Jaipur Literature Festival

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img_2394Ok, it’s been a couple weeks now, but the Jaipur Literature Festival was an excellent way to begin my travels in India. I was expecting something smaller, not the several thousand in attendance, moving between the three simultaneous events taking place at Diggi Palace. Some highlights included Pico Iyer in conversation with Patrick French about the V.S. Naipaul biography, The World Is What It Is; a screening of documentary, The Strange Luck of V.S. Naipaul; a discussion about Defining Diaspora; and Basharat Peer in multiple presentations, including interviewing Mohammed Hanif, discussing the Fundamentals of Fundamentalism and a talk about Kashmir, past, present and future.

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Rumi on the front lawn

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img_2366Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.

I have been here before, listening to Coleman Barks’s slightly Southern voice reading out loud his translations of Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th century Persian Sufi poet. I was nineteen and had just traveled around the world on a ship, visited Shinto shrines in Japan, rubbed the bellies of plastic Buddhas in Taiwan, placed hands over flame in temples in India, and drawn sketches of whirling dervishes in Istanbul. I had ended up, somehow, in Athens, Georgia. It was a bit like being dropped into mud after the freedom of the open seas, but there were moments when the boundaries of the little Southern city fell away and the outside world slipped in.

There are love dogs that no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them.

Barks was teaching at UGA when a friend told me about the reading. It took place at night in a bookstore with a witchy bent that sold dried herbs from glass jars and tarot cards in addition to the left-leaning books. The lights were off, candles lighting up the faces of the young crowd as we sat on the floor amidst the stacks, passing a jug of cheap red wine hand to hand while Coleman read. It all seemed terribly romantic.

The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

When the reading was over, the non-smokers followed the smokers outside to stand under a full moon that ruled the sky, casting our shadows upon the pavement. Cleavers reached out from the edges of the parking lot and clung to the hems of our jeans.

When it’s cold and raining,
you are more beautiful.

All the images of Jalaluddin Rumi portray an old, wise man with a full white beard, but at eighteen, or eight, depending on the telling, he was a young exile on the move. It was 1219 and the borders that separated nations and states were shifting under Genghis Khan’s domination; would continue to shift, only the delineation between land and sea remaining the same as the new maps were drawn over the centuries that bring us to today. Rumi and his family left their home in Persia as the Mongols invaded, moving westward until they reached Turkey. In the journey was the learning, was Hajj, were the chance meetings that shaped his life as a Muslim.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.

I haven’t heard or read Rumi for years. The three volumes of poetry I bought that night are scattered – one lent and never returned perhaps, two more in a box in a basement somewhere, I think, maybe. But on the second evening of the Jaipur Literature Festival  in Rajasthan, India, a couple of weeks ago, Barks is onstage as I remember him, rotund and bearded. The night air is cool as I sit with friends from New York on cloth-covered folding chairs set up on the lawn of Diggi Palace. Colorful fabric is draped overhead, lit up with white lights. It is all terribly… royal. Barks reads from memory in the deliberate cadence of the poet, looking across the stage to Turkish reed flute player Kudsi Erguner, who leads a group of musicians in accompaniement to Rumi’s words.

Gamble everything for love,
If you’re a true human being.
If not,
leave this gathering.

It is at once transcendent and trite. Is it my stubborn refusal at surrender? My unwillingness to spin, one handed turned to heaven and the other to earth? But I admit my appreciation for any search for God that involves love-making and wine. I wonder, again, hearing this, seeing the images throughout India  of Krishna and Radha wrapped in each other’s arms, where did the sex go when God went west? How did it come to be, a bachelor God with no mate? A mother who was a virgin?

Without a net, I catch a falcon and release it to the sky, hunting God.

India, a brief history of time

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pattiporch

1971 – I am eighteen months old with a head full of black curls, cradled in my father’s arms as my American mother holds the hand of my four-year-old brother, who is all big brown eyes as he stands close to my mother’s leg. She is meeting her Indian in-laws for the first time. For seven years, they have not acknowledged her existence, but now they greet us at the Madras airport, placing tremendous garlands of fresh flowers around each of our necks – mother, father, son and daughter. A family within a family.

1980 – Ten is the perfect age to take a child to a wildly different place than the one they recognize as home. They are old enough to handle themselves as travelers yet young enough to not be locked into the world of preconceptions that they will soon enter and never quite leave. My parents pack our suitcases with six weeks’ worth of my brother’s and my school books, digital watches and calculators as gifts, and a bottle of Hershey’s syrup to help the malaria pills go down. We are going to India! My cousin is getting married. In my journal, a sporadically filled red record book, there is a page labeled “Unusual Facts.”

unusualfactsDays before the wedding, my female relatives dress me up as a little bride, the weight of the braid extension and gold jewelry heavy on my tiny head. My aunt gathers fresh leaves to grind into henna paste and makes designs on my hands. I don’t remember whether I realized that I was nearly the same age then that my grandmother was when she married. I return to America with the fading red marking of mehindi on my hands, lice in my hair and a hunger to experience other worlds.

