Icescapes

Response to Thubron

Sometimes you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely your own at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack, and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable. You fear only your failure to understand or to reach where you are going. Sometimes you are move by a kind of heartless curiosity, which shames you only on your return home. At other times you are touched, even torn; but you move on.

Extract from Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron (London, 2007), pp.114-115

There is something different in the experience of those who live in a place and those who travel through but the dangers of being a voyeur are real all the same. To authentically engage with local people and remain true to myself and why I came can be fraught and lost amidst a struggle for identity but also the challenges of daily survival. Sometimes even I have moved on from suffering or simple kindness I could have shown. Poverty and cultural strain are wearying. This is no excuse. I am simply trying to observe what’s going on here and my role within it. Confronted with so much basic need it’s easy to be overwhelmed and wonder where on earth one starts. What is the right response to a beggar boy outside a mosque is Central Asia? Is it any different to the one sitting outside Oval tube station with identical open sores? Both are just as likely to have deliberately dressed for their day of self-abasing prostration to passers by. What is really going on? Do they have a choice? Am I feeding an addiction when I offer money? Perhaps I should take them for a meal or give them bread instead. I’m on my way to class, only stopping at the traffic lights while the red numbers count down before a half-missing nose and gaping cavity press up against the window of the car, the man’s eyes pleading in the miserable cold. This is not about appeasing guilt although giving something always makes me feel better. Do I have more time now on Koch-e Marmul than I did on Baker Street? Can I do any more than I did in London before this disintegrating face fades from memory? Spare change is offered, enough for bread. This will have to suffice as the impatient honking of horns grows. The lights have turned green and I move on. We were told the poor would always be with us.