Thailand—A Pauciloquy of Wor(l)d Delusions

"Abruptly terminating our conversation, the saint became gravely motionless. A sphinxlike air enveloped him. At first his eyes sparkled, as if observing something of interest, then grew dull. I felt abashed at his pauciloquy; he had not yet told me how I could meet Father's friend."

Paramhansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

[If this here entry don't finish ya all off, it will make you...longer!]



Bon Noiche, my side-saddling pen-guinos! I'm at least a dozen hours ahead of you, and believe me when I say: you have no idea what's on the way toward you, even this millisecond! But I digress (or do I?) from my overplanned digressions...(don't y'all wanna scream at people who overuse the mighty elipsis?!)

As you know by now, in this less-than-linear part of the globe, each ending a-wake-ns the next country, and each wake is the backward glance of the way previous countries cycle through the hippocampus in the center of our b-rain.

Par exemplo, I'm thinking about our old pal from Ronda in in Spain, Rilke again, as he did declare that the goal of poetry was to help us change our lives. If you go to the online collection of his letters, you may find, however dated, a few thangs of interest. The "Intro" says this of him: "One of the most significant indications of Rilke's maturity is the growth of his capacity to learn and be nourished from a wider variety of experience." This includes his travel.

Here's the 10,000-lb. URL to his letters:

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:FtisEKtwTJIJ:www.archive.org/stream/lettersofrainerm030825mbp/lettersofrainerm030825mbp_djvu.txt+Werner+Maria+Rilke%27s+%22Almonds&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

If you follow de scroll down, you'll run into his contradictory letter from Cairo to the Prince of Thurn and Taxis (the Medieval family who owned the first private mail system in Europe, and who Tommy-Gun Pynchon scopes out in his novel, The Crying of Lot 49). It turns out that Rilke and the Prince and Princess of Thurn and Taxis were in a seance circle, and here's the way the aging Rilke handles a long-distance sermon for Our Lady of Perpetual Ambiguity that makes me look like a sprinter on the road-o-words (some of you are yawning and jumping down: that's okay, my restless Mexican jumping beans: I'll catch you below the fine print):

"I was for a while inclined, as you now seem to be, to assume"external" influences at these experiments; I am no longer so to the same degree. Extensive as the "external" is, it scarcely bearscomparison, for all its sidereal distances, with the dimensions, 'with the depth dimensions of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be in itself almost immeasurable. If then the dead, if then those to come are in need of an abode, what refuge should be more pleasant and more proffered to them than this imaginary space? It appears to me more and more as if our customary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and in a sense beneath us) spreads to such breadth that, the farther we find ourselves capable of letting ourselves down in it, the more generally do we appear to be included in the given facts, not dependent on time and space, of terrestrial, of, in the broadest sense, worldly existence. Since my earliest youth I have entertained the conjecture (and have also, as far as I sufficed, lived by it) that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness mere being could become an event for us, that inviolable presentness and simultaneity of all that which, at the upper "normal" apex of self-consciousness, it is granted us to experience as mere "sequence". To suggest a personality that would be capable of perceiving what is past and what has not yet come into being simply as presentness to the last degree was, even then, in the time of the "Make", a necessity to me, and I am persuaded that this conception corresponds to a state which is real though it may be retracted by all the terms of life as we practice it.

