It is a massive Self that is responsible for these myriad injustices, tyrannies, exploitations which plague us all, which prevent us from pursuing a life of intellectual, moral, or spiritual purity without implicit and inescapable hypocracy–we are (I am) ultimately responsible, we are (I am) ultimately powerless.  I speak of an inclusive Self comprised of all of us who live silently or loudly within an organization of bodies complicit in its own oppressions.  This is the ego of all our egos.  It is very different from the ultimate Oversoul/Brahmin which binds us to All and then to One through our divine spirits: that Thing which is free from karma.  No, this Self is the amalgamation of all our karmas, and thereby binds itself to that Brahmin by binding all of us to materiality via injustice and despair, preventing us from even imagining a collective enlightenment.   This is the shared Self of the Polity, the self-loathing ego of humanity, at once a national, corporate, and global being comprised of all us Masters and all us Slaves.  The cruelty is that we are ultimately powerless over this Self (what can I do against all this ocean of injustice and dispair) and yet ultimately and inescapably responsible for it, for it is ourselves, not Other; its crimes are our crimes.

To be able to speak concretely, let me reference one pathology of this Self among many many that I could choose, brought to mind by this article on Rampant Racism in the Criminal Justice System on Counterpunch today.  This is nothing new, but must be constantly revisited and reminded, because this is a massive and brutal injustice being perpetrated IN OUR NAME, as citizens, whether law abiding or not.  And yet, I can do almost nothing except point to it.  Understand it.  It is our history and our legacy:

Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the  criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as  the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended.  Her book, The New  Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as  evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans – a  racialized system of social control.   The stigma of criminality functions in  much the same way as Jim Crow – creating legal boundaries between them and us,  allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from  millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted  people.  She calls it a new caste system.

Or, say this issue doesn’t bother you like it does me: choose another: coorporate control of our environment, human trafficking, war war war, poverty and inequity, and so on and on.  What of Afghanistan?  How can we ignore the documents leaked today of misery, coversion, incompetence, and collusion?  And yet, how can we act on them? we cannot.

How is a civilized individual supposed to pursue self betterment, artistic creation, spirituality and purity, when s/he recognizes his/her attachment to this political Self?  Must we intentionally and powerfully continue to cleave ourselves into Individuals and simply ignore the incredibly strong ties that bind us together–the bindings of economy, culture, government, labor? Oh, Guruji, please explain and enlighten: my mind is clouded by confusions!

In looking for my keys (aargh, where are my keys?) I pulled out my small pile of scraps and fragments that my typewriter has generated over the last few weeks.  This blog was originally conceived as a public notebook, and this post is in line with that: these fragments are totally raw, unedited, personal; they are a blend of fiction and reality; sometimes I was writing the emotional state of a fictional character in my mind, and yet I cannot hide the truth that I have been focused on vocational anxiety, and what little writing I’ve managed to eeke out of that unproductive emotion can only wallow in it pitifully.

–

THE PLATFORM OF THE SATISFACTIONIST PARTY INTERNATIONAL (DRAFT)

What is is all that is, and so it must satiate.

Since what is is all that is, any economy predicated on growth and dependent upon expansion for its health is inherently a lie.

We have been lied to by expansionist policy: humans are enveloped in finity.  We cannot escape our own skin.  And yet, we must eat.

The past has put too much energy and investment into expansion: we will turn the movement inwards, to provide sustenance for our own bellies first.

Therefore, all capital relegated into abstraction by history must be liquefied into usable material.  What is, must be made available to consumption; what was always only hypothetical must be rendered as a lie.

i e, all capital must be liquedated.

Capital that exists as human potential must be either liberated or more fully utilized.  Labor is not the only human potential.

All assets owend by previously incorporated national entities must be liquefied and fed back to the bodies politic, including all back stores of grain, inks, papers, oils, and other commodities.

In the case that assets owned by a particular national entity are human in nature, i e of an emotional or creative value, or expressed in terms of potential instilled by a process of over- and elite- education, these assets must be brought under liquified scientific scruitiny and re-administered to the intellecutal elite who will re-create value to be fed back to the Taxpayer in aspirational morale.

And so on, ad nauseum.

–

The mind has become obscured.  It can no longer differentiate passion from desire, dharma from vocation.  I am controlled, manhandled by the anxieties of desire.  I am not my situation: my days run through me as a river in the desert; I waste myself unwisely, expend myself in diversions, offer myself to those who are unworthy.  I spend energy trying to ignore myself.  I cannot sustain creation and balance.  I ebb and flow rapidly, I find myself unpredictable and unreliable; I surrender myself to myself; I bow before the ferment; I am too ready to accept faliure as fate.

Again I will try; today again I will remake myself.  I will become…

–

What truths can economies manufacture?

What productivity does anxiety wreck?

