The Apocalyptic Universe

After an abortive attempt to get a tune-up for Arcee today (we got a diagnosis – slightly ragged wheel rims causing the wobbling I’ve noticed of late – but I wasn’t ready to leave her for a whole weekend), I drove into town and finally took the chance to check out the Lanna Folklife Museum.

The newly opened Folklife Museum is in a massive former courthouse near the centre of the city.  Like the Chiang Mai Arts and Cultural Centre across the street, it’s more dioramas than artefacts, but together, the two give a solid overview of the area’s history, art, and religious traditions.  While the Arts and Cultural Centre is endearingly dusty, the Folklife Museum still smells of new, and the interior is beautiful, all pale wood and cool tiled floors.  It covers the art and religion side of the equation, with exhibits on Lanna (northern Thai) music, pottery, textiles, murals, and Buddhist ritual practice, as well as a couple of rooms dealing with more day-to-day matters like rice harvesting, unique local foods (including khao soi, northern Thai sausage, and the tomato-pork dip I once heated up and ate like a curry in front of my bemused colleagues :)), and traditional courtship.  Courtship in Lanna society, it seems, used to be a little like old-fashioned courtship in rural English or American communities:  boy comes courting, boy and girl sit on the porch (well, in the Thai and American versions) while she does some kind of household chore, family discreetly leaves them alone, and if boy and girl hit it off, marriage plans are made.  (Also, apparently, once they started to fall in love, young Thai folks would secure “a permission to touch hands”.  Whether this was her family’s permission, his family’s, or each other’s wasn’t clear.)  My favourite detail was this:  “During a flirtation, they were interacting with a tactic of speaking.”  Wow!  Flirting with someone by talking to them!  I’m so glad that I’m privy to these erotic secrets of the mystical and seductive Orient. :P

Modern Lanna courtship rituals retain this magical art of talking, by the way.  Just with fewer porches and less spinning involved, and more malls, moped rides, and procurement of frothy orange concoctions from Wawee Coffee.

The more formal arts sections of the museum are cool, too, especially the gorgeous textile and pottery displays (including 700-year-old plates with remarkably Roman- or Japanese-style decoration).  I think that, like the Cultural Centre, it’s probably best as a first stop for tourists and new arrivals to get some context for their visits, but there were still some intriguing details I hadn’t known before.  Like the fact that the poles leaning against Bodhi trees on temple grounds serve a practical, as well as a devotional, purpose – Bodhi trees grow outward until the branches start to sag under their own weight, so the poles are there to hold the tree up (and gain karma for their donors in the process).  Or the (northern, at least) Thai belief that before birth, the soul needs to pay homage to the zodiac animal of its birth year, and that the animal will then bear the soul to the head of its father-to-be.  (I wasn’t entirely clear on which head.  Ahem.)  Or the fact that palm-leaf manuscripts were used almost exclusively for scriptures, but the (presumably cheaper) mulberry paper was used to produce books of talismans, magic, poetry, and even erotic drawings (which were apparently used as talismans).  Or the way traditional Lanna artists would depict kings, queens, and royal courts in the Burmese painting style, and reserve their own local style for scenes of ordinary life and nature – which makes sense, given that Burma ruled Chiang Mai for five hundred years, so the Burmese court was probably the popular standard for royalty and elegance for some time after that.

There was also a display explaining common tropes in Buddhist art, which drove home one of the things they told us way back in my first VSO training – different cultures have different concepts of time.  Not just whether ten minutes late counts as rude, acceptable, or actually pretty early, but also historical time.  The teleological view of history – the idea that it’s linear, from primitive past to glorious future, all moving towards some kind of goal – is primarily Western, and ties heavily into Christianity (although I think that view of history probably pre-dates it).  In the Christian belief system, the world doesn’t get remade again after Judgment Day.  That’s it.  In many other belief systems, however, including Buddhism, history is cyclical.  The world is destroyed and remade, just as humans die and are reborn.  This display explained that Buddhists believe there were innumerable past Buddhas, and even in our own epoch, Siddhartha Gautama is held to be the fifth (other traditions say fourth) Buddha.  (We’re still due one as well – the Future Buddha, who will arise when most people on Earth have forgotten the Dharma.)

The exhibit included an etched-glass mandala painting labeled “The Apocalyptic Universe”, which sounds like some kind of eighteenth-century work of speculative fiction.  If it isn’t, I may have to write it.

