Using Literature and Technology To Relieve Adolescent Problems

Adolescence is a time of changing. Young people find themselves going through significant physical, psychological, and social changes -- changes that many do not want to go through. Many have short attention spans and are bored easily. They have questions of self worth and future direction. In addition to their own problems, they are at an age when many must start taking positions of responsibility within the family because of family problems. In today's society, it is not unusual for a woman to be the sole head of the family or a male to be the emotional supporter in the family. And then there are the all-important peer pressures.

We, as teachers, have an opportunity and a responsibility to help young people work through some of their problems. We may not be willing, or prepared, to become their psychological advisor, but we can offer them adolescent literature that will fit their special problems and through which they can see that decisions are not always black and white but are determined by various actions. Through literature we can offer them experiences that will force them to assess situations and hone their decision-making skills. But using technology can provide another way to address those problems. Students can take what they have read, internalize it, and present it in a format that will allow them to help other adolescents. Doing so will in turn build their own self-concept and reinforce the relevance of the subject.

In the sophomore language arts curriculum at Bethel High School, we have a unit called "Pressures." I have taken this unit and adapted it to integrate the use of technology with the reading of adolescent literature. Students identify an adolescent problem they wish to investigate and then work in groups based on their selection.

There are two versions of my unit, based on the level of the students and their experience with technology. In the first version, which is more suitable for less-technology-experienced students, they read a YA book that deals with the problem and then work in groups to design and create a book mark based on the novel. They use PageMaker software to turn their page sideways and create four columns so they can put four copies of their book mark on one page. The minimum requirements for the book mark include having a description of the problem, some connection between the book and the problem (it could be how the character faces the problem or solves the problem), the title and author of the book, the names of the group members creating the book mark, and a graphic that ties everything together. The book marks are then printed on the laser printer using card stock paper. We print enough copies of each book mark that each group member gets one. I also get several; and we give several to the librarian who keeps them at the circulation desk to give to any student who checks out a book and wants one. Having them in the library gives recognition to the students who created the book mark. Availability of the book marks also provides possible information about a problem and a book dealing with that problem to students who would like to read it but may not want to go to a counselor and admit to having the problem.

The second version takes longer and is for the more-advanced student. Again students identify an adolescent problem they wish to investigate and work in groups reading a variety of books about the problem. They conduct research using sound filmstrips, Dialog, videotapes, on-line encyclopedia, Newsbank, and electronic card catalogue as well as traditional print resources. They interview social workers and our student assistance coordinator.

After gathering extensive information, students work collaboratively in our computer lab of fifteen Macintosh computers, two Imagewriter printers, and one Laserwriter II printer. They create an individual book mark about the book they read. They also create a group pamphlet about the problem. They use Microsoft Works, PageMaker, Wet Paint Clip Art, and Art Roundup. Some use the scanner to digitize pictures for the pamphlet.

Minimum requirements for the pamphlet are that each one has to include research and statistics about the problem, some possible solutions for the problem, and local phone numbers that students can call to get additional help. They also have to include the names of the books they read that can be checked out of the library to get further insight. And they must include the names of the group members.

The pamphlet is printed on colored paper. Students may create a bi-fold or tri-fold pamphlet by using PageMaker to turn the page sideways and choosing either two columns or three columns for the text layout. It is then printed in multiple copies and is distributed to students from the guidance office, the library, the Nurse's office, and the office of the Student Assistance Coordinator. Whenever a student comes in with a problem, he or she can freely pick up a pamphlet to read.

This year we have added a new dimension to the program. Since many students have become so adept at creating hypercard stacks, they have started one on adolescent literature. Each card summarizes a book that one of the students has read and rates it on a 1- 4 scale based on criteria we established in class. We have a variety of categories, one of which is the Virginia Young Readers Program and one of which is adolescent problems. Students create cards for each book they read and copy it into their own personal file as well as our school file of hypercard stacks.

This unit is particularly satisfying for me to teach because students gain so much from it. They are actively engaged as learners who tackle personally meaningful topics that they choose. They plan their own research using a variety of technological tools. They collaborate to gather, analyze, and integrate the information that they decide is relevant to their topic. They produce a finished product that is used for a real-world audience and which continues to give them recognition throughout their years in high school. Every student can be engaged in this project and feel good about the final products.

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About the writer:
Sharon Hurwitz teaches English and serves as technology facilitator at Bethel High School in Hampton, Virginia. This article was published at http://scholar.lib.vt.edu

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Is There a Place for Digital Literature in the Information Society?

Finland and other Nordic countries in many ways belong to the forerunners in the development of the so-called information society. For the time being, the level of development towards the information society has mainly been measured by technological and infrastructural qualities - the amount of computers available, the coverage of wide band connections etc. It looks like the substance side of the equation has been largely forgotten. Information still is, to a large extent, published and distributed as books. Libraries, as well organized archives of literature with well educated personnel, can be even seen as one of the corner stones of the information society. Especially so in the Nordic countries, where the public library system has traditionally been widely acknowledged and respected. Currently, there is a serious discussion going on about the future role, strategies, and foci of public libraries: should they stick to their traditional role, or should they remodel their services toward portal-like gateways to virtual archives.

One more characteristic of Nordic culture should be mentioned here, which is the high appreciation of literary knowledge, accompanied with literacy rates reaching towards 100 percent. All this put together creates an interesting test bed for the case of digital literature. The infrastructure is there, the literary culture and literacy is there, and public access to literature, both print and digital, is well organized. Only one thing lacks, which is the digital literature itself. The central question in this paper is, why is it so -- does the (almost) non-existence of digital literature in countries where the circumstances seem to be as close to the ideal as one can imagine seriously undermine the belief in the digital literature in general? Or is it rather, that too strong a literary culture is foremost an obstacle for the development of digital literature?

I will take a closer look at projects carried on in Finland, in order to promote digital literature (such as lending ebook devices out from public libraries; providing pupils with 'e-bags', publishing national bestsellers in ebook format, establishing literary fora in the Internet, etc.), and seek out what has been learned from these experiments. Also, I will take a look at similar projects in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, which all share, by and large, the same qualities of well-developed information society and strong belief in literary knowledge. Through this survey I'll try to find some tentative answers to the questions if there is, indeed, a place for literature in the information society, and if there is, where is it, and how would that literature look like.






Finland and other Nordic countries in many ways belong to the forerunners in the development of the so-called information society (for example, in 1996, according to a survey by IDC, the top five in Information Imperative Index were USA, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland). For the time being, the phase of development towards the information society has mainly been measured by technological and infrastructural qualities -- the amount of computers available, the coverage of wide band connections etc. It looks like the substance side of the equation has been largely forgotten. Information still is, to a large extent, published and distributed also as books. Libraries, as well organized archives of literature with well-educated personnel, can even be seen as one of the corner stones of the information society. "In the information society development libraries are central, as they are open-for-all access points for printed, and increasingly, electronic materials." (Lintilä & Savolainen & Vuorensyrjä 2001, 50). Especially so in the Nordic countries where the public library system has traditionally been widely acknowledged and respected. Currently there is a serious discussion going on about the future role, strategies, and foci of public libraries: should they stick to their traditional role, or should they remodel their services toward portal-like gateways to virtual archives. Whatever the future path will be, they have been quick to react to the current challenge: just in a couple of years, the amount of libraries with Internet access went up to 90 percent in Finland. (Lintilä & al. 2001, 50).

In addition to the high respect towards public libraries, another characteristic of Nordic culture should be mentioned here, which is the admiration of literary knowledge, accompanied with literacy rates reaching towards 100 percent. (As a side-step it should be mentioned here that according to the UNESCO statistics people in all Nordic countries are among the most avid book readers in the world -- but Iceland is totally in a category of its own; in many ways Iceland is an exceptional case when it comes to book production, reading and library use, and because of that, a separate study of digital textuality there would be certainly interesting to read.) All this put together creates an interesting test bed for the case of digital literature. The infrastructure is there, the literary culture and literacy are there, and public access to literature, both print and digital, is well organized. Only one thing lacks, which is the digital literature itself.

The central question in this paper is why is it so -- does the (near) non-existence of digital literature in countries where the circumstances seem to be as close to the ideal as one can imagine seriously undermine the belief in the digital literature in general? Or is it rather that too strong a literary culture is foremost an obstacle for the development of digital literature?

To say that electronic literature is non-existent is, naturally, an exaggeration, as there are various projects, experiments, and try-outs happening currently in all the Nordic countries. But it is a huge leap from small scale (and often subsidised) experiments to full blown commercial (or at least professional) production. It is, however, important to distinguish between electronic literature as digitalisation of literature, which is (or could be) also published in print format, and which is referred to when the talk is about 'ebooks'. Another category is natively digital literature, such works that employ the potential of programmed media in ways that render them impossible to be published in print -- these works I refer to with the notion of 'cybertexts'. In addition, one should also acknowledge various Web sites where discussion and criticism about literature is carried on. Most of the existing activity belongs to the first or the last category, the cybertext category being the one closest to empty.

I will take a quick glance at some projects carried on in order to promote digital literature in Finland (such as lending ebook devices out from public libraries, publishing national bestsellers in ebook format, establishing literary fora in the Internet, etc.), and seek out what is the current situation. Also, I have checked some similar projects in Sweden, Denmark and Norway to widen my perspective. In this essay I'll try to find some tentative answers to the questions if there is, indeed, a place for literature in the information society.

Virtual libraries

Both academic and public libraries changed their services (browsable catalogues and loaning) into digital form in quite an early phase. Soon after that started the talk about 'virtual libraries'. For some time now, this has mainly meant bibliographies of books and articles categorized by subject, with occasional abstracts included. Lately, there has been a major shift towards including full texts in the virtual libraries too. On a national level, the virtual library development has been organized through the FinELib (the Finnish Electronic Library) Program. Tellingly titled report, Knowledge Society in Progress (Varis & Saari, 2003) gives much credit for the work done by FinELib so far. The aim of the program, as formulated in the report, is: "FinELib was launched to support higher education, learning and research in Finland as part of the Information Society Programme" (ibid., 10)[1]

As one of the few weaknesses the report sees in FinELib is the lack of Finnish resources and mechanisms to encourage domestic publishing. (ibid., 29) There is simply no local text material available in electronic format, and the report, once again, comes to the conclusion that "until now the emphasis has been more on technical advancement creating new solutions and options for the end-users and partner libraries rather than on contributing to the knowledge society in the broadest sense." (ibid., 31)

One question still to be answered is how or with which devices ebooks will be read on. There have been projects at least in Finland and in Denmark, where libraries have also loaned out the reading devices to accompany the ebooks. There have been both dedicated reading devices and handheld computers used in these projects, but even though it is quite clear that some alternatives to reading on tabletop screens have to be available, the loaning out of this kind of devices cannot work on a larger scale.

Are libraries in the future going to lend or rent ebooks out? With the current pricing models of ebook publishers, it seems that there is really no possibility for the prevailing principle of all-free public libraries. If the tendency is such that books (as ebooks) will turn from products to services (the reader is not purchasing a copy of the ebook, but access to the ebook), it certainly requires some serious innovations to turn these services into library items. On the other hand, FinELib and other such programs (especially from Nordic countries) have aimed at, as an international consortium, to influence the pricing and licensing policies towards more library friendly direction (Varis & Saari 2003, 21)

So far most of the ebook projects at libraries have been based on the no-pay principle. It is, however, quite doubtful if this can be continued if the ebooks at some point really become a significant part of their everyday processes. Thus, the Stockholm University Library chose to bill the students for borrowing ebooks. At the start they found out that "the publishers were less interested in the project than we had expected" (Widmark 2003, 4). The 138 students who took part in the project downloaded 118 times an ebook title for 10 minutes free trial, and only 4 titles in all were downloaded (per pay) for 24 hours reading time. Still, in the questionnaire handed out to the students after the project, two thirds (65%) said they find the idea of having textbooks available as ebooks either very good or good -- from this, and some occasional positive comments from the students, Widmark goes on to conclude quite optimistically that "... ebooks seem to develop to a natural medium both in public and academic libraries" (Widmark 2003, 6) There is very much the same spirit in the FinELib report stating that "FinELib should initiate PR-campaigns... in order to promote the use of electronic materials" (Varis & Saari 2003, 33) There is really not that much of demand for electronic texts, but a great belief in that since people are not outright hostile towards the idea, they will be hooked once they've been lured to try it. And to make it even easier for people to get into contact with all this information, "there should be a vision of public broadband access to FinELib material for every citizen" (ibid., 39) And further still, "the challenge of new literacies should be elaborated in a National Media Education Programme also to promote information literacy supported by electronic library services." (ibid., 46)

It seems that in Finland (and in other Nordic countries as well) the libraries have chosen their path, for easily understandable practical reasons. The society puts ever more demands for the libraries while simultaneously cutting down their funding (a silly situation, if something ever is) -- in such a situation electronic and virtual services promise a strategy to overcome the problem. Of course, for academic university libraries (as for all libraries with serious non-fiction departments) the growing amount of multimedial and database type publishing creates a need for electronic services -- and this need is not based on economy but genuine changes in the publishing world.

Ebook markets

Until the past two years there has been no local language ebook publishing in the Finland to speak of apart from highly specialised professional publications and some dictionary type publications, which have been available in Finland for some ten years now. Lately, the biggest publisher in Finland (WSOY), introduced a line of ebooks through their book club, starting with electronic versions of their current bestsellers. This selection is by now extended to thirty titles. The same seems to apply to other Nordic countries; there is a selection of some dozens of e-titles, just so that one cannot say there is nothing available -- but nothing more.

Also, a newcomer in the Finnish book selling markets, Eweline.com, has started with totally electronic selection. They offer ebook versions of titles other publishers have put out as print books -- there is probably no obstacle for including originally electronic titles in the list too, but currently there are not many of those available. The enterprise is too new to decide yet how the concept works, but judging from the deals they have come up with major Finnish publishing houses during the last couple of months, at least their activity is getting stronger. It is notable that the list includes mainly (almost exclusively) academic and non-fiction titles, even though this may change.

One big obstacle, in Finland especially, for the ebook publishing is the taxation; whereas print books have been subjected for several years for a relatively low VAT, ebooks are treated as software products, and as such, suffer from higher VAT rate. Once more, a rather paradoxical situation in a country so eager in its aspirations to be an exemplary case of information society (so much so that there are frequent talks about starting a Ministry of Information Society).

While conducting the Book 2010 project (for an English version of the project report see http://www.jyu.fi/nykykulttuuri/Kirja2010/index.htm) about the development trends and future vistas of Finnish book trade it soon became evident that all the bigger, traditional publishing houses were very sceptical about ebooks, let alone cybertext publishing. They were interested in the potential, but they were not eager to make any investments (apart from certain eLearning initiatives) in this field. One explanation behind the doubtfulness seemed (and still seems) to be the bitter experiences with CD-rom publishing. There were high hopes and serious investments in them in the early 90's, but that market never boomed (one exception being France, where there is, at least, CD-rom market to speak of). Now there are some modest, minor scale ebook publishing (as parallel publishing of print originals) experiments, but it feels safe to predict that if there ever will be professional cybertext publishing in the Nordic countries, it will not be done by the established book publishers but by some other instances, probably coming from the so-called new media field (a somewhat similar opinion is expressed by Norwegian Jorunn Danielsen in his column "Are ebooks only a man-thing").

Literary forums in the Internet

Various discussion forums are one important factor in the digitalisation of the literary world. Even if they were focussing on topics related to print literature, they are still dragging one corner of the literary field into the digital realm. The foremost example of this in Finland is Kiiltomato.net, which is a web based publishing venue for literary criticism -- it was created to open up a space where such books that never got any publicity in the 'mainstream media' (meaning mainly the biggest national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat) could be reviewed. In addition to the reviews, there is a discussion forum, and a bulletin board for literature related announcements. Monthly leader is often ranting about the situation of literature and libraries in the digitalised information society. This is clearly the case of secondary literature gone digital, mildly using such technologies as hypertext linking. There are also some small scale literary magazines published online sharing a rather traditional understanding of literature despite their publishing format.

There has been some activity among creative writing groups, too, to arrange meetings and feedback rounds through mailing lists or web forums. All in all, even though these are mainly rather marginal cases, they still go to show that the literary crowd is not wholly against the digital realm.

Cybertext publishing and the new technologies

Is there any cybertext publishing around in Finland? In any systematic or even commercial way, no. This is the current situation despite the fact there was a very early start in this field. Already in the late 80's and early 90's a group of scholars and students at the University of Tampere produced a couple of hypertext novels in Hypercard format. One of these (HyperApocalypsis) employed the premise that if the reader is not interested enough in the story and quits reading in less than 15 minutes, all the characters will die, and that'll be the end of the (fictional) work. After that, nothing much has happened, the rare exception being Markku Eskelinen's Interface I-III, a highly ambitious combination of print novel and a multifaceted web-based cybertext.[2]

Just recently, a best selling Finnish fiction author, Ilkka Remes (writer of action-laden thrillers with political intrigues) was granted funding to produce a fictional work employing the Internet, mobile technologies, and game like qualities. The work itself is still to be seen. On a somewhat smaller scale, Tommy Taberman, a popular poet and media personality has run a 'mobile diary' service -- people can subscribe to his short daily SMS messages.

And that is about it; and there doesn't seem to be much more activity in the field in other Nordic countries either.

Literary cybertexts

It should be quite evident by now that ebooks are closely linked to education and enlightenment -- where there is some ebook development detected, there is also a related eLearning initiative somewhere close. But what about literary electronic texts -- either with artistic or entertaining aspirations? These seem to be two quite distinct fields. The artistic cybertextuality, as I see it, belongs to the same category with all the other experimental or avantgarde writing. As such, it is by definition not even trying to gain the interest of the big audience, and consequently, its commercial potential is low. For print literature, there are arts and culture funding available, and on the other hand, the publishers are willing to put out works with zero income expectations if their artistic and/or cultural value is deemed high enough. The latter way is mainly blocked for a brave pioneer of cybertextuality. As publishers are already cutting down the non-profit, artistic publication of print books, they quite clearly are not interested in investing for the cybertext experiments. There simply is no such cultural prestige to be gained in the cyberworld, at least not at the moment.

The various funds, on the other hand, seem to be willing to invest in this field. Eskelinen's Interface was the first project to receive a grant from the Kordelin Foundation. Interestingly enough, the next author to receive funding for a digital work was a best-selling popular fiction writer with a concept of mixing fiction and game. That is, the writer and the fiction would probably never been selected for the grant, as it is clearly a case of such a commercial product that doesn't really need any additional funding. This leaves the form of the proposed work as the reason for funding. This may have been a good choice, actually, as there is a huge need for public awareness raising if cybertextuality wants to break out from the academic ghetto. This may be comparable, on a smaller scale naturally, to the Stephen King.com endeavour in the US, which took the ebook publishing to a wholly new level of publicity.

The fate of reading

Thus, we could easily dismiss the present lack of cybertext literature (and related structures) as a question of timing. It simply takes much more time to develop the generation of writers, the structure of publishing practices, and foremost, the reading public for something completely different compared to traditional literature. If this change is going to happen, it does so with or without national funding projects and other back-up investments. But there is another possibility too. I believe we have to take seriously the prospect of a radical change -- of radical decline -- in reading habits. This stance has been presented most eloquently in Sven Birkerts' book The Gutenberg Elegies. The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age (1994). Birkerts' lamentation of the cultural decline related to the rise of the network society has been dismissed by the proponents of electronic literature (by yours truly, too) left-handedly, by referring to the obvious fact that Birkerts doesn't seem to know anything about the serious work of cybertexts there is actually available. But this doesn't really hit the mark of his argument at all, as he is writing about a larger, and more fundamental, change in the Western world. He is not really lamenting that electronic textuality is conquering the place of traditional print literature, but rather that there is no place and no time and no willingness to really read at all, in this new world; that is, to read in a literary sense (which leaves out all the functional reading for work and education).

As I see the situation, the electronically published work of such authors as Markku Eskelinen, or Jan Guillou (who published one of his novels as a web serial before it came out as a book -- quite interestingly, he stated if one is going to publish his text in electronic format, it is better to do it before than after the print publication), for example, in Nordic countries, or by M. D. Coverley, Stuart Moulthrop, Michael Joyce, John Cayley, etc. in the Anglo-American world, very much belong to the literary tradition Birkerts is speaking for. Thus, it is not so much a question if people will read digital literature in the future, but rather, if they will read literature at all. (Of course, this is an exaggeration, one that Birkerts uses, too, as naturally nobody is stating earnestly that literature in toto would vanish). There are already statistics in Finland referring to the possibility that reading is less and less popular pastime for youth (also, in all age groups, the amount of persons who had read books during the last 12 months, has come down by 10 percent during the 90's). There is a well-known phenomenon amongst teenagers, where reading suddenly decreases, only to gradually increase again around college age. So far it is impossible to say for sure if we are witnessing a genuine generational change, or if it is, after all, only a temporarily strengthened version of the old pattern. It is often stated that even though the reading of books might be decreasing, people are reading other types of texts instead, most notably magazines and Internet pages, so, all in all, the amount of time spent for reading is continuously increasing. There is quite a strong resonance with this reasoning in the conclusion of the FinELib report: "Media literacy is multidimensional while digital literacy may refer to the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers. Digital literacy can simply be a new way of thinking." (Varis & Saari 2003, 51) In the elegiac mood of Birkerts, this is false optimism indeed -- reading literature is an activity fundamentally different from this kind of text-zapping and functional reading.

The situation may change, with a faster or slower pace, but currently one cannot but draw the conclusion that there is really no demand for electronic, and even less for cybertextual, literature in Finland; neither is there much creativity invested in it. (Nor, for that matter, much research interest -- the strong Nordic presence among the digital literature scholars suddenly seems to be dispersed, as researchers one by one have shifted their focus from literature to computer games, digital television, blogs etc.) Why is it so, while the situation especially in the US, and to some extent in France and Germany, shows that in bigger language areas multiple fields of cyberliterature have emerged?

Partial explanation might be, at least in Finland, that the popular taste is favouring realism. The dominant reading strategy relies upon the assumption of verisimilitude between fiction and reality. This has led to a rather thin tradition of experimental writing in general, and could reflect upon opinions over playful cybertexts especially. Literary taste, and the horizon of expectations, then, would work against the emergence of new cybertextual developments. Sweden differs here quite clearly from Finland, as there is a much stronger tradition of experimental and 'cybernetic' writing (see articles by Ingvarsson and Olsson in this issue of Dichtung Digital). A remarkable newer example of this kind of writing is Sven Lindqvist's non-fictional A History of Bombing with its twenty-two 'entrances' and multilinear structure.

Another partial explanation is probably the bookish culture of Nordic countries. It is not so much about valuing literary knowledge alone, but appreciating books themselves as precious artefacts. People want to have thick, hardcover volumes, which look like books. Suffice it to say, that in Finland paperback books have only had a few percents share of the book market for decades -- only during the last couple of years has paperback publishing started to show some upward thrust.

Third explanation comes from quite a different direction, from the inherently global perspective of information society concepts. In this world, what matters are products and formats, which easily can be adopted all over the globe. Literature, tightly tied to national languages (which in the cases of all Nordic countries happen to be very small indeed), does not suit the expectations of the architects of the globalized digital world. Whereas the Finnish national identity in the late 19th century was essentially based upon literature, the renewed sense of nationality in the network society seems indifferent, if not almost hostile, to literature. For traditional literati this should be good news, really, since this gives new ground for print literature as the vantage point from which to critically comment upon increasingly homogenised digital reality. The great novel about the estranged information society still keeps us waiting, though. It is maybe decades too early to expect the great cyberwork dealing with the intricacies of the networked cyberworld to appear. And even then, it may well emerge from somewhere else than the Information Society grazed Northern Europe where people are way too busy with information and its transitions in order to be able anymore to stop for a while to read and to think -- and to react to their reading.



References

Birkerts, Sven (1994) The Gutenberg Elegies. The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Fawcett Columbine.

Danielsen, Jorunn (2001) "Er e-bØker mannesaker?" ["Are ebooks only a man-thing?"], Magasinet Kulturnett 06/06/01, http://magasinet.kulturnett.no/

Eskelinen, Markku (1997, 1999, 2003) Interface I-III. Helsinki: Provosoft. Http://www.kolumbus.fi/mareske/

Lindqvist, Sven (1999) Nu dog du - bombernas århundrade. [A History of Bombing.] Stockholm: Bonniers.

Saarinen, Lauri & Joensuu, Juri & Koskimaa, Raine (eds.)(2001) Kirja 2010. Kirja-alan kehitystrendit. [Book 2010. Development trends in book trade.] Publications of the Research Center for Contemporary Culture 70. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. An abridged English version available at: http://www.jyu.fi/nykykulttuuri/Kirja2010/index.htm

Varis, Tapio & Saari, Seppo (eds.)(2003) Knowledge Society in Progress. Evaluation of the Finnish Electronic Library - FinELib. Publications of the Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council 4:2003. Helsinki: Edita.

Vuorensyrjä, Matti & Savolainen, Reijo (eds.)(2000) Tieto ja tietoyhteiskunta. [Information and Information Society] Helsinki: Gaudeamus.

Widmark, Wilhelm (2003) "Slutrapport för projektet 'Kurslitterature som e-bok -- ett samarbetsprojekt mellan Stockholms universitetbibliotek och eLib" ["Textbooks as ebooks -- a joint project between Stockholm University Library and eLib"]. Stockholm: Stockholms univeristetsbibliotek. Available at: http://www.kb.se/bibsam/bidrag/projbidr/avslutade/2003/ebok_widmark.pdf


[1] The Finnish word 'tietoyhteiskunta' covers both meanings of 'information society' and 'knowledge society', and there is often confusion about how it is used in any given occasion. I prefer here 'information society’, as there is always a strong connection to information technology in Finnish discussions.

[2] There has been some other academic experiments in hypertext fiction around the Nordic countries in the early 90's, but the interest in general seems to have been more on MUD's, MOO's and other game related activities, and lately, on blogs. Norwegians especially have been highly influential in MOO development.

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This article was written by Raine Koskimaa, published at www.brown.edu

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The Rise of The Superartists

What do Olafur Eliasson and Takashi Marakami have in common? One is a neo-Light-and-Space artist who proffers installations with a nebulous environmental theme. The other is the Andy Warhol of Japanese cartoons. Eliasson is a lofty Apollonian. Murakami is an edgy Dionysian.

Yet -- aside from the fact that they are both just concluding high-profile mid-career surveys at big New York institutions -- the similarities between the two are also obvious. Both run art factories, where they oversee teams of assistants who produce their expensive works: Eliasson in Berlin, Murakami in Toyko and New York. Both command huge followings, inside and outside the art world.

A more obvious response might be that what they have in common is Louis Vuitton. Murakami has famously hitched his star to the luxury brand, giving it a makeover and plopping functional boutiques in the middle of his museum retrospective. Eliasson, for his part, was called in to create holiday display installations in all 350 global Vuitton locations in 2006.

You could also point out that both artists have lent their talents to car companies. Murakami did so in 2005, with his design for the prototype Nissan Pivo. Eliasson, more recently, created a BMW "art car" which he froze under a casing of ice, a statement about the German manufacturer’s commitment to the environment which featured as the centerpiece of his touring retrospective when it debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Yet beyond and behind all this, there is something else, an actual stylistic continuity that it is important to see beneath the distinct themes of their different oeuvres. Eliasson and Murakami, along with Damien Hirst and Cai Guo-Qiang, form nothing less than the cutting edge of a contemporary avant-garde. Hirst, Murakami, Eliasson and Cai are the Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger of an artistic sensibility that will likely be remembered as one of the essential stylistic developments of the day -- the rise of the "superartist." Jeff Koons is this phenomenon’s Paul Cézanne. Warhol is its Manet.

All of these figures are, of course, phenomenally successful. But it is not just their concurrent success that justifies grouping them. The characteristics of the "superartist," as I have argued with respect to the young artist Shaun El C. Leonardo [see "Man and Superman," Sept. 27, 2007], may be based on an ability to penetrate the media, but they also constitute a real axis of esthetic invention.

First of all, as each of these figures has evolved, their work has increasingly refused to be constrained by the narrow confines of the art community. The very nature of their practice, and its status as art, depends on its interweaving with wider media. From figures of narrow significance within a certain tradition they have evolved into cultural impresarios, bringing their trademark art sensibility to cartoons, clothing lines and commissions for tourism boards.

This then rebounds on what they do within the art world, affecting its definition and presentation. "Superart" has a populist touch, and appreciation of the work tends to be an appreciation of being part of a collective, as opposed to an individual, esthetic experience, just as the works themselves tend away from personal statements and towards blank social referents -- death, change, media, atmosphere. Experiencing the wonder, shock or enthusiasm of other viewers is part of the game. Hence, the Ripley’s Believe It or Not spectacle of Hirst’s diamond-clad skull, and the long lines awaiting it, the ephemeral bliss of Cai Guo-Qiang’s pyrotechnics, the way Murakami’s sculptures and paintings catalyze manga-mania, the amusement-park enthusiasm of crowds observing each other within the haze of Eliasson’s artificial sun at the Tate Modern.

Ordinarily, when critics speak of the art world as part of the "culture industry," they are guilty of a loose use of concepts. The notion of the "culture industry," as famously put forward in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, refers to a specific, Taylorized mode of industrial creativity, characteristic of Hollywood. It is pitched against the tradition of individual expression that it has been the art world’s historical vocation to preserve -- albeit in a form that is increasingly self-contradictory. However, with the superartists, who function more and more like "imagineers," who cut their work to the specifications of giant institutions, whose work is indivisibly associated with production by their own boutique design studios, "visual art" becomes less and less distinct from mass culture, and the idea gains more traction (though Horkheimer and Adorno’s totalizing, "resistance is futile" rhetoric is still a fairly unhelpful way to analyze such phenomena).

(As an aside, I would add that if it seems that the superartist field is particularly male-dominated -- even given the famous male bias of the art world in general -- this probably stems from the same reasons that there are disproportionately few successful female architects or film directors: It is just hard to convince the moneymen to get on board with a woman’s ambitious vision.)

