Upwords

The Day of Water

2011-01-08T18:58:00.001+08:00

Spring Cleaning: Vegas

2009-04-02T11:35:00.004+08:00

Last week I was in Las Vegas and I realized that--counterintuitively--it's a place of wild emotion. Vegas vibrates with manic-depressive waves, up and down. Exhilaration flies and despair plummets throughout the strip like ghosts in a movie. Truly a city of sin, Vegas normalizes things that are prohibited elsewhere. Vegas sells sin, wraps it up in "free" drinks and pushes constantly. Corruption coats the floor, tripping one up trying to find the way through labyrinthine casinos.

Like a deceptively tempting oasis, the strip rises out of waste drawing moths to its brilliance. Vegas’s global field of attraction accumulates here at the massive core of indulgence, a place unbound.

I was there for the Association of American Geographers annual meeting.

Many geographers were unhappy with such a happy/unhappy place, surrounded on all sides by the false glory of winning and the grinding emptiness of loss. Dollars flew through the air, fluttering to the sex-paved concrete. Vacuous gazes conducted flashy lights directly through scorched optical nerves to the frontal lobe. That's where prediction drives the chase brain endlessly around one more short corner. There is never anything around that corner. But third-eyes squeeze ever tighter to see around that corner. They focus further into the spinning future of imagined wealth and power and luck.

Sweet, capricious luck.

Calloused Hands

2008-11-05T14:12:00.002+08:00

I'm am glad the next president mentioned these. They are certainly metaphorical for work in a time of hardship. I think they are also quite literal. Physical labor may return to the United States. I suppose it depends just how difficult the recession becomes.

But for now, I am glad for a president who inspires, who calls us to action, and whom we must continue to make accountable for his power. Obama has a chance to be great. Let's make him great by doing the work for him.

Peace.

History, Capitalism, and Culture

2008-09-28T08:51:00.003+08:00

I am reading Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." The piece is--as the title implies--concerned more with The Storyteller as a changing character in human history than with the particulars of Nikolai Leskov, a storyteller who bears the exemplary burden here.

It occurs to me on page 4 of the essay--at the first mention of capitalism--that there is a rich history of cultural interpretation available to EuroAmericans. It's primary subject is their own history. This is not to suggest that there is not such--or a very different--form of autointerpretation elsewhere. It is only significant because it is the shared cultural history of which I am both the flora and the fertilizer.

I study Asia, South Asia, the Himalaya, Nepal, Kathmandu and the cultural history as living culture that makes its home there. The kind of cultural interpretation that Benjamin and Habermas write about Europe may have something to offer analysis in Asia. But it may not. Not directly, at least. Many have used cultural interpretation to study Asian ways and ideas. It is not impossible, and it may not even be hard, but is it a good fit?

Being a theory head, my first response is to say, "Yes! Ideas are meant to be interwoven and interbred." And I will conclude that still. However, before going there, it is important to figure out how it is that EuroAmerican frameworks can help us in understanding what is going on elsewhere.

While I am admitting biases, I might as well also reveal that I am both a humanist and a constructivist. Based on my own experience, informed by reading a bunch, and--primarily--talking to people; I think that social forms are all contingent. (Note the universal claim to contingency!) They are contingent on many things. In fact, I would say that they are contingent on all things. Everything that has happened worked to created everything that is now. Perhaps you can see where I am going with this.

Difference is rife but comprehensive.

I diverge. The point is to say that Benjamin and Habermas may not be able to tell many anything about Himalayan cultural and political economic history, but they can tell me something about the history of the lens I use to understand Himalayan environments. What's more is Kathmandu--indeed most of the globe at this point--has been touched by that invisible, yet apparent, hand of capitalism. Thus their insight is doubly useful to a geographer interested in contemporary spatial practices even in a non-EuroAmerican place. Because there is no such remaining place. Just as there are no places untouched by cultural forces emerging elsewhere. With a good sense of deep history, it is increasingly hard to justify naming places with polar pure categories.

This can lead towards archaelogical questions concerning the birth place of culture. I have no comment on that. I aim only to be clear that the set and setting for this research is not separate from the history, capitalism, and culture characterized by Benjamin, Habermas, and a list of others.

Nepal Declared Republic Today

2008-05-29T01:10:00.004+08:00

The first meeting of the Constituent Assembly (CA)--the body charged with writing Nepal's constitution and forming it's new government--was today, May 28th. Mere hours ago, the 601 member CA unanimously voted to declare Nepal a republic just before 11 PM Kathmandu Time.

This was the first step to real change in Nepal as it has the effect of stripping the King of his superhuman rights. While the declaration of a republic at this moment seems to be the birth of a new Nepal, it is actually a destructive moment for the old Nepal, the King's Nepal. Now amidst the rubble, the CA has the herculean task of lifting a new state out of those fallen edifices of monarchy and feudalism.

Jai Nepal.

An Epistemology of Hope

2008-05-27T01:44:00.004+08:00

What if our way of knowing the world--our epistemology--were based more on what we would like to have happen in the world than what has happened? What if the way we thought about the world and the tools we used to access it were encoded with an implicit--or explicit--moral order? It wouldn't have to be too overbearing or specific. It might be as simple as: "do no harm" or "be nice" or "look for good." To some degree we already do this, but it seems that focusing on the historical record and the materially observable present limit what we can know about the world.

In the first, a historical perspective reveals the long cycles and processes of history--change in the past. There is nothing inherently unhopeful about this view. However, inertia is a powerful thing and there are several massive gravities flying quickly through our long and short histories. Primary among them I think of war. Certainly war is not a single lump of stuff like a planet or a simple Newtonian body. However, it is a vast collection of those things, among others. This leaves us with a plethora of conventional wisdom that says that war is inevitable and inexorable as it has characterized human history for quite a while. This strand also allows the sloppy slide into social darwinism which elevates--or demotes--social processes to the level of biological mutation and selection. For our more aggressive neighbors, life and history is a process of the strong surviving. To be fair to the historians I love and respect, history is also way of seeing what has worked and what has not in order to figure out how to do things better in the present and future. For radical historians, it is about figuring out how the stories we know about the past are nasty ways of hiding oppression, violence, and abuse. Worse, those stories may perpetuate the nastiness. History is fantastic for what it tells us about our past and about what we think about our past. For many history is a chronicle of facts. It is this view that I cannot countenance. It is this view--by far the most common way of thinking about history--that leads to me to condemn the hegemony of looking backwards.

So that brings us to the present. Here we are, kind of. Things are good; things are bad. Things are. How do we know these things? Well, we have very powerful instruments for knowing the world. First, we have our senses--are there five or six? Then we have microscopes, telescopes, orthoscopes, and a bunch of other scopes for seeing the world closer and in better focus. There is direct perception like so. Then there is the cascade of inferential knowledge that we have built on the regimentation of that direct perception. Inference is the principle best expressed by the old saying, "where there is smoke, there is fire." For a long time we have known that fire makes smoke. We also know that nothing else makes smoke. Therefore, when we see smoke--even if we cannot see the fire--we know the fire is there. Another example is a piece of iron in a lab or anywhere for that matter. If we see a piece of iron that has rusted we can infer that there is oxygen. We can't see the oxygen, but we know it is there because we know that oxygen and iron make rust. Thanks to microscopes, we can actually see that happen. We don't have to infer anymore. But what about those things that we cannot see directly and cannot infer based on previous direct perception? How do we know those things? Perhaps they don't exist. However, I would like to argue that there are many things that we don't see--and perhaps can't see--that do exist.

There are a bunch of questions that pop out of this one and I invite those questions from regular or occasional or even random readers.

The first one that I will bring up--and then let this thread go where it will--is the question of who? This shocks me as much as it does you, I am sure. Recently, I have been working on Where in a big way and continue to do so. Where--in this case--is perhaps best answered by who. In the case of the nagas, there is a being--an existant--known directly and inferentially in South Asia that is seemingly inaccessible by our ways of knowing the world. Traditional "Western" (god, i hate that term) empirics--ways of experiencing--are not capable of knowing that nagas exist.

It may be logically impossible to know something that is neither directly perceived nor inferred. But, what if it is only one group of people that fails to do so? What if there is another group of people who does one or both of those things? How would we go about knowing what is going on in that group's knowledge system?

For all this talk about existence, etc. I have to admit that the existence of nagas or any other being--for that matter--is only as interesting as it says something about our world and how we live in it. It is more important that nagas exist as a category of practice for some folks than that they exist as magical beings in the water that surrounds us everywhere.

So this is where I would like to suggest an epistemology of hope. History and Science try their best to be fair and balanced--like FOX News, I hear. This is wonderful. However, as far as accounting for our future and for the depth of humanity and the world we inhabit, I far prefer to think a bit broader. Why exclude ways of thinking about the world that may lead us somewhere happier, healthier, with a bit less suffering?

Willful Ignorance

2008-05-02T23:53:00.002+08:00

It's a phrase I have been dropping like bombs over Baghdad since I have returned to the US. It is a common affliction among people--humans that is. I suppose it is possible for nonhumans to be willfully ignorant, but I have little to go on with that possibility.

The phrase might be interpreted to be oxymoronic. You know: Military Intelligence and all that. But, I don't think it is. I think it describes a subtle loop that feeds itself its own waste. In a way its widespread practice is a violation of that very old taboo that humans have built into their second nature: don't eat where you shit.

How can we be willfully ignorant? Doesn't ignorance preclude choosing to be ignorant? Time--as we know--heals quite well. Each small moment of awareness that we abandon for a return to nasty habits of ignorance slices through pre-existing ignorance. But the cut hurts a little bit and so we back away from the blade of knowledge and let the wound heal a bit so that we can continue on with whatever daily lives we lead without looking into the laceration to see the rich crimson blood that might leak forth.

This is all to reiterate the tired platitude of cultural studies: it is historically contingent! We can be willfully ignorant because in small moments of insight we see the extensive damage our very mundane lives do to the environment and to other people. But, given the difficulty of changing habits we have developed over years of months of weeks of days of hours of minutes of momentary replication, we slide back into them. The knowledge-wound still hurts, but we heal and/or bury it in order to carry on.

Awareness of all our transgressions, violences, and wounds is too much to fully realize. Reluctantly, I must admit to Freud's insight on this front.

I shant leave you with no hope, though. This is the challenge. To hope in the face of the dreadful realization that each American is responsible for scores of killings and even more dispossession around the world.

The hope is this: the hidden wounds of ages of violence are all forgivable. In fact, they are the sources of enlightenment themselves. In the wounds are the seeds of compassion, the kind that gives us the capacity to understand the suffering of each person upon which we have delivered pain and from which we have received it.

Thank G...er...

Things Gone Change

2008-04-14T06:56:00.002+08:00

Things are looking exciting and different in Nepal as the Maoists are doing increasingly well in the gradually returning election results. This election is about forming a group of representatives to create a state, to write a constitution.

The success of the Maoists is predicated on many things. Topping my list, however, are two items:

1. Nepal is full of poor rural folks who have been neglected for a long time by the ruling elites in Kathmandu.

2. The Maoists are violent. Yeah, that's right: power comes from the barrel of a gun. One of my favorite Mao quotes. Brilliant man, wasn't he? This is a bothersome bit here: the Maoists have used violence to secure power. Admittedly, they could have done worse. Admittedly, a good portion of the 13,000 some deaths over the period of their revolution were carried out by the government's army and police. But, Maoist violence--threats and attacks--continued up to election day. Bad news.

