Full Squaring the Circle

I just finished a second day of shooting again down here in Tirunelveli for the Edward Sargent film, and already Madurai seems like a strange, distant dream that I had and am trying to determine if it were just a dream or reality. Madurai is unlike any town that I have ever been in, and probably won't encounter again to some degree. I asked my friend Handel from Tirunelveli about what people think about Madurai from other parts of Tamil Nadu.

"Chaos," was the first word out of his mouth. Indeed, chaos, as I have written about before.

I further asked him what do non-Madurai people think about the people from Madurai. He told me that they are best known for their fondness and passion for the arts and their gift of gab. It got me to thinking that that pretty much sums up my four favorite mid-sized cities that I have lived in: Austin, Texas, Bologna, Italy, Antwerp, Belgium, and now Madurai, India. Each of them boast of a lively arts community, replete with civic events highlighting the city's dedication to the arts as well as being known for writers and well-versed speakers.

From each of these I have gleaned an essential part of what makes me tick as a person. Each city has added an angle and side to me, and with Madurai, I feel that the picture has been completed and has become a final complement to what I value in life and seek in a cityscape if it is to be a backdrop to my life. I love traveling to the "big cities" of NYC, Chicago, London, Paris, Rome, and so forth as well as the small, quaint villages of Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy, Sneem, Ireland, Maruthakulam, India, or Camden, Maine and the like, but the bulk of my life has been spent in a mid-sized city like Madurai.

From Austin, I feel that I developed my formal educational training and open-mindedness. A passion for outdoor activities and the awareness of a city "identity," that being "weird" for Austin. A love of coffee shops and specialty grocery stores, live music and good, homestyle foods of all types.

From Bologna, having been associated with the Università di Bologna, the oldest European university, I gained a sense of tradition and historical sense of educational import. Bologna is a city of civic pride as well as a place for intense protest and forward thinking. It is the city of divine Italian food where I learned to cook and an appreciation for the deft hand of Italian detail in a city that is not a tourist destination such as Firenze or Venezia. I learned a sense of living on a daily basis, picking up foodstuffs for dinner on the way home and appreciating the strolls under the endless portici that adorn all of the sidewalks of Bologna.

In Antwerp, I have learned a city in a new language. I began and ended a marriage that lasted nearly 20 years there with many, many, many ports of call in between. I have learned the role of raising a child there and how to rebuild my life after a few years of difficulties that I overcame in Time. I have learned there how to stand up for myself and assert my being a foreigner and I have learned the many nooks and crannies of the city that I will soon be returning to with a new life and fortified foundation.

From Madurai, dear sweet, smelly, dirty, beautiful Madurai. I have learned how to find the beautiful in the grotesque, the hope in despair, the reverence of a community that I have never seen before. I have learned the patience equal to the many statues in the Meenakshi Temple and how it feels to be a true minority, to be the only one who looks different and the humility that comes with that. I have learned the nature of childish curiosity on the faces of the children and the attitude of fatalism that sometimes we must adopt to make it through the day. I have learned that no one of the five senses can trump the other and that above all, I am able to find peace, serenity, and a blissful calm in the midst of the "Chaos."

Here are some parting shots of my Madurai...

Living on the Edge

When I was in college, my friend Justin gave me a copy of Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” because he felt that I would be able to relate to it. Justin’s was a turbulent friendship, filled with heady discussions, arguments, and an intense respect for each other’s passion, mine for writing, his for botany. As friendships so intense may sometimes suffer great moments of upheaval, so did ours. Now a successful academic botanist, I have been in touch with Justin sporadically, but will always be grateful for the books that he suggested, greatest amongst them was Maugham’s. In the last couple of weeks before coming to India, I re-read the copy that he had given me before I had moved to Belgium for the first time nearly 20 years ago. In the interim I had read it again, but rather cursory in attention, and had seen the absolutely horrible film version in which Bill Murray misses the role of Larry completely, but it has always stuck in the back of my mind, percolating.

When I re-read it then, I was in for quite a surprise. The accidental protagonist of the book is Larry. Everyone is worried about Larry and how he should live his life, because he just “wants to loaf.” This being the 1920’s and Americans should be grabbing the world by the balls and making buckets of money, but Larry just doesn’t seem to get it. He ends up living in Paris for a while in an undisclosed, yet presumably low-rent apartment loafing and reading books, teaching himself Greek and thinking about life. Meanwhile, the world is racing by, apparently leaving him far behind. Americans in Paris are making buckets of money back home and enjoying the high life that Paris can offer in all its pomp and circumstance. Until 1929, that is and the stock market comes crashing.

Larry, who had not made money, had no money to lose, save for a sum that he had squirreled away for maintenance. Among other things he is attempting to learn Greek, French, and read as much as he can, all the while loafing, being a drop-out in life, much to the disgust, chagrin, and frustrations of those who know better for him.

What I had not taken note of, as it meant nothing to me and I had forgotten, was that Larry ends up in Madura, the former name of Madurai, where he has a philosophical epiphany of sorts with regards to his deep exposure to Advaita Vedanta , more specifically, the concept of what is beyond Good and Evil. Sitting there in Antwerp at my favorite jazz cafe, De Muze, reading this and having booked my tickets for Madurai, I looked around to see if the Men in Black were watching me, feeling rather like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show.

Madurai has indeed challenged me on this front as well, and whether Justin was a prescient seer or if the book planted a dormant seed, or mere coincidence that I ended up here, for me is a mere curiosity. What I have found since I have been here is that the tenets of Advaita Vedanta Advaita Vedanta take on a rather different significance for me. One lives here on the edge of the razor, between an overload of the senses on one side and a resigned fatalism on the other. In Apocalypse Now,  Brando as Kurtz describes a dream that he has of a snail crawling along the edge of a razor, a straight razor’s edge. The frailty of the human condition against the backdrop of the indifference of Nature and Natural Law, for Kurtz is truly “the horror, the horror.” How does one live on this razor’s edge, on one side, Good, the other Evil, one side, Life, the other Death?

Teaching today about the concept of the non-Finite verbs to 11 and 12-year olds, I drew a timeline, indicating the past, present, and future and that these types of verbs were “out of time.” I saw their eyes widen with wonder at the concept of being “out of time,” which is actually quite prevalent in Indian philosophy as the idea of a “beginning, middle, or end” is pointless as time is even beyond Infinity, something akin to what Kant settles on in his Critique of Pure Reason. Pure Reason, with the precision of Occam’s Razor, is beyond our human capacity, beyond ever our capacity to conceive of it. It is the Face of God.