Torches!

Ecstatic people steal the thunder from the Japanese girl. Blind thunder it was. Blinding. Not lightning. What did you say sis? Did you really say it? C'mon. C'mon. You! Run it now. Don't stay a moment longer. They are a'coming. Sis home! Run home now. Forgive me. There's nothing mother can do now. She's a flame now. Yaaahhh, the torches! If you hear my voice no more, take care still. May he save you this night.

Joyce Ape Bharat

Begin, let us, by blogging on blogging, or blog we never will. Cut straight to the heart of the matter, let us, or cut we never will or never will begin. Commentary:I had written some stuff. The comp got virussed and the stuff eaten up. So begin we must anew. Regret not the loss, let us, or create, we will not, anything anew. It is late night. And there has been time lost unquantifiable. Tell you strictly only what needs to be told, let us, coz there's no more time to be lost, unquantifiable. Commentary, paraphrase et al: Things are cyclical and commonplace. The night comes before time. Curse you. (I mean I got overpowered by sleep, to atone the sins of the day, as I was writing this line here. Unsweet caesura as I was waxing, poetical) To begin anew, anew, anew....ah! how lovely the sea waves spread out anigh, anigh, anigh (oh happy metaphor, you warm my cockles ennew, ennew, ennew...) Consolation, justification, and a defense: Crystallization and dissolution, a choice. And obscurantism, a sublimation. Nay, not an ossification (stonization etc), but a non-being of formlessness. A tendenz not ingenerate or unacquired, but not uninstinct either. But resisted, it must be. Tire not, let us, or stinting in our effort be. Patience unbounded, agape immoderate I demand. Nay, we demand. Thou do more than I. (By the bye, Mahatma, a busybee tale I remember, but there no place here be for it to be, coz our Tale all Arjuna the Great Archer and his Fish be. Thou await your moment mahatma, as I await mine.) Our tale begins at the flood-womb, the torrent-bed of the rib-cage. The Muladhar. (Required a scrapbook for busy-bee tales lest they be sparked out unrevived forgiten, Mahatma. Say thou, "What O' cosmosie, even Mahatma has no place in your tale?" I rejoin,"It be a tale, no driftwood." If unmemory is the price to say, so it be.) Before and as the seawaves drift afar, afar, afar, our tale must begin at Muladhar, O Mahatma. Like a fistful of sand not gripped be, there's no steering be for driftwood flotsam, unflotsam. Before the noon-tide the Muladhar must quickened be. O'God Satyanarayan, thy blessing beseech-ed be! Things are cyclical and commonplace. Be busy with business noble, O Mahatma, thy advisement be. Things cyclical and commonplace, the universe a neurosis be. And the noble path cannot short-circuited be. A prayer and a gift, we supplicate you. No conceit this, figurative and moral. Unapt and unaesthetic accidents among the jetsam and flotsam. A fistful of sand, a man and his shadow, things and words, poetry and idea be. If only a thing begun, could indeed begin. Or not be formless, even if it only the shadow of a shadow in a cave be. Whereto herefrom ? Aporia so soon? Gift me Satyanarayan the rock of eye! Concealment, Maya, bedazzlement away with thee! Scales from the eyes, shroud from the body, fall! Obvelation! Make way for Manifestation! Revelation! Necessities of mortal being call away the stargazers too. Mortal Beings? Get away with this incongruity, you must let me. More than an incongruity you must not accuse it of being, else the aporia, the cavernous earth-world, gapes again at me with its gob agape. Agape Eros Eros Agape not, ought not to be. Thou reckless lord of earth, world, the earth-world, being immortal Immortal being, how blissful thou be! May man not forgive thee, but thou 'O Incomprehensible, All-Forgiving, thou ought to have forgiven him ante-creation. The creature himself rails,"How ill-conceived a being thou has begotten!"World-ling, world-man, earth-man, homo, pisser, naked ape, endemann, biped, son of man, mother's child, piece of flesh, deathling, fragment, Adamite, mortal, terrestrial, personeity, tellurian, earthly, anybody, snooks, moosh, poppet, flipper, thou, I, earthite. Arthaat, i.e. philologically speaking, post-lapsarian, chronlogically stating thelogistically. To Sahasradhara, through unpassable geological crusts, we odyssey, we bessech thee O' Suryanarayana! Come, set to work again, let us. And again and again with agape unquantifiable, dimensionless, hugeuos, immensible. In the dimness of being, the dragoness borne the child of mist, the unman. Barehanded snatch the burning log from fire, let us, assoil the soiled shrouding. The wayfarer so bedimmed be, O' Satyanarayana, towards Sahasradhara, let the tread well lit be. The world without end traversed thee in three steps O' Suryanarayana! The two little sisters aborned of the orphaned, widowed mother, we saw the beloved little house, O' Satyanarayana. Lost his courage Arjuna the Archer Great, the slippery eel vanished into the oceans vast O' Satyanarayana. The two little sisters and Arjuna knew naught of each other, O' Satyanarayana. The two little sisters in Nabokov's hellish island, O' Satyanarana. Living on time bought from thee, O' Merciful Satyanarayana. Thy rock of eye Krishna salved Arjun's wounded light O' Narayana. But blinded the two little ones, the glitter of the tussle of your world, O' Narayana, as they crawled down craggy rocks to Mother River, O' Narayana. The little one tugged at the hem of her sister's dirty frock, O' Narayana. And the tussle of thy world glittered as mother beat her guts on the rocks of Mother River, O' Narayana. The sisters shed salt tears down the tongue into the river into oceans vast, O' Narayana. World without end Thee traversed in steps thrice, O' Narayana. Lovely were the tresses of mother, of mother river, O'Narayana. Strangers to each other were Arjun and the sisters, O' Narayana. And the tresses and tears both mingled into the rivers and Oceans, O' Narayana. Mother and daughters mourned by the Mother River, O' Narayana. Love and pain made love to each other, O'Narayana. For once the tussle lilted to the world Ears, O' Narayana. The battle bold ensued for love of frightened souls, O' Narayana. Mother River reddened of horror old, O' Narayana. The girls arfight screamed at night of terror untold, Narayana. Ha our tale, woe our tale must not remain untold Narayana. For she our mother will curse our soul If the corpse unburied remained O'Narayana. Madhuri what price thy music Asks the Shudra old O' Narayana. For love of blood O'beloved mine Burst the cloud-vault of manna O' Narayana. With grinding teeth thou must not make music The creation symphony gala For labour of love are man and all beings O'Narayana. A game of dice was forbidden thee For one false throw has unloosed chaos sheer And there's no reining the carnage O'Narayana. Man after man unblooded And the last grain of patience strained out Cease quenching thy unseemly curiosity with man's blood. O Maker thy creatures screeching shrieking Make a din of the world Caco-caco, phoney, phoney Blood splatterd on the floor and wall. It does not behove thee O Narayana Make truce and cease now Washing the laundry of gods in our unholy blood. Drop a doleful tear for the laundress mother Beating her guts on the river bank The children be screaming their own little guts But the river of blood would cease not reddening The drink of life from the womb of holy River Mother. We love and revere thee O Holy Father Cast a glance down at our wormy world Look not askance or turn in disgust For who else we be but the children of thy loins father. The world was good that thou created Father Wherefore these oceans red? A desiccated tear into the overflown lotus of our heart Drop O' quivering flame of our eyes Satyanarayana. Be darned the maze of thy spider yarn Liberties countless shall we take With the last strand until man can count. There be no prayerless drought that beset the hearts down here It be a matter contrary if we state it thus We be drowning and dying now of overlove. Love thy god, love for thy god Kill and be killed O' crusader man. Until the victor, the last man standing Has lost all thou had gifted him Narayana. In the bounty of thy heart The red till this day Hastinapur Stood naked, orphaned, widowed Narayana. Thy church widowed, thy man naked propose a toast let us in the name of the glorious Rended lilting throats of the children and women Narayana. Women?-Mothers, sisters, wives The holiest of holy And reward of the sacred world of heroes war-scarred. Draupadi, Sita, and Mary Magdalen The skull too small to lodge the soul The echoes love lilting dying eternal Lullabying tales of terror sublime Julia Juliet July eternal O Lingaless tongue dripping red mother. And many as was the man acreate She sprang from the loins and rib O'Mother. Loving alot the lion her lord Of den, domain, and Eden O'Mother Of ken, lane, plain, rain, Of mighty main and mane majestic O Mother Drooling, saliving in lanes and loins Lorn with lust loveless unbloodless Athirst unsalted liquidless for For lioness, the unantlered indiffrerented undifferentiated Mother Acreate divided the halved unsalved wounded awandered Mother Bodalisqued revered prostituted prostrated Strumpeted harlotized forwhored bejaded Brothelled bordelled estranged drivelled Commoned womaned walked paganed polecatted Ventured frigatted nightshaded nighttraded Flingdusted pleasured masqued vizarded Meretricianned marmalade-madammed Flingstinked shetraded dollcommonned Whetstonewhored Man-leeched mermaided nocturnalled bulkered strummed Visormasked highflyered mother. Marketdamed barberchaired barberchaired Girl-about-towned Mother. Screwed hacked loosevirtued trugmallioned Womantowned townmissed kennelnymphed loosefished Mother. paphianed cythereaned cyprianed Recievergeneralled dollymopped Mother. Hookered horsebreakered flaggered rollered Scuppered scrubbered Our Lady of Evening and Night Mother. Prosteyed prostied prosticuittoed Prossied prozzied prossed proed prodded probed poul-de-luxed The prince's palace of pleasure publicsectorized Mother.

