Month: August 2004

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Quiddity

Suddenly, the little tab in the top center of my Yahoo inbox that used to say “Powered by hp,” is fire-engine red and fires a new slogan one word at a time, Burma Shave style.

YOU (with a target for the O)
ARE
YOUR
PLAYLIST.
you + hp

There’s a thought! Interesting timing, too: I hadn’t noticed it until a couple days ago. Right on the eve of the GOP convention, which is described as the most scripted and theatrical ever.

I gather that on Sunday afternoon, as several hundred thousand of the unwashed mashes acted out their own playlists in the streets, the illuminati of the Republican Party were in the theatres enjoying special Republican Party-approved Broadway musicals, such as “The Lion King” and “Wonderful Town.” “No one will be sent to see Mark Medoff’s play ‘Prymate,’ . . . a show that confronts racial sensitivities and has a black actor playing a gorilla. They will not be sent to Tony Kushner’s “Caroline, or Change,” a serious musical about civil rights. In fact, they will not be sent to anything that touches on contemporary issues,” the New York Times reported.

In other words,

YOU
ARE
OUR
PLAYLIST.
you + GOP

Give my regards to Broadway.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The devil in the details

All weekend the air hangs thick and heavy. On rare occasions when the sun peeks through the clouds, the woods and lawn turn into a Turkish steam bath. With barely a breeze at ground level or aloft, the numerous thunderstorms move at a snail’s pace, like clipper ships becalmed in the Sargasso Sea. From Saturday afternoon on, one can hear an almost constant rumbling from storms in every direction.

When the storms hit, they bring brief downpours of monsoon strength. I sit on my porch and enjoy the tempest, teacup in hand. It’s just as well that I decide to take a break from blogging on Sunday – the computer is off more often than it’s on. My link to the web is through a wireless, so-called ethernet connection between here and my parent’s house, and my father has learned the hard way – through two fried modems – always to unplug the jack from the wall at the first hint of a storm. The surge protector can’t save the modem from a burst of electrons along the telephone line.

Yesterday afternoon we had two lightning strikes that almost certainly would have cooked the modem had it been connected. This wasn’t one of those storms with lots of cloud-to-cloud lightning, “sound and fury signifying nothing.” It was a thunderstorm that meant business: sheets of rain, long minutes between bolts of lightning that went straight to earth (or in fact, straight to sky, but I’m talking more about perception than reality here). The second close strike hit right behind my parent’s house with an earsplitting crash. Ah, adrenalin! I do love a good storm . . .

I was attempting to read a book called The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power, by Bruce Kapferer (University of Chicago Press, 1997), but it wasn’t easy. The author plunges right into a dense, theoretical discussion in the Introduction, then proceeds to survey the entire field of “Sorcery in Anthropology” in Chapter 1. Only in the second chapter does he begin to get into the nitty-gritty, with descriptions of actual practices in the area where he has conducted fieldwork – among the Sinhalese Buddhists of Sri Lanka. Finally, my head stops hurting and I start finding passages I can sink my teeth into:

The supplicants to the shrines of Suniyam and the other demon-deities unite with the forces of magnified, transcendent, godlike human action. They join with the capacity of this action as a force in the destruction and re-creation of human realities, as a dynamic in the energies of exclusion and inclusion in the orders and relations of the life world, and as the expressive force of alienated and alienating power. When people visit the shrines to Suniyam and the other demon-deities or sorcery gods (usually to ask for assistance for some immediate practical matter concerning their everyday lives), they enter into the vertices of the turbulent power of human being. There they draw upon the magicality of human being and extend themselves into its magicality. This extraordinary potency of human beings is as apparent in lack and dispossession as in possession, to which Suniyam and other demon-deities give marvelous expression. I refer to the capacity of human beings to direct their consciousness actively and transformationally into the world, to make and unmake the realities of themselves and their fellows, to become intimate and influential in the actions of others, and even, as it were, to become consubstantial with the very bodily being of others. This is the potency of sorcery.

