Shunya's Notes

In Which an Old Man Cloaked in La Calavera Catrina Engages in Dialogue

Flash fiction by R Alexander, a relatively new author on Shunya's Notes; see his bio line at the end of this piece.

Conscious of the dust his shuffling feet raised, a man moved slowly up the rutted incline of the arroyo. His brown hand clutched a gnarled knob of a walking stick. A shadow moved beside the road. The old man looked around to see who might be watching him, but his cataracts hazed the light which stabbed at the back of his eyes. It may have been that he had learned to tilt and angle his head like this to gain the purchase of sound as much as for the sake of the light. In any case, his head tilting, his arms pulling roughly, and his head turning and shifting gave him the look of someone intently focused and supernally aware of his surroundings, as though he commanded the physical landscape but chose, out of wisdom, to allow it its recalcitrance.

A boy, six or eight judging by his thin frame, curious about the old man's serape, tugged his sway-backed grey towards the old man. The boy's knees stuck out beneath blue shorts, and his shoeless feet felt warmth and comfort in the dust.

“Your burro has more sense than you,” the old man muttered without humor.

“He’s in no hurry, old man.” The boy's burro pulled away, its worn hooves scraping the dirt.

The old man snorted. "What makes you think I'm old?" He wanted to keep walking but the effort of talking had stopped him. “I'm younger than you,” he said, his voice coughing the last few syllables. Dust and dry air scraped the back of the man's throat, so between his toothless gums he formed up enough spittle to spit without dribbling on himself. From between his lips passed a spray of slime and grit.

The boy stopped tugging the rope and watched as the old man wiped his chin, to assure himself that it was dry.

The old man looked at the boy and frowned. “You'll never convince him to do what you want,” he said. “You may force him, but he'll never believe a word you tell him.” The old man spoke with some foreign-sounding accent, using the same word for belief as the boy's grandmother had.

High overhead wisps of cirrus stitched the fontanelle of the sky. The boy raised a finger and pointed past the huddle of village huts. “The cemetery is that way.”

The man brushed the accumulated dust off the image of the Calavera Catrina embroidered into his serape in gold and crimson and blue, the color of the sky. "Go away, pest," he said. “I have no sugar for you.”

“Do you know where you are headed?” The boy's palms ached from rope burns.

The Skin Trade

Chloe Schama's review of Pricing Beauty by Ashley Mears offers startling insights into the fashion industry and the road to supermodeldom. 

What does it take to succeed in an intensely competitive, cutting-edge industry? You need to show ambition, clearly, while never exuding unbecoming eagerness. For the right kind of exposure, you may have to work for free—even go into debt. You need to be calculating with your acquaintances, but avoid close connections with possible competitors. Above all, you need to stay beholden to the unlikely dream of success and the rare moments of magic, building calluses and erecting blinders to the unpleasant and grueling realities.

Such self-steeling is required for a career in any number of creative fields: journalism, novel-writing, acting, design, singing, dancing. But the world in which such demands come into perhaps the sharpest relief is that of the fashion model. The modeling world, with increased intensity in recent decades, has become one of freakish and outsized expectations—professionally and physically. Look no further than the apex of the industry, the high-end catwalk model, for the starkest example: she is often a size 00, with a waist that compares to a seven-year-old girl’s. For all the beauty it regularly displays, there is something deeply twisted about this industry. In her new book, the former-model and current professor of sociology Ashley Mears untangles just how crazy the fashion industry can be.

More here. Also check out this related article by Ashley Mears on 3 Quarks Daily.

Three Hundred Ramayanas?

Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations is a 1991 essay by A.K. Ramanujan, scholar and man of letters from South India. In it Ramanujan surveys the wide range of Ramayana stories extant in Asia. The essay came to my attention because it was just dropped (after its inclusion in 2006) from the B.A. History (Hons.) course at Delhi University, owing to protests by right-wing Hindutva types who don't like the idea of so many Ramayanas, including some that, according to Ramanujan, have Rama and Sita as siblings.

