Sunday, May 24, 2009
hearing-
wonder if the supposed schizoid "hearing voices" is more likely to be a sort of "quick reading", rather as one might in a split second glance catch a tag in a billboard while zipping past it- so the "voice" is more to do with a reading( hence language areas of the brain?- or even script as "image" commandment) than the auditory-
Monday, May 18, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
on a post scientific world
-where science has no salvific meaning, - where there is only a competition between the multiplication of functionalities & the deepening burrowing of numbness/depression; & "specialization" is a word to mask the diminishing returns of thought's labor, scientists have to struggle more & more & ask for more & more money to make "new" knowledge whose diminutiveness is labelled hopefully as "new" lab (or "natural") knowledge hence to immunize oneself by, contra zeno, to find higher level instrumentation to "see" more & more, & to create new & abstract knowledges by manipulating abstract statistical/mathematical speculations-
Monday, May 11, 2009
2003-4
despite the stresses of that year want to affirm what i did achieve, try-a quite fine appreciation of carnatic & hindustani including learning/understanding a bit of carnatic, the effort at kalaripayattu, dancer-friends, watching theater, writing some long letters, & some now-lost prose though i remember it well & think about it--
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
totalitarianism, lite
like organic tobacco, like torture without permanent damage or scars, or even pain, taser-convenient-; like the doctors telling us to exercise more more more eat less less less- all easier than destroying macdonald's (& the imminent traumas in india with industrial food growing obese), & are cheaper studies to fund-
Friday, May 1, 2009
short shot novel
Soldiers had arrested the deaf man.
Four years ago, the soldiers had surrounded the village with military show and set it on
fire.
Corpses roasted like fish etc- even the crows didn’t eat them.
So today Biranchi Das of the Tatma quarter took a seer of ghee and a gelded coat to bribe the officers.
“A reward of a thousand and one rupees to any villager who gives intelligence to catch runaway freedom fighters” said the military cap.
All the village could only mutter, (reverently irrelevantly as it were ) Gosai Tulasidas said in the ramayan he is fortunate who even has a glimpse of the LordGod.
Yes we will help the sarkar.
Good, said military cap, Indeed aren’t you a servant of the country?- If so how can you not join together with us and help.
In the Old Days, Chapter 2:
The Indigo sahibs had large bungalows and large ponds where the ox carts returning from the Ganges halt and the old women search for medicinal roots and the young play cautiously in the ruins.
When the sahab laid the foundation of the bungalow a drummer was sent to announce it all over the nearby villages.
He changed the name of the village to his bride’s name, had the district board build a road for the Rautahat station, opened a post office.
The old women still speak of the beauty of the bride from Calcutta, but she died of malaria within the week.
There should have been a dispensary before the post office. But the furious, inconsolate sahab rode his horse (faster than the train they say) carrying his dying bride on it.
To no avail. The bride died. Then the Germans built synthetic indigo, the indigo era ended.
At his bride’s grave, the mad sahab mourned all day: Darling, the doctors won’t come, won’t come, he was heard to utter to her gravestone.
That was many years ago. All that place is haunted now. Only last week Nandalal of the Yadav quarter was whipped to death by an evil female spirit-- whipped by a whip made of snakes.
Some of these ditches are sacred though, lotuses, especially on the day of the full moon in January.
That was the time the Yadavs took to wearing the sacred thread. But the kshatriyas said: Whoever heard of a plowhand being a kshatriya Shiva ho Shiva ho!
You may call them upstarts but nowadays nobody dare care the Yadava quarter the cowherd quarter.
Still, all remember their leader herding buffaloes only ten years ago, being ordered about by everyone!
Nowadays many disputes are settled by all the communities together in the wrestling ground where the leatherworker Shobhan beats the drum dhaaaka dhaaaka dhinna dhinnna to announce the kacheri entertainments.
Chapter 3, interlude
“You are a servant of the country. What is worldly wealth to you?”
Its not as if you are some outsider. Your mother’s sister could even be my father’s brother’s wife. So you and I are cousin-brothers.
“A house isn’t a home without an old woman in it” as the proverb goes.
But how can the old woman do everything at the same time- churning the butter and at the same time collecting cow dung in the cowshed at the same time as going from house to house pounding and grinding grain?
