SILK ROAD

Part 1.

The walls are trembling, the windows shake, there is no much space between your bed and the ceiling and the small metal cast of the room make strident noise every 20 seconds. It is not an earthquake or a building colapsing over your head. It is a regular sleep wagon in an overnight trip in Uzbekistan. If ancient caravanmen strived to cross stepes and deserts, tooday people have many facilities to reach cultural oasis hidden in the exothic Central Asia.

However, crossing these countries still require a good tolerance to unexpected events and improvisation to solve problems, especially if you travel alone. Many people had asked me where I am from? do you travel alone? what are you doing visiting these places? or, who is better: neymar or cristiano ronaldo? (when they want to test my football knowledge to break the ice).

But most of people do not speak anything in English (and is not their fault), and as I dont know how to speak russian (aside of thanks and cheers) and Uzbek or Kahzak, communication here is really hard.

Even asking basic directions, countimg numbers or saying “how beautiful are your eyes” (that was for the gently Train Station receptionist in Toshkent that questioned what I was doing there, traveling to Bukhara whereas she was intrigued by my life and destinations for several minutes), are almost impossible to be said. I feel like the Arabic warrior in the film “13”, in which he has to live with a group of vikings and has no understaning of their language or what are they doing. To solve these situations, the thing is to try to improvise words, to use many gestures and signs like a crazy clown, or to pretend you understand what others say and repeat the steps above or follow your instict. Many times, it worked for me.

Despite these complications, acknowledgements and future memories of mine will preserve certain people who helped me in crucial moments. For example, the Iranian receptionist woman that didnt mind in using all the minutes of the world to give me advices to know my first destinations in this trip. Also, local people in the Asian city of Istambul that gave me directions to a local Hammam, a Turkish bath, and the staff who treated me like a king and gave me a magnific massage. The Uzbekan man whose mother was a Spanish Philologist in Tashkent and took me in his car to a hotel to exchange money at night and dropped me off at my train station. And also too many other people, young and older, that I tried to communicate and could relied on in different levels even to have a short talk about nothing and nothingness.

Special mention also go to the elderly man that spoke to me while I was reading in a bank in the street, the old woman that told interesting things that I could not understand, and the younger boys who wished me the best while I was traveling in their country. Even the family that invited me to have dinner at their low income home with the intention to sell me handcrafts and food show me that, despite they seem nice at the beginning but wanted to obtain money, they acted within a real context of a country with economic thresholds and few alternartives for living.

On the otber hand, My terrible wishes go to the “greek” man who invited me to a bar in Turkey but at the end took me to a luxurous brothel. In here I felt like Odiseu in Calypso Island, where he realized that diversion and delights were a trap to travelers. In my case I realizad that since the second minute. No, I didnt sleep with a Turkish escorter, but this sudden visit (the place was hidden besides a normal bar) cost me a revenue that I could have used in other moments. Moreover, the Club owner was a bastard and treat me like a trash. I was used as a cannon ball to launch a scam plan as they wanted, so I felt terrible with myself, especially because I lost the ability to detect this kind of invitations with second or third intentions. Anyway, one day I swill return to these sleeping wagons in the middle of “nowhere”, and show the charming railway that conducted me to new places, spacially and mentally. Despite the noise and little discomfort, this route is enigmatic and opens the heart of tired travelers and wicked men. There are wagons for friends, with space to four persons, or even for lovers, whith private chambers for two, in which the relative disorder and trembling beds are thousand of times whorthier than the most luxurious brothels and hotels that one can visit. After all, you will be traveling in the same road, the silk road, which has conducted armies, Generals, emperors, trademen, poets, peasant and kings. All of them thinking at least once on friends or lovers while they stayed on here during the starring night.

Part 2.

Love and the journey are one and the same thing. Even when someone is not traveling, he/she is making a journey, a returning trip to home. Not in spacial terms but in a metaphoric way of speaking. The greek poet Georgios Seferis explains it accurately:

“The first thing God made is love then comes the blood And the thirst for blood Goaded by the body’s seed as if by salt”.

“The first thing god made is the long Journey That house is waiting With its blue smoke With the dog grown old Waiting that he may die, for the homecoming”

“The broken timbers of unfinished journeys, Bodies that know no longer how to love.”

As Seferis suggests, we live in a constant mutation in which the journey itself it what guides the act of traveling. If the balance between journey and love has an inevitably end (unless you are immortal), bodies one day will stop traveling. But as the verse suggest, it is worse to stop loving while living because it cancels the travel even before perishing phisically, in flesh in bones. Like a wrecked ship and its timbers, bodies that reject the limited leeway to lose in the inevitably lost game of life (dreams and happines are not eternal and life is what you have lost and not only the things you conquered) are marks of a journey that has failed in advance and in the only part that someone could have won: the art of failing loving or the ephemerid moment of winning and loving before the end. And I say this not because of existantialism motivations or mere nihilist excuses. I say this because the act of traveling is not where you are going but what you are aiming at right before the definitive end of the play where we act. In other words,

“He who was living is now dead we who were living are now dying with a little patience” (The Wasteland, T. S. Elliot)

Yet, realizing our contingent existence should serve to reflection and act beyond the mere carpe diem, the need for exploring all the continents and taste the best foods in the world. This are pertinent actions but they could only substitute life with theleological assumptions and ends based on anxiety, consumerism of collections of experiences, in the bad sense. None of those actions should be considered as permanent directions to our journeys.

They could be done but being aware that they re-programm our lives in a continous sense, and serve as auxiliary tools to navigate. Yet, they are not the stars of our sky and the north in our bussols. Sometimes, as in a game of chess, the result is not as important as the play and the strategies. Thus, the journey and loving turn into autoreferential processes, as parts that feed theirselves and mantain the act of traveling and loving, with all our failures and absurd conditions imposed by external circumstances, and in a limited span of a life. Therefore, what remains afterlife? maybe nothing, but before this, a game is being played.

“If life has no meaning, history has no meaning; there is no answer to the question: “What shall we ever do?” The only thing that has meaning is the abstract game which we are to play, a game in which the meaning is assigned and arbitrary, meaning by convention only -in short, a game of chess” (The Wasteland).

—— Reference: Karka, Carmen. The love and the symbolic journey in the poetry of Cavafis, Elliot and Seferis. Pella Publishing, New York. 1982.