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Poems by Jamie Asae FitzGerald

March 16, 2003 by RWS-SB Leave a Comment

Leisure Time

As bombs drop and destroy cities overseas,

memories of children, landscapes of lives—
I am home with a cold, nursing seasonal wounds.

For someone somewhere

war is a reality and this, an unreal dream:

the quiet rasp of a heater, news of other nations nothing more
than a background noise.

After Effect

“Knowing love, I will allow all things to come and go, to be as subtle
as the wind, and take all things
with great courage. My heart

is as open as the sky.” Ryan Vego, 1967–2000

For a moment I have found this place of repose,
in the hush that falls after tragedy—
in shorts and slippers out on the front stoop,
warmth of the black-and-white cat seeping into my back.

I remember this calm after Ryan leaped from a cliff, an electrical cord around his neck. This act,

that explained nothing, unearthed memories: his hair always going in the wrong direction,

one kiss in the Pacific Northwest winter, where breath was visible—the soul flying out of our mouths like the car exhaust
swirled up in cold, silver plumes.

I thought of him hung in an arbor;

moss-covered mother logs watching over him; ferns unwinding under his feet;

his cheeks, opalescent pink and green;

eyelashes, coated with metallic matter— not suspended from a cliff side

like a man crucified on rock,
there for an early morning jogger to spot.

Everything was brighter then: people down the pews, clasping hands; light shining through chapel glass.
Just as in this repose—the hush that falls after tragedy, the cat that leans into my back and takes the ache away.

Pepe’s Garden

This is the garden my grandfather built out of days of sun and

rain squalls.
It is as much a part of him as his own body—flower of his hands,

earth and flesh, root and tendon, vein and vein.
He merges with his garden unaware, yet so aware of every shriveling leaf and escaping root.

At least with plants, he knows death’s coming before it arrives, and snips the vine in time.

He moves within it, just as the wind moves, touching everything. He and the plants, circle the same sun, some for fifty years
or more, he for eighty-eight, photosynthesizing or taking their time in the hot, moist shade.

Around him, it’s expiration and inspiration—a good-looking wahine, black locks pouring across shoulders, legs slipping out of a
green pareo, oxygen lifting off her skin.

She reacts to his touch just as he reacts to a new bloom.

The same wind that blows the red anthurium, blows his baggy shorts across his withered legs.
He, a bonsai, carefully pruned by the mysterious hand of experience, branches stunted, bears the beauty of a harsh discipline.

His phallic cacti have grown so high, the old man’s hair all
white and light.
I love these large prickly cocks, their babies growing like worshippers at the feet of Buddha.
I love the hack hack of a machete and the snip of sheers.
How to keep roots off the ground?
How to keep a banyon moored in a pot, its white roots spilling
out and contorting?

At the end of the street, behind the last house, a stream floods over lava rock and tangles itself in ferns and grasses where mosquitoes breed.
My grandfather goes to collect slick black stones that feel as good in the hand as cool lips on a hot cheek, stones that make sounds like sip and tuh when they touch, stones for laying on skin or a window ledge, in a vase for flowers or as my grandpa does in a stream of cement that runs under a miniature footbridge with re-bar handrails.

Impossible to describe the bonanza of life in a tract of just
a few square feet.
Pot after pot, all cement, a metal gas tank turned sideways and

severed for planting, orchids hanging from chicken wire, from coconuts with one-quarter cut, Pele’s hair hanging from the chopped branches of a lychee tree.

The winding path of his garden and swaying papyrus, their sprouts golden at the tips, a pony tail palm, the bush with the leaves
that cut, papaya, avocado and mountain apple tree.
All that grows in the back grows free. All that grows in the

front he keeps.
He’s building the temple with his own hands.

Filed under 2003 Tagged with Asae, by, FitzGerald, Jamie, Poems

Disney’s California Adventure Theme Park: Rhetorical Shape of a California Dream by Michael Williams

March 16, 2003 by RWS-SB Leave a Comment

These would be the successive phases of the image:

it is the reflection of a basic reality
it masks and perverts a basic reality
it masks the absence of a basic reality
it bears no relations to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard 256)
After taking the Lion King Tram from the Timon Parking Lot, and purchasing a

Disney Passport from a Disneyland Ticket Booth, Disney’s California Adventure opens southward to “Sunshine Plaza’s” centerpiece, a fifty-foot-tall sun sitting atop a perpetual wave fountain just beyond the Golden Gateway. Disney’s California Adventure Theme Park is the newest addition to what is now known as The Disney- land Resort, comprised of both theme parks, three hotels, and Downtown Disney, an outside shopping mall with merchants, restaurants, and a movie theater. These two additions to the Magic Kingdom mark the transformation from park to resort and a concurrent transformation from simulacrum to imitation. In my thesis, I in- tend to expose ideologies at work to identify implicit themes that foster a co-created narrative about California between park tourists and their environment, with par- ticular attention to how that reality has shifted from constructions of “pure simula- cra” in Disneyland to the “reflections and perversions of reality” in California Adventures. This thesis will not rest on the shoulders of such leftist verbiage, how- ever, but will simply identify the fantasy themes at work in the space that comprise rhetorical visions and root out the shared ideologies that from which they arise. This process will yield the anatomy of Disney’s contribution to California Dreamism, a contribution that does not simply tack on to an essential core narra- tive, but in adding to it alters its “shape” entirely.

Disney has long been identified with homogeneity. As such, they provide their tourists with a unified environment replete with symbols that consistently signify the experience Disney purposely creates. Defining “fantasy theme,” Foss states: “It is a word, phrase, or statement that interprets events in the past, envisions events in the future, or depicts current events that are removed in time and/or space from the actual activities of the group” (123). The events are taken out of time and place, and dramatized in a homogenous environment, which renders signification efficient and guarantees a shared experience, a shared reality. In varying terms, critics have made such observations about Disneyland and Disneyworld for decades, although the “statements” are understood in the broader semiotic and symbolic sense, rather than the merely linguistic. Luis Marin in his article, “Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia,” for example, attempts to “show how a utopic structure and utopic func- tions degenerate, how the utopic representation can be entirely caught in a domi- nant system of ideas and values and, thus, be changed into a myth or a collective fantasy” (1). In a fantasy theme analysis, one identifies a collective fantasy of a group, noting its setting, characters, and actions. This narrows down specific ways in which people order their experiences and “provide compelling explanations” (124). These

[s]ymbols create reality because of their capacity to introduce form and law into a disordered sensory experience. The chaotic and disorderly sensory world is organ- ized and made manageable by the symbols that are devised to dominate it: “The process of language formation shows for example that how the chaos of immediate impressions takes on order the clarity for us only when we ‘name’ it and so perme- ate it with the function of linguistic thought and expression.” (Foss 122; Ernst Cas- sirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 87 )

Disneyland provides an environment where shared experience is assumed within its borders. One could analyze, for example, the slogan, “The Dream That You Wish Will Come True” for a fruitful fantasy theme analysis. My task, however, involves a rooting out of the semiotic statements, the tacit though at times obvious ideologi- cal statements suggested by the architecture and symbols used in Disney’s Califor- nia Adventure.

