there is no memory

Posted on April 14, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #118: Chiang Mai/Bangkok flight: Early morning and we have a flight to catch. Some urgency in getting M organized, her bag with tinkling-bell/woolly-teddy-bear appendages and putting on these brightly coloured shoes. Then down in the elevator, along the corridor and all the doors that open different ways… obstacle course. Is it a pull or a push? M says it’s a plush. I simply assume they should all be the same but Western standards don’t apply here (not necessarily a bad thing). There’s a tug, an unyielding shove but we get most of them right, out in the street and the taxi is waiting.

No time, bags flung in and we’re careering through the quiet streets at a surprising speed. Fortunately no rush-hour traffic, it’s a public holiday, Thai New Year (Songkran) and we’re at the airport; suddenly there… it feels like some kind of space/time anomaly has taken place. X-ray machines, no queue at check in, boarding pass issued, more X-ray machines and we’re in Departures with more than an hour to spare.

There’s an old 80s song: ‘…and you may ask yourself, well… how did I get here?’ (Talking Heads). I’m as bewildered as anyone would be at this time in the morning, whatever it is that brought me here. In a larger sense, karma, causality – even though time cannot be excluded, in a manner of speaking. The flight is called, and the announcement that elderly passengers and families with small children are invited to board first. M says: Toong Ting? We can go now, it’s our little joke, because M and I qualify on both counts… so hand in hand we line up behind the wheelchairs. It’s as if I’m being led by M, not the other way round, and in a moment we’re walking down the ramp, on to an empty plane. Enough time to get the bags stowed away and into our seats before the great sea of passengers pours in.

Flight leaves on time, uneventful journey, I ask M if she’s okay, it must be really boring for kids, not being able to see above the high passenger seats. I look down at her small face, and don’t see M, I see her grandmother who died three years ago. M says she’s okay and I get up from the seat; go along the aisle to the tiny toilet at the very end of the plane, a kind of perspective shaped endspace inside the tailpiece of the fuselage. Curious experience, everything is tailored to fit; we live in a bespoke world. Just enough room to turn around see myself in the mirror, believing in this mirror reflection of myself that takes the place of that which is aware. Who am I? No answer required, no seeking, no wanting or needing. Just being with the question.

Back to the seats and M is still there of course. In no time at all we’re landed, bags picked up from the belt, on to the trolley out of the airport, into the car and the family take over from there. I can relax when we get to the house, M is busy changing clothes and getting ready to join the thousands of people out in the streets for the water throwing games. Just before she leaves, M comes to my room with a small bottle of auspicious scented fluid mixed with water and pours a little on my arm and rubs it in, Happy Songkran Toong Ting, runs out the door.

‘There is no memory. There is only the act of remembering.’[Nyanaponika Thera]

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Photo above shows the Songkran water party at Silom (see this link). M is standing on the left

The Nyanaponika Thera quote is sourced in Cabrogal’s post: Meeting the Mahathera

~ G R A T I T U D E ~

too much

Posted on April 12, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #117: Chiang Mai: Walking to school with M and we pass this 30 foot high sculpture of a cat with a moustache and a small handbag… too much. That’s how it looks to me, thinking of the many poets who died for love of the metaphor – and is this a monument to their too-muchness? But that’s only how I see it, a European living in Thailand. I ask M if she knows what it’s supposed to be? And look down at this small person walking beside me, backpack bouncing slightly always out of sync with the motion of her walk. She tells me something at length, but I can’t hear properly, so acknowledge with hmmm, really? Wait to see if there’s a follow-up response, but we’re focused on going to school and besides, we’re in this public place.

It’s too much – me being here, walking with this eleven-year-old Thai child holding my hand, and she with her Thai cultural behavior. When I ask M if I’m walking too fast, because she’s so small maybe I should slow down? She says, no Toong Ting, is okay and places her cheek against my forearm as we’re walking along in the heavy traffic, no pavement … it’s that too-much thing again. She’s on the inside all the way until we get to the main road and turn right. Then I need to change hands so I’m on the outside shielding her against the traffic and little M is on the inside. Three people on a small motorbike go past us, looks dangerous – but I’d be wrong to say that’s too much; it’s ordinary low budget. For them, it’s just right. What’s too much is that I think it’s too much, and my views and opinions are not relevant here.

