Goin' On A Journey. In Memoriam: Mridula Jose, 1944-2015

My dear, sweet and almost always upbeat sister-in-law, Milla, (Mridula Jose), is no more.  A positive force in the lives of all who knew her, Milla and that force which appears to be so inexplicably negative came together on September 30, 2015.  The result is a terrible silence.

My sister-in-law had a period of extraordinary lucidity the day before she succumbed to a disease she had been fighting for years.  I want to call everyone and say good-bye, she told her son, Ranjit.  After doing this, she discussed final matters with him, including instructions for her funeral.

We got our call a few hours before she passed away. It was difficult for her to talk; her speech was slurred.  Despite these impediments, the Milla we knew shone through like sunlight at the mouth of a cave.

I will never forget how she announced her impending death.  "Time to go!" she told us.  It wasn't so much what she said but the way she said it.  Goin' on a journey, it's all right.  Those three words were vintage Milla.  No one else could put a positive spin on a negative spiral in such a disarmingly simple way.

She subsequently thanked us for everything--these were for us her last words.  In Indian culture, you don't tell your relatives that you love them all the time, but at the right time.  The right time had come.  We shouted, "I love you!  We love you!  We'll miss you forever!"  Sometimes five minutes add up to eternity, a truly glorious sum.

Her body decided to retire, not Milla.  A gifted teacher, Dr. Mridula Jose continued to walk into classrooms until the day she could no longer walk.  Many, many students whom she encountered while teaching literature at Stella Maris will, I am very sure, never forget her.

Real teachers cannot stop.  On her final day on earth, shortly before she called us, she asked Ranjit to read aloud T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, one of her favorite poems.  She had to say good-bye to literature as well!  Ranji later told me that while he was reading the poem. she interrupted many times in order to deepen his understanding of the text.  A little room in Besant Nagar became, as it were, a large classroom in Stella Maris.  She was doing what she loved, teaching again, alas! for the very last time.

One of her last wishes, Ranji informed me, is that if any song is sung or played during a memorial for her it should be her favorite hymn, Nearer My God to Thee..  I don't think Ranji was familiar with the melody; I sang a few bars over the phone.

A few hours later, my wife, Nirmala, Milla's older sister, and I were sitting in meditation before an altar we had recently set up in our living room.  (We had transformed our coffee table to a shrine to commemorate the very recent death of Shyamala, Nirmala's older sister.  Four deaths in five months!  This has been a rough year.)  During meditation, I thought of Milla's request.  I knew I had a Gospel version of Nearer My God to Thee somewhere.  Rising from meditation, I searched till I found it.  While I was playing the hymn, a few feet from Nirmala and Nataraja, we got the phone call that Milla had died a few minutes before. We'll remember those moments "forever" as well.

Earth is a different place for us, now that Milla is no longer on it.

A few years ago, I composed a little hymn entitled, Goin' On A Journey.  The lyric tells a story of a near-death experience that becomes a real-death experience. The penultimate stanza is sad: "I have to leave my loved ones... It's hard, it's hard, it's very hard..."  Joy triumphs, however, with the return of the major key of the final stanza: We're gonna be together, it's all right!/ We're gonna be together, it's all right!/  Soon we're gonna be together/ no umbrellas needed EVER,/ We're gonna be together, it's all right!"

I didn't write that last stanza; Milla did. 


Addendum, one year later:

A Review of "Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out," A Novel by Mo Yan

Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
by Mo Yan
Translated into English by Howard Goldblatt
Arcade Publishing, New York, 2006
540 pages

1.
Authoritarian regimes--China is a prominent contemporary example--fear their writers and go to elaborate lengths to control them.  Writers of literature are generally an independent lot for whom dedication to aesthetics and truth go hand in hand.  The latter aspect gets them into deep trouble with a regime that only permits dedication to its truth and represses the truth by persecuting dissent.  For Chinese writers who  adamantly object to totalitarian control of thought there are two choices: exile or prison.  It is sad to say that so many of the best Chinese writers and intellectuals have felt compelled to choose one or the other.

There is, of course, a third choice: compromise with, or even full acceptance of, a regime that does its best to crush independent thinking perceived as a threat to its power.  This is generally the choice preferred by hacks.  Mo Yan, who is the president of the state-sponsored Chinese Writers Association; Mo Yan who refuses to condemn the criminalization and incarceration of Lin Xiabo, the well-known activist for the democratization of China who received a Nobel peace prize in 2010; Mo Yan is arguably politically tainted but is, nevertheless, no hack.  He is a skilled writer; his novel, Life and Death are Wearing Me Out is well worth reading.

