absence, nostalgia, reluctance

So I suppose you (one) could characterize my total absence and failure to 1) update the blog, 2) fix the youtube links for the audio in the last post, 3) tell you about everything that happened after we left the North of India, as a bad case of nostalgia brought on by my reluctance to accept the fact that the Indian dream is over. For now. I have been swept up in a Beefheartish rill, viz:

Run run morning soon Indian dream tiger moon
Yellow bird fly high go battle sky to shatter the moon

Anyway, I found a passage that pretty perfectly characterizes the topic of reluctance & travel memoirs, from W.G. Sebald's Vertigo:

"It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled "Prospetto d'Ivrea" and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle's advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one's travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them."

This is just as true of pictures we take ourselves, for those moments and the narrative that they create amongst themselves take precedence over all the minutiae, the slippery little bits of existence that keep escaping into the past, like smaller and smaller balls of quicksilver, as we move inexorably forward; or, in the common language: you can feel the experience slipping away from you the more you try to organize it into a narrative, mementos, or photos.

Despite all of this, once the fit of nostalgia has passed, I promise to fix the audio links, and post more photos, and tell you what they are photos of...

love from Bushwick, Brooklyn, to everyone... gb