Hercules Reclined (Dream Sequence from a short story)

The other day a man with thick, black rimmed glasses sat opposite me. He scratched a fancy looking fountain pen across a pad laid out in front of him and asked; “What did you last dream about?”
I answered thusly:

Hercules reclined against a rock. His taut muscles flexed and with each brushing stroke they painted in the air a letter. “A” boomed the demigod, and the assembled, awed by the sight of Zeus’ son, mouthed in humbled silence a repetitive “a”.

Europe shuddered as the alphabet coursed itself through to Z. The thunderous roar of Hercules’ voice capitalising what the humbled mass before him could only mutter back in submissive lower cases.

The Greeks chorused whilst the French declined. Poles postured and the Turks knocked on the door. The English smirked knowingly and the Romans wept for they saw the Tiber foaming with their own demise – and though they lamented loudly in Latin, crying fouls and warnings to the assembled – ‘learn from, but follow not’ – no one noticed, for no one spoke Latin.

Doomed to creak, were the shelves laboured with Latin works. Doomed to creak and warp, the planks of wood upon which Horace and Virgil rest; their brackets wrought neither of metal nor stone, but instead the mortar of unread.

And as Europe listened the Atlanteans howled; liberty, brotherhood and equality from over the expanse of sea there yonder. The best of their generation expired upon an altar carved from the stony truths of sanctified lies; they broke limbs beneath the burden of holy missions serving that altar and died in their droves at that altar’s plinth. The altar was carved deep with known unknowns and unknown unknowns, unreadable for the Atlantic eyes and ears were clogged with blindness and deafness, ignorant of the tutorial of Hercules as he boomed, in exasperation: “A!”

To which the Greek chorus chimed in unison. To which those not listening quoted Shakespeare: ‘tis Greek to me!” To which Babel continued to chatter. The young died in their droves, and the beast that grew fat below the sewers of Baghdad, clogged as they were with the shit, muck and dead of war, stirred. This a creature unimaginable in its terror – its bones creaked in waking stumbling, its scales scratched at the earth’s plates and its eyes saw all that was to see, and saw all that was not to be seen.

To the east generals mirrored Alexander’s path and circled the squares of Sogdiana’s triangles; there’s not to be, a victory, there’s not to be, a Roxanne, nor there’s to be a favourable history. From the mountain above all mountains the Kremlin Highlander laughed his terrible laugh, and men died. The one with cockroach eyebrows wept his deepest tears, and men died. With love, ol’Jugashgulash admired the merry prancing of Prometheus unbound – who rejoiced for his liver would his remain and because he alone had trumped gods.

Sarmatians aimed arrows, Scythians readied horses. The Cossacks polished their boots, Chechens sharpened daggers and on the shores of Caspar’s Sea, Khazarian warriors bared toothy smiles; and all the assembled beasts of Asia, all the great tribes and clans of Huns and Tatars and Turks and Mongols came to prostrate themselves before the Red Tsar who turned in bed and begged for five more minutes before beggining. Their horses bit at the reigns, the swords trembled in their clasp and their muscles lay taut for they would not repeat: “A!”

And the assembled prayed for deliverance, their eyes focussed upwards on heaven above, begging for intercession. They did not notice Mendel’s son walk by them, his back bent double over with the weight of Judaica, it obscured him. Nor did the assembled notice the man in Mendel’s tread whose voice was drowned by the Greek chorus chiming, but Thomas saw, though he doubted.

In their palaces Persians resurrected gods and enriched the scent of their land with incense. Their mouths salivated and they drooled great rivers for the end of days was drawing near. The Hagarenes and Saracens trembled for every generation had declined. Along the sea the children gathered and congressed over questions: what will be? And in London they wept, as in Paris, whilst in Berlin they beat their chests for the end drew closer.

Gog and Magog shifted in their seats and Istanbul quaked, whilst academicians in Athens dusted their Aristotles to find meaning. All was late, all was too late, for no one had cracked Joyce’s code, too busy admiring the smile of Lisa. The seas were dried and the mountains crumbled, the naysayers bellowed ‘hallelujah’. Prayers were not answered and the wealthy realised too late what was upon them, yet they could not part their money’s company for no one would sell, and fewer still would buy.

The dogs barked and the winds howled. India’s rivers became great serpents and coiled around the nations of man, squeezing out a last exhale. The best were starving, the worst were fattened and the altar dripped with the blood of many to sate the appetite of the beast. Urartuans clambered to their ark, but twas too late for they had salted and peppered other peoples’ plates, to them fate too would come. The sons of Ham marched north, and on their backs were their burdens, their heat and their worth, their weary and their dead and Macbeth shrieked with horror for they brought forth the offerings of suffering to his feet.

The Red Tsar laughed, the beast awoke, the Atlanteans howled, Thomas doubted and Hercules reclined upon his rock, his muscles flexed, tautly waving through the air drawing shapes whilst his mouth echoed: “A”

No one repeated.

And Prometheus unbound wept for joy upon seeing that man was doomed and from his dying liver he regurgitated the ache of his centuries long torment, with it to silence the cacophony of the end, and this celestial bellyache was rendered a painful, guttural: “O”

With that, all ended.

White coat man folded away his papers. Replaced the fancy lid to his fancy fountain pen. Acknowledged me no further and left, being sure to close the door on his way out.

