India and Water II

Thoughts about India and Water.

Ajna, you're jealous to not have been born in India. I'm jealous to not have any valid physical or emotional connection to India. It's not apart my identity but it is a part of me. I think I've told you that I think I should have been born Indian, or maybe I was in a past life. There is something that pulls me in to her that I can't define or understand or explain, and I quit trying. I'm in love with her and she is a foreigner.

I think we both romanticize India. I don't know how far you take it...but I know that I sometimes get carried away and have to snap back into some sort of reality. In my mind, I haven't just put India on a pedestal...I've put her in the clouds...I don't know...the top of the beanstock or up a thousand rungs on a ladder, as if she is so intrinsically perfect. Untouchable. and then i remember untouchables, and other fatally beautiful flaws, and something falls down. me or her. i think it's interchangable.

but the romance is still there. she makes me swoon and seeing her scars and bruises seduces me and turns me on. the ganga is something like that. to any observer, a blemish or something undesired, that needs to be fixed or covered up or something. to a lover, something that is utterly right.

you talked about it being clean and dirty and full of life and death. yes, it is super dirty. the water is brown. but i can't help but think how it is just simply dirty because of an accumulating, long history of love. that dirtiness is something that people have adapted to and have been living with and will continue living with. they will continue to be born perfectly, healthily, in the water. i can't help but juxtapose that with water that looks clean and clear, but is completely poisoned from a short, careless, loveless last half century. those places you read about where frogs have two heads or an extra leg on their faces. Where people and animals alike are sick with tumors. all the hidden, extracted chemicals, additives, fertilizers that go somewhere are so much more extraordinarily harmful, and we pretend like it wasn't us or turn our heads, ignoring the damage, and simply exploiting a different source of water to purify for our bodies. India is aware and open about the dirtiness of the ganga, understanding and accepting that a long history of love is simply wearing her out. she is getting old, wrinkled from smiling and sunshine.

the other thing with the ganga is it is a river and i couldn't stop thinking about it's one-way nature while i showered. the water was coming out of the shower head, on me, and down through the drain. the river flows one way and constantly is washing away. remember when we talked about rivers in heymann's class? The river is associated with loss or release. A means of letting go and starting again, because nothing remains...it is all carried away downstream. i guess my mind wanders to the everglades...it's tons of grasses and trees and mucky...but the entire system is basically one slow moving river, and all that stuff is just filtered. So I can't help but think of how the ganga works as a filter, how it, above all else, has an extraordinary capacity to clean because it has been harboring human life and death for thousands of years, and the dirt, the proof it is working, is what it has to show for this.

Isn't the ganga a god? (The passage from the epic talked about it being god cum too.)ahh...the possibilities, potential, reality, will always flow.

She has carried me away! I'm floating downstream and laughing at myself for not realizing when I let go or if I was ever holding on in the first place. I can't escape the romance! I remember reading your post and thinking about how we gloss over reality. I'm worse than you.

The fact is that India is loveable. California needs to discover where his love for her is--because he has an undeniable capacity to do so--and his project will pour out.