| Thursday 02 / 26 |
batti gayo
How to describe Kathmandu? Historically, it is where the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, the cultures of India and China, as well as uniquely Nepali elements have come to mix in this deep, fertile valley of Kathmandu. Nepal is certainly a land of extremes. From the icy forehead of Everest to the subtropical, malarial plains of the Terai, from the old, intricate woodcarvings of Newari temples, to the ugly, blockish new concrete buildings, from the steady drone-like chants of Buddhist monks to the unpredictable blasts from the bombs of Maoist insurgency, the paradoxes and violent juxtapositions here leave the visitor simultaneously repulsed and enchanted.
When I walk back from this office to my home this evening, I will pass through narrow, rocky alleys between high brick walls, onto a large, paved street. Here I will cover my nose with my scarf so I don't choke on the thick, black exhaust fumes. Then I cross a bridge over the Bagmati River, which is strewn on both banks with garbage, and which reeks of sewage. I will press my scarf even tighter to my nose and walk faster until I am clear of the river. At the end of the bridge is a police checkpoint. These upstart young men wielding rifle guns will check my bags, and hopefully will not hassle me too much. Of the many fighting groups here, these security guards are to be trusted the least. Clearing this checkpoint, I again walk through narrow alleys, passing by some old stone statues made colorful by red tikkas. Then I enter a dramatically wide, pedestrian space, of beautiful temples with woodcarvings of many-armed deities that you can look at closer, and closer, and closer. This is the old city of Patan, and its sight is spectacular. Old structures here are truly living museums -- these ancient structures may be fading away and cracking, but after 2,000 years women still wake up in the mornings to adorn the statues with red and orange tikkas, kids still play on the steps of these temples, people still gather here to sing, to dance, and to carry out councils with deities. In the face of the new the old refuses to die.
Except for the wealthy who drive here and there in air conditioned cars, one cannot escape the ugliness of life here. In the US, our garbage is conveniently channeled to landfills, animals are slaughtered in sanitized spaces, but here goats are skinned on the streets and garbage is strewn on riverbanks. Americans surely produce more garbage and eat more meat than Nepalis, and both countries are needing ecological awareness, yet here the environmental damage is visible and visceral. I am dumbfounded sometimes by how people here can walk by heaps of trash, smell the sewage, choke on the air, and not feel like doing anything about it. I think one gets used to a certain kind of life, one unfortunately learns to accept her environment and doesn't imagine anything better. People often expect the government to solve social problems, ignoring the fact that government runs on public pressure, and without the people government is ineffectual.
How to help people feel empowered? How to inspire people to take charge of society and their own lives? This is the key to a successful democracy in any country.
I am particularly interested in empowerment through performance. Dance and music allow for modes of expression unspeakable through direct means. Songs of political resistance subvert the medium of written or spoken expression. |
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| Sunday 12 / 28 |
travelling
The excitement of travel relies on the change of place, of sights, sounds, and smells. Skimming the surface, never venturing deep enough to see the reality of it all, a traveller doesn't have to face the deeper complexities. The traveller isn't bound to the rules and obligations of society. Customs foreign and familiar are met with a passing glance, a curious nod, and the traveller moves on to the next place, the next wide, warm beach or cool mountain. The lure of travel stems from this feeling of freedom, the feeling that the world is presenting itself at your feet. Yet after a while novelty itself becomes routine, the disconnection from society eats away at a person's innermost sense of meaning, belonging, purpose, and freedom becomes the very thing that confines.
Yet still I travel, still I go, choosing to dig deeper and deeper in the hope of finding a lead, a clue, a piece of a mirror which I can dust away and see a clear reflection. Perhaps I am driven by a deep sense of dissatisfaction, incessantly and wildly dreaming of a life different from my own. A dream is a slippery thing. It is a ghost which beckons, leading you through mazes, dim hallways, only to disappear and leave you lost until the next one leads or until you find your own way out.