Reflecting on his travels through the United States, Umberto Eco observes that “Disneyland is more hyperrealistic than the wax museum, precisely because the latter still tries to make us believe that what we are seeing reproduces reality abso- lutely, whereas Disneyland makes it clear that within its magic enclosure, it is fan- tasy that is absolutely reproduced” (43). Whereas imitations may attempt to fantas- tically represent reality, Disneyland realistically represents fantasy. Without an original artifact as a quality-guide, its criteria for authenticity as “genuine fake” is constituted in its ability to gather assent from the masses—to capture their imagina- tion, (re)construct it, and sell it—in whatever order. This is most obvious in the way Disney feeds the imagination of a movie-going audience with their animated features, and then demarcates a space where these creatures of pure imagination become three dimensional and perfectly tangible. Disney similarly represents our nostalgia in Main Street and New Orleans Square, dreams of an idyllic future in the original Tomorrowland (recently redesigned in fittingly retro, Jules Verne-esque fashion—effectively representing nostalgia for the “future,” yesterday’s future), desire for adventure in Adventureland, and fantasies of exploration and discovery in Frontierland.

Although California Adventures appears in part to be an ideological extension of Frontierland as “the representation of scenes of the final conquest of the West,” its purported correspondence to actual historical events, places, and architecture on several fronts depend on a real and verifiable artifact to guarantee the quality of the imitation (Marin 5). Take for example its counterpart to the Magic Kingdom’s “Main Street” entrance, the Hollywood Pictures Backlot, which appears just to the left of the fifty-foot-sun. One of the three “themed lands,” Hollywood Pictures Backlot invites guests of the resort to “experience the magic of Hollywood” (Walt Disney Travel Co. 4). As such, it forms a “Main Street” of sorts, with two lanes divided by a broken white line, and shops and restaurants with facades patterned after Hollywood landmarks on both sides. In his analysis of Disneyland, Marin describes its “Access to the Center”:

Main Street USA leads the visitor to the center. But this route toward the center plaza is also the way toward Fantasyland, one of the four districts of Disney- land. So the most obvious axis of Disney’s utopia leads the visitor not only from the circular limit or perimeter to the core of the closed space, but also from re- ality to fantasy. This fantasy is the trademark, the sign, the symbolic image of Disney’s utopia. (3)

Umberto Eco amplifies Marin’s description:

Main Street—like the whole city, for that matter—is presented as at once abso- lutely realistic and absolutely fantastic [. . .]. The houses of Disneyland are full-size on the ground floor, and on a two-thirds scale on the floor above, so they give the impression of being inhabitable (and they are) but also of belong- ing to a fantastic past that we can grasp with our imagination. The Main Street facades are presented as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but the interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing. (43)

The Backlot mirrors this description in most essential ways. The layout Eco de- scribes is essentially the same, except that the Backlot attempts to represent actual and verifiable Hollywood sites, such as the Los Angeles Theater and the set of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and several soap opera sets, instead of representing in an exclusively general way the feeling or idea of Hollywood; the Backlot is supposed to recreate the “Golden Age of Hollywood” (Disney Online). Main Street recalls an idea of something, constructed in simulacra (these are not intended to represent known buildings from an actual Main Street, although they are patterned after ac- tual buildings); and although the Backlot recalls an idea of something as well, they are signs with immediate referents, whereas the Main Street structures signify pri- marily themselves and an abstract ideology.

The Backlot’s “trajectory” is geographically counter to Main Street’s, as it leads to the edge of the park instead of the center; however, one may recognize a parallel ideological trajectory: Main Street leads to the “symbolic image of Disney’s uto- pia,” Fantasyland; and the Backlot street similarly leads to perhaps the most domi- nant image of California: blue skies and white clouds. This is not to say that the street leads to a view of the Anaheim sky, but to a Hollywood-style backdrop that continues the street and building images in center-point perspective into the “dis- tance” amidst a too-blue sky with too-white clouds; ironically, the back-drop is set against the Anaheim sky, depicting a dissonance of blues—the imitation much cleaner and bluer than the real thing. Here we have an imitation of an imitation (an original Hollywood backdrop depicting a blue sky), exposed side-by-side with the original original: the present less-blue sky. As Eco notes about the Magic King- dom several years earlier, “Disneyland not only produces illusion, but—in confess- ing it—stimulates the desire for it [. . .]. Disneyland tells us that faked nature cor- responds much more to our daydream demands” (44). Here as well, the illusion is purposely obvious, and nature by comparison despairs next to a dingy blue. But this image represents more than the perfecting effect of technologizing nature. In addition, “[t]he fake is recognized as ‘historical,’ and is thus garbed in authentic- ity,” as Eco noted of Disneyland’s New Orleans Square (30). The fake is histori- cized, a sort of popcorn authenticity found in an imitation of an imitation sky. Its depiction of a road that never ends represents its surroundings, perhaps the most popular example of California’s prosperity, wish fulfillment, and real fantasy: Hol- lywood. In addition to the referents, the content of the picture on the backdrop— the road that never ends—suggests movement beyond what is known, a traversal via idyllic dream-stuff toward an as yet undetermined, yet optimistic, end: a dream beyond the dream, of what is yet to come.

The park as a whole clearly represents this theme. As a park that is “Golden Age” oriented in all three sections—the “Golden Age of Hollywood” in the Backlot; the “pioneering spirit of its people, past and present” in the Golden State; and “the ‘Golden Age’ of amusement parks” in Paradise Pier (Disney Online)—it represents a “Golden Age” of achievement and prosperity, and hence a twice idealized ideol- ogy: dreams of the past (re)inspiring a “manifest destiny” teleology of the present (yesterday’s dreams of the future), re-dreamt in the present to reorient us toward a continued future as such. The Golden State is perhaps the section of the park most overtly geared toward this ideology, however, evident in Disney’s aforementioned description of it. And within the Golden State, “the emotional centerpiece” is the twenty-two minute movie entitled “Golden Dreams,” which “celebrates the people and events that have helped shape the character of California” (Disney Online). “Golden Dreams” attempts to communicate California’s general millennial history, encapsulated in a “California Dream” theme. The “California Dream” was a mar- keting invention in the Nineteenth Century meant to encourage people to move to California, most of the main substance of which is comparable to the familiar “American Dream.” Opportunity and prosperity, realized through hard work, forms the dominant theme of this movie’s depiction of the “California Dream.” Nine- teenth Century California is not only an untapped space for living the “American Dream,” but also a beautiful and healthy climate purported to alleviate the discom- fort of those with failing lungs, consumption, etc. (Vail). The movie does not high- light this latter detail, but chooses to focus on issues that support an ideology of progress.

