Issue Sixteen of Ol' Chanty has been delayed due to the fact that the editor is taking a rest.  Hopefully, it will be out again in January.
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EDITORIAL

Welcome to Issue Fifteen. Once again, my 'Bible' hasn't come up with the goods on number fifteen, so I guess I'll have to improvise again.

I have come to the conclusion that Louis MacNiece hit the nail on the head when he wrote "World is crazier and more of it than we think. Incorrigibly plural." All too often, I find it hard to have ideas about things which are adequate to their "incorrigibly plural" reality and so I prefer to keep schtum. So many people have so much to say and their ideas are so fixed and unalterable that I really do want to beg off and say "Get on with it everyone. I don't have the head for this anymore." People with convictions, for instance, which you cannot argue with because they are set in stone. It doesn't matter what part of the political spectrum they're on, whether they come from the right or the left or indeed sit in the centre. I've had them all with their firm and solid convictions. Yeats's "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity." speaks for me I believe. The best lack conviction because they have too much integrity to allow their beliefs to stand in for reality. Of course, having convictions, which one sticks to through thick and thin because one's life seems to depend on them, is not quite the same as having ideas and throwing them into a volatile mix. One can always change one's ideas, which is much harder if they're convictions. "Convictions" as Nietzsche said, "are a more dangerous enemy of truth than lies." Poets lie all the time, but then they do not present what they write as gospel. They explore, they play, they may even seem to mean what they say, but one thing they don't do is take what they write at face-value. World is simply too crazy and plural and there's always more where it came from.

After the appeal in the last issue for more women writers, the scale has been tipped the other way. In fact, all but one of the poets in this issue are women, and that one is  my ol' mucker, Joe Mismo, who I asked to contribute something and who, like the Trojan he is, sent me some poems to make up the shortfall.

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QUOTE - Saint-Just  (A man with very strong convictions)

"One dare not hope that things will improve so long as one foe of Freedom breathes. Not only the traitors, but also the lukewarm and the indifferent, everyone who takes no part in the republic and moves no finger for it. After the French people has announced its will, everything which is contrary to its will stands outside the sovereignty of the nation, and who stands outside the sovereign is his enemy."

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CONTENTS

Poem-Sequence by Karen Margolis

Short Story by Ted Jackson

Quote - Flannery O'Connor

Poems by Bethany W Pope, Win Harms and Stellasue Lee

Quote - Henry Miller

Essay by Richard Livermore

Poems by Joe Mismo

POEMS - Karen Margolis

Smiles wide open

Poem sequence in progress from the cycle Song of Age



Anything’s possible


“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”
                                                   − T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land


anything’s possible
she said, typing the words 
into the box marked reply

a finger click carried the message away 

an electronic pigeon 
delivered it 
instantaneously
to a mailbox, where it waited 
obediently for pick-up

we’re all creatures of habit
clinging to old words
for communication

what keeps us bound to a constellation 
that serves marginal ads instead of inspiration
and absorbs our input into clouds?
— we even have the cheek 
to call our electronic jottings
after the song of birds 
  
How can I tell you 
in a new millennium’s shorthand 
of a life spent working to buy time
(just another word for freedom)
now we’re figures from each other’s pasts

your words waking
waves of tenderness
for you, and the girl I was:
pure heart in her smile
               
I long to throw a thought in your direction
and wait to see 
laughter spreading across your lips
starting small at the corner
and ending on target on the far side
(the wicked side)
making ripples, the lineaments 
of age to come

Let’s leave the Baltic
to its icy winds
and refugee memories
anyway, the present 
was always our meeting point

moi, je préfère
the swing of promise in my step
walking away 
down the Rue de la Liberté
to greet the gulls on the promenade
crying out their messages
whatever the weather

Let’s leave our masks at home
and meet alone 
with our smiles wide open


Plan for a rendezvous with an old lover

In a place you never knew
catch a weekend free from life
where nobody will find you
(remember: pack the Opinel knife) 

cut the days in question
out of your iCal
and paste them in a space
marked ‘magical’

