Reflections and Inscriptions

I wrote this over a year ago. It had been 14 days since I was in Asia, and it sums up many of my thoughts about this whole over-arching experience.

Asia is gone to me, snuffed out in a way I anticipated but didn’t fully acknowledge. And I feel a sense of loss. I miss having no preconceived notion of what I will find around the next corner. I miss the signs of life that are unavoidable on the street, in every window. I miss the interactivity that comes from being a curiosity.

I have learned so much on this journey. My first days in India drove home something I had only touched on before: that the world is happening all the time, wherever I am. I had perhaps seen a glimmer of this as a child in New York, while the jungle sounds of the city drifted through the window of my grandparents’ guest bedroom late at night. But in India this hit home in a new way, that the world is impossibly enormous and complex, and it is happening all the time.

Human ingenuity has also been on display to me throughout my travels. The entrepreneurship of zipper fixers and tailors, the diverse range of improvised plumbing, the variety of strategies for preparing and carrying food: chopped and bagged, compartmentalized in aluminum lunchboxes, wrapped in paper or banana leaves.

And oh, the places people go and how! Scooters and motorcycles chopped in every way imaginable. Bicycles as elaborately painted rickshaws in Bangladesh, as flatbed freight movers in India. Three-wheeled vehicles, from glossy Thai tourist tuk-tuks to slow Burmese passenger carts with exposed engines belching smoke. Buses ranging from luxurious Malaysian machines to grizzled behemoths that careen through poorly maintained Bangladeshi highways. In Dhaka, a bus pulls up next to our auto rickshaw and loses a window spontaneously, the glass panel hurling itself suicidally into the street with a clank and a smash. Another one bites the dust.

A constant state of decay. We in the European diaspora fear death so much, and we invest so much energy at all times staving off decay — decay in our refrigerators, our roofs and floorboards, our cars, all our material goods. Not least our bodies, where even when decay is unstoppable and undeniable, we hide it under the guises of hair coloring, make-up, surgery, contact lenses, wigs. For me, I think I have a lot of work to do making friends with decay, coming to grips with it. I am so fortunate to recognize this project at this early time of my life, even if the work in front of me is daunting; I probably have some time to get my story straight before my own decay begins to accelerate, heedless of my fears and discomforts.

So, I am on the verge of finishing this trip, which I see as field training, a diagnostic test on my own limitations and escapes from the world. But it is also more than an experiment or dress rehearsal. The interactions we have had (among ourselves and with the people we have met) have been real; meaning that comes from them is rich and true, and their ethical content cannot be denied. This has become part of my history, a chapter or a whole volume in the narrative of my body and my consciousness. Every present moment I inhabit going forward will forever exist in dialogue with this, as it does with every other experience I have had. My myth of self-improvement will creep through these memories in search of signs of growth, raw fragments to sculpt into a sense of meaning.

Thus, my history is much more than prelude. It is the creation myth that I rewrite daily to support living and acting in every moment, the sole inheritance bequeathed to me from my past selves.

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