Let's hope they can put a cork in it as they try to form a civil government.

Let's hope for Nepal.

Nepali Elections

2008-04-09T18:52:00.002+08:00

Things are a bit tense here. They are also quite relaxed; it is Nepal after all. Tomorrow is the Constituent Assembly election. This is the political poll that will--hopefully--determine the appropriate group of representatives to write a new constitution for this fair country which used to be the world's last remaining Hindu Kingdom.

To facilitate this polling the UN, the Carter Center, the EU,and many other foreign organizations have flooded the country to watch, help, and lend some witness this historic event.

Man-on-the-street is a bit less than optimistic, unfortunately. I know many people who will not vote. Some because they think it will change nothing and some because they can't; they are not citizens. A good number of Tibetans living in Nepal are not citizens.

Most dramatically, there will be a curfew from midnight, the beginning of Thursday, April 10, for twenty four hours, I believe. The cops are already out and the traffic is already light. A week long drought of alcohol combined with a week long government holiday has resulted in an odd sense of calm before what might be a storm of recounts, cheating, stealing, violence, etc. It also might be a calm before a calm in which some semblance of legitimacy is conferred on the process and it all comes out alright.

Keep Nepal in your prayers. This gentle places needs some loving these days.

On Ends and Beginnings

2008-03-29T16:53:00.004+08:00

Cessation and Arising.

The constant flux of being that has come to be called becoming, but which still does not cut it. Arising and Falling. Things fall apart. Things grow up and are born. Things are not really things in that thingy way we think of them as being things.

What do we do with this? How do we know and talk about a world that is constantly moving and changing, growing and dying? How do we exist in such a world? Perhaps most importantly, how do we make such a world a better place to be, live, grow and die?

Well, these are the nuts, as they say in poker. These are the questions under all the other questions, I reckon. These are the questions, who, by their very asking, make the world a better place. That is the way I want to change the world. Asking these questions and all the questions that precipitate them and all the questions that cascade from them is one step to awakening ourselves and our world to the reality of themselves.

I can't say that reflexivity, recursive understanding, self-knowledge, or awareness is the end of everything, the soteriological goal, but I can say they make a damn good next step.

That is all I can ask for: the next step; a move towards peace and away from suffering.

Good luck, Nepal. Good luck, World.

Feast and Famine

2008-03-03T18:45:00.003+08:00

Energy in Kathmandu is hard to come by these days.

We have just come out of a hard spot during which there was no petrol, natural gas, or kerosene. Each of these plays a central role in the basic functions of life here in the Valley. As much as Nepal is regaled (not much) for its relatively miniscule energy consumption, Kathmandu is still hamstrung without the little energy it does need.

About a month ago, the Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) announced that they would have to raise petrol prices for globally obvious reasons. There was a two day strike called a bandh here in Kathmandu. The government run NOC repealed the price increase and all was well.

For a week. Then, because gas was cheap, Kathmandu ran out of it. then there was another bandh because there was no gas.

Then, the folks in the Tarai--jungly, rice paddy filled southern strip of the country--felt like they had had enough of being ignored by the Kathmandu-centric powers-that-kinda-be. So they called a Tarai bandh, which means nothing was happening in southern Nepal. This included the safe passage of tanker trucks which supply the landlocked nation of Nepal with energy from India.

My favorite tea shop was bereft of tea or food the other day because the proprietor had no methane to cook with nor any kerosene to boil tea with. Technically, there was food, but if there was nothing to burn to make heat to cook with, well, ke garne? That means "what to do?" What to do? Well, I think some people ate less or not at all in these last weeks. I suppose that is one thing to do.

Or not to do.

Naga Journal Feb 25, 2008: Agency

2008-02-27T16:58:00.002+08:00

A note on the agency of nagas.

I can see two ways in which the nagas have effects in the world, are agents, make change, take place. The first and most commonly considered (in the whole of the natural sciences) is what causal relationship the object has with the things and beings around it. This is the kind of agency we consider ourselves to have. Can we do things, make causes for action and act on the world around us, on each other, and affect change? These are the criteria for agency.

Agency has a processual sense to it which makes it a bit passive as a term. There seems to be little agency in the term agency. It is not even possible to form the word in active sense directly. It needs by a secondary verb to be. I agent it. Nope that doesn’t work. One must say: “I am an agent, I have agency.” Agency is the quality of a noun. It is an adjective, is it? Agency is that which an agent has. Which is derivative of which?

Anyway, back to the nagas: there is that sense of agency that we can see, let’s call it gross agency. Not that it is disgusting or anything, but it is not that detailed and mostly about what is easily comprehended, the manipulation of the physical world. If we think of another level of agency, that being the process and interaction of physical objects and sets of objects, then there is another level of subtlety or complexity to that and as we rise in complexity and deepen subtlety, the function and behavior of the world becomes more complex and harder to understand. In some ways, the very visibility of the world changes with this complexity and subtlety. As the unit of being morphs from gross object in the world into subtler process in the world, the process is harder to see than the object. It takes an imagination of what the interactions between the object in sight and the relationships it has to the rest of the world. In that way we can expand the visibility of the world or our vision of the world by adding to it. Seeing in one’s mind, rather than with one’s eyes, can expand the visible field of the world and indeed we all do it naturally when we tie in what we see with what we cannot see, but perhaps have seen, and might never seen.

In this way, it is challenging for me to see or know nagas in this world. I see a lot that goes on around them here in the Himalaya, but not in the states or many other places outside of asia. Where may be beyond the point here (gasp!). the fact remains that at a grosser level of interpretation, vision, evidence, and knowledge, there is no way for me to know nagas or to know that they do not exist. The evidence is circumstantial and I have not and probably will not see a naga with my own eyes. There may be inferential knowledge of the agency of the nagas and that may count well for their existence, but their agency is another thing. We like for tools, humans, and animals to have agency in the world where they move around and do things to the world. Beyond that, we often even restrict agency to humans alone, which seems odder to me more and more.

What other ways can we say that the nagas have agency? What if we think about the movement towards subtlety and its consequent invisibility? What is agency then? If it is the degree to which the being or thing is connected to others, then nagas have some degree of agency. If agency is the ability to plan and make change in the world, then there is some degree there as well, though not at the depth I think of humans as being at. However, this could merely be an epistemological barrier rather than an ontological one. They may have as much depth as we do, but we simply cannot get to it to understand it.

So beyond this, if we look at the text of the klu ‘bum which has a number of propitiation rituals to them in which the nagas are enticed and supplicated and requested and ordered and a number of different tones of social interaction. There is a causal relationship being established here, but it is no through the direct rock to rock or chemical to chemical way, but in the way that two beings of desires and hopes interact, cautiously, through mediating gifts and requests, respectfully, dominantly, and passively.

Naga Journal Jan 21, 2008

2008-02-15T13:54:00.000+08:00

...Later that night, on the way back from a wonderful beginning of the evening at Ruben’s going away gathering and a terrible ending of the evening leaving the Dutch, I got a cab with a fellow named Ganesh. He had been in the army for seven years and five of those were in the jungle fighting Maoists in the east of Nepal. He and I had a very interesting conversation about the nagas. He was asking about my research and I explained it in simplistic Nepali: I am trying to figure out what is up with the nagas that nobody has seen, yet everyone does puja to. He liked the question: if they are not there, then why do puja? Himself, a religious man who didn’t drink or smoke or any of that, had a family and behaved himself well, did not seem to be one to wonder about that. But it was as if he found the question a bit liberating, funny even. Yeah, if there are no nagas, then why do we do puja?

Perhaps it is to make the nagas exist; to create them. Further, we don’t know that they do not exist, of course.

I am wondering about this methodology, if it is a methodology. I simply ask many people: where are the nagas? And I am getting a shit load of different responses. Some that answer the question directly, some that like to talk about the fact that the question exists, and some that don’t see any reason to address the question, but more reason to wonder what I am doing in Nepal and what I care about nagas for. Most everyone I have talked to so far thinks that nagas exist. The exceptions may be among the materialist Maoists, though I wonder to what extent, and among the urban elite.

Naga Journal Jan 20, 2008

2008-02-13T19:38:00.002+08:00

Today was Sunday. Yesterday was Saturday. On the 19th, I met with an old friend of mine for lunch. We ate at the Garden Café. He’s a monk, so I bought. You always buy lunch for the monk. They live from donations. Theoretically. My friend knew there were nagas because his lama and lamas in general make offerings to nagas. This is an interesting case of social inference. Where there is smoke, there is fire. Where there is an offering to a naga, there must be a naga. Wow. This might just be the central insight I am trying to get at here. Or at least, one of the logical underpinnings of it. We know there are nagas and where they are because there are various ways that it is inferred. There is no, or rarely is, direct perception of nagas. However, nagas are known to exist because they are made offerings to, because they are made statuary of, and because they afflict or endow us.

That afternoon, I went for a fairly long bike ride (enfield) into the northeast corner of the valley. It made my forearms hurt and they still do as their two primary activities are writing and motorcycling for these last days.

Naga Journal Jan 18, 2008

2008-01-22T23:37:00.001+08:00

I took the Enfield up for its maiden voyage to Gokarna. It was lovely and difficult on that bike. At the top of the hill, where the road crosses over in to the valley behind the hill, I stopped and chatted with a couple of guys, one older in his 50s or 60s and the other in his 30s or 40s. They were lovely guys also out for a ride and chilling, surveying their area. They lived within short sight of the roadside we sat on; just west south west of the Gokarna Hospital. Our conversation ranged far and wide and they were interesting and talked of the old days before the Tibetans came, the differences between American and Nepali culture, and eventually, nagas. When I found out they lived right there, I asked them if there were any nagas in the neighborhood. They agreed that there were and spoke a bit about them. They said that nagas are colorful and can be red and blue and all sorts of colors. That did part of the work of differentiating them from snakes which are usually green, black, and sometimes with white spots. They said that nagas lived in water, but not in trees, and not in fields. As I write this the somewhat paranoid question arises: how am I to believe them? Moreso: how am I to believe that they were not intentionally misleading me? How am I to know that they didn’t think the questions were absurd and were simply toying with the ignorant foreigner? The answer to that question is that I believe them because I spent a good chunk of time chatting with them before asking about nagas or anything crazy like that. I did the routine conversation, asked a few questions that were more complex to demonstrate my ability to understand. By the time we were talking about nagas, they trusted me and I trusted them. Or so it seemed. I do feel that I can read that trust simply by having the conversation. It often seems obvious, just as with any person, when someone is aggressive or negative and cannot yield good information. The language barrier often does not confound that powerful communication.

Further, given that trust, it is remarkable that there was very little show of shock that I had asked about Nagas. This is common. At least as common as the idea that I am asking about snakes. Both are more common than a shock at the fact that I am posing such a question. Makes me wonder why the question is not shocking. Because it would be if I had brought it up with someone I had just met in the states. Does this imply that nagas are normal for the people I am bothering with this silliness? It just might. It might also be that the oddity of asking about nagas is overshadowed by the oddity of my foreignness. That could be too. Both/and…

Anyway, this conversation about the nagas gets me a few things:
1. Nagas are not just at religiously sanctioned locations. They are also just in neighborhoods.
2. nagas can be differentiated from snakes (a central problem in the interviewing) by their colorfulness. They are not plain snakes in green and such. This may imply that nagas might otherwise look like snakes.
3. random dudes will talk about nagas and have something to say.
4. water is specifically important as a place for nagas.