When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012,  his willingness to be in effect a part of a repressive state was like a big red ball thrown into your garden.  You couldn't ignore it; you had to pick it up.  Many Chinese intellectuals were either saddened or made furious by the news.  A previous recipient of the Noble Prize for Literature called the decision a "catastrophe."  Another prominent writer called Mo Yan a patsy.

In the year the award was given, Perry Link wrote an article for the New York Review of Books with the following title, "Does the Author Deserve the Prize?"  The essay implied that the price he has paid for a lucrative writing career endorsed by tyrants--that is, being a sycophant--made him unworthy of the award.  It is significant to note that whether Mo Yan is a good writer or not is not discussed.

It might be a sad fact but it is a fact: if an artist is brilliant and outshines most of his contemporaries, his moral shortcomings are relegated to his shadow.  It is unproblematic and very rewarding to enter the brilliant  realm of Wagner's music; the shadowy deficiencies of the man do not affect the notes. The novelist's case is admittedly somewhat--but not completely--different, since prose is a much less abstract art form than is music.

I believe that Life and Death Is Wearing Me Out proves beyond doubt that Mo Jan is a very good writer.

The novel is an epic tale of small-town life in China from 1950 until 2000.  It centers on a landowner, Ximen Nao, who is executed as a class enemy as soon as the Communists come to power.  He is subsequently reborn in turn as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog,  a monkey, and finally as a human, the Millennium Boy, Lan Quiansui.  The reincarnated animals, now serving those who had served Ximen Nao, are involved in many lively adventures with the inhabitants of the village of Ximen.  The background is the cataclysmic history of China during that period.

2.
There are many excellent novels that provide convincing portrayals of how life is or was  under a totalitarian regime.  Examples: Everyone Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada, depicting everyday life under the Nazis; The Land of Green Plums, depicting everyday life in Communist Romania, by Herta Müller-who, by the way, is the Nobel Prize winner who thinks that  the award to Mo Yan was a "catastrophe"; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, depicting life in a Soviet gulag; The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, depicting life in Trujillo's Dominican Republic, and finally, der Turm by Uwe Tellkamp (as yet untranslated into English) which depicts life in East Germany.  Having read all of these, I assert without hesitation that these novels give one a better idea of how life was under those regimes than any history book.

If you are expecting a novel that accurately depicts the catastrophes of recent Chinese history, however, Yan's novel isn't the book for you. There is an important distinction between the novels I mentioned and the one I am now reviewing: all of the former were written by authors who lived through a terrible regime, and wrote their novels either in exile or after the regime in question  fell. (The sole exception is Solzhenitsyn's novel which was written in the Soviet Union at a time when a depiction of Stalinist terror was no longer taboo.) The only criticisms they faced were from reviewers and readers.  If Mo Yan, living in China, had given a more truthful portrait of life in China from 1950 until the present, he would either have been forced into exile or have been arrested.  He made his choice. He also made the choice to write well.

The current situation in China reminds me a little of the history of racism in America.  Seventy years ago racism in the United States was brutal; it has eased up since then but it is still omnipresent. There are no longer millions dying in China at the hands of a repressive regime; freedom of thought, however, remains very much unachieved.  Many people are still either exiled or jailed because of their democratic beliefs. The regime allows some mentioning of "excesses" of the past as long as they remain light-years away from an honest account.

Life and Death are Wearing Me Out follows unwritten Communist guidelines in this regard.  A character in the book, Lan Lian, the executed and reincarnated Ximen Nao's farmhand, resists, despite increasing pressure, to stop being an independent farmer and join a collective.  Lian insists that Mao Zedong permits independent farming.  When Chairman Mao dies, he is as grief-stricken as the most ardent Communists.  We see here an example of the Communist lie that the "excesses" came from the bottom and not from those at the top.  There are many examples of glossing over disasters of the past.  One of Ximen Nao's incarnations, a donkey, is killed and eaten by starving peasants.  There is no mention either of the cause of the starvation or that at least 30 million peasants died during it.  The disastrous bird-killing campaign is mentioned late in the book and only in passing.  The equally disastrous steel campaign during which China was deforested to fuel backyard furnaces that were to transform scrap metal into steel--it did not produce usable steel--is indeed mentioned, in, however, a very superficial way.  Later in the novel, a person is given the advice to contribute to rebuild a temple destroyed in the Cultural Revolution--that's the only mention of the enormous destruction of temples that were carried out during those horrible years.  The ravage of Tibet, still a very taboo topic, is, of course, not even mentioned in passing. Yan's  superficial, often humorous portrayal of Chinese history reminds me of Longfellow's line, "Into each life a little rain must fall."  The truth is that the intermittent downpours under Chairman Mao were unimaginably severe.

