Last Friday, the Chinese drama student club, Thus Spoke Ann Arbor, took the stage of Angell Hall Auditorium A, and presented the Mundane World, a play in Mandarin originally written and directed by Meng Jinghui, a Beijing-based leading playwright and director of experimental theater. Meng is especially known for his avant-garde plays, the most famous ones among which are Rhinoceros in Love, Hitler’s Belly, the Accidental Death of an Anarchist, the Murder of the Hanging Garden, and the Mundane World. He developed a distinct and recognizable style of contemporary plays, which could be characterized by their humorous scripts, ridiculous storylines, satirical elements, and a mix of singing and dancing throughout the play.

The Mundane World is one of Meng’s signature works. The adaptation by Thus Spoke Ann Arbor is divided into four acts, developing three different storylines. The first one is about the romance between a monk and a Buddhist nun who ponder whether to resume secular life after observing the expressive love between a young couple. The second one is adapted from a story from the Decameron about a young man who falls in love with the daughter of a humble countryman. In an attempt to sleep with the young lady, the young man stays overnight at the countryman’s house, after which all the hosts and guests end up in the wrong beds. The third one, also from the Decameron, is about a stableman who pretends to be the king to spend the night with the queen, and fools the furious king who later knows about the illicit affair.

The script was beautifully written. Many lines were hilarious and others thought-provoking. The acting throughout the play was excellent. Act III adopted a quite unusual way to present the story: the stage was cut off into two parts as if there was an invisible line in the middle. The dilemma of the protagonists was cleverly shown by arranging two groups of actors/actress mirroring each other and performing at the same time to represent the two inner voices of the protagonists debating against each other.

I really enjoyed this comedy-drama, and I look forward to future plays presented by Thus Spoke Ann Arbor. The trailer of the play could be found under the link below (apologies for Chinese dub only):

Prior to my trip to Morocco, I thought that all oriental/Persian rugs were the same. Most of them red, with blue and cream-colored arabesques with tan outlines. Some of them featured in Jeff Bridge’s movies….

But after a visit to a Berber rug cooperative, I learned the subtle differences and personal touches that go into every rug. I also learned that Berber women are more productive than I am in my off-time!

But first, a word on Berbers. Both ‘Berber’ and the term ‘Barbarian’ come from the latinate Roman empirical term for outsiders, who spoke such a different language from Latin that the Romans thought all they were saying was “bar-bar-bar-bar” (basically the ancient version of the Charlie Brown adult voice). Berbers are not Arabic. They are known to have been in North Africa since at least 3000 BC. Waves of Berber migrants swept across North Africa in the third and eleventh centuries with further migratory and nomadic patterns within the country.

Most Berbers have created permanent settlements. Some speak Arabic and some have converted to Islam. However, it is important to know that Berber has its own culture, language, and history, apart from the Arab dynasties of North African and the Middle East. I asked a Berber man at the cooperative how they keep track of their history and he told me it is completely an oral culture.

I soon learned that Berber men are often farmers or migrant workers, while the women do the cooking, child care, and other household activities, including rug-making!

So without further ado, the Berber Rug Cooperative!

After entering another enchanting Moroccan door…

 

we entered the Berber rug cooperative. Like many other commercial entities in Morocco, they do not believe in conveying scarcity by displaying limited wares.

 

When I entered this Berber rug cooperative, I noticed a few things. One, that Moroccan rugs are not all Persian-looking. They are not all knotted, the way your prototypical Persian rug is. Moroccan rugs are notable for being embroidered, knotted, and woven (sometimes all in the same rug!). The use of these three different methods produce some highly textured floor decor that did not fit my taste, but provided one of the girls on my group with a great entry rug.

We were greeted by a man in traditional blue Berber garb.

 

In terms of the materials, sheep, goat, and camel wool are all fair game. In terms of patterns, Berbers traditionally incorporate diamond geometric patterns with natural symbols (wheat, river zig zags, etc). They dye their fibers saffron yellow, mint green, and henna orange.

 

Every tribe has their own story and set of symbols that the women pass down from one generation to the next. With their busy schedules, it is amazing that Berber women find time to weave at all, but one woman (if she has been trained from a young age) can make up to fifteen rugs in her lifetime! And these are not pot-holder mini-rugs. We’re talking 5 X 8 and larger.

Without books or a significant written culture, the Berbers place a great deal of emphasis on the symbols that stand for who they are, which are expressed in their rugs that they use every day.

 

 

 

 

 

I had this dream the other night which began with me talking to James Elkins, an art historian kind of guy with frameless glasses and big interested eyes that are very aware of themselves, and in fact he writes books on how to use them and see everything all at once but this time in particular we were discussing The Object Stares Back.

And he’s going on about how seeing is being seen, how everything we look at looks back, and the world is so full of seeing staring things that we can’t comprehend most of them, our minds can’t keep up and it becomes overwhelming very quickly. Soon enough we’re talking about images and how they like to provoke this “stifled dialogue” (his words) where there’s always this possibility of “disinterested seeing” while simultaneously offering the eyes so much, so that the image always sets us up for disappointment because it isn’t real – it’s just an illusion sitting on the wall in frames (like parentheses that keep the world’s words flowing around them as they sit untouched), little fences keeping the picture and the things inside it from escaping out into reality.

