Saturday, June 07, 2008
Friday, June 06, 2008
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Development and Intervention
On both CNN channels in Kathmandu, you will see repeatedly the same promo, the same bit of self-deception: To understand the story, it says, you have to understand the people—and not only does CNN, but it can also communicate this understanding to you, with analysis.
Nevertheless, as the earthquake in China, still unnamed, and the lingering, ineluctable devastation in Burma of Cyclone Nargis continue to dominate the news here, CNN continues to display a American-centric view of China that, one presumes, both reinforces the extent of the devastation and the dominance of our national and nationalistic conceptions to their viewers. The reporting on Burma is scarce, usually a bare-bones reading of factoids and changes in the situation, the anchor staring straight into the camera, solemnly, making unidirectional eye contact with thousands and perhaps millions of people: a plane has arrived, a ship has left, there are now some-thousands confirmed dead.
There is little actual analysis, but then the television has never been a real form for analysis; like a speech or the theater, it is a form for performance, for inspiration to action. The level of evil that necessitates action, that necessitates Intervention, is the most present issue that arises from both Nargis and the Burmese government (and, in CNN's intimations, from the earthquake as well)—but like many historical events, the failure of all of us to intervene will be both tacitly recognized and tacitly buried, marked but forgotten.
The issues in Intervention are much the same as the issues in Development: self-determination and agency; imperialism; power and hegemony; issues of world view and culturally-enforced ethos, of cultural relativism and cultural absolutism; exploitation and cultural appropriation; exoticism and exoticzation; and presentism, the belief that what is now is both all there is and all there could be. And just as the major actors in Development are confined and constrained by the narrow world view of a certain, small segment of the developed world, the major actors of Intervention—nations and those that hold power in national governments—are bound by a view of politics that lies similarly unexamined and unchallenged, but is similarly partial and fractional.
Perhaps the best way to understand this is via the New York Times Magazine article this week, written by David Rieff. He writes of an idea "enshrined in a United Nations-approved covenant as the 'responsibility to protect'—the idea being that a state that engages in criminal behavior toward its own people has forfeited not just its moral but also its legal right to sovereignty."
Later, Rieff writes, entirely earnestly:
The harsh truth is that it is one thing for people of conscience to call for wrongs to be righted but it is quite another to fathom the consequences of such actions. Good will is not enough; nor is political will. That is because, as Iraq has taught us so painfully, the law of unintended consequences may be one of the few iron laws of international politics.First, it should be noted that Rieff is taking something of an intellectual risk by talking about intervention at all—as he notes, even though the coalition concerned about Darfur is exceptionally broad in its politics, mainstream American culture fails to consider Intervention as anything but a fantastic option, neither feasible nor plausible. But unfortunately the article's conception of what Invention is and what it means is constrained by the limits of American political discourse, constrained by the limits of mainstream American imagination and memory.
I don't mean to be particularly critical of Rieff alone here—I certainly have little expertise, whether credentialed or autodidactic, on the complex interplay of power relations between governments—for his article is not so much an apology for certain values as it is a reflection of them. So that I take exception to his conception of politics, his conception of agency, his conception of morality as our moral duties stretch across borders, is more an offense that comes from the limits of my own culture. This view is hierarchical and oddly non-judgmental, as if acknowledging difficulty, perhaps extreme difficulty, is sufficient justification for inaction. It's a view in which we, as more or less non-empowered citizens, bear neither responsibility for our governments inaction nor responsibility for the results of that inaction; a view that is informed by an unfortunate conception of propriety and agency.
The paragraph I've quoted—the penultimate paragraph, by the way—is entirely specious and is ergo both easy pickings and a good place to begin. The point he makes—that we can have good intentions but not understand the consequences of our actions—is true of literally every decision we make in life. I may order a mojito at a bar that takes the bartender far longer to make than a normal drink and puts him in a surly mood, even though my intention was not to do so. I may choose to take a bus for environmental reasons and unwittingly step on someone's foot as I climb on or off, or as I shift on the rubber mat in the middle to make more room.
We can expand this idea to bigger areas as well, were the stakes begin to become a microcosm of those involved in international politics, where part of the responsibility lies with our own, chosen1 ignorance. If I'm a new, experimenting college student at UCLA and buy (or even smoke) marijuana in a cinder-block dorm room with Sovietistic furnishings, I bear partial responsibility for the perpetuation of system that makes the foggy, hidden hills of Humboldt County dangerous places, though of course the agents of the US's drug war bear much, much more, even as most of them are less directly involved.
Likewise, if I am a parent and buy Chiquita bananas because they are a good source of potassium for my kids, I've unwittingly bought into a system of exploitation economics—pick fruit for solely subsistence pesos or get shot—in Central and South America.2
That we come in with our best intentions, and that we strive to do right continuously, that we are aware and awake and adaptive enough to change our actions when life elucidates the unintended consequences—and when, as sometimes happens, our best intentions do more harm than good—is in fact the best we can do as people constrained by bodies and brains and the very real limits of what we can possibly know.