©Ara Iskanderian February 2/2/2010

Pinter's The Caretaker

The other day I sauntered on down to the Trafalgar Studios; there, whilst sucking on a Werther’s Original and with a pizza filled belly, I nestled into a seat to enjoy the two hours traffic of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Around me, shrouded in piles of coats, handbags and winter paraphernalia were aged English couples, barely talking to one another, and American accents chimed with the ethereal noise of people locating seats.

Directly in front of me a young couple, whose saliva glands evidently excreted a rather more gluey substance than yours or mine, had their faces permanently velcroed; the play was doomed to be punctuated by their incessant whispering, the sickly scent of their cheap vinegary wine and the sound of their overly wet smooching.

A thick boot tied around my cold foot temptingly trembled in rebellion at my better side, willing me to let rip and land the fat, rubber soul of my caterpillar into the back of the male element comprising said couple. There, with all the accuracy rage could muster, impart an Ara shaped boot-print into the back of ‘Checkered-smoochy-couple-man’s’ overly gelled and elaborately faux-tousled skull. In many ways the rest of my leg began to resemble a leash with an agitated Rottweiler at its end.

Ol’tight-trousers anonymous in front of me never knew how close he came to a complaint.

Soon, the calming influence of the Werther’s Original took its effect and the play began, distraction replaced annoyance. What can I tell you about the play? It’s centred around a single bedroom within a dilapidated house. The bedroom window doesn’t shut, the roof leaks and its filled to the brim with dust and junk and bric-a-brac, including a very important Buddha.

Nothing happens in the play – there’s no great catharsis experienced by any of the characters, no epiphanies are dished out, no great prophecy or inherent message, it begins and ends the same; abruptly. In its course Aston, brings home a tramp, Davis, they start out as friends, and then fall out. Aston’s brother Mick joins the duo and through Davis’ presence we learn of the troubled relationship between the brothers that ultimately inflicts itself upon Davis who, tail firmly between legs, leaves: the end.

You never learn the full back-story of the characters, of which there are only three – why is the tramp a tramp, why one of them is a loner, why the third dreams the way he does. Despite the play lasting two and half hours, everything ends as quickly as it begins – much like my Werther’s Original. You suck and suck, it gets your juices going, dissolves into consumption, but ultimately when your mouth is lubricated with the residual sugary sweetness of toffee, just as your enjoying it, your left still salivating wanting more, and with nothing left to show save the mental calorie counter in your head racking up the numbers.

That’s the thing about Pinter, he’s not a man that seeks to impart a message, nor preach something profound, no, no, no – his plays are all about the dialogue between equally unfamiliar men. We, the audience, never learn enough about any one character for them to fully escape the realms of anonymity. Other playwrights might spend a portion explaining who so-and-so is, and convey things that we might care for the person and eventually we make a friend who can never leave the pages of a script or the boards of a theatre. Pinter doesn’t do this, instead he writes dialogue that is instantly ascertainable, not alienatingly clever, but conversations you can actually imagine, or have experienced yourself – real conversations, that are likely to occur – not like say the contrived dialogues of a Woody Allen script where layman one discusses the finer points of Hegel to layman two, who returns the favour by employing Socratic method.

No, when the characters of the play engage they talk about very real, very human dreams, their loneliness and relationships to each other are believable. When Mick laces his brief biography with references to the areas of east London through which he’s passed and experienced this or that, you can imagine it. Likewise, when Davis the tramp talks of his wanderings through the west of the city, tramping through Shepherds Bush and freezing along the Great West Road, you can relate to it. Sure the familiarity of London geography helps out – but again that’s part of the appeal of a Pinter play to me, he describes a London, recognisable, sexily grotty and rather attractive. The only unbelievable part is that anyone would take home a tramp, having said that Pinter said the play was inspired by a neighbour who did exactly that.

You could wax lyrical about the meaning of The Caretaker, what this means, what that means. Another playwright, Terrence Rattigan, suggested that the two brothers represented “the Old Testament God and the New Testament God, with the Caretaker as Humanity...” to which Pinter laconically retorted “It’s a play about two brothers and a caretaker.” A rather similar laconism to Samuel Beckett who when a critic suggested Waiting for Godot (the best play ever) was about God, replied “if it was about God I would have called it Waiting for God.”

There are a lot of similarities between the two plays – and Pinter is known to have been heavily influenced by Beckett’s Godot; tramps are a central motif to both, there is a sequence concerning ill-fitting shoes in both, a couple of very similar scenes and when Mick and Davis both reel off locations across London’s its rather akin to Godot’s Lucky’s monologue when he exclaims: “Feckham Peckham Fullham Clapham”.

“Nothing happens” is a line in Godot that one critic used to summarise Beckett’s play and it likewise lends itself to summarising Pinter’s The Caretaker. However, in the course of nothing happening my aching booted foot willing violence upon another man was placated and the dripping dialogue of Pinter’s pen transfigured into mid-air lyricisms dancing on the stage ahead, offered a nice distraction from the biting boredom and cold of mid-January London, in which, ussually nothing happens.

© Ara Iskanderian

The Aztecs

A well-deserved break from the snow, and the offer of a free ticket, conspired to inspire within me a tactical retreat from the ice clogged streets of London - and the dreary monotony of Northolt’s stealth-like black ice, lethally stumbling its frozen denizens into muttering messes. A retreat that prompted me into the warm bosom of that most opulent repository of the British Empire’s looted wealth; the British Museum.