The Star of Redemption

We shall know death

Not in good tim e

No time

We shall not deny death

Then

When it is no time

Good time

For the All

It is Nothing

Dialectically conditioned

Universal

And all

In a place past time

Manuscripts

Begin, let us, by blogging on blogging, or blog we never will. Cut straight to the heart of the matter, let us, or cut we never will or never will begin. Commentary:I had written some stuff. The comp got virussed and the stuff eaten up. So begin we must anew. Regret not the loss, let us, or create, we will not, anything anew. It is late night. And there has been time lost unquantifiable. Tell you strictly only what needs to be told, let us, coz there's no more time to be lost, unquantifiable. Commentary, paraphrase et al: Things are cyclical and commonplace. The night comes before time. Curse you. (I mean I got overpowered by sleep, to atone the sins of the day, as I was writing this line here. Unsweet caesura as I was waxing, poetical) To begin anew, anew, anew....ah! how lovely the sea waves spread out anigh, anigh, anigh (oh happy metaphor, you warm my cockles ennew, ennew, ennew...) Consolation, justification, and a defense: Crystallization and dissolution, a choice. And obscurantism, a sublimation. Nay, not an ossification (stonization etc), but a non-being of formlessness. A tendenz not ingenerate or unacquired, but not uninstinct either. But resisted, it must be. Tire not, let us, or stinting in our effort be. Patience unbounded, agape immoderate I demand. Nay, we demand. Thou do more than I. (By the bye, Mahatma, a busybee tale I remember, but there no place here be for it to be, coz our Tale all Arjuna the Great Archer and his Fish be. Thou await your moment mahatma, as I await mine.) Our tale begins at the flood-womb, the torrent-bed of the rib-cage. The Muladhar. (Required a scrapbook for busy-bee tales lest they be sparked out unrevived forgiten, Mahatma. Say thou, "What O' cosmosie, even Mahatma has no place in your tale?" I rejoin,"It be a tale, no driftwood." If unmemory is the price to say, so it be.) Before and as the seawaves drift afar, afar, afar, our tale must begin at Muladhar, O Mahatma. Like a fistful of sand not gripped be, there's no steering be for driftwood flotsam, unflotsam. Before the noon-tide the Muladhar must quickened be. O'God Satyanarayan, thy blessing beseech-ed be! Things are cyclical and commonplace. Be busy with business noble, O Mahatma, thy advisement be. Things cyclical and commonplace, the universe a neurosis be. And the noble path cannot short-circuited be. A prayer and a gift, we supplicate you. No conceit this, figurative and moral. Unapt and unaesthetic accidents among the jetsam and flotsam. A fistful of sand, a man and his shadow, things and words, poetry and idea be. If only a thing begun, could indeed begin. Or not be formless, even if it only the shadow of a shadow in a cave be. Whereto herefrom ? Aporia so soon? Gift me Satyanarayan the rock of eye! Concealment, Maya, bedazzlement away with thee! Scales from the eyes, shroud from the body, fall! Obvelation! Make way for Manifestation! Revelation! Necessities of mortal being call away the stargazers too. Mortal Beings? Get away with this incongruity, you must let me. More than an incongruity you must not accuse it of being, else the aporia, the cavernous earth-world, gapes again at me with its gob agape. Agape Eros Eros Agape not, ought not to be. Thou reckless lord of earth, world, the earth-world, being immortal Immortal being, how blissful thou be! May man not forgive thee, but thou 'O Incomprehensible, All-Forgiving, thou ought to have forgiven him ante-creation. The creature himself rails,"How ill-conceived a being thou has begotten!"World-ling, world-man, earth-man, homo, pisser, naked ape, endemann, biped, son of man, mother's child, piece of flesh, deathling, fragment, Adamite, mortal, terrestrial, personeity, tellurian, earthly, anybody, snooks, moosh, poppet, flipper, thou, I, earthite. Arthaat, i.e. philologically speaking, post-lapsarian, chronlogically stating thelogistically. To Sahasradhara, through unpassable geological crusts, we odyssey, we bessech thee O' Suryanarayana! Come, set to work again, let us. And again and again with agape unquantifiable, dimensionless, hugeuos, immensible. In the dimness of being, the dragoness borne the child of mist, the unman. Barehanded snatch the burning log from fire, let us, assoil the soiled shrouding. The wayfarer so bedimmed be, O' Satyanarayana, towards Sahasradhara, let the tread well lit be. The world without end traversed thee in three steps O' Suryanarayana! The two little sisters aborned of the orphaned, widowed mother, we saw the beloved little house, O' Satyanarayana. Lost his courage Arjuna the Archer Great, the slippery eel vanished into the oceans vast O' Satyanarayana. The two little sisters and Arjuna knew naught of each other, O' Satyanarayana. The two little sisters in Nabokov's hellish island, O' Satyanarana. Living on time bought from thee, O' Merciful Satyanarayana. Thy rock of eye Krishna salved Arjun's wounded light O' Narayana. But blinded the two little ones, the glitter of the tussle of your world, O' Narayana, as they crawled down craggy rocks to Mother River, O' Narayana. The little one tugged at the hem of her sister's dirty frock, O' Narayana. And the tussle of thy world glittered as mother beat her guts on the rocks of Mother River, O' Narayana. The sisters shed salt tears down the tongue into the river into oceans vast, O' Narayana. World without end Thee traversed in steps thrice, O' Narayana. Lovely were the tresses of mother, of mother river, O'Narayana. Strangers to each other were Arjun and the sisters, O' Narayana. And the tresses and tears both mingled into the rivers and Oceans, O' Narayana. Mother and daughters mourned by the Mother River, O' Narayana. Love and pain made love to each other, O'Narayana. For once the tussle lilted to the world Ears, O' Narayana. The battle bold ensued for love of frightened souls, O' Narayana. Mother River reddened of horror old, O' Narayana. The girls arfight screamed at night of terror untold, Narayana. Ha our tale, woe our tale must not remain untold Narayana. For she our mother will curse our soul If the corpse unburied remained O'Narayana. Madhuri what price thy music Asks the Shudra old O' Narayana. For love of blood O'beloved mine Burst the cloud-vault of manna O' Narayana. With grinding teeth thou must not make music The creation symphony gala For labour of love are man and all beings O'Narayana. A game of dice was forbidden thee For one false throw has unloosed chaos sheer And there's no reining the carnage O'Narayana. Man after man unblooded And the last grain of patience strained out Cease quenching thy unseemly curiosity with man's blood. O Maker thy creatures screeching shrieking Make a din of the world Caco-caco, phoney, phoney Blood splatterd on the floor and wall. It does not behove thee O Narayana Make truce and cease now Washing the laundry of gods in our unholy blood. Drop a doleful tear for the laundress mother Beating her guts on the river bank The children be screaming their own little guts But the river of blood would cease not reddening The drink of life from the womb of holy River Mother. We love and revere thee O Holy Father Cast a glance down at our wormy world Look not askance or turn in disgust For who else we be but the children of thy loins father. The world was good that thou created Father Wherefore these oceans red? A desiccated tear into the overflown lotus of our heart Drop O' quivering flame of our eyes Satyanarayana. Be darned the maze of thy spider yarn Liberties countless shall we take With the last strand until man can count. There be no prayerless drought that beset the hearts down here It be a matter contrary if we state it thus We be drowning and dying now of overlove. Love thy god, love for thy god Kill and be killed O' crusader man. Until the victor, the last man standing Has lost all thou had gifted him Narayana. In the bounty of thy heart The red till this day Hastinapur Stood naked, orphaned, widowed Narayana. Thy church widowed, thy man naked propose a toast let us in the name of the glorious Rended lilting throats of the children and women Narayana. Women?-Mothers, sisters, wives The holiest of holy And reward of the sacred world of heroes war-scarred. Draupadi, Sita, and Mary Magdalen The skull too small to lodge the soul The echoes love lilting dying eternal Lullabying tales of terror sublime Julia Juliet July eternal O Lingaless tongue dripping red mother. And many as was the man acreate She sprang from the loins and rib O'Mother. Loving alot the lion her lord of harem Of den, domain, and Eden O'Mother Of ken, lane, plain, rain, Of mighty main and mane majestic O Mother Drooling, saliving in lanes and loins Lorn with lust loveless unbloodless Athirst unsalted liquidless for For lioness, the unantlered indiffrerented undifferentiated Mother Acreate divided the halved unsalved wounded awandered Mother Bodalisqued revered prostituted prostrated Strumpeted harlotized forwhored bejaded Brothelled bordelled estranged drivelled Commoned womaned walked paganed polecatted Ventured frigatted nightshaded nighttraded Flingdusted pleasured masqued vizarded Meretricianned marmalade-madammed Flingstinked shetraded dollcommonned Whetstonewhored Man-leeched mermaided nocturnalled bulkered strummed Visormasked highflyered mother. Marketdamed barberchaired barberchaired Girl-about-towned Mother. Screwed hacked loosevirtued trugmallioned Womantowned townmissed kennelnymphed loosefished Mother. paphianed cythereaned cyprianed Recievergeneralled dollymopped Mother. Hookered horsebreakered flaggered rollered Scuppered scrubbered Our Lady of Evening and Night Mother. Prosteyed prostied prosticuittoed Prossied prozzied prossed proed prodded probed poul-de-luxed The prince's palace of pleasure publicsectorized Mother. Dennedkennedpennedlanedlentrentrentsentpentpaintbentment Abetmentpresentment to all our crimes O'Mother. resentmentamendmenttenementattainment The plate scraped and off-dined Mother. Relentmentrelentlessprefermentpreponement The postponement of all predeterminatement Mother. Ointmentofall lointmet the loins of Lucifer's dethronement mother. Fallenmentpollenmentstolenment purloined mother. Brodelwomanned strangewomanned Catted puted polecatted stewpotted Mother. Causey-paikered streetwalkered hackstered twiggered Wistcoateered nightradered Our Lady of Pleasured Mother. Nightwalkered shetradered bulkered highflyered Generelgomorrhealreciever firedraker horsebreaker Mother. Hooker flagger roller pusher Scrupper scrubber goose of Winchester Mother. Commonwoman strangerwoman horebedabbed whorewoman Publicwoman stalewoman croshabel-lady bedabbled badlylabelled bordellwoman. Hackneywoman hackneywench hackneyedbuttocktown-woman Treadlebeadle marmalademadam Hacneylady mermaid dollcommon. Marketdame dollymops Queen's woman Our Lady of tears, Night, and evening Mother. Workinggirl streetgirl nightgirl motheatentom'sgirl Publicommoner our lady of customers Nightmoth hellworm hellmother Mother. She Mariabedecked highhollowcheeked Communitywelfare meretricious mother. Drabbed stale pugged pun Twopennyupright jailedmother Mother. carryknave fireship maux manleech In company of motherunaccompanied Mother. Kennelnymph Caucodette cocotte common Venereal splitarsed mechanic mother. Curtal yumyum-girl brassnail whiteslave Broadshawl soileddove geisha trollop unvirgined lady longlong dollops time ago. She don't come easy The easyvirtued one The Hussied-bussied sister Mother