It occurs to me that a key phrase in all this is “as it were.” With that last crash of thunder still echoing in my ears, I’m wondering in my usual way just how much it really amounts to, this “magicality” – Sartre’s expression for the power of human intentionality arising from the formation of social bonds. How can you really compare the sparks from a human encounter with the awesome power of Nature? What do “godlike human action” and “the expressive force of alienated or alienating power” really amount to?

But then I remind myself of just how much destruction has been wrought by human beings since their adoption of the mechanistic worldview in the 17th century. Once alienated from the true wellsprings of Creation, the engineers, managers and economists, caught up in their boundless faith in the power and rightness of the human will, have indeed forged a terrifying global reality in which even the weather cannot now be ascribed solely to God or Nature.

The storm moves slowly off. With the last rumbles dying away in the east, it’s time to reconnect the Plummer’s Hollow intranet. But something’s wrong; I can’t get through. I use the pinging software installed by my techie cousin Jeff, and sure enough, there’s nothing passing between the houses. I buzz my Dad on the intercom: is the modem working? Yep, no problem, he says. I run back and forth between the houses, trying this and that, dodging the ever-more-rampant tear-thumb – a moisture-loving plant that has taken over much of the lawn this summer.

We try our usual gambit when the connection fails: turn the main computer off and let it rest for a few minutes before restarting. Neither of us has any idea why this works, but usually it does. No dice this time, though. Finally, it occurs to me to try unplugging and reconnecting both wireless units. I reason that since they are plugged into unprotected circuits, a power surge from the lightning must have somehow knocked them off alignment, even though all their little lights are still glowing green.

It works! Or so the “WS Ping ProPack” suggests. I have to signal my dad to reconnect the modem briefly in order to verify the restoration of my connection. Another storm has already begun to move in.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Gall

From Reuters:

Police said there were more than 200 arrests during the day, most unrelated to the march, but there was at least one clash between self-styled anarchists and police along the route.

Why is it they never tell us about the well-behaved, officially designated anarchists that must be out there? I mean, imagine if everyone just called themselves anarchists whether they had any right to or not. It would be, like, anarchy!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

New tricks

Most of my best correspondents are machines, I was muttering to myself as I scanned through my latest e-mail messages: automatically forwarded comments from Haloscan (5); automatically generated, monthly listserv subscription information (3); weekly updates from online dating services to which I had never subscribed and from which I could not seem to withdraw my name (2); spam addressed to people whose e-mail handle resembled mine (8); and a barrage of action alerts from close to two dozen do-gooder organizations. My favorites are the ones where all you have to do is hit “reply” and “send” and they do the rest – including sending a fax on your behalf. I love the idea of my lobotomized senator having to pay for the privilege of receiving tens of thousands of identical faxes on some issue he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about. The power of the people and all that.

Just then the phone rang. It was my mother. “Hey, you know that girl Joan you used to date? I just got the nicest letter from her! She mentioned she was doing a lot of driving for her new job, and said she’d be passing through in late September. It kind of sounded like she wants to stop in for a visit! Though she didn’t come right out and say so.”

“Huh,” I said. A letter?

“So this morning I called her up, and we had the nicest conversation! She said she was sorry now about the way things worked out – or didn’t work out, you know – but that she had always admired our family so much, because her own had been so dysfunctional and everything. She told me a few things that I can’t really share with you, but it was just, I don’t know, nice.

“So anyway, she’s going to drop in on the 28th and 29th – that’s when we’re all getting together for a late Labor Day celebration, and to see Tom and Crystal’s new baby, remember?”

“Oh yeah, right.”

“Well, I just thought, you’d be here anyway at that time . . . But with everyone else here too, there’d be less pressure on you to talk with her if you didn’t feel like it. And you remember what a great cook she was! She said she’d be glad to help out in the kitchen – she sounded really excited about it. I mean, you know, I just feel sorry for her.”

“Uh huh.”