[clip] ... This story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rama there is a Ramayana. The number of Ramayanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five hundred years or more are astonishing. Just a list of languages in which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan—to say nothing of Western languages. Through the centuries, some of these languages have hosted more than one telling of the Rama story. Sanskrit alone contains some twenty-five or more tellings belonging to various narrative genres (epics, kavyas or ornate poetic compositions, puranas or old mythological stories, and so forth). If we add plays, dance-dramas, and other performances, in both the classical and folk traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger. To these must be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays and shadows plays, in all the many South and Southeast Asian cultures." Camille Bulcke (1950), a student of the Ramayana, counted three hundred tellings. It’s no wonder that even as long ago as the fourteenth century, Kumaravyasa, a Kannada poet, chose to write a Mahabharata, because he heard the cosmic serpent which upholds the earth groaning under the burden of Ramayana poets ... In this paper, indebted for its data to numerous previous translators and scholars, I would like to sort out for myself, and I hope for others, how these hundreds of tellings of a story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions relate to each other: what gets translated, transplanted, transposed.

More here.  Read Amardeep Singh's defense of the essay here and watch a heartening protest at DU. A paradoxical effect of DU's decision will be an increase in the popularity of this essay, and bringing it to the attention of new audiences like me who had never heard of it before.

India's Silent War

From Imran Garda of Al Jazeera comes this rare, insightful, and truly heartrending report on the plight of the Adivasis. "A 40-year long civil war has been raging in the jungles of central and eastern India. It is one of the world's largest armed conflicts but it remains largely ignored outside of India. Caught in the crossfire of it are the Adivasis, who are believed to be India's earliest inhabitants. A loose collection of tribes ... about 84 million of these indigenous people, which is about eight per cent of the country's population. ... The uprising by Maoist fighters and its brutal suppression by the Indian government, has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 1980, and displaced 12 million people." But numbers do not reveal the larger tragedy, stories like this do, which we hardly ever find in the Indian media. (Via Usha.)

Revisiting the Bhagavad Gita

Here is a clip from Peter Brook’s brilliant adaptation of the Mahabharata (1989). It contains the film’s rendition of the Bhagavad Gita. I am rereading the Gita now and plan to write a review soon. I’ll argue that given the catastrophic destruction of life by the war’s end, a more reasonable response to the Gita is to question, rather than admire, Krishna’s "wisdom", and to see Arjuna’s straightforward doubts about the war as more genuine and human. In my estimation, the arguments that Krishna employs to convince Arjuna to fight are not very convincing, and are often pernicious. By extension, I think the Gita is not a worthy guide to life (or the ‘inner battlefield’), at least not in terms of moral reasoning. It seems to me that Krishna, using a dazzling array of abstract ideas and psychology, brainwashes Arjuna into thinking that he has penetrated his illusions to understand ‘ultimate reality’, from which vantage point the great warrior is able to overcome all his moral doubts: hardly a commendable state.

My critique will be hard to dismiss as an example of Western/Eurocentric bias (especially by irate Indian readers, some of whom did just that with Wendy Doniger’s take on the Gita), for I intend to amplify a critique of the Gita’s philosophical worldview that was extant within India even two millennia ago, in the thought of the Buddha himself and then Nagarjuna. (To be continued...)

A Basic Call to Consciousness

by Usha Alexander

In 1977 the NGO arm of the United Nations put out a call for papers from the native peoples of the world, asking them to describe the oppression they have suffered. The Haudenosaunee—better known to us as the Six Nations Confederacy, or by their French appellation, the Iroquois—responded with three papers (collectively, A Basic Call to Consciousness), which they described as “an abbreviated analysis of Western history, and which call for a consciousness of the Sacred Web of Life in the Universe.” Further, they wrote:

What is presented here is nothing less audacious than a cosmogony of the Industrialized World presented by the most politically powerful and independent non-Western political body surviving in North America. It is, in a way, the modern world through Pleistocene eyes.

Scholars and casual readers alike should question the significance, in the age of the Neutron bomb, Watergate, and nuclear energy plant proliferation, of a statement by a North American Indian people. But there is probably some argument to be made for the appropriateness of such a statement at this time.
…

It is a geological kind of perspective, which sees modern man as an infant, occupying a very short space of time in an incredibly long spectrum. It is the perspective of the oldest elder looking into the affairs of a young child and seeing that he is committing incredibly destructive folly. It is, in short, the statement of a people who are ageless but who trace their history as a people to the very beginning of time. And they are speaking, in this instance, to a world which dates its existence from a little over 500 years ago, and perhaps, in many cases, much more recently than that.

