Nomad Codes

propitiator flopping around a pile of ferns beside the booming speaker stacks, we called it a night. Lion had pleaded with us not to stay after dark, but the crowd seemed perfectly mellow as we returned to the car. Then Lion and the Driver whisked us away, relieved less for our safety, I suspect, than that their long day was finally done.

    The night before we departed from Yangon, we stayed in a hotel near the Shwedagon Paya so we could walk up to the holy site in the early morning. Shwedagon crowns a steep hill and is approached by four long stairways that lie in the cardinal directions. We chose the north approach, which does not have an escalator or elevator and is crowned at the top by a guardian ogress. There she sat, like a proud and hideous fishmonger’s wife, surrounded by an enormous pagan array of green bananas. Someone had stuck a burning cheroot between her fleshy lips.
    Shwedagon is a world-class sacred spot, a peaceful palimpsest of Burmese spirituality, with equal measures of supernatural pop, alchemical esoterica, and energized Theravada Buddhism. The paya itself sits in the middle of a fourteen-square-acre platform that hosts an impressive array of pagodas, platforms, pavilions, shrines, and 3-D murals. The crowded, helter-skelter deployment of these structures, as well as the riot of eras and styles they represent, give the site an eclectic, urban feel despite the pervasive air of gentleness and calm. That morning the place was crowded with ordinary folks, and their range of attitudes and practices, from silent meditation to the ritual bathing of rodent idols, suggested a casual democracy of the spirit.
    The paya itself sat like a Buddha at the center of the square, an enormously fat and pointy bell topped with a gold-plated umbrella that tinkled distantly in the breeze. The gold leaf that coats the massive form was mostly muted beneath the overcast skies, though occasional blasts of skin-crisping sunlight brought the surface to blazing life. The stillness embodied by the paya reminded me of the implacable tranquility of the great Gothic cathedrals, but rather than the medieval sense of hushed interiority, this huge tapered thing was all surface, sitting squarely in the midst of the bustle, its windowless mass embodying an architecture of meditation. I climbed up a small platform near the paya, and sat silently among the astrologers and shop-keepers, meditating on the melancholy of departure.
    As we hustled back to our hotel to collect our luggage and leave, we counted the small amount of kyat that remained in our pockets. Rounding a corner near the hotel, we came upon a young man holding a cage filled with sparrows. Five hundred kyat, the last of our lot, would buy us the right to release three birds and thereby stock up on some merit, an empty but poetic act of exchange that seemed as good a way as any of dispensing with this nearly worthless paper. The guy placed two birds in my hand, and they immediately took to the air. Then he set one sparrow on J’s open palm, delicately lined like an old soul’s, and the bird just sat there, perfectly content, like there was nowhere to go. But our flight would not wait, and so J softly shook her hand, and the sparrow rose into the glowering skies.
    2006

INVOCATIONS

KLINGON LIKE ME

    The dealer floor of the latest Star Trek Creation Convention is closed, the day’s security work is done, and in a darkened Ramada Inn conference room, the Klingons prepare for their ritual, Tera’daq Tlhinganghom’mey. The hulking creatures, all members or allies of the Karizan Empire, file past a table in silence, depositing their energy weapons in a pile. Incense chokes the room as twelve aliens, both male and female, take their seats around an altar. Candlelight reflects off the latex ridges of some foreheads, and the soundtrack of Bram Stoker’s Dracula plays on a nearby tape deck. The impressively built Mok walks counterclockwise about the altar, brandishing a hammer of Thor as he invokes the heroes of old and demands their presence at the gathering. The candles shake as he slams the hammer on the table. “We are between the worlds,” he announces.
    A huge, balding man enters, supporting himself on a cane. He is Korghas, supreme commander of KLAW, the Klingon Legion of Assault Warriors. Like many of those present, Korghas is not in garb, but he radiates klin , that volatile essence of the Klingon. KLAW and the Karizans have fought bitter fanwars in the past, but