Indus Valley Civilization

I'm pretty skeptical of glorification of a prior era. As if people back then had it all figured out, were more functional than we could imagine from our toxic modernity. Lost gardens of paradise. The way I see it, the walls constituting our memories, collective and individual, have been far too graffitied to accurately make out the original mural. That place, and what it was really like, is now inaccessible, buried forever beneath layers of time. I think nostalgia for a better epoch is dangerous. 

My curiosity about how our predecessors lived, however, remains unbounded. As of late I've been intrigued by the Harappans of the Indus River Valley. 

We don't hear much about them because nobody knows much about them. Their writing is indecipherable, their remnants more sparse than those of contemporaries in the Middle East. But these South Asians were on the forefront of human possibility. Around 5,000 years ago, the level at which they were farming and organizing and trading was matched only by the Mesopotamians and Egyptians.

 

I don't think South Asian civilization is thought of, generally, as one of those legendary ancient agrarian civilizations. But it's older than China, the Mesoamericans, the Greeks. It was also larger than anything else had ever been, spanning from arid Balochistan (western Pakistan) to the Yamuna River (near Delhi).

 

Harappans had cutting edge urban planning, standardized units of weight and measurement, granaries to store surplus barley and wheat from irrigated fields, and networks of trade reaching the other wealthy clusters in Iraq and Egypt.  

Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, their two most famous cities, are notable for their impressive infrastructure. They had sewage drainage systems, trash collection, public baths, street grids, and tens of thousands of residents. Their ruins were uncovered during British railroad construction in 19th century colonial times when workers began unearthing oddly uniform bricks. These were Harappan bricks, and their repetitiveness indicated the existence of an ancient shared mathematical system across the region; people had developed uniform standards to measure and build over vast swaths of land. They were trading raw materials and finished goods like metals and precious stones, timber, textiles, and animals throughout the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, laying the foundations for the Indian Ocean trade networks that have flourished for thousands of years since. 

But what really caught my attention about the Harappans is what they didn't have. There was a degree of wealth inequality, as seen by different-sized houses, but there is no evidence of a centralized political entity, a King or ruling religious elite, in any of their excavated sites.

In these grand cities and alluvial plains, archaeologists have found no temples or palaces, no great monuments, no signs of an army, no lavish burials. No artwork revering such institutions or powerful individuals. No sign of any of it.  

 

Those are the first things we come across in ancient ruins. Monuments to religion and state are the first things people will come across in the ruins of DC and Beijing and Moscow and every other major city inhabited today. People in the Indus Valley seem to have lived relatively equally and peacefully, especially compared to Babylon and Pharaonic Egypt. Even though they had the resources and technical prowess, they weren't building grandiose structures to a god or a divine ruler.

Could there really have been a flourishing group of more than 5 million people across thousands of square miles, in contact with other strong states, with metallurgic technology and standard brick sizes and written language, without centralized, political religion? Worship of the military? A King or warlord? Is this possible? A civilization that lasted around 2,000 years? 

 

Nobody really knows how the Harappans lived or were governed. I'm not suggesting this was an egalitarian utopia. But it seems clear from what we do know that their priorities, what they dedicated resources to, were not the same as other similarly-complex societies. Their mystery may persist until the end of time.

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Deep down, it seems everyone simply wants to be liked by others. All of us humans carry this built-in, pervasive itch day after day, across ages and thousands of miles. It must be related to survival strategies developed over millennia, a foundational aspect of our inescapable social nature. At some level, I think we can recognize this hope for acceptance in ourselves and others when we genuinely interact with people, even if it's buried under layers of denial and scar tissue. At least I believe we can train ourselves to think this way. 

I listened to a talk by Charles Yu, an author who recently won a National Book Award for Interior Chinatown, which I haven't read (yet). He was a corporate lawyer for over a decade before switching to writing full-time. He discussed his struggles during that time to embody what he imaged a lawyer to be: someone more aggressive or assertive or domineering, not a "quiet Asian guy" like himself. 

He said his efforts to align with an image of who he should be, this twisted mental game, held him back personally and professionally. He boxed himself into a corner, erecting the slippery walls himself. Looking back, he said, when he opened up and showed people who he really was, told them that he liked writing, they actually liked him more than when he was hiding, and they shared details about themselves in return. He ended up doing his job better because of it. His self-imposed facade, a defense against potential persecution, had transformed into a weight holding him down. 

It a paradox how we hurt ourselves by stifling the authentic self, when releasing it ended up yielding the very things hoped for, the things we thought we could gain only through this stringency.

