A Short Walk

Saturday August 20th

I've been back in Kabul for two days now and have whittled them away
doing absolutely nothing of consequence. I didn't, and don't, feel
good about that, but I don't feel any strong inclinations toward
anything else. In an effort to sort out these feelings, I sat down in
front of the computer earlier today, closed my eyes, and just "free
wrote" for a while. I didn't imagine I'd post, or even keep, the
results, but I suppose in an effort to have this blog accurately
reflect my travel experience, I should include everything... even
barely coherent personal ramblings. The results are below.

A few hours after writing this, I realized that the answer to doing
nothing right now and not enjoying that feeling, is to volunteer my
services. I've started talking to people in hopes of finding an NGO
that wants a week worth of free help with IT/HTML/web design stuff or
writing/editing stuff. Hopefully some will bite.

-----------------------

I feel listless. Doldrums.

I've accomplished nearly everything I set out to do here. The only
remaining items are a visit to the OMAR landmine museum, the destroyed
areas of West Kabul, and a day-trip to the Panjshir Valley. After
that, I will be... done? Was Afghanistan merely something to conquer?
Go here, see this, do that. Done. A box checked off.

I'm not sure what I wanted here. Romance? Jason Elliott's descriptions
of the beauty of the landscape and the hospitality of the people?
Danger? Awe? To sit in a cafe back home and casually mention that I've
just returned from Afghanistan, in hopes that it'll draw raised
eyebrows and a warm regard for my masculinity and bravery?

I hope it's not the latter.

Honestly, I hope it's not any of these things. This is to be a
vacation for me. Some time away from work. Some time devoted only to
myself. But I really don't know what to do with it. I almost wish I
had some sort of job if only so I'd have something to do. "What does a
man really need? A few pounds of food per day, a place to lie down in,
and an activity that yields a sense of accomplishment. That's it." I
think it's the last item that's lacking here.

Doldrums.

My trip across the Central Route wasn't epic, by any means, but it was
a tough slog that had the benefit of being aimed at something precise.
I was heading east, and every moment of jarring pain in the back of a
HiAce or riding pillion on a motorcycle was a bit of progress toward
that. I went where a relatively few other people have been, especially
recently. Remote. Adventure.

Done. Check. Next? Kandahar, just to say... what? To impress... who? A
few people who know that of all of Afghanistan, Kandahar is likely the
only place with a modicum of active danger. I don't want to do
anything for the sake of impressing people, but I also don't want to
sit here at the Mustafa, watching pirated DVDs, talking with the
expats, etc. I want something more. And for lack of a better choice,
maybe I should run off to Kandahar. Zip down to Peshawar and head off
to Dara. And what? I have a week left. A little more than that, before
I fly to Dubai. After that, it's pure vacation silliness. A play in
London, a movie. Food. A fucking hamburger.

Can I have my vacation here at the hotel? How much will a hotel cost
in London? A hostel? $20 per day at the Mustafa. $2 for a DVD. $10 for
12 MRE meals of varying quality. Henry Miller. I could finish reading
my books. I could absorb every last ounce of juice from everything he
wanted to communicate, in hopes that somehow it'd help alleviate the
lack of direction here.

Why do I even want direction? Do I have to feel like I accomplished
something? Do people returning from vacation get asked, "So, what did
you accomplish?" Is it not equally noble... no, not noble... Is it not
equally valuable to simply sit and be with your thoughts and devote
all your time to yourself? That's vacation, I think, though I've known
since Ecuador that in many ways that sort of lack of goal direction is
disappointing to me.

Why?

When I see people who're afraid to stop, to settle down, to take a
moments respite to reflect, I think they're running from something.
Afraid of something. Afraid of what they'll find if they look inside
themselves and so they reach and grasp and grab and anything they can
get their hands on, they devote themselves to. Anything external.
Anything that doesn't require personal honesty.

