Awake! For morning in the bowl of night
has flung the stone that set the stars to flight.
And lo,
The hunter in the east
has caught the sultan’s turret
in a noose of light.
Words from the Rubaiyat of Mr. Omar Khayyam regarding wakefulness.
Here it is not even 7 am yet.
“sabah il fol”
Learning a new language can teach you new ways of looking at the ordinary parts of life. Even the most simple words and phrases can teach you about the lives of the people who use them. Below, phrases with ordinary meanings are translated literally into English, showing why it is a good thing that the world has many ways of saying the same thing:
Arabic:
-Good Morning
Sabah il nour/fol/ishtah: “Morning of light,” “morning of flowers,” or “morning of cream”
-Praise for a beautiful child
Ya ammoora! : “Oh little moon!”
-Bread (in Egyptian dialect)
Aish: “life”
Sinhala:
-In response to the question “how are you?”
Innewa: “Being”
-Pretty
Saray: “Spicy”
-Standard Polite Greeting
Ayubowan: “Have you eaten rice?”
Spanish
-Sorry
Lo Siento: “I feel it.”
-Goodbye
Adiós: “to God” (similar in Italian)
Armenian
-Stop annoying me!
Klookhys mee artooger: “Stop ironing my head!”
German
-Passion
Leidenschaft: “To suffer together.”
-Placenta
Mutterkuchen: “Mother’s Cake”
-An experienced person
Alter Hase: “an old rabbit”
-Gums
Zahnfleisch: “Tooth meat”
Siwi (the language of the Siwa oasis)
-Water
Amaan:“security”
Indonesian
-Breasts
Buah Dada: “Chest fruit”
-Sun
Mata Hari: “Eye of the day”
-Urine
Air seni: “Art water”
As an aside, there was a contest to decide the most beautiful word in the world. The winner was yakamoz, Turkish for “the reflection of the moon in the water.” Are there words that should be added to the list? Let me know.
In Sinhalese Buddhism there are two types of karma. The first type moves you closer and farther from enlightenment, but does not effect your prospects for rebirth. It is altered through meditation, or other enlightenment-making activities. The other type is measured in ordinary life and is used to determine rebirth. Good actions, like donating food, are called “Ping,” which sounds like the noise made by ringing a happy little bell. Bad actions, like kicking a cat, are “Pau” (“pow”), which sounds like the noise a comic book punch makes.
These noises are handy reminders about what is happening to your future self with every act you commit. So say the Buddhists.
The drawing above is of a benign Sri Lankan demon. The symbol to the demon’s lower right is the Sinhalese for “ping”. The drawing was put onto an ancient notebook which I found in an old house in the jungle.
Yesterday was a big day so now I am slightly tired. There was a lot of thinking happening on this blog yesterday, and certainly I cannot maintain that level of rigor and accuracy.
Here is a drawing so stupid that it is not up for debate:
full size
This is a drawing I made after going to the aforementioned Sri Lanka. It depicts a stupa (holy site in Buddhism) as a series of weirdly shaped heads. Usually impressive things were put inside stupas, like Buddha’s begging bowl. Dead bodies are never put in stupas because Buddhists set dead people on fire.
There has been a lot of news coming from Sri Lanka over the past few days, none of it good. The long standing tension between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sinhalese majority has turned into war in the north and in the east, which are the areas held by the LTTE. This is very sad. Nearly everybody I knew in Sri Lanka on both sides of this tension was very kind and welcoming. No one I met wanted war.
[caption: A group of Sinhalese soldiers gets their regimental flag blessed at the Maha Bodhi Stupa, where a relative of the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment grows today.]
Since this fighting is happening outside the eyes of American news cameras, however, it gives a very interesting chance to examine war and how we feel about it and, even more interestingly from my point of view, how religion and violence are viewed in the United States.
History
Sri Lanka was ruled since antiquity by the Sinha dynasty, which was a monarchy born out of the Sinhalese ethnic community. They were periodically invaded by armies of Southern India, which brought a good degree of cultural mixing (most notably the introduction of Buddhism in the 3rd century), however, Sinhalese culture remained distinct. During the colonial period, starting int he early 16th century, Sri Lanka became a major center for trade and was frequented by Arab, Portuguese, and Dutch sailors all of whom had influence on the islands cultural makeup.