India, Briefly

2008-01-07T14:47:00.000+08:00

It's been a long journey since I last wrote. My brother Steve and I are in Delhi shortly before heading up to Kathmandu good times have and will ensue.

The Red Fort in Dehli:

Hot Property on the Arabian Sea in Mumbai:

Calcutta Again: Dishes are Done

2007-12-09T17:31:00.000+08:00

The Program I have been leading for the past three months is done. The students are on their way home or home already and I am hear in Calcutta, wondering what has happened.

There are a number of things to reflect on from this experience. Pedagogy is among the most accute issues I will be wondering about for the next few months. Living and travelling (26 travel days in a three month program) with 12 students, responsible for their education as well as their health among a list of a hundred other things, is a wild proposition.

Experiential education, it is called. Teaching through submersing the students in a world unlike anything they know. It has major implications for education in general, but I will be thinking in the next weeks about the way to integrate rigorous curriculum with nomadic travel.

Help me think about it, too.

The Himalayan Traverse: part two, the Rise and Fall

2007-11-05T19:00:00.000+08:00

The traverse into Nepal from Tibet rises up to the mountains, but not so much that you run into them. The road at the Nyalam pass drives across a high plain that appears to run right into a reaching white peak. It looks as if you will drive into the mountain, but then you rise a bit more and it looks as if the mountain is just beyond the edge of the earth and you will drive right off the edge trying to run into it. That is the odd syncopation of the Himalayas. The mountains are high and the valleys are low and insistent India does not arrange them in a straight, orderly line.

From that pass, instead of tumbling into the abyss or colliding with a high mountain, the daring pilgrim lopes down the valleys that negatively define the snow mountains. The valleys are endless and shape the hills and mountains and snow mountains. They surround the deep roots of the Himalayas that spread vastly through the Tibetan plateau and the South face of the mountains.

The descent is uncertain at first. Where are we going, the pilgrim asks herself tentatively. Then it hurries on, cascading further into the unknown. The world is still dry and high at that point. But there are hints of change in the air and in the land. The steep valleys are strewn with rocks and boulders. They look like they are sitting there, profoundly old and a bit surprised at their exposure after millenia of burial under snow, other rocks, and--once upon a time--an ocean.

However, the trickles of water from secret, sacred places suggest another story: one of flow. The trickles, somewhat uncertain about their direction, wandering like vaguely hungry sheep join each other and become streams. The streams, more bold, course confidently further down into those ever steeper valleys. They join each other and become strong rivers. At this point, the pilgrim is fairly sure that the direction is known, if not by her, by someone with a bigger mind's eye.

A bit of imagination yields another vision of this place. It is not just the water and the pilgrim that are flowing down these rising mountains. It is also the mountains themselves. Those resting rocks and boulders are not resting at all when seen within a larger timescale. They are flowing as well. The whole of the mountain side is rolling down the mountain. The boulders are rolling, slowly and in fits and starts, but they are rolling anyway.

The power of this gravity, the urge for the world to collapse on itself despite its apparent density, pulls everything down the valley's channel. Everything there wishes to fall down, to go to Nepal. The pilgrim feels this and knows now that the course is certain and soon to be complete. The high plateau, shoved up by India's tectonically sustained impulse, yields quickly to the happenstance of its edge that is not an edge. It is not line between Tibet and Nepal, between the plateau and South Asia. It is vast, though discrete, network of bases and roots. The upward gaze of the mountains and the upward heave of the plateau trip over the Himalayas and tumble down the hills like Jack nearly crushing his boney crown.

The world itself tips over and falls here carrying the pilgrim, the nagas' water, and the earth itself with it. The course is certain and the pilgrim is on his way home--a place she is never sure she will reach.

The Himalayan Traverse: part one, Tibet

2007-10-25T12:27:00.000+08:00

I am now fantastically compelled by the movement from Tibet to Nepal. It is one of the most dramatic and enlightening spatial flows in the world. I am convinced.

Admittedly, my experience is limited, but tumbling from from the plateau thrust into the air by an insistent Indian subcontinent through the Himalayas from Northeast to Southwest is thrilling.

The dessicated Tibetan plateau is high. The bottom of the valleys there are 12,000 feet. They are surrounded by higher hills that would be considered mountains anywhere in the United States. Beyond those mountains are even more mountains, occasionally of the striking kind that pierce the sky with craggy, snowbound aspirations towards the divine.

The world is rare there: the air is thin; the population sparse; and the space raw, complete, close, and lunar. Being from the lush-then-frozen swamps of southern Wisconsin, I cannot help but feel as if I am a few molecules away from the evacuation of everything as I know it. It is just about as different a landscape as my vision can imagine.

There is life, though. And I am beginning to see it as a landscape of life instead of death, of water instead of drought, and of spirit instead of emptiness.

In the next post, I will describe the approach the mountains from the North.

Calcutta Nights

2007-09-08T20:41:00.000+08:00

Arriving in the middle of the night in Kolkata, I expected a hell on earth shaped vision much like I once saw arriving in Patna, Bihar, India once in the middle of the night long ago.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Kolkata is a wonderful town and I have had nothing but a helpful hand extended to me in the streets here. One young fellow was excited to tell me about his NGO and suggested I bring my students by to hear more about it. It is a beautiful town with smiling folks.

I am reminded everywhere that this town was a colonial capital for the British Empire. It feels utterly post-colonial and the town invigorates the term for me. PoCo is not just a Zeitgeist nor simply a cultural turn, but is a place with solidity and materiality. The entire design of the city is colonial and now post-colonial. The architectural landscape is filled with the mansions and offices of empire. And now: they are offices and apartment buildings and mansions and everything.

In Thailand

2007-09-03T02:02:00.000+08:00

Ah, the other side of the world. Such a nice place. I am set up in a little eddy street just off the national memorial everything section of Bangkok. The street went from four lane boulevard to clogged 1 1/2 lane jumble of flourescent rods, 50cc bikes, and hanging garden guest house.

Picture technology is beyond me this eve. Time to reset the ol' clock, get some sleep, get up earlier than my body thinks, round about the time you (CST willing) are hitting the hay.

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

2007-08-03T13:20:00.000+08:00

Obama: Done For

2007-08-02T04:43:00.002+08:00

I have to out Obama for being a war-monger. Such unnecessary warbling in the breeze of fear is nonsense, violence, and completely inappropriate for one who aspires to be a world leader. If he cannot speak with audacious hope, then he betrays any attempt at popular resistance to the way things are; namely, aggressive, hateful, and angry.

Grow up, Barack.

For further reading of the candidates revelation that he is not actually different then the hawks currently in charge, read here, here, or anywhere here

And So He Goes

2007-04-12T23:21:00.000+08:00

Dear Kurt,

I want to thank you for all the poison.

I want to thank you for all the barbs.

I want to thank you for all the lies.

Your poisonous humor was a belly laugh until
sore gut when I realized the hemlock had tasted like honey.

Your sharp stabbing in
sight thrust forth a handful of roses
when I realized their thorns and wilt.

Your dire prose lied like science fiction
when I realized suffering was true.

I took your name as mine when I was affirmed from childhood beyond.

I took your humor as mine when I first read Deadeye Dick.

I took your vision as mine when I first saw the cycle of violence.

The horror factory you made cogent and incoherent at the same time; hilariously tragic and dangerously alive; full and empty; and utterly complete is your second truth after the giggling absurdity.

Your third truth, the most powerful, is the reality of individuality. This is no sacred cartesian ghost, but a human being mortally injured by culture and always dying. This individual is a creation of his society. She is not a free-willed champion, but an encapsulated and defeated iteration of consciousness.

Thank you, Kurt, for giving us this story, this image, this human being.

Harry goes to Iraq

2007-03-28T22:58:00.000+08:00

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

In response to Dr. Yi-Fu Tuan's recent Dear Colleague Letter:

Dear Yi Fu,

I also noticed with humor the seemingly anachronisitic deployment of Prince Harry to Iraq. It does humiliate his American cousins. It make me think that the United States is less a 'country' than England. Perhaps we are more an affiliation of merchants who took a country for our own, free from aristocracy (if only to recreate the negative effects) and their honor.

The Harry insistence is an oddity. Surely, he did not have to go to Iraq. But he does anyway. The absurdity is that by going he most likely puts more at risk rather than contributing to greater 'security' in the world. His presence will attract more violent attention and require more energy to defend him, an individual, than he will likely contribute to the 'war effort.'

In my view, real honor would have Harry doing all his royal person could to end the war and war altogether. His class and his family have wrought so much pain and violence on the world, the least they could do is convince their 'cousins' to cut out this nonsensical war against everything.

On Discipline

2007-01-27T04:06:00.000+08:00

Nearly two months later...

Discipline is the subject. After meeting with my Advisor the other day, I have been thinking about discipline. There are two ways I have been thinking about this word in relationship to my study and writing:

1. Discipline as in the discipline of Geography, disciplinary boundaries, and interdisciplinarity. This one is about being in touch with a body of literature that calls itself something and orbits, more or less tightly, around a specific set of themes, problems, and/or methods.

2. Discipline as in focus, hard work, work ethic, and taking care of business. This one is about knowing what to do and doing it; keeping track of obligations and maintaining them; and focusing one's eyes on one's prize.

Any other thoughts on discipline out there?

"Liberalism": DTMFA

2006-11-23T05:43:00.000+08:00

There is the big problem with the current designation "liberal." It is nearly nonsensical as a description of one's political orientation.

This post is inspired by a conversation going on at MUFA Chat. It also corresponds with the death of Milton Friedman, iconic free market economist. The problem with the proliferation of "liberal" as a political identity in the US is manifold. First, it has taken on demonic dimensions thanks to AM radio everywhere. Second, it conflates two kinds of liberalism and hides their meanings. I know we can't just make "liberal" go away. But, here is my attempt to add a bit of nuance to the conversation. This is not unique nor particularly well-informed, so I solicit comment, correction, and question.

Milton Friedman, may his ideology die with him and both of them peacefully, was liberal in an economic sense. That is to say that he thought that government regulation of economic activity was counterproductive and wrongheaded. He thought that individuals should go about their business liberally (without restriction). He and other liberal economists believed that the market would take care of itself via the invisible hand.

The other notion of liberalism that gets caught up our political debate is more an opposition to social conservativism (the idea that society is falling apart and that we need to conserve traditions, customs, and habits of the good old days). Social liberalism would have people freed from their traditional bonds to liberally explore their own place in society.

So, when we speak of political liberals, we are really talking about social liberals, I think. Economic liberals are most often found on the "conservative" political spectrum in our country. Frankly, I find this ambiguity and confusion to be fatal to "liberal" as a political term. It only obscures what people really think about economic and social policy. It does very little to describe what people actually think and goes a long way towards creating an unstable dichotomy that divides our society.

It makes it easier to conquer us.

California Dreaming

2006-11-16T12:55:00.000+08:00

This happened today. Thanks to NBB for alerting us.

A New Idea, A New Abstract

2006-11-09T13:26:00.000+08:00

This is the abstract I submitted for the 2007 meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco.

Place, Nature, and Knowledge: Towards a Spiritual Ecology of the Kathmandu Valley

This paper will propose a methodology for understanding the way that naga serpent spirits mediate the relationship between people and environment in Nepal. From ancient aquifers and the texts that mythologize their history to contemporary debates on health, pollution, and falling water tables, people in Nepal have looked to nagas to represent their environment. Today, what was once thought of as a stable and spiritually endowed ecosystem is faced with increasing pressures from rural-urban migration, international refugees, and foreign tourism. Different emerging notions of nature, place, and spirituality interact, coexist, and occasionally conflict. My research will explore these relationships, their effects on the religious and ecological networks in Nepal, and the spiritual ecologies they produce.