My honied bunnied sissy O sister.

Lovelied bullied sillied killiied

My ribaldpallidsallied salad darling

Darlinged marlined saltlinged longlinged

Don't envy the fate of my beautiful darling.

Tied up like a woodoed doll

and raped against the wall my darling.

Other loins purloined the due of my loins

The salt of my eyes my Eden's apple

The little sisters' gutflinging mother my darling.

She died for shame in Solomon's lap

My wooden shodden well-trodden darling.

Tales of you go whispering through jungles

tingling through bay of shingles darling.

For a brief moment we pause to listen to the silence,straining to catch the notes of a faraway music. The drums beating so distant, the clouds thundering, you can see them a-coming from so far-far away. O Caecelia, you are hereby addresed again. Jingle the man without conviction. Every woman's lover, every person's and non-person's poet. The shape of a river, the face of a mirror. And if I am not you, blame it on the crack eternal in the receptacle that lets the shadow slide out and holds not well the liquid. An apt simile would be a man impotent. I am all silence and you must wring out the necessary sounds by thundering with exquisite fingers on the keys of my being. Who said a man cannot be a musical instrument and a woman a musician? The man who invented the old romantic cliche knew nothing about music, let alone seing it in its true essence.

Have you seen a woman unafraid of dying? Where does the absence of fear come from? It must have its origin somewhere. Then you also must have seen a man afraid of dying? Where does the fear come from now? It must have its origin somewhere too. So, they both have their origins and herefore, they both are-fear and its absence. Now what does it mean to say that something and its absence both exist? To say that absence exists. How can something, that is not, be? Now, I must admit that I can smell sophistry creeping in here. The mode of articulation of a few of these questions is inadvertently sophistical. And it is this inadvertence that has been the foe of man and philosophy. It depends on what you are asking and how you are asking.

