Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

 Nepal

Like many other animal species, Homo sapiens are said to be sexually dimorphic. Not only are male sapiens on average somewhat larger than females, but since very early in their evolutionary history, the sapiens sexes have had very distinct cultural and behavioral patterns as well. Typically, in the context of the ancient hunter-gatherer cultures from which all modern sapiens arose, the females were relegated to gathering wild plant material, maintaining the hearth, and of course, nurturing the young. In these circumstances the characteristic attributes of female sapiens - their behavioral bias to utilize social mechanisms rather than direct action, and their heightened empathy compared to males, for example - must have emerged through natural selection.

 Spain

This arrangement left sapiens males in charge of hunting other animals and providing dietary protein in the form of meat. This of course involved the development of weapons, skills and cooperative strategy. In the process, the typical male sapiens aggressiveness and tendency toward risk-taking must have been selected for as well.

Stones of a Prescribed Weight

As the plane banks for its final approach to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, the women aboard transform themselves.  Every trace of makeup has been carefully wiped away during visits to the toilet. Head scarves are tightened along with seat belts. While they may have boarded as Asian beauties, each and every one is a picture of Muslim modesty in the line for the passport check to enter the Islamic Republic.

            Of all the changes that have swept Iran during the more than three decades since the fall of the shah, those that have affected women are the most visible symbols of the regime that came to power. The transformation was both complete and abrupt, considering that the tradition of hejab – Islamic covering for women – had all but died out in Iran, at least for the urban majority, at the time of the revolution.

            A glance through almost any middle class family photo album reveals all the familiar snaps. There are wedding days with brides in white, girls in bathing suits at the beach and lovers holding hands.  Women appear in sun dresses, tennis shorts and the full range of female hair styles.

            Leaf further back in time and it is obvious that the ‘60s hit Iran with many of the same phenomena that Europe and North America experienced. Adolescent boys sported long hair and bell-bottoms. Girls wore mini-dresses. It is only when one gets back to the faded, yellow photographs of grandparents and great-grandparents that one begins to see head coverings on the women.

            The effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization on the country, together with a 1934 ban on the chador by Reza Shah, the last shah’s father, had removed the custom from all but the most traditional sectors of society. Indeed, through most of the ‘60s and ‘70s, particularly in the middle-class areas of Tehran, while women covered to attend the mosque, it was the prostitutes who habitually wore the chador, not for religious reasons, but to cover the skimpy costumes of their trade.

            During the final days of the monarchy, however, wearing a head scarf became a symbol of political protest. Because there was such widespread discontent and because Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious man, was able to focus this discontent, women took to wearing the scarf during the street demonstrations out of respect for the perceived spiritual aspects of the uprising.

            While a sizable minority of women embraced this return to traditional values with enthusiasm, many soon found themselves trapped unwillingly behind the veil. As radical fundamentalists hijacked what had started as essentially a middle class revolution, patrols of Revolutionary Guards appeared on the streets, meting out instant justice to those who failed to comply with the new moral order.

            Although enforcement is extremely haphazard, the penalties for transgression are severe. From time to time, newspapers publish a menu of torments – 70 lashes for lipstick, 40 lashes for eye makeup or nail polish.

            Those caught in more serious violations of the moral code, prostitutes, for example, or even just unlucky lovers, are in deep trouble. They are buried up to the neck in sand with their head covered. A hundred local people, marshaled by the religious authorities, are then gathered in a circle around them and throw stones of a prescribed weight.

Ruins of Iskandar

Located in the Kashmir Valley about 40 kms west of the Indian city of Srinagar, Iskandar (Alexandria) was built by Greek colonists in the wake of Alexander the Great's 4th century BCE conquests.  It is notable for representing the farthest eastern penetration of Hellenistic cultural influences.  Iskandar flourished only briefly.  Beginning after the death of the conqueror in 323BCE, Iskandar was slowly swamped and assimilated by the indigenous culture.

