The Reluctant Traveler

Tram No. 15

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:02:00 +0000

Square outside the International Hotel, Lisboa, Portugal

My wife, Nancy, and I had just visited the Museu Colecção Berardo (1960-2010) in the Belem section of Lisbon, Portugal and were on our way back to the hotel. In the tram Nancy sat opposite a young couple while I stood a few feet away struggling with a vending machine. It took me five minutes to wrestle tickets out of it.

When I sat down, the couple were trying not to smile at my awkwardness. The woman couldn't have been more that 25, the man, 27. They had the look of a pair who had lived together half a lifetime, not the year and a half that they had, in fact, been a couple.

They told me this themselves. The conversation started this way.

"Be careful what you say to me," I had said to Nancy in a loud voice nodding in their direction. "They look as if they speak English."

"We do," offered the young woman.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"Right here," the young woman replied.

"But your English is so good. How did that happen?"

It's amazing how little of your language you need to hear to make an accurate assessment of someone's competence. Theirs was excellent.

"We work for a British company here in Lisbon," she said taking in her companion with a tiny circling gesture of her head. "We're computer technicians."

I took it that this meant she and her partner were help-desk people.

She was tiny, with well-tended fingernails painted a deep purple, but no lipstick. He was much taller, thin, with a two-day beard and an earring in each ear. Their hands seemed to be permanently intertwined. She had a huge mood ring on her left hand, the one holding her companion's. He had one, too. He dug it out of his wallet to show us. In a word the two of them were sweet. It made you feel good to chat with them.

I mentioned that I had read in the newspaper that morning that 30% of Portugal’s young people were out of work, compared to 50% in Spain. I wondered what they made of that statistic.

“I think it is misleading,” the young woman said. “There are jobs, but young people don’t want them. They graduate from college and are not about to work in a gasoline station or a supermarket.”

“Most people go to college in Portugal for a good time,” the boy added. “They aren’t really serious about work. But that is going to change.”

“How so?” I asked.

“In the past everyone could borrow money just like that,” he snapped his fingers. “They never worried about paying it back and there was so much money sloshing around that the banks didn’t either. But all that’s over. Now everyone is going to have to learn to live within their means and that means working in a gasoline station even if you have a college degree.”

They got off the same stop we did. We said goodbye, exchanged e-mail addresses, embraced one another as if we were old friends. As I watched them walk away, I had the feeling we were looking at Portugal’s future. It could be worse.

The Inca Legacy

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:10:00 +0000

Pachacuti, The Ninth Inca Emperor

The history of Peru is the history of small independent tribes, the Chavin, the Nazca, the Moche, the Chimu. All these cultures faded into and out of one another over a period of three thousand years buried under the heel of Inca domination. The Peruvians are obviously proud of their Incan ancestors. But a cursory reading of Incan history isn’t all that pretty. Historians have spoken of Incan Communism. Well, I suppose so if you happen to be strongly anti-Communist. But the Incans were one of the purest and most highly organized fascist governments ever to come down the pike of history. The government was king and vice-versa. The interests of everyone were subservient to the king who, of course, was the son of the sun. Here is what Prescott in his “Conquest of Peru” has to say about Inca government:

“[the Peruvian monarchy] watched with unweaned solicitude over its subjects, provided for their physical necessities, was mindful of their morals, and showed, throughout, the affectionate concern of a parent for his children, it yet regarded them only as children, who were never to emerge from the state of pupilage, to act or to think for themselves, but whose whole duty was comprehended in the obligation of implicit obedience.

Such was the humiliating condition of the people under the Incas.”

The Incas emerged at about 100AD from the Sacred Valley, the valley of Cuzco. Over the next 1400 years they soaked up small tribes like paper towels after a milk spill; sometimes by diplomacy, sometimes by force of arms. Hugh Thomas in his book The Golden Empire (Random House, NY, 2010, p. 219) writes:

About a.d.1200 the third mythical Inca--the ruler was so-called--carried the tribe’s authority beyond Lake Titicaca, with expeditions to the eastern forests as well as to the Pacific and beyond La Paz to what is now Bolivia. Nazca and Arequipa came into Inca control in the early 15th century, and in the next hundred years, the seventh Inca, who took as an additional name that of the god Viracocha, defeated and absorbed the till then powerful Chanca at the battle of Xaquixaguana, a turning point in the history of the country. Then Pachacuti, “the best all-round genius produced by the native races of America” in the words of the archeologist Sir Clements Markham, established in the early fifteenth century what seems to have deserved the name of empire, comprising much of the coastal plain and an important part of the Andes...Pachacuti was the Ch’in emperor of the New World. His son Tupac Yupanqui added much of Ecuador to the Inca empire in the second half of the fifteenth century and conquered half of Chile.

This is what the genius of Pachacuti gave rise to. The society was ordered in such a way that the majority of the manufactured wealth, mainly from mining and from agriculture went to the king and his class. Within the Incan ruling class were a group of bureaucrats whose job it was to inspect storehouses built and maintained by local tribes throughout the empire for the benefit of the king’s armies marching further and further in a tsunami of conquest. A portion of the goods was set aside for the king. This in no way distinguished Incan rulers from their European counterparts. When the conquistadores came to South America and wreaked their special brand of havoc on the people and its structures, they, too, were required to put aside what was known as the “king’s share.”

Below the bureaucrats were the soldiers and below them the villagers, farmers and, of course, the stone workers who built the magnificent cities of the Incas. Each class was required to contribute to the royal coffers. A complicated system of highways connected the various parts of the Incan empire and the bureaucrats were constantly traveling these roads to make sure the engine was producing for the monarch and his military.

There was a certain benevolence attached to the reign that separates it from most fascist governments and is probably the reason for the appellation “Incan communism.” As long as everyone did his job, no one was allowed to go under. The empire would restore destroyed houses, take care of the lame, the infirm and the elderly. It provided a number of services that essentially meant that if you kept your nose clean, we’ll take care of you. One thing was ostentatious in its absence. No one, but no one ever advanced. Whatever class you were born into, you died out of. The system was one big welfare state for everyone with the lion’s share of the welfare at the top but with enough set aside for the needs of the population so that no one was starving, without shelter or jobless.

The great similarity between the Inca Empire and the U.S., of course, is the migration of wealth to the top. History teaches us that, no matter what the form of government, far more often than not, that's where the wealth ends up.

Homogeneity vs Diversity

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:14:00 +0000

Shanghai Museum

The Shanghai Museum is a work of art on its own. It resembles an ancient Chinese stew pot. It has four floors devoted to 21 separate categories of art, ranging from the neolithic to the Qing Dynasty. My favorite section is the Chinese bronzes on the ground floor.

The Bronze Age in China extended from the 21^st century BC through the Zhou dynasty, which began in 1040BC when the Zhou subdued the Shang rulers for whom they had been vassals. The resultant Shang-Zhou amalgam was a critical one in the history of the Chinese. For one thing, a single Chinese state began to emerge. For a second, the historical record indicates the remarkable extent to which this state was homogenous. If you compare it with what was happening in the West the contrast couldn't be more startling. Here is what Fairbank and Goldman (China, Harvard University Press, 2006) have to say about it:

The cultural homogeneity of ancient China as revealed by the archeological record contrasts remarkably with the multiplicity and diversity of people, states, and cultures in the ancient Middle East. Beginning about 3000BC, Egyptians, Sumerians, Semites, Akkadians, Amorites (ruled by Hammurabi of Babylon), Assyrians, Phoenicians, Hittites, Medes, Persians, and others jostled one another in a bewildering flux of Middle Eastern warfare and politics. The record is one of pluralism with a vengeance.... The contrast with ancient China could not have been greater. (pp. 40-41)

The bronzes in the Shanghai Museum bring all this to mind. It is very likely that Chinese bronze technique was transmitted to China from Central Asia via the Middle East, but in slow increments, not as part of some vast and sudden infusion that threatened Chinese homogeneity.

The relative homogeneity of China from its earliest days is of vital importance in understanding the China of today. China's vastness, its barely fathomable immenseness, could only be manageable if it were, in fact, homogeneous.

The Chinese have a curse: May you be born in interesting times. These are interesting times. Let me take a stab at why. Societies since the beginning of history have been conducting a kind of unsupervised social experiment. On the one hand there is the West with its diversity, its small nations, relatively speaking, its smaller population, relatively speaking, its plethora of religions. On the other hand we have China with its enormous population, its enormous landmass, its marginalization of religion, and, relatively speaking, its enormous homogeneity.

Europe and Asia: 001AD. Notice the great number of tribes in
Western Europe as compared with their absence in China.
(Click on map for a larger view.)

Over the centuries these societies have been slave-owning, feudal, socialist, communist and capitalist. The 21^st century has emerged, with the fall of Russia and the rise of China, as the apotheosis of capitalism. For better or worse that is the path both the East and the West have settled on.

Now the question is this: Given a capitalist world, which societal organization is best suited to it? Those who say that the 21^st century will be the century of the Chinese are predicting the outcome of this experiment. They are saying that a homogeneous population under the rule of a single political party, a population unriven by religious differences because religion has essentially been marginalized, is better positioned for world dominance than a diverse population governed by a multitude of political parties and segmented into a crayon box of religions. It may well be. But as Chou en Lai, the First Premier of the People’s Republic of China, is reputed to have said when Nixon asked him what he thought of the French Revolution—they were walking in the walled gardens of the Forbidden City at the time—“It is too early to tell.”

A Good Life

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:15:00 +0000

Sillustani is a Quechua word meaning ‘peninsula.’ It is also a Pre-Incan burial ground. The site, a handful of kilometers southwest of Lake Titicaca, is surrounded on three sides by the waters of Lake Umayo. Sillustani is one of many such cemeteries perched on the hilltops surrounding the lake. Its principal feature is the chulpa, a 39ft. high tower in which nobles were buried in the fetal position along with their families, their servants and their belongings in preparation for their rebirth.

Señora Malagra

The Colla, one of the warlike tribes that harassed the Aymara into Lake Titicaca, are the principle occupants of these chulpas. They were conquered by the Incas and became the southeastern arm of that empire, living on the shores of Lake Titicaca until their death and internment in these funerary towers that look like giant ice cream cones with the tip at the bottom lopped off.

It is a long walk from the buses to the towers, at least so it seems to me. I am feeling better after two days of severe intestinal distress. I decide to trudge to the top, one step at a time. When I get there, I see off in the distance an island in the middle of Lake Umayo. On the island is a tiny house. I am startled by that touch of civilization in what otherwise seems a very wild and remote place, a table top of an island in the middle of a lake that surrounds a cemetery on three sides.

Nearby I see a woman seated with a vicuna lying near her, its feet tucked up under it. She is wearing the traditional bowler hat, red jacket and green skirt. She looks like a Christmas ornament. She is busy spinning wool from a handheld spindle. Every so often someone hands her a sol. She obligingly smiles. The benefactor takes her picture. That is why she is here, of course, to earn a few soles.

"Who lives in the tiny house on the island?" I ask Eliseo, our local guide.

He points to the lady in the red jacket.

“She is the caretaker of the island and its 60 vicunas. She works for the government,” he says.

The house is rent-free, he thinks. She gets paid a small salary. But, of course, it is not enough. That's why she's here at the foot of a 39ft chulpa and not out on her island tending her flock.

Eliseo tells me he thinks her name is Malagra, something like that. She has a husband and six children. He says she rows from the island here every day to pose for pictures. I move to the edge of the hill. It slopes sharply down to the shore far below. Sure enough there is a tiny rowboat tied to the rocks along the shore.