I don't feel like that's me. I like to imagine that I'm quite honest
with myself and quite capable of sitting quietly, fading slowly into
my mind, merging the conscious and unconscious, honestly assessing how
I feel, what I think, what I want, what I fear.

So what, then, do I fear here?

Do I fear returning home and saying, "Yes, well, I travelled -- nay,
adventured! -- for the first three weeks and the last week I sat in a
hotel, eating MREs and watching DVDs, feeling as though Afghanistan
had nothing left to offer me." Or I had no spirit of adventure left?
Nothing to draw me out and engage me? Did I go on this trip in hopes
that people would think I was more... cool? Masculine? Brave?
Adventurous? Did I have something to prove? If so, was it to myself or
other people? Both? In what ways? To other people, that I have the
courage needed to put myself in danger? No. To other people, that
Afghanistan is not as dangerous as they think? That the world isn't so
nasty and barbaric that we have to stay home, huddled in the corner.
The world is nasty and barbaric, but it is beautiful and tranquil at
the same time. People under stress -- people in war zones, or zones
recovering from war, etc -- are both the most beautiful and the most
ugly. Stress brings out the extremes of human nature. Grace. Dignity.
Murder, rape.

I want to sort myself out here. I don't want to spend another day at
idle, seeking to fill my time with aimless chats with the expats or
sitting up in the DVD lounge, etc. What does Kabul have to offer? If
nothing else is here for me, I should leave. What's near here?
Countries: Iran, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, China,
Pakistan, India. Iran and Turkmen Baba Land are out for the difficulty
of obtaining visas. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan would likely be more of
the same although perhaps Uzbekistan would have a different energy
because of their brutal quashing of a popular uprising recently. Would
people talk to me about that? Could I help? China is too far, I think.
The Wakhan Corridor is not easy to traverse and flying in would take a
considerable investment of both money and time, especially since going
into Tibet itself is a major pain in the ass and requires a measure of
trickery with government officials and official tours and the like.
That leaves what? Pakistan? India? I could go to India but I almost
prefer to leave the country wholly untouched until my Four Points
trip. What's it like to close your eyes and start walking, blind and
unknowing, and to suddenly find yourself underwater? Your entire body
changing medium. The temperature. The danger. All of it in a flash. I
want India to capture that moment. I'm afraid it'll be more of the
same...

Is anything in this world different? I've often paraphrased the Dalai
Lama and told people that all we're all fundamentally the same. We
have hearts, minds, feelings. We seek to maximize happiness and
minimize suffering. We're not really different at all. And yet... I
feel so drawn to travelling, in hopes that a culture will be different
from my own -- or "different enough" -- that I'll... what? Have some
change? Provoke some change in myself? What change? And why? And why
provoked by something external? Because that necessarily must be the
case, or because it's easier than "provoking" it myself, internally,
purely through self reflection. "The only zen on a mountaintop is the
zen you take with you."

There was a line or two in Tropic of Capricorn that touched on this.
Early in the book. I should fish it out and reread it. The most
dangerous and most difficult adventure doesn't require that you go
anywhere -- it only requires that you go within yourself.

Sadie and I talked about this, ages ago. In another time, when rivers
flowed uphill. I think our final agreement centered around something
like this: If you strip away all your preconceived notions of what the
world Is, the kids playing in the yard across the street from your
house is as wholly foreign a situation as anything, ANYTHING, you can
find anywhere in a remote corner of this planet. What, then, is the
point of travel? Where's the pith here? We strap ourselves into little
metal sleeves and we catapult them through the air, landing somewhere
else and... what? Improve our ability to empathize? Maybe that'll play
out in meaningful ways. Politics, etc. Would we be so quick to
degenerate into violence if the "other" -- wasn't? Is meeting new
people worthwhile? Meeting different sorts of people? People with
different value systems? I think the last one is worthwhile. It must
be. It's the collision of divergent opinions and out of this
collision: partial truths can be combined, the truth itself can be
revealed and strengthed, having been tempered by fire, and things
false can be shed like snakeskin. JS Mill.