1984 – Fourteen is the worst age to take a child to a wildly different place than the one she recognizes as home. I momentarily forget my desire to experience other worlds. I bury myself in Stephen King novels as a means of escaping the ever-present members of my extended family (I have 19 first cousins) and mostly refuse to wear Indian clothes, convinced that the only way to remain an independent human being (read: teenager) is by wearing Jams surfer shorts. But I take note – the bumper stickers that command BE INDIAN, BUY INDIAN, the billboards that remind A SMALL FAMILY IS A HAPPY FAMILY, the warning labels on alcohol, DRINKING ALCOHOL DESTROYS FAMILY, for a country less than a decade out of prohibition. It is Diwali, the Festival of Lights, and I follow instructions to shower, put on my new set of clothes (Indian) and oil my hair. My brother and I set off endless rounds of firecrackers with our cousins, a thousand explosions into the night.

1989 – The hunger has returned. I’m traveling around the world on a ship with a school program and our Indian port city is Madras. As the hundreds of other students diverge, I go awkwardly into the dark night with my uncle, for the first time unsheltered by the interface of my immediate family. I have just read V.S. Naipal’s India: A Wounded Civilization and begin to recognize the immensity of India’s history. My father was born in a colony under British rule. He was a boy as he watched Gandhi lead the country to freedom, and a young man when he found his own by boarding a ship to America. A context develops, dimensions made of stories. At one moment, I am sitting with three of my male cousins, all about my age. We’re watching television when a video comes on for a favorite Bollywood song. They leap up in unison, singing all the words and dancing, jumping on the furniture. There is a freedom and joy and playfulness in their movements that I watch, awestruck.

1993 – I want to see my grandparents one last time. Thatha’s astrologer has announced his death date and it is imminent. I go to the astrologer’s son for a reading of my own, but halfway through, he gets completely flustered, spitting out that that he can’t do it right! I have been born on the wrong side of the planet! He is unsure how to interpret the stars – should he be looking at the placement of the planets as seen from India at the moment of my birth, the assumption upon which all of Vedic astrology is based upon, or as they appeared over New Jersey on that March morning? He tells us to leave, it’s impossible, but not before he has prognosticated that I will problems with my stomach (I will), that there is an adoption on my mother’s side (there isn’t then, but there will be later) and that I will marry a man born east of me. Just months before this trip, I met a man named S. He was born west of me, and I write him love letters on thin sheets of airmail paper. Thatha lives on.

1999 – I’m meeting my father in India; my grandmother is dying. When he picks me up at midnight from the Chennai airport, for Madras has now changed its name back to its pre-colonial incarnation, monsoon rains have flooded the streets and he has had to abandon the car and come in a three-wheeled auto rickshaw that can manage the flood waters. “We’ll go straight to see Pathi,” he tells me urgently, as we drive through the wet, still night. “I don’t know if she’ll make it until morning. She’s been unconscious for days.” When I arrive, my grandfather paces in the dim house. Pathi awakens, sits right up and begins talking in Tamil. She speaks no English. I speak Tamil like a toddler. She kisses me, takes scoops of my cheeks with her fingers and brings them to her lips. We smile and hug and then she goes back to sleep. She will live for another seven years. My grandfather for another five, passing multiple death dates the astrologer pronounces.

2002 – S. comes with me for the first time, though our relationship is a shell of what it was and this decision to travel together is perhaps a bad one. He meets my grandfather and the rest of the family clan, but it is Pathi I wanted him most to meet. She is a small round woman I love with a deepness I reserve for few. We sit together for hours and hold hands, without language. Beyond language. My love for her is unhindered by thought. I bring her tea and snacks and comb her hair. S. takes photos of her and me out on the balcony in the golden Indian light, but the photos disappear inexplicably, a bit like the mortar that held our relationship together for ten years.

2005 – My parents – in a surprise twist! – have moved to India. My father has not lived here for 45 years and my mother, raised Baptist in Chicago, has never lived here. My grandfather has died, a year after 9/11, a date no one predicted. The youngest of the three dancing cousins is getting married and my brother and I sit with the older two on the roof, drinking beer illicitly as we unravel the meaning of life, love and the universe. We come to no conclusions. We have been designing a family website and the four of us are creating an awkward gap as the roots expand and grow around us in the family tree.

2009 – The photos S. took mysteriously reappear, and on a brief visit to NYC, he presents me with 8” x 10” reprints as he holds his new baby in his arms, as his girlfriend walks in the door. Two years ago, Pathi died. I return now, no longer a grandchild on this earth, to a place that is a shifting home, to the place where my father left fifty years – half a century! – ago. India has long ago shed its isolationist ways, although a small family is still a happy family. Time is moving water, and I slip into it.

into the new year

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img_1987“This then is life.
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
How Curious! How real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.”

