Where am I?

In a bright and airy first-floor apartment, in the Sanjaynagar locality of Bangalore, listening to the early morning traffic and the scratch of my sister's pen on paper in the room next to me, recuperating from a long, surprising day On the Town, meeting and spending time with friends of friends and defying sleep at 7 AM. Trying to configure words to put a shape to how I got here, where I've come from, and what it was like along the way.

I've traveled some 1,700 since my last post, and have another 300 or so before I sling down my pack for more than 24 hours. From Sangatya in Udupi region to Mangalore, to Bangalore on an overnight train; to Zahirabad on another overnighter. I spent two weeks with Usha on her little homestead outside Machnoor village in Andhra Pradesh and all too quickly had to leave again with hardly a chance to consider how much I'll miss her. My time there warrants far more energy than I have for it now; I'll have to devote some words to it later. Back to Bangalore on the same train, going the opposite direction, with the purpose of meeting Dove at the airport and getting a jump start on our month together roaming the mighty India. Thanks to the great kindness of Usha, who put me in touch with her friend Shailaja and her niece Anupuma, and the generosity of Anupuma herself, who left town for a holiday in Goa but left the key to her apartment in my care (after knowing me for, you know, an hour or so. We call that Trust and I dig it.)--Dove and I have had a safe, comfortable place to spend the wee hours of the morning sipping tea and chatting away, catching up on a long separation and playing show-n-tell with the contents of our backpacks. I guess I'm through being amazed; somehow it doesn't seem strange at all for her to be here, suddenly a part of this edge of my life that has until now been foreign and estranged from the rest. Maybe it's the sleepless night talking, but it seems natural. I'm happy to see her, happy to have this time together. Pleased as punch that she's in my life.

Today we'll roam Bangalore lazily and hop on a train to Mangalore in the evening. By lunchtime tomorrow we'll be back at Shreekumar's little tropical paradise, ready to throw off our packs, put on our work clothes, and dig in.

The earth is good to me

My back is sore from dragging a pick accross the ground, and stooping to drop seeds of black gram into the furrow behind it, and carrying enormous baskets of dried leaves on my head. My arms and ankles are marked with a lattice of scratches from the thornbushes woven into the straw mulch. I'm feeling slow and sated after a dinner of fried rice & sprouted black gram, vegetable sambar, and coconut idli. In short, I haven't got the grace to tell this story well, but I'll tell it to you anyway as it comes to me, in spurts and starts.

I'm having a wonderful, life-affirming time here and I feel utterly at home. Here is Sangatya farm, a little piece of land, 6 acres, about an hour from the Karnataka coast. (If you want to see it on a map, look for Mangalore. 60 km north you'll find Udupi, and inland from there you'll find Karkala, the nearest town) I've been here for 12 days now. It's a farm that's trying really hard to be a non-hierarchical, sustainable farming community, but has run up against the fact that there aren't enough people who want that. At one point there were 8 people living in this little house and working the land; now it's dwindled down to one, with visitors. Shreekumar is the farmer, a gentle and articulate man with a background in anarchism and environmental/political activism and an upper-tier education in engineering. He teaches thermodynamics and other engineering courses at a university in Mangalore, which means he's gone from the farm 3 days a week. He speaks 4 languages. Then there's Vijayendra (Viju), a 68-year-old “professional revolutionary” who hasn't been formally employed since he was 20, a writer of eco-anarchist pamphlets and short stories, a consultant and our scribe. Between the two of them they speak 6 languages that I know of. Hindi, English, Tulu, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi.

And then there's me.

I've been here for 12 days, farming, educating myself and being educated, napping in the sun and swatting mosquitoes. I'm mostly very, very happy here. As a farm, right now we have coconut palms, banana plants, a motley crew of vegetables in a little patch of garden, a mango tree in bloom, a curry tree, itty-bitty hot peppers, and areca palms that we're ignoring, because they're leftover from the last farmers who lived here and they're a useless, inedible cash crop used to make gutka and betel, the chewing tobacco of this part of the world. In the rainy season we grow rice, and a lot of it, and we're munchng our way through the dried reserves of black gram, horse gram, millet, and more. There's too much for Shree to do here alone, and I feel necessary and appreciated for the work that I do. My work so far has been planting a whole field of maize and black gram (a kind of small bean), digging new beds and gathering leaves to mulch them, watering and digging irrigation; spreading coconuts and millet to dry in the sun. All of the work is done by hand and with simple metal & wood tools. It's not hard work, just simple work, and it takes time. The black gram and the maize have sprouted in most of the field and I derive great proud and nurturing pleasure from watching them grow from seeds to sprouts to what look like real live plants. It's beautiful.

As for the rest of my time here, I've been learning a million things. Most of life here centers around food, and we eat a lot of it. Our diets are built on rice and coconut, supplemented with dal, bananas, vegetables from here and from the store, and other odds and ends. I'm afraid I'll grow fat here on rice and coconut and rice and coconut, but I'll at least be in good company. We have tea and coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon. I've learned how to use a solar box cooker, how to cook on a wood fire, how to make sambar, dal, gati, idli, coconut chutney, and other local dishes. How to crack a coconut and catch all the juice, how to wash dishes using ash and coconut husk, the local method for sprouting mung beans. That the stem of a banana plant is edible and pretty tasty when cooked with the right masala, as are green, unripe bananas. I've also been learning in a less culinary direction, from books and talks with Viju and Shree. I'm up to my elbows in anarchism, here, and reading everything from organic farming techniques (“On Composting”, by Venkat, the father of permaculture in India) to classic and new anarchist literature (Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj; Vijayendra's Regaining Paradise) and a treatise rejecting vegetarianism (The Vegetarian Myth), which is a remarkable piece of non-fiction. I've been bathing and washing my clothes in the river, and letting the little fishies nibble at the dead skin on my feet.

There are so many sounds here, and most of them are birds and insects. Viju is a bit of a naturalist, and he's taught me the names of many of the birds we see each day—drongos and warblers and golden orioles, cattle egrets, cormorants, crow pheasants, sunbirds (which are tiny and brilliantly bejeweled in red and green and purple, like the prettiest hummingbirds, but they perch and flit instead of humming). Peacocks are actually pests here, eating the tender shoots of plants we mean to grow. There are huge spiders and tiny frogs, and rat snakes draping in the trees, and biting, stinging ants, and small lizards that run up and down the wall eating bugs that stray into the house. The mosquitoes have stopped biting me, and I've stopped using mosquito repellant.

This place is radicalizing me and educating me. I want to lead a good life and a peaceful life, and I want to educate others, and I want to grow my own food and defend as much land as I can. I want to reject conventional agriculture and its wanton destruction of entire ecosystems, its depletion of topsoil and gulping down rivers for irrigation and forests for fields. I want to make a difference, or at least find myself an island of sustainability, responsibility, love, and compassion and refuse to be a part of the World at Large. It's a lot to ask, I know. I'm prepared to work hard for it.

Hop, skip, jump

I'm setting down in southern Goa for the night, taking a moment to relax in this fan-cooled cyber cafe in Magdaon before catching a bus to Benaulim beach. Since I left Palitana early on January 13, every day has had its component of backpack-lugging and public transportation, and I am worn out and feeling harried and dirty. I'm tired of being on the go. I'm ready to pause for a couple of days and take a breath, or a few, but I'm dashing down the coast in a bit of a hurry, to get to Sangatya by the end of the week.

Up before dawn on January 13th to catch a bus to Ahmedabad, where I stowed my luggage and bought a ticket for a night train to Mumbai. I strolled around the city, or approximated a stroll while avoiding being run over by rickshaws or beaten by sullen begging ladies (no joke). I walked a lot, my feet and legs still aching from my two ascents up Shatrunjaya, and without a map, and somehow managed to miss every tourist attraction in the Lonely Planet. Go figure! I did see, however, long market boulevards lined with many-coloured carts and stalls selling kites, kite paraphernalia, noisemakers, and other glittery, festive items in preparation for Makar Sankranti, the international kite festival hosted by Ahmedabad on January 14th. I started feeling sensory overstimulation pretty quickly, and spent my last few hours in the relative sanctuary of the train station. I hopped on a train to Mumbai and set up camp on the top bunk for the night.

Tom met me in Mumbai, after a little classic confusion--he was waiting for me, I was waiting for him, seated probably not 10 meters apart, but somehow we missed each other. In his long, light kurta he just blended right in, curly halo, white skin, and all! We rode the rails up to Sanjay Gandhi National Park, then down to Colaba, got a skeezy hotel room for the night and set about being tourists. We spent the next afternoon at Sanjay Gandhi, sitting in a little clearing in the woods eating papaya and noodling on the ukulele: pretty much exactly what we would have done had we met anywhere in the world. There is something totally surreal and uplifting about connecting with a friend and countryman on foreign soil. It has something to do with the bizarre coincidence of it, being in the same place at the same time for different reasons, and for different timespans, and in different roles. It also has something to do with the sudden opportunity to speak grammatically complex English instead of pidgin, and to speak about your experiences, impressions, opinions, and beliefs with a like mind and kindred spirit. It was--thank you, Tom--replenishing in ways I can't express.