And it is, to our knowledge, the very first statement to be issued by a Native nation. What follows are not the research products of psychologists, historians, or anthropologists. The papers which follow are the first authentic analyses of the modern world ever committed to writing by an official body of Native people.

Historically, the Haudenosaunee included a subset of the tribes located near the Great Lakes region, in what is today the northeastern USA and southeastern Canada. Based on archaeology and the correspondence of oral histories to cosmological events, the original five nations of the Haudenosaunee—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—are believed to have inaugurated their confederacy almost 900 years ago, making them one of the oldest extant democracies in the world. Their political system included features like redistribution of wealth and a prerogative granted to women to veto any decision to wage war. The sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, joined them in 1722.

Haudenosaunee history includes a revolutionary figure, referred to as Peacemaker, who was born among the Huron people at a time when the local nations were locked in cycles of blood feuds and warfare. Peacemaker's commitment to peace, even in boyhood, made him an outsider among his people. As a young man, he went forth into the world to spread his message of peace and his plan for unity. Eventually, with the aid of Ayonwatha (Hiawatha), a Mohawk man, and Jingosaseh, a woman from another nation, Peacemaker succeeded in uniting the five nations, creating a system of government that balanced the political powers of women and men, and establishing the Great Law of Peace, an orally transmitted constitution that outlines the principles on which their government is founded and administered.

In their papers to the UN, the Haudenosaunee present a fascinating historical ethnography of the West—turning the tables and shining the anthropological mirror back at us. In their telling, they use categories to describe us that most of us do not identify with, and they reduce what we consider our monumental and far-reaching historical moments, much as we gloss over such details in our histories of indigenous peoples, or of any group that seems very distant from us. Interestingly, while this may diminish nuance and complexity, it can still see through some of our own biases and denials. For example, here is their quick take on Eurasian pre-history:

Miss Representation

Go see the very well put together documentary film, Miss Representation, which explores "the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls." While not in theaters (yet?), click on the movie website to locate a screening near you (trailer below). 

Gary Gutting on Corporations

Gary Gutting, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, has an incisive piece on how to think about corporations. Must read, especially for leftists and liberals who tend to see corporations as evil, rather than as dangerous—a distinction that is really important to understand.

Far more important than questions about what corporations are [i.e., whether they are "people" or not] is the question of what attitude we should have toward them.  Should we, as corporate public relations statements often suggest, think of them as friends (if we buy and are satisfied with their products) or as family (if we work for them)?  Does it make sense to be loyal to a corporation as either a customer or as an employee?  More generally, even granted that corporations are not fully persons in the way that individuals are, do they have some important moral standing in our society?

My answer to all these questions is no, because corporations have no core dedication to fundamental human values.  (To be clear, I am speaking primarily of large, for-profit, publicly owned corporations.)  Such corporations exist as instruments of profit for their shareholders.  This does not mean that they are inevitably evil or that they do not make essential economic contributions to society.  But it does mean that their moral and social value is entirely instrumental.   There are ways we can use corporations as means to achieve fundamental human values, but corporations do not of themselves work for these values. In fact, left to themselves, they can be serious threats to human values that conflict with the goal of corporate profit.

More here.

The Chinese are Coming

This breezy BBC documentary (early 2011) explores the nature and impact of China's rising influence around the world, especially in Africa, Brazil, and the U.S., and how China is reshaping the balance of power among nations.

Over a million Chinese now live and work in Africa, running high-yield chicken farms to giant mining operations, selling goods, lending money, building infrastructure. Inevitably, they have also brought with them a range of cultural values and economic practices that cause friction at times. Pop pundit Tom Friedman says of the chinese: "what's most unsettling to most Americans is not their communism, it's their capitalism". That said, you can also see this two-hour documentary as a series of human stories from a rapidly changing world—from Angola, Zambia, Congo, Tanzania, Brazil, and the U.S.—and ponder the role each of us plays in the unfolding of the world as it does.

Magister Xu

Flash fiction by R Alexander, a new author on Shunya's Notes who will contribute a piece each month; see his bio line at the end of this post.

