The Arrogant Emu

I had several friends tell me that I should go see this exhibit - several friends and the Metro, which has shown itself as faithful of service and as mercurial of temperament as any companion. Then, when I was at the National Gallery on an unrelated errand, I saw this image (the poster for the exhibit) blazoned on a banner the size of a wall.  Impressed that any object as small as the one in the picture was clearly designed to be should stand up so well under such extremities of magnification, I dropped everything else I was doing and went to take a look.

Now, the online resources on this exhibition are pretty comprehensive - presentations at the National Geographic site , a timeline at the NGA site - but the disadvantage of the flash and the slideshows and the video is that it’s going to be impossible for me to link individual images as I discuss them.  So if you’re interested in something that I’m talking about, I suggest browsing around through those two sites, or obviously, if you are in the area, going to see it for yourself.

The very existence of this collection, a motley assemblage of archaeological pieces from four sites in northern Afghanistan, is due to a series of events which makes the exhibit’s explanatory film play like a spy thriller.  Narrated by Khaled Hosseini, who has the most melancholy accent I’ve ever heard on anybody, the film describes the depradations first of the Soviets and then of the Taliban. The bombed and sacked Kabul museum, the dynamiting of the Bamyan Buddhas  - the images filled me with horror.  The latter, particularly, was almost obscene, as if they were documenting a murder.

Now, surely that is a classic case of misplaced priorities?  If it’s murder I’m talking about, the world has plenty of real murder without worrying about cultural destruction.  Stone and metal can and will be carved again, words rewritten, but a human life is irreplaceable. Yes, that’s true, but artifacts are more than merely material objects in a world of material objects; they are the links between present and past that populate a culture with a democracy of the dead.  To kill a person is to end his life in the world, to destroy his creation is to end his immortality in it. There’s a reason that genocide is something other than mass murder: killing lots and lots of people is not the same as wiping out a culture from the face of the earth.

But the point is that not everything was destroyed, that hidden away in crates in the basement were works of gold and stone and ivory and glass.  Greek and Indian, Chinese and Persian, nomadic finery and architectural flourishes, the past came tumbling out.  The curators smiled and the journalists cheered and I could have cried with happiness. And it’s not even my culture.

Well, sort of not. I hadn’t realized just how Greek Afghanistan was in the days when it was Bactria and Alexander rolled his tanks across it.  All that the exhibit offers of Balkh, mother of cities and capital of Bactria, is a battered pillar capital that was serving as a block of stone in a dam. And that speaks eloquently of lost glory, but the sturdy Strato, school principal, the astonishingly familiar little votive of Herakles, and the reconstruction of the city plan of Ai Khanum, speak not so much about lost glory as about the vividness of the past, at once immediate and remote.  Though the digital reconstruction of Ai Khanum could use a bit of work.  Everything looks so sterile and pristine!  And the presentation could stand to take a page from video games and display a little map of the whole complex and the bottom of the screen while you’re zooming along through the smooth-walled, pixellated hallways.

From the storerooms at Begram came an assortment of objects that might have been hoards of private treasure or might have been intended for trade, and display Indian as well as Greek styles.  There’s quite a shocking contrast between the Indian female figures and the Greek - the former have little wasp waists and enthusiastically amplified breasts and hips, while the latter barely have the long line from torso to toes interrupted by a hint of curvature. A little human-headed rooster figurine looks like something sketched by a modern political cartoonist, and a line along the skirt of a figure on a glass cup was either an unusually free gesture or revealed a momentary tremor in the artist’s hand.  A sweet-faced Indian river goddess serves a furniture decoration, and a series of elaborate friezes of women beautifying themselves serve as a recursive beautification to a chair or a throne that has long since crumbled to dust.

Speaking of things that crumble to dust and leave their adornments behind, the last exhibit is that of a nomadic burial site; one man and five women. Their finery had rotted away completely, but the hundred of little gold ornaments remained, showing where the edges of the cloth had been. Most of the cases just stack these little decorations up in rows, but one shows the figure of a tiny woman, outlined in what can only be described as bling.

Most of the exhibit speaks through design, the curling gold and turquoise of the nomad belt buckles or the bronze novelty basin whose fish flapped their tails when the reservoir beneath was filled with water.  One block from Ai Khanum, though, was inscribed with words in Greek, and of the lines, only one, “Practice wisdom” remains.