When I have discussed the "superartist" concept with people, their first reaction is usually to treat it an evaluative category (as in, "But Eliasson is really quite soulful," or "It’s true -- Murakami is a hack"). In fact, it is a descriptive category. These artists are simply capturing a contradictory set of contemporary cultural developments -- on the one hand, they reflect the increased mainstream currency of contemporary art, and a popular hunger for meaningful experience; on the other, this is bound up with museums’ need for the media-frenzy of prefab blockbusters and the desire of corporate sponsors to use art to put on a human face.

Still, some evaluation is in order. So I will say that, of Eliasson and Murakami, I believe that Murakami better grasps the implications of what he does. Eliasson’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was titled "Take Your Time," a phrase clearly meant to pitch the show as a defense of the subjective experience of art in response to the go-go-GO temporality of commercial culture, preserving the temple-like esthetic austerity of MoMA. However, Eliasson’s practice, based on a technocratic manipulation of perceptual effects, does not really lend itself to this kind of appreciation. The "time" of the title is the objective time of science, warning viewers to let their retinas adjust to whatever environmental manipulation the artist is plunging them into. You experience, above all, admiration for Eliasson’s engineering prowess.

Murakami, on the other hand, seems much more at home with his superartist status, perhaps because he hails from a country that has a weak contemporary art market in the first place, meaning that he has always conceived of himself as transcending its narrow confines. "One-hundred percent yes," was his Warholian answer when, on the occasion of his "©Murakami" show at the Brooklyn Museum, someone from New York magazine asked if his partnership with Vuitton affected his art practice. More importantly, however, Murakami accurately pitches his promiscuous style of artistic spectacle as a product of a specific, interpenetrating alignment of economy and culture -- the definitive characteristic of "superartistry" -- rather than disguising it as an autotelic form of perceptual investigation, as Eliasson tends to do.

The same interviewer asked Murakami what he would do if the bottom fell out of the art market. "I’ll keep making art -- paper and pen," he replied. "I’ll make small things." So all hail to the superartists, as long as they last.


--------------
About the writer:
BEN DAVIS is associate editor of Artnet Magazine. He can be reached at bdavis@artnet.com. This article was published at www.artnet.com

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Van Gogh: The Artist As a Whole Man

He was the son of a minister, the eldest of six children in a family that valued education, cultural experiences and religion. Early on, he exhibited a talent for drawing and watercolors. But for the longest time, van Gogh ricocheted from job to job and place to place.

In 1869, at age 16, he went to work for Goupil & Co., a prestigious art gallery in The Hague where one of his uncles was a partner. After four years, he was transferred to the gallery's branch in Paris, and then, briefly, to London, and then to Paris again. In March 1876 he was dismissed. Evidently, he'd taken an unauthorized leave the previous Christmas, when the gallery was especially busy, and in any event his personality was not exactly suited to selling pictures and serving clients.

The following month, he accepted a position as a schoolteacher in Ramsgate, England. Within a few months, he moved on to another school in Isleworth, near London. Late in 1876 he resigned from that job, too, he and and his family agreeing that he had no future as a teacher in an English boarding school. He then worked as a bookstore clerk in the Dutch town of Dordrecht, but quit after a few months.

In May 1877 he moved to Amsterdam, where he began to prepare for the entrance examinations to study theology at the University of Amsterdam. He hoped to become a minister like his father, but by July 1878 he had abandoned his studies. Instead, he went to Brussels and took a three-month course for evangelical missionaries, after which he was appointed a lay minister in the impoverished Belgian coal-mining district known as the Borinage. There, he applied Christian doctrine rather literally: He gave away his clothes and possessions to the poor and needy and lived with virtually no personal amenities. An inspector for the Comite d'Evangelisation viewed his behavior as overzealous and counterproductive. Again, van Gogh was dismissed.

In 1880 he turned to art. The discouragement of the years of accumulated failures began to abate by late that year, when he wrote to Theo that he had started to draw: "I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself, in spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. From that moment, everything seemed transformed for me." With his brother's financial assistance, Vincent embarked on his journey as an artist.

He moved to Brussels in October to study art, but found the city too expensive for his modest allowance; the following April he returned to Holland to stay with his parents in Etten. At the end of 1881 he moved to The Hague, where he studied with Anton Mauve, a distant relative and the leading figure of the group of artists known as the Hague School. Van Gogh concentrated on drawings and watercolors and did little oil painting until 1882.

His decision to become an artist provided a sense of purpose but did not mitigate his personal problems. While living in The Hague in 1883, he moved in with a prostitute known as Sien, who had a 5-year-old child and was pregnant with another. The move strained his relationships with his family and with Mauve, who stopped offering advice and instruction. Most of his friendships, in fact, collapsed under the gravity of his personality.

His intelligence, prodigious talent and determination were very likely overbearing. He was very serious and held strong opinions. When challenged, he would became angry or withdraw behind a wall of silence. In a letter to Theo, he offered a self-portrait that is confirmed by the accounts of others: "[Father and Mother] have the same dread of taking me in the house as they would about taking in a big rough dog. He would run into the room with wet paws – and he is so rough. He will be in everybody's way. And he barks so loud. In short, he is a foul beast."

In November 1883, he moved to Drenthe, a province in northeastern Holland. After three desolate months there, he joined his parents in Nuenen, a village in the province of North Brabant, where his father had recently become the parish minister. Between 1883 and 1885, he drew and painted the landscape and the peasants in the area – and with the same compassion and empathy he had shown in the Borinage. Pastoral imagery and the world of the peasants had a strong attraction for him. "I often think how the peasants form a world apart," he wrote to Theo in 1885, "in many respects so much better than the civilized world."

It was in this spirit that he executed his first great masterpiece, "The Potato Eaters," which he painted in Nuenen in September and October 1885. Not long after finishing a work that appears to be a premiere pense, or first version, of "The Potato Eaters," he wrote to Theo about his project for "a real peasant picture": "All winter long I have had the threads of this tissue in my hands, and have searched for the ultimate pattern; and though it has become a tissue of rough, coarse aspect, nevertheless the threads have been chosen carefully and according to certain rules. And it might prove to be a real peasant picture. I know it is."

At this point, van Gogh's development was largely influenced by the work of artists he had seen and admired in London, Paris, Amsterdam and The Hague. In some instances, he knew their work only from black-and-white illustrations in magazines. Many were landscapists and painters of peasants who were members of the Hague School in Holland or the Barbizon School in France. Some, such as Jean-Francois Millet, were well known, but were not members of the avant-garde. Two or three years would pass before van Gogh became familiar with the paintings and ideas of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

He had very specific ideas about the content and the meaning of his paintings. In addition, he was quite eloquent about how he intended to convey his message. In the same letter to Theo, he laid out his approach to "The Potato Eaters": "I personally am convinced that I get better results by painting them in their roughness than by giving them a conventional charm . . . It would be wrong, I think, to give a peasant picture a certain conventional smoothness. If a peasant picture smells of bacon smoke, potato steam – all right, that's not unhealthy; if a stable smells of dung – all right, that belongs to a stable; if the field has an odor of ripe corn or potatoes or of guano or manure – that's healthy, especially for city people. Such pictures may teach them something. But to be perfumed is not what a peasant picture needs."

Clearly, "The Potato Eaters" was painted within the confines of a limited range of color, or "certain rules." In addition, the drawing of figures, the rendering of space and the interpretation of form are rife with exaggerations and distortions. Van Gogh's works depend heavily on a process that early in his career he described as "reasoned out and willed." If he had painted in the grip of emotional outbursts and uncontrolled effusions of energy, there would be little or none of the analytical thought that characterizes his correspondence.

Van Gogh often sent sketches, drawings and paintings to his brother, who was working for Boussod & Valadon (formerly Goupil & Co.) in Paris. Theo must have shown his brother's work to friends, because one of them, Charles Serret, apparently voiced complaints about Vincent's knowledge of anatomy, interpreting his intentional distortions and remarkable expressiveness as ineptitude. In a letter of July 1885 to Theo, the artist replied to the criticism with equanimity but conviction: "Tell Serret that I should be desperate if my figures were correct, tell him that I do not want them to be academically correct . . . Tell him that my great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodelings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like – but truer than the literal truth."

Not long after completing "The Potato Eaters," van Gogh left Nuenen and enrolled in art school in Antwerp. But his classes at the academy frustrated him, and his professors and fellow students found him peculiar. He stayed for only about three months.

One morning in early March 1886, Theo received a note, delivered by a porter from the railroad station: "Do not be cross with me for having come all at once like this; I have thought about it so much, and I believe that in this way we shall save time. Shall be at the Louvre from midday or sooner if you like."

Vincent was in Paris, suddenly surrounded by the modern painting about which he had only read and heard.

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source: www.washingtonpost.com

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Love in the Time of Cholera: The Heart's Eternal Vow

Love, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a game of eternity. It's about then that we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.

At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent, premortal hope? Pretty far out on life's limb, at least. Suppose, then, it were possible, not only to swear love "forever," but actually to follow through on it -- to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one's alloted stake of precious time where one's heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel García Márquez's new novel Love in the Time of Cholera, one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.

In the postromantic ebb of the 70's and 80's, with everybody now so wised up and even growing paranoid about love, once the magical buzzword of a generation, it is a daring step for any writer to decide to work in love's vernacular, to take it, with all its folly, imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously -- that is, as well worth those higher forms of play that we value in fiction. For García Márquez the step may also be revolutionary. "I think that a novel about love is as valid as any other," he once remarked in a conversation with his friend, the journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (published as "El Olor de la Guayaba," 1982). "In reality the duty of a writer -- the revolutionary duty, if you like -- is that of writing well."
And -- oh boy -- does he write well. He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity: the Garcímárquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar, as in this description of a turn-of-the-century balloon trip:

"From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor.

"They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by everyone's shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon."

This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality -- youthful idiocy, to some -- may yet be honored, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable. This is, effectively, to assert the resurrection of the body, today as throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea. Through the ever-subversive medium of fiction, García Márquez shows us how it could all plausibly come about, even -- wild hope -- for somebody out here, outside a book, even as inevitably beaten at, bought and resold as we all must have become if only through years of simple residence in the injuring and corruptive world.
Here's what happens. The story takes place between about 1880 and 1930, in a Caribbean seaport city, unnamed but said to be a composite of Cartagena and Barranquilla -- as well, perhaps, as cities of the spirit less officially mapped. Three major characters form a triangle whose hypotenuse is Florentino Ariza, a poet dedicated to love both carnal and transcendent, though his secular fate is with the River Company of the Caribbean and its small fleet of paddle-wheel steamboats. As a young apprentice telegrapher he meets and falls forever in love with Fermina Daza, a "beautiful adolescent with . . . almondsshaped eyes," who walks with a "natural haughtiness . . . her doe's gait making her seem immune to gravity." Though they exchange hardly a hundred words face to face, they carry on a passionate and secret affair entirely by way of letters and telegrams, even after the girl's father has sound out and taken her away on an extended "journey of forgetting." But when she returns, Fermina rejects the lovesick young man after all, and eventually meets and marries instead Dr. Juvenal Urbino who, like the hero of a I9th-century novel, is well born, a sharp dresser, somewhat stuck on himself but a terrific catch nonetheless.
For Florentino, love's creature, this is an agonizing setback, though nothing fatal. Having sworn to love Fermina Daza forever, he settles in to wait for as long as he has to until she's free again. This turns out to be 51 years, 9 months and 4 days later, when suddenly, absurdly, on a Pentecost Sunday around 1930, Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies, chasing a parrot upon mango tree. After the funeral, when everyone else has left, Florentino steps forward with his hat over his heart "Fermina," he declares, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love." Shocked and furious, Fermina orders him out of the house. "And don't show your face again for the years of life that are left to you . . . I hope there are very few of them."
The heart's eternal vow has run up against the world's finite terms. The confrontation occurs near the end of the first chapter, which recounts Dr. Urbino's last day on earth and Fermina's first night as a widow. We then flash back 50 years, into the time of cholera. The middle chapters follow the lives of the three characters through the years of the Urbinos' marriage and Florentino Ariza's rise at the River Company, as one century ticks over into the next. The last chapter takes up again where the first left off, with Florentine now, in the face of what many men would consider major rejection, resolutely setting about courting Fermina Daza all over again, doing what he must to win her love.
In their city, throughout a turbulent half-century, death has proliferated everywhere, both as el cólera, the fatal disease that sweeps through in terrible intermittent epidemics, and as la cólera, defined as choler or anger, which taken to its extreme becomes warfare. Victims of one, in this book, are more than once mistaken for victims of the other. War, "always the same war," is presented here not as the continuation by other means of any politics that can possibly matter, but as a negative force, a plague, whose only meaning is death on a massive scale. Against this dark ground, lives, so precarious, are often more and less conscious projects of resistance, even of sworn opposition, to death. Dr. Urbino, like his father before him, becomes a leader in the battle against the cholera, promoting public health measures obsessively, heroically. Fermina, more conventionally but with as much courage, soldiers on in her chosen role of wife, mother and household manager, maintaining a safe perimeter for her family. Florentino embraces Eros, death's well-known long-time enemy, setting off on a career of seductions that eventually add up to 622 "long term liaisons, apart from . . . countless fleeting adventures," while maintaining, impervious to time, his deeper fidelity, his unquenchable hope for a life with Fermina. At the end he can tell her truthfully -- though she doesn't believe it for a minute -- that he has remained a virgin for her.
So far as this is Florentino's story, in a way his Bildungsroman, we find ourselves, as he earns the suspension of our disbelief, cheering him on, wishing for the success of this stubborn warrior against age and death, and in the name of love. But like the best fictional characters, he insists on his autonomy, refusing to be anything less ambiguous than human. We must take him as he is, pursuing his tomcat destiny out among the streets and lovers' refuges of this city with which he lives on terms of such easy intimacy, carrying with him a potential for disasters from which he remains safe, immunized by a comical but dangerous indifference to consequences that often borders on criminal neglect. The widow Nazaret, one of many widows he is fated to make happy, seduces him during a nightlong bombardment from the cannons of an attacking army outside the city. Ausencia Santander's exquisitely furnished home is burgled of every movable item while she and Florentino are frolicking in bed. A girl he picks up at Carnival time turns out to be a homicidal machete-wielding escapee from the local asylum. Olimpia Zuleta's husband murders her when he sees a vulgar endearment Florentino has been thoughtless enough to write on her body in red paint. His lover's amorality causes not only individual misfortune but ecological destruction as well: as he learns by the end of the book, his River Company's insatiable appetite for firewood to fuel its steamers has wiped out the great forests that once bordered the Magdalena river system, leaving a wasteland where nothing can live. "With his mind clouded by his passion for Fermina Daza he never took the trouble to think about it, and by the time he realized the truth, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in a new river."
In fact, dumb luck has as much to do with getting Florentino through as the intensity or purity of his dream. The author's great affection for this character does not entirely overcome a sly concurrent subversion of the ethic of machismo, of which García Márquez is not especially fond, having described it elsewhere simply as usurpation of the rights of others. Indeed, as we've come to expect from his fiction, it's the women in this story who are stronger, more attuned to reality. When Florentino goes crazy with live, developing symptoms like those of cholera, it is his mother Transito Ariza, who pulls him out of it. His innumerable lecheries are rewarded not so much for any traditional masculine selling points as for his obvious and aching need to be loved. Women go for it. "He is ugly and sad," Fermina Daza's cousin Hildebranda tells her, "but he is all love."
And García Márquez, straight-faced teller of tall tales, is his biographer. At the age of 19, as he has reported, the young writer underwent a literary epiphany on reading the famous opening lines of Kafka's Metamorphosis, in which a man wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect. "Gosh," exclaimed García Márquez, using in Spanish a word in English we may not, "that's just the way my grandmother used to talk!" And that, he adds is when novels began to interest him. Much of what come [sic] in his work to be called "magical realism" was, as he tells it, simply the presence of that grandmotherly voice.
Nevertheless, in this novel we have come a meaningful distance from Macondo, the magical village in One Hundred Years of Solitude where folks routinely sail through the air and the dead remain in everyday conversation with the living: we have descended, perhaps in some way down the same river, all the way downstream, into war and pestilence and urban confusions to the edge of a Caribbean haunted less by individual dead than by a history which has brought so appallingly many down, without ever having sopoken, or having spoken gone unheard, or having been heard, left unrecorded. As revolutionary as writing well is the duty to redeem these silences, a duty García Márquez has here fulfilled with honor and compassion. It would be presumptuous to speak of moving "beyond" One Hundred Years of Solitude but clearly García Márquez has moved somewhere else, not least into deeper awareness of the ways in which, as Florentino comes to learn, "nobody teaches life anything." There are still delightful and stunning moments contrary to fact, still told with the same unblinking humor -- presences at the foot of the bed, an anonymously delivered doll with a curse on it, the sinister parrot, almost a minor character, whose pursuit ends with the death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. But the predominant claim on the author's attention and energies comes from what is not so contrary to fact, a human consensus about "reality" in which love and the possibility of love's extinction are the indispensable driving forces, and varieties of magic have become, if not quite peripheral, then at least more thoughtfully deployed in the service of an expanded vision, matured, darker than before but no less clement.
It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera -- all genres, by the way, that are well represented in this novel -- but not the Big L. What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level of understanding, is an author's ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the full extent of his caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.
In translating Love in the Time of Cholera, Edith Grossman has been attentive to this element of discipline, among many nuances of the author's voice to which she is sensitively, imaginatively attuned. My Spanish isn't perfect, but I can tell that she catches admirably and without apparent labor the swing and translucency of his writing, its slang and its classicism, the lyrical stretches and those end-of-sentence zingers he likes to hit us with. It is a faithful and beautiful piece of work.
There comes a moment, early in his career at the River Company of the Caribbean when Florentino Ariza, unable to write even a simple commercial letter without some kind of romantic poetry creeping in, is discussing the problem with his uncle Leo XII, who owns the company. It's no use, the young man protests -- "Love is the only thing that interests me."
"The trouble," his uncle replies," is that without river navigation, there is no love." For Florentino, this happens to be literally true: the shape of his life is defined by two momentous river voyages, half a century apart. On the first he made his decision to return and live forever in the city of Fermina Daza, to persevere in his love for as long as it might take. On the second, through a desolate landscape, he journeys into love and against time, with Fermina, at last by his side. There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime's experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance -- at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.

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New York Time Book Review

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Popular casino sites review

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Something in the Air: Perfume

A couple of weeks back I went to Kyoto for a three day weekend. Three day weekends occur fairly frequently here as Japan is blessed with an abundance of public holidays. They give the perfect opportunity to travel around the country without using up any of our precious paid holiday. This one was for ‘Foundation Day’, a holiday to celebrate the founding of the Imperial line by Jimmu, Japan’s possibly mythical first emperor. During this weekend my novel of choice was Patrick Suskind’s Perfume. This book has been highly recommended to me from all directions, and always seemed to follow me about. From being in Germany when the film was released a couple of summers back; to a South African friend here who can speak fluent German having a copy in its original language on her bedside table. And while I was home in the UK over Christmas I spent a brief visit in London. On the tube there was a man about my age sitting opposite me reading it in Italian. This is clearly a novel that transcends the boundaries of nationality and language.

While reading it I had to marvel at my own contribution to its internationalism. It’s a novel originally written in German and set in France. And here I was reading it in an English translation in the most quintessentially Japanese city in the world. Kyoto was originally the capital of Japan before it was moved to Tokyo about 140 years ago. As a result it has kept much of it’s old grandeur from this period in the shape of hundreds of shrines and temples. It is also has the most working Geisha, as anyone will know who has read about these rare creatures in Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha. I had to wonder about what it was that makes the novel so attractive to people throughout the world, and I can only conclude that it is its preoccupation with smell. I doubt that any work of literature has ever before been devoted to the sense of smell in such a way. I actually heard once that in Austen’s entire oeuvre there is not a single reference to smell, although I haven’t checked for myself. Why has this sense been neglected for so long in literature? What is it about smell that has relegated it compared to the other four?

Maybe it’s because smell can be so difficult to explain. It’s such a personal sense. While most people will have similar experiences of what affects through sight and touch, smell influences people in different ways. For me the smell of lavender always reminds me of being aged 11. There was a lavender bush in my school and all through the spring and summer there was one corner of the playground that would be filled with its delicate yet prevailing scent. But perhaps it’s also because it is the sense we pay the least attention to in our day to day lives. I could vividly describe the view of Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion, with snow on its slanted roof, the noise of the many tourists present, and the chill in the February air. But as much as I try to find it in my memory I have no idea what it smelt like there. The reason that the lavender bush stays with me is because it was so incongruous in the middle of an inner-city school yard. I had never smelt real lavender before, only the synthetic kinds that comes in soaps and drawer liners. Perhaps that’s why Perfume seems to have spread around the world. Like the lavender its evocation of smell intrudes on our normally scentless literary lives.

By Kimberley Long, published at http://thereaderonline.co.uk

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Casino guide with personal review

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Andrea Hirata's novel goes beyond childhood memories

Title: Laskar Pelangi
Author: Andrea Hirata
Publisher: PT Bentang Pustaka, Yogyakarta
2005, republished 2008,
534 pp


Andrea Hirata's Laskar Pelangi seems to start slowly. Like other coming-of-age novels, the story maintains an intimate closeness to its childhood characters, who in this case are children from the impoverished neighborhoods of resource-rich Belitong or Belitung in southern Sumatra.

The novel, which has been republished for the 16th time since its 2005 launch, focuses on a class of 10 elementary school students with a rainbow-like variety of talents and defects, hopes and desires. Their individual struggles to soar eventually succumb to the realities in which they are rooted.

Apart from studying the world through the lens of the children's eyes, the novel also provides insight into the perspectives of the meagerly paid teachers who dedicate their lives to the happiness and growth of their students.

The novel chronicles the simple and hard lives of a nickel-rich town, which is socially usurped by an affluent and greedy mining company that divides the people.

Andrea's novel provides a rigorous and heartfelt examination of a crumbling education system, a never-ending class struggle and the poverty which these two social dynamics seem to perpetuate. By selecting a setting which is very close and personal, the author passionately weaves a witty, metaphor-rich story.

Andrea's portrayal of class struggle and deep-rooted poverty emulates the work of literary giant Mark Twain. Class struggle is seen as a reality to live with. Although there's nothing amusing about it, the narrative seem capable of unleashing a dimension of pathos capable of eliciting a smile or a giggle.

For Indonesian readers, Andrea has offered something more than Twain, particularly for readers familiar with an upbringing in a small town setting. The story seems to evoke a suitcase of memories and nostalgia. The childhood characters of the narrative become as close as the reader's own.

Throughout the story it's difficult to distinguish whether the book is a memoir of the writer's experience or a fictitious novel. The author was born and grew up in the same area as his debut novel. But whatever the truth is, whether it's fictitious or not, Andrea succeeds in enunciating his childhood reminiscence. A romantic recollection of impoverished lives in his hometown becomes a literary work that intrinsically carries with it the higher moral impetus which is social satire.

The novel begins with "Ikal" the first person protagonist, providing an account of his first day of school at Muhammadiyah elementary school in Belitong. The school, which is the oldest one in town, was established by moderate Muslim clerics. The particular day represents a critical moment for the school. A crucial decision must be taken if the number of enrolled students does not reach 10.

Andrea carefully builds the suspense with descriptive exposure of the facial expression of the school's caretaker K.A. Harfan Effendy Noor and teacher N.A. Muslimah Hafsari. Although central to the novel, the two people are not fictitious characters.

Andrea subtly manipulates and rides on the waiting moment -- as one by one would-be students show up -- to take on the vicious cycle of poverty and fairness of the education system.

"My father is nervous. I can understand it, it's not easy for him, a 47-year-old mining worker to send his son to a school. It's easier to give me up to a tauke or dried coconut kopra company for I can help to earn money for my family."

Other parents possess similar dilemmas, weighing the desire to advance their progeny while buckling under the strain of their poverty. Instead of taking it as a form of basic rights, education is simply seen as a conduit to attain better welfare. Uneducated, the small town folk generally assume seven- or eight-year-old children are ripe to earn real money for a living rather than attending classes to learn abstract concepts and knowledge that push them to an uncertain future.

"Parents are here (at the school on the first day of school) to avoid mockery from government officials if they are not sending their children to school."

The Muhammadiyah school where Ikal and his nine friends go is rundown. The patched building lacks decorations to embellish the crumbling walls and faded paint. The pious teachers' untiring spirits are the only light shining in the otherwise grim classrooms. Andrea's recollection of his classroom is best reflected in his description of the class wall.

"There are no pictures of the President and Vice President, nor is there a picture of that weird big bird (state symbol Garuda). To cover a crack on the wall, a poster has been placed. It's a picture of a thick-bearded man wearing Muslim garb. The man looks up to the sky and a lot of money rains down on his face from the sky. There is a sentence below which later I understand is the name of the man, Rhoma Irama...Hujan Duit (Rhoma Irama...rain of money)." Rhoma was a dangdut king who is also known for his staunch Islamic point of view.

Though taking Islamic education, Andrea doesn't present his main characters as religious students. Gullibly, they remain kids and better off that way for the children's innocence -- intentionally or not -- works well in this particular situation. For instance, upon hearing a story told by the school principal about Noah and his giant boat that gives salvation for those who believe and practice the belief, Ikal naively draws his first moral lesson: "If I'm not pious, I have to be a damned good swimmer, otherwise I'll drown."

Though predominantly inhabited by ethnic Malay residents who are staunch Muslim, the coastal town of Belitong is also home to ethnic Chinese. Unlike the common stereotype, Belitong Chinese are not all wealthy and happy.

Many make up the poorest part of the society. But Andrea humorously flips the misery: "...families of Chinese descent don't have to think about costly trips to their ancestors' land in Jinchanying to see the Great Wall because in Belitong they can see it, stretching for tens of kilometers, dividing Belitong."

The Great Wall he means is the one built by the mining company which divides the hustle and bustle of the mining industry and the rest of Belitong. Inside the wall, which he calls The Tower of Babel, the mining company quietly runs its own life: well maintained asphalt roads, Victorian-styled housing complexes, best schools for their children and public facilities to pamper the company's staff and their families.

It's a world apart, on the other side of the wall as Andrea describes it. The scenario is a textbook example of social stratification in the domain where the mining giants operate. The economic gap somehow seems common amid the rapid economic growth which both raises and excludes. Andrea's work somehow manages to provide readers with a sense of proportion. Through extensive use of paradoxes, Andrea allows his readers to draw their own conclusions.

Laskar Pelangi is not as light as it seems. The author is very resourceful in his use of metaphor. The witty story-telling shows a depth of understanding regarding the human struggle. The writer provides an appreciation for what it is to be alive and not only to blindly submit to one's fate.

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Source: Jakarta Post

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Zarathushtra - ethical philosopher or spiritual leader

There is one major difference between a philosopher and a prophet. Most philosophers are rational beings who base their philosophy of life on reason. In contrast the prophets may or may not be rational or reasonable, however, invariably prophets and spiritual leaders are creatures of extreme.

Generally philosophers base their philosophy of life on ethical values. Consequently they preach the path of reasonableness, balance, and moderation. Through their rational thinking, they prefer to eliminate extremes at either end of any spectrum, and consider the correct method, approach, or path to be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. While this approach is very pragmatic, particularly with regards to social behavior and communal living, it has nothing to do with spirituality.

On the other hand, invariably all prophets have selected a spiritual path, which is none other than the path of extreme. For example, Christ chose the path of Love. He considered the path of Love to be the only true and spiritual path; to such an extent that he beseeched us to love our enemies. Moses was another extremist who considered God's Laws to be the Supreme guidelines of life. He believed in the supremacy of God's Laws to such an extent that his entire prophetic message was based on these, epitomized by the Ten Commandments, followed by many many more rules and regulations as outlined in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy of The Old Testament.

Prophet Muhammad was yet another extremist whose entire philosophy was based on submission to the Will of God. The word Islam simply means submission. He believed God's Will to be the Supreme and the unequivocal in life. Therefore Muhammad in an extreme way preached the path of Submission. Even in the case of Prince Siddhartha, when he discovered the "Middle Path", he preached that we should accept all extremes of life, preferring neither the harsh nor the gentle. To tread the middle path, for Siddhartha meant to be completely detached from the passions of life, be they pleasurable or sorrowful. Hinduism too preaches that we can only attain Godhood when we can achieve complete and total detachment from this life.



Was Zarathushtra a philosopher who preached moral and ethical values or was he a prophet who also preached an extreme adherence to his path?

Through close study of Zarathushtra's philosophy, it becomes abundantly apparent that Zarathushtra preached adherence to the path of Asha. The Ashem Vohu prayer clearly states that we should "Do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, and all else shall follow. "

The path of Asha, otherwise referred to as truth, righteousness, or by any other name, is also an extreme path. Zarathushtra preached that adherence to this path is of utmost importance in this life, and will have eternal consequences in the hereafter.

But the question now becomes is the path of Asha simply a path of moral and ethical behavior? Is moderation and balance in life a part of this path? Should we resist all evil, all untruth, all injustice? Or are there any cases in which some evil, untruth, or injustice may be tolerated? Are there any cases where a white lie may be justified? Is it okay to kill? What if we are faced with a mass murderer? What if we have the opportunity to kill Hitler? If killing is wrong, then should we not kill at all? Not even Hitler?

These are obviously moral and philosophical questions that are asked by every generation. The timelessness of such questions goes back to the root question: whether the end justifies the means?

A philosopher's answer to such questions would naturally lead to the reasonable conclusion that to follow a path of moderation, there may be occasions which will require us to bend such ethical and moral laws. There may be cases of greater evil which need to be fought with lesser evil. Obviously if we refuse to fight the greater evil with lesser evil, then the greater evil will be victorious. And clearly the consequence of such victory is death and destruction of the Good.

