Vanity of vanities!

1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 A stream runs to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be
among those who come after.

-Ecclesiastes Ch 1: 1-11, ESV

I was once talking to a friend who’d come from Netherlands and I told her listen if anyone tells you come to India so you can find yourself they’re trying to scam you. This was in Delhi. In winter. You look out the window and all you see is smog. You go out and your eyes and nose will start to itch. I cross the Yamuna river every day to work. It’s black and covered in effluent foam.

Maybe you’ll find yourself in the mountains. I went to the mountains myself sometime after that. In Kasol you get good hash and overpriced chai. I met this guy, Tanuj, on the way to Rasol, who had a small cafe where I got some overpriced chai. I talked to him for a while eventually he took out his chillum and handed me some clean as a motherfucker hash and asked me to crush. If you’re sensible enough you’ll realise why the chai is overpriced. And that the hash is free. I’d met another guy a while back, on the same route. He didn’t even have any chai to give. He just asked me to sit on his squalid piece of land while he rolled one and told me how the government shut down the cafe he used to run. Now he lives here in poverty, with a woman who couldn’t look me in the eye and a snot nosed kid who had nothing but a piece of a plastic pipe to play with. He didn’t look over twenty-five. His plot of land was next to a stream coming down the mountain though. It was completely clear. Not like the Yamuna.

Before heading to Rasol I’d stayed at Tosh with some friends. We met a baba there. He called himself the Silent Baba. Or wrote it rather. We were in the cafe under our room and had dropped a not small amount of acid. Silent Baba was passing around his chillum. His Russian girlfriend was on the side soundly sleeping off some opium she had taken. He tore a piece of paper from his box of cigarettes and wrote on it, I cleaned the beach in Goa. Ask around, he gestured, other people will tell you. They know me. The Silent Baba who cleaned the beach in Goa. The first time I looked at that piece of paper I thought, what the fuck, why are you selling your fame to me. But in a moment I saw that he was simply speaking a truth about himself. He cleaned the beach. It was hard work. People know what he did. If you ask around people will say ah yes Silent Baba he cleaned that beach in Goa.

When I was at Tanuj’s I met Jango. Chunilal Jango. He got us some fenny and told me how he studied the Bible for ten years but never converted because they asked him to stop drinking and give up smoking. I can’t do that he said all I want is love I dont want to just fuck many people are like that I don’t give a fuck I’ll just love he shouted at the mountains. Jango told me, no other castes are allowed into our homes we’re Thakurs but I don’t care about all that stuff you are a friend. That night I stayed at Jango’s place and his nephew Sammy who was eighteen asked his girlfriend to marry him over a video call. She said yes as if he’d asked her if she wanted another cup of tea. They had to go to Malana to get her. Over the mountains. In the night. They went.

In Kasol you don’t have to buy hash, because the hash doesn’t matter. It is an offering that locals will make to you. Like an invitation to chill. The hash doesn’t matter. The chilling does. Because when you do a bridge is crossed and while you will always be a customer of their hospitality they will then show you a truth about their lives. That it is all living and labouring and suffering. If you go there to find yourself they’ll help you do that because they want you to come back and buy more of their overpriced chai and maybe find yourself more. If you chill you’ll probably figure out that that’s all that’s there to do. For a small time you sit together talk and pass the chillum around and Tanuj will invite you to come in October and make some charas with him, Jango will tell you how much he loves the whole world despite not having found his one true love, Silent Baba will tell you that when you’re in Goa ask for him and come chill with him, and the woman who couldn’t look you in the eye will be pleasantly surprised when you ask her name and thank her for letting you be there.

Also, I finally finished reading Anna Karenina. There’s something to say about finding yourself. That moment of clarity where you recognise you’re position in the world where you see yourself atop the wealth history has given you and feel no guilt, that your material relations are forever bound in conflict, and that never will you cease to suffer all the things you’ve ever suffered, that your labour is not just for yourself but unto the world and that that is all you’ll ever do. There’s no comfort or peace in knowing this. It just is. You and your very particular uncommunicable suffering and how you choose to approach someone else’s own particular uncommunicable suffering.

‘Don’t I know that the stars don’t move?’ he asked himself, looking at a bright planet that had already changed its position over the topmost branch of a birch. ‘Yet, looking at the movement of the stars, I cannot picture to myself the turning of the earth, and I’m right in saying that the stars move.
‘And would the astronomers be able to understand or calculate anything, if they took into account all the various complex movements of the earth? All their astonishing conclusions about the distances, weights, movements and disturbances of the heavenly bodies are based solely on the visible movement of the luminaries around the fixed earth, on that very movement which is now before me, which has been that way for millions of people throughout the ages, and has been and will always be the same and can always be verified. And just as the conclusions of astronomers that were not based on observations of the visible sky in relation to the same meridian and the same horizon would be idle and lame, so my conclusions would be idle and lame if they were not based on that understanding of the good which always has been and will be the same for everyone, and which is revealed to me by Christianity and can always be verified in my soul. And I don’t have the right or possibility of resolving the question of other beliefs and their attitude to the Deity.’
‘Ah, you haven’t gone?’ the voice of Kitty suddenly said. She was walking the same way towards the drawing room. ‘What, are you upset about something?’ she said, studying his face attentively by the light of the stars.
But she would still have been unable to see his face if lightning, again hiding the stars, had not lit it up. By its light she made out his face and, seeing that he was calm and joyful, she smiled at him.
‘She understands,’ he thought. ‘She knows what I’m thinking about. Shall I tell her or not?
Yes, I’ll tell her.’ But just as he was about to begin speaking, she also started to speak.
‘Listen, Kostya, do me a favour,’ she said. ‘Go to the corner room and see how they’ve arranged everything for Sergei Ivanovich. I’m embarrassed to. Did they put in the new washstand?’
‘Very well, I’ll make sure,’ said Levin, getting up and kissing her.
‘No, I won’t tell her,’ he thought, as she walked on ahead of him. ‘It’s a secret that’s necessary and important for me alone and inexpressible in words.
‘This new feeling hasn’t changed me, hasn’t made me happy or suddenly enlightened, as I dreamed – just like the feeling for my son. Nor was there any surprise. And faith or not faith – I don’t know what it is – but this feeling has entered into me just as imperceptibly through suffering and has firmly lodged itself in my soul.
‘I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray – but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!’

-Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy