Fayaz Alibhai

It’s the last day of the residency. The previous night, each of us had, in our own ways, reached out and made gestures, verbal and physical, to continue to restore harmony. And we accepted the gestures, understood them for what they were, and reciprocated. We were creating space for kindness, if not forgiveness. And late into the evening, we had lingered in collective company, conscious this was our last night at the residency. This morning, rather unwillingly, we mull over the conflict and anger from the previous day. It’s one thing to read about how people ‘lean into’ the difficulties and challenges they face and be inspired by their courage to do so from afar. It’s quite another to see it happen in front of you and learn whether you have the stomach to follow. This is not about being thin- or thick-skinned. It’s about consciously dealing with pain head-on. In revisiting examples of conflict, disagreement, displeasure, discontent, and/or misrepresentation among us, the underlying question was simple: How could/should we act in these circumstances? In our own way, we became the subjects of our own ‘breaching experiment’, a sociological concept referenced in the reading we never made it to from the previous day, namely, ‘Human After All: Auto-tune, Technology, and Human Creativity’ by Ed Ledsham. A breaching experiment is ‘where a social rule (such as queuing) is broken (queue-jumping), provoking a reaction from the subject. After the rule is broken it is possible to study the breach, identify the unspoken assumptions and then consider them.’ We turn, eventually, to the analogy of wounds and healing. That whereas some of us are inclined to rip off the plaster, others are more mindful of the need to let it heal before exposing to air again, or allowing the scab to be picked at. How we say and mean things are not always heard and received in the spirit we intend. The greater the trust and faith we have worked to create, the more expansive we are to the idea that we all mean well. And so the analogy developed to make clearer that the intention was not to hurt further, but to ensure that the piercing thorn was indeed removed so as not to fester unnoticed. Again, intention and reception. Harking back to the previous day’s observations on the need for building consensus around the rules of engagement, what we wanted, and how we could get there, we agree that our primary expectations for this last day, are ‘to end on a high note.’ We recognise that we have come away changed in many different ways. For many of us, Culturistan was not merely the readings, or authenticity, or the food or…

Things broke down today. Having led residentials and pilgrimages in the past, I had expected it. But half-way through, not on the penultimate day. Hitting the wall was almost inevitable — here we were, nine of us, miraculously carving out 10 days sandwiched between dizzying travel and professional and personal commitments, thrown together — willingly, even if uncertainly — in a remarkable intellectual, artistic, and geographical space. Despite our relative isolation, the outside world had, to paraphrase Denise Vargas’s ‘Shadow’, manifested its ‘presence in absence’ and in all its complexity for many of us. And the residency is neither a picnic nor a holiday. It was always going to be a place for hard thinking — about the work we do, why we do it, and perhaps most importantly, how we do it and how we bring ourselves fully to it, with all our passions and skills and experiences and biases conscious and unconscious. ‘If—‘, by Rudyard Kipling, the first and only reading we could tackle today, was thus a poem of particular relevance for all of us, even if it didn’t entirely resonate for some of us. Our discussions revolved first around being ‘a Man, my son’, and whether this could speak equally to ‘a Woman, my daughter’, or even more broadly, ‘to a Human, my child’. They then moved on to the poem making a virtue of individualism over the value of the collective or the community or society. Determined self-belief is often necessary in the face of communal doubt, but where do we draw the line? For what? Empire, entrepreneurship, AI? And when? And whom can we trust to tell us? And when they do, what is most effective? Being blunt or being kind? All of these issues rapidly came to the fore. I was reminded of Chinua Achebe’s masterful novel Things Fall Apart, whose title explicitly references W.B. Yeats’ poem, ‘The Second Coming’: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.’ Had we brought out the best in each other, and perhaps, the worst in ourselves? How can we hope to effectuate change if we are unable to be civil at a table? How do we move forward? How do we build? There were lessons in the readings, perhaps, that we needed to return to. The extract from Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness, which we had discussed earlier in the week, could be one example. A man’s denial of torture and rape against a woman in detention…

