jedicist.org Blog

Baldwin’s “blind fever” (Notes of a Native Son 70) has today been subsumed and isolated, turned against itself. Since the Civil Rights movement failed to secure any meaningful equality or standard of life for the descendents of American slavery, one could say that nothing has changed for Black America, but it has. Harlem has become gentrified, white, safe. The ghetto has become more marginalized, removed from Morningside Heights, institutionalized, segregated. The prison system has mushroomed into a hungry beast that thrives on Black rage. The projects—the urban outposts of the prisons—serve to turn Black rage against itself, where it can be closely monitored by the NYPD, invisible to the rest of the city, a threat only to those bored and incarcerated in the zoo. Those whose passions put themselves outside the lines of acceptable submission are fed directly into the maw of razor wire and automated cellblocks.

I am a neighbor of The Red Hook Houses. The projects surround my small white house on both sides, looming over my windows. I am utterly safe. Because I am not directly involved in the life of the projects, because I am white, automatically distant, as I drag my dirty laundry through their world, and yet I can hear their rage because I am not deaf. As if I were, I listen to a youth in red roar into his cell phone, “dat mutherfucker’s stepped over the line, ‘s just askin to be shot,” And I know dat motherfucker who’s getting it looks just like the one shouting into the phone, who looks just like the one on the other end of the call, because I hear it also on the street between the bodega and the Laundromat, on the way to the train, outside the police station. He inflicts the distilled violence of the world upon his peers, or at least their pit bulls bred to fight, the suffering that comes, if from nothing else, from neglect, and some day they’ll end up on the inside, where bigger men will in turn inflect themselves upon him (this I also know because I’ve heard the suffering of creative souls in prisons, where I taught a creative writing class for three years).

Meanwhile, Red Hook can continue to be a hip summer destination for the artistic classes; I can move peacefully in ignorance into and about my house. Here, Harlem is a memory of grandfathers and my alcoholic lonely old superintendent, who shows me his bullet wounds he got back in Harlem in ’82, the very visible invisible man of this rotting house, flooded by my waste (the sewers under my house are clogged, and all the drainage gets backed up into his basement apartment).

There was something admirable, revolutionary, writerly about Baldwin’s fever that burned against the manifestations of oppression—white people enforcing Jim Crow. There is nothing so romantic about today’s segregations, about traumatized youth who turn their trauma onto each other. And so, it ought not to be talked about. American civil society has a blind spot for the prisons of its own country, and the ghettos that are the prison’s urban incarnation. These prisons are not Abu-Graib or Guantanamo. They are legal, through and through; it were born of legality; their father was Reagan, its grandfather Jim Crow. This has been supported and escalated by every president since Reagan. Obama is not the kind of Black affected by this system. In frustration and despair, I’ve tried to stop talking about it; my voice is not big enough, not yet; I’ve fled to other, more optimistic topics, because, quite simply, I want my art to have access to beauty.

Yes, I’m just posting my imaginary waste on the blog, the scraps that otherwise would never see the light of day, things that in another age would lie dusty somewhere in a drawer, but now I can offer to you, because why not.  But no longer is my blog such a catalog of exotic adventures, no longer does it have the allure of far-away truths, and if you’ve continued to read it through this lapse into unreality, I thank you and appriciate you.

—–

Chin “Nose” Malai sat on a dilapidated movie theater seat, the type that bounces rather than reclines, peering over a descending wave of filthy heads.  A high-ceilinged room with a big inert gray screen—a relic of a bygone age—and about three hundred ill-fed unwashed bodies.  All had once been a possible revolutionaries—at least idealists, maybe artists, egomaniacs, but now rested together as one mass of flesh.  He might be able to remember not being in the theater, but it was days ago—impossible to tell, and he wasn’t really sure how he had ended up here.  He dozed, in and out of awareness, the incessant fluorescent light always waiting for him to wake to pierce his corneas with reality.  No fans stirred the heavy air, and the heat filled Chin with a relentless self renewing stench.  They were fed, occasionally, at random intervals.  Nose had no way to tell how much time had passed.