Narrated by the spirit of California, Califia, the story is told from the point of view that California is itself a place of dreams. Califia embodies California’s own good intentions to take care of its people, whoever they may be at the time. The movie begins with Native Americans doing Native American things: building canoes, tell- ing stories about how they must protect the land (blatant environmental message), wearing lots of face paint. Califia, played by Whoopie Goldberg, smoothly com- ments on their “dream of California,” suggesting a primordial connection between the native ideology and the current “California Dream,” supported also in her own native dress, deified authority, and matter-of-fact acceptance: others had dreams not compatible with the natives’, and many of the native peoples were killed off by the diseases they brought (Golden Dreams). Her short narrative of the Spanish occupa- tion that follows represents the only unrealized dream in the movie—the Spanish never made California part of their empire.

The narrative resumes at the time of the Gold Rush. Here, mere narrative associa- tion places the plight of these new settlers on equal footing with the dream of the native peoples, because the dream does not belong to any one people, but belongs to the land itself. In other words, the messy business of accountability is rendered moot in this conception where the motivation for all action is a function of the land and space, and the people inhabiting the space are merely under its spell. However, the people are not totally without agency. Although the land supplies the dream, the people must remain strong and committed to that dream so that it may be real- ized; as such, we see that a commitment to the dream is a commitment to the land, a backdoor way to a vague and ironic sort of environmentalism. Whereas one may criticize the mining of precious metals as raping the land, the movie’s identification of mining with the “dream” launders away the pejorative interpretation—the miner only follows the dream supplied by the land, dreamt originally by its native peo- ples, and carried on by its enduring spirit, Califia. This specific scene depicts a weary and nearly defeated miner panning for gold, but Califia, who assumes minor roles throughout the movie, points out a piece of gold just under a rock, thus moti- vating him to keep following the dream, and moving the “California Dream” itself forward.

The narrative then moves to deal with a topic still firmly with us: immigration and racial diversity. Here, the Chinese are celebrated for their work on the railroads, then a weeping Chinese mail order bride benefits from the encouraging words of Califia, “Be strong.” Her new husband reiterates this, insisting that life will not be easier in California, but that they will prosper if they work hard. While Chinese emigrate from the Far East, Americans migrate from the Midwest during the De- pression, and Califia’s message remains: “Be strong.” The message that hard work pays off dominates this representation of the California Dream, although it is not the kind of hard work one identifies with American “rugged individualism”; these narratives suggest cooperation with the land, a negotiated and co-wrought “hard work” that jibes with the “California Dream.” It continues as Califia takes us to the site of Mr. Mullholland’s triumph of piping water into the California desert, to the California groves where we witness Cesar Chavez speaking to his fellow workers, to Hollywood where our imaginations are transformed into reality almost magically before our eyes, and to Berkeley where the first personal computer prototype is un- veiled and its destiny as a “California Dream” realized on a global scale is made evident. The dream of a better life leads to farming and to mining the land for re- sources, to industrialization and irrigation, to aviation, to media and computer tech- nology, which reaches out to the whole world. This ethos is consistent with Marin’s criticism of “Disneyland [as] a fantasmatic projection of the history of the American nation, of the way in which this history was conceived with regard to other peoples and to the natural world [. . .] an immense and displaced metaphor of the system of representations and values unique to American society (1). California Adventures extends the size of the metaphor, and ironically both extends and nar- rows the effect of the metaphor. California, one would think, represents itself rather than a nation, but as we see, its theme extends past the borders of even the original Disneyland, making multi-culturalism and diversity one of its main topoi. Quite simply, the “California Dream” is embodied in every accomplishment re- corded within our borders, and is attributed to California-ness, while it concurrently calls outside its borders, globally, for those with the same dreams to realize them here. Disneyland then lays claim to this ethos by reversing its own proximal status. One may have once said that Disneyland was located in California, however na- ively. Jean Baudrillard notes the ironic play of significance of Disneyland:

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland [. . .] presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simu- lation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. (262)

Disneyland, if we agree with Baudrillard, already signifies America by apparent opposition—the apparent fantasy that is Disneyland oppositionally sets off the “re- ality” that is America. California Adventure’s alters this effect, somewhat, because it attempts to ground its credibility in crafty imitation and depiction of actual events rather than through self-signifying simulacra. Ironically, the addition of California Adventures more obviously exposes Baudrillard’s observation by effectively con- structing a California that belongs to Disney in Disneyland. The opposition, and hence the illusion, begins to collapse. The “Golden Dreams” movie contributes to this collapse of opposition by trying more than any other feature in Disney’s Cali- fornia Adventure to be authentic representation. Yet, how authentic can it be? It is twenty-two minutes and claims to give a history of California. The narrative must be extremely selective.

Naturally, the state’s darker moments do not make it to the screen, although the virtual wiping out of the native peoples is whitewashed as one dream picking up where another left off, a clever and smooth way to deal with an undeniable recalci- trance. But the fact that the LA riots, for example, were not dealt with is not sur- prising, and one is hard-pressed to come up with a viable criticism. Who would expect a themed show such as this to focus on the negative? If we were to take the narrative at face-value, as a documentary intended to educate us on the history of California, then perhaps one could criticize its selective vision, its banal optimism. But the events it describes seem to merely provide credible support for a theme: the “California Dream.” The depiction of the dream at once exalts California and calls out to the world—the dream of a better life is everyone’s dream. The characters and actions in the movie represent a universal struggle to attain prosperity, and its proximity in California certainly includes everyone in the theater. Essentially, no one is left out. It is not only for Californians, but for anyone who was led to this place by whatever inclination; any tourist is even in some small way a part of the dream.

The setting is a complex play of California and Disney Resort; in a sense California is in Disneyland, and in a sense the reverse is true. They do not appear to be mutu- ally exclusive, however, because the play between them is articulated tongue-in- cheek throughout the park. Disney motifs and trademark Disney Imagineering per- vade the park’s attractions, and everyone’s ticket is still a Disneyland ticket. “Dis- ney’s California Adventure Theme Park celebrates the fun and adventures of Cali- fornia, Disney style” (Disney Travel Agents). It also celebrates the progress and achievements of California and its people. But who are its people? Anyone who pays to stay at the park is effectively “its people,” which is not an especially novel observation; in conjunction with the “California Dream” message that all dreams of a better life are embodied in the state itself, those who share that feeling and find themselves in the state at any point have an implicit claim to the spirit. The topoi of the park collectively provide motive to its people: the “California Dream” moti- vates us. Since California is itself largely a tourist-driven state, the theme park con- tribution into the “Dream” narrative complements the state’s ethos. In short, Cali- fornia is supposed to be pretty and it is supposed to be fun. A settler from 1888 testifies to the appeal of its climate: “We certainly can live on climate, and climate alone, so long as those who want it, seek for it and pay us for it when they have found it” (Vail 8). And pay these “settlers” do—as Umberto Eco notes, although the merchandise they buy is real, “[w]hat is falsified is our will to buy, which we take as real, and in this sense Disneyland is really the quintessence of consumer ideology” (43). The park’s visitors are captive consumers, but willing. The sign of prosperity in this ethos is the ability to have more. “In America [and California] you don’t say, ‘Give me another coffee’; you ask for ‘More coffee’; [. . .] more than you might want, leaving a surplus to throw away—that’s prosperity” (Eco 15-16).