(Of course, the UN document that Rieff refers to has unintended consequences of its own: it confers an idea of legitimacy on the illegitimate; it uses the status, deserved or not, of the UN to begin or continue a checklist of minimum qualifications that somehow define any government as “acceptable”; and in doing so, indeed moves governments like China's and Zimbabwe's towards legitimacy, by placing a threshold that they can argue they have crossed. Even if in the end arguing that somehow a 17-year-old Tibetan from Shigatse has “consented” or is legitimately subject to caprices of a commissioner in Beijing, 2000 miles away, because his grandfather's grandfather was made a vassal and his grandfather's bid for autonomy crushed is plainly foolish, simpleminded, such a document grants other states, like the US, a means to avoidance, to allowing the detention or torture or death of the 17-year-old because of his place of birth, because something entirely fortuitous.)
What Rieff reinforces is essentially a rightist idea of agency, of action: that our actions are not justified unless an authority figure gives us the ok, the go-ahead. In the case of the United Nations, the authority is an undemocratic, unelected, and insular group3 of people who have declared themselves the arbiters of morality. Rieff, like most American center-leftists, considers the UN to indeed be a moral authority; the American right, generally very critical of the UN, has no qualms with this authoritarian model but instead with who is the ultimate authority.
In other words, Intervention belongs at the level of governments, and even they must get permission before intervening. It's this model that I take issue with.
There is another model, however: that of the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans—the democratic government and its allies—were supported by the Soviet Union and little else. That is, except for the International Brigades, more than 30,000 full volunteers who defied their governments and fought and struggled, literally, for their principles, for their own, personal moralities. On the other side Franco's rebels, usually called the Nationalists, were supported by not only Germany, Italy, and Portugal but also tacitly by the Great Britain, France, and the United States—indeed, Texaco provided fuel on credit to Franco's troops, directly abetting massacres at Guernica and elsewhere, and Britain provided the transit for Franco to come out of exile and let him station weapons at Gibraltar.
Since that time—and here I intend no causality—we've become slowly and increasingly suspicious of cultural concepts and constructs like honor and glory, and rightfully so, concepts to which we could heretofore appeal; to say that George Orwell was “honorable” for defying his government and attacking and defending against fascism now invites furrowed brows and scrunched faces appealing for definition, appealing to reason. We as a society have denounced the sort of public shaming, or threat to shaming, that circumscribe ideas of honor and glory; on the left, we have idolized resistance, fetishized it—and this is how we choose to understand the acts of Orwell and others, as resisters.4 Indeed, on an international level, one of the things that the current Tibetan uprising has shown is that international pressure and shame—here, on China—have no effect if the target has or chooses to feel no shame.
But the act of shouting No! is itself an accession to power; to decline, to demur, to protest or complain or appeal to other authority are all ways that acknowledge and ultimately accept the power that another holds. Power is never unidirectional.5 If I am your boss and I order you to dig a ditch, although I have an economic and structural power, you can still press back with other power: you can go fast or slow, you can do the job haphazardly, you can decline to let me know that the soil is unstable and will collapse overnight, you can get me sent to see the HR manager for speaking to you too harshly. Or you can tell your trainee to do it, and he can reserve all the same mechanisms of power in his relation to you that you reserve in your relation to me. And just because a government or association of governments works to constrain not just individual agency but the possibilities of individual agency does not mean that those possibilities do not exist.
The point is that agency is not reserved for governments alone, nor, because of this, is responsibility. Just as corporations often serve as a mechanism for perpetrating acts that would be gravely immoral when performed by a single individual by dividing and diluting blame among employees and stockholders, governments can perform the same function. To ignore or, worse, fail to conceive of a place for individual agency and individual responsibility is at the same time a way of consolidating power among the enfranchised-and-empowered and also an ethical failure.
In fairness to Rieff, most likely he believes that the United Nations is an effective or at least baseline moral way of building consensus—that is, acting in ways that other peoples with other biases and perspectives, both national and historical, believe is right. But the UN doesn't build consensus—if a bare minimum of votes pass a resolution and no one on the also-anti-democratic security council objects, that's not consensus but a failure thereof.
In the end, as we all recognize, morality is not democratic. I am not bound to your ideas of what's right any more than you are bound to mine. And though essays like Rieff's limit appropriate action by lowly citizens to advocacy and harassment, to calling our representatives and writing letters to the newspaper, there are further possibilities, possibilities for direct action. Just as Development recognizes a place for non-governmental actors, and just as the Spanish revolution held a place for non-Spanish combatants, Intervention has a place for the individual. It's valid to ask Why doesn't the US do something? or Why won't France intervene?, but also valid to say Why don't you intervene?, Why don't you do something?
1 Chosen in the sense that one can choose which subjects and fields to remain ignorant of and in, even as moral responsibility is diluted because one must choose fields to remain ignorant of and in.
2 I am perpetually amazed that anyone would ever buy a Chiquita banana after the outright evil of United Fruit—the real event that the massacre of 3,000 Macondoans in A Hundred Years of Solitude was based on. That the company still exists at all is a failure of previous generations; and a failure of my own.
Or, to put it another way: In college, I had a classics professor who liked to paraphrase from Aeschylus. Once blood is shed, who can call it back? he would ask.
