Everybody's talkin' 'bout

Norman Mailer.

Dancing about Architecture

And who could do it better than Clive James?

I won't waste time trying to be funny about John Coltrane, because Philip Larkin has already done it, lavishing all his comic invention on the task of conveying his authentic rage. (For those who have never read Larkin's All What Jazz, incidentally, the references to Coltrane are the ideal way in to the burning center of Larkin's critical vision.) There is nothing to be gained by trying to evoke the full, face-­freezing, ­gut-churning hideosity of all the things Coltrane does that Webster doesn't. But there might be some value in pointing out what Coltrane doesn't do that Webster does. Coltrane's instrument is likewise a tenor sax, but there the resemblance ends. In fact, it is only recognizable as a tenor because it can't be a bass or a soprano: It has a tenor's range but nothing of the voice that Hawkins discovered for it and Webster focused and deepened. There is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop. The impressiveness of the feat depends entirely on the air it conveys that the perpetrator has devoted his life to making this discovery: Supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can. The likelihood that nobody else would want to is not considered.

From 'Duke Ellington: The Supremacy of Swing' in Slate. Other chapters from Cultural Amnesia on Slate here.

More invective coming up shortly. It's the season for it, apparently.

Disclaimer: The thing about invective is one doesn't need to agree with it to be entertained by it.

Do the Math

This is what happens when mommies try to teach their kids to count. Someone's liable to get impatient, like.

When in line with five other really tired, hungry people behind you, that is SO not the time to teach your kids economics.

...

"I want a slushee. A pink one," Megan declared. The elderly cashier looked positively orgasmic with delight. Well, roll me in sugar and call me cookie, isn't that fucking precious.

"That will be ONE DOLLAR, AND EIGHTEEN CENTS!" the cashier hollered. Because we all know that if you don't understand the math? Holler. No speaka dee English? Holler. If Crystal has a migraine? Holler.

"Ok." Megan whipped out her Hello Kitty coin purse and with her tongue poking out, methodically began counting out pennies.

Sweet bleeding Abraham, someone fucking gut me and cover me in bleach. It will be less painful.

"And eighteen cents!" Megan declared after what seemed like an hour. The entire line behind her breathed a collective sigh of relief.

As I inched forward, using that "breathe down your neck so you'll move faster" mentality, the mother spoke.

"Now, your turn, April."

'The most pompous festival in India'

Excerpts from today's Hindu Metro Plus (Hyderabad edition):

"Deepavali, the biggest and the most pompous festival in India, is celebrated differently in different regions, but all treading the traditional path."

Vinita Pittie, Designer: "Within a period of one month we worship all the main female deities. We all do it, but don’t know why."

and

"The house is vacuum cleaned (our version of spring cleaning) and decorated passionately with oil lamps and flowers. ."

and

"...we bathe ourselves with a paste of haldi, gram, seasame seeds and other Indian ingredients. "

Deepika Reddy, Danseuse: "Since I’m also a guru, this is a good time for my students to seek my blessings and they come laden with boxes of sweets."

I think 'pompous festival' takes the paayasam, but I'm wondering which I'd choose for second place. I feel rather fond of people going around the house in a frenzy of passion, scattering flowers and spilling oil in the wake of vacuum cleaners.

What do you think?

'fevers and disquiet'

Look what Equivocal has gone and done. He's pointed people to Barthes over here:

The Uncertainty of Signs

(Whether he seeks to prove his love, or to discover if the other loves him, the amorous subject has no system of sure signs at his disposal).

I look for signs, but of what? what is the object of my reading? Is it: am I loved (am I loved no longer, am I still loved)? Is it my future that I am trying to read, deciphering in what is inscribed the announcement of what will happen to me, according to a method which combines paleography and manticism?

Freud to his fiancee: "The only thing that makes me suffer is being in a situation where it is impossible for me to prove my love to you."

Signs are not proofs, since anyone can produce false or ambiguous signs. Hence one falls back, paradoxically, on the omnipotence of language: since nothing assures language, I will regard it as the sole and final assurance: I shall no longer believe in interpretation. I shall receive every word from my other as a sign of truth; and he, too, receives what I say as the truth. Whence the importance of declarations; I want to keep wresting from the other the formula of his feeling, and I keep telling him, on my side, that I love him: nothing is left to suggestion, to divination: for a thing to be known, it must be spoken; but also, once it is spoken, even very provisionally, it is true.

Equivocal said, on Hash's blog, that Barthes' book will "painfully and accurately elaborate on all the things you know but are not willing to accept."


But see, I have a system of sure signs. I have auguries -palms, cards, pacts I have made with stars, birds, trains, (mail vans); and they all usually say the same thing. They all agree that the universe is conspiring to tell me what I already know to be true.

