Train

May 19

I write this on the topmost bunk in a room (7x7x10ft?) with six beds. Sleeping up here gives you control over light and darkness. I am the Sun god. Left that cramped mobile dorm, treading lightly on to the john to write on the toilet. Having finished my business I stumble and shuffle down the narrow corridor into a coach of seats instead of bunks. I realise I have not written very much. The mind has been too busy absorbing - this must come before any sort of release. The moments I wish to record are witnessed by my senses. It is in the sandy courtyard, hearing eerie churchbells of Almería, children howling with laughter and in another language at dusk. People-watching is a timeless activity, just like pegging and plugging made up stories into faces, and you can watch a whole dialogue unfurl between two people walking past. You create a story, invent an inner monologue.

I have noticed as much as possible. Awareness has led me to my senses which are piqued by the world that surrounds. It is necessary to connect the mind and body this way, spiritually.

We have stretched ourselves through a melting pot of scattered alleys and sunlit strolls, through markets bursting with flavour and people groping for a view, gasping for a breath, in a place that caters to your every delight. In Madrid there was a chain of miniature bookstore kiosks, all lined up in a row, dozens of them parading thousands of books (from the rare to the kitsch) to the passerby. Here you are as an eternal pedestrian, swept up by the moment of something new and unheard of. You focus your sights on everything at once, but it is impossible to notice everything at once. All the minutia, all the common and uncommon elements of life working at once. So instead you watch and experience a chain of events unravel naturally, the progression from action to reaction to rejuvenation all through your unsteady eyes. I am drunk off my senses!

It is a challenge to be a faithful and honest witness to the world around us felt by our eyes and ears, internal pleasures and fears, fixations neuroses etc. In short, everything that gives off a perpetual motion that reminds us we are caught in constant motion. Ex-stasis?

Whipping through a green French countryside, everything is polite and nothing is obtrusive. Plaster white homes with rusted iron roofs scattered like salt. There are wires of course, and the odd industrial warehouse. But nothing obscures the view; something is missing. Gone are the corrosive elements getting stale in our consumerist age- I see no advertising, shopping malls, no giant wastelands of parking fields and outlet stores and so on. Simply farmland mixed with forests and sometimes the rare relic of nobility- a castle perched on a hill, a beautiful shadow on the land overlooking the peasants of old.