Why am I so determined to obey?  Why do I so virulently seek my own powerlessness?  What am I doing to my lungs, my body, my voice?  Oh, great risi,  advise me, I know not my dharma.  AM I to function, to languish, or to revolt?  I am comfortable with any of these, my path is not yet formed.  I get no directions from community or environs.  Individualism has taken me too far off any recognizable road.  I have something to offer any who is not myself, but I do not know who or what.  Like a child lost in a forest, I watch capitalism but cannot participate; like a child in a forest, I can walk through streets lined with mighty buildings and cannot enter any; what I call my home is a temporary shelter, a camp.  Will I reach home in this life?  Is this my desire?  Is desire what ought to guide me?  I am mighty.  This, I have never doubted.  But the nature of my expression, the manifestation of inner power in the form of a life’s work, I do not know.  I have long believed that when I am old, it will become clear what my life’s work has been.  I have never thought that I would know beforehand. I thought perhaps that it would only be a soft touch that was required from myself to enter the chute of karmic works, to begin to truly create, to feel desiring products to spin daily out from my fingertips.  Effort is worthwhile, and yet I am lazy: I have been lazy; I must soon reposition myself, delve into some rich atmosphere of intention, intention that most valuable of treasures, which brings significance to every action.

–

drive, drive that beast along.  That unyielding desire, drive it to wealth justified by art that does not lie; the forum that is a lie.  White space is expensive in this land, white walls do not come easy.  Through riches and on to death.  Through fame and on to failure.  Through love and on to war, we drive, holding drinks and passing out printed cards, we try to thrive through mimosas and martinis, barely balancing on the edge of sobriety, we drive, through convention centers of hungry eyes, through failure we drive.

Jai Jai Navia

Zed

First of all, I want to open this blog to comments and participation in a non-spamming kind of way. For that to happen, though, I need to control who has an account on this blog, so send me an email. Details are Here.

So, I’ve joined this lovely writing workshop here in Brooklyn. Besides meeting and doing writing prompts every week, the group is also doing a long-term collaboration with an equivalent group in Dublin, Ireland, that works like a long exqusite skeleton: one person will send a kernel, the next person on the other side of the pond will rewrite it and add one element, and so on. I just began a new thread of this project with a fragment about Solemna Navia, a character of mine who remains stubbornly fragmented and storyless; I thought this would be a perfect venue for her to grow into more minds than my own:

Solemna Navia was a plant. She had installed herself within warriors and made them farmers; she sought to use their Power to make a place for herself, at least a body for herself, beginning with food. The Toxic Event had taken the place of food, of plants; they all had trampled over their dinner on the way out the door. Her stomach felt the absence almost immediately, and now, years later, she wondered if the void would ever be filled. Perhaps once she had been a dedicated and careful anorexic, but now she began to mourn food, to miss it as the lover she had lived to hate. So she decided to begin to produce, to grow. She wanted to become life, and life is food, and love of food could teach love of the earth. Land in the city was disorganized, cut into unstable chunks of ex-lawn. So she hatched a plan to go south, find some land. She had found the Banks, an old tobacco farm, the soil depleted by decades of monoculture in service to addiction. Her warriors held her in their mind, planted her dream into the earth.

This is for the soil that once was never unclean.
Roots grow into leaves
May you be clean again.

Solemna Navia knew that the life of plants is in the dirt, that their intelligence comes from their roots. Though her field was irradiated and toxic, she coaxed from it lives purer than the food that had been eaten before the Event. Her crops were fertilized with the oils and plastics of decaying gadgets, once coveted motherboards whose silicon strove to kill the lives she strove for. A rebirth is a slow thing. Irrigation is a small canal. Clouds of ash are unforgivingly dark. Jai: jai Navia!

I’ve been working on the section of my book about British colonialism in India. (if you don’t know what book I’m talking about, scroll down a few posts to the intro)

First of all, it’s interesting working on this project now in this place.  On the one hand, India feels far away in my life; on the other hand, when I write about it, it still feels like the thing I ought to be writing about; my topic.

This chapter demands that I look again at the Raj.  It’s hard not to be more interested in the historiography of the Raj than the actual history; how scholars and historians approach the period, which ended quite recently and which had a tremendous impact on the modern world in both the east and the west, and is in no way simple.  For example, I’ve been reading what Wendy Doniger says about the period in her big book “The Hindus: an Alternative History”. This is a truly brilliant and very useful book; I really appreciate what Donager has done in bringing both cohesion and complexity to my understanding of Indian history.  The whole book, I notice, is about the synthesis that history has created in India, about how every time there’s a new power structure in India, it gets incorporated with its ideas alongside the old; the Arayans incorporated themselves alongside and within the Indus Valley Civilization, the Brahmins built on the Vedas of the Arayans to create a ceremonial power structure and a new generation of holy texts; new sects and offshoots of the religion (buddhists, jains, shaivites, tantrics) created new forms of synthesis, until the Mughals came and again, there was a tremendous amount of exchange and synthesis under the Sultinates and the Mughals, who genuinely valued Hindu culture and who drew parallels and points of exchange between the two religions.  This is Doniger’s attitude until she gets to the British.  They brutally and arrogantly imposed themselves upon India.  This is the inescapable truth; they were guilty of racism, hubris, violence, economic and human slavery and exploitation.  But why do modern scholars like Doniger not feel the impulse to continue the narrative of synthesis into the colonial period?  Because it strikes too close to home; they’ll come off sounding like apologists for colonialism and orientalism, which is the tradition we all inhabit as Westerners writing about India.  It’s too politically risky for us as writers and scholars.

