It is impossible for me to write about my visit to Vietnam without first speaking of the American War against the Vietnamese people in the 1960's and 1970s. Opposition to the American War shaped my life and the choices I made in the 60s that have had consequences for my life and the lives of my children ever since. And for most Americans who opposed the war the American War against the Vietnamese people remains a source of profound shame and regret ... an unfathomable set of war crimes as barbaric as any known ... crimes and horrors that went unpunished and forever will, crimes that cost the lives of 58,000 young Americans, and murdered more than a million - that is not an exaggeration - more than a million Vietnamese children, women, and men. I hated the war. It was wrong, immoral, and what I viewed as a holocaust against the Vietnamese people ... and I had lived through one holocaust, thank you. How the bulk of the German people had stood idly by while Jews, Gypsies, Communists, gays, and disabled people were systematically exterminated was one of the most pressing moral questions I'd ever thought about. What would I have done? Would I too have been a good German? And here was a war that in every conceivable way seemed equally as immoral to me as the war against the Jews. And, in fact, I was just standing by.
At first I participated in and organized protests and demonstrations against the war, it was all I could think of to do. I was not rehired at my teaching position at Hunter College in 1966 because I made the war and opposition to the war so large a part of the curriculum in my courses. I next found work at the State University of New York in Plattsburg, home of a Strategic Air Command U.S. Air Force base, and promptly began picketing the draft board there, each day at lunch time walking back and forth in front of their downtown offices with a sandwich board sign that read, “Stop killing our children,” with pictures of recently killed American servicemen on the front of the board and pictures of Vietnamese children killed by U.S. forces on the back. Dozens of students ultimately joined me in my vigil, a story appeared in the local newspaper with a picture of me and my sandwich board, I was invited to speak before the local Chamber of Commerce on Memorial Day.
I though long and hard about what my subject would be and ultimately focused on the issue of what a patriotic citizen should do if he or she felt there was a conflict between his nation, by which I meant his or her ethical and societal values, and his state, that is the institution empowered to carry out the wishes of the people of the nation. I cited historical examples of this conflict in my talk, most notably about slavery. I referenced the good German question. I explained why in relationship to the Vietnam War my values, which I thought were eminently patriotic - I had after all served in the U.S. Army in 1960 and 61 - necessarily required me to oppose the actions of the state in Vietnam by whatever means I could.
The Chamber of Commerce applauded me. They shook my hand. They gave me a commemorative certificate. They went to the president of the college and said, “get rid of him.” And he promptly did.
I dropped out of teaching. I defined myself as a revolutionary. I actively supported third world liberation struggles in all the ways I could without being jailed. I advocated violence against my government and aided and abetted those who carried out such violence. I helped begin a commune in Vermont where I lived for years, initiated in part by a desire to assist in stopping the war, of dropping out, of not paying taxes, of helping resisters get to Canada. There is no doubt in my mind that internal American opposition to the war contributed to its ending.
Of course, it goes without saying that the American War is immensely prominent in the minds and hearts of every Vietnamese person I've evet met. How else can it be? For the Vietnamese young, there is the unfathomable fact that Vietnamese brother and sister fought bitterly against brother and sister. And while for older Vietnamese people there is both genuine forgiveness and genuine pride - winning as a David against Goliath helps with both - the consequences of the war, of land mines, of the cancer inducing banned chemical weapon attacks with Agent Orange - and of literal decades and generations of war against the imperialistic Americans, French and Chinese - are seared into (what appears to me) a remarkably militant national consciousness, repeated in museum displays, songs, flags, names, propoganda, tours, and iconography. That the Vietnamese can be as tough as they obviously are, as determined as they are, and as warm, kind, and smiling as they are moves me immensely. As Uncle Ho reminded and advised us, "What could be more natural? After sorrow comes happiness."
Travel Stories
Introduction
Myanmar is the most authentically non western country/culture i have ever seen or been in. fields with over 1000 buddha statues 4 or 5 times life size. reclining buddha statues the size of ocean liners that you can walk in like the statue of liberty, only MUCH BIGGER. monks everywhere. children everywhere. pagodas in caves, stupas on seemingly unreachable pinnacles, mountaintop villages that can be accessed only by foot and that must be what Shangri La was intended to depict. 85% of the people are engaged in agriculture, ox carts, 1940 chevy trucks, women with yellow caked faces, men wearing longyis. even in the cities people cook with wood and charcoal. refrigeration is rare, mostly styrofoam and ice. even on the moving train they cook with wood. the sense of government oppression is nowhere visible or apparent to me other than in whispered fears and resentments, and some crazy checkpoints between states. non-burmese minorities do not have equal access to government positions. the people are immensely fascinating and somewhat alien; their “innocence,” grace, kindness, effusiveness, generosity, ease of laughter, delight, warmth, and wish to be of help are a stunning contrast to american impatience, reserve, distrust, and paranoia. there is also wretched and immense poverty, and direly unsanitary conditions, but no homelessness or starvation. a family of four can live “adequately” on 5$/day. i got my head shaved for 50 cents. i bought a dozen kids ice cream cones that were individually sculpted by the vendor artist - baboons, flowers, turtles - for a dime each. i keep giving things away, bracelets, necklaces, trinkets, and the next thing i know they are being returned in some other form from some other source. loren was openly revered as if a movie star. women touching his blond arm hairs, men squeezing his biceps. one cute waitress told him openly, “i love your body.” it was not a come on, just a statement of positive feeling. you cannot believe the number of people who seem to think it is okay to pat my belly. and forget opening my laptop in public because it draws a crowd of avid onlookers and commentators: monks, kids, cabbies, women with babies. i’m really enjoying this place … and i absolutely love the city of mandalay with its immense palace grounds, markets, lovely people, and quiet lanes.
