Color Me Green

So far, in all my extensive reading of the extraordinary events going on in Iran, I've found only one reference to the effect Obama's speech in Cairo has had on Iranians who went out in unprecedented numbers to vote. The comment was made by a "Dish" reader, who has been conversing with relatives in Iran, and who wrote to Andrew Sullivan's blog, "The Daily Dish":

"I would also say that anyone who doesn't think that Obama's No Ruz message and his speech in Cairo didn't contribute at least something to this uprising doesn't know any Iranians - the feeling of hope that Obama gave to Americans and people all over the world (rightly or wrongly…) has trickled down to Iranians. On a human level, as well, everyone knows how far a little respect can go."

From his hideout in the Urals, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (he is in Russia for a conference), has been trying to discredit the post-election turbulence erupting back in his country as the result of "American interference." Obama, however, has remained smartly even-handed, refusing to "meddle," in Iran's internal affairs, and resisting the drag toward any of those pompous, set-piece condemnations we are so used to from the previous administration. Predictably, his neo-con opponents--all those folks who now make a career out of finding reasons to attack whatever Obama does or doesn't do--have seized on this opportunity to criticize his silence as "shameful." John McCain, bless his putrid heart, has called for Obama to overtly denounce "a corrupt, flawed sham of an election" and its brutal treatment of the protesters. The McCains of this world just don't get it: the notion that the most powerful action can often be inaction. Obama's "deferential" open hand towards the Muslim world, in Cairo and elsewhere, has now hit it's first significant target--setting in motion the core of a potential velvet revolution in Iran. Whether it can succeed or not is up for grabs, but the stakes are huge.

Today, the fifth straight day of street demonstrations in overt defiance of the regime, the crowds resembled nothing so much as those we last saw in this country on Obama's victory night and his inauguration. Reports have it that the nightly ritual chanting from roof tops, which began days ago, is getting stronger, not weaker. It would seem that there is havoc behind the scenes among the clerical leadership, and Ahmadinejad's big supporter, Ali Khameni, is in hot water for having counted the votes even before the election took place: his credibility is now on the line. The drama of this story is better than any movie. Will the ayatollas abandon Ahmadinejad, or will they risk thwarting millions of (mostly young) Iranians and delegitimizing themselves? Will Mousavi get the new election he has called for--or will Iran devolve into a brutal dictatorship? The Iranian people have determined that Ahmadinejad is really a disgrace to Iran's global image (rather the way Bush/Cheney was to America's). Another four years of his malign influence will likely sink the country like a stone to the bottom of the pond. Meanwhile, Iranians have watched us transmogrify and rise up from the ashes. I believe they would like to follow in our footsteps.

Last, but definitely not least, there is Andrew Sullivan himself, sitting on the end of a pier in Cape Cod, live-blogging the whole extravaganza, blow by blow, for days now. Bravo to Andrew for doing such an incredible job:

Andrew Sullivan: The administration should, in my view, resist the grandstanding of the neocons - who remain almost autistic about the world they seek to remake - but insist that no violence be used against peaceful demonstrations. The truth is: if these crowds continue to grow and the regime does not massacre them, there's a chance they could topple the regime. By focusing on government restraint, you can empower the resistance without giving Ahmadi's thugs an opening.
Oh, and the president should wear a green tie from now on. Every day. He need say nothing more.

Twittering from Tehran on government theft, fraud, and intimidation:
We were told to report election results as 62% for the president and ignore the real voting. The real ballots were taken by the government.
about 2 hours ago from web
I work for the government in northwest Tehran.
about 3 hours ago from web
As we left work on Friday and the presidents people came in we were shocked they would steal government records.
about 2 hours ago from web
If you go to the back of the complex, four trucks full of ballot boxes are being hiden there.
about 2 hours ago from web
I have discovered that there are several trucks parked at the Shirudi sports center full of the real ballots taken by the government.
about 2 hours ago from web
We were threaten with arrest if we spoke out, pluse we would lose our jobs.
From an article by Pepe Escobar in The Asia Times:

Ahmadinejad has made his power play against Mousavi and Rafsanjani. The Supreme Leader fully supported him. Mousavi and Rafsanjani, plus Khatami, need an urgent counterpunch. And their only possible play is to go after Khamenei.

As Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, among others, has noted, Rafsanjani is now counting his votes at the Council of Experts (86 clerics, no women) - of which he is the chairman - to see if they are able to depose Khamenei. He is in the holy city of Qom for this explicit purpose. To pull it off, the council would imperatively have to be supported by at least some factions within the IRGC. The Ahmadinejad faction will go ballistic. A Supreme Leader implosion is bound to imply the implosion of the whole Khomeini-built edifice.

