It’s midday, well just after, on New Year’s day 2009. It’s a bitingly cold but bright blue-skyed day with people stuffing their hands deep down into their jacket pockets and with burst balloons tangled up in tree branches. I’m in the Hungarian café, before heading to a Montclair gathering at JB’s.
I’ve just emerged from the Cathedral of St John the Divine across the street. It’s fully exposed and open again, free from the scaffolding and temporary walls that had blocked sections off for repairs from a fire in 2001. Now it feels whole, totally different. Going inside is like walking into a living creature. A whale’s belly? Yet instead of chaos and clutter there’s ordered beauty, enhanced today by shafts of winter sun shining through the stained glass windows and scattering rainbows across stone columns. Further enhanced no doubt by my slightly fragile champagne-hungover state.
(An East Asian woman next to me is taking photographs of the cakes she’s ordered. Two big ones - too difficult to choose between them I guess).On the North side of the Cathedral there’s a place for cremated priests, in stacks of square marble-fronted cremation boxes. There, an African American priest asked if I could help him find his friend, Thomas Andrew Moneymaker. The priest was partially sighted so couldn’t find Thomas in the book that indicates who is where. “He was cremated,” he said. “I’d never be cremated.” He said the reason his friend wanted to be cremated was that his body had disintegrated. I turned the pages to the M's. There were three Moneymakers.
(The woman eating the cakes has gone already, leaving two halves of them uneaten, and grinning and saying “happy new year” before setting off in her bright yellow jacket).
The first Moneymaker was a woman. “No that’s his mother,” the priest said with a trace of impatience. Then another man. And then Thomas Andrew, died 1998, box 80c. We found the box - the priest called out, put his hands up to it and stayed still in front of it for a while.
On light and religion still, in October I watched the pattern of Diwali in Madurai, a town spun like a web around the massive Meenakshi temple in its midst, in Western Tamil Nadu. Sunday 26 October was preparation. Divali being a festival of wealth as well as light, the streets were in a consumer-frenzy, shoulder-to-shoulder elbow-to-elbow with people buying and selling clothes, sweets, toys, washing machines. On quieter street corners women sat stitching together chains of white jasmine flowers to hang in women’s hair the next day. Early morning on Monday 27 I went into the cavernous temple where the scene was totally different, quietly respectful, a time for religion. Families wearing the festive clothes bought the day before circulated and greeted each other. For a while I sat watching and listening by the “Golden Lotus tank” – which as it sounds is a swimming-pool-like tank (rimmed by red and white garish painted checks), with a big gold lotus plant in the middle. There were layers of sound, from furthest to nearest: the clatter of fire-crackers echoing round the streets outside; a repetitive chant like this _ __ _ / _ __ _ / _ __ _, short note-long note-short note on and on drowsing the air; caws from crows hanging about in the towering gopurams (towers) whose intricate multicoloured sculptures were sadly wrapped up in wooden scaffolding interwoven with straw while I was there, making them look like enormous haystacks ; the chatter of families and groups of friends circling the tank; the jangle of toe bells; and the brushing of bare feet on dusty stone. The quiet, harmless side of religion that is so often drowned out by violence.
In that day’s Hindu newspaper was a column on the “practice of meditation”. It described meditation as “stopping the wheel of thoughts in the mind by coming out of the habit of brooding on trifles. When the mind keeps flitting from one thought to another, the whole strength is lost.” Something to keep in mind this year, for which my main resolution is calmness. (Calmness, along with curiosity, openness and honesty were four principles that I decided a while ago are the ones I live my life by, or at least try to). Anyway, the thinking is that with the calmness, all the other plans and projects and the things on my list of “40 before 40”, drawn up in a South London pub with Gita the night before I turned 30, will either be easier to make happen, or will be less troublesome if I don’t.
So in that spirit of openness, here are the 40 things. Many are intentionally unquantifiable to make them easier (“more of this”, “more of that”)...
Stop smoking
Write children’s stories
Write novel
Get the above published (not the smoking bit)
Find Latin lover / sensible man to settle down with [If I was allowed to update this, which would be cheating, I'd change that rather narrow and prescriptive entry to "love"]
Speak Spanish more
Climb some mountains
Have 1 or 2 children
Get thinner and fitter
Live in cities by the sea e.g. Bombay, Lima, Caracas (close enough), Istanbul
Play flute well enough to be in a band
Dance salsa really well (and generally dance a lot)
Work in prisons / with prisoners / ex-offenders
Write poems that make a difference
Wherever I live know the place inside out
Keep childish
Expose injustices (through words, work, etc)
Be kinder to the environment
Build an eco-house
Swim in the sea
Document life in diaries and pictures
Drink less coffee (but not give up)
Be more vegetarian
More music
Cook delicious things
Meet and talk with hundreds of people, of different ages, from different places
Do things well, “with love” as Das [owner of Rasa restaurants in London] would say
Lean about cemeteries
Learn about and make maps
Make something that lasts
Sail lots
Learn and speak Portuguese
Work for human rights
Write letters
Ask questions, be open, listen
Keep reading all kinds of things
Don’t fret re things I wish I was doing; either do them or stop worrying
Spend time in open spaces
Make people laugh and smile.
Well, embarrassingly childish and/or highfalutin a lot of them but there they are.
When I extracted myself from the quiet spot beside the Golden Lotus Tank I meandered through the temple’s labyrinthine intestines lined with Gods and sparkle and encountered the temple elephant. Tourist touts outside the previous day had been urging me in to see the elephant doing its rounds a
nd I’d resisted, so was happy to stumble across him like that. His forehead was decorated with white paint and people were queuing to have him tap their heads gently with his trunk, a diwali blessing.The peaceful rhythms of the morning were broken in the afternoon when the syncopated tirade of firecrackers sped to a raucous frenzy. Groups of kids spiraled laughing from doorways. By early evening the narrow streets were piled high with the crackers’ paper remnants and festivity rubbish, with the occasional cow perched on rummaging on top.
That night as the train I took from Madurai to Cochin wound through the dark countryside small splashes of coloured fireworks sprung up from hidden villages. As magnificent, if not more so, than the $50,000 display that Ra and I had chanced upon at Fisherman’s Cove hotel outside Chennai, financed by a group of corporate executives clearly not yet affected by the financial crisis.
Manhattan's 109th Street has its own coloured lights dynamic going on. In the build up to Christmas people strung fairy lights between the trees, until one day they all disappeared and we had notes delivered, telling residents not to do that (no reason given). But that hasn’t stopped creative light-decoration, in fact it seems to have provoked it: strands of coloured bulbs wrap around porch columns and twist about the fire-escapes, looking like weird sea creatures floating in the air as you walk down the street. Twinkling lopsided stars lurk behind the bars of basement windows.
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I found perhaps my favourite sculpture the other day, at the end of a walk on a cold Sunday morning across West 109th Street, through Central Park and out the other side to Spanish Harlem and the East River. The statue’s in Thomas Jefferson Park, at 112th Street on the East edge of Manhattan. It’s called El Arbol de Esperanza and was designed by Brower Hatcher, though is way better (says me) than any of the sculptures that are photographed on his website. It’s a tree, with a dalek-like trunk, and then a round clump of woven metal branches like a birdsnest on top, filled with coloured ceramic sea animals, birds and toys made by local children.
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