A Review of BUTTERFLY’S WINGS, Tenzing Rigdol’s 3rd Collection of Poetry

I was watching the recent Voice of America Kunleng discussion on contemporary Tibetan writing, with guests Tenzing Rigdol (artist, poet) and Dhondup Tashi Rekjong (editor, writer). There was talk about Rigdol’s recent book of poetry and talk about Bhuchung D Sonam’s recent book of criticism, and discussion on the urgent need for criticism and the huge gaping hole there, where our small community is concerned. Of his own book, Rigdol said, “If a book isn’t reviewed, it becomes an orphan.” So this is…not an adoption exactly. I am hardly a real reviewer. This is more like a care package.  

A Review of BUTTERFLY’S WINGS, Tenzing Rigdol’s 3^rd Collection of Poetry

Originally Published on Phayul on August 20, 2012

Tenzing Rigdol follows in the tradition of the sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso, Tibet’s most beloved poet, with this slim volume of love poetry. By devoting an entire collection of poems to romantic love, he elevates this most secular of emotions and assigns it a sacredness usually offered only to the Dharma in our society.

One the whole, I found Butterfly’s Wings to be beautiful and powerful and inventive in some places and clumsy and clunky in others. An imperfect but exciting and noteworthy collection nonetheless, it makes me thrilled to continue to watch Tenzing Rigdol’s evolution as a poet.

The first thing you notice about Butterfly’s Wings is how beautifully it is produced. The cover art, a serene and lovely image of a young Tibetan couple enjoying a quiet moment of intimacy on a moonlit night, is by Tenzin Norbu, an artist from Dolpo. As a physical product of the collaboration between Rigdol, the publisher TibetWrites and the filmmaker Tenzin Tsetan Choklay who did the book design, this is a rebuke to the indifferent book covers churned out by most Tibetan publishers.

The best poems in the collection are the most restrained and the most simple.

One of my favorites is below:

Your body is calligraphy at work-

Smooth, round, blunt and abrupt.

Only my silence befits your adornment.

A single word is now a hindering crowd. (Pg 48)

I savored the beauty and power of the following lines:

I spend my life in an effort

To collect your dances,

Your whispers,

Your shadows and

Smiles.

For you are your own kingdom,

Wherein beggars like me draw out their hands for alms. (Pg 49)

How imaginative and evocative is that last line, a line for schoolboys to echo in their midnight letters: “For you are your own kingdom...”

The best moments in the book occur when the poet is most spare and direct, as when he asks:

What can a statue do

When his master loves him

With hammers and nails. (Pg 58)

And when he says:

I weigh less than

Your single stroke of a smile. (Pg 49)

But unfortunately this restraint and simplicity are not as present throughout the collection. Indeed, rather than restraint, I found an excess—an excess, mainly, of adjectives, particularly Latinate ones. Rigdol doesn’t trust his nouns to do any heavy lifting; where he has a noun, he must use an elaborate adjective.

For example:

Sozzled eyes

Glimmer in briny tears

Before the pungent smell

Of betrayal disguised. (Pg 68)

Why insist on telling us that the tears are “briny” and the smell “pungent”? Presumably, everyone expects tears to be salty and smells to be smelly. Not all nouns need ornamentation. Too many adjectives overload the poem, like too much make-up on a woman. In a poem, real estate is precious. As Rigdol himself tells us in his best poems, a single extra word is a hindering crowd, or simply, a crowd.

Contrast these two lines, both from the first poem in the collection:

Ample yet soft and modest,

Palpable yet fragile and volatile…

Between your eyelashes

I travel the distance between stars. (Pg 15)

How little is said in the first sentence and how much in the second!

I also thought some of the poems could have been refined further.

For example:

As I breathe in the aroma of your soul like a gardener

Without a word,

A cold breeze of purity awakens the rim of my forgotten

Nose.

Through my dark nasal tunnel, streams the waves of your

Aliveness

And my throat collects them like a wineglass receiving the

Imprisoned wine. (Pg 79)

How lovely and apt that image of the throat as a wineglass receiving the captured wine is, but why the tonally off “dark nasal tunnel”? Like a wrong note, it jars my enjoyment of the poem. And dare I ask, how is the nose “forgotten” when it is breathing in the aroma? And don’t the line breaks, as they are, distort the shape of the poem rather than enhance it? A poem is a creature for the ear, of course, but my eye cannot help nosing in.

