The Social Meaning of Witchcraft

 

     When I was teaching in West Africa, the Senior School Certificate Examination included questions about Shakespeare’s Macbeth, so the three upper forms read and reread that one play.  A compact thriller, it is probably a good choice for secondary students, but several in my class were particularly impressed with the witches.  “You see,” one of them told me, as though he had uncovered something he was not supposed to know, “the English have witches, too.” 

     The Nigerians, it seems, have so many that they are still outlawed, though legal conviction punishes far fewer than the number who suffer vigilante action.  Are the fictional Elizabethan weird sisters in fact substantially the same as their real Nigerian contemporaries who announced a professional conference of witches not so long ago in Benin City? [1]  How much does either have in common with the self-identified contemporary witches for whom the identity is associated with feminism and New Age beliefs or, on the other hand, with the traditional Christian view that a witch is a conscious agent of the devil?  In Margaret Murray’s many publications (pooh-poohed by other specialists), she argued that witches were simply devotees of a pagan religion.  Writers who were not anthropologists (and even some who were) used to refer to practically any tribal shaman, healer, or priest as a “witch doctor.”  Slippery as it already sounds, the definition is further complicated by the fact that there exist numerous accounts of male witches and of benevolent ones, and that the great majority of people who have been considered witches by others have denied the charge, at least until torture began.  Practically the only common factor is the alleged use of supernatural means, but a great variety of practitioners meet that criterion.

     The present inquiry therefore adds two further conditions.  The supposed witch is female and she uses her magic power with a malevolent aim.  Probably the most common usage in English and sanctioned by centuries, what this definition loses in inclusiveness, it gains in a sharper focus on the meaning of what is surely the most historically significant set of witches, those considered to be wicked women.  The great majority of people charged with witchcraft had, of course, no such malicious intentions, but the prejudice built into the term is itself informative.  Virtually all information about the phenomenon derives from the statements of the supposed witches’ voluble enemies, who considered these unfortunate women the worst of malefactors, leaving us with a substantial story of their persecutions but almost nothing about their actual beliefs or activities. 

    Hostile accounts of witches are prominent not only in European history, but in other parts if the world as well.   A few years ago the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution calling for the “elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.”  In many countries of Africa the existence of witches is widely accepted.  Only a few weeks ago the African Union voted to encourage its members states to remedy the damage done by such beliefs.  The resolution aimed at halting the outright murder or subjugation to ordeals of suspected witches, as well as a variety of harsh punishments such as their confinement to “witch-camps” in Ghana and enslavement in Tanzania [2].

     Several accused witches have been judicially executed in recent decades in Saudi Arabia where witchcraft remains a statutory crime [3].  In India accusations of witchcraft, primarily directed against poor, elderly, and low caste women, have occurred from early times until the present.  Over a thousand five hundred people so labeled are still killed every year [4].  In Papua New Guinea about a hundred women are killed annually for similar reasons [5].  Even in relatively developed countries such as Russia [6] and the United States [7] such incidents occur.

     The Biblical text most often invoked in European witch-hunting is Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”  Whether the term mekhashepha in this passage derives from a root meaning “mutterings” (referring to incantations) or from another meaning “cutting,” (indicating one who gathers plants) [8], it clearly indicates a practitioner of traditional remedies.  Of course, as the Hebrew scripture abundantly reminds us, anything savoring of another religion was anathema to the ancient Jewish leaders for ritual reasons apart from any ethical implications.  In this way all unorthodox beliefs became associated with disloyalty to Jehovah.  Later, of course, the Christian god proved no less jealous [9], and the practice of magic was identified with fealty to the devil.

    Due to the hegemony of European Christianity, witchcraft was universally forbidden from the start [10], but widespread persecution did not occur until the Early Modern era.  While the anxiety caused by wars and epidemics may have played a role, surely the principal reason for this escalation of violence in which tens of thousands were executed was the Reformation as the Roman Catholic Church moved to protect its exclusive franchise on the supernatural just as the ancient Jewish priesthood had done.  This is true in spite of the fact that few if any of the accused “witches” were in fact Satanists [11].  Whereas one might have expected that the belief in witches would have been more widespread during the Middle Ages in Europe when science was less developed, in fact it was not until the Reformation threatened and then overturned the long hegemony of Roman Catholicism that authorities seeking to reestablish control were moved to take action not only against the Protestant reformers but also against imagined enemies who were more easily overcome: old women, Jews, and those suspected of covert unorthodox beliefs.

     Beyond the attempt to maintain the hierarchical religious power structure the pursuit of witches also reinforced male authority in the family and in the community.  At base like all superstition and much of religion it expresses the anxiety people feel concerning events beyond human control.  Misfortune of all sorts, first of all mortality, but illness, injury, crop failure, and any of a myriad other calamities might strike at any moment.  Seeking protection from such undesirable but unforeseeable suffering, people fenced their actions with elaborate defensive systems. They honored the deceased ancestors, yet also took precautions to prevent them from bringing problems to the living. They relished the meat their hunters brought, yet performed rituals to propitiate the animals’ spirits. They courted, divided the tasks of life, and made heterosexual love, but remained anxious that the mysterious other might be surreptitiously causing harm.  The veneration of female fertility deities in prehistoric times represented at once the joy of nature’s plenty and the fear that its largesse might be withheld. Once such earth mothers were replaced in the role of divine chief executive and source of the good things of life by male sky gods such as Zeus and Jehovah, the rich gifts once associated with females both holy and human were lost and only trepidation remained in the face of the female supernatural.  It is the story of the rejection of Asherah among the Jews and of Pandora, once named “all-gifts,” but then said to have brought woe among the Greeks.

     The misogynistic implication of the belief in this sort of witches is undeniable. The wish of male culture makers to project responsibility for misfortune on the other led to the systematic repression and exploitation of women in patriarchies around the world. The case of witches makes clear that women’s relegation to second-class status was motivated by their oppressors’ self-interest (or, at any rate, by selfish intentions), yet men felt apprehensive still.  Customs such as the sequestering of women during menstruation certainly arose from the same sort of fear that led to the witch prosecutions. Often marginalized people – the poor, the eccentric, the foreigner -- were selected as particular scapegoats in the desperate effort to control the unpredictable turns of fortune or to seek revenge for misfortunes that had already occurred.

     Apart from those with religious power seeking to retain it, believers wishing to exhibit piety, and everyone’s wishing to avert bad luck, the concept of vicious female witches enforced male patriarchal control in a way accepted by most as self-evident and natural.  A more general, non-religious fear of women is suggested by the word witch’s otherwise paradoxical use to mean both an "old, ugly, and crabbed or malignant woman" (from the early 1400s) and a "young woman or girl of bewitching [i.e., attractive] aspect or manners" (middle 1700s) [12].

     Thus it has been the witch-hunters and not the witches who behave in a superstitious and an unchristian manner.  The strategy of scapegoating is of a piece with the prodigious human sacrifices of the Mayans and the Aztecs and the monstrous crime of the Holocaust as well as with the dehumanization of the poor and enemies in war, xenophobia, racism, and bigotry in general.  On a smaller scale similar patterns abound: the bullying of schoolchildren, domestic violence, blame-shifting and even supercilious language toward subordinates.  Life is insecure, suffering always at hand, and the resulting fear and anxiety stimulate the desire to believe that untoward events must be caused by others and that hostile action is required in self-defense.  Those with power easily believe that their power is justified.  Deflecting responsibility does not, of course, solve problems, and the result is often a redoubling of violence in the pursuit of well-being that would be poignant were it not so selfish.  The empathy and cooperation of people has always existed in tension with the demands of ego and the convenient ability to dehumanize those who live over the next hill and the more vulnerable among one’s own group. 

     While campaigns against witches have diminished, our species is as irrational as it ever was, and blaming and penalizing those who are weaker is as common as in the day of the Salem trials.  Magic thinking is so appealing to many that the mythic patterns survive.  When the war in Vietnam was draining the spirit of our nation and causing untold misery, a good deal of the public thought the problem was protesters.  When unions were organizing and Black scabs were brought in, white working-class people readily believed that their enemy was their fellow worker rather than the plutocrat exploiting them both.  When the government must save money, the savings are most often found in the small amounts spent on the poor, the ill, the outcast, the nonconformist.  In a curious echo of earlier delusions, many people thought during the 1980s and 1990s that Satanic ritual abuse and murder of children was occurring in spite of the lack of corroborating evidence [13].  Currently, many right-wing extremists fantasize that “liberals” and Democrats and the witch-like Hillary Clinton are regularly committing such crimes.  Today, when the existence of our species is imperiled by imminent environmental catastrophe, when millions of our brothers and sisters are in want, when the rich steal an ever greater proportion of our productivity, some are convinced that what needs remediation is people in drag reading stories to small children. 

     The black arts derive their evil character not from the acts of the so-called witches, but from the barbarous viciousness of those considered righteous.  Projection of one’s own faults, displacement of blame for adverse events, vilification of those who are in some way different, and, most dramatically, outbursts of murderous ferocity against outsiders have always been the most readily available solutions to human problems.  The only flaw in these approaches is that they do not work.