And then, as the seeming eternity was turning into bedsores, especially focused on the area of his left butt-cheek, the fluorescent lights dimmed.  At first Nose thought that he was losing consciousness, but soon the place was totally dark: three hundred blind mice in a hole.  As the light faded, the ambient chatter of the fleshy room grew to a crescendo in confusion.  The darkness was absolute enough to give Chin swimming hallucinations.  His butt still ached from the chair, which swayed below him in the dark.

The last thing he had expected was for the screen to come alive, but a sudden and shocking beam of silver light slammed across the room and plastered itself against the whiteness.

Whiteness. That’s what he had thought, just now, plastered itself against the whiteness. The word echoed in Chin’s skull.  It had erupted as if subliminally queued. It had imposed itself on him.  As he stared at the phenomenally bright rectangle of whiteness that consumed him.

He found he could not move his arms.

Big black block letters appeared on the whiteness, or perhaps in his cornea, or perhaps deeper along his optic nerve as they approached comprehension: you are witness.

Whitness?

one’s self I sing, a simple separate person.

Which was almost certainly not on the screen, so Chin was vaguely proud of them, being his own.

Which screen summarily went black, not off, but a dynamic seething gray, in which shapes could be made out.  Green began to pervade the picture.  And faces stared back at Nose, black and green, as if taken by night vision cameras, as if to prevent the subject from knowing they were being filmed, like lions behaving like themselves at night under the watchful eye of National Geographic.

Why was he being shown his own theater, his own prison?  Some exquisitely conceived psychological torture? Some self-imaging technique?

As soon as the question was conceived, he began looking for himself.  But to no avail.  He should be right there, right in front of himself, if the picture was a mirrorlike reverse image.  He wasn’t.  He looked at the guy next to him in the darkness.  He wasn’t on the screen. The whole theater had stilled to motionless.  The faces on-screen were writhing and farting.

He unzipped his pants.

In her old bed, Solemna’s flesh still ached. She would not be free again until the morning, when she’d have to worry about his breakfast, and the ensuing silence. The silence of ash, of hard dry land that would need to be plowed soon.

But now he needed her for what any body could provide-warmth, resistance. His hands eroded her body, telling a lie. He grunted, telling a truth.

His flesh cascaded upon her, then collapsing motionless. As if resolution had been reached after all these years. She felt her own breath. She did not feel his. She knew he wouldn’t get up. She wiggled out from beneath his body.

In the mud, his flesh was still smoldering. The fire made the mud boil around his feet, made the riverbank come alive with hunger. She had cooked all of his food for twenty five years, and she would not be free without him, either. In another age, she thought, she would cast her living body into the flames alongside him. It had been done before, though she did not know whether it was done of love or duty. Some things she would do for duty: she will burn the red silk sari she had been married in. Some things she would do for love: she will climb a mountain alone to break her bangles at on the summit. An then she will be free of both.

She will never be free. Power is only absolute in absence; he will always have been.

He had said to her, once, “Heaven is a temporary punishment for good deeds accumulated. Merits exhausted, souls fall back to bodies like bodies falling to earth on the battlefield.”

That was twenty years ago, when he still talked in metaphor and knew it was only that. Now he was a fire built from a tree felled by his wife.

She could do all that she ever wanted to. She could do nothing. She would live nobly off of charity. She would go days on end eating nothing. She would never ask for food, but she would receive it, nonetheless.

No, she would not. She would continue to cook, because she already knew how.

She felt her own breath. She began to disrobe, unfolding the pleats of her red sari. She wore a white garment; never again would she adorn herself in color. She thought of Draupadi, whose virtue five husbands failed to protect, whose colorful sari defended her.

There is no blameless one. They both had committed evil, justified only by the perceived righteousness of her cause. And she had won.

This piece was written following the form of David Markson’s brilliant novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I cannot recommend that novel enough–you don’t want it to work it’s way into the canon in twenty years and not have read it.

”

The fact is, I did not buy all the books I own.

Well, I should say, I have made some particularly good book purchases, but it just so happens that I also own a lot of books by chance.

For example, just the other day as I was up to my elbows bagging the soggy kitchen trash, my heathen roommate threw Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) by Herman Hesse across the room. I caught it with my gut. I will read it as soon as my teacher stops dictating my weekly reading.

