Istanbul 04: The Dervish

By revolving in harmony with all things in nature--with the smallest cells and with the stars in the firmament--the semazen testifies to the existence and the majesty of the Creator, thinks of Him, gives thanks to Him, and prays to Him. In so doing, the semazen confirms the words of the Qur'an (64:1): Whatever is in the skies or on earth invokes God.

Monday, May 19, 2008, Turkoman Hotel, Istanbul

Ate at the Rumeli restaurant before going to the large outdoor tourist cafe to watch a whirling dervish spin and spin. He was such a beautiful boy, probably in his mid-20s with a heavy five o'clock shadow and exquisite Sufi outfit. I kept thinking of how he (the man) disappeared in his dancing à la anātman in Buddhism, yet really more akin to Western mysticism because the experience of Śūnyatā within Buddhism is not supposed to be mystical at all.

Here he was, dressed all in "death": his robe a shroud for the ego; his camel-hair hat, a tombstone. But as any mediocre Tarot card reader will tell you, death is merely a symbol for change.

Tiananmen

I was in Beijing just a few days after the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It was still closed to the public for “renovation,” in anticipation of protests and commemoration events. I could only get a few shots of the huge Mao poster above the gate before shuttling along to the next stop on our tour.

I was attending a conference on biography and life writing at Peking University, presenting a co-authored paper entitled “Politicizing the Trivial: Life Writings of Virginia Woolf & Slavenka Drakulić.” It was basically a comparison of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Drakulić’s How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, an evaluation of how early twentieth-century capitalism and late twentieth-century communism had failed in gender equality and how those failures resonate with each other across geography and time. I was still surprised I had even been given a visa after the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade the previous month.

Since I never technically saw Tiananmen Square, I’ll rely on the description from Jan Wong’s Red China Blues, a brilliant memoir that should be required reading in literature, politics, journalism, and cultural studies.

Tiananmen is gargantuan, the biggest square in the world. It is a hundred sprawling acres in all, flatter and bigger than the biggest parking lot I have ever seen. I used to get tired just walking from one end to the other. Moscow’s Red Square was intimate in comparison. Tiananmen could simultaneously accommodate the entire twenty-eight teams of the National Football League plus 192 other teams, each playing separate games. It could stage an entire Summer Olympics, with all events taking place at the same time. Or if you put a mountain in the middle, you could hold a Winter Olympics there instead.

Tiananmen Square made me feel tiny, insignificant, powerless. That was no accident. As the geographic and political center of Beijing, it was enlarged after the Communist victory to celebrate the grandiosity of Red China. In 1949, the Great Helmsman stood on the rostrum, in front of the Forbidden City, to proclaim: “The Chinese people have stood up.”

Tiananmen, which means Gate of Heavenly Peace, is also one of the least hospitable squares in the world. There is no bench or place to rest, nowhere to get a drink, no leafy tree to offer respite from the sun. Only the one-hundred-foot high Monument to the People’s Heroes punctuates it, and, after 1977, Mao’s white and gold mausoleum. Tiananmen is also one of the most monitored squares in the world. Its huge lampposts are equipped with giant speakers for crowd control and swiveling videocameras. The commercial photographers, with white pushcarts and colorful shade umbrellas, are actually plainclothes police. For a modest fee, they snap photos of Chinese tourists posing in the square and mail you the pictures a week later. That way, they have your name and address, too.

Here is a well written op-ed from the New York Times: China’s Grief, Unearthed by Mia Jian. For those of you less squeamish, here's an excerpt from a BBC report nineteen years ago:

Overview

Is it over yet?
Now is the time when my prick of a professor contacts my colleagues to let them know when the revised deadline is for their obligatory rewrite. Graduate school is so much easier when the professor dies and everyone automatically gets an A.

Overkill
I’m still a bit shell-shocked by the death toll in Burma. Day one: 400; day two: 4,000; day three: 10,000; day four: possibly 100,000. And how many of those deaths by “natural disaster” are really and ultimately a result of the political fiasco of a corrupt and illegal government? Only one news report claimed that the military had killed about 40 “inmates” because of a “riot” situation. Of course, ultimately, all these deaths are the result of a failed policy of institutionalized terror and abuse hanging over the Burmese people, but will we ever know the proportion of those killed by the storm (and neglect by the government) to those directly murdered by the government over the past few days? Has anyone heard from Aung San Suu Kyi?