The readings today continue to exercise us. For or against, it’s difficult to find common ground for all but the first one, ‘Growing Blind’ by Rainer Maria Rilke. We note the discrepancy between title and text. In the text itself, references to being blind are oblique. The unique skill of the individual there is to sing, which has nothing to do with her eye. And that once she had surmounted ‘some height or bridge…/She would no longer walk her way, but fly.’ Is this us? At this point in time, this week? Are we growing blind, too? Each of us great at singing our own songs, but less great at other things, equally necessary, perhaps? Is this about well-roundedness or valuing something unique to us? Ahmad asks what can we do to fly. I wonder if we put art/ists on a pedestal, but don’t necessarily value them. Some of us tell (and some of us remember without telling) stories of singers and dancers, or artists and academics brought out for entertainment, but not truly allowed to participate or remunerated where it matters. Is value related to authenticity? Is money the only quantifiable measure of value? Ahmad asks gently, but provocatively, ‘Who here feels that they are being paid what they deserve?’ Only two of us raise our hands. To the great surprise of the rest of us. I wonder why we are surprised. The second reading, ‘Has the Incredible Accuracy of Art Reproduction Ruined the Way we Experience Masterpieces?’ by Noah Charney, brought out some interesting contrasts. As a whole, we seemed more comfortable about the idea of a replica of the Chauvet cave than a perfect 3D-digital copy of Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Almond Blossom’ from the Relievo Collection. Is scarcity or exclusivity part of the awe we feel for the original? And what about apprenticeship, a kind of medieval franchising, where ‘[t]he mark of a good assistant was his ability to paint in a way that was indistinguishable from the master’s style, so that the finished painting, sculpture or decorative object would appear to have been created by a single artist.’ How much inauthenticity (or fakery – again, as with masks vs costumes, what words we use lead us, consciously or unconsciously to very different ways of thinking and being) can we take? Are we more or less accepting of a museum display if we know it’s fake? Does it matter if we don’t know? What if the object is an AI copy? And passes the Turing test (think Blade Runner)? We go back to some of our discussions from the previous day. There is, also, the issue of the democratization of culture. Replicas, digital copies, ‘fakes’, can function…

We are flagging. Late nights writing up our blogs, inordinate amounts of coffee, serious sleep debts, and powerful readings leading to challenging questions to the group and to ourselves are beginning to take their toll. It is appropriate that today’s readings begin with ‘Keeping Quiet’, by Pablo Neruda: It would be a fragrant moment without rush, without engines; we would all be together in a sudden uneasiness….If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves… Gelareh and I discuss these lines wondering out loud how everyone wants to speak, and to be heard. But if no one is listening, then what? Shouting is not an effective strategy. Ahmad reminds us all that we have three days left. He’s mixed things up a little, deciding not to enforce our normal schedule, leaving it to us to determine, henceforth, to continue to read/attend/discuss the formal sessions or to break out into individual and informal discussions as and when we wish. I’m not convinced this is the right course of action. Ahmad disagrees, and references Mario de Andrade’s ‘My Soul has a Hat’ from Day 1 – ‘We have two lives and the second begins when you realize you only have one.’ It is now up to us how to spend the rest. And so we move on. Greg takes over the chair for the second reading, ‘Art Forgery: Why Do We Care So Much for Originals?’ by Milica Jovic. We wonder whether time is a necessary function of originality. Why is a 1920s Mercedes with 80 per cent of its parts replaced still considered a 1920s Merc, but a 2018 Merc with 80 percent of its parts replaced by older parts not constitute an older Merc (why somebody would do the latter, other than for this thought experiment is not clear, but then maybe that’s the point — it is no more than a thought experiment). I digress. At any rate, Yasmeen offers a suggestion that perhaps an original work of art is a gift, but prints and replicas are commodities. Gelareh and Estephania are aghast at Taha’s assertion that 80 percent of the Louvre’s on-display collection are not originals. What changed their experience, therefore, becomes an extended and fascinating discussion, with even the Blueman Group being drawn upon as an example. Ahmad decides that as an academic piece, the third reading, ‘Can Machines Create Art?’ by Mark Coeckelberg falls to me to lead. I’m not sure I agree with the logic. And while I’ve read and enjoyed the piece thoroughly, I haven’t prepared myself to lead a discussion on it. Like…

