The Times Quotidian

This is a three part essay on Oman as seen through the eyes of archaeologist Aram Yardumian. In 2008, Mr. Yardumian was a member of the American team doing research at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat. Various research interests have also taken him to the Caucasus, India, and southern Africa. He is currently involved in research on Turkic-speaking populations, and continues studies in various languages, including Tamil. His paper on photographer Mitchell Payne’s neurosurgery series from the early ’70’s appears in the current issue of Philologie im Netz (PhiN), the German journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.

Dispatch Oman, Part One, The Coast, Interior and Empty Quarter
by Aram Yardumian

Oman: what do you really know about it? To begin with, it is not in the capital of Jordan, nor is it one of the trucial states. It is in an independent Arab nation whose nipple, a rock formation called Ras-al-Jinz, is the easternmost point on the Arabian Peninsula, bordering Yemen to the west, Saudi to the northwest and the Emirates to the north. Separated from all of them by vast stretches of uninviting dune desert, Oman has avoided total domination by Seljuks, Macedonians, Mongols, the British, and—most fortunately—Ottomans, and is therefore quite stable and happy. It is a nation recently opened to the world, one curiously modern and welcoming of the infidel and the things we do and peddle. In Muscat, the capital, we go to Carrefour, Lulu Hypermarket, Baskin Robbins, Borders, and KFC (rather the Omanis go to KFC, I eat at Cafe al-Failaq) to buy things and to remind ourselves that there really is no clash of civilizations. Oman’s motto, as coined by His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said is something like ‘progress with respect for heritage.’ And while these forces cannot always operate concomitantly (the secret police recently built a compound on top of some important grave assemblages in Ras al-Hadd) it’s not a bad way forward.

As archaeologists, we are welcomed especially by the many bureaucrats and officials who live what appear to be painfully boring lives in plain square office warrens. The interminableness of these office buildings cannot be overstated. They are kudzu reaching into a thicket—you may follow and follow and lose your mind before the end. We nearly did. Following a visa mishap (the wrong stamp was used at the airport), I spent long afternoons traveling deeper and deeper into the Heart of Bureaucracy, one office opening into the next, each turbaned man behind each desk more salt-poisoned with boredom and less able to communicate, the maps on succeeding walls less and less resembling anything geographic. I never did find Col. Kurtz. But one sympathetic fourth cousin of the Sultan went so far as to produce a stamp and ink it, and bring it close to my passport—but he just couldn’t bring himself, in the end, to make an expedient move. Ultimately I took matters into my own hands to expedite the process. (In the end, I drove to the United Arab Emirates, had my passport stamped, made a u-turn and immediately re-entered Oman).

The country is divided, historically, between the coast and the Interior, the latter of which reaches up into the Empty Quarter, and down the southern coast of the Peninsula to the border with Yemen. The Interior is slower, more old fashioned and more preposterously friendly than Muscat which has super highways lined with bright flowers, Peugeot dealerships, blocks of mysterious-looking flats, and a desalinated water supply. In the Interior you wave at everyone, young, old, blind, animal and mineral, and they wave back, and if you are invited in for coffee or tea you kindly accept. Camels wander freely along and across the road. And you’ll tie your tubes in knots to keep from hitting one of them in the car. The sheikh of A’Direez died recently in a camel accident—that is to say, he was driving at night in the mountains and hit a camel crossing the road. When this happens, the camel’s legs buckle under its weight, and all its entire body crashes through your windshield, and it is curtains for you, with the horn blaring under the combined suffocating mass until the Bedu find you in the morning.

Geographically the Interior is much like East Africa: savannah with flat topped, thorny acacia trees that grab onto your mutarrh and pull; the fantastic mountains that look as if they were dropped there by cosmic helicopter. Settlements exist wherever there is water available through falaj (or qanat) system and the aqueducts that transport the water for irrigation. Date palm oases exist here and there by the side of the road, and are grown crowded closely to maximize one’s share of the falaj water. The groves are woven together so densely that they become, upon entry, cold and Jurassic, and unwelcoming of the sun. Yet, between the trees, bright green robust grass thrives and strange giant dragonflies move slowly about.

