Siddhartha Returns: India Journal, vol. 2, part 3
“He knew that what he was now doing marked a turning point in his life—it was out of line with everything that had preceded it.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
January 20-25, 2019
I finished my Ayurveda treatment a few days ago. As I expected, the last days were a snap. The detoxification program kept me
indoors for a full day, but it was a necessary rocess. The idea behind detoxing once a year is that
you hold many of the impurities your body ingests in the colon until it can
break them down over time, sometimes months.
Your body uses a large amount of its resources protecting you from these
toxins, so if you flush them out of your system
regularly, it allows the body to take a break and use that extra energy to
rebuild other areas that need it. After
doing some form of detox for over the last 20 years, I am convinced that there is definitely
something very beneficial by doing it.
There are many ways to detox, but here, you drink some warm
coconut milk with some drops of a liquid in it that allows the colon to release
these toxins. During this process you
slowly drink hot water and your body begins flushing out your system. At first you feel very tired, as the toxins
enter your bloodstream and your body goes into high alert fighting them, but after a couple hours, you feel a reawakening of
both mind and body. It’s quite
therapeutic and once it is over, your energy is fully restored, your body and immune system has strengthened itself and your mind has clarity of
thought.
After the detox, there was one more day of massages- both the foot
and the oil massages and then it was over. I feel rejuvenated and healthy as I write
this. While I didn’t “love” the
treatment itself, I still recommend doing it for anyone visiting here and I will
do it again on my next visit.
I finished Tender is the Night
and it had a most devastating ending.
It has stayed with me the last few days and I keep thinking about how
its meaning is universal to so many people.
I love novels that scream at your soul to wake up and take life by the reins and this was one of them. What a
tragedy. Another tragedy is I cannot
find anyone who has read it to discuss it with…but, that is not unusual in the
least, as my reading list is somehow, confusingly, sadly, way out of fashion
these days.
I find it interesting how so many novels written in that period
(1920s/30s) have these fantastic “hit you in the gut” tragic endings. Today, it seems like we mostly get a steady
diet of redemption or save the world stories.
Why is that? I recently met
someone who has been involved in publishing for over thirty years and when I
told him I was on my final lap of finishing my first novel he immediately
asked, “is it a happy ending? Does your
protagonist find redemption?” When I
demurred, he immediately interrupted and said, “Trust me, I know all about getting published and if it’s not a redemption story you will never see it in
print.” After I began protesting the whole
idea of what he just espoused, he shut me out and moved on. I guess I can’t call him up for some literary
agent references!
The historian Edith Hamilton said in referencing fiction, “A
people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of
the people as no historical reconstruction can.” When I look at the fiction books being
written today, especially those that populate the New York Times bestseller
list, I worry about where our culture is and represents. I find most of today's novels superficial with shallow, predictable endings, which is why older, classic literature dominates my reading
list.
I haven’t seen much written over the last thirty years in the
States besides Bukowski, Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, and a few others that
I believe will be read and talked about in 50-100 years. I do believe Salinger was writing up the end,
but we are still in the waiting game to see if we will ever be blessed to be
able to read those sacred scripts. (I am
hopeful that they are coming and will start being published within the coming
few years and it will be the literary event of my lifetime- fingers crossed.)
After Tender, I read
Solzhenitsyn’s drama The Love Girl and
the Innocent. It’s a story about two
prisoners in the gulag where the girl has to make her lover accept that moral integrity
in the camps is a passport to death and that she must share herself sexually with the camp bosses or her lover will be killed or transferred to another camp. It’s not a happy tale, but the writing didn’t
pack the punch that Fitzgerald always does. I’m happy I read it though, as I’d like to try
to write a drama after I finish this last edit of my novel. In this effort, I’m trying to
read more of the genre to get a better feel for how to write it.
I then started Henry Miller’s The
Air-Conditioned Nightmare, which was recommended to me by a friend. I’m only about a third into it, but it is no Tropic of Cancer just yet. It was written in 1941 and Miller has fled
the war in his beloved France and returned to the States. It is filled with melancholy and long diatribes
about how bad U.S. society is. I find
the writing heavy and verbose, but I’m giving him some leeway and will push
forward with it. Some of the few strong
passages in it do speak to me as a former expatriate. Many of those observations he writes about ring
true despite the almost 80 year difference in our timelines and his reminisces of
France are well done.
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| A typical view of Kerala's landscape |
Some
final words on India before I wrap this up.
I’ve never been a big fan of beach vacations and while that is a big
part of the place I've called home these last weeks, it is also a small part.
The culture overrides just about everything here and despite staying in
Kovalam for only two and a half weeks, it was enough to disconnect and take a
nice step back. I think the British
colonization helped preserve a unique and positive culture while also adding a
Western touch to it and when I mention this to Indians I meet, most of them agree
with this idea in principle. One of the
great ironies of the present day is the country that colonized the world is now
leaving the European Union because they don’t want immigrants in the U.K. How ridiculous and petty are the British? I guess I shouldn’t insult any country when I
see what is happening in mine. We still
have the big T and his GOP lemmings ruining the U.S., though I still stand by
my belief that 2019 will end this madness one way or another.
I
wish I had another week to travel to a different region or two, but there
aren’t many other places that I know of that can take you this far in such a short
period of time. I am tan, rested and
ready to get back to the Polar Vortex coming to Chicago just after my arrival
there. Then, it’s time to tackle my
novel over February. I look forward to
it. Thanks for reading and keep pushing yourself
forward- onward and upward!
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| Street Dog in Kovalam |
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