Since boyhood I have been
fascinated by a mythic kingdom known as “The Secret Community”, first glimpsed
in the 1930's movie “Lost Horizon” and hinted at in arcane tomes like those of Lobsang
Rampa, where enlightenment, joy and eternal youth would be bestowed upon any
who discovered it. Whenever I trekked in the high Himalayas I fantasized that I
would wander up some hidden mountain crevice and stumble upon a glowing
monastic village clinging to a cliff-face and be welcomed within by a loving,
wise people, there to end my days far from the rat-race of the cities below.
As I got older and wiser I
realized I wouldn’t be fit to live in such an idyllic community even if I did
find it as I am a deeply flawed human, restless, temperamental and neurotically
horny, and it wouldn’t be long before the good citizens of Shangri-la threw me
out on my ugly arse. Perhaps I hoped “They” could heal me of my problems, my
foibles, woes and psycho-sexual fuck-ups and I could then end my days in peaceful
contemplation of the meaning of this crazy Universe, for I’m not that bad a
fellow. But after much hard-felt cogitation I also figured that such a site is
indeed just a myth, this world too corrupt and nasty to allow such a beautiful
phenomena to exist for any length of time, at best it would be turned into a
tourist attraction, like a meditation theme-park and cash-cow, at worst it
would be bombed to rubble as a threat to consumer capitalism.
At the end of my latest
sojourn in India, to have one last glorious experience of the high Himalayas, I
was taken by a mate in a four-wheel drive way up into the mountains, past the
town of Rudraprayag where sacred rivers clash, along a ridge and into the snow.
On previous journeys the snowy crags of the Himalayas had always been a distant line of monoliths, seemingly impossible to
reach, no matter how much they seemed to hover right over me. But now we drove
right into them, deep into the gleaming white crevices, the four-wheel drive’s
tyres half buried in snow. We then drove down off the ridge, into a hidden
valley, the road gave out and we bumped over boulders, slushed across streams
to eventually pass by terraced rice-paddies and orchards, through lush
vegetation cultivated as if in a lost paradise.
We drove to the very end of
the hidden valley, very close to the Tibetan border, to the village where my
mate had grown up, medieval wooden huts perched upon the slopes of the high
Himalayas, refreshed by brooks of pure snow-melt, orange, apple and walnut
trees in abundance. We stayed there for a few days and I was treated like a
visiting Maharaja, the simple food delicious, the people polite and caring.
They were all in bed by 9pm, and an exquisite silence reigned till dawn when
they arose to begin their activities of daily living, lighting the cooking
fires, tending to the animals, fetching water, working the fields, much as
their ancestors had been doing for hundreds of years, a traditional mountain-peasants’
life.
And to my harried soul it
seemed halcyon, without the complications of town and city. The children played
and studied, grew up and married, ran the farm and had children of their own,
following hallowed traditions, and saw the world around them as sacred, in synch
with their gods. They were a simple people with simple lives, perhaps close to
my idealistic myth of “The Secret Community”.
Yet they also had satellite
TV and while I waited for my evening meal the kids turned it on and I was
bombarded by commercials for Dettol, potato chips and Indica cars, and I wondered
what useless desires were stirred in the breasts of the locals that might cause
them to be dissatisfied with their simple lot. My good mate who’d brought me
there himself had fled to the towns below in search of a job, money, adventure,
distraction, and his fondest wish was to one day own a car. After all, it was
that four-wheel drive that allowed us to visit his far-off village so
comfortable and speedily.
When I got back down from the
mountains and was in my favourite restaurant I got to talking with a fellow
diner and we both admitted to being tired of all the big babas, swamis, fakirs
and fakers in so-called spiritual India who had built institutions and promoted
programs of “7 Easy Steps to Enlightenment”, money and fame the obvious
agendas, (he thought access to western women was actually the main motive!) We
agreed that the sweetest of all souls to hang-out with were the ordinary people
who toiled through life, had no pretensions, no money, no adoring retinues, the
people you meet in the chai-shops, resting under trees by their fields, walking
the dusty roads, sitting on the gutter watching the world go by. These simple
people have become my gurus, they give me great joy with their homely
hospitality, and they have no bullshit about them. (They can waffle on about
the love of their gods but I overlook this as their way of seeing the world as
sacred.)
I thought of all the unsung
heroes of the world, who do their work without great recompense, medals or
limelight, like nurses, teachers, cleaners, orphanage managers, mothers and fathers.
That they’re probably all around me all the time, sitting next to me, passing me
by, and they don’t trumpet about their greatness, their achievements, their
toil, they just get on with it, quietly, unobtrusively, really caring, for the
betterment of humanity, nature and the world in general. And that was my
epiphany, “The Secret Community” has been around me all the time and I just
couldn’t see it, because I’m such a fuck-up, searching for the “Other”, looking
for the stars and not where my feet are tramping.
As I foresaw I was flung out
of the Himalayan “Community” on my flawed arse and spirited back to Australia and the suicide towers of Northcott. Cursula next
door disturbs me every night with witches’ Sabbaths on my doorstep, cackling
and guzzling booze or hissing with junkies over the providence of their next
hit or hanging from her bedroom window at 4am.
shrieking how her zombie boyfriend is trying to kill her; he never is, she
simply wants the rest of us to know she exists, eternally.
And my beloved 91 year old
Dolly from two-doors up has been moved into a nursing home, no loner able to
look after herself, and on visiting her I saw that she possibly has only 7
months left on this planet. Living in this housing ghetto will be unbearable
without her, she consoled me when I’ve been lonely and unloved, she was the
unheralded queen of Northcott, the real personality who cut the ribbon on the
joint when it first opened in 1960, not the Queen of England as the bureaucrats
would have it, she only visited later. Oh how can I bear this zombie-land
without her, one of the saints of “The Secret Community” soothing the savage
beasts by sheer goodness of heart?
If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB
address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up
anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India
of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.
