Water flowing into the ocean, two ways. First, a young cowherd and his adorable creamy white charges. They lumber down to a little rivulet that cuts the beach and lies down in the sea. The cows lap at the water, and one lets out a strong yellow stream.
No matter to the drinking cows. No matter to the little boy leading the cows to water, who could easily have crossed the little river somewhere else but just walked through the spot where the cow urinated, and heavily. This was your warm spot in the pool worry times quite a bit. But they are very cute when they go to drink.
Second, oceanside many rocks have been placed to shore up the coast, preventing oceanic erosion. More on river erosion later. So one beach is particularly secluded, you can either wade around a cliff edge at low tide, dodging crabs that live on the underside of coral, or you can make your way down the cliff over this human-made rock barrier. I'm looking for a way down and I notice the gentlest route is down a series of darker stained rocks. Once it clicks, I realize of course this is the natural stairway eroded by rain, the watercourse. I'm really getting off on water words, and watercourse is right up there.
As a parallel, ever hear of Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky? I read Orsolya's friend Michael's copy and never returned it (he moved to Ohio) . More sidetrack bracketing, I think his last name was Brigand or something else cool like that. So this book, Salt, mostly about the salt cod diet of most of Europe, but my favourite part was this: Herbivorous animals find saltlicks. Thus they beat trails to these saltlicks. Pioneers follow the trails and hack them out. Early trading parties use the trails and make them paths. Surveyors chart roads over the paths. And thus human settlement is influenced by animals like deer and buffalo (in fledgling America) finding salt. So animals use erosion-formed highways as well, riverbeds, et cetera. And I was able to climb up out of the deserted beach area.
This was in Varkala, where I spent Nov 30-Dec 7. I very quickly became burnt out on moving around and I've mostly been putting up roots in comfortable places. For instance, instead of training to Lucknow, I'm mostly likely staying here in Delhi until Friday night. It does feel like the last day of camp to be back here at the start and all alone and the new travellers seem so hesitant and halting and green.
Anyway Varkala. Yes I will follow tangents, this is the closest I get to real conversation. The night before Varkala, I took a night bus from Ernakulum to Trivandrum then waited from midnight to five in the train station for the first train. Built some empathy for homeless people, building a little space for yourself. Arrived in Varkala at 5:40, and took a cab to the beach resort area. The interior of the cab reeked of boozeohol. What can you do? The guy's driven this road one thousand times, there's no traffic, I felt safe. He tries knocking on gates to earn his "points", his tourist round up commission, but everyone's still asleep in their comfy, comfy beds. Goodnight everybody. Simpsons, comet episode. So I pay him and walk away and watch the day colour flare up on the beach. The point is how sublimely sublime it was after the long night.
So the early morning. I would wake up at 5:15 most mornings and go to the water, swim, or just watch. It's not sunsight itself one watches, above I wrote "the day colour flare up" which I like, but I had something else saved up. One evening a German man, Rick (of all the beach resorts in all the world...) commented that one couldn't see stars near the moon, that the moon dissolved the stars. Great find by a non-fluent speaker. SO, in the early morning I feel that the colours of the world resolve themselves. I've tried many other verbs for how sunsight brings colour back into the world, and this is my fave, resolve.
Can you feel a light breeze raising the hair on your forearm? Soft wind brings the ocean surface to dimpled lizardskin, and the angled light catches it in just that way, and on the curl of waves the first glimpse of flashing light when nothing else has lit up yet ....MMMMMMMMMMM.....
So the ocean. And light on it. Varkala is near the southern tip of India on the western side. So the sun was lighting the undersides of palm fronds in the morning and clipsing over the Arabian Sea horizon at about 5:45 pacific maritime. So at four o clock, the glittering no-need-to-get-fancy-with-the-description diamond field over the water stretching away until our home planet curves out of sight (poochie died on the way back to his home planet)
The sights from on the little black sand beach that the older German and French mostly Ayurvedic treatmen crowd frequented...the next one is the set of cliffs where the tourist scene is, beautiful geotextured red rock bluffs that are dense with shadow when the morning sun is still behind, and they're just perfectly not-straight to be funky-adventurous. At night the orange white red candy bulbs come on and the perfect not straightness makes this band of light so, so, carelessly tossed onto a bed elegant that one just wants to listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing Caravan, or sing it oneself.