Myanmar 2
the internet here is so problematic that i’ve had to send these myanmar entries to sam in the states so he can post them. and forget sending photos from myanmar, or accessing additional funds beyond what you came in with, since the government refuses to permit the use of credit cards or travelers cheques anywhere and there are no atms allowed either. but notwithstanding these mostly petty inconveniences, and the fact i may end up in india flat broke and praying for a money changer who will honor my credit card for a fee, myanmar continues to amaze me in ways i can barely describe. so would the fact that i helped wash a 16 foot long python today and then had it slither on its wet belly slowly across my shoulders behind my neck and down onto the floor qualify? or that joy and i visited olden pagodas on the other side or the irawaddy river while being driven around on an ox cart and at the end the ox cart driver asked for an extra dollar as a tip for the oxen? or the time i was eating a freshly fried burmese pancake from a street seller of an early evening in the poorest section of mandalay, served to me on very absorbent pages filled with penned lessons pulled from the vendor’s daughter’s lined school homework book, when a sparrow fell as if out of nowhere dead at my feet and lay there motionless in the street on its back while the vendor’s daughter pulled gently on the sparrow’s tail feathers to get it out from under me as i was eating (or trying to) and after about two full minutes the sparrow righted itself in one swift motion and flew fully functionally away? or the people who come up to joy and me and want to have their pictures taken, or their kid’s pictures taken, waving to us from passing motorcycles, smiling with betel juice stained teeth, such as there are teeth left in their mouths, monks who want to talk with us, students in their last year of medical school eager for conversation, random taxi drivers who give us directions and unsolicited suggestions of places to visit not necessarily seeking a fare. myanmar is a frustrated anthropologist’s paradise. and as the burmese man who lives in the one room bamboo hut without electricity or running water told me in broken english today, “life is here so free.” or perhaps even more to the point, the t-shirt being worn by the kid walking hand and hand with the monk that read on the front, “this order is the important secret which must never be omitted …” and on the back read, “time passes indifferently.”
YOGA IN BAGAN
On a sunny hot afternoon in Bagan, Myanmar I decide to do yoga out of doors. Although I am self-conscious about doing yoga where I can be seen, next to our guesthouse is a lovely 1,000 year-old brick and mortar temple that I wander over to and where I lay down my mat on the level back terrace, out of view of people at the guesthouse and in the midday shade. From my mat I can see the bamboo hut village that abuts the temple, the dusty ox cart and walking paths that connect the village, and the garbage heap where the plastic bags and bottles that blight the countryside are dumped. Focusing on yoga takes a bit of effort, but soon I am moving from posture to posture, eyes closed, breathing mindfully and rhythmically, somehow having forgotten about my setting.
Perhaps forty or so minutes into my routine, on instinct, I turn around and look to my rear where I see four boys, about 8 to 10 years old, each carrying handmade slingshots, and each staring at me in a mystified, fascinated, respectful way. I have no idea how long they’ve been there, but my guess is about three to five minutes. And although I laugh out loud on seeing the boys, which markedly breaks the silence, I also continue my practices and postures. Only now the boys have put down their slingshots and are imitating my movements and giggling. And while I am doing the postures, I am also laughing out loud at the boys and at myself. And the more I laugh the move unbounded the boys’ movements and laughter become, and soon we are all laughing loudly together and doing yoga postures together in the shade of the temple. After about five minutes of moving through a series of standing postures I simply cannot go on with the yoga in a focused way, so I sit down on my mat, cross-legged, facing them. And they sit down on the terrace floor cross-legged facing me. I say “yoga” and they laugh. I do a side stretch and they do a side stretch. I move very slowly and explicitly into a full lotus. They move into full lotus. I briefly lift my butt off the ground about half an inch pressing into my palms. They all lift their butts up four or five inches above the terrace and swing back and forth supported on their palms as I can only imagine doing. They are so wiry, and funny, and, of course, laughing hysterically. And when we move into downward dog, the rocks they are carrying around for their slingshots fall out of their shirt pockets and clatter to the brick and mortar floor, and they are laughing even harder. And I am laughing. And there is no way to keep up even this level of the practice while laughing so hard, and it is nearly time for me to be ending anyhow. So I sit down cross legged again facing them. And they sit down cross legged facing me. And I say “hello” in Burmese. And they say hello. And I put my hands in prayer position in front of my heart. And they put their hands together in prayer position in front of their hearts. And I say, “Namaste.” And they giggle. And I bow toward them. And the boys bow toward me. And I get up and roll up my mat. And they get up and grab their slingshots and start firing at leaves and tree trunks and the temple bells. And I say goodbye. And they say goodbye. And I wave. And they wave. And I ring a huge temple bell very loudly with the large wooden striker left there for that purpose. And the bell reverberates. And I reverberate. And I walk back toward the guesthouse. And when I am almost there I turn around, and the boys are still standing on the temple terrace waving, and I wave again, and say “Namaste” again, and walk to my room, my asana practice over for the day.
Jumping Cat Monastery
Inle Lake is surrounded by steep mountains, and dozens of traditional Burmese, Shan, and Intha villages that cannot be reached by means other than boat. And pagodas that cannot be reached other than my foot. The lake rises and falls depending upon the season and the grace of the gods, goddesses, and “nats” of water and rain. Some of the village houses stand on stilts in the water whatever the height of the lake. Others are seasonal or on land. All trading and travel needs are met with the use of boats. The scenery includes young boys riding water buffalo, men and women washing clothes, field workers and children waving, fishermen with nets, dugout canoes being paddled while standing -using one leg to move the long thin paddle through the water. Harvesting watercress, tomatoes, squashes, and corn being grown on floating islands made of river silt and river muck created over the centuries by people with nothing more than their backs and their shovels who do not greet you by asking, “How are you?” but rather, “Are you happy?” An aquatic culture practicing aquatic farming with ecological awareness on small footpaths and busy boat lanes with bamboo dams, wonderful woven bamboo retaining walls, bamboo stakes and ties, bamboo houses and fences, And bamboo’s consciousness of strength, flexibility, versatility and utility in a land of earthly industry, of farming, weaving, carving, and craft. Of diligent labor.