I look again at her, this time with admiration. She is tiny, doll-like even. And yet she rows that boat from the island to the mainland everyday, climbs up to the top of the mesa where the chulpas are, and then, after a day of weaving and posing, climbs down and rows back to her island, her husband, her six children, and 60 vicunas.

What kind of life is that? I wonder.

And yet the island she lives on, the house, the lake, the surrounding mountains in the distance, it is all so lovely.

Maybe it’s a good life.

Lake Titicaca

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:16:00 +0000

Straw boat moored on floating island of the Uros: Lake Titicaca

Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world. This has been a topic of some discussion among my companions. Is it or isn’t it? I wonder what difference it makes. With enough qualifications you can make this lake or that the biggest, the best, the most dangerous, whatever. The so-called Ojos del Salado Pool in Argentina is 20,965 ft. high making it the highest lake in the world, but qualify lake with the term “navigable” and Lake Titicaca races to the front. The Himalayas are the world’s highest mountain range. Hold on a second. Are you measuring from sea level or the center of the Earth? Sure the Himalayas are the highest from sea level, but take into account the bulge that the spinning Earth gets at the equator and its the Andes hand down.

I don’t understand why it is important to be the farthest this or the highest that unless we are all animists at heart and being the largest or farthest has something to do with our own internal drive to dominate. Homo sapiens arranges himself into the dominant and the dominated. So why shouldn’t we do the same thing to the objects in the world around us? It’s a mugs game.

This morning we head out to Uros Island skimming along the top of the world’s highest navigable lake to a community of floating islands inhabited by an amalgamation of the Uros and the Aymara, a people driven into the lake 600 years or so ago by aggressive land based tribes including the Collas and the Incas who gave them no peace anywhere else. There is something ironic about that. The Incas believe that they came from the lake because the sun sent two of his children, Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, to Earth to encourage them to put aside their warring ways. The children rose up out of the lake to spread peace and happiness across the region. The Incas responded by driving the Uros back where they, the Incas, came from. It isn’t easy making sense of the world.

The floating islands are made of straw called totora and are literally rotten to the core, made rotten by the action of the water the islands float on. Every month the islanders bring in new batches of straw and layer it atop the old layer so that the island is constantly being replenished.

This works with totora but it doesn’t work with children. This floating community is doomed to peter out because teenagers born on the floating islands are educated offshore only through elementary school. Sooner or later every teenager leaves to attend high school on the mainland. But, as the song says, how’re you gonna keep’m down on Uros, once they’ve seen Puno? 80% stay on the mainland. It is only a matter of time before the islands are deserted for lack of replenishers. For that matter it is only a matter of time before Lake Titicaca disappears as well. For a long time its height has been rising and falling in equal amounts. It might lose five feet during the dry season only to gain them back during the wet. More recently, unfortunately, the trend is in the wrong direction. Evaporation is doing a number on the lake. The floating islands of the Uros will be reduced to being a diorama in a Puno museum.

Machu Picchu

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:08:00 +0000

There are two plaques at the entrance to the Machu Picchu sanctuary. The first reads, in part, Hiram Bingham, scientific discoverer of Machu Picchu in 1911. The association of the word discoverer with Bingham is stretching it. After all, when Bingham reached Aquas Calientes, he asked a local farmer if there were any ruins nearby. The farmer or perhaps his son took him straight to Machu Picchu. Bingham is reported to have paid him un sol for the trouble of making him the discoverer of Machu Picchu. He may have discovered it for himself, but the Peruvians knew it was there for hundreds of years. They just didn’t know what a golden egg they were sitting on. There is even one Peruvian woman who is suing the government claiming her ancestors were given the land. She has filed papers to prove it. Fat lot of good it will do her now.

Bingham was not so much a discoverer as a publicist and this he did very well. Thanks to him the Peruvians suddenly woke up to the goldmine that the jungle was hiding. They began conservation, restoration and exploitation efforts that are still going on.

The current operation is very impressive; several well-built, well-maintained and well-run Perurail trains ply the tracks between Cusco and Machu Picchu bringing in hordes of visitors every day. A shuttle bus system runs efficient Mercedes Benz busses up the mountain from Aquas Calientes to the sanctuary.

When Bingham paid that guide one sole, he set in motion the exploitation that seems to continue today. Machu Picchu is a money making machine. It has been thus for half a century at least. But look around Aguas Calientes and ask yourself where the money has gone. Into train tracks, spiffy trains that run on time and fancy restaurants. Where are the sidewalks, the paved roads, the libraries, the modern schools, the state of the art hospitals?

Ecclesiastes says there is nothing new under the sun. He got that right. Cambodia’s Angkor Wat is Peru’s Machu Picchu and Siem Riep its Aguas Calientes. If you drive through Siem Riep, you pass through a town with virtually no infrastructure at all, poor people everywhere, unpaved roads, virtually no public amenities, to world class hotels built by the Japanese who split their take with the government of Cambodia. The people in Siem Riep, worse off, I think than the Peruvians of Aguas Calientes, wear rubber sands made from old tires.

There is a second plaque at the entrance to Macho Picchu.

“Considered a masterpiece of location, urban planning, design and construction of footpaths, buildings, sidewalks, canals with many fountains, the infrastructure of Machu Picchu illustrates the advances in civil, hydraulic and geo-technical engineering of an Incan town. Their drinking fountains, solid stone walls, surface and subterranean drains and the tapping of springs are all excellent examples of Incan civil engineering.” (my translation from the Spanish)

The plaque is heavy on engineering and light on location. Not surprising I suppose since the American Society of Engineers put it up by way of recognizing Inca engineering genius. But the fact is that were it not for the mountains, Machu Picchu would be one more tourist attraction in South America instead of the number one tourist attraction of the continent and a worldwide tourist target. Location is all.

The guidebooks describe Machu Picchu almost universally as a magical place that engenders a feeling of calm, a sense of soothing serenity. It is as if they were describing Machu Picchu after taking a Valium. I think the guidebooks are right. And I also think I know why. Machu Picchu illustrates the taming of the wild. Here the Andes are threatening. The shaman propitiates them. Machu Picchu tames them. It says we can, after all, live in the midst of danger.

There is controversy over why Machu Picchu was built. Was it a royal residence? Was it a summer resort for the Inca? Was it a religious site? Was it all of the above? I don’t think any of that matters. What matters is the aftereffect of the city. Once it was built it made a violent and vicious world seem safer. And indeed the builders were right. The Spanish never sacked Machu Picchu. They never found it.

One of the biggest mysteries of all is that, aside from a tiny cemetery near the Inca trail, there are no remains at Machu Picchu; certainly nothing to match the 1,000 people who inhabited the town in the clouds. It is as if at one point everybody simply picked up and abandoned their talisman against the wilderness. Perhaps it was because some calamity taught them that Machu Picchu was an illusion after all.

Wallace Steven’s wrote a poem called Anecdote of the Jar:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

He could easily have been thinking of Machu Picchu when he wrote it.

On Landing at the Chavez Airport in Lima, Peru

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:58:00 +0000

I have just returned from three weeks in Peru and Ecuador. I thought I might blog a bit about that trip. It took me to Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and finally to Ecuador and the Galapagoes Islands. As usual, I kept a journal of the trip. Here are some bits and pieces.

October 18, 2011

I am getting too old for this, getting up at 6:30am and flying 4,000 miles to some place that Nancy says I must see before I die, even if it kills me. So I've flown the 4,000 miles and I've drunk the equivalent of a bottle of wine en route to make it seem like fun and now it is 11pm and Nancy and I, along with several of our companions, are driving out of the Jorge Chavez International Airport in the Callao District of Lima, Peru to our hotel.

I don't know. Maybe it's because I'm dead tired and find it easier to be sour than sweet but when Augusto, the man who picked us up at the airport, tells us that the airport was named for a Peruvian pilot named Jorge Chavez who flew across the Alps in 51 minutes starting in Ried-Brig, Switzerland and crash landing in Domodossola, Italy only to suffer major injuries that caused him to die from loss of blood four days later, I wonder why the Peruvians think of him as a Peruvian. He was born in Paris, France of Peruvian parents. He never set foot in Peru.

Every country needs its heroes, I suppose, even if they have to manufacture them. Hell, Virgil manufactured Aeneas for Rome.

The Peruvians have taken Chavez to their collective bosoms. Not only is the airport named after him, but there is a statue of him in downtown Lima. The Peruvian Air Force repatriated his ashes where they are now at rest at the Las Palmas Flight School. His last words, according to a friend, were "Higher. Always higher." Well, I suppose those are pretty good last words, but they are not as good as William Barton Rogers' last words. Rogers died giving a commencement speech at MIT in 1882. (This was five years before Chavez was born.) He collapsed on stage in the middle of his speech. Just before he expired, he said, "Bituminous coal."

While we are on the subject of last words, I have to recall my favorite. They were supposed to have been uttered by Oscar Wilde just before he died. He was in a cheap hotel room in Paris where he went after his release from Reading Gaol in 1897. He probably didn’t say them but I’m sure that, had he been able, he would have endorsed them. Just before he died he gestured toward the wallpaper and whispered to his friend Ross, “One of us has to go.”

The Dividing Line

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 23:10:00 +0000

Recently, Nancy and I drove up to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine to see an exhibition of Edward Hopper paintings. One online description begins this way: “During the nine fruitful summers he spent in Maine between 1914 and 1929, Edward Hopper produced some of the most beautiful and evocative paintings and watercolors of his career.”

Nancy and I are great admirers of Hopper. So it was a no-brainer that we would drive six hours there and back to see this unusual collection of his early work. The surprise was how much I didn’t like it. I thank my friend, Duane Paluska, for showing me why.

Like Bowdoin Duane also runs a gallery in Brunswick. He calls it ICON. Duane is a fine artist in his own right. Several of his furniture pieces, both utile and deconstructive, are in the Bowdoin Gallery and the Portland Museum of Art, an hour south of there. One is sitting in the living room of our house in Cambridge.

As luck would have it, Duane was in his Brunswick Gallery when we called ahead. No, he hadn’t seen the exhibition.

“If Hopper hadn’t put people into his pictures,” Duane said while we made our way slowly through the exhibit, “No one would remember him.”

Thanks to Duane's comment, a light bulb went on inside my head. The Hopper paintings we were looking at were just like those of his contemporaries. The exhibit showed some of them: George Bellows, John Sloan, Rockwell Kent. If you were to mix up the labels on the paintings, no one would notice except, maybe, the experts. Each was pretty much like the other. I’m sure there were differences in coloration, brush strokes, design. But they were not remarkable differences. Hopper and his contemporaries were as interchangeable as Tupperware bowls. But try interchanging a Hopper painting like the iconic Nighthawks, the one with the man and woman looking gloomily into the middle distance across the counter of an all night diner, or the excruciatingly lonely Hotel Room in which a woman clothed only in an undergarment sits on the edge of a narrow bed, bent over a train schedule (pace the Bonds' poem to follow), her clothes strewn over a chair, her shoes beside a dresser.

The point is that when Hopper put a person in a painting, he put a story in the painting, too. You can’t have one without the other. The storyteller is, of course, the viewer, including the painter. Here, for example, are a few stanzas from Diane S. Bonds' Hotel Room (Edward Hopper 1931) that illustrates my point:

Hopper's woman sits, before turning back

the antiseptic sheets, nearly nude and bent

above her book. Her cell-like room argues

the world is a disease (sparse furnishings

the hues of bodily fluids, one wall shadowed

like a bruise.) And the light! the woman reads

in the glare of the examining room,

the operating room. But if you think

the room speaks of defeat (isn't it defeat

we find in narrow places?) consider whom

she resembles most: Mary clinging to her book

as she withholds her gaze from Gabriel.