So I got on a night bus from Mumbai to Ganpatipule on January 15th, and arrived early morning in that little dusty seaside village on January 16th. Nothing to report, really; beautiful beaches and two streets lined with resorts. It's a popular Hindu tourist destination, due to the beachside Ganesha temple. I walked up and down both streets more times than I remember, entertaining myself as best I know how. I hung out on the beach with my book and uke, tried and failed to make a long-distance call to America, and went to bed early.

January 17th--that's today! I was up before dawn again to zip down to Ratnagiri, where I caught a train, 2nd class, general seating, to Magdaon. My journey is almost over for the day (just a 15-minute bus ride to the beach) and I'm so unutterably relieved. I haven't decided whether or not I'll leave town tomorrow, but by Friday I should be in Karnataka, at Sangatya farm, where I'll plop down my backpack and unpack it for three and a half blissful weeks of stasis. Hallelujah, forever and ever amen.

Many legged journeys

Claudi and I left Jaisalmer on a night train to Jodhpur, where we grappled with the aggressive noise and bustle (still shell-shocked and timid from 10 days of quiet, slow village life) for a whole 11 hours before hopping on an evening bus to Udaipur. The bus jolted and bumped up across some mountains in the dark, and I sat white-knuckled and lock-kneed, leaning into each turn and willing the wheels away from the edge of the narrow, rocky strip of pavement. When we arrived in Udaipur, it was around 11:30 PM, and the prepaid taxi counter (where you can get a fair fare of 50 rupees to anywhere in town) was closed; our first impression was a rickshaw driver twisting our arms for a 250 rupee fare. We bargained and haggled and whittled him down to the normal fare, but when he delivered us to the hotel we had to fight to get him to stick to the agreed-upon price. We slept and rose in the morning to roam the city.

Is this what the Lonely Planet does to a city? Udaipur is a weird, sad place, distinctly segregated into a tourist playground in the once-romantic, charming Old City, and a real, plain and garish, loud and smelly Indian city. Our hotel was well outside the tourist area, so we walked through the real city on our way to the area surrounding the mammoth City Palace. It's as though someone flips a switch as you turn onto Lake Palace Road from the main thoroughfares; all of a sudden the signs are in English, and every shop is selling the gamut of bottled waters, toilet paper, postcards, 'handicrafts', miniature paintings, jooti (pointed Rajasthani sandals), Ali Baba trousers and paisley scarves for foreigners. Cyber cafes, rooftop restaurants, Your Best Stay in Udaipur! Indian Cooking Lessons! Touts and rickshaws and shopkeepers jumping out at you (“Hello what is your name you like pretty shirt I give you very good price!”--all one sentence). I realize that tourism brings a lot of money to a place, but here it doesn't seem to improve the lives of the most, and instead it causes people to scrabble, wheedle, and con to get every last rupee. It has made a lot of the places I've visited very ugly, the steady flow of foreigners who don't understand the way this culture works. Not that I do...I felt guilty for what has happened to Udaipur, which was a really lovely place once, I'm sure, even though it's not my fault. To me it felt colonial and dirty, the white Europeans coming to town to get their shoes shined and their backs massaged and their hands decorated with henna by the dark-skinned, head-bobbing, obsequious natives.

Claudi and I were both disillusioned with the city—I might even say I was disenchanted, Udaipur—but we still managed to have a good time, and we stayed there for four days deciding our next move. We took a few yoga classes with a kind and welcoming man who teaches for donations. The classes were pleasant and interesting but not particularly inspiring, though I learned some simple new postures to help with digestion. We ate our breakfasts at little eateries whose existence is perfectly summed up with the title “Hole in the Wall”--niches just big enough for benches and narrow tables crammed together, with a specialized cooking station cranking out one or two delicious dishes in alarming quantities for 10 or 20 rupees a plate. If you want parantha or puri with dal and curd, you go to one little hole in the wall; if you want lemon rice or samosa, you go to another. We drank heavenly sugarcane juice in the shade outside the Sajjan Nivas city garden, freshly squeezed by fantastic machines like tabletop printing presses with roaring engines. We took a lesson on painting henna with an artist sitting on the floor in the Namaste Cafe; he liked us, I guess, because we agreed on a price for 1 hour's teaching and after two and a half hours he would only accept what we'd agreed upon. And we discovered the best eats in Rajasthan, at Bawarchi restaurant, a bustling diner-like place, where the food is guaranteed delicious and bottomless and the tables are in constant rotation. The thali arrives, a large round silver platter with small silver cups, and one by one the waiters come to dollop something on your plate: one waiter handles rice, one handles dal and raita, while another keeps your plate full of three different vegetable curries and someone else flips fresh chapati onto your plate every time he passes. We were monstrously hungry, but we had to beg and plead with them to stop refilling our plates after we'd eaten our fill. We ate there two nights, because we knew immediately there were no better options. The place was clearly the local favorite, and rightly so.

We took a day trip to Ranakpur, an intricately styled Jain temple supported by 1,444 hand-carved marble pillars, none of which are the same, a feat of skill and devotion that left me in awe. It was a place of peace, a place that gave me (as I expressed it to Claudi) a “fullness in my heart” The place was stark white and bore no decoration beyond the architecture itself and the saffron-and-sandalwood paste dabbed ritually on the foreheads and bodies of the Jain idols. Still, though, I tbreathed with a life and a joy that made it feel more open, relaxed, and welcoming than the dark and cloistering churches and cathedrals I've seen in Russia and Italy. The wind blew freely through the open structure. It felt ancient, but also timeless. The word devotion began to get lodged in my head.

Finally Claudi and I parted, she making a last-minute decision to board a bus to Ambaji and then Kutch, the Wild West of Gujarat, and I similarly deciding, finally, at the bus stand, to go to Palitana. In one day I traveled from the hills of Southern Rajasthan down across the table-top flat expanse of the Saurashtra peninsula, 7 hours from Udaipur to Ahmedabad and 5 hours from Ahmedabad to Palitana. We hugged in the aisle of my bus and exchanged a hurried goodbye; the last I saw of her she was still asking everyone with any reason to know, in a slow and clear German-accented voice, about the bus routes from Ambaji. I don't think it occurs to her to be scared.

Just. Like. That. I was alone again, after almost 3 weeks of her company, at the mercy of India. Luckily, India is very merciful. My newfound head-wiggling skills won me smiles and reciprocal head-wiggles (the quintessentially Indian gesture of good will), and the folks around me were kind and generous. My neighbors shared their orange with me, and fellow passengers invited me to their home to meet their families and have dinner. I declined as politely as I know how, and all the same one of the men helped me to find my next bus in Palitana, wiggling his head all the while. On the bus to Palitana, nobody spoke English, not even the bus driver, but it turned out fun and fine. I remember worrying about traveling in India with no Hindi, and now I see how unfounded my concern was. In a larger city, where you're likely to be cheated or you or your property to be harmed, someone will always speak enough English. And in small towns, off the tourist beat, Indians are, by & large, not dangerous. They are kind, friendly, respectful, caring, and helpful almost to a fault. There are those who will cheat and steal, but people here care for each other unbelievably. I remember, also, being chastised by a babushka on my train from Moscow to Kiev for leaving my backpack unattended for a moment. And for good reason—Russians are often dangerous. But here I feel no need to lock my door. It's not a question of poverty—people here are poorer by far—instead it seems to be a matter of dignity, hospitality, and straight-up brotherly love.

I took a room at the Hotel Sumeru for 100 rupees a night and slept peacefully and happily.

Palitana is a pilgrimage site for Jains, because of the hilltop temple complex at Shetrunjay / Shatrunjaya mountain, which lies at the top of 3,300 stone steps built into the side of the hill. It takes about an hour to climb, without stopping, and most people have to stop along the way. Shatrunjaya is also the reason I came here. I set out on my first morning looking for breakfast, thinking I'd start the trek in the afternoon, but the streets flow like a river to the base of the hill, and I found myself pulled there. I surrendered. A young man named Pawas showed me around the temples at the bottom of the ascent and tied a beaded bracelet on my wrist for good luck. I dlimbed it! When I wandered through the temples at the top I was awed, again, by the devotion. The ways we worship, I thought like a mantra, The names we call god.

Here at Shatrunjaya all those many carvings on the temple walls—ecstatic dancers, musicians and laughing bodies in joyous motion—seem to make sense. At Ranakpur, with its warm and peaceful silence, there were no such carvings—and that also felt right. But here the air was filled with bells and music, bright and celebratory chants and songs with harmonium, tambourine, sitar-like stringed instruments, many voices echoing up through the maze of temple shrines to the vibrant blue sky. The shouts and prayers of pilgrims and devotees blanket the place, and the carved dancers seem to laugh along, moving with the rhythm of some god's love. The offerings of puja, from coconuts and melons to sweets and incense, flowers perfuming the air, intricate images of holy symbols drawn with colored rice, the bright orange and saffron yellow of the monks' draped uniforsm—this place felt alive with color, lights, belief, love. Each visitor was deep in their own expression of devotion, carrying trays of offerings from idol to idol, sitting with tiny tables in front of selected shrines. The ways we worship, the names we call god.

