Intimate Stranger

THE RETURNS

So what did I bring back from my trip to Berlin? First, a lake of black tiredness like a liquid mirror just below the horizon of wakefulness, threatening to rise at any moment and engulf me in dark oblivion. The Afrikaans word for jet lag is vlugvoos — to have been made spongy, perished or rotten by flight. Then, a jumble of impressions.

Airports have become irksome and dangerous places. The illusion has been punctured. It was probably never going to be ‘normal’ for the human to fly, but these entry zones were intended to lull you into thinking you were in some shopping mall piping soothing music, with service people, polite and efficient, processing you painlessly through the various stations of embarkation, and your fellow-departees interestingly attractive. It was to be painless, though dull. Now it is chaos in there. To get on board is like going into combat: sullen but ill-trained functionaries body-search you and dig into your luggage repeatedly, irritated clerks ask silly questions over and over, waiting lines snake for miles down the corridors, fellow-travelers are disheveled and grumpy, flights are retarded beyond decent delays. In Frankfurt, on the way back, rushing for a connection, I made my way to the head of the line by telling people they should not be fooled by my beard, that I’m actually seven months pregnant. You wouldn’t want me to have a messy miscarriage right here, would you now? An angry woman with glasses spat at me. At the screening posts little old ladies of eighty or more, clutching forms and passports and tentatively tottering on spindly ankles, were ordered to return to the check-in counters and book their umbrellas. One had visions of madly yelling grandmothers spearing pilots and transfixing them to the walls of the cockpit. And once you surmounted these obstacles, were you finally to feel more secure? Of course not. The only slight distraction was to try and spot the air marshal. As the aircraft growled and shuddered to get into the air one was painfully aware of the howling emptiness below.

On board I read a news item about problems at Tel Aviv airport. It would seem that the take-off flight path has planes fly directly over a considerable cemetery. The descendants of Aaron, the Cohens, destined to be priests, are not permitted to enter burial-places so as not to be defiled by death. A ‘solution’ had been found: these believers take their shrouds with them (in effect, plastic body-bags), and zip themselves inside for as long as it takes for the shadow of the plane to move over the impure place. Due to more stringent security concerns, one is no longer allowed to take along your folded death envelope as hand luggage. The authorities worry about people smothering in their sheets. A rabbi who was unwilling to break the rule hired a small private plane to fly him, wrapped in his shroud, to Cyprus where he boarded a regular connecting flight to London.

We are moving into a whole new world. On an incoming aircraft a gentleman got up from his seat shortly before landing and hurriedly made his way to the forward toilet. Time and bladder have their own pressing habits. Immediately two flight attendants and a third person in civilian clothes (obviously the air marshal) floored and overpowered the hapless man, holding a cocked gun to his head, and all the other passengers had to stick ’em up before placing same on the backs of the chairs in front of them. The trussed man apologized profusely, explained that he is a full-bladdered lawyer, to no avail. (Being from Mexico, his skin was also the color of sunned wind.) The plane landed, agents came on board to take the unthinking fellow in custody, and he was only released hours later, sopping wet by then one presumes.

I crouched in my seat and promptly tried to get drunk. Just before leaving the house I learned about the death of my mentor and old friend, Jan Rabie, far away in South Africa. I was told that it had been hot and sultry there for quite some time. He would have been uncomfortable with the early season heat, lying in his bed in a home for the terminally weak. He’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s for a number of years already. He had become shrouded in grayness. The last time I visited him there he recognized me immediately, but it was as if he had to come back from far to focus; Golden Lotus and Gogga were with me, and he insisted on speaking French. On the 14th, last week, he had his 81st birthday, and the next day his heart stopped. Maybe he’d tried to sit up, to get one last look of the blue mountain wall behind and the ocean rustling below, smell the wind and taste the salt. He’d been a singular traveler, always going against the trends of his time, execrated by the bourgeoisie, so little understood, denigrated even by his fellow writers. . How I loved him.