A floating restaurant named “Nice.”
A floating home for monks whose name translates to “Jumping Cat Monastery” and actually has jumping cats. You should come here to see and contemplate people who do not walk or run except inside their houses, whose entire terra firma is often but twelve square feet of bamboo flooring filled with mats, bedding, a wood cooking stove, some pots and pans, family photographs, potted plants, posters of soccer teams from England, clothes drying on hooks, and bells ringing.
I had wanted to leave some of you with the jumping cats, relatives of whom once lived in your home, but wasn’t sure what the monks would want, so I just eased you into the laketo become one with the fishes, and the silt, and the floating islands which support the plants that feed the people who grow and live and thrive and die here, and who asked when you entered their waters if you were happy.
in transit
much as i love(d) myanmar, i am now at the airport in kuala lumpur, where i will spend my 3 hours in malaysia in transit drinking their famous “white coffee,” having a bowl of ipoh hor fun, using my credit card again! (i was almost totally out of cash in myanmar w no way to get more there), enjoying the sight of my first rain in 2 months, exploiting the free high speed wireless internet available at the airport (utilizing my well traveled international male power adaptor, of course) in this nation of 28m people i know nothing!! about, and will then be on my way to chennai, india, where i haven’t even booked a room and have no idea where the path will lead me until i rendezvous w sam in delhi three weeks from now.
i’ve enjoyed thinking of myself at times these days as a mendicant and poet, someone who is feeling more than thinking, quieting his mind, being more than doing, a monk wandering the streets seeking alms. of course i know i’m just an american tourist, but there is also a way in which my “thinking” and active cognition have been substantially reduced in terms of their activity and dominance in my brain and have been not so much “replaced” as overwhelmed by “just” being in time and space and feeling what I am conscious of, aside from the sights and sounds that abound and surround me, is an internal sense of comfort, awe, gratitude, appreciation, wonder, happiness. these are states of being I am aware of, sensations, feelings. they are far different than doing, thinking, solving, figuring out, planning, rushing, cramming, socializing, catching a quick cup of coffee and a bite, squeezing “it” all in. of course, I am also aware there is are real differences between vacation and work, between retirement and employment, between being forty years old, raising a family, paying off a mortgage, and pulling hard in the harness traces, and being seventy years old contemplating the life you have lived and the choices that appeal to you in the life remaining, but beyond these obvious situational determinants, there is also no denying the energetic reception and emanations that characterize my state of being here and now, which is in some way the only time that is real as I “know” that word - real - to mean.
Manila to Baguio to Manila
I find it hard and emotional tearing myself away from Wamena, New Guinea. The plane is over an hour late and Olfied waits with us until he is sure we are on board and no longer in his care, clearly above and beyond the bounds of his duty. Yeskeel also meets us at the airstrip and in addition to his new cell phone, Yeskeel has also replaced the traditional hand woven net bag he had been using to carry his minimum traveling possessions in - thread, extra gourds, a bone needle, the craft project he is working on, some cash – and still naked as the day he was born except for his penis sheath, feathered headband, and wristwatch, is now carrying a mid size backpack like a schoolboy. Who says I am not an agent of social change?
We fly from Wamena into Sinesta, Papua, and then drive an hour into Jayapura, the Papua capital, making touristy stops along the way, including at the hilltop former army HQ of Douglas MacArthur where MacArthur and his staff planned retaking the Philippines from the Japanese in 1944. The view is magnificent. We also travel by motorized “canoe” to a small island paradise in the middle of a series of three spectacular Papuan mountain lakes where we buy paintings on canvas made of pounded bark. Lastly we stop at a very modest anthropology museum, at a very modest university, where I buy a surprisingly beautiful museum quality Asmat carving, not more than fifty years old probably, but very moving and authentic in design and expression – male and female figures holding hands atop another squatting male and female hand holding couple crafted in the classic coastal Asmat tribal style.
We spend the night on the tenth floor of the fanciest hotel in Jayapura with a commanding view of Jayapura’s spectacular deep-water harbor. In the morning, before heading to the airport I experience intense chest pain right at my heart, pain so significant and persistent I am forced to lay down. It is sharp pain, which I take comfort in, classic heart attack pain being described more often as “crushing,” but the pain really hurts (5 on a scale of 1 to 10), and doesn’t abate. I take a muscle relaxant and chew some aspirin. I have no other symptoms and am clear that unless things get considerably worse I will not seek medical care or alter any of our travel plans until we reach Jakarta, at which point we can reassess before Joy and I separate as planned and she heads home while I travel on to the Philippines.
It is fascinating and rewarding for me to observe my own calm demeanor. I am mostly hoping this is not a heart attack, or even angina pain, although I am indeed seventy three years old and have in the past decade had one LAD balloon angioplasty and two coronary stents placed inside the blood vessels which nourish my heart. I am also in persistent atrial fibrillation, which I take three or four meds for each day, and have a “benign” leakage in one of my heart valves. (I have a hard time associating the word benign with any heart defect, but I do trust and genuinely admire my cardiologist.) What I’m hoping is that this is just gas inspired pain, which is what it feels like, although unusually intense and persistent.