The Smart Money

How can anyone take free trade seriously? Clearly no one in any government or the global corporate world does. The parts of the world economy that are able to compete internationally are primarily the state-subsidized ones: resource extraction, capital-intensive agriculture, high-tech industry, weapons, etc. The irony is that research and development is paid for with taxes, while anything marketable is taken over by the private sector. This combination of public subsidy and private profit is called free enterprise. It’s a sad state of affairs when the best investment advice urges oil futures, and shares in weapons manufacturers and privatized water. But that’s where the smart money seems to be going.

The World in Black and White

Then meets now...

Rajasthan, India

After All

The false prosperity that the West has enjoyed since it began its rise to world dominance at the end of the medieval period was fueled initially by plunder. Think of the Spanish in Mexico and Peru. Think of the British in Bengal and North America.

            Once this dominance began to stabilize in the face of colonialism and the emergence of capitalism, the system ran on exploitation.  Think of the slave trade.  Think of Indian cotton, woven in Manchester and sold back to the Indians.

            Most recently, the system has been powered by unprecedented amounts of debt.

            Initially, this debt was relatively easy to come to terms with, partly by virtue of the fact that its relative size diminished in relation to that of the expanding economy, and partly through inflation, which reduced the significance of the actual amount of the debt in relation to the amount of money in circulation.

            The problem is, of course, that debt, even when created out of thin air, like a Treasury bill, is effectively a promise tied to some sort of resource.  It is based on the idea that something will eventually be produced and sold by someone in order to generate the capital required to pay the debt.

            Unfortunately there are now non-negotiable constraints on economic expansion.  Even the desperate optimism of the political and financial classes will not save the situation. After all, there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West and the asymmetrical distribution of global resources must continue.

Digital Faces & Postmodern Social Landscapes

Moodswing

Let Me Count the Ways

I love thee

With serotonin produced in my raphe nuclei.

I love thee

With testosterone receptors deep in my hypothalamus.

I love thee

With dopamine that floods my primitive reptilian brain.

World View

Ideological renovations...

Beijing, China

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 5

Too Gruesome to Run

There are mobs of lepers, blind people, the maimed and the crippled.  In addition to whiffs of burning, a close approximation to whatever brimstone smells like, the sharp stink of festering shit and stale urine hangs over these slums of gobbed and spittled pavements and knotted, sooty, noisy, honking traffic, drought, then flooding, disease then hopelessness.

            Confronted by a gruesome, thrusting, leprous stump, a nightmarishly eroded face, pleading, streaming eyes, we shake off the beggar children clinging like tenacious burrs, their filthy fingers in our pockets. The only sanctuary for meditation is a stinking latrine, the noises outside coming from the traffic of whores and soldiers and dogs fighting in the dusty street, and the grinding wheels of the carts, piled high with swaying people and baggage and dirty bedrolls and lolling children, pulled by desperate, frightened, wide-eyed, wild horses and donkeys with toast-rack ribs, the flies swarming over the sores in their hides made by the constant rubbing of the harness, all fleeing for their lives.

            We are having documentaries instead of dreams. Each night the same images: people weeping, others bleeding, eruptions of cruelty and savagery, enduring injustices and callousness, bewilderment, shame, sorrow and pointlessness.

            A man was arrested for riding a train without a ticket.  He spent the next thirty years in jail awaiting trial because his case papers had been misplaced.

            There are thousands of refugees pouring into the city in advance of the invading army. Armed squatters are stealing other people’s homes. A new and more malevolent breed of gunmen is emerging onto the streets. Hundreds of civilians are dying in the bombing raids, more than half of them women and children who are not, and can not be, criminals or terrorists or any other kind of enemy.

            Reporters speak from their hotel balconies, the smoke from the burning slums nicely framed against the clear blue sky in the background.

