Everyone Likes to Watch

I've been a little scarce in the push to get everything ready for my fly-away date --September 6 .

But must take a moment for these pictures. In one, Indian holy men, sadhus, peer through smoked lenses while Rahu eats the sun during the recent solar eclipse of an earlier post. Lots of Americans know the other picture. It has come to be seen, nostalgically, as an image of delight in new media and mindless submission to popular culture in the allegedly primitive 1950s: These viewers go toward the light -- the movies, our artificial sun and moon -- in their 3D glasses.

There's an Italo Calvino story, "The Daughters of the Moon," a magical realist allegory for our time--or not, depending on how you like to think about these things. Its first paragraph is a presumably real excerpt from a science article and lays down the conceit of the story.

Deprived, as it was, of a covering of air to act as a protective shield, the moon found itself exposed right from the start to a continual bombardment of meteorites and to the corrosive action of the sun’s rays. According to Thomas Gold, of Cornell University, the rocks on the moon’s surface were reduced to powder through constant attrition from meteorite particles. According to Gerard Kuiper, of the University of Chicago, the escape of gases from the moon’s magma may have given the satellite a light, porous consistency, like that of a pumice stone.

This in its own way is a fable of cultural collision. The collidee, the moon, is worn down and softened into a lighteness of being that bears, patiently, the traces of its traumatic encounter with the collider (in my wild reach for fabulist parallels, the fire and dazzle of India.)

It's a different fable from the one about being reborn as a whole new person. You might say both are true stories. I like this one better.

My Name is Khan

New York Times: Shah Rukh Khan, understandably annoyed from being detained by immigration officials at a New Jerey airport last Friday, had this to say: "The US doesn't lead an isolated, parallel universe existence...there is a whole world which makes all the good and bad that is happening. So if we are scared of violence and terrorisim, all of us are responsible for it. It's not that the world is and America is not."

Kipp Report: The king of Bollywood began his acting career in television; in 1988, he landed the role of Abhimanyu Rai in a popular series called Fauji, and in 1989, he acted as Senior in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, among others. In 1992, he made his film debut in as Raj Mathur Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman. He has since made over 70 movies, many of which have been successful. One of his films, the 1995 hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, remained in cinemas across India for over 10 years. His latest project, My Name is Khan, is about racial profiling, making the incident at Newark airport last week ironic. He was travelling to the US to promote his movie, but was detained for questioning as part of routine security checks.

Natural Analogues

I had to post this image by Ed Kashi (note the match with Varanasi's most ancient name) for Corbis in today's New York Times: the ropey back of an old man against the soft texture of his hair and the placid reticulatedness of the sea. There is resilience and comfort in patterns like this one, familiar from river currents and tree trunks and rooted plants and, yes, the skin of experience. With a little effort we can see in such patterns cultural traces as well. Here is an analogue of Indian civilization, or at least the aggregate of historical cultures we clumsily call India, written in flesh. Here are grooves and rivulets that become tributaries and branches and alluvial paths for exploring, a footprint of becoming in time. It puts me in mind of something an old friend, Mike Adams, says. He argues that the profoundest psychological engagement with the deep pattern of life is imagistic. Without denying the power of seeing (honored, after all, in the title of this blog ), I wonder if any less intensity attaches to patterns expressed audially and proprioceptively. Still, this iconic image relates, as Hindisum does, the individual to the larger reality with which we are--shall we say, cosmically--imprinted.

Midnight's Children

So.....Happy 63rd Independence Day, India!
(Left-click on this image to see how dramatic it is, full size.)

Nationalism and tradition celebrate together in this image of dancers whose coordinated movements bring to mind red-robed Durga, the many-armed Mother Goddess in her warrior aspect. Instead of mace, sword, disc, arrow, trident, she hold flags as attributes of her power. Durga is the mother with a thirst for the sacrificial blood of animals as well as devotees. So reinvigorated, in some ancient versions she bestows fertility on the land. Durga originated as an mountain goddess among the non-Aryan cultures of India. She began as a liminal sort of deity, eating meat and drinking liquor and blood, which are polluting to Aryans. Likewise, her strong warrior spirit distinguishes her from the traditionally submissive Hindu woman. Later she took her place as an establishment goddess who protects the stability of the cosmos, a challenge she takes in stride and treats as play.

In Hindu mythology, she springs from a great convergence of light and heat energy emitted by male gods frustrated by their inability to defeat the dangerous buffalo demon Mahisha. They surrender their potency so she can save the universe. She operates without male allies--sometimes creating female helpers from herself on the battlefield--and always wins.

Durga is not the center of Indian independence festivities, though. That is Bharat Mata, Mother Goddess India. More about her another time. Consider, rather, the president of India, Smt. Prithaba Devisingh Patil, a Durga-like figure as Commander of the Indian Armed Forces. She is decidedly not Durga-like insofaras she must rely on her male and female allies in Parliament who both limit and enable her power.