Perhaps the overt fantasy theme, noticeable by any park guest, is fun. This is a park designed for fun, no doubt. But few in our consumer culture will accede unques- tioningly to the “consumer ideology.” We have become savvier than that. How- ever, the fantasy theme working at the fundament of the Disney ideology seems to be: by acting on one’s dream for a better life, one may achieve prosperity. Al- though this is a “California Dream,” it is at once inclusive of all people. Addition- ally, we associate prosperity with consumer power. This is all fun, of course, but the “California Dream” theme makes it meaningful, and guarantees a shared ex- perience that goes beyond the technical appreciation of a roller coaster ride. They are given an ideological base from which to interpret history and culture in this state, and that narrative is reinforced in the movie “Golden Dreams,” certainly a slanted view of California’s history. Luis Marin’s similar comments on Disneyland years prior suggest a method of representation long established, though nowhere near as neatly as in Disney’s California Adventure, where the mitigating influence of pure simulacra is almost nonexistent:

The visitors have learned the codes of the language of Disneyland and have thus been given the possibilities to tell their individual story, to utter their own speech. Yet their freedom, the freedom of their own individual narrative, is constrained not only by these codes but also by the representation of an imaginary history contained in a stereotyped system of representations. (Marin 5) The effect seems to be less a matter of strategy in this case, however. The fact is that they chose an actual state as their theme, with actual trademarks and motifs that they had to represent, be- cause the concept is at base a representation of something real. I do not see this as an overtly ethical issue, but aesthetical. If we revel in the postmodern scope of Disneyland as the epitome of simulacra, the Sistine Chapel of the hyperreal (Eco 48), then Disney’s California Adventure is truly a step backward. If we instead take Disneyland as the epitome of consumer culture that here celebrates a “prosper- ity” rhetorical vision in consumerist terms, then perhaps it has taken a step forward.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Reader: English 602, Part 2. Ed. by Cezar Ornatowski. SDSU, 1999: 253-81.

Disney Online. “Disney’s California Adventures.” 13 May 2002. Disney. <http://disneyland.disney.go.com/disneylandresort/CaliforniaAdventure/index>

Disney Travel Agents. “Disney’s California Adventure Park.” 13 May 2002. Dis- ney. <http://www.disneytravelagents.com/default.asp?PageID=2.1.1.2>

Eco, Umberto. “Travels in Hyperreality.” Travels in Hyperreality. London: Har- court, 1986: 1-58.

Foss, Sonja K. “Fantasy Theme Criticism.” Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice. 2nd ed. Illinois: Waveland Press, 1996: 121-29.

Marin, Luis. “Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia.” 13 May 2002. Georgia Tech:

Literature, Communication, and Culture. <http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~broglio/1101/marin.html>

Vail, Mary C. “’Both Sides Told,’ or, Southern California as it is . . . 1888.” Cali- fornia Reader—Southern California. 13 May 2002. <http://www.notfrisco.com/calmen/bothsides.html>

Filed under 2003 Tagged with A, Adventure, by, California, Disney’s, Dream, Michael, of, Park:, Rhetorical, Shape, Theme, Williams

Orientalism and the Representation of ‘Others’ in The Mummy by Ridha Mikdadi

March 16, 2003 by RWS-SB Leave a Comment

Why can’t the heterogeneous West create its own images of splendor and desire without reproducing tired stereotypes of a lush Orient that never existed anywhere but in the desire-drenched recesses of their collective minds? (Susana Loza 166)

In 1979 Edward Said published his brilliant and still highly controversial work, Orientalism. In this book he proposes the following idea: the Orient is actually a Western invention, a way of differentiating between East and West, white man and brown man, and although this Orient didn’t and doesn’t actually exist, it was this idea of what the Orient and therefore the Oriental should be that defined and con- tinues to define an entire region of the world. Said defines the Oriental as the Other, the seemingly opposite of the Occidental or Westerner, and suggests that this way of distancing oneself from one’s opposite allowed the appropriation of entire cultures without the responsibility of having to defend one’s colonialist actions. In 2002 it is obvious that the West continues to think of the East in Orientalist-terms, especially in the cultural stereotypes produced and promoted in Hollywood’s film industry.

While Said defined the Other in terms of the Arab, it is a term that can be applied to any group of people that is denigrated at the expense of another group of people for the express purpose(s) of the group doing the denigrating. “In Orientalism, Said expressed the hope that additional studies of other aspects of the phenomenon would follow his own, and indeed cultural critics and theorists have taken up Orien- talism as an intriguing and compelling paradigm for the representation of race, eth- nicity, and gender in the media and particularly in film” (Bernstein 4). American cinema has long been fertile ground for fostering cultural stereotypes by no means limited to Arabs. Any cultural minority, foreigners, women, homosexuals and even aliens have been traditionally depicted as the Other, as a way for the white hero to be depicted as that hero. After all, every hero requires a nemesis, and as film is a visual medium, one very easy way to define a movie’s characters and their innate goodness or badness is by what makes them different from or similar to the pre- approved status quo, which includes race and skin color.

In 1999, Hollywood released The Mummy, a PG-13 rated action-adventure movie set in the ruins of ancient Egypt. Headed by a primarily British and American cast, The Mummy is guilty of virtually every cultural stereotype possible pertaining to Arabs as Others. The glorious Egyptian past is highlighted with amazing scenes of pyramids, gold and physical beauty, while the modern-day Arab circa 1923 is ugly, dirty and uneducated. Not only that, but the modern Arab man has been reduced to a treasure hunter within his own lost civilization, a useless human being written into the script for the purpose of having someone to laugh at. Simultaneously, in a somewhat redeeming twist, The Mummy doesn’t limit itself to the Arab population, but also stereotypes its British and American characters, although those particular stereotypes seem to be more comical than racist. Americans are depicted as vio- lence-loving cowboys, gamblers and not particularly smart individuals, while the British are depicted as colonialists, racists and elitists. In fact, the only positive representation in this movie is that of Evie, the half-British, half-Egyptian incredi- bly intelligent if somewhat ditzy heroine.

The plot of The Mummy is fairly simple. Once upon a time, Pharaoh Seti I’s mis- tress, Anck-su-Namun and the High Priest Imhotep fell in love. But no other man was allowed to have Anck-su-Namun, and so the two lovers murdered the Pharaoh which led to her death and Imhotep’s eternal damnation as the undead. Fast for- ward three thousand years to 1923 Egypt, and Imhotep has become a myth, legend and Hamunaptra, the city where his body is buried, is now a fabled and cursed city of gold lost somewhere in the vast Sahara desert. With the help of a treasure map, the three protagonists Rick, Evie and Jonathan (to be later joined by a mysterious Arab nomad) are thrown together to try and find Hamunaptra and hopefully bring Orientalism and the Representation of ‘Others’ in The Mummy 55 back untold riches. Instead, they end up unleashing Imhotep and must then spend the rest of the movie trying to save the world from the curse of the Mummy. There are many characters in The Mummy and the Other is represented in a variety of forms. The main group of Arab characters are Imhotep, the mysterious Arab nomad, a prison warden and to a lesser extent Anck-su-Namun and Seti I. Then there are the protagonists, Rick, Evie and Jonathan. Also included in the movie are a group of American cowboys searching for Hamunaptra as well, scores of Arabs as diggers, prisoners and zombies and a variety of minor characters, all set against the magnificent backdrop of ancient Egypt’s splendor.

