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About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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In Pursuit of the Drepung Loseling Marching BandThe story starts with me trailing a troop of eight Tibetan Buddhist monks through a small-town neighborhood on the outskirts of Auburn, Alabama—a sprawling town composed almost entirely of outskirts surrounding a tiny nugget of town. It's an odd time and place for the story to start, seeing as the events that the story details are almost over at this point, but that's where the story starts nonetheless.
A note about careful word choice: I said trailing, not tailing. I wasn't following them. Merely following. Big difference. Neither they nor I was sneaking. They knew I was there—or if not I specifically, they knew that they were being followed.
As for them sneaking, it's just not possible: red robes with sunny yellow drapes and sashes in the mid-Saturday-afternoon sun-dappled lanes, tall forward-curved bright yellow hats with lemony brush-manes—something like might be worn by showy Trojan smurfs.
Besides, they were blowing twenty-foot-long telescoping copper horns, beating drums, honking things like the brassy bastard children of clarinets and oboes, banging cymbals, ringing bells, chanting, singing, and generally making a holy racket. And marching through a neighborhood in the kind of suburban Southern USA you get when there's no real urban USA anywhere nearby.
I was close enough behind them to, well, not to touch the rearmost of the procession, but at least to be able to bowl them down with one of the smaller of the children trailing along with us, were I to pick one up and fling him or her.
It was basically a funeral, but only symbolically—a pretend funeral for the deliberate destruction of a thing of incredible beauty, one of a billion different possible viewpoints of the various overlapping layers of reality as depicted in a brightly-colored sand mandala constructed for the instruction of the monks in training and the edification and edumacation of any passersby. This all took place at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts in Auburn, Alabama, April 13th through 16th, 2005, across the street from Auburn University's Poultry Science Division Annex. In spite of that, there were passersby, many of whom had driven more than a hundred miles to be there, myself and my lovely fiancée included.
It was her idea, but how the hell could I turn something like that down? Besides, she offered to drive—since, according to her and maybe a hundred other previous passengers, my driving makes onlookers car-sick. I stay out of wrecks, but I don't necessarily stay off the sidewalks or, for that matter, out of trees. I enjoy driving. Obviously a bit too much. But I digress.
As funerals go, it reminded me somewhat of a New Orleans jazz funeral, but, well, stranger. Smaller, more raucous, with more laughing children and more stunned residential suburban onlookers coming out of their smallish brick houses, scratching their heads.
It was a helluva thing.
And it's not particularly lost on me that the reason I was seeing this in motherfuckin' Bible Belt Alabama—I had passed no fewer than seven Christian churches in the three miles previous to our turning into the museum parking lot—was that China invaded Tibet, forced a few monks and nuns to have sex in the streets by virtue of pointing (and occasionally firing) a few machine guns and such, and pretty much ran the ones out of the country that they didn't kill outright. And then stole all their sacred stuff and either sold it or destroyed it.
Thank God for that. If the Chinese Army hadn't been such murderous raping thieving beasts, I'd have never had this opportunity to profanely witness these sacred rituals as an American day-tripping tourist, surrounded by laughing children with disposable cameras.
If the doctor removing your cancerous tumor isn't careful enough, the operation could trigger a radical explosive distribution of leftover cancerous cells throughout the body where they will find new homes and grow: a process known as metastasis. There's a metaphor for you. That's how the Drepung Loseling Monastery and Marching Band came to be housed on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, in excellent position to tour the conservative American South, where, as religiously uptight as we are rightly known to be, we're still hugely more accepting of the strange and diabolical ways of others than, for instance, Beijing.
Go figure.
Tourist or not, I got more out of it than the spectacle, an armload of lame camphone snapshots, and a couple of silk pouches I bought from them that I'm now using to carry the various components of my computer in when I go out to hit the cafés and write.
I made the effort to catch the lecture explaining the symbology and structure of the general categories of mandalas (sandalas?) used by the monks as a part of tantric instruction, much of which I could relate and I just might do so one day—when I think I understand it well enough to recommend my own interpretation over that of a book written by a legitimate expert. Right now? Nothing doing. Go hit a library.
But the largest thing I got out of this was context. See, there's no possibility of a smooth transition between Central Alabama and the Tibetan Alps. Again we end up with a lesson that I got that I don't have the expertise to relay to you. Yet. Until then, you're on your own.
But I'll give you another analogy: If you dribble a drop of black ink into a cup of clear water, you learn a hell of a lot more about both ink and water than when you add a drop of water to water or a drop of ink to ink and study them each separately. In the latter two circumstances, you see only what happens on the surface....
And that's why I started this story where I did: a troop of Tibetan Buddhist monks en route to dissolve the remains of a sand-painted mandala painted into a stream in a quiet neighborhood in sunny springtime Alabama.
Get it?
Seek these things out.
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Vidicon was the buddha but the pay was lousy . |
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Pages: 1 of 1 In Pursuit of the Drepung Loseling Marching Band
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