I've only just become aware of an event, a "Karma Chain," that happened at the end of April during the annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. There are so many delicious ironies packed into the thing that I have to comment.
This is what I heard at one time: Like a shimmering star, or a flickering lamp, a fleeting autumn cloud or a shining drop of dew, a phantom, a dream, a bubble, so is all the existence to be seen.
and ended as:
Follow the glass stone. Follow the glass stone. The droid from hell. If anything exists, it changes.
The droid from hell? That's fabulous! But even the interpolation of Star Wars (Use the force, Luke!) into a Buddhist sutra is not the most delicious part. It was who waited for the message at the other end of the line:
Salman Rushdie, of course.
Rushdie's brilliant novel, The Satanic Verses raised the ire of many in the Muslim world, including Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, who issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death. The Satanic Verses is itself very interested in textual history- it draws its title from a probable apocryphal story of a textual problem in the Koran. A large segment of the novel depicts in a dream (of a man who is losing his mind, no less) the passing of the text of the Koran from the archangel to Mohammed to a scribe, who willfully miscopies some verses, and who is not caught by Mohammed when the scribe reads the verses back to him.
Who better than Rushdie to receive the message of the Karma Chain? And what better message in this age of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism (both of which tend to reject not only evolutionary theory but also the idea that their holy texts might be subject to the instability inherent in all communication) than a Buddhist message about the fragility and transitoriness of all existence, including texts. (And about how beautiful that existence is, perhaps because it is fragile and transitory!) And what better way to end than for Rushdie to tweet the result when the game was over. Odd, though: I haven't been able to track down those tweets.
Finally, where better than on the High Line? Every city is a palimpsest, but no part of New York is more visibly a palimpsest than the High Line, a great park emerging from an obsolete train line. More photos here.