A prophet however, may respond to such questions by saying that survival in life is not the paramount issue. That goodness in life is far more important than survival. But to believe in such philosophy of life, otherwise referred to as "dogma" by philosophers, one has to transcend reasonableness and rationality. This is where spiritual belief becomes the dominant force.

According to a prophet, if a truth is truth, it is always truth, regardless of time or circumstances. Therefore if an evil is evil, it is always evil. A lie is always a lie, whether it is black or white. And killing is always wrong, whether the object of murder is an innocent child, or one as notorious as Hitler.



But what is this force of belief that enables a prophet to become a prophet and not a philosopher, a mere preacher of the path of moderation and balance?

Spirituality is a level of consciousness that transcends rationality. While a philosopher may reach the peak of the rational world of reason by opposing the irrational, a prophet becomes a sign post in the non-rational world of Spirit.

The predominant feature that a prophet possesses, which a philosopher lacks, is the element of faith. Faith is something which transcends reasonableness, rationality, and even emotions. Faith is neither a thought nor a feeling; yet it includes thoughts and embraces feelings. Faith is a level of knowing which transcends logic, and paradoxically co-exists with a level of not-knowing.

All prophets possessed this faculty to a great extent. They had faith in the existence of a higher power, and an eternal mode of being. They recognized our physical mortality, yet they also believed that death was simply a doorway to another dimension. Furthermore, they recognized that the importance of life and living was not in longevity, nor in its quantitative accumulations and achievements; but in its qualitative features such as justice, love, truth, beauty and joy, to name but a few.

In short, all prophets believed if we maintain our faith and spiritual belief, and if we respond accordingly in our lives, then somehow, sooner or later, this Universe will progress towards its desired end.



The path of Asha is an extreme path. Along the path of Asha there are no compromises. And there are no exceptions to this rule. Any evil is evil, any lie is a lie, any injustice is an injustice; and each and every one of them will cause us to deviate from our desired path.

Zarathushtra may have been a philosopher, but his philosophical mind was always subjugated to his prophetic vision. Zarathushtra was a spiritual leader first and foremost. His vision was that of an extreme spiritual path. Traveling along this path is exceptionally demanding. One must constantly be aware and vigilant. There may be many pitfalls. The only weapon that we can take along this path is the spiritual weapon of faith. It is with this weapon of spiritual faith that we can use our tools, our Good Mind, and do our utmost to discern what is truth, what is love, and how with full moral courage we must proceed and behave.

Zarathushtra said that there is but one path and that is the path of Asha. What he meant by this dictum was that there are many paths which lead to untruth, but there is only one path which leads to truth and righteousness. Just like there is only one direction that is the true North, while there are infinite directions which are not. While our Good Mind is our compass, possessing the weapon of spiritual faith is similar to believing in magnetism. At any given time, we may not be heading exactly towards the true North, but at least we can discern what is South, East, or West, and refuse to tread in that direction. Our worldly progress towards perfection is nothing but our attempts at trying to fine tune our direction until such time as we reach our true North.

It is because of this extreme position of Zarathushtra, that one can put him in the category of a spiritual leader, rather than a mere ethical philosopher.

In our daily lives, we can emulate philosophers and try to behave in socially acceptable ways. Alternatively, we can try to be the best we can be, by emulating prophets and spiritual leaders such as Zarathushtra, even if it means becoming an eccentric extremist, but an extremist for Good.

Given the social infrastructure of the West, and the materialistic and rationalistic indoctrination that we are subjected to from birth till death, it is not surprising that the Western mind desperately craves for spirituality. While the typical North American tries to quench his/her spiritual thirst through fascination with Eastern or aboriginal ritualism, we have the opportunity to go to the spiritual core of our religion. Rituals may act as tools or a sub-text to reach this spiritual core, but can never replace it.

As Zoroastrians in the West we have the opportunity, nay, the obligation, to transcend ritualistic formulism of the East as well as the dogmatic rationalism of the West. Only then will we be able to emulate Zarathushtra himself, as our true spiritual leader and not as our ethical philosopher/guide.

Ó Shahriar Shahriari
Vancouver Canada
September 15, 1997

Published in FEZANA Journal, Summer 1998

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www.zarathushtra.com

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Zarathushtra’s Philosophy - Basic Overview

Ahura Mazda

Literally translated, Ahura means The Lord Creator, and Mazda means Supremely Wise. This was the name by which Zarathushtra addressed his God. He proclaimed that there is only one God, who is the singular creative and sustaining force of the Universe. Zarathushtra was the first Prophet who brought a monotheistic religion.


Choice

As human beings we are given the right to choose. However, because of the law of cause and effect, we are also responsible for our choices, and must face their consequences.


Dualism

Even though there is only one God, our universe works on the basis of moral dualism. There is Spenta Mainyu (progressive mentality) and Angra Mainyu (evil or regressive mentality). Zarathushtra pleaded with us to think clearly before we choose, and asked us to choose the progressive choices to bring about beneficial consequences. He said that Ahura Mazda would not order us to choose either this or that.

In other words, having given us the ability to choose, Ahura Mazda leaves us alone and allows us to make our choices. And if we choose good, we will bring about good, and if we choose evil, we will cause evil. This is how the moral universe operates.


Devil / Ahriman

Based on the previous principle, we are the causes of all the good and all the evil that happens in our moral universe. Or simply stated, according to Zarathushtra, there is no Devil. However, some of the Post-Zarathushtra scripture introduced the concept of the Devil, or Ahriman, which was effectively a personification of Angra Mainyu.


Purpose in Life

To be among those who renew the world… to make the world progress towards perfection.



Happiness

Happiness is a byproduct of a way of living. And happiness is for those who work for the happiness of others.


Amesha Spentas (Holy Immortals)

Zarathushtra tells us that Ahura Mazda created everything based on the 6 Amesha Spentas, which are in fact divine emanations or aspects of the creator. These are:

1. Vohu Mano – The spirit of the Good Mind
2. Asha – The spirit of Truth and Right
3. Khshatra – The spirit of Holy sovereignty
4. Spenta Armaiti – The spirit of Benevolent Devotion and Love
5. Haurvatat – The spirit of Perfection and Well-Being
6. Ameretat – The spirit of Immortality.

According to Zarathushtra not only the universe was created on the basis of these six, but also they permeate every aspect of creation including ourselves.


Angels

Later on, Post-Zarathushtra Zoroastrianism mythologized the Amesha Spentas into angelic hierarchies, and brought back some of the Pre-Zarathushtra Gods into the scripture as angels.


Cosmology

Ahura Mazda first created Vohu Mano or the Spirit of the Good Mind, through which God created a plan or blueprint for the universe. Part of this blueprint was to incorporate an operating mode and operating laws. This was Asha or the spirit of Truth and Right (the software of the universe).

Then comes the actual act physical creation, which involved certain actions and manifestations. This is Khshatra or the spirit of Holy Sovereignty. These manifestations are actualized through Spenta Armaiti, with much devotion, faith and love.

And finally that the universe is created in the spirit of Perfection (Haurvatat) and is timeless and immortal (Ameretat).


Microcosm

Each one of us carries the divine essence within ourselves. It is our duty to recognize this and act accordingly. How?

Based on Zarathushtra’s teachings, we can and should act like Ahura Mazda. We should think about every choice that we wish to make and in the spirit of our good mind choose wisely. We should respect the natural and moral laws and operating mode of the universe. We should act diligently, with love and faith. And we will then make perfect and timeless choices, and fulfill our purpose of renewing the world.


Co-workers

We are co-workers and co-creators of God. We are here to fulfill the divine plan, not to become obedient slaves of God, nor to be helpless children of God. And this is why we are given the choice. Even the choice not to cooperate with God’s plan and go against it, and that is why we find evil in the world. Because there are some who choose not to work according to God’s plan.


Heaven and Hell

According to Zarathushtra after we leave this life, our essence leaves the body, and depending on the choices that it has made, either it will go to the House of Songs or Realm of light (if he has made good choices) or to the Realm of Darkness and Separation (if evil choices).

Heaven and Hell are not physical places, but are described as timeless states of consciousness: either state of oneness with or separation from Ahura Mazda.

Post-Zarathushtra Zoroastrianism mythologized these timeless states of consciousness into everlasting physical locations and descriptive places. This later concept permeated into Judeo-Christian religions.


Some Corollaries

* Since we are all endowed with the divine essence, we are all good and divine. Therefore it is not the human beings who are evil, but their choices, actions and deeds that could be good or evil.
* There is only one way to fight evil, and that is by spreading goodness, just as there is only one way to fight the darkness, and that is by spreading light. Similarly, only by spreading love can we eliminate hatred and enmity, and not by fighting and opposing each other.



Some Basic Maxims of Zoroastrianism

* Humata, Hukhta, Huvarshta, which mean: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.
* There is only one path and that is the path of Truth.
* Do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, and then all beneficial rewards will come to you also.

© Shahriar Shahriari
Vancouver, Canada
April 1, 1998

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www.zarathushtra.com

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Book Review: The End of Modernism

Canetti's novel never fails to elicit rather strong opinions. Recently in the New Yorker, David Denby declared it "a long, provocatively odd, and emotionally demanding novel."[1] Remarkable amidst the variety of these distinctly unambivalent reactions is the fact that readers have tended to see Auto-da-Fé as a compellingly contemporary work, and in one notable case, even pronounced it a "postwar novel."[2] This is an understandable error.

Canetti did not really gain wide recognition until the early 1960s, when his quixotic anthropological study Crowds and Power first appeared. Implicitly addressing the Cold War stalemate, and hailed as "above ideology," this much-discussed book was bound to encourage readers to associate Canetti in the first instance with the burning issues of that bipolar world, rather than with prewar modernist fiction. Yet placing Canetti the novelist alongside the likes of such unmistakably postwar writers as Grass, B"ll, and Christa Wolf was probably more than an oversight. Those who read and reviewed the novel at this time, including those who certainly knew of its Weimar-era origins (such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger), were in fact quite prepared to view it as a work chiefly about contemporary society. It may be that "social relevance" was already becoming a dominant criterion of literary achievement, even before the student movement established it more firmly. And it may also be that some critics simply mistook the date of republication—it was reissued in the wake of Crowds and Power in order, in part, to capitalize on that book's success—for the original date. Whatever the case, nobody seemed to miss the modernist context of the early 1930s, when Canetti actually wrote what would be his only published novel.

There is more to this, of course, than merely a testimony to the novel's ageless appeal, though this would have pleased Canetti immensely since he aspired to nothing more than to be a writer who transcended his own times. This episode reflects an important fact about Auto-da-Fé: readers, even literary critics, are curiously disinclined to associate Canetti's novel with the classics of literary modernism. For this, as I endeavor to demonstrate, there is very good reason. Though surely part of the same anti-realist tradition that embraces Joyce, Musil, and Rilke, Canetti is indeed strikingly different. The novel's wicked humor, its analytic posture, and above all its concern for the diminishing public sphere set it far apart from what we would come to know as "aesthetic," or "high modernism."

In a graduate seminar on modernism, I recall asking about those estranged and world-weary aesthetes, the typical protagonists of high modernism: How did they navigate their social lives? My question, which arose out of my reading of Auto-da-Fé (a novel, incidentally, that was not on the course syllabus), was met with polite disinterest. As I began to work my way into the secondary literature, it occurred to me that critics often only complicated the matter by attempting to apply a high modernist template that just does not fit Auto-da-Fé. And, when the novel failed to measure up, they credited themselves with having discovered an "error" in its conception. Fortunately, just around the time of these musings, a paradigm shift occurred—in the case of German literature, one that is associated chiefly with Peter B?rger, Russell Berman, and Andreas Huyssen&$151;that enabled me to approach the novel with an eye to its rich social and cultural context. This approach has proven most fruitful above all in taking the novel on its own terms, opening up a vista on a whole array of topics that up to now have only been addressed, if at all, in piecemeal fashion.

While this more capacious view of modernism structures the bulk of this study, allowing me to tap into Canetti's unwavering interest in social arrangements, it occurred to me that adhering to the traditional construction of literary modernism may, in its own way, prove just as instructive. What first helped me see the distinctive features of Auto-da-Fé, after all, was the marked contrast with aesthetic modernism. Thus in the final chapter of this study, I turn back the clock and place Canetti's novel in the context of high modernism. This exercise throws the novel into contrastive relief, revealing more clearly than otherwise possible all the narrative features that comprise what I have dubbed Canetti's trademark "analytic modernism."

Readers familiar with Canetti's engaging autobiography, the evocative North African travel memoir, or his far-flung anthropological study are typically struck by the breadth of the author's interests, the variety of his experience, and the quality of his erudition. These same expectations are fully met in Auto-da-Fé, yet up to this point there was no book available to guide the reader through the rich and complex contexts and intertexts that make reading this challenging novel such a rewarding experience. Despite some valuable monographs on particular aspects of the novel, as well as quite general surveys of Canetti's entire oeuvre, we have lacked a substantial study of the full range of topics broached by the novel: the Freud satire, the "cultural" case for misogyny, the virulent racial anti-Semitism in its relationship to a failed humanism, and a cluster of philosophical and pseudophilosophical movements of the interwar period.

Though Canetti's novel belonged to world literature long before it was reclaimed by German readers in the early 1960s, scholarship has tended to favor the German readership. I will attempt to serve two masters: both the generalist who knows the novel as Auto-da-Fé in the ordinarily quite excellent Wedgwood translation, as well as the more specialized Germanist, who will want to examine the original text in the context of my analysis. In order to accomplish both tasks I have arrived at the following solution: I have translated all quotations (or used available standard editions) from the secondary literature, including Freud, Adorno, and Lukács. For the novel itself, which is the principal object of my study, I have provided both the English (which in not a few cases represents my revision of Wedgwood) and Canetti's German original. While this may seem pedantic and cumbersome, it will, I think, prove worthwhile. For when it comes to humor and nuance, of which Canetti is an acknowledged master, even a talented translation can usually only capture one of an array of semantic options available in the original. Most of my alternate renderings appear, perhaps unsurprisingly, within the discussions of misogyny and anti-Semitism, topics which were not aired so openly in Wedgwood's day. Taken together, there now appears to be enough evidence that this "personally supervised" translation, while still of enormous value, cannot in fact have been line-edited by Canetti himself.

My interest in making this study of Auto-da-Fé available also to the nonspecialist and students of comparative literature has much to do with Canetti himself. Roger Kimball captures perfectly the intrinsic dual thrust of this enterprise when he describes Canetti's works as "scrupulously avant-garde yet 'large' enough in their ambition to command mainstream critical attention."[3] One of the things that makes Canetti so continually attractive is that he represents an ideal to which so many of us still, if only covertly, aspire—namely, that of the nonspecialist polymath. There may be no more memorable a skewering of academic overspecialization and pomposity in all of world literature than that which we find in Auto-da-Fé. Yet this is clearly not to be read as an anti-intellectual stance. On the contrary, Canetti steadfastly maintained that it is possible to be a serious intellectual generalist without necessarily devolving into a dilettante. The effort, at least, is necessary, Canetti felt, lest in our drive to master detail we lose sight of the larger social good. And those who are preoccupied with their own narrow specialty become vulnerable, as the novel unforgettably suggests, to the power grabs of the less scrupulous. Though Auto-da-Fé mercilessly critiques acquisitive bourgeois notions of German "cultivation" (Bildung), Canetti himself redeems—and refashions—the concept in his own literary-intellectual career. It is my hope, therefore, to enrich the reading experience of the more general reader, even as I engage my colleagues in fairly specific debates about the novel's complex relationship to the interwar period of Austrian and German culture, traditional literary modernism, and Canetti's own considerable body of social thought.


Approx. 304 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 9 illus., notes, bibl., index, GLS No. 124
$65.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-8124-8
Published: Fall 2001

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Theophanies and Lights in the Thought of Ibn 'Arabi

The Theory of Akbarian Theophanies

Ibn 'Arabi's idea of theophanies is closely tied in with his theories on being, knowledge and spiritual experience. More precisely, this idea forms the basis of his description of existence, knowledge and liberating experience. For the Master, existence, like knowledge and liberating experience, is only a reflection of theophanic effects and particular aspects of their universal manifestation. From this we already have an intimation of the importance of theophany and its major role in the thought of Ibn 'Arabi on three levels: existence, knowledge and the liberating experience of the human being.

Theophanies, Sources of Existence

Theophanies in the realm of being are manifestations of the divine Truth with regard to infinite perfection and eternal glory. God-Truth in Himself is an inexhaustible source of riches and splendors: He is the "Hidden Treasure" which longs to express itself and be known. God-Truth is Beauty and the property of beauty is to shine forth. He is Love whose nature is to give of itself The divine theophanies are essentially the outpouring of His Beauty, His Perfection and His Love which are expressed in the immense theatre of the universe. The Existential Theophanies taken as a whole comprise three levels which the Master calls hadarât (Presences or Dignities).

First level: Pure Essence. These are called existential theophanies of the Essence.

Second level: the Attributes. These are the existential theophanies of divine qualities.

Third level: Acts. These are the active existential theophanies since the nature of God or the divinity as such is Essence, Attributes and Action, personified by His Divine Names.

The existential theophanies of the divine Essence are the determinations of God in Himself, for Himself in His Essence transcending all manifestation and form. The world from which these theophanies and their radiance spring is that of Unity ('alam al-ahadiyya). In this universe, the divine Essence appears as beyond all description, name or qualification. It is the world of pure Essence considered as Mystery of Mysteries and Secret of Secrets from which the theophanies of the Essence originate, the mirror in which the absolute existential Reality is reflected.

The existential theophanies of divine Attributes are the determinations of God in Himself for Himself under the aspect of His intrinsic Names and Attributes. The world specified for this type of theophany is the Unicity ('alam al-wahda) of the Essence with Its Attributes. God-Truth manifests both in His Essence and in His intrinsic Perfection after his concealment as "Hidden Treasure

This appearance arises by the mediation of what Ibn 'Arabi calls the most holy emanation (al-fayd al-aqdas). In this particular world of theophanies the beings destined to incarnate appear in the form of immutable realities.

The existential theophanies of divine Action are the extrinsic effects of divine Power in the manifest world. The world where these theophanies are exercised and revealed is called by the Master 'alam al-Wahdâniyya, the Unity in its three aspects: Essence-Attribute-Action. It appears by the way of the holy emanation (al-fayd al-Muqaddas): a universe where God manifests Himself in the form of eternal realities encompassing species and individuals, sensible forms and abstractions.

God-Truth alone is, then, the principle and source of existential theophanies. He contains the theophanies in their many dimensions. As we have just seen, the theophanies revolve around the Essence, Attributes and Actions. They do not come from nothing nor do they return to nothing. From the fact that God is at the centre of the existential theophanies, the source of their manifestations and many dimensions, they are nothing but the manifestation of the Absolute and cannot be dissociated from Him. They come from God-Truth and return to Him.

Thus the existential theophanies are manifested in the three levels of Being: ahadiyya (Unity) - wahda (Unicity) - wahdâniyya (Unification), according to the modes of Essence, Attributes and intrinsic and extrinsic Action. That, in substance, is Ibn 'Arabi's theory of theophanies. It is different on the one hand from the idea of emanation (al-fayd) cherished by the philosophers, and on the other hand from the idea of creation advocated by the Moslem theologians (mutakalimun), even if certain aspects and conclusions coincide.

The fundamental difference which distinguishes Ibn 'Arabi from the philosophers is the Master's notion of the Unity of Being in its creative act, which is at the base of all existential manifestations, whilst the philosophers favour the notion of the multiplicity of Being. Ibn 'Arabi considers Being as an unconditional absolute (mawjûd-la-bi-shart) beyond all duality or multiplicity. According to him, the multiplicity which we observe at the sensible or spiritual levels does not affect the Unity of Being in its creative act. It simply represents its various degrees and many states. The existential theophanies, therefore, only constitute a facet of the Absolute-God who is One in His existence and many in His manifestations. One sees how the philosophical theory of emanation goes against that of Ibn 'Arabi. For the philosophers, Absolute Being is subject to a negative condition (mawjûd-bi-shart-la) from which the possibility of the multiplicity of being within the manifest follows, at every level, spiritual or material.

The major difference which divides the Akbarian idea of theophany and the theologians' notion of creation, hangs on the understanding of the existential multiplicity as a divine action outside of Being in its Essence and its Attributes on the part of the theologians, who do not distinguish between Essence, Attributes or Action within the divinity. Ibn 'Arabi, on the contrary, conceives of the many aspects of creation as an effect of the existential theophany itself in act in the manifold modes of manifest existence. The theophanies of Act, like those of Attributes and Essence, revolve in the divine sphere: they are the expressions of Its absolute Perfection. For the Master, nothing is external to the divinity and nothing can exist outside of the Absolute.
Theophanies, Sources of Knowledge and Spiritual Realisation

As we have seen, the Akbarian theory of theophanies is not limited to the sphere of existence, it is related to knowledge and spiritual realisation. The divine theophanies are the origin of sensible and spiritual knowledge, the mainspring of its evolution and the domain of its diffusion. They are the eternal archetypes which, by lighting up the mirror of the heart and the intellect, give rise to experiential knowledge and Certainty. In reality, the links between being and knowledge are sufficiently strong to provoke the expansion and evolution of consciousness because the most subtle part of the human being is his intelligence and his heart: they are the quintessence of man himself, the heart is the receptacle of gnosis and the intellect is the centre of knowledge. This is how Ibn 'Arabi defines theophany as the basis of knowledge: "It is what reveals itself to the heart in the lights of the Invisible." This definition enlightens us on the nature of knowledge, its source, its means, and its object. Knowledge is the unveiling of the deep reality of things, its essence, before the gnostic. This unveiling works symbolically by the opening of the heart under the influence of the divine theophanies which project their lights into the heart.

This allows us to grasp the nature of knowledge and the relationship established between being and knowledge, principally at the level of the human condition. It thus renders credible the thorny questions which one asks oneself, such as:

- What is the intermediary between being and knowledge?

- How is knowledge transformed into being in the heart of the gnostic?

- How does being in turn become knowledge in the heart of the gnostic?

Light is the link which binds being to knowledge. It is the crucible of the final transmutation. It is through It and in It that the nature of knowledge is transformed into being in the heart of the gnostic. Just as the nature of being in turn is transformed into knowledge, and it is then that the most subtle mysteries are revealed in the inmost depths of his heart and the reality of things appears to him in their archetypal form.

When Light shines on the mirror of the heart it is gradually diffused in the same manner as the irradiation of the existential theophanies. Each particle of Light projects spiritual knowledge according to distinctive nuances of colour. One may thus differentiate between what the Master calls:

(a) nûr al-anwâr (The Light of lights). This comes from the essential theophanies of absolute Truth. Ibn 'Arabi sometimes calls it "the dazzling irradiations" which provoke the annihilation of the being and cannot be perceived by him except in the most intimate secret of his heart (as-sirr). This secret of the heart is an uncreated substance, of celestial origin, by which man gains access to the superior angelic and divine world. It is the theophany of the Light of lights which reveals the absolute reality in its most transcendent aspect, and causes certainty at its highest degree to be born in the heart. Ibn 'Arabi calls this form of knowledge haqq-al-yaqîn (absolute Certainty), and it is the fruit of direct experience.

(b) anwâr al-ma'âni (The Light of the intellect). By this term, Ibn 'Arabi refers to the intellectual knowledge transmitted by these theophanies at the moment of their irradiation in the heart. This light is the way of access to the meaning of Truth as it is grasped by human intelligence. Thanks to it man sees the reality of existence in the world of Unicity with the eye of the heart. He also perceives the link which unites all things to God. Thanks to the irradiation of the theophany of the Light of the intellect in the heart, Certainty is established ('ayn al-yaqîn) - the Certainty which comes from direct vision.

(c) anwâr al-tabi'â (The Light of nature). This refers to the learning and knowledge which human reason acquires under the influence of the existential theophanies in Act. It is here that the gnostic and the philosopher concur in the acquisition of learning. At this level, they join together in studying the exterior phenomena of existence: their appearance, their evolution and their disappearance. But the gnostic perceives them as an effect of the celestial lights propelled on to the stage of outward existence whilst at the same time detecting beneath the surface the shadow of the superior Being. Thus, in the world of multiplicity the sublime signs of the world of Unification appear to him. Philosophers and learned men only see isolated earthly phenomena. The influence of the theophanies of the lights of nature produces in the heart a form of knowledge called ilm al-yaqîn (Certainty arising from knowledge).

The world of Unity is the domain where the existential theophanies of the divine Essence are manifested; the world of Unicity is the domain of theophanies of divine Attributes; the world of Unification is the domain where the divine theophanies occur, extrinsically and intrinsically, in Act. Knowledge and illumination at the level of being follow the same process.

The theophanies of the Essence at the level of being are comparable to the theophanies of the Light of lights at the level of knowledge. The theophanies of Attributes at the level of being are comparable to the theophanies of the Light of the intellect at the level of learning. The theophanies of Acts at the level of the being relate to the theophanies of nature at the level of knowledge of matter. There is therefore a perfect concordance between the three forms of unity of the theophanies of Being and those of knowledge.
Theophanies and Liberating Experience

For Ibn 'Arabi, the theophanies of lights are the sources of gnosis and knowledge, and transmit learning and knowledge through the organs of man's senses in the form of waves of light. As we have already said, lights are the principles of existence in Ibn 'Arabi's perception and it is due to the effect of their emanation and diffusion that things move and come to life. Knowledge and existence are joined together in human consciousness at the level of the spiritual plane and man's ultimate destiny. For man light is, therefore, principle, means and end. It is at the origin of his condition of being for it is an integral part of his constitution and of all elements of life -simple or complex. It is also the channel through which man subsists on the material and spiritual planes. It is both food and drink and the essence of sensible, rational and spiritual knowledge. Lastly, it is the final destiny of man for it is through it that immortality is achieved.

If what we have just explained comes from the truth, it is easy for us to grasp the close links which exist between the notions of theophany and liberating experience. That leads us to examine this particular aspect of Ibn 'Arabi's thought, viz. liberating experience which is the pivot of his general theory of divine existential theophany. It is thanks to the divine theophanies that the man on the Way is guided in his quest for perfection through the stages and abodes up to the highest station. The spiritual knowledges which irradiate his being are intangible realities which spring from the source of absolute Truth. They fill his heart with joy and happiness; they arouse in him the taste for perfection and the desire to attain saintliness. They penetrate the whole of his being, his thought, his will, his sensibility, his consciousness, his feelings and his aspirations, transformed into energies of light and fire. Then the man becomes a living witness to purity, saintliness and redemption.

The Stages, Abodes and Stations are the components of the Temple of walâya: human-divine friendship in Islam. They are its composition and meaning. For Ibn 'Arabi this building material comes from the divine theophanies, whether they manifest on the plane of being or knowledge.

The Stages (al-ahwâl) result from psychological or spiritual influences which affect the man of the Way during his progress towards the God-King. We might mention Ecstasy (wajd), Annihilation ('istilâm), Happiness (bast), Despondency (qabd), Awakening (sahû) Drunkenness (sukr), etc... They arise like flashes on the horizon, blinding flashes of lightning which straight away disappear. However, these stages are necessary for the liberating experience of man; thanks to them he may distinguish the contingent from the permanent, the ephemeral from the eternal, until there no longer remains in his consciousness anything except that which is destined to endure.

The Abodes (manâzil) are the spiritual places of the divine Sphere. They are the luminous oases of eternal paradise, the palace of Truth. The man of the Way takes refuge there, and rests after the vicissitudes of his quest and his struggle. There he finds the shadow of light, rays of knowledge and the joy of saintliness.

Finally, the Stations (maqâmât) are the topmost foundations of walaya: the moral distinctions and spiritual degrees accorded to the men of the Way. They constitute the stabilising element of liberating experience.

According to Ibn 'Arabi, al-fanâ' (extinction) is the apex of the Stages; al-baqâ' (permanency) the apex of the Abodes; al-yaqîn (certainty) the apex of the Stations. Each one of these manifestations assumes three distinct forms and at the same time is in close and constant relationship with the divine theophanies in their existential and gnostic manifestations.

Al-fanâ' (extinction) is a sort of mental, yet real, death. The man of the Way experiences it freely; it is the final passage which leads to the summit of the Stages. It liberates man from all contingency outside of his spiritual quest; his ultimate aim is the Truth. Three degrees may be distinguished here: fanâ' of acts, attributes and essence.

The Sufi fanâ' in its triple manifestation does not have an exclusively negative effect or action; it is the annihilation of everything contingent, whether this be in the form of action, attribute or essence; more precisely, it is the annihilation of everything that is not God, and God - may His Name be praised - is the supreme object of all good, all beauty. Fanâ' thus conceived is an internal state which requires from the Sufi a sustained and permanent effort of concentration to break his fetters and take on the demands and calls of truth, by his acts, his moral virtues, his whole being. That implies perfect control of himself: in words, deeds and thoughts. It is at this price that he attains an interior spiritual state where he becomes the pure and clear mirror in which the lights of Truth are reflected in all their splendour.

The state of baqâ', permanency, is life with God, through God, in God, for God. It is the summit of the mystical Abodes in the waiting for the Beloved. Here there are also three degrees, each one referring to a particular aspect of the divine theophanies as principle of existence and its qualitative evolution: faith - knowledge - grace.

The first aspect of the Sufi permanency is situated at the level of acts. The action of the Sufi is here united with the divine action acquiring its order, harmony and durability. This specific degree of Sufi baqâ' is the result of the shooting forth of the divine theophany as existential principle and the lights of nature as source of knowledge.

The second aspect of permanency is situated at the level of qualities and attributes. Here human virtues are raised to the level of the divine Attributes, acquiring their perfection, dignity and durability: such that the man's heart attains to a spiritual abode where it is the pure and clear mirror on which the characteristics of the supreme Creator are engraved. In its turn, the power of acts in the abode of permanence becomes a docile instrument by which the divine plans in the world and within the living person, are realised. This particular form of baqâ' is a reflection of the divine existential theophanies at the level of the Attributes and Qualities, and the effect of the lights of the intellect as principle of knowledge.

