Chronicles Of The Return

The last few weeks have been tough. I’ve been battling a recurrent infection, one that seems to crop up once a year. It’s pretty dreadful. By the time it is in full swing I am lethargic, full of malaise and generally feeling sorry for myself. I told myself, last time it occurred, that I would go to the doctor immediately once the symptoms appeared. Due to America’s horrible health-care system I had to wait two weeks to see a specialist, which was more than enough time for the symptoms to worsen. I walked into the doctor’s office with a significant gait in my left leg. He looked at me and shook his head. “Why didn’t you come earlier,” he asked.

“Had to wait for approval from my HMO. Took a week. You were booked the next week,” I said.

The doctor looked at me kindly and said, “next time call me and I’ll prescribe you something before you come in, okay?”

He’s certainly one of the best doctors I’ve ever interacted with. He has an exceptional bedside manner, listens to everything I tell him, queries me fully, often time spending upwards of thirty minutes with me. For a doctor that’s priceless.

The prescription is for a heavy anti-biotic. The kind where you spend 10 minutes in the sun and it leaves you feeling like you’ve crossed the Taklamakan without water.

As a side note, I’ve read on several occasions that ‘Taklamakan’ means ‘goes in, doesn’t come out,’ in an ancient Chinese, or possible Tokharian dialect. Having flown over the Taklamakan several times and circumambulated its edges, I have to say that I agree.

One May when my father and I were in Dun Huang, the last great oasis before the Taklamakan, I got to thinking about Xuanzang, a 7th century Buddhist monk who sneaked his way past the T’ang guards at the Jade Gate, into the Taklamakan. He then proceeded to cross it, disproving its meaning as a toponym, but no matter. He then crossed the Tien Shan, chilled at a Buddhist monastery in Samarkand–just a few years before the Arabs irrupted into Central Asia, and then did a backwards dogleg into Afghanistan and India where he spent a decade plus collecting Buddhist manuscripts to take back to China.

Buddhism was not new to China, but it’s safe to say its roots were nothing compared to those which dug deep after Xuanzang’s return to Chang’an, the capital of the T’ang empire. What course might Chinese Buddhism taken were it not for Xuanzang’s efforts at travel, discovery and exploration? And what course might my life have taken had I not been exposed to Chan Buddhism in China in 1999?

This diminutive monk spent his remaining days translating the Buddhist corpus is a spartan monastery cell, eschewing all glory and worldly goods and his good works echo down the centuries to my own time and my own debt of gratitude to him.

Now that’s a character with character. Central Asia is littered with them, from the monstrous Timur–aka Tamerlane, who left a trail of human skulls from Damascus to India–to the poignant Omar Khayyam.

I tend to think about people like Xuanzang and Polo and ibn Battutah when I am feeling sorry for myself. Sometimes it works: I feel better, realizing my pedestrian concerns, minor ailments and the general discontent I feel with my post-modern life do get the better of me.

But sometimes it fails: I want to be Polo, or Rabban Sauma, Wilfred Thesiger, people who lived a full life so far away from home. People who made the world their home, citizens of this great and tragic blue ball spinning off into eternity.

And then I get a text message and the world comes roaring right back at me.

If I’m rotting, it’s a charmed, golden atrophy. What calamitous catalyst that Turkish woman wrought on Friday is beyond my comprehension.

I was terrified: the white screen of death had been staring at me for weeks. Weeks of writing indolence—all wrapped up in the job search. Trying to be normal, respectable. And never knowing where to begin the final portion of the book: the white elephant in the room, Turkey.

Fits and starts. But many more fits than starts.

And then I heard that voice, that sound. Suddenly a torrent of words poured forth. Real inspiration. And I’m wary of inspiration, because it is the handmaid of the muse and the muse is a fickle bitch. She’s mean. Devious. Demanding. And what she gives she just as quickly takes away.

It started an hour later after I left the coffee shop: the words, at first a trickle and then a river, the stories just came over me like a ton of bricks. Maybe not the best metaphor, but I felt overwhelmed, relenting to the voice, the inspiration, as fickle as it is.