            “As political alternatives have been eliminated,” they say, “the difficulty of deciding has been compounded by the difficulty of living with what has already been decided. The stagnation of the state has given rise to an alienated politics which oppresses rather than liberates.”

            Thus the stage is set for an epic catastrophe. All the elements of farce and tragedy, from hubris and delusion to final calamity are in place. Officers dine at high table in their ambassador’s ruined residence, their red wine served by liveried waiters, their table graced by attractive women.

            A glad-handing politician in the face of a full-scale legitimacy crisis passes through a hostile crowd followed by a camera. People can smell his sweat.

            “This is your land. These are your houses, your meadows and gardens, your memories,” he tells them. “The nation is glorious, its people steadfast.”

            From which direction will death explode in on him? Will it be a smiling, handshaking, garlanded suicide bomber like with Rajiv? Chopped down by rifle fire from her bodyguards, like Rajiv’s mom? A cool sniper, with or without a conspiracy, as with JFK and King? Strung up in the marketplace like Najibula? Cut down in a cold rain of hot angry lead like Mr. and Mrs. Ceausescu? Bazooka-ed in exile in his Mercedes, like Somoza? Loneliness and pneumonia in a filthy, freezing, concrete cell like Liu Shao Chi?  Whichever, there’s anticipation that unpredictably, one day the crowd will turn like a pack of dogs.

            The photographs show severed heads and dismembered corpses, amid the rubble of ruined villages, each a Golgotha, a Guernica, some with dead cows and horses, most too gruesome to run, even in the back pages.


To be continued...

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

 Inner Mongolia

Early in their evolutionary history, Homo sapiens began expressing a unique urge to understand and influence their environment, seeking to explain phenomena and manipulate materials. This instinct led to the development of technology.  Beginning with the mastery of fire and the fashioning of stone tools in the Paleolithic, sapiens slowly and incrementally accumulated a vast array of tools and skills, eventually allowing them to invade virtually every habitat on the planet.

 Afghanistan

Technological development was excruciatingly slow for tens of thousands of years, until, beginning in the era we call the Enlightenment, advances in the natural sciences laid the foundation for an explosion of technical expansion.  Since then, sapiens technology has become so refined that some members of the species are even capable of making replacement body parts.

Thinking the Unthinkable

The era of ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing and consumption is over, done, finished, for good.  Only charlatans, fools and the willfully blind, claim to believe otherwise.

            So too is the exponential growth of technology which is running up against the finite amount of wisdom so far accumulated by the sciences.  There will be further refinements, no doubt, as the last few pieces of the puzzle of the material universe fall into place, but no more big game-changing great leaps, as there were, for example, with the harnessing of fire, the invention of moveable type, the development of steam power, or even, most recently, the emergence of the digital.

            Both phenomena are only blips on the timeline of human history in any case.  We have spent countless millennia living in static economic environments, making little or no technical progress.  The past three hundred years or so have been an anomaly.

            Thomas Malthus was right.  Economic growth in the long term is now out of the question. In a world in which the human population grows faster than the economy there will always be a looser for every winner.  Moreover, the losers will naturally suspect the winners of taking unfair advantage, if not of outright racketeering, and in most cases they will be right.  As world population peaks about midway through the present century, in the face of the inevitable competition for food, water and fuel, the losers will also be largely dead.

            The economic order is neither just nor sustainable.  Everywhere the globalizing free market squeezes the middle class, enriches small elites and broadens the membership of the excluded.  At current rates of consumption and population growth, global economic collapse is imminent.  Do the math.  It’s time to begin thinking the hitherto unthinkable.

Ruins of Datong

Datong, located in northern Shanxi Province, China, was since ancient times, an important node of enterprise and exchange on the Silk Road between China and Mongolia.  Beginning in the mid-7^th century CE, it became a centre of Buddhist scholarship and worship as well.  Its library once contained the entire Chinese Buddhist canon carved on over eighty thousand wood blocks for printing.  Its grottoes still contain over 50,000 carved images of the Buddha.  Datong was sacked and destroyed in 1649 in the violence that led to the collapse of the Ming dynasty.