Swapan Chaudhuri, Aashish Khan and the CalArts Tabla Ensemble, REDCAT April 3, 2010
By Marla Apt

My first exposure to classical Indian music was an unforgettable Ravi Shankar concert. The meditative focus of the musicians to which the presence of the audience contributed required throughout the mostly improvisational intricacies of raga struck me as spiritually uplifting and physically revitalizing. I found myself soon thereafter in India hunting for a set of tablas.

It is said that each note on the Indian scale corresponds to the human subtle anatomy (chakras and nadis that govern the flow of prana or energy in the body). With roots in ancient vedic religion, Indian classical raga music is viewed by many as a spiritual discipline that can lead the individual to the direct perception of the true nature of reality. However, after a couple of years of less than intensive study of the tabla, I discovered that the joy of pure artistic transmission only comes from a lifelong single-pointed dedication to the subject, As Ravi Shankar says “It is only after many long and extensive years of ‘sadhana’ (dedicated practice and discipline) under the guidance of one’s guru and his blessings, that the artist is empowered to put ‘prana’ (the breath of life) into a raga. This is accomplished by employing the secrets imparted by one’s teacher…. The result is that each note pulsates with life and the raga becomes vibrant and incandescent.”

Content with not being able to experience bliss in front of my own tablas, I’m happy for an opportunity to listen to the practiced masters of Indian music, most of whom became initiated into the art before the age of ten. Last week, one of India’s most recognized tabla players, Swapan Chauduri accompanied Aashish Khan at REDCAT. The evening began with the Cal Arts Tabla Ensemble, seven tabla players (all men) playing a composition written by Swapan Chauduri. Hearing what is normally an accompanying instrument in a largely improvisational form performed in a rehearsed mini orchestra subtracted much of the potential beauty and subtlety from the tabla. While all of the musicians were technically proficient, (certainly more fluent than my two years of tabla studies ever delivered), their playing, most of the time in unison with only a brief solo allotted to each individual, lacked the artistry and expression that I think a half hour tabla spotlight demanded.

However the depth of sound elicited from Swapan Chauduri’s hand, even during the tuning reminded us of the richness possible when a lifetime of disciplined mastery meets with a hand drum.

My last classical Indian music listening experience was a 3-day music festival in India. The audience of thousands wandered under the music tent, sprawled in the sun or picnicked on the ground from morning to late night listening to extended sets by vocal artists and masters of various instruments from all over India. The stark contrast to the short set performed by Khan and Chauduri in the clean black box of REDCAT was apparently a difficult transition for Khan’s instrument. Adapting to having just returned from the humid climes of India, the sarod refused to remain in tune and required continual and extended adjustments.

The introspective and weighty sound of the sarod extracts a soulful depth evocative of the blues guitar. A lute-like instrument, the sarod can have anywhere from 17-25 strings. Only 4 or 5 main strings are used to play the melody while the other strings are used for drone and resonance.

Aashish Kan, practically a member of classical Indian music royalty was trained by his father, the great Sarod master, Ali Akbar Khan and was initiated into the study of music by his Grandfather, the famous Sarod guru and innovator, Allaudin Khan, one of the twentieth centuries most influential classical Indian music artists, His Aunt, Annapurna Devi, also a teacher to a long list of India’s most recognized classical musicians was married to Sitar maestro Ravi Shankar.

The concert followed the traditional Indian recital that begins with an emotional and introspective unaccompanied exploration and coaxing of the chosen raga that leads into a rhythmic section followed by drum accompaniment in the melodic raga composition that becomes the point of departure and return for innumerable improvisations. When he did finally harness the cooperation of his instrument, Khan delivered a lovely, slow tempo raga composed specifically for the time of day. Chauduri whose instrument required very little tuning honored the mood of the raga while expertly following (with technical, artistic and mathematical skill) Khan’s extemporization.

