i am buying a sack of ginseng seed and setting up some guerilla gardens around certain of my communities' centers. it's $75/lb. i got a hookup through rural action. the king of the forest returns to share adaptogenic immortality with those of us savvy enough to respect! i cannot publicly divulge the sites, lest rogues come and stake out ground zero and sneak off with the roots. not that they'll be ready for a few years yet.
in other plant news, there is this rumor that cucumbers are not just the poor semite's bitter watermellon. this information is questionable (it claims to be from the NYTimes but it ain't on their site) but i do find munching on fresh cukes is a good way to keep cool and hydrated in the summer months
http://www.lankanewspapers.com/news/2009/10/49154_space.html
This information was in The New York Times several weeks ago as part of their `Spotlight on the Home` series that highlighted creative and fanciful ways to solve common problems.
1. Cucumbers contain most of the vitamins you need every day, just one cucumber contains Vitamin B1, Vitamin B2, Vitamin B3, Vitamin B5, Vitamin B6, Folic Acid, Vitamin C, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium and Zinc.
2. Feeling tired in the afternoon, put down the caffeinated soda and pick up a cucumber. Cucumbers are a good source of B Vitamins and Carbohydrates that can provide that quick pick-me-up that can last for hours.
3. Tired of your bathroom mirror fogging up after a shower? Try rubbing a cucumber slice along the mirror, it will eliminate the fog and provide a soothing, spa-like fragrance.
4. Are grubs and slugs ruining your planting beds? Place a few slices in a small pie tin and your garden will be free of pests all season long. The chemicals in the cucumber react with the aluminum to give off a scent undetectable to humans but drive garden pests crazy and make them flee the area.
5. Looking for a fast and easy way to remove cellulite before going out or to the pool? Try rubbing a slice or two of cucumbers along your problem area for a few minutes, the phytochemicals in the cucumber cause the collagen in your skin to tighten, firming up the outer layer and reducing the visibility of cellulite. Works great on wrinkles too!!!
6. Want to avoid a hangover or terrible headache? Eat a few cucumber slices before going to bed and wake up refreshed and headache free. Cucumbers contain enough sugar, B vitamins and electrolytes to replenish essential nutrients the body lost, keeping everything in equilibrium, avoiding both a hangover and headache!!
7. Looking to fight off that afternoon or evening snacking binge? Cucumbers have been used for centuries and often used by European trappers, traders and explores for quick meals to thwart off starvation.
8. Have an important meeting or job interview and you realize that you don`t have enough time to polish your shoes? Rub a freshly cut cucumber over the shoe, its chemicals will provide a quick and durable shine that not only looks great but also repels water.
9. Out of WD 40 and need to fix a squeaky hinge? Take a cucumber slice and rub it along the problematic hinge, and voila, the squeak is gone!
10. Stressed out and don`t have time for massage, facial or visit to the spa? Cut up an entire cucumber and place it in a boiling pot of water, the chemicals and nutrients from the cucumber with react with the boiling water and be released in the steam, creating a soothing, relaxing aroma that has been shown the reduce stress in new mothers and college students during final exams.
11. Just finish a business lunch and realize you don`t have gum or mints? Take a slice of cucumber and press it to the roof of your mouth with your tongue for 30 seconds to eliminate bad breath, the phytochemcials will kill the bacteria in your mouth responsible for causing bad breath.
12. Looking for a `green` way to clean your faucets, sinks or stainless steel? Take a slice of cucumber and rub it on the surface you want to clean, not only will it remove years of tarnish and bring back the shine, but is won`t leave streaks and won`t harm you fingers or fingernails while you clean.
13. Using a pen and made a mistake? Take the outside of the cucumber and slowly use it to erase the pen writing, also works great on crayons and markers that the kids have used to decorate the walls!!
Showing posts with label articles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label articles. Show all posts
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Pakistan's Sufis Preach Faith and Ecstasy
The believers in Islamic mysticism embrace a personal approach to their faith and a different outlook on how to run their country’s government
* By Nicholas Schmidle
* Photographs by Aaron Huey
* Smithsonian magazine, December 2008
In the desert swelter of southern Pakistan, the scent of rosewater mixed with a waft of hashish smoke. Drummers pounded away as celebrants swathed in red pushed a camel bedecked with garlands, tinsel and multihued scarfs through the heaving crowd. A man skirted past, grinning and dancing, his face glistening like the golden dome of a shrine nearby. "Mast Qalandar!" he cried. "The ecstasy of Qalandar!"
The camel reached a courtyard packed with hundreds of men jumping in place with their hands in the air, chanting "Qalandar!" for the saint buried inside the shrine. The men threw rose petals at a dozen women who danced in what seemed like a mosh pit near the shrine's entrance. Enraptured, one woman placed her hands on her knees and threw her head back and forth; another bounced and jiggled as if she were astride a trotting horse. The drumming and dancing never stopped, not even for the call to prayer.
I stood at the edge of the courtyard and asked a young man named Abbas to explain this dancing, called dhamaal. Though dancing is central to the Islamic tradition known as Sufism, dhamaal is particular to some South Asian Sufis. "When a djinn infects a human body," Abbas said, referring to one of the spirits that populate Islamic belief (and known in the West as "genies"), "the only way we can get rid of it is by coming here to do dhamaal." A woman stumbled toward us with her eyes closed and passed out at our feet. Abbas didn't seem to notice, so I pretended not to either.
"What goes through your head when you are doing dhamaal?" I asked.
"Nothing. I don't think," he said. A few women rushed in our direction, emptied a water bottle on the semiconscious woman's face and slapped her cheeks. She shot upright and danced back into the crowd. Abbas smiled. "During dhamaal, I just feel the blessings of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar wash over me."
Every year, a few hundred thousand Sufis converge in Seh- wan, a town in Pakistan's southeastern Sindh province, for a three-day festival marking the death of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, in 1274. Qalandar, as he is almost universally called, belonged to a cast of mystics who consolidated Islam's hold on this region; today, Pakistan's two most populous provinces, Sindh and Punjab, comprise a dense archipelago of shrines devoted to these men. Sufis travel from one shrine to another for festivals known as urs, an Arabic word for "marriage," symbolizing the union between Sufis and the divine.
Sufism is not a sect, like Shiism or Sunnism, but rather the mystical side of Islam—a personal, experiential approach to Allah, which contrasts with the prescriptive, doctrinal approach of fundamentalists like the Taliban. It exists throughout the Muslim world (perhaps most visibly in Turkey, where whirling dervishes represent a strain of Sufism), and its millions of followers generally embrace Islam as a religious experience, not a social or political one. Sufis represent the strongest indigenous force against Islamic fundamentalism. Yet Western countries have tended to underestimate their importance even as the West has spent, since 2001, millions of dollars on interfaith dialogues, public diplomacy campaigns and other initiatives to counter extremism. Sufis are particularly significant in Pakistan, where Taliban-inspired gangs threaten the prevailing social, political and religious order.
Pakistan, carved out of India in 1947, was the first modern nation founded on the basis of religious identity. Questions about that identity have provoked dissent and violence ever since. Was Pakistan to be a state for Muslims, governed by civilian institutions and secular laws? Or an Islamic state, governed by clerics according to sharia, or Islamic law? Sufis, with their ecumenical beliefs, typically favor the former, while the Taliban, in their fight to establish an extreme orthodoxy, seek the latter. The Taliban have antiaircraft weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and squads of suicide bombers. But the Sufis have drums. And history.
I asked Carl Ernst, an author of several books about Sufism and a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whether he thought Pakistan's Sufis could survive the wave of militant Islam sweeping east from the region along the Afghanistan border. "Sufism has been a part of the fabric of life in the Pakistan region for centuries, while the Taliban are a very recent phenomenon without much depth," he replied in an e-mail. "I would bet on the Sufis in the long run." This summer, the Taliban attracted a few hundred people to witness beheadings in Pakistan's tribal areas. In August, more than 300,000 Sufis showed up to honor Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.
Qalandar was an ascetic; he dressed in rags and tied a rock around his neck so that he was constantly bowing before Allah. His given name was Usman Marwandi; "Qalandar" was used by his followers as an honorific indicating his superior standing in the hierarchy of saints. He moved from a suburb of Tabriz, in modern-day Iran, to Sindh in the early 13th century. The remainder of his biography remains murky. The meaning of lal, or "red," in his name? Some say he had auburn hair, others believe he wore a red robe and still others say he once was scalded while meditating over a pot of boiling water.
In migrating to Sindh, Qalandar joined other mystics fleeing Central Asia as the Mongols advanced. Many of them settled temporarily in Multan, a city in central Punjab that came to be known as the "city of saints." Arab armies had conquered Sindh in 711, a hundred years after the founding of Islam, but they had paid more attention to empire-building than to religious conversions. Qalandar teamed with three other itinerant preachers to promote Islam amid a population of Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus.
The "four friends," as they became known, taught Sufism. They eschewed fire-and-brimstone sermons, and rather than forcibly convert those belonging to other religions, they often incorporated local traditions into their own practices. "The Sufis did not preach Islam like the mullah preaches it today," says Hamid Akhund, a former secretary of tourism and culture in the Sindh government. Qalandar "played the role of integrator," says Ghulam Rabbani Agro, a Sindhi historian who has written a book about Qalandar. "He wanted to take the sting out of religion."
Gradually, as the "friends" and other saints died, their enshrined tombs attracted legions of followers. Sufis believed that their descendants, referred to as pirs, or "spiritual guides," inherited some of the saints' charisma and special access to Allah. Orthodox clerics, or mullahs, considered such beliefs heretical, a denial of Islam's basic creed: "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet." While pirs encouraged their followers to engage Allah in a mystical sense and relish the beauty of the Koran's poetic aspects, the mullahs typically instructed their followers to memorize the Koran and study accounts of the Prophet's life, known collectively as the Hadith.
While the tension between Sufis and other Muslims continued through history, in Pakistan the dynamic between the two groups has lately entered an especially intense phase with the proliferation of militant groups. In one example three years ago, terrorists attacked an urs in Islamabad, killing more than two dozen people. After October 2007, when former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto—a native of Sindh province with roots in Sufism—returned from exile, terrorists twice targeted her for assassination, succeeding that December. Meanwhile, the Taliban persisted in their terror campaign against the Pakistani military and launched attacks in major cities.
I had seen the extremists up close; in the fall of 2007 I traveled throughout northwestern Pakistan for three months, reporting a story on the emergence of a new, considerably more dangerous generation of Taliban. In January 2008, two days after that story was published in the New York Times Magazine, I was expelled from Pakistan for traveling without government authorization to areas where the Taliban held sway. The next month, Bhutto's political party swept to victory in national elections, heralding the twilight of President Pervez Musharraf's military rule. It was an odd parallel: the return of democracy and the rise of the Taliban. In August, I secured another visa from the Pakistani government and went back to see how the Sufis were faring.
