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Just thinking of Possession and Cambodian workers

1/28/2014

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Cambodian workers have been battling for their rights since the elections that once more put Cambodian People's Party, the party of  Hun Sen in power (there is a dream commentary on this from my dream research that I will post soon.)  One of their demands is a raise from US$100 per month to $160. The former communist-affiliated CPP -led government has been aggressively resistant. Alessandra Mezzadri writes in Cambodian sweatshop protests reveal the blood on our clothes, 

Over the past century, the sweatshop model has globalised, travelled the world, and continually relocated in its endless search for new reservoirs of cheap labour. This has accelerated with the rise of neoliberalism and “export-orientation” has become a byword for speedy development. The relocation of garment factories to the developing world has been accompanied by a progressive decline of prices for consumers, and consumerism has been framed as a means to alleviate world poverty, not only through fair trade schemes but also through “aid for trade” rhetoric. Today, in the context of what is known as the “retail revolution”, western consumers can purchase a pair of jeans on the high street for £5 – and also be gratified by the thought that, after all, they are shopping to save the world.
I am interested in the intervention of spirits in resistance.  This Sunday's  International New York Times, posts an Op-Ed, Workers of the World, Faint! that underscores how such resistance is imbricated by both human and spirit assault. 

The article itself refers to Aihwa Ong's earlier work Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia.  But though these spirits slowed production, they did not change the conditions of the factory.

In Cambodia, the neak ta and other spirits (these are all sorts of boramay) call out against this indignity. Here are the last few paragraphs of the Op-ed.

And now neak ta have been showing up to defend other victims of development. The spirits have appeared at demonstrations and sit-ins organized by the political opposition, which has been contesting the results of elections held in July, which kept Hun Sen’s governing party in power. At protests against urban dispossession in Phnom Penh, traditional animist curses are often levied at state institutions. Salt and chilies are hurled at courthouses, chickens are offered to spirits, mediums summon local gods to mete out justice in land disputes.

Last year, in a slum in Phnom Penh, a demonstration by residents who were being evicted by a wealthy landlord was interrupted when a neak ta possessed an indigent woman who lived under a staircase with her mentally ill husband, both suffering from H.I.V. The woman assaulted a local official who was trying to shut down the protest, forcing him to stand down. Previously, the landlord had cut down an old banyan tree believed to be the neak ta’s home.

“I have been protecting this area for a long time,” the woman shouted, “and I am very angry because the company demolished my house. I am very, very angry.”

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Klee's angels

1/5/2014

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I love Paul Klee's angels, all 29 of them. He created them in 1939 at the thrumming of Nazi boots across Europe and the onslaught of scleroderma, an incurable skin disease.  Left to right,  "angel applicant" resembles "the offspring of a bulldog and a Halloween mask who might never reach heaven" (The Met).  "Still female" is a heart-breast-wing creature in metamorphosis. The third "Angelus Novus," is most famous. This angel was purchased by Walter Benjamin and inspired a much-quoted reference in On the Concept of History.    (Benjamin escaped occupied France to fascist Spain and committed suicide when he was denied passage.) 

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.

Benjamin's arrow flies straight to the heart. Klee's angels aren't ethereal; they are able to meet our human conundrum. 

What a clutch of  "forgetful," "ugly," "incomplete," and "poor"  hybrids. Far less exuberant than Klee's other paintings, these are intimate companions one might want for the suffering and irritation of an incurable illness and the terror of the Third Reich. 

More angel sketches below.

And where do we go after Klee?


To Rilke, who asks,
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders? 
And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear, 
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

Not Christian but Islamic angels appear in Duino Elegies.  As the house guest of Princess Marie von Thurn ind Taxis at her castle in Duino near the Adriatic sea, Rilke has an epiphany.  Von Thurn allows us this illumination in her memoirs:

Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, jutting to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs. These cliffs fall steeply, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke paced back and forth, deep in thought, since the reply to the letter so concerned him. Then, all at once, in the midst of his brooding, he halted suddenly, for it seemed to him that in the raging of the storm a voice bad called to him: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?)… He took out his notebook, which he always carried with him, and wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed themselves without his intervention … Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and replied to the difficult letter. By that evening the entire elegy had been written down.

These poems are strange, disturbing, and beautiful. Read this Harper's article for insight. 

