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Shukie Writes

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Archaeologists of Now

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When life decides that a city is necessary for a Sunday walk the eyes are opened more than the reverie of the moors. Things are revealed, especially if it involves a tracing of old haunts. Manchester say, like yesterday. In a vinyl shop, and suddenly, as always, aware that this is a different kind of life, where the cataloguers gather. There in the midst of the collectors of stuff, and that realisation, they ultimately have their day and that day is now.

Flicking through vinyl there is that familiar sense of a lesser history at the fingertips, of the stuff that remains from those wilder nights and those crazy people. That craziness of me too, and all of us there in a moment of life now passed. It always feels now past in record shops, now and past. Age, I guess, but not quite. They were always there then too, the collectors, the cataloguers, the archaeologists of now.

They gathered at the side of things, collector huddles searching the pulsing beat of a place or a moment for ephemera. Seeking the pieces of life they can place in boxes or on shelves and satisfy their need to own the moment they were never quite part of. If they were there at all. That’s the sad beauty of stuff, it is transferred, traded, stuff that collectors buy and sell and create lives that are not their own. I look through the Jazz section and remember that line from Gil Scott Heron, about in every record store being stuck in the box named miscellaneous, then getting moved to the box called Jazz. And finding out that jazz means miscellaneous. Sure enough, he is in the box labelled Jazz. With him is Sun Ra, Nina Simone, the staples of John Coltrane and other accepted markers of jazz as genre. Despite the differences between them and the absolute awareness oi how this is a segregation unnoticed but absolute, there still is a box named jazz and 95% of those in these boxes are black and American. Gil would not be surprised, he knew then cataloguers work to simple divisions. The boundary they seem to struggle with most is between the past, the now and the future. Maybe we all have this difficulty.

My youth living from a rucksack and 4-night weekends and multiple jobs in cities and towns around networks of squats and flats and bedsit rooms of enforced nomadism meant stuff just never got accrued. Self-survival means you find the best of a situation but really, one thing never regretted is a life without collecting stuff. Now with Nina Simone at New York Town Hall and Gil Scott Heron live in 1986, on transparent white vinyl, I find myself in the dull sadness of it. I tried to remember what year I first saw Gil Scot Heron, was it 1986? No, maybe ’87 at Dingwall’s and I held his hand as he held the mic out to the crowd and I danced with those beautiful spirits with park bench suntans and still untamed souls. And this silent sleeve contained none of that and I wished it would and know it could not. The moment back then was all there was, and no merchandise seemed to exist, or if it did not for us. Maybe at the sides were the collectors, they must have been there. Like me now, collecting the Nina Simone coming of age, her appearance at the Town Hall in New York. Before explicit activism, before Mississippi Goddamn, after a youth of perfecting the piano, and here now, after Ms Simone herself. None of the real meaning and only long ago echoes of life. Neither of these have great album covers, and I remember the Parliament albums I bought as a teenager just because the covers were so great. How Parliament and George Clinton brought cartoon power to my world and as living breathing sounds that I had to know alone, never once hearing others talk about in schoolyard or disco. Still, I was drawn in by crazy cartoonish anarchy and kept there by music that dug new channels of thought and invention. This was not stuff, it was part of a life of now and now alone and the impact of it was of body and mind, of dancing and thinking and moving that reflected both. The albums are long gone. Collections need a static space and plenty of it.

We left the record store and we considered going to the museum, the art gallery, but I had seen enough of dead stuff and wanted to move, to be around living and breathing people. I returned again and again to the archaeologists of now, how life as you age is curated by these stuff collectors and the aliveness of the wild ones, even my wild self, is suffocated by shelves of vinyl and boxes of pristine trainers. Like cellophaned toys, boxed, unopened, the tragedy of a static life of curation. Tiny suburban warehouses hold many of these silent exhibits, bedrooms and backrooms and lofts in which pasts are recreated. Lives not of beats and rages and wanders but as fetish and commodity in frequently dusted cupboards. It lasts longer, this attempt at immortality. It also kills the point of life altogether, feels that way at least. They are in the ascendancy now, archaeological debris still there as museums of dance and terror while so many of the dancers are gone. Trainers that never ran down streets pursued by United or Albion, never climbed tress or bounced on unsprung dancefloors of cement. But neither are they ripped and soaked and thrown in bins and lost to the air of another lifetime. Dorian Gray efforts in footwear and dustcover sleeves. As the existentialists never said, Exhibits before Existence.

