the writing life

it is the same everywhere. the forests are under assault. the last remotenesses crumble.

and what is this constant feed of information doing to me? doing to you?

new types of conceptual filters... (that is why so much of history seems so insane; seen through their conceptual filters at the time, it made sense.... perhaps...) new types of conceptual filters for a new type of world. 

the ability to ignore has never been so important.

writing leads to discoveries, and 'words build bridges into unexplored regions'[quote a. hitler] (both for the reader and the writer, the speaker and the listener), apart from its ability to bring pleasure, wonder or emotion to whoever should read it.

and then why disvalue it so much? that with all this staring into glowing rectangles, not even an hour, a stingy half-an-hour given to the art? cause 'i practised by art til i'm blue in the face, man...' ('my heart's on the plate...') [roots manuva, chin high]

it's still a typewriter. with a few little extras. don't forget your origins.

Lost in La Mancha again

Enter The Dragon. Later, Enter Another

By Lavie Tidhar

 

Back again and then

[panic stalks even the bare hills here
it never quite leaves me]

Lazy never continued the story he began with 'The Return', below...

It was tapped out in the freezing cold glorious glittering sun and crystal sky Kabul dawn (preternaturally clear, for one morning the smog and smoke has blown away and the far high mountains are visible clad in snow) shivering in the office, twisted and drunk and two days and nights sleepless through three countries.

The dynamics of the situation are...

Well.

Stay tuned. Maintain radio contact. Keep a low profile. Practise all relevant anti-surveillance techniques. Stay calm, and never admit to anything. Don't worry, we will meet again.

"خانه دوست كجاست؟" در فلق بود كه پرسيد سوار.
آسمان مكثي كرد.
رهگذر شاخه نوري كه به لب داشت به تاريكي شن‌ها بخشيد
و به انگشت نشان داد سپيداري و گفت:


"نرسيده به درخت،
كوچه باغي است كه از خواب خدا سبزتر است
و در آن عشق به اندازه پرهاي صداقت آبي است
مي‌روي تا ته آن كوچه كه از پشت بلوغ، سر به در مي‌آرد،
پس به سمت گل تنهايي مي‌پيچي،
دو قدم مانده به گل،
پاي فواره جاويد اساطير زمين مي‌ماني
و تو را ترسي شفاف فرا مي‌گيرد.
در صميميت سيال فضا، خش‌خشي مي‌شنوي:
كودكي مي‌بيني
رفته از كاج بلندي بالا، جوجه بردارد از لانه نور
و از او مي‌پرسي
خانه دوست كجاست."

“Where is the friend’s house?” asked the horseman just at dawn.
The heavens paused.
A wayfarer took the bright branch from his lips,
conferred it on the darkness of the sands,
pointed with his finger to a poplar tree and said,
“Just before that tree
there is a garden path greener than God’s dreams.
In it there is love as wide as the blue wings of true friendship.
You go on to the end of the path that takes up again
just beyond maturity,
then turn toward the flower of loneliness.
Two steps before the flower,
stop at the eternal fountain of earthly myth.
There a transparent terror will seize you,
and in the sincerity of the streaming heavens
you will hear a rustling.
High up in a pine tree,
you will see a child
who will lift a chick out of a nest of light.
Ask him,
“Where is the friend’s house?”

"Well, wishing you godspeed..."

"Godspeed? What speed is that?"

"Oh, about 120 mph or so..."

(Approximately the terminal velocity of a human body in free-fall)

oh dear, blogger has screwed up my lovely template somehow while updating to this new interface. both interface and template served me perfectly well for years and years now, who knows what is going on...

in haste... but realgem is still here!

this reality thing still feels like a cutting knife, sometimes, with nothing to hide behind

The Return

for many of us, all roads have led to norway.


that is an oblique tangent on which to start the story.


tomorrow: remember to buy soap, a good knife, some alprazolam, and a surge-protected 4-way extension lead.


hahahahahhahaa!


let’s start with something more sickly, sickly familiar, then. waking up at 0600 after a horrible sleepless night in deep dark, still distinctly withdrawally, forcing myself out into the pre-dawn black chill of winter london with nothing, not even a valium to take the edge off...


no, wait a second, we’ve heard this one before. i think.


some of the parameters are different, though. i would like to think.


the extraction operation begins with 2 large cans of monster energy drink, a quarter of vodka, and finishing off the thai and the moroccan in between bursts of frantic packing, phoning, organising, tying up loose ends in a desperate rushed fumble.


fast forward 28 hours and four time zones or so in a blur. (i get the emergency exit seat on the emirates B777-300, giving me all the leg-room, and a pretty and chatty slovakian air hostess sitting opposite me for take-off, before she gets up to keep the passengers fed and me supplied with magical endless absolut miniature bottles.)


dubai. i am sitting in a bar half-way up a reproduction in pale yellowish stone of the great pyramid - complete with giant statues, hieroglyphs and glittering pharaonic gold - only better, because it has terraces with palm-shaded multi-level swimming pools with swim-up bars set into the side. fans of peacock feathers wave mechanically overhead to stir the cool air and eddies of cigarette smoke inside.


i am drinking what turns out to be one of several hideously over-priced vodka tonics. i haven’t slept, and my foot still taps convulsively occasionally. i am waiting for a visa. nervously. i wonder if they will take notice at the consulate that i have travelled many times before to afghanistan, but on a different nationality passport. whether they found it curious that i ticked the box saying i had never applied for an afghan visa before but addressed the clerk in dari.


...


