Kenya
1.
The mountains are covered in wet, green leaves. The Colonial Set owns it all, the wetness and the green and the refreshing black tea; they brew it for people like me, who write about their absurdities in the society pages. When the new Commissioner came to Nairobi on a black swan’s back, and tried to teach the Masai cricket, when everyone knows they prefer baseball, I was at a villa in the White Highlands drinking gin with Irving Berlin. There are shimmering plantations in the White Highlands waiting for the snows, but Kilimanjaro’s having none of it. No fucking white Christmas for those guys! Still, the black swan added an air of insouciance when it dropped by on its return to St James’s Park; and the Masai are booked on an Air Kenya flight to play the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. They’ve made the Indian Ocean disappear without telling anyone.
2.
The railway runs through Tanganyika, spirals around Kilimanjaro, and heads out east; but I missed the train and feel like a butterfly on a sizzling hot plate. No doubt the Colonial Set are on board with their pink champagne and tennis racquets, sniffing freshly peeled bananas between stations. I slip a note to the king of the Mau Maus – “Place is empty. Great time for an uprising!” – but he wants it filmed and set to music. He’s good friends with David Lean and wrote a glowing review of Doctor Zhivago for The Times; David ran off with Julie Christie, however, and is no longer working. We take the time to train a clutch of Kenyan long distance runners for the Commonwealth Games when they’re inevitably rebranded. Empires, and Colonialists, will have to collapse before then though.
3.
Most of the Colonial Set are washed up. They lounge, more than anything else, generally in white linen suits and loafers, drinking pink gin and assorted cocktails, waiting for the documentary of their lives to be filmed by indigenous anthropologists. Occasionally, there’s a performance, a self-mocking vaudeville, like a mimicry of fruit in the tropics, where all the colonialists dress in feather boas and tiaras. Wet, lush, green, dry, and deathly are the characters on the mountains and savannah; but here, there’s only gin.
4.
Several lions have infiltrated the Set, posing as crypto-journalists from the 21st century. The White Highlands are awash with lions. We’ve pulled the Indian Ocean over us, temporarily thwarting the Masai’s great plan to leave the world behind. The king of the Mau Maus coaxes David Lean on to the open savannah and there’s a conference to discuss ivory reparations for the elephants. If only it was as easy as hanging the Commissioner’s hide from the slopes of Kilimanjaro; but the black swan wouldn’t stand for it.
5.
Suddenly we’re 15,000 years in the future, on a bright galactic night, in a market full of pearl-clad natives and sophisticated lions walking upright. Geometric lights spin in the air and there’s the aroma of Venusian hashish pouring from Bedouin palaces. The moral standards have rocketed skywards, over the mountains, whose peaks hold the ocean and the stars and the collective nervous breakdown of the Colonial Set. The Times reported it all, I’m happy to say, even publishing photographs of the Kenyan long distance runners on their astral marathon around the luminous fringes of Saturn.
Australia
1.
Our ship has run aground in the Outback. Captain Cook is consulting the charts but you can tell he’s embarrassed, and ever-so-slightly flustered. Now he’s projecting his humiliation on to the crew, blaming them for turning right at Botany Bay, instead of just dropping anchor. We’re surrounded by miles of shimmering red sand; the sun is blazing and burning up our sea salt skin. As a naturalist, I’m pretty excited; I get to write about lizards and snakes and God knows what else, instead of boring old plant life and exotic birds; but the ship is creaking, rocking in the hot, dry wind, and the sails have been torn apart by dust clouds. The silence is immeasurable. It’s like a presence; a big, hot joke.
2.
Suddenly the ship is rising, floating on air, burning like a beacon on calm seas. We’re moving again, and the crew are busy acting like nothing’s wrong. It’s a desert, a sea, a ship in a storm; just keep sailing! Just keep ploughing the waves, rolling over stones and rocks and dried out tree stumps that look like crucifixions. Just keep sailing over burning sands. There are dark skinned natives surrounding us, holding spears and wearing feathers, blowing into long patterned tubes. They’re laughing and pointing at us, lounging around in the sand. We feel like fools but are lulled by the deep, gurgling waters of the colourful instrument. Lulled into a dream, into origins. Lulled by creation and spirits, ancestors and nebulous tales. The ship quickly vanishes.