My primary question is: How are people’s ways of knowing the world materially emplaced in the world? Further, how do knowledge systems, as materialities in the world, interact with natural processes? Specifically, do Buddhist beliefs in nonhuman spirits and meditative mind training affect people’s interaction with the natural world? How does this relationship manifest itself in the Himalaya where traditional and modern ways of knowing the world are in sharp relief? Furthermore, if we look at Nepal’s variety of Buddhist knowledge systems as modern ways of knowing, what kind of natures will these ways of knowing reveal to us?

Waterboarding.

2006-10-28T08:33:00.000+08:00

It's not just a sport anymore.

It's now a sanctioned interrogation technique in the hallowed war on terror.

Read more here.

It's Hard to Believe...

2006-10-20T10:13:00.000+08:00

The Guardian is reporting that President Bush is changing his mind about Iraq.

The Extreme Speed of Ideas

2006-10-05T04:23:00.000+08:00

A world in the ideosphere speeds by with flailing passengers: emobodiment and time. Living for ideas rushes along and pulls everything behind it, or pushes from behind the largess of accumulation and the stuckness of being.

Flying would be the way of the idea, if they had their way, but instead, we are caught in the web of bodies, material, rocks, trees, and society. Yikes, it seems to so contradict the natural drives running the mind's engine.

Of course, when we challenge, as Rorty, Wittgenstein, and Dewey have done, the dominance of ideas and their supposed ignition of the engine of history, we are left in a world of practice.

What does this mean? How come the quick switch? How does it work in the world we live in?

I dunno. But, I think it has resulted in an analytical framework wherein the old Cartesian, Hegelian, and Kantian hegemony of the subjectively present ghost in the machine is slaughtered, enslaved, and tied down to the body's practical motion and activity in the world.

This is where we are now, in a world of practice, where minds emerge from social structures, their attendant languages, and the habits they each enforce.

To some degree, this must be true, but where did the ideas go?

Are our ideas simply reflections of the world? Rorty dumps the notion that they are reflections with the isolated subject and leaves us with hermeneutics. He takes direct pains to let us know that he is not replacing epistemology, which understood the way that mind's knew objects, with hermeneutics.

Instead, he means for the ascent of hermeneutics to hold the hope that epistemology would not be replaced and that philosophy will hobble along just fine without it.

So, what do you think? Is it possible to know objects out there in the world? Or, are we stuck in our knowledge and merely capable of interpreting the world-as-we-know-it?

Speechless

2006-10-01T03:41:00.000+08:00

Non Sequitor: Africans in Space!

Bangkok on Fire!

2006-09-22T10:49:00.000+08:00

Not Really as these informed writers note:

Leubkenator

Somebody Else

Il Papa

2006-09-17T01:06:00.000+08:00

Or something like that. Someone with some Italian language can help me out.

So, the glorious patriach of the Holy Roman Empire cum Church has stuck his utterly clean foot in his utterly filthy mouth. He had the gall to say that Islam has reached its sublime superbillion head count by killing and force. This has, apparently, set the Muslim world to fits.

The hilarious part is that it is completely true. It gets funnier when one points out, which I have not yet seen in our vast public sphere of rational-critical debate, that Christendom, that condemned Kierkegaardian category, has done no less "conversion by the sword." South America, anyone? Hell, North America? At least the Muslims had the decency to give folks the option: convert or die. Our dear legacy in North America is one of qualitatively deeper malice. Our injunction was simply, "die."

It seems to me that such would be the obvious comeback from the Islamic world, whereever that is. But, as I have been learning in the past years, we do not live in a world of rational-critical debate....yet.

Not that such a thing is inevitable nor inherently valuable, but that our world still struggles to recognize similarity-and-difference. We seem to see the world as one of blacks and whites, a world of "others." Or, we naively call everyone to the table as human souls, rational decision makers, equal sufferers, or commodities.

This is where I would invoke a hybridized humanistic/class-based analysis. We need to see both similiarity and difference in the world and in the world's people. We need to know that all people love, hate, die, cry, hope, and suffer. We also need to know that people do this differently in different times and places.

Furthermore, this does not lead me to conclude, in the classical inter-religious way, that all roads lead to God, Enlightenment, insert-favorite-first-principle-here.

The ways we cultivate ourselves, the ways we practice our lives, the way we frame our understanding all create their own distinctive futures. In a way, we are facing the tower of babel thousands of years on. Different circumstances, environments, foods, literatures, languages, religions, practices, ideas, revolutions, musics, etc. create distinct nows and futures.

If one meditates on compassion, one cultivates compassion. If one meditates on grace, one cultivates grace. If one meditates on justice, one cultivates justice. These are all distinctive frameworks in which people have understood and created themselves anew.

Peace and Unrest.

Home.

2006-09-02T22:42:00.000+08:00

Back in the States and wondering what happened in the 24 hour hopping skip from KTM to ORD. The semester starts this week. Whoop Whoop.

I think I am going to maintain this blog for more intellectual and academic writing. I also wonder if this should be a political venue or not. Containers will continue to host more personal and poetic writing.

Any suggestions on how to transition a blog from "Summer Adventure Blog" to "Back to Work Blog?"

Change, Disappointment, and Magic

2006-08-17T16:43:00.000+08:00

Things happen. Other things do not happen.

Vipassana retreat did not happen. Three days with Sakya Trizin did.

A long and in depth story of disappointment at the hands of meditation or the lack thereof was the case and I think I will tell that one at the other blog. It's a bit more personal than I like to write up here.

What happened instead was a week of opportunity that I had not foreseen. Without the retreat, I had the time to do other stuff. On that list was writing, reading, preparing my thoughts for presentation to my new advisors, meditation, yoga, and chillaxing.

And another thing: partriarch of the Sakya sect of Tibetan Buddhism, Sakya Trizin, was to give a three day teaching during the mornings of the letter that Chogyal Phagpa, old school master of Sakyaism, wrote to Kublai Khan. It is short, but pretty hard hitting with all sorts of emptiness and noneffort and other such elite ideas of nonduality. It was pretty good and what is more is I met an incredible person, the patriarch's assistant who was an anthropologist in New Guinea in the 1960s (I think) and who new exactly what I was talking about when I did my dissertation crazy-talk-thing.

It was nice and still is. This afternoon, I have a private and probably short interview with Sakya Trizin. I have a few questions. One about practice, one about research, and one about something else that I have not decided about yet.

Wish me luck. I have less than a week left now. Of the six of us who came as educational refugees to Nepal from Lhasa, I am the only one left.

For the Buddha heads out there: The last two texts I have looked at, the Chos dBying mDzod of Longchenpa and the Letter from Phagpa to Kublai Khan, there is an extremely strong presence of idealism (beware this word. I do not refer to Hegelian idealism or any other previously established Euro thought). By idealism I mean to say that the entire world is given up to the mind. Both of these texts do work to establish a tight relationship of mind and space. At points going so far as to say that space has the nature of mind and vice verse. This is eventually done away with by the prasangika madhyamika negation of all that and its inherent existence.

My question is: why establish the emptiness of the world by undermining its own reality by saying it is all mind first and then negating the mind? Why not go straight for the mind, leaving the world alone?

Also, I think there are some deeply humanistic threads going on here. Because Buddhism grew into a philosophical system based on a therapuetic system that was based on a rejection of other philosophical systems, the orientation of discourse is throughly grounded in the human mind and all other moves, negations, and positions seem to funnel through idealism and the human mind on their way to somewhere else (usually mere negation).

Also, how is it that Nagarjuna and his spirito-intellectual children, the prasangikas become the dominant philosophical view in seemingly all Tibetan Buddhist sects?

Ciao, soon, and refuge.

Working

2006-08-10T13:55:00.000+08:00

Whew. The Khenpo and I are meeting twice a day so that we can finish the text we are reading. It is quite interesting but exahausting and time consuming. The text is the root verses (the poetic summary) of a longer discussion of the nature of space. You might see why I am interested in this text. I won't reveal the ending, but it has a lot to do with the mind and is stunning with its audacious idealism (imperial term duly noted). Or, so it seems. The text consistently returns to the negativist tropes of emptiness, nature, thusness, etc.

The book is wild, actually, and I am constantly warned that it is questionable that I read it at all. This poses an enormous methodological problem. I will get into this later.

So, I want to include this book in the dissertation and think I will anchor a chapter themed Space around it. Do a bit of philosophy, maybe and then dive into nature, water, and place to interweave and look for connections if there are any.

2006-08-04T20:31:00.000+08:00

Intention

2006-08-03T21:18:00.000+08:00

This post is in response to Jason's question 3.

Intentionality and belief are intimately related and very importantly so, I think. Intentionality is of major importance in Buddhist understandings of causality. In the moral/causative notion of karma, intentionality is a major determinant of the nature of the action executed and fruit ripened. Intentionality, in large part, is a primary tool of Buddhist practice. It is by this potency of mind that we create our world and take in our world. Intentionality is manifold in this understanding. There are also multiple representations of intentionality. For some it is a function of our natural mind with all of its faults and merits. It is what gives so much power to our desires and disgusts; the ability to direct action, to see briefly into the future, to plan, etc. With this kind of mind, we can love and hate deeply and develop quite complex modes of channeling such desires. This is a simple and afflicted mind. Rather, with a bit of purification we can mold the mind and train it to use its vast power and resources to do good rather than simply consume and escape. Thus goes the explanation.

On the other hand, some Buddhists say that the mind has the nature of purity and luminosity and it is merely a layer of delusion that morphs that primordial mind into the base thing we carry about with us. In this idea, it is not the deconstruction of afflicted mentality that provides a path from suffering, but rather the revelation of a naturally luminous mind from its suffering. They seem to be two sides of coin, the dark and the light, the negative and positive. This is a major conversation in Buddhist history that abides to this day and I certainly have not done it justice here, but just want to get at the nuanced and multiple notion of intentionality in Buddhist thinking.

The bottom line is that intentionality is normally deployed to do stupid stuff like attach one’s focus to an object of desire or to direct one away from a nasty thing. What it can do, however, is an enormous amount of work for the good of oneself and of others. In the case of one’s own practice, one can use the concentrative, focusing, and analytic powers of intentionality to deal with the dissatisfaction (dare I say, suffering) of one’s current state of being. This is the Buddhist project writ large: to use the mind’s abilities to refine the mind’s abilities so that one can see through to the real and thereby stop expecting the world to be other than it is and thereby stop smearing oneself with disappointment.

Moreover, harnessing intentionality can rock the world. A human with a mission is tough thing to deal with and in many cases has changed the world, in some cases, for the better. Think Jedi knights: they train their minds to a point where their intentionality manifests as telekinesis, etc. and they are the big boys on the block. Even the star destroyers or what not can’t deal. There is also a dark and a light side. I, personally, do not ultimately hold that there is such a thing as that duality besides the way we build it into our world. But, Buddhist literature speaks broadly of good and bad and they discuss intentionality in those terms as well. Intentionality is the major juice that humans flex in this world. For the most part, we squander it on porn, war, and wealth. We can choose to do otherwise.

As far as the relationship of intentionality to belief: that is a tough one. I am less interested in belief than I am intentionality. But, I think that belief is an important and conditioning ground upon which intentionality is built. One exigency of speaking about belief rather than intention is that it allows me to elide the moralism that lurks behind much of this writing and thinking. Belief is cute, limited, and separable. Intentionality provides a rockier surface upon which to sail the ship of this dissertation.