Null and void
As a prelude, Mousavi has already bypassed the Supreme Leader, sending an open letter to the powerful mullahcracy in Qom asking them to invalidate the election. Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, head of the election vote-monitoring committee, has officially requested that the Council of Guardians void the election and schedule a new, fully monitored one.
...Ahmadinejad knew Khamenei was on his side. But it's fair to argue neither Ahmadinejad nor the ultra-right wing spectrum may have evaluated the full implication of a dubious electoral victory possibly imploding the whole system as they know it.
Will Rafsanjani go for broke? As he prepares a Council of Experts counterpunch against the Supreme Leader and Mousavi plots the next resistance steps, the ball is now in the Iranian street's court. Much will depend on this Monday's peaceful march along Vali Asr street in Tehran and in 19 other cities, and a national strike on Tuesday, both called by Mousavi.
...An election was stolen in the United States in 2000 and Americans didn't do a thing about it. Iranians are willing to die to have their votes counted. There is now an opening for a true Iranian people-power movement not specifically to the benefit of Mousavi, but with Mousavi as the catalyst in a wider struggle for real democratic legitimacy. The die is cast; now it's people power against "divine assessment".

Andrew Sullivan comments:

This blog has long been interested in Iran, especially in its younger generation so open to the West. Part of it is that I've long believed that Iran was much more likely to become a democracy than its neighboring Arab states - and that this might be the key to unwinding the clash of civilizations that was hurtling us toward apocalyptic scenarios. Part of it is that being immersed in online media, I'm perhaps more aware of the vibrant debate, evolving culture and amazing passion of Iran's Millennials. So this day is a moment of great hope and joy for those of us who have been waiting for it and knowing that one day, it would come. But many Americans have, sadly, been left unaware of this phenomenon - and a glance at the cable news of the weekend helps explain why. Maybe these images will change that. A reader writes:
I am 31 years old. I cannot remember ever having a discussion about "Iran" at work. I cannot remember ever having a discussion about "Iran" with my wife or members of my family. Unless it was about their nuclear weapons program, or their involvement in Iraq, I cannot remember ever having a conversation about "Iran" with any of my friends.
Today, people at work are sharing photos, many of them are those found on the links you have provided. People are speaking about "Iran", not as an enemy - but as a people who has had their freedom taken from them. I don't know how this will resolve, but those protesters need to know they are not alone.
They aren't. If you can read this out there, know that we are with you, every day and every moment of your fight for your freedoms. And know this too:
Yes You Can.


Note from an Iranian to New York Times columnist Roger Cohen:

I received this note from an Iranian-American with family here: “The bottom line right now is whose violence threshold is higher? How much are the hard-liners willing to inflict to suppress the population and tell yet another generation to shut up? And how much are Moussavi and his supporters willing to stand to fulfill their dreams? It sounds so inhuman, but that’s what it comes down to. It’s very scary.”

And finally, two more of Andrew's most recent posts. And so, let us all take heart:

Totten sighs:
According to the New York Times, Fars News Agency reports a partial “recounting” of votes has begun in Iran. But they are not being counted. They were not even counted the first time. Fars says the “recount” in the Kurdish province of Kermanshah shows “no irregularity.” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has almost no support among Kurds whatsoever. Claiming he “won” 70 percent in Kermanshah is as outlandish as Dick Cheney winning San Francisco and Berkeley in a landslide.

17 Jun 2009 07:33 pm
Optimism In Iran

Laura Secor talks to a friend in Tehran who has been protesting:
The energy, she told me, was indescribable. You could not feel afraid; the sense of common purpose was too powerful, and it had left her with a profound and nearly serene certainty that this movement would succeed.

Andrew comments: That is my feeling too. I am well aware of who has the guns. But the peaceful manner in which so many have revealed such courage these last few days has already stripped the regime of all legitimacy. I believe they will prevail. I do not know that. I believe that.

Ahmadinejad's "Crushing Victory" in Iran

"Crushing?" Yeah, you better believe it! This was definitely the right choice of word for the way Iranian Ayatollahs and their military clamped down on the progressive forces gathering under the "green" banner of the Mousavi campaign, which began to seem like a real threat to the status quo. Mir Hossain Mousavi was being touted as "Iran's Obama." His wife was out on the campaign trail with him, promoting women's rights. Students were out campaigning, just like in America. Now Mousavi is under house arrest--for urging his backers to resist a government based on "lies and dictatorships." Iran is in shambles, with protesters eaten up by rage, their candidate thrown to the dogs.

As one Iranian blogged from Iran, "They didn't rig the vote. They didn't even look at the vote." They just made up a number and wrote it next to Ahmadinejad's name.

