Sunday, January 20, 2008

Monkeyshines and Momulation

It occurs to me, now that I’ve hit “publish,” that this is my MLK Day post.  I mean no disrespect by it.  Really, now that I think on it, I believe this story helps me reach across some long-impermeable lines.  Language, culture, skin color and religiosity can all be barriers to communication and interaction.  This need not be so, and I think the following vignette makes that point quite neatly.  Radically paraphrasing Dr King, people are people.  Open your eyes to them and this truism will prove itself to you time and time again.

We spent our afternoon today at the Asian, where a special ceremony was held to dedicate two new paintings by Korean monks.  The dedication involved 45 minutes or so of sutra chanting, during which Zach was well-behaved for 15 minutes and in another gallery for the remaining 30 with Kel; I spent those 45 minutes kneeling on a tatami in increasingly deep meditation while the monks chanted in the soaring beauxzart Samsung Gallery until I sensed a disturbance in the force: Kel and Z were signaling me from the flyway bridge outside the glass doors.  Actually, Kel was signaling to me and Z was signaling to the people three stories below him in the lobby, but I got the point and excused myself. 

By the time we got back to the gallery, the monks had finished the “eye-opening” ceremony, enlivening the portraits by completing the painting of their eyes, and the jig was up, so to speak - except for the dancing and drumming that followed.  When I’d read that there would be “dancing and drumming” I immediately thought of something else, but what they actually had going on was much more restrained - a single beautiful woman in a ghostly white costume with sleeves as long as her torso, in a slow, delicate and extremely tightly choreographed performance to the sound of a single small tom-tom and a gong.  It was breathtaking to watch her, but Z’s enhanced energy levels were conducive neither to her concentration, the enjoyment of the rest of the audience, nor our continued attendance, so we only got to watch for a short time.  But during that short time I did see something that made an impression on me, and I’ll try to freehand it here for you:

The initial ceremony was conducted by three monks in sienna robes, shaveheaded and full-throated.  After we’d returned to the general vicinity of the great hall to see that they had concluded their devotions, I found one of them standing on an elevated throughway just outside the Samsung doors.  He seemed to be in his 20s or 30s, slender of build and middling of height. 

Before him stood a halmoni - a korean woman of an age exceeding that at which propriety permits me to estimate it.  Halmonis are, if I may venture a general stereotype, tough birds.  They run families, and since families run Korea, they are truly national matriarchs - and they damn well act like they know it.  This particular halmoni was just a shade over five feet tall, dressed in a severe black pantsuit with carefully coiffed hair and minimal but very accurate make-up. 

She stood, as I mentioned, before the monk, and spoke intently at - not to - him.  Her mouth moved inexorably and without pause.  As I stood near them, stealing peeks as I was able, I never heard her stop talking and I never heard the monk speak a word.  She had locked her gaze on him and he stood as if helpless before her.  His face, so serene during the ceremony, was now tense and hunted; he had taken grip of his beautiful robes in both fists and was anxiously twisting them ever tighter till I expected to hear the fabric rent.  His weight shifted from foot to foot and he glanced around like a forgotten prisoner looking for his missing jailer; meanwhile, halmoni’s hard eyes never wavered and her mouth never rested.

After several minutes, someone walked between them and broke the spell for long enough to let the monk suggest that they ought to view the dance - or so I assume, since they spoke korean, but halmoni immediately, unsmilingly turned on her short sensible heels and led him into the hall.  As she pushed her way through the crowd to get a good vantage point she looked neither left nor right, and permitted everyone whom she bumped to apologize to the back of her head for being in her way.  The monk, walking behind her, bowed low before entering the room and to every person before whom he passed, smiling and gentle. 

Halmoni was insinuating herself deep into the crowd, having spied an empty chair in the middle of the auditorium, but the monk turned right where she’d turned left and placed himself in a discreet spot near the back of the hall by a broad marble column.  As he stood there, a man - caucasian, but dressed in an all-black tunic-and-trousers outfit strongly reminiscent of monkwear - approached him and bowed to him with more than perfunctory reverence.  They engaged in a brief conversation, and then the man in black presented the monk with a cardboard box of the general size I’d associate with gourmet chocolates.  The monk seemed taken aback and smiled broadly at the gesture, taking a few moments to read and, it seemed, translate the wording on the box, and then opened it to see and sniff its contents - not chocolates, but incense.  The monk seemed delighted to have received it, and the man in black seemed grateful for the monk’s response. 

For a few moments, the two men stood together, exchanging few words but many gazes, toward each other as well as upon the graceful, anachronistic, otherworldly dancer.  Then, suddenly, the audience around them was torn asunder as halmoni worked her determined way back to the column and her monk.  The man in black sank into the background, and halmoni took up a position microns away from the tips of the monk’s ceremonial slippers.  She began to speak again, too quietly for me to hear her but with an intention that echoed unmistakably off the coffered ceiling.  The monk seemed to shrivel in his robes.  From his place against the column, retreat was impossible.  Halmoni scanned the crowd briefly and derisively as she resumed her part of a conversation in which interruption would have been, not only unthinkable, but actually impossible. 

That monk had entered a discipline that enveloped his entire life, had immersed himself in learning and spirituality, had become a teacher and leader to his countrymen and to strangers, and then had traveled nearly 6,000 miles to continue his work - and even so I found it all too clear that he still couldn’t get away from his mother.

Up next: oh, I don’t know.  I’ve got a cute Zach story, a bit of fiction, and a bus stop incident.  We’ll see what feels right.  And for those who are interested in the bigger world of words and what they can really say, can I ask you to take a look here?  It seems I’ll be guest-columning there on wednesday.  Stop by and help me move in some furniture or something.  I’ll bring the keg but you are responsible for filling it yourself.