sauerkraut in india

fukky risotto and a sadoo are riding the marudhar express when a tourist across the way says – look, there’s the taj mahal. the sadoo says no that’s the mona lisa. the tourist looks confused and annoyed, says it’s obviously the taj mahal. the sadoo says you obviously know nothing about signs.

the air india attendant at narita asks to weigh my carry-on – limit 7kg. i know it’s over because of the food. so i take out the food, put it on the floor and weigh my bag without it: 6.5kg. take the bag off the scale, return my food, leave.

a german, a swede, and a canadian

are sitting on the rooftop of a guest house ...

why travel? –

• to record humanity in its dusty dusk
• to re-savour the wilderness
• to hear the silent song of the plant
• to keep the bow taut (for contrast, for the sameness of things)
• to see the moon and sun
• to trip over time’s mirrors
• to reanimate death
• to ask this question
• to have the eyes scrubbed and the body bodied
• to virtualize nature and skin the internet
• to re-eroticize absence and presence
• to participate, however tentatively and disdainfully, in my fellow species’ orthodoxy – money
• to immerse myself in that film about flesh, the common human plot – and there plot that plot in words
• to put poetry in its place and replace place
• to glorify unpasteurized organic sauerkraut

 

varanasi and jerusalem – coital spirit partners in the production of religious babies (with astounding longevity)

you see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons

if you don't know the rules, you are crushed; but if you do know the rules you are cut off from your own nature

so simple and so labyrinthine, so guileless and so angry, so innocent and so dangerous ...

depicting the failure of love, the failure of society, and the failure of humans to rise above the ridiculous

do indians get sick when they visit the west because it's too hygienic?

everyone on these long-haul international flights just sleeps or watches movies – don’t they have minds to use during their brief transit through life?

whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate

                but we have a drug for this!

i see the world is mad

if i tell the truth they rush to beat me

if i lie they trust me

  keep the slanderer near you, build it a hut in your courtyard –

  for, without soap or water, it will scrub your character clean

gote noats

the proprietor of a guest house says he plays the tabla. i ask him if he plays out anywhere, in public. no, i only play for god. probably doesn’t tweet either.

the night lit loggias of bundi cornea of aravalli, sockets of worms, apertures onto the days when junglī suar wandered protected on a greener, less regulated, and three-dimensionally more vicious earth.

the 5-hour bus from jaipur to bundi in its 49 numbered seats holds 71 passengers, 8 on top, 9 goats, obese sacs of produce heaped mercilessly in the aisles, 3 employees (driver, bus manager, ticket operator), no washroom or a/c – it’s midday and 34°. deluxe, the agent had told me. my body doesn’t fit anywhere, only hindi’s spoken, no shocks on this bitch and the road’s all hole ... i’m a conscious turd flushed onto the laughing dirt when the receptacle of hadoti finally welcomes.

i had hardly believed him.

the celebrations, festivities, pan-coloured noise, parades occur multiple times daily. gods, death, marriage, birth (and what’s the bloody difference?). some ridiculous-looking male dressed in a silver suit and flowers is plunked on a horse that’s so weighted in decoration how can no one laugh or protest (where’s friedrich when you need him ... maybe b. tarr can direct the bundi horse)? a few dudes beat relentlessly on big drums for 30 minutes before the procession – which includes the requisite 20 following females and blaring tuktuk – begins to jolt and belch its way eastward. it’s all religion and it’s all the time.

a bordeaux man – almost comically friendly, pulls up a small stool to sit and chat to me, misses the stool falling on the floor (feel like i’m in a chaplin skit) – asks me how long the flight is home. about 15 hours i say. i thought it wouldn’t be much longer than paris he says – isn’t there a way you can just zip over the arctic?

in my homeland i never say i’m a writer. in that world of privilege as language and language as privilege such a designation is too pretentious, wearied, photocopied, easy, meaningless ... lumping me with gangling cheese strings of humans i have no affinity with, embarrassments to language, no-cost writing, bud lights of Word. but here i use it as an efficient conversation-ending explanation for why i don’t do tourist things but sit stupidly around staring into space like an incarnation of the god Vapid. everyone (europeans, indians) seems satisfied, asks no further questions.