Over Easy
Please don’t get me or my politics wrong: I think Obama is a fine candidate. Hell, I voted for him in the primary and was more than willing—initially, at least—to serve as a district delegate for him. But it makes me sick to see him swallow the bait—hook, line, and sinker, as the saying goes—from the incessant race baiting over his relationship to Rev. Wright. The only reason Rev. Wright was an issue was because he was black. The only reason Obama (felt he) had to respond was because he was black. And the race situation in these United States rolls happily along as it always has.

It aint’ over till the fat lady sings.
Decades after these United States congratulated itself for passing along democracy and capitalism to the Soviets, we see a new Soviet-era and Soviet-styled passing of power out of the hands of the peoples of the former Soviet Union and into a handpicked puppet. Former “democratically-elected” President Vladimir Putin passed the position on to “democratically-elected” Dmitry Medvedev, who in turn appointed him Prime Minister. All this in time for Victory Day celebrations in which triumph over the (other) fascists was observed in true Soviet-era fascism—er, I mean, fashion. Perhaps the Russians have become a little too proficient in American “democracy.”

Bolesław Leaf
March 19, 1994 - March 16, 2008

Rest in peace, my little orange baby.

Broken Wing

There are few things more tragic than a suffering animal, whether that animal be human or not. Watching the demise. Witness to the dissipation. All you want to do, all you feel you can do, is hold on to something no longer there. If it ever was. Knowing full well that nothing you do can effect any change in the situation of our own mortal vastness.

I’ve studied enough Hinduism to know that it’s all illusion: the pain, the suffering, even the conception of life itself. But the illusion is all we have. All we can know of life.

The post-structuralists are accused of nihilism, but only by those who don’t understand them. They gesture toward the im/possibility of death. It is always already outside of our phenomenological experience of life. It’s a death that lives on (sur-vivre as survival), that dissolves ontology, absent both the ontic as well as the logos. Something singular yet universal, embracing all horizons.

And yet it’s not death that concerns us, as the Cynics would agree. It’s dying. It’s the slippage from being to nonbeing. The erasure of all but the trace. The omnipresent absence neither here nor there. The unbearable void that muffles the word, the name, the universe.

But everyone—even the so-called Christians—agree: it is only through dying that one becomes immortal. Too bad none of us will be around when it happens.

Please keep Bolesław in your thoughts.

A bad case of the hollows.

Yeah, this band is rad. I love new music that gets under my skin. Angry words about how fucked-up stuff is. Makes me wanna burn it all down. Singing at the top of my lungs … before I cough up a ball of phlegm the size of my head. Calls me back to Berlin, to that basketball court where it all began. At 11:11 (or was it 3:32?) last night I fell asleep only to wake up within 20 minutes. I read some Gadamer. Watched porn. Went back to bed more frozen than when I first laid down. Sometime around 2:00am I woke up to the sound of Spic-O-Rama, but without that adorable John Leguizamo. I dialed 9-1-1 on speed-dial to report the disturbance. Today’s shot. Tomorrow probably too. It’s now 4:00pm, and I’m only thinking about the things I should’ve already done by now instead of the things I have to do next. Can’t use the sink downstairs because of the leak. Don’t know when I’m going to get back to the gym that overcharges me on a monthly basis. Sick of the scams all utility companies pull with new service contracts. The bruises up and down my arms have finally faded from the boxes and boxes of books I moved. Ordered two new books from Amazon today. Eventually I’ll bruise myself by moving them as well. Benjamin’s greatest fear was losing his library. Before I slip away into nonbeing, I wanna pile everything I still possess into a gasoline-soaked mound and flick a match in its general direction. Just to see what would happen. Dreading Friday. Not because it’s my birthday but because it’s the anniversary of when the sky over Texas caught fire and rained down on our heads. Dead astronauts and all.

Listen when your hair gets pulled. Don’t get caught. It’s gonna be alright. As soon as the embers die.