 

Authenticity is palpable and inspirational, which is why I think it's powerful. So much more is achievable when those walls are taken down and rest replaces the defenses. We all know this well, but it still takes bravery to follow-through. 

 

My sister and I watched The Green Knight last week. Like so many tales before, it has a message warning  against living a lie. Doing so eats everything around you, slowly. Better to face the demon and win peace of mind. Then comes the good stuff.

National Identities

I was sitting in the Tuileries Garden, the sun tucked behind puffy clouds yet still radiant, fiery. My friend, donning Ray-Bans, short hair on his cheeks and long hair on his head, was saying something along the lines of:

    "People have died for ideas. But what even is an idea? A nation is an idea. Everything is an idea."

 

I was in France for the first time in August. I quickly noticed a strong reverence for precedent there. Legitimacy is proven by the idea that a place, or food, or ideology, or language, or style, has been tried and tested by a long line of predecessors. An unambiguous pride stems from heritage. I got the impression that the French nation is defined by a lore, a history more than cherished but quite deliberately placed centrally in their society like the Black Stone in the Kaaba; a people who root themselves in camaraderie with the countless that came before. 

 

This sacred historical mythos, the national religion, comes in a different, still patriotic form on this side of the pond. For better or worse, I think ours is more future-oriented with a healthy dollop of underdog, rags-to-riches, land of endless potential rhetoric. Our possibilities unite us, not a shared past. All nations are ideas, after all. 

I also saw that conflict is an essential ingredient to the conception of the nation-state in both countries. At Versailles there's a hall of paintings glorifying the major French battles up to Napoleon. The story of France. In Washington DC, a visitor walks up the National Mall, strolling from Lincoln to the Capitol, through a series of memorials for our 20th century wars. The story of America. 

Deliberate effort is exerted to unite the mass of individuals with a shared idea. A nation is far more capable than the sum of its parts. That seems to be what politics is all about. From my limited exposure, it seems the French have created a sturdy, gravitational, pervasive idea to define themselves; forged through centuries of war and power struggle, but also the stroke of paintbrushes and pens.

The Importance We Give Places

Some months ago I was looking for a book with the most up-to-date story on Texan independence. Nothing stood out to me so I let the urge pass. 

 

Not long after, the provocatively-titled Forget the Alamo began riding the critical circuit, gaining steam with every bemoan from ticked off right-wing Texas government folk. It was perfect timing; I put in an early hold at the library and a few weeks later it was in my apartment. 

 

I've publicly lamented about the fairy-tale narrative around the Alamo, the Republic of Texas, the whole grand parade of "freedom" and "liberty" evoked in seemingly any circumstance. Freedom and liberty to enslave, to properly complete the idea. 

I'm glad the truth behind the legend is being unearthed and shared with the public. Because the toxic propaganda was masked as fact for so long. It still is, amazingly. The way symbols have been used to keep other people down in this country should be universally known; that's the way their oppressive power ceases. This book does that in a casual yet well-researched manner, and I think access to work like this goes a long way in raising interest and care for historical narratives.

It is incredible, though, to see how tied people get to the idea of a place. It gets personal real quick. We imbue meaning in the world around us, greatly so in physical locations. Threatening one's understanding of a place must be a destabilizing force in a human psyche with few equals. I guess I get why traditionalists refuse to see the Alamo as a military blunder by half-drunk criminals and slave owners fighting for a militant, deeply racist society built on the shared value of making money on the backs of black people. Doesn't make their purposeful ignorance right, though. 

 

I was reading through this book while at my childhood home in San Antonio, alone there for the first time in years. It was strange to feel the duality of a place--a potent symbol sharing a town with an ordinary home and human being, the name San Antonio standing in for both that and this. Nothing in life is experienced the same way twice. 

Old Movies & Modernity

Old movies can be inaccessible to a modern audience for a number of legit reasons. The pacing can be uncomfortably slow, the graphics archaic, the acting a touch too dramatic, the relationships impalpable to 21st century sensibilities. There's also a pretentiousness around watching them, which I know I risk entering by writing this. 

They're much harder to swallow than an old book, I think, because the medium of film/TV changes with relentless pace. Old movies are clearly old. A book, on the other hand, is the same word-on-paper format whether it's 10 or 1000 years old. The words may make the age obvious, but at a sensory level there's no difference between the two. You read and imagine with the turn of a page.

