Part of an old letter I never sent (because just now I have nothing new to write)

If only I had something to tell you.
The pauses between our words tonight were long and numerous. During these pauses we looked not at each other, but at the fire. All the things we wanted and needed to say to each other passed silently from our eyes and into the fire. The ashes describe everything we truly feel and desire in a language that no-one will ever understand.

It has been such a long time since I last saw you. I kept wondering if it was really you, and not some impostor in a mask. The train makes skeptical noises as I write this. Sunday train, now arriving at Heatherdale. The perfect night sky is vandalised by billboards, talking about cars. Or streetlights, pretending to be stars.

Shiva Ratri

This Monday is lord Shiva's birthday, you know, Shiva the destroyer. We will go to Pashupati temple, to witness the strange festivities.

The Sadhus will be there, they will have walked a very long way to give Shiva some milk.

They walk all the time.

There is something so simple and beautiful and comical about the milk. There are a lot of other things they do, but the milk is the thing which sticks in my mind. I ask people about Shiva Ratri often, it's intriguing because everyone has something different to say about it. Most of the younger people talk about how it's the day when everyone smokes ganja.

I have trouble writing the word 'ganja' instead of 'weed' or 'grass', it just seems so, I don't know. Such a range of names are available for this innocuous herb, each name defines the speaker of the name more than the herb itself. Marijuana, every syllable pronounced with care, comes with the image of a man in a suit, holding the offending item at arms length. Ganja comes with dreadlocks, the sound of Bob Marley, devotion not only to the drug but to the culture. But that's the word they use here in Nepal. It's in the lonely planet phrasebook and everything. गाँजा.

The older generation just say that it's Shiva's birthday, and talk about the milk and the other things, other people say that it's a day when a lot of tourists go to Pashupati to look at sadhus and get stoned.

Two friends have just left, returned to Germany to get on with things. It feels like a significant loss to our little friendship circle, those two who were up for anything. A late night walk home and here they are with another friend, sitting high above the ground, in the earth-chomping part of an earth mover, somehow they had convinced the driver to take them for a spin. There is one of them, at the Newari new year's (which falls in November) celebrations, commando-crawling at a snail's pace across the stage behind a traditional Nepali singer, in front of hundreds of Nepali revellers.

It is sad that they are gone, sad and inevitable. We all have other plans. Some of us must continue our studies, some have plans to do travelling puppet shows across America in caravans led by donkeys. I must go back to Australia and see my new nephew/niece, witness my family's encroach into this new territory, the new generation.

Two more weeks, less, in this media art collective and then it's off again to a new house. Hopeully this one I can stay in for longer than a month. It is in the Newari part of town, old stonework and woodwork, intricately carved into many shapes, some religious, some whimsical. Narrow roads built long before the idea of cars, the houses' grey stone walls looming up and marginalising the sky, and then opening without warning, to reveal temples, shrines, other oddments. A real Indiana Jones style place. The owners of my flat are really friendly, they don't talk much English, they make their own Raksi (Nepali moonshine), and their son's band has a rehearsal room downstairs. It will be great to have a change, to be forced to speak more Nepali, and spend less time in those parts of Kathmandu which are becoming increasingly infested with Western Christians. To my Christian friends, I'm sorry. I've just deleted a large tirade against Christians in Nepal because if I have a problem with others zealously imposing their poorly-corroborated beliefs upon people who are in no need of them, then I would do well to keep my own views under my hat. The turbulent river of pro/anti Christian debate is hard to avoid these days, and anyway, it seems futile to argue with logic about something which resides in faith.

Awkward silence. How to bring this back to a suitable conclusion, how to tie it together? Shiva Ratri, sadhus, old men on the bus who touch their hand to forehead, chest, forehead, chest, forehead, and so on, as we drive past a certain shrine. Buddhist monks with iPhones. The unconfident, bespectacled, and comb-overed man in my conversational English class, who talked about being a guerilla fighter for the Maoists and helping to overthrow the royal family, his stories completely at odds with his appearance, only his small, focussed, granite eyes, giving weight to his words. This place is changing, we can all see it, we are all excited, and at least a little bit scared.

Fire and Oxygen.

Time to put up the last journal entry from those Brunswick warehouse times. It's really difficult to put up this stuff without editing. But that is sort of the point, and besides, I don't like forewords.

FUCK! Driving me fucking mental and you’re not even doing anything! Anger mixed in with embarrassment.

Ah, a last touch of high-drama, to do with my favourite journal star. Looking back to that night, last night, it feels like I was possessed, that was not me. And yet, those feelings were so clear, I can still taste them. Without punctuation, this is what happened inside my head.

