Gore Vidal on the creation of the universe

In honor of the late Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr., 1925-2012, a writer you may love or hate but must admire, I offer this review that I wrote 9 years ago:


Creation by Gore Vidal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A 600-page travelogue on a long-gone world. Cyrus Spitama, half-Greek, half-Persian grandson of Zoroaster, boyhood friend of Xerxes, travels across the vast Persian Empire of the 5th c. BC, to India — where he marries a king's daughter and converses with holy men of various persuasions, most memorably with Gautama Buddha himself — and thence on to Cathay (China), where he becomes the prized slave of an impoverished duke, listens to Lao-Tze, and comes to know the aged Confucius intimately (they go fishing together). Finally he manages to return to Persia, in time for Xerxes' assassination and the ascension of his crippled son Artaxerxes, who sends him on as ambassador to Athens, where he hears Thucydides' distorted pro-Greek version of the Persian wars, chats with the young Pericles, and dictates his memoirs to his grandson Democritus. Lots of action, even more philosophical discussion, but only sporadic, unsustained narrative tension — ideas, rather than characters, are Vidal's main concerns here. Cyrus, one of the few purely fictional characters to appear, is seeking to solve the riddle of creation, a paradox for Zoroastrians, solved by reincarnation for Buddha, an event that never occurred for Lao-Tze, and an issue beyond human knowing and thus not worth exploring for Confucius. In an epilogue, Cyrus' grandson Democritus sums up his famous solution to the problem — all is matter, made up of "atoms," ceaselessly recombining to create new things. Fascinating as popular history of philosophy, but lacking the sustained, complex character development that Vidal achieves brilliantly in Burr. We get intriguing glimpses of Pericles, Xerxes and the others, but the only truly complex and fascinating characters are Atosa (Darius the Great's wife and mother of Xerxes) and Confucius.

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Potosí and us

Now that global capitalism has crashed once again, it may help order the mind to look back on how it all began. This is one of the multiple agendas of the complex, exhausting, sometimes exhilarating exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía, Principio Potosí / ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?

It is the premise of this multimedia, multinational, multiartist, intensively interactive show—it comes with a roadmap inviting the conscientious viewer to cross and recross the big exhibition space many times, to pause before videos or graphics or installations, and even to climb platforms and ladders to view everything in proper sequence—that it was the silver of the Cerro Rico ("Rich Mountain") of Potosí in the Bolivian Andes that made it all possible. That's the mountain, disguised as the Virgin Mary, or rather fused with her (silver made sacred) in an anonymous 1720 painting reproduced in the show. This high Andean mountain with its seam of silver (now in Bolivia) was sacred to the community there, but to the Spanish conquerors all that was sacred was the wealth they could extract from it, and raping and ravaging the mountain was of no concern.

The Reina Sofía show traces how the rich silver lodes of Potosí financed the global spread of the then new "system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labor power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where, because all economic actors are dependent on the market, the requirements of competition and profit maximization are the fundamental rules of life"—as Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood defines capitalism in her indispensable little book, The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).

This was radical break from pre-capitalist market, trade or pillage economies, which were often brutal and violent but did not buy and sell human labor (there were lots of slaves, but not organized slave markets) nor regard profit as the highest goal. Those pre-capitalist exploiters were far more intent on glory and immortality (as a tour of the ruins of ancient Egypt recently reminded us).

For Wood, the shift began with the enclosures in England in the 15th century or earlier, and she doesn't mention Potosí. But what gave it a big boost, and expanded London's force as a market vortex, was the wealth sucked out of new colonies in América, especially Potosí.  As the curators of the Reina Sofía show (Alice Creisher, Max Jorge Hinderer, Andreas Siekmann) write in the exhibition guide, the king of Spain had so many debts that as soon as the treasure galleons reached the Port of Cádiz, bags of silver were transferred directly to the ships belonging to his creditors elsewhere in Europe—England chiefly.

But the museum show is not only about Bolivia and the careless, more or less accidental genocide in the Americas (the conquerors didn't set out deliberately to wipe out the native population, and sometimes even lamented the suffering they had caused, but they had to have that silver!). It also wants us to see the parallels to the grinding down of humans in other parts of the world to feed the insatiable monster of profit and luxury for the few. A group of Russian performing artists have contributed a powerful video of a theater piece, about the collusion of political bosses, the Orthodox church, the arts establishment, criminal gangs and a consortium from  the Arab emirates to build a huge Gazprom Tower in St. Petersburg (illustration), over the opposition of conservationists and others. The link takes you to the architects' page. But here you can see the theater piece itself without even traveling to Madrid; whatever the merits of the argument, we loved it as proof that there are still Marxists (and Brechtians) in Russia. Chto Delat: Songspiel (The Tower).