The last degree of baqâ' is permanency of the essence. In this domain the essence of the servant is raised to the height of the divine Essence in its Unity, Sublimity and Universality. He is totally absorbed by the divine Life. It is through God that he sees, through Him that he hears, through Him that he expresses his will, through Him that he contemplates. This is the most perfect form of Sufi baqâ', the final stage of the hero's quest. This particular abode is in its turn acquired by the effect of the theophanies of the Essence on the existential plane and by the effect of the theophanies of Light at the gnostic level.

But in what form does man receive these three degrees of fanâ'? How can he realise his quest for permanency which is the pinnacle of the abodes of heroes? In short, what is the mount which allows the Sufi to realise the state of fanâ' and baqâ'? By means of divine Love is the Master's reply. Only Love is capable of guaranteeing us access to the degrees of fanâ' and baqâ'. Let us hear Ibn 'Arabi, in his symbolic and poetic language, describe to us the experience of fanâ' in its various modes and the degrees of baqâ' in the shadow of Love and the presence of the Beloved, God-Truth:

My Beloved, joy of my eyes
You are me as Myself, there where I am My companion at every moment
- May God be glorified! -
You are my essence
Hand in hand let us enter together into the presence of the only Beloved
Let there be no more distinction between us Becoming One in Reality
Oh, how wonderful a thought
and what subtle blending:
"The transparency of the glass, the purity of its contents become identical causing confusion:
Is it the glass or is it the wine that we see? "
All life in the universe vanishes
Moons are eclipsed, the sun disintegrates, the stars explode.
We are thus thrice annihilated.
Similar to annihilation itself
And we attain to the three degrees of Permanency
Following the example of Permanency itself.

Certainty (al-yaqîn) is the summit of the Stations, as we have already seen. By it the Temple of walâya is fully completed. This is the repository of liberating experience in Islam. In relation to the exoteric religious life Certainty is the sister of religious life in its perfection (ihsân), that is to say the adoration of God - may He be exalted - according to the visionary way; through this channel it is the pillar of Islam in the accomplishment of its external practices, as it is the foundation of faith (imân) in its internal dogma. It is in fact ihsân which gives the external religion its true meaning and the domain of faith its real values.

Certainty (al-yaqîn), like Permanency and Extinction, comprises three degrees. The first degree is referred to by the Master and by current Sufis by the name 'ilm al-yaqîn (the knowledge of Certainty), which means that Certainty is the result of knowledge. At this degree the object of Certainty is knowledge just as the aim of knowledge is Certainty. Both together are in the soul uniquely, such that Certainty is the first degree of spiritual life and the last of speculative experience. This particular degree of mystical yaqîn is the result of divine theophanies in Act at the level of existence and also the result of theophanies of lights of nature at the gnostic level.

The second degree of yaqîn is what one calls in Sufi terms 'ayn al-yaqîn (the Eye of Certainty), that is, Certainty as a consequence of contemplation and vision. At this level, the object of Certainty is present in front of the gnostic and is not only a speculative concept. Here knowledge becomes what one calls 'ilm-hudûrî (Presence of knowledge), and that is the second aspect of Certainty in the spiritual way and in liberating experience. By this kind of knowledge, the man of the Way is distinguished from philosophers and learned men. This particular degree of spiritual Certainty is the result of divine theophanies of Attributes at the level of existence, just as it is the result of theophanies of lights of the intellect at the level of gnosis.

Finally, the last degree of yaqîn is called haqq al-yaqîn (the total reality of Certainty), that is, Certainty as supreme truth. Here, Certainty has a particular colouring: it is the fruit of an all-embracing experience because the object of Certainty is identical to the one who is experiencing it, knowledge being transformed into actual experience and actual experience into knowledge. At this stage, in fact, knowledge is not limited to the intellect, nor to the vision of the one who is contemplating it, it becomes one with the human being. This is the final phase of yaqîn, the apotheosis of the spiritual and intellectual journey. This high degree of Sufi Certainty is the effect of the Emanation of the divine Theophanies in Essence at its existential level and that of the diffusion of the Light of lights (Dazzling Irradiations) at the level of the theophanies of the gnostic.

Translated from the French by Cecilia Twinch

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source: www.ibnarabisociety.org

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The Mystery of Numbers by Annemarie Schimmel

there is an integer between three and five, but it is not four, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed.

The Mystery of Numbers is a rather odd book. It begins with a very brief introduction to different number systems and beliefs about numbers, covering the Pythagoreans, gnosticism, the Cabala, Islamic mysticism, medieval numerology and numerical puzzles. The bulk of the book is a kind of encyclopedia of numbers: each of the numbers up to 21 gets its own chapter; after that they are dealt with "en masse". Each chapter is an unordered and pretty much unstructured compilation of beliefs about the subject number, mostly drawn from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There is no attempt at cross-cultural comparative analysis, or at relating beliefs about numbers to other symbolic systems. Schimmel shows off an immense knowledge of historical and literary detail, but doesn't even try to synthesize it into more than a collection of random tidbits. Here is a typical extract:

In philosophy and psychology, 3 serves as the number of classification: time, space, and causality belong together. Since Plato, the ideal has been taken to be composed of the good, the true, and the beautiful, while Augustine established the categories of being, recognizing, and willing. The Indian Chandogya Upanishad likewise mentions several triadic groups, such as hearing, understanding, and knowledge, and in the later Upanishads, the 3 basic values that express the fullness of the one divine being are sat, chit, and ananda (being, thinking, and bliss).

According to the doctrine of the Zohar, the world was created from 3, namely wisdom, reason, and perception, manifested in the fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For the Cabalists, the uppermost triad of the ten sefirot represents the potencies of perception; the medium triad, the primordial powers of spiritual life; and the lowest triad, the primordial power of vitality. Manichaeism knows 3 ways, and the Temple of the Grail has 3 gates, those of right faith, chastity, and humility.

and so on (the chapter on 3 runs to 28 pages). This is fine for a few chapters, but it soon gets rather tedious.

The Mystery of Numbers is not a book anyone would want to read in one go, and many will find it completely unapproachable; I read the introduction and the first few chapters, then skimmed quickly through the rest. It could be used as a reference, for answering questions like "What is the significance of the number five in this poem?", but the lack of structure will hinder this (though there is a decent index). I thought this was a rather disappointing treatment of what should be an interesting subject.

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reviewed by http://dannyreviews.com

Publication Data: The Mystery of Numbers, by Annemarie Schimmel. Oxford University Press, 1994. Paper, 314 pp. ISBN 0-19-508919-7

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The best electric rates from reliable electric companies in your area

As you may have known, Texas is one of many states with deregulated electricity. So what exactly is electricity deregulation? Until a few years ago, electricity market of Texas was a monopoly, and electric consumers did not have a choice in choosing their electric providers. With electric deregulation, electric consumers are now able to choose their Retail Electricity Provider (REP) from a handful of REP in the market.

Today, there are so many electric providers in your service area. But, it's hard to know which electric company is right for your family or your business. TexasElectricRate.com guide you find the best electric rates from reliable electric companies in your area. You can view many Texas electric power companies in your area and choose an electric plan for your residential or business electric needs. Cirro Energy is the most recommended electric companies which provides you with cheaper and reliable residential electricity in your area.

At www.texaselectricrate.com, you can compare and find the best Electric Rates in your area. Every area in Texas has different electric rates. Check out some of the more reliable and cheapest electricity choices in your area of Texas.

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Maintenance Plus Chelation Program

It is well known that over time chelation therapy will ultimately deplete your body's minerals. This is why it is essential that you replenish your body with the required minerals and vitamins during the chelation process. Essential Restore achieves this on the weeks that you are not chelating.

Cardio Restore offers you a safe, yet powerful and easy to follow oral chelation program. We invite you to complete our 9 week Chelation Plus Program and see for yourself that you can restore your health and quality of life.

Cardio Restore offers you a complete, all liquid oral EDTA chelation system that includes our liquid chelation formula, a liquid vitamin C&E and a liquid multi-vitamin/mineral supplement. EDTA Chelation therapy provides a total arterial cleanse that travels through every vein and artery in your entire body. By cleaning all of your veins and arteries you increase blood flow, which is what supplies oxygen and nutrients to your body (organs, tissues, muscles, nerves, etc.).

Cardio Restore Maintenance Plus Program is for those who have completed the 9 week Chelation Plus Program or have recently finished I.V. chelation therapy. This program helps you maintain your current level and can help to prevent future build up of excessive mineral and heavy metal deposits.

Vitamin C&E Restore is taken on the days your take Cardio Restore. Vitamins C & E help to fight free radicals and assist in the healing process. It is important to take Essential Restore only on the days you are not taking Cardio Restore to ensure that your body does not get mineral deficient or interfere with the chelation process.

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Wawancara Ayu Utami soal Novel Terbarunya "Bilangan Fu"

Bagaimana komentar Ayu Utami soal novel terbarunya "Bilangan Fu", berikut ini wawancara Nong Darol Mahmada aktivis JIL (Jaringan Islam Liberal) Komunitas Utan Kayu dengan penulis novel fenomenal Saman (1998) dan Larung (2001) yang menerima Prince Clause Award pada tahun 2000 tersebut.

Wawancara ini dilakukan pada acara peluncuran novel Bilangan Fu, Minggu (20/7) malam di Graha Bakti Budaya TIM Jakarta.

Mbak Ayu, dibanding dengan novel-novel sebelumnya, saya melihat tema yang diangkat dalam novel ini cukup berat yaitu ingin mengritik 3 M: modernisme, monotheisme dan militerisme. Kenapa? Bisakah diceritakan proses awal kenapa mengambil tema ini? Bagaimana proses penulisannya?

Tentang 3M itu saya rumuskan sambil mendaki gunung Gede, olah raga rutin saya. Biasanya, sambil berjalan saya merenung-renung. Lalu, muncullah ide itu setelah pikiran saya berputar-putar sampai tak begitu bisa saya sadari lagi. Barangkali jalarannya begini. Pada masa Orde Baru, sebagai aktivis kemerdekaan pers, kami tahu bahwa musuh utama demokrasi adalah militerisme. Itu "M" yang pertama.

Nah, sekarang? Setelah Indonesia lumayan terbebas dari militerisme, kita menghadapi ancaman baru. Yaitu, ancaman yang berasal dari ketidakbebasan pikiran. Keengganan bahkan ketakutan terhadap kebebasan pikiran. Ini rupa-rupanya berasal dari beberapa hal. Dalam kasus Indonesia: satu, ketakutan. Ketakutan pada apa? Ketakutan bahwa kemerdekaan akan menghilangkan identitas kita sebagai "bangsa timur", "bangsa beragama", atau apapun yang kita percaya sebagai identitas kita. Sedihnya, ketakutan ini ternyata dipelihara melalui-atau menggunakan-agama. Ditambah dengan meningkatnya kekerasan atas nama agama sepuluh tahun belakangan ini. Kebetulan Indonesia mayoritas muslim. Maka, itulah "M" yang kedua: monoteisme. Saya percaya bahwa Islam maupun Kristen, yakni agama-agama monoteis, memiliki persoalan mendasar dalam kapasitas menerima perbedaan. Ini harus diakui secara jujur tanpa takut. Dua, ketidakbebasan pikiran ini datang dari kemanjaan yang dipelihara oleh kapitalisme. Kapitalisme tak bisa dilepaskan dari modernitas. Itulah "M" yang ketiga. Modernitas.

Jadilah 3M yang saya sebut sebagai ancaman terhadap dunia postmodern: Militerisme, Monoteisme, Modernisme. Hahaha. Ini autokritik sesungguhnya. Sebab, saya punya idealisasi tertentu pada militer. Saya penyuka pria dengan military-look. Tegap. Cepak. Hehe. Saya juga menikmati buah kapitalisme. Saya juga lahir dari tradisi monoteis.


Saya ingin tanya lebih detail lagi. Apa sih yang anda maksud dengan modernisme itu?

Sebetulnya terminologi yang tepat adalah modernitas. Atau pemikiran modern. Bilangan Fu juga bercerita tentang persoalan lingkungan. Rusaknya lingkungan karena eksploitasi dari manusia modern yang kelewat batas. Dalam skala besar: pemanasan global. Tapi, novel kan harus mengambil skala yang lebih kecil dan terfokus. Maka saya bercerita tentang eksploitasi penambangan gunung gamping di pantai selatan Jawa.

Apa alasan ekspolitasi? Ekonomi! Alasan ekonomi semata. Nah, inilah alasan yang sangat khas datang bersama modernitas dan konconya, kapitalisme. Manusia memandang dunia dari sudut kepentingan ekonomi belaka. Dari sudut kepentingan dirinya belaka. Manusia modern tak punya rasa hormat pada alam.

Sederhananya begini. Dulu, ketika masih hidup dengan "takhayul" tentang roh-roh penunggu bumi, manusia bersikap hormat pada alam. Masyarakat adat biasanya tidak berburu atau menebang pohon kelewat batas. Mereka permisi sebelum masuk hutan. Nah, manusia modern-yang telah berpikir rasional dan tak lagi takut pada takhayul-kehilangan rasa hormat itu. Jika dulu manusia tradisional melihat alam sebagai subyek, kini alam semata-mata obyek. Dulu bumi harus disajeni, kini bumi hanya untuk dieksploitasi. Manusia modern telah demikian sombong.

Kritik saya yang terutama adalah bahwa pemikiran modern yang terlalu mengagungkan rasio atau akal telah terlampau jauh meremehkan nilai-nilai tradisi, yang sesungguhnya sangat positif terhadap alam, dan juga telah merendahkan bumi. Ah, kita juga tahu, dalam perdebatan filsafat, bahwa rasio itu tak lepas dari kepentingan. Tak lepas dari libido, kata Freud. Tak lepas dari kekuasaan. Akal sehat itu tidak sehat-sehat amat. Kerusakan bumi menunjukkan bahwa rasio telah menjadi alat dari kehendak berkuasa saja.

Nah, dari penjelasan anda tadi, apa sebenarnya yang ingin anda tawarkan dalam mengritik modernisme ini?

Tawaran saya: spiritualisme kritis! Manusia tak hanya punya kepentingan jahat. Manusia juga punya kepentingan baik. Sama seperti manusia tak hanya punya nafsu rendah, tapi juga nafsu luhur. Kita switch, kita alihkan saja. Jadikan akal instrumental itu alat dari kehendak baik. Apa yang mendesak sekarang? Menyelamatkan bumi! Bukan menyelamati akhirat! Hal yang paling utama dari kesadaran modern sesungguhnya adalah kemampuan kritis. Inilah yang patut disyukuri tiada habis dari modernitas, buah rasio. Ini yang saya kira harus kita genjot. Kita kritik diri kita. Kita kritik nafsu-nafsu berkuasa kita. Karena itu, saya menawarkan "spiritualisme kritis."

Kita tahu, ketika rasionalitas berkembang, mereka mencurigai habis-habisan agama. Tuhan sudah mati, kata Nietzsche. Tapi, kesalahan kaum sekularis-dengan menampik agama-adalah justru membiarkan agama jatuh ke tangan kaum fundamentalis. Karena itu, kita butuh merebut kembali agama. Dan menafsirkannya kembali dengan lebih terbuka. Kita harus lebih belajar dari agama-agama bumi. Yaitu, sekali lagi, untuk menyelamatkan dunia lebih daripada mendahulukan akhirat.

Anda juga mengritik monotheisme. Apa yang salah dengan konsep ini?

Menurut saya, ada yang salah dengan slogan monoteis ini: kami mencari akhirat, bukan dunia. Dalam Bilangan Fu, saya khususnya menyoroti secara prihatin kesombongan monoteisme atas agama-agama lokal. Monoteisme-entah Kristen entah Islam-merendahkan agama-agama lokal sebagai penyembah berhala. Padahal, sesungguhnya agama-agama lokal ini memiliki penghormatan yang luar biasa pada alam. Dikotomi monoteis atas dunia dan akhirat harus dikaji ulang.

Salah satu contoh yang pantas membuat kita prihatin adalah, dua tahun lalu, segerombol pemuda dengan atribut Pemuda Persatuan Islam (Persis) di Jakarta memangkasi sebuah beringin tua di Harmoni. Alasannya karena pohon itu dianggap keramat, bahkan jalur busway pun tak boleh merobohkannya. Pemerintah kota juga mempertahankan pohon itu karena nilainya bagi lingkungan.

Ada sebuah cerpen yang sangat puitis dari Marguerite Yourcenar tentang seorang rahib Kristen Ortodoks yang menghanguskan hutan demi mengusir jin dan peri. Pada akhirnya jin dan peri itu bersembunyi di gua pada sebuah bukit cadas. Untuk memenjarakan mereka, sang rahib mendirikan gereja menutup mulut gua itu. Tapi, Perawan Maria membebaskan peri dan jin itu dari balik jubahnya sebagai burung-burung layang-layang. Buat saya: agama tak berhasil membebaskan manusia. Manusia memanjakan nafsu berkuasanya dengan agama, tapi yang suci memberikan kasihnya.


Mbak Ayu, setting dan tokoh dalam novel ini tentang pemanjat tebing. Kenapa anda mengambil setting dan tokoh tentang itu? Kenapa si akunya bukan perempuan?

Saya belum siap bercerita tentang diri saya sendiri. Hahaha… Saya masih ingin menyembunyikan pribadi saya. Hehehe…. Saya kira penulis justru leluasa untuk menjadi bukan dirinya.

Sesungguhnya awal cerita ini sangat pribadi dan sederhana. Yaitu, kisah masa lalu kekasih saya, Erik Prasetya. Ia memiliki sebuah periode sangat bahagia di masa mudanya, ketika ia menjadi pemanjat tebing, memiliki sahabat, sesama pemanjat, yang ia sayangi, serta kekasih yang ia cintai. Mereka membangun persahabatan yang istimewa antar tiga manusia. Sahabat itu mati dalam kecelakaan di tebing. Setelah itu, hubungan dia dan kekasihnya tak bisa sama lagi. Saya terkesan dengan hubungan yang puitis itu dan tragedi yang mengakhirinya. Betapa rentan manusia.

Tapi, sisa cerita dan pergulatan pemikirannya adalah bagian saya sendiri. Saya menulisnya di masa setelah reformasi. Keprihatinan saya adalah gangguan atas kedamaian dan hak sipil dari gerombolan yang memakai nama agama. Jadi, keprihatinan saya adalah ini: reformasi memberi kita kemerdekaan, tapi masyarakat tidak siap dengan kemerdekaan itu. Dan agama dipakai untuk menolak kemerdekaan.

Saya punya kesan novel Bilangan Fu dibanding novel Saman, sepertinya hanya bisa dipahami oleh kalangan terbatas karena soal tema yang diangkatnya cukup berat, orisinil, dan gaya bahasanya juga lebih berat dan penuh data, tidak secair seperti novel Saman. Apakah anda sengaja memilih seperti ini?

Saya kok tidak begitu sepakat. Struktur ceritanya sebetulnya sangat padat dan sederhana. Lebih sederhana daripada Saman ataupun Larung. Yaitu, tentang cinta segitiga yang istimewa. Tentang usaha menyelamatkan kawasan karst atau gamping. Memang Saman lebih manis. Karena si "aku" penceritanya adalah perempuan lugu yang sedang jatuh cinta dan melankoli. Larung lebih gelap karena karakter yang memiliki sejenis kegilaan. Bilangan Fu diceritakan oleh karakter yang sinis dan skeptis: Yuda. Memang ia punya cara pandang yang khas dan suka mengomentari banyak hal. Tapi, Yuda yang membuat struktur cerita yang sederhana menjadi tidak biasa. Yuda yang membuat hal sehari-hari jadi nampak aneh.

Mbak, kenapa sih judul novelnya Bilangan Fu? Banyak yang bertanya soal judul ini. Terus, apa sih Bilangan Fu itu?

Semula saya ingin menamainya Jalur 13. Semula ceritanya adalah jalur pemanjatan maut berangka 13. Angka yang dianggap sial. Lucunya, angka 13-yang dianggap sial di Barat ini-jika diurai dan dijumlah sebagai 1+3 hasilnya adalah 4. Yaitu Tsi, angka sial di Cina. Hehehe.

Saya semula memang ingin bermain-main dengan sebuah bilangan yang dianggap angker. Tradisi membuat saya berputar-putar pada bilangan 13. Ternyata akhirnya saya berakhir dengan sebuah bilangan yang memiliki properti 0 dan 1 sekaligus. Bilangan ketiga belas dalam sistem bilangan berbasis 12, bukan berbasis 10. Ada banyak hal menarik mengenai perbedaan bilangan berbasis 12 dan 10 ini. Semenarik fakta bahwa jari
kita sepuluh dan fakta bahwa bumi mengelilingi matahari dalam 12 bulan!

Apapun, bilangan fu adalah bilangan yang metaforis, bukan matematis. Spiritual, bukan rasional. Ia merupakan kritik bahwa pengertian kita tentang Tuhan yang satu dalam monoteisme terlalu matematis. Ketika monoteisme dirumuskan, orang belum mengenal bilangan 0. Konsekuensinya, 1 yang dimaksud bisa sama dengan konsep mengenai 0, yaitu yang penuh sekaligus kosong, tidak terbatas, tidak rasional.

Kenapa "Fu"?

Semula karena ada alat musik tiup yang bernama Fu. Tapi, perhatikan, bunyi "fu", juga "hu", dan bunyi bersuara bilabial adalah bunyi dasar. Bilabial adalah bunyi konsonan yang dibuat dari aliran udara menggetarkan dua bibir. Kalau kita bernafas keras, kita mengeluarkan bunyi yang mirip ini. Buat saya, itu bunyi nafas. Bunyi kehidupan. Ya.
Bunyi hidup tapi bukan bunyi nafsu.

Berbeda dari "ma", seperti dalam "mama" atau "makan"; "pa", seperti dalam "papa" atau "pangan"; "da" seperti dalam "dada". "Ma", "pa", dan "da" adalah bunyi libido. Saya
tulis di Bilangan Fu, "ma" dan "pa" adalah bunyi perut, yang mencintai rasa kenyang. "Fu", atau variasinya "hu", dalah bunyi hidung, yang dari sana manusia bernafas. Fu adalah bunyi ruh.

Dalam novel ini juga banyak tersaji tentang cerita rakyat dan pewayangan. Apakah anda punya tendensi ingin menafsir ulang cerita-cerita tersebut?

Ya. Bagi saya cerita rakyat dan pewayangan, seperti juga kitab suci, terlalu kerap ditafsirkan dengan penyederhanaan berlebihan. Saya ingin menyumbang dalam tafsir yang seharusnya lebih kompleks.

Misalnya, saya ingat, ada seorang guru SD yang protes terhadap cerita rakyat. Menurut dia cerita rakyat itu bukan cerita anak-anak. Contohnya cerita Sangkuriang, yang bercerita tentang hubungan seks. Lha! Memang, cerita rakyat bukan cerita anak-anak. Tapi, bukan berarti tidak boleh diperkenalkan kepada anak-anak juga. Keistimewaan legenda adalah karena ia bisa disampaikan sebagai cerita segala umur, termasuk anak-anak.

Tetapi, di lapisan berikutnya ia mengandung bahan dan data yang lebih kompleks. Kita harus memelihara kekayaan itu. Lagi pula, setelah berumur, saya tahu dan percaya tak ada yang sungguh-sungguh baru di dunia ini. Jadi, kenapa tidak menggarap tema-tema klasik?

Berapa lama anda menyelesaikan novel ini?

Empat tahun penuh kegagalan. Setelah itu, sembilan bulan menuliskannya dalam bentuk yang sekarang ini dengan sangat lancar. Dalam empat tahun sebelumnya, sejak akhir 2003, saya mencoba menulis dan terus merasa gagal. Saya berlatih panjat tebing, penelusuran gua, dan pelbagai lain. Begitu banyak waktu, tenaga, dan uang yang saya habiskan, sesungguhnya.

Tapi saya puas. Saya merasa seperti pemanjat bersih. Yaitu, yang tidak memaksakan ide pada cerita. Seperti tidak memaksakan bor dan paku pada gunung batu. Saya merasa memanjat dengan jalur yang disediakan alam dan dengan peralatan yang tidak merusak tebing.

Mbak, apa saja hambatan dan tantangan yang dialami ketika menulis novel ini?

Tantangannya, saya tidak ingin mengulangi Saman dan Larung. Saman dan Larung ditulis di masa Suharto yang otoriter. Karena itu, saya ingin membebaskan diri dari linearitas bercerita. Dalam keduanya, saya ingin bercerita yang tidak lurus tidak padat, melainkan longgar. Bilangan Fu tidak. Saya ingin kembali kepada cerita yang sederhana. Apalagi di masa yang khaos dan ribut ini, saya ingin kembali kepada plot yang lurus. Ternyata tidak mudah memberi makna baru pada kesederhanaan.


Pertanyaan terakhir mbak. Adakah perasaan "terbebani" karena khawatir novel ini tidak sebagus atau tidak sesukses novel Saman?

Tidak. Sukses itu selalu separuh nasib. Nasib tidak bisa dipaksakan. Saman sukses karena dia yang pertama di zamannya. Dia pemberontakan. Dia menghantar pada masa perubahan. Dia diluncurkan sepuluh hari sebelum Suharto jatuh! Dia membawa gosip pula.

Selain itu, saya yakin bahwa Bilangan Fu lebih bagus daripada Saman. Paling tidak, saya lebih puas terhadap Bilangan Fu dibanding Saman. Secara struktur dia lebih kompak, lebih padat. Secara isi dia lebih berbobot. Saya juga senang bisa melibatkan gambar dari banyak khasanah, bisa memasukkan berita-berita koran yang absurd.

Memang, sekali lagi Bilangan Fu tidak manis dan lembut seperti Saman. Tapi, itulah hidup. Seperti anggur atau keju. Saya bertambah umur. Saya tidak bisa terus-menerus lembut seperti keju muda. Saya tak bisa terus-menerus manis atau jualan manis.

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diambil tanpa izin (semoga yang punya tidak keberatan) dari blog Nong Darol Mahmada http://nongmahmada.blogspot.com

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Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children voted best Booker Prize winner

READERS have voted Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel Midnight's Children the greatest Booker-prize winner of all time.

The "Best of the Booker" was awarded to the controversial British author to mark the 40th anniversary of the Booker prize, regarded by many as one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes.

The 61-year-old author won the 25th anniversary "Booker of Bookers" prize for the same novel in 1993.

Rushdie, whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats against him, was widely tipped to win the award, which was voted for by readers online and via SMS.

Rushdie was in the US on a book tour when the award was announced in London last night Sydney time.

"Marvellous news!" he said in a statement. "I'm absolutely delighted and would like to thank all those readers around the world who voted for Midnight's Children."

Victoria Glendinning, chair of the panel who drew up a shortlist, said: "The readers have spoken in their thousands. And we do believe that they have made the right choice."

Roughly 8,000 people from around the world took part in the online poll. Midnight's Children was the clear favourite, winning 36 percent of the vote.

Some critics believe it to be Rushdie's finest work, eclipsing even The Satanic Verses, for which he remains best known - and most reviled.

Rushdie beat nominees including Australian literary heavyweights J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey.

The full list comprised Rushdie, Pat Barker (The Ghost Road), Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda), Coetzee (Disgrace), J.G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur) and Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist).

Both Coetzee and Carey have won the Booker Prize twice. Carey, who now lives in New York, described being shortlisted for the "Best of the Booker" as being similar to being hit by truck.

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www.theaustralian.news.com.au

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Yang Kurang dari Bilangan Fu

Novel teranyar Ayu Utami "Bilangan Fu" mempunyai tekanan pada aspek spiritualitas. Entahlah, apakah ini merupakan perjalanan spritual penulisnya, ataukah dari hasil risetnya. Sebenarnya itu juga tak terlalu penting. Apa yang disampaikannya dalam buku itu jauh lebih penting.

Pemanjat gunung memang identik dengan seorang pencari. Yuda, tokoh aku dalam Bilangan Fu, dalam perjalanannya memperoleh pengalaman mistik mendapat bisikan berbunyi "fu". Ia mendapatkan pencerahan dari kawan barunya bernama Parang Jati yang membukakan dia akan kearifan lokal. Jati banyak mengajarkan bagaimana menjadi tokoh seperti "Semar", dan dalam sisi lain mengkritik Kupukupu, yang memandang persoalan mistik secara radikal.

Tapi jujur, saya terganggu dengan dengan kemunculan Ahmadiyah dalam novel itu. Ada kesan Ayu menambahkan bagian itu dari peristiwa aktual, sementara rentang cerita dalam novel itu berkisar pada periode 90-an akhir. Sebenarnya tak jadi soal jika kita abaikan persoalan di luar cerita dengan begitu nama-nama dan peristiwa punya dunianya sendiri seperti yang dibangun penulisnya.

Saya pribadi kurang puas, karena sebenarnya menurut saya Ayu bisa menggarap novel itu lebih menggigit dan tidak tergesa-gesa dalam penyelesaiannya. Tampak pada bagian akhir-akhir Ayu kewalahan, dan banyak mengada-ada hingga terkesan Ayu tak bisa untuk tak memunculkan seperti Ahmadiyah itu. Yang bisa dieksplorasi lagi sebenarnya tentang konsep bilangan, konsep tentang satu, tentang tuhan, yang bisa digali dari Ibnu Arabi. Barangkali karena Ayu pakai rujukan keyakinannya.

Pada bagian akhir-akhir, Ayu lebih banyak berkutat pada cerita sejarah. Memang itu penting, karena dia menyinggung sejumlah peristiwa di masa lampau yang celakannya karena pembaca dikenalkan dengan tokoh-tokoh yang sudah dikenal maka Ayu harus mengisahkannya dengan rujukan dari buku-buku sejarah. Akibatnya nasib para tokoh-tokohnya terlantarkan.

Satu lagi, banyak bagian yang diulang-ulang. Kebencian tokoh Yudha akan televisi muncul sampai berkali-kali. Capek kalau menghitungnya. Baiklah jika itu sebagai sebuah penegasan, tapi dalam sisi lain, bagi saya terasa mengganggu.

