walking backwards....

The following is my response to Yann Martel's  The High Mountains of Portugal.

A young man walks backwards through the streets of Lisbon. Looking backwards at what he had, what he was. What he has lost: his lover, his son. But moving inexorably forward.

It’s 1904.

[Elsewhere. Another time, another place. The young men who fought the so-called Great War rise up and walk backwards, to their homes, to their families. They are resurrected.] (1)

The young man — Tomás is his name — has never been in an automobile before. He is instructed to turn the steering wheel to the right to turn the car to the right. Turn it to the left to go left. But he’s puzzled. If the top of the wheel is going towards the right, the bottom is going to the left. At the right side, it is arcing downwards. At the left, upwards. How can a circular motion be described in linear directions?

[Elsewhere. Another time, another place. People believed the planet was flat. They drew flat maps, with dangerous places at the edges.]

To turn the car to the right [a quarter of a turn on a spinning planet orbiting a star] you turn the steering wheel clockwise.

[Such a curious direction: “clockwise.” Turning in the direction of time. The direction of the stars, the directions of prayers. Elsewhere. Another time, another place.] (2)

[Or “counter-clockwise.” Against time. Undoing time. Looking to the past. Moving/walking backwards.]

[But of course, the direction of the hands on a clock depends on where you are standing. From inside the clock, the clock runs backwards.] (3)

[Elsewhere. Another time, another place.]

The clock at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, from the inside looking out.
Photo credit to Joe Vlad, the blogger.
https://joevladineurope.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/

_______________________________________________________________________

The young man — Tomás is his name — journeys in an automobile, north from Lisbon into the “high mountains of Portugal.” He moves from the city — the modern human habitat — back to the country where the amenities are few and primitive. He retraces the human journey: from the urban, to the agrarian, to the wild. 

As he moves across the earth he loses himself; he loses his humanity. He loses all regard for outward appearances, even the pretence of cleanliness. He becomes filthy. He stinks. He becomes infested with lice. He scratches himself raw. He douses himself with moto-naphtha. He catches on fire. He is naked, injured, and alone in the middle of nowhere, in a state so vile he is barely recognizable. Not that there is anyone there who would recognize him anyways. He has reached the farthest edge of human existence.

And then he finds what he is looking for. The next step backwards in time; in the human journey. The ape. The chimpanzee.

On a cross, lifted up. Resurrected.

Because going backwards in time is always about resurrection. Re-animating the dead. Finding the lost. [Elsewhere. Another time, another place.] 

Unless it’s about origin.

When we look back in time, we find, “Not a god — only an animal.”(4) This is our origin story.

______________________________________________________________________

An older man — Eusebio is his name — is visited in his office late at night by an even older widow. Eusebio is a coroner. The widow has brought him the body of her husband.

Upon opening the body, he finds that it, in turn, contains the body of a chimpanzee. The body contains all that it has ever been; its entire genetic code.

_______________________________________________________________________

[Another time, the same place.]

An even older man — Peter is his name — adopts a chimpanzee to fill the empty space left in his life  by the death of his wife. He unwittingly retraces Tomás’s journey, ending in the high mountains of Portugal, taking the chimp with him.

He leads the chimp backwards to the beginning of the human journey. To the wild place where human and ape divided. To the place where their separate destinies converge back into a common origin.

Then the chimp leads Peter. He takes him to a tall standing rock; to the very top of it. 

Both man and ape peer over the edge of the known, and into the mythic. Into the mystic. Into the world as it was before our origins. They have reached the centre of the clock where time can pivot in both directions. The “still point of the turning world.” (5) The black hole at the centre of the universe. The place where the beginning inhabits the end.

[Every time. Everywhere.]

Notes:

(1) As seen in the frame story created by David Fincher for the film version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. A mysterious clock-maker is commissioned to make a clock for a train station in New Orleans. When it is finished, it is revealed that the clock runs backwards. The maker claims that this was so that we could “turn back time,” so to speak, and our war dead would rise from their graves and sail backwards across the ocean to come home.

(2) Tibetan Buddhists have prayer wheels — cylindrical spindles containing papers with prayers written on them.“The practitioner most often spins the wheel clockwise, as the direction in which the mantras are written is that of the movement of the sun across the sky.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_wheel

(3) There is a photo which has been taken many, many times, of the view of Paris from the upper floor of the Musée d’Orsay (formerly the Gare d’Orsay; a train station). The viewer looks out through the glass walls of a large clock. From that vantage point, the hands of the clock appear to be running backwards.

