India is feeling more and more like a prison. I don't feel free to run wild. Everything I do people tell me there is a danger, be careful, women are afraid, so afraid. Don't go out late at night on your own. Buy pepper spray, more and more stories about rape and molestation. Fear everywhere. Tonight I was told by a perfectly lovely stranger or a friend you could say, I met him in a watch shop, he took me to fix my mechanical camera and paid and refused to except money from me. All the way he told me to be careful there is danger and also that I looked like I had no fear. Why should I fear? Fear is for people who don't want to live and create their world in a 2 dimensional rectangle. So how could I trust him? It's all so stupid. Of coarse there are people you can't trust but you just have to work out who they are and try not to attract them. Try not to fear at all cost, because that way you will definitely attract them, be brave and strong, I'd say it's better to risk 100 rapes than spend your whole life in the village, not growing, not living, waiting till it's all over, fearing everything, fearing death and then finally you don't have to fear anymore because your last fearful breath has left your stone cold body.

As usual I dreamt of apocalypse, is this usual I wonder, for any human, in any age? I suppose it must be. The place was quiet though there were many friends around. All the experts all agreed, (I don't know in hindsight whether a load of DIY Southlondon tinkers, even if they were inventors of sort could be qualified as experts) I asked them one by one. Consensus:no hope, we are totally fucked. So we were just sat around waiting for the time bomb, waiting for the stars to go out one by one, (oh god no! parallels with Dr Who) Anyway as in most dreams, the realism made it immeasurably dark. That petrifying feeling, waiting for the world to dissappear. On waking ofcoarse there was relief, a little. Of all the bad things are almost certainly about to happen, at least this was not one of them

Fucking satifies and numbs the mind, tricking the body into sleep and relaxaton. We have every right tobe wild and enjoy it, but we lie in our stuffy caverns touching and caressing, the world slides us by and the earth falls of the edge of the universe. But it's ok coz we all just came and nobody noticed.

U\nconscious splatter

The power is in beginning
live your dream
my head split in two
from every sentence uttered, hatches a smirking contradiction
The cards warned me of this, the moon...
dancing with blue lunacy and illusion-
don't drift away------------
time to go to the countryside- time to be
with nature
reflecting on what I said,
flashes of memories where I chanted an internal dialogue
outbursts of pure creativity which come from intellectual study
_____Carlton Cottages_______
it is boring and it doesn't get you anywhere.
But there was that boy- on the outer reaches of Cuenca-about 17
or 18-good looking. He stood out from his group and spoke to me in English/ are you clever? he asks
you write down your thoughts? He presumes
Nietzsche emerged. from his shoulder bag.
I do it for him sometimes, I write my thoughts because he thinks it's a good idea,
sometimes I do too.

The grimy truth

So I hardly want to write this, as it's not n appropriate representation of the light and smiley orphanage where I work, well not so much work but play and dance and sing and have fun, "drawing didi (older sister), drawing drawing, " , full of love and sunshine and giggles , energy and delicious home cooked food by auntie, (i'm not exaggerating), but today i read some of the case studies for the children I'm working with, well not directly them, but some other children in nearby associated homes. I was asked to edit the education co-ordinator's writing and so i began... and it started more like a fairy story than a real-life story, she always wrote, "and this is a story like any other poor family's," as if it's the rule not the exception. And so I lapsed into the mode of dreamy reading like a fairytale, until the real horror that it's actually the parents of the happy kids like mine at the home that this has happened to. So there were many stories six in total. They told of quarrelling, drunken fights night after night, wife-beating, shouting, despair and usually much death. In the first, the mother was covered in petrol by her drunk husband and set alight, her 3 screaming kids watched her slowly burn to a corpse screaming 'mamma mamma,' they were then shifted to their uncle's house until that created more quarreling, since their aunt and uncle were just as poor and now had twice the mouths to feed. Other stories told of a mother swallowing kerosine until she died, to escape a similar torture of the first, I believe her brother then had the same fate. Another story told of 5 boys who all died one after another due to some kind of degenerating health disease, this caused their father to commit suicide. I could hardly believe I wa s editing the sentences, "losing my memories" to 'lost my memory' and "was beating me" to 'he would beat me.' It hardly seemed important to get the English perfect in this situation, it felt crude.

But these were suprisingly stories of hope, because the kids that have ended up at the home have all come out of depression and isolation and take part in all activities in the school. They love learning and singing and dancing. When I look around at all the children, who make my day so happy, with their smiling faces, I can hardly believe they have come from backgrounds like these. I think it is testament to the value of love and nurture that these children will I'm sure grow up to be happy and valued people, able to love and give. If this is possible, then anything is possible.

Circles in Secunderabad

This morning I woke up wondering; why am I trying to read this complicated book on Skepticism, in the usual dry academic style with a lack of poetry, wondering whether my saturated brain will actually take in any more, knowing that even if I do understand it and take it in to what purpose can I use it? I know damn well I wouldn't be able to express the ideas vocally in meaningful sentence and I think I would also have trouble relating it in writing. It's almost like I have an illness, a belligerent curiosity to know more, understand more, but as always I'm frustrated my my lack of memory and my powers of expression. But then it occurred to me on my journey to work, through the crazed hecticity, heightened energy and smokey dead air of Secunderabad, that regardless of all this, it really is nourishing. Whether you succeed in remembering it, it makes you grow and the journey through Secunderabad itself seemed to add weight to the ideas in the book, like will being the essential essence of all things: you can see it in the scabied starving dogs, lepers without any limbs at all who have to lie down to beg and the trees that stay alive regardless of the carcinogous pollution, which they may enjoy, but I doubt it. Yes, why stay alive when you can die, only because of will, and because the things you read occasionally strike a chord and help you go on and "moments of experiences which take us beyond the practical or scientific perception of the world."

I'm interested in something my friend said about making art in the woods and then destroying it, like the monks who build mandalas for hours and days, gracefully and fastidiously, only to burn them as soon as they are complete. Reading about the mind, about thoughts and dreams is like this, no matter if the ideas vanish, the work has been done in feeding the soul or something like...

Or then maybe I'm divided, maybe too much philosophical thought actually removes you from the truth of nature/nature of truth, like in Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Siddhartha only really discovers himself and happiness by the sole contemplation of the river, of nature without any intellectual imput from teachers or words. But this is, strangely, almost exactly one of the ideas in the Skepticism book, that nature is experienced at once in it's power of transcending the mind and as being contained in the mind, only the later Romantic poets couldn't find the balance in the end...their minds swallowed nature up, as their belief in the power of the mind becomes stronger. according to the author I can't remember, Anthony Rudd or something.

I don't know if it's just me, but I get a kind of synchronistic reading list while I'm travelling, where it seems that much of what is being said in one book seems to link up to ideas in another, though the books, just arrive in my hands, almost arbitrarily (perhaps). For example in a book I actually brought with me: Visual Magik, by Jan Fries he talks about Shamans realising (or imagining) that what they experience outside is actually only a reflection of the inside. And in Siddhartha also, it seemed to express everything I wanted to say about truth and life at the moment of reading, as books often do, yet I discovered it, with missing spine in a cupboard in a cottage in Mysore. Books seem to arrive at the right time. But I yet again have no real conviction in what I'm saying, my favourite line in the whole of Siddhartha was (quoted incorrectly) "In every truth the opposite is also true," so what can I say, all this is true and the opposite is also true. Do I waste 15 rupees I wonder???

Dailamo dailamo

dala-dala dailamo

dailamo dailamo dai-ilamo dailamo

(transliteration, Telugu song meaning group of soldiers)