Over the rainbow

I'm back in Pokhara, where I learned anew that monsoon rains aren't just downpours of a few minutes. I'd walked to the far end of Lakeside, taking cover in a bookshop as rain began, and had time to look through their entire selection of English books, and to pick out a slim volume on Buddhist-Hindu festivals of Nepal as well, perhaps wishfully, as a pre-loved copy of D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow. No rainbows in sight even the better part of an hour later, I got drenched just finding a place selling umbrellas!

I should have known. It started raining like this - steady, heavy, unrelenting - the first night of my mini-trek. We weren't in Jomsom, probably for the best as scoring a flight in as well as out would have been a miracle, but also because the Jomsom area is dry like what we'll be seeing approaching Kailash. Doing Phedi - Dhampus - Pothana - Landruck - Ghandruck - Nayapul showed me a different Nepal, steep, green and overflowing with water, terraced rice paddies rendering the few available hillsides corduroy, the stone steps of our many steep trails doing double duty as waterfalls.

If you google any of these places, you'll see amazing Annapurna skylines. I had to content myself with the painted signs at guest houses called Perfect View, View Top, Lucky View, Annapurna View, Sunny View, Hungry Eyes, etc., as the rain continued through the second day (we trekked 4 hours nonetheless - and, beyond my glasses fogging, it was fine), and was replaced by thick clouds on the third. Plenty to see anyway, just not the peaks  - come back in March or October, everyone advised. But we did get to see something I've not experienced before: a rainbow, deep in the valley below us!

Then last night in Ghandruk - photos should arrive in 36-48 hours - I got lucky. Just as the sun was setting the clouds around Annapurna South started to clear. It was, as promised, higher than I could have imagined in the sky. It awakened thoughts of Moby Dick and distant planets. Late at night it still mutely shone, as if a moon had decided to park there for the night. It stretched a landscape already severely vertical (Landruk-Ghandruk looks like a straight line on the map but involves going down about 400m in a narrow v-shaped valley and up again about 700m). Magnifique!

And then, as the last light faded from Annapurna South and its saddle, the region's other star, Machhapuchhre, the Fishtail, emerged from wispy clouds on the other side of the valley, shining in the day's last light. From farther east it looks like a mega-Matterhorn, but from here it looked like one of those fluted volcano-tops of art or animation, impossibly slim. How could it have hidden behind so few clouds? It, I learned, is the holy mountain.

Ah, the thunderstorm is threatening a blackout. More soon!

 

(Monsoon rain view from a café between book and umbrella purchases; during the night, a big old tree just to the left of this one fell over.)

Raincheck

Greetings from the Chhetri Sisters' guesthouse at the north end of lakeside Pokhara. The late morning flight in a tiny plane offered vistas of cloud, but I'm pretty sure I caught a glimpse (and a snap? we'll see) of a familiar-looking icy peak in the vicinity where Everest lives. It's low season here, most of the tourist establishments on the pretty lake open but empty. A few lanky European kids loiter about like stray dogs. Tourist rowboats, unused, are surrounded by floating plants, some sporting purple flowers. It's the wrong season for the famous view of the Himalayan skyline over a little temple island - clouds hug the mountains. But midday's bright humid heat has given way to a refreshing sunset rainfall: monsoon!

Tomorrow's flight to Jomsom is looking unlikely - the weather has led to the cancellation of all flights there so far this week, and a break in the weather is not expected. (Flying weather seems the exception, not the rule, as it's up a steep mountain valley where visibility and wind are often an issue.) It's not the end of the world - Pokhara is point of departure for many treks, and we've found another which, while it won't go as high, should be plenty interesting and less dependent on transport subject to meteorological interference. Heading up to about 2000m it will offer rustic villages, lush vegetation - and the possibility of a spectacular view or two. The main mode of transport will be my trusty old legs. I've met my guide, who's friendly and knows the area inside out, so we'll be able to respond to challenges and opportunities as they come along. (Yes, there's a porter, too, who'll be happy I self-consciously packed light.)

In any case, there'll be pictures eventually - the 22nd or 23rd - and, who knows, perhaps an update from an internet cafe before that.

Following Ma Ganga

Some pics from this morning's Kuala Lumpur-Kathmandu flight. A winding river and distant mountain in Malaysia. The western edge of the amazing Sundarbans, one of the mouths of the Ganges. Ma Ganga herself. (Just think, I'll be at her head in just a few weeks!) Towering clouds - no Himalayan mountains on view today. Kathmandu.