The residency continues to be intense. Reading 1, ‘The Bridge Builder’ by Will Allen Dromgoole is about paying it forward, and leaving things better than we find them. The bridges are, of course, literal and figurative, about today and tomorrow, past and present. We don’t often remember or care who may have built the bridges we cross. Equally, while some of us may be better at building bridges, others may excel at helping people cross them. In other words, bridges are about institutions and individuals. And sometimes, bridge builders may build or help only because they may have to retrace their paths or need help re-crossing them later themselves. Does that affect the value of building and/or helping to cross? In this regard, Ahmad asked what we were doing in our lives and spheres of influence for future generations. How did we get people on board? And what strategies do we employ when personal stories, normally effective, don’t work? Of the second reading, a selection of six poems from Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, Ahmad asked us to pick which one resonated the most. Two each chose #12 and #29, one chose #43, and I chose #9: ‘Fill your bowl to the brimAnd it will spill. Keep sharpening your knifeAnd it will blunt….Care about people’s approvalAnd you will be their prisoner.Do your work, then step back.The only path to serenity. The third reading, ‘On Trees’ from Wandering: Notes and Sketches, by Herman Hesse was impossible for me to read without feeling the presence of Abbas Kiarostami writ large over it. A deeply moving and beautiful piece, it needs no further gloss: ‘So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.’ There is a lot to take in, much to mull over personally and professionally. I am surrounded by hardworking, incredibly talented individuals who bring all of themselves to the work they do, the passions they follow, and the lives they lead. It’s a real privilege to spend time with my fellow residents. The afternoon trip to the Chateau de Chenonceau, 40min away by car, is a welcome break from routine. A generous, not to mention…

The work we need to do is showing its impact on us. It’s been a heavy, and emotional day. I’d woken up early, like several others, to get a head start on our blog posts, the increasing development and maturity of which is inversely proportional to the speed at which we can write and send them on to Ahmad to upload. In the midst of some fierce thinking in the kitchen-cafe, I got distracted by haunting sounds from the living room next door. ‘What is that?’, I asked Greg when he came into the kitchen-cafe, ‘It’s making me sad.’ ‘Join us’, he said. And so I did. Only to be flooded by a sudden, inexplicable admixture of loss and longing. I’d never heard the music before, but it pulled, almost too tightly, at my heart even as my mind tried to place it. ‘Rumi’, ‘reed’, ‘poetry’, ‘Persian’, amongst a dozen other words and places and concepts raced through my head. Nebulously strange and familiar, new yet old, past as well as present, it unsettled and stilled in equal measure, jumpstarting an incredible conversation between Greg and I. And so the tone for the first reading of the day was, for me, at least, already set by this ‘merely’ improv performance by Greg and a Kurdish colleague of his. Denise Vargas’s ‘Shadow’ raised a key issue of authenticity — how does one square being true to oneself, seeking pleasure and fulfillment, with wider community and societal expectations about responsibility and the collective creation of meaning? ‘Be the voice/that breaks the silence, not the echo. Be song, be scar/be question/be anything but shadow’ urged Vargas, which led to much discussion about the different connotations of shadow in different geographical and cultural contexts. For all its diminishing associations in the poem, shadows and shade instead evoked for many of us elsewhere, images of refuge, safety, and tranquility. This also led to a rich discussion on different models of leadership. Another important question raised in the discussion for this reading, as well as the one that followed, namely, ‘An Open Letter to Eric Schmidt‘, by Mathias Dopfner, was ‘How do each of us change something destructive into something constructive?’ More bluntly, perhaps, it challenged us to come face-to-face with a rather inconvenient truth — how do we get over our anger, our disappointments, our sense of injustice, our betrayal by others, our hopelessness? In other words, how do we get over ourselves and out of our own way to do the work that needs to be done? Especially when we are in the thick of it and don’t have the will, the capacity, the energy or the time or the clarity or the headspace…

