NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – NEPALESE CAPSULES: EPISODE VI | PART II
PARAGLIDING ASHES TO ASH
Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard.
LATE ORPHANS
Jetsun Milarepa and dear Mother’s atrocious terror attack had left their Auntie and Uncle homeless and horrified. As it turned out, their entire family had been wiped out. They were the only survivors and their only hope to keep up with their fancy lifestyle was to harvest their massive land in mid-September.
Darth Mother was well aware, and asked Milarepa for the coup de grace: what about sending a hailstorm to destroy it?
No sooner said than done: Milarepa summoned the skies and shared the location of the said land in his astonishing telepathic fashion.
Next day, precisely at 13:13pm a furious hailstorm fell, destroyed the crop and left Auntie and Uncle penniless and demented. Only then Darth Mother asked them: “Would you like to work for us?”
Auntie and Uncle became their slaves.
She kept them both on a leash.
Now Here. Mexico City, September the 6th, 1951.
On their last night together, Joan and Bill Burroughs drank thirty-six beers and three flasks of tequila, snorted all the methamphetamine and opioids that their narc-doctor had prescribed them for twenty quid, never went to bed or made love, and wrote in a notepad the formula to eviscerate Burroughs’ worst editor, a ginger man that according to the writer was “no less than a cheap adulator and irascible idiot who never learnt how to read, let alone write.”
Burroughs had recorded the publisher on a number of occasions after inquiring him about how he would sodomise the wife of the president of the publishing corporation they both worked for.
Bill would disguise the device in his jacket, and then press record.
LAST MORNING
Eventually, during Joan’s last morning on Earth, she and Bill came up with a plan to use Burroughs’s recordings against the editor.
It was all Joan’s idea, and it took a minute to execute:
It was around noon and they were loaded in their Mexico City apartment, when Joan asked Bill to use their second home landline and wait for instructions.
Joan grabbed the main telephone, rolled her fingers on the rotary dial, and said she wanted to speak with the editor. When the secretary wondered who she was Joan said: François Sagan. Pas Carl! Je suis François.”
“MON DIEUX!!
The editor couldn’t believe it. He said “Mon Dieux” many times, while Joan kept whispering to him “Bonjour Mon Amour, t’es cannon.”
He was confused and excited, and then, just like that, Joan asked him to remove his trousers, put his belt around his neck and start running around his office like a horny dog. He obeyed promptly like most editors, although unlike most editors he thought he was talking to Françoise Sagan and had a hard-on the size of the Eiffel Tower.
Only then Joan gave Bill the sign to use the second landline. Bill called the headquarters of the same corporation, and asked to speak with its president. He said his name was “Faulkner, Bill, Faulkner.”
Bill used his famous circumspect tone to suggest the president to report immediately to the office of the said editor.
“What’s that mister Faulkner?”
Burroughs said that he had just received an obscene phone call from the editor. “The situation must be addressed immediately and I believe you are the only one who can deal with it. Get some help, please.”
The president said, “Of course, mister Faulkner!” Two minutes later he found his editor on the ground, dick out and eyes bulging with lust.
Next thing Joan played William’s tape on the receiver.
The editor looked up, saw the president and only then he realised it was his voice saying extremely dirty things about the wife of the man that he had in front of him.
He was fired live over the call.
Nowhere: Manaslu, Nepali Hills, 1100.
Milarepa never quite got over his atrocious past. After witnessing the damage he had caused, he resolved to live in penance, and embraced the teachings of a Buddhist sage, Marpa Lotsawa, AKA Marpa the Translator.
Marpa was an accomplished Buddhist dominatrix who would never get tired of punishing his submissive disciple. He was also a lyric scholar who had translated the Holy Scriptures of Buddhism into Tibetan, and had devised the foundations of the grammar of his country.
Milarepa was sent to wander the vertiginous altitudes barely provided with a robe, the only piece of clothing he allowed himself to wear, and the main reason to explain his funky name. MILA was his family name, while REPA translates for a thin cotton robe that could be easily mistaken for a Sumo throng.
Milarepa had reached rock bottom and he was fracking his own depression. The memories of the massacre would haunt him forever, and Marpa was anything but ruthless about it. After spending long spells isolated in the heights at freezing temperatures, the serial-killer-martyr would descend to the plains and kept working on detaching himself from his murderous mind. In order to do that, he devised a Yoga practice under extreme heat to blow off steam —quite literally. Many centuries later, the practice would become the most stinking workout ever developed.
Milarepa was miserable and Marpa did everything he could to make him feel worse. It was the only alleged way to attain Nirvana, so he kept obeying and kneeling to the insults, orders and verbal abuse of his adored Buddhist Master Bully, to whom he wrote his most famous, and perhaps embarrassing love poems.
“I am thinking of my Father Marpa, who can relieve suffering.
At his feet, I, poor man who tries to relieve suffering,
Make obeisance.”
(…)
“If my Lama is sitting there, I’ll be happy.
Even if my reverence be not great enough,
I still have the heart-wish to see you.
Even if my “hurt heart” is not big enough,
I still wish to see you.
I think, I think of my perfect Lama.”
(Milarepa, 1166)
PARAGLIDING LATE ASHES
There’s something akin to a cotton robe literally flattening my balls. It is a complex belt buckle with a trapdoor to my rectum.
The whole ring road ball mess is double wrapped around my groin and backbone, and holds my tight ass even tighter, and I feel like a nut with a temporary cracked shell, a suicidal sort of nut, the kind of nut that lets someone grab her o him or whatever gender nuts have, and jump off a cliff with me, the fucking nut fuck, attached to the nut fuck who I’m paying a hundred dollars to jump off the said cliff.
An elastic rope also stitches my scrotum to that of my dear master Pilot, a guy named Rajan, who I met outside a garden not far away from Chitwan national park, one of the many jewels that crown the Nepali countryside, stunning land beyond the Himalayas, WonderLand all over, east or west, south or north, 3 million people and the most incredible flag in the world, these unparalleled skies…
I mean, how could you possibly improve such heavens? Guardian of the ultimate proof of our irrelevant existence, the mountain range that killed so many heroes, the dream of so many delusional, loving nuts, businessmen, acrobats, climbers, hikers and all sorts of addicts…
I’m doing this for you Ash, I’m fucking jumping with a guy who I met outside a garden and said to me “Together we can fly…”
I mean, you would have done the same, right, Ash?
SAUNA VOID
I really thought Rajan was seducing me, I mean romantically speaking. But, as it turned out, it was just another business mistaken for love.
Your life, my book.
He was out there, standing outside the same lush garden where I heard your voice for one last time; he just popped up while you where checking out and said:
“Together we can fly…”
Was that your last wish?
I thought I would die for you, and then I realised that I was still alive
And jumping —Even if only to write you evermore.
INTERSTELLAR
Instead of soil there is air and a very fleeting sense of what steam, thermal water, panic, death-wishing and murderous thoughts involving the garden seducer who now has you clasped at 5 THOUSAND FUCKING METRES between his teeth and his breathe; his balls and yours together, unified.
Before perspective can be measured or hills scanned we fall into a cloud, a proper vacuum-steamed facility of lukewarm oxygen and white, vaporous matter, soaring like Skywalker through the five-dimension Interstellar; perspiring the shit out of your opened throat
Fuck Ash, if you haven’t noticed it yet I HAVE BEEN SCREAMING SINCE THE END OF SOIL!
I would jump for you;
And I am.
I would die for you,
And I am
We will be Prince,
And You are.
We are the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation, THIS VOID.