(4) Yann Martel. The High Mountains of Portugal. Page 129.

(5) T.S. Eliot, from the poem, “Burnt Norton.”

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, 

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”

the pain of Tibet....

"Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I'm doing a lot of research recently, you'll see... [the]  crude face of political domination. You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet until you move through it at the ground level. I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind the statistics you hear about: 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes, 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. This young man's father had been a scribe to the Panchen Lama. That meant he was instantly killed at the time of the Chinese invasion. His uncle fled with His Holiness in the Diaspora that took the people to Nepal. His mother was incarcerated for the crime of being wealthy. He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she couldn't bear to be without him. The sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp. One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of Mao, and for that transgression, she was given seven years of hard labor. The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold."

- Wade Davis, excerpt from the 2003 TED Talk Dreams from Endangered Cultures

on the failure of walls....

Photo of Lhasa, Tibet by Wade Davis. 2015
See more here.

Wade Davis, in his brilliant 2003 TED Talk entitled Dreams from Endangered Cultures, concluded with the following remarks:

“And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious at least to all of us who've travelled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not remote at all. They're homelands of somebody. They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope.”

This is something I learned travelling in Tibet last summer. That there’s no such thing as “remote.” That a place I’d always understood to be isolated and inaccessible was once a major stop on the Silk Road, where the cross-pollination of cultures and peoples is still evident everywhere. In multiple languages — indeed multiple alphabets — on every sign. In the multiple types of foods on menus — Mandarin, yes. But also, Tibetan, Indian, Szechuan, Thai and even “English.” In multiple forms of traditional dress and hair styles. In still more adaptations of “modern” dress.

I realized that Tibet is a whole lot less insular than, say, Beijing -- a place that is absolutely stunning in its cultural homogeneity.

Because there is no “remote” anymore, and maybe there never was.

Walls are a failed experiment in human history.

I am thinking that the Buddha must have been female....

A mandala based on the lotus in beautiful, downtown Lhasa.
The lotus is viewed as a sacred flower, as in "the jewel in the lotus",
as in "om mani padme hum,"
the central mantra of Tibetan Buddhist practice.

I am thinking that the Buddha must have been female; at least in Tibet.

(The gods, as we know, are shape-shifters.)

There is so much of cycles there.

Above and below: sand mandalas in the Sera Monastery in Lhasa.
Each made with the intention of its own
dissolution; as a reminder of impermanence in the universe.
Photos by Ariel Tarpey.

Of mandalas

containing all of the directions at once

and all of the seasons.

All of space and all of time,

radiating outward from a single point.

Mural of the Wheel of Life or the Wheel of Samsara outside the sanctuary
at the Sera Monastery in Lhasa.

Of the wheel of life.

Of the understanding that

day gives way to night

and night to day.

That life that gives way to death

that gives way to life once more.

Of karma.

Of "what goes around 

comes around."

Prayer wheels, each of them designed to
 revolve like tiny planets in a prayerful universe.

Of approaching the sacred obliquely,

in clockwise circles.

Of orbits.

Of revolutions;

of both seeking and being 

the fixed point,

because the fixed point is god.

For more posts about my time in Tibet, click here, here, here, or here.

dispelling gravity....

My personal prayer wheel, purchased in Lhasa, Tibet this summer.
Prayer wheels are cylinders that spin around a central axis.
They contain printed prayers,
which are sent out into the universe by the spinning motion.

Prayer wheels

kept in motion by the hands of believers 

and sometimes by tiny moons on chains

orbiting around them,

gathering momentum,

dispelling gravity.

A bank of public prayer wheels in the Sera Monastery, Lhasa, Tibet.

"Everything is motion.

To the motion be true."

Bruce Cockburn, The Gift

For more posts about my time in Tibet, see here, here, here, or here.

six red doors and a blue one….

Door inside Sera Monastery, Lhasa, Tibet.

I don't know why Tibetans paint their doors red, 

but I love them.

Doors to the Debating Room, Sera Monastery, Tibet.

A red door in an orange wall, inside Jokhang Temple.

A red door on a commercial street in Lhasa.

Across the street from my hotel in Lhasa, Tibet.

The non-conformist.

