I have my heart in my throat as I scurry around doing my last minute planning for a trip to Istanbul next week. Along with travel guides and language dictionaries, I stumbled upon a lovely epistolary novel by artist and librarian Katherine Branning. She created an imaginary correspondence with Lady Mary Montagu (1689-1762), a British woman of letters who wrote home extensively about Turkey. It's a bridge to telling Branning's own story about contemporary life and her experiences there over 30 years.
The book shares snippets of Lady Motagu's letters, which are detailed and delightful, but I find that the passage I most needed to read was the one explaining her goal of the book. It consists of a kind of scold: p. 4 "I do not wish to bore the reader with travelogue stories of the petty absurdities and pesky frustrations of travel: the gippy tummy, the missed planes and buses, the lost money or camera...I do not wish to relate lengthy and boring stories that lead the reader down a circuitous route to make a mocking point about how odd the customs of the land are, nor do I want to skewer Turkish pride by telling contemptuous or comical stories. I just wan to relate some of the stories that have happened to me and what they mean to me...
p. 5 "My years of travel and my entire professional career in cross-cultural relations have taught me much, the biggest lesson being that one must tread very lightly when walking in or talking about foreign lands and people. I have learned that your viewpoint on the world is always tainted by the perspectives that you carry inside of you, inherited from your native land and from your upbringing. When you are confronted by an unexplainable situation, you must take a deep breath and stand back from it, and then remove your Western hegemonic eyeglasses. Then, and only then, can you start to analyze what is theirs, yours, and the truth."
That first bit stings a little because much as I try to evolve past being the person on her social network complaining about being stuck in traffic, I have been guilty of boring the reader with my trials and tribulations on the road. Likewise, I am quick to bite when I perceive a cultural joke. I hope my readers and friends will be patient with me since I'm learning as I go. This passage, from a chapter in which the author contemplates Islam, is another favorite of mine:
p. 225 "We all search for a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, and finding that truth can take many paths, religion being one of them. Everyone on earth - the atheist, the pious , or the agnostic - possesses some form of spiritual impulse. Everyone seeks answers to the same questions relative to the reason of our human existence, what is important in life and the afterlife, the role of love, service, and moral law. Most of us are taught to seek these meanings in the traditions, spokespersons, sacred texts, saints, clergy and prophets of established religions. Yet the truth is more layered than one religion can provide answers for, so the more a human being learns from traditions other than those of his own upbringing or culture, the more he will be able to carve his own meaning and truth. These meanings can indeed be found in religion, but also in art, philosophy, nature, in work, in private and intimate self-dialog, in science, or in service to others. There is not one path, one voice, one text. The world is too big for that."
Monday, December 3, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
The Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi
There is a story I tell on myself about a day in one of my college sections when I was so overloaded from assigned readings that I gave an example from the wrong book. Not just the wrong book for that class mind you - but an example from a Serbian novelist's book from another class that no one else there had read (Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis). I thought I was making my point masterfully, with a reference to a scene involving an outhouse no less, when I realized that the only students nodding along were the ones who never did the reading. Everyone else was looking at me like I'd lost my mind. My second confession is that I didn't finish reading Albert Memmi's Pillar of Salt that quarter and it has been with a guilty conscience that the battered copy with the USED sticker on its binding has been atop my bookshelf. It's moved with me several times since I finished by B.A. in 1999 and I finally, finally read it this year. I think I love the prologue best of all. Every time I picked it up to put it in the "sell" pile I would reread the prologue and shuffle it back in with the rest.
Prologue: "This morning I got up before the alarm clock rang. I washed my face with cold water, bathed my smarting eyes in my cupped hands, and was out of the house before the first streetcars came by full of sleepy grocers on their way to the central market. As I entered the examination hall, my name was called out, and I felt, as always, my heart beat faster. I took the seat that was marked with my name and made the acquaintance of my neighbors.
We are old hands in the game of being students, and to display any emotion now would be absurd, so much so that we even exhibit our disinterest in the tone of our conversation. My neighbor to the left is small and dark, with somber eyes set deep beneath jutting brows. His name is Bounin. Yes, he's a North African from Constantine, and already a teacher. He is taking the exam now just for sport. The degree might be useful, of course, but he is already too old to be tempted by considerations of vanity. My neighbor to the right is called Ducamps, and he affects an elegant disorder in his dress and manner, with his well cared for hair all rumpled. He is finishing the job of studying if only to have done with it all, and he detests teachers and the whole teaching profession: a fool's job hat reveals the nature of the men who choose it. Ducamps leans back in his chair, stares at us as if taunting us, and forces us to concede his complete detachment. In my turn I explain that I come from Tunis. no, Tunis has not been razed to the ground by the Germans. Have I gone through the whole reading list? No, indeed; not even the most important books, the required readings. What do I intend to do after the exams? I don't know. Bounin insists, with all of his anxiety: will I choose journalism or research? Frankly, I don't know, I no longer know.