I tried to write an angry poem about our ranks being thinned out, and how futile our battle against the subversive and sly and cruel Dog Death is turning out to be.

Some months later his wife, Marjorie, the painter and mistress of gossip, will have a massive brain hemorrhage on the opening night of a retrospective exhibition of her work in Fools Forest. When Jan was too weak to resist she used to go to the hospice where he lay at lunchtime and eat up all his food. Now she will end up in the same place. When she finally comes to and is less befuddled she will ask after her departed husband, he has left and she doesn’t know where he is. Friends will gently remind her that he’s dead and gone, but she will contest that and tell them she has been reading the obituaries in the daily newspaper and there was nothing about Jan.

On the German side, when you arrive, matters are more relaxed. You step high and try to look sober. The autumn days are blustery but clear. Many men have clipped moustaches and short, graying hair. They go dressed in long, elegant coats of good cloth. The women are noticeably slimmer than those on this side of the Atlantic. They use little visible make-up and wear their hair loose. Their feet seem to be narrow and their shoes are shined to a high gloss. People carry briefcases (there are few backpacks to be seen) and stride purposefully. Many have folded newspapers that they then open with crackling sounds as if unveiling revelations. They frown their brows and make snorting noises. On the front pages there are reports of the war in Afghanistan and photos of summary executions carried out brutally. Some of the headlines are in Gothic script. Articles describe how a Green Party minister in a three-piece suit voted with the senior coalition partner, the German Socialist Party, to send soldiers to the war, and then speculate about how this may break the ruling alliance. I wasn’t used to being in an environment where people are in appearance so homogeneous, so predominantly white. The streets in Berlin are smooth and clean and often tree-shadowed. I saw no dogs outside. The buildings sometimes have colored facades and the windows are double-glazed. The Tiergarten is aflame with the slow fire and rust of the dying season. Despite growing economic difficulties there still is a lot of good money in Germany. You can smell it on the soft necks of people when you embrace them or on their manicured hands.

The conference was a textbook example of wasted effort, energy and money. Well, perhaps not entirely so. One of the working documents was a recently approved UNESCO declaration on the rightto (cultural) diversity. Although it was written in the regular gray putty of Internationalese, clearly the product of many a compromise arrived at through dull and cynical committee chugging and slugging, it still constitutes a reference point of legitimacy for the oppressed or ignored minorities of the world. Under the title, “The Global Dimension of Cultural Policy,” the conference grouped UNESCO bureaucrats responsible for the implementation of that strange institution’s cultural policies, those running the “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” in Berlin, directors and other top dogs of the Goethe-Institut and the Institut Français and the British Council, and random stragglers and strugglers of culture and creativity.

Of course, some of us immediately contested the very idea of culture (or rather Culture), arguing that it was certainly not, or not only, an exportation of ‘values’ (such as human rights, secularism, democracy, the celebration of diversity. .) from the privileged Center to the impoverished world, but rather that one should read these as the expression of a given country’s diplomatic policy which cannot be separated from the more overtly rapacious economics and politics pursued by it, as may be witnessed in the ways in which oil companies (for instance) plunder the riches of the third World. The Ogoni people in Nigeria have been disarticulated by the pressure and the exploitation of Shell, an Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, and when Ken Saro Wiwa led a revolt against this humiliating condition he was captured, tried and executed by the Nigerian authorities of the time, working hand in glove with the multi-national. . And oh, the webs of intrigue and complicity (even with ‘the Evil One’), all motivated and justified by profit. There is this story, which cannot be told here, of FBI agent John O’Neill investigating various terrorist attacks on American targets only to find his attempts to prove Bin Laden’s guilt blocked by the US State Department at the behest of the oil lobby making up President Bush’s entourage. The former Soviet republics — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and especially Kazakhstan, also known as “the new Kuwait,” are swollen with oil and gas reserves. Russia will not let the US use their pipelines, Iran is an unpredictable rogue, and that leaves Afghanistan. Chevron, directed right through the 1990s by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embedded in Kazakhstan. Unocal in 1995 signed a contract to export $8 billion worth of natural gas through a $3 billion pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan. The royal house of Saud protects Bin Laden (for as long as he doesn’t attack them, but only infidel American interests), yeah, and Saudi Arabia, without even the beginning of an inkling of that weird mutant process called ‘democracy,’ spawns the narrowest doctrines of fanatic Islamic fundamentalism to be found anywhere and finances their spreading all over the world. But the US will never offend or inconvenience Saudi Arabia. This is called “respecting the Culture of the other.” If ever those turncoat ‘terrorists’ were caught they’d have to be tried and executed by secret military tribunals lest they start spilling unsavory beans in public. After the wild-goose chase an embittered Agent O’Neill, as head of security at the World Trade Center, haplessly but perhaps fortuitously goes to his death under avalanches of rubble and the hellfire of burning jet fuel. Onward Christian so-holdiers. .

