Mnemnoscope

Once more, into the breach?

2009-10-22T19:44:00.001-04:00

Well, why not? How could it hurt, really?

Politics, lesson one:

2009-05-01T14:14:00.003-04:00

This, from today's NYT:

The investigation of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman also surfaced recently in news reports that Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat long involved in intelligence matters, was overheard on a government wiretap discussing the case. Ms. Harman was overheard agreeing with an Israeli intelligence operative to try and intercede with Bush administration officials to obtain leniency for Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman in exchange for help in persuading Democratic leaders to name her the chairman of the House intelligence Committee.

What, me worry?

What does 'Provenance Unknown' mean?

2008-07-06T11:24:00.003-04:00

If you've ever wondered about 'the how' by means of which artifacts end up at your favourite museum for your admiration, there's a revealing paragraph in an article on the Dunhuang caves in today's NYT:

Other people soon knew. In 1907 the British explorer Aurel Stein arrived. For a pittance he bought around 5,000 silk and paper scrolls from Wang and sent them to England. Some were paintings and banners; the bulk were religious and secular books in Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian and other regional languages, evidence of the capacious ethnic melting pot that China has always been.
Of all Stein’s books the prize was a ninth-century woodblock copy of the Diamond Sutra, or the “Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom of the Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion.” As if defying the scripture’s insistence on transience as the only reality, this marvelous scroll is the earliest known dated example of a printed book, six centuries older than the Gutenberg Bible.
After Stein came the French linguist and Sinologist Paul Pelliot. In one marathon reading session he eyeballed the entire remaining contents of the library cave, sorted out the cream and packed it off to Paris. Then a Japanese expedition arrived to claim a share, followed by a Russian one. In the 1920s the swashbuckling American art historian Langdon Warner sliced 26 murals from Mogaoku cave walls and gave them to Harvard, along with a pilfered sculpture. (You can still see the ghost-outlines of figures where he lifted off the thin plaster sheets.)

So much for 'provenance unknown.'

A tribute to Amar Sonar Bangla, with love

2008-07-01T23:53:00.002-04:00

Through the jongole I am went
On shooting Tiger I am bent
Boshtaard Tiger has eaten wife
No doubt I will avenge poor darling's life
Too much quiet, snakes and leeches
But I not fear these sons of beeches
Hearing loud noise I am jumping with start
But noise is coming from damn fool's heart
Taking care not to be fright
I am clutching rifle tight with eye to sight
Should Tiger come I will shoot and fall him down
Then like hero return to native town
Then through trees I am espying one cave
I am telling self -" Chatterjee be brave"
I am now proceeding with too much care
From far I smell this Tiger's lair
My leg shaking, sweat coming, I start pray
I think I will shoot Tiger some other day
Turning round I am going to flee
But Tiger giving bloody roar spotting Bengalee
He bounding from cave like footballer Pele
I run shouting "Kali Ma tumi kothay gele"
Through the jongole I am running
With Tiger on my tail closer looming
I am a telling that never in life
I will take risk again for my damn fool wife!!!!!

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

And now for something completely different. For those who've read Sy Hersh's recent article, here's a video that sheds light on the history of the US-Iran relationship. It should be viewed, I think, as not only representative of a certain sort of military relationship: rather, it reveals the texture of a cultural relationship - one in which geo-political imperatives, the belief in the rectitude and desirability of American-style consumption, and the interests of the military-industrial complex are all present. A period piece, perhaps, and one deserving of sympathy as we move ever closer to .... what?

For Michael Bhatia

2008-05-23T11:43:00.004-04:00

Today I discovered that a friend of a friend died in Afghanistan. There's tragedy enough in that sentence, but the death of Michael Bhatia was painful in another way: Michael was working on a project that I had tried (in vain, alas) to organize with the Canadian Army in Kandahar. From the little that I have been able to glean of Bhatia's life, it is clear that he was a brilliant scholar (his dissertation, based on three hundred and fifty interviews, studied the motives of Afghani Mujahiddeen) and a fine person too. But perhaps most importantly, Michael had the tremendous moral courage to stand for his convictions. Bhatia did not merely study the country from afar and he was not a propagandist for the pro- or anti-war crowds. Instead, in the finest traditions of service through scholarship, Bhatia went to Afghanistan: to live among soldiers and civilians, to reflect on their lives, and to produce work that would have had tremendous impact on the lives of ordinary Afghanis. Such intellectual strength and nobility is truly rare, and it will be missed. Without the privilege of knowing Bhatia and of reading his work, I can only commemorate his sacrifice.

This loss hurts.

The Prison of the Self

2008-04-26T17:31:00.002-04:00

I am a cage.

Without comment

2008-04-06T18:05:00.002-04:00

مانا کی یہ سنسان گھڑی سخت کڑی ہے

لیکن مرے رل یہ تو فقت یک ہی گھڑی ہے

ہمّت کرو، جینے کو تو عمر پڑی ہے

Vermeer's Hat

2008-03-02T14:33:00.002-05:00

Tim Brook, one of my favourite historians (and people), has a new book on the early modern world called Vermeer's Hat. Needless to say, I can't wait to read. Below, a link to rather erudite interview with the author on EconTalk.

Tim Brook on France, Canada, the Dutch, China, Guns, Beavers, Columbus, Hats, and much more, all here.

No Country for Young Men

2008-01-10T02:25:00.000-05:00

The City
C P Cavafy

You Said: "I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
The city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

I woke this morning to the inquisitive snout of the dog in my face, in a silent, sun-lit room, surrounded on all sides by trees and quietude. I read a little poetry, a little Stendhal, a little Sebald. In unseasonably warm weather, we lunched on a patio; we watched an excellent movie, we walked around a historic neighbourhood I know from the account of a young British officer who visited this city after he visited that other one I love so much in the year 1795; the streets, quaintly cobbled, still bear two-hundred year old names. I enjoyed with great pleasure a rather hard-to-find Japanese beer; afterwards, we, the two old friends that we are, talked, over cups of tea, about the trajectories of our lives that gracefully but insensibly bear us to where we go. Was I happy today, was I liberated? Admittedly, no: today, perhaps, was a day of special discontent. But now, as I prepare to sleep, I look back over the day, over all days ever before, and I see the vista of time, much like the landscapes of Texas that I saw today, is infinite, and pleasing to behold. So what if one grows older, so what if nothing succeeds as planned, so what if one only now begins to see that the pattern of one's life was wholly unanticipated, that it bears its own mysterious logic only in this very now being revealed? At least we are here. Of a great calm, what is there to say? The silence reigns absolute.

Il ritorno in patria

2008-01-04T14:27:00.000-05:00

The following afternoon, back in London, my first port of call was the National Gallery. The painting by Pisanello that I wanted to see was not in its usual place, but owing to renovation work had been hung in a poorly lit room in the basement into which few of the visitors who wandered into the gallery every day found their way.
...
The train rolled slowly out of Liverpool Street station, past the soot-stained brick walls the recesses of which have always seemed to me like parts of a vast system of catacombs that comes to the surface there. In the course of time a multitude of buddleias, which thrive in the most inauspicious conditions, had taken root in the gaps and cracks of the nineteenth-century brickwork. The last time I went past those black walls, on my way to Italy in the summer, the sparse shrubs were just flowering. And I could hardly believe my eyes, as the train was waiting at a signal, to see a yellow brimstone butterfly flitting about from one purple flower to another, first at the top, then the bottom, now on the left, constantly moving.

W G Sebald, Vertigo

Two days ago I found myself, once again, in the National Gallery in Washington DC. I remembered almost nothing of this imposing edifice that I had once visited in some seven years ago to the day on a winter day that is in my memory as gray as bright. It was something of a shock, therefore, to discover that between galleries lay broad circular halls with fountains and flowers that I had presumed existed in some other museum elsewhere. I noted again, with deep unease, the familiar soft light, the flowers, the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters that glittered in the fountains, and the tourists who photographed each other there. We had gone to see an exhibition of the Turner's paintings, and on the way I spotted, briefly, a sequence of four Monets, one so common so as to be tawdry, none of which I remembered. During the exhibition, my friend P. paused for a second and then exclaimed with a tone of absolute surety that he had seen a certain painting elsewhere, and many times. Others, he remarked, we had seen together on our previous excursion to this hallowed ground.

But Mnemnosyne, laughing, lurked coyly somewhere in the shade of those lofty columns, those forgotten fountains, those flowers. I remembered little - and in vain did I search for a Modigliani or Gaugain afterwards to ease my heart. We walked, then, in conversation, through the works of Turner, seeing his progression from a young man obsessed with the movement of emptiness through space, through the depth of clouds and their relation to a resounding sea, to someone who had finally discovered the power of the gestural significance of abstract colour. We came, eventually, to a room filled with Turner's pictures of the burning of the houses of Parliament, on loan from the National Gallery in London. This room will remain forever emblazoned in my memory ("Never say Forever," whispers sultry Mnemnosyne in my ear) - a brilliant burst of flame in the fading evening skies of a little Island, of a city by the sea. Of these, perhaps one picture jumps immediately to mind:

And later that evening, as we emerged from the gallery, the sky stopped me, breathless, in my tracks. To call it azure, to call its broad clouds pink, would be effrontery. I shan't make that mistake: instead, point only to the remarkable coincidence of the symmetry of colour, of form, of meaning, between paint daubed on canvas a hundred and seventy odd years ago and the perception of one evening by two eyes so very recently.

And it came to me then: The remarkable unity of colour - for a blue, after all, will always be a blue (if not the same blue) - that reaches across years of life and death, of creation and destruction, of ceaseless change, strife, and turmoil; from sky to paper and across the chasm of time to sky and yet again, to eye; to point to the wholeness of aesthetic experience, and to hope: and so, quite naturally, to the promise, ultimately, of a good life, one worth living.

Goodbye, Bibi

2007-12-30T12:57:00.000-05:00

The Funeral of Bobo
J Brodsky

Bobo is dead; there's sadness in this line.
O window squares, O arches' semicircles,
and such fierce frost that if one's to be slain,
let blazing firearms do the dirty work.
[...]
Farewell, Bobo, my beautiful and sweet.
These teardrops dot the page like holes in cheese.
We are too weak to follow you, and yet
to take a stand exceeds our energies.
[...]
You were all things, Bobo. But your decease
has changed you. You are nothing; you are not;
or, rather, you are a clot of emptiness--
which also, come to think of it, is a lot.

Rather apropos, don't you think? I sometimes wonder whether Brodsky is turning into Hafiz. Faiz has an appropriate verse here too:

Even though this dire moment is upon us,
remember, my heart, it is only a moment.
It's courage we need: after all,
terrible as it is right now,
what's left of our life remains to be endured.

On that note, I wish you, gentle reader, a happy new year. There will be more.

The Return of the Native

2007-12-22T02:49:00.001-05:00

As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days - four days which were the happiest days of his life.... He chose a train leaving for southwestern Germany in half an hour, spent a quarter of his whole fortune on the ticket and thought with pleasurable excitement how he would cross the frontier without a single visa; and beyond it was France, Provence, and then - the sea.
As his train moved off he fell into a doze, his face buried in the folds of his mackintosh, hanging from a hook above the wooden seat.
- V Nabokov, Mary

It was all the more surprising and indeed alarming a little later, said Austerlitz, when I looked out of the corridor window of my carriage just before the train left at seven-thirteen, to find it dawning on me with perfect certainty that I had seen the pattern of the steel and glass roof above the platforms before, made up as it was of triangles, round arches, horizontal and vertical lines and diagonals, and in the same half light.
W G Sebald, Austerlitz

What can I say about my life, asks the poet, save that it is long and that is abhors transparence? Here, dear and gentle reader, is what I can tell you about life. In life: there are no departures, no escapes, no final goings-away; only, always, an uncanny returning to the half-familiar.

Once, in youth, one believed in the promise of emancipation. One would, one imagined, by means utterly ordinary, leave one's flawed life behind, live in a future pure, unblemished, lovely; one could transcend every obstacle unscarred; one's soul, after all, persevered despite the beauty of every setting sun and ending love. When you boarded a train, the very rails bore you away forever.

Now, at the ripe old age which I currently inhabit, I have come to realize the folly of the very idea of escape. In life, there are no departures, no new beginnings, no total breaks. Instead, in one's peregrinations, one's increasingly fevered flights, one finds only -- not the familiar, but its shattered fragments. The subject, either you or me, dear reader, can never be lost - for that would imply a hope of being found; instead, we return, against our will, to haunting, uncanny, remembered places. No return to roots, then: only a constant return to incompleteness, to the lostness that now seems always to already have been so definitive.

What, then, is the lesson for this life? To return, once more, to a city where no one remembers my name? To see a sunset, seen so many times before, in a world where one is no more than a flitting spectre? How can I tell you about the unhomely homeliness of walking a street where a former self once trod? How can I tell you about the exact replication of a moment of silence, of evening, of clouds inflamed, possessed by the angularity of the sun's rays, but in a place where the self exists only as a shade? How, then, to describe the passage of time, it's heart-stopping discrete-ness?

Much as it goes with you, former selves are for me too also distant, unimaginably so. Once, I suppose, I was proud of how much I had grown, become myself, surpassed the past. Now, all that retrospect yields is is an absence. And the deafening roar of the onrushing silence.

Dreams in the Frozen Season are longer, keener.
The patchwork quilt and the parquet deal,
on their mutual squares, in chessboard warriors.
The hoarser the blizzard rules the chimney,
the hotter the quest for a pure ideal
of naked flesh in a cotton vortex...
Joseph Brodsky: Eclogue IV: Winter

A Farewell

2007-11-12T18:12:00.000-05:00

Leaving school, we sat in the back of your father’s official white ambassador, and you produced a cigarette – was it a Classic Mild, and did I take one from you? After all, we smoked together, in those days when lighting one was an ordeal not a pleasure – and we talked briefly, desultorily, for a while, about exams. Then you asked me if I liked Bjork, and I told you that I didn’t, and you smiled, because you did. But you understood why. Just because you always understood everything.

When you were in school, and your life seemed charmed, we sat once on the dismal brick steps on one side of the field, doubtless contemplating the hordes of children passing left and right, clutching water-bottles and tiffin-boxes. In yours (a transparent plastic bottle with a yellow octagonal cap), you often brought vodka to school, to be consumed in toilets and corners with your henchmen. I thought then that you were living dangerously, that you disregarded the ordinary human considerations which for me were an endless labyrinth, that you operated with a certain simplicity of action (such as the time you walked up to an exhibition table full of flowers for Teachers’ Day, and seizing a bundle at random, presented it to your girlfriend – without, of course, removing the card thanking the teacher.)

A gentle soul with an anarchic streak: on that pale winter day we sat eating onion buns – your favourite, when we drank, because they were ten rupees a one – and you held forth on whatever came to your mind. I always enjoyed your disquisitions, little displays of a proto-erudition that, over gentler years, would have bloomed and matured. And even if I was cut to the quick by the sharp mockery with which didn’t hesitate to treat me, in a world that seemed barren, one took for granted your genius: one expected that you would always be around, in some form, to offer advice and alcohol and humour and cigarettes and thoughts and silent company too.

Listen, my friend, forgive me for speaking of you now that you no longer have the right of response. What did you think of me? Did you take me for a friend as I do? Did you ever remember me, as I to this day remember you? Did I ever come up in conversation or mental monologues, as you, from time to time, did? And were there some conversations that linked us in ways that were only ours? After all, friendship, you would no doubt have agreed, was selfish. And love, too, in all its magnificence and harshness; that, too, I saw and learned from you. But even if we were not friends, we were crawling to a tenuous understanding; because I think that in some way – and let us savour the full meaning of the word – I think it may well be that there was, if nothing else, this: recognition.

Recognition. I certainly recognized something in you. You could be happy; exuberant, even. But in your happiness there was a certain abandon, a recklessness, or perhaps an unhesitating moral courage; it could swing, I knew even then, to something else: a place where there was only action, no joy. And you never shared that great wild desolation within with me. So that even now, when one fantasizes about lives uninterrupted by exile and by death, something else waits in the shadows of a world in which I could still drop by to browse your books, your cassettes and CDs, to have a drink, to go for a walk.

Now you are gone, and I am still here. You sold the world, as one of our favourites sang, and I am still standing on verge of that staircase to that other place where you won’t be found again. I am scared, my friend, that you did not really think this through. Did you ever pause to think that somewhere, far away, there was still someone to whom your memory was inviolate? Did you judge the consequences of every action? Did you weigh every pebble, every nugget, of possibility? And how many others are there now, substance of no form and no particular trajectory, that are united only in the recollection that once you passed by, and briefly illuminated our darknesses?

It is late, and I am drinking some scotch, in your memory, to you, purely as an anaesthetic, as ana-aesthetic, as a gesture of all the drinks we have already downed, and all the ones I never shall again. Never, despite its deceptive size, is a rather large word. A word which encompasses worlds. Time is passing, and somewhere you are absent. Time is passing: mnemnosyne’s mortal enemy, amnesia will eventually prevail. But you, casual archaeologist, future reader: be careful. We lived here once.

I am trying to remember a conversation we had once as I walked with you to the gates of the campus. I know that we were talking about something very, very significant; it seems at this hour that if I could summon forth this talk we had as we walked over those uneven flagstones on that summer evening then what would happen is: a blinding flash of epiphany, and everything explained: the tortuous thread to join you; me; the days and the years passing by; and the why, the why, the why.

But it doesn’t come.

S.K. (1979-2006). Rest, finally, in peace.

Pity the curlicue

2007-11-08T20:50:00.000-05:00

Once, February was the cruelest month. Because it was the shortest. Now, I suppose it's back to April. And so, the curlicue is the saddest shape: a spiral gone awry, away, and away, and away. Never to return. Until it stops.

A spiral can be giddy too. To come to the same place, but be elsewhere: above, perhaps, or below.

And what about circles?

In a book I picked up one rainy Saturday, in a dusty bookstore, in a neat little city, by the churning black sea. A book of which a copy lies on this shelf, ("A heartbeat's double") but not the same book that that lay in a room with a large window that faced a lawn that faced trees, behind which, interrupted by a sliver of sand, there lay the black winter sea. In a book waiting to be given, to be brought back, to float away forever. In a book I read an afternoon, in the dark of an unfamiliar room. (Reader, take note: an entire elegy on the periphery of a story about a book that lay untouched on a metal shelf in a corner of a room with a sloping roof facing a green courtyard, silent at night but for the sound of wind through pines).

Are you warm tonight under those six veils
in that basin of yours whose strung bottom wails;
where like fish that gasp at the foreign blue
my raw lip was catching what then was you?

...

We are parting for good, my friend, that's that.
Draw an empty circle on your yellow pad.
This will be me: no insides in thrall.
Stare at it a while, then erase the scrawl.

I can hear the sound of the number one train. It is leaving the station.

For Friends Across the Border

2007-11-03T18:57:00.000-04:00

Kolo
by Joseph Brodsky

In March the soldiers
with rifles on their shoulders
Out run through brambles
the locals with their bundles.