MLB --> KUL --> KTM

The adventure begins! In 90 minutes I'm off to Kathmandu (connecting in Kuala Lumpur), arrival scheduled for 11:30am on July 16th. I'll be staying with friends for the night, then heading on twenty-four hours later for Pokhara, and the next day on to Jomsom and a four-day trek to Kagbeni, Kharkot, Muktinath and Marpha. I'll be back with my friends in Kathmandu on the 22nd. The next four nights I've booked a room (with A/C) at Kopan, a big Tibetan monastery near Boudha on the outskirts of Kathmandu. From July 29th to August 9th, it's off for the Kailash Kora. Internet access will be, it's probably safest to say, unpredictable - not working some of the times I'd expect, but doubtless also available at others where I'd not. Look forward to photo-laden bursts along the way!

Sehbehindert

I fly at midnight for Nepal, so there was time for a final day in Australia.
This is the mist on the Mount (Macedon) on my final morning here.

I'm feeling a little out of touch with the homeland - and more, doubtless, to come. By the time I learned of the Supreme Court's Voting Act and gay marriage rulings, the news was already cool and complicated by layers of commentary - which, I couldn't help myself, I turned to instead of trying to articulate my own reaction. I wished I'd been in space with other people affected so I - we - could react in real time. Yesterday's shocking (yet, sadly, unsurprising) not guilty verdict of Trayvon Martin's killer felt even more like this - though I found out about it in time to see the first reactions flashing through the web. It feels almost like a dereliction of duty not to have to stand on American soil as a beneficiary of its enduring racism and seek words, gestures, actions that don't sound hollow. Something to take with me to Kailash.

Making a mint

Inspired by their favorite sight in Canberra, the Royal Australian Mint, my nephews have made a mint of their own. As in Canberra, the giant robot who transports vats of coins - Titan, "biggest in the southern hemisphere"! - was detained by technical difficulties, but we got by with the aid of a faux-Lego Smurf.
Our actual stamping - naturally to our own hand-drawn designs - remains satisfyingly manual.

Roadside attractions

I've wound up seeing rather more of Australia than I expected this visit, over a thousand miles across three states (South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales) and the Australian Capital Territory. Not quite in the order visited: Adelaide (A), the Barossa Valley (B), Melbourne (C), Castlemaine (D), Mount Macedon, my hub (E), Wangaratta (F), Holbrook (G), Gundagai (H), Canberra (I). I haven't mentioned charming Castlemaine, to which my friend K took me for a quick visit last week - apologies - or Holbrook, where we stopped on our way back from Canberra.

I should say something about Holbrook, which quite won me over with an almost absurd identity quest. A town on the way from Sydney to Melbourne known as Germanton, after an early settler, decided it needed to change its name in 1915. The name of Captain Cook's childhood being taken, the town wound up with the name of Lieutenant Norman Holbrook, the first submariner to win the Victoria Cross (for an intrepid mission in the Dardanelles in December 1914). The town is 400km from the coast, but built a relationship with submarines which has landed it part of a full-scale 1960s submarine, the HMAS Otway.

This all was made possible in significant part by the relationship of Lieutenant Holbrook and his namesake town - he visited three times over the course of his life. Though he never lived in Australia, his widow Gundula reported that finding out about Holbrook's name choice "was probably the proudest day in Norman's life; to be recognised by a small community on the other side of the world." We heard this from her in person - well, from those of the disturbingly lifelike 30cm hologram which narrates the story in the Submarine Museum (right). We were curious about her, too. An Austrian, Gundula was there for the unveiling of the Holbrook Submariner's Memorial in 1997; how and when did she become Norman's wife? In any case, the derring-do of this landlocked town, successful beyond all imagining in hitching its wagon to a submarine star, quite won me over. And it's pleasing to have this story, complete with landlocked submarine, told with a German accent! (Picture sources)

Change of season

(Actually most of the little irises are blue.)

Loopy

The National Museum in Canberra is a very, er, ambitious piece of architecture. It makes some sense when explained - inspired by knots, with nods to famous buildings in Australia and abroad - but never condescends to be a mere building. Here you see the towering metal loop of the "Uluru line," in traditional Aboriginal colors, reflected in the pond of the "Garden of Australian Dreams," a bewildering palimpsest of maps, the word "home" in a hundred languages and, the implied suggestion presumably, songlines of many peoples; the cursive script at right spells Australia if seen from space, albeit backwards. I suppose that, like the knot architecture, it tries to convey a sense of unchosen but shared belonging. "We like to think that the story of Australia is not one story but many tangled together," explained the architects.
"Australia" has ever been overdetermined in the mapping department, as Abraham Ortelius' 1595 map "Maris Pacifici quod Vulgo Mar del Zur" - included in the collection of the museum - confirms. Notice that vast Terra Australis, sive Magellanica, nundum detecta. Even before it was found the great southern continent had been named by Europeans - twice! And since then, judging by the museum's hyperactive multimedia show "circa," it's been a dizzying cavalcade of people and events. It's hard not to be wistful for the coherence of works like the Martumili Ngurra canvas, painted by six Central Western Australian women in 2009, and the long-standing care of people and land underlying it. Is it more mature for a member of what Australian theologian Chris Budden calls "Second People" to seek a common map or to foreswear one?