Maybe we do need stuff, Nina Simone still brings uplifting moments and movement in this body. Gil Scott Heron and Angel Dust shivers through nerve endings that may well be the same ones that sparked fluid dance and excited chatter in a London of East and North and now only history, mostly forgotten. There is a difference though, between sparks of memory and the reification of commodities. A clean distinction between those that sweat and pulse and others with white gloved separation of object from context. Like museum sadness that wipes over the soul with a velvet glove of missed points and emptiness, stuff without life is only ever nonsense. Our lives contorted by taxidermists of volcanic life do dangerous things, they suggest that the curation and the catalogue is part of the moment. No, they are nothing but seismographic reproductions of lives elsewhere -in other times and other places – and only if we recognise this can we allow life to be lived now. For one thing, the curation of stuff marginalises us from our own lives . False histories abound as others piece together stuff with the fog of memories from the famous and the things seem to the only voice heard. Ours are left outside, soiled and outside the cellophane wrappers. And things don’t mourn the lost dancers, that remind us of our own perishable inevitabilities.

As we moved around and saw the smiles and the laughter, heard songs from pub stages and smelled the aroma of market stalls, I felt the rise of new life. It was good, it was the feeling of the past drifting to where it belonged. Dead and gone, and a recognition of all those tired reminders of another Manchester in their right place, in glass cabinets, glazed coffins of nothing at all. All that’s missing is cremation, but that is our own choice and we can let these pretend pasts burn away inside that crematorium in the soul. Live now, and enjoy searching through the past while knowing archaeology is only the joy of hands in the dirt, but never a finger on the pulse.

Washing line in the old days

120 Year Old Rhubarb

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Either side of a congested road lie two rows of terraced houses.  Enter dad’s front door and you go through a vestibule, into a front parlour and through that into a back kitchen.  Beyond this lies the yard, a hard surface of paving slabs, three feet wide and 12 feet long.  Either side a brick wall high enough to mark a boundary but still allows for neighbourly morning greetings and grumbles about the weather, or less commonly updates of births and deaths and shenanigans between the two.  The washing line cuts a diagonal swath across and in warmer weather than today would obscure any passage with billowing sheets or towels hardening in brisk winds and infrequent sunlight.  At the opposite end of the yard is a red wooden gate, when unlatched it allows passage to the backs, a strip of dirt that runs the length of the fifty or so terraced houses on the street.  In winter, a mucky rivulet runs the centre of the backs and ruins football pitches cricket wickets and shoes picking their way to leave bins for collecting.  Across this strip of winter sluch and summer dust is a series of random fencing, crafted from reclaimed wood, de-industrialised gates, old signs and mismatched trellis.   And beyond this ramshackle boundary lies another world.

The world of the pens has existed as long as the houses, the earliest block built for farm labourers.  The strips of smallholding fenced from the agricultural land beyond them.  These pens offered subsistence, not gardens for pleasure but for food, a space to swap waged labour for graft paid in root vegetables, fruits and leaves.    The terraces grew tenfold to accommodate the reapers of a three-hundred-million-year-old harvest in subterranean fields.  Coal brought new inhabitants, from the surrounding fields, from Wales, Lithuania, Poland to hew the rock formed in ancient sunlight and cloud their own with its belching murk. Within the pens, these slivers of dirt, open to the skies, allowed more than food on plates.  Disappearing lives, histories of land and season, skills in agriculture and cultivation were kept as tiny cultures, traded and passed between generations.  Cultures from the East and West, dunked in darkness together during the waged week, created spaces to share as they grew.  Miserable wages meant feasting came from the abundance this freed labour brought.  A liberation of tilling and heaving, caring and nurturing that partially fended of the poison of the pits and the brutal practices of paid work.

The mines have long gone, the slag heaps of the Wigan Alps now themselves returned to a greener today.  The flooded pits a lake sanctuary for birds, the millions of tons of rock dragged from its resting place, now a series of ash forests, meadows, bird hides.  These three sisters of tortured earth now bringing a wildness that masks the muscle-ripping endeavour, the mile-below explosions that stripped men of life and limb.  The gentleness as the earth reaches again to the sun and forgets the pulse of humanity that brought us here.

In the pens, some legacy remains of these unfolding communities of families and their struggles to survive.  Here, in the pen, we continue to grow, if less now, different now.  More of the land beyond the still trembling fences is given to lawn, furniture to recline, trampolines, flowers and inedible plants.  Bird tables offer pet warehouse grain and seed to replace the seasonal abundance lying amongst tilled soil, crawling about leaves and bark.  Lost now are my own gnarled childish hands, black from digging the spuds patch, weeding, scratched by nettles, soothed by docks.  But by that old potato patch, now mowed not struck with spade, is a strip of history.  Fifty golden crowns that shock a history of another world and reminds us of the fleeting nature of our own.  Rhubarb.  In a strand of earth that runs the length of the pen, this leafy waist-high forest was the first thing our octogenarian neighbour showed us as he passed on the pen.  In the mid 1970s, Mr Davis, a miner for fifty years and grower for all those and more, waved his arms about these veined swathes of greenery.   ‘Russian Gold’ he told us, flourishing when he took the pen on in the 1920s, bursting with late summer growth now as he showed scant regard to the rest of the plot.  As we took in the fruit bushes, the onions laid out, the cold frame made from some demolished house windows decades earlier, we came back again and again to the rhubarb.  Into the shed, then as now a series of old doors and one grimy window, dominated inside by an oil soaked sleeper bench, the air rich with oil and of wooden handled tools worn smooth by never-ending activity.    It was to the window we went, ‘great view of the rhubarb’ he said.  These crowns were the touchtone to a whole lost history, of dipped stalks in sugar, of Mrs Davis’s crumbles and pies, of ruddy coloured wine and summers sipping away a sunset.  He talked of trading these riches, wrapped in newspaper, a prize from the East.  He told us of stalks in a jackbit tin, consumed a mile beneath the sunlit earth and bringing just a little light to that darkness.   Back we went, to his own handover from the miner that started this crop, brought over from Lithuania, or Poland, or somewhere in sacks, a few at a time.  The times when the Baltic farms gave labour for Summer and the Lancashire underground fields took the rest for Winter.  He reckoned that the crowns were seventy or eighty years old, as old as him ‘but dealing wi’ it a fair bit better’.  Dad remembered Mrs Davies giving us a dozen stalks in newspaper when they moved in, that symbol of kindness an ancient one.  Purple stalks, hard as the arms that cut it.  And still this miniature forest of ancient wealth gives its bounty.

