Samsara rollecoaster

by Gabriele Paccagnani (Italy)

A leap into the unknown China

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I am sending a sample so that you can see how I write: Everything is clear. Broccoli. Every little green bud of broccoli contains myriads and myriads of mini buddha-heads sprouting out of the entangled chaos of microscopic quantum reality. I see it now. Each one of the billions of tiny buddhas are jingling-dangling frenetically swinging and shaking their heads and hands up and down, not smiling but grinning like enthusiastic pervs, bridging Brahman the influencer with the antisocial Dao to the turbo-capitalistic merry-go-round of atomic matter. Broccoli is the connecting link between the void and the infinite, between my mental samsara rollercoaster and the living room in a flat on the 22nd floor of a building in the suburbs of Chongqing, central China. A megacity of 30 million people sprawling over a geographic area vaster than Scotland, a population density in the central districts higher than 1500 people per square kilometer, the economically and demographically fastest growing conurbation on this planet of extra self-aware apes, an endless horizon of skyscrapers melt into the reddish dust of sunset over the self-perfectionist folly and mechanical development, the post-apocalyptic polluted hordes cherishing smog and facemasks as the post-rural modern bliss of joyful money. I raise my eyes from the broccoli dimension of fractal wanking buddhas. Jima the crazy Kyrghizo is insistently observing his magnificent golden retriever, the dog’s hair shining on the mirrored long sunrays of late afternoon, flowing and levitating gently on the living room carpet. Jima is like an ascetic shaman from the Great Steppe who realizes that the highest animistic enlightenment dwells in the simplicity of the beast. I get up from the couch and walk slowly toward the window wall. Gazing out I wonder if this technocratic socialism can be a better system, then I remember that Jima’s girlfriend is about to come back from university and she must absolutely not find us high and wise like conferring bonobos. We must go, now. Jima’s family owns a hotel on the desolated uplands of kyrghizstan, but that isn't where we are heading now, I hope. He is Muslism, looks Chinese and speaks Russian (and about 6 more languages), creating a crossover of worlds that would be difficult to imagine if it didn't exist already. He might be anywhere now, he might be dead, he might be happy. If you travel for a long enough period you will meet people that you already know you won’t see ever again, but you might make good friends for a while and then, years after, they have disappeared into the oblivion of such distant memories that the whole time spent together could have been a childish dream or a fantasy. It toughens your skin, and it also teaches lessons of love. Waiting for the soviet elevator. The waiting is long, very long. Time calcifies in the elevator hall and in the elevator itself, same for the underground teleport. You enter a mind-confined space-time without connections to the outside earlier or the outside later. Silence drops easily, hallucinations of soft mental vacuity shine on the lucid metal walls, fear lurks behind your synapsis. Still waiting, I cannot help but remember another lift in another part of China, thousands of miles afar, four years before. I had been wandering southbound for six months from Beijing, hitch-hiking and riding and walking, before I made it to the mellow seashore of Sanya on a tropical winter. Only there and then the waves bestowed onto me the dawn of a departed boy, there I learnt I was wind. I woke up the first day of the world on a remote land with confused landmarks, for I was born naked on a flat earth and the only star in the clear sky was big, great and high, slightly off its zenith, brightness on the throne, forever. The waiting is over. We finally entered the iperbaric lift- teleport but we now got to descend 22 floors, in the time it took to reach the bottom and exit the building there could've been a Quran A.I. waging war on the Communist Kung-Fu monks. Memory's parallel universe take over my lookout tower again. [...]