As with the wineglass image, at his best, Rigdol can create gorgeous lines with bright and sharp metaphors and similes: he says, “I lay shrunk like a frozen shrimp” (Pg 73) and likens love to “a wind-carried pollen looking for its soil-mate.” How inventive and unexpected and fun that “soil-mate” is.

And where the adjective does earn its place (“my decanted mind”!), there is music to be found.

When you lay unwrapped in bed like a strong argument

With your knees starting at your awakened breasts,

I collect my withered thoughts in surrender… (Pg 39)

Rigdol is a very well-known contemporary Tibetan artist whose Soil Project, the site specific installation for which he smuggled soil from Shigatse, Tibet and brought to Dharamsala, the capital of Tibet-in-exile, made international headlines. In some ways, we can see this book as a site specific artwork as well, with the site being the female body, specifically the body of the beloved.

If this book is the result of Tenzing Rigdol’s surrender, I think we can conclude that it was a fruitful surrender.

"Namkha Jhida, Bird-chaser" by Dhondup Tashi Rekjong

I am posting a translation. I actually translated this a while ago, in May, for an informal Tibetan writers’ gathering that was hosted at Latse Library, but didn’t get to put it up before. The piece itself is an old piece about an episode in his childhood, by Dhondup Tashi Rekjong, but it’s hilarious and vividly written. Dhondup Tashi Rekjong is editor of Tibet Web Digest and Karkhung, a new site that translates pieces from English and Chinese into Tibetan. He is former editor of Khabdha, the most popular Tibetan language blog in exile.

NAMKHA JHIDA, BIRD-CHASER by Dhondup Tashi Rekjong

Namkha Jhida was my friend, my childhood friend. When I was young, every time I went home for my summer holidays, I would go bird-chasing with Namkha Jhida. It has now been more than ten years since I last saw Namkha Jhida but these childhood memories are still fresh in my mind. Namkha Jhida's real name is Namkha Tsering, and family and friends used to call him Namkha. The people in our village called him Namkha Jhida, Bird-chaser, because he loved chasing birds.

The village kids also loved chasing birds. During summer holidays I would go home to the village with my father, and most of my summer vacation would be spent chasing birds. I would spend all day with Namkha Jhida chasing after birds, and some days we wouldn't catch even a single bird. Sometimes running after the birds, we would leave footprints all over other people's fields. When the owners saw this, they would tell our parents, and we would get a beating from our parents. In those days, we would get a beating like that every one or two days.

If, we caught many baby birds in a day, we would divide the baby birds amongst ourselves. Namkha Jhida was always our leader. During our bird chasing expeditions, everyone listened to his orders. After we had caught the birds, he would pick the best baby bird. After that, we would take our picks. Carrying a baby bird in our hands, we would go back home. Before reaching home, we would hide the bird somewhere near the house, sometimes under a hedge bush. The next morning, usually the bird would be dead. I think now that when we were young, we earned a lot of bad karma.

One day, we went with Namkha Jhida to chase birds. Namkha Jhida carried a long rope in his hands. We came to a small cliff:  we knew that there was a bird’s nest up there. But we had never found it. That day, Namkha Jhida said, "Today we will empty this nest." We all agreed. But we couldn't decide on who was going to climb the cliff. We talked about it. But no one volunteered to climb the cliff. We all looked at Namkha Jhida. We all wanted him to climb the cliff. Finally, Namkha Jhida said he would climb the cliff.

We went to the top of the cliff. We tied the rope around Namkha Jhida's waist. There were six of us. Three of us held the end of the rope. Very slowly, we lowered Namkha Jhida down the face of the cliff. Two kids went to the bottom of the cliff. If Namkha Jhida were to fall, these two would catch him. Three of us held on tightly to the end of the rope. The two friends at the bottom of the cliff yelled out, "Lower the rope a bit more." So we slowly lowered a bit more rope. They said, "Lower the rope a little bit more, he is almost at the nest." Again, we let out some more rope from our hands. We yelled out, "Is that okay? Is he at the nest?" "Lower the rope a little more," they said. "Oh, I got it, I got it," Namkha Jhidha started yelling. All of a sudden, the rope slipped out from the hands of the kid at the end. Namkha Jihda's body began pulling at my friend and me.