And it was easy, unforced. The words were true and pure and rolled off my fingertips like a poem, or a song in the night under clear skies and the moon. All of it: the mosques, the light of the skies in the Straits, the mountains, the smiles, the smell of raki, the bitter twinge of olives for breakfast. The characters, the moldy apartment with damp ceilings I stayed in. Mahmoud. The songs on my iPod in Istanbul blasted from the speakers. And the historical anecdotes came even easier. The wizened sufis and the cruel sultans. The ghosts of Sinan and Justinian merged, seamlessly, as effortlessly as gliding through the Seljuk mosques of Mesopotamia, the circle of a dome and the upside down triangle pendentives.

Before I knew it, I’d written almost ten thousand words.

It’s not for nothing that every travel journal I own begins with this invocation to her:

O’ muse:

When I am weak, give me strength.
When I am lonely, give me friends.
When I am afraid, give me courage.
And when I am lost in the darkness, help me find the light.
In exchange I offer you my words.

She’s fickle, no doubt. But she also rewards devotion.

It’s not the best shot in the world. But I had to have it. My father, Ahmad and I are hurling down the highway towards Meshed and the Holy Grail of all travelers in Persia: the tiled magnificence of the Gohar Shad, trying to make it there before dark. The day before was spent crossing the barren, lifeless Dasht-i-Kavir.

The great range of mountains in the photo is the Kuh-i-Nishapur. I was dying to go up into the hills and see the famed turquoise mines. Turquoise—the color of the Turks—that arresting faience adorning mosques and minarets from the Pillars of Hercules to the Straits of Malacca. Green may be the color of Islam but turquoise left an indelible, obsessive stain on me. The stain of blue in the harsh Central Asian heat and sun. Amidst the orchards of Samarkand and the opaque olive pools of Bukhar-i-Sharif and the summit of Persian architectural expression: the Sheikh Lutfollah mosque of Isfahan.

The mines, worked since antiquity, finally petered out in the late 19th century. Perhaps the turquoise mined here found its way onto the ring fingers of Chinese princesses and Roman potentates? Who is to say it is not so? In the grand sweep of time anything is possible. And it was a day pregnant with the possible.

Behind me was the Parthian Steppe. Just writing the words gives me chills, chills that conjure up images of those mail clad cataphracts who captured the emperor Valerian, or the wily archers who massacred a full legion of Romans and a consul—Marcus Licinius Crassus—at Carrhae in Mesopotamia, thus, dealing out fatal blow to the Triumvirate back in Rome.

“Parthian country,” I mumbled to myself as we raced across the red grass steppe. The dirt more crimson than the cereal laden grasses littering the steppe. I shook my head in the wind and heat and thought, “it is still a wild, feral land.”

A few miles East of us, set in a crease in the foothills of the Kuh-i-Nishapur, were the remains of the city itself. Jewel of Khorasan, home to Omar Khayyam and Farid al-din Attar, avatars of the great 10th-11th century blossoming of Persian science and mysticism. And then came the deluge: a new nation of wild horsemen stormed out of the Central Asian heartland, fresh from the conquest of Kwarizm, those Mongols, and Nishapur was obliterated, never to rise again.

We stopped and walked through the sun baked ruins: a wasteland. It is said that the Mongols left a mountain of skulls near a half wasted city gate as a warning: do not return.

But the ghosts did not heed the Mongols, for like a whisper, just above the breeze, I could hear them, a keening lament for a civilization lost.

Another interesting search came in today: “what do marco polo’s chronicles tell you about the impact these asian cultures had on europe.”

Polo’s chronicles don’t tell you much. But if you find a good annotated version, say, like Yule and Cordier, the amount of subsidiary information is amazing. Alas, there is no one book out there that really touches on this subject in toto. Most of the ones that try to, do so in a very polemical way. Which is sad, because the influence of Asia–from the Near East to the Far–on Europe is tremendous.

No, not the city in New Mexico, but the Portuguese conqueror of Goa and Malacca: Affonse da Alboquerque, to be precise.