The Sinha dynasty remained intact as a Buddhist kingdom, however, until the early 1800s when Britain took an interest in the island as an extension of its colonial power in India. Sri Lanka presented a challenge to the invaders due the location of its central government. Kandy, known as the hill capital, was virtually unreachable due to the rugged terrain, thick jungles, and presence of malaria, and British armies took heavy losses on their way to the heart of the island. In 1815, however, the hill capital fell, and Sri Lanka became Ceylon under British rule.
The British used the island to grow coffee and tea with varying degrees of success. To cheaply harvest their crops, they brought in large numbers of indentured servants from Southern India, who were largely of Tamil origin. Because of their proximity to the political and financial power of the British, certain Tamils were more cooperative with the British than were the Sinhalese, who remained somewhat stubborn in their opposition to colonial rule. As a result, Tamils received noticeable benefits from the British in the form of education and political power.
When independence came in 1948, the Sinhalese, who remained in the majority, responded to underlying feelings of resentment towards the departing colonists and the Tamils by enacting policies to keep political power in Sinhalese hands and to correct what they saw as unequal distribution of resources and education.
This, unsurprisingly, resulted in push-back from the Tamils, whose increasingly agitation resulted in riots in 1958. At the same time, a population explosion was underway which produced a sort of underclass of uneducated and unemployed Sinhalese.
These factors, along with the global economic pressures of the 70s resulted in a violent rebellion by a group known as the JVP (People’s Liberation Front) which was a leftist Sinhalese nationalist party. This rebellion was brutally repressed. During my time at Peradeniya University in Kandy, I heard stories of the government placing the heads of rebels on spikes around the school fountain as a warning to students, and this was on the more “subtle” side of what went on.
The violence begot more violence, and also begot a good degree of ethnic mistrust. In the Northern, largely Tamil areas, groups of Tamil students began a campaign to remove non-Tamils from Jaffna University, and similar attempts took place on the Sinhalese side in the center of the country. It was a very volatile time, and both sides became more entrenched and distrustful as a result.
The following years were marked by increasing tension. Thugs working as agents of the government worked to suppress dissenting political views, and voting fraud, including the outright theft of ballot boxes, became a political reality. The Tamils, as a dissenting group, were heavily targeted by these actions. In 1983, the increasing thuggery hit a breaking point, and the Jaffna library was burned down.
The library was a significant symbol to both sides. To the Tamils, it was rightly considered a point of pride as one of the most complete and treasured collections of ancient and modern literature in that area of the world. To the Sinhalese, it represented the privilege that Tamils enjoyed under British rule.
In response, a group of young Tamil students struck back, calling themselves the Tamil Tigers and later the LTTE ( Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). The first strike was an attack on a military convoy in which 13 Sinhalese soldiers were killed.
This was 1983, and is often considered the start of Sri Lanka’s civil war. It is also used as the point from which “total casualties” of the conflict are measured in the media.
Shortly after the attack, Sinhalese around the country launched viscous raids on Tamil homes and businesses. In brutal and sad neighbor-to-neighbor violence, an estimate 3,000 Tamils were killed, and there are many harrowing accounts of Tamils fleeing or hiding in homes of sympathetic Sinhalese neighbors while their own homes burned to the ground.
In the aftermath of this violence, 150,000 Tamils left Sri Lanka creating a sizable diaspora. Those who remained congregated either to the central hill region (where there is little ethnic conflict today) or to the north and east (the centers of today’s conflict).
Since, the Sinhalese and the northern Tamils have hovered between high tension and outright war. The LTTE, though weak by conventional standards has survived by employing unconventional tactics. They are credited with inventing suicide bombings, and are also accused of using child soldiers. They are famous, among other things, for equipping their cadres with cyanide capsules intended to be bitten in the event of capture to avoid interrogation.