All signs indicate that Obama's speech in Cairo galvanized hope for change, and in a great feat of socio-acupuncture, liberated a youth movement that was unanticipated--and caught the Mullahs off guard, with their robes down. Not so fast, they countered with their coup d'etat. We're not stepping over the edge into that brave new world of freedom. We've got the upper hand, and old Slyboots Ahmadinejad--whose mongrel face, it's true, could launch a thousand beaded belt buckles--is still in mock charge. It's a fatwa. You know about those, don't you?

"It's far too early to make sense of what is happening, and what just happened in Iran," Andrew Sullivan writes on his blog, The Daily Dish. "It could be another episode of tragic suppression of stirrings of democracy and reform in that theocratic state. It could be a new, more significant marker in the regime's loss of legitimacy among its educated classes. It could possibly lead to real unrest, as riots today revealed, and a much less stable regime. It could lead to an even more disturbingly aggressive and know-nothing government, threatening the world and the region with weapons of mass destruction, precipitating awful conflict. Or it could mean that many of us have been deluding ourselves in thinking that there is not widespread popular support in Iran for hardline religious conservatism."

I've been following the Iranian election story as it unfolds, mainly through Andrew's blog and that of Marc Ambinder, also an AtlanticMonthly blogger. They have best access to sources in Iran whose posts are being translated from Farsi. I've collaged together some of the material I've found on these sites, and one from the Huffington Post as well. The first excerpt comes from Andrew's blog, quoting Gary Sick, the second from Marc Ambinder's.

Gary Sick:
On the basis of what we know so far, here is the sequence of events starting on the afternoon of election day, Friday, June 12.
Near closing time of the polls, mobile text messaging was turned off nationwide
Security forces poured out into the streets in large numbers
The Ministry of Interior (election headquarters) was surrounded by concrete barriers and armed men
National television began broadcasting pre-recorded messages calling for everyone to unite behind the winner
The Mousavi campaign was informed officially that they had won the election, which perhaps served to temporarily lull them into complacency
But then the Ministry of Interior announced a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad. Unlike previous elections, there was no breakdown of the vote by province, which would have provided a way of judging its credibility
The voting patterns announced by the government were identical in all parts of the country, an impossibility (also see the comments of Juan Cole at the title link)
Less than 24 hours later, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene`i publicly announced his congratulations to the winner, apparently confirming that the process was complete and irrevocable, contrary to constitutional requirements
Shortly thereafter, all mobile phones, Facebook, and other social networks were blocked, as well as major foreign news sources.

Andrew adds: "All of this had the appearance of a well orchestrated strike intended to take its opponents by surprise – the classic definition of a coup. Curiously, this was not a coup of an outside group against the ruling elite; it was a coup of the ruling elite against its own people."

@marcambinder I've been following the coverage of the Iranian elections all day on Twitter; that'll continue tomorrow. I've got links to some of the best Iranian-based sources, and to the courageous American journalists, like Bill Keller and Jim Scuitto, who are finding ways to break through the Iranian coverage ban. I'm @marcambinder. Sign up -- you won't get spammed, and you will get unfiltered insight.

Questions for the next week include: did the American media stand down? (I say no, but lots of other people say yes.) What are Khameni's intentions? How foreseeable was the plan to rig elections? Is it AT ALL possible that Ahmadinejad actually won by, say, 51%, but that his totals were inflated? Is the outpouring of protest (Green Revolution) more of an important development than the "re-election."?

And lastly, this from the Huffington Post, reported from Cairo by Brian Murphy:

Whether this is enough to spawn a sustained opposition movement remains an open question.

Much depends on how much they are willing to risk. The heartland of Iran's liberal ranks is the educated and relatively affluent districts of north Tehran. It's also the showcase for the gains in social freedoms that began with the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997: makeup, Internet cafes, head scarves that barely cover hair and satellite dishes that are technically illegal but common.

The ruling clerics tolerate all that to a point _ part of a tacit arrangement that the liberties stay as long as reformists remain politically meek. A real protest movement could threaten their coveted Western-looking lifestyle and risk a brutal response from groups vowing to defend the Islamic system.

The political chief of the powerful Revolutionary Guard has warned it would crush any "revolution" against the Islamic regime by Mousavi's "green movement" _ drawing parallels to the "velvet revolution" of 1989 in then-Czechoslovakia.

...Authorities also called foreign journalists with visas to cover the elections, including members of The Associated Press, and told them they should prepare to leave the country. Italian state TV RAI said one of its crews was caught in the clashes in front Mousavi's headquarters. Their Iranian interpreter was beaten with clubs by riot police and officers confiscated the cameraman's tapes, the station said.

"The massive demonstrations of police and army presence on the streets was designed to show that they were quite ready to kill protesters if they had to in order to impose order," said Patrick Clawson, deputy director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "On the whole, these guys in north Tehran who are terribly upset about what is happening are not ready to die.

