"Man's happiness is not in freedom, but in acceptance of a duty" Andre Gide.
After 4 days in Katmandu, I decide that I have had enough of the futility of city life. I don't like cities any longer. Whether I am in Europe, in America or Asia, a city is still a city. Unless I have something to do in the city, such as work, business, or relations to meet, the thing I look for in a city is a park, a way out of the derision of human senseless activity. The Asian city is just even more filthy than the technological age cities. With piles of garbage rotting in the sun, lower castes darkened skinned people going through it bare foot. With it's mutilated dogs and half their face missing, eyes hanging out of their sockets, kids of a couple years old lying in the street on cardboard, already abandonned by all, pilling with flies as the pile of garbage next to it does. The beggars grabbing your arms, as a sea of never ending forgotten humans. Forgotten by all, a vapid look in their face, with nothing left in them that we could call human. Yet, this vapidity is still human, so terrifyingly human that we dont want to recognize ourselves in these racked forms of life. It is part of us as well, abandonned, left alone to die as a piece of garbage.
The bars playing the same few Occidental songs over and over again. A set of Pink Floyd songs, Green Day, Mexican Salsa, Gotan Project, mixed with fuzzed indian jazz, and the typical nepalese sound of high pitched ting ting ting. The tourists partying from bar to meat market, the same as in any other city of the world. All in a dusty and car horns filled pulpable air. Temples everywhere, doing nothing to me, all falling apart, as wearing the signs of time as invisible coat. All is crumbling in this walls, everyone is praying and doing pujas (religious offerings to the gods). The temples worshipped by humans and pigeons alike. With money, incense and drops of shit, we worship stones and carved deities.
The best thing I saw in Katmandu, was amazing Tankas. With a more modern approach, as opposed to stricly ruled by monastic rules of unothorized expression, the Katmandu tankas had a breathe of fresh air painted through them. A wonderful mix of imagined background, of new colors and even new godly scenarios. My periods starting, not helping my emotional state, I felt being crushed from outside, inwards, only to be thrown back out into the streets filled with shops after shops. Forms and colors all could be reduced to about 10 shops, but in cities they are mutliplied by hundreds and thousands, as in a game of mirors, each reflecting
each other's desires.
After sitting long enough in my simple Thamel room, I get a bus ticket for North India. The next day, departure time, there is a strike, which means no bus. I take an even simpler room behind the bus station, floor covered in plastic red and grey mosaic pattern. Using my day, I sit on the wooden bed reading St Exupery Par Lui Meme, an analizing of the french writer and aviator who wrote the Little Prince. I discover the latent Humanist in me, as well as the term "Spiritual existential". A term which I did not know actually existed in philosophy, applied to Plato, Kierkegaard, Augustin and others. A term with which I used to define myself as a kid, in the private notebooks where I scribbled my thoughts. It conforts me to know that I wasn't just making terms up. I eat a thali (the eternal national dish of rice and bean soup + curry) in the dining room with a few other nepalese. The TV is on, playing a slap stick joke sort of comedy. I feel back in the begining of tv times, when there was no words, only pies in the face and funny faces. Who needs dialogue when you eat with your fingers after all...
"Don't be afraid to give up the good, to go for the Great" is written on one of the typical nepalese posters on the wall. Typed on top of images of Switzerland (Nepalese people often comparing their mountains to Switzerland), of fat and white babies pointing to luxurious houses. The posters being found in most cheap places, gives a synthetized feel to the place, as each of the images are digitaly worked out, even 3d like at times, with added light effects and other cheap graphic tricks, pleasing any untrained eye in the computer graphics departements. I am reminded of the times working as a lab assistant in computer classes, and looking at begining students works, reminded of my own early work, with the instant plastic wrappings, lights and other flashy options. The day after, in my little room, an illumination comes. What do "I" want? I want and need peace and quiet. I want to be able to hear myself think, I want to relax my head.
Funnily enough, during the meditation of the day before, that was also the answer I had gotten. Yet I had rebelled against my own advise and had gotten the ticket for North India.
I go to the near by bus station, cancel my ticket, get fully reembursed and purchase a new one for Pokhara. I know that 7 hrs away from this pit hole of a mess, I can find peace.
On the bus, the voice of the monk come back in my head: "you'll be back in 2 weeks!!". It only took me 5 days, he was almost right.
Back in Pokhara, after 7 hours of repleneshing myself with green mountains never ending, as far as the eye can go, green green, and more hills. Fogg and rain giving the green a darker color, even deeper green. Full of dark yellows. As the bus goes deeper in the mountains, i can finally hear myself again, I am here, in the bus, present and sitting. A sense of "I" as ellusive as it might be is back. As soon as i see the rice field, the women in traditional outfits working in them, I feel closer to any type of so called spirituality than when I sit in pigeon shit covered temple walls. Even, if I know this is my own choice, for really spirit sits in everything, yet it is my choice.