Habitual homages were indulged; a linger beside the tourism clogged Rosetta Stone – it’s all Greek to me before a quick nod to the winged Assyrian bulls, shrunken with age. Then a little adoration spilt before the plinth of Alexander’s raised, decapitated head, a kowtow to the daintily extended and bronzed hand of Anahit, and then standing admiringly before the broken statue of Ozymandias, king-of-kings, and beneath his awesome, disinterested, pupil-less eyes mouth, in hushed, quietening whispers the prayer of Percy Shelley’s poem to hubris;

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Prying ourselves away from the distraction of ancient history, thickening the air and seeping into my porous brain like the demanding affection of nicotine addiction, we made our way to the museum’s Moctezuma exhibition with all the urgency that the prospect of closing time could inspire.

The renamed Moctezuma, more commonly known to English speakers by the apparently erroneous name ‘Montezuma’, was the penultimate Aztec king, and the last Aztec dynast to wield any real monarchical power; his two successors were really mere rebel leaders quickly despatched by the incoming Spanish. Under Moctezuma’s reign the Aztec Empire reached its zenith, establishing an hegemony over the peoples and neighbouring states of Mexico (the Aztec word for their nation).

From their capital of Tenochtitlan, upon whose ruins modern day Mexico City sits, the Aztecs developed a systemised form of record keeping, refined a sophisticated solar calendar and established a rather complicated, and unpronounceable, pantheon of gods with their own distinct mythology.

The organised religion of the Aztecs was almost obsessed by death; ritualised sacrifices involving the gouging out of hearts, apocalyptic prophecies forewarning the imminent return of all-conquering deities, ritual purging by fire and evidently massive symbolism associated with the skull. The required human sacrifices to appease the gods made war a constant feature of Aztec statecraft. Each new king was expected to launch a war of conquest, thereby fulfilling the dual coronation requirements of expanding the realm and acquiring sacrificial victims for ritual bloodletting.

It’s a little hard to wander through the exhibition and not have flashbacks to Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto about the neighbouring Maya. What little I do know about the Aztecs always compelled me back to the same question; how was such a tiny population expected to sustain the grandiose building projects of their nobility and likewise the human-sacrifice demands of the priestly caste? The obsession with death that marked the Aztec empire, their predecessors and contemporaries; the Maya, Toltecs and Olmecs – was surely tantamount to shoddy foundations.

When the Aztec kings, priests, nobles, and the Aztec peculiarity – ‘god-impersonators’ – momentarily pondered the jade encrusted skull-like masks (in some cases masks made of actual skulls) before donning them did they see their own fate reflected back at them; death? Just like Nazis in the SS must have pondered the death’s head skulls on their belt buckles in moments of doubt and wondered: ‘?’.

No wonder the late Aztec empire was wracked with doomsday prophecies. It was a society obsessed with death and destruction whose single most famous motifs are that of a bleeding heart, life draining away, and skulls, life gone for good. It seems as though the Aztecs, more than anything else were a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Silent stones carved into the shapes of leering vulture-like eagles, with bowls in their backs to serve as receptacles for post-sacrifice human offal, lifeless plastic looking eyes shouting distress at you from previously flesh and blood covered skulls, where skin has been replaced by jade. Is it an archaeological find of beauty? Or a spectacle of death encased in glass and vaunted as a sophisticated culture prematurely ended by Spain’s conquest?

Surely such a state was doomed to end in any case. Maybe the chill creeping into my spine is the result of historical propaganda that deplored Aztec civilisation as bloodthirsty; it’s difficult to tell whether I’m guilty of lapping up the victor’s history, or genuine human revulsion for the statistically unknown levels of mass murder that cemented Aztec civilisation and society.

The Aztecs are not the only example of a civilisation becoming obsessed by death. The ancient Egyptians developed a whole cult of death where theology and necrology coincided. Their chief god, Osiris, was king of the underworld, whilst their seminal text is the wonderfully titled ‘Book of the Dead’. Similarities don’t end there; Egyptians and Aztecs used ‘glyphs’ rather than an alphabet as a system of writing, both built pyramids and their mythologies bear some resemblance. This leads some to speculate of implausible cross-fertilization, or likelier that there are common underlying trends in the human psyche that play out in the creation of civilisations and religions.

Unlike the Egyptians, the Aztecs lacked a major water source like the Nile, failed to develop a sophisticated agricultural system, iron, or the wheel – a crucial invention – and had no horses, which made their armies slow and the newly conquered prone to easy rebellion (many quickly sided with the all-conquering Spanish). In the Old World, horses provided armies with a level of mobility that turned nations into empires and brought empires into covetous, competitive conflict thereby spurring on successions of conquerors in a historical process that charts itself from the rise of Egypt to the modern day. Indeed some of the surviving Aztec reports that first describe the Spanish talk of half-human half-deer creatures, in reference to their cavalry, who brandished ‘fire sticks’, evidence of the relative naiveté of the Aztecs who went on to fete the Spanish as gods.

The Aztecs too secure in their unassailable hegemony, like their Egyptian counterparts, had few competitors, grew rich and opulent, but unable to meet outside threats. With nothing to fear in this life, they began to fear the next. For all the hypothesised vitality of their death-obsessed culture Aztec civilisation had stagnated at its apogee. The military means of the Spanish, far more advanced than anything the Aztecs had, hand in hand with European diseases, spelt the end of the Aztec empire. One can only imagine the unequal combat as similar to those movies where aliens invade a beleaguered earth.