The two of us screamed, "Namkha fell" and let the rope slip from our hands. Our friends at the bottom of the cliff cried out. We ran to the bottom. We were all very frightened. Namkha cried out, "Shit, shit, shit" while rubbing his butt. He said to my other friend, "You were the one who let go of the rope." My friend said, "No it wasn't me, it was him." We started quarreling about who had let go of the rope. Our quarrel grew. It grew and then turned into a fight.

Namkha Jhida became incensed and said, "Shit, why are you fighting? From tomorrow, don’t follow me anymore. No more baby birds for any of you. As your punishment for today, each of you has to catch and bring me two baby birds." We stopped our quarreling and fighting. Then, without any baby birds in our hands, we silently went back home.

Originally published on Khabdha.com in March 2010.

http://www.khabdha.org/?p=7000#more-7000

YAK HORNS LAUNCHES

Sunday, July 15^th, saw the launch of my friend Bhuchung D Sonam’s new book Yak Horns: Notes on Contemporary Tibetan Writing, Music, Film & Politics at Jimmy’s Italian Kitchen in the center of McLeod Ganj. There was a reading also, and a few days before the launch, I got a call from Bhuchung and Tsundue inviting me to read, which I was tremendously joyful about. It was going to be BDS, Tsundue, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and me—It was a luminous triangle and I didn’t really fit but BDS shoved me in, and I was excited and grateful.

The day of, I was on Facebook and saw a poster for the event—nicely designed with the beautiful book jacket and wait, what’s this—reading and discussion? Whaa? I called BDS and Tsundue in a consuming panic and they were both so casual and calm about it: “It’s a completely informal discussion, nothing to worry about, it’s just talking” and I was thinking, yeah nothing to worry about for you guys because you are constantly on stage and giving interviews and used to talking and thinking on cue but I have to know what I am thinking about beforehand because I don’t know what I am thinking until I am thinking it, privately, not publicly!

But the event, moderated by Dechen Pemba of High Peaks Pure Earth, actually went really well—the organization, seemingly on the fly, fell into place seamlessly (there was even a poppy seed cake to welcome Yak Horns into the world). The sound needed a bit of tweaking in the beginning, but that was eventually fixed. And there was a full house crowd, attesting to Bhuchung’s popularity in this town and possibly also the fact that there’s a ready population of the young and the restless in Dharamsala, supplemented by the seeking tourist, always on the lookout for a new gathering, a new restaurant, a new contact, a new angle, a new relationship.

Photo: Kunsang Kelden                                                                           Bhuchung D Sonam at far right

Bhuchung explained that he called the book Yak Horns because when he was growing up in Tibet (and what does that feel like, starting a sentence with those words-when I was growing up in Tibet…) parents gave their kids cut-off yak horns to suck on as “jibdo”, so a yak horn is something that is a very familiar and intimate reminder of home. He said he wrote this collection for two reasons: to provide the Tibetan voice which is often missing or muted, compared to the other non-Tibetan voices pronouncing judgement; and to have a bridge between the community at home and in the diaspora.

I have been picking at the book but haven’t yet had the time to really sit down with it, but it has got a gorgeous cover and just looks beautiful, and I was hooked with the opening piece “Exile is a Lonely Pen”, an essay on exile and writing.. The book is primarily a collection of criticism-- criticism being the one really important thing that’s been almost entirely lacking in our modern literature. Has anything been created until it’s been reviewed? So the talented Bhuchung D Sonam is doing Tibetans a great service, and as a friend as well as a fan, it’s great to see BDS the critic as well as BDS the writer get official between the covers.

DELHI

This was years and years and years ago. I am not sure where we were going-probably either Kathmandu to visit my mother’s relatives or to Varanasi for a Kalachakra teaching. I have a vivid memory of coming out of a station in Delhi and then all of us, my parents and brother and me, piling onto a horse cart with all our luggage, our bags and tea thermoses and even a rather large and unwieldy travelling kumbali (blanket). It was probably not my first time in a horse buggy, but for some reason that ride stayed with me—the startled eyes focused by blinkers, the clip clop of the horse’s shoes striking the curving paved road as we came out of an underpass, the whip lash across heaving shoulders even though the poor animal was straining with all his strength.

The horse buggies are nowhere to be seen now. These days the transportation of choice is the metro, a silent sparkling thing that puts the screeching boxcars of the New York subway to shame. The authorities are serious about keeping the metro safe, secure and spit-free; there are metal detectors, men with rifles and signs everywhere that anyone caught spitting has to pay a Rs. 200 fine. Although honestly, something I have long thought more noxious than spitting? Ball scratching. Where’s the fine for that? Here’s a sign I would like to see: No private scratching in public!