Version One: What can I do if the other insists on wearing dark glasses?

Version Two: Who needs to say anything with all that chatter of signs going on?

Hmm.

Ishaghpour on JLG

From the book Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century:

Youssef Ishaghpour: The difference from a historian's work, you spell it out in your film in a JLG/JLG quotation: "It isn't said, it's written, it's composed, it's painted, it's recorded," while a historian's work is essentially spoken. A historian can't allow himself to create "images," as you with montage and collage can bring together unconnected things, because a historian ought to be able to make a rational presentation of all the intermediate relations and mediations. Every time an image appears a mass of of connections, interferences and resonances spring up around it. When you raise the Liberation of Paris, there's De Gaulle's speech, there's your image of that epoch, of Resistence people in slow motion, of Duras with the song that mentions Marguerite, and a shot of her book La Doleur, there's the commemoration of the Liberation set up for television, and you talk about Debord, but also about Claude Roy who had taken the CNC set up by Vichy...I must be forgetting a lot of things, but if I remember right it ends with a scene from Pierrot le Fou concerning some of those same maquisards, who are said to be dead but of whose names and lives we learn nothing. There's always, at every moment, a polyphonic structure, you have up to ten or a dozen levels of different elements, several images and several texts, which don't always go in the same direction. And perhaps that's why it's
difficult for historians to accept. Because for them there's a fact and then another, in a relation of cause and effect, while with you it's like a sound in which one can hear not only the harmonics but also the counterpoints, in all polyphonic simultaneity, and even the inversions, but also the circular ripples going out from these things and the links that are formed at certain moments not directly, but as points of resonance and intersection between these ripples, which may be and sometimes are contradictory, as in music.
(from "History and Re-memorization", pp 25-26)

That's Ishaghpour in conversation with, who else, Godard; more specifically about Godard's monumental work, Histoire(s) du Cinema.

It illustrates, for me, the central problem of trying to understand Godard - that most cerebral of directors - and his work on an intellectual level.

At any given moment in a Godard film, you will be required to absorb several things at several levels: the music playing, the text that preceded the shot, the voice over, the conversations and all the other elements of the frame; to even attempt to separate and assign meaning to each of these elements as they occur is impossible, primarily because film, like music, occurs in time. And because time passes even as you become aware of it, you can only experience it without attempting to understand it in any other way than in the act of watching.

Who was it who said, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"? S/he might just as easily have replaced 'music' with 'Godard's films'!

K Post

For km, who wants to know more.

There are reasons other than pure laziness for having put off this post. What can I tell km about J. Krishnamurti that doesn’t land up sounding like the first line of Love Story?

The reason it is difficult to do this is because I’ve just been to Rishi Valley and seen most of the five-part talk that K had with my classmates in ’84. Memory - like hope - is a foul, deceitful thing; I had different memories of K until I saw those YouTube videos. I remembered the hair combed with careful vanity right across the head but had forgotten that his eyes had become rheumy with age. I didn’t remember that his hand shook so much; I had imagined them to be cool and steady. What can I say with certainty?

There’s a book cover with K walking near the old guest house, umbrella in hand. Did I ever see that, or do I remember it only because there’s a photograph to nudge me to believe it also as the evidence of my eyes? I don’t know. But I do know that there was RV before K and RV after K; a difference that was apparent even then, but more evident now, after the passage of two decades.
The first year that I was in Rishi Valley, everything was strange and new, everything was experienced with the same mix of eagerness and a total lack of surprise. December came – I think it was December, but I could be wrong – and Krishnamurti spent some weeks in Rishi Valley. He spoke expensively with the teachers; people came from all over the world to meet him; and he had three talks every year with the children.

We’d gather in the auditorium, happy to skip a class or two, and arrange ourselves on the mats laid out below the raised stage. He would arrive, escorted by his nephew, Narayan, and pause for a moment, do a namaste and get on to the stage. For every day of those three days, and the three years that I heard him speak, he would start in exactly the same way: he would look around at everyone and say, finally, “What shall we talk about today?”

It amazes me to recall now, that even very young children would say things like, “Pride” or “Competitiveness”. Did they really want to talk about these things? (K asks someone that, in the talks linked to above) Or did they imagine that’s what he wanted to talk about and they had better humour the founder of the school they were studying in? Even across the distance of these years, I remember that though there was no special reverence (of the kind devotees accord to their gurus, for instance) there was also no fear. The children chattered as they do, and fell silent, also as they’re capable of doing.