Joy is obviously concerned, but whether by nature or respect for how much I resent and resist being physically “mothered,” cared for, nursed, or “babied,” she maintains a balanced combination of engagement and distance that I appreciate. It is also pretty clear that if I were home I would be headed for the hospital, or at least a medical appointment, but given that I’m in New Guinea, with a flight scheduled to depart in a few hours, I’m not intending to alter my plans if I don’t absolutely have to. And if I’ve had a small heart attack, I “reason,” I’ve survived, the damage is done, and there isn’t anything much I can do about it now anyhow. And if it’s symptomatic of a severe blockage I’m just hoping it will remain partially open until I can get home and be treated. Is this denial? I’m thinking it must be, but also trusting my behavior and the choices I am making are a reflection of good coping skills. I often say that the deepest gift I received from my yoga ashram training in India is a deeply increased sense of acceptance and, although I mostly don’t want to die, I am a reasonably mature person who knows he must and shall die, and I feel I’ve been graced with a rich and full life for which I am grateful.
So we hang around the hotel for a spell and after about forty minutes, whether “on its own” or in association with the medications I’ve taken or both, the pain has abated and we are on our way to the airport and Jakarta. And because our plane is late taking off from Jayapura Joy and I do not have the time together we’d anticipated in Jakarta and after busily making sure she is checked in - without a word of reference to my heart - we take our leave of one another. “See you at home,” I say. “I’ll be in touch,” Joy says. “Wha. Wha. Wha,” we say nuzzling together like Dani warriors, and Joy is gone and my heart and I are again alone.
My flight to Manila is uneventful and comfortable. I reflect that I have no idea who I really am any more, if I ever did, or how I’ve become who I am, but the man I see in the mirror appears as an older anonymous traveler, an interesting looking stranger dressed in beads and head dress flying comfortably close to the end of his journey five miles above his home planet in a tin can.
Manila has a unique feel and look to it, mostly because of the famous Jeepney buses that just say “Philippines” and are everywhere … as ubiquitous as overloaded tricycles - motorcycles with the little sidecars attached - that you also see everywhere. And more than that there is the prominence of the food focus and the food scene. I mean I have never been anywhere where there were more restaurants, food chains, street vendors, and people eating … everywhere! Continuously. Hotdogs, skewers of pork, ice cream cones, ears of corn, shumai, sweet rolls, pizza, sweets and pastries beyond belief, all of which are being actively consumed by young and old on the street. Plus the people on the street are all comfortably and casually dressed and seem to have a nice, casual air about them.
I take the a cab from the airport to the bus terminal and ride directly to Baguio, a famous mountain summer destination and town/city six hours north of Manila where I have the name of a woman with roots in the Philippine tribal traditions of the area. Once we leave the flatlands of Luzon and head up into the Cordilleras the temperature changes notably and the scenery is fantastic, a bit like mountainous Bali. And like Wamena, which is only a degree or two off the equator, but at a mountain high elevation, so the climate of Baguio is comfortable and quite pleasant, maybe even a bit chilly.
It’s hard to find a room in Baguio – it is that popular a Filipino tourist destination – and ultimately end up in the Baguio “Condohotel,” a kind of rooming house with full kitchen facilities that is mostly populated by Filipino families seeking inexpensive quarters and the possibility of being able to prepare their own food rather than eating out, which although quite inexpensive by US standards, can still be a burden for a Filipino family on the road.
My email connection has been failing since somewhere in Bali, which is disconcerting and frustrating to me. The room is dirty and I have to keep a towel by my bed to wipe off my feet before getting into it. And although the room doesn’t compare in pathos to some quarters I’ve slept in in India … and there are no bugs or mice … I’m not completely comfortable and feel a deep uncertainty as to what I am doing here. And despite my efforts to contact the native woman I’ve been anticipating would serve as some sort of guide for me in the area, I’ve had no response from her. Indeed, truth be told, I’ve come to the Philippines for reasons that no longer seem very valid … the possibility of scouting out basketball options for Sam, the draw of seeing the homeland that was so formative to an old, fully faded, but once influential love of mine, and some fantasy about offering something to the typhoon ravaged areas … carpentry, painting, daycare, sports coaching.
As for basketball let me just note it is everywhere in the Philippines … vendors in the street hawking NBA official balls and team shorts, on the tube almost twenty four hours a day – NBA games, European League games, games of the Philippine League teams, which I believe Sam could have made (and there is no question of my objectivity in this regard). And on the NBA All Star weekend I watch some old Filipino guys at a bar watching the three point shooting contest as Stephen Curry is shooting and they are shouting, loudly, at the TV, “Come on Steph! Come on!!”
Plus it was Valentines Day, and I was recently separated from Joy, and the streets of Baguio are filled to overflowing with people carrying flowers, and holding hands, and kissing, and begging. And when I say overflowing I mean just that. The streets are teeming with people, like Times Square on a busy day … and there are lines everywhere: lines to reach the ATM machines (guarded by men with machine guns), lines to order pizza at Pizza Hut, lines to get into the SM Mall passed security - one line for women, one line for men, lines at the checkout counter in the supermarket. And the longest lines of all, this is really quite amazing, two lines at least seventy people long – yes, I counted – at each of the main entrances to the mall waiting for taxi cabs to pull up to the mall and take them home. And although cabs did appear during the time I watched they came quite slowly and only sporadically and the lines grew and grew.
On my second morning in Baguio I have pain in my left arm and a distinct facial tingle – both signs of restricted blood flow to the heart, but I remain in significant denial, only conceding that I will not travel five or six hours further north to Sagada, even further from medical help if needed. Instead I keep trying to make plans, although nothing is working for me. There are no rooms at other hotels. I can find no tours of real interest other than to old forts, churches, and strawberry farms. The Internet and computer repair shop I found is not opened and the phone number I call listed on the shop door does not respond. Even the Starbucks Internet is down.
