Category Archives: Asia

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A Life Spent Searching – the Travels and Writing of Annemarie Schwarzenbach

It’s mainly the reason why every October I write about all the books I’ve read in the last year, that some remain in my thoughts. Isabel Cole’s translation of Annamarie Schwarzenbach’s All Roads are Open is one of these, as well as having the kind of attention to typography, layout, and design that … well, makes me less likely to spill a late-night snack in bed over.

Which is to say, it’s already near the top of everything I’ve read in the last six months. I also read Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way and Vita Sackville-West’s Twelve Days in Persia as a result, and Annamarie makes them both read like spoilt upper-class nobs whose only talent is the distinct whiff of colonial racism – I kept thinking if I was traveling with them I’d be obliged to leave them stranded and be off with their car and money because that’s all they’re good for. Perhaps being hooked on heroin gave Annamarie an empathy absent in these others; it did wonders for William Burroughs also. At very least, her translation into english adds a great deal to 20th century Central Asia writing.

25 April, 2012
20:00
Dialogue Books
Schönleinstraße 31
Berlin, Germany

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Journalist, novelist, antifascist, archaeologist, world traveler, the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) became a European cult figure following her rediscovery in the 1990s. At long last, her works are also appearing in English via Seagull Books.

To celebrate, join Dialogue Books as we host Alexis Schwarzenbach, the writer’s grandnephew and the leading expert on her life and work. He and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s translators Lucy Renner Jones and Isabel Fargo Cole will also read from a selection of her works suggesting the breadth of her concerns and creativity. Lyric Novella is the tale of a young “man’s” love for a nightclub singer in decadent Weimar-era Berlin, while Death in Persia is a more open exploration of lesbian love and existential anguish against the background of 1930’s Teheran, and All the Roads Are Open is an account of Schwarzenbach’s epic journey in a Ford from Switzerland to Afghanistan on the eve of World War II.

ABOUT

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, born in 1908 to one of Switzerland’s most prominent families, published her first novel at the age of 23. Her friends Klaus and Erika Mann introduced her to artistic circles, and she scandalized her conservative family by living an openly lesbian lifestyle and supporting leftwing political causes. From 1933 to 1941 she took numerous trips in Europe, the USSR, the United States, the Near East and Africa as a photojournalist covering social and political issues, while also publishing novels and short fiction. After the outbreak of World War II she sought ways to take political action, helping the Manns’ anti-Fascist efforts, but increasingly succumbed to depression and drug addiction.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach died in 1942 in Switzerland following a bicycle accident.

Annamarie Schwarzenbach Annamarie Schwarzenbach
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Reading: James Palmer — The Bloody White Baron

This is one that fell into my reading list in a couple of disparate but connected ways. The first, or rather more direct, being the author James Palmer, is also responsible for Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China, which is on my upcoming reading list. The second, but chronologically earlier (as in read before, though published after The Baron) is Charles Stross.

Science-fiction to insane White Russian nobility seeped in revolution-era apocalyptic Buddhism? Well, it all started in the Laundry, and to paraphrase somewhat, … Eldritch Abominations, the Wall of Pain on the dead plateau wherein the Sleeper lies imprisoned in the pyramid, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the Eater of Souls, “Stop Teapot … Before he makes tea.”

(I have a feeling I’ll be reading The Fuller Memorandum again shortly.)

And we do meet Teapot. And he is making tea.

Back in the slightly more real world, The Bloody White Baron is the biography of one Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximillian Ungern von Sternberg, of Baltic-German noble descent who found his way through life with such an unfailing fondness for brutality (he would take walks in the fields around his battles, littered with bones and butchered corpses fed upon by wolves and carrion birds, because he found it peaceful and calming), and ripened with a demented, anti-Semitic, Buddhist shamanism, that the character Charlie grows from the real Ungern and places in a Lovecraftian universe of horror from other dimensions doesn’t seem so unlikely at all.

The actual book is more in the line of Peter Hopkirk, slightly sensationalist but rollicking-good story of Central Asian and far-East Orientalism adventurism in the last days of Empire, which is to say despite the endnotes, this is more a generalist work than my usual tendencies towards academic-ish texts.

