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Review of another Motorcycle travel book

The road gets better from here by Adrian Scott. Virtualbookworm
Here’s the text of my review linked to this book at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Gets-Better-Here/dp/1602641862/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276290099&sr=1-1

This is probably the best motorcycle travel book I have read. It manages this impressive feat in a number of ways. The story it tells is one of incredible toughness – both physical and mental – in the face of a serious accident on day one, the worst start any traveller on a motorcycle could imagine. Less than ten pages in and the narrator is eating a mess of his mangled food, mixed with gravel, nursing a broken ankle crouching by the side of a deserted road on the easternmost tip of Russia. What follows is the story of three months of usually gruelling riding. Also moving is the sense of humanity we get at just about every turn of the journey. Scott is taken in by generous and hospitable folk throughout, people who have unimaginably tough lives, living on very little by Western standards, with almost unbearable occupations, but who share what they have with him – and with real pride and nobility (usually).

Adrian Scott’s writing is impeccable. He must have spent hours each day with his notebooks. He describes, for example, the nuances of facial structure of the people he meets as it changes as he journeys across westward across Asia. His accounts of architecture, particularly of his extended stay in Samarkand, are vivid and detailed. He is a traveller who has done extensive research before he left (or maybe he added it afterwards – I doubt it somehow) and his book gives us detailed but readable political and social histories of many of the newly independent countries he visits. He also seems to have taken the unusual trouble to learn some Russian in preparation. His intelligent but deeply-felt engagement with the cultures and individuals he comes across puts this writing in a different class to some other authors who seem to have gathered a few superficial impressions more for merchandising reasons than to do justice to where they have been.

But the book has some oddities. First, we are told nothing about the traveller/writer. Even by the end of the story, we don’t know why he undertook his journey, what he did before he left – was he a journalist, an academic, a traveller – or how he got home? We are given absolutely no information apart from the fact that he is unnaturally tall. (As evidence of this, a small cover photo appears to show his head wedged against a ceiling somewhere.) And for the biker reader, he assiduously avoids telling us the model or make of his bike though we get plenty of fascinating detail about his relationship with his much patched together vehicle. From one of the photographs you can make out it’s a Kawasaki. And the photographs, as well as the map of the journey (the Silk Road largely) are very low quality, but strangely this adds to the believability of his story. They are often very moving, showing people in pretty grim circumstances.

So what did he do next? I have no idea. Web searches turn up nothing and the book doesn’t seem to have nurtured a cult following though in my mind it deserves to, no less than Ted Simon’s first book (OK, Ted did it thirty years before). In fact this possibly cheaply produced book (it could have done with some editing – its full of typos) is refreshingly free of celebrity endorsements. For anyone interested in travelling, biking or Asia, this is an absolute must read.

More on confession and ritual

I was obviously in a grump when I wrote my last rant about the Buddhists. This week felt better though its hard to say why. One thing I learnt regarding what felt like a moralising tone to ‘confession’ was that at the time of the Buddha the notion of a personal ethical life as part of religious life was only just developing. The religious life upto then consisted of making sacrifices and carrying out observances. This would explain not only the Buddha’s warnings that just wearing the orange robes of a monk wasn’t the way to reach nirvana but good will and good deeds. This seems a rather obvious thing to point out today. Similarly, the New Testament teaching of Jesus emphasised the emptiness of following traditional jewish teachings without a transformation of the heart and the way that people deal with eachother. I think today we have such an exaggerated sense of the importance of our individuality that we can’t help but respond to these ancient religions as if they are calling to us overwhelmingly as individuals to be transformed from within, with our emotional life, and our personal behaviour leading us toward this new life. I think there might be some unfamiliar value in a flavour of the formal in our ritual. In other words, it could have value whether ‘our heart is in it’ or not.

Buddhism, guilt, confession and the superego

I’m attending my second course at the FWBO Buddhist Centre in the anonymous town where I live. I have an allergy to certain aspects of organised religion, mostly from my experiences with evangelical christianity some years ago. It is something to do with the way that the habits and often unthought-through views of certain groups get tangled with the religious teaching. Last week the topic of our course on Ritual was confession and celebration. The idea is a kind of emotional progression in the ritual: we see a far off beautiful snow-capped mountain top; we become acutely aware of its distance from where we are; in spite of this we strive to reach that lofty height and resolve to set out on the journey. The mountain top is something like the Buddha with his unattainable qualities of wisdom and compassion, so we confess our shortcomings in preparation for our journey. Needless to say, the topic of confession and evil deeds leads to a great deal of conversation. The instructor emphasises the releasing effects of apologising to people we may have wronged and generally acknowledging our shortcomings – the example of eating one too many chocolate bars comes up and gets a laugh (the evangelicals always used this example too). There are smatterings of agreement in the class that acknowledging this stuff can be liberating – though one or two ask whether it might be more useful to investigate our ‘wrongdoing’ and what we get out of it. If we did that we might not need to do so much apologising. But confession is not analysis which seems fair enough – but it is presented as having an emotional therapeutic benefit. A helper gives a testimony about his ill will toward a fellow Buddhist and his confession to an elder.
Discussing this with a friend she observes, ‘so the Buddha is meant to be a kind of superego, a constant reminder of our constant state of failure’. Lacanians, she says, seem to have a more accepting attitude toward ‘wrong-doing’. Out of the lecture group she is a member of about a fifth go outside, between the lectures, for cigarettes. Smoking may embody the death drive, but everyone enacts the death drive in one way or another and smoking is just one of these.
This seems eminently grown-up to me.
What is going wrong in this Buddhist group (in my view something is)? Why does this same old half-baked morality keep re-emerging in these kinds of context? How do the traditions of Buddhism get somehow turned into a kind of pop-psychology? I really don’t know. I know people sometimes look to Buddhism as a kind of therapy and the teachers tend to respond in these terms, describing ritual in emotional terms, in this case. Other Buddhist teaching appears to want to liberate people from the dualism of thinking oin opposites, good and bad, etc. So why do we come back to this place?

Black Widows

These are the faces, we are told, of the two young women who blew themselves up on the Moscow Metro and killed 39 commuters.
Picture 1
The woman on the right seems attractive, beautiful cheek bones and the burns to her eyebrows emphasise their lovely line. Their lips are sightly apart and their eyes are sadly closed – not because they are sleeping, but because they are dead of course. We wonder so many things about them: were they mothers? how could they have become so committed to their cause, so angry that they failed to see the humanity of the people thoughtlessly getting off their train on the way to another day at work? or were they heavily pressured into this act, as some news sources are saying about the black widows? In the seventies I remember there was something romantic about the young woman terrorists like Astrid Proll. I also remember the women bombers dolling themselves up to more easily get through the checkpoints in The Battle of Algiers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Algiers_%28film%29) but what is happening here? Is this preparing and sending women in to commit suicide just an extreme and cynical piece of sexism from communities who may not hold women in high regard? And we wonder how these photographs were taken, by maybe slightly hardened but still shocked on this occasion police photographers. How could they work out from that mangle of bodies that these two were the bombers? Their faces seem strangely intact for the people closest to the blast. We cannot help but ask whether their bodies were blown in two by the explosive belts they were said to be wearing. What expression, what feelings can we read from these two dead faces? We can only read our own fantasies about them I suppose. There seems a hint of triumph in the woman on the right. The other woman still seems more like a child. I wonder if the coming weeks will bring their stories into the light. I feel a deep sadness for them and anguish for those killed and maimed.