I visit the post office to buy postcards from a wrinkled old Tibetan lady. For me she wears a smile. It's nice to know that local postcards are sold in an area officially closed to tourists. I wander around for food supplies: cured meat, some cold cream and a penknife for opening packages and cutting wieners.

Back at the hotel, Oscar waits on the steps with his girlfriend from Montreal, Suzanne. They've given up on the improbable ride to Lhasa. Three days. Some tell them that a China Post truck can take them east.

Everyone is road-burdened. Oscar is dried up, and he has that forgetting-to-drink-water look that shocks the system of desert travellers. He's very much in his own dreams. His Suzanne is French-Canadian. Suzanne has pretty eyes, obviously a prime chase in her day. Oscar opens up in her presence, as he habitually mediates his thoughts through her. They've lived together long enough to read each other's minds before they speak. When you get past his defenses, the serious mien dissolves, revealing a boyish face and a mischievous, winsome wit.

Suzanne has iron hair and worries about running out of money. The local banks do not cash traveler's cheques this far out. The nearest Bank of China is in Kashgar, north, or Zhigatse, east: both cities are nearly 2000 kilometres away. No choice for Oscar and Suzanne, with only forty dollars cash... They need to beg a ride now. Their air of shy desperation is attractive, pitiable: everyone knows that inescapable fear of being caught in the middle of nowhere with nothing in your pockets.

Upstairs, Paul explains he's bound for Purang, a county near India, south of Mount Kailash. He has several sheets of photocopied instructions about hiking across the border. I tease him about the heavy load and suggest he dump everything. While he sorts, I wash clothes. Nothing to do but rest and talk. Paul likes my Kentucky-Virginia tobacco and explains Britain and India...

We lose the lights at 8:00 P.M., so I go out to find a candle. Ali is an all-night town. The hotel is switched off, but the disco-karaoke bars come alive, even this early. Defeating boredom is a major task for the countless soldiers stationed here. The discos are on the second floor of buildings up and down the main street. Chinese smooch music and loud electronic Western dance music pulses through the night: plenty of entertainment for off-duty guys and their working girls. On days off, soldiers come out to disco dance and get drunk with young women - Chinese and Tibetans both... Some of the girls look nineteen-fifties, with heavy stockings and ballooning dresses; maybe it's because most of them have the hefty comportment of big mamas, not the lithe delicacy you'd expect from a super-hot Asian. Okay, so a few of these girls are slim and up-to-date, sleekly draped, and wear softly painted faces. Daytime Ali wears a more ordinary face... The town is new, and its unusual variety of life completely reflects its total isolation. You can see everyone's daily routine: the itinerant poor Tibetans get up early to stand by the main intersection and wait for work even though there's almost none. Each one wields a shovel and wears his one and only set of clothing. Some taller guys wear their long hair wrapped up with the distinctive red strings of the Khampa - the eastern Nomads. These unemployed guys wait for gravel trucks to arrive, so they can try to get a day full of shovelling. In the marketplace you can find fresh vegetables for sale at subsidized prices, trucked in from a long way away. But while the shop streets are often busy with local people, most soldiers hide away in their barracks, standing guard, driving trucks, or marching around town - very early in the morning. Some of the army officers ride around on their vintage BMW olive-green motorcycles: they always sit very upright on the bikes, as if in a hurry to get somewhere fast to do something important - like smoke cigarettes and drink tea. Just like us! Sometimes you can see honchos as they are driven about in expensive land cruisers, busy as they are administering to the vast desert. Paperwork is still China's prestige occupation.

...I find a candle and it lights our room with a quiet glow. The gentle light disarms the mind, and warms the heart's voice. Even so, I learn that Paul has experienced about the same level of cynicism as I about the world, which isn't too bitter. He's only a couple of years younger. I'm happy just to relax my bent bones. The world can't chase us out here. Nobody is concerned for us. We can't be held accountable for each other's innocent predicaments, or for resignation to destiny. World-free knowledge is costly, and it defeats the expectations of lovers and families. A special independence. Paul studied art in England but he isn't missing anything much at home. His good girlfriend went to America. Left each other behind, dangling.

Unspoken life is so abundant. "Western intellectual freedom" floats, conceptually, on a large midnight ocean of beliefs and freedoms. We share a vast lexicon of readily available ideas and beliefs that comprise everything we know, from facts and figures to the capacity for subtly weighing the abstract limits of acceptable scientific or political truths. Yet, we are free to follow the world of imagination instead of the familiar routes prescribed by old laws and codes. Even believers wield a socially necessary skepticism. Everyone values understanding each other easily. So, we see how people share the secrets of a language, develop subcultures, or find security with a fashionable creed. Satisfying the deeper longing for community is important. We can feel each other out with a language quite in excess of the words we speak. It's a collective consciousness that comes before and after experience; it's made primarily from all the comforting, conventional intuitions of our hyper-conscious age. We seem to know more than we really do.