And then the light bulb finally goes on … aren’t all these difficulties also interpretable as having the significance of “signs from the guides?” And isn’t it true that if I’m significantly occluded but haven’t had a heart attack that I want to avoid a 100% occlusion and possible heart muscle damage? I mean isn’t it true that an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure? And here my friends my South Seas journey ends, just that fast and just as suddenly as my journey to Africa ended in Dakar, Senegal last year, nothing any longer working, the mojo of the voyage exhausted and spent ... and by afternoon I’m back on the bus to Manila and at the airport trying to change my ticket.
Paul Theroux, whose “Dark Star Safari” book I finally finish on the bus from Baguio to Manila, writes of journey’s end that the concluding of the travel narrative appears to fix a place forever in time, but that that “is a meaningless conceit … because all you do as a note-taking traveler is nail down your own vagrant mood on a particular trip.” I think that is a fair and accurate commentary. I try to write of the places I visit with enthusiasm and from the heart. I write trying to capture images, to convey realities, to share excitement and occasionally despair, to entertain. I say it is immensely important to listen to one’s heart … and my heart has been speaking to me as forcefully as it can without actually harming me lately, and I have been stubborn and selective in my listening. And far more than the possibility I am having some medically significant heart vessel event is the certainty that my heart is no longer happily into this trip, that I don’t want to be on this specific voyage any longer, and that I don’t have to be. I am not a prisoner, not in the U.S. Army, not in the middle of a trial I might not want to be stuck in, not a kid in a classroom, not an infant sent unwisely to a camp from which there is no escape, not a claustrophobe despairing of his apparent failure to find comfort in ordinary circumstances. I am a wise elder I dare say, a man on walkabout, a spirit seeker. And as I do yoga on my last morning of this voyage my mind turns unavoidably to the world I will soon inhabit back home, and I am witness to the serious struggle taking place in my mind (and in my heart) between my desire for refuge, hermitage, silence, and the quiet simple self acceptance of trees, and my perception of a “need” to “do” as well as to “be,” to engage, to be seen as an interesting and sociable person, a desirable person, a person of value, a useful member of the species, the family, and the community. And I do feel deeply torn. And in such a moment I realize that my true earthly and spiritual work is thus well laid out before me.
Chu Chi - tunnels
Maps
Wamena Photos - othe
what did freud know
One Day in Mandalay
Alice, the innkeeper of Peacock Lodge, in Mandalay offers me the option of staying an additional day and I accept … one of the advantages of having flexible time and believing in guides. I also alter my travel plans on Alice’s suggestion to break up the long slow train ride to Lashio, so I am only doing the viaduct leg by train. I’m eager to go to these places, but for today just cruising around this city I almost feel familiar with seems the perfect thing to do. And doing yoga, reading, relaxing, writing, and getting onto the Internet, are all so much more acceptable on the road than at home. Mark that revealing fact, Mr. B.
Anyhow, from the time I step out the door of the Peacock my day is just enchanted, beautiful, wondrous, and, yes, even divine. I snag a ride in a pick up on a side road outside the guesthouse where I’m staying and somehow actually find myself where I wanted to go, the pagoda at the top of Mandalay Hills. Interestingly, I remember nothing about the pagoda or the hilltop although I was here w Joy less than a year ago, but each encounter I have with the physical environment evokes a pleasant memory and a warm feeling in me.
I’m sincerely invited to join a luncheon picnic with a half dozen young men and women seated on a sheet on the tile floor outside the pagoda that looks delicious but which I decline. Then, on a wooden bench working a poem, a robed monk in his late thirties sits down next to me, asks in broken English where I am from, and wants to know about my travels in and impressions of Myanmar. So there we are just chatting away fabulously, his English is actually not that bad, he’s simultaneously helping me with my Burmese, and I’m being as frank and probing as I normally am, given the restrictions imposed by the language impediments. Turns out learning English is one of his ambitions, he’s a serious student of the language, has read some Shakespeare and Dickens and a number of monks at his monastery in central Mandalay are studying English together. When I ask if I can visit his monastery with him, he asks what day I had in mind, I say today, and just like that we’re in a little blue pickup truck taxi on our way to the ShweYaye Sung Monastery compound behind the big Maha Mani Buddha statue in the middle of town.
When we get to the monastery U Ke Tu, for that is his name, insists on paying my 4$ taxi fare, but relents when I remind him he is a poor monk living on alms he collects begging in the morning and the grace of his parents. He takes me to his room inside the monastery. He introduces me to monks we encounter saying, “This is my friend.” He lives in a room with three other monks on a straw pallet on the floor. The room is cluttered with mostly books. We sit on his mat and practice English and Burmese. A half a dozen other monks join us. We laugh a lot. One of the monks asks what my “ambition” is, but it turns out he meant what was my work. I say that at twenty I was a soldier, at twenty-five an anthropologist, at thirty a farmer, at thirty-five a hospital administrator, and at forty-five a lawyer, which I still am today although mostly retired. We try to define retired, and “mostly retired.” I correct their pronunciation. We spent a lot of time on the “sm” sound of smart, and on differentiating between p and b, between d and t. Ke Tu, to test out his language skills, sings a beautiful pop love song in English that I am vaguely familiar with and that I understand about half of what he is saying. (“I am sailing, I am sailing, cross the ocean, passed high seas. I am flying …”). I play them Joy singing her song about her mother, and then play Jimmy Durante from music I’ve downloaded on my laptop singing “Make Someone Happy.” The words seem particularly apt, even profound in a Buddhist monastery. We try to talk about Buddhism but it is impossible. I say something about my spiritual “ambitions.” We try to talk about the difference between religion and “spirituality,” but the word “spirituality” doesn’t even appear in the English to Burmese dictionary we refer to, and its definition of “spirit” is more confusing than helpful. I am invited to dinner and decline. I’m also a bit unsure about this, but I think I was also invited to bathe, which I also declined.