Some people stay in a dharamsala, a pilgrims' rest-house, for one month to perform the arduous pilgrimage of 99 treks up and down the mountain. That's 3 or 4 every day. Those who are weak or injured and unable to climb up themselves can hire, for an exorbitant fee, a dholi, a chair suspended from a bamboo pole, carried by two to four people (men or women).

I came to a little bit of magic just as I was about to leave, when a young man pointed out a Muslim temple built a little apart from the Jain complex, but inside the main wall. I checked it out—an open courtyard in white and green, round, with niches like coffin-shaped cupboards in the walls, each filled with bedding and personal possessions. A man slumbering in the courtyard rose and invited me to sit, explaining that the Muslims who had come to Palitana in ages past had set up camp there, with their leader stating that “Adinath”, the ringleader of the Jain gods, and “Allah” are different names for the same god. Ahmedkah, the Muslim mystic, the crazy old saddhu, invited me to eat lunch, and we passed around a little stone chillum. We got high and met god, meditated, drank chai, and the other woman sitting with us, Bijia, saw that I have no jewelry and gifted me to bejewelled bangles from her own wrist. I decided to come back up before I leave Palitana, to say hello and goodbye and pay my respects again. (Today I began the ascent at 7:30 AM and had breakfast with Ahmedkah and his family. I carried my ukulele up the mountain to sing him Cat Stevens--"If you want to sing out..." He sang me "We shall overcome" in Hindi.)

The walk back down was difficult, with the wide stone steps encouraging you to run down and my rubber sandals chafing at my feet. I took them off when blisters formed and ran down barefoot. Pawas found me at the bottom of the hill and brought me to his friend Bharat's English class for children, where I sat and talked for 3 hours with students from age 7 to 17, asking and answering questions. Bharat's wife Kujbu invited me for dinner, and Pawas picked me up to listen to some music at a Jain temple in town. He dropped me back at the Hotel Sumeru, exhausted and bewildered and full of magic, and I staggered to bed. People are generous and whole-hearted here.

The next day Bharat picked me up in the morning and I spent the whole day talking with his students, with a new class assembling every hour. They asked me innocent and piercing questions: “What is the name of your god?” (The Earth, I say) “From which caste do you come?” (No caste, I say) “Why did you come to India?” (I can't answer) Kujbu and Bharat fed me lunch as well, and I practiced kite-flying with Kujbu and their 4-year-old daughter Nensy (which is a sweet misspelling of Nancy). Kujbu is a beautician; she does bridal makeup, hair, and mehndi—henna tattoos. She offered to mark my hands.

On my last day in Jaisalmer, 8 days ago, I walked to the lake and watched pedalboats wander bewildered on the water's surface, and I wrote in my journal what I felt about January 4^th, 2012. India owns my body, I wrote; she has marked it for her own. I am swaddled in her cloth, with her leather on my head and feet. Her scarves, draped across my shoulders, her knapsack on my back. Her roiling, clenching sickness in my guts, her spices fiery on my tongue. It's taken less than a month for India to conquer my body, and now she goes to work on my soul, or spirit, or whatever lives inside me. Not the microbes rioting in my intestines, not inside me, but whatever moves my mind and heart.

Today, January 12^th, I'm glancing down at my hands, decorated in deep ochre and burnt orange brown, and trying to understand just how conquered I am. India, you are in my skin. You are seeping into my follicles and staining my hands, you are decorating me, the way you claim your own. Mehndi, henna, beauty given as a gift. Adopted, adapted, accepted, allowed.

It's exactly one month today.

Farm #1 and afterthoughts

The numbers tick up awfully fast from 01.01, and the days that go along with them. I returned from Dumpal Khadin organic farm around noon on January 1st and I've spent the days since then leisurely at Shiva's guest house and strolling the streets of Jaisalmer. A glorious hasteless dream, where time creeps by one moment at a time with jolts where whole hours have passed. I like it here.

The farm was, as far as farms go, a letdown; I'm not sure what I expected (patches of chickpeas interspersed with rows of cumin and mustard? Picking fresh from the garden every day?) but the reality was a vast monoculture of chickpeas and a scraggly patch of cilantro, which village children uproot to nibble on. There were two other WWOOFers there when I arrived, Jan and Claudia. They had come to the farm at the same time and both are German but by coincidence; Jan left the morning after I arrived, bound for greener pastures, and Claudia stuck around for the whole 10 days I was there.

We came on the back of a motorbike, with my backpack straining against my back. In the morning Shiva took Jan back to Jaisalmer and left me and Claudie alone in the desert with his brother's family.

We lived in the desert with Moto, his ailing mother, his wife Shandni, and their three children (6 years, 3 years, and infant). Not to mention a downtrodden sandy-colored dog named Anda (“egg”), a cow and two calves, and a handful of goats. The house one stone and cement block and three huts made of mud and cow dung, clustered around a packed-mud/dung courtyard. The chickpea field is several kilometers away, a 30-40 minute walk across open scrubby desert.

Living in the Thar desert is difficult, in plain ways. To drink, we draw water from a concrete tank in front of the house in a shiny silver pail on a rope (but don't drop the rope, because it's not attatched on the other end!). To bathe, wash clothing, and repair the house, we take from the pond (rainwater accumulated July-September), which serves as watering-hole for the goat and cow herds. It's a 10 minute walk to the 'lake', where we wade in the soft kneaded mud, adding our feet to thousands of hoofprints in the mud, and fill 10-liter metal jugs with brown-grey water, which we carry back on our heads, water sloshing down our necks and faces. The day is measured out in steps down and back up the path to the rapidly-diminishing pond. Water is too precious to waste on things like washing dishes, so we use sand.

The sun is harsh during the day and the nights can be very, very cold. The night I spent in a grass hut next to the chickpea field, I could see my breath in the air. I layered all the warm clothing I brought, saying a prayer each night to the Merino gods.

While we were fetching water on my first working-day, Claudie informed me that though the farm is mostly organic, they are spraying the chickpeas this year because the insects are especially bad. I felt cheated and disappointed, but not surprised; life is hard here, and they don't want to take any chances at losing the crop. I spent one day weeding in the chickpea field, glaring up at Moto's distant figure walking down the rows with a backpack sprayer. I planned to make a fuss, since I didn't sign up for front-line exposure to pesticides. But It didn't become an issue, since most of the weeds had already been pulled and that afternoon was the only one we spent in the field.

Life moved along in an unhurried, steady way like the gait of a lazy cow, but I was constantly anxious, since I was never sure what would be expected of me. Whenever idle, I felt like I needed to be doing something to earn my keep. After we finished weeding the chickpeas we were mostly entrusted with small tasks and home-improvement projects. We swept the courtyard, gathered firewood, ground wheat flour by hand, milked goats. Claudie and I spent one day putting up a roofless structure for storing goat-n-cow food, constructed out of supple sticks and rope, then moved all the grain into the new structure. We also spent one day helping Moto to cut grass for a new thatched roof. Most of our time, though, was devoted to refinishing the house with a mixture of sand, water, and cow shit on the walls. (When they talk about cow shit, they call it “cow shit” in English, without crudeness or shame; for them, that's the word to call it.) So we fetched jug after jug of water, and then fetched pans of sifted sand, and mixed both with big piles of wet cow shit using our bare feet on the floor of the courtyard. We spread it on the walls of the house with our hands. There's a feeling at first of complete, utter revulsion, when skin first touches crap, and then a sort of resigned disgust that turns into prideful stoicism. Which in turn gives way to a gross fascination and finally a sort of visceral enjoyment at the texture between fingers and toes, muddy and smooth. In short, it's AWESOME.

Christmas came and Shiva came from Jaisalmer to throw us a little party for it; we built a campfire at the grass hut (Shiva's “farmhouse”) and made dal, rice, and rota, little round biscuits cooked in the coals. Shiva brought real chocolate cake from town, and homemade whiskey from his brother's stash. We walked back, staggering, through the dark, scaring each other with desert ghosts and the threat of wild boars. New Year's Eve passed unmarked, though I woke up early to salute the sunrise on the first day of the year. “One Year Ago Today....” I thought about it. Two years ago today....three years ago today I shaved my head bare. Two years ago I drank champagne in the freezing cold at the top of a sledding hill. One year ago today I was struck horizontal with the worst hangover of my life, in St. Petersburg, Russia, with friends I hope to see again someday. On January 1^st we walked 6 km to the highway and flagged down a little truck to bring us to Jaisalmer for 20 Rupees.