Now I’ve gone and told the story anyway.

But this is not what the conference is about. Let’s talk about Culture and Diversity. On the second day, when it was my turn to speak up, I started by explaining how I work at present in the creative writing program of a university in Babylon. My graduate students are of diverse backgrounds — the urban metropolitan jungle, the ghetto, rural hinterlands — but also of distant foreign parts like India and Pakistan and Cambodia and Croatia. This multi-cultural and multi-ethnic environment surely came about ‘naturally,’ shaped only by movements of people and the law of supply and demand. It has a pleasant absence of hegemony or orthodoxy, at least culturally speaking: everybody is different and nobody inferior. However, understanding and accepting and maybe even valorizing our differences will only have a fair chance of being put into practice when together we concentrate on the same discipline of creativeness, in this instance writing. The project and process of expanding consciousness — growing perceptions, transforming ideas into words and words into ideas or dreams, becoming aware of implications and responsibilities — establish a shared space where differences can be appreciated and mediated, where there will be hybridization (even of values, up to a point), but as well an affirmation and recognition of irresolvable specificities. Hybridization gives one another ‘identity’ but does not necessarily resolve or even dilute the constituent parts. We are lucky, I said, to have a circle of activity where we exercise the knowledge of a communal human root and perhaps even similar existential aches.

Now, in this joint creative activity, I found that we deal sooner or later — among other more mundane concerns — and from many different angles, with notions such as the following: what if any are the limits of the permissible and, related, does imagination have a moral content or connotation? In other words, the question of the links between aesthetics and ethics. Is creativity a form of power, or do the arts constitute a non-power in opposition to (and as a subversion of) the power of politics and the market? If non-power is in contrast to power, why is it not then a counter power? Because it doesn’t try and gain adherents or exercise influence, perhaps? The writer and the politician both rely on words, they work the field of perception manipulation — but do they use the same vocabulary? More importantly, how do the purposes of communication differ? Is the one language not dangerously infectious to the other?

Here I used an example. Señora Lourdes Arizpe (who used to be the UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture and is now a socio-anthropologist teaching at the National University of Mexico) had said on the first day that, “Politics is the art of the possible.” I propose that art or creativity is, among other things and manifestations, the politics of the impossible — that is, both the dream and the responsible materialization of transgression.

Will power always be corrupting? Or (and I was still talking about notions that emerged in writing class): what is the impact of beauty on reality, if such an antinomy were thinkable? Let us rather ask what the impact of beauty on matter could be. Can we submit that ‘a thing of beauty is a truth forever’? What is beauty? We identified some underlying components: harmony, shape, structure (and are these not synonyms for ‘order’?); texture and color. But also disruption and rupture, jumps and breaks and open ends and inconsistencies. Then we asked ourselves whether these ‘elements’ are valid and operative in all cultures.

Why do we seem to reach for the same forms of exploration, questioning and celebration? What do we do about ‘identity’? Is it just a mask to scare others with?