Let the evening grow shadows 
pour a cocktail of champagne 
flesh and forgetting
for now. then. once. again
decades dissolve in showers
never ending



After thought (damp version) 

text to my self: our next meeting 
shouldn’t happen in a public place

unless I knot my hands 
behind my back
cross my feet tightly under the table
and wear a scarf 
to keep my mouth well hid 

no body can tell me 
to stop the fountain 
of a spring so many years ago 
rising and peaking to overflow  

swamping my domestic nettle patch
and drenching your comfort zone

it was a rainy day.
Some things don’t dry out
even after weeks
of lukewarm towelling
and self-doubt.

 

Writing a poem on a rainy afternoon

Paper and pen I take to bed
and lie with them
like an invalid
or a lover



The e-book authoress as an obsolescent model

Met my dream man
at the Frankfurt Book Fair
he rode me to paradise
in a pink rocking chair
my seamless black stockings
got ripped on the way --

well, you can’t make a novel
without some type defacing the page 

SHORT STORY
Ted Jackson

           AS THE WORLD BURNS, KEEP THE WHEELS TURNING                                              

Well my weekend was different!                               
Meeting friends for a long weekend in Chamonix, what could be better.                                                       After one of the best Sunday’s skiing and a lovely Sunday night to remember, Monday was even more promising.  So much for promising.  
Monday was beautiful, legs still strong.
Had not skied in a few years. 
Going over a small group of moguls, on top of one a little too fast.  
I thought to slide down it and stop as I cut the top.
My ski’s might have crossed but they dug into the next mogul.
I slammed to the ground hard, covered in snow and the wind knocked out of me.
My hip really hurt.
I thought, wow, this is going to hurt tonight and tomorrow.
Now my idea of blunt force trauma is a broken heart or an unexpected police visit or bad food in a third world country.
Eventually gathered myself together to ski to the Gondola and ride down.
I knew this was not good and my stomach hurting,
I had to walk downstairs and urinate and walk back up.
This took 10 or 20 minutes.
I was to meet my friend at the bottom of the Gondola. 
About 50 meters away was a restaurant.   
There was a bench about 3 meters away and that is all I could walk.  
I was worse by the minute.
My friend came and got the car and I said it was hospital time.
This started a round of three hospitals for X-rays and internal bleeding, and then debating on an operation.
The pain was becoming abstract.
I couldn’t feel anything and I felt everything.
They kept putting me in ambulance and on and off gurneys and through internal X-ray machines.
Every movement excruciating, the drugs were Flintstone vitamins.
I had lost my voice by now.
It was a laryngitis growl.
No way to tell these veterinarians that concerning drugs the recommended dosage is for beginners and I was a professional! 
Nothing worked anyway.
Hospital # 3 determined the bleeding had stopped and was sending me back to Hospital # 2 with a fractured pelvis and a Hematoma (blood clot) sitting on top of my bladder. 
By this time, I already was full of needle marks from every conceivable
intern on call (“We have a live one, let’s go practice!”).
In the old days I could hit a vein in the dark with either hand, being ambidextrous had it’s advantages.  
Now my left arm was swelling up from some blind intern who, I think, was afraid of needles (my love affair with them is over, but I’m not afraid of them).
The vermin ambulance driver demanded 200 euro to take me back to Hospital # 2, where I was to stay indefinitely.
Now I hate hospitals, and if I’m ever in another one for any length of time, I will call a hit man, crawl to the parking lot and have him do his job (of course, paying in advance).
Now, I had the bed next to the window, overlooking the mountains. 
The wisest thing I had with me were earplugs, to drown out the insipid French game shows my neighbor liked, and one of those airline masks.
My roommate was a kindly old guy and all we ever did was smile at each other and say Ca vas. 
I tried closing my eyes and clicking my heels and repeating: “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
I opened my eyes and I was still there, maybe it was the paper slippers, but I don’t think men look good in ruby red slippers.  I would try anything at this point!
But that bitch Dorothy lied! 
At this point I was paralyzed with pain and hallucinating on a photo of a chalet on the wall.  
It kept changing colors and there were animals running around.
Now, I thought there was an old friend in the bed next to mine. 
I don’t think I was talking out loud, or making croaking sounds, but who cares.
Most nurses were nice.  They didn’t speak English.
The one rock star doctor smelled of arrogance and condescension (his mother must have been proud).
There was a nice Serbian doctor who answered my questions.  The rock star jerk wouldn’t even come into my room anymore.  He would stand in the doorway, look at my chart, check it and leave.  Seemed I offended him by having questions about my health.  (I have no belief in the Lazarus syndrome.)
This went on for a week. I kept getting some kind of useless aspirin crap and accepted a sleeping pill every night.  
I couldn’t focus or concentrate.  
I had a catheter for 10 days and if you don’t know what it is, you don’t want to know.  
One night, for some reason, the pain went off the chart.  I started asking for morphine (they had given me some before, half tablets?).
Who the fuck ever heard of half tablets, and with all my drug-free years I was not abusing or trying to and, actually, was conscious of the Flintstone aspirin and pills they were giving me.                                                