    

 

 

1.  in 1987, High Priest Osemwegie, playwright and founder of the Ebohon Cultural Center, announced a meeting of witches in Benin City.  After a storm of protest from fundamentalist Christians, he declared that the gathering would proceed, but, for security reasons, would be invisible.  More recently, in 2019 an academic meeting featuring academic papers in topics relating to witchcraft had been scheduled at Nsukka University, but had to reformulate its announcements due to Pentecostal pressure from churchmen who thought it was, as the earlier meeting had indeed been, a gathering of practitioners.

 2.  The UN resolution (#47) passed in July 2021.  Among many other sources, the camps are reported by Leo Igwe, “Witch Camps and Politics of Witchcraft Accusations In Ghana.” Maravi Post, June 13 2022 and enslavement in Dale Wallace, “Rethinking Religion, Magic and Witchcraft in South Africa: From Colonial Coherence to Postcolonial Conundrum,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2015).

 3.  Among recent victims of this legalized murder have been Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali in 2006 and Amina Bint Abdulhalim Nassar in December 2011,

 4.  Seema Yasmin, “Witch Hunts Today: Abuse of Women, Superstition and Murder Collide in India,” Scientific American January 11, 2018.

 5.  An even higher estimate is suggested in the Wikipedia article titled “Witch-hunts in Papua New Guinea.”  The general situation In Papua New Guinea is surveyed in Charlie Campbell, “How a 7-Year-Old Girl Survived Papua New Guinea’s Crucible of Sorcery,” Time July 16, 2019.  Other stories may be found in   Maya Oppenheim, "Rising numbers of women in Papua New Guinea suffer brutal violence after being accused of 'witchcraft'," The Independent June 10, 2021.

 6.  Samantha Berkhead, “Practical Magic: How Russia’s Ancient Witchcraft Traditions Continue to Thrive,” Moscow Times, November 4, 2020.

 7.  Among the cases in the United States is that of E’Dina Hines in 2015.  Often, as in the case of Eder Guzman-Rodriguez in 2011, children are the victims. 

 8.  The translators of the Septuagint rendered the word as φαρμακοὺς, a word that (as Derrida in Plato’s Pharmacy noted) applies equally to a healer and a poisoner.

 9.  Witchcraft is a capital offense in the Laws of Hammurabi (eighteenth century B. C. E.).  Similarly, verse 102 of the second surah of the Koran (Al-Baqara) propounds the idea that devils teach magic.  “And they followed what the devils taught during the reign of Solomon. It was not Solomon who disbelieved, but it was the devils who disbelieved. They taught the people witchcraft and what was revealed in Babylon to the two angels Harut and Marut.”

10.  In England the laws of Alfred, for instance, condemn unrepentant witches to death.

11.  A sort of synthetic Satanism, primarily meant to be provocative, arose in the 18^th century with Philip Wharton, 1st Duke of Wharton’s Hellfire Club (1718) and Sir Francis Dashwood’s Order of the Knights (or Friars) of Saint Francis (1749) whose meetings Benjamin Franklin occasionally attended.  Later, playing with Satanism enjoyed something of a vogue with Éliphas Lévi and Aleister Crowley.  This trend reached a sort of epigone with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan (1966).  The Satanic Temple, an entirely secular organization, was founded in 2012 by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry with the goal of provocatively challenging the intrusion of religion in American government.

12.  Oxford English Dictionary.

13.  A useful brief survey is provided in Bette L. Bottoms and Suzanne L. Davis, “The Creation of Satanic Ritual Abuse,” Journal of Social and Clinical Pychology vol. XVI, no. 2 (1997).

Favored Places

     The traveler can hardly name a favorite destination any more than a favorite food or play. Roast lamb does not compete with cashew-fig ice cream or a dish of just-shelled peas in butter. One might laugh with Aristophanes in the morning but be ready to cry with Aeschylus by evening. It is inevitable, though, once the traveler has wandered long enough to make comparisons, some places are recalled more fondly than others, and the traveler finds himself musing on ratings, pretending for a time that all the world was made for nothing more than a pleasure trip.
     Travel is about experiencing difference. There would be little point in visiting a destination very like one’s home. A destination may gain sensational appeal if it deviates radically from one’s home. I recall my first sight of Morocco. On my Wanderjahr, after months traipsing about Europe, thinking myself full to capacity with admiration, I was struck with that seemed a new magnitude of wonder when I crossed from Algeciras to Ceuta and found myself feeling as though I was not merely walking the streets of a medieval neighborhood (as one may do in Carcassonne if one is unbothered by small boys with wooden swords); I seemed rather to have been transported to an earlier age. All around me were the sights and smells of a preindustrial society: charcoal fires with bubbling tajines, incense of unknown kinds, street musicians, animal handlers calling warnings to those with whom they and their beasts shared the narrow lanes. From the minarets the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. On top of everything else fifty years ago Morocco held out a kief pipe with its long stem and small clay bowl to the visiting American, ideal accompaniment to a glass of mint tea, a beguiling bonus indeed. We stayed in Fes for several months, mostly sitting in cafes chatting, rarely seeking out sights. When we were not socializing with our friends, the youths of the streets, marvels came to us. We observed nomads forming a vast camp, enacting rodeo-type games (the tbourida or fantasia), firing their blunderbusses in a grand fête for the circumcision of the king’s son, now the ruler.
     Visiting India provided a similarly rich sensual assault, sometimes retaining even the cannabis as well. A week on the shore of the Ganges in Varanasi included countless rhesus monkeys snatching food and offerings and scampering over roofs, onto terraces, then to trees while holy men chanted and sang below and a constant stream of devotes came to partake of the river’s divinity. To the foreign visitor the scene is a pandemonium of marvels: Shiva-lingams on every corner, Hanumans dripping with sindur-tinted ghee, paan vendors whose trays offer a galaxy of accompaniments, scents of burning incense and burning corpses. The imagery is expressed in one of the most elaborate and variegated pantheons of mythological beings ever imagined on earth. Active temples are everywhere with chanting here, prayers there, a friendly, English-speaking priest in a third. Every evening at the Dashashwamedh Ghat a service is held, the Ganga Aarti, with worshippers exhibiting the same brand of fervor one might expect at a pentecostal service. The visitor who grew up in the suburban Midwest can hardly stray further afield.
     Difference alone is no guarantee of satisfaction, though. I enjoyed Morocco and India on my own terms. Working in rural Nigeria was exceedingly unlike home. While exciting and rewarding at times, the daily difficulties often seemed overwhelming: living apart from shops (other than the market every four days in Agbarho) in a place where such ordinary goods as cooking gas were rarely obtainable even to those who knew the ways of the black market, while playing as neophytes our roles near the bottom of the formidable Nigerian bureaucracy, all of this in steam-room temperature and humidity. It did get the better of us.
     Around the great attractions of the globe, the places that comprise people’s “bucket lists” (a horrid term), the volume of crowds can distribute the pleasure more widely, though unfortunately in markedly smaller doses. When I was last in Pisa’s Campo dei Miracoli I could view the bell tower only past myriad other spectators, half of whom seemed to be posing gag photos in which their subjects were either holding up the structure or knocking it down. It is enough to make one feel like a snob.
     If people are not standing shoulder to shoulder, though, or even if they are, some sights live up to their reputation. The mountainous setting of Machu Picchu is flat-out breathtaking as is the prospect from the far less remote Delphi. The Taj Mahal has a precise symmetrical beauty like that of Versailles. For me perhaps the greatest revelation among wonders of the world was Angkor Wat. The vastness and grandeur of the place with literally miles of unfamiliar reliefs made it an easy matter to avoid the groups and lecturing guides, the selfie-takers and vendors they attract, by simply stepping a few feet off the standard route. The grand panoramas of events mythic and historic seem never to come to an end, and it is all carved upon vast fanciful, partially overgrown structures and overseen by the massive big-lipped heads on the Bayon temple.
     One could hardly sustain being bowled over every day, though, and a mood for the monumental at times gives way to a wish to sit in a quiet cafe. Two small towns that I find utterly charming are Nafplio in Greece and Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic. Neither is in any sense off the beaten path; both are popular, yet each has a beauty that has so far survived the crowds. In Nafplio a short stroll takes the visitor from the pleasures of the town with its battlements and bougainvilleas to Arvanitia Beach which seems more secluded than it is. Český Krumlov with its medieval streets and looming castle struck me as the closest approximation of the illustrations in fairy tale books.
     The museums that remain most strongly in my memory are the ones anyone would name: the Louvre, the Prado, the Uffizi, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, the Archaeological Museums of Athens and of Mexico City.
     Smaller museums of which I am especially fond include the Musée Moreau in a little-visited street of Paris with paintings covering the walls and endless cabinets, cupboards, and drawers of intricately imagined and constructed mythic scenes. I recommend as well Teylers Museum in Haarlem, fundamentally unchanged since its founding in 1784, which bills itself as a Museum van de Verwondering. With the Illumination of daylight only, the visitor can wander the galleries and central multitier library and see a large collection of elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific instruments, with marvelous fossils and crystals around the corner, and drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in the next room. In Bangkok the walker can enjoy a green respite from the sometimes sweaty streets by entering the gate of the Wang Suan Pakkad Palace (called the Lettuce Farm), in fact a small museum with a number of objets d’art as well as entire buildings, including the wonderful Lacquer Pavilion. A pleasant attendant added a grace note, giving us woven fans, saying they were a gift from the queen, but they seemed superfluous in that leafy and refined realm.
     And then there was the Ramnagar Fort Museum in Varanasi which we reached in a pedicab passing over an unsteady pontoon bridge to reach the crumbling structures where the current maharajah resides (though his title was abolished a half century ago). Here one may view tigers killed in royal hunts during the days of the raj, now leaking their stuffing amid decayed crocodiles and the remnants of the old glory: palanquins, howdahs, ivory carvings in glass cases covered with a layer of dust. When a tourist entered a room, an aged gentleman arose from the seat he seemed to have been occupying for the last century to gesture with a whisk, raising a bit of dust and justifying his request for baksheesh.
     In hotels I look for character over grandeur, but I appreciate the Ottoman Legacy Hotel in Istanbul with its majestic central court and high ceilings. Though built originally for offices, the structure features domes on either side modeled after those of Jerusalem’s Masjid al-Aqsa and in the interior a generally princely waste of space. The window of my room overlooked the spice market, the Mausoleum of Sultan Abdulhamid, and, further off, the water. It was only a few steps to the Topkapi and Hagia Sophia.
     I loved the San Tomas Hotel just by the market in Chichicastenango. Once the residence of the United Fruit agent, its rooms wander on sometimes in irregular levels, with courtyards with macaws and monkeys and luxurious plantings, religious art on the walls, rooms without television or air conditioning. I only hope it has not changed.
     A share of every day is given to eating. I think it is true that in France the diner is likeliest to be given a memorable plate, often notable for smoothness and elegance what with butter and cream and pureed vegetables, capable, too, of the intoxicating aroma of bouillabaisse, the earthiness of truffles or buckwheat, and the simple straightforward excellence of a fresh baguette. Not surprisingly, Italy and Spain can offer comparable pleasures. Greece hasn’t the range but, using only garlic, oregano, and thyme, can prepare the best roast lamb or grilled cuttlefish with which cold retsina is the best wine, little as one would wish to drink it daily.
     India offers the most dazzling array of “aromatics,” as the spices and herbs are termed in Dharamjit Singh’s cookbook. A thali plate, like a mandala, represents a universe, including the spectrum of flavors of sweet, salt, bitter, sour, astringent and spicy. Without a doubt the finest vegetarian cuisine in the world, Indian cooking is superb at making tasty dishes out of inexpensive ingredients while requiring considerable cutting, chopping, and the assembly of grand symphonic combinations of seasonings.
     Much good criticism is at bottom appreciation, but discernment is impossible without value judgments. Britain’s grey peas are not extinct, nor is the fried bread that might await the traveler at breakfast there. Yet the U. K.’s colonial history redeems it: inexpensive Indian restaurants are often a wise choice as are Indonesian places in Holland. Generally, I found little to like in the cuisines of the Czech Republic, Nigeria, or Puerto Rico. I can recall a dish in Prague with both potato dumplings and wheat dumplings and a bit of pork, a grey-brown assemblage, filling to be sure, but with little to recommend it other than the accompanying beer. And in San Juan the second frying of the plantains in mofongo rendered them hard and heavy, resembling the carnitas with which they are served. A Nigerian meal is typically a ball of starchy tuber – cassava or yam – with some meat and hot pepper in a bit of sauce called stew.
     As I write I remember the pleasure I took in hearing stories from friends who had bummed around Europe before I made it there and the delights of reading books that allowed me a wider range of experience vicariously than I could accomplish on my own. There is an equally abstract delectation as well in recalling these details from a lifelong travel habit. They are now arranged in the house of memory like a series of objects in a cabinet of curiosities, baubles one can study and turn over in the mind, sparkling yet fixed. The living fetish, though, of travel, is always in the future; the appeal is surely in not knowing, in vacuity in fact. Before visiting a place for the first time, I entertain an odd vacancy about what I might experience. In fact no one knows tomorrow, but the future contains a promise which is only enhanced by its mystery. That next trip, the visit to a place previously unknown, beckons always from the horizon.