Saya suka gaya bercerita Ayu dalam novel ini, yang bisa berubah-ubah, melompat-lompat. "ketika saya menuliskan kembali cerita ini", karena dengan urutan itu, si aku banyak mendapat masukan dari Parang Jati, setelah kemudian mengolahnya kembali dan tentu saja dengan memberikan sejumlah catatan.

Novel ini patut diapresiasi karena kaya akan wacana: sejarah dan nilai-nilai lokal yang sudah banyak dilupakan generasi sekarang. Ia memtret ketegangan antara tradisionalisme dengan modernisme, dan mengajak pembaca untuk berpikir melampaui dua fase itu: berpikir postmodern.

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Atheism, a challenge to the faithful

Atheism is perhaps a new global trend, but it is nearly as old as the idea of God itself.

Due to the increase in religiously motivated violence in many parts of the world and the widening gap between science and religion, the idea is now becoming more inviting, more challenging and, thanks to the Internet, more militant than ever before.

Here the word "atheist" is usually linked to the demonized Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), whose aborted "coup" left a traumatic wound deep inside the consciousness of most Indonesians. That is why, according to Martin Sinaga, a Christian theologian at the Jakarta School of Theology, atheism is more often prejudiced against here than discussed.

In 1949, Achdiat Karta Mihardja published Atheist, a novel about a young Muslim named Hasan in his quest for God in the newly born country charmed by atheistic socialism. The book stirred controversy and Achdiat was intimidated -- even though he never proclaimed himself to be an atheist -- after people misunderstood his novel.

In 2004, he wrote Manifesto Khalifatullah (The Manifesto of God's Successor), which he considered as a sequel to Atheist because in it the quest of God is over, concluding that human beings are the successors of God on Earth.

Responding to the planned publication of books on atheism in Indonesian language, Sinaga said there was nothing to worry about.

"We can't deny their existence. Such books as The God Delusion and God is Not Great are asking the questions that are also asked by the believers.

"Where is God when people are suffering? Where is God when disasters strike? Where is God when there is evil? The main issue is not atheism here but the internal struggle in the quest for God," Sinaga said.

Ihsan Ali Fauzi, a Muslim scholar at the Paramadina Foundation, concurred with Sinaga, saying there was no use in pretending the books never existed or deliberately trying to keep them away from the younger generation.

"The youth, who are mostly Internet literate, would easily find out about it one way or another." he said.

Fauzi argued that religions, if they are true, should be able to survive any attack, and books on atheism should be seen as a test for the faithful.

"Instead of damning these books as poisonous, it would be a lot more productive if we proved that what they claimed was false," Fauzi said.

"This is actually something that we should appreciate as it will sharpen our thoughts," he added.

Nevertheless, both Fauzi and Sinaga both doubted these kinds of books would be widely accepted by the Indonesian public. If they did not resist, they said, the public would simply ignore the books, especially when the big players in the industry, which have bigger promotional budgets, refused to publish them.

Candra Gautama, the editor in chief of Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia (KPG), said it would not be easy to translate a book like The God Delusion.

"The main problem our publishing industry faces is the quality of translation," he said.

Pustaka Alvabet said it would press ahead with its plans to publish "enlightening" books on atheism, despite apprehension they would not sell well or, worse, incite religious violence, confirming what the anti-religion books are saying.

Serambi is also prepared to launch Julian Baggini's A Very Short Introduction to Atheism, which the company's editor in chief Qomaruddin SF said was more "informative" than "provocative".

Time will tell whether books on atheism -- whether or not they have sufficient promotion and high quality translation -- really have a place in Indonesia.

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Ary Hermawan. Jakarta Post

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Reflecting on Wali Songo's understanding of pluralism

by Siska Widyawati

Wali Songo wrote in an old paper, Mertasinga, "About the path that you shall take, don't be exaggerated. Lead life with simplicity, don't be arrogant if you talk, and don't overact in front of other human beings. That is the true path. To meditate on the mountain or in the cave only creates vanity. True meditation is in the middle of the crowd. Be noble and forgive people who make mistakes. This is the only true path."

That was a teaching of Syekh Attaulah to Sunan Gunung Jati. Gunung Jati was one of the "Wali Songo", or "nine saints", in the history of Islamic preaching in Java.

This paper was translated by Amman N Wahjoe, who inherited this document from his father, handed down from generation to generation in his family. Wahjoe translated the paper, which used to be called babad -- originally written in Javanese and Sundanese, then translated to Indonesian. The paper has become an important document in unveiling the history of the saints in Java.

They are sacred documents that were usually considered as the exclusive heritage within a family and treated as a charm, even though most of the family members did not know the meaning or even how to read them.

These old documents are very interesting, and allow us to gain deeper understanding of the teachings of the Walis in Java. I think they will show the roots of the beliefs of my ancestors. The more I search, the more I find the simplicity of their teaching that touches my inner spirit and religiosity. I was used to hearing their stories, full of syncretism and myth, such as how one of the Wali conjured a gold tree from a normal tree, or traveled to Mecca in a minute. There is no problem with myth; the problem is people are more attracted to myth than the real teachings.

The wisdom of the Wali are deep treasures within Islamic Sufism. One example is the teachings of Sunan Kudus, one of the Wali, who lived in Kudus city, Central Java. He asked the people in Kudus not to slaughter cows, to tolerate the beliefs of Hindi people who also lived there. Until now the teaching is still well preserved by many people in Kudus.

One of the sunan who was famous for his creative approach, and whose teachings were rich with local content, was Sunan Kalijaga. This Wali used cultural approaches to preach. One of his legacies, which is famous among the Javanese, is the tale of demi-god Ruci (Dewa Ruci). The tale was of Bima (one of Pandava's brothers) who met with Ruci, who shared the same appearance with him, but in miniature scale. The meeting of Bima and Dewa Ruci symbolized the meeting of a human with his own soul.

The tale of Ruci is a symbol that is famous among Sufism treasures; that every human must meet with her/his own soul to know their true mission in life. Unfortunately, there are many Javanese people who perform the tale of Ruci with skin/shadow puppets to purify themselves without knowing the true meaning behind the tale.

Another surprising fact is that most of the Wali's were foreigners. According to the book by Sudirman Tebba, "Mengenal Wajah Islam yang Ramah" (To know the kind face of Islam, 2007), and also in the Mertasingan paper, most of the Walis came from the Middle East and Campa.

Sunan Gunung Jati and Sunan Kudus had Arabic descent. Other Walis such as Sunan Ampel, Sunan Giri and Sunan Bonang had family ties in Campa. Campa is thought to have been a town in Cambodia.

The fact that foreigners came especially to Java and undertook Islamic preaching is interesting. Why did they come to Java? And moreover, how did they, as foreigners, have the ability to translate Islamic values into local values, or in other words, preach in the language of the people?

This is a mystery that demands serious research, but with their unique Sufism treasure, the Walis taught my ancestors to worship God in a simple surrender; as what else is the meaning of Islam other than total surrender to God?

It is a shame that the essence of Wali's teaching is forgotten nowadays. Many people in Indonesia try to see their Islamic reflection from outside rather than in their own history. The Pan-Islamism movement of the '80s has had a big influence in changing the way Indonesians understand Islam.

The intolerant teachings, only focused on the implementation of sharia (regulation) without wisdom, made Islam to be perceived in a very different perspective among the young generation of Indonesian Muslims.

Modern Indonesian Islamic movements primarily descend from Islamic movements from Egypt or the Middle East, and this has made many people alienated from their own history of religiosity. The hardliner school of thought is triggering a reactionary movement, called liberal Islam, that tries to put Islam, which has its own transcendental logic, into a framework that is sometimes too material.

I don't find the face of Islam that I believe in my conscience to be divided between two extreme movements. I find the inherent connection of my beliefs, about how to be a real Muslim, in the teaching of Walis.

In the context of the one-sided understanding that Islam is identical with violence and terrorism, it is time for us to regain and try to find the essence of the legacy of the teachings of the Walis; for us to find our own unique history of religiosity and spread this to the world, Islam as a blessing to the entire universe.

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The writer is a journalist. This article was published at The Jakarta Post. She can be reached at siskawidyawati@gmail.com

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Ayu Utami launches 'Bilangan Fu'

Indonesian artist Landu Simatupang (left) read the fragment of Fu Numeral (Bilangan Fu), the latest Novel by Indonesian famous writer Ayu Utami, at Graha Bhakti Budaya, Taman Ismail Marzuki, Jakarta, Sunday (20/7) evening. This event was held to launch the novel. (Kompas Images)
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Writer-Journalist Ayu Utami on Sunday launched her third novel, Bilangan Fu (Fu Number), seven years after her previous literary work.

"I had to learn rock climbing and conduct deep research before writing the novel," Ayu told reporters at Taman Ismail Marzuki arts center in Central Jakarta about the novel which centers on rock climbers.

During the launch, the 40-year-old writer gave a copy of Bilangan Fu, which expresses her criticisms of modernism, monotheism and militarism, to veteran rock climber Harry Suliz, the founder of Skyger rock climbing club.

Noted theater actor Landung Simatupang read parts of the novel published by Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, during the launching.

Ayu's first novel Saman won a writing competition held by the Jakarta Art Competition in 1989 and Prince Claus Award in 2000 from Prince Claus of the Netherlands. She wrote her second novel Larung in 2001.

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Jakarta Post

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Review Bilangan Fu: Manifesto Spiritualitas Ayu (2)

Dalam komentarnya terhadap De Sancta Trinitae karangan Boethius, Thomas Aquinas membuat sebuah pernyataan yang sangat terkenal yaitu bahwa pada akhirnya kita menyadari bahwa Tuhan tidak bisa kita pahami. In finem nostrae cognitionis Deum tamquam ignotum cognoscimus. Maka Tuhan atau kebenaran tinggalah sebagai misteri, yang senantiasa kita cari tanpa pernah kita temukan.

Sikap paling masuk akal yang muncul dari kesadaran itu adalah pengakuan bahwa kita tidak tahu apa-apa tentang Tuhan. Kita tidak tahu apa-apa tentang rencanaNya pada dunia ini. Kita tidak tahu apa-apa tentang kehendakNya pada diri kita, kelompok kita, dan kelompok diluar kita. Hanya Tuhanlah kebenaran, sebaliknya kita sama sekali tidak tahu apakah kebenaran itu. Dengan demikian kita tidak akan keras kepala menganggap diri sebagai yang benar, dan menghakimi orang lain sebagai yang tidak benar.

Kesadaran dasar ini juga akan membantu kita memandang semua sarana untuk mencari Tuhan secara proporsional. Sesuci apapun sebuah ayat, tak lebih dari sebuah wahyu, dan bukan kebenaran itu sendiri. Tidak perlu kita berkelahi meributkan rumusan-rumusan ayat kitab suci yang isi atau tafsirannya berbeda antara kelompok yang satu dengan yang lain, karena jika demikian kita menganggap rumusan wahyu itu sebagai Tuhan sendiri.

Tokoh protagonis Parang Jati dalam novel terbaru Ayu Utami adalah sosok yang mewakili bentuk penghayatan spiritualitas yang menghargai (respek) pada orang lain dan lingkungannya. Bahwa kita seharusnya berinteraksi dengan segala sesuatu di luar diri kita (manusia dan lingkungan) dengan sikap welas asih dan tidak memaksa. Sikap ini dipertentangkan dengan sikap tokoh antagonis Kupukupu, yang karena selalui dihantui rasa tidak aman dan belum selesai dengan eksistensi dirinya, menafsirkan rumusan ayat-ayat dalam Kitab Suci secara matematis, dan menggunakannya untuk menghakimi semua orang yang dianggap menyimpang dari rumusan tersebut.

Seperti dalam dua novel terdahulu (Saman dan Larung), dalam novel ini kita masih bisa merasakan kelincahan Ayu dalam memainkan kata-kata sehingga terlahir ungkapan-ungkapan puitis yang pada titik-titik tertentu melahirkan letupan keindahan laksana kembang api di angkasa. Berbeda dari dua novel terdahulu, dalam novel ini Ayu lebih kontemplatif dan lebih mendalam, tanpa terjebak menjadi nyinyir. Tidak heran Ayu sendiri menamai novel ini sebagai manifestonya tentang spiritualitas kritis.

Memang ada sedikit yang terasa mengganggu menyangkut kutipan-kutipan berita dari surat kabar yang tidak bersesuaian dalam waktu dan tempat dengan kejadian sebenarnya, sekilas terkesan dicocok-cocokkan. Namun kita harus selalu ingat bahwa bagaimanapun kisah ini adalah fiksi (rekaan), bukan fakta sejarah.

Bagaimanapun sebagai sebuah karya, novel ini memenuhi syarat keindahan (menggetarkan jiwa), simbolisme (apa yang terjadi di Watugunung merupakan miniatur dari kejadian secara nasional dan internasional, menyangkut modernisasi yang eksploitatif terhadap alam dan perlawanan antara kaum fundamentalis dan moderat agama), dan sebuah pernyataan sikap pengarang terhadap itu semua. Atas pertimbangan itu semua, novel ini bisa digolongkan dalam karya sastra.

Kita tunggu apakah novel ini akan mendapat penghargaan sastra seperti novel pertama Saman.

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the review above was written by gagang_aking, member of www.bukukita.com forum

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On Sweden, state power and Susan Sontag

On the evening of June 26, Granta Books celebrated the publication of two new books: Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown and Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff. Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta magazine, spoke on what these books mean to her.

You may well wonder what David Rieff’s book about the death of his mother, Susan Sontag, and Andrew Brown’s book about Sweden have in common, other than the fact that they are both published by Granta.

Susan Sontag, of course, had somewhat of a connection to Sweden, since she wrote and directed two films there, in 1969 and 1971. A few years later, Andrew Brown too went to Sweden and lived there for a decade, immersing himself into Swedish working life. There is probably not a person in this room – other than perhaps Andrew – who understands what the connection between these two books is for me. I grew up – again in the ’70s – immersed in Susan Sontag, Foucault, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and the cultural critics of the day. I was unreflectively anti-Social Democrat and concerned about the creeping extension of state power. Rather like in Britain today, that was a common concern between liberals and libertarians.

One of the pivots of that discourse was the idea that the state took excessive numbers of children into care, that at least a part of the state constituted, in effect, a repressive machinery where individual rights were potentially sacrificed to powerful social norms, parallel to the coerced sterilizations of those unfortunate people who were regarded as socially undesirable, which continued into the ’70s.

I still think that point of view is largely true. From this book, however, I learnt that the story of children taken into care was unintentionally internationalized by Andrew himself – his story about one particular case bounced from his piece in the Daily Mail (mothers weeping, soulless bureaucrats), to the Private Eye (jokes about Sweden), to Der Spiegel (‘Swedish children’s Gulag’, based on six cases). Many years later, Andrew did some more research into his original case and came to the conclusion that the state had been right to take this particular boy, ‘child A’, into care, and that the mother, indeed, was a psychopathic fantasist who posed a real danger to the child.

State power is a tricky thing, and the Swedish state was mythologized by right and left alike. We never thought of the state in any terms other than power – it was, to us, the Foucauldian ultimate panopticon, controlling its citizens. When progressive friends in Britain or America eulogized Sweden’s welfare state and freedoms, I quoted sterilization and children taken into care at them. I pointed out that Sweden in the 1980s seriously considered forcible quarantine for its HIV-positive population. Was I right to be so sceptical about Sweden? I don’t know. I think I was. But I now also think – partly because of Andrew’s story of ‘child A’ – that the whirl of myth and rumour surrounded the state much as it surrounds any celebrity – and Sweden in a sense was a celebrity state because it had become globally symbolic of the welfare state, of high taxes, of sexual education and liberation.

Susan Sontag wrote about the pervasiveness of ‘interpretation’ in relation to art: ‘None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.’ In Sweden, ‘interpretation’ became an incessant drive to understand the social system and culture in which we lived – our entanglement with the state, ultimately, was taken for granted.

Now, as I get older, and as close friends and family battle with the potentially fatal illnesses of our day – cancer, autoimmune disorders, addiction – each with its own complex mythology, I am more interested in her ideas in Illness as Metaphor. She wrote, ‘Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance’; a significance which she thought of as irrelevant or as oppressive static around the real and subterranean processes of the body. David’s book, in a sense, completes her refutation of illness as metaphor, as he describes her refusal, and his own collaboration in that refusal, to be confined by the symbolism of progressive and mortal illness, as well as the cost of that refusal: there was no peace or acceptance, seemingly, and farewells came too late to be fully understood and meaningful. It’s a painful book, but it is also an extraordinary testament to the fact that our discourse, our ideologies and our theories, really do inform, or even constitute, our way of being in the world. That is as true for Sweden as it is for Susan Sontag, as Andrew and David have so eloquently shown.

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Granta

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Modernisme (Nukilan Bilangan Fu)

Almari

Taruhan. Kau pasti enggan percaya jika kubilang padaku ada sebuah stoples selai berisi sepotong ruas kelingking. Kudapat dari menang bertaruh. Aku tidak gandrung pada benda itu: botol gelas berisi buku berkuku yang mengapung di air formalin. Pacarku Marja membencinya sampai ia pergi. Katanya, kaca tebal dan cembung membuat efek akuarium. Kelingking itu jadi tampak bagai seekor balakutak. Kukunya yang ungu adalah mata memar, memergokinya setiap kali dia melirik ke sana. Kubilang, kalau takut ya jangan kau menoleh kepadanya. Aku sendiri menikmati kelingking itu sebagai salah satu dari koleksi benda yang kudapat dari menang taruhan.

Pada dinding kamar kosku ada sebuah almari. Kupersembahkan untuk menampung kenang-kenangan, cenderamata menang taruhan. Isinya kebanyakan barang tak berharga. Kelingking itu, misalnya, tak ada gunanya bagiku. Di sebelahnya telah kutata pula sebilah iga manusia, melengkung bagai pedang, dengan satu pasak salib nisan terbuat dari granit hitam. Meski kasihku akhirnya pergi juga, sesungguhnya tiga benda itu sajalah yang membikin dia jeri. Sisa koleksi tidak membuat aku tampak seperti manusia gothik. Aku bukan karakter dari cerita Alfred Hithcock yang telah klasik. Aku hanya manusia yang mengabdi pada hobiku. Aku adalah seorang pemanjat dan petaruh. Begitu saja.

Ruas kelingking berkuku belah itu milik si Fulan, temanku, sesama pemanjat tebing dulu. Tidak, aku tidak mendapatkannya dengan memotong jarinya pada talenan sebab ia kalah taruhan. Aku bukan psikopat. Kami sedang memanjat di Citatah, barisan tebing gamping di tepi kota Bandung, ketika tiba-tiba sebongkah batu rumpal. Sekepala manusia besarnya. Aku sedang memanjat, sementara Fulan berada di kaki gawir. Ia sedang kena giliran tugas sebagai juru masak. Aku berani bertaruh batu itu gumpil sendiri dari sarangnya lima meter di atas kepalaku. Bukan aku yang menyebabkan. Aku menjerit anjing ketika ia melayang melampaui kepalaku. Segera kutahu bahwa kawan-kawanku di dekat tenda ada dalam bahaya. Batu itu telah bertambah kecepatan pula manakala tiba di tanah kelak.

Sedetik kemudian kudengar di bawah ada yang meraung jalang. Suaranya gaduh anjing dibunuh. Posisiku terhalang ganjur tebing untuk melihat apa yang terjadi. Kami berusaha secepat mungkin untuk turun, meluncur dengan kait delapan bergantian. Sampai di tanah kulihat Fulan telah dibaringkan pada tandu, yang sedang dinaikkan ke dalam Landrover kuning tua yang kudapat dari beberapa kali menang judi sabung ayam. Tak kulihat luka pada sekujur tubuhnya. Hanya kulihat kelingkingnya berdarah parah. Tepatnya, hanya kulihat seluruh bidang telapak tangannya berwarna merah, pekat mengilap.

Sebelum mobil menyala, kawanku yang lain terdengar menghardik kepadaku. “Yuda! Kau carikan potongan kelingkingnya sebelum gelap!”

Tentu akan kucari sampai mati, sebagai kesetiakawanan yang masih bisa kusumbangkan. Sebelum tikus hutan mencurinya. Aku menemukan ruas jari itu, terserak di tepi semak-semak, dekat kompor bensin yang terguling. Ia melenting tak jauh dari ceceran darah. Prioritas membuat teman-temanku tak melihatnya tadi. Kubuntal kelingking malang itu dengan bandana yang semula mengikat kepalaku. Segera aku menyusul ke rumah sakit dengan ojeg. Supirnya kuancam agar ngebut. Tancap gas, atau motormu kurebut. Tiba di sana, kulihat dokter sedang mengobras kelingking yang buntung. Aku terlambat. Dengan segala sesal dan prihatin aku meledak, “Stop dokter! Ini, saya temukan kelingking itu! Ayo sambung!”

Dalam kalut kubuka bungkusan dan kuacungkan ruas sepetilan lengkuas. Tapi semua mata memandang ke arahku dalam diam, kepadaku dan kepada jari yang kuajukan, bagai sepuluh menit lamanya. Aku merasa menjadi gerakan ganjil dalam film yang dibekukan. Lalu kulihat dokter itu menggelengkan kepala, pelan. “Percuma. Sudah putus. Tidak bisa disambung,” ujarnya dingin.

Ketika suasana telah tenang, kulihat di tatapan Fulan ada magma yang terarah padaku. Ia duduk di kursi tunggu ruang gawat darurat sekarang. Bibirnya mengatup tegang dan matanya menyorotkan api. Rambutnya ular berbisa. Apa salahku? Bukan aku yang meruntuhkan batu. Lagi pula, kalau bongkah itu rumpal karena aku, kami semua tahu bahwa kecelakaan yang diakibatnya tak bisa disalahkan pada siapapun. Itulah kebersamaan kami. Batu jatuh bisa terjadi setiap saat. Bagian dari risiko petualangan. “Yuda…” Ia menyebut namaku, tapi aku yakin kudengar bunyi desis di akhir ucapnya. Yudas. Engkau Yudas, si pengkhianat. Aku memegang stoples berisi kelingking yang telah tanpa pamrih kuperjuangkan sampai di sini. Suster berpantat montok itu telah mengemasnya buat kami. Tapi dokter itulah yang salah, bukan aku. Dia yang tak mau menyambungnya. Keras kepalaku membuat aku tak sudi minta maaf, bahkan sekadar untuk melembutkan hati kawanku.

Aku justru mengajukan taruhan. Taruhan sepertinya adalah satu-satunya bahasa yang kumengerti pada usiaku waktu itu. Umurku sembilan belas.

“Kelingkingmu pasti tumbuh lagi. Tidak sempurna, tapi tumbuh lagi. Percayalah. Taruhan…” kataku tanpa pikir panjang. Di usia itu seorang anak muda memang tak perlu pikir panjang. Seseorang tertawa karena aku memperlakukan jari seperti buntut cicak. Si Fulan belum bisa tersenyum. Katanya, “Boleh. Kalau tidak tumbuh, kau telan kelingkingku itu.”

Aku sebetulnya tersinggung. Ia sama sekali tak menghargai jerih payahku. “Oke,” tantangku tanpa kehilangan humor. “Tapi kalau tumbuh, kau telan kelingkingmu ini?” Teman kami yang lain menengahi. “Kalau tumbuh, kelingkingnya biar buat Yuda. Kalau tidak, buat Fulan. Siapa tahu bisa disambung lagi kalau sudah ada teknologi baru.”

Demikian saja. Semula tak ada satu pun yang percaya. Tapi setelah setahun berselang, kami melihat jari si Fulan telah bertunas lagi. Tidak sempurna betul memang, persis seperti yang kukatakan serampangan dulu. Ruas yang hilang itu telah digantikan oleh taju baru yang lebih kecil, dengan kuku yang lebih pendek dan tampak lebih lunak. Tapi jentik itu tumbuh kembali, seperti ekor cicak! Kami tak ingin ke dokter, sebab kami tak membutuhkan penjelasan. Jari bertaruk kembali, apa lagi yang perlu dijelaskan? Keterangan akan menghilangkan rasa mukjizat. Lebih menyenangkan bagi kami para pemanjat untuk menerima teori bahwa jari pemanjat tak banyak beda dari buntut cicak. Teori ini lebih memberi harapan. Begitulah, dengan sebuah upacara kecil di antara gerombolan pemanjat kami, si Fulan menyerahkan stoples kaca istimewa itu kepadaku sebagai tanda kekalahannya.

Aku mengenang upacara kecil itu dengan agak syahdu. Malam. Bintang waluku. Tebing menjulang sebagai bayangan gelap. Angin. Bau alam bercampur unggun yang meletik-retas. Kami duduk melingkari tonjolan batu di mana kecelakaan dulu terjadi. Di atas pembakaran, daging domba mulai matang. Bawang putih dimemarkan. Selusin Balihai dingin dalam kulboks dengan es batu yang mulai mencair. Beberapa botol kola, serta Mansions dan Drum. Semua yang termurah dan cepat membikin pusing. Si Fulan duduk dengan wajah kalah. Ia tahu tak benarlah sikapnya menyalahkan aku dulu. Ia tahu, jika aku berkeras dengan nilai taruhan awal, maka dia harus menelan acar kelingking formalinnya sekarang.

Tapi bukan itu yang terutama membuat aku biru. Dalam pidato kecilnya, si Fulan berkata bahwa ia harus mengurangi kegiatan memanjat karena dia akan segera menikah. Ini sekaligus akan menjadi pesta melepas masa lajangnya. Lalu si Fulan menyerahkan stoples selai itu kepadaku bagai sebuah wasiat. Anggota gerombolan yang lain bertepuk tangan. Seseorang menirukan suara tersedu sinetron sendu.

Aku merengkuh dan mencium kelingkingnya yang baru. Ada rasa sedih dan marah setiap kali seorang kawan pemanjat menikah. Aku tahu pernikahan berarti akhir petualangan panjat tebing. Mereka akan segera pensiun, untuk mencari nafkah dan memberikan kehidupan yang stabil bagi kaum pembujuk itu dan anak-anak tuyul yang akan mereka lahirkan. Lalu satria pun akan menjadi sudra.

“Aku sedih kau meninggalkan agama kami,” bisikku kepadanya. Sesungguhnya, ia bukan berpindah agama, melainkan turun kasta.

Ia mengelak dan berkata bahwa ia tak akan meninggalkan sepenuhnya pemanjatan. Aku tersenyum kering. Semua laki-laki membual, di malam lepas lajang, bahwa mereka takkan kehilangan kebebasan sampai kapan pun.

Si Fulan. Ia telah pensiun sekarang. Di usia dua puluh empat. Pemilik kelingking dalam botol selai yang kusimpan baik-baik itu. Kawanku yang berwajah bulat berambut wol, yang bagaimanapun telah pernah menjadi teman berbagi dalam hidupku.

Aku tetap dengan pilihan hidupku. Bahkan sampai hari ini, bertahun-tahun kemudian. Di sebelah botol acar kelingkingnya, pada rak yang sama dari almari di kamar kosku, tertatah juga tulang iga beralas beledru. Rusuk itu milik mendiang ayah temanku, dan salibnya, yang tersandar pada dinding, adalah batu nisannya. Kudapat dari taruhan yang lain, yang berawal dari debat mengenai mana lebih baik: kremasi atau penguburan. Kubilang pada Oscar, temanku anggota gerombolan juga, bahwa kuburan Blok P tempat ia akan memakamkan ayahnya pasti digusur dalam sepuluh tahun ini. Jika aku salah, pada tahun kesebelas aku akan tidur di sebelah kubur ayahnya selama empat puluh hari sinambung. Jika bolong satu, aku harus mengulang dari hitungan satu. Ia telanjur setuju sebelum aku mengajukan syaratku. Nah, sekarang syaratku. Jika aku benar, aku minta sepotong rusuk dan pasak nisannya ketika mereka membongkar remah-remah makam. Sepotong rusuk, siapa tahu menjelma perempuan cantik. (Oscar punya ibu yang masih berbentuk gitar di usia empat puluh lima.) Kuburan itu menjelma kantor walikota. Oscar memenuhi janjinya dengan tipu-daya terhadap keluarganya. Atau barangkali ia menipuku dan memberi tulang iga dari kuburan lain. Terserah. Demi rasa-rasa yang aneh, Oscar juga secara rutin mengunjungi tulang itu dan memberi penghormatan dengan caranya sendiri. Barangkali ia sendiri senang berada dekat relik leluhurnya. Barangkali ia menikmati tipuannya padaku. Terserah.

Almari kenang-kenangan taruhan. Ia memelihara kesendirianku dari hingar-bingar kota yang aku tak tahan. Pada saat-saat tertentu aku sungguh memandangi isinya dengan nikmat yang membuat hatiku tersenyum. Gelas selai berisi kelingking masam. Sebilah rusuk garing. Sekumpulan tetek-bengek. Botol berisi kentut yang tak pernah kubuka. Beha milik pacar temanku. Foto burung kami yang kami jepret ketika seorang teman perempuan menitipkan kamera analog. Rambutnya berjerangut. Kawan cewek yang sedang belajar fotografi itu baru sadar ketika ia mengambil hasil cetakan foto dari Fuji Image Plaza. Buku tua How to be a Sensuous Man. How to be a Perfect Gigolo. How to Read Books. How to Win Friends. Bagaimana Menjadi Kaya Dalam Sebulan. Bagaimana Menghipnotis Orang. Wayang Werkudara. Kepompong ulat kedondong. Sejilid ilustrasi porno dan kasar dari Eric Staton. Satu set koleksi komik Superman dari Amerika. Boneka Spiderman pelbagai ukuran. Firdaus Oil. Tongkat Madura. Minyak binatang biul untuk memperbesar payudara. Sebuah kutipan pada papan, tanpa nama: Kelak, ketika tua, kita tahu kita semakin sulit tertawa. Sebab, seperti pohon, semakin menjadi tua semakin mengeras diri manusia. Tentang hal yang menyedihkan itu boleh juga kita bertaruh.