We’ve been sitting on the mat at least two hours. I say I have to go. Ke Tu tells me it was his “lucky” day that we met. I say it was “magical,” and “exceptional,” and that it has made me very happy. As we are leaving the monastery we run into the head abbot who I am introduced to and to whom I say in pretty poor Burmese, “It is a pleasure to meet you (tweiya da wan thaba de), which evokes a huge laugh. The abbot just laughs and laughs. It is contagious. I have a few photos of him. He is the most Buddha look a like person you have ever seen. Ever. (See photo above)).
Ke Tu and I continue toward the street. Young monks are bathing with buckets of cold water pulled up from a well. Naturally, they are laughing. Ke Tu takes may hand and we walk hand and hand together. He intertwines the fingers of his right hand with those of my left. We are both aware something out of the ordinary has been shared between us and while our separation and my departure are the most ordinary and familiar of human experiences, there is a poignancy that makes it very hard for me to separate, knowing as I do, that like many of my experiences on these travels and towards the end of my life, they are not likely to be repeated or reencountered, that they exist only in the present and in memory.
Ke Tu insists I ride back into town on the back of a motorcycle “taxi,” which I do without helmet and aware of the risks, but when in Mandalay … The taxi deposits me after dusk at a downtown market. Men are playing some kind of board game I have never seen before. I am asked if I play. I say, “No, I play checkers,” as I pull out my traveling checker set to show them what I mean. An older man in the crowd says with a big smile and good humor, “Ha! I am checker champion. You play? Winner get one thousand chat?” And there we are playing Burmese checkers (far more interesting than the American checkers I grew up with) right on the sidewalk under a streetlight as a decent sized crowd of men gathers. When I am forced to jump a piece of his he says, “You eat!”
In the first game I make a rookie move and it is all over. In the second game we agree to a draw. And in the third game, in a moment of checker brilliance I’d like to repeat some day soon, I see a number of moves down the board and force him into a fatal position that neither he nor the kibitzing crowd of more than twenty onlookers sees until it is too late, and when I make my penultimate move which forces him into an obviously fatal position I pump my fist once up in the air and the crowd literally cheers and claps, good naturedly teasing the “champion” on his defeat at the hands of this foreigner.
At times I feel as though I can only take so much more pleasure, have rarely been this ecstatic, am really enjoying my travels, all in part a tribute to my truly favorite guide, Sacajawea Joy, the prophetess of the notion that it can and will just keep getting better, that we can attain and tolerate more and more pleasure and a feeling of excitement and delight as a dominant state of mind and being. The word Joy uses is euphoria, by which she means a utopian ideal of emotional bliss. I’m in favor of that. It’s just a little exhausting without practice. But you just had to see this monk laughing.
Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong
I leave San Francisco late on a Sunday night and arrive in Saigon/HCMC on early Tuesday morning, having “lost” an entire day - the plane flying westward ahead of the rising sun on the eastwardly rotating Earth never out of darkness. Air time twenty-one hours.
HCMC was originally swampland inhabited by Khmer people for centuries before the arrival of the Vietnamese. It reminds me of Bangkok, only smoggier if that is possible, and with more motorcycles. I have a room in the backpackers’ section of town and take certain odd pleasure in saying I’m sleeping in an alley, which I am. On New Year’s Eve I go out into a crush of people and motorcycles that would make Times Square proud. And although it is mostly young people drinking beer and being loud, I do manage a few touching encounters, including the only young person to greet me directly – a quite beautiful woman in short shorts and bright red high heels with a tiger tattoo on her ankle who intentionally walks over to where I am seated at an outdoor restaurant, perhaps conspicuously alone, clinks her beer bottle with mine – no she was definitely not soliciting me - and says, “Happy New Year, uncle.” And a much older man - standing at the entrance to “my” alley as I walk back to my guesthouse - who raises both his hands at about shoulder height with his palms open and reaches out to me as I approach him, grasps both of my hands which have come up to meet his, and holding our palms together and fingers entwined raises our hands high, looks me in the eye, and says, “Healthy New Year, sir.” I am touched. I bow. I walk up five flights of stairs. I sleep well.
I spend my first full day in the city walking around seeing the sights and being exploited by street vendors whenever they can, paying too much for a short rickshaw ride, a cold coconut drink, and a man who gives me directions, but chased half way down the block by a bakery shop employee who I have mistakenly given a 200,000 dong note to (approximately 10$), instead of the 20,000 dong note I meant to give for what my pastry cost. The large numbers of zeros are confusing to me. One million dong equals 50$ and the Vietnamese joke they are all millionaires. One dollar is over 20,000 dong. There are 10 million people in Ho Chi Minh City. There are seven million scooters and motorcycles. The museums that attract the most visitors are the War Museum and the Museum of National Reconciliation, not much to see at either venue, but clearly a source of immense pride for the Vietnamese. Red flags with golden stars or hammers and sickles are everywhere.
On day two I pay less than 10$ for an all day bus tour to the famous Cao Dai Buddhist temple and monastery in Tay Minh, about three hours out of HCMC, and a visit on the way back to the famous Chu Chi tunnels, where Viet Cong sympathizers and villagers dug 200 miles of very narrow three and four meter deep passageways beneath the claylike earth to take refuge and hide as American B-52 bombers dropped their deadly payloads and American troops roamed above the underground villagers with heavy armor and tanks. It is the second set of defensive tunnels I have crawled through on my hands and knees in less than twelve months, the first being last January, 1,000 meters up Mt. Kilimanjaro, where the Chagga people sought to protect themselves from the Masai raiders and I wrote about in my Africa travels blog.
