31/01/2024
I’ve been here before. I’ve smelled the smoke of the dead and dying. I know the water is both pure (from the Himalayas) and sh*tty (250,000 times worse than the WHO estimate for what constitutes healthy water). I’ve breathed the muggy air and drifted the grey syrupy waters before. But I’ve never been this particular me before. Whenever I visit my past I find it has always changed, not because the past changes or because I have changed, but because the present is always fraught with mystery. The past is the past, but when I go back and walk the same smells and step the same stones, I walk with the future before me, unknowing. The changes in my life are mostly evident in the hopes I carry for my future.
When I was in Benares last I was 24. My father, the monstrously huge architect of my childhood, was just dead, the fear I’d always felt as the son of an older
man (aged 53 when I was born). I had only just realized that I would rather steal and cheat than live honestly if it meant surrendering my time for somebody else’s profit. My future then was equal parts falling in love and reading better books. But the future then was much bigger than it is now, loaded with more possibilities, stretching out forever. My future now is tiny.
The ghats of Benares, the smells of Buddha’s Manhattan, the great snaking river swollen with life and infected with death, the stoic witnesses, the unicorns, the nourishing blue sky . . . all these offer a hope for the living (and peace to the dying!), but cause me intense discomfort: My present right now is quickly becoming my past, and my original ideas about religion and India and Benares will have changed because of this new trip, not because of the trip itself but because the expectations I had for my future are evaporating. The dreams are there, still, but certain realities are much more a part of my life than 16 years ago: Death is coming, and I hide my cowardice in creativity, as if the spinning of dreams and illusions will cheat the inevitable. And I use the word creativity here in an objective sense: like a spider I’ll keep making webs whether they work or not.
While I’ve been here before, and much remains the same as then, the experience now is different because that sense of mystery before me is more focused and limited than it was then, when a younger me was here. And the limits I feel on myself now make me fight for expansion, in the same way I use creativity to fight oblivion, so even knowing there is less ahead now makes me want to see more and results in plans to go
back to the Galapagos and swim with the sea lion pups, back to Madagascar to investigate vanilla, back to empty awesome Arctic, back to my limitless future.
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