And I’m right there with him even when he goes on saying “furthermore, images are corrosive and have the power to melt parts of what we are and re-form them into new shapes” and I’m really digging this guy now and nodding my head and saying things like “yes!” and “damn!” and I realize we’re walking in a seemingly endless hall of luminescent blue-grey stucco and the shiniest hardwood floor I’ve ever seen, so glassy that I notice the reflections of all these paintings before the actual paintings themselves and there’s no ceiling so where’s all this light coming from? I look around in a state of bewilderment at how it’s not pitch black in here and I go to ask old Jim what he thinks and he’s gone. I’m alone in this strange mad corridor full of whispers and my footsteps sound obtrusive and echo all over so I stop walking and turn to hear with eyes what all this quiet ruckus is about.

Hanging there are five gigantic landscapes in gilded frames at least six inches thick, if they were parentheses they’d be in 98-point font and bold faced, and inside these massive golden fences are classical American painter Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire series. Each landscape is a snapshot of the same river valley at five points in an unnamed Greek-looking society’s evolution, depicting the Savage State, Pastoral State, Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and finally Desolation in that order, constructing a narrative that spans hundreds or maybe even thousands of years. Naturally I begin with the first painting on the far left-hand side and I get so close to the surface I can smell the old musty oil paint and just when I think I hear it the surface begins to ripple and shimmer mysteriously. What else is there to do but poke and the second my finger tip makes contact there is a flash of light even brighter than the hall and the hall is gone and so am I.

 

Midnight
moonlight
howling in the waves
footprints
card tricks
no one left to save

The fool sets one step a time a journey
sets a journey a time one step

The fool sets a time

Meeting moon
devil’s croon
but his chains are too loose
lovers’ dare
strength is here
foot hanging from a noose

Spin the wheel of fortune
see what you might find
sun and stars or hermit
all is found behind

High priestess lays with hierophant
sleeping side by side
but emperor and empress
are not content to hide
with justice in their chariot
they ride and ride and ride

Will you seek magician’s truth
strike the tower at its base?

Can you find the world inside
of death’s solemn embrace?

Temperance tips the scales and then
your judgement, your new face

Will you walk the way,
will you walk the way?

As much as I wanted to write a beautiful poem in honor of National Poetry Month, poetry is just not my craft: I’ve never worked on it, never gotten feedback on what I do haphazardly throw together, and usually I prefer to use anything that I write in poetic form as inspiration or building blocks for a song or essay. So although I pretty quickly decided to write an homage to a poet instead of a poem this week, I didn’t expect one poet to come to mind so immediately, clearly and irrefutably as an artist I want to honor: Charles Bukowski.

It might be because I’m back in food service, working at the North Quad dining hall. North Quad isn’t too bad; I can say with confidence that I’ve worked worse jobs. But there’s something about banging your head on the oversized milk prep tubs, about showering off that thin layer of grease after working grill, about reaching your arm into the garbage disposal up to the elbow and pulling out a consolidated wad of raisins, egg, yogurt, sausage and napkin, that is so goddamn far from poetry. There’s something about the burns on your forearms, the lingering smells of bleach and sour milk, the small, infected cut on your palm, that feel at once too dull and too intimate to abstract from. How do you transpire from sore feet? From hairnets? I don’t mind food service – sometimes I even like it – but there’s a certain embarrassing something about human nature that comes out when people are getting fed. The day drags on, the polite customers start to irk you, the rude ones suddenly deserve to die, and suddenly you feel weighed down by the sheer amount of grease, trash and dirty pans that go into feeding the masses. So how do you come home stinking like chicken grease and escape a mindset that accidentally, subconsciously derides the idea that your human experiences are worth making art out of?

Well, that’s when Charles Bukowski comes to mind.

My middle-school friend Montana Welton had made a startling jump from a propensity towards pulpy, serialized vampire novels in sixth grade to a suddenly refined preference for Kerouac, Salinger and Punk Rock anthologies in seventh grade, and she first lent me ‘Ham On Rye,’ by Bukowski around that time. The grim autobiographical narrative covered Bukowski’s childhood during the great depression, describing a childhood and young adulthood plagued by abuse, poverty, chronic acne, and isolation. I was intrigued and drawn in to Chuck’s gritty, proletarian world, and when I went looking for more novels I discovered that Bukowski had written volumes upon volumes of poetry.

The poems are forceful, declarative sentences separated by line breaks, elaborating on basic themes of Bukowski’s life: drinking, horseraces, women/whores, menial labor, and cheap hotels. Through the narrative of Bukowski’s body of poetry, we seem the poet as a laboring, legendary tough guy, a kind of superhero of everything voracious and brutal and secondrate. Bukowski’s “lowlife odyssey” has been described as a kind of comic-book world, the production of a poet who comes to the brink of self-reflection but can’t quite give up the need to be the hero of his own narrative – a pride that ultimately condemns him to be a ‘conventional writer.’ And it’s true that Chuck’s fierce pride and bravado might ultimately limit his capacity to self-reflect.

Yet presence of this ludicrous, whore-mongering, horse-betting, hyper-masculine character has stuck around in my life and my thoughts, because he gave me the tools to understand how poetry – how art – could be pulled out of the least lofty of human experiences. Would Bukowski shy away from writing about the grime of the dish machine, the spilled antidepressants, the shiny scars left by a mysterious rash, the cruel or stupid lover? Though Bukowski’s poems may caricature the poet as a colorful character, an uncomplicated, comic-book serialization, they resound with me because they took pride in the insanity of life. Where poets often seem to be trying ruefully acknowledge life’s gritty mess in an attempt to transcend it, Chuck just rolled around in it. And that’s what I love about him, because that’s all that we mortals can really do.