Guatemala 1975

There they are, so many lives, on the steps of a church in Guatemala. The soldier who is a full-blooded Mayan wears the uniform of those who will perpetuate the coming genocide.
Which he himself will participate in-- all the others most likely dead because of it.

Amazing how all you need to switch sides is the right clothing and a haircut.
The symbol is the key that throws the switch,
allowing us to perform previously unthinkable acts.
Armies all over the world perform the same magic trick.

What is it in the human brain that permits us to compartmentalize actions?

And what happens, as it seems to be with increasing frequency in Iraq, when those compartments break down and the images of war and peace overlap--as they are also doing in Iraq--
where it can be lethal just to walk down the street?

If all war is a struggle for territory, to get it or keep it, then it is critical to know who is us and who is them. Chimps, who go on war parties, leave their own group to invade another’s. Apparently warlike behavior thrives on clear-cut divisions. Because it is inconceivable that natural selection would operate in favor of self-destruction, to turn on one’s own group is suicidal. And when that is done, as it is in civil war, divisions must be reestablished symbolically, via uniforms, flags, and songs.

One must turn the self into the Other.

In Guatemala it is long been possible to turn your back on a despised social status simply by changing clothes. The young Mayan soldier on the steps of the church, participating in the mournful Mayan ritual of remorse performed annually in ChiChiCastenango, has been assumed into a larger identity.  From the moment he put on the uniform he became the Other.

For the young men and women returning from Iraq,
it is taking off the uniform that is the problem.

Having become the Other, how does one return to the Self?

FICTIONAL ATTACHMENTS

                 The final episode of the popular tv program, Lost, was broadcast last night and proved fully as preposterous as expected.  Stories, back-stories, side stories, alternate stories, none of the stories were original or convincing or logically consistent.  Nor were any of the numerous plot lines ever resolved; instead they merely veered off on yet another tangent, making the story in the end irrelevant.  
                 So why did I watch it?
                 Because ultimately my interest in Lost had nothing to do with plot. And everything to do with character. Almost as if they were the sum of their various stories yet existed independently of them, the characters, and, by extension, the actors who played them, compelled attention. Viewers were caught up in them, cared about them, and seemingly had to know how things turned out for them.
                  But why?

                  I have long believed, and the Lost phenomenon seems to validate this belief, that we can have relationships with people who don’t exist-- fictional relationships, as it were. And these fictional relationships can influence our lives fully as much as real ones, sometimes even more.  Not only that, they seem to provide something the psyche needs and may often be unable to get in the real world-- a simulacrum at least partially satisfying. Like the child’s doll or the object wrapped in a blanket in some baby monkey experiment or other, the substitute not only takes on the character of the real, but approximates its power. Our psyches accept it and respond accordingly. 

                  Consciously we know it is not real, but that does not matter. There is a deeper level of our selves which does not care. It takes what it can get.  
                   Whether it is housed in the external world or lives within the privacy of our minds, the illusion has a deep and mysterious power, a power that seems to gain its force through a connection with an archaic part of our brains that responds to resemblances.  

                   And perhaps is able to create them as well.

BANNED BEAUTY: CHINA IN THE 90'S

My first days in China were the color of mud. The sky and the streets formed one continuous brown sheet, and the long hutong leading to my hosts’ apartment block, pure sludge. The apartment block itself, its cement walls cracking, was a grey-brown I was to become all too familiar with. But this was not entirely unexpected. These were Stalinist era buildings. The real surprise lay inside, in people’s abodes, in apartments they made not the least effort to domesticate. My hosts, people of learning and culture, artists, treated their home as if it did not exist. Things lay were they fell; all around indecorous heaps of trivial things, which might have been cherished for their nostalgic value, were mere dust-catchers, good for naught. If inanimate things could be depressed, those stained and cracked walls certainly were. In short, the interior environment expressed the same lack of concern, the same indifference, the exterior one did. This initial impression was confirmed in every home I visited.
In fact ugliness was so prevalent in the People’s Republic of China that I suspected it might be deliberate. All utilitarian explanations aside (i.e. it is easier to build big ugly buildings than lovely, graceful ones), I believe the hideous towns and cities of the PRC are the direct result of a conscious decision to blunt people’s perceptions, to shut down their sensory capacities and numb their feelings.
To force them to huddle inside themselves like turtles and render them emotionally inert.
Quite simply put, beauty is politically incorrect. It threatens a strictly utilitarian view of life by inferring that uselessness may have value. And if that were not enough, beauty is an indulgence, a distraction from the work of revolution that ought to be the sole preoccupation of every good citizen. It weakens one’s resolve by making one happy in the moment, in the status quo that must be changed.
The puritanism of China, of Soviet Russia, and of Nazi Germany, as well as that of the Puritans themselves is quite unlike the spartan aesthetic of the Quakers or the Zen masters, who stressed simplicity as an antidote for excessive sensuality. Fascists of all stripes cultivate ugliness. And in doing so, they cultivate depression as well. One can see how a depressed population would be all the more easily ruled. For there is something in the sense of beauty essential to life.
Though taste is far from universal, the sense of beauty is. It even seems to exist in plants. Flowers, after all, are designed to attract. And most certainly it exists in birds, bower birds in particular are quite fussy about their esthetic choices.  Be that as it may, it can safely be said that all humans have a sense of beauty, however disparate. One can with less assurance (but more bravado) conjecture that this sense of beauty constitutes one pole of consciousness. That is to say, it is one of those crucial concepts, like time and space, by which we order our mental worlds, and without which our sanity is threatened.
We need it to steer by. Without it we lack an essential component of thought. To rob people of their sense of beauty, is to violate the structure of the mind. That such a violation is so prevalent in fascist societies is telling. In China, the wholesale brutalization of the longest lived high culture in the world can have been no accident. Its consequences no small thing.
 