Why is such a revisionist novel still worth reading?

3.
For at least three reasons: Mo Yan is a great storyteller; he is very inventive and, finally, almost never boring.  (If it is true that he wrote this long novel in only 42 days, he also writes unbelievably fast and is thus an equal of Georges Simenon in this regard!)  Regarding his inventiveness, thinking animals, all incarnations of Ximen Nao, occur throughout; in lesser hands, this may have become tedious, but Yan pulls this off brilliantly. Most adults sometimes look back with nostalgia at a time in their lives in which animals talked and behaved like humans--at least in storybooks.    Yan captures this nostalgia without requiring the reader to suspend adult experience.  Far from it.  There is a wonderful scene in the first section in which human sexuality and asinine sexuality combine as Ximen Nao, now a donkey, approaches a young female donkey's behind. It was fun to feel like a kid and an id at the same time.

There are many interesting characters who are also character-types.  Ximen Nao's son Ximen Jinlong, adopted by Lan Lian after Ximen Nao's execution,  is a  well-portrayed type that exists everywhere: all he wants is power for himself, and will change according to the times in order to hold on to it.  During the time of Chairman Mao, he is a fervent Communist and browbeats his adoptive  father for remaining an independent farmer, since this threatens Jinlong's position as a high-ranking member of the Communist party.  Later on, he becomes a full-fledged capitalist and attempts to transform the village of Ximen into a resort!  (The Chinese government, by the way, intends to transform the village in which Yan was born into a "Cultural Experience Zone.") Another character, Hong Taiyue, "a typical lowlife, the dregs of society, a beggar who went around banging on the hip bone of a bull ox," rises in the local branch of the Party due to his impeccable peasant credentials; when China adopts capitalism, however, he feels as much at home as a minnow in a mall.  Desperate, he  puts on a suicide vest and kills both himself and the unscrupulous Jinlong.

The last section of the novel is by far the best.  Mo Yan who writes himself into the novel from the beginning, is responsible here  for a new direction of the plot.  He introduces the unhappily married Lan Jiefang to Pang Chunmiao, a beauty twenty years younger than himself.  History, that is revisionist history, is completely forgotten as Mo Yan tells the love story and its consequences.  (The affair causes a major scandal, proof that Chinese society--at least in rural areas-- has yet to permit the permissiveness  of the West. There's always room for progress!) Their tragic love story is a quintessential page-turner. This section of the novel is first rate-fiction, proof beyond doubt that Mo Jan is a very talented writer.

Conclusion

Perhaps Mo Yan has written here two novels, one for China and one for the rest of us.  If one knows what really happened, one can deconstruct the novel into one that confronts Chinese history with an effective use of poetic understatement.  A hint of horror can effectively bring those horrors to mind than pages of accurately depicted misery.  Those who have been brain-washed by state-controlled disinformation are able to view the novel as realistic historical fiction.  Am I being facetious?  Perhaps, perhaps not. Who knows what Mo Yan keeps to himself in order to remain the darling of the Communist Party? Time might tell.  In the meantime, read this enjoyable novel with an informed and inviolate eye.


You are welcome to read past book reviews of the Baltimore Online Book Club by googling the title of the novel along with my full name, Thomas Dorsett.

1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
4. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
5. Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan

Our next meeting will take place on October 14, 2015.  On that date, the six members of our group will discuss the novel,  Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner; I will post my review shorty therafter. You are invited to read the book and to post your comments onto the comment section of the review.   I wish you pleasurable reading!

Black Lives Matter? Doesn't Everybody's?