But nothing is monolithic.  There were Englishmen with a genuine and deep respect for Indian culture, and there were things that the British did in India that, over time, proved themselves to be positive and useful .  The British literally shaped Indian society; they dictated where and what the cities would be, built the rail lines to run between them, and brought the English language to India, which has proved to be the foundation (for better or worse) of the contemporary Indian economy.

This is the situation I’ve placed myself in, because I am arguing for the inclusion of English in the literature and culture of India.  Which is an easy position to take, since English is such a big part of the linguistic milieu of contemporary India, and because the large number of English speakers in India is the bedrock of the new Indian economy.  But while arguing for this, I need to not be dismissive of the horror of the history that brought the English language to India.  Professor Lal was, in truth, a beneficiary of colonialism–it gave him the incredible education which he continued to gain the level of scholarship and wisdom that he has attained.  But is he sensitive enough to the damage that the British did?  Am I?

I better stop writing about writing this and write it.

The mighty signifier Drugs names a narrative that births a calculated and urgent economy of fear and desire subsumed into raw desperation and dilapidation, an economy sanctioned by a bumbling civil system that we all propagate and support, a system that seems not to know what to do with the population that it created in America to exploit, and so continues to mindlessly and automatically oppress.  That mighty signifier Drugs deemphasizes and confuses the substances that it claims to signify: chemicals which interact physiologically with a Human, creating distinct physical states that should be understood medically.  Along with that material signified, Drugs points to a narrative and archetype that has been re-created in the American psyche: the violent and violating minority who profits unfairly off despair (this discourse never bothers to probe that despair, lest it be traced back to the dominant economy), the menacing cancer that preys on youth.  The violence that is packed tightly within the word is supposed to be somehow ontologically connected to the substance itself, rather than the regime that has been created by fear of that very violence.  Whether or not I like it, the significance of the word Drugs is heavily laden by a regime of anti-produductive forces that war at once from within and without marginalized American communities—a regime enacted through the legal system and justified by its own narrative.

Cocaine, for example, ruins lives.  It does so because it contains the chemical power to destroy bodies.  However, it cannot be overlooked that the most common side-effect of cocaine—seen as a social force—is chronic prison sentences.  Prison is not the prescribed treatment for any physical ailment, including addiction or withdrawal therefrom, including also poverty, malnourishment, hopelessness, abuse, or trauma.  Indeed, in the absence of prison education and rehabilitation programs, it is hard to see just what prison is prescribed to treat, as a body or as a body politic.

More likely than any salubrious effect desired, the carceral regime that is enabled by this narrative is enacted upon bodies because those bodies are Criminal, were born Criminal.  The American system was created to be exclusive and continues to be: others have said it before me, so I will boil it down to the essence: the Other is essential for the Self to be.  This is true economically: America was blatantly built on slavery.  Perhaps our economy today has less dependence on bondage labor than it once did, perhaps not,

especially if the regime of low wages and high debt is recognized for the calculated malevolent beast that it is.  Those who seek a way to opt out of that system that keeps labor desperate and cheap must be dealt with somehow.  And yet, we must get our drugs from someone.

Whitney is the name of my backpack—I did not name her, she came with it embroidered upon her upper flap.  Though chronically overweight, she is beautiful as a backpack is when capable of embodying freedom, of containing a life and remaining reliably manageable, even light, upon my shoulders.  At her heaviest, I humped her up Bear Mountain in California with no water, across Kota in Rajasthani heat, through rattlesnake sandcanyons in Arizona.  Hers was the only geography that matched my own.   For a time long enough to be entirely significant, she was what I called home.  She was eternally balanced; I never doubted that I could shoulder her weight alone, and so I never doubted myself alone. 

                She bore all the weight of bad planning and arrogant packing.  Boots in the city, coats and a sleeping bag in the heat, a tent in suburbia.  She housed a chaotic library of obscure poets and epics, sacred texts, canons of Beatnik nostalgia, comic books, Infinite Jest and Upanisads.  Why did I carry a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow so far when I had already finished with it entirely?  Did the British leave their bibles behind?  Not to mention folders of papers I dreamed of as books, bound but unedited, the raw nonsense of roadside solitude; not to mention the boots I wished could write books on my behalf, they having been closer to the ground.

                She contained my Machine: a full size black USB keyboard and a nonprofit green toy laptop; all that she contained looked childish; purple pants and peanut butter, a bite-sized pillow with mosquitoes on it; most of my gear young gifts from a mother who didn’t realize how they would be used. 

                She contained a constantly rotating menagerie of mementoes and artifacts; out of Tucson, a beaded belt, out of California a box of condoms, out of Maine a single tile—a last place trophy in a canoe race—out of Seattle a new razor, out of Boulder, Parmesan cheese and bookmarks made of flowers, out of Calcutta, clothbound books, out of Orissa, ganja, out of Bangkok, an unwanted tattoo (I blame her), out of Calcutta again all the art I could eat, and always stones, pebbles that rattled in various pockets; from her belly, gifts re-pollinated across vast distances, from her womb chocolate was born and eaten,

                My knives slept in outside pockets—I always knew how long it might take me to reach them, but never did, except frequently for mangoes.  Clean water tablets and antibiotics littered throughout—never used, proudly.  Unwrinkled shirts were wrapped in packing cubes, reserved for interviews and intellectual moments: with Whitney to dress me, I was no vagrant. 