[to be continued. we are another 28 hours along now, and despite my best efforts to bludgeon my consciousness into a blissful coma, still sleep has continued to elude me]

sorry i haven't been writing.

a lot of the parameters have changed.

i'm trying to find the big story

others are looking for it too

(if you are browsing idly for something interesting to read, the labels feature might be instructive as to what this has all been about)

oh, who knows about anything

this is a serious document

today, I met a librarian of jihad

He holds him with his skinny hand,
"There was a ship," quoth he.
'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

Chief Mess Officer's log:

Adrift off Looe, gentle swell. Crackle of West Country voices over the VHF. Attempting to cook a meal for three crew on gently rocking small gas stove. Gentle breaths of breeze strong enough to blow out a small flame but not strong enough to sail under.

"Food will be ready in three-and-a-half or seven minutes exactly."

"In three-and-a-half or seven minutes exactly?"

"It's the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. While the lid is on, the notional food inside exists in a state of quantum uncertainty. It is only when I remove the lid that the quantum waveform collapses into a definite state..."

We have been becalmed out here all day and are probably delirious with hunger and sun.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

"Oh shit! I forgot to put in the Higgs bosons! They could ripple back through time to before when I started cooking, and cooking time might increase to theoretical infinity. We might be stuck in a quantum time loop, just like in Dr Who... We're really fucked now..."

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

"Oh good. I have removed the lid, and the rice has collapsed into a... into a 'Mexican risotto-type thing' quantum state. I have hereby prepared a delicious meal, and disproved all that pseudo-scientific gibber in Dr Who as well. As Chief Mess Officer, it is naturally within my mandate to conduct physics experiments on the gas stove."

Lazy, now dubbed 'Whippet', is set to running errands around in the dinghy, when he can spare the time from putting out nets surreptitiously for mullet and wow, jackpot, even bass...

Halfway across Falmouth harbour he notices the water in the boat is almost up to knee-level and there is definitely more of it than there was. Then the outboard sputters and dies.

His unfortunate passenger is set to bailing frantically while he phones shore. "Um... is there a bung missing here that you forgot to tell me about?" - "No." - "Well, we're shipping water awfully fast. Did Wayne fill the petrol up like he said he would when he borrowed it last time?" - "Um, I don't know. Quite possibly not, knowing him..." There is laughter at the other end of the line as he rings off.

The water is about an inch from the gunwales. Lazy looks up, and a brilliant double rainbow has appeared, almost incandescent across a moody, glowering sky.

And God said:"This is the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you,
and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. It shall be, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow shall be seen in the cloud; and I will remember My covenant which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. (Genesis 9:12-15)

He sighs heavily, gets the oars out, and sets to rowing, hard. His passenger is bailing - a panicking man with a bucket is better than any pump when the water's rising - and we reach the mud, thank God it's low tide, just in time.

Lazy's passenger stalks off in a rage, convinced this was an incredibly unfunny practical joke played on them by "Captain Blight", and he is left alone with a heavy swamped boat and no outboard, and mystified and worried about the source of the leak. Surely he hasn't somehow accidentally holed the boat that Captain Blight borrowed from the old gentleman? No, that's impossible.

There is a little bit of petrol in a bottle marked 'meths' under the sail in the dinghy. Lazy fills the outboard and shoves the boat off, prays and starts the outboard. Holding the tiller with one hand and working the boatpump with the other, he heads back across the harbour and into the cove and creek.

He just makes it to the other side, ramming the boat into the low-tide mud shore, again with the water lapping at an inch from the rail, pulls her ashore, drags her up dry. Water jets out of a little hole aft where the bung is missing.

Captain Blight is kind enough to provide dry clothes and sherry.

"...and as we were there with a dead outboard, sinking, I was thinking..."

"You were thinking: 'It's not my fault!' " interrupts Captain Blight, laughing.

"...I looked at the sky, and there was this double rainbow, and I thought, well, if I'm going down, at least it's a beautiful day for it."

A near-disaster averted. I am pleased to note that Lazy seemed to enjoy every minute of it, but I am not so sure about his unfortunate passenger.

It is utterly mystifying why it all should have happened in the first place. Bungs aren't supposed to just fall out as there is water pressure keeping them in.

"I suspect..." I am saying later.

"You suspect skulduggery. You suspect - Wayneduggery," says the malung, who won't talk to Lazy any more, also due to a later boat-related incident.

ستاروں سے آگے جہاں اور بھی ہیں
ابھی عشق کے امتحاں اور بھی ہیں
تہی زندگی سے نہیں یہ فضائیں
یہاں سینکڑوں کارواں اور بھی ہیں
قناعت نہ کر عالمِ رنگ و بُو پر
چمن اور بھی، آشیاں اور بھی ہیں
اگر کھو گیا اک نشیمن تو کیا غم
مقاماتِ آہ و فغاں اور بھی ہیں
تو شاہیں ہے ، پرواز ہے کام تیرا
ترے شامنے آسماں اور بھی ہیں
اسی روز و شب میں الجھ کر نہ رہ جا
کہ تیرے زمان و مکاں اور بھی ہیں
گئے دن کہ تنہا تھا میں انجمن میں
یہاں اب مرے رازداں اور بھی ہیں 

Sitaron se aage jahan aur bhi hain
Abhi ishq ke imtehan aur bhi hain
Tahi zindagi se nahin ye fizayen
Yahan siakdon karwaan aur bhi hain
Khana’at na kar aalam-e-rang-o-bu par
Chaman aur bhi aashiyaan aur bhi hain
Agar kho gaya ek nasheman to kya ghum
Maqmat-e-aah-o-fughaan aur bhi hain
Tu shaheen hai parvwaaz hai kaam tera
Tere saamne aasmaan aur bhi hain
Isi roz-o-shab main ulajh kar na rah ja
Ke tere zameen par makaan aur bhi hain
Gaye din ke tanha tha main anjuman mein
Yahaan ab mere raazdaan aur bhi hain

Beyond the stars there are worlds more
Our quest yet has more tests to pass
This existence alone does not matter
There are boundless journeys more
Do not rest on what you have
There are paradises more to explore
Why worry if you have lost one abode
There are a million addresses to claim
You are the falcon, your passion is flight
And you have skies more to transcend
Lose not yourself in the cycle of days and nights
Within your reach are feats even more
Gone is the day when I was lonesome in the crowd
Today those who resonate my thoughts are more

Mohammed Iqbal 
Naujawaan ke Naam, Bal-e-Jibraeel, 1908

Sharp metallic percussion of dropping scattering coins. They walked ostentatiously, spilling spare change all over the wet rainbow marble pavements.

