Saturday, June 18, 2011

Literature's Enigmatic Encounter: Tagore and Ocampo

In September of 1924, Rabindranath Tagore received an invitation to attend Peru’s commemorative centennial celebration. A hundred years before, led by Simon Bolivar, Peru had defeated Spanish Colonial forces to become an independent nation. Peruvians wanted the Bengali Nobel Laureate to participate in the festivities marking the historical event.

Tagore, 63, had recently returned to India from an exhausting four month trip to China and Japan. He needed rest but with wanderlust in his blood, the poet found the invitation from Peru irresistible. With family members and friends to give him company part of the way, Tagore sailed on the ship Haruna-Maru from Colombo for Europe. The Diary of the Westbound Traveler is a work from this period, along with several poems he composed on the Haruna-Maru.

From France, with Leonard Elmhirst as his secretary, Tagore boarded the Andes bound for Argentina. He had met the idealistic Elmhirst in the United States in 1920. Moved by Tagore’s vision of rural development, Elmhirst had raised money from wealthy American patrons and came to Shantiniketan the following year to organize Rabindranath's village projects.

Tagore fell ill on the Andes within a few days and became bedridden. But the poems kept flowing from his pen – “Stranger,” “Absent-Minded,” “Hope,” “Wind,” “Dream,” “Sea,” and many others. After three weeks at sea, on November 6, the ship docked at Buenos Aires. Flu had severely weakened the poet; further traveling was out of question. Without prolonged rest he would be risking his life, doctors told him. Reluctantly, he had to give up on the invitation from Peru.



The year 1914 was one of the darkest in Victoria Ocampo's life. Two years before, at the age of twenty two, she had married the man of her dream, anticipating a life of respect and love and free from dogma and prejudice. She had reasons to dream, for in Monaco Estrada she thought she had found a sensitive, handsome young man who considered her an equal and approved of her passion for literature and art. Although born into wealth and privilege, she was not immune to the prevailing social custom where women were treated as chattels, a legacy of Spanish Colonialism that was sustained and supported by Argentina's Catholic Church. For a woman yearning to break free from male injustice meant social ostracism and disgrace. The strong willed and impulsive Victoria had felt like a captive even in her parents’ home. Life with Estrada promised freedom and creativity.

Barely had her honeymoon begun when Victoria’s dream was shattered, for the man of her dream turned out to be as just as tyrannical and chauvinistic. She had traded one form of captivity with another. For over a decade Victoria would live through this loveless and sometimes violent marriage, fearful of hurting her parents, until finally one day she summoned the courage to obtain a legal separation.

In 1914, however, she had begun to despair of life. With no one to turn to and none in whom to confide her sorrow, she came across a copy of André Gide’s French translation of Gitanjali, a collection of poems by a Bengali poet named Rabindranath Tagore who had won the Nobel Prize for literature the year before. The depth and beauty of what she read stunned Victoria. The ray of hope emanating from those poems pierced the darkness around her. The spiritual energy in such lines as

... Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, plunge it
Into the deepest fullness. Let me for once feel
that lost sweet touch in the allness of the universe ...

lifted her above her personal tragedy. In the illuminating biography, Victoria Ocampo Against the Wind and the Tide, the author Doris Meyer quotes Victoria many years later to describe the effect Tagore's poetry had on her:

"I remember the moment and the exact spot where this took place. I was leaning against a white marble fireplace in a room upholstered in light gray silk. The house no longer exists. Neither do those I was afraid of hurting, or those who were hurting me. Nor does the poet who was bringing me the gift of tears, as not even the closest friend would have been able to do. The images which now live only in my memory will cease to exist together with it, as easily, as irrevocably as all that has preceded them into nothingness.

But the Gitanjali over which I was weeping will remain. "

Not knowing who he was and separated by barriers of language and culture, Tagore nonetheless became her spiritual companion. She had found hope, a reason for living.


