LONG WALK TO THE TRUTH 

BOOK 1 - MOROCCO 1968

1.

PREAMBLE

I wake up and gaze around me.  Above, the undercarriage of the bus. To the side, desert, barren mountains, endlessness...ness...ness.   Except for this cube of cubicles, a surreal box construct rising out of the desert sands like an implant. A human nest.  All locked in their structure for the night.  I visualise what I can of the normal human behaviour inside the little boxes within the big box. The evening meal, family relationships of all kinds.  Kids, mothers-in-law, grandparents,  men lording it over their little harems. Sex.  What would their sex be like?  Conducted like a surgical procedure under sheets, making no sound as everyone around would hear every breath ?  I curl back into the blanket with Tom and seduce him awake, enjoying our animal lust, our naked bodies gleaming purple-blue, like wet steel, in the desert moonlight,  the fire in our eyes burning, burning, as we feed eachother the best love we know how, licking and sucking, sharing juices with more appetite than I ever had for sweet food or drink.  Intoxicated with our love, drenched in sweat, wild for eachother, two crazies on the road to India. Like two butterflies in a bottle, wild expressions of freedom enclosed by the occupied territory of people seemingly locked into cultural repression and slavery.

What fairy tale is this head in the petrei dish dreaming ?  But, wait, there’s more !  Can it be the same story, same heroine, same planet ?

Riding side-saddle behind the sheikh on his white stallion she felt like a prize captive wild princess being taken to be sold in the soukh.  The horse picked its way along the narrow piste, sure-footed, untroubled by her extra weight. The track rose higher and higher winding into the mountains taking them inland from the coast, the immense grey Atlantic Ocean disappearing as they entered a narrow gorge.  She felt the danger, the mystery, closing in as the canyon walls narrowed and the little horse surged on and on and up into the magic of the Grand Atlas. 

Her companion turned and smiled reassuringly, his handsome face amused. Yes, he had a prize.  He was taking the strange woman from the country he had never heard of nor known even existed to the monthly market and he knew she was either stupid or very brave to risk the adventure with him.  He felt flattered by the trust she showed.  And she in turn felt flattered that he chose to escort her on such an adventure.  In her heart she felt no peril.  His wives were a happy lot and she felt his role as a family man precluded any weirdness on his part.

Way back down the piste her companion Tom, Abdullah, crazy son of God, the mad hippy dope freak, followed on Maya. The little donkey was labouring heavily up the steep stoney slope. Tom had turned his ankle the day before and couldn’t walk and was riding the donkey for the first time on all their travels. He was in a foul mood. Most unholy she thought, smiling sardonically as they left him far behind , moving steadily and swiftly now, the little canyon opening into a wider valley and the piste rising ever higher into the arid mountains.

At the top of a rise they halted and dismounted, stretching, looking out over the view.  The ocean was visible again but now a long way off, a distant ribbon of surly jade far below.  Mountain after mountain stretched to the north and the south.  To the east before them another rose like a wall. A small mud baked kasbah perched on a nearby hilltop, silent as if deserted, red in the morning sun.   An eagle spiralled up, up, soaring out of the valley below.

The sounds of a delicate flute,  citrus tang - a boy beneath an umbrella shaped tree full of goats, surreal fruit relentlessly eating every leaf.  She pulled her flute from her bag and played along with him.  The tune picked up as he caught her messages, blending the Berber rhythms with her polyglot of travellers’ argot.

The sheikh watched her as he sprawled luxuriously amongst the rocks in

his white robes, as if on silken cushions, the amused smile, ever so faintly cynical she thought,  never leaving his hooded darkly-kohled eyes. The little stallion nibbled at a rare patch of weed beside the path catching its’ wind.  Soon they were off again, the horse lunging forcefully as they mounted ever higher up the track.  She felt exhilarated.  Never had she thought she would be doing this.  It was a fantastic dream. She ran her hands over the horse’s rump, letting the stiff sweating hairs and churning muscles beneath his skin speak through her fingers - this was no dream.

Within the hour they arrived at the soukh.  A  sheltered glen under a grove of stunted trees beside a tiny rill.  A cluster of tents.  Robed men haggling.  The women squatting in a separate group of colourful rags around baskets of produce. They dismounted in a circle of curious eyes.  The sheikh replied softly to several queries, obviously about the strange woman he had brought , but she couldn’t understand the Berber dialect.  He indicated that he had business and would meet with her later so she wandered alone, wrapped in her burnouse, looking at the beads and trinkets of the women who seemed very disinterested in her business.  I’m too strange for them to cope, she thought.  She tried to barter but lost interest.  It was not a tourist market but she had seen these wares before and wasn’t tempted.  She just wanted to make contact and see what value they put on the things they were selling.  Eventually she bought a few bracelets for the sheikh’s small daughter and  some vegetables and pulses, then made her way to the tea tent where the men were gathered.  She sat amongst them in a dark corner on cushions, sharing the pipe and sipping sweet mint tea. They seem to accept her. She put  this down to the fact that the men had more freedom to travel around and she was probably not an alien creature to them as she was to the women who rarely left their local areas. 