...Ahmadinejad addressed a crowd in Tehran, but did not mention the unrest, saying only "a new era has begun in the history of the Iranian nation."



.

(The) Dick

So much has been going on in the world (and right here at home), I haven't managed to write a word this week, partly for not knowing where, with so many sky-high possibilities, to even begin. I've barely had time to sit down on my new sofa, and have been sleeping like a giraffe (for only two hours a night, according to some sources). Constantly tracking everything has become a full-time job, but I'm happy to be doing it, because the world narrative these days is one continuous rave, its many facets glowing like a disco glitter ball.

Slow down. Observe. Position yourself. Long enough to see what's really needed.

This week found the Prez in Cairo, defying all the safety locks as usual, stunningly radiant and fabulously iconic as always, redemptive with his words (including dromedary phrases in Arabic and a luxurious orgy of quotations from the Koran, Bible, and Talmud), and winning Muslim hearts by declaring that the Pyramids were "even better" than Five Guys. Who, I ask, could possibly top this?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Rush and the former Congressman Tom Tamcredo compared Supreme Court noninee Sonia Sotomayor favorably to members of the KKK; Dick Cheney was everywhere, bashing Obama, and trying to rewrite the history of torture as practiced under the Bush administration. As Maureen Dowd so aimiably put it:

“The punks thought they could roll over us...Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

North Korea was busily shooting off missiles; Iran was gearing up for an election that could, if the world should be so lucky, put paid to that goofball Ahmadinejad once and for all. Or not. Frank Rich in the New York Times deliciously referred to Rush, Newt, and Dick as "the trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the [Republican] party." Tsampa wrote Jane from Nepal about the dzi bead he bought in Roanoke, which has proved to be not only authentic, but on a par with two of the most significant dzi's in existence, impressive enough to be offered to the Dalai Lama. And today, Sasha Obama celebrated her eighth birthday in Paris.

But what got my attention over all of this cacaphony was Dick Cheney's claim that criminalizing a previous administration for its policies sets an outrageous precedent, especially when you are unraveling "the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11." Obama seems more than willing to unravel the policies--but much less willing to criminalize them. I find myself seriously questioring whether he is right.

Then I saw the documentary on PBS that Bill Moyers showed about a week ago, reconstructing in minute detail how the Bush administration (orchestrated by Cheney) came to authorize torture. Shortly after that, I read Jonathan Schell's recent essay, "Torture and Truth," in The Nation. Suddenly all the particles began looking more like a solid than a wave--a hard-edged, must-write-about-this kind of entity. Not like when the smell of roses meets the nose, but more the marble table when it meets the shin. Like when the rubber finally meets the road.

Schell starts off by also seriously questioning Obama's desire to concentrate on the "future" rather than the "past," so as to get it right from now on. The Bush administration, Schell explains, "hellbent on justifying its forthcoming invasion of Iraq, was ransacking the intelligence bureaucracy to find or produce two things that it turns out, did not exist: weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and cooperation between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The torture practices authorized by the White House, Justice Department, and the Pentagon in 2002 were not, according to Schell, for the purpose of preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. They were used in an attempt to find a smoking gun that would link Iraq with Al Qaeda.

As I'm reading this, I'm thinking: this is huge! Illegal practices instituted to force-find illegitimate justification for an illegal war of preemption. These are not "policies"--these are, indisputably, crimes.

It was Colin Powell who carried out the dirty work: he conveyed the perjured testimony exacted by torture to the world, via his unforgettable speech of pitch-perfect lies at the U.N. Security Council shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Many of us of knew at the time he was lying, but there was no way to prove it. And anyway, it didn't matter. The plan for the invasion was already a done deal.

"The war," writes Schell, "as we learned later from the photos of Abu Graib, produced torture. But before that happened, torture had produced the war." This is, of course, the very narrative (the) Dick is now preempting in order to escape any accountability. Schell cites a cartoon in the Washington Post in which a torturer stands over his victim, who is on his back on a waterboard. The torturer says, "There's a problem of getting false information." Cheney, standing next to him responds, "Problem?"

As for the issue of "criminalizing [a previous administration's] policy decisions," Schell topples (the)
Dick's case with no uncertainty: "Those who really criminalized policy--that is, those who ordered crimes as a matter of policy--are given immunity by charging those who would prosecute the crimes with criminalizing." Bingo! Schell then concludes: "Better to look the torture in the face and having looked, to remember, and having remembered, to respond, and having responded, to call those responsible to account so that we never do this again."

I think there will be no escaping this wretched story as it slowly but inevitably seeps into the cultural bloodstream, even if our dear Prez does not want to appear as if he is wasting his time trying to squash a roach when more important things are calling.