Next day – for again for less than 10$ - I take an all day tour to yet another Buddhist temple and monastery – and then an afternoon series of boat rides on the Mekong. The Mekong is really quite remarkable … and immense … running over 2700 miles from its origins in Tibet and forming part of the international border between Myanmar and Laos and Thailand and Laos before emptying - at places over 2 miles wide - into the South China Sea. (Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, and Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, sit on its banks.) Of Vietnam's 90 million people more than one fifth live in the delta southwest of Ho Chi Minh City, yet the villages I see seem sparsely populated.
I love the way the people here have made the river their home. There are fish being fattened in cages descending twenty feet beneath the floor of floating homes, where 1,000s of tiny tilapia and catfish are raised from when they weigh less than an ounce to when they have been fed and grown to a full kilometer in weight – twenty-five tons of fish at some family farms concentrated in a big net ready for sale and slaughter to factory ships that come to the farmer’s door.
Islands dot the river, thousands of islands, almost all inhabited, every inch utilized, farmed, irrigated. One particularly compelling sight for me on the delta islands is the omnipresent pamelos growing on trees where the fruits have been draped with small white cotton sheeting to protect them from insects and look like little ghosts hanging from the tree branches, a bit like Halloween decorations in the states.
It is while looking at these tiny ghosts that I feel very intensely the energy of the Americans who perished here decades ago for nothing more than a corporation's profit, a general's ego, and an imperialist's paranoia about the third world ... and a sudden sadness overwhelms me, a grief heavier than mere recognition or acknowledgement, something resonant at an energetic and cellular level as I wander away from my group to sit quietly among bee hives and smoke.
Arriving Home
I begin the day in Madrid, a city I’m in love with. It’s the ham. When I arrive "home" after these ten or twelve weeks away it’s not like I imagined it would be, but then I'm not sure I spent that much time thinking about how "things" would actually be when I came "home." I’m still a man in search of his narrative plot lines. (Can’t see the forest for the trees, Big Guy?)
The view of Boston approaching as our plane glides into Logan over the harbor and the Harbor Islands, over Deer Island with it’s sad history of abuse and Winchester is one of the most beautiful landing approaches anywhere on the planet. My fabulous 26 year old son meets me at the airport. We go for coffee, catch up a little - friends, ladies, football, basketball, work, money - the important things in life - explore the purchase of a car for him now that I’m home and need my ride back, what his short and long range plans might be … playing semipro ball in Europe? going to a grad school where he might still eligible for NCAA D1 competition? It's another plot where the main character doesn’t know what’s gonna happen next.
Sam treats me to dinner, good Vietnamese food. We see a fascinating violent allegorical movie about slavery - Django Unchained - that we both like. I wrote a brief review, posted on this blog site under "Other Writings." I predict Jamie Foxx’s line, “The D is silent,” will enter our vernacular like Eastwood’s, “Make my day,” did. We hang out after the movie with his mother (my lovely ex, Lynne) at her home in Jamaica Plain. It’s comfortable - at least for me it is - and everything I feel about her remains the same … how worthy of love she is, what a nice person she is, what is and isn’t there, how I am freer to pursue what I want absent the ballast she provided, how devoid I am of anger and resentment free of the constraining anchors and dissatisfactions I felt I had in the marriage. Lynne is said to believe we just "drifted apart." I’m okay with that explanation … although in my narrative I did the drifting and she did the more or less honorable holding fast.
When I finally take my leave and begin my drive down to the Cape it's around midnight. My good son has filled the car’s tank with gas. Was it really me down on my knees inside a church in the Ethiopian town of Debre Libanos less than two weeks ago, me who climbed to the cave where good Saint H hung out all those years in the thirteenth century standing on one leg and being fed one seed a year by the nice bird who supported the good saint’s efforts, the guy who was just in Mali, Senegal, Madrid, and is now back home … whatever home means … on the sandbar shore with a view of the frozen bay? The house still in renovation mode on a little project that started when I left and should have been long ago concluded. But I get over that fast when the painter and plumber appear.
Snow on the ground. Walking barefoot to bring in firewood and get the wood stove going. Starting to clean up. Writing memos to clients whose trial begins in about six weeks. Doing laundry. Watering houseplants. Measuring out pills for the week. I hang out my new shingle - “The Writer is In” - and the write. I play at being the housekeeper and even the cook. I listen to a lot of music and don’t criticize myself for not doing yoga or taking a walk. I clean things, organize and put away things. Rest. Spend a lot of time feeding the fire. The house smells of smoke, incense, and paint. I don't drive the car or make a phone call. I barely step outside except to bring in more wood.
Joy arrives by midnight. We seem/are so comfortable together. I love how she loves me and how I love her. Someday I’ll try to explain my experience of this love better, but it too is not what I imagined it would be … and as I said, I’m not sure I spend much time thinking about how things will actually turn out anyway. I like that. I work hard on being a good person. On being a person I really like, here and now. Workin’ it, hard. And there’s soooo much to “do.”