A few people recognize us, smile; night shift security guards salute… too much; I’m not sure how to react when I’m being saluted at. We get to the school; other kids are there, the familiarity of it. M takes her shoes off, waves bye-bye and enters the building. I set off back the way we came, my too-much reaction is unavoidable and have to struggle to see it just as a reaction. For the Thais it’s different, there’s this built-in sense of ‘too much’; food is too spicy; too many colours in a room interior… that’s what they call ‘too much’. The word is bprung dtàeng, ปรุงแต่ง. There’s the mind form of it too; thinking too much, ‘conceptual proliferation’ the Buddhist term papañca. Human beings are like this; the reaction to follow thought is as automatic as the eyes see, nose smells… thoughts proliferate.

“It is quite amazing to watch as the mind takes the simplest thought, jumps on it, and runs off in all directions. Just as the ear hears without any effort (and in fact it takes a lot of effort to make the ear not hear), the mind proliferates effortlessly, and it takes a lot of effort and/or training to hold this tendency in check. It’s the unbidden “going” of the mind to so many different subsequent thoughts that is important, rather than the diverse places it goes […] By becoming masters of the directions in which our thoughts proliferate, we can achieve freedom. The Buddha recognizes that the mind’s tendency towards Papañca is unavoidable, and instead of fighting the inevitable, he teaches us how to ride (and tame) the tiger.” [Leigh Brasington]

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endless horizons

Posted on February 27, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #113: New Delhi: Carrying stuff upstairs, laptop under arm with notepad, phone in pocket, pen held in teeth, water bottle neck clasped between first and third fingers. Pause at the top of the stairs to turn the door handle (how much better it would be if we had three hands), it opens by practiced handle-lever push with thumb, and timed shoulder-shove. Out into the bright daylight of the roof terrace, carrying everything to the table, and unload piece by piece.

Bring the chair over and sit… now maybe I can relax for a bit in this warm spring-like weather. But the voices start up again as if they’ve been waiting off-stage for their big entry: What’s with all this control-freakery? Why try to do everything at once? Leaving on Saturday 28th night, red-eye flight to Bangkok, change for the Chiang Mai flight and arrive there early Sunday morning on 1st March. I know it’ll be hot in Chiang Mai and as we get nearer to April, hotter still. Then 1st May to UK because I have to get a new passport (no pages left), and two weeks later, back to Thailand on a tourist visa. One week later, the return to Delhi before my India visa runs out… and I need to have that renewed too. Then, to crown it all, it’ll be impossibly hot by the time I get back here, temperatures reaching their peak, 46°C.

Intrusive thinking about ticketing, schedules, filling in forms; uninvited thoughts gate-crash the party, insist on getting attention and shouting out: What’ll happen if the flight from Delhi doesn’t arrive in Bangkok on time, and I miss the flight to Ch’Mai? Noisy internal dialogues about the whole itinerary – I need to ease out from this clamour of conjured-up scenarios, imponderables and enigmas – searching for something creates the idea that it is lost. Delete the ‘my’ in my-self. They’re not ‘my’ thoughts; they belong to everyone – the generosity of letting go. None of it is ‘mine’, I don’t think these thoughts, these thoughts think me. I don’t breathe the air – the air breathes me. Cognitive functions synchronize things so the world appears the way it does. I don’t see the world; the brain selects what is seen. Sounds are heard, but there’s no listener. The ear is a musical instrument. The body is a sensory-acoustic device that plays an immense chord of vibrating harmonics at 432 Hz, the natural frequency of the universe.