Now my left arm was all red with a feeding tube put in crooked and a catheter in my cock.
I was loosing it, so they wheeled me somewhere to give me a morphine pump.  Pretty cool, they’re going to give monkey boy a pump.
Now, if the thing really works I could pump myself to oblivion or death, which was more preferable. 
They left me in a hallway, for what felt like an hour, under one of those nurses’ beepers. 
So I’m wacked out of my head in pain and left under this beep, beep, beep incessantly.   
When I kept moaning and saying move me, they smiled and ignored me.  
So finally, after a five minute procedure to give monkey boy his personal morphine pump (a childhood dream realized!) the tubes were underneath me and not working.
But they had already moved me out and into another hallway, under another nurses’ beep, beep, beep.
After getting nurse Ratched to hear my cries and seeing her enjoy her break, she got irritated at me for insisting she move me.  So she ignored me.  
Finally back in my room I ripped out the morphine pump, soaked the sheet with some inferior make-believe morphine painkiller and sweat, and kept beeping the nurse.  
Another nurse Ratched came in, pissed off at me.
She had one of those studs under her lower lip and frizzy hair that looked like she had stuck her finger in a light socket.    
Now I can barely move and everything is slow motion out of breath. 
I’m in here over a week.
I haven’t eaten and I’m weak.
I get out of bed and tear the sheets off.
I finally get some other nurse to give me a sleeping pill to knock me out.
And now I’m insisting on real pain killers and sleeping pills or I’m going to threaten nurse Ratched if they don’t.
Now after ten days they take the catheter out.
I haven’t used the urine bottle yet and wake up in piss and sweat, and my luck, nurse Ratched is working the night shift, so, of course, she’s pissed.
I probably interrupted her game of solitaire.
I use crutches to get to the bathroom, which I’ve never used before. 
I haven’t stood up in ten days.
I’m wobbling, trying not to fall over.
I look in the mirror full of pain, humiliation and dark circles under my eyes and start getting tears.
I’m so angry and disillusioned; my skin is sallow, off color, and no muscle mass left.
(I could have won a contest at a Halloween party).
One of the nice nurses rolling me gently from one side to the other to change sheets, with me still in the bed, says you look pretty bruised.  
So I give her my I-phone.  She snaps a few photos.
From under my arm to my thigh I’m purple and yellow.
(So I get a new Christmas card and understand what blunt force trauma is now.)
Now I’m only eating after a week and I’m convinced the food was made by blind orphans in a sweatshop factory, and the caterer and his banker had to be the best of friends. 
I was getting a little more coherent and some concentration was returning.  
I started reading a book on mountain climbing, and looking out at the mountains, my only solace.
I was receiving some phone calls and SMS and emails from friends.  
I never really called anybody, I couldn’t.
But a few calls came in on my mobile and friends were getting in touch. 
I only have two things of value: my word and my heart.
I sincerely thank those that got in touch and give my love. 
Now the thing about compassion, true compassion, it approaches a spiritual level.  I don’t understand why some people go into a profession where it is a key characteristic.
I can only guess they practice it for the attention and applause. 
Now after all this time, the insurance people gave a verbal okay for everything, but nothing written. 
These weasels will boil in their incompetence.
They started squabbling with the hospital about some date and terminology.  
I started ringing around trying to solve the problem because they wanted me to sign a paper guarantying payment.
As polite as I can, I told them they should quit taking the patient’s real drugs and stop giving them placebos.
After 18 days I sat in the lobby dressed, packed, made my own reservation out of Genève.
The hospital kindly offered to drive me to Genève for 400 euro.
I kindly told them what they could do with their offer.  
Now my insurance is supposed to pay repatriation costs, but I have to pay up front and send them the bills.
They offered no help, nor did the hospital.
I was being held hostage in the lobby, changed two flights, as urgent faxes went back and forth.
I even edged my luggage towards the door and offered a few people 200 euros for a ride to Genève. 
I think I looked a little scary, no takers.  
Finally, after some mish-mash negotiations between the hospital and the insurance, I got a cab to Genève. 
Needless to say, I missed the last flight, but I managed to hobble out the door unassisted from the Joseph Mengele Alpine Health Spa.
I made reservations first thing in the morning and foolishly declined help from KLM.  I walked around the airport in slow motion looking for a hotel desk.  
Finally got a hotel, a decent meal, and a hot bath.  
I had forgotten such simple pleasure.
When back at the airport in the morning, I did take KLM’s offer for assistance for boarding, and putting me in a taxi on arrival at Schiphol.
I could not believe I was actually coming home.  
My faith was renewed by a sweet, jolly, angry at the government Afghan refugee, who was raising four kids, as a taxi driver.  An honest man, I asked and I listened. 
Maybe that little Kansas girl was right.  
“There is no place like home.”
It’s just a question of getting there.
I got home and went to  bed for 24 hours.  
I’m on the mend, make me a pot of New Awlins Gumbo and watch a copy of ‘Cool Hand Luke’.  
I’ll be even better.
Sooooo………………………