Claudie's company was indispensable to me. We talked about our experience, whether it was good or bad. Often it was both—extremely frustrating, challenging, but simple and rewarding. A full belly at the end of a day of hard work. Hot tea in the cold morning. And I learned. Our position was a strange one at the farm. On the one hand, we were guests, and in India the guest is god. So we aren't allowed to help cook, and we were always served our meals and chai before the family. On the other hand, our purpose for being there was to work, and we had to earn our keep. We were the low ladies on the totem pole, so we are given all manner of menial tasks. The women, who have domain only over their own children, and the children, who have never had power over anyone, delighted in ordering us around. I felt a little like the dog, Anda, who walks with his tail slung low around his bum, for he knows his place is low. It was discouraging and dismaying that no one bothered to learn my name but addressed me & Claudie both as “gori”, which means “white-skinned person”. So...when I went into the desert my name changed from “Madam” to “Whitey”. Charmed, I'm sure. We felt like outsiders, gawked at by the children, who, even when we were elbow- and ankle-deep in cow shit, jabbed their hands out at us asking “10 rupees? 1 rupee? School pen? Photo?” Only Moto and his older brother Mogu spoke any more English than that. One of the goat-herd boys would stride by with a big smile on his face repeating the only words he knew--”Hello! Camel Safari! Camel safari hello!” The experience was not pleasant, but I can't say it was bad.

It's hard to begin to talk about it; the structure of life is so different from any I've ever experienced, and it seems like there's no way to translate the daily tasks and necessities without providing a floor plan, without diving into a series of nesting explanations, descriptions, and definitions that set the stage and provide the context for what little story I can offer. And there are too many stories I feel that I'm leaving out. The story of the food meeting my digestive tract and two days of horrible, dehydrated stomach cramps, the story of my clothes being dirty, dirtier, then cleanish, then dirty. The story of the kids and their sticky fingers on the fretboard of my ukulele. The birds flying in and out of our room whenever we opened the door. The goats bleating. The story of the sun rising, climbing, and slowly trekking across the sky.

Now Claudie and I have decided to cast our lots together for awhile, since we're both traveling alone. We've been living in Shiva's guesthouse in Jaisalmer for three days, cooking and cleaning and unsure if we're supposed to be paying for our room or not (we'll find out when we leave, I guess). A few local characters have learned our names and shake our hands as we walk down the street. If you stand still in one place long enough (and long enough is not long at all) someone here will offer you tea and conversation. You could spend a lifetime in Jaisalmer on front stoops and in little shops, sipping chai and talking about the world. But we're leaving tonight on a train back to Jodhpur, where we can catch a cheap bus to Udaipur. I'm happy, though these past days I've felt comfortable and at home. I'm starting to get itchy to move on.

Out into the desert

I bid Jodhpur a fond farewell, after one lass makhaniya lassi and some fresh cucumbers. I bought myself a vegetable peeler so the range of raw things I can safely consume has widened greatly. Goodbye, Jodhpur! I'm on a color tour of India, from the Pink City to the Blue City to the Golden City.

I spent my few hours last night refreshing the Indian Railways ticket-status page, hoping to see my Jodhpur-Jaisalmer ticket change from "W/L 7" (waitlist; can't get on the train) to "CNF" (confirmed, hop that sucker!), back in the rooftop restaurant paying too much for dal fry and roti, listening to Canadians kvetch about being "over India". And the numbers changed, so I popped my backpack up on my shoulders, holstered my ukulele, and armed with iodine-purified water, toilet paper, and my new diary, I haggled my way to the train station for 40 rupees and hoisted myself up to the third-tier bunk that my patience won for me. Night train to Jaisalmer, 6 hours, 11:45 PM and arriving at 5:30 AM. Cold. The desert is cold. Because it's winter.

Shiva the farmer met me at the train station with his motorcycle, and in the pre-dawn chill we careened through the streets--me juggling backpack, ukulele, and shoulder bag--to his guesthouse so I could get a little bit more sleep before riding out into the desert. When I woke up there was water boiling for me to shower, and hot lemon-ginger tea for my sore throat, and we climbed up to the roof to soak in the sun and dispel the lingering chills of the night. Then Shiva went to deal with guests and turned me loose at the 500-year-old Jain temple complex to roam and entertain myself for the day.

Jaisalmer is peaceful and relaxed, my favorite place so far. The streets are narrow and the number of auto-rickshaws is low. It's quiet and there is less pollution than in any of the other places I've been. The stonework on all the old houses is incredibly intricate, and the Jain Temples were overwhelming in the beautiful craft and painstaking skill that went into them. It makes me want to study art again. Shiva asked me over tea on the roof if I like India--the big question that I'm not in any hurry to answer yet. I like pieces of India, the answer I came up with. I like the kind people and how beauty is so prized, how people surround themselves with beauty (painting the cows, the elephants, the cars, their doorways, their motorcycles, their skin with henna). I like the food. The rhythm can be fatiguing. The garbage is heartbreaking. But I love Indian art. It strikes me deeply as sincere and vibrant. I feel movement in the Jain sculptures and I feel song in the paintings on walls and papers. It feels sacred even when it's secular. So much feels holy here.

Yeah, Jaisalmer is nice. People walk most places. The buildings are all made of a honey-amber-colored stone that I've heard glows gold in the sunset, but I haven't gotten a sunset yet and we're hoping to ride out to the farm. I did buy myself a tiffin and a beautiful camel-leather fedora to shield my eyes from the sun. I feel like a pilgrim. I look like Indiana Jones in loose Indian ladies' clothing.

So I'm out into the desert for two weeks, no electricity, no plumbing, and (I think it goes without saying) no Internet. Just the sun and the sand and the chickpeas we're nurturing along.

Here I go!

One Week

The air is cool and comfortable, filled with music drifting up from--somewhere--it sounds devotional, but maybe it's Bollywood. I'm seated on the floor on the roof of the Cosy Guest House in Jodhpur, the Blue City of Rajasthan, eating bananas and oranges and sweet peas from the pod (only things that come in natural packages). I burned my mouth on a samosa and the juice from these sweet little oranges stings and smarts on my lips. I'm barefoot happy and wrapped in the soft gauze scarf I haggled for and won in the market today. My body is clean but my clothes are dirty, and the smells wafting from the kitchen make me wish I hadn't spent my budget for the day. But the scarf is warm now and shaded me from the sun, and today I also bought sunscreen, so it's worth it for my skin.

I've been on the ground in India for one week today. I'm at a loss to understand how I've managed to live so much in one week. It seems like I've always been here, but if that were the case then I wouldn't be so disoriented. And my Hindi would be much, much better. I've had a few scary moments with Indian men overstepping boundaries, and a few really stupid moments where I was naive enough to get cheated out of a tidy sum of money. But I'm learning from those, and the good parts are much better.

Short version goes like this: I was in hotels in Jaipur for three nights, then spent two nights at my newfound friend Rahul's family home in Amber, a town right outside Jaipur and full of life. His family didn't speak much English (the kids learn English in school, but it's rudimentary still) so we communicated mostly through food, headbobbing, gestures, sheepish smiles. The food that Rahul's sister cooked was incredibly delicious, but had me dashing in and out of the toilet room and doubled over with stomach cramps. Turns out that when it's spicy going in, it's still spicy coming out...enough said. Rahul and his friends Lala, Mann, Vinod, and Vijay went out of their way to show me a wonderful time in Amber, from introducing me to a baby elephant to throwing a party in honor of my older brother's birthday. And then on December 18th I hopped a train to Jodhpur, the Blue City. How long have I dreamed of coming to Jodhpur? Long enough. It's not as blue as I imagined it, though to be fair it's pretty blue. And tomorrow I'm jumping on another train to Jaisalmer, to meet up with Shiva Singh, who runs Dumpal Khadin organic farm, my first WWOOFing connection.

My innards seem to have quieted themselves, and the food here in Jodhpur has been amazing. Amazing masala omelettes for 50 cents on the street; amazing saffron lassi from a shop under the clocktower (they have a whole menu, but Lonely Planet mentioned their saffron lassi and now they don't sell anything else; they don't even ask when foreign people come in, but just clunk a saffron lassi on the table. and it's incredible); the best samosa I've ever had (I had three for lunch/dinner). Even the cheapest street food here tastes wonderful. Everything is full of flavor. Surprisingly, the sweets aren't great. Jalebi, little fried squiggles of sugary dough, turn my stomach. Really, it's just fried sugar. Raju, a boy I met in Jaipur, insists that people eat them for breakfast. Yeah, right. And most of the other sweets I've had so far are similar concoctions of sugar and butter (held together with a little gram flour) without much flavor.