Dad tending to the rhubarb

These huge waving poisonous leaves, the proud and relentless stalks, the pulse of a lifetime of which our own is only fleeting.  The houses and the rhubarb, solid fixtures for more than a century as all the waves of humanity that brought them have gone.  Back out the pen, across the backs, yard and  house and onto a road now choked with a blue smog of Saharan oil replacing the murky haze of coal fires.  The parting gift, if you time it right, the newspaper packaged stalks of a Russian Gold from dad, himself the octogenarian.  The headlines change in that inky wrapping but an ancient thread runs through those veins and ours.

Listen to this as a sonic essay here

Red Museum, Dubrovnik

Dubrovnik, Red Museum and Angry Dolls

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I am writing this on the ferry away from Dubrovnik and onto the island of Mljet, national park and lakes. The visit to this departure point in the Adriatic was something that initially I thought I would leave unwritten, unsaid. The twelve hour journey from Virpasar, although initially exciting with train and buses through Montenegro, was wearisome by the fall of darkness and the fully laden climb up ridiculous numbers of steps to our new home. The view from the balcony there was ultimately rewarding but it did not feel enough after that torture of what we later came to know where named the twelve stations of the cross. I can well believe it, and my Catholic upbringing forbids any further flippant comparison between crucifix and rucksack, but I was finished by the summit. Maybe this start, the exertion and the paltry reward of water and a packet of cheese and onion, was part of my initial sense of underwhelm in our new city. It felt new, soulless and interspersed with old buildings amidst the new port development and the suburban crawl up the hillside. Functional, clean but nothing to bring that greater love I know others have for this place. I was also aware of an impending interview online, that had lain like a dust cloud on the horizon, calling me into emails and documents that felt deader and drier than ever in this odyssey of rekindling life. I met old friends for a virgin Mojito after a visit to the Red Museum, saw the creation of Yugoslavia and the disintegration. Learned why the new port area is this new and how disintegration claims many victims, of lives, families, time etched into buildings and fabric ripped apart in violent fragmentation. Amongst this the clear love and pride for achievements made and the power of people to shape and reshape their spaces, envious of the peoples and their power, and angered by deception and cruelty. Histories familiar to all our worlds but more clearly felt when at a short distance and one step away.

The toys called out the most, their anarchy and weirdness made more so by unfamiliarity. So used to the cutesy, wide eyed simpleton depictions of childhood in England, these ugly darkspace fairytale characters screamed from another version. A doll that really looked in need of a child’s intensity of care to sooth the anguish and anger in its face, a clear indication of not romanticising motherhood, of babies, these are humans that plastic face warns, they demand things. An edgy museum of the uncanny, of track-suited families manufactured in the factory in the nearby city. I heard the light-hearted mockery of those nearby in their own western designer sports gear. The tracksuits in polaroid echoing another past resonant with their factory unions part of the governing of their lives, with their involvement, at least in principle.

I wondered if reversed, what they would make of the empty symbolism of the globalised trainers and tracksuits of those viewing them today. Maybe it is not empty, maybe silenced voices and distant labour is what they celebrate. Great museums make us walk the steps of those that have gone before in ways that remind us we are just a few steps behind. Just in different shoes, maybe.

Angry Doll in Red Museum Dubrovnik

We met old friends and drank a virgin Mojito, walked the journey back and took the crucifying steps home, one last time, unladen. Still outrageous. Silently thanked the old friends for their gift of bus tickets and knew we would never climb those steps again. We swam in the Adriatic the following morning, checked ferry tickets and returned home for the interview. Sat in sight of the bustling port, the flow of traffic and people and the perfect symmetry of peopled architecture at work, this was enough. The interruption of an interview was a mistake, the presentation and me ill-prepared. What seemed invigorating use of Henri Bergson’s philosophies on this Balkan odyssey proved silk slippers in a boggy marsh of regulation, employability, resilience and compliance. Another clash of cultures, This one in real time, no polaroids. Other worlds sometimes shed light through the darkness they inhabit and we are elevated through simply by not being there. Ideologies are fought out in many ways and wear many disguises. Curating our own present as a museum of the future is a good way to spend an hour of walking. Ultimately, the interview proved a dust fleck on a crystal orb, and the relief of its ending a wipe with a chamois.

