Negative Capability

I have been so preoccupied with finalising my gorgeous new book, Vishvarūpa that I’ve not blogged for almost a month. My use of Sanskrit words in the collection led to considerations as to whether, when and how I should assign a notion of difference to the romanisation of these words. How should one language be represented in the script of another? Should the phonetic complexities of Devanāgarī, with its voiced and unvoiced consonants, its aspirated and unaspirated ones, which are so carefully distinguished in Sanskrit, be transliterated in the roman alphabet? This is made complicated when vernacular translations of the oral form differ from the standardised written form and share semantic value with the written form of the translator’s language. So Śiva becomes Shiva, so pūjā is commonly written as puja, or even pooja.

How authentic are the transliterations when they ignore the Devanāgarī ligatures; those beautiful horizontal lines from which the consonants are hung?

The earliest surviving script in India is Brahmī which is found on rock inscriptions. Devanāgarī emerged in the first century AD, but Indian phonetics was highly elaborate and well differentiated several hundred years before the Christian era.

What authority do I, for whom Devanāgarī has been erased by the coloniser’s language, (exoticised by a forced conversion, if you like), exercise in using Sanskrit? With what authenticity could I lay claim to it? And what of limitations in the printer’s font, the typeset? Should I domesticise the script afterall, or would that simplification remove all trace of its difference? In considering these questions I am not unlike the ethnographer, with my insider/outsider perspective. Is the exotic positioned in a foreign locale or can it be reconstructed or reconstituted to recover its losses? Can the exotic invade the ordinary?

As you can see these were and are complex considerations, and sometimes I’m not sure how well I have responded to them. I think perhaps mine has been an intuitive response. But in the end, I am glad that the title of my book contests both mine and the coloniser’s language.

Only when we cross a boundary are we truly conscious, sentient, vital, as we break down our own categories and definitions. All art must at some point be radical in order to engage. I am an ardent fan of the Russian novelist, Nabokov, a writer who lived in exile from the language of his first dreams. He spent years revising his prototype novella, crossing the boundaries of genres: the erotic with the literary, the poetic with the mystery. And not-so-parenthetically, I note, a friend and fellow poet-novelist, Roberta Lowing, has done something similarly spell-binding with her poetic thriller, Notorious.

But I should direct you now to You Tube, where you’ll come across a video of the master linguist, and entomologist/etymologist himself, in conversation with the literary critic, Lionel Trilling, circa 1950. Go, check it out…

Collective Brightness edited by Kevin Simmonds, will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press, later this year. The contributors include Carl Phillips, Jee Leong Koh, Nikole Brown, Jason Schneiderman, Truong Tran , Nikky Finney, DA Powell, which makes me so pleased to be included. It may be one of the first contemporary anthologies covering LBTIQ poets writing on faith, religion and spirituality. Here’s just one imprimatur:

“Collective Brightness sheds a shining light on a journey that no longer takes place in the dark. The glory of holding Kevin Simmonds’s anthology in one’s hands is that it burns as the sacred text of our queer times: heavy with burden, luminous with hope.”
–Rigoberto González, National Book Critics Circle

In this video Ellen Bass performs her “God and the G Spot”

Last week, in the reluctant autumn sun our dear friend and fellow poet, Kerry Leves left us with memories, words and light, for the other side. Goodbye for now, Kerry.

Why am I sure
that this rite is what I came for?
Why does this thin smoke
pouring into a windless sky
seem like a triumph?

(from ‘Varanasi,’ by Kerry Leves 1948-2011)

A week ago, Mummydag set off with D-dag and Mini to Mutthi Mutthi country in search of Mungo Dog. Along the road we passed all kinds of heavy duty vehicles free wheeling and wide-loading. Aside from a scary skirmish or two it seems Rainbow Man was watching over us and we reached our hidey hole in good time, albeit covered in mud.

Mungo Dog or Megacanine (MC) hails from 40,000 years ago, in the late Pleistocene, a precursor to the garden variety dingo. Radiocarbon dating of her wind-exposed skeletal fragments has excited anthropologists and archeologists into research frenzy. Although an entire fossil has not been discovered, the remains of her doggy flakes and coarse pelt vestiges bear witness to her occupation of the vast Willandra Lakes. We kept our eye out for pawprints in the alluvial bulldust.

