Truths: Confused, Revealed or Forgotten?
Truths confused
Retirement offers ample time to focus on one’s bearings.
On waking, my attention tends towards the structural bearings: the state of my natural and prosthetic joints.
But by evening, my thoughts often question where exactly I am.
A news item catches my eye:
Man rescued after sailing blunder
A lost sailor had to be rescued after running out of fuel circling a small island when he thought he was sailing around the UK coast.
With only a road map for directions, he set off on the river Medway, from Gillingham, and headed for Southampton.
But the coastguard said the man had ended up travelling around the Isle of Sheppey. A spokesman said “This guy had run aground after running out of fuel. He was attempting to travel around the UK from Medway to Southampton and somehow lost his bearings and ended up travelling around the Isle of Sheppey. He didn’t have the usual navigation charts or maritime equipment.”
The man told the rescue team he had been keeping the coastline to his right and had ended up sailing in circles around Sheppey. After the coastguards gave him advice on fuel usage, it is understood the man later attempted to continue his journey.
Published: 2010/04/28 01:55:28 GMT © BBC MMX
The story is amusing and instructive.
Am I boldly setting out to experience life’s myriad wonders?
Or, wasting opportunity and energy, confined in the tight circumnavigation of habit?
Truths revealed?
Truths forgotten?
Reliable charts? Accurate navigation equipment? Ready for stormy weather?
Who am I kidding?!
(Both cartoons from this month’s editions of The New Yorker)
Spiritual Masala
Here spirituality is a religious ratatouille:
The recipe includes Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism, Judaism and Zoroastrianism.
Each providing
Colour
St Sebastian's Day Festival
Cochin Synagogue
Jain Temple
Culture
Preparing for Kathakali dance
Christian Festival
Curiosity
Commerce
Temple souvenirs
Temple traders
Conversation
Comfort
And
The Gentle Arts of Woodwork
The monsoon is still at least a month away but evening rains have started.
With the rains come ever-increasing numbers of mosquitoes.
Insect repellents work well for evening excursions but leave you feeling uncomfortably warm and sticky.
When I close the door at dusk
The mosquitoes migrate instead through the louvre-shuttered windows.
The problem does not unduly concern me but overseas guests are cruelly targeted when they stay. My sister never complains but, on leaving India, often looks in need of an urgent dermatological opinion.
I seek advice.
My carpenter, who aptly lives in the local village of Nazareth, almost disappointingly, is named is Sebastian.
He suggests constructing fitted mesh screens across the windows and doors.
Sebastian sends his men. Their tools are minimal, their skills impressive.
No work bench or rulers are used.
Most is done by hand
And the wood is held by a bare foot,
The older craftsman teaching his pupil.
Some window shapes are simple to frame and mesh.
Others, more tricky.
Soon the project is more than half completed and the unwelcome mosquitoes noticeably fewer in numbers.
________________
But outside, a different sort of carpentry is happening.
My house-boy urgently calls: “Papa, please you come!”
In the empty plot across the lane, beyond the wall and cables, a man is perched on a tree.
High on the tree.
The tree top has been cut through and folds over before falling.
The rest of the trunk soon follows. After a few hours all the trees in the plot have gone.
I am left to ponder future developments.
What will I face when I look out from the door?
Redefining the Question
I receive the New Yorker regularly.
It is a kind gift from my younger son.
This month I particularly enjoyed a writer’s account of his return to the USA after many years abroad.
The following section was especially intriguing.
Most Chinese were intensely curious about foreign life, and they liked to ask certain questions. What time is it there? How many children are you allowed to have? How much is a plane ticket back?
People tended to have extreme views of the U.S., both positive and negative, and they became fixated on fantastic details that they had heard. Are American farmers so rich that they use airplanes to plant their crops? Is it true that when elderly parents eat with their adult children the kids give them a bill for the meal, because they aren’t as close as Chinese families? When I taught at a college, a student names Sean wrote in an essay:
I know that persons in America can possess guns from some books and films. I don’t know whether it is true….I know that beggars must have bulletproof vest from a book. Is it true? There is a saying about America. If you want to go to heaven, go to America; if you want to go to hell, go to America.