I guess I didn’t really mind. Actually, I didn’t think much about it at all, until the very morning of the reunion. My car’s CD player wasn’t working, so I was more or less forced to do some thinking for a while on the drive over. I started wondering about the logistics. Where was Joan going to sleep?

“She can sleep in your old bedroom, can’t she? I figured you could just grab a sleeping bag from the attic and sleep on the living room floor,” Mom said cheerfully when I called her on the cell phone. “It can’t be much different from all that camping you do, right?”

You know those vivid dreams right before daybreak, where you feel as if you’re lucid, as if your conscious mind is fully in control? But then you wake up and realize that it wasn’t, and that you had had no more control over the way things turned out than in any other dream. That’s kind of the way that weekend felt.

Joan was completely different. It had only been twelve years since I’d last seen her – it seemed like yesterday. But in that time, evidently, she had worked at a half dozen different places, traveled all over the world, made (I think) quite a bit of money during the dot-com bubble, and when it burst, spent a couple years “getting her head together” at some ashram in Oregon or Washington state.

This last experience, she said, “totally changed my life,” and I believed her. The thing is, I didn’t much care for the change. The Joan I’d dated had been very opinionated, funny, decisive. She was the kind of person who knew exactly what she wanted out of life, which always fascinated me because it was so alien to my own, more contemplative existence. We liked each other a lot, but ultimately had decided that our constant disgreements were wearing us out.

The new Joan was anything but pushy. Even her voice had changed; her sentences now tended to trail off into the ether, or else would end with that peculiar rising intonation so popular among the younger set these days. And it was almost impossible to pin her down about anything.

“So what are you up to these days?” I asked after the obligatory long hug and effusions of warm mutual regard.

“Oh, so many things, you know? I mean, I’m just sort of being, like in harmony with the universe? Living in the now . . . ”

“My mother said you were doing a lot of driving for your new job. You’re in sales?”

“Oh, I don’t know if I’d call it that . . . I mean, people do call it that . . . Like, you just did? But I don’t know if that’s my reality? . . . I drive . . . Sometimes I might get a sale . . . People in a rest area somewhere might read the side of my van and come over, you know, and talk for a while . . . If they don’t buy anything, that’s perfectly O.K.? Because I’m like in it for the whole journey?”

“Well, O.K., but what are you selling?”

She led me up to my old room and showed me what appeared to be an unpainted piece of lawn furniture. “I brought this one to give to your mother? I think they’re so beautiful . . . But maybe you don’t agree . . . ”

“Um, well, I guess it is kind of . . . compelling. It’s a garden ornament of some kind?”

She let out an irritatingly tinkly laugh. “It’s all hand-forged in the traditional way . . . No one makes them like this anymore . . . It’s kind of based on a design, or really several designs, that I found in an old catalogue from 1898 . . . ”

“You make them yourself?” I asked, remembering that her parents had been artists.

That laugh again. “Oh, it’s not like I have a forge in my backyard or anything . . . ”

Then, perhaps sensing my frustration, she knelt down and pointed out the outline of a dog sitting on its haunches. “They’re so popular with dog lovers . . . Anyone who’s ever had a companion animal knows what a deeply spiritual connection that can be . . . Like my Hermione here? Would you like to say hello to Dave? Dave, this is Hermione . . . ”

There was a dog on my bed. A brown and tan mongrel – a beagle-border collie mix, by the look of it. “Hello,” it said.

Joan let out another tinkle of laughter at my evident surprise. “Yes, she’s quite a talker, aren’t you Hermy?

“We met at the ashram?” Joan continued. “Sri Ramanujan – that’s the guru – he tried to teach her a little bit of the Vedas? But I guess she didn’t really care too much for that . . . She decided to start speaking English instead . . . ”

“I said to myself, fuck this! I want to be able to go into the kitchen and place my order with the cooks! ‘Hey, brother, how about forking over some of that sorry end of a sacred cow,'” the dog said in a gruff but perfectly intelligible voice, ending with a couple of short barks that were the closest she could come to laughing.