Silence spreads from the back of the hall, hesitates, then soon dominates the anxious aisles. This is the solemn moment when the anonymous supervisors, their faces like masks, their gestures ritualistic, move in a wave along the rows of students, passing out the examination questions at the end of each table. The hands of the students feel these little squares of yellow paper, their eyes inspect them in flight. They have read the questions, and their heads rise again as they smile anxiously, though their words must remain detached. This easy banter is aimed against the future, the university, our own shameful weaknesses, and the watchful gaze of the supervisors. But we can only whisper, for silence has already triumphed. Silence. The huge hall and its hundreds of students no longer seem even to breathe. Each one of us has now identified himself with his own task, each is alone for the next seven hours.
In that moment, facing my blank sheet of white paper, I suddenly understand that these tasks no longer concern me. The spring that was taut within me is now completely released, my strength and my will power have abandoned me. I am neither surprised nor disappointed. How was I ever able to be so interested in these games that now seem so absurdly futile? Today, we are asked the following: "Analyze the influence of Condillac on John Stuart Mill."
I look around me at all my comrades. Their heads bent forward, their faces pale, their hair tangled beneath their nervous fingers, they all know what they want. All of them - the old students whose studies have been delayed by the war, and the younger whose luck has not yet run out - all are jealous of time. To gain time, to waste time. But what have I to lose? There is but one final stake for me to risk, and I perhaps have already lost it.
Bounin looks up, with a movement of his chin towards me, his fountain pen still moving, he asks: "How's it going?" Bounin's eyes are vague, he is already deep in his subject and he scarcely hears my answer. His lips sketch a smile and he bends his head again. Ducamps is examining the ceiling. he is one of those who pretend to reflect before they begin to write. I, too, appear to be thinking, but I'll not be working later. For the first time in my life I'm about to waste the time allotted to me for an exam. Within a few hours, I'll be wasting a whole year, in fact all of my life. But what have I done with my life up till now? I can no longer play this part that I've been acting.
No one looks up any more, all these backs are bent in the silent struggle. now, if I don't write, I'll attract the attention given to the defeated or the novice. I've allowed my eyes to wander all over the hall, to the painted panels of the ceiling, along the walls lined with books. I've counted the panes in the windows, the shelves of the bookcases, the aisles and bays of the hall. no, I'm not a novice and I don't want them to think that I am. I still have this absurd sense of shame, so I lower my head and pretend to write. I write anything that comes into my head, and the first hour goes by, as always, quite pleasantly.
This solace is a vice: this forgetting through writing, which is the only thing that gives me some peace of mind and distracts me from my world. I can no longer think of anything but myself. Perhaps I should begin by closing my own account. How blind I was to what I really am, how naive it was of me to hope to overcome the fundamental rift in me, the contradiction that is the very basis of my life! Well, I might as well admit it: there's a constant ringing in my ears and a pain in my chest. At first I refused to pay any attention to it, but the ringing in my ears is now like an insistent bell. The truth is that I'm a ruined man, that I ought to declare myself bankrupt.
To give myself countenance, to escape, I continued writing for seven hours, like all the others. I even made the most of the extra fifteen minutes of grace granted to the stragglers. That is because my whole life was rising up in my throat again, because I was writing without thinking, straight from the heart to the pen.
At the close of this exhausting session, I had some fifty pages to carry away with me. Perhaps, as I now straighten out this narrative, I can manage to see more clearly into my own darkness and to find my way out."
College-aged me underlined two passages midway through the novel despite being someone who almost never marks up books. I think it's because it was already so heavily highlighted before I bought it - with someone's system of "X"s and "O" as well - that I drew my own little horizontal line along the text and put my initials ek. The first is from a story the narrator tells of a summer camp that foreshadows his holocaust experience. In a letter home he begs his parents to take him home but it just becomes a family joke.
p. 54 "Do you remember the time you wrote to us: 'You must absolutely carry me up?'?" These jokes contributed to make me learn, the hard way, how personal one's anguish must always be, how difficult to communicate at all.
I think it was reminiscent of my own family. My father was not the kind who kept plans, "What do you want to do next weekend, sweetheart?" If I was lucky he would arrive on a weekend morning less than hungover and say, "Get in the truck." When I told my other family members that I was his "hostage of choice" it never occurred to me that they wouldn't know better than to let it get back to him. I still cringe a little at the acronym "HOC." The next passage reminds me of him to, although the narrator's father made leather harnesses in Tunis and mine had a sole practice law firm on Vashon Island.
p. 124 "At five, a European lady came in and made me spend two hours repairing her suitcase, as thought I were a luggage-merchant or a leather worker."
Like most artisans, he hated dealing with anything outside his own craft, and he refused to change a single detail of his technique.
"Then why did you do it?" my mother asked with an interest that was at least partly affected.
"How could I refuse? Besides," he admitted, "if she'd paid me decently, it wouldn't have been so bad. But what could I ask for the job? It takes a long time and isn't worth much. When her suitcase had been new, it wasn't worth two hundred francs. So I said: 'Pay me what you want." She gave me twenty francs - they're in my pocket. If it goes like this I'll close the shop."
He repeated this threat all his life. We didn't more than half believe him, but that was enough to keep us permanently anxious and unstable."
The last passage I'll ferret away here before I sell this book (or more likely donate it to the library for their booksale given the shape it's in) speaks to me about identity, journeys and sleeplessness:
p. 316 "Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous adventures, but see that your soul remains you own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, from somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take. refuge in sleep."