Belief orients intentionality, in large part. Ideally, for many in our distinguished European intellectual history rationality would guide intentionality. And, in amazingly well trained (and perhaps denatured) humans, rationale can drive intentionality. However, in large part, I think that humans tend more towards their animalistic heritage by driving intentionality with hunger, lust, fear, anger, and ignorance. (Another topic: emotional mediation of action, intentionality, and reaction). Somewhere in there, belief rests well as a way of interweaving rationality with base emotions and culturally or biophysically inherited patterns. (Excuse the functionalist rhetoric; it is so natural for me). In other words, belief represents an interweaving of more disembodied minds with more embodied minds. And it often mediates our action. We justify hidden emotional reaction with belief statements in which we can hold what we can’t understand about ourselves and the world with what means we can. From this matrix and mess, what we are, intentionality finds its conditioning soil and rises to do whatever work it will do.

Phenomenology say what?

2006-08-03T11:39:00.000+08:00

This is a bit of a response to Jason and Nick. It began as a response to question one courtesy of Jason and quickly spilled over. You can see the beginning of this conversation here

Phenomenology and its two parts: these I do not know and perhaps should. If I understand them clearly from your brief but indicative descriptions, the idea of communicated events is very important. One of the ideas that was born out of the master’s thesis was the possibility that spirits in landscape are located, torn-off bits of consciousness/subjectivity/identity/mind left in the world to communicate to others that would come along. As of now, this is a metaphorical construal, but the more I think about it, the more it seems plausible. The thinking there is that spirits are thought by their believers to be independent subjectivities in the world, nonhuman subjectivities. Switch visions for a minute and see it from a materialist American perspective: these people are worshipping rocks.

What I can see is that people are worshipping rocks. What I can hear if I listen to them when they speak is that they are worshipping sentient beings living in/on/at/beneath/above/around the rocks. This gets to the heart of the onto-epistemological problem. The way I see this project saying something about that relationship is in the fact that belief exists there in that moment and at that place. In fact, the deployment of a belief-oriented knowledge of the world weaves that knowledge into the spatial fabric in which that rock and its place in the world exist. Thus the epistemic is woven into the ontic. This is the least developed part of this thinking and, perhaps, the central. I cannot tell yet. It seems utterly important, but it is hard to wrap a brain around.

The intersubjective, communicative, or translated event then is the place. And that again is a geographical edge that geographers have backed away from and that I think bears some maintainance: place pauses time. Despite the Christo-Hegelian-Marxist domination via the clock, time is not monolithic and does not utterly determine everything. That is not to say that things exist timelessly, but rather to say that part of our human placemaking project is to grasp a hold of our world, to make something that will stay. And of course, it never does, but it does endure for some dure. This is the point at which I would insert the torn off consciousness idea of place.

When we make places, especially places of meaning and supermaterial value, we insert a bit of meaning into landscape. That place, marked by monument, grave, reliquary, natural beauty, local knowledge, or cosmological significance, bears a bit of meaning, a communicative moment. The practitioner may believe that there is some sentient being there with whom they communicated, they may not and instead think of it as only a function of their own mind, or they may simply be following the socially normative rut that leads them to practice and in which they further maintain and endow the cultural practice, projecting it further into the future.

While this may not be a moment of communication with a rock or spirit, and while it may be; it certainly is the apprehension of the rock as something more than a rock. That apprehension is present in the place in/at the human body and so exists in the world. What is more, is that when that individual believer moves on and leaves, their participation in the belief of the place either creates a believable place or maintains a previously existing believable place. Both individually and socially, a bit of torn off consciousness, a story, a lesson, a principle, and, maybe, a being are left in the world and constitutive of cultural landscape.

Power to the nonPeople!

2006-08-03T11:23:00.000+08:00

This post is in response to Nick's thoughts below.

I do not wish to disempower nonhumans. Though I can see how you might think so inasmuch as I continue to border on idealism. But, instead, of course, I wish to walk a middle path. That is a path that gives what credence is due to the difficult object that a human is and places that difficult human object in a material world that is largely, but not completely, acted upon by the difficulty of that human object.

I would not take issue with, but would question, the notion that environment is everything. I can’t say that it isn’t right now. But I also can’t say that such is not an overstatement of the importance of environment. I think that environment is largely assumed not to be everything. I think that your intuition is on point with my line of argument: I agree that environment can be considered everything. Or, rather, that environment, as a category, should consider everything. I don’t think that this is an accomplished fact, however. I think many would argue that environment is not everything and, if it were, such and understanding would render impotent the “environment” category.

I think this gets to a basic problem in Geography that has threatened its institutional power in the US and has led some of our colleagues to state openly that they “just happen to be in a geography department” and that what they really do is sociology, geology, environmental studies, etc. That problem is that geographers attempt to integrate the entire cross section of a point in time. We have a hard time cutting off our sample and view of the world around a single theme. Or, at least, I do.

The themes I do want to consider are place, space, and the causative, mechanistic, and organismic functions in place and space. As I try to assemble a research plan while here in Nepal, which has been a joy to do, actually, I find myself thinking more along the lines of trying to do a classic geography that takes inventory of a place. But not in the form of a list, but in the form of a dynamic and morphological network where people, water, plants, mountains, spirits, society, and belief come together; or, rather, emerge together; or, rather, abide together.

Old is when you start to see patterns and then get stuck in them.

2006-08-02T20:43:00.000+08:00

Just a thought.

Big ups to the respondents to the literature and geography post below. Your comments and questions are sending me into fits of noomorphology. hehehe.

But seriously, this is the kind of conversation I live for and I am deeply grateful to those who join me. I am giving serious thought to Jason and Nick comments and will get them up here soon. Things are going well and busy for me right now, so I don't get to a computer that often.

I have decided to forego the Thai beach for a meditation retreat here in KTM. So, on the 15th, instead of heading to the land of sand, sun, and mai thais, I will bind myself to an absurd schedule of sitting.

Oh, anyone got any webspace to spare for a piece? I have a couple more videos I would like to put up. I need about 150 megs.

Monsoon 2

2006-07-24T18:02:00.001+08:00

Rain. It rains a lot in monsoon. That earlier post where I wrote about monsoon being easy. Not so much.

This weekend was lovely, but the three days leading up to that were watch settingly regular downpours in the afternoon that resulted in utterly flooded streets here in Bouddha. Like Venice kind of flooding. Like you are better off with knee high galoshes and a small boat than with other modes of transportation such as cars or sandals. Unfortunately, I did not get a good picture, but I will if it happens again.

In a way, it reminds me of winters in Wisconsin. You get shut in and the only thing to do it relax or study. There isn't much rushing around to do this and that. It is mostly about not going anywhere.

Potluck anyone?

PS: thanks for the responses to the post below, I hope to make it a growing conversation.

Photo thanks to the Kathmandu Sanitation Department for demonstrating the lovely end of monsoon.

How does Buddhist Literature help me think about Geography?

2006-07-21T13:56:00.000+08:00

One of the themes of my Ph.D. work that marks a significant realization for me is a shift away from studying Buddhism as an object and beginning to think of it as a source of research and writing. Who knows how much work it will do in the world outside my own writing, thinking, and knowing, but I think there is something there.

What is the difference between thinking of Buddhism as a source and object of study? I think it has to do with withdrawing from the owning, third person, view from nowhere and taking on a belief. That is not to say that I or anyone would have to believe in Buddhism to do this, but it may mean that I or anyone may have to believe that others believe. And, perhaps, this is not a simple, blind belief I am talking about; but, rather an sympathy and willingness to hear, listen, and know what someone else knows. In this way, the scientific method both helps and hurts.

Without evidence, as there will rarely be in religious, spiritual, and magical matters, science and its variety of simple methods will be unable to say anything about the belief to be believed. But, because it cannot say anything, it is also unable to say anything negative about it. "There is no evidence for belief" some might say. And they maybe true, though I suspect some cognitive pscyhologists are doing their darnedest to assemble the scientifically methodical knowledge of the subject. However, what they should really say is, "there is no evidence for belief based on our methods and epistemological modes: We cannot know, with this kind of knowing, that there is or is not belief or anything to belief at all."

That said, we have got to think a bit broader. We have got to know more. We have got to expand the way we know the world. Or, rather, we have got to add different ways of knowing the world to our epistemological toolbox.

Thus religion, spiritualism, and other "premodern," "irrational," and "nonscientific" modes of knowing the world and, consequently, being in the world demand to be taken on as sources of knowledge and experience rather than simple objects whose behavior is observable and from which we can know the world.

Andrew Sayer, I believe, discusses humans as "difficult objects." The problem with them, is that they are not simple. They are not only physical bodies moving through space, nor are they only economic nodes circulating resources, wealth, and commodities, nor are they only socially situated animals who think, act, and be like everyone else of their class.

They are difficult because we cannot see "inside" them. We cannot know their minds, emotions, loves, passions, failures, incompetencies, losses, wonder, hope, desire, etc. without asking them. And, moreover, we have to believe them (critically, of course) in order to really gain anything from asking them questions. And beyond that, once we have their answers, we cannot simply plug them into our pre-existing rubrics, tables, data sets, codes, and scientifically acceptable modes of knowing.

We have to change the way we think about their answers based on their answers. We have to believe what they say enough to let it change the way we think, the way we see, the way we ask questions, the way we write, and the way we analyze.

This is a bit of what I am thinking when I say I want to use Buddhism as a source more than an object of study. I am just beginning this journey and would love to hear thoughts, have holes poked, and listen to criticism.

And: How does this style of writing go over? Is it clear, what I am saying?

Studying Again

2006-07-17T13:39:00.000+08:00

I began reading a text this morning with a khenpo at the White Monastery, for those of you who know Bouddha. For those that don't, a khenpo is a teacher trained in a set of philosophical, logical, and liturgical literatures; it is equivalent to having a university degree of some kind. The White Monastery, the Seto Gompa, KaNying Shedrup Ling, is a powerhouse of contemporary Buddhism both on the Tibetan and Nepali side of things and the western side of things. They now offer MAs and PhDs in Buddhist Studies and are taking their place as a premier site of international learning in Buddhist Studies.

The twist is that this khenpo is from Golok, Tibet. Golok is an area in eastern Tibet of cultural, historical, and political significance. The only problem is: it has its own language. So, my brain hurts after reading with and listening to khenpo-la this morning. He is smart and we are reading his own book which is composed clearly, simply, and artfully. I am glad to study with him, but I feel like I am in first year Tibetan again. It's good for me, I think.

The text is on the two truths, eventually. Only the last 5 pages of 40 are on the two truths, so we will see what it takes to get there. Initially, upon skimming the text, I was impatient to get to the meat of it, but now that I know it will take me two weeks just to understand what he is saying, I am ready to sit back and enjoy the ride.

He proposed this text, his book, after hearing me explain my thoughts and hopes for the dissertation. At first, I thought, "wow, not only did this guy understand what I said, but had a text on hand, immediately, that he thought was relevant." Then, with a good dose of skepticism, I thought, "actually, this guy just wants to read his own book with me." I imagine the reality of his intention is somewhere in between.

A little on the doctrine of the two truths. I am sure there is plenty of debate on this point and I would welcome enlightenment on the issue by anyone who might know more, but I just don't know it yet. The idea of two truths is that there are two ways of being and two ways of knowing the world: Ultimately and Conventionally.