Another narrative strain is about the superexploitation of Chinese workers, and their communal resistance efforts, including songs and workshops with artifacts made by children. And there are videos of performance pieces by indigenous women in La Paz, subverting the whole colonial concept of Christian submission in a dance by a rebellious virgin and the stripping naked of the colonial rulers in familiar old portraits. And graphs and documents on workers in Dubai, along with a heavy critique of Seville's Dubai-financed art biennial.

And repeated denunciations of the Catholic Church's complicity in exploitation, not only in colonial America, but in the Spanish civil war and the Franco regime. And let's not forget The Karl Marx School of the English Language, another Chto Delat production from Russia, where you can hear Russians trying to enunciate in English Karl Marx's famous description of "the rosy dawn of capital"—the primitive accumulation from places like Potosí. It's a strange thing to hear in an art museum in Madrid, where you can't expect everyone to follow Russian-accented English, but in the complex context of the whole show, for those of us who can follow the text, it was a welcome reminder of a powerful and extremely relevant text.

Unsolicited opinions

This week's essay is not about Spain, but a couple of other conflicts that affect all of us. I probably don't know any more about them than you do, but we have to try to find out enough to orient our responses or we'll all fall prey to the demagogues. These opinions are not political positions but are tentative, hypotheses open to revision in the light of new information or a logical rebuttal.

Tibet, China and the West
Have the Chinese "invaded" Tibet and are they oppressing the Tibetans, somewhat like the Americans in Iraq? I've read claims that the Chinese population now greatly outnumbers the ethnic Tibetan population of Tibet due to deliberate population transfer by Peking. ("Chinese" in this context means mainly Chinese-speaking Han, though Mongol, Uighur or other non-Tibetan Chinese are also in the region.) First, I doubt that this is true; most sources state that over 90% of the region's overwhelmingly rural population is Tibetan, though Han may be more numerous in specific urban areas. Second, even if it were true, I don't see how uncoerced labor migration, whether or not encouraged by the government, could be offensive to human rights.

We've also seen calls for negotiation by Peking with the Dalai Lama, billed as the "spiritual leader" of the Tibetans. Anybody who allows anybody else to lead his or her "spirit" --Pope, Patriarch, Grand Rabbi, Ayatollah, Lama or shaman -- has to that extent given up a claim to personal, responsible citizenship. I have no way of knowing how many of the monks protesting in Lhasa have truly surrendered their will to that distant, exiled figure; I suspect that the ringleaders among them are just using him as they would a flag, to rally people around their own chosen cause.

My conclusions: I think what motivates the protests is panic in the face of inevitable and necessary social change. Tibet is being forced into the modern world, of which the Han immigrants are willy nilly representatives. And those adventurous Han, struggling to make a decent living (as they understand it) in a strange land, are the first victims. Probably -- almost certainly -- the police have overreacted to the protesters, because that's what frightened policemen do.

Boycotting the Olympics won't do anybody any good. And demanding Tibetan independence of China is just loony -- it can't happen now, or probably for a very long time, and wouldn't do the Tibetans any good. The only way even its advocates conceive it is as another state run by a religious institution, and we have enough of those to deal with. That's something people are still trying to get free of here in Spain.

Encouraging Peking authorities to negotiate with a committee of the protesters there in the country is probably a good idea -- not with the Dalai Lama or any other exile group claiming jurisdiction over people who never elected them.

Some sources I found helpful:
Tibet’s history, China’s power by George Fitzherbert, Open Democracy
Tibet's Population Put at 2.84 Mln in Gov't Survey, All-China Women's Federation
How many ethnic Chinese live in Tibet (population transfer)?, TULARC
Tibet's Economy Depends on Beijing, by Anthony Kuhn, NPR

Victory in Iraq?
The problem with Petraeus' promise of eventual victory in Iraq is that, as he conceives it, it is not a victory of American values and it certainly is not a victory for Iraq. What he's talking about is a victory for the American Armed Forces as an institution. He and Bush want to postpone the embarrassment of televised defeat, and are willing to sacrifice thousands more Iraqi and U.S. bodies so that the brass and pols can save face.

The only argument against U.S. withdrawal is that we would leave the country in a bloody chaos. As though that weren't what our troops have created. So they should stay there and be part of that horrible bloody chaos? Just get out! There is no good solution, no clear way to reduce the violence without killing all the potential killers, i.e., producing more violence. Our military presence is the defeat of American values -- “liberty and justice for all" -- and a costly delay of victory for and by Iraqis.