Tapi, di tempat yang paling terhormat di almari itu, di tengah-tengah, di antara dua lilin persembahan, aku memiliki sebuah peti kecil. Kotak perhiasan terbuat dari kayu jati yang permukaannya secara rutin kugosok dan kurawat. Pada tanggal-tanggal tertentu kusulut lilin di kanan kirinya, kunyalakan ritualku. Di dalamnya terdapat sepotong batu sederhana. Batu endapan berwarna kelabu, nyaris segitiga bentuknya. Padanya ada sebuah jejak fosil. Berbentuk labirin cangkang siput sekepalan. Batu itu tampak seperti replika yang dijual sebagai suvenir museum geologi. Dan memang batu itu pantas menghuni sebuah pedestal terhormat di sebuah museum istimewa. Museum yang tak hanya memperlakukan koleksinya sebagai obyek ilmiah; melengkapinya dengan kartu berisi data-data mati. Melainkan yang juga menganggap benda-bendanya sebagai subyek, yaitu yang memiliki ruh pada dirinya. Ruh yang mewujudkan diri dalam rupa dongeng dan cerita. Di bawah batu endap itu terdadah secarik surat tua bertulis tangan dengan sepatah kalimat terakhir: apa yang tak selesai kau mengerti di sini, tak boleh kau tanyakan padaKu di luar.

Pada batu itulah kisahku ini mengkristal.

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J.M. Coetzee and his censors

J.M. Coetzee cuts a surprisingly dashing figure in person. Speaking last week at the University of East Anglia, as part of UEA’s New Writing Worlds season, Coetzee took to the stage with a loose walk, even a subtle swagger, in a perfectly pressed suit. He spoke on censorship, and then gave readings from two of his early novels, In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). His delivery was nuanced and witty, albeit with a sense of private restraint. At one point in the evening, I even saw him laugh.

Writing under the threat of censorship, Coetzee has said, is ‘like being intimate with someone who does not love you’, someone waiting for you to slip up, someone who measures your mistakes and then runs to tell their friends. Censorship has long been an obsession of his, but his attitudes have always been marked by subtlety. His essays on the subject, collected in Giving Offense (1996), ‘do not,’ he wrote, ‘constitute an attack on censorship’. Coetzee’s tone is always investigative and probing. With humility he wrote that ‘I cannot find it in myself to align myself with the censor… the dark-suited, bald-headed figure, with his pursed lips and his red pen’.

But as Coetzee explained last week – and as Peter D. McDonald reported in the TLS in 2000 (it’s surprising that Coetzee claims to have heard of the public existence of the censors’ internal reports only last year) – the reality of the author’s run-ins with the censors belies the popular image. Not only were the censors complimentary of the books – for example, one censor called In the Heart of the Country ‘outstandingly well-written’ – but they were themselves sophisticated readers known to Coetzee. Among them was H. van der Merwe Scholz, a professor at the University of Cape Town, where Coetzee also taught. Another was Anna M. Louw, herself a novelist based in the city. These censors were part of Coetzee’s intellectual and social world, drawn from the small South African intelligentsia who, Coetzee suggested, considered themselves to be ‘guardians of the Republic of Letters… book reviewers to the power of n’ protecting a space for literature from a philistine state.

But you’ll find no gratitude in Coetzee, no dedications in his books to some censor’s bureaucratic serial number. Here are some choice fragments of the censors’ reports on In the Heart of the Country, a novel in which there is sex – both consensual and forced – between white and black characters: there are ‘traces of protest literature’; the sexual intercourse ‘across the colour bar’ is ‘so firmly interwoven, even overwoven, by the sometimes almost hermetic style, that it won’t give any offence’; the novel will be ‘read and enjoyed only by intellectuals’; ‘it is difficult to abstract reality out of the spinster’s flights of imagination’. Despite In the Heart of the Country’s troubling and transgressive content, in the censors’ view the novel was rendered innocuous by a literary quality which curtailed the book’s likely readership. A classic defence.

So how did it feel for a writer who once said that he considered it ‘a badge of honour to have a book banned in South Africa’ to find out that the state’s literary representatives – his unloving readers – were actually on his side? How are we to interpret the disdain and sarcasm that spiked Coetzee’s voice as he quoted these lines?

The extract he read from In the Heart of the Country – the rich, speculative, Beckettian monologue of Magda, a lonely, disused and mistreated daughter on a farm in the middle of the Karoo – is telling. ‘I am a black widow, in mourning for the uses I was never put to’, the extract began. ‘But I have another sense of myself, glimmering tentatively somewhere in my inner darkness: myself as a sheath, as a matrix, as protectrix of a vacant inner space.’

But Magda’s protective retreat – her ‘sense of election’ – is weighed down in darker moments. She wonders ‘that if only I had a good man to sleep at my side, and give me babies all would be well… a man whom I would vow to bend down to a little lower, slave for a little harder than another woman would, whom I would have to disrobe for on Saturday nights, in the dark, so as not to alarm him, and arouse, if the arts of arousal can be learned, and guide to the right hole, rendered penetrable with a gob of chickenfat from a pot at the bedside’.

Here are sceptical attitudes to marriage and stark references to sex framed by a sophisticated speculative device: the ‘spinster’s flights of imagination’ that the censors thought exonerated the book from obscenity. But as a ‘protectrix of vacant inner space’ the speculation is part of the protest, an assertion of a controlling intelligence able to resist what Magda describes as ‘the bucolic comedy… not to be explained away by poverty, degeneracy, torpor or sloth’. The censors had excused the novel by privileging its literariness. But in so doing they had missed its power.

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source: www.granta.com

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Interview: Jonathan Raban

In the latest issue of Granta Jonathan Raban investigates the de-landscaping of the American West. ‘Second Nature’ is an exploration of man’s attempts, through projects like the Grand Coulee Dam, to control raw nature, and a new breed of radical environmentalist who longs to return the land to a state of pristine wilderness.

Raban was born in Norfolk in 1942 and raised in a vicarage. In 1990 he moved to America and currently lives in Seattle. His books include Bad Land (1996) set in eastern Montana in the teens of the twentieth century and the 1990s; Passage to Juneau (1999), an account of his solo voyage from Seattle to Juneau; My Holy War (2006), a collection of mostly political essays; and, most recently, the novel Surveillance (2006).

On the day of our interview he was busy formulating plans to avoid the Seattle Independence Day celebrations that ‘turn the area around the lake into a total zoo of patriotic drunks’. He answered the telephone from the gentler surroundings of ‘a room lined by bookshelves’ complete with an ‘antique sextant gathering dust in an open box, and the remains of a chess game that my daughter and I abandoned about four years ago’.

HG: You’ve said that you come from a ‘long line of English clergymen, soldiers, professional people’. Have there also been writers in your family? Growing up in the vicarage, were books an important part of family life?

JR: Theological books for my father, but before her marriage my mother, when she was nineteen, twenty, made a living by writing romantic short stories for a women’s magazine. Her mother supplied the plots and she wrote the stories. She did well at it — bought her own car on the proceeds, a black Austin 7 with red leather seats, registration number AUP 595, shortly before the war. My earliest travelling memories go back to that car, bowling, rather slowly, through the Norfolk lanes on strictly rationed petrol. But her editor scarpered to South Africa, and my mother never wrote again, at least not for publication. Her letters to me when I was at boarding school were writerly ones, full of description and simile, so I guess something of that rubbed off on me.

In 1960 you went to Hull University. Philip Larkin would have been the librarian at that time.

Oh yes, that was the chief reason for applying to Hull. When I was there I turned myself into the Student’s Union library committee, which meant that I could go and beard Larkin in his sanctum, allegedly to discuss things like fines and extended opening hours but actually to talk about books. It’s awfully boring to say how good Larkin’s poems are but they’re still a touchstone for me. Quite aside from all the other virtues of his poetry, Larkin’s handling of landscape is exquisite, especially in works like the seaside poems, that train journey from Hull to London in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’… After Hull I taught English and American literature at the University College of Wales at Aberwystworth and at the University of East Anglia. Then in 1968 a commission for a television play, a regular slot as a reviewer for the New Statesman, a once-a-month date on a BBC radio book programme, produced by Russell Harty, and a few other gigs and assignments, took me to London and after that I wrote a mixture of things: reviews, essays, a lot of radio and a few TV plays, some short stories and autobiographical pieces for London Magazine under Alan Ross. The Bristol Old Vic put on a stage play of mine, which might just as well have jumped to its death from the Clifton bridge. Among my early books was one about contemporary poetry, The Society of the Poem, and, in 1973, a book called Soft City, which is coming out again in paperback next month.

You first appeared in this magazine in Granta 10 with ‘Sea-Room’, about taking possession of the boat that would figure in your book Coasting.

Yes, that would have been in 1984, when Bill Buford was still editing the magazine from Cambridge. I miss our long liquid lunches, first in Cambridge and then in Islington.

Hunting Mr Heartbreak, published in 1990, documented your move to America. In ‘Sea-Room’ you write about feeling like ‘a lonely visitor’ in your own home and country. Did moving to America, becoming an official ‘resident alien’, somehow legitimize the ‘outsider’ status that you seem always to have experienced?

I think that’s true. From the moment I went to boarding school aged eleven – and maybe before that – I felt myself tarred with the brush of outsiderdom. The outsider thing is a quite – natural component of most writers’ equipment and useful in all sorts of ways. I came closest to losing it when I was in, as we laughingly say, ‘literary London’ in the Seventies as part of the gang that hung out at the Pillars of Hercules in Soho, under the influence of Ian Hamilton, editor of The Review, then the bigger, glossier New Review. In some ways outsiderdom is personally uncomfortable but it perhaps also helps you to see the world with more clarity then you’d have if you were fully immersed in it and part of it. Anyway, I’ve since become incurably deracinated – not that all that many people now are ‘racinated’, are they?

In books like Bad Land and in ‘Second Nature’ you certainly cultivate a position as an outsider and ‘sympathetic traveller’. Does this stance ever disguise, or perhaps avoid, a more censorious engagement with subjects? I’m thinking particularly of the section in ‘Second Nature’ that deals with the radical environmentalists and the rural loggers.

Avoidance? Maybe, but on that particular issue I think my being in two minds is heartfelt. I want to see the very things that the radical environmentalists are campaigning for: the survival of the salmon, the preservation of old-growth forest, all those things. But at the same time there’s a streak of fierce, authoritarian puritanism in the rhetoric of the hardline enviros – they’re the Cotton and Increase Mathers of our age. I’m not that kind of fundamentalist, and I instinctively dislike fundamentalism in all its forms, its inherent intoleration of the differentness of other people. Too many of the enviros simply want to wipe the land clean of the farmers and logging and mining communities for whom the land is home. A little more human imagination would come in handy, it seems to me. As I said in that piece, the creation of the national parks that embody the American notion of wilderness has led to the development of some of the most desolate forms of human society on their outskirts – the so-called gateway towns whose only function is to service tourists. It seems to me that these places, the work they provide, the strip malls and motels, are demeaning both to the people who live there and to the visitors. It’s a lose-lose situation.

You mentioned an American notion of wilderness as if you have a different definition?

It always seems to me odd to call a place a wilderness when every wilderness area in the US bristles with rules and regulations as to how you can behave, what you’re allowed to do, and is patrolled by armed rangers enforcing the small print. They’re parks, of course, not wildernesses at all. A wilderness that’s truly wild is beyond human rule, which is something I’ve always loved about the idea of the wilderness of the sea, at least before we fucked it up and made it wild no more, just one more critically endangered habitat. One of my favourite stories is that of the Mignonette, a yacht lost in the south Atlantic in 1844. The crew took to the dinghy, and, by the custom of the sea, drew straws to decide who was going to be eaten. The cabin boy drew the short straw, as cabin boys usually did. The defence put up the argument that because the ocean was a wilderness, and because the act of cannibalism took place not in a registered British ship – a small, detached chunk of England, sailing under the Red Ensign – but in an unregistered dinghy with no flag, the law of the land couldn’t possibly apply. What happened in the dinghy was beyond the reach of the courts, and subject only to maritime custom – the unwritten code of the wild. The defence lost but it was a good line to produce. Byron said much the same thing: ‘Man marks the earth with ruin – his control/ Stops with the shore…’ Now we’ve marked the ocean with ruin, I guess we in a sense control it, so that’s our last true wilderness gone. Hello to the world of Wall-E...

In non-fiction books such as Old Glory (1981) you blend a tale of personal adventure with a strong sense of literary artifice. There are hints of, among other things, the medieval or renaissance quest narrative…

Oh yes, I had The Faerie Queene, for instance, open on the floor under my desk when I was writing Old Glory and was busy smuggling bits of Spenser into my book. All those encounters with mythical creatures, trials by water, trials by fire, and so on… As you say, there’s more artifice in it than the book lets on, and I hope the undercurrents of literary allusion and patterning work on the reader’s subconscious without calling undue attention to their existence. I wanted the book – as a hap and hazard first-person journey – to have an air of natural artlessness about it, but that, or so I hoped, was its best claim to artfulness.

How would you describe the non-fiction you write? You’re often shelved under travel writing, which doesn’t seem quite right…

Well, I’m glad you think so. Travel writing seems to me a too-big umbrella, full of holes to let the rain in. Anyone commissioned by a newspaper to write up meals and hotels in foreign holiday resorts is a travel writer. Anyone who does a guidebook is a travel writer. Then there’s what Chatwin did… Naipaul, Thubron, Theroux, O’Hanlon, Dalrymple… I feel some affinity with all those people. ‘Travel writing’ seems an insufficient term to describe what happens in their work. I admired Chatwin’s insistence that The Song Lines was a ‘novel’, and his withdrawal of it from the shortlist for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. Ditto WG Sebald and The Rings of Saturn – a great book, with much personal travelling around East Anglia in it, which he published as a work of fiction, which it sort of both is and isn’t. Chatwin and Sebald knew that ‘travel book’ and ‘travel writing’ were terms of literary abuse, and did their best to rescue their books from the category. I know that feeling.

Non-fiction, even literary non-fiction, tends to be promoted or sold more by subject than by author. In a bookshop George Orwell’s fiction, for example, will be collected in one place but his non-fiction is scattered between history, politics, sociology.

That’s always been my beef… I’d adore it if bookstores would simply go over to alphabetical listings so that sociologists would rub shoulders with novelists, historians with poets, etcetera. It was in the twentieth century that the profession of authorship became suddenly specialized. The division of labour in the Industrial Revolution somehow entailed a corresponding division of academic and literary labour as well. People became short-story writers or novelists or playwrights (or ‘radio playwrights’ or ‘television playwrights’) with as hard a line between these increasingly narrow and artificial genres as that between, say, ear-nose-and-throat men and heart or bowel specialists. To my own detriment I’ve spent most of my writing life stepping out of line: one idea would obviously be a magazine piece, another a play, another was clearly demanding to be a journey, another a novel and so on… You know John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters? The term ‘man of letters’ now seems hopelessly archaic, but I’d like to think there’s still life left in the notion of the writer who’s just a writer, someone who shifts from form to form, unselfconsciously, as so many of the Victorians did, without the critical police telling them they were trespassing across professional boundaries. Soon poets who write sonnets will be told they have to stick to sonnets and not write villanelles.

Is there a form that seems more natural or easier for you?

No, they can all seem equally difficult when they’re not going well. Sometimes I find the book review just the hardest form in the world. Thankfully I gave up writing poetry as a student so at least I don’t have to worry about that.

And do you follow a particular method when you sit down to write?

I don’t really have a routine, though I often start things off in longhand upstairs before going to work in the study. I do wish that I could still use my electronic typewriter. I liked pulling the page out of the typewriter each morning and retyping the whole thing because something needed altering three quarters of the way down; that was when all the interesting changes got made – before I ever reached the obviously offending passage. On a computer screen, you tend to change what you immediately see needs changing without ever being forced to discover by laborious retyping that, on the third or fifth go-around, this doesn’t work, and that doesn’t either. But they stopped making cartridges for my Quietwriter. For a couple of years I was able to buy them on eBay. Then they got as rare as hen’s teeth, and I shifted reluctantly to working on a computer. I think the mechanics of the typewriter generally improved people’s prose styles, while the mechanics of word-processing tend to do the reverse – a dimly predictable opinion from someone of my age, a late-coming digital immigrant, unlike digital natives like my fifteen-year-old daughter.

So most of your writing takes place in your study?

Yes, and my study’s a pit: a disgraceful mess of papers and books and grime. It looks burgled, though it suits me. I’ve always had in mind as an ideal workspace Francis Bacon’s studio in South Kensington. It was just perfect chaos. The untidiest, least swept, most colourful, most disorganized room – though probably perfectly organised in his mind – just a wonderful space. It’s now in Dublin – Ireland, anyway – I think, in a museum.

Can I ask what you’re currently reading?

By my bed I have a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s collected journalism. For my money Waugh is just one of the best stylistic craftsmen in English in modern times but he could sure be sloppy when he was writing journalism. It’s funny, his letters and diaries have a sort of stylistic and witty consistency to them, but the journalism is just all over the place in a way that’s fun to read, with pages of brilliance succeeded by pages that read like they were phoned in against a deadline, and probably were. I like searching out the nuggets in it. I also recently re-read Put out the Flags. It’s one of Waugh’s pitch-perfect novels, funny and grave in equal parts, and way better, I think, than, say, Brideshead Revisited. Infuriatingly, he wrote it in about six weeks. God, how I wish…

How long did your last novel, Surveillance, take to write?

Around a year and a half. That’s about average for me.

‘Second Nature’ appears in Granta’s ‘New Nature Writing’ issue. Have you read much that you’d term ‘new nature writing’?

Most of the new American ‘nature writers’ are too good for me. All that moral uplift in the woods and mountains. A lot of it dates back to John Muir, the patron saint of the Sierra Club – the prayerful lyricism, the endless summoning of the ‘sublime’, and no laughs at all. I feel like a sinner in their church. I prefer books like Lawrence Kilham’s The Common Raven and the American Crow – close, fascinated, often comic observation, with no theology in it, rather in the line of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. But I’m also a fan of books about, as it were, the intellectual history of nature, and how we’ve perceived and used it, like Landscape and Memory by the polymathic Simon Schama; a landmark book, I think, and brim-full of ideas that suggest further ideas – a book that makes one feel more intelligent the more one reads it. You put it down, and go on thinking, and then you get to writing…

Many of your books are concerned with notions of travel and movement, perhaps with escape. In the Granta piece you write that there is ‘an instinctive English sense that attachment to one’s place of birth and its known place and landscape is a moral right’ whereas in America ‘one’s local patch of soil is rarely an ancestral tenancy…but rather a perch from which one may at almost any moment flit.’

Living in America, I feel precious little need to up sticks and go somewhere else; I feel that I’m ‘somewhere else’ most of the time. Eighteen years, and I’m still a traveller, picking his way through a foreign land that starts at the front door. But then, that’s a rather American state of mind. Most of the people I know in Seattle have come from far elsewhere, some of them very recently. They’re such compulsive movers – flitting from north to south, east coast to west coast, up from California, down to California, trying their luck in Montana, or Colorado, then moving on. They’re migrants in their own country, and my mindset fits rather well with theirs. Perhaps I ought to call it feeling at home here. But here’s the thing, I seem to live in America by day and in England by night. It’s odd, but almost every dream I have, even though it has American people in it and is about the present not the past, seems to take place in a London flat or a low-beamed cottage in Essex or a stretch of open landscape in the Thames Valley, like between Maidenhead and Cookham. These days I seem to divide my time between the continents, commuting back and forth across the Atlantic every night. But maybe that’s an American thing too: I’d better quiz the former New Yorkers and Californians I know here, and ask them about the physical geography of their dreams – which may well turn out to be much like mine.

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source: www.granta.com

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Book Review: Bilangan Fu (1)

baiklah, akan aku ceritakan pengalaman membaca novel keren terbaru ayu utami, bilangan fu. sampai pada lembar terakhir aku merasa tak mendapatkan "imbalan" seperti pada novel kebanyakan. malahan ia menyisakan pertanyaan yang menteror.

aku sadar betul, ayu utami bukanlah penulis yang sebatas ingin memberikan penghiburan dan kepuasan kepada pembacanya. namun ia menawarkan suatu pemikiran baru mengenai spiritualisme.

masih sering kita melihat praktek-praktek upacara pemujaan dan persembahan (sesajen) kepada batu atau pohon di daerah-daerah yang masih memelihara takhayul. sebagian besar orang menganggapnya kuno, kampungan dan tak intelek. ada yang menilai sebagai bentuk perbuatan terkutuk yang menduakan Tuhan.

ayu utami memahaminya lain. melalui novelnya ia ingin mengatakan, agama-agama langit telah gagal menyelamatkan alam. agama bumilah yang secara sistematis memelihara alam. sayangnya agama-agama bumi ini telah terlindas nilai-nilai baru: modernisme dan monoteisme.

dengan setting watugunung (pegunungan kapur) dengan para pemanjat tebingnya, ayu sangat piawai meramu dan mengolah perbenturan dua keyakinan melalui kedua tokohnya: parang jati dan kupu-kupu. plot yang agak lambat namun padat, pembaca diajak memahami perbedaan antara agama-agama barat dengan timur (hindu budha, konghucu, tao, shinto dan agama lokal. (semacam pangestu, parmalim, kaharingan?).

rupanya perbedaan itu terdapat pada bilangan yang dijadikan metafora bagi inti falsafah masing-masing agama. agama timur sangat menekankan konsep ketiadaan, kekosongan, sekaligus keutuhan. nol. harmoni yang menghargai kontras (yin yang). dimana dalam yang satu selalu ada yang lain.

sebaliknya monoteisme menekankan bilangan satu. Tuhan mereka adalah satu. monoteisme memandang orang lain tampak seperti hidup dalam kegelapan dan penderitaan sehingga membutuhkan terang mereka. mereka melihat orang lain tampak seperti iblis sehingga boleh diperangi.

bagi mereka yang memilih agama langit daripada agama bumi, ia menawarkan bentuk keyakinan baru, spiritualisme kritis. kritis terhadap kebenaran yang dibawakan setiap agama. intinya jangan pernah mau menjadi budak kitab suci manapun.

kebenaran biarlah berada di langit. kelak kita akan mengetahui misteri itu. namun saat ini bumi membutuhkan kebaikan kita. maka sebaiknya kita berbuat baik kepada bumi, karena langit tak butuh belas kasih kita.

pada novel ini, ayu sangat bersemangat mengenalkan vocab yang jarang dipakai orang sejak dari bab pertama. bahkan beberapa tak kutemukan di tesaurus : dekis, retis. darimana ia mencipta kata-kata itu? lainnya yang kuingat: mendebik, miang, berjerangut, lihap, cedok, menyintas, membeting, wadat, menyalut, terpelecok, mengempal, orak, mengajuk, bergoler-goler dan dubuk.

ada roman (yang bukan picisan) asmara ketiga tokohnya, kita akan menemukan arti cinta yang aneh. yuda mencintai marja (cewek) dan parang jati. marja mencintai yuda dan parang jati. parang jati mencintai yuda dan marja. tak ada rasa cemburu, karena mereka tak ingin saling menguasai.

source: http://fanabis.blogsome.com

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Ayu Utami: Saya Tak Pernah Nulis Buku untuk Laris

Justina Ayu Utami. Perempuan ini rupanya sedang ditunggu-tunggu. Siang itu, puluhan orang datang khusus untuk bertemu dengannya dan meminta tanda tangan penulis novel fenomenal 'Saman' tersebut.

Ayu, siang itu hadir di Pameran Buku Ikapi, Istora, Senayan, dalam acara jumpa pengarang. Acara itu terkait dengan peluncuran novel teranyar Ayu, 'Bilangan Fu'. Ini merupakan novel ketiga perempuan yang memenangkan sayembara menulis roman Dewan Kesenian Jakarta 1998 tersebut, setelah novelnya 'Larung' yang terbit tujuh tahun lalu.

Maka siang itu, tidak heran jika penggemar perempuan langsing ini berdatangan. Dalam hitungan tidak ada satu jam, Bilangan Fu pun laku 70 eksemplar lebih.

Bilangan Fu berkisah tentang cinta segitiga antara dua laki-laki pemanjat dinding beranama Yudha dan Parangjati dengan seorang perempuan bernama Marja.

Lewat "Bilangan Fu", Ayu mengangkat tema yang disebutnya sebagai 'spiritualisme kritis'. Ini merupakan keprihatinan Ayu atas banyaknya sikap intoleran dan beragama secara formalitis setelah reformasi.

Di sela-sela melayani permintaan tanda tangan dan foto bersama dengan penggemarnya, Ayu membeberkan proses penulisan Bilangan Fu. Seperti apa? Lalu apa maksud Ayu mengaku tidak ingin menyenangkan orang? Berikut petikan wawancara Iin Yumiyanti dari detikcom dengan Ayu Utami:

Bisa anda ceritakan proses pembuatan novel Bilangan Fu. Idenya dari mana?

Prosesnya agak panjang. Idenya? Saya punya pacar, namanya Erik Prasetya. Ia dulu seorang pemanjat tebing. Tapi ia berhenti memanjat karena sahabatnya meninggal dunia. Teman pacar saya ini namanya Sandy Febijanto. Ia salah satu dari pemanjat tebing terbaik Indonesia.

Pengalaman ini (kematian Sandy) mungkin membuat trauma atau sedih yang terlalu berat sehingga pacar saya lantas meninggalkan dunia panjat tebing. Ia tidak mau lagi ke Bandung untuk latihan ataupun melihat tebing-tebing.

Tapi ia selalu bercerita masalah ini kepada saya. Saya sampai pada titik sudah penuh dengan ceritanya. Akhirnya saya putuskan, oke saya akan menulis novel dengan tokoh pemanjat tebing.

Apa yang ingin anda sampaikan lewat Bilangan Fu?

Begini, kalau Saman, keprihatinan saya itu kan kerasnya represi pada masa Orde Baru. Bilangan Fu ini keprihatinan saya setelah reformasi. Saya melihat setelah reformasi , marak sikap intoleran dan cara beragama yang terlalu formalistis.

Bilangan Fu bercerita tentang cinta antara dua pemanjat tebing dengan seorang perempuan. Nah saya ingin memadukan kedua hal ini, kisah cinta pemanjat tebing dan persoalan religiositas bangsa ini.

Bagi saya, ada kesamaan antara memanjat tebing dan beragama. (Ayu lantas tersenyum). Nanti kalau kamu baca novel ini akan ada kesamaannya. Kesamaannya gini, pemanjat dan orang beragama sama-sama ingin mencapai puncak.

Pemanjat tebing ada yang kotor atau dirty climbing. Mereka ini pemanjat yang merusak tebing. Mereka memasangi berbagai macam alat, bor, paku dan sebagainya untuk mencapai tujuannya mencapai puncak. Yang penting bagi mereka bisa sampai atas.

Begitu pula agama. Dalam mensiarkan kebenaran agamanya, ada yang mamakai cara seperti cara-cara pemanjat tebing kotor. Misalnya dengan main paksa saja, semua dihajar saja, kebudayaan setempat dihajar.

Tapi ada juga pemanjat tebing yang bersih, mencapai puncak dengan cara-cara terpuji, dengan cara-cara berdialog.

Jadi dalam mencapai tujuan apapun kita bisa melakukan dua jalan, jalan yang kotor, yang memaksa, yang merusak atau jalan yang bersih yang tidak memaksa.

Inspirasi novel ini adalah pacar anda, Erick. Apakah tokoh utama dalam novel ini yaitu Yudha sebagai pelukisan pribadi Erick?

Tokoh Yudha sebetulnya adalah saya juga. Yudha itu bagian diri saya yang skeptis dan sinis. Kalau Parangjati bagian diri saya yang bijaksana (Ayu lantas tertawa). Tapi saya lebih suka tokoh Yudha, karena tanpa tokoh sinis kita melihat dunia terlalu lempeng, terlalu biasa.Yudha tokoh yang mengacaukan banyak hal, memandang dunia dengan cara berbeda.

Hubungan Anda dengan Erick masih sampai sekarang?

Masih.

Mengapa anda bukan sebagai Marjanya?

Itulah salahnya, orang selalu mencari saya mewakili tokoh perempuan. Padahal belum tentu. Di Saman, banyak yang mengira saya sebagai Lailanya. Padahal sebenarnya saya sebagai Samannya.

Tokoh Marja terinspirasi dari beberapa teman-teman perempuan saya yang orangnya baik. Ia sederhana, tidak usah pakai teori macam-macam, tapi hatinya memang baik saja.

Novel kedua anda, Larung, tidak sesukses Saman, bahkan ada yang menyebut gagal karena kurang laku di pasaran. Lalu dibandingkan Saman dan Larung, Bilangan Fu ini, apa istimewanya?

Sekali lagi saya tidak pernah menulis buku untuk laris. Saya selalu mencadangkan kalau buku saya tidak disukai orang karena memang saya tidak pengin menyenangkan orang. Saya ingin menyampaikan apa yang menurut saya perlu. Saya ingin menyampaikan ide pergulatan saya. Jadi saya selalu siap jika novel saya tidak laris.

Soal Larung, orang yang suka sastra mengatakan bab I Larung bagus sekali. Tapi memang tidak ringan bagi banyak orang. Tidak semanis Saman. Tapi ya gak papa. Kalau disebut gagal ya tidak apa-apa.

Apa istimewanya Bilangan Fu?

Saman dan Larung dengan Bilangan Fu memiliki banyak perbedaan tapi ada banyak persamaan. Beda utama Bilangan Fu dengan Saman dan Larung, adalah zaman yang menjadi settingnya. Saman settingnya zaman Orba, dimana represi pemerintah masih keras sekali di semua bidang.

Saya ingin membongkar paradigma itu. Karena itu Saman dan Larung sebagai sebuah novel strukturnya tidak rapi. Ia seperti mozaik, fragmen yang terpisah-pisah. Tidak memakai plot yang lurus. Tapi itu merupakan salah satu cara yang saya ambil sebagai reaksi saya dari terlalu tertibnya nilai-nilai dan terlalu tertibnya kaidah menulis yang saya rasakan di zaman itu.