The first scene of the movie introduces Imhotep, Seti I and Anck-su-Namun, set against the ancient city of Thebes; Egypt shown at her best, three thousand years in the past. All three characters are physically beautiful, covered in gauzy material, gold and make-up, and each contain a measure of power. There is no West at this point in history, so it is acceptable to show Egypt as a powerful nation, but there is the insinuation of the Other through the murder of Seti I, that Imhotep and Anck-su- Namun are treacherous and disloyal – the Arab as untrustworthy. It is worthwhile to note that it is Anck-su-Namun that strikes the first blow, the Oriental femme fa- tale – beautiful, sexually alluring but deadly. As Gaylyn Studlar says, “[...]the imaginary topography of the East[...]held the promise of a different feminine iden- tity-preposterous and improbable-but also destructive of the claims of prevailing ideology and, therefore, “evil””(qtd. in Loza 167). Each character is given a brutal death through murder, suicide or torture, and there is the ever-present idea of magic and the supernatural pervading the scene with Imhotep’s promise to raise Anck-su- Namun from the dead and his subsequent damnation as the eternal undead.

Three thousand years later the audience is introduced to 1923 Cairo, a place with a glorious past and a lousy present. Evie and Jonathan are siblings, working for an Egyptian curator that employs them because their parents “were the museum’s most generous patrons” (The Mummy), the Arab as greedy/money-loving. Jonathan is a con-artist, depicted as a British colonialist – arrogant, elitist, racist but somehow inescapably charming and funny. It is Jonathan that makes the majority of the rac- ist jokes in this film, but that doesn’t stop him from being portrayed as a coward, physically weak and hopelessly dependent on his little sister, Evie.

Evie, on the other hand, is depicted as beautiful, courageous, intelligent and ex- tremely knowledgeable about ancient Egypt. It is she that discovers the treasure map hidden in a “puzzle-box,” but she is also responsible for unleashing Imhotep and then later finding the only way to kill him. Evie also admits, while drunk, that her “father loved Egypt so much that he married my mother, an Egyptian” (The Mummy).

Notice that she doesn’t say her British father loved her Egyptian mother, he loved Egypt and married an Egyptian as a result. It is also important to point out that Evie speaks with a British accent throughout the movie, and dresses as a European until losing all of her clothes in a shipwreck, whereupon she is dressed as a pseudo- traditional Arab woman. Only Evie’s outfit is sheer, while the Arab women who dress her are covered from head to toe in heavy black material. It is also dressed as a seductive Arab girl that Rick, the American treasure seeker who agrees to lead them to Hamunaptra in return for being freed from a Cairo prison and certain death, finds Evie sexually desirable. Once again it is the image of the Oriental woman, covered and veiled in a sheer material, that is sexually alluring, or rather the re- pressed British librarian dressed as the Oriental that gives Evie a sexual dimension.

Rick, the movie’s hero, is depicted as an American mercenary, treasure-hunter and bad-boy – he is initially jailed for “just trying to have a good time” (The Mummy). He is the brawn in this movie, carrying at least two pistols and a shotgun at all times, with physical strength and the ability to win a fight. He is not, however, ex- tremely intelligent and spends the movie, much like Jonathan, at the mercy of Evie’s intelligence, always coming to her rescue but unable to defeat Imhotep with- out her help.

There are two important Arab characters in this movie that are never named. The first is the mysterious Arab nomad, a member of the Med-Jai, an ancient group of Arabs dedicated to keeping Imhotep from regenerating and unleashing his curse upon the world. “In the movies, where Arabs always seem to be Bedouins, they were gifted with remarkable powers as warriors who could corporealize out of no- where from beyond the next sand dune[...] ”(Leuchtenburg 21). This Med-Jai spends the first half of the movie trying to stop and later kill Rick, Evie and Jona- than so that they will not find Hamunaptra and Imhotep. However, once the crea- ture is released, he must join the protagonists since he needs their help to stop Im- hotep. There are several interesting and disheartening facets to this character. First, he is never named. Here is the representation of a “good” Arab and he never has a name. A name is what defines and identifies a human being to other human beings, and yet this character doesn’t have a name until the sequel. Simultane- ously, he is never depicted as one hundred percent good – he tries to kill the pro- tagonists for the first half of the movie. However, once East and West are united under the common cause of fighting against the ancient East, this Med-Jai is given a more positive role. Which doesn’t stop him from being characterized as a ma- chine-gun toting, horseback-riding, never-haven-flown-in-an-airplane or driven-in-Orientalism and the Representation of ‘Others’ in The Mummy 57 a-car Bedouin, who cannot possibly hope to save the world from Imhotep without help from the British and the Americans.

The second character is the Arab prison warden, a superfluous character written into the script as the butt of every joke who’s sole function is to be the culturally stereotypical Arab. He, like the member of the Med-Jai, is also never named, and is depicted as a “bad” character until his untimely and horrible demise. In one scene he is characterized as the personification of a camel narrated by Jonathan, “never did like camels. Filthy buggers. They smell, they bite, they spit. Disgusting.” (The Mummy). He is the formulaic Hollywood Arab – smelly, rude, ugly, ignorant, las- civious, greedy, gluttonous and violent; a formula derived from an Orientalist per- spective.

Finally there is the reborn Imhotep – an ancient threat come to bring about the end of the modern world. In a lot of ways, the character is reminiscent of Saladin, a barbaric Eastern threat bearing down on the civilized West, bringing with him the promise of the destruction of their world. Imhotep is not so much a stereotyped character as he is the personification of the Arab threat to humanity. Here is an all- powerful, unstoppable supernatural force that is, of course, stopped by an Ameri- can, two Brits and an ambiguous Arab with no name who seemingly sacrifices his life while trying to help these Westerners kill the evil Imhotep.

In the last scene of the movie, Imhotep has been vanquished, returned to his grave, Hamunaptra has disappeared beneath the sand taking most of her treasure with it and Rick, Evie and Jonathan are left standing. At this point the mysterious Arab reappears, having survived his ordeal, to humbly thank his Western counterparts for having saved the world. As he says, “you have earned the respect and gratitude of me and my people [...] may Allah smile upon you always” (The Mummy). He then proceeds to kiss his hand, press it to his forehead and bow to the group. Of course Jonathan can’t resist this last display of Arabness, and reduces the thanks to a caricature of the Christian Trinity. What is interesting about this last little speech is that it is the first time in the movie Allah is mentioned, it is the last scene and there- fore the last impression the audience is left with of this character, which is that he may have helped out, but he is still an Arab, a member of Islam and most impor- tantly, his character is shown as riding off into the absolute opposite direction of his Western counterparts, who ride off into the sunset. So back to the dark the nameless Arab goes, where he belongs with his people somewhere in the desert, riding a horse and living in a tent.

