dance of the albatross
(3,270 words - with footnotes)

A REPORT FROM THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS:
A MODULATION ON ART AND POLITICS

Art has always been political. With respect to the material context of the body politic, it is reflection, emanation and rebellion; a multi-dimensional, imperfect nexus which trickles back to the flickering torches of pre-history, to cave painting, ritual burial and the grunt of rudimentary tribal chant, and also to the symbolic codes of writing, which arose later from the sandstone fonts of the city-state.

Fiction's symbolic axis turns on human interaction, so that even in a romantic fiction, love is political, both tactically and also inherently in its positing of a dialectic between poles. The deliberate avoidance of societal or overtly political reference points within such narratives is a consciously political act, defined by the publisher's guidelines, the genre's historical origins, and fear of the slush-pile.

Parallel processes apply in crime, sci-fi and erotic/pornographic fiction, the generic nature of the characters and the over-riding dominance of metaphor revealing the true political charge of such genres. Literary fiction sets as its broad agenda, a depiction of the potentially fluid human condition within a context, and is therefore overtly political in nature. Epic, narrative and lyrical poetries are equally enmeshed in the thoughts, feelings, responses and actions of humans or their simulacra, and therefore also have political relevance, whatever the overt content. Oral forms, from which the written arose, and which have deep linkages with music/architecture, tend to carry an implicit tribal/universal ethos, and so might be regarded as sonic cartographs of societal evolution.

From initial impulse, through form, content and on to the responses of professional readers, agents, publishers, booksellers, reviewers and general readers (not to mention the tangential interactions of the work with other artistic creations and the judgement(s) of historians), everyone involved is making political decisions. Every time we lift finger bone to keyboard, we are on the point of creatively re-playing the mythologies of Babylon, Zimbabwe, Firenze, Moenjo Daro, Stratford and Anyang, or perhaps those of the Native Australian dreamscape or the Nazca dust-lines 1.

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The writer never attains total awareness of a piece of work. If they did, it would have become an item of propaganda or an advertisement, which need not necessarily negate it as a work of art, but which shifts its subconscious effect away from provoking thought to the triggering of one-dimensional behavioural responses whose aim is to cower the reader; to force them into a place of submission which exists without the possibility of heterodoxy. The scriptic ark of the US film industry is broadly regressive; glorifying capitalism through idols/stereotypes, it seldom questions from first principles. Faith texts possess a powerful aesthetic because they stimulate thought around an immanent, yet elusive, music. Still, the skins of their manuscripts have been worn like flags.

Writing and politics: not a simple nexus. In the heat of the latest Levantine conflict, the most prominent poetic advocate for Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish 2, wrote a volume of love poetry. To write of love while your home is being bulldozed requires a peculiar kind of concentration, one which by its very existence, is liberating and which, morally, psychologically and spiritually, is 'righting the wrong' which has been committed against you. Death may be the ultimate wrong, the ubiquitous injustice, or it may be the great leveller, and therefore the defining right. But it is only these things when we write about it. And in doing so, we define the course of its political trajectory though our lives.

Contexts change, and a work of art which possessed a particular relevance in one period may acquire a quite different connotation in a later era. Any piece of art may be used for propagandist purposes when its complexity is ignored in favour of a simple, concretised, sloganistic interpretation. Every flag was once a work of art; romantic fiction is degraded mediaeval romance cycle. The C12th troubadour movement celebrated the chivalric quest for unattainable love, produced beautiful poetry and song and helped spread a sense of refinement and various musical instruments throughout western Europe. It was also subversive (its Arabo-Cathar 3 associations, its Mariolatry 4 and the fact that the some of its most prominent troubadours and patrons were women) and it was obliterated by the Papal Inquisition. Viewed from a modernist position, the idealisation of woman would be seen as yet another 'maid-mother-crone' tactic of control, the art, merely a distorted expression of those (the women of the nobility) who had been denied any real power in society. But that part of France recovered only recently from cultural-linguistic demise, and scores of Black Madonnas remain secreted in backwoods churches, cryptic reminders of the old matriarchal order represented through, and before, written history, by figures/concepts/women such as Astarte, Demeter, Isis, Kali-Durga, Fatima, Zeinab, Maryam, Brigid, Aisha, Mary Magdalen, Binah, Umrao Jaan, Pakeezah, Teresa of Avila, Razia Sultana, Jeanne d'Arc, succubi, witches, midwives and so on. 5