Now those seances, with all their disturbing or confusing attendant manifestations, with their fatal clumsinesses, halfnesses and (there can be no doubt about it) their countless misunder standings . . . , lie on the road to such insights, and could not pass me by as, intuitively, these insights were already prefigured in me; they have not, since I always inclined to assume a totality of the possible, in any way altered my conception of the world: it is just that I would simply have missed things of that sort not occurring. But just because, in a sense, the naturalness of this tremendous thing was already included in my inner assents and concessions, I also declined to side with such disclosures more than with any other mysteries of existence; they are to me one mystery among countless mysteries, all of which have more share in us than we in them. Whoever, within poetic creation, is initiated into the fabulous wonders of our depths, or at least is, like a blind and pure tool, somehow used by them, must arrive at developing for himself in marveling one of the most essential applications of his spirit. And there I must confess my greatest, my most passionate marveling goes to my own achievement, to certain activities in Nature, even more than to any mediumistic happenings, deeply as they have now and again stirred me. But regarding precisely these, while accepting them obediently, seriously and reverently, it is my strange instinct, when they pass over and into me, at once to waken counterweights to them in my consciousness: nothing would be more foreign to me than a world in which such powers and interferences had the upper hand. And strangely: the more I act thus (at pains after every nocturnal session, for example, immediately to hold the sight of the starry, still night just as grandiose and valid . . .), the more I believe myself in agreement with what is essential in those happenings. They want, it seems to me, rather to be tolerated than recognized; rather not rejected than summoned; rather admitted and loved than questioned and exploited. I am, luckily, quite unusable as a medium, but I do not doubt for a moment that in my own way I keep myself opened to the influences of those often homeless forces and that I never cease enjoying or enduring their association. How many words, how many decisions or hesitations may be laid to the score of their influence! Moreover, it is one of the original inclinations of my disposition to accept the mysterious as such, not as something to be unmasked, but rather as the mystery that, to its innermost being, and everywhere, is thus mysterious, as a lump of sugar is sugar throughout. Possibly, thus conceived, the mysterious on occasion dissolves in our existence or in our love, while otherwise we achieve only a mechanical breaking up of the most mysterious, without its actually passing over into us. I am (that would perhaps be the only spot in me where a slow wisdom could begin) completely without curiosity toward life, my own future, the gods . . . What do we know of the seasons of eternity and whether it just happens to be harvest time! How many fruits that were meant for us or whose weight would simply have entailed their falling to our share, how many such fruits have inquisitive spirits interrupted in their ripening, bearing off a premature, untimely knowledge, often a misunderstanding, at the price of a (later) edification, or nourishment destroyed. But I must close, dear and valued friends, after attempting to describe so wide an orbit. Take from it something that is yours and, if circumstances allow, always communicate with me about the particular jolts and movements that translate themselves to you from the unknown. You too will not manage without the awakening of counterweights: which luckily you do not lack, since artistic work, house, family, Nature and, not least, the animals fervently occupy your heart and your interest. These indeed, who are privy to the whole, animals, which have their self-evidentness in a broader cross-section of consciousness, are again the most apt to lead yonder and are close to the medial state . . ."

But I hear some of you saying, "Green Hombre, what be this-hyere blather?" It's several things, of course. Partly a stand-in for me, seeking to achieve a more open stance—kind of like learning to use just a pitching wedge for the back nine of my life, with no more strokes added to the game, just some new kinds of swinging. So ambiguity is acceptance of the important role of mystery and the power of choice; we have to CHOOSE or be chosen when we don't know the answer. And if we're, say, having a teeny Shango ceremony on Grenada, it means we choose to be ridden by the Voudoun loas, including him ownself, mighty Shango.

It's also sometimes wondering if I'm still being dogged by Ishmael Reed. For instance (and here Peter N may have to take my side, if he's reading this serpentine thang), here are the boats waiting in the harbor in the port near Bangkok when we arrived, as if they were sent from Reed's novel, Mumbo Jumbo (where the character, Thor Wintergreen, may also be, "by Jupiter!" [a slave in another novel], a god). Can you read the words on the ships? ("Thor Jupiter" and "Jumbo Shipping"):





But to turn to a third (in Rilke's word) counterweight, there's that psychic's words in South Africa (what did you get me into there, Patti?!). As I like to say, the gods/goddesses speak to us, but in Klingon! What did her predictions mean, exactly? Were they only a guess at my predilections, or a "tuning in," David Antin style, as in his book of talk performances, Tunings? That great jazz pianist, Fats Waller, might once again proclaim, "One never know, do one!"

Okay, if you're not saddle-sore already my fine po-mo, post-colonials, lets exchange our jod-purrs for some sweatshop Nikes and get on with this here entry.