~Walt Whitman

X marks the spot

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img_1942
Click on image for slide show.

There was a great egret, three feet tall if it was an inch, standing in the middle of Flood Street. Before Hurricane Katrina surged the city, there were once rows of houses instead of the weedy wild fields that now fill the expanses between the asphalt. The tall bird stood, considering, and flocks of starlings chattered in their watery language from the branches of the thick oaks that remained standing, battered but alive, nearby. I was in the Lower Ninth Ward, seeing, finally, what had happened to the city of New Orleans.

I lived there in the Big Easy once, when I was an eighteen-year-old kid trying out architecture school before leaving the school and the place in search of something and somewhere else. Then, as now, it struck me as a city from some other time, some other country. Certainly not America. The architecture, intricate and rotting; the food, heavy and complex, distending the belly; the air, wet and erotic; the divide between tourists and those who lived there — the number a fraction of what it once was — a chasm that had grown in some ways and shrunk in others. Everyone we met was kind, generous, some fierce pride about survival uniting them in defeat and resilience both.

The Prospect.1 New Orleans (P.1), apparently the largest biennial of contemporary art ever organized in the country, was taking place throughout the city, at established art museums as well as warehouses that had been transformed into museums, rough with plywood floors and alive with music and sound. There was art at the city parks and universities and Ideal Auto Repair. Outdoor installations included the frame of a woman’s house who had enough money to rebuild, until the contractor ran off with her money, leaving her nothing. Shuttle buses took us out, farther and farther from the screaming sameness of Bourbon Street – to St. Claude and then the Lower Ninth Ward, a place that no one had heard of before August 29, 2005. Rain fell from a slate sky as we passed houses still boarded up and silent. Half of the houses I saw  were still marked with the large X — spray-painted signs that rescue and recovery teams who inspected houses, one by one but much too late, left to mark their passage. A date, the agency acronym,  a marking of what they found – the number of dead.

Other houses were freshly painted. Life resumed.

It was the second thing I learned about New Orleans before I went there for school, (the first was that there were as many bars as churches, and a lot of both). But the second thing I learned was that parts of the Crescent City lie as much as 18 feet below sea level. It’s an impossible city. They rebuild, slowly, but the levees are still weak and more storms likely. I was reminded of my visit to a relief camp set up on the shores of south India after the tsunami. Another storm will come, someday, but, really, where else are the fisherman and their families who live in these seaside villages to go? In New Orleans, most of the people don’t live off the sea, but they do live below it. I looked at the length of the levee where a rogue barge struck during Katrina, causing or accelerating the breach that resulted in the worst of the damage. The rebuilt wall looks like an eight-foot concrete barrier. It looks insignificant. Unsubstantial. It is not angled, to help lean its slight frame against the wall of water that lies beyond.

More art stood there among the waist-high grass, an extension ladder stretching up to a suspended window frame thirty feet above, defying gravity; metal letters as tall as large child, spelled out in a circle, “HAPPILY EVER AFTER.” Mostly it was wide open space, a place for the birds that have wings to lift them out if needed, along with a few structures, widely spaces. Two trailers parked next to a double grave. The house of Common Ground Relief. A half dozen Make It Right eco-houses like splashes of child’s paint.

But much of the city is as I remembered it from twenty years ago. The stuffed artichoke from Frankie and Johnny’s. The swill at Cooter Brown’s. The smell of iron from the brakes of the St. Charles streetcar, acrid on the tongue. The rain that falls, heavy, lingering in the grand oaks whose branches reach back to the ground, as though they, too, are lazy from the heat.

Go. Remember this place that shouldn’t be there, but is. I recommend the Avenue Garden Hotel, a cozy place right on St. Charles, that is struggling to keep it together as the economy hits the city like yet another storm. Go and listen to the music, transcendent in the night.

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Jazz at the Spotted Cat
Jazz at the Spotted Cat

giving thanks in St. Bernard

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Wes the Violet Cowboy

Wes the Violet Cowboy

Wes the Violet Cowboy is emblazoned in block letters with a Sharpie marker across the back of Wes Kramer’s yellow shirt. He’s standing outside the back door of the Frederick J. Sigur Civic Center in Arabi, just outside of New Orleans proper, where dinner is being served as rain clouds move in. The front of the building is still battened up with sheets of plywood, and only about half of the businesses along Judge Perez Drive look like they’re still in business, but here  the kitchen is running and the great room is filling up with people. There are more volunteers with their white t-shirts than those seeking meals, and most eyes fall on Wes as he walks into the room that echoes with the sound of voices. He props up his guitar against a chair while he goes to get a plate of turkey and fixings. The guitar was given to him by his Aunt Sue more than forty years ago, and it is bordered with Mardi Gras doubloons nailed into the wood and identical to the ones woven into his belt. He sits down to eat, his daughter across the table from him, and her son next to her. The boy has his earphones in, but he watches every move his grandfather makes, and smiles each time his grandfather makes someone else smile, which is often.

