When people would point at something and ask if there were a world behind it I would always say I liked a parent walking past their kid playing the same video game habitually and sees Vippo, the lead. ‘Oh my kid plays that game where the orange guy in shorts with the pointy ears jumps really high and squeals when they land on exploding cabbages or something.’ The parent takes the kid to a gaming conference. At the entrance there is an 18 foot inflatable of Vippo. The kid is foaming at the mouth sputtering about how Vippo is wearing his emerald flip flops that he received after saving a jetski tournament from being engulfed in a lava flow, and that Vippo’s hair is done in the style it was the one time he won a mambo competition on a side quest. The parent is happy to see the kid exuberant and looks forward to taking them to a design your own gummy shop afterward to make it a perfect day.
I talked about getting off a plane and seeing some kind of corpse burning ceremony and not having significant understanding of what was going on. People are speaking in a language I do not understand. Everything is on fire people are moving in chorus people are standing around watching. Maybe some of them are like me. Maybe some of them have some conception of what is happening beyond appearances and smells. One time the pace of my body moving through a space determined the rate that time progressed in the environment. When things were like this I was looking at a very red sunset through some hills covered with reeds. When you’re on the highway in the US, there are glarescreen delineator blades on top of a concrete barrier dividing the north and south lanes. The broad side of the blades face the driver. They look like an infinite line of dominoes evenly spaced a few inches apart facing you—they are distinctly opaque like a succession of skinny walls all arranged kissing the edge of a long contour. When you are riding as a passenger in the back seat looking sideways at the delineator blades they disappear, the blades are so thin that when driving past them the solid objects appear as a blur the same way that helicopter blades become a translucent blur. If the delineator blades are green then all of the backdrop that the blades overlap with will appear tinted by a rhythmically translucent field of green. When I was running looking at the reeds, if I moved slowly I knew that the reeds were solid objects, if I went fast they became a tinted blurry field almost like a succession of refrigerator-sized frosted prismatic lenses arranged in an infinitely long reed-height wall. In traditional Indian music (dhrupad alap, vilambit khyal ektaal, carnatic mridangam tani avartanam etc) tabla rhythms often occur at time signatures unfathomable by Western musical time scales—hyperbolic comparisons come to mind like your intestine is 20 ft long but I know another creature that’s intestines can wrap around the world like a rubber band ball 20 trillion times before they are halfway coiled. In contemporary Western music most rhythms resolve, repeat, or rhyme with themselves in a few seconds. In Indian rhythmic structures, similar cycles can take 18 minutes or more to unfold. Those time scales are so extremely different that to most Western ears the cycle is imperceptible as a cycle because the listener’s attention cannot zoom out far enough to see a pattern, they see a near infinite forward movement that never references what came before it.
In tabla rhythms there is this thing that happens where the drum taps increase in density until they tumble from being perceived as rhythmic patterns to being continuous or undulating tones, similarly to how spinning propellers go from being an arrangement of blades to a translucent wall. Elsewhere a snare rush or snare roll tumbles from being sequences of taps to stuttering fields of tones.
Whoever first arranged rhythms in these 18 minute tumbling cycles I thought was familiar with the way I was experiencing time.
I saw people actually burning. They smell very good like honey ham wrapped in a white sheet. That is not a put on, it’s just how it is. They do not burn you if you are under 10 years, over 80, 4-6 other conditions that I can’t remember, or if you have been bitten by a cobra—because you either are still pure or have gone through enough that you have been made pure again. A cobra bite radically transforms the composition of your blood such that your blood becomes solid. A vein full of blood with a lifetime of wear and tear, a tablet dropped into the heart that spreads through the core of the stream in a corkscrew pushing the deepest undercurrent of the flow outward to the surface as it hardens from the inside out. There is suddenly a dusty skin on the noodle that a burst of wind wipes clean leaving a snaking ruby. If you’re one of these people you are wrapped in a white sheet with a rock tied to you and placed in the river to sink. If you are not one of these people the fire makes you one.
People go to Varanasi because dying there delivers moksha, freedom from the obligation to reincarnate on a plane that is always too hot or too cold. Many would say this is an over simplification and add many conditions or dismiss it completely saying that this would make it too easy. Some of those same people would agree that if a woman goes to a temple and prays for a house in exchange for her good deeds and whole heartedly believes that contract to be fulfilled that she will receive the house, and that someone with a more byzantine model of the world that features more doubt will watch the house fall through the cracks of their shaky faith.