Prologue: "This morning I got up before the alarm clock rang. I washed my face with cold water, bathed my smarting eyes in my cupped hands, and was out of the house before the first streetcars came by full of sleepy grocers on their way to the central market. As I entered the examination hall, my name was called out, and I felt, as always, my heart beat faster. I took the seat that was marked with my name and made the acquaintance of my neighbors.
We are old hands in the game of being students, and to display any emotion now would be absurd, so much so that we even exhibit our disinterest in the tone of our conversation. My neighbor to the left is small and dark, with somber eyes set deep beneath jutting brows. His name is Bounin. Yes, he's a North African from Constantine, and already a teacher. He is taking the exam now just for sport. The degree might be useful, of course, but he is already too old to be tempted by considerations of vanity. My neighbor to the right is called Ducamps, and he affects an elegant disorder in his dress and manner, with his well cared for hair all rumpled. He is finishing the job of studying if only to have done with it all, and he detests teachers and the whole teaching profession: a fool's job hat reveals the nature of the men who choose it. Ducamps leans back in his chair, stares at us as if taunting us, and forces us to concede his complete detachment. In my turn I explain that I come from Tunis. no, Tunis has not been razed to the ground by the Germans. Have I gone through the whole reading list? No, indeed; not even the most important books, the required readings. What do I intend to do after the exams? I don't know. Bounin insists, with all of his anxiety: will I choose journalism or research? Frankly, I don't know, I no longer know.
Silence spreads from the back of the hall, hesitates, then soon dominates the anxious aisles. This is the solemn moment when the anonymous supervisors, their faces like masks, their gestures ritualistic, move in a wave along the rows of students, passing out the examination questions at the end of each table. The hands of the students feel these little squares of yellow paper, their eyes inspect them in flight. They have read the questions, and their heads rise again as they smile anxiously, though their words must remain detached. This easy banter is aimed against the future, the university, our own shameful weaknesses, and the watchful gaze of the supervisors. But we can only whisper, for silence has already triumphed. Silence. The huge hall and its hundreds of students no longer seem even to breathe. Each one of us has now identified himself with his own task, each is alone for the next seven hours.
In that moment, facing my blank sheet of white paper, I suddenly understand that these tasks no longer concern me. The spring that was taut within me is now completely released, my strength and my will power have abandoned me. I am neither surprised nor disappointed. How was I ever able to be so interested in these games that now seem so absurdly futile? Today, we are asked the following: "Analyze the influence of Condillac on John Stuart Mill."
I look around me at all my comrades. Their heads bent forward, their faces pale, their hair tangled beneath their nervous fingers, they all know what they want. All of them - the old students whose studies have been delayed by the war, and the younger whose luck has not yet run out - all are jealous of time. To gain time, to waste time. But what have I to lose? There is but one final stake for me to risk, and I perhaps have already lost it.
Bounin looks up, with a movement of his chin towards me, his fountain pen still moving, he asks: "How's it going?" Bounin's eyes are vague, he is already deep in his subject and he scarcely hears my answer. His lips sketch a smile and he bends his head again. Ducamps is examining the ceiling. he is one of those who pretend to reflect before they begin to write. I, too, appear to be thinking, but I'll not be working later. For the first time in my life I'm about to waste the time allotted to me for an exam. Within a few hours, I'll be wasting a whole year, in fact all of my life. But what have I done with my life up till now? I can no longer play this part that I've been acting.
No one looks up any more, all these backs are bent in the silent struggle. now, if I don't write, I'll attract the attention given to the defeated or the novice. I've allowed my eyes to wander all over the hall, to the painted panels of the ceiling, along the walls lined with books. I've counted the panes in the windows, the shelves of the bookcases, the aisles and bays of the hall. no, I'm not a novice and I don't want them to think that I am. I still have this absurd sense of shame, so I lower my head and pretend to write. I write anything that comes into my head, and the first hour goes by, as always, quite pleasantly.
This solace is a vice: this forgetting through writing, which is the only thing that gives me some peace of mind and distracts me from my world. I can no longer think of anything but myself. Perhaps I should begin by closing my own account. How blind I was to what I really am, how naive it was of me to hope to overcome the fundamental rift in me, the contradiction that is the very basis of my life! Well, I might as well admit it: there's a constant ringing in my ears and a pain in my chest. At first I refused to pay any attention to it, but the ringing in my ears is now like an insistent bell. The truth is that I'm a ruined man, that I ought to declare myself bankrupt.
To give myself countenance, to escape, I continued writing for seven hours, like all the others. I even made the most of the extra fifteen minutes of grace granted to the stragglers. That is because my whole life was rising up in my throat again, because I was writing without thinking, straight from the heart to the pen.
At the close of this exhausting session, I had some fifty pages to carry away with me. Perhaps, as I now straighten out this narrative, I can manage to see more clearly into my own darkness and to find my way out."
College-aged me underlined two passages midway through the novel despite being someone who almost never marks up books. I think it's because it was already so heavily highlighted before I bought it - with someone's system of "X"s and "O" as well - that I drew my own little horizontal line along the text and put my initials ek. The first is from a story the narrator tells of a summer camp that foreshadows his holocaust experience. In a letter home he begs his parents to take him home but it just becomes a family joke.
p. 54 "Do you remember the time you wrote to us: 'You must absolutely carry me up?'?" These jokes contributed to make me learn, the hard way, how personal one's anguish must always be, how difficult to communicate at all.