Faded ideas to take to heaven

[redacted]

Chirag-i-Dair

Said I one night to a pristine seer
(Who knew the secrets of whirling time)
"Sir, you well perceive
That goodness and faith,
Fidelity and love
Have all departed from this sorry land
Father and son are at each other's throat;
Brother fights brother, Unity and federation are undermined
Despite all these ominous signs,
Why has not Doomsday come?
Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?
The hoary old man of lucent ken
Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled
"The Architect", he said, "is fond of this edifice
Because of which there is color in life; He
Would not like it to perish and fall."

(Mirza Ghalib, Benares, 1827)

Some velvet morning when I'm straight...

Sale demonios

"The sick is in your head," said Viktor. Dismissively.
"Yes, and so is everything else. You're in my head, Viktor. Get out!"

i sit here trying to think myself into the head that brought you all these words

"Words build bridges into unexplored regions."

Adolf Hitler

nostalgia

Nature abhors a vacuum

And the vacuum, well, it abhors nature

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

(Bhagavad Gita - famously quoted by Oppenheimer on witnessing the first atomic test explosion)

He who is free from the notion of Ego, whose intellect is unattached, though he annihilating all the worlds, he slayeth not, nor is he bound by the results of his actions.

(Bhagavad Gita)

Benares

The City of Light.

They may be funeral pyres burning day and night, but it's still the city of lights.

Burning means learning
Cremation is education

Jai Kali Maa

Until 1837, every Friday a boy was sacrificed at the big Kali temple in Calcutta. The Kali-worshiping Thuggee strangled and buried as sacrifices their victims with lead-weighted yellow kerchiefs.

In the Kali temple beside Manikarnika Ghat in Benares where the funeral pyres burn fierce day and night one can openly buy brown sugar and opium and white heroin.

All this we know.

But is Kali a dark goddess?

Still in the picture here!

I snipped the stitches from my head wound with nail-clippers and drenched everything in Dettol.

Most indicators better at the moment.

Is it better to just surrender to fate or is it possible to fight it?

"You had learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something."

(George Bernard Shaw)

There is a strange convoluted story that this thought encapsulates. I will tell it later.

I lost all sorts of things, including my mind. Hope that no one ever maliciously spikes your drink with datura (deliriant hallucinogen of nightmares). You will naturally wake up several days later on some temple steps overlooking the Ganges, totally cleaned out. Maybe with luck you will still have your clothes. With luck you will not have taken a vicious blow from a steel bar across your head laying it open to the skull, and have a vague memory of cotton thread stitches at Marwari, the people's hospital, the sensation of the needle going through your flesh and feeling no pain at all. Strange flashes of huddling in the night, naked in a Kali temple, talking to faces of entities floating inside the walls. No memory at all of being treated like a street lunatic or of being taken in by a compassionate rickshaw driver and given brown sugar as a tranquiliser.

These things you will discover later, after you wake up in a filthy room that you don't recognise, overlooking the sunrise over the river. Seemingly once again smoking filthy brown powder because there is a darkness that won't lift. Once again playing main suspect and chief investigator at the same time as you try to uncover where the missing days went.

If you are going to be an idiot like that, at least hope for chloral hydrate or Rohypnol, which are pretty good to knock someone out without the psychotic effects. But why spend the money when you can just grab a handful of datura from the garden?

Oh shit, and it's one of the oldest tricks in the book, I've heard it so many times before.

Everything happens for a reason.

Not necessarily a very good one though.

A month and it still rains. Everything is damp, clammy to the touch, and there is no way to dry it. The air is heavy with water even when the rain stops. Matches won't light. Clothes won't dry. Everything smells of mildew or rot. My lungs rot in my chest from breathing water.

enshrouded in monsoon cloud and never-ending drizzle. cocooned in mist.

take the high road.

now the cloud is below, and the mountain stretches upward, impossibly, forever. the road zig-zags up the mountainside in an impossible 20km traffic jam of churning mud, broken-down trucks, pouring waterfalls and choking smoke. from nowhere, pani puri men with trays on long spindly legs appear along the length of the snarling snake of traffic, like mushrooms from spores that lie dormant until just the right circumstances appear.

what if we are dead and this is the afterlife and we just don't know it yet?

the stench of psychosis in the early dawn
he stirs and wakes and moves a pawn

Flew via Kuwait which was a first. It hadn't occurred to me it was the main hub for Iraq. Next to the gate for the Delhi flight was a direct Washington flight that wasn't on the boards and monitors and didn't seem to be announced. It was full of State Department people and mercenaries or spooks whose cigarettes I smoked cause I had run out. Overhearing their conversations gave me a sort of chill to think crazy rednecks like this are trying to run another country.

It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when he awakens and quite reasonably says to himself: "I will never play The Dane." When that moment comes, one's ambition ceases...

That would be Uncle Monty in Withnail & I.

I act out that Hamlet to-be-or-not-to-be drama every goddamn day...

What, you don't?

another allegorical sunset photo or something

"so many anyways"

Catching bullets with my teeth

Green hills and enemies
These things they make us sentimental inside
Your words are gelignite
Or just another sentimental aside...

Don't know what to do next?

Keep breathing.

Breathing is very important.

"The soul is dyed the colour of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny — it is the light that guides your way."