There is ignorance of evil; there is doubt; and there is complicity.
3 People generally don't conceive of it as such, I think because its bureaucrats tend to be harmless-looking tall men from Germanic Europe, but the UN is deeply undemocratic. Did you vote for your UN representative? Are you as equally represented as a person from China? Or, to perhaps be more fair, as a person from Canada, or from Indonesia, or from Mauritius? Does the UN—the "authority"—act in the interests of people or of its paying members, which are governments?
As for being insular, I'll relate an anecdote: I was sitting in the Imago Dei cafe in Kathmandu on Monday, and in a bid at procrastination I began eavesdropping a conversation between Americans on the black couch by the door. A younger woman—white, dark hair and plastic frame glasses—had just had an interview with the UN and was telling the other woman—older and rounder, skin now just beginning to sag—about the questions they asked, which were more in the form of a test or interrogation than a traditional American job interview.
At the end of her story, the younger woman said that she didn't think she would get it: "He said, 'With your passport, it's going to be very difficult to get a job with the UN.'"
I was incredulous, and as I made sure to type, word for word, and save and save again what she said, the two of them talked about this as if it were normal and acceptable.
4 This is of course the idea of honor in a different form, though the discussion that this idea begs is out of my scope.
5 Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams come to mind first as excellent exponents on the nature of power, but I'm sure there are many, many more that one could look to for reference.
Monday, June 02, 2008
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
Of lichen and cinquefoils
Imagine, for a moment, life at 15,000 feet, on a hill in the Himalaya called Kyanjing Ri, at the top of which you are 500 feet higher than the highest point in the lower 48 States, 2700 feet higher than the highest point in New Zealand, higher by about 13,000 feet than the highest point in the England. All around you are swirling clouds that rise from the snowmelt creeks below and the great snowbanks of the Himals far off, separated from you by deep glaciated and river-cut valleys, pushed and pushed back by winds inconsistent and unpredictable.
The ridge you stand on, or lie against to catch your breath or to protect yourself from the skin-chapping wind, is a staircase of sandy humps, eroded on the windward side in huge, crescent-shaped washes. The knobs of its rocky spine lie exposed only at points of stress and bend, as if stretching for those craggy and dark Himals just out of grasp, knobs covered just barely by the gray freckles of half-buried loose stones and tufts of a rusty green shrub of the willow family called tukshing in the Sherpa language. At the summit, you find a wooden pole or two or three garlanded with the tattered cloth prayer flags of Tibetan Buddhism, the five colors faded from granite dust, from the constant inner-cloud drizzle, from the unimpeded sunshine of high altitude. And more, that insistent and consistent blow, even stronger here, a blow that breaks small branches and pinches shut incipient flower buds, that makes dropped seeds barren and desertifies the topsoil.
You expect lichens here, of course, black and brown against the white and gray granite and schists like spotting on a cow or a yak or a jopkyo—the cross between the two that is common in the Himalaya—and perhaps a tuft of grass or two, perhaps a wayward baby mountain goat at eye level across the deep unnamed valley in front of you, climbing perhaps the ice falls to cross to the next valley, but little else visible to the eye.
And yet: just down the path from the top of Kyanjing Ri, in a dip behind a necklace of rocky windbreaks, a black and chubby bumblebee rises up to investigate the sweet, novel smell of sweat. A little farther, still on the ridge, at the saddle where the trail diverges west to Kyanjing Ri's north peak or east along a higher set of Ris, where you stand 30 vertical meters below the north peak, a quartet of black-tailed songbirds swoops overhead, moving from valley to valley, each taking graceful cuts and curves and arcs, the white splay of their fanned tails sinking in bobs as they descend between green hillsides, the overtones from their high-pitched chattering lingering, leaving the remnants of echoes to hang in the air.
Underfoot you find not the barrenness of the imagination but instead green- and maroon- and chalk-striped caterpillars that inch and flex across the trail, no bigger than the long joint of the thumb, exposed only when not safely camouflaged among tukshing. A black ant scouts for food, or for an enemy colony, rivals for pollen and larvae and fallen or dropped tukshing berries in autumn. On a rock a beetle suns himself as best he can, his black carapace pockmarked with constellations of divots at the thorax that gleam mineral green, the long channels incised on the wings of his abdomen reflecting black and iridescent red. Twice the faint whiff of a skunk's scent wafts up—an animal not listed in Tej Kumar Shrestha's Mammals of Nepal--but it is gone in a blink.
Flowers appear or reappear 10 meters down from the ridgeline, first bright yellow cinquefoils like buttercups, tiny slips of orange in candleflames where petal meets ovule, the entire flower small as your smallest fingernail. Its color is a shock, and when picked and angled under a chin, like the buttercup, the cinquefoil reflects gold. Just below this the perfect purple globes of primulas—primroses—grow, tiny flowers facing up and down and every which way, rising from a stiff stalk like dandelions and looking just as balanced, just as ready to confetti the ground and air. Every so often the sunny-side-up face of an anemone (a. obtusiloba) shows, a star of cupping white petals surrounding an orange, star-shaped receptacle and nestled against the ground, no longer bothering with any stem to speak of. Nearby, a dwarf or cousin of the purple iris--i. kamaonensis--that grows so happily even 300 meters below, here fragile and timid, a flower's wallflower.