Mind contemplating the experience of ‘me’ seated on the chair; aware of the pressure points where legs touch the seat, bearing the weight, arms on armrests, and everything else is empty space, just this invisibility. I’m not aware of the mass of internal organs… slightly unnerving; get up and walk around. Feet appear down below on floor surface: left, right, left, right. The roof-terrace enters my vision, floor, wall, the plants – objects seem to pass through the body. Meanwhile, far away over endless horizons, another place begins to stir with aliveness; this time on Sunday I’ll be ‘there’ in Ch’Mai – or Ch’Mai will be here in ‘me’….

“And men go abroad to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.”
[St. Augustine]

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The photo of the sea at St Andrews comes from Sue Vincent’s post: The Elasticity of Time
– G R A T I T U D E –

flowers from far away

Posted on February 9, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #110: New Delhi: The computer feels cold to touch, hands stretch out over the keyboard and the soft spaces between the fingers are exposed to the chill. Make them into fists; stay warm, too cold to type… melancholia of late winter. Sit there for a while. It takes quite a long time to realize I could just stop what I’m doing and go up to the roof terrace in the sunshine. Around this time, the shadow cast by the tall building next-door moves away and there’s a patch of sunlight where I can place my chair and sit in the warmth.

Get up from the desk, out to the hall by the back door and up the cold steps to the top; habitual handle-grab, shoulder-push on an old door that’s always stiff, squeak, it opens… bright daylight enters, birds fly across my vision in a blur of random directions. Blue sky, and clothes hanging on the line, the smells of outside, vent pipes, clay-tiled rooftops of other people’s houses, other people’s laundry.

There’s new warmth in the air – I notice it immediately, walking around our small urban garden and checking out all the plants that live here in flowerpots and containers. Everything has that dry wintery look, but there are some signs of life, shoots appearing in the crumbling earth… an innate sentience. Take a photo with my camera phone, seeing the flowers as stars and planets. Tiny white blossoms form in clusters. So small, there’s a feeling they’re arriving from far away; distant galaxies seen moving towards us in slow motion.

I didn’t know. It was here all the time, and everything that happened prior to this, everything going on unseen, below the surface of the earth… before the flower, the seed and before the seed, the flower that created the seed; a sequence of patterns that started before I arrived in this place, flowing from the past into the future, always seen from ‘here’.

I place my chair in the patch of sunlight and sit down; a fundamental response to the first signs of that easing-away from the coldness, the unique warmth of Springtime, a softening around the hardness, a release from the upset, the injured and the slow spinning wheel of seasons takes it all away. Listening to the green parakeets chattering in the Eucalyptus trees opposite, there’s only the moment in which everything appears…

“… appearances are so intimately one with Consciousness that there are in fact no appearances as such, that is, existing in their own right. Rather Consciousness is the sole substance of all experience.” [Rupert Spira]

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outside-in/inside-out

Posted on February 3, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #109: New Delhi: The early morning flight from Bangkok to Delhi leaves in darkness and the sun rises along the way. It takes only three and a half hours; have breakfast, fall asleep, wake up and pretty soon we’re descending. Up go the flaps down go the wheels; we’re on the ground and rumbling along a bumpy runway. Get ready to go, reassemble the parts of who I am and out of the aircraft into the vast arrivals hall. A long walk to immigration, miles of pale tangerine carpeting, entry stamp on my passport thump. I’m through. Find a place at the luggage belt to stand and wait and watch the bags move past the centre of my vision. Feel dizzy… all journeys merge into one; can’t remember what my bag looks like, panic for a moment then remember. I see it, grab the handle, get it on its wheels and leave through the green Nothing-To-Declare exit. Driver is waiting, into the car and we’re away in the traffic.

Adjust my watch back 1½ hours and step into an earlier time, a continuation of events that started before I got here. The flight from Bangkok disappears; a memory replaced by present-time experience – there’s no feeling of ‘me’ having arrived in Delhi, it’s like Delhi has arrived in ‘me’… outside in & inside out. Delhi fills my vision; all the sensations, noise and commotion of morning rush-hour traffic on the airport highway. Car horns honking all around: pap-pap, pee-pee, pah-paah, PEEE….