But I suspect our new wisdom isn't wisdom after all. It's a faith in persuasions and shared sensations more than it is any certainty based upon true insight or wide experience. We excel at the imitation of knowledge, so we can build imaginary truths from wishes and fantasies. So many experts and professionals are so named because blessed with nothing more than a great nose for fakery, or even, commercial viability. Imaginative ingenuity often amounts to a talent for monitoring the cleverness of society's excuses.

The feel we have for past experience is about the same for winners and saints as it is for losers and psychos. Poets, priests and politicians - all the same. The surplus and lack of residual joy and bitterness best expresses perhaps the only difference between the extremes of human fortune that identify each experience as personal. It is emotive and physical: blessed with bounty or cursed by deprivation...

Knowledge is made of so many agreeable and disagreeable things. In this respect, we suffer our knowledge, and we cannot simply describe its sensibility overtly; intelligence has a nature most positively conveyed via feelings of mutual affinity. Put two artists in the same bog, and they'll usually find each other...

Paul and I have found each other without much difficulty. It's a relief for us, since we have to knock off that familiar encrustation of solitude and lonely despair. He's unwilling to admit me at first, but maybe that's because my jabber reveals nothing about my inner man, but only distracts him with obvious, glib observations.

Amidst such reflections a reason appears in the glass to explain all of my mock-extroversion. This new reason is inspired by that weird experience - meeting some stranger who already "knows" me... (...that is: somebody who "knows" who I am without really knowing me, never having met me before, or worse, somebody who pretends to know me so well that I can't possibly go on knowing myself better afterwards...) Then what do I do? Laugh at myself, for I've always felt a monkey; that's to say, I've always felt all my attempts at original thought remain a derivative fantasy - a long, drawn-out sort of preparation for art that I may never be capable of producing. Now: before laughter drowns the last of my thoughts, let me point out that the selfish nature of our compulsions - like the great fame and wealth we are obliged to acquire - all these distractions that have nothing to do with making art, and all the worldly and naive motives, they collude to destroy our compass with false promises, spanning not the gulf of our dreams, but unleashing the full force of unforeseen disasters. The result: we make ourselves bad - nobody else does.

Without owning up to our weaknesses, we are monkeys without wanting to be. Only if you master your faults can you gain wisdom.

When the great Blake - that plebeian scribe who saw the world for what it really was, and didn't care to flinch or subscribe to the opinions of his contemporary betters, who much-reviled him or didn't bother to know him at all, since he had nothing to lose or win, but only an expression to create - when he put those inimitable words, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," into the mouth of the devil, and into the spirit of his terrible Nobodaddy, he did it for one very good reason: only if we can see through the deceit we share with one another can we come upon true progress... The devil persuades us to follow our senses to the breaking point of human limitation so that we cannot possibly forge a return to the good soul - the inner heart of our purely natural and divine destiny; and worse, the devil wants to deceive us for having begun as good beings, and not simply as "already-fallen" victims of ignorance and emotion, resignation to which only perverts the meaning of our graceful design with forgetfulness and inverted dreams.

Paul isn't about to "know" me too well, and he assumes nothing true or false about me. That feels good. Paul and I lie on our respective beds, softly smoking tobacco, sipping beer and smiling our words into air that doesn't listen to us. He and I alone can hear each other tonight, and it feels good to live for that private intimacy...

I have said nothing about poetry and writing to Paul. Isn't he lucky! The poets are far away from us. That's fine, relax - not to kill ourselves with memories of pleasure, remorse and helplessness. (Failures are more capable of looking askance at their vocation than serious-minded successes. Witness a windbag like Nabokov when he has the misfortune to write an introduction to one of his finer novels: he doesn't care a whit for this or that writer, and he's "indifferent about the Orient..." Too seriously right for his own good!)

Paul doesn't need to say very much when I ask him about his feelings for India. He points out that he feels more comfortable in India than anywhere else in the world. Now, I've never been to India, and may never get there, but I do want to go. He says that India and its people - especially the way everything looks and tastes - appeals to him very much. Paul has crossed China off his list, and says he's disappointed. But he hasn't really seen the big, populous and abundant wealth of Hunan and Jiangsu anymore than he's visited the pine mountains of Yunnan or the minority villages of Guizhou. As for all those people, he only suspects a few things about them - but doesn't really have much of any clue...

