Into Africa

It was about 81 degrees today, here in the Northwest Corner, with 86 predicted for tomorrow.  Well nigh impossibly warm, sunny weather for Seattle, considering that we've reached only the last day of April and the first of May.  I recall one of my blog entries a couple of years ago lamenting that it had barely reached 80 once, at a time when we were already well into mid-July.

It's become my tradition that I leave Seattle in what may well prove to be the nicest days of the year, traveling to some far-off destination with far less attractive weather.  Take my hikes in the Scottish Highlands and in the English Lake District, for example.  Please.  (I'm joking -- those were excellent and memorable hikes.  Excellent in every respect but the weather, and even the weather was authentically British.)  

So I'm keeping a close watch on Johannesburg, in whose direction I launch myself on Friday.  Tomorrow's high will be 74 degrees.  Not bad, of course, but not a better-than-balmy May Day in Seattle, either.

I eagerly await my trip -- a marathon 41 hours of travel.  That includes a five hour layover in San Francisco, where I'll meet up with my sister at the airport, and a 12 hour layover in Paris.  You can do a lot in Paris in twelve hours, but I'll be arriving at about 2 a.m. Seattle time, with half my trip still lying ahead of me.  Shall I sit in the airport, in broad daylight, and try to sleep a bit?  Or shall I go into town and see a bit of springtime in Paris?  I guess I'll play it by ear and see how I feel.  I'll still have another eleven hours of flight ahead of me, from Paris to Johannesburg.

Less than two hours after my scheduled arrival in Africa, my cousin -- the fearless leader of this safari -- has scheduled a three-hour bike tour of Soweto.  Soweto, of course, is the native township where student uprisings against the apartheid government began in 1976.  At least 176 students were killed during the demonstrations, with observers making other estimates of up to 700 deaths.  All because the government tried to force the use of the hated Afrikaans language in the black schools, on a strictly equal footing with English. 

I don't know whether there's any true analogy, but I think of Soweto as being the Harlem of Johannesburg.  One obvious difference from Harlem, of course, is that in South Africa the native blacks were the overwhelming majority of the country's population.  In any event, the area has great historical significance -- today's Soweto lies within the Johannesburg city limits and represents about a third of the city's population -- and visiting it should be a memorable experience.

I suspect that I'll be ready for bed and a sound sleep immediately following the bike ride and dinner.  Bright and early the following morning, we fly to Livingstone in Zambia -- and admire Victoria Falls for a day and a half before driving westward into Botswana.

"Longview man in Damascus"

Syria has been a problem internationally for the past few years.  Before the current rebellion, it was a frequently touristed country, a country from which forays could be made into a more problematic Lebanon.  But going back even further, the relative status of the two countries was once more reversed.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lebanon was, in large part, a tourist's paradise. Syria, on the other hand, was a revolutionary, socialist state, and a thorn in the side of American diplomacy.  As with Iran today, from 1967 to 1974, we had no diplomatic relations with Syria. Syrian visas had to be obtained through the Pakistan consulate.

While going through some old boxes, I've just discovered a yellowed copy of my hometown newspaper, The Daily News.  The paper contains an article that I well remember scribbling out in long hand, while sweating in the sultry heat of the Beirut YMCA.  I mailed the article back home to the Daily News, where someone forced himself to read my scribbles, and decided to print it. 

Having nothing more interesting to write about today, I've decided to preserve the 44-year-old article in my blog.  I'm typing it verbatim from the newspaper.  I'm making no attempt to "improve" my then-journalistic writing style, or my use of language and punctuation.

The article was published on August 29, 1970.
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BEIRUT -- Damascus isn't host to many American tourists this year.

At first sight this may seem strange.  The road from Beirut to Damascus is good, the fare by shared taxi is only the equivalent of $1.65 and my visa was issued swiftly and with no difficulty.

But there are few takers.

This was emphasized to me by a friendly group of students, somewhere in the twisted labyrinth of streets that make up old Damascus.  I had been wandering along rubbernecking, camera in hand.  In my blue jeans and shaggy mane, I no doubt appeared as exotic to the natives as they to me.