[Unlikely or not, tonight's soundtrack is that nightstalker from Dripping Springs, Texas: Delbert McClinton, from the CD, I'm With You:

"My baby's lovin is oh-so-fine
She gonna hit me with a heart-attack!"

But here in Thailand a heart-attack could just be the price of being out in the leathery gray air of Krung Thep, the Thai name for Bangkok, which roughly translates as "City of Angels." But L.A.'s foul air can't compete with the twelve million souls here who drive their lawnmower motor tuk-tuks, cars, trucks and squillions of motorcycles through gridlock every day. There are over five million of these motorcycles gumming up your windpipes, and crossing the street is an exercise in terror. Stop lights don't mean much, and I had to just walk out into the on-coming stream and keep moving; hesitation means inevitable injury, so moving ups your chances you'll become part of the obstacle course. By contrast, here's a street in the boonies, that hasn't yet turned into the antstream of rush hour.



Originally the cycles and cheap-ass Chinese, two-stroke scooters that will end up all scraped, rusted and dull, the mufflers held on by coat-hangers, start out shiny and new, like this:



The first night I bartered for a van with four of the student film-makers. We paid $120 for a two-hour ride from the distant new port into Bangkok, and stayed in a hotel. We got lucky and heard a decent jazz group (who learned this music by ear), and I actually beat the neighborhood pool shark to commandeer the pool table for us. This area of the city had hotels, and the sex trade it attracts, nearby. A David Bowie clone my height, who weighed about as much as a Pekinese, checked me into the hotel. I watched "him" try to type in my name with three-inch-long pink fingernails.

The next day we happened on a multi art exhibit that included these boots-turned-into house:



But our main reason to be there was to shoot a documentary podcast at the place that had impressed me when I was last there in 1973—the former Pasteur Institute, now known as the Snake Farm at the Red Cross center. It's the second place in the world to be established to create anti-venin for poisonous snake bites (the first in Brazil in the early 20th century).

We had to back-sheesh the Director for $90 to be able to film, but had the ear of their main herpetologist, who did an interview with us. We watched the morning milking of the King Cobras, and the show later in the day that exhibited all the snakes. Here's the outside:



Care to see the King (one of them is 18 feet long)?:



How about a plain ol' cobra (whose venin is six times deadlier, but that rarely continues its aggressive attack and repeated bites that inject more poison, like the king)? Or maybe about another dangeroso creature, the banded krait?:



Thanks to some generous donations to this center first started by a French doctor, the Snake Farm has a newer building with exhibits, and the horses they use to develop the serum antibodies is now outside of Bangkok.

Inside there's an albino cobra:



The snakes used to be milked for venom in an old circular pit by young boys who risked their lives catching them with just their hands or a stick. Now it's inside with tongs. However, this researcher was bitten, and his arm turned black and he lost parts of fingers:



The Snake Farm now also breeds non-poisonous snakes to aid agricultural researchers in rodent control; one such rodent policeman is this snarly rat-snake:



The center also works on diseases like rabies, and I've got the sign to prove it:



As you might imagine, this was the perfect place to practice my soon-to-be-world-famous gesture of dismissal and disgust, the "Greenman Cobra Spit," demonstrated below:



Down the street from the Snake Farm (a regular subject for Red Wiley's blues in Austin, Texas), I found my new, dream transportation, and the way I can earn money from tourists under my pseudonym, Rick Shaw:



After getting back to the ship, I left on the next trip to the beach and Koh Samet. First we headed into the countryside, past herds of grazing cattle:



Eventually we got to the beach where we would catch the speedboats to the island of Koh Samet. They were...boats. Speedy ones:



At the pier where we got on them there were dreamy fishing boats:



Especially this little gem, which reminded me of the tugboats I love:



After awhile we approached the beach:



Once there, I had my own, wee, air-conditioned bungalow; seemed a shame to inhabit it alone, but that's the way I roll, these days:



I opened the door and...voila!



