Mauritius - Returns at Mahébourg

Mauritius – Returns at Mahébourg

It is the lull of the late afternoon.  Clotting clouds have gathered around the monolith of Le Morne and, as they attempt to rise higher - heavy and hulking - the sky gives way and begins to drip with the first rains of tropical moisture.  Flowers begin to sing with a vibrant hue; I can see whites, yellows, purples and a deep magenta surrounded by a myriad of palm tree greens.  Each leaf stirs to an unseen breeze; birds smooth out slow, soft trills.  

I am too relaxed to read; too content to think; blissed out by the same love of Mauritian landscape that ripened the Romantic writing of Jacques Bernadin de Saint-Pierre almost 250 years ago.  There is something magical about being in Mauritius which always makes my heart feel it is in a sacred space.

The philosopher Joseph Campbell often spoke about discovering your bliss in sacred spaces – an awareness that you are being guided by hidden hands through open doors towards a path which seems to have been waiting for you.  Once you find this path then stay with it; journey towards the thing your heart really wants... no matter what. When you follow bliss, you arrive in bliss.  Poets are redefined by him as those souls who have managed to make a profession and a lifestyle out of being in touch with their bliss. 

Mauritius is the place where my original Siesta del Somewhere began in 2007.  Points of origin, like points of departure, have the potential to transform us forever.  We are reminded of Odysseus, hero of Ancient Greece, who on finally returning to his island home of Ithaka is unrecognisable to his beloved wife, Penelope.  Whenever we return ‘home’ something of it, and something of us, has changed. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre left France in 1768 an engineer; he arrived back in Paris three years later as a writer, already crafting his Mauritian love story Paul et Virginie.  When we travel, we collect stories and experiences to share, creating negotiations of space in which these exchanges can touch, affect and transform ourselves as well as others. 

We could possibly even argue that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had discovered his own bliss in Mauritius, and was able to carry it home to France.  There, it continued to speak to his heart, enabling him to create a new life for himself in familiar surroundings – understanding in the echoes of Psalm 87: ‘All my springs are in thee.’

Sitting here now, watching shadings of rain fall far out across the boom of surf near the horizon, I reflect upon a painting I had seen earlier today, at a museum in Mahébourg.  It depicted Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s characters Paul and Virginie.  While looking at it, I remembered having bought the novel on my last day in Mauritius in 2007 – at the airport bookshop.  I read it as my plane flew across African skies towards Europe.  Each word I encountered on that flight made me fall in love with the book more and more.  Even now, I still find more and more to love about that book each time I read it – discovering something new about it and me... the same way we do about our loved ones (when we stop and look closely enough).

Standing in front of that painting today, I realised just how much that book and that initial visit to Mauritius had helped create the life I was now enjoying:  writing a PhD thesis on travel literature in which Bernadin de Saint-Pierre played a minor but influential role... back in Mauritius writing... watching how following bliss had played a minor but influential role in everything that happened the moment I left here in 2007 and continues to unfold now.  One book, one island, and a billion new possibilities every day.  How much I love this place.

The Indian Ocean

Just a Perfect Day, just like the perfect way Lou sung songs of sangria for: deep, black sleep – no dreams, no allegories to clean… only the unending depths of rest carried through towards the light of mango dawn woken wide with espresso and friends’ laughter… Stretched out in sunshine, dreaming of sleep on Cottesloe sands, the songs of Krishna blue call in steady waves of azure – the same silk waters that Robert Edouard-Heart wrote his poems for, far from here, looking out across the Indian Ocean from his Mauritian home…those sacred, sunlit waters, gin-soaked and sapphired, emerald and clean…

Tous les songes d’Asie,                       All the dreams of Asia,

tous les parfums d’Afrique,                 All the perfumes of Africa,

toute la poésie

chimérique                                          All the chimeric poetry

me viennent ce soir avec cette brise    Comes to me tonight

de la Mer Indienne.                             with the breeze of the Indian Ocean.

In front of the Indiana Teahouse I watch wave upon wave wash ashore.  Waves move in on heavy sighs, crash flat on sand in claps of silence.  Again and again, and again.  Out at sea, dancing sunlight cools on a morning breeze.  Ships and distant shorelines fade from view.  The shimmering blues move through the colours of ocean, so clear from where I look. This beautiful, beautiful ocean – there is no ocean like the Indian Ocean; linking lands, joining continents, merging the common prayers of all people and all religions together through an exchange of language, coastline and the narratives we all share.  There is no ocean like the Indian Ocean.

A faint breeze drifts in, cooling wet skin, still warm with sunshine surrounding it.  The sea is so clear, so pure, so flat today, so calm, so sunlit, so alive – moving with curves, curling with swirls, movement hypnotic for a moment, for a lifetime.  Far out in the deep beyond, just in front of me, just in front of Rottnest Island, a solitary tall, white sail glides past in silence, arching along the horizon’s crescent moon.

And then beneath the aqua marine: weightless, breathless, silence.  Curtains of sunlight billow and move through the jades, through the gin, through the Krishna blue.  Now is the dream.