Still cultures linger on. Some scholars speculate that the Aztec cult of the death possessed elements that were easily transferable to Catholic Christianity, with its emphasis on a suffering Christ, Himself a human sacrifice, and that this as much as the sword helped the spread of Catholicism in Mexico. Indeed, the Catholic symbol of the Sacred Heart is supposed to have its origins in the persistence of the Aztec belief of the heart’s religious sanctity long after the conquest. In a similar way, ancient Egypt, so obsessed with death and decline was forever conquered by Greeks, Persians and Romans with only its culture left to speak of its former glory, elements of which crept into early Christianity – the halo for instance.

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz once wrote a series of essays attempting to decipher Mexican identity from the legacy of Spanish culture and Aztec predecessors. Paz concluded: “If a man is double or triple, so are civilisations and societies. Each people carries on a dialogue with an invisible colloquist who is, at one and the same time, itself and the other, its double.” Maybe this is what the Aztecs saw when they looked at their decorative skulls; they, the living, facing their deathly others, willing on their terminal decline. It’s a strong Mexican theme traceable in the artwork of Mexican artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in whose paintings, amongst vibrant colours are macabre skeletons to juxtapose life. The popular Mexican revolutionary Zapatero equated himself with the failed rebellions of Moctezuma’s successors, willing his own defeat.

Perhaps, I wonder, the pain and shock in the Aztec skulls’ eyes is the surprise of the dead at the self-fulfilling prophecy of Aztec civilisation: the end is nigh!

A postcard depicting a romanticised, European oil painting of a tragic Moctezuma lies beside me as I conclude this blog. Moctezuma looks like an Aztec Ozymandias, woefully ill-armed, doomed to be forgotten, pained, disproportionately lengthy, fleshed out, fragile and rather ungainly, rather like this far too long blog. In my defence another quote from Paz: “A historian describes like a scientist and has visions like a poet” hence its length. Now stop reading and go and do something interesting, because I’ve run out of words.

©Ara Iskanderian 11/1/10

Janus

The ancient Romans had this intriguing god named Janus. Always depicted with two faces; one ever looking towards the right, the other focussed on the left, Janus’ duality enabled the god to simultaneously look forwards and backwards, inside and out, high and low. In short Janus could see everything and was subsequently an all-knowing – omniscient – god. Added to this ability to be ever watchful, and on account of this, Janus was known as a guardian god, a protector and seer of justice. Some trace the grinning and groaning faces of the theatrical spirits Comedy and Tragedy in the god’s two faces; wherein one is usually depicted as stern and serious, the other smiling and welcoming.

There is even a lot of evidence to suggest that Janus was an actual being. A human king attributed with excellent kingship who introducing legislation and currency to the Italian peninsula, subsequently he was deified. However, that’s not meant to suggest that there was some two faced mutant king ruling a portion of classical Italy. The contradictory symbolism of this extreme incarnation of black and white bipolar is rather akin to the qualities of China’s yin-yang principle. In Janus was the symbol of opposites symbiotically engaging as a positive singular one, not an abstract god, but an attainable, altogether ‘human’ god.

Janus was charged with absolute clear-sightedness, always aware of all arguments for and against, a quality that depictions of the deity were supposed to personify. The Roman poet Ovid provided the following description of Janus for his Latinate readership:

“Whatever your eyes let you see – sky, sea, cloud, earth – these are my domains and remain in my hand. It is my function to look after the vast world.”

Most of all Janus was associated with doorways, arches and gates. Indeed his name is derived from the Latin word for gate ‘ianua’. Roman cities’ entrances were marked with depictions of the god and under his patronage one moved from the rural countryside to the urban townships. In Rome there was a doorway sacred to Janus, symbolically open in times of war (a means to solicit the god’s intercession) and closed in times of peace.

By overseeing transitions from rural to urban landscapes, periods of peace and war and his patronage of doorways, gateways and entrances Janus became the patron deity of new beginnings and fresh starts. In their ancient wisdom the Roman calendar writers devoted the first month of the year to the god Janus and hence we gained the month of ‘January’- the month of Janus, god of new beginnings, and the month of the doorway, one that looks onto a new year with new possibilities.

Under the patronage of this classical deity, and with the hope that sacrifices to the god would assuage his aid and intercession, ancient Roman citizens resolved to make changes to enact over the course of the New Year; the first New Year Resolutions. It’s always nice to learn the origins of words, terminology and traditions – at least for me it is.

Anyway the beauty of the tradition of Janus and Roman-era customs of New Year’s resolutions was that as with most ancient deities, the deity’s attributes couldn’t be divorced from what it patronised. Janus in contemplating both future and past, and everything else for that matter, couldn’t be divorced from his role as guarantor of resolutions and new beginnings. In short then, a new beginning that is inconsiderate of the past is doomed to failure, or so ran the logic of our Roman forebears.

It is the consideration of the past, meditation upon its implications and how the tentacles of history reach out beyond the limits of an event’s position in time that birth genuinely new beginnings. For all the resolve, and stalwart stoical confidence in starting afresh or turning over a new leaf you are doomed to failure so long as an ‘existing past’ remains unconsidered. The conclusion of a successful new beginning in ancient Roman thought was achievable only through the equitable balancing of a past with a future. Otherwise starting something from scratch and ignoring the resources available to you was akin to building the roof of a house first.

But in contemplating both past and future it is easy to make the present a contradiction of the two and merely flounder in the impossible task of escaping said contradiction. That is the real challenge of fulfilling a resolution, not actual commitment, for commitment can wane and temper according to conditions, instead averting the contradiction that emerges from the space between past and future and inevitably, in its irreconcilability, results in failure. Janus in his two faced entirety is a figure of contradiction; a creature so fanciful and fantastical, it could never exist, being as it was likely plagued by the constant indecision of knowing which way to go, subsequently went nowhere, became a dilettante, and ultimately failed.