Not to imply this isn’t well-researched (as far as I can tell; Russia and north of Tien Shan not being a region I know much about) and James does a commendable job of balancing the hysterical complexity of multiple falling empires, revolutionary nationalists, upstart imperialists, straggling enclaves and exclaves of the former, and various Mongolian and Steppe groups and religious powers all variously forming shifting alliances and slaughtering each other.

I was often reminded, during reading this (yes, I’ve already finished, so this is a quasi-/crypto-review) the similarities between eastern Europe and eastern Siberia, Mongolia and the Steppe; both being ground underfoot repeatedly by advancing and routed ideologies, and both to this day having their histories unwritten, commensurate to say, Germany or China. As he points out in the epilogue, exactly what happened to Mongolian Buddhism in the ’20s and ’30s under Soviet-led or -inspired communism happened in Tibet under Mao. The difference being the latter is something Brad Pitt gets banned permanently from China for (I watched Seven Years in Tibet last night as a distraction), whereas the former is a footnote.

James Palmer — The Bloody White Baron James Palmer — The Bloody White Baron
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Archeypical Encounters in Shibari

A weekend of workshops – two days of only ropes from lunch until deep into the night. After the Saturday self-suspension workshop, Sunday was for a completely different group, with a correspondingly different focus. A group of seven from a Berlin Tantric massage organisation wanted to see what of Shibari would come together with what they did. More knots and learning, some figures I’d forgotten, vats of chai tea, suspensions, Dasniya and I tying Lewis, another great pot of soup and more post-rope eating around the long table … The theme for the next monthly workshop might be Shibari and Food.

In the meantime, Dasniya hauls over to Helsinki in a week and an half, for a workshop at Todellisuuden Tutkimuskeskus. For those who are interested in doing her workshop, all the information is below.

Archeypical Encounters in Shibari
A performative rope research in Helsinki

When: February 23th to 27th, 2012
Schedule:
Thu 17-21h
Fri 17-21h
Sat 12-18h
Sun 12-18 + Showing
Mon contemplation + future planning

Where: Todellisuuden Tutkimuskeskus (Reality Research Center) / Suvilahti / Puhdistamo 6, II krs / Helsinki, Finland

Costs: 100 €, max 12 participants
Contact: Julius: email hidden; JavaScript is required / 050-537 4244
Dasniya: email hidden; JavaScript is required
More information: Todellisuuden Tutkimuskeskus , Dasniya Sommer

Utopia
What goods are at stake in a Second Life age of global mega bit exchange? Among billions of personal and more anonymous data, identities get suspended. If things were simply upside down, or inside out it would be an easy trot. But affairs seem more intricate. Seizing chaos literally. Rooting bodies airwards, floating into the world wide void.

Incompatible archetypes form patchwork communities and trench warfares. On the scout for oneness, traveling meditative galaxies, individuals become partially ascetic. Is the social task to transform and reduce archetypical existence to zen-zero?

The Method: Atheist Yoga & Un-Shibari:

Traditional Shibari settings operate with binary constellations like active-passive, men- women, dominant-submissive. One person taking control over a second person, by restricting and decorating them with ropes. Or: The Good and the Evil, The Beauty and the Beast.

What questions are needed, in order to move beyond these (gender insensitive) concepts?

-what archetypical behaviour do we find, and identify with, within the normative Shibari practice? why disidentifying with these figures? why are they enjoyable/can be problematic?
-towards what dynamic do specific type-constellation lead?
-how can rope technique be tailored, so that it becomes compatible with performative role models?
-what archetypical sensual/sexual patterns do practitioners decisively or unconsciously experience, copy, manifest or challenge in relation to their (sub-) cultural context?
-what concepts for semi-intimate relations allow for these kind of experiments in real life? (between romanticism, polyamory and asexuality)
-which other socially informed practices, like reading, dancing, massaging, tea ceremony, food can be combined?

