2005-07-17 - 1:15 p.m.
What I'm listening to: Here Comes the Express-BT Express.
I've had an increasing interest in pilgrimage sites for some time now. I'd mark the beginning at about the time when I started to go to Pakistan alone to see my cousins. Prior to 1997, all of my trips were with my parents (vacations that is).
In May '97 I was 19, and had just finished my first year of film studies at Carleton. I had been working part time at a camera store for six months, and had saved up enough to travel. One of my cousins was to be married that April, but I couldn't attend the wedding because I was writing exams. They were even considering holding up the wedding so I could be there, but with all the hall arrangments, etc. it was impossible.
I feel the need to explain this...holding up a wedding so one person can attend. In South Asian culture, weddings are by far the biggest party in your life. You're raised to believe that this will be the biggest and most important day of your life, so attendance is usually in the 500 people range on the conservative side. Also, people usually travel far and wide for this event, because culturally it is believed that this is a big event.
This is if you're more on the traditional side. Of course, if you're not really into the culture that much, weddings and all the parties around them aren't really an issue.
So I got to see the married couple about a month after they were married, and I got to see the other close family. I was only there for two weeks, so time was limited and I had to make an 'A' list of people that I could see, even though I try to avoid playing favourites.
This trip in '97 was my first trip alone, first trip in my adult life, as the last trip was in '89, when I went with my mother and my grandparents to go and pick up my grandmother, my dad's mother, to bring her back to Canada.
I still have very fond memories of that trip. All of my grandparents were healthy enough to travel and tell stories. My grandfather died a year later almost to the day, of liver complications. He was one of the people who received tainted blood back in the late 70s after a heart bypass. Thankfully, his family was compensated by the provincial government.
I remember Michael Corleone confiding in his mother about his family, in Godfather II:
"Did pop ever feel that he was losing his family?"
The sense of nostalgia in Godfather II, with the flashback sequences and so on, is beginning to be felt here and now. I'm remembering the times of my childhood in Pakistan, as well as listening to the stories of the remaining elders, with the old adage: "times have changed-things were better then".
So my interest in pilgrimage sites is to actually 'see' a place where these stories took place-the site materializes these stories, but the journey itself implies a sense of longing for another place outside of one's one daily sphere of reference.
When I went to Pakistan for the first time alone when I was 19, and saw a lot of relatives that I hadn't seen since I was little, but also heard about, and when I saw one of my ancestral homes (those who have been to my place will see a black and white picture of the courtyard of this house on my wall), I realized that when one hears stories of the past, orality is not lost up in smoke. These places did actually exist, and these people did really live here.
This interest was also heightened by a conversation that I had with that oh so wonderful woman in Cambridge (who is ok these days by the way...I made sure of that, to see if she was ok or unharmed by the London bombings). We were sitting alone, facing each other, on a bench under a tree in a park near the Cam river (hence the word Cam-bridge) and she started to tell me about Ground Zero (not a very romantic thing to talk about but hey it was still really dreamy considering the setting and more importantly the company), and how people photograph the site. But more importantly, how it functions as a pilgrimage site. Some people will pose in a happy way, others in a funerary stance, others will just stand and look stoic.
This conversation is what inspired me to go and visit this during my last day in London last April:
This is of course the famed zebra crossing on the cover of "Abbey Road" by The Beatles. Near the tube station (St. John's Wood) there is a coffee shop with all sorts of Beatles paraphanalia, with signs for sale, etc. with the hope that fans don't steal the city signs, as has been done with the 'Penny Lane' signs in Liverpool.
Even more interesting was the need to make one's mark:
'I was here', the graffiti says in its own way. I wonder if it's a conscious decision to inscribe one's name in the ledger, and identify with the larger global community of Beatles' pilgrims?
I felt the same thing when I went to see Jim Morrison's grave at Pere Lachaise in Paris. But, regretably, sharing those photographs is all the more difficult, because they are shot on film (woohoo) so scanning them may be a problem. But anyway, the grave itself is nothing special, but it's worth it just for the pilgrimage site. People have left guitar pics, blunts, etc on the actual grave, and all the other stones around it are defaced, with inscriptions like 'Jim Morrison's grave this way' and the likes. Imagine being the guy known as 'the guy who's grave is next to Jim Morrison's'. That's like having a famous neighbour, and constantly being harrased by the press about their personal habits, etc.
'So...does he come out at night for spirits with all the other ghosts, or is he more of a homebody in his afterlife?'