No less important to the Oriental portrayal of The Mummy’s characters are the scores of nameless and faceless Arabs who fulfill the role of what I like to call cannon fodder. These are simply bodies to be blown up, shot, run over, eaten by scor- pions or melted by salt acid from ancient Egyptian booby-traps. They are killed, turned into zombies and shown in the most unattractive light possible, close-up shots only including men without their teeth. They are hordes of brown-skinned, turbaned natives dying, killing or cowering before their white masters.

Arab women aren’t portrayed positively either. In the middle of the movie there is a scene that includes an obese bellydancer with her stomach hanging over the sheer skirt of her costume, waddling alongside a man who is so drunk that when he steps into the fountain he thinks someone has spilt their drink. Besides Evie and Anck- su-Namun, this caricatured bellydancer and a gaggle of screaming, fully-covered Arab women are the only other representations of women in this movie. So modern Arab women are immensely unattractive and ancient Arab women are beautiful but evil.

However, there is also the depiction of the American as the Other in this movie. Besides Rick, the only other Americans in this film are a group of men, dressed like cowboys and one gangster, seeking the treasures of Hamunaptra. They’re shown as gamblers and violence-loving, dumb men. They also all die in this movie, fodder for Imhotep who removes their organs and sucks them dry. In one scene of the movie, Rick, Evie and Jonathan are searching Hamunaptra for treasure. Sand- wiched between siblings, Rick endures insults from both:

Jonathan: “Those damn yanks [...] no offense.” Rick: “None taken.”

Evie: “Those beastly Americans [...] no offense.”

Rick: “None taken.”

In short, no group is spared cultural stereotypes in this movie as women, Ameri- cans, the British and to the greatest extent, Arabs are characterized as the Other.

What is important about this film and other films like it, is that The Mummy makes no political pretenses which is a pretense in and of itself. Every scene and every character is carefully contrived to be a part of the story and propel that movie for- ward. Plus, this movie chose specific images of specific races to portray, images that promote the Westernized ideal of ancient Egypt, “and these representations rely upon institutions , traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient” (Said 22).

Film is an important aspect of multiculturalism. It is an all-pervasive medium and America’s number one export that decries any inherent politicalness, yet politicizes even its most minor characters. Film is everywhere, in every country, in every cul- ture, language and level of society. It is mass-produced so-called entertainment for the masses, and as such can never be innocent or harmless. Film has become the literature of the twenty-first century. “Mass production, which has characterized literary dissemination since the early diffusion of print technology, has spread to other material cultural domains that include painting, photography, film, television, radio and software. In other words, literature[...] no longer dominate[s] cultural production” (Cochran 73, emphasis added). Which means that if an audience mem- ber doesn’t know the difference between a real Arab and a stereotypical one, then the identity of an entire race of people comes down to the distorted images that are portrayed of them, and this example holds true for a variety of Hollywood race portrayals.

Added to which only recently have these stereotypes been labeled as such, which hasn’t stopped the Hollywood film industry from perpetuating them. Robert Stam writes in his book Film Theory, “what is most striking about “official” film the- ory’s relation to race and multiculturalism is that theory sustained for so long such a remarkable silence on the subject” (272). Stam goes on to define mass media as “form[ing] a complex network of ideological signs situated within multiple envi- ronments – the generating mass-media environment, the broader generating ideo- logical environment, and the generating socio-economic environment – each with its own specificities” (310). Cinema does have an agenda, the agenda of all the people that work in the film industry whatever that may be, and it is used as a tool that re- lays information regardless of its truthfulness or accuracy, information which is broadcast to the world.

The Mummy is a perfect example in that it was given a PG-13 rating, has no sex scenes or foul language. It is the kind of movie that parents let their children watch, the kind of movie marketed as fun, filled with adventure, action and enough propaganda to stop a viewer of Arab descent in her tracks. This is a movie that doesn’t pose a threat because it’s just entertainment, right? The point is that mov- ies are a way of influencing the masses and today the masses means the world, and if viewers don’t know the difference between reality and stereotypes, then it is the stereotypes that become accepted truths. As Said says, “in short, the construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything but mere academic woolgathering” (332), or, in this case, The Mummy is anything but a mere movie.

I would like to leave you with a specific thought. It used to really bother me that a South African plays Imhotep, a South American plays Anck-su-Namun and an Is- raeli plays the mysterious Arab nomad. However, upon watching this movie again,

I had an epiphany of sorts- that is, if three separate races can be used to portray a fourth separate race, if we are that interchangeable that a South African, a South American and an Israeli can all be Arabs in this movie, then aren’t we as humans more similar than we are different? And at the very least, Otherness cannot be de- fined physically and that the stereotyping that The Mummy promotes is simply an illusion, something that we can question and ultimately reject.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Matthew. Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. Ed. Matthew Bern- stein and Gaylyn Studlar. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Cochran, Terry. “The Matter of Language.” Boundary 2 25.2 (1998): 71-93.

Leuchtenburg, William E. “Arab and American Culture.” Conference Sponsored by the American Enterprise Inst. For Public Policy Research. Ed. George Atiyeh. Washington DC: 1997.

Loza, Susana. “Orientalism and Film Noir: (Un)Mapping Textual Territories And (En)Countering the Narratives.” The Southern Quarterly 39.4 (2001): 161-174.

The Mummy. Dir. Stephen Sommers. Perf. Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah and Arnold Vosloo. Universal Pictures, 1999.

The Mummy Illustrations 1999 <http://www.themummy.com>. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2000.

Filed under 2003 Tagged with and, ‘Others’, by, in, Mikdadi, Mummy, of, Orientalism, Representation, Ridha, the

Threshold to Mindfulness of Reciprocity by Kathryn LaFevers Evans

March 15, 2003 by RWS-SB Leave a Comment

In a multicultural, multidisciplinary world, where humankind’s common ground for communication is in the unspoken language of the heart, a leadership model of mindfulness of reciprocity empowers the literary professions as authoritative in the arts bound together by language.

Louis Montrose, in his essay “New Historicisms,” challenges us to “resist the reduc- tive tendency to formulate our conceptual terms in binary oppositions; rather we should construe them as joined in a mutually constitutive, recursive, and transfor- mative process” (413).

This threshold to the process of mindfulness of reciprocity is offered perennially in teachings of sages, scholars, and artists. I propose a visual model of this process, based on “our wisdom traditions,” as master philosopher-theologian Huston Smith calls religions, and on wisdom from Western culture’s art and leadership traditions.

What theory has rejected from religions is the coercion inherent in their boundaries and the political power they wield against freedom. What theory needs to embrace is religion’s distillation of wisdom in human values, without which we continue to seek our own largess in selfish territorial motives.

Human values such as kindness, compassion, humility and joy are the building blocks of this model of kaleidoscopic communication through mindfulness of recip- rocity. Mindfulness of reciprocity is thus simply—attention to love. I suggest we solidify the multicultural, multidisciplinary leadership role of the liter- ary professions by acknowledging human values, commonalities of the human race, thereby crossing the threshold we have apprehended into attention to love.

