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Fantasy Frangipanis: More on Why We Need Lost Magic Kingdoms*
The frangipani (named after an Italian, so the proper plural is frangipanis; there is no frangipanus) is an absurdly sexy tropical flower. It is so perfectly adapted to Euro-American projections that it is easy to see why it fringes motels and swimming pools all over the tropical world, and sides of houses in south Florida.
Pleasingly symmetrical,with fleshily plump petals, it exudes a fragrance so intrinsically redolent of perfectly balanced perfume that it eclipses the sick thickness of the smell of jasmine or the rotted sweetness of Southern magnolias. It is as ideally suited to a fantasy tropics as the latter two are to the fantasy of a sickly decayed Old South or the reality of a normal day in New Orleans. (It required Katrina to turn the Crescent City into a truly sick surreality in which books and khaki pants became luxury commodities to be sought out in cities possessing the consumer paradises of shopping malls. In other words, the reduction of New Orleans to the French Quarter and the Garden District surrounded by a fragile economic infrastructure turned the city into a genuine piece of the tourist Third World. I walked through downtown Suva three decades ago thinking that it would be difficult to live in a city in which the Desai Book Depot and the almost-unreachable bookstore of the University of the South Pacific were the only intellectual games in town. I presume Fiji is much more sophisticated today, but it was my first glimpse of a country that was dependent on sugar and tourism to stay modestly prosperous. No wonder places like Mauritius and the Northern Marianas diversified into garment-making; Mauritius has since gone high-tech, and at last report was trying to turn the whole island into the world’s first totally wi-fi country. It was proving difficult to get the wireless network up over the part of the island that consists of nothing but photogenic sugar fields.)
But I digress. The point I wanted to get to was Lawrence Osborne’s observation that “For centuries, Europeans and their offshoots have searched for hidden valleys, lost kingdoms, vanished islands, and sunken civilizations. I don’t know whether the Japanese or the Indians share such obsessions and travel in order to exorcise them. But if they do not, and the pathology is indeed unique, then I assume that something about us is proved. After El Dorado and Atlantis, for example, there was Shangri-La, supposedly a Tibetan word for paradise.” And reflections on James Hilton’s novel follow, and China’s attempts to market a tourist region called Shangri-La.
Osborne doesn’t know that Shangri-La, or Shambhala, really is a mythic paradise with real kings in it…or more accurately, an impossible place where enlightenment is possible, but one with a fantasy history attached to it by Central Asians, with teaching lineages that supposedly stem from it. This is why the just-closed “Portals to Shangri-La: Buddhist Art from Mongolia” was called that. See Nicholas Roerich’s metaphysical travel books for more than you ever wanted to know about the Shambala legends circa 1927. See Glenn Mullin for everything else.
Of course, this mania of ours lies behind René Daumal’s novel “Mount Analogue,” the most spiritually sober version of a fantasy paradise we shall ever get. The overheated real-world fantasies of the 1920s and1930s included the invention of Bali, a real place turned into an aesthetically tasteful theme park avant le lettre. Daumal served for a while as publicist for an authentically Hindu dance troupe that introduced the metaphysics of Indian dance to Europe.
So we long for lost kingdoms and places of magic. We long for them so much that we aren’t satisfied with the stories we already have; we keep making up new ones. One could spend one’s life collecting up the delicious fragments that already lie in ruins all about us, but for whatever reason, the public laps up new versions of stereotypical fakery.
I realized, belatedly watching “The Da Vinci Code” last Thursday in a 1929 movie palace bedecked with a blend of Egyptian and Moorish symbolic architecture, that one reason Dan Brown’s potboiler sold so well was that it mixes the thriller genre with the magical quest genre. Throwing in Rosslyn Chapel, not part of Baigent and Leigh’s original potpourri, was an inspired touch. The would-be competing novel “The Rule of Four” flopped because it turned the genuinely magical Hypnerotomachia Polyphili into a dumbly literal codebook for finding a bunch of buried paintings. Ho-hum.
*"Lost Magic Kingdoms" was the name of surrealist Eduardo Paolozzi's exhibition at the Museum of Mankind in the mid-1980s, using ethnographic materials for the purposes of contemporary art. It was widely decried as politically incorrect. More to the point, it wasn't as good as the straight stuff in the vitrines in the adjacent galleries.