Her address to Indian citizens on their national birthday spoke directly about communal violence (the commonly used term used for religious strife), the politics of water, the rights of women, swine flu, the need for social justice in the continuing economic development of the country, and the maintenance of India's ancient civilizational heritage. She portrayed India as the land, its oldest image, but as the "noble mansion" described by Jawaharlal Nehru in his 1947 Tryst with Destiny speech , an edifice President Patil said is supported by four pillars of democracy, inclusive economic development, social empowerment and a value system based on a civilizational heritage. Her speech was, of course, delivered at midnight, as was Nehru's on the occasion of the birth of independent modern India. With this new metaphor of the country as a living space built for and by its people delibered at the "stroke of midnight" (he called it the ending of a period of ill fortune brought about because "we have endured all the pains of labor," he created a new mythological space and time for the nation.

Industrial Picturesque

Reading Viaduct - Photos by Juan Levy

The Reading Viaduct is a mile-long earth berm along which the Reading Railroad used to bring anthracite coal from Pottsville to Philadelphia. It runs above Northern Liberties and offers an updated version of a strain of English romanticism that helped make Central Park. The “picturesque" English park was for contemplating classical ruins in a natural landscape, a nostalgic refuge from industrialization for the class that had brought that world into existence, not least with steam-powered railroads for transporting coal (Like good burghers, they disdained the aristocratic French gardens of Versailles in their own choice of an aesthetic).

Today the bones of this late industrial fabric are having a go of their own at nostalgia. Made softer by wildflowers and grasses among rusted rails and weather-carved wooden ties, those bones are quite beautiful. On Sunday, walking the viaduct under a big sky was akin to being in a spacious meadow where warehouse mountains popped up every so often.

Clusters of Center City skyscrapers to the south never intruded on the serene horizontality of the berm. Where small trees were burned between the ties, the woody remains were like black and brown sea corals with eyes at the end of each velvety charcoal knob.

This is industrial picturesque, a phrase that doesn’t properly capture the look of signal bridges made graceful and fragile (and classical: what is a signal bridge, after all, but industrial post and lintel). English picturesque meditated on the aspirations of classical civilization to timeless beauty and knowledge. American civilization was built on the railroad, emblem of the mobility and strength of industrial capitalism. If English gardens showed how timeless values surrender to nature and time, the lesson of the Viaduct might be that what once pushed relentlessly forward is now stilled and vulnerable--but also a gift to be re-adapted in this moment as a unique space for the community.

The berm looks out on (and eventually the Viaduct could connect to) surrounding neighborhoods, abandoned buildings, and artists’ studios. An imaginative reincarnation of the Viaduct would bring additional energy and beauty here. My "excellent adventure" neighbor Juan Levy brought me along on a scouting mission by folks thinking along the lines of the wildly popular High Line in New York City (Kate Brower points out the Viaduct is considerably wider than the High Line).
A couple of these folks, John Struble and Sarah McEneaney, founded a non-profit group in 2003 to develop the Viaduct as an open public green space with its railroad fabric intact. You can find out about their terrific work here. And this link shows how local artists engaged the Viaduct last April. I intend to join up when I come back; it’s a wonderful project.

The trip was partly a chance to test a camera Juan was recommending for India. Along with Waldo Aguirre and Brendan Keegan at Annenberg, whatever image quality I manage to achieve in video and still shots (and getting the images back here!) will be with the help of these good folks.

Totally incidental: After a fierce thunderstorm yesterday, tons of rainwater pushing the Schuylkill along were smoothly sluicing over the spillway by Boathouse Row. As they tumbled over the dam in the late afternoon, those gallons of muddy water looked like (stay with me now) gallons of molten milk chocolate and, where they violently churned up the river below, frothy whipped cream. It was GREAT.

When he shuts his eyes it is night

Good footage last week of the solar eclipse that swept northeast across swaths of Asia. Online videos showed worshipers observing the occasion in Varanasi, directly in the path of the shadow of the moon, where 2,500 folks gathered at the Ganges to watch a total eclipse for 3 mins 48 seconds, the longest time until 2132.

A scientific world paints eclipses as extravagantly, in its way, as poetically gorgeous mythology. One commentator enthused that scientists wait a lifetime for an opportunity like this to see the delicately streaming sun's corona, 2 million degrees centigrade. They describe the beading of light from the reflected irregularities of the moon into a gemlike ball of light perched on the corona as a wedding ring, which it exactly resembles.

In Vedic astrology an eclipse is a sun-eating dragon that swallows the moon. Being Indian mythology, there are different versions. In one, the culprit is Rahu, a frightening dragon who is all head. Rahu diguised himself so as to sneak a drink of the forbidden nectar of immortality churned during the Samudra Manthan, the famous churning of the ocean of milk. The Sun and Moon spotted him and told Vishnu, who lopped off Rahu's head before he could swallow the divine nectar. But the part that had touched the nectar, his head, became immortal. Rahu swore vengeance on the Sun and the Moon, and whenever he sees them he tries to gobble them up. Since, being bodiless, he can hold neither very long, they come safely out the other side, but their power is distressingly weakened.

