5th Installment

Hell first, then Heaven.

Throughout the centuries religious ideologues have dispensed the wisdom that discipline and self mastery are necessary to walk the arduous path to Nirvana. "Repress your desire, deny the pleasures of the flesh, self flagellate and you too can enter the Kingdom of God," or so my primary school teachers would instruct me. The journey was long, minutes seemed like hours, stomaches heaved and arseholes quivered, but here I am, broken and fatigued on the shores of Paradise. This is the story of the torments I endured on the path to Shangri La.

Canto I - Ear Wax Mountain.

It is now clear to me dear reader, that the might of the British Empire in India was not crushed as some 'historians' would have it, by the will of Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian people or due to its exhaustion after two world wars but by poor sanitation. After a month of Indian cuisine my health had deteriorated to the point where my lower intestine would cough up its brown nectar regardless of whatever social situation the rest of my corpus was engaged in. Woe betide the traveler caught off guard without loo roll or a pot to plunder. With this confession it will come as no surprise that the prospect of a city break in Kuala Lumpur would be of great relief even to the seasoned traveler.
By the grace of God we landed in KL and we made merry. With the guidance of St Christopher's fair hand we landed in Bangkok and we sang and we drank and we made merry. But just as Shiva ushered in merriment and abandon so to did he connive against me, not content with my loose stools he turned his attention to my aural cavities. For the past year or so before this trip my ears had failed to produce the usual measure of protective wax. This did not concern me but only compounded my belief that I was somehow genetically superior or somewhere further along the evolutionary tract than the base human being. Be warned friends, such hubris can never go unpunished.
Having flown with such frequency over the past month the congealed ear wax upon my person had compacted due to the variegated air pressure, leaving me partially deaf. For days I roamed the streets of KL and Bangkok forlorn, segregated from the rest of the hearing world.Constructing my own internal muted world I raged upon the gods who had forsaken me. Dumbed down and delirious I mumbled my way to a doctor's couch where examination fell upon me. No man knows dread until he is approached by a Thai nurse holding a fist full of six inch singular tipped wooden ear buds. She began to dig, each shovel load more gruesome than the last. Black stagnant twists of ear candy were heaped in a steel surgical bowel. After what seemed like hours later I came to gazing at an ear wax mountain brightly lit under florescent lamps. Relief washed over me like the warm waters which would greet me one day. Finally I realized my body was fallible, I was mortal, ready to join the rest of humanity and relinquish ubermenschian delusion. No longer was I condemned to walk the planet for eternity.

Canto II - For the Love of Terra Firma

One hundred and eighty souls arrived at the Gulf of Thailand at 4.00am waiting for the ferryman. As dawn broke the bay lay flat and still, its meridian shimmer allowing no incline of its secret depths or tempestuous virulence. Sunrise marked the sky with hope, illuminating towering cushions of cloud, each one a different dream scape shifting with the flow of morning colour. There is perhaps a mystical promise of hope that one day human incongruence would be laid to rest , lumpen and without pulse on the morticians table. Clutching violently to this hope 180 wretched souls thrust themselves upon the water all too eager to take flight from the horrors of whence they came.
Irrespective of class or caste the souls were herded beneath deck. Each with their adornments, trinkets and self image they boarded the vessel not knowing the fate that awaited them. There is dear reader, an unalterable natural law that bears upon all men. Known to the Egyptians, to Plato and the Theosophical Society, handed down from time immemorial The Great Law of Equalization would pronounce its name once more. Sires and seers spoke of this law and the systems by which it might be recognized. First there is death, the dark lord for whom all men must one day cower. Then there is excretion, the humiliating excess that even the most refined dignitary must produce and stand aghast. Finally there is sea sickness which one day all men must face.
So the boat proceeded out of the bay and into the high waters. The more vain amongst us refused the sick bags that were circulating presuming that The Great Law of Equalization did not pertain to them. There we were, some more distinguished than others with their designer handbags, branded rucksacks, fashionable hairstyles and well applied makeup, all so very different, one better than the next. Then began The Great Equalization. Stricken with panic some ran to the toilet but to avail as it was already awash with vomit. Like rats they ran on deck projecting their breakfast overboard. A tepid salty mist caked the air stifling any attempts at curative deep breaths. Torrent after torrent of partially processed food , bile and stomach lining cascaded off the windows, crawled and dribbled along the deck. Hunched double, divested of their adornments and pretensions the 180 souls docked on the paradise island of Koh Toa.