To celebrate, the old town of Dubrovnik. Lighter in spirit now, the illumination of my whole self was intensified by the visit here. THIS is why people love Dubrovnik! The old town area is perhaps the most beautiful and visually outstanding place (outside natural creation) that I have ever seen. Stone and marble, perfect warm architecture of sultry smooth lines and a welcome to that part of the self that knows it is in built space, but one crafted to for natural instincts. Centuries of design and rebuilding, of violence and trade and mortars, still those skills and imaginations of earlier minds and hands hold us from those times when nature lapped more closely over our steps. This whole walled city has so little green but vibrates with the senses of a forest that has been partially ordered and made in small part human, solid and less fluid. Lighting in this place, like the old town in Kotor, is magical. Simple, Not spectacular. No hideous illumination where what is to be seen fiercely exposed by phosphorous beams, Lamp lit, warmth and shadow that reveal bit not fully, allowing spaces to dream in those miniature dusks between lamps and the darker boundaries between them. The designers returning here for the rebuild of the destruction of only thirty years ago have completed an amazing reconstruction. Electrified but with a nod through many ages, to oil burning and candles before that. The most recent attacks of invading armies now come with other polaroids that do not merely echo a past but remind us we are still part of turbulence, destruction, violence, war. Nothing has been fixed. The beauty of a walk around this old town is that life is pulsating here and like the angry and desperate doll, our nature to love and care for each other comes with simultaneous awareness of our desire to blast, burn and destroy.

The charms of my own visit mean I come in a time of peace and ice cream, glowing flesh and sultry ambles. Sat with a pistachio cornet on marble steps listening to a jazz musician busker barely bothering to hide the careful curation of his impromptu performance. The people strolling by are often magnificent, moving as a languid and resplendent stream. Lolling slow strides of a nonchalant catwalk in which the audience is only rarely glanced and disdainfully even then. Like a forest, the perfume of the air alters at times of day and through distinct periods of the night, wafting down the grand thoroughfare and more cutting zephyrs in adjoining alleys. Darker streets draw me soft gusts of salt and fresh wildness, then through metres thick stone gateways to leave the enclaves and find the moonlit sea lapping this incredible stone boundary. People on the outside, like the cats within, lay in moonlight on rocks, steps, plinths, bar stools.

The city remembers the loss, an artist pictured after carrying his 90 year old mother to safety as his life work of drawings, canvases, notes and film is engulfed behind him. This single personal loss still stinging amidst the centuries of creation also blasted away as ages of change crash against each other. I remembered too the beautiful Montenegrin beekeepers and those kind and gentle dwellers by the lake in Virpasar. The enemy of the artist, or he theirs, seemed difficult to piece together in this balmy bliss.

Leaving here, I realised we had spent four hours doing nothing but buy and eat an ice cream. Like forest walks, the adventure of being around and in discovery mode means having anything else to do is superfluous nonsense. There are cathedrals within this cathedral, magnificent interiors spaces that are more obvious renditions of being crafted, designed, made beautiful. Some tiny, others huge and golden. For me, the town itself was enough. Before the forests and lakes of the island of Mljet tomorrow, this space showed a past in which the natural and the architectural shared a pulse. Built in those times before we destroyed more deeply and offering, like the museums beyond its walls, a vision of other worlds and paths we have built and forgotten. Rebuilt with care and skill in a new order of European and global tourism and City pride. Outside the city walls we passed again restaurants with white gloved waiters and red carpet dressed diners on our way to the bus stop. Our 11pm transport was filled with youth in this beautiful and zesty city, many returning home from work in restaurants, a teenage violinist, chatter high and joyful. As we disembarked in the high hill suburbs long skinny brown limbs carried these slender ones around the steps and alleyways in bounces and skips, still singing their goodbyes and jokes as they traversed the hillside around our own plodding, breathy ascent. The ancient old city below is beautiful and draws in the world in its thousands. It is up here in the apartments and steep stepped hinterland that the future of this city is being crafted. If you get the chance come and visit them for a renewal of hope of what is possible after the darkest of times.

Lake Skadar, Montenegro at sunset

Lake Skadar and Montenegro

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Adventure is often stifled by the idea that there’s nowhere left to go, it’s all been done. After a single full day at Skadar Lake my zeal for adventure is revived entirely. There is so much unseen and massive opportunities lie everywhere. On the border between Montenegro and Albania, the lake has shores in both countries and incredible riches between.

