Michael Vinay Bhatia Tribute

This speech was delivered by Alexander Nemser, a 2006 Marshall Scholar, at the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission Annual Dinner on May 12, 2008:



Thank you all for being here—my fellow Marshall scholars, Marshall Sherfield scholars, members of the Marshall Commission, and others. Thank you especially to the Marshall alumni, to whom we are in debt for their contribution to our class’ fundraising project for Darfur.

On behalf of the Marshall class of 2006, I would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Frances Dow, Secretary John Kirkland, and the other members of the Marshall Commission for the privilege and opportunity you have given us to study, converse, engage with bright minds from all four corners of the globe, and  exchange ideas while in the United Kingdom as Marshall scholars. We truly appreciate your generosity and good will. 

Thank you to Mr. Adrian Hodges of the Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum for joining us this evening.
I would finally like to thank Mary and Lizzie for all of their work and support.

    I was originally planning to read a heavily ironic speech full of hilarious anecdotes, in which I apologized to Mary and Lizzie for making them feel, through my elusiveness and recurrent absence, like professional hunters of Bigfoot, the legendary North American missing link between man and ape; and in which I told you about the Bodleian Library at Oxford’s unique collection of original Kafka manuscripts—they are not available for vieiwing; and in which I told the story of how I watched from my window in New College, Oxford, as a young man destroyed 20 bicycles and I said and did nothing—when someone asked me, “Why didn’t you call the authorities?” I realized it was because I wanted to watch him do it. Later, I thought to myself, “This must be why Plato kicked the poets out of the Republic.”

    However, after hearing the news of the loss of one of our number, 2001 Marshall Scholar Michael Bhatia, and after reading a bit about Michael’s achievements and character, I felt I could not deliver my funny speech. Instead, I have decided to read a few reflections on our sense of the world’s capacity to be remade, even many times over, and its constant tendency to present us with the unexpected. I will conclude with a poem I wrote while here.

In a pair of hands, in the formation of a planet, and in a particular, shatterable arrangement of objects, the world reveals its multiplicity like an idol turned to show a face on the back of its face.
In the book of Genesis, the world and all that creepeth on it are created twice, destroyed, and remade; and Adam, “the human,” is created twice. Mortally vying for priority of version, the multiple authors of the text left us with a stack of stories, each infuriated and beguiled by the one before it, with all the possible worlds scattering into the margins. “The earth was without form, and void…” The Hebrew for “and void” appears nowhere else in any part of the Bible, except in reference to this initial use, and so the translation is a guess. Maybe it said, “The earth was without form, and sought to possess form.” Ironically, the final redaction, in which the world is made, and then remade, leaves a record of the same impulse of revision felt by God before the flood.
We are left in the end with a feeling of potentiality, a feeling it could have gone another way.

The paradox, as well as the realism, of Shakespeare’s tragedies comes in the sense that while the individual intractable, and terrible and noble for being so, the final devastations at the ends of the plays are the result of surprisingly minor conflicts which, at the moment of their appearance, might have been resolved in the other direction. Thus one character might even seem like an alternate-universe version of another character in the same play, or the result of an alternate path taken by a character in a different play.

The tragedy, however, occurs at the end of possibility, when the individual looks back and sees with the horror of understanding that A went this direction, B went that direction, and now we won’t make it to C, which seemed very close. Coming to his senses at the end of the play, Othello may feel that things began to go wrong even as he was telling Desdemona about another world where there are “hills whose heads touch heaven,” or only when he walked into the room and put out the light.

The dream of traveling in time grips us as much for the wish to redress yesterday’s misstep as for the desire to watch, next to the ram in the thicket, as an angel stops Abraham’s hand.
***

    A utopia picks up where a satire leaves off. The latter, driven by a leveling impulse, chops down the trees of a forest, leaving nothing, while the former responds by using the wood to build a new world. This new world may replace, become, or exist alongside the old one, or do all of those things. The end of the utopia comes when it, too, inspires a satire. 

The known world, scattered with incomplete utopias, nonetheless provides us with elements out of which to form new frames. And in doing so, we open a window onto a world where, under a black sun, Hamlet is Polonius, and our hearts are whole.

As an introduction to my own poem, I will read a selection from Michael Bhatia’s photo-essay on Afghanistan, published in the Globalist.

“Upon our arrival at the USA Gardez PRT, we were subjected to a brief wait by the Afghan guards while our credentials were reviewed. Their guard post was surrounded by potted plants and singing bird cages, the guards only recently rustled from their afternoon naps. Driving away after that generally unsatisfying interview, we turned to see these guards running after the truck.

Worried that we had breached some security protocol, a hand was thrust through the window containing a neatly folded piece of paper. The inscribed Pashtun poem spoke of fleeting glances between man and woman, and of poverty and longing.

The guards then pleaded with Kate [Clark] to deliver the folded note to the BBC in the hopes of it being read over the air. Here is the Afghanistan of poets.”

    As compliment to that poem, which was indeed broadcast on the BBC, I offer one of mine, written during my time in England. It is about how our experience of the infinite is both unexpected and necessary.

To An Astronaut

It was no planetarium:
neither mystery nor commentary,
only a blue encounter with the code.
What little you saw in the cosmos that was yours
lasted only a few seconds,
flashed somewhere at your back,
and was consumed.

At times it seemed a harsh system,
shifting according to its plan,
eluding tabulation,
quivering with the conviction of its orbits.
Mostly it was a wavering display
of senseless iteration,
the backdrop black as the blank eyes of a pharaoh,
asleep in an eternity of access.

At the farthest point,
half-asleep with vertigo,
you saw the green horizon as a circle.
Returning to earth, you found yourself the bearer
of a secret knowledge,
like that shared by two children who have watched,
over an afternoon, the death of a horse.

The colony in space is years away:
you will not live on it.
But Earth is no home for our mutant minds,
which harbor heaven and flee their anchors,
dodging cruel-edged thoughts and floating up
to embrace a looming memory
of troubling and treasured proximity.