I found myself especially drawn to the displays on Buddhist mythology and ritual today.  After two years living and traveling in Southeast Asia, I feel like I’m only now beginning to get the hang of Buddhist iconography, being able to “read” the imagery the way I can read Christian imagery in a cathedral.  (Visiting places like Borobudur temple in Indonesia and the National Museum in Siem Reap, Cambodia has been incredibly helpful for this.)  Before today, it never really occurred to me as something I’m going to miss, but I think I will.  Not so much for what it is (although a lot of it is beautiful), but as a thread that’s woven so deeply through the past few years of my life.  I’ve become very used to strolling along, anywhere, and looking up to see the spires of chedis and the ornate, winged gables of temple halls, studded with pieces of mirror or painted in gold.  It’s as much a part of my daily life here as noodle shops or riding my motorcycle, but while I actively love those things and have always known I’ll miss them (well, from the point at which Arcee stopped terrifying me and became indispensable and awesome), I’ve never really considered temples in the same category before now.

There’s another aspect to it, too.  I promise, I’m not going to go all, “ZOMG Thailand is so spiritual, you guys,” because I think that’s a massive oversimplification of a) Thailand and b) everywhere that isn’t Thailand.  However, there is something I find nice about the sheer visibility of Buddhist history and ritual here.  I suppose that it can act as a reminder of the spiritual side of life, lifting me momentarily out of my day-to-day concerns.  And yeah, it’s tough to swing a cat without hitting a church (or repurposed church building) in central London, but they aren’t as showy from the outside – they’re something you generally need to think about and seek out.  And even then, it’s generally seen as a little bit odd for a non-Christian to pop into a parish church for a few minutes because it looked pretty and they were in a contemplative mood.

Anyway, long story short, the Lanna Folklife Museum is well worth a quick trip if you’re traveling to Chiang Mai – and it wasn’t my only new cultural experience this week, either.  A few days ago, I took my friend R. out to dinner so that I could beg for tips about an upcoming job interview for a position in what used to be her field.  We decided to check out the new location of Khun Churn, the best vegetarian restaurant in Chiang Mai (no, seriously, fight me, bro), which has just moved inside the Old Chiang Mai Cultural Centre, south of the old city on Wu Lai Road.  The place is more of a pain to get to, tucked away amid warehouses and woodworking showrooms and second-hand stores hawking I Heart NY gear covered in Statues of Liberty, so, unlike the museums in the centre of town, it’s become almost the exclusive purview of coach tours.  Which is a shame, because it’s a great place (and free, unlike the other Chiang Mai museums).  The centrepiece is a genuine 140-year-old teak house on stilts – well, I thought that was impressive, although R., being English, laughed and pointed out that her place in Lewisham is at least that old.  Anyway, this house used to stand on the riverside near Wat Ket, and belonged to a wealthy Chinese merchant family.  It’s outfitted traditionally, from the ox carts and wooden looms underneath the house, to the gorgeous dressing table (set on the floor at kneeling height), curtained sleeping area, and separate model kitchen upstairs.  There are some fantastic antique clothes and betel sets on display, too.  The Cultural Centre also has a small hilltribe market, where you can buy textiles and coconut-shell stilts (or do what I did, and just watch small children using the stilts to try and stomp each other :)).

After dinner, we caught part of a performance of traditional Lanna and hilltribe dances.  It’s striking how, in some cultures, there’s a really strict gender segregation when it comes to communal performances.  Women dance, men play music.  And while there may be occasional male dancers (usually in flashy solo performances that involve swords or fire), there are almost never female musicians.  (This seems to be the case in a lot of Arab countries, too.  In Indonesia, by contrast, every gamelan orchestra I saw was a mix of men and women.)

The dancers ranged in age from six or seven up to around sixty, and I have to say, it was the adults letting the side down in a lot of cases.  Maybe it was a cultural thing – grown women needing to be demure and not show off – but most of the adult dancers half-heartedly strolled through simple line dances, waving their hands in a vague manner.  (And then there was the older guy who danced what had to be my favourite dance of the night.  I don’t know the Thai name, but I can only imagine that it translates to “Desultory Drunken Hopscotch”.)  The kids and teenagers, on the other hand, threw themselves into it.  There was a harvest dance where teenage girls whirled and flipped handfuls of rice on wide, flat baskets, and another dance with a young man juggling four flaming brands in his hands and mouth.  The most impressive dance of the night was one where kids sat in a circle holding bamboo poles in rows between them, thumping them and clapping them open and shut rhythmically (imagine the background beat in “We Will Rock You” – that rhythm).  Other children jumped between the poles, trying to keep from getting their feet caught.  Like double dutch, except instead of rope, they were using heavy poles that could easily crush an ankle.

And then the kids in the circle moved the poles around, forming a shifting cross-hatch like some fiendish web of alarm-system lasers in a Mission Impossible movie, and the kids jumped through those.  Respect, man.

It feels a bit strange to be exploring some of these things only now, when I’m so close to leaving.  It’s natural, I suppose – it’s so easy to put off seeing things when you live in a city.  But it does make me a little more melancholy about moving away.