From Rilke, we follow  French Catholic mystic, Olivier Messiaen, whose music is speckled with the angelic drawn by Rilke's imagination. Messian's angels, like Rilke's, are formidable, terrifying creatures who communicate without language and are unmoored from space and time. 

When I first heard Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time,  the fusion of sound and color had an eschatalogical musicality. It emerged from his years prison camp and was performed in January 1941 a night as cold as this one. Inspired by Revelations, Messiaen wrote it “in homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises a hand toward heaven saying: 'There shall be time no longer..'” Messiaen's synaesthesia, a condition where sound resounds in color, gives the Quartet a palette that is bold and ethereal with light.  While Rebecca Rischin tells us that sections of the Quartet were composed before his incarceration, I am sure he was not wrong to say that "colored dreams" during captivity "gave birth to the chords and rhythms of my quartet."  They are alive in the music, in the angelic judgement, and rainbow garments, and the inexplicably haunting clarinet depicting the abyss of the birds. Birdsong and angels, Messiaen's angelology was deeply influenced by Thomas Aquinas as well as Rainier Maria Rilke. Indeed, Messiaen invented Langage communicable,  a musical alphabet that translated assigned  phrases from St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae into sound, pitch and duration (Sheldon 2008). Shenton also notes that at least seven compositions have movements named for angels including St. Francis, and the Meditations on the Mysteries of the Holy Trinity.  The Meditations in particular intend to invoke the ceaseless praise of the angels. Sometimes, the music, I can't bear it. 
 
And oh, imagist poet H.D. also writes about angels from London during WWII.  (Hilda Doolittle's Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall / Tribute to the Angels/Flowering of the Rod. )

 “Tribute to Angels,” is a gorgeous anthem to the angels, and then...

I had been thinking of Gabriel,
of the moon-cycle, of the moon-shell,

of the moon-crescent
and the moon at full:

I had been thinking of Gabriel,
and the moon-regent, the Angel,

and I had intended to recall him
in the sequence of candle and fire

and the law of the seven;
I had not forgotten

his special attribute
of annunciator: I had thought

to address him as I had the others,
Uriel, Annael;

how could I imagine
the Lady herself would come instead?

----

“The Flowering of the Rod" is a paean to female-centric restoration/resurrection

Yet resurrection is a sense of direction,
resurrection is a bee-line,

straight to the horde and plunder,
the treasure, the store-room,

the honeycomb;
resurrection is remuneration,

food, shelter, fragrance
of myrrh and balm...

From this to French philosopher Michel Serres' Angels: A Modern Myth. Serres sets a conversation between Pia, a doctor at the medical center in the Charles de Gaulle Airport, and Pantope, a traveling inspector for Air France.  (Marc Auge calls airports the non-place of super modernity.) Angels, Serres-as-Pantope tells us, are now all forms of communication: fiber optics, switchers and routers, postmen, translators, climatologists, quasi-objects. 

I wondered when reading his text, is there nothing angels are not?

Fortunately, Pia anticipates my frustration.  She sums up Pantope at the end of a long excursus: 
So your angels are individual and multiple; messengers that both appear and disappear; visible and invisible; constructive of messages and message-bearing systems; spirit and body; spiritual and physical; of two sexes and of none; natural and manufactured; collective and social; both orderly and disorderly; produces of noise, music and language; intermediaries and interchangers; intelligence that can be found in the world's objects and artifacts….You must admit that your angels are elusive. What's more, sometimes they can be very evil!" 

He replies
Their form is generally adaptable. That form is the skeleton key which enables them to open the blackest boxes, and this wealth of different forms extends to embrace all the different aspects that you have just listed and thus enables us to read our present era like an open book: our sciences, both abstract and practical, our hardware and soft technologies -- all our activists both concrete and volatile. (1993, p  296)

Michel Serres,
Angels: A Modern Myth, 1993
Andrew Shenton Olivier Messiaen's System of Signs, Ashgate, 2008
Rebecca Rischin For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet 
Siglind Bruhn, Messiaen's Contemplations of Covenant and Incarnation, Pendragon Press, 2007
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at the bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.

That mankind  [sic] has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”     
 

Ranier Maria Rilke 
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    Kathryn (Kerry) Poethig 

    I teach Global Studies in California, study feminism, religion and peacemaking in SEAsia,  I've taken on this Invisible Aid project and decided to blog it as I go.  This work sits in the intersection of political, metaphysical and personal imaginal worlds.

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