"Spirit is matter" says Julian, a polish applied mathematics teacher during some of the only interesting conversations I had during this Katmandu stay. Julian was just coming back from giving a conference on Artificial Intelligence in Lhassa. I met him at the Monkey Temple. We spent 2 days discussing things. AI, consciousness and the problems in programing an esthethic sense into the machine. Julian argues that beauty exists in itself, which I have to disagree with. "We create beauty" I say, "as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder". We discuss the future of AI, and how an AI might react to a human intelligence, of the Universe, as he informed me of some of the latest advances in theoretical physics, the Solitude Wave theory, and other fun subject matters. I enjoyed those couple days of discussion, as we walked from monasteries on top of mountains, back to the noise of the city center. Invited by a monk for a cup of tibetan tea as the kids in the courtyard were repeating their classes, dressed in that wonderful burgandy red that is the tibetan tradition, Julian mentions the similarities between such kids being grown up in enterely hermetic and closed system, focused onto themselves and the inside world, and the modern kids of the Entertainment society, growing up in games, all inside their own selves.
"Matter IS spirit. All is spirit" Julian echos as I hear the tractors passing by behind me, as I sit in the modern world of the internet, while the same farming techniques are still being applied in the surrounding rice fields, the water buffalos still being the perfect medium for working the fields. I decided not to stay at the buddhist center, as I wanted to sit and reflect alone. Really alone. One of the attraction of religions is that they offer a sort of cocoon, a confortable blanket of beliefs to wrap around the self, making it less alone. It is one of their great appeals, they take away some of the individual burden of the individual, replacing it by a set of theories.
So, I take a room at a little familial guest house, right across from my favorite chai shop. Finishing The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by the popular Japanese author Murakami, I wake up and have my morning pot of chai in company of Piet the painter. Every morning he reads me the new chapter of his book, and we discuss it. The day passes in the moonsoon weather, i read and eat samosas. I can relax. Piet tells me that I am a philosopher, that I should write, that it'd be sad not to share the thoughts in my head. I reply calmly that I know, yes I know those things. I reply that I do write, I have been writing since a kid, painting walls and various white pages, I know.
Maybe one day I will organize those spread out pieces of mind, edit them, rewrite them, cristalize them into a concrete form, easy to distribute.
Maybe I won't.
For now, I am happy being in a place where nothing happens. In a place where life is still the same as hundreds of years ago, except for electricity and the tourists coming by to enjoy the surrounding trekkings. Nothing has changed in the people, nothing happens here. I enjoy peeling aways the first impressions and feeling what passing tourists will never see. What the passing tourist sees is a mask of being relaxed of the locals "they're so cool and chill" they notice. But really, the people seem more resigned than anything else, a sort of deep sadness underneath it all, a profound acceptance of life as it is here. Between boredom and emptiness, they pass the days, one after the next, in a sort of accepted resignation. Go somewhere else? How and where? And why? They only hear of the outside world by passing strangers, they see images, but really.... go where? Underneath the chill masks, there are alcohol problems, wife beating problems, money problems. The kids are bored, the old just sit, nothing happens... The kids want bikes, they want white girlfriends who represent keys to the synthetized posters on the walls. The old bought land when they had any income, land to grow some food, land
for the future generations. Now, the kids just want bikes, they dont want to pay for the marriage fee anylonger, they get bitten by the western ways one after the other.
A bike is what they want, no more land for corn, just a bike and easy girls. They want things easy, as the west wants to cure it all with a pill or a click.
If only they knew that the western world is as empty as theirs, just more synthetized, like in the posters, anesthezised, bleached out and printed on adds for Kalvin Klein with ken and Barbie on it. If only they knew that Ken and Barbie are really dead empty shells. If only they knew the emptiness and depression of many in the west, if only they knew, but they dont, only seing the posters on the walls, only
dreaming of a greener green, dreaming of plastic bonzai trees.
In this atmosphere of nepalese wanna be Barbies and Kens, I can take some time to think of my next move. I can go back to Europe, and see what to do from there. I can stay around or in India and enjoy the life on this side of the chow mein noodle, taking the job offer in Arambold or doing more work with the Tibetan community, eventually starting a business. I can sit somewhere and write a book, I can go somewhere and decide to make a family. I have many choices, and that is not always the easiest choice to make. But no matter what we do, it is always a choice, even if really we each have a bit of Kens and Barbies in us
For now, I'll go swim in the lake, in it's deep green water, surrounded by mountains and water lotuses. Lay on my back and watch the blue blue sky with it's perfectly defined clouds passing by, as so many shapes in the sky. Then, I'll read more of the Wind Up Bird chronicle by Murakami Haruki, to enjoy words and their ever changing labirynth worlds.
A world in which all is alive, moving and evolving.
A world I love, a world of Art, Life and Wanders.
Peace, love and momos to all of you out there
Photos from Katmandu.