Over dinner in a Karachi hotel, Rohail Hyatt told me that the "modern-day mullah" was an "urban myth" and that such authoritarian clerics have "always been at war with Sufis." Hyatt, a Sufi, is also one of Pakistan's pop icons. Vital Signs, which he founded in 1986, became the country's biggest rock band in the late '80s. In 2002, the BBC named the band's 1987 hit, "Dil, Dil Pakistan" ("Heart, Heart Pakistan"), the third most popular international song of all time. But Vital Signs became inactive in 1997, and lead singer Junaid Jamshed, Hyatt's longtime friend, became a fundamentalist and decided that such music was un-Islamic.
Hyatt watched with despair as his friend adopted the rituals, doctrine and uncompromising approach espoused by the urban mullahs, who, in Hyatt's view, "believe that our identity is set by the Prophet" and less by Allah, and thus mistakenly gauge a man's commitment to Islam by such outward signs as the length of his beard, the cut of his trousers (the Prophet wore his above the ankle, for comfort in the desert) and the size of the bruise on his forehead (from regular, intense prayer). "These mullahs play to people's fears," Hyatt said. " ‘Here is heaven, here is hell. I can get you into heaven. Just do as I say.' "
I hadn't been able to find a clear, succinct definition of Sufism anywhere, so I asked Hyatt for one. "I can explain to you what love is until I turn blue in the face. I can take two weeks to explain everything to you," he said. "But there is no way I can make you feel it until you feel it. Sufism initiates that emotion in you. And through that process, religious experience becomes totally different: pure and absolutely nonviolent."
Hyatt is now the music director for Coca-Cola in Pakistan, and he hopes he can leverage some of his cultural influence—and access to corporate cash—to convey Sufism's message of moderation and inclusiveness to urban audiences. (He used to work for Pepsi, he said, but Coke is "way more Sufic.") He recently produced a series of live studio performances that paired rock acts with traditional singers of qawwali, devotional Sufi music from South Asia. One of the best-known qawwali songs is titled "Dama Dum Mast Qalandar," or "Every Breath for the Ecstasy of Qalandar."
Several politicians have also tried to popularize Sufism, with varying degrees of success. In 2006, as Musharraf faced political and military challenges from the resurgent Taliban, he established a National Sufi Council to promote Sufi poetry and music. "The Sufis always worked for the promotion of love and oneness of humanity, not for disunity or hatred," he said at the time. But Musharraf's venture was perceived as less than sincere.
"The generals hoped that since Sufism and devotion to shrines is a common factor of rural life, they would exploit it," Hamid Akhund told me. "They couldn't." Akhund chuckled at the thought of a centralized, military government trying to harness a decentralized phenomenon like Sufism. The Sufi Council is no longer active.
The Bhuttos—most prominently, Benazir and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—were much better at marshaling Sufi support, not least because their hometown lies in Sindh province and they have considered Lal Shahbaz Qalandar their patron saint. Qalandar's resting place became, in the judgment of University of Amsterdam scholar Oskar Verkaaik, "the geographical center of [the elder] Bhutto's political spirituality." After founding the Pakistan Peoples Party, Bhutto was elected president in 1971 and prime minister in 1973. (He was ousted in a coup in 1977 and hanged two years later.)
As Benazir Bhutto began her first campaign for prime minister, in the mid-1980s, her followers would greet her with the chant, "Benazir Bhutto Mast Qalandar" ("Benazir Bhutto, the ecstasy of Qalandar"). In late 2007, when she returned to Pakistan from an exile imposed by Musharraf, she received a heroine's welcome, especially in Sindh.
In Jamshoro, a town almost three hours north of Karachi, I met a Sindhi poet named Anwar Sagar. His office had been torched during the riots that followed Benazir Bhutto's assassination. More than six months later, smashed windowpanes were still unrepaired and soot covered the walls. "All the Bhuttos possess the spirit of Qalandar," Sagar told me. "The message of Qalandar was the belief in love and God." From his briefcase he pulled out a poem he had written just after Bhutto was killed. He translated the final lines:
She rose above the Himalayas,
Immortal she became,
The devotee of Qalandar became Qalandar herself.
"So who is next in line?" I asked. "Are all Bhuttos destined to inherit Qalandar's spirit?"
"This is just the beginning for Asif," Sagar said, referring to Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, who was elected president of Pakistan this past September. "So he hasn't attained the level of Qalandar yet. But I have great hope in Bilawal"—Bhutto and Zardari's 20-year-old son, who has been selected to lead the Pakistan Peoples Party after he finishes his studies at Oxford University in England—"that he can become another Qalandar."
Musharraf, a general who had seized power in a 1999 coup, resigned from office a week into my most recent trip. He had spent the better part of his eight-year regime as president, military chief and overseer of a compliant parliament. Pakistan's transition from a military government to a civilian one involved chipping away at his almost absolute control over all three institutions one by one. But civilian leadership by itself was no balm for Pakistan's many ills; Zardari's new regime faces massive challenges regarding the economy, the Taliban and trying to bring the military intelligence agencies under some control.
In the seven months that I had been away, the economy had gone from bad to worse. The value of the rupee had fallen almost 25 percent against the dollar. An electricity shortage caused rolling blackouts for up to 12 hours a day. Reserves of foreign currencies plunged as the new government continued to subsidize basic amenities. All these factors contributed to popular discontent with the government, an emotion that the Taliban exploited by lambasting the regime's perceived deficiencies. In Karachi, the local political party covered the walls of buildings along busy streets with posters that read: "Save Your City From Talibanization."
Perhaps the biggest challenge for the new government is reining in the military's intelligence agencies, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. The Pakistan Peoples Party has long been considered an anti-establishment party, at odds with the agencies. In late July, the PPP-led government announced that it was placing the ISI under the command of the Interior Ministry, wresting it from the army—then days later, under pressure from the military, reversed itself. A uniformed president may symbolize a military dictatorship, but Pakistan's military intelligence agencies, ISI and Military Intelligence (MI), are the true arbiters of power.
In August, I got what I believe was a firsthand indication of the extent of their reach. Two days after Musharraf bid farewell, I began my trip to Sehwan for the urs for Qalandar, along with photographer Aaron Huey; his wife, Kristin; and a translator whom it is best not to name. We had barely left Karachi's city limits when my translator took a phone call from someone claiming to work at the Interior Ministry Secretariat in Karachi. The caller peppered him with questions about me. The translator, sensing something odd, hung up and called the office of a senior bureaucrat in the Interior Ministry. A secretary answered the phone and, when we shared the name and title our caller had given, confirmed what we already suspected: "Neither that person nor that office exists." The secretary added: "It's probably just the [intelligence] agencies."
We continued north on the highway into the heart of Sindh, past water buffaloes soaking in muddy canals and camels resting in the shade of mango trees. About an hour later, my phone rang. The caller ID displayed the same number as the call that had supposedly come from the Interior Ministry Secretariat.
"Hello?"
"Nicholas?"
"Yes."
"I am a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper. I want to meet you to talk about the current political situation. When can we meet? Where are you? I can come right now."
"Can I call you back?" I said, and hung up.
My heart raced. Images of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic militants in Karachi in 2002, flashed through my mind. Pearl's last meeting had been with a terrorist pretending to be a fixer and translator. Many people believe that the Pakistani intelligence agencies were involved in Pearl's killing, as he was researching a possible link between the ISI and a jihadi leader with ties to Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber.
My phone rang again. An Associated Press reporter I knew told me that her sources in Karachi said the intelligence agencies were searching for me. I had assumed as much. But what did they want? And why would they request a meeting by pretending to be people who didn't exist?
The car fell silent. My translator made a few calls to senior politicians, bureaucrats and police officers in Sindh. They said they were treating the two phone calls as a kidnapping threat and would provide us with an armed escort for the rest of our trip. Within an hour, two police trucks arrived. In the lead truck, a man armed with a machine gun stood in the bed.
Another phone call, this time from a friend in Islamabad.
"Man, it's good to hear your voice," he said.
"Why?"
"Local TV stations are reporting that you've been kidnapped in Karachi."
Who was planting these stories? And why? With no shortage of conspiracy theories about fatal "car accidents" involving people in the bad graces of the intelligence agencies, I took the planted stories as serious warnings. But the urs beckoned. The four of us collectively decided that since we had traveled halfway around the world to see the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, we would do our damndest to get there, even if under police protection. After all, we could use Qalandar's blessings.
That evening, as the setting sun burned the color of a Creamsicle as it lit the sugar-cane fields on the horizon, I turned to the translator, hoping to lighten the mood.
"It's really beautiful here," I said.
He nodded, but his eyes stayed glued to the road. "Unfortunately, the fear factor spoils the whole fun of it," he said.
By then we could see buses clogging the highway, red flags flapping in the wind as the drivers raced for Qalandar's shrine. The railway ministry had announced that 13 trains would be diverted from their normal routes to transport worshipers. Some devotees even pedaled bicycles, red flags sticking up from the handlebars. We roared down the road in the company of Kalashnikov-toting police, a caravan of armed pilgrims.
The campsites began appearing about five miles from the shrine. Our car eventually mired in a human bog, so we parked and continued on foot. The alleys leading to the shrine reminded me of a carnival fun house—an overwhelming frenzy of lights, music and aromas. I walked beside a man blowing a snake charmer's flute. Stores lined the alley, with merchants squatting behind piles of pistachios, almonds and rosewater-doused candies. Fluorescent lights glowed like light sabers, directing lost souls to Allah.
Groups of up to 40 people heading for the shrine's golden dome carried long banners imprinted with Koranic verses. We followed one group into a tent packed with dancers and drummers next to the shrine. A tall man with curly, greasy shoulder-length hair was beating on a keg-size drum hanging from a leather strap around his neck. The intensity in his eyes, illuminated by a single bulb that dangled above our heads, reminded me of the jungle cats that stalked their nighttime prey on the nature shows I used to watch on TV.
A man in white linen lunged flamboyantly into a clearing at the center of the crowd, tied an orange sash around his waist and began to dance. Soon he was gyrating and his limbs were trembling, but with such control that at one point it seemed that he was moving only his earlobes. Clouds of hashish smoke rolled through the tent, and the drumming injected the space with a thick, engrossing energy.
I stopped taking notes, closed my eyes and began nodding my head. As the drummer built toward a feverish peak, I drifted unconsciously closer to him. Before long, I found myself standing in the middle of the circle, dancing beside the man with the exuberant earlobes.
"Mast Qalandar!" someone called out. The voice came from right behind me, but it sounded distant. Anything but the drumbeat and the effervescence surging through my body seemed remote. From the corner of my eye, I noticed photographer Aaron Huey high-stepping his way into the circle. He passed his camera to Kristin. In moments, his head was swirling as he whipped his long hair around in circles.
"Mast Qalandar!" another voice screamed.
If only for a few minutes, it didn't matter whether I was a Christian, Muslim, Hindu or atheist. I had entered another realm. I couldn't deny the ecstasy of Qalandar. And in that moment, I understood why pilgrims braved great distances and the heat and the crowds just to come to the shrine. While spun into a trance, I even forgot about the danger, the phone calls, the reports of my disappearance and the police escort.
Later, one of the men who had been dancing in the circle approached me. He gave his name as Hamid and said he had traveled more than 500 miles by train from northern Punjab. He and a friend were traversing the country, hopping from one shrine to another, in search of the wildest festival. "Qalandar is the best," he said. I asked why.