 

the second night in rajasthan i ascend to the rooftop terrace of my guesthouse and a young french couple is dimly fucking on a chair. is clearing my throat sufficient international language? should i pull up a chair and watch, yank my dick out and cum on their faces? i go to a table, pull out my notebook and begin writing.

taragarh fort

the taragarh fort is the only place i can go here where people are thoroughly absent, where i’m actually alone. no eyes. 700 years old and unmaintained, a glory pervades the place, which was made – like most of civilization’s structures – for killing. crumbling staircases and paintings (a place made by goblins kipling commented), weedy courtyards, algae and guano stepwells, room and turret enfolding in nested surprise (this place could never be public in the west – it's too full of litigation potential!), i meet no one in my 4 hours wandering this monstrous beauty. it was made for this – failure, dilapidation, emptiness. monkeys and me are the only sign of mammalian life. the honks and bands of bundi are silent, the sleepy omnipresent activity which hangs from every aperture like laundry tucked away, endless religion shuts up, the dead mughals are almost likeable in their deadness.

structures are not built for their stated purposes but for what they become after their purposes have left. in the first silence i’ve had since the brief interludes i had in hawai’i i understand why things are built, this human rabidity – for the invested humans to die, their memory to be lost, their visions forgotten, their sufferings and killings made irrelevant, and something to emerge from the uninhabited spaces that speaks of a vigorous purity, a meditative integration directly unachievable by a species so committed to compartmentalization, mono-narrative, destruction.

a ruinous fort teaches me this, and why human society has become for me the noise of a broken muffler collapsing down a mountainside.

in losing purpose, purpose is found.

propreantepenultimate

the dogs wake me every morning between 0300 and 0400 for their scheduled street fight – their sorting the day’s hierarchy? a requisite sacrifice, maiming, exile? as if hundreds of canine demons are auctioning their souls on the block of eternal hunger, an experimental band barely clinging to the cliffs of sound jamming on that nearby abandoned rooftop. institutional and community life without their euphemisms, a polycacophonous rooster birthing the corruption of the day. i sit on my bed of camels for the hour’s free concert – war eventually exhausting itself (jabes writes within the human moral realm even evil must sleep) – this audio textbook of history, resting afterwards on the grass of dreams.

while this town is softer, gentler than many in northern india, it inevitably has its aggressions. only here have motorcycles and tuktuks aimed for and hit me – though lightly, as they stopped – always young men thinking it a joke. others – of the same tribe – sneer as they pass, spitting at my feet. less subtle than the routine aggressions of my home culture. pros and cons.

though tourists are here, they’re relatively few and disappear once out of town on the rural roads. there i’m a sufficient novelty that the contents of every fifth motorcycle are compelled to say hello, a decent percentage of these pulling alongside, i guess to fully manifest the exchange, ensure the white man knows the indian exists.

one gaggle of 3 boys (they all look 12 but the driver says he’s 18), initially amusing, circle back to me so many times, take uncountable selfies with me, ask me to record phrases in their phone then laugh outrageously, that i finally get annoyed and tell them to go home and watch porn.

this is a town of bands. bandi. i’ve lost track of the number that have passed below – led by 6 or 7 male uniformed brass- and drum-players, followed by colourful females carrying jars. looks like pt barnum should emerge, with a topper and dancing elephants. (as music, i prefer the dogs fighting.) the animals as usual are insouciant, though the monkeys and humans watch, bound in camaraderie by their eyes.

cows, despite being holy here, survive on plastic bag scraps and wire. their indifference to all manner of proximate abuse, noise, traffic is almost admirable. the dogs and wild boars too – the former often curled sleeping on the road during the day while vehicles go racing by honking loudly centimetres from their dreams. what trust! or, rather, what enculturation.

the guest house i’m staying at is run by a family whose living area is the lobby. sometimes i enter and 9 adult humans and 5 children are congregated, tv on, the tumbled troupe all gossip and screaming. i keep probiotics in their freezer and as i obtain a pill one morning an adult asks me what is your disease?

the proprietor’s son who does the cooking says you write too much. (that’s a new one.) reminds me of a recent paternalistic email from a bureaucrat in the housing co-op i live in – all power to the imagination! he hypocritically closes. these inane expressions of conformists, who are given residence in the house of language, born into the temple of imagination, growing to use their habitats, their birthrights, as walls and missiles. endearing in a sense i suppose. but the zoo after a few visits loses its appeal and one seeks possibility outside the societal cages of virtuous enforcement and obeisant commonplaces.