3.
Now we’re barefoot and transparent; I take a swig of rum but Captain Cook has obviously been spiked and is on his fifth acid trip of the expedition. He think he’s Jim Morrison, but we’re in the wrong desert. My only reference point is Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 masterpiece, Walkabout, starring Jenny Agutter. Even that has its limitations, though, having been filmed on a beach in the South of France. Jenny appears and offers me some nuts and berries. My mouth is covered in a thick, red pulp, and juice is dripping from my tongue. There are lizard close-ups in my cinematic vision, and a talking snake is crawling up my back like a boom mic. It takes me to the caves, where the ancestors are snoring.
4.
I want to change the movie. I hold a consultation with the ancestors, but they can only offer me a bit part in an ET movie. Jenny says she needs to be on the set of Call the Midwife, and promply disappears. I’m in a boardroom. Time and space are multi-dimensional set designs. The producers are extraterrestrials, and the Outback is a mote in their eye. Frankly, I’m on the verge of a panic attack (which may or may not be the catalyst for my ascension), but I’d rather be eating candy floss on Blackpool beach during peak season. I want to speak to the director, but apparently, that’s God, and he’s busy dishing out bad trips to Captain Cook. One of the producers hands me a didgeridoo.
5.
I’m breathing in cycles of eight and blowing storm clouds from the instrument. An immense geo-climatic shift happens as a snake over Uluru. It unfurls and wraps itself around the rock seven times, hissing and rattling and writhing like an emotional pump. Uluru bursts and it rains rainbow drops of sweet, hard candy. I stick out my tongue, gather the rain; hot, then cold drops, then sweet and sticky sugar, tangy like Orange Fanta. My tongue slithers out and tastes the air; it flicks and licks my eyes. I blink and wake up on a farm in West Yorkshire, cast as one of the Railway Children, holding a purple frisbee, which I promptly toss into a field of white cattle. The frisbee lands in a cow-pat, and transforms the fields into the glistening Southern Ocean. Meanwhile, Jenny Agutter has been nominated for a well deserved Oscar, and Captain Cook is a fat burnout haunting Parisian cemeteries, trying to get his poetry published.
India (Revisited)
1.
Our monastery was destroyed by the Chinese. By the time they arrived, I’d been living out of body for several years, floating about the cloisters, nipping lazy novices, generally getting enlightened that way. I used to terrify the monks, writing sutras on the walls with yak butter and getting statues to sing K-pop melodies through the night. That all changed with the invasion. A Vajrayana ghost has to be a little more circumspect.
2.
Honestly, it took me a micro-second to cross the Himalayas. It was like stepping out of your front door and dissolving in a pale blue wintery light, then re-emerging at Dharamsala where the gang was holed up after an arduous four months trek over the snowy, windswept peaks. Different temporal realities. I left a big ghost shit in the monastery for its new occupants. Ignorant colonialists! I hope they get buried by a mudslide.
3.
I realise my compassion has been eroded somewhat by all this, and I’ve been downgraded in the astral hierarchy of enlightened beings by Chögyam Trungpa himself. My buddha nature has gone AWOL and they want me to reincarnate as a yak. Ok, I will, but not before I have a little fun. I want to turn the Dalai Lama into an international K-pop star. I have three weeks to do it, or half a
mantra in astral time.
4.
That was easy. I didn’t even need three weeks. His Holiness was very willing. If you turn on your TV set you’ll see him. He’s every K-pop idol’s dream, and the girls are going mad for him, throwing their panties around in Korean grocery stores, screaming mantras in shopping malls, generally getting enlightened that way. I actually didn’t foresee this, however, and I’m finding all the hysteria quite distasteful. I’ve decided to return to Tibet to haunt the Chinese, although I’ll miss India. Maybe I’ll set off a few landslides, drown the colonialists in mud, move right back up the enlightenment ladder that way. I also can’t get those damned K-pop melodies out of my head. Vajrayana ear worms are the worst!
.
Stephen Nelson
Asemic writing on Instagram @afterlights70
Picture Rupert Loydell
.