Sometimes I awake early in the morning, and in the dim light my head turns drowsily to the curtains and for a moment I think I am somewhere else, in a dream, at home, any of the dizzying number of places in which I have awoke. The places in my memory merge together and for a moment in my half-consciousness I feel at home, secure, aware, connected. I go back to sleep. Then I awake again in the light of day, glance at the curtains and recognize their unfamiliarity. I look out the window, into the morning, and I realize that I don't know what I'm doing today and that I don't really know the place where I am. Angry for a moment at the disconnection between dreams and reality, I let these feelings go and start my day.
How can a person feel at home wherever she is? How can a person stitch together the motley pieces of memory and consciousness, dream and reality, into a path, a coherent design, a work of art? When a person starts to acquire more new information, ideas, problems, solutions, than she can handle, the work becomes hasty, the mind becomes distracted, and she loses sight of the design.
The desire for something else, though it may lead to dissatisfaction, is also the very thing that motivates us. To find the solutions we must know the problems, dive head first into them and get to know the messiness of reality. Why would humans want to improve, to invent or to move forward if we were satisfied just where we were? It's the feeling of being shattered to pieces that motivates a person to pick them up and piece together something new, in a different way, through a different vision. Strange as it is, perhaps it is just this feeling of being shattered and putting myself back together, getting lost and finding the way, erasing the board and writing the whole thing over again, that I crave, and which pushes me to examine and turn over these pieces again and again. |
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| Saturday 10 / 11 |
diving
My diving instructor, a Fijian man who grew up in a Taveuni fishing village, and learned to swim even before he learned to walk, was a kind and patient man who had an old relationship with the sea. The preliminary theoretical training included the scientific basis behind what happens to your body under the pressures of deep water. The whole idea, science, and equipment of scuba is to allow humans to breathe underwater. It's amazing how humans can transcend such basic bodily limitations through technology. Once you're in the water and the ocean surface closes above you, that respirator is the only thing keeping you alive. But after a while you forget about this fact, you and your heavy equipment become weightless and you feel as if you are just another species of fish.
The second day of the training was my first introduction to the creatures of the tropical sea. Off the coast of Taveuni is the tiny island of Korolevu. It looks from the shore as nothing more than a tiny patch of land in the sea. My instructor and I hopped on a boat to its shore and we wore our tanks, jackets, respirator, and finally the fins, the combination of which makes for an awkwardly moving land creature. I looked out at the strip of beach extending into sea and told my instructor that I was afraid. He said that there is nothing to be afraid of -- diving is one of the safest sports, and there are no dangerous creatures around here. But any amount of rationalizing wouldn't allay my fears. Anyway, we walked out into the water. I was looking down as we walked at the waves lapping back and forth, and fought a dizziness emerging from fear and the motion of waves. Before the dizziness set in the floor left my feet, and we were horizontal and swimming. I suddenly lost all sense of orientation. I was horizontal instead of vertical, I was kicking with my feet to move, and the alien seascape offered no landmarks. There was none of the gravity or basic physical properties of land. My body was learning the physics of another planet. My instructor was my only human companion in this world and I held onto his arm fiercely. He felt my grip and told me not to be afraid. "Just think, it is so beautiful," he said.
With this we descended, or rather, he descended as I attached myself to him. I could see nothing but blue, a clear cobalt hue, and suddenly I saw the first fish, small, striped and swimming casually past my eyes. His eye, located on the side of its head, seemed to glare at me with a nonchalant amusement. Was it looking at me? If so, what sort of sensations were registering within its mind? Upon this first communication with another creature, I instantly relaxed and released the breath I was so tightly clinging onto. As we went deeper I saw my first colonies of coral. They looked like colorful, fragile glass sculptures on the sea floor. The small green fish that were nibbling on their edges disappeared into the coral as I swam past, all at once, like they composed the breath of a collective mind.
