ESSAY: Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part II Mullaya
10.01.07Part two of an essay series based on the theatrical production of 'Nine Parts of Desire' by Heather Raffo.
Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part II Mullaya
By
Mark Edward Grimm
Part II: Mullaya
In a scene form ‘Nine Parts of Desire” we see Mullaya, and old Iraqi woman standing on the banks of a river in Bagdad.
BAGDAD – “Without the river there would be no here, there would be no beginning.”
Is it the beginning that we long for? Isn’t there always the desire to return to the womb, to return back to the point of orgin? If we follow the ‘lines of flight’ back to the past, in our collective memories, navigating the machinic phylum and understanding its emergent properties then we find the intensity of our earliest memories are that of “eden”.
The river is the river of life, the root of civilization. “Qurna, Eridu, Ur. The garden of Eden was here” - the Garden of Eden was Baghdad. The Garden of Eden is Iraq (Babylon)– the dawn of civilization is the garden of civilization.
Lets quickly look then at the garden. What does it mean to be a garden? A garden bears many things. A garden bears fruits and vegetables and anything else that we can domesticate as a food source OR anything that naturally occurs as a source of food. A garden is also a place where plants, bushes and trees grow. It creates a shade on the earth. A garden is also a place where things rot – they die and then they are returned back to the soil later to be resurrected in the rejuvenation of new growth. A garden is also a place of ‘pests’ – at least a pest to us and to the garden – a place where external entities from outside penetrate the wealth of the garden because the garden is a living organism – a living ecology.
The pest, I think, is the most interesting aspect of this garden ecology because if we as humans are trying to tend to the garden and what the garden produces and offers us then we are always trying to get rid of these pests that are coming from the outside of our ‘perfect’ ecological systems in order to feed off our self-created system as a host. It is amazing that it is as if reality itself is trying to burst into our nice little harmonious systems in order to disrupt our ‘utopia’ and create chaos. If there were no such thing as a ‘garden’ would the ‘pest’ exist?
It would be kind of like saying that if an apartment OR house didn’t exist for us to live in would there be such thing as ‘dust’? We are always trying to push this thing called ‘dust’ out of the house only for it to eventually creep back in – on our pants on our shoes etc. This is like the void again – the void is always trying to push itself back into a place that is constantly trying to eradicate it. Rats in the sewers, roots and ‘weeds’ pushing themselves out of the concrete and pavement of the roads – parking lots. Is as if we are only interested in building an illusion of the world as our own perfect ‘garden’ – always trying to re-create this perfection of what we keep remembering in our collective memory. In America this is called ‘Disney World’ but in Baghdad this is called ‘The Garden of Eden’.
The ‘Garden of Eden’ stretches back in our collective conscience to when we were apes – when we evolved. BUT the more modern version – in ancient history – is the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’ which was once in present day Al-Hillah in Iraq. As described by he Greek Historian Diodorus:
The Garden was 100 feet long by 100 wide and built up in tiers so that it resembled a theater. Vaults had been constructed under the ascending terraces which carried the entire weight of the planted garden; the uppermost vault, which was seventy-five feet high, was the highest part of the garden, which, at this point, was on the same level as the city walls. The roofs of the vaults which supported the garden were constructed of stone beams some sixteen feet long, and over these were laid first a layer of reeds set in thick tar, then two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and finally a covering of lead to prevent the moisture in the soil penetrating the roof. On top of this roof enough topsoil was heaped to allow the biggest trees to take root. The earth was leveled off and thickly panted with every kind of tree. And since the galleries projected one beyond the other, where they were sunlit, they contained conduits for the water which was raised by pumps in great abundance from the river, though no one outside could see it being done. (Wellard, 1972, pp. 156)
Like all present day gardens this was a controlled garden – a fabricated garden, a constructed garden. And like all present day constructions – especially constructions that have reached utopic proportions – it invited the pests at the outskirts of the city walls looking to feed on that same ‘utopic’ vision yet ‘destroying’ that vision in the process allowing a morphogenetic process to occur that was not in the initial intent. The naked, thus, must put on clothes again to shield the intrusions of the outside created through the specific conditions of the inside.
But unlike an invading force of populations, viruses or pests - the very earth that it rested on – through an earthquake it was destroyed in the first century B.C transforming this ‘garden’.
And again the ‘imaginary’ was rebuilt in a new form, the area of present day Al-Hillah emerged as the center of learning, education and technology in the Islamic world. A new garden of illusion created but also at the same time – again – creating its own vulnerabilities through our own concepts of perfection. From the outside – a sweeping void the ‘nothing’ again consumed in the form of the ‘nomadic method’.
As Mullaya said:
“When the son of Genghis khan burned all the books in Baghdad the river ran black with ink”.
In 1256 a ‘black death’ of ‘nomadic’ forces swept in and the Mongol empire – having no regard for the structure of the city. This was not a ‘misunderstanding of the city’ as many would argue (Deleuze & Guatarri 1987) but instead it is, on the contrary a misunderstanding of nomadic external forces and the power of a decentralized ‘war machine’ on a structured state.