Needless to say, I’ve been a bit pre-occupied the last several days, head buried in a bunch of 19th century accounts of travelers running amok–now there is a word with one hell of an etymology, but you’ll have to wait for the book for that story–up and down the Malay Peninsula. And then, there is this guy Alboquerque, or Albuquerque for you spelling Nazis out there.

He was a real piece of work.

In a nutshell, Alboquerque was ordered by the King of Portugal to capture Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea. The strategic rationale was pretty solid: cut off Moorish/Egyptian shipping of spices in the Red Sea and thus cut Venice–who shipped all the pepper and cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg from Alexandria, into the Mediterranean–out of the spice trade altogether. Trade was equally as cutthroat then as it is now.

Affonso was on his way to do his duty by the king when a report came in that the Sultan of Malacca had razed the Portuguese warehouse in Malacca and taken 20 Portuguese hostage, including Ruy de Araujo, it’s commander, or perhaps in modern parlance: the consul general.

It was late in the year and Alboquerque missed the monsoons blowing back towards Africa and Aden and thus decided to avenge Portuguese honor instead by attacking and capturing Malacca.

By an accident of weather, sometime in 1511, the great spice entrepot of Malacca was siezed by Alboquerque, 1,400 of his men and a bunch of German artillery.

The Portugeuse now maintained a chokehold on the single most strategic geographical locale of spice trade–the Straits of Malacca, that 250 mile long sliver of water between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The history of the Far East would never be the same.

One of my chief complaints on modern Central Asian scholarship is its intense focus on the Great Game era and the modern politics of the Central Asian energy corridor, Afghanistan and the like. This stuff is important, but there is so, so much more to Central Asia just under the shifting sands, hidden in the caravanserais lurking between silk road oases. One fact about Central Asia you may not know is this: there would not have been anything approaching modernity were it not for Central Asia’s Golden Age. Yes, I realize that’s a pretty cut and dry statement. But it’s nevertheless true—again, there are lots of moving parts involved in this history, but ideas like this were no doubt critical to Europe’s advancement. For example: the idea of ‘zero’ and ‘irrational numbers’ was knowledge transferred along the silk road between the 11th and 13th centuries:

The astronomer al-Khorezmi wrote a book comparing the utility of Indian numerals (and the concept of zero) with all other contenders, while others mined Indian geometry, astronomy, and even calendar systems for good ideas. Earlier Central Asians had tested various alphabets, including ones from Syria and India. Several local languages opted for an alphabet deriving from Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. It is hard to imagine a more intellectually open region ­anywhere.

And that’s not all, the list of technology transfers between East and West via the Central Asian ecumene, which to my mind is a better description of what we call the Silk Road, is long. Algebra? Yup. Algorithms? Yup. We all know about gunpowder. Perhaps most of you know the stirrup came originally from China?

A few years ago a Chinese scholar claimed that it was China who made the West what it is, via the vector of the Pax Mongolica. And Joseph Needham’s masterful series on Chinese technological advances goes a long way to validating this claim. But it’s also fanciful. There were multiple inputs into Europe’s rise from backwater to global dominance: in the aftermath of the Black Death wages for peasants had to rise, the opening of the sea route via Africa occurred, the ‘discovery’ of the New World, the combination of gunpowder and metallurgy creating cannons, the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, and the Renaissance awakening (in no particular order). But, there is a kernel of truth to the claim as well. The Pax Mongolica did expand Europe’s intellectual horizons—and of course there were the great Medieval explores like John of Carpini (probably the most courageous and hardy of them all, insanely overweight about 65 years-old, he road a mule–whilst sick–most of the way across the Steppe, which was literally terra incognita at the time, in winter), William of Rubruck, Odoric of Pordenone, and the master himself, Marco Polo.

Alas discovery is one thing, but practical applications are another: where would we be without gunpowder? Where would we be without paper? Where would we be without the stirrup? Or even the divine right of kings—a concept originating in China that spread to the West via Persia. In the end it was the rising hunger for spices, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, pepper and silk and all the assorted goods of the East—and then using the East as a place to offload the surplus goods of the West that gave rise to Europe’s dominance. But none of it could have happened without the trans-continental pollination that Central Asia provided.