Being a largely improvisational melodic form based on a prescribed number of beats that holds the musicians together, a raga takes time to build and unfold. After the opening act, intermission and extended tunings, the short two ragas beginning late in the evening whet my appetite and left me tired but wanting for more.

Michiko Hirayama, Giacinto Scelsi, Canti Del Capricorno (1962-1972), REDCAT April 2, 2010
by Nancy Cantwell

“They are songs that explode classical convention: their vocal expressionism is ignited by the phonemes, not by any semantic content. Language seems to be atomized for all time. then an electrifying flow of sound is heard again, almost an archaic rite of evocation” – Jügen Kangold

As Michiko Hirayama took to the stage at REDCAT on April 2nd I could tell that we were in for penny, in for a pound. This was no garden variety solo recital, for as she entered the darkened hall Hirayama beat the gong that hung around her neck as if a call to prayer. Theatricality aside, it was time to listen up.

Canti Del Capricorno is Hirayama’s signature work. It was written specifically for her voice and spirit by outsider composer Giacinto Scelsi. Largely self taught, the Roman aristocrat Scelsi, forged his own idiosyncratic music one note at a time, even beyond the avant-gardism of the day. Forgoing a brief dally with serialism Scelsi focused on his own naïveté and peculiar passion for microtonality, believing that he was indeed more of a medium than master composer creator.

70 minutes of straight vocal performance for any singer is an undertaking, but for 87 year old Hirayama, I realized that we were witness to something beyond prowess, this was a chance to experience a direct embodiment necessitated by the composer. “…Scelsi liberated me in my head so that I could produce any sound with my voice. He pushed me to explore my vocal possibilities to work in ways that any classical vocal school had forbidden.” Written over a ten year period, Hirayama collaborated with Scelsi, at first laboriously improvising one or two of the compositions and finally, with the composer’s authorization, Hirayama penned Canti to completion of the 20 piece song cycle.

Song may be misleading to the uninitiated listener. These pieces are ritualistic, fierce and at time agonizing forms of human expression. Wordless, they take on a language of their own. I felt the sense of becoming a participant in the decoding of autistic yearnings for understanding. There is a child like intensity and curiosity for the exploration of new meaning to the creation of sound.  Michiko Hirayama pours all her strength into her performance, channeling each note of this life’s work. Each song conjures afresh an archaic rite of passage, a world of intimate interpretation and mysterious communication.

The staging of Canti Del Capricorno at REDCAT included four stations each carefully arranged to facilitate the petite Hirayama and accommodate the prodigious score. Hirayana administered over the fragile document, greatly considering each turn of the page and coddling with loving kindness as she motored from setup to setup to sing.

Canti Del Capricorno achieves a particular resonance and reaches some satisfying resolution when Hirayama is accompanied by an instrument. Aniela Perry’s soulful turn at contrabass underscored the feeling of lament. Ulrich Krieger on saxophone provided a sizzling embellishment, while California Ear Unit veteran percussionist Amy Knoles was joined by newcomer Lydia Martin to provide a strong heartfelt pulse to the piece, much to the visible delight of Hirayama whose fisted hands pumped and gestured with glee.

Canti Del Capricorno, Canto No. 5

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Canti Del Capricorno, Canto No. 14

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Canti Del Capricorno, Canto No. 19

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Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
by Guy Zimmerman

Reading Stephen Batchelor’s Confession of a Buddhist Atheist is likely to have an irreversible impact on your image of the historical Buddha. Far from a demi-god who woke up one day beneath the Bodhi tree and lived out his life in an alternate universe defined by bliss and ease, Batchelor’s earthy and forceful Siddhattha Gotama exists within a Shakespearean landscape defined by passionate treachery and high political intrigue. While Batchelor takes pains to present this figure as one of many legitimate pictures of the Buddha, the picture he paints couldn’t be more bracing.

