Jamie Lyons

Wanderlust along the Burma Road…

So I’m on the Burma Road with Kipling in one pocket and Orwell in the other, and already I know I’m fucked. Because I can’t un-read those guys, can’t unknow what they knew, what they got wrong, what they got right for all the wrong reasons.

Kipling saw empire and called it romance. Orwell saw empire and called it what it was: a boot, a lie, a slow rot. And here I am, a century later, trying to find something real in the space between their words and the actual red dust under my feet.

The thing is, I can’t not be a tourist. That’s the first myth I kill. I’m here, aren’t I? With my passport and my assumptions and my desperate need for this to mean something beyond the transaction. The local kid selling me warm Coke knows it. The woman making mohinga at dawn knows it. They’re kind enough not to say it.

What I can do, maybe, is shut up and pay attention. Eat what’s offered. Listen to the silence in the pagodas that isn’t really silence at all, just the absence of my own noise. Watch the light change over the Irrawaddy and understand that this river doesn’t give a damn about my literary references or my Instagram-worthy moment of clarity.

The Burma Road doesn’t care that I’ve read the right books. It just keeps going, like it always has, carrying the weight of things that happened here: the brutality, the beauty, the billion small human moments that never made it into anyone’s narrative.

I’m not Kipling. I’m not Orwell. I’m just here, trying not to be an asshole about it.

This is Burma and it is
unlike any land known about
Rudyard Kipling

Look at those elephants.

Seriously, look at them. Towering over the street like a dream made manifest, like something that crawled out of the collective unconscious and decided to take a walk. You think you understand puppets? You think they’re for children? You don’t know shit.

Most of us don’t want to admit that we’re all terrified of authenticity. I’m scared shitless of standing there, naked and human, saying what I actually mean or feel.  I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that. So we build these elaborate constructs, these papier-mâché gods, these cloth-and-bamboo avatars, and we make them tell our truths. Because if the puppet says it, if the elephant dances and sways and speaks in our voice but not with our face, maybe we can get away with saying what’s actually in our hearts without getting destroyed for it.

The puppet is the ultimate fuck-you to realism. It says: “You want truth? I’ll give you truth. But I’m gonna make it twelve inches tall and paint it in colors that don’t exist in nature, and you’re gonna believe it more than if I just stood here and talked to you like a regular human being.”

It’s the oldest magic trick in the book. The shaman knew it. The Greeks knew it. Every street performer in Myanmar to Fisherman’s Warf knows it. You want to tell someone their world is ending? Their god is disappointed? Their heart is breaking? Don’t just say it. Build something impossible, move it with your hands while hiding in shadows, and let it speak. Let the elephant stumble and cry. Let the demon rage. Let the lover sing.

Gentlemen,” returned Mr. Micawber, “do with me as you will! I am a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants- I beg your pardon; I should have said the elements.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Because here’s what Dickens understood, what everyone who’s ever pulled strings or worn a mask understands: we’re all just “tossed in all directions.” Life throws us around like we’re nothing. But when you make the elephant dance, when you take dead materials and breathe your own desperate humanity into them, you’re taking control. You’re saying, “Okay, chaos, you want to toss me around? Watch me make art out of it. Watch me make meaning.”

The puppet doesn’t pretend to be real. That’s its power. It announces itself as artifice, as construction, as made, and then it goes ahead and breaks your heart anyway. Maybe especially because of that honesty. It’s more real than real because it admits it’s fake.

These elephants in Myanmar aren’t trying to fool anyone. They’re obvious and utterly impossible. And that’s exactly why they work. That’s exactly why, when they move through the street, people stop and stare and remember something true about themselves they’d forgotten.

We need our puppets. We need our monsters and gods and elephants. We need something bigger than us to carry the weight of everything we can’t say out loud.

Wanderlust over a collapsing and swaying Myanmar bridge…

So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

You know that moment, and if you’ve really traveled, you know exactly what I’m talking about, when you realize that the universe is indifferent to your continued existence? When the thin veneer of Western safety standards, the illusion that someone, somewhere is looking out for you, just… evaporates?

