naming the other's face

that we choose to call them terrorists, that terror is the dominant face, mode, mood. if we say it saddens us, depresses us, rather than terrifies, how may 'we' differently act; or, even, what might it take to just acknowledge the simple panicked, feeling (& yet also the need & finding of refuge) of the desire for pure animal's flight-

a mood does not belong to parcellable time-- hence the condemnation of the holocaust-denier, but no equivalent condemnation of the imperialism/colonialism-denier; or the fact that slavery was unfortunate history (& hence & thus fortunately passed), but no term exists for the perpetualism of the racism-denier, for (s)he who denies that race pervades us still

2. a key political question for the next half century & beyond is if the united states (& to a lesser extent the eurostate) will accept to peacefully & non invasively, non abrasively decline-peace depends on all countries' maturity on this-& india, china, etc would do well to accept that we are going to be very largely very poor for much longer, for centuries perhaps, a longer period than anyone's decline

translation of section of muktibodh's brahmarakshas

[found thanks to meera, & painstakingly retyped by her, from around 2000, m phil class at delhi university]


That side of the city near the ruins
an abandoned, empty well
and within, in cold darkness
in waters deep within
amid deep-sunken stairs
in the old stale puddle…
I can not follow these seeming-foundations
these depths

surrounding that well, entangled
silently stood the fig trees
in those hang the nests of the night bird abandoned,
brown, round

The smells of a hundred past pieties
green, jungly, raw
swim in the air and become the weighted doubt
of some unknown eminence
that rattles the heart

on the railings of the well, beguiling, green
elbows resting
sits the white flower-star tree

and nearby,
a flashing redflowered cluster
my kanher
calling me to that edge of danger
where the black mouth of the well
glances upward toward the sky’s void

in the void of the well’s thick darkness
sits the brahmarakshas
where from within rises echo after echo
like the mutterings of the insane
speculations,
impurity.
to wash away, at every moment
the shadow of – impurity
day and night, to make clean—
brahmarakshas, scouring his body
with the claws of his hand, again
and again hands chest mouth
still it remains…
still it remains

and…from the lips
wondrous strotras, mantras
fevered, chaste sanskrit curses,
crevices on the forehead weave
glistening strands of thought
in a continuous bathing’s insane flow
-- life’s sympathy blots
but, in the well’s deep inner wall
diagonal sun-rays fall and
motes rise, when
light surfaces
he thinks the sun has bowed and saluted him.

when moonlight forgets its way
and its rays bounce off the walls
he thinks it adores him as the
Venerable knower.

body and mind pierced, yet
he rejoices, feeling the sky
too has humbly accepted.
and with a twofold, frightening virility
his understanding mind ranges
through the folk-tales of Sumer-Babylonia, mellifluent Vedic hymns
today’s chands, mantras, theorems, theories
of Marx Engels Russel Toynbee Heidegger Spengler Sartre even Gandhi
everyone’s proof afresh commented on –
all this as he bathes in the well’s dense greenness.

…this thundering, echoing, moving
darkness-- bringing up phonemes
obscure words revolving anew
each word cutting up its resonance
each form battling its reflection
maimed
becoming
the echo that wars with its echo

upon the well’s rails
beguiling green elbows rest, and the
white flower-stars listen
-- to these echoes
the delicate fruits of the gooseberry tree
listen, the ancient fig
listens, listen too to the tragedy that meanders
in this insane allegory
-- all barred within this old well

owls' strange glitter eyes low-wing'd on hilltop:


less than a city. a bay. late upturned ocean's


light, of an end november's thanksgiving.


to return bag full of food to an interior

emptied, alchemised of silence



presence only in this eremitic ghost's laugh:

circular breathing

the snake slithers lost

sees the old places

disappearing.


it does not remember

everywhere all around the old palaces canyons of music

hung unsupported from the sky, invisible.


the heart of the fig was still cold

a live inner red of hibiscus


graves stay fresh, diaries with dates
but no years, suspended

timeliness.


in a sort of morning languour and at the sleep's edge
a lion peeps in inquisitive. make instruments of snake-skin

drive them out from paradise, but their body still holds some. walk


and walk and walk to see these last lions.