So I bow in gratitude and reverence - as I do every day I do yoga - gratitude to -
- to “isness” - to existence, to the “original” act of creation, where existence comes into existence, to creativity, consciousness;
- to the “heavens,” to infiniteness, stars and planets moving away and toward one another, being born and dying;
- to father sun – the provider of light and heat – the solar source without which there would be no livable earth, nuclear explosion after nuclear explosion, hundreds of nuclear eruptions on the surface of the sun every minute for six billion years thus far and six billion predicted to go. that’s a lot of energy, only a fraction of which comes our way;
- to mother earth – the planet on which we live … to gravity, to air, water, earth and soil, to the creatures, large and small, animal, vegetable, and mineral who help sustain us, sometimes even giving up their lives for us, to Mother Earth;
- to the ancestors – literally, back to grandmother Dinkinesh (aka “Lucy”) whose 3 million year old bones are available for worship in Addis Ababa, and occasionally on tour, even now I believe coming to a museum near you, back beyond Dinki to the origins of life on Earth, forward from her to grandfather Idaltu, also resting in Addis, a fully modern homo sapiens who lived in the area around Afar, Ethiopia only 160,000 years ago, a mere 8,000 generations ago, our mothers’ and fathers’ mothers’ and fathers’ mothers and fathers, who lived, loved, suffered, bore young, and died so that we may live, pieces of their biology and their "spirits" within us; gratitude to the ancestors;
- to the 5,000 year long lineage of yogis and yoginis whose “practices” have come down to us without books or manuals of instruction, but solely as practice, of being seated on a mat, practicing asana, breathing, spiritual focus, the wisdom of the teachings, gratitude for the Yoga, unity as best as we can perceive it;
- to those we share our practice with this very day, those in the physical space with us, whose energy and intentions impact each of us, as our energy and intention impact them, it can’t be avoided, it’s how energy “works,” and even gratitude to those persons we thought of in our yoga practice today, which in the highest mediative world would be no one, but gratitude for those we thought about as we practiced this day;
- and, of course, to one’s self, to loving how sincerely you, yes I'm talking to you, are trying to be the very best person you can be, kind, gentle, strong, trustworthy, engaged, interested, curious, active, grateful to yourself for the effort you extend, grateful for your/our/my commitment to doing the practice, to a grateful awareness of what good, loving people we actually are. Yes, gratitude.
And Namaste to you too.
And since the sign on the door into my office now reads, “The Writer is In,” herewith 2 last vinettes from Madrid ... and then perhaps good-bye to Africa for a while.
Random Travel Notes
1. I’m walking late at night through the somewhat busy streets of Madrid when I approach a very chunky obvious woman of the night in short skirt and tights standing on a street corner with her eyebrows. She catches me looking at her, her excess makeup, her sad alert face, and says to me in Spanish, “Come on. Let’s go.” And I say, “No, thank you.” Yes, I really do say, “thank you,” ever the well trained, polite, courteous if not courtesan older man. And she, of course, says, “Why.” And I can say, in Spanish, which gives me immense pleasure, “Because I have a woman I truly love very much.” And, although I know this is purely my projection, she looks at me admiringly, respectfully, acceptingly, as she smiles and turns away.
2. I am on the Metro headed for the Madrid airport and my flight home early on Sunday morning. Across from me seated alone on the train is an African woman staring at me. Very odd for an African woman to be starting at me, especially since she is obviously not a “business” woman, and when she sees me looking back at her she points to my shirt, a lovely purple T shirt I bought for three dollars at the Monastery of Debre Libanos in Ethiopia that has Amharic writing on it saying “Debre Libanos,” that I already deeply prize, but has faded with multiple washings very quickly, as has the obviously Ethiopian Orthodox cross on the front of the shirt faded, such that the shirt appears old and well worn.
“I am Ethiopian,” she says smiling broadly at the mystical and unlikely possibility of connecting with Ethiopia - and an Ethiopian guide - as she heads for church of a Sunday morning on the Metro in Madrid, “and I couldn’t help notice your shirt. Are you from Ethiopia?”
“No, I bought this shirt when I visited the Monastery at Debre Libanos,” I say laughing and pointing to the lettering on my shirt.
To which she says, “It must have been a very long time ago.”
And although at the time, it had been actually less than two weeks, it did already seem like an eternity, and I said, “Yes, it was.”
Museo del Prado
The city of Madrid is so alive, so vibrant, so clean. There is so much good public transportation. The architecture is phenomenal. The streets are wide and thronged with people who speak beautiful Spanish. The food is fantastic. There is a vibrancy, a liveliness that is alluring. I wish Joy was here to share it. I drink too much coffee. I eat only Spanish ham. I spend hours at El Prado, truly a mind boggling museum, whose only competition I see in this city of four million is the not equally well known, but truly equally bustling and fantastic Museum of Ham, where I also sample the art.
El Prado displays what are truly miraculous talents in vast numbers of works, all so well preserved, mostly 1,000s of oils over three or four hundred years old, all by men - Rueben, Goya, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Durer, Brueghel - portraiture paintings, religious paintings, paintings which change perspective depending on the angle from which they are viewed, paintings with far more than a thousand figures and a thousand faces, paintings of one dog, one horse, one cardinal, one Christ, bloody scary paintings, paintings of Maja Naked and Maja Clothed, Spanish paintings from as early as the 1100s, Italian paintings from the 1300s, front lighted paintings, back lighted paintings, the details almost beyond belief so realistically do they appear, the range of expression on the faces, the blacksmith’s shop, how alive and full the larder, down to a red boiled lobster.
But most of all as I stroll the streets of Madrid, I’m ready for home, and again concerned about what I will “do” when home to fill the time and feel useful, relevant, and with purpose, besides my one engaging upcoming trial, my summer gardens, my occasional visitors, and Joy. I’ve become such a loner, perhaps the most loner person I know, sans clients, students, men’s groups, study groups, card games, church socials. And although there is always the dream of writing in a more focused, useful, disciplined way … and/or of doing and being yoga in a way that truly deepens me … and/or contributing to the effort to promote greater social justice in a substantial way, knowing war and the inequitable distribution of wealth still turn the human wheel and that, at least theoretically, it could so easily be changed. But the bottom line for me is that this trip is over … and although I don’t want to be on the road right now, I’m also really not sure I’ll find home at home.
And, of course, the ham was also really fantastic.