It’s Sunday, Day 4 at Culturistan. The work, the thinking, continues to intensify and so we start a little later than usual. Most of us take the opportunity to catch up on sleep and tread a little more softly. Today’s sole reading is ‘Life While You Wait’ by Wislawa Szymborska. We all agree that we are ‘Ill-prepared for the privilege of living/…can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.’ But we don’t on agree on whether we ‘loathe improvisation’. ‘If only,’ Szymborska continues, ‘I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance, or repeat a single Thursday that has passed! But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.’ If only. All of us at some point thus far have expressed this sentiment. But the play must go on. Prepared or not, the stage is set, ‘The props…surprisingly precise’. The poem is a metaphor for life, and the reality of our daily joys and dramas. So far, so obvious. But, as ever, Ahmad pushes us to explore it more honestly — are we improvising, even performing, for everybody here? What masks do we wear in life and in work, and especially when the improv’s not working and we’re scared? In and of themselves, masks are not negative or positive. We could use ‘costume’ in place of ‘mask’, the resulting nuance of which might make it more palatable (whereas masks hide our eyes — windows into our souls, yes? — costumes cover our bodies). Either way, some people need more, others less. And we wear multiple masks and/or costumes for multiple roles. If we’re aware of which ones we’re wearing, and when, and why, perhaps we can use them to better our performance in all the roles we have to play. Appropriately, the poem brought us to an incredible afternoon with Jul, who regaled us with the story of how he came to write comics, and particularly the resurrection of Lucky Luke. Jul also screened several episodes from 50 Shades of Greece, his new series on Arte, which is a commentary both hilarious and critical on contemporary society and politics through the lens of the stories of the Ancient Greek gods. This set the bar rather high for the next segment of the day — three groups each putting on a performance of Antigone, with wicked inspiration from Jul. Yasmeen and Iason played Antigone and Ismene respectively, each sending up their own (‘authentic’?!) personalities and interpersonal dyanamic to laugh-out loud guffaws from the rest of us. Carrying over the in-jokes, Estephania, Tara and I played out what to do with Polyniece’s uncovered body — should we reduce (let it be devoured by vultures), reuse (offer it to Cannibals…

Our lunches and dinners are getting ever more elaborate and expansive — last night, Group A made fesenjoon, served with salad, and sides of stir-fried brussel sprouts and broccoli, and garlic-sautéed mushrooms, before finishing off with a nectarine crumble (and not a cheeseboard in sight!). Lunch today was venison, with a side of beans, and a potato and leek salad. And the return of the cheeseboard. We are all eating far too much. And drinking ridiculous amounts of coffee. But it’s all to fuel some serious thinking — and subtle changes in the way we are beginning to approach the readings. Today, ‘class’ was held in the garden behind the kitchen-cafe. As the sun arced over the sky, its heat seeped slowly into our discussions. There’s a lot more going on, undercurrents gaining strength, changing direction on a sea still calm. Responses to questions are slower, more careful, deliberate. Follow-ups keep pace, probing gently, not to promote a personal view nor to push a professional stance. Ahmad both directs and manages these deftly. There is a distinct sense of the boundaries of ta’rof, a form of Persian politesse, being recalibrated. We are more honest about not understanding assertions we are hearing, but it is accompanied by cues both verbal and non-verbal that we are open and willing to listen more actively and thereby seek clarity about new, and unfamiliar positions as we seek to integrate those ideas with our current worldviews. The first reading, ‘The Real Work’ by Wendell Berry inspired and bored in equal measure. For those of us at a sense of loss, ‘no longer know[ing] what to do’ or ‘which way to go’, the realization that we may ‘have come to our real work’ or ‘our real journey’ was profound. For those of us perhaps less lost personally and professionally, these observations were obvious and expressed with greater poetry elsewhere. We all agreed, however, on the last line, ‘The impeded stream is the one that sings.’ The next reading, ‘Trying Out One’s New Sword’ by Mary Midgley put forward strong arguments against moral isolationism — the idea that ‘the respect and tolerance due from one system to another requires us never to take up a critical position to any other culture, that we can never claim to say what is good or bad there.’ Using an example from classical Japan of a samurai who could only test the efficacy of a new sword by wielding it, ideally fatally, on an unfortunate traveler, Midgley posed three questions: 1. ‘Does the isolating barrier work both ways? Are people in other cultures equally unable to criticize us?’ 2. ‘Does the isolating barrier between cultures block praise as well as blame?’…