Bees

Bee Keeper at Virpisar, Lake Skadar

 

The train station for Virpazar is out of town and down a single track with a shortcut to the centre over a lightly trodden path. A little shop and a few houses are here, and our accommodation a couple of rooms next to our neighbours, the bees. Our more conventional neighbours, inhabiting the house next door, are a beautiful Montenegran couple in their seventies. Both their and our back doors open onto what might otherwise be considered a garden. It is in fact a magnificent city of bees.  Over three stone tiers hives stand together as a coliseum around a level of yet more hives. In and around the tiers are other layers of tomato plants, beans, grape vines, small but already perfect miniature aubergine. The plain of grass is carpeted with bursts of flowers from huge and ostentatious globes of tightly bound pink and yellow petals, to single stem fragile purple funnels with openings just the width to allow a bee to squeeze in, the fabric stretching like cotton as they push themselves into the base. Several trees offer some shade and climbing frames for lizards and crickets and add height to this perfect spot on earth. Sat in the shade of the houses, the beekeeper is at work stripping wax from frames ready for new construction, by man and bee. Open shirted and in the middle of the hives he is neither noticed nor distracted by the thousands of bee flights in and around him. Eight decades of continual presence in this space, with these bees, has made him one with the world he helped create. Every motion purposeful, yet in languid accord with this dense heat and soft hum of a city at work. The mother of this space brings us honey lemonade, and tasters of several of the honeys they collect, across the shores of the lake in three other locations. We see only this one and it is intoxicating enough. This is a world of perpetual movement that is so perfect it feels eternal and unchanged. Change is happening by the lake, a new, as yet unfinished, hotel building and the castle a luxurious wine tasting venue of glass and polished hardwoods with free lifts up the hill in an electric cart. In the city of bees we see that natural order, of symbiosis, of change as process. Not as replacement or demolition and best guess rebuilding that serve distant purposes. Processes of slow and purposeful change that still have construction, but mindful of human, bee, plant, of the networks of lizards and birds. The perfection here is that recognition of things being eternal, at least as far as our consciousness can perceive it. Sustainable in the natural sense of the world, not as trees planted to offset fuel burned, earth mined, land scorched. Even a few hour here spent scribbling show deeper levels. Not some rustic perfection, a space we can all claim, but a symbiosis of existence we need to include in the ways we make other decisions, the ones that affect us all. The initial sight, of clouds of bees around each hive, is false. By watching, it is clear this is constant coming and going, no bee is clouding around a hive, they come and go in individual lines of flight and so vast are their numbers they only appear as a buzzing entity. The hives have landing pads where these tiny wanderers continually land and deposit, then leave again. Their industry involves the harvesting of the flowers evolved alongside them, their brushes bringing new plants, for new visitors, and the plants survival. The industry of the beekeeper is no less, awaking in the morning he is there. At night, still tasks to do. Between times, in hard heat, sat together the beekeepers in shade, sipping honeyed lemonade. Work as purpose, as love, as belonging.  Up the road, over the tracks, the hubbub of more boat trips for sale, of us being ‘the mark’. Reminded of that world of a cultural grating of one against the other, idealised visions of dehumanising, division generating hustlers. Here, both worlds exist, they seem not incompatible. The beekeepers talk to us only possible through smart phones, translation apps, mediated by transatlantic machine voices. Still, we speak, we hear each other, their honeyed tones and soft music, my clunky tones.  We communicate, technology and lines of possibility that bring different periods of growth together. Finding here came through internet searches, other people leaving verbal and visual trails, the hosts secured by booking holiday apps on their smartphones, us getting to them through ours. Lines of flight can be beats of bee wings or through technology. Idealistic possibilities maybe, but why not? Why imagine anything less than the ideal. The hum of the city of bees is entrancing but we did not come for the bees. This planet holds so much and despite the heat, there is still slow wandering that brings incredible sights and experiences. We take off across the tracks.

From here The Lake. It bears capitalisation, Skadar Lake is the largest lake in Southern Europe and it is vast. Surrounded by the mountains of Montenegro and Albania, it is immediately beautiful, it needs no processing of nuance. The first glimpse of this giant body of fresh water in the midst of these granite hard mountains is breath taking. Dawn boat trips are the privilege of those staying over here and they start as early as 5am. The benefits are to catch the hundreds of bird species taking flight in the first promises of sunlight. Emerging from reeds and the numerous types of tree, shrub, bush, grassland, lilies and every possible shade of green, this feathered universe transforms the water. Coots defy physics by running on the surface to escape the boat, hundreds of cormorants create clouds then when we turn a corner into a new creek, they splash their wings on water as liquid timpani. Just two of us ahead on this boat and the captain, a bonus of being connected by the beekeeper’s local connection’s. He leaves the tiller and rushes to the front to point to some white shapes beyond the lilies and reeds ahead, “pelicans!”, and before us four of the most outstanding birds you can imagine. Giant beaks, tilting to the side as they trawl the water’s surface for food.  Majestic, slow in motion but their power and beauty is immediate. Despite these giant bills the pelicans are elegance in motion, the smooth sweeps of head and the languid perfection of their movements, the strangeness of the sacks beneath the bill, the nonchalant looks over shoulders at our chugging arrival. They enchant all visitors as emblems of this magical water. When they have enough of our prying they take flight, as if in slow motion and with the same casual elegance as they swam, they fed, they existed before our arrival. We were transfixed by the lake and returned in the late afternoon to get closer still, kayaking this time. After a few awkward simpatico finding strokes and banging into a boat or two, we found our way down the reed tunnel rivers to the main body of the lake. Eels floated by mouths agape, their watery movements as fluid as their world, our own movements growing more so as we felt our way through this sultry network of yellow and white lilies in fields of floating pads, of reed stalk and bush. Cicadas added their accompaniment of audible heat to add to the still air and honey smooth water we stroked paddles through and glided across.