It is no accident that Bonds' poem harks back to the long line of Annunciation paintings of the Renaissance. Think of Fra Angelico’s fresco in the San Marco convent in Florence. There isn’t a soul in Christendom who doesn’t know that story.

Duane’s insightful comment made me realize that the entire history of Western painting turns on this question: Is there a person in the picture? Ezra Pound once said that the task of the 20^th century was to break the back of the iambic. His remark heralded the end of metrical verse and the onset (should I say onslaught?) of free verse. Well, I think the boundary between classical and modern painting is just as definitively characterized. Take the person out of the painting and whatever is left, it isn’t a story.

The Story of F

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:57:00 +0000

My wife, Nancy, has a childhood friend. Let me call him F. They grew up together on an island in the south, a beach resort town with weather beaten clapboard houses cheek by jowl with “open only for the season” inns. In that town F. had two strikes against him. He was Jewish and he was gay. It was not surprising that he would become an ex-patriot. Nor was it surprising that when he chose to live in another country, it would be on an island. Old habits die hard.

The year Nancy announced that we were going to Bhutan, she said, “There is no way we’re going to the Far East and not include a detour to visit F.”

I could understand that. They had known each other for 56 years. That is how we ended up spending four days with F. on an island in southeast Asia where, to the locals, a Jew and a Christian were about as different as 1% and 2% milk. As for being gay, well, come on in and sit right down.

F. lived from day to day, he told us. He made a bit of money working for a pharmaceutical company. But now he was working for no one.

“My father told me I should have been a chemist because I could turn money into shit,” he said with a shrug. “The truth is I never thought I’d live past fifty.”

We were sitting in a garden next to his rented four room house in a tiny, hard scrabble village near the ocean.

“There was nothing here,” he said. The sweep of his hand intended to take in the tiny plot of the garden barely grazed my wine glass.

It was dark, except for the yellow, blue and aquamarine lamps that had been set up around the edge of the garden that pasteled the trees, already as high as the two-story bungalow, so that they looked like splayed crayons in a coloring box.

“I planted all this myself,” he said contentedly. “Everything grows in this climate. Night blooming jasmine. Bird of paradise. Papyrus. Lotus. Things I don’t even know the name of that the gardener put in. This place is a paradise.”

A large rhododendron plant behind him twitched as tiny tree frogs leaped from one leaf to another. They chirped as they leaped, like tiny parachutists leaving the plane.

“We have cobras, you know.”

He added it as an afterthought.

“My friend killed one a year ago. It was in the corner of the garden. It was hissing like a gas pipe.”

F. looked liked a laughing Buddha, one with a Groucho Marx mustache and a bald head. He sat with his legs crossed under him as he spoke. Every now and then he ran his hand over the top of his shiny pate and looked at Nancy sheepishly, as if the loss of hair was his own fault.

“I remember the day your mother’s cat died,” he said after a sip of wine.

“I’d forgotten that,” said Nancy. “What happened.”

“She was walking along the shore across the street from my house. She looked kind of odd. I asked her if everything was alright.”

“The cat died,” she said.

I told her I was sorry. I asked her when it happened.

“Last night,” she said.

“Did you bury it in the back?”

“No,” she said. “It’s still on the sofa.”

“Can you imagine that?” he told us. “It was still on the sofa. I couldn’t get over it. I asked her if she wanted me to bury it for her.”

“What did she say?” Nancy asked.

“She shook her head and said she’d tend to it tomorrow.”

That evening, after dinner, F. took us to a gay bar to meet his friends.

New Liberty Jazz Band: A Family Band

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 01:04:00 +0000

I suppose this is stretching it a bit, but playing trombone in a Dixieland jazz band while riding on a 1941 fire engine is a kind of travel. Anyway, it is the kind I like. I think it was Wynton Marsalis who said that playing in a jazz band is a bit like being married. When it is your turn to solo, the business of the others is to make you sound as good as possible. And vice versa. About 25 times a year—mostly in the summertime—the members of the New Liberty Jazz Band try to make me sound as good as possible. A Herculean effort on their part. When they solo, I try to do likewise. Much easier.

The members of the band have drifted in and out over the years, sometimes because of differences in how the music ought to be played and sometimes because of death. Last year our clarinetist for well over a decade died of pancreatic cancer. We went through that death with him as he complained of stomach pains during a gig and of the doctors not being able to diagnose whatever it was. We watched as he drank from tiny little bottles of an energy drink while we wolfed down Italian subs. When the diagnosis came, death followed quickly. We all went into mourning. In other words we behaved the way Marsalis saw people behaving in a jazz band. We behaved like a family.

The band has played together in one form or another for over 30 years. There are eight musicians, four of whom have been with the band since the beginning. I came along about 20 years ago. Our singer joined ten years later. Like any family we have had to adapt to aging. Our piano player’s wife has become severely demented. Because he is who he is, he takes care of her himself, something he is well suited to do. He was a doctor before he retired some 25 years ago, an ob-gynecologist. He has found a wonderful caregiver with the apt name of Lulu. Lulu helps him keep his sanity. She frees him up to play with the band. She is a Seventh Day Adventist. Saturday she cannot work. When members of his family can’t spell him, he forgoes the Saturday gigs. We get substitutes. They are excellent players. The music doesn’t suffer, but the family does. Somehow it is not the same thing.

Our banjo player’s wife is similarly afflicted. So he is similarly constrained. We used to rehearse once a week. Now it is once a year. The family is changing, but it isn’t breaking down.

My mind has drifted to the New Liberty Jazz Band because we have just come off our busiest day of the year, the 4^th of July. We played three parades; the first in Needham, the second in Sudbury and the third in Wakefield. The temperature during the day was incredibly hot, over 90º in the middle of the day. Everyone was doing his level best to make everyone else sound good. And sometimes we did. How can I tell? The people who lined the streets as we passed by stopped looking at us and started to dance. Or else they applauded. Or else they mouthed “good job” and give us the thumb’s up sign.

Yesterday, in Sudbury, MA we were playing a tune that featured the trombone. It is called Kid Ory’s Creole Trombone. We passed a young girl. She couldn’t have been more than 12 years old. She aimed her blue vuvuzela at me and started blowing it at the top of her lungs. I aimed my trombone at her and started playing. As I swung into the solo she stopped blowing and started listening. Thus we were engaged, she and I, for the entire song. Not once did I look away. Not once did she.

As the fire truck moved on, she waved goodbye. It’s moments like this that make traveling on the fire truck pure joy.

Something Gets in Your Blood

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:12:00 +0000

Nancy and I were in New York staying at a hotel on 51^st Street, between 5^th and 6^th Avenues. The locale happened to coincide with the loading entrance to the Radio City Music Hall. On the street was a convoy of 18-wheelers, there to unload the Cirque du Soleil's latest extravaganza, Zarkana. Just outside my hotel entrance was one of the rigs, its owner/operator, Terry Martin, sitting at the passenger-side window surfing the internet. One thing led to another. Soon I was sitting ten feet off the ground behind the steering wheel. Terry was next to me and behind us, in a two-bunk space that she told us was smaller than a prison cell was Terry's wife, Gaye, talking to Nancy.

Terry and Gaye had been on 51^st Street for five days, waiting to unload. Their rig was just one of 45 look alike monsters come to the cholesterol-clogged arteries of New York to wait along with Terry. What was taking so long? The answer can be given in the form of a joke: How many unions does it take to unload an 18-wheeler?

The power unit was a bright, shiny fire engine red that, just as reliably as Proust's madeleine, took me straight back to my childhood and the toy matchbox semi I got for Christmas. This rig was no toy. It was a 2001 Kenworth W900L that Terry bought used in 2005 when it had 581,000 miles and four previous owners on it. When I sat behind the steering wheel, the odometer would have read north of 1.3 million miles if it could go up that high. The dashboard looked as complicated as a 747. The driver seat was up so high that a normal car in front was invisible beneath the horizon of the hood.

"If you aren't careful, you can run right over top of it," Terry said.

Terry is on the road 300 days out of the year.

"That's a lot of driving for one man," I said.

"Oh, it's not just me," he said flicking his head toward the Studio Sleeper behind him. "Gaye drives, too. We pretty much divvy up."

That blew me away. I was pining to drive an 18-wheeler at least once in my life, if only from my back door to the end of the driveway, and here was a couple who live in a power unit ten months a year.

Terry says he does all the work on the unit himself. The only problem is that he can't stay home long enough to finish it. (Home is Henryetta, Oklahoma.) He just installed a brand new generator but ran out of time to hook it up.

"Why don't you use some of this hurry-up-and-wait time?" I asked.

"Can't," he said. "You have to be ready at the drop of a hat to move on up to the dock when they call you."

"That means you both can't leave the rig together."

"Yup."

It was Gaye who told us the sleeping quarters were smaller than a prison cell. The comparison didn't stop there.

Terry taught himself to drive. It was back before there were schools for such things. He said the best teacher was a Detroit power unit. If you made a mistake, the machine bit you. Truck drivers had a saying, "The best teacher was getting your thumb caught in the door."

When Terry bought the power unit in 2005, he paid $65,000 for it. Back then, at the beginning of the financial meltdown, he said 80,000 owner/operators went out of business. The used truck lots were filled with acres and acres of units like his. Four other guys had bid on his but couldn't follow through. Terry was able to nail it down.

Thirty-five blocks south was the financial district where the meltdown started. Here was a guy who told me he lived from pay check to pay check while a mile away CEO’s were being paid millions for doing a lousy job. As Ecclesiastes says, "The race is not to the swiftest."

Nancy and I have made friends with Terry and Gaye. But it is a new kind of friendship. They are never home long enough for a visit and there's no room for guests in the prison cell behind the wheel. Still, Terry has given me a website I can go to that will track his whereabouts 24 hours a day.

When the Cirque du Soleil comes to Boston, we'll pack a lunch and take it out to him and Gaye. We'll have a picnic while we're waiting for his number to come up.

"This is a tough life," I said to him. "Why do you do it?"

"Something gets in your blood," was his answer.

=============================================================

Addendum

The company Terry works for is Clark Transfer. They specialize in moving shows around the country; hence, their motto, "Get the Show on the Road." The current owner of the company, Matthew Molitch, is the son of "Whitey" Molitch who, along with Jim Clark, started the company back in the 1920's. Clark was an Irishman; Molitch, a Jew from Odessa. If I read the company bio right, Whitey was born in Odessa in 1904. That was one year after my own mother was born in the same town. It was one year before the pogrom that drove my mother's family (and probably the Molitch's) out of Russia. How can such big trucks function in such a small world?

The Black Mamba: A Lethal Whip on Wheels

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 18:32:00 +0000

My last blog about the Egyptian Cobra that escaped from a Bronx Zoo snake house reminded me of another snake encounter, this one in Malawi. Here is the relevant journal excerpt.

*****

Traveling up the Shire (rhymes with 'leery') River in Malawi is a bit like being in a float during a Fourth of July parade. Both sides of the river are lined with spectators, in this instance spectators whose eyes, pink ears and bulbous noses that occasionally spout four foot high jets are all that remain above water.

The hippos of the Shire blink lazily as we motor by, turning their massive heads in unison to watch. Overhead flocks of white-chested cormorants stitch the sky. The water is calm and as the sun sinks lower the sky turns pink, then orange, then gray.

By the time we reach the camp landing, the sky is black, save for the billions of pinpricks that let the light from the universe next door leak in. We are shown our rooms, the showers and told where to take supper. We are told to carry our flashlights with us whenever we move about the campsite. We are told that two hippos typically come up into camp at all hours of the night to feed. We are told not to worry if we hear them snorting.