Is it important? Is it unique? Is it unchangeable or interchangeable? Do we not have several identities up our sleeves, like monkeys, and are some more important than others or is it a question of “horses for courses?” Is memory immutable? Do we have an obligation toward communal memory? Why? How?

Then, for instance, September 11 happened. And we said in class (I told the audience): creative writing is so futile and insignificant — how do we come to terms with happenings which blow our minds, leaving the hollow stench of death beyond the reach of words and imagination? Should we even try? And along similar lines of horror: what do we do now that we live in the shallowing of human intercourse where the only expressions of global species similarity seem to be the propagation and the hallowing of comodification, the reification of consumerism?

I suggested that these reflections, and all the other hollow questions, may come across as abstract or trivial (were we not gathered here to discuss The Global Dimension of Cultural Policy?) but then assured them that they could be translated in concrete writerly concerns. Like: How to use the metaphor as transformative device — indeed, as radical undermining of our simplistic assumptions about ‘reality’; how to grow into the authority or the illusion of what we call voice; how to explore the pleasures of a narrative arc with its pretense at order and control; what to do about the question of language, of belonging or not belonging, of who it is that the writing is intended for. And then that these approaches could be applied to other walks of life as well.

I repeated (obviously there was just no way anybody could get me to speak to the subject of the session!): Tolerance, or even just reciprocal acceptance, must be rooted in the concrete field of transformation to make sense. Differences, even when these are confrontational, can be mutually enriching when explored creatively, in a practical environment — or rather, an environment of practice — always tending toward producing something you can lay your hands on — the book, the painting, the movie — where they (the differences) are examined critically and, if possible, self-critically, where they are not permitted to become institutionalized as some form of support for power.

Unfortunately, as we know, large sectors of humanity (let’s call these sectors ‘cultures’ for the sake of convenience) are led to believe that in the beginning there was Truth, and maybe innocence, and all of history since then is a sorry story of decadence and decay. When any culture, however rich or ancient, is but a confirmation of prejudices or the conservation and parroting of so-called truths, it is doomed to be exclusive, voracious, totalitarian, ultimately fundamentalist. I am not referring here only to known expressions of fundamentalist monotheism, although I’d venture to say that monotheism inevitably predisposes to fundamentalism and thus to intolerance.

Let me jump (I said): when the president of the United States and the prime minister of Britain suggest that September 11 was an attack on civilization, they are in effect equating civilization with globalization (which is but the married name of whorish expansionist capitalism), and therefore by implication making a case for Western global fundamentalism.

For my part, I don’t believe that ‘revealed’ Truth is ever innocent or benevolent. It can be dangerously evil. For me, the story of mankind is the nomadic search for many, many truths along harsh roads bordered with the flesh and bones and the apparitions of truths long since eaten by birds; it is looking for truths to fill a grumbling stomach, and spitting them out like pebbles when they have lost their flavor.

Reader, I don’t imagine my contribution went down well. But then, I was the only statutory terrorist present and had to live up to the image. Osama Bin Laden’s beard is longer than mine, that’s all.

That was Saturday. We were all tired of talking important sounding nonsense. I went for lunch with an old accomplice, Joachim Sartorius, now in charge of Berlin’s annual cultural festival. Towards the end his wife and a blonde-haired friend joined us. I told them how I saw Naipaul levitate recently in New York as a reincarnated Lord Vishnu, an affliction that had come over him ever since he’d been given the Nobel Prize. But how admirable and profoundly compassionate it was, too, that he expressed his appreciation of prostitutes who initiated him to the pleasurable apprenticeship of self-disgust and reassured his shrinking manhood. The blonde friend was a novelist who just recently had one of her books turned down in the US, ostensibly because of the very graphic descriptions of bestiality and zoophilia involving dogs and refugees.

The wine carried me through a long afternoon of quite useless arguments.

