Woke up after ten hours on the twelve-hour red-eye flight from Buenos Aires… Sometime around dawn in the dark, dreamlike hum of the airplane cabin I woke with a sudden unearthly chill, my mind filled with strange grey silent movie dreams of Narcisa… Dreams I can’t remember, don’t care to remember, but can’t forget…
Looking out the plane window at dawn, I saw the landscape below, and for a moment I thought of other planets, and now I sit here blurry-eyed and I wonder where on earth this could be… Cold, lunar, alien, miles and miles of eerie, unfamiliar, uninhabitable, inhospitable terrain. Endless craggy hills forever for as far as I can see, and that’s pretty fucking far from ten thousand meters up in the goddamned air… It’s the surface of Mars I see down there… Alpha Centauri, whatever… Not a sign of human life or any other kind of life anywhere below.
I search for the map in the magazine on the back of the seat, trying to calculate where in hell this plane could be flying right now. I narrow it down to the interior regions somewhere off the Pacific coast of Mexico. Somewhere over the state of Guerrero maybe. And just that word,Guerrero... It means Warrior, it brings back all the years of memories, stories, songs, sights and smells, tastes and sounds and flavors and sensations of places, people, events. Spirit Music… Things vaguely remembered and carved deep into the fabric of my soul, indelible as hieroglyphic markings on shiny stone pyramid walls of lost Mayan tombs in dark jungles…
I look down out of this plane window now but I see no place that in any way resembles that Mexico I once knew so well, the riotous tropical roads traveled by a ragged teenage gypsy hitchhiker running from the Curse, and years later by a road-worn alcoholic biker wearing out the road to hell again and again and again.
Desolation is the only word to describe what I see down there from this surreal vortex, the groggy hangover haze of jet travel limbo… Desolation. A perfect place for a human being to simply disappear and die without a trace and quickly, quietly be absorbed right into the core of this great and terrible Earth… Bones flesh teeth face thoughts eyes heart memory swallowed up like so many base minerals to feed and seed the merciless soil of Nowhere…
Lands of boundless dirt and sand and ashes and dust and craters and spirits… Spirits of Indians and Entities and light and shadow falling falling falling down down down with the smell and taste of Nothing… Nowhere. Nothing. The perfect place for Nobody…
And again I think of my poor Narcisa so far away, so hurt, so damaged and pissed off…Nobody. With the smell and taste of Nothing now.
copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009
I’m in awe…and there’s a strange feeling of being at the bottom of the ocean…in the deepest depths of the human/spirit/undying love condition…
peeling the layers…to the core…and finding more layers, memories, dreams…multiple realities…
down.
the rabbit hole.
What I mean is…
It’s Bloody Brilliant!
Thank you!