2.

You have to surrender to the madness, to the constant cacophony of sound that assails you night and day. You have to surrender to the extremes of human existence. Death and life dance down the same avenue of trees like in a Woody Allen movie. You walk past patched up hovels and a mother offers you her baby. It’s like being questioned unceasingly about your humanity, your compassion, to see if you are real or a fake or that the only time you have compassion is when you’ve bought that $100 Kashmiri shawl and you cover yourself, and fake yourself into believing that all your meditating is just more bullshit for the new age freaks. India can really crush your ego, it puts you into a blender and you come out as part of some cosmic drink you don’t understand but you keep going. You head for the ghats because that’s where life’s at but you don’t see it because behind the dark sunglasses is a dead man ,and you throw yourself down onto the great ghat into the burning pyre, and someone cracks your skull to set your soul free but your a stubborn son of a bitch and the man whacks you again and again, and finally your skull opens up like a chicken egg , and over that dark river of light you see the forest and that’s where your going, gone, gone, gone beyond the great beyond. And you sit in an old tunnelled out boat floating on Mother Ganges, thinking is this boat going to sink and you fuck about with your old Russian Zenit camera that you bought for a song, and you focus in and out not knowing what’s going to turn out and nearby is a wedding party, and in another boat are funeral guests, and you go bang, and you take the shot, and when you get home you develop the image, and you see the people in the boat leaving and heading to another boat. And you know it’s out of focus and the sky and water seem different shades of green , and you know you’ve captured the essence of that river, that land, that place, and you want to shout hallelujah but no one believes you, they just say, hey that photo is out of focus, and you look at them and you want to scream at them and shake them out of their Western madness. Can’t you see, you dumb fuck , I just photographed nirvana. The other person just yawns , I think it’s your shout he says. You have to submerge yourself into the river and drink that holy fucked up water and then crazy things happen. You see people who should be dead or you have a epiphany at Gandhi’s mausoleum even though the Mahatma is not there. You stand there in the middle of a thousand multi coloured marigolds and you are overwhelmed by love for the human race, and a telegram you send home that should read good comes out as God. All is God with me and you know this place is a perfect fit for my schizophrenic personality and all I can hear is Madonna singing like a prayer before she got into her bondage days and I think maybe this is my real home and you keep coming back even though your bowels have been to outer space and back, and the hash in a blender on the rooftop of the shanti guesthouse turns you into a frenzy of kundalini energy and who needs Timothy Leary or Ram Dass. I’m lost in the here and now and I can’t find my way out.