Toward the end of Confession, for example, Batchelor tells of an old king who, when visiting Gotama, hands his sword and turban to his military commander and enters the sage’s hut alone. Inside, Gotama listens as the king laments his dwindling capacity to generate fear, let alone respect, in his subjects. Out loud the king wonders how Gotama has managed to preserve his own authority so successfully. At the end of the meeting the old king steps out of the hut and is dismayed to discover that his general has absconded with the insignia of royalty. Instantly, he sees that the visit was a diversion set up by his son, whom the general is now en route to coronate. As the defeated old monarch rides away, Gotama knows the new king will now attack his homeland, taking revenge on the population for a deep and long-simmering humiliation. He travels out and sits beneath a tree on the border of the country. When the new king approaches at the head of his army, Gotama persuades him to turn back. Before long, however, the troops return – the king has ordered them to invade the land and slaughter every man, woman and child.

The old monarch in the story is King Pasenadi, who ruled the kingdom of Kosala in the Ganges Plain of Central India some twenty-five hundred years ago. His son, the new king, is Vidhudaba, and the land he will invade with murder in his heart is Sakiya, home of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha Sakyamuni. For forty years, Pasenadi has been Gotama’s main patron and protector, and because of his demise the remaining few years of Gotama’s life were marked by an elevated state of uncertainty. This is just one of many remarkable narratives Batchelor has patiently brought to light out of the vast archive of early Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon* (See Note), narratives that force a grounding reassessment of what it means to practice the dharma.

An iconoclast and polemicist, Batchelor has earned his authority on contemporary practice the hard way. A monk first in the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and then in the tradition of Korean Zen (where he met his wife Martine, herself an accomplished practitioner), Batchelor’s understanding of the dharma stacks up against anyone’s. He also writes extremely well. His first book, Alone with Others, was rooted equally in Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The Awakening of the West came next, followed by the hugely influential Buddhism Without Belief.. Batchelor’s 1998 translation of Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center presented the 5th century Mayahana teacher as a poet, while his Living with the Devil traced the parallels between the figure of Mara in Buddhism and that of Satan in the West. In addition to his work as an author, Batchelor is an accomplished photographer. He is, in short, a very impressive gentleman.

I heard Batchelor read from Confession recently. We were at Against the Stream, the dharma center on Melrose Avenue in East Hollywood founded by Dharma Punx author Noah Levine. Levine presents the dharma as a rebellion against the forces of greed, hatred and delusion, so Against the Stream felt like an appropriate setting for Batchelor. Seated on a small dais at the front of the room, he read a few passages from Confession and then took questions from the crowd. Batchelor almost visibly winced as these questions centered on issues of reincarnation and karma that he views as completely unfruitful avenues of inquiry. Batchelor is unflinching in his advocacy of an empirical approach to practice, stripped of belief. And the Confession is in part an effort to separate out those teachings that were unique to Gotama, such as “this-conditionality,” from the common cultural traditions of his day.

Reading Batchelor brought home how my own subtle idealizations of Shakyamuni Buddha have been driven by secret longings to become invulnerable to harm. It is through the space opened by admiration, I sense, that certain “gaining” ideas can infiltrate one’s practice. Instead of a total critique of normative modes of living, the dharma then begins to devolve into a smile button pinned to the lapel of a spurious identity, the vain self-image of being someone on the path to “enlightenment.” Reading Confession helps re-energize the practice of dharma as an effort to radically transform the ground of experience. Seeing Gotama so deeply engaged with the radical contingency of his time and place underscores how dogma will not help us – we must engage with experience breath by breath.