Lets go dig up sweet potatoes in the jungle near the old bungalow.
Besides, foreign medicine has cow’s blood in it.
Are you chewing your betel nut, or your own words? Speak clearly.
Brother, if somebody dies and everybody goes off to Kashi with the ashes, who’s going to stay at home to lick the plates after the funeral feast?
Chapter 4. The Mahant’s Dream
This february weather is so cold it could chill even a tiger.
Earliest morning at the toothless mahant sahab’s ashram:
Maya trembles as the all-knowing eyes of the Lord Open/ Satguru Sahab awaken! Awaken! Bhora bhayo bhava bharam— song sung as if the tame deer of the ashram was prancing-
O dispel the darkness of ignorance-
Eat tapioca for fever. The Satguru has sent me a dream today. Let him who knows time, place and cause of things interpret the dream for us.
Inset: Dream / Sequence: Preparations for the killing of the evil shape shifting demon Pralamba.
I was surrounded and glorified by relatives of my wife’s family and was in a joyous mood and playing hide and seek surrounded in picturesque-ness with my herd of cows and the heat of the sun had not sucked off yet the verdancy of the land. Thereupon in the guise of a virgin maiden a demon stole upon us. I recognized him immediately, but did not speak, rather welcomed him into our play, all the while thinking how to kill him. I then said, lets make two groups, and play various games, and the losers must carry the winners on their backs. But when the demon could not carry me, he assumed his original form of a cloud flashing illuminations and carrying the moon, his entire body plated in gold. I chased him across the sky, with furrowed brow and hair and eye of fire, intent. There was all around us the thundering sound of falling trees, Then suddenly the demon assumed the form of a giant crane with a sharp beak, and approaching me suddenly, swallowed me up entire. All around, my family and friends fainted. But I was burning like fire with my fury in his throat, and as I from within blocked the passages of all his vital airs, he was forced to disgorge me, even as his very eyes popped out of his head and his eyeballs were rolling here and there on the ground, like marbles for children to play with. I was disgorged, uninjured, furious, and when he, blind, approached me again with his beak, my righteous rage tore his beak apart like the twin blades of common grass. When last I struck him, like unto a lightning cleaving mount meru, he engorged himself of his entrails, and black clouds of smoke went out in all ten directions. All around, the relatives, flabber-gobber-smacked at these swift turns of events, began to hail me as the incarnate of the Lord Forever, Bravo Bravo, offering homage with conch, bugle horns and drums. They embraced me as if I had returned from the dead, while above, the gods were greatly satisfied and threw down flowers of marigold and jasmine from Indra’s garden.
It is wonderful that the words of the knowers of brahman are never untruthful. As I watched the satguru in amazement at his deeds in my dream, he suddenly turned to me and said:
Though you are blind the light of your inner eye is extraordinary with divine light. Give a feast to the whole village, jilabis and sugared curd (make separate arrangements for the Thakurs and Brahmins to eat away from the others, and the sepoy people and Military Cap from the cowherds…)
But outside, the villagers gossip:
The blind mahant is no mahant, a mahant who keeps a woman is no mahant, they’ll say she is only a servant, but we know better. I knew her when she wore only one piece of clothing, and cried every night from the work, her eyes swollen like kadam flowers-
though they say, he only keeps her as a daughter for her education, we know better, we’ve heard it before- Now the previous mahant, the satguru was truly a great man…
We remember how strict he was, how as punishment once, we remember a young man who had to hold a pot of water on his head for five hours balanced only on 5 betel nuts, if even a drop fell, he was beaten with a broom—the old mahant was indeed god fearingly pious-
Now, the ashram has become just like Rama Modi’s shop outside the courthouse, everyone clamoring to speak, unwilling to let anyone else.
Brother, you’ve read the Shastras and Puranas, you know that there is no greater sin than to look out for ourselves and not for others, he who creates difficulties for his fellow citizens is not a human being…
You all know the old story of the Donkey growing miserable from carrying the heavy bucket of salt…
Quiet, Quiet we have no time for stories, make your point quickly please.
I haven’t read the shastras, and puranas, I am a poor man, a simple man, child of the mud and soil and sugarcane-
Hear, hear. So are we all. The poor are forever to be oppressed, mahant or military cap it doesn’t matter.