And finally, swimming. I enjoy it very much. In Florida at the end of '03, when Tishman was there and we saw four nights of Phish in Miami (being alone has made memories more vivd and accesible and enjoyable) ...in Florida I swam out very far and my loving protective mother sent Tishman out to yell for me and bring me back in. So here in India I swam out as far as I wanted. Point being that you get a view of the fishing villages beside the tourist coves and the Miami-1930s-Art Deco explosion watermelon coloured mosque peaking out behind palm trees. I remember being glamoured by a cathedral set amid palm trees in Melbourne, and this had just as much exoticy goodness. This gaudily painted mosque and hearing the call to prayer while I'm out there treading water and here I am on the globe and where's the closest person who knows anything about me...I give up trying to finish sentences but suffice to say it was a moment.
So that was Varkala, and my main tack was water. I will keep it positive and based on my direct experience, but don't forget that there are increasingly strong bad bad problems with water in India. I don't have the knowledge base yet to make my point, too speculative, so direct experience. My direct experience is I saw a doc at the India Social Forum. I criticize all documentaries I can remember for the same things, bad music, long pauses without information featuring bad music, and lack of establishing shots, moving shots, zoom outs, don't make the film if your budget can't support a day with a helicopter. (The opening shot in The Shining when you can see the shadow of the helicopter - ¿how could Kubrick and his editors fudge it up?)
My specific complaint about every single film at this forum was the attitude that I the artist can present the problem and no solutions, that is up to you, the audience. This specific film without solutions was about RIVER EROSION (finally) and showed how piles of rocks held together by chicken wire would eventually be sucked into the river and the gov't allocated improbable amounts to put these useless rock barriers that everyone knew were disaster funds earmarked for corrupt pocket lining.
One thing I know I can't describe is a face, and there are so many face shapes that I've become used to here in this country. So the one interview in this erosion movie that saved it was with a young man in a village that had been washed away by the river. He had the face and the eyebrows that look like he wants to fight, sharp cheekbones and all the facial hair he could grow was a thin moustache. One owuld pin him as Indian but he shares some Asiatic features, almost like a Thai boxer, maybe like the specific one in Ong-Bak, the strongest henchman.
Anyway this man had bloodshot eyes and spoke with the purest mountain-distilled rage, outrage, fierce protectiveness of his family and village, hatred, bewildering impotence in the face of faceless bureaucracy and this quiet river collapsing the alnd underneath him.
Water goes in toward gravity, what we call down. It finds the most natural way. which some call Tao and some just call nature. That's the basic truth of water and erosion, the most important geography lesson. So as a river flows, it wavers back and forth - the resistance it meets at one bank bounces back and creates more force against the opposite bank, and back and forth. So a river meanders. The width of area that a river can be expected to meander acoss is the meander belt. Watercourse, watershed, and meander belt are my fave water terms. Compare meander belt to flood plain.
What was the point...cast my mind back, right: one of the hugely imperative for human survival negative things about water in India, the only one I can talk about through direct experience, a movie I saw.
So one last positive thing about water in India, seeing as how I didn't go to Varanasi to ride down the Ganga and watch bodies interred as inBaraka or do the backwaters in Kerala or see any waterfalls. The last thing happens on a train - I hear the bed sound of the running train change into a ruttle.
When you compound rumble and rattle, you either take away ruttle or ramble, and trains can't ramble. They follow the track (unless they detress) and they move in cyclic rhythm (loving the assonance)
So I hear the ruttle and I know that we are going over a bridge so I look out the window and its so gorgeous travelling over a river so briefly...and this is my spot to link water and trains and talk about my train rides.
So, train rides!
First was the Ashram Express overnight from Delhi to Ahmadabad via the desert cities of Jaipur and Jodhpur. Lois Mason was connecting from Jodhpur to Jaiselmer. She told me about her second husband and her new life running a guesthouse called the desert moon. As good a time as any to reference Ella Fitzgerald singing A Night in Tunisia.
I have a new scale, basically it's romance - adventure - magic - epic, and this first train ride supplied the romance (situational, not between two people). I made it up to adventure but I couldn't actually achieve magic on this trip - I think that needs a companion, but in my life I tihnk I will make it to epic.
My last train ride was a two night, 50 hour train from Trivandrum, * almost * the southern tip of the country, all the way to Delhi. Lying on my upper berth like a sailor. Eating glucose biscuits and drinking water. Opening the train door and watching it pass by. Hearing a ruttle and watching water. Watching palm trees become sparse and speckle and give way to scrub and rock and industry. Getting off and being back in Delhi, where I started just about six weeks ago.