That Tagore would pass through Buenos Aires on his way to Peru became known in Argentina in September of 1924. The possibility of meeting in person the poet who had saved her a decade earlier from mental and spiritual abyss could be a momentous event in her life. In preparation, she began reading as much of Tagore's translated works as possible. She had help, for in one of those mysterious ways in which an artist can touch the souls of receptive readers in distant shores, Tagoré had become a major literary figure in South America at the time, due mostly to the translations of his work in Spanish by a remarkable literary couple named Juan Ramón and Zenobia Camprubi, who translated twenty-two books by Tagore between 1914 and 1922. The translations also influenced other major literary figures, including José Ortega y Gassett, a leading Spanish intellectual of the time, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda in Chile, and Octavio Paz in Mexico.

When the Andes arrived at Buenos Aires on November 6, no one was more prepared to receive Tagore on Argentinean soil than Victoria Ocampo.


Complete rest in Buenos Aires upon embarkation, the doctors had advised Tagore, but where? Victoria was quick to seize the opportunity. Renting a villa named “Miralrio” (River View) in the suburb of San Isidro, not far from the Villa Ocampo where she lived, and selling a diamond tiara as payment, Victoria offered its peace and solitude to Tagore and Elmhirst. Gratefully they accepted. Victoria’s own household staff was to care for Tagore but she was too shy and awestruck to reside in the rented villa herself.

For two months, Tagore convalesced at San Isidro, his home away from home. The villa was situated on the bank of the River Plate and the view from its balcony was spectacular. In Victoria’s own words:

I had instinctively led Tagore to that balcony immediately upon his entering Miralrio, certain that if he was to take anything away on leaving it, it would be this: the memory of the landscape that would meet his eyes morning and evening, with its changing light. That landscape was the only gift worthy of him.

The flowing river and the lush trees and flowers of San Isidro healed Tagore’s body and nourished his spirit. The three of them, Tagore, Victoria, and Elmhirst, took long walks along the bank of the Plate. In Victoria, Rabindranath saw a woman of uncommon beauty and kindness, whose intelligence, sensitivity and spiritual yearning left the deepest impression in the poet. He was thirty years older than her; the odes he wrote to her "Guest," "Fear," and "Last Spring", to name only three were suffused with tenderness and poignancy. Yet there was also a certain tension between the three, as suggested by Elmhirst in a letter written to his fiancée in England:

Our hostess (V.O.) was quite – next to the poet himself – the most difficult person I ever came across … Besides having a keen intellectual understanding of his books, she was in love with him – but instead of being content to build a friendship on the basis of intellect, she was in a hurry to establish the kind of proprietary right over him which he absolutely would not brook … she was a bundle of prides, intellectual, aristocratic, and physical, against which, and their ferocious hold upon her nature, she was constantly at war. For her, then, I was either bridge or barrier, obstacle or convenience as occasion turned out …

During the Tagore birth centenary in 1961 in India, Victoria herself wrote of her relationship with Tagore: “Little by little he partially tamed the young animal, by turns wild and docile, who did not sleep, dog-like, on the floor outside his door, simply because it was not done.”

After two months at San Isidro, Tagore began to feel restless. Driven by an imaginary sense of duty that he was to regret later, he and Elmhirst left Buenos Aires on January 4, 1925 for Europe on board the Julio Cesaro, in staterooms arranged for them by Victoria. But Tagore could not forget her. Memory of Victoria continued to haunt and inspire him in his later years. He composed at least two songs around her: I know you, O maiden from a faraway land! Your dwelling is across the sea ... and On the green bank by the blue sea, I have seen the incomparable while passing by ... From the Julio Cesaro, he wrote to her: “… I believe that your love may help me in my fulfillment … I have lost most of my friends because they asked me for themselves, and when I said I was not free to offer myself, they thought I was proud. I have deeply suffered from this over and over again – and therefore I always feel nervous whenever a new gift of friendship comes in my way. But I accept my destiny and if you also accept it we shall forever remain friends.” And on the eve of his death in 1941, sixteen years after bidding farewell to Victoria in Buenos Aires, he wrote:

"How I wish I could once again find my way to that foreign land where waits for me the message of love! The dreams of yesterday will wing their way back and, fluttering softly, build their nest anew. Sweet memories will restore to the lute its lost melody ... Her language I knew not, but what her eyes said will forever remain eloquent in its anguish. "

Neither could she forget him. Tagore had invited her to visit him in India but time and distance proved insurmountable. Nevertheless, she corresponded regularly with him, meeting him once more in Paris in 1930 where she organized an exhibit to introduce to the art world Tagore’s unusual drawings and sketches she had discovered at San Isidro. She followed India's struggle for independence with keen interest, exchanging lively ideas with him about how to expel the British Raj from the subcontinent. Through it all, she always gratefully acknowledged his deep, steadying influence on her.

