Directed Chaos

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In Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" a cohort of townmen open the earth in remote country to find a bolus of writhing snakes -- they set kerosene and flames to them, just to watch the mute burning of evil, or its effigy, or its physicality outside of themselves, recognized by its own same slithering energy within. (Most men in history have done the same thing at some point, whether it was the bombing of Dresden or the smashing of a roach on the kitchen floor.)

Feeding the fish at this "holy pond" at Bhaktupur, a town out in the Kath Valley, reminded me of that scene. The human fascination with watching the surfacing fish - an occasional orange coy but mostly brackish brown slick shiny muscular and snakelike - as they suck at rice krispies thrown through their roof and bully each other for position, is somehow as I imagine those snakes in the fictional ground. You throw the rice puffs over and over just to watch them reemerge heaping and thrashing and knocking each other off - a scene going on in every one of our cells, and in euro cup soccer matches, in public swimming pools throughout America in summer, in the crowd at rock concerts, and in every Kathmandu traffic jam. The rising and receding, maybe not of pure evil but of directed chaos. People sit at the edge of the pond and lose themselves in it for hours.