Off fly the envoys
contemplating new ways
of creating symmetry
in a future cemetery.

Up go the pundits
explicating bandits.
Clearly outworded,
down go the murdered.

The expensive warriors,
sailing by on carriers
flying Old Glory,
signal hunky-dory.

Far is the neighbor,
loveless or unable,
neutral or bullied.
Near is a bullet.

...

Blood as a liquid
shows no spilling limit;
one might build finally
here a refinery.

Home stay the virtuous
with their right to watch this
live, while they are dining:
it's a mealtime dying.

Soiled turns the fabric
of the great republic.
Ethics by a ballot
is what it's all about.

Mourn the slaughtered.
Pray for those squatted
in some concrete lair
facing betrayal.

---

With love, and in sympathy.

At home in the city

2007-10-31T12:00:00.000-04:00

... We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city that we pursue, in vain...

...In the great city, so three-dimensional, so rooted in its soil, drawing colour from such depths, only the city was real. Those of us who came to it lost some of our solidity; we were trapped into fixed, flat postures. And in this growing disassociation between ourselves and the city in which we walked, scores of separate meetings, not linked even by ourselves, who became nothing more than perceivers: everyone reduced, reciprocally, to a succession of such meetings, so that first experience and then the personality divided bewilderingly into compartments. Each person concealed his own darkness.
-VS Naipaul

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
-T S Eliot

Il faut être absolument moderne.
-Arthur Rimbaud

----------------

A tight quiver of the first rays of the sun spread rose from across a horizon obscured by the building across the street. The train arrived at the station: a foretaste, a dull rolling rumble, a squeal, and a silence. Then the klaxon of the door opening; another silence; and again, the rising roar of metal dully grinding against metal. Sleep was nowhere to be found again. Why did trucks have to stop outside the building and idle in the morning? Someone spoke sharply; a hint of cigarette-smoke rose to the fourth floor. It's no use turning in bed. Pulling a pillow over one's head couldn't possibly work. The trick was to just stop thinking. Stop thinking. Stop thinking. Really there was no need for conversations at any time beyond two in the morning. If one had to get drunk, better to get drunk alone. Last night, walking by the river, in the emptiest part of the city, and the sudden view of the power-plant, three stacks of chimneys, all eerily silent. Had it been moonlit then? Perhaps if coffee could somehow be arranged, matters might improve. She could always just file her nails and fall asleep. She never drank Coffee - always those infernal cups of green tea, barely drunk, then left to cool forever on side-tables and shelves. What had it been like? Why is everything forgotten? Shall it ever come back? And then there's no point even thinking about the article. It was too rounded, too perfect. Why criticize it? Just criticism for its own sake. Perhaps that was the whole idea. And then that one was wrong: I'm not dead inside, I think. Not yet. But as She explained: one had to be modern. To be really modern one had to lose all sense of home. No home. Homes are no longer possible, in this world of ours. Someone was spraying the sidewalk with a hose. What was it like to be sprayed with a hose? Holi? A summer evening? When was the last time? In Shahjahanabad Dihli, in the 1750s, there were no hoses. There were flowerbeds, though. Were they called kyaris? Must make a note of that. There were writers: fat, corpulent, obese gourmands; wry, self-effacing, writers. They had homes. Why didn't Anand Ram ever write about his home? God, I'd kill to read about Anand Ram on his own home. What was his bedroom like? How did it feel to be a fat man, sleeping after a huge meal of Chicken Dopyiaza, in a house, behind the walls, at the end of the summer? Where was his home in Delhi? Which Kucha? Where did he keep his elephant? How did he feed it? Did he have a tree for it? We had a tree for the elephant. At home. But there are longer any homes. Those who have a sense of home are doomed. Pity them. They will never become. And eventually, they will be destroyed: trapped in the edifice as its very fiction crumbles around them. That was what Walter Benjamin was doing, then, with Berlin Childhood. That was the connection with the Arcades Project. Freedom; autonomy; sovereignty; owning oneself; being free; being alone, utterly, utterly alone; in order to become oneself, one had to break from every notion of home. At home in the university? No. Not even there. Someone is rattling a cart over the sidewalk. A damned shopping-cart. What a racket. No doubt a homeless man. Why must they pick through trash at whatever time it is now? Good thing the heat is turned down. It would be unbearable otherwise. One should arise. In a minute. To work. Perhaps if one were to read enough, and write enough, then in the end, it would be no longer necessary to need home. Home is also people. There are people in my home. But it's not my home, that apartment in that city. Nor for that matter that other one, in that city. Nor this, in this one. Perhaps this is it: to grow up, to become, to make a life for oneself. Oneself. One. One must investigate this, to the end. At the core, a nugget of meaning. And one needs meaning, after all. Become a peripatetic, she said. I thought I already was one. How odd, to be homeless, to be broken away, to be shipwrecked, and then, all over again, just when one thought one was done, to be, again, homeless. And how like her: using sociology to explain experience. How does she? How do I? What is it I do anyway? The quilt will no longer keep the light out. And now I know what I do. History.

On the beloveds...

2007-10-23T22:08:00.000-04:00

<<

The lovely ones of this country are also unequalled in grace, and in splendour are like the shining moon. I do not say that any land is wanting in beauty, but that the habits of the beautiful women of this country are quite distinct; for that neatness of form, blandishments and coquetry, winning and charming manners, decorating, anointing, ornamenting, foppishness and elegance, which are seen here, are beheld in no other region, and this is a well known thing, that in the immediate neighbourhood of dilli, as far as beauty goes, an unadorned one has the elegance of adornment, and should one with a body fair as silver, but unpolished, come here, in a short time, having obtained neatness of form, she will rank among the beauties of the world. In short, everyone here knows how to steal and rob hearts, and whomever you look at, she is an expert in sharpness and repartee; and should she form the desire, then with one glance she will drive a wise man mad, and in one instance deprive a hermit of his hermit's clothes; the devotee of a hundred years immediately on seeing her lovely glance becomes a debauchee, and the old hermit a worshipper of Venus.
...They destroy the Mussalman's faith,
And, if they choose, can turn a Hindu into a Mussalman.
In an instant they will change a mosque into an idol temple,
And cause a state of paganism in the temple [sic] of Mecca.
The praise of the beautiful ones is beyond bounds
-- How then can the pen sufficiently write it?
>>

Araish-i Mahfal, by Sher Ali Ja`fari Afsos, tr. Maj. Henry Court (1871)

Comment is unnecessary.

Why I (don't) write

2007-10-23T17:02:00.000-04:00

All Asiatics are unscrupulous and unforgiving. The natives of Hindustan are peculiarly so; but they are also unsympathetic and unobservant in a manner that is altogether their own. From the languor induced by the climate, and from the selfishness engendered by centuries of misgovernment, they have derived a weakness of will, an absence of resolute energy, and an occasional audacity of meanness, almost unintelligible in a people so free from the fear of death.
D. Keene, The Fall of the Mughal Empire of Hindustan, (1887) pg. 32

It's true. I'm having a little trouble writing.

2007-10-09T00:05:00.000-04:00

This is for the brilliant scholar, lover of Coetzee and Pamuk, she whose laughter and play, in the abstract, are as vivid as the smell of coffee under a parasol and words left unrecorded, of walks, and of conversations that will never be reproduced. I have said enough, and you will know what I mean.

Memory is elusive. Literature is the bait; the hook within will summon, resistant and unyielding, some aspect of a life lived before. And sometimes, a word, a thought, will reveal something waiting and hidden. Consider this excerpt from Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games:

All this was true, and it was a restful pleasure to lie under a thela [cart] and complain. They had already complained about the municipality, corporators, transfers of honest civil servants and police-men, expensive mangoes, traffic, too much construction, collapsing buildings, clogged drains, unruly and uncivilized Parliament, extortion by Rakshaks, bad movies, nothing worthwhile to watch on television, American interference in subcontinental affairs, the disappearance of Rimzim from soft-drink stands, inter-state quarelling over river waters, the lack of good English-Language schools for children whose parents didn't have truckloads of money, the depiction of police on the movie screen, long unpaid hours on the job, the job, and the job.

I laughed until I cried when I first read this. Then I wondered if I'd been laughing in the first place at all. For me, this is a lovely representation of a subcontinental imaginaire, the mentalites of a place where "the streetcar's multitudes, jostling, dense,/speak in the tongue of a man who's departed thence."

And so it goes.

Three

2007-09-30T23:54:00.000-04:00

Three poems, by Brodsky. Two are appropriate. One less so.

I went to a museum
saw art ad nauseam.

----

I sit at my desk
My life's grotesque.

----

Oysters, like girls, like pearls.
Pearls like darkness and moisture.
With pearls round her neck or amidst her curls,
my girl makes my world my oyster.

----

There will be a lot of Brodsky on this blog in the near future. Also, old readers will appreciate this picture I took today at the MoMA: Mayakovsky by Rodchenko.

There will be real writing here too, and soon. For now I must read.

The Life of the Mind

2007-09-12T21:28:00.000-04:00

I declare triumphantly that I am alive, self-constituting as we speak, in love with life, and all the rest. The ivory tower is warm and comfortable, and it is right and proper, fitting and just, -- and fun -- to think once again.

Watch this space - more will come.

In the meanwhile, let me leave you with a quote from Derrida truly worth pondering:
<<
Can différance, for these reasons, settle down into the division of the ontico-ontological difference, such as it is thought, such as its "epoch" in particular is thought, "through," if it may still be expressed as such, in Heidegger's uncircumventable meditation?

There is no simple answer to such a question.
>>

Oracles

2007-07-23T03:27:00.000-04:00

Cleaning through the detritus of my past lives that continues to float aimlessly in the present, I found something I jotted down while waiting at an airport a few months ago.

Through the plated glass, one saw a vista of the airport, water and wooded habitation. The foreground was filled with the ceaseless motion of aircraft and trucks, but behind it lay a desolate stillness of green and brown that merged, in the distance, with a squat row of grey indeterminate structures that obscured the horizon. Amongst the seats that faced this panorama, here and there sat leaden figures frozen in place, mesmerized, perhaps, by the particular variety of gloom that is endemic to those silent airports through which it seems no shall ever pass again. I did not then ponder over the fundamental and stultifying contradiction of waiting in a place where one came with the sole intention of achieving movement; instead, a thought flashed sudden and complete in my mind: we are condemned to wander ceaselessly hither and thither all over the impassive face of the globe in search of rest that does not exist anywhere. I could not remember anything, and in any case felt utterly unable to move; corpse-like we faced the earth and the sky. The silence was interrupted only by the ravings of a madwoman who had somehow found her way to this desolated spot. I was seized by the sudden urge, dormant for decades and erroneously presumed extinct, to chew my fingernails. Even much later, the woman’s harsh, insistent words lingered on. Did she glimpse, for a moment, some higher form of objective reality beyond the haze which beclouded her? Amongst all her accusations, insinuations, and pleas, was there an oracular warning, an intimation of things to come, that only the sightless could see?

COIN and all

2007-07-09T14:12:00.000-04:00

Friends, Lovers, Concubines, Secondary Squeezes: This one deserves a blog post all of it's own. Loping through one of my usual haunts, I found George Packer's blog.

newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker

For those of you who don't know George Packer - he's perhaps one of the best contributors to the New Yorker, and has been writing for some time now on the war in Iraq. I am, of course, interested in his writing because of my broader concerns about the theory and practice of counterinsurgency - but this is a blog worth reading if you've the faintest interest in what's happening in the Land of the Tigris today. While we're on the subject of COIN, I might as well point out that the two best places for discussion are The Small Wars Journal and the Intel Dump.

SWJ: http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/blog/

Intel Dump: http://www.intel-dump.com/

I suppose this is all by way of me finally beginning to overcome the sheer sensation of nausea when confronted with the horror of Iraq. But opening question: is the theory of counterinsurgency ethical? (I haven't been able to download the argument in Anthropology Today yet, but I shall.) Follow Saint Augustine: Keep Picking Up and Reading! Meanwhile, I'm counting down the days...

Waiting

2007-07-06T03:44:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking today about the work and toil that lies ahead. Frankly, it makes me happy. Let it be noted, for the record, that I am fully mindful of the tremendous, intense, ecstatic submergence that lies ahead.

In March, I saw once again, after many long months, the sight of young people stumble dazed from the library, blinking in the sunshine, enveloped by a deep fatigue and a yet more relentless thirst unslaked. I envied them then, but now it is not so very long. Nevertheless I am haunted by the spectre of the Corinthian columns and gardens amongst which the Thinker sits. And all around, autumnal blue skies pierced by needles of glass and steel.

Am I aestheticizing? But of course. To write, to think, to envisage, is in the end to narrativize. I have created my narrative, and now I must inhabit it. I regret nothing, and I shan't apologize. For I have not yet even begun to live. How can I wait?

Gentlemen, I am joking, of course, and I myself know that I am not joking very successfully, but really one cannot take everything as a joke. Maybe I'm grinding my teeth as I joke.

Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

The absence of silence

2007-06-26T02:16:00.000-04:00

It is a time of transition, and I am preparing for outward change with internal stillness. For once, the winter that continues outside in June matches the onset of winter that has taken hold somewhere within me. Now, my yearning is reserved for the purity of text.

For the last little while, I have browsed through Pamuk's Black Book, but I have found nothing I want to inscribe here. What worthwhile intellectual experiences have I recently enjoyed?

Silence.

I have been immersing myself in the beautiful voice of Maria Callas, and I recently watched Fires on the Plain with the lovely 韩丽.

I see something of myself. But I am not yet an allelophage.

I have a fear. I fear I shall have forgotten how to have a thought and hold it by the time I leave this city. The city itself has turned to a cross of lights that flashes through clouds - will they never leave? - on invisible mountains.

I feel profoundly reticent. I am not myself.

Tonight, I drank several glasses of wine, more beer, and swapped cards. I spoke of the Asia Pacific Gateway Initiative to diplomats. I saw Stanley Kwan's Rouge. Perhaps I was moved. In any event, certitude escapes me.

Watching the best cinema this past century has to offer convinces me, as ever, that there is no respite anywhere on the surface of the earth, and that we are all doomed to walk to it endlessly, seeking - but never finding - rest. Life, unfortunately, is endless action, and there is no silence, no solitude, no escape.

Soviet cinema folllows.

The Lead-Soled Shoes of Memory

2007-05-31T01:17:00.000-04:00

We live in days when Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith are lauded for qualities imperceptible to mere mortals such as you and I, dear reader. On the other hand, a fool of Christopher Hitchen's magnitude is allowed to train his Flugabwehrkanone against Guenter Grass. But Grass is not a blimp - really, rather a Zeppelin: lumbering, perhaps, certainly very much out of fashion - and yet, and yet, capable of spectacular feats that the young nippers (Smith, Roy, Martel and god-knows-who-else) cannot hope to match, despite their flashy Messerschmitt-esque agility with words. Consider these excerpts from his excursus into the end of the war, published in a recent New Yorker:

There were bodies everywhere, one next to the other and one on top of the other, dead, still alive, writhing, impaled by branches, peppered with shell splinters. Many were in acrobatic contortions. Body parts were strewn around.

Isn’t that the boy who was tootling away on the harmonica? And there’s that private, his lather not yet dry. . . .
The survivors were either crawling here and there or, like me, rooted to the spot. Some wailed, though not wounded. I made no sound; I just stood there in my piss-soaked pants, staring at the innards of a boy I had been shooting the breeze with. Death seemed to have shrunk his round face.

But I had already read everything I write here. I had read it in Remarque or Céline, who—like Grimmelshausen before them, in his description of the Battle of Wittstock, when the Swedes hacked the Kaiser’s troops to pieces—were merely quoting the scenes of horror that had been handed down to them. . . .

Now this involution in the last paragraph is the thinking of a master - one who realizes, and has shown, that all distinctions between narrative, literature, life, and experience are amorphous at best and utterly arbitrary and false at worst. Maestro Pamuk has also demonstrated this quite compellingly in his Black Book (kara kitap), which funnily enough, I do not often find cited amongst those who claim to love his writing. But the false adulation of Pamuk is another matter to which I shall return later - for now let me say how happy I am Sebald never got the Nobel prize, else every debutante with literary pretensions would throw "Austerlitz" carelessly next to "The English Patient" in their parroted list of imitative preferences. Strong, strong is the herd instinct...

But it is Grass, today, who has to recite mea culpas for his involuntary enlistment in the SS in late 1944 (that alone should say everything, but it doesn't.) I cannot see why Grass hasn't pointed out that he, too, was a victim - a sixteen-year old sent to his death on paths lined with the bodies of 'deserters' running from the wrath of avenging Soviet armies that were better-trained, better-equipped, and overwhelmingly greater in number. Grass, contra Hitchens, has never claimed personal moral superiority - even though he was a bare-faced child when deployed to the Ostfront (by then coiled deep in the heart of the Reich) and from his first moments had to face traumas far greater than the ones that our young comrades were recently subjected to in a classroom in Virginia Tech: unlike so many others - jews, gypsies, catholics, homosexuals, communists, liberals, dissidents, poets and artists, writers and thinkers - Grass emerged from the pyre. For this one life, and indeed for every single other saved life, we should be grateful, struggle as we must to imagine walking a mile in Grass's own shoes.

Why should we do such a thing, and what might be the experience of such an exercise? Grass himself supplies something of an answer:

After is always before. What we call the present, this fleeting nownownow, is constantly overshadowed by a past now, in such a way that the escape route known as the future can be marched to only in lead-soled shoes.

Shout-Outs

2007-05-22T21:06:00.000-04:00

For one reason or another, it's the season of shout-outs again. A couple of blogs are particularly noteworthy here, and they all have something to do with China. My raving sinophilia has been further exacerbated over the past several years by an unhealthy amount of contact with students of Chinese history. They are a fascinating and motley bunch, these westerners who have given their youth and their lives to the love of China. Now let us dissect their corneas.

First, if only to get him out of the way, comes the Peasant of Superior Excellence and Urbane Refinement (PoSEUR). Besides his hardly-single-minded pursuit of Ming esoterica - matters on which we have conversed for many a twilight hour, I might add - the PoSEUR has come to be mesmerised by the culture of skateboarding in Shanghai. His latest post, worthy of perusal, exemplifies this love: it contains his audacious collaborative design of a pair of Nike sneakers which wittily commemorate the birth of skateboarding in China. According to hoary legend, the first was a milkman who used a skateboard on his early morning peregrinations, and the shoes playfully celebrate the birth of this cultural idiom.
As a caveat, let me add that these shoes may also be considered the tortured cri de coeur of the historian who has come to accept that he is fully and inextricably implicated in the very forms of production and consumption that are abhorrent to him for the violence and destruction they have imposed on his adopted homeland. And now, the latest flicker of occasional effort from the PoSEUR has produced an album of 'Things You Can Put on the Back of a Bike:' I see this as not only as a catalogue of the tremendous resilience of the people who are enmeshed in productive networks 'elsewhere,' but an ironic insight into the contradictions which produce the subject of production and the object of consumption.

