Lobsters traded for cigarettes and soya oil : 4
We had a pizza party for my birthday. As much a party as you can have with four people and no disco ball. I put on my Celebration Leggings, Emma made a delightful selection of pastries, including a valiant attempt at dim sum, and tom dug out the last of the cheese he had been preserving in oil. One by one the pizzas were dressed and put on the barbeque, and as we settled into evening the colour of the sunset and the colour of the rum in our glasses merged for just a moment into a godly oneness.
The party, and general event of turning thirty, came at a time of a slightly different vibe for me on the boat. After the intensity and newness and Oh My God I'm Alive of sailing and teaching in the Marquesas and Kiribati, and then Majuro with lots of socialising and classes and intrigue, this last month on the outer islands has been slow and rhythmic and a bit trancey, so much so that i have even got around to reading the Ancient Mariner again:
'Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean'.
Well, not entirely idle. In Maloelap we visited Tarawa, an island that was home to 3000 Japanese troops at the beginning of WWII. It was their easternmost airfield and, from 1942, totally cut off from resupply by ship or air. The Americans didn't bother to send in ground troops - they just dropped a shedload of bombs on the place and let them get on with starving to death, along with the Korean slaves that the Japanese had brought with them. By the end of the war only 47 Japanese were still alive.
Much of the infrastructure remains, and the overall feeling is of being in a real life level of Tomb Raider. Sections of bomber and fighter planes sit in the tall grass, their steel propellors wedged into the soil. Rusting howitzers and pillboxes loom at the edge of the reef where locals hunt for lobsters at night. Shell casings as big as your leg that may or may not still be live. A huge concrete ammo store. Best of all, a lot of the bunkers and stores now taken as part of local people's houses. Little signatures of vivid red paint around tiny windows that would once have housed machine guns. Multi-coloured drying clothes softening the moody grey of the concrete walls, giggling girls waiting for kettles to boil on coconut husk fires.
How angular and static these concrete bunkers look next to the exploding, infinitely complex, constantly adapting nature all around. It seems natural to see each of these buildings alone, a rugged individual, whereas the plants, coconut palms, wandering chickens, ants, seemed to make up a whole organism that, whilst the individual actors would each die and decay far quicker than the concrete bunker, would collectively watch this single bunker decay over hundreds, thousands of years, until it became sand and truly in sync with the island.
Japan's expansionist, militaristic behaviour before WWII came from a desire for increased natural resources to industrialise, grow and compete with China and the west. So they came to this island, built huge structures, ordered each other around and believed in their superiority over other nations and nature itself, minds as rigid as buildings. You can't help but marvel at what they managed to do (and feel chilly when you see the execution block at the edge of the island). But for me the bigger marvel is how nature (and the Marshallese people) just waited, let the Japanese burn themselves out, and then patiently began rebuilding again, no judgements made.
Next to Tarawa are two tiny, uninhabited islands. White beach, coral, a flock of black birds, loads of hermit crabs, dry coconut shells littering the floor, you know the kind of thing. I spent one unflinchingly sunny day there, just me and a couple of books and some music and a snorkel. It felt like the final step of this journey away from London, from time divided into minutes and hours, from the exhaust noise and the 'experiential advertising', from everything being so stimulating, busy and familiar that you don't notice the changes happening inside your head. A lot of the new thoughts and ways of thinking I have had in the last six months are infact me just having the space to realise - and accept - seeds of thought planted months, years ago, that have taken hold gradually, barely noticed.
It helps that the boat has a high quality and eclectic library, chock full of ideas that spin and shed light on my own. One thing that comes up time again is the nature of the individual in relation to the universe:
'Music, like Life, and like you, is one entity expressing itself through it's differences." - Victor Wooton
'Each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety.' - Alan watts
'An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing' - Masanobu Fukuoka
'The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims, and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.' - Albert Einstein
"As the sea 'waves', the universe 'peoples'" (or something like that) - Gandhi
'Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There was - and then no more of Thee and Me.' - Omar Khyamm
'Our usual understanding of life is dualistic: you and I, this and that, good and bad. But actually these discriminations are themselves the awareness of the universal existence. "You" means to be aware of it in the form of you, and "I" means to be aware of it in the form if I. You and I are just swinging doors" - Shunryu Suzuki
To me, these collectively imply that our deeply held idea of each of us as a separate entity is an illusion, as is the idea of any binary: you can't experience or explain the concept of 'up' without the existence of 'down', or 'night' without 'day'. Or arrogant without humble, or male without female. Or me without you. Opposites inform each other. Our own identity is formed by what is 'not you' - you are someone's son, someone's sister, someone's boss, someone's enemy. You are feeling anger towards another. You are eating the food that another has grown. Even to say 'i am 5ft 9' is only relevant in relation to the height of everyone else.