Knowing and Not Knowing

     We value knowledge and regard its lack as a simple deficiency, but that view is neither inevitable nor is it always serviceable. In fact knowing and not knowing, like all bipolar oppositions, have a dialectical complementarity. [1] Their relation is so intimate that ignorance is entailed by every specific claim to knowledge, and skepticism in general need not be a logical cul de sac. The apophatic tradition’s route even as far as the divine is only the most spectacular use of not-knowing. Neither the lack of direct demonstrable evidence (of God, for example) nor an insufficiency of evidence (for any other proposition) need bring an end to inquiry.
     There is an inescapable figure/ground relationship involved in sense perception and no less in cognitive processes. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated that, when one focuses on an object, one necessarily, at the same time, becomes unaware of its context. For every apparent gain in understanding, there is a corresponding loss. It is no more possible to maintain an equal awareness of all parts of a field than to fix both the position and momentum of a quantum object. To understand an utterance means to ignore other associated data. To recognize one reality means to be unconscious of many others. For functional problem-solving and most science, this presents no difficulty; indeed, the limited focus is essential and fruitful. In this way, not knowing is harmoniously intertwined with knowing throughout daily experience.
     Rightly understood the apparently limiting condition of our inescapably partial vision is more often the enabler of conviction than an obstacle. Growing up one is educated by acquiring the beliefs cultivated in one’s own culture. While the process enables an individual to function effectively in a social situation, it requires becoming blind to other possibilities. Yet societies do change, and, for the individual as well, this patterning of blindness and insight [2] may develop, evolve, and alter. The comfortable certainties of received ideas may be threatened or overturned by exposure to other societies with other visions, which may leave the thinker hopelessly at sea, but which often results in an eclectic or a skeptical point of view, or simply a more informed conclusion. A similar step toward enlightenment may occur due to ratiocination, meditation, drugs, or any of the range of techniques people have developed for altering consciousness and thus broadening the mind’s horizon.. Only then does the individual realize the significant role ignorance played in what had felt very much like secure conviction.
     But there can be no eliminating a residue of uncertainty about even the most superficially self-evident facts. One of the most systematic and influential philosophic formulations of this is the Indian catuṣkoṭi, a series of propositions that has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [3]
     The catuṣkoṭi is generated by considering the array of possibilities when considering the truth of a proposition P. It may be so (P) or it may not (not-P). It also may be that both P and not-P are true, or that neither P nor not-P is, resulting in the following. Clever logicians including the great Nagarjuna then doubled this to eight propositions and added a capping ninth term sunyata, or emptiness.


Positive configuration
1. P
2. Not-P
3. Both P and Not-P
4. Neither P nor Not-P


1.
Negative configuration
1. Not (P)
2. Not (Not-P)
3. Not (Both P and Not-P)
4. Not (Neither P nor Not-P)

Sunyata


     This catuṣkoṭi has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [4] To me it is a dialectical series of oppositions that, rather than resolving, leads to a further bipolar pair. It expands indefinitely like a human embryo starting with a single cell, then doubling and redoubling into nearly unfathomable complexity. In the broadest application the formula applies to any proposition, that is to say, to the world at large.
     One may walk through the progressively unfolding implications of the catuṣkoṭi until their complexity becomes unwieldy. One naturally takes the reality of the phenomena one can perceive for granted. This is the first term of the original tetralemma. The first duality then appears with the suggestion that the world is in fact illusory, a veil of maya, avidya, or not-knowing into which one must look more deeply to achieve enlightenment. At this point the critical doubt is productive, suggesting possibilities which would not otherwise arise. This skeptical questioning, flying in the face of common sense, produces the second term.
     Yet the world is not wholly and simply non-existent either. Even if it be a magic show, a puff of smoke, a flash of light, even these are something. The world must simultaneously exist in some sense while not existing in the last analysis. On the other hand the paradox forces the observer to conclude that it neither fully exists nor fully lacks existence in the ordinary understanding. These then are the third and fourth terms.
     This schema already gives the juggling thinker too many thoughts to keep airborne at once, but the savants’ increasingly exquisite metaphysical elaborations may serve the receptive mind as a basis for epistemology. Frustrating though it may be for those with little tolerance for paradox and mystery, this view, in which knowing and not-knowing are symmetrically intertwined, seems the closest approach we may attain to Truth.
     The view of those pursuing the apophatic conception of Ultimate Reality makes an even stronger claim: that the divine is “the affirmation of all things, the negation of all things, and beyond all affirmation and denial.” Nirvana etymologically refers to being extinguished, blown out like an oil lamp, yet it is the goal of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Recent studies have pointed out significant parallels between these spiritual traditions and the discoveries of modern physics. [7]
     What can it mean that the positive and negative charges in the universe are equal? Surely the same should be true of matter and antimatter, though, for the present, these seem stubbornly unequal. [7] When one totals up the entire cosmos the answer must be zero, but a simple blank is not the result, or we would not be here wondering. On the contrary the observer, knowing and not knowing at the same time, gazing through the optical lens of ordinary vision corrected by the additional lens of philosophic speculation, sees most often instead the phantasmagoric phenomena of the world which are both there and not there. We know only by not knowing and see only by blindness.