Perhaps then it’s the inherent contradiction of Janus that led to his cult dying out, or perhaps it’s his patronage that in turn makes resolutions impossible to fulfil, and hence the contingent failure. Still, having said all that, contemplating the message epitomised by this god at the start of the New Year, I hope is of some plausible use in navigating the expanse of past and future which will outplay in the year ahead and the twenteen decade thereafter. Happy New Year!

Anish Kapoor Blew My Mind

A blog’s been a long time coming, though the seeds of one have been germinating in my skull’s soil for quite some time. Discerning what to write about in what has been a very hectic month is as difficult to conclude as an undesired chore.

Yesterday, I paused for a moment, slouched on the sofa, munched on reheated Persian kebab, listened to the residue of an earlier argument, watched snippets of Rudolf Nureyev prancing about to a Khachaturian ballet on the telly and began contemplating a postcard I had earlier propped up against the corner of the television.

Not much really, a great big block of ochre red just passed a waxy arched doorway of the Royal Academy of Arts’ main gallery, currently hosting an exhibition by Anish Kapoor. The picture plays a trick; either the block is smaller than the doorframe, but is otherwise a perfect copy of the arch’s outline, or else the block of wax has already passed through, and then what you’re witnessing is something in the distance, beyond the archway. Of course there are giveaway clues as to which is true.

What struck me, as I sat quietly at home, late on a Friday night, post a pint with Effendi Al-Firangi, a heated discussion about Afghanistan, a reheated Persian kebab churning in my belly, was how in the month that had just passed by, it was watching this slow moving slab of wax that had afforded me my only slowed, conscious, moment of observation; the kind that might warrant the subject matter of my rambling away in this blog.

Ostensibly I had spent a good quarter of an hour watching an almost imperceptibly slow block of wax, a good twelve feet tall, four metres wide, eight metres long, pass along tracks laid out through three galleries. So slow, that it’s movement was describable as stealthy, so agonisingly slow that you wonder why exactly you stood, with an equally gormless group of tourists, pretentious art people and bored housewives, watching a block of wax course slowly by.

Its passage looks so painful through the arches that it reminds you of choking on a too-large morsel, passing painfully through your gullet, whilst the evoking twinge in your arse suggests what’s implied here is constipation. The blood red density of it might just represent the passage of blood, the tracks, the limits of a vein, and the painful push through the archway is rather reminiscent of those obesity awareness campaigns which show the passage of blood through fat clogged arteries.

Whilst one could ‘wax lyrical’ about the piece, entitled ‘Svayambh’ – self-generated in Sanskrit, you are just staring at a slow-moving block of wax. Kapoor argues that the art lies in the process whereby a substance ‘sculpts itself’ and defines itself. I’m not certain this is what is actually occurring – the material is manipulated by a human-authored mechanism, just as the archways are unlikely to allow for the non-sentient block of wax to form itself into the shape of an elephant.

Having said that it was mesmerising. Almost as involving as the installation wherein a cannon fires a giant artillery shell of wax (red again) at the far wall, after being triggered by a very serious looking attendant (very serious, as though charged by God with some celestial task) every quarter of an hour; bang! The predictable noise of the impact and gasping sighs of people in total awe, this one I don’t get, I like it, but don’t get, can’t even begin to interpret it. It’s just a cannon firing wax pellets that, over the exhibitions course have built up into a mound of hardened wax, splattered over the frescoes of the gallery’s neo-classical ceiling. Rather than engage in a debate over interpretation, I can’t help but wonder more about the cleaning bill for an exhibition, a large part of which might just as easily be called institutionalised vandalism, as well as art.

That’s not to say I didn’t fall in love with Kapoor, who, like myself, is half-Iraqi, half-Indian, though he’s Jewish, and I’m Armenian, and this similar familial background is the origin of my interest in the cheeky chap. What’s astounding is that the whole exhibition, indeed the artist’s whole work, relies entirely upon the individual’s perception; you don’t necessarily ‘get it’ because your approach is variable, and each new approach, by the same individual, provides a new perception. You need to have David Bowie’s question: ‘Don you wonder about sound and vision?’ echoing in your head to fully appreciate Kapoor.

Take the sculptures seemingly made of granules of pigment, you awe at the fragility, how has the artist managed to maintain them in those positions when even the sighing breath of an ant would be enough to tumble them down. Look a little closer and you’ll see it’s a facade, a granulated coating giving the impression that what you thought were mounds, are in fact sculptures. A seamless bulge from the wall entitled 'When I Am Pregnant' disappears with distance, or closeness, changes in perfection, dimension, shape and size – all dependant on where you stand. Though completed, the implied pregnancy suggests the sculpture is still in development; its conclusion has yet to be ‘birthed’. The title, equally ambiguous in its resolution might as well be followed by ‘...’.

Though there are only a few pieces you linger. A yellow indentation in the wall would appear deeper than it is its playing on the norms of your mind’s understanding of convex and concave makes an inversion simultaneously a protrusion. Gives you a bit of a headache as well.

Kapoor’s sculpture ‘Slug’ is equally evocative; either an intestine attached to an anus, in which case you’re looking at a digestive tract, yet the colouring and style might equally be an umbilical cord attached to a vagina. The colours and shapes are playful; they’re both natural bodily greys and organic loops mixed with viscerally graphic reds and all-too-perfect shapes.

