Though I am barely a poet,

There be a poem published

in Issue 5 of Caper Literary Journal

I just came from this show, part of a series called the Impossible Music Sessions featuring a hip hop crew via video feed from Guinea Bissau, the Baloberos Crew.  They were represented by Hasan Salaam, an MC from New Jersey who you have to check out if you’re into revolutionary hip hop and repressed american voices.

Sorry for the bad sound and camerawork.

Guinea Bissau’s in a political situation that’s familiar to a lot of the post-colonial world; military coups, corruption, instability, massacre.  It’s a hub of the global drug trade, and the drugs are handled by the military, which uses the capital gained from the traffik to assert domination over the country. Baloberos uses their music to communicate honestly and openly with the people of their nation, staying true to the revolutionary tradition of music and hip hop from Fela Kuti to Dead Prez.  Hasan Salaam is right there with them; I was blessed to get to see him and meet him–he is an honest and talented MC, a voice that society (our society, not Guinea, now) needs to hear.  Though he is Muslim, I get the sense that Hasan rhymes about realities and oppressions that don’t come from being Muslim in America, but that come from being poor in America; the universal weight of capitalism that lies on all our soldiers.
The military arrested and tortured the members of Baloberos Crew for telling the truth of their situation and their country’s situation.  They were pistol-whipped and warned to stop their music. It was beautiful to see them standing strong and proud via video feed live from their homeland; we were all reminded just how large the world still is by the squeal, delay, and feedback of internet video, but everyone was determined to communicate despite language and all the technical problems.  They had a guy on their end to translate.  There was a lot of sign language, the universal sign language of hip hop.

There were a lot of production people and intermediaries who made this moment of global communication and exchange possible.  Their presence was a little too noticeable; the producers of the event weren’t as well spoken as the MCs, but then again, the purity of the exchange that they generated was worth celebrating, and it clearly took a lot of effort.

I wish that good works like this would get the attention that they deserve.  I wish that honest global dialogue and exchange was easier.  But, recognizing that it is difficult, let us celebrate it when it occurs.

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 trip to Varanasi was a highly visual one.  I was helping my friend Smitha with her photography project: in fact, I convinced her to stay a few more days only to take pictures.  Those will be the good ones, but we have to wait a few months for her to process the film.

First, some pictures from Kolkata (you know how often you get a few older pictures on your memory card.)

This is the lake near my house that I run around when I’m being responsible

And these are the pretty flowers near that lake

And there was also a big, firey Machine by that lake

And then I the workers working on the Machine got ready to pose for a picture

Machine

And then I took a picture–I really like this photo:

And there was a sculpture exhibition in Kolkata.  The sculptor is based in Delhi…Let’s see, I forget his name.  I think it’s Rajkumari.

Now we get to the Train Ride.  I accidentally booked me and my friend Dan on the very very wrong train to Varanasi.  A ride that ought to have been 12 hours was more like 26.  The train went through rural Bihar and stopped at every single station.  I felt like I got a sense of what Bihar was like, and it lives up to its repuation.  I made a little video; maybe you’ll get as bored watching it as I did on the train.  If nothing else, it’ll give you a sense of how fast the train moved.  There’s a little Patna there in the middle.  Without ever having been to either place, I’m willing to say that Patna is kind of like Baltimore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E70sQrAuKxU

OK, now varanasi.  I was fascinated by this temple; when I was there before it was totally unsubmerged, you could walk in it and enjoy it.  Smitha took a good picture of it with her big camera, but these will have to do for now

Something’s going on at Assi Ghat

We went to find the Silk workshops.  It was intersting because the area we found (with the help of an autodriver with a kickback from our silk purchases) was very integrated, with Hindus and Muslims working side by side.  It did seem like the Hindus were more senior on the business end of things, but it’s always nice to see communal harmony.  Everyone was working hard, and people seemed well-enough fed.  The children wanted photos, not money.

The weaver’s family upstairs from the looms

Preparing the Loom

Weaving

The Machine Loom

The Goings On at the Dyeing Shop

And, the finished products being sold to us

OK, done with the weaving. Here’s Baba ShivDas building a Yagya pit on the terrace of my guest house.  ShivDas is Italian, and has been in India for most of his life.  He’s a LalBaba.  A Yagya is the sacred fire sacrifice that’s as old as the vedas, and it’s the duty of every Baba to conduct Yagyas on auspicious days.  That’s the social role of Babas–they are bringers of the fire. It’s usually a many-day affair.  And yes, that’s cow dung and water he’s using to build it–very good building material.  The shape of the pit is very symbolic; this square is supposed to represent a cow’s mouth–it could be a circle–the chakra.  Or, if he was a different order of Sadhu, it could be, for example, a three tierd structure, representing the three orders of existance.  and so on.

and then there was an ELEPHANT!  Hooray.  But it kind of looked sad.

