UB and stuff

Baikal and Irkutsk

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living the mongol dream

My deep fear/awe of/in significance has been drastically curtailing my blog output, I’m aware. It’s something I’m working through. Either the leaches or the succubus ‘ll get the words flowing.

It’s the first rainy sunday morning since we arrived and we’re fittingly nursing post-circus hangovers (those trapeze artists sure do go down smooth). For those who aren’t yet fully aware, we live in a perfect ex-patriot utopia of cheap ingestible and readily accessible incomprehensible cultural happens. Last night a karaoke style benefit for a hopitalised high-wire walker (no safety net, but the culprit of course was a drunken driver), a few whiles gone – Chinggis Khan the opera, a mighty achievement for the dramatic arts! Tonight perhaps the Ballet, perhaps a mongol/rock fusion band, but most likely unending faff.

We had our first lesson in Mongolian traditional dancing on thursday. Roughly described it’s a potent mixture of happy peasant, graceful steppe princess, eagle fascination, and high camp. I flapped and curtsied for dear life, I swear.

And still we’re trudging our way through a forest of linguistic half-meanings. We’ve reached the halfway point of our language course and can construct precarious word castles of genuine beauty (if not rectitude). But alas, as you might expect when needed they collapse to ruble, or recede to lost communicative realms as mirage – as you like it.

We’ll keep on.

Well, it wasn’t much but perhaps it’s the start of a beautiful something or other…

Out of town, further

Finally we found our way briefly beyond the sloping rim of the modernity cauldron UB. Dodging thereby the homicidal tendencies of a dozen or so city drivers an hour, by minibus we fled. It appears that misery and liberation both enjoy company, ours being a large handful of miscellaneous development worker types bent on weekend adventure and boozy story generation. They had decided despite explicit warnings from no lesser authority than the ubiquitous planet (‘this trip is only really sensible from the beginning of June to the end of September’) that they would like to hike 7 and a half hours through blinding snow via no visible markers, from the ruined monastery Mandshir to the alien crash site memorial Zaisan on the southern border of UB. Having hiked sufficiently in Australia to know that it is a semi-pathological activity at the best of times, we decided to accompany them only to the follies launch.
And what a lot of vodka I happened to consume. Enough certainly to legitimately excuse us from skipping into death’s icicle trickling fingers. What a clever lad.
I lay prone in the early morning Ger gloom as the little remaining warmth from the long retired central stove escaped through the cracks in the door (and from the marrow of my bones). The morning passed with occasional vomitous communion on the rolling outside, interspersed with semi-conscious glimpse of hiero-revealed vistas. Through the square squat door Saskia would compel me to regard: the snow! And there are animals out here to! Goats and Sheep, and tres shaggy chic!
Finally once the adventurers had adventured forth (they got half-way-ish and beat a tactical retreat – cowardice vindicated once again!) I arose to find the world bitter on the tongue but oh so sweet on the eye. The valley below was indeed littered with much woollen bodies and the hills above growing steadily whiter under the silencing onslaught. We walked up upon wind shaped ice waves crested with foam of fresh flakes. They cracked beneath us, plunging our feet haphazardly into the nether spaces beneath insulating snow. These sounds and sensations are so strange to my parched Australian ears and city feet. To the tree line and past. The evergreen forest is so unaccustomed, I half see shaded spirits dart from trunk to trunk. But the peace overwhelms my fearful imaginings.
On by partial breakfast and tree roots drowned by compressed ice flowing, the snow falls thicker and we approach the ruined monastery of Mandshir. Destroyed by zealous idealism/bloody pragmatism in the 30’s and now (but not right now) redeveloped for the tourist trade, we find it cheerfully sparse of people. A drunk Mongolian lady who tests her English, another group laugh around an old bronze cauldron. But the weather and season render the air clean and emptied, purified in passing by the myriad snowflakes. We follow the blue prayer flags that mark trees out for worship or clemency. A makeshift dark wooden walkway draws us to a clearing, above which cosy Ger smoke and half gone walls. Looking around we see cows mottled white and warm brown, steaming between the trees. We walk on footprints, the only discernible path is that of those gone before, up. Nothing crowns this day up there, it is already bejewelled, but a small museum and so solid remains of other’s strivings for the good, the prized, or whatever may have led them there and away. We walk down, helping each other step from obscured slipping ground to ground – like aged companions. The white strains our eyes and the cold makes us beam. From the long wrangled taxi window we see our adventurers huddled in a tight hippy circle on the warmer southern slopes. The light casts briefly gold through the snow sun shower clear plain. Through it we pass, to continue in the uncertain illumination beyond.

It’s not quite meaningful but…

It’s not what you’re looking for, but perhaps it’s for you.

A name of enduring befuddlement from the nether mind of my dreaming.

‘Black cloud floating in pastel’ – the puppy.

Make of it what you wish.

I am birthed naked and icky to the world of blogging

Befuddled this pleasant evening

My sticky tongue out-sticks
From the side side middle of my lips
While I mull like a stuck mule
Over the chameleon content of this poem

Starts out physical and like all the rest ends up
Nonsensical at its truest centre
Which I think is over there by the fridge
Botching noodles with garlic and flair

But by the way it passes the sound of air drumming
Staccato summer evening breeze
Veering short of crashing headlong
Into the onomatopoeic inarticulate now

For two moments I get worried on the reason
But remember and all feels swell
It’s a fine poem that goes and falls short of meaning

Scruffy haired night