The first installment of my Rep Ipsa Loquitor column for mylaw.net, which talks about Aamir Khan, monkeys, and Midas. Do check out the website, especially if you’re in the legal field: it has all sorts of oddities and amusements.

The Bibliotheque Nationale.

“The diploma gives society a phantom guarantee and its holders phantom rights. The holder of the diploma passes officially for possessing knowledge, and comes to believe, in turn, that society owes him something. Never has a convention been created which is more unfortunate for everyone- the state, the individual, and in particular, society.”

Paul Valery

This Independence Day, a friend studying at NLSIU wrote an exam on Private International Law. The special repeat in question (more on those in a minute) was scheduled for the previous afternoon and postponed at the last minute at the request (presumably) of Rahul Gandhi’s security detail, which occupied NLSIU’s academic block all afternoon. ‘We figured the exam was cancelled’, said my amused friend that evening, ‘when we were waved away from the building by a guy with a gun’. Mr. Gandhi was coming later that day to address a student body directed to bedeck and bejewel themselves in his honour whilst refraining from spontaneous displays of political acuity.

That a politician could halt and censor the administration of the best legal school in the country isn’t the amazing part of this story (though is it only alumni who remember when Yasin Mallik was to be found waiting to give his talk at tea-shops outside law school?). Of the four people who wrote the exam the following morning, a final roadblock for the weary, only three passed. It was a somnolent public holiday, not to mention the Sabbath, yet the college revived itself from the festivities long enough to shaft someone. Maybe I reread Little Women a few too many times growing up, but does this sound like an allegory of Pilgrim’s Progress already? And I’m just getting started. If only a German professor could come rescue us.

The culturally appropriate reference here is probably 3 Idiots. Its themes will be familiar to anyone who spends time in institutes across the country: the suicides we avoid, the intellectual tyranny we try escape, vindictive and petty teachers, the formalisation of an education system focused more on job training and less on creativity. In science circles, this means the invention-cycle gets derailed and we expend our brains to help other people make discoveries; in legal circles, it means we care less about policy and big pictures and more about dodging regulation and honing the company line. Other elements in the movie are clearly theatrical. Colleges punish slackers, true, but they punish the genius maverick just as much. Rather, they define and distort such people until either the genius or the maverick in them is burned out. Perhaps, though, that is only my college. Did yours happen to fail anyone on Independence Day?

It was no ordinary exam that she failed: the special repeat is granted to people that have one subject standing between them and salvation, whether it be going up a year or getting out entirely. This special repeat was a fifth-year one, so now she graduates next year. The length of the stick bears no comparison to the paltry carrot: the NLS degree, a barcode to the good life. Parents consider it a guarantee for employment; friends, who know better, counsel legitimacy. For the people writing this exam, the degree is a shiny piece of cardboard limp with age and effort; long toil having sapped any enthusiasm they might once have had for it. It is only an ability to explain to the curious and the critical what one did for the last five (six/seven/eight) years that motivates people giving exams one week before convocation; the quick rebuff – ‘I got my degree’ – because you have no genuine response to the question. It is a scenario to prove Montaigne’s prescience. The school of necessity is kept by a violent mistress.

I didn’t run that gauntlet in my final year, though I can sympathise with the emotion that propels it. One year later, I’m still filling the gaps in my education and grappling with the terror of utter ignorance. Perhaps a legal education is intended to forge orators more than writers and framers of technical minutiae more than artists in abstraction; maybe the failing is all my own. I was not the brightest button in my class, nor in my college, but neither was the person who topped it, at best a schemer and at worst a venal backstabber. To be a star in this academic firmament, you needed not only smarts and work, but also the right kind of intelligence and increasingly the right kind of wheedling.

If you were to ask me what I discovered in my five years training to be a lawyer, how to down a dozen shots and the wondrous Sonny Boy Williamson would probably rank higher than any academic achievements. On the other hand, I am an inveterate reader, and a finer library you would be hard pressed to find in your everyday college. The “elite college” is thus a complex conundrum: quicksilver classmates who take one from country bumpkin to consummate blatherer, teachers who can inspire if they would just try, a vigorous curriculum which can’t but help improve one’s erudition and elocution. I learned plenty writing four papers every trimester; it taught me invaluable lessons in pacing, structure, discipline, research, and creativity. True, these developments went largely unnoticed and they certainly didn’t reflect on my grades. Yet, without law school I wouldn’t be writing this column, and for that I will always be heartily grateful.

The Blind Leading the Blind, Bruegel

If the only marker of education is the improvement of one’s personal lot in life, there is no doubt graduating from a reputable institution repays one hundred-fold. For every classmate lost between years, there is one at Harvard and another making more money than Midas. Yet, all too often, the cost of the degree is obscured by publicity, and all anyone on the outside hears about is the payoffs and the kickoffs. As with any bloodsport, broken bones and buckets of guts and tears are ignored in the quest for the ideal outcome, the perfect reputation. When this goes on for too long, middlemen and managers peddle illusion. Everyone doesn’t graduate; people leave to save their sanity, people are forced to leave; sometimes they kill themselves, often they become cutouts of their once-vibrant selves. Any worthy enterprise takes its toll, but shouldn’t worth be measured, partially, by its downside? Don’t potential students have the right to know what they might be getting into, rather than encouraged to rush headlong into the promise of a rosier existence?

The real benefit of the education is emancipation, social as much as personal. It opens up worlds and doors that are all too readily closed to fresh blood, it catapults one into the arena where decisions are made and policy considered. It gives one, to use a hackneyed word, agency. A legal education, with its emphasis on the ways in which we are governed, does that better than most. We are the music-makers, the movers and shakers, and sometimes the world-losers and world-forsakers.  To have informed, considered opinions on our politics is no small achievement. Democracies are run, or ought to be run, from a vantage of knowledge, and reading India’s constitution does, in fact, take the better part of three college courses. Understanding it takes the better part of three decades. Yet, this is precisely what makes a stultified legal education, of the kind we increasingly notice in our institutions, such a terrible waste: laws were invented to be interpreted, and when one’s creative faculties are locked away for five years, that is a skill it is impossible to learn. One might know, down to last precedent, what everyone else thinks of the matter, and lack even the inklings of an autonomous opinion.

It is the fearlessness required to prove everyone else wrong, or dated, that makes a good brain a brave one, and that is the difference education is intended to foster. We were all smart when we got in; it is the purpose of a professional education to transform us into courageous, enlightened, and engaged intellectuals, with less to lose than most people and thus more spunk and daring on display. It is the purpose of a legal education to empower one to convert helplessness into franchise, to aid those who can’t speak to stand up for what they are owed by society, by privilege, by history. Chomsky called it the ability to speak truth to power, a responsibility Edward Said spoke passionately about in Representations of the Intellectual :

“The intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier, nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas (sic), or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or the conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public.

“This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policy, but rather of thinking of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or received ideas steer one along. That this involves a steady realism, an almost athletic rational energy, and a complicated struggle to balance the problems of one’s own selfhood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere is what makes it an everlasting sphere. Yet its invigorations and complexities are, for me at least, the richer for it, even though it doesn’t make one particularly popular.”

We were sent to a law school that was founded on the premise that it would educate questioning minds as well as polished ones; that it would train people to appreciate what Joyce meant when he said “Thinking is a mode of experiencing the world”. Instead, we leave little more than trained monkeys that can marry the right AIRs with the right occasion (admittedly no little skill; shelves of AIRs induce vertigo in my brain). To boil it down to a nutshell sound bite, here is my point: perhaps, to be advocates in the truest sense of the word, we should also be taught to stop and wonder, every so often, whether precedent might be less important than principle, and heresy more productive than hierarchy.

The unfolding of the Logos introduced directionality into history

Such as do build their faith upon
The Holy Text of pike and gun
Decide all controversy by
Infallible Artillery
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By Apostolic blows and knocks
call Fire and Sword and Desolation
A godly-thorough-Reformation.

Samuel Butler.

This monster-post, inspired by the book The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch,  has been in the works for a long time. I have been reading it for an even longer time (it is not quite a book one finishes). The history he tells bursts with anecdotes, people and ideas; they combine headily during a heady time. Writing about it was intended to illustrate the principle of Fortitude, eleventh in the Tarot; that one must practice what one preaches.  Often in the reading I felt like a lone sailor lost upon a vast vessel, nipping between coasts and trading information: had the priests became pastors and wives replaced concubines? Were they likely to? Who was invading whom? Had the Habsburgs blitzed through yet?

.

Storm At Sea, Bruegel

I am caught within the wave of the large book. There are primarily two reasons people read non-fiction, discounting the obvious motive of pleasure: one is to figure out a ‘position’ to a specific question/ related set of questions (what can you do about a problem like Sarah?), the hunt-for-data; the other is to get an inkling of perspective, context, the hunt-for-the-idea (How is American Conservatism different today from 100 years ago?). I defy you to find anyone willing to undertake a book longer than 300 pages for the former cause. If polemic cannot be condensed down to that size, it has no right for exist: any heft will simply be more excuses for the opinion, all the more suspect for being disguised. Passionate manifestos, incendiary reporting, pithy histories, reasoned commentary — these are all excellent reasons to read a book, but they are limited by the demand for relevancy, this devotion to defining the conventional wisdom of the times.

The pleasures of weighty tomes are that they allow detail and deliberation to build rather than argue.  A long history, a sustained piece of philosophy, these are written with the desire to enable the fashioning of an autonomous hypothesis from the broad welter of fact.  An essayist marshals facts that suit her story, a historian marshals stories that surround her every “fact”.

McCulloch’s history, in keeping with his tradition, doesn’t short-circuit by telling you who to side with in the multifaceted debates of his chosen time: it just lays them all out, in sometimes interminable detail, within a complex web of shared relationships and assumptions. He describes events and their ripples, ideas and their diaspora, people and their migrations; all set within a narrative best described as Transylvania talking to Scotland.   He demonstrates how the same scriptures led to many forms of worship in one city even as they’re being hacked down to meet the partisan requirements of its neighbour. It is this meandering quality that makes large books, especially those that aren’t anthologies, so damnably hard to write about. They pool in the shadows and form backdrops, but are rarely showpieces. It is impossible to pinpoint what such a book made you think about, which hunches it confirmed and which it dismissed, for the journey is made between amorphous hunches and nebulous conclusions.  I don’t know what I thought about the Reformation before I read this book: I began the book because I didn’t know what to think.

I can tell you, instead, why I am reading about the Reformation. First, as devoted readers (hullo parents) know, I am interested in the ways divinity interacts with humanity.  Not very much survives the tumult of human passage, save two truths: there are ideas, and there is matter; only a very few entities may transcend both. I am fascinated by the divine as a bridge between human eras: constantly evolving, yet always retaining the core kernel of faith every religion needs to survive.

Does one trick people into believing in the power of the metaphysical; persuade, coerce, or reason? Does one contemplate or act or purify one’s way into a happy immortality? Is there an insurance policy for the family we can invest in while alive?   Religion, it is easy to forget in our era of theocrats and evangelists, is the purest free market that exists. It is a barometer of human madness, as variable and contrarian as the spirit it seeks to channel. It is the fallacy of fundamentalism and rationalism alike to imagine that religion can shape the zeitgeist, rather than be shaped by it. Slavery was legalised by Papal Rome while Dominicans in Spain were reviving jus gentium and inventing the concept of human rights.

We live in an era the most determined humans call postmodern; which is unlucky for those of us who only achieved modernity meagre decades ago. Then again, perhaps we ought to be glad to have made the goalpost when so many others are consigned to the pre-modern. In any case, I felt it was time to get to the root of the uprising, back to when modernity was first fashioned. And thus we come to the Reformation, one bridge across time in one small part of the world. Pick any modern ill you find strewn across our conversations- nationalism, secularism, communism, capitalism, fascism, colonialism, liberalism- and you will find analogues or antecedents in the Latin Reformation, that brutal, cold time in history.  So, really, my question is: why aren’t you reading 800 pages about that?

Which is my way of saying I can’t think of any earthly reason you would want to know this stuff, so I shall just plug along and hope that I am entertaining enough to reward the effort this enterprise involves. If I must have fortitude, after all, so must you. What follows is my mini-history of the Reformation, for the curious, the insane, and the bored. It’s the broad outline of an infectious revolt, beaten back here and then there but never everywhere.

My aim is to sketch how this time folds into ours: how movements born with radical visions were trapped in fresh prisons woven out of ‘purity’, patriarchy, and racial pride. The Reformation is a study in how rights can grow broader even as the communities they accrue to grow ever narrower. My perspective diverges slightly from MacCulloch’s. He observes, with a tinge of triumph, the birth of tolerance amidst all the sectarian violence. You will forgive me for being less impressed by the miracle of pluralism. As with ‘plural’ Hinduism, tactical freedom was accessible only to the elite, not the general mass of humanity, upon whom most behaviours are imposed. MacCulloch, to give him due credit, ably argues that most lives were increasingly constrained by the renewed interest everyone had in their private life and souls.  The “Reformation of Manners” had a dramatic impact on longstanding social and sexual practices, and steadily degraded the rights of women. Many Free Cities, for instance, revoked the right to female citizenship during this era, as women began to be considered legal chattel.

Patriarchy was ceasing to be a microcosm of the God’s purpose and an expression of what was considered the the natural make-up of a mechanical universe… Society, once integrated by the cosmology of humours and by Galen’s theories, with gender a continuum, was from around 1700 conceived in terms of rigidly divided opposites- especially gender. By 1800, men were told that they must exercise rigid self-control and never shed tears; women that, after all, they were not uncontrollable and lustful like Eve, just passive and gentle crybabies, to be shielded from life’s brutalities.

Church weddings and the legitimacy of children rose in importance, as every Church rushed to exert their influence among the faithful, and marriage was now seen as a necessary sacrament, a ‘holy contract’. Cohabitation and premarital sex, once encouraged by the practice of long engagements, came under much fire in this era, as the clergy discovered the pleasures of marriages and insisted everyone ought join their state of bliss. Brothels found their licenses revoked across cities (rampant and fatal syphilis probably helped that along).  In the protestant world, clerical wives replaced nuns as the apogee of a pious woman’s ambition; the brides of god had become wives of men.  The growth of nuclear families proceeded apace in these lands, and the new justification that marriage was the ‘natural state of man’ made the social stigma surrounding homosexuality worse.  The patriarchal order within the family was emphasised even by so-called humanists, who would, one might think, feel compelled to ‘humanise’ women simply to be consistent.  Not a bit of it:

A good example [of humanist scholarship] is Mary I of England’s tutor Juan Luis Vives. He wrote the popular treatise The Education of a Christian Woman, which did indeed recommend education for all women, but that thought was overwhelmed by a good deal of talk about women’s need to control their passions, battle against their weak nature and obey their husbands. Vives also made explicit a double standard in chastity: ‘human laws do not require the same chastity of the man as the woman’, he said reassuringly, ‘men have to look after many things; women only for their chastity’

Yet, for all such instances of subtly reorganised dogma, it remains a revelation to learn how inexhaustibly diverse people are, even within close confines. What could more claustrophobic than the  revealed scripture of the Only God? Yet the ruckus, once raised, took two centuries to resolve.   Some bits of this story, it must be said, are right out of the plot of Lost: consider Martin Luther stamping out of the Diet at Worms in fury, declaring the Pope to be the Devil masquerading as the Saviour (the original ‘AntiChrist’) and suggesting that the faithful ought to follow his own example, stampede the false Church, and recreate the true Church. Substitute Jack Shepherd  for Luther, John Locke for Pope, and the Island for the Church, and tell me that isn’t the final season in a nutshell. Here I stand, and I can do no other, like the man (apocryphally) said.

This being a long essay, I divided it into pages. Look below the little facebook and twitter icons below to go further.

I am, it must be confessed, an enormous birthday spaz. I miss them in spades, and at length. These are not small transpositions- not by, say, a day, or even a week. I have been known to be off for months, calling people in June to wish them for February. I am liable to skip years entirely; and my more patient friends call to kindly remind me to wish them. It is this haphazard jerk within that all my birthday-posts were intended to restrain, for if something is part of my writing calendar I can’t possibly forget, right?

It was a sound plan. Well reasoned, and so far, well executed. Then my writing calendar terrified me so much I began to avoid it. Tomorrow, I told myself everyday, I will look and see what deadlines I have. Blip! Blip! went the radar, while the navigator napped. This post is thus almost a week late, so back I go to being a jerk. Happy birthday, bluefloppyhat. Without you this blog would have no art, and it thanks the universe with me that you are alive. I forgot because I am an ass, but I do love you so.

This be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

—- Larkin

Words

A sentence uttered makes a world appear
Where all things happen as it says they do;
We doubt the speaker, not the tongue we hear:
Words have no words for words that are not true.

Syntactically, though, it must be clear;
One cannot change the subject half-way through,
Nor alter tenses to appease the ear:
Arcadian tales are hard-luck stories too.

But should we want to gossip all the time,
Were fact not fiction for us at its best,
Or find a charm in syllables that rhyme,

Were not our fate by verbal chance expressed,
As rustics in a ring-dance pantomime
The Knight at some lone cross-roads of his quest?

—– Auden

This Be Another Verse.

They don’t fuck you up, your mum and dad
(Despite what Larkin says)
It’s other grown-ups, other kids
Who, in their various ways

Die. And their dying casts a shadow
Numbering all our days
And we try to keep from going mad
In multifarious ways.

And most of succeed, thank God,
So if, to coin a phrase,
You’re fucked up, don’t blame your mum and dad
(Despite what Larkin says. )

—– McGough.

As people I love and grew up with hit the merry mid ’20s, all one can be expected to do is to furnish them with poems in their revelry. This is the last hurrah for 2010 (well, as far as I remember; my memory is terrible at birthday-documentation.) This one is for someone whom, if I were cooler and less awkward around slang, I would call Sistah!

Things the world already knows about her: she’s a peake-geek with a romance (and tentacle porn) fixation. Things it doesn’t (plenty) were presumably left mysterious with sound reason, and we shall not dwell upon them.

Therefore,

I cannot give the reasons

I cannot give the reasons,
I can only sing the tunes:
the sadness of the seasons
the madness of the moons.

Pan, Mervyn Peake.

I cannot be didatic
or lucid, but I can
be quite obscure and practic-
ally marzipan

In gorgery and gushness,
and all that’s squishified.
My voice has all the lushness
of what I can’t abide.

And yet it has a beauty
most proud and terrible.
Denied to those whose duty
is to be cerebral.

Among the antlered mountains
I make my viscous way
and watch the sepia fountains
Throw up their lime-green spray.

Mervyn Peake.