Suddenly I found myself sitting on a chair in the little dirt street, surrounded by a throng of young people.  One, who could speak English, handed me a bottle of orange pop and began asking questions.

"My friend, where are you from?"

"From America."

"America!  But there have been no Americans in Damascus for many, many years!  Why have you come?

"Oh, curiosity, I guess.  I wanted to see what your city is like," I said.

"Curiosity, yes."  And then sadly.  "There are few visitors here any more.  But there are many visitors in Beirut, yes?"

"Yes, many," I said.  "They may be afraid to come here.  (They nod agreement.)  But your government has been very kind to me."

After taking a group picture of them and promising to send them a copy (I still have my friend's address printed out in  careful Arabic), they smilingly bid me farewell.

This condensed exchange is just one of many examples I experienced of the warmth and curiosity of the Syrians, especially the young, toward foreign visitors.

Unfortunately, just a few moments later I tasted official Syria in the form of a rather Kafka-esque experience.  Fear of such incidents no doubt discourages many from visiting Syria.

I had been followed by three grubby, appealing urchins for several blocks.  They begged to have their pictures taken.  So, finally, while we grinned at each other, I posed them swiftly, clicked the shot, and started to move on.

Suddenly I was surrounded by a group of Syria's ubiquitous soldiers.

"My friend, you should not take pictures of these boys in the street," one said.  "They are bad pictures."

I wasn't prepared to argue.  I apologized profusely for whatever I had done.  I vowed not to do it again.

But justice obviously demanded more than nice talk.  One soldier took my camera in one hand, firmly held my hand in his other, and moved off to the police station with me.

The young desk officer examined both me and my passport with awe.  This case was obviously too big for him to handle.  He led me to his superior, a large, jovial mustached fellow with a disturbing resemblance to a World War II photo of Stalin.

"Stalin" obviously wanted to forget he had ever seen me, but by now he had a large crowd of underlings about him, awaiting his decision.  I recalled that revolutionary countries occasionally resort to summary executions.  But even revolutionary bureaucrats are adept at passing the buck.

Joking with our now considerable retinue, Stalin led us to his superior, an ascetic SS type who wearily glanced at me, my passport, the incriminating camera, and finally at the mob.  My God, I thought.  Pontius Pilate!

With an air of resignation, he picked up his vintage 1930 phone and put through a call to -- who knows?  The Ministry of Foreign Affairs?

Through it all, I was given repeated assurances that they definitely wanted visitors to take lots of photos.  But of their beautiful girls and handsome men, their fine buildings.  Not pictures of street children, pictures which would bring shame on Syria among my American friends.  This was told me in voices full of both fatherly warning and comradely friendship.

The call to the Ultimate Authority finally was returned.  My camera was gravely handed me.  The crowd was hushed.

"You will, please, open the camera."

"But that will ruin all my pictures!" I said.

"Yes, please."

I felt like Alice confronted by a courtroom full of playing cards.  I should be able to blow them all away and wake up.

I opened the camera.

"Please give to me the film."

I watched helplessly as my pictures of mosques, narrow streets, fezes, veiled women, robed sheiks -- and my student friends -- were exposed to the light.  I watched as some 20 frames of film were pulled from the cartridge and senselessly aborted.  Incongruous with my emotions, they were all laughing happily at this triumph of socialist decency over decadent Western realism.

My camera and passport were politely returned.  They were still chuckling together as I walked down the hall.  The soldier who first "arrested" me came up.  "My brother," he said, "do not hold this against me."  He was just doing his job, he said.  He sincerely hoped I would enjoy my stay in Damascus.

In that moment, hearing the combination of friendship and national pride in his voice, and recalling America's image in Syrian eyes, my film seemed rather unimportant.  We smiled as we parted.

No, not many Americans will visit Damascus this year.  And I can understand why.  But it is too bad, for both our countries.

