Back to the travel archive page
14 January 2009
Amsterdam update
Watching Obama on tv is a refreshing, encouraging experience. I realized today that what has been missing in the last Presidential run above all has been stature. I find myself unstoppably placing the highest of expectation on this multi-cultural, intelligent and skinny-yet-attractive man. I am bound to be disappointed; has he not said that he will disappoint us on some if not many fronts? I have started reading Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, and so far he has thrown out the most devastating statistics concerning the war dead and post-war dead that is microscopically currently being re-duplicated in Palestine. Someone recently said in protest that we are all Palestinians now. For the pagan, we could be Philistines. This is the land of Philistine. The irony would be that as we pleasure-seeking hedonists re-assert Philistine-rights, we might become the ultimate preemptors of the whole overly tiresome dispute. It is clear to me now, if it has not already been for a long time, that Britain should never have upped the Crusade game by re-installing the Jews in what had become Moslem land. That was one of the most colossal of mistakes. But at the same time, it is also one that cannot now be viably undone. I have myself personally little enthusiasm for the state of Israel, and have decidedly ambivalent feelings concerning Judaism the religion, but in the past I have attended passionate anti-war rallies, I find I am presently unable to participate in the anti-Israel demonstrations that are mushrooming hither and thither. As extreme and wrong the Israeli course of action is, it is equally understandable.
Although the term may be new, collateral damage has long been a part of human interaction. Have we any reason at present to see that change? Must it be a normal course of the human river right up to its end? Or can we not somehow become collectively tired of the waste and wrongness and have the world that Takeshi Kitano portrays in his Boiling Point as well as the world we see daily in the battle fields of Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan – collectively tired to the point that we make it change. If we were to do something like this, or something in the same vein, we might need a star like Obama to lead us to the holy land.
Are not W's three medals of honour awards the most outrageously partisan of final acts – final acts of a defeated and negatively paradigmatic administration? We have the economic vortex – and it alone I firmly believe – to thank for ending the hegemony of the last eight years. Without it, we would have had no Obama victory. But with a truly new tide, we can will the change – if we want. Once the recession/depression has accomplished what was necessary, we can will ourselves out of it. New leadership can help, and Obama provides just that. The rest is for us to do, that is, the real work. It is us and us alone, no star-in-the-sky leader, but we ourselves who can will and make the changes that allow a fundamental shift in the human experiment.
I had not been particularly informed or curious about the yogic siddhis until I was asked by Professor Knut Axel Jacobsen (University of Bergen) to contribute a chapter in a forthcoming anthology. That came to occupy the Amsterdam introduction. When it was completed, I found that I had discovered the auxiliary of yogic powers. Patañjali or someone after him elaborated the siddhis as these strange feats of accomplishment – risky even because of their strangeness and their power and ultimately their seductiveness. By contrast, the pagan siddhis are the much more accessible powers of wishing, health, wonder and freedom. Maybe these are the same as the Hindu understandings, but the pagan's version is one that is much more compatible with living with the ordinary in life and not the realm of the super-powerful as necessary as this last might now be for a saner and more balanced world. For us, we have only two things to do here. Wish it, and concentrate on the health of everything: our world, our selves, our rivers and waters, our forests and rain forests, our interactions and relationships.
Anyhow, Amsterdam after our first month of essentially a seven month stay has been splendid beyond words. Bureaucratic morasses at every turn, yes, but a functioning and enchantingly beautiful apex of Western culture all the same. Our solo-solo aloneness is now coming to an end, Mercury is retrograde, we are still in the nemotemi/Black Days, and who knows what else or what next? – but something seems to be happening 'out there', so we might just strap ourselves in for the ride.