How was your weekend?

Love your pal Limpy

QUOTE - Flannery O'Connor

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

POEM - Bethany W Pope

Dust

In the moment that the air solidifies to aspic, 
gelatinous and clear, and you are suspended like an olive in it, 
held between the leap and plummet while the Jeepney 
sends its old gears stuttering to a halt, 
you have time to contemplate death. 

When Gilgamesh sought Utnapishtim at the end of the earth 
(the literal end, where time never landed) 
the living mummy stroked his beard 
and mouthed his words around halves of a broken kola nut. 

'The life that you are seeking you will never find. 
When the gods created man they allotted to him death, 
but life they retained in their own keeping. 
You shall eat dust.'

All the hero fled with was the story.

You have never heard of Samaria, 
of Wild Men who feast on mud, 
of gods or the hero-kings who serve them. 
At seven years old you are flying through air, 
three inches from the bullet.

The age of reason has struck at last, 
its shock wave spreading like a knife through raw liver, 
the colour and texture of the flesh which streaks from the shoulder 
of the sack-dressed woman who loved you enough
to thrust you from your seat on the over-crowded bench. 

One minute she was stroking your hair, 
murmuring over the odd light colour.
Then there was air.

Even this aspic cannot suspend you; 
the mass of all this gathered death is not greater than your own. 
You sink, and hit the boards resonating 
with the thump and shudder of tires over limbs.

Your wide brown eyes are a centimetre 
from the oval rainbow 
of a single lost fish scale 
which swells to encompass your world.

Hell is but a House of Dust and mud is all that fills the hunger. 
This is the taste which you hold in your mouth 
while the stench of cold sweat plugs your nostrils, 
the sweetish rot which seeps 
from the ancient pores of the farmer 
who let his new-bought chickens fly 
to cage your weak body in his shield of bones. 