                I was no vagrant; she always had a pillow for my head and sheets for my bed—what else is a home?  With her, I was no nostalgic hobo, with her, I remained a student, with her, I remained alone. I did nothing alone, went nowhere alone: I had support, security, and she was that, all that, and yet purely material; and so I was ashamed to be seen with her; I saw envy on the faces of fellow hippies and mendicants, who rightly saw my wealth in her, saw the blessings of my American birth in her, the true ease of my journey, the fact of my fleeting and willful homelessness, the inescapability of my material attachment: the certainty that I carried karmas, the uncertainty of what they are, seen also in the constant need for Internet, to be able to be present in two places, one of which could be anywhere at all, and in the other I was not alone. 

                Ah, Whitney, what a pleasant fatness you are, even in your current emaciation above my closet; what a sign you have become in your absence; I have put you down at least for two years, but I do not know whether I want to pick you up again. 

I just got back from a trip to “northeast India.”  It feels like I traveled through three or four countries, each with totally distinct cultures, languages, experiences.  In no way did it cohere.  I’ll list my destinations in order, then move on to the interesting part of the post: first, Murshidabad, on the plains of Bengal, from which the Bengali Nizams used to rule their empire.  Then, an infinitely long and difficult journey all the way around Bangladesh to Shillong, Meghalaya (the first video from that journey itself).  Then back to Guwahati, capital of Assam.  Back through Siliguri, the only transit hub for the whole region, to Darjeeling (scenes from the Darjeeling Limited playing the whole time in my mind), then a long jeep ride to Gangtok, capital of Sikkim, with a daytrip to a nearby monastery featured in this post, if these videos ever upload.  Gangtok to Pelling, and Pelling to Kechopari Lake, where I stayed at a lovely little hamlet on top of a hill overlooking the lake, with a big family of Tibetans and a big (newly formed, two day) family of French, Isrealis, and Americans–much more to say on that point, later.

Having become obsessed with Tony Gatlif’s movie Latcho Drom before I left Cal for this trip, I decided to document the memorable music that I would come across (of course with no intention other than a blog post–I’m no filmer).  Latcho Drom traces the continuity of Gypsy/Roma music from India all the way to Spain.  It is beautifully shot and full of spirit, with excellent sound recordings.  In contrast, my videos are terribly shot, with lots of background noise, a shaky, low-resolution digital camera.  You have to use the same selective listening you would use in real life if you were trying to listen to music, while, say, at a busy train station full of chaiwallahs.  The other contrast with Latcho Drom is that while Gatlif’s movie shows an underlying unity, I hope that the accumulation of these videos will show the huge diversity of experience.  All cultural experience is valid, even if hugely displaced from its native land. There’s nothing inauthentic about covering Bob Dylan in Shillong, not in this era.  Though the legwork on that one is awesomely over-the-top.  Like all the work I do in India, the only thread holding these together is that I was there, that they shaped an aspect of my perception.  I thought about editing them together, but that would obviously look terrible.

The first one was this blind Bengali boy who sang these beautiful bauls while we were stopped at a train station as I made my way from Siliguri to Guwahati, so on that narrow strip of India that connects the ‘mainland’ to the ‘northeast states’.  Excuse the terrible cuts–i just slapped three videos together on my camera itself.  One thing I tried to show was that for the people around us, especially the two men next to the singer who were simply introduced to me as “local tribal men”, the real show was me and my camera, not the singer.  The man with the mustache sort of ‘produced’ the whole thing, by making the boy sit and play for us, paying, encouraging me to video him–he’s in the army, stationed in Hyderabad, and was in the midst of a four day train ride from Hyderabad to his native Guwahati.  Oh, I think that if you listen to the cries of the vendors in the background, you’ll hear one guy walk through saying “Pendrive, Pendrive” selling USB flash drives and loads of other consumer electronics.

This is some hard uploading. I’m sure it’ll suck to download.  Highly recommend hitting “play” then immediately “pause” on each video, then walking away to do something else. Maybe I should’ve done youtube for all of them, but I didn’t. Felt too uncontrollably public, maybe.

The first day in Shillong, at the Bob Dylan Birthday Bash!

At Rumtek Monestary. I was interested in the sacrifice aspect of it, which I speculate is an aspect of Tantra, which transcends the artificial division between Hinduism and Buddhism. Happily for you, I decided against videotaping a goat sacrifice at Kamakhya Temple in Guwahati, which would have been a nice juxtaposition.

This was, literally, my arrival in Kechopari, on my first exploration of the land. Listen hard. She wouldn’t sing as soon as she saw me, but I know she wouldn’t object to you listening.

And now, on a rainy night in Kechopari:
A Frenchman:

An American:

First one Isreali:

Then another:

And, before this post is complete, I’ll video Dhruva Lal playing. Check back.

And one more from today, in Kolkata!  a kind of sexy/bored one, maybe.  OK, I don’t know how to turn a video, so turn your head. This is the drum I resisted buying at the music store, though I failed to resist buying an Ektara, which I will show you when I see you.

So, there you have it.  As soon as you get on the road, anywhere in the world, you meet lots of wonderful musicians.  This time I just remembered to turn on the camera some of the time.