They cannot both be-the something and its absence. If something is capable of being in its absence, then you must tell us what is being meant by that something. But there is also the obverse of it, that is, the mirror. Imagine our world as a labyrinth full of intertwiningly serpentine paths lined by mirrors. Now imagine two persons walking throuh the labyrinth. What one sees, the other doesnt, and vice-versa. But that does not make the seen unseen and the present absent. The soul, on the surface, is infinitely labyrinthine. Therefore what you divined in the other has gone unseen by himself. Therefore, it is not the end of the world, when what you divined within yourelf has too gone unseen by him. And when it has gone unseen once, it will never be seen again like the river that has flown and gone for once and all. A moment gone by never comes again, and something having been and dwelt in that moment is never the same again. No wonder then that the world's battlefield is a labyrinthine mirrored maze where the warriors are, have always been, and will always be tilting at no go windmills. History, human and philosophical, has adduced enough evidence for this hypothesisation of human destiny. And if one is to objectively infer from this labyrinth of a human locus, the same inferences can be drawn about all speculations regarding things metaphysical. Nay, we should rather say, especially regarding things metaphysical. We have failed miserably in the layer between the physical and the metaphysical, and sadly for us, in the ascending order. There have been greater battles lost to nature than victories won. The war overall tilts askewed for us. We will come back to the physical facet of this world to rebegin the investigation. We will probe for the spiritual mnalaise of the physical. The world as we make to inhabit it is not a shred more b eautiful than the world inhabited by our ancestors. How do we know? The spirit lives and constructs in the remembrance of past. And eschatological speculations forebode their worst in history. We have betrayed and been betrayed by them all-the physical, the real, and the metaphysical. The reflections multiply and the confusion grows in that order. A spiritual malady afflicts the world and the mirrors go on engendering truths and their reflections. A disorder of echoes reigns, and there's no denying and no asserting. All true in their own right and yet the sum of the parts never adds up. So all our exertion should aim at resting content with the human condition? But that is not to be. We are conditioned and destined to be restless. Truth is an insatiable seductress. Man must earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. He must breed with his kind nd populate the earth. And so he must go on multiplying the mirrors with their reflections. This is also the allegory of man's soul. For unsoul is the condition for belief in soul. Until the last link of the chain is not unbound, the being shall wander and groan in thraldom. Buddhists call it 'unatma'. There must not be a soul to be freed. And indeed there is none. And the labyrinth of mirrors is an optical illusion. The Hindus call it Maya. Instantaneous liberation, the chain broken, the labyrinth unwound, the serpent uncoiled. There is no separation between man and freedom. Man IS free. And that is the truth. But to know it we must hear. Hear with all our being. Hear what percolates and winds and echoes through every pore and hollow and bend of the labyrinth. It must be gone through wholeheartedly as a necessay rite because we do not know what the preconditions and causes are. Everyone beginning from their own unique poisition in the link. And it being a labyrinth of links, one should neither compare the position nor the nature of one's link with another's. It is enough to know that it is beyond us to fathom the interinkages of destinies. It is one destiny, multiple manifestations, incarnate lybarinthinally. It is one soul, the oversoul., undifferentiated. The feeling of individuation is a trick of Maya. And this is for the time being. We must await a longer period and go a further distance. The kaleidoscoping eplosion, ever expanding big bang.

A lot of preparation is required before the rug is pulled from under the feet. Disillusionment is the giving way of the ground. But this is a disillusionment in the real sense of the term. The stripping away of Maya. Truth in all its glorious emptiness. Misapprehend not this emptiness on account of your myopic prism. For lack of a better translation we call it Emptiness and, let us, therefore glorify it.

Unshodof her shroud

Unloved of her lust

Some phosphorus exercises for my brain.

So we tell of the underbelly of the world

The stenchful pool where lilies die

Of the foul vapors of the ghostly jungle

The lover weeds coil and twine and tangle

Around their beloved saplings

The paedophiliac cannibalistic monsters

Preying on the flesh of their own

The seed of their loins, blood of their blood

But for how long shall the predators gorge on others

The internecines shall turn on each other before long

And the survivor shall at last devour himself.

It cannot go on in thy world O Narayana

Cease thy seep of human blood o Narayana

Thou shall have created a creature pale bloodless

Like a sapling's milkwhite sap o Narayana

And then the sport of lover-beloved

Could go on forever

Even after the honeyed moon had hidden behind the clouds Narayana.

Drunk senseless on lunar love

The wolfmen grow deadlier every passing night Narayana.

How do you say you will save the souls of

The two litle girls now vulnerable motherless Narayana

Shall they also beat their guts on the bank of mother river?

But you will squeeze not much blood out of the two litle guts Narayana

The saplings must be let to grow into fullblooded young flesh Narayana

But sickly souls, their own or others'

Shall devour them before dawn Narayana.

I remember the tale of a twelve year old

Found dead and naked

At the edge of the town Narayana.

Let us skip the unseemly details

Of the rest of the story

Let it suffice

That the little mortal did not die

A destiny natural deserved by her untainted soul Narayana.

Let me add too

That the predator did not deserve the name

The name of a lion or vulture or scavenger Narayana

For thou had hollowed his old soul out

Before he could look

Towards where his destiny had b een carved and sealed

His heart with a glinting knife of steel

With an evil sparkle in thy eyes Narayana.

In the light of this tale now tell us o enlightened One

What do you wish done to the two little defenceless ones Narayana?

Do thou still wish the epic lay of evil to go on?

Mercy on the unknowing teller

Blame it Lord on his unseeing eyes

But beg and sing he must until alive

There be throbbing blood with soul aquiver in his life.

So ho our tale, woe our tale

It must go on till the end of our days Narayana.

The song of thirsty longings

Would not be quenched with sugared lies

A glimmer of thee

Nothing more nor less

Like a crystal honey drop

On the lips of my beloved Narayana.

Genteel be thy touch

On the cusp of my throbbing longings

Let me hide all in thy dewey mound

I shall cup thy hills

With all the love my lips can carry

Tonight I shall show thee How well these vampire lips

Can love thy nape, beloved.

Among the mists of the night And warm clouds,

Amidst the fetid waters of fearful jungles Exhaling vapors hot and sweet Intoxicating, Suffocating, I shall hide And bide my time.

I shall wait this night For the clouds to hit the moon

And vanish behind the snowy tufts of sky.

Then shall I rise In all my awful glory

And bare my teeth For thee, my beloved.

Thou shall know me by the glint in my eyes

And my blood-red lips And incisors snow-white, And the grin to send the chills Down down thy spine, my darling.

All these centuries

I've been drooling and salivating For the chance To sink my steely Glinting Wolfish teeth Into that shapely Ivory neck of thine, Silky smooth

And snowy soft.

Oh it makes me delirious And faint With delight and desire.

But it be no time To lose my senses And swoon away, Coz tonight is the night Having awaited the millenia Of writhing ache, I meet my darling.

So I must beware And watch out

Lest they steal her Or she slip away Like a never meant to be dream my darling.

Jonathan Harker's Journal

Early was Munich left

Vienna is awaited the morning next.

The train be an hour late

A wonderful place seems Budapest.

I missed Mina my darling.

Then hush and lovely came the nightfall

Full of full moon and stars sparkling bright

Hotel royale was our night halt

Served for supper

Chicken some way done with pepper Thanked be lord

I could make do with my German smatter

The dish was called peprika hendl.

Headed for the country of Transylvania

Close by the carpathian mountains

Of Bukovina and Moldavia,

The country of castle Dracula.

Wallachs and Magyars

Huns And Saxons

Szekelys and Dacians

Our citizen Carpathians

Form a curious mixture

Like any place and all populace where

Descendendants of Attila the Hun steer.

All the spirits of world are gathered

Into the Carpathian horse-shoe

If there ever was

A truly real whirlpool of horrors.

I must ask the Count

When I reach that castle of castles

Dracula Castle.

More paprika and porridge of maize flour

Mamaglia and impletata

Eggplant stuffed with forcemeat

And cooked for hours

A hurried breakfast and a rushed run to the train

Had to sit in the cariage on end for hours

Dawdling through a country beautiful

Little towns and castles on top of steep hills

Like made in missals old

Rivers and streams

With wide stony margins

To tide the ancient

Flowing floods cold.

Folks all in colorful attire

From France and Germany

In short jackets and old trousers

picturesque and pretty the women

Round hatted, big belted, and white sleeved

Something fluttering with a lot of strips

High booted, bras nailed

Heavy baggy leather belted

Barbarians and mistresses of some old

Oriental band of brigands.