He breathes his scant white beard into his mouth 
and gnaws the rough strands. 
In the vein-pulse of the rib-racked chest against your cheek 
you can feel his heart improbably beating.

The secret of life comes through his heart, 
the story you gained from this terrible sinking. 
'When the gods created man they allotted to him death. 
Your life they retained in their own keeping. 
In time, you shall be dust.'

POEMS -  Win Harms

1
he slices the autumn breeze
with harsh words
bleeding salty tears
glass of vodka drowns
as he drinks, thankful
reeking goodbyes
his tough burns
somehow i crave it
screaming scars of leaving
the words work their way
out of my mouth
into an unheard scream


3
he had shit brown eyes and dishwater hair
an eighteen year old fair skinned kerouac
on the road to somewhere in colorado
dressed liked a beatnik, a modern beatnik
while his long hair hippie friend
slept the whole ride there
i don’t remember their names
sugar on the tip of my tongue
i had barely tasted the sweetness
we pulled to a stop and they strolled off
to ski or find their souls somewhere
while i was stuck with ten more hours
and sick, sweet fantasies of the 
private car we got high in

POEM - Stellasue Lee

Résumé
 
I am the caretaker of small things—darks
in one load, whites in another, sheets
 
by themselves. Only I, open and close
windows, turn on and off fans,
 
dust, mop. Hand out small portions
of food. For each person, each cat, a different
 
palate. I listen for wild birds, watch
a lavender sky fill to shades of blue.
 
An orange sun parades over fields
of hay, now strewn with cut bales--
 
I see Hawk circle overhead as I open the door
to find two FBI agents in my doorway. I listen,
 
careful to say nothing of value, allow nothing
anyone would find interesting to spill out.






 

QUOTE - Henry Miller

"You may as well have your say, they're going to shit on you anyway," 

ESSAY
Richard Livermore

                   My Problem With Hinduism


Way back in the 70s, I met an American student who shared a flat with a student from India. He told me about his flatmate’s constant deference towards everything to do with rank and caste, adding that no two peoples deserved each other more than the British and Indians under the British Raj, since they both had this deference towards caste. Not long after, I was staying with friends in a small village in Yorkshire when one of my hosts happened to overhear one woman in a shop say to another who had clearly offended her, “I’ll have you know I’m Lord So and So’s head-cowherd’s wife!” I can’t remember the name of the lord, but it certainly seemed to bear out what my American friend had been saying - at least concerning the Brits. Of course, he was being benignly simplistic in his interpretation of that period of imperial history, but nonetheless he did have a point. In certain ways, an upper-caste Englishman might be particularly well placed to understand - and exploit - the caste-system in India, although of course, the histories dividing the two different countries and the fact that, in India, caste is endorsed by the dominant religion makes quite a difference. Perhaps, to really understand India and its dominant religion, Hinduism, one needs to be a Dalit - a member of the lowest caste in Indian society - and look at the world from the point of view of the Dalitbahujans, otherwise known as the Untouchables, since they were the original inhabitants of India, who became displaced and thereafter oppressed and exploited by the Aryan conquerors who swept down on India from the North.

In  terms of its deep past, India shares a lot with Europe. It appears that the indigenous agrarian populations of Old Europe were conquered and subjugated  by nomadic herding peoples who hailed originally from the foothills and plains to the West of the Ural mountains. These conquerors bequeathed us the Indo-European language-group, which includes classical Sanskrit. However, in Europe these events occurred somewhat earlier than they did in India when largely peaceful and egalitarian agrarian populations were overrun, subjugated and exploited by nomadic herders whose territorial and conflictual way of life predisposed them to knowing all about war. In the process of subjugation, these nomadic herders  became a warrior-aristocracy, lording it over the populations they had conquered. In time, in order to properly control the populations they’d conquered, they needed to create the political institutions of the state and law and also the appropriate religious institutions to co-opt those they had conquered and render them amenable to rule. To accomplish this, of course, many of the harsher martial and patriarchal elements of their own original religions would have to be softened, since the earlier inhabitants of Europe - India too - were much more matriarchal and pacific. Female deities would have to be re-introduced, though the new rulers would, of course, make sure that they too were subordinate to the male principle in the divine scheme of things they’d established.

