Hello, White Lotus
Hello, White Lotus
By Anders Bergstrom
The day we met the White Lotus was as auspicious as it was weird. Indian and Nepali Buddhists regard the lotus flower as one of the ashtamangala. Ashtamangala are 8 symbols thought to deliver good luck, good fortune, and a prosperous life. They often appear in works of fine art, displayed prominently in homes and businesses. In my western genius-ness, I saw these ashtamangala merely as a conch shell, endless knot, or gold fish…but what I didn’t realize was that these images were beckoning me. They were drawing me in like a big cosmic tractor beam, toward one particular afternoon in May of 2000.
My friend Noah returned from India in the spring. He’d been gone for a year or so, and during the course of this year, he’d grown a very large beard. It was nothing short of impressive; especially for a guy who’d grown up in Fresno, CA where beards lose out 10-1 to mustaches without irony. It exploded from his cheeks in a contorted cloud, twisting and curling without respect for order or approval of his elders. Its dimensions weren’t particularly natural, its scope was almost too perfect, its influence was staggering. The beard proceeded Noah’s actual arrival to anywhere by not only its wonders of the physical world, extending by more than 2 inches the dimensions of the man’s face, but the beard accounted for an extended metaphysical presence of the newly returned expatriate.
It isn’t only the beard that makes the man. Any gentleman worth his salt knows that a strong facial hair statement needs compliment. It can’t just hang there off the chin like an uncomfortably botched joke. A beard of that size and stature needs equally handsome garb. Bono compliments his beard-like messianic ego with big, wrap-around shades doesn’t he? Well, Noah left for India with 2 suitcases, full to the brim with modern, culturally appropriate, and reasonably clean, western clothing. Upon his return, these suitcases, once home to a comfortable and versatile wardrobe, were absent of their previous cargo. Instead, the suitcases were stuffed full of incense, tasty digestive tablets, spices that all seemed to focus on the word “masala”, bejeweled pillowcase covers, strange rocks called “gutkha” that I was supposed to eat and enjoy, and a bottomless supply of memorabilia paying tribute to Noah’s new heroes Satiya Saibaba and Guru Nonokji.
So how did he transport his clothing? Well, he wore it. All of it. Blue shirt. Brown pants. Flip flops[1].
Noah is a guy who pays attention to detail. He also likes to prove a point. His post-India fashion direction was as important to his point as his massive beard. His point was authenticity. He wanted to shock people into understanding how much more fucking crazy, beautiful, and different the Indian culture was than ours. He transformed himself into the very world he’d just experienced, so that others could experience it as well. This is genius actually, a one-man cultural theater.
The end result of Noah’s return and subsequent cultural transformation was to convert our small Santa Barbara apartment into a veritable spice market. Cheap Escher prints were replaced by confusing posters of cartoon gods, sparkly tapestries, and a number of homages to aforementioned spiritual leaders who I couldn’t help but develop some kind of appreciation for (where Jesus has failed, Guru Nanak somehow succeeds). Our kitchen became a jungle, home to strange new vegetables and smells that were as welcoming as they were puzzling. We became hosts to the Indian experiment of Santa Barbara, CA. We removed most of the western college student nonsense that had traveled from one apartment to the next with us, dating back to the early years away from home, where one comes to the troubling conclusion that a 10 year old, dog-eared poster of WWF superstar wrestlers The Bushwackers would make a terrific compliment to bedroom aesthetic[2].
Succumbing to Noah’s passion, evangelical attention to detail, and pushy nature, we’d allowed ourselves to evolve along with Noah’s cultural experiment…to become the experience that he had brought back with him, stuffed unceremoniously into his flowered suitcases. Suitcases that carried with them the appearance of a great-grandmother’s lifetime worth of trinkets and keepsakes transported through time and space under cover of embroidered azaleas and kept safe by thorny stems arranged in a pleasing-to-the-eye pattern appropriate for luggage.