The dining room is an outdoor space set with several long tables and ringed by a fence made from dead branches stuck in the ground. At one end is a huge baobab tree and in front a circular fire pit whose flames illuminate the baobab. It looks like a prop out of King Kong. During dinner three staff members play conga drums and a makeshift marimba. The drummers are excellent, accompanying their singing with a complex set of rhythms that are beyond me, seven against four against three, something like that. Another African dances to the rhythm, a halting shuffling step, with small incisive steps that accent every seventh beat. Sometimes the drummers are there with the beat; sometimes it is understood. The odd thing is the marimba playing. It is not African but gamelon, tri-tonal music with the distinctive gamelon rhythm. How did it get here?

I am seated between Nancy and Gary Brown, one of our safari guides. Gary is an amateur herpetologist. I ask him if black mambas are in the area. He says yes. I tell him I am told they can grow to 25 feet in length and, unlike most snakes in Africa, are very aggressive. He says that they only grow to 14 feet and are this big around. He makes his hands into the compass of a fire hose at full blast and adds that they can move at speeds of more than 12 miles per hour.

“Are they really aggressive?” I ask, trying to disguise the tremolo in my voice.

By way of answering, he tells me this story. A few years ago he was driving his land cruiser along a dusty unpaved roadway when he suddenly came upon a 14 foot long, fire hose thick black mamba stretched out across the road. It was sound asleep. A snake lover, he wanted to do it no harm. He jammed on his brakes as fast and hard as he could. The vibrations of the skidding wheels woke the snake. Before Gary could blink, the mamba had reared up to a third of its length, darted over the hood of the land cruiser and struck the windshield like a baseball bat, shattering it. Then it slithered off into the underbrush. Gary said the attack lasted no more than a few seconds.

As he finished the story I stared at the baobab tree casting snake-like shadows across the ground and asked myself (for the umpteenth time) What the hell am I doing here?

That night I drifted off into a fitful sleep with the promised hippos foraging just beyond our tent. They sounded like chainsaws starting up.

Shaggy Cobra Story

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 21:37:00 +0000

On March 25^th of this year an Egyptian cobra escaped from The Bronx Zoo’s Reptile House. The story went viral. Within days the whole world knew about it. News stories focused on the cobra’s lethality—humans dead from one bite in 15 minutes. Someone taking the snake’s point of view began posting on Twitter. The site attracted over 200,000 followers. A week later the cobra was found in a corner of the Reptile House, comfortable and apparently unperturbed. All the fuss, the hype, the panic, the anxiety masking as humor, went out of the story like air from a balloon. Like the snake itself, the story no longer had legs.

The story recalled another Egyptian cobra-on-the-loose adventure that happened when I was in Tanzania in August of 1995. It was our last day on safari. The day before we had gone looking for pythons curled up in treetops in the Angaruka Plain. Thank goodness we hadn’t found any. Well, we actually found their molted skins rolling around on the ground like so many monster cigar wrappers. That was a disappointment to my fellow travelers. So our guide, Peter Jones, promised a stop at a snake farm on the outskirts of Arusha.

The farm consisted of 20 glass cages each with a different snake ranging from the harmless to the aggressively deadly, including a black mamba whose bite, like the Egyptian cobra’s, meant death in 15 minutes. An African guide took us through. He looked battle ready in his fatigues and combat boots. That didn’t inspire confidence. His English was good, and he relished ending his description of each snake with a comment like “dead in 10 minutes,” “no life in one hour,” “24 hours and the life is gone.”

Midway through the tour Peter suddenly pointed toward the ground.

“There’s a loose snake,” he yelled to the guide.

“All our snakes are in cages,” he said not bothering to look where Peter was pointing,

“It’s an Egyptian cobra,” Peter insisted.

The guide continued to shake his head. Suddenly, out from under a bush came a two-foot long snake, no rounder than a limp garden hose. It was reddish in color. It slithered across the path and into a larger clump of bushes several feet away. The guide saw it. He began yelling at the top of his lungs. Six people, including the South African owner of the farm and his wife, came running.

The owner was a short, burly man with bad teeth. Unlike the guide, he wore only shorts, a ratty t-shirt and a pair of canvas sneakers. If there is such a thing as snakebite-proof apparel, he wasn’t wearing it. He brandished a six-foot metal pole forked at the end. He looked like a poor man's Poseidon. Without the slightest hesitation he dived into the bushes right behind the cobra. There was a tremendous amount of heaving and branch shaking. It was as if the bush were on the verge of giving birth. Then just as suddenly the heaving stopped and the South African emerged with an Egyptian cobra wriggling helplessly, its head clamped between his thumb and forefinger. He put the snake into a plastic barrel and clamped the lid shut. The snake would undoubtedly end up in one of those 20 glass cages.

For the snake farm owner in Tanzania this was just another day at the office. But put that missing snake right in the middle of Metropolis and it is Chicken Little all over again.

There's a lot to be said for a forked stick and a natural habitat.

My Dinner with Philip Rahv

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:31:00 +0000

Recently, I decided to take over the cooking chores in our house. That isn’t strictly true. What is true is that my wife Nancy decided that I should take over the cooking chores. She does the taxes, the laundry, and the shopping. The least I could do, she says, is the cooking. I agree. How could I not? The surprise is that I find that I actually enjoy it. I wonder why I hadn’t done it before. I had good reason not to have been blind to the joys of cooking.

Years ago, when I was on the faculty at Brandeis University, I was invited to dinner by Philip Rahv, one of America’s great literary critics. Born in the Ukraine, he came to America in the late twenties and along with William Phillips founded—two years before I was born—what came to be the most influential magazine of literary criticism of its time, the heralded Partisan Review.

My dinner with Philip came toward the end of his career and, sadly, his life. I had joined the faculty of Brandeis University in 1965. Philip died in 1973. The dinner was probably somewhere toward the end of the 60’s, say 1968.

When I arrived at his home, he invited me into his living room. His wife—decades younger than Philip—was sitting at one end of a comfortable sofa, her legs tucked up under her. I remember that she wore crinolines and looked like a yellow morning glory, an impossible flower. The conversation was interesting. How could it not be with someone like Philip Rahv to talk to? Throughout I kept wondering about the dinner. His wife seemed permanently planted on the sofa. Philip showed no signs of going anywhere.

At one point he looked at his watch. Then he announced that dinner was ready. He suggested we move to the dining room where I was treated to what my memory tells me was the best dinner I ever had. I realize that memory can make mountains out of molehills. Even so, I am prepared to take an oath that this was among the top ten of my life. I can provide evidence for this ranking. Even though it must have taken place over forty years ago, I still remember the main course. It was swordfish covered with barbecue sauce. Who puts barbecue sauce on swordfish? The thing is this wasn’t just any barbecue sauce. It was magical. Green beans almondine and a small salad rounded it out. But I’ll never forget that sauce.

“Who do I thank for this extraordinary meal?” I said. “I didn’t see anyone in the kitchen.

“I’m a gourmet cook,” he replied. “I like to make dinners that cook themselves. That way I spend maximum time with my guests.”

I was surprised. I didn’t expect that one of the country’s most profound literary critics would give such things a second thought. I had the temerity to tell him.

“I once heard a story told about George Bernard Shaw,” I said. “He had invited a young man to play billiards. The young man made mincemeat of him. ‘Well,’ said the young man. ‘What do you think of that, Mr. Shaw?’ Shaw replied, ‘I think that, young man, is the sign of a misspent youth.’”

Philip was amused. “And your point?” he asked.

“Gourmet cooking is surely too trivial a thing for you to waste your time on,” I replied.

“That remark,” said Philip, “Is the sign of a callow youth. Wait until you have reached my age. Then you will understand.”

I have. And he was right.

Someone Else Is Living My Dream

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:19:00 +0000

My wife and I have just returned from two weeks in Spain, my first visit, I’m sorry to say, in 75 years of life. Long overdue. Even then, I doubt I would have gone had not my son and his partner moved there several months ago. As someone who hates to travel, I have to say that the two of them took the pain out of Spain.

My son and his partner live in an apartment on a side street just off Paseo de Recoletos, a wide, handsome boulevard that runs from Plaza de Cibeles to Plaza de Colón. The apartment is less than a mile from the Prado and a tad farther to the Reina Sofia, both world-class museums. Picasso’s Guernica, only two years younger than me, hangs at the latter. At the Prado you will find Goya’s incredible black paintings, the series that includes Saturn Devouring His Son.

The apartment has a spacious living room and large white walls just made for the kinds of photographs my son and his partner go in for: a fully clad couple dancing underwater, an announcement of a Dwight Macintosh exhibition, the remarkable artist treated for mental retardation for most of his life, a poster for the Almodóvar movie, Mujeres al borde de una ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).

The kitchen is small, too small, but that doesn’t stop my son and his partner from creating incredible meals. These are normally taken according to the Spanish clock, which means dinner at 9pm, preferably 10pm. That leaves plenty of time for a couple of glasses of wine, especially during the preparation, to say nothing of the consumption. If the Spanish do this all the time, they must be the most sleep deprived nation in the world.

We didn’t spend all our time in the apartment. My wife and I travelled to Córdoba to see the mosque, to Granada to see the Alhambra, to Seville to see the Alcázar, to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry and to Barcelona to see La Sagrada Familia by the remarkable architect, Antoni Gaudí. Gaudí I would rank up there among the architectural geniuses of the world. It is incredibly hard to be original. He managed it. Over a hundred years later his work is still as surprising as the day he conceived it.

Having said that, my mind still goes back to my son’s apartment. I think I know why. I have always thought it would be splendid to live in a completely different culture, one where you would always be on the outside looking in, trying your best to move inside but never quite making it. The essence of that feeling is the language. Every day that I went out into the city was a linguistic adventure. I wanted to try out what I’d gleaned from the grammar books, overheard conversations, the TV. I did that for two weeks and it was exhilarating.

For one thing the Spaniards liked the idea that I was trying to learn their language. Taxi drivers gave me grammar lessons. A guide at the Alhambra taught me the difference between estaba and ha estado. For me going out into the streets of Madrid was like opening up a set of nested dolls, each one bringing me a little closer to the impossible goal of fluency, but closer nonetheless.

I envy my son and his partner. They are living my dream.

The Extraordinary Ordinary

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:58:00 +0000

I’ve just returned from two weeks in Spain, the Spain of Madrid, Córdoba, Granada, Seville, Barcelona and Bilbao. I’ve learned a lot on this trip. For example, I’ve learned that Antoni Gaudí, the architect of La Sagrada Familia, La Casa Batlló and the Parc Guell, is a consummate genius right up their with Imhotep (the Pyramids) and Jørn Utzon (the Sydney Opera House). In Bilbao I’ve learned that Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum is its own best work of art. I’ve learned that Charles V was right when he said to the architects who placed a cathedral in the center of the mosque in Córdoba, “You have destroyed something unique to make something commonplace.” I’ve learned that the Alcázar in Seville, the summer palace built by Pedro the Cruel, is lovelier than the Alhambra, even though the latter is the real McCoy and the former a fake.

But there is something else I’ve learned, something of the right-under-your-nose variety. What is extraordinary about it is that it is so ordinary. I’m talking about public transportation; the buses, the metros, the high-speed railways, the not-so-high speed railways. All of these made getting around in Spain easy and, best of all, fun.