Heraclitus

"Detox or Die"

This is the original BBC documentary about David Graham Scott taking ibogaine to cure his long-term heroin and methadone addiction, mentioned in these pages before. The fact is, I had never actually seen it, or bothered or maybe not wanted to watch it. It's only now that I see what Ed Conn, who talked me through the ibogaine space on the phone, looks like. On camera, at least. I actually only watched it after David posted it on Ed Conn's Facebook (cf. earlier post on Facebook friends I've never met - Edward is another one I would never turn away from my door.)

I recognise many things about the experience, as he describes it and films himself. I can tell where he is. It is odd I should never have watched it before. I knew about it, we published an interview with David Graham Scott, I researched everything about ibogaine back then when I was put in touch with someone who could get me some, but I never watched this before. It is really very good.

Four Lions

One thing I will say about that movie is that it would never have been made in the US. They couldn't make a comedy about al-Qaeda terrorism.

But it has moments of high comic genius, like the bit with the snipers firing at the charity marathon with runners in costume. -This is control. The target is a bear. -I see a bear. Clear to fire? -Yes, engage the bear. (The bear falls.) -No, that's a wookie! -Is a wookie a bear? -Negative, a wookie is not a bear. -I took out the bear. -That wasn't a bear, it was a wookie! Wait, there's the Honey Monster. Control, is the Honey Monster a bear?

Or when armed cops burst into the kebab shop where Faisal is holding a single Muslim kebab shop guy hostage, and they shoot the hostage. -Are you alright mate? one of the cops asks Faisal. -Yeah, he says, and detonates the bomb. The spokesman of the Met Anti-Terror unit makes a TV statement: "Our position is, that the police shot the right man, and the wrong man blew up." Which sounds like some of the things they said during the de Menezes debacle.

But of course, they were all old jokes in that movie between me and the malung, anyway. And they could have thrown in "cause it's our deen, innit" somewhere as well. Barry was obviously based on Dave's mate Attila, otherwise known as Abu Abdullah. All in all, I would have expected more from Chris Morris, who brought us the infamous Brass Eye pedophilia edition (watch it if you haven't seen it before).

(the ceilings have eyes and so do the floors
and so do the faces nailed to the walls....)

Bright spring dawn sunlight streams in and still I can't sleep...

Phase IV and the 101st monkey

Phase IV, originally from 1973, is available to view streamed on lovefilm.com - it's one of the free ones, you don't even have to register for the site. I had never heard of the film until yesterday but then someone talked about when we were sitting around. I was electrified, galvanised when I heard what it was about, ranted excitedly at everyone, went to watch it right away.

In the Arizona desert, scientists discover ants behaving in ways that ants just don't. Different species co-operating and communicating, building strange structures in the desert, setting out to drive first species that are ant predators and then humans out of their area, declaring war on humankind. Not "It Came from the Desert" giant ants, just normal little ants that have a new agenda.

It was uncanny - you may remember even from this blog - this has been a theme I have been playing with for years. I am obsessed with the thought that, while I believe we will reach the stars from this planet one day, it may not be us, but the evolutionary descendants of the ants who cross the interstellar void... Once when I began to write it as a script, I began with "Scientists discover an ant colony in the Arizona desert somewhere that seems to have begun developing technology...", down to that detail about Arizona.

You know the 100th monkey phenomenon, of course? After the 100 monkeys have reached their critical mass and suddenly monkey minds everywhere flash with new knowledge, and you're one of the monkeys left thinking: "Ahhhh - that seems so obvious now! Why didn't I catch on in the beginning like those other monkeys?"

I feel like the 101st monkey... So. Somebody already had the idea. And somebody else just changed the name of their band to 101st Monkey, try looking it up on Myspace or something.

It is a very interesting film. It used the then-new technique of ultra-close up photography of ants, and real ants star collectively (unwillingly or unwittingly) as a major character of the film. It is not a B movie; more thoughtful than that. It has beautiful cinematography and some clever lines. And some stupid ones. It is different from my vision, where ants evolve high technology spontaneously (in the film, it ends up being some sort of alien radiation that speeds up evolution - which gets the humans too... hence Phase IV of evolution on this planet).

There's a nod to Un Chien Andalou, with ants crawling out from a hole in the palm of one of their dead human victims.

I am in touch with Hollywood people about doing the script for the remake.

Un Chien Andalou

got me a movie
i want you to know
slicing up eyeballs
i want you to know
girlie so groovy
i want you to know
don't know about you
but i am un chien andalusia
wanna grow
up to be
be a debaser

Facebook

Being switched on hip media heads, you doubtless already know all the paranoid stuff about Facebook, how In-Q-Tel (CIA-controlled venture capital fund) invested loads of money in it (for use as a data-mining laboratory I guess), cops and employers and benefits and tax investigators and spooks trawling all over, all that stuff.

Yes, good to be aware of things, but whatever. It has allowed me to re-connect with people I would never have known what happened to them. I grew up in three countries and everyone I knew dispersed to thirty or forty more, and it has been nice to see someone you never expected to to become an Orthodox priest or raise a kid in a lesbian marriage or become a pilot or a professional poker player or join the French Foreign Legion.

Then there is this phenomenon of people who just promiscuously collect Facebook friends, just anyone, add 'em all, like it's a popularity contest. Get all these requests from "and who the fuck are you" people? "Uh, well, it said we might know each other cause we wrote an email to the same person once or something."

I do have some Facebook friends I have never met, though, and some of them do sort of feel like actual friends. Alex - (S)wine Alex - is a good one - I don't know who he is, but if he showed up at my door I would give him a place to live, feed him and get him extravagantly drunk without any questions. I'm also friends with Luke Reinhart, the guy who wrote The Dice Man, who is actually George Cockcroft, cause he seems to have liked my little review of his book. Oh, and with Andrew Bonner-Walker, who did Luke's website/Myspace for him, and who is producing a Dice Man film. And, yes, with Ed Conn, who guided me through the ibogaine space over the telephone (and David Graham Scott on camera).