Confession also contains an extended meditation on the blessings and pitfalls of religious institutions. Without institutions, religions disappear…but institutions inevitably distort the insights and practices they exist to convey. On this level Confession does for Buddhism what Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels did for Christianity. Exploring recently unearthed gospels by renegade apostles such as Thomas and Phillip (and even Mary Magdalene herself), Pagels radically altered our sense of the actual teachings of Jesus. In a similar way Batchelor ponders the effects on Gotama’s teachings of the struggle after his death between the authoritarian Kassapa and the dreamy Ananda. While Kassapa may have compromised the subtleties of the teaching, he also helped to ensure we can experience the dharma today.

The tension between the dogma and practice is always challenging because language itself is part of the problem. The experience of presence is immediate and ephemeral; any attempt to depict it becomes distorted by the crudeness of words. The linguistic “forms” we deploy to describe the experience of dharma begin to do what all forms do, which is to persist and draw energy, replicate and spread taking, finally, institutional form. Seen in this way the issue of enduring institutions on the one hand versus the immediacy of practice on the other falls under the rubric of “the middle way.” The challenge is to hold both ends of this spectrum balanced in the mind at one time. Our problem can be viewed as a root imbalance or bias in the direction of the “form” end of the spectrum. Using the language of modern science, we tilt toward the left-brain, with its strong ego-based linearity, over the connective right brain. Gotama then becomes a pioneer in a necessary rebalancing, a forerunner of the kind of human being we must all become if the species is to continue to thrive.

If Batchelor at times seems overly harsh in his assessment of the traditions that formed his sensibility, it is perhaps to provoke an important question: where do the impulses of orthodoxy and hierarchy lurk within the emergent culture of Western dharma? Already, no doubt, such retrograde forces are exerting their distorting effects. And yet one of Batchelor’s themes is how elastic the dharma is, able to adapt to radically diverse cultural settings, and resistant over the long haul to all efforts to co-opt its transformative power. This elasticity is rooted, perhaps, in the dharma’s capacity to activate the remarkable gifts of practitioners like Mr. Batchelor himself.

*Note on Batchelor’s translation

For the confirmed dharma-geek, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist includes an account of how Batchelor managed to track small threads of biographical narrative hidden in the vast Pali Canon. Crucial to his ability to do this is A Dictionary of Pali Proper Names, first published in 1938. Running itself to 1,370 pages, this massive index allowed Batchelor to follow accounts, for example, of King Pasenadi, cross-referencing for accuracy and detail. Batchelor is translating this primary source material himself, giving even more weight to his portrait of the man Siddhattha Gotama.

Bigger Than Life (1956), directed by Nicholas Ray
Re-released by The Criterion Collection on DVD and Blu-ray disc
by Rita Valencia

“When a friendly, successful suburban teacher and father (James Mason) is prescribed cortisone for a painful, possibly fatal affliction, he grows dangerously addicted to the experimental drug, resulting in his transformation into a psychotic and ultimately violent household despot.” (IMDb.com)

The word normal is of relatively recent origin, coming into usage in 1828 to mean “conforming to common standards.” The notion of a such a thing as a common standard to which behavior conforms is so deeply ingrained in us that it resists analysis, and yet, it is a uniquely contingent idea, falling apart with the least pressure. In the course of a day, one can move from home to school or work, to recreation, to cultural or religious activities and cross through different zones of “normalcy” where entirely different sets of behavior are expected. The fact that it was 1828 before this word became part of the vernacular hints at its scientistic origins, in new sociologies and psychologies that measured, tested and categorized human behavior. The concept of normal appears to be deeply connected to systems of social control and to rationalism, although the latter connection is ironic, for normative behavior is culturally determined and based on a subtle web of largely irrational behavioral cues which go mostly unstated (and thus elude people with maladies such as autism or schizophrenia). People are said to be behaving “rationally” when they are acting in a normal way, and so the “rational” conflates with the conventional, and meaning quickly evaporates as the actual agenda for normality emerges: social control. Intrinsic to the concept of normality is the silence of fear, anxiety and dread–hidden, but badly.