"He could communicate directly with Allah," Hamid said. "And he performs miracles."
"Miracles?" I asked, with a wry smile, having reverted to my normal cynicism. "What kind of miracles?"
He laughed. "What kind of miracles?" he said. "Take a look around!" Sweat sprayed from his mustache. "Can't you see how many people have come to be with Lal Shahbaz Qalandar?"
I looked over both of my shoulders at the drumming, the dhamaal and the sea of red. I stared back at Hamid and tilted my head slightly to acknowledge his point.
"Mast Qalandar!" we said.
Nicholas Schmidle is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. His book, To Live or To Perish Forever: Two Years Inside Pakistan, will be published May 2009 by Henry Holt.
Aaron Huey is based in Seattle. He has been photographing Sufi life in Pakistan since 2006.
* By Nicholas Schmidle
* Photographs by Aaron Huey
* Smithsonian magazine, December 2008
In the desert swelter of southern Pakistan, the scent of rosewater mixed with a waft of hashish smoke. Drummers pounded away as celebrants swathed in red pushed a camel bedecked with garlands, tinsel and multihued scarfs through the heaving crowd. A man skirted past, grinning and dancing, his face glistening like the golden dome of a shrine nearby. "Mast Qalandar!" he cried. "The ecstasy of Qalandar!"
The camel reached a courtyard packed with hundreds of men jumping in place with their hands in the air, chanting "Qalandar!" for the saint buried inside the shrine. The men threw rose petals at a dozen women who danced in what seemed like a mosh pit near the shrine's entrance. Enraptured, one woman placed her hands on her knees and threw her head back and forth; another bounced and jiggled as if she were astride a trotting horse. The drumming and dancing never stopped, not even for the call to prayer.
I stood at the edge of the courtyard and asked a young man named Abbas to explain this dancing, called dhamaal. Though dancing is central to the Islamic tradition known as Sufism, dhamaal is particular to some South Asian Sufis. "When a djinn infects a human body," Abbas said, referring to one of the spirits that populate Islamic belief (and known in the West as "genies"), "the only way we can get rid of it is by coming here to do dhamaal." A woman stumbled toward us with her eyes closed and passed out at our feet. Abbas didn't seem to notice, so I pretended not to either.
"What goes through your head when you are doing dhamaal?" I asked.
"Nothing. I don't think," he said. A few women rushed in our direction, emptied a water bottle on the semiconscious woman's face and slapped her cheeks. She shot upright and danced back into the crowd. Abbas smiled. "During dhamaal, I just feel the blessings of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar wash over me."
Every year, a few hundred thousand Sufis converge in Seh- wan, a town in Pakistan's southeastern Sindh province, for a three-day festival marking the death of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, in 1274. Qalandar, as he is almost universally called, belonged to a cast of mystics who consolidated Islam's hold on this region; today, Pakistan's two most populous provinces, Sindh and Punjab, comprise a dense archipelago of shrines devoted to these men. Sufis travel from one shrine to another for festivals known as urs, an Arabic word for "marriage," symbolizing the union between Sufis and the divine.
Sufism is not a sect, like Shiism or Sunnism, but rather the mystical side of Islam—a personal, experiential approach to Allah, which contrasts with the prescriptive, doctrinal approach of fundamentalists like the Taliban. It exists throughout the Muslim world (perhaps most visibly in Turkey, where whirling dervishes represent a strain of Sufism), and its millions of followers generally embrace Islam as a religious experience, not a social or political one. Sufis represent the strongest indigenous force against Islamic fundamentalism. Yet Western countries have tended to underestimate their importance even as the West has spent, since 2001, millions of dollars on interfaith dialogues, public diplomacy campaigns and other initiatives to counter extremism. Sufis are particularly significant in Pakistan, where Taliban-inspired gangs threaten the prevailing social, political and religious order.
Pakistan, carved out of India in 1947, was the first modern nation founded on the basis of religious identity. Questions about that identity have provoked dissent and violence ever since. Was Pakistan to be a state for Muslims, governed by civilian institutions and secular laws? Or an Islamic state, governed by clerics according to sharia, or Islamic law? Sufis, with their ecumenical beliefs, typically favor the former, while the Taliban, in their fight to establish an extreme orthodoxy, seek the latter. The Taliban have antiaircraft weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and squads of suicide bombers. But the Sufis have drums. And history.
I asked Carl Ernst, an author of several books about Sufism and a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whether he thought Pakistan's Sufis could survive the wave of militant Islam sweeping east from the region along the Afghanistan border. "Sufism has been a part of the fabric of life in the Pakistan region for centuries, while the Taliban are a very recent phenomenon without much depth," he replied in an e-mail. "I would bet on the Sufis in the long run." This summer, the Taliban attracted a few hundred people to witness beheadings in Pakistan's tribal areas. In August, more than 300,000 Sufis showed up to honor Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.
Qalandar was an ascetic; he dressed in rags and tied a rock around his neck so that he was constantly bowing before Allah. His given name was Usman Marwandi; "Qalandar" was used by his followers as an honorific indicating his superior standing in the hierarchy of saints. He moved from a suburb of Tabriz, in modern-day Iran, to Sindh in the early 13th century. The remainder of his biography remains murky. The meaning of lal, or "red," in his name? Some say he had auburn hair, others believe he wore a red robe and still others say he once was scalded while meditating over a pot of boiling water.
In migrating to Sindh, Qalandar joined other mystics fleeing Central Asia as the Mongols advanced. Many of them settled temporarily in Multan, a city in central Punjab that came to be known as the "city of saints." Arab armies had conquered Sindh in 711, a hundred years after the founding of Islam, but they had paid more attention to empire-building than to religious conversions. Qalandar teamed with three other itinerant preachers to promote Islam amid a population of Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus.
The "four friends," as they became known, taught Sufism. They eschewed fire-and-brimstone sermons, and rather than forcibly convert those belonging to other religions, they often incorporated local traditions into their own practices. "The Sufis did not preach Islam like the mullah preaches it today," says Hamid Akhund, a former secretary of tourism and culture in the Sindh government. Qalandar "played the role of integrator," says Ghulam Rabbani Agro, a Sindhi historian who has written a book about Qalandar. "He wanted to take the sting out of religion."
Gradually, as the "friends" and other saints died, their enshrined tombs attracted legions of followers. Sufis believed that their descendants, referred to as pirs, or "spiritual guides," inherited some of the saints' charisma and special access to Allah. Orthodox clerics, or mullahs, considered such beliefs heretical, a denial of Islam's basic creed: "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet." While pirs encouraged their followers to engage Allah in a mystical sense and relish the beauty of the Koran's poetic aspects, the mullahs typically instructed their followers to memorize the Koran and study accounts of the Prophet's life, known collectively as the Hadith.
While the tension between Sufis and other Muslims continued through history, in Pakistan the dynamic between the two groups has lately entered an especially intense phase with the proliferation of militant groups. In one example three years ago, terrorists attacked an urs in Islamabad, killing more than two dozen people. After October 2007, when former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto—a native of Sindh province with roots in Sufism—returned from exile, terrorists twice targeted her for assassination, succeeding that December. Meanwhile, the Taliban persisted in their terror campaign against the Pakistani military and launched attacks in major cities.
I had seen the extremists up close; in the fall of 2007 I traveled throughout northwestern Pakistan for three months, reporting a story on the emergence of a new, considerably more dangerous generation of Taliban. In January 2008, two days after that story was published in the New York Times Magazine, I was expelled from Pakistan for traveling without government authorization to areas where the Taliban held sway. The next month, Bhutto's political party swept to victory in national elections, heralding the twilight of President Pervez Musharraf's military rule. It was an odd parallel: the return of democracy and the rise of the Taliban. In August, I secured another visa from the Pakistani government and went back to see how the Sufis were faring.
Over dinner in a Karachi hotel, Rohail Hyatt told me that the "modern-day mullah" was an "urban myth" and that such authoritarian clerics have "always been at war with Sufis." Hyatt, a Sufi, is also one of Pakistan's pop icons. Vital Signs, which he founded in 1986, became the country's biggest rock band in the late '80s. In 2002, the BBC named the band's 1987 hit, "Dil, Dil Pakistan" ("Heart, Heart Pakistan"), the third most popular international song of all time. But Vital Signs became inactive in 1997, and lead singer Junaid Jamshed, Hyatt's longtime friend, became a fundamentalist and decided that such music was un-Islamic.
Hyatt watched with despair as his friend adopted the rituals, doctrine and uncompromising approach espoused by the urban mullahs, who, in Hyatt's view, "believe that our identity is set by the Prophet" and less by Allah, and thus mistakenly gauge a man's commitment to Islam by such outward signs as the length of his beard, the cut of his trousers (the Prophet wore his above the ankle, for comfort in the desert) and the size of the bruise on his forehead (from regular, intense prayer). "These mullahs play to people's fears," Hyatt said. " ‘Here is heaven, here is hell. I can get you into heaven. Just do as I say.' "
I hadn't been able to find a clear, succinct definition of Sufism anywhere, so I asked Hyatt for one. "I can explain to you what love is until I turn blue in the face. I can take two weeks to explain everything to you," he said. "But there is no way I can make you feel it until you feel it. Sufism initiates that emotion in you. And through that process, religious experience becomes totally different: pure and absolutely nonviolent."
Hyatt is now the music director for Coca-Cola in Pakistan, and he hopes he can leverage some of his cultural influence—and access to corporate cash—to convey Sufism's message of moderation and inclusiveness to urban audiences. (He used to work for Pepsi, he said, but Coke is "way more Sufic.") He recently produced a series of live studio performances that paired rock acts with traditional singers of qawwali, devotional Sufi music from South Asia. One of the best-known qawwali songs is titled "Dama Dum Mast Qalandar," or "Every Breath for the Ecstasy of Qalandar."
Several politicians have also tried to popularize Sufism, with varying degrees of success. In 2006, as Musharraf faced political and military challenges from the resurgent Taliban, he established a National Sufi Council to promote Sufi poetry and music. "The Sufis always worked for the promotion of love and oneness of humanity, not for disunity or hatred," he said at the time. But Musharraf's venture was perceived as less than sincere.
"The generals hoped that since Sufism and devotion to shrines is a common factor of rural life, they would exploit it," Hamid Akhund told me. "They couldn't." Akhund chuckled at the thought of a centralized, military government trying to harness a decentralized phenomenon like Sufism. The Sufi Council is no longer active.
The Bhuttos—most prominently, Benazir and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—were much better at marshaling Sufi support, not least because their hometown lies in Sindh province and they have considered Lal Shahbaz Qalandar their patron saint. Qalandar's resting place became, in the judgment of University of Amsterdam scholar Oskar Verkaaik, "the geographical center of [the elder] Bhutto's political spirituality." After founding the Pakistan Peoples Party, Bhutto was elected president in 1971 and prime minister in 1973. (He was ousted in a coup in 1977 and hanged two years later.)