How many have threatened someone saying they would leave them looking like a Michael Jackson Jacket covered in zippers.
It’s 1am in the city and the haze is foggy. A White Limousine that looks like a pitbull face that ran into a wall if you squint pulls up at the curb and rolls back on the rubber of the tires slightly as the driver brings it to a halt. The driver has acne scars and a face shaped like a Hershey kiss slammed between book pages. She tries to unlock the doors in the back but accidentally rolls down the passenger side window. She hits the button in reverse because she is embarrassed by her accident. The door clicks.
All the chrome goes black in a gasp. A flirty snub nosed pelican faced person in a black turtleneck beret and blonde swoop bob snaps their fingers to the poet’s clap and accidentally shatters their fingers like a tuning fork made of chopsticks.
All the puddles on the asphalt hold their breath freezing the reflections of the pink and blue video walls with girls with huge eyes dancing on them in chiseled images. The water stopped moving so all the reflections became very clear like a chiseled image but they also kept moving but some of the people who were there wanted to pretend that the images in the reflections were frozen.
Everything is purple.
Dr. Sevi steps out of the rear of the car. Her white pants fill everyone’s vision. They call her Dr. because of all the bad things she has done. She has kidnapped people in ways no one can imagine are real any place else. 60% of Cambodia’s GDP comes from camps that run online phishing scams running on slave labor in the jungle. Thailand’s tourism industry is in a crisis because an enormous chunk of their tourism came from China’s growing middle class. In the early 2020s a Chinese actress was kidnapped when she arrived in Thailand and trafficked to Cambodia to work in a phishing camp. This is close to unimaginable in many places. Dr. Sevi is the boss of this. It happens because she wants it to happen.
When her shoe steps out of the car the driver tremors shoot up her arms and into her face. The street cries. Everybody cries. Now the shoes are on the street. Soon they will be on everyone. Right foot left foot. Right shoe left shoe. Elbows pressing down on the table very heavy after the steps. A pig in a pork pie hat selling translucent peach paper folded in the shape of chrysanthemums on a vending tray looped into their makeshift twine suspenders trips launching salt out a cracked thimble tied around their neck into a quarter sized puddle of tonic water on the edge of the table. Dr. Sevi looks at the salt dizzy. A moment ago the puddle was reflecting a deep blue light and now suddenly something piercing and white bounces off of it. It was very white for an instant. When the salt hit it, it combined with the other white and became very bright.
Dr. Sevi’s eyes were carpet. They were also sand. The cuffs of the shirt had become impossibly itchy she could not move she could not suck her cheeks. Her eyes would not close all of her toes were tied to the column supporting the table.
Through the window she’s at the cafe on the lake choosing a ceramic stuffed animal to paint with the paints they give you when you take a coconut to drink from. She’s filling in the eye with white paint and going way beyond the bubble of the eye onto the forehead to make the pupil look smaller. Everything below her ankles are being goaded into separating under the pressure of swelling tendon the same way they were when she was peddling the swan boat. She did not walk for so long that her thighs have no fat on them and almost no muscle. She moves her legs with her ab muscles. All her muscles are exhausted and the higher tendons in her thighs risk snapping because there is nothing to support or insulate them. She is 1 ft deep in the ground from the kicking and chunks of the sidewalk cough up in pulses landing around the edge of the crater. The table legs are 2 ft below the sidewalk the table is always diagonal. The table jumps with every kick. The ceramic stuffed animal jitters and slams against the table as they descend. It is half maroon now and there are deep green swirls penetrating the maroon coat. The underside of the toes are bleached raspberry. Now her feet are revealing emeralds and rubies. Now her legs fray inside but stay pumping from inertia. Heat is inside paper thighs. Nobody knows her head is underground. A cookie on a belt disappears under pouring chocolate ribbons and a bone is enveloped by cascading honey cools into the sticky squishy ridge of a forehead. A finger with the residue of rubbed grass blade glides through the friction of a sheet of warm watercolor paper in a menu spitting distance from a pond where mosquitoes press targets into the water with their weight. At both tables at the same time Dr. Sevi and Shelia. Would you like some? A nostril-width spoon with wet tapioca slides into her mouth. The fluid holding the tapioca is cold at one table and warm at the other beads at the rim shaking onto her shirt. My legs swinging off the edge of Morgan Creek with the sister that remembers me I know home.
This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.
Defamiliarization should make the familiar strange, not make meaning plead the Fifth. Thanks for the provocation.