I’m in a Soviet-era jeep that should’ve been decommissioned during the Nixon administration, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with five other souls. Locals who’ve made this crossing a hundred times and whose faces register the exact amount of concern the situation warrants: somewhere between “mildly inconvenient” and “probably fine.”

The bridge, and I use that term loosely, is a Frankenstein’s monster of rotting planks, rusted cable, and optimism. It’s swaying. Not gently. Swaying like it’s having second thoughts about this whole “being a bridge” thing. Below us, the river churns brown and indifferent, ready to receive whatever tribute we might offer.

The jeep creaks forward. Every plank groans its protest. I can see daylight through the gaps. My Western mind is screaming the very reasonable question: “Why the fuck am I doing this?”

But here’s the thing: this is why. This exact feeling. This cocktail of terror and exhilaration, this reminder that you’re alive in ways that climate-controlled offices and two-week vacation packages can never deliver. T.S. Eliot knew it: sometimes you leave your body on a distant shore. Sometimes you have to scare yourself awake.

The bridge holds. We make it. Of course we make it.

Until next time.

Look at this magnificent bastard suspended in mid-flight, caught between the ocean’s memory and some salaryman’s 3 AM craving. This is Tsukiji at 4 in the morning, when Tokyo’s still half-drunk and the only religion that matters is the one written in fish blood on concrete floors.

This icon of a tuna didn’t just die, it’s flying, one last airborne fuck-you before the auction block, before the knives, before it becomes another transaction in a city built on transactions. This is the real deal, the screaming heart of capitalism at its most honest, no spin, no marketing department, just raw tonnage of ocean meeting raw human need.

Tsukiji isn’t precious. It’s not a museum or a photo op, though tourists stumble through at dawn with their cameras. It’s men in rubber boots wielding blades like warriors, moving hundreds of pounds of flesh with the efficiency of assembly-line poetry, fast, tight, no wasted motion. The market smells like brine and ambition, where fortunes are made on weight and shimmer, where a single bluefin can cost more than your car. That is if you have a really nice car.

That flying tuna captures everything: grace, violence, commerce, mortality. The space between ocean and endpoint. Pure Tokyo. Pure everything. I think I’ve managed to catch what Kierkegaard warned against: actually seeing something instead of just gaping at existence.

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
Soren Kierkegaard, 1843

築地市場
Tsukiji Fish Market (Tokyo Fish Market)

I was fifteen when I spent that year in Italy. Fifteen, when you’re all elbows and hormones and terrible decisions, when everything imprints on you like wet concrete. And Italy didn’t just imprint. It branded me.

We lived in a villa in Fiesole. Fiesole, where the hills roll up from Florence and you can see the whole damn city spread out below you like God’s own postcard. The villa had once belonged to Mussolini’s mistress. Now it was filled with Stanford undergraduates, which is either poetic justice or cosmic irony, I’m still not sure which. The ghosts of fascist romance replaced by American kids trying to figure out how to order coffee without embarrassing themselves.

I was supposed to be going to the International School of Florence. “Supposed to” being the operative phrase. Some days I’d show up. Most days I’d just roam. Down the hill into Florence, getting lost in streets that had been there longer than my country had existed. Watching old men play cards in piazzas. Learning that a proper lunch could take three hours and nobody thought you were lazy. They thought you were civilized.

I didn’t understand what I was seeing then. The way people moved through the world like they had a right to be there, like pleasure wasn’t something you had to apologize for or schedule between therapy appointments.

Now I’m back, and I see this guy. This glorious bastard in a Speedo, on a moped, weaving through traffic like he’s conducting a symphony. Hair perfect. Not a care visible on his sun-bronzed face. And I think: could I ever be that free?

Because that’s what that year gave me. This permanent ache, this knowledge that there’s another way to be human. That you can just… be.

I learned it at fifteen, in a dead dictator’s mistress’s villa, while cutting school to watch Italians live. I’ve been chasing it ever since.

Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there.
Henry James The Portrait of A Lady