Generating performative material:

-investing into stupidity, non-rational primitive actions -combining these with ropes
-self-suspension as subversive strategy
-adding archetypical performance to the rope work
-learning the traditional technique and finding new approaches -rope improvisation
-deviating dramaturgies within a rope situation: self->partner->self suspension

More meta-material to generate tasks/for Mondays reflection:

-avoiding second nature-shibari patterns or their (semi-)conscious reproduction -unjudging, indulging and exploiting them
-transforming the archetype
-talking about (care-) ethics
-being critical on Shibari/BDSM practices?
-finding formats for non-/participatory performances

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after the self-suspension workshop

Hours of suspension, sun and blue sky and freezing outside, chai tea by the tureen, leek, potato, grünkern soup (with special additions from Régis) … ropes and talking and hanging ourselves up, lowering ourselves off, warming up fingers and bones and lungs, eight or nine or so hours of all this from when the sun was around its zenith until far into darkness.

Many photos also, though the combination of dimness in Alte-Kantine and not such a large sensor in my camera made for extended runs of blurriness. Much happiness nonetheless to have beautiful Lewis come all the way from England for the weekend, as well as others who are not always in Berlin.

Tomorrow, with a different group, we make something of the same. Well, to say something with ropes. Perhaps not so much of suspension, and more of floor and other things.

The photos, then …

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 1 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 1

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 2 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 2

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 3 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 3

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 4 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 4

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 5 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 5

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 6 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 6

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 7 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 7

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 8 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 8

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 9 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 9

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 10 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 10

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 11 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 11

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 12 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 12

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 13 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 13

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 14 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 14

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 15 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 15

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 16 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 16

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 17 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 17

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yoga + shibari regular berlin classes for february

Sunday, Thomas’ last day in Berlin, and post-breakfast a soup was prepared. By 1 o’clock, up-and-down stairs was occurring, on our way to the Alte Kantine for an afternoon and evening of Shibari and self-suspension. With only five rings (until we drag ourselves upwards to drill more), the dozen of us was a perfect number. Happy to see some faces returning from the end-of-year pause also, and two coming all the way from Sweden.

Dasniya started with some (gentle) bootcamp warmup, and then spent the first two or three hours teaching basic tying and harnesses for hips, legs, torso, then going on to full-suspensions and showing some more painful possibilities like the single-bound-leg inverted hanging. Dinner was all us around the table, which is why Alte Kantine is so perfect for these classes and workshops, with much talking about philosophical, social, feminist and gender issues in BDSM and shibari.

And so on to February, more yoga and shibari classes every Wednesday evening in the Alte Kantine, and a trip for Dasniya at the end of the month north and east to Finland to teach in Helsinki.

Jeden Mittwoch Yoga & Shibari im Wedding.
1., 8., 15.,22., 29.  Februar, 19-23 Uhr.
Ort: Uferhallen Kulturwerkstatt, Alte Kantine, Teatris, Uferstr. 8-11, 13357 Berlin,
U8 Pankstr/U9 Osloerstr.
Kosten 20/15 Euro
Workshop Text Deutsch

Every Wednesday there will be Yoga & Shibari in Berlin-Wedding.
February 1., 8., 15., 22., 29.
Location: Uferhallen Kulturwerkstatt, Alte Kantine, Teatris, Uferstr. 8-11, 13357 Berlin, U8Pankstr/ U9 Osloerstr.
Costs: 20/15 Euro
Workshop text english

dasniya self-suspended and reading dasniya self-suspended and reading
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Reading: Paul A. Van Dyke — The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845

Continuing my return to reading China, as with my focus on women in the history of China, so too is there a strand which pays attention to the south, Lingnan, Guangdong, Canton.

So much of what is written on China is in fact only a small part thereof — Beijing as China, Shanghai as China, the eastern core. Other parts of the country are so distant as to be other countries, and despite the ongoing Han homogenisation programme, these other parts still retain their individual histories.

Paul A. Van Dyke’s The Canton Trade seemed like a good place to continue, after reading Julia Lovell’s The Opium War a few months ago, and now, more than half way through reading, I can say he hasn’t skimped on thoroughness.