kayak on Lake Skadar

Once in a while, we were accosted by the larger boats, their wake causing us to perfect the hard oar steer to move into the rush of wave and avoid it hitting us side on. This came to us like natural understanding, attuned to the water, part of it and immersed in it (though not literally, thankfully). Later, after a few hours of adventure into open water, creeping up on great crested grebes and herons, pygmy cormorants, egrets, stumbling across leaping fish escaping some larger predator below, we found ourselves, lost. Here, the worst of things becomes a handy aid. The party boats, thankfully few in number, played out their eurobeats to a dozen or so revellers in lazy sways of dance on the top deck. Glad to be at a distance, we were happy their noisy interruption showed the way back through the lily pad maze and into the homeward bound river to Virpizar central.

Virpazar on first arrival is tiny, at dawn almost silent. In the afternoon and evening it becomes host to the temporary boat trip stands, and a few tourist stalls, a small supermarket and a good few restaurants. After a 8km walk into the hills, to visit the beach on the lake near Godinje, a return to Virpazar feels like entering Gotham city. Such is the silent beauty of those magical mountains, any electrified energy feels alien, a shock to the system. Then home, via the shortcut path and over the train tracks, now so familiar and welcoming after just two nights here. We learned on a factfinding mission to the train station (which involved strolling over and onto the platform to read the sign that says buy your tickets on the train, stroking the barely raised head of the sleepy dog, and talking for half an hour with the only other people there, a Swedish couple travelling to the capital, Podgorica) that many stay further afield. Up hills and in camping spots, family homes and many diverse eco homes and guest houses, we saw many of these beautiful people at the tiny beach. The swim in the lake had a reverential quality to it, most came by car or lived in the surrounding hills and walked there like us. Not as far as us, the climbs need later afternoon or early morning in the summer heat, the alternative is to fry on the hillside and find the beauty of mountain paths more torturous than beguiling. We took the later afternoon option and had reward in a cool return home at dusk, with bats and swifts as company above and yellowing sunsets across the mountains to soften our eyes and let us forget the climbs. The swim in the lake was special, the almost still water allowing mist to swim a distance and lie back and float, soaking in the tranquillity amidst this perfect late afternoon of wide water, magnificent white mountains and ethereal stillness.

Virpazar Train Station

This is a wonderful world to be in and there is space for many to be in it. It seems the abundance can welcome many, to be in the mountains, to walk the hills, swim the lake, sit by bees. It is not visiting that causes problems in these places, but expectation, entitlement. I am learning our visits are to be ones that come with a sense of accord to what is already here, to fit with that, not to bring our own demands of other worlds, other designs of perfection that do not flow. This will involve processes of difference, of eco camping as well as farming, of guest houses as well as bee keeping. Travelling by bus, by train, might save the demand for asphalt car parking slots. It might even rejuvenate the train station, not a coffee franchise, but maybe whatever comes with a sense of presence, of destination.

I am finding on our travels that which we already know. We live on a beautiful planet and people are part of that, how we all live, how we see each other. There is symbiosis in the city of bees and those that live here, plant, insect and human. We can be part of that and it looks to me like letting the pulse of those that know the land be the ones that decide what happens there. Yes, I am just on holiday, but travelling gives that space to see things differently and appreciate what we have. Buses and trains are a great way to get closer to the places, the plants, the animals, insects, birds and the people in the life of mountains, lakes and towns. A guidebook I have reading here is called ‘unknown paths and lonely places in the border area between Montenegro and Albania’. It talks of yet another world we can barely see, one up there in those giant mountains around us. All of possible because of ancient pathways that link tiny enclaves of people. Amongst the practical guidance of navigation and dwellings, it tells a deeper tale. Of how we can look to the past and the present as rich guides to how we live successfully on this planet. We can love it and explore it without having to destroy it.

A meditating Monkey looks out over Bundi from the Goblin Palace

First Dance, Then Think: Travels in Rajasthan

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First Dance 

Then Think 

This was the opening title and closing thoughts of a biographical approach to Samuel Beckett I watched on television. 