Today, really for the first time since I got here, I was alone. In Jaipur Rahul and his friends were my constant escort, and yesterday in Jodhpur I met this awesome American couple at the railway booking office and ended up spending all yesterday and a lot of today with them. They've known each other since they were 15 and have been traveling for something like 5 months, on an epic journey around the Ring of Fire starting in Alaska and down the West Coast, then to south Pacific and across Eastern Asia into India. They were so even-headed, so real. They helped me to break through my inability to haggle, and they helped me to find a new notebook and pens (which was a day-long journey from bookstore to stationary store and everywhere in between). And they recommended the omelette shop where I'm having breakfast again tomorrow. The dude who runs the omelette shop has been making omelettes there and nothing else for 13 years; he goes through over 1,000 eggs each day. Lonely Planet talks about him, too, so of course everyone goes there. In the afternoon I parted ways with Galen and Jeff (they're bound for Goa) and I hiked up to Jaswant Thada, this beautiful white marble memorial to some Maharaja or another, built in 1899 and overlooking the whole city. There's a garden there where I sat and broke in my new notebook. I felt peaceful and relieved to be alone. I heard the call to prayer resounding out above and through the whole city. It's so eerie and amazing: several lead voices on PA's, sounding amplified as if only by reverence and spirit, and this deep thrumming beneath of thousands of voices amplified only by their unity. I want to get up before sunrise tomorrow and hike up to the hilltop to see the sun come up over the edge of town. It's my last chance to do so, since I'm getting on a train tomorrow night for Jaisalmer. Maybe I'll just watch the sunrise from the roof of my guesthouse, which is a bit above the main part of the city, in the Old City, the blue part of the city.

This is a really challenging place. I'm learning strength and awareness, and dealing with a lot of thoughts about necessity, luxury, equality, entitlement, humanity. Waste, garbage. Generosity, kindness. Desperation. I'm reading a dark and cynical William Burroughs book called The Western Lands, based in ancient Egyptian writings. He writes of Sek, the second soul, life energy that abounds in disaster and desperation. This place is rich with life energy, with Sek, fertile with life energy.

I've only been here a week; seven days seems like an awfully short time to change your life.

Hobo is going, again!

Yeah, Hobo is going again--but not to the frozen wastes of the far north, oh no. Hobo's bound for warmer climes, to overwinter (like cabbages in December! Like kale under a low tunnel! Like spinach in a hoophouse!) in a land of spice and color, shrouded in mysticism and air pollution.

INDIA.

And she's leaving in about, oh, say, three hours. Give or take.

(and she's going to try to keep updates. Or at least write letters.)

Moscow

Moscow was shrouded in smoke! I got here day before yesterday, in the evening, and the whole city smelled like the inside of a woodstove. People march stony-faced up and down grey streets with surgical masks hiding their expressions (or lack thereof), buildings fade off into an otherworldly haze that obscures the ends of streets and wipes away the skyline. After dark the city transforms into a dreamscape; maybe it was the bottle of Bordeaux I shared with Vasya, maybe the shock of leaving Petersburg, but more than anything the surreal sensation of walking into a dream was from the omnipresent smoke. Дым, it's called in Russian. Dym. And it seeps into the metropolitan, and it cuts at your eyes, and it reminds me of my father and the 3rd-degree burns I got when I warmed myself too close to our gargantuan iron stove. I was so tiny, and the stove looms enormous and black in my memory; was it really twice as tall as me?

The smoke has cleared somewhat, but the singed smell remains, and the whole city is parched. Grass is sand-colored and harsh, trees are already shedding crumpled, crisping leaves. August is a force to reckon with here.

Tomorrow I'm taking the train to Kiev.

I'm too busy having adventures to write them down! I'm too busy jamming under the bridge on the far side of town, playing my kazoo, drinking rum on the banks of the Neva, riding Petya's spare bicycle in between lanes of traffic, shooting watermelon seeds at pigeons, swimming in the Bolshaya Nevka, making galettes, packing my suitcase, being locked out of my apartment, walking across town (and back again), birthday partying, giving concerts on the roof, sleeping under the table, in the park, at friend's houses, everywhere but my bed. Oh I wish I could give my time here the description it deserves.

Нам не так уж долго осталось быть здесь вместе

I feel, again, for the hundredth time in my life, like my life is a text scrolling past me faster than I can read it, and it falls to me to reach out and grasp at it, try to slow it down and at least make sense of the moment before it's gone. But the moments fly by and I gain no understanding, just a fleeting sensation that I've missed something important and it will never come back. I feel the weight and guilt of having taken even a moment of my time here for granted, I feel like I deserve bruises for how much I've wasted wallowing in loneliness, helplessness, self-pity when I was down. I can't believe I let myself get away with it. Once again I've come to that point where my stay has been whittled down, the days have dwindled to few and I can count them on my fingers but before I can close my palm on them another chalk line appears on the wall and another day has disappeared. I am sad, because I don't want to go home. I am sad, because part of me thinks this is home. I am sad, because it is a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only once. If I had two lives, I'd spend one of them here.

I am scared, because I don't know if I'll ever come back.

It seems like I discovered all of the books, films, songs, and pictures that resonate with me early in life, all at once; I turn back to the same pages and notes to describe my state of mind, even though I've heard hundreds of songs since then and read more books than I remember. Maybe I've grown harder, the way babys' skulls are in pieces at first but stitch together with time; maybe I'm not growing anymore.

My life is so incredible and I miss it already.

Vacation within a vacation!

Without paying attention, without any intention, I somehow managed to take an entire week off work. Last Thursday I left Andrey Khlobystin's Nevsky Prospekt apartment and shoved art to the back of my mind, fully intending to get back in the saddle on Monday morning, but through a string of unrelated events, Monday arrived, and then Tuesday, and then Wednesday...Monday I spent half the day getting to and from the Smolny headquarters to return a library book and ask Elena, the asst. program director, if she had any leads on finding a transcriber for my interviews. I had just gotten home from the office, around 4 PM, and was preparing myself for a line of stilted introductory phone calls, when the rest of my day was suddenly consumed by a search for bicycle wheels--

Here I must pause and explain why, precisely, I was looking for bicycle wheels. Once, I had bicycle wheels. I even had a whole bicycle! When David said his bitter farewells to this godforsaken country--once and for all!--he bequeathed me his cell phone (borrowed from Smolny) and his ancient, forest-green, Soviet-issue collapsible bike. It needed some work before I could ride it, so I locked it up in my courtyard and forgot about it entirely apart from when I would see it entering and exiting my apartment each day. At least a week went by, probably more, and each time I saw the bicycle I remembered that I needed to find a wrench and tighten the handlebars. And then one day, I pushed the door open, greeted by the suddenly not-so-familiar sight of my bike, exactly as I had left it, only WITHOUT WHEELS.

Well, as things often go with me, it's taken at least another three weeks for my search for bicycle wheels to evolve past a half-assed, disinterested effort into a full-blown investigation. The best part of the investigation has to be the fact, uncovered when I drunkenly began asking my chainsmoking neighbors if they'd seen, "by chance" any bicycle wheels lying around, that someone in the building "just happens to have" a set of wheels he might be willing to sell.

Yeah. Please, sir, sell me back my bicycle wheels. Can I get a discount for not punching you in the teeth?

Anyway, the ordeal of tracking down a bike shop, learning it would cost me over $100 to replace my wheels, and enduring the heat (St. Petersburg is hard when you can't eat ice cream) had left me so exhausted that my day was done.

And yesterday I tried, I really tried to work! I called several artists I've been meaning to get in touch with, and again today, but everyone has left town for the week, and nobody will be back until early early August. So I've thrown it all to the wind and simply embraced my free time: I'm going to Novgorod on Friday and I plan to be absolutely useless for the rest of the week. Zach Hanson, friend & compatriot from last fall, is back in town, and we have a whole lot of being useless to do while he's around.

Picnics on islands, picnics on rooftops, picnics in parks

Birthday picnics
On Thursday night, Katey & I met Mitya and schlepped out to Kammeny Island with violin & ukulele in hand to celebrate Vasya's brother's birthday. Vasya had returned unexpectedly from Moscow as a surprise for his brother; the whole family was having a picnic on the island with 6 or 8 bottles of wine and a smorgasbord of zakuski (appetizers/side dishes). I was expecting something a little more thrown-together, a little more potluck-y, a little more young-hooligans-boozing-in-the-park, so I brought homemade bruschetta and a nectarine galette (oh how I love to cook) but it was unnecessary, given how clear it was that Vasya and Daniila's mother had spent at least the last 12 hours in the kitchen. They had the best goddamn tomatoes I've ever had in my life. I ate them like apples! The whole family did toasts about love and long life and how wonderful family is, how honored they are to have this son/brother/nephew, etc... A few glasses (uh, plastic cups) of wine in and the fog of fresh acquaintance was lifted; Mitya and I cracked open our cases and played a few songs; Spanish folk songs and Russian rock and international classics and Beirut. Vasya sang (Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao!), Mitya sang (Gagarin, ja vas ljubila!), I sang (a careless life, a scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking). We missed the last metro and walked back across all the islands, almost 2 hours on foot.


Lunch picnics
Pasha and I had lunch on Friday in the Tauride Gardens, sprawled out on a bedsheet eating egg salad and playing Simon & Garfunkel with him on guitar. I was cranky and unreasonable; I was unfair and I hurt his feelings. We parted unpleasantly.