P. Lal had a correspondence with Hesse, if I remember right. Had some influence over Siddhartha.

No, actually upon reflection, it was only P. Lal’s wife’s father. Shrimati Lal was her name, of course, but I cannot remember her maiden name, which would be her father’s name.

P. Lal claims that his wife dated Robert Pirsig is college in Michigan. She denies this.

I do not own P. Lal’s book by chance. One does not own a book by P. Lal by chance. I can hardly claim to have bought it, although I did. I do own it; many of them, in fact.

That is to say, I paid a small price for these books of P. Lal, but they were really brought into my life by good fortune.

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories by Tim Burton came into my life by chance. When I was moving out of an attic apartment in Providence, it lay unclaimed. It is a book with very few words, and with illustrations that look just like A Nightmare Before Christmas. It has a very high production value, for a book, which is why it doesn’t really count, as a book. One would think, it having so few words, I would at least have bothered to read them, but I have not.

I own the Dover Thrift Edition of A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen because it has been assigned to me three times, and so carry a faint dislike for it. I must have bought it, but not the first time it was assigned in college, having bought a copy in Colorado at some point. Such was the nature of my education.

There are three attractively cheap collections of various plays of Bertolt Brecht, because once I found him, I could not be satiated. If I reread them, I will be blissfully happy to be doing so.

A lonely planet guide to Iceland, because at some point my fantasies over-brimmed on amazon.com. I don’t know when, though, because I can’t find the year of publication anywhere on this edition. I tried to sell it, the bookstore wouldn’t take such a thing.

I have just returned from defecation in the bathroom to which I have relegated Pegasus Descending: The Book of Bad Verse by Keith Waldrop. This book I have also tried to sell without having read it. I read a lot of bad poetry in my life—especially during periods when I was a teacher. Now, to celebrate good bowel movements, I read in it randomly, and learn that many great writers wrote at least some terrible verse. But they can be excused. Hopefully this response also can be excused.

The surfaces of books—I mean the covers—are paramount. I want to make a good show of myself, even if only to myself. I think that Miss Lonelyhearts has the best cover, which still doesn’t explain why I have two copies of it.

I am waiting to reread A Lover’s Discourse by Barthes until I am again a lover.

Books owned by my father have a different aura entirely; I miss them since I mailed the bulk of them back to our shared library. The New American Poetry was abused by me way beyond repair, so all that I have left is a second anthology in a similar vein, a book about the poetics of The New American Poetry. And, of course, the book by himself, Minding American Education by Martin Bickman, which could have saved America if more people had bought it in time.

But again I must be showing off.

And, of course, I have been avoiding mention of the first edition of Gravity’s Rainbow, which has against our will turned into something of a holy text, being one the only copy in existence that was read through so many times with so much adoration by both of us. Of all books, that one particularly should not be treated with reverence. However, I remember seeing it on my father’s desk early in life, and knowing that I was waiting to read it. Now it is held together with packing tape and a spiderman band-aid.

Might Frank-Thoughtless have not been Frank-Performer, living, perchance, on the edge of Wealth in a dilapidated apartment, a favorite of the children, a Frank who accommodates all their love and more, as he accumulates small devotions, as sharp as the rocks that bounce harmlessly off of police barricades?

Indeed he might have been.

Frank-Thoughtless have been Phranque-Night-Dreamer? Might not that engorged harvest moon have gripped him by his very veins? Was he not charging topless through the windy night, clinging to himself by his reins, drinking the darkness, to encounter a creative force where there was none? Was he not drawn forth, his book, half-read then, fledgling in his awareness, burning a hole in his purse, his pen bulging in his pocket, hollow drums unfilling his trunk, his guitar, exhausted from the day’s abuse, crying for him at home?

Would not this Phranque be breaking the law and all laws of reason and sense with every waking breath? Would not this Phranque be pure of mind but engorged of body, drowning in his own figs, caring for a sickly earth with a sickly body?

He might be, indeed.

And might he not have been Phranque-on-Fire? As a Fire was the destination he sought, nothing more than those selfsame fires that had warmed his ancestors’ harmless loins during ancient similar nights, but now a grave transgression against the city he had left behind, not to mention the love he had left behind.

And might be this Phranque dancing? Flying in a quivering orbit around the raging sun of a pagan fire, grinding his ellipses ever wider to include the whole silent selfish crowd, flailing on high, beating the hard mud on which he walked, simply circling, slowly circling, some meaning he refuses to see in himself.