My sleep was fitful that night

All sorts of queer dreams

A wolf howling under the moon light.

The paprika and carafe still hot in my belly

My sleep was thirstful for the strange

caresses of the night

Slept towards the morning as dawn

Crept up and knocked at my door.

The Eye of the Tiger

The universe has one eye

That sees all

Seen by none

Existential Insomnia

A sleepless night

Abnormal dreams

Howling wolves

Dark moon

Darker clouds

Burning innards

I was thirsty for the strange caresses

Of the night.

Fell asleep towards the morn

As the dawn curled and crawled

And crept up

Like white smoke

And knocked cheerless

At my door.

Nabokov’s Hellish Island

I remember the tale

Of a twelve year old

Found naked and dead

In the woods

On the edge of the town

Let us skip the unseemly details

Let it suffice

That the little mortal

Did not die a death

Deserved by her untainted soul

Let us also add

That the predator

Did not deserve the name

Of a lion or vulture or scavenger

For Thou had hollowed his soul out

Before he could look

Towards where his destiny

Had been carved and sealed

Like his heart

With a knife of glinting steel

For the cliffs, the cliffs

The cliffs of hell

Called had him away

Unshod of her shroud

Unloved of her lust

Don’t envy the fate of my beautiful darling

Tied up like a wooded doll

To her weeping cot

Raped against the wall.

Other loins purloined

The due of my loins my darling.

Orphans’ Mahabharata

The world without end

Traversed Thee

In steps thrice.

The two little sisters

Aborned of the orphaned

Widowed mother

Remembered

The pretty little doll’s house

With its small bright lamp.

Arjuna the archer great

Lost his courage

And the slippery eel vanished

Into the oceans great.

The two little sisters and Arjuna

Knew naught of each other

The two little sisters

In Nabokov’s hellish island

On time thrown away

Like husks to the wind.

Arjuna’s wounded light was salved by

Krishna, the rock of thy eye

But the glitter

Of the tussle

Of thy world

Blinded the two little ones.

And she

The little on e

Clutched the dirty hem

Of sister’s frock

And crawled down the craggy rocks

To Mother River

And the tussle of thy world

Glittered evermore

As the widowed mother

Beat her guts

On the rocky banks

Of the flowing Mother River

And the sisters shed salt tears

Down the tongue

Into the river

And the oceans vast

To perstruct thy exquisite pearls.

As the world without end

Thee traversed

In steps thrice.

Lovely were the tresses of mother

Of Mother River

Strangers to each other

Were Arjuna

And the sisters

And the tresses and tears

Both mingled

Into the rivers

And oceans

As the mother

With her two little daughters

Mourned by Mother River.

For once the insulted tale

Lilted to the World Ears

And he looked into the river

Reddened of horror old

The gils affright

Screamed at nights.

Ha our tale,

Woe our tale,

Must not remain untold

For she our mother

Will curse our soul

If the corpse were unburied left.

Creationism

Creationism angled

Bird dangling

Fuhrer infuriate

Blind design

Then

And then there is a certain relief

And why shouldn't there be?

To keep us going awhile.

Scrape

Life must scrape it's dirt

with a sharp file

Yours truly

Yours truly

is often truly bored

of life

(preposition emphasised)

Passage

It drains

and refills

bottomless

and topless

intestinal passage

Did you ask?

So mother, did you cry and ask to see

the stones

that were all

that remained

The House

All those things are pretty much

where you left them

the vase, the bible,

the animal porn

save when there's a flutter

inside me

and the house seems to rock

and shriek

like in a quake

and the earth seems to curve away

from a house haunted.

it's a sad end

when the soil doesn't want it

I alone in the house

sometimes lucid

and suspicious

at others craving

and delirious

in your wake

and then

I take out

Chromosome Colored

What are we doing here

chromosome colored

Subaltern Mahabharata

And the monkey stole the mead of princes brave

and pointing fingers

thou and thou shall I kill

gouge out your eyes

and drink deep of your blood

as it spurts from the sockets hollowed out.

Draupadi shall have

What is happiness but morning!

It was something unjust,

obscure,

perhaps in-comprehen-sible.

I was wondering what it was

night or day,

as far away

a whistling train

like the song of a bird

in forest,

I heard.

Deserted stations,

a lamp-post

like an empty spot-lit stage,

unusual gestures of

a strange conversation

clinging to the softness of silent nights,

looking for the signs

of warmth and love.

Sometimes

Sometimes in ironic moments

a man asks clever questions like

'

October 10th

It's tenth of October

The masses have gone crazy

There's revolution in the air

Prison break

Baby! Where do we go now? The black Guy's wife to her husband. Unearthed -Season-2- Prison Break

Fire

Your fire flows luminous through my body
I dare not name you
As I have stolen your name

Fanon: A critique of Gandhi or Against the principle of hope.

So the slave thought that the master's conscience would one day force him to make the bondsman a gift of liberty? Out of an overflowing human munificence of heart? A slave and a Candide? Splendid! Humanity shall one day wake up from its evil spawning slumber (For what are His dreams but good and evil dialecticising along the cobblestone of this world and leaving monuments and debris behind?) and universal brotherhood will replace judgement day and end of history or whatever other teloses the mystics and the realists might throw in the face of that most fundamental of human principles - hope.The fountain of this vision of human history is older than just some local intellectual tradition called European enlightenment. It is as primitive as human heart. It wells irresistibly out of the optimist and the soft hearted and that gushy flaw in the most pragmatic of souls. And eternal it does die. Hope that love is the reigning deity and hatred the barking dog. Hope is the anxious knowledge that human nature is underivatively humane and the world beautiful. To revolt against hope is to renounce one's humanity and be cast aside as a heretic and traitor to all that is or could possibly be well with the world. But hope is also enslaving. The knowledge bred by hope is consoling but solipsistic and, therefore, imprisoning. Necessarily and inevitably, human history since its origin has been the captive of hope. A prison very real and brutally enshackling, erected out of a community of souls overgorged on idealistic love and visionary humanism.

A nation always explodes into liberation even though the spark was lit in an ancient recess of history and the fire had to burn a long rope before reaching the threshold of detonation. Sleep does not taper off, but terminates. And then there is disturbed, restless or troubled sleep populated by tense dreams and succeeded by awakening. But always awakening, always a termination. It is the dreAMS UNDERLYING sleep THAT PREPARE THE moment of awakening. The mind of humanity is never silenced by sleep. Its dream is only dormancy. It dreams, then it alternates between sleep and dreams before snapping violently awake. The individual may enjoy spells of dreamless sleep but not the collective. History is not dreamlessness but humanity dreaming. Always dreaming. All too often nightmaring. And no collective awakening is ever gentle. A mass of men dream the fulfilment of their long repressed freudian desires and the Oedipal pain is at last destroyed like a malign tissue by

Germinal

1. This is for the poor. The rich. And all the suckers under the sky. Black when I craned my spondylotic neck upwards. Bloody infinite the inverted hopeless cone of night. God only knows where it meets its limit or what hole eats it up. And expand big-banging if it does, worse still then. How endlessly is it expanding despair when imagined thus? Devil, deep sea, frying pan, fire. Better the cone disappearing into Hawking's hole. The wretchedness of the world apocalypting itself at the ultimate and a parallel world beyond where hell lives. But who, anyway, faithfully cared for hell? It was for/of/by here that we  chickenshitted and loved and feared the chickenshit more than death, Houris and the angels. C'mon Prophet, light it up! Light either this or that up. It is dark here, there and all over. Is our night this hour. Asleep is the Master. Is our Master tonight.