1. Among the classic statements of this idea is the second poem in the Dao de Jing. As it is critical to the concepts to follow, I include a translation of a portion of that poem in James Legge’s clunky old translation for which, despite all its awkwardness (and its author’s Christian bias), I retain an affection: “All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is; they all know the skill of the skilful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what the want of skill is. So it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to (the idea of) the other; that difficulty and ease produce the one (the idea of) the other; that length and shortness fashion out the one the figure of the other; that (the ideas of) height and lowness arise from the contrast of the one with the other; that the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea of one following another. Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his instructions without the use of speech.”

2. This tidy phrase is, of course, the title of Paul de Man’s virtuoso critical performance. Deconstruction, with its insistence on the statement which is sou rature, “under erasure,” directly engages the dialectic of knowing and not knowing.

3. In fact this gap may well be considered an example of my own ignorance or blindness fostering a new conclusion. The catuṣkoṭi is closely paralleled by reports of the philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis in Sextus Empiricus. As Pyrrho is known to have traveled east with Alexander where he conferred with Persian magi and Indian yogis it is likely that he returned with some Eastern ideas. See Diogenes Laertius 9.61. For a useful sketch of parallels between Pyrrh and Madyamika, see Thomas McEvilley, “Pyrrhonism and Maadhyamika,” Philosophy East and West xxxii, 1 (January 1982), 3-35.

4. Note that, unlike some of the Asian thinkers I accept all these propositions as finally equal in truth value. For some they are alternatives among which one must choose.

5. Eriugena's translation of the pseudo-Dionysius “omnium positio, omnium ablatio, super omnem positionem et ablationem inter se invicem.” (Patrologia Latina CXXII 1121 c-d).

6. The seminal work was Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Capra was qualified both as a particle physicist and a psychedelic veteran. His books have, not surprisingly, had a mixed reception. I have not read them.

7. This is called baryon asymmetry.

A Trip to India

Whether it is discernible to readers or not, I generally edit a bit before posting even in material drawn from my travel journals. Below, though, I have transcribed my notes from a few weeks in India complete with lists of monuments, complaints about hotels, and descriptions of a meal or two with no attempt to shape a coherent essay. In spite of the often casual nature of the blog genre and the frequently discursive quality of travel writing, I don't plan to repeat this practice, which was suggested to me solely by the time pressure of two weeks of travel followed by the holiday season. The observations below were written in Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Ranthambore Park, Udaipur, and Mumbai. Six years ago we toured India independently after intentionally devising an itinerary that avoided the touristic Golden Triangle. This time we went with a group -- this explains the relatively plush accommodations, the elephant ride, tiger-spotting (unsuccessful), and the like.

Photograph by Patricia Seaton

12/2 Wed.

     Upon disembarking in Delhi the traveler feels the eye-burn of acrid air and smells the faint but pervasive foulness of the Industrial Revolution's decay. Ah Delhi! What promises might this stink of acquisitive desire first make and then frustrate or keep before the return home?
     As we were staying at the Holiday Inn, we found ourselves in one of those peculiarly uncongenial locations only money can buy. Such structures are grand and self-sufficient. Guests are meant to venture out only by taxi, But I did have a look around the neighborhood that seems so little like a neighborhood. Homeless people had built a fire right by the road beneath the elevated highway (here called a flyover). A wandering cow stared blankly at a few off-kilter feral dogs. Dusty boys playing cricket in a grass less field paused in their game to watch me pass. Seeking a place for supper I walked to a mall only to find that most of its shops were liquor stores though it did boast a Domino's Pizza and a Chinese restaurant. Street vendors offered momos for 20 rupees and "famous Kolkata egg rolls."
     We headed then together across a broad canal on a bridge without a real sidewalk. In the dark a mad maelstrom of traffic rushed by, half the drivers honking repeatedly. The headlights of the cars, many ignoring lanes and passing too close to ignore combined with the noise and what seemed real danger of being struck to create a temporary nightmare. Once over the canal, crossing the next street with continuous traffic but no signals seemed simple. Fortunately almost at once we found a modest place beneath the metro station where we shared a creamy paneer dish, garlic nan, jeera rice, raita, small whole onions that had been marinating in red vinegar (beet juice?), along with the lime and soda water so popular here.


12/3 Thurs.

     We visited again the Jama Masjid built by Shah Jahan with its huge courtyard and exceedingly shallow interior. They say that 25,000 believers can all salaam at once in this outdoor space with its two auxiliary pulpits for relaying the imam's words to the masses. Somehow, when we entered no other visitors were present, just a dozen of the pious praying, doing ablutions at the central pool, and reading the Koran. A white shrine in one corner is thought by the credulous to hold a hair from the prophet's beard and other relics. The massive domes are top heavy though the minarets in every corner strive to balance the composition.
     We rode a cycle rickshaw through the lanes of old Delhi and then turned onto the Chandni Chowk near the Red Fort and the Jain bird hospital. A zebu pulling a cart, its hump slanted rakishly to the side, turned its head my way as though sharing a secret.
A government-sponsored Disability Day was being held near India Gate. Walking through a crowd of people conversing with each other in highly animated sign language felt oddly like flying through viscous air.
     We visited the Gandhi Smirti where the leader spent his last days trying to halt the communal violence that followed Partition. Here the skinny old man wrapped in a white cloth was assassinated. His politics and personality contained great contradictions which were then multiplied by those of this vast land. He put his mission before his personal life, yet, unlike Ho, he had a family. His use of the sadhu tradition led him to ascetic practices such as celibacy and fasting. Nonviolent satyagraha may have succeeded in the independence struggle only because the British, who had imprisoned him several times, were ready to abandon their empire due to other historical forces. (Armed struggle was unnecessary in Africa.). Yet in the end Gandhi remains an immensely moving and impressive figure, that rarest of things, a political actor with principle.
     The Laxmi Narayan Mandir, extremely popular with visitors, was built in the 30s by the Birlas, a wealthy industrialist family, and has the extravagant imagery in which Hinduism is so rich, including a number of representations of Buddha and a baroquely decorated chapel for Krishna. The Birlas had supported the self-rule and self-sufficiency movement and thus Gandhi participated at the temple’s dedication. The garish figure of Laxmi at the altar is associated with money, so it is clear why the Birlas and the general public might adore her, yet more uncertain how the great preacher of the extinguishment of desire would react to his inclusion. The temple was built with modern materials and includes such showy features as artificial waterfalls.
     The Qtub Minar complex with its enormous but bulbous and ugly minaret was built at the beginning of the 13th century by Qutb-ud-Din after wrecking some twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples that once stood on the spot. Should there be any doubt, the mosque beneath was called Quwwat-ul-Islam or "the might of Islam." When one wishes really to conquer a people, it is doubtless good policy to conquer their gods as well. Now, apart from the slightly absurd tower, many of the victor's buildings, the Khalji Madrasa for example, are likewise ruins. Strolling among the remains of once mighty contenders induces an elegiac mood. Ozymandias again!


12/4 Fri.

     The Akshardham Mandir is very modern, constructed only a bit over ten years ago, but it is extraordinary in a manner as arrogant as the Qtub minaret with as little true spirituality. While the medieval minaret was meant to awe the defeated with a display of temporal power to which religion was attached almost incidentally, this twenty-first century structure has a pushy sort of vulgar ambition that tastes foully of capitalist conspicuous consumption. Much more than the Birla temple built seventy years earlier, its ambitions toward grandeur are expressed in insistent artificial excess somewhat like Las Vegas or Dubai. It is described by its promoters as though by a real estate sales agent: seventy thousand figures carved during three hundred million man hours, as though such numbers could generate greatness. I did not witness the attractions that have led more than one observer to call it a Disneyland-style temple: the son et lumiere show, the animatronics. I suspect the Hindu nationalists of the BJP were critical to the grant of land for its creation, though its guru Swami Narayan lived what was probably a very holy life two hundred years ago. Yet it does bludgeon its way to the visitors' attention and even to a sort of admiration akin to that one feels for art brut builders or kitschy fifties formica.
     We drove then to Agra, first passing through endless miles of high rise apartments and a great many more under construction, the cancer-like growth of the modern metropolis, before emerging to fields including patches of mustard grown more for oil and greens than for the seed, past beehives and small-scale brick kilns.
     On the outskirts of Agra, we stopped at the tomb of Jahangir's vizier Mirza Ghiyas Beg, the onetime refugee who managed to be named "the pillar of the nation,’ Itimad-ud-daulah. The so-called Baby Taj struck me as elegant (though not sublime). The two mausoleums have in common the white marble facing and the striking petra dura work with Persian motifs of vases, flowers, and trees.
     In Agra we stayed at the Agra Trident.


