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.

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.

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.

Ruins of Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first city in history to be destroyed by an atomic bomb.

Even with hindsight it’s impossible to be sure whether the use of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the post-war nuclear arms race or whether the bombs demonstrated their horror in a way that no harmless experiment could ever have done, and so helped to hold the ultimate violence in check throughout the Cold War.

Ruins of Ephesus

This tiny fragment of marble (8cm) has a story to tell.

Our story takes place in Ephesus, located on the eastern Mediterranean coast in present day Turkey. Ephesus was a Greek city-state of classic antiquity, home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, namely, the Temple of Artemis, a many-breasted fertility goddess. It boasted the second largest library in the ancient world after Alexandria.

The façade of the ancient library still greets visitors today. As do the remains of the public baths across the street, featuring an outer courtyard latrine surrounded by marble benches, under which water ran to flush away the waste. Musicians are said to have performed on a platform under a colonnade in the centre of the courtyard to entertain the people as they went about their business, (so to speak).

You guessed it. This fragment was once part of that very toilet seat.

There’s more:

Also to be seen in Ephesus is the House of the Virgin Mary, both a Christian and Muslim shrine. It is believed by many of both faiths that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was taken to this small stone house by St. John and lived there until her Assumption into heaven.

This is clearly the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. Why else would the current Pope say, on his very first foreign trip, undertaken to Turkey, on November 29, 2008:

"From here in Ephesus, a city blessed by the presence of Mary Most Holy, who we know is loved and venerated also by Muslims, let us lift up to the Lord a special prayer for peace between peoples."

It is my contention that this fragment may well be a priceless holy relic.

After all, what can the Virgin have done with her time between the Ascension and her own Assumption? I suspect she must have availed herself of the wondrous library. And when nature called, she must have slipped across to the public toilet, where this fragment of marble, attached as it was to the rest of the seat at the time, almost certainly must have come into contact with the immaculate backside.

Ephesus dwindled and was eventually abandoned in the 15th century as its port silted up and its trade access failed.

Certain Female Spiders

Chivalry is dead, but that tradition of gallantry formerly masked and to some degree mitigated the organized oppression of women and its echoes still resonate. While males monopolized political and economic power, they made their domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and postures, letting them pass through doorways and get into lifeboats first.

They set themselves up as the protectors of the weaker sex, and this cloying but useful fiction set some limits to their capacity to exploit women through sheer physical force. Although, at the same time, the counter-convention of droit de seigneur, which justified the predatory exploits of privileged males against women socially inferior to themselves, showed that at no time did men cease to regard most women as fair game.

The exploitation of women by men, far from constituting a secondary formation dependant in one way or another on the organization of production, as good Marxists are taught to think, antedates the establishment of production based on private property. Needless to say, no slur clings to Odysseus for his infidelities to Penelope, willing or unwilling, in the course of his wanderings homeward. The faithfulness required of a man to his home and his kin did not include the chastity of his body as it did in the case of his wife. The long history of rape and seduction serves as a reminder that animal strength and nothing to do with the economic system, remain the basis of masculine ascendancy, manifested in its most direct, ancient and brutal form.

Yet polite conventions, even when they are no more than a facade, function as an operational myth that provide women with a degree of ideological leverage in their struggle to domesticate the wildness and savagery of men. We have surrounded essentially exploitative relationships with a network of reciprocal obligations, which if nothing else, obscures the exploitation, thereby making it perhaps a little easier to bear. Nevertheless, regardless of her poise and her intellectual maturity, the fact remains that Simone was still deeply hurt by Jean-Paul’s infidelities.

Male and female are subjective assignments. A society which grants the privilege of doing or being done to, exclusively to one sex or the other, warps its children. A child of either sex has urges to penetrate, devour, and possess; to be cherished, dominated, and contained. Who can resist a detailed account of how certain female spiders eat their mates?

Ruins of Tikal

Tikal, located in present day Guatemala, one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya, reached its peak about 900CE, only to be abandoned within a century due to over-exploitation, deforestation and erosion, exacerbated by climate change.