Night picnics
Friday night, we met up on Palace Square, Mitya and me, and played everything we could think to play for an hour or more. The Doors, Janis Joplin, Beirut, the Beatles, even Radiohead. We made enough money for dinner and two bottles of wine, and while the clouds rolled in off the sea we converged with two of Mitya's friends and took our little concert up onto the roof, violin and accordion and ukulele. We drank our wine and ate our baguettes and sang our hearts out under the slight spattering of rain and the heavy, warm wind until the dawn.

Girly picnics
I've fallen in with some foreign interns from all over the globe; Elina from Kazakhstan, Sarah from Taiwan, Marcelo from Brazil, Ewa from Poland. I took Elina, Sarah, and Marcelo out to Udel'noi market, where we spent the afternoon gawking at the rare and ridiculous, the treasures and trash. I almost bought another accordion, a bigger, subtler, more elaborate and more beautiful one. Elina bought two old cameras, and charmed a vendor into giving us all scarves for free. We tired ourselves out, bought a bag of tomatoes and returned to my apartment where I made gouda crostini and bruschetta (my new favorite thing) and took them up to the roof. I felt like a hero from the excitement, amazement, and sheer glee it gave them to be on the roof, in the sun, above the domes and chimneys of this gleaming city.

This is a blog about the weather.

Soooooooooo sleepy.

It's dawning on me that I might never get a full night's worth of sleep again. Or that I might never be satisfied with 8 hours again; every morning I feel like I was awake all night, and every night I resist sleep until my eyes close on their own.

I worked diligently all week: Interviews every day!

Irina Dudina--we drank mors in the ballroom of a renovated palace/theatre. She claims to be the first artist after the fall of the Soviet Union to point-blank address contemporary Russian politics with a satirical, critical eye in her art.
Ivan Sotnikov--he drank sour white wine out of a box until drunk in his musty, cluttered apartment/studio while I searched for an excuse to excuse myself and he showed me crude, primitivistic paintings that I just didn't get.
Ilya Gaponov--he and his wife Katya
Sasha Terebenin--he suggested I might want to live in St. Petersburg forever; I told him I want to buy a dacha in the countryside, raise goats and grow watermelons
Yuri Shtapakov--he chainsmoked, shirtless, throughout the interview, cracked jokes with the ease and grace of a well-settled rock star.
Manya Alekseeva--I took a marshrutka from a far-away metro station, hoping beyond hope that I was going in the right direction. She directed me over the phone and I gave myself up to god (figuratively) and my spotty recognition of the unfamiliar street names that I had only incompletely parsed. She met me on a dusty street corner in billowing Israeli pantaloons and squishy foam sandals. Her house is in an area of town that over the past 20 years or so has slowly been developed, unofficially, into an "artist's village"--artists moved out there because it was cheap and there's a lot of space to create large projects without interruption or the constraints of four close, pressing walls. Manya hosts art shows in her enormous, decaying living room and has monumental sculptures haphazardly strewn around her lawn. I joined her outside for a post-interview cigarette (her, not me) and we clicked perfectly on historicism: the historian's most important task is not just the rote, accurate chronicling of events; a good historian approaches their work the way an artist approaches theirs, as a project, as a proizvedenie, a work of art that says something.
Veronika Rudyeva-Ryazantseva and Andrey Rudyev--a funky young couple, both contemporary artists, whose work rarely coincides. Veronika, a video-artist, asked me to sing a Russian song for her present project. We climbed up onto the roof and she filmed me singing "Gorod Zolotoy"--the Golden City, with the golden spire of Petropavlovsky Krepost' glinting in the background.
Andrey Khlobystin--whose verbosity began the moment we sat down and continued, uninterrupted, for 40 minutes. He's writing a book right now that attempts to answer all the questions that I've been dreading addressing: What is contemporary art? What is Russian art? Is there a characteristic that unites all of Russian art? Is Contemporary Art a purely international phenomenon? He's brilliant and he suggested quite a few interesting, convincing ideas about the nature of Contemporary and of "Russian", as an attribute. His book is in Russian, I believe, but it's going to be a very, very important source for my thesis. I can tell. He spoke at an almost incomprehensible pace, giving the slightly comical impression that the words were building up behind his mouth and exploding outward, but not quickly enough to prevent the growing traffic jam. He has too much in his head to take his time; these thoughts are URGENT. By the end of our interview (he bowed to me, sensai-style, before locking the door behind me) I was tightly-wound, strung-out, and exhausted from the sheer effort exerted to comprehend and keep up.

So, by Thursday my brain was fried (and I really get it now, Dove: "Professor, can I be excused? My brain is full."), and I gave myself the whole weekend off. I haven't given work any more energy than it took to write this post since Thursday afternoon. I deserve it; aside from conducting 9 interviews in 5 days, scurrying all over the city to meet artists at their leisure, I had some urgent, unrelated-to-research business to take care of. On Tuesday night, my acquaintance Pasha brought some friends over to project a movie on our wall. Pasha asked if he could try out my violin and, thinking nothing of it, I showed him how to hold it and then turned my attention elsewhere. An hour later I picked it up--and panicked to hear a raspy, breathy, squealing tone coming from my usually acoustically pleasant bow. I grilled Pasha until he admitted that he had been stroking the horsehair. Upset, exasperated, angry, I explained that the horsehair is NEVER to be touched, that the oils from your hand ruin the hair and it requires specific substances and some level of expertise to clean it, neither of which I have. He apologized and offered to pay for the repair, so we spent all of Thursday morning at a stringed-instrument shop getting my bow professionally cleaned. Just in time, in fact; Mitya had invited me to a picnic Thursday night at which he and I were to be the entertainment--ukulele and violin, with vocal accompaniment. I was expecting a messy gathering of young hooligans of the kind that gather on Palace Square--but it turned out to be a charming family gathering in honor of Mitya's best friend's brother's birthday; other than Mitya and Vasya nobody was familiar--except, oddly enough, Philippe, the director of Smolny Institute (for those whose memory needs a jolt, that's where I studied last fall). Turns out that Vasya's brother works at Smolny; what a bizarrely small city this is sometimes.

Picnics and street concerts (last night Mitya and I made enough money for wine and dinner, which we ate on the roof with two of his friends, under the lightest sprinkling of rain and the most beautiful wind, singing and playing and learning songs from each other until late, late, late...) and spontaneous excursions to Peterhoff; interviews and farewells (the law students from Cleveland are peacing out) and reunions (Katey's back and it is so wonderful to see her!) and it is time for a long, long sleep, which I doubt I'll ever get.

I've got two weeks left in St. Petersburg. I plan to use them well.

Am I really all the things that are outside of me?

I took my coffee on the roof this morning, listening to the wind and my favorite music piped in through wires and tubes. Took off my clothes with a silent chant of "Down with tan lines! Up with nude beaches!" and had a moment of clarity and melancholy as I communed with history and extracted myself from it. The things I believe in have no place in history; nobody writes a historical narrative about freedom, beauty, truth, and love. Hammocks, and gardens overflowing with watermelons and zucchini, and sunny afternoons spent on blankets in knee-high grass--don't make history books. So I'm a bohemian alone on the roof, refusing to be a part of a history that isn't about people and life but some lofty importance we all assume we have. I believe in the beauty of insignificance. I would rewrite history a different way, fill the annals of time with the sun-carved lines on Columbus's face, the flutter of Marie Antoinette's heart before the guillotine, the sigh of relief from the back of Hemingway's throat as the first swallow of whiskey hit his belly in the morning.

I waved to the man who sits on the neighboring roof sometimes; I could see his smile from fifty meters away right before I ducked inside.

I have a confession to make: it doesn't make sense to me to be studying a history I don't believe in; I'm made for trees and old time string bands and smores and thunderstorms. I'm not an academic, and sometimes I think I hate History. I just want a dacha in the woods and a typewriter and a kitchen and a garden and some baby goats that will grow up to be mama goats. My tastes are simple.

I'm living on watermelon until August.

Next to every fruit stand, in front of grocery stores and in the courtyard of the market, iron domed cages have appeared, their vertical bars painted green. All at once they popped up like mushrooms after the rain, covered with tarps and empty, for the time being. Watermelon season has begun: within a few days those giant cages will be filled with mountains of enormous Asterkhan watermelons for 18 rubles/kilogram. All of St. Petersburg will be seen carrying the swollen green melons under their arms, taking them home to be a constant feature at the dinner table for the next month or so.



I got my first rejection today, from an artist who doesn't think it's worth his time:

(my direct translation) "I understand you, princess--you need to defend something, your dissertation or I don't remember what, but I'm not sure that I need to waste time on these frivolous goings-on. Understand me correctly, don't get offended."

