Nm

We got snowed out. We're leaving tomorrow instead of today.

Now I'm stuck in limbo, with all the loose ends tied up and emotionally ready to get on a plane, but with 24 hours to kill...

Tough choices at the last minute

Of course this doesn't include my guide book, notebook, or Hindi study guide, but I think I've decided on which books I'm taking:

Dennis Lee - Riffs
Lisa Moore - Open
Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost (for rereading)
J.M. Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians (also for rereading in a new context)

I think....

My last full day in Canada for four months

... was full of great people. After spending most of yesterday having fun with my brother (which was totally worthwhile) and not getting anything done, I was all agrumble and anxious this morning until A.G. called from Nicaragua, which really just perks a person right up. It's been strange not hearing certain voices every day, and it was really comforting to get that hit of familiarity this close to departure.

Later I got to grab some food with T.G., who I'm excited for - I'm happy to hear that people are noticing that she's way too competent for her current job, and there may be people out there who will go out of their way to help her out in the near future. Also, the moving to the UK.

Finished it off with my grandparents and J.P., who is getting married next summer. I'm to keep an eye out for plate-sized mirrors and jewelry for the bridesmaids (which includes me). And the full series box set of X-Files DVDs - of course there's a reason we've been friends for so long.

I'm realizing, partially through talking to some people who have experience in the area, that a lot of the advice in our guidebooks is really ethnocentric, and proceeds from the assumption that any decent white person will be traumatized by any degree of exposure to anything (or -one) not Judeo-Christian and North American / Western European in origin. This is not totally surprising. One of the "resources" I was given at the travel clinic I went to was a booklet on different types of diseases found in different parts of the world (eg. cholera, typhoid, dengue fever) accompanied by maps of where the diseases are high- and low-risk. Pictured below: the entry for Traveller's Diarrhea.

The entry states that the cause of the "disease" is exposure to unfamiliar bacterial cultures. As you can clearly see by the map, unfamiliar bacterial cultures apparently ravage everywhere outside North America, Western Europe, and Australia. Baffling. I understand that my pamphlet is geared at Canadians, but surely this map incorrectly suggests that something is just wonky in the microbial life of all developing areas which isn't wonky where we live. (Of course that's not true; any perfectly healthy person born and raised in any of those dark-blue places is likely to get sick as death when introduced to 'benign' Canadian bacteria [-ae? -um?].)

So, within reason, I'm going with a new strategy: Ask The Locals.

I can't believe how many new things I've had to acquire for this trip. New backpack, new shoes, new camera cards, new first aid supplies, new water purification stuff, new thermal leggings, new hot/cold long-sleeved shirt, new immunities... I got new glasses today, because my prescription was 2 years out of date. Apparently my eyes have disintegrated way more than anyone's eyes should disintegrate in two years. I blame Robert Lecker, my computer screen, and the hours 3 through 7am.

I got the "why India" question a total of 4 times today. I've more or less resorted to "Read this... you'll see."

But, in case anyone is still unconvined:

Here's the place which will just be so great that I can't wait to get there.

See you soon!

The argument against cheap suitcases

Zippers rip, swears are sworn, tea is made, emails are read, and the next thing you know, you've lost a full two hours you really needed for packing.

grumble

I will say, though, that I'm having my first experience packing as much shit as humanly possible into my new (non-cheap, nigh indestructible) backpack. It's already a strangely intimate relationship. Although I'm surprised by how much it holds, it really doesn't feel like the appropriate capacity for a 4-month trip through varying climates. I guess that's the challenge. I've been wearing it around my apartment a lot lately, trying to figure out how to wear it and move with it when it's loaded up with weight. I also keep discovering more things that zip, detach, cover, or lock - and each time, each one seems extremely necessary. Which makes me think I need to work on this relationship some more before leaving.

Wolf Parade and Sonnet L'Abbé, you float me on the hard days.

Troubling predeparture conversations

A: "Where are you flying into?"
me: "Delhi."
A: .....
me: "What?"
A: "You know how people say nothing can prepare you for India? When they say that, they mean Delhi."
me: "I thought when they said that, they meant Mumbai...."

Oh well. They probably meant both, and that's just fine.

So I've set myself up this space to post while on the road, partially as a record for myself and partially to avoid assaulting you all unnecessarily with 'update' emails.

I've been doing some thinking about why I'm doing this trip, why I'm doing it now, and what I'm hoping to get out of it. It's been a strange thing to think through; it's hardly unusual anymore for my demographic to go places our parents would have been unlikely to choose, and for long periods of time. It sort of feels in some ways that travelling outside of North America and Western Europe (I have yet to hear a satisfactory term for this group of areas, probably with good reason) has become for our generation what the two-months-in-Europe-after-graduation trip was for previous generations (though, of course, plenty of us still opt for Europe). I wonder what both of these mean. I certainly see myself wanting many of the same things, and probably sinking myself into similar problems.