 

for some reason i’m reminded – consciousness even yet sprouts through the hard soil of ubiquitous establishment and cliché – of bruno schultz, who knew his uselessness, and used it, despite the variegations of human force and treachery, to colour life’s long night.

indira gandhi airport

what no one tells you is that the best place to hang out if you’ve got time to kill in the domestic area of t3 is the mcdonalds. no one’s there (is any indian stupid enough to pay ₹170 for a spicy mcchicken?), the eating area is spacious, clean, with large windows overlooking a plane-taxiing area. of course it’s the only time i feel slightly nauseous. i recover from mcgut with the most expensive g&t i’ve ever ordered but also a deliriously delicious one. i imagine the quinine killing all the malaria i contracted from the filthy ganga mosquitoes in varanasi, who are silent, small, and deadly ... like a good fart.

an equally chipper spot – and no nausea – is by gate d62 – an immense vacant bright space right by the runways. only distant humans visible. a superb place for frisbee.

this is a silent airport – there will be no flight announcements

is posted around. but bad music is piped everywhere.

there are prayer rooms, divided by the sexes; both are empty.

                right next to these is a medication room; perhaps – as the signs are only in english – everyone’s praying in it.

ubiquitous signage –

caring for mother nature

                                clean airport

                                clean india

have the signage people ever left the airport?

there’s more soap in this terminal than the rest of india combined ... why don't you export some to indian rail?

this has been awarded the best airport in the world 2 years in a row?

what makes it the best is that it smoothly instils happiness and gratitude in me despite or for being ripped off ... holy motherfucking ganesha, after surviving varanasi gandhi’s the blessed brilliant best for giving me the opportunity to pay ₹1,250 for a drink.

parallel travel notes –

a tuktuk driver thinks i’m japanese. i guess all non-indians look alike.

it’s not that air travel necessarily saves that much time over its land competition – certainly the former’s more suspect fiscally and ecologically – but air’s modes are more stimulating. getting from varanasi to bundi by train would have cost me $35 and taken 22 – 32 hours (1,000km), whereas plane+bus takes me 17 and costs 270 (not including the money i blow at airports and staying overnight in jaipur). but on the train i’m in a coffin-sized compartment, by air i have multiple stopping points, interstices of exploration. even in the sarcophagus of the plane cabin i’m relaxed, creative, amused, energetic. in the train-tomb i feel claustrophobic, numb, irritable, prehistoric. worth the extra $350? i’m working on the cost-benefit analysis that takes into account the psychic-aesthetic ledgers.

the dude in front of me on the flight to jaipur reeks so badly of cologne i assume he’s dying of some noxious disease and has to use a potent olfactory tactic to mask it. such autism, in endlessly diverse manifestations, everywhere. i continue to develop my brand and smell, having become indifferent to others branding their autism sanity ... intelligence ... virtue ... power ...

the contrast between the short skinny indian man (a ubiquitous type) and the tall enormous kind (not uncommon) is astounding (the female spread looks smaller) – the gap seems larger than other ethnicities, as if 8 or 9 of the skinny sort could fit in the enormous one. reminds me of the pharoah’s dream in the torah about the cows.

the amusements in indian railway stations – hindi, followed by a colonial female brit english voice – train 54639 to allahamabad has been cancelled. any inconvenience is deeply regretted.

                my asshairs it is

what do the 17,829 indians who have been waiting on platform 12 for 7 hours do now?

indians always seem to be almost walking into each other – aiming for other bodies. this isn’t simply that there are so many bodies – when there are obvious spaces for circumnavigation the other bodies still almost walk into me, avoiding my flesh at the last nanosecond (same with motorcycles and tuktuks). maybe it’s analogous to people clumping together in a largely empty theatre, a weird way to deal with our kenophobia.