Indeed, and indeed!

And would he not be as Phranque-In-Truth-of-Paranoia? And would this Phranque lay awake awaiting a Revolution he would never himself generate, heartbreakingly, and not for lack of effort, but simple historical circumstance, uncontrollable, even by an elite and malevolent few, for would not this Phranque have seen a Masonic face where there was only the schizoid fragmentation and paranoid impulses of a manufactured population, having manufactured themselves to refuse his own image alongside all those who would be his brothers.

He might! He might!

And might this Frank-Thoughtless also have been Phranque-Desiring? Too much in love and too little in beard? Satisfied eternally, yet constantly hungry for No-One-Knows.

Would the bonfire Phranque-Desiring had built burn all night, burning as he might fly around it in ecstatic orbit alone among a small multitude of inward selves, inward himself, in a paralysis of inwardness, turning planetward as the ground turned beneath him, reaching out to the mindless selves staring at the flames, forcing them to interact and acknowledge him, and yet he going home into the silent night unsatisfied back into his apartment outside Wealth?

But might this Phranque actually be our own Frank, solitary and unknown?

In the end, you are right, ash is ash.

I just took down a post…I’m revising that piece, but I’m also thinking that since I would like to place that piece in a publication, I probably ought not to publish it first on my blog.  Some places dislike that.  So, here’s something to tide us over.  I was supposed to write a thing that was influenced by my recent reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov, so I wrote a gloss on a poem I wrote on my typewriter in Kolkata:

Where my self did take myself         1

a thought to lie in rot

rebirth to take or not

what ought to have been lost

was lost.                                                5

I only seek to submit

to myself the only place

to deposit what once was ash

I follow myself

neither that will yield

what shall forever be veiled

the opposite now unknown

till time definite

ends my now.                                  15

The weeks cycle on

each day blends in

to the now remains in

reclusion and rhythm;

kaidas code seconds selfish        20

until leaving, that fierce

inevitable rupture,

the step that will close this chapter

of finger speed thru kaidas faster

devour selves in dha                     25

thirikita dha ge na

dha ge thin na ki na

drown lusts in ink.

Line 1: Where my self did take myself

Namely, the Lake Gardens neighborhood of Calcutta, West Bengal, India, where the poet found I, a massive Smith-Corona manual typewriter with the painted inscription “Property of the State Bank of India” upon my cover waiting for him. He immediately removed the cover so he could see my hammers strike. Five months of listless production and countless episodes of solitary insanity later, in February of 2009, as he stared down another six months before returning to his homeland, his caress upon my carapace produced this, an unremarkable poem among several.

Line 2: a thought lie in rot

Desire, savagely unfulfilled; he used to look at my rollers longingly, as if I could replace his being-alone.

5-6: Lost

We can only speculate as to what the poet had lost; certainly he did not leave my side often enough to have lost anything material.

8: ash

The sight of riverside pyres burning flesh become an obsession of any visitor to my country. The poet smoked copious quantities of cheap marijuana from bidis while staring at the blank page in my rollers; he seemed to lack an adequate ashtray, because he exclusively spread his waste upon my keyboard.

10: shackled to empty nights

Though my city sleeps deeply, it does so in the streets, making it difficult to imagine a literal interpretation of empty nights. The only reading left open to me is the emptiness of a stranger submitting to large amounts of time spent being a stranger.

12: veiled

Clearly, an incursion of the Musselman upon an otherwise Hindu sensibility. Perhaps this can be explained by the prominence of the romantic ideal in the Sufi faith, an ideal that has little place in the daily morality of the modern Hindu.

19: Reclusion and rhythm

He would pass his days hitting Tabla drums vigorously, improving perhaps his speed but not his rhythm. Perhaps because of this deficit, he exclusively played in private (though he must have, of course, played in the presence of his Banarsi gurdwallah Guruji, whom he visited weekly, taking his sheaf of Tabla notes.)

