el gato's blog

excuse me while i go and explore the world Maya Angelou is a poetic favorite of mine not because she masterfully weaves her way through verse and language, but because she manages to pinpoint exactly how I feel (with quotes for every occasion) with such immense grace. A favorite of mine: “I long, as every human being does, to be at home wherever I find myself.” As we have traveled the globe in the past seven weeks, we have seen the ways in which travelers have inserted their presence in foreign lands as if they were their own. They planted flags, sat knee-to-knee with natives, and traded goods. Some of them were gone for as much as 30 years, and others for shorter explorations—a few whose trips were debated and guffawed at. As a modern audience, it is interesting to examine these adaptations to new cultures, not so much to show us that it is possible (for we both know and strive for this), but rather to remind us that we, as a human race and society, have been seeking to walk around barefoot in every place that there has been ground to do so. Everyone longs to make new footprints.

While Odysseus often yearned for his own sunshine-state of Ithaca (“and in my view, nothing one can see is ever sweeter than a glimpse of one’s own native land” [book nine]), he found himself perfectly capable in the local cultures, prompting others to treat guests as they should be treated (through practices such as gift-giving.) Herodotus, on the other hand, was in desperate need of a new home, seeing as he was exiled from Helicarnassus for some kind of mumbo-jumbo against the ruling dynasty. He thus made all the journeys discussed in “Histories,” wandering along the beaches of Egypt and Persia, peeking into the inhabitants’ ways of mummification and dietary habits. He even comments on the issue home-pride, like Montaigne so liberally expounds on, in which he observes that “Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.” (94) It is important that we do not look introspectively on other cultures in a demeaning way, for “to each man his own.”

I came across a great article in Salon magazine’s archive that so beautifully pinpointed our underlying motives as modern-day Dora the Explorers. Iyer writes, “We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed.” This idea of luxury and distribution is one that we find hammered heavily (and literally translated) into Marco Polo’s travels, who is essentially making a journey out of the allocation of goods. He writes about the sifting of pearls and silks and gold, but is also sure to note the oddities and marvels he discovered along the way (because that is the information the Khan was especially interested in.) Columbus, who embodies Iyer’s idea to the extreme, felt that he had MUCH knowledge to impart on those who value systems differed from his own. “But they seem to me a people very short of everything.” (55) Since many of our explorers used their narratives as a way to recreate a place to those who couldn’t ride the global waves, it is essential that we look at traveling as a way to solidify a culture into public reality (for ourselves – “ah yes, this way of life actually exists” – and for others who know no different – “oh, tell me more.”) Iyer writes, “Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.” For Ibn Battutah, on his pilgrimage to the Mecca, we find that he is wonderfully comforted by the camaraderie in other followers—as if he doubted such people existed. “Of the wondrous doings of God Most High is this, that He has created the hearts of men with an instinctive desire to seek these sublime sanctuaries…and has given the love of them such power over men’s hearts.” (46) Perhaps such solidification of this reality is what propelled Ibn Battutah to travel so much longer.

Iyers also tries to find the good in tourism, saying that while it cuts a society down, it also lifts it back up. He argues that new places force us to see with new eyes, therefore exerting that traveling “shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we'd otherwise seldom have cause to visit.” This reminds me of chapter twelve in Cabeza de Vaca’s journey, when the Indians grieved extensively over the crew’s loss of men, thereby making the travelers reevaluate their situation. “The Indians, seeing the disaster that had come upon us and brought so much misfortune and misery, sat down with us. Seeing that these crude and untutored people…grieved so much for us, caused me and the other in my company to suffer more and think more.” (57) Sometimes, within new contexts, we see the worst parts of ourselves reflected back in the best parts of others. Thus, providing us with this really strange out-of-body undertaking in which we strive to be better once we return home.