2. Have you seen a drop of ink sliding its crooked trajectory down a rough painting-board? So is the path of man along the Earth Road. Crooked and staining the virgin whiteness of the paved marble-tiles of the Earth Road. Virgin and sinful she is. The upturned mother-whore ripe for plowing. Come stoop and kiss her and say goodbye to the marching procession of creatures on her belly and in your skull. Which one the more chimerical is a question lost in the dance of their onward nowhere march. My epiphanic goodbye to all that swirling in the waltz of homo sapien insanity and human death.

3. My step falls heavy, light, awkward or elegant, insensible of the dirt, dirt laden ground that catches it howsoever it falls. But the rambler says the ground is insensate. Blind are the limbs of the tight rope walker for she knows not how the rope is balancing her unpaused, moment by moment. So self-aware are the objects around us that they fail not in their nature. It is only human free-will that is committed in a total ignorance of itself. Free and unseeing. The world is constantly balancing our fragile movements. Then one day we stumble and become dirt to balance the same free human will. C'mon now, tell us Prophet how high is our pedestal and how close to Him are we flapping our wings?

4. I am beggared and buggered by all that happens around me. The scales over my eyes have created a prism of magic. So perfidious are our acts that fidelity itself is jealous. Waves, strings, muons, vaporous rings. All is vanity. Treacherous vanity. Can this thread be elongated? Words dancing in darkness.Catch and arrange them as they play the artful dodger in the elusive night. Impossible of comprehension. Natural order is a chimera. All is a dream sequence- life, its stories and their rambling longings. I have hit the limits of this act of thought.It was sustained by the enveloping darkness and now - adieu.

4. I am in a quandary. Trapped by an aporia. Our lies and infidelities are made possible by the mute fidellity of the universe. I play with words without gratitude and humility. For they have always been playing but in my hallucination I have dispossessed them of their playfulness. How pitiful is my poverty, disabled my dream and chimerical my life? But the invisible crutches extract their due when in a beautiful conjuring of temporal aesthetics they suddenly vanish and I fall out of existence. We are dancing in a space of aporia. Never see through an opaque object in your field. Or they will one day stop seeing through you. It all, after all, depends on the rope not snapping under the balanced weight of the tight rope walker. Be eternally and perpetually grateful for the fine balance of forces permitting your walk on hard ground. Soggy, it is awkward and slippery. Bushy, it is forbidding. Scorching, it hurts. Gapping, it swallows. But firm, it is what we stand on.

5.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

She said God loved her and He loved her people and He had sent her to save them. Such crazed conviction in her deep abyssal pools-of-passion eyes, the long fearless lashes shading glimpses of another memory of the castaway souls judging in their titillated trances over the destinies of God's folks but themselves swallowed abysmally into a ruin world-without-end. She had the appearance of one whose passion was dangerous and they were suspicious. She said she had come to save them and they were suspicious. If only they would look hard into her crazed eyes and glimpse the terrible that waited there. Gaze, gaze long and deep into those passionate eyes and save your eternities, ye Pharisees. Judge ye not of her who stands caged and a criminal before you now. For she is Joan of Arc and she belongs among you and has come to save your souls.

Her eyes rave within themselves as if the waves of the ocean have gone wayward and know not where to flow and swerve hither and thither. She is Joan of Arc. Her reckless eyes uplifted towards the inquisitors are lit aghast by the savage lust of evil worming its way hollow through the flesh of the Pharisees. She swore truth, nothing but the truth, on the soul of her land as one of the wretched picked and flicked a worm out of his ear hole. Oh! she hurt. The song of Joan of Arc hurt. The Pharisees conferred in the corners and the chief inquisitor leaned over to ask who she was. She said she was Joan. Jeanette they called her in the village, probably nineteen of age. Nineteen they said and smirked a cruel autocratic coterie smirk between themselves and there were orbs of ripples in her pools-of-passion eyes. And so on she went through the inquisitorial catechism. But she was still, as far as the nature of the beast caged in their voodooed court, a girl of the Lord. Joan the girl of Lord. Jeanette the Joan of Arc. And she was a witch to burn. But sometimes a speck of pity for herself and a fleck of fear flickered through those eyes as she felt in her bones the unseen net being cast around her. For you knew that secreted away in those bored aloof eyes of her captors was an obscene treachery.

They were fair and just. These inquisitors. And before burning her with a very inflammable oil they craved to fairly agonize her through the ritual of 'Prove thy fidelity to the Lord.' Their bloated cheeks were puffed with the poisonous gases of a surfeit of roasted witches. They had devil's horns and the parched striated fly-beguiling lips of the dead. To begin with they sought to confirm the roots of her religious being. So they asked as you do a child and a heretic if she knew her Lord's prayer. And she said yea. Who taught it to her? And she said her mother and then something suddenly stood still in those rippling eyes and in the lively courtroom and the ephemeral lives of her endless faces died away and for a trembling moment a pathetic perplexity stood still in those mimetic lineaments and the devil pulling at his horns too stopped and craned his neck precociously and hopelessly to sense the extraordinary befalling them. She closed her eyes rapt, her features softened, nostrils quivered, a soundless tear rolled down her cheeks and she voicelessly whispered to herself, "My mother!" The inquisitors who had sacrificed their souls and ossified their hearts at the altar of the earthly church unabated, laying their first trap, asked her for a recitation of the Lord's prayer and she like a sweet thirteen year old wrongly accused of a salty act too frightful for her frail arms to have executed artlessly wiped her cheeks with the back of her fingers  and shyly shook her head as if she had been asked to reveal her virginity. The Sacred was virginal and to be sung in the inner sanctum of heart and not testified even in an inquisition unto death. Yet the Pharisees insisted and repeated their demand for Lord's prayer and threatened a witch's death if not knuckled to. But Lord's prayer was for the Lord and Joan was never, never the one to knuckle under and sing and pray to the mineral rabid throng  a profane proof of pusillanimity. The tears checked themselves in the trickle and the eyes opened big and round and deep and fierce and Jeanette the vulnerable virgin withdrew within herself, within a shell hardened and fenced against the Pharisees,  her face flint-like by an ardent stoniness of soul, Jeanette by Joan of Arc. But flesh to granite the fierce eyes still burned.

Notes of Intolerance

It is time for a waltz my sweetie. Put all your silver in it. I will tell you four tales from the cradle to the grave.

 Look at the blue lady rocking the baby under a beam of smoky blue light. In a mofussil town four of these ladies decided to do something for humanity. The ladies all stood tall  greedy for reform. The moneybag goodwill tyrant might pay for their altruistic love - they thought. In the pink light they waltzed to the tinkling music of silver coins. Light melodies of gaiety. They took each other's arms and danced gaily. Marvellously jolly. Light as the blue skies their peals of laughter. Firm handshakes and peacock feather fans and then the ladies danced with the gentlemen. A blue spell was cast in the ballroom. The bluebeards and witches were amiable all. Snowy cloud hair-dos and sparkling necklaces glitzed through the pinkish neon glow of the sweaty hall. Little affairs flourished in the corners of the ballroom as old ladies tasted second flushes of youth. Virgin blushes struggled through the thick rouge. The powdered faces were so fleshlike under the artificial flash. In the shadow of a black greatness a pink portion of life danced. A lower world peopled by silhouettes. A still life so spellbinding in its pretence to vivification, statuesque men and women made mockery of the lifesize triviality of the human race. Regal chairs, beautiful steps, and tall vases, the old ladies  could not resist stealing glances at the unfading archness of their bosoms and the almost foolish greatness of their citadels. It was balmy in the ballroom. A stale pink breeze had stagnated there. Still there was a stale fin de siecle freshness about all the good noble people assembled. 