The first year, for at least two of the talks, no one spoke much; K did. I can’t remember anything of it at all, or of him or what he said or anything. The following year – the year in which all of us finally crowded on stage and made some kind of history – when he came and asked us what we wanted to talk about, I must have piped up. Because there I was, making my way up to the stage, and invited to sit right next to the man.

I’m afraid I can’t remember very much of what happened. There are three photographs at home, to mark the occasion. Someone always recorded the talks and he very kindly sent my parents those photographs. In one, I’m looking deeply serious, head bent. K has his hand on mine, urging me to think of something. In the second, I’m looking at him, still serious. In the last one, I have my trademark grin on my face, and K is smiling.

There was some talk about routines, which is as much as I can remember about a conversation from more than two decades ago. At one point during the conversation, he asked me to ‘look at the flowers’. I thought it was a general exhortation and continued to look at him, vowing the next time to spend time looking soulfully at flowers, creepers and the barks of trees. “Look at the flowers, my girl,” he urged me again and I woke up from my reverie, realising that he meant, look NOW.

Is it only now that I remember from that talk, that quality of listening with total attention, as if what you were saying was the most important thing in the world? Undoubtedly. What did I know then, of attention? He asked a question and I assumed he wanted an answer; I was the kind of person then, who was ready with an answer as soon as a question was asked – and worse – who always had a question to ask. It made me impatient when he said, as soon as he’d asked a question and I’d started to answer it, to hear him say, “Wait! Listen to what I’m saying. Did you understand the question? Really understand it?” Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understood it, and here’s my answer and isn’t that what you wanted, I used to think.

In that talk that was recorded, there was one section where he’s talking about classrooms and teachers. He said, as I remember from the talk, “If I was your teacher, and found you wanting to look at a lizard, I would say, ‘Let us both look at the lizard’ before we got back to what we were doing. His point was, that if you were distracted, forcing your mind back to something else would not take away the distraction; merely dilute the power you bring to what is considered more important.

At this point, or thereabouts, a classmate said, “Sir, you will make a very bad teacher!” there was utter silence for second. Then K broke out into a laugh and everyone else joined him with that immoderate laugh that signifies shock. How did the kid dare? But this was the point: neither then, nor later, were there any reprisals.

I wish I could say things were like that through my entire time in RV but they weren’t. the following year was K’s last in Rishi Valley. We didn’t know it then, but he must have; he was suffering from cancer and the talks he gave when we were in Class 9 were the last. He was visibly more tired. Just days before, one of our teachers had unexpectedly died. It was on all our minds. When he asked what we wanted to talk about, someone said, “Death.” “Is that what you really want to talk about?” he asked. He would have asked that anyway, but that year, no one took him up on it. Someone – someone very young – asked him to talk about himself. No one had ever asked him to get autobiographical before. There was patent disapproval from the teachers’ benches, but everyone else ignored it and the air was clamorous with demands for details of his life. He began, clearly reluctant. A few sentences later, he gave up. He said, “I’m sorry, I cannot do this. This is a waste of time.” We were back where we had begun, but half an hour had elapsed – nearly one class successfully wasted – and we didn’t really care. This was December ’85. A few months later, we were in class and one boy who, for some reason, wasn’t in class, passed by our window. In broad mime, he indicated that someone had ‘kicked the bucket’. Some minutes later, he brought a note in and there was a special assembly to announce that Krishnaji had died.

So there isn’t very much to tell, is there? It’s more difficult to separate influence from experience. We hardly saw him, but at least we did see him. We had three years in which he came and spoke to us; spoke to the teachers. That must have – has – made a difference. In the years since, people who go to Rishi Valley can’t differentiate it from any other boarding school because – and I appreciate the decision – the school doesn’t indoctrinate them in any way by subjecting them to compulsory talks or anything of the sort. If they come to K, they do it in the way that anyone else in the world does – though his books or talks, because no one else discusses these things seriously, without offering easy solutions.*

* And the famous quotation that illustrates this is the one he made at Sannen all those decades ago when he broke off with the Theosophical Society and refused to be their World Teacher:

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organised; nor should any organisation be formed to lead or coerce people along
any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organise a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organise it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallised; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.

The whole thing here.

Update: An ex-Principal, Balasundaram, has this to say about Krishnamurti.

Crackers at Dawn

What is it about festivals that turns normal, sane people into hyperkinetic shopaholics/partyhoppers/pyromaniacs?

No, really. If people aren't making lists a mile long with interesting items such as 1) buy crackers; 2) soak diyas; 3) grind arisimaavu for kolam; 4) harass tailor for backless choli; and 5) put reminder for D's card party 9pm, they're doing all of the above. It's very very distressing.