The World in Black and White

Ideological contradictions and rough justice...

Guatemala City

Seeing Through the Smoke

As I was growing up, the symbolism of the various cigarette brands coloured my fantasies and aspirations and contributed elements to my very identity in ways that were subtle and powerful, yet virtually invisible at the time.

            I realized this one insomniac night, while rummaging around in a drawer.  I discovered part of a long-forgotten pack of Salem.  Images of witches and legal procedures came fleetingly to mind.  As I sucked on one to ignite it and exhaled my essence into the room, I was painfully conscious of the irrationality of the act.

            My mother smoked during her pregnancy with me and I am convinced I emerged from the womb looking for a fag.  I was born an infant addict, condemned by regular placental infusions to a childhood of miserable, but mercifully unconscious, cold turkey.  It took me a full fourteen and a half years to get my next fix.

            That first time behind the barn, when all the other boys were coughing and gagging and turning green and throwing up, I was in a reverie of deja vu, having recognized something familiar; knowing that at last I’d found something that had been missing; something that gave me solace.  That black and white image of the rebel without a cause, slouched in his leather jacket with his hands in his pockets, with a fag dangling from his lips, played a part too.  I know it did.

How was I to know any better, back in those days, long before the Marlboro Man died of lonely, hacking emphysema?  After all, the iconography of tobacco was seamlessly woven into the fabric of society.  On the back covers of my mother’s Women’s Day magazines, that I’d leaf through looking for brassiere and corset ads while sitting on the toilet, there were colour photographs of sincere-looking, white-coated doctors pausing for a smoke between surgical procedures, with stethoscopes round their necks and those round, silvery reflector disks with a hole in centre on their foreheads, telling me that Lucky Strikes would stimulate my heart and circulation.  How true, in a way.

             And those Camels, posed in front of palm trees and the pyramids, and the bearded sailor in the little circle on the sea-blue packs of Players spoke to me of romance and distant shores, and brought to mind images of the droopy, bare-breasted, black women I’d seen in the National Geographic Magazine, beating their millet with mortars and pestles made from poles and hollowed-out logs.

Digital Faces & Postmodern Social Landscapes

The Engagement

Continental or Native Vegetarian Breakfast

Pleasure, once I overcame the major influences of Catholicism and it became an end in itself, began, little by little, to take on the qualities of work. Whereas the gratification of forbidden impulses used to arouse guilt, once I’d dealt with those issues, failure to have fun lowered my self-esteem.

I countered with psychic self-improvement. I got in touch with my feelings, I ate healthy, took lessons, immersed myself in the wisdom of the East, learned how to relate, and even overcame guilt and fear at the prospect of pleasure itself. All this came to be measured by standards of achievement, like amateur sport gone professional.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the woman I was with at the time, who was in the habit of answering everything I said by asking, “Are you sure that’s what you meant to say?” was into, of all things, the measurement of sexual performance.

She insisted that satisfaction depended on the acquisition of proper technique and believed that it could be achieved only after disciplined, coordinated effort, practice and study. She had books and diagrams showing the location of the g-spot, and newsletters from the Boston Women’s Collective. It started out quite exciting, but in the end I was just exhausted.

I was finally able to break away and repudiate the rhetoric of achievement when she ran off to an ashram providing group therapy sessions for vegetarians, advocates of free love, and counter-cultural enthusiasts, with herbs and potions and crystals on silver chains, in which the attainment of spiritual wisdom, coming face to face with God Herself, required the emptying of the mind of all preconceived notions.

Spiritual guidance took the form of encouragement to stand and scream at the surf pounding on the beach at Goa. There was massage therapy and aroma therapy and encounter groups, the brochure said, as well as various other facilities to assist catharsis and the search for inner peace, with a choice of single or double occupancy and continental or native vegetarian breakfast.