There’s a hold-up, maybe there’s been an accident. What’s happening? The sound of car horns increases in volume, and slowly we get nearer and begin to see the cause of the obstruction. There’s a vehicle positioned right across the road, but it seems to be moving… wait and see. It looks like the driver is trying to turn round. Yes, he’s doing a three-point turn into the oncoming traffic. What? At this point, the noise of horns stops for a moment; uneasy silence, everybody thinking wow, we don’t know what’s going on here, but this guy must think he has a very good reason for deciding to do this, and they edge past him cautiously. The driver completes the turn, after many stops and starts as the flow of traffic continues to swerve past him whenever there’s a space to get through. Then he’s coming towards us, driving carefully against the traffic flow and assertively looking everybody in the eye.

The first thing that comes to mind is: this is just so… wrong, and I’d like to dwell on how wrong it is, but it’s too weird – searching for something to blame, but can’t find anything with sufficient blameworthiness. One thing is certain; it must be pretty scary to be doing what he’s doing. I see him in silhouette as we pass, gripping the steering wheel, alert, tense, determined. I watch him through the rear window; an enigma, a complete reversal of everything we think of as logical. The rush of traffic engulfs him like water moves around a stone in a fast moving river, then he’s gone.

Up front, in the normal directionality of things, we appear to be getting through the congestion. Traffic picks up speed, acceleration; honks, squeaks and toots all around as if the cars were jamming with each other in an improvisation by Miles Davis on trumpet.

“Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside of them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.” [Rabindranath Tagore]

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a world of things

Posted on January 27, 2015 by tiramit

“Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them.” [Matsuo Bashō 1644 –1694]

OLD NOTEBOOKS: East Anglia: It’s the last day, I’m leaving, this is it… the end – no more departures and arrivals I’m leaving now for the very last time. The house is to be sold, the rooms are empty, all remaining things ready to be put into boxes for the recycling people to collect after I’m gone. Right now it’s all arranged in two groups: a) stuff to be given away and, b) ‘stuff that I can’t let go of YET’… still some reluctance, lingering over things I want to keep. Gazing fondly at a pile of books, a framed picture, pondering, hesitation, attachment… but how will I get all this into checked-in luggage for the flight to Thailand? Some time spent considering this but, impossible, let’s face it. In the end it’s a decision pushed along by the momentum of leaving; there’s a car coming for me in the afternoon. Out of time, ok, pack up and leave… and I move everything into a), the stuff-I’m-giving-away group. That settles it.

But I’m tugged back… did I just do that? Hands reach out to take the stuff back again. Pause for a moment to think about it and everything stops, emptiness, there’s nothing there… thought is an elaborated construct built in a landscape of no-thingness. An awareness event turns up out of nowhere, the kind of thing that couldn’t happen in any other circumstance: let someone else have these things. It’s the letting-go thing, the generosity of easing, the release of all that tight energy – giving it all away, giving it all back to the world, returning to the context of how it all arose in the first place. I stop for a moment to think about how that feels, but there’s no thought, everything is still wonderfully clear and completely empty. There’s a world of things, then there’s not.

Suddenly it feels like everything I’ve been holding on to doesn’t matter anymore, and that’s okay. The loss is only there if I ‘think’ it into being. Sit down, close my eyes and everything becomes invisible. Feel the pressure points, lower back, seat in chair, feet on floor, elbows on the arm rests – but no body, no head – it occurs to me that sometimes the universe doesn’t exist… takes my breath away. Only a curious intensity in the place where the thought used to be contained; something that really never happened… years and years of nurturing a dream about something that wasn’t there.

