The Legend of Apsara Mera

Every traditional martial art deploys katas which are combat against an imaginary opponent. Katas distill fighting style in such a way that aggression is transformed into beauty, which takes the form of choreography. And katas also comprise a narrative usually concerning a series of struggles or obstacles that are overcome. In this sense many katas resemble ballets and operas. Imagine Wagner's Ring cycle as simply a very complex kata with an orchestral accompaniment! The Royal Ballet of Cambodia’s  “The Legend of Apsara Mera,” which was recently performed at BAM reflects both the Eastern tradition of the kata, turning martial arts technique into dance movement while also displaying the leitmotifs of the fertility cycle, the relation between god and man, the search for immortality and the mythical origins of a civilization that are characteristic themes of Western opera and classics of enthno-anthropology like Frazier’s The Golden Bough. Indeed the final section of the opera which concerns the wooing of the goddess Apsara Mera by Prince Kambu presents the myth of the founding of the kingdom of Cambodia. For a country that has had its share of revolutions, the costume design of the ballet, with its shimmering gold mail, which seems to defy gravity, revolutionizes one’s view of antiquity. The current production was choreographed by Her Royal Highness Princess Norodom Buppha Devi, the daughter of the late King Norodom Sihanouk. One wonders if his mythic and embattled reign will someday be represented in the repertoire of the company.

The Kafka Studies Department

photo of Gabriel Josipovici, readysteadybook.com

At the conclusion of his essay/review about June O. Leavitt’s The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka, Stanley Corngold and Ruth V. Gross, editors, Kafka for the Twenty-First Century, Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner Franz Kafka, The ghosts in the machine, David Suchoff’s Kafka’s Jewish Languages, the hidden openness of tradition and Shachar M. Pinsker’s Literary Passports, The making of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe, (“Why we don’t understand Kafka," TLS, 9/7/2012), Gabriel Josipovici remarks, “The besetting sin of the Kafka critic is impatience, the need to locate the mystery and the solve it, as it were, the need to move…across the text from beginning to end, not stay with it, savour it, allow it slowly to come into focus. To do this we have first of all to recognize that the best way in to Kafka is not via an idea—Kafka and mysticism, Judaism, the insurance business or the condition of modernity—but via his unique way of approaching his material.” Reduction is what one does with a sauce, but not with one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Redaction is what one does with the manuscripts of a writer who was as brilliant in his elusiveness and he was in his use of language and who instructed the executor of his estate to destroy all his work. Commenting earlier on the compendium of essays Kafka for the Twenty-First Century, Josipovici says, “Two of the essays…explore those writers from Italy and Israel whose works exhibits ‘familiar Kafkaesque themes, such as metamorphosis, existential absurdity, bureaucratic nightmares, marginality, power and identity.’ One had hoped Kafka studies had progressed beyond this level, but apparently not.” It shouldn’t be surprising that even Kafka’s writings have created an industry, with its own lingua franca (watered down ideas), awards (publication), trials (phd examinations) and titans who jealously guard their castles (critical turfs). Indeed, it’s Kafkaesque.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Can Stephen J. Gould’s notion of punctuated equilibrium be applied to human sexuality?  If evolution doesn’t conform to a smooth pattern, how do we determine what sexual congress will be 500 years from now? For instance, rather than being a period of repression, the Middle Ages were a very sexy time. The Canterbury Tales is one of the most ribald works of world literature, easily competing with Frank Harris, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Going back further in time, there’s Sappho and the great erotic poet Catullus. It’s odd that the swingers club of the ‘70s was named Plato’s Retreat. Shouldn’t it have been Caligula’s Retreat, for a time when the vox populi was urged to carpe diem?  In fact, sexual expression seems to move by the principle of devolution rather than evolution, with advances in man from his earliest prehensile form, homo habilis, leading to the predominance of mind over matter.  In the ‘60s there were love children, but homo is often not erectus by the time he reaches his adult state. He’s too sad.

   

Still there’s the notion of progress.  In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discussed the compromise that man must make between his instinctual drives and his social nature. The mind is rather inventive. If fetishism provides a detour that allows the discharge of sexual energies that might otherwise have been inhibited, then perhaps progress can be described as the movement from merkins (pubic wigs) to hot waxing, from girdles to thongs, from pantyhose to the scene in the appropriately named Basic Instinct where Sharon Stone startles her interrogators by revealing the absence of any undergarment at all?

  

But what does the future hold?  If the sexual drive derives from procreation, then Viagra has helped to make sex a gratuitous act that persists far beyond the procreative years. Will there be some drug in the next century that makes sex possible for consenting adults who have already passed away? Nicholson Baker created a character in his novel The Fermata who has the futuristic ability to undress women with little or no consequences. Now this fantasy has become a reality with the new generation of security devices to be used in airports around the world.  Do these devices herald the prospect of a kind of parthenogenesis or immaculate conception—at least in airports—in which the voyeuristic impulse can impregnate another mind? What about timeless erotic passion, what the Germans called Liebestod, or love-death? And what about Wagner? Will there still be a Bayreuth Festival in 2500?

Helen

There is a woman who is a modern day Helen of Troy. She realizes the power she has over men, which is to get attention by giving it. Despite the transparency, her victims are totally prostrated by her dark gaze. There is a bit of mockery in that gaze, a sense of déjà vu, an unearned familiarity. Marlowe described Helen in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus as “the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Illium.”  Men of great experience are willing to relinquish everything for nothing. They are totally conquered by her, and would easily make Paris’s mistake, sacrificing their own lives and those of their comrades for a phantom. They literally fall for her.

   

Helen travels up and down modern skyscrapers and plies her charms amidst jihads, health plans, and G20 talks, amidst sophisticated wine tastings and designer fittings, amidst Esalen hot tubs and wilderness rehab sweat lodges, amidst particle accelerators and Hubble telescopes, amidst securitized mortgages, TARP funds, and credit default swaps.  Her perfumed fingerprints grace the legacies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses alike.

Wagner’s Bayreuth and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater are monuments to the power of the demiurge, what George Bernard Shaw called the Life Force. Goethe said at the end of his Faust, “the eternal feminine/ lures to perfection,” though this latter-day Helen plainly lures man to disaster, the same way the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis lured the unwary traveler in Odysseus’s day.

   

This Helen lives on among proficiently demystifying sexperts who ascend the mountain of safe sex, a testament that certain longings have not entirely passed from the world, that science is not totally triumphant, and that disenchantment has not overtaken the multiverse. Helen makes no sense, yet armies of her admirers still fall both for her and the Trojan Horse.