When I last went to Afghanistan a couple years ago, it was about the time of the great Facebook explosion. At the time, the privacy defaults left most pages wide open to people who didn't realise. I joined the Afghanistan network, with its fake profiles (in Arabic and Pashto) for OBL, Mullah Omar, etc etc. I found servicemen's pages with wall posts like "Hey it'll be great when you guys from the 7-2 take over from us at FOB whatever on May 5 - we'll have a party when we're out of here. You guys are gonna have it so easy with the new Apaches covering your asses, but they've been saying we'll get em next week for a month now" or whatever. (And talking about paranoia - there were loads of weird goings-on on that Afghanistan network...)

I shot off loads of messages to loads of different people on different pretexts and with different stories and met up with some in Kabul. This is how I got to know Alex - Kandahar Alex - whose Facebook updates normally get me the big stories from Kandahar/Kabul days (or months) before the BBC or the press - and a few other people on the Kabul international scene. This is also how I met Wali Ahmad, who showed me his town.

Oh and then there are the Brazilian girls, of course, but they were socially promiscuous to begin with, before Facebook.

"Everyone I know is on Facebook, but everyone I want to know is on MySpace..." (-Zoe)

Моя цыганская - Владимир Высотский

(in the morning everything will be fine.... just a little more time, a little more time.... but morning comes, and everything is wrong... you smoke on an empty stomach, or you drink away a hangover....... everything is wrong - in the bar, in the church, everything is wrong....)

Lazy now seems determined to take back everything that drugs have taken away from him in his life

Mind you, drugs have immeasurably improved his personality, too

monsters in the deep

fuck with the abyss
and the abyss fucks also with you

and then it's just chin high, head up, and walk it where it needs to be walked

the demon-possessed can spit out nails, jagged pieces of glass, father amorth tells

i walk around spitting match-sticks

i am desperate. i buy lottery tickets. i would suck cock for a break.

i don't believe the things i find myself doing, and this time around, they don't even feel entertaining or worth writing about

life isn't a competition in brinksmanship. the palette doesn't have to be these colours of endless rainswept brutalist urban decay. there's no need to be shivering in these poisonous states

i should have taken photos or you won't believe me

it's just more of the same thing over and over again, a little bit more robbed of its magic, a little less beautiful

recursively

it's cold

i miss you, baby

A short visit to Hindustan

After four days of living in train stations, airports, sleeping in luggage racks entwined with sudra labourers from deepest Bihar, living on guavas with salt and chilli pepper, popping hypnotics at an alarming rate which I don't realise until I see the empty cards in the side pocket of my bag - because I feel a nagging sense of unwellness, an unhealthy sweat, and I have left behind someone I love - and because of course Benares has its silks, and its temples, and its ancient pilgrims waiting to die by the sacred river, and of course it still has its prostitutes - and its powder unlimited too, and I am weak and sweating out opiate metabolites. Maybe to you in a holy city you must be holy, but here everything you do is holy by definition.

After a tour of the alien south, I am finally back in Hindi country, and it feels good to know that even after ten years, I am no longer completely an uncomprehending stranger in a strange land - fellow travellers either undeservedly congratulate or rib me for my lurching heavily urdu-leaning hindi. By the second day in the train I feel the air getting hot heavy and wet with the air of the Arabian sea and know Bombay is near. Arrive, instantly engulfed and swallowed by the lunatic city, a giant pulsating pululating creature, a local train ride is like a particularly harsh full-body massage, and here there is the new generation too, sultry Indian college girls and neon lights of bars and clubs winking seductively.

Half-sleep, wake intermittently from disquieting dreams, in an airport that is too freezingly air-conditioned. And then it is into the tunnel of steel, first past the sandbagged emplacements outside the departure terminals and then surrender to the processing and rendering and petty humiliation we are subjected to these days for the privilege to fly. The plane is full of dark Dravidians speaking south Indian languages going to their servile jobs in the Gulf, the occasional Pakistani, an English convert to Islam.

In Muscat, Oman, the banking system does not seem to realise that all of my accounts are overdrawn to the maximum and put me well in credit, and I wonder whether I should take advantage and empty the duty-free shop. I settle for the traditional cigarettes and tobacco - I am trying to give up, but it is all at ten per cent of the UK price. Drug dealers and capitalists.

Mystified, I need to find an internet to contact my banks and see what this is all about. There is only one public one, in the business centre of the luxury Plaza VIP waiting room, so I charge 10 Omani Ryals to my abused Visa card for three hours of luxury - hot shower, wash my shirt collar, shave, breakfast like a king, Red Label unlimited. Very good value.

Earlier, I sat in the waiting room cafe sipping tepid tea and wondering at the number of people in military-type jackets with corporals' or sergeants' stripes on their sleeves. Why not full shoulder-boards with generals' or staff officers' tabs, I wondered? And instead of buying that awfully interesting looking Robert Fish (Fisk?) book, something about the great war for civilisation and the conquest of the Middle East, about decades of atrocity and injustice across the Middle East and Central Asia, decide to finish James Joyce's Ulysses on the last leg of the journey back to freezing London.

Stories from recent months hopefully follow soon.

"Ah well, everything happens for a reason."

Yes, but not a very good one.

Lethargy

When I started this blog, I didn't know or care who would read these words.

To my surprise, people came and read, and even continue to do so (90% through Google searches on "chemical torture" - still #1!), and realgem has allowed me to (virtually and in reality) meet some people I deeply respect who I would never have connected with otherwise.

But now that I know some people, even if few, do read these words, something has changed. Just like the first time I was paid for a piece of writing - and it probably wasn't even a piece of reporting or a story or anything, more likely a press release or a consultancy report of some sort - something changed, and I look at the piles of old notebooks and typewritten pages strangely and wonder how and why I did it. And this is also why it is important to be on Brian's trail, because he was mystical. The work and the art and not the finished product were what counted.