I could hear my bed calling me: "Mark! Mark! Lie down!:



The bathroom tile was another pattern for my mandala collection:



I had a good look at the spirit houses on the property. I love these shrines set up everywhere—pre-Buddhist—to insure the success of a house or business, and will make one for my yard, to match my Mayan shrine:



I wrote 48 postcards to many of you (if you didn't get one, it means I don't have your address, so email it to me to win the next postcard lottery); I needed fortification for this, so I searched out my old friend, Mr. Elephant Beer:



Is there really anything better than a pen, some blank paper, a beautiful view and a cold beer?
But beyond the ten thousand Buddha postcards, the Yogananda beckoned (I hear you laughing Buddha-Jeff). I've owned several copies over the years of The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramhansa Yogananda, but never finished it. After a few dozen pages, it always seemed like I'd had trip-to-pain seconds at T-Giving dinner, and I'd go to sleep. I'm sure I've even given away several more copies of the book. But in Nagarcoil, in India, our host gave me a copy, and I now feel obligated to finish it. Partly because, even though the edition looks recent, it says it's the 1946 version, and it's autographed by the author on Jan 19, 1947. Either it's an original, autographed copy, or it's a later trade copy that the Yogi sent his ethereal double back to sign?

Anyhow, after finding Koh Samet's only pool table, with perros perezosos sleeping underneath it and no pardners but the mosquitoes, I ran out of 20 Baht notes, and, tired of lying my way to the truth on postcards, decided to go back into the book, where I found this from "the perfume saint" (who could materialize odors for the Yoginanda):

"Man can understand no eternal verity until he has freed himself from pretentions. The human mind, bared to a centuried slime, is teeming with repulsive life of countless world-delusions. Struggles of the battlefields pale into insignificance here, when man first contends with inward enemies! No mortal foes these, to be overcome by harrowing array of might! Omnipresent, unresting, pursuing man even in sleep, subtly equipped with a miasmic weapon, these soldiers of ignorant lusts seek to slay us all. Thoughtless is the man who buries his ideals, surrendering to the common fate. Can he seem other than impotent, wooden , ignominious?" (43).

Amen, y'all. My (possibly anti-malarial Malarone) inspired nightmares confirm the "life of countless world-delusions." Wish I could recall the Greatest Hits of My Nightmares, but I suddenly can't remember them. More on that anon.

Part of our angst probably just occurs because reality often fails to match what we've imagined. Our old blog-sage Alain de Botton makes an important distinction in The Art of Travel:

"We are familiar with the notion that the reality of travel is not what we anticipate. The pessimistic school, of which des Esseintes might be an honorary patron, therefore argues that reality must always be disappointing. It may be truer and more rewarding to suggest that it is primarily different."

Do we, once we've been to more than half a century of countries, somehow learn, from reflection, that our happiness is—unlike the Yoginanda's steady attempts at bliss—a cyclical occurence? Again, the great Botton weighs in on this:

"It seems that unlike the continuous, enduring contentment that we anticipate, our actual happiness with, and in, a place must be a brief and, at least to the conscious mind, apparently haphazard phenomenon: an interval in which we achieve receptivity to the world around us, in which positive thought s of past and future coagulate and anxieties are allayed. The condition rarely endures for longer than ten minutes. New patterns of anxiety inevitably form on the horizon of consciousness, like thw eather fronts that mass themselves every few days off the western coasts of Ireland. the past victory ceases to seem so impressive, the future acquires complications and the beautiful view becomes as invisible as anything which is always around."

So imagine this, my John Lenons: what if we stopped imagining the future, nanny-second by nanny-second. Instead, let's try imagining the present opening up, cockroach by clock-tick. Wouldn't this foil the Disney "imagineers?" Join me now as we take a timeout to let go of all our "wor(l)d delusions." There, isn't that better? Feel free to share your delusions, however, as they may lead to a some short stories more interesting than the Kansas City phone directory.