Since concern about creaking bones and the fading quality age has upon amorous ardour was recently expressed, this post now seeks to inject some from far away, to make this a complete present, as it were.

To those who would woo, I tell you this is the poem to use.

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,

She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;

She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:

I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;

She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,

Coming behind her for her pretty sake

(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:

Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;

She played it quick, she played it light and loose;

My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;

Her several parts could keep a pure repose,

Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose

(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

Roethke

And, finally, to end with an air of symmetry and a word of birthday advice from the great gaffer in the sky.

Balance

In crazy balance at the edge of Time
Our spent days turn to cloud behind today-
And all tomorrow is a prophet’s dream
This moment only rages endlessly
And prime
Is always the long moment of decay.

Mervyn Peake.

Today was, for all kinds of reasons and many years ago, an important day in this life. I don’t have very many of those, since I live independent of calendars, and my way of dealing with momentousness is to find writing that will remind me of the day (so here we go again).

Out of the chaos of my doubt
And the chaos of my art
I turn to you inevitably
As the needle to the pole
Turn-as the cold brain to the soul
Turns in its uncertainty:
So I turn and long for you;
So I long for you, and turn
To the love that through my chaos
Burned a truth,
And lit my path.

— Peake (I mildly tinkered with it, my apologies).

The poem is for someone without whom this blog would never have been conceived, let alone executed; he handles all the melancholy writer blues I invent in spades with remarkable aplomb (and then cleans up after me). Living with me is never easy, and heaven help anyone who does so voluntarily.

The songs are for laughs.

This is the second of the mylaw.net articles on the American midterms. As usual, please head thither for links to the articles on which my analysis is based- I do believe in credit, but setting up two sets of hyperlinks is my idea of too much work. Unless I have directly quoted from the article, or otherwise think you cannot live without reading it, I have omitted the reference in this version of the essay.

I’m still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny. We would hear constantly about her voice, her laugh, her wrinkles, her marriage and what a heartless, evil bitch she is for doing something – whatever! – men have done since the Stone Age. Each week would bring its quotient of pieces by fancy women writers explaining why they were right not to have liked her in the first place. Liberal pundits would blame her for discouraging the armies of hope and change, for bringing back the same-old same-old cronies and advisers, for letting healthcare reform get bogged down in inside deals, for failing to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan – which would be attributed to her being a woman and needing to show toughness – for cozying up to Wall Street, deferring to the Republicans and ignoring the cries of the people. In other words, for doing pretty much what Obama is doing. This way I get to think, Whew, at least you can’t blame this on a woman.

- Whatever Happened to Candidate Obama? Katha Pollitt.

One day in 2008, we all woke up to the news that the long-suffering Hilary Clinton was capable of such gymnastics as public weeping. I am not now, and I certainly was not then, a news junkie. All the flap about Obama had passed me by entirely: wasn’t he the guy who declared his desire for the presidency on a talk show? I had assumed that Clinton was a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination, that she would probably win, and the world would trundle on heedless. Washington is united when it comes to ‘security’ wonks: Blackwater, for instance, was defended by a firm run by Clinton strategist Mark Penn. In the corner of the globe that most of us inhabit, that simple truth is often all that matters.

Yet here she was, whimpering, and the election was close to a year away. India’s Indira and Germany’s Angela, it appeared, didn’t translate into America’s Hillary.

That was the day I swallowed my pride and sought education from sundry politics nerds: the mystifying distinction between primaries and caucuses, conventions and their delegations; and how, exactly, did colleges get to elect the president of a country? Most began with an admirably concise answer to the first question: they’re both dogfights for the nomination. Unfortunately, I was then at the height of my elections-are-gimmicks-and-circuses phase (which I am yet to fully recover from); and there was the predictable flame-out before the conversation could turn to other foundations of American Civics 101. The profusion of talking heads obsessed with Ms. Clinton did, however, get me interested in the interplay between feminism and electoral politics: what, really, is the price worth paying for a woman in power?

Two years later, the liberal web is aflame with gossip about the renewed onslaught of Mama Grizzlies, invading from the newly discovered continent of Republican Women. The tone ranges from panic (Is Feminism Dead?!) to prophetic (Feminism Is Dead!) to poetic (Whither tarry them wanton women?). The Nation recently devoted a whole issue to the phenomenon; unique in this election’s news-cycle, a measure of rational curiosity prevailed. They snigger some (how could one not), they swagger more (look to us, true feminists) yet there is enough genuine appraisal of events to make it worth reading. The analysis follows four broad rubrics:

1.    Dems ain’t lovin’ their women enough. The Democratic Party must learn, Salonista Traister argued in the follow-up to her New York Times op-ed, ‘to treat its women as a fundamental asset rather than a vaguely irritating embarrassment.’ Get thee to counselling and save this union!

2.    It’s Clinton’s fault, or Obama’s, or the media’s; depending on your perspective on 2008. The underlying argument remains the same: the primary campaign broke feminism’s back by polarising the movement, and then Palin clinched the squabble.

3.     It’s feminism’s fault for being a bad mother: first releasing Sarah’s tribe into the wilderness, and then wandering off to establish a lesbian commune. “Get your own damned torch”, Robin Morgan once snarled at a younger rival. “I’m still using mine.” And so they did.  This is the meta-version of Point 2.

4.    The notion that conservative women were ever not a force is a fallacy. It is true that such women are active and hogging the headlines this year, but that is true of conservatism in general, for reasons that go far deeper than the headlines. It is creditable, I suppose, that the GOP might finally graduate from being an old boy’s club, but women have always been the invisible half of most movements as well as most populations.

These are interlocked arguments: Democrats are alienated from some factions in their base because of policies the Clinton administration orchestrated, not least the widespread dismemberment of the welfare state. Obama’s term is yet to endear itself, all the frantic messaging in recent weeks about the ‘legislative president’ notwithstanding. This has made its core constituents – feminists, but equally trade unions or civil rights activists – apathetic to potential Republican gains this season: how much worse can it get, so why not let them burn themselves out? Feminism, similarly, is in a dire quandary today because too many people it helped elect, women and men alike, betrayed the ideals that got them into office. If Bill Clinton is feminist by today’s standards, why can’t Sarah Palin lay claim to the dubious prize?

Causes.

The question of how feminism came to sail such dire straits is best resolved by a spot of chronology. The story begins with the last time one of these ‘Years of Women’ was announced in the land, back in 1992. That cycle, it was Democratic women on-stage, but the underlying dynamics of governance accelerated away from feminist causes alongside the purported landslide. (Random trivia: Barbara Boxer, the California Senator who is now relying on marijuana to keep her seat in this year of absurd womanhood was first elected in 1992. Her opponent this election is Carly Fiorina.)

The 1992 Women of the Year.

Katha Pollitt’s Reasonable Creatures (1995) and Subject to Debate (2001) are a fascinating feminist foray into Clinton-era politics, and she highlights, across both, the growing disaffection of the organised female vote:

So what really matters is horse trading with your colleagues and helping Bill Clinton keep his election promise to ‘end welfare as we know it’, even if hundreds of thousands of children go hungry and their mothers end up on the streets (in apologist circles, this was also known as ‘overhauling the system’) … Well, as I find myself saying more and more these days, it’s good to lose your illusions. The fact is, congressional women have been pretty disappointing in the Age of Newt … like other social justice movements, organised feminism is caught in a co-dependent relationship with electoral politics: no matter how often and how blatantly our hopes are betrayed, we keep coming back, begging to have our illusions rewoven for another bout at the polls.

- ‘Where are the women we voted for?’ in Subject to Debate.

When you consider the contortions demanded of women, who must contrive to combine, or appear to combine, attractiveness and asexuality, brains and deference, zeal for work and absence of ambition, it doesn’t seem to much to ask that men in politics live by the family values they are to enforce on the rest of us … single mothers, discarded housewives, and other family-values victims: forget the elections. Vote with your feet!

Family values and the cult of the nuclear family is, at bottom, just another way to bash women, especially poor women. If only they would get married and stay married, society’s ills would vanish. Inner city crime would disappear because fathers would communicate manly values to their sons, which would cause jobs to spring up like mushrooms after rain. Welfare would fade away.

-  ‘Why I hate Family Values’ in Subject to Debate.

Pollitt was a trenchant critic, from the left, of the Clintons’ administration; she would’ve agreed with Michael Kelley as he argued the Clintons’ practiced the ‘politics of virtue’, if not quite in the spirit he intended. Clintonian Democrats espoused what they called ‘business liberalism’: extensive welfare cuts coupled with a feel-good family-values hypocrisy designed to demonise people (such as young unwed mothers) whom such programs had once helped. It proved to be a strategy with notable, if paradoxical, dividends; endearing dissolute Bill to Middle America while laying the foundations for the Republican sweep of the 1994 midterms, the Newt Gingrich Congress which shut down government for Good (and cos they could).

As a consequence, the ‘90s were terrible years for organised feminism and allied movements: social safety nets collapsed, reproductive rights came under fire from the resurgent Gingrich-right, and intoxicated young women began to care more about making out on camera than about hard-won liberties. Already battered by Reagan, serious left-radical dissent curled up to die. If you ever wondered how it came to pass that the Left in American politics would be the furthermost Right elsewhere, now you know – failing all else, blame the New Democrats.

This, you will recall, was the heyday for toes and sex-scandal politics (ironic, as Pollitt points out, in a land with family values); the baby boomers drove an already dysfunctional ‘First Wife’ syndrome to fresh and ridiculous heights. In an era of ‘campaign theatre‘ and news-cycle presidencies, popular politics in the US appears unlikely to recover from the assumption that politicians’ wives are little more than political capital, detachable subsets born within a single personality. A decade down, it is now Washington wisdom that no one can win if their wife will not campaign, will not behave, and will not pretend she prefers pregnancy and her hookin’ husband to multiple orgasms. There is a game to be played while deciding whose sexual peccadilloes are to be paid out to the press as fodder for the madding crowds, and the women involved rarely play it, at any stage.

It was this languid state of decay that made (mostly male) pundits conclude Obama Hope-Changer was the obvious choice for the Democratic nomination in 2008: the vaunted ‘Clinton fatigue’ that so much hay was made of at the time. Obama, they argued, was more feminist than the HillBillys would ever be: look, he’s even willing to pass the Lilly Ledbetter Act for pay equity as the first thing he does in office! (He did.) Women pundits embraced the more-strident-than-thou approach in response to this ridiculing of ‘their’ candidate (though Hillary, recovered Goldwater gal, was a lukewarm feminist at best) and thus was battle engaged: would you rather be racist or feminist?

The tangled web of decisions progressive women faced in their choice between Clinton and Obama in 2008 was, thus, extremely fraught. They were caught between deploring the Clinton administration’s feeble record on causes close to the caucus, like abortion, welfare, and health-care (even starker in comparison with Obama’s strong, if untested, liberal credentials) and recognising the very real need for effectual women in politics. Either way, liberal women found themselves apologising to someone: Gloria Steinem pontificated incessantly about how feminists were betraying their gender if they didn’t support the first woman to seriously run for President, while Oprah told her audience they were racist if they didn’t vote for the nominally black dude. On the one hand, women are better represented than African Americans in elected office; on the other, well, there are about four times as many women as blacks around in the first place, and half those blacks are women. Intersectionality, that dreaded word introduced by late-wave feminism into academic parlance, was now a frightening political reality. Are black women more black than women? It’s a raging (if rather pointless) debate, one that this ‘Year of Conservative Women’ conveniently exploits, for there is no denying Tea Party conquistadoras assume white women are more white than women.

It was a primary season that balkanised the democratic female base, helped along by a media notorious for painting Ms Clinton into every corner they could contrive. She was a sensation about which the media was, for once, bipartisan: MSNBC and Fox News alike spent months competing for the Clinton-bashing ratings. Is she too masculine? Is she too feminine? Should she have worn skirts or pants? Why did she cry? How could she not cry, the pathetic Ms. Lonely-Hearts whose husband loves him some beehive? It was enough to make the most ardent Hillary hater into a frustrated acolyte.

Consequences.

Despite the din surrounding the dilemmas women face about electoral politics, everyone on the left appears to have coalesced on the party-line on two matters:

- That conservative women running for office are dupes; useful idiots, by Frank Rich’s reckoning, intended to mollify and entertain, while the (discernible) Republican agenda descends ever deeper into economic lunacy. Palin’s feminism, the cruder version of this argument runs, was invented for the benefit of white men.

- That women are, fundamentally, Democratic voters

Christine and Sarah- Can you tell 'em apart?

There is convincing evidence for the first hypothesis. For one thing, female representation is set to hit a thirty-year low if Republicans do really well this season, grizzlies and all. Most women currently in power are vulnerable Democrats: 25 of the 38 female senators in history have been Democrats, and 69 of the 90 Congressional seats currently held by women belong to Democrats. Statistically, liberal or moderate women are likelier to fall and be replaced by conservative men than by conservative women (many of whom are fighting toss-up elections; and their chances aren’t helped by the constant, arguably justified, feast of ridicule). Further, where they have won thus far, Tea Party grizzlies have done so on their own steam, often fighting derision from within the Republican camp. The big scandals dogging controversial Republican women – Nikki Haley in North Carolina, Sharron Angle in Nevada, the inestimable Christine – were originally leaked to the press by their (male) opponents in the Republican primaries. Most damnably, even demonstrably intelligent GOP candidates this election – say, ex-CEO Carly Fiorina – have come out in favour of palpably absurd policy proposals, such as cutting federal aid to bankrupt states (California is so broke it hasn’t bothered to come up with a budget for three months). The loony outliers, like Delaware’s Christine, spend their time clarifying that they aren’t witches. It is worth noting just how ironic this is, as Betsy Reed does in The Nation:

The fiscal crisis in the states cuts to the core of women’s economic security: as Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress points out, women are suffering the brunt of it because they make up 60 percent of state and local government employees, and they depend disproportionately on the social services, such as childcare, that states provide. Although the first wave of this recession hit men hardest, Boushey says we are undergoing a shift toward job losses for women as cuts in the public sector mount. The reductions in childcare subsidies that states are contemplating, for example, will affect a workforce that is 95 percent female; and at the same time, the loss of services will surely make holding jobs impossible for many former welfare recipients who now, thanks to Democrat-inspired welfare reform, have nowhere else to turn.

It’s insidious how Republicans are deploying women candidates to pitch government belt-tightening to women as the “keepers of the family budget,” as if the stresses of working families are increased by childcare, healthcare, eldercare, after-school and other social programs… It’s one thing – and not a small thing – to celebrate the strength of women in politics. But it’s supremely cynical to do so, as the GOP Year-of-the-Woman revelers have, while working to undercut the strength of women in society.

On the second point- that women are born Democrats – I must confess I find myself terribly amused. After all, the first generation of suffragettes voted Republican, almost to the woman. There is, admittedly, sustained evidence for a ‘gender-gap’ in recent elections: women, relative to men, are more likely Democratic voters; battleground races can turn on the female vote. Nonetheless, in terms of electoral data, this is about as helpful as saying that alternate sheep in Iowa would vote Vegan. To be fair, the gender-gap is not blatant nonsense – folk like Bart Stupak could do with some reminding of who elects them – but for strategic purposes it is, effectively, deadweight (similar to the ‘Bradley Effect’ when it comes to race in electoral politics). The gender-gap doesn’t even imply that the majority of women vote Democratic; more women voted for Reagan than against him, for instance. It simply means that a high percentage of the losing vote in that election (or the winning vote in 2008) was cast by women voters. Women can, and do, swing elections – but rarely entirely on their own. We are not a marginal constituency, strictly speaking, but we are, as they say, creatures of momentum.

American Elections, that lucid conservative Michael Kelley once wrote, are about three kinds of voters, upon whom one must perform assorted functions. The first is the base, which one must enthuse and palliate; the next is the counter-base, which one can never woo, though one may defuse; and the most important is the vast (and growing) swing vote to whom one must render oneself ‘minimally acceptable’ by taking ideological positions somewhere between base and counter-base. This last is an amorphous array of populations that have to be first seduced into politics and voting and only then into party lines. The permutations are close to infinite: One can rely on a strategy of whipping up core constituencies while confusing everyone else, and hope they turn out in record numbers while enemy partisans flag, which is the Republican strategy this time (and a pretty sound one at that during midterms). One could, alternately, craft a coalition that ‘spans the swing‘, which is how Democrats are positioning themselves. Or one can set out, as Obama did in 2008, to invest under-tapped and under-represented populations and supplement one’s base; relying on them, in turn, as you battle more important categories within the vested electorate.

In a country that doesn’t like to vote, yet is forced to do so in bushels, political acumen is measured by how you frame the game as much as how you play it; the wizardry lies in accurately mapping these three categories against demography, money, and geography.  Lisa Murkowski (an Alaskan senator ousted by Sarah Palin) is discovering precisely this in her exciting three-way race this season: after being slammed from the right during primary season, she’s now fuelling her write-in candidacy based on a newfound ‘moderate‘ status. It this political tightrope that GOP folk fresh off the Tea Party Express will have to learn to walk, now that they have purged themselves of all moderates, and it will spell their future electoral success. Will they follow the Democratic women of 1992 and abandon their base, or the Gingrich Congress of 1994 in riding the wave till it drops? What will be the verdict of this election season: that Republicans cannot win without moderates, or that moderates cannot win without Republicans?

He was seen walking only with Her,

and unafraid of her scythe.

– The sun now on tower after tower, hammers

on anvils – anvil on anvil, of the forges.

Federico was speaking

flattering Death. She listened.

‘Yesterday in my verse, friend,

the clap of your dry palms sounded,

you gave ice to my song, your silver

scythe’s edge to my tragedy,

I’ll sing to you of your wasted flesh,

your empty eyes,

your hair the wind stirs,

the red lips where you were kissed…

Now as ever, gypsy, my death,

how good to be alone with you,

in this breeze of Granada, my Granada!

— Antonio Machado, The Crime Was in Granada.

This month I’m attempting “Chronicles of Short Books”, where I take small books by big writers and attempt to.. supplement them. I’m not quite sure how this works yet; broadly, I aim to stay faithful to the authors’ perspectives, but necessarily not to their knowledge. My cards have been stormy lately, there is much war and death in them, and I recommend buckling down for gloomy posts. But I’m guessing you lot don’t particularly fancy methodological disquisitions, so let’s move right on.

Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, the small book that changed my life forever, will begin the series in the next post.  It was because of Looking Back on the Spanish War thatI went onto read Robert Fisk’s Great War for Civilisation, the biggest big-book of my young and sorry life. Between them, Orwell and Fisk taught me that the world around me demanded considerably more attention than I accorded it, and my tryst with non-fiction evolved into a full-blown affair.

