(Interrupting myself: Reunion)

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Here -- oh Herr Jahnn, in case you did not know -- is how a cultured man lives his life: he may, for example, imagine it to be a replay of the classics; or, rather, a variation on them.

If so, then this one is one of the oldest; and the variation is this: this time he -- Ulysses -- went ahead to prepare the place; and she -- Penelope -- followed, braving monsters, dangers, contrary winds, sea-currents, gods' curses, technological failures, brigands and -- suitors. Yet, she persevered and, at last, here she is. And here they are rejoined: do they not look good together?



But, pray, old friends, tell me, can you tell: which is the male and which is the female?

As is right and proper, the male is the more beautiful one, even if, contrary to nature, he is not the more gaudy. Of course, that is merely the function of the relative value of the classics and the moderns: the classic patterns, like Popper's well-tested theories, have been tried by generations of makers and consumers, they are veterans, and therefore they continue to perform well. As for the new patterns -- in part, their weakness lies in the fact they are obliged to be different from the past, novel; and thus their makers are banished to search in territories which had already been combed over by artists of the past and found to be -- marginal land, poor mineral deposits, incapable of true greatness. No amount of 14K gold is ever going to disguise that.

Here, judge for yourselves:


The male of the species.


The female.

(Yes, Grasshopper, how smart you are, and how well you remember your lessons. These are Benjarong. Three cheers for The King!)

More nationalist pride

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The Thai term benjarong is derived from Sanskrit panchrang for "five colors". It describes a type of pottery still made in Thailand today. It was originally made exclusively for the ceremonial needs of the Thai court, to Thai designs and patterns, in China. Several producers make it in Thailand today, with varying degrees of technical expertise. This one, my newest puppy, about 20 cm high, is by one of the best, Vangtal. The gold is 14K.

I know this fellow

Across a busy street, and down a little alley (aklang with urgent jabbering of hammers), another temple is being aluminum-clad. In the ordination hall, amidst a jumble of half-finished repousse panels, brick, mortar, cement and various vicious-looking builders' tools; and partly obscured by a door (like a naughty student punished to stand in a corner), there stands this head, about four feet high chin to top-of-headdress. It will be a giant statue of a supernatural being. Just what being, I do not know: not a Buddha (wrong sort of face), not an apsara (the headdress is too regal), not a Hindu god (the face is too sweet and too... Thai, while Hindu gods are odd-looking -- presumably Indian, or the best a Thai artist who'd never seen an Indian can imagine one).

This face is so Thai in fact that at first glance I thought it was a portrait of a friend.

This work is quite unique: I have seen few temple statues of this beauty anywhere in Thailand, none at all made within living memory. Further, temple images usually strive for the stiff monumental look -- it is meant to be otherworldly: the creatures which populate Thai Buddhist heaven are not like us (or else we would not need to strive to change ourselves). The only piece which approaches the lively realism of this head that I can think of is the 7th century black soapstone male torso of a Hindu god, discovered in the 19th century in Nakhon Si Thammarat, in the Kra Peninsula, and now housed in the Bangkok National Museum. (It is easily the most beautiful piece there). So, this is a very special work.

I want to know where this head is going. That will be the temple to worship at, obviously.

Temple Silver

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Both sides of Wualai Road -- the so called "Silver Street" -- are little alleys packed with silver manufactories. The sound of hammering comes here from every house. Men sit packed tightly, shoulder to shoulder, at small working benches, hammering, soldering, rolling and polishing. The silversmiths are neither a guild nor a caste, but are united by the traditional feudal master-servant relationship -- smiths receive room and board plus a small stipend -- and, for those established in business, intermarriage. They are united enough to undertake joint projects such as lobbying for government subsidies and temple construction. This temple is covered head to toe (except for its roof tile), both inside and outside, with hand wrought aluminum.


The technique known in Thailand as "Lanna Silver" is really nothing but good old repoussé. It works even better with aluminum which is similar in color, far cheaper, softer, and does not need to be heated during hammering (unheated silver often cracks when hammered). Its only downside is that it does not tarnish with age, which is what some of the repousse designs call for, but this effect can be achieved by staining.

Below is a wall panel from the temple, showing half-life-size Rama leading the monkey army against Lanka. The panel is probably 2 meters high by 1.5 meters long.


Here is a three-panel window blind with stories from the Jataka.