20: Kaidas

Kaidas are a set of rhythms laid out in patters of sixteen beats. The life of a student of Tabla is one of memorization; each kiada begins with a simple outline and then expands upon itself in variations that ought to be played in order daily by the student. For the poet, daily practice sessions lasted from one to three hours, often preceded in later months by an hour of meditation. I often found myself staring longingly at his fingers caressing the skin of his drums, wishing they were upon my keys, producing something with meaning.

21-22: Leaving…rupture

Written in February; the poet had six more months left in my country. However, he would daily fantasize about his departure, a moment he referred to as his “reward.”

25-27: Dha therikita dha ge na dha ge thin na ki na

The beginning sixteen beats of a kaida he played obsessively towards the end of his stay with me, ignoring my silent keys.

This piece was picked up on counterpunch yesterday: http://www.counterpunch.org/bickman09172009.html

The cloak of secrecy and mendacity that covers the shadow war the United States is waging in Pakistan undermines democratic values both in the battle against the Taliban and back home. Our strategy relies on backroom deals, on proxy warriors and private mercenaries, on the complicity of a corrupt Pakistani government, on mechanized drone attacks, and on public deceit. And that’s why, when Judith McHale, the Obama Administration’s new under secretary of state for diplomacy and public affairs, arrived in Pakistan, she was told by the prominent Pakistani journalist Ansar Abbasi, “You should know that we all hate Americans. From the bottom of our souls, we hate you.”

The full extent of America’s game in Pakistan is impossible to know; it seems to have utter control over the Pakistani government under Asif Ali Zardari. Whether he was actually bought or simply believes that his only chance of staying in power is to slavishly obey American desires must remain a subject for speculation. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when Zardari met with President Obama on May 6 and 7, about twelve hours before the offensive in Swat materialized out of nothingness, or rather materialized out of a terrified army and peace treaty with the Taliban ceding the territory. That offensive created an internal refugee crisis and humanitarian disaster. Pakistanis feel that American interests are at odds with their own: America wants to annihilate the Taliban, but Pakistan needs peace and stability so that moderate and liberal elements can be fostered on a grassroots level. Clearly, Zardari has been convinced of the American point of view. But as that big picture remains stubbornly opaque to the civilian viewer, I want to turn to another battle being waged in Pakistani territory, along the Afghanistan border. Although that battle is part of the war in Afghanistan, its impact on Pakistan is overlooked and very important.

The war in the tribal areas, in the Northwest Provinces and Waziristan is primarily fought with unmanned drones, which routinely fire Hellfire missiles into homes, schools, and caves. The most recent of these attacks occurred on Tuesday, (September 8), killing ten, following one on Monday (September 7), killing six, etc. They’ve been going on for over two years, they are barely reported upon in the American media, and they have become an uncontrollable fact of life in the region. It is impossible to know how many of the casualties of these attacks are Taliban fighters; there have been high-profile targets (most notably Baitullah Meshud, a Taliban leader killed on August 5), but there have certainly innocent deaths. Providing hospitality to strangers who may or may not be Taliban fighters amounts to a death sentence under the reign of the drones—and the culture of the region prizes hospitality as a sacred duty.

The drone attacks are massively unpopular in Pakistan, and understandably so. Try, for a moment, to imagine life under the drones; they are constantly overhead, gathering intelligence, watching, and you never know when they’ll decide to strike. They’re literally inhuman, faceless, soulless—it’s straight out of science fiction—and this in a tribal, rural area where people might travel days to see a TV or a telephone. That the attacks continue uninterrupted into the holy month of Ramazan adds insult to injury.

The prevailing discourse within Pakistan is that the drones violate Pakistani sovereignty, and it’s a line that the Zardari government periodically trots out in public. The Obama administration leads us to believe that Zardari, like his predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, allows the US to operate its drones with impunity, and that the public stance is purely for the sake of public opinion. But Pakistanis aren’t as stupid as we seem to assume they are; they know that their government cannot and will not move to stop the drones. Indeed, until recently, the Pakistanis were using intelligence gathered by drones. It reveals to the world the dishonesty of the Zardari government and makes it appear (rightly) cowed and enslaved to America, further weakening support not only for this incarnation of the American puppet government in Pakistan, but also the ideal of democracy in the country. The Taliban don’t need a propaganda machine, they only need to point to the sky where the drones fly, having taken off from a base within Pakistan.