This post records the poets and volunteers the Spanish war immortalised, for this was a war of illusions, and they were the ones who pierced it best.

Arrival In Madrid of the International Brigade

One morning in a cold month

In a dying month, spattered with mud and smoke

A month without knees, a sad, besieged, unlucky month

When from beyond my wet window panes you could

hear the jackals

Howling with their rifles and their teeth full of blood

then

When we didn’t have more hope than a dream

of more gun powder, when we believed by then

That the world was full of nothing but devouring

monsters and furies,

Then, breaking through the frost of that cold

month in Madrid, in the early morning mist

I saw with my own eyes, with this heart which looks out

I saw the bright ones arrive, the victorious fighters

From that lean, hard, tested rock of a brigade.

This was the troubled time when the women

Carried an emptiness like a terrible burning coal,

And Spanish death, sharper and more bitter

than other deaths

Filled the fields which until then had been honoured by wheat.

Through the streets the beaten blood of men had joined

With water flowing out of the destroyed hearts of houses

The bones of dismembered children, the piercing

Silence of women in mourning, the eyes

Of the defenseless closed forever,

It was like sadness and loss, like a spat-upon garden

Comrades,

Then I saw you,

And my eyes even now are full of pride

Because I saw you arriving through the

Morning mist, coming to the pure brow of Spain

Silent and firm

Like bells before daybreak

So solemn with blue eyes coming from far, far away

coming from your corners, from your lost homelands,

from your dreams

Full of burning sweetness and guns

To defend the Spanish city where freedom was trapped

About to fall and be bitten by beasts.

Brothers, from now on

Your purity and your strength, your solemn story

Will be known by child and man, by woman and old one,

May it reach all beings who have no hope, may it

descend into the mines corroded by sulphuric air,

May it climb the inhuman stairways to the slave

May all the stars, all the wheat stalks of Spain and the world

Write your name and your harsh struggle

And your victory, strong and earthy as a red oak tree.

Because you have given new birth by your sacrifice

To the lost faith, the empty soul, the confidence in the earth

And through your abundance, your nobility, your deaths,

Like through a valley of hard, bloody rocks

Passes an immense river of doves

Made of steel and hope.

–Neruda

“The Crime was in Grenada”, excerpted at the beginning of the post, is about the assassination of Federico Lorca by Franco’s forces. Lorca, already a famous poet, was visiting his home when he was killed. His family, many of whom were also killed, was prominent in local Popular Front politics; Lorca himself was something of a radical. After Spanish Morocco, the Granada garrison was one of the earliest to revolt against the civilian government, and Lorca was one of Fascist Spain’s earliest victims.

By the time Orwell is fighting at the Aragon front in winter 1936 contempt for the South, which fell to Franco early, is endemic. We meet no one from Cordoba or Seville, but  Andalusians are referred to as “semi-savages” with the “faces deeply stained from the ferocious suns of farther south” who had “run from Malaga so fast they forgot to stop in Valencia”, winding up in Aragon after Franco’s coup. Even Orwell, so restrained and unwilling to judge, finds them “very ignorant” and politically naive. Yet how many of our images of Spain- the olives, the men, the architecture, the flamenco- come from this bewitching slice of historic geography!

Song of Spain.

Flamenco is the song of Spain

Gypsies, guitars, dancing

Death and love and heartbreak

To a heel tap and a swirl of fingers

On three strings.

Flamenco is the song of Spain.

I do not understand.

Toros are the song of Spain:

The bellowing bull, the red cape,

A sword thrust, a horn tip,

The torn suit of satin and gold,

Blood on the sand

Is the song of Spain.

I do not understand.

Pintura is the song of Spain:

Goya, Velasquez, Murillo,

Splash of color on canvass,

Whirl of cherub-faces.

La Maja Desnuda’s

The song of Spain.

Langston Hughes, used to being an alien within an estranged society, was perhaps the only one who saw through the paradox of “the moor” asked to trust in other people’s democracy:

I looked across to Africa

And seed foundations shakin’.

Cause if a Free Spain wins this war,

The colonies, too, are free—

Then something wonderful’ll happen

To them Moors as dark as me.

I said, I guess that’s why old England

And I reckon Italy, too,

Is afraid to let a worker’s Spain

Be too good to me and you—

Because they got slaves in Africa—

And they don’t want ‘em to be free.

Listen, Moorish prisoner, hell!

Here, shake hands with me!

I knelt down there beside him,

And I took his hand—

But the wounded Moor was dyin’

So he didn’t understand.

— A Letter from Spain to Alabama.

And, finally, we must have the great Auden, who rejected his own poem in later years. In my collected Auden, therefore, “Spain” was not to be found. Orwell had a rather better opinion of it, calling it one of the few decent pieces of art to emerge from the destruction. This is high praise indeed, given he was no fan of Auden’s, calling the poet a “gutless Kipling”, which if you know Orwell’s views on Kipling himself is something of a mixed insult.  He admits to the ‘spiteful remark’ later, but never quite apologises: it is a fact, he writes, that Auden’s early work embodies “an atmosphere of uplift”. Squabbles aside, I tend to take Orwell’s side in re “Spain” and if anyone has the full poem, would be much obliged if you would email it along.

What’s your proposal? To build the Just City? I will,

I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic

Death? Very well, I accept, for

I am your choice, your decision: yes, I am Spain.”

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot

Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;

On that tableland scored by rivers,

Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive.

Photographer: Robert Capa.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,

The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,

The masculine jokes; to-day the

Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead; the animals will not look:

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and

History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Come close to my clamour,

people fed from the same breast,

tree whose roots

keep me in prison,

because I am here to love you

and I am here to defend you

with my blood and with my mouth

as two faithful rifles.

— Sitting upon the Dead, Miguel Hernandez.

(An edited version of this essay appeared on mylaw.net)

The Spanish Civil War is a bellwether for humanities geeks. For most, it was just one more brutal event in a brutal decade: with things like the Holocaust and atomic bombs to report, how interesting are a bunch of anarchists running around trying to change the world? There are a smattering of those in every war. For us nerds, however, the war means much more: it was a harbinger, a prophecy, a betrayal. This was as true at the time it happened as it is now; which is why all the eccentrics and writers of the world were drawn to the battle like moths to a flame. It was a war in which, as Auden once wrote, poets exploded like bombs.  Think back to any mid-century poet or journalist, and odds are they were annealed by fires across Spain. Orwell describes a very cosmopolitan Catalonia, brimming with Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, not to mention the Russians; Neruda, for that matter, made his way all the way from Chile. Spain, too, offered up her own literary sacrifices: Lorca, killed by Franco in Granada; Miguel Hernandez, lost to prison and pneumonia.

Orwell was amongst the first wave of these adventurists, and Homage to Catalonia is a bitter love-story about the country and the ideals he was determined to save. It begins in 1936, when Orwell first joined the POUM militia on the Aragon front, and closes in 1937, when he is running from Barcelona with the police, as he put it, one jump behind him. The story of how a soldier became a traitor is the story of Homage to Catalonia.

Unlike most Englishmen rushing off to Spain in the late ‘30a- say, Esmond Romilly, or Rupert John Conford, or, briefly, Eric Hobsbawm- Orwell was no reckless adolescent. He was published, married, well into his life, all of which he risked on the front for close to a year.  By the time most journalists thought it might be worth their while to head into Spain- Martha Gellhorn, for instance, reached Madrid around the summer of ’37- Orwell was already a veteran; already, in fact, a fugitive. His perspective on the war both benefits and is hobbled by this early vantage- no later book will describe the infighting between the anarchists and the communists in as much detail, yet the bombing of Guernica finds no mention in his story.

The first part of the memoir is spent ruminating about the country and his comrades, amidst a dull, weary routine of foraging for firewood and scheming to stay awake in the freezing nights. War, it appears, is mostly in the anticipating.

In secret I was frightened. I knew the line was quiet at present, but unlike most of the men about me I was old enough to remember the Great War.. War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant mud, lice, hunger, and cold and scrambling up and down over the jagged limestone that knocked one’s boots to pieces, pouncing eagerly on tiny twigs of wood.

Given the ragged state of the militia that Orwell describes- very few rifles, no ammunition, no candles, no boots or uniforms, little food- the relative calm seems serendipitous. In the summer months, we are told, there was fierce fighting in the area; however, this being rugged terrain, once the trenches had settled in, there was very little to be done. He describes the weird claustrophobia of trench warfare, where the enemy is too close for comfort, yet too far to hit:

The new sentries were no sooner in the trench than they began firing a terrific fusillade at nothing in particular. I could see the Fascists, tiny as ants, dodging to and fro behind their parapet, and sometimes a black dot which was someone’s head would pause for a moment, imprudently exposed…. They were simply remote black insects whom one occasionally saw hopping to and fro.

At first, he deplores the hopeless amateurs he is fighting alongside, especially considering the brutal professionalism of the other side. Franco’s Spanish Foreign Legion (at the core of the military rebellion that began the civil war) are hardy, longtime soldiers; Goliath, as it were, facing off against an army of Davids armed quite literally with slingshots: “There were nights when it seemed to me our position could be stormed by twenty Boy Scouts armed with air-guns, or twenty Girl Guides armed with battledores, for that matter”. Over the course of his time at the front, however, he comes to appreciate the revolution the militias have initiated in army discipline, especially in contrast to the brutal treatment meted out by the Fascists to their own as much as to others. In yet another first for this war, the Popular Army that replaced the militia system in 1937 was a midway between the two types- though, of course, Orwell could not have known this would be the prototype of the postmodern armed forces: voluntary in theory, conscripted in practice.

Considering the contrasting approaches across the jagged front, he writes:

They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of a classless society. Of course there was not perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would’ve thought conceivable in time of war…. the newly raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob not only because the officers called the privates “comrade” but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob. In practice, the democratic ‘revolutionary’ type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers’ army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It depends on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. Revolutionary discipline depends on political consciousness- on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed, it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.

After long stretches describing the long tedium of the war, the lack of cigarettes, and sundry observations about the changing political scenario in Republican Spain, Orwell is suddenly thrown into action.  The Government, he tells us, has finally “produced a decent bomb.” The militia, long unused to the concept of ammunition, are enthused by the sudden influx of weapons and plan an offensive down the line. Orwell’s redoubt is called upon for volunteers, and off he goes to try kill the Fascists.

He describes his first, and only, attempt at killing the enemy with a typical combination of detail and dry wit:

The Fascist, Robert Capa.

If I had fired I could’ve blown him to pieces. But for fear of shooting one another we had been ordered to use only bayonets once we were inside the parapet, and in any case I never even thought of firing. Instead, my mind leap backwards twenty years, to our boxing instructor at school, showing me in vivid pantomime how he had bayoneted a Turk at the Dardanelles. I gripped my rifle by the small butt and lunged at the man’s back. He was just out of reach. Another lunge: still out of reach. And for a little while, we proceeded like this, he rushing up the trench and I after him on the ground above, prodding at his shoulder-blades and never quite getting there- a comic memory for me to look back upon- though I suppose it seemed less comic to him. Of course, he knew the ground better than me and soon slipped away.

The whole thing plays out like a comic opera. Orwell and fellow troopers storm the Fascist post, kill a few people and almost steal a telescope, and then are killed in turn and retreat. The whole point, we are told, was to make sure that the Fascists couldn’t divert troops to a bigger offensive down the line; in the logic of war, the night was considered a well played tactic. Orwell, on the other hand, concludes his recounting of the absurd night regretting the abandoned telescope.

The kind of war Orwell describes appears anachronistic in our age of martial megatrons: the primary weapons of the early Spanish war were bayonets and machetes. It was in the Spanish war, nonetheless, that the defining civilian experience of war changed from that of privation and disease (with the harrowing fear of slaughter should their side lose) to one of destroyed cities and poisoned air. It was the Spanish war that erased the innocent from the annals of history: in modern war, anyone’s game. This is a side of war Orwell is singularly silent about, being himself a soldier; bombing campaigns inevitably target cities and productive populations, not chaotic front-lines where it is hard to tell ally from enemy. Martha Gellhorn, observing the war in Madrid, wrote what is likely one of the first accounts of a bombed-out shell-city; “the shadows”, she writes, “crawled over chaos”.  In our time, the sceptre of charred landscapes resides at the tip of our collective memory- images from pitted Sarajevo compete with the napalm-burned jungles of Vietnam- to the point where further description seems close to obscene. At the time, however, Guernica set Europe aflame with horror, yet another symbol in this concertedly significant war.

Guernica, Picasso

And you forget them at your peril

For though you fight as well as they

You’ll be betrayed, as we were.

David Marshall, I lived in a time of heroes.

Everytime Stalin swaps partners, Marxism has to be hammered into a new shape.
— George Orwell, Inside the Whale.

Capa, Falling Soldier II.

Capa, Falling Soldier I

The quintessential experience of modern war- bombing- was perfected by the Luftwaffe over Spain; tens of thousands of bombs were dropped on every major city: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga and, of course, Guernica, where the Basques convened under the holy oak. It was, as Sven Lindqvist points out in A History of Bombing, a symbol waiting to happen, given the savage precedent set by colonial wars of earlier decades. For the bomb had already been used, extensively, across Africa and Asia  by assorted European ‘great powers’; it was only a matter of time before the weakest link within the metropolis would be targeted.

Franco was the last to leave Chechaouen (in “Spanish” Morocco) in 1924 and the first to return in 1926 when France had won the war for Spain. He never forgot Chechaouen. It was there that the taboo against calling in the air force of a foreign land to bomb one’s own territory was first broken- and the taboo against bombing a city full of defenceless civilians. Chechaouen laid the foundation for Guernica.

Throughout the interwar years, the fear in Europe grew- the fear of a new kind of war, a war that would suddenly strike like lightning from a clear sky at peaceful, unarmed people….Guernica gave a name to that fear…  The destruction of Guernica made such a huge impression because it was precisely what everyone was waiting for… The painting was hung in Paris while the air in Guernica was still acrid with smoke… Chechaouen had no Picasso. There was not even a camera there to record the destruction. Among the tens of thousands of documents collected by Ali Raisuni, there is not one single image of Chechaouen after the bombing.

If Orwell has nothing to say about this innovation made to the practice of war, he has plenty to say regarding the other contribution the Spanish made to 20^th century world-history: the blueprint for every betrayed revolution. One of the worst kept secrets of revolutions is their hopeless factionalism: hardly do the suborned masses capture the castle, it appears, that they begin self-stratifying. One of the better kept secrets about revolutions is that while the circumstances may distort terms within the debate, the hoary political distinction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ remains intact.

In every revolution, the hidden power-play has been between the left and the right within the revolutionary forces, only later to be exploited by authoritarian forces seeking to squish the revolt wholesale. Imagine a revolution to be the siege of a city that can only be taken down from inside, and inevitably is, if only the army outside can hold out for long enough. In 18^th century France, the Jacobins, far to the left of most, won the internal battle; till Thermidor claimed Robespierre’s head. In Russia, Lenin’s left-wing Bolsheviks prevailed against the gentler Mensheviks. Later, in a reversal, Stalin kicked Trotsky out; partially why Russian socialism swirled around ‘Marxism’ in such a demented ballet.

In Spain, following this pattern, the war and attendant revolution devolved into a twisted menage a trois: anti-Fascists tussling amidst themselves, with orthodox Communism at the extreme-right end of the spectrum. As Orwell notes, the Comintern was obsessed with Russian survival by the late ‘30s, and that depended on Russian military alliances with liberal (and, later, fascist) Europe. Having had their hopes dashed by the ill-fated German revolution of the ‘20s, and alarmed by the rise of Hitler as a symptom of the failure of world-revolution, the Comintern was no longer interested in the ‘wheels of the world revolution’ that Trotsky wanted to set into motion. Stalin’s Russia retreated  into a “socialism in one country” formula, whether for preservation or for purification we will never know, and global socialism has never recovered from that taint. The global policy of Soviet Russia, at any event, was containment and preservation, not expansion or solidarity.

This policy-shift impacted Communist movements worldwide- Indian communists not least- with the consequence that global communism spend much of the ‘30s behaving like an eccentric pendulum, swinging upon the drift of Russian foreign policy. The Russians, for their part, used their status as the primary arms-dealer to the Republican government much like Hitler and Mussolini used their connections to Franco: to introduce conformity in Spain for a greater geopolitical cause. Spain, was, in every sense of the word, an experiment: a petri-dish breeding scuppered revolution, modern war,  and postmodern political theory.

The Progress of Orwell's War.

The Collapse of 1938

At the beginning of the war, the working classes and unions defended the cities and countryside against Franco’s revolt to restore the monarchy (which had fallen in 1931 to popular unrest).  In spring and summer 1936, during the fiercest fighting, a quiet revolution conducted itself across vast swathes of the Republic.  Land and production were collectivised, militias organised, and both the Central and the Catalan government, Orwell argues, “could be said to represent the working class”. Power was shared by the CNT (Anarcho-Syndicalist trade unions), the UGT (socialist trade unions), and the government was headed by Caballero, a left-wing socialist.

Slowly, however, the coalition was purged from within; ‘syndicalist’ unions like CNT and ‘trotskyist’ militias like POUM were phased out in favour of more reliable ‘Stalinist’ forces. In May, the fragile Catalan government was shattered, Barcelona erupted in riots, and the anarchists‘ long expulsion gathered momentum. One year into the war and the revolution, the government  consisted primarily of liberals and right-wing Socialists who served Russian ambitions more than Spanish ones. In six months, Catalonia went from revolutionary government to a liberal one: Lenin’s October revolution in mirror- inverse. The consequences of this shift upon the war effort were both enduring and dramatic, as Orwell notes:

One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the right… I grasped that the Communists and the Liberals had set their face against allowing the revolution to go forward. I did not grasp they might be capable of setting it back… There is very little doubt that arms were held back lest they should get into the hands of the anarchists, who would afterwards use them to revolutionary purpose; consequently the big Aragon offensive, which would have made Franco draw back from Bilbao, and possibly from Madrid never happened. But this was comparatively a small matter. What was more important was that once the war had been narrowed down to a ‘war for democracy’, it became impossible to make any large-scale appeal for working-class aid abroad…

Since the 1914-1918 ‘war for democracy’ has had a sinister sound. For years past the Communists themselves had been teaching the militant workers in all countries that ‘democracy’ was a polite name for Capitalism. To say first “Democracy is a swindle!” and then “Fight for Democracy!” is not good tactics. If, with the huge prestige of Soviet Russia behind them, they had appealed to the workers of the world in the name not of democratic Spain but of revolutionary Spain, it is hard to believe they wouldn’t have got a response…

What clinches everything is the case of Morocco. Why was there no rising in Morocco? Franco was trying to set up an infamous dictatorship, and the Moors actually preferred him to the Popular Front Government! The palpable truth is no attempt was made to foment a rising in Morocco, because to do so would have meant putting a revolutionary construction on the war. The first necessity, to convince the Moors of the Government’s good faith, would have been to proclaim Morocco liberated. And we can imagine how pleased France would have been with that! The best strategic opportunity of the war was flung away in the vain hope of placating French and British capitalism”

Orwell, by happenstance, was actually in Barcelona when the fighting between the POUM and PSUC, anarchists and communists, exploded. In the weeks prior, the tensions between the CNT and the UGT had escalated, and finally the city rioted, caught between the Civil Guards and the various militias. Orwell was recovering from an injury as he met with his wife in the city, and had requested a transfer to the International Brigade, stationed in Madrid. In the meanwhile, waiting for a pair of boots (‘the kind of detail that is always deciding one’s destiny’), he got caught up in the Barcelona fighting as a partisan for POUM.  Three days after the fighting ceased, he was back at the front, still fighting along the anarchist line (he declined to join the PSUC-affiliated International Brigade after his Barcelona experience).  “If we could drive Franco and his foreign mercenaries into the sea”, he writes in his journal, “it might make an immense improvement in the world situation, even if Spain itself emerged with a stifling dictatorship and all its best men in jail’.