It’s tempting to sleep in another half hour. I’d slept at 1.00am the previous night, thinking and writing, longhand, about Day 1. But I’d committed to a morning walk during a wifi window earlier that evening, and sans connectivity now, at 7.15am, there wasn’t a way of reneging. I bargained with myself in that peculiar early morning combination of lucidity and stupor. I yielded. Twenty more minutes. Enough time, it turned out, to make it for the walk with Tara and Yasmeen at 8.15am returning for a quick coffee and a couple of slices of toast before getting down to the business of discussing the readings for Day 2. We started with ‘Sand and Foam’ by Kahlil Gibran, with him ‘Seven times…despis[ing his] soul’. Even as it evoked for many of us the seven deadly sins, there is much about keeping up appearances here, about pretense, pride, and making excuses. All of us have. Many times. Personally and professionally. Is remembering and then revealing the truth an honest act? And is it meant to be redemptive? Or are such insights calculated moments of vulnerability, strategic and expiatory? Much discussion follows about Gibran’s life, and the extent to which authorship and positionality affect (or should or should not affect) the content. It was almost inevitable segueing to the present time by invoking the life and music of Michael Jackson. Wagner would have been another fascinating, historical, example, but we didn’t get there. The second reading, ‘Fifteen Lashes’ by Anwar Iqbal is a distressing read for several of us. A ‘big public flogging show’ in a maidan between Rawalpindi and Islamabad arranged by General Zia ul-Haqq, it is ‘a form of punishment which in Pakistan owes as much to an inherited British colonial tradition as to the penal code of Islam.’ What is the function of such detail, such gory observation? Does it make it real? Does it validate a report? Is it perhaps a proxy for authority? And why, despite its particularity did it remind some of us of the violence of drug cartels in Columbia or of lynchings in the American south? Maybe it’s because the most powerful, universally relatable stories are those expressed through the details of a particular context. They are true (one might say authentic) to their roots, growing as well, flourishing even, when transplanted afar, as in their native soil. Some of this Geertz-like ‘thick description’ was evident in Day 1’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’. But there are other, filmic, congruences of such graphic narratives – any Tarantino film, The Stoning of Soraya M, which I still cannot bring myself to watch, or Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ, which come every Easter, I feel an inexplicable…

It’s an odd sensation, on land at least, to be cut off from mobile phone reception and wifi in rural France. In the air or out at sea, it feels less alien and anxiety provoking — for now, at least. In time, perhaps not. A small window of time (in the quiet of the night) and space (in the living room by the rustic kitchen) for connectivity is both welcome (for family news) and unsettling (for the intrusion of the unrelenting bus(i/y)ness of the world. Day 1 began with Ahmad providing a background to the genesis of Culturistan. Inspired by his fellowship at the Aspen Institute, Culturistan differs in a few key ways — it is considerably shorter, more age-inclusive, and driven by process rather than results. Whereas the Aspen fellowship culminates in a project that improves life for a specific group of people, Culturistan is designed for the longer, and more intangible, term. Hence the blogging requirement, which aims to document the day-to-day process of discovery and reflection. A series of ice-breakers came next, the first of which involved teams of two, with one person leading his/her blindfolded partner through a Post-It minefield. Of course, Ahmad made every effort to thwart our progress, particularly singling out Greg and myself by strewing ever more fuschia Post-Its in our path. Next came an exercise in active listening to new partners introduce themselves, and then recounting, on their behalf, those introductions to the rest of the group. The discussions on the readings were somber, reflective affairs. Mario de Andrade’s ‘My Soul has a Hat’ challenged our ideas of wanting to be the fisherman from the Check-In readings. Suddenly, we were in a hurry. A ‘hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give’ and a jolting revelation: ‘We have two lives and the second begins when you realize you have only one.’ The second reading comprised Letters I, VII, and IX from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. Mixed feelings from the gang on these, from the sincerity and value of Rilke’s advice to the development of a more honest, mutually revealing conversation between Rilke and the young poet over the course of the letters. Here, we saw Rilke shift from being a benevolent expert and authority figure keeping a studied distance, to be more introspective, if not reflexive pen pal. In the VIIth letter before taking a turn, arguably, in the IXth to a kind of mild exasperation with his ‘dear Mr. Kappus’, Rilke writes, ‘If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches…perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.’ More fundamentally, we…