That evening we went to dine in a Thai restaurant. I found myself seated between a journalist with liver spots on her hands, who seriously tried to elucidate for me the deontology of relations between the media and politics, her hair was artificially red and her bare shoulders had the appearance and the substance of slack sea bamboo, and on the other side a delicious old Frenchman who spoke several Asian languages and could converse in slow admiration with the pretty waitresses. One of them particularly, lowered her eyelids in a demure figure of seduction, and made suggestive use of her hips as she walked back and forth from the kitchen to our table. The old gentleman, it turned out, had been born in Vietnam in 1921. Smoking and beautiful women kept him alive, trim and vigorous, he claimed. He was a cultural anthropologist specializing in oral literatures. His grandfather, whose name he inherited, had been a wandering journeyman of Greek or Provençal or maybe Catalan origin, his grandmother was impregnated when the hay was still freshly cut, and then abandoned, he himself grew up a bastard, some of his grandchildren are black and some yellow. Life was such a wonderful and unforeseeable adventure. He was in no hurry to die. Peasants are the wisest people on earth. Suddenly he started telling me how hard it was in the Japanese concentration camp where he’d been interned during the war. The guards wouldn’t allow the prisoners to beg for cigarettes or food. It was demeaning, only dogs beg, and they’d be beaten if caught. Like dogs. The only way he could get a cigarette was to kill fifty flies. So he’d spend his days on the rubbish heap of the camp, killing flies in exchange for smokes. Until he learned how to read the facial expressions of the guys playing poker or bridge. As an astute observer of foreign customs he developed a special talent. Once he started playing and winning at cards he didn’t have to kill flies anymore.

The Sunday morning session on Cultural Policies in Times of Crisis, the last one I attended before beating a hasty retreat to Tegel Airport, turned out to be heated. The subject was introduced by a countryman of mine of Indian descent, Sarat Maharaj, currently a co-curator of the Kassel Documenta. I was made proud by his incisive intelligence, even though he was clearly an unconditional and quite uncritical modernist. He made the point that crisis is not just good, but essential for any artistic breakthrough, insofar as it illustrates that old forms are ill adapted for dealing with complex new realities. Señora Arizpe objected that ‘crisis’ meant death where she came from, it’s no salon game now (we all had flame-flowering towers besmirching the islands of our minds), that a Duchamp ‘ready-made,’ such as his famous toilet bowl, would have been senseless in Mexico when it was first sprung on mankind in a full flush of avant-gardism, whereas the murals of Diego Riviera bound the people, interpreted them to themselves, gave shape to the dream of a nation respecting diversity. I intervened to suggest that this ‘crisis’ (of clashing civilizations) we all twalk around without naming, is nothing new, for a long ongoing time there has been a crisis of hunger and exploitation in the poor world, translating into death, yesterday today tomorrow, and since Duchamp may indeed be an inappropriate protagonist given the more than likely absence of such sanitary pedestals there, it may be more apposite to suggest as vector for modernity in Mexico at that time Frida Kahlo, the fat Riviera’s wife, who with her dark blood disguised as paint certainly struck deeper chords than the muralist. Maharaj went on to laud culture (we had a similar problem with the concept, he also preferred ‘creativiteness’) as vehicle for heterogenesis, the production of difference — as opposed to the logic and the celebration of sameness. Culture, as practiced and exported by the rich countries and by an international bureaucracy like UNESCO, could not honor the ethics of difference; it led to representationalism where all one had to do was to make the other visible (and mighty self-satisfied you’d be for doing so), to managerialism as ‘pis-aller’ for true and vigorous exploration, and ultimately to cultural consumerism or tourism confirming the mere retinalization of differences.