As Benazir Bhutto began her first campaign for prime minister, in the mid-1980s, her followers would greet her with the chant, "Benazir Bhutto Mast Qalandar" ("Benazir Bhutto, the ecstasy of Qalandar"). In late 2007, when she returned to Pakistan from an exile imposed by Musharraf, she received a heroine's welcome, especially in Sindh.
In Jamshoro, a town almost three hours north of Karachi, I met a Sindhi poet named Anwar Sagar. His office had been torched during the riots that followed Benazir Bhutto's assassination. More than six months later, smashed windowpanes were still unrepaired and soot covered the walls. "All the Bhuttos possess the spirit of Qalandar," Sagar told me. "The message of Qalandar was the belief in love and God." From his briefcase he pulled out a poem he had written just after Bhutto was killed. He translated the final lines:
She rose above the Himalayas,
Immortal she became,
The devotee of Qalandar became Qalandar herself.
"So who is next in line?" I asked. "Are all Bhuttos destined to inherit Qalandar's spirit?"
"This is just the beginning for Asif," Sagar said, referring to Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, who was elected president of Pakistan this past September. "So he hasn't attained the level of Qalandar yet. But I have great hope in Bilawal"—Bhutto and Zardari's 20-year-old son, who has been selected to lead the Pakistan Peoples Party after he finishes his studies at Oxford University in England—"that he can become another Qalandar."
Musharraf, a general who had seized power in a 1999 coup, resigned from office a week into my most recent trip. He had spent the better part of his eight-year regime as president, military chief and overseer of a compliant parliament. Pakistan's transition from a military government to a civilian one involved chipping away at his almost absolute control over all three institutions one by one. But civilian leadership by itself was no balm for Pakistan's many ills; Zardari's new regime faces massive challenges regarding the economy, the Taliban and trying to bring the military intelligence agencies under some control.
In the seven months that I had been away, the economy had gone from bad to worse. The value of the rupee had fallen almost 25 percent against the dollar. An electricity shortage caused rolling blackouts for up to 12 hours a day. Reserves of foreign currencies plunged as the new government continued to subsidize basic amenities. All these factors contributed to popular discontent with the government, an emotion that the Taliban exploited by lambasting the regime's perceived deficiencies. In Karachi, the local political party covered the walls of buildings along busy streets with posters that read: "Save Your City From Talibanization."
Perhaps the biggest challenge for the new government is reining in the military's intelligence agencies, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. The Pakistan Peoples Party has long been considered an anti-establishment party, at odds with the agencies. In late July, the PPP-led government announced that it was placing the ISI under the command of the Interior Ministry, wresting it from the army—then days later, under pressure from the military, reversed itself. A uniformed president may symbolize a military dictatorship, but Pakistan's military intelligence agencies, ISI and Military Intelligence (MI), are the true arbiters of power.
In August, I got what I believe was a firsthand indication of the extent of their reach. Two days after Musharraf bid farewell, I began my trip to Sehwan for the urs for Qalandar, along with photographer Aaron Huey; his wife, Kristin; and a translator whom it is best not to name. We had barely left Karachi's city limits when my translator took a phone call from someone claiming to work at the Interior Ministry Secretariat in Karachi. The caller peppered him with questions about me. The translator, sensing something odd, hung up and called the office of a senior bureaucrat in the Interior Ministry. A secretary answered the phone and, when we shared the name and title our caller had given, confirmed what we already suspected: "Neither that person nor that office exists." The secretary added: "It's probably just the [intelligence] agencies."
We continued north on the highway into the heart of Sindh, past water buffaloes soaking in muddy canals and camels resting in the shade of mango trees. About an hour later, my phone rang. The caller ID displayed the same number as the call that had supposedly come from the Interior Ministry Secretariat.
"Hello?"
"Nicholas?"
"Yes."
"I am a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper. I want to meet you to talk about the current political situation. When can we meet? Where are you? I can come right now."
"Can I call you back?" I said, and hung up.
My heart raced. Images of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic militants in Karachi in 2002, flashed through my mind. Pearl's last meeting had been with a terrorist pretending to be a fixer and translator. Many people believe that the Pakistani intelligence agencies were involved in Pearl's killing, as he was researching a possible link between the ISI and a jihadi leader with ties to Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber.
My phone rang again. An Associated Press reporter I knew told me that her sources in Karachi said the intelligence agencies were searching for me. I had assumed as much. But what did they want? And why would they request a meeting by pretending to be people who didn't exist?
The car fell silent. My translator made a few calls to senior politicians, bureaucrats and police officers in Sindh. They said they were treating the two phone calls as a kidnapping threat and would provide us with an armed escort for the rest of our trip. Within an hour, two police trucks arrived. In the lead truck, a man armed with a machine gun stood in the bed.
Another phone call, this time from a friend in Islamabad.
"Man, it's good to hear your voice," he said.
"Why?"
"Local TV stations are reporting that you've been kidnapped in Karachi."
Who was planting these stories? And why? With no shortage of conspiracy theories about fatal "car accidents" involving people in the bad graces of the intelligence agencies, I took the planted stories as serious warnings. But the urs beckoned. The four of us collectively decided that since we had traveled halfway around the world to see the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, we would do our damndest to get there, even if under police protection. After all, we could use Qalandar's blessings.
That evening, as the setting sun burned the color of a Creamsicle as it lit the sugar-cane fields on the horizon, I turned to the translator, hoping to lighten the mood.
"It's really beautiful here," I said.
He nodded, but his eyes stayed glued to the road. "Unfortunately, the fear factor spoils the whole fun of it," he said.
By then we could see buses clogging the highway, red flags flapping in the wind as the drivers raced for Qalandar's shrine. The railway ministry had announced that 13 trains would be diverted from their normal routes to transport worshipers. Some devotees even pedaled bicycles, red flags sticking up from the handlebars. We roared down the road in the company of Kalashnikov-toting police, a caravan of armed pilgrims.
The campsites began appearing about five miles from the shrine. Our car eventually mired in a human bog, so we parked and continued on foot. The alleys leading to the shrine reminded me of a carnival fun house—an overwhelming frenzy of lights, music and aromas. I walked beside a man blowing a snake charmer's flute. Stores lined the alley, with merchants squatting behind piles of pistachios, almonds and rosewater-doused candies. Fluorescent lights glowed like light sabers, directing lost souls to Allah.
Groups of up to 40 people heading for the shrine's golden dome carried long banners imprinted with Koranic verses. We followed one group into a tent packed with dancers and drummers next to the shrine. A tall man with curly, greasy shoulder-length hair was beating on a keg-size drum hanging from a leather strap around his neck. The intensity in his eyes, illuminated by a single bulb that dangled above our heads, reminded me of the jungle cats that stalked their nighttime prey on the nature shows I used to watch on TV.
A man in white linen lunged flamboyantly into a clearing at the center of the crowd, tied an orange sash around his waist and began to dance. Soon he was gyrating and his limbs were trembling, but with such control that at one point it seemed that he was moving only his earlobes. Clouds of hashish smoke rolled through the tent, and the drumming injected the space with a thick, engrossing energy.
I stopped taking notes, closed my eyes and began nodding my head. As the drummer built toward a feverish peak, I drifted unconsciously closer to him. Before long, I found myself standing in the middle of the circle, dancing beside the man with the exuberant earlobes.
"Mast Qalandar!" someone called out. The voice came from right behind me, but it sounded distant. Anything but the drumbeat and the effervescence surging through my body seemed remote. From the corner of my eye, I noticed photographer Aaron Huey high-stepping his way into the circle. He passed his camera to Kristin. In moments, his head was swirling as he whipped his long hair around in circles.
"Mast Qalandar!" another voice screamed.
If only for a few minutes, it didn't matter whether I was a Christian, Muslim, Hindu or atheist. I had entered another realm. I couldn't deny the ecstasy of Qalandar. And in that moment, I understood why pilgrims braved great distances and the heat and the crowds just to come to the shrine. While spun into a trance, I even forgot about the danger, the phone calls, the reports of my disappearance and the police escort.
Later, one of the men who had been dancing in the circle approached me. He gave his name as Hamid and said he had traveled more than 500 miles by train from northern Punjab. He and a friend were traversing the country, hopping from one shrine to another, in search of the wildest festival. "Qalandar is the best," he said. I asked why.
"He could communicate directly with Allah," Hamid said. "And he performs miracles."
"Miracles?" I asked, with a wry smile, having reverted to my normal cynicism. "What kind of miracles?"
He laughed. "What kind of miracles?" he said. "Take a look around!" Sweat sprayed from his mustache. "Can't you see how many people have come to be with Lal Shahbaz Qalandar?"
I looked over both of my shoulders at the drumming, the dhamaal and the sea of red. I stared back at Hamid and tilted my head slightly to acknowledge his point.
"Mast Qalandar!" we said.
Nicholas Schmidle is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. His book, To Live or To Perish Forever: Two Years Inside Pakistan, will be published May 2009 by Henry Holt.
Aaron Huey is based in Seattle. He has been photographing Sufi life in Pakistan since 2006.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Summary/Strong Response Essay: Neither sex can be freed in the exploitation of the other
Who are you? You are a unique individual, who is constantly expressing original behavior in all of your interactions with the rest of the universe. Every self-organizing body acts on this principle. Human are subject to this freedom, constantly thinking and moving out of the same unrealized potential. Simply put, our social contract is this: mutual respect for universal self-expression. Unfortunately, many people assign and coercively enforce behavioral expectations on one another that severely limit our ingenuity. At times, these expectations seem as great in scope as the limitless paths they are blocking, but rest assured that division and subtraction cannot really destroy it. One current trend expectation is designed to micromanage everyone's behavior, on the basis of which of two roles your body is predisposed to play in biological reproduction. Since it is unnecessary and oppressive to the open-ended structure of our beings, we should examine this and all other pervasive cultural demands. When we have come to understand them, we will freely reject or accept them to our taste. Current thought blockages demand adherence to a rigid dramatization of our relationships, the parts of which are cast based on gonads and ovaries. Rest in the fact that these social demands are not humans, but ideas, and humans need feel no compassion in dismantling harmful thoughts. In “There Is No Unmarked Woman”, Linguistics professor Deborah Tannen observes and criticizes a particularly offensive demand that society places on female-sexed people.
Tannen reports how in the academic workplace, women are expected to unceasingly project a positive identity, using their physical appearance as a medium. The author objects to this expectation for a number of reasons, mainly because it is a social inequality set up between equals. Tannen makes a linguistic analogy to this expectation , comparing it to a “mark”. A mark is a language particle which tweaks the commonly assumed, basic meaning of a word but remains impotent when not assigned to a root expression. The effect of how women are marked is described through the story of an academic conference. “Each of the women… had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup, and accessories, and each decision carried meaning” (411). Tannen proceeds to describe how none of the men present chose to express anything unique about themselves through their dress. In fact, they seemed to be wearing an interchangeable uniform. Tannen makes another objection to the mark, describing how some observers punish women who choose to convey little or nothing through bodily presentation. Finally, Tannen entertains the idea that men are biologically more comparable to a linguistic mark, noting among other things that the default sex of non-reproducing worker ants is female. The author concludes regretfully how the essay’s content may qualify them as a male-bashing feminist, and that being an unmarked woman seems impossible. I agree with Tannen that treating women as marks, who only gain meaning by wearing beautiful accessories, is grotesque and unfair. I also appreciate how well the text flows. But Tannen is overlooking the mark society puts on non-conforming men, and misleads us by suggesting we might solve the marking problem by marking men instead of women. We start moving past the mark by appreciating how broad and mutable our identities are and can be.