Nicholas Ray, in his 1956 melodrama “Bigger Than Life“, creates a mythical normality, infused with reason and rationality, as a frame for a tale about the descent into madness and disorder. If his characters were any more “normal” they would become self-parodies; as it is, my fascination with this artifact of the 50’s lies with its creepy flatness and lack of any UNexplainable behaviors or feelings. Once his illness is diagnosed and his pharmaceuticals dispensed by the gravely rational doctors–the heirophants of this terrifying order–the madness that overtakes James Mason is an entirely sensible plot development. Although Mason’s behavior is aberrational, there is no mystery as to its origins in the demands of a normal life, where he has to work two jobs to make ends meet, and breaks down physically under the pressure. It seems that the appearance of normalcy entails social and economic dysfunction, although the larger implications of this dimension of the story go unexplored in favor of lingering in a domestic terrain of almost bloodless virtue. (An interesting quote of Ray from another project, “It’s not blood, it’s red”.)

Ray’s zone of normality in Bigger Than Life is a protean handiwork of veneers and signs, a clinically perfect film vocabulary, much admired by Godard and other New Wave directors. The coming darkness of Mason’s breakdown is presaged by a scene in which Mason follows his wife through the rooms of their home turning out lights on her. She is angry and suspicious of him because of his unexplained absences (which of course have an innocent explanation), but he is oblivious to her feelings in his desire to seduce her–a scene which Mason masterfully infuses with subtle menace. Sometimes Ray’s use of symbolism is clumsily overt, as the bathroom mirror which Barbara Rush breaks in a fit of pique over her husband’s irascibility, followed by a camera angle of his face in the cracked shards. More successful are the architectural details. The house is small, and movement is tight, especially around the water heater, standing in the passage from kitchen to dining room; an anomalous, intentional, eyesore, streaming drips of rust from its cap. The ugliness of this object is a silent marker of a family in economic stress. Color is a character: red in Bigger Than Life is a sumptuous visual sign pointing the way to the madness that unfolds. In the opening scene, a cascade of children coming out of the school where Mason teaches are spattered with red articles of clothing. Mason develops a taste for red during his spree of psychosis, insisting that Barbara Rush pour herself into in a stunning Dior party dress, hardly the thing to wear to church, though it makes for a brilliant image.

The neat equivalencies between symbol and symbolized is steadfast, and although sometimes dull (a word which emerges from the generally aseptic dialogue along with the famous, all-time-great line “God was wrong”) it creates a compelling unity of style and content. There are moments in this film which quickly graduate to a sort of postmodern fever dream. The most notable is when James Mason, emerging from a psychotic crisis where he has fancied himself the Biblical Abraham about to slay his son, wakes from his delirium and he claims to have seen Abraham Lincoln. Then, with his family close, he recalls which Abraham he is actually talking about, and remembers the horror he came so close to perpetrating. Conflating of a Biblical figure of such intense gravity as Abraham with the patriotic icon of Lincoln, our own American saint, could only have occurred to the minds of successful Hollywood screenwriters engaged in a rare moment of free association. (Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum wrote story and screenplay, with several others “uncredited” including Clifford Odets and James Mason himself). The staunch rationalism of this mythic story serves to define the ethos of its era and simultaneously, with its curiously disturbing message about how easily the nuclear family can devolve to mayhem and madness, belies the dull verities of “normal” society’s values. The great irony here is how normality, which is the moral determinant of all action in this film, is subverted by delusional promises of science (pharmacology in this case) and by a madness so clearly driven by socioeconomic distress. Given the inevitable ramifications of the psychosis portrayed here, the neat conclusion of this film is uniquely unbelievable. The nuclear family of the post-war decade, along with its the normality myths, would ultimately prove fragile, delicate and filmy as the celluloid on which Bigger Than Life was exposed.

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