And so, when I see an essay like this is a publication like the Wilson Quarterly, it makes me smile. This essay is a good introduction into medieval Central Asia and I look forward to the book he is writing.

Skiv posted an excellent response to my post about languages. I thought I would share it and my response.

It’s one thing to say that “the life and death of languages is much like the change of the seasons: timeless and irrevocable.” I don’t think that makes a good case for letting it happen, however. Letting some languages die because they don’t fit our present framework denies that there may be some future framework in which they are more relevant.

I don’t know if there is a good case or a bad case for letting it happen. I’ve pondered the nature of languages and know one ancient language, speak two modern languages fluently and have dabbled in others. I’ve tried to learn agglutinative languages, Turkish and Korean. I’ve tried to learn at least one analytical language, as well: Chinese. I do hope to one day learn Chinese and also Turkish. But that’s by the by.

The languages I have been most successful with are obviously declensional, Russian, Latin and English, although English has very, very little in the way of declensions any longer. Clearly my mind is ordered such that a languages of declensions is easier for me to ‘get.’ Alas, my attempt at Sanskrit was, well, the synonymity inbuilt in the language is just too difficult for me. At least at the current time. Although I may try again. I think there is something to be said for an educated person to understand the basics of the ancient trifecta of languages. But then, I’m a classicist in that sense.

I suppose that’s my current framework. As for future frameworks where such languages may be more relevant? I can’t speak to that, although there is a clear analogy to be made with preserving all of the species of animals on the planet. But I’m not really sure that analogy is applicable.

At the same time, I can agree that a language never exists in a vacuum; those who speak it, as with the use of any tool of any sort, do so because it serves a need. Even a completely constructed language, as Esperanto, Elvish or Klingon, does things for its speakers that another language does not. Obviate the need and the tool becomes obsolete to all but the antiquarian and the hobbyist.

I can’t really say the need is obviated, even when a language is dead. I’ll give you an example. Nat has written many times about how the decline in learning the classics, Roman (Latin) and Greek, has led to the decline in civics in America. I agree. If a language is the window into the soul of a culture, then a dead language can teach us things, help us to plot the path of success and avoid the potholes that other cultures lost wheels and axels to.

What’s pivotal to me is the cultural context of the language. Not just how we order a double-shot half-caff skinny dry vente in Urdu, but the shape and depth of the culture from which any language grows. Languages contain and express the subject positions of their speakers. The old saws about the Inuit having 44 words for “snow” and the Hawai’ians having 20 words for “lava” are illustrative. They fill a need to differentiate.

I couldn’t agree more with the larger point. I guess that is why I find linguistics—at least the comparative version of it, so fascinating. And it’s also why I always make it a point to learn the rudiments of the local language when I travel.

The writer and traveler Richard Burton reportedly spoke and read a great number of languages, including Sanskrit and Babylonian. The historian and Masonic philosopher Albert Pike read and integrated many ancient source documents into his text “Morals and Dogma.” At one time, being at least moderately familiar with ancient languages — at least Latin and Greek — as well as more than one modern language, was the mark of an educated person. Books from the turn of the last century often cite aphorisms and quotations in their original languages, the assumption being that even if the reader does not speak that language, they are at least educated enough to recognize the meaning of a famous phrase. Learn and understand the phrase, down to the subatomic level of understanding the subject position from which it was spoken, and you have the culture in the palm of your hand.

Again, this is an excellent point. It’s also why I learned Latin. Now, when I attended a private, parochial elementary school I studied Latin. But that was required. After receiving my bachelors I took to studying Latin and Ancient Greek, post-bacc. I made it through Latin and can functionally read it—and most of the Latin inscriptions I have come across in Europe and the Levant. Greek? Not so much. The aorist was terrible. And the third declension, what my professor kindly called, ‘the garbage dump of ancient Greek,’ was just as dreadful. I personally love seeing old Greek and Latin quotes in books and scholarly papers. I love translating them literally. I think my favorite it ‘sine qua non.’ It literally translates as “without which nothing.” Of course that’s the spirit of the modern translation: an essential condition or element; an indispensable thing. And yet, the literal is quite a bit more powerful in my book.