Thereafter things fell apart. People in the hall became restless and wanted part of the act. It was suggested, appropriately to my mind, that UNESCO was certainly a diligent (though indigent) and equitable custodian of the world’s cultures, but it had no mandate from any popular constituency, and there was a noticeable lack of input from creators and independent-minded intellectuals. No stimulation, no juice. Finally, it was doomed to be only collecting and preserving dead things. UNESCO is the custodian of the dead and their winds. The director of French Institutes worldwide advanced the conviction that one just had to operate within the boundaries of the realistic, umm, politically realistic, even if it meant imposing some contortions on the rebel (rabble) conscience, that the international cultural traffic was a means toward federating skills and knowledge, that it is in the nature of all politicians to attempt avoiding death. Whereupon it had to be pointed out to him that most politicians not only do not shirk from terminating human life, but indeed verily relish the enterprise. As long as those terminated are ‘foreign,’ obviously. (Later on, during coffee break, we would lift our upper lips at one another and show teeth in what would just have to pass for smiles.) It was brought to our notice that, as for the bright cultural export idea of promoting convivéncia, the world living together harmoniously, it needed to be said that the poor world may well experience the diffusion of culture from the rich part as an encroachment. When last did a delegation of African anthropologists travel to Europe to go and measure the circumference of a typical Auvergnat peasant’s head? And when you open your cultural institute in some underdeveloped, coughing, foot-shuffling country — should you not simultaneously open a similar institution in your own country to disseminate their culture? Surely reciprocity should be an absolute guideline? How else might you prove useful, messieurs les riches de ce monde?

To promote true exchanges. To open up spaces for vigorous creativity down there. To let us see some of the diversity and incoherence and confusions of your cultures, not just the smooth products adobed (and daubed) by officialdom. Why are you so expansionist? Is it in your barbaric nature? Are you not using ‘culture’ as the lubricant for better screwing the rest of the world politically and economically? In the front row a man with a very expressive and unruly moustache became more and more agitated. He put up a finger, either asking for assistance or requesting permission to leave the hall. What about this politically correct nonsense of cultural equivalence? Can we not agree about a number of basic taboos, the infringement of which will be intolerable and unacceptable, and then build further? Clitorectomy, pedophilia, the enslavement of women, ethnic cleansing. . “Are these expressions of culture?” someone asked. Capital punishment, as indulged and largely condoned in the United States of America. .? The moustache was by now crawling over the man’s face. It was time to go.

(mirror note 6)

The only real divertissement came when a gentleman with a prospering moustache, functionary of UNESCO, explained the wondrous project they’d embarked upon to establish (create?) The Memory of the World. One had visions of an enormous echoing space, maybe a cave, that had to be furnished with the elements that would constitute our shared human memory. In this way shall we become global. The earnest man of Arab origin, a librarian by profession, presented his paper while projecting on the wall behind him images of our memory genes. That is, our documentary heritage which was being rescued from the attrition of time, “acidified paper that crumbles to dust, leather, parchment, film and magnetic tape attacked by light, heat, humidity or dust.” Next to him on the podium sat a ponderous German historian, eminent member of an organism called IAC, the International Advisory Committee, white-haired with age and seasoning, and nodded a solemn and wise head. Trouble was that there was little traceable correlation between the discourse and the images. Peccadilloes! The beauty, surely, was that here you had the dream of creating a vastness with neither beginning nor end. Like the Borges story of attempting to draw a true remembered face of the world, this ‘map’ would eventually have to be big enough to cover all of human consciousness. Were there criteria?

You bet, sir! Documentary heritage must be shown to have had major influence on the history of the world at a particularly important time and crucial place, associated with people who made an outstanding contribution; it should give valuable information about a major theme, or should be an example of outstanding form or style, encapsulating a cultural and social or spiritual value which transcends, transcends. . And the morsel of heritage will be enhanced if it has a high degree of integrity or completeness or if it is unique or rare. But how do you decide as poor, coughing, foot-shuffling humans? Oh, oh, sir. It is almost too much to bear. Maybe the old tried method of leaving the documents on a table overnight and that which has not fallen off deserves to be included? Are there exclusions? Well, after months of agonizing but expert deliberations, it was decided not to include anything relating to the ‘Condor Project’ in terms of which a cabal of Latin American dictators and the CIA had physically eliminated thousands of leftist agitators and dreamers. . This was too horrible to remember. And nobody knows yet how to incorporate the Berlin Wall.