Here is a Dutch silversmith (she works in one of the silver factories here) with the temple minder and a bit of outside wall decoration. The peacock is a mystical symbol in many religions. In Christianity he represents the glory of life after death, in Buddhism the sudden unfolding of the mind at the moment of enlightenment.


Here are two life-size heavenly guardians on the outside wall, each side of the window. They are wearing Burmese court dress (as only befits a city with such strong Shan influence).



And here is the entrance to the temple:


Take a look at the doors again: Indra on Erawan on the left, carrying Brahma on his shoulders.


And Vishnu riding Garuda on the right:


And a Ramayana scene in the tympanum:


In Khmer architecture (and all things Khmer are still the cultural model for Thailand), the tympanum is the triangular stone above the door opening, within the arch created by the two entwined nagas (heavenly snakes). In the one below there is a scene from the Ramakhien (the Thai Ramayana): Sita has been kidnapped; Hanuman arrives to tell Rama and Lakshmana of her whereabouts.


And in this, another scene from the Ramakhien, Rama and Sita, reunited, have taken refuge in Hanuman's mouth.


And here is a wall decoration: a man-sized Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, with his rat vehicle and a bowl of gulab jamun (his favorite sweet).


And here is Indra again, in greater detail:


Uniquely, and perhaps a sign of things to come, this one has been signed. (Enlarge yourself and look on bottom right). Walking back along the main street I saw a similar panel being completed. "How many men did it take to make it?" I asked. "One", was the sly answer. "And how long did it take you?" "A year."

Typically of gender-confusing Thailand, about a fourth of the silversmiths are women.

And here is the tree of life again (a photo from the interior).

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PS A friend asks how it is done: One places the sheet of metal (silver/aluminum) on a bed of warm tar, which then sets; and glues to it the desired picture in reverse. One then proceeds to hammer out the outline roughly by pounding with a hammer at the paper picture (and the underlying metal). One then warms the tar, detaches the sheet of aluminum, turns it over, places it on a bed of warm tar again, and, as soon as the tar has set, hammers out the details from the front.

Traditional mural painting is alive in Thailand

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I think it was in 2003 that, by complete accident, I stumbled upon this book. While perusing it, I was suddenly seized by a powerful desire to go and see all the mural paintings reproduced in it. The next morning I rented a car and set out on the journey. It lasted four weeks, covered perhaps 4,000 kilometers, visited seventeen different establishments, and culminated in a ramshackle temple in Thonburi, Bangkok, where a small crowning epiphany descended upon me like a fine spring shower.

Everywhere I went I was struck by how much the murals had deteriorated in the fifteen years since the book's publication. They all had, but those in Thonburi especially so. As I looked at them with love and the sweet heart-breaking sadness of regret -- and monks around me chanted their sutra -- I experienced one of those sudden revelations of Dharma: of course the monks do nothing to preserve the murals: that is the very essence of Buddhism, is it not, to know that everything is an illusion, everything passes, and that one must not try to hold onto illusory ephemera. It is well to admire a flower, but it is foolish to regret its wilting.

But, luckily (for us aesthetes), there is a cognitive dissonance at the heart of Thai Buddhism: while the monks know that all art is impermanent, all ritual is waste of time, and all temple building a pain-begging exercise in vanity; they do not teach these facts strenuously. (That, too, is the essence of Buddhism, is it not: to want to teach would mean to strive. This is why Thai monks are generally Savakas (Śrāvaka), that is, they are assumed to receive instructions directly from Lord Buddha himself: not even their teachers bother to teach them).

Thus untaught, ordinary Thai lay believers continue to strive; and, in particular, to strive to build and decorate temples. All of Thailand is abuzz with the noise of construction machinery. A full tithe, in my estimation -- one in ten sites -- is a temple going up.

One is going up nearby. I have been visiting it over the last four years to watch the progress of the work. Currently a Burmese style chambered stupa is being decorated. It has two halls, one lower and one upper. It is dark in the upper hall, and photos mostly do not come out as a result, but here are a few taken recently to give you a flavor of what is going on.

The temple is associated with the royal family and is therefore both richer and more gorgeous than most. Most temples in Thailand are pretty kitchy; but this one, well, this one shows that mural art is not dead in Thailand. Old murals rot, fade and fall away, but what is the big deal with that when new beautiful murals are painted afresh every year?

Here is a view of a section of the upper room.


The hall has entrances in the northern and southern walls; while the eastern and western walls are decorated with full-wall murals. (The view above is of the south-eastern corner of the room: a full painted wall is on the left and the southern entrance just to the right).

