mallorys_camera | An Oasis In the Taklamakan (Reply)

I've been watching this documentary on the Silk Road made by a Sino-Japanese archeological team sometime in the early 1980s.

I'm finding it incredibly fascinating, partly because I've always been fascinated by the lost Buddhist kingdoms in the Taklamakan Desert. But partly because the documentary is just so dorky, shaking cameras, overexposed video, plumy voiceover narration, kind of like one of those sex ed movies I was forced to watch in high school. But those were made in the 1950s. Was 1980s technology really that clumsy? But I lived through the 80s! I remember them as being, well, hip.

It dawns on me now that the 1980s are exactly as long ago from the present tense as the 1920s were from the decade of my own birth. As a teenager, I used to read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories, Berenice Bobs Her Hair et al. I couldn't really distinguish the time stamp on those short stories from the time stamp on the Edith Wharton, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels I also devoured. It was all just part of some massive, lumpen past
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I suppose it's always that way when you're young. The past is embryonic, undifferentiated. You're the being 500,000 years of reckless evolution was supposed to produce.

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The lost Buddhist kingdoms… Khotan. Loulan. Dunhuang. Oasis towns in the vast, forboding Taklamakan Desert, they all reached their prime some time between 600 and 1100 A.D.

The Mogao Caves in Dunhuang were rediscovered by Westerners some time around the turn of the 20th century. There are almost 600 of them. The caves aren't natural; they were carved in the hillsides by wandering Buddhist monks, starting in the 4th century. They're remarkable both for their artwork and for being the repository for an amazing collection of manuscripts, sutras and paintings on silk and paper that were apparently stashed there and then bricked up to keep them from being destroyed by marauding Islamists.

Khotan is still a town today in the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang. In the 8th century, the Tibetans from the South – then, believe it or not, a warrior tribe – and the Sunni Muslim Uygurs fought a huge war over Khotan. The Tibetans won, only to be massacred by Gehngis Khan five centuries later. Timur – known as Tamerlane in the West – came a century after that. Today, the local population is mostly Muslim Uygurs, a Caucasian phenotype. They speak a kind of Turkish, though I'm not sure they'd be able to understand directions to the nearest toilet in Istanbul.

Loulan is the most bizarre of the lost kingdoms. One day in the 5th century A.D. it simply vanished for no apparent reason, and with it, the nearby lake, Lop Nur.

This kind of transience is very Buddhist, of course.

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I've also been listening to lots of NPR. That's one of the truly great things about living so close to New York City – NPR features talk programming practically 24 hours a day so I'm no longer forced to listen to right wing radio hosts.

NPR is filled with stories about Syrian refugees. They die by the score in shootouts and explosions throughout Damascus – the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, culture fans! – and Aleppo. They crowd under olive trees on the wrong side of the Turkish border, trying to make eye contact with the border guards: Buddy! Have a heart! (In Arabic, of course.)

Do I care?

Truthfully? I don't. I've come to see these seizures in the body politic, these swings of the antinomian pendulum as a movement that's so much greater than the suffering of individuals. That includes my own suffering too by the way: Though I'm not living in a pitched tent under an olive tree, I'm still a refugee, still part of the flood tide of the dispossessed and historically irrelevant. The world gets rid of people like them and it gets rid of people like me. It shakes us off. Maybe that has something to do with overpopulation. I don't know.

All I know is that civilizations rise and fall, and that the past is always irrelevant to the present tense, a curiosity in a cave somewhere on a lost transportation route through a desert.

I hold on tenaciously. I really don't know why. Force of habit, I suppose.