I was watching this while thinking how I could make a trip to India matter to my thoughts of the north, our northern heritage and future north thinking. I wanted so much for it to be, and it felt so much that it should be. 

And it is. 

All things are. We cannot have an isolation of region and our wanderings as northerners and the wanderings of others to this north, they make what things are. Place is only meaningful because of the movement between. 

 It transformed me, India. I never wrote while I was there despite thinking I would write every day.  Northern India, Rajasthan, Delhi, Agra. Wild cities, desert edge, mountain top temples and fire lit courtyards in marble palaces. I wrote nothing at all as every second of time burned bright images in me and swung me this way and that, belly deep. I worried how the continual desperate snapping of camera seemed to catch nothing but tiny reflections of what I wanted to keep forever. The seconds, minutes, hours and then generations that bound together like the tiny knots in the carpets weave showed the flawless dexterity of craft through millennia. Each knot so tiny as to be imperceptible, the perfection only  revealed when the whole expanse was flung from roll to wide carpeted brilliance.  

I never wrote while I watched those nimble-fingered carpet weavers. Not a word, as they sung to each other the song of form and colour, the harmonic codes of symmetry and shape. Songs, a revelation. Who knew that every carpet crafted held within them these songs of magic and perfection? Not me. The words still did not come. This was a lost world of the deep time crafts we now marvel at but cannot grasp or hold. Sat in the wool haze of this weaving room, eyes flickering through microscopic organic dust of this ancient creativity. Not a word came, maybe none dare challenge this series of chanted directions.  

On train journeys through lush green and then bright mustard flowers, the dramatic flourish of a vivid red sari amongst three tiers of cadmium yellow, goats in dust clouds on arrow straight highways, fires and gold and growth. Long staring faces and others with universe bright smiles, my own stranger face here in this landscape for the first time. All that could come was the click of a half-remembered camera shutter, forlorn hopes to make aspic still that which was everywhere, alive. Futility of capture in a teeming lifeworld that strummed across every fibre I had.  

Writing was impossible. 

In these flying past train rides, trundling through, then plodding aimlessly within worlds, I saw that everything is here, including us.  Strange and familiar, all the same, just strung differently. Made uncanny. In desert landscapes where crops waned against harder yellow soils, huge red brick chimneys grew high. Familiar, but here still belching with smoke and not the trees that spout out of our remaining Northern spires.  No terraced houses or mills beneath these monsters and each stark steeple proud against brilliant blue skies, at once the same and still impossibly different. Humped backed cattle and macaques picking through silhouetted mounds and us here too, lost histories still echoing of a cotton trail and a working life beneath heartless temples of redbrick smokestacks.  

This world that hummed and throbbed, that teemed with activity and making do and getting by. Our world too, a part of it never yet seen by most, at least not by me. Eyes alive, frequencies altered.   

Not a word written. 

In jewellery workshops in Jaipur, the world sends its precious stones. They always have.  Since before time was recorded in ways we can listen. Craftsmen here were the same colour as the gems they shaped. Every surface water and dust, the emerald green fingers and cloth only their eyes shown out, focused on the rocks they shaped into jewel. I was drifted back to grandad in his Ashton back kitchen, ‘if coal dust were gold dust we’d be laughing’ he said. It was not and it clogged, clothes and lungs.  He lost his leg to those tiny particles rather than collapsing boulders, as my child self-imagined. Would this precious gem dust do the same?   This workshop was something of a performance space, created for us, and in thousands of Jaipur village rooms the same goes on in shadow, homes coloured through emerald, topaz, ruby, agate, the incredible lapiz lazuli.  Each stone its own experts, that know its pressures, it shapes, through generations the same stone and the same crafts.  And here it is, underpaid but simply perfect. A living craft that reminds more than any report or statistic what we have ourselves lost and lost forever. These ancient threads, once snapped, cannot be restrung. How much more are they valued?  Here, the art is clear and beautiful, and as each worker stands from workbench or loom and walks through showrooms of opulence, they do so aware. Unlike the dust and the staining of geological hue, the wealth does not stick to them as they make their ways home. This is craft through the ages and I look again at the towering monuments of UNESCO and the marvellous and the marvelling we all do in our millions. This dominating wholeness, these incredible places of marble and precious stones, this mesmerising gem lit opulence. Every tiny inlay, like every tiny carpet knot, essential to build the massive. Remember the visionary, the grieving maharaja, the forlorn majesty.  Remember more the efforts of body and village, of generations, of eons of craft and dedication to form a beauty of forever from the hard rocks of distant mountains. Remember them, and we can remember our own lost past. For every Taj Mahal, let the perpetual, unheralded graft of the many wash over us with the same miracle sensations that the giant, the completed, the whole allow.  

Emerald Crafts people at work at their bench

Now, in our forgotten empires of empty mills and rewilded slag heaps, remember those that toiled.  We came from that too, not just redbrick and coal dust. All I could see in the shadows of the Taj Mahal, the Amber Fort, Red Fort, the City Palace, was us and the history of the unrecorded, the pillaged antiquities stripped away and all that was left was the craft that created them.  

