I made a little game.
It’s a card-based “activity generator”; basically, a set of open-to-interpretation prompts for actions that will enrich or improve your life, one way or another.
I call this game the Tarot of the Arriviste, mostly because it sounds badass, and I’ve been thinking about Austin Osman Spare a bit recently.
Things can get weird when you’re tired, exhausted, and out in the woods alone.
Fortunately I was on the home stretch of my first ultramarathon when the trees began speaking.
It was all so obvious, too; they’d been there the whole time, but this was just the moment they chose to speak, or I was able to listen. Unsurprisingly, they were pissed with humans generally, and especially about what we were doing to the air and water.
The travel is done for now, and travelogue with it.
Coming home from a holiday sucks. Previously, I’ve avoided this and generally gone for one-way tickets; stepping into new lands and lives, total forward escape.
This time is different. I’ve got a greater sense of something to return to, and of the value I can bring here.
In Bali, on the outskirts of Ubud, there is a most remarkable museum: the Setia Darma House of Masks and Puppets.
On arriving at the beautiful estate, it’s not immediately clear where to start. A guy comes over, and offers to show us around. It seems like he’s the caretaker, though his role isn’t exactly clear.
The sounds of the street dogs gives way to the braying of camels shortly before dawn. Our hotel was beside their mustering point.
Beyond them, the Pyramid complex of Cheops, the Sphinx, and the desert. This is what we came here for.
Giza is hard work.
As a myth worthy of exploring, and perhaps even inhabiting, the Story of Actaeon contains a heady witches’ brew: a hunt, the glimpse of beauty of the immanent body of a Goddess-in-flesh; a metamorphosis.
Then, a reversal: Another hunt, and a glorious death – and another metamorphosis.
There are versions, improvements and shifting details, as there usually are in any story worth retelling. Easier to abandon truth and purity for a compelling performance.
Sometimes, going out means going in.
Going through the Old World has recapitulated so many parts of my own development. All the facts learned in the classical studies classroom are attached to memories of growing up on a far edge of the world.
Athens, the famed city of the philosophers, and so much history, lends itself to these sorts of wankish ruminations.
Alexandria is my favourite place in Egypt.
The sensuous curve of the long waterfront is a delightful walk; not even the starving, fornicating stray cats or the constant pestering horse-and-cart touts detract overly from this lovely seaside stroll.
The place does feel different from the more inland parts of Egypt, somehow – whether the gentle Mediterranean breezes, or the faint echoes of its legendary founding and subsequent cosmopolitanism seems unclear.
So: we’re looking for the palace of the Doge, to prepare for a trip the next day.
Venice is a disorienting braid of fascinating streets packed with fascinating distractions; when moving down lanes running between medieval buildings. This is a subtle city, and it’s easy to get lost.
We were sitting at a lovely restaurant, beside the harbour in Chania, in Crete. Mornings there were cool in the shadows, hot in the sun.
Initially, the Minoans built and used this same facility; then the Egyptians. The Venetians expanded and developed it further, as the tides of empire and the Mandate of Heaven shifted to the ones most worthy to bear it. Now, It has a a number of excellent restaurants and a marina with pleasure boats gently testing their moorings.