Ha! Faked you out, you thought we were gonna talk about Islam today, didn’t you? Didn’t you! No, this object commemorates a local god, Talab, in a hill-town in Yemen, who inspired a wealthy person, also named Talab, to give his namesake god this remarkably life-like sculpture of a hand. (MacGregor’s hand surgeon expert points out that it’s modeled on a working hand, not a severed one, you can tell from the veins; and that the guy had broken his pinky at some point.) Of course, Yemen has been Islamic from the 600s on; but before that, it had bits of other mainstream religions, and before that, like most of the world, it was a strange welter of an infinite number of gods. Seems to me that Hinduism, with its reputed 33,333,333 gods, still operates along those lines; each river has its god, every hill and cloud; or else people are trained to see the numinous in all things. The advantage of such a system, seems to me, is that it must encourage respect for all elements of the world, because, whatever it is, even if it isn’t sacred to you, you’ve probably had enough experiences to know that it’s gotta be sacred to somebody. The disadvantage of such a system may be obvious: relativism. Mrs. Moore’s sound effect in the Malabar Caves.
If gods are really metaphors for values, then maybe the really fascinating thing is the process by which a person shifts gods. When Butterfly tells Pinkerton that she’s rejected her gods so she can worship side-by-side with him at his church, for example. (Of course, in that case there’s this tragic/pathetic thing where she goes back to her dad’s sword, at the end, giving up on the western god who abandoned her.) Isn’t that the same as those of us who switch our prejudices, against smoking or gay sex or what-not, and the head-spinning process involved there?
No comments:
Post a Comment