But there are old movies that can seem strikingly contemporary in theme and content. I think the first one I ever saw where I felt that way was Taxi Driver. It follows a reclusive, disillusioned, alienated guy driving a taxi in NYC. I was shocked by how similar this character is to school-shooter types littered around today, how in line it was with the current loneliness epidemic in the wealthy world. Though the prominence of such fringe members of society may be uniquely modern, the presence of them isn't new at all. 

 

I've written on this before, about the clutch of recency bias, how pretty much everything that's happening on a macro, thematic level, and even more so everything about human nature, has happened before. Nothing new under the sun, as they say. I think I've come to a point where I can get past the outdated parts of old movies to recognize the commonalities between our times. 

Two I recently watched: Chinatown and The Bridge on the River Kwai. 

Chinatown is about this PI in LA who gets embroiled in a deep web of corruption that, in timeless fashion, is about water rights and money. There's injustice and the weight of history and the hopelessness of fighting power--it's dark in the way we expect only of our jaded coevals. Both it and Taxi Driver were made during the decay of the 70s, so they're not that old, but 50 years is a long time to still be relevant in the mechanized era. 

The other, The Bridge, is about a captured British battalion in WWII tasked with building a railroad for the Japanese in Burma. This one's got all the classics of mankind--pride, masculinity, honor, control, dominance. The same sort of movie could be made today to rave reviews, I think. Some things never go out of style.

Sunset in a Cold Month

There wasn't a place to sit last I was here. There was bustle, congestion, the underlying hum of chatter across many conversations. Not unlike a hive of honeybees. 

Today is different. The setting sun throws flecks of radiant pastels--lavender, tulip yellow, pink carnation--down the fading blue canvas sky, down to this empty and deserted station, down to my singular figure upright in space. I slide onto a south-facing bench. The sky splashed in color, the jungle beneath cloaked in shadow. 

Withered leaves scrape the sturdy-as-ever cement in a cool autumn wind of impending night. I look out over the tracks, running far to the west, straight until the curvature of the Earth brings the parallel into one. The rumbling had stopped when the train crossed over that line of horizon. Like it fell of the edge, silently, gracefully. 

 

Last I was here the railroad cars reached far towards that western frontier. They were filled to the brim with the waving arms and jostling torsos and fidgeting steps of men in anticipation. Their laughs and calls could be heard down the line on this very platform, now eternally holding empty chairs and empty benches. 

 

Their energy seemed to rock the entire train. Maybe it did. I don't know. I was shaky in my starchy uniform, its sharp edges not yet creased to the angles of my body. 

 

I remember sitting on this very bench, too. I stared at the leafy tree-tops of the jungle ahead under a white sky, so bright it hurt the eyes and burned away the clouds. People kept kicking my feet because we were all equally unfamiliar with the heavy steel-toed boots. Clumsy and frantic, we all were. I sat on this bench with my bag between my ankles and I stared in stupor at the jungle line. 

 

I remember a man sat next to me. He sighed and heaped his body beside mine with forceful noise. He pulled out a picture of a farmhouse in a hilly field lined with mature sorghum. I hardly took a glance before returning my gaze to the bush. He went on chattering about the house he could not bare separation from, his wife and child, his dark airy soil. Eventually he got up and left. I didn't get to catch his face before he went away. 

I wondered where such a deep jungle could come from, so dense it blocked meeting of sky and land, lying just there across the tracks. It was as if the radiating sun above did not exist. This time, I notice, I wonder how the sky could possibly light up with brilliant hues, rich and vast, while the jungle beneath could stay in such impenetrable darkness. Where could it possibly end. 

Lost in thought, I feel, for a moment, the vibrations of an eastward-bound train rolling towards me. I sense it coming out of the enormous sun dipping behind the flat crescent valley. But when I look up, nothing. It's not coming this time. The station is empty, that is except for me.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,

One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those great books that's really about everything. Incredible pain lives alongside ecstasy, the pendulum of fortune swings back and forth, there's war and obsession and family and faith. It appears at first as a fantastical tale, but somehow transforms into a monument capturing the breath of humanity in an odd, poetic way. 

 

At points the novel feels like a series of fables. Magic is part of it all (see last post); many of the situations described are so absurd they require a second take. 

 

The non-linear storyline follows the Buendía family, a cursed, larger-than-life, dysfunctional group where everyone shares the same few names and traits with their predecessors. The Aureliano's act one way, the José Arcadio's another, the Remedios' their own. It's hard to keep track of which character did what and where their spot on the family tree is (conveniently drawn on the first page). But it becomes clear that this confusion is intentional.