If I have written so much about the PoSEUR, it is to mark through text the final impossibility of the disinterested observer - for surely I myself will receive, gratis or otherwise, some consumable token of creativity, stitched together by migrant labourers, to be worn on my feet in New York, and used to initiate conversations with attractive members of the opposite sex ("Yeah, these are totally limited edition, but my friend designed them so...") This theme of implication finds a distant echo in the writings of 鲁大伟, who has most recently written a pithy summary of the autocannibalistic nature of 'Creative Destruction.' Like the PoSEUR, he too loves Shanghai; but where the PoSEUR resorts to irony (perhaps if only to veil his hedonism), 鲁大伟 points quietly to the visual evidence. Not, however, to be construed as an immunity to outbursts of irreverence, play and jollity...

For these lovers of a place and culture, my beloved Robert Burton has a particular diagnosis in his Anatomy of Melancholy:

The lascivious dotes on his fair mistress, the glutton on his dishes, which are infinitely varied to please the palate, the epicure on his several pleasures, the superstitious on his idol, and fats himself with future joys, as Turks feed themselves with an imaginary persuasion of a sensual paradise: so several pleasant objects diversely affect diverse men... These things in themselves are pleasing and good, singular ornaments, necessary, comely, and fit to be had; but when we fix an immoderate eye, and dote on them over much, this pleasure may turn to pain, bring much sorrow and discontent unto us, work our final overthrow, and cause melancholy in the end.

Beware, dear sinophiles! Make amends ere it's too late! But even as I write this I must confess having greatly enjoyed the obsessive affections to urban detail that mark Purple Butterfly, so much so that I now listen to the wistful sounds of 'Golden Voice' Zhou Xuan, and dream inadvertently of a neon city by the sea. 韩丽 has played her part here, I must admit, but I'll reserve comments on that for later. Escape from the objects of our study is perhaps a greater nightmare than the hallucinations they so regularly generate.

Butterflies on Silicon, and Friendship

2007-05-09T20:45:00.000-04:00

Two posts: First, a lovely little poem by Chinua Achebe, sent thoughtfully to me by wonderful old friend Smaartipants, a figure redolent of memories that seem to grow ever more vivid. When I do write about Indian Womanhood, she, I suspect, will prove to be one of its finest exemplars.

Butterfly
Chinua Achebe

Speed is violence
Power is violence
Weight violence

The butterfly seeks safety in lightness
In weightless, undulating flight

But at a crossroads where mottled light
From trees fall on a brash new highway
Our convergent territories meet

I come power-packed enough for two
And the gentle butterfly offers
Itself in bright yellow sacrifice
Upon my hard silicon shield.

Just the sort of poem I like: dense with imagery, pregnant with possibility, tendrils of meaning trailing in the slipstream. I've been turning this little gem in my mind all day, and I'm still not done with it. Gives one something to think about, including - and perhaps especially - devotees of Kundera.

Secondly, an extract from that comic masterpiece Afternoon Men, by Anthony Powell. This one, I suppose, is for all my friends, and quite possibly is the funniest sentence written in the English language in the last century.

'Yes,' said Fotheringham, 'I shall say it again, and more than once again, how fortunate I count myself to have such friends as I have; and whatever people say say about friendship, and no one knows better than I that it is a quality that in these days is often rated lower than those temporary emotional connections between this or that sex which have their foundations on soil as impermanent as the sand of the sea-shore, yet it is eventually a thing, in fact it is the thing, that in the long run the happiness of men like you and me, if you will forgive me for the moment in classing us both together, depend on most of all in this struggle, this mad, chaotic armageddon, this frenzied, febrile striving which we, you and I, know life to be; and when we come at last to those grey, eerie and terrible waste lands of hopeless despair, unendurable depression and complete absence of humour that drink and debt and women and too much smoking and not taking enough exercise and all the thousand hopeless, useless, wearying and never to be sufficiently regretted pleasures of our almost worse than futile lives inevitably lead us to, when the vast and absolutely impenetrable mists of platitude or, in the case of some, of dogma envelop us and cover us up entirely, when we have given up the last feeble effort to keep up anything in the nature of appearances and have indeed sunk to those slimy horrible depths of degradation and misery and lowness that comes to those who would sell their name, their intellect, their mistress, their old school, their honour itself, for the price of a bitter; when love has come to mean to most boring form of lust, when power means the most useless pots of money, when fame means the vulgarest sort of publicity, when we feel ourselves exiled for ever from the pleasant pastures of debonair insouciance (pardon the phrase), which is, I suppose, the one and really only possible mitigation and excuse for the unbridled incoherence of this existence of ours, it is then, and only then, that we shall realise fully, that we shall realise in its entirety, that we shall in short come to know with any degree of accuracy----- what was I saying? I seem to have lost the thread.
'Friendship.'
'That was it, of course, I'm sorry. That we shall realise what friendship means to each one of us and all of us, and how it was that, and that only, that made it all worth while.'
'Made what worth while?'
Fotheringham made a comprehensive gesture with his hands.
'Everything,' he said.
'As, for instance?"
'I'm not a religious chap. I don't know anything about that sort of thing. But there must be something beyond all this sex business.'
'Yes.'
'You think so?'
'Oh yes. Quite likely. Why not?'
'But what?'

Thoughts on Reading an Old Favourite

2007-05-04T17:48:00.000-04:00

Resolve the issue by not resolving it.

Expectation demands resolution.
Resolution demands action.
Action demands force.
Force demands resistance.
The greater the force, the greater the resistance.
The only solution is not to seek a solution.
Not seeking a solution, things will take their natural course.
When things take their natural course, all is as it should be.

It is just as important to trust the trustworthy as it is to trust the untrustworthy.

Action will remain incomplete.
“In action, watch the timing.”
The time is ideal when nothing opposes.
There is no ideal time.
Therefore, “In action, watch the timing.”

The manifestation and movement of the universe has nothing to do with one.
One is also a manifestation of the universe.
If one can improve anything at all, it is only oneself.

Conserve and persevere.

Engel-land

2007-04-28T12:57:00.000-04:00

Of late, I've found myself describing and defending my dislike of England to more than one person. Being that everyone around me has not unfortunately read Lady Chatterley's Lover, which adequately (if somewhat confusedly) makes my case, how pleasant it was the other day to find an utterly appropriate poem by England's own poet-laureate Philip Larkin.

Going, Going

I thought it would last my time --
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
...
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts --
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely: but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.

Perhaps my problem is not that I dislike England, but that I have loved it too much. Once the false artifices and illusions of love are dispelled - as they always are, sooner or later - all that remains is a coldness and even a horror: a horror at one's own capacity for delusion. But I for one will never be ashamed to admit that I believed it all, that Enid Blyton shit, about the vicar and the jolly village policeman and the bumbling but well-intentioned country squire who pottered around his rose-bushes (having spent his time slaughtering Fuzzy-Wuzzy in the Soudan) while his world-weary daughter played tennis and drank martinis with, but resisted the advances of, the urbane but utterly nihilistic Lord Fotheringham. And I could imagine where I might have fitted in too. What else is my problem? I now have four distinct versions of Hanaq Pacap Kusikuynin. It's not a good sign. Now to retreat strategically to bed before the hangover truly seizes.

The True Subject

2007-04-24T00:12:00.000-04:00

The true subject of poetry, the great Faiz Ahmad Faiz informed us, is the loss of the beloved.

The method of poetry, then, is the ability to evoke - or perhaps enunciate - a single image with the greatest perfection and concision. As you know, O loyal readers and lunatics, I am particularly appreciative of dense poetry. But if there's one glorious exception to my preferences, it is the oeuvre of the great Philip Larkin. Consider, for instance, the 12th Day of October, 1944: In the night, fifty-two bombers delivered a hundred and four thousand pounds of high-explosive to the doorsteps of the denizens of Hamburg. One plane was lost. The voiceless screams of the burnt, the blown, and the asphyxiated are not recorded in these statistics.

Somewhat earlier in the day, Sergeant Jack Pendleton from Sentinel Butte, North Dakota, surrendered his life to a hail of machine-gun fire near Bardenberg in the service of the machine of war that was inexorably grinding towards the final and utter destruction of the The Reich. But the human panoply is infinite: For even as the memory of the soldier who gave his life was being sanctified, another American soldier by the name of Madison Thomas was hanged for disobeying a military order. I have chosen to point to these few stars in a great galaxy of death and suffering that is ever war, and was more so than ever the second world war, for the purpose of bringing your attention to what the twenty-two year old Philip Larkin did on October the 12th. On that date, he opened his first workbook, and in it, while death and destruction rained all about him and his suffering world, he wrote:

'Within the dream you said'

Within the dream you said:
Let us kiss then,
In this room, in this bed,
But when all's done
We must not meet again.

Hearing this last word,
There was no lambing-night,
No gale-driven bird
Nor frost-encircled root
As cold as my heart.

In two sentences, the young Larkin perfectly enunciated a vision -- a feeling -- with perfect concision and yet evoked it so strikingly so as to be unmistakable and unforgettable: the dream, the coldness of the heart all form a single and perfect image of an interior emotion that we may all have shared, but rarely articulate. And let us be honest, how many nights have I been woken by my own dreams, to lie still and watch the moonlight on my window-sill, and struggle not to ascribe metaphysical order to the random firing of my own neurons?

Now look at How Faiz does it:

...In that blue lake the bubble of a leaf floats in silence,
floats for a moment, sails and breaks, softly
Very softly, very pale, the faint colour of wine
fills my glass, softly.
The wine glass, the wine bottle, the roses of your hands
emerge like the memory of a dream, come into being
and dissolve, softly.
The heart repeats some more words of love, softly.
You said, "More softly."
The moon went down and said, "Still more softly."

Faiz uses the word 'Aahista,' which might mean "gently" or "slowly." But where Larkin captures the image of a feeling, Faiz uses image after image, all drawn as sparingly as possible, to hint at the feeling. Faiz realizes that "Wine," "Wine Glass," and "Blue Lake" are all perceived by each reader - but your appreciation of this poem is perhaps not so very different from mine. Is it that the destiny of the poem, its inexorable search for its true purpose, leads all meaning to unite and converge in the single aesthetic moment of perception? Or am I merely creating the 'discourse' of a poem which is perceived in infinite variation? Why are both poems 'poems' as such, what makes them work, what is their internal life, why do you like them both, why are you satisfied to see them together? Again, let me ask you, dear reader, is the intertextual space between them an infinitely open playground in which you and I can freely stroll hand in hand, or is there a rigid axial street of meaning that links them, and from which we cannot diverge? The historian in me seeks the former, the neo-platonist in me yearns for the latter.

Now for the real question: you've read both poems. Close your eyes. What remains? What is that feeling? Can you cup it in your hand? Can you spread it on paper?

या खुदा मुबारक!

2007-04-13T23:23:00.000-04:00

अब मय अपनी मातृभाषा मे लिख सकता हूँ - मुझसे खुश कोई नहीं!

काश मैं उर्दू मे भी लिख सकता। पर जनाब-ई आलि, बस अब आगे-आगे देखिए होता है क्या!

मेरे प्यारे दिल्ली कि दिल-भरी भाषा...

Broken eggs make me grieve

2007-04-13T22:54:00.000-04:00

Exercise the utmost caution, dear reader, for I find myself in delicate terrain here: it's not sorrow, but the aesthetic of melancholy that is refracted now in my imagination. What follows is not for the one who never heeded Saint Augustine's command ("pick up and read") but the one who even today innocently does. Where Janus, looking on the heedless past, sees only pathetic ruination, so also he dispassionately (brother to Clio?) notes that the future blooms fuller than ever before.

Elegy
By Joseph Brodsky

About a year has passed. I've returned to the place of the battle,
to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings
    from a subtle
lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade
- wings, now the shade of early twilight, now of stale
    bad blood.
...

At sunrise, when nobody stares at one's face, I often,
set out on foot to a monument cast in molten
lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth "commander
in chief." But it reads "in grief," or "in brief,"
   or "in going under."

As for me, what? I am as happy as I have ever been; I can't say what will be besides that which has been etched in the stone of my palm (classical colonnades and eighteenth-century sabk-i hindi), but thank you, inscrutable storyteller, for returning my sight with - and by means of - your own two eyes.

Vancouver, and a Warning

2007-04-12T18:53:00.000-04:00

I can't say I do this much, but this here article has some relevance to my life (and thus your life), given the amount of time I spend carping about the fluctuations in the quality of the NYT. As far my long and transparence-abhorring life goes, a new chapter of encrypted meaning has opened: this fall, I shall have to bid good-bye to the city of sea and mountains that I have come, over the years, to love. The thirty-six odd months I shall have spent here on the eve of my departure, will have, in their own way, been as formative as any in my young life. What will Vancouver become for me? Shall its memories and mores collapse into a fat red dot in a distant corner of the terrain that my compulsive cartographical impulse constantly defines, categorizes, and archives? Or will it remain a city of the present, a place to which I turn and return? In any case, it is still too early to yield the terrain of this land to Mνημοσύνη nani, (a harsher matriarch than her daughter Κλειώ, who remains apparently still my muse and guardian). No, as far as fair Wengehua goes, "...until black clay has been crammed down my larynx/only gratitude will come gushing from it."

Also, while perusing my newly-discovered true love, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton, I found this prescient warning. I'll post other extracts as they pertain to my life in the fullness of time. What style, gentle reader, what style - and what truth!

<<

Solitariness as a cause of my condition:
Voluntary solitariness is that which is familiar with melancholy, and gently brings on like a Siren, a shoeing-horn, or some sphinx to this irrevocable gulf, a primary cause, Piso calls it; most pleasant it is at first, to such as are melancholy given, to lie in bed whole days, and keep their chambers, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by a brook side, to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect them most; amabilis insania, et mentis gratissimus error: a most incomparable delight it is so to melancholise, and build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose and strongly imagine they represent, or that they see acted or done: Blandae quidem ab initio, saith Lemnius, to conceive and meditate of such pleasant things ... So delightsome these toys are at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years alone in such contemplations, and fantastical meditations, which are like unto dreams, and they will hardly be drawn from them, or willingly interrupt, so pleasant their vain conceits are, that they hinder their ordinary tasks and necessary business, they cannot address themselves to them, or almost to any study or employment, these fantastical and bewitching thoughts so covertly, so feelingly, so urgently, so continually set upon, creep in, insinuate, possess, overcome, distract, and detain them, they cannot, I say, go about their more necessary business, stave off or extricate themselves, but are ever musing, melancholising, and carried along, as he (they say) that is led round about a heath with a Puck in the night, they run earnestly on in this labyrinth of anxious and solicitous melancholy meditations, and cannot well or willingly refrain, or easily leave off, winding and unwinding themselves, as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at last the scene is turned upon a sudden, by some bad object, and they being now habituated to such vain meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can ruminate of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects.

>>

Point taken.

Faiz, Aesthetics, Ethics

2007-04-01T21:41:00.001-04:00

Without comment, a poem by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, sung by the inimitable Nayyara Noor. Also, two excellent new blogs added to the sidebar. Check them out. The video should be treated as an extended comment on Pakistan under General Zia-ul Haq in a particularly subcontinental idiom of poetry. More coming, including Brodsky. Thought for the day, emanating from a drunken conversation with a certain Monica (smart, she) at the U of C: if aesthetics precedes ethics, then are aesthetic politics a higher and truer goal of human society than ethical politics?

On Eugene Onegin, and perhaps Nabokov

2007-03-28T01:28:00.000-04:00

Mahana no atua/Day of the Gods. Paul Gauguin, 1894. Chicago Institute of Art

I've been busy. A break from Brodsky, and a brief turn to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, a poem capable of moving even when translated from the untranslatable original. I was introduced to this translation, conducted by James Falen, by the inimitable H.H. (who also, at Macalester, introduced me with rigour and severity, to the other H.H.) It should be noted that I am waiting with great impatience for the latest and supposedly best-ever translation of Onegin, produced by Dr. Stanley Mitchell, and to be published by Penguin. Before we dive into some aspects of the Falen translation that has given me so much, a witty aside - here, the unseemly squabble between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson over Nabokov's - and let us face it, certainly Quixotic - prose translation. That, to be found here, has Nabokov venting spleen at full blast:

We [Wilson and I] have had many exhilarating talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings, we both realized with amused dismay that despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Eugene Onegin aloud, he started to do this with great gusto, garbling every second word and turning Pushkin's iambic line into a kind of spastic anapaest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches.

This, too, in the NY Review of Books. Tres, tres hilar, as the lovely Katya (Tylevich) would say. But enough of this. I'm a little shaken today, perhaps even stirred, and need the restorative and calming draughts of Polonaises and Nocturnes (Fred's): and of course, it is pleasant indeed to return to some of my favourite passages:

He who has lived as thinking being
Within his soul must hold men small;
He who can feel is always fleeing
The ghost of days beyond recall;
For him enchantment's deep infection
Is gone; the snake of recollection
And grim repentance gnaws his heart.
All this, of course, can help impart
Great charm to private conversation;
And though the language of my friend
At first disturbed me, in the end
I liked his caustic disputation --
His blend of banter and of bile,
His sombre wit and biting style.

The Neva by the Night. Bogolubov Alexey Petrovich.

How often in the summer quarter,
When midnight sky is limpid-light
Above the Neva's placid water --
The river gay and sparkling bright,
Yet in its mirror not reflecting
Diana's visage -- recollecting
The loves and intrigues of the past,
Alive once more and free at last,
We drank in silent contemplation
The balmy fragrance of the night!
Like convicts sent in dreaming flight
To forest green and liberation,
So we in fancy then were borne
Back to our springtime's golden morn.
Eugene Onegin, 1.46-47

I like the first stanza here for purely narcissistic reasons, too crude to be enunciated before delicate ears such as yours. The magic of the second, as far as I am concerned, derives from the river that does not reflect the moon, which still adorns the luminescent summer skies: skies that exude a fragrance, which, when drunk, permit in this most special of all cases, a a moment inhabited safely without amnesia - a transcendental moment in which one is "Alive once more and free at last." I can never seem to be rid of this particular expression of emancipation, of river, of balmy, fragrant night...

On a not-wholly-unrelated note, I can't wait to get to Chicago and spend my Saturday at the Art Institute. It has been a long while since I last set my eyes on Gauguin. There'll be plenty to write about after a day amongst the Gods...

Jean Baudrillard is Not Dead

2007-03-07T00:14:00.000-05:00

Jean Baudrillard is not dead. Jean Baudrillard did not die today, because the only 'proof' of his existence I have ever seen are his writings and videos; these simulacra clearly demonstrate that no original version of this hyper-real Baudrillard has ever existed. In fact, Jean Baudrillard's writings exist only to prove that we live in a society in which there are no French philosophers, nor even Philosophy, nor even France: there are only the desiring phantasmagoriae of cyborg others engaged, as Achille Mbembe has shown, in the carnival of mutual zombification - one, I might add, that is made possible only because of the post-enlightenment universality of meconnaissance.