I think it was reminiscent of my own family. My father was not the kind who kept plans, "What do you want to do next weekend, sweetheart?" If I was lucky he would arrive on a weekend morning less than hungover and say, "Get in the truck." When I told my other family members that I was his "hostage of choice" it never occurred to me that they wouldn't know better than to let it get back to him. I still cringe a little at the acronym "HOC." The next passage reminds me of him to, although the narrator's father made leather harnesses in Tunis and mine had a sole practice law firm on Vashon Island.
p. 124 "At five, a European lady came in and made me spend two hours repairing her suitcase, as thought I were a luggage-merchant or a leather worker."
Like most artisans, he hated dealing with anything outside his own craft, and he refused to change a single detail of his technique.
"Then why did you do it?" my mother asked with an interest that was at least partly affected.
"How could I refuse? Besides," he admitted, "if she'd paid me decently, it wouldn't have been so bad. But what could I ask for the job? It takes a long time and isn't worth much. When her suitcase had been new, it wasn't worth two hundred francs. So I said: 'Pay me what you want." She gave me twenty francs - they're in my pocket. If it goes like this I'll close the shop."
He repeated this threat all his life. We didn't more than half believe him, but that was enough to keep us permanently anxious and unstable."
The last passage I'll ferret away here before I sell this book (or more likely donate it to the library for their booksale given the shape it's in) speaks to me about identity, journeys and sleeplessness:
p. 316 "Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous adventures, but see that your soul remains you own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, from somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take. refuge in sleep."
Monday, November 26, 2012
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston
p. 315 "I stopped rubbing my longjohns, then considered getting a postcard from my collection in my dresser drawer. The woman in the woods. It could not be that way for me. Somehow I knew it. Some "over me" was always watching, and not for an instant could I forget it. Perhaps it could not be that way for any man, I wasn't sure, and I had no intention of asking anyone. Nothing I had ever read in books enlightened me. On the one hand I envied her, that woman on the moss, wished I could be capable of such abandonment. But it was, I told myself, a carrot dangled by biology, the animal impulse to chase after which I must not give into or it would mean my doom. I well understood my father's horror of domesticity, of entrapment and confinement. The thought of nights in some fetid breeding bed while the products of other such nights lay listening in the next room or outside the door I found so revolting that I vowed I would never marry. My parents marriage was the only marriage I knew from the inside out. To me, their marriage was marriage. To live thus would be to forsake all destinies but the anxiety-ridden drudgery of caring for a horde of children. I would never drag myself out of poverty if I got married, let alone achieve more than the limited success considered proper for the best of my kind by men like Reeves.
Trapped in a marriage, I would be driven mad by the casual assumption of privilege and preferment and innate superiority of "the quality," it its effect on my father was anything to judge by. But unlike my father, I told myself, I was outraged by the "quality" not only on my own behalf, but also on behalf of others. I saw no contradiction in wanting to achieve greatness through altruism. How else but through altruism could on by both virtuous and great?
But before I could make up my mind about the postcard, I fell back to sleep."
Trapped in a marriage, I would be driven mad by the casual assumption of privilege and preferment and innate superiority of "the quality," it its effect on my father was anything to judge by. But unlike my father, I told myself, I was outraged by the "quality" not only on my own behalf, but also on behalf of others. I saw no contradiction in wanting to achieve greatness through altruism. How else but through altruism could on by both virtuous and great?
But before I could make up my mind about the postcard, I fell back to sleep."
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Wendell Berry on "People, Land and Community"
I've been reading an anthology on multicultural literacy that includes an entry from Wendell Berry's Standing By Words: Essays. I will admit to grumbling a bit to myself about its theme. Although eloquent on the subject of time and ecology, his ideal of multi-generational farming catches in my craw. I'm the unwilling partner of inherited farmland in a family of four adult children, all of whom have chosen non-agricultural paths. Our acreage is on the little island in Puget Sound where our father was born and where our family moved in 1984. None of us live there now, though our mother still has her house a few miles away.
We're approaching the third year anniversary of our father's death - with the land minimally tended but property taxes and other expenses an ongoing consideration. For me it has become an albatross. My memories of the place are more bitter than fond; I think of liability and loss when I must think of it at all. Consensus is not easily reached even amongst partners by choice and I've wanted to sell my share since learning of it. I've reached basically the same agreement with my sister to buy me out twice - and twice she has backed out.
Our father was an attorney and 'gentleman farmer' so while our lives were greatly influenced by his wishes and whims we were never at the mercy of the next harvest. I agree that some knowledge can only be learned over generations (and the hard way) but I'm digressing into something too personal.
The passage I want to excerpt says more about people than land. Berry talks about the stumbling blocks created by the ideas that information can be 'sufficient' and that in the scale of a human life "time and work are short." He's drawn a conclusion that resonates with me and scares me, "It is simply true that we do not and cannot know enough to make any important decision."