As I lay me down to fall asleep
with my demons dying and my pilot light weak.
I curse the last six months I’ve been hiding behind a mustache.
To those last ten years I’ve been howling at a paper moon: Fuck you.

The New 30

I think it’s fairly telling that I should lose my earrings just a couple of weeks before I turn 40. I had to remove them at the doctor’s office while they were taking an EKG. I wanted to get my heart a little look-see since midlife is fast approaching. I put them in my shirt pocket, joking with the nurse that I couldn’t remember the last time I had removed them. Afterwards, I sat at Nodding Dog Coffee Shop in Bishop Arts for an hour working since I haven’t had an Internet connection since Friday afternoon and I’m supposed to be teaching an online section of philosophy this term. When they closed, I returned to the old apartment to do some more gathering of my things to move them to the new flat. It seems most of our things are finally here, and there are even some books already on the bookshelves! Today we finally got phone and DSL. (And AT&T sucks absolutely, but that’s another post altogether.) It must’ve been while I was cleaning and packing that my earrings slipped out. Perhaps I’ll find them when I go back for that last transport of framed art and a vacuum cleaner. So, my heart is healthy. The doctor said I have the heart of an athlete. That’s good news, especially since both my maternal grandfather and my father died of heart disease. No diabetes. No high blood pressure. And he’ll send me the results from the thyroid tests once they return from the lab. Another year. Another decade. Another (new) home. (It wasn’t until we were saying goodbye to Mary that I realized I spent my entire 30s at my last home: I moved in when I was 29, and I just now left—not counting a couple of years in Japan and Europe.) My 30s were good, and so much better than my 20s. I’m looking forward to the future, no matter how short that may prove. This is probably the first time in 17 years that I don’t have any of my rings in any of my 7 holes. I miss body jewelry. I miss the sleepless nights that turned into blissful decadence instead of exhaustion. Now it’s off to bed. Or to work.

R.I.P.

Stockhausen 1928-2007

Thanksgiving Thursday

A random selection of music to be thankful for:

• "Beaten Thursdays" by Prefuse 73
• "The Columbia" by Lackthereof
• "Elvis Cadillac" by Rickie Lee Jones
• "Four Three All India Radio" by Echo Other
• "In a State" by Mojib
• "Kitten Who Did Not Want To Give Up" by BrainStorm
• "Masca" by The Duke Spirit
• "North American Scum (Radio Edit)" by LCD Soundsystem
• "NYC" by Interpol
• "When Under Ether" by P.J. Harvey

Just thinking about the multitude of ghosts that haunt every Thanksgiving and the network of friends around the globe who have made this a special holiday: 44 years ago President Kennedy was killed just a couple of minutes drive from my home; 10 years ago Michael Hutchence was found dead; Sonia in Kumamoto and the apato I painted green with the windows closed--I don't think my brain cells have really fully recovered; Tak & family in Osaka with my first bottle of beaujolais; Jola & the girls in Warsaw with several other bottles...; Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade way back in 1986 and the crappy meal in the basement of the Empire State Bldg.; "In this fateful hour..." over and over; and now me alone with a stack of books and one painting by Redon to keep me company.

American Justice/Global Injustice, or Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I just finished reading two articles from the IHT: German claiming CIA torture loses final appeal and 40 years after Che's death, his image is a battleground after doing some serious thinking since finishing my class this afternoon. I taught the Hindu creation myth today.

Brahma grows bored and so creates Maya to play a game with. She convinces him to create the world of illusion: the universe, the stars and planets, the animals and plants. Then she tells him to create an animal that would be intelligent and aware, one that could appreciate Brahma's creation. So after creating humans, he asks Maya when the game would begin. She cuts Brahma into millions of tiny pieces and puts a piece in each human. Then she makes the pieces forget who they are. The game consists of the pieces finding themselves again.

So, what's the purpose of the game? To win? To lose? To move beyond the illusion of the duality of winning and losing? Is the purpose of the game merely to continue the play? These are all questions that washed ashore during discussion. Is the Holocaust or the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq just humans taking the game too seriously? Am I taking their game too seriously? How serious are the charges of kidnapping and torture made by Khaled el-Masri? (Alas, not serious enough to be addressed by the US Supreme Court.) Can anyone take Che Guevara seriously after forty years since his murder (also conducted by the CIA/US government) and after the sale of millions of T-shirts with his iconic, revolutionary gaze?

