Jan Golembiewski - Magic

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
www.transitlounge.com.au

First Published 2018
Transit Lounge Publishing
Copyright Jan Golembiewski 2018

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

Cover design by Josh Durham/Design by Committee
Typeset in Caslon 12/17pt by Cannon Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the
National Library of Australia: trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN: 978-1-925760-15-6

This book is for Bem, my lover, wife
and fellow explorer of the miraculous

Prologue

W HERE DID ALL the prophets go? What was it that bottled the djinns and stopped the flight of magic carpets?

Little has changed since existence was like a cloud that couldnt be pinned down. A time when the world was still a swirling lava of possibilities waiting to happen a time when there were no laws deciding what was possible and what was not. A time when something might happen, but then again might not. In the very beginning, well before the revelation of the Torah on Mount Sinai, before any rules, there must have been little difference between dreaming and wakefulness. In those days, miracles must have happened all the time, only to go unnoticed, for what is a miracle, when nothing is impossible?

Leap forward to the twenty-first century: a time when miracles have become miraculous, for they must force a gap between knowledge and science to assert themselves. Its not easy. We have so many ways to know and explain our cosmos that weve even made the mistake of believing everything must be as bound by law as we are. Now there are so many rules that even the Torah lies ignored, an anachronism beside Newtonian laws of physics and Pythagorean laws of mathematics, not to mention civil laws, criminal laws and other social structures that shackle todays reality. Now we have so many laws, rules and beliefs that theyve clogged up the passage of consciousness that once flowed so smoothly. In the interests of learning the how and why, reality has been cemented by an ever-growing rulebook. Were supposed to settle into the restrictions imposed by this new environment and even be happy with our democracy, education, economy and the systems that stifle us. Most of us have little freedom but in our dreams; light peeping through minuscule cracks in the wall.

A terrible downfall perhaps. But by standardising, documenting and controlling everything, weve gained a lot. Evolution has accelerated. Routines make things automatic so we no longer have to wait for lightning to strike whenever we need fire. I can get on a plane and not need to rely on the capricious wishes of deities to know itll take off and deliver me elsewhere.

Laws and language make communication possible, and this in turn has oiled the wheels of a kind of progress, so it hasnt been all bad. Just think how it must have been; it took the Jews forty years to cross a patch of desert that could have been crossed in forty days at a dawdle. And that was with The Law to organise people. (They were rocketing along!) How efficient weve become now. How perfectly constructed.

Our perceptions have lost their effervescence because of restrictions dredged from the past. In the face of what we know, we just cant imagine an expanded future. Reality has become the same soup, served day after day. But deep down were all camels with two humps what we believe and what we are. Our true nature is still there, but it remains so steady and unchanging it goes unnoticed. The other (what we believe) compels us to shout warnings, declarations and proclamations with every new restriction we find. But we are pushed forward by religion, by love, desire and (for some of us) a need to know whats beyond the cracks the nature of the silent hump; the magical truth, the swirling lava of possibilities waiting to happen; the original, dreamy, whole truth thats been left untouched for millennia. Inside us all theres a core of being that hasnt been worn down by the dense materiality of laws. And those of us who catch a glimpse of it ache to reclaim our inheritance. We seek miracles amongst the muck of ordinary life.

And its there as ever, a reality rich in magic. The world of the prophets, witch doctors and shamans. But the way there is tenuous, tangled and dangerous, and like all things miraculous, its capricious. There for a passing instant and gone the next.

If youre one of those souls that cannot help but yearn for our former freedom, then this book is an invitation. If you too have discovered that the guidebook points the wrong way, then go and search for yourself. And when you see an opening, take it. Go to Elsewhere to where the imagination has no bounds, to a place that echoes with infinity somewhere as big and open as the human soul.

I chose the Sahara.

This is a true story, but it feels like a dream because its been documented retrospectively from another world. I have a few objects that have miraculously returned from Africa with me: a hand-drawn map, some tarot cards and some other bits and pieces youll hear about later. I offer you these as veracity, as proof of experience, like sand brought up from the bottom of a river. But how could you understand what it was like to be at that depth, just from seeing the sand transported to the shore?

So I have one more thing. Ive visited the very edge of the world, have swum the lava of existence, and have returned with this: my story.

Fool

T HE SAHARA IS hot during the day but at night it gets cold, especially the hour before dawn. Its morning, and this cold, dry, sandy ground is no place to think about rolling over and having a lie-in, so I sit up. I do some vigorous yoga stretches and kung-fu forms to warm myself. Then I close my eyes to meditate.

For breakfast I have some buttermilk, kindly given to me by a Hausa trader last night. He somehow realised I might need it although my needs are something I never speak about, and we have no shared language. While drinking, I notice a slash in my little string bag. It must have happened while I was asleep: a thief robs a beggar. It only takes a second to realise what hes taken. The 2,000 African francs note the trader pushed onto me with some buttermilk. If the thief had only asked, I would have given it to him. Its of his world, not mine. I dont need it.

I walk slowly toward the well on the outskirts of Gaya, the little country town near the borders of Nigeria, Benin and Niger. The sun rose an hour or so ago, and people are emerging from mud huts and filling the dusty street. The massive baobab trees expand in an impressive but vain attempt to fill the Sahara sky.

Im feeling an uncharacteristic sense of foreboding, like Im climbing a tower and the stairs are crumbling behind me. The only way down is over the edge. But theres also a pleasant feeling of blankness, an emptiness that comes from having no possessions and no fixed plans: of having to rely completely on the goodness of circumstance.

Ina gajiya. The greeting from nowhere takes me by surprise and I jump. I turn and look directly into the eyes of a policeman. Hes a giant, both broad and tall. He wears a dusty blue uniform, a rounded, white taqiya on his head indicating that he is Muslim. His face is scarred with childhood smallpox and the cuts the medicine man inflicted to rid him of it. And theres one other detail, its a feeling he projects: a current of aggressive, poisonous neediness that neither his dark sunglasses nor his religious garb can mask.