She’s fallen asleep I can barely keep my eyes open maybe if I announce that I’m going to bed she will follow no that didn’t work never mind I’ll get an early night and do some good training tomorrow go to sleep go to sleep how long have I been lying here surely the movie has finished by now she must be sleeping in Y’s bed I bet he’s stoked about that I saw the way he turned when I walked into the kitchen the way he had been holding her go away nasty thoughts fuck right off Y and X are good friends my friends they would never but I saw what I saw oh troubled mind just let me sleep I just want to sleep why do I need her next to me just to sleep she doesn’t need me at all for nothing I don’t want her to need me I don’t want to stop being crazy about her either Fuck surely the film’s over now maybe if I get some water then I can go past and look into the room put my mind at ease oh I’m so angry I just want to sleep now will I achieve anything if I live my life according to the patterns of a girl like that I can’t believe I would think that Y would what is wrong with my head there they are both asleep don’t worry about me guys have a nice sleep over I’ll just wander around awake all night waiting for insanity to set in what if this chair accidentally fell over oops too hard felt good though how do I get her out of my head I gotta get myself outta her bed oh now they’re awake I’m going to sleep in my own bed I’m so sick of this shit now everyone’s all worried and I know the more I try to explain the worse it will get

 

I would like to throw this book in the ocean, or set fire to it, or both. I could seal it in a large watertight container, so that it could burn and sink at the same time. How long could it burn for before it ran out of oxygen? She is my oxygen, what a shame I’m on fire

I miss her, the possum that scratches and scratches up in my roof. That makes those unbelievably strange noises. Fur so soft, inviting, but get too close and you’ll get scratched to bits by those tree-faring claws. Dark eyes, like someone has taken to reality with a hole-puncher. I tried to talk to her sometimes, thoughts and feelings, but she just looked in silence, a look that would make Shakespeare stutter. She wasn’t concerned with the affairs of humans. Not this human at least.

Is this how the book ends, with a fizzling dramatic climax, and no tangible conclusion? Perfect really, in a couple of weeks I’ll be walking down Newcastle streets with X, see page 1. The only difference will be the position of the Earth in relation to the sun. And of course, 6 months worth of bizarre memories from a particularly turbulent year. 2009. Year of babies, break-ups, art, music, love, pain, savings, inspiration, business, festivals, devising, dividing, and writing. Mostly writing about, or to, one special strange young powerful girl. So here’s to you, all of the other people who make up my world and barely get a mention. I could never have hoped to meet and/or make friends with so many amazing people. I’m learning.

The end

Writer's block.

Here in Kathmandu I bounce from room to room, one month here, one weekend there, another month somewhere else. This month, I am staying at Sattya, a media arts collective. They have poetry slams, they show documentaries on their rooftop cinema, and they have workshops in multimedia sorts of things, like photography and stop-motion animation. It's close to living the dream, staying here, except that I am an impostor. I don't do multimedia art. I used to play with 3D animations when I was a teenager, but it was my brother who had the flair, and the patience. In those days, we had talked about making an animated TV series, my brother and I. First it was going to be inspired by those things which we saw in our mind's eye: robots and castles and knights upon flying ostriches, you know. It was a wonderful abstract story, from what I remember. And then we talked about making Musashi, based on that book by Yoshikawa, the classic tale of self-mastery. I liked to make my brother's 3D creatures move, dance around, but whenever I found an obstacle that seemed unnecessarily difficult to overcome, of which there were so many in that program, I would give up. And then there was my brother, staring intensely into the computer. All of those little polygons, thousands of them joined together just so, I would see him day after day going through, finding the polygons that had gotten twisted up, untwisting them, tesselating them where necessary, zooming in in in, and then after a week of this I would see that he had made one... really... nice... hand. I am a performance artist with my foundation in circus training and puppetry, whose best work is always improvised, never to be seen again. I am someone who avoids taking photos because everyone else's photos are so much better. What am I doing in a multimedia arts collective?

Aah! It's all falling apart! What is that intangible thing that holds it all together? That glue beyond grammar and syntax? How does anyone even write anything? It has no purpose, it's just noise, noise in your head! Noise in my head which I translate into writing and then you read it and it becomes noise in your head! What is this thing, this so-called writing? It's not like I don't have anything to write about! Being in love with someone who is far away, being in a foreign country which is itself bound up in mystery, magic, and violence, living in a community arts collective, teaching circus to freakin' human-trafficking rescuees, for crying out loud! But these words, what do they do? Will they make me stronger, you wiser? No. Are they new, original? No - Yes, insofar as every moment and action is in someway unique - but no. I write and write, I have written so many things in here, what has come of it? I can feel my muscles tensing and untensing while I type. I am uncomfortable here, for some reason. Settling in, perhaps, or it could be to do with the fact that I'm not really able to settle, always moving on, chased off by the dogs of my own invention. I feel so out of place all the time! Triceps twitching, tired from pushups, from lifting people, spotting their backflips, in movement at least I feel comfortable, at home.

