Category: <span>Essays</span>
Essays from Patrick Cumby
Here’s where I ramble on about stuff I care about.
This post is part of a series of micro-travelogues called Seven Weeks in India. To see all the posts in this series, click here.
I first noticed it on my wall-map of the world, a small, oddly-shaped blob of Indian territory disconnected from the rest of country linked by a long, thin tether of land I could cover with my pinkie finger. This strange little geographic extrusion was unlabeled; it looked oddly vulnerable stuck between Nepal and Bhutan and Burma and Tibet and Bangladesh and China.
You can read history from a simple map. The fact that this region was a part of India even though it was so remote and disconnected suggested a geopolitical struggle at some point in the past. Its location at the base of the Himalayas and at the center of a cluster of other nations suggested strategic importance. Curious, I looked at the area in Google Maps. Odd and compelling place names filled the screen: Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh. When I switched to satellite view in Google Maps I was confronted by a bizarre landscape of a truly gigantic river basin draining the world’s highest mountains. It was obvious from the map image that this was a land of tremendous geological scale. The biggest rivers, the biggest mountains. I was instantly hooked. I’d stumbled across a strange and exotic land, the most undeveloped region of India, a sheltered cocoon filled with tiny remote villages and traditional tribal cultures and a vast alien landscape unlike anyplace else in the world. We would definitely be visiting this place on our trip to India.
But how?
Admittedly, this is a bit heavy-handed and iconoclastic, but I offer no apologies; it’s the way I felt after reading the news today.
She was born in the heart of the first man, and she has stalked us since. It was she who elevated the kings to their thrones and the gods to their high realms, and through the millennia her tyranny has grown boundless.
To some she seems a noble warrior: tall and terrible; to others she is a virtuous goddess: beautiful and compelling. Yet all men know the crushing power of her weapons: in her right hand is Patriotism, in her left Religion, and spanning her brow is the crown of Righteousness. She is glory and misery, passion and cruelty. She is the sword and the flag, the hymn and the verse. She is the army marching to defend the homeland from the enemy, the preacher condemning the unbelievers. She knows that the hollow cavity of our soul can be filled by love or fear, but not both, and that fear is the more energizing passion.
Here’s a flash-fiction story inspired by an evening I spent at Canyon de Chelley, surely one of the most magical places on the North American continent.
The old man stood at the rim of a canyon in Navajo country, his toes just three inches from the raw edge. Sunset had come and gone, and now the thousand-foot-drop at his feet could only be perceived as a black emptiness as huge and compelling as eternity itself. It was visceral, existential; instead of a canyon, he felt as if he was leaning over the farthest end of the earth, staring down into cosmic infinity. Death was three inches away, but he’d never felt more alive.
I hear the same mantras over and over from my most successful and happy friends, as well as the famous artists and business people I admire most: Live in the moment. Be mindful. Live like there’s no tomorrow. It leaves me wondering… do they know something I don’t? What the heck do those words even mean, really?
So, as a project for the new year, I’m going to do a little philosophical experiment. And because I’m a writer, I’m going to write about it. If you don’t like philosophy, or you don’t care for experiments, stop reading now and go check out the latest cool article over at wired.com.
Okay, you’re still reading so let’s just dive in. I’m neither a philosopher nor a scientist, but in an effort to make my philosophical experiment be all scientific-like, I’ve developed a hypothesis. Here it is:
Screw the future. It’s irrelevant to happiness and it hinders success.
Designers say the eye is guided by the simplest elements of an image. Maybe that’s why we humans find whitespace so compelling; it provides context for the pattern-recognition tendencies of our brains. But truly, it is the unexpected disruption of simplicity that elevates a beautiful scene into one that is sublime.
Writing is influenced by so many things, from your mood to the meal you just ate to the temperature of the room and the comfort of your chair. Writers all dream of finding the perfect spot to do our work, quiet and undisturbed but surrounded by beauty and inspiration. We all have to settle for what we have, an old armchair in the bedroom or the kitchen table or the hotel bed at a Hampton Inn.
Some writing spots, however, are better than others, and some, occasionally, are spot-on perfect. Once I found a place so perfect, so sublime, that I had to bottle it up and save it for a rainy day. Even now I regularly retrieve the bottle and pour it out whenever, like today, my chair is uncomfortable and the room is cold and the sky outside is grim. Today’s bottle contains a stone patio on the city walls of Montepulciano, Italy, high on a hill in Tuscany.
Images and impressions on a Moroccan train from Casablanca to Rabat teach me not to point out the mote in another’s eye while ignoring the log in my own.
In the Casablanca Train Station
There’s something about the collision of old and new, of tradition and progress, that makes the bizarre wreckage of Casablanca utterly irresistible. A gleaming new train station with flat-screen monitors, none of which work because nobody knows how to operate them. Luxurious first-class coaches where the air conditioner has probably never been switched on. State-of-the-art train platforms covered with blowing trash, apparently because nobody thinks it’s a problem. Internet-connected ticket machines that will instantly debit my bank in America, next to a bathroom with a filthy squat toilet attended by a smiling old lady in a burka.
