Sherry Chandler

Alas, it has always been so

but that’s no reason not to try to change it.

From Vietnamese poet Linh Dinh at Harriet, a post called Man = Animal = Vegetable = Mineral = Everything = Nothing:

Anima Female souls, from the roots an, “heavenly,” and ma, “mother,” recalling a time when all souls were supposed to emanate from the Heavenly Mother. In the 16th century A.D. Guillaume Postel said every soul had male and female halves, the animus and anima. The male half had been redeemed by Christ, but the female half was still unredeemed and awaited a female savior. This was a new development of the old Christian view that only males had any souls at all. The third canon of the Council of Nantes in 660 A.D. had decided that all women are “soulless brutes.”

Alchemist applied the word anima to all “spirits” considered female: Anima Mercury, Anima Mundi, etc. The Spirit of the World was connected with the elements of earth and water, like Eleusinian Demeter, “Mistress of Earth and Sea.” One reason alchemists were suspected of heresy was their notion that the World-Soul was a female anima.

Certainly no heresy amongst the media pundits this election season, though as with racism and homophobia, I often suspect that the reason white men are so frightened is that they fear the power of those they have repressed.

But them’s heavy words for a nicely whimsical post that wanders around in animism and/or superstition and/or Magic Realism ( “Better safe than sorry.” ) from Betty Boop to odd churches built of flint in East Anglia and on to Viet Nam.

A border town is exciting. The beginning and the end, impure and illicit, it promises surprises and adventures. Marking the bloody, not forgotten advance of one army, the retreat of another, it yearns to spread across that arbitrary, colorfully mapped line, be it a mined field or a thin river, to resume conquest or merely to reunite kin.

Châu Đốc is set amid a beautiful landscape of mountains and sugar palm trees. Even with a lucrative traffic of contraband goods smuggled in from nearby Cambodia, it is still an unusually poor town. Seven out of ten houses are thatch huts. (And we’re talking leaning, decrepit thatch huts, with their one item of luxury a constantly glowing black and white TV.) Châu Đốc has only been Vietnamese for about 300 years. Its earliest recorded settlers were the Funanese, who thrived from the 1st to the 5th century AD, their empire spreading across all of present day Cambodia, southern Thailand, southern Laos and into Malaysia and Burma. I doubt if even 1% of the current inhabitants of Châu Đốc have heard of the word “Funan.”

…

The most famous temple in Châu Đốc is the Lady Chúa Xứ Temple, dedicated to a stone statue. Rebuilt many times since its founding in the 1820’s, its modern, tasteless buildings are now the destination for busloads of Vietnamese pilgrims year-round. They come to pray for, among other things, a winning lottery ticket or a good turn in romance.

According to legends, during the early 19th century, a young girl in Vĩnh Tế village started speaking in tongues and instructed the villagers to retrieve a statue from the mountain. They did as told, but the forty men assigned to carry the statue could not budge it. The girl linda blaired once again and told the villagers that this task was to be accomplished by nine virgins. Nine maidens were quickly recruited and, sure enough, they lugged the statue down the mountain with ease. They walked and walked until, suddenly, they could walk no longer. The statue had become unbearably heavy again. Where they set the statue down became the site of the temple.

Scholars have determined that this statue is actually of Indian origin, a Shiva Linga, and dates back to at least the 3rd century BC. In its present reincarnation, it has a painted face, an elaborate red crown, and a red and yellow Chinese robe, with two swirling dragons on its chest. Worshippers believe that the statue is getting larger each year, with measurements to prove it. “It is a kind of living rock,” one woman told me

The fabulous post finds a moral in Kafka and Krazy Kat, one that we would all do well to heed, to wit, that we are all apes and mutts with delusions of grandeur. And it culminates with the translation of 13 “anthropomorphic” Vietnamese folk poems.

Go read.

Linh Dinh blogs at Detainees.

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