The Silk Road

I saw this article today and it spooked me. It was related to this article. And especially this one.

In the past two years a thought keeps bubbling up.  At first I thought it was just a random vestigial thought, a mutation of my psychological evolution, deriving its exegesis from remnants of other more palpable wants. It wasn't a cohesive thought, just tatters of colors and snippets of sounds -- but clear and strong enough to have a tactile pull. Here are some exemplars:

• The heady and sometimes suffocating weight on my chest. A causal by-product of traveling in high-altitudes.  The air is by turn crisp, like brittle leaves, or dry and dense because of the swirling dust.
• Glimmerings. Sun-parched faces: russet-tinged tinged masks of millimeters that shield impenetrable souls, strings of lights, like fireflies flickering at dusk, stretching back to the beating heart of no-history, where Aryan ancestors conversed with Tengri and Eje...
• The lonely mountain passes, where Mother Earth is less madonna and more medusa.
• The oases encircling vast lakes, blue diamonds set among greenery surrounded by the parched desert. Pools of forgetting for there are too many memories to remember. Where travelers have stopped, where they have sung songs, delivered thanks and lay down to rest, some still at slumber underneath the quickening earth.
• The marketplaces, where Arabic is mingled with Turkic, where Uigurs and Afghans and Mongols bleed together in a stream of colors, of skullcaps and veils, of the muezzin's cries and the bodhisattva's chants.  Flashes of windblown stalls, where the wares, jumbled and forgettable, are the same stuff as the trades millenniums ago: spices from India, silks from China, metals from the Near-East and ideas -- those transformative and provocative sprites -- flitting about, connecting invisible threads between minds and hearts and souls.

I keep dreaming about this idea. I had it in Zhongdian, where we were so close to Tibet and a couple of days away from Kashgar, the beginning of the Road.  I had it in Turkey, at the other end, the eastern gate of the trail.  And I've had it in New York, Houston, Seattle, and every place in between.

Of buying a jeep -- Chengdu or somewhere in western China -- spare tires, spare gas tanks, backpack and a tent and foodstuff -- and heading towards the setting sun. I would follow the trails of countless pilgrims and merchants, kings and paupers, diplomats and prisoners -- explorers -- and work my way along the Silk Road.  I'd start out in Kashgar, then speed past the desert and test myself against the Tien Shan and the Himalyas and the Hindu Kush, stopping along the way in Samarkand, Herat and Om -- discovering the forgotten wonders of humanity in the ancient cities of the Mongol Khanate, China, Persia, Tamerlane and caliphate.

Maybe it will take 3 months, or maybe 6, or maybe a year.  I'd stopped to wait out the landslides, or the winter, the dust storms, or just to live with a local tribe.  I'd learn forgotten languages -- speeches that has no use, designated to the rubbish bin of progress -- I'd eat food that can only come from the wastelands, boiled goat, lamb's head, yak's cheese -- I'd learn to ignore the discomfort of being alone, thrust myself into a land where time travel backwards, remove myself from the march of globalization, communication and digital evolution.

And the idea is that I'd do this before 50.  At least that's how it is in my head.  The idea keeps coming back because it requires me to be contrary to the utmost.  I'd have to be solo to feel connected. I'd have to reject everything that I am working towards right now: my career in technology, relationships, stability. But somewhere inside of me is a gut feeling, a childhood dream even that found me daydreaming about archeological digs.

I suppose the journey is a metaphysical apogee of my other-self, a more intuitive and instinctual shadow – one that threatens to overwhelm me unless I can catch it – like lightning in a bottle.