The eastern wall, which hosts the main image (its eyes have not yet been "opened" so it is OK to photograph it in any old way), features a view of the Buddhist cosmos: the stupas, floating in the clouds of fragrant ether, each represent a different universe, of which one is ours (with all its eight billion light years and all); and in the center of this multiverse grows the great tree of life. It is, of course, golden.








The western wall represents another heavenly scene: Hindu divinities (including Erawan (in Thai, Airavata in Sanskrit, the thousand-headed white elephant who is the vehicle of Indra, the old god of war) disporting themselves in the flying palaces of the Western Paradise. (Note that the picture is not complete yet and there are still blank spaces).






And here are a few details from the sides. These two are sections of the eastern wall -- they are found under the small side windows located to the right and left of the main mural.



And this is a panel next to the northern door.


The next (and last) photo is different. This one is executed in gold dusted-paint and gold-leaf on black lacquer base. It is a leaf of a double-door leading into the hall. (As it is the external surface of the door, it is covered with sturdy plastic to protect it against gold thieves). Around new year's, I watched the painters -- it was a husband and wife team -- both of them in their fifties, fat, squat, indifferent looking, poorly dressed; for their looks you could have thought they operated a fermented-pork-sausage and booze stand in the village night market-- he painted the images freehand in black; she colored them in gold. The dissonance between their less than ordinary looks -- and unassuming demeanor -- and the incredible work they turned out was really very thought provoking. What is it like to make stuff like this all day? What is it like to then return home to the hovel one lives in and look at oneself the mirror?

Then there the old saw, too: do not judge a book by its cover, though obviously, in this case, you would not go wrong judging the hall by its entrance.

Some instances of art copying life

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Sometime in the 13th -- or perhaps 14th -- century this sculpture was cast in the kingdom of Thailand. It was incredibly successful: so successful in fact that it occasioned a whole world of copies. The vast body of lost-wax bronze statues which arose as a result of all this copying is today referred to by art historians by the name of Sukhothai -- the name also given to the particular epoch in Thai history (1238 - 1438 A.D.) What you are looking at is therefore a Sukhothai Buddha.

How odd he looks: a drooping, bulbous nose, extraordinarily long, apparently jointless fingers (in the gesture of Vitarka Mudrā, the gesture of discussion and transmission of Buddhist teaching) -- and limbs (which look more like slithering spineless snakes or worms than limbs), broad, deliciously round shoulders, oversized, round feet, and prominent, nippled breasts make for a strange, otherworldly figure. To me, this Buddha looked like nothing I have ever seen; certainly, he did not look Thai.

Used to the fact that Buddha representations in Asian art can be pretty unnaturalistic, ascribing to Lord Shakyamuni various anatomical features which ordinary mortals do not possess -- a bump on the top of the head symbolizing blazing intellect (the usnīsa), humongous, hanging ears (I have forgotten what they symbolize -- surely, the Chinese belief that men with long ears are good at making money is derived from the Buddha ears, not the other way around), etc. -- I have assumed that I was looking at an idealized image of the saint; an otherworldly image; a representation of what a heavenly creature might look like -- somewhat akin to western European winged seraphim, or the saints from Orthodox icons with bony narrow faces and bulging eyes.

I was curious to see what all these odd elements symbolized, but slow at finding any discussion of them. I was especially curious about the facial features. Here, look closely:

What an odd face, eh? And, in all honesty, difficult to characterize as beautiful. Why, oh, why, I wondered, did the Sukhothai Thais imagine lord Buddha to have looked like this?

I did not discover the answer until several years later when I boarded a Sri Lankan plane: everyone on it -- stewards and stewardesses, the pilot, even the luggage-handlers -- looked like this -- yes: bulbous nose, drooping eyelids, even -- yes -- wormlike fingers on pudgy hands.

The answer to the mystery of the Sukhothai Buddha's look is simply this: that he is a Singhalese.

This is not surprising. Sri Lanka is Theravada Buddhism's Rome. To Theravada nations -- Burmese, Thais, Laotians -- Colombo and Candy are what Jerusalem and Rome are to Poles. The Polish Jesus looks Italian; is it a surprise then that the Thai Buddha would look Sri Lankan?

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(A Sherlock moment: Buddhism was introduced to Thailand from Sri Lanka on several occasions -- which are sometimes referred to as renaissances, or revivals; one took place at the beginning of the Sukhothai era; could it be that this Buddha was simply imagined by his creators to look like the missionaries arrived from Sri Lanka? And if so, does the Sukhothai Buddha represent a particular person? Or perhaps -- the Sukhothai Buddha is merely a Thai copy of a holy image brought by the missionaries from Colombo?)