Last thing to do is bless the rooms, hands held in anjali in that small dwelling: “Wishing in gladness and in safety, may all beings be at ease…” There’s a clear sense of closure. Going through the door… I’ve been in this house 36 years and it’s gone in a flash. Standing outside, blinking in the bright daylight, surprised to discover it’s a just a day like any other day. A last look inside, sunlight extends in from the doorway… goodbye little house! Pull the door closed, lock. Get in taxi, door slam. We’re off across the landscape…

‘When this exists, that comes to be. With the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be. With the cessation of this, that ceases.’ Samyutta Nikaya 12.6

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Many thanks to Jeff for: ‘stuff that I can’t let go of YET’ – source: Leaving Lexington. Photo: a stand-alone Sycamore tree at the top of the hill

the light of memory

Posted on January 23, 2015 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: East Anglia: [post written in New Delhi] The old house is sold. A printout of the email from the lawyer signed, enveloped, stamped and sent by DHL to England, 4000 miles away. A small packet of A4 paper folded once, bearing all the correct documentation, tucked away in a bundle, squeezed into an aircraft for a night and a day. At the other end, registered, signed-for and unlocked, unpacked, seals broken, it’s confirmed by officials, checked, stamped and placed in a folder and delivered by a guy on a motorbike to an office in East Anglia. Smoothened out in the bright white electric light of a cold January morning (by a mature female hand probably, cosmetics, manicured nails and a silver ring), and there’s my signature, exposed for all to see; idiosyncratic squiggle recognised by law as being ‘me’ saying ‘yes’ I agree to the foregoing; I relinquish, renounce, I have read and understood the above-mentioned; box ticked, it’s all yours… sayonara, goodbye little house that sheltered me for 36 years, my small cave, hollow, burrow in the side of a hill. Everything there that was ‘me’ is fading away, even as we speak, already feels like I was never there. It’s like a death… all that remains is a memory of so many comings and goings, arrivals/departures, and in the 36 years I was there I never stayed longer than 3 months. There are only the journals left; words written in old notebooks, hard-to-read writing in ball-point pen etched into the surface of old yellowed paper:

OCTOBER 10, 2012: Today is the last day. Getting ready for the flight to Thailand… that familiar feeling of departures is in the air. This time tomorrow I will not be here. I’ll not be in a room that has split floor boards stacked in a cupboard next to the fireplace in the sharp coldness before the fire is lit. Yes, at least I’ll be away from this stunningly cold house where I have to wear a coat indoors, going around with kindling, paper and matches first thing in the morning, rushing to get the fire lit, the flames going and some heat started up. I notice a certain… vigour in everything that seems to be necessary to keep warm. Words come out in steamy puffs of breath, and a kind of gasping breathlessness: haaaaah! It’s cold.

There’s a fragrance of cleaning products around the house. Yesterday was a day of hoover and broom and the place is clean now, pity I’ll not be here to appreciate it. Everything gets a major clean-up a couple of days before I go. It’s always like this; then, on the last morning, I have breakfast, wash out my coffee cup, place it on the edge of the sink; wash my breakfast plate and leave it to dry in the dish-rack – it’ll have plenty time to dry…. The house is locked up, sealed like a time capsule until I return; into the taxi and I’m gone. The house remains as I left it, exactly like this, for countless days and nights and afternoons and early mornings, sun peeps in the window, nobody at home; all through winter, all through Spring and then one day I come back, open the door, break through the spider webs, trip over the mountain of junk mail and enter into this same moment enclosed here now. Same cup sitting on the edge of the sink, same plate in the dish-rack. And the whole house says: Hello, how’ve you been?

And now I know I’ll never be back there again. Stirring the ashes of a fire gone out, a life I think I wanted but never had – maybe I should have tried harder… maybe it was meant to be the way it is. Maybe I’ll go there one day with my Thai niece M – we’ll drive down that road and I’ll show her the house where Toong-Ting used to live. Slow down and stop, look at the old place for a moment and drive on. It’ll all be ancient history by then …

“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all…. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.” [Eugène Ionesco]

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house on a hill

Posted on January 14, 2015 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Chiang Mai: I used to have a house on a hill in England, so far away from here – it’s just a memory now. I had it for 36 years and it was sold just a few days ago… feels like a part of me has become extinct. Another part of me says, what’s gone is gone, let it go because I never really lived there. I’d stay there for a while, go away to Asia for a year, then come back; very long grass in the garden and generations of spiders.