Above is a Tibetan vision of Rahu as a demon with multiple heads. (There's a reason, of course, he has them all, but that will have to be the subject of another post.) When Rahu swallows the sun, the precaution of fasting prevents one from ingesting malefic influences afoot. Pregnant women must stay indoors and parents do not want their babies born on this day. To ward off the effects of the eclipse, folks undertake ritual bathing in purifying rivers and streams to cleanse their sins.

Something so momentous, ominous and beautiful as stealing the sun needs a story big enough to convey awe and respect for the impact on us of the primal powers of Nature. Religiously, this is huge. Divine space visibly invading and transforming human space for all to see. We don't treat phenomenal Nature so profoundly in the West. Man walking on the moon is, after all, human space invading the divine. Rainbows, maybe. We are able to see them as auspicious omens, as in this wedding story in last Sunday's New York Times.

There was plenty of science on the ground in India, but some were not impressed. In Taregna, some folks believed that the obstruction of the sight of the eclipse by overcast skies (it's monsoon season) happened for a reason. " The scientists have made a mockery of this divine thing. It is because of this that no one here could watch the eclipse," a devotee explained.

The title above comes from a Chinese legend about the celestial dragon—

When he shuts his eyes it is night

When he opens his eyes it is day

Heat lightning in the summer sky brings dragons to mind.

Can the Axis Mundi Be Televised?

There's a debate about televising darshan at the most prestigious and sacred of all Varanasi's Hindu temples, which is one of the most important temples in India. Kashi Vishwanatha, or Vishveshara, as it also written, refers to the ancient name of Varanasi followed by the name of Shiva that means"Lord of All.' It is the site of one of 12 jyotirlingas in India, where Shiva rent the earth with a fiery beam of light to connect heaven and earth (A website that tries to explain the symbolism of the jyortirlingas is here.) The materialized lingam with its hundreds of thousands of artifactual expressions was given by Shiva to his followers to remember these events. In Diana Eck's retelling, Shiva, the mountain ascetic, left his solitary life of devotion to marry Parvati, daughter of the Himalayas. He became a city dweller when the chose the beautiful city of Varanasi for their home. Eck:

By the time of the Kashi Khanda this city was said to have been the "original ground" created by Shiva and Parvati, upon which they stood at the beginning of time when no other "place" existed; the place from which the whole creation came forth in the beginning and to which it will return in the fire of time's end, the place where Shiva's linga, as the unfathomable symbol of the Supreme Lord, first pierced the earth.

Little surprise that Kashi Vishvanatha has been a focus of political and religious struggles across the centuries, razed and rebuilt by Hndus and Muslims, associated with figures like Akbar, the great and tolerant Muslim empire builder and Araungzeb, the Muslim Sherman so far as the destruction of Varanasi was concerned. It was built in its present form and location by Rani (queen) Ahalyabai Holkar of Indore in the 18th century. The application of new media (millennially considered!) to religious tradition might seem to be a Benjaminian threat to the aura, or what Rudolf Otto called the numinous. But the consequence projected in the news article below seems to be laziness by devotees rather than a dilution of the sacred or even an assault on it. (The introduction of church service by telephone in the late 19th century in the United States provoked like predictions of devotional laziness among Christian congregants.) And an official Shaiva site about worship, itself a new media platform, that includes videos of worshipers doing puja before lingas is witness to the complexity of the technology/presence dialogue. The contemporary political is clearly involved since the BJP is the source of this particular complaint. Here's the article about the controversy:

From evaranasi.com:

Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and former Union minister Murli Manohar Joshi has objected to the “live darshan” of the ‘jyotirlinga’ in Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi recently started on television.

“This technology will promote sedentary religious habits among the devotees. There is no alternative to visiting the temple physically,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday.

“We are not against technology, but physical ‘darshan’ is an integral part of Hinduism. Live telecast from the ‘garbhagriha’ of the renowned temple will enable devotees to have a ‘darshan’ sitting conveniently in their bedrooms,” Joshi said, adding, “I support those who are against the live telecast.”

The Kashi Vishwanath Temple Trust, which has been managing the affairs at the 18th century temple since 1983, has recently tied up with Tata VSNL and Tata Sky for live telecast from the shrine.

Talking to mediapersons at Varanasi, Joshi also reiterated the BJP’s stand on the Ganga Expressway project. He said it would not only destroy fertile land, but also pollute the sacred river. The former HRD minister, however, evaded a direct reply when questioned about the fertile land destroyed because of the Golden Quadrilateral Project during the NDA regime.

“Whatever has happened in the past should be forgotten and not be repeated,” he said. The BJP leader criticised the attacks on north Indians by Raj Thackarey and his party. “It happened in Assam earlier and now it’s happening in Mumbai. I appeal to all political parties to refrain from stirring up hatred.”

Much more to be unpacked religiously and politically. Stay tuned. A promising start may be provided by Philip Lutgendorf, writing in Lawrence A. Babb and Susan Wadley's Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia on the culture phenomenon that was the televising of the Ramayana in 1987 and 1988.