Not going to Dhaka tomorrow, in light of today’s “mutiny.”  It seems to be resolved, maybe, but I don’t understand what’s going on, really.  I though that Bangladesh was chilling out, what with the election and all, but as Professor Lal just told me, “Bengalis are sentimental people.” I’m not trying to wander in my clueless way into someone else’s war.

I do have to leave the country before my 180 days of being in India, or else it’s indian prison for me (it has happened).  So if I don’t end up going to Bangladesh, I’ll head to SE Asia very soon.

While I may or may not have some more visitors coming to check out photos, I thought I’d put a few thoughts.  Pictures below.

Wherever I go, people preceed me.  Lives preceed me.  Would not if only I were universal.  But, that not being the case, I must only walk.  Inevitably walking backwards without understanding.  I must not have any answers, I must not pretend to have any answers.  I must not be other than whatever I can be.  I must not be a god.  I can only futiley continue to try to lose my conciousness.  Where is the Moon today?  I know it is waning.  Where is my music?  Lost in my pursuit of oblivion.  Daily, I lose answers to questions, many unasked.

Dhaka, unknown, empty city, here I come.  i wonder if a city such as you will contain meaning.  Is it purely a geographical entity?  Does it exist only because maps say it does and populations (and history) demand it?

Here we go!  I just uploaded 120 photos without looking to see what they were.

First, I guess, some clips of the trip to visit Tulamiah Mouhaddin and his family and his workshop, where he binds all the writers workshop books.  Smitha took a bunch of great portraits here, so the real photos from this excursion will be in her final project, not on this blog.

They had a kid scamper up the tree to get us coconuts to drink:

it’s a family!

d

We accidentally went on a muslim holiday, the third day of last Eid, so they weren’t actually working.  So we made them pose as if they were.  This guy in front is Mr. Mollah, who I’ve had the most contact with–I think he pretty much runs the operation.  He’s going to teach me bookbinding later.  oh, and this photo sucks, and you can see Smitha’s camera in the foreground.

Took this photo just in front of my house, in front of my landlord’s gate.  These guys are rickshawpullers, and mostly hang out there in front of Writers Workshop, so I hang out with them sometimes, failing to communicate. Photo taken at the urgent behest of Ranjan, who works with WW.  And there you have a typical bengali working-man’s lunch, lots of rice, potatoes, daal, and fish.  The fish is a good reason to be bengali

This is the one photo I took at a communist party rally, DYFI–a smaller party, but a member of the Left Front government.  It’s on the Maidan in the middle of kolkata.

The world’s biggest Banyan tree is in the Kolkata botanical gardens.  Everything in these pictures counts as one tree.  It’s cooler than my pictures of it.

Bloody awesome, what Professor Lal ownes.  He’s got great taste in culture.

I went to check out Dakshiniswar Mandir in North Calcutta.  It’s a Kali temple.  Saint Ramakrishna realized enlightenment here.

On the way home, I bought some spices from these guys.  Near Howrah bridge and the flower market.  Steriotypical tourist photo time!  I can’t not take them when I see them.

HAHA this makes me laugh every time.  To the point that I emailed it to my parents.

LOL.  but behind the goofy English, it reveals a cultural difference.  In India, there are so many people–so many laborers willing to work cheap, masses of uneducated people, never taught to think and barely to speak, many of whom look like each other–that the only way they can get people to value human life is to make an economic argument that a life is more financially valuable than car parts, which is obviously untrue.

And then, the icing on the cake: the west Bengal Tourism And Food Festival!  man, I crack myself up.

A tree on the lake near my house

Another Jed-Mission was to go to Kumartoli where they make the clay idols before Saraswati Puja.  So everyone in this picture is Saraswati.  She is a lovely lady and I would like to marry her.

Oh, that last one is Kali, standing on Shiva.  I have no choice, I have to marry her.  She is Time.

This is Netaji Bhavan in downtown Kolkata, near where I lived when I first came to town.  It is the home of Netaji Chandras Bose, who is absolutely worth a wikipedia search: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhas_Chandra_Bose

Amazing, right? Did you know about him?  While Gandhi was giving the British more reasons to stay and prolonging their rule, he was leading a team of guerrillas against the British during WWII.  They alligned themselves with the Japanese against their common enemy.  They used to stay up in the Northeast Territories and strike downward.  Someone please make an epic movie of his life!

And a few days ago I went to an exhibit on printing and bookmaking in Calcutta.  Not much to see, but interesting.

FINALLY! SUNDARBANS.  The Journey There was Epic!  I don’t even want to talk about how epic.  But basically we took a train a ways, then we had to hop various conveyances to get progressively closer to the Sundarbans.  But I didn’t know the geography or the names of the towns on the way.  So…boat..rikshaw…boat…rickshaw rickshaw…confusion: I think we’re here and just don’t know it…boat…we’re in GOSABA!

GOSABA!  Me and this girl walked around, and we found the mud by the riverside.  It was crazy clay, like you only get in art class.  we couldn’t resist walking through it, which attracted kids to walk through it and have fun with us and we all had muddy fun!

Boats!  Gosaba’s a nice river fishing honey making village. Not many tourists come through…we were definately the only ones in town, and they were surprised by our presence.  I had lots and lots of bengali “getting to know you conversations” and felt good about bengali for the first time ever.  Not may photos taken though, besides these:

Then we walked through the village outside of town, and these nice people invited us to their mud hut front yard for tea, and they were great and charming.  Husbands are fishermen, and here’s this guy, too:

That picture caused much hilarity.  She was trying to ask Stephanie if she needed to go to the bathroom, but stephanie doesn’t know bengali or that the ear-pull is a signal for bathroom, and they couldn’t ask me to translate because it was girl-talk time, clearly.

THE NEXT MORNING, boat tour!  matias and stephanie, matias chilean guy who I really like.  He’s funny because he always engages everyone around, expecially bored mustachoes, with physical humor that sometimes places him in bodily danger.

This was our guide.  He kissed us a lot.  BFF.

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e197/jedbickman/SANY0129-1.jpg IS THERE A CROCODILE IN THIS PICTURE?  I hope so. Yes!

Apparently, that’s all the photos I’ve got.  I relied on the girls for photography, so hopefully they’ll share their pictures soon.

It’s funny, I don’t feel like I’m on an adventure till I go through pictures from such a huge range of time.  Instant nostalgia.

I just wanted to point out

two different times since saturday I have been personally congratulated because the new record holders for the world’s longest kiss are Americans.

thanks, Indian media.

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!