Paul A. Van Dyke — The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845 Paul A. Van Dyke — The Canton Trade
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the n+2 dimensional space for n>1 — day 3

Experiencing a little fatigue today – I haven’t done yoga for five days in a row since such a long time. We started a bit late also, detouring to watch a Kraftwerk and history of Krautrock documentary in ten minute chunks before wandering over to Bains.

We had a long discussion about what we are doing before the lunch-ish break – no dinner break it was already 17h – which resulted in a final couple of tasks where things started to coagulate.

On Saturday we talked with Ivo for a while about dramaturgy, or the perceived necessity of having an external dramaturge. I had been trying various things from Dasniya, and finished with an un-shibari experiment that had something worth repeating, yet was also empty. I think the issue is neither one of dramaturgy, as we are both well-versed in the milieu within which shibari, bdsm, and all the other facets of rope resides, nor is it one of direction – as in stage direction. What isn’t clear is what this work is about.

We have a lot of ideas, topics of research, small things that have become entire processes for working with rope; we’ve discussed from feminism and identity theory to physics and knot theory along the way, and obviously these things somehow fit into the work, along with the specific Japanese aesthetics of traditional shibari and so on, which we also play with. The question of what the work is about is perhaps better understood if this was a theatre work, if there was some text to work from and characters who must arrive in the room. Coming from working with Daniel Schlusser on Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, also with shibari, possibly my thoughts are a little this way.

It’s also for me the need to have something to hang on to, that helps in pushing a work along; that I can use as a reference point to criticise and justify my decisions. Obviously working in a collaboration changes this and might even make it the not-possible way to continue. So, we talk, maybe for me to be able to make sense through words what is allowable so I can do things with conviction.

There are some almost formal things – flicking to uncoil ropes, the sliding walk of the tea ceremony or kyudo archery … – that will probably recur throughout, and cause a rupture in the mess of ropes. Other things – at least in what might be construed in my head as the section we’re working on at the moment – need a day or two refinement before I suspect they can be deemed coherent enough to make a remark on.

It pulls between an abstract, close to formal dance or movement and another that is perhaps a metonymy or representation, and yet another, lurking beneath, that is … neither of these. Maybe corporeal, sensorial, coming from rendering a character as much as an own internal emotion …

It seems likely we’ll be working all weekend. After all, it’s only two weeks, so twelve days instead of ten counts for something.

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the n+2 dimensional space for n>1

Once more going west, we take the ungodly hour flight from Schönefeld to Brussels. Dasniya and I are having a two-week residency at Bains Connective to work on pretty much everything we’ve ever talked about to do with Shibari and ropes. It’s heading towards something I’ve been slowly working on for some time, which is a return to Guangzhou.

Michael Garza –the principal Bassoon in the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and one of the first people I met when I landed in that city close to ten years ago – and I have been talking about doing something there with a chamber music wind quartet. This led also to thoughts of taking ourselves south-west to Bangkok. So, Dasniya and I will spend two weeks working on some ideas, and making some kind of performance for the last Friday.

We also hope to wander up to Amsterdam to see some of Cinedans next weekend (no Lewis, sadly), and on the final weekend we have a Shibari Bondage workshop in Bains.

In the meantime, here is some text for an idea of what we may be doing.

The anarchy of knots or the n+2 dimensional space for n >1 or the rope was a plant

By Frances d’ Ath and Dasniya Sommer

The two week residency at Bains Connective in Brussels is the first phase to work on raw material based on the following ideas.

The cultural history of ropes goes back to the Mesolithic. It is a tool for binding, tying, restraining, lifting, fixing or lashing. It can lift cargo onto a ship, or a person off the ground. We tie our shoes every day, and bind damaged limbs or bodies with cloth bandages. At whatever level of consideration, our relations towards, and knowledge about this material, exist in thoughts in countless quotidian moments.

In topology knots are mathematicised. There is knot theory and tabulation itself, which leads to braid theory and physical knot theory, relating more practically to the real world. Back in abstract calculations there are ‘unknots’. A string with its ends joined together, creates an un-undoable loop. Or a wild knot, which is not tame, because of its so-called ‘pathological’ behaviour.