I’ve been experimenting with different ways of writing the City, especially given that I’ve decided I’m not comfortable with the expository-nonfiction-cultural-ambassador type travel writing I’ve been doing in the past on this blog.

All that has been inhaled

was but recently exhaled

Elsewhere.  The streets

absorb bodies, som erefugees

in their native land.  Kolkata

breathes for bengal, for india.

gasps in awe of beauty,

art that has been born before,

distains modernity in favor of poverty.

Doggedly expands.

Kolkata that once was is again, under the surface of the new giant, swollen, bloated with hunger and satiation, inhaling exhaust, clay and plastic flowing in her veins.  Everyone will be fed.  If not in this life, then in the next.  This city will continue to exist, at all costs, continue down the avenue of excess filth it has laid for itself, continue to give meaning ot india and its mass with its true art, its performance of and for souls with sense of the immensity of history and the immensity of the present.  What will never change is the mass body, a people high on exhaust fumes will never be simply stoned, the flow of phelgm and the constant cough features of the landscape we bring with us into meditative auditoriums, buildings that know true permanence.  Built to be a capital of an old empire, will never be much use to the new ones.  Will always know the power of culture, the endless performance of dreams.

It is not all dust and starvation.  There is an interior.  Private space meticulously maintained, full of antiques and kitchens, where servitude seems natural, furniture-like.

And on the streets it remains an outrage, and I see the POWER of indian culture in the true acceptance of misery, the obligation people have to a lfie and a work that seems to me nothing that a conciousness should ever be asked to bear.

—

Kolkata is a tongue that licks filth and turns it to clay, which it then molds into cups for tea and painted gods.  That injects curry into colas.  Semiconciousness and ecstasy.  The silence of small language, the silence of educational neglect, humans untaught how to think.  Words only for the simplist external communications, and no selfawareness.

where words fail constantly.  Words ring hollow in uncomprehending ears, language stubbornly refuses to be other than gibberish, fails before the immutable altars of constantly misunderstood dieties that ought to do nothing but silently signify and instead govern conciousness, make men subservants.

A seat of the pursuit of music, an understanding eterna rhythm that does nothing but change.

Means disease, that could have been avoided.

I thought I’d type  in some of the pages that have come off my typewriter recently.  I’ve been unfocused, to say the least, in my personal writing.
I am driven by a lust for production.  I want and expect meaning to pour out of me unprompted.  And it is desire, like any other.  I desire to have done action which I have not yet done.  Which I cannot now do.  The time remains stubbornly wrong.  Because I remain attached to desire.  For a stack of printed pages.  For my name, recognition is a trap, this game designed by capitalism in its craziest hour just before its collapse, the time during which I have grown.  My time is brewing without me.  My history being written elsewhere by my fast-moving country, my culture without me.  time is creating the life, the American life, which I will lead.  Not my whole life is the result of my own actions.  I will be a witness and a victim of what so far is America in a post American age.  When capitalism finishes collapsing, only then will I inhabit the postCapitalist age I have been claiming to live in, for years.  Capitalism has given me an unwieldy ego to carry into the long next chapter.

I defeat myself with desire, constantly.  Desires that I do not desire enough to meaningfully fulfill.  Yet.  I am waiting for time to pass, guidance to be given by Maha Kala.  Te time is almost here for me to surrender myself. the path, though, remains hazy.  Even in its utter clarity.

I am blind to all that is outside myself.  I do not understand what is is to live as You.  To be Indian, for example, secure in your birth-given dharma.  To be a servant and be content.  A professional waiter (waiting, not serving).  Or to be a woman.  Woman, I cannot tell if you are happy or not.  I know you must be suffering because you are a live.

Neglect piles up

open your mouth and begin the battle: A O M

———

That eternal flame

universally recognized

must not be described.

All that words can do

can do nothing but

obscure scriptures.

All descriptions in this world

of divinity and names

do injustice to the knowledge

we all have

And injustice spoken

soon brings it upon

our bestiality.

Destroyer ink cleaves bodies

brings dissolution to

our broken humanity.

Fizzures unkind erupt

between texts and their

uncompromising readers

eager to become believers.

Words at war, words at war

their inscription brings

unfeeling institution

brings simple conflict

fought simpely

with blood and power.

Divinity is not

a shrine to Power

BATHING in exhaust.  This city bathes in its own fumes, submerged in pollution that has long since replaced air (DID I POST THIS ALREADY?  I DONNO).  Each boty has settled into filth, made it their own, invisible to themselves.  The buildings move like ancient mountains, exist for teeming bodies to work themselves around.  An expansive soul makes this city beautiful, bearable.  An internalization of art repeated enlessly, feeling endless.  Craftsman, pandal builders, kumars and a new Art class–sons of scholars turning to Abstraction and Rock and Roll.  Effortless integration of language and cultures.  Streetside surrealisms abounding, endless darshan of survival and cration.  A river exists somewhere here.  Everyone has poetry in them, a gift of Tagore inaccessable to me.

minor literature is usually sincere.  Sincerity is enough to make it worth while, though not enough to make it marketable, and not enough for me to know quite what to say about it.

If Kolkata cannot breathe air, it will breathe clay, and create what we never can make out of glass and steel.