We took the high-speed train called the AVE from Madrid to Cordoba. The first thing that struck me was how presentable everything was. The cars were graffiti free. The seats were comfortable and, whether we rode in preferred or ordinary class, each bank of seats came with its own audio plug-in with stations for music or news. And just in case you didn’t happen to have your own pair of auriculares ‘headphones’ an attendant came along with a free pair in a neat little black bag with a drawstring. On our trips I collected so many I started giving them out to people I’d meet along the way. We took the slower trains from Córdoba to Granada and from Granada to Seville. Same reaction. Clean equipment, comfortable seats, absolutely on-time service. And that’s just the trains.

The subways were equally clean, on time and convenient. In fact, the electronic displays telling you how long you had to wait for the next train were displayed not only in minutes, but in seconds. Buses were frequent, sometimes only five minutes apart, always on time, always a pleasure to ride and the route charts always completely transparent. It helps if you can speak a bit of Spanish. But the systems are so user-friendly that you don’t need to.

All the cities we visited had cars, but nowhere near in the road-choking numbers you see in the United States. And no wonder. Who needs a car in Spain? If I lived there, I certainly wouldn’t have one. Nancy and I bought a portable GPS system to use when we rented a car in Spain, our first intention. We found public transportation so amenable, we dropped that idea. Instead we put the GPS to work planning walking tours.

I don’t think I ever realized how much a good public transportation system contributed to the mental health of a nation. Boy, could we use one. I doubt it will ever happen here. The entrenched interests of the car companies and the oil companies have determined that every family have a huge piece of plastic and metal to move more often than not a single person from one place to another, traffic jams, road rage and high fuel prices be damned.

I would rank Spain’s public transportation system right up there with Velázquez, Gaudí, Goya and Picasso when it comes to bringing pleasure to the people.

The Great Wall of China

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:14:00 +0000

When Robert Frost wrote “Something there is that does not love a wall,” it wasn't the Great Wall of China that he had in mind. The idea of the wall has been in my head ever since I heard you could see it from the Moon. (Alas. You can't.) But, as the Chinese say, "No problema." The reality of the wall surpassed its hype.

You reach the wall at Mutianyu by taking a cable car advertised at the entrance as The Best Cable Car in the mountains. The climb to the cable car entrance is arduous, made more so by having to run a gamut of vendors selling everything from postcards to Chairman Mao's little books. Our guide constantly warns us that the best way to deal with vendors is to pretend they are not there. They are, she says, aggressive to the point of being obnoxious. My own impression is that on a scale of 1 to 10 the Chinese vendors are somewhere around a 4 compared, say, to the 10 of Egypt and Indonesia. More often than not “Bu yao, she she” (I don't want it. Thanks.) is enough to fend them off.

The Lonely Planet and the Eyewitness Travel Guide both place the genesis of the Great Wall in the Qin dynasty. Fairbank and Goldman (China 2006) consider that a folktale. Makes you wonder about the accuracy of these guides. Here is what Fairbank and Goldman say:

Walls were built by Qin and other Warring States and later by some dynasties, but the hoary legend that Qin built the Great Wall of China has long since been exploded. The vast wall system visible today was mainly built by the Chinese Ming dynasty in the sixteenth century. In a fresh interpretation Arthur Waldron (The Great Wall of China 1990) has recently demonstrated how the Ming wall building, though of little military value for keeping out the non-Chinese nomads to the north, resulted from the officials’ inability to decide on any better course, either to attack or to trade. (p. 57)

The hard fact is that the incalculable cost in human life that went into its construction renders it not only a failure but a disgrace. That doesn't distinguish it from other projects of historical hubris, of course: the Pharaonic pyramids come immediately to mind or the temples at Angkor Wat.

Over half a millennium later, like the pyramids and the temples, the wall has come into its own as one of the world's top tourist attractions. Imagine that! All those hundreds of thou-sands of souls doomed to die hauling millions of tons of stone and earth to the tops of hills above Mutianyu and pounding them into place so that six hundred years later we might ride a cable car to the wall and watch a Chinese bride pose for pictures in a rented wedding gown.

That, I suppose, is as good a measure of human progress as any.

Chairman Mao's Mole

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:50:00 +0000

For over 500 years the Forbidden City has been home to 24 Emperors. The Last Emperor, Pu Yi, the so-called Child Emperor, abdicated in 1911. On January 1, 1912 Sun Yat Sen headed the newly formed Republic of China. It was the end of Emperorship. Or was it? The 880 meters long and 550 meters wide Square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace is the home of Chairman Mao’s mausoleum. Hawkers try to sell you Mao's little red book, or a watch with the face of Chairman Mao and a hand that waves at you.

Mao’s tomb is at one end of Tiananmen Square, the Gate of Heavenly Peace at the other. Mao’s portrait hangs above the central archway. It is replaced every three years. A single artist devotes his life to the painting, supplying portrait after portrait of the same face down to the mole on Mao's chin. I marvel at that mole. It is an imperfection. Yet the artist continues to paint it. If I were to write a history of China, I would call it Chairman Mao's Mole.

The portrait is flanked by slogans. The one on the left says, “Long live the People's Republic of China.” The one on the right says, “Long live the unification of the world’s people.” The world is hardly unified. So is the slogan China's expression of a long-term goal to unify the world under its leadership? I don't think so. I think it is the expression of the Chinese view that there is only one world. That world is right here. We are in the central kingdom, Emperor, or no. We are standing on the vertical line in the character for China, zhong:

One should be careful what one wishes for. China wishes for centrality in the world community. It is surely on a path to getting it. The myriad of problems that come with that, pollution, overpopulation, unemployment, are apparent in the brief time we've spent in Beijing. The air quality on the Sunday we arrived was rated one step above hazardous. The Forbidden City was crowded and it was an off day. The population growth rate is now 0.66 percent per year. China’s population is at an all-time high of 1.3 billion people. It is expected to grow to 1.6 billion by the year 2040. Then 80% of its population will be living in cities. Since January 1, 2005 33 million new Chinese have been born.

For me the main problem facing China is a cultural one, the one behind the slogan “Long Live the Unification of the World.” It is that business of Foreigner on the sign over the Passport Control kiosk. It is what leads China to say that the Nobel Peace Prize was desecrated when it was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, the man who was credited with defusing the standoff between the Army and the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The offense for which he was sentenced to 11 years in prison was “openly slandering and inciting others to overthrow our country's State power.” If Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin were Chinese, they would be keeping Liu Xiaobo company. The Nobel Committee in honoring Liu Xiaobo claimed to be honoring “the foremost symbol” of the “struggle for human rights” in China. An editorial in the China Daily for Monday, October 11, concludes with this, “Like it or not, the Nobel Peace Prize broadens the suspicion that there is a Western plot to contain a rising China.” This is where the real battle lines are being drawn.

An Honest Demagogue

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:55:00 +0000

I recently returned from a three-week visit to China, my first. Shortly after setting foot on Chinese soil I taught myself to say: Wo shi lao wai. ‘I am a foreigner.’ The sign I saw on the Passport Control kiosk at the Beijing airport—it said “Foreigners”—was my inspiration. The comparable sign in Boston reads “Visitors.” At MIT one no longer talks about foreign students. Now they are international students. The word “foreigner” has become exclusionary, non-PC.

I think I have some sense of what the word might mean to the Chinese. One of the places my wife and I visited before going to Beijing was Bishu Shanzhuang ‘The Avoid-the-Heat Mountain Villa’ in Chengde. It is a palace complex consisting of nine courtyards and their attendant buildings. They housed the Emperor and his retinue for six months out of the year when the heat in Beijing became unbearable. Kangxi, the great Qing Dynasty Emperor, began the complex in 1703.

On the wall of the emperor's bedchamber, the so-called warm room, there is a plaque that reads:

No Forgetting the National Humiliation

Emperor Xianfeng signed Beijing Treaty here. On October 28, 1860 it was in the warm chamber Xianfeng was forced to sign Beijing Treaty with Britain, France and Russia which ceded south Kowloon to Britain and to admit Aihui Treaty through which more than a million square kilometers of territory that lies to the north of the Heilong Jiang River and to the east of Wusulijiang River was ceded to Russia.

For most of the past two hundred years China has been a country whose relationship to the rest of the world is rather like that expressed in the plaque, one of humiliation at being pushed around by the British, the French, the Germans, the Americans, the Japanese, the Russians. A milestone of that humiliation includes the capture by the French and the British of Beijing in 1860 that led to Xianfeng's humiliation and the plaque outside his bedroom. The shame of the Second Opium War left China with something to prove, a history to overcome. That is what China is doing now as it is on the threshold of becoming the world’s No. 1 economy.

For the last 100 years China has undergone a set of internal changes beginning with a civil war in 1912 that would certainly have destroyed a lesser country. The Great Leap Forward, an attempt to collectivize Chinese agriculture, resulted in millions of deaths. The precise number may never be known. If Mao was their Dr. Frankenstein, then the Red Guard was his monster. Over a million people are estimated to have died at their hands. And yet, despite it all, China did not fall apart. It thrived.

Is this an indication of a special characteristic of the Chinese? Some special trait in the genes of its people designed to withstand cyclones? I don't think so. I think the secret of China's historical stability is quite simply her size. She is so big she absorbs upheavals the way the Earth absorbs meteors. Several million dead out of a population at the time of something like two-thirds of a billion people may be horrific, but it is not self-annihilating.

Could an upheaval like the Cultural Revolution happen in America? I think the answer is quite possibly. If a demagogue—what Chomsky recently on NPR has called an “honest dictator”—were to emerge beholden to no one and who really and truly believed that foreigners are evil, that church and state ought not be kept apart, that healthcare for everyone is socialistic and therefore anathema, that social security needs to be privatized and that America needs to separate “real” Americans from the rest (the take back America-ists), if such an “honest” demagogue managed to focus the unfocussed anger that permeates America today—of which the tea party movement is the tip of the iceberg—and be democratically elected (not at all out of the question given the current rifts in American society), if such a leader were to become president, then America would certainly experience a monumental upheaval of the sort that plagued China throughout the 20^th century. The only difference would be in the process that led to totalitarian leadership. (The recent Supreme Court decision equating money and free speech has moved the country closer to that eventuality since the best indicator of an election win is how much money a campaign spends on its candidate.)

Would American democracy as we know it survive a totalitarian presidency? I think not. Unlike China, America, as big as it is, is simply not big enough.

The Night Clifford Died

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:52:00 +0000

What do Clifford Brown, Richie Powell, N.C. Wyeth and John Gardner have in common? If you said they are all artists of one kind or another, you would have been right. But that’s not what I had in mind.

All four of them died in road accidents in Pennsylvania. This blog is about how I found out about one of them.

On a rainy night in June (June 26, 1956 to be exact) Clifford Brown, the great trumpet player whose young years belied the tremendous influence he had on jazz was driving to Chicago with pianist Richie Powell and his wife, Nancy. They were on their way to a gig. Nancy was at the wheel. Just west of the town of Bedford, on the Pennsylvania turnpike, Nancy lost control of the car and the three of them hurtled to their death.

It was a terrible loss for jazz. Brown was 25 years old at the time and left behind barely twenty records of his artistry. But that was enough to establish him as one of the great practitioners of the 20th century.

It was because of his reputation that I decided to listen to him on the evening of June 25 at a nightclub in Washington, D.C. I don’t remember the name of the club. I think it was the Silver Dollar. Or perhaps it was the Silver Fox. It was a long time ago, 54 years ago to be exact.

I had graduated from George Washington University and had gotten a Fulbright Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford. That summer was a time of excited anticipation for me, getting ready to leave the country for the first time, getting ready to lead a new life in a different land. I deliberately booked passage on the Cunard line’s Queen Elizabeth. Not the upstart QE2 (I also sailed on her), but the original. I chose an ocean liner because it took five days to cross the Atlantic. In 1956 Icelandic Airways made the journey in the unheard of speed of 26 hours! Too fast for me. I thought I needed time to get my head out of one world and into another.