The goal of the LTTE is to create an independent state called Tamil Eelam in the northern and eastern portions of Sri Lanka. The goal of the Sinhalese government is to eliminate the “terrorists” and unite the country under (what realistically amounts to) Sinhalese rule.
Though there is a great degree of dispute on this point, my impression is that a good amount of the violence that took place during the 20 year stalemate was committed by the LTTE against Tamils. Conditions in the North and the East have steadily worsened, and those civilians not affiliated with the LTTE are harshly intimidated into either voicing support or serving among the LTTE cadres. It is highly inadvisable to be a prominent Tamil politician who does not support the LTTE. There were also notable attacks on Buddhist religious monuments, with reprisals and crackdowns following from the Sinhalese.
Today’s “blood bath” is the result of Sinhalese armies moving in to Tamil controlled areas in the north in an effort to finally crush the LTTE. The LTTE, probably expecting little mercy, are fighting a guerrilla war and using human shields in some cases. It is sad, it is brutal, but it has been going on for some time and is in many regards not surprising.
In 2005 there was a lot of news about global trends towards global religious conservatism. Examples included the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and Central Asia and the growth of the Christian right under Bush in the United States. Under the radar, a similar trend took hold in Sri Lanka. The 2005 election was between Mahinda and Ranil. Mahinda was a Sinahalese Nationalist, who vowed to fight the terrorists. Ranil was more militarily moderate, less nationalist and more open to the global community. Mahinda won the support of politically active Buddhist clergy who commonly appeared at his rallies, and Ranil’s Buddhism was questioned. Similar to other areas of the world, religious nationalism won the day, and Mahinda, for all intents and purposes, has been carrying out exactly what his campaign rhetoric suggested he would.
What I learned from it:
Now, this situation can teach us a lot about religion, nationalism, and violence, especially when it is compared to other global conflicts. Mahinda, by combining Sinhalese pride and paranoia with the imagery of Buddhism tapped into a very deep well of emotion, and has succeeded in mobilizing his nation to take violent action without significant dissent. This use of Buddhist themes runs contrary to the view of Buddhism in the West as a simple philosophy of peace, or as a religion about self-improvement rather than politics.
At the same time, the island’s Muslims, numbering somewhere around 40,000, have been almost entirely passive throughout this conflict. They tend to keep to themselves among both Sinhalese and Tamils. They practice their religion freely and in the open and have rarely been the targets or instigators of violence.
Looking at this situation, there seems to be nothing inherently within Islam that makes it a violent religion. If there was, Sri Lankan Muslims would be involved in the violent acts seen on the island. At the same time, common conceptions of Buddhism have been turned on their heads. It is now Buddhism, a “religion of peace” that is being used to promote and justify violent actions towards another ethnic group.
The religious rhetoric floating around in this conflict suggests that it is not religion itself that is the cause of the conflict, as is sometimes thought to be the case in the Middle East. Instead, religion is a rallying cry used to mobilize forces in an existing conflict; it is a shared language through which to express frustration, but it is not the cause of frustration.
It seems to me that the root causes of violence in Sri Lanka are not religious but rather 1) perceived or actual economic disparity and 2) perceived or actual ethnic divisions that correlate to economic disparity. There is a similar situation in Palestine, though the actors are different. What we have is the simple reality of too many people competing over too few resources in the context of a power vacuum left by colonial withdrawal.
Does the conflict suggest that Buddhists and Hindus are two diametrically opposed groups that have been warring over a piece of land since time immemorial? No. Does it suggest that opposing religious beliefs are proof that the conflict will never be resolved? No.
If anything, this conflict shows that religious beliefs are one of many types of rhetoric that can be deployed to stir up populations which are already opposed for historical and economic reasons. Religious rhetoric helps solidify a strong tribal mentality which paints the world in two colors, and which insists that there is a marked inequality and injustice extant between the two groups. It also doesn’t hurt that both Sri Lanka and Palestine experienced significant colonial intervention and subsequent irresponsible extraction. God help Iraq in 50 years, so to speak. It is also worth taking stock of how religious themes are used to codify and amplify tribal and cultural divides in our one’s own society, as certainly recent American actions abroad were helped along politically by pseudo-religious language.