——

HERE will never stop

being far away.

Home though anywhere can be

because of eventual return

will continue to be

far away.

Because of eventual return,

return promising eventual rebirth into a life

far away

Where I will embrace

all most beautiful im

possibility.  Your

fiction makes you

pure.  The future’s

inexistance gives joy

when it comes.  It

may not.  All I know

is to DESIRE.

——-

I am at the beginning.  A time of uncontrollable desire and expectation.  I understand, I think, the importance of controlling IT.  For my happiness.  Is happiness my desire?  Is the renounciation of a spiritual quest for me?  Is it for anyone?  Everyone?  I want to look outside myself.  To be outside myself, better than myself.  Insight.  Exsight.  It does not come with physical displacement.  It comes with listening, and love.  And yet life seems to sequester me.  I seem to sequester myself.  TIME TO GET OUT

AND IF YOU HAVEN”T GOTTEN ENOUGH, I also posted the BEST on pinkos copies, which is my lifetime ally!

This is very rough.  Sometimes writer’s block is actually editor’s block.  So don’t hold back your thoughts

I was brought here. As opposed to the first time I was in India, when I came here, I thrust myself over this land as if to conquer it, I delayed my graduation so that I could do so. Before, I could form a complete Self in India, because I had left my Self in America behind, and so could focus on a narrower range of my mind. I could, perhaps, devote more of myself to India, because I had left more room for it within myself. But now. There is more passionate conflicting chaos, having packed a fuller backpack, an eleven month eternity that leaves less room for storage. . I have brought my whole self here, complete with all my disjunctions, ones that I unknowingly left behind before. But I brought only a mess of unsorted disjunctive desires connected to an unwieldy mass of idealisms.

And now I am here, again, for a longer time, even still a bit unsure how it happened. It was my dharma, my path through life, that gave me this time in Kolkata. I ought to be here, now. Funding was provided. A parting gift from my education that once was everything. Noble labor was provided, a Writers Workshop exists here that can exist no where else in the world, and it ought to be part of my life, so I am here.

Writers Workshop is a small utopia of publishing. I now know that it can exist, that it can be possible to Make Books from love, to treasure them in themselves as objects without concern for whether they can sell or whether they will accumulate in a warehouse. Writers Workshop exists out of a conviction that words written ought to be bound together on pages—well bound, by hand, not mass-produced—because they were written and therefore loved, written and therefore to be encouraged and preserved.

(more on WW and P. Lal)

And it’s really a simple thing, Writers Workshop. Its contained in a small part of one house in Lake Gardens where there’s a lot of other life going on. The four guys who staff the warehouse and the book shop work long hours, but it seems to be long hours of simple sitting. Books get published at a furious rate, about a hundred a year, but no one’s straining or stressing themselves to achieve this. Professor Lal somehow, gets enough time to do his own massive life’s work—not only the Mahabharata, but also poems, essays, autobiography, and a lot of reading and political engagement—while remaining the sole guiding force of the publishing operation. Books appear in print that I didn’t know were in the works. Occasionally I proofread some proofs, but the poetry just appears out of nonexistence with no fanfare or note.

Imagine the implications of this for a young child of capitalism. Imagine why a young child of capitalism (seeking escape, perhaps) would have gone so far out of his way to get exposure to this

But the only way I could imagine to be here was to introduce to it that—capitalism. To work with Writers Workshop, I had to create that work. Not only to get funding, but also to be a part of a thing that has existed fifty years without me easily, I had to invent a role for myself. I was funded through a postgraduate fellowship from my undergraduate university—meaning that it wasn’t a research grant (what kind of grant it is remains vague), so I wanted to find a way to contribute to the effort, to be a part of it. But it has been running fifty years fine without me, under the guidance of Professor Lal, who is himself Writers Workshop. There isn’t really editorial work to do, because Professor Lal trusts his authors to edit themselves (how can you change someone else’s creative work?). I certainly was never taught the actual skills of printing and binding books, nor is there any lack of devoted and expert labor in those areas. The only role I could imagine for myself was as a Capitalist and a cyber-modernist; I would use the Internet to try to help Professor Lal sell his books.

Writers Workshop uses no real system of distribution. Before the Internet, you could either show up at the Book Nook outside his house in Lake Gardens (a closet of books hidden in the bushes; impossible to find or give directions to), or you could write to him with prior knowledge of what book you need, and include a check. For fifty years this sustained itself; it sustained itself because the authors each loved their own books, and supported their publication both directly and through selling books.

And the only role I could imagine was to bring the values of my America to it—to try to get Professor Lal to sell his books. I’ve been cataloguing the books—endlessly typing as fast as my fingers will move, to enter into my laptop the titles, authors, excerpts, tables of contents, of all the books I can lay my hands on from the Book Nook, the only physical outlet for the sale of Writers Workshop books, outside the Lal house in Lake Gardens. And then, I take that material-cum-data and fling it online, on the Writers Workshop website and on the bookselling website, alibris.com. By the press of a button—or a lot of buttons—I’m taking books that have never left 162/92 and giving them a global reach, though I don’t hope to give them a big reach, to sell a lot of them. Just a few of them, to deserving readers.