I've written before about 'tolerance for ambiguity' as the core competency I am missing in the success criteria of my corporate legal jobs. It turned up in my performance reviews annually, in both of the companies I worked for, as if it were just waiting to remind me that I was in the wrong line of work. I want to know the answer. I research toward certainty. Most days I would assist with creating an assessment of risk, often on a deadline made unnecessarily short by someone else's poor planning, always with the need to finish with incomplete data. I learned what was 'sufficient' and how to move forward. I did the work for seven years but I never really got comfortable.
Berry argues that there is no 'sufficient' when it comes to information. "On this dilemma we can take marriage as an instance, for as a condition marriage reveals the insufficiency of knowledge, and as an institution it suggests the possibility that decisions can be informed in another way that is sufficient, or approximately so. I take it as an axiom that one cannot know enough to get married any more than one can predict a surprise."
"What is not so well understood now as it perhaps used to be is that marriage is made in an inescapable condition of loneliness and ignorance, to which it, or something like it, is the only possible answer."
Oh, Wendell.
"We can commit ourselves fully to anything - a place, a discipline, a life's work, a child, a community, a faith, a friend - only in the same poverty of knowledge, the same ignorance of result, the same self-subordination, the same final forsaking of other possibilities."
I struggle right here, caught up in the inertia of uncertainty - professionally and personally - but he still sees some light. "Our decisions can also be informed - our loves both limited and strengthened - by those patterns of value and restraint, principle and expectation, memory, familiarity, and understanding that inwardly, add up to character and, outwardly, to culture."
As I take my walk today I'm thinking about the possibilities I've forsaken, some as yet unimagined, and the choice's I'm not making in the face of future's uncertainty. Can I really trust my character and culture enough to be guided by them?
We're approaching the third year anniversary of our father's death - with the land minimally tended but property taxes and other expenses an ongoing consideration. For me it has become an albatross. My memories of the place are more bitter than fond; I think of liability and loss when I must think of it at all. Consensus is not easily reached even amongst partners by choice and I've wanted to sell my share since learning of it. I've reached basically the same agreement with my sister to buy me out twice - and twice she has backed out.
Our father was an attorney and 'gentleman farmer' so while our lives were greatly influenced by his wishes and whims we were never at the mercy of the next harvest. I agree that some knowledge can only be learned over generations (and the hard way) but I'm digressing into something too personal.
The passage I want to excerpt says more about people than land. Berry talks about the stumbling blocks created by the ideas that information can be 'sufficient' and that in the scale of a human life "time and work are short." He's drawn a conclusion that resonates with me and scares me, "It is simply true that we do not and cannot know enough to make any important decision."
I've written before about 'tolerance for ambiguity' as the core competency I am missing in the success criteria of my corporate legal jobs. It turned up in my performance reviews annually, in both of the companies I worked for, as if it were just waiting to remind me that I was in the wrong line of work. I want to know the answer. I research toward certainty. Most days I would assist with creating an assessment of risk, often on a deadline made unnecessarily short by someone else's poor planning, always with the need to finish with incomplete data. I learned what was 'sufficient' and how to move forward. I did the work for seven years but I never really got comfortable.
Berry argues that there is no 'sufficient' when it comes to information. "On this dilemma we can take marriage as an instance, for as a condition marriage reveals the insufficiency of knowledge, and as an institution it suggests the possibility that decisions can be informed in another way that is sufficient, or approximately so. I take it as an axiom that one cannot know enough to get married any more than one can predict a surprise."
"What is not so well understood now as it perhaps used to be is that marriage is made in an inescapable condition of loneliness and ignorance, to which it, or something like it, is the only possible answer."
Oh, Wendell.
"We can commit ourselves fully to anything - a place, a discipline, a life's work, a child, a community, a faith, a friend - only in the same poverty of knowledge, the same ignorance of result, the same self-subordination, the same final forsaking of other possibilities."
I struggle right here, caught up in the inertia of uncertainty - professionally and personally - but he still sees some light. "Our decisions can also be informed - our loves both limited and strengthened - by those patterns of value and restraint, principle and expectation, memory, familiarity, and understanding that inwardly, add up to character and, outwardly, to culture."
As I take my walk today I'm thinking about the possibilities I've forsaken, some as yet unimagined, and the choice's I'm not making in the face of future's uncertainty. Can I really trust my character and culture enough to be guided by them?
Friday, September 21, 2012
Tales from the Thousand and One Nights
I spent Saturday afternoon at the Noor Iranian film festival with my friend Johanna to see Nasseredin Shah and His 84 Wives. The documentary, made by a Norwegian director, combined animation with a photos taken by Nasseredin with the camera he received from Queen Victoria in 1842. Much of the film centered around political and familial intrigue between the women as they rose and fell in their husband's favor. (For a brief interlude he preferred a cat to all of them, but it met an untimely end.)
One striking thing about the group photographs of the women, aside from the fact that the photos exist at all, was that it showed a standard of beauty for the time that's markedly different from the one I'm accustomed to. Although they came from different regions and ethnic groups in and around Persia, many of his beauties were heavyset and most had dark facial hair, with their "mustaches" and "monobrows" being coveted features. During the Q&A after the film one of the festival organizers said she'd researched this and learned that these traits suggested a woman who would give birth to strong sons.