And if you’re in Varanasi, it’s very important to take at least one boat ride and take pictures of the city from the boat:

This is the Nepali temple–check out a map: Varanasi is close to Nepal, it’s a busride away.

Smitha attempted to get this picture, taken from a boat, with her big camera.  Which, if it comes out, will be quite a photographic achievement.  We’ll have to wait and see.

Taken from the roof of Shuklaji’s house while his son was asking for the monies.

Now I got a series of Smitha setting up her camera.  This was always an adventure, because it’s a really slow process, and attracts a big crowd of interested Indians.  And it was my job to do crowd control. This particular picture was not fated to be: she was trying to take a picture of a group of cows, but all the curiousity about the camera that the crowd generated made the cows themselves curious, so they came to look, almost destroying her camera.  Obviously, during that action, I wasn’t taking pictures myself.

A temple near Durga Kund

I like this picture.  Kuruksetra is the battleground on which the final battle of the Mahabharata was fought.  It’s also apparantly that filthy tank.  Or maybe it’s the tractor.  Or the water pump.

And here’s a picture of India

Oh, this is funny, right?  Totally inexplicable.  Obviously Western money.  But what do they want?  To turn the boatmen into windfarmers?  Even to put a windfarm near Varanasi is silly: there’s no wind!

And there’s a whole fleet of them

I got a picture of the Indians taking a picture of the white people, but I just barely missed my chance to get a picture of the white lady taking a picture of the Indian lady taking a picture of her.  The longer I stay in India, the more I begin to behave towards white people like Indians to: I stare at them and am entertained by their reactions to India and by them in general.  It’s very strange, given that I know what it was like before I was used to Indians behaving like that.

And, to finish it off, some silly Tabla playing (It’s not Ramuji–he’s better)

And that’s all I got, folks!  Eid Mubarak!

On Friday I went to a short-film festival of socially relevant films held at an NGO here.  The films were uneven, but the message of each was very clear: the first one told a typical story of women traffiking in India, a tragic and massive industry, there was a very blunt one about discrimination against Muslims in America, one about transgenderd people in India and the struggles they face (for this one I would have appriciated some audience dialogue that didn’t happen; it was clearly too graphic and uncomfortable for many members of the Bengali audience.  People were laughing, some walked out.  Homosexuality is not so much discriminated against here as…hidden).

It did strike me that the name of the event was “Black and White,” which seemed to me to be a clear reference to American racism, because the discriminations and injustices that were addressed by the films were all pretty brown-on-brown.  This was never explicitly discussed or explained, but I’ve noticed an interest in India about the various American oppressions and injustices.  On multiple occasions here I have been asked about the massacre and displacement of American Indians–for a while I speculated that this was because of the name “Indian” but I don’t think that’s it. 

There’s no inherent concept of sarcasm or irony in Indian culture, there’s no system of meaning things other than what is said.  So I think that Indians are bewildered and facinated by the hypocracies of America; we claim to be founded upon equality and freedom when we are founded upon slavery. India is explicitly founded upon slavery and inequality, the caste system.  Educated Bengalis seem to need to constantly remind themselves that what America says and what America means are two very different things.  Indian politicians spout hate and they mean hate, but American politicans spout liberation democracy and equality and mean imperialism.  In order to resist this imperialism, they must first navagate the trecherous waters of hypocracy and doublethink.

That was obviously very oversimplified and myopic.  Indian politicans totally lie all the time, for example.

And then on Saturday I went to a gathering where young poets (ten to twentyfour) read their poetry.  It was really wonderful to hear all the voices of Bengal; there was a lot of cliche, of course, but there were a few exceptional poems.  Sadly, the event was on the roof of a tall building during a rain storm, so I couldn’t stay long–I was too cold.

Though I haven’t been so regular about keeping up the blog, if you are tuned in now I promise a lot of good media coming down the tube; the much promised picture post will happen whenever I plug my laptop into the internet. And I’ve got a chunk of fiction coming down the pipeline.  So bear with me.

Copied a few transcreations of the Upanisads into my notebook:

 

From the Taittiriya Upanisad:

“All things of the earth

       are born from food.

They emerge from food

     they merge into food.

Food is the first-born of creatures

      so food is the medicine of all.”

…

“She wished:

      I will be born

      I will be many.

By the heat of tapas

    by creative heat

She created

      all there is.

Having created it

     she entered it.

She entered

     the formed and formless

     the defined and undefined

    the sustaining and non-sustaining

     the thing and non thing

    the true and not true.

Whatever is

              is true.

Truth is

          whatever is.”

