Miscellania
There're a few distinct things that I've been ruminating on and want
to talk about. Typing is so easy and mindless for me that it's a very
zenny, lovely way to sort out my thoughts and sharpen my reflections.
Open the floodgates and let it all go.
-------- Hitchhiking in Afghanistan
Kristine sent me an email about my "hitchhiking experience" saying
that she'd discussed it with her sister and her sister's girlfriend
and they'd wondered about my judgement there. "Did your discomfort
[with the original driver] push you into an even more dangerous
situation?"
The answer is that I don't know and that I can't know. But, that
having been said, I do think I made the -right- decision for that
moment in respecting my gut instincts.
Here's why I think that's the case: The brain, as an organ, receives a
LOT more information than the conscious/higher mind ever sees. In
every nanosecond, the brain is taking in probably hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of bits of distinct stimuli -- visual,
aural, olfactory, tactile, etc. Only a handful make it to the
conscious mind. Case in point: you can sit and study in a loud cafe
and you really "hear" nothing whatsoever as you're doing this. But if
someone in the cafe says your name, you'll hear that. Your brain was
hearing everything the whole time and it was filtering out everything
except that which it deemed important, ie your name being said. Or you
can lay in the grass and while you won't consciously feel the grass
touching you at every moment, you will feel a bug start to crawl up
your leg.
Now, "gut instincts," such as they are, are from the oldest part of
our brain: the brain stem or, as it's sometimes called because it is
so ancient and survival-focused, the "reptilian brain." This is the
part of the brain which, I think, receives much more information than
the "conscious mind" does. It's separate, as much as any one part of
the brain can be, from the higher faculties that let us do neat stuff
like calculus and writing haikus. The parts of the brain that do those
sorts of things developed much later and are much more "conscious."
The "higher" mind has a propensity to get caught up in all sorts of
stupid bullshit that takes a long time to sort out, eg thinking. It
takes a long time, that is, compared to the brain stem which has had
hundreds of millions of years of evolution aimed at, first, making
snap -- instant! -- decisions that'll promote survival and, second,
making those decisions based on danger recognition patterns that've
been honed over the eons. The brain stem is functionally instant and
it's very, very good.
So, that's the long answer. I trust my "gut instincts" because they
come from a place with much more information than the conscious "I"
has, and they come through a part of the brain that's had hundreds of
millions of years to "get it right" on making instant decisions which
will promote the survival of the organism, namely moi.
The short answer, of course, is that I trust my "gut instincts"
because they -feel right-. :)
-------- The Minaret of Jam
The Minaret of Jam was easily the most potent experience I've had in
Afghanistan. I wish I were better able to capture the intensity of the
experience but I can't find the words to wrap around it.
While I was there, I wanted to play capoeira or meditate or compose a
haiku with tea leaves. Do something to honor the experience. To
channel or reflect some positive energy back into the experience. Lift
a mountain, dive into the river and swim down to the bottom and dig
with my hands until I broke through to the other side of the world.
-------- Theme Songs
During the prep for this trip, and especially as the final day
stateside grew quite close, I felt like my "theme song," as it were,
would have to be the White Stripes track, "Seven Nation Army."
Travelling across Central Afghanistan, through the mountains, moving
up through a valley, paralleling a river, rising to the peak of a pass
where you can look out over the tops of the mountains, feels like
something nicely captured by the Chemical Brothers track, "Surface to
Air."
I don't know what to make of the desire to associate music with
experiences. Is this any different from a couple having "our song" or
associating your first dance at prom with a certain track? I remember
laughing at someone for wanting to listen to certain music while
flying over the Hindu Kush, but that's exactly what I want to do. I
want to set my experiences to music. Breathe aural life into them and
let them bounce and jiggle and radiate vibrant sound.
-------- Western Women Travelling in Afghanistan
Someone asked in one of the blog comments if I'd run into any female
travellers here.
I've only met one. She's an American named Molly. Tall, skinny, blonde
hair and blue eyes; she's a glassblower from Ohio off on a
post-college walkabout. She's been on the road for a year, travelling
from Cairo to Cape Town and, now, around Central Asia.
The practical "this is Afghan culture" side of her travel experience
has played out with many hotels refusing to let her stay there and
many busses requiring that she purchase two seats in the vehicle,
paying double, so that nobody would sit beside her. At chaikhanas, she
sometimes has to sit behind a curtain, seperate from all the men
who're eating. She covers her head while she's out but she's so
blatantly a foreigner that I doubt anyone is fooled.
I wish she was still here so that she could answer the implied
question in her own words. My own take is that despite all of the
above, she's excited and happy to be in Afghanistan. She understands
that the curtain in restaurants, the seating arrangements in busses,
etc, are all cultural things that you just have to put up with. I
think that she's chosen to travel with two Western men while in
Afghanistan, when she'd previously travelled alone much or most of the
time, probably points at some measure of fear or insecurity. She
mentioned that she feels safer in NWFP/FATA Pakistan than she does
here, but I'm not sure that's well founded. It might just be the
"dangerous rep" of Afghanistan and I, personally, think NWFP/FATA is
far more dangerous for a foreigner than most parts of Afghanistan.
I think travelling here as a Western woman is do-able -- Molly is
proof of that. The negative side is that you deal with a bit more
bullshit, with hotels and busses, and the negative expectations
Westerns bring are probably compounded for women by the fear of rape.
On the plus side, if you're culturally aware and polite, things are
generally pretty safe here and Western women are a sort of "third
gender" which gives them access to both Afghan men and women. The
latter are completely closed off from Western men with no respectable
Afghan man letting you (me!) interact with his mother, wife, or
daughters.
The handful of other women I've met here haven't been travellers. A
contractor, a photographer who stays in the hotel all the time except
when travelling with a private driver and a translator, and a few NGO
workers or Thai hair-stylists working at fancier hotels in the city.
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