But I digress. If, however, the person called Jean Baudrillard had ever existed, he is not dead today. The news of Jean Baudrillard's death serves only to illustrate the simulacrum of death, which apparently happens to everyone, but is different in all instances and comes from no traceable originary model.

The death of Jean Baudrillard is only a clever obfuscation of the fact no such thing as death exists.

Jean Baudrillard is not "dead."
Long live "Jean Baudrillard."

Meditations: Bajaur and Small Wars

2007-03-05T20:58:00.000-05:00

It's never been easy being a resident of Bajaur. And it's not just the two airstrikes last year - reading the Babur-namah, I found a description of the first great Moghul's advent towards the plains of Hindustan.

Since the people of Bajaur were rebels, and infidel customs had spread among them, and the religion of Islam had been lost, they were put to massacre and their women and children were taken captive. As there had been no battle on the eastern side, a few men managed to escape from that direction but more than three thousand were put to death. I entered the conquered fortress to make an inspection. On the walls and in the rooms, streets, and lanes lay corpses in untold numbers. Those who were coming and going had to step over the dead bodies.

Here's a rather interesting article by Dr. Raheal Ahmed Siddiqui, on his search for the fortress of Bajaur which has now ceased to exist, and it includes a fanciful local history of the region (complete with Alexandrian legend). This area, of course, is filled with the stuff of legend - a classic regional periphery, that, when not being sacked and plundered, has served as the origin of similar violence. I can only imagine some literate CIA agent, an alter ego, product of a little liberal arts college, a quiet American traversing the terrain in Pajero or on camel-back, thermos of chai, Swedish K, volume of Kipling. And do Russian shades still search for the elusive dushman in silent, frozen valleys that spring will never touch?

I no longer have a copy of To Urania on hand, so I can't cite the perfectly appropriate poem ("Lines on the Winter Campaign, 1980") - could some loyal reader send me the text? As substitute, here's another - unrelated - extract; something to sample on a night in which the first faint stirrings of a spring (one that shall not be kept forever at bay) can plainly be felt.

"A thousand-li-long road starts with the first step," as
the proverb goes. Pity the road home does
not depend on that same step. It exceeds ten times
a thousand li, especially counting from zeros.
one thousand li, two thousand li --
a thousand means "Thou shall not ever see thy native place." And the meaninglessness, like a plague,
leaps from words onto numbers, onto zeros especially.

That's from the poem entitled Letters from the Ming Dynasty. And here's the last stanza of December in Florence, also by Brodsky.

There are cities one won't see again. The sun
throws its gold at their frozen windows. But all the same
there is no entry, no proper sum.
There are always six bridges spanning the sluggish river.
There are places where lips touched lips for the first time ever,
or pen pressed paper with real fervor.
There are arcades, colonnades, iron idols that blur your lens.
There the streetcar's multitudes, jostling, dense,
speak in the tongue of a man who's departed thence.

For me this evokes home in the way that a burst of lightning, perhaps, evokes a tree standing alone amidst a field: evokes me to pieces, in fact. The Jugalbandi I spoke of was to be an exchange - in discordant harmony - of past and present in the city I love. Variations on a theme? But that will have to wait. First I must write about Gericault's Raft of the Medusa and a conversation that may or may not have taken place several years ago with Anne-Marie at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In the meantime, loyal readers, try this: first-rate, Alpha-Plus writing on Delhi I've encountered in a blog - especially good because there's none (or almost none) of the banal carping or augmentation of cliche-trash in the overflowing, toxic landfill that they call the blogosphere.

An End to the Dance

2007-03-02T15:44:00.000-05:00

I have just concluded the most important intellectual project of these past few months today: the savoring and digesting of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time - a book I have read not only as if there were no tomorrow, but as if it had been written exclusively for me, as if I am the only one to have ever read it, the only one ever to have contemplated it in the history of literature. This is not megalomania or the psychotic self-obsession with which I am sometimes credited by my noble detractors - it is, rather, a state of uncritical acceptance, a child-like fascination with the text, a hypnotic, mesmerized process of absorbing the written word - a capacity for indulgence and enjoyment, in short, that I had believed ground to dust beneath the relentless wheels of academic analysis. I present here Nicholas Jenkins' final reflection, extracted from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy - one worth a slow and careful read.

"I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies of all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh. he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c."

I shall be writing more on Powell in the near future.

Resonances

2007-02-18T04:38:00.001-05:00

One of the many wonderful moments in Jules and Jim. In a curious way, the song - and indeed, the theme of the movie - matches very well with A Dance to the Music of Time (both painting and quartet). Of the latter, I am now in the fourth movement, and it is with some sense of loss I realize that soon there will be no more to hear from Nicholas Jenkins - for it is he, and not Widmerpool, who is the subject and object of the symphony. I cannot summon respect for self-confessed Widmerpudlians, and I imagine they are the sorts of people who have conspicuously enjoyed that rather fat book by Vikram Seth - though I am not insensible to the temptation to cast an eye over Two Lives. I don't mean to carp, so let us face the fact that Mr. Seth is one of the two or three readable Indian writers in recent memory. It should be interesting to compare his work to that of Rohinton Mistry, who occupies pride of place in my heart as the writer to speak for the Indian condition. You may surmise from this that I am quite unmoved by the impending spectacle of Gogol Ganguly jogging in skin-tight Nike tops through Bombay slums. Anyone who's suffered through the preview of that movie - as I did again today - must wonder why quintessential Bengali intellectual deddy, replete with sad eyes, khadi kurta,and cigarettes that are clearly substitutes for Navy Cuts (purchased individually, at the Dhaba) is moping around the Suburban States in the first place. Immigrant stories - unless done right a la Mistry - are just so dreadfully boring.

Also, dear reader, I wish it to be noted that I have very recently watched The Lives of Others, and notwithstanding Anthony Lane's overly pretentious review of the movie, it is in fact excellent. Though far be it for me to criticize Mr. Lane - he is perhaps my favourite reviewer, possibly the only one in whom I place anything approaching unequivocal confidence. His review of Star Wars, for instance, was a model of literary outrage - an act of intervention in the public culture of our times very much in the Sartrean mould. If you must ever read a review, read this one.

The prophecy for coming posts: more Brodsky, some Philip Larkin, some lovely movie clips, and something grim out of the Baburnama. As for now: It is 2 AM; it rains; and the beautifully-bound U. of C. edition of A Dance is singing its siren song to me.

Fleeting thoughts

2007-02-14T01:15:00.000-05:00

Two years ago: black, red ribbon. How ironic -- deeply ironic -- that I will never go to Berkeley.

One year ago: Broken Flowers. There is an End, claims Holly Golightly. Really? Brodsky's question - 'What's the use of forgetting/If it's followed by Dying' is deeply misleading - and in fact, quite irrelevant. Tell me now so I know? Forgetfulness - a dream, a hope - a lost cause to those born under the sign of Mnemnosyne. Our compulsion is to be vivid.

Today: Requiem. And like never before, in pace. But only in pace.

Autumn: A Dance to the Music of Time. Oh, Mr. Proussin - it's only a matter of time.What else? Three movies. Sword of Doom, The Battle of Algiers - but none will match The Army of Shadows. I remember a Kurosawa movie - one whose name I forget - if only because I couldn't watch it. India - the past, the future, beckoned. And even today, the past - and the future - beckons. As Brodsky would say:

Look: what's been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon's blade.

Indian Womanhood

2007-02-11T19:56:00.000-05:00

...Can wait a little longer, as far as I'm concerned. I'm writing today merely to note the contents of a library-return slip that has entranced me since I found it in a Naipaul some time ago.

1) Miguel Street
2) Adult Paperback
3) Labyrinth: a detective investigates the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the implication of Death Row Records' Suge Knight and the origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal

I should very much like to meet this person.

Ripostes

2007-02-05T23:11:00.001-05:00

I just realized that the dancer in this wonderful Satyajit Ray Set-piece is no other than Saswati Sen. Will someone take me to a Kathak recital the next time I'm in Delhi? I believe the Kathak Mahotsav is held in February - another cultural event that has come, perhaps, to eclipse the preeminence of that venerable institution which dominated our lives, the India International Centre. I'll have to save the IIC for another day, of course - but let me note quickly that were I in Delhi, I could - without the slightest aforethought - quietly walk to Auditorium #1 at 6:30 today and listen to the music of the 'Dilli Gharana.' Afterwards, a quick stroll to Khan Market and... but do let's continue. I should also note that I might consider sacrificing precious time in Delhi for a chance to visit Lahore, should the next ministerial meetings ease visa regulations. Kasuri Sahib, are you listening? And can we stop that wretched Wagah ceremony while we're at it?

A few quick riposte: Firstly, I've been accused of writing deliberately obfuscatory posts - why, after all, use the complex where the simple could do? I could answer this question with a condescending sneer, and that would be enough to satisfy me. But instead let me point to the fact that complexity - at least to some minds - is beauty in itself. Everything here is certainly play, but this particular frivolity values shade, texture, nuance and tone.

Now to matters literary. Finally, a blog on Thucydides - I've been looking for this long and hard. Ironic, of course, that it comes from Carleton, our bitter rivals for intellectual dominance on the Minnesotan tundra. In this post, Clara Hardy considers the Sicilian Expedition in light of the recent plan for the troop surge. This reminds me of a wonderful dinner conversation with the great Josh Ober, formerly of Princeton, but now at Stanford. For this, and for so much more, I am forever in gratitude to the Classics department at Macalester - especially Beth Severy-Hoven and Andy Overman. That, too, is worth another post. Josh Ober's lecture is certainly worth listening to, by the way.

A particular form of my apragmosyne now involves the reading of blogs that touch Delhi. Let me begin by saying that I firmly and fervently believe that Indian women are perhaps the most sophisticated, intelligent, well-read and articulate as a group. My blogger is not behaving in the realm of blog-aesthetik, so the sting in the tail will come in the next post, dear reader. I think I shall title it "On Indian Womanhood." Tee hee.

On Comments: A Raspberry

2007-01-22T23:57:00.000-05:00

Perhaps because I've come to accept life as the unending infliction of injury and illness by disinterested parties, I have learned to accept its slings and arrows, however random, that are in my case more brutally quotidian, literally, than psomi, - for me, inevitably, stale and warty. While I have painfully developed the ability to ingest this foodstuff of existence, particular morsels of sordid reality and undeniable fact continue to lacerate my craw. One of these - a most egregious imposition on one as meek and mild as myself - is the anonymous comment, which every so often finds its place on this blog. And yet, more often than not, life itself provides the balm.
For instance, I encountered this passage in A Dance to the Music of Time as I fulminated over the temerity of an anonymous person to plant a mnemnetic minefield, as it were, in the words of someone whom Nabokov, Il Maestro, has not without fairness called "Toilest." This passage, by virtue of internal refrentiality within the web of my life, as well as its general truthfulness and realism, was a source of immense comfort to to me, and so I reproduce it for your edification below.

'The notable thing about professional seducers,' said Maclintick, now returning to his former carping tone of voice, 'is the rot they talk when they are doing their seducing. There is not a single cliche they leave unsaid.'
'Although by definition the most egotistical of men,' said Moreland, 'they naturally have to develop a certain anonymity of style to make themselves acceptable to all women. It is the case of the lowest common factor - or is it the highest common denominator? If you hope to rise to the top class in seducing, you must appeal to the majority. As the majority are not very intelligent, you must conceal your own intelligence - if you have the misfortune to possess such a thing - in order not to frighten the girls off. There is inevitably something critical, something alarming to personal vanity, in the very suggestion of intelligence in another. That is almost equally true of dealing with men, so don't think I hold it against women. All I say is, that someone like myself ought to restrict themselves to intelligent girls who see my own good points. Unfortunately, they are rarely the sort of girls I like.'
Barnby grunted, no doubt feeling some of these strictures in part applicable to himself.
'What do you expect to do?' he asked. 'Give readings from The Waste Land?'
'Not a bad idea,' said Moreland.
'In my experience,' Barnby said, 'women like the obvious.'

I love it when text becomes a sort of speculum mundi, and for however brief a second, can cast the light of illumination, dazzlingly, over the diverse facets of one's own experience. Now let us be done with anonymous comments: names, after all, are part of god's plan: hence the variegation and excesses of language with which I gaily decorate the fringes of the vacuum.

Apropos of the library.

2007-01-18T22:20:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy week, and filled with work. Such time as has not involved the endless drafting of reports, summaries, memos, and presentations has been occupied instead by the infinitely lofty pursuit of literachur. The third floor of the VPL has quickly become a favourite haunt, and I have developed rather warm feelings for the literature section, with its plethora of qualities not perhaps of the most praiseworthy nature: modest: arbitrary: disorganized: puzzlingly incomplete; and yet familiar and congenial, lacking in the pretentiousness of the academic monolith. There are, of course, the usual giggles of ESL students, some of whom bely the common stereotype that assigns them vapid and vacant intellects by their sedulous devotion (no doubt) to the memorization of past participles. There are also the aged, who, in the autumn of their lives, have finally found the time to enjoy such writing as they find pleasing. They shuffle slowly amongst shelves and are happy with an otherworldly look, as if their gaze is already turned to the place of rest that we must only envy from amongst our secular toils. There are the taciturn fat, stubbled gamers who rapidly flick through the small collection of DVDs in stern competition with bored Japanese and Korean youth who have exhausted all the other meagre charms of this demure city and care little for the written word. Latinas, ever-excitedly chattering with their compatriots. rub shoulders at faded computer terminals with morose middle-aged Greeks, while blimpish Persian mothers-in-exile drift slowly by.

The particular niches I frequent are, by virtue of their relative obscurity, basins of silence in which the natural quietitude of the library accretes: grows mouldy, even. I find little masterpieces, and am always left in awe - horror vacui, if you will. Millions of gallons of ink have squirted, spurted, smudged and dried on uncountable pages that surround me in all three dimensions. They represent the ever-fluctuating ingenuity of hundreds of thousands of minds, which have quill or pen to be applied to paper because they wish to record something of themselves for eternity. And yet others have written for even odder reasons. Their sense, their intellect, their spirit has been captured and caged, and it sings silently all around one. But hearken to the world! - which passes by, complete within itself, without knowing or caring in any way at all. Books, I suppose, belong in libraries. They are something like the dead themselves: Of them, Sebald writes

When space becomes too cramped, the dead, like the living, move out into less densely populated districts where they can rest at a decent distance from each other. But more and more keep coming, a never-ending succession of them, and in the end, when the space is entirely occupied, graves are dug through existing graves to accommodate them, until all the bones in the cemetery lie jumbled together... As for me, said Austerlitz, I felt at this time as if the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing. (Austerlitz, 130-32)

Perhaps it is so with the ether of ideas and speech that we store as the essence of our own lives. To pick a book from a shelf, then, is to drink in the life of another time and another place. Look, for instance, at what I found in a book of Tamil poems from the Third Century:

Bathing in the roaring white waterfall
has changed his color.
His matted locks are brown leaves
on a blinding tree,
and he is plucking for food
a bunch of thick leaves
from a bindweed.

He was a hunter once.
He had a net
of words,
and he caught peacocks
that wandered innocently
into his yard.

- Maarippittiyaar
Puranaanooru 252

The translator is A K Ramanujan, who I have come to enjoy. Here is a sample of his own verse:

Do not worry about Despair
Just comb your hair
Despair is a strange disease
I think it even happens to trees.

On that note, I believe it is now time for me to return to my reading. There is a long list of books, each patiently awaiting their turn: A Proust I Can Stand, A Lost Conscience, The Fat Old Funny Man, The Addict and Creator, and even A New Master. Thanks be to Mr. Dead Inside for the last.

A push and a shove, and even baroque

rolls, tumbles, and like the rest

assumes, happily, the grotesque.

The Malaise of Hypermodernity

2007-01-06T18:14:00.001-05:00

without comment.

Of Humour

2006-12-27T19:05:00.000-05:00

<<

Moffet, a tall, gloomy man, on account of his general demeanour, which was certainly oppressive enough, had in some degree contributed to Stringham's dislike for university life. Stringham used to call Moffett 'the murderer', not on account of anything outwardly disreputable in his appearance, which might have been that of some ecclesiastical dignitary, but because of what Stringham named 'the cold cruelty of Moffet's eye'. If Moffet decided, for one reason or another, that an undergraduate on his staircase was worth cultivating, there was something sacerdotal about the precision with which he never left him free from attentions; as if the victim must be converted, come what may, to Moffet's doctrines. Moffet had at first sight made up his mind that Stringham was to be brought under his sway.
One of Moffet's tenets was in connexion with the manner in which Stringham arranged several ivory elephants along the top of his mantlepiece. Stringham liked the elephants to follow each other in column: Moffet preferred them to face the room in line. I had been present, on one occasion, when Moffet, having just finished ‘doing the room’, had disappeared from it. Stringham walked over to the fireplace, where the elephants stood with their trunks in line, and turned them sideways. As he completed this rearrangement, Moffet came in once more through the door. Stringham had the last elephant in his hand. Moffet stared across at him forbiddingly.
‘I am afraid I do not arrange ornaments very well, sir,’ said Moffet.
‘Just a whim of mine regarding elephants.’
‘I will try to remember, sir,’ said Moffet. ‘They take a powerful lot of dusting.’
He retired again, adding: ‘Thank you sir,’ as he closed the door. The incident disturbed Stringham. ‘Now I shall have to go down,’ he said.

>>
Anthony Powell, A Dance to The Music of Time

photography and mnemnoscopy

2006-12-23T20:36:00.000-05:00

Of my many loves, I believe I reserve a special place in the heart for the art of photography; photography is of course (and quite naturally) a terrible misnomer that betrays the instrumental and technologically-centered conception of the art - art, here, defined by process more than its ability to represent truth and reality. Of course, rarely ever has nomenclature moved in harmony with the potential and possibility of art, which perhaps is why we are perpetually lost in a haze of misunderstanding and misrecognition of the reality that surrounds us. We think of laminated pieces of paper that have received the imprint of light as having somehow captured the fundamental reality of the situation or the conditions under which the shutter blinked: hence photography. And with this misleading name we have struggled to understand and interpret what 'photos' really are - an exercise doomed to failure. But in order to really comprehend the workings of the art, and its ability to evoke and stimulate some greater truth within the bounded peripheries of our own consciousness, I propose that we at the very least draw a distinction between photos that have as subjects our own selves (in one way or another) and images of unknown places and faces.

And so, the photograph I reproduce below is of particular interest to a very small number of people. But for us, or at the very least for me, this is not a photograph: it is, properly speaking, a mnemnoscope - an optical device most suited for the use of dedicated mnemnospeleologists such as ourselves. This device, this particular configuration of lighted pixels, will produce for only a particular set a very distinct neuronal flare that reveals not some previous frame of reality or lived experience or 'the way things were,' but provides, in essence, merely a rapid stratigraphy of an temporarily-excavated sample. And what is revealed here, from this particular sort of image and under these particular conditions - I cannot stress this enough - is something of the self.