i’d rather die in a plane crash than a train. in the latter i’d be mangled, tortured, severed, taking hours or days to die. a plane would be a few seconds or minutes. (i read recently of a united flight taking off from honolulu that blew a door and a bunch of passengers were sucked out with their seats [still strapped in] over the pacific – now that’s a good curtain, a ride worth the admission price.)

i picture the plane going down, some malfunction, some seed of genealogies of litigations, padding the otiose pads of lawyers, my colleagues in wisdom screaming, frantic – i’d be calm, even laughing, like major kong at the end of dr. strangelove.

taking off from delhi the western horizon at dusk looks like the earth’s smoking in a hammock of industry hanging from trees of forgetting. the sun drinks a bloody mary while the last metallic birds drop their young into time’s embers.

                like liner on god’s dark eyeball

                lava from lilith’s pussy at the cliffs of her mons

very nicey varanasi

leaving varanasi is exhilarating and sad. it should be a city i can live in forever – its hovels ... the whole city’s a prehistoric strip mall – traffic, beggars, friendliness-hostility mix, omnipresent food, wily sadhus, consumptive ritual, nanometre negotiations of space, spewed and tumbled architectures, as if the city’s made of oneiric mud, ghat scene, as if california were an addict of the drug old religion, bipeds, cows, goats, bicycles, motorcycles, tuktuks, cars, buses all righteously, nonchalantly claiming the same real estate, tourist as alien and target, scum and saviour, hash, opium, excrement (i'm even offered dmt one night) ... the ganga anchoring the scene like a spiritual stock exchange.

but it’s not.

its assumed holiness, monoculture, filth and noise, as if these are virtues, expats either caustic or earnest ... my tuktuk driver somehow manages not to kill us or anyone else on the way to lal bahadur shastri airport, which is the puzzle piece fitting the emptiness between varanasi and the world.

 

except it’s still india – different flights of different airlines to mumbai and delhi leaving at the same time share the same gate according to the departure screen. the sign above the gate just says mumbai.

no?it’s?both?yes?it’s?both?yes?it’s?india

a thanatopsychocultural blend of

melancholy, god-cows,

pansensuous gutter dreams

coming soon to varanasi –

• a starbucks by dashashwamedh ghat
• grunge punk nightly in vishwanath temple following aarti
• skateboarding park on the ghat steps
• sadhu rap thursdays
• calvin klein bovine sex club sundays
• burn your favourite enemy tuesdays
• varanicey verynasti 5,000 year anniversary celebration lasting 5,000 years – all kashites become honorary sadhus
• bumper tuktuk – come on! you can finally touch!
• feminist wednesdays
• send one varanasi beggar to manhattan for every 1,000 tourists
• amputate a limb of every 1,000^th tourist UN justice program
• shri baba baba turns the ganga to piss, parts the piss, and the children of kasha walk through to the promised other shores
• spiked lassi fridays
• cow poop spas for the world’s uberultrarich
• a subway line running under the ghats, a station at each ghat
• malaria mondays
• burn your saree saturdays
• bike lanes!
• food court at varanasi junction
• anti-corruption mosquito bots

 

* danke for the varies, rev bon hofmann

bundi

the colours of death came to me one night. they had shapes like architecture, and spoke in the bright sullenness of the houses of bundi in those rare moments when nothing asserts itself, when the messy duvet of the hills lies soft after the frenzied religious lust that tosses on the bed of this land. doors were unlocked and i wandered through those corridors and rooms undisturbed. the mirrors were wells of unreflecting and my face was like the grammar of sleep. i encountered bodies, still and perfect, white moons around absent centres, and they seemed like eyes – unblinking, plucked, sightless, visionary. i say, i would be those eyes. i would be a body perfect, still. no one answers, and my words fall somewhere in the temple of abysses. the architectures of death are blue. blue, skygreen, and nectarine. they come to me in nights. i inhabit them like love.