But perhaps the most unsettling and beautiful thing about adventure and making new footprints is that the world seems to constantly expand, no matter how much we know or how far we go. Like Cabeza de Vaca who completely misjudged the Florida coast and Columbus who, well, was so-totally off—the world becomes “a moving target quicker than our notion of it.” Because let’s face it – not all of us are blessed with the power to make it rain like Prospero. But would we want to? Because while the storm eventually ends, our desire to make sense of it, get lost in it, and fall in love with it should forever reign.

whatchu lookin at, son? As a species, we spend so much time cloaking ourselves in garments sewn with curiosity. We linger at crash sites; eat food from around the world without leaving our apartments (oh, the luxury), and people-watch out of coffee shop windows incessantly. But to where does this lead, if anywhere at all? As Montaigne so lovingly puts it, “our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind.” This is just one of many lessons that we learn from the Of Cannibals excerpt, which was written in the 15th century after Montaigne supposedly locked himself up in a chateau after a failed marriage. Please, if only we all produced such material after a broken heart!

a vintage shaman I will be the first to admit that I grew up with an aversion to holistic medicine: I took one look at acupuncture and headed the other direction. But now, a bit more mature in my medical methods, I have become desperate for an ailment to my plaguing migraines. And while a part of the process is a lovely little prescription cocktail, the other sector is a cranial-sacral massage (read as: a modern day medicine woman travels with her inflatable mattress to my home and shifts the flow of my cranial fluid all with the power of her hands. Yes, it’s creepy at first.) The treatment gets really hot and I have to drink about four huge bottles of water afterwards to ease the dizziness. But trust me, her shaman-miracles (and her degree in occupational therapy) have saved me a few morphine-drip-trips to the ER.

Now traveling back in time: in Cabeza de Vaca’s “Account”, we find out that the medicine men get to have all the fun. They have the most freedom and can pile on the woman (and score, “there is great friendship and harmony” [60] among the felines) – but most of all they use rocks for beneficial powers and are showered with treasures. Cabeza de Vaca describes the natives’ practices in chapter 15, “When they are sick, they call a medicine man, and after they are cured they give him not only all their possessions, but also seek things from their relatives to give him. What the medicine man does is to make a cut where the pain is and suck around it.” But this is the part that we most readily know.

What I didn’t realize (until the internet enchanted me) was the connection between the shaman and music, which used some of the earliest forms of percussion (as reported by a European) with their “arietos” – the healing rattles made of dried gourds. Cabeza de Vaca writes, “They had hollow gourds with pebbles in them, which is a sign of great solemnity, since they bring them out only for dances and for healing ceremonies, and no one else dares touch them. They say that those gourds have powers and that they came from heaven, because there are none in that land.” (92) What is fascinating about this is that a contemporary composer by the name of Colin Matthews, some 500 years later, uses Cabeza de Vaca’s musical undertone as the inspiration for his piece: “The Great Journey of Àlvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca.”

It is a note-based interpretation of the text in the form of a cantata with one baritone voice and eight players. The ingenuity of the piece, aside from its literary origin, is that Matthews set strict limitations for the work. All the instruments and voice had to be European but the end result had to be “tribal.” Lina del Castillo, who analyzes these guidelines, suggests that this severity in instruction is an attempt at replicating the hardships that Cabeza de Vaca had to deal with during his travels. Basically, he had to make the most of what he had and Matthews focused the musical version around that sense of ingenuity by stripping the ensemble down to the bare essentials.

But more importantly, Matthews tries to mimic a disjointed harmony of communication that the Spanish traveler encountered time and time again throughout the narrative. Rushing rolls of percussion create tension with the wind section and the sole use of the Spanish language (which, as we know, is all Cabeza de Vaca had to work with.) Ironically enough, though Matthews had the “arietos” available to use, he chose not to – as a way to both complicate and simplify the creative and tense tonality. You can listen it to it HERE!!!

i would totally read this comic I don’t think that finance could be any farther outside of my comfort zone of conversational topics than it already is…which is on an island all by its lonesome self. But all I could think about as Cristobol (as the Spaniards love to say) weaved in and out of his island “sightings” was: that greedy (but apparently strapping in the looks department) bastard! Unlike our other travelers who were in for the kicks and giggles of curiosity and religious expeditions (not to mention the capitalistic trinkets and sexual escapades), Columbus had some ulterior motives. He was in it for the gain. But what exactly did profit look like for him in 1492?