Sekarang justru saya merasa terlalu banyak akrobat dalam penulisan. Maka saya ingin kembali ke plot yang sederhana dan linear. Karena itu Bilangan Fu, dari segi plot dan cerita jauh lebih sederhana.

Jadi dari segi plot lebih sederhana. Tapi tetap mengandung banyak perdebatan. Lebih banyak perdebatannya dibandingkan dengan Saman.

Bilangan Fu masih mengangkat tema cinta yang sering menjadi cara klasik untuk menarik pembaca. Mengapa?

Bagi saya, cinta itu selalu menakjubkan. Di novel ini, tokohnya sangat dingin, sinis dan mengejek masyarakat. Tapi di sini kisah cinta bukan tempelan. Dihadirkan bukan hanya sebagai bumbu agar seru ceritanya.

Kamu bisa melihat perbedaan bagaimana seks digarap dalam film Hollywood dengan film Prancis. Di Hollywood, seks sering hadir sebagai bumbu pembungkus, dibikin erotis. Di film Prancis, seks dihadirkan sebagai persoalan manusia, misalnya laki-lakinya tidak bisa ereksi. Jadi cinta atau seks bukan sekadar bumbu.

Jadi Bilangan Fu lebih ringan dibaca dibandingkan Saman dan Larung?

Hmmm, susah menjawabnya. Mungkin lebih berat, kan lebih tebal (halamannya). Novel ini banyak sekali perdebatannya. Tapi perdebatannya tangkas. Saya menawarkan kata kunci baru yaitu spiritualisme kritis. Yang saya maksud adalah, orang tetap percaya sesuatu, apakah itu Tuhan atau nilai yang lain tapi ia tetap kritis pada apa yang dia percayai. Ia tidak buru-buru menerapkan kebenarannya pada orang lain. Karena kebenaran hakiki tetap jadi misteri. Yang lebih baik pada hari ini adalah kebaikan itu sendiri.

Mengapa sampai butuh waktu sangat lama untuk menyelesaikan novel ini?

Untuk mengetahui detail dunia panjat tebing, saya ikut latihan panjat tebing pada akhir 2003. Saya masuk sekolah Panjat Tebing Skygers. Lalu saya mulai menulisnya tahun 2004. Selama empat tahun saya melakukan pencarian yang tepat untuk menuliskan kisah ini. Tapi saya selalu tidak puas.

Baru September 2007 lalu saya menemukan cara menulis yang saya merasa puas. Setelah itu saya menulis nonstop. Jadi 4 tahun pencariannya, 9 bulan penulisan bentuk terakhir.

Biodata:

Nama Lengkap: Justina Ayu Utami
Lahir: Bogor, Jawa Barat, 21 November 1968
Pendidikan: S-1 Sastra Rusia Universitas Indonesia
Buku yang ditulis:

Saman (memenangkan Sayembara Mengarang Dewan Kesenian Jakarta 1998)
Larung
Parasit Lajang
Sidang Susila
Bilangan Fu

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The spiritual side in Ayu Utami latest book

The Indonesian Edition

Title: Bilangan Fu
First Edition: June 2008
Published by: Kepustakaan Gramedia (KPG)
Size: 13.5 x 20 cm
Price: Rp 60,000


Celebrated author Ayu Utami shares her thoughts on her latest book, Bilangan Fu (The Fu Numeral), at her house in Central Jakarta. She moves fluidly between subjects, from critical spiritualism to rock climbing and her partner in life, Erik. I even get treated to a dance with the couple's beautiful dog, Alpo.

I arrive at Ayu's house in Utan Kayu area at noon on a Monday. The men hanging around street outside tell me the doorbell is behind the brick wall, next to the rustic Balinese wooden door.

Peeking out from behind the wall is a man who flashes me a smile as he opens the door.

This is Ayu's partner, Erik Prasetya: freelance photographer, Jakarta Institute of Arts lecturer, rock climber and inspiration for her new book, due for release next month. Just behind him is the writer herself.

The two look 10 years younger than their years. Ayu, who will turn 40 in July, is slender in dark jeans, with a purple tank top showing off her toned biceps. Her skin, tanned from her 10 to 15-kilometer runs, glows. She wears her thick wavy hair down and looks beautiful with little makeup.

Erik has reached the ripe age of 50. Spectacles perch on his nose and I catch a glimpse of silver grays in his short hair. Dressed in a black-and-white batik sarong and gray sleeveless shirt, he looks in good shape, thanks to a disciplined fitness regimen.

They show me into the study and Ayu offers me dim sum to eat. I tell her I am a vegetarian and she disappears to the kitchen.

The study is spacious and opens onto other rooms. A tall white cabinet filled with books stands along one part of a wall. In front of the cabinet sits an antique desk with a laptop. A wooden art installation hangs from the high ceiling.

As I sit, a beautiful creature with big eyes and long eyelashes hops forward and rests its front legs on my lap. This is the couple's dog Alpo.

"Back up a little," Erik tells me. "She can stand on her feet and dance."

It is true. Alpo is not only beautiful -- she really can dance.

Ayu returns from the kitchen with a jug of water and a plate of tasty homemade energy bars, and we sit in wooden chairs in the middle of the study to get down to talking.

Right away, Ayu launches into an explanation of the concept of the fu numeral, which is the essence of her new book. She talks fluently, the words and sentences flowing freely from her lips.

Ayu is characterized by a mixture of sound historical knowledge, a healthy dose of free imagination and a critical way of thinking. This mixture led her to the concept of the fu numeral.

"The fu numeral is something that I've formulated. It's a number that has the properties of both one and zero. It's not a mathematical numeral, but a metaphorical numeral; not a rationalistic numeral but a spiritual numeral," she says.

"I use this to criticize monotheism."

With this last statement, her voice takes on a stern edge.

In the background, Erik, his legs resting on an exercise ball, is nodding off to sleep.

"I feel quite happy with my formulation," she says with a laugh.

And with another laugh: "I feel quite a genius with my discovery."

Ayu thinks monotheistic traditions understand the concept of one in an overly mathematical way, "whereas monotheism actually developed before the number zero was conceptualized".

To understand Ayu's concept of the fu numeral, it is first necessary to understand the history of religious development and the history of numerical development.

The concept of one god in the monotheistic tradition that started with Abraham around 4,000 B.C. emerged before the concept of zero was incorporated into the numerical system. The concept of zero or nil was first discovered in India around the fifth century.

"There, the concept of nil came from the concept of sunya or emptiness. The concept of a holistic divinity in the Eastern tradition is conceptualized into nil, while in the Semitic tradition it's conceptualized as one," she says.

"The numeral one, which monotheistic traditions use to define god, is actually one that is whole. However, we've come to understand the concept of one in a very mathematical sense since zero was discovered, which has resulted a very mathematical monotheist belief."

She incorporates this concept of the fu numeral in her book, along with "critical spiritualism", another concept she developed, by telling the story of a skeptical rock climber named Yuda.

By "critical spiritualism", Ayu means attempting to use our mind, living on Earth with our bodies and struggling against the urge to surrender to fatalistic faith.

"After we struggle to the very final moment and realize that we cannot grasp the ineffable, then yes, we surrender," she says.

This critical spiritualism is reflected her own spiritual journey. Raised in a Catholic tradition, she grew up despising religion. She became an atheist in her 20s, rejecting all religious values.

As she entered her 30s, she says, she came to view religion in a different light.

"I see in religion humanity's attempt for dialogue. Scriptures cannot be read literally, but have to be read contextually and metaphorically.

"Religion can renew itself. It's like a historical reality. In the end, what is important is not what is true, but what we do on Earth. Truth will always be delayed -- what's important is kindness," she says.

The spiritual Bilangan Fu has a different emphasis to her previous books Saman and Larung, which dealt with sexuality. What they do have in common is that they serve as a social critique.

Saman, released in 1998 just months after the toppling of former president Soeharto, was a critique of the hypocritical patriarchal society and repressive New Order Regime. Its sequel Larung shared the same broad themes.

Bilangan Fu is a critique of the growing power of religious fundamentalists, such as the Islam Defenders Front, and the increasing violence toward religious minorities over the past 10 years.

Both Ayu and Erik have signed the National Alliance for Freedom of Religion and Belief.

"In the past 10 years, people have been interpreting religion in a very shallow and fatalistic way. Religion is used to give life to power, or people are lured to the powerful side of religion. It's a sad development," she says.

Ayu dedicated Bilangan Fu to Erik. She was inspired to write a novel about rock climbing because of him. Once an avid climber, Erik stopped for 14 years after the death of his best friend in a rock climbing accident.

"When I first started going out with Erik, I didn't do any rock climbing, and neither did Erik, because of his trauma. But he kept telling me all these stories about rock climbing. I thought, why are you telling all these stories if you don't even do it anymore?" she says.

"So I decided to write a book about it."

By this time, Erik has woken from his doze. He joins us at the table and places his hands behind his head.

"I dedicated this book to Erik. This is a way for me to picture him in his youth with his late best friend and his girlfriend who left," she says, looking at him with a smile.

She started to learn rock climbing in late 2003, after which Erik returned to the sport.

"The first time back was magical. It all came back, the smell, the feel of the wind," Erik says.

They now have their own climbing wall in their house.

According to Ayu, Bilangan Fu was her hardest book to write, taking her around four and a half years to finish.

"There was so much that I wanted to say, my concepts of the fu numeral and critical spiritualism, but I didn't want that to ruin the structure of the story. Finding a simple structure for a complex matter is the hard part," she says.

"I saw her struggle to put her ideas into her book," Erik chimes in.

"It was not easy, and there were times she despaired and even said that her ideas could not be put into a book. But then she found her way."

Ayu likens writing to rock climbing.

"In rock climbing, a good climber should climb clean, which means we have to find a natural path, we can't destroy the rocks. That was my principle in writing as well -- if we can't find one path, we choose another," she says.

"And in desperate times we usually find the way."

Image: www.khatulistiwa.net
artcile: The Jakarta Post

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Dina Oktaviani: The lost biography of a young poet

City lights picked me up/and we tried to forget all the things/that had shredded the solitude back in that room//we may never understand/why old calendars/could change history/as easily and quickly as a highway rush


How do you feel after reading the lines above? How would you feel if you were told that the verse, an excerpt from a poem titled Silent Calendars, was written by a 15 year old? Dina Oktaviani composed it in February 2001. She had never before submitted her work to a national publication, but a year after Silent Calendars was written, Media Indonesia decided to print it in its Sunday edition, along with her other poems.

And how did she feel about it? "I was happy about the pay," she said, laughing. "But seriously, back then, I had to pay my own school fees, and I enjoyed spending money. My parents were proud too. They said they didn't want me to be an artist, but they bragged about my printed poems to the neighbors anyway."

Born in Tanjungkarang, Bandar Lampung, on Oct. 11, 1985, Dina used to dream about being a spy. Today, the mother of a 3-year-old boy has written poems and short stories for various publications, and published two books, Como Un Sue*o (anthology of short stories, Orakel, 2005), and Biografi Kehilangan (A Biography of Losses, anthology of poems, Insist Press, 2006). Her piece of poetry Hantu-hantu Tanjungkarang (The Ghosts of Tanjungkarang) was recently included in 100 Puisi Indonesia Terbaik 2008 (100 Best Indonesian Poems 2008, Gramedia Pustaka Utama).

In regard to Dina's poems, acclaimed poet Sapardi Djoko Damono commented on the back cover of Biografi Kehilangan: "She entices us to experience the secrets of life in unique ways, ways that have never been captured by other poets. Her experiences are arranged in sharp metaphors and imageries, a characteristic of modern poetry."

Sitting in a quiet cafe in Yogyakarta, smoking clove cigarettes and occasionally taking a sip of her iced lemon tea, Dina recalled falling in love with literature, particularly poetry. It all started in junior high school.

"In third grade, I watched a play that made me want to continue my studies at a school that had a theater group. One day, the play's director came to my school and staged a production, and I found out that Teater Satu, his theater group, had just formed a theater forum for senior high students. I often came to the forum, and I guess Iswadi Pratama, the director, observed my passion for theater and asked me to join the group. A few weeks later, he came to me and whispered in my ear: 'Would you like to learn about poetry?'" Dina embraced the opportunity, despite all the rules her mentor had laid out for her.

"I wasn't allowed to read teen magazines or comics. I couldn't watch sinetrons or band gigs. Oh, I wasn't allowed to have a boyfriend either. Falling in love was OK, but not boyfriends. After my poems were published in Media Indonesia and Republika, he then said I could break all of those rules, that I was free to do all the things that had been out of my reach in the last nine months. But I was no longer able to enjoy the things that I had deprived myself of," she said with a weak smile.

It was a coincidence that her mentor was also an editor with the Lampung Post. "Sometimes he asked me to edit the work of his reporters. And then he suggested that my friends from the theater forum and I work on a supplementary page for teenagers. My friends got bored, so I did the whole thing myself."

However, she sometimes misused the column for her own satisfaction and benefits. "I would make up questions and answers for the discussion section, though I was supposed to get the answers from real people. I was so selfish, I wanted people to read nobody else's opinions but mine. I also wrote poems under my friends' younger brothers' or sisters' names. When it was time for payment, I borrowed their IDs and told the treasurer's desk that those kids had asked me to get the money for them. I was such a criminal."

Dina took out a laptop from her bag. "Hey, you have a laptop too, don't you? This place has got a wireless connection. Let's chat via Yahoo Messenger," she said in a playful tone, adding, "just for the hell of it."

Time for the next question, through the internet, just for the hell of it: Why Yogyakarta?

After graduating from her senior high school in Lampung, Dina went to Jakarta to study French at the Jakarta State University. Realizing she could learn much more from books than from her French classes, she decided that Yogyakarta was the right place for her. "I had imagined Yogya to be a quiet place, and it turned out to be true. Here I also found BlockNot Poetry, which offered more than I had expected." Blocknot was a journal that published short stories and poems. At the end of 2003, Dina became one of its editors.

Since writing is her passion, does Dina call herself a writer, someone who turns writing into a primary source of income? "I do other sorts of jobs. Translating pays quite well, and I also take short-term projects like joining a creative team for events, etcetera. But I had 'writer' typed in the occupation column of my ID card. It wasn't easy. I had a quarrel with the village official. He insisted that 'writer' wasn't an occupation, so I told him: Women get to have 'housewife' written on their ID card. Is that an occupation? Do women get paid for being a wife and a mother? I do have other jobs, but unless you are ready to have me here every month to get my occupation column changed, just put 'writer' there. It's my permanent job."

Dina admitted to being more of a poet than a writer. Imagine the argument she would have to come up with for putting "poet" in the occupation column.

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This article was written by Daniel Rose, contributor for the Jakarta Post.

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Taufik Ismail’s Anger against ¼ and ½ Indonesian Women Literary Works

by Dewi Candraningrum. The writer is a lecturer of the University of Muhammadiyah, Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia. She is recipient of DAAD Stipendium, now taking post doctoral program (phd) in Universitat Munster, Germany.


January 9, 2007, senior poet and artist, Taufik Ismail (TI) deliver his culture oration in IPB, entitled Gerakan Syahwat Merdeka (The Free Sexual-Arousal Movement). Syahwat derived from an Arabic term which could be equated with English words "arousal". His words are decorated with ultra morality under the name of absolute fear against the global conspiracy. He spoke against a bunch of conspirators who propagated this lusty sexual arousal which were categorized into 13 lusty faces.

As if these 13 movements have been inspired by a satanic call to destroy the morality of the Indonesian. The most interesting face is number five, (5) “writers, publishers, sexual propagandist which are merely ¼ and ½ to be categorized as literary works. Those of Indonesian women’s writers who are only interested in talking about sexual arousal. They have no shame at all. It is a literary mazhab of s.m.s (sastra mazhab selangkang).” It is clearly a glance of anger. I was tempted to imagine who those women writers are, those who write not in his mores and those who write under the correct morality. What is correct and incorrect in morality? What kind of ideological cloak that decorated the absolute ideal morality he embraced? What kinds of cosmological construct that defines “what art is” Taufik is now believing?

I then retoured my rereading on the work of Helvy Tiana Rosa and Ayu Utami, two Indonesian women writers who have a different gender construction in relation with morality.

Hamka once wrote and shed his capture of peaceful mores under the abode of Kabah (Di Bawah Lindoengan Ka’bah). He propagated these way of life in his well-known Padang published Pedoman Masjarakat in the thirties. The quest for Islamic identity which was inertly searched by former Islamic writers was then transformed by Hamka into outwardly search.

This outward search is now also shared by women writers in Forum Lingkar Pena. The propagation shed its light on the mass Islamic pops magazine like Annida and Sabili whom one of its prominent Islamic women writers, Helvy Tiana Rosa (HTR), becomes the main actor. HTR is in firm search of Islamic identity. Her Cut Dini, Lizetta, and Hanan are shouldered with the roles of star of wars to defend and protect other Muslimah. If Hamka spoke against the Dutch, Helvy read against the global war on terror which have apparently cornered the Muslim. These works of literature are being read as well as being interpreted thousands of times. The Islamic identities that they uniquely represented through its characters have its legacy in every person who read it. The Islamic mores is usurped in the beauty of its brave major women characters. The untouchable beauty of her Muslim women is inaugurated to serve the Islamic morality a women of Islam are willing to participate. Helvy’s aesthetical works deserve a place in the rainbow of contemporary Indonesian women writers.

Writers can never live without critics. Critics affirm the legacy writers deserve to achieve. These very rights shall be guaranteed and protected by “the civilization of ratio” that we affirm.

The way Ayu Utami pick a woman character to speak against the patriarchal feudal construction of women’s bodies, represent her ability in giving back women women’s own voices. Voices that enable them to apprehend the meaning of sexuality in women’s own social cultural construct. She has returned the right the women have. She has interrogated the level of horizon which is casted upon the soul of the languages. Her words were often attacked that they sparkled with the glance of lust, which is immoral. The deep structure that was roamed by her words represents a different cosmological gender construction. The sound of existentialism, of the being, is obstructed to speak against the taboos feudal Indonesian. Ayu very mores shed further challenge to the so-called rigid-textual-scriptural interpretation. Like Helvy, Ayu’s aesthetical facts deserve a place in the rainbow of contemporary Indonesian women’s writers.

From the surface hermeneutical inquiry, it seems that Ayu’s and Helvy’s construction of women’s bodies are in conflict. It is indeed, but not necessarily paradoxical. The civilizations of “here and now” and “there and after” remain enriching the color of Indonesian women’s writers. They are the precious wealth, Indonesian have. Clerics may laud that the world of “there and after” is better and holier than the world of “lusty here and now”. A senior poet will surely assure and appreciate both of the works as equally valid. A senior poet will not easily angry just to stamp that the literary works of “here and now” is lusty, is immoral, is solely ¼ and ½ to be regarded as “literary”.

Taufik’s anger to one of both genres is an anger of an old man. An old man who is longing for the world of “holy-sacred there and after”. His anger could be interpreted as his own shock of his inability to see that “morality” shall become the responsibility of not only women but men as well. His morality is deeply ingrained in his interpretation that “women’s bodies as source of temptation”, that spectators of those temptations are freed from any responsibility of the so-called ultra-morality. Is this fair? Shall morality be shouldered merely to women’s bodies? How about the spectators who apparently shows their greedy patriarchal mores in the name of religion?

The different gender constructions that are perceived by Helvy and Ayu need not necessarily to be paradoxical. The different positions they outcast could be paradoxical that certainly enhance the source of creativity. They are the deposit of millions of interpretations which lubricated the hermeneutical cycle of work of arts. The beauty their words represented is the rainbow of contemporary Indonesian writers. Ayu together with other Indonesian writers establish a remarkable group of women who created a great deal of the fabric of modern Indonesian women writers, to retell the story of women from different social cultural background, to mediate the voices of women, to negotiate the resistances into the aesthetical transformation, which are indeed women’s own stories, which are belong to women, only.

source: http://indonesianmuslim.com

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Ayu Utami: Taufik Ismail Seperti PKI Saja

Penyair Taufik Ismail belum lama ini kembali menegaskan keresahannya akan Gerakan Syahwat Merdeka. Gerakan ini salah satunya muncul lewat sastra. Mereka yang masuk dalam barisan yang dituding Taufik adalah para penulis fiksi yang suka mencabul-cabulkan karya.

Salah satunya yang kena tuding adalah Ayu Utami, si pemenang Sayembara Roman Dewan Kesenian Jakarta 1998 lewat novel fenomenal 'Saman'. Taufik menyebut si Parasit Lajang ini sebagai pelopor angkatan sastra Fraksi Alat Kelamin (FAK). Itu gara-gara novel 'Saman' yang ditulis Ayu yang menabrak tabu seks menjadi trend dan banyak diikuti penulis lainnya.

Bagaimana pandangan Ayu atas tudingan yang dilontarkan Taufik Ismail? Di sela-sela memenuhi permintaan penggemar untuk menandatangani novel 'Bilangan Fu' dan foto bersama, Ayu menjawab semua tudingan itu.

Perempuan kelahiran Bogor itu mengaku surprise, karena meskipun ia dituding sebagai pelopor angkatan sastra Fraksi Alat Kelamin, ternyata sejumlah penggemarnya yang datang adalah dari kalangan perempuan berkerudung.

Berikut wawancara Ayu Utami dengan Iin Yumiyanti dari detikcom:

Apa pandangan anda terhadap sastra Indonesia kini? Taufik Ismail belum lama ini kembali menegaskan munculnya Gerakan Syahwat Merdeka. Apa pendapat anda?

Pernyataan Pak Taufik Ismail itu kurang baik karena ia suka memberi stigma. Itu sama seperti orang-orang PKI saja. Cara-cara seperti itu kurang sehat. Menurut saya itu terjadi karena pemikiran Pak Taufik terlalu sederhana, picik.

Saya merasa Pak Taufik seperti ini, seumpama melihat perempuan, dia kan punya mata, tangan, kaki, tapi Pak Taufik melihatnya kok hanya dari alat kelaminnya saja. Mengapa yang dia pikir hanya itu? Fokus dia hanya melihat pada syahwat dan kelamin. Saya pikir ada masalah dengan fokus Pak Taufik.

Menurut saya, kita boleh saja tidak setuju dengan sesuatu, tapi tidak boleh dengan memberikan stigma.

Tapi kalau diamati, setelah novel Saman yang anda buat, di dunia sastra memang seperti kebanjiran tema yang mengangkat masalah seks secara berani dan kebanyakan ini dilakukan para penulis perempuan. Tanggapan anda?

Sekarang soal sastra, atau baiklah soal novel. Kalau kita lihat setelah Saman atau tepatnya setelah reformasi, tiba-tiba novel atau fiksi yang mengangkat masalah seks meningkat. Ini kita harus melihatnya secara menyeluruh dan rileks. Jangan dilihat hanya sepotong-sepotong.

Harus diketahui masa itu kita baru saja mendobrak zaman yang represif. Situasi chaos dan terjadi euforia kebebasan setelah rezim Orba yang represif tumbang. Pada masa itu memang terjadi euforia kebebasan, termasuk masalah seks.

Euforia seks tidak hanya dilakukan sastrawan perempuan, ada juga laki-laki, Moammar Emka yang membuat Jakarta Undercover, itu kan laris luar biasa.

Tapi sekarang, setelah 10 tahun, pendulum beralih lagi. Sekarang pendulumnya pada agama. Setelah masa chaos, orang rindu pada hal-hal yang berbau spiritual, maka novel seperti Ayat Ayat Cinta pun laris.

Jadi apapun sebenarnya bisa jadi pasar bagi industri, penerbit juga film. Seks bisa jadi pasar, agama juga bisa.

Jadi menurut anda tidak ada Gerakan Syahwat Merdeka dalam sastra?

Saya tidak setuju dengan tudingan soal Gerakan Syahwat Merdeka. Yang dituduh itu kan salah satunya saya. Itu pandangan yang picik. Ada banyak hal dalam tulisan-tulisan saya, mengapa yang dilihat kok hanya seksnya?.

Maksudnya kalau ada syahwat merdeka, lawannya apa sih? Syahwat terikat? Itu sadomasokis namanya. Kalau mau menyalurkan syahwat harus diikat-ikat dulu.

Menurut anda, sebaiknya bagaimana memandang seks?

Seks harus diakui sebagai bagian dari kekuatan manusia. Maka harus diregulasi dengan baik. Diberi tempat aman, diberi ruang untuk berfantasi. Silakan mau syahwat merdeka, syahwat terikat, tapi jangan memberi gembok pada tukang pijat. Silakan saja liar dalam berfantasi, tapi dalam bertindak tetap dibatasi.

Saya sebetulnya mengajak orang untuk terbuka. Jangan membuat peraturan karena ketakutan. Kita takut begini lantas kita larang. Di negeri yang banyak VCD porno tidak semua terjadi perkosaan. Tidak ada relevansi antara pornografi dengan perkosaan. Kita ambil contoh di Jepang. Di sana, di restoran yang juga dikunjungi anak-anak , banyak disediakan komik yang isinya mengerikan sekali, seksnya kasar. Tapi di sana, jumlah perkosaan tidak tinggi.

Tingkat perkosaan tinggi, justru di mana perempuan sebagai individu tidak dihargai, dimana perempuan dianggap sebagai obyek.

Saya kira banyak kok laki-laki beradab yang merasa gengsi untuk memerkosa.

Kesimpulannya sastra masih aman-aman saja dan tidak perlu terlalu dikhawatirkan?

Tidak perlu takut dengan seks. Aku heran, kenapa sih takut pada seks? Kalau mau tahu, data IKAPI justru memperlihatkan buku yang laku itu adalah buku pendidikan dan buku agama. Jadi tidak usah takut atau takut berlebih-lebihan pada seks. Nanti malah jadi neurotis.

Biodata:

Nama Lengkap: Justina Ayu Utami
Lahir: Bogor, Jawa Barat, 21 November 1968
Pendidikan: S-1 Sastra Rusia Universitas Indonesia

Buku yang ditulis:
Saman (memenangkan Sayembara Mengarang Dewan Kesenian Jakarta 1998)
Larung
Parasit Lajang
Sidang Susila
Bilangan Fu

---------
foto: Ayu Utami berfoto bersama penggemar-penggemar ciliknya.
sumber: Detik News

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Turner Prize 2009 judges revealed

Tate has announced the judges for the 2009 Turner Prize: Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven; broadcaster Mariella Frostrup; Jonathan Jones, art critic of The Guardian , and Andrea Schlieker, curator of the Folkestone Triennial. The panel will unveil their shortlist of four artists spring next year with the winner announced in December 2009.

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Writers Talk: Ideas of Our Time

106 videos produced by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, featuring well-known writers discussing their lives and work with other writers or critics.

One of the most important literary resources currently available on video.

Each video in the series features a writer talking with another writer or critic. In these conversations friends and professionals, who have one thing in common - a love of writing and literature - get to the very heart of their lives and their work. Many of the videos contain questions from a live audience. The writers speak in their own time, with little editing and no censorship.

The videos may be used in a variety of ways. As part of an educational program they will inspire and bring students closer to an international body of writers. They may be used as the basis for creative writing courses. As part of a public library resource they will lead new readers to established and new writers.

The videos are produced by ICA Video at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. Recent titles have received generous sponsorship by `The Guardian' newspaper.

Available on request: an illustrated catalog with biographical details and cross referencing index for the following subject categories:

visit http://www.roland-collection.com/rolandcollection/literature/literature_101.htm

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An Introduction to Sufism

by
Zakir Hussain

A paper presented to
Dominion Lodge No 117
A.F. & A.M. G.R.A.
On 11th February 1998

With minimal editing by Syed Mumtaz Ali, in deference to the learned author's gratuitous request and his kind remarks: "I am pleased and honoured that you consider this essay worthy of a wider audience. Please feel free to edit and/or add additional notes as you deem fit."

# What is Sufism?
# Origin and Background
# Formative Years
# Orders and Lodges
# Rituals and Practices
# The "Path" - Its Teachings and Tenets
# Sufi Literature and Poetry
# Sufi Music and Dance
# Contemporary Sufism
# Conclusion


What is Sufism?

Sufism is the mystical dimension of Islam based on the esoteric, or "inner-meaning" of its scripture, namely the Qur'an. Sufism's central doctrine is based on a verse of the Qur'an; in which God says, "I created man and breathed My spirit into him." This "Divine spark" placed into every individual, says the Sufi, must be nurtured and cherished. Furthermore, each individual "spark" or "spirit" separated from the Universal Spirit, desires to return and reunite with the Universal spirit. This is confirmed by another verse in the Qur'an, which says "from God we came, and to God shall we return." This "returning" is vital and central to the Sufi doctrine. Now, the Sufi embarks on a spiritual journey known as the Sufi Path; a path of devotion and love; which leads to none other than God Himself. I shall have more to say [about this] ater on.

Origin and Background

The word "Sufi is derived from the Arabic word "suf," meaning "wool," Garments woven from wool were generally worn by early mystics, who came to be known as "Sufis," There are other explanations and meanings of the word 'Sufi' but the one I have just given is generally accepted by most Sufis and Sufi scholars. Sufism is known in Arabic as 'Tassawuf' or Islamic Mysticism. A Sufi is a mystic, if by "mystic" we mean a person who strives towards intimate knowledge or communion with God; through contemplation, meditation and or "inner-vision."

The origin of Sufism goes back to the Prophet Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, who received the Divine Revelation known as the 'Qur'an,' over a period of 23 years. As all Muslims know; the Holy Qur'an is a "multi-layered revelation," whose verses can be interpreted literally, metaphorically, philosophically, and mystically.