Wes has never left his home in Violet in St. Bernard Parish but for two years in the Army, when he was stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 1961-2. He is happy that he was too late for Korea and too early for Vietnam. He was content to ride out his service in the North and return home to a house that made it through all the storms before Katrina.

“All the hurricanes that passed could not take the tin off that house,” he says, olive eyes set in a weathered face. He has a toothless grin that comes easily and only once disappears, as he tells me about his house filling with water – he holds his hand up to chest level – and that he wanted to get to the nursing home where his mom was, but he just couldn’t, he just….

He thanks God for his daughter, who has taken him in. He thanks God for giving him the ability to write songs that make people laugh. At sixteen, he picked up the guitar. At 46, the parish voted in his song, “Hearts of St. Bernard” as the official parish song. At 71, today, he steps up to the mic and plays the song to the several hundred people who are eating their Thanksgiving meal. The room fills with applause when he finishes the song. And then he plays another that he sings when blessing the shrimp boats. His grandson, earphones still plugged into his ears, sings along, mouthing each and every word.

map making in new orleans

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Brodsky & Utkin

Brodsky & Utkin

For my first assignment in my first (and last) year of architecture school, we were given black, white, and grey sheets of construction paper, some glue and a pair of scissors. I was almost surprised they didn’t tell us not to run with sharp objects in our hands, and to pass them, if we’d please, handle-first to our neighbors when sharing. But the assignment was this: make three maps of your home (meaning the place where we’d grown up and just left, heading to these hinterlands of higher education), graphically using just the three tones. The first map was your block, the second your town, the third the greater area of your county or township.

Each one, I found, was progressively harder. The further I radiated out from my house, the harder it was to remember what went where, especially using the unambiguous line of cut construction paper and not a more forgiving medium such as pencil, which can be fudged and smudged. This was long before Google Earth, but cut by cut I formed the shape of the place that had shaped me. The pond where I fished for sunnies with my brother. The woods (long gone now) that I cut through on my way to grade school. The two rivers that bordered the small town. The ocean they drained into. We rarely look at maps of the places we grow up in, and I imagine the information that guides us through these local landscapes without thought are lodged in some deep recess of the brain. The knowing below knowledge. We learned, through that assignment, in that magnificent stone building, how to make our own maps of the worlds we inhabited. How to define space. I quit architecture, but some lessons remain.

I’m back in New Orleans, the home of that freshman year of my life. It’s been a dozen years since I was last here, long before Katrina came, conquered and left. I hope to walk by that building where I spent many an all-nighter, to cross St. Charles and see if the grand old tree I remember from 20 years ago is still there, it’s tremendous branches still sweeping the ground. Tomorrow we’ll help serve a thanksgiving dinner at the Civic Center, but there’s also a long list of restaurants to hunt down in the pursuit of fried artichokes and crawfish and beignets and booze. Hopefully I’ll check out the Prospect.1 Biennial with art installations all over the city, including the recovering Ninth Ward.

But I leave you with an assignment. Draw a map of your place, however you want to define that. If your supply of construction paper and glue is low, then paper and pen, not pencil, will do. No research. No internet. Just you and the recesses of your mind. Let me know what you come up with. Governor Palin gets her own special assignment — to draw a map of Africa.

And happy thanksgiving.

an international election

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img_1731

There will not likely be a revolution. But a shift did happen on Tuesday night. I join the world, less those who despite all evidence to the contrary believe things were going swimmingly, in a collective sigh of relief. And revel in the miraculous ability to still be moved by the power of words spoken by a – gasp! – politician.

Vote. Here. Now.

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Down Parkside, Bedford, and Winthrop, the line does wind.

Down Parkside, Bedford, and Winthrop, the line does wind.

Jess & I fixed some tea and headed to the polls right at 6 am, when they opened here in New York. While it seems that everyone I know in other parts of the country already voted long ago — early voting, mail-in ballots — it’s today or nothing here. People were streaming in from all directions to join the quickly growing line that went around the corner, and around the corner again. An hour and a half later, I was in the solid metal booth, strangely reassured by the old-school machine being used in the 63rd precinct. And not reassured that the other booth for the same district was already out-of-service. I stepped in. I cranked the red lever to the right. I voted. I pulled the crank back to the left, and with a resounding THUNK, my vote was cast. I believe. I do believe. If one doesn’t believe, then there is nowhere to go from here. I fear my cynicism runs deep, yet still I hope we are on the brink of some paradigm shift we are long overdue to make. Age of Aquarius anyone?