Deepak rides his motorbike from Pushkar to help with a friend’s wedding on the outskirts of Ajmer, but his familiar route has sprouted an irregular police post with two officers. Deepak has no helmet.

“We will see your papers,” says one officer, while the other remains seated nearby on a plastic chair.

“My papers are home in Pushkar,” says Deepak.

“Your license then,” says the officer.

“It is home too.”

“You can not ride without a helmet.”

“But I am not entering the city. My friend’s wedding is nearby.”

This excuse almost always works. Weddings are important events. Even police must marry. Besides, the law only applies if you are in the city.

“You can not ride without a helmet.”

“But I can not walk back to Pushkar. I must go to the wedding. It is close.”

“You need a helmet.”

“I have no helmet,” says Deepak. “Maybe some money?”

“Police do not take baksheesh. You need a helmet.”

“I have no helmet. Can you give me an option?”

“There is a shop over there that sells helmets,” says the officer, and motions to a shop near to where the other officer remains seated.

Deepak puts his motorbike on its kickstand and walks to the shop. He takes a 100 rupee note from his pocket.

He hands the shopkeeper the money.

“Helmets are 250 rupees,” says the shopkeeper.

“Helmets are always 100 rupees,”

“They are 250 today.”

“Why are the helmets more today?”

The shopkeeper smiles.

“Ask the policemen why the helmets are 250 rupees,” he says.

My poems have little meaning here in India. For example:

Buddy Jones took a corner too tight,
sailed off the ramp in his half-ton,
graceful as a bomb.

There would be no comprehension of the word buddy, or recognition of the commonplace nature of the name Jones. The juxtaposition would be meaningless - there would be no good ole boy behind the wheel of his truck. Speaking of which, to foster a better understanding, half-ton could be changed to truck, but that would ruin the slant rhymes throughout. There is no possibility of sailing trucks, no seeing in the mind’s eye a F150 that floats for an instant midair, much less being able to make any connection to a prairie boy’s dreams of the sea - which is a stretch in any case. The word ramp would not be understood as a highway exit because there are no overpasses on Indian highways (there are plans for such structures, but the work progresses like a snail caught in molasses). And bombs, well, they could not be perceived as even remotely graceful here in South Asia.

My math means much the same - nothing. To say that my net income, as it is in Canada, borders the poverty line, is ludicrous in view of the poverty in India. As a wandering merchant who spends many nights sleeping in a tent or a vehicle while on the road at festivals in Western Canada, my neighbours consider me a poor soul. But my neighbours have not seen entire families huddled together on the side of the road with only a tarp for shelter, or families who live in buildings still under construction, like the people I saw in Delhi who washed every foggy morning under a hose dragged to a street drain. They were fortunate, because it is also possible to wash their laundry with the hose. I watched one evening from across the street as they gathered around a fire in an open room on the ground floor. The fire was fuelled by discarded construction materials, a luxury, like their jobs are a luxury - working barefoot in the damp and draughty bamboo-scaffolded shell of a four-storied, hand-poured cement structure. Their temporary residence is a luxury because, after the construction is complete, they will have no home.

I read somewhere that, in the Hindu religion, there are 300 million names for god, but that’s an ancient sum. If the number was meant to represent the incarnations of each and every one of us, it is grossly out of whack. Even if that’s not the case, the sum could be a one or two million miscalculation, up or down. Whatever, who in a single lifetime could name all those gods, much less understand their attributes? But maybe that’s the point? I certainly don’t know.

This short essay took root one afternoon in a hotel garden in Jaipur, after reading a short story by Rainer Maria Rilke, from a book called Stories of God. The story is about a ghetto in Venice where, because there is no room to expand the ghetto outward, it must grow upward, room build over room over room until the view from the top, over the buildings of Venice, is of the masts in the harbour. An old Jewish goldsmith, the kindly patriarch of the ghetto, has an agreement to always live in the highest room. One day, a room is added to the top, and the old man and his young daughter have a view over the masts to the sea. The daughter brings her newborn and illegitimate son onto the roof of the high room, into the sun and the clear air to watch the sea. Of course, this is a very poor explantion of Rilke’s story, and can not convey what a miraculous thing it is to catch a glimpse of the sea from a Jewish ghetto in Venice.

The instant that I finished the story, from some high minaret, came a resonant call to prayer. And, I thought: what a strange place it is to be reading Rilke’s Stories of God, in a hotel garden in Jaipur, in India, a land where the gods are legion. It was one of those moments that settle as if carried by a gentle breeze, followed by the desire to share the unshareable.

I get everything wrong here. Mostly, I am at a loss for figures or words. To a naive western man like myself, a writer and artist who has spent most of his creative energy in a search for the heart of his homeplace in the Canadian landscape, real and virtual, India is incalculable and indecipherable. The very idea that I might make my writings, much less my poems, understood by everyone in the world, not academics or other poets, but to people I meet here, people who ask what it is I do, what is my job, leads to a certain paralysis of thought. Maybe, though, I am in good company, because Rilke’s sonnets would likely be just as meaningless to millions of people on this vast sub-continent.

outside the slave market
a man with no arms or legs
dressed in clean white linen
lay on a wheeled wood slab
his head in a porcelain bowl
faced sideways, smiling

For reasons hard to explain, I spent several years photographing the cemeteries of Western Canada. When asked why, I have no slick answer: I did not set out to pursue such a study. Nonetheless, I traveled tens of thousands of miles: highways, gravel roads, mud and dirt trails. Fort Assiniboine to Val Marie, Hinton to Dauphin, each year a different route. I shot countless frames of film, wrote reams of journal entries, and jotted marginal notes on county maps. I even wrote a book.

For years I kept those maps and journals in a box in the basement. But events conspired and I recently gained some square footage in the basement ( my partner calls it my mancave ). The maps have been torn and stapled to a carboard wall - the prairies remixed - a giant grid ripped to shreds. Hundreds of churches, cemeteries, and relic settlements are circled. Some margin notes have been preserved. There was plan of sorts. It was fun. I had to find some way to deal with those damn maps. I have an idea what to do with the negatives and slides, too - but that’s for another time.

I have always been fascinated by artist’s books. My mancave is chock full of artifacts ready to morph into more than merely stacks of stuff. But, in the meantime, the marginal notes and journal entries have become poems. In bookish, a digital media collaboration with babel, those poems have been broken into random lines that appear on the facing page of a book-like interface. The adjoining page repeats a database of funerary images. Keyboard score is by my rock’n'roll buddy, Dennis Meneely.

Bookish is an electronic artists’ book. Click on image: