As life wanes, a traveler and author makes peace with the cosmos…
by: Peter Trelay
On the side of a garbage-strewn street in the little town where he’d taken refuge, he saw a leper with no fingers or toes sitting cross-legged. He was leaning forward from the waist, so that his nose hovered just above the ground. The bowl he had trapped between the palms of his outstretched hands contained a few coins. To passers-by, he was invisible. Perhaps because they believe life is suffering, and we pay for the sins of our former lives.
In the distance, vapor was rising into the air, as the searing lava met the water extending the landmass of the little island in the vast ocean. It made him think about the millennia lost to human consciousness, and the infinite future. It evoked that sense of calm that comes from realizing how insignificant we are in our petty contests for self-affirmation and glory, struggling to make a mark on the sliver of time we call modernity.
Despite these thoughts, he took his tablet from his backpack to scan the latest rejection letters for his novels. He felt nauseous, but began typing:
‘Better to begin at the end, it makes more sense. In need of repose, he was dislocated again. Old and forgotten, even to himself. In tooth and nail struggles with tumours and gloom, he navigated the cobwebs near the bottom of the scale. Pack your bag, shuffle your feet, and watch your back. He’d come full circle, continually paying a precious price for his freedom and slavery. Shaken and stirred, then spread thin, to fade. Dispersion had brought acceptance of terror. But the weaker he became, the more intense the journey to survive to the end.
‘With the weight of years, it now appeared to have been a long, bad dream. It had taken a lifetime to kill his expectations. The pervasive indoctrination through shame, guilt and menace; through myth, religion and hype, had never become invisible to the voyager. He’d lost the patience so necessary to deal with the peons assigned to administer the humiliation, and was now at the end of his rope, both physically and financially. Living for so long, navigating the pitfalls of declining civilization, had finally worn him down to the point where it seemed pointless. He had now drifted so far from his original state of grace that he had become unrecognizable to himself.’
He stopped. A memory from his childhood had broken his train of thought. At the ripe age of sixteen, two years after his father abandoned the family, he’d left too, unable to swallow the drunken tantrums of his mother. This event had steered him through life, making him accept that everyone must find and assume their identity, and then use it to imbue their existence with a sense of purpose. But he never felt the need to find some final endgame. This was his emancipation. He remembered some author writing that the majority suffer from a languid soul, but for him, it was the driving inspiration, like a defining principle. The journey had become the goal; the purpose was to experience the world, but on his own terms, with no one telling him what was proper or improper. He no longer suffered from the thought that this would lead him into some sort of moral nihilism. He gave to each one what they deserved, according to his criteria, and had stopped doubting in his ability to discern what that should be. This had provided him with sensitive radar, and a deep understanding of hypocrisy in all its forms.
He began typing again.
‘When people remain fixed in one place too long, the absurdities become invisible to them. Strategically placed blind spots created through indoctrination into the accepted codes of behavior, cover over the farcical elements. These blind spots, are the welds that hold societies together. Farce is part of the human condition, in this, the existentialists were right. They’re essential for maintaining harmony and cohesion. Without them, any society begins to unravel because the collective cannot exist without the inherent inequalities of the pyramid of power. To disguise this, and preserve consensus, it’s essential to promote the myths of otherness and national unity, and pay lip-service to the heroism and dedication of the workers. This was the glue and attraction of the socialists. From their inception, hypocrisy is inherent in societies, because all nations are forged through the telling of lies, and the spilling of blood.
‘Each society is insular, and raises its members according to its fixed and immutable values. When they look to the worlds beyond their own, it is normally with a bemused, superficial curiosity that allows them to feel smug and superior. This is the beauty of traveling over touring. A tourist takes two weeks, goes somewhere to experience the quaintness of some other culture, and returns with a reinforced bias for his own. The traveller moves through the world on his own schedule, sometimes living for long periods in places. The anxiety and feelings of alienation brought on by unfamiliar people, mores, and situations slowly diminishes, until the world itself becomes their abode. As a result, they begin to see the world more for what it is, and less for how it compares to their own little corner of the planet.