I think the game makes me sick. I only find myself nauseated.

Remembrance

One of the many blemishes part of Putin's blemished legacy, Anna Politkovskaya was murdered a year ago.

Observance

Today, on Columbus Day (Observed) I’m sitting through a lecture on early American history—yeah, academic calendars don’t quite match up to national holidays. (When I was at UD—boo! hiss!—I was told that we would not be off on Labor Day because “we are not laborers.”)

But today, I too feel like Columbus: discovering something that millions of people already knew about. (Thanks, Lisa Simpson!) My discovery: I need a break from sitting through lectures and spending far too many hours in front of a computer doing research and writing.

A modest proposal for renaming the day observed today:

• Stolen Continent Day
• Genocide Day
• Taino Heritage Day
• European Legacy Day (celebrating the effects of smallpox and “conquista”)

Indeed, perhaps we all should just walk backward into the ocean….

Il y a / n'est plus

A hundred years of his undying death articulating as if the singular unsaid, unsaying, unsayable, in its fully exteriorized impossibility against the homogenized totalization of a text, an other. He always already (yet) exceeds his own excessive supplementarity. I hereby sign and countersign your centenary as we both recede in our mutually singular oblivions.

Bullet-Point Friday

• Stop having those miniature emotional outbursts (read: breakdowns) when you translate sentences like, "The baby with the head like a balloon died in the hospital while she held his hand," or you're never going to finish this translation assignment by Monday. Tochman's reportage is difficult enough without getting emotionally involved with the people he writes about. Besides, you'll have plenty of time to cry after you finish the Ph.D. when you find yourself even more unemployable.
  
• I have to admit that I hate Apple more and more. Their software is utterly non-intuitive and buggy. I feel the vein in my forehead start to throb and my right eye begin to twitch every time that damned spinning rainbow mouse icon appears because that usually signals that I'll soon have to reboot. And why, oh why, can't they not release iTunes updates every fucking week? (Or when they do, make it smart enough to not require that I have to delete all the old shortcuts and add new ones?) And how much longer will it take me to figure out how to add Polish and Japanese fonts to this PowerBook? I've been trying for a couple of weeks so far with no luck whereas I had no problem with all my PC machines. (And yes, I've visited all the help sites and have downloaded various fonts packages, and yet still I can only type in the Devil's language (read: English).)
• Offer to take Jason to the Stevie Nicks' concert next time she plays Dallas. Hell, if he is interested in spending his birthday listening to Tori Amos wail away at the piano, then he's got to be a fan of the spinning lace and chiffon of that witchy-witchy woman with the soul of a poet.
• Remember the pure bliss of sitting at all those coffee shops in San Francisco just last weekend with Jola, Kris, and Stephen with no agenda, no plan, and no anxiety about the sheer immensity of my insurmountable workload waiting for me back in Dallas. That was the best (and most necessary) get-away of all times.
  

Voices

Nothing abides. Nothing remains.

Today I found out that Ray Williams died. (We raise our voices.) He was the chair of the fine arts division at the community college I attended. (We learn to speak.) He listened, especially when I had something (important) to say. (We speak our minds.) He spoke to me as if I had something important to say. (He taught speech. And humanities.) Although we certainly were not close, he had a deep impact on my life. (I teach.) He was sensitive, and intelligent, and passionate. (I am still learning to listen when my students speak.) Rest in peace, Ray. (Your voice will be missed.)

Burnt Out

Cameron Diaz using her eco-friendly (and edible) hair gel.