Before we go any further, I think it is important to raise certain distinctions between poetry and religion which I think are important to this discussion. In The Bhagavad-Gita,  Arjun's Cosmic Vision can be said to be poetry of the highest order. However, The Bhagavad-Gita  as a whole is a religious work. The difference lies in the fact that the Cosmic Vision really does get to the heart of something; it is direct and visionary, dealing with processes of creation and destruction within a cosmic framework. There is nothing extraneous to this vision, It is lucid and intelligible on its own terms and really doesn't need to be explained in religious terms. However, the Bhagavad-Gita  as a whole is a religious work premised on certain religious notions such as the idea that no one dies because no one is ever born in the first place, something which might (or might not) be true, but is not directly self-evident in the way that Arjun's Cosmic Vision is. The Bhagavad-Gita as a whole depends on accepting the 'truth' of a superstructure of ideas whose authority is institutional rather than self-evident. It is this which makes it a religious work as opposed to poetic. Religion may use poetry, but let's be clear that these two things are not the same, and we should always distinguish the one from the other.

Hinduism as a whole is an extremely synthetic religion, which has gone through many transformations to perpetuate its hold over the original inhabitants of India. But it has always remained the religion of a dominant caste. Personally, I have been able to relate to many aspects of Hinduism  because they express certain themes which I have found quite compelling.  However, I have also been aware of undercurrents in Hinduism which alienate me from the religion as a whole. In epics like the Mahabharata and sacred texts like the Bhagavad-Gita it is quite easy to see how Indian spirituality is determined by martial requirements. In the Bhagavad-Gita, for example, when Arjuna has scruples about killing so many of his own kinsmen, Krishna responds by saying that they don’t in fact die, but that their souls, which have always existed, pass on to other forms. As a battlefield philosophy, it seems highly convenient. It is easy to see how all these other-worldly notions of the different religions originate in states of society in which the promise of life in this world has been very seriously curtailed - usually by military means. Not only that, but behind The Vedas and the other ‘holy texts’ of Hinduism there stands the Other, the original Dravidian inhabitants who never quite went away. They had dark-skin, thick lips and curly hair, just like many of the inhabitants of South India today. Within Hinduism, the mixing of castes is supposed to be one of the symptoms of the age of Kali Yuga, when the world is said to come to an end. "What world? Who's world?" one is tempted to ask.

Hinduism carries this baggage with it; so much so in fact that according to the Dalit writer Kanchi Ilaiah in his book Why I Am Not A Hindu, the future of India will be marked by the struggle between the Dalits and Hindus, just as it has been in the past. Of that past he says, “The head of the Brahminical Gods, Indra, is known as the Deevatideera. He is the original Aryan leader who led the mass extermination of the Indus Valley based Adi-Dravidians, who were also Adi-Dalitbahujans. Brahmins consider him a hero because he killed hundreds and thousands of Dalitbahujans at that time.” The agrarian based culture of the Indus valley is for me a fascinating topic because these Adi-Dravidians seem to have created an urban civilisation without the aid of a state to organise things. According to Burton Stein in A History of India, the cities of the Indus Valley were primarily trading-centres which were politically run by means of a complex system of chieftainship rather than a militarised state. More recent theories suggest that the demise of the Indus Valley urban civilisations was not brought about by violent conquest, as Ilaiah suggests, but rather because they just dissolved back into the surrounding countryside once the cities outgrew their usefulness - something that would be unthinkable if they were military centres. Whatever the truth of that is, the relationship between Hindus and Dalits remains problematic and should be taken into account when considering the actual reality of Hinduism and its future. Is it the religion which the hippies idealised in the 60s, or a form of what Ilaiah calls “spiritual fascism” in which there is now a huge potential for actual political fascism to emerge, which parties like the BJP - the Bharatiya Janata Party of "the butcher of Gujurat", Nerendra Modi - exploit with their concept of Hinduvta. BJP advocates hold that Hinduism is the true religion of India, and Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism and no doubt the more aboriginal religion of the Dalitbahujans or Adivasis should be considered un-Indian? Attempts have been made, according to Ilaiah,, to marginalise the religious beliefs of the former inhabitants of India and render them  ‘Hindu’, but the Dalits themselves stubbornly resist this and cling to their old ways and beliefs.