And now I've got a week of the last day of camp.
No matter to the drinking cows. No matter to the little boy leading the cows to water, who could easily have crossed the little river somewhere else but just walked through the spot where the cow urinated, and heavily. This was your warm spot in the pool worry times quite a bit. But they are very cute when they go to drink.
Second, oceanside many rocks have been placed to shore up the coast, preventing oceanic erosion. More on river erosion later. So one beach is particularly secluded, you can either wade around a cliff edge at low tide, dodging crabs that live on the underside of coral, or you can make your way down the cliff over this human-made rock barrier. I'm looking for a way down and I notice the gentlest route is down a series of darker stained rocks. Once it clicks, I realize of course this is the natural stairway eroded by rain, the watercourse. I'm really getting off on water words, and watercourse is right up there.
As a parallel, ever hear of Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky? I read Orsolya's friend Michael's copy and never returned it (he moved to Ohio) . More sidetrack bracketing, I think his last name was Brigand or something else cool like that. So this book, Salt, mostly about the salt cod diet of most of Europe, but my favourite part was this: Herbivorous animals find saltlicks. Thus they beat trails to these saltlicks. Pioneers follow the trails and hack them out. Early trading parties use the trails and make them paths. Surveyors chart roads over the paths. And thus human settlement is influenced by animals like deer and buffalo (in fledgling America) finding salt. So animals use erosion-formed highways as well, riverbeds, et cetera. And I was able to climb up out of the deserted beach area.
This was in Varkala, where I spent Nov 30-Dec 7. I very quickly became burnt out on moving around and I've mostly been putting up roots in comfortable places. For instance, instead of training to Lucknow, I'm mostly likely staying here in Delhi until Friday night. It does feel like the last day of camp to be back here at the start and all alone and the new travellers seem so hesitant and halting and green.
Anyway Varkala. Yes I will follow tangents, this is the closest I get to real conversation. The night before Varkala, I took a night bus from Ernakulum to Trivandrum then waited from midnight to five in the train station for the first train. Built some empathy for homeless people, building a little space for yourself. Arrived in Varkala at 5:40, and took a cab to the beach resort area. The interior of the cab reeked of boozeohol. What can you do? The guy's driven this road one thousand times, there's no traffic, I felt safe. He tries knocking on gates to earn his "points", his tourist round up commission, but everyone's still asleep in their comfy, comfy beds. Goodnight everybody. Simpsons, comet episode. So I pay him and walk away and watch the day colour flare up on the beach. The point is how sublimely sublime it was after the long night.
So the early morning. I would wake up at 5:15 most mornings and go to the water, swim, or just watch. It's not sunsight itself one watches, above I wrote "the day colour flare up" which I like, but I had something else saved up. One evening a German man, Rick (of all the beach resorts in all the world...) commented that one couldn't see stars near the moon, that the moon dissolved the stars. Great find by a non-fluent speaker. SO, in the early morning I feel that the colours of the world resolve themselves. I've tried many other verbs for how sunsight brings colour back into the world, and this is my fave, resolve.
Can you feel a light breeze raising the hair on your forearm? Soft wind brings the ocean surface to dimpled lizardskin, and the angled light catches it in just that way, and on the curl of waves the first glimpse of flashing light when nothing else has lit up yet ....MMMMMMMMMMM.....
So the ocean. And light on it. Varkala is near the southern tip of India on the western side. So the sun was lighting the undersides of palm fronds in the morning and clipsing over the Arabian Sea horizon at about 5:45 pacific maritime. So at four o clock, the glittering no-need-to-get-fancy-with-the-description diamond field over the water stretching away until our home planet curves out of sight (poochie died on the way back to his home planet)
The sights from on the little black sand beach that the older German and French mostly Ayurvedic treatmen crowd frequented...the next one is the set of cliffs where the tourist scene is, beautiful geotextured red rock bluffs that are dense with shadow when the morning sun is still behind, and they're just perfectly not-straight to be funky-adventurous. At night the orange white red candy bulbs come on and the perfect not straightness makes this band of light so, so, carelessly tossed onto a bed elegant that one just wants to listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing Caravan, or sing it oneself.
