MOROCCO: ANOTHER TIME

At college I had a friend who had lived for a year in Morocco, part of the time in Marrakech and the rest of the time travelling. At this time there where hundreds of young Europeans who had escaped their regimented lives in order to live under the sun, to smoke marijuana, and to drift outside of calculated time. My friend said that he had travelled there in order to find himself and imagined if he ventured deep enough into the desert sands of the Sahara, something along those lines might happen. Apparently someone had said to him that the extreme heat of the desert burns away Karma. When he told me this he laughed, because he added, that whoever had told him this, had read too many books. He added that extraordinary things do happen in the desert and that the heat is a threshold experience. For him the strangest thing was that Moroccans themselves would like to escape to England and couldn’t understand what the fascination with Morocco was, especially since everybody was so poor. One thing that stuck to me about these conversations was the way he talked about time, or at least, the sense of being outside of time. He talked about this short journey from Spain, departing from Tangiers on a bus and slowly emerging into a different type of time, serving to wash Europe out of his body. I am not sure if this is an image but it stayed with me. He had this book ‘Fez’ by Titus Burkhardt, and whenever I could, I would look at those images in rapt fascination.

All these conversations occurred in 1970 and this was the beginning of a distinctly dark period. Many talked about the end of the whole Industrial period but other than the ever hopeful figure of revolution, all this spelt was social and political entropy. I wasn’t certain about anything but I wanted to escape entropy, so I aligned myself with the most hopeful figure I could find, namely revolution, which I my case was making political posters that attempted to literally figure revolution. Metaphorically speaking, this took me all over the world because the whole world appeared to be in turmoil. On another level I was a drop out, living in squats and social security, a common reality in those years. Everything appeared to come from skips, furniture, or the basis of furniture, disused electronic goods and so on. It was an incredible distance from my adolescent years living in a home of wall-to-wall carpeting and antique furniture, but then that was a different life and a different time. It is difficult to find coherent images for this.

It was now the late seventies and the only clear image I had was of Morocco. I just needed to escape, so I sold everything I had, collected my passport, hitched across Europe and caught a boat to Morocco. A found myself in a tiny, run down room in Marrakech with nothing to do other than to let the sweat wash away the sense of Europe from my body.

After the process of washing, came the stark realisation, that, to lose yourself in order to find yourself, there needed to be something there in the first place: and I was having difficulty with that. I met a Japanese girl and she was always making me up in various ways in order that I could examine myself in different guises. We talked a lot about previous lives, imaginary lives; in fact all possible lives because our present life was elusive. We then travelled together, across mountains, in the desert, to this city and that city, this village and that village, never tiring of the crowded buses or the stomach bugs. Moriko had come to Morocco in order to buy amber, coral and silver for a shop in Tokyo and I started to enjoy this trading game. The important thing was to take time, not to be hurried into deals. Anyway it is like a theatre in which roles are assumed and something is played out. Eventually we returned to Marrakech and sold all the beads and silver in order that you could continue to travel together.

Before coming to Morocco, Moriko had worked in Central America as a precious stone buyer. It was a very dangerous business and as a consequence she had to work with a body guard. She told me that danger could be quite addictive and that the beauty of the stones, combined with constant danger had lodged inside of her in ways that she couldn’t really fathom. Eventually the whole region had just become to dangerous, but on returning to Tokyo, she found she could not settle back into the formality of concrete and stiff suits, so Africa was to be her next continent. The only true dangers I had faced had come from within, whilst she had lived with guns being drawn or threats on life being made. She used to laugh about macho man with their guns and threats, she said they had little else after that, that they were weak really, but this was also the secret of why they were dangerous. I couldn’t work her out, one moment she spoke as if she was Buddhist, the next moment she was fascinated by Sufism, and then she would go on about Heidegger, then there where days of silence. All I knew is that she was always in motion, whereas I just felt stiff. Sometimes she would just thump me and if I reacted angrily, she would say that she had punched me because I was angry and therefore needed a punch. She told me that if I had left Europe, then I should leave cause and affect behind as well because I was too literal about things. She also told me that I shouldn’t live as if I was in a picture all the time. On one occasion she said that I was a bit of a ghost and that she would leave me shortly because ghosts are difficult to be with. I lacked what she called conversation, even though I talked a lot. Perhaps her silences unnerved me.

So the day arrived when I awoke from a long sleep, to find a note from Moriko, telling me, that from now on, our journeys would go different ways. She wrote that I should find someone who could teach me how to breathe properly. It was a strange goodbye letter and there where things that I simply could not understand about her. Perhaps she didn’t need other people but simply accepted the circumstances of life. I imagined that she was going to return to South America, that she missed the dangerous life, and that it was this combination of exceptional beauty and danger that made her feel alive. But this was just my image.

So a year later I was back in London learning Kundalini Yoga in an Ashram. Before leaving, I had started some felt tip pen drawings and I returned to this, alongside making collages. The time with Moriko had given me the taste for trading and so I started to buy and sell Oriental works of art in order to make a living. To be honest I could not really have imagined the shape of my life now from the shape of my life ten or even five years previously. What if I hadn’t heard about someone’s journey to Morocco, saw those images in a book, been fascinated with an idea of living in another time, spent days in the desert, and then learnt to breathe properly? I feel that I might have been following a trail on the remote edges of my life because I was without a proper centre. So now my life was drawing in the morning, searching through salerooms in the afternoon, doing Yoga in the evening, mediating before sleeping. I must admit to missing Moriko though and our time in those vast open spaces, but that was now another time.