Where are we?: Leeches and rock and roll elephants

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Leeches and rock and roll elephants

Chitwan National Park, southwest of Kathmandu on the road to India. The last days of the monsoons, The skies pour – Here, take this cloudburst, and how about this one! they seem to say with each mucky step we take through the forest. Last days of the monsoon season? Not so fast. Is our karma really that bad?

Between downpours, we are poled downstream in a dugout canoe. Kingfishers, brilliant blue and orange, perch in branches overhead watching for prey. Flashes of the yellow-backed sunbird. A heavy-headed Great Pied Hornbill just ahead.

We tramp exhausted along muddy leech-infested trails, one moment slopping in mucky jeep tracks, the next whacking through thick bush and several metre high elephant grass so dense that the only visible wildlife are the out-stretching, twisting leeches latching onto, then sucking blood from our toes, hands, legs, crotches. Oowww! Get the hell off you blood sucker! Where the hell is it? I can feel it but can’t find it. The voices of people tramping through leech-infested muck. A guide shows us how to use the rough surface of a leaf to extricate the little blood-suckers. At a viewing platform, the men and women separate on two levels for a leech-search up and down and inside our pants. Bloodsucker! Chitwan gives new energy, new power to the word.

Another day. Our steady-footed elephants rock and roll us between tree branches high above the elephant grass. The pleasure, way up here, of finally seeing animals other than leeches: spotted and barking deer, a mongoose, red plumed and green tailed junglefowl, a pair of wild peacocks roosting high in a dead tree, another grazing through the grass. Along the river, a one-horned rhino bathes in the muck, and gharial crocodiles lay their slender elongated snouts along the sand, a bulbous protuberance rising from the end of each snout like a pot - ghara refers to local pots.

Between times we rest in our garden hotel and stroll through the quiet village nearby. None of the city's snapping putputput of auto-rickshaws – or their exhaust.

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Where is here?

The title banner includes a detail from “Targets” (2000) by the U.S. artist Joyce Kozloff. “Targets” is a walk-in globe within which are painted panels of every country bombed by the U.S. since 1945. One panel on wheels acts as a door to the globe.

In the detail here, the door is ajar and we look out into the dark uncertain. I want maps (and any official representation of place), notorious for concealing their own human making and values, to have something like this doorway into their made life, an entering place where we can stand and ask questions of all those place names, images and other marks made familiar-seeming and coherent by being caught within the administrative-scientific grid-space of straight lines and co-ordinates. I recommend Kazloff’s creative wonderings about maps, places and empire, including her “Imperial Cities,” “Silk Routes” and “Voyages” projects.

Canadian painter Landon Mackenzie combines her expertise in cartography, her interest in neuroscience, and her curiosity about the experiential dimensions of place, its human ‘mapping’, and the contending personal and cultural memories and their stories (“the ghostly bits”) that inhabit places and maps. Mackenzie’s work is discussed widely but most interestingly from the perspective of this blog by Alan Morantz, Where is Here? Canada’s Maps and the Stories They Tell.

The traveller's way

The traveller’s way, as experienced here, offers up blind corners and wonders. It branches and digresses. It leads to places that excavate memories, to others that invite dialogue and questions. The traveller’s way humbles with what is not known or understood. Beyond the coordinates of empire, the traveller’s way invites the toes to stretch and curl down into those singular places where the peculiar energies of the ghosts of others’ creaturely lives seem to whisper words like ‘longing’, ‘delight’, ‘care’. The traveller’s way cheers on a more open life.