Whenever you say Police Police its as if somebody dumped chilli powder in your ears. When molasses endure suffering- it gets the name Sugar-
In jail, when the police tried to break our hunger fasts by giving us milk sweets We say Give the milk sweets to your bastard children-
Just look at the chameleon Military Cap, just yesterday he was fighting and quarrelling with the yadavs, I wasn’t born yesterday. He is a chameleon I say, no matter what the blanket of wisdom, or that he was in jail as a freedom fighter-
Chapter 5. Khelavan’s Life and Thoughts and Dreams
If a man sleeps in the courtyard you can be sure he’s sick with a fever, a cold, a headache or something. But a man without a wife- why should he sleep in the courtyard? A man sleeps thus only if he wishes to get his wife’s pampering.
Khelavan’s wife had been rubbing Khelavan’s belly with a bitter smelling oil and his belly was making noises. The wife was irritated at not being able to smoke the hookah, and had said so.
When he thought of Lachmi sitting next to him in the meeting at the mahant’s ashram in the morning, and the smell of her body, turmeric and sweat, he couldn’t sleep notwithstanding his wife’s miffed massaging, and began thinking of his mother. She used to be mad when people called him an orphan-boy- You don’t become an orphan if your father runs away or dies, your mother has to die too. You are not an orphan, she used to say, rubbing the oil onto his lower back with her tired, bony, dry hands, sitting beside him and putting damp cloth on his forehead all night when he had the fever, praying and cursing God saying What kind of God is he who calls and wants only the good ones by His side?
He then felt tearful as he remembered his mother spending her many days massaging her father in law, late into the night, her eyes heavy and drooping, but if even one sign of drowsiness, the old man would slap her SMACK, it really stung, he had spent much of his childhood too, beaten by that old man whose frail looks were belied by his slapping strength and power. His mother would try to save something for him everyday from his greedy grandfather by skimming the cream from the milk and hiding it under his rice.
Sometimes as punishment, he would be woken up in the middle of the night by the grandfather and told to graze the buffaloes. The howl outside would be hooting ominously- but many of those times, in those nights that nudged past the return of the morning sun, he would fall almost into a trance, all alone with his buffaloes in a seeming far corner of a hushed blind star painted universe.
He felt an erection and realized he had also somehow in all this been thinking about Lachmi. His wife, looking disgustedly at him and his body (as if they were two separable things), said she was very tired and had to go to sleep and had to wake up very early in the morning and that she had no time for such things. Seeing this expression on his wife’s face, he felt his body respond by going mollifyingly limp, and now realized that even the thought of Lachmi could do no more magic at least this insight, with his belly ache and disgusted wife and all
Chapter 6: Melancholia souffle
Lachmi marveled at how, as her breast buds were growing, her hair was changing into something more cooperative, blowing gaily and even evenly in the wind. She had remembered the many men’s eyes in the ashram looking at it, but most especially the military cap and Khelavan. She held close to her the new rosewood clasp the military cap had surreptitiously gifted her during the mahant’s interminable dream.
So he had even said he would bring her special city shampoo for her hair tonight, and here he was, coming. Military cap took one look at her, and then with a quick thrust of the hand undid the clasp and let her newly wild hair all free, while his fingers pressed down hard on her scalp. She gasped, and surrended to his probing her scalp in the pitch darkness outside the ashram but near enough that she could hear the awful mahant begin to ask where Lachmi was. If she was caught…
The Military Cap man had a strange and powerful gentleness, and expertise that made her wonder- irreverently she thought- if he had been a barber once. How could someone so illustrious have spotted poor little Lachmi, pathetic keep of a blind mahant, taken an interest in her, and then made this weird request to shampoo her. How did he already possess a rosewood clasp to give her, did he always carry one in his pocket, she thought giggledyging. A man sent to catch the thugee freedom fighters was spending his nights shampooing a low caste orphan girl. Strange are the ways of the Lord, as the mahant always said, and Lachmi felt a new respect for him.
She saw his serious face, his unmoving mustache and unmoving feet, his serious hands full of lather, and she was wonderstruck in heaven. May this go on forever, she thought melting into complete passivity, she who had known nothing in life but work and molestation. Now the tiredness of her entire life took over her, her torso and each limb became heavy as jackfruit. Like Sobhan the drummer his hands moved in beats of eight.