From the Avyakta Upanisad (a little text to the lion avatara of visnu that is rarely studied)

“Om Terrible Powerful Maha-Visnu

Flaming Everywhere-Facing

Terrifying Holy Man Lion

DEATH’S DEATH | praise”

“Pour self into self as gift into fire”

“The terrible one!

    terrible for he is lion faced

The powerful one!

    powerful for he is the essence of power:

The great Visnu!

  because he straddles the three worlds:

The Flaming One!

    For he is aflame with radience

Everywhere-Facing!

    Because he has many forms

The Terrifying One!

Afraid of him, the sun rises,

Afraid of him, the moon,

Afraid, the wind blows

Afraid falls the rain:

The Holy One!

Holy Holy Holy Sri-embraced:

Death’s Death!

For he is the death of death, giver

of immortality to food-eating creatures.”

 

 

And there’s a lot more where that came from.

The plastic cosmos

will outlast its makers.

 

At least,

something ought to

                             outlast plastic-

                                                     asphalt will not.

nor,

cloathing nor terabytes.

Nor,

LANDfills of silent machinery,

quiet LANDmines

                         waiting for

                                        a human’s heavy step.

OUTlast?

    I will not, My body says.

    I will, I say.

I WILL the rot.

-

So I find it difficult to avoid discussion of the dissolution of America, in conversations and in writing.  Starting with the financial issues–should Indians really expect to live in a world where America has little power?  How soon?  I have my own ideas, but I’m far away, I find it difficult to imagine already.  I follow news closely, of course, but I have no sense of what the tone is in your life over there.  If you read this, please comment and let me know…anything.  What your sense of the situation is.  If this thing has touched your life in any way already. Are people getting fired?  Your friends?  The election is the election, I’m just as plugged into that nt’l dialogue here as I was there.  But not so much with everything else.  Help me out here.

If you’re checking out this blog for the first time, I’d appricate it if you scrolled down and checked out the first couple posts before this one.  Thanks!

Well, if you’re going to be reading this blog, you’re gonna have to get used to reading fragments and scraps out of context, posted at inappropriate times, things sometimes too writerly to be read. Here’s an overview of what’s been in my notebook recently, with this trip hanging somewhere in the unimaginable future. And, inevitably, I’ve posted some of it scattered around Pinko’s Copies. This is how I work, and I don’t have a problem with making it public, I think, especially once I get a sense of who reads this blog. Here and everywhere, please comment, start dialogues, tell me that you exist.

1.

It was no mistake that Bey was there on the dusty streets, paranoid of feral dogs. He was sent there to be American. To be the American. He was there through the whole thing. Well, he came after the factory had been shut down by the farmers. But still through all the awkward tension that surrounds revolution. Had been witness to a representative portion of all the little skirmishes entirely too personal to be News, that add up one day at one pre-determined place and time. He was there because America could never be there—to inward looking. And so was Bey, who one day looked too deep inward and popped out the other side. Fetus omphaloskepsis. He hadn’t necessarily found anything in there, just looked deeper through nothingness until he found himself outward. Deep outward. 36 hour flight Outward.

Incessantly, events happen. Things far outside Bey’s peripheral vision, behind that house over there, or in the city that he just left two weeks ago, things he’ll never know about, but that were earth-shattering for the folks directly involved in them. Not News, never News, News he knew about. The News never surprised him. But the lives did.

2.
Do we share a world? The immensity of our failure shakes every life. Schizophrenia is when the world pays farmers to not produce food (actually, to produce Not Food). Schizophrenia is when surplus turns so quickly into starvation.

Will Obama recover from The Narrative? Will he lead us, his people? will he actually speak to and for me?

But I will be Absent. Absolutely Absent, engaging with the Starvation side of things.
I will be Unimagination. In the immensity of the Global System, enmired in Reality. In Love.

3.

hilarious and incessant paranoia of not being there, of being unplugged, not on the scene, unobservable, missing out, unlaid, not realizing the big push, the long haul, the inevitablility of tomorrow. The absolute necessity of Taking Time. Of being unobservable. Walking alone on top of a mountain and through airports.

4.

He imagined his soul like a bulbous growth hanging off the side of his astral self like a tumor or some sort of hemorrhoid. He imagined himself stroking it, watering it, feeding it with special hi-nutrient water, maturing it until it could be harvested and sold.

5.

The streets lie horizontally, the buildings vertically. Only the outsides of things can narrate, just as all the senses are placed on the human skin, all meaning is placed on the skin of the city. The interiors justify and align the facades. Cement depends on molds and rebar for structure. Rebar predetermines the structures. Cement overdetermines the city. Each building is hollow inside, making the city a shell, indifferent to habitation. And through the streets, all manner of man and metal roam.