So let us peer into the mnemnoscope. The following image was recently gifted to me by an old friend named Kitty. It is the only image I have of my life in India; for reasons worth delving into at a later point, I have always been somewhat reluctant to collect the visual evidence of my passing through this world. This has begun to change, and I now scour the earth of my life for traces of its past. But I have never in fact seen this particular configuration of red, blue and green until today.

What are we to make of this? That, my wise and perspicacious reader, is not really a matter for the birds, though you would be pardoned for thinking so. I will leave this here, and perhaps we shall return and reconsider. In the meanwhile, I want to sort through the multitudes of traces that this image has revealed. What is the pattern?

Christmas Thoughts

2006-12-21T01:40:00.000-05:00

So, because everyone I have yet met tends to dislike Joseph Brodsky, it is with pleasure that I present to you a poem by the inimitable aforementioned. As a prelude, I found this rare volume of Brodsky in the hallowed halls of the Vancouver Public Library, downtown. Surrounded by gaggles of unusually-diligent or merely conscience-bestruck ESL students, by old retirees and middle-aged working women - the dead and the walking wounded of this never-ending war - I retreated quite naturally to the literature section. This section, merged in an act of holy simplicity with the academic writing on literature (thus volumes of Nabokov cheek by jowl with writings on the man) was not as penurious as I had feared. Apparently there must be people in this city that fetishizes athleticism who nonetheless continue, furtively, to 'pick up and read.'

I don't know if anyone had read this volume; I suspect, by the randomly-placed strips of notepaper, that some diligent reader in the past had marked some poetry for special attention. What did my nameless and faceless progenitor enjoy? Did his or her enjoyment blossom and fade, and is Brodsky merely the peeling marginalia of fading memories: a Russ. Lit. class that a middle-aged, middle-sized accountant took so many years ago, a paper written, a grade got and forgot, the distant hum of a violin finally, as always, obliterated by the infinity of near balalaikas?

But I digress. Let me copy here, then, the sedulous macaca that I am, a few verses that caught my eye.

1 January, 1965 (A Christmas gift from me to you)
You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gift at all.
It's clear that you are now to old
to trust in good saint Nick;
that it's too late for miracles.
- But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven's light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.

I'd end here, but the note is unusually and frankly unpalatably cheery. So I'll end with a much more satisfying excerpt from

Postscriptum
...Alas, unless
a man can manage to eclipse the world,
he's left to twirl a gap-toothed dial in some
phone booth, as one might spin a ouija-board,
until a phantom answers, echoing
the last wails of a buzzer in the night.

Bleach

2006-12-16T04:10:00.000-05:00

This is my Fiftieth post; I have been writing for approximately eighteen months now. I don't remember why I decided to do this, but I have persevered. Perhaps, in the terms of the great Sir Vidia, it is merely part of the search for order; an order I crave as my restlessness grows ever the greater. I need Ἀμνησία - from whence comes Amnesia, and not coincidentally, Amnesty. Now that my toils are behind me, at least for the moment, I will ignore the kind-hearted advice of a dear friend ("Drink Less!") and in fact do exactly the contrary for the next few months. I want the sensation of life, liminality, forgetfulness and freedom. They are all the same.

There is a spectre hovering around the fringes of my consciousness; a familiar other I encounter with startling regularity. I am curious, I attempt to de-cipher. The ghost is shy, elusive: ashamed, even?

There is such a thing as bodily memory: the physical memory of our passing through time, the traces of lived experience. In the medieval world, monks routinely encountered palimpsests of little worth; they washed and scrubbed them, and then copied doctrinally sound treatises on them; and so, we presumed, all that was old and worth knowing was lost. And indeed it has been the case that the vast majority of what was once written and known is lost. But today, in this era of magic - one in which we have almost proven the absolute non-existence of ghosts, for instance - we can scan and study these ancient texts: we can coax them to reveal their former realities; and so, from a thirteenth-century byzantine euchologion - a handbook for orthodox bishops - there emerges the spectre, again, of former knowledge: Archimedes' "On Floating Bodies," somehow rises to the surface of our World of Senses and offers us a glimpse behind the infinitely-veiled - and thus infinitely beguiling, infinitely alluring - World of the Past.

And so it is with me. The palimpsest of the body will always bear traces. That which the mind through its own workings will forget shall be stored in subcutaneous catacombs: and there it will lie, never to be washed away completely: no amount of bleach will suffice.

The City

2006-12-11T22:15:00.000-05:00

In lieu of taking the time to write something myself, let me point my enemies - you assassins, detractors, poisoners, murderers, hired givers of evidence (the technical term, I believe, is sycophant) - let me point, I say, you and your attentions to a passage I have been repetitively savouring over the past few days.

There's a reason I like Naipaul. He is an insufferably, unendurably brilliant writer. To read Naipaul is to understand what it means to be incisive, to be cold, to let skin, muscle, fat yield unresistingly beneath the scalpel of intellect - and all this, I might add, with a mocking laugh. I can almost imagine him, the great auteur, sitting at his desk, poring over his diligent notes, patiently assembling marvels of malice. But more on the inimitable Mr. Naipaul, the Karan of my personal Mahabharata, a little later.

Here's a quote for you. Suppress your primary instinct and don't criticize Homie - but, yes, certainly I find myself in agreement with you: this is perhaps one of the most dazzling evocations of something that has come to obsess me more and more in my own life:

...It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves. It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city that we pursue, in vain... (18)
..In the great city, so three-dimensional, so rooted in its soil, drawing colour from such depths, only the city was real. Those of us who came to it lost some of our solidity; we were trapped into fixed, flat postures. And in this growing disassociation between ourselves and the city in which we walked, scores of separate meetings, not linked even by ourselves, who became nothing more than perceivers: everyone reduced, reciprocally, to a succession of such meetings, so that first experience and then the personality divided bewilderingly into compartments. Each person concealed his own darkness. (27)

From The Mimic Men (1967)

PS: Where's Vogdoid?

I'm not a madman, just a loyal reader

2006-12-09T00:44:00.000-05:00

Here's a quote from the great magister himself, for your pleasure. Once my 'works' are finished, no doubt I shall be writing more.

"Well, at least I gave my readers something to believe in."

 "They believed in you, and didn't you ever love that! Listen, I worshiped you so fervently that if I read a particularly brilliant column of yours, I'd jump up and down in my chair and tears would roll down my cheeks. I couldn't stay still; I'd pace the room, pace the streets; I’d dream about you. But that was just the beginning. I thought and dreamed about you so much that a moment arrived when the line between us faded into the mists of my imagination and I could no longer see where you ended and I began. No I was never so far gone that I actually imagined myself to be the author of your work. Do not forget that I'm not a madman, just a loyal reader. But it did seem to me that in some strange way by a circuitous route, that would be difficult to trace I had played some part in the making of these brilliant sentences, these elegant ideas. That if it were not for me, these inspired inventions would never have come to you. Don't take this the wrong way. I'm not talking about the countless ideas you stole from me, without once bothering to ask about my permission. I'm not talking about the myriad ways in which I found inspiration in Hurufism, nor am I referring to the discoveries I made at the end of the book I had such difficulty publishing. Those were yours, anyway... when I read your pieces, I felt as intelligent, as triumphant as if I had written them myself. They were not just applauding you, they were applauding me too -- of that I was certain. Because you and I were together, far from the madding crowd, on another plane. I understood you you so very well. Just like you, I hated those crowds you saw filing into movies, soccer matches, fairs, festivals. Doomed never to become full-fledged human beings, they were always falling for the same old stupidities, the same old stories. Even at the moments when they looked their most innocent, even then they where the victims of tragedies that broke your heart, you still knew that they were the culprits too, or, at the very least, collaborators. I was sick and tired of their false messiahs, their blundering presidents, their military coups, their democracies, their torture, their films. For years, whenever I came to the end of your columns, I'd tell myself, Yes! This is why I love Celal Salik [Ka? Ak? -ed] so much! And such would be my elation that tears would stream from my eyes. As they did yesterday when I sang for you like a nightingale, recalling each column, one by one. Before yesterday, could you ever have imagined a reader like me?"

End Quote.

Here, gentle reader, enjoy the resonances: in your heart -- and yes, I know who you are, all of you -- something will now sing.

Remember Me Watching.

2006-11-23T00:36:00.000-05:00

What a tricky thing obligation is. Like dust, it tends to settle over time. One begins to write a little blog, thinking, "Perhaps it will amuse me. Perhaps it will let me pass the time in joy and peace." Days pass; then months. No one reads what one writes, and most certainly don't understand. And then, one night, one finds oneself typing inanities such as these into a little-text box. Why? Because one should.

Meanwhile, dishes are peacefully mouldering in the sink. Forms, essays, letters are meandering towards completion. A computer is whirring. Various obsessions and madnesses are fading. And Other dishes will get dirty. New essays will spring forth. Other computers will be purchased. From the hollow deep, magnificent and unpredictable new psychoses will, like the hallowed lady of Loch Ness, no doubt coyly rear their heads.

I forget. This is amusing, because I have spent much of my life trying to remember. When I was very young, I decided that it was absolutely necessary to remember everything, at all times. The way to do it, I thought, was to quickly remember everything I did in the past minute every minute; then recap the past five minutes every five minutes - and so forth, until I had transcended myself and become an absolute mnemonic machine.

And today I realized how little I remember; like flotsam, I too am drifting through the aftermath of some awful nautical tragedy - the quiet catastrophe of life. An orphaned shard of metal, still glowing hot, I no longer know what the whole was to which I once belonged. Am I sad? No, not in the least. I can remember so little, it's true, but I can watch. This, perhaps, is how I want you to remember me, "those who forgot me would make a city:" remember me, watching.

Now, I will read Moby Dick.

Emancipation?

2006-11-10T20:36:00.000-05:00

The other day, I talked to an old friend. This conversation reminded me of Room 03, where I spent so many happy hours listening to the inimitable James Stewart, who is quite probably the best professor of History I shall ever encounter. One day I shall write more about Room 03, but today I merely want to record a poem towards which Prof. S., "obliquely, but with great force," directed our attention. Now, today, it has become a useful optic through which to visualize the fading contrails, the disappearing phosphoresence, of my own past.

Emancipation: 1865

Sighted through the
Telescope of dreams
Looms larger,
So it seems,
Than truth can be.
But turn the telescope around,
Look through the larger end—
And wonder why
What was so large
Becomes so small
Again.

- Langston Hughes

National Songs

2006-11-02T00:40:00.000-05:00

ghurbat men hon agar ham, rahta hai dil vatan men
samjho vahīn hamen bhī, dil hain jahān hamārā

Before they were painted yellow, mine - for much of my life, the number five - was all unpainted metal with a maroon stripe. This was the maroon of colonial Fabian Socialism, the red of the intellectual elite who loved Cambridge even as they never belonged; and the unpainted dull steel - made in Jamshedpur, doubtless - looked very much like the steel of fraternal socialist cooperation, its metallic hues reflecting those of our Air Force's early unpainted MiGs. This bus of socialism wheeled us through early morning streets past a park that was invariably filled with bent old men saluting the flag; and I wondered how they braved the cold even as I shuddered uncontrollably at the gusts of air which razored in from imperfectly-sealed windows. It is a strange and mysterious thing, this love of the motherland.

In the mornings, we stood at assembly, a grim crew in maroon and grey, waiting to return to relative warmth of our dimly-lit subterranean classroom; after the news had been read, the choir came to sing, and we sang with them. We sang "We Are Springdalians," even as the world around us changed, even as the second clause of the first line became an object of derision; and we sang the National Anthem.

My long and conflicted relationship with our National Anthem in some ways reflects the history of my nation. As a member of that very special generation - that, which received the full blast of state propaganda, nationalist cartoons of execrable quality and all, and that which came right before the arrival of and Lehar Pepsi and Star TV, - as a member of this golden generation I experienced the Nation in all its oddities. I remember a republic day on which I lay on the couch watching the row of marching soldiers and tanks, enjoying that particular emotion that can only be summoned by millions of marching feet, by the heavy machinery of death, by tales of soldiers single-handedly killing three or thirteen or a hundred and thirteen of the Enemy; that emotion which can be produced only by the televised sorrow and dignity of the sari-clad War Widow receiving a medal from the President; that emotion, in short, which we might call patriotism - an inadequate word for the frantic, choking postcolonial love of the mother-soil.

And yet, this day, bedecked as I was in a khadi kurta, I tainted the wellspring of my own limitless joys by failing to stand up when, at last, the National Anthem was played. The whole Nation stood, but I lolled on our faux-tartan blue and white couch. And from somewhere, perhaps the Akai TV, perhaps the recesses of my own heart, came a hurtling guilt that pushed me to attention. And so I stood at attention, troubled, pained, in exactly the manner that we had been taught since our childhood - aatenshun, the cosmic dual of standuteez - with only the TV to accept my confession, if not to ameliorate my guilt.

And it was, in fact, at this extra-rigid aatenshun that we stood when the National Anthem was sung at school. Because it was, after all, the National Anthem, and it was the Nation, and we loved it, even though, but still. And yet, we understood not a single word of this National Anthem. Even today, I do not know the lyrics and can understand only snatches of the Sanskrit, our classical language of choice. And no one else can either. So I realize that my entire life, I have pledged allegiance to what? Who is this distant mother to which my blood has been bonded?

If politics were the art of what should be possible, I should imagine another world in which my India experienced a moment of simultaneity in the shared imagining of an ideal to which we all might truly aspire. When we now sing our Anthem, what are we to conjure in our mind - what? vindhya, himachal, ganga, jamuna? What else might we sing? Not Vande Materam - now, unfortunately, just another sanskritic bleat of the saanskriti-wallahs.

I should like to sing the only song that encapsulates my ideal of India: Saare Jahaan Se Accha. It is the only song I understand, and it is the only song that forces no feats of imagination greater than the visualization of a bulbul or the ganga. And it is the only song that demands no obeisances to a Glorious Mother, that demands no litany of the geography of our territory; no, the beauty of Saare Jahaan lies in its hidden simplicities, in the way that it addresses the core crisis of our time (Mazhab Nahin Sikhata...) and perhaps most importantly in the implicit and explicit organic solidarities of Hindi hai hum.

Of course, our neighbours south of the Vindhyas may not consider themselves to be Hindustani. Perhaps now they do: after all, Bollywood and Tollywood and Mollywood have trumpeted their twisted tunes, and we have swallowed them all. Now we are Indian, now we are Hindustani, now we are Bharati. But the irony of the reconceptualization of a Hindustan become neatly congruent with the twisted folds of our National Borders, Lines of Control and Lines of Actual Control - a Hindustan the opposite of a Pakistan - is an obvious and laughable one.

And the lines of control have carved our very speech to become the ever greater forward-slash in "Hindi/Urdu" - a gash that runs through Hindustan, Saare Jahaan se Accha. But like so much else, we have learnt to ignore this bleeding fissure; we no longer see it: for never, never in any of my schools or anywhere else in my country, did we ever sing these final lines of the original:

iqbal ko'ī meharam, apnā nahīn jahān men
m'alūm kya kisī ko, dard-e-nihān hamārā

...So much easier to let the heart beat in unison with a million jackbooted feet.

The Country of Gandhi and Nehru

2006-10-20T20:14:00.000-04:00

Comrades:
Everybody who loves or cares about India must, without exception, watch this video immediately. Please set aside approximately forty-nine minutes of your life to take just a little glimpse into Kashmir. In coming posts I hope to discuss this in greater detail. I would ideally like to generate some unbiased, analytical discussion of every aspect of what is represented here. Please comment.

Furthermore OR a rejoinder

2006-10-19T20:49:00.000-04:00

[This particular rant is on a topic in which I have some interest. I shall leave this draft version up for comments. If it can be improved, then well and good. If not, it goes to the Great Blogosphere in the Sky. - Blogographos]

Charges of snobbery are happily accepted, especially if they emanate from Silverplath.

However:

The debate is old. On the one side, that believer in the emancipatory power of technology and its proletarianizing possibilities: on the other, he who saw the final enslavement of mankind through the utter mechanization of culture.

Because

I suffer from no need to be 'fair' in ramblings already doubtlessly categorized as excursions into insanity, I shall quote only from the latter, whose tenor accords so beautifully with Orwell's vision.

Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes. The motives are markedly economic.

Meaning cannot be drawn from such relations. Meaning is not essential and absolute in the Platonic fashion, but it is hardly unstable, contingent, local, negotiated as the PoMos would have it. Meaning, in the end, is merely the quanta of control, the specie of domination and subordination in the economy of social control. It must be systematically extracted from text, it must be defused, discredited, cheapened - indeed, it must be laughed at. But this is not the subversive laughter of the subaltern - it is the mechanized resampling of the laugh-track. In this world,

Criticism and respect disappear in the culture industry; the former becomes a mechanical expertise, the latter is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading personalities. Consumers now find nothing expensive. Nevertheless, they suspect that the less anything costs, the less it is being given them. The double mistrust of traditional culture as ideology is combined with mistrust of industrialised culture as a swindle... The screenos and vaudevilles in the movie theatre, the competitions for guessing music, the free books, rewards and gifts offered on certain radio programs, are not mere accidents but a continuation of the practice obtaining with culture products. The symphony becomes a reward for listening to the radio, and – if technology had its way - the film would be delivered to people’s homes as happens with the radio [sic!].

Reading 'good' books in this world is either a means of establishing oneself within the field of the social, of breaching the bastions of established taste and securing one's position in the habitus. Or the practice of 'reading' good books is merely the reward for the practice of reading and pretending to think - a practice, that, like any other, opens a vast varieties of consumption contingent on the cultivation of a particular emotional or intellectual texture of the self.

Which brings us to snobbery. Yes, it's merely the desire not to cheapen the esoteric that makes me thrash convulsively at this prospect: the television producer casting benedictions on the writer and his works, masticating sentiments, uncertainty, beauty to the soggy mess that you will consume with your cereal in the morning. And remember that it is precisely the same process which exalts the low even as it lowers the high. And everywhere, a pleasing sameness, condition of our lives, of nightmares indistinguishable from dreams.