As we swam further along the sloping sea floor we saw more of these coral colonies of all colors, shapes and design, with all sorts of fish grouped with their own kind engaged in their daily activities, feeding, swimming along. With all this time on their hands, surely there is time for recreation, for I saw fish swimming backwards, sideways, even straight towards my mask to inspect me face-to-face. Each group of settlers in these cosmopolitan colonies has its own place and purpose in the whole system, with duties such as cleaning the sea floor, cleaning the other fish, supplying food to other marine creatures, and so forth. Seeing marine creatures only from tanks and laid flat in supermarkets, one never gets a sense of their collective intelligence, of the intricacies of marine society. Diving allows one to be a brief visitor, spectator and participant in this world. It's amazing to see how creatures have developed such complex systems without human participation. Being among such a world of smooth, natural rhythms is profoundly relaxing. I emerged from the dive feeling peaceful, inevitably a little shaken, but all the more ready for the next exploration. My world had expanded that day. When I looked out at the sea, my vision was not of a dark unknown under the surface, but of a colorful and complex world with sensations wholly different from my experience on land. My body was slowly acquiring the feeling of the sea. I was chiselling away at a mystery, uncovering beauty of a wholly different order. |
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| Monday 09 / 29 |
reef hopping
Coming from a city, where strangers usually remain anonymous and there is not much sense of community, the tightly knit social feeling of the village was a welcome relief. Wandering about aimlessly for two months, I gradually hungered more and more for the feeling of home, any home, having a purpose and place and people to share life with. Our week in Naweni was wonderful. The villagers, families, children, elderly people, truly accepted us as part of a community. They would give us a big smile and say "Bula" (hello) to us when we were walking through the village. People usually greet each other by asking "where are you going?" or "where have you come from?". Sometimes it was difficult to make much more conversation than that. There would be a big, smiling hello, the standard question, an answer, a pause, and then a parting. But these actions of greeting were not empty -- they were not the passing "how are you doing?" questions people ask back home even when they are too busy to hear your answer. They were genuinely interested in us and our response, and whatever we had to say.
And they had all the time in the world to hear your response. I consider myself a very laid back person, but the pace of life in the village was incredibly slow, even for me. Our host father leisurely left home when he felt like it, went to work on the farm, with a village building project, or family discussion, for a few hours, came back, ate lunch, and lay down on the floor, taking a nap. That would be enough work for the day. The rest of the afternoon was free. Our host mother's job was to go fishing and take care of the children. This she did, but even her duties took no more than a few hours a day. And when it rained, which, being a rainforest environment, it did very often, people would not go outside at all. What do these people do with most of the languid, humid, warm days to themselves? They go to church. Three to four times a day. The church drums sound at timed intervals throughout the day, the only way people know what time it is, and even the drummers are often late for this. When the drum sounds, people must stop whatever they're doing -- if they are within earshot, they pray for a moment, and if they are in the village, they go to church, pray and sing. They also go to each other's houses and talk. In the evenings they have kava circles, where they pass around this beverage (which numbs your lips and sends you to bed feeling pleasantly numb for a good night's rest), play the guitar, and talk.
I wondered what exactly it was that contributed to the discrepancy between working hours in, say, farming villages in Nepal and the village here. One reason may be that fishing is a relatively easy way to procure food, especially since fish are so plentiful in the surrounding lagoons. Fishing is an activity mostly of waiting for the fish to come to you. Furthermore, the land and climate in Naweni itself may be more productive for farms than in Nepal. There is an incredible amount of work to be done in Nepali hill farms -- tilling the land, seeding, planting, husking the rice, etc, which makes it necessary to spend a full 8-10 hours in the farm doing this work. Perhaps people did work more long ago, when they still made canoes by cutting and chiseling wood, and clothes by pounding, drying and weaving tree bark, but now these arts are mainly gone in daily life.
Nevertheless, all this free time made for a very supportive social structure. A village environment must be the best place for children. After school, the children of the village played free, romping among the seashore, climbing trees, talking, laughing, and the parents never had to watch them because they knew they were safe. Not like many places in America, where kids come straight home from school and turn on the TV, or do some other uncreative, solitary activity. What a refreshing contrast were these kids, who could play, run around, and explore with total freedom. It was remarkable just how fearless, sociable, and happy these children were. Sometimes, while Paul and I were sitting in chairs with our noses in books, they would gather around us on the floor and stare. When we put down our books and said hi, they would greet us and say, "Tell us a story."
"What kind of story?"
"The story of your life. Tell us the story of your life."