World View

The Fountain of Blood.

Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Tehran, Iran.

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 4

Luckless and Unconsidered

Smoke from the burning embassy district hangs low in the sky.  The presidential palace rises out of the mud, a gaudy display of staircases and columns and coats of arms, with its pair of bookend armoured personnel carriers parked back-to-back at the gate facing angry, stone-throwing crowds.

In front of their hovels, luckless and unconsidered, women cook rice and beans or fry bananas on smouldering twigs or dung cakes, while their babies mew and crawl and weep, their tears streaking their dusty faces.  The men rest, fat paunches over waistbands, machine guns propped to one side, stoned eyes focused on the infinity of despondence, the inherent dignity of the human person lost in a social landscape that is nothing but a heap of combustible material, littered with the usual debris; venereal disease, neglected bastards, piles of un-biodegradable trash, people reduced to despair, a few people’s privileges paid for by many other people’s work.

One, little more than a girl but old, seeks and finds her naked scrap of an offspring from the ragged children with matted hair who are sitting in the dust.  She squats and attaches the child to her nipple.  After, she wipes his backside and his snotty face with the hem of her wrapped skirt and places him back in the dust.

Down the hill, wading and splashing in the delta streams, older children squeal and shout and grab at the teats of slovenly, slothful water buffalo, amid a detritus of rusted hulks and engine blocks and broken bicycles and dirty plastic bags, where only twisted flowers grow in the morning sunshine filtered through a haze of diesel exhaust. The teats are covered with a film of the black crankcase oil that slicks the surface of the river from shore to shore.  They squirt warm milk and burnt fossil hydrocarbons down their eager throats.

To be continued…

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

 India

Homo sapiens are uniquely adept at utilizing systems of communication for self-expression. In addition to the exchange of ideas and information through language communication, each cultural tradition has evolved a complex set of non-verbal signals capable of conveying at a glance detailed ideas about identity and ideology.

 El Salvador

Some of these culturally evolved signals are almost universally recognizable by all sapiens.  They are a sort of communication short cut, rich in information, that function to quickly define the relationship between the recipient and the signaler, making reciprocal behavioral expectations clear to both parties.

Professor Nemesis

Professor Nemesis is obnoxious even in small doses, but especially so when accompanied by his own self-aggrandizement and his personal group of sycophants.  His academic fame was established back in the day, when he'd finessed a multi-million dollar research grant to come to the conclusion that people who use television as their primary source of information tend to be less well informed than people who read newspapers, and that education levels - he likes the word mediated - have a lot to do with this.

He was on all the talk shows, even Larry King.  His methodology was impeccable, indeed elegant.  I often heard him bragging about it over the din at lunchtime in the staff canteen, explaining that the data collection itself was a display of logistics that would have inspired the heart of any sergeant major.  The world owes a debt of gratitude to Professor Nemesis and this is a fact that he misses no opportunity to communicate.

            Don’t be too quick to accuse me of bitterness.  It’s just that I grew to know his classroom methods very well.  His main tactics are intimidation and ridicule and he uses both very liberally and with sadistic skill.  He speaks an ugly language, using lots of abstract nouns that activate my spell checker; nouns like textuality, discursivity, supplementarity, synchronicity, plurality.  At one time or another, I had every one of his graduate students weeping and snivelling and blowing their noses into tissues in my office over the burning humiliation they felt in his presence.

            “Why haven’t you read Goffman?” he’d thunder at them across a silent, anxious seminar table, pointing an accusing finger; though Goffman wasn’t on the reading list, only things authored, or more accurately, co-authored with earlier generations of graduate students, by Nemesis himself.

Ruins of Heliopolis

 Heliopolis, located in modern Lebanon at the town of Balbec, was, at its peak in the 2nd century CE, the largest spiritual sanctuary in the classical world.  Its temples feature the largest stones ever quarried, moved and set in place by human endeavor; some weighing almost 1,000 tonnes. The city dwindled in importance as Christianity gradually took hold in the area in the subsequent centuries.  A series of devastating earthquakes did the rest.