The time I had a dim idea that I hated Diwali was when I was in college and we didn't have long enough vacations to make a long journey home. So I stayed back in the hostel with about ten other people for Diwali, and choked and hacked and coughed the night away, as Delhi went berserk (this was in the days before people became all eco-friendly about crackers). Our hostel being a few feet below road level, and the season generally being cold-ish, all the area's smoke used to pour into the narrow, ill-lit corridors of our hostel. By ten, our eyes were red and if we were foolish enough to wander the corridors, we looked like lost ghosts and felt like shit.

In later years, all the sustained and concentrated air pollution of the season gave me breathing problems that disappeared only when I left Delhi. For the first time in five years, this year I'm having trouble with my breathing at this time of the year. That's because Hyderabad is always ahead with the conspicuous consumption and invariably out of the loop when it comes to issues of pollution or the environment. Though the guys who sell crackers are not allowed to put up their stalls until two days before Diwali, the air's been rent with loud blasts for several days already. For the first time, this morning, I'm going to succumb and get on an inhaler.

I hate Diwali (along with New Year's Eve, Pongal, Holi, blah, blah, blah).

And that reminds me of another grouse: will someone - Veena or BM or some other Tam - please tell me which bright person first thought it would be a good idea to wake up at 4am, wake up the neighbourhood with a ladi, put oil and bathe with shikakai and all, get tricked out in new clothes, burst more crackers, eat leghiyam and bakshanam and call relatives all over the country all before sunrise?

Oh god. I hate all festivals.

km: I promise to catch my breath - really catch it properly - and do the K Post. Later today. Stay tuned.

Poems in Wasafiri and Kritya

Five poems in Wasafiri and three in Kritya (you'll have to scroll down a bit for mine.)

Wasafiri, however, is not an online journal. Those of you who live in England, or whose libraries subscribe to it, will be able to have access to it. It's the Winter 2007 issue.

reminder to myself

Apart from that rather cynical note I put up the other day, I haven't really reacted to Tehelka's November 3 issue ( I hesitate to use words and phrases like' expose' or 'the story of our times' because of the ways in which they are used and overused.)

There are several reasons for this:

1. We've known for five years now what happened in Gujarat. There's no way to ask the 'why now' question without losing all nuance (this is a more important point that anyone realises from the way I've said it; because some arguments get appropriated by people one is emphatically not in sympathy with, one usually stops asking them.) A more important question would be 'what now' but no one seems to be willing to answer that.

2. While we do need to be reminded time and again about atrocities that happen everywhere, in the hope that we will be induced to not repeat them, surely the way in which we respond must change with time? If we reacted the first time, in the aftermath, with horror, what should our reaction be after five years? Anger at the way in which nothing has been done? A cold, factual approach that outlines what has, actually been done so far and strategise what one ought to do next? Or a fresh round of horror that seems suspiciously like whipping ourselves up so that we know we can feel the pain of others?

3. My own, very personal view is increasingly despairing. I don't believe that we can change other peoples' minds with our words. Yes, such stories are important; the films that have been made after Gujarat are important; but see what they've all achieved. The people who see/read and understand the scale on which things happened are powerless and continue to be so. If we ever had the moral strength to force action on the basis of what is right, we seem to have forfeited it a long time ago.

I was going to say, it's best under the circumstances, to shut up. I was going to say, the sooner we all destroy ourselves the better it will be.

Then this morning, I visited a blog I read with great interest and link to frequently. On bloglines you don't get to see all the things on a blog's sidebar; this morning, I saw this quote by Wim Wenders that Jim has up on the side, and I changed my mind:

The most political decision you make is where you direct people's eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political. . . . And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show her, every day, that there can be no change

I did believe that (I secretly still do, I think). The only thing is, because it's so easy to believe, it becomes inherently suspicious. I'd like to question why I think nothing can change people, when obviously so much has, in the past. Why do we, today, want to find everyone's ulterior motive?

I'm often reminded of Rashomon when I ask such questions. After a screening of the film once, in the discussion that followed, we were asked which version of the story we thought was the true one. It was clearly a trick question, because the most important point about the film is that truth is a matter of perspective. But one girl was emphatic in her assertion that Mifune's version was the true one. She thought that it rang true, this story of corruption and deception. This is how people are, she said - gullible, duplicitous and vile.

It's an unfortunately seductive view to take of the world because so much supports it. It's harder to recall the other people and events that demonstrate that not everything in the world is like this.

This is why I'd like to raise my voice now and say that whatever one can do - sign petitions, watch the elections with groups that are present, write in places where people will read and discuss these things - one should do. And think how much worse things might have been if people hadn't been doing precisely these things through every such event in our histories.

Other such posts: Mumbai Mon Amour, The Dishonesty of Parzania, Beginning with the protest and ending with the loo.