At the end of the day, I return to my initial point which is that on both side of this conflict I have met kind, friendly, warmhearted people who only want to raise a family and get on with life. Buddhism is not functioning in an “evil” way, just as Islam is not functioning in an evil way in the Middle East. What it is doing is exploiting decades old prejudices and insecurities which remain unaddressed despite the violence.
What is happening now is sad, pure and simple, and we can all hope that the violence comes to an end.
The strange case of Don Hayes, Don Hayes, Don Hayes, Don Hayes, Don Hayes, etc:
full size is encouraged in this case in order to fully enjoy Don Hayes Don Hayes and Don Hayes
When I was in university I liberated these photos of a dour gentleman from the college archives. For obvious reasons, they are fascinating, and it required little work on my part to turn them in Real Art. The only way I was able to identify the man in the photos as Don Hayes was to match his picture to another I found later that carried a label, but strangely the addition of a name only served to increase my curiosity regarding this strange stack of photos.
Wonderfully, in the case of Don Hayes I believe there will always be more questions than answers.
Some time ago when I was going to the food store, I saw two jinns in my home town. Since I saw this, I have been researching jinns very closely in an effort to understand their ways and habits.
When I was in Sri Lanka, we dealt with jinns all the time. In fact, there were entire methods that had been used for many centuries for handling the mischief of spirits like this. Usually these methods involved foods, because jinns are always hungry.
I used to ask Lakhita why it was that there were demons like this in Sri Lanka but not in America. He told me that it was very simple: hungry ghosts, jinns, demons, etc all prefer to stay in natural places that are dark and foresty and away from lights. In America, he said, it was obvious that no jinns could live because everything was lights and pavement.
This made sense to me, and it made sense that people in America would not have any methods of dealing with jinns since the jinns had all gone into hiding in this country.
When I began living in America again, I forgot all about jinns until that day at the food store when I saw two men in hooded sweatshirts who did not fit properly in their bodies. I also felt as if something near me was very old- the same feeling I would get in an ancient forest or near ruins of some kind. This was unusual because in my town all of the buildings are new.
I stayed away from them, but later when I was buying my food they came past me. Even though there was no aisle space behind me, they walked past me with no effort, and they said something in a language I did not recognize. I made a funny face to the food store clerk to see if she had heard what I did, but she did not seem to notice anything out of the ordinary.
I decided some time later that the jinns had probably come because that was a time of great fear for people in America. I also thought that perhaps they were there to help America make a big change that would force them to become more human in their ways. Part of being human understanding things that are not human, and so far in America this is not a priority.
The picture above is one of my attempts to capture the likeness of these two jinns so that I can remember their look. When I write more abut my research I will put more pictures.
Q: Is Boredom a problem?
A: Yes boredom is of course the problem. Boredom is the other side of creativity.
This is a great video because of its mysteriousness and because of the nerd voices that keep saying things in the background.
Drawings based on dreams: Part 2
Once when I was sleeping I invented a story about a town that held a flower contest every year. In the story, the flower contest was very important, so everyone wanted to win. There was one man who wanted to win very badly. I am not sure why he wanted to win. Maybe it had to do with his childhood, or maybe he wanted to impress somebody he loved.
Anyway, for him it became an obsession, even though he would come in last place every year. Over time he grew very strange and lonely from working so much to improve his flowers. His heart grew very dark.
After many years no one saw this man anymore, but he was in his house creating strange and ghastly plans.
He invented a way of planting flowers where he would put the seed inside the mouth of a head and plant it so that all of that person’s ideas would go into the flower and make it beautiful. He experimented and it was working and producing beautiful, odd, and wonderful flowers.
Soon though he became very deranged with power, and started committing murders of neighborhood children in order to steal their heads to plant his flowers.
His garden grows more and more exotic and amazing because of all the ideas going into the flowers until one day, the children became zombies and came back for their heads.
The story ends with the zombies parading through town with these giant flowers on their heads that have grown because of all the ideas in their heads.