12/5 Sat.

     Though we arrived at the Taj Mahal quite early crowds had come yet earlier. The dreadful smelly smog, only marginally less intense than in Delhi, here made the iconic structure appear as a dream or a vision. What can one say about such a sight? Like the Eiffel Tower, Machu Picchu, or the Great Wall it is so familiar from images that it can scarcely be seen in person. Still, it is evidence of the refined aestheticism of the Mughal court, reflecting that of Persia. I suppose it is cheering in a way that this beauty is not confined to a small circle of aristocrats, but is available to the mob daily, including myself. Though popular opinion would like to view the structure as a testament of love, it is doubtless still another statement of arrogant power, eloquent long after its builder was ousted and confined by his own son (who murdered his brothers as well). At least that ruling class valued cultivation of the sensibilities as a sign of their nobility, just as the courtly Elizabethan sonneteers did. In these latter days hustling photographers pose couples in Bollywood postures and the glorious building has been reduced to mere backdrop.
     The red sandstone fort in Agra is protected by two and a half kilometers of ramparts. Furnished with high walls, drawbridges, moats, and a zig-zag main entrance to prevent a rapid rush of invaders and the use of battering rams, it looks virtually impregnable. The larger part is still a military base. This is where Shah Jahan served his house arrest. When not killing family members or other foes, this brutal bunch enjoyed such refined pastimes as bathing with concubines in a porphyry tub amid flower petals.


12/6 Sunday

     Today's drive was lengthy, broken only by a stop at the Abhanagari step well (or baori), a huge hole dug in the 9th century or so with geometric patterns of rock descending in a sort of dizzy op art pattern. Next to it are the ruins of a large temple where local residents lounge and chat and goats leap, perhaps imagining themselves in the mountains. Today the village of Abhaneri is small and humble, but a thousand years ago it must have been a center of regional power. Some sort of harvest festival was in progress, heralded by a sound truck bearing more passengers than one would have thought possible riding along with the companionable gods and blasting music with a heavy beat. Behind followed a procession of women, many balancing tall terra cotta urns on their heads topped with sprigs of greenery. Some merely walked along while a considerable knot gyrated ecstatically. Patricia joined the dancers, imitating their moves expertly and swinging more rhythmically then many of the Indians. They seemed delighted with her and grins spread all around while small children strove to touch the foreigner who had mysteriously materialized to grace their celebration.
     A short time later we encountered a funeral with the somber line headed by pall-bearers carrying a body in a white winding sheet on a board. They were making their way to the crematorium. So life inevitably evokes death and it is surely salutary to avoid lingering too long amid the joys of food and children and love and all the affairs of life lest one deceive oneself and entertain the thought that Yama has been outdistanced.
     After nine hours on the road we pulled off onto a one lane dirt track, then a smaller one, bumpier yet and arrived at the Pugmark just past the village of Sawai Madhopur outside the Ranthambore National Park.


12/7 Mon.

     As the park is a former maharaja's hunting grounds, there is a large fort on the hilltop in the park with temples and a mosque as well as occasional lodges, tombs, and shrines on the grounds. Pilgrims visiting the temple give food to the local monkeys so they congregate along the road in trees waiting for likely patrons, rather like the vendors that rush to the side of the paused vehicle at the park's entrance offering Chinese-made tee shirts and stocking caps.
     We failed to sight a tiger during our morning and afternoon drives through different areas of the park, though we saw tracks and heard the monkey's danger calls when they, with better vantage point than ours, spotted their antagonist sleeping or creeping through the high grasses. They, the jungle cats, leopards, and the hyenas had sense enough to dodge the attention of the visitors though we carried cameras rather than firearms.
     We did, however, see plenty of fallow deer, sambar, blue bull antelope, wild boar, black-faced langur, macaque, crocodile, and countless birds including egret, ibis, teal, cormorant, red wattle lapwing, woolly-neck stork, snakebird, whistling duck, tree partridge, parakeet, various herons, jungle crow, weaver bird (with nests), and bulbul. There were a great many wandering peacocks, and the tree pies came begging for handouts.
     The ride was a bit rough and dusty, yet glorious as every beast has its virtue, and the alarmed cry of the monkey is no less a marvel than the tiger's roar, and though Blake wrote of the latter, it was only to combat the prejudice born of fear. We were told that the Ranthambore tigers have killed not only livestock but a good half dozen of our own species as well in recent years, so the hostility of villagers who live nearby is judicious and well-founded.


12/8 Tues.

     On the way to Jaipur we stopped at a small government school and witnessed the students' routine for opening the day. Lined up in size order and in classes, they executed a few moves reminiscent of military drill and sang the national anthem. Holding their hands in prayer position they then chanted petitions to Sarasvati for educational success. An older girl then read headlines from the newspaper and "thoughts for the day" along the lines of "do not spit or use tobacco" and "mind your parents."
     In Jaipur we are told that over half the population of something over four million are employed in the gem trade. The astrologers tell people what stones are beneficial for them, so this metaphysical benefit coincides with the Indian taste for conspicuous consumption and gaudy over-the-top decoration.
     After a lassi served in a disposable pottery cup we entered the Raj Mandir movie house to see a Hindi film with the usual sharply drawn heroes and villains and nonstop alternation of thrilling action, song and dance, romance and comedy. Not knowing the language was no impediment to following the story. The place was not old but was vulgarly opulent with more levels of ticket price than a Broadway theater. Why is it that in this land where arranged marriages are still the rule, all the films are about romance?
     We ate perhaps the best Indian meal of the trip ever had at Tulsi, a small vegetarian restaurant located, surprisingly, in the Ramada hotel where we were staying. I had strolled the nearby streets without finding a likelier place, but I am glad that this time I did not follow my preference for a hole-in-the-wall. Sharing a thali we had more than we cared to eat. We particularly enjoyed ker sangria a combination of "desert beans," which look rather like strands of seaweed or long evergreen needles prepared with fresh capers and a good deal of oil.


12/9 Wed.

     We engaged in the most touristic of experiences riding a painted and gaily draped elephant to Jai Singh's Amber Fort with its lengthy fortifications snaking over the hills to protect a luxurious palace. The visitor heard flute music and came upon a snake charmer with two cobras. Then the gauntlet of the undiscourageable hawkers begins
.     The City Palace, one-third of which is still occupied by the family of the last maharaja, had some marvelous gates, each with different decoration. The so-called museums here displayed little more than the remains of royal wardrobes and paintings of some of the men who wore them. One could see as well the huge silver urns which the ruler in 1901 brought with him when visiting Britain. He had thought it prudent to carry his own water, unsure of the safety of what would be available in the West and probably thinking his own had curative powers.
     The complex of eighteen large devices built by Jai Singh for astrological calculations (the Jantar Mantar) is an abstract spectacle apart from its intended use. A very large sundial here (the Samrat Yantra) can indicate the time correct within two seconds while the complementary marble hemispheres in holes in the ground can indicate an individual's horoscope. This meticulous observation and ingenious invention in the service of superstition recalls to me the Chinese invention of the compass which was used not for navigation but for Germany and of gunpowder, the use of which was confined for centuries to fireworks.


12/10 Thurs.

     We drove to Jodhpur and encountered numerous military convoys coming from the posts along the border with Pakistan.
     We visited first the fifteenth century Meherangarh Fort (the Sun Fort), one of the grandest fortified palaces in the world. In order to build here, on the hill called Bhaurcheeria (the mountain of birds), Rao Jodha evicted a sadhu known as Cheeria Nathji (the lord of birds), constructing a dwelling and temple for him on the grounds. He then sought to ensure his security on the spot by burying a man alive in the foundation. The man’s family still occupies a home in Raj Bagh (Raj’s Garden) provided them in compensation four hundred and fifty years ago. Entering the gates one may see the damage left by cannonballs and the handprints of the maharajah's wives made before they committed suttee in 1843. At a temple dedicated to Chamundi, in 2008 249 people were killed in a panicked stampede during the Navratri festival. The goddess is depicted as aged and skeletal, wearing a garland of human skulls (mundamala). Liquor and animal sacrifices are offered (and, in the past, human sacrifices) to this fearsome one-time tribal goddess.
     Apart from the associations with class and gender exploitation, war and ferocious religious imagery, the fort as a whole is a magnificent witness to human engineering, aestheticism , and ingenuity. Pleasingly asymmetrical and endlessly various, it offers new marvels around every turn and on every level. At the present time there is also an exhibit of miniatures which mostly feature goddesses, though there is one of a polo game, and several of maharajas. Among the breathtaking rooms are the Flower Palace or Phool Mahal, used by the ruler for his private recreation with its stained glass and gold-decorated ceiling, the Takhat Vilas with its European Christmas tree balls hanging from above, and the Pearl Palace (Moti Mahal) whose walls are covered with some sea-shell preparation. The stone lattices or jali are intricate and elegant, though testifying to the system of purdah which the Rajputs adopted from their Muslim enemies.
     We then checked into the Ranbanka Palace Hotel, a "heritage" hotel in what had been the palace of Maharajadhiraj Sir Ajit Singh ji, a prince in 1927 when the structure went up. Apart from the Ottoman Legacy in Istanbul this is surely the grandest place in which I have ever stayed. Our accommodations consisted of a sitting room with marble floor and fine carpet separated from the spacious bedroom by columns and drapes, again with fine carpets, then another room holding two large wardrobes and little else, and an unnecessarily spacious bathroom. Excess, but a pleasant surprise for a single night.