But the obfuscation isn’t limited to the Pakistani government. Both the American government and the Pakistani government refuse to publicly comment upon or confirm any of the drone attacks, as if there is some reason why the drone attacks should be beyond public debate, as if by keeping the operation classified they escape responsibility for it. Perhaps they do—through subcontracting it to private mercenaries. The New York Times recently reported that the drone operations are carried out by Blackwater, the same thugs we last saw killing and torturing Iraqis. There may be nothing technically illegal about this, but I find it deeply unsettling that our murder machines should be operated so far away from democratic institutions or public debate.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&_____________________&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

——–+++++++++___________———+++++++++++++

****************%%%%%%%%%%%%%%##############@@@@@@@@@@@@@@(((((((())))))))))))()())))))))))))))))))

**********%%%%%%%@@@@@@@**********)))))))(((((((())))))))))

&&&&&^^^^^^^^^^&&&&&&&&&&$$$$$$$$$$$$%%%%%%%

a few more fragments off that old typewriter:

<!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:”Times New Roman”; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”;} table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-parent:”"; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>

Any god that demands obedience is not my god. My god is only what I am and what I create. Unlinked to community and identity. Readily discarded. A useful symbolic system. Certainly nothing worth killing or dying for. Rather, I’ll try to avoid killing and die on my own terms. Which doesn’t seem so difficult, yet proves to be impossible for all those warriors of their own gods taking orders from other humans. I’ll never understand it, nor do I try very hard. I assume that those who kill, for example, those who stormed Mumbai. live for a thing that they will never know.

[][][

As time loses relevance, I will gain peace. My time here is both too short and way too long. It is not too short. But it is not endless, it has a definite end, and the vast majority of my life will be spent, probably, in America. And now I understand why. Why culture happens in communities that evolve together, that globalization is young and we’re not meant to share everything with each other. Exchange is meaningful and useful, but will never be complete. Canons form sets of assumptions. Canons are too big to gain a broad understanding of too many of them.

[][

Mythologies are stories that constantly happen, that never cease occurring. I dols are images that never move, but can disintegrate. People are gods that time can rot.

I can trust myself to be myself, even when I think I will be Other.

-=-‘\

This navel lies

everywhere

birth can be taken.

birth can be chosen

though not by self.

Language will only obey.

Language can create

though not through self.

What I can create May Outlast

what I can destroy.

[][][

What if rebirth is possible? What if what is I can be transmuted?

Does conciousness depend

on the energy of body?

Will death unplug it

like a light?

Or can it transform

to a life its own

And then find

another body to inhabit?

And if so, if it can live beyond,

why am I engaged

to this sack of meat?

Will what once was I

again find an eye

to live behind?

Or is this just

my last chance?

Must I be forever food-fed?

(faith is the belief, of course, that these questions have answers, somewhere)

Please answer me not. No good can come of your guesses.

Don’t believe what anyone says, so long as they eat food, they know only as much as you. Be god, let others be god for themselves. Work with them to create knowledge and art, but for spirit, maintain yourself. Refuse labels that can be turned into identities

What is, ought to be.

that simple acceptance

Is my answer.

If you reject it, then you ought to.

gotcha.

Zoom out, for once.

I can’t see. Light enters my eyes when there is no light, darkness unyeilds to distinctions and frames over which I can interpose any simple reality, impervious to my castes and religions and regions and races, and I can no longer distill who ought to be killing who, much less any whys. Trains burn before their destinations, leaving tracks to turn to livelihoods and bodies left empty in stations waiting for departures they might or might not be supposed to take, the timetables bereft of any meaning, the clock whirring about the empty side of maha kal thirsty and satiated durga, laxmi spilling money that ought to have never existed. Spending money that never was, eating food that never was grown, massaging spices into meats unslaughtered, words written with no inspiration. Artists alone with no desire to represent, earwax begun to flow leaving ears defenseless, addicts lining up for a taste.

(ghobi begun to lay asia to waste, empty lands that once bred life breed heat alone, foreignness comes home, domestic strangeness of selves unsaddled with identities, places misplaced and misfiled, this became conditional upon His glare and again fell unnaturally at His feet. Crying lonelinesses set aflame and reduced to ash. sweet glorified water drowning itself. Governments self-born skeptics. Ophaloskeptic party sweeps the elections!