I saw all this and could not write a solitary sentence.  

There is an energy in the way all things overlap. Inequality we shared from our own histories, it remains here, as it remains with us. India acts as a polished lens probing deep into ancient exploitation, of warriors, oppression of thousands of years. And on the edge of eternal chaos it thrums as perfect life. The epitome of how things are.  There is dignity in every act and maybe why there are three million gods.  Everything holds something to be thankful for, to celebrate, to look beyond the ordinary. It feels like the eye of everything and there is no possibility of a word being written. Wandering every street or hillside, lake or market and the temples appear in the middle life. Shrines appear everywhere, in trees, in the middle of the road, behind a chai stall, random eruptions so that you never really know which is everyday life and which is sacred. And then you realise, it is always both all at once. India is a universe in nebula form, ancient flows and the right now, it can only be lived, that’s what I thought, but I could not write that. Not then. 

Meditating Monkeys on Goblin Built Palace Domes.  

A part of the Bundi Palace built into a hillside
Bundi Palace, the work of goblins, not of man, said Kipling.

 

Amongst the tumult of life small moments tingle still, bring the pen to the hand and both to the paper. One of these was Bundi, a desert edge town of no size compared to most we had visited. Still beyond words, mine at any rate. Kipling said of the palace here that it was, ‘a Palace as men build for themselves in uneasy dreams—the work of goblins rather than of men’, that in 1888. I thought that clumsy, the description of these shapes of palace and mountain side all the same and never quite sure which it is, until granite elephant or stone peacock emerges, or window or ledge or one of the hundreds of doorways and passageways opens ahead. I wanted to ignore Kipling, but then read him and it is brilliant, and 14 decades on the life inside is lesser, but the same decaying majesty he found, remains. It was not abandoned then, although he imagined it two hundred years before, in another prime it had lost. In Kipling’s wanders, the pigeon post would still have been cooing, now empty wooden boxes are all that show this visible feathery line of flight and fancy once served a purpose. The town streets beyond still teem, the temple still sings out in vivid song and colour. Kipling said the accents of Bundi were unfathomable, a brilliant American documentary maker on our visit had just finished saying the same about mine.  Words are never just simple routes between us. And it is what lies beyond words that always says the most. Amidst the peepholes and passageways, tunnels and hidden depths of this mystical ancient rock palace, the thing that stays with me materialised.  Up above, atop the smooth dome of the palace walls was a meditating langur monkey. absolutely still, staring across the streets below. I saw for the minutes she transfixed me, the timelessness of her watch, her gaze. Her ancient presence had been here in generations before the dome, before the palace, or the streets beneath. She and her ancestors were both part of, and apart from, this scene. An hour or more later, in the huddled backroom of the chai stall, I looked up past the steaming brass urn and up the bustling trades of the street and up to the skyline and the place.  There she was still, unmoved.  Looking out into mist and sunset. and it was so clear then that she would always have been there, her and her ancestors, looking over Kipling, over invading armies and splendid celebrations and coronations and strife and labour and laughter and worship and all of it. The past dissolved in that monkey stare, two universes eternities apart and yet cheek by jowl.  I tried to imagine myself in that simian skull, impossible. But for a second, fleeting, maybe imagined, it hit me. The stop in the flow. The everything and the always all at once. It was seconds long, but all the expectation of India was clearer in those seconds. Not earnest holiness as perhaps anticipated, not enlightenment. It was the simple seeing of it all as already there and here, of everything and nothing at all. Right there, alongside each other. The treks around the Wigan Alps in ripped jeans and mucky shoes and cold fingers and gaping upwards at ravens in trees. Intense life and absolute stillness, just a breath away from each other.  So close, if you could give yourself up to it, a lifetime’s endeavour to even contemplate, but if you did, you would see they are exactly the same thing. And then, a falling back that would have no landing, a tumble into the otherness that India invites us in to see.   

First Dance,

Then Think. 

Artists at Pushkar temple at Dawn
Dawn over Pushkar

 

And now, these first days back and everything seen there resonates here, maybe without the reification of the everyday.  Back to the tendency to let the marvellous become grim not glorious. We see ourselves more in others, where frequencies alter and we try to make sense and cannot and only find the patterns when we give up, relax and let the flow happen. The pathways of travel are not geographical and the moments that matter evade the click of the camera. Words then, in those moments, do not come. Only now do I cling to them as a means of making something solid of that magic ether.  We must dance first, and that dancing can be in the streets and hills of here, of the familiar made uncanny by knowing we are part of the universal at every second of life.   

I am not sure of the purpose of writing this or sharing it.  I feel it has some, it is an invitation to something, and I am not certain what.  

 

References: 

 Dance First. (2023). Directed by James Marsh. United States: 2LE Media, Film Constellation & Proton Cinema.  

 Kipling, R. (1888). Letters of Marque. Found at https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/journalism/letters-of-marque-17.htm 

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