So anyway, Delhi. Delhi Delhi Delhi. I have passed through Delhi many times over the years, most recently two years ago, but I haven’t really ever seen Delhi. I do the obligatory trip to Connaught Place and Janpath and otherwise stay tucked away in the narrow gullys and stacked hotels in the Tibetan colony (kaloni!) of Majnukatilla on the outskirts of the city. If I go out at all, I am always anxious that my bag or my wallet is going to be lifted. Cities have a way of putting you on the defensive. Delhi, too large and sprawling and hot, always defeats me. But this time actually I managed to see a couple of other places that were new, to me at any rate.

First I hung out in a Khan Market café for a couple of hours with a friend from school. Called the Café Turtle, a coffee shop on top of a bookstore, the place could have been any coffee shop in Cambridge. Either Cambridge. The café was green and lime yellow, with small round marble-topped tables and photographs of Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gilliespie and B.B. King on the wall. Our hangout included lots of laptop time, a special bookstore purchase, haircuts and lunch. After this, before returning home, I thought I should go to India Gate because it was shamefully nearby and I had never yet been.

India Gate was kind of magnificent. It’s very tall, quite simple and quite imposing. Designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens, it is a memorial to India’s war dead. It’s always such a sad thing looking at memorials, essentially graves. I have never seen the Vietnam War Memorial in real life but even just looking at photos of that memorial brings a lump to my throat. Maya Lin knew what she was about. Lutyens had names of the fallen soldiers inscribed all over the massive marble facades of the Gate. Most of the names were too high up but from what I could read, I saw a lot of Singhs and Khans.

Here’s the inscription on the gate:

To the dead of the Indian armies who fell and are honored in France and Flanders Mesopotamia and Persia East Africa Gallipoli and elsewhere in the near and the far east and in sacred memory also of those whose names are here recorded and who fell in India on the North West Frontier and during the Third Afghan War

I thought of all of our dead, who never had a chance to be honored. Or even acknowledged.

Then I walked along the Rajpath from India Gate to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President’s House, also designed by Lutyens. (Right before India’s independence.) The long straight road with a walkway of red earth and a green lawn on each side reminded me a lot of the mall in Washington (although not so much all the corn cobs and the ice cream sticks littering the grass).

The Rashtrapati Bhavan, when I got there (in what definitely felt longer than the 15 minutes that the ice cream vendor claimed), was still disappointingly far in the distance behind iron gates. I got a good look at its garden though, with two hedge carved elephants that I thought at first were misshapen camels or dinosaurs.

Between India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan, a small funny thing happened. As I didn’t have my camera with me, I let myself be corralled by one of the boys trying to sell tourists photos of them with their fingertips holding the top of India Gate. I want a photo of just the Gate, without me, I said. Rs. 30. Then I had to wait while the boy went off to print the photo from a printer conveniently located under a tree some 15 feet away. Who knows how the cables worked.

When the kid came back, he suggested that I go sit in the park with him. I guess it was an obligatory pick-up on his part as a) I was female b) I was a tourist and c) I was alone. Since there were swarms and swarms of people all around us, and he was as short as me and looked about 16, I humored him.

We walked to the park and sat down. I wanted to hear his story, but first things first.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“20,” he said. “How old are you?”

“28,” I said. “I am your older sister (didi).”

His eyes went wide and shifty. Then he pointed to the sun, hanging perfectly high in the sky, and said, “If you want to see Rashtrapati Bhavan, you better go before it gets too dark.”

The Things I Carried

From New York to Delhi and Dharamsala, by other people for other people. (Nothing to do with Vietnam!)

-3 envelopes variously filled with cash amounting to $5000 (already delivered, fyi, for any interested parties and no longer to be found on my person or in my luggage but you might try Ladakh Bud Vihara!)

-A big plastic bottle of multivitamins and packets of chicken bullion cubes (which cubes, why yes, can also be found in India)

-A pair of snow boots with T-shirts stuffed in the shoes (from my friend for his mother who lives in Dharamsala where it does not snow)

-1 envelope of $200, Proactive facewash and Uniqlo shirts and socks

-1 iPhone boxed with a $100 taped to the side (the iPhone not being gift enough)

I am obviously not listing the things which my mother sent for relatives and the stuff that I brought for people and the stuff I brought for myself.