And here also the fingerbone branches of dwarf black junipers crabwalk outwards, the tree growing not up from a trunk but downhill from a root, its berries just beginning to display a checkerboard of straw and faded orange. Nearby its cousin, the dwarfed drooping juniper, with hand-size fronds splayed like sea fans amid cascades of the gray-green succulent saxifraga hemisphaerica that texture the land not just with shadow and light but with rosettes of nested leaves—a plant too small to register with many locals here, even as their fingers trace figures in the soil in search of a lucrative, ginko-like mushroom. Like you, they avoid the spikes and prickles of the morina polyphylla, which clings to skin and clothes and fur like the burrs we find in our socks when we tramp through American fields and meadows.
This area really belongs to the s. hemisphaerica, though, and where it is not, tufts of green and green-yellow and blue-gray grasses bend and curl, tonsure-like. As you near the grass you see it is grazed, is haphazardly mown; and next to it bullet-shaped scat, dense and as yet undisturbed: yaks, and jopkyo too. Today they are farther down, grazing on lusher grass in a warmer and moister gulch below even where the Tamang and Tibetan mushroom hunters inspect the green terraced edges of mountain goat paths and run fingers across the mossy edges of veiny stone. But the yak nimbly amble this high and higher, crossing the Ganja La Pass in late summer when its deep snow has melted and grasses and perhaps irises are available to be eaten, 16,340 feet above sea level and more than 1,000 feet above this saddle. At the trail's divergence, you find a single, cleft footprint of a mountain goat, moving upwards.
And the lichen. They are not just gray and black, scaly and tumor-like on the stone, ugly as parasites, but a jumble of color—gray and black, certainly, but also a continuum of green from deep forest to neon, yellows the colors of those cinquefoils and of mustard, bright white like snowcaps, a pink verging on tika-like red, rusty orange and burnt siena. Far from camouflaging the rocks as yak the lichens highlight them, mark them, give them color and depth.
Lichen are some of the world's most amazing organisms, a symbiosis between an algae that can photosynthesize and a fungus that can eat rock, so hardly that only they and a few fellow crypto-endoliths can survive in inland Antarctica. They're also edible, but know: it takes thousands of years for a lichen the size of your fist to grow. Mostly commonly in the Sierra Nevada of California they appear on the ground as a pale green cargo-net-in-miniature, or as attached to trees with flakes that vaguely resemble the puffed fingers of juniper leaves. Here in the Himalaya, they are more common as splotches on rock faces or mani stones, blooms or Pollockian arcs across an otherwise smooth surface.
Still, life at this altitude and in this place feels especially precarious, especially precious. The taking of it—the picking of a cinquefoil, the trampling of a saxifrage, the eating of a bird's-nest lichen—feels a violation, an injustice, the theft or appropriation of an heirloom worth little but difficult to replace. To pluck a cinquefoil of its petals like a forget-me-not is to be an agent of universal melodrama, is to choose consciously a cynical, anticlimactic ending to the fable of the cinquefoil's life: where it has heretofore survived the brutally indifferent winds and dwarfing airs and the tatatat of hailstones, has outcompeted its fellow flowers in brightness or sweetness, has defied—like all things—comically and cosmologically staggering odds by simply existing at all, its life is ended for nothing, for a distracted whim.
To see this is to place ourselves in a narrative that is not our own, in that we are not its subject; it is to recognize our own in- or consequentiality in someone else's story. It is, implicitly, to understand the dialectic of our lives, that each of our stories intersects with an infinite set of other stories, to understand that those other stories are often as valuable as our own.
The vast majority of these stories, however, is fundamentally unknowable. The history contained within a cinquefoil is incommunicable; we can intuit a story from the unusual kink of its stem, from the aborted bud it still carries, from the faintly green oil on a piece of quartz-marbled granite nearby and a crushed and torn leaf. This story, though, is not the cinquefoil's at all, but our own, double-boiled and filtered through the still of our understanding. Just as the vastness and magnitude of the universe are beyond human-scale modeling, beyond fathoming, are comprehensible only in the abstracts of mathematics and physics, so too are the knottings and weaving of microhistory, the separations and connections, impossibly Gordean. The world is bound by secret knots, as Kircher wrote; but of stories.
The paradox of these stories is that they are constructions—prose is architecture, Hemingway said—both conscious and unconscious. Simply to perceive a cinquefoil's existence as a story is a shortcut, a trick of the human mind. That we can see the world as a tangle of stories, or as tightly wound with them as a ball of yarn, is a benediction, a blessing; but is also the consequence of the confluence of speech and culture, or potentials physiological and pedagogical. To impart a story to a cinquefoil is to misunderstand it, is to perceive its existence over time in a fundamentally human way. That is, to conduct or construct the story as a melodrama is to limit ourselves to an understanding of the story as a human story; to give nature a moral is, in the end, a mistake of attribution.
