Rather than try to figure out why my word processer just stopped letting me typed (a data-loss restart in my immediate future), I thought I’d rather share with you my average daily fruit consumption these days:
1 KG (5-6 pieces) Mango
1 whole watermelon (small, but substantial)
4-5 Banannas
.5-1 KG grapes
I wrote a post about meditation, then I got shy and took it down. Maybe I’ll put it back up.
I’m back in Kolkata where it is HOT and where mangoes are 40 rs a kg
I just posted a LOT of pictures on the page on the right called “Orissa, Hyderabad, Karnataka, Mumbai” I figured I’d do a page this time because it would overwhelm the blog immensely.
Yesterday was a beautiful day that could use a blog documentation. Notice that this is my second post back-to-back–I’d like you to read my apology below because it’s important to me.
It was my full day to see Hampi. Hampi was the capital of a massive empire in Karnataka from about the 14th century to mid 17th century, when the Mougals invaded. It covers a huge, beautiful, green area in a fertile river valley, with hills of giant boulders balanced on top of each other in impossible configurations. I heard that when Hanumaun was flying over India carrying a mountain with some herbs growing on it to give to an ailing Seeta, some rocks fell off the mountain and fell here.
When I first got here, I took a little wander and found beauty immediately. After meditating, waiting for the sunset, wrote “I saw Ganesha and asked him for the strength to be an artist. I climbed a lingum rock overlooking the valley, and when I saw the rocks protruding from the green bananna trees, I didn’t feel so alone anymore. I wait for the sunset tho it might be many hours from now. My rock radiates heat into my lowest gate. Nothing supernnatural will happen, but what is natural is enough for me, now. So I gave up for this moment closed-eye meditation. Eventually, white folks gather over there, ogling, and I ogle them with pleasure. I want company, but certianly not them. Is it worth the courage? No..”
That night at guest house cafe, made friend of Michael, an Italian who has been living in India for years, buddhist. I he had spent three winter months living in a villiage high in the mountains of Uttaranchal, an experience which taught him that life need not be so full of action. My life is very full of action.
I woke up early in a sleepy town, at 7, because the heat was coming and I felt prepared. I didn’t know where the main, famous sites were besides, variously, 3, 6 or 8 KM outside of town (the town is really a tourist center, one street sandwiched between ruins and the temple. I walked, then wondered why I was walking when I could be running, so I held by purse in my hand and ran down the road gleefully in fast bursts in my green fisherman pants that match my green chackos, flailing. I came to a place to enter the ruined capital, and so did, but there wasn’t much remaining out there. After being cheated of eight ruppees at a pay-and-use toilet (the relief was worth it without question, I went back onto the road, where I saw some adolescent boys watching their fathers load huge bunches of green banannas. I wrote up dialogue for that encounter last night on my little toy typewriter, but the encounter culminated in them giving me seven juicy, sweet, delicious ripe bannanas as a gift, which I accepted only because I knew that they weren’t theirs to give (if the bannanas had represented their personal wealth, of course they would have been bought. But they’re the bosses’ wealth, and the bosses’ wealth should be taken).
[then I saw the Vitallita temple I had to pay rs 250 to get into! ]
Along the river between the vittalita temple and Hampi bazzar I had adventures. First I walked upriver, beyond most of the ruins, into the canyon, where I bathed in the river. Incidentally, my malaria medicine kills a broad range of infections and blood parasites; I don’t ever go in dirty water, but when the moment and the river is clean, I don’t feel like I have to worry about it.
Then, on the way back, I saw more temples and carvings and beauty than I could assimilate. My body was ruling me, my sun energy flowing strong as I absorbed the growing heat of the morning. I felt strong in the legs and less so in the mind. So, for this journey in the morning, I had fun with my strength, weaving and saloming through unbeleavable architecture and carvings and gods and sexy stone dancers. There was a big mountain with a temple on top, and I walked around it till I found the staircase, climbed up it, met the crazy man in the temple (not a priest or anything, just a crazy guy who didn’t understand why I didn’t understand Kannada, so we talked about our beards and our hair with gestures). I missed the cave, apparantly. I always miss things when my legs are going so fast. Then back down into town for thali lunch.
I gave you a flavor of the morning, so I’ll skip right to the evening. There was a period of restlessly hiding from the heat and drinking lassie.
We had (an Italian named Michael and I–who turned out to be worthy of respect, who has been in India since 2002) rented bikes for 20 ruppees, heavy, one geared mountain bikes. I had bought the ticket to see the two sites that you have to pay to get in–a silly purchase, because there was so much to look at for free, but since I had shelled out rs250 for it (a substantial amount of money–my budget for food and lodging for two days–on lucky days), I had to go see it. We petalled out, I saw it, appriciated it, but not as fully as I could have if my mind had been more present. I had a physically epic day, and Michael was waiting. Better we get back on our bikes and explore together.