When the rains came

I haven't paid much attention to Hollywood's biblical blockbusters since I turned about 20.  For the most part, they seemed both bad theology and bad aesthetics.

But the release of Darren Aronofsky's Noah may draw me back to the theater, just out of morbid curiosity. 

The story of Noah and the Ark is known to all.  Kids have (or used to have) as toys small wooden boats that they could march their little lions and giraffes into -- two by two.  As the story was told to us in Sunday School, God did seem a bit excessive in his irritation with mankind, but then we weren't sure exactly what mankind had been up to, back in those antediluvian days.  But, it all ended well for our heroes -- the dove, the olive branch, God's covenant embodied in a rainbow.

James Baldwin added a bit of uncertainty to the denouement, it's true, by alluding to the ambiguously hopeful language of a Negro spiritual:  "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time".  But that was later -- no one told me anything in Sunday School about any "fire next time."

The reviews in publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker make it clear, however, that Aronofsky has presented us with no Sunday School pageant.  He reads the story in the Bible as revealing to us -- or at least to him -- an appalling world, an appalling God, and a frighteningly appalling Noah.

As both child and adult, I've always read the story in Genesis as describing a world much like our own, where humans just like ourselves had been increasingly acting out, as we humans are apt to do, until a somewhat anthropomorphic Deity finally felt he'd had enough.  Modern society hadn't yet invented "time out, go to your room" or "you're grounded" as punishments for wayward kids; under the circumstances, only mass drownings seemed appropriate.

But Aronofsky proposes that in the brief three chapters of Genesis since Eden, the world had gone downhill -- physically and morally -- in a big way, rendering our present-day fears of global warming and criminal conduct somewhat laughable by comparison.  Fallen angels still hung around earth, now embodied as 16-foot high "Watchers" who, although fallen and frankly plug-ugly, were friendly and helpful to Noah and family as they built their ark (more a floating box than a boat), all without the assistance of Home Depot.

Humans back in the day tended to live many hundreds of years; Noah himself was about 500 years old when he got the chilling word from God.  We might be getting a bit irritable at that age ourselves, and can sympathize with the irritation and intolerance that Aronofsky's Noah apparently displays toward everyone, including his own family, and ultimately toward God himself.

So does Aronofsky get it right?  My own version of the Bible explains the events leading up to the Flood fairly succinctly as follows:

When men began to multiply on the earth, and had daughters born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and they took wives for themselves, as many as they wished.  Then the Lord said, "My spirit shall not remain in man forever, since he is flesh.  His lifetime shall be one hundred and twenty years."

There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God had relations with the daughters of men, who bore children to them.  These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

When the Lord saw that the wickedness of man on the earth was great, and that man's every thought and all the inclination of his heart were only evil, he regretted that he had made man on the earth and was grieved to the heart.

Genesis 6:1-6.

  My edition of the Bible seems somewhat frantic in offering an unusual number of reassuring annotations to these verses, annotations that don't entirely alleviate the peculiarity of their imagery. 

Who were the "sons of God"?  From the reviews I've read, I'm not sure that Aronofsky deals with that issue, but some writers have suggested that embodied angels had been dallying with fair human women.  Sort of a "Leda and the Swan" myth.  My Bible's annotation insists that the sons of God were the descendants of Seth and Enos, while the "daughters of men" may well have been wicked offspring of Cain.  An interesting, but not surprising, inclination to blame the women for any resulting improprieties. 

But it's of course the "giants on the earth" who really grab our attention, as they did Aronofsky's.  To him, the giants were huge angels embodied in stonelike bodies.  To the annotator, they were merely "men who were noted for their strength and cruelty."   

Genesis says nothing about the post-Edenic earth's having fallen into environmental crisis, or having been ravaged by constant warfare between brutal contending forces (although, a few verses later, it is proclaimed that the earth was "corrupt" and "filled with violence.")  But, on the other hand, neither does Genesis claim, as I gathered from Sunday School, that men like us lived peaceably if wickedly together, happily tilling the soil of the Fertile Crescent and raising cheerful but corrupt families.  It just doesn't say much of anything on the subject.