12/11 Fri.

     The Jaswant Thada is an early twentieth century marble memorial to Jaswant Singhi II and subsequent maharajas by the Dev Kund used for ritual bathing after cremations. As it was only just opening time, the only shoes outside were the pointed ones from the attendant who lit incense before the altar which had no deity but only a photograph of the big man. He then assumed a stylized posture and began playing a flute, though I am not sure whether his aim was to offer the melody as he had done the incense or to elicit a tip. Perhaps both.
     On the way to Udaipur we stopped at the fourteenth century Ranakpur Jain temple and meet the weirdly fascinating gaze of Adinath and the other tirthankaras. Though many describe Jainism as a religion without a god, the temple designers were not inhibited from including numerous Hindu deities as well as worshiping the fully realized beings, the last of whom lived over two and a half centuries ago. Not only did the visitor have to shed all leather including wallets; in addition drinking water and menstruating women were forbidden. We were most interested in the reliefs on the way in illustrating a variety of sexual practices. Like many other moralistic works, these conveniently managed to titillate while condemning.
     We arrived at the so-called Royal Retreat outside Udaipur. Though the scenery was fine, the place was a four-star prison in that it lacked even gardens or walking paths. Above, on a high cliff a resort made to resemble a fort was under construction. We were a half hour outside of town and the nearest village seemed to lack a restaurant. As it turned out the place (about which we had already complained -- the original hotel was on the shore of Lake Pichola) was disastrous. I can scarcely begin to enumerate the complaints which every traveler there seemed to have. Among them though was service in the overpriced restaurant so very slow that one was advised to order at least forty-five minutes in advance (though this led to cold plates being brought to the table), lack of hot water or, in some cases, of water at all, failure to clean the rooms or replace towels during the day, exile to the chilly verandah restaurant for breakfast while Indians there for a wedding party and an anniversary celebration ate in comfort indoors. We were stuck, our only compensation being accommodation in a separate cottage-like room off by itself near an imposing Jaganath cart, though to reach it we had to pass the swimming pool area by the side of which many men seemed to have a habit of peeing. We grumped over a shared dish of grisly mutton bones in a tepid sauce of cashew and rosewater. So close to one of the most picturesque cities of India and yet be confined to this sorry place.

12/12 Sat.

     Udaipur is certainly beautiful at least on the lake or on its shores. Pichola and the smaller lakes, all joined by canals, were created in the fourteenth century by a gypsy Banjara tribal chief and expanded by generations of maharanas. The view includes three royal mansions as well as numerous somewhat less lavish havelis once occupied by aristocrats. One grand residence, the Jag Niwas, was built on an island as a summer palace though unfortunately today it is a hotel, while on another island is the Jag Mandir, likewise today a private hotel. Thus the Rajput warrior aristocrats of the past have yielded to the plutocrats of today.
     Even today in hot weather the visitor can appreciate the luxury of the eighteenth century "garden of the maids of honor," the Sahellion-ki-Bari with its shady lanes, its flowers and palms, and its later fountains,one of which features four monolithic elephants in marble. With an almost Heian refinement, these fountains are designed to generate different sounds, a powerful monsoon or a gentle forest rain.
     We took a boat around the lake from which none of the funky cluttered streets were visible, but only the grand homes of the nobility and the equally grand landscape beyond. We paused on the island of the Lake Garden Palace, the Jag Mandir where the reigning Maharana had sheltered Europeans during the Mutiny of 1857 and admired the frescoes in the Gol Mahal.
     Not far from the City Palace, the Jagdish temple, built in 1652, enshrines the black stone image of Jagannath an irregular deity considered by some an avatar of Vishnu (replacing Buddha) though not included in the standard Dashavatara. The primary association of this deity for nonbelievers is the Ratha yatra or chariot festival in which high carts bearing his image are pulled through the streets be devotees with speed and force that are implied by the word juggernaut. He is often depicted in idols carved of tree stumps, featuring huge eyes and no legs and looking archaic indeed flanked by similar figures of his brother and sister Balabhadra and Subhadra.
     In the evening we were not inclined to make the hour-long round trip to town, leaving us no option other than to eat in the restaurant. At first we were told that we could not enter the restaurant which had been reserved for the parties but when we objected we were then allowed a table. Looking for something modest and bland, she ordered a lamb burger which arrived looking quite nice with tomato, lettuce, and egg, but which proved to lack lamb. When she questioned the waiter, he shook his head enigmatically, saying, "Yes, no lamb, ma'am, correct." After another fifteen minutes, she received a separate plate with pieces of lamb.
     We sought sleep as the parties continued into the night, culminating with midnight fireworks.


12/13 Sun.

     We arose at 3:45 for the flight to Mumbai about which we had been reading in Suketi Mehta's overpraised book Maximum City. In spite of its prizes, I consider it indifferently written and poorly edited. Many specific ideas are repeated again and again and anecdotes illustrating them are piled up till they become tiresome indeed. When the author strives for rhetorical drama, the result is almost always second-rate. Still, it provides information on the underside of the city unavailable elsewhere. Mehta may be unique in his acquaintance with the metropolis' gangsters, bar dancers, and general corruption.
     The Mahalakshmi dhobi ghats are visible from a bridge above. This slum in the middle of expensive real estate includes a large number of concrete sinks into which water is diverted, this had been the center of the city's dhobi-wallahs, but, since the advent of the washing machine, it is less essential to many whose parents sent their laundry. To compensate, some of the neighborhood's residents have solicited "first wash" work, especially for makers of school uniforms. The collection of discarded clothing for resale is another means of livelihood. Still, those who live here tenaciously hold on to their rights -- the land is not privately owned but rather city property --and have sued to provide their ouster. Given what Mehta says about the interminable unfolding of court cases, reminiscent of Bleak House, they may have a good while yet before being moved. In spite of the miserable shanty-town construction, every hovel had something I do not, a satellite dish.
     In the Maru Bhavan Gandhi Museum, once the home of a friend and supporter who offered Gandhi a room when he was in Mumbai, one can see odd little dioramas depicting critical moments in the leader's life. His room is preserved complete with spinning wheels, bed, and bookstand and nothing else. There is a small balcony where he spoke to visitors. The photographs on display include scenes with Tagore, several with British Quakers, and a delightful one with Charlie Chaplin in which both are grinning widely. Among the letters displayed are notes to both Adolf Hitler and FDR seeking to forestall war.
     The Oval Maidan was filled with white-clad cricketers and lined with British buildings reminding me again of Malcolm Muggeridge’s comment that the last true Englishman would be an Indian.
     From our twenty-first floor room at the Trident one could see the water and the cityscape, including the Rajabhai clock tower, while wheeling birds circled and dived. At one point a wedding party below drummed and danced and marched.


12/14 Mon.

     The Chhatrapatra Shivaji Museum, once the Prince of Wales Museum before its rechristening by the reactionary Shiv Sena party, is fronted by a handsome garden and crowned with a fine dome. It was designed by George Wittet (who also did the Gateway of India) in a mixture of Gujarati, Islamic, and British styles. Though the building lacks air conditioning, the collection is excellent, including a fine sculpture hall which includes a good share of Gandharan Buddhist work and first-rate Hindu sculptures. I particularly liked the dramatic representations of Durga killing the bull, a motif called mahisasuramardini. On the next floor are examples of many schools of miniature painting and a hall of works featuring Krishna. The cafe in a shady courtyard full of plants had a full "special lunch" for 90 rupees, but the hour was too late, and we made do with hearty a pair of samosas for 35.
     On the way back to the hotel we got peanuts from a street vendor while another whacked at a coconut and inserted a straw. As evening fell, we drove out to the airport to begin the thirty-some hour trip back home.

