Buddha's eyes follow you everywhere, they are everywhere. I make a connection: big brother, the obsessive neurosis of Western man to be subjected to controls by unknown people, glances by unknown people, checks by unknown people. Perhaps this obsessive neurosis has its precedent in Buddha, it is the declination, the Western corruption of an atavistic source of blessing, from before Christ. On the other hand, it would not be the first time that Western man declines for his own use and consumption conceptual objects of Eastern origin: the swastica, the dragon, the resurrection, the Tao, the void, the full, the atom, quantum mechanics, the prototype of the Trojan War.
Power, big brother, the one who wants you dead.
Buddha, big brother, the one who wants you alive.
You never know if Kathmandu fascinates you or disgusts you. Probably both. The expression "city full of contradictions" has the musty taste of journalistic labels that our local scribblers attach to any city, be it Rome, Palermo or Busto Arsizio. A bit like what happens at certain funerals, 'he was a good person, he always smiled', a label that works. Kathmandu embodies that label in its essence, like all the great cities of the East. East, another label, Eurocentric label. So let's say a bit like all non-European cities. Perhaps it is as a reaction to its chaos that the Nepalese mountains arouse a sense of profound mysticism, of love for solitude, immediate, without mediation. From the suffocating embrace of Kathmandu I begin to feel a tender and poignant intention to make itself loved at all costs. And it succeeds. Kathmandu bears witness to my absence, my absence, my absence from me.
My hotel is just in the center, Thamel area. Around my hotel there is a series of narrow streets that seem to lead nowhere, whose sole purpose seems to be to make you lose your tracks. I find a tunnel, inside which traffic is prohibited, you can only go on foot. There I find the sweetest part of my embrace with the city. There I lose myself the whole day before my departure for Syabrubesi, the town from which I will begin my journey in the Langtang Valley. I slow down, I observe, I smell the scents, I look at the colors, the signs, the books, the faces of the people. I sit down. And I breathe. I close my eyes. And I breathe. I rise in ecstasy. And I breathe.
It is getting dark. I go back to the hotel. Another hot shower. It is not just a question of hygiene. The water that flows on the skin restores your static balance. It is the amygdala within which we live, the energetic cocoon that attracts certain things and repels others, a karmic phenomenon, the most tangible.