Where do we sit now? Staring at the children in the yard across the
street and travelling overland through Papua New Guinea. Francis Ona
is dead. John Garang is dead. There're interesting things happening in
the world. Interesting. Geopolitics. What's going to happen with
Bougainville? Sudan? What's happening with Iran? What's the real
story? What's the real danger? Was Iran the most likely candidate of
all middle eastern countries to home-grow some democratic revolution?
Wasn't that true, a few years ago? Bah.

Release.

Children play in the yard. Collisions of value-systems benefit
everyone. A generation whose minds are sapped by television. What do I
know about Henry Miller other than some inkling that he had some sort
of (long term, long distance) liason with Incest-bunny Anias Nin? Is
it selfish to hope that authors, artists, have something to offer me?
"Be heart-core. What is it that we do art for?" Communication. The
wrist must be loose and relaxed as it holds the end of the paintbrush.
The fingers grasp gently and the circle is drawn slowly, its value in
the experience of creating not in the final product. A perfect circle
on rice paper.

I don't know why anyone travels except that... it's romantic. I think
we're hoping for some experience to change us. Chain jus(t)[ice]. Why
on earth am I in Afghanistan? Why did I move to San Francisco? Would I
be happy sitting in a 10x10 room, duracrete, one lightbulb... of
course not. Afghanistan and San Francisco have a measure of beauty...
and a variety of things to offer me. Things that... bring me
happiness? Joy? Happiness is transient and has an opposite in sadness.
Joy is something deeper, perhaps. Tied to the soul. Souljoy. "She's
unique among women I've loved in that I feel souljoy merely from
sharing physical presence with her." Transient. Redefining "joy" in
such a way that it's not mere transient happiness, and not merely the
long-term presence of short-term lust and chemical attraction...
pheromones. Moths. Joy. Happiness comes and happiness goes. Joy is a
noble pursuit because it's a slow burn. Lifetimes of the slow ebb and
flow. Or years, maybe. Punctuated by tragedy. The slow breath of the
universe. Brahma's chest slowly rising and falling. Vishnu and Shiva.
"I have become death, destroyer of worlds." Chapter 11. Maybe I should
have brought the Bhagavad-Gita with me instead. Fuck Umberto Eco for a
game of soldiers. Marquez too.

What fits moods? Why do we want to amplify our moods? When I feel bad,
I don't want to feel good -- I want to feel worse. I pick music that
matches my miserable mood and I seek to deepen it, as if in suffering
I am legitimized. In happiness, we want to amplify that too, choosing
happy music, positive situations, etc. Amplification. Modulation.
Frequency and amplitude. With a mood of a certain frequency, we want
to modulate the amplitude and maintain the same frequency. My time
here in Kabul is, then... I see no correlation. An attempt to grossly
increase the amplitude of my present life in hopes that by doing so I
would alter the frequency? A collision. The glancing blow of a meteor,
spinning through space, the product of dull, dry calculus instead of
the magic of chaos.

Chasing an impossible dream. Hoping for external circumstances to do
the work that it's too hard to do internally? Too intimidating to even
begin? The value of... We want life to happen to us. Yet, "Life is
what happens while you're busy making plans." Plans. I'm good at
plans. Good at lists. Steps, strides. Giant steps. Slipping silently
along the shore of the Sea of Tranquility. Mind games. Intellectual
gymnastics. Fantasy. Day dreaming. Lobsang Rampa might want you to put
your consciousness in your big toe but the stronger experience is to
put it elsewhere entirely. A body works, struggles. A mind is free.
Wholly seperate. The simple things are left to base motor skills and
the mind, the post-bicameral mind of Julian Jaynes, is free to wander
and dip and dive and slide and swim and twirl and then explode --
spraying itself out into oblivion, tiny particles falling like an
umbrella of lonely, screaming electrons.

Maybe I'll go play soccer with the kids at the Shahr-e Naw park.

posted by daviduri @ 9:50 AM