Maybe that was what led me to go to the Silver Whatever on Tuesday, June 25. Clifford was there with Ritchie Powell. I don’t remember who was on bass. George Morrow, maybe. On drums? Max Roach? Could have been. In fact, I only remember two things from that evening 54 years ago. The first was that I was obviously in the company of a young master. The second was that I recognized a woman in the audience that I knew from school. She worked in the cafeteria. We always spoke to one another when I came by for lunch. She doled out the mashed potatoes. I doled out the chit-chat. I was glad I had run into her that night. It marked me as one of the white kids in the know. Her smile that night was far warmer than it had ever been at lunch.

As it happened, I had occasion to go back to campus the next day, the Wednesday. I remembered seeing her and thought I would stop by to tell her how great I thought Clifford was. Now, at last, I would have something real to talk about.

I picked up my tray, put it on the rack and slid it past the desserts, the salads, the sandwiches. When I came to the hot meal station, she looked up.

“Hi,” I said. I was about to go on, but before I could utter another word she burst into tears.

“What’s wrong?” I blurted. I was caught off balance. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. I didn’t know what to say, where to look, what to do.

She must have seen that in my face. She dabbed at her eyes with her apron. Then she said, “You haven’t heard, have you? Clifford’s dead.”

Birth of a Nation of One

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 21:15:00 +0000

Yesterday, the 7th of July, was my 75th birthday. Nancy and I spent the day with friends in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Buzzard's Bay is virtually at their doorstep, nothing between the house and ocean except Cutty Hunk, the outermost of the Elizabethan Islands. You can see it from the veranda. It lies to the south-southwest just six miles away as the gull flies.

The house is over 200 years old and used to lodge the ferryman, who ran the ferry across the nearby Little River before the current and quite sturdy bridge was built. To turn a profit the ferryman outfitted the house with a small bar. He fortified as well as ferried his clients. The bar is still there.

The expression “Belly up to the bar” meaning to “drink up” is of obscure origin. I personally go for the explanation that says it stems from pressing one’s belly up against the bar to drink. Rather like other expressions that make use of parts of the anatomy; for example, having one’s “back against the wall,” meaning to “have one’s options limited” or “facing up to the truth” meaning “coming to grips with the truth.” In the latter “grips” is another reference to the anatomy though once removed from “hands.”

Not everything that looks like an anatomical reference is. For example, in “footing the bill,” the “foot” refers not to a part of the anatomy but rather to the bottom of the bill where the payer signs: hence “footing the bill” meaning to “pay the bill.” There is, oddly, some independent evidence in favor of the anatomical meaning of “belly up to the bar.” It comes from the bar in the house of my friends. If I were to belly up to that bar, the top of the bar would come somewhere between my belly and my knees. Clearly, I am too tall for it unlike the inhabitants of the area some 200 years ago. Assuming they were four inches shorter—I believe there is evidence from gravesites to support that—the bar that they bellied up to in my friends’ house was a perfect fit.

But I am already straying too far from my intended topic, my 75^th birthday. After dinner we stepped out onto the veranda. My friends suggested we do so to catch the breeze before we turned in. It had been 92º back in Cambridge when we left earlier in the day. The breeze was a subterfuge. No sooner had I settled into a deck chair with a glass of wine than the sky exploded. Fireworks! A beautiful if illegal display of screeching pinwheels and spidery bursts that looked like glass marigolds shattering in air.

The display went on for twenty loud and color-filled minutes. Then it stopped. A carbon scented cloud of smoke floated down around my shoulders. I sat there in silence. I had seen fireworks before. Boston on the 4th of July after all is one of the world-class venues for fireworks. But no 4^th of July display compared to the twenty-minute fusillade on the edge of Buzzard's Bay that was put on just for me.

Why did it have such an effect? Fireworks celebrate beginnings. Here, at the age of 75, I was focused on the hourglass running out of sand. Then, out of the blue, came this electric blare celebrating a start, not a finish.

To my friends in South Dartmouth who had the good sense to invite me to a fireworks display in honor of me, let me say, “Thanks for the leg up on the future. I’ve got to hand it to you. I needed that.”

Mulling Malta and the Balkans, Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:23:00 +0000

Friday, April 10, 2009

Malta’s Three Cities are Senglea, Victorioso and Conspicua. The first is named after Grandmaster Claude de la Sengle. The second and third are

nods to the victorious Knights of St. John and the 1565 siege of Malta, that titanic event in Maltese history that pitted Mustapha Pasha, commander of the Turkish land forces and Piale Pasha, commander of the Turkish navy, against Jean Parisot de la Valette, 48th Grandmaster of the Knights of St. John. Malta’s capital city, Valetta, is named after him. His portrait hangs in the throne room of the Grandmaster’s palace. In it he is wearing an outer garment that looks like the Maltese flag with sleeves.

Malta’s written history begins with the Phoenicians, who inhabited the island around 800BC. It was a whipping post during the Punic Wars, finally ending up in the hands of the Romans until the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Then it changed hands like a hot potato, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, the Spanish. King James the First of Aragon expelled all the Muslims on the island around the year 1250AD. The Spanish were always expelling someone, Arabs, Muslims, Jews—and always to their own detriment since in every case it put their economic clock back at least a hundred years. In 1530 Charles V offered Malta to the Knights of St. John. The locals didn’t have a say in the matter. Charles was looking for a cheap first line of defense against the Turks.

The great siege began on the 23 of May 1565 with an attack on Fort St. Elmo. Suleyman the Magnificent was intent on using Malta as a stepping-stone to Sicily and then Europe.He sent a land and a sea force to do the job. The Ottoman naval attack was under the command of Dragut, the 80 year old commander who, fourteen years earlier, in 1551 had defeated the very same Knights at the Battle of Tripoli. After a month of remorseless bombardment, Fort St. Elmo succumbed, but not before a cannonball put an end to the old man himself. News of St. Elmo’s fall reached Dragut just moments before he died. He is reported to have made several signs of joy, including raising his eyes heavenward “as if in thankfulness for its mercies.” Then he closed them forever. At his death Mustapha Pasha, commander of the land forces that suffered a loss of 8,000 men, is recorded as having said, “If so small a son has cost us so dear, what price must we pay for the father.” By the son he meant St. Elmo. The father, of course, was Fort St. Angelo.

What interests me about this battle is the way in which the two leaders, Jean de la Valette and Dragut, the one a seventy one year old Christian, the other an 80 year old Muslim, announced their intention to fight to the death.

Upon breaching the walls of St. Elmo’s, Mustapha Pasha found 60 Knights of St. John’s still alive out of the original force of roughly 150. He promptly decapitated all of them save nine. (I wonder why nine and not one for each apostle.) These he nailed to wooden crosses in mockery of the crucifixion and sent them floating, crosses and all, across the harbor to St. Angelo’s. De la Valette showed that he, too, had an imagination the equal of Mustapha Pasha’s. He decapitated all his Turkish prisoners, stuffed their heads into cannon and fired them back across the harbor to St. Elmo’s.

The battle was one of the most momentous not only in Maltese history, but in the history of Europe itself. Here is Jean de la Valette bravely holding out against the Turks for three and a half months.

Nor could he have held out much longer. Fortunately for him, the Grand Viceroy of Sicily sent 9,000 men to the rescue. This was the so-called Grand Soccorso. There is a frieze commemorating it in the throne room at the Grandmaster’s palace. This relief force was enough to send Piale Pascha and his brother Mustapha back to Suleyman the Magnificent with a shrug of their shoulders that said, “Not this time.” Suleyman said, “With me alone do my armies triumph.” He, too, was an old man.

More than 12,000 men died in this battle including 400 Knights of St. John and yet the image of octogenarian Dragut sending nine crucified Knights floating toward de la Valette and the septuagenarian de la Valette retaliating by stuffing cannon with the heads of dead Turks and sky-rocking them back to Dragut strikes me as, well, if not funny, at least blood-curdlingly ridiculous. What would they have done if they had been forced to face one another directly? Claw at one another’s beards? Stomp petulantly on the ground until one of them died of apoplexy? I am awestruck at the endlessly creative ways mankind, especially old mankind, has devised to kill off its young men.

I look out over the waters of Dockyard Creek at St. Angelo and Senglea and count the expensive yachts moored to the quays. I watch the tiny tourist boats skittering beneath the citadels like water spiders. As I look at the brand new condos, still unfilled, whose balconies overlook the four hundred and forty four year old slaughterhouse of St. Elmo’s, each condo costing at least 700,000 Euros for 800 square meters of space, it is hard for me to see the history of what happened here as anything other than absurd. But that, I suppose, makes it no different from any other conflict in the history of the world, a history in which men have chosen to resolve their differences by killing their adversaries instead of their impulses.

Malta is not so much an island as it is the top of a mountain. Some 14,000 years ago the glacier that covered Europe began to recede. As it did, the water level of the Mediterranean rose, some 120 meters to be exact, enough, anyway, to separate Malta from its mainland. Just 80 kilometers separates the island from Sicily’s Cape Passero. On a clear day you can see Mt. Etna.

The first inhabitants reached Malta around 5200BC, roughly 2500 years before the building of the Palace of King Minos at Knossus. The oldest free standing stone structures in the world are here. They date from 4000BC to 2500BC. These structures belong to the so-called Temple period. They were not dwellings but ceremonial buildings in which god knows what went on. Orgies, maybe. Or sun worship. Or just plain old gossip mongering. We don’t know who the people were or where they came from, except that it was probably over water from Sicily.

We have fragments of their art; Temple art, those concupiscent female figures with their arms folded across their fat bellies and their thighs bulging like weather balloons. Botero could easily have sculpted these figures. Or rather Botero could easily have made his reputation by copying them.

If you were to take these corpulent figures and stretch them out like pieces of salt water taffy, so that the legs are no longer massive but straight limbed and leave the arms folded across the stomach just the way we see them now, you would have the typical figures found in the Cyclades, those islands at the mouth of the Aegean Sea.

I’m not sure what this all this means—the Temple figures, the Cycladic figures, Botero—except to say that when it comes to artistic intelligence there really is nothing new under the sun. Every age has had its geniuses. The only thing that has changed is the technology that allows the same ideas to be expressed in difference ways. As far as I am concerned, the Templatic sculptures of Hagar Qim are as good as any piece of abstract sculpture on the market today.

There is one exception to this notion that the ancients were as good as any of us. I am thinking of the ability of sculptors to present the human figure realistically. That didn’t happen, as far as I can see, until 600 BC around the time of Phidias and the Parthenon. Michaelangelo and Bernini brought it to its highest level in the 15th century AD. Indeed, Michelangelo’s Pietà has my vote for the world’s greatest statue. In any event realism took about 2100 years to emerge. From then on it has been same old, same old.

When I first arrived in Malta, I had a strong feeling of déjà vu. But I knew that was impossible. Then I realized what it was. I’d seen the Da Vinci Code and Swept Away and Gladiator and Troy. They were all made here.

I think that if I had to live on Malta I would go stir crazy. The island is 18 miles long and nine miles wide. Nothing is more than an hour’s drive from anything else and most of that time is spent in traffic. Aside from the monuments like the Co-Cathedral of St. John where, by the way, John de la Valette is buried and the Grandmaster’s

palace and the forts and the monumental fortifications and the walled city of Mdina, I get the feeling that Malta is either an unattractive slather of cheap concrete tenements, or a very expensive summer home for the wealthy.