In his book, Gods of Love and Ecstasy, which deals with the connections (or parallels) between the traditions of Shiva and Dionysus, Alain Danielou, a French convert to Hinduism, has this to say about the Aryan conquerors from the North. “Nomadic peoples have no true contact with the world of nature. They do not live together in common with places, trees, animals, except those they have subjugated. They take their gods and legends with them and are inclined towards monotheistic simplification. Nature is seen as anonymous pasture to exploit and destroy and the gods as guides in the service of mankind.” According to Danielou, Shiva and Dionysus are the antidote to these particular traits in the culture bequeathed to us by our original conquerors. However, Danielou is also against the mixing of castes and races, thus showing himself to have inherited the mantle of unreconstructed Brahmanistic Hinduism, which saw the Dalits  as polluted and therefore not to be mixed with. This was how upper-caste Hindus looked at the world, but not the lower-caste Dalits, who apparently had no problem with mixing. According to Ilaiah, their’s was an  agrarian religion, much more matricentric and egalitarian, rooted in their relationship with the soil. Hinduism proper considered work to be polluting and needed to maintain the hierarchy of social relations which raised upper-caste Brahmins above work and the soil so they could concentrate on their own spiritual salvation or 'enlightenment'. This, of course, is how Hinduism got to be such an ascetic religion, in which the spiritual was raised high above the physical domain where life itself properly functions. 

I dislike any form of reductionism and don’t want to imply that this is all there is to Hinduism, which, in my opinion, has spawned some of the most profound philosophical and poetic works and ideas in the history of religion, and this must at least partly owe to the leisure taken for granted by upper-caste Brahmins. However, if Ilaiah is anything to go by, the price has been high.  Ilaiah wants a complete revolution, and, in the process, a wholesale replacement of non-productive Hindu values by productive Dalit ones.  In this, he invokes Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Personally, I don’t think he does his cause any favours by invoking a movement that, as  far as I can see, had no creative content at all, only destructive. Ilaiah also invokes Hegel, but only the Thesis/Antithesis dichotomy in Hegel. He casts the Dalits as the Thesis, and the Aryans who came after as the Antithesis.  He's probably right here, but it is still  a bit worrying, precisely because he invokes it in connection with Mao's Cultural Revolution. One cannot but be reminded of the anarchist objections to such crude Thesis/Antithesis concepts in Marxism as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, whereby one set of masters is simply replaced by another, and power is allowed to accumulate in the hands of a new ruling-elite. To be fair to Hegel, he went beyond this Thesis/Antithesis dichotomy towards some kind of Synthesis; but even this I feel is only a sleight of hand solution, since, like the Thesis and Antithesis, it turns out in the end to be just another form of representation which fails to get to grips with the multitudinous heterogeneity of what it's supposed to represent. 