1. Why me?

I remember reading, many years ago, about a study the result of which seemed convincing to me then and seems even more convincing to me now.  If I recall correctly, the teacher of an elementary school class had a student come up and stand in front of the room.  Then she said, as I retell it: "Jimmy, you've been doing great!  I'm very proud of you!  Now sit down." Whereupon Timmy smiled broadly, and buoyed by praise, floated, as it were, upon a sea of frowns.  The study found that if you praise someone before a group, the unpraised majority will tend to view it as a criticism of them.  "What about me, Mrs. Edwards?  You must think I'm doing badly." Anyone familiar with human nature knows this to be true.

If you think this finding only applies to kids, think again.  It is behind much of the white criticism to the Black Lives Matter movement.  I will explain.

The working class is under increasing--and unnecessary--duress in the United States.  A shameful percentage of the wealth generated by the recent recovery has gone to the very wealthy; not only that, the poor and the working class were forced to bear the brunt of the untrammeled greed of Wall Street.  It was the bankers and such whose fanatical devotion to the golden idols of money and power lead them to irresponsible decisions; they escaped the consequences of their acts, the poor and working class are still paying dearly for their errors.

All members of the working class have been affected.  Whites have been victimized as well.  Especially under-educated white males--their incomes have been declining for a long time.  Once you could live the American dream as a white man without a college degree; now lack of education is an invitation to the America nightmare. Please don't misunderstand; I'm not saying that African-Americans were not denied participation in the glory days of Ozzies and Harriets; racism and gender discrimination were rampant. What I am saying is that when whites under siege hear of a movement called "Black Lives Matter" the immediate reaction of many will be, "What about me?"  And that is exactly what has happened.

The reaction is inevitable as it is unjustified.  No objective person of any race can deny that racism is still very much with us.  No objective person of any race can deny that there haven't been egregious cases of white police officers abusing blacks, too often ending in death,  The abuse, which has gone on for far too long,  has to stop, "Black Lives Matter" is a legitimate movement.  My only criticism is this: in anticipation of the "what-about me?" reactions of disgruntled whites, maybe a better name for the movement would have been, "Black Lives Matter Too!"  Imagine the progress we would make in combating income inequality if the poor and the workers of all color came together--every Republican's nightmare!

2. Why Can't They Be Like Us?

No objective person of any race can deny...  OK, I can understand some of the testiness of the hard-pressed white working class.  But what about the lack of empathy among those who have no financial worries at all?

I was looking at my YouTube video recommendations and, Lord knows how, there was Bill O'Reilly.  My jaw dropped as I listened, my eyes bulging with, well, shock.  There he was insisting that there was no racism in the United States!  He was arguing with a blond woman who asserted that racism was embedded in the current cultural fabric.  He became livid.  He said he was ashamed of her conviction that racial prejudice still exits; he implied that she was unpatriotic and playing into the hands of America's enemies.  Besides, some degree of racism exists in all countries, he asserted--as if that was a justification to dismiss a widespread American problem.  Isn't that a bit like a doctor in the 1950s concluding  that, since  tuberculosis exits around the world, we can afford to be complacent about the cases in our own back yard?  On a more recent video, he insisted that the "Black Lives Matter" movement is a hate group, comparable to the Klu Klux Klan!!

Mr. O'Reilly miserably fails what I call the Moccasin Test.  If he had sincerely tried--the data is out there--to walk a mile or two in a black person's shoes, he would not be able to make such ridiculous statements.

America's great advantage is its pluralism.  It has allowed our country to be a magnet for talented people from all around the world.  E Pluribus unum--What will happen if we let our country's motto deteriorate into "From Many, two or three or four?"  What would happen if we let that motto, which has served most of us well, degenerate into "Everyone for himself and God against all?"

Trouble is that many whites ("us") consider blacks "them."

A friend of mine once said, wisely: First, you have to identify with yourself.  Then, you extend that identification to family and friends; after that, most important, you reach out to everyone else.  O'Reilly's concerns dead-end with people who look like him and who are rich like him.  Not a great moral achievement.

What if the O'Reillys of this world ignored how much melanin one had in one's skin and how much moolah one had in one's pocket?  What if the O'Reillys saw what happened to Freddie Gray and say, "This has got to stop!  He could have been my son!"

I am white and a senior--that puts me in the most conservative demographic group in America.  I would like to have a chance to consider voting for a true conservative.  That is unlikely if the Republican Party remains the party of oligarchs.

Conclusion

All right, Mr. Armchair President, what should we do now?
Two Things.