There Are No Snakes in Ireland

2006-10-19T20:27:00.000-04:00

In 1831, Mr. James Cleland, an Irish gentleman, being curious to ascertain whether the climate or soil of Ireland was naturally destructive to the serpent tribe, purchased half-a-dozen of the common harmless English snake (matrix torqueta), in Covent Garden market in London. Bringing them to Ireland, he turned them out in his garden at Rathgael, in the county of Down: and in a week afterwards, one of them was killed at Milecross, about three miles distant. The persons into whose hands this strange monster fell, had not the slightest suspicion that it was a snake, but, considering it a curious kind of eel, they took it to Dr. J. L. Drummond, a celebrated Irish naturalist, who at once pronounced the animal to be a reptile and not a fish. The idea of a 'rale living sarpint' having been killed within a short distance of the very burial-place of St. Patrick, caused an extraordinary sensation of alarm among the country people. The most absurd rumours were freely circulated, and credited. One far-seeing clergyman preached a sermon, in which he cited this unfortunate snake as a token of the immediate commencement of the millennium: while another saw in it a type of the approach of the cholera morbus. Old prophecies were raked up, and all parties and sects, for once, united in believing that the snake fore-shadowed. 'the beginning of the end,' though they very widely differed as to what that end was to be. Some more practically minded persons, however, subscribed a considerable sum of money, which they offered in rewards for the destruction of any other snakes that might be found in the district. And three more of the snakes were not long afterwards killed, within a few miles of the garden where they were liberated. The remaining two snakes were never very clearly accounted for; but no doubt they also fell victims to the reward. The writer, who resided in that part of the country at the time, well remembers the wild rumours, among the more illiterate classes, on the appearance of those snakes: and the bitter feelings of angry indignation expressed by educated persons against the—very fortunately then unknown—person, who had dared to bring them to Ireland.

More here.

Memory

2006-10-12T20:39:00.000-04:00

This will be a brief post. I wish only to note that Orhan Pamuk, Exalted Magister, has won the Nobel Prize. This fills me with inconsolable sorrow. For already it has begun, the praising and lauding of Pamuk the political figure: Pamuk, the Good Turk; Pamuk, the writer we need: a warm, conscientious, liberal, multi-cultural, nominally-Islamic voice of reason (even Reason?) in these troublous times.

What shall be lost, Readers, is that plain and frankly irrelevant fact in the Age of Spectral Mechanics, namely: Pamuk is a brilliant author. He is perhaps one of the five finest post-war prose stylists in the world. I shan't extol his virtues here, but anyone who has closely read or The New Life or The Black Book will know what I mean. Snow, of course, is wrenchingly evocative.

So begins the avalanche of drivel from the high and mighty arbiters of elegance, mothers with their book-clubs, blithely ignorant bookshopgirls, pimply undergraduates, assorted hippies, Quiet Americans, 'artistic' Delhi girls, Earnest Lit. Crit. Careerist Crets, Oprah, Bernard Lewis and his ilk, and all their crazed followers.

What, Me, Bad Mood? No Reason At All.

Fragments without Wholes

2006-10-02T01:22:00.000-04:00

Daily Intertextual Synchronicity #1: Having succumbed to the cold that I've been expecting all week, I've finally given up the intention to do more work tonight. I woke up this morning with a pain in my throat, in my early morning delirium imagined that I had the bubonic plague instead. Was I going to report myself to the authorities, or should I just go about my business as normal? Should I quarantine myself in the house, stuff towels under my bedroom door, die or live conclusively? It's only now that I remember that once, when young, innocent, unjaded, I had read The Plague.

It felt worse to be lucid and realize that I have a cold. A cold means ineffectiveness; lack of clarity; absence of productive activity. I've been whining and griping all day. So I decided to update my dear little blog. I found little bitlets of things I'd written before, including a fragment written well before I read "North Baltic," the subject of my previous revery below. Read carefully, careful reader, and ponder Daily Intertextual Synchronicity #2:

...This morning, I woke up feeling quite satisfied with myself, and also in the throes of a mild-to-middling hangover. Mitwohner and I went to coffee at Joe's cafe. I had a cappucino - it wasn't bad. Then we decided, on the spur of a saturday morning moment, to go to another cafe - one I haven't been to for years. So, after the space of two years, I found myself drinking an excellent cappucino (to compare, of course) at the Laughing Bean. I had forgotten how good the coffee was there, how charming the neighbourhood was in its own rather shabby way.

How does one forget something so real, so true, so fundamental as the taste of good coffee? I think there must have been entire days when I never truly awoke before I was permitted to drink coffee. When I was a child, I was forbidden both Tea and Coffee - they were for adults, I was told: and moreover, they made one's skin darker. And we all absolutely must have the whitest possible skin in India, mustn't we?

I recall the moment of transition - down the rabbit-hole we go again: the moment of transition in this case involved the dawning of the realization that I needed to study for school - that there were examinations I absolutely needed to do well in. This realization dawned at about the same time as I managed to finally crystallize the until-then amorphous pleasures of loneliness. But at a certain point in my life, I found myself at home, alone, happy, enjoying the first moments of spring - all too short in Delhi, I'm afraid. The first day it was possible to wear a T-Shirt is as magical as the first day it is no longer oppressively hot to wear a pear of Jeans. Fleeting moments between seasons.

On days such as this, I'd pop a CD from the meagre and prized collection we possessed: Nirvana, perhaps, or one of Mother's collection of Beethoven or Brahms. [And here we go - careful, now! -Ed.] I'd go to the kitchen, and turn the broken handle on the gas flame until I heard the loud hiss of gas escaping from the dull and scratched red cylinders we kept below the counter. I'd fumble around for the gas lighter - something that had fascinated me endlessly when I was younger, because of its ability to fire a single spark from centre to periphery - and get a nice flame going. I'd heat some water from the large, stainless steel filter, and as it boiled, I'd whip a small amount of milk, and considerably larger quantities of nescafe and sugar together in a cup. By the time the water was hot enough, the cup was filled with a slightly foamy, glutinous residue: together, they formed a cup of coffee that I took to the steps of the tiny verandah of our flat. Sitting in the shade behind the overgrown hedge, watching the ants carry dead insects away for consumption, enjoying the warmth of the cup on my skin, listening to the occasional vespa bounce off the speed-breaker on the road beyond, I would let my thoughts drift to my favourite fantasies.

One day, I thought, I'd be out of this horrible place: far away from my parents, I'd be a real human being and I would make my own decisions. I'd drink as much coffee as I'd like, and whenever I wanted. I'd live in America, where everything was perfect and just The Way It Really Should Be. In America, the coffee was better, obviously - and the people were nicer, richer, happier, more fulfilled. The ones I would encounter would all be beautiful, happy, well-adjusted and pleasant people - intellectuals with pleasant smiles, the lot of them.

I'm in heaven now, I suppose. All is well and peaceful with the word. As an editorial intervention, let me add that I haven't shaved in three days: I feel like a grizzled veteran as I grin here wryly, rubbing my beard, reflecting now on the utter glory, the depravity, the brutality, the absolute, mechanistic, rooted motion that is life: a series of images, flashing haphazardly on the surface of an ever-rippling pond. Perhaps it's because I've been reading Vertigo again.

The cold has seized me, and here I sit, all belagcholly. I've had my bitter tea, with ginger and honey, and I've listened to Mozart's Requiem. My day is complete. But before I go completely, notice that I've added some excellent new blogs for your reading pleasure. There'll be more, so do use the email alert feature. Perhaps next I'll write about Vertigo - a proper review; or about Three Songs. Or Rodchenko.

Here's the first chapter of Austerlitz.

PS. Kate: Did you snidely compare me to Oblomov in a recent conversation 'twixt us?

Thus a match is enough to set a stove aglow

2006-09-11T22:04:00.000-04:00

For a little riba, looking at Gauguin:
(My version of your experien')

North Baltic

J. Brodsky

When a blizzard powders the harbor, when the creaking pine
leaves in the air an imprint deeper than a sled's steel runner,
what degree of blueness can be gained by an eye? What sign
language can sprout from a chary manner?
Falling out of sight, the outside world
makes a face its hostage: pale, plain, snowbound.
thus a mollusc stays phosphorescent at the ocean's floor
and thus silence absorbs all speeds of sound.
Thus a match is enough to set a stove aglow;
thus a grandfather clock, a heartbeat's brother,
having stopped this side of the sea, still tick-tocks to show
time at the other.

This may well be one of the most beautiful poems I've ever read in my short life.

So, being that this blog is slowly but surely turning into the hallowed shrine of a certain J. Brodsky, I might as put in one more image, if only because this, really, is how I see him - and in his visage, myself.

2006-08-16T01:23:00.000-04:00

I'm a transcendent nationalist. I like to imagine, albeit falsely, that my sentiments are somewhat 'old-school.' I also suppose my love is framed by my age - after all, I belong to the one generation that received a full dose of the State's propaganda before it was drowned out forever by a million episodes of "Dallas" playing simultaneously on Star TV. But my friends will all remember not only the constant repitition of "Phool Hain Anek Lekin Mala To Ek Hai" (There are many flowers but there's only one garland). They will also remember the assemblies at school, the choir belting out patriotic songs in the shade of the school building, and the flag, the flag, the flag: as it unfurled, as the petals fell on the head of some geriatric worthy summoned especially for the purpose of inculcating patriotic virtues in us, the young, by his auratic presence. What's worth investigating, of course, is why, despite our unbridled cynicism and distrust of authority, we can still love the flag.

I remember my first memories of the American flag, and that of the Soviet Union. I remember, as a child, being delighted when a pleasant summer breeze would make the Stars and Stripes flutter proudly over the embassy at Chanakyapuri. How beautiful it was, that flag, and how unsullied! In my innocence, the flag was a symbol of purity, of idealism, of all that was good and worth preserving. I did not understand then understand dialectic materialism, with the consequence that the Hammer and Sickle looked ominous and ugly as it hung limply at the Soviet Cultural Centre right behind my house in Delhi. I didn't hate the Soviets too much, though: I particularly enjoyed episodes of the "Just You Wait, Rabbit!" cartoon and the slobbering, ravenous wolf.

Now, of course, the red flag of the toilers and peasants is gone forever, and it will never return. I miss it. The Stars and Stripes continues to fly, but my feelings for it are tempered by the reality of imperium and the understanding of the fundamental emptiness of symbols.

But the Tiranga: I remember fragments of Nehru's speech to Parliament describing the new flag of a young nation. What would Nehru say after fifty-nine years of oppression in Kashmir and the North-East, despite fifty-nine years of caste-based oppression and the destruction of secularism, of fifty-nine years of malnutrition and starvation for our poor 'citizens'? What would he say today, I wonder, about the Muslims of India, who now have to prove at every turn that they, too, do love the flag he introduced in parliament on our collective behalf?

Why, despite everything, does our flag fly even today?

Curlicues and Sh'ers

2006-08-11T13:21:00.000-04:00

Someone is reading this wretched blog in Indonesia. I hope to god it isn't my advisor. I'm sure he'd taunt me mercilessly if he knew how silly I was being. No, no grown-ups allowed in this child's wonderland. Speaking of advisors, I have an unbearable amount of academic work to do - papers to revise, papers to publish, papers to burn and never to remember again. But I'm not going to write about academics here, today, now.

I want to briefly sojourn to a moment frozen in my past. Some - many - months ago, I found myself in a musty bookstore, redolent of forgotten literature: old books that had been rotting in prairie houses, shelves crammed high with dust-covered, dog-eared works of prose and poetry, faceless authors lost in a sea of time, marooned on islands of fleeting fame in centuries past. Here it was, one cold Saturday, that I found a beautiful edition of a slim volume of poetry by one of my favourite Russian authors. And I was overjoyed, not because it was for me, but because it was a gift -- a perfect gift -- for someone else. I wanted to leave an inscription in that gift, a thought to echo faintly, but nevertheless ceaselessly, across all eternity's marbled, mausoleal halls.
The words came: The Pen Wished to Leave a Trace Behind ...
And suddenly, with another sentence, I had a couplet.

In the end, I wrote the second line of the couplet, because it was more beautiful. And it was a single, evocative line. In truth, I now realize, I was scared of my own poetic tendency, because the couplet that bubbled unbidden sounded very much like the english translations I'd read of Urdu Sh'ers - the native poetry of my mother-soil that I am only beginning to tentatively rediscover.

Memory is: a series of interlocking garbage-chutes suspended over a dark abyss. The perpetual ride swings violently in, as ever, an unanticipated direction, and I find myself now in Khan Market, with my an old friend from school, very dear to me. Let us call her Green Skirt Girl. We walked on the crowded pavement, and we talked of The God of Small Things, which if I recall correctly, I loathed and despised. Somehow this memory is connected to two other fragments - a person I shall call Smartipants (or Joobitch, exactly as I fancy) and the reading of Qurratulain Hyder's River of Fire. Thinking back now, there was something in the Amaltas trees under which we talked, Smartipants and I, about the Long March. I still have a feeling, so very vivid, as we lay sprawled in the grass in her college, talking about this or that - a feeling of unlimited possibility, of life stretching before one infinitely, of the head-rush of oncoming beauty. It was 1999, and it seemed to appropriate to think in millenarian terms, as we sat dressed in the fashion of the day, or as we were conducted, in scooters, to Dilli Haat. Here we'd sit, suttas in hand, (navy cut) mocking the buyers and mendacious purveyors of ethnic doodads. But back to the river of fire. Thinking of it now, no book did more to shape my consciousness of India, it's history, and my place in it than that one work. Or perhaps it was Jawaharlal Nehru's Autobiography. Truth be told, I can't remember, for today memory is trembling and oblique.

The coffee has run cold. Last time in Delhi, I found myself, alone, in Khan Market. There were new cafes now, some very creditable indeed. I saw a sign for a wonderful, hidden little place there, but I didn't go in. I've been there once, and I don't want to disturb the cobwebs that have gently settled over coffee and scones so many years ago.

I saw Farooq Abdullah, Black Cat Commandos in Tow, striding around. I walked to the IIC past the houses of Wing Commanders and Naval Chiefs. I passed a bridge in the Lodhi Gardens that was built five hundred years ago. In the distance, the tombs of departed Lodhi warrior-chiefs lay secure in their cocoons. The bright flash of the last ray of a smokily-setting sun reflected off a solitary lapis lazuli tile on an otherwise stripped and begraffitied dome. As the reflected light caught my eye, I felt the presence, across a chasm, of an other time, an other Delhi, and in it, walking alone, perhaps even an other me...

Seven Statements

2006-08-01T23:32:00.000-04:00

I have only a few things to say: firstly, my postings will be relatively intermittent due to cyclical loss of interest, accumulation of pressing -- and depressing -- tasks, and so forth. If you really, truly love me - and even if you're not ready to acknowledge that to yourself yet - do use the subscribe box on the side so you can be informed by e-mail whenever the latest pearl is cast.

Secondly, who is "Abby"?

Thirdly, I'm writing a bulletin on Pakistan for the job. Do read it here and let me know what you think - this is a topic I will be working on for a while and I'm really interested in everyone's comments. I'm planning to write a radical manifesto on how India needs to formulate a brand-new Pakistan policy. Mail me, O fellow sojourners in the World of Policy, and also laypersons of all stripe, if so you are inclined.

Fourthly, in coming days, I will be writing more about Delhi, because people seem to have gained a lot of pleasure from the post on that immortal city. Any ideas or themes you'd like me to work with? Any strident objections?

Fifthly, Dear Tessy, I miss you very much too! But it is your turn to send me an email and tell me all. And I do in fact have much to tell you. Shall we dare use the telephone?

Sixthly, for those who've been following the latest shenanigans in Parliament (Sansad Bhawan, that is): Yeh Mole to bahut Anmole nikla!

Seventhly, it's nice to be in touch again with old friends! Keep reading!

Yesh ananasy, ryabchiki zhui / Dyeh tvoi posledni prikhodit, burzhui!

2006-07-27T03:11:00.000-04:00

"Past One O Clock".

1

She loves me-loves me not.
My hands I pick
and having broken my fingers
fling away.
So the first daisy-heads
one happens to flick
are plucked,
and guessing,
scattered into May.
Let a cut and shave
reveal my grey hairs.
Let the silver of the years
ring out endlessly!
Shameful common sense -
I hope, I swear -
Will never come
to me.

2

It's already two.
No doubt, you've gone to sleep.
In the night
The Milky Way
with silver filigrees.
I don't hurry,
and there is no point in me
waking and disturbing you
with express telegrams.

3

The sea goes to weep.
The sea goes to sleep.
As they say,
the incident has petered out.
The love boat of life
has crashed on philistine reefs
You and I
are quits.
No need to reiterate
mutual injuries,
troubles
and griefs.

4

D'you see,
In the world what a quiet sleeps.
Night tributes the sky
with silver constellations.
In such an hour as this,
one rises and speaks
to eras,
history,
and world creation.

5

I know the power of words, I know words' tocsin.
They're not the kind applauded by the boxes.
From words like these coffins burst from the earth
and on their own four oaken legs stride forth.
It happens they reject you, unpublished, unprinted.
But saddle-girths tightening words gallop ahead.
See how the centuries ring and trains crawl
to lick poetry's calloused hands.
I know the power of words. Seeming trifles that fall
like petals beneath the heel-taps of dance.
But man with his soul, his lips, his bones.

Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Notes to the gentle reader:

Pay special attention to the delicate and beautiful stanza #3. This was found in his suicide note, along with the phrase, "Don't think I'm a coward. Seriously, it could not be helped."
The picture has been taken by another hero: Aleksandr Rodchenko - one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Perhaps one day I will write about the great Russian Futurists.

The title belongs to a happier, earlier Mayakovsky. It translates, I am told, to:

Eat pineapples, chew on quail,
Your last day is coming, bourgeois!

Pearls From Swine

2006-07-26T01:39:00.000-04:00

Apropos of the subterrainean but swift current of the fear of loneliness -- and also its love -- I present a quote that shall serve as the thought of your day, having already nourished my imagination for a few scant seconds.

I honestly can't say I like Murakami. Of course, I could tell you, gentle reader, why not. But considering the parlous, indeed imperilled, state of our society, our literature, and our poetics, my sober analysis would be taken as diatribe. No, I had best refrain. Instead, let me proffer a counterintuitive thought: much like the famed monkeys who are even now busily clattering away on a million keyboards in another universe, writing unbeknownst to them and unprovably to us, Hamlet, King Lear, and so forth - much in the same way, I said, Monsieur Soseki Lite, Mynheer Coelho Plus, can sometimes come up with a good para, a real corker. This is from Sputnik Sweetheart. The book itself is not good. I fear Murakami's corpus is imploding. Neverthe-, nonetheless, I reproduce for your mental mastication:

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."

Belagchollic Daze

2006-07-23T16:48:00.000-04:00

Has a week flown by since I last wrote? Life is a daze, a blur of color, sound, image. I have been far too engrossed admiring the shapely beauty of melancholy; it curlicues through my life like a drop of ink in a clear, odorless glass of water. It is time to cast aside such preoccupations, O Graphos!

Yet again, I find myself yearning to be back in Delhi. I love that dying city more with every passing day. Only, it isn't dying. It's fresh, pulsating, living, beautiful. I love to go to Delhi, to meld in, to merge with the masses, to float away in the throngs. I savour the physicality of the 'Traces of the Notables,' the sudden silences, the breezeless days in the rapidly-disappearing but still obviously timeless expanses to the south of the city. And then there are the city's cafes. There, my thoughts come to me as my own, unmediated by the person I am now; I feel truly, finally, autonomous. There is so much joy in the prospect of sitting with coffee, (cappucino, always) cigarette, (Gold Flake, Classic Milds, Navy Cut, Davidoff) and book (Acquired at Fact & Fiction) at Barista, watching the young ones constitute themselves with guitars, chessboards, newspapers.

