Chapter Two in A Spiritual Autobiography, a work in progress

We will now leave the story of Louise's early life and fast forward to Afghanistan.  Everyday in the newspapers all around the world and especially  the newspapers concerned with military and political affairs, one can read about Afghanistan, but this Afghanistan is not Louise's Afghanistan. Louise's Afghanistan is a place you'd really like to be, where no one ever took out a hand grenade and shoved it up your ass just because you were a woman or a Jew or a Big Buddha made of stone. Louise's Afghanistan is a green place, full of vegetables and people smoking hashish in secret and not only in secret and in Louise's Afghanistan there are geraniums and a lady poet, even one in Western clothes with a little orange traveling case, can walk around and never be disturbed, not even by unfriendly looks, and then if you are lucky, in Louise's Afghanistan you will meet the beautiful boy you saw on the Orient Express and he will be traveling to India just like you, only he will have companions,  traveling companion, and you will be alone and then suddenly his companions are your companions and you have a hotel room in Kandahar and there's nothing like a terrorist around. You are the curiosity of the hotel but nobody bothers you. You walk around marveling at the children and the dry dusty streets, Afghanis clothes, utensils, foods. You've already been to Herat and before that Mashid, but Mashid is in Iran, so maybe it's not appropriate to discuss Mashid. Nevertheless by way of diversion, or let us say preparation, you can tell how in Mashid you put on a costume that hid you underneath itself, totally. You are stranger, even to yourself, and no one can see you dressed or, to be more specific, HIDDEN. In this way, you visit the famous mosque. where only Moslem people are allowed to be. You know you will be arrested if you are discovered to be an impostor, even many years later you might be killed fortelling this story, but you will tell it anyway. Because you are not afraid. So you are there in your veil and you are wandering through the courtyards of the mosque, the huge courtyards and then you come to a place where people are standing around a coffin and someone is reading a book and soon you are crying and you don't why you're crying but something is touching your heart and tears are flowing down your face. Then you remember, you must not be discovered, you must not do something strange like crying just because there is a coffin and someone is reading a book. Your eyes are still visible. You open them to make sure no one has noticed your tears but then you notice everyone else is crying too. You read about something called 'Objective Experience', before you took this trip and you know it's happening to you. You don't think Moslem Jew Christian you think Holy, you think Saint and no one notices you are different because you're not. Then you're in Herat. You can't believe the cypress trees and children. Those children are very innocent.

You have never seen such innocent children. They are like birds moving all together, But not weak birds. They move around, like little dancers, beside the streets and by the waters. When you read the newspapers and see all the soldiers, you know those same people you're supposed to hate are those grown up children, you don't hate them. You were in Afghanistan and the children were like ornaments, everywhere children and flowers and fresh fruit. Afghanistan was a medieval kingdom and looked like one and felt like one. So how did all those children become soldiers, the ones trapped in caves and other people's moral dilemmas and economics. In Herat you find a mosque, another one, but this one is outside the town and in ruins. You are alone on a hillside, looking at the mosaics and the doves are flying in and out of the ruins. No one bothers you or notices you. You are brave and you are very protected, it is your love of all this that is protecting you. No one is throwing stones at you or telling you to come with them to shoot up some heroin. One night you sleep with a lot of people, a lot of other travelers in a big room. Some local musicians come and play for you on Afghani instruments. Another night you're sleeping in a bakery, behind the bakery. Someone has some hashish and you try to smoke it, or eat it but then you leave your body and its very scary and you even can't get back so you wisely decide not to smoke or eat any more hashish because you are on your way to India to study music and if you don't have a body, how will you get there? One night you're walking on a street, you and the person you're walking with, a tall thin boy, suddenly feels a wave that is very dark. You can't explain it but you feel it and you have to turn away because you know you are not supposed to walk down that street and that if you do something really grotesque will happen. Not just you, the tall boy feels it too.

In Kandahar, as said, you meet the beautiful boy from the train and you and him and his traveling companions all live together in a yellow room on a side street of the city. Osama Bin Laden isn't there yet. No one is there, only the Medieval Afghanis. One day you go to a village built on stilts. All the men and all the women and all the children are living on houses built on stilts. and all the men and all the women and maybe even all the children are smoking hashish, but not you. You learned your lesson behind the bakery. There is a peaceful feeling in the village however, very peaceful and eternal, like it never began and never will end either. Then you go to the river. You dive in but the current of the water is too strong for you. You are moving downstream and there seems to be a possibility of drowning.  But there is nothing to be done, until you are gently washed onto the shore. So you don't drown and then you go back to Kandahar with the boy from the Oriental Express. You keep hearing about a place called Bamiyan, but you don't go there. Those statues have been there forever so you don't feel you have to see them, besides you don't know much about Buddhism, just what you read in the Bollingen series of books and what you learned from Allen Watts and DT Susuki. Then you go to Kabul. You go to Kabul. I think you are alone again. You are trying to get to India. The boy from Istambul, who is French, looks curiously like Rimbaud. You've seen Rimbaud's picture on the cover of Les Illuminations. Then he starts talking about his sister He really loves his sister. He's obsessed with his sister. That's weird because you know Rimbaud had those deep feelings for his sister and he went back to France to be with her when he was sick. On the bus to Kabul you get sick, very sick. You start to vomit and can't stand to be on the bus anymore with all the people and some animals too. But the Afghanis leaning out of windows don't just leave you in the desert or make fun of you, or give you some lousy plastic  bag to vomit into. They stop the bus in a village and they get someone to come in a little horse or even human drawn cart and someone takes you to a doctor and the doctor does something. I think he gives you some medicine or maybe an injection  and then the horse or human drawn cart goes back to the bus and the bus is waiting for you. The bus with all those Afghani people and some animals  leaves again and no one is angry or anything and it's interesting that all this happens without you being able to speak a single word of Farsi or Pashtu. Kabul is very large and very chaotic. The traffic is moving in every kind of direction. You get to go inside courtyard of a real Afghani house. The women who are covered up on the street are FREE inside the houses. They are very elegant and call out to each other You go around with your little pad, you are writing on little tables and there are geraniums. There are also movie theatres. You go to one which is really big and looks like it belongs on Broadway or somewhere and you don't even remember the film, just the theatre. But slowly you are becoming aware that there is a music you have never heard before, it is called Indian film music, and though you could never suspect this,  you will later play this music, when you are in Bombay and need 'money'. (You never susect that in Bombay you will meet up with the same beautiful boy and traveler's and they will come to stay with you, but when they leave, secretly, one afternoon, they have stolen  all your possessions and you will go with the police in a big jeep  to the 'bad' part of time and find them and they will give back everything and you forgive them, they are your brothers, but it is hard to explain all this to Joep, the respectable  Sarangi player you are living with. Luckily you saw the 3 walking down the beach heavy charged...it was painful when you got to your yellow house and saw that everything was gone but luckily, you knew what to do. There was 'protection').After all this you leave.  You have to go to Pakistan to go to India. and in India you are going to study sarangi. and one of the nice things you remember about Kabul is that from every single music store and there were many, sarangis were hanging from the ceiling. You wonder, what has happened to all those hanging sarangis now? Do you think the Russian army is playing sarangi, secretly? The Talibans, the Americans  — are they all playing sarangi? Have the armies finally given up their mission to  relax and play music instead? That's your advice. But you're a musician or would like to be one. You're not a military person, even years later, you felt very sad when you learned about the activities of the Russian army. You didn't know America had secret designs in Afghanistan.

You never thought that the turquoise plates and cups, which were sold outside the cities, not just a few plates and cups, blocks of them, all shining in the sun, you never thought they would one day all be shattered.

2002