Why am I here doing that? I’ll have to put some effort into explaining myself (even to myself). The Writers Workshop has been doing wonderful work for fifty years without me—I witnessed the fifty year anniversary celebrations as a newcomer. It’s been sustaining itself just fine; it doesn’t need to sell a lot of books to maintain the mechanical printing press, the family of binders, the guys who sit in The Book Nook and the warehouse of unsold books. Though he’s very open to the work I’m doing, Professor Lal has no pressing desire to sell more books. Personally, I have nothing to gain from the enterprise: I’m paid by my university fellowship, and have no financial connection to Writers Workshop.

The Jed of two years ago would’ve had deep and justified problems with this project. Aren’t I extending the reach of a global capitalism that I was loathe to represent? Aren’t I embodying the ideal of the Hungry Ghost—if it’s good, make it bigger!—and forcing a Western model of business on a local, Indian enterprise?

Just after I left to come here, the structures of American capitalism began to collapse, dramatically. It was both completely expected and absolutely surprising, obvious yet inexplicable. Everyone asked me about it, and I didn’t know what to say; it either came out too strong (“We’ve been spending money that never existed ever since WW II”) or bewildered. But it became clear to me that I need not worry so much about my complicity in American capitalism. As an unsustainable system, it will dramatically and tragically take care of itself. The real question is: what are we going to build in its place? A question too big for me to answer, I hope you won’t think that I am trying to do so. I’m just trying to guide my own actions.

For better or worse, the briefly dominant system of corporate capitalism created channels of global exchange unique to this historical moment. Ideas, capital, poems, films, TV shows, songs, images, can be transferred anywhere in the world instantly (or close enough) with a well-placed click. My body can be transferred anywhere in the world via a few hours in an uncomfortable metal box. I can come to India from Denver, Colorado, and never see the ocean. Though it’s easy to forget, these are new things, historically. Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that we’ve exhausted their potential under the corporate empire. We accepted predigested mass cultures, though we know somewhere that each society has more depth to offer.

In my roundabout way, I am trying to say that I dream of an international culture, or at least cultural exchange, created out of the rubble of the American empire (which hasn’t finished falling yet). We can make ourselves and our arts—as much of it as we want to—available to each other, to enjoy and learn from. We can, as we never could before, experience and treasure the immense diversity of thought and creation in all the cultures of the world that survived or escaped the notice of the rein of the suits. And we can create something new out of it, supportive communities that aren’t tied to the limitations of place. It sounds big, but I’m actually trying to think small. Lots of small connections, person-to-person connections that nurture individual understandings. Writers Workshop is small, and should stay small. A family can only bind so many books by hand, and the books should be hand-bound, because that labor brings a beauty impossible to find in the mechanized world. But it can be made available, in a small way, to individuals all over the world. Not everyone who will be inspired by Writers Workshop books lives in Kolkata. I am, and I live in America. So it’s about making the books available, about helping them transcend space. Which is something that was inconceivable in 1958 when P. Lal started Writers Workshop, and remained so until one of his authors, Arunha Sengupta, built the Writers Workshop website. Even though it’s international, it’s still a person-to-person exchange. I found the website in my research while applying for the grant, got in touch, and ended up on the Lal’s doorstep four months later.

I see a responsibility to myself to enact global community in my body, to let myself be a place of international connection, the meeting of all the discontinuous places I’ve been. Jaya—victory—will be when art here meets art there, or art here meets producer there, or artist here meets reader there, or any combination thereof.

If I include myself in those connections—which I do, then Jaya is every day. But to stop there would not satisfy.

And now I am here, again, for a longer time, even still a bit unsure how it happened. It was my dharma, my path through life, that gave me this time in Kolkata. I ought to be here, now. Funding was provided. A parting gift from my education that once was everything. Noble labor was provided, a Writers Workshop exists here that can exist no where else in the world, and it ought to be part of my life, so I am here.

Writers Workshop is a small utopia of publishing. I now know that it can exist, that it can be possible to Make Books from love, to treasure them in themselves as objects without concern for whether they can sell or whether they will accumulate in a warehouse. Writers Workshop exists out of a conviction that words written ought to be bound together on pages—well bound, by hand, not mass-produced—because they were written and therefore loved, written and therefore to be encouraged and preserved.

(more on WW and P. Lal)

And it’s really a simple thing, Writers Workshop. Its contained in a small part of one house in Lake Gardens where there’s a lot of other life going on. The four guys who staff the warehouse and the book shop work long hours, but it seems to be long hours of simple sitting. Books get published at a furious rate, about a hundred a year, but no one’s straining or stressing themselves to achieve this. Professor Lal somehow, gets enough time to do his own massive life’s work—not only the Mahabharata, but also poems, essays, autobiography, and a lot of reading and political engagement—while remaining the sole guiding force of the publishing operation. Books appear in print that I didn’t know were in the works. I don’t contribute anything to the process. Occasionally I proofread some proofs.