Her eyes bright, her body levitating, and her perineum tightening and relaxing tightening and relaxing, yes for once she was unviolated, by this kind, grave mustached man, till now, she thought, only unfairly referred to in the village in dread and contempt as Military Cap.
She felt happy and steaming as shit compost after the monsoon. This will go on forever, she promised herself, as the shampoo made great rainbowed lather soufflés in the dark forest undergrowth, while far away the voice of the mahant kept receding and receding, becoming ambivalent and harsh as the chirp and hysteria of the crickets all around, while she felt all lush and yielding, her heart leaping like hilsa, like the unrushed, unrushable rising of chapatti dough over a fire
Four years ago, the soldiers had surrounded the village with military show and set it on
fire.
Corpses roasted like fish etc- even the crows didn’t eat them.
So today Biranchi Das of the Tatma quarter took a seer of ghee and a gelded coat to bribe the officers.
“A reward of a thousand and one rupees to any villager who gives intelligence to catch runaway freedom fighters” said the military cap.
All the village could only mutter, (reverently irrelevantly as it were ) Gosai Tulasidas said in the ramayan he is fortunate who even has a glimpse of the LordGod.
Yes we will help the sarkar.
Good, said military cap, Indeed aren’t you a servant of the country?- If so how can you not join together with us and help.
In the Old Days, Chapter 2:
The Indigo sahibs had large bungalows and large ponds where the ox carts returning from the Ganges halt and the old women search for medicinal roots and the young play cautiously in the ruins.
When the sahab laid the foundation of the bungalow a drummer was sent to announce it all over the nearby villages.
He changed the name of the village to his bride’s name, had the district board build a road for the Rautahat station, opened a post office.
The old women still speak of the beauty of the bride from Calcutta, but she died of malaria within the week.
There should have been a dispensary before the post office. But the furious, inconsolate sahab rode his horse (faster than the train they say) carrying his dying bride on it.
To no avail. The bride died. Then the Germans built synthetic indigo, the indigo era ended.
At his bride’s grave, the mad sahab mourned all day: Darling, the doctors won’t come, won’t come, he was heard to utter to her gravestone.
That was many years ago. All that place is haunted now. Only last week Nandalal of the Yadav quarter was whipped to death by an evil female spirit-- whipped by a whip made of snakes.
Some of these ditches are sacred though, lotuses, especially on the day of the full moon in January.
That was the time the Yadavs took to wearing the sacred thread. But the kshatriyas said: Whoever heard of a plowhand being a kshatriya Shiva ho Shiva ho!
You may call them upstarts but nowadays nobody dare care the Yadava quarter the cowherd quarter.
Still, all remember their leader herding buffaloes only ten years ago, being ordered about by everyone!
Nowadays many disputes are settled by all the communities together in the wrestling ground where the leatherworker Shobhan beats the drum dhaaaka dhaaaka dhinna dhinnna to announce the kacheri entertainments.
Chapter 3, interlude
“You are a servant of the country. What is worldly wealth to you?”
Its not as if you are some outsider. Your mother’s sister could even be my father’s brother’s wife. So you and I are cousin-brothers.
“A house isn’t a home without an old woman in it” as the proverb goes.
But how can the old woman do everything at the same time- churning the butter and at the same time collecting cow dung in the cowshed at the same time as going from house to house pounding and grinding grain?
Lets go dig up sweet potatoes in the jungle near the old bungalow.
Besides, foreign medicine has cow’s blood in it.
Are you chewing your betel nut, or your own words? Speak clearly.
Brother, if somebody dies and everybody goes off to Kashi with the ashes, who’s going to stay at home to lick the plates after the funeral feast?
Chapter 4. The Mahant’s Dream
This february weather is so cold it could chill even a tiger.
Earliest morning at the toothless mahant sahab’s ashram:
Maya trembles as the all-knowing eyes of the Lord Open/ Satguru Sahab awaken! Awaken! Bhora bhayo bhava bharam— song sung as if the tame deer of the ashram was prancing-
O dispel the darkness of ignorance-
Eat tapioca for fever. The Satguru has sent me a dream today. Let him who knows time, place and cause of things interpret the dream for us.