But it was all generalisation - supposition based on little information. Her  musings changed tack.   Who knows what really goes on in these societies, she thought.  She couldn’t even work out her own culture, let alone this dance of life in slow time.  So much is unknown, unknowable.  We move in as anthropologists to study evolution and human behaviour, cataloguing the data, drawing lines between points.  Analysing, making arbitrary deductions. Judgements. But when it comes down to the reality of everyday life the lines become blurred.  Can life be fixed design ?  On this Barbary Coast random elements are a part of the picture.  An evolutionary melting pot. But pull back focus, there is a larger picture.  From seeming complexity emerges implicate order.

After some time Tom arrived.  Not amused.  Resenting her easy journey while he had had to suffer the indignity of riding the donkey. 

She laughed at him. “Here, come and have some tea and a smoke and relax.  Cool it. Get with the scene man. Stop your fussing !”

She let him lean on her and helped him to hobble into the tea tent, feeling his tensions seething away as he sorbed her reassuring presence. 

Sometimes he was such a fractious little boy.  After the smoke he was back to his old self and she watched bemused as he tried to interest a cluster of men in God’s Eyes, thinking how this was such a bizarre version of idea diffusion. The induction of Hopi Indian magic mushroom cult symbols into the Islamic Berber culture through this opportunistic hippy acid freak beggar.  Would they trance dance and find their lion souls, their wolf spirits ?

Where is he now  I wonder.  Last I  heard of Tom he was in Simla and he had thrown out all my drawings, my visual diaries of our precious pilgrimage  years, and let them flutter away over the snow.  The way he lived he is probably dead now.  Crazy person.  Prophet of the New Age,  High Priest of the Magical Kingdom of the Insighted Vision. Osiris to my Isis.   Living the romantic dreams overlaid with the delusions of sensory alteration of  THC, STP, DMT, LSD....  I wonder if he made it through.  I barely have, but here I am, permission of the universe, writing it all out now, some forty-five years later.  I wonder if he would know me if we passed in the street, or I him.

I guess we didn’t believe in each other enough.  After all it was all so weird, so new.  No maps for the territory we were covering in our search for Truth, for Meaning.  The damaged lives we sought to explain and rectify drove us on, looking past maya, past mythos, past previous human experience, to the workings of  the planet, the biosphere and the universe.  Unbinding our conditioned minds.  Refusing to accept what we heard, what we were being told we had to believe.  Seeking the Truth for ourselves.  Taking our thinking up out of the dross of the mundane, higher, higher,   Blind instinct our only guide leading us ever on. Relentlessly.   Until we came, or at least I have come, to the source, the water of life, the biosphere, evolution, the cosmos.  To an understanding of It All, as much as can be so far explained by science and reason and logic and the workings of the mind fettered by religion, politics, social bindings, mythologies.  Then putting all these things into the Big Picture and understanding how IT All came to be and our place in IT.

And still illusion and delusion mock me as I write. Can I,  do I,  really know it yet?  Will I ever ?  Can one ever be free of the information environment we live in, of the self who interprets it, of the peer pressure to conform or be cast out ? 

“ No way!”. the Cosmic Joker laughs, “ This is the Tao of Physics.  This is the displaced particle, the time warp,  the Unknowable and the Unknown.   
“The Tao that can be put into words is not the Everlasting Tao.” 

 IT is completely linguistically indescribable, says Brett’s Alchemy. Beyond Infinity and Eternity. That Big Picture is not for tiny humans, who swarm on this little ball of life like a smear of bacteria in the immensity of a universe which we now suspect may be just one dimension, one reality in a landscape of infinite possibilities.  It is a scenario so enormous, complex and unknowable that we can only postulate a metaphor of the wall, and the hole in the wall, or the crack in space, or the tear in the fabric of reality, to explain what could be beyond our imagination or ability to experience. 

The room,  the wallpaper and the 4th wall. The 11th Dimension.

Only change is certain.  And who knows what form that can take in a universe of seemingly infinite possibility, but even that is only our limited viewpoint.   Perhaps a mind that can encompass all the workings of what seems a complex universe within which our little biosphere and human culture is a predictable knowable thing can see that possibility is not only finite, but simply a range of events, of which only one will fit to circumstance.  But watch out for the “meant-to-be’s” !

God playing dice in places we can’t even imagine, says Stephen Hawkings  as if he discovered it.  The displaced particle, says the Dalai Lama. Tao. Om. God. Allah.  We have always had to wrap it up in a single package which comes unstuck as soon as we try to get a handle on it.

“But I have an instinct....”   and off she goes dancing away from the mainstream and into the wild, her eyes alight with some rebellious mystic fire and a certain feral ability to witness key events of our time, sometimes by “chance”.  “There is no chance !” roars back the Professor of Ecology.  I wonder how he explains my sixth sense, my precognitive powers, my ability to sense happenings half a planet away ?  Everything is natural, how can it be otherwise ?

This is a journey to The Truth.  My Truth, Your Truth, Our Truth.  Relative Truth and Absolute Truth.  All our secrets are the same. Point of View is the operative.

Events took place along my route like beads on a rosary - crystal, jade, emerald, lapis lazuli, coral, amber, ruby, sapphire, gold, silver, onyx.  

The Goddess’s beads are the jewels of this life experience.  Then I found an iron bead, a lead bead, a forest seed.   

Black cockatoos flying back to the mountain, shrieking under an ominous sky, can also read: rain expected. Nothing bad about that !