India—The Land of Mu

Ahoy my soporific land-lubbers (I double-dawg dare you to track down the Stith-Thompson Index etymology of that there phrase),

The sun went down about a week ago, somewhere north of Mauritius:

There it is, preparing for the green flash that didn't materialize that night...

Right now as you sleep, the full moon is brightening above grey clouds and a pink horizon on the Bay of Bengal. I'm talking to Jack Daniels II in the fac-staff lounge, and wondering again over the chiaroscuro of this shadowy planet, tipping over the equator and listing on the paper sea. Increasingly I believe that Loren Eiseley was right: "If there is any mystery on this planet, it has to do with water." The way it can flatten itself, and still swell enough to tip the boat. The pin-pricks that look like rain under a cloudless sky are as miraculous as the tears that run down the ski slope of smiling face.

I'm letting India affect me, reflect me—a wicked Rod Laver psychic backhand that has me running past the baseline, as fast as I can, while standing still...

Here's what I want you to know (even you who, like Mz Plattner, have been to both India and Indiana): this sub-continent comes back upon you, as if re-incarnation were indigestion (e.g. my dreams last night, that that tried to integrate moi and India, triggered by your photo that I've always loved, Astie, with all three of you hijos/hijas there, side-by-side, musical siblings, with Spendoo the Magnificent playing the toy sax that made Bella howl, all her border-collie instincts saying that sax was coyote:



But to provide an example. About five years after I had been in India the first time, I was making an X-mas eggnog in a bemoth bowl. It was the same brown color as the Ganges, and when I poured in the rum convection currents brought the ice cubes roiling up like bloated cows, still sacred in death. Here's the poem:

Christmas in Benares

"come into my kitchen…" traditional blues lyric

Late afternoon—bright sun through cold glass
winter's twilight in the warm kitchen

Pouring dark rum into the crystal bowl of eggnog
currents of convection surface

until I am shrinking, far away
into the old boat of memory

Square yellow sail, weathered
on the brown glassy expanse—

evening on the Ganges in Benares
Hopeful corpses wrapped by an orange sun

burning ghats the horizon of the bank
Suddenly a roiling vortex

erupts, bumps the boat
Sacred cow, a bloated white stone

floats in the current
refusing gravity, singing rebirth

Epigraph, Sort Of:

Wiki Take One (hot links only work when ON Wikipedia):

Mu is the name of a hypothetical continent that allegedly existed in one of Earth's oceans, but disappeared at the dawn of human history.

The concept and the name were proposed by 19th century traveler and writer Augustus Le Plongeon, who claimed that several ancient civilizations, such as those of Egypt and Mesoamerica, were created by refugees from Mu — which he located in the Atlantic Ocean.^[1] This concept was popularized and expanded by James Churchward (1851–1936), who asserted that Mu was once located in the Pacific.^[2]

The existence of Mu was disputed already in Le Plongeon's time. Today, scientists dismiss the concept of Mu (and of other lost continents like Lemuria) as physically impossible, since a continent can neither sink nor be destroyed by any conceivable catastrophe, especially not in the short period of time required by this premise.^[3][4] Moreover, the weight of all archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence is contrary to the claim that the ancient civilizations of the New and Old Worlds have a common origin. So, the very "facts" that the theory was conceived to explain are now seen to be false. Mu is today considered to be a fictional place.^{[5] [6]}

Wiki Take Two:

Mu (Japanese/Korean), and Wu (Chinese traditional: 無, simplified: 无 pinyin: wú Jyutping: mou2) is a word which has been roughly translated as "no", "none", "without", "no meaning". While used in Japanese and Chinese mainly as a prefix to imply the absence of something (e.g., 無線/无线 musen/wúxiàn for "wireless"), in English it is more famously used as a response to certain koans and other questions in Zen Buddhism, intending to indicate that the question itself was wrong.

The Mu koan is as follows: A monk asked Zhaozhou, a Chinese Zen master (known as Jōshū in Japanese): "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?", Zhaozhou answered: "Wú" (in Japanese, Mu).