“We became, like, best friends?” Joan said.

“Nobody else wanted anything to do with me. ‘Who wants a dog that can talk? Besides, she’s so judgemental,‘” Hermione mimicked. “Idiots!”

I regarded her warily. “So what do you do?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation away from topics that might offend the newly sensitive Joan.

“What do I do? I’m a dog! I piss and shit, shed hair and scratch up the furniture. I live like a queen! And besides, let me tell you, it’s a full-time job just keeping an eye on this flako nut-job!” Bark bark. “I have to take her for a walk every morning, or she’d do nothing but sit around and gaze at her navel all day. Honey, I say, if anything ever happens with your navel, I’ll tell you! You’ll be the first to know!” Bark bark bark.

“She plays piano, too? It’s, like, so beautiful and spiritual,” Joan said demurely. “She says she taught herself, but I think she must’ve remembered it from a past life?” Hermione replied with what can only be described as a snort.

So the visit turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had expected. I figured the only way to find out what had really happened at the ashram, and what was happening in Joan’s life now, was to ask Hermione in private. Plus, I wanted to make sure she was really speaking on her own – I wouldn’t put it past Joan to have learned ventriloquism.

But the dog really was that vocal – and that smart. “No, Joan isn’t a ventriloquist!” she said as I pushed the bedroom door open.

Her words did sound a little muffled, though. She was lying on the bed as before, with one of my bathroom slippers between her teeth.

“Hey, that’s my slipper!” I protested.

“Well, I figured it belonged to somebody,” she said as she gave it a good shake. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell Joan to buy you a new pair before we leave.” Chew chew chew.

“But why . . . ”

“Look, Dave, do you have any idea what it’s like to be a carnivore? I mean a real carnivore with real canines that give you sharp jolts, unpleasant little reminders of their existence, if you go too long without ripping apart a rotting carcass. You know what I’m saying? Bad karma be damned! This isn’t a lifestyle choice!”

I laughed. “O.K., but why my slippers? If you have some issues, let’s talk them out. I mean, you can do that, right?”

“Dogs don’t have issues, Dave. They have problems. Look, I know there are such things as pet psychiatrists, but you’re not one of them, O.K.? I had no idea whose slipper this was. I’m sorry! You’ll get a new one!”

And she was sorry, too, I could tell that. She was, after all, a beagle-border collie mix – they have a gift for that sort of thing. I wondered whether her facility with human speech might have supressed her native capacity for empathy, though.

She let out a bark of laughter. “No, you don’t do it like that! If you want to learn how to tell what others are thinking, you can’t just look straight into their eyes – that’s no good,” she said.

I hadn’t even known that that was what I wanted to learn until she said so. It occurred to me that speech was perhaps the least of the tricks that Hermione had learned from hanging out with the guru at Joan’s ashram.

“The corners of the eyes,” she said, “and on human beings, the corners of their mouth – and the lines between the two. That’s where you look.”

I settled into the armchair next to the bed. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Inside the ruins of the machine

I’ve been reading The Lost Heart of Asia, by the British travel writer (and novelist) Colin Thubron (HarperPerennial, 1994). He describes a circuit of the former Soviet Central Asian republics – the ‘Stans, minus Afghanistan – just six months after the collapse of Soviet rule.

The Uzbekistan portion seems especially poignant, considering what that country has since turned into: a dictatorship more brutal and possibly even more corrupt than it had been when the Russians called the shots. Uzbekistan now also hosts a garrison of the American empire, a major anchor for a string of bases and “forward command posts” strung throughout the region. Under the just-announced restructuring of American forces abroad, Central Asia is slated to become even more central to U.S. global hegemony. One can’t help but feel grim fascination at this complete repositioning of what had been, only a few years before, a region on the geographical periphery of Western interests.