Tahiti - Beach

Sunrise.  I woke at dawn and walking at first light here along Lafayette Beach I watched the morning colours change.  A yellow sky waiting for a yellow sun, reflecting floating hues on the surface of this ocean.  


Just magical.  Just incredible.    Bits of blue, green, shining emerald, a ruby light, then far out to sea, giant clouds, sometimes black sometimes white, move without sound across the horizon, passing between me and the island of Mo’orea.  Regular breaths of surf crash ashore and distant songs of a ukulele murmur against the lapping shore.

Midday.  The sun is moving overhead.  The beach looks incredible now.  Black sand shines with the glint of golden sheen, flecks of yellow inside the blackness of Tahitian ash.  A yellow sun high in a yellow sky, reflecting light in the flat endless ocean.  Pebbles and stones rattle together as they are dragged back and forth through the rolling shoreline.  Kids play in the surf beyond the break.  A fisherman loads up his bait. A coconut floats out to sea.  There is no breeze.  All is breathless.  All is still.  Slowly, slowly, jet lag overtakes and I sleep again in the warmth of this soft, volcanic sand.

Siesta.  Asleep on the beach I have officially turned 40 somewhere else in this world.  My birthday begins here in Tahiti at midnight tonight, but it happened 18hours ago in Australia and 12hours ago in Europe.  Too much time and time passes too slow, too slowly for time to think.  Stuck in the depths of a dream where treasure maps spin through hearts and minds, whispering clues, coursing out paths in journeys wide enough to keep you on track towards an ultimate X marked out in the sand.  

Places like this do exist.  Stretched out on the black sand I sleep in the shade of the day. Yesterday’s jelly-fish sting still rings raw across my back as the sun pins and needles its blistered ache.

This is why we travel: to journey, to pilgrimage, to open ourselves to others and new surroundings, to open our hearts, to open ourselves to the shared vulnerability of being alive – allowing unseen lives to pass alongside us and in some small way, touch us forever.  If such places call to you, then go.  The world is a grand dimension restricted only by our imaginings. 

Sunset.  The sun is dipping behind a huge bank of thick grey clouds, causing a purple haze to emit sunshine and shadows around the island of Mo’orea. It drops from the heaven onto the ocean like a giant curtain – pulling the end of the afternoon as evening approaches.  People slowly leave the beach now.  The light has dipped a lot, and disappears quickly here on the equator.  The air is filled with the sounds of a cooing dove as distant thunder keeps sounding.  Flat thunder claps of sonic boom.  Bright flashes of sheet lightning blink behind the cloud bank as the storm broods. Some kids from France sit further up on the sand playing a guitar, all singing Bob Dylan’s ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door.’

The thunder keeps sounding and the sky changes colour again.  Some blue, some pinks, some yellows.  All reflecting on a silent South Pacific Ocean – as ever the sand is black, ash black.  A huge crescent moon begins to rise.

Mauruuru, Tahiti.

Tahiti - Gauguin

Gauguin

In 1891, a French painter raised in Peru set up home here, near a lagoon at Mataiea not far from where I am now standing.  Paul Gauguin had gambled much on painting.  His wife had already disowned him; he had abandoned a successful career in the Paris Stock Exchange; and, had seen his friend, Vincent van Gogh first cut off his lobe at a house they shared in Arles, before hearing news that the Dutchman had taken his own life.  

Little wonder, on the eve of his departure to Tahiti, he was quoted as saying, ‘I am leaving to find peace, to rid myself of the influence of civilisation…I want to create art… To do that I need to renew myself in unspoiled nature.’ 

Here at Mataiea there is a museum dedicated to Gauguin.  It houses replicas of his paintings – such as his most famous Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? – along with authentic photographs, sketches, notebooks and wooden carvings.  Despite illness and financial problems, Gauguin painted 66 canvases here, before sailing briefly back to Paris and returning here in 1895.  In 1900 he settled on Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas Islands, building his own studio ‘Maison du Jouir,’ and is now buried there, following his death in 1903.

For me, the story of Gauguin has always been inspirational.  I first read about him in W. Somerset Maugham’s fictional representation, The Moon & Sixpence, while working at a call centre in London almost 20years ago, searching for the courage to follow my own dreams of writing.  

Avoiding the moral judgements concerning his decisions to forgo his responsibilities and securities in Europe, it always struck me as admirable to be prepared to follow a passion to the ends of the Earth – especially when we are surrounded by so many who seem able to give good lip service to the pursuit of dreams, yet seldom do anything about working towards them.

Being here at Mataiea reminds me almost of CP Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaka’ – where we are reminded that it is the journey towards our dreams that is more important than the actual realisation of them.

I look now at these slow moving waters of this lagoon and see the same colours reflected and refracted through them as Gauguin must have seen all that time ago.  The black sand, shimmers with flecks of gold coral; the ocean deep with flat patches of blues, bottle greens sinking down, as a hue of pink forms in its curling foam. 

Same place, same colours, same sounds.  

In 1894 Gauguin wrote in Noa Noa, his Tahitian Diary, ‘I am learning to know the silence of Tahiti.  In this silence I hear nothing except the beating of my heart. I understand why people can remain seated for hours and days gazing at the sky.’