On a whim, we turned away from town, though we knew that it would be dark, because we saw a temple nestled in a cliff down the road. We biked to it, up the hill. It turned out to be a big, lively temple with brahmin residents and music, perched on a cliff that overlooked the valley illuminated by afternoon light which fell in distinct shafts that emerged from behind a single cloud in the sky, perfectly placed to shield us from the power of the sun. It was said that Rama and his brother Lakshmana camped on that boulder on their way down to Lanka to rescue Seeta. I believed it; it is where I would have camped, unquestionably.
We took the same road I had taken that morning back, first past the vitthalita temple, riding into the most flamboyantly orange sunset I have seen in a long time.
We were dragging our bikes over the ancient road, built by a long-dead empire, along the river. Pushing our bikes, mostly, in the twilight that was becoming night quickly. We went back to a temple I had walked past that morning, and he showed me the carvings I had missed–the most hilarous, well preserved, and well done carvings I have seen in India; debaucherous animal sex.
I had put my clip-on sunglasses in my pocket unthinkingly in the setting sun, overwhelmed with beauty. I have lost those sunglasses, to my shame. I have a long and terrible history of losing every expensive pair of sunglasses I have ever owned, tragically; I feel just the same as I felt when I lost my expensive oaklies as a kid. I have to be a dreamy American who goes to India and simply hemmoraeges wealth and material posessions that anyone with any conscience and appriciation for things would treasure with their life. Especially given that it was a wonderful birthday present from loving parents, given with good energy towards a rich trip in India. I indulged my self-loathing on this point this morning as I retraced our footsteps from the night before, searching for them. When they did not appear, I have to suppress it; I cannot indulge in attachment to material objects at the expense of my mental and spiritual life. Gladly, I lost none of the love with which the glasses were given to me, so I really lost nothing. That’s the end of that.
We had dinner in a dark cafe outside of town, wallowing in perfect silence overlooking a river. Watched dogs fighting for territory.
Biked into lively bazzar, returned to guest house for coffee. I ought not to have drank coffee last night; it was strong, South Indian steam-brew, and I slept nary a wink last night. I know that I will have the energy to travel today, because I have no option, there is no alternative.
Over coffee, we talked. He has a new job in Bangalore writing Italian subtitles for American blockbuster movies. He asked me why all American kitchen sinks are directly below windows. I told him that was just in the movies, of course–for dramatic lighting of the wife as she does dishes. But then I let slip that I thought it was nice if you could have a house arranged like that, that it brings some liveliness and interest to the chore of doing dishes. He told me, being studied in Buddhism, that the window only serves as a distraction from being present in the moment, washing dishes.
Then, sleepless with caffine I’m unaccostomed to, I meditated. Wrote meaningless nightime rambles:
“Many realizations, mostly first and sticky American layer of irony. My mind will not slow down.
There is a black band on my left wrist. usually, there is a red band on my right wrist, properly, there is. Mine just fell off after more than a year; a piece of red hemp I had gotten from a stranger on the street of Seattle, which is of course another, long-distant story. Now I have a tan line on my wrist.
Body writing. Cottonmouthed. Thirsty.
The cool moon force is coming up my left side, because the fan is to my left. This may be opposite tradition; the book I bought today for its hilarious pictures says so. Irrelevancy. My cooled leftern half was actively pecieving Parvathi Kali Durga, and my Western halve was vaguely radiating. At the time, I thought it to be gender-backwards, though now seems not.
Recieving the force is supposed to come downward up, rather than coming down the Hubli river (river name?).
The moon inflicts herself upon me. My awareness of her power on my life thru my body is immense, and means that I am not free, that I am living as a body not only as a mind. These are forces, purely mythic, purely physical, undeniable.
Old realities pouring up my spine. I can see the snake coming upwards up the left channel, black scaled, perfectly halved, constant and eternal, with face, turning red exactly at apogee, diving down red precisely at appogee, at Brenschluss, says Pynchon, just where the rocket turns back to the earth. (For Rocket: Cobra. Kunda Lizard. Sir Radiation-faced.)
The book distracts me by making me laugh at myself. I could not be more a steriotype of myself. I do not particularly want to escape this sense of irony, destructive Americanly though it may be; it is my defense against the danger of institutions and religion.
I was laying east to west, not north to south, and she flowed stubbornly perpendicular to my spine….
The flow is side to side tonight, and feels lobsided because the coolness and rest overpower my depleted sunlight, which I gave over to the sun god today as a sacrifice to his power, and I was rewarded with power, physical excellence, body functioning purity daytime, but weary night.”