From little things

Canberra greetings during NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) week on the 50th anniversary of what many regard as the start of Aboriginal land rights, the Yirrkala Bark Petition.

This petition, protesting bauxite mining on the Gove Peninsula and signed by many Yolngu leaders, was not the first Aboriginal petition. Its significance lies in part in its being the first to employ the form and language required for parliamentary recognition - together with articulations of Yolngu law in the bark painting around it. Parliament recognized the petition - a first - and in so doing created an opening for recognizing Yolngu law as law. The particular claims, for their part, were rejected first by Parliament and later by the courts but the protests generated by these rulings helped speed recognition of land rights and the abandonment of the fiction of terra nullius. I gather the bark petitions are on display in Parliament House, which we're visiting tomorrow. Hope I get a chance to see them!

On the road to Gundagai

On to Canberra! Last night my sister's family spent with some friends live in Albury and dropped me off in Wangaratta, where friends of mine from Melbourne now live - priests who had been connected to St. Peter's Eastern Hill, my church in Melbourne in 2006-7. Wangaratta bills itself somewhat dauntingly as a "rural city" offering "the ultimate in livability," and the view above certainly is idyllic. I can confirm that R and J do live in wonderful digs on the cathedral close, and that we had an evening of delicious food and rich conversation. Oz vs US, pedagogy, queer Christianities, Dresden, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, movies, Thomas Merton, and: what should the Church do or be for country Australia?

Today I took the train from "Wang" to Albury, and from there it was through New South Wales to Canberra, which celebrates its centenary this year. On the way we passed through a storied town called Gundagai, and sought out the famous Dog on the Tuckerbox. The story I was told was reminiscent of the faithful dog Hachikô whose statue is the main meeting place at Shibuya station in Tokyo - of a squatter or swagman whose loyal dog kept his tuckerbox safe for him. The Dog on the Tuckerbox is decorated with plaques commemorating the lives of early settlers and the visits of generations of dignitaries, but the story, described at a discreet distance from the statue, is not quite the heartening tale of frontier solidarity I had been led to expect...

Bar-Rosa valley

 

Spent the day with my friend G on a tour of the Barossa Valley, home of Australia's wine industry! The tangle below is a certain Jacob's Creek. 

Backscratching

Greetings from Adelaide, where I'm on a mini-visit - my anthropologist friend G has just accepted a job at thr University of Adelaide, and this is her very first weekend down under. What fun to be able to initiate her in some local Australian knowledge - notably the advantages of a Cinema NOVA membership and the tasty cheapo wines called clearskins, which have slightly mitigated the inevitable shock Americans encounter at the Australian cost of living. In return she noticed things in the impressive Australian Aboriginal Culture Gallery of the South Australian Museum I should have but didn't - like the curious use of the loaded word "colonised" in its introduction. Tomorrow we take on the Barossa Valley!

Rorschach sticks

What do you see? This work of my nephews' art has been sitting on my sister's mantlepiece for some time. She's assumed it was a Nativity scene. I couldn't see anything in it but a wine bar. We were both wrong, of course! Plainly it's a street sweeper - missing a fourth popsicle stick.

God flip

I've just finished Deborah Bird Rose's Wild Dog Dreaming, my first Kindle-for-Mac book (hence no page references, sorry). It covers a lot of territory, including a powerful meditation on the Book of Job, imagining that at least one of Job's dogs must have kept him company on the ash heap - which manages, somehow, to change everything.

Dogs, Rose shows with both dingo stories from Australia and myths and poems from ancient and contemporary societies, invite us to a more complex relationship with the earth. They care for us, engage us in our humanity in a profound way. (An essay by Levinas, "Name of a dog," is the surprise proof text for this: a dog named Bobby alone acknowledged the humanity of Jewish prisoners of war during WW2, but Levinas, writing several decades later, can't return the gesture and respond to the "face" of a dog.) Yet hers is no romantic view of cuddly puppies:

What with their howling at the threshold of life and death, their eating of corpses, and their public sex, dogs bring sex and death together in the most visible and stunningly extravagant ways. The dogs’ outrageous excessiveness is so dog, and so world, so in the present, so in the face of human conventions, and thus forever a reminder of our connections within the world of life, lust, death, grief, and unbounded enthusiasms and desires.