While he was off at the front, however, conditions for POUM worsened, helped along by a largely PSUC-partisan press which painted the syndicalists to be fascist fifth columns who had engineered the riots to weaken Barcelona and soften it for Franco. POUM veterans were harassed and imprisoned, which proved disastrous for the scores of foreigners affiliated with it, especially the Italian and German fugitives who faced deportation back to their own country.  Bob Smillie, who had served on the front even longer Orwell,  disappears into prison on his way back to England; Georges Kopp, a Belgian and Orwell’s onetime CO, is arrested on his way to a promotion. By late June, Orwell himself is injured again, this time so badly that he is declared unfit for further combat.

As usual, he writes of the horror of a bullet-wound with calm detachment:

The whole experience of being hit by  a bullet is very interesting and worth describing in detail… Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion…Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came.

Ivor Hele

Back in the city after his hospitalisation, he describes the change in Barcelona’s once-jolly and brave camaraderie with wrenching and wretched disappointment: “No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food-queues, and prowling gangs of armed men… It was as though some huge evil intelligence was brooding over the town “. The evil intelligence is soon alerted to his presence in the town, and Orwell skips out of Spain with the police hot on his trail, after a few days spent playing hobo on Barcelona’s streets.

The war, of course, went on long after Orwell left; and the Republic, despite all the sniping, put up a brave, honourable front. In September 1938, the International Brigade was withdrawn from the fronts by the Spanish government, following a volley of diplomatic chatter about “intervention” and its pitfalls from the liberal left. By this time, the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact was less than a year away, and arguably Russia had overplayed it’s hand in Spain, festering understandable resentment amongst its leaders (the Brigade was communist, almost to the man). One of many open questions about the war is what might’ve happened if the thousands-strong International Brigade, so valorised in song and memory, was allowed to stick around to repel Franco’s overwhelming Italian and German support. Be that as it may, the turn of events served to accelerate away from Orwell’s brave brethren at POUM, and history has recorded them as cowards, fools, or traitors. Even the otherwise impeccable Hobsbawm fell prey to the fallacy; he spends a goodly portion of Revolutionaries excoriating Spanish anarchism. Belying Orwell’s experience, he argues that Spanish anarchism was simply too haphazard, and, well, anarchic to fight a war; further, that it made the mystifying error of not attempting to change the style of ‘primitive Spanish revolt’. The communists, he suggests, had the only rational policy to achieve these fine goals, which explains why they prevailed while anarchists foundered (though he is much too fine a scholar to fall for the party-line blather about the Fascist fifth column cunningly hidden behind POUM).

Ivor Hele

Homage to Catalonia’s final chapters, written in England in late 1937,  are full of denunciations of the demonisation of POUM and the developing ‘Left’ orthodoxy coalescing around the Republican government’s altered history of the war.  Dumbfounded to the point of incoherence, Orwell piles invective upon insult; he is desperate to give history an account of the ‘real war’ to stand against the Republic’s blatant hypocrisy. He points out the irony of a government planning elaborate schemes of disinformation and censorship even as it  denounces libellous fascist propaganda about ‘red atrocities’ (such as Franco’s famous thesis that Guernica’s denizens burned down their own town); he shudders at the prospect of heresy-hunters in a land once transformed by freedom; he balks at the choice between alternate tyrannies. Orwell distilled his fury and bewilderment from these chapters in his 1942 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War:

Early in life I had noticed that no event was is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I aw newspaper reports which did not bear any relationship to the facts, not even the relation implied by an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of the imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened… This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate, similar lies, will pass into history… I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

A Year in Reverse, Part One.

Over the next week, I shall be putting up collections of things I wrote this year that haven’t made it to this blog yet. Pre-bogey readers, all ten of you, will remember I blogged for Himal SouthAsian earlier in 2010, and these were mostly written to that end. They are ‘political’ reportage, if you will be generous with your definition. Mostly, I talk about news I find interesting. This year that happened more often than is usual, as Chaosbogey’s Politics will tell you. Here is me covering other elections from the year.

The second part of the reversal was Playing Cassandra.

Antique Wine in an Antique Bottle.

June, 2010

The recent demolition of the West Bengal CPI (M) in Calcutta municipality elections brokered many fates. In a country where some form of election is a daily occurrence, municipal elections inevitably get the short shrift. Not so here.  Newspapers and pundits portend that it marks a turned tide, that 2011 assembly elections shall see the party in the bay rather than in Bengal. Writers’ Building (in Calcutta, even administration must have a booksy air) might finally see new occupation: Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress.

Writers Building

The party in present form is evidently just the Lady, a few trusted deputies, and her unwavering agenda of uprooting the CPI (M). One wonders how this party will cope with the delegation of government. To the facile observer, Banerjee’s Didi might echo that other formidable and self-reliant Lady CM: Mayawati’s Behenji (even their honorifics collide). An important difference remains. Mayawati has had spells of power to considerably enrich herself, while Mamata is that rare mystery: an impecunious politico. She is currently Union Railway Minister, an easy route to padded bank accounts. Perhaps her restraint was just prudence: what is a ministry compared to the treasury of an entire state? Will she stay uncorrupted by power once her crusade is accomplished? It is a wager Bengal appears willing to take.

Foreshadowing of the immanent change has been gathering for a while: the brutalities at Nandigram and Lalgarh; the clumsy break between the left alliance and the Congress in 2008 over the nuclear deal; the rebellion and public spat in the Kerala chapter last year; the death of the hypnotic Jyoti Basu earlier this year.  Both Kerala and West Bengal, India’s two communist bastions, elect new state assemblies next year, a year that looks poised to establish some very unpleasant realities for the new decade.

The official left in India has been hamstrung, time and again, by the tension involved in reconciling all-embracing revolution with too much revolution, and it has rarely emerged the stronger for it. In the ‘60s they squabbled about Maoism, in the ‘70s about Naxalism, in the ‘90s they conflated the two categories conveniently. The only coherent policy attributable to the current CPI(M) is a not-so-subtle game of playing both sides against the middle, and it has served them terribly this past five years. They are the socialist government that sold out farmers to Big Industry, paradoxically arguing against privatisation of public assets at the same time. “Confused” doesn’t begin to describe it.

I live with a Bengali forsworn to Mamata Banerjee, and arguably I am partisan. Yet, at this point, even the most dyed-in-the-wool red must recognise that the government in Calcutta does little to bolster either Marxist philosophy or praxis, let alone popularity. 35 years of denied democracy is a hard pill to swallow however ardently one desires social transformation. Coupled with the sceptres of murdered farmers, I find it impossible to resist the conviction that our socialist experiment, like so many globally, has failed. Marx has proven over the last century to be as fallible to twisted dogma as the next dead man. That said, Indian socialism has not failed the same way, or for the same reasons, that European communism did: our “communism” has forged independently tortured paths right from its official founding in Tashkent in 1933. No rhetoric can paint Mamata Banerjee into Lech Walesa.

Everything’s looted, betrayed and traded,
black death’s wing’s overhead.
Everything’s eaten by hunger, unsated,
so why does a light shine ahead?

By day, a mysterious wood, near the town,
breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume.
By night, on July’s sky, deep, and transparent,
new constellations are thrown.

And something miraculous will come
close to the darkness and ruin,
something no-one, no-one, has known,
though we’ve longed for it since we were children.

Anna Akhmatova.

Like all things that take root in India, communism has gone native. The way out of these woods is for us to discover as well, if we are not to go the way of rudderless Eastern Europe, and jeering at a flogged ideal rarely dispels it. The more marginalised and venal the parliamentary left gets, the stronger militant factions will grow. Hannah Arendt and her descendants might choose to interpret the tendency of socialist government to implode as proof of socialism’s natural totalitarianism. I believe that it is institutions that rightly bear the charge of tyranny, not ideas nor individuals. We stand agreed that bureaucracy and socialism are not well-mixed. The dispute lies in which part of the equation we would emphasise and which we would dismantle.

The Ballsified Clegg.

A White Man Who Ran

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.
– From: Going, Going by Philip Larkin.

Britain goes to polls on 6th May 2010. In a single day, the tiny island will elect more legislators than the masses of India do over the course of two months. Clearly, British elections are not the mela we are used to around election season, where skeletons are harried out of closets for months in order to provide the electorate with a good show. All the same, 13 years under the same government will make anyone twitchy, and the Britons are determined to make the best of a bad job. As Hugh Rifkind noted yesterday, this proved an excellent election for bullshitters, and the only thing that need constrain one’s observations is one’s imagination.

For years, one would be laughed out of any British pub (or Indian clubs frequented by posh folk that ‘follow’ politics in the mother country) at the very mention of the Liberal Democrats (Lib-Dems). One such Scotch uncle suggested my breath and ‘youthful exuberance’ were better wasted upon the Greens. Astonishingly, in just under a month, the British media resurrected the party and concocted a passable (and regrettably pale) shadow of Obama. We are all (those of us who inhabit countries where elections remain a thankfully periodic affair) a few elections into the naughts now, and we demand our jollies. It is a decade in which the liberal-left has felt singularly defeated; we now demand politicians come with a firm fix of messiah.

The omnipresence of information in our decade sometimes blinds us to how easily manipulated it remains, especially in the era of publicity politics – and one is easily seduced into buying into left-liberal pinups Obama-style. The usually clamourous Brit papers seem fully committed to Cleggmania; as with Obama, one must head to Chomskyland to find anything resembling a critical appraisal of the man and his politics slanted from the left. The Guardian granted him a fanboy-editorial; the Independent, a paper one can usually count on for nastiness, is being remarkably effusive. It is all eerily similar to Obama-mania and the attendant conversion of a complex political dilemma into a simplified personal faith.

The chief difference is the length of the campaigns – Obama’s mojo took years in the making and penetrated every level of popular culture (I was initially introduced to Obama as Rory Gilmore’s post-college job back in 2007). British productions are more subdued. Besides, the goal of the Obama-campaign was infinitely more ambitious: it convinced citizens that a system as politically infantile as rigidly bipartisan democracy is sustainable and innovative. Cleggmania is merely intended to buffer the bumpy road to coalition politics; a cross any mature democracy in the postmodern world has to learn to bear.

Nonetheless, if this media gush-fest should succeed, it will only strengthen the narrative and ensure sequels, as each new faux-Obama slowly chips away at the real one’s achievements. Rahul Gandhi looks set up to be 2014’s Obama, with a complimentary campaign of Change!  Irony is so last century.  Maybe they’ll launch the Kaun Banega Obama? show, where politicians from across the globe compete to receive six months of great press and the Nobel Peace Prize.

All too soon, the historic Black Man Who Could could only be remembered as the first in a dynasty of media-fashioned political leaders, propelled along by the power of the headline. It took Obama less than a year to bring everyone thudding back to earth – it will likely take Clegg, should he slip into power, correspondingly less. That said, I can’t deny I would rather see Clegg flamenco into Downing Street than watch Britain go wholly Tory in denial. Hilarity, if nothing else, is guaranteed.

I say this as a college-age Indian not particularly invested in the next British PM. I like the sound of accessible visas and university funding, and I am told the Lib-Dems have the best policy on both (of course, given my taste in media, it is unlikely that I would be told otherwise). If I were British-Asian, I suspect my calculations would be more agonised. It would then be a choice between representation and ideology. I would be intensely suspicious of the Lib-Dem’s miserable record when it comes to representing women and people of colour: it has the lowest number of MPs from both groups.

Of the 15 ethnic minority MPs in the last Parliament, 13 were Labour and 2 Tory; there were no African or Asian MPs in the 63-strong Lib-Dem contingent. The party is fielding only four this time with a shot at winning. In contrast, the Tories have opened up their party under David Cameron (though not without a fight). The Tories are fielding as many minority candidates as Labour (44), ten of whom are standing from reasonably safe seats. In an election where even the Tories are making a point about diversity and encouraging ethnic-minority candidates for the first time (albeit dubious ones, like the ultra-right PR goddess Priti Patel) Lib-Dem apathy must be looking especially dismal. In other constituencies and on the other extreme, political parties founded on the sole plank of identity politics threaten Labour even in London’s solidly red East End. (Respect, one such, is a Bangladeshi-focused party founded, weirdly, by a Scot).

Even worse, the party that does best with catapulting my community and gender to elected office- Labour – would be the worst hit by a Lib-Dem victory. In some areas the clash is especially poignant: Diane Abbott, the first black woman in British Parliament, is defending her seat against a 20-something white man standing on the Lib-Dem ticket. To quote the local newspaper:

Meanwhile the Lib Dem challenger Keith Angus reckons, in this campaign video posted on YouTube, that it’s a two-horse race between him and Abbott. Well, yes, but only in the sense that one horse is a Grand National winner and the other is a Blackpool beach donkey.

I am glad I am not this hypothetical British voter, bewildered amidst political psychosis, as surely as she is glad not to be me. ‘Tis true we have embellished versions of each other’s lives. That is as much part of the diaspora as a consequence of it, and it is unlikely that I will ever stop checking in with the Scotch Uncles to try get a better glimpse into her world.

The fact is we both make the same series of non-choices in our political lives: between converging forces more apart in rhetoric than in reality; but that is not something we enjoy being reminded about. Rather, we engage in the metaphysics of coalitions; the subtle skill of calculating when and whether undercutting can lead to undermining. This is expertise better sought from the study of third world democracy, where the coalition was mastered, than from first world variants hostile to the form. To that limited extent, I’m the luckier of the pair of us.

****

I owe the title of this post to a senior who will (hopefully) write a book with similar title one day. He also had, from a distance, the prettiest eyes in college; and legions of fangirls as a consequence (yes, women, I think he noticed). So you will agree there is much to thank him for.

A Year in Reverse, Part II.

(Part I was Deluded Democracy, about elections around the world.)

The first of these.. snippets is a dismembered essay I wrote for popmatters back in February. That essay makes less sense every time I read it, and I’m hoping the remnants of it will fare better. Another essay that would’ve made it into this series is Of Nativity, where my allegiance to Frantz Fanon was recorded for posterity to note. It has already found its way onto this blog, however, and that’s that as far as introduction goes.

Playing Cassandra.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a woman of demonstrably diverse talents. If she should want to find conventional employment, one would assume it would be a fairly easy process. Bait and Switch is a detailed exposition into why one would be wrong. In it, she goes undercover again, as she did in Nickel and Dimed, this time in the very white collar world of PR and marketing. Excluding the publishing world, she starts the book applying and searching for marketing/PR positions promiscuously, sans moral qualm and geography. Her single string is income level, yet she spends the rest of the book upgrading herself in vain. 

I read this book amazed at the ‘transition’ industry unemployment in America has spawned, converting desperation into dollars. By synthesizing selfishness with self-help, Corporate America seems to have learnt how to systemically shed people while simultaneously convincing them it’s their own fault they’re out of a job.

Ehrenreich describes her steady line of career coaches offering contradictory advice on the basis of loopy personality tests, one of whom hilariously advises her to work on her writing skills. She negotiates the catch-22 of “appropriate” attire for corporate women (simultaneously professional and feminine, without being either threatening or provocative), encounters the evangelical Right, and discovers the new workforce makes the people it retains as miserable as the ones it fires. Several of the people she networks with are employed, but desperate to find alternate employment: either because they are underemployed and dissatisfied, or because they are stretched far too thin compensating for fired colleagues. Apart from time and energy, she ultimately spends $6,000 on her job search: money spent on coaches, resume-checkers, job sites, networking “clubs” and “events”, bootcamp (essentially group therapy), a wardrobe consultant, a “professional development seminar” until, finally (and fittingly), she is offered the chance to pay someone to employ her.

Mervyn Peake, Mad Hatters.

In her penultimate chapter Ehrenreich introduced me to “independent contractors”- a term I associate with people who can violate most Indian labour legislation. In American unemployment circles, it apparently means working for companies as direct sales people, with neither benefits nor salaries. The only income comes from commissions, which can be of two kinds: finding more agents to sell the product for the company; or from direct sales of the product to consumers.

In one instance she describes, Ehrenreich is offered the chance to sell “supplemental health insurance” for AFLAC, but when she enquires about her own health insurance, she is evaded with: “We’re independent contractors, we get our own”. “Supplemental health insurance”, as the name somewhat obliquely suggests, is additional health insurance for people who don’t receive adequate coverage from their employers; a business that is booming, her interviewer hastens to inform her, as people have less disposable income while healthcare costs are ballooning.

To become part of the dubious AFLAC-family Ehrenreich needs to get a license and attend training ($1900); and then hope that the local market for the product hasn’t already been saturated. The more people she can pull into the scheme, either to buy or sell, the more money she earns; and even there, as Ehrenreich points out, it’s tough to distinguish pyramid schemes from legitimate ones.

As an option for the white-collar unemployed, there are thousands of commissions only sales jobs such as the one AFLAC offered me. According to the Direct Selling Association, 13.3 million Americans worked in such sales jobs in 2003, selling $25 billion worth of goods. In many cases, like AFLAC, these jobs offer rewards not only for selling the product but for recruiting new people to do so as well. On it’s dark side, the direct-selling world is filled with traps for the unwary- pyramid schemes in which the ultimate product is valueless non existent. An outfit called JDO Media, for example, enticed people to make money by enlisting others to sell a sketchily- developed ‘marketing program’- for which privilege each recruit had to put up as much as $3,500…

… a real job involves some risk taking on the part of the employer, who must make an investment to acquire your labour. In real estate, franchising, and commission-only sales, the only risk undertaken is by the job-seeker, who has to put out money upfront and commit days or weeks to training. Then she is on her own, fearful that the market will soften or that the quasi-employer will flood the area with competing sales reps or franchisees.