On the Ganges' Shore

     With even the most detailed directions, we could never have found our guesthouse on the Ganges’ shore by ourselves. A young worker from the Sita Guesthouse on the Chausadi Ghat where we had booked a room met us on the nearest street large enough to accommodate traffic other than on foot or hoof. (Plenty of motorbikes zoom through the narrow lanes, but they don’t really belong there.) We moved rapidly through one turning after another, passing a variety of little shrines, many Shaivite, with fresh offerings around the lingams. In a short time I gave up trying to set mnemonic markers so I could find my way back and simply followed my guide to the banks of the slow, dark, impassive Ganges.
     When we met the proprietor of the Sita, he proudly informed us that his late father had been a distinguished astrologer who boasted among his clients the actress Goldie Hawn. He ran off to fetch a scrapbook with photos confirming this connection to celebrity before showing us to our room. When we pointed out a few small insects in the bedding, he enthusiastically declared, “No problem, no problem at all!” and shouted orders at one of his workers who presently appeared with a spray can of insecticide which he applied liberally enough to create a noxious poisonous cloud. “There! Okay, now, no?” he confidently asked.
     Whether wisely or not, we accepted the room. It had a balcony over the river and a side view facing a dormitory for some faction of holy men. We were to see them at all hours doing domestic chores like washing clothes and cooking. It mattered little that our modern sink simply drained onto the floor, thus teaching the hand-washer to lean well forward in an effort to avoid splashing one’s trousers.
     Varanasi is without doubt a spiritual center of Hinduism, but I learned that does not necessarily lend to its appeal as a holiday destination. “Why would you go there?” an Indian-American friend had asked, “You go to Varanasi when it’s time to die.” The fact is that the burning ghats where cremations are performed leave most visitors surprised not to be more disturbed. Perhaps even the visiting skeptic is influenced by the general spectacle of religiosity, played out at all hours on every side. The constant crowds of saddhus, devotees bathing in and drinking the murky water, masseurs, yogis, both for hire and self-absorbed, diviners of various stripes (some sheltered in permanent little shaded seats to receive hopeful customers), pilgrims, musicians and chanters, apes and cattle, all create an otherworldly atmosphere in which any manifestation of mortality short of a ravening Kali with a girdle of skulls is likely to seem digestible, even one’s own poor vulnerability. Then there are the touts and beggars. Now and then a haunting flute melody would rise from the path along the river’s side. There was no telling whether the tune arose from an enlightened ascetic who had trekked down from the mountains or a hustler hoping to gather a few coins by selling cheap pipes.
     Even apart from the constant scene along the river’s edge, there was no lack of action. The rhesus macaques whom I had previously associated primarily with their beneficent role in the polio research of my childhood leaped from building to building seeking freshly offered edibles at the many shrines or a bit of tasty trash. On the rooftop restaurant of the Sita one worker stood by at all times with a stick to prevent the animals from snatching the dinners from in front of guests. After dark, we heard them thrashing around on our balcony.
     The tourist and the devotee alike can experience an epitome of the Ganges’ symbolic potential every evening at the Dasaswamedh Ghat where an elaborate ceremony is held, lasting perhaps an hour and a half, and featuring fire, incense, bells, juggling, chanting, a row of seven simultaneous officiants, and music in various tempos. In this spot Brahma himself is said to have performed the archaic ten horse sacrifice detailed in the Vedas and described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The present-day ceremony, called the Ganga Aarti (Ganges Perfect Love) is a full-blown spectacle. As mendicants and holy men circulate, congregants clap their hands with the music; they pray; at times they raise their hands, fingers wide, and wave, looking like nothing so much as a Pentecostal service. People place votive candles in small boats of folded paper and set them floating in the river, so that, after a time, a veritable flood of luminous desire illuminates the water’s path downstream. Praise of Agni, the god of fire and twin of Indra, opens the first hymn of the Rig Veda. His transformative flames were considered to transmit sacrifices to the divine world, and the use of fire as a route to god flourishes here nightly.
     After a time the casual visitor to Varanasi may find the powerful odors of the city -- incense, cremation, excrement, cooking, sharp chemical scents and soft floral ones, charcoal and rot – to be too much, particularly in concert with the incessant cries, shouts, songs, and chants. Our own remedy was to catch a pedicab to Sarnath, on the city’s outskirts, the Deer Park which was the site of Buddha’s first sermon to the five bhikkhus. The pandaemonium of Varanasi vanishes in this airy and quiet area frequented only by monks and pilgrims. The visitor notices, though, that the hovels of the destitute still line the approaches to the temples, monasteries, and colleges, most of which are walled off and set back from the road, surrounded by green lawns and gardens. The fabulous mythology of the Hindu pantheon, the phantasmagoric sights of the holy city, the most potent of sights, sounds, and smells, all can seem in memory a lurid dream, though a dream dreamt only yesterday.

Pestering Allen

     The summer of my undergraduate junior year – it was 1966 -- I couldn’t seem to hold a job. I began as a manual laborer for a company that maintained power lines for the electric utility. I had obtained this position through the intercession of the power company’s CEO, the father of a friend. The foreman felt annoyed by this rare directive from the executive offices into his domain, considering me a punk-ass college student. Even if I thought more appropriate terms would be sensitive and artistic, I would, I think, have welcomed being called a bit neurasthenic at the age of nineteen. Whatever the terms, the sequel justified them. I believe I actually passed out digging in the heat or maybe I just felt I was about to, but, at any rate, I resigned, much to my supervisor’s satisfaction.
     I then took a place at a drill press in a filthy foundry casting blast furnace parts on the west side of Chicago. This place had an all-black work force on the floor. They had no vacation days whatever, no benefits, cash pay at week’s end. Workers would simply leave for a while when they needed a break and then return, allowing me to insinuate myself as the only white person in this constantly fluid staff. I have no doubt that the place violated every labor and health code in the book, but they had doubtless made arrangements with the regime of the elder Daley. Every afternoon they would pour the molten metal, creating infernal clouds. At the day’s end one would shower on the premises and the water would run black. At home I would blow my nose and find my handkerchief gone quite black and noxious. Here I lasted a week.
     A friend then suggested I join him at the Loop employment agency where he had been working for a few weeks with great success. The place paid employment counselors like salesmen: a low base guarantee, bolstered by commissions for every person placed. This system emphasized the common interest of company, counselor, and applicant in such a way that it encouraged unethical, even illegal practices. Where to begin? In training one was initiated into a secret code by which employers could include race among their requirements and their preference would be preserved in a way that was not explicit. In contacting past applicants, whether they had found a job with the company or not, we were instructed to try to find how much money they were presently making and then claim to have an opening that would pay twenty percent more.
     My friend had such fluid verbal skills that he had been a roaring success, generally defeating the veterans at winning the weekly bonus that went to the most productive worker. He was willing to say anything to anybody, and had the ability to size people up in a few moments and address them in the most effective way, making small talk and side comments that made people instantly trust him.  gthis was how it worked for him, but not for me. After a few days I was off again.
     I gave up on employability at this point and headed down to Champaign-Urbana where I could hang out with friends and enjoy the atmosphere of the largely depopulated University of Illinois campus. As it happened, that summer the National Student Association had chosen to hold its national convention there. It was to be another year yet before the revelation that the organization had been funded since its formation in 1947 by the CIA, but those reactionary spooks must have been worrying about their investment for some time. The government’s strategy was the same as in covert CIA support of, for instance, the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party which ruled for fifty years, that is, to see that socialism made no headway. Created to supplant the leftist student groups of the thirties, some of which were still alive, if feeble, the NSA’s president in 1966 was David Harris.
Harris was the Stanford student body president who had gone south during the Freedom Summer of 1964. He was to resist the draft, indeed, to help found the organization called the Resistance and to serve fifteen months in federal prison. In the summer of 1964, though, the draft was not the issue it became several years later. Apart from discussing the widening war in Southeast Asia, the NSA was set to debate legalization of cannabis, and I discovered that Allen Ginsberg had come to educate the delegates on the benevolence of the good herb. He was to stay for a week.
     Led by a slightly older poet, Michael Holloway, a group of four or five of us went in search of Allen. We ran in to him almost at once in front of a dormitory elevator and introduced ourselves as the local poets. Graduate students, undergraduates, drop-outs, seeking then to establish a new American culture, we knew each other through happenings and parties and several had appeared the previous spring in what we regarded as the hip issue of Oblique edited by Holloway.
     Ginsberg engaged us at once, taking a aggressive tack and saying to Holloway, “You’re a poet, you tell me. Well, what’s your best line -- the best you ever wrote -- come on -- what is it?” Not surprisingly, Holloway hesitated and, after a dramatic pause, Ginsberg continued, “You know, a beautiful line like my friend William Burroughs, wrote, like ‘Motels . . .motels . . . motels . . . loneliness.’”
     After regaining his equipoise, Holloway questioned Ginsberg’s mission. “You shouldn’t be spending time with those guys hung up on politics. Isn’t your place with the artists?” Ginsberg asked if we hadn’t had friends busted for pot, and wasn’t it a love-act to advocate for them. He wanted not just our coterie (where marijuana was pervasive) but the “mainstream” NSA, representing the future, to declare for legalization and, to that end, had painstakingly compiled fact sheets proving cannabis innocuous, citing evidence from scientific authorities, laid out in a logical array, and photocopied on pink pages.
     We succeeded in distracting Ginsberg as the marijuana issue only consumed a half-day of the convention’s business. Most evenings he attended parties in funky student apartments and talked for hours. I don’t really recall faculty there, though some may have found their way to the scene. There were some alienated high school students sniffing glue or something in a closet which elicited a warning from the poet: “That’ll cause your brains to drip out your nose.”
     I have heard accounts of Ginsberg behaving badly, but I have none to report. I would not count the incident of my straight friend who caught the poet’s eye. Asked to visit the dorm room where Ginsberg was staying, he headed off happily, though even a nineteen-year-old undergraduate might have known what would happen next. Twenty minutes later, he returned, shaken. “Man, Ginsberg just went in the room, and I shut the door, and, by the time I turned around, he was sitting on the floor naked and, oh my god, it was just like this big mass of hair with a penis sticking up!”