Thubron’s “Lost Heart of Asia” has indeed been rediscovered, albeit in a manner far different from the expectations of its inhabitants when he interviewed them in 1992. The most common dream then, he found, was for a pan-Turkic empire with its capital in Burkhara or Samarkand. Pan-Islam seemed a remote and distasteful possibility, even to Muslims. Some yearned for the return of Soviet stability; others with longer memories hearkened back to the benign neglect under the czars, before forced collectivization and Stalin’s purges turned everything upside down. Environmental catastrophes present and imminent contributed to a general sense of “lostness” and malaise.

This is a part of the world where world-conquerors have come and gone with depressing regularity. Samarkand, the capital of Uzbekistan, was once the center of a vast empire founded by Tamerlane the Great. As Thubron points out, its very name has evoked the quintessence of the exotic in the Western European imagination for several hundred years. Samarkand was “the fantasy of Goethe and Handel, Marlowe and Keats, yet its reality was out of reach.” For Thubron, its ruins even now seem inaccessible, “as if a whole secret city had died within the modern one.”

The 20th-century philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari derived their crucial concept of a war machine in part from Central Asian historical models. Through war machines, the self-organizing and emergent powers in non-organic matter can be concentrated and turned upon the centralized hierarchies of states and empires; the latter attempt in turn to capture and transform war machines into armies. Tamerlane, as a Mongol and a Muslim, built an enduring war machine similar to what the Spanish conquistadors later employed against the Aztec and Inca empires: one part military, one part universalizing religion. Six centuries later, the landscape still bears witness to the monstrous imposition of his rule. Thubron writes,

I went out into the ruins of Bibi Khanum, feeling an obscure self-reproach. Even in desolation the mosque seemed to tower out of an era more fortunate than my own (but this was an illusion). Tamerlane had built it as the greatest temple in Islam. Thousands of captured artisans from Persia, Iraq and Azerbaijan had labored to carve its marble floors, glaze its acres of tiles, erect its monster towers and the four hundred cupolas bubbling over its galleries. The emperor flailed its building forward. He considered too small the gateway completed in his absence, pulled it down wholesale, hanged its architects and began again. But the mountainous vaults and minarets which he envisioned crushed the foundations, and the walls started to fracture almost before completion. People began to be afraid to pray there. It towered above me in megalomaniac reverie, raining the sky with blistered arches and severed domes. Cracks pitched and zigzagged down the walls. Tiles flaked off like skin. The gateway loomed so high that the spring of its vanished arch began eighty feet above me, and completed itself phantasmally in empty air. Gaping breaches had split the prayer-hall top to bottom, and the squinches were shedding whole bricks.

Everything – the thunderous minarets, the thirty-foot doors, the outsize ablutions basin – shrunk the visitor to a Lilliputian intruder, and peopled the mosque with giants. In the court’s centre a megalithic lectern of grey Mongollian marble had once cradled a gargantuan Koran, but its indestructibility, and perhaps its isolation from the mosque’s wrecked heart, had touched it with pagan mana now, and it had become the haunt of barren women, who crouched beneath it as a charm for fertility.

As I sat nearby, three young worldlings, urban and confident in high heels, went giggling and nudging towards it. Their shrieks rang in the ruins. Then, separately, they dropped on all fours and crawled in and out between the lectern’s nine marble legs. At first they ridiculed one another at this place where fun and superstition merged. But once unseen by their companions, creeping through the marble labyrinth, an unease descended. Covertly they touched their palms to the stone. One of them kissed it. Then they emerged, straightening their stockings, and tripped away.

Perhaps this is the best that we can wish for: that the imperial state will be crushed under the weight of its own, vast machinery. Eight centuries from now, will the ruins of oil refineries be converted to some more benign use?
__________

See also In the twilight of empire (August 18). I cribbed the stuff on D&G’s war machine from Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, by Mark Bonta and John Protevi (Edinburgh University Press, 2004), which you should all immediately go buy. For more on the book, see Forest time, forest space (May 25).