“Independent contractors” must be a global euphemism for the unregulated underbelly of the corporate world. As Ehrenreich wryly observes at the close of her last interview with Larry, the AFLAC minion, she “might as well have applied at Wal-Mart and been given a pushcart full of housewares to hawk on the streets”.

 Bait and Switch was published in 2005, long before one noticed the words ‘recession’ or ‘economic crisis’ bandied about in the popular press. It talks about the slow extinction of a class: the powerful American executive, the golden boys of capitalism. It confirmed what I had been reading on the fringes: that the recession unfolded across a decade, gathering momentum, with different classes hit at various times and accreting intensity.

The fringes in India are making similar noises today about the drive towards a fully corporate, privately owned economy and its costs upon our ecology and our people. The mainstream remains complacent about the advantages of “modernization”, unwilling or unable to hear protest, even as it rises to a crescendo of desperate violence. Ms Ehrenreich outlines a disturbing evolution in the pattern of global capital: if the American corporate workforce is being forced to adapt to a permanently “lean” culture, which recruits and discards at will, how much worse will things become in India?

In India, privilege still seems to ensure jobs, the “boom” is on, and I am no economist. Nonetheless, it appears a fragile dream, grafted onto a vast quagmire of extortion and exploitation. Employment in India has always been uniquely ridden by the scepter of caste, and the corporate dream may only be the latest avatar of the Brahmin imaginary.

The Brahmin Imaginary.

The Brahmin stranglehold on the telling of Indian history is twofold: literacy, and legitimacy. As the clergy, Brahmins were the only caste where formal education is in the job description. This made them readers, and collectors of manuscripts, in a predominantly oral culture; the genetic intelligentsia. As a class, they have always been dependent upon royal power: first for ritual sacrifice, later for land grants. Divine kingship has always been a potent symbol in Indian politics: even the Mughals fell under its spell. The Brahmins, intermediaries to the gods, were convenient legitimators for any king seeking to attest his kingship and establish a dynasty; ritual sacrifice persisted in royal consecrations long after it had disappeared from the popular religion. The British found them handy collaborators, and from colonial times Brahmins have drifted off the land and into the professions.

Even in 2010 India, Brahmins dominate education, especially higher education. I suspect the trend would be especially prominent in the professions and the higher echelons of management: the very executives Bait and Switch talks about. Companies owned by other communities are nevertheless likely to employ a fair number of Brahmins in managerial posts. While the civil services and public companies reserve posts for the “scheduled” castes, private enterprise is free to hire who it wants, and they tend to prefer the dwija.

(More Fintan Taite illustrations can be found on his website. There are more than a few scattered across chaosbogey, but they’re but the tip of an iceberg.)

The obvious disadvantage Dalits in corporate India face is that they are relatively alone in a culture still dominated by kinship bonds: they have a far smaller network of family and friends to turn to for employment. Even as family businesses give way to the more impersonal firm and the corporate meritocracy entrenches itself, the process of exclusion is likely to continue unabated: caste privilege can operate in many covert, insidious ways. Idiomatic English, comfort with technology, dietary habits, an elite education, even a person’s name and home address can flag off their caste to potential recruiters, making candidates vulnerable to the other person’s prejudices.

In any case, verticality far predates the birth of the corporation in India, so one can be sure that access and promotion remain two very different things. It would be very interesting to study to how two famously opaque hierarchies, caste and corporation, interpenetrate within Indian corporate culture to create a new heaven of conspicuous consumption for the Dwija, oblivious to reality. For the Dwija, reality comes with an escape clause. But for the excluded majority, the really interesting question is this: when the lean times come, who amongst the dwija will be shed?

Ms. Ehrenreich tells a compelling story about betrayed people living out the nightmare inversion of the American dream. I will hazard the guess that the advantages of the lean, mean corporate machine will suggest itself to Indian employers soon. When this new Brahmin heaven implodes, as so many have in the past, I am curious to see what the tenacious bunch do next. India’s rulers no longer require divine legitimacy, the traditional route Brahmins have for bouncing back. But Brahmins have spent centuries arbitrating employment and honing their blaming-the-victim expertise. So maybe they’ll just morph into the transition industry in the (even more) destitute India their vision leaves in its wake.

(yes, I’m one too, and the choice of pronoun in this essay was self-evasion. What to do, no?)

Third Generation Sales.

Numbers are a notoriously relative factor within Indian politics, existing only to be massaged at every corner. The distinctive semantics of numbers is nowhere clearer than in the convenient slippage between lakhs and millions in the media’s perpetual quest for the more glamorous statistic. 5 million is, after all, a far more imposing figure than 50 lakhs, unless one has cultivated the esoteric skill of fluently flitting back and forth between numerical systems. In a country where “crorepati” and “millionaire” are practically synonymous, it’s safe to assume such literacy remains an elite skill even among the educated. Add to that the inevitable and instinctive association between millions and dollars, and a million is virtually guaranteed more eyeballs than a paltry 10 lakhs.

Conversely, when an effort is being made to downplay the magnitude of a certain value, the ingenious “hundreds of lakhs” are trotted out in defiance of mathematical logic. Corporate accounts, for instance, enumerate in the hundreds and even thousands of lakhs by default. But the big money still talks in crores, the Indian billion, seamlessly transiting between the hoi polloi and the haute. By this marker, the recent sale of 3G spectrum to telecom majors within India was almost too haute to touch.

The Government of India laughed its way to the Reserve Bank this past week, even as the Pakistani Government was busy ejecting its country out of the internet revolution. 3G spectrum, which enables the further diffusion of the web across India, sold for twice its estimated revenue, at a whopping 67,700-odd crores (677 billion rupees or 15 billion dollars, for those who prefer an alternate gloss). I should reiterate, before my compatriots get smug about our relative freedoms, that this diffusion is strictly an elite phenomenon, as anything that assumes more than barely-there literacy is bound to be. Besides, it’s easy to forget that internet access is expensive in the subcontinent, a reality that posher phones are not likely to address. The average internet monthly plan can (and does) feed entire families for weeks, if one neglects the attendant requirement of a computer/smart phone. My internet bill is half the (optimal) monthly minimum wage. Despite our burgeoning cyber-cafe culture, this disparity is not easily resolved. The web has been a home to many of us while remaining a myth to many more.

From, of course, xkcd

Sermons aside, when news of the final 3G deal broke on 19th May, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee was asked how the windfall was to be spent “for social interest” by a zealous (if naive) television journalist. The minister acted coy, if only because he realises the bounty is hardly about to reach those who most need it: India’s budget allocates a paltry 900 crores towards agricultural production, indisputably India’s poorest profession (after, possibly, day-labour, but that is not even considered a profession within India’s three pronged system of manufacturing, agriculture, and services). We are, they tell us, a perennially poor country. So poor we can’t afford to offset an obscene 16% inflation rate on basic food grains and commodities.

Well, anyway. Woe betide the less fortunate. It is, after all, what they are there for: to be used as lightning rods for all the squalor and misery we live amidst. To most of my peers, the sale of 3G spectrum deserves attention because it marks a transition in our paradigm for mobile information (the pun is intended, but forced: I am using mobile as an adjective, not a noun). It’s shift embodied by the iPad: once 3G settles down, the iPad will go from being a bewildering and largely useless gizmo to another splendid toy for the social climber’s stable. We are a young, voracious nation unwilling to be left out of the gadget wars, a fact telecom companies obviously respect enough to cough up such astonishing amounts. That is, I suppose, all for the better, if it ensures that I will never be bereft of wikipedia. And I can’t wait to be able to stream movies while I read, rock, surf, skype, and play video games on the train to heaven.

Where Green Ants Dream.

An Allegory for Niyamgiri and the Dongria Kondhs.

Green Ants can be interpreted at various levels- it can be constructed as a classic tale of the human and environmental costs of human greed, as a study of the encroaching tides of western rationality upon profoundly different ways of thought or as an indictment of a civilisation that respects no other. At its heart is a question: can you really consider yourself civilised if you cannot understand another person’s perspective, or at the very least respect it?

The story of green ants is a tale about corporate profit clashing with aboriginal beliefs. It is, in some ways, the story of advancing capitalism. Capitalism has always laid waste what came before it- whether it was the “red” Indian or the brown one, the yellow man or the black one. The white man, they say, was blind to his own history and imported his blindness to the colonies. This was done by subordinating, undermining and dividing cultures with the ruthlessness only the religion of profiteering can muster. How can it be otherwise? If all is fair where money is to be made, how easy it must be to poison societies where wealth is respected but not worshipped. Historically, imperial ambitions have always mixed well with religious fervour: the only difference in the modern world is that money is the new false god.

In Herzog’s movie, a mining company wants to excavate the holy ground of a group of Australian aborigines: they believe that the land that is to be mined is where the green ants, upon whom existence depends, dream; and upon that dream rests reality. On the face of it, it is irrational and absurd, but really is it any more absurd that ordering existence for the benefit of the unqualified zeal for profit? Than unrestrainedly exploiting resources, when the finiteness of them is beyond question? The “American dream” is today what constructs reality- and it is no more tangible (and some would argue possible) than the green ants’ dream. This film, to some extent, exposes it for the myth it is by deconstructing other myths that have sustained other cultures in their fight for survival.

The sharpest voice protesting capitalism today says that it steals from the poor to reward the rich. The latest recession, for instance, will hit aid to dependant Africa and the sundry poor of the world worse than anyone else, because they are the most expendable. It was caused because of the recklessness of big business and banks; yet they received a trillion dollars in stimulus packages. This is a story about how stealing from the poor, the unrepresented, the helpless, is the easiest and quickest crime in history and one that has always borne rich dividends. It is made easy by dismissing their qualms and their claims as irrational, backward, irrelevant and placing them against “real” truths, like the fact that the world needs to mine constantly to support a wasteful and extravagant system. It is made easy by the fact that the privileged of the world- economically, culturally, socially privileged- are so few and yet so powerful, and the only ones that have the resources to be able to stick together. And the fact that they disguise their minority so effectively by forcing the majority to fight amongst themselves for scraps. In fights for survival, metaphysical questions about the “system” and its validity are a luxury. It is only when one’s basic beliefs about existence are challenged that one begins to consider actually fighting, and by then it is often too late.

I would like to be Mercutio. Among his virtues, I admire above all his lightness, in a world full of brutality, his dreaming imagination- as the poet of Queen Mab- and at the same time his wisdom, as the voice of reason amid the fanatical hatreds of Capulets and Montagues. He sticks to the old code of chivalry at the price of his life perhaps just for the sake of style but he is a modern man, sceptical and ironic: a Don Quixote who knows very well what dreams are and what reality is, and he lives both with open eyes.

Italo Calvino, A Hermit in Paris.

My debt to Italo Calvino, my shameless plagiarising of his device, will be obvious to anyone who has read The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Over the years, I’ve borrowed many things from him, not least my stock response on dates and parties to nerd ice-breakers such as who is your favourite Shakespeare character? and Don’t you wish some sidekicks would kick their principals off-page? What’s good for Calvino is certainly good enough for me, despite (or perhaps because of) my own lack of opinion/knowledge when it comes to the Grand Bard of Almighty Lit.

I read Castle to write a college-application essay back in high school, and it was my silver lining across a shabby six months. I was supposed to read If on a winter’s night.., which I gave up speedily enough. Castle I could begin to fathom, and I read the book like a talisman across the exam-onslaught that is 12th standard. The only chemistry I remember is my attempted synthesis of the periodic table and sundry arcana.

It was much later I read his description of the calculation behind that collection; in Memos he calls it a “fantastic iconography”, his use of the tarot-imagery within it a “machine for multiplying narratives”. What struck me then was the dexterity of the text, how every story could fold into any other, creating new polarities, new points of tension, alternate realities.

In years since, I continue to drift to him when I need someone to remind me of literature’s redemptive power.

 I’ve dipped into most of his books, but the only ones I claim to understand are Castle and (hopefully) Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

I don’t think I’ll ever “finish” reading Calvino. I don’t think I ever want to.

The artist’s imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realising. What we experience by living is another world, answering to other forms of order and disorder. The layers of words that accumulate on the page, like the layers of paint on canvas, are yet another world, so infinite but more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation. The link between the three worlds is the indefinable spoken of by Balzac; or, rather, I would call it the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes. A writer- and I am speaking of a writer with infinite ambitions, like Balzac- carries out operations that involve the infinity of his imagination or the infinity of the contingency that may be attempted, or both, by means of the infinity of linguistic possibilities in writing.

“Visibility”, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino’s final book, is a catalogue of virtues he would like to see preserved in our millennium. It was intended to be a manual for future generations about the nature of writing: as a skill, a vocation, an enterprise. Hold steady to these questions, he tells us, keep faith in the maelstrom of your world; if these should die the world shall be a fell place indeed. He completed five of the planned six lectures: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity. Of the last, Consistency, we have only the hints he buried across the span of his literary career.  Calvino was a prolific writer, and fans will know that the concept of “masterpiece” is redundant when it comes to this master of the fable. Calvino’s gift is the vignette, his best work evokes snatches of illustrated tapestry. This is the Calvino of Italian Folktales and Cosmicomics: ironic, precise, detached. Calvino, in his fiction, is an avatar of the weaver Arachne, announced with a faint cackle and the crinkle of old paper in the background.

The virtues he launches upon are couched in multiple metaphors and matched with a million myths. Every nuance is awarded its own indelible image and its paradox. For the first of the lectures, Lightness, he evokes flight, earth giving way to sky. Pegasus, born of a dying gorgon’s blood; the poet Cavalcanti, vaulting on nimble legs over a tombstone. Later, in Exactitude, consider the perfect cohesion of crystal and the goddess Maat, who balances the weight of souls against herself. Calvino carves at  his virtues with a chisel attuned to shadowy detail: between the void and the universe, as he writes, lies only the balance of literature. If you must write, children, you must negotiate every contradictory impulse.

When praising the velocity of stories, the economy of emotion that makes them sing, how can you ignore the stories that stop time altogether? Which would you emphasise in the rhythm of your story: a single, perfect moment, or the bustle of a lifetime? Poetry, it is true, must strain towards precision, yet isn’t the imagination a pursuit of the infinite? How does one tap into the network of All Things? By submerging oneself into the galaxy of convergent causes that shape every outcome? By dissecting and dissembling until  every cause of every event is laid bare; each in-step, all leading toward the grand cosmic equation? Does the universe tend towards immense complexity or an elegant simplicity? Is existence a perfectly balanced crystal; or a wild, ravenous fire? Is writing the perpetual pursuit of things, a perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety, or silly defiance in the face of inevitability? The best way to defeat mortality might be to construct one’s own legend;  but its price is usually the one life we are all guaranteed.

Memos belongs to Hermes, sacred to writers, for he invented the alphabet itself, to enable the world to question itself.  This Calvino, always ‘astute, agile, adaptable’ is the one you will meet in his autobiography (A Hermit in Paris) and in his first novel (Path to the Spiders’ Nest) where he wrote about war and growing up in Fascist Italy. His essays on literature, and the elusive Invisible Cities, demonstrate yet another facet of his delicate imaginary. In these he is the spawn of Chronos, Titan of space-time, who swallowed his progeny and was made pregnant with the universe.  In Memos, which is perhaps the only book where the three worlds of Calvino’s imagination collide, Calvino references Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths and its multiple dimensions of time: present time, as experienced, century after century; willed time, the future as shaped by causation; multifold time, in which every present perforce forks out upon alternate destinies. It is an allusion that cuts to the hidden heart of Calvino’s own writing.

Like most of his contemporaries in mid-century Europe’s literati, Calvino was deeply concerned by the erosion of truth from the world, by postmodern philosophy’s willingness to fragment in the face of paradox. The 20^th century was, after all, a time of great paradox; in a few generations, the multiplicity of things was replaced by a multitude of them.  Everything was made contingent and disposable, and history rendered immune to evolution’s laws of creative selection. The unceasing flood- of information, of resources, of images- looked poised to fatally undermine the personal imagination, that true undecidable that fashions the artist. Without this capacity to dream of things that might have been and never were, would anyone retain the ability to wonder? About enchanted flutes and feathered ogres?  Calvino, who delved into myths calculated to endure and evolve, was alarmed by this new transience in human thought.  Memos was his plea for old literary values- levity, brevity, accuracy, diversity, memory- in a prefabricated, instantaneous world. Literature alone, Calvino insists, can create antibodies to fight the plague of language.

Six Poems for a Quarter Century

… in honour of guns, who taught me about most of them, and loves poetry with a deeper passion than I have ever managed. She will probably be spending her quarter century kicking back in office with google reader, so this is to make that transition slightly more entertaining. Absence is a gift, my love, but it is not the one I would most willingly give. At fifty, hopefully, we shall celebrate our birthdays whingeing in Kasauli; doing what we do best- the ample pursuit of drama- much to the consternation of our many and annoying progeny. Happy 25, my love. Seeing how I am usually several weeks and months late when I do these posts, I thought it best to begin the year’s birthdays jumping the gun, as it were. Ok, terrible pun.

Fintan Taite

(from the website of Fintan Taite. )

Memory

This slow spider dragging itself towards the light of the moon and that same moonlight, and you and I whispering in the gateway, whispering of eternal things, have we not already coincided?  Nietzsche

Consistency

Fame is my tawdry goal, and I despise

My heart for harbouring that crimson yearning-

For well I know that it will bring no burning

Beauty before the burning windows of my eyes

For I, unknown, am spun with mysteries

And all the firmament of stars, my awning-

And yet I have a love of parrot cries.

And cry o’ nights for fame, that spangled thing

And only on grey evening of clear thought

I know that there is nothing sold or bought

That alters with the selling or the buying

Yet now when I am painting, or am trying

To launch a frigate line of cargo’d thought

The foul red lips of Fame begin to sing.

—– Mervyn Peake

Multiplicity.

What made me supplement the endless series

of symbols with one more? Why add in vain

to the knotty skein always unraveling

another cause and effect, with not one gain?

–The Golem, Borges.

Flight

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

On the fore-finger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;

Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,

The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,

The traces of the smallest spider’s web,

The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,

Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,

Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,

Not so big as a round little worm

Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;

Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut

Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.

And in this state she gallops night by night

Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.

—- Mercutio’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet.

Velocity

You are not

the others, and you see your feet have brought

you to the centre of a maze their tread

has plotted.

Your matter is time, its unchecked and unreckoned

passing. You are each solitary second.