Sufficient Justification

Long to be free of hunger and rage. Seek to achieve a calm detachment beyond emotion. Outgrow dependence. Eat a balanced diet and brush your teeth after every meal. Cultivate an indifference to life itself. Acknowledge its passing. Take moderate exercise, cook with olive oil, drink a little red wine every day, and stay away from cigarettes and heroin. Be intoxicated with laughter. Let curses dissolve like the evaporation of a nightmare on awakening. Be noble, be strong, be great in heart and be compassionate. Practice forbearance. Give. Ask for nothing. Hope for nothing. Don't be afraid. The will to live is sufficient justification for being alive.

The World in Black and White

Twice a day, everyday.

Quetta, Pakistan

High Art and Low

Consider this music called jazz. With its social and cultural origins among the illiterate and more or less despised and dispossessed African diasporas of the southern American states: brothel pianists, nomadic cotton pickers, watchers of passing trains and steamboats, street-corner guitar players, out-casts and strumpets, it has expanded and evolved to include a cultural community that today cuts across boundaries of age, sex, economic status, vocation, ethnicity and the state. The most vital in the abundance of contemporary music, jazz has become established world-wide as the mother vernacular of urban popular music.

Globally, jazz complements each individual cultural musical tradition by offering a universality that has not become lost in vulgarity and self-reference. More importantly, the value that jazz musicians attach to innovation leads most to hold a view of composition and music history that is truly global in scope. Just as jazz was born in America in an amalgam of African and European Diasporas, it has continued the practice of absorbing different musical influences and has remained capable of absorbing new traits without sacrificing either its dignity or identity.

In a global cultural landscape in which popular music has become increasingly strident, aggressive and barren, jazz continues to exalt the simple charm of existence without much demand for reflection on the part of the listener. With the music of contemporary high culture becoming progressively rarefied, abstract and minimal, leaving room for only highly sublimated emotions, jazz, by its raw exuberance, brings an element of balance. It is at once both high art and low; the true classical music of the global, post-modern age and also its genuine folk expression; through its various fusions the living, growing, musical incarnation of the global cultural personality, its once oral traditions of generational transmission now accomplished electronically.

If jazz has any purpose, it is a way to discover, to create, and to define a missing part within human beings related to what it means to be human. In this sense, jazz could be called an existentialist art. Jazz musicians create their essence by playing jazz, as both the global classical music of post-modernity and as its folk music.

Digital Faces & Postmodern Social Landscapes

Plane to see...

The Age of Reason

The age of reason was six, we were told, my first grade classmates and I.  With it came the ability to distinguish evil from good, right from wrong, and the state of sin from a state of grace.  Our baptisms had freed us from the guilt of original sin, a guilt that even then I wasn’t willing to acknowledge because it wasn’t fair.  Now, through confession and the Eucharist we would be fully members of the one, true, apostolic and universal church, unlike the poor, dead, un-baptized African babies who were condemned to the spiritual and sensory deprivation of Limbo.

            While far away in Moscow, Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin, and in New York City, Charlie Parker lay dying, painstaking preparations drilled us in our catechism as if we were a flock of talking parrots and set us to commit to memory the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, and mea culpa, the Confiteor, the confession of faith.

            We were told the Mysteries.  Ah, the Mysteries; the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the tongues of fire and the infallibility of the Pope.  And somehow I began to acquire the elements of an image of the source of all evil as a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hooves, ass’s ears, claws, fiery eyes, gnashing teeth, a huge phallus and a sulphurous smell.  All this before the Second Vatican Council, when the priest turned around and started speaking English instead of Latin and we were told not to say Holy Ghost anymore, it was Spirit, Holy Spirit, because we didn’t believe in ghosts.