The series of concrete sculptures, pushed through an icing dispenser, in their asymmetrical randomness, but all produced in the same way, conjure different images. Collapsed layers look like ancient civilisations’ ruins, pseudo-altars, masses of corpses and tapered ends are rather phallic looking. Again, you’re just looking at concrete, as you were just looking at wax, a reflection or powder...

That’s my take on the genius of Kapoor, he devilishly plays with your perception, and the outcome is deliciously infectious and leaves you really wondering as to how you perceive things. What’s complicated might just as easily be reduced and reinterpreted accordingly.

Then again I might just have wasted my time staring at and explaining essentially a glorified candle.

©Ara Iskanderian 5/12/2009

British Genocide Denial: A Damning New Report

This week a wonderfully alarming headline appeared in the British Guardian newspaper: “Britain accused of ‘genocide denial’ over Armenia”, a reference to a damning report published this week by Geoffrey Robertson QC. Robertson, who previously presided over the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone, was commissioned by a group of prominent British-Armenians to investigate the heavily redacted documents at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Sifting through fifteen years of documents dating back to the government of John Major, the QC concluded that what had occurred was nothing short of ‘genocide denial’.

Let that expression sink in for a moment.

Just a few weeks ago the nefarious British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin MEP sat nervously twitching before an audience on the BBC’s Question Time programme. It wasn’t long before audience members tackled Griffin about his denial of the Jewish Holocaust, and his ludicrous historiography was exposed. It wasn’t long before Griffin’s fellow panellist Jack Straw jumped on the bandwagon and ridiculed the BNP leader, challenging his denial of the Jewish Holocaust. Straw’s all too easy attacks won him several rounds of applause.

However...

This is the same Jack Straw, formerly the Home Secretary. The same Jack Straw, formerly of the Foreign Minister. The same Jack Straw who tackled and criticised the demagogic Griffin for Holocaust denial, was the very same man who would have been privy to the documents that Robertson investigated, no doubt some of the paperwork maybe even crossed his desk, and yet no hint of irony was discernible on his face during that panel show. I know this because I was looking out for it. There’s a word for what transpired; hypocrisy.

Let me make one thing clear before I proceed, I am in no way attempting to apologise for Griffin, nor the BNP, but am merely making the following point: denial is wrong, in whatever context and people in glass houses, like Mr Straw, shouldn’t throw stones. Likewise the revulsion inspired by the Guardian headline should be no less than that which greets Griffin and the BNP’s racist policies.

Genocide denial is a crime in itself. Switzerland, Germany and France are all countries who have legislated against it. Genocide denial, is to commit the crime twice, say’s Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and author of the astounding memoir Night; first the dead die, and then in turning their deaths into a non-event they die a second time. Britain now stands accused of participating in that secondary process. Not a very nice thought is it?

The damning statement in the report is one that graces its cover. A particularly odious example of Orwellian doublespeak, it reads:

“HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] is open to criticism of the ethical dimension. But given the importance of our relations (political, strategic and commercial) with Turkey...the current line is the only feasible option.”

The ‘current line’ being complicit genocide denial. There is a tacit admission in the above ‘...is open to criticism...’ that denial is taking place, indeed there is no attempt to smokescreen the truth or even bother hiding denial behind ambiguous phrases or clever terminology - remember, no one was meant to read this. Instead we can read the following: ‘our position is unethical, but we are justified for the following reasons: x, y, z, therefore our position is permissible. A particularly Machiavellian logic employing the English language in such a way that would have made Georg Orwell beam with ironic pride.

Of course there is nothing particularly shocking about this ‘revelation’. Ethical foreign policies are hard to come by; everyone knows that, Iraq’s a great example. Indeed, bear that ‘strategic’ element of the above extract in mind. Successive American presidential candidates, Bush through to Obama, have all pledged to recognise the Armenian Genocide. Post-election all have reneged on that promise because of the military importance of Turkey as a transit point for America’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Former Israeli President Shimon Peres was heavily criticised by Holocaust scholars when he cancelled a seminar on the Armenian Genocide in Tel Aviv after Turkey threatened to annul certain bilateral military contacts.

When Obama travelled to Turkey to repair bridges a week before he was due to address American-Armenians and use the ‘g-word’ it was apparent he would flip-flop. He did, the first death knell to change sounded out, and despite learning no less than two new Armenian worlds ‘metz’ and ‘yeghern’, meaning big massacre, Obama lost a lot of Armenian support.

Robertson unearthed a 1999 briefing that further added to the above: ‘Recognising the genocide would provide no practical benefit to the UK’. Again tacit recognition, the g-word is actually used, but here, once more, benefits versus ethics are weighed against each other. The moral argument loses. No prizes for guessing which one wins. However, what makes such a stance so evidently questionable, as something cited as self-evidently justifiable, is that it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. When France recognised the Armenian Genocide Turkey again made threats to cancel diplomatic ties and military contracts, end cooperation and recognise the Algerian genocide. It didn’t stop France, and all the threats proved empty. This further detracts from the FCO briefing.

Perhaps the most insulting part of the report’s findings is that the notion was encouraged by the FCO, amongst British politicians and civil service staff that historians were in disagreement over the facts. Short of an expletive beginning with ‘B’ and ending with ‘T’ I can’t think of how better to repudiate such a statement. No serious historian of the subject has ever denied the Armenian Genocide. There have been shoddy pseudo-scholastic attempts that utilise questionable sources and techniques, certain personalities shown to have been on the Turkish pay roll have written polemical paragraphs denying the facts and are heralded as part of a non-existent and unnecessary debate.