Inset: Dream / Sequence: Preparations for the killing of the evil shape shifting demon Pralamba.
I was surrounded and glorified by relatives of my wife’s family and was in a joyous mood and playing hide and seek surrounded in picturesque-ness with my herd of cows and the heat of the sun had not sucked off yet the verdancy of the land. Thereupon in the guise of a virgin maiden a demon stole upon us. I recognized him immediately, but did not speak, rather welcomed him into our play, all the while thinking how to kill him. I then said, lets make two groups, and play various games, and the losers must carry the winners on their backs. But when the demon could not carry me, he assumed his original form of a cloud flashing illuminations and carrying the moon, his entire body plated in gold. I chased him across the sky, with furrowed brow and hair and eye of fire, intent. There was all around us the thundering sound of falling trees, Then suddenly the demon assumed the form of a giant crane with a sharp beak, and approaching me suddenly, swallowed me up entire. All around, my family and friends fainted. But I was burning like fire with my fury in his throat, and as I from within blocked the passages of all his vital airs, he was forced to disgorge me, even as his very eyes popped out of his head and his eyeballs were rolling here and there on the ground, like marbles for children to play with. I was disgorged, uninjured, furious, and when he, blind, approached me again with his beak, my righteous rage tore his beak apart like the twin blades of common grass. When last I struck him, like unto a lightning cleaving mount meru, he engorged himself of his entrails, and black clouds of smoke went out in all ten directions. All around, the relatives, flabber-gobber-smacked at these swift turns of events, began to hail me as the incarnate of the Lord Forever, Bravo Bravo, offering homage with conch, bugle horns and drums. They embraced me as if I had returned from the dead, while above, the gods were greatly satisfied and threw down flowers of marigold and jasmine from Indra’s garden.
It is wonderful that the words of the knowers of brahman are never untruthful. As I watched the satguru in amazement at his deeds in my dream, he suddenly turned to me and said:
Though you are blind the light of your inner eye is extraordinary with divine light. Give a feast to the whole village, jilabis and sugared curd (make separate arrangements for the Thakurs and Brahmins to eat away from the others, and the sepoy people and Military Cap from the cowherds…)
But outside, the villagers gossip:
The blind mahant is no mahant, a mahant who keeps a woman is no mahant, they’ll say she is only a servant, but we know better. I knew her when she wore only one piece of clothing, and cried every night from the work, her eyes swollen like kadam flowers-
though they say, he only keeps her as a daughter for her education, we know better, we’ve heard it before- Now the previous mahant, the satguru was truly a great man…
We remember how strict he was, how as punishment once, we remember a young man who had to hold a pot of water on his head for five hours balanced only on 5 betel nuts, if even a drop fell, he was beaten with a broom—the old mahant was indeed god fearingly pious-
Now, the ashram has become just like Rama Modi’s shop outside the courthouse, everyone clamoring to speak, unwilling to let anyone else.
Brother, you’ve read the Shastras and Puranas, you know that there is no greater sin than to look out for ourselves and not for others, he who creates difficulties for his fellow citizens is not a human being…
You all know the old story of the Donkey growing miserable from carrying the heavy bucket of salt…
Quiet, Quiet we have no time for stories, make your point quickly please.
I haven’t read the shastras, and puranas, I am a poor man, a simple man, child of the mud and soil and sugarcane-
Hear, hear. So are we all. The poor are forever to be oppressed, mahant or military cap it doesn’t matter.
Whenever you say Police Police its as if somebody dumped chilli powder in your ears. When molasses endure suffering- it gets the name Sugar-
In jail, when the police tried to break our hunger fasts by giving us milk sweets We say Give the milk sweets to your bastard children-
Just look at the chameleon Military Cap, just yesterday he was fighting and quarrelling with the yadavs, I wasn’t born yesterday. He is a chameleon I say, no matter what the blanket of wisdom, or that he was in jail as a freedom fighter-
Chapter 5. Khelavan’s Life and Thoughts and Dreams
If a man sleeps in the courtyard you can be sure he’s sick with a fever, a cold, a headache or something. But a man without a wife- why should he sleep in the courtyard? A man sleeps thus only if he wishes to get his wife’s pampering.
Khelavan’s wife had been rubbing Khelavan’s belly with a bitter smelling oil and his belly was making noises. The wife was irritated at not being able to smoke the hookah, and had said so.