Warding off Old Age

The stated purpose of Marsilio Ficino's "The Book of Life," which he finished writing in 1489 and dedicated to his patron, Lorenzo de' Medici, was to help people live long and in good health. Ficino's father, who was a famous doctor in Renaissance Florence, introduced his son to Cosimo de' Medici, hoping to win support for his son. Having decided that Ficino was more a "doctor of souls" than of bodies, Cosimo bought a set of Plato's manuscripts in Greek for Ficino to translate, and gave him a villa in the hills at Careggi. Ficino thus became the first translator of Plato's "Complete Works" into Latin, and the villa, which was modeled on Plato's Academy, became the central meeting place for Renaissance philosophers, artists, and statesmen of the Medici era.

When "The Book of Life" was published in 1489, it got a bad rap, especially from the Roman Catholic Church, whose clerics viewed it as a work of demonic magic and necromancy, in part because of Ficino's interest in astrology and in part because of its continuous referencing of Greek gods. I found myself unexpectedly reading this book as a synchronistic spin-off from a recent discovery that Tibetan dzi beads (see my previous two blogs), if worn as a protective amulet, can actually increase human longevity. It turns out that Marsilio Ficino"s "The Book of Life" is really a therapeutic treatise, dating from the Renaissance, aimed not just at curing the black bile of melancholy, but also a kind of manual of practices for enlivening the body in order to maintain a long and happy life.

Book Two of "The Book of Life" is entitled "How to Prolong Your Life," so I launched into it with some zest, being in the appropriate age zone for caring about such things. I confess I found many of its pronouncements outlandish, ranging from the intriguing to the grotesque. Some of the occult herbal concoctions, poultices, and cordials for warding off old age were pretty off-the-wall, often demanding ingredients I've never seen in any health food store, like ground-up gold.

My favorite poultice of all times requires using the inside of a fresh warm bread, mixed with mallow wine and mint powder, and applied to the stomach. Generally highly recommended by Ficino for eating are fresh cheeses, figs, dates, eggs, capers, sweet apples, jujubes, hyssop, coral, and betony (whatever that is}. However nothing surpasses pistachios for nourishment--and pine nuts, the latter supposedly even more nutritious if kept in warm water for about twelve hours before eating. (I'll probably continue to go for the less nutritious version, myself.)

To a modern, Western sensibility, there is something frankly decadent about perishing bodies fallen into a state of besiegement drinking blood in order to become rejuvenated. However, Ficino enthusiastically recommends it. Drinking fresh blood, he maintains, is good for the health, especially when it is young blood drunk by an old person. Listen up here, because the formula involves finding a willing and happy adolescent with good blood. An old person who has no other hope should then suck an ounce or two from a vein barely opened on the adolescent's left arm, in the manner that leeches do.

"Afterwards," explains Ficino, "they should take an equal amount of sugar and wine, and they should do the sucking, while hungry and thirsty, and with the moon rising." Wow! Has Anne Rice heard about this, or the "Twilight" movie folks?

For those in ordinary or medium physical condition, an alternative to sucking blood is to suck wine; Ficino recommends not taking white wine but red, making sure it is styptic and bitterish, and tempering it with iron-water or mastic-gum. It is really necessary, he says, to accept Bacchus's gift twice a day. Not only should you let your mouth frequently suck in its odor to refresh your spirit, but he also advises washing your hands with a little sweet-smelling wine to which you have added some cooked camomile, myrrh, and roses. It is also good to put some in your nostrils and on your temples. I can't help wondering what modern medics might make of such sequinned hygiene for warding off the swine flu?

"Zero tolerance," my alligator muse and sidekick Virgil pipes up, to immediately settle the matter. "You human beings may be far more complex than asparagus, because you live a large part of your lives in the realm of the symbolic sublime. Even so, I can almost hear those docs saying, using the immortal words of Groucho Marx: 'Go, and never darken our towels again.' "

Virgil's probably right. Off he goes again, this time hoping to get squiffy at the Villa Gallici, his favorite four-star hotel in Aix-en-Provence, where a maid spritzes the flagstones and rugs in the lobby with essence of lavender each morning to insure the appropriate ambience. I think maybe he's hoping to have a secret encounter with the ghost of Marsilio Ficino. Now that would be truly synchronistic, don't you think?

The man peering over his shoulder in the painting above is Ficino. The painting, by Domenico Ghirlandaio, is called "Zacharia in the Temple," a fresco found in Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

More Dramaturgy of Dzi

This weekend my friends from Boone, Hank & John, came for an overnight. On Saturday we went out with four more friends to a restaurant situated on the river in Radford, one where none of us had ever been before--a big, cedar-beamed building with a vaulted, cathedral ceiling, but no river view from inside. It's called River Company Restaurant and Brewery, and going there was a treat, with excellent food and margueritas!