Ultimately, humans and other things have no essential self that all identity can be reduced to.

Conventionally, humans and other things exist and and operate in the world as if there were such identities.

This distinction is used in multiple examples and analyses. The reason it is relevant, or may be, to my dissertation is that it provides a way of thinking about multiple modes of being (for example: a mountain's existence as a lump of stone and snow and a mountain's existence as a divine abode). It also provides a way of thinking about multiple modes of knowing (for example: conventional vision and knowledge of the mountain holds it to be a lump of rock and snow and ultimate vision and knowledge of the mountain holds it to be a divine abode, etc.).

Buddhist value systems have each of these as acceptable modes, but obviously, the soteriological project of enlightenment seems to prefer knowing the mountain and more than just a mountain as a place of transcendental value where humans can touch the divine and see beyond the entrapping web of suffering to that which is beyond. (note: intentional use of Buddhist rhetoric).

Well that's a monster, no? Let's hear it.

Naya Nepal

2006-07-16T18:27:00.000+08:00

It is the new Nepal.

That's what I have been hearing over and over.

The new Nepal, in list form, straight spatial inventory:

Hip Hop
Bank Robberies
Short Skirts
Wireless Internet
Political Violence
Speaking up against injustice
Dating
Addicts
Popular Resistence to US/British/Indian foreign policy
Uncertainty about the future
Rape
Folks locked out of their homes
Hip Hop

One Cow Skin

2006-07-14T19:24:00.000+08:00

Rob, the Dutchman, told me a story about the creation of the Bouddhanath Stupa near which I currently live.

He said, "About five hundred years after christ, a Tibetan woman came from Tibet to the Kathmandu Valley and proposed to build a stupa to the king. The King was quite concerned about the proposition because he reckoned that land was valuable at the time and he couldn't just go around giving up space for building religious monuments. On the other hand, it was par of his job to patronize religion.

When he balked, the Tibetan woman said that she would restrain the size of the stupa to one cow skin. Now, the king could see that she was a smart woman and Tibetans were renowned for their shrewd business sense and so he did not consent immediately despite the diminutive size of the proposed project. He told her to come back in a few weeks.

He thought and thought on the problem. Something didn't seem right about the woman's idea. He consulted his ministers and astrologers and mathematicians and engineers. Despite the king's intuitive concern, they could not see how one cow skin could be morphed into anything more.

Weeks later, when the Tibetan woman returned to the palace, the king had to assent to the construction of the stupa but remined her of the deal: only one cow's skin worth of land was to be used.

The woman returned to Tibet wondering all the way how she could get the most out her one-skin alotment. When she arrived home she found the biggest cow skin she could and pondered over it for a few days. Finally, she took her best knife and sharpened it as much as she could. With the razor-edged blade, she sliced the cow skin horizontally (insert indicative hand motions around the edge of a table) and unfolded the skin with four flaps in each direction. She then gathered 10 friends and they all slowly and gently pulled on the edges of the skin. They did this for days and weeks and months, pulling the skin ever broader.

She then sliced the skin again and unfolded larger flaps from the center. This time she gathered 100 friends and they all pulled gently and slowly for days and weeks and months. Finally the skin was enormous, thin, and ready to go to Nepal.

She set off with the skin and arrived in Kathmandu weeks later. She laid out the skin over the fields and looked on it with wonder and accomplishment. The farmers were completely perplexed. She called the king to come, see, and approve the project to continue. When the king arrived he was astounded and, understandably, did not believe that the enormous area the skin covered to possibly be just one skin.

He took the skin to his palace and had his bean counters search the skin for any seam, any stitching, or anything that would indicate that the piece was indeed multiple pieces. Alas, he and his staff found nothing and were forced to concede the area of land to the stupa-building Tibetan woman.

And that is the story of the Bouddhanath Stupa," Rob said to me. He then told me to stand up (we were on one of Bouddha's rooftop terraces) and look at the shape of the stupa: jagged edges that are not round, but quadrangular. "See, it is shaped like a stretched cow skin."

In other news: How 'bout them Israelis getting back into business in Beirut, eh? Smoke 'em out, as we say in Texas.

Nepali Book Love

2006-07-12T15:45:00.000+08:00

Tibet has a fair amount of rocks. It also has quite a few buses. Rocks + Bus = Not Going Anywhere Fast.

This image is from the journey from Lhasa to KTM and is taken on the west side of Lhatse and demonstrates the result of a bus driver anxious to avoid police checkpoints where "gifts" are accepted. Our driver, named Jigme, was thereby interested in taking a shortcut. I love shortcuts, don't get me wrong, but they are not so stable in Tibet where development is a religious term meaning very rapid change, even in shortcuts.

Referred to the Everest Bookstore by friends in the know here in KTM, I discovered a wonderful little place where the operator knows personally every book in his store and is more interested in chatting about one's research interests than in selling books. Needless to say, the latter founds the former. And that is how it should be.

The referring new friends with whom I share a flat, were excited about this particular store and a couple of others because of the operator's enthusiasm for finding relevant books and the small cultural pool the store provides.

When I walked into the shop, there were four Nepali men sitting about drinking chia, sweet milk tea, which we were subsequently offered, and chatting. Civil society's public sphere was alive and well in that store. Those new friends loved the fact that the cultural pool supported such in-house discussions and lamented its lack in the US.

I do too.

Intellectual culture in Nepal is alive and well.

Monsoon

2006-07-11T15:52:00.000+08:00

Is wet and hot. I have moved into an apartment and am living well, reveling in the ease of being here in Kathmandu instead of the state supervised cultural prison we call Lhasa. Perhaps that is too strong. Oh well.

I am beginning to think more solidly about a research design where I look at reproductions of spiritual visions of landscape and place in Lhasa, Kathmandu and the States (Madison, even?). I may do it through nagas, klu, serpent spirits. The big question mark is research affiliation in Lhasa. US and Nepal are easy to research in, but Lhasa may be more difficult.

Today is the full moon and I will go to Pashupatinath temple and sit in the forest and listen to Indo-Nepali classic music. It will be lovely, I think.

I love it when a plan comes together.

2006-07-09T21:53:00.000+08:00

We met with a few Tibetan teachers today and it looks like things are going to work out. We begin meeting tomorrow and that should be good.

In other news, it is monsoon season here. For those of you not familiar with South Asia weather and climate that means that it is hot and wet. Like the MC Hammer song.

I got a call from friend, colleague, wunderkind from South Africa today. That was a wonder to be walking down trash laden Nepali "street" speaking with a friend in South Africa.

I have been thinking about exile since being here in Bouddha, KTM, Nepal, exile seat of many a Tibetan, powerful and meek. A conversation with fellow exile from Lhasa led to the possibility that there may be connections to be made, considered, dumped between Tibetan exile and Jewish exile. Wealth, education, class, insularity, urbanity, local resentment, occupation, and a number of other factors came to mind. I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter. Let'em rip.

KKKathmandu

2006-07-08T14:10:00.000+08:00

Here I am in the old city and the lovely one where things blare and cars move at the lightening pace of 20km/h.

We have reolcated a section of our defunct program to this venerable town and hope to do better in the realm of getting instruction in Tibetan language. I feel at home and here and comfortable. I am pretty convinced that I am going to apply for the Fulbright to come here in 2007-2008. We will see. I am going to look for snakes. I mean nagas, the serpent people/spirits. This is also a good place to think about reproduction of religious places and spiritual visions of landscape since this valley has been so wildly infused with meaning in waves going back for awhile. The only weakness: it has been done quite a bit, so I need to think about what new, if anything, I can say.

Pictures coming soon...

Nepal

2006-07-07T19:57:00.000+08:00

Glorious Day. I am in Nepal, home of monsoon sweat and wandering yogis and mangoes and jungle glistening hills and home.

Things went a bit south in Lhasa. Not fatally so, but enough that a few of us decided to relocate to Kathmandu. The clincher for me was a quickly expiring visa blended in with more than a pinch of reluctance on the part of the aptly named Public Security Bureau to extend my visa more than a week. The clincher for my cohort was a failed program in Lhasa that resulted in, among other things, the inability to secure regular instruction by Tibetans.

Long story short: It is easier to get instruction in Tibetan in Kathmandu than in Lhasa. Go figure and hail progress.

Nepal is beautiful and I cannot believe I forgot it was so. I feel wonderful about being here in the thick, wet monsoon air that moves so quickly from saturation to mist to rain. The world is lovely here and I am happy to be here.

It is the king's birthday. Yeah, the one that killed his brother a few years ago. The one that took over the country by disbanding the legislature. The one that was recently forced to give up power. I will keep you posted.

Peace.

Breaking News: Train in Lhasa

2006-07-02T11:14:00.000+08:00

My apologies for being absent. I will make it up. I Swear.

Hail Progress!

So seemed to be the call through the streets of Lhasa lined with representatives of coercive force: the cops, or who looked like cops in a town where it is often hard to tell who is and is not a police officer.

The train for Golmud left Lhasa yesterday morning, or so I hear. That’s right, a train from Lhasa, the highest train in the world and what has been portrayed by many as the next step of Chinese integration of Tibet. Whatever that might mean.

As you can see from the pictures here, I didn’t get closer to the train than the garbage and shit strewn flood plain underneath the train station. In order to use the four-lane road to the station, I apparently needed a white SUV with tinted windows or at least a bus full of Chinese dignitaries. I tried to arrive in style: I took a cab. Now, being the bumpkin from the Midwest that I am, anyone else driving me anywhere is high class in my mind. Imagine my surprise when I was halted in my high-class steps, or wheels, and told I could not proceed on to the station. I walked across a small temporary bridge underneath the banner wrapped behemoth that will soon conduct Lhasa’s traffic between the station and the city. They are not really in the same place (Europeans gasp).

The small bridge tied together with steel cable and notably not attached with much else to its frame, rattled under the herded foot traffic. To its miserable side stood the half-bridge across the Kyichu and it pylons making rapids of an otherwise pacific river bedecked in revolutionary (capitalist) propaganda (which, I have discovered does not have a negative connotation here).

At the end of that treacherous, clanging bridge awaited a small car that I hired to take me the remaining 5km to the station. Certainly, it was walkable, but the ceremony was set to begin soon. This car got a whole five hundred meters from the end of the bridge and its wasted riverbed and dams, to the main road before I was stopped again. The car was not allowed to continue. Apparently there was too much VIP traffic to allow such a thing. I got out and walked along the road on the south bank of the Kyichu River as it wound around to a new four lane, unsustainably planted entrance road. Police stood vigil over the empty road every hundred meters and said nothing until about half way down the road. The greeting was a wave of negativity, his hand desperately attempting to communicate prohibition, block, and no. I kept following the stream of Chinese who were similarly frustrated at each point, but seemed not to take any no as the final word.

In fact, it seemed to be that the “no”s applied only to very limited localities, modes of transportation, and kinds (classes) of people. I followed the Chinese flow off the road down into the river’s flood plain, home of garbage, construction camps, mud, and those of us who wanted to see history happen but weren’t on the bouncers’ list. The flow of people gathered and grew and was repeatedly refused reentry to the road. Stay down there, out of sight (kindof), amongst the piles of mud bricks and human feces seemed to be the message.

Finally, by following the construction road through the detritus of Chinese Lhasa society, which led through an active construction site, we arrived in the full splendor of the new Lhasa Station. We were below and away from the station so that the VIPs did not have to see us. In fact, the variety show extravaganza that accompanies any official event was blocked from our view as well with 2 storey high cloth frame walls of red, of course. There were speeches and songs and I could see none of it, though I could hear some. And it was boring. There were TV cameras flying above the hubbub on levitating cranes. And it was the first time I was disappointed not to have a camera trained on me in China.