The most resounding knick-knack tucked away in those suitcases was a stack of dusty cassette tapes. These tapes transported us on a musical journey through religious ceremonies, cultural festivals, caste-heavy ghettos where children sing and old men puff away on stone chillums while the sound of living music emanates deep from within the fiber of this vibrant vibrating culture of color and tone. We enveloped ourselves in Indian classical music, played hauntingly on sitars, sarods, and host of other strange twangly-buzzy-hummy-yummy-whoozy contraptions that have been around since Jesus was in holy diapers. We danced like jackasses in our room along with Daler Mendhi’s pulsating beats[3], angelic samples of female wailing, and his tell-tale finger wiggle that, if seen on MTV, could likely spark a revolution in single-digit dance-moves amongst America’s youth.
This music made me feel that I was experiencing something of intrinsic worth. Art that was born with a message and channeled meaning to whoever happened to stumble across it, be they in an ashram in Delhi, or an apartment in California. Music often requires a cultural inference…a framing of the tune, a snapshot in time and place, in order for us to attribute value and judge greatness. “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” is likely the crappiest Beatles song ever written, and in a vacuum, one that would be hard-pressed to find work as a sitcom theme, but in context, this song represents a great coup of creativity, transcending the rock genre completely, and resulting in a massive raison d’etre for progressive musicians to come. This new music that traveled to America via Noah’s gardenish baggage was a different creature. It wasn’t created by the man holding the sitar (to wit: Ravi Shithead?), it was created the moment Shiva recreated the entire world after having just destroyed it while having sex with a million Bollywood actresses simultaneously[4]. This music wasn’t an expression of meaning by members of the artistic caste of
Noah’s one-man cultural theater was taking many of us as its regular patrons…every day when the curtain opened, we were humble observers of his conversational Hindi, weird looking skirts and turbans, the tendency to waggle his head in just the right way to represent an affirmation (“wait…wait…he’s gonna do it…hold on…HAHAHHA-HAAA”), and his ability to uncover an active Indian social network in Santa Barbara. Through this network, we were invited to celebrate with the Indus Student Club at our University, an evening of chemical revelry that didn’t end until just shy of 6 am, in a living room full of sweaty dancing Indians tossing a slight giggling Sikh boy around the crowd like yippee aloo masala.
These Indians embraced Noah as one of their own. He knew secret details about Indian culture that only one of them would know…their favorite soda pop, their vernacular inside jokes, their cousins. It was as if they’d known him since whenever. This was a credit to Noah’s authenticity. He wasn’t a tourist in India…he was an Indian who’d happened to grow up as a white boy in California. This is why Noah travels. He travels to lose himself in the culture of the other. He challenges his sheltered upbringing[5] by removing his consciousness completely from everything he’s known. He becomes where he is.
Noah and I stepped out of my pickup truck one afternoon and hurriedly made our way inside our modest apartment through a light drizzle. When it rains in Santa Barbara, it’s not so much rain as it is just slightly moister than normal, and not nearly as groovy. It had been overcast and damp for over a week, and we were starting to wonder if spring had hit the snooze alarm. We hustled inside, kicked off our shoes (a new rule ratified by Noah’s unilateral congress), and fired up the tea kettle. It was then that I noticed the mischievous look on my friend’s face.
“You’re not doing anything tomorrow afternoon, are you?” he asked.
“I have class…so not really. What’s up?”
[1] I’d like to elaborate here. These pants and shirt not only accounted for all the clothing that he’d carried back from India, but they were the only articles of clothing that he wore for the next 3 months.
[2] This isn’t historically accurate. I did have a poster of The Bushwackers, but it was burned off the front door of my dorm room by some meathead when I was a freshman in college. I’d borrowed this poster from Noah. Sorry ‘bout that.
[3] This dude makes one hell of a music video too.
[4] Or something like thst.
[5] Have I mentioned that we’re from Fresno?
1 comments:
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