Some of the yachts moored in Dockyard Creek looked as if they could launch another attack on St. Elmo’s. How viable is a society like this, especially during the current global economic crisis? The rich come in for a couple of months, bask in the sun and then hop it for wherever they keep their money while the native Maltese watch them come and go and wonder whether this is just one more wave of invaders like the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs and the Normans.

It would be nice to spend a year here so that I could see if what I sense is really true. But then it would be nice to spend a year in Rio de Janeiro or Rome or Kyoto. Who has the time? I’m already too old to drive in Malta.

Mulling Malta and the Balkans, Day 2

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:07:00 +0000

Sunday, April 11, 2009

Sicily was a virtual Times Square of the ancient world. At one time or another practically everybody who was anybody came here, albeit with blood in his eyes. Everybody and her brother had won or lost a piece of the place. Syracuse is as good an illustration as any. Founded as a Corinthian colony in 734BC, about the same time that Corinth invaded Corfu, within a century it rivaled Athens in power and prestige. That, of course, meant enemies.

Threatened alternatively by the Athenians, the Carthaginians and the Romans, Malta’s early history was one war after another. What made it war worthy is reflected in its celebrities. In the fifth century, Aeschylus and Pindar worked here. When the city fell to the Romans in 212BC, Archimedes was killed here. St. Paul slept here.

The presence of Archimedes in Syracuse made it all that much harder for the Romans to conquer the town. One of Archimedes inventions was the Architronito or steam cannon. At one end of a barrel was a chamber filled with rocks. When the rocks were heated, steam generated by dousing them with water propelled a stone ball the length of six football fields. The Romans wanted Archimedes captured alive. Instead a Roman soldier ran him through while he was doing math in the sand.

The centerpiece of Syracusan ruins is a part of the Regional Archeological Museum. An amphitheater 453 feet across and, at its largest, 59 rows high, it was built by the Greeks in 475BC and enlarged in 230BC. Aeschylus' Persai (The Persians), an account of the Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis in 480BC, was premiered here in 472BC. The battle had taken place a mere eight years earlier.

A mountain stream brings fresh water into the upper reaches of the amphitheater. The third balcony as it were. One can easily imagine the Syracusans moving back and forth between the fountain and the play. Like the Japanese Noh theater, these spectacles went on for days. Our guide thinks the fountain’s main purpose was to provide inspiration for the actors, rather like a watercooler to officeworkers. Maybe. Her guess is as good as anyone’s.

Behind the theater is the stone quarry. It was used to build, not only the superstructure of the amphitheater—its seats were carved out of solid rock, which is why they have survived until today (you can't steal a mountainside)—but everything else in the vicinity, the houses, temples, the administrative buildings. It was also used as a concentration camp.

According to Thucydides at one time 7,000 Athenians were imprisoned here. They would have been herded into a black hole hewn out of the rock by stonecutters. Today, the roof has long since caved in. It looks more like a rock garden for giants than a prison.

One cavern of the quarry remains undamaged. Called Dionysius Ear because of its remarkable acoustic properties—you can hear a whisper at one end when you are standing out of sight at the other a la the whispering scene in La Dolce Vita—the guides are filled with complicated stories about the genesis of this cavern. They call it the amphitheater’s sounding board and explain that it was left this way in order to amplify the voices of the actors in the amphitheater next door. Our guide is dubious and so am I. The hole at the top of the cavern is much too small to allow the cavern to resonate. When we visit the amphitheater itself, workmen have begun to hide the stone seats beneath wooden covers to protect the stone itself and the 1,000 person per night audience coming to see Medea, Oedipus and The Eumenides.

We bury our dead in as many imaginative ways as we kill one another. In the catacombs of Syracuse, 25,000 souls were interred in pigeonholes. It is like a battery of post office boxes for dead bodies.

It is often said that death is the great leveler. Not so. The catacombs were strictly reserved for Christians. Even in death birds of a feather flock together. This only goes to show that how we bury our dead is not, in fact, for the dead but for the living. Our guide describes how one tomb has three holes drilled into its top slab in order to allow milk and honey to be infused in the grave in hopes of awakening the dead. As someone out of the crowd remarked, “It didn’t work.”

I find catacombs a bit on the far side, though not as far out as, say, the practice of the Capuchin monks in Rome who take the bones of dead brothers and fashion them into altars, clocks, crosses, and other pieces of ecclesiastical furniture. The designs are inspired. You can see them on display in Rome beneath the Capuchin monastery and church on the via Vittorio Veneto near the Piazza Barberini.

By far my favorite way of burying the dead is on display at University College, London. There you can find its benefactor, the great utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, not in a pigeonhole or a crypt or in the shape of a writing desk. Rather, he is sitting upright in a glass cabinet, stuffed where he needs to be and clothed as he was when he walked the streets of London in the 19th century. His real head is in a tin box under his chair. At least it used to be. The probably apocryphal story I heard when I was teaching there was that it fell off when a heavily loaded lorry drove by. Today a wax replica sits on his dead neck, well hidden by a high collar, and, if I remember correctly, a broad brimmed light brown hat shades his waxen head. The university officials keep him in a cabinet in a corner of the main building. If you ask the beadle outside the Provost’s office to wheel Jeremy out into the open, he is obliged by Bentham’s will to do so. Bentham meant his last remains to be an anti-religious piece of propaganda. He called it an “auto-icon.”

There are two things about the island of Sicily that have surprised me. The first, of course, was the ruins themselves; they are ubiquitous, suggestive, sad and, in many instances, incredibly beautiful. I think the temple at Segesta, for example, is better than anything I’ve seen in Greece save the Parthenon. The second is the ruinous metropolises that have grown up around them.

Palermo, once one of the most beautiful cities in the world, has been obliterated by the Mafia-inspired building surge that is remarkable as much for its origins as it is for its execrable taste. In Agrigento a revivified Mafia has done the same. Ditto in Catania. Ditto Syracuse, another city overrun by a scabrous architecture. Now a new modern French designed cathedral adds insult to injury. Its dome rises above the rooftops like a grey concrete teppee. I ask Leanna, our guide, what the people of Syracuse think of it.
She asks if there are any Frenchmen among us. Then she says, “We don’t like it.”

Neither do I. Leanna is gracious. She points out how the French hated the Eiffel Tower and now it is that country’s icon.

“Maybe it will turn out to be really good,” she says.

Only Ortigia seems to have emerged unscathed from the architectural plague of the 1950‘s on.

This gorgeous headland at the tip of Syracuse, in fact, the site of the first settlement 2700 years ago, is a beautiful oasis in a sea of cheap cement. In its center is the Syracuse Cathedral, built on the site of a Temple to Athena erected in the 5th century BC. In the 7th century AD Bishop Zosimus converted it into a church, perhaps to celebrate the defeat of the Carthaginians in 480BC by Theron of Agrigento and Gelon of Syracuse. The columns of the original temple are visible. The stonework of the church has simply enfolded them. It is a remarkable example of how, in order for a temple to survive, it became a church. It was this transformation that saved the superb Temple of Concord in Agrigento.

If you are married in Ortigia because you have the great good fortune to come from there, where, I wonder, do you go on your honeymoon? Ortigia has barely been touched by the Mafia generated building blight and now it looks as if it won't be. The boom has stopped. This is not because Sicily has run out of people to build houses for. Rather it is because the French connection collapsed in 1970. When Marseilles was busted, the Sicilian Mafia picked up the heroin trade. Here is a corroborating statistic. In 1974 eight Italians OD'ed on heroin. By 1980 Italy had 200,000 addicts, hundreds of which died each year. In 1989, for example, the number of deaths was 951. So the Mafia got out of the house business and into drug trafficking. Good for the città, bad for the cittadino.

Two things happened in Syracuse that stick in my mind. The first involves the Emperor Constans II who, in 663, decided to move his capital back to the west from Constantinople. He had tried Rome but found it much too much of a backwater. He preferred Syracuse so he moved the Byzantine capital there. He ruled the Empire for five years until, according to John Julius Norwich, “a dissatisfied chamberlain, in an access(sic) of nostalgia, surprised him in his bath and felled him with his soap dish.”

The second concerns Archimedes who, charged with finding out whether a crown was pure gold or not, hit upon the idea of testing the suspect crown by the amount of water it displaced compared to the displacement of the real thing. The idea struck him while he was taking a bath. He was reputed to have run home from the bath house, completely naked, yelling “Eureka,” I have found it.

If anyone believes this, I have some stock guaranteed at an annual rate of 10% to sell him.

We leave Syracuse at 12:30pm on the dot bound for Albania. We are headed out into the Ionian Sea where a Force 8 gale on the Beaufort scale awaits us. This means six to eight foot seas and thirty to forty knot winds.

Everyone on board is reeling from wall to wall like drunks at a New Year’s Eve party. The crew has helpfully distributed barf bags at convenient distances along the handrails of the corridors, convenient meaning one barf bag every three feet. Only twenty people show up for dinner. Everyone else is either lying in bed or barfing in a bag. And people wonder why I describe myself as a reluctant traveler.

Nancy is one of those in bed. She started feeling queasy about 4 o’clock. I checked in on her about six. She wanted something light to eat. The staff said we could order something in our room. She has a salad, soup and ginger ale. I have roast beef, onion soup, shrimp cocktail, salad, two rolls with butter and tea, the whole nine yards. I don’t get seasick and I’m feeling pretty smug about it. It’s just about then that the ship takes a deep breath, holds it for a few weightless seconds, then lets it out in a starboard roll that dumps the dinner, plates and all in my lap. And people wonder why I describe myself as a reluctant traveler.

Mulling Malta and the Balkans, Day 3

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:05:00 +0000

Monday, April 13, 2009

Last night I slept like a lump of dough in a bread machine. That I didn’t need. This morning I woke up to see bird droppings on my cabin window. In the bathroom I noticed that the brand of tissues is called Funny. I wonder if the other cabins have the same brand or if someone is trying to send me a message. I make for the library first thing to update my blog. The room looks like Savonarola had been preparing for a book burning. And now, in preparation for Albania, Paul Harris gives us a picture of the country. Allan Langsdale follows with a talk on Basillicas and Baptistries at Butrint.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to put what either has taught us to the test. It seems that the ship is being stalked by a low-pressure system. The upshot of that bad behavior is that, since all the harbors in Albania open to the southeast, the ship could make it into harbor but not out. The staff and Captain have come up with a Plan B. We detour to the Greek island of Corfu. Lia and her staff have managed to arrange a whole new itinerary in a few hours. When we dock, three busses and a contingent of guides are ready to take us to see the Achilleion Palace, the Church of St. Spiridon, an overlook with views of Ptichia and Mouse islands, with time to spare for a walk through Corfu town. At the overlook the wind is so strong it is an effort to face it.

Elizabeth of Austria was Franz Josef’s wife. He, however, preferred an actress. So Sissi, as she was called, built Achilleion and retreated there as often as she could until she was stabbed to death in Geneva where she was staying on a private visit. Her last words were “What happened to me?”

Several years later Kaiser Wilhelm II bought Achilleion. In one of the rooms his writing desk is on display. For a seat it had a saddle instead of a chair. Apparently, he loved riding, even when he was writing.

I am not very fond of Kings and Queens. So it is hard for me to break through a certain democratic antipathy toward the luxury of the place, as low key as it is, compared, say, to Versailles. Furthermore, the photographs of Kaiser Wilhelm standing ramrod straight with his arched back and his Fuller brush moustache, hand resting lightly on sword hilt, are infuriating. Wilhelm wanted war. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo was for him what weapons of mass destruction were for George W. Bush.

