Pull Up A Chair…

I have been traveling on the sly, lately. This overpowering urge to do more, experience more, be somewhere outside of my normal day-to-day context has overtaken me. But only in the evenings as the shadows lengthen, and the darkness seeps in from the lace curtained windows as I light the scented candle and slip into our cozy, cool cotton sheets to read before dropping off to slumber. It’s enormously powerful, this urge to travel, even only in one’s mind. So much so that I long for bedtime when the days are long, or filled with rancor or turmoil, and the escape of a travel narrative so well written that I can almost slip into the skin of the writer and see, taste and feel the journey.

It’s as though I’m having an affair of sorts, but with another place and time, with the book I’m currently reading.

It was the title that initially grabbed me: "Shadow of the Silk Road." Isn’t that marvelous? The author, Colin Thubron, has superbly melded the glorious scenery and feel of modern China with the tensions and the weight of the past, at least in the part I’m currently reading as he is about to leave Xian. I wanted to share a passage with you this morning, because it struck a chord:

But beneath this artifice, of course, a power was throbbing: the power of trade. In the Western Market where the Silk Road came to rest, two hundred guilds of merchants worked. Their reach was immense. They embraced almost every people between Arabia and Japan: Persians, Turks and central Asian Sogdians especially, Indians, Bactrians, Jews, Syrians. There were times when whole echelons of the Tang court — including its elite bodyguard — were foreign. The moneylenders — sometimes so extortionate that people pledged their slaves and sacred relics — were Uighurs from the west. Along the Silk Road too came the music and dance of Turkestan — a fearsome, whirling flamenco was the rage for years — along with acrobats, jugglers, and trapeze artists; and in the inns near the Gate of Spring Brightness the fair girls of Central Asia sang to flutes and befuddled the poets with their green eyes.

Although the imperial supervision of foreign merchants stayed rigid and finicky, a new tolerance was in the air….The enveloping mantle of the palace ladies slid away, and by early eight century women were to be seen riding like steppeland men in boots and Turkic caps, even bare-headed.

And deeper attachments were at work. For two centuries the capital reverberated with the gongs of Buddhist temples and monasteries. In 645 the pilgrim monk Xuanzang returned from India laden with more than six hundred scriptures, settling to translate them in a pagoda that still stands, and the whole city massed to greet him. Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Manicheism — all were accepted with benign curiosity, while the indigenous faiths of China — Taoism and Confucianism — bided their time.

But by the tenth century this city of complicated glory lay in ruins.

…When all else has disintegrated in the two-thousand-year-old graves of the Han, their silk gifts and shrouds remain, often thinned to colourless slivers, sometimes shockingly vibrant. By Han times the women of every household cultivated silk, and the whole imperial court was shimmering in a hierarchy of complicated grades: silk unicorns and peacocks, poenies and horses….

Above all, for more than a millennium, silk was used to pay off and soften the nomads ravening beyond the Great Wall. Often it took on the status of currency. As lasting as coin, it became salaries, taxes, tribute. By the first century BC the ancestors of the Huns were exchanging its beauty for their horses. In Rome, beyond the other end of the Silk Road, it began fascinating the rich, and subverting the economy. Long afterwards the Visigoths of Alaric, besieging the tired city, were deflected by a partial ransom of four thousand Chinese silks.

So much of the world around us is in chaos so much of the time. But it was ever thus. At the time that all of this was occurring, complex trade had been going on in large parts of the world along the Silk Road and beyond, in nations we hear about on the news as though they were cultures from another planet. But because of this melding all along these trade routes, so much of who we were, and who we are, has been a melting pot all along. Not just here, but across the globe.

One of the things that continues to amaze me is how uninterested and uninformed people can be about history — cultural, political, social, whatever kind you want to label it — and because of this so many self-styled leaders fail to see the pitfalls of their actions when some investigation of what has already passed would have been illuminating in that regard. And without such understanding, we fail to see how we are all connected as though one family stretched out across the passage of time. I never feel like I know enough, and am always curious to find yet another piece of the puzzle that is who we are and why we are here.

What struck me with this was another article I was reading earlier in the week about various delectable sandwiches in the NYC area. So many of them had roots along the cultures of the Silk Road, and it was amusing to think about the various spices that would have traveled this route to city-states and cooks who used and refined their tastes and then passed them down through generations to make their way to a sandwich from a deli in Brooklyn.

We are a meshing of cultures here in the US, in so many ways — isn’t it time we not only celebrated those unique things that each of our family history’s bring to the American table, but also respected what we could learn from one another and our own journeys and those of our ancestors. If we would only listen. Pull up a chair…

(The above YouTube is a selection from Yo-Yo Ma’s latest Silk Road CD.)

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