Deborah Tannen has observed, recorded and criticized patterns of oppressive behavior. For this they are applauded. Furthermore, Tannen earns more credit for the outrage they muster against the less-than-wholesome role women are brainwashed to enact in the academic workplace. Though the right to dress provocatively remains ours, we must also be able to rely solely on other communication mediums and say nothing particularly with bodily adornment. The ideas we express in vocalized words and gazing could be further explored as alternatives. Reacting to societal expectation requires the use of a person’s energy, time and creativity, and to always be performing a spectacle is wearying. The right to remain silent is supposedly the law of the land, yet women who withhold biography from costume are ostracized. Tannen reports that “a woman whose hair has no particular style is perceived as not caring about how she looks, which can disqualify her from many positions, and will subtly diminish her as a person in the eyes of some” (412). If my English professor embarked on the quest for tenureship at Ohio University, dressing professionally without making her suit an expressionist art piece would unfairly hurt her prospects. If they were a man, they could dress in a uniform suit and tie and be considered perfectly acceptable by the selection committee, instead of inviting scorn for being uncreative or emasculated.
Content considerations aside, this essay effectively unsettled me with its thesis and made for an easy, pleasant read. Tannen’s use of repetition was effective at illustrating her problematic thesis. Each category of a female’s personal accessories was shown as a response to society’s mandatory female expressionism. The essay also utilizes imagery to evoke strong feelings, coherent pathos, early on in the narrative. The description of the conference women, on pages 409 and 410, does a good job weaving the objectively described details about the women's appearances with subjectively experienced qualities about their personas. “the hair robbed her of bifocal vision and created a barrier between her and the listeners”, Tannen astutely observes, noting how the particular woman was “full of dignity and composure.” That description also sets up a strong contrast with the next woman’s appearance, who is portrayed more as an image-sensitive bimbo. These two women are symbolic of the competing needs Tannen describes having, the needs for privacy and self-expression. "Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman." (415) We infer and agree that on any given day, making the choice of broadcasting your personal vibe semiotically, non-verbally, is desirable. Why then did all of the men at the 3 days of conference dress in exactly the same manner?
Tannen shows how all eight of the men were remarkable in their unified plainess. "There could have been a cowboy shirt with string tie or a three-piece suit or a necklaced hippie in jeans. But there wasn't. All eight men wore brown or blue slacks and nondescript shirts of light colors. No man wore sandals or boots; their shoes were dark, closed, comfortable, and flat. In short, unmarked." Would a man be judged unequally if they got more creative in dressing? Is there an expectation of men to be less visually self-expressive than women? The men may have been unremarkable, but were they unmarked as Tannen says? Tannen demonstrates that a large, burdensome amount of personal expressiveness being forced onto women yields an inequality- women are marks without their costume. "The men in our group had made decisions, too, but the range from which they chose was incomparably narrower. Men can choose styles that are marked, but they don't have to, and in this group none did." (411) If only one of these men had chosen to express themselves with more semiotics, they would have been an exceptional case. None could report that this hypothetical, exceptionally dressed human male was completely normal.
Depending on the nature of their deviation, a man's sexual orientation, values and mental balance are intrusively up for question in ways that won't be applied to women. A good example of this is wearing bright, colorful clothes together with a smile. On a woman, bright colors and a smile are perfectly acceptable. However when a male walks into your lecture hall class encased in a pink polo shirt with an indulgent smile on their face, it is stunning, and some people will assume they are homosexual. The guy could be smiling because he thinks the tendency to make major characterizations based on clothing is immature, and is having a private laugh at the expense of his classmates. If people are pigeon-holing such guys as homosexual for utilizing a range of color and facial expressions that are acceptable for females, than they are being judged less fairly than women. Expressive men are judged to be absurd when they stray from their prescribed range of stylistic choices, and yet their range is "far narrower" than that available to women. Men’s prescribed range of expression is more outrageously restricted than women.
For men, dressing uniquely is frequently and incorrectly assumed to exclusively be a targeted attack on common identity. When I wear a kilt to Alden library, some regularly-dressed men glare at me, or cut the sweep of their gaze short when they see the pleats of cloth swishing around my legs. It's true that I do mean to insult the plainness to which they hold themselves. I object to their plainess for two reasons. For one, it demonstrates a stunted version of what masculinity can look like, an immaturity to sees oneself and others as insufficient on their own. Men need women, women need men, and we need to express this as a stylistic codependence to mimic our symbiotic roles in biological reproduction. That is what I see when a guy looks like he's trying to blend in with a bunch of other guys who are trying to blend in. Another part of what I'm objecting to with my kilt is their tense hold on what is acceptable for men to wear. By agreeing to all wear pants or shorts, wearing a kilt makes me look like a wingnut. I am also expressing a positive message with my kilt. The range of possible expressions that we can accept as normal becomes infinite as we accept the infinite expanse of the universe as normal. My kilt expresses that I as a "white" person have ethic roots that I treasure and can use to relate to oppressed minority groups. The native cultural wisdom of my Celtic ancestors was destroyed by the invasion of the Roman empire, and continues to be degraded by the British occupation of Wales, the Isle of Man, etc. We can see what Tannen disregards the mark of socially reinforced, unfairly restricted self-expression on males. Unfortunately they also go beyond this and enter into tired, feminist male-bashing. This detracts from the coherency of the message.
Tannen uses a faulty interpretation of biological phenomena to weakly justify socially marking men, instead of women. They were “intrigued to see Ralph Fasold bring biological phenomena to bear on the question of linguistic marking”. (413) Fasold “stresses that language and culture are particularly unfair in treating women as the marked case because biologically it is the male that is marked.” (413) Tannen is extremely misleading with this argument. Implied is that marking men can be more fair than marking women. I believe that the injustice of marking humans stems from how these coercive, limiting social expectations stand violently in the way of self-expression. Differences in our anatomy, such as whether we have either gonads or ovaries, do not cause our social marking of either sex because people are marked in the mind. From our mind, and not necessarily the particular layout of the sex organs, do we muster the will to express sexist grudges. The injustice of marking females and males is unqualifiedly unfair, and is not essentially why violence against us is wrong.
Tannen questions whether their own activity can objectively be labeled “male-bashing” (414), and concurrently argues for linguistically casting males as superfluous to females. In male-bashing men for an identity that is legitimately beyond their control, Tannen is only insulting one person. A better question that Tannen does not ask is: where do we go from here? As I see it, our task now is growing a society that is more respectful of our own and each others’ freedom, which will lead to more self-expression. That way, people may choose to live out their existence in community that is more beautiful and tricky than a pre-scripted diatribe across some sex binary.
Being socially cast as half of a co-dependent, biological relationship places unnecessary restrictions on one’s range of self-expression. Getting out of this bind can take two routes. The immediate need is to de-attach ourselves and develop a sense of self- worth and that is not sex-dependent. We create the reality of our persona from our self-worth through our words, thoughts and deeds. When we choose how to act and sensibly define who you are, other people must live alongside you in that self-defined reality, and you are free from their social pressure. If they reject you and you do not violate them by accepting their behavior as legitimate, or mark them as less than human because of their unkindness, than you are free during and after you part ways too. The other route that we are using to escape the shackles of our physiological limitations is wrestling them to the ground.
If you were capable of reproducing without anybody else’s assistance, it would put you outside the consideration of the two-sexed reproductive cycle and therefore the precise marks that are reserved for men and women. This is a path that is already being explored by humans today. Women choosing artificial insemination over a man ejaculating inside their uterus are already in this territory. Despite marking being a mental activity, there’s no sense ignoring the current requirement for intersex cooperation to make new babies. Tannen sites that asexual lizards of the Cnemidophorus genus create fertile eggs in their ovaries, without insemination. They make a poor analogy between the lizards and human females: “Thanks to parthenogenesis, they have no trouble having as many daughters as they like. There are no species, however, that produce only males. This is no surprise, because any such species would become extinct in its first generation.” (413) Though the lizards have ovaries and can technically be considered “female”, these lizards are not subject to the duality of the sexes that humans are because there are no males in some of these species. The sexual abilities necessary for reproduction of Whiptail lizards are not divided between two genotypes. All the necessary parts and abilities are united in one being, which can reproduce without help from another being. We have a ways to yet to go on this path, yet. The word “hermaphrodite”, which describes the lizard as analogous to a self-pollinating flower, comes from a mythological concept we have yet to achieve. The male trickster god Hermes, merged with a female sex goddess Aphrodite, into one composite, self generating organism. The gods did it for fun, and medieval European alchemists strove to this ideal in their search for immortality. Will we become de-attached hermaphrodites and realize our destiny as truly sovereign individuals?
Works Cited
Tannen, Deborah. “There Is No Unmarked Woman.” Blackboard. 20 Jan. 2009. Path: WRITING AND RHETORIC I ENG_151_A20_winter_2008-09; Course Documents
Tannen reports how in the academic workplace, women are expected to unceasingly project a positive identity, using their physical appearance as a medium. The author objects to this expectation for a number of reasons, mainly because it is a social inequality set up between equals. Tannen makes a linguistic analogy to this expectation , comparing it to a “mark”. A mark is a language particle which tweaks the commonly assumed, basic meaning of a word but remains impotent when not assigned to a root expression. The effect of how women are marked is described through the story of an academic conference. “Each of the women… had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup, and accessories, and each decision carried meaning” (411). Tannen proceeds to describe how none of the men present chose to express anything unique about themselves through their dress. In fact, they seemed to be wearing an interchangeable uniform. Tannen makes another objection to the mark, describing how some observers punish women who choose to convey little or nothing through bodily presentation. Finally, Tannen entertains the idea that men are biologically more comparable to a linguistic mark, noting among other things that the default sex of non-reproducing worker ants is female. The author concludes regretfully how the essay’s content may qualify them as a male-bashing feminist, and that being an unmarked woman seems impossible. I agree with Tannen that treating women as marks, who only gain meaning by wearing beautiful accessories, is grotesque and unfair. I also appreciate how well the text flows. But Tannen is overlooking the mark society puts on non-conforming men, and misleads us by suggesting we might solve the marking problem by marking men instead of women. We start moving past the mark by appreciating how broad and mutable our identities are and can be.