Allen Pestering: a postscript of second-hand anecdotes

     Fearful of idealizing the poet who meant so much to so many (including me), I add a few anecdotes told me by an Indian friend concerning Ginsberg’s visit there in the early sixties. Being a guest in a culture for which he had such interest and admiration did not obviate the poet’s fondness for shock. Without such a taste, we would never have had Howl and Kaddish, both monuments of twentieth century American poetry.
     He enjoyed people’s reactions when he introduced Orlovsky as his wife. More than one thought this term must be explained by some gap between Indian and American use of English. When presented to a prominent writer, son of a previous prime minister, Ginsberg immediately asked the man if he were fond of masturbating. He pressured a leading journalist to help him obtain a visa extension and then not only vanished without thanking him, but, according to my friend, later snubbed him when the Indian was visiting New York and happened to meet him again.

Two Parades

1. Republic Day Parade in India

Actually, it was the full dress rehearsal for the Republic Day parade, but it was difficult to imagine the real thing to be much grander or more ceremoniously conducted. Security was fierce -- it was, after all, only a few months after a terrorist attack in Mumbai that in which hundreds died, but the supervision seemed ill-organized and full of holes. All observers, and there were tens of thousands, were to have tickets. Countless security forces, army, police, who knows what, shepherded people around. A great variety of tickets separated those with higher status who were allowed into grandstands while common observers took up street-level positions along Delhi’s grand boulevard, the Rajpath. A complex system of color codes indicated not only status but location along the route. We, of course, had no tickets of any sort, having only just heard about this celebration. One gracious officer told us we could go ahead though we lacked tickets. The next said we had to be gone, yet, that said, he ignored us as we proceeded. After some time, during what may have been our sixth or seventh conversation with the authorities, a friendly stranger offered us tickets that permitted us legitimate standing room among the crowds.

First came the regular military display: flyovers, tanks, and marching bands galore, including grandly mustachioed Rajasthani troops, drummers dressed in faux leopard skins, and others in flamboyant costumes such as massive bright turbans topped with even brighter starched fans, others with outsize batons to toss high in the air. One unit played band instruments from the backs of resentful-looking camels; others proceeded on grave elephants. There were several units of tartaned bagpipers. I recalled Malcolm Muggeridge’s line: “The last Englishman will be an Indian,” and wondered if he might be a kilt-wearing Scot instead.

Then came floats from each of India’s provinces representing regional culture and economy. One group of tribal dancers succeeded another, each impossibly exotic even, I take it, to the Delhi-wallahs. From this outsider’s perspective, it was more Mardi Gras than Fourth of July. There were huge leering faces, the divinities difficult to distinguish from the heroes of history, tableaux in which half the figures were living, half were dummies. Even what one might reasonably have expected to be tiresome, the floats from bureaucratic government agencies, had their charm. On the float of the rural electrification commission, for instance, there were power lines ending in delighted couples in front of computer screens as though the first effect of peasants’ receiving electric power would be their purchase, not of an electric light, but of a Dell computer. There were no beauty queens but there were cars carrying the winners of the National Children’s Award for Bravery. The viewer could only imagine what they had done, but I have no doubt it was truly heroic.


2. Fiesta for San Juan Bautista

I hadn’t been sure we would make it to Puno, at 12,500 feet on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Demonstrations by farmers wishing to stop large-scale mining which they felt endangered their water supply had closed the roads and cut off the town in the previous week. But a short-term agreement to cease action until after the election had quieted the scene. One evening I followed the sound of pipes and drums to a small church outside of which the band played to a small group dressed some in suits and some in local costume. They tossed multi-colored confetti in the air and set off fireworks. As I stood outside the fence watching an elder man gestured to me to enter. It was the feast-day of John the Baptist. I had seen the church with his name across town on the other side of the square. Someone appeared from inside the church with a basket of ritual bread – I was given a piece. Fortunately no one asked me if I were a Catholic or even a Christian. Youths in tee-shirts and jeans played a dozen pipes while seven drums made up the rest of the band. Next thing I knew a religious image was thrown about my neck by a member of the local St. Anthony of Padua club. Then six men lifted the large wooden frame, and, holding the saint’s image, they set out for his church, music playing all the way, punctuated by occasional fireworks. We walked through the square, past the shattered windows of the Justice Department and the banks. Marching in the middle of the musicians, with the insistent pipes of all sizes, with the drums sounding somehow anxious for all their emphatic punch, one felt that the hearts of the devotees of St. John were beating in unison, even the heart of the interloper who just happened by.

More Portraits from the Floating World: Pa'ahssysy and Spector

Pa’ahssysy

     Pa’ahssysy, we were told, was a kula or kief wino. In the mornings he washed cars, preferably for tourists, for an hour or two, and he contrived to stay stoned most of the rest of the time. Around mid-day he would enter Mufis’ hole-in-the-wall café in Fes's new town and call for mint tea. Mufis would continue reading the paper, then he might bark a few orders to his assistant Ahmed and proceed to stare into space for ten minutes, only then rising to make the tea. Pa’ahssysy could sit, then, satisfied, for half the day drinking his tea and smoking tiny bowls in an unhurried and consistent pace, blowing the ash to the floor. The slow service may have reflected Mufis’ feeling that Pa’ahssysy’s custom was a liability to his establishment, though he cared to go no further than to hedge a bit about the charity required of every Muslim.
     Pa’ahssysy resembled an amiable if slightly pixilated bear, very dark with a woven cap ornamented with stars and a black three-quarter length pseudo-leather coat tied about the middle with grimy raveling string. His eyes, it must be said, were somewhat weary and blood-shot. He often slept in the park.
     Pa’ahssysy spoke no French, so our communication was largely through gesture and expression. He delighted in repeating his name and laughing as though it were an excellent joke, but he also made sudden, apparently unmotivated, growls. If a police officer were to pass by on the street, he would assume a scowl and declare, “Yechh – police” and then laugh harder yet. His attitude must have grown from experience. He had recently spent six months in prison for accosting a woman on the street outside his carwash and making bold advances. When she resisted, he claimed to be chief of police. Ahmed told us that while he was playing cards, Pa’ahssysy had stolen his wallet (which must have had precious few coins) and vanished for a week or two.
     Once we met Pa’ahssysy in the medina and he took us on a tour of the “shnen sbil” (a garden that felt to him like home), the Oued Fes, Moulay Idriss, the Bab Boujeloud. These place names became charms of friendship that day.
     Shortly before we moved on, Pa’ahssysy made another of his periodic reappearances, now sporting a new blazer with a woven crest of Fenwick High School in Oak Park on the lapel.


Lester Spector

     At breakfast on the rooftop of the Sita Guest House in Varanasi, as the waiters stood by with sticks to threaten monkeys eager to snatch a bit of food, Lester Spector told me he had been practicing meditation for thirty-six years. “But I’m a Jewish boy from the Bronx – I don’t expect to be enlightened – still it helps me to carry on.”
     And the man certainly does carry on. During his career, apart from a year with a guru in Patna, he had been a lawyer in the US, later a law professor in Toronto and then in Western Australia where he had also sat for a decade as a Supreme Court judge and wrote a number of scholarly books on legal topics. Apart from these substantial professional achievements, he had studied Jungian psychology and had published a widely sold road novel about two unlikely seekers in India.
     Australian tax authorities were pursuing him yet with an annoying civil suit seeking to recover a considerable sum. “I’ll win eventually, but it will take years. I occupy myself by making obstacles in my life this way.” This legal entanglement may account for his avoiding Australia in recent exploits.
     He said he had spent a year doing work for a gangster-linked business in Moscow. When his intention to leave them emerged, they tried “at gunpoint” to reclaim his compensation. Though rather foggy about the details, his account had him outwitting the tough guys and making off with the money. He seemed at any rate somewhat flush.
     His girlfriend was on her way back to Australia. He said his novel had been optioned by a major studio and he was scouting, among other things, locations for filming. Whatever it was he was after, his restless eyes did move in an unusually lively fashion.