This preference is a far cry from modern-day Seattle. Certainly there are men who fetishize ample women's bodies (many of whom say so in rather tactless ways). The opposite seems more common though. Just this week I skimmed a dating profile where a man specified that his future girlfriend's BMI (body mass index) would need to be less than 24, "otherwise don't bother." (He didn't appear to be particularly fit himself, but she needs to fall in the "normal" category to be considered. I can't imagine why he's still single.) His online brothers content themselves with the more straightforward description "slender", the encoded HWP (height weight proportionate) or the euphemistic "takes care of herself."
Another source of ideas about ideals is that's been on my mind lately is Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. I've been reading the Shahrazad stories a few at a time over the summer. The Penguin edition has an introduction that says the stories owe their origin to three distinct cultures: Indian, Persian and Arab. "They can be regarded as the expression of the lay and secular imagination of the East in revolt against the austere erudition and religious zeal of Oriental literature generally."
I expected desert tales and was surprised how many shipwrecks and islands there were. Apart from sailing, mules and camel caravans, travel is expedited by tricking a giant mythological bird called a Roc into carrying you or by calling upon the power of a jinnee. I was less surprised by the way beautiful women are described. Here are sisters from The Porter and the Three Girls of Baghdad ("city of peace"):
p. 243 "A young woman, dressed in rare silks and cloaked in a gold-embroidered mantle of Mosul brocade, stopped before him and gently raised her veil. Beneath it there showed dark eyes with long lashes and lineaments of perfect beauty..."
p. 244 "...the door was opened by a girl of surpassing beauty. Her forehead was white as a lily and her eyes were more lustrous than a gazelle's. Her brows were crescent moons, her cheeks anemones, and her mouth like the crimson ruby on King Solomon's ring. Her teeth were whiter than a string of pears, and like twin pomegranates were her breasts."
p. 244 "A third girl, slim and exquisitely beautiful, was reclining on the couch. Her face was radiant as the moon and all the witchcraft of Babylon was in her eyes. A paragon of Arabian grace, she was like a star twinkling in a cloudless sky or a golden dome shimmering in the night."
I'd like to see a classroom full of young writers have fun with this - perhaps a description of their society's ideal, or a subverted version of it, or a translation of it into more lyrical language...
One striking thing about the group photographs of the women, aside from the fact that the photos exist at all, was that it showed a standard of beauty for the time that's markedly different from the one I'm accustomed to. Although they came from different regions and ethnic groups in and around Persia, many of his beauties were heavyset and most had dark facial hair, with their "mustaches" and "monobrows" being coveted features. During the Q&A after the film one of the festival organizers said she'd researched this and learned that these traits suggested a woman who would give birth to strong sons.
This preference is a far cry from modern-day Seattle. Certainly there are men who fetishize ample women's bodies (many of whom say so in rather tactless ways). The opposite seems more common though. Just this week I skimmed a dating profile where a man specified that his future girlfriend's BMI (body mass index) would need to be less than 24, "otherwise don't bother." (He didn't appear to be particularly fit himself, but she needs to fall in the "normal" category to be considered. I can't imagine why he's still single.) His online brothers content themselves with the more straightforward description "slender", the encoded HWP (height weight proportionate) or the euphemistic "takes care of herself."
Another source of ideas about ideals is that's been on my mind lately is Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. I've been reading the Shahrazad stories a few at a time over the summer. The Penguin edition has an introduction that says the stories owe their origin to three distinct cultures: Indian, Persian and Arab. "They can be regarded as the expression of the lay and secular imagination of the East in revolt against the austere erudition and religious zeal of Oriental literature generally."
I expected desert tales and was surprised how many shipwrecks and islands there were. Apart from sailing, mules and camel caravans, travel is expedited by tricking a giant mythological bird called a Roc into carrying you or by calling upon the power of a jinnee. I was less surprised by the way beautiful women are described. Here are sisters from The Porter and the Three Girls of Baghdad ("city of peace"):
p. 243 "A young woman, dressed in rare silks and cloaked in a gold-embroidered mantle of Mosul brocade, stopped before him and gently raised her veil. Beneath it there showed dark eyes with long lashes and lineaments of perfect beauty..."
p. 244 "...the door was opened by a girl of surpassing beauty. Her forehead was white as a lily and her eyes were more lustrous than a gazelle's. Her brows were crescent moons, her cheeks anemones, and her mouth like the crimson ruby on King Solomon's ring. Her teeth were whiter than a string of pears, and like twin pomegranates were her breasts."
p. 244 "A third girl, slim and exquisitely beautiful, was reclining on the couch. Her face was radiant as the moon and all the witchcraft of Babylon was in her eyes. A paragon of Arabian grace, she was like a star twinkling in a cloudless sky or a golden dome shimmering in the night."
I'd like to see a classroom full of young writers have fun with this - perhaps a description of their society's ideal, or a subverted version of it, or a translation of it into more lyrical language...
Friday, September 7, 2012
Jason Elliot's An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
I'm clearing out my physical bookshelf as part of my preparation for life's next adventure, so I'm starting this blog as a place to put some dog-eared pages. Maybe they get incorporated into lesson plans later or maybe they just help me lighten the load in my next move. My sturdy 4-year-old laptop recently gasped it's last overheated breath and my public library generates myriad "send error report" messages when I try to reach my Wordpress blog, so here are some excerpts to consider over breakfast.