A brief textual description of an astonishing and powerful event presents great advantages to the dramatist.  He can interpret the event in any of a number of wildly differing fashions, none of which do harm to the underlying text.  He can bring his own hopes, fears, and obsessions to the story he tells.  Ancient Greek dramatists famously made such use of their civilization's own myths and legends.

It sounds to me that Darren Aronofsky has done exactly that.  And I'm afraid I can't resist going to watch it.

Secrets of the East

When I was a boy with my nose in a comic book, only one image was needed to call to mind the vast subcontinent of India -- a "fakir" sitting cross-legged on the ground, playing a "flute" (actually, a "pungi"), a basket resting on the ground immediately before him.  And out of the basket -- a seemingly hypnotized cobra, weaving its body to and fro.

It was the persistent image that one was apt to see in American comedy movies -- if Abbot and Costello never encountered a snake charmer, they should have.  But it was those comic books that really imprinted the image -- a snake charmer said all you needed to know about India, or about the mysterious Orient in general.

Closely related to this image, in my mind, was the Indian rope trick -- same fakir, same pungi, but in place of a snake, a rope was weaving its way, snake-like, into the air.  The rope trick often was used interchangeably with the snake charmer by the popular media to evoke "exoticism."  But it was the cobra that fascinated me as a kid; I wasn't really sure exactly what was going on with the rope trick.

Nor have I given the matter much thought since.  One can only focus on so many mysteries in a short lifetime.

But today I encountered a discussion of the rope trick, at least at second hand, that fired my imagination.¹  A soldier in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Frank Richards,² recalled a conversation with one of his batallion cooks who claimed to have witnessed the trick.

When he [the cook] had counted out thirty rupees he [the fakir] produced a coil of rope from his basket and uncoiling part of it threw it in the air.  The coils straightened out and the rope, which was about thirty or forty feet in length, hung in the air with one end of it about two feet above the ground.  The fakir now told a small native boy who was with him to climb the rope.  After he had climbed to the top of it he pulled the remainder of the rope up with him.  The fakir made a few passes with his hands and boy and rope vanished in the air.  Then he told the onlookers to look towards some bushes about fifty yards away, out of which sprang the native boy who had climbed the rope.  ...  There were many natives attached to the battalion who were spectators of the performance.  They said that fakirs of his class were only seen once during a man's lifetime, and that the men who had witnessed his performance would never see him again, once he had left the camp.

A couple of Richards's fellow soldiers told similar stories of encounters with different fakirs.  Richards offered several possible explanations, including various mechanical techniques for getting the rope to rise in the air, or, more marvelously, the fakir's use of mass hypnosis on his audience.

[Reportedly,] once somebody took a camera snap of the fakir performing the trick, and neither boy nor rope appeared on the finished photograph --only the fakir gesticulating and the audience with a glassy look in its eyes.

A number of websites attempt to explain the rope trick.  Sometimes they describe successful exposure of a specific performance -- usually one performed on stage -- as merely "a clever piece of deception," using wires and smoking chemicals.  I'm not sure anyone has clearly revealed the secret behind the trick as performed by religious fakirs, outdoors, where there has been no obvious access to mechanical or chemical enhancements.

The little boy in me -- the Tintin, if you will -- wants to believe that mysteries still remain to be discovered in the East.  Lamont Cranston's "power to cloud men's minds."  Chandu the Magician.  The hypnotic gestures of Mandrake the Magician.  The trained scientist in me, of course, says "Absurd."  But those infantile connections in the brain, formed in earliest childhood, murmur: "But wouldn't it be cool!?"
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¹The Raj: An Eyewitness History of the British in India, ed. Roger Hudson (1999).

² Frank Richards not only wrote a book describing his years serving in India (Old Soldier Sahib, 1936), from which the quotations in this post were taken, but also wrote what has been praised as "perhaps the finest memoir of the Great War to be written by a ranker." (Old Soldiers Never Die, 1933)