At one end of the wisteria garden outside the Achilleion Palace there is a statue of Achilles triumphant. At the other end there is the fallen Achillles. The lesson of the two statues is crystal clear. But military power is an aphrodisiac that is hard to resist.

Like so many of the islands of the Aegean, Corfu has been conquered more times than you can shake a stick at, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the Italians, the British. What is conspicuously missing from the list is, of course, the Ottomans. They have never managed to conquer Corfu though not for want of trying.

In the esplanade where we disembarked for a stroll through Corfu town, there is a statue to Marschal Mattias Johann von der Schulenberg who, in 1716, repulsed the last attack of the Ottoman Turks against Corfu. Sultan Ahmet III had ordered a force of 30,000 men and 3,000 horse to breech the citadel that stands opposite the esplanade.

The siege lasted five months. Finally, on August 18 von Schulenberg with 800 picked men launched a surprise counter-attack, creeping out of the citadal just before dawn and attacking the Turks from the rear. The maneuver was a success and also incredibly well timed. The next day a horrific storm broke that not only tore the Turkish tents to shreds and reduced their battleground to a mud hole, but destroyed several of their ships in the harbor. The Turks fled. One year almost to the day a bolt of lightning hit the same citadel. It ignited three ammunition stores. The explosion did what the Turks had so miserably failed to do. It was too late. The Turks never conquered Corfu.

During our tour of Corfu Town, we visit the Church of Saint Spyridon, named after the beloved miracle-working patron saint of the island, whose mummified body is enshrined in a silver coffin housed in a tiny room off the main interior of the church. Several days a year, the coffin is opened to allow the faithful to kiss his slipper-clad feet.

As we drive back to the ship, we pass a row of car ferries ready to take cars and their drivers to Greece and points beyond. Their bows are open wide and resting on the quay like so many sheep dogs with their tongues hanging out.

Mulling Malta and the Balkans, Day 4

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:29:00 +0000

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Durres and Tirana

An author and lecturer on the tour, Paul Harris, describes Albania. He has traveled extensively in the country. He makes it sound like a Marx Brothers movie with real bullets. He says that every house has a Kalashnikov rifle and that nine out of every ten cars is a stolen Mercedes. I didn‘t believe him. That night I asked the captain of the ship. He said that sadly it is true. There is a huge trade in stolen vehicles. Later on Kela, our guide, tells me that it was true about the Kalashnikov rifles, but only up through 1997. Now they are all gone. Now I’m not sure I believe her. She says the only rule Albanians follow is that there is no rule. Her comment, made only half in jest, adds to the picture of Albania as the wild west of southern Europe. When a few days later I asked Kristina, our Dubrovnik guide what the Croats think of the Albanians, she said that they didn’t think of them at all.

Durrës was one of the major cities along the Via Egnatia, an ancient road that linked Durazzo (the Venetian name for Durrës) with Constantinople. Knights of the First Crusade came though Durrës in 1097. Some, like Raymond of Toulouse, sought and received letters of safe conduct from Emperor Alexius Comnenus’ family as Raymond and his fellow knights made their way to Constantinople and ultimately Jerusalem.

I find it strange to reconcile the past with the present. The First Crusade is the beginning of a violent clash between two cultures that a thousand years later invades my own life. It is like a feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys that will never go away. The Crusades have taken on mythic proportions. When I see a place where one of its ghosts still marches, a place like Durrës, I find it hard to reconcile my conjured idea of the mythic past with its dingy, dusty, dreary, and mundane present. Certainly, the past was just as dingy.

As we drove away from the dock at Durrës, we passed an unkempt plot of ground that appeared to be the yard of a private home. Three hemispheres peeked up out of the earth like R2D2 clones. These were bunkers built by the Communist dictator, Enver Hoxhe, shortly after he took power at the end of the Second World War. They added paranoia to the anonymity. Not looking good.

For a thousand years there were no nation states in the Balkans, just groups of tribes united by common languages. The land here fell first within the hegemonic grasp first of the Byzantines and then of the Ottomans. Some historians do not see a sharp distinction between the two eras. The distinguished Romanian historian, Nicolae Iorga, argued that there had been “a Byzantium after Byzantium.” And, of course, from the 11th century through the 18th there were those pesky Venetians dominating the Dalmatian coast.

In Kurje we visited a folk museum. At one point the guide, an old man who spoke English in phrases rather sentences, pointed to two stone wheels.

“Stones for grinding flour,“ he said. “Are two hundred years old.” That’s about as old as Albania as a nation. Montenegro, on the other end, has been an independent state for just three short years.

What brought nationhood to the Balkans? The answer is the great powers of Western Europe. The Balkans was caught up in the struggles between a Christian Europe and Eastern Orthodoxy and then between a Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire. For five hundred years the Ottomans called the area, not the Balkans, but the Rumeli, the “Roman lands,” that they acquired along with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. So what was it that brought national boundaries to a boundary-less land and along with it the vast eruptions of violence that many of us have witnessed during our own lifetimes? Arnold Toynbee put it this way in a passage quoted in Mark Mazower’s A Short History of the Balkans:

The introduction of the Western formula [of the principle of nationalism] among these peoples has resulted in massacre…Such massacres are only the extreme form of a national struggle between mutually indispensable neighbors, instigated by this fatal Western idea.”
Mazower expands on Toynbee’s point:

“Ethnic cleansing”---whether in the Balkans in 1912-1913, in Anatolia in 1912-1922 or in erstwhile Yugoslavia in 1991-1995--was not, then, the spontaneous eruption of primeval hatreds but the deliberate use of organized violence against civilians by paramilitary squads and army units; it represented the extreme force required by nationalists to break apart a society that was otherwise capable of ignoring the mundane fractures of class and ethnicity.

In other words, according to Toynbee/Mazower the Balkan Peninsula was the Africa of southeastern Europe. Just as the great powers of Europe descended on the dark continent during the so-called “scramble for Africa” of the 19th century and arbitrarily divided up the spoils of a land unhampered by national boundaries to the vast detriment of tribal boundaries, so, too, did they force national boundaries on the Balkans, opening the way for the bloody and fractured history that we have come to know from a distance during our own life times.

As we visit the various Balkan nations, then, beginning with Albania and making our way through Montenegro and Croatia, we will be looking at the results of overlaying nationalism on regions that were “otherwise capable of ignoring the mundane fractures of class and ethnicity.”

It is well beyond my capabilities as a travel journalist to unpeel the complicated onion of each country, but that, I think, is the task facing the historian of this area and what every tourist passing through the Balkans must keep in mind. Begin with the harsh fact that tribal units were forced at the point of a gun into the Procrustean bed of nation states. Then work back to see what infernal mischief that wrought.

That is the rub with Albania. Tomorrow when we visit Kotor we will find a tidy city with one of the world’s best natural harbors. The town is beautifully maintained—clean streets, winding alley ways, picturesque aspects at every turn of the head from the vantage point of an immaculate public square, The elegant influence of the Venetians to whom the people of Kotor turned in 1420 when they found themselves besieged by local clans and unable to protect themselves is evident everywhere.

In Tirana, on the other hand, the capital of Albania, the only influence visible is that of the communist regime of Enver Hoxhe, a merciless regime that traumatized the Albanians for forty two years, driving the populace into a state of cultural catatonia.

Take our first visit to the National Museum. The doors open at 10am and we step into a room lined with pictures of dead men. It is as if our first taste of cultural Albania is the city morgue. There are film loops playing constantly showing the execution by the Communists of members of King Zog’s government. Not all the dead are court ordered executions. Many were shot trying to escape Albania after the Communist take-over.

Why in the world would Albania put such an angry first step forward in introducing visitors to its country? I think the answer is that it wasn’t tourists the museum authorities had in mind when they designed their dreary recollection of Albanians dead and dying.

In 1836 John Stuart Mill, the great British philosopher, wrote:

The spectacle, and even the very idea of pain is kept more and more out of sight by those classes who enjoy in their fulness the benefits of civilization…It is in avoiding the presence not only of actual pain but of whatever suggests offensive or disagreeable ideas that a great part of refinement consists.”

We saw an excellent example of that during the Iraq War. The Bush administration forbade photographs of dead American soldiers returning home in caskets. The reason given was not wanting to intrude on the privacy of the surviving families, which is another way of saying that we didn’t want to let the nation grieve with them. Obama rescinded the policy as soon as he took office.

In the Museum I watch a group of school children pass in front of the exhibit. There must have been twenty-five of them. Only one wore a head covering in a country that is 70 percent Muslim. But whatever the religious makeup of the children might be, it was clear to me that this exhibit is for them. If Albania doesn’t look like a country of refinement, I suspect it is because the Albanians don’t want it to be. I think they want to remember how miserable the recent past has been. The exhibit is a warning of what was and what will come again if they don’t remember.

Everyone has been struck by how much trash one sees. The banks of the river that runs through town look like the town dump. Along the roadside wherever there is open land waiting for a builder’s backhoe, you will see a tangle of plastic bottles, empty paper boxes, discarded Styrofoam cartons, the flotsam and jetsam of a consuming society. These eyesores strike us as an outward manifestation of a slovenly character. Perhaps.

But perhaps the trash in the rivers and by the roadside and in the streets is not the sign of a country whose citizens don’t give a damn, but rather the sign of a country that needs to be reminded of where it has been. The spontaneous outdoor dumps of Albania are not a reflection of a slovenly populace but the expression of an angry one. Perhaps the trash is meant to say, “This is what we’ve been for the last half century, a nation whose leaders treated us like trash. Let’s not forget that.” It is a form of samizdat.

That is changing, I’m sure. The current mayor, Edi Rama, is now into his third term. He returned to Albania in 1998 from a career as a painter and artist in Paris. The impact of that is apparent in the painted buildings along the main drag in Tirana. Anything to bury the drabness of the last fifty years. He has encouraged the opening of movie houses that show foreign films, perhaps old hat to us, but something entirely new to Tirana.

The Albanians may not know where they are going. But they know where they have been and they don’t like it. That is not completely true. When we drive to Kruje, we visit a museum touted as the best in Albania.

It is devoted completely to the 15th century figure of Skanderbeg, the Albanian hero who single handedly reined in the seven warring tribes of the area and rode them against the occupying Ottomans like the wagon master behind the Budweiser Clydesdales. Statues have him looking like a bearded Arnold Schwarzenegger. If the Albanians don’t look to their streets with pride, they look to Skanderbeg. There is a statue of him in the center of Tirana.

Skanderbeg’s real name was Gjergj Kastrioti. As a child he was sent to Turkey to be educated. There his military talents emerged and he was given a new name, Icsander, i.e., Alexander. Beg was a suffixed title, Lord Alexander, no doubt meant to recall Alexander the Great.

Did Skanderbeg really exist? Well, of course he did. But I mean was he the hero that the Albanians say he was or the hero the Albanians need. Every emerging country needs an identity. Virgil’s Aeneid was written to provide Rome with a past. Skanderbeg is Albania’s Aeneus. Once we were kings, the memory says. In Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Skanderbeg is seen, not through the eyes of the Albanians, but with a far more jaundiced eye:

The enthusiasm of chivalry and religion has ranked him with the names of Alexander and Pyrrhus; nor would they blush to acknowledge their intrepid countryman: but his narrow dominion and slender powers must leave him at a humble distance below the heroes of antiquity, who triumphed over the East and the Roman legions.

The problem with the kind of thinking that looks to the past for present dignity is that it signals a lack of imagination. The desire of the Muslim world to return to the brilliance of its Ottoman past is another example of this lack. My hope is that Albania won’t allow itself to continue looking back in anger. It may take something akin to a good swift kick in the pants. Here’s hoping.