And yet we applaud the “diffusion” of English. It’s a useful tool, but I wonder that maybe we’re reshaping all our problems to fit the tool, instead of honouring the diversity of tools to address unique problems. “When you have a hammer, suddenly everything looks like a nail.” Not so many years ago, the Northern High Plains of the U.S. became a mecca for “call centres.” There’s a mixed cultural metaphor for you!

A cultural catachresis? I like it!

I’ve lately been turning this over in idle moments. The ability to travel anywhere at will has diffused English very widely. Cultures in isolation develop their own languages, from New Guinea to the Appalachians. As our globalized oil-and-debt-supported infrastructure contracts, I think we’ll see increasing divergence of local dialects again. Which leads me around full-circle to the realization that the diffusion of English also carries the markers of a culture and a worldview that may need to adapt to changing circumstances.

Agreed.

Though that means ultimately that communication across regions will require learning more languages (or at least allowing for regionalisms), I also think it restores the flexibility of language diversity to reflect and facilitate the development of robust localized cultures.

And this, in turn, I might add, will hasten the decline of some languages and speed up the growth of others. Timeless, and irrevocable, indeed.

I’m a linguistics geek. I fully confess that the comparative study of languages, that baseline to which we understand and perceive our worlds fascinates me. It’s led me down a lot of odd paths, one of which has been a rather dilettante-esque study of the Indo-Europeans. Yesterday, after languishing on my bookshelf for ages I finally completed J.P. Mallory’s “In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth.” It was an excellent book—but the archaeology made my eyes water over at times. It’s an summation of the available information up to 1989 and a rough hypothesis of where the proto Indo-European homeland was. And Mallory makes a strong case for the Pontic Steppe, which is also my preference. Of course, after the fall of the Soviet Union a lot more information—and archaeological sites—became available. Sadly the money was not commensurate with the opportunity. Regardless, I am looking forward to reading David W. Anthony’s, “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World,” in the very near future.

I’m not going to review the book, as there are plenty of those out there in the scholarly literature. I’m simply going to comment on one sentence in the book. Mallory writes, “As Ernst Pulgram observed thirty years ago, there are three ways by which we might imagine a language to expand: the migration of complete populations, infiltration of an area by small groups; or diffusion. . . The last hypothesis has never been encountered.”

That got me to thinking about the definition of the word ‘diffusion: the spread of linguistic or cultural practices or innovations within a community or from one community to another.”

I think we might very well be witnessing the global diffusion of English. Now, I’m not a language supremacist, or an absolutist, by any means. Languages die. Languages change. New languages are thus born out of old ones. It’s a story almost as old as human evolution, and possibly as older. I’m also very ambivalent about preserving languages on the brink of dying. If they die, they die. Certainly, I applaud the work of people who seek to document the literature of said languages, verbal and written, but the life and death of languages is much like the change of the seasons: timeless and irrevocable.

What I find fascinating about the idea of language diffusion is that it wasn’t possible fifty years ago when Pulgram made his comment. The technology wasn’t in place. But now with the internet? After visiting 54 separate nations on this planet and hearing at least that many different languages it always blows me away that so many people in the world speak English. And many people who speak English have little exposure to English speakers. In some places there is infiltration, like Korea or Japan where American soldiers are based. In others there is some small scale immigration, but none of it is wholesale. At least not anymore. Not after Australia and North America were populated by English-speakers, that is.

And so we live in an age where English has diffused across the globe, into the farthest nooks and crannies of China, into the jungles of Sumatra and the wilds of Anatolia. And there English is, breaking into the thought patterns of foreign tongues, sometimes like an unwanted guest, but always there. It’s fascinating to consider what the languages of the world will look like in two or three hundred years. Will they have become homogenized, or will they have broken up into so many news ones?