Elliot's book about his travels in Afghanistan was both interesting and a slog to read at times- florid writing that occasionally was as pretentious as it was informative. Three passages about the experience of being a solo traveler with imperfect grasp of the local languages made me mark page numbers.
p. 191 "By one o'clock the sun had thrown a pale yellow light over the bare hills and the day felt already spent. I was worried about the way ahead. Always there is this kind of suspense on a journey where you are both isolated and robbed of your own language. Under such conditions the means by which you make sense of things begins to be transformed; you can no longer rely on familiar signals but a cryptic sequence of tiny events, the pattern of which you sense more keenly as your isolation grows. It leads to a kind of parting of ways; you either let go of your worries and put your faith in the natural unfolding of events or are plagued with anxieties, which multiply as darkness falls.
I could hear the two voices at work. One was an incessant reminder about safety, fear of loneliness and insecurities of every kind. How would I know if a truck came and went? Would my bag be safe in the serai? Time and again I had been told it was unsafe to travel alone...I had been from the beginning of the trip aware of this first voice; an almost relentless tale of worry about how things would turn out at every stage, like that of a homesick child longing for the familiar. It had its own legitimacy but as anyone knows who has been touched by the spell of travel there is another voice longing to be heard, and now for the first time I was able to hear it; a calmer signal on which I was unwilling at first to rely. It was the impulse to put my trust in the natural course of events, and to surrender not passively but intelligently, to the restraints and opportunities of the moment. Was I not fed and warm and in a place of beauty? Things would work out..."
p. 289 "What, after all, was a travel book? That young Italian [Marco Polo] had started it all in the thirteenth century, and had given the telling of tall tales from foreign parts its subsequent respectability. On the whole it had not changed much since Polo's time: a man or a woman sets off for foreign parts ignorant of both the language and geography of the place, with an out-of-date map and borrowed phrase book, preys shamelessly for as long as the family trust will allow on the hospitality of the native people, and returns home to hastily record his or her first impressions in a semi-fictional collection of descriptions that affirm the prejudices of the day. Then reminded of the mediocrity of the experiences described and to ease the risk of any intellectual burden on the microscopic attention span of the reader; he or she retrospectively invents a fashionable 'quest' around which the narrative can be twisted in every direction except toward the truth, fits it tidily with invented dialogues, speculative history, sweeping inaccuracies, mistranslations, verbose accounts of having braved hazards endured daily by ordinary local people without complaint, portrays as a revelation long lists of trivial facts known to every local schoolchild, and bludgeons the original spirit of the endeavor in an attempt to appear erudite with the academic verbiage of out-of-print encyclopedias, disguising all the while the discomfort of being at sea in an alien culture by resorting to the quirky, condescending humor that its couch-bound audience will think of as funny. The result? Only a confirmation of what everybody already knows: better to stay at home."
p. 345 "Under the scrutiny of a dozen stern gazes I felt an old pang ignite defensively: to travel with an Afghan friend. With the right company, the inevitable burden of enquiry would be shared more evenly between visitor and host, and polished exchanges would replace my own cracked idioms. There would be no need to reach that point of mental debility where expression in another language seems an impossible exertion. Only an Afghan friend could help decode literal truths from cultural prejudices or, conversely, explain satisfactorily to others the strange Western habits that risked giving offense; the wish to slope off and write, to be alone from time to time, to know the names of things, to visit places for no obvious reason.
In an unfamiliar language you make up a lot of what you lack in the spoken word by interpreting tensions of voice, gesture and ritual that betray another's meaning. In a strange of dangerous place you are forever reading these signals, consciously or not, through an alliance of the analytical and the intuitive, and the more hazardous or unfamiliar the circumstances, the greater the meaning you come to extract from ever smaller events. Sometimes lack of language seems to lighten things, and your contact with others is unburdened by definitions. Bu at others there comes a point of exhaustion when you simply want to talk about ordinary things and not have to think about every word. A journey magnifies both extremes; I was feeling the weight of the latter and, meeting the stares of twenty silent men, felt mute and helpless."
Elliot's book about his travels in Afghanistan was both interesting and a slog to read at times- florid writing that occasionally was as pretentious as it was informative. Three passages about the experience of being a solo traveler with imperfect grasp of the local languages made me mark page numbers.
p. 191 "By one o'clock the sun had thrown a pale yellow light over the bare hills and the day felt already spent. I was worried about the way ahead. Always there is this kind of suspense on a journey where you are both isolated and robbed of your own language. Under such conditions the means by which you make sense of things begins to be transformed; you can no longer rely on familiar signals but a cryptic sequence of tiny events, the pattern of which you sense more keenly as your isolation grows. It leads to a kind of parting of ways; you either let go of your worries and put your faith in the natural unfolding of events or are plagued with anxieties, which multiply as darkness falls.