Some earlier Buddhist thinkers had maintained that creatures such as dogs did have the Buddha-nature; others, that they did not. Therefore, to answer "no" is to deny their wisdom, whereas to say "yes" would appear to blindly follow their teachings. Zhaozhou's answer has subsequently been interpreted to mean that all such categorical thinking is in fact a delusion. In other words, yes and no are both right and wrong. This Koan is traditionally used by students of the Rinzai school of Zen as their initiation into Zen study.

Wiki Take Three:

Knowing that both the sacred and profane (e.g. Mircia Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane) were "all wore out," poet-scholar Charles Olson dove down through the Sumerian night in the middle of the 20th century, trying to get behind the Greek, even the Egypt that inspired it. First he rose to the surface as his "real," overlooked (and therefore not tainted) character in "Apollonius of Tyana" (cf Selected Writings). Then Maximus arrived, whose symbol was a piece of beaten tin that resembled a Chinese ideolect, swimming that Atlantic Turbine of Olson's disciple, poet Ed Dorn, and swimming to shore in his quasi-hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts, the real/symbolic home of the three-volume Maximus Poems.

[Utopian Interlude: Take a moment to think about how you would try to remember and re-make your hometown, with everything you have learned and now know.]

For Charlie, Mu was that Sanskrit for first utterance: "down through your own throat, to that place from which all drama springs." So this place is the making of a lost continent, that "g/host continent" that Loren Eiseley speaks of on behalf of us all. Olson's Gloucester is this mu-verbing that calls into being the Lost Continent of Mu, those fragments of Gondwanaland, that split the difference between the Atlantis of the Atlantic and the Mu that could have been the Pacific; halve this and you're in the Mu (Japanese something/nothing) of...

INDIA!

First a visual incantation/evocation: our old friend, Ganesha, remover of obstacles:

As many of you know, there are only two choices for me back in Oregon when I'm having a bad day: either I pick up my Jiffy Lube Rasheed Wallace bad boy lunchbox (hair of the dog that bit me), or the one with Ganesha on the outside.

First, the Non-Tour, with a Non-Tourage: Here's where I DIDN'T go:

Why not? Well, I don't think the first visit could be improved upon, so long ago, when I felt what is part of the new scholarship on the building—that it is a Sufi Paradise, rather than a big bauble of romance. I heard religious singers perform on the spiral steps under its dome, the whole air column below the dome some group levitation (Paul Horn recorded these acoustics on his album, Inside).[Don't forget that Taj Mahal the building was created (here's that numero zero prime for world mythology again) in 22 years, while Taj Mahal the musician was created in only nine months; just ask his mama.]

So what to do?: We landed in the self-described "Detroit" of India, Chennai. There's no way to show you the carbon that is smeared into the pavement and lungs of everyone living in this city of eight million. So let's assume you'll spot that along the path of our journey. We'll head out for Nagarcoil, near the southern tip of India. There are only two basic choices to get from ship to overnight train. The first is the death-defying "took-took"—an ATV with fenders and a back seat for three Thumbelinas. It's vibrations, along with pot-holes that could hold a sacred cow, are a good way to check in on how your kidneys are working. It looks like this, after a bath:

The other one, which may look like a step up, usually has no valves, rings or gaskets left, and the exhaust is a steady blue-black:

Here we are at Egore, the train station; wasn't that easy?!:

In this quickly and carefully snapped photo, the mob is temporarily out of view. But don't be fooled: the last-minute, non-line and swarm is just outside the frame. Even the destination up ahead looks homey here (you know, like Peticoat Junction):

But, alas, to get on the train you have to take a closer look at the tracks their ownselves. So let me break you into that carbon stain slowly:

Care to join part of our group in our sleeper-car?:

That's moi, being invisible, as always...

As the jaundiced twilight came through the dirty window, the train whipped through the hour it took to move through the sprawling edge of Chennai. The countryside became the night, the round folds of brownout, electricity sparking and intermittent outside the main city.

