Month: November 2011

Here’s something you can’t do every day: How about you and I slip into Leonardo da Vinci’s head for moment? Deep in. Thanks to historian Toby Lester, we can.

Wendy MacNaughton for NPR

 

In a book soon to be published, Lester says Leonardo used to travel with a small notebook hanging from his belt, and “whenever something caught his eye,” he would make a note, or begin “sketching furiously.”

“It is useful,” Leonardo wrote, to “constantly observe, note, and consider.” But when you are Leonardo, what sorts of things are buzzing around in your head? Well, Toby Lester describes what is essentially a “To Do” list buried in one of those notebooks, a bunch of things Leonardo planned to do one week, or month, in the early 1490’s.

I know what my To Do list would look like, and it would look nothing, not even remotely like this one.

Here’s what was on his mind, stuff he wanted to do. This is a direct translation, with my amendments in brackets:

Wendy MacNaughton for NPR

 

What a jumble! Cannons, wall construction, studying the sun, ice skating in Flanders, optics, and that oh-so-casual, “Draw Milan.” It’s like his mind could wander off in any direction at any time. How did he concentrate? How did he focus?

Maybe he went in and out, plunging into a task that concentrated him fully, and then, once done, he’d spring back to the rough and tumble of Anything Goes. Great minds can go as they please.

Another giant, Michel Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, wrote that no single idea could hold him. “I cannot keep my subject still,” he wrote. “It goes along, befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.”

I like being drunk like that.

The Benefits Of Not Focusing

“We live in an age that worships attention,” says my friend (and Radiolab colleague) Jonah Lehrer. “When we need to work, we force ourselves to concentrate. This approach can also inhibit the imagination. Sometimes, it helps to consider irrelevant information, to eavesdrop on all the stray associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain.”

That ability to let go, float free, does seem like an essential part of a creative mind, not just in giant ones. Those of us who make our livings closer to the ground, have to do it too. In his forthcoming book, (coming to bookstores this Spring) Jonah mentions a study by Dr. Holly White, then at the University of Memphis, and her colleague Priti Shah, of the University of Michigan.

They recruited 60 undergrads, half of whom were diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). So these kids had real difficulty focusing and sticking to any one activity. All the students were then given a variety of creativity tests (including the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, originally developed by Shelley Carson at Harvard) and, surprisingly, the ADHD students generally got higher scores. When White asked, “Who among you has won a big part in a play, an art prize, a science prize?” — who has been recognized for his or her achievements out there in the real world — again it was the ADHD students who had done better.

Minds that break free, that are compelled to wander, can sometimes achieve more than those of us who are more inhibited, more orderly, the study suggests. Or, as Jonah chose to put it, there are “unexpected benefits of not being able to focus.”

Wendy MacNaughton for NPR

Dimmi, Dimmi, Dimmi…

The other element, of course, is stubborn curiosity. Leonardo, that icon of a Renaissance Man, wanted to know everything. On one page of his notebooks from the early 1480’s, you can see he has gotten a new pen and he’s just doodling, testing it out, and as his mind wanders free, what does he write?

Says Toby Lester: it’s a riff on the phrase “Dimmi” (“Tell me”). Leonardo jots the words, “Tell me…tell me whether…tell me how things are…tell me if there was ever.”

These, says Lester, “are the tics of an increasingly hungry mind.”

A very hungry mind.

Toby Lester’s new book on Leonardo hits the book stores in February. It’s called Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image (Free Press, 2012); Jonah Lehrer’s book also has a 2012 release. His is called Imagine, How Creativity Works (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). And, yes, both Wendy MacNaughton, whose wonderful drawings illustrate this post, and I know that Leonardo wrote Italian from right to left, as in Hebrew or Arabic. We decided to set his prose in the ordinary way to make it easy to read, but purists can always grab a mirror and see it like the original.

NOT so long ago, I was in the town of Beit Meri for the baptism of a friend’s daughter. The church, Mar Elias, was perched over Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea and built amid the Roman ruins of the town. Incense that symbolized prayers lifted to God filtered through the hall. So did history, all those rituals of a Christian community indigenous to a region whose faith runs as deep as its diversity.