Today, I awoke from awakeness, having not slept and only occasionally allowing myself to submit to my meditations, frustratingly keeping myself on surface conciousness, perhaps out of self-torture instinct. I packed up, ate Idly in a hotel full of police though my body was crying for more substantive nutrition, gave in, ordered fried Puri and potatoes, chai. Set off to find sunglasses: the loss of the sunglasses gave me the massive gift of a morningtime trip back to my favorite temple among all the sites in Hampi, where I touched the warm breast of stone temple dancers, and took much better pictures of those carvings I enjoyed so much. Because of that loss, I will be able to share with you some better photos, eventually.
Then I went to the temple in town to do Puja to Kali Ma. I don’t normally engage in rituals, but I needed to replace that red band to get the flow of my energy straightened out. It was a simple, straightforward, but perfect affair, not much money involved. And now I have a coconut to eat as Prasad, which I think I will do down by the river.
TRAVEL:
I am about to travel to Pune, where I will stay one night on my way to Mumbai. Will fly from Mumbai back to Kolkata on Monday, April 20.
I was reflecting, and became uncomfortable with the thought that my little preface to my quarterly report in the most recent post below might be taken in the wrong light. The Arnold Committee is not paranoiac system of control like the Interzone Corporation from naked lunch. I was trying to be funny with myself. In my reality, Brown and my fellowship is an benevolent, flexable structure that gives me true freedom; immense freedom that is a priviledge I very very few people ever experience in their lives. They have sent me on a journey, and I thank them for this life-changing and life-giving gift.
Nobody said anything to me about this or pointed it out to me. I realized the mistake through reflection, and then didn’t have time to get to an internet cafe for too long.
Moreover, I’m proud and blessed to be associated with Brown University, which is respected hugely among the academic and artistic classes throughout India.
The Naked Lunch reference, actually, came out because of a particularly good class I took at Brown from an amazing professor, Prof. Ahearn of the English and French departments. In that class, we read Baudillaire, Rimbaud, and Naked Lunch. Ever since, these texts–particularly Rimbaud and Burroughs–have stayed with my conciousness, especially as I have bizzare adventures of the mind and body in this very strange land. Everything relates back to texts.
So any negativity that might have been hanging on to those words, please read it as a thank-you to a good professor from Brown, one among many.
My fellowship vaguely and unenthusiastically asks me to write these quarterly reports (I am strongly reminded of William Burroughs ‘Naked Lunch’ where all his ramblings are ‘reports’ in his paranoiac system). However, they are valuable to me to isolate what I’m doing and why; I assume that people understand my actions and my project without me ever explaining myself, especially on this blog, so I thought it would be good to post this. It’s the last report from India. I’ve been doing a lot of writing, but not posting it anywhere, but hanging on to it until I can get to some point where I can collect myself and my thoughts and synthesize it.
Quarterly Report IV
Dear Arnold Committee
Although my project has stayed focused in subject and intention, it has gone through a few incarnations in terms of its form, which has changed how I have lived in India as an Arnold Fellow. As you know, I have been living in Kolkata, and have been cataloging Writers Workshop books and putting those descriptions on the website, so that they could be offered for sale online at a future date–I even tried to put them for sale online myself at alibris.com. I was looking for ways to be involved in Writers Workshop as a business, since Professor Lal has the functioning of the publishing activities under control without me. He appreciated my efforts, and it was a good way to familiarize myself with the body of writing that is Writers Workshop. But at a certain point, I had to face the reality that the work I was doing was not creative, and that I was only getting part of the story of Writers Workshop through staying in Kolkata. And so, I began meeting authors who had published with Writers Workshop, at first in Kolkata, and now in other parts of India. As of my last quarterly report, I applied for permission to travel to a few communities nationally to encounter authors in their home habitats and cultures. And so, I am currently writing from the South Indian state of Karnataka, where I am interviewing writers, poets, and translators. My intention is to tell a story (certainly not THE story, but rather MY story) of Writers Workshop through a piece of writing that centers around the personalities of the people involved in Writers Workshop, beginning with Professor P. Lal, who is responsible for the formation of this national literary community. I have had to limit my project, because Writers Workshop has 3,500 titles, and I want to be able to read the work of the authors that I meet before I meet them–many wonderful people and a lot of great writing will be sadly omitted. Through my discussion of these personalities and their work, I will also be able to touch on cultural and social themes that have gained prominence in my experience of India–for example, the many faces of Indian Feminism and the dire plight of women in this culture, the hugely different approaches everyone has to their spiritual lives (an expansive subject that covers faith, yoga, and even perhaps my own experiences wrestling with myself in a foreign and spiritual land), and mythology, a subject that begins with Professor Lal’s Mahabharata scholarship–interestingly, every Indian writer I meet feels the weight, in some form or another, of the expansive Indian mythological tradition.