The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking. (Ibid p. 354)
Because there are always going to be cracks in the milieu, especially a very homogenous plane - because it is much easier for something external (culture, social organization) to be ‘the other’ - that it sets the soil for easy penetration and replication. Once there are drastic homogenous conditions it is much easier for the potential of the reverse to emerge or transcend upon that same consistent plane. The radical shift from the ‘State’ to the ‘nomadic machine’ is even more extreme and to that end the ‘nomadic machine’, once it has transformed a space from an intensive ‘minor’ organizational schematic to an intensive ‘major’ system must then recondition this severe anxiety of the ‘conquered’ state into a new anxiety – a new void as a the return of a linear aristocracy.
The conquering of the Maya became an example of this extreme external, foreign force descending upon them. This was a ‘super void’ in the sense that the two cultures – Mayan & European ecologies, biology’s etc. had been completely separated for thousands of years – since the initial embarking on separate journeys from the “garden of eden”. While the European populations had exposure to intense civilization (dense urban environments, market economies), the Maya, being relatively new from emerging out of nomadic populations relatively, did not. This created a condition of sterilization that had openings for all these different external relations to exploit, develop and emerge as a dominant ‘majority’. Disease, religion, external substance (alcohol) easily found a vulnerable host to develop within. As McNeill (McNeil 1976, Delanda 1997) says of the Europeans, they contained within their own biology a “biological weapon urban conditions of life [had] implanted into the bloodstreams of civilized peoples.” (p.62, p. 131) So in a way, all they had to do was to show up – and biology took its course.
From then on it was all too easy – history could be wiped like a computer hard-drive. The bishop Diego de Landa “in one of histories worst acts of cultural vandalism, … burned all Maya manuscripts that he could locate in his effort to eliminate “paganism.” (Diamond p. 159) This was an easy result from, as Delanda (1997) says, “cultural material [that] flowed together with genes and biomass (not all human) across the Atlantic [creating] a whole complex mixture that triumphed” (p.133) over the Mayan populations. A ‘blank slate’ had been created and in this way an entire continent was “transformed into a supply region for all three spheres of the European economy: material life, markets, and anti-markets ” (Ibid).
Is the present day – 2007 – Iraq this same promise of a ‘blank slate’? Except here there is no ‘virgin’ ground for a new emergent becoming – this ground is too old, ancient. It is as though we are trying to get back to the garden that we left yet the garden is different – it has changed, mutated and morphed in unexpected ways. It is as Mullah says, the “great dark sea of desire”.
The variations in possibilities have been expended in a multitude of ways prior to even our slightest conception of the space, topologies and histories involved. In this sense the major (the nomadic) is too strong and the sedentary army cannot proceed against the smooth planed that has settled in, as Mullah says, “This land between two rivers”.
Obviously the old techniques were tried to an extent. When the American army invaded it protected the economic interests of the oil fields yet allowed the museum to be vandalized. Another erasure of history - is there a word for this? To control a society, to dominate a people we know for certain - their history must be erased. Yet as we also know – total recall is inevitable. Memories always resurge, bubbling and brewing from underneath the concrete, the parking lot that has tried so hard in vain to hold back the earth from doing what it wants to do – what it desires most to do – grow.
American slavery has shown this because out of this cultural elimination there is still a culture that is retained – the blues, jazz emerged from this great cultural repression – it could never leave, it was always there. By repression, homogenization - we breed super-culture. Like with the virus – by eliminating viruses we give rise and opportunities to super viruses. And ‘terrorism’ – whatever our subjective understanding subscribe the definition to be - the more we try to eradicate ‘terrorism’ we help to build new forms – super-terrorism.
“The Garden” is this great illusion and also paradox. The more we build and create this garden as an image of something that we think we lack – some vision of ‘good’ and ‘utopia’ – the more we are inviting what we don’t want from the outside – inside. When we try to build this garden anew – a creation of a new location – our garden will both spread and thrive OR the tenders of ‘the other’ garden, viewing our garden as an invading weed such as in an aesthetic war between greening states, will stop it.
So to return to the beginning, the question for me is not - why do we need the garden? The question instead is why does the garden need us? What do we do to this garden that it cannot do on its own? The difficulty is that our memories of this garden have all slowly changed through and within populations to the point that we do not know or recognize this ‘Garden of Eden’ when we see it anymore – too much time has past since parting ways long ago in the cradle of human evolution. The garden has ceased to need us because we have become so reliant on NOT needing the garden – precisely because we are looking for something that either already IS or a garden we can re-create (Disney World) in our own fantastic illusion of perfection – and the garden is bored of disingenuous relationships which means we are not necessary anymore to its survival.
Delanda, M. (1997) A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. New York: Zone Books
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. London: Penguin
McNeil, W. (1976) Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, NJ: Anchor/Doubleday.
Wellard, James. 1972. Babylon. New York, NY. Saturday Review Press.
_
No trackback:
Trackback link:
Please enable javascript to generate a trackback url