The problem with Orientalism is that you get into it and discover that even the things you liked (because they were your own, or just because they were so bad) actually have connections to those across the dividing line. When you watch the above clip from a film by Fritz Lang called “Das Indische Grabmal” you are liable to think that before Bollywood borrowed everything else from the West it also got its inspiration for bad dance sequences from them. We learned to be Indian from Western cinema. Every colonial cliche adorns the walls of our imagination. (Not true, I hope someone is saying. Partly because Indian cinema is older than Lang. But also because I’ve been presenting a faulty principle. Because if what I’m saying is true, then those who came of age in the eighties learned to love their country from “Gandhi” and learned to love, period, from “Jewel in the Crown.” And that can’t possibly be right, right?)

Thanks, Linta Varghese, for the clip.

This evening I participated in a beautiful Christmas ceremony at the Vassar Chapel; led by my friend Sam Speers, the service was very much a homage to a God who, as Thomas Merton has written, is out of place in this world. “His place is with those who don’t belong, / Who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, / Those who are discredited, / Who are denied the status of persons, / Who are tortured, bombed, and exterminated.” What I found moving among all those human voices singing and praying together was Sam’s repeated invocation of spirituality as a blessing or grace–not as politics or its deathly absence, but instead, among darkening days, and amidst doubt, as an opening up to love and light.

I read out aloud to the congregation a poem chosen by the Reverend; it is “The Hammock” by Li-Young Lee, whose closing lines are:

Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am
by coming before me. And my child’s wishes, older than I am
by outliving me. And what’s it like?
Is it a door, and a good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.

Photo

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