FROM THE CLOUDS ❖ Holy buildings of our own construction

cathedrals of belief, and tourism

Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait (1971)

1.

I’m a pattern-oriented person. Recursion, self-similarity, and harmonics are interesting to me. Recursive fractals are the convergence of efficiency and beauty; the meeting of perfect process and perfect outcome.

This pursuit of recursion draws me to solo journeys. I love to walk alone, stare at something for a very long time, or build something slowly and extensively as layers lift and fall off. It’s a sort of self-hypnosis that is attractive to people with a creative sensibility; an interest in revealing the unconventional truths lying directly beneath the ordinary senses. In this sense I am a ‘spiritual’ person.

I’m a big believer that our psyche is shaped by and reflected in our environment. I feel pulled into this tunnel of recursion when I stand underneath a tree older than my mother’s mother, or inside of a cathedral. I often wonder what it would be like to build a cathedral brick-by-brick. I imagine it as a tight braiding of the physical and psychological pilgrimage, with equivalent peaks and lows of scaling a mountain.

There are very few activities we can undertake in modern age which take us from those significant peaks to lows of pilgrimage, I feel. In the throes of modernity we take holidays where wellness is a pill to be consumed, provided by the labor of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic pecking order. You can put an exact price on your own peace of mind.

The difference between holiday and pilgrimage is the intention. Holiday is a means of disconnection in which the destination is the destination. Pilgrimage is a means of connection in which the journey is the destination. We go on holiday to retreat from overbearing responsibility and we go on pilgrimage to come home to something ineffable we suspect is already there.

B told me about how at certain times of the year religious pilgrims will pass through his home village, and the houses prepare food and welcome the hungry travellers into their homes on their way to the temple. I wonder if this basic connection is what our animal brains yearn to imitate when we become tourists, transacting cultural exchange and choosing to enter parts of other’s people’s homes that are most palatable to us. I feel deeply that hospitality belongs to culture more than industry. Byung-Chul Han writes that “Tourists travel through non-sites emptied of meaning, while pilgrims are bound to sites that assemble and connect human beings.”

2.

If you want to be enlightened, you’d better save up a few thousand for a life-changing trip in the Himalayas and an ayahuasca ceremony, otherwise bad luck, kiddo - you’re an unworldly small-minded babe for life.

3.

When I was a tourist in Bali, and intent on consuming wellness like a pill, we went to a ‘sound healing’ centre where we all lay down in big pyramids and listened to rainsticks and singing bowls to cleanse ourselves of our psychic baggage. Everything was white and symmetric; all roughness perfectly smoothed over. I asked B if he notices when he’s the only dark-skinned person there and he just laughed and says of course, but he had fun anyway. He never takes these things personally. Out of curiosity I crept around the pyramids where the light-skinned people don’t venture and saw the dark-skinned men standing in a giant ditch digging and sweating in the smoke of burning wood to build the newest, bigger meditation pyramid. I felt the sharp dissonance between the Garden of Eden-esque patio where we sat and ate vegan cheese thirty metres from these men working into sunset amongst the clanging of metal and hot dirt. I ask myself in our desire to be spiritually pure how much do we commit sin? This question keeps coming back to me in this age of worshipping individualistic wellness. I thought to myself that perhaps these men are more enlightened than us, because they are here building something in the real world while we endlessly explore our childhood memories in order to dislodge the slightest pebble of anxiety from the bottom of our psyche that will finally unveil our blindingly magnificent purpose to build something real and lasting, but probably I was just projecting. Maybe they laugh it off and smoke a cigarette like B does.

I admit I’ve swallowed the bitter pill of Western liberal self-hatred and it’s far too late for me to jam my finger down my throat and throw it all up. The elegant logic of stories in the West about the immaculate virtues of economic growth jar against the plain imagery of this encounter. Perhaps it is straightforward to be blind to when you can hardly map yourself onto these men but some of them had skin the same tone of my father, who was the smartest person I knew.

Leslie Jamison wrote of tourism built on inequality and suffering, “It may be hard to hear anything above the clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyway.”

I still enjoyed my time in Bali. Laugh it off, smoke a cigarette.

4.

I’m thinking of the holy recursive cathedrals of ideology we build around ourselves and its stained glass through which we gaze at the world. The cathedral is perfect from the inside.

My cathedral has crosses and your cathedral has circles: we could hurl bombs at each other to prove the supremacy of our Divine Truth only to find the real truth that stands between us is the shithole of rubble we’ve just blown up right here. In what ways are we seduced by the beauty and perfect ideas that shield us from the coarseness of reality? What truths are my beliefs protecting me from? What good is knowing these truths and what do I do about it?

I consider the superstitions of the West: abstractions which don the holy vestments of rationality-supreme whose manifest realities grate against its utopian ideals. The superstitions which chant the tenets of endless growth and free market and functioning meritocracy to abate the emotional discomfort of seeing people rotting on the street (who of course deserve it), or the red line of greenhouse emissions rising with an automaton-like constancy (we’re working on it), or the mere fact that no economist ever seems to know what the fuck is actually going on.

My assertion isn’t that taking a holiday is an evil act of colonialism, or that capitalism is the religion of the West, blah blah. I blame very few things on colonialism, because not only am I too spineless to take such a totalising stand on the source of human suffering, but the concept, to me, is too broad and unclear. I’m suspicious of my desire to flatten the texture of cultural differences in a sweet hope that surely we are mistaken about this idea that some human lives are better than others. And I’m also suspicious of my bent towards nostalgia, a notion of ‘better times’ or of pre-modern society where everything was perfect as-is. Truthfully I like nice things. I like medicine. I like big houses. I like being happy and comfortable and having things available to me; being safe is a religion worth rejoicing in. And also I don’t like being this goddamn self-centred all the time.

All I can ever really say is that I see things that don’t feel right and I feel a need to write them somewhere. I see them often. I don’t like to say that I write political writing because I don’t feel like my observations are grand intersectionalist declarations of war against colonial white hegemonic such-and-such. I just feel like they’re observations.

Is noting suffering politics? Because if so, shame on us.

In a sense these observations are the bricks of the cathedral I am trying to build when I write: a steady accumulation of a body of evidence for what I actually believe, a laying of brick to brick to see what structure stands.

At the centre of my unfinished cathedral I know very few things for certain. All I know is we are in the most basic, naive sense we are all blameless: if we could press a button to eradicate cruelty with no negative consequence I know with every atom in my body that we could all agree to do it. But there is no button.

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