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Regressive politicians have used such figures as grist for the mills of their particular societal mythologies, while defence of a local language/literature so easily can turn into parochial xenophobia. In the beginning, Europa was a bull-riding virgin who had the Aegean coast of Greece named after her. Asia was the 'sunrise' coast opposite. Hellenism's Indo-Atlantic arc became a major defining factor in Islamic civilisation. Egyptian-Minoan-Greek-Islamic. Sikander (Iskander, Alexander) became a mythical hero in Islamic folklore; along with Socrates and the rest, he had been living in Alexandria, Delhi and Damascus long before the vellum and papyrus of Greek civilisation was transmitted to the dons of Oxbridge and turned by them into some kind of leather-bound English hymnal. For three centuries, the dons have been applying a politically-loaded construct retrospectively. The Romans did not see themselves as 'Europeans'; lacking in geographical and mythological integrity, that concept really developed during the Crusades as a means of defining 'Christendom' as an exclusive entity. Yet how many people, how many artists, today question this, and other, 'fundamentalist' views? The mythologies have been re-written as a closing of the minds. A debate around such questions of first principle is badly needed because the spurious appropriation of traditions by this or that political movement is based on superficial and false assumptions in pursuit of monolithic circuits of control: e.g. India-Hindu-caste system; Islam-burqa/Wahhabism-hatred of Jews; Judaism-the 'West'/Israel-hatred of Arabs; Christianity-Renaissance-love-blue eyes-whiteness-the Atlantic axis, and so on 6. To paraphrase Trotsky: History, as written by the arms-dealers. In C9th Cordoba, the master composer-musician and fashion celebrity, Ziryab, added a fifth, a 'soul', string to al 'ud ('the lute'); a good model for the dissemination of the seeds of human language. From the silent darkness of their wells, artists must strive to reveal connections, linkages which have never been broken (because they are immanent), but which have been hidden, denied, rusted over by those (artists and politicians) who would that we remain serfs for all time. Humanity, and art, are legion, and everything is linked to everything else. Long live the heretics!

However conceived and executed, art can be used as propaganda by both (opposing) camps. Thankfully, perhaps, it is an unreliable fellow-traveller. Artistic geniuses may be bigots, misogynists or racists. Wagner, Mishima and Naipaul confused the dialectics of art, mythology and politics. Rather than make allowances for such, we must strive never to forget those other brilliant artists who never had the chance to shine or emerge, or who were crushed, killed, mutilated, simply because of their ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, age or gender, or because they dared question from first principles. In whichever way we are capable, we must step into their sandals, into the flesh of their soles and we must walk the wildernesses through which they could not walk. This, of course, is a blatantly honest political exhortation. Such a thing may be impossible. It is difficult enough simply to tread in our own feet; by what authority, then, do we presume do display the skins of others? At best, artistically, we may hope that our state of awareness may allow such streams to seep into our subconscious and thereby become part of that which we attempt to create.

Flying into Trouble - Manteq-at-tair: A Modulation for Alba 'The Conference of the Birds' ('Manteq-at-tair'), was written in the late C12th by Persian Sufi, Farid ud-Din Attar. It describes the spiritual journey of a flock, led by a hoopoe guide-bird, from the secular to the divine. It was written in the multi-layered, allegorical, epic form similar to that of Dante and Chaucer, around two classic Sufi themes, love and self-annihilation. In English, it is 4,400 lines long. I was commissioned to write a short version for inscription on a wooden book within a renga platform 7 at the centre of an area of proposed conversion (from post-industrial wasteland to regenerative, geopoetical garden) behind a theatre in an ethnically diverse part of Glasgow. The company, Nationale Vite Activa, which had won the contract to 'raise' the 'Hidden Gardens' had consulted widely with the local community as well as with artists, architects and botanists from South Asia and Scotland, their aim being to create a living space which would grow naturally and gradually, which the local community would feel was their garden and which would also have a universalist ethos.

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Attar's poem was appropriate for this setting for several reasons: Firstly, even in English, it is very beautiful. Secondly, the theme of quest for pantheistic union melded with the philosophical concept of garden as mirror of paradise. Thirdly, in our incurably insectiforous world, the Sufi message of antinomianism is a powerful one. Fourthly, there is a tradition, going back to Anglo-Saxon, of bird-poetry in English. Fifthly, the concept of journey resonates powerfully with those who left their villages and towns in South Asia to make a new life in Scotland (Alba)/Britain (Albion) 8. And lastly, when I visited the site, all I could hear in the midst of the city, was birdsong!