I think he sold himself on India because he needs to feel he has a home waiting for him somewhere. He likes to visit Bodhgaya at Christmas, in the poor state of Bihar. There, he and his English buddies gather at a certain monastery, the Burmese Vihar, to remind each other, I suppose, that they come from home and speak the same tongue. I try to picture this scene, but can't really. While all people are all "the same" - and so must easily know each other - you can never imagine how others actually live until you join them. You can conjure up all sorts of images, yet those ideas inevitably correspond to how you would live in that situation if you were he or she... I imagine several thin guys, sitting round on cushions, smoking and drinking, reading books, talking about anything that comes to mind, but not talking too fast and never hurrying. That's what I want to see: people never in a hurry. I need to see Paul and his buddies being very relaxed, unfazed, untaxed, free of judgement, free of dreams and free of speech - with no worries. Pardon the idyll.

Paul tells me of the pleasure he got watching the world walk by, one day, maybe it was Varanasi, in the square, high on hashish. Time isn't so interesting as emotions freed of schedules and routines. He gives me no bad memories and looks forward to going back to India soon. He talks so positively about the place that I start thinking maybe I can go, too. He wants to paint postcards for money. Some of his friends keep a guesthouse in the mountains. A nice way to live, if you don't mind cleaning up after others all the time.

I ask Paul about the current art scene in Britain. He wants to make me to laugh. The popular people have strangely changed names. They sound like cartoon characters, actually. They are skillful at gimmicky art - one-liner visuals with punch-drunk subtexts. Fuck it. What do I know? All I know is that this kind of boring writing, unlike their art, doesn't exactly compel people to give me a lot of money for doing something absolutely fucking silly, now does it?

Anyway, Paul isn't missing or missed. He's a loner by choice. His girlfriend went to work in a New York gallery. A lot of attractive-bright women end up working in galleries: I suppose it's next best thing to becoming a fashion model, and one step up from being just another shop girl. In the minds of such prime beauties and money-laying successes, Paul and I don't exist. In fact, his girlfriend has already forgotten him. He won't say as much. Poor guy, he needed her. She can lead a life of disillusionment, too.

But men never will understand women well enough, will we? Women always know how to be wise and leave losers for winners. Even though they may not want to have kids, it's always something like a procreative urge driving them to the strongest protector. Besides, women want to feel more like winners than men, but perhaps that's because women are raised to be insecure and dependent, which is a traditionally and legally upheld paradox. (Society lives in the thrall of male winners, notwithstanding that most big men of the world really are dickheads ...ah, forget it...) ...Especially attractive-bright women: oh, they can't bear the notion of even a little bit of public embarrassment, or even imagining ever going about with poor losers. The main point is: you seldom meet an intelligent woman who is independent enough to be completely free of what other people think, unless she already believes that she's in love with you... So, nothing in the world is new, at all - ever. How many girlfriends did Dante have? The yawns happen. I start rambling to Paul about my favorites, and since Paul is fascinated with Buddhism, I suggest William James, "The Psychology of Religious Experience." As for my top five faves - I needn't mention them here... I'm a lousy student... "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" - Walter Benjamin. One is enough.

Paul is a bit too certain of his point-of-view, which is normal for a man who lives to run away. I'm actually closer to his way of seeing and justifying himself than I permit myself the uneasiness to realize. Our conversation gets past good and bad memories: it flows too quickly. Not the gaze of a predictable script about the coolness of being alive, nor about the dreams moving our lives. Talk jumps all over the place: the subjects reveal predilections and obsessions. ...Age steals the dreams of youth. Are you at that stage yet: too certain about what you think is right and wrong about the world? It's like a dream: because I'm detached, and can't forget enough, so, I will remain underdone... Paul's stage wants to imagine that none of the knowledge we have gained actually leads us to wisdom. I'm closer to Paul than any certainty. Humans only pretend to genius.

Paul tells me one particularly horrible tale about something that happened as he drove to Ali from Kashgar. Some local police stopped them to extort money from everyone. It was night. The savage officers dragged one of the Tibetan ladies from the jeep into an office. The frantic driver collected money from all the passengers. By the time he paid off the police, the woman was brought back with bruises to her stomach and a black eye. Many Chinese people are control freaks and can be monstrously mean when they want to get something. The sick thing is that they do it with such cunning. Yet, seldom will police do anything bad to white foreigners: the Chinese play at double standards and will show all the great face they can muster for us. But with local folk, the cops are cavalier and frequently terrorize peasants - who have no option but submission to cutthroat authority. Sometimes, it's really depressing to be white and feel too privileged. Impoverished people are helpless the world over, but they are never more desperate and silently cowed as those who suffer a colonial miasma so trumped-up as China's control over Tibet...

I talk too fast, about the futility of being a writer, and how there are so many "bad" agents in New York City, as if I know. I know nothing about it really - but I explain how literary agents will "promise" to look for a publisher if you pay a 200 dollar fee. But what you don't know is that they already plan to send back your work very much untouched with an apology about how unmarketable it is, or that it needs "more work," or that you should come down a notch in your expectations, and other randomly generated bits of dum-dum for the usual amateurs who cannot quite grasp what it takes to transform themselves into a popular hack...