I suddenly realize how critical it is to make myself and my project seem important; being modest will get me nowhere. From now on I'm slamming all my credentials down all at once: fellowship from prestigious university, support of the State Center of Contemporary Art, huge list of artists I've already spoken with. I gotta make it seem like all the cool kids are doing it! Although most of the cool kids don't seem to need much convincing; they agree right away. Summer is a slow season for artists in St. Petersburg, the exhibition season hasn't started yet, and they seem to be eager for ways to spend their time.

I, on the other hand, am running out of time to spend! And there are too many ways to spend it! Walking around the city, sunning in the park, playing music, swimming in the countryside, eating vegetarian food at a Hare Krishna cafe (why is every vegetarian cafe here run by a cult?), sweating buckets in the awful humidity. Yeah, I've got a full schedule.

And the clouds opened up...

Today the rain finally came. Hesitantly at first, the first few drops sizzling on scorching hot sidewalk and bare brown shoulders. The air stirred and grumbled (the thunder purred and rumbled), and as sweat mingled with rain the city breathed a collective sigh of relief. A storm had broken over St. Petersburg, or rather the storm had broken the still and sweltering heat built up over days of sun. The streets were like a greenhouse; even in the shadows one couldn't shake the panicked feeling that we were all baking in an oven. The rain has cleared the atmosphere and my mind feels sharper, clear, not cottony, delirious and slow under that oppressive heat. I'm going to sleep well tonight.

Madness! Hooliganery! Yorscht!

Madness! Hooliganery! YORSCHT!

My new American friends invited me to a concert on Friday night! Auktsion was playing, a new-jazz experimental group maintaining a steady reputation of awesome since the early eighties, with a special guest on the contrabass: the bassist whom I had drunkenly asked, in October of last year, if he would like to jam sometime. К сожалению, he said, Я очень занят.

The law students (Americans + 1 Il'ya, from Moscow) met me at the metro with a bottle of vodka and a bottle of beer, neither with caps, both juggled around the group. Matt had an umbrella; he twirled it in drunken arabesques and passersby gave us a wide berth. At the concert we danced and drank, offended our neighboring concert-goers and made friends with some, and grew thoroughly sauced as the night progressed. As I was standing talking to Matt and Will, a young man sidled up to us with a grin on his face. "Hello," he said, and we decided to become friends. This is Mitya: his English is well-thought, delicately accented, humorous and irreverent, full of surprising words. He is a translator; he makes puns and bi-lingual jokes. He plays the ukelele--"What? You play the ukelele? I play the violin!" Immediately we were all invited to jam with him and his friends on Palace Square after the concert, and we exchanged phone numbers.

The show ended; we trooped back to the metro. "Where are we going?" Natalie wailed. No time to explain--we dashed up the stairs, wreaked a brief tornado of havoc on my apartment, leaving it in shambles with my violin and accordion in hand. We searched for Mitya on Palace Square, found him sitting in a circle of friends above which hovered a giant, luminous white balloon. "He's a magician," Mitya explained, indicating the swarthy, elegant-looking fellow, dressed in a flowing white tunic and pants, who was maneuvering the balloon. We played Beirut and the Beatles, drunkenly out of tune, and I got in a fight with a saxaphonist who apparently plays on Palace Square every night; he didn't want to play with us, but we wanted to play with him.

The Americans began to droop, and fried with fatigue we said goodbye to Mitya and his troop, bought another bottle of champagne and some wine and limped back to my apartment. We climbed onto my roof to greet the sunrise, yelling at the dawn. As 5 in the morning drifted in, it found everyone asleep on the cool red metal of the roof, except for me and Il'ya, having a playful bi-lingual conversation about art and history and god-knows-what.

On Sunday night, Mitya called to invite me to another gathering of friends; they would meet to play music in the park, and "If I had time and a wish" I should join them. Monday I puttered around all day, just waiting for the evening. I went for a run, then bought some wine at Aromatniy Mir, to share with the musicians. I played violin and accordion all afternoon, hoping to make up for my awful drunken playing on Friday night. I lay in the sun at Usupovsky Sad, writing and reading and feeling my skin caramelize, and finally returned home, dressed, and hopped a bus to meet Mitya and his friends. Meet them I did, in the park on the University Embankment, all dressed cleanly and crisply, with moistly twinkling eyes and bright smiles and smoky voices, a ukelele and a guitar and a shaker made of a gin&tonic can filled with sand or pepper. We had all come prepared, and the music was lovely. We passed the bottle of wine, passed the guitar around, passed the violin even, and someone brought a satchel full of beer, and I slathered myself in lotion against the mosquitoes buzzing around my ears & ankles. Oh the evening! Melodies, harmonies, tunes familiar and strange, singing deep, joyful, mocking, sometimes quiet and heartfelt. When the repertoire dwindled we finally packed up our instruments as the sky was dimming, and walked along the embankment--to Palace Square! someone said. To the roof of my apartment! I quipped--and that's where the group parted--Volodya was going to the train station, back to Moscow, and everyone wanted to see him off. Mitya and I continued to my apartment to sit on the roof, and we drank pomegranate juice and ate olives straight from the container. We spoke both English and Russian and leaned back to look at the starless deepening sky. It was late; he had missed the last metro train and the bridges had already opened to allow naval traffic. I offered him my extra bed.

June 13th, Tuesday--I spent the day in a daze, exhausted and unenthusiastic. Woke up early, 7:30 AM, to Mitya fumbling with the lock on the door; got up to work my magic with the finicky device. I didn't try to go back to sleep, but instead made phone calls to the evening across the ocean. My voice was heavy with sleep, thick with regretted cigarettes and wine swigged from the bottle, my skin was crisping on the windowsill, and I said goodbye to Dove with the plan to go to a vegetarian Hare Krishna cafe near Ploschad' Vosstaniya for breakfast. I showered and dressed and took the metro to Ploschad' Vosstaniya; the cafe was closed, so I strolled around looking for somewhere to grab breakfast. I had cold borscht and Grechesky salat at a somewhat sleazy Cafe Sahara on Ulitsa Vosstaniya, then made my way back to my apartment trying to shake off the otherworldly feeling within which I was wrapped. I took my time, contemplating how little I wanted to keep my scheduled meetings. At home I laid down for a few moments before nenthusiastically gathering all my equipment again and heading out to meet Vera Svetlova at Ploschad' Aleksandra Nevskogo. We strolled through the cemetery at the Aleksandr Nevsky Lavra, and did a short interview in the cafeteria there. She spoke with a lisp and flowing, graceful gestures, and repeated my questions back to me, and echoed the same sentiment I've heard many times already: "Russian" is a tradition based on adopting foreign ideas and modifying them; matryoshka dolls (Japanese), Icon painting (Byzantine), even the Futurists & avant-garde (Italy).

We rode the metro back to Sennaya together, and I finally managed to take an hour's nap before getting back on the metro to meet Ivan Khimin at Ploshcad' Muzhestva. He immediately insisted we speak on ты, and we walked half an hour in the sweltering sun to his studio. The neighborhood reminded me of Primorskaya, all tall grey buildings and wide empty streets. The studio was on the 5th floor of a building that appeared only half-constructed; the whole length of it is one long hallway littered with paintings, sculptures, debris, connecting bleak fluorescent-lit studios. A dozen or more artists work there. bought cold Czech beer and then drank it on the couch in the corner of his empty studio, pressed against the wall to stay out of the sun. He spoke blurred words and I didn't catch half of it, with my mind sprawled flat on the open roof, sizzling, with my mind swaddled in cotton and sweating feverish, with my eyes drooping and straining to focus. He was very nice, but I kept yawning; I nearly fell asleep. It feels as though the weekend was interminable, like I'm still in the clutches of that exhaustion. Maybe it's the heat (a baby on the bus smiled at me so sweet). We rode the metro back and he said goodbye at Mayakovskaya, and I went home to sleep and hope that my days continue suchly!

Success days!