Gabriel García Márquez distorts time and its forward flow, showing beginnings and ends as not-so concrete, the barriers between past and present and future not so impenetrable. The memories of time gone slosh around in the muck of daily life. 

 

The world turns round and round in cycles. The characters tread the same paths their ancestors did because what are we if not combinations of those that came before. The way this vast, epic story is told is equally beautiful and scary and raw. 

The first sentence sets the tone. 

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

 

It's so famous because time is all jumbled up--as if what will happen is already known the same as what has happened before is. The sentence starts in the future, jumps to that present, then returns to the past in one fell swoop. This continues to happen throughout the rest of the powerful, devastating book. 

It isn't a disheartening tale, though. Wonder is far too central to it. I recently learned that demographers estimate more than 100 billion humans have lived on the planet--I get the same feeling from knowing that, trying to wrap my mind around it, as I do from One Hundred Years of Solitude. It makes me imagine myself in a much larger and intertwined system that fundamentally characterizes my life.

Time is fickle and strange in the world Márquez created, just like it is in the world he physically inhabited. A story like this gives perspective to how unfathomable and astonishing is life as we know it. 

A final thing. I came across a video of this Canadian dude singing from the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian. The passage he recites is about the olden times, the countless days before. The distant past when things began. 

 

To think that one of the first pieces of literature and music, ancient by our standards, pays homage to the immense amount of time that has passed is amazing. Time seems to have always been a mysterious shadow drawing our attention. The grand questions that pester us today have been asked and pondered for longer than we can possibly know.

Magical Reality

I read a feature on Kevin Durant in The New York Times Magazine by Sam Anderson (s/o a former housemate of mine with the same name) with a questionable title and many, many beautiful phrases describing the Slim Reaper, the former MVP, the enigma known as KD. 

Anderson's description of Durant as an esoteric-thinker, a stoic savant ("He has exactly the sort of transcendental galaxy brain that likes to rise up very high, and then slightly higher, to think about things like deep time and space rocks and the meaning of life") is awfully different from the public image Durant has with the many NBA fans as a petty, delusional, somehow insecure superstar. I'm obviously in no position to comment on his character given that I've never met the guy; what I liked most about the piece was the way Anderson wrote about KD's game.

"He moves with a pure, unforced economy of motion, a frictionless glide," "When Durant makes a shot, its swish seems extra pure — the ball hovers inside the net for a second, as if it lives there, as if it wants to take its time and really enjoy itself before it falls," "the tall ethereal phantom."

A master in his craft is at a spiritual level, Anderson is trying to say. Almost magical. 

This got me thinking about the ubiquitous place that idea, magic, has in regular life. The concept of the inexplicable, of irrational occurrences, of things beyond our sphere of knowledge, is everywhere people are, and it permeates quite deeply. 

Authors use magic all the time. It feels like every piece of fiction employs an element of the fantastical. And in a somewhat contradictory way, the role it plays in storytelling is to help tell the audience something about the material world, the world that is in many ways defined by not having magic on its list of possibilities. The world defined by scientific principles and reason and logic.

 

I'm reading One Hundred Years of Solitude; it embodies the genre of magical realism, which itself comes from ancient human traditions. Religion, through its priests and shamans, has been crossing the canyon between real and magic for thousands of years, bringing stories and signs and even supposed displays of the divine existence to our holy rituals for time immemorial. 

Our levels of skepticism on the subject vary widely, but even if you only recognize the widespread, nearly universal presence of the metaphor of magic, the idea of miracle and that some things in our lives elude rational explanation, you see that there's something deeply ingrained about magic in us. It seems to be everywhere, and humans seem to rely heavily on it to grapple with a strange and chaotic existence. 

Magic might be a rudimentary word. But I think it captures the scope of what I'm talking about--how we have an urge to explain what we don't understand, and there's a whole lot we don't understand, so we need a stand-in idea to fill the gaps and allow us to move on with the day. When faced with the subconscious, or the bizarre laws of physics, or the endless creativity and curiosity of the brain, or the skills Kevin Durant has on the hardwood, we recognize a perceptible form of magic, a mundane and grand reality we can't really explain, a world that demands the inclusion of the great beyond in all its aspects. 

What each person considers magic is different, but I think there comes a point for everyone where the only explanation left is an ultimately unexplainable one. That's why it comes out in the mediums in which we try to answer those big questions; art, human communication, spirituality, our passions. Facing, and reckoning, the unknown is another shared experience between all of us.