From the literary tradition of early 19th Century France, Honore de Balzac reminds us that our goal is not only to instruct, but also to delight, which is a profound pur- pose. Droll Stories: Thirty Tales by Honore de Balzac, are satires on such passion- ate historical figures as Queen Margaret of Navarre. In his preface, translator Jacques le Clercq documents that critics in retrospect praised Balzac, alongside Shakespeare, as the greatest storehouse of documents on human nature (xi). Le- Clercq concludes:

Thus if the Droll Stories were but so many bawdy jokes, Balzac’s good humor, his verisimilitude and his style would make them worth reading. Yet their rib- aldries—the rough-and-tumble jollity of a thoroughly healthy man—should not divert our attention from the genuine pathos underlying more than one tale. (xxii)

Yet, in the “Prologue to Second Ten Stories,” Balzac discloses how this collection was received by his contemporary critics and friends. He likens himself to a favor- ite author past who declared he was determined never again to take his pen in hand:

Another age, but the selfsame manners…Arduous labor it is indeed to excogi- tate One Hundred Droll Stories under the fire of broadsides directed at him not by jealous ruffians alone, but by his kind friends into the bargain. For the latter did not fail to come to him tragically in that dark hour, and: “Are you mad?” they cried. “What on earth are you thinking of?”…In order not to discourage fine sentiments (intolerable though they are) the Author bequeaths his old openwork slippers to these friends, and he assures them, for their greater peace of mind, that within the recesses of that reservoir of nature, his brain, he holds threescore and ten fine stories, his own personal property and exempt from sei- zure or attachment. (175-76)

Balzac implicates the shortsighted criticism and all-around lack of friendliness of his alleged friends as the culprit in history’s loss of the 70 unsung Droll Stories. These critics were not willing to look beyond their own horizon, not willing to risk losing the comfort of territory.

Figure 1; MODEL: DRAW AN ARC OF HORIZON

Through a satirical essay, “Defending Literary Studies Has Become a Lost Cause,” Michael Berube, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, reminds us that “…our junior faculty members are foremost among the department’s most rigorous and most popular teachers. What they teach is what they love, namely, great literary works.”

Theory and criticism are deemed unequipped to cross the threshold they themselves have apprehended—to the heart of the matter, which is love, a value central to hu- man nature. The model to be constructed, depicting human values as a venue for sustainable dialogue, is a critical tool we may find useful.

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes relates, in Lefevre: Pioneer of Ecclesiastical Renewal in France—in 1492 Lefevre asks of his fellow scholars in reference to Aristotle’s natu- ral philosophy, “For what is philosophy if it is not love of wisdom? What is a phi- losopher if he is not a true lover of the same?” Properly understood, then, philoso- phers are friends. “Consequently, when they are spiteful and malevolent men tear- ing each other to pieces they no longer regard them as philosophers” (1-2).

This single observation embodies polarities inherent in religion: on one side is in- clusion through human values; on the other side is exclusion through zeal for con- formity. Clearly, I’m not suggesting conformity to cultural codes of conduct pre- scribed by morals, but rather, a closer look at ethical tools for healing conflict.

Hughes praises Lefevre:

His career was not stamped with the dazzling brilliance of Pico della Mirandola, the prophetic fire of Savonarola, the lofty detachment of Erasmus, the thunder- ing impetuosity of Luther, or the polished intellectuality of Calvin, all of them his contemporaries; but, as with each of them, his genius lit up the European world. (ix)

Yet, also like his contemporaries, Lefevre denounced Islam (12), reminding us that zeal is inherent in human nature. The threshold we have apprehended is that of ethical choice towards inclusion through love. Lefevre, though a Catholic himself, sought refuge from violent religious persecution by the Catholic Church in the court of Queen Margaret of Navarre (Marguerite de Navarre).

Probably of the Fourth or Fifth Century C.E., The Yoga System of Patanjali: Or the Ancient Hindu Doctrine of Concentration of Mind, translated by James Haughton Woods, delineates the powers of friendliness, compassion and joy as “Supernormal Powers” (252). That these human values are systematically cultivated in one of humanity’s oldest wisdom traditions speaks to the power inherent in the value di- mension of life. Essentially, the technique expounds that attention to love enhances human communication. The substance of love is cultivated, not the ineffable; love is the current through which communication flows (252-253). Former MIT professor, Huston Smith, in The Illustrated World’s Religions: A Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions, captures the reciprocal experience of joy in the Zen embrace of paradox, and in the Zen practice of mindfulness to life as a process.

A group of Zen masters, gathered for conversation, have a great time declaring that there is no such thing as Buddhism, or Enlightenment, or anything even remotely resembling nirvana. They set traps for one another, trying to trick someone into an assertion that might imply the opposite. Practiced as they are, they always elude these traps, whereupon the entire company bursts into glori- ous, room-shaking laughter….And though we cannot hope to capture their per- spective completely, it being of Zen’s essence that it cannot be impounded in words, we can give some hint of what they are up to.

We can begin with the point just alluded to, the limitations of language. We all know that menus are not meals, or maps the terrains they depict. The distinctive thing about Zen is its preoccupation—obsession even—with this distinction, and its alertness to how often spiritual nourishment (if we may put the matter this way) stops with menu reading. When the Buddha made his point by holding up a flower and Mahakasyapa got that point, no words intervened. And when (a thousand years later) Bodhidharma brought that “point” to China, he defined the treasure he had brought as “a special transmission outside the scriptures.” Zen continues this expe- riential emphasis. (88)

This would indicate that instruction is founded primarily in the boundaries of lan- guage, whereas delight resides primarily in the unspoken language of the heart.

How are we to reconcile this subjective paradox within the literary arts whose me- dium is language? How are we to marry the violent zeal inherent in language with the peace of silence? Smith gives us a direction: “Along with this sense of life’s goodness there comes, secondly, an objective outlook on one’s relation to others; their welfare seems as important as one’s own….Dualisms dissolve…” (91).

Literary theory and criticism’s leadership role as authoritative rather than authori- tarian is parallelled in Thomas Cleary’s “Communication of Hearts,” from his trans- lation of Zen Lessons: the Art of Leadership. This Song Dynasty letter to the Zen master Huanglong Sheng depicts mindfulness of reciprocity through a metaphor of leader as sky and benefactor as earth:

Figure 2; MODEL: DRAW AN ARC OF SKY AND REDRAW THE ARC OF EARTH

…Essential to leadership is winning the community. Essential to winning the community is seeing into the hearts of people….Now if the sky is below and the earth above, their positions are certainly contrary, yet it is called safety, because above and below are intermingling. (27)

Figure 3; MODEL: DRAW AN ARC OF SKY BELOW AND AN ARC OF EARTH ABOVE THAT, TO COMPLETE BOTH CIRCLES

Montrose envisions this sense of humility within our arts, a joyful sharing of lively diversity within an articulated unity: “—a ceaseless contest among dominant and subordinate positions, a ceaseless interplay of continuity and change, of identity and difference—such a perspective opens cultural poetics to history” (405).