A simple request, but where was I to start? I noticed that the people in the village, in general, loved stories. They would always ask for any and all stories we could tell, and listened with great interest. I told them about the sea in California, how the water is cold and green, how you can't see down to the bottom of the floor and how the sea is very rough, no coral and no calm, warm lagoons, and they were very surprised and interested. It was like I was describing a totally different world, and I was. I could sense them just trying to imagine what I was describing, simple to me but beyond what they have ever seen. Describing my home in this manner made me feel even more like home was a long, long way away.
Every day after school, the children were eager to entertain us. Their favorite thing was to take us to the seashore, point out the blue starfish, brittle starfish, crabs, and spiny urchins with great delight. One time, a child pounced into the lagoon, emerging with a small fish, caught with his bare hands. Some time later, he tapped my shoulder and said, "look! fish is dead!" The eye of the fish filled with a bloody tear, which dripped down the side of its head. "Great," I thought. "Thanks, kid." I tried not to think about it. |
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| Saturday 09 / 27 |
underwater world
For each of the benefits of Naweni there was an equal trade-off. The tightly knit social fabric of the village did not allow space for educational or economic advancement. After all, the people had so much time to talk to each other because there was no work. They could not earn money. If a farmer's child did not want to farm, if he wanted to go to college instead, he would have to leave this environment, and his parents would have the almost impossible task of coming up with his tuition fees. People increasingly were trading the village social life for the anonymity and relative social fragmentation of a bigger city somewhere else, where they would have access to jobs, education, cultural, and artistic pursuits. It's human nature to seek something other than what you are already familiar with, it's curiosity and ambition that drives us out of these environments.
Our next stop was the island of Taveuni, a short ferry ride across the Somosomo Strait. Not far above the water hung a warm mist that shrouded the green islands. We sailed slowly through this mist to the small port at Taveuni. Taveuni is known as Fiji's 'garden island,' famous for its abundance of life both above and under the water. On land is a tropical rainforest, and in the water are coral reefs -- two of the most diverse habitats on earth.I couldn't believe the abundance of color I'd experienced in the last month. The Cook Islands atolls were quite barren, harsh sandscapes with coconut trees providing brief patches of shadow, extending gently into lagoons of the most brilliant and bright hues of blue and green that I've ever seen. In Fiji the islands were more lush, verdant, thick with dark green rainforest vegetation, sloping sharply down to deep, dark ocean. It's so soothing to the eyes and ears, to sit on the shore and stare at these colors, listening to the gentle lapping of the waves.
Taveuni is also home of the famous Rainbow Reef, and here I took my first Open Water diving course. It is one of the most challenging things I've ever done. I've always been afraid of the ocean. I've often looked down at the sea from boats, wondering about what's beneath the dark water, wondering how deep it is to the bottom and what's swimming underneath. From the shore the waves tower, roaring to the shore and finally pounding the sand, throwing up shells and plants, sucking into its enormous, hungry body what it had deposited last time. In many ways it is a rough, inhospitable unknown. I logically knew that diving here was safe, yet an irrational fear held me back. Many people in the Pacific Islands, depending on the ocean for their food, are amazing freedivers. The men in Naweni would spearfish in the open ocean for their food. They paddle outside the reef in their canoes, taking their spears with them, jump in the water, hold their breaths and just dive down. Even the children splash, play, and catch fish in the lagoons. Yet I was always deathly afraid that something would emerge from the depths and bite me or otherwise pull me down. And who would save me then?
Fear is an emotion that forces us to stick only to what's safe and familiar, and therefore holds us back from the potential enjoyment life can offer. Overcoming my fear of the sea, I thought, would be a step towards gaining control over my mind and emotions. Once I separated fear emerging from illusions, distorted perceptions of reality, from reality itself, I could act with confidence. Under the sea was a world beautiful beyond my imagination. Glittering with the reflection of sunlight, its dark, rippled surface was only teasing me with the illusion of danger.
The best way to overcome a fear is to plunge into the fear itself, struggle and fight and never let go until it is tamed. Finally you look at it eye to eye, you stare into its history, and once you are completely calm, it dissolves. The traces remain, grabbing hold of the slightest mental weakness to emerge again. Every day of the course, I set out to grapple with these demons, and came back exhausted, only more eager to venture out again the next day. |
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