1. Assure that all Americans who can work have jobs that pay a living wage.  Assure that all Americans have adequate housing.  Assure that all Americans live in safe neighborhoods.  Norway does it, Sweden does it, why can't we?  Workers would be more satisfied with their lives--and empathy increases with happiness.  Working class whites would  be thus less likely to have the disgruntled Why-Me? view fostered by Fox News.

2,  Sharply reduce the segregation of poor African Americans into high-poverty neighborhoods.  Implement the Fair Housing Act of 1968!  Whites red-lined blacks into slums long ago; since then, their indifference has allowed things to actually get worse. (The number of people living in disadvantaged neighborhoods has nearly doubled since 2000.) Things must and will change, the sooner the better. Guess who's coming to borrow a cup of sugar?  Your neighbor, no matter the race, no matter how rich, no matter; what really matters is decency, what matters is the real you. It can happen.

This will not be an easy path, no doubt, and, no doubt, there is no other.

Thank you, Mr. Armchair President!  Do you hear the sound of one hand clapping? Congratulations, Mr. President!  It's clapping for you.

The Cosmic Dance

1. Introduction

Today I received the very sad news that my wife's sister, Shyamala, passed away unexpectedly. She was on a fishing trip with her husband, an annual event that gave Shyamala a chance to be close to nature for an extended period--how my sister-in-law loved to be outdoors!  They were somewhere in the wilds of British Columbia when she suffered a massive heart attack.  She went peacefully and painlessly with her husband at her side in sublime surroundings--that is indeed a consolation.

As soon as I heard the news, I started to prepare for an evening meditation in her memory.  On our little altar is a statue of Shiva Nataraja, The Lord of the Dance, which we bought so long ago in Chennai, India.  This iconic representation of the cosmos originated in South India over one thousand years ago, and has not lost its significance to this day. Staring at the cosmic dance during the meditation, I knew I had to write a little essay about it in Shyamala's memory.

2. The Cosmic Dance

Everything is in motion, nothing--not even "nothing" stays still. (So-called empty space is seething with activity at the Planck level, less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter.) We imagine permanence in things because their rate of change is so much slower than ours that they seem permanent.  It takes a plastic bag among the tons of garbage unconscionably thrown into the ocean centuries to disappear; it takes us only about eighty years. Protons take so long to degrade that we're not quite sure whether they degrade at all; the acoustic acuity of humans begins to degrade at the age of thirty.  It will take a very long time for all of the estimated 300 billion stars in the Milky Way to die; the 100 billion neurons of a human brain just might disappear tomorrow. Like it or not, death is always in the picture, advancing, somewhere between background and foreground, until the whole canvas is blank.

The cosmic dance, however, is not lugubrious; the face of the dancing Shiva is always serene.  Why?  That is the subject of this essay.

The Hindus always knew that change is absolutely integral to the cosmos.  (There are few absolutes.)  It took centuries for the West to catch up.  The ancient Greeks believed that change was restricted to the Earth.  Everything in the heavens was thought to be unchangeable.  Scientists as late as Einstein believed the cosmos to be static; though individual cosmic bodies change, he thought that the universe over very long distances remained the same.  Now we know that the universe is expanding and is not eternal at  all, only practically permanent in comparison to us.

(Einstein, however, was sometimes wrong in a way that proved to be right, albeit in a different context.  He proposed that there was an anti-gravity force, represented by lambda, that balanced gravity.  Without this force, he reasoned, the attractive force of gravity would eventually cause the cosmos to end in a big fiery crunch.  Einstein's  equations indicate that the universe was either contracting or expanding, but not static.  Neither possibility is consistent with the static/eternal universe he imagined; hence his lambda hypothesis.  As we all know now, the universe has been expanding for several billion years, at an ever increasing rate.  Einstein later thought that his lambda hypothesis had been the greatest blunder of his career--turns out, without a doubt, that there is a lambda after all.)

We are all--along with everything else--part of Shiva's dance.  Yet we have the illusion of being separate from the cosmos, unique observers of what surrounds us.  This illusion of separation, whether an accident or an inevitable evolutionary development, conferred great adaptive  advantages.  We could "separate" ourselves from something in order to analyze it; we became tool makers, composers of great music, speakers and haters and makers, evil and good, almost gods. Evolutionary adaptions, however, are not cosmic truths. Self-awareness brought with it, however, a major inconvenience, the knowledge of death.