I want to foray to the land where Mnemnosyne reigns. In my world, she laughs and plays with Clio. She sleeps in the rocks behind our old house at JNU, and she calls from Room 362; she spins forth the incredible, soft light that envelopes Delhi on certain evenings, when even the monstrous housing complex of Vasant Kunj looks beautiful in the distance. At such times, it is best not to think of dull, dreary home - home, with tubelights and washingmachines in the cramped little diningroom; home, with the TV, the depressing news, and a hundred years worth of New Yorkers slowly becoming more and more exotic, antiquated, and readable. No, it is better to think of other, larger, more expansive homes: to be a nomad in Clio's land, with only one's imagination for guide; to literally lose the self in an six-hundred year old tomb; to walk in a crowded night market and be jostled amongst the sweaty throngs; to imagine false continuities from an unknowable past - and make them real by seeing through them; and all the beautiful faces.

Here's a creditable evocation of the city. I want to go back, to find the first girl who ever broke my heart, seven years ago, and thank her for using peach-scented deodorant. That scent will never leave me, and nor will the picture of the caged snow-leopard you described in your rushed, extravagant hand-writing - without, I noticed, a return address in Ladakh. I want to go back, to stand with the idle and the aimless outside the Aaj Tak office in Connaught Place and watch the news on the giant flatscreen. Once again, I want to be dropped off outside the 'Office' from an old Maruti by the jewbitch and taste the feeling of that goodbye. I want to drink at the Gymkhana and sneer at the Puppies ("Rinki-Tunnu-Babloo-Sunny") on the dance-floor. I want to talk to the scooter-wallahs about absolutely everything. I want to play the flaneur, the domestic tourist, the South Delhi boy, the local intellectual, the NRI intellectual, the nephew, the dazzled rustic, the college student, the IIC-Lingerer, the British Council Whore, the C-Block market tippler, the nightclub-raver, the Friends-of-Music stoner, the Manali-goer, the Bombay-hater, the Calcharr Valcharr, the Bengali Mocker, the Rest-of-India Mocker, the Marxist thinker, the Khaadi and Nike poseur, play all my selves simultaneously and consecutively.

The secret of Delhi is this: we have familiarized everything, so the world is our home now, and we are at home in it. Take me back, if only for a while.

Thought for the day

2006-07-15T19:55:00.000-04:00

[...]
Other people are contented, enjoying the sacrificial feast of the ox.
In spring some go to the park, and climb the terrace,
But I alone am drifting not knowing where I am.
Like a new-born babe before it learns to smile,
I am alone, without a place to go.

Others have more than they need, but I alone have nothing.
I am a fool. Oh, yes! I am confused.
Other men are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Other men are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea.
Without direction, like the restless wind.

Everyone else is busy,
But I alone am aimless and depressed.
I am different.
I am nourished by the great mother.

-Laozi, book 20, tr. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English

On Counseling and Huzun

2006-07-11T02:55:00.001-04:00

Today, as I was traversing the streets, wrapped in my cloak of solitary gloom, I found the newspapers adorned with the headline, "Picton Searchers Offered Counselling." Once again, I found the fury rising in my throat. And I thought: why, wherefore, whence come these state-sponsored bosoms, wet still with the tears of the previous, on which we are asked to fling and confess? What good does it do? What will it do, any external thing, to ameliorate grief? Why should I permit the snake, the rose, the jewel within to become something that which we can all touch, examine, and feel? Don't the fools realize that our sorrows are the textures of your lives? How will you survive a world in which we are not daily excruciated?

Then I wished, wished with all my heart: let God, in some other universe, send the counselors to Somme, to Verdun and to Catalonia, so that the drivel of Remarquez, Waugh and Orwell be all magically transubstantiated into our joyless, tasteless, senseless pleasures: Then, we, of this generation, could safely be born neutered from the start, anchored firmly in a long-since vanished sea.

Perhaps on a connected note, I recalled this line from Pamuk:

When you see a beautiful woman in the street, don't look at her hatefully as if you're about to kill her, and don't exhibit excessive longing either, just give her a little smile, avert your eyes, and walk on.

The reverse-cheshire cat of that smile has been playing in my heart for a while now. And speaking of Huzun, I want to share something with you:

Sometimes I feel this has been sitting in my soul since before the day of my birth. They say of us that we do not believe in reincarnation - rather, that it is in our blood and bones. And it is true that sometimes, at night, when I am completely still, the silence around me changes and becomes clear, dense, poised on the verge of revelation. Is it my marrow I hear churning then?

At times like these, I realize that I am haunted by the ghosts of people I have never known.

Their anguish, frozen so long, has crept across dusty pages and jumped down my throat. So that on some nights, I can see quite vividly cities which have disappeared from this earth, peopled by remarkable men and women, full of colour and life, their features etched, riddled, with their pain and suffering. And in the days, the books gather dust again, the faces fade, but the sorrow remains.

What else is there to say today? Far too much and not enough.

I apologize, with a bitter smile, if none of this makes any sense to you. What is here does not belong to the realm of the real.

2006-07-07T21:12:00.000-04:00

Today, I've finally had the opportunity after a very long time to sit down and think about my life; I had something of an epiphany, sitting in the car, at the lighthouse: I watched the shadows of leaves wave slowly, purposefully, pregnant with intention, across my arms. It reminded me, for no discernible reason, of a certain day in San Francisco, when I sat in park near Haight-Ashbury with empty pockets and wind-blown hair. As I worried and fretted, as my mind narrativised and improvised, it suddenly came from me: nothing, nothing at all, could ever take the memory even then coagulating in my brain.

And so, today I realized again is that all which truly belongs to me is my consciousness; there is nothing save it that will not, one day, be taken from me. And one day, I suppose, this consciousness too shall go. It alone will not fade. One day, when you are sitting by a lake and watching little ripples blend amongst themselves into the whole which is only the sum of separate parts, you may remember reading this; and then you will understand.

Arular et al

2006-07-04T14:45:00.000-04:00

I don't really see why the hell I should have to go through this miserable charade of writing if no one cares or comments about what I do. Actually, of course, it's much better this way, and I know it to be so. I'm here, it's overcast, my heart is shaking for I have read what I should not have read. I do this periodically. This is the summer of my discontent, my absolute and utter displacement, my journey through karmic garbage-chutes to some compacted beyond; any minute now I expect to emerge, screaming, soaked in blood, in a new life and a new world.

The land of memories is in many ways reminiscent of the Kashmir that I once knew and loved. Now divided by an artificial Line of Control (but not an International Border), its winter passes are patrolled, monitored, mined. Insurrectionary crossings are fraught with danger. It is best to stay put and meekly go the through the rituals of traversal from checkpoint to checkpoint.

I have wanted for some time now to write of the essence of a nation, but that is a project that will require time, care, and the careful study of biology and toxicology. Instead, I want to meditate briefly on some music that I have recently encountered. Because of my hermetic isolation from the culture of these times, I knew nothing of M.I.A. until rather recently. I do recall quite clearly that the PoSEur had mentioned this music to me when it first burst upon the international scene, made a fair assessment of it, to which I added my deprecations, and there let the matter rest. But then I had a chance to watch this video of the song Galang and was forced to make a more intensive studyof the phenomenon that has apparently set the underground indie rock scene, so to speak, on fire.

I do have other things to do today, and I don't want to do a crude hatchet job on Maya Arul when really she deserves a swift cut from the rapier. But I do want to point out that she expresses her sympathies for the LTTE and the Tamil Struggle, which is at various points equated (equally vaguely) with other resistance movements. But for me, the enduring face of the conflict from which she (fraudulently) extracts cultural capital (turned now, by young lovers of music everywhere, into real capital) is this, and this - a place where unsung, poor soldiers died in someone else's war for no fault of their own.

I'm now going to go and write a serious piece on Sri Lanka today, and it will be available at my workplace on Wednesday.

PS. And a big, huge thank-you and hug to my wonderful cousin, the Princess of the (Neighbour)Hood, for reading my blog and correcting my mistakes. She is, literally, one of the best.

2006-05-31T02:25:00.000-04:00

It is the season of birth, and blogs are sprouting right and left in my conciousness. It is pleasing to see the daguerreotypes of self-awareness that have been ruined by the flitting of a moth here and there. Of my dear friend Kevin I can never say too many good things, and these I must save for a more opportune moment; and whatever's left reveals itself.

And now, I must tell you a little of the only story I know. But before we go on, I must insist: God does not play dice. There are no red herrings in fate, only the inexorable and mechanistic workings of wheels within wheels. I'd like to write more now about the Marksist - may his moustache proliferate, may his sarcasm wither your spirits, O ye striking students of Delhi University! - but it grows late, and my back aches from this absurd apelike posture in which I must write. There are self-examinations more poignant than mine. But I have not yet begun to write.

College, Delhi.

2006-05-22T15:10:00.000-04:00

A very large number of people have recently visited my blog. Thank you all very much for reading what I've been writing. Today, I want to spend a little time recording the memories that remain of my first days in college.

One day, late in the summer of '99, I went to my first class in the History program at Sri Venkateswara College in Delhi University. This institution was the charitable endowment of an enormously rich religious trust, but wealth of its coffers was not reflected in its architecture. Ugly in the plainitive, shabby manner that is the hallmark of Indian civic architecture, the college was far indeed from the ivy-covered walls within which I had imagined I would one day study. Past a large gate, over a curving drive-way that ran through a field of dead grass rotting in dry mud, into a sloppily white-washed building, through a dark corridor with aged bulletin-boards, and there was class.

We were a motley bunch ourselves: some products of Delhi's 'public schools,' except a gaudily-painted girl from Bombay who was instantly disliked by all for being 'sluttish;' the silly Catholic schoolgirl who, without mentioning it, was clearly proud of her 'Portugese blood' and chattered on about the plethora of dogs in her house; the Playboy, who when complimented on his clothing, could not but fail to mention that it was "versace" he had recently "picked up" in Paris; the plain but articulate girl who was loud, brash and aggressive if only to cover the seething insecurities of which she was made; the boring, scholarly kid whose jokes were never funny, who tried to hard to please, who wore horn-rimmed glasses and smoked amateurishly; and the unwashed pothead who had made a habit of watching The Matrix while stoned.

And then there were the children who were the products of Government-schools, the sons and daughters of poor homes in a city that was rapidly becoming richer. Between these last and us, the product of middle-class homes, there was a yawning gulf. They did not speak English, and we did; their clothes were obviously inferior; their hair was unstyled by professional hands; and they kept to themselves. One of them was particularly scholarly, and I established a tentative and hesitant friendship with him, based on mutual respect and inordinate politeness. With the others, there was natural common ground, so one could take their company for granted, even if one disliked them. And one did.

And there were others, a vast revolving set of Delhi's youth - very much a small, face-to-face society filled with the odd products of a society in transition. Sometime it seemed that this network of self-absorbed people, so invested in their appearance, their activities, their fashions, the details of their lives and their loves, was a remarkable and unique youth. At other times, the people who languished in the halls of the university seemed to be just humans, like humans everywhere and at all times. This, I now realize, was patently not true: but in those days, the idea numbed me with terror. To truly understand this terror - a terror, really, of suffocation - one needs to have sat through a class with the Marxist.

I wish you were here, dear

2006-05-01T22:55:00.000-04:00

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish you sat on the sofa
and I sat near.
The handkerchief could be yours,
the tear could be mine, chin bound.
Though it could be, of course,
the other way around.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish we were in my car,
and you'd shift the gear.
We'd find ourselves elsewhere,
on an unknown shore.
Or else we'd repair
to where we've been before.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear,
when the moon skims the water
that sighs and shifts in its slumber.
I wish it were still a quarter
to dial your number.

I wish you were here, dear,
in this hemisphere,
as I sit on the porch
sipping a beer.
It's evening; the sun is setting,
boys shout and gulls are crying.
What's the point of forgetting
if it's followed by dying?

-- Joseph Brodsky

Meanwhile, in a distant country...

2006-03-17T01:24:00.000-05:00

Missing person letter
Originally uploaded by seanhorgan.

Gloomy prognostications and pleasant melancholy

2006-03-14T11:51:00.000-05:00

I'm listening to the sound of rain dropping from the eaves of my residence to the ground below. Even cold spring rain can't disguise the fact that Canada's temperatures this winter were 3.7 degrees centigrade warmer than the average. This winter, in fact, has been the warmest winter ever.

Meanwhile, a recent article in Science has stated that the Antarctic ice sheet has begun to melt, at the rate of 36 cubic miles per year. This rate of loss is far, far higher than previously estimated.

I'm not surprised at all. We have only the faintest grasp of the delicacy and intricacy of the ecological webs that have enabled our existence. We don't have the capability to imagine the cascade of effects our actions precipitate when they disrupt the environment. Of course, 'nature' is hardly a static system: but once we've managed to change the ecological paradigm by raising the temperature of the planet - well, really, it's anybody's guess.

I'm not surprised, but I'm certainly worried. I'm quite fond of this world, for all it's flaws, and I would hate to see it be replaced by another. And yet, that's precisely what will happen in the coming decades: for the change in our ecosystems will not be isolated from the world of politics and commerce.

Out there, beyond the safe and cosy confines of the first world, are more than two billion Indians and Chinese who demand by right the West's lifestyle of consumption. Of those, many millions are still struggling to survive; for them, global warming is a laughable threat in the face of more immediate worries. How will the West persuade these people to shun cloro-fluoro-carbon-based product and to restrict Carbon Dioxide emissions? As this article shows, there is absolutely no sign that the emission of so-called greenhouse gases is even beginning to level off.

Sometimes I think: so let it all end. Let us go boldly forth into a world where the environment as we know it falls apart. After a few decades - perhaps a century or two - our wonderful civilizations shall fall into anarchy and destroy themselves. The few humans who survive will lose what little we have learnt, and will resort to the mutual infliction of savage and personal brutality that we have come to admire in a modern age of routine, mechanized and impersonal brutality. Even when we're all dead and gone, and our architecture has become a series of picturesque ruins for no-one to behold, the earth will still continue its journey. Soon, I imagine, the calcium of my bones will be recycled into the coral reefs that will doubtless stretch across the remnants of our coastal cities, and multitudinous shoals of brightly-colored fish will dart through what was once 'me.' Perhaps some more deserving inheritors of the earth will, by the grace of god the most beneficient and merciful, again find pleasure in that sight.

Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

2006-03-05T21:19:00.000-05:00

I have nothing that I wish to communicate to any of you right now. My Birthday is coming. I doubt it will be as much fun as the last. I remember my birthdays when I used to live in India: it seems as if it were several hundred years ago now. I found a description of my birthday the other day. It brought back memories.

On the 17th day of March, which is the solar anniversary of the emperor, His Majesty is weighed twelve times against the following articles: gold, quicksilver, silk, perfumes, copper, rúh i tútiyá, drugs, g'hí, iron, rice-milk, seven kinds of grain, salt; the order of these articles being determined by their costliness. According to the number of years His Majesty has lived, there is given away an equal number of sheep, goats, fowls, to people that breed these animals. A great number of small animals are also set at liberty.

If any of you breed sheep or goats, please contact Abu'l Fazl to receive a gift. No fowls are being distributed this year, on account of Bird Flu.

A Nice Article

2006-02-20T00:56:00.000-05:00

Read this, and leave me alone. I'm very busy.

Colors

2006-02-01T14:27:00.000-05:00

The Ride
Originally uploaded by Blogographos

On Orhan Pamuk

2006-02-01T13:45:00.000-05:00

I don't have favorite authors. Only the trite play that game. But I must confess that when I do succumb to the dubious charms of idolatry, my obesiances as directed as often as not towards the remarkable figure of Orhan Pamuk. A magister, a mesmerist, an enchanter, Pamuk is clearly one of the greatest of the latter half of the last century. I will have something to say about Sebald one of these days, but those of you who have encountered his works will testify to the dazzling -- and waxing -- virtuosity of his craft. He has recently been acquitted by a Turkish court, which in itself is some cause for celebration. On the other hand, would it be worth his permanent incarceration and the subequent loss of future writings if this would ensure Turkey's irrevocable exclusion from the EU? Someone will know what I'm talking about.

...et Deimos

2006-01-31T23:27:00.000-05:00

Today, I had another opportunity to chat with my wonderful friend, the peasant of superior excellence about censorship and China. The Peasant of Superior Excellence (PoSE for short) made several excellent points regarding the hype surrounding internet censorship in China, and how such hype contributes to the prevailing fantasies of the new and insidious 'oriental despotism' discourse within which China is placed. Now I am a disciple (μαθητής, heh heh hehdeggeh) of the PoSE (I am a dedicated PoSEur, if there ever was one) and so I decided to do a little more 'research.' This site describes in a lucid, albeit preliminary fashion, how Google's filtering works. I don't approve at all of the way it transcribes its title (Internet Censorship Explorer) in Cyrillic (another sign of the pervasiveness of 'Oriental Despotism' discourse) but it nicely complements this post, which also dwells on the technical aspects -- and limitations -- of filtering. It is nice to see that there are 'Watchdogs of the People' out there, noting, dissecting, and distributing. Lovely indeed.

I am a little ambivalent about internet filtering of this sort, but I am willing to admit that there are complexities of all sorts in the issue. At heart lies a particular vision of social engineering, which, while certainly distasteful to me, is nonetheless a form of human organization. That, in itself, makes me wary of criticizing it too harshly. Besides, it's not as if we live in a world of guaranteed freedom and established liberal principles, is it?

I watched, and enjoyed, the Dear Leader's speech today before the house of congress. I was pleased to see that the tactical alliance between the American newsmedia and the organs of American government remains flourishing. From the patently pre-planned manner in which CBS News provided still images that complemented and magnified the impact of what Bush had to say, it seems that the organization has decided (like its other competitors) its role is not to present objective reportage but instead to uncritically smoothen and sweeten the churnings of the government's propaganda machinery.

I saw several glimpses of my favorite Condoleezza Rice during the speech. She seemed happy and at ease, betraying no obvious symptoms of insanity or Macbeth Syndrome; this provoked my curiosity enough to locate and read an excellent article about her from my favorite publication. If you have 20 minutes to kill, and an overwhelming urge to find out more about what made Ms. Rice the person she is, do click here. You won't be disappointed. Having read it, I must say I have marginally -- and thus infinitely -- more sympathy for the woman.

I wish I were paid to blog, so I could express my opinions without risking my bread and butter. I hereby give both the New Yorker Magazine and the New York Times (and other reputable organizations) the permission to offer me exalted positions of little responsibility and high remuneration, so I can continue my god-given mission of enlightening, uplifting, edifying, and civilizing you, the barbarous heathen multitudes (who are so very dear to me).

