The Demons Behind the Familiar

Met Baalorma at the Johnson Museum to view an exhibit on Himalayan religious art, most of it on loan from the little known Rubin Museum in NYC, the largest repository of Tibetan religious art in the world outside of Asia.

You can’t really see the details in this reproduction, the cunning diadem of skulls, the artfully drawn disembowelments and gnawing vermin along the sidelines. Tibetan religious art is like a graphic novel written by William Burroughs and illustrated by Hieronymus Bosch.

A part of her religious heritage Baalorma didn’t know about. I think she was quite mortified.

Her husband would have known about it – he was a monk before he fled Tibet.

“Tibetan Buddhism is very different from other types of Buddhism,” I told her. “Tibetan Buddhism uses the religion that was there before, the spirits people used to believe in. You don’t find anything like it in, say, Zen Buddhism. There, can you see? That deity is blue like Krishna –“ But it’s impossible to explain syncretism through a language barrier.

Scary stuff. Tibetan Buddhists don’t believe in Hell – they believe in Bardo which is like a residential hotel with really sinister people living in the room next door that you check into for 40 days before you’re reincarnated as a toad or a snake or a locust. That is, if you’ve been naughty in your previous lifetime.

I parked my car in Collegetown and hiked to the museum. Would have been a pleasant walk, but I am sicker than I thought – this cold has really weakened me. Could I possibly have pneumonia? My first time actually walking on the Cornell campus and I wasn’t particularly impressed. The one really beautiful part of it, the bridge over a two hundred foot drop to Fall Creek and the gorges, has been fenced up with incredibly ugly black wire chain link. It had been a famous suicide venue for Cornell students in despair over midterm results: There were three such suicides last year. Of course, that’s out of 14,000 students so it’s like what? .0002 percent? I would argue that’s statistically neglible, who cares, let ‘em jump! But I suppose risk managers don’t see it that way.

Came home, felt so weak and debilitated that I could barely cook dinner for Robin. A filthy kitchen awaits me this morning. I need to clean it but really I just want to sleep.