There is also a major consolation.  When we transcend discursive thought, when we transcend the ego through absorption in work we love, through selfless devotion to the people we love and to noble causes we love, we no longer sit like a wallflower in a dance hall while the great music plays on. Illusion disappears--for as long as our selfless absorption lasts. It usually doesn't last very long; our little identities intervene.  Let me say again: the ego is a good thing, necessary for life in the world.  The interplay between Shiva's dance and an imaginary diva, the individual soul, is the source of both the glory and tragedy of humankind.

Whenever we overcome the ego, we stand beside it, as it were.  This getting-beyond-the-self is the very definition of ecstasy.  I will close this section of the essay with a poem I wrote long ago.

Stone and River

Metaphors that help us live here
are chiefly two: stone and river.
Aware of change, afraid to be alone,
most opt for the permanence of stone:

"A boulder at the center reigns;
however fast the current, it remains;
countless, unique pebbles at each side
retain their shape, even if dislodged."

I, I, this is the language of rock;
yet everything is swirl and flux;
despite appearance, all is sea;
no me.  Fluid, all reality.

Nothing to transcend our going?
Everything is water flowing?
Nothing but fate, nothing but chance?
And ecstasy: dance.


3. The Four Mudras (Hand Gestures)

a. The Damuru Mudra

Hindu gods, when represented anthropomorphically, are often depicted as having four arms; the additional limbs represent superhuman power.  They also indicate that the anthropomorphism is merely symbolic; Shiva is not the ideal human, unlike Zeus, who was often depicted as such.

Each of Shiva's four hands displays a different hand gesture, which is crucial to any interpretation of Nataraja,  the Lord of the Dance. 

The first mudra is shown by Shiva's upper right hand.  This is the damuru mudra.  His hand is holding an hourglass drum, the damuru.  It is the symbol of creation; the hourglass represents the origin of time, which has been flowing ever since.  The prescient Hindus thus indicate that even time isn't eternal and arose at the beginning of the universe.  This is the scientific view also, which only became established in the last century.

The damuru is the best symbol I know that illustrates the essential difference between Eastern and Western religions.  In the West, creation and revelations arrive visually, not acoustically, as in the East.  God created visibility simply by saying Fiat Lux, let there be light.  Adam and Eve saw God  in the Garden of Eden.  He intervened in Exodus; the division of the Red Sea was apparent to all. He revealed himself in the Ten Commandments and in the Torah, words which were visible for all to see. In a later mythology, the actual  and only Son of God could be seen walking the Earth--and was visible, at least for forty days, from the third day after his execution.  Allah, more remote, since Islam was a later revelation and God became more and more transcendent with the passage of time, nevertheless gave, via Gabriel and Muhammad, a book every word of which is said to be of divine origin.

In the East, as illustrated by the drum in Shiva's hand, creation is represented by a sound rather than by light.  In the West, you keep your eyes wide open and witness God's revelations.  In the East, you close your eyes, turn inward, and hear the sound of creation, the sacred syllable Om, inside your own consciousness. An external god has nothing to do with it!  Gods are useful to depict and to reify insights gained by turning inward.  They are symbols--at least in the higher forms of Hinduism.  The summit of Hinduism is non-duality, which leaves no purchase for polytheism or even theism.

The differences between the two worldviews are clear.  One is an inward stance, the other an outer.  One stresses wisdom, the other stresses action.  Both views, I think, are essential.  It is a great advantage of our multicultural age that we are able to combine both and make whatever religion or non-religion we practice better by incorporating both elements.   I do think, however, that the tonal view of creation is superior and more accurate than the visual one.  Admittedly, as an avid amateur musician, I am closer to the sonal interpretation.  But the essential difference is very real: in the East revelation occurs within consciousness, in the West revelation comes from beyond consciousness.  For doubting Thomases like me, who are very skeptical regarding external revelations from a divine entity, there is no doubt: the Hindus are right.

b. The Agni Mudra

In Shiva's left upper hand, in perfect balance with the creation mudra on the right, is a flame.  Agni, fire, is the symbol of destruction.  Since this is a cosmic dance, it indicates that everything we know, matter, galaxies, people, files, come into existence and eventually disintegrate.  I hold that this symbol not only refers to a fiery death, but to cold deaths as well.  (Our universe will probably keep on expanding, eventually there will be no matter at all--a cold death.  But some scientists believe that our universe is on a "brane" which, after eons, collides with its sister brane--a fiery death.  The important thing to realize  is that  death is inevitable for both organic and inorganic entities.  Balance between the two is an essential concept of Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance.  Our universe will die, but there are likely others; many scientists assert that universes are born and die all the "time."