And finally, swimming. I enjoy it very much. In Florida at the end of '03, when Tishman was there and we saw four nights of Phish in Miami (being alone has made memories more vivd and accesible and enjoyable) ...in Florida I swam out very far and my loving protective mother sent Tishman out to yell for me and bring me back in. So here in India I swam out as far as I wanted. Point being that you get a view of the fishing villages beside the tourist coves and the Miami-1930s-Art Deco explosion watermelon coloured mosque peaking out behind palm trees. I remember being glamoured by a cathedral set amid palm trees in Melbourne, and this had just as much exoticy goodness. This gaudily painted mosque and hearing the call to prayer while I'm out there treading water and here I am on the globe and where's the closest person who knows anything about me...I give up trying to finish sentences but suffice to say it was a moment.
So that was Varkala, and my main tack was water. I will keep it positive and based on my direct experience, but don't forget that there are increasingly strong bad bad problems with water in India. I don't have the knowledge base yet to make my point, too speculative, so direct experience. My direct experience is I saw a doc at the India Social Forum. I criticize all documentaries I can remember for the same things, bad music, long pauses without information featuring bad music, and lack of establishing shots, moving shots, zoom outs, don't make the film if your budget can't support a day with a helicopter. (The opening shot in The Shining when you can see the shadow of the helicopter - ¿how could Kubrick and his editors fudge it up?)
My specific complaint about every single film at this forum was the attitude that I the artist can present the problem and no solutions, that is up to you, the audience. This specific film without solutions was about RIVER EROSION (finally) and showed how piles of rocks held together by chicken wire would eventually be sucked into the river and the gov't allocated improbable amounts to put these useless rock barriers that everyone knew were disaster funds earmarked for corrupt pocket lining.
One thing I know I can't describe is a face, and there are so many face shapes that I've become used to here in this country. So the one interview in this erosion movie that saved it was with a young man in a village that had been washed away by the river. He had the face and the eyebrows that look like he wants to fight, sharp cheekbones and all the facial hair he could grow was a thin moustache. One owuld pin him as Indian but he shares some Asiatic features, almost like a Thai boxer, maybe like the specific one in Ong-Bak, the strongest henchman.
Anyway this man had bloodshot eyes and spoke with the purest mountain-distilled rage, outrage, fierce protectiveness of his family and village, hatred, bewildering impotence in the face of faceless bureaucracy and this quiet river collapsing the alnd underneath him.
Water goes in toward gravity, what we call down. It finds the most natural way. which some call Tao and some just call nature. That's the basic truth of water and erosion, the most important geography lesson. So as a river flows, it wavers back and forth - the resistance it meets at one bank bounces back and creates more force against the opposite bank, and back and forth. So a river meanders. The width of area that a river can be expected to meander acoss is the meander belt. Watercourse, watershed, and meander belt are my fave water terms. Compare meander belt to flood plain.
What was the point...cast my mind back, right: one of the hugely imperative for human survival negative things about water in India, the only one I can talk about through direct experience, a movie I saw.
So one last positive thing about water in India, seeing as how I didn't go to Varanasi to ride down the Ganga and watch bodies interred as inBaraka or do the backwaters in Kerala or see any waterfalls. The last thing happens on a train - I hear the bed sound of the running train change into a ruttle.
When you compound rumble and rattle, you either take away ruttle or ramble, and trains can't ramble. They follow the track (unless they detress) and they move in cyclic rhythm (loving the assonance)
So I hear the ruttle and I know that we are going over a bridge so I look out the window and its so gorgeous travelling over a river so briefly...and this is my spot to link water and trains and talk about my train rides.
So, train rides!
First was the Ashram Express overnight from Delhi to Ahmadabad via the desert cities of Jaipur and Jodhpur. Lois Mason was connecting from Jodhpur to Jaiselmer. She told me about her second husband and her new life running a guesthouse called the desert moon. As good a time as any to reference Ella Fitzgerald singing A Night in Tunisia.
I have a new scale, basically it's romance - adventure - magic - epic, and this first train ride supplied the romance (situational, not between two people). I made it up to adventure but I couldn't actually achieve magic on this trip - I think that needs a companion, but in my life I tihnk I will make it to epic.
My last train ride was a two night, 50 hour train from Trivandrum, * almost * the southern tip of the country, all the way to Delhi. Lying on my upper berth like a sailor. Eating glucose biscuits and drinking water. Opening the train door and watching it pass by. Hearing a ruttle and watching water. Watching palm trees become sparse and speckle and give way to scrub and rock and industry. Getting off and being back in Delhi, where I started just about six weeks ago.
And now I've got a week of the last day of camp.
posted by dob at 10:05 PM
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