*
The preciousness of life here, as long-limbed snowflakes fall on my shoulders and melt; as they settle into the crevices of exposed gneiss and do not; is, when properly attributed, a projection of precariousness of my own life in this place, and those of others like me. The cinquefoils, unlike people, abound. Indeed, there are certainly more of them nearby than people, and Polunin and Stainton's Flowers of the Himalaya lists the cinquefoils potentilla cuneata and p. anserina as “quite common” and “common,” respectively.
And yet, I see charisma in this cinquefoil, because it thrives where I cannot, in these dusty soils that as they dry pucker into hundreds and thousands of tiny crabholes like at the beach, though there are no crabs here, because it reminds me of a childhood myth of yellow flowers and chins and warming sun and topiary-like bluegrass, because it brings me a sense of comforting, warming sunshine. I pick a cinquefoil, inspect it, dispose of it; and in my mind I have done something wrong.
Little such charisma exists for lichen, though they are hardier, perhaps because they are less familiar, perhaps because they are easy to see as static and boring, perhaps because their lives and lifespans do not neatly parallel our own, unlike cinquefoils and primroses, elephants and snow leopards. Indeed, they are so culturally marginal that the saying that moss prefers the north side of the tree is not at all true for moss, but instead for lichen. Lichen earn what little value we attribute them when I tell how slow-growing they are; you can understand that to cut a lichen's life short after 100 years is like to cut short your own at 10, or 5.
Again, though, this presumes that our lives are parallel; that they continue like the ties of a railroad track, that even if you cannot see the twin, shined rails around a curve or sinking down a slope hidden by high wheat or alfalfa, you know that so long as the rails continue the ties must as well. With some certainty I can assert information about railroad ties; there is a limit to their possibility. Not so lichen, or rather, not so the intersection or non- of my life and its. In this metaphor we know simply that I am a piece of wood, and so is the lichen; all else is uncertainty, is a wilderness of mirrors propped up by a frame of cedar two-by-fours.
And the Newspapers!
Despite a misleading BBC report, things are pretty quietly happy here in Kathmandu. But then, the elections went smoothly, so what was going to happen the day the monarchy was rightly disposed of?
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
At Dakshinkali
Dakshinkali is a small temple, maybe a kilometer from the town of Pharping, cool, shaded by pines and settled in a small gully. It's a pleasant place for a picnic, and on Saturdays—the one day of the week Nepalis have off—you hear tinny versions of Green Day and Bollywood classics through the trees, from the clattering stereos that families have brought, along with woks and pans, piles of tomatoes and cucumbers, to the thatched-roof gazebos on the way to the temple.
If you walk to the temple down from either carpark and along the paved footpath—not the dusty road packed with stalls selling tiny apricots and colorful roosters, framed pictures of the idol of Kali in the temple and garlands of marigolds—you'll notice a faded red streak in the square concrete gutter next to the path. This is blood.
Kali is an incarnation of Parvati, the consort of Shiva, and to (simplify greatly) is Hinduism's goddess of time and change, and ergo death. She demands sacrifices of uncastrated male animals to appease her, and Dakshinkali is a center of her worship for the Kathmandu Valley.
Other than that the butchers at Dakshinkali decapitate the animals—and for bigger animals like goats and buffalo, this involves sawing through the aorta and jugular vein, the tendons of the neck, and the spine with rough jerks and pulls—the ritual is extremely matter-of-fact. There is little ceremony: the goat is handed over to the butcher and he starts in without prayer or delay. It's certainly gruesome, but quick—over, for a goat, in perhaps 15 seconds, and throughout you hear the din of people calling to their relatives for other offerings—coconuts are popular—the rapid, uneven chop as another butcher dispatches and bleeds a series of chickens put into his hands, the ringing of bells around the temple and casual talking all along the coiling, stretched queue.
The Lonely Planet guide mentions "swarms of tourists" at Dakshinkali, but when I visit he only other foreigners are a film crew from National Geographic shooting a story on Dakshinkali.1 And perhaps on leprosy as well—Andy, the crew's sound guy, points out a man, a leper, waiting to make his sacrifice at the temple. To me the man looks normal, but then I am trying not to look to hard—he has already seen Andy point at him.
The film crew leaves for lunch soon after I spot them, though, and I go back to feeling both extremely visible and totally invisible at Dakshinkali. I've finally learned to say the polite form of "sorry" in Nepali—mas ghonhola2—and I pronounce it well enough that it induces a number of beggars and sadhus then speak rapidly to me in Nepali, trying to divest me of coins or 10-rupee notes. But because Dakshinkali's a religious place, striking up a conversation is hard—there is no obvious avenue of approach, especially when it seems that few here speak English.
I am curious what the consequences are for not placating Kali. Andy's gesture, a brief wave of the hand, makes me wonder whether Kali is the bringer of leprosy—which, by the way, I thought was more or less extinct. Though I try to ask here and there in a rudimentary way, the best conversation I can have is with Rajnat Tiswari, a student reading in Hindu scriptures, one of the many men who apply tikas3—the red dots on Hindu foreheads—to the penitent for a donation of a few coins. He also hoses off the paving stones in front of the temple from time to time—he had been doing it when I wandered in.