Earlier in the afternoon we'd cruised around and ran into a vintage car show on the main street of Christiansburg, visited TJ Max and a couple of plant nurseries, and stopped for frozen mochas. All the peonies in the garden are out--it is their shining moment of the year. The rest of yesterday was about changing sheets and heat-pump filters, spraying weeds, eating watermelon, and watching Colin Powell on Face the Nation. I also read Time magazine's cover story about Michelle Obama. (I haven't got round to remembering the fallen soldiers yet.) But I did especially enjoy hearing Michelle talk about the family's dinnertime ritual of playing "roses and thorns." You go around the dinner table and everyone recounts in turn one wonderful and one awful thing that happened during their day.

Then I got this email from my friend Gilah Yelin Hirsch, an artist who lives in Venice Beach, CA. She was responding to my last blog, the one about me buying a sofa and our Tibetan friend Tsampa finding a precious dzi bead in Roanoke:

"I happen to know a good deal about dzi beads AND happen to have been on a life-quest from the first time I beheld and held a "9-eye" dzi bead in BodhGaya in 1986. The Tibetan that I was led to regarding the bead wore his under his arm. All Dzi beads are passed down from generation to generation and are very great treasures indeed. Just holding it was quite an experience. I subsequently bought a piece of a 3 eyed bead in Leh, Ledakh, and during my search became quite an authority on real vs all sorts of knock-offs. Yes, the tooth banging is very much part of the ritual. My last big Dzi bead event occurred in Katmandu (2006), when my flight out was cancelled and I had an extra two hours to roam. I happened in to a Chinese antique shop in a very old part of Kadu. The shop was stuffed more densely than a Dickensian novel, but there, behind the "counter", in a tiny cabinet loaded with treasures, almost invisible as it was mostly hidden by all sorts of stuff, I spied a necklace of dzi beads and other valuable stones. I tried not to seem excited and asked to see it. The vendor was astonished because unless you know what it is, it doesn't look like much. I asked what he wanted for it - 22 beads, each a unique and amazing piece. $100, 000, he said, non-plussed.

"By this time I had less than an hour to get back to the airport. In record time I bargained down to $800 ( I have never spent anything more than $100 on anything, ever!) but didn't have the cash, only credit cards. No one on that "street" had ever seen or heard of credit cards. Word of a huge sale was spreading rapidly in the hood, and someone at the tailor shop down the lane sent a kid to find his cousin who had a motorcycle who could bring the credit card to the bank and me to the airport. And so it went. The amazing necklace hangs on my wall - too heavy and way too juicy to wear. (Normally, those Tibetans who have ONE dzi bead wear it on a leather lace as a collar around the neck and never remove it.) I recently showed the necklace to Kuno (who has been headquartered here since April and will be until October), who also bit each bead. Although I think he sees it with prejudice as I bought it from a Chinese person - he is definitely impressed.

"I am still after a 9-eye. "Simiku", of my own. I have a 3-eye dzi, several 1-eyes, as well as a "sheep's eye" and a few with rigorous geometric designs, not quite eyes; also a couple of other patterned dzis. Everyone is a gem."

So, if I had my very own dzi bead at this point, I'd lie on the bed and play with it and think more about this warding off of old age, a topic whose geodesic forces are obviously of some historic interest to me. Since I don't have a dzi, however, I will play around instead with synchronicity--always my favorite way of moving full tilt ahead without really knowing where I'm going. I'm on the prowl for any hidden nestling of significances in my new puzzle box of dzis. Without even blinking, the universe leads me straight to another unread book on my bookshelf. It's called "The Book of Life," written by Marsilio Ficino, a Florentine doctor and philosopher who was born in 1433 near Florence. At a quick glance, it seems to be a kind of encyclopedic compendium of herbal concotions, healing poultices, and charms intended to help people steeped in the occult tradition of Renaissance Florence have long and healthy lives.

So stay tuned, and I will regale you with some of the more fantastical suggestions it offers for warding off old age in my next blog.

All in An Afternoon's Shopping

Last week, while ex-VP and known-to-shoot Dick Cheney was out and about spreading the word and making the case that "torture saves lives," I was busy jumping over pieces of cardboard and buying a sofa. All my life I've wanted, but never managed to own, a really gorgeous, comfy sofa, stacked with buttery soft cushions. Now I have one, and it all came about because of the "butterfly effect," including the unlikely help of a Tibetan Buddhist healer, Tsampa Ngawang, who was born in 1948 in Chonkhor village near Muktinath, and comes from a long line of lamas and amchis (traditional Tibetan doctors) stretching back to the 7th century.