History happens without a bang.

Later in the day there were laser light shows and fireworks over the Potala and the people were jubilant.

By the Way: What is up with this World Cup? Germany fouls Argentina in the box and the Latino gets the yellow card? Did not all the calls go for Germany in that game? Don’t get me wrong, my allegiances were with Germany the entire time, but I couldn’t celebrate after a dirty game like that where the outcome is called instead of won. Reminds me of Florida. All-Europe semifinals? Gimme a break. A time to make friends…among Europeans.

Lhasa Reborn: Talkies

2006-06-15T17:00:00.000+08:00

I am beginning to think of Lhasa as a place to live rather than a place that attacks my body. It is nice to think that although, Montezuma, or perhaps, the "Big Cheese" as we call him in these politically sensitive parts had his revenge on me last night. God bless the water method.

Lhasa is starting to feel like a small town where one can really dig into the networks that are going on here. On the other hand, it is an autonomous region (cough) and so I am sure these initial aspirations have their limits.

I have been faithfully going to my morning class. Today, however, I stayed in bed and in the WC for the morning. Them's the breaks. I have been eating fantastically at Korean, hotpot, Sichuanese, and other restaurants. The meat, however, has taken its toll. Tibetans, Chinese, and those living with them eat more meat than you can imagine. It just ain't a meal with out at least a handful of shredded strips of pork.

Big news for today: I have put up a short of my first day in Lhasa. Really, it is just a sort of geographic study in place of the public square in front of the Jokhang, sanctum sanctus (or something), of Lhasa and the Tibetan Buddhist world. So, check it out at my website. It is under the link called "Talkies." I hope to make more of these. Now that I have made one, it may progressively take less time to create them.

This one is quite basic and I resisted the urge to use a soundtrack primarily of hip-hop, so you get the sounds of the place. Any editors or film connoisseurs out there with suggestions, let me know, please.

Also, if there are any special requests, I may be able to field them. I am thinking right now of doing a transect of Lhasa, a very long rather than wide city, on the main street which is aptly named: Beijing Avenue.

The photo here for your enjoyment is a wall painting reproducing a Picasso piece that I believ is named, "the musicians" or "the band" or something.

Or Something.

Wild Worlds: I Got a Cell Phone

2006-06-13T18:07:00.000+08:00

Last night I was in a bar with two of my colleagues from this summer program and we entered an epic intercultural exchange with an extremely drunk crew of folks. These guys turned out to be some of Lhasa's elite and it was a wacky evening that I may recall in the future.

This post is primarily to disseminate my new phone number.

It is: 86 (Chinese country code) 136-5890-9646. There are apparently cheap phone cards on the net for calling China. They are so cheap you don't even get a card, just a set of numbers. If you are cold calling from your landline with some wonderful international plan, use that thing 011 to get out of the States. If you are calling from a cell phone, I got nothing. I suspect it is prohibitively expensive without a card of some sort. Ask your owner.

Bottom line: Call me!

Remember that I am On the Other Side of the World, exactly 12 hours ahead of Eastern Time Zone and 13 hours ahead of Central and 14 hours ahead of Mountain and 15 hours ahead of Pacific.

I did my first lesson of Chinese today as well and it is wacky too. I am tempted to go for that language as well, but we will see. I now know how to say, hello, how are you?, I want this/that, this is mine, etc. (though not too much etc.).

Real bottom line: Lhasa is a real place with drunks, cell phones, business, politics, beggars, temples, oppression, enlightenment, ecological disaster, human suffering, and smiles.

Saka Dawa

2006-06-12T16:36:00.000+08:00

Yesterday was Saka Dawa, the day of the Buddha's birth, enlightenment, and death. It may even be of his conception, puberty, social transgression, and first teachings. I doubt the verity of the second sentence, but conjecture so to illustrate the convenience of a single day embodying three significant days for Buddhists. Anyway, the point is that it was a big day here in Lhasa, or so I thought. But, I was surprised just how chillaxed the whole affair was. There were more pilgrims, more circumambulators, and more charitous acts, but it was not what I thought. Potential methodological problems in discerning the lack:

1. I was in the wrong place
2. I was at/in the wrong time
3. I was doing the wrong thing

I went to the Barkhor, the middle circumambulatory route (henceforth known as Khora, 'cause it is easier to type), and wandered about looking at things and for things. I relaxed in a few tea houses (almost as cool in Tibet), did some filming which is actually videography but less sexy when known thus, and looked for security cameras. While Saka Dawa is a religious holiday, the holy of holies in Lhasa, the Jokhang, located in the center of the Barkhor was relatively calm. Conventional wisdom, apparently, is to go for a picnic on such a day, but I was in no bodily mood to sit in the sun or the shade.

The filming was pretty exciting and we will see if I can edit something worth looking at. I focused on the Barkhor and the acts of circumambulation and prostration. I was thinking of a voice over explanation or a soundtrack, but I am unsure of my skillz with the sticks (ability to edit video), yet.

On the acclimation front, I am feeling better, but am still reluctant to walk all day or anything like that. I try to keep my expeditions short still and wonder when I will be able to do more. the amount of water I must consume here is extraordinary. While it is probably only the recommended amount for any flat lander to be healthy, it is a basic function of maintenance here.

We started class today and it went well. Better than I expected, actually considering the fact that we do not have native speaking teachers yet. I am in a small group of people who speak pretty fluidly and it worked alright this morning. We chatted about this and that and then one told the story of his research which is was good to hear in Tibetan. The real work will be in the afternoons when I will roam the streets making friends and conversation, I think.

This image is from Tagong, not Lhasa. This rainbow had three spectrums in a row. Someone tell me if the formatting is strange and I will change it.

Love.

Lhasa ____Coming

2006-06-10T17:18:00.000+08:00

I arrived in Lhasa with 19 other aspirants to Tibetan fluency and then I got a headache and then I slept and then I awoke and realized it was 4pm and I hadn't eaten all day. If you have spent any time with me, you know what unintentional fasting does to me (or what I let it do to me).

I dragged my exhausted and famished frame out through the gate of our hotel's keep and wandered among the solar heating stores and metal shops that line our street whose name I do not know yet. I found a place run by a young couple and managed to communicate to them (they were Chinese) that I wanted food and I would not understand their menu and they should make me whatever they fancied. It was slightly spicy noodle soup with mystery meat (probably yak). It was yummy.

I feel better. I got some chocolate and yogurt for dessert and I am back to the room to chillax for as long as it takes to feel good.

Lhasa is drier than Tagong and while it may be the same altitude, that difference in moisture may conspire to afflict me more thoroughly. I'll let you know.

Doing the 'Du

2006-06-10T06:05:00.000+08:00

Chengdu is revived, revised, and recreated in these last days. I am going to Lhasa tomorrow, I think. But, while waiting in what I thought would be the squandered squalor of Chinese urb, I was given the chance to see behind my own negative scheme for what Chengdu would be.

First wonderful thing about Chengdu: tea houses. I was shown this lovely practice of calm and slow-release caffiene by a set of the current class of Fulbright fellows to southwest China. They were Americans (United Statesians), some of which are here to Tibetan things and some Chinese, and are a wonderful and generous crew of people.

Sitting, drinking, and chatting in a teahouse is a joy of joys, but less ecstatically joyful than it is relaxed and lazy joyful in that way that whiles away a day with simplicity. Shadows, vined-infused trellaces, flitting sunlight, warm and always warming tea bowls, trickling water, shirtless men and fanning women, newspapers strewn over short tables,
playing cards plummeting over that newsprint and collecting in carelessness, and wandering conversation all filled in those stretching hours like organic, free-range styrofoam peanuts crowding comfortably around a precious kernel.

Chengdu is a broad city of four million, or so I hear, and considered the tech capital of China. Four million is not a large city here and it feels manageable for a bumpkin like myself. I have explored, the central city, the southern quarter around the river, the southwest side where Tibetans have accumulated, and the southeast side where the wonderfully intoxicating god-realms of high tech clearance are built behind facades of multistory images of computers and young Chinese people having the time of their lives with their tech.

The hardware there comes in several categories: Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Those are in ascending order of perceived quality as well as price. I went a bit hog wild in those god-realms, consuming like a real American and watching the mysterious RMB (Chinese yuan) slide away from my fingers like so much monopoly money. Oh, yes, that did actually come from my bank account. hmm... Best buy: Software which they burn on site and on demand and even have Apple stuff occasionally.

While that is fresh on the mind, the tech purchases that I am still flying a bit high on, do not undergird my new found enthusiasm for this town. One thing that does: fashion. Specifically, women's fashion seems to be flourishing around here. Or maybe its me. It occurred to me too late to do a photographic survey of Sichuanese fashion, unfortunately for all you Elle readers out there.

In other news: the program is cancelled, but we are going to Lhasa anyway, staying in guesthouses instead of dorms (disadvantage: no DSL; advantage: not living in State property). We are having a meeting in 10 minutes to plot or course of action, design our language pedagogy, and meet each other in toto for the first time.

In still other news: the US military occupation proudly proclaims that it has extinguished the life of one al-Zarqawi (sp). Killing is apparently a wonderful thing. Though, the oft-wise pater, M. Bush, has tempered our national celebration of his death with the clarifying claim that killing this terrorist is not the end of the ne'er-ending war. We must stay the course, of course.

Chinese anyone?

Back into China

2006-06-06T08:37:00.000+08:00

I am back in Chengdu and the world has changed, of course.

The program in Lhasa is cancelled.

But our applications have not been rejected.

This apparently means that we are still going.

I don't get it quite yet. I will find out. I woke up yesterday and counted my money. Not enough to chillax in Tagong any longer. I had been thinking I would run four hours down to Kangding and use an ATM (Tyme Machine in my native parlance). Refreshed with a fresh wad of Chinese Yuan courtesy of the US Department of Education, I imagined I would return to the idyllic pastures of Tagong. There I would laze away the day speaking Tibetan and wearing my new Khampa cowboy hat (I fancy that it is of yak wool, for when it rains it smells of them, but it probably is of sheep). But, I was informed by the resident white guy in Tagong, a researcher from UVA, that Kangding's ATMs would not provide me with the roll of 100 Yuan notes, I needed. I split all the way back down to Chengdu.

Which is a big dirty city as previously noted. Luckily, there are some beneficient clouds cleansing the air with large dollops of rain. Lovely. And also luckily because the program is apparently a jerry/jury/gerry-rigged ship now with plans C,D, and X all in effect. Or something.

News on the blog. I found an English terminal with which to change the settings so all you non-blogger folks out there can comment if you are stirred to do so. And, I will be getting them by email. So, despite the PRC's injunction against my blog and all blogger blogs, I will be able to read your comments. Which I love.

Oh, and just the day before I left Tagong, my headache faded into painful memory only. I acclimatized or acclimated or adjusted to pauce oxygen. I can live on the plateau. Angels and dakinis sing with joy. Hopefully, I can keep it up for the next five days in the wetter, dirtier, lower, denser altitudes of Chengdu, China.

Love.