Rajnat is nice enough, and his accent in English is good, but little communication takes place. When I ask what happens if Kali gets no sacrifices, Rajnat says, "Yes, yes, Kali...very powerful goddess." I try to correct, to ask what Kali does when she gets angry, but Rajnat looks at me blankly and I let it go.
*
On the way to Dakshinkali, perhaps an hour or two before, I had stopped at a small restaurant at the intersection of the main, wavily paved road to Pharping and Dakshinkali and a rocky dirt road up to a pagoda-style temple not far. I stopped both because it was hot—the Kathmandu official temperature, which is nearly always low, hit 30º C—and because I wanted to make sure that the other temple was not Dakshinkali. Sitting at the small stand, asked to join a table with a pair of Nepali brothers, I was asked by Prasad, the older—"I am older and he is fatter!" Prasad said gleefully—the standard Nepali questions: where am I from, how old am I, am I married, do I have girlfriend?
It was this last serious of questions that the woman who ran the shop picked up on. She said something to Prasad, who translated: "You like to meet Nepali girl? She has sister, good, sister."
I tried to demur but the woman insisted that I promise to call her sister—the name next to the number I wrote was Parvati KC3, but I was unclear whether that was the shopkeeper's name or her sister's. Even when I told her that I wasn't looking, that I had broken up only a month ago with my girlfriend, that she broke my heart, etc., the woman wasn't having it. "Take," she said. "Number." So, to not offend, I took.
I only mention this because something was lost there between us, between me and this woman, even with the intercession of Prasad.
Prasad and his brother on the way back from Dakshinkali.
1 I watched the crew film an interview with a woman waiting in the queue with a rooster in her hands. The film crew had a Western-dressed Nepali translator with them, and the producer whispered questions in his ear for him to ask the woman. The producer—a big, ruddy man who looked immediately English from afar but was likely Australian (I talked only with Andy and Wes, the cameraman, who were both Aussies and liked me because they liked San Francisco)—also carried with him a clipboard with a stack of participant releases on it. I presume this was for National Geographic's liability company rather than National Geographic itself: written contracts involving foreigners are on the whole completely unenforceable in Nepal; and the releases were written in English.
2 I actually only learned this because it's the first phrase of the message you hear when the phone isn't working. It's fun: All the expatriates immediately recognize it, because you hear it all the time. But Nepalis understand as well—it's almost certainly the most comprehensible thing I can say to a Nepali who doesn't speak English.
As always, these transcriptions should be understood as very rough.
3 Called tilakas elsewhere in South Asia, but in Nepali the word is tika.
4 KC is a common Nepali last name—it took me a long while, and many questions, to learn that. That it's not spelled in English "Kaysi" or something similar may be a quirk of transcription, but I don't know if the name is just spelled with letters in Devanagari script (which I can't read anyway).
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Adinath Lokeshwor Temple, Chobar, Nepal
Yes, those are pots and pans attached to the temple and all the buildings surrounding it--the temple is to Ganesh, the famous Elephant-headed god, and newlyweds make offerings of cookware to ensure that they will have a happy marriage.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Saturday, May 24, 2008
On Monasteries
Sometimes a sense or a feeling only happens for only a moment, but lingers, and when such happens it's best suited to poetry, better suited to a free flow of words than the implied causality of narrative. Such is the case with Pharping; but I am not a poet.
It's in Pharping, about 20 kilometers south of Kathmandu by road, that, for a moment, the desire to join a monastery, to detach from the world, comes together: a leaf fallen on a clear, languorous mountain stream, stuck by surface tension to something with no form at all, only mass and movement. I am looking along the railing of a gompa, a monastery, up on the hill, nestled against and at the joints concreted to the exposed stone of the hillside, to see a kettle boiling tea above a small stone stove filled with firewood, and an old monk beating the dust from his welcome mat. A faint breeze blows off the hill, but we are in the lee.
The peace is like the peace of the mountains, the feeling of splendid self-sufficiency without the feeling of loneliness, of isolation. It's gone after a moment, though, and just after a very light rain begins to fall, barely enough to tickle the hair on my arms.
*
Travelers come to Nepal, often, to find something, because they are looking for what is more or less a religious experience. They are looking to get something out of Nepal; they have come because they think that here, finally, they can find peace—or can learn to find it. Some come to be among practicing Buddhists, in Buddhist places like Pharping or Boudha, though avowed Buddhists are only about 10% of Nepal; others come for a different kind of spiritual experience, something akin to being one with the mountains.
That one would go anywhere in search of a specific experience is somewhat odd to me, but yet also familiar: many of us Westerners come with metrics on which we gage our experience, an y-axis list of goals. For all our exoticization, Buddhism as proffered to Westerners is very much in line with this: we take classes at Kopan Monastery,we participate in vipassana, because the experience is the goal; or else the goal is to be the person we imagine we will be when vipassana is over, and the ten days' silence itself is a means.