4th Installement

A foreward warning

Dear Reader,

For those of you who read this account of our travels for the ever diminishing shred of relevance it has to our holiday please heed this warning, Michael’s sun bent mind has entered a state of psychosis, when he is not emailing innocent young Swedish ladies to try and form relationships with them in an attempt get closer to  their uncle Yngwie J Malmsteen (to whom they have no relation at all) he is wandering the streets of Pondicherry firmly believing he is in Paris in 1939 and meeting with Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. The following installment may be an enjoyable read, but be aware that by reading it you are feeding his psychosis.

enjoy

Parisienne Walkways (RIP Gary Moore)

I remember Paris in 39

The Champs Ellysee

Saint Michelle and old Beaujolais wine

oh I recall those Parisienne days   Phil Lynott.

Mercurial rivulets of time pass through a young man's fingers more quickly than I care to remember. Indeed it was more than three score years and ten to where my mind drifted as I cycled through the remnants of French colonial rule in Pondicherry. Street names and signs hung as latent reminders of what once was, adorning the grid of boulevards running north to south and east to west. The French Quarter was constructed as an asphalt tableau to the height of rational enlightenment thinking.

The humidity of my surrounds lent an almost dreamlike quality to that day, collapsing the usual dichotomy between warm interiority and cool exteriority. Perfume and cigarette smoke stagnantly draped the air. My heart hastened as my mind took flight catching glimpses of lovers no more. Graciously I traversed the Indian traffic which seemed so out of sorts in this all too Gallic mise en scene. Then, amidsts the fumes and fractured images of coital embrace, the boulangerie erupted emitting sweet essences of French loaves and croissant. Francophiles amongst you will recognize the potency of this scent and its ability to transpose the inhaler to times gone by. There I was in Pondicherry, there I was in gay Paris. There I was in Pondicherry, there I was hurtling down the cobbled streets of the Parisienne embankment snagging my sky blue woolen slacks in the bicycle chain. Out of breath having just extinguished my pipe, sweat jarred from my brow. The Seine flashed and danced in the sunlight as its turgid, sepia breadth stretched out ahead of me. My bell sounded as I struck the cobbles with gusto sending my French loaf and copy of Being and Nothingness asunder in the front mounted basket. For it was he whom I was here to meet.

I shall never forget that warm summer of 1939 when Hitler's goose stepping jackboots marched across the Maginot Line pressing ever closer to our beloved Paris. In the days before their arrival the wind ceased and the suns glare intensified. It was my old friend Albert Camus who had arranged the meeting shortly before the German occupation. A sense of urgency charged with anxiety rattled through a population all to aware that the ruts which they had furrowed and made comfortable would soon be ruled over by the iron will of fascism. Society became uneasy with itself as we wondered how our futures would be carved up. Who would collaborate, who would resist? History reveals that Satre himself struggled between his loyalty to his ailing mother and his commitment to fight fascism. Relationships were strained. Satre intent on promiscuity, Simone de Beauvoir ever loyal. 

As I arrived at the Cafe Saint Germain already unnerved by the monumental philosophical monolith I was to meet, I immediately sensed the awkward toing and froing of biting conversation. de Beauvoir shot a glance straight over to me as she tapped a gold lighter against the marble coffee table. My friend Albert seethed as Satre berated him for having never read Hegel. And then it happened. Police sirens wailed as the commissar came over the tannoy requesting that people continue about their daily business as the first German collumns had entered our city. 

Then I came to, crashing into the present, an old man in Pondicherry. Although that memory marks the beginning of the catastrophic events in French, indeed world history, it was a serene vista of three people who I would never see again. A memory I had forgotten forgetting about all those years ago. For surely I am a different man today, almost all of me corrupted by time and yet a fragment of me remains in that warm summer of 1939. For reminding me of that shard of myself submerged in the sediment of time I shall always love you Pondicherry.