And it gnaws at me, because I miss this world of pretty words and strange life forms swimming in the aquarium of the computer display.

I make texts, I make pictures, I may as well put them here or somewhere - share your work and the world becomes your notebook. I have some other notebooks, too, you can see in the sidebar.

Yet it has somehow become so difficult lately, and often I feel so tired.

(image found here, another of Alex's web presences)

Cochin

...'Jewel of the Arabian Sea' ...always had a fabled aura in my mind...

(The contraptions in the photos are fishing machines like Chinese dragons, introduced by the Chinese here in Kubla Khan's time... their jaws are strung with nets which plunge into the sea again and again for fish...)

Search

No one knows where Brian's (original post from the time) unfinished book is. Although he never seemed terribly concerned with finishing it; the writing of it was what was important. I believe it is somewhere in the south of India, in a metal trunk packed with manuscripts, notebooks and typescripts.

By one of those strange coincidences ("I believe in coincidences but I don't trust them" as Doc O says), I ran into a mutual friend of ours from Goa from 10 or 11 years ago (a time before e-mail and mobile phones). "He spoke a lot about you the last time we talked," she told me.

When the murder happened*, I was in the middle of my descent into a long and opiated dark night of the soul, and none of it really registered then. It is only now, that I have revisited places we knew and loved those years ago, that a deep sadness has fallen on me; a realisation I never knew at the time how much our friendship meant.

I have the name of a town, a less than half-remembered care-of address, and a laser-printed photo, and I go searching.

* CNJ report from the time. The "salacious gossip", speaking evil of the dead, that Michael Griffin refers to would be from The Sun (see link in my original post if you're that curious), and maybe also from this other CNJ story - "their body language showed they were more than just friends" - yes, in England maybe, but Brian was warm and physically affectionate in a way that few English people are.

26/11

Not only had Lazy's Arambol with its somnolent atmosphere of tropical alcoholic lethargy turned into something like the fucking Glastonbury festival, there were squads of soldiers in camo patrolling in the evening, and high-up plainclothes cops from Delhi poking around.

Yes, it's terrorism again, and the fear of another Mumbai attack. It would be perfect. If I were a Lashkar e Toiba strategist, that is where I would hit. Rubber dinghy with silenced engine. Four dreadlocked operatives in loose-fitting tie-dye or batiq; didgeridoos which collapse into AKS-74 gas-operated 5.45mm assault rifles; embroidered anti-personnel fragmentation juggling balls. And finding some Israelis to kill would be simplicity itself.

India

there are more foreign cars and motorbikes on the roads than there were... everyone has a mobile phone... everything is a bit more expensive, except for internet and phone access... brahmins still chant prayers in ancient temples, priests mumble mass in portuguese-era churches, the azan still rings out from minarets, narrow streets still smell of jasmine, incense, butchers' offal and sewers... women still sway in brilliantly coloured saris and grizzled fishermen scratch their chins, autorickshaw horns squawk angrily at cows ambling through traffic chewing on plastic bags... the arabian sea still crashes in gentle waves on the white sands and the palm trees still sway in the breeze...



(the new 1 and 2 rupee coins with a thumbs-up and v-for-victory/peace-man for the no-alphabets, with older British-influenced coins above)

hot heavy air coast of arabian sea sun in haze maybe if i type fast and make spelling mistakes i will keep writing here.

because there are things to write, yes there are things to write, but i can't write now.

Love and courage, I feel, are the two highest virtues

and another extended hiatus

thus far resisting all temptations to hit 'delete'

should be back soon enough, here and elsewhere in the aquarium as well

And I could have been a particle physicist

A Large Ion Collider Experiment switched back on after repairs

"The collisions could provide the first experimental evidence for the Higgs boson, which many scientists believe explains the origin of mass. Other researchers are looking for evidence of Supersymmetry, the idea that every particle in the Universe has a “companion” particle.

Last week, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, suggested that the breakdowns at the collider could be caused by the Higgs boson itself.

They said that the boson could theoretically ripple backwards through time to destroy whatever had created it in the first place. This could also cause the accelerator to malfunction, they said."

Yes, I imagine it could

Men do not know the natural diseases of the mind; it does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work; Mus in pice.

-Michel de Montaigne, Que sais-je?

or something

"I don't think humans have figured out a functional form of sexual relationships. Traditional gender roles seem useless and non-productive, and these are generally mirrored in sexual roles and representation. Of course, that is true in prostitution as well, but to me it seems fairly rational and straightforward, which is more respectful of the participants than the unconscious charade psychodrama that usually constitutes regular romantic sex."

-in Letters from Johns (and there is also Letters from Working Girls)

Love is like a snowmobile racing across the tundra
It flips over, pinning you underneath
At night, the ice weasels come

(Gwendolyn's mother's poetry - Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Tom Robbins)

I performed this poem at my sister's wedding reception when she married into a tee-total clan of Mennonites from Manitoba in what was theoretically a no-alcohol event (to keep the Mennonites happy). I was completely sloshed on Koskenkorva, it was in Finland after all, and most people seemed to have bottles hidden in their cars. It was a golden late-summer day. At dusk I took this picture:

Sometimes naked
Sometimes mad
Now the scholar
Now the fool
Thus they appear on earth:
The free men

(found in old notebook, unknown origin)

People run hither and thither.