The Prophet used to explain and clarify the meaning of each chapter and verse of the Qur'an to his immediate friends and companions. To a select few of his Companions he explained the mystical interpretation of the verses; thus starting a "chain of transmission" of the esoteric meaning of the Qur'an. This was conveyed first by "word of mouth" from master to pupil or disciple. This oral tradition has continued from generation to generation to the present day. It is interesting to note that the "Sufi pledge" between a Sufi-master and his disciple is still an oral one. It was much later that Sufi teachings and practices were formally [laid] down in writing for future generations.

Formative Years

The formative years of Sufism were between 620 to 1100 AD. It was during this time the Sufi masters, known in Arabic as "Shaikhs," started to form the first Sufi fraternities. These early fraternities, and indeed some individual Sufis, met with great hostility and resistance from certain sections of the Muslim community; on points of interpretation of Islamic Theology and Law. Some early Sufis were even persecuted on account of their mystical utterances and beliefs. The most famous Sufi-martyr was AL HALLAJ of Basra in Iraq.

Nevertheless, individual Sufis achieved great eminence because of their piety and practices. The well-known among them are RABIA BASRI (a [female] Sufi Teacher), JUNAID, IBRAHIM ADHEIM, and HASAN BASRI.

Perhaps the most notable one was the great theologian and philosopher AL GAZALLI who lived in Syria around 1100 AD. His famous treatises, called the "Reconstruction of Religious Sciences," the "Alchemy of Happiness," and other works; set off to convince the Islamic world that Sufism and its teachings originated from the Qur'an and were compatible with mainstream Islamic thought and theology. It was AL-GAZALLI who bridged the gap between traditional and mystical Islam. It was around 1000 AD that the early Sufi literature, in the form of manuals, treatises, discourses, and poetry, became the source of Sufi thinking and meditations.

Orders and Lodges

Around 1200 AD Sufism was institutionalized into Sufi orders. Generally, the political atmosphere from North Africa to India was "ripe" for the formation of Sufi orders. Under the patronage of kings and sultans, prominent Sufi masters received financial grants to build lodges and hospices to house the master; his disciples, students, novices and even travellers. The lodges soon became schools of Sufi learning and scholarship. Attached to the lodges were other places of learning, such as colleges and universities; where students could learn Islamic law and theology, philosophy, and natural sciences.

The most prominent Sufi master of the day became the "founder" of a particular Sufi order. One of the well-known orders is the "Qadiryya" founded by the great Sufi-master ABDUL QADIR GILANI in Iraq. Others were founded in different parts of the Islamic world by Sufi-masters such as JALALUDDIN RUMI in Turkey, SUHARWARDY in Asia minor, and MUINUDDIN CHISHTI in India. Although each order had a regional flavour, their basic teachings and practices remained fundamentally the same. Because of this, a mutual respect and admiration exists between various orders. Hence, a Sufi may belong to more than one order.

It was between 1200 - 1500 AD that Sufis and Sufism enjoyed a period of intense Sufic activity in various part of the Islamic world. Hence this period is considered as the "Classical Period" or the "Golden Age" of Sufism. Lodges and hospices soon became not only places to house Sufi students and novices but also places for "spiritual retreat" for practising Sufis and other mystics.

Some of the original orders, which I mentioned before, along with new ones are to be found in the Middle and Far East, India, Africa and various parts of Europe and North America. It is estimated, that presently, there are some 40 Sufi Orders in the world.

Rituals and Practices

Now, I should like to talk about the Sufi rituals and practices. It is rather difficult to summarize all the practices and rituals associated with the various orders. However, there are certain practices common to all the orders. They are:

1 Ritual prayer and fasting according to Islamic injunctions.
2. Remembrance of the "spiritual lineage" of each order.
3. The practice of "dhikr," an Arabic word for remembrance of God, by invocation.
4. Meditative and contemplative practices, including intensive spiritual training, in "spiritual retreats" from time to time.
5. Listening to musical concerts, to enhance mystical awareness.

The ritual of "initiation" into the order is ordained by the Sufi master of that particular order.

Aspiring novices had to undergo a period of intense training in self-discipline, learning to control one's instincts and desires, guided by the Sufi-master. It was the master who would eventually decide if the novice was ready to be initiated into the order. The "initiation" was and still is a "solemn pledge" by the novice to obey the master implicitly in all matters, spiritual and moral. The master in turn pledges to instruct, teach and guide the "new initiate" along the Sufi path. The initiation really symbolizes that the initiate or disciple is now ready to understand the "inner truth" of spiritual realities. Realities which can only be experienced and understood by "intuitive knowledge," Knowledge which stems from the "heart," rather that the "mind."

The practice of "dhikr" is the central feature in all Sufi orders. "Dhikr" is the Arabic word for the devotional practice of the "remembrance of God," It is performed by the repeated invocation of the Names and Attributes of God. It is based on the Qur'anic verse in which God says "Remember Me and I will remember you," The practice of "dhikr" may vary in different orders; but its ultimate object is to create spiritual awareness and love for God. It can be practiced individually, or collectively. Some orders perform it silently and some loudly; all under the direction of the Sufi master.

It should be noted that "dhikr" is not exclusive to the Sufis [for] it is practiced by all Muslims as part of Islamic prayer and devotion.

Another important practice in Sufism is what is called "Sema," or "Sama' " which literally means "listening," These auditions may be a recitation from the Holy Qur'an, or devotional poetry. Throughout the centuries, Sufi poets have written mystical poetry for devotional purposes and some have even been set to music. Listening to musical concerts, as part of Sufi devotion, is permitted and practiced by certain Sufi orders.

A Sufi Order known as the 'Mevlevi Order" founded by the Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi, who lived in Turkey around 1200 AD, permits a "mystical dance" known in the west as the dance of the Whirling Dervishes. To appreciate the significance of this dance,it is necessary to be aware of its symbolic interpretation and meaning.

Veneration of Sufi Saints is a common practice amongst Sufis. Devout Sufi masters who led highly devotional and spiritual lives were elevated to sainthood. The Sufis believe that a Sufi saint (although dead for hundreds of years) can still make his "spiritual presence" felt to his disciples Hence, it is common practice among Sufis to visit [the] tombs of Sufi saints to pay homage, recite Sura Fateha and/or other Quranic passages, pray to God for isa-e-thawab (i.e. praying to God that the rewards of such recitations be bestowed on the dead), and ask for the deceased saint's blessings. There is no formal procedure, or official appointment, or proclamation, similar to the practices of other religions used for the canonisation of saints.

Other practices, include ritual prayer, fasting, and meditation, as directed by the master. Finally a Sufi may, under the strict guidance of his master, enter into a "spiritual retreat," for a fixed period (usually between 3 to 40 days, or for 24 hours) for intensive prayer and meditation, and daytime fasting. It is best to remember here that all these practices are to prepare the Sufi for the "spiritual journey" along the Sufi path; a path which leads towards God through love and devotion.

The Path - Its Teachings and Tenets

I shall now try to outline briefly some of the principal teachings and tenets of Sufism. The Sufi firmly believes that each individual spirit desires union with the Universal Spirit, namely God, after death. Furthermore, he believes that it is possible to "experience" God in this life! This kind of experience is described by Sufis as supra-sensory, ultra-mystical, and even "visionary," It must be emphasized here that this kind of "experience" has been achieved by only the elite! Nevertheless, this is the goal of every Sufi.

Sufism teaches that the Sufi who seeks God, must advance by slow "stages" along the Path. The "stages" relate to repentance, followed by abstinence, renunciation, 'poverty', patience and trust in God. These stages constitutes the ethical and ascetic disciplines of Sufism. Total commitment at each stage is vital towards the spiritual progress of the Sufi.

The individual soul is called "nafs" in Arabic. Sufism teaches that the soul initially is a "demanding soul," which can be and should be disciplined into a "contented soul," and subsequently into a "soul at peace." These characteristics of the soul are described at length in the Qur'an and commented upon by Sufi teachers and scholars.

Sufism's primary teaching is based on the Unity of God called "tawheed" in Arabic. Its emphasis is on the "Oneness" and "Uniqueness" of God. This concept of Unity leads to the realization of Unity which embraces multiplicity in the Universe. This may sound paradoxical, but Sufi writers and theologians (both classical and modern) have written volumes on this subject, with particular emphasis on explaining various aspects, or grades of manifestation, in terms of immanence and transcendence.

Sufis believe that God's earliest creation was the human "intellect." Giving humans the knowledge to discern, and to choose between right and wrong, good and evil. This knowledge in Sufism is raised to a higher level, which arises from the "heart" rather than the "mind." It is this intuitive knowledge that distinguishes a mystic from a philosopher. It is through the practice of intuitive knowledge that a Sufi experiences mystical phenomena and visions.

The central doctrine of Sufism, however is love, divine love. The Qur'an teaches that "God's mercy is greater than His wrath" and that "God's love is His supreme attribute." The Sufi does NOT reject, but instead believes in the doctrine and the concepts of the 'Fear of God' and 'God's wrath of the Day of Judgement." The Sufi maintains that obedience to God's commands should ensue NOT out of the fear of punishment of Hellfire or for the desire of the pleasures and bounties of Paradise as a reward, but rather with the sincere motive and intention of attaining proximity to God - purely for the sake of, and solely for the pleasure of God. To the Sufi, Paradise (as a reward) and Hell (as a punishment) are but graphic terms to make us understand a state of things which is beyond all our notions of life in this world. The Sufi longs for what is beyond Paradise, the vision of God Himself - the ultimate reward after entering Paradise. And nothing would be lovelier than gazing upon the Lord when He removes his 'veil' (His 'garb of grandeur'). The Sufi attests that God has created man with a mind, free-will, and love. Therefore the mainspring of Sufism is love. Based on this, the Sufi path becomes a 'Path of Love,' where the Sufi becomes the 'lover' and God the 'beloved.' This love affair ends only with the ultimate union with the Beloved. This love relationship is depicted in most volumes of Sufi literature and poetry.

Sufi Literature and Poetry

As has been previously mentioned, earlier Sufism was based on an oral tradition, but around 1000 AD, its teachings and doctrines were put into writing. For the next four centuries, Sufi literature flourished in the form of manuals, mystical tales and anecdotes, treatises on Islamic theology, philosophy, metaphysics and mystical poetry.

Sufi manuals were for the instruction and practice of new "initiates," in various orders. They took a form of "master-disciple" instruction on correct behaviour and conduct within the order. They also dealt with strict "obedience" to the master, methods of "dhikr" and meditation, and also with piety and devotion to God. A famous classical manual is by IBN ARABI called, "Journey to the Lord of Power," which is a handbook on spiritual retreat.

Tales and anecdotes in the form of literature are really meant as "teaching tales," with the purpose of driving home a moral or mystical point. Some of the tales are elaborate and allegorical in their content. A classical example is ATTAR's "Conference of the Birds," and SA'DI's "The Rose Garden," and many others by Arabic and Persian authors and poets.

Classical Sufi treatises on the nature and essence of Sufism and Islamic theology were written by the famous Sufi philosopher AL GAZALLI, who lived in Damascus, Syria around 1100 AD. His famous work called "Reconstruction of Religious Sciences," and "Alchemy of Happiness"' are classic examples. Another Sufi master IBN ARABI, born in Spain around 1160 AD, is perhaps the most profound Sufi author of his time. Two of his famous works are called "Bezels of Wisdom," and"Meccan Revelations." They deal with theories on pantheism and monotheism, such as the theory that asserts that "God is Nature, and Nature God." The other theory differentiates God from Nature, by asserting that "God is above Nature, which He created." Yet other theories deal with the "Unity of Being," and the "wisdom of prophecy," and so on. Studies based on such works are still subjects for Sufi contemplation and meditation.

Sufi poetry is recited by Sufis to enhance mystical awareness. Such poetry written in the "classical era" were by Arabic poet IBN-AL-FARID, and persian poets such as HAFIZ, SA'DI, JAMI and RUMI. RUMI, perhaps is the best known in the West for his monumental poetic works called the "Masnavi" and "Divan-i-shams." Poetic imagery both symbolic and mystical, depicts the central themes with which all Sufis are familiar with, are the "pangs of separation of the lover from the beloved," the "individual soul's" desire for mystical union with the "Universal soul," These are some of the important themes. Classical and modern Sufi poetry can be found from North Africa and Middle East, to India and Indonesia.

Sufi Music and Dance

The practice of music and dance in Sufism, is rather contentious. It is by no means universally accepted by all Sufis as some Sufi orders frown upon it. Others [may] rejoice in the recitation of mystical poetry, accompanied by musical instruments and performed as part of their prayers and devotions. Some Sufis consider such music conducive to "mystical ecstasy." These Sufis maintain that music can arouse passion - either sensual or spiritual. It is spiritual passion (longing for God) which is the Sufi's goal. Hence musical concerts are a regular feature of some Sufi orders.

The Sufi dance that is much talked about in the West, belongs to one Sufi order, founded by a Sufi master JALALUDDIN RUMI who lived around 1100 AD. This dance is known in the West as the dance of the "whirling dervishes." Actually, the dance is performed by the Sufis from that order under strict and controlled conditions, led by a Sufi master. The "steps" and "motions" symbolically depict the "cosmos in motion."

Contemporary Sufism

There are two aspects of Sufism, one is called "practical Sufism" and the other [is] "philosophical Sufism." One deals with the actual practice, while the other deals with the 'way' and how it is practiced. By way of analogy, it has been said that the "philosopher" looks at "water," and describes its properties, whereas the "Sufi," on the other hand, drinks it to quench his thirst.

Sufism was brought to the West within the last two hundred years by several western scholars, who were generally Christian missionaries. This gave a rather biased view of Sufism, which is now being corrected. Contemporary western scholars, now study Sufism within the framework of Islamic theology and tradition and are therefore able to present it as "the mystical dimension of Islam." Some of the contemporary authors and scholars are FRITHJOF SCHUON, TITUS BURCKHARDT, MARTIN LINGS, S.H. NASR, and ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL.

As previously mentioned, a "schism" exists today within the Islamic world. A certain section of Muslims believe that Sufi practices are too radical,[and are] a departure from the fundamental teachings and practices of Islam. This is debatable and I do not propose to go into it here.

There are also two schools of thought within the Sufi community. One believes that Sufism is firmly entrenched in Islamic thought and tradition, and cannot be uprooted from Islam. The other school believes that the Sufi message is a "universal message," and therefore transcend any one religion. However, an overwhelming majority of practising Sufis belong to the first group. They maintain that the so-called "Sufism" of the second group is a mere misnomer and that it should really be designated as "mysticism" mainly because the word 'Sufi' has an essential Islamic connotation. It is obviously for this reason that genuine Sufism is correctly referred to as Islamic mysticism. In other words, one must distinguish between genuine-Sufis and pseudo-Sufis who appear to have mushroomed in the very fertile land of California and other places such as Europe and even Asia.

Conclusion

I should like to conclude by summarising a Sufi as one who is a mystic, empowered by the Qur'an and the Prophet, guided by the Sufi master and Saints and belongs to one of the many Sufi orders. In addition to ritual prayer and fasting, he practices various techniques of meditation. He recites poetry and delights in music all towards one goal, namely union with God, the Divine Beloved.

Finally it is said that Sufism in the olden days was a "reality without a name," today it is a "name without reality."

source: http://muslim-canada.org/sufi/introductionsufism.htm
another link: http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/s/sufism.html

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Book Review: Home truths

Praised for his 'perfumed, dandified style', Andrew Sean Greer is one of America's finest young writers. He tells Stuart Jeffries about the family secret that inspired his latest novel, The Story of a Marriage



A long time ago in Kentucky, a man took Andrew Sean Greer's grandmother for a drive. The man, a family friend, told her something she didn't want to hear. During the war he and her husband had been lovers.

How did she react, I ask Greer. "She just said to him: 'Get the hell out of here.'" Greer sits back in his seat. We're chatting in his publisher's offices in Bloomsbury. I lean forward, thinking Greer will continue the story. I'm expecting (this being the American south of the 1950s) passion, ruin, shame, marital recrimination, probably divorce, possibly the husband being named and shamed for his sexual orientation in the local newspaper.

But no. That's the end of the story. "My grandmother was not a great storyteller," says Greer. Didn't she confront her husband? "They never talked about it. That wasn't the era of psychoanalysis when everybody tells everybody everything and where there is a presumption that confession and confronting difficult personal issues is good for a relationship." Do you know if your grandfather was gay? "Well, he did spend a lot of time cleaning his shoes and looking after his appearance. I knew him until I was about 13. He was this guy in a chair." You never asked him? "I never did."

These are not small matters. His grandmother's sliver of a tale sparked Greer's latest novel, The Story of a Marriage. Like Greer's 2004 novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, his new book comes to Britain with rave reviews. According to the New York Times: "Greer's considerable gifts as a storyteller ascend to the heights of masters like Marilynne Robinson and William Trevor." Whatever Greer inherited from his grandmother, it wasn't her shortcomings as a narrator. Greer is only 37 and John Updike has already compared him to Proust and Nabokov for his "perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment". He's a monster of precocity, with a (sickeningly well-founded) confidence in his talent scarcely imaginable among his transatlantic peers.

In the book, the eerie domestic calm of Pearlie Cook's marriage to her husband Holland in early 1950s San Francisco is disturbed by an elegantly dressed gentleman caller named Buzz. He has come not just to tell Pearlie that he and Holland were together during the war (he never, Pearlie notes, uses the word "lovers"), but also that he has "a proposal". It's not quite an indecent one, but it's pretty wild. He will give her $100,000 if she agrees to allow him to take her husband away, probably to New York, where a gay couple might just find a sympathetic corner to build a life together. She will be able to raise her boy Sonny in unimagined luxury, and spare him the shame of it becoming known that his daddy is homosexual. How can she refuse?

"In 1953, when the story is set, women did make sacrifices of this kind: she would have wanted to protect her son. Dad being exposed as gay would have been another mark against her son. It still goes on, that kind of naming and shaming of gay people," says Greer. Not, surely, in San Francisco? "No, but when I was living in Montana 10 years ago, they were trying to pass a law to put lesbians and gay men on the sex-offenders register." No! "Oh yes," says Greer. "My country is nothing if not diverse."

What is especially engaging about the book is that Greer decided to ventriloquise Pearlie. It's rare enough for a male novelist to attempt the first-person narration of a woman protagonist. It's surely singular for a gay man to tell the story of how a straight woman's world is turned upside down by a gay man, from her perspective.

But there's a twist. In fact, this is a book of thrilling twists that make it quite hard to write about without blabbing things readers might enjoy discovering for themselves. Pearlie and Holland are African American, while Buzz is white. The reader wonders: how can Greer, the juggler, keep adding balls - motherhood, race, sexuality, war, first-person narration of a historical persona of whose mindset he can have only the faintest glimmer - without dropping them?

Despite the book coming in at under 200 pages, there is so much in it, and it is written in such an elliptical, lyrical style, that it doesn't so much demand to be read as re-read. It is a complex novel set in the ueasy American era of the Korean war, red scares, Senator McCarthy and the execution of the Rosenbergs - Greer insists the 1950s was a fearful decade. "Some people think of the 50s as a time of innocence, but they are misremembering it or reinventing it: if you look at the papers of the time, they are filled with dread and anxiety." About what? "The shame of not being able to beat the communists in Korea. The fears of race and of sex. Fear is the main thing: people think of Eisenhower as this lost father of a president, but he advocated burning Karl Marx's books."

But what does Greer know of this time and those people's struggles? He was born in 1970 in Washington DC to two scientists. "They both told me the 50s were dreadful." He has also clearly spent a lot of time reading up on the era, the fraught period before the civil rights movement, Vietnam, women's liberation, rock'n'roll and queer politics.

Isn't it presumptuous of you, I ask Greer, to write a black woman's story? "Yes! I knew what I wasn't going to do was to pretend to cover the African-American experience. That was not for me to do. And I wasn't going to write her as a representative African-American woman. That would be insulting." Instead, he tried something more daring: Pearlie is an exceptionally well-read woman (how many poor, non-college-educated twentysomething Kentuckians in the 1950s would have read Flaubert and Ford Madox Ford?). "So, yes, I am presumptuous, but I wanted to have an imaginative empathy with her."

Holland and Pearlie are an odd couple, the only black family living in Sunset, which is the only district of San Francisco, Greer gleefully relates, that the government reckoned would survive a nuclear attack. They have attempted to escape their shameful Kentucky pasts (in which Holland was locked in his bedroom by his mother to avoid the Korean war draft and Pearlie had been snitching on her workmates for government agencies) and to deracinate themselves.

This, I suggest to Greer, is hardly Armistead Maupin's San Francisco, a sunny city of hedonistic sexuality. Sunset even has its microclimate - cold, even in summer, and frequently consumed by fog. "You should see it - it's a network of small houses with little yards stretching right to the ocean. Not quite suburban, but where, after the war, families could build their little fortresses against the world." It sounds great: a fog-bound zone of tepid couples devoid of community spirit, locked in festering relationships. It is here, nonetheless, where Greer sets his story.

In one scene, Pearlie finds herself outside a bar called the Black Cat, part of San Francisco's nascent gay scene but where incoming transvestites are obliged by bouncers to wear badges announcing: "I am a man." Later, she stands outside the newly opened City Lights Bookstore and feels a change coming on, one long sought by those alienated from America's often straight, white, paranoid, male, conservative national narrative: "It was as if part of the body was stirring, moving very slowly to rouse the rest. Some change was coming; I was part of it. The way we lived would not do, would not hold."

Pearlie isn't talking overtly about her strange marriage, but she might as well be. How she and Holland live together, burdened nightly by unspeakable secrets as they sit silently listening to the radio, is one of the book's mysteries. Each is inscrutably passive, which - again - is a challenge for Greer: how do you write about non-communication, how do you dramatise the book's main point - the essential unknowability of even those we love best? At one point Pearlie reflects on marriage, to my mind harrowingly: "At the time, my sense was that marriage was like a hotel shower: you get the temperature right and someone just beyond the wall turns on his shower and you're stung with ice water, you adjust the heat only to hear him yelp from pain, he adjusts his, and so on until you reach a tepid compromise that both of you can endure."

Isn't this a gay writer's scathing critique of heterosexual marriage - at least as it was once practised - where secrets and lies fester unexamined for decades? "You may think so," laughs Greer. "But I thought there was something true about it that applies to all long-term relationships. Not the whole truth of course."

The book has attracted some dissenting reviews, most significant being Updike's in The New Yorker (the very place where, four years ago, he made Greer a star with his eulogy to The Confessions of Max Tivoli). Updike wrote: "The Story of a Marriage is a sentimental, overwritten, overcalculated novel that nevertheless proves moving in the end, pulling all its prevarications and flourishes into an affirmation of the unideal everyday as it was experienced 50 years ago and, possibly, as it is even now."

How does he respond to that? "When Updike wrote that, it was like having a father admonish you. But he loved Max Tivoli, so if I take the praise, I have to take the criticism. It's not as overwritten as my previous book, which I did that way for the fun of it. My language is certainly heightened and intense, but I wouldn't have it any other way." Quite possibly, this is Edmund White's fault. Novelist and critic White taught Greer literature at Brown University. "There's a lyrical writer and I learned a lot from his literary taste. He supervised my thesis, which was a novel. Fellow students made fun of it because it was written so lyrically. It was a time when everybody seemed to aspire to write like Raymond Carver."

Greer likes to set himself formidable literary challenges. The Confessions of Max Tivoli had an eponymous hero who was ageing in reverse. His latest book revels in imaginative complexity. Greer tells me that in his next novel, which he has just started, he has set himself a huge, though undisclosable, challenge.

"With each book I'm trying to do something that terrifies me," he says. I wouldn't expect anything less.

· The Story of a Marriage is published by Faber, £12.99

The Guardian

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Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The flood had made and the only thing for it was to wait for the turn of tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! ... The dreams of men, the germs of empires.

Between us four was the bond of the sea, making us tolerant of each other's yarns. Which was just as well when Marlow, sitting serenely as a Buddha, began his two hour, Freudian critique of colonialism.


"This also has been one of the dark places of the earth," he said didactically, ensuring we should not miss the parallels between the Romans in Britain and what was to follow. "Many men must have died here. The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing. All that redeems it is the idea."

He broke off to let his words hang portentously. We waited patiently for him to continue. There wasn't anything else to do. "I don't want to bother you much with personal details," he said eventually. "But I'm going to anyway.

"When I was a little chap I had a passion for the blank spaces on the map. And there was one, the most blank of all that I had a hankering after. True, by the end of my boyhood it was no longer a blank. It was a place of darkness. Yet like a giant snake, ensnaring me with its phallic symbolism, this mighty river drew me in and I got appointed as a steamboat skipper.

"I crossed the Channel and in a few hours I was in the whited sepulchre of my employers' city. I saw the Company doctor, inspected another map which showed the river coiling snake-like through the darkness and said goodbye to my aunt. It's queer how stupid women are. They live in a world of their own.

"As the steamer made its way along the serpentine channel of the river, we passed several settlements where many niggers lay dying in the service of the Company. We eventually disembarked and, in the company of a vastly overweight, unattractive white man, the very obvious physical embodiment of imperial greed and exploitation, began the two hundred mile journey on foot to the Central Station.

"I arrived to find that my steamboat had been sunk and I kept myself to myself, content to overhear snippets of conversation about a man called Kurtz. "Who is this Kurtz?" I asked at last. "He runs the Inner Station," the manager said. From this reply, I inferred that this man was afraid of Kurtz, as if he held up a mirror to the moral bankruptcy of Belgian colonialism while somehow escaping judgment himself.

"Two months passed, time which I spent being charmed by the snake-like properties of the river as it slithered its way into the wilderness of the jungle id, before my boat was seaworthy and I could set off in search of Kurtz in the heart of darkness. I had on board with me several white men, whom I shall meaningfully call pilgrims, a bunch of cannibals - surprisingly jolly fellows when not eating rancid hippopotamus - and my sturdy, silent helmsman. This fine black specimen did not speak, but had he done so would undoubtedly have said: 'You are a good man, Mistah Marlow. We niggers have no language or culture worth mentioning. It is just a shame that we've been civilised by those fat Belgian bastards instead of by someone with your more refined sensibilities.'

"We stopped briefly at an abandoned settlement where a written note warned of dark, ominous events ahead and as we neared Kurtz's station on a bend of this vast snaking river, we were becalmed by fog. The screech of savages rent the darkness and a hail of pitiful arrows rained down on the deck. My sturdy helmsman rashly opened a shutter and was struck by a spear. He looked up, grateful that his last vision before he passed into his own heart of darkness should be of me. I patted my pet affectionately as he died, before tossing his body into the murky darkness of the snake-like river.

"At last we reached a clearing in the jungle and there we found Kurtz, semi-delirious with disease, being tended by a young Russian man. 'It was Kurtz who ordered the natives to attack you,' he told us. 'They are in awe of his savagery. They treat him like a God.' We gathered up his vast stockpile of ivory and I began to read his journal that started as a witness to a noble moral ideal and ended after nine long years in unimaginable barbarism with the exhortation to exterminate all the savages. Yet somehow I could not condemn him.

"Kurtz escaped during the night and I found him heading back towards the heart of darkness. He talked briefly of his Intended before whispering 'The horror, the horror'. We carried him back onboard and set off down the muscular, coiling stream, yet he died before we reached the brightness of the ego.

"I too almost succumbed to illness and it was with a sense of moral fatigue that I visited Kurtz's Intended on my return to Europe. 'Pray tell me his last words,' the Intended murmured. My heart trembled. She was only a woman and thus too dim to be told of the moral depravities of the heart of darkness. 'They were your name,' I said."

Marlow ceased talking and we turned our heads towards London, once more mindful of its darkness.

The Guardian

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Poster poems: Remember your lines

Memory is both wellspring and subject of much poetry. Time to think back for inspiration

The muses, so the Greeks believed, are the daughters of memory, which may, I suppose, be a way of saying that the arts depend on, are born from, our ability to remember and our need to recognise patterns and meaning in the memories we have stored away in our minds. And poetry is no exception; a great deal of poetry mines memory for its matter. It may be that a poem grows out of the individual memory of the poet, or the poet might give expression to a race or group memory in telling "the tale of the tribe". One way or the other, memory is at the root of things.

The effects of poetry often depend on the tension between shared and unique memories to set up patterns of expectation in the mind of the reader. My use of the Greek myth of Mnemosyne at the start of this blog is as good an example as any of what I mean; if you have the myth in your memory store, my first sentence will be transparent to you, if you don't, then it may seem completely daft. You might click on the link and add a new tale to your store. You may even decide that I'm some kind of pretentious eejit who likes to show off. I'm sure that your reaction depended to some degree on whether or not the story was part of our shared memory pool.

Poets have dealt with questions of memory in a vast range of ways. Austin Clarke, in his long major poem Mnemosyne Lay in Dust, dealt with perhaps the scariest one of them all: what happens to a poet if memory deserts them? Fortunately, Clarke recovered from the breakdown and the resulting memory loss that are charted in the poem, but it remains a powerful record of what the death of memory means.

Memory, like archaeology, deals in layers of deposits laid down over time. When we revisit memories, we often find ourselves digging through several layers and focusing on one particular moment. It is this phenomenon that underlies a poem like A Time Past by Denise Levertov.

The ambiguous nature of memory has also intrigued poets. Robert Browning's poem Memorabilia is a moment of realisation; the memory the poet asks about is not the memory that means most to the person questioned. For George Oppen, a memory of the commonplace becomes an anchor in a world under threat. In his poem up into the silence the green, EE Cummings looks at, or maybe enacts is a better word, memory's fleetingness. Wyatt, in his splendid They Flee From Me, sings another of memory's ambiguities, our powerful ability to disremember that which it has become inconvenient to be associated with.

Perhaps most common of all are those poems in which the poet projects memory forward into the future and, like Christina Rossetti or William Shakespeare, attempts to use poetry to shape how they will be remembered after they have gone. This is, of course, a course of action that is doomed to futility; how can a poem control the memory of others?

So, this week I'm inviting poems on memories, or on memory itself. What are the memories that have shaped your writing? Are there disparities between how you remember events and the way that others recall them that have struck you as interesting or important? Can you, indeed, remember any of them?

SOURCE: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk

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