– Borges

Precision

Gunnar Thorgilsson

The memory of time

Is full of swords and ships

and the dust of empires

and the rumble of hexameters

and the high horses of war

and shouts and shakespeare

I want to recall that kiss, the kiss

you allowed me in Iceland.

— Borges

(An edited version appeared on mylaw.net. )

This is the creature there has never been.

They never knew it, and yet, nonetheless,

they loved the way it moved, its limber

neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.

Not there, because they loved it, it behaved

as though it were. They always left some space.

And in that clear unpeopled space they saved

it lightly reared its head, with scarce a trace

of not being there. They fed it, not with corn,

but only with the possibility

of being. And that was able to confer

such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.

Whitely it stole up to a maid- to be

within the silver mirror, and in her.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II-IV.

One of the great truths about a reading life is that timing matters. When you read something is almost as important as what you read.  Last year, I finally gave up my old standby of reading books in one sitting. What had once been an intense and freewheeling experience was now diffuse and overwhelming. This I justified in many ways: diversity, deadlines, multiple bibliographies, a brain that can never be satisfied with only one of anything. The truth was I simply couldn’t read the way I had all my life any more. It was no longer about the reading, it became about the writing.  To write, one must compress, paraphrase, and excerpt like a librarian on pills. This is as often exhausting and dull as it is exhilarating and refreshing, and books lost their hold upon me.  My nose for them was all nostril and no flair. Where once I had anticipated reading, I now planned it; and in the crossfire I abandoned my visceral love of a good story, the very reason I began this whole writing shebang in the first place.

This past month I have set about trying to recover some of that lost stardust. I read mountains of fiction, usually the most regulated commodity on my reading lists. As with any reader, fiction is my confectionary: curative in small doses, addictive in large. I watched even larger doses of television, to tide over days when the very sight of a book gave me the hives. I did freelance work that was more about a good pitch than a good tale.  I even went dancing. In all, I got me a life. And I detested it. The book that drew me back from the abyss (read in one sitting) was Reckless, by Cornelia Funke. A few weeks later, happily ensconced in my library, I am wondering why this little book managed what so many others could not.

Funke’s ‘Inkworld’ books were skilled at world-building and clumsy with plot; Reckless, weirdly, inverts this equation. The story races along, while the ‘mirror-world’ is drab and populated by stock fairytale types: witches, dwarves, unicorns, fairies, shape-shifters.  The dominant races- humans, and stone-people known as Goyls- are at war. This is the world that Jacob Reckless, our hero, ventures into at age 12. He slips between the worlds for another dozen years; a famous treasure-hunter in one, an absent brother in the other.  Finally, Jacob’s worlds collide, his brother is attacked by Goyls, and Reckless begins. If fur turns to skin, and skin to stone, what remains?

Reckless is an experiment in the tradition of Through the Looking Glass, though it sorely misses the wit and invention of Carroll’s classic. There are no March Hares and singing walruses to be met here, nor do the unicorns declare children to be fabulous monsters. Mirror-worlds have spawned into an enormous sub-genre in recent years, and Reckless is a solid (if not incandescent) sample of the trope. It served, anyhow, to draw me towards an ancient trail, and the road to sanity was littered with glittering mirrors.  Everywhere in my reading, I saw magical mirrors: Denethor’s Palantir; The Mirror of Erised; Lady Shalott, whose mirror crack’d from side to side; Despair of the Endless, locked in her hall of mirrors. Perseus, who turned Medusa’s gaze upon herself; Narcissus, who taught humanity to glance askance. There are enough of them scattered about to garner Diana Wynne Jones’ attention in her Tough Guide to Fantasy Land:

Mirrors are somewhat infrequent, despite the fact that glass is used for windows. Many of them are made of polished metal and are the property of rich people and Enchantresses. Where mirrors exist, of whatever material, they are not commonly used for combing hair. They will be employed for Prophecy or Farseeing, or, less frequently, as the way from our own world to start the Tour, or simply for travel. Glass mirrors are almost exclusively used as a device for spotting Vampires or other Enemies in disguise.

Archduke Wilhelm in his Gallery, Teniers.

Reckless is a novel woven out of fairytales, and Funke is a competent, if uneven, writer.  The tales themselves are familiar from the Grimm Brothers’, and adults seeking a new skew on old favourites are probably better off with an Angela Carter anthology or Sherri Tepper’s Beauty. Yet, even read as a novel for the Percy Jackson generation, Reckless reeks of squandered potential. This might improve in later novels, as Jacob ventures towards unchartered fairytales, from the wild reaches of Russia to the mystic isles of the Celts. I love The Once and Future King almost as much as Ms. Funke claims to, and the memory of T.H.White is enough to seduce me into yet another Arthur-myth. When I read Funke’s next book, however, I’ll re-read Gind, the other children’s novel woven out of fairytales I read in 2010.

Gind, by Harini Srinivasan, is a travelogue set against the backdrop of the Ramayana. It’s the story of a journey that three brave vanaras, two fierce (if dim) rakshasas, and one languid gandharva make across the length of the subcontinent. The only human in the story- the rotund sage Agastya- wanders about being either dire or obscure, and has become so powerful as to be immortal (and terribly imperious besides). The story begins when the gallant Gind and his father, Karuppan, set across India to escort a princess back to her homeland: all the ruckus kicked up by Ravana’s desire for Sita, we are told, has made for dozens of displaced and kidnapped princesses whilst the rakshasas figure out which princess it is their master wants.

The three vanaras begin their epic trudge from the deep south, winding their way across the teeming forests and rivers of India, at a time when everyone else is intent on going the other direction.  They reach the Himalayas in time to aid Hanuman in his quest for Sanjeevani, are rewarded with a quick flight to-and-from Lanka, and finally wind up in Tibet. Along the way, they meet Sugriva’s vanara armies and innumerable imaginary beings; pishachs and kinnaras, yetis and yalis. Unlike Funke’s turgid world, Gind fairly overflows with life, flora and fauna alike.  Gind is treasure trove, in short, for a collector of curious beasties, which is all one can truly ask of a good fairytale.  Mrs. Srinivisan has a fresh, funny take on an ancient story, a deft hand with description and nonsense verse, and her book shakes the cobwebs out of the Ramayana very effectively.  Gind is proof, in keeping with White’s legacy, that some stories stay evergreen simply because every generation rewrites them.

****

The above was originally published over at mylaw.net. In the spirit of full disclosure, let me add here that I grew up pilfering from Harini aunty’s bookshelves. I tried most desperately, thus, to err towards understatement. This proved impossible. All I can say in my defence is that Gind and I were fortuitously met. Finally, since I can’t let Carroll go past without purloining some verse, here is ‘The Barrister’s Dream’ from The Hunting of the Snark. Fans of the Agony in Eight Fits might want to skip ahead to mylaw’s updated Snark and celebrate India’s Republic Day on 26th Jan.

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.

But the Barrister, weary of proving in vain
That the Beaver`s lace-making was wrong,
Fell asleep, and in dreams saw the creature quite plain
That his fancy had dwelt on so long.

He dreamed that he stood in a shadowy Court,
Where the Snark, with a glass in its eye,
Dressed in gown, bands, and wig, was defending a pig
On the charge of deserting its sty.

The Witnesses proved, without error or flaw,
That the sty was deserted when found:
And the Judge kept explaining the state of the law
In a soft under-current of sound.

The indictment had never been clearly expressed,
And it seemed that the Snark had begun,
And had spoken three hours, before any one guessed
What the pig was supposed to have done.

The Jury had each formed a different view
(Long before the indictment was read),
And they all spoke at once, so that none of them knew
One word that the others had said.

“You must know —” said the Judge: but the Snark exclaimed “Fudge!”
That statute is obsolete quite!
Let me tell you, my friends, the whole question depends
On an ancient manorial right.

Henry Holiday

“In the matter of Treason the pig would appear
To have aided, but scarcely abetted:
While the charge of Insolvency fails, it is clear,
If you grant the plea `never indebted.`

“The fact of Desertion I will not dispute;
But its guilt, as I trust, is removed
(So far as related to the costs of this suit)
By the Alibi which has been proved.

“My poor client`s fate now depends on you votes.”
Here the speaker sat down in his place,
And directed the Judge to refer to his notes
And briefly to sum up the case.

But the Judge said he never had summed up before;
So the Snark undertook it instead,
And summed it so well that it came to far more
Than the Witnesses ever had said!

When the verdict was called for, the Jury declined,
As the word was so puzzling to spell;
But they ventured to hope that the Snark wouldn`t mind
Undertaking that duty as well.

So the Snark found the verdict, although, as it owned,
It was spent with the toils of the day:
When it said the word “GUILTY!” the Jury all groaned,
And some of them fainted away.

Then the Snark pronounced sentence, the Judge being quite
Too nervous to utter a word:
When it rose to its feet, there was silence like night,
And the fall of a pin might be heard.

“Transportation for life” was the sentence it gave,
“And *then* to be fined forty pound.”
The Jury all cheered, though the Judge said he feared
That the phrase was not legally sound.

But their wild exultation was suddenly checked
When the jailer informed them, with tears,
Such a sentence would have not the slightest effect,
As the pig had been dead for some years.

The Judge left the Court, looking deeply disgusted:
But the Snark, though a little aghast,
As the lawyer to whom the defense was entrusted,
Went bellowing on to the last.

Thus the Barrister dreamed, while the bellowing seemed
To grow every moment more clear:
Till he woke to the knell of a furious bell,
Which the Bellman rang close at his ear.

This birthday post is for someone I have shared my life with for the better part of four years. You might recognise him as the voice of reason in “Books, Boyfriends, and Bandits“, and it has often been claimed (and not only by him) that he is the saner of the two of us. Personally, I think a fruit fly is capable of more sense, but I can’t deny it was the paradox of pragmatic recklessness that drew us together in the first place. As Yeats once said, some people are bred to harder things than triumph. He was always one such, and it was a lucky day that law school threw us in each other’s paths.

That said, I have an aversion to mush, so shall we move right on to the poems part of this post?

First, a description…

Child on the Curbstone.

The headlights raced; the moon, death-faced,
Stared down on that golden river.
I saw through the smoke the scarlet cloak
Of a boy who could not shiver.

His father’s hand forced him to stand,
The traffic thundered slaughter;
One foot he thrust in the whirling dust
As it were running water.

As in a dream I saw the stream
Scatter in drops that glistened;
They flamed, they flashed, his brow they splashed,
And danger’s son was christened.

The portent passed; his fate was cast,
Sea-farer, desert-ranger.
Tearless I smiled on that fearless child
Dipping his foot in Danger.

— Elinor Wylie.

And now, a blessing, from the only prophet the boy is likely to accept.

May Gods’ blessing keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
May you stay forever young.

– Dylan.

I’ve been in television hibernation this past month, and it took the centenary of women’s day to draw me out. I’ve always been iffy on the subject of women’s day — why, precisely, are we celebrating half of humanity? I guess any publicity- look, we exist- is better than none.

Here I am. Watch me exult.

The excuse for my telly fest (which concluded last week) was my contribution to Popmatters’ Whedon retrospective, which will go up later this month on bogey. The inspiration for my little rant below was Darla, that first modern working girl.  For a feminist writer, Whedon is uniformly unkind in doling out her fate, though perhaps after 500 years of killing she was due some dying. Multiple times, even.  Darla, Angel’s sire,  is the vampire we meet in the first scene of Buffy. Dusted by Angel in season one, she is revived by Wolfram and Hart three years later, tormented in assorted ways (including one ill-fated pregnancy) until she finally kills herself. Amazing how often that happens in Angel: women sacrificing self for spawn. Though I guess Illyria is not, strictly speaking, spawn.

My title, for whedon-trivia, is borrowed off Cordy, from my favourite Angel episode. This would be Billy, in which Lilah kills her misogynist client. What can I say? Lilah’s got me on my knees. Remember when she gives Wesley The Divine Comedy before he goes all dark and they get all horny? In the original Tuscan, too, so classy and clever, which almost made me want to be a lawyer again.

Billy, though, is in close competition with Guise will be Guise, where Wesley impersonates Angel while the original and a fake swami have the following conversation:

Magev:  “You’re deeply ambivalent.”
Angel:  “Yeah, well, I am and I’m not.”
Magev:  “You need to get over her. – Okay, what does she [Darla] look like?”
Angel:  “She’s beautiful. – Small, blonde…”
Magev:  “Right.  So here’s what you do.  You go out and find yourself some small, blonde thing.  You bed her, you love her, you treat her like crap, you break her heart.  You and your inner demon will thank me, I promise.”

And, in spirit with these serendipitous times, a poem I found on Spaniard in the Works,

Chewing slowly,

Only after I’d eaten

My grandmother,

Mother,

Son-in-law,

Two brothers-in-law,

And father-in-law

(His big family included)

In that order,

And had for dessert

The town’s inhabitants,

Did I find, says Kabir,

The beloved that I’ve become

One with

In anticipation of the essay which overwhelmed my feb, I shall talk about prostitutes to bring in this women’s day. I make, in said essay, the point that it is no coincidence that all the ‘Aurelian’ vamps of the Buffyverse- Darla, Angelus, Dru, Spike- were sired prior to 1900, since they each embody aspects within the ‘greater darkness’ of modern thought. This bit below was written to explain what I meant by that, except, well, it went all tangential and was ultimately edited out. Basically, what I’m saying is this: I would’ve liked Angel a lot more had it been Darla.

The challenge the prostitute poses to civilisation is that she rests on the even more unstable category of “womanhood”. Ever since the Enlightenment, the world has been invented by and for certain men, with endlessly differentiated hierarchies women are largely left out of. We are not oppressed, persae, because we exist in every race, in every nation, in every ethnicity, at every class and juncture of social ordering. But we are irrelevant, and that is somehow worse. Capitalism was widely perceived such a roaring success for so long because it had a hidden army of slaves in women. The female body has been the site of every battle liberalism has ever fought: class, race, caste, tradition, religion. Are we sex objects? Man’s Rib? Mothers? Are we to be endured, understood, tolerated, indulged, disciplined? Men, you notice, simply have to be to count. Women have to jump hoops.

Prostitution cannot, in any liberal discourse, be a legitimate profession- no one can want to do it. People can want to be arms smugglers, nuclear scientists, President Bush, but there is no way women want to derive gain from pain (for sex is often pain, love or lust or whatever else it is). I am not suggesting that prostitution be reconstructed as this pleasurable profession for promising young women (though why not, since marriage is?)  merely that it is necessary to understand what makes it so unpleasant in polite company. It is the fact that the transaction involved- sex- is the least important thing about it. It is the realisation that women can sometimes set the terms of the bargain that is so dramatically inscribed upon the body of the prostitute.

In my opinion, that says a lot about the way it is “tackled” by the modern state. The dangerous thing about prostitution is the woman herself, not what she does. This has been imagined through various metaphors, infection and parasitism being the most persistent ones.  To bring her in front of power, you have to inoculate her or be expunged. The prostitute is at the bottom of both entrenched hierarchies in the modern world: crime and the state. She is a criminal, she lives on the street, an easy whipping post for both sides. She is the abused body that exists on the peripheries of normal life: and the police are just that shade worse than the pimp. If one takes this to its logical and imperial conclusion, the colonised prostitute is the real scum of the earth– she doesn’t even think she’s selling herself- for her, it’s an alleged tradition (not, of course, her profession). Now imagine the postcolonial whore, gape at the burdens she has to bear. She faces a nationalist tradition that wants her to bear the cross of “Indian Culture”, redeemed of its orientalisation so painstakingly by the nationalists and their emphasis on the sati savitri. She faces a liberal tradition that can barely bring itself to talk about her, except in the limited and disempowered role of social victim. She is intensely debated, defined, confined and regulated, so she won’t burst out of her very useful black hole and expose modernity and ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Indian-ness’ for the frauds they are.

Lindsey was right. The woman really does deserve her own show.

The only reason this post isn’t called this fuckin’ ‘verse! is cos I was scared of the search-spam said title would generate.

I have been burned, and I repent, whatever Gibbon might think.

Well, then. Last month the mylaw books column was all about women. It was an exercise I undertook with a fair measure of derision — and it was one I didn’t want to be ‘seen’ taking. It wasn’t camaraderie, or redressal, or anything so simple; it was, if anything, acknowledgment. Women aren’t talked about enough in our world, in any field, and four weeks of me writing about female writers is hardly about to change this.  The women I wrote about – Barbara Ehrenreich, Diana Wynne Jones, Zadie Smith- are all in their own way spectacular, but in no way representative. They aren’t the women I look to for guidance, or direction; they are merely the women my eye turned to this month. I felt it was important to make a statement, thus I did, and shall we leave it at that? I equivocated with Zadie, I gad about with Diana, I damn Don Draper with faint praise. The death of Diana Wynne Jones a week after I wrote about her makes an unhappy tribute out of that essay, much as I ardently wish she was still around spinning capital yarns. If I had known, I’d have made a grander task of it. The grim reaper stalks us all, and seems determined to steal away the best of us.

Richard Teschner

You can read it all over at mylaw. One of these blessed days, I am assured by editors and doyennes over at that illustrious website, information shall scuttle free. That will be the day I provide links. Till then, er, sign up? It’s a crash insight into what the legal community is thinking at any given moment, and surely y’all know us lawyers have our tentacles in bloody everything. Last week, pimping apart, I tackled my first graphic novel. Twas my first attempt at a negative review, something I’m ambivalent about. Books speak differently to each of us, and I don’t see the point of denigrating them when I’ve personally found them unappealing. I suspect I’ve been phenomenally bitchy to compensate for the terseness of the review; it was a tightrope between clarity and charity, and insincerity is a terrible vice in a writer. It’s not the best thing I’ve written, but this is my job, and I do it the best I can. This week, in expiation, I wrote about Micheal Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay, and all is gawking and gushing about genius.  In other news, my Whedon essay is published, and I am inordinately proud of it, so perhaps one of you could trash it and restore the karma of the universe.

This is the unedited version. It holds the ‘temperance’ card in my arcana, inspired as it was by Macaulay: virtue is vice in just temper.

The Big Bad Universe.