Environmental Sensitivity

2006-06-04T07:32:00.000+08:00

I have known a few people who have been labeled environmentally sensitive by their caretakers. They were once diagnosed as overly sensitive to scents in the air, mold in the walls, dust on the drapes, light from the sun, shrieks from slaughtered pigs (or, more relevantly to urban US: sound from the TV or bus), heat, cold, and any of the thousands of other bits of world that compose our locale. It is quite easy to dismiss such maladies with suggestions that folks toughen up or relax or get a grip. They are often needy to the point of being a burden on others. They need space, quiet, and cleanliness. In short, they need control.

Beyond such crippling cases as these, most humans, if not all, are environmentally sensitive. We care about the way our world, the places inwhich we abide, are arranged. We care about their shapes, colors, feelings, and rich qualities.

I am going to personalize this. I quickly tripped off into universalization, which is nice and fun and all, but less compelling.

I am environmentally sensitive. Time on the Tibetan plateau, 3 days now, illustrates that powerfully to me. My head is broadened in the lower air pressure conditioned by the diminished column of air above me. My yoga teacher has taught me to broaden, open, and loosen the space behind my face in order to facilitate breath and other lovely juices that need flowing. The broadening my skull undergoes at 3700 meters, however, does this work to an extreme. In fact, the sinus cavities north of the soft pallette that I intentionally do work to open constrict in an effort to hold my head together as my cerebral cavity reaches towards the sky.

Just because I am paranoid, does not mean they are not after me. Just because I am environmentally sensitive does not mean that the rare air above me is not doing its best to explode my skull.

All this is to say that I have a headache. Luckily no more.

If I go for walks which inevitably lead me to ascendent trails, I not only reach into lower pressure, but into sparse oxygen. Beyond that I am exerting myself.

Chatting with a Buddhologist who has been here for five months, I listened to his advice to just relax. This is the advantage of the researcher over the backpacker. The backpackers are often here for adventure among Tibet nature and have but a day or two to accomplish it. The researcher is, hopefully, here for a deeper adventure among Tibetan culture and can take it easy, relax, and listen.

Good thing my ears still work in this explosively rare environment.

Tagong

2006-06-02T08:01:00.000+08:00

Excuse my brief e-absence. Between bus trips and recalcitrant terminals, it has been difficult to get to a keyboard. Yesterday, I arrived in Tagong, a Tibetan town in western Sichuan province, a four hour bus ride (hellishly bumpy and vomit laden) up into the hills. I am at 3700 meters, which is approximately the altitude of Lhasa, my destination. Last night was my first night at such altitude on this trip, so today and tonight will be the real test of my biophysical capabilities. Wish me luck. In prevention of oedema, cerebral and pulmonary, I have been taking hella drugs and doing pranayama (controlled breathing). I haven't been able to do such breathing practices because the air in the mainland cities is filthy. Read that final word in all caps. China's air is terrible. Up here, the air is much cleaner and therefore more appropriate for pranayama.

Tagong is a town that hosts an annual horse racing festival in late summer that draws people from all over Khams (eastern Tibet) to drinking, racing, betting, trading, and general merriment. The area boasts vast (for Tibet) grasslands. I haven't made contact at the monasteries, where my Lhasa dialect is most likely to be effective. Otherwise, linguistic connection is hit or miss. My Tibetan is certainly poor, having been absent from Asia for 3 years. Also, it takes a cosmopolite in this area to understand Lhasa dialect. Tagong is a long way from Lhasa and central Tibet.

This place is nice, calm, Tibetan, and clean, so I think I will stay here for a few days. I am regretting not having used Kathmandu as my entry point to Lhasa. Khams is nice, but Nepal is home. Now that the program has been delayed a week and Nepal is clamer, it would have been lovely to be there. But, c'est la. Chos thams cad mi rtag pa red.

Kangding

2006-05-30T18:30:00.000+08:00

Otherwise known as Dar mDo in Tibetan. This is the place that most marks the meeting/divide/border between Tibetan cultural regions and Han cultural regions. Oddly, the most distinctive building in town is a Christian church. My Tibetan works here, kindof. This is the eastern edge of Khams, the eastern province of that which used to be and is still claimed to be Tibet. In Tibetan circles it is said about Tibet that there are as many languages as valleys and while that does mean that I only have access to one valley, it makes conversation in this area a bit more difficult. Still, it is nice to be around folks I can talk to.

Discussion is not the reason I came here, however. The benevolent Dr. T (kindof like Mr. T, except with a syringe and 'scrip pad) instructed me to ascend to 8,000-10,000 feet, stay the night and then go up further before returning to 8-10k and then going back down to Chengdu. His real advice was to go to Lhasa straight, overland, little by little. That, however, is politically and bureaucratically impossible, so here I am. Kangding is at 2616 meters which I reckon to be about 8k and I just ran into a guy who wants to go to 3700 meters tomorrow which I reckon to be about 12k, Lhasa's altitude.

Backstory: I have been to Tibet twice before and both times suffered from crippling altitude sickness. Thus the preventative measures. Ask me why I am returning to a place that, as Advisor T put it, "is biophysically" restrictive?

This blog will probably deal with that question all summer. Right now I have a few reasons and I don't know if they are up to snuff. My bio-physios will answer the question as well and I think it will have the final say.

More on Kangding: I was here six years ago on my first attempt at the plateau. Soul brother and fellow adventurer, O'Sulewskivitz, and I stopped here on our way to Lithang. When we arrived, I suffered for four days before admitting defeat and returning, tail between my legs, to Kangding to drink of its richer oxygen.

Philosophical Moment One: Zhang Jing (Cola) and I on the train looking out the window at the rural squalor between Beijing and Chengdu. She says to me, "when do you think children realize that they are rich or poor?" Damn good question in a language not your own, no?

As Homer would say, "Hmmm....class consciousness."

News Flash: Incompetence and/or politicized bureaucracy rampages through the streets of Lhasa leaving my summer program wounded and delayed for at least four days. Old arrival date in Lhasa: June 3. New arrival date in Lhasa: June 7, at earliest.

Let the good times roll.

Train to Chengdu

2006-05-30T00:10:00.000+08:00

I awoke to a Tuanian moment of space travel this morning as the train raced across a rising-sun country side of haze. I had no idea where I was nor did I know what time it was. All I knew was that I was between point A (Beijing) and point B (Chengdu). My position was nearly irrelevant beyond that locative awareness. The train was annihilating the distance at some speed well above slow. The world out ther was a rushing repetition of factories, farms, strolling people, and the omnipresent haze.

My ignorance is mine in this situation. Having made the trip twice before, I knew what was out there and had ne'er the liguistic faculty to investigate further. Tibetan does not work in China.

Contrast that space travel through a world unknown and unnamed (to me) to the cramp in my back. I had purchased a "hard sleeper" seat, the class between "hard seat" and "soft sleeper." I have only ever taken the hard sleeper before, but hear word that seats are for sitting up and soft sleepers are four to cubby rather than six.

Anyway, I felt the deep constriction of place on my body-mind this morning as I sat up to hit my head on the bunk a long 3 feet above me. I recalled the story of Amistad and wondered if mutiny had ever been attempted by the inmates of a Chinese train of bourgeosie.

Oh, right, in China, they skipped the bourgeois part and took the peasants straight to the top. Supposedly. The failure of the Chinese Revolution is another post, perhaps for another blog. Well, maybe it did succeed: it is true that I cannot access my own blog while under state supervision here. (Thanks to Master Bauch for relaying these notes to you.)

Yes, the confines of place: The world inside the train was far from the flowing space outside. It was small and cramped, socially and physically. Folks, as usual, were quite nice to me at best and ignoring me at worst. Not bad for an infidel who can't even speak. I thought about the way my body felt as it was stuck in a place too small. The bunks long enough for my toes to hang over the passage way, the seat broad enough for an ass cheek and a half, and the aisles wide enough for my more aggressive carmates to shoulder past me. To be fair, I seemed to be the only one uncomfortable with the quarters. Most danced delicately down the aisle with little contact at all.

It is most interesting to me that my body internalized the cramped space with cramped muscles, sore back, and omnipresent headache. Studying yoga has made me a bit more sensitive to that kind of thing and I felt it. There is more to the internalization, physically, of constraining places than I will get into here. It is exciting to think about the interplay, nay, interpenetration of place and body and then also mind (conventionally distinguished from body only).

In other news, I met a young geologist named Zhang Jing, the lone forward English speaker in the house. She invited me to her home to have some wonderful Szechuan cuisine prepared by her mother. Peace be upon them.

Pictures coming soon.

Beijing 2: An Ode

2006-05-30T00:02:00.000+08:00

Oh Beijing, the vocative case fits you well.

It calls your new name and solidly rings thumping idio-signs in five bands of constricting/flowing concrete.

Squares shape you.

Thousands of men and years (and maybe women) etched your urbanity on long Chinese war plains.

Beijing, the Northern Capital, set between the ocean and hoards, where is your beauty?

Is it in the race skyward of empty commercial units of space?

Is it in the organic chaos of state controlled fractalization, ever repeating and diminishing right angles, razed and revised?

Is it in the depth of your narrow alleys regularly stemming from laned roads stemming from freeway sized ground streets?

Instead, I think it is in your grilled MSG kabobs, luscious sticks of flesh roasted over charcoal of unknown genealogy.

It is in your willows, dusted with haze and weeping with vibrancy.

It is also in your Han pride and health with cigarettes dangling carelessly, ignorantly.

Your beauty is in your calisthenics that are yoga but not yoga, bending from waist and not hips, knees locked.

Beijing, I do not love you, but I do owe you and so offer you this ode.

Beijing

2006-05-28T01:16:00.000+08:00

I have arrived in hazy Bejing and will begin the next segment of my journey tomorrow. This city is sprawling and dirty in the air, if not on the ground. I may do a tourist thing tomorrow in the city before my train leaves at 4pm.

The first time I was in Beijing, in 2000, the city struck me as the only place I had ever been that reminded me of the United States. I think differently of it now, but then noticed that, like the US, people only speak one language, think that their country is tops, and have a powerful civic religion cloaked in a state claiming to be areligious.

One obvious difference to me now is the difference in wealth or seeming wealth. While each state portrays itself as wealthy, individuals in the States have more access to wealth (credit cards) and live highly consumptive lifestyles. In China, it is not so.

Please excuse the simplistic comparison. I will reach more depth in Tibet, I think.

Getting Ready, It Begins

2006-05-24T02:20:00.000+08:00

Welcome. This blog will follow my journey to and residence in Lhasa, Tibet this summer. I think that I will have decent enough access to the internet to update this weekly, at least. There is a possibility that access to this site will be blocked on my side of things in which case, I will try to find an alternative. I also hope to foster discussion here, so please feel free to chime in whenever you like by commenting.

The first challenge to this adventure is securing state sponsorship for my presence: I have to get a visa. Apparently, the applications for student visas are still in process in the capital (I am unsure what keywords will get this site blocked, so I will be as sparse as possible with proper nouns until I know). Everyday our faithful leader (the program director from Columbia University), calls the University in the capital and everyday he is told that the officials who would take care of it are in a meeting.

Power play? Incompetence? Overloaded bureaucracy? Maybe so. As of now, the plan is to get a tourist visa instead of a student visa the day before I leave from Chicago. Yikes.

I am feeling nervous and excited about this summer. It will be my first return to the Himalaya since 2003: a three year hiatus. This blog will be somewhat circumscribed, I think. I will focus on doing a bit of reporting on what I see, hear, and learn as well as reflecting on what it means. If you are interested in further layers of experience, I will be recording that in a different venue.

I suspect that my next post will be from the Middle Kingdom proper, while I am enroute to the destination up there.

Peace,