I miss you when wheels turn

This was written about a week ago. Many many things to write about Mali, and they are going to come, when and if they come at all, in non-chronological order. Sorry for spelling and grammar mistakes, but this was done quickly, and my brain has holes in it.


I'm in Segou.

Segou is an elegant, quiet, too-dignified to be threatening town (despite being the ancient center of the Bambara empire) on the banks of the Niger River. Yesterday I arrived after four hours curled on a foul bus seat, brown and soaked with grime and the old sweat of legions of previous occupants (sorry, that's gross), the air inside the miasma that is the only logical result of clusters of humans, being in spaces which frequently approach or exceed our own body temperatures.

On the way, during one of an almost endless series of stops, I ate 3 small bananas and two bars of a sort of thin, sesame seed wafer, conglomerated by honey and perhaps other things, which was impossibly good, much better than anything sold from the top of a little girl's braided head has any right to be.

Otherwise, I mostly slept in a sweaty doze of half consciousness listening to, among other things, Soulajboi (forgive me) in my earphones, oddly juxtaposed with the staticky Malian music videos, B movie quality, playing on the one lone tv screen, with their highly stylised, almost kabuki-like gestures expressing emotions which I, not speaking Bambara - much less the siren-shrill nasal variety which singers use-, could only guess at. The stars are all highly gussied up Divas in shiny cloth and nuclear war-ready hairdos, their colorfully robed back-up dancers swaying and prancing about in the odd, it-would-be-geeky-were-it-not-so-earnest moves which are their signature. Tupac, O iconic one, rhymes, sharp as a razor, in my earphones about "just my luck that I be fuckin' with the wrong one" while the grand dame of Mali pans out her up turned hands in front of her beseechingly, before clutching her heart and averting her trowel-caked make-up'd eyes in some inexpressible sadness. Life is strange.

Segou is unequivocably beautiful, by almost any standard, but to a degree to which anyone who had not lived in Mauritania for a time, or maybe just anyone who isn't me, couldn't really get. Even its errors are correct. (I just stole that from Nikki Giovanni, so sorry). I feel extreme jealousy of, mixed with my characteristic defensively arrogant disdain for, the Americans who live here, and who I'm convinced don't appreciate it, but that's the way it goes. It is, indeed, one of our things, (but how many of those things there are is both, the quadrillion dollar question, and, as of yet, deeply, darkly undiscovered by yours truly). Humans are cellularly, impossibly bad at imagining either the future, or other, worse presents, and so we settle into our own little slotted situations, all along the spectrum of conditions, triumphing and bitching at all our petty and profound challenges, respective to our niche, no group being, in general either happier or more miserable than others, and blocking out all visceral (not intellectual) knowledge of all the other infinite levels above and below, separated by nothing more than the skin of a bubble. It's in our blood, it seems, which is at once despair inducing and beautiful.

The trees have a lot to do with it (back to the beauty) honestly, though not everything. They line the boulevards. They are, in fact, what is meant, that little picture in your head, when you say "tree lined boulevards", tall, tall, tall, old growth crooked green-capped trunks of knotty, world-wise, slumping character. I don't know what these trees are called, though they are of course not Neem, for the most part because, (though I love you!) Neem is largely personality-less in a workmanly way. Instead these trees are magicians. It's much too easy, (apparently) and not at all new, to personify these giant, lurching boughs shading the streets, as benevolent protectors, but maybe there are worse things to do with them.

Last night I took a walk down to the Niger River- it is 2 minutes away- to watch the sun set, though it was hiding behind a giant, impromptu cloud formation the size and shape of a cropped mountain top, so...so much for that. Instead, I watched the river, which was in no uncertain terms an irridescent silver-gray which bled periwinkle blues from frayed, floating edges.

It was really lovely. Honestly, it was so beautiful that it made me uncomfortable. I seriously kept shifting positions on the cement, sun-warmed sidewalk, cross-legged, and then knees up, and then arms akimbo and all such nonsense. It seems I don't know what to do with things like that. I mean, what do you do with beauty? I don't know how to meditate -I'm not Zen (Jesus, I am so not Zen, though I can do a reasonable imitation of it) - or to even begin to quiet my mind. I can not 'take-in' peace as an entity. I can't cry (no joke) from some sort of transcendent 'joy' but even if I did, I'd probably stop again almost immediately from sheer embarassment at all the weird pathos.

So instead, I just 'gave it an hour' (meaning a few minutes) -which is one of those Hassaniyan expressions that sounds awkward when translated because of its sheer no-frills kind of accuracy, which I've grown to depend on - watching the two lone fisherman (I'm not making this up) messing with their net -tall, black, and thin sillouhettes (sp?) standing in their crescent-shaped dugout canoe like illustrations in some book you might have read before bed a long time ago.

The young men nearby, down below, took their evening baths in the river, demonstrating that interesting truth that even dirty water can make you clean(er) and I watched them while simultaneously trying to not seem like I was, until I became unavoidably conscious of being a (perhaps more than) vaguely creepy voyeur (the difference between tourist and voyeur is much, much smaller than we like to admit) and so I got up, with neither ceremony nor grace, and left them alone with their honest splish-splash.

to be continued......