Victoria Ocampo went on to become a leader in the movement to secure women’s rights in her country and emerged as a star in the literary circles of Latin America. As an ardent feminist she was clearly ahead of her time. As essayist translator, her work has been compared to the leading twentieth century women of letters. In 1931 she founded the Spanish literary magazine Sur (South). As its editor, guiding spirit and financial backer, she transformed it into the foremost magazine of its kind in Latin America. Through its pages, she launched the career of Jorgé Luis Borges and introduced to her countrymen such writers as Gabriela Mistral, T. S. Eliot, Octavio Paz, André Gide, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus and many others. By publishing neglected writers and taking on unpopular subjects, her name became synonymous with literary integrity and freedom of thought. She was jailed in 1953 for lashing out against the regime of Juan Peron. International pressure forced the dictator to release her from prison after twenty six days. In 1977 she was elected to the Argentine Academy of Letters, the first woman to be accorded the honor.

The reputation of Argentina’s “Queen of Letters” has grown steadily since her death in 1979 at the age of 88. It is likely that Victoria Ocampo will be remembered long after another Argentine, Eva Peron, has become a footnote in that country’s history.

Tagore composed sixty one poems on his voyage to and from South America in 1924, including twenty six in Argentina that are considered among the most lyrical and evocative of his poems. To these were added sixteen more that he had composed earlier that year and the collection was published as Puravi, which means ‘Easterner’ and is also the name of an evening raga in Indian classical music. To whom did Tagore dedicate Purabi? To “Vijaya,” the Bengali name he chose for the woman “who filled my days abroad with grace and beauty,” Victoria.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Two Movies

You have to have the patience of a tree to enjoy “The Tree of Life.” That’s the problem in this enigmatic and “cosmic” movie. Normally we don’t go to the theater to test our patience; we go mostly to have a good time. It can be a thriller, a comedy, a tragedy, a whatever, as long as it engages and surprises us, makes us laugh or maybe even cry.


But “The Tree of Life” that won the Palme d’Or Prize this year, the top honor at the Cannes Film Festival, doesn’t quite fit any category. It is too arty for its own good and the viewer is left wondering if director Terrence Malick isn’t trying too hard to impress with big ideas.


The story itself is actually quite moving. It follows the ups and downs – mostly downs - of the O’Brien family in the small town of Waco, Texas, in the 1950s. The father (Brad Pitt) is a stern and humorless patriarch who looks down on his three sons because he feels they do not measure up to him. They are not macho enough, intelligent enough and gifted enough. He is, of course, tragically oblivious of his own fundamental failings. The mother (Jessica Chastain) clings to the idea that love alone can conquer all and tries to bring a sense of normalcy to her children’s upbringing with grace and sweetness. When the middle child dies, she looses her poise. “Lord, why? Where were you? Who are we to you? Answer me?” her character asks in whispered voice-overs.


While life at home for the three kids is a fearful drill of taking orders from the father (“Don’t call me dad, call me father”), outside is an idyllic world of grass and sky and stream and meadows and friends. These impressionistic snippets are redolent of universal childhood and Malick captures them with sensitivity. What makes them also poignant is the tension at home.


At the ritualistic family dinner, one of the children cannot take the father’s overbearing behavior anymore and asks him to “keep quiet.” “What did you say?” screams the father. He grabs the child and locks him in a room. “You have turned my children against me,” he shouts at his wife. “You undermine everything I try to do.” The hunter is defending himself by claiming to be the hunted!


The wife has had enough. She retaliates by pushing him away. He immobilizes her with a viselike grip and releases her only when convinced that the last ounce of her resistance has sipped away.