In so many ways, yesterday and today have been fantastic successes. Like so:

Tuesday, July 6
--Interview with Aleksandr Dashevsky--fun! Hiked out to Petrograd Side in the scorching sun; he met me on the sidewalk with a sack of plums & nectarines, he was late because he had to go to the store. You NEVER show up as someone's guest empty-handed; I brought a half a kilo of green grapes. We climbed the 7 flights of stairs to his top-floor studio. The staircase was narrow, asymmetrical, and cool, with clouds of flies ("It's too hot for them, too, in the sun," he joked) and richly-hued, threadbare carpets on each landing. His comments were very interesting--new contemporary art and contemporary artists are all the same, dealing with the same issues of mass media, consumer culture, the failure of capitalism no matter where you look; as long as artists deal with such universal issues their art cannot be tied to their national, personal experience. In Russian contemp. art there is nothing that Russians can call their own, for just that reasons--the issues they deal with are the issues that are fashionable. Artists move to Moscow from the far east and the south and instead of continuing to create art that's linked to their personal experience of having lived where they lived, they look around at the art that everyone else is making, the pseudo-indignant, conformist-in-its-feigned-subversion art, and copy it. There have been enormous breaks in the history of Russian art, with the Revolution and then with the end of the avant-garde/the beginning of Socialist Realism, and with Stalin's death and the onset of sots-art, and then the fall of the USSR; as a painter (which is surprisingly rare these days, in fact) Dashevsky wishes to sew up some of these rifts, to link himself concretely to the history of art in his country and the rich tradition of canvas paintings. We ate nectarines and plums and grapes and the sweat rolled down our faces, and the lighting was perfect for my video. I left in high spirits.
--Interview with Vitaly Pushnitsky. Amazing! His opinions were strong, convincing, and contrary to my expectations and what I've received so far. I only succeeded in asking him a few of my scripted questions because he rendered so many of them superfluous. He spoke of the deep link between language, thought, and art, and for him "Russian Beauty" is an impossibility because beauty is universal and 'Russian' isn't an ideal that Russians champion; he described it as a common misfortune that all Russians share: to have been born in Russia. His views of Russia were bleak--if Russian Beauty exists, he says, it is a beauty "In spite of" instead of a beauty "because of"; in America nationalist patriots hold up the flag and say "We love the USA because of this, and this, and this--our strong economy, our revolutionary history, our comfortable place in the sphere of world events, etc etc etc"...while nationalists in Russia can only say "We love Russia in spite of this, and this--its dirt and its dysfunction and its corruption, its poverty and confused identity; nevertheless, we love her." He spoke of the impossibility of contemporary national/folk art that avoids becoming ethnographic. He greeted me warmly on the landing outside his new, clean, spacious apartment ("We just moved here"), gave me slippers at the door and then put his finger to his lips, said his baby son was sleeping. He offered me coffee, I brought him strawberries, and after the coffee he insisted that I eat something, practically forcefed me a delicious traditional salat (uh, salad) of beets, potatoes, pickles, and dill. He began speaking immediately, almost unbidden, uninhibited as though we had known each other forever, something about national differences in character linked to the physical climate of the country; in Russia the seasons are unpredictable and harsh, and the people are just as intense. His former teacher Ivan showed up with a new student of his, Dasha, in tow, and she & I listened as though to a televised debate as Vanya and Vasya argued over whether or not national art can exist today. As I left he tried to convince me that I was, in fact, an artist, despite what I might think. "To be an artist means only to ask good questions. You don't have to have the answers." I left, again, in high spirits, but exhausted from the hours of comprehension and blurting out scrambled, nearly indecipherably butchered Russian.
--I walked home, decided to treat myself to a cold drink at a nice cafe where they don't have wi-fi, because I wanted to take a breather in the here and now instead of losing myself in cyberspace as I am wont to do when I have nothing else on my schedule. I picked Stirka, a bar/club a few blocks from my home, where you can do laundry in the functional washing machines along the back wall. There were jolly American voices all around when I walked in, and I sat down by myself and spent a few moments in shock before I realized that I needed to take this opportunity for some no-business socializing. I introduced myself. Law students from Cleveland, and they don't speak a word of Russian except for Spasibo and Pozhaluista. They were so nice! Chris bought me a beer, and I had a long talk about art with Natalie, and by the time I tottered off to meet with my landlord Nadezhda I was thoroughly drunk.

And I spent today relaxing, playing music, writing postcards, cooking, reading; went to the market. I had a meeting with Irina Vasil'eva at 7 PM, which was great fun but not very useful; she wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea of the interview and preferred instead to invite all her friends over to sit with us in this cute little cafe of her choosing (she knew everybody in the place). Several bottles of wine were produced and the company got raucous, so I turned off my voice recorder and just let myself enjoy the company. I excused myself at 8:15 to give myself ample time to walk across town to Loft-Etagé, an art center with a fantastic little cafe where I was meeting Ivan Tuzov, a photographer/contemporary artist-turned-animator, at 9 PM. He's the youngest artist I've talked to so far, only 26 years old and a little shy. He was awkward with words so our interview wasn't too productive, but it was interesting and, again, good company. We took the same train to get home, and we parted warmly with a promise that he would send me links to his new animations and I would send him info about Louise Bourgeois. I dashed home to make a very, very important phone call to the United States (yeah, you, I'm talking to you.) and cooled off sucking on frozen grapes and sipping iced tea.

Baskin' in the warm glow of time well-spent! I have another interview tomorrow evening, and more translation to do. Plus....

Sarah is effecting her triumphant return to the motherland tomorrow afternoon!! REJOICING ALL AROUND!

Sunny!

I got caught in a rainstorm on my way to the vernissage of Yuri's installation across the

Fontanka. All morning the sky had been cloudless, but suddenly around 6 PM the clouds rolled in and the streets emptied. I dashed into a musty passageway to wait for the rain to subside, along with three girls in sky-high heels who had also decided not to carry their umbrellas. It was still sprinkling when I continued on to the show; there were people in every doorway and at every gate who had similarly been caught unawares.


Yesterday I took the day off. I made one phone call in the morning and then packed my backpack, caught an elektrichka up to Sestroretsk, on the Bay of Finland, about an hour up the coast from St. Petersburg. Men were selling cookbooks, strips of bandaids, maps, ice cream out of ice chests--up and down the center aisle of the wagon. When we reached the platform I didn't know where I was going; I let the crowd from the train carry me along, across the tracks, into a fruits & vegetables market (the kind that springs up next to all these dusty little train stations), through a few huge apartment buildings, onto the main road into town. Standing on a bridge over a small river, I could feel salt in the wind, and found a packed-dirt path along the bank, so I followed it into the woods in the hope that it would lead me to the shore. I ran into an old man who was collecting Podorozhnik, a medicinal plant, in a plastic bag, and he guided me onto all the right paths and pointed the direction to the seaside. "You ought to be careful, a girl like you, in these woods--the kinds of people we've got around here!" He prefers Belorussia, he says; none of this muck, litter, garbage everywhere, it's so clean and peaceful, and the people are friendly. "Here, just look at this mess, and everybody's drunk." He also confirmed my suspicion about a spiky-leaved plant I'd had an encounter with earlier: крапива, stinging nettle!




The mosquitoes were vicious, even worse than the ones that keep me vigilantly awake in my apartment, but when the mud gave way to sand and the trees opened up onto a coarse-pebbled beach, they subsided as well. It was a beautiful expanse--the beach was narrow, covered in dry reeds and grass that rustled, driftwood, tiny blue and purple flowers. The remains of a campfire were still smoking where I laid out my towel on the edge of the woods, but the beach was empty and silent so I took off all my clothes and stretched out to read the last 100 pages of Force of Circumstance. I was nervous and kept glancing around, remembering Beauvoir's recollection of falling asleep on sand dunes in Tunisia, then waking up to a man with a knife sitting on her belly. Still, the sun was bright and there was nobody to be seen. I put down the book every now and then, looked around me and was overwhelmed with a sense of--I want to call it vertigo, but I know that's not right. An awe at being where I am, utterly alone, so far from what I consider my life, lying in the sun on one far corner of the vast Euro-Asian landmass. Instead of the isolating, maddening solitude of living alone in a big city, I felt a solitude that was serene, voluntary, replenishing. It was just what I needed.
I laid there until my stomach grumbled, then got dressed and dove back through the woods. Had some embarrassingly bad soup in a cafe by the railroad tracks, then some incredibly good dark raisin bread baked in the Sestroretsk bread factory, and the most perfect tomato I've ever tasted, which I ate whole, from a fruit and vegetable stand in the market. I caught the 6:30 train back to Petersburg. There were more men selling ice cream on the return train.

And today woke up at noon, feeling terribly groggy--I couldn't sleep last night from the nettle burns on my ankles, the mosquito bites, the heat, and I took some benedryl to soothe myself a bit--it put me to sleep, alright, but waking up is so unpleasant with benedryl. I went out for a run, then spent the entire day walking around the city. There was a street celebration in honor of Fyodor Dostoevsky outside the apartment he once lived in; performance art, puppet theatre, fake 19th century signs up on all of the buildings. I got sprayed with chunks of watermelon by actors deep in Dostoevskian despair and madness, who tore them apart while another actor, Dostoevsky I presume, wrote words in blue paint on a grey backdrop. I went into Land, a posh supermarket where they sell tofu, squid ink pasta, Johnnie Walker Blue Label (15,000 roubles a bottle; the price is staggering even in dollars), individually packaged mangoes, camembert and hummus--I bought orange preserves and dry soymilk. Bought a stale croissant from a stuck-up bakery near Chernishevskaya metro, sunned myself in the Tauride Gardens while I finished Simone de Beauvoir.

I've been practicing my accordion without big results; I'm far too impatient for musical instruments and this is an exercise for me as much as sit-ups or the gym. But I take a few deep breaths, set my eyes on my goal, and take baby steps toward it: first scales, chords, simple tunes. THEN, La Valse d'Amélie!

Tomorrow's the Fourth of July, and across the ocean I feel like celebrating for the first time in my life--because I'm so out of place here, because I'm independent, because it might make me feel a little closer to home. Yeah, huh.