The cut glass bottles tinkled in their felt-lined compartments, rattling loose their stoppers. Magister Xu balanced his beaten, cardboard, leather-bound case atop his knees, as the carriage swayed from side to side, and clutched it with a careful, arthritic grip. Though the driver called noisily to one of the horses, the wind and movement swept away whatever correction might have been intended. Magister Xu took the cap from off his head and laid it not ostentatiously atop the case. The cloth was embroidered with the patterns of the night sky, stars and symbols indicating their movements and meanings.

From courtesy, he tried to avoid looking into the eyes of the woman sitting quietly across from him.  When Magister Xu averted his eyes, however, he found he seemed instead to be searching for a glimpse of her ankles. The thought of this unsettled him.

He cleared his throat. “You are traveling home?” It was forward of him, he knew to speak to a woman without an introduction, but it settled his mind some to hear the sound of his voice rising over the embarrassing sound that seemed to emanate from his lap, the sound of his case of glass bottles.

The woman sat motionless and silent and stared straight ahead. A yellow veil partially covered her delicately dusted face. He forgot to resist looking at her, and saw her wide, painted eyes, frightened and tearful. He had been thoughtless, he realized. There was no home for this girl. And for him to speak to her, when they were alone like this: such forwardness she must endure.

The heat was nearly unbearable. The coach was uncovered to the sky and the sun, which was no longer high, leered through the trees, dappling the travelers in an animated flow of motley.

They rode like this for an hour until Magister Xu began to nod off to sleep. His head felt heavy and fell repeatedly to his chest, as Master Xu dreamt. His wife, appearing older than she did even now, wore the heavy red silk of a bride. Her face was uncovered. He saw himself wearing the crisp white linen of the groom. He smiled. The stars on his silver cap glinted like a chandelier's baubles.

A look of annoyance gathered in his wife's face. “We are nought but dust.” The words came out in his old Nana's dialect, the language of a foolish people.

“Concentration," he said. “Potency.” Or did he? He had meant to flatter this woman, though over time he had grown to know her to be thoughtless and self-absorbed.

“Sir!”

He felt a hand on his knee. What had prompted this? 

The State of Solar Energy

An encouraging report on the current state and outlook for the solar energy industry. "The cost of solar panels has dropped significantly. Thanks to that and to new financing, the rooftop solar business is going gangbusters." Listen to the audio report, or read the transcript.

Recent reports of solar companies going bankrupt and stories about alleged federal loan scandals have cast long shadows on the entire solar industry. But the sun is far from setting on photovoltaics. In fact, in 2010 - solar panels that could generate 17 gigawatts of energy - that's equal to about 17 nuclear power plants - were sold worldwide. And this year, the US industry expects to double its production, and companies are growing fast to meet the demand for roof top panels. Living On Earth's Ingrid Lobet reports.

Pamuk on Why He Writes

An excerpt from Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize lecture in which he talks about his life, his writing, his father, Istanbul, and more (via Usha):

As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs is dead. Watch once again his Stanford commencement speech, 2005. Also check out two interesting articles about him. The first introduces his biological father from Syria, and the circumstances that led his biological parents to put him up for adoption in the U.S. The second is a view into the mind of the amazing inventor he later became. It comes from an ex-colleague and the former CEO of Apple, John Sculley. And finally, from The Simpsons show, come satirical clips on Steve Mobs of Mapple, on thinking differently, and on a Mapple Store.

Alan Wolfe on Political Evil

Michael Ignatieff reviews Alan Wolfe's Political Evil: What it is and how to combat it.

Evil is a moral problem for everyone, difficult to acknowledge in ourselves, hard to understand in others, and difficult to defeat without committing lesser evils. Liberals—I count myself as one—have a special problem with evil, connected to our particular form of self-regard. Liberals like to believe we are tolerant, but evil, by definition, cannot be tolerated. We believe that politics ought to be deliberative, but we can't deliberate with evil. We think compromise can be honorable, but there are no honorable compromises with evil. We think politics ought to be governed by reason, but evildoers, while they may reason, are not reasonable.

Alan Wolfe, a distinguished and prolific professor of political science at Boston College, and author of more than 20 books, including The Future of Liberalism, has written a dispassionate guide to these quandaries in Political Evil. He distinguishes between evil in general and political evil in particular, and argues that we should think politically about evil because the evil that we can actually do something about is a form of politics and can be defeated only if understood as such.

More here.