Across the Globe without a Plane
Crossing the World Word by Word
It was my grandmother who started me on crosswords. Not so much by saying they were good for your vocabulary, memory and meeting sexy librarians, which they are, but more so by her actions. The rare morning I crawled out of bed before seven am, just watching her sitting on the couch occasionally sipping her steaming coffee in the morning light, the only sounds the scratching of her pen filling in gray newspaper blanks both across and down, filled me with an indescribable sense of peace. Rather than idle time it seemed a kind of meditation to me and I immediately took it up, to the confusion of my university friends, who figured I was merely affecting an attitude rather than attempting a brand of, albeit convolutedly western, yoga. To the contrary, and despite the difficult first few years in which I made more messes than anything else, the heart of it has has stuck with me: crosswording is codebreaking. I now wish I, like the infamous New York Times Crossword Editor Will Shortz, could have majored in Enigmatology, but I wanted to get laid in college, so I studied art and acted weird, saving the variety of clues, the dialects, regionalism and themes that inevitably find their way into the puzzles of crosswords for the privacy of the early morning. The pages of the Sunday L.A. Times Magazine crossword edited by Merl Reagle are streaked with mostly entertaining witticisms and pop culture references, yet it was his faraway sounding clues like the four-letter “Old Thailand” and the nine-letter “Asian Capital” rather than the three-letter “Dodger Ron” and the four letter “Nick & Nora’s dog” that got me interested in popping out of my southern California university bubble and seeing the world. In fact it was seven-letter “Great Khan”, one of the more intriguing loan word combos I had ever heard, which piqued my interest in chucking the daily grind of nine to five office rigmarole after graduation and moving to Asia, in effect beginning my search for the Great Khan himself.
Alternatively passing through the steamy flesh joints and semi-tropical jungles of Thailand and Laos, the boisterous mercantilism and cluttered countryside of China, and residing for more than a few years within the sere austerity and drunken fratboy culture of two-faced Japan, it often felt more like I was checking off a pedantic “to do” list of errands than whittling away at any remaining Asian mystery. Had everything been dug up, dusted off, polished, restored, repainted, museumed and essentially decoded hundreds of years before my family had even settled in California? What chance did a modern would be enigmatologist have finding mystery in virtually integrated global communities wirelessly interconnected by sophisticated information superhighways networking digital publishing protocols rendering analogues irrelevant?
Where is he, Fidel?
None, that is, until the semiotician Umberto Eco’s excellent collection of essays Serendipities: Language & Lunacy fell into my lap, in which he writes about the hoax of the mysterious Minister-King Prester John’s Letter, which may have at least in part drawn the Polo family, and specifically Marco, to their infamous travels in central Asia, and how the latter mistook the former (who never existed) as the leader of Genghis Khan’s patron tribe, his adoptive father, so to speak, whom Genghis, like everyone else who opposed him, had to kill. Eco’s point is that history is written and often rewritten to fit the facts, or hoaxes, as they may be, which happens more often than we think. Serendipities jogged my memory with its esoteric references to “Tartars”, the oft-used though incorrect appellation I had read in Henry Miller’s Black Spring, Thoreau’s Walden, and Polo’s own The Travels of Marco Polo. Aha!
This lead me to look into what the “real” story of the great khan was: who was he- Tartar? No. Where did he come from? Mongolia, sure, but specifically, who knew? Were all of the largely allegorical stories heard while growing up in California where the extent of his culture, so I thought, was the Mongolian BBQ joint boasting freeze-dried meat we visited once a month, true? Was he, as Voltaire suggested, a barbarian? Wait, weren’t they German? So many questions, so I started looking and, living in Japan, figured I would start with the popular “kamikaze” theory, the so called divine wind some Japanese use to mythologize the repelling of Khubilai’s Korea-launched Mongol ships. In In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Takesaki Suenaga’s Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, Thomas Conlan writes, “…the notion of the ‘divine winds’ represented a function of the medieval mindset, which emphasized otherworldly causality, rather than a caustic commentary on the ineptitude of the Japanese defenders…”
The Secret History of the Mongols (Anonymous, 1227)
So the ancient Japanese were superstitious. Great. Didn’t answer my question, but Conlan did lead me to perhaps the only piece of Mongolian literature that ever turned out to be a big deal: The Secret History of the Mongols. Which does tell me that by the time of the unsuccessful naval expeditions A) Genghis was long dead and B) he probably wouldn’t have done it in the same way or, likely, at all, though that’s another story. Back to The Secret History of the Mongols: what a name for a budding Riddler to chew on! After excerpting it (a translation of the Russian version translated from a copy of the original Chinese script copy of the long lost Mongol original), the anonymous writer was either Christian (as were many Mongols) or had likely read parts of the Bible, as it stinks of Psalmy hyperbole and overuses allegorical mythology in places, though that said, it also tells the story of the Great Khan. It documents his rise from lowly steppe castoff to leader of the largest empire the world has ever known, and everything in between. Yet the book, as most do, lacks meat, blood, sex, all things vital to the Genghis’ Asian conquest, by the very fact of it being something one reads, sitting in a chair with a sensible shirt, quizzical looks aface and thoughts of getting drunk with smiling women sometime in the near future. My point is, why stare at the scrotum of the goat when you can eat the goat’s balls, crispy and fried and washed down with fermented mare’s milk surrounded by the same mountains as Genghis on the vast green steppe beneath the eternal blue sky?
So I went. And I ate.
And here I sit beneath that same blue sky in which warm breezes push puffy flotillas of cumulus clouds and their fat shadows across green foothills where graze teams of horses and kines of cows, herds of goats and flocks of sheep, the lifeblood of the Mongolian livelihood. I am in the guts of it, the living, breathing orgasmic center of the natural world. Finally, a place where literature has no meaning and newspapers have no readership, where roads and electricity and toilets and running water are far-off luxuries rather than daily assumptions. A place, maybe the last one, where a couple million people live in the same style of felt ger huts in the same nomadic fashion as did their steppe-dwelling Hun ancestors: where you rise and retire with the sun, sleep on the floor, consume massive amounts of fermented yogurt, butter, milk and other dairy products (though very few vegetables), and can set up hut anywhere since there is no concept of land ownership.
What’s an eight-letter word for amazing?
Hint: It starts with an “M_ _ _ _ _ _ _”.
Other answers: (Siam) (Ulan Bator) (Cey) (Asta) (Genghis)
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