Bookplate; from the collection of Richard Sica

Joss Whedon’s great gift is his ability to extrapolate into the clear blue sky from mundane speculative fiction stereotypes: fairy tales, space travel, mind control. It was this uncanny momentum that lifted Dollhouse’s torpid first season into the sublime second season and a propelled Firefly into Serenity. The most consistent application of this talent was in the crafting of his ‘Big Bads’. Whedon might not have invented the seasonal arc on television, but he certainly made great strides towards perfecting it, and he did it largely by dancing through shadows.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon’s most influential cultural product, chronicles the rebellion of a champion. Buffy is the chosen one, strong enough to bear the weight of the world, until she finds a way to scatter and delegate her burden. The superhuman strength is an imposed fate, it is her destiny to be the slayer. Her true skill lies in an ability to forge friendships and build pragmatic alliances; with a little help from her friends, the Scoobies, she helps protect human civilization against the forces of chaos and anarchy. Yet, it is only by breaking ancient laws that she ultimately liberates herself, and the evidence is clear: sometimes you have to break the rules to preserve them. Whether this is an improvement remains to be seen. The season eight comics delve into the consequences of creating an army of slayers, but this essay is restricted to Whedon’s television.

A lot has been made of in fandom about Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Joseph Campbell’s work. A quick scan of Hero with a 1000 faces reveals his debt, and certainly the narrative structure of Buffy draws heavily upon the “monomyth” of the hero.  However, I think the emphasis on Campbell elides more important themes within Whedon’s television, and evades his central cultural point: that evil is an empirical question, not an epistemological one. Evil is as it does, not as it is conceived.

Evil is a behavior, not an ineffable Kantian category. Like all behavior, it is mutable and socially constructed. The hero and the devil in the Whedonverse are interdependent, and morality is born in the space between the within and the without.  One generation’s savior is another generation’s terrorist, ethical positions exist only in the eye of the beholder. The Initiative’s experimentation upon demons in Buffy is as repellent as the Alliance’s experiments on River in Firefly; the humans who trap demons to fight as gladiators are as surely villainous as the demons who trap humans for slave labour.

What makes the world run is neither good nor evil, but rather the balance, the paradox that neither has any meaning without the other. This paradox is at the crux of all Whedon’s television, whether inspired by the tech-heavy future or fantastic pasts. Like all speculative fiction, they are a comment about the here-and-now, not about the far future or a mystical alternate reality. It is true they deploy different modes and tropes; Buffy is epic and Angel tragic; Firefly is satirical and Dollhouse dystopic. But this is typical of Whedon’s holistic conception of human experience, as his prophet, Joseph Campbell, explains:

The happy ending of the fairytale, the myth, and the divine comedy is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the individual tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift in emphasis within the subject, it is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest — as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos is to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of forms and of our attachment to them; comedy the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible… [together] they constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged of the contagion of sin and death.. It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy

Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless.

– Gibbon.

Whedon makes his point in several layers, woven into the plot, the people, the philosophy of the Whedonverse, his “metaplay”, a theatre whose leading metaphors state that life is a dream and the world a stage. His people are not classical heroes- everyone’s emphatically self-conscious- but they are reluctant, if not ignorant, heroes. He takes the personal-identity crisis furtherest with Echo in Dollhouse, but the dilemma of alternate personalities exists early in Buffy.  For every Buffy there must be a Faith, for every Giles an Ethan Rayne. Doppelgangland, for a Willow fan, is the best thing about season three. Later in Buffy, Whedon focuses more sharply on the human self – that pesky soul – as a  source of  ethical conflict.

This is a theme that marks its appearance with that existential Frankenstein, Adam, in season four and finds an apotheosis in Dark Willow and the nerds by season six. In season five, which featured Whedon’s first god, the Grandiloquent Glorificus, the biggest betrayal of all was by her human alter-ego, Ben. Gods, even malignant, capricious gods, are no match for what humanity is willing to do to itself. With questions of the self squared away, Buffy moves on yet again in season seven, debating choice (Demon Anya) and free will (Spike).

With Spike, admittedly, the conflict muddies, for re-souled Spike is not recognizably different from de-souled Spike. Angel/us does us the favor of being schizophrenic – Angel is as ‘good’ as Angelus is ‘evil’ – especially in the early seasons of Buffy. No such switch exists for Spike. As demons go,  Spike was always capable of reckless love and relentless pragmatism. He concedes as much in the episode Lover’s Walk: “I might be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it”. He allies with Buffy to keep “Happy Meals with legs” kicking along in season two. Spike’s noblest moment isn’t season seven’s gibbering lunatic, nor is it his stint as champion in Angel. It occurs long before the acquisition of his soul, when he protects Dawn from Glory in season five of Buffy.

The fundamental question is — does having a soul mitigate attempted rape, even assuming lack of free will does mitigate murder?  It is true the Buffy-Spike sexual relationship is exploitative on both sides, which is perhaps more justified in a demon like Spike than in a hero like Buffy. She abuses his affection for her almost as badly as he attempts to abuse her. The bathroom-rape is a touchy subject for Spike fans. Does recognizing that both parties enjoyed hurting each other make the question of consent irrelevant? What makes the scene most jarring is that it is inconsistent with Spike as a person, rather than as a vampire. It is his pride, not his soul, that we presume will prevent such abhorrent behavior. Plenty of human men, after all, are capable of rape, souls or not. All this agency placed on the fragile soul in the Buffyverse makes me wonder: what makes humans so magnificent that it comes as part of our packaging, while demons must undergo terrific trials to attain it? There are as many valorous, compassionate demons as there are shiftless, sadistic humans, so why attach a metaphysics to destructive impulses?

Bookplate; from the collection of Richard Sica.

In Angel, human evil becomes the dominant motif, and the ranks of helpful demons greatly multiply. Doyle dies trying to prevent demon-on-demon genocide, and the worst evil in town is a bunch of corporate lawyers. In the industrial city, good and evil have never been considered distinct. The city and its sewers learned to coexist long ago; the apocalypse chugs comfortably along in the slums whilst the party proceeds apace uptown. Angel’s central theme is that there is no true innocence in this world, that life is a series of competing betrayals.  The entire cast of Angel is corruptible, and corrupted, over the five seasons. It is Angel, not Angelus, who tells Darla that sex with her was “perfect despair”, Angel that treats her so shabbily upon learning of her impossible pregnancy. It is Angel who sires Sam Lawson on the submarine, though he could probably have convinced Spike to do it.  It is Angel who agrees to take over the LA offices of Wolfram and Hart to protect his son (ineffectually, as it turns out).

Angel is all about atonement, redemption, remorse; it highlights the scar tissue of learning to live with oneself rather than with a cruel world. It is Angel, more than Buffy, that is the spiritual predecessor to all the soulful vamps and cylons that litter this decade’s popular culture. What Angel sought to do with tragedy and angst, Being Human’s Mitchell seeks to do with humor and perspective. With Mitchell, being a vampire is an extension of being human, rather than a perversion, something that Whedon’s tormented Angel could never get himself to believe.  Despite the fact that Mitchell’s bloodlust must be intolerably worse than Angel’s – Being Human’s vamps can’t satisfy their thirst with bottled blood – his overcoming of it isn’t portrayed to be a victory for human nobility, merely for human decency. This profound shift in the paradigm of the vampire, from someone intrinsically evil to someone battling addiction, would’ve been impossible without the dialogue about the nature of evil that Angel began in speculative television.

It’s as if the world today were a cinder of yesterday’s fire.

– Borges.

Whedon’s skillful shadowing goes past personality; even the institutions of good and evil in the Buffyverse are built to reflect one another: the Watchers’ Council here, Wolfram and Hart there. As Lucifer Morningstar once told Dream of the Endless, hell is heaven’s shadow, its dark reflection inverted upon the lake of reality. The clearest instance of this balance is the Ra’tet’, a collection of five entities responsible for the sun’s journey across the sky. Two are evil, two good, and one is human.

Consider, for a more dominant metaphor,  the two “families” we track through the Buffyverse: the Scoobies and the Order of Aurelius. If the Scoobies are all facets of what we consider “the greater good”- as the adjoining spell in Primeval indicates – the vampires are all embodiments of aspects within the greater darkness. The Aurelians symbolise the sum total of the “dangerous classes” – Darla (vice), Angelus (predation), Drusilla (madness), Spike (aggression) – the very impulse from which the fantastic was born.

Scholars of the genre draw its protohistory back to the 19^th century, arguing that the fantastic was founded upon schisms that the Industrial and French revolutions introduced into genteel European society.  “The dream of reason produces monsters” proclaimed the famous Goya painting. It was a genre beloved of the romantics, with their wild and varied crazes, and imbued with their inconstancy, flippancy, and eternal doubt. The Buffyverse, in its distinctive postmodern way – Buffy is very much a 20^th century slayer – draws heavily on this conflict between reason and romance that so animated earlier centuries. It is no co-incidence, in my opinion, that the chief vampires in the two series were all sired to prior to 1900; each represents a different ethos in the evolution of modern thought.

Whedon’s penchant for the long narrative makes Dollhouse and Firefly feel condensed, accelerated, unresolved; barely is the Big Picture revealed that the plot abruptly halts. This has great narrative benefits, but it makes analysis a wild walk down whimsy lane. The early episodes of Dollhouse notwithstanding, Whedon’s foray into science fiction matches the best of the Buffyverse.  Firefly is a satire on colonialism, a lesson about the price of hubris. The plot details the exploits of a band of pirates – let us call them the malcontents – that crew the spaceship Serenity. The backdrop is a throwback to 19^th century imperialism with its bandits, cowboys, and outlaws. Firefly is a story from back when the metropolis and the colonies were presumed to be mutually exclusive, each quarantined in their little bubble of privilege or squalor.

From bluefloppyhat’s spanking new tumblr avatar.

The movie Serenity is a twisted slayer origin myth. The shadow-men invested the first slayer with the heart of a demon through magic; the Alliance manufactures superheroes with technology. In both cases, the girl herself is considered little more than a weapon,  and the forces that foster her also propel evil. Demons are the living embodiment of the perils of magic, Reavers of the perils of technology.  Slayers presage monsters, and Serenity explores, appropriately, the origin of demons and heroes alike. Whedon is making the same point with the Reavers of Firefly/Serenity as he did with the power-that-was, Jasmine, in Angel: to pacify humanity is to enslave humanity.  Unmitigated ‘good’, in Whedon’s worlds, is as dangerous to humanity as unmitigated ‘evil’. Peace can be as brutal as war for those caught on the side that lost; for most, the war is never over. Angel Investigations and the malcontents fight, as champions of the under-represented, for their own survival as much as anyone else’s. Neither the Alliance’s Pax nor Jasmine’s World Peace has any place for rebels, and survival is a constant battle at blurred boundaries of humankind.

The Jasmine-arc in season four of Angel was much maligned, buried as it was beneath many episodes of Oedipal frenzy.  Deficient fathers and prodigal sons are a consistent feature of Angel; and disappointing parents are a feature of the Whedonverse generally.  Joyce Summers is the best parent in the universe, yet she manages to entirely overlook two years of slayage. Amy’s mother snatches away her youth, River Tam’s parents allow the government to experiment on their daughter. Whedon inverts this  tendency to devastating effect in Angel. ‘The father will kill the son’ reads the false prophecy, while it is the sons of Angel that are forever plotting to kill their parents. Another Angel staple is the implausible impregnation of Cordelia with an assortment of grisly demon-spawn. In season four, one such pregnancy comes to term after an apocalyptic comshuk with Angel’s son (I warned you). Cordy finally dies, swallowed whole by her fertility, and Jasmine is born.

Jasmine is an aspect of the powers-that-be, the purest force for ‘good’ in the Buffyverse. Like the First Evil, the powers prefer to work through intermediaries; oracles and seers opposing lawyers and preachers. Embodied, as with Jasmine, they are every bit as pompous and megalomaniacal as the First. The First has the legions of hell intent on destroying humanity, Jasmine has legions of ‘saved’ humans crusading against demon-kind. The opposition is predictably symmetrical: while the First Evil is unleashing itself  in Sunnydale, Jasmine and her minions are wreaking havoc in LA and driving demons to the Hellmouth. With Angel’s Jasmine, as with Serenity’s Miranda, the price of salvation is savagery; the relinquishing of nuance and judgment. They are both, in effect, anti-utopias.

Henry Clarke, illustrating Poe.

Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.

– Blake.

Dollhouse carries this skepticism forward into a full-fledged dystopia, which is where utopia meets tragedy. The people of Dollhouse begin slaves and shells, ensnared and enamored of the Big Bad. Some of them- Adele, Topher- are acquiescent harbingers of catastrophe, wholly immoral if somewhat benevolent. Perversely, they are thus the only people capable of averting the apocalypse, which is perhaps why they fail so remarkably.  Where powers-that-were and ancient evils fail, the modern corporation succeeds. Rossum’s Attic is the only part of the Whedonverse in which previous centuries fall away, for a dystopia, more than any other literary form, is born from the crucible of the present.

In “A Utopia of Fine Dust”, analyzing the futurists Fourier and Saint-Simon, Italo Calvino once argued that the trial by fire for utopias lies is the narrowing of their distance from reality. The more the imaginary world breaches into to our own, the more potent are the values it seeks to convey.  Utopia, he writes, is a city that cannot be founded by us, it can only found itself in us, build itself brick by brick in our ability to imagine it, to think it out to the ultimate degree.  It is a city that claims to inhabit us, not to be inhabited, thus making us possible inhabitants of a third city…a city born of the mutual impact of new conditionings, both inner and outer. In the 21^st century, utopias have mostly given way to dystopias, and the values to warnings, but the form itself remains unchanged. It elaborates worlds that, like utopias, ‘must be sought in the folds, in the shadowy places, in the countless involuntary effects that the most calculated system creates without being aware that perhaps its truth lies right there.‘ (“On Fourier”, The Literature Machine)

Dystopias are worlds where the best of intentions are married to the most cynical of outcomes. They are stories about the cost of a tailored humanity. The fundamental anxiety of Utopia, Jameson notes, is the fear of losing that familiar world in which all our vices and virtues are rooted (very much including the very longing for Utopia itself) in exchange for a world in which all these things and experiences- positive as well as negative- will have been obliterated. “My project, as Sartre puts it, “is a rendezvous I give myself on the other side of time, and my freedom is the fear of not finding myself there, and of not even wanting to find myself any longer”. In Brave New World, a new humanity was fabricated with hedonism and eugenics, in 1984 with repression and rage, in Dollhouse it is done with technology and desire. In each, the price was free will and individuality, in each the protagonists are subtly different from fellow drones and thus capable of transcending their ‘conditioning’. Slowly, out of the cohesion of Society, the individual is born and betrayed – John Savage, Winston Smith, Echo/Caroline – returning, in the end, right where they began. Savage goes back to the wild, Winston to his bleak acceptance, Echo to the Dollhouse. Unlike the others, Echo has a family to fall back upon, and thus survives to set the world right; how far and how well, we will never know.

In the last decade, dystopias have proliferated as a format in popular culture, spawning endless movies, television shows, books and videogames. Even that most cheery of movie formats- animation- explored dystopia in Wall-E, while television shows like V and books like The Hunger Games have made it a familiar feature of 2011‘s cultural landscape. It says a lot about the human condition that all we see everywhere are tragic futures, the pathetic mangling of the illusions of progress and human perfectibility. Yet, if one is to draw a line between Brave New World and our present deluge of dystopias, it must be done mindful of the circumstances they mediate. If Huxley wondered “Can humans become robots?” back in 1932, today we wonder, “Can robots become human?”. Our conclusions, nonetheless, need not differ from Huxley’s, who condemned mankind to either lunacy or insanity. Joss Whedon, less pessimistic, relies on his unconventional families- such as Adele’s Rebels in Dollhouse- to recover the world from its apocalypse. Are we likely to be as lucky?

also from bluefloppyhat's tumblr

All the art in this post that isn’t from bluefloppyhat was discovered on 50watts, which has some of the most spectacular illustrations I’ve found yet on the web. Expect to see much more from that carnival of wonders in upcoming posts.

in which bogey attends an awards function.

Happy May Day, all. This year, being a somewhat socialist/somewhat liberal, I decided to celebrate by recalling other ditherers in Indian history. Thus, the Romantic Revolutionary

 M.N. Roy straddles both ‘internal’ challenges to liberalism in the last century: socialism and nationalism. He used each to challenge the orthodoxies of the other, constructing an elegant (if neglected) analysis of self-determination movements along the way. Roy took upon himself the unenviable task of having faith but no obedience, and the price he paid for it was being right in obscurity.

No longer, etc. Bogey to the rescue!

In other news,

This post restores the original title of my Himal essay on Indian graphic novels, and was written to acknowledge a range of people. The good folk at mylaw allow me the freedom to chronicle my obsessions. One went from sniping about Kari to adoring Kavalier & Clay (Luna Moth is my inner superhero) to prophecies of interstitial living.

 I owe a great debt of thanks, further, to Bidisha Basu (of Leaping Windows) for putting me in touch with Alok Sharma. My gratitude to Alok is, I hope, well reflected in the essay, for he put me in touch with worlds I would had no hope of grasping without him. His documentary, once it comes out, looks to be a trove of info for comics nerds, especially those who would delve deeper than more Marvel this and DC that. I also owe Sarnath Banerjee, not so much because he helped my essay along- though he did- but because he redeemed my faith in human conversation.

Roberto Paez, illustrating Don Quixote

I was supposed to ask him questions about the ‘scene’ and industry finance and such, but our conversation soon drifted off into nerdy image/text deliberations and I abandoned all my Serious Relevant questions.

We discussed, in order: Luna Moth and the naming of Phantomville; psuedo-science; vicco vajradanti; Joe Sacco, ‘his abominable Gaza book’, and sexy locations in graphics journalism; empathy in writing; Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection; King Leopold of Belgium; Lewis Carroll; relative merits of the Scott Pilgrim and Ghostworld movies; Marshall McLuhan; the accurate pronunciation of Alain Robbet-Grillet and the mysterious tendency people have of acquiring accents after six hours at the Dubai airport.

 Things we didn’t talk about (but I wish we had) are Superman’s recent rhetoric about American foreign policy and the Swamp Thing cognition experiment. If you know you aren’t ‘alive’, but retain every memory of being human, what does that make you?  Do superheroes teach us a manichean ethic of malevolence/benevolence; do they ‘sublimate a culture of victimhood to manufacture one of enterprise and liberty’?  Do they foster a blind arrogance in human capacity? In human generosity? The American Dream is sold to us across millions of panels and genres: whether you read Archie or Flaming Arrow.  (Ok, so I made that last up. But she would be a neat superhero, non?).

For all the randomness of our conversation, it was not nearly as entertaining as the one the divine Kuzhali Manickavel had with a member of the Hyderabad Graphic Novel Project. They discuss kolams and fractals, speculate on furtive inspirations behind the Matrix trilogy, and decide that the classic song ‘If you come today’  is all about quantum indeterminacy.

VT Thomas, "Toms"

Is the title of an article I wrote for Global Comment. It was about Saas-Bahu soaps, and I tried to be amusing rather than acidic.  I might have failed.  Go judge for yourselves?  Yes, the title was inspired by a BB King song. I like him. A lot. No one’s perfect, so deal with it, ok?