My strategy was to transform the problems inherent in turning an eight hundred year-old Farsi epic (via a recent, complete translation) into a relatively short poem in English for a wooden book in a C21st garden. I altered species and drew on linguistic, folkloric and mythic references from Scots, English, Urdu, Punjabi and Gaelic (e.g. the guide-bird became a white stork). In the end, I had a motley, yet appropriate, crew of birds, each possessed of a spiritually-debilitating flaw. I changed 'the King' to 'the Queen', partly as a matriarchal re-instatement, partly because the female is humanity's original genetic blueprint and partly because, in English, the shape of the letter, 'Q' resembles the body and tail-feathers of a bird.

These are a few samples:
All the way from the lands of the pure to the land of ice-white cliffs
Once before had the white stork come this way,
Gille-copain chasing the gazelle
Wrapped in a goatskin cloak
The plural reference to Pakistan implies that there is more than one purportedly pure land, while the cliffs could be those of Albion/Alba. In 1416, a mating pair of white storks was spotted in the spire of St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. No more came to Britain till the summer of 1967. 'Gille-copain', linked to the name, 'Giles', is Gaelic for 'cup-bearer'; a Sufi reference to the one who bears the wine-filled jaam of inspiration/illumination. The gazelle is an Arabic symbol of love. The goatskin cloak also refers to the name, Giles, and to the legend of the saint, who like a Sufi ('suf' means 'wool'), was clad in a goatskin cloak.
From the banjar zameene of Paradise, strode the peacock:
The Punjabi word for 'wasteland' links the peacock's Edenic expulsion (for the sin of pride) with T.S. Eliot's influential post-'Great' War poem.
Through a hole in the hoolet mosque, with mouse eyes the owl stared into the night,
Searching ever for yellow dirt, and hooting:
Once, I was a monarch's daughter.
Hoolet is Scots for 'owl'. 'Yellow dirt', filthy lucre, is a nod to Robert Burns and also to fool's gold, a Sufi/alchemical term.
The rising bones of the lark trilled in forgetful, melodic insanity,
Boasting crystal pride among the empty vaults:
I am the shadow of a saint, moving across heaven's blue valley.
My arc is perfect nastaliq: I have no need of journey.
Vaughan-Williams spins into a nastaliq arc of Farsi/Urdu/Arabic script, whose cursive form resembles the lark's soaring trajectory.

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The birds travel through the valleys of Quest (in Gaelic, 'Sireadh'), Muhhabbat (Farsi for spiritual love), Gnosis, Separation, Wahdat (Arabic for 'Unity'), Raivelment (Scots for 'Bewilderment') and Poverty/ Nothingness. In Verse 27, the theme of darkness and rebirth, and inspiration/prophecy, through the Quranic/Biblical legend of Jonah and the Whale, appears:
Burn like the moth in the candle's flame!
Be drawn whole by the breath of the whale
By Verse 31, we're
In the nowhere place, [where]
There grew a great, hollow tree…
…It was the first, the oldest, tree
and we're in Pollokshields, Glasgow, in the midst of the 'Hidden Gardens'.
A page of wood, the size of a door,
Runelled with letters of sap and wave…
…Moon, cloud, leaf, wind
Ten-and-twenty grains, the breath they had sold.
Celtic runes, haiku-esque forms and Judas Iscariot! In the theme of the ten-and-twenty birds who make it, we hint at the Simurgh (lit. 'thirty birds'), the Queen, whose revelation is imminent, but also at the children's English nursery rhyme.
The souls of the thirty rose free, as One, into the light, into the bodhran mirror
Whence they saw, reflected, a great palace shaped like a quaich and on the Throne
Thirty birds
The Queen
Back to Rabbie Burns, via Perso-Gaelic drum mirrors, whisky jaams and alchemical marriage over a quaich. The climax. But
This pearl, this fana, cannot be pierced,
You have no knowledge of what lies ahead
So sip dark whisky from the quaich of baqa,
Be nothing first!
Only then, will you exist
Huu

Liberties have been taken, as to evoke the music's vitality, as an 'ud virtuoso must experiment with the traditional form of the maqam, or as Beethoven radically altered waltz sound-forms in the Diabelli Variations. Flamenco was appropriated by Franco and turned into an anodyne tourist pageant, its roughness gentrified into saccharine. However, a new generation of practitioners has re-defined the genre, recognising and delineating its inherently political nature and its Arabo-Sephardo-Gypsy origins as felag menu, 'the music of the peasants'. One of the most powerful of these artists, Enrique Morente is steeped in the deep song of the Vandal lands, from martinete to flamenco mass to perhaps the most explosive electric folk-rock opus of all, Omega. Tradition is muscular and inclusive; it is not some precious weakling to be djinn-sealed in a glass case and admired from afar with a guilty (?frightened) awe. That would be the death of it, indeed! To counter the appropriation of art by the cohorts of the tyrannical (we will never prevent it from being so appropriated), artists must aesthetically and politically constantly re-invent the basic forms and thus breathe new life into them and so subvert the peacock's attempt to make them dance to its simple beat: Mor! Mor!