Deborah Tannen has observed, recorded and criticized patterns of oppressive behavior. For this they are applauded. Furthermore, Tannen earns more credit for the outrage they muster against the less-than-wholesome role women are brainwashed to enact in the academic workplace. Though the right to dress provocatively remains ours, we must also be able to rely solely on other communication mediums and say nothing particularly with bodily adornment. The ideas we express in vocalized words and gazing could be further explored as alternatives. Reacting to societal expectation requires the use of a person’s energy, time and creativity, and to always be performing a spectacle is wearying. The right to remain silent is supposedly the law of the land, yet women who withhold biography from costume are ostracized. Tannen reports that “a woman whose hair has no particular style is perceived as not caring about how she looks, which can disqualify her from many positions, and will subtly diminish her as a person in the eyes of some” (412). If my English professor embarked on the quest for tenureship at Ohio University, dressing professionally without making her suit an expressionist art piece would unfairly hurt her prospects. If they were a man, they could dress in a uniform suit and tie and be considered perfectly acceptable by the selection committee, instead of inviting scorn for being uncreative or emasculated.
Content considerations aside, this essay effectively unsettled me with its thesis and made for an easy, pleasant read. Tannen’s use of repetition was effective at illustrating her problematic thesis. Each category of a female’s personal accessories was shown as a response to society’s mandatory female expressionism. The essay also utilizes imagery to evoke strong feelings, coherent pathos, early on in the narrative. The description of the conference women, on pages 409 and 410, does a good job weaving the objectively described details about the women's appearances with subjectively experienced qualities about their personas. “the hair robbed her of bifocal vision and created a barrier between her and the listeners”, Tannen astutely observes, noting how the particular woman was “full of dignity and composure.” That description also sets up a strong contrast with the next woman’s appearance, who is portrayed more as an image-sensitive bimbo. These two women are symbolic of the competing needs Tannen describes having, the needs for privacy and self-expression. "Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman." (415) We infer and agree that on any given day, making the choice of broadcasting your personal vibe semiotically, non-verbally, is desirable. Why then did all of the men at the 3 days of conference dress in exactly the same manner?
Tannen shows how all eight of the men were remarkable in their unified plainess. "There could have been a cowboy shirt with string tie or a three-piece suit or a necklaced hippie in jeans. But there wasn't. All eight men wore brown or blue slacks and nondescript shirts of light colors. No man wore sandals or boots; their shoes were dark, closed, comfortable, and flat. In short, unmarked." Would a man be judged unequally if they got more creative in dressing? Is there an expectation of men to be less visually self-expressive than women? The men may have been unremarkable, but were they unmarked as Tannen says? Tannen demonstrates that a large, burdensome amount of personal expressiveness being forced onto women yields an inequality- women are marks without their costume. "The men in our group had made decisions, too, but the range from which they chose was incomparably narrower. Men can choose styles that are marked, but they don't have to, and in this group none did." (411) If only one of these men had chosen to express themselves with more semiotics, they would have been an exceptional case. None could report that this hypothetical, exceptionally dressed human male was completely normal.
Depending on the nature of their deviation, a man's sexual orientation, values and mental balance are intrusively up for question in ways that won't be applied to women. A good example of this is wearing bright, colorful clothes together with a smile. On a woman, bright colors and a smile are perfectly acceptable. However when a male walks into your lecture hall class encased in a pink polo shirt with an indulgent smile on their face, it is stunning, and some people will assume they are homosexual. The guy could be smiling because he thinks the tendency to make major characterizations based on clothing is immature, and is having a private laugh at the expense of his classmates. If people are pigeon-holing such guys as homosexual for utilizing a range of color and facial expressions that are acceptable for females, than they are being judged less fairly than women. Expressive men are judged to be absurd when they stray from their prescribed range of stylistic choices, and yet their range is "far narrower" than that available to women. Men’s prescribed range of expression is more outrageously restricted than women.
For men, dressing uniquely is frequently and incorrectly assumed to exclusively be a targeted attack on common identity. When I wear a kilt to Alden library, some regularly-dressed men glare at me, or cut the sweep of their gaze short when they see the pleats of cloth swishing around my legs. It's true that I do mean to insult the plainness to which they hold themselves. I object to their plainess for two reasons. For one, it demonstrates a stunted version of what masculinity can look like, an immaturity to sees oneself and others as insufficient on their own. Men need women, women need men, and we need to express this as a stylistic codependence to mimic our symbiotic roles in biological reproduction. That is what I see when a guy looks like he's trying to blend in with a bunch of other guys who are trying to blend in. Another part of what I'm objecting to with my kilt is their tense hold on what is acceptable for men to wear. By agreeing to all wear pants or shorts, wearing a kilt makes me look like a wingnut. I am also expressing a positive message with my kilt. The range of possible expressions that we can accept as normal becomes infinite as we accept the infinite expanse of the universe as normal. My kilt expresses that I as a "white" person have ethic roots that I treasure and can use to relate to oppressed minority groups. The native cultural wisdom of my Celtic ancestors was destroyed by the invasion of the Roman empire, and continues to be degraded by the British occupation of Wales, the Isle of Man, etc. We can see what Tannen disregards the mark of socially reinforced, unfairly restricted self-expression on males. Unfortunately they also go beyond this and enter into tired, feminist male-bashing. This detracts from the coherency of the message.
Tannen uses a faulty interpretation of biological phenomena to weakly justify socially marking men, instead of women. They were “intrigued to see Ralph Fasold bring biological phenomena to bear on the question of linguistic marking”. (413) Fasold “stresses that language and culture are particularly unfair in treating women as the marked case because biologically it is the male that is marked.” (413) Tannen is extremely misleading with this argument. Implied is that marking men can be more fair than marking women. I believe that the injustice of marking humans stems from how these coercive, limiting social expectations stand violently in the way of self-expression. Differences in our anatomy, such as whether we have either gonads or ovaries, do not cause our social marking of either sex because people are marked in the mind. From our mind, and not necessarily the particular layout of the sex organs, do we muster the will to express sexist grudges. The injustice of marking females and males is unqualifiedly unfair, and is not essentially why violence against us is wrong.
Tannen questions whether their own activity can objectively be labeled “male-bashing” (414), and concurrently argues for linguistically casting males as superfluous to females. In male-bashing men for an identity that is legitimately beyond their control, Tannen is only insulting one person. A better question that Tannen does not ask is: where do we go from here? As I see it, our task now is growing a society that is more respectful of our own and each others’ freedom, which will lead to more self-expression. That way, people may choose to live out their existence in community that is more beautiful and tricky than a pre-scripted diatribe across some sex binary.
Being socially cast as half of a co-dependent, biological relationship places unnecessary restrictions on one’s range of self-expression. Getting out of this bind can take two routes. The immediate need is to de-attach ourselves and develop a sense of self- worth and that is not sex-dependent. We create the reality of our persona from our self-worth through our words, thoughts and deeds. When we choose how to act and sensibly define who you are, other people must live alongside you in that self-defined reality, and you are free from their social pressure. If they reject you and you do not violate them by accepting their behavior as legitimate, or mark them as less than human because of their unkindness, than you are free during and after you part ways too. The other route that we are using to escape the shackles of our physiological limitations is wrestling them to the ground.
If you were capable of reproducing without anybody else’s assistance, it would put you outside the consideration of the two-sexed reproductive cycle and therefore the precise marks that are reserved for men and women. This is a path that is already being explored by humans today. Women choosing artificial insemination over a man ejaculating inside their uterus are already in this territory. Despite marking being a mental activity, there’s no sense ignoring the current requirement for intersex cooperation to make new babies. Tannen sites that asexual lizards of the Cnemidophorus genus create fertile eggs in their ovaries, without insemination. They make a poor analogy between the lizards and human females: “Thanks to parthenogenesis, they have no trouble having as many daughters as they like. There are no species, however, that produce only males. This is no surprise, because any such species would become extinct in its first generation.” (413) Though the lizards have ovaries and can technically be considered “female”, these lizards are not subject to the duality of the sexes that humans are because there are no males in some of these species. The sexual abilities necessary for reproduction of Whiptail lizards are not divided between two genotypes. All the necessary parts and abilities are united in one being, which can reproduce without help from another being. We have a ways to yet to go on this path, yet. The word “hermaphrodite”, which describes the lizard as analogous to a self-pollinating flower, comes from a mythological concept we have yet to achieve. The male trickster god Hermes, merged with a female sex goddess Aphrodite, into one composite, self generating organism. The gods did it for fun, and medieval European alchemists strove to this ideal in their search for immortality. Will we become de-attached hermaphrodites and realize our destiny as truly sovereign individuals?
Works Cited
Tannen, Deborah. “There Is No Unmarked Woman.” Blackboard. 20 Jan. 2009. Path: WRITING AND RHETORIC I ENG_151_A20_winter_2008-09; Course Documents
Monday, March 10, 2008
Food To Be Harder To Get. Or Maybe Easier.
Yikes.
Food is rapidly becoming more expensive. Like, even for spoiled Americans. Becoming unspoiled could be unpleasant. Or it could just mean more fresh local wild chaos food.
I heard about a greenhouse operation in Milwaukee, Wisc., where they lay down a lot of active wormy compost, lay down some finished compost on top, and plant in that. The active compost underneath helps warm everything. Big piles of compost in the corners also warm it up. Worms everywhere. No other power or heat source.
Food is rapidly becoming more expensive. Like, even for spoiled Americans. Becoming unspoiled could be unpleasant. Or it could just mean more fresh local wild chaos food.
I heard about a greenhouse operation in Milwaukee, Wisc., where they lay down a lot of active wormy compost, lay down some finished compost on top, and plant in that. The active compost underneath helps warm everything. Big piles of compost in the corners also warm it up. Worms everywhere. No other power or heat source.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
excitement in Springfield
We heard a loud-ass boom earlier this evening, followed by many smaller (but still big) sounds--like someone banging on an empty dumpster with a hammer--accompanied by emergency vehicle sirens heading toward Springfield's very own coal-fired power plant. And a constant loud sound like a jet engine that wasn't going anywhere.
Here's the story so far from the State Urinal-Register:
CWLP fire under control, but damage appears severe
and CHRIS WETTERICH
An explosion in part of City Water, Light and Power's Dallman generating station this evening caused major damage to the city's power generating complex.
The explosion occurred about 6:50 p.m. No one was injured.
The city's biggest single electrical generator, the Dallman 3 plant, was still operating, and the city was obtaining power from the national electric grid. As a result, aside from brief and isolated power outages early in the evening, officials do not expect customers to experience any further power interruptions.
Springfield Fire Department spokesman Bob Reside said the explosion -- apparently one large explosion, followed by a series of about a dozen smaller ones -- took place in the power plant complex's main building, a four-story structure off Stevenson Drive near Dirksen Parkway and Interstate 55-72.
A large section of an exterior brick wall on the building's fourth floor collapsed into the interior of the building during the fire, Reside said.
"This just shows how dangerous this has gotten because of damage to the structure," Reside said. "We have to expect further collapse."
The fire was fueled by oil leaking from damaged and blazing power transformers and boosted by a steady wind. However, firefighters were reporting about 9:30 p.m. that the oil flow was being cut off and the situation was gradually being brought under control.
Foam was being used to battle the oil fires, not only because water is ineffective against an oil fire but also to avoid polluting nearby Lake Springfield with oil, Reside said.
The cause of the explosion was still undetermined as of 9:30 p.m., with the main suspects apparently being a transformer malfunction or an explosion of flammable coal dust. In any case, at least two transformers caught fire.
