Book 1 #17 Donkey Walk 4: Idyll

Moroccan Horseman by Rashid Hanbali - see image below.

Riding side-saddle behind the sheikh on his white mare 
she felt like a prize captive wild princess being taken to be sold in the suq.  
 The sure-footed mare nimbly  picked her way along the narrow piste,
 untroubled by the extra weight. 
The track rose higher and higher winding into the mountains 
taking them further and further inland, away from the coast.

The immense grey Atlantic Ocean disappeared 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 laboring heavily up the steep stony 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 spiraled 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 traveler's 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. Such a handsome man. The mare nibbled at a rare patch of weed beside the path catching her’ 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 mare’s rump, letting the stiff sweating hairs and churning muscles beneath her skin speak through her fingers - this was no dream.

Within the hour they arrived at the suq.  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 colorful 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 burnous, 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.  

Artist Rachid Hanbali in present-day souk with friends

But it was all generalization - 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 behavior, cataloguing the data, drawing lines between points.  Analyzing, 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 seemingly chaotic complexity emerges implicate order. I was thinking in fractals.

I didn't know it then, the concept of fractals had yet to permeate our common mind pool. 

But looking back from now, after many recent years as a fractal artist, I now realise that is where I first evolved them in my mind.

Mandelmania

My fractal  homage to Benoit Mandelbrot 2009

It seems Idea diffusion is real. 

It would be half a decade before Benoit Mandelbrot introduced us all to Fractals!
Undoubtedly he, and others, would have been researching the concept for years before releasing results to the scientific world.in the late 70's.
But I had no idea what fractals were in his language. Then.
I had no words for what I was experiencing, I just saw and understood. 
The implicate order spoke a universal language.

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 ratty looking 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 fifty 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. It was confusing times. A revolution. So many like us were putting our programmed ways to the test. I sought the Way through Truth. A real signal, adamintine. All else was noise.

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.  The hard wiring and the programming. Laying down the tracks. Tabula rasa. 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 ?

 

Tao

“ 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.

Reality?

 Even as I write no definitive ultimate Truth has been found .

“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

Back in Tamri after our suq trek we relaxed again

into our gentle routines over the following days:

Surfing. Writing. Drawing. .

Creating God-s eyes and weaving with beads.

Making love

Sorbing the ethos of Atlantis,

Watching the sunset over the ocean from the Dunes

Star gazing into the limitless universe on moonless nights 

 

Walking the canyons, climbing cliffs, walking with Maya to visit kasbahs

 

My homage to Hokusai

Finding fractals in waves, trees, clouds, fossils 

Letting our minds explore conceptual thinking and IT ALL

Days of sheer bliss

.

Then came a shock awakening. The world beyond came calling.

Unbeknownst to us the wheels of fickle fate were turning.

One morning our idyll was sundered.  

 Down one of the excruciatingly bad roads that dropped over the cliff line above, 

more like gorges really, negotiable, but barely, came a jeep.

 

Agadir express

In the front was an Arab driver and the passenger was, amazingly to me, a very spaced-out flippy-lippy Jamaican via Harlem New York hep cat , with a fast line of bent gab.  I had a bit, OK, a lot,  of trouble following him , but Tom understood him very well. 

“He has authority to take us to Agadir.  We are to be put into protection.  This Barbary coast is a bad place he says. We are in danger.  People disappear from here.” 

  

What?