He evokes in my imagination the impression of a kaleidoscopic vision: “to read, as in a refracted light, one fragment of our ideological inscription by means of an- other” (414). To further define these beams of light which support reciprocity be- tween viewpoints, I turn to an architectural model and a leadership model.

G.F Young relates two examples of grace, prosperity, and peace under the leader- ship of Western culture’s great patrons, The Medici: “Brunelleschi’s sublime archi- tectural structure, the great dome of the cathedral of Florence, “is built on this prin- ciple, one dome within the other and the two bound together so as to support each other…” (37).

Figure 4; MODEL: DRAW TWO PERPINDICULAR LINES INTERSECTING IN THE CENTER OF BOTH CIRCLES, WITH ARROW POINTS MEETING AT THE PERIMETER OF THE INNER CIRCLE

For our model of mutually supportive spheres in the human realm, the equalization of inward and outward forces represents balance through love. The negative force of zeal is harnessed and supported by the positive force of love.

The integrity of both spheres depends upon equal cooperation through the cohesive powers of love and trust—mutual authoritative strength, not authoritarian force. In that simple truce is the power of mutual ownership, of peaceful communication.

The Zen letter “Communication of Hearts” expounds on this in practice:

Now if those who are above other people are able to control themselves and thereby be generous with those below, those below will gladly serve those above…Thus when those above and below intermingle, then there is safety and peace. People who lessen themselves are a benefit to others; people who aggrandize themselves are harmful to others….Therefore, when a leader wins people’s hearts there is flour- ishing, and a leader that loses people’s hearts is abandoned. (27-8)

Lorenzo the Magnificent, the beloved de Medici ruler of Florence in the 1400’s took a unique course. Convinced that an autocratic style of government was the only one of which the conditions of the time admitted, he yet did not follow the ex- ample of other rulers around him who in that age were erecting thrones, their meth- ods being force, crime, and treachery. Instead he solved the apparently impossible problem of combining two things diametrically opposed, an autocracy and a democ- racy, and contrived to preserve the form of government loved by his countrymen and yet to wield personally an autocratic power. Unsupported by any military force, he yet exercised absolute authority; but only because his countrymen well knew that no one else could produce such happy results. The Florentines saw their city, through his abilities, raised to the leading place among Italian states, made the intel- lectual and artistic capital of Europe, and daily advancing in a commercial prosper- ity in which they each individually shared; and they had no desire to kill the goose that laid such golden eggs. (Young 151)

Figure 5; MODEL: DRAW THE NODES OF OPPOSITION ON THE PERIMETER OF THE INNER CIRCLE; CONNECT TWO IN TRIANGULATION TO THE OUTER CIRCLE; DRAW ARROWS FROM THE OPPOSING NODES TOWARD THE PERIMETER OF THE OUTER CIRCLE, ARROWS POINTING TOWARD THE MIDPOINT OF THE INNER CIRCLE, ARROWS POINTING OUTW ARD TOW ARD THE OPPOSING NODES.

Thus, oppositional zealous energy is directed toward the loving leader, not as a sac- rifice in violence, but as a support for prosperity and peace within the sphere of the opposing camps. This model expands kaleidoscopically in both directions, reflect- ing the infinite viewpoints of our multicultural, multidisciplinary world.

Figures 6 & 7; MODEL: DRAW SIMILAR TRIANGLES IN ALL DIRECTIONS TO NODES ON .

Young further elucidates Lorenzo’s leadership qualities:

The relation which existed between these two brothers is one of the pleasantest things in the history of the Medici. At that epoch jealousy between two brothers placed in such a position as Lorenzo and Guiliano were was the normal state of things. That it was entirely absent in their case speaks well for both of them. And it is an indication of Lorenzo’s character, and of what his conduct in the minor rela- tions of life must have been, that he should never have given cause for any feeling of jealousy in a younger brother so nearly his equal in ability, and his superior in good looks, and that, on the contrary, the latter should have “worshipped” him; or, again, that Lorenzo from his side should never have felt jealousy at the admiration and popularity so universally bestowed upon Giuliano, and much exceeding that accorded to himself. (177)

Literary arts cannot transcend the boundary of language, but can express and inform innumerable arenas if we choose to affirm positive commonalities of the race of humankind. The model is a template upon which to assess the motivations and in- tentions of our theory, criticism and literary works.

It may be interpreted as depicting such theories as that described by Anne Middle- ton in her essay “Medieval Studies,” where she describes the model of new philol- ogy as a “horizontal expanse of middle ground bracketed between the old polarities of traditional medieval history” (28).

In “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,” Leah S. Marcus’ description of a text could be compared to the model of kaleidoscopic communication through mindful- ness of reciprocity:

It is not a fixed entity, like the physical book that may serve as its vehicle; not something that can be specified, objectified, held in the hand, and interpreted according to the rational, linear categories of interpretation. It is instead a “field” of forces in the scientific sense of the term, that, in interplay with the consciousness of the reader, sets in motion a volatile, indeterminate, and open- ended process; always resisting the rationalizing and codifying thrust of inter- pretation as it is traditionally understood. (51)

Heather Richardson Hayton, in her teachings on “Sacred Texts: Dogma and Her- esy,” explains that proof resides in and informs only its own boundaries, even as regards science. She describes how St. Bernard of Clairvaux, an 11th Century ab- bott, formerly a knight, effects his leadership through crafting his discipline in the language of courtly love, which serves to delight as well as to instruct.

Utilizing the language of love in his career as abbott, St. Bernard was able to navigate and negotiate diverse boundaries successfully and gracefully. Hayton explores how the language of love acts as currency for constructive criticism, while praising and protecting the boundaries of opponents. I suggest that the methodology of apprehending cognitive structures and social forces through textual processes demonstrates this model’s use in accommodating layers of po- larities.

Bradford Keeney, acclaimed scholar at the vanguard of articulating the space shared by psychology and spirit, documents the healings by the Bushmen doctors of Djok- hoe, Namibia: “There is a power that comes from the Big God. It starts with his love for all things….This power is in all of life” (35). Huston Smith leads us to this threshold in his comprehensive work on contemporary reductionist philosophy, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind:

Our sun…takes…approximately 224 million years to complete one revolution around our galaxy. If these figures sound astronomical, they are actually paro- chial, for they are confined to our own galaxy. Andromeda, our second closest neighbor, is one-and-a-half million light-years removed, beyond which the uni- verse falls away abysmally, range after range, world after world, island universe after island universe. Now along comes an Isaiah, a Christ,…a Buddha; along come men who are…the counterparts of Copernicus, Newton, Faraday, Kepler, and they tell us something equally incredible about the universe in its value di- mension. They tell us of depth upon depth of value falling away from this visi- ble world and our ordinary perceptions. They tell us that this universe in all its vastnessispermeatedtoitsverycorebylove. Andthat’sincredible.(260-61)

In conclusion I ask, if our goal is for an accessible, sustainable communication, would this model of the transformative process of kaleidoscopic communication through mindfulness of reciprocity be better named simply, attention to love?

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