Rope is for justice. In tug-of-war games a collective has to act in concert. If they do well, an inch may decide their triumph. In Japan during times of war, prisoners were suspended and tortured with horrifying rope techniques. The status of the prisoner could be signified with the colour of the rope, and the degree of artistic ornament. Medieval rope was used for similar injustices. Ariadne’s thread, in contrast helped Theseus to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

Neuroanthropological thoughts invite us to perceive the rope as a tool, like a hammer is, or a pair of chopsticks, or a musical instrument. There is a dexterity added to the ability of the hand by it which it is not simply an addition. That is to say, ‘I’ am not merely ‘using’ a tool, but the ‘I’ that gains familiarity with an object, ceases to delineate between ‘me’ and ‘that’. These objects become part of us and in turn we extend ourselves into them.

In this way, the rope is my fingers, or perhaps to say the rope is my tactile organ, somewhat prehensile also. I do not merely feel through the rope, acting as an intermediary, with sensation being communicated along it towards or from me; I feel through the rope as its qualities are to touch what my skin is also.

It is almost as if we do something close to forbidden by taking this object of use and turning it to (sensual) play. Shibari, Japanese rope bondage does that. Because of its origin as a strand in martial arts technique, it needs to decisively dissociate from real methods for punishment. Instead it goes with consenting intensities of BDSM play or contemporary performance.

Between two people the rope allows for a degree of deferral, both for and against communication. Depending on the actions and intentions at either end however, the deferral in itself is somewhat neutral. It causes a possibility of communication that, by its tangible intermediary status, is not what or how one would commonly interact with another. It instigates a pause in thinking, a space for interpretation.

We work into an improvised dismantling of traditional tying rules and the logic behind these. While tying the body and the room, we bring in theories of Taoism, ‘Wabi-Sabi’, ‘Ma’, which allow us to be slightly less perfect, and impermanent. A rather european analysis of bodies, gender identities and role assignments in Shibari culture accompanies our experiment.

Musically, we are collaborating with Michael Garza, principal bassoonist of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. This is for a performance/installation with his wind chamber music group in Guangzhou and Bangkok in 2012.

Tea Ceremony Shibari tea ceremony shibari
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Reading: (2nd time) Susan Mann — The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

In early 2008, before I moved to Berlin, I had a book-buying spree, and a couple of those books I didn’t finish before it was time to pack them all into boxes and off to storage, where they would remain for the next three years. I’m about to embark on one of the bigger, more serious books on my list, Gail Hershatter’s The Gender of Memory — Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, and noticed on the back cover Susan Mann provided a quote. Her The Talented Women of the Zhang Family was one of the unfinished ones I had to choose between taking on the plane or boxing up. At the time I found it a demanding read, and so it remained behind while I flew.

I’m not really sure why I decided to read it, thought I’m pretty sure it was a post by Nicole Barnes at The China Beat that was responsible, and feeling a little daunted by Gail Hershatter’s monograph, as well as somehow feeling drawn to this unfinished one, have instead spent the last few days immersed in one of the most beautiful scholarly works I’ve ever read.

Coincidentally, some of the names that appear in Julia Lovell’s The Opium War recur here, though from the opposite side; through the lens of late-Qing Dynasty literati and scholar-civil servants.

What draws me to this book now, and to much on my upcoming reading list, is the centrality of women in the historical narrative. I notice this near-total absence especially in Central Asian and Afghanistan scholarship, as well as in a significant proportion of Chinese writing — the history, culture, art of these regions as commonly presented is in fact the men’s history, and for no good reason.

Perhaps to say, in praise of this work and the author, that I have already put her other works on my reading list, and it is very unlikely I will not be writing about The Talented Women of the Zhang Family again. Also that it has unexpectedly rekindled my love of Chinese history and culture, and her passion for the subject has reminded me of this which I’d forgotten.

Susan Mann — The Talented Women of the Zhang Family Susan Mann — The Talented Women of the Zhang Family