There is a long and ever growing list of reputable institutions, scholars and countries across the world who agree that what occurred was genocide. Many of those voices come from Turkey and Britain Indeed, I have it on good authority that a recent delegation of Turkish parliamentarians that came to tell Gordon Brown the ‘truth’ were themselves given a history lesson by the Prime Minister.

Still, as a British-Armenian through and through, who takes on the schizophrenia of such a hyphenated identity, genocide denial detracts from reconciling those two identities together. My reasons for being here and British, are the same for my ancestors leaving over there, Armenia, genocide, which underlines my being Armenian and explains my being British. A government denying that act precludes my family history and community from fully entering the melting pot of British multiculturalism. Armenians came here, with, and because of their history. They accept that they are British, in return Britain must accept its Armenians’ history.

The timing of this report is perfect. Coming a few weeks after the respective presidents of Turkey and Armenia signed an agreement whose footnotes envisage a joint historical commission to rule decisively as to whether the Armenian Genocide was or wasn’t. It is the opinion of this blogger that no commission is necessary, but that in any case the truth will prevail for the case and argument is robust and moral. Robertson’s report helpfully detracts from the denialist camp, proving that it is flawed by anti-scholasticism and marked by an unethical rewriting of history for political ends.

Hopefully Robertson’s findings will cast a long shadow over any possible commission. In the meantime I warm my expectations with the following quote by Arthur Schopenhauer; ‘All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, third, it is accepted as being self-evident.’

©Ara Iskanderian 7/11/09

Anahit

Karina Goldsmithson, a good friend of mine from University, was recently over in London from her year abroad in Tel Aviv. Her gap year, being several years longer than the norm, was beginning to resemble indefinite leave and, as she later admitted, was merging into contemplation of joining the post-modern, so-called ‘trickling’ aliyah, and emigrate permanently to Israel. In the months that I hadn’t seen her she had tanned a pleasant shade, her teeth had whitened and she was looking exceptionally lithe. She didn’t want to talk about being attractive, but rather her new job.

Goldsmithson had managed to score a job at the reputable Israeli Archaeological Survey and was spending her twenties excavating Biblical ruins and skeletons of peoples suspiciously resembling Canaanites. I, though happy for her, was jealous. With excited eyebrows, rather thick and masculine looking, and a furious flurry of hand movements she was describing to me her latest find, a Sheban mummy with an intact phallus and pubic hair.

Only half-interested, I distractedly played with some loose granules of sugar, carelessly spilt upon the tabletop. The Israeli Archaeological Survey, IAS for short, was founded by Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general with the Armenian surname. Dayan was Karina’s hero, and she made no end of reminding me of that fact, not because of his military prowess, but because Dayan was an amateur archaeologist, like herself.

She told me once more of Dayan the Israeli Cyclops, how a two-eyed boyfriend of hers had born a passing resemblance to him, she’d ditched him after finding out he was a pothead with an unsatisfactory libido.

We continued catching up over cappuccinos, more froth than caffeine, staling in the fake light of the coffee shop. She told me of her Tel Aviv apartment, the large Jimi Hendrix poster on her wall, a few failed relationships, an upcoming trip to Amsterdam and how she was thinking of taking a more Hebrew sounding name. I had less to relate, I was still in London, jobless, penniless – working out how to pay for the coffee’s in fact, contemplating a return to smoking and where next to take this catch up given that money was lacking and time was pressing. Karina, whom I had never before thought of as pretty, in her new found litheness was presenting herself as something bordering upon an attractive creature, and for the first time ever in her company I felt a great sense of desire.

We’d met one day after I had stumbled upon a symposium of UCL’s Jewish Society in the university’s colonnaded cloisters, filled with faux Roman marble statues, the stench of stale sandwiches, bedraggled students, Jeremy Bentham’s not-rotting corpse and, on that day, Karina. After our introduction conversation followed. She quickly discovered my love of Bowie, he was leaking out of my still playing earphones, and I learnt that her “thing” was philosophy so we talked about Maimonides. She was somebody resembling an expert, myself attempting to blag that I knew more than a thing or two. We were both Spurs fans, which unnaturally lengthened the conversation beyond the exhausted, albeit admittedly long, rapport that accompanies meetings of Armenians and Jews, who quickly compare similarities.

Karina suggested food, I suggested pizza. We agreed. Over pizza we discussed archaeology, Karina admitted her desire to leave England for Israel and dig up Roman piazzas or ancient Hebrew burial mounds, whilst I nodded and tucked into a fungi. I told her of my PhD desires, whilst she chomped at a four cheeses. It was still early, and a Thursday, so I suggested that we two historians take advantage of late night closing times at the British Museum and head down to complete a quest we had thrice failed in achieving whilst Karina had been in London.

She agreed but insisted on a quick drink first, sure. We headed to a pub in a backwater alley off the Tottenham Court Road, bought two bottles of Corona with lime, sipped them quickly as she told me about her first hand experience of the war in Gaza and how bias the Western media were. Karina had bought the Corona’s so I got us a couple of whiskies and these were quickly downed. Her cheeks flushed red and my nose lit up like Rudolph sneezing a flare. The pub was rammed pack and the sweats had gripped us so we left and walked arm-in-arm towards the imperial loot house that is the British Museum, singing Bowie tracks along the way.

Despite the swilling cappuccinos, pizza, beer and whisky churning in our stomachs we were happy to be completing a promise I had made to Karina years back, to show her the head of an Armenian goddess.