But the father is not a one-dimensional character. He has the capacity for tenderness, even if not realized. As he prepares to play the piano one day, his middle son begins to strum on a guitar in the porch. The father hesitates, shocked by the musical gift of his son, and refrains from playing until the son has finished strumming. What makes the scene heartbreaking is the father’s inability to express his love and admiration. He simply cannot bring himself to say, “Son, that was lovely. Play for me more.”


All this would have made a touching, growing-up story of childhood, sadness, tragedy and ultimate redemption but Malick sandwiches it between heavy symbolism and metaphors that seem to take up the bulk of the movie’s 2 ¼ hours. We are treated to an interminable stretch of the creation of the universe, volcanoes, waves, dinosaurs, planets, asteroids and everything in between, just in case you miss the point that the director deals with heavy-duty ideas of chance, life, morality and mortality. The cinematography is gorgeous (I kept thinking it was the movie version of the great photographer Ernst Haas’s book, The Creation), but what’s the point? Just get on with the story, I wanted to tell Malick, and let us decide what to make of the impenetrable, big questions of life.


I will still recommend this movie because it shows what a father ought not to do to be a good father. Although “The Tree of Life” is a period piece from mid-20th century, it is shocking how many fathers in our days are still stuck in that mindset. Fatherhood is fraught with tension, indifference, arrogance and often, downright cruelty. With Father’s Day coming up this Sunday, “The Tree of Life” is a movie a father should give as a gift to himself, to become the antithesis of the character portrayed by Brad Pitt.


*

“Midnight in Paris” is a delightful ode to the Jazz Age Paris of the 1920s when heavyweights of literature, painting, movies and music took up residence in the City of Light. It is Woody Allen’s most imaginative work to-date and connects the past to the present to put our preoccupation with money and fame in context. Unlike Allen’s recent movies, heavy with ambiguity and symbolism and the dark currents flowing in the human heart, “Midnight” is a beguiling movie to savor for its romance, charm and humor.


Gil is a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter (Owen Wilson) who travels from Southern California to Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) with the idea of settling down there. He is fed up with Hollywood. He has no desire writing scripts on-demand by tyrannical conglomerates. He wants to put the finishing touches to a novel that he dreams will set the literary world on fire when published. He wants this to happen in the artistic center of the Universe - Paris.


His fiancée, of course, has other ideas. Inez is as materialistic as they come, an epitome of conspicuous consumption. Ditto her parents who are also visiting Paris. The clash of the couple’s opposing life-view must be resolved, but how?


Walking back to his hotel alone one night, Gil loses his way in the alleys of Paris. At the stroke of midnight, a magical kind of taxi pulls up as he sits exhausted by the pavement. Its passengers invite him to join them. He is hesitant but buoyed by their enthusiasm, gets in. He is brought to a soiree where he runs into … Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter and Ernest Hemingway. He has traveled across time and arrived at the Paris of 1920s!


The seamless way in which Allen does this is itself magical. As the midnight encounters continue on subsequent nights, Gil meets Picasso, Gertrude Stein (who promises to review his manuscript), Matisse, Salvador Dali, T.S. Eliot, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray and many others. Allen leavens the story with parodies of these famous characters. His parody of Hemingway, clipped sentences and all (“No subject is terrible if the story is true and if the prose is clean and honest”), is particularly hilarious.


Stein approves of Gil’s novel and that decides the issue for him. He will settle in Paris to pursue his literary muse. Inez throws a fit but only for a few minutes. She adjusts, the quintessential material girl, and banishes Gil from her life.


The movie ends on a happy note, though, and you find making a mental note to yourself: “I am going to have to see this movie one more time.”

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Apple's Ascendance

For Steve Jobs, each Apple product - iPod, iPhone, iPad, iAnyThing - must not only be a marvel of technology but also a work of art. This confluence of function, design, aesthetics, software and hardware has captivated consumers around the globe and transformed Apple into the most valuable technology company in the world.

At the recent Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, the visionary chiel of Apple unveiled another service – iCloud - that is likely to increase the company's lead over competition.