‘Like the fear of death, the fear of loneliness is universal. We become attached to people and places, and when we are separated from them, we feel a loss of identity and alienation. This comes from the absurd desire to have something constant and unchanging, which runs contrary to the laws of physics that govern the universe. If you want to live, you have to be willing to feel passion, and invest yourself in it, but you must also be prepared to lose it all, without falling to pieces in despair. Those that vaguely think that somehow, they will ultimately receive what they expect out of life, often end up on the scrapheap of human wreckage. You have to depend on yourself, and develop the ability to change direction at short notice when necessary. People who are unable to take responsibility for their own existence, fall prey to depression, angst and dread. It paralyzes them, and they live on the periphery of their own lives, incapable of self-motivation. They become static, bored, devoid of authenticity, and find themselves dancing to the beat of someone else’s drum. Time does exist, at least in our temporal world, and nothing could be sadder or more pathetic than nearing death, and realizing that you haven’t lived because you lacked the sense of self that makes it possible.’
More memories interrupted him. He got up slowly, feeling dizzy and shuffled along the track. Then the sky opened, bathing the vast expanse of ocean in light. A dark brown sandbar formed a protected pool where the sardines sheltered from the crashing waves. Birds circled above, waiting for the opportune conditions to divebomb the school and snap one up. He followed them as they tucked in their wings, and turned to the side. Imagining how they felt as they dropped headlong, gathering speed to pierce the water like arrowheads. He envied their freedom.
In his 20s and 30s he frequently lived by smuggling. Mostly hashish, but also gold, cameras, watches, and precious stones. It was a high-risk, high-dividend business, and he loved the travel and adrenaline it involved. But perhaps its greatest allure was the complete independence it afforded. A smuggler doesn’t have to answer to anyone. He’s a free agent, who makes his own decisions about where and when. At least until he’s caught. But by some miracle, this never happened to him. He had perfected the ability to adopt the persona of the dumb tourist. He knew how to feign their marvel and disorientation, as well as their dress-sense, and it never failed him.
He headed back into the jungle to get away from the sun’s rays that were forging the patch of skin cancer on his neck, flower and suppurate again, despite the surgery he’d had to remove it. Will it kill me before I do? he thought, as he observed a tribe of Long-tailed Macaques moving about on the thick branches of a Ficus tree. He stopped to admire the columns of aerial roots extending into the ground to support its heavy limbs. How solid and stately it appeared, a thing of monstrous, yet exquisite beauty. He sat on a moss-covered log to type again:
‘In the jungle, nothing is wasted; the ants recycle everything. Within their well-defined social order of workers and soldiers, they are much more organized and efficient then we are. If one of them suffers some irreparable damage and cannot fulfil its duty, it’s cut to pieces by the soldiers, and carried away with the rest of the spoils. They recycle everything, faithfully, and in silence.
‘When it rains here, time stops, and the present and past converge in an endless dance of growth and decay. What was, becomes a part of what is, in a process with no beginning or end. For me now also, what took place long ago, doesn’t seem much more distant than what happened yesterday. Our memories are fickle; they transform continually. New things are added, and many of the old fade away. What we remember, is conditioned by the impressions and desires of the moment. What once seemed trivial, might now seem significant, and vice versa.’
He packed the tablet away, and continued, even more slowly than before.
The smell of putrefaction came wafting in the air, and he noticed a dark colored mound in the middle of the road ahead. When he approached, he found a metre long, black iguana with half its head and two legs crushed. Wherever man goes, useless death follows.
He ate what he could from the steaming bowl of noodles with seafood, while sitting on a plastic stool staring at the locals whizzing by on motorcycles. He felt weaker still, and returned to his hut on the outskirts of town. Soon, he was fast asleep.
The bell rang and the muffled sounds of children screaming in a playground permeated the room where he lay. Unsure if he was asleep or dead, he felt as though he were sinking into a thick miasma, with the light of life fading into the distance above him. Vignettes from his many travels were playing out in his mind’s eye. At first, they were ordered and focused. But soon began swirling in chaotic fury, making his tired, cancer-riddled body feel yet more ephemeral. This terrified him, and he fought in vain to ascend towards the light of consciousness, Gradually, a strange calm engulfed him, lulling him into relinquishing the desire to struggle, now accepting that indeed he was drifting away.
As he passively observed long-forgotten scenes from his infancy, he began musing about whether transmigration and Nietzsche’s “eternal return” was not merely a philosophical thought experiment, but a metaphysical reality. The prospect of watching snippets of his existence on repeat for eternity, briefly renewed his sense of dread. But then, looking up from his pram parked underneath a tree, he gurgled and chirped in delighted fascination at the leaves dancing above him in the breeze, obscuring and then revealing the sun’s rays.