There was a rich old lady almost Raphaelite in the sublimity of her virgin innocence. But alas! Only she could appreciate her own so savant womanliness. The willowy youths taken with each other had not a glance to spare for her. All about her young life was swirling as her tender loneliness stood trembling amidst the gaiety of birds and bees. The beaus all came one after the other to shake her hands and then left to look for unrealized sweethearts in the crowd. The gay scene receded away and away until it was a mere madding crowd dancing on a silver screen and her eyes were so alone in this theatre of a world as the dancers swayed and swirled slower and slower in very, very distant enchanted world. Then she put her hand over her mouth in an utterly sad gesture of an amply tragic heroine.

But our heroine is a young girl. Young and poor and happy. She has a father and friends, a garden and pets, and flowers and a Cinderella consciousness. So we will recount her tale now. The first tale. We see the geese and the pretty trees in her garden. They cackle and chuckle. And there comes the father out of the small cottage. Hatted for the day he is lighting his cigar when his darling child comes running after to hug and kiss him and wave a jolly pretty goodbye to dear dad. She is so pretty and gay and blooming youthful and light of heart and unseen of sorrow. Her frock is white and spotless as her sinless soul. Then when daddy is gone the immaculate maiden twirls around and runs back into her innocent virginal den. She is frolicsome and loves to watch the geese making love. Her innocent soul has a TASTE FOR THEIR UNTAINTED LOVE GAMES. 

And she has a boy for her own. But she knows him not. And he is ignorant of her too. And he is an honest and hard-working lad. Fun loving too when it is an appropriate moment. Is kind and abhors the bottle which drank his father and widowed his pious mother. I see him milling around a speck in a great unwashed factory deluge. This pack-like-sardines mass of men is cruel - virulently antagonistic to youth and laughter. The boy is the child of an unlucky age.

So the vestal virgins arrived at the ball for the uplift of this benighted mass. Happily for the virgins the withered old lady and her gilded-tyrannical-patron-of-mankind brother were also at the ball. There was dancing and sumptuous food and real ancient wine.

Who is an intellectual?

Who are the intelligentsia? More fundamentally, who is an intellectual?

Temptation of St Antony

The desert of fine white grains of sand stretched till that sharp and dark horizontal line at the far end of the field of vision where sand met the sun. The fine dry whiteness of the desert shimmered and undulated endlessly in all the directions. The only spots to arrest the eyes were the elongated illusory shadows cast by the sun along the valleys between the billowing dunes of the desert. This barren land travelled expansively through the country bearing a scythe mowing dead all the verdancy before it. It was grown with an invisible weed that exceptionally conscientiously fed on the growth of the soil. In short, it was a desert country pure and immense.

Where the sand stopped, the barrenness continued still, a rocky barrenness. It was a desert country of sandy and rocky deserts, regs of rock pavements and ergs of sand seas, plateau landforms and basin deserts. And desert mountains. In one of those desert mountains lived a hermit. He lived high up in a sickle-shaped heart of seclusion in the mountain with a threadlike thatch for a floor, the seclusion configurated by a circle of dry serrated sticks to keep off intruders human and beast. He was an unmingled hermit and he brooked no intercourse. In the horizon created by the sky darkening against the curving edge of the mountain, a horizon jagged here and there by the jutting black rocks of the mountain, stood another bristling silhouette. The silhouette of the hermit's alcove made of splints and that peculiarly workable earth material which is the stuff of these desert rocks. It was severely bare and transcended austerity.

Metamorphosis

Everything changed in nineteenth century. The world as humanity knew it metamorphosed into something new. 

Mother

I came back home last night to die. Mother was waiting on the porch. She was wearing the red bordered white saree whose red had become a pale orange and the white yellow with the repetitive years of soiling and washing. As she stood there erect, hands to hips, I could see her back as the house could. But the erect frame belied the hollow weakness that the tortuous years had carved within. Around her and the lonely house crickets were chirruping in the dark night 

Proto-existentialism: Textual criticism of Either/Or

Kierkegaard opens his chef d'oeuvre Either/Or with the following epigraph:

Greatness, knowledge, renown,
Friendship, pleasure, possessions,
All is only wind, only smoke:
To say it better, all is nothing.(1)

In this essay, we seek to grasp the existential situation by concentrating a penetrative gaze through to that originary moment in history that was the birth of this unique and defining weltanschaung. Our project hinges on our ability to unconceal and witness that moment as the birth to presence of a novel worldview. We are aware that there are no sharp-cut demarcations in history, even less so in the history of philosophy. But there is a movement akin to the throes of labour, when something new struggles to emerge from the depths of history, borne and precipitated by a crisis of the human condition. We seek to situate that proto-existential moment in the historical and genealogical context of existentialism. Our problematic is two-fold, or rather, two tiered. By locating and encountering the proto-existential mood in its embyonic purity we see existentialism with the freshness of a virgin gaze, so to speak, shod of all the cutaneous paraphernalia and historical accumulation. The perspective of this gaze is a real-world space-time one, that is to say, a conjunction of the historical and the spatial perspectives. The historical perspective unveils/envisions a temporal locus for the figural event of the conception of an epochal idea. All human discourse is made possible by being populated with such figural events; for it is these figural events that mark all the definitive signposts of historical discourse. Without such 'created events' or 'figural figments' discourse would be impossible. These events are the preconditions and constituents of discourse. It cannot, however, be our purpose here to inquire into the foundations and making of discursivity. It is sufficient unto our purpose to indicate the fact of this figural and created foundationism of discursivity, so that we can embark, with a clear conscience and directness of purpose, on the process of unraveling and teasing out the various strands that emanate from this origin and constitute the meaning and Gestalt of existentialism. The word Gestalt is of theoretical and methodological pertinence to our project. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary Gestalt is a structure, configuration, or pattern of biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts. In the present essay we will mainly scrutinize certain special psychological phenomena peculiar to the nineteenth and post nineteenth century man and extract the philosophical outlook germinating out of the thus delineated psychological state. Existentialism was seeded in the nineteenth century European mind and even though every idea has a history, each member in this history of ideas has its own singular epoch and eventuates from the dialectical interplay of historical forces.  This configuration of the attributes of the concept of existentialism fits the Gestalt paradigm with the historico-psychological forces functioning as the causative agents and the newly emergent hermeneutic of the existential weltanschaung as the resultant functional unit integrated out of these same constitutive historico-psychological ingredients. These forces are inscribed as historico-psychological as the psychological states flowing out into the existential worldview are but products of historical forces, as are all psychological states. Going by the testimony of the three figures synonymous with the dawn of existentialism and attributed with having played a seminal role in its genesis, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, it is more than anything, a psychological state. The epigraph to Kierkegaard's Either/Or, quoted above, is connotative of the period and its mood of nihilism, a mood whose harbinger was the new breed of men, the nihilists, prophesied so druidly by Nietzsche. For the first time man was face to face with the abyss of nothingness and unmeaningness as the new normal of the life world.

The history of the world and that of its religion and science until the advent of existentialism was the history of man's reason. History after all is the reflection of the universe in man's eyes. And universe until that moment had been reason spatio-temporalized. There was meaning to life and the world. But there came a moment in this history of man when his life and universe no longer made sense to him. Everything became a project in unmeaningness. Passions, which had been subservient to reason until then, were liberated and let loose upon the universe without a reason to regulate them. Consequent upon this reign of unreason was a high irrationalism of the universe.

Is reason then alone baptized,
are the passions pagan?