The butterfly first began flapping its wings when I was visiting my friend Kathy Pinkerton, whose house is filled with unusually comfortable furniture. I had casually mentioned my ongoing lust for a sofa, and she suggested we start by reorganizing all the furniture in my living room. EEK! I thought, frozen by the sheer ambition of it. No way, we can't do that! (I definitely suffer from the limitations imposed by realism.) My living room, as I saw it, was already full-up with stuff, and even though there was one chair I was dying to get rid of, its removal would hardly clear enough space for a bonafide sofa--one that would be perky, soft, and, as I said, replete with buttery cushions. Disclosure: I do already own a sofa of sorts, but it's pretty hard-nosed--a Mennonite day-bed from Mexico that is painted ochre. The distressed look. Beautiful, yes. Comfortable, no.

Hiding my panic, I tentatively asked Kathy what she would change if she could, figuring to put her on the spot. Without missing a beat, she proposed moving the life-sized statue of my Burmese bodhisatva (a young, "seed" buddha-in-training, also painted in ochre) that stands between two windows along the back wall, and suggested putting it instead on the brick platform that extends out from the brick fireplace. That way, by also removing the recliner chair I hate, and shifting the other chair I like to a different spot, a large area would open up for, just possibly, a second sofa.

A few days later my friend Jane Vance arrived at my house with her longtime mentor and friend from Nepal, amchi Tsampa Ngawang, whom we were going to take on a jaunt to Roanoke while he was visiting Blacksburg. Tsampa had brought me a gift from Nepal of seven copper offering bowls, and a copper vase, decorated with dragon arms and bright green stones. I'd put crepe paper flowers in the copper vase--a small bouquet of cobalt violet roses, bought in a gas station convenience store for five dollars, that luckily I thought, at the time, were irresistible when I saw them. I had also placed seven rose-shaped candles in the offering bowls, that exactly matched the cobalt violet of the flowers. It was all drop-dead beautiful, I thought, violet being a perfect foil for the aspiring buddha's flowing, jewel-encrusted, ochre robe. Tsampa and Jane enthusiastically agreed.

When I told them about Kathy's idea to move the sculpture to the fireplace ledge, Tsampa immediately said, "Buddha better up high, look up at him. More like shrine." "Let's do it," said Jane. The two of them lifted the statue from its longtime resting place of eighteen years, and after a few moments of admiring the new position, we left for Roanoke.

After lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant, of sauteed greens and beer, we wandered into Reid's, an upscale furniture store around the corner. At first look, there wasn't a single sofa there I liked, until the sales lady suggested we take a stroll to the warehouse next door. There, like a star somehow fallen out of the solar system, the perfect sofa sat waiting, hushed and still, in the center of the room. It was a glowing thing of beauty, covered in velvet, with a pattern of aubergine and ochre vine leavest set on a background of sage green. As it turned out, the sofa was able, despite much anxiety-in-waiting, to make it through my double front doors.

But I wasn't the only one who found a treasure that day. We took Tsampa to my favorite antique store with its own printing press, right next to the new Taubman Museum. (We had also planned on going to the museum, but it was Monday, and so it was closed.) Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tsampa at one point fingering a necklace made by a local craft artist. It had one large, sausage-shaped, ruddy bead, framed by a beaten-copper, hand-made, spiral curlicue. The bead was on a leather thong. Tsampa kept running his fingers over the bead, and once he even banged it against his tooth. I imagined he was thinking about buying it as a gift for his wife, who was back in Nepal. The price was not cheap. Tsampa bargained, got twenty dollars knocked off the price, and bought the necklace.

Afterwards we went to a Mexican restaurant and over lime-green margueritas and quesadillas, I learned that Tsampa had bought the necklace for himself. He believed the bead was an authentic dzi bead, which, he explained, in his country, was "worth maybe one thousand dollar." It could significantly lower blood pressure and provide longevity to the wearer. Tsampa looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary as he played with and studied his new necklace--clearly every bit as excited by the dzi bead as I was by my sofa. Later Jane, who seemed to know all about dzi beads, explained that in Tibet's mystery medicine books, dzi beads are described as healing illnesses, particularly blood-related diseases and protecting a person from ill-willed enemies and from their evil curses. Dzi beads have been around for 2000 to 2500 years. The ancient and pure dzi beads of Tibet are extremely precious and rare. Tsampa told us that if he confirmed, once back in Nepal, that the bead was indeed genuine, he would wear it for the rest of his life.

To learn more about the intriguing artistic collaboration between Tsampa and his friend Jane, please check out her website at agiftforthevillage.com. The photo of Tsampa above is by Sherrie Austin.