After some failed attempts, Apple has perfected the technology to eliminate the need for manually synchronizing content to smart devices. iCloud will allow users to store content - music, photos, backups, contacts, calendars, email and ebooks - on Apple’s remote servers (“cloud”) and have it automatically pushed to their iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac or PC via WiFi.

iCloud is free. Each user gets 5GB of free storage, more than plenty for most consumers. More storage will require an annual subscription.

The term “automatically” is a critical differentiator. Apple users will not need to manually upload content to iCloud; it will happen, well, automatically. This is where Apple leapfrogs over its competitors. Both Amazon and Google have announced their own cloud services but they require manual uploading, a boring and time-consuming process that looks primitive compared to Apple’s.

The only “restriction” for iCloud to work seamlessly is that the devices will have to belong to the Apple ecosystem, that is, all the ‘i’ devices across the Apple universe. The company has ensured it by integrating iCloud technology into its operating systems – the iOS for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, and the Mac OS for its laptop and desktop computers. All Apple devices will be able to “talk” to the cloud. Users will be able to move content to and from the cloud no matter where they are, as if they are communicating with their local hard drives. iCloud will also automatically backup all your mobile devices.

Will this lock current and future users into Apple products? Steve Jobs certainly hopes so. iCloud will become available in September with the release of iOS 5.

What does iCloud do to the current state of consumer technology? It profoundly disrupts it. As Jobs said: “We’re going to demote PC and Mac to just be a device. We’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” The Post-PC world is upon us.

One company that Apple has completely overshadowed is Microsoft. Every time Apple releases a product or a service, Microsoft comes across as a plodding behemoth and a weak imitator. When Apple launched its wildly successful iPod in 2001, Microsoft followed with Zune in 2006 but withdrew it from the market in 2010. It was a no-contest: Zune was inferior to iPod in every way. When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, it took Microsoft 3 years before releasing a competitive product, Windows Phone 7. But the Microsoft phone is a distant third after the iPhone and Google’s Android phones. Microsoft’s purchase of Skype in May for $8.5 billion has left many industry analysts scratching their heads.

In May of 2010, Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world’s biggest technology company based on market value, after Apple almost went out of business in 1990. Apple now has a market value of about $320 billion, more than the combined value of Microsoft ($200 billion) and Intel ($115 billion)! The only other company in the world that has a greater market value is ExxonMobil ($390 billion), the oil company. Industry experts are speculating that Apple may overtake ExxonMobil in the near future.

While for the last 10 years, Microsoft stock has been stuck at about $25 a share, Apple’s stock soared from $11 a share in 2001 to its current value of $330, a rise of over 3000%!

The bulk of Microsoft’s revenue continues to be generated by its two cash cows, the Windows operating system and the Office suite. But as the digital hub moves from the PC to the cloud, and as the iPad relentlessly cuts into the sale of Windows PCs, the top technology company of the ‘80s and the ‘90s appears to be six or seven steps behind Apple.

There is no one with the vision and business acumen of Steve Jobs at Microsoft. Bill Gates, his closest competitor, left Microsoft in 2008, and while the current CEO Steve Ballmer is a talented manager, he is no Bill Gates and certainly no Steve Jobs. Recently, when a respected money manager asked Steve Ballmer to step down and pass on the torch to someone else, Microsoft stock immediately went up. Microsoft sorely needs a new vision and a new style of thinking at the top to regain the glory of its yesteryears.

Apple is on a roll. How long can this last? Just as empires rise and fall, so do technology companies. Today’s colossus is tomorrow’s also-ran. Yet Jobs seems to have found a way to keep reinventing Apple. He is currently battling pancreatic cancer but the vision he has laid out for his company and the creativity he has unleashed among his engineers will probably help Apple continue its dominance in mindshare and market share for several years to come.

As our gadgets become smarter and smarter, do we run the risk of becoming dumber and dumber? After all, if our smart devices can do our work for us and even think for us, what is left for us to do other than to scroll screens and push buttons for titillation and entertainment? Sure, we can create documents and post opinions and search databases and look up references and be connected to each other and to the cloud 24x7, but will our creativity be sucked out of us in that mode of mostly passive consumption? Smart devices may give us instant access to the world’s storehouse of knowledge but unless we set aside time for reflection and assimilation, it is difficult to see how intelligent gadgets can help produce a Fermi or a Tagore.