Chants vaulted over the stone, their rhythm defiantly Eastern, with an intimation of Constantinople, and inflections of Greece, Rome, Persia and the ebb and flow of Arab tribes moving across the Syrian desert. There were echoes of lamentations recited in Ashura, the holiest time in the Shiite Muslim calendar, or the cadence of the call to prayer, from the Sunni Muslim mosque in my neighborhood in Beirut. Beliefs separated the rituals, but history, culture and language bound them — at least for now.

“Of whom shall I be afraid?” the priest intoned, as the baptism unfolded.

Fear is, in fact, a sentiment voiced often these days by Arab Christians, a sad refrain for an ancient community that was so long a force in politics and culture in the Arab world. These days, a community that still numbers in the millions — with the largest populations in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories — finds itself little more than a spectator to events reshaping a place it once helped create, and sometimes a victim of the violence that those events have unleashed. In all the narratives that the Arab revolts represent — dignity, democracy, rights and social justice — many Christians hew to a far bleaker version of events: that their time may be running out.

“I’m not a fanatic Christian,” a friend told me after the baptism. “I don’t go to church. I respect all religions. But from what I see now, in 30 years, there will be no Christians left here.”

Worries about the fate of Christians in the Middle East are often thrust uncomfortably into the conflict between the West and the Muslim world; in the American presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich regularly warns of an “anti-Christian Spring,” as he did in a Republican debate last weekend.

But focusing on that conflict, and the bigotries that beset it, misses the nuances of what Christians represent to the region, and the lessons that their history in other times of tumult might offer the future. In the 19th century, they ushered in a renaissance of Arab culture. Just generations ago, they helped articulate the ideologies that seized the Arab world’s imagination. The fate of Arab Christians today will help define the unresolved struggle within the Arab world about its own identity — how universal, fair, just and equal its societies turn out to be.

“There is a part of Islam in every Arab Christian,” Ghassan Tueni, a journalist, diplomat and intellectual, once told me in Beirut. His suggestion for Christians’ survival was simple, that both they and Muslims imagine an identity that they could somehow share.

The idea is not new. It was debated more than a century ago by Christians and Muslims, during another upheaval. But it remains relevant to a contest as important as any other in the Arab revolts — whether the region can move beyond fear and forge an inclusive community, in which rights are individual, before grimmer impulses make co-existence impossible. In the exodus of Jews from the Arab world, in civil wars in Lebanon and Iraq, in upheavals today in Egypt and Syria, an axiom has proved true time and again. No community, it goes, has a guarantee of its survival.

The question is, on what basis can the Arab world forge that guarantee?

THE Arabic language, so poignant today in delivering demands for change, underwent a renaissance in the 19th century, in which Arab Christians played a decisive role. The language shook off its torpor and became a medium of modern expression and the axis of a collective identity, as old literary genres were revived, new forms of writing — from the novel to journalism — were embraced, and a modern vocabulary was introduced. Its revival marked a decisive turn in the modern Arab world.

Some of its most noteworthy figures were men like Butros al-Bustani and Nasif al-Yaziji, Christian writers and scholars from what is now Lebanon who lived through horrific sectarian carnage, particularly in 1860, with civil war in Lebanon and a massacre of Christians in neighboring Damascus. (Those events still figure in the collective memory of both places.) Arabic, Bustani suggested, could bridge sectarian differences that had pitted community against community. The land, he said, “must not become a Babel of languages as she is a Babel of religions.”

To Bustani and many such figures, the strife illustrated the danger of sectarian belonging, and they set out to articulate a common heritage of language, culture and equality in rights and laws. The idea would have many iterations, but in essence, it was based on citizenship independent of faith, as Syrians, Egyptians, Arabs or others.

In the ensuing decades, the secular ideologies that followed, often led by Christians, were motivated in part as a way to find a place for Christians and, occasionally, Jews, in a region where they were destined to be a minority. Influenced by Europe, the ideologies were imbued with their own chauvinisms. But whether it was Arab unity, Communism or pan-Syrian nationalism (seeking a homeland across Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Israel and the Palestinian territories), underlying each was a secular ideal that has now grown faint.

Some people still trade stories in a Christian town in southern Lebanon about the way those Communists and pan-Syrian nationalists used to pour into the streets from a bar and slug it out well into the 1960s. Little joined the two. Communists considered the nationalists fascists; the Syrian nationalists considered the Communists interlopers. But they shared an idea of citizenship that was universal, and their identities arched more broadly than the smaller notions of self in the town as Maronite Catholic, Greek Orthodox or Protestant.