We were awakened outside Nagarcoil to the dry mountains, red soil and patchwork of fields that were heading toward brown in the second-hottest month, but still sometimes green from the rains of January (the south of India has two monsoons, one in our winter, one in our summer—the influence of being exposed to two converging oceans).

Wind power has blown in—about a 10-year investment:

Ironically, it's not the brahmin class that appropriates the brahma bull-power; two yoked cows appear:

Sometimes the countryside was still green:

Our upperclass host family had their own gated, comfy compound within the city of Nagarcoil. The professor who accompanied us led us there, to their home surrounded by birds and amphibians and flowers:

There were mynas calling out, from the top of coconut palms:

Here's an old friend, some of you will know well:

Design was everywhere, including this metal mandala above the front door:

The Greenman finally came home to mandala doodle-central, when we sought out the ever-present rangoli. For a quick gloss, go here:

http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/art/rangoli.htm

We visited a school with children ranging from elementary to high school, where the girls demonstrated rangoli:

Here's my fave artist, who I collaborated with, making ginormous rangoli, taking turns:

I had the girls teach us a children's lullaby in Tamil, which I'm still practicing. They also danced for us:

Our host in Nagarcoil took us to a rubber plantation, where it was hot and silent.

When a worker chiseled a trail around the trunk, the white latex began to move toward the wee collection pot:

Like maple syrup, it takes a few hours to fill a bowl attached to the tree with white latex:

Before it can congeal, it's taken to the shop where several machines turn it into sheets of rubber. When they're bundled, all it takes is an awl chopping into them to make the sheets stick together, as the rubber acts like nails, hammered into the skins. Then it's off to the tire companies:

While we weren't so traditional we sat on the floor, we did dine off banana leaves (don't drink the wa-wa, though):

Beyond our veggie meals, we went to an ayervetic doctor that treats a squillion folks a year. Here's what it looks like behind the scenes: "bubble, bubble, toil and trouble!":

Herbs are grown and gathered:

These decoctions and concoctions takes several days to gumbo themselves into the oil that will be sold and applied:

When you get up close and personal, these aromatic and bitter herbs smell a lot like a mouse that died inside your VW dashboard, when the heater comes on; go ahead, amigoes, and have a whiff, as it might just cure you!:

Maybe you should take a break and read Celia Lyttleton's The Scent Trail, about perfumes?

One worker turned what looked like rabbit pellets into capsules with this hand little machine:

This man, probably thinking of Gilligan's Island, sliced up Ginger:

The doctor had his own herb garden, which probably included imaginary theraputic weeds like nosedive, thistletoes, morbindoraba, gindletick and suchatrial. Of course there were real ones, some of which I recognized.

No doctor worth his (epsom) salt would risk not having a poster, so here ya go:

There. Breathe deeply. Feel better? I know you do, my pesky little beetles...

In case you care, we're just now passing the Andaman Islands, home of tsunami attack, where the pernambuco wood that makes up my mad-scientist travel guitar (soloette.com) was harvested (the last of its kind). "What's that got to do with anything?" I hear you ask. Just this: we visited the southern tip of India, where the Arabian Sea meets the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, with waves coming from three directions. It was there that the 2004 tsunami did some of its worst damage.

When the sea receded off the beach, some of the tourists crossed a few hundred yards out to the island that holds the massive statue of the Tamil poet. Then the sea came back with a vengeance, twice. It brought a wave 140-ft high, that came up to the shoulder of this statue:

There was a Ghandi shrine right at the tip, and in the center this:

Outside, it lookey like this:

10,000 plus people were killed when they were washed out to sea in the two massive waves...

Close to Nagarcoil, we visited a rope factory. First we drink de coco-nut wahta.

Here's teeny ukulele tune I wrote for you baby mongeese readers:

Drink de coco-nut

Not de ba-NAH-na

Drink de red coco-nut

Not de ba-NAH-na

[Chorus]

Den beat it, just BEAT it!