And then hither again.

alcohol is a good social drug because it reduces your ability to understand what other people are saying

(from here)

my back teeth are more filling than tooth. i had a tooth finally pulled the other day, it was glorious. my quality of life immediately improved 25 per cent or so.

shit proliferates. bad shit drives out good shit. it's the inexorable march of entropy.

i'm gonna get an electric typewriter so i can write without goddamn emails and blogs and facebooks.

i was digging in the garden today, hardpacked soil in a long-abandoned flowerbed.

at about a foot depth i dug through the central egg chamber of a huge ant colony. there was a tiny little plastic kid's toy in there, first i thought it was a little dinosaur figure.

no, it was an anteater.

strange.

i save earthworms from the biting ants to bring to the flowerbed and herb patch. i love earthworms and hate ants.

i am sure we will reach the stars from this planet someday. but it may well be the descendants of the ants and not us who reach other worlds.

bastard things.

it's that fucker i hate. what fucker? the one that lives down the street, a couple houses down. what number? i don't know what number. 7. or 8. i don't care what fucking number. but i don't like him. i'm gonna punch his lights out the first pretext he gives me. what fucker? you know the one i mean, the one that really enrages me. that wannabe rockstar wanker. no, he doesn't have blond hair, he's got dark hair. i think. if it's not dark it might be light though. i don't know. his name? fuck knows. i don't fucking know. you know the one i mean. that mean-spirited fucking twat that i want to punch. i don't know anything else about him.

Running under a big sky

London is so very pretty in the summer. A long absence does much to re-inspire an appreciation for the cultural wealth of this city - the libraries, the galleries, the opportunities for study and learning, the people gathered here from every corner of the earth.

Lazy lurches from one extreme to another, as is his wont. After a thousand broken vows, he returns once again to the caravan of seekers and lovers of knowledge. After the years lost to heroin, and then a year-long drunken bender across four countries and two continents, he runs, he hammers the punch bag until he collapses, he does sit-ups and push-ups and yoga stretches, he seeks a squash partner and a sparring partner and joins a boxing gym; he reads widely, he applies himself fanatically to his passion, the study of languages.

We have re-instituted VFEC, the "Valid Fucking Experiment in Consciousness" of our driven and Nietzschean years (there is even a VFEC blog, although most entries have been redacted. The first post may be useful as background and as a statement of intent).

Lazy takes up chi kung and meditation and pranayama once again. He borrows and reads Paulette's books on Taoist sexual alchemy and maintains himself in a state of heightened sexual excitement without allowing himself to come, attempting to channel the ching into strengthening the chi and shen and forcing his consciousness wider open. He reads Radigan's Solipsist novel The Steppe and contemplates the nature of external reality and knowledge. He resolves to conduct many experiments on himself, the only subject you may ethically experiment on; and on others. He cultivates a sacred detachment, the paradoxical state of non-attachment / non-disinterest.

And it is so effortless. If you must force yourself into any type of "self-improvement", so-called, you are harming yourself, as you do not really want it, or perhaps you want it too much.

"Act without doing; work without effort. The way is not difficult, only there must be no wanting or not wanting."

When you come back after a year, and there are the same people, sitting in the same places, beer cans held at the same angles, having the same conversation.

It fills me with a chilling existential dread.

"My God, you were hard work," the black girl said, wiping my come from her lips after I had struggled through a numbing alcohol, weed and cocaine haze to orgasm in her mouth.

Brazil. Onde a puta goza, o traficante cheira, e o abogado vira amigo. There is something so strangely gentle about her. "I like you, you're nice," she says. "What, most of the people who come here aren't?" She shakes her head emphatically. She soaps me down in the shower and we talk about where I'm from and why we came to Sao Paulo and why she ended up in a brothel in Santana. "My mother has brain cancer. The treatment is so expensive," she says. "Huh. Life is brutal," I agree, and she gives a small sad smile.

My friend is relaxing downstairs, chatting with the doorman and some of the girls. "Shit, man, you've just been waiting sitting here? Sorry I took so long." "It's nothing, it's nothing!" We walk. I say thank-you to the girl on the way out and he reprimands me for thanking a whore.

I feel indifferent to everything, but my senses are open, soaking in the world, the insane city around us. A change is coming. I can feel it.

Like above the roofs of Katmandu, of Benares, Peshawar and Kabul - the sky out here in the periphery is full of kites. A strange mixture of sadness, longing and joy, a sense of places lost and far away, falls on Lazy as he watches the kids duel in the skies (cruzando pipas, they say here) and run through the streets after the defeated kites fluttering down trailing cut string.

This is where to drink when up in the vila, o chileno's bar. Or really it's more like a trailer wedged between two houses to get R$2.50 beers or glasses of pinga to drink in the street in front and with a covered yard behind where to sit if you like or if it's raining or if there's a game on the tv.

No one knows why he's called chileno, least of all himself. Like he's not chilean for a start. But he's not just a grumpy grizzled half-cracked old guy who's heard too many appeals for credit and waters down the sao francisco either, he's an artist and a songwriter, though you might not think. He is camera shy but my friend managed to get the first known picture of him.

He brought out his big notebook for me and we discussed lyrical writing. He writes lyrics in spanish now, which is eccentric in itself as, as i said, he has nothing to do with chile and he had to ask me how vivo sonhando com ela would be, and he's translating them into english as well, and how would i put tô apaixonado por ela, and like this. He wouldn't bring us beers in return even though we demanded, but i was honoured when he sang us a few of his lines at least. If I ever vanish for days I might be here. Good luck finding it

Happy Bloomsday innit

Turn to face the strange

Hahahahahahahaaa. That Ishmael. "I have come to believe in the total malleability of human nature: anybody can be anybody."

That was when we were young and zealous Nietzscheans and before this lapse into a morbid and impotent fatalism.


It is time, again:

Face the world and walk out into the strange. Find what you fear, and do it.

