Structures of the Imagination

We have been most centrally concerned in this book with one particular aspect of Bhaktapur's communal life, its poetic imagination, and we have emphasized, for the most part, only one of the subjects of that imagination, the city itself. Bhaktapur's imagination has worked over a span of several centuries, making use of the opportunities and constraints of its history and its context in the building of a world. As its citizens, at the same time poets and audience, strove to build a coherent civic world out of the opportunities provided by history, tradition, and accident, they became progressively enveloped in and shaped by what they were building.

Shakespeare's Theseus discovered a midsummer night's dream that he found "more strange than true," in contrast with the unstrange truths of Athens. Yet, as Puck reminds us at the end, Theseus, his dream and his truth, all is our dream. We have been concerned for the most part with Bhaktapur's dream within a dream—those particular aspects of Bhaktapur's order that were "marked," that is, precisely, made strange to Bhaktapurians, although as Hindus and not Athenians Bhaktapurians find them to be members of an order that is both strange and , in some sense, true. That order, the "religious realm," which is where most of Bhaktapur's marked symbols are situated, is there generally sharply distinguished from the "ordinary," the unstrange. As we characterized the marked realm (for the sake of considering its margins in

chap. 11) its "proper spaces are the temple or shrine, the purified, bounded and isolated puja areas in houses, the ideal spaces of the city carved out through the positions and festival movements of the deities; its expert workers are the priests; its time is the calendrically determined eternally recurring times of festival or that of rites of passage or of crisis-generated or prophylactic ad hoc worship; its proper action is in ritual and the traditionally specified actions of the festivals."

Bhaktapur's referral of most of its marked symbolic forms and enactments—myth, legend, drama, literature, poetry, and music—to the realm of the gods is one of the city's most striking features to a secularized Westerner. It is the city's way of making all these forms both strange and true, and thus giving them great seriousness and force. Not as is sometimes said of religious matters, "ultimate" seriousness and force, for there is in some of Bhaktapur's thought, particularly in the implications of its Tantrism, something else more profound beyond the realm and reality of the city's gods. But it is that system of deities that puts Bhaktapur at the center of a cosmos and that provides the characteristic emblems of the realm of strange symbols.

Alongside the strange world of marked symbols Bhaktapur has also constructed, as all communities do—sometimes yielding to, sometimes molding, sometimes denying recalcitrant "physical facts"—a world of self-serving common sense, a world meaningful in its "embedded symbolism." This world, illustrated in this book in our discussions of the city's larger and smaller social orders and by the ideas, feelings, and actions of the "purity complex," is the kind of order that Theseus confidently set as truth against dream. The strange and the ordinary are united in Bhaktapur's urban mesocosm in a common world mediating between the microcosm of each of its citizens and the macrocosm.^[2]

We have been occupied throughout with details of that mesocosm. We wish now, in summary, to consider some of the most general aspects of Bhaktapur's order, the arrangements that give some overall coherence and characteristic style to Bhaktapur's multilayered and segmented world. We will make a working distinction between two interrelated issues. First we will consider some very general aspects of the city's symbolic forms that contribute to the particular meaningfulness , the particular coherence, of Bhaktapur's life. Then we will consider some of the arrangements of symbolic forms that serve to make, under Bhaktapur's special circumstances, potentially meaningful forms intelligible , and thus, ultimately, significant . Both are aspects of our orienting question, "What is Bhaktapur that a Newar may know it?"

"Meaningfulness" and "intelligibility" are really proposals toward an explanation for why, once many other features are in place, Bhaktapur is the way it is. We will in the final section of this chapter make some further probes at distinguishing the necessary from the contingent in Bhaktapur's order in a search for that city's typological and explainable features.