Throughout the reading, I found that if you asked the question: “What lovely thing would Columbus like to rob (or trick, bribe, deceive, etc.) this culture/island/land of?” the answers were especially telling. First, he had every intention of putting the natives to work. He writes, “They should be good servants and very intelligent, for I have observed that they soon repeat anything that is said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, for they appeared to me to have no religion.” (56) But not to worry! Columbus only selected the most special people to be his parrots. Thank goodness he also had a knack for capitalizing on un-tapped potential: “I saw a piece of land which is much like an island, though it is not one, on which there were six huts. It could be made into an island in two days, though I see no necessity to do so since these people are very unskilled in arms.” (58) How ironic that later he confesses that he didn’t want to pass a single island without possessing it. Apparently his sea-legged ego got the best of him.

Third, we learn that Columbus was the ultimate trickster – especially when it came to reaping the benefit in the end. At times, he appears to have a bit of decency in him. “I had not taken the ball of cotton from him, although he wished to give it to me. The people gathered round him and appeared astonished. It seemed to him that we were good people.” Ah, but then we see the silver lining of the deal. “It was to create the impression that I had him set free and gave him presents. I was anxious that they should think well of us so that they may not be unfriendly when your Majesties send a second expedition here.” (62) Of course, just when we were starting to like him a bit more. (But let’s be honest, once he starts spotting the gold in people’s noses…all bets are off and all grubby fingers linger to the surface.)

My intention is putting you through this treacherous commentary was in relation to a Wall Street Journal blog post written last week about private equity firms and our beloved, Columbus. And while I screw up my venture capitalism and hedge funds and private equity funds terms enough to make me (and you) topsy-turvy, I am going to give it a shot. Basically, Kreutzer writes about carried interest throughout history. Which, in my kind of terms, is the profit that private equity funds make off of public company deals that is not given to the investors. Apparently the average is around 20%. She references a talk given by the CEO of the Carlyle Group (the ringmaster of PE firms), who said that carried interest has existed since the days of Venetian traders of the Middle Ages (though later in the post, there is discussion about Assyrian investors in 3,000 BC who had some financial deals of their own…FASCINATING) – who often shared their profits with their crew. From what we know, Columbus wanted 10% of all the island revenue…less than half of the current average of carried interest. In that respect, he’s a winner! So let’s end this thing on a positive note, shall we?

the building blocks of life I think that in my past life as a fourteenth-century woman roaming the desert sands and exploring lighthouses at the fresh age of 22…Ibn Battutah and I would have been BestFriendsForever. But that is beside the point.

In reading this text, I was astounded at the amount of narrative difference that existed between he and Marco Polo, simply on the level of storytelling. In Ibn Battutah’s Mecca-driven travels, I noticed three, standout stylistic differences between the two rough-and-tumble travelers. First, there is actual dialogue. When Ibn Battutah attributes a custom or an observation, there is conversation for the first time in our travel classics. Secondly, there is poetry to his observations. Alexandria is not just a city but also rather a woman who is graceful and humble in her stature. “She is a unique pearl of glowing opalescence. (6) This personification of a place not only applies to Alexandria but to Cairo and Mecca and Baghdad so on and so forth. I believe that this feminization of the land and its people brings true breadth to the text. He embodies the realm of Mother Earth to all of its stunning dimensions. Third, in line with Herodotus and his sparing mentions of Homer’s Odyssey, Ibn Battutah refers to other works of poetry and literature (like that of Arqalah the Damascene and Abu Tammam) to enrich his observations. He is humble in his knowledge and recognizes that many have said it better, so he uses their words to elevate his opinion of education and literacy. Which leads me to my next rant.