I am a brain in a bath tub

Life is great

Pour me more bubble bath, please





get your own strange ribbon here

leafing through a book like "the correspondance of henry miller and anaïs nin", it makes me wonder what sort of legacies the writers of my generation will leave behind. "the collected facebook updates of alex nichols"?

it's too cold to write

i have a theory, based in part on observing lazy's narcissism, and in part on seeing on the webstats how many people click through from here onto their own blogs, that most people spend more time admiring their own blogs than they ever have to spare for others'

sometimes lazy hates people. so he stays in bed all weekend with his russian fucking course book, a volume of borges in fucking portuguese, a friend's novel he hasn't finished reading yet, and a bottle of scotch whiskey. 36 hours later his liver hurts alarmingly and he decides to give up drinking. life feels empty...

Fun facts about transport in São Paulo

A law against drunk driving finally came into force a little over half a year ago but hasn't really changed anything. Everyone still drives around completely out of their tree.

If there is such a thing as a São Paulo bus map, I still haven't been able to find it. Asking people can help, although often even the drivers and cobradores don't know where they're going.

Bus stops are always located in the middle of blocks and well away from train and metro stations, rather than at corners of the crossings of main roads and rail routes.

Passengers in Metrô and train stations always stand on the escalators and never stand on one side to allow people who want to walk up to pass. Further, if there is a ludicrously crowded escalator, and a completely empty set of normal stairs, everyone will still try to pack onto the escalator. These people love escalators.

Morning and evening rush hours see traffic on main routes, in ten lanes and three layers (including elevated and underground), going absolutely nowhere.

Futebol!

Best reason ever for supporting a football team (because isn't your team as arbitrary as everything else?) :

About as remote as you can get in São Paulo state, where the paved road ends and a dirt track goes off into the bush, but still only a few hours from the city, you can still find the odd Indian village. A friend of mine is a lawyer, and she has taken up a case for land rights on behalf of some Guaranis.

They all support Palmeiras (="palms") in the village. The old Indian guy explained: the palm tree is sacred to us. The world was born from a palm tree. We eat palmito (palm heart). The birds which are messengers of the spirits perch in the palm tree.

Therefore, we are all faithful to Palmeiras.


Oh and I met Sócrates, Brazilian football legend from the 70s, in the bar a while back. These days he is getting a bit alcoholised and he was completely sloshed. Like Gazza. I asked him what he thought of English football.

"It's a load of shit," he said. "Just like the football in any country."


[From a more-or-less indifferent football fan in England I have become a complete devotee in Brazil. Just like I follow cricket when I'm in India or Pakistan - it is very difficult not to be caught up in the feverish excitement. I used to make money betting on the cricket in India, back when Pakistan was still a team to be reckoned with, because no matter how poor the chances, it seemed to be utterly inconceivable to people that anyone would want to bet on Pakistan (ancestral enemy...) winning. Not only that, but in Brazil it's a different game, a beautiful virtuoso game compared to the tactical workmanlike football of Europe.]

Life and games

Lazy has recently taking up playing poker. He's pretty good at it too, until he crosses a certain line of drunkeness and throws all his money away on silly bluffs. Better late than never to the game, as always...

We have always enjoyed chess, and seen card games as somehow slightly inferior. But really, poker is every bit as strategic. You have no control over the cards you're dealt, but you have to fight the best fight you can with them... and if you stay cool, you can convince the opposition that you have a much better hand than you really do. Not to mention the power of money - once you're winning and have a big pile of chips in front of you, it gives you so much more freedom of action than the little guys.

As such, it is infinitely more like real life than the idealised one-on-one battle that is chess.

Aliens go home!

There is this conceit that you come across in science fiction sometimes - I am reminded because I watched the recent re-make of The Day the Earth Stood Still yesterday (in low quality and dubbed badly into Portuguese, both of which probably improved the film) -- there is this conceit -

An alien from a hyper-advanced culture beyond our imaginings where all suffering and stupidity has been banished descends to earth to study us... accepts human limitations to live a human life in a human body among us... and mission finished, refuses to return to his blissful and transcendent alien life

- that there is something noble about the human condition...

something noble in the squalor of it.

Memory and desire stirring

"Do not sit to think what you should write - sit to write what you have thought."

That sounds very much like Dr. Johnson again. See the very first post on realgem - he had the distinction of opening for us.

Very well then. Consider:

You have no way of knowing how your memory will record the present that you are experiencing now.

(This thought flashes into my head as sun blinds me as I cross Br. Faria Lima into on-coming traffic, and somehow I am certain I will remember this moment, if one of the madly weaving cars doesn't get me in the next five seconds at least.)

I feel nostalgia for the bizarrest things, things that were hellish at the time.

(Cursing at pain in a hospital bed, unable to sleep for pain, cursing the nurse who refused to bring me more morphine...)

Conversely, sheer ecstasy sometimes becomes flat, pale and tasteless when played back by memory.

Particle accelerator

"The medium is the message."

I still don't fully grok what Marshall Macluhan meant by this gnomic statement, but I can generalise it to apply to various contexts. Right now I am thinking of the difference between composing on a computer screen, as opposed to and compared with an old-fashioned (electric) typewriter, and longhand, with a pen, on paper. Surely different regions of the brain are active - different sets of motor neurons, certainly - but how do these connections being lit up impact on other connections elsewhere in the brain? Specifically those to do with "creativity", so-called - maybe "synthesis" would be better, originality being protecting your sources - and those to do with "language"? (All gods are one. So are all languages. Discuss. 3000 words.)

"Phenomenal consciousness is defined as a subjective that experiences itself."

Similarly with the idea of things remaining in an undetermined state until they are observed, from the field of sub-atomic physics. What effect does the "observer" ("reader") have on the "experiment" (the writing)?

A simple particle accelerator...

sdfhsrth
ypoirh hnvbn
.......x...we.as. hgahdf......aerhadfhafd....asgdfgBANG!sdagfd
hbpoisfuhz\xcv
qn tmx
r
:
.
w

(particle or wave? 2000 words. 50% of final score.)