It has been a while, though, since we had a pilfered poetry post on this here bogey, so I figured I would indulge us all and keep silent. A few words in credit: all the poetry that follows is from Annie Zaidi’s book Crush, which has helped me through many an unrequited time. I have imposed my own order on the verse, as I do each time I read this deft little book. I have read it backwards, forwards, sideways and with every random pattern I can generate and every single time it has found for me a story. I love that her language is simple and swift, that all the genius is in the way words are used, that if you don’t listen closely you might miss something until the next time you visit the lines. In the first verse below, for instance, how much she captures with such a basic pun!  But I am not a poetry critic and shall never attempt such a rarified art.  I love Crush almost more than I loved Known Turf. #‘nuffsaid

(More ‘Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’ illustrations at BibliOdyssey, here)

The Progress of a Fight.

Once,

he told me,

he wanted nothing from me.

Once,

I refused to believe him.

It was an evasion I was to find myself very grateful for.

Break Up #1, Three months in.

I’d forgive you all your loves

if only

you’d forgive me my lovelessness.

Doisneau, 'Stairway'

#2. Eight months

My page is already too crowded

With verses to people, forgotten.

But every bland afternoon, or so

I cram in another line

for a forgetful you.

#3. Two years.

Even if I run?

Even if I cling?

Even if I let out my smiles on lease?

Even then?

#4. Two years, five months.

Heat

smoke

stink

lint

And this ankle-biting, straggling chain

Of the free pursuit of happiness.

#5. Three years, eleven months.

Now, I think, I’ll hold you yet.

And now I think, you’ll let me go.

… at this stage I lost count; besides, ‘breaking up’ became an abstract concept.

Year Four.

Hush! Have you nothing for me

but the noise of language?

Your ego-

My ego-

Weapons of mass destruction, guarding against

the consummate species we could be.

Go,

rot

in your stubborn silence.

I’ll be damned

if I break mine

….Why we persist. I think.

To think, I thought my spontaneous desire

Would, someday,

spontaneously expire

Waterhouse, 'Echo and Narcissus'

I began keeping a diary when a cousin told me to write letters to myself, ‘so that you remember never to be such a dolt again’. It was sound advice, for all that it never worked, and I have never regretted taking it.  Besides, what in life matched the intensity of  ‘half agony, half hope’? Letters were clearly the path to love, and it was best to get practising.

So it was my first notebook was born.  In the twelve years since, my diary multiplied itself into 17 notebooks and countless folders, all sorted by subject and whimsy.  Last year, when I declared myself a writer, some of this copious chaos made its way online.  This year, I suspect it will unleash mayhem.  Hold on, etc. But not here. I have another blog! A “personal” one, heh. Welcome back, Nandini Ramachandran.

Back to bogey, I’m glad this blog has retained its low profile. I like that I can ramble on about boys and random reading and things on telly that get me in a tiff. I like that I haven’t had any scary spam and that my commenters only talk when they have stuff to say. People who’ve been with me from the beginning know that this blog’s journey has a long way to go.  I’ve barely scratched the surface of my arcana, and I promise to stumble slowly along heedless of the world’s spectacular lack of interest. Far in the future, a din-acolyte may even publish the selected ChaosBogey. That will be the day I turn over in my grave. Or, given my Hinduness, the day my ashes tremble violently with amusement as they swirl along the Ganga.

Well, anyway. Here be a poem. Courtesy a couple of Shelleys.

We rest;  a dream has power to poison sleep.

We rise; one wand’ring thought pollutes the day.

We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,

Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;

It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,

The path of its departure still is free.

Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;

Nought may endure but mutability!

This month, in said spirit,  I begin a few new experiments. My column on Bookslut- Mystic Myna- talks about classic prose. I started with Isaiah Berlin, that most tractable of philosophers. He was my first dip into the Russian Masters, and I’m quite seduced. Perhaps even enough to attempt Elif Batuman. Perhaps not. Berlin sent me off to Chekhov, with whom I began my other experiment, a reading blog on the website firstpost.in.

This project (hebdomad in my head) might become, if the stars align,  an all-week-round affair.  Tis currently at two posts a week.  The new blog will be as whimsical as bogey is (heh) organised, and was founded out of a selfish desire to escape bibliographies. I wanted a more diverse reading life, to be able to take risks, to wake up one morning and attempt Tolstoy. Or, I don’t know, an IL textbook.  And write about it. I shall hope to have enough craft to make this exciting, enough navigation to make it fruitful, and enough sense to make it feasible. On the whole, I expect to fail.

I’m currently at that heady, flexible stage of planning a writing project where anything’s game, so if anyone has ideas/advice/suggestions do write in. Any publishers who wish to send me (interesting) free books will be happily flogged; all friends who desire a touch of old fashioned nepotism are hereby granted the spotlight. We could even hold festivals!  I hope (and I am a fantasist) to grow hebdomad into a forum, a destination on the webs for the cyberati to gather and chatter. Do with it, dear reader, what you will.

Hebdomad, some of you will remember, is the blog I run on firstpost. It ostensibly belongs to one Ramachandran, and is doing reasonably well, thank you for asking. Neil Gaiman tweeted a post about his vampire sestina, which brought a skip to one’s step and a hum to one’s stats. He ignored, perhaps out of modesty, another fawning post about Sandman (his and E.T.A Hoffman’s). He was even gracious enough not to point out his sundry vampire-fic. Thankfully, comments folks were less restrained, and I’ve liblisted The Graveyard Book and reread ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ (I realised half way that I had it confused with ‘Lady of the House of Love’, which is either a great compliment or a terribly trite comparison.)

All the gaiman geekdom, anyway, earned me the gig. Hebdomad lives, and the most recent post remembered the spirit of Michael Kelly, whom I debated across the writing of Chaosbogey’s Politics last year. I spent a week with the blues ladies, mourning Janis and Billie Holiday. The parent, beloved reader, assures me I ‘broke’ the Indian slutwalk story by writing it up in the early days of twitter hysteria.  Most of bogeydom will agree (all you lonely victims of my assorted rambles) that fashion isn’t my forte. To write said trailblazer, thus, I prudently chose silence and dipped into Dorothy Sayers. A few days later, on 13th June, I celebrated her birthday, and was vastly entertained to find she shared it with Yeats. And so we are led into a poem.

Time drops in decay

like a candle burnt out

and the mountains and the woods

have their day, have their day

what one in the rout

of the fire-born moods

has fallen away?

Tisn’t as happy a poem as I’d have liked. (‘A Coat‘)  Fitting, though, given the fate of slutwalk, a debate from which I’ve finally walked away. Or so I declared on bookslut, which is as good as any virgin’s oath. There is, I will admit, a post waiting in the wings should the blessed event come to pass, failing which it will go up on July 25th. Then I’m done, if only because scores of women have said everything I need to say, and done so far better than I ever could. For a sampling, here is Annie Zaidi, or Kuzhali Manickavel, or Nisha Susan. Katha Pollitt wrote an eloquent (and global) love letter to the movement, giving it much needed Serious Feminist Cred. Also, since I quote from it so liberally in the ‘slut essay, this be the rest of Adrienne Rich’s poem:

The light of outrage is the light of history

springing upon us when we’re least prepared

thinking maybe a little glade of time

leaf thick and with clear water

is ours, promised us, for all we’ve hacked

and tracked our way through: to this:

What will it be? Your wish or mine? your

prayers or my wish then: that those we love

be well, whatever that means, to be well.

Outrage: who dare protection for their own

amid such unprotection? What kind of prayer

is that? To what kind of god? What kind of wish?

— Through Corralitos under Rolls of Cloud, IV.

That is that as far as news goes (oh wait, I moaned about my nose). This Saturday, I shall be doing a Peake centenary post, so do keep an eye out for some amusing verse.  Now, because this is bogey and I love you all so, I shall inflict upon you an ‘exclusive’ from the failed experiments of my writing life. The.. bile that follows was written in an aborted attempt at understanding economics as I was reading ”The Relentless Revolution”. It is also why the first draft of that review concluded with this immortal line: ‘it is the purpose of histories to differentiate between porsches and potatoes.’ So now you know.

 Learning Curves.

This week, while on holiday, I was presented with a difficult decision. I could go to the beach by train (and save some time). Or by bus (and save some money). I wound up, being me, buying train tickets and going by bus. My point in telling you this is to illustrate the exotic concept of “marginal utility”. If you listen in economics class, I discovered, you excel at life.  The founding premise of the market economy, after all, is the law of rational choice: that consumers across a fixed income-bracket will distribute their money amongst goods closely examined for said “marginal utility”. This is why we believe, almost as an article of faith, in the law of diminishing returns, and why demand-curves inevitably slope downward.

Two goods are equimarginal in microeconomics when their relative ‘price-utilities’ are equal; i.e. the utility a hypothetical consumer gains from each rupee she spends on either is equivalent. This is also called ‘perfect indifference’ in consumer theory.  I was, in my choice of conveyance, perfectly indifferent between money and time.  It is independent of the total quantity of money spent: a bus ticket might cost less but takes longer.  One porsche worth a crore of rupees may be functionally equivalent in this scheme of things to two million potatoes bought with that money.  According to the law of diminishing returns, the more potatoes you can buy, the less they will matter to you. That they might mean an awful lot to someone else is where economics shrugs and plots its next graph.

Chloé Poizat, ‘A mes yeux distendus’

Analogies of this sort are to be found everywhere in the optimistic field of legal economics. I once spent an entertaining afternoon pretending to be a rancher and conducting a variety of thought experiments to test the veracity of the “social norms” thesis in The Problem of Social Cost, Ronald Coase’s seminal attempt to marry transaction costs and the American midwest.  All ranchers, I concluded, will eat only beef and wear nothing but cowboy hats unless someone stages a market intervention. Call it interference if you must, but I bet they won’t be thinking about death-panels and tea bags in the throes of a communal cardiac arrest. This, in essence, is the dilemma with classical economics: all its relativities are conceptual, not personal. Like acceleration is doubly-differentiated distance, ‘demand’ is doubly-differentiated choice. It’s abstracted to the point where it ceases to matter, the purest expression of a mob mentality.

(A tribute in passing to those truncated lives:  they were splendidly convivial, not to mention naked, and them cowboys made my brain a very happy place that day. I felt genuine remorse in that genocide, however routinely one kills off  casts of millions whilst pondering thorny dilemmas. I drowned Atlantis in a cunning application of Bernoulli’s principle. I insisted Vesuvius keep my schedule in erupting; I counted how many bombs it would take to destroy every city in Asia. 200,317 bombs, by the way, to obliterate our continent, with no later an innovation than Fat Man and a  similar definition of ‘city’.  I’ve forgotten the one I used, though the number itself is seared into my brain)

My favourite illustration of  marginal utility, though, comes from the venerable Samuelson’s amusing aside about the usage of time at the advent of academic emergencies. Faced with  multiple exams and no knowledge, he asks, how would you allocate your time?  (why the perfectly rational would find themselves in such a precarious position remains a mystery). Would you be sensible and focus on a few, say history and politics, rather than hobnob haplessly between subjects? In Samuelson’s world, the clear thing to do is to concentrate; do that which will yield in the best use of your time, he proclaims. If you let stratospheric grades in those offset other disappointments, the average is likely to be higher than when you scrape through all.  Spoken, I can only say, like a man who has never actually failed an exam in his life. For the benefit of readers with similar good fortune, I must assert from experience that it doesn’t work that way. In my world, where failure was once a constant companion, the only thing to do is to declare self superhuman, read very little of any in a heroic quest for All, and rely ultimately on alchemy. But that would not be quite rational of me, would it?

Hullo, strangers.

It has been a long while, I know, and I owe you all explanations. The days, they have been bleak. Literary life was niggardly and personal life devastating, while the parents- backbone, strength, comfort- are losing faith. It’s not so easy, I find, to disappoint. It’s even worse to have terrible timing. Worst of all  is beginning something you have no skill at substantiating and no hope of concluding. I thought, almost a year ago now, that I could stand the perennial anticipation of unfinished business. It turns out delusions are made of sterner stuff than I am.

That was why I haven’t been around, in case anyone was wondering, for heartachey bogey is no fun to read. For once, I find myself agreeing with Thoreau. Tis appalling arrogance to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. That is also why this post will be uncharacteristically terse, for said misery shows no signs of relenting and I am as despondent as exhausted. I hope to wake up soon.

Waking Up

Daylight leaks in, and sluggishly I surface

from my own dreams into the common dream

and things assume again their proper places

and their accustomed shapes. Into this present

the Past intrudes, in all its dizzying range-

the centuries-old habit of migration

in birds and men, the armies in their legions

all fallen to the sword, and Rome and Carthage.

The trappings of the day also come back:

my voice, my face, my nervousness, my luck.

If only Death, that other waking-up,

could grant me a time free of all memory

of my own name and all that I have been!

If only morning meant oblivion!

For the last few months, the brightest spot of my day has been the bits of Borges I read for inspiration. My devotion to him evident from the few published essays I wrote: September’s bookslut column, the latest Hebdomad post, even a review of the werewolves-meet-Vikings novel Fenrir. 

Other things I wrote- the first draft of a novel, a book proposal, dozens of letters and timing projects- are best relegated to the basement of all existence. These past months have been my first tussle with the life I chose. Sentences were dragged out kicking and screaming, each more misshapen than the last; other people’s words served to intimidate and oppress mine. Tis more frustrating, and feels a good deal more final, than any of my struggles with isolation or penury.

The only consistency in my life has been Hebdomad, and there is a short listing of things that appeared after my last bogey post at the end of this one. The first of them, for a bitter memory, was written after the Bombay blasts in July, and it is perhaps fitting that this post go up the day after the bombs reached the Delhi HC.  That court came within a inch of being my own stomping ground two years ago, and the earthquake in the evening has me wondering about all the 2012 natter. Maybe the world will end. That could be bogey-worthy, right?

I collected poems for that post, my point was, and this one didn’t make the final draft.  For what solace she may offer, Adrienne Rich:

Yet when the tale is told of wind

That lifted dust and drove behind

To scoop the valleys from their sleep

And bury landscapes inches deep.

Till there must follow years of rain

Before the earth could breathe again-

Or when the appetite of fire

Blazes beyond control and higher,

Then sinks into the sullen waste

Of what, devouring, it effaced,

And thinly in my palm I hold

The dust of ash grown wan and cold,

I know what element I chose,

To build such anger, mould such woes.

– “he that remembereth we are dust”

It has been a joy, it has, even when it was an endurance test, to know that my words never entirely escape me. It might be no fun writing a weekly blog from the depths of dismay, but it is satisfying to know you can. But enough already about my life. Below is the promised list of posts that appeared after Mervyn Peake’s birthday. Since then, the frequency of my blog has come down to one a week.  The list is thus more meagre and more ‘timely’ than earlier Hebdomad tidings. I’m not sure I like this format, and I shall probably change it up again by the next bogey post.

Watching the Potter movie.

“Maggie Smith is so stunning here that she redeems every Potter movie ever made. When Prof McGonagall preens “I always wanted to try that spell” during the attack at Hogwarts, it makes you want to devote your life to perfecting transfiguration (and a Scottish brogue).”

The death of  Amy Winehouse

“She was a valuable companion through the raging hangover of the next morning. Your night, however irresponsible and insane, will always pale in comparison to hers. In one song, she deplores her ‘alcoholic logic’: last night tips into my mind through the puddle in my head.

In another, ‘Addicted’ a homage to Janis Joplin’s ‘Mary Jane’, she snarls at her friends: don’t make no difference if I end up alone.”

On Capital Punishment:

“The death penalty is probably the most divisive subject within criminal law. Of all the theories of criminal jurisprudence — punishment as reform, as redressal, as deterrence — it is the notion of punishment as vengeance that is the most famous and (arguably) the most dated…As Mahatma Gandhi once noted, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Hugo Steiner-Prag, "Der Golem"

Midnight’s Twins, Faiz and Tagore.

But, unheard, it still kept crying out to be heard.
No one had the time to listen, no one the desire,
it kept crying out, this orphan blood,
but there was no witness. No case was filed.
From the beginning this blood was nourished by dust.
Then it turned to ashes, left no trace, became food for dust.

– Faiz, trans. by Agha Shahid Ali.

Those who have any faith in Man cannot but fervently hope that the tyranny of the Nation will not be restored to all its former teeth and claws, to its far reaching iron arms and immense inner cavity, all stomach and no heart; that man will have his new birth, in the freedom of his individuality, from the enveloping vagueness of abstraction.. 

— Tagore, and I see why Borges calls him ‘incorrigibly imprecise’, atleast in English. I discovered, while writing this post, that he wrote a play featuring another Nandini, and that there is a Bengali song in which yet another din is harassed/flattered depending on how seriously you take eve-teasing.

A woman’s history of the world (or why Delhi needs a slutwalk), a rare Hebdomad post that comes close to bogey’s, heh, chaos.

The moon shared in her daughters’ downfall.

Left far behind were the times when the Egyptian moon would devour the sun at dusk and sire him at dawn, when the Irish moon kept the sun in line by threatening him with perpetual night, and when the kings of Greece and Crete would dress up as queens, with taffeta tits, and in sacred ceremonies would unfurl the moon as their standard.

In the Yucatán, the moon and sun lived in matrimony. When they fought, it caused an eclipse. The moon was lady of the seas and the springs, and goddess of the earth. With the passing of time, she lost her powers. Now she only reigns over birth and illness.

On the coasts of Peru, we can date her humiliation. Shortly before the Spanish invasion, in the year 1463, the moon of the Chimú kingdom, the most powerful of moons, surrendered to the army of the Incan sun.

– Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors

A whiff of the old Hebdomad, “Alternate Songs” , in which I read Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet in between books filled with GRRM’s overwhelming misogyny: “[Pierce’s] boys, it must be said, are delicious: regal Jon, with his sapphire eyes and midnight hair; crooked George, all wit and wickedness. Best of all is [Alanna’s] dance with the Shang Dragon, a conquest worthy of any hero.”

Willy Ronis, Devant Chez-Mestre, 1947.

And, finally, from “Cinders”, a pilfered poetry post that migrated from bogey to hebdomad to plus, some larkin’.

Ugly Sister

I will climb thirty steps to my room,

Lie on my bed;

Let the music, the violin, cornet and drum

Drowse from my head.

Since I was not bewitched in adolescence

And brought to love,

I will attend to the trees and their gracious silence,

To winds that move.

So maybe that wasn’t so terse. I remain (heh) hot blooded, or perhaps I am, well, cold as ice. One must see things through to their logical conclusion. If you want me, I’m yours in languid loquacity.