Have I mentioned that Rose's first work, her most fieldwork-based book, was called Dingo makes us human? This book fleshes that claim out more broadly. And its base notes remain Aboriginal in inspiration.

She ends this book with a description of a moment early in her fieldwork when a fraught funeral was happening outside but she was kept inside by Old Tim Yilngayarri, telling her stories about birth. This was more than a diversion. Aboriginal worlds build in oscillations between life and death, as they do between humans and other forms of life. Aboriginal ritual moves between dance and non-dance, music and non-music; the gaps between precisely scripted moments are filled with humor and improvisation. Rose quotes ethnomusicologist Cath Ellis' description of Aboriginal music as "iridescent," characterized by the shifting of figure and ground. Rose calls this the "flip."

In the performance of ceremony, there are many flips. For the dancer there is the flip between the feet on the ground and the ground on the feet: Who is the dancer, and who is the danced? If we focus on motion, it is clear that both are dancer and danced, and that the significance of this mutuality is located in the flip back and forth between us.

The flip is part of what Rose commends to us as ways of living in a time of extinctions, extinctions in part triggered by the culture of human beings claiming to be, like Job's God, separate from and superior to the Earth. Her reading of Job doesn't consider the largely Earthy content of the divine speeches. The closest she'll come to theism is this gloss on Old Tim's exclamation, "True God! God's a man: Lord Jesus":

Sometimes he is human, sometimes not, sometimes clever, sometimes not. There is always an element of uncertainty; we can’t know for sure which person or animal is god at any moment. 

Rose's objection to God-talk is that it refuses the ambiguity of life - think of those unruly life-loving death-dealing dogs - an ambiguity falsified by categorical distinctions of nature or value and better understood in terms of an embodiment of the "law of participation" Lévy-Bruhl thought characteristic of animist cultures. What she's recommending isn't an easy New Age spirituality either.

The flip is not an oscillation outside of time, but rather, as part of life, it works with the dynamics of disorder and creation. It is important to note that the philosophy of the flip runs counter to two important maxims that are current within contemporary spirituality movements. It is not possible that “we are all one” in flip philosophy. Differences must exist; there must be I and You, self and other, death and life, in order for there to be flips back and forth. Nor is it possible that “everything is connected to everything.” It is the movement away that makes possible the movement toward. The unmaking and the making both matter. 

Dingoes apparently often appear in human form, but never to us humans. We need to learn to be part of a world wiser than we are - even about what it means to be human.

Taste test

 Trackwork on the rails led to the postponement of lunch with a friend, so I made my way to an old haunt in the Target Passage, there even six years after my friend K told me about it (though now it's $11, not $7).

Choice of noodle and soup (here spinach, tom yum) + 6 items... but I should have had two eggplants and two mushrooms, like I used to: the bitter gourd was verrry bitter, and that red chili nearly killed me!

Emerald City

Melbourne, from Mount Macedon

Victoria nature

Verdant

Explored one of the Macedon Ranges Walking Trails - found tree ferns!

Cross-species kinship

I've been making my way through Deborah Bird Rose's recent Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (University of Virginia, 2011). I used some of Rose's important Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture in the Aboriginal Australia course. In this work she argues for an "ecological existentialism," weaving together Aboriginal and western stories, engaging philosophers and ecologists, histories of genocide and the great man-made wave of extinctions of our time, all in the service of ethics. An American anthropologist who's been in Australia for decades, Rose is a central figure in the "environmental humanities" which seems to be such an exciting intellectual community here in Australia.

Other parts of this book, like its engagement with Levinas, I'll tell you about some other time. Here's just two bits of her Aboriginal-informed insights. The first fits my existing, rather schematic and not unromantic, conceptions.

Old Tim Yilngayarri’s stories about Earth-Sky connections are especially precious to me because he was the only person in the region who had been there. He told how the Sky people had dropped a rope and taken him up to their country where they gave him special powers. And when he looked back at Earth he saw the fires of people’s camps looking like stars.

The second goes way beyond this: not Sky people but animals, including us. (What Rose calls "cross-species kinship" is one of the main themes of her book.) The start of a powerful argument for the importance of death to life she describes hunting with Aboriginal people and, here, dividing up the still warm body:

[Y]ou know without any doubt that the way this animal feels to your hands is exactly how you would feel if someone were doing this to you— the same heat, same textures, the fresh smell, the red blood. That intimacy of interchangeable interiority forms a special kind of empathy based on the tactile knowledge of our mammalian kinship and our shared condition as creatures born to die. This dead animal could be me, and I myself will one day be a dead animal.

Existential indeed! ... And there's a chapter coming up about Job!