Imagine the implications of this for a young child of capitalism. Imagine why a young child of capitalism (seeking escape, perhaps) would have gone so far out of his way to get exposure to this

But the only way I could imagine to be here was to introduce to it that—capitalism. To work with Writers Workshop, I had to create that work. Not only to get funding, but also to be a part of a thing that has existed fifty years without me easily, I had to invent a role for myself. I was funded through a postgraduate fellowship from my undergraduate university—meaning that it wasn’t a research grant (what kind of grant it is remains vague), so I wanted to find a way to contribute to the effort, to be a part of it. But it has been running fifty years fine without me, under the guidance of Professor Lal, who is himself Writers Workshop. There isn’t really editorial work to do, because Professor Lal trusts his authors to edit themselves (how can you change someone else’s creative work?). I certainly was never taught the actual skills of printing and binding books, nor is there any lack of devoted and expert labor in those areas. The only role I could imagine for myself was as a Capitalist and a cyber-modernist; I would use the Internet to try to help Professor Lal sell his books.

Writers Workshop uses no real system of distribution. Before the Internet, you could either show up at the Book Nook outside his house in Lake Gardens (a closet of books hidden in the bushes; impossible to find or give directions to), or you could write to him with prior knowledge of what book you need, and include a check. For fifty years this sustained itself; it sustained itself because the authors each loved their own books, and supported their publication both directly and through selling books.

And the only role I could imagine was to bring the values of my America to it—to try to get Professor Lal to sell his books. I’ve been cataloguing the books—endlessly typing as fast as my fingers will move, to enter into my laptop the titles, authors, excerpts, tables of contents, of all the books I can lay my hands on from the Book Nook, the only physical outlet for the sale of Writers Workshop books, outside the Lal house in Lake Gardens. And then, I take that material-cum-data and fling it online, on the Writers Workshop website and on the bookselling website, alibris.com. By the press of a button—or a lot of buttons—I’m taking books that have never left 162/92 and giving them a global reach, though I don’t hope to give them a big reach, to sell a lot of them. Just a few of them, to deserving readers.

Why am I here doing that? I’ll have to put some effort into explaining myself (even to myself). The Writers Workshop has been doing wonderful work for fifty years without me—I witnessed the fifty year anniversary celebrations as a newcomer. It’s been sustaining itself just fine; it doesn’t need to sell a lot of books to maintain the mechanical printing press, the family of binders, the guys who sit in The Book Nook and the warehouse of unsold books. Though he’s very open to the work I’m doing, Professor Lal has no pressing desire to sell more books. Personally, I have nothing to gain from the enterprise: I’m paid by my university fellowship, and have no financial connection to Writers Workshop.

The Jed of two years ago would’ve had deep and justified problems with this project. Aren’t I extending the reach of a global capitalism that I was loathe to represent? Aren’t I embodying the ideal of the Hungry Ghost—if it’s good, make it bigger!—and forcing a Western model of business on a local, Indian enterprise?

Just after I left to come here, the structures of American capitalism began to collapse, dramatically. It was both completely expected and absolutely surprising, obvious yet inexplicable. Everyone asked me about it, and I didn’t know what to say; it either came out too strong (“We’ve been spending money that never existed ever since WW II”) or bewildered. But it became clear to me that I need not worry so much about my complicity in American capitalism. As an unsustainable system, it will dramatically and tragically take care of itself. The real question is: what are we going to build in its place? A question too big for me to answer, I hope you won’t think that I am trying to do so. I’m just trying to guide my own actions.

For better or worse, the briefly dominant system of corporate capitalism created channels of global exchange unique to this historical moment. Ideas, capital, poems, films, TV shows, songs, images, can be transferred anywhere in the world instantly (or close enough) with a well-placed click. My body can be transferred anywhere in the world via a few hours in an uncomfortable metal box. I can come to India from Denver, Colorado, and never see the ocean. Though it’s easy to forget, these are new things, historically. Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that we’ve exhausted their potential under the corporate empire. We accepted predigested mass cultures, though we know somewhere that each society has more depth to offer.

In my roundabout way, I am trying to say that I dream of an international culture, or at least cultural exchange, created out of the rubble of the American empire (which hasn’t finished falling yet). We can make ourselves and our arts—as much of it as we want to—available to each other, to enjoy and learn from. We can, as we never could before, experience and treasure the immense diversity of thought and creation in all the cultures of the world that survived or escaped the notice of the rein of the suits. And we can create something new out of it, supportive communities that aren’t tied to the limitations of place. It sounds big, but I’m actually trying to think small. Lots of small connections, person-to-person connections that nurture individual understandings. Writers Workshop is small, and should stay small. A family can only bind so many books by hand, and the books should be hand-bound, because that labor brings a beauty impossible to find in the mechanized world. But it can be made available, in a small way, to individuals all over the world. Not everyone who will be inspired by Writers Workshop books lives in Kolkata. I am, and I live in America. So it’s about making the books available, about helping them transcend space. Which is something that was inconceivable in 1958 when P. Lal started Writers Workshop, and remained so until one of his authors, Arunha Sengupta, built the Writers Workshop website. Even though it’s international, it’s still a person-to-person exchange. I found the website in my research while applying for the grant, got in touch, and ended up on the Lal’s doorstep four months later.

I see a responsibility to myself to enact global community in my body, to let myself be a place of international connection, the meeting of all the discontinuous places I’ve been. Jaya—victory—will be when art here meets art there, or art here meets producer there, or artist here meets reader there, or any combination thereof.

If I include myself in those connections—which I do, then Jaya is every day. But to stop there would not satisfy.