Collapse Soup

Anyone following my blog on a regular basis will know that I am a relentless dabbler in the literature of civilizational collapse. I seem drawn to reading this stuff as a moth to flame, ricocheting back and forth like a billiard ball between the recondite pronouncements of Timothy Geithner (that we'll get through this and that none of the biggest banks are at risk for insolvency) and my own fitful but persistent inner panic that says no, dear, we won't.

This pessimistic side is reinforced every time I read another doom-writer like Derrick Jensen or James Howard Kunstler, and, more recently, Dimitry Orlov, whose book "Reinventing Collapse" I have just finished. The problem is, I tend to believe both sides, knowing of course that they can't both be right, since they avow diametrically opposite things. The Obama-Geithner axis projects a slow but inevitable recovery; by contrast, here is some quintessential Orlov:

"Let us not even try to imagine that this will all just blow over. Make no mistake about it: this soup will be served, and it will not be tasty."

The soup in question is "collapse soup," whose ingredients must be present for a modern, military-industrial superpower to collapse. The required ingredients are: a severe and worsening trade deficit; a runaway military budget; and ballooning foreign debt. Apply heat to this mix, which can be supplied by a humiliating military defeat or a looming catastrophe that generates huge amounts of fear (provided in the instance of Russia by the war in Afghanistan, and by the nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl). Stir the pot, and you will get a tasty order, not of Chinese wonton, but of Dimitry Orlov's collapse soup.

Orlov, who was born and grew up in Leningrad, has lived in the U.S. ever since the mid-1970s, but he returned to Russia during the late 1980s for several extended visits, in order to study various stages of the Soviet collapse. As an experienced observer of the phenomenon of collapse, he was hoping to understand what happens when a modern economy crashes, and the complex society it supports disintegrates. The collapse of the U.S., he claims, may seem as unlikely now (his book, published last year, was written before the extreme downturn in the economy) as the demise of the Soviet Union appeared to be in l988, but the warning signs read loud and clear.

In the end, Russia was able to bounce back because of its rich reserves of oil and natural gas, which is not true of the U.S. The Soviet Union did not need to import energy, whereas oil production in the U.S. peaked in 1970 and has been declining ever since. Its economy was never based on runaway consumerism, nor on huge credit debt, as is ours. American car-based culture, which has to import three-quarters of its oil, is destined to find itself without enough energy to keep its economy functioning. In truth, as the world's largest debtor nation, the U.S. is already technically bankrupt. I read this, I cringe, and know that it is true.

Listening to Geithner and Obama, however, you get a rather different impression. They assure us that by saving the banks and greening the economy, disaster can be averted. The goddess of technology will provide clean energy to galvanize another century of economic recovery. Orlov, however, mocks the prospect of biofuels as a lethal exercise in futility; it amounts to burning one's food to feed the car addiction and destroying what is left of topsoil in order to continue driving. "Welcome to the sideshow at the end of the universe," he writes. These kinds of solutions are nothing less than boondoggles--they result in more severe problems than those they attempt to solve. I must say I felt the full impact of this comment when I caught the final minutes of a documentary on PBS the other week, about the prospect of mining lithium on the high steppes of Bolivia--lithium being the crucial component for battery-driven electric cars. This single area in Bolivia seems to contain the world's supply of lithium, and corporations are already in a bidding war for mining rights. Once we've destroyed another remote region of the earth with our tragic ambitions, and the lithium disappears, then what?

Orlov suggests that a better alternative would be to reduce energy consumption by progressively shutting down all non-vital parts of the economy, and redistributing our limited resources to uniformly provide for the welfare of the entire population. But he isn't holding his breath waiting for this to happen. "Since such a revolution is not politically possible, the only remaining alternative is economic and political collapse."

God knows these are not good days to be in the auto business. The entire industry seems to be folding its tent and vanishing in front of our very eyes. So it was synchronicity at work again when somebody alerted me this week to the work of a design student at the University of Central Lancashire in England named Sara Watson. Watson was given a Skoda Fabia car by a local recycling firm; she then spray painted its surface so the car blends in with the building and parking lot of her studio (as in the photo above). Viewed from exactly the right angle, the entire car magically disappears. The procedure took the artist about three weeks to accomplish, and the art work is being used as advertising for the local recycling firm that donated it.

I'm always happy when art has the last word. But this time, the last word has to go to Orlov, who on page 82 of "Reinventing Collapse" has this to say about my hapless subject for the past month: plastic debris: "The last act in the American consumerist tragedy will end with the now naked consumer standing on top of a giant mound of plastic trash. At the end of an economy where everything is disposable stands the disposable consumer. But once the consumer is disposed of, who will be left to take him out with the trash?" (Orlov's blog can be found at cluborlov.blogspot.com.)