I could hear the two voices at work. One was an incessant reminder about safety, fear of loneliness and insecurities of every kind. How would I know if a truck came and went? Would my bag be safe in the serai? Time and again I had been told it was unsafe to travel alone...I had been from the beginning of the trip aware of this first voice; an almost relentless tale of worry about how things would turn out at every stage, like that of a homesick child longing for the familiar. It had its own legitimacy but as anyone knows who has been touched by the spell of travel there is another voice longing to be heard, and now for the first time I was able to hear it; a calmer signal on which I was unwilling at first to rely. It was the impulse to put my trust in the natural course of events, and to surrender not passively but intelligently, to the restraints and opportunities of the moment. Was I not fed and warm and in a place of beauty? Things would work out..."
p. 289 "What, after all, was a travel book? That young Italian [Marco Polo] had started it all in the thirteenth century, and had given the telling of tall tales from foreign parts its subsequent respectability. On the whole it had not changed much since Polo's time: a man or a woman sets off for foreign parts ignorant of both the language and geography of the place, with an out-of-date map and borrowed phrase book, preys shamelessly for as long as the family trust will allow on the hospitality of the native people, and returns home to hastily record his or her first impressions in a semi-fictional collection of descriptions that affirm the prejudices of the day. Then reminded of the mediocrity of the experiences described and to ease the risk of any intellectual burden on the microscopic attention span of the reader; he or she retrospectively invents a fashionable 'quest' around which the narrative can be twisted in every direction except toward the truth, fits it tidily with invented dialogues, speculative history, sweeping inaccuracies, mistranslations, verbose accounts of having braved hazards endured daily by ordinary local people without complaint, portrays as a revelation long lists of trivial facts known to every local schoolchild, and bludgeons the original spirit of the endeavor in an attempt to appear erudite with the academic verbiage of out-of-print encyclopedias, disguising all the while the discomfort of being at sea in an alien culture by resorting to the quirky, condescending humor that its couch-bound audience will think of as funny. The result? Only a confirmation of what everybody already knows: better to stay at home."
p. 345 "Under the scrutiny of a dozen stern gazes I felt an old pang ignite defensively: to travel with an Afghan friend. With the right company, the inevitable burden of enquiry would be shared more evenly between visitor and host, and polished exchanges would replace my own cracked idioms. There would be no need to reach that point of mental debility where expression in another language seems an impossible exertion. Only an Afghan friend could help decode literal truths from cultural prejudices or, conversely, explain satisfactorily to others the strange Western habits that risked giving offense; the wish to slope off and write, to be alone from time to time, to know the names of things, to visit places for no obvious reason.
In an unfamiliar language you make up a lot of what you lack in the spoken word by interpreting tensions of voice, gesture and ritual that betray another's meaning. In a strange of dangerous place you are forever reading these signals, consciously or not, through an alliance of the analytical and the intuitive, and the more hazardous or unfamiliar the circumstances, the greater the meaning you come to extract from ever smaller events. Sometimes lack of language seems to lighten things, and your contact with others is unburdened by definitions. Bu at others there comes a point of exhaustion when you simply want to talk about ordinary things and not have to think about every word. A journey magnifies both extremes; I was feeling the weight of the latter and, meeting the stares of twenty silent men, felt mute and helpless."
Friday, August 31, 2012
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
It's a good thing I never got around to Rilke during college because I would have been insufferable! My friend Barbara gave me a few of volumes of poetry when she moved and I especially enjoyed these two translations by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. They throw out the rhyme scheme in favor of a more modern sound. For those who don't read German, they've kept the first line as the title for the translated verse. Please forgive me my missing umlaut on ware:
Wenn ich gewachsen ware irgendwo
If I had grown in some generous place -
if my hours had opened in ease -
I would make you a lavish banquet
My hands wouldn't clutch at you like this,
so needy and so tight.
Then I'd have dared to squander you,
you Limitless Now.
I'd have tossed you into the ringing air
like a ball that someone leaps for and catches
with hands outstretched.
I would have painted you: not on the wall
but in one broad sweep across heaven.
I'd have portrayed you brashly:
as mountain, as fire, as a wind
howling from the desert's vastness
Ich bin auf der Welt zu allein und doch nicht allein genug
I am too alone in the world, yet not along enough
to make each hour holy.
I'm too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing -
just as it is
I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones -
or alone.
I want to mirror your immensity.
I want never to be too weak or too old
to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.
I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed
for where I am closed, I am false
I want to stay clear in your sight
I would describe myself like a landscape I've studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I've come to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime'
like my mother's face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged.
Wenn ich gewachsen ware irgendwo
If I had grown in some generous place -
if my hours had opened in ease -
I would make you a lavish banquet
My hands wouldn't clutch at you like this,
so needy and so tight.
Then I'd have dared to squander you,
you Limitless Now.
I'd have tossed you into the ringing air
like a ball that someone leaps for and catches
with hands outstretched.
I would have painted you: not on the wall
but in one broad sweep across heaven.
I'd have portrayed you brashly:
as mountain, as fire, as a wind
howling from the desert's vastness
Ich bin auf der Welt zu allein und doch nicht allein genug
I am too alone in the world, yet not along enough
to make each hour holy.
I'm too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing -
just as it is
I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones -
or alone.
I want to mirror your immensity.
I want never to be too weak or too old
to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.
I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed
for where I am closed, I am false
I want to stay clear in your sight
I would describe myself like a landscape I've studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I've come to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime'
like my mother's face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged.
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