to be getting on with where you are right now.
All part of the journey.
I am thinking of the millions of tourists going places right now. What is that all about really?
Spending a lot of money, seeing a lot of ....? New things? New people? Better things? Nicer people?
Taking themselves and their spouses and whining bambinos with them wherever they go; or just their backpacks; to make it happen.
What exactly?
To escape the rut. How did they fall into one in the first place? To what will they return, after a fortnight, or a couple of months or a year abroad with a broader mind?
And when the kids leave home will we want to go around the world again? My parents did. My mother keeps on suggesting new places of interest, but she never fails to come back disappointed (I think she only really liked Iran; maybe to encourage my sister who is a Farsi translator but otherwise chronically suicidal).
Of course, the voice in my head doesn't know you from Adam (our First Crusader).
But that doesn't stop her from having a conversation and speaking out of turn - your answers, after all, are all slow in coming.
Would having money running like water every time you turned on the tap, change anything fundamental for her?
Would it stop the struggle and the strife?
That is to ask: would she stop living the life she has and change her style?
She was happy to answer that. She sees no reason not to carry on as she has been for the past 30 odd years or more.
No, make that 50: when was I not I?
There is no shoving me off the barricade;
or alteration that can be made to my passions without stripping me pathetically butt-naked and burning every garment in my wardrobe:
every thread that hangs off my frame has been stitched on to save time
that otherwise might go to waste on things like…
well, offal (defunct organs testifying to disorganisation).
<This is Brit Fellon's Fence. Mine is a pile of firewood.
While we are well-off in life and its line does not intersect the headline and leaves the heartline to run its line straight across the mounds of Mercury to Jupiter without causing collisions, it's best to stay in the saddle and overview your ranch from there.
I am less sure my picket-line lies much farther beyond my own garden fence these days;
which betrays - quite possibly none too graciously - how fundamentally woman I am with little extra (modernity) added on. She who bears one new potential close to her heart better than he does the promise to refurbish the whole world.
Poppycock. Pappekak. Piddle on that.
No woman bears a son (or a Plan) vicariously. Or she cannot be called a decent mother (earth-guardian).
Yet many mother-in-laws in particular do, I have noticed, surveying the mothers of sons (which I am barely). They seem to hope through them to be part of something bigger. I am looking at the majority of countries in this world.... We have a long way to go before we can hope for free men, sons born free, boosted, indeed, to make a difference! But only if they so originally think to do so.
Mothers as enablers. Husbands as enablers. What bearing do these thoughts have on being financially able to travel as much or as little as you would like? As always, everything in my noisy head is interlinked: one giganormous airport. Indirectly, all this (holiday) travelling will show us all something yet: one big bottom line conclusion has still to come. This piece, like all my other pieces, muses on freedom.
By Vivek Doshi
I used to struggle with the meaning of life. (So maybe I was sixteen, once, afterall?),
now I cannot grasp the purpose of society anymore.
It works well for start-ups and pop-ups and Up-With-People (an international, touring youth performance-initiative for gap-year students back in the eighties).
But I think I’ve outgrown it.
I sometimes wish I had joined an Ashram when it wouldn’t have been hysterical to do so. Although, I always thought it was a little bit of a hypocritical cop out. Another mini society; how likely was that to succeed?
I hear Andy Barlow (Lamb) lives half the year in Goa, not in an Ashram methinks. So, they still harbour semi-hippies there, I guess. If considerably affluent ones. Did make me file the Immaculate Conception Church in Panaji, Goa, under "want to visit". Another project I'll never finish: evaluating the very act of pinning what I pinned over the course of a number of years. I have no intention of visiting a single one, that much is quite clear to this little housemouse.
Ashes Sitoula; Pashupatinath, Kathmandu
You will love the tag/description given for Maria Dolores Vazques’s, photo above, of Soldeu, Bordes d'Envalira, Andorra: “Trees on hill during daytime”. If THAT’s a hill… and where do the trees go at nighttime?
Giggles! I'd have to answer this post in multiple sessions as you covered a lot here while I feel like those travelers in the 2nd picture most of the time. More about that later perhaps.
Having grown up as a nomad, mas o menos, I have no illusions about any place being fundamentally better than another. I usually travel for specific reasons that include, but aren't limited to: I don't want to be where I am right now. My interest in the Hills has mainly to do with air quality, I like to breathe, climate and population. Of course this is offset by the fact that hilly terrain is harder on old bones, so I want to find a place that is flat enough to walk on, and high enough to ensure that polluted air doesn't use my lungs as a filtering medium on a constant basis. L.A. and Bogotá in the 70's were good examples of that.