It was hard to respond to such combinations of truth and exaggeration. In the early years, it frustrated me, because without any context I couldn’t convey a more nuanced perspective. But eventually I realised that the conversations weren’t strictly about me, or even about my home country. In China, I came to think of the United States as essentially imaginary: it was being created in people’s minds, and in that sense it was more personal for them than it was for me. The questions reflected Chinese interests, dreams, and fears – even when people discussed America, the conversation was partly about their own home.
Go West, Scenes from an American homecoming.
Peter Hessler, The New Yorker. April 19, 2010.*
My recent trip to the USA, despite many previous visits, reflected this pattern of being conditioned by what was familiar, rather than objectively seeing a different society and culture.
As Vedic Hindu philosophy first suggested and modern physics agrees:
The observer, the observed and the process of observation are intimately bound.
When we think of, or question, the unfamiliar what we articulate is based on what we have seen before.
But our questions have value.
They provide insight into what motivates or worries the observer.
When ever we examine national character, religion, history or even alien life forms, we project our fears or required certainties, often attempting to reinforce existing judgements.
We rarely wish to explore beyond this safety zone.
Like a newspaper with its own agenda, the mind exercises censorship.
By first defining the questions, awkward observations can be kept at bay.
It seems impossible to see beyond the shadows on the wall.
All that catches my eye is conditioned by previous reflections.
My desires and fears are caught in the picture
If I am a camera, that camera casts its own shadow.
*Sadly, Peter Hessler’s excellent and entertaining article is only available on-line to subscribers of The New Yorker.
The Four Horsemen and Me
The previous two postings were an attempt to beguilingly dangle my size 44 chappaled feet out from the restriction of electronic purdah.
“For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones burned as an hearth. My heart is smitten and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread. By reason of the sound of my groaning, my bones cleave to my skin. I am like a pelican on the wilderness, I am like an owl of the desert. I watch and as am a sparrow, alone upon the roof.”
Well, maybe not exactly.
Whilst I travelled in the States, four horsemen of the apocalypse briefly visited my home and body.
They left business cards.
In their wake, strong tropical storms had brought down trees, cables and my defences.
Shaji. Dalila & Sumant, my trusty staff, have overseen the slow reopening of communication channels between myself and my public.
The internet cable is now intact; the wi-fi router again controls local airspace; the mobile phone is accepting at least some of my text messages.
Although the digital camera may still languish in a technician’s workshop; its screen perpetually frozen on New Mexican vistas; my chest now produces only moderate volumes of green sputum – the club class freebie offered to frequent fliers with sufficient air-miles.
Shaji, Dalila and Sumant respond to my indisposition with well rehearsed efficiency. My agent was consulted for advice on how to interpret the ka-ka entrails; physicians’ opinions, western, ayurvedic and “homoepathic”, were offered but declined.
I start myself on anti-pyretics and the antibiotics that happen to be at hand – more suitable for Dengue or diarrhoea than a chest infection – but broad-spectrum and surprisingly efficacious.
Following some days of semi-hibernation, a diminishingly productive cough, and indifferent appetites, I arise, sleek and slim-lined, renewed and reinvigorated. Not, perhaps, a butterfly of tropical exotica, but firing on three cylinders and in the mood for a malabar fish curry.
From Shadow To Light
For the south Indian tropics, there is no Spring.
The seasons are marked instead by the arrival and departure of monsoon storms.
In the more temperate climes of New Mexico, winter has reduced the trees
To stark architectural forms.
The transition from short days
Long shadows
And meshed skies
To lengthening light
And nature’s gentle reawakening
Brings relief and delight.
Returning to New York
I find it transformed to a City of Blossoms
Scents and Shadows
White blossom and caged shadow.
But despite the beauty of Spring and sweet melancholy of Autumn, just a few days of winter is enough to remind me why I choose to live in the lush and sultry sunlight of Malabar.
A Trick of the Light.
Three weeks in the New World:
First celebrating my son’s wedding in Manhattan
Then gently relaxing with family in New Mexico
The spring light and warmth has coaxed out new foliage from the trees of Central Park
And etiolated limbs from New Yorkers, tired of winter.
In New Mexico, most cottonwoods remain bare.
The waxing light of spring brings new reflections:
Cubist reflections of the high-rise city;
Quieter reflections of New Mexico.
But even in the midst of nature’s reflections
The human hand
Is never far away.