The frangipani (named after an Italian, so the proper plural is frangipanis; there is no frangipanus) is an absurdly sexy tropical flower. It is so perfectly adapted to Euro-American projections that it is easy to see why it fringes motels and swimming pools all over the tropical world, and sides of houses in south Florida.
Pleasingly symmetrical,with fleshily plump petals, it exudes a fragrance so intrinsically redolent of perfectly balanced perfume that it eclipses the sick thickness of the smell of jasmine or the rotted sweetness of Southern magnolias. It is as ideally suited to a fantasy tropics as the latter two are to the fantasy of a sickly decayed Old South or the reality of a normal day in New Orleans. (It required Katrina to turn the Crescent City into a truly sick surreality in which books and khaki pants became luxury commodities to be sought out in cities possessing the consumer paradises of shopping malls. In other words, the reduction of New Orleans to the French Quarter and the Garden District surrounded by a fragile economic infrastructure turned the city into a genuine piece of the tourist Third World. I walked through downtown Suva three decades ago thinking that it would be difficult to live in a city in which the Desai Book Depot and the almost-unreachable bookstore of the University of the South Pacific were the only intellectual games in town. I presume Fiji is much more sophisticated today, but it was my first glimpse of a country that was dependent on sugar and tourism to stay modestly prosperous. No wonder places like Mauritius and the Northern Marianas diversified into garment-making; Mauritius has since gone high-tech, and at last report was trying to turn the whole island into the world’s first totally wi-fi country. It was proving difficult to get the wireless network up over the part of the island that consists of nothing but photogenic sugar fields.)
But I digress. The point I wanted to get to was Lawrence Osborne’s observation that “For centuries, Europeans and their offshoots have searched for hidden valleys, lost kingdoms, vanished islands, and sunken civilizations. I don’t know whether the Japanese or the Indians share such obsessions and travel in order to exorcise them. But if they do not, and the pathology is indeed unique, then I assume that something about us is proved. After El Dorado and Atlantis, for example, there was Shangri-La, supposedly a Tibetan word for paradise.” And reflections on James Hilton’s novel follow, and China’s attempts to market a tourist region called Shangri-La.
Osborne doesn’t know that Shangri-La, or Shambhala, really is a mythic paradise with real kings in it…or more accurately, an impossible place where enlightenment is possible, but one with a fantasy history attached to it by Central Asians, with teaching lineages that supposedly stem from it. This is why the just-closed “Portals to Shangri-La: Buddhist Art from Mongolia” was called that. See Nicholas Roerich’s metaphysical travel books for more than you ever wanted to know about the Shambala legends circa 1927. See Glenn Mullin for everything else.
Of course, this mania of ours lies behind René Daumal’s novel “Mount Analogue,” the most spiritually sober version of a fantasy paradise we shall ever get. The overheated real-world fantasies of the 1920s and1930s included the invention of Bali, a real place turned into an aesthetically tasteful theme park avant le lettre. Daumal served for a while as publicist for an authentically Hindu dance troupe that introduced the metaphysics of Indian dance to Europe.
So we long for lost kingdoms and places of magic. We long for them so much that we aren’t satisfied with the stories we already have; we keep making up new ones. One could spend one’s life collecting up the delicious fragments that already lie in ruins all about us, but for whatever reason, the public laps up new versions of stereotypical fakery.
I realized, belatedly watching “The Da Vinci Code” last Thursday in a 1929 movie palace bedecked with a blend of Egyptian and Moorish symbolic architecture, that one reason Dan Brown’s potboiler sold so well was that it mixes the thriller genre with the magical quest genre. Throwing in Rosslyn Chapel, not part of Baigent and Leigh’s original potpourri, was an inspired touch. The would-be competing novel “The Rule of Four” flopped because it turned the genuinely magical Hypnerotomachia Polyphili into a dumbly literal codebook for finding a bunch of buried paintings. Ho-hum.
*"Lost Magic Kingdoms" was the name of surrealist Eduardo Paolozzi's exhibition at the Museum of Mankind in the mid-1980s, using ethnographic materials for the purposes of contemporary art. It was widely decried as politically incorrect. More to the point, it wasn't as good as the straight stuff in the vitrines in the adjacent galleries.