Phobos...

2006-01-30T11:57:00.000-05:00

What does climate change mean to you? Everywhere I go, people seem to be talking about how bad the weather is, how it has come to redefine capriciousness, and how it's much warmer, colder, or rainier than it used to be. Now, this report tells us that scientists are almost certain that global warming is imminent; it's not clear how far we are from the so-called "tip-off" point, but once we do tip over, there will be severe consequences. How severe? Well, a slight rise in sea-levels may cause a change in the composition of your favorite coastal vistas. Of course, America is to blame: we can only hope that America's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol was not (as fear) the worst mistake that President Bush made. Frankly, I am not happy about this.

Moving on to happier topics: this website presents a small list of words that the Chinese government has requested be 'filtered' by Google. It suffers from Small Sample Bias and Selection Bias. But the choices are instructive.

History
Tang Dynasty, Qin, Qin Dynasty, Emperor Wen, Emperor Kangxi, Chairman Mao, Mao, Lu Xun, Famine, Genocide

Society
Anti Socialist, Chinese Communist, Chinas, democracy, dictatorship, oldest person, party policy, grass roots, expelled from school, human rights, peoples, peoples court, provincial party, suzhou city

Morality
dissidents, moral standards, obey, truthfulness, vicious, patriotic, villians, evil actions, extreme behavior, hatred, hearts, foolish, liars, outcasts.

Interpretation coming up...

Not the happiest of moods after all this? Continue the trend.

The British Library

2006-01-24T00:31:00.000-05:00

The British Library
Originally uploaded by akaicker.

Here is a picture I took in the BL in London. I quite like it. I think you should like it too. Am I not indeed the greatest living human being?

Coming soon, more interesting posts than this one, but with less interesting pictures.

Conservatives

2006-01-23T23:50:00.000-05:00

So it appears that the Conservatives have won this election in Canada, and will establish a minority government. No doubt they will also blather on about a government of national unity after a particularly divisive election, and then attempt to do bad things to Canada, though future generations will never agree whether the Conservatives succeeded in destroying Canada or failed in their attempts to save it.

Frankly, I don't care.

Now I have no particular love for Conservatives of the political stripe. I do enjoy the idea of social conservatism: my ideal state (strong, like my coffee) would be a liberal political democracy with a meritocratic government and a strict, North-Korea style dress code. Simple living and high thinking taken to their logical extremes - that's the ticket!

I have problems distinguishing my utopias from my dsytopias.

Our Conservatives are probably going to be a colorless and undistinguished bunch. Were they made of sterner stuff, the first Canadian soldiers would be en route to Baquba or Karbala already. But no: these Conservatives, for all their derring-do, won't bother jumping into America's Quagmire. They'll just pretend they're more supportive than the erstwhile incumbents.

Zhen came home, whining prettily about the Conservative victory. But of course, she's like me, and doesn't really care in the least. She's now eating pork chops, beans, and rice, and has already forgotten about the dire predictions we made last night. the country is going to the dogs, and we are playing fiddles of the metaphorical variety.

In other, better news: I saw an excellent movie today. It's called I Am Cuba, and it's truly a beautiful piece of cinematic effort. It was an appropriate gift from my dear friend Christmas "Krys" Kelly, who has an intuitive understanding of my aesthetic sensibility. The movie itself was a wonderful period-piece propaganda flick with some amazing Soviet constructivist cinematography. Although it was about Cuba, with mostly Cuban actors, it was a Mosfilm product through and through, and it included a nod to Eisenstein with a scene involving water cannons. One of these days, I'd like to compare how those two scenes are structured, and the intertextual moment that emerges inbetwixt. If memory serves, it was directed or perhaps written by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, before he sold out the Rodina.

Now I will go and do some more Urdu. At night, the conservative stormtroopers will probably come to get me, but I don't care. I can almost imagine the scene:

'We are the dead,' he said.
'We are the dead,' echoed Zhen dutifully.
'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.

so it goes.

At last, fame.

2006-01-07T01:21:00.000-05:00

After years in the woods, it seems a mention on the Crazed Peasant's blog (see below) has brought me, albeit temporarily, into the lime-light. I'm touched and flattered by the attention, and am in fact sorry that I don't have more on my blog: I've been thinking a bit about a lot of interesting things, and I'll get them here the minute I've finished my grading and writing. So do keep checking back, or sign up on the e-mail list, gentle reader, because the best is yet to come.

Tim's wonderful blog

2006-01-06T01:42:00.000-05:00

So I just discovered my friend Tim's wonderful and hilarious blog. Worth a regular read, folks. Check it out here at:

超級農民牛B衣

And send him encouraging comments and money so he keeps it up.

Here's a good one

2006-01-05T17:50:00.000-05:00

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."

Rejected by the Publishers - New York Times

Updates will follow, as and when I have time. But rest assured, dear readers, that I haven't forgotten you! So check back frequently and write me flattering, prodding notes or comments. I crave your attention and indulgence as I hope you crave the pearls of my writing.

Busy, Busy, Busy

2005-11-30T21:32:00.000-05:00

Well, folks, it's that time of the year again and yes, your favourite Abhishek is swamped, utterly swamped with work. Papers to grade, papers to write, thoughts to think - it's all getting to be a bit much: which is why I've strategically invested in a bottle of Remy Martin V.S.O.P (P.B.U.H!) to get me through the long, hard nights of grading. So I'll leave you with this here story to read and talk about. Apparently, the militants have adopted a shocking new tactic. As the NYT reports,

The Marine offensives have generally met with mixed success. While troops have been able to uncover many weapons caches, they have found that guerrillas retreated from the towns well in advance of the operations. The fighters would then come back after the Marines had departed.

Meanwhile, in my favorite city, the government has decided to give every student in government primary schools CDN$3.10 for buying ...Jerseys: the children are presumably too malnourished and poor to brave the Delhi winter without government aid. After school, many of these kids go home to help their mothers, who make clothes (such as those for GAP) that are exported at huge profit to America: we buy American dollars - and American public debt - thus financing America's public expenditures, a small fraction of which, via USAID, returns to India. But a much, much larger fraction goes to funding the war in Iraq which apparently is proceeding with "mixed success." (we threw a war and no-one came!)

Comments?

Little Richard, With a Pipe...

2005-11-28T18:54:00.000-05:00

Apropos of the pathologies of American life, here's an illuminating tale.

Richard Henderson, age 20, killed his family on Thanksgiving with a pipe. Have we, consumers of CNN's sordid tidbits, become accustomed to this sort of thing yet? Is it still fair to ask: Why did he do it? How does it feel? Or should we silently absorb the story and move on - gratified, scintillated, re-affirmed in our varying notions of the outside world, happy in our fragments? If Richard were to explain his actions, would he mumble off a few words about insanity, rage, youth, stupidity, anger, depression, and abuse? Or would he say:

Swinging the pipe into oncoming foes was not only satisfying; it was gruesome. Blood and teeth sprayed every which way, but they weren't going down without a fight. One of our targets actually looked down for the count, but when we turned around, he was suddenly right on top of us, trying to strangle the life out of us. Not cool. A few more whacks and he wasn't getting up any time soon.

Those aren't his words: they're the recounting of the fevered satisfactions of the latest video game for the XBOX 360 (Panoptical Sphere?) by the name of Condemned: Criminal Origins.

Not that video games cause violent tendencies to arise in the minds of our innocent youth: I've played and enjoyed many a game in my life, and hope to continue doing so. But I'm really beginning to get quite interested in this formless malignance of violence that floats through America's collective unconscious. More on this when I have both time and inclination in suitable combination. In such situations, though, always ask: what would Walter Benjamin say?

Comments, anyone?

Home

2005-11-27T20:13:00.000-05:00

Red Fort, Old Delhi
Originally uploaded by r12a.

Speaking of home, I will be here in just a few weeks. I can hardly wait! I've been studying the old city of Shahjehanabad for so long now - no doubt there'll be wallowing in nostalgia and the search for lost time before long. Now if only Zhen could come too...

On Torture

2005-11-27T20:07:00.000-05:00

An excellent article on the whole Torture debate is to be found here, at the Washington Post Online. The real question, of course, is how the inhabitants of a land ruled by a liberal constitution for two-and-a-quarter centuries have not yet internalized a sense of what it means to be 'humane.' Where is the lurking pathology, the hidden violence in the American psyche that lets people 'waterboard' others? Are human beings fundamentally vulnerable to evil - do we have to return to the idea of original sin in order to understand human nature?

And most importantly, what is it amongst these American elites - the Gonzales types - who feel no compunction in permitting their underlings to torture and kill? What shining, higher ideal world are they hoping on the screams and the suffering of others? They must know that most of the people tortured are innocent, because torture, as the article points out, is a routine, institutionalized practice.

Torture achieves nothing. The torture of civilians and enemy combatants did not win America the war in Vietnam, as books such as A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan have demonstrated in so lucid a fashion. Is it then some bizarre notion of Realpolitik - "just do what needs to be done in order to ensure our freedoms here" - that permits men like Gonzales to feel no horror, no shame, in viewing the objects of their affection - the broken, bleeding, battered bodies - on which a new life is to be built for the oppressed of the world?

This, it should be noted, is a new form of torture - and potentially far more explosive than other practices. Torture has historically been used to punish people or to extract compliance from them: but there has always been a torturable class, as Graham Greene pointed out in some book or the other (set in Havana. The name eludes me). Such, indeed, remains the condition in India today: those who are tortured are generally the weak, the helpless, those who don't have powerful 'uncles' in the Police deparment. But when a whole people become a torturable class - as is certainly the case in Afghanistan and Iraq, and may quite well also be true for Kashmir - then one senses the failing powers of the state. Torture, raw coercion of this sort, implies the defeat of ideology. It denies humanity to the victim, and ensures the victimised people will never be reconciled with the state. It's not a good way to win wars.

Torture, everywhere, is equally indefensible. I think naturally of Kashmir, because it the bleeding wound in our body politic, and I hope that we - for I do take responsibility for the actions of the servants of my democracy - do not torture Kashmiris. I hope, even more so, that we do not torture Kashmiris because they are Kashmiris.If this is in fact the case, we have lost Kashmir forever, and no self-respecting Kashmiri can ever reconcile with the land of Gandhi and Nehru. But my sense, and my interaction with the few Kashmiris that I know, is that such is not the case. India's war is brutal - not pardonably, but comprehensibly - because it is a war for survival, or has been portrayed in those terms. In any case, nation-states don't give up territory.

America, of course, is different. Americans now travel the globe, visit distant and exotic lands, and replace the brutal dictatorships that govern those oppressed orientals. But here ideology stops: it stops, completely and irrevocably, when a young, naked Afghan is chained to a concrete tarmac overnight. The frozen corpse of this 'suspected' terrorist or a 'sympathizer' has no counterpoint to offer to "Freedom, on the march."

I leave you then, with this question: why, really are Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan? What, really, do they hope to achieve? It's not a rhetorical question: but we must begin to excavate the substratum of violence, hatred, and arrogance within American society that permits the sort of things we have only begun to see.

A Most Peculiar Man

2005-11-24T14:05:00.000-05:00

Visit The Gold Medal Set. As seems to be becoming the norm, I will refrain from commenting.

More Cries for Withdrawal

2005-11-17T16:41:00.000-05:00

Just between you and me, gentle reader, I think that this Rep. John Murtha would be an example of what is called an 'old fool' in the parlance of our times. I don't know how he thinks of himself as a democrat.

Pro-Defense Democrat Calls for Immediate Troop Withdrawal

But let's get this clear. This man claims that Iraq is more dangerous than Vietnam - a place he has apparently "fought" in. According to this report on CNN, Murtha said:

"I tell you, these young folks are under intense activity over there, I mean much more intense than Vietnam ... You never know when it's going to happen."

Right. Because nothing unexpected ever happened in Vietnam, such as, um, say, Ia Drang, the Tet Offensive or what-have-you.

According to the article in the Post, "Murtha at times appeared to choke back tears as he described visits to badly wounded service members in hospital wards." Ever get the chance to visit an Iraqi hospital, sans medicine, sans doctors, sans electricity?

What, then, of the people who have now been hurled in the face of a greater evil than Hussein's Dictatorship? Shall they be left to their fate?

Sickening.

What is it good for?

2005-11-16T21:38:00.000-05:00

IMG_2926
Originally uploaded by TwoCrabs.

As if any comment were needed at all.

Finally, Some Guts

2005-11-16T21:25:00.000-05:00

Maj. Gen. William Webster, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, has called plans for withdrawal from Iraq "a recipe for Disaster." In this article, he claims that the deaths of 221 dead americans would be vain, were the US to pull out of Iraq right now.

Of course, it's entirely far too much to expect some mention of the tremendous suffering of ordinary Iraqis - the woundings, the deaths, the torture, and the everyday humiliation of being occupied by a group of arrogant, testosterone-addled teenagers from the midwest.

The truth is that Iraqis have paid the price for American hubris and imperialism; the "democracy" being built in Iraq is being almost literally built on their bodies. These men and women have suffered one organized and brutal tyranny - and now they must endure a disorganized if equally brutal tyranny again. This time, however, so Americans can congratulate themselves on the 'tremendous sacrifices' they're making in Iraq.

But America makes no sacrifices whatsoever. The lives that are lost belong to the young, the foolish, the uneducated, the residents of nowhere, America; rather than leading a life of quiet despair bagging groceries in Sioux Falls, MN, these kids tried to inject some meaning in their existences. Those existences come to a shattering halt - most recently for five more Marines in New Ubaydi - just so that other (and usually richer) Americans can feel proud when they see the Ole Star and Stripes hanging limply in the front yard.

So I ask you, O Americans, what sacrifices are you truly prepared to make? Are you willing to renounce your SUVs? Are you willing to live in a world where the social cost of your so-called 'gas' approximates the prices you pay for it?

What's most shocking here is that the Democrats are advocating this withdrawal from Iraq. It shows, if it ever needed to be shown, that the Democratic party has come to be utterly spineless and utterly without vision. How can a so-called liberal think about getting "the boys" back home in this situation? What of the anarchy and terror that would descend on defenceless Iraqis? What, then, shall future historians think America wanted to do in the middle east - bring Islamic Fundamentalism to the one country in which it did not previously exist?

What a grotesque cleft there exists between the ideals - of liberation and the "march of democracy" on the one hand - and the desire to get Americans out of "towel-head" land.

America must stay the course. My only hope is that it pays in full the price for its actions.

Monseiur Le Cheney, Yet Again

2005-11-16T04:40:00.000-05:00

Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force

Americans:

Rejoice. Yet more evidence to suggest that the Vice President of the United States suffers from an utter bankruptcy of morality.

I decided to jump on the blogging bandwagon because I'd imagined, in my naivete, that I could make cool and incisive comments about the state of affairs in he world today. And yet, every revelation of the unutterable follies of the American Government send me into convulsions of frothing rage. Will someone care to explain to me why the Vice-President needs to have secret meetings with executives from oil companies?

Now don't get me wrong, folks. I'm not a bedreadlocked hippy by any means, and the utter absence of marijuana in my bloodstream will testify in favor of my claim to at least an ordinary level of rationality. But one hardly needs any more than ordinary rationality to observe that a collusion between the White House and the Oil Industry has resulted in the creation of a flawed national energy policy: one that will compromise America's national security and shackle it to the ever-increasing use of inefficient, unviable and environmentall y unsustainable fuels. No one could possibly gain from such a faustian bargain, except of course Unser Liebe Teufel.

Which leads to the next puzzling question: who, in this wicked web, is the devil? I think, O Americans, that the blame lies squarely on your collective shoulders. You inoffensive Iowans, you quiet soccer moms of nameless midwestern towns, you clean-shaven young financial analysts at Merrill Lynch - it is all your doing, and that of your forefathers. In following points, I shall explain why. The reasons, again, require only ordinary rationality. As the anachronism from the age of the the radio goes, "stay tuned."

Encounter With a Naxalite

2005-11-16T04:23:00.000-05:00

The Hindu has a laconic report today about the death of three naxalites at the hands of police forces. The writing, as usual, is terse and seemingly factual; but it conceals far more than it reveals. Apparently, the police launched a dawn raid on a training camp with more than 200 "ultras" including 40 women. A firefight ensued and three of these "ultras" were killed.

India's war against the naxalites is not proceeding well at all. That two hundred militants - if the number has not been exaggerated by security forces - can meet to train in the countryside, one really must wonder about the state of affairs out there in the mofussil.

What's of true interest - and it's not an issue much examined - is the set of circumstances that drive so many young men and women to radical ideologies - to become "ultras" beyond the pale. What oppressions have they suffered? Where does their rage and their anguish come from?

Yet another story of failure - the failure of India to realize itself.

The Hindu News Update Service

Back

2005-08-28T23:23:00.000-04:00

That the entire exercise of blogging is an utter waste of time is irritatingly obvious. Whatever is truly private can never be written here - that must go to the realm of my sadly neglected journal; on the other hand, anything truly worth publishing must never be published here; showing people one's writing in progress is like "passing around samples of one's sputum," is how Nabokov once described it. So why not just stop now, why write another word at all here?
Partly because of the overwhelming urge to destroy myself by the excruciation of wasting time. Self-annihilation can be had more cheaply in sleeping-pills, lengths of rope, knives, drugs, alcohol; but there's nothing quite so satisfying as the slow degeneration to lunacy and death - one, I might add, that becomes tangible as one watches the the whirling game played on the chequerboard of nights and days. I have, in my opiate haze, been a spectator for a long, long time. Now, paralysed, unable even to twitch an eyebrow, I sit in my stupor and await the bitter end.
But I'm being very cynical today. The end is certainly not yet nigh, make of it what you will. So I think I shall periodically throw together a few words here for the consumption of the masses, but also - and far more importantly - to keep my literary abilities in some state of preservation.

Sunny Vancouver

2005-06-13T19:21:00.000-04:00

I've wanted to keep a blog for the edification of the general public for quite a while now. Today seems to be as good a day as any for such a noble purpose. I suppose I'll permit myself the luxury of writing here from time to time about whatever I fancy; being that this is the lighter incarnation of my more private writings, I shall also enable the 'comment' feature so the Great Unwashed have a chance to express themselves at my expense.

I've been thinking of working on learning the Urdu script for a little while now. It's a very beautiful and elegant way of writing; there's a subtlety to the formation of individual characters that seem to permit an aesthetic unity to the whole; I suppose this is true of all forms of writing - but there's something particularly attractive about the graceful whorls and curves of the Perso-Arabic script.

I'm off to St. John's now, and from there to the gym - I haven't been there for quite a while, but it seems that is now indeed time to start exercising again - and I think I shall purchase some alcohol today to stock up for these next few months. A small bevy of domestic tasks await me; the fridge, for instance, needs to be de-frosted. I've been quite lackadaisical over the past few days, but I'm trying to shake the torpor off and launch afresh into action.