This idea is reinforced strongly in the pacific cultures we have visited (and in accounts of pre-Colombus American cultures). Here people seem to see the *community* as the basic entity, rather than the individual, and support each other accordingly. I am you, therefore what is good for you is good for me, so let me help you, or take what I need without feeling bad, and let's sit here and enjoy each other's company with no self-consciousness or agenda. It is hard to imagine the full implications of this without observing it in action on a day to day basis, and that privilege has affected me profoundly. I have always believed in a society without property, where people understand that a happy individual is contingent on a happy community, where people give to their ability and take to their needs. I always thought this was some goal we were slowly evolving to, but it turns out that it is something that has been practiced here for centuries! And no one has even heard the word 'socialism' (I had a right laugh trying to explain it to Atah in Kiribati). Why has it taken me 30 years, a lot of luck, and a trip to the other side of the world to glimpse this? Why is it not part of our discourse? I blame the lizards.
The importance of the individual in our society also creates an unnecessary pressure for each individual to 'succeed'. This success is measured by a set of criteria that, from the perspective outlined above, becomes absurd: The relative numbers of dollars, children, lovers, qualifications, youtube hits, rose bushes you have in relation to those around you is irrelevant given the knowledge that we are all just slightly different iterations of the same great steaming star spangled universe. Perhaps instead (as was suggested over lunch), success is the very action of defining your own goals and then having a go at achieving them. Or perhaps success is our collective ability to appreciate the beauty around us at any given moment, and share that appreciation and beauty with others. Not really sure.
Definitely sure that it is harder to appreciate beauty if you are being bombed, or in a detention centre, or being beaten by your father, or working 16 hour days, or hungry. For me, it is also hard to appreciate beauty when these things are going on around me. An indignant and fully referenced rage at the existence of such problems kept me deep in the activist scene for many years, but in the last few years my revolutionary activity has slowed. I see so many of my friends doing so many useful things, and my relative inertia used to bother me. I wondered if dropping out of the UK for while was a bit selfish. Einstein again: 'The life of the individual has meaning only in so far as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful'.
In the last weeks I realise that I don't need to worry about it: Whatever I will do, I will do, and it is probably going to be useful in some way because if it wasn't useful I wouldn't be fulfilled. Happiness is the balance of purpose and pleasure. Alan Watts:
"It is like the centipede's skill in using 100 legs at once.
The centipede was happy quite, until a toad in fun, said 'prey, which leg goes after which?' This worked his mind to such a pitch, he lay distracted in a ditch, considering how to run"
SO MANY of my friends are doing amazing things with all one hundred of their legs and worrying that it is not enough, or not quite the right thing. But each day we have a choice about what we are going to do, and we can either do one thing, or another, and that is that. They are doing something today, and they will do something else tomorrow, and both days will be guided by who they are and what they want. Worrying clouds the issue. Suzuki: 'All that we should do is just do something as it comes.' Both completely obvious and easier said that done I know, but it empties the past of regrets and fills the future with relaxed, positive intent. And an emphasis on being still and present enough to really see the trees in the wood.
So, dear reader, these are the things that are passing through my mind, isolated as it is out here. I am happy to be passing into my fourth decade with all my limbs, most of my teeth, and no major addictions or nihilistic tendencies. Tom describes life post-30 as 'a slow decline', but at this moment at least, I honestly don't mind.
* For example, I was once chatting to a homeless veteran somewhere in California sortly before Obama was reelected. He told me he HATED Obama and would be voting republican. Why? Because Obama had promised free dental care to veterans, and for whatever reason (probably because of Republican opposition) hadn't delivered. How could I either feel animosity towards him for voting republican, or ever change his mind?
Top 6 most influential albums of my first 30 years (chronologically):
1. History - Michael Jackson
2. Urban Hymns - The Verve
3. Argaes Bryson (sp.) - Sigur Ros
4. The Dead Pets' first album
5. Uprooting - Warsaw Village Band
6. The Mande Variations - Toumani Diabate
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