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However, in the final analysis (and may it never be written!), at the level of the complex, global society, if they are to allow their creations to breathe, to truly exist as independent beings, to possess, as it were, voice and soul, artists need to 'let go'. And so, the politics of the piece becomes inherently unstable, the work opening itself to rival interpretations. This parallels the changing subsets of language, the genetic flow of human life and the dynamic of politics itself. Every fiction is an energetic re-write of history, of the pattern of knowledge/mythologies, and artists must ceaselessly examine and expostulate on the past which is part of us and which constantly (re-)creates our present. Writers are the shamans, the griots, of human time.

Gorky's work transcends Stalinist appropriation and Chinese opera survives the Cultural Revolution. Great art is flexible and potentially universal. 'Traditional' art-forms tend to be tenacious, subliminal and transmutable. West African music, in the USA, becomes blues, jazz and rock; Eisenstein's 'Byzantine' work eludes total definition; Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed pushes beyond the Brechtian dialectic, eschewing the protagonist/antagonist/chorus model of classical theatre in favour of a form where audience become actors in a fully-engaged, politically-aware context, to the point where these separate terms lose their meaning.

Just because something is 'old' or self-consciously belongs to a recognised tradition does not mean that it is regressive politically. The work of Saadi of Shiraz is popular with eight year-olds in Iran and yet for centuries, also has fuelled the highest levels of scholarly discourse. It has become the language, and is impossible to censor. Attar was persecuted for his poetry and beliefs. The peacocks, the owls, the ducks and all the others are still in power and are running our gold and our lead, our lives and our deaths. Such writing is no less risky today.

Perhaps the significance of art ought ultimately to reside in our definition of its essence, its core aesthetic (however that word mutates, culturally), its delivery of truth in pure forms, all the while never losing awareness of the origins, contexts and appropriations, the symbolisms and synaesthesias, which define, frame and impact upon it. On this level, art is filigreed, manifold, calligraphic, at once, both stability and change; the antithesis of the monolithic. Through the depth and universality of its possibilities, art can transcend politics and thus avoid total appropriation. The substrate upon which art draws, has a zillion names and as many shades of reality. Next time there's a clear night, go and stand in a gutter and gaze at the stars. If you're lucky, you might just hear the sound of wings flapping through the darkness.

Footnotes:

1) Babylon, etc.: ancient cities. The Nazca dust-lines, many miles long, were cut into the ground by the Nazca civilisation of S. America.

2) M. Darwish (b. 1942) has penned over 20 vols. of poetry. Most of his work deals with the impact of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

3) One theory attributes troubadour poetry as deriving from Arabic forms, via Spain. Many love-courts were sympathetic to the contemporaneous, anti-hegemonic Cathar heresy.

4) Mariolatry: Excessive reverence for the Virgin Mary (or possibly for Mary Magdalene).

5) Astarte was a Levantine fertility goddess (=Aphrodite), later demonised by Christianity as 'Ashtaroth'. Demeter was a Greek fertility goddess, Isis was Egyptian 'queen of heaven', and Kali and Durga are the two fierce aspects of the goddess Parvati , consort or energising power of Siva the destroyer in the Hindu cosmic cycle. Aisha and Fatima were the powerful wife and daughter, respectively, of Muhammad, while Zeinab was Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who in the face of Imperial Rome, seized power from her husband and established her own, Levantine empire. Maryam and Mary Magdalene were mother and disciple, respectively, of Jesus. Binah is the Kabbalistical (esoteric Jewish) feminine symbol for 'Understanding', a prelude to wisdom. Umrao Jaan was an Indian film, based on the first major Urdu novel and possibly the autobiography of a mid-C19th Mughal courtesan who was a musician and dancer who tried to change her traditional role (and who suffered for it); Pakeeza was an Indian film about a similarly-talented and rebellious (fictional) courtesan ; Razia Sultan was a C13th ruler of the Delhi Sultanate (and subsequently also the subject of a film) who stood up to male domination. Teresa of Avila was a C16th Spanish Catholic mystical saint and poet; Jeanne d'Arc was the mediaeval French Catholic mystico-nationalist general who became the saviour of France; succubi are female spirits in the western European tradition, said to seduce men during the night.

6) Of course, thankfully, countless individuals in (and of) these geo-conceptual domains make complex personal differentiations between such political and cultural polarities.

7) Japanese platform, a focus from which poetry is elicited and recited in a collaborative, communal fashion.

8) Ancient names for these lands; in Latin, 'alba' means 'white'.

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