I just finished a great book, actually the transcript of a great lecture, called "The concept of home". In it the writer/speaker stated that having been a journalist for so many years has allowed her now to write without being precious. To paraphrase, she said something like "I believe in writer's block no more than I believe in hairdresser's block". One of my goals when I came back here was to write for at least one hour every day. An interesting challenge during load-shedding times, where the power cuts are currently up to 14-hours per day and rumoured to rise before the Winter's out. Writing with a pen, in the cold, by candle-light seems unnecessarily difficult when I can wait until a later time, sit in comfort, let words pour from ten fingers dancing, spider-like. Now I'm beginning to think I need to get a writing job to cure this sporadic writer's block. File or Fail. At any rate, it would be a funny story, writing for some magazine in Nepal, in English, for the bizarre ex-pat community (they look so formal, normal, they drink so much!). I have just heard that they are looking for writers at ECS, I might go and apply. The only problem is that I've already got too many jobs, each of which comes with its own impudent demands on my free-time: lesson-plan, do the stretches, write a god-damned report about the things I already said every week for five months! 

But, at least I have this good old blog, which perhaps 20-30 people read, some regularly, a cozy cabaret audience, enough people for me to try and craft each post into something vaguely noteworthy - vaguely coherent at least - but not too many that I have to worry too much about it. At one time I'd thought it would be lovely if I got heaps of followers, random comments from parking inspectors in Estonia, etc. but now I'm glad that no-one makes too much of a fuss. Thank you, dear readers, for reading these uncertain acts of word-arranging.

Gorkhaland

I don't have those famous naked-dreams, maybe because nakedness doesn't bother me overly much. Instead I get stabbed. It has happened twice in my memory, both times by Nepali men. The first time, when I was here last, I was dreaming that a one-eyed man caught me stowed away in the back of his truck. Earlier that day, I had seen a one-eyed man on the street corner, no patch or fake eye, just a strange fleshy pocket, mesmerising in its grotesqueness and simplicity. In the dream, whilst I was trying to explain, in a light-hearted way, why I was hiding amidst his tarped cargo, he rudely stabbed me mid-sentence, expressionlessly, like he wasn't even listening. This time, in one of last night's dreams, I was merely waiting for a meal at a restaurant, and a mullet-haired man came upstairs and stabbed me without warning or explanation. I woke up, not shaken, nor frightened, but irritated, because I'd seen it coming but hadn't been able to get out of the way, for all the people milling around. "People!" I thought, "Always milling about, completely oblivious to the fact that I'm in a rush to get somewhere!"

Maybe it's the Gurkha-mythology that is so abundant here, the famous Gurkha soldiers and their curved khukuri knives, there is not a day that does not contain some mention of them. The circus company I train has been asked to perform at the Gurkha ball, and so I was trying to find out the dates, and instead I found an article about Bishnu Shrestha.

It happened about 5 months ago. Bishnu was a Gurkha who was returning to India, on voluntary retirement, when his train was hijacked by 40 thieves (I kid you not). The whole thing played out in true action movie style, he sat quietly by while the robbers - armed with swords, knives and guns - took his wallet and belongings, along with the other passengers. But then they began to strip an 18-year-old girl nearby, in front of her parents, their intentions unmistakable. She called for help, and Bishnu the Gurkha stood up, and pulled out his khukuri. Apparently, "taking control of the leader", presumably using him as a shield, he killed 3 robbers and injured another 8 before the remainder fled. According to one article, he himself was surprised that so many of them fled, commenting that maybe they thought he had more Gurkha friends on the train. Maybe it was the force of mythology, and the curved knife so renowned for decapitation.

I asked an ex-Gurkha officer once, why it is that the Gurkhas have this reputation, that precedes them, mythologises them? He told me that it was something about Nepali people, that they are by and large the most lovely, patient, and friendly people you could hope to come across. But there is this thing, what I now call the bubbling pool of rage. I have seen it quite often, the snap, from the calm exterior, someone will just, without warning, completely lose their shit. I've never seen it directed at me, or at any sober foreigner for that matter, and I've never witnessed a stabbing. But it is scary. Is it insensitive to write this? I don't mean to portray Nepali people in a negative light, especially when I have had such a positive experience here, and of course generalisations are by nature massively flawed, but for the sake of the story, and the myth, let us imagine that beneath everyone's calm, collected surface, lies a seething pool of violent rage. Is it thinner for some, less structurally sound?