You know how it is. Tibetans have lived for a long time in India or in Nepal, where the postal system used to be unreliable, and the only sure way to get something to someone was to send it through someone. And now the post is reliable but Tibetans still prefer to send parcels through personal courier –which happens to be any friend of a friend of a friend—rather than the post. What do we have against the post? Are we bad at packing parcels? Is the gift more special when carried by a person from the community? Is it laziness, economizing and habit?

For my mom, the US postal system barely exists except as a conduit for bills. She has an inherent distrust of the postal system, and willfully ignores it. I tell her my friend sent me something from DC and she says, with who? Worst offender that she is, she once sent my aunt in Kathmandu a sack of apples through some guy who was going to Nepal. A sack of apples from India to Nepal! Sure Kullu Manali apples are famous. But! It’s probably her postal karma that I am now paying for.

Apologia

Erm... I have not been updating Yuthok Lane, and apologize to my friend(s) haphazardly following this blog. I started this blog while I was working—as a reason, an excuse or a prompter for writing really. But after I started my MFA in September I had so much reading and writing for school that I no longer kept up my non-school writings and allowed my blog to fall by the wayside. Which was regretful. And embarrassing. In fact throughout these past many months, I kept intending to disrupt this hiatus and put up a post, and now that summer is upon me, I will do it! As there will soon be time and also travelling!

The Great Debaters

(at Asia Society)

A random piece I wrote a while ago reflecting on Geshe Thupten Jinpa’s and Daniel Purdue’s talk at Asia Society on the Tibetan Debate Tradition. It’s incomplete but as it’s just languishing on my laptop, I figured it’s better to just put it up as it is.

On April 29, 2011, Geshe Thupten Jinpa, official interpreter for His Holiness and the founder and president of Institute of Tibetan Classics in Montreal, and Daniel Purdue, the author of Debate in Tibetan Buddhism, gave a talk on the Tibetan debate tradition at Asia Society. It was fascinating and my friends and I just sat thrilled through the whole talk. I just didn’t know much about this tradition at all, except that it’s a Socratic system where you try to arrive at the truth through reasoning and that the person on the ground, answering to his opponent’s questions, only has a choice of four answers. And it seemed particularly poor not to know much about the debate tradition, because it is the primary mode of critical inquiry in the primary institutions of learning in Tibet – the monasteries.

So apparently the Tibetan debate tradition came from the Indian. In fact, it was really just constructed by one man, Charpa Choje, in the 12^th century at Sangpu Monastery, who took Dharmakirti’s Pramanavartika and extracted and adapted the form of debate, including the very specific debating language.

And I don’t know because the speakers didn’t directly speak about this, but it seemed to me like since then there really hasn’t been many upgrades to this form and it has sort of carried on, this very structured, arcane language, without many changes which is one big reason that I certainly can’t understand any debate that goes on in a debating courtyard. Another of course is that a lot of the debating is done by Kham and Amdo monks whose unfamiliar accent is coupled with the specific debate language, and they might as well be speaking Esperanto.

Actually seeing Thupten Jinpa with Daniel Purdue (after the talks and before the Q&A, they staged a display of debate in English!), that was the first that I have ever been able to see the process, and I was awed and amazed because it is really $%##&(*@ awesome! It was like the Socratic dialogues, which usually start with Socrates picking a poor guy, asking a simple harmless question, asking a follow-up question to his answer, probing deeper into his answer and gradually just taking this guy apart in the most reasonable, mild and brilliant display of intelligence - well that was what Thupten Jinpa’s debate with Daniel Purdue was like.

They decided for Thupten Jinpa to take the challenger’s position and so he asked Daniel Purdue if compassion and justice were the same. DP said, no, not necessarily and it went on from there. I wish I remembered the specific twists and turns and counter turns in the argument but my memory fails.

It was like chess, but with words instead of chess pieces, so that much more challenging. Imagine if Gary Kasparov had to announce his moves instead of actually making them, where they can be tracked, on the chess board. It’s the ultimate mental exercise.

It was just wonderful. And I was seeing this debate conducted in English, not in the home tongue of the Tibetan debate, Tibetan, in which the arguments would flow that much smoother, being assisted by built-in linguistic props and tools. A fierce debate in Tibetan must be that much more intimidating and awe-inspiring.

* An info sheet prepared by Daniel Purdue on Tibetan debate can be found here http://asiasociety.org/countries/traditions/tibetan-buddhist-debate?order=ASC