When he thought of Lachmi sitting next to him in the meeting at the mahant’s ashram in the morning, and the smell of her body, turmeric and sweat, he couldn’t sleep notwithstanding his wife’s miffed massaging, and began thinking of his mother. She used to be mad when people called him an orphan-boy- You don’t become an orphan if your father runs away or dies, your mother has to die too. You are not an orphan, she used to say, rubbing the oil onto his lower back with her tired, bony, dry hands, sitting beside him and putting damp cloth on his forehead all night when he had the fever, praying and cursing God saying What kind of God is he who calls and wants only the good ones by His side?
He then felt tearful as he remembered his mother spending her many days massaging her father in law, late into the night, her eyes heavy and drooping, but if even one sign of drowsiness, the old man would slap her SMACK, it really stung, he had spent much of his childhood too, beaten by that old man whose frail looks were belied by his slapping strength and power. His mother would try to save something for him everyday from his greedy grandfather by skimming the cream from the milk and hiding it under his rice.
Sometimes as punishment, he would be woken up in the middle of the night by the grandfather and told to graze the buffaloes. The howl outside would be hooting ominously- but many of those times, in those nights that nudged past the return of the morning sun, he would fall almost into a trance, all alone with his buffaloes in a seeming far corner of a hushed blind star painted universe.
He felt an erection and realized he had also somehow in all this been thinking about Lachmi. His wife, looking disgustedly at him and his body (as if they were two separable things), said she was very tired and had to go to sleep and had to wake up very early in the morning and that she had no time for such things. Seeing this expression on his wife’s face, he felt his body respond by going mollifyingly limp, and now realized that even the thought of Lachmi could do no more magic at least this insight, with his belly ache and disgusted wife and all
Chapter 6: Melancholia souffle
Lachmi marveled at how, as her breast buds were growing, her hair was changing into something more cooperative, blowing gaily and even evenly in the wind. She had remembered the many men’s eyes in the ashram looking at it, but most especially the military cap and Khelavan. She held close to her the new rosewood clasp the military cap had surreptitiously gifted her during the mahant’s interminable dream.
So he had even said he would bring her special city shampoo for her hair tonight, and here he was, coming. Military cap took one look at her, and then with a quick thrust of the hand undid the clasp and let her newly wild hair all free, while his fingers pressed down hard on her scalp. She gasped, and surrended to his probing her scalp in the pitch darkness outside the ashram but near enough that she could hear the awful mahant begin to ask where Lachmi was. If she was caught…
The Military Cap man had a strange and powerful gentleness, and expertise that made her wonder- irreverently she thought- if he had been a barber once. How could someone so illustrious have spotted poor little Lachmi, pathetic keep of a blind mahant, taken an interest in her, and then made this weird request to shampoo her. How did he already possess a rosewood clasp to give her, did he always carry one in his pocket, she thought giggledyging. A man sent to catch the thugee freedom fighters was spending his nights shampooing a low caste orphan girl. Strange are the ways of the Lord, as the mahant always said, and Lachmi felt a new respect for him.
She saw his serious face, his unmoving mustache and unmoving feet, his serious hands full of lather, and she was wonderstruck in heaven. May this go on forever, she thought melting into complete passivity, she who had known nothing in life but work and molestation. Now the tiredness of her entire life took over her, her torso and each limb became heavy as jackfruit. Like Sobhan the drummer his hands moved in beats of eight.
Her eyes bright, her body levitating, and her perineum tightening and relaxing tightening and relaxing, yes for once she was unviolated, by this kind, grave mustached man, till now, she thought, only unfairly referred to in the village in dread and contempt as Military Cap.
She felt happy and steaming as shit compost after the monsoon. This will go on forever, she promised herself, as the shampoo made great rainbowed lather soufflés in the dark forest undergrowth, while far away the voice of the mahant kept receding and receding, becoming ambivalent and harsh as the chirp and hysteria of the crickets all around, while she felt all lush and yielding, her heart leaping like hilsa, like the unrushed, unrushable rising of chapatti dough over a fire
right side
even reading, thinking about paintings- make dreams so much more vivid, larger, closer, & even somewhat organized in the shapes & lighting that you've been trying to get on canvas-
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