Big History & Moving to the Water

I came across something called Big History.

It's a field of study, as founding Prof David Christian explains in this TED Talk, that aims to understand history in its totality. Not just starting with civilization, or the evolution of Homo sapiens, or even the beginning of life. It includes everything in the story of the universe, from the Big Bang to today, the Big History.

To better explain our world and how complexity has arisen from an entropic, empty blackness, these historians study subjects normally separated in academia; physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, paleontology, all of it. They’re trying to re-conceptualize history as not just a slightly-aloof pursuit of primary documents and chains of events, but as a grand, macro-level telling of everything that has ever happened.

It’s ambitious, clearly. And it goes against what we think of with academics; that research needs to specialize to truly grasp a piece of the complex universe, that dedicated submersion within a well-defined topic is how individuals can add to the shared body of human knowledge.

I don’t know if Big History will ever become mainstream, or if it should. From what I’ve seen, it seems to gloss over details (as something this grand in scale must inevitably do) and also approaches human history deterministically, which brings up its own ethical/philosophical dilemma. 

 

But with the help of Bill Gates, the Big History Project was made as a high-school level course free online. I like the potential Big History has to stimulate general intellectual activity in teenagers--it seems like it could show students how fascinatingly connected everything is, sparking exponential growth and linkage of their interests.

 

I came across this concept through one of the Great Courses called The Big History of Civilizations (free through your public library!). A disciple of Prof Christian, Prof Craig Benjamin, uses the interdisciplinary framework of Big History to examine human civilization.

Something he touched on is how water availability drove the establishment of ancient settlements in the Middle East. Jericho, which is the longest continually-inhabited city in the world, has had groundwater gushing from the Ein as-Sultan/Elisha spring for the more than 10,000 years that humans have lived there. That's amazing and totally logical. 

Life and water are intertwined by fate, so it isn't surprising that most human development sprung up right around ample freshwater. 

But compare that ancient, basic, most-obvious line of thinking with a modern dilemma. 

 

The Colorado River, flowing across the arid Southwestern U.S., is the water source for around 40 million people and millions of acres of agriculture in 7 states and 2 countries. The green lawns of Beverley Hills, the spewing fixtures of the Vegas Bellagio, Lake Mead and Lake Powell and 15% of all the crops grown in the United States (as of 2012) all come from the Colorado.

But there isn't enough water in the river for all this. And everyone knows it. 

Demand has outpaced replenishment rates for 20 years now, during which most of the basin was in a historic drought, yet the thirst gulps insatiably. Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona have been among the fastest growing states population-wise for the last 3 decades. Miles of aqueducts and dams divert the flow to such an extent that the river rarely even reaches the ocean anymore, only through concerted effort. 

On top of all that demand, supply is waning as the Rocky Mountain snowpack that feeds the river is shrinking under a warmer climate. Flow in the river has already declined notably and is predicted to drop off even more dramatically. The reservoirs are shriveling up before our very eyes.

When I told my friend about the impending water shortage out West, how insane it is that more and more people continue to move to a region with a contracting water source, he simply replied 

"Yeah, no one thinks about water when they move."

 

What a wild time we live in.

Side Note on Myself

I've been stagnant for the last week or two. The culprit for my idle frustration, I believe, is a multifaceted one. Getting into my personal details isn't the point, though. It's the upwelling of the frustration I want to focus on.

 

I'm finding compartmentalization difficult nowadays. It's like everything in my life swirls into one irreversible concoction. I can't pinpoint specific origins anymore, or limit aspects of my life to their own little boxes. 

 

Part of this has got to be work from home. I have no physical separation between personal and professional, so even if I work 8 hours, I tend to feel in the same mode as I did before and do after. 

The spillover is also exacerbated by the loosening of my schedule. I don't have a stated block of time for a specific class or a specific class for a semester block. Things in general are much more fluid and self-motivated, like I mentioned in my previous post. 

I do like the freedom I get in this more integrated lifestyle. I can better transfer positive energy from one thing to another, compounding the impact and efficiency. When it's negative energy, though, the same properties of transfer and compounding apply. A canyon can form.

That's what I think happened with me over the last few weeks. I got bored and lethargic in one manner, then the feeling escaped confines and infected everything. 

Oh well. I guess it's through these instances that you learn to pull yourself up off the ground and back on the horse. The flip side of the downward slide is that finding an inspiring motivation in one part of life can be the stimulus that rights the course for the rest of it too. 

There's a double-edged blade out here. Got to use it the right way or that cut will sting.