Nothing makes Skajlab wish the whole world would burn to smithereens than the incessant and insipid Cameron Diaz talking about the environment. Yes, I bought those damned expensive light bulbs several months ago. Yes, I gradually grew accustomed to the bizarre glow that emanates from them. (Even my neighbors commented on the strange light coming from my windows!) And one of them has already burned out! So much for saving me money in the long run. So much for saving the world one light bulb at a time. So much for eco-spokesperson Cameron making a real difference: I’m sure now in the post-Live Earth fantasy she’ll refuse to be a part of any production that is not entirely green and utterly significant. I wonder just how many of those st00perstars are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the world and give up their careers and celebrity lifestyles. My light bulbs are not going to make the least little impact if Al Gore himself is still jetting around the globe presenting his fancy slideshow. Jets don’t run on rainbows. PA systems don’t run on love. Stop preaching (and “raising awareness”) and actually conserve energy (and my patience) by sitting your sorry ass at home in the ethereal glow of an enviro-friendly light bulb that’s about to burn out long before the world. And I’ll gladly keep my TV turned off for good measure.

Marked by the trace and the testament

Derrida's Learning to Live Finally--his last interview before dying in October 2004--is a brilliant testament to learning, living, and loving. This little book arrived today, and I eagerly read it in its entirety this afternoon. Here are a few of my favorite passages:

I don't want to renounce anything, indeed I cannot. Because you know, learning to live is always narcissistic ...: one wants to live as much as possible, to save oneself, to persevere, and to cultivate all these things which, though infinitely greater and more powerful than oneself, nonetheless form a part of this little 'me' that they exceed on all sides. To ask me to renounce what formed me, what I've loved so much, what has been my law, is to ask me to die. (29-30)

At the moment I leave 'my' book (to be published)--after all, no one forces me to do it--I become, appearing-disappearing, like that uneducable specter who will have never learned how to live. The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. This is not a striving for immortality; it's something structural. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, 'proceeds' from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing. It's the ultimate test: one expropriates oneself without knowing exactly who is being entrusted with what is left behind. Who is going to inherit, and how? Will there even be any heirs? (32-3)

[S]urvival is an originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existence.... We are structurally survivors, marked by this structure of the trace and of the testament.... [D]econstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life. ... This surviving is life beyond life, life more than life, and my discourse is not a discourse of death, but, on the contrary, the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus surviving to death, because survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible. (51-2)

To get a lucid and direct taste of this philosopher "whose entire work pays homage to the subversive intensity of existence," I recommend this little book, this blur, this tear--a mere paper left behind when a great thinker ceased to exist.

Bringing Sexy (and Consumption) Back

Who would've thought that TB could be so fuggin' sexy?!?! This photo from the AP (or perhaps it was Jeff Koons or even Pierre et Gilles) does more to glamorize the disease than any lackluster nineteenth-century painting or even Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. I wish I was coughing up blood with both of them....

Memory of Loss

The dead will always outnumber the living.

One of my favorite works at the Art Institute was Chagall’s 1938 White Crucifixion. In it Chagall chooses to depict the crucifixion of Jesus (the “King of the Jews”), including this scene as the crux of a long history of pogroms against the Chosen—a history with its own chiasmus at the Cross, that damnable and lamentable inversion from Chosen to chastised, from blessed to bereaved. And somehow we good Christians (and post-1948, Judeo-Christians (if such a hyphenated beast/bestial identity exists; and why not Judeo-Christiano-Muslim?)) only remember the last 2000 years of victimhood and not the prior 5000 of gloating victors against all the other desert peoples (with their own desert gods). History will teach us nothing, for even the Palestinians (these new Philistines) will rise up and slaughter new innocents. It reminds me of a recent headline: “army battles militants,” and yet the unasked question still heard in the depths of language: who more militant than the military? And you too do not exist … nor I. Auch du und du. I’m reminded too of all those Japanese I befriended and loved whose fathers, and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers probably shot at my own grandfather, filling his mortal body with shrapnel and environmental detritus so that even weeks before his death metal was still winnowing its way from beneath his skin more than sixty years after the ceasefire. And when will this fire finally cease? And who will burn for more? And whose father, or grandfather, or great-grandfather was absent—absent in the way of a missing limb or a lastborn son—due to a shot fired from my grandfather’s rifle? How the missing trace their absence(s) down through the generations so that in my clinging I cling only to that which absences itself, that missing part, that lifeline of longing. Each near-death experience (and I know such a hyphenated beast exists) brings me closer to the death that awaits only me in its mortal vastness, in its singularity and solitude, for only that one death will make it all better by making us one.