No one, of course, fights in the streets nowadays, over those ideologies at least. They haven’t for a while. The people there consider themselves solely Christians, condemning themselves to a status as a minority. And in that town, an identity so small, so vulnerable, probably means their eventual disappearance.

THE debate these days in the Arab world isn’t really about secular versus religious anymore. It is rather a debate within political Islam itself. The Arab world is far more conservative than it was even a generation ago. Those older ideologies seem tired, or horribly disfigured by their blood-soaked realizations in Syria and Iraq. And by virtue of money — and the willingness of regressive states like Saudi Arabia to spend it — secular voices appear peripheral to the more pronounced religious discourses of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, reformist trends within political Islam, the most puritanical currents, known as Salafists, and all the disputes among them.

Rare is the Arab politician today who would specifically endorse secularism; the word itself in Arabic is virtually a synonym for atheism. In an otherwise triumphant tour of North Africa, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey unleashed invective from all stripes of Islamists when he endorsed a rather tame take on secularism, namely that the state would treat all religions equally.

Across the region, the climate seems to have grown more inhospitable, more dangerous. In places like Egypt and Syria, authorities have cynically fanned fears and biases to fortify their power. In the military’s bloody response to a Christian protest in Cairo in October, Egyptian television referred to Copts as though they were foreign agitators bent on subversion, calling on “honorable citizens” to defend the army. Religious stalwarts often speak rightly of Islam’s long tolerance of minorities. But these days, the talk feels condescending; minorities are asking for equality, not benevolent protection.

Sometimes there is not even that.

“They came to kill, kill, kill,” a 21-year-old named Bassam Sami told me the day after an attack last year on Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, in what amounted to Iraq’s equivalent of a pogrom. Inside the church, blood smeared the walls, and scraps of flesh remained between the pews. Outside, many mourned what the massacre of 51 worshipers and two priests meant for a country that once represented a remarkable entrepôt of beliefs, customs and traditions that glided across boundaries.

Iraq’s Jews left long ago, many harassed by a xenophobic government. Iraq’s Christians dwindled. Once numbering as many as 1.4 million, at least half have left, mirroring the emigration of Christians elsewhere in the Arab world. As they departed, a country hardened by war, occupation and deprivation became smaller than its parts, and the sole axis of identity was not the language Bustani mentioned, or a shared past, or a common culture, but immutable affiliations — sects and ethnicities, the politics of each seemingly foreordained.

Power meant survival on that day of bloodshed, and the Christians there did not have the leaders, the ideas or the numbers to press their demands as Iraqi citizens.

“We’ve lost part of our soul now,” Rudy Khalid, a 16-year-old Christian, told me. He shook his head, a gesture suggesting the inevitable. “No one has any answers for us.”

IN that town where pan-Syrian nationalists and Communists once fought in the street, I had a conversation with a Christian friend. The locale was poignant, near Mount Hermon, ribbons of snow receding from its crest, at the intersection of the borders of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel, each wrestling with narrower identities.

“The question is,” he told me, as we stood in a valley, “do you keep living in the past or do you look somewhere else? And if it’s somewhere else, where is it?”

My grandparents had left the place when old orders crumbled after World War I. My friend was filled with the sense of fear and loss they undoubtedly knew. But, he told me: “I don’t have the guts to make that decision. I don’t have the guts to say goodbye and go.”

As Christians, he said, we faced marginalization. Other than a few brave and noteworthy examples, we lacked leaders who could articulate an identity beyond religion to the broader community of Christians and Muslims. We were not part of the debates that would define the region’s new body politic, and we felt estranged from the identities that would underline the coming orders.

The trend of minorities in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere, whatever their ideological bent, was to coalesce into parties that pressed their demands simply as minorities. To persist in the smallest of identities, organizing ourselves by faith and not citizenship, we faced a long autumn before our demise.

“You have to find identity somewhere else,” he told me.

It was the same question Bustani grappled with 150 years ago. How do a people who share a land, customs, history and a language find a common end? The task may be impossible, and societies may simply have changed too much to imagine reconciling faith and secularism. There are too few voices within majorities offering such a vision and too few leaders among minorities to articulate it. But all those years ago, Bustani had managed to imagine something different, until the very day that he died, with a pen still in his hand. In the end, his idea was as simple as it was elegant: citizenship.

 

Anthony Shadid is the Beirut bureau chief of The New York Times.