Most of your observations ring true with me and I never saw society as something other than a wealth collection device that doesn't care much for it's components so long as there are enough of them to function. I never felt the need to join any particular group, club or society, probably because moving 17 times in 10 years made me realize at an early age that the dynamics of any group would eventually make it behave like most others. That doesn't mean I like to live in isolation either.
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You early bird. Picking up the reply you wrote 2 hrs ago. But that's my perspective after having lain awake most of the night. Not for the heat which may swaddle me tightly always, but for the lightning. See tomorrow's post.
Since I am on a little new experiment with putting up but not posting till tomorrow, I am always one day ahead and one day behind at the same time. This to see what lies inbetween. Here and now. The role of the replies. And the many conversations in my head.
Where does true time, true reality, true experience exist? I somehow have my answer (inconveniently an innate pre-set) but I now have to live it (with this life of mine). Thus we must conclude: one doesn't really know a thing. Good. That leaves more time to contemplate how to love. To love : a verb used willy nilly but it will do for now.
In this life-long contemplation I have found society to be very much the party pooper on the work of loving and poeting (documenting it). It is what makes an Andorra or a Navarra or any Hill that does not tax the lungs alluring (our - yours and mine - weakest organ planetarily (ruled by Mercury) so we better make sure we prioritise clean air. And because we love our other planets, we'll add water and earth to the list. Fire can do it's own work.)
There are indeed several offsets to consider. It will become a close race between the wisdom that staying put in Theresienstadt (instead of boarding the train to Auschwitz) is sometimes better and the factor of really not wanting to be here anymore.
It has taken me fifty years to claim the right to move (instead of be moved about, if in no way as madly as you have been) for extremely personal reasons. The trick is to respect these. They are so simple I fear they might turn me blonde. Namely, I am thoroughly fed up with the lack of joie de vivre, and the way we clench spirit in our ignorance. I am used to but equally fed up with being used to a never ending very subtle but undeniable social control that is no less oppressive than any political system.
I don't have a Rwanda to walk across to help me make sense of the fear and failure to be human around me. Or "to heal" what injustice causes. It delights me to hear of individuality rising in places where tribalism is still the main starting point. But where to go with my individuality? How to escape the garrishness of individuals leaping before they can walk?
... and not end up in an isolation that is never as lonely as a crowd that rejects you. Oh, as you well can relate, it's not the being thrown out on your ear that gets to the likes of you and me. It's all fair if the pitting is square. It's the squirming nervously just because you take the trouble to ask them to reword their gibberishness that makes me rumble.... We know they can't. I suppose to insist they try makes me a nasty piece of work, after all....
There is no saving the world. I am perfectly alright with that. I refuse to be insulted any longer with the accusation of wanting to be the Messiaha. Please! I have cookies to bake and a doily to crochet (más o menos). No time to sit and preach in olive groves.
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On a previous post you summarized quite well with: "there is no point surviving alone". Ah, there's the rub and that's where things get complicated. Then there is "we know they can't" ...and I can't picture you as as the proverbial blonde.
I look forward to reading the next one if this heat doesn't kill me first, pfff...
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No, no, no, you're not the killable-by-a-bit-of-summer type. Besides, it's not like you're living in the Drunense Duinen.
Happy to hear I am not sounding blonde yet, but this sun is doing its best to turn the silver into gold (which is far from flattering. It somehow connotes chain-smoking - which is not what we want to have to think of with our delicate lungs).
Or it could just be the sun that's done it for him, too. All those happy little tours du monde on his bike...
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And why we feel (think) we are in a rut?
Who defined it a rut?
Isn't it the system, telling us we're in a rut, then giving us the solution to scape it?
And what/who is the system? Aren't we a big part (or even the whole) system?
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Very valid point. Those darn second hand thoughts again ploughing the field (into ruts)! Ruts (routines) are not so bad, even. But when they become sticky mud pools that lie fallow it makes for a sad patch of land.
If only we grew up knowing we were special just as we are. But we can only learn to laugh and love and play creatively if somebody shows us how. Sadly if you are in a (brainwashed) rut those things are impossible. Love and creativity are never automatic. Only authentic when fresh in the moment.
When I use the word System I do have a very specific construction in mind that will try very hard to swallow everybody up. It is a force that pollutes individuality. But you are right we cannot become too paranoid about it, for there is no complete escaping it. I am not one for "going off the grid" in any radical way. That is often a bit of a lie too, if you ask the seasoned me.
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