c. The Gajahasta Mudra, the Elephant Trunk Pose

Shiva's lower left arm points gracefully to his uplifted left leg which represents "upliftedness" or transcendence.  I've thought for some time that the pointing down mudra also represents humility.  It is essential to control the ego to approach the ecstasy of Nataraja. To make spiritual progress, an "individual" must be modest and unassuming.    Egotists believe that they are, as it were, at the center of the universe--Nothing could be farther from the truth!



d. The Abhaya Mudra,  The Do-Not-Fear Gesture

The raised palm of Shiva's lower right hand assures that one should not be afraid.  Everything in the universe is part of this dance; you are and always will be included. In scientific language, no information is ever lost.  Things continually take on different forms, dissolve, and take on different forms again.  The Darwinian illusion that we are separate has no place in Shiva's dance; humans are treated like everything else.  The individual suffers; expect and seek out help from fellow human beings and from yourself, not from Shiva. Shiva's consolation is that one's true self never dies. This is, however,  a hard truth; the dance is what it is and not what we might want it to be--The only times we understand the do-not-fear mudra is when we transcend, at least temporarily, the slings and arrows of the inevitable downside of individuality. Some form of cosmic consciousness might indeed transcend death: here, again, I must confess to be more or less a doubting Thomas.  I also confess that at other times I doubt my doubting.

4. Apasmara, "Heedlessness"

Shiva's left foot is grounded--it is supported by earth, while the other leg is raised.  I call this Shiva's objective leg.  This contact with the earth doesn't allow superstition.  It is his science leg.  He is standing on apasmara, who represents ignorance.  Shiva dispels ignorance by insight that does not flout reason.  As mentioned, previously, Hindu is a wisdom tradition; the "enemy" is ignorance, not evil.  The two, of course, are connected.  Only a person who is ignorant is able to commit evil deeds.  The raised right leg represents "upliftedness" or transcendence.  Notice that this leg can only represent transcendence while the other leg is grounded. This is a concrete way of demonstrating that transcendence is only possible when reason and nature are given their due.

5. Prabhamandala, The Ring of Fire

The statue of Nataraja is always depicted within a ring of fire.  Traditionally, this indicates the fire of destruction--Brahma is known as the God of creation, while Shiva is given the role of destroyer.  (Destroying illusion is a prominent part of the Shiva myth.)  I interpret the ring of fire somewhat differently.  I view it as an almost impenetrable barrier which separates the outer world of illusion from inner Truth. There have been a few (Jesus of Nazareth, Ramana Maharshi, Buddha) who passed through this barrier during their lifetime; there have been undoubtedly a few more who remain anonymous.  The complete and permanent awareness that one is not merely a part of, but that one actually is Shiva's dance is, however, exceedingly rare.  As mentioned earlier, we approach Shiva's dance in our best moments, that is, when we forget ourselves while completely absorbed in what we are doing.  This is however different from an irrevocable awareness that the I of individuality is nothing while the transcendent I of consciousness is everything.  In Hindu tradition, those who have passed this barrier are buried rather than cremated.  (The fire of cremation is viewed as a rite of purification.) No need to pass through fire twice.

Conclusion

Is Shiva's dance an accurate representation of reality?  (Reality refers here to an objective world beyond human consciousness.) Probably not.  As Kant proclaimed during the Enlightenment, we can never know "the thing in itself" since what we know is always an interpretation by our senses.  The Hindus knew this and went a step further, a "fact" which I will now explain. The famous Thillai Nataraja Temple, located in Chidambaran in Tamil Nadu, India, is the traditional site of Shiva's dance.  It is thus considered to be, metaphorically, the center of the universe.  It is also understood that this universe occurs within the human heart, that is, within consciousness.  There is no music, no dance, beyond the mind. But in Hindu tradition inside and outside are one--a traditional name for God in Tamil is Kadavul, meaning The Outside/Inside One. In this sense, Shiva's dance is an accurate representation of reality, since in a very "real" sense, consciousness is the creator of all things.  For those of us who imagine that we live outside the ring of fire, (that is, just about everybody), the Nataraja icon is arguably the best metaphor for wisdom that we have.