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Now skip about a thousand miles to the west, to Khajuraho, in Madhya Pradesh -- and about three hundred years back.

I am not sure why I was not amazed by all the sex on the walls of her temples -- by which everyone else seems to be so amazingly amazed. (Just look at page one of the Google image search, here, if you have any doubt: not one of the pictures on page one does not sport an erect penis).

Perhaps I am jaded enough to admit to myself what most men cannot -- or will not -- that not much of the sex we have is really worth having; most of it falling in the -- well -- blazé category, I suppose?

Or perhaps I was more taken with the rain-making ritual (as if to reinforce me in my obdurate atheism, it rained all around Khajuraho but never on it as long as the prayers lasted); or the Navratri festivities in the village; or the Bhil dodeci-annual dip in the Betwa (which, I bet you did not know, is the twelfth holiest river in the world); or with all the villagers of Khajuraho -- some 12 thousand of them -- whom I encountered doing their coeducational public morning squat on my first (and only) walk through the countryside.

Or perhaps with the cows wondering aimlessly among the monuments -- they seemed to be ruminating on something philosophical; or -- the goats climbing them?

But this is not to say that I was not impressed by the statuary. I was. I was completely and wholly taken by a particular girl -- a recurring girl -- recurring in several different places on the each of the 24 temples.

Now, the amount of statuary put on the temples probably meant that a central requisitioning office in charge of the construction sent out to the workshops orders saying "twelve free standing of statues of a girl removing a thorn from their foot (type A); twelve statues of a girl looking at herself in the mirror (type B); and another twelve of a girl gazing sideways (type C), by Friday afternoon" because certain stock images repeat again and again throughout the complex.

And this means that the girl I mean was a stock image -- she was a trick -- the trick of a one-trick-pony artist -- developed by a particular workshop who then sold her to the requisitioning department -- repeatedly -- and then did her in numerous copies, mechanically, reliably, fast: everyone just like the other. ("Karna, we have another order for the big nose", the boss would say. "Yeah, ok," said Karna, and setting aside his paan and lifting his tools set about chipping yet another standard sized block of stone).

But this did not matter. I saw her everywhere and everywhere she had the same impact on me; everywhere she seemed to be looking at me secretly, from beneath her drooping eyelids and down her magnificent nose: a girl from 1000 years ago spying on me from all sorts of places -- from around corners of buildings, from up top, from down below -- in the falling dusk.

Like the Sukhothai Buddha she looked like no one I have ever seen before: an impossible human being; she had huge eyes and a monstrous, gigantic, fantastic nose, which gave her an incredibly beautiful, bird-like -- peahen-like -- air:



plus -- narrow lips, pointed chin, short neck, broad, round shoulders, fantastically large breasts, impossibly, boyishly narrow hips and slim, long, long legs.

She looked like no other statue ever made in India and like no person I have ever seen there.

Or anywhere.

Like the Sukhothai Buddha she seemed an impossible person, an artist's fantasy, an invention, impossible, but wonderful; his idea of what life could be like if it could only break the bounds of possibility: one third bird, one third goddess, one third boy.

Impossible that is until -- until -- I met her here, in Lisbon.

I am sorry, but I must know, are you from? I asked her, amazed.

Kutch, she answered.

Kutch. In Gujarat. 600 kilometers to the east of Khajuraho. Not impossible, I guess.

I am sorry I don't have her picture to show you: all the photos I took of her back in Khajuraho I have left in Thailand. And her modern living copy here would not be photographed for any money at all. So the best I can do is show you this -- which is another stock image from Khajuraho, perhaps from the same workshop. It is the same girl -- or, except for the width of her hips -- nearly the same. Note the nose, the eyes, the shoulders, and the impossibly long legs.

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Now, you know what this means, of course: that art historians discussing imagery of statues from behind their stationary desks -- those who have not traveled the world to see what actual people look like -- have no idea what they are talking about; and that art really copies life to a much more faithful degree than we could have ever supposed.

It also means something else: that the old racists of the 19th century were completely and absolutely wrong but also -- a little right. There are not 3 (or 4 or 5 or 6) races of men; but there are definite types of looks -- numerous, yes, but limited, and readily recognizable.

Perhaps one could say that there are a million human types on earth?

A million races of man?