"Transformers contain oil and it is burning and has spilled out of the transformers," Reside said about 8:30 p.m.
An unknown number of employees were inside the plant when the explosions occurred, but all evacuated safely.
There was no danger to the public from chemical fumes, and the fire posed no threat to nearby businesses or residences, Reside said. Firefighters kept an eye on several nearby hydrogen tanks, however.
"We have nozzles fixed on them so they don't explode," he said.
Witnesses reported one large explosion, followed by 10 to 15 smaller ones.
Micki Dickerson, who was at Capital City Shopping Center, said the first explosion "sounded like the loudest thunder you ever heard, it shook the windows and the building.
"The first explosion was real loud and the second almost as loud. We went outside, and then it sounded like gunfire --- boom, boom, boom. Then it stopped for a second and started right back up."
The explosion was followed by a steam release from the power plant.
“Now, it sounds like you're standing too close to a jet," she said shortly after the blast. "It's still going on. You can't hear the sirens for the sounds of the power plant."
A resident of South 13th Street e-mailed The State Journal-Register to say "the entire back half of my house vibrated at ten till 7. It felt like something hit the house.
"Then I heard a long series of what sounded like gun shots. At least a minute or so in length. I thought a house in my neighborhood was on fire or had been damaged."
She likewise reported a sound like "an airplane engine" as steam was released from the plant.
Several suburban fire departments, including Rochester and Sherman, were called to staff Springfield fire stations while city firefighters respond to the CWLP incident. Sherman also sent an aerial truck to the power plant after a city truck experienced mechanical problems.
Police detoured motorists away from the area of Dirksen Parkway, Taylor Avenue and Stevenson Drive, and interstate off-ramps were closed near CWLP. However, streets started to be reopened before about 8 p.m.
Here's the story so far from the State Urinal-Register:
CWLP fire under control, but damage appears severe
Last Updated 11/10/2007 9:28:33 PM
and CHRIS WETTERICH
An explosion in part of City Water, Light and Power's Dallman generating station this evening caused major damage to the city's power generating complex.
The explosion occurred about 6:50 p.m. No one was injured.
The city's biggest single electrical generator, the Dallman 3 plant, was still operating, and the city was obtaining power from the national electric grid. As a result, aside from brief and isolated power outages early in the evening, officials do not expect customers to experience any further power interruptions.
Springfield Fire Department spokesman Bob Reside said the explosion -- apparently one large explosion, followed by a series of about a dozen smaller ones -- took place in the power plant complex's main building, a four-story structure off Stevenson Drive near Dirksen Parkway and Interstate 55-72.
A large section of an exterior brick wall on the building's fourth floor collapsed into the interior of the building during the fire, Reside said.
"This just shows how dangerous this has gotten because of damage to the structure," Reside said. "We have to expect further collapse."
The fire was fueled by oil leaking from damaged and blazing power transformers and boosted by a steady wind. However, firefighters were reporting about 9:30 p.m. that the oil flow was being cut off and the situation was gradually being brought under control.
Foam was being used to battle the oil fires, not only because water is ineffective against an oil fire but also to avoid polluting nearby Lake Springfield with oil, Reside said.
The cause of the explosion was still undetermined as of 9:30 p.m., with the main suspects apparently being a transformer malfunction or an explosion of flammable coal dust. In any case, at least two transformers caught fire.
"Transformers contain oil and it is burning and has spilled out of the transformers," Reside said about 8:30 p.m.
An unknown number of employees were inside the plant when the explosions occurred, but all evacuated safely.
There was no danger to the public from chemical fumes, and the fire posed no threat to nearby businesses or residences, Reside said. Firefighters kept an eye on several nearby hydrogen tanks, however.
"We have nozzles fixed on them so they don't explode," he said.
Witnesses reported one large explosion, followed by 10 to 15 smaller ones.
Micki Dickerson, who was at Capital City Shopping Center, said the first explosion "sounded like the loudest thunder you ever heard, it shook the windows and the building.
"The first explosion was real loud and the second almost as loud. We went outside, and then it sounded like gunfire --- boom, boom, boom. Then it stopped for a second and started right back up."
The explosion was followed by a steam release from the power plant.
“Now, it sounds like you're standing too close to a jet," she said shortly after the blast. "It's still going on. You can't hear the sirens for the sounds of the power plant."
A resident of South 13th Street e-mailed The State Journal-Register to say "the entire back half of my house vibrated at ten till 7. It felt like something hit the house.
"Then I heard a long series of what sounded like gun shots. At least a minute or so in length. I thought a house in my neighborhood was on fire or had been damaged."
She likewise reported a sound like "an airplane engine" as steam was released from the plant.
Several suburban fire departments, including Rochester and Sherman, were called to staff Springfield fire stations while city firefighters respond to the CWLP incident. Sherman also sent an aerial truck to the power plant after a city truck experienced mechanical problems.
Police detoured motorists away from the area of Dirksen Parkway, Taylor Avenue and Stevenson Drive, and interstate off-ramps were closed near CWLP. However, streets started to be reopened before about 8 p.m.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Government won't disclose air safety survey
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized. AP story on Yahoo News.
Not only that, but they've "ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers."
Not only that, but they've "ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers."
There's more in the article. So much for a free market! LOL.A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits. Luedtke acknowledged that the survey results "present a comprehensive picture of certain aspects of the U.S. commercial aviation industry."
The AP sought to obtain the survey data over 14 months under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
"Release of the requested data, which are sensitive and safety-related, could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey," Luedtke wrote in a final denial letter to the AP.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Colin Macleod and GalGael
i want YOU to read this obituary, and then go peruse the GalGael Trust site. when you're done, if you're interested and excited about these topic articles, lemme know so we can cheer and discuss them. bless up. -badger
from http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/colin.htm
Colin Macleod
Motorway protester known as the Birdman of Pollok
The Herald. Glasgow (UK): Nov 7, 2005. pg. 16
By THE GALGAEL PEOPLES OF SCOTLAND
COLIN Murdo Macleod began life as a far-flung Gael in Sydney, Australia. He was one of the five children of Donald and Josephine Macleod. When he was four, the family came back and settled in the Pollok area of Glasgow.
Gang culture, alcoholism, drug addiction and violence were daily facts of life. Colin saw it all. He could stand his ground among the toughest of them. But what made him so exceptional was his depth of understanding and the tenderness of his heart.
That heart was, throughout childhood, always drawn to the pure wildness of nature that, at the end of the day, sustains and contains the city. And it was given wings by true nature wild - by time spent in wilderness.
"You should be a naturalist, boy, " his grandfather from the Isle of Lewis once said, for at school he'd be always daydreaming out the window, and throughout life the far-seeing eye of his eagle's mind was forever out with the stags on the hill, leaping with the wild salmon in the river and running under sail in a gale - singing heavenwards on the Gaelic ocean wave.
But the Holy Hebrides of his father's family were not his only inspiration. A saving grace of his childhood environment was that all around were the trees and creatures of Pollok Park. Colin spent endless hours there, climbing high in oak and beech trees, hunting for sparrowhawks and wrens, collecting rowan berries and ash keys, finding joy in the smallest Tawny Owl's feather.
Colin's deep connection with this nature, this Creation, inspired him to protect it when it was threatened by the arrival of a motorway. Spending nine days in a 150-year-old beech tree, he became known as the Birdman of Pollok.
It was here that he came to understand that the constant letters he wrote to newspapers, his articles (under the name of Quiet MacLOUD) and even his written poetry, were not sufficiently powerful tools for the unadulterated spiritual force he wanted to convey.
Help came from the fact that before the motorway protest in the early 1990s, he had been inspired to learn to carve stone among the Abenaki tribes of Canada and among the Lakota of South Dakota. Here, he also witnessed an indigenous people's struggle to reclaim their native language and traditions.
On his return to Scotland, he had bought himself a chisel, made a hammer and taught himself to carve - practising Celtic knots and other designs on derelict buildings and beneath railway bridges throughout Glasgow and beyond. And the carvings flew from his chisels thick and fast.
The 1990s became a prolific period of creative energy.
Respect, as a prelude to reverence, was a constant theme in all his work and human relationships. For this man, "work was worship, " as George MacLeod of the Iona Community had once put it. Animal carvings spoke in their own language, especially through an eagle totem pole that became the defining icon of the motorway protest at the prophetically styled Pollok Free State.
In standing his ground at the Free State, Colin was unafraid of derision and ridicule. He had built the necessary spiritual bravery to "hold fast". "I don't go to church, " he was to say in a Radio Scotland Life in Question interview in 2005, "but I do connect very deeply with the foundational Christian values of love and forgiveness. And when I read the Bible and you've got Jesus going to the wilderness for 40 days, I realise you've got a wilderness man, just like in Gaelic culture the songs of river and mountain anchor you."
His greatness lay in the fact that his warriorship was not that of the sword. The sword would have been too blunt an instrument to cut the darknesses that he named, unmasked and engaged. Rather, Colin's way had become the path of the spiritual warrior. He was an artist who integrated head, heart and hand.
Many people, so many people, warmed themselves round the Pollok hearth. The motorway protest became almost incidental. It was a convenient focal point. Indeed, he used to say: "It's simply about fresh air - it's just common sense." But in this world such sense is uncommon.
It has been said that Colin failed to halt the motorway. But while the outward Battle of the Trees was lost, an inner spiritual war was won. Ordinary people found their voice and glimpsed their own greatness.
He deliberately rekindled a sense of peoplehood. This was the birth of GalGael; reconnecting of people with their land and true potential. The name, GalGael, means that there is both a bit of the stranger and a bit of the native in us all. The boat - the Hebridean Birlinn - was a symbol. He set out to build one, he did so, and in May last year it carried them to Ireland where his mother's people had come from.
A legend for the modern day that he envisioned was to see the creation on the Clyde at Govan of a Hogback longhouse and a granite slipway. These would be centres for community skills that would ensure that the people were given back their river, their story.
Colin breathed life into natural materials through his carving, into the Clyde through his boats and into people through his belief in them. He was a poet who wrote his lines in wood and in stone and on our hearts.
Many of us have lost our best friend, Donald and Josie have lost a son, Gehan has lost her anam cara, and Oran Angus, Iona and Tawny have lost their beloved daddy.
He whom we consider to have been our greatest living poet, prophet and chieftain, has now flown this world.
Has Scotland seen many who embodied all three of these qualities, and from such ordinary origins, since the days of Wallace and the early Celtic saints?
He leaves a legacy that lives on in his children, in the people he touched and in his works. He was only 39.
Gus am bris an la, mo ghraidh.
from http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/colin.htm
Colin Macleod
Motorway protester known as the Birdman of Pollok
The Herald. Glasgow (UK): Nov 7, 2005. pg. 16
By THE GALGAEL PEOPLES OF SCOTLAND
COLIN Murdo Macleod began life as a far-flung Gael in Sydney, Australia. He was one of the five children of Donald and Josephine Macleod. When he was four, the family came back and settled in the Pollok area of Glasgow.