People have tended to react to my trip in one of two ways. The first, which tends to come from the older generation, is a mix of cautious support and curiosity as to why in the world anyone would choose India as a destination. (Early email a concerned family member: "Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Austria. Even Hungary. All these countries have bathrooms in them. And did you know that India was right beside Pakistan? I'm sure you didn't." [NB: I did.]) I haven't really been able to explain it to anyone who's had this reaction, and don't expect I'll be able to. The second reaction, which has usually come from my own generation (and community) has been one of total understanding and excitement.

There is, however, a difficult subset of this group, who follow up their approval with a question to the effect of, "Are you going there as a spiritual journey?"

That question sends me off in a million directions. My gut wants to say no; I'm not expecting some mystical experience to happen; I feel like this question comes from an embarassingly orientalist set of ideas about what India is; I have never had a moment of transcendence triggered by bright colours, a foreign language, or the smell of incense or curry* here, and don't really expect it to work any differently there; I feel that human beings are basically the same everywhere, and I don't expect any one or group of people overseas to answer my questions any more than I expect anyone here to; that it's not appropriate to look at other parts of the world (or anyone else) as answers to the parts of ourselves that remain mysterious.

But I also know that that answer is disingenuous. First, of course I believe that we do define ourselves with and against others, and that on some level, you need to allow yourself to do that in order to accept other people's humanity - at its best, it's an act of sympathy. Second, although it's easy for me to say that I'm not seeking any kind of religious experience, spirituality is an entirely different question.

I consider myself a spiritual agnostic. I'm moved by beauty, by suffering, by justice, by history. I'm moved by chaos and paradox. In this spirit, I can say that the last few years have been a profoundly disorienting and grounding experience for me; I believe strongly that the organizing principle of the world and of life is chaos (mantra #1: "crazy shit happens all the time") and that this needn't dislodge our sense of self and justice (mantra #2: "don't be a dick"). Trying to understand my place in this world, and in history, has become very spiritual.

And this trip has a lot to do, for me, with locating myself within these things. Our generation does not have the option of ignoring the non-Western world, and we have good reason to be angry with our parents (where applicable) for doing so. I think I'm drawn to India, specifically, because it strikes me as a particularly hard place to rationally come to terms with; it doesn't fall easily into the "developing world" paradigm that gets applied so liberally** to anyplace that doesn't have easily visible markers of 'advanced democracy' and ' late capitalism,' and allows us to, for example, talk about areas as bafflingly varied as "Africa" and "South Asia" as if they were homogenous. Without having been there yet, India (and here I do mean the whole of India) encapsulates something for me about both the mechanics of the world and our moment in history, and I think this comes from the contraditions and multiplicity of things it contains. Within four months, and within a single nation, I'm going to see some of the oldest structures on the planet (some of which predate the Roman ruins by hundreds, even thousands of years), and then move on to a few cities which are becoming some of the most important technological and economic hubs in the world. India is a constitutionally secular society which has been dealing with issues of religious and regional plurality (with varied degrees of success) since long before Canada was a twinkle in some British lord's eye. Not to mention the issues of population management, which will become a serious global concern over the next century, not only due to the increasing global population but due to scarcity of resource concerns, displacement due to climate change and...

Well, I could go on, but I'll save all of that for the road. In the meantime, I'll be trying not to think every experience into some abstract comment on the cosmos and its relation to worldly justice, and to see the places I'm going to as openly as I can, and for what they are. This is by no means the end of my reservations, intentions, hopes, or assumptions.


In closing, a word on the title of this blog: last year I read Anne McClintock's brilliant article, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colonial," which got me thinking in a serious way about the current prevalence of the prefix post-. We're stuck, we're told, in a culture*** that's post-modern, post-capitalist, post-communistic, post-democratic, post-feminist (yuck), post-9/11, post-just-about-every-movement-that-has-tried-to-take-the-world-seriously. Post-colonial, of course. McClintock's insights about the way these terms obscure our ability to talk about so many problems that still exist are great, and I won't repeat them. But I think what all this adds up to is a sense of floating in a void, of being disconnected from what's happening around us and in the places we can't see, and of feeling like no one's contributions are meaningful. I worry that the term that's missing from this list, and is the sum of all those terms, is post-responsibility. One major artistic theme of the twentieth century was our individual dislocation from history, our inability to see any semblance of ourselves in the stories of the past, and how that prevents us from seeing and telling the stories of the present, and worse, of the future. I think this view requites an awful inflexibility in the way we look at history; it may not happen on horseback anymore, but I'm not sure it ever really did.

I want to work through these ideas; I think the post is bullshit. I think we all need to get back into our bodies, back into history. I think I'm going to India on a spiritual quest to confront the question of where and who I am, and where and who we all are.

(Of course, I also enjoy the pun on traditional mail; these are my letters to you, which appropriately enough will come electronically rather than by the actual, traditional post.)

And, of course of course, the 'comments' button is at the bottom of each post for a reason.





* Okay, so I've had some pretty transcendent curries... but I think this has more to do with how badly the traditional Anglo-Saxon diet accomodates vegetarians than some spiritual property inherent to the spice. I'll let you know later whether this was, in fact, curry witchcraft.
** Wording deliberate.
*** Few words make me cringe harder than "culture," but there it is.