For more posts about my time in Tibet, see here, here, here, or here.

people-watching in Tibet….

Little Tibetan boy, peeking out at my daughter from behind his mother. Photo by Ariel Tarpey.

People-watching in Lhasa must rank amongst the best in the world.

Newly arrived tourists with their white scarves. Nomads in traditional dress, come in to the city to sell their wool, long hair in a single braid wrapped around the head with a scarf woven into it. Stylish young Chinese girls wearing 6" heels. Boys in black leather and skinny jeans. Women wearing surgical masks made out of sari silks to shield their faces from the sun, to keep their skin white. Young people wearing t-shirts with unlikely English slogans -- do they know what they mean? The young and the edgy, with prayer beads firmly in hand. Small children peeking shyly or staring openly at my white-skinned, purple-haired daughter. Pilgrims prostrating themselves in prayer. Others spinning their prayers to god, prayer wheels kept perpetually in motion. Red-robed monks hailing taxis, checking their cellphones. 

Rickshaw drivers competing with cars and trucks. Cyclists and motorcyclists by the swarm. I watch them to see how many things they can pile on, and how they will balance them.  Whole families on bikes, no helmets on. Kids on parents' laps in cars, or leaning out the windows. Kids everywhere, picked up and carried by parents -- no strollers, no backpacks, no shawls. Pedestrians crossing busy streets at their own risk, guided by rules -- or luck -- that I can't discern.

People playing dice, or washing their hair on the streets. Bartering for goods, or measuring lengths of cloth in street-side tailor shops. Street vendors following us down the street. Beggars and bold children asking for money. Thoughtful Tibetans with their hands full of small bills, doling out compassion, turning the wheel of karma.

Top left photo: an older man spinning prayer wheels on a street in Lhasa.
Top right photo: Linda from Lhasa with my daughter.
Bottom right photo by Ariel Tarpey.
Bottom left photo: a Chinese tourist with my daughter.

Monks inside Jokhang Temple.

For more posts about my time in Tibet, click here, here, here, or here.

where communism meets theocracy….

This little boy was left napping on a blanket in the shade of a tree inside
Sera Monastery in Lhasa, Tibet. Without a word being spoken,
passersby were dropping money on the blanket.

On our first day in China, I ask our Beijing tour guide if China is still a communist country. Only in name, she says.

But I think it’s more than that.

Everybody has a job, she tells us. If you are too young or too old, you are given a simple job. The old ones get the job of pushing the last person onto the bus, for instance. Begging is not tolerated because everybody should be working a legitimate job.

Fast forward several days to our time in Tibet. Begging is common here, occasionally to the point of being a nuisance. Locals of all backgrounds seem to have endless pockets. They readily hand out small bills to beggars and children. They leave money in every nook and cranny in the temples. Nobody coming behind them picks up the bills, though I suspect if they did it would be interpreted as an act of desperation.

I don’t know for sure about Tibetan Buddhism, but in Thailand, for instance, the monks beg for every meal they get. Begging is looked upon as creating an opportunity for others to give, to improve their karma. It’s an opportunity for grace.

At the very least, begging functions in Tibet as a redistribution of wealth. It’s somehow their working out of: “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs.”

20 July 2014

palimpsest....

Wendy Stefansson. Palimpsest. Dust cloths, dust, thread, string, wood. 2007

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a tradition of making prayer flags. Small rectangles of brightly-coloured cotton are block-printed with prayers, then strung in a windy location, often high in the Himalayas.  The wind, it is believed, blows the prayers to the universe.

In medieval Christianity, books were written and illustrated by the hands of monks. When new parchment was unavailable, previously written pages were erased, often imperfectly, and new words were written over the old. The manuscript thus created was called a palimpsest.

Both of these concepts inform these, my prayer flags. Made from used dust cloths, the dust of my body forms the text. My dust is the physical evidence of my daily living and my daily dying – the shedding and regeneration of cells that began before I was born and will go on beyond my death.  In this exists my prayer -- my daily participation in the cycles of life, in the universe, in godness.

These -- my dust marks, my prayers -- I have loosely outlined with stitches in dust-coloured threads.  These tracings will remain, will retain the memory of my dust after it is unwritten and re-written by the elements.

May 2007

Wendy Stefansson. Palimpsest.

Wendy Stefansson. Palimpsest.

Wendy Stefansson. Palimpsest.