Gupta Jean not BE your girl, no

Gupta Jean not BE your girl, no

Then we split open de nut and eat the white fruit lining. Den we soak de coco-nut for a whole year, then whop it into fine hair. This is then spun, and dyed and woven into de booty-ful tings:

My fave producto was this Bill Wither's welcome mat: is it epitamy? irony? signifying?:

But wait, there be mo! We also visited a sweaty shop textiles mill. I can't tell you the hourly wage in 100-degree building, or you'd faint. But a few of these here pix can't hurt nobody, nest-pa? Just so you know, mis-spelling is not an "offence" here:

So the cotton bale stepped up to the bar and was carded:

A few trillion steps later, when the cotton thread has been separated from weevils, dirt, lumps and mysterious "foreign matter," the thread builds, and is spooled toward the shirt and saree companies in Varanassi:

But wait! If you continue reading and stay in this blogosphere for the next five minutes, we'll throw in an anti-climactic trip to a snake temple! Potentially interesting—as it used to be a Jain temple (and you know that means not even an insect could be bruised in the making of it)–this had the cobra statues around the temple not covered like lingams with milk, but with some eggs (to attract the snakes that probably don't live here no mo) and processed, packaged yellow muck that stands in for fresh offerings of food and flowers (the plastic wrappers spill out of a rare blue waste can). At least the tree is old enough to know better:

There's the cobra, in his hoodie from foodies:

And yet worshippers did stoop to put a finger in the curry-colored offering, dabbing it onto that meditation shakra between the eyes:

And now for something completely different, and almost as funny as the (monty) pythons: Ballywood! Beyond his other assets, our host owned a theater. It was a massive place, sans air-conditioning. We sat in a hot-box for vips, upstairs. Here's proof:

Here's the current fave movie that we watched half of, until the 100+ temp and full-tilt humidity forced us to stumble out into the parking lot, where the moto-psycle nightmare would later rev its engines:

The "star" is a Borat cross between Omar Sheriff, a gay Sly Stallone and Dave Thomas of the old Second City. His side-kick has a toupe to look just like him, except he's shorter, and is trying to combine Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon and Jackie Chan (who's was a mega-death-star in India until his last tour, when he refused to meet people at his premiere). Anyhow, someone's trying to assassinate our hero, but they never shoot during the dance scenes, when he and the two women he is hanging with (one will no doubt turn out to be a traitor) and possibly falling for have maybe fifty costume changes per tune, which includes his and her outfits that look like those in Blazing Saddles.

After another all-night train ride from Nagarcoil to Chennai curled into fetal position on a weeny upper berth, but not sucking my dirty thumb, I had one day left. Several of us crammed ourselves into a took-took and headed for Guindry Snake Park to get some b-roll for our planned cobra film. Of course I further perfected my "cobra spit" gesture that some of you know so well:

My theory is that the Indian figure-eight yes/no is actually mimicing the swaying hood of mr cobra:

However, the only way to do it is to watch some NBA wobble-head dolls [which reminds me: which one of y'all can help me finally trade my two Mike Miller bobble-head dolls for the sacred Arvidas "Sabas" Sabonis one? and while we're on this, and in spite of my goal of either/and, let me just take a moment to remind you that Big Head Kobe and the Phil Jackson 5 were trampled by the humble Blazers; thaz right, humbled!].

I also worked on my new (until now top-secret) "Nile crocks spit!":

I also saw some kind of cross between a gar and a crock: the gharliana, which looks like its snout was bound like the feet of a Chinese princess:

And then it was over. The custom agents stamped our visas and passports, and the tugs pulled us out past the container ships and harbor sludge. The pilot ship pulled close, and he walked off our ship and sped off.

Did it happen? It felt like that Borges story I love, "Circular Ruins," where we wonder if we are the invention of someone else's consciousness. To see if I was "re-all," I took a photo of myself in my cabin mirror, at least certain I wasn't a vampire:

My cerebellum is full of so many Indians smiling, or staring solemnly or offering a peaceful "namaste" greeting; I wonder how long these auras will remain, distinct from the blur that 1.3 billion people can become?

Another chandri ("thank you")...