It makes much more sense for me to approach this project on the national rather than the local level because of the nature of Indian writing in English. Writers Workshop was founded and maintained on the somewhat controversial belief that English has taken a place beside the hundreds of native Indian languages as an important medium for Indian literature. However, in a country broken up into states along linguistic lines, English is unique because it has no native place in India; English speakers, writers, and readers are spread out throughout the country. One of the writers I interviewed, Shashi Deshpande, says that English language writing is at once marginalized because it has no physical place in the Indian landscape, and privileged, because it is the language of the educated elite, and has the potential to reach an international audience. Professor Lal, who spent his early career vigorously defending the right of Indians to write in English against Indian cultural conservatives, regards English as the Church Latin of the nation–the only language that South Asians around the region can communicate in. The project of Writers Workshop is to create a national community of writers. This intersects interestingly with the intention of the Arnold Fellowship to encourage me to engage deeply with a single community for a year; I am staying within a single community, even as I move around the country. Many of the writers that I meet know each other, or at least know each others’ work.
I’ll close this report with a quick run-down of the work I’ve been doing, the places and people I have encountered. In Kolkata, I began my interviews with Madushree Gupta, a conventional Bengali housewife who found some freedom from the restrictive social role that she has been placed in through her writing; she introduced me to the question of writing in the context of women’s issues. I met Anarban Basu, the only Indian science fiction writer I know of. Sudipta Chatterjee, a government beaurocrat of West Bengal who writes excellent fiction. And, most notably for my project, Nileen Putananda, an (ex) poet with deep spiritual convictions, who became a friend and helped me to add yoga and discipline to my life; he certainly began one of the narratives that I have been following since. After finally leaving Kolkata, I went to Bhubanseswar, Orissa to been a poet named Basanta Kumar Kar, who writes passionate personal verse, but who is now working on a project that involves telling the stories of women who are trapped in a system of prostitution and exploitation–women he meets through his work in NGOs. Then, I went to Hyderabad, where I stayed with Hoshang Merchant, a venerable poet who has published over twenty books with Writers Workshop; he is the most notable openly gay Indian academic and writer, and his flamboyant, youthful personality added a whole set of stories to my trip as we became genuine friends. His student, Prakash Kona, whose vaguely postmodern, theoretically driven creative prose effected me deeply, has also become an important personality to my project. Also in Hyderabad were Vithal Rajan, an idealistic, brilliant and very knowledgeable writer whose prolific writing is immensely charming (he has a book of stories about Sherlock Holmes in India), and Minakshee Mukherjee, a critic who recently wrote about Writers Workshop and P. Lal in the national newspaper, the Hindu. I traveled from there to Bangalore, where I met to very different feminist writers, an academic and poet named Meera Chakravorty, and Shashi Deshpande, who is the most well known and successful of all the authors included in my project, a prolific novelist. Today, I am going to Dharwad, a cultural center of Karnataka, to meet a translator from Kannada, G. S. Amur, and a novelist, K. Ragharendra Rao. From there, I will go to Mumbai where I will meet a Marathi novelist that I have had much correspondence with, Indrayani Sawkar. I will fly back to Kolkata, where I will write and synthesize these experiences, and then travel to the Northeast states, where I will meet five brilliant writers and poets who represent an entirely different side of Indian literary culture, including Mamaing Dai, T. Ao, and a mysterious figure known only as Rajkumari.
I’m writing this just for the thrill of posting a blog post from a chordless keyboard onto a massive widescreen TV, another world from the Hyderabad I have been living in over the past days. Life with Hoshang is something of a constant scandal, where gay-lust replaces basic utilities; he gets water for one hour every two days and we haven’t had electriity for the past two. On the way back from the old city just now, where he was taking me to see the palace, he picked up the autorickshawallah and told me to get lost, so I contacted my friend from couchsurfing, who has a highly collegiate and heterosexual night planned for me. I just heard whisper of a sportsbar! NCAA?!? joy.
OK more soon.
arrived in hyderabad yesterday morning. Since, I have been living inside the life and home of hoshang merchant, a strange but lovely life for a venerable horny old poet. He’s got a lot of good friends and lots of respect, and wants to show me off to everyone. A couple dedicated to Espiranto with a prodigy child, an irish lady who has been in India since 1962, and so on. Lots of stories, some drama, some simplicity, a lot of good food in the last two days. more soon
Powered by WordPress