This is not the only local religious tradition of introspection, however: India has sanyasa, in which successful men whose children are raised leave home (wives included) and become itinerant beggars—that they don't know what they're looking for is, in the end, the point. And while sanyasa is certainly more explicitly religious than vipassana, it's also in many ways more human: less about renouncing the world than it is about interacting with it and in it.
*
Pharping is a far quieter town than Kathmandu, more peaceful but still familiar, still built with stone and mud huts, with brick buildings in the Newar style, with protrusions of elaborately carved wood sills and screens for windows and posts and lintels for doors. It's familiar and yet not, like a visit from Thamel in Kathmandu to Lakeside in Pokhara.
Like Boudha, you see monks and nuns in robes walking upright through the town in beautiful crimson and gold robes, men and women who carry themselves with the posture of calm of the devoted, who wait a fractional moment and temper their voices before speaking. And though most are Nepali, some are not: they are French, South African, American. I don't mean to suggest that it's the Tibetan Buddhist influence that gives Pharping its feelings of calm, of quiet; but as an outsider, as a foreigner, it feels like that's the case.
Save a few—those whose paths led them to Pharping (or Boudha) by chance—these monks have come for the destination, rather than the journey; it is not the moving that interests them, but the long rests in between movements.
*
Nepal is a religious country, and because to Westerners its rituals and forms of religiosity are usual and exotic it's an easy place to exoticize, an easy place to presume spiritual depth in someone you can't communicate with and whose daily life is far different from your own. That much of Nepal can appear to a Westerner, to use a Deepak Chopra line about India1, like an early archaeological dig where all the layers are inadvertently mixed up, it's also easy to romanticize Nepalis, especially rural Nepalis, as more virtuous, as more connected to the land and the earth in some vague, spiritual sense, to identify them with your own ancestors, also romanticized.
And this, I think, is the essence of the tension of living, and traveling, in Nepal. While it's easy for a place to provide a totally external experience—it's easy for Paris to provide a view of the Arc de Triomphe, or San Francisco of the Golden Gate bridge—it's hard for even the Vatican to provide a communion with the divine. Tourist-driven adventuring, here, is safe: it is guided treks, bungee jumping, a mountain flight above the Himals to see Everest. The exhilaration, or the relief, or the sense of confidence or pride that comes from real adventure, here, often, is a consumer product; it is, or seems to me, canned.
I don't wish to harp on this point too much, so I will leave things at this: unburdened travel is not vipassana but sanyasa; it is not a guided meditation into the divine but instead a journey of mud and hunger that fulfills a purpose you cannot define, even to yourself. And that purpose could, very easily, be vain.
1 Being able to quote anything by Deepak Chopra is of course a tad bit embarrassing, but also, because of his passion for Ayurveda and his semi-medical, semi-religious writings, rather fitting.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Siphal, Kathmandu
I'm not going to claim that it's the best photograph I've taken, but it might be the most accurate.
On the way to Pashupati I was wandering around the pothole-infected roads of Siphal, and saw down an alleyway a large temple in an empty square, with a lone red motorcycle and a boy sitting by it. As I took pictures, the boy cautiously approached me, usually from behind, to see the picture on the screen. When I looked toward him he would turn away, shyly.
Eventually I figured out that he wanted me to take his picture, but was too shy to ask. And just as I was about to push the shudder, he looked down at his feet.
I waited a moment, for him to look back up, then took the picture just the same.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
The ghats of Pashupati
The first time I visited Pashupati, I abstained from taking pictures of the cremations.
Pashupatinath--the nath suffix1 refers to a holy place, here the main temple with its enormous golden image of Nandi, Shiva's bull; likewise the stupas at Swayambo and Boudha become Swayambunath and Boudhanath, respectively--is the most holy Hindu site in Nepal, on the banks of the Bagmati River, which far into India feeds into the Ganges. The temple is so holy, in fact, that non-Hindus are forbidden to enter, as are leather goods (shoes, belts, watch straps), cameras, tape recorders, and binoculars.
Accordingly, Pashupati is a popular place to be cremated; there are, apparently, cremations here every day of the year, even through Monsoon. Indeed, when the royals were massacred in June 2001, they were all cremated here, including Crown Prince Dipendra, in a ceremony that also included Brahmins defiling themselves in something like 84 ritually prescribed ways and then riding elephants out of the valley to help shepherd the souls of the departed. For this the Brahmins gave up their caste forever, but were very well compensated, at least in worldly terms.
Among tourists who go to Pashupati—and most tourists in Kathmandu make it to Pashupati, though the less elegant Swayambo seems to be more popular—an interesting phenomenon occurs: those that don't photograph the cremations feel superior to those, unnamed, that do. It's the imposition of a camera, perhaps, the feeling that somehow by taking pictures we are commodifying someone's grief. It 's also our feeling, collectively, that privacy is somehow necessary for grief; and that as upright and ethical citizens, we ought to respectfully allow grief to come out in whatever way, in whatever terms, the grieving find necessary.