& images bloat and wave away,
swollen eyed & with the slashed tafetta

torn silk of rumpled skin


walk and walk and walk to see
waterbuck

catch polymbronic wasps


move in the sand's city like a snake on water
writing a disappearing script a

horse in orbiting gallop


like children's voices burying deeper
in time as it passes


eyes untouchable & in a different layer
from the faces in the old
sepia's oyster'd womb.


the grandmother's arms that reach below the knees
her looking perched in some elsewhere


some older past of the past
to her granma whose figure

did not come up legible
in these mediums of dark

so lost its the oldest memory

of the oldest when the oldest was
young she was beautiful


but not alive in light no memory
but mine and i cannot breathe

her luminosity into the camera's eye

so yes lost and the loss of even what was
lost and many many further mores-


her gait that of the cross rhyming drums.


the outermost rind of the brain perspiring

in this heat's evocation of ghost.


such landscapes command belief and no
malarial malaise resolves


a second, a third, a hundredth funeral and still
the ghost dissolves recurs calls deciphers

our hand's writing

her smile her briefcase her glasses her slipping
hearing her beer


2. yellowish curve contours the late
afternoon's high plain. midst painted canvas tepees & boarded up
small businesses by wet after-rain potholes,

a miniature stadium where the cameras catch up
on the dancers between 7 bass drums & amplification equipment
& soft voiced mcs making a strike for each tribe

from somewhere ornamented voices in falsetto,
vocables in a united concentrate & then
single file flamboyance, singers in farmer's caps

men dance alone, women in 2s & 3s

hours & hours of this owl-ish monophonic dance midst brief,
interrupting ceremonies beating percussive plancks & gambling bones & curing
by medicinal bundles & viscera of small local animals

wind instruments represent the superb naturale buttons
right song for the right anything, anything can be made
more auspicious more potent memorable w strings of deer hoove




3. night's cold

wave-rushes / the zebra's eye

lash lone in the single / intruding,


invading silence of space and


gorge. glad of

the hour's temptation for it was the path


elephants loved for its moistness an' shade



night runs its frenzy like a mute/ rolling, mountain range :-


3. one day i decided/to open that door again

to profane the relic, to put back the wandering ghosts amid the mice & bats

them bespectacled ghosts sucking at beehives, wearing snakeskin
trailing rat droppings.

how they solved the past
slowed the frame drank the carbolic acid.

they had no hunger. their teeth were failing falling

they needed no food. some petulantly obese some thin as teenagers

five red flames ring their hair they look unappeasably sad under unblinking lashes


i did not disturb them. i closed the door again.


4. ensphered in rain


a mosquito net afloat in sapphire forest air.

to the ear's farthest horizon again

again

the rain's pitterpatterpitterpitterpatterpitter roar


again-against



ascends the cochlea's spiral

world at -9

the quarter in the sky white
moon on the blue hills on
the green traffic arrow-Go

this was outside. the colors clean.


inside, and before, a pianist played
ravel's gaspard de la nuit.



the woman at the piano turned
to a single slather of a
wild calligraphic

stroke

piano keys snake
down the spine

flickering tremollos but all
still plosive


the call of the moral
life of joy

ears grow into elephant wing
strained dough in bubble


piano rises. floats & trans-
ports becomes a fist


banging walls & ceilings


the skull a drum


contra schumann it is
joy that breaks
in the fingers's bones

and falls as love


what a frozen little land
inside the piano.


immensity, it makes one feel
as a single
strand of

hair


in an emptied opera-house.

europe's winter breaking
over the berkeley mediterranean

the moon a white cancerous growing

quarter the traffic still weavering home

up the hill's twistings &

blue tablecloth sunset