Curiouser and curiouser it was part of a larger building owned by my Great Aunt Liz, a spinster, a recluse and she could read fortune-telling cards. Aunt Liz gave me the house by Deed of Gift in 1978, then became a bit distant and elderly and quite stubborn about allowing me to help.

I’d send Aunt Liz postcards from the places I’d been and bring back gifts but she became more and more remote. Our communication dwindled and in the end she hardly spoke to me. When I knocked on her door, she would open it on the chain, smile and say: ah, so you’re back. You’re looking well… then close the door. I’d hear the lock go: click, and I was left outside.

This is how it was, a kind of companionship, no more than that. She was probably disappointed that I wasn’t going to just come and settle down in that place and be what she’d imagined I’d be. But what could I do? Her decision to create a situation for me to have a ‘home’ next door to her was just so kind. There I was in the centre of rural life and the simple rumbling-along of things, but… never for very long, always moving on to somewhere else.

She died in 1989… I was in Japan and it was impossible to return. I negotiated with a relative who inherited Aunt Liz’s part of the house and to cut a long story short, eventually I owned the whole building. Contractors were hired to renovate the place, but it was two or three years before I managed to get back. The house on the hill had long since become a dream… years and years spent thinking and planning how I could go live there in the end, and just get old sitting by the fireside. These last few days I have revisited that same place in the midst of these rememberings, knowing that sometime soon I have to disengage from it – it’s not my house anymore it’s somebody else’s. People I don’t know walk around in these rooms where I used to be, sit by the fireside stare into the flames.

How long do memories remain? One time I was sitting there burning some old floorboards removed during the renovation of Aunt Liz’s bedroom. The wood was dry and old and good for kindling. They were also painted along the ends – she had a carpet in the middle and painted floor boards all round the edge. It all came back to me when I found it… stuck in the paint on a piece of the floorboard, a human hair – a single strand of hair, quite long. It got stuck there as she was applying the paint. I kept it for a while; would hold it between thumb and forefinger for a moment and pull the tension of it gently… still attached to the painted wood. Then one day I placed the wood piece in the flames and watched it burn away.

Everything is always in the process of ceasing to be, turning into ash. There’s a reluctance to leave, drawn towards the extinguished fire; something peaceful about the absence of everything…

As fire, through loss of fuel grows still [extinguished] in its own source, so thought by loss of activeness grows still in its own source… For by tranquility of thought one destroys good & evil karma. With tranquil soul, stayed on the Soul, one enjoys unending ease. [Maitri Upanishad 6.34]

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a world of lost passwords

Posted on November 16, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #102: Delhi: I’ve forgotten my password… fearing my papers might be stolen, password discovered and, of course this is how the whole paranoia of Identity Theft unfolds, I dreamed up some devious way of encrypting it then forgot how I did that. Now it’s gone… this elusive quality passwords have, they slip away secretly if you’re not holding on to them or buying into the created anxiety scenario that sells the product; insurance to cover the insurance to cover the unforeseen event; an imagined disaster. Rearrange the furniture of the mind; if you’re a Buddhist, having your identity stolen is no big deal because it’s an assumed identity anyway. There never was an actual ‘self’ in here, anatta, selflessness, and spiritual generosity. I’m pretty sure there’ll come a time when banks don’t offer loans to Buddhists anymore; they don’t meet the criteria, don’t have the credentials; that tenacity of clinging to ‘me’ and ‘mine’ is noticeably absent… Buddhists are not a safe bet, at any time they may close the agreement and happily give everything away. Banks don’t like freedom from suffering; enslavement to sensory input keeps them in business.

So I feel reasonably okay about losing my password, what’s gone is gone. It’s my Thai account and they will fix it up for me – I’ll be there in 2 weeks so I’ll be able to explain the situation; go and see the same bank teller lady I’ve been visiting over the years, who will look up when I come to her desk with my queue number ticket and a recognition comes into her face: You’ve forgotten your password again, right? It did bother me at first; aging, memory loss, an inability to retain passwords, and also that she might think it’s all a made-up story… how could anyone forget their password so often? And the real reason for coming to see her again and again is that I’d like it if we could get to know each other better… we can’t go on meeting like this.