Arundhati Roy, perhaps the most vilified person in India today, is less than impressed by the way Hinduism and Hindu identity-politics has been used by the contemporary Indian state to advance the interests of an already dominant caste in the emerging global economic world-order. "It's the old Brahminical instinct. Colonise knowledge, build four walls around it, and use it to your advantage. The Manusmriti, the Vedic Hindu code of conduct, says that if a Dalit overhears a shloka or any part of a sacred text, he must have molten lead poured into his ears. It isn't a coincidence that while India is poised to take her place in the forefront of the Information Revolution, millions of her citizens are illiterate. (It would be interesting, as an exercise, to find out how many 'experts'—scholars, professionals, consultants—are actually Brahmins or from the upper castes.)" Just as in Britain it was the large Whig landowners engaged in the clearances and enclosure of land - and also investment in the trans-Atlantic slave-trade - who were able to take most advantage of the emerging Industrial Revolution, so too does it seem that it is the Brahmins in India, using similar methods of dispossession, who have stood most to gain from India's emergent 'Industrial Revolution'. No wonder Hinduism has become such a big thing again.  According to Roy, it even effects the building of the atomic bomb, which has been called the Hindu Bomb - in the way Pakistan's has been called the Islamic Bomb. She recognises India as a hugely diverse country which has fallen under the spell of such ideas as national identity and national pride, which, to all intents and purposes, means Hindu identity and pride. This may have worked during the struggle for independence against British Imperial rule, but once independence was achieved, it all fell apart because of India's ethnic and religious diversity. Roy believes that any attempt to create unity using this highly synthetic form of Hindu national-identity is doomed to failure. But her thesis can be equally applied to Iliah's form of Dalit identity-politics. In the end, everything is too caught up in flux of everything else to be pinned down in these ways. This becomes even truer if states are used to defend, consolidate or advance identity-politics. Israel is a prime example of how that leads to the dispossession of those who do not belong to the in-group the state acts on behalf of. Manifest Destiny was obviously not just an American invention to justify taking land away from the original inhabitants of "Turtle Island", it was a variation of something much more ancient - and modern. No doubt the first Aryan invaders of India had their own version of Manifest Destiny - like the Brits had their "White Man's Burden". Such rationalisations seem to be the stock-in-trade of all the world's conquerors and the sooner they are deconstructed, the sooner we can move on. I believe that the way forward lies in side-stepping identity-politics completely and opening oneself up to wider, more fluid ambiguities, where the play of difference is recognised as much more important than any established identity. How is this to be achieved? Well, from the bottom up, of course. But further than that, it's for people themselves to find out.

POEMS - Joe Mismo

Hippos

Leopards may come
and go as they choose,
changing their spots
mid-mind as it were,

zebras become
a horse of that stripe
tigers are 
to the felidae tribe,

but hippos will always
be linked in my mind
with sausages
yet to be cooked.




Being There


The many worlds that don't appear
when I am not observing them
- since I observe but one is free
for me to clap my eyes upon -

include the one behind the scenes
in parallel dimensions where
the wildebeest the lions see
collapses into being there.



Metamorphic Conundrums

In the beginning...
there was no beginning
or beginner to make it begin
but something giving birth to itself
as shapelessness becoming itself
in the not-itself of itself taking shape.

And so I grew up
- infant, toddler, teenager, man,
from me in my prime to me in decline,
changing from me to me all the time 
- the drummer, the soldier, the dog in the game,
never the same, yet always the same.



Lioness

She lives from impulse to impulse
and in between knows only sleep;
no thought frees her, lifts her out
of the imprisoning present;
she does everything as in a dream,
sees zebra, wildebeest, kudu
on her radar-screen and is stirred
into action, murder in her eyes, 
as she hugs the ground and inches 
forward, freezing when her prey 
looks up, then moving like a ghost again
until she's close enough to charge.

If she has you in her sights, no plea 
suffices to turn her from her 
chosen path; you are nothing 
but the next meal, the next occasion 
she can feed. No point negotiating 
terms with her, appealing 
to her better self, reasoning 
or trying to make friends with her; 
to flash a wad of notes at her 
will not avail; it's fight or flight, kill 
or be killed, life reduced to life or death 
where life or death is all that counts.


 
Who Goes There?

The angel descends from those dark 
windy places where  matter 
is formed from nothing at all 
and conjured into unlikely existence

where death has his house 
and, guarding that house, a dog 
rudely barks at the incoming stranger, 

as if it were barking a sentinel's "Halt!" 
at the passing fugitive wind.



The Day I Was Born

All was quiet on the day
I was born; I heard no angels 
sing my name; no Magi came, 
no we three kings of orient are 
following that yonder star 

- a birth like any other, like 
Baby Jesus might have had 
had he not acquired a dad 
along the way who also 
ruled the universe.