Gang culture, alcoholism, drug addiction and violence were daily facts of life. Colin saw it all. He could stand his ground among the toughest of them. But what made him so exceptional was his depth of understanding and the tenderness of his heart.
That heart was, throughout childhood, always drawn to the pure wildness of nature that, at the end of the day, sustains and contains the city. And it was given wings by true nature wild - by time spent in wilderness.
"You should be a naturalist, boy, " his grandfather from the Isle of Lewis once said, for at school he'd be always daydreaming out the window, and throughout life the far-seeing eye of his eagle's mind was forever out with the stags on the hill, leaping with the wild salmon in the river and running under sail in a gale - singing heavenwards on the Gaelic ocean wave.
But the Holy Hebrides of his father's family were not his only inspiration. A saving grace of his childhood environment was that all around were the trees and creatures of Pollok Park. Colin spent endless hours there, climbing high in oak and beech trees, hunting for sparrowhawks and wrens, collecting rowan berries and ash keys, finding joy in the smallest Tawny Owl's feather.
Colin's deep connection with this nature, this Creation, inspired him to protect it when it was threatened by the arrival of a motorway. Spending nine days in a 150-year-old beech tree, he became known as the Birdman of Pollok.
It was here that he came to understand that the constant letters he wrote to newspapers, his articles (under the name of Quiet MacLOUD) and even his written poetry, were not sufficiently powerful tools for the unadulterated spiritual force he wanted to convey.
Help came from the fact that before the motorway protest in the early 1990s, he had been inspired to learn to carve stone among the Abenaki tribes of Canada and among the Lakota of South Dakota. Here, he also witnessed an indigenous people's struggle to reclaim their native language and traditions.
On his return to Scotland, he had bought himself a chisel, made a hammer and taught himself to carve - practising Celtic knots and other designs on derelict buildings and beneath railway bridges throughout Glasgow and beyond. And the carvings flew from his chisels thick and fast.
The 1990s became a prolific period of creative energy.
Respect, as a prelude to reverence, was a constant theme in all his work and human relationships. For this man, "work was worship, " as George MacLeod of the Iona Community had once put it. Animal carvings spoke in their own language, especially through an eagle totem pole that became the defining icon of the motorway protest at the prophetically styled Pollok Free State.
In standing his ground at the Free State, Colin was unafraid of derision and ridicule. He had built the necessary spiritual bravery to "hold fast". "I don't go to church, " he was to say in a Radio Scotland Life in Question interview in 2005, "but I do connect very deeply with the foundational Christian values of love and forgiveness. And when I read the Bible and you've got Jesus going to the wilderness for 40 days, I realise you've got a wilderness man, just like in Gaelic culture the songs of river and mountain anchor you."
His greatness lay in the fact that his warriorship was not that of the sword. The sword would have been too blunt an instrument to cut the darknesses that he named, unmasked and engaged. Rather, Colin's way had become the path of the spiritual warrior. He was an artist who integrated head, heart and hand.
Many people, so many people, warmed themselves round the Pollok hearth. The motorway protest became almost incidental. It was a convenient focal point. Indeed, he used to say: "It's simply about fresh air - it's just common sense." But in this world such sense is uncommon.
It has been said that Colin failed to halt the motorway. But while the outward Battle of the Trees was lost, an inner spiritual war was won. Ordinary people found their voice and glimpsed their own greatness.
He deliberately rekindled a sense of peoplehood. This was the birth of GalGael; reconnecting of people with their land and true potential. The name, GalGael, means that there is both a bit of the stranger and a bit of the native in us all. The boat - the Hebridean Birlinn - was a symbol. He set out to build one, he did so, and in May last year it carried them to Ireland where his mother's people had come from.
A legend for the modern day that he envisioned was to see the creation on the Clyde at Govan of a Hogback longhouse and a granite slipway. These would be centres for community skills that would ensure that the people were given back their river, their story.
Colin breathed life into natural materials through his carving, into the Clyde through his boats and into people through his belief in them. He was a poet who wrote his lines in wood and in stone and on our hearts.
Many of us have lost our best friend, Donald and Josie have lost a son, Gehan has lost her anam cara, and Oran Angus, Iona and Tawny have lost their beloved daddy.
He whom we consider to have been our greatest living poet, prophet and chieftain, has now flown this world.
Has Scotland seen many who embodied all three of these qualities, and from such ordinary origins, since the days of Wallace and the early Celtic saints?
He leaves a legacy that lives on in his children, in the people he touched and in his works. He was only 39.
Gus am bris an la, mo ghraidh.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
zines: Village Magazine is all you want, and more; Just Slingin' it with Modesto Anarcho's new zine
if you're interested in an earth-respectin', ecstasy induced, professionally produced zine about radically healthy independent living in the ghetto, check out the Village Magazine. Hakim can hook you up. i've read #1, workin' on #2 and #3, and they got poetry, rants, herstorical reflections, and even some D.I.Y. it's what a good zine should have in it.
i just sent away from the Modesto Anarcho zines, which i am also very excited about. particularly anticipating #3- check out the description! from http://www.myspace.com/modanarcho
Modesto Anarcho 3
April 2007
Contains articles on surveillance technology, community gardening, "Rogues Against the State" essay, and local news. Also contains a DIY guide to slinging.
$2
holy methane-producing cow crap! they be slingin'!?!
i just sent away from the Modesto Anarcho zines, which i am also very excited about. particularly anticipating #3- check out the description! from http://www.myspace.com/modanarcho
Modesto Anarcho 3
April 2007
Contains articles on surveillance technology, community gardening, "Rogues Against the State" essay, and local news. Also contains a DIY guide to slinging.
$2
holy methane-producing cow crap! they be slingin'!?!
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Scrooge McDuck
Joe's a big fan of the comics that became "Duck Tails" when I was young. They're hilarious parodies of the American Dream. The protagonist is oneScrooge McDuck, an eccentric centrifugillionaire, whose always almost losing his money and always thinking about it. His spends most of his free time in his money boz, which contains 3 cubic acres of coins. He likes to "dives about in it like a porpoise", burrow through it like a gopher and toss it up and let it hit him on the head. His ceasing to consider the hoarde as currency and it's frequently precarious position (the hollow Earth opens up beneath it, robbers try to steal it, he must leave it to get away from his city's smog, etc.) show the follies of an addiction to money. Apparently there's a similar critique of technology in the form of Gyro Gearloose, an inventor and believer in Progress, who almost always get the gang killed when he tries to do something right.
Pick 'em up and look at 'em if you get chance. It's a classic piece of American literature. Here's a pic of Scrooge.
Pick 'em up and look at 'em if you get chance. It's a classic piece of American literature. Here's a pic of Scrooge.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
the Moonies are for real. dystopia is here, right alongside our utopia
i'll be looking into this more in-depth later, but have you heard of Reverend Moon and his craziness? well, here's for starters: 81 USA congress-people, along with big shots from all the major imperialist religions, crowned him (and his wife) King of the universe in the fucking Senate office building 3 years ago! what the bloody hell does this mean?! i dunno.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
shiso and shawnee salad; scary political matchings
today, i was reminded of the "shiso" that grows in many simple urban Cincinnati gardens. i ment to talk about it last summer, just didn't get round to it. it's name was spotted in a package of pickled ginger at the food co-op, and so here i am, bringing it to your attention.
according to the mother of all wikis:
"Perilla is a genus of annual herb that is a member of the mint family, Lamiaceae. The most common species is Perilla frutescens var. japonica or shiso which is mainly grown in India and East Asia. There are both green-leafed and purple-leafed varieties which are generally recognized as separate species by botanists. The leaves resemble stinging nettle leaves, being slightly rounder in shape. It is also widely known as the Beefsteak plant. In North America, it is increasingly commonly called by its Japanese name, shiso, in addition to being generally referred to as perilla. Its essential oils provide for a strong taste whose intensity might be compared to that of mint or fennel. It is considered rich in minerals and vitamins, has anti-inflammatory properties and is thought to help preserve and sterilize other foods. In Nepal and parts of India, it is called silam. Its seeds are ground with chili and tomatoes to make a savoury dip/side dish."
this purple type's the one all over Clifton Heights. again, quoting el wiko:
"The purple type is called akajiso (赤紫蘇 "red shiso"?) and is used to make umeboshi (pickled ume), or combined with ume paste in sushi to make umeshiso maki. An inflorescence of shiso is called hojiso. Its young leaves and flower buds are used for pickling in Japan and Taiwan."
the other plant, i could only find online reference to in the humongous .pdf file Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World, which says it's latin name is Hydrophyllum virginicum. it's leaves are green, splotched with a more silverish verdency. Joe says when the silver dissapears later in the season, it will be too late to enjoyably consume.
in other news, i hear that Pope Ratzinger has appointed Henry Kissinger as an advisor. and Will made fun of Chavez for waving around a Chompsky book. seriously, when i heard this my fear of the dark returned and i had trouble going from building to building last night.
and... 'parently these posters are popping up all over Europe in train stations:
according to the mother of all wikis:
"Perilla is a genus of annual herb that is a member of the mint family, Lamiaceae. The most common species is Perilla frutescens var. japonica or shiso which is mainly grown in India and East Asia. There are both green-leafed and purple-leafed varieties which are generally recognized as separate species by botanists. The leaves resemble stinging nettle leaves, being slightly rounder in shape. It is also widely known as the Beefsteak plant. In North America, it is increasingly commonly called by its Japanese name, shiso, in addition to being generally referred to as perilla. Its essential oils provide for a strong taste whose intensity might be compared to that of mint or fennel. It is considered rich in minerals and vitamins, has anti-inflammatory properties and is thought to help preserve and sterilize other foods. In Nepal and parts of India, it is called silam. Its seeds are ground with chili and tomatoes to make a savoury dip/side dish."
this purple type's the one all over Clifton Heights. again, quoting el wiko:
"The purple type is called akajiso (赤紫蘇 "red shiso"?) and is used to make umeboshi (pickled ume), or combined with ume paste in sushi to make umeshiso maki. An inflorescence of shiso is called hojiso. Its young leaves and flower buds are used for pickling in Japan and Taiwan."
the other plant, i could only find online reference to in the humongous .pdf file Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World, which says it's latin name is Hydrophyllum virginicum. it's leaves are green, splotched with a more silverish verdency. Joe says when the silver dissapears later in the season, it will be too late to enjoyably consume.
in other news, i hear that Pope Ratzinger has appointed Henry Kissinger as an advisor. and Will made fun of Chavez for waving around a Chompsky book. seriously, when i heard this my fear of the dark returned and i had trouble going from building to building last night.
and... 'parently these posters are popping up all over Europe in train stations:
Friday, March 30, 2007
interesting article alert
"The Gnosis of Anarchy; The Spirit of Revolt and the Revolutionary Spirit" has a bunch of interesting history. for instance, I had no idea there was any connection between Bakunin and the Masons (now I do). maybe you won't find it worth reading. i know it's not really fair to lay something this thick on you (it's 90 some pages). another good article on the recent past is "Down with the Empire! Up with the Spring!", a by now famous piece on the little known EF! Albion slew of amazing victories in the face of "the biggest road building project since the Romans".
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