 

the power of cow in kāśi

cows are like dogs here, curled by the fireplace of death

they look at me in that doggy way – friend-hopeful, disappointment-accustomed, ever-trusting, eating the scraps of the human, pets of the kingdom of kashi, suckling the world’s maw

isn’t it right that cows are sacred, more holy than homo sapiens whose name is dubious? for do they not provide happy meals for the Empire of Hamburger, milk for the only animal who drinks of the breast until death, suffer silently the abattoir and stun gun, lay themselves in thin delicate strips for the aristocracy of kobe niku, curdle for the sweet diversity of cheese, take the flies of the world and sole the feet of the upright, graze the pastures of the wasting earth? all this without complaint, signing no waiver, lacking any charter of freedom, driven from eden without myth, god or iphone. who would not worship? who would not prostrate itself before the power of cow?

cow, who rhymes with wow and now and dao, whose homonym walks in reverse, who holds nothing at its centre with balance, equanimity, this beasty god and gody beast

i see them posing on the steps of the ghats like unassuming divas, depositing sanctified poops like coneless DQ ice cream in the banks of vision, wandering among death beyond concern and rite

and the humans around, hawking, stuffed with self-importance and grief, tilling history like oxen for strange and inedible produce – what are we in our two-legged swill and swirl next to the bovine whom we deign to feign to master; drink, slaughter, eat?

here on the ganga, lotus flowers lit and floating like plucked stygian souls, i see kamadhenu rise. it is not woman who will redeem us. not the mute gods, war. hardly technology or money or even love. it is cow

yottalopoli

these yottalopoli, tokyo and delhi, doppelganger siblings in unsustainability, the former of scrubbed privilege, incarcerating order, the latter of anarchic filth, screeching hunger.

delhi’s noisier, dirtier, more aggressive, obnoxious, relentless, meaner than i remember it. this bothers and fascinates me less than before, having become more intimate with these attributes, their ubiquity in society. their externalization (muted, sugar-coated in the new world) seems an inevitability among the planet’s urban architectures, at least until we figure out how to modify the soul ... perhaps the central practice of the human, a practice which religion, philosophy and art haven’t had much success in; technology now attempting new forms of the practice through genetic modification.

new delhi train station at midnight looks like hades – heaped wraiths, gustave-doré-scapes of grey and destroyed time. the trains look like death cars. it smells like the marriage of a garbage truck that’s never emptied and a latrine that’s never washed.

if anything looks like the end of the world, delhi does. as if the apocalypse has happened (even the moon looks sick here [looks like sushi rice in tokyo]) ... yet humans – photocopied without governance (the machines hyped, 24/7) – still wandering the destroyed earth bound by chemicals and technological scraps ... sign, sign the signs of ends ... (how could i ever return to europe after this ... that museum mausoleum?)

the delhi metro, like the entire city, is impossible. around the ticket-purchasing counter are thousands of people – no lines, no organization. the few ticket-purchasing machines all have out-of-order signs. if you have a pass you can get right in but you have to go to the counter to get a pass. do i want to push claustrophobically for three hours for a traffic-free ride under the nation’s capital? i return to the honking bumper-rickshaw maelstrom above.

the train from delhi to varanasi is delayed first 2.5 hours, then another 2, and finally departs 6 hours late, at 0230h. there are no announcements, apologies; information’s absent; no one knows anything. i find out eventually from a local on the train that the delay’s due to fog – the drivers are scared of not being able to see water buffalos on the tracks, a potential derailment issue. at some point i begin asking people how far to varanasi. the answers: 2 hours, 3, 4 maybe 6 hours, 5, 7. turns out to be 8. because we’re off-schedule, i’m told (all this from seasoned local travelers) we have to give way to every on-schedule train, making the ordeal 24 hours instead of 12. there are 23 cars – most of them sleeper class:  a comic misnomer, as they’re piled with hundreds of humans compared to mine at the top of privilege with only 12. by the end the washrooms reek so badly even passing them makes me gag. and that’s in ac first class. i’m in a cabin with 3 indians who speak only a few words of english. we occasionally nod and smile and exchange a few snacks as signs of goodwill and survival. finally, rabid with freedom, nearing midnight, i break into the thick madness of one of the world’s oldest cities, death hot in the air, my driver negotiating cows, goats, shit, bipeds, suicide-drivers to deposit me near my ghat, its nighttime wailing sticky on the ganga, the old asian moon nonchalant at the burning bodies on those sacred dirty shores.

 

people ask me where i’m from. canada, i say. where else? good country is the most common response. i suppose so. but we’ll see how good it is in a few years when the world begins invading it for its water and climate and land.