Foreigner and Nepali alike come to watch cremations at Pashupati: Nepalis mostly from the terraces on the eastern bank, high above the ghats just next to the main temple, foreigners from a rampart just south of the bridge across the Bagmati, clustered in huge tour groups or far enough interspersed around the Ram Temple to feel separate and individual, adolescent-like. A number of these tourists do come prepared: professional-level SLR cameras and bulky telephoto lenses, khaki fisherman's vests with pockets blooming up everywhere, fertile with filters, lenses, accoutrements and paraphernalia. At certain moments it can give the walk the feeling of the photographers' well at an important baseball game, a bustle of relatively polite, mostly professional paparazzi activity.
For whatever reason, avowed amateurs like myself—those of us with with compact point-and-shoots in a pants pocket—are spared. It is a case, perhaps, of signals given and signals mis- and understood. That I should have an SLR signals that my photography is serious somehow, that I have committed something material—and likely something of myself—to its pursuit.2 That in actuality I shoot with a camera the size of a back of cigarettes, a camera that is battered from tumbles onto rocky trails and, most notably, a short ways down a mountain in Montana—this signals something else, and somehow exempts me from disapprobation.
This, obviously, is not altogether fair, nor is it altogether accurate. Our collective assumption, and I am not immune, is that these semi- and wanna-be pro photographers have a single notion in mind: That of getting the shot. That is, that they are getting their pleasure, and in a sense their power, from the grief of others, succubus-like; that they have little regard for their own imposition; that they are trying, with the capture of a "good" photo, to increase their own reputation--increase their own status--within their local or extended communities. Or so we other Westerners understand them, and judge them.
But there is another use of photography, more benign and less self-conscious, and altogether more common: That of photography as an incitement to dialogue. Physically the actions are much the same—capturing a scene or a landscape with a light-sensitive sensor or light-sensitive film—but the intents diverge. It is the photography not of look at my pictures but the photography of look what I saw.
We are familiar with the idea of photography outside narrative: the posed family portrait, everyone wearing white and khaki with a neutral backdrop that gives no bit of location away, save in its own sort of negative information; the band's hi-res; the actor's glossy; the MySpace self-portrait with camera held at arms'-length. These are meant to convey something at once general and specific about the subject: a cheerful disposition, the right, artistic attitude, a certain "look," certain visual signals of class and of personal interests.
But the idea of non-narrative photography is a construction, for each photograph takes place within a narrative: the creepy photographer's run-down studio in a strip mall in El Cerrito, his long, wavy gray hair matted to each sheet and office chair; a publicist whose idea of cool involves leather jackets and dreamy looks just past the mercenary photographer's right ear; a seemingly endless day of black-and-white smiles and half-smile and no smiles, only to have not a single shot be the right one; a bored Friday night during private school's ski week, and the realization that an entire evening could be spent finding just the right angle to hide a pimple and highlight the elegance of high cheekbones smoothed by the last remnants of baby fat. The thing about such staged photos is that the stories are expressly, intentionally hidden; the idea is not as much look what I saw as it is look what I want you to see.
Photographs of strangers or of strange places, like the photos we take at Pashupati, are different. In the pessimistic assessment they serve as creators of status, of power: look at how I see. There is a certain element of pedagogy in this, and a certain arrogance, or confidence, of pedagogy, the certainty that you have something worth teaching. Like soccer, or negotiation, or writing, you improve both by doing and my watching how others do, but there are far more soccer matches or negotiations or books than one could ever peruse.
In certain situations, with certain signifiers, we find this sort of creation of culture almost inconceivably gauche: at funerals, at highway accidents, at times in churches, at public bathing sites and bathrooms. We assume, because of the trappings of wealth, because of a certain manner of dress and a camera that costs what the typical Nepali makes in 10 years, that this is exploitation of grief, of poverty.
And sometimes, often perhaps, it is. There are more generous ways of seeing, however, and other intents. Put into an album, stiff pages protected by plastic film and leafed through casually by our friends, our photographs allow us to say, Let me tell you about this person; we can say, The photo may read like this, but let me tell you about the beauty and horror of this place, Let me tell you how people live here. We use our photographs to tell stories, but also to open the doors to the stories we want to tell.
For example: I want to tell you that burning bodies pop loudly, violently, much louder than the pop and crackle of sweet sap boiling between bark and heartwood, but it has taken me an entire essay to come out and say it.
1 Pronounced nat+h, or in approximate English phoenetics, NAHT-h, but with the tongue on the teeth, like in Italian. Nepalis, at least those in and around Kathmandu, also tend to pronounced the letter u, when mid-word, similarly to its pronounciation in Japanese, which is to say almost not at all, as in the Japanese word hibakusha, meaning the atomic bomb survivors. The best, still-rough equivalent I can give in text is to the e in Oregon, which kind of sounds like a hiccup in the middle of organ.
Pashupatinath, then, is closest to pash-pa-tee-NAHT-h than any other way I can think of syllabicating it.
2 The paradox here is that oftentimes point-and-shoots require more imposition, more posed photography, than SLRs, because it's difficult to get sharp pictures from a distance far enough to be surreptitious; but also that people are more at ease with their portraits being shot with a point-and-shoot than a fancy camera. Perhaps the lack of communicated "seriousness" signals a lack of desire to exploit of the images--that the images are to be used only personally, and therefore no reciprocal (and unoffered) consideration is in order.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
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