THE SEDER

For eight or nine years now I have been going to their home, to a house presided over
by a woman of exceptional warmth and personal charm,  to participate in a tradition 
that dwarfs me and my small lifespan by thousands of years.
But only this year did I think to examine the ceremony.  
How interesting, I thought, looking at the Seder plate in the middle of the table, that food should be symbolic. Unlike Christianity where visual symbols abound, taste not vision dominates this symbolic tradition. The Catholic Church, of course, retains vestiges in the Eucharist  of a symbol system based on taste but then they tack on transubstantiation, something the far more down to earth Jews would never do. 

For mysticism is a side show in Judaism not the main event.
Because just staying alive has been critical for this historical people forever on the run, always in danger of having had their last meal, always in danger of starving in the wilderness, never sure if they will see tomorrow, 
in Judaism food rules.  Where will we live, Jews ask, and what will we eat ?

In fact, food, survival, and ritual are thoroughly intertwined in this religion that makes of every Friday night meal 
a sacred act, where not merely eating but taking food together is key, along with the primacy of taste, 
the emphasis on food preparation, the importance of cooking and eating utensils,
and everything that has to do with meals.

In the Seder there is the sense that family and tradition subsume and supersede the individual who nevertheless still has a voice and is allowed to speak. This speaking and reading, asking and telling, laughing and singing  exalt that human voice both in its capacity to express thought and its capacity to express feeling.

As a symbolic recreation of an event and of a predicament, the predicament of slavery, the Seder has a universality than transcends its faith.  Non Jews often feel privileged to be invited to one--
and rightly so, for the Seder is a gift.

And that, too, is part of this meal, because the Seder is celebrated for everyone.

So here’s to those Jewish mommas stuffing their children full of food they don’t need, ignoring bad table manners and gentile gentility in favor of sheer appetite. 
Le Heim.

MAN RAY AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM 
As if encapsulating every seminal urge of early 20^th century art, Man Ray was the consummate polymath, trying his hand at everything from painting to collage to objects to photography-- and whatever lay between. He once said that he painted what he could not photograph and photographed what he could not paint. True as that might be, as a photographer he was a master of style and manipulation, tugging at the boundaries of a resolutely realistic medium to create works of photographic imagination rarely equaled.

Introduced to Dada circles by his friend Marcel Du Champ upon his move to France, Man Ray was almost immediately accepted into the Parisian avant-garde.  It was in Paris that he began to photograph seriously. Initially a solution to the problem of earning a living,  photography in Man Ray’s inventive hands became a major conduit between the experimentation of the Surrealists and the dissemination of the printed media. Combining the elegance desirable in fashion with the quirky and erotic edge the Surrealists loved, along with his own penchant for technical experimentation, Man Ray soon became the photographic darling of le beau monde. To be photographed by him was the insignia of success, much the way being photographed by Richard Avedon was for a later generation.