We have not discussed much about education in these books and perhaps we were saving the subject up for Mr. Battutah. The traveler himself doubled as a scholar, most definitely. We can see his qadi law education bursting through the verses of his travels. He notes colleges among the way and regards them with high praise, putting cities like Munyat Ibn Khasib above others do to their brainpower institutions. Because in its essence, traveling is an acquisition of knowledge and we go to far means to do so. To quote the Prophet, “Travel in search of knowledge, even though the journey take you to China.” What is so interesting to me is not that Ibn Battutah was educated (though in comparison to the still illiterate population of the world…it is quite remarkable), but rather the fact that he is being used today, in the modern-world, as a get-your-diploma-now type of role model.

His fourteenth-century behind finds itself as the poster boy for international education in an article for a local Yemen publication. The writer encourages her community to learn across borders because new ideas and concepts come from the interaction with new people of unknown cultures. And who better to show someone WHY they should broaden their Yemen horizons than Bill Clinton and Ibn Battutah? Both are strangely used as examples for “reaping the benefits of learning, studying, traveling, and writing abroad.” I commend the writer for her ability to contextualize Battutah in such a contemporary light. To be quite honest, I wouldn’t know how to start drudging up such a past. But her spotlight on his education reminded me as to why his text was so much richer in the first place! Gold star for you, Ibn Battutah.

Marco Polo Bling? Messer Marco Polo was a man who loved the finer things in life. He loved his jewels, his wine, his fine fruit, his gold, and most definitely his silk. You should see the highlighting of my book as it weaves through his narrative detailing the luxury of the Eastern world – the man was obsessed. And rightfully so! He was traveling at a time when bartering and merchants flooded the harbors and the deserts like New York knock-off purse stands. But while I was prepared to construct this entire post around the extravagance of his travels (why did Polo chose only to tell us of the finest cities? I quite like Herodotus’ odd cultural explorations…) – I have decided to take a slight detour.

A huge part of my concentration is poetry – the construction of it, the audience of it, the way in which the format so aptly tells a story and why it is able to do so. Thus, I am always on the look out for writers that make me want to be a better wordsmith. Enter: Daneen Wardrop, a literature professor at Western Michigan University (if I would’ve known that in high school – perhaps I would have just stayed in the Midwest…hm, on second thought…maybe not.) How ironic that his poetry is lovely AND comes from a collection entitled, The Silk Road: Marco Polo’s Wife. Out of the selection of poems that I read, each piece carries its own voice. Sometimes, Wardrop addresses Polo head-on and in others, he places himself amidst Polo in the thirteenth century – listening and taking in his tales. In one, from the perspective of the Silk Road, Wardrop writes – “Marco, when you, Niccoló, and Maffeo returned after twenty years/ In rags, at first not recognized. / jewels sewn in the hems of you Tartar clothes—/ the seams of your clothes, highways/ you passed around ginger, ginseng, / then jade, lapis / and I, not yet your wife, / scorned the jewels / that reflected the moon but were not the moon itself.” Later on, the Silk Road questions, “Did I want some east?” I found this passage to be extremely poignant and to give such character to Polo’s accounts. To me, the poem is such a commentary to the Eastern commodification of luxury items. What would this invasion of extravagance have been like to experience? Why seek beauty in jewels and gems when the moon, the stars, and the sun were the original inspiration for such pieces in the first place?