Tracking the Changes

The pace of change began to pick up after the soldiers in Little Rock, after Elvis appeared in black and white from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show, (white-bread America missing the point that the point was those thrusting hips), and those changes continued and accelerated and gathered momentum as part of the rights of cultural passage from Eisenhower through the sacrificial Kennedy to Nixon, when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters displaced Dale Carnegie as the arbiters of the ethos.

We all thought the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution actually had something to do with culture, and we were vaguely in favor of that. We downed quantities of peyote and mescaline and LSD and wrestled with insight while watching the dark clouds of enlightenment hanging over angry orange sunrises through bloodshot eyes. There were black and red posters of Che in his beret, and one that said Electric Circus in day-glo letters that shone in the dark.

Beatles, Doors, topless, bottomless, Nixon, Cambodia, Kent State. Coltrane died in sixty-seven. We let a wispy-haired, blue-jeaned, cowboy-booted, Yankee draft-dodger sleep on our floor for a week that summer. He never once took off his leather jacket, even though it was hot. Experience was something that could be occupied, taken possession of, known in its moment-to-moment quality, its texture, its delight and its terror.

Were there any of us of that generation who were not skewed and exhilarated and disillusioned by the simple awareness of ourselves against the backdrop of 1968? Doctor King’s dream moved us deeply, and we felt an enthusiastic agreement when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said, with one of those distinctively Indian waggles of his head, “If we are blessed with the ability to have desires, why should we not also have the right to try and realize them?”

But the very pretence of revolutionary solidarity itself vanished, as the Woodstock nation mutated into Altamont amid phosphorescent parodies of pop paintings inspired by the mindless minimalismof modern art. It was the end of May, 1969, when the self-consciously and perhaps arrogantly named Art Ensemble of Chicago, having come to the conclusion that the American mid-west was exhausted of creative possibilities, left for Europe.

The beliefs that we might have clung to had been cancelled by the advances of science. We were metaphysical vagabonds, lost souls in a state of confusion. God was well and truly dead. What passed for spirituality was simply an outpouring of words and style; a mixture of pop psychology, recycled hippie philosophy, scraps of Hindu claptrap,* cultural-specific nonsense and Judeo-Christian contradictions.

*Jagganath means lord of the universe. It is one of the names of Krishna in his incarnation as Vishnu. He’s a democratic socialist. All castes are equal before him. And he crushes them, every one.

The Distant Past

I can still remember how it ended. The twentieth century, I mean. We were free to make whatever moves the constraints of physics and chemistry permitted. Amid dreams and visions, signs and wonders, everything was relative, value neutral. All behaviour was culturally relative and socially constructed.

We all knew, after all, that social reality is a kind of collective evolving fiction, constructed and maintained by the processes of socialization, institutionalization, tradition and everyday social interaction, all through the medium of language, the jostling world-views of different social classes, religions, cultures, media exposures, and so on, to be escaped only through drugs and alcohol, religious transcendence, psychotherapy perhaps, schizophrenia or love. Only then do our hallucinations and fantasies become real, and metaphors become literal.

Thus everyone's actions were morally equivalent to everyone else's actions. Heroes acted out of self-interest, just as criminals did. The guy who risked his life racing into the burning building to save the child was no better than the arsonist who had set the blaze. There were almost no taboos left to transgress. After Tito died, the Croatian authorities renamed the streets after Fascist leaders.

Some of us aspired to a refined hedonism, a celebration of luxury, of the pleasure of satisfying desires in the most refined way, with no expense spared. Others of us scrounged in litter bins, hoping to find the remnants of a Big Mack or a sweet-and-sour takeaway that the flies and rats had not already commandeered. There was the texture of plastic and new-age philosophy, the re-release of Star Wars and the re-appearance of flared trousers, all parts of a kind of nostalgia industry for the increasingly recent past, to fill the void that lay at the heart of experience.

Ruins of Palmyra

Palmyra, located in modern Syria, once a flourishing interface between the Silk Road and the Mediterranean, was besieged and sacked by the Romans in 272CE.