Especially known for his photograms (which he called rayographs), light drawings, and solarizations, whose painterly qualities he often combined with straight photography in his portraits, Man Ray shared the experimental stage in photography with his Bauhaus contemporary, Moholy Nagy. There is a tug of war over who invented the photogram first. Neither, as it turns out, since camera-less photographs were being made at least as far back as Christian Schad a generation or so earlier and probably before that. Nevertheless Man Ray produced some of the most beautiful examples of the technique, several of which are on display at the Jewish Museum retrospective currently on view in New York. His delight in surrealist juxtapositions can be seen as well, most particularly in the found objects, but also in photographs such as Noire et Blanche. While I am confining this article to a discussion of Man Ray, the photographer, the Jewish Museum should be applauded for presenting a show which explores the full range of his talents, their evolution over time and the historical context within which they flourished.

 

BALI
LIFE AMONG THE GODS

Were I reborn a god, I would insist upon being a Hindu one. Any god with good sense would. For only then would I be offered delicious things to eat, wonderful music to hear, and dancers worthy of my divinely discriminating eye. Besides none of the other deities have half so much fun. Here on Bali the gods eat drink and make merry at least twice a day, their meals served on exquisitely crafted trays made from banana leaves. Since the spirits are everywhere, their offerings are as well: in the middle of the sidewalk, on a threshold, on the dining room table, in the street where cars pass. A visible feast for invisible guests who are real enough for all that, to the Balinese, at least.

I suspect I might have already been transformed into a local deity, or perhaps I have snapped completely under the pressure of so much beauty. On friendly terms with their gods, the Balinese throw flowers at their feet rather than rip bleeding hearts from their chests. There are flower and food offerings on every doorstep, small shrines and large temples on every street. Characterized by courtyards and compounds, inviting rather than overwhelming, Balinese temple architecture is possibly the most appealing in the world. Certainly these are places any god in his or her right mind would consent to dwell.

Days here follow each other like contestants in a beauty contest, one more dazzling than the next. Bali is an omage a la beaute written by a late nineteenth century French poet, a decadent with slightly mystical leanings for whom the ever presence of religious feeling adds an extra frisson of esthetic delight.

On Bali the distance between nature and culture lessens. Or at least they are not polar opposites, but meet somewhere in the middle, on a rice paddy perhaps, or in a garden. Of course, rice paddies and gardens are nature cultivated. But that is what one feels about Bali generally, that it is nature cultivated, shaped, celebrated, and sung. I have never felt this anywhere else, not even in Japan where the national esthetic has traditionally celebrated the beauty of nature. In Japan that celebration is rigorous, masculine, and willed. On Bali it feels sensuous, spontaneous, and feminine. More natural in short! There is less focus on formal precision--the Zen exactitude that makes Ryanji so breathtaking (one feels they have counted every grain of sand!)  No. In place of Japanese fastidiousness, here is an openhearted liberality. Even though Balinese music and dance require enormous technical precision, they possess a joie de vivre absent from their Japanese equivalents. The gods here are generous, and so are their celebrants.

On Bali it is possible to be in nature and in culture at the same time. The wilderness is not the antithesis of the civilized and the boundaries between them are muted, the extremes of America and Europe avoided. Here one can be a plant, an educated plant, a “thinking reed” as Pascal called us, with a rather different meaning in mind. Despite the constant presence of birds, crickets, frogs, and other wild things, on Bali plant, not animal, life is the dominant form. For here nature is Green. Green Fertile Feminine.

ON TRAVEL
For me travel is not about places; it is about setting things in motion.
It is I, first of all, who am set in motion, but since the world around me changes as I do, it, too, seems to be set in motion. And so we circulate around each other, the world and I, moving in our mutual, intersecting orbs. Thus collisions and encounters multiply, offering an abundance of unexpected contacts with people and places. While traveling I do what we all do in normal life: meet people, make decisions about which actions to take, deal with unexpected setbacks and opportunities, change directions.
But it is done more rapidly, more intensely, and more continuously than in normal life, which is weighted with layers of inertia and sameness. Moreover,this limbo, this decontextualized space of travel, allows me to imagine myself reborn into a universe of infinite choice.

LETTER FROM BURMA

I am at Bagan, an ancient capital in glorious ruin, one of the marvels of Asia that stretches for miles along the Irawaddy River. Here, as everywhere, I am struck by the shapes and forms with which a culture characteristically expresses itself. Buddhas, standing, sitting,and reclining, acres of breast-shaped pagadas surrounded by dry grass and oxen carts.The geometric Maya, the Thais with their spirals and flames, and now these maternal mounds attached so firmly to the earth. Indeed, they seem to swell up right out of the ground. No Gothic disdain for earthbound limitations here. Oh no. Let the Europeans worship their "Heavenly Father"; somewhere in these people is the adoration of a small child for its Earthly Mother.