-=-=+

To Ganesha

These flowers I give to you will stay in my room until I throw them away. I place them at your feet to place them near to my own nose. Your toes have supported more admiration than I can give. I can only give myself to myself, and you will be thrown away tomorrow. I can only give myself to myself, and you will be thrown away tomorrow. I will only serve you by working on my life’s work, daily. Only will I cut off my tusk and I will leave yours to be regrown.

You are nothing without me, I keep you alive. If I did not, a billion Hindus would, but you’d still be dead. A meaningless death, irrelevant to both of us.

Perhaps tomorrow you will be reborn. You are whenever I remember to do it, but tomorrow I will discard your body. [note: Diwali]

You have both a history and a story. Your history is billions of personal stories that I’ll never know. Your stories I’ll cherish because I can possess them, repossess them. ON my mind today, of course, is the day you cut off your tusk to pen the Mahabharat. Transcribing the text, a thing you possessed becomes ours only in your memory. A thousand retellings written throughout the body and the time of Hindustan, but still not enough to fill your ample gut.

All of this is made of food, O great eater. Harvested radiance, light.

Bindu. The dot that hung over the moon, above Aum, that bindu the highest pearch that a signifier can attain, the closest a signifier can be to significance. Hanging over the eternal vowel, the rushing of air between my lips, the chard-bindu that hangs over all my ink, that pushes sound out of the mouth which consumes, that is the fruit of all prana, all that is taken in. I namaskar the bindu, the Chandra, and the O that it hangs over. I namaskar the blank page which it stains, I namaskar the ink that stains it, I namaskar the mouth that utters it, I namaskar the air that is shaped and the body that shapes that sound, the gift of Chandra-bindu, the half-moon, the eternal purity of the mouth unstained by the pollution of our cities. That moon blank page that will never be stained by human tough. That has no feet to throw myself at. The only action I can take against the moon is to see it, salute it, I can never take I before Chandra, which waxes and wanes as I do, that shines dramatically everywhere I will ever go. The moon that teaches my body to be in bondage to nature alone, that it is nature alone, in bondage to itself so that perhaps I will escape while my body takes my place in bondage to you, Chandra.

“

Lay a sword crosswise on a pit.

If, thinking, ‘like this, like this,’

I walk on it,

worrying, I will fall in the pit.

The best way of gaining death

is to long for immortality.”

—-The Maha-Narayana Upanisad

Like this, like this

I will chose to long

what for I chose to long for.

The best way of gaining death

is to live.

“She!

Unborn!

Red,

Black,

White!

Unborn!

The Givers of the Light!”

–Maha-Narayana

“This Trispurna

The threefold prayer

one can give to a Brahmin

unsolicited.

A Brahmin who

repeats the Trispurana is absolved of the sin of killing a Brahmin.

He achieves the fruit of a soma sacrifice,

He sanctions the feeding of a thousand poor. om.”

–Maha-Narayana

Let us forgive ourselves,

Let me forgive myself for

your oppression, Poor,

with one day’s food. Let

me forgive myself for my crimes

by praying against your deaths,

which will come soon anyway.

I haven’t posted since I left India, and that was already a long time ago.  I needed time.  Thanks for checking back after so long.  I also needed to finish my project, which finally got turned in to the printer.  When it is released, I’ll post a digital copy on the blog.
Now I’m going to start revisiting the writing that I did on my typewriter in Kolkata, typing it in to the computer so that it can go with me forward.  I don’t even remember writing a lot of it.  Little of it is dated.  And I’m going to post some of it here.  It is unedited and may not be very good.  Beginning with this poem: [a kaida is a tabla rhythm)

Where my self did take myself
a thought lie in rot
rebirth to take or not
what ought to have been lost
was lost.

I only seek to submit
to myself the only place
of deposit what once was ash

I follow myself
shackled on empty nights
or shallow fun
neither that will yield
what shall forever be veiled
the opposite now unknown
until time definite
ends my now.
The weeks cycle on
each day blends in
to the now remains
reclusion and rhythm
kaidas code seconds selfishly
until leaving, that fierce
inevitable rupture,
the step that will close this chapter
As my fingers get faster
speed through kaidas going faster
devour themselves in it
devour themes in ink.