Once upon a time there was a man named Stephan Icarus. He used to tell himself, I am Stephan Icarus. I have a double-dozen of years. I am an American. I am in India. I will soon return to America. He knows that he can no longer be a praiser of his own past.

Stephan was reading the newspaper this afternoon. Fish were popping up on the surface of Lake Rewalshid. A recent pilgrimmage to the lake, including a speech given by H.H. the D.L. in front of 44k, initiated the annual fish-feeding. The ardency of devotion was linked to a mass of bellyups. Sacred lake. Overdevotion? Underunderstanding? He scratched into the margins something he'd read once...

The soul has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, and religion. I shall try to fly by these nets.

Stephan is not sure if he disremembers the event. The complication is not forgetfulness, it is rather bandits on the highway of recollection. He remembers disremembering a story from a friend about monkeys and monks. A realization that the mindmush has trained itself well to find fortuitous fruit. He took it as his habit. The tendency to unearth in the language of memory ambered wines. He remembers when he saw a strange sparrow beg for food, which summoned a query of disbelief in all things. Not a convert, nor a pervert. Just a soulseeking no soul, or no suffering. No meaning? Apparently.

And so amongst a crowd of smileys did Stephan catch a pair of lynxeyes across the room, and knew that, whether in life or in revery, he had heard their tale before. On the way over to her company, he glanced out the window and pined for a view of seadusk, yet there was no sea.

He had just completed several days of study: the sacredness of lakes in the Tibetan Plateau. Kate advised that Tibetan iconography contains frequent reference to a triad of creatures, one of which is the chu-srin which when lips move they say chu-sing. Like when you hurriedly tell someone you're choosing when it is obvious that you have no choice. The choosing is a creature part alligator and part conch shell. Part figure, part litter. Uhl. You choose.

The cider wasn't helping. The game felt old. The efforts redoubled, were rewarded with some success, but still there were cramps when the subject of lakes came up. Stephan mentioned the newspaper article, for reasons of refutation with a manylayered me-mind. I am American. I am at a pub. I am in exile. I am not a cynic.

The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.

But it is time to put the shoulder to the wheel, Stephan sd, with his most skintight accent. Mere disconfidence did not a contradiction make. And so he continued. He began to name places like mTsho-sngon-po and Khri-bshos-rgyal-mo and Lake Kokonor and Queen Who Flooded Ten Thousand. Even in the best of days, there were always too many names for one thing. Too many thoughts on one place. But this was an important place. A site of gnas-skor, a sacred land, site of many a bla-ri. And, to the foreign tongue, it is best thought of as Blue Lake, since that's what the Tibetan exiles in Dharamsala call it. Stephan didn't like cider. He preferred unsuitable pairs. Such as the taste of proper ale and glycerine-laced epiphanes. DharamTibetans preferred the taste of glycerine-laced beers, English, simple translations, and power shortcuts. So it is Blue Lake.

Soon Stephan found in the forced music and forced ambience of a ski-lodge without snow, the regurgitations of his discoveries. And by their proclamations, they nearly became dear. The Gaelic word for deer is the same as the word for God.

Dear Dedalus, if Stephan were ofamind, he would stand up and address the ski lodge without any snow:

If there were no serpent deities in Lake Anavatapta What would become of the rivers flowing in the world? If tehre were no rivers, flowers and fruits would not be produced The manifold precious forms in the ocean would not even exist.

There are many rivers flowing in the world, and
They cause forests and medicinal herbs with flowers and fruits to grow,
This depedns upon the Lord of serpent deities who lives in Anavatapta
The power and glroy fo that Lord of serpent deities exists there.

-Phags pa bsdud pa

But he does not stand. He does not know how to pronounce the name of the text he cites. Phags pa bsdud pa. He keeps it to himself. So it goes when one word borrows another. Let there be known the Blue Lake, largest in Amdo province, in the demarcated borders of China. It was created when a Tibetan King commissioned a temple. The temple collapsed during construction. Construction began anew, but collapsed again. The collapse occured a third time, and the King sent an emissary lama to find a wise man of the woods. The Tibetan lama found an old man who knew the secret, but, out of fear of catastrophe, would not tell it to any Tibetan lama. Out of deception, the emissary states that he is not. So flowed the forbidden knowledge: under the foundation of the intended temple was an underground lake. The emissary, overjoyed, returned quickly to the homeland, only to find that the lake had overflowed and killed ten thousand people. This Mongolian legend hints at the lake's name. But it is Blue Lake. So this is discorrect.

There is another legend, Stephan continued, without any tone of disappointment. A Tibetan minister asks his son to fetch water from a spring which is covered by a very large stone. Don't forget to cover it, he says. Natch, it is forgotten, and the spring floods the entire plateau. A siddha... or was it Padmasambhava... or was it Guru Rinpoche? throws a mountain on it to stop the flow. Hence we have Blue Lake. It's central island is the remainder of the mountain that ceased the flood. This too, of course, is discorrect.

Intellect would continue to flow, without a mountain to cover it. Like many discorrections, The BBC proved last year that the highland insurrection was groundless. Military sonar shows that Loch Ness contains no Nessie. Few anymore recognize or appreciate the beauty of a tautology. (They might not be discorrect.)

Beauty, to Aquinas, was three things: wholeness, harmony, and radiance.

Stephan would state at this point, that he was an American, and who is he to declare, as an exile, where truth was. But at this point, it should be sd, he sd after she sd, that the theme of a maleficent lake that impedes the transmission (conversion? spread? impregnation?) of Buddhism within the Tibetan Plateau, is a common theme of Tibetan mythology. Consider Machig Zhama, whose health was restored after releasing a lake, removing a blockage and redirecting a lake into the valley. The lake was called bdud-mo mtsho and yum-mtsho and lake of the demoness and lake of the mother. Again, many names for one thing. Here was where Lhasa was founded in the 11th century. Herein is the foundation of Lhasa. Herein is Tibetan culture forevermore forasitwere. Profundity? That would be discorrect.

But who is he to know? He does not stand. He sits, and wonders if the exiled hippies with newreligion know that Tibetans demarcate skyworld from humanworld from serpentworld below. Do they know? Would they, in a pinch, use their Tibetan prayer flags for toilet paper if they needed to use the squat hole? He does not know.

He knows that there are klu that inhabit the water bodies. Are they upset that Kokonor was massively polluted in 1974? Will the klu retain their prophecy: that if Yamdrok Tso dries up the entire population around it will die? These are the legends. This is why people still offer serpent daily medicine (klu-sman) and serpent ritual cakes (klu-gtor). One sounds like a famous German footballer. The other sounds like a bathroom cleaner. Ibid.

Stephan knows all of this is roughshod. He cleans his mind and considers the alternatives, and wonders wherewhatnext. Sometimes, when Mr. Icarus walks the streets back home, he wonders if he has found any perch of significance. Or if he is only the vagabonding sparrow that settles under the awnings of others. Perhaps it is better that the mind not applaud itself, afterall applause echoes until it sounds something like dwarven artillery.

Disheartening.

P.S. Stephan owes much gratitude to a dead man named Jim, words printed by a multinational Peguin. Conceived long ago in France, printed recently in America and purchased in San Francisco. Traded, illegally, in Buenos Aires, by a lawyer who knows of the fine print that no one reads in the first page of every ISB with an ISBN. Stephan thanks them, because they are not in his company and a whiskeyed conversation with them would be enlightening.

P.P.S. It takes potatoes to make whiskey. Potatoes are indigenous to the Andes. Jim doesn't care. Jim is dead.