There is a head in the British Museum, a beautiful decapitated head much larger than a human head and made of iron. The head is something of a celebrity and had graced the cover of a Penguin History of Ancient Greece, wrongly illustrating the goddess Aphrodite. In the absence of a body, the decapitated head sat upon a plaster pedestal in a dark corner of the British Museum’s former, now forgotten, Armenian department. The department was closed down long ago, never extended beyond the boundaries of a corner and now lies submerged in ancient Greece. However, as a child in the nineties I had spent many Saturday afternoons with my proudly Armenian father staring up at that beheaded beauty in dumbfounded adoration of stone, adoration compelled by a fear that the monstrous head might fall atop me and squash me flat.

As the years passed so did the head’s place of origin written upon the plaque, alternating between ancient Greece, historic Armenia, modern Turkey. A bit like Karina and myself, the head’s identity was torn between ancestral lands, birthplaces and geographical locales and swollen by the ego like column upon which it rested.

Not for me, the condition of a briefly lingering glance accompanying a slow tread and the indifferent eyes of a tourist. The tourist, who happily overlooks this treasure, but thinks nothing of queuing an hour’s half to witness the enigmatically non-existent smile of Mona Lisa because some bow-tied art historian declares the Mona Lisa a treasure – and fuck you if you don’t get it. The tourist cares not that his indifference renders my beautiful, decapitated head a clothes horse for dust, and covers it with the shroud of forgotten.

No, not I! I with my child, teenage, adolescent and adult eyes in peering poured adulating adoration upon this sculpture. I worshiped her with the same proud loving and longing of my ancient pagan forebears who came to worship at her, now long lost, nonexistent feet, which perhaps lie buried beneath the dunes of Eastern Turkey; pounded further into the earth’s bowels by people’s unaware of what history lies beneath their feet.

I, like some great-great-great x100 Hellenised Armenian forebear was made to worship, adore and stare out this beauty, whose eyes had been gouged out to reveal a hollow brainless head, and from these empty iron sockets a mesmerising listlessness bored into my very soul eking out fearful love. The forgotten goddess’s shapely neck languidly curved to one side like some disapproving mother possessing the supple neck of a swan. The curls of her hair so elegantly draping her symmetrical face inspired such longing within me that I felt as though I was committing adultery against the cross that hung around my neck.

I remember wanting to kiss that statue, uncertain whether the cold unbending metal, unyielding to the aeons it had witnessed, declining empires and failing conquerors would accept my nobody kiss? Fearful that the fossilisation process of a thousand years of age might have rendered this masterpiece so fragile it would collapse under the weight of a single kiss, I decided not to.
Awe gripped, I merely looked on, as a child, as a teenager, as an adolescent and so on. Though the goddess’ head misses its body, its cult and no longer possesses the worshipping multitudes it no doubt once did, it still has an interested party who, in shape, size and thoughts largely resembles me. Karina has always wanted to share my sentiments, but we never got round to going together.

After finishing a medley of Bowie, I turned to Karina and dominated the ensuing footsteps of conversation, sliding us towards the museum, with these notes, nowhere near as soberly thought out, nor as eloquently conveyed as here. Karina with a polite ear, listened, and with tightening grip sneaked a few pinches of my bicep. The early evenings of autumn made her look stunning, and the crooked neck she bent when turning to look at me resembled the neck of the bodiless goddess, which compelled questionable thoughts to further infect my concentration, and again lust was choking the chain around my neck.

We finally reached the British Museum to find the gallery closed. A velvet rope hung limply between fingertip stained brass columns; altogether the rope and columns resembled a grin mocking our lateness. Darkness obscured the contents of the gallery preventing my finger from pointing to the head over there in the distance, thereby salvaging something from the misfired adventured. Did we dare leap the rope, as threateningly impossible to cross as the fragile yellow tape of a crime scene? Everything screamed too late, no entry, but the whisky encouraged adventure and Karina whispered suggestions of jumping over.

A watchful gallery attendant with his accusing eye second guessed us and angrily called out from the corner; “gallery’s closed” proceeding to watch us till we left.

“Never mind” said Goldsmithson, going back to Tel Aviv the afternoon of tomorrow, perhaps never to return to England; “another time.” Ours not, the moment to stand beside one another and share a common interest in the presence of the statue, we were never to have a memory that would be specifically ours. Then I noticed her look of disinterest at the dissapointment leaking from my face and realised how pathetically lacklustre I looked in my shabby clothes, circumstance and surrounded by the works of the ancients that were already grabbing her attention away from me, shaming me physically and mocking my cowardice in defying the attendant.

We began to leave, but not before passing the castrated Greek statues now standing in silent agony, each a monument to the prudence of history’s course. Karina cracks a joke about circumcision. Together we stand briefly before the statue of some athletic looking ancient Greek, contemplating his mutilated genitals. Karina cracks more jokes at the expense of the emasculated marble man, whose humiliated head bows in her deference. I can’t help but read between her lines, take it personally. She giggles at the unfortunate man, who despite all else perfect about him, fails to impress in this department, unlike the Sheban mummy she just dug up with full phallus and pubic hair.

The Museum nears closing and Karina Goldsmithson says her goodbyes, plants a polite kiss on my cheek and walks in the opposite direction to me on her way home. Tomorrow she’ll be back in Tel Aviv analysing the ancient crotch of an anonymous Sheban, whilst I’ll be languishing in London, counting the days till her return.

© Ara Iskanderian November 1/11/09