Part I of our three-part series, “Missed Connections”

I like drunk people. If everything else falls through I’ll become a bartender. I like the pratfalls and the goldfish-memory; I enjoy watching people make the same incredibly witty remark or having the same profound insight, at seven-minute intervals over the course of an evening. My favorite, though, are the affectionate drunks, who discover, when their better judgement is gone, that they love everything and everybody. A pity it is that we have to be poisoned to declare it, but when you peel away sense and reason, underneath you discover inarticulate, universal love. What? I take my encouragement where I can get it.

We were sitting outside doing whatever it is that people who don’t smoke do when they are tired of the music and noise and trying to make themselves heard over other people trying to make themselves heard. “Getting a breath of air,” maybe. I asked her how she was enjoying herself, not having much else to say.

She looked over at me. “You’re so cute!” she declared, and laughed until she snorted. Having lost her bearings slightly, she peered around until she had fixed my location again in her field of vision, then put her hand up on my shoulder, equal parts camaraderie and steadying herself. “Do you know,” she announced after a minute, “I used to have such a crush on you.”

I didn’t say anything. “No, I mean it! Isn’t that funny. For years! I - You were-” I think I made some kind of acknowledging noise, but I still said nothing. She was in vino to the point of veritas, and there was no stopping her, but anything I said would have fixed it in her memory as an exchange rather than a revelation, and would make it all the more embarrassing to recall the next day. Besides, what do you say to something like that? “Oh really?” “Thank you?” “I had no idea?” “Yes, I kind of figured you did but honestly I never found you all that attractive?” Drunk or sober, rejection stays with you, it leaves an acrid taste in the heart for years.

“Not any more, of course! I got over that years ago.” (Belatedly afraid of misinterpretation.) “I never thanked you, no, I never did.” She looked up from her hand until she found my face. “Thank you,” she announced in time-lag earnestness. “It was very good for me. You did me a great service. You were my cowpox.”

“Eh?”

“Cowpox! No! Listen! It makes perfect sense! You’d infect somebody with cowpox because it gave them immunity to smallpox, which was much worse. And see- Everyone’s bound to suffer… misplaced affection. Bad relationships-” She brushed at the front of my lapel with her fingers, I think she was afraid that she had spat on me with that last ‘ps’. “And thanks to you, I was inoculated against heartbreak. It wasn’t fun, I mean, but it could have been much worse… Because of that crush I’m immune now to crushes now, immune to loving the wrong people, my heart unscarred.”

“You’ve been thinking this out for a while!” I said, suddenly suspicious and slightly annoyed. “No one who’s as drunk as my personal olfactory breathalyser proclaims you to be would be capable of sustaining that analogy. You’ve thought this whole thing through already. Did you just have to get drunk in order to tell me this?”

“No, just in order for you to take me seriously,” she replied with sad, sodden sweetness. Then she blinked, and in the same movement folded herself up against my shoulder and fell asleep.

It was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible
Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies
that had not been sown–as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted
to be done, that had led to it–as if observers of the wretched
millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such
vapouring, combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,
and worn out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be endured
without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew the truth.

-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

It suddenly occurred to me, about Robert Mugabe: the international community urging other African leaders to condemn him is just a bit rich. Not that his government isn’t brutal, ill-advised, and illegitimate, because it undoubtedly is. And not that other African leaders aren’t the only ones in position to have any real moral authority over him, because they undoubtedly are. Think about it, though - Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980. That’s living memory - hell, that’s your living memory, some of you. It’s certainly Mugabe’s. He basically took over from Ian Smith - if you want to talk undemocratically elected tyrants who thought of themselves as perfectly legitimate authorities - and is it any wonder that he is also prickly, repressive of political opponents, and profoundly suspicious of his own people and the Western world?

Understand!  I am not saying that someone’s actions are excusable because they are explicable.  Guilt is as vast and expansive as the air; it is not diminished by being shared.

Speaking of governments that fail to understand those they govern, I came across an article some time back that suggested that the Burmese (Myanmarian?) government really failed to grasp the scope of the destruction wreaked by Nargis; with their flow of trusted information basically self-controlled, the fear of foreign interference was more real and comprehensible than vague rumors or bald statements of disaster.  This capacity for self-deception, on a personal, ethnic, or a governmental scale, is what happens when you become the center of the world and is by itself an excellent argument against tyranny. But it got me thinking: as a civilian, as a chump on the ground, is it better or worse to know the scope of the disaster that has befallen you?  Your family has been wiped out, your village, your livelihood - what difference does it make to you to know that this has befallen tens of thousands?  You are the last of everyone you knew - does it make a difference to know whether or not you are the last of your people on the earth? One town perishing in agony and chaos is sad and unfortunate.  Hundred of towns perishing so is a humanitarian disaster - but where does the difference in sorrow cease to be individually perceptible?