Though this is a fruit-fly zone, we feasted on native tomatoes, quandongs, a kind of plum, acacias and succulent mistletoes. But after two days in the wind and eerie mud, we were starting to get hungry and had to resort to eating roo, of which variety, the grey or the red is recommended over the black. In the lunettes of the dried up lakes we found what we hypothesised to be a demi-zygoma of a zygomaturus. There was evidence of clay burials and the cracked shell of ochre-sprinkled eggs but still there was no artefact of the mythic and elusive MC.

In the end we retreated to a campfire and the warmth of a nearby station. Mummydag started to cook dinner: damper and roast veges, while D-Dag and Mini wandered around to inspect the empty shearing sheds and greet the ravens, the butcherbirds and the resident kelpies. All at once Mini became besotted by a shy, collared pup named Nip. We hadn’t found any real traces of MC but we’d made a new friend, and so the next day it was impossible to go out tracking, and the day after that it was impossible to leave the station, and so we have a story.

impermanence: expressions of Kyegu, Tibet.
A photographic record, illustrated expressions of being there, and
responses to the 2010 earthquake by Jayne Shephard

11-24 April 2011,
drinks with artist 6pm Thursday 14 April
TAP Gallery, 278 Palmer Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney
www.tapgallery.org.au

Thursday 14 April 2011 is the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake that officially killed 2698 people in the town of
Kyegu in Yushu, Eastern Tibet. Another 100,000 people were left homeless, with the unofficial death toll estimated to be as high as 10,000. The quake reduced more than 90 per cent of the town’s buildings to rubble. Twelve month on, enduring the harsh climate, people remain without stable housing. Tibetan involvement has been excluded from the reconstruction and planning following the impact of the devastation. Many Tibetan families have refused to accept the government’s ‘offer’ of new, yet significantly smaller, reconstructed homes in exchange for their ancestral land.

Jayne Shepherd travelled to Kyegu in 2007 as part of a pilgrimage to eastern Tibet, the homeland of His Eminence Aenpo Rinpoche. I met Jayne at Dee Why a few months ago at a concert to raise funds for the earthquake. Her photographic exhibition aims to raise awareness for the community in Kyegu and to support the Kyegu Relief Fund. The public are invited to participate in the prayer flag installation by contacting the artist at jayne_jns@hotmail.com You will be sent specially prepared rice paper on which to write your prayer or blessings. Amongst hundereds of other votives, my daughter Tegan has drawn pictures and written her own words. 25% of all sales of photographs and drawings is being donated to the Kyegu Relief Fund.

The Yushu area is known for its strong Tibetan identity, with Tibetans making up 97% of the population. Although Tibetan businesses dominated the area prior to the earthquake, there has been concern from the immediate aftermath of the earthquake that Tibetans who lost everything in the devastation and are trying to recover will be overwhelmed by Chinese economic migrants setting up businesses as the reconstruction continues. Yushu was once a centre of historical and cultural significance.

It’s hard to imagine a land so remote, or the despair of a people deprived of their spirit, their culture and political freedoms. Recent reports suggest that Chinese authorities have censored and confiscated more than 3000 copies of the video documentary, Hope in A Diasaster. The film was produced by monks in Kyegu, following the earthquake. In song and film it celebrates Tibetan unity by depicting how Tibetans from three provinces carried out relief and rescue work after the earthquake. Many Tibetans consider Amdo, Kham, and U-Tsang to be the three provinces that make up Tibet, although Beijing has almost entirely absorbed Kham and Amdo into the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan.

500 Tibetans living in Nangchen have signed a petition for authorities not to detain or arrest the monks who produced the film. In the face of such brutal political repression, may the struggle for Tibetan independence thrive.

Details: Michael O’Connell: My Grandparents morphing into Mr & Mrs Howell, 2011, oil & acrylic on canvas. Lorna Murray: Decoration and Other Indian Remedies, 2011, laser cut perspex and etching, board, bindis, photographic transfer

Lorna Murray
Michael O’Connell
OCCIDENTAL TOURIST
1-20 April, 2011
Opens Friday 1 April 5-7pm
Meet the artists
Harrison Galleries
294 Glenmore Rd
Paddington