In another poem, Wardrop speaks to and questions the power of Marco Polo’s storytelling. “Back at the house, today as every day, travelers come from all maps to ask Marco for his tales/ Marco’s stories have become stories of stories/ Perhaps one day a visitor will ask of my journey walking past archways on my way from outside to in/ I can sit next to Marco now and no longer miss myself/ When I catch my breath I will finger the elephant, buy peaches, go home.” I think this piece really speaks to the glorification of “celebrities.” Yes, I understand that Brad Pitt volunteered in Indonesia…but so did I (not really, but for my point’s sake, go with me here). But have you read about it? Most definitely not. Our culture loves to fuel the fire of the privileged. Traveling is a privilege and those who are privy to the experience are the ones that come back with the stories. Wardrop highlights this in his poetry and parodies how a “normal” day consisted of fingering the elephant, buying peaces, and going home. We elevate Marco Polo for the historical travel accounts he brought back to Venice – but if Kublai Khan worshipped the ground that I walked on – I most certainly would be bringing back embroidered curtains from Persia for all.

I could really praise Daneen Wardrop for quite a while but I won’t put you through anymore of this public love fest. However, I will leave you with one final snippet of his work – “The thousand Buddha Caves, westernmost outpost of China/ where Turquoise paintings that after months of eastward sliding, Taklimakan sand/ almost took your eyes out with disbelief/ If Buddha had been Christian, you say, he’d have been a saint/ And in a mural crowd of stone people one man, a round-eyes, was painted in the middle: / someone there before you, Marco.” I don’t know if Polo found himself to be entirely original in his findings (he was extremely removed from his narrative), but he certainly wasn’t the first to tell the story of a culture. And with that, I am off to buy some peaches.

once upon a time I cannot help but imagine Herodotus, in all of his bearded fifth-century glory, perched under a blanket tent (flashlight in hand) and spilling the twisted tales of marriage auctions and the mummification of the poor. He would’ve scared the living bejeezus out of me as a child! But as a 415 BC inhabitant of his time…I’m not so sure. How much would I have believed? Would I have dreamed of what it would be like to live entirely off of fish mortar or maybe coveted boats with animal-hide sides? Growing up in this twitter-all-things-myspace-facebook generation has forced me to take science fiction and tall-tales as products of an imaginative culture that knows too much and trusts too little (if anything at all.) But in Herodotus’ time when written accounts of travel and historical documentation will slim to none – c’mon, he’s kind of the man!

Being the journalistic dork that I am, it is quite compelling to dissect The Histories as more of a travel editorial (with a bit of age on the backburner) – one that seeks to inform the globally ill equipped (and Wall Street-recessionistas unable to travel the high skies) of everything they are missing. His language is compelling without being too much though he gets a bit poetic at times. For me, I think he has a decently well-informed grip on how to move the story along. He spends little time on many customs and traditions, weaving in and out of water and land by point-blankly introducing his next topic (i.e. “The following are certain Persian customs which I can describe from personal knowledge” [44].) He understands that excess detail kills the on-the-fence reader but loses touch with that when ramblings about sacred animals lead the way for a bit too long (I’m not exactly riveted by his otter-speak.)

Aside from the argument of fact or fiction, it is obvious that Herodotus most certainly wrote to inform. His attempt at ethical attribution seeks to give credit where credit it due. He writes, “Up to this point I have confined what I have written to the results of my own direct observation and research, and the views I have formed from them; but from now on the basis of my story will be the accounts given to me by the Egyptians themselves.” (17) In a travel story amongst peers and amigos, we place less emphasis on where information comes from and simply spit forth what we know and create. But Herodotus, though horribly off, infuses credibility to his historical voice even if the tales are a bit taller than tall. So without a model of journalistic/historical sorts to measure himself by (he obviously hadn’t learned the rules of objectivity), we owe the poor man credit for having fumbled his way around the desert floor in complete and utter blindness.

So perhaps the larger picture of this “record of the traditions of the various nations” is not their encyclopedia-value or bedtime-story-quality, but rather why we still find entertainment and pleasure in it. I think the answers reside in the days after the sea voyages and forest treks…it is all about the stories we bring home (okay, and the souvenirs don’t hurt either.)