But there’s a sadness in her eyes…. it’s been so long now, years pass between our meetings, I go away, forget my password and come back and see her again, she gives me a new password and we observe each other silently. She looks well, but older. It must be this job she does; working in a bank, selling security for finance that may or may not bring wealth or ruin, manipulating a hypothetical danger… unwholesome livelihood, hovering always on the edge of anxiety. Even now I can see the lock-down procedures starting in my head – falling into the trap of believing it’s real. Let it go, let it go.

It’s a death, it’s gone, my password dwells now in the world of lost passwords where there’s no urgency about who is who or what or which object belongs to who or whom and the things we cling to, the clings we thing to, have no adherence, glue dissolves, unsticks – structures collapse, fall… form and formlessness

“… like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel. Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon, like a carousel that’s turning, running rings around the moon. Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face, and the world is like an apple whirling silently in space – like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.” [The Windmills of Your Mind, 1968]

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Photo: Jiab’s visit to the Southernmost tip of Kerala looking out towards Sri Lanka

transparency

Posted on November 8, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#101: Bangkok Suwannabhume Airport: Looking out from the interior of this coffee shop into another interior; the glittering glass-paneled B concourse, and through that glass window to what’s out there; blue sky, a concrete horizon and planes taking off. I am contained in a transparent interior, inside a larger interior, contained in a reality construct, the steel and glass of this moment. It’s the same place I was in last time, and the time before that (the ‘Mango Tree’ coffee shop, near gates B1-B6, if you’re ever in this neck of the woods). We started coming here a year ago and Jiab comes when she’s travelling on her own… sends me phone-pics of fruity drinks and ice creams she consumes after the photo is taken. This is my departure lounge; the Delhi flight leaves from this coffee shop, rather than gate C5, which is simply the entrance to the plane. A kind of applied personification in an airport vastness, anonymity and incidental eye contact with a few individuals. I see their birth, their death, their merging in a sea of people all on the way to/from somewhere else… going or coming. We’re all just passing through.

Long columns of us waiting to be X-rayed, instructed and directed by officials guiding us into and out of security portals like water passes through rocks and stones in a continuous flowing stream. No resistance to it… the coldness of regulations; a physical sensation in a body that’s somehow become transparent. I notice how the energy feels rather than how I can ‘be’ negatively energized by it. Everything is so much not what we think it is, there can’t be any assumptions; just letting it take place and being okay about it is enough. Disengage from thinking it should be something other than what it is, and everything that’s currently bothering me about that disappears for a moment – long enough to be able to see it’s possible to let go of all the shoulds and shouldn’ts completely… the peace that’s in that.

Surveillance cameras protrude into the space I’m in and suck out all data, send it to a room containing video screens, dark and gloomy, where security people with bulged-out eyes scan the images of the crowd, zoom-in, zoom-out. I feel I’m being looked at, studied… I’ve just been jostled slightly, pockets rifled. I can’t see them but I know they’re there. This whole thing is a performance, there’s a sudden urge to do a song-and-dance act. Maybe it’s a more serious drama production; Japanese Kuroko stagehands, dressed in black, appear on stage with the actors and rearrange the scene as the play is going on. They’re there for everyone to see but become invisible. The mystery of how we can be unaware of things in plain sight – mesmerized by politicians, illusionists’ sleight-of-hand; everybody acting out the story of their lives without questioning it, improvised dialogue according to the karma of causes and conditions.

Coming near to the end… the last camera, passport stamp, thump! And I’m suddenly through the barrier, blinded by the lights of the glitzy duty-free, gold Rolexes, impossible jewelry and stumbling towards my place in the coffee shop. Waiting for the flight to be called, the great leap up into the sky. A heightened feeling, a quickening, I know all this is happening – mindful alertness, awareness creates an awareness, aware that it is aware…

“The vastness created these human circuitries in order to have an experience of itself out of itself that it couldn’t have without them.” [Suzanne Segal, Collision with the Infinite]

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