Reason was both Christian and scientific, but the passions were ostracized out of the realm. It was then discovered, out of sheer necessity, that the passions had a role, a vital role, to play in the creation, as opposed to determination, of meaning. For instance, it is intuition, rather than logical ratiocination, to aver that "the inner is the outer and the outer inner". For what is the middle term to negotiate the binaries of the inner and the outer and thus arrive at their equivalence? What infers the presence of the inner which, by definition, is imperceptible to the senses and thus creates the binary opposition of the inner and the outer? What is even the ratiocinative faculty but passions at work, as enunciated by Nietzsche, Freud, and modern psychology? Passions are not pagan and the inner is not always the outer. The outer sometimes harbors inside it somewhere a secret and that is the first instance of the asymmetry of the irrational. A lopsidedness of order that is the disorder of the aesthetic and that upsets the equivalence of things. There has always been  this secret at the heart of the order of things. A secret that is the source of all the pleasure that life affords and that lends meaning to existence, despite reason. 

Grapes of wrath

'The rains fell gentle that night
and did not lacerate the earth.'

Stream of consciousness: Swann's Way

Remembrance of things past is the narrative of the canny and uncanny crevices of memory.

"And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book, which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; i had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the su

Aesthetics

"Beauty is the sensible manifestation of good.

Liberation

Materialism might not be as bloodless a philosophy as may appear at the first instant. In fact, of the two philosophies of materialism and spiritualism, the former is the older. If Heidegger declares that we ill understand the being that belongs even to us, how can we hope to understand such alien being as that of matter? "How can we define a being whose nature is absolutely unknown to us? (1)" But it is a philosophy not as easily dismissed as the idealists would like to have, for even before Marx the materialist spectre has always and ceaselessly loomed over the horizon of human thought. The point to be conceded is that matter counts and that it must be liberated from spirit's guilt over it.

Dialectical materialism is a 'negative philosophy' on account of its inherently destructive tendencies. It is not negative in its teleology but in its methodology. All true philosophy must be negative in its methodological scope as its real function consists in evolving by negating its own moribund elements. But the history of European philosophy witnessed an insidious movement on the part of the dominant status-quoism in the form of something called 'positive philosophy.' It was something reactionary and knee jerk at that. It was the philosophy of the 'established fact,' "to counteract the destructive tendencies (of negative philosophy), there arose, in the decades following Hegel's death, a positive philosophy which undertook to subordinate reason to the authority of established fact.(2)" The idea of positive philosophy is a contradiction in terms. "The content of a truly philosophical work does not remain unchanged with time." What is true of a truly philosophical work is true of philosophy per se. The philosophical content is in the movement of thought. 

The only philosophy deserving of its Greek etymology pertains immediately and directly to the needs and concerns of living men. The latter too do not remain unchanged with time; this impermanence of the human universe can only be addressed by a negative philosophy whose introspective critical power "uses the strength of the 'epistemic' subject to break through the deception (Trug) of constitutive subjectivity." "Under current societal conditions, thought can only have access to the non-identical via conceptual criticisms of false identification." That is why the need of the moment is a negative dialectics as the speculative identity between identity and non-identity is negated by a non-identity between identity and non-identity. This fundamental non-identity can be addressed only by a methodology of negative dialectics. It is necessary to counter, by dint of determinate negations, the sometimes inordinate and unjustified claims and conclusions of thought. But Adorno's materialism is shot through with more idealism than the idealism of most idealists. This idealism is, of course, not a metaphysical idealism, but an ethical one. The unthought of his philosophy is human suffering. This suffering is the undeniable ground of all philosophising for Adorno; somewhat akin in its indubitability to the notion of dukkha in Buddhism. But whereas Buddha, and Schopenhauer, in the wake of the Indians, launched into a negation of life itself, Adorno embarked on the project of negating the evil of suffering through the tools of critical philosophy. For Adorno, human suffering is the cardinal materialist fact and all philosophy must begin in the aftermath of this fact. The crux of his charge against materialism does not lie in the mere production of commodities but in the alienation and suffering of the producers.

The production of commodities might not in itself constitute the essence of materialism, but it definitely contains its origin. Georg Lukacs remarks that the analysis of the processes of commodity production was a necessary beginning to the Marxian enterprise of the portrayal of the capitalist society in its totality. The structure of the capitalist society is a reflection/product of the commodity structures, and not just its objective but subjective forms are comprehensible too only in terms of this materialist analysis. It is these subjective forms that concern us at the beginning of the present essay as it bears directly and immediately on the consciousness of the human beings living in such a society.
The essence of the capitalist society is the reification of the life-world. It is a space hostile to the subjective truth of a Kierkegaard; a space of 'phantom objectivity' where human relations have become reified. The cold veneer of rationality fogs the truth of an ulterior social reality. It is these social relations that form the starting point of the commodity structure, and ultimately of the whole socio-economic superstructure, and this in the last analysis results in the fetishisation of all commodities, including human beings. Lukacs demonstrates that this fetishistic character pertains not just to the objective forms of the commodities, but more profoundly, it enters into the attitude of human beings towards those commodities, other people, and the world in general. It leads to a fetishisation of the subjective stance. The modern age is characterised by an infiltraion of the inner life of man and society by the commodity structure, whereas the premodern age, despite possessing a commodity relations structure allowed the latter to manifest itself only in the shape of the external social world. It had, so to speak, not yet coloured his consciousness and become the skin of his thought. Whereas production conditions in modern times direct the social movement of humanity, that is to say, it dictates the inner movement of society.

Lukacs makes the case for a qualitative shift in the basis and character of social relations; for a world where commodity exchange has become the catalyst for social change; for a society that has commodity production as its prime mover; indeed for a world whose telos itself is its total reification. The subjective phenomena of such a society make for a most interesting study. "As a matter of fact the exchange of commodities originates not within primitive communities, but where they end, on their borders at the few points where they come in contact with other communities. That is where barter begins, and from here it strikes back into the interior of the community, decomposing it." The ruinous influence of commodity exchange on societies is the consequence of the degeneration of the inner processes and subjective phenomena of society; of the qualitative alteration and reification of man's consciousness. 'A commodity exchange directed in upon itself' becomes one vicious circle of a raison d'etre of the capitalist society and results in the alienation and dehumanisation of its members who are reduced to the state of objects in a network of commodity relations.

The qualitative difference of pre-capitalistic economies of commodity exchange from the capitalistic ones lay in the fact of this exchange being a trait of the former as opposed to being the latter's very essence, its constitutive force. Lukacs uses a telling theological metaphor to delineate the nature of this difference. It is needful "for the commodity structure to penetrate society in all its aspects and remould it in its own image" to constitute a capitalist society. "Remould in its own image." In the capitalist society, commodity makes society (and man) in its own image. The theological extent of the metaphor underlines the extent of the constitutive power of commodity in modern society. Man's relation to commodity is no longer an external one; he has rather internalised the very form of the commodity and the interior mould of his consciousness has been cast in the shape of a thing. The distinction between the capitalistic and the pre-capitalistic society is that between commodity as a universal and commodity as a particular. The universal is the essential form in which all its particular instances are cast and disclosed. The critical commonplace regarding the commodification of society refers to a stage in world-history when the universal soul is fashioned after the form of commodity. Matter, soul and their interrelations are reified, culminating, eventually, in the depersonalisation of economic relations and the reification of consciousness itself. Interpersonal relations were substituted by interrelations of commodities, which directed in upon themselves, spiralled into an uber-complex hyperweb that has cloaked human relations to the extent where it is impossible to percieve them amidst the fog of multilinear, multi-layered, and multidimensional movements of commodities. Human relations, in the form that they existed prior to the dawn of capitalism, are dead. Marx labelled this destructive beclouding of human relations as 'economic mystification.'

Commodity has become a category of consciousness. The latter has become a prisoner of the forms of commodity causing the descent of human subjectivity into reification. The evolution of the merchant's capital from a mere "intervening movement between extremes which it does not control and between premises which it does not create" to a universal category of society is the story of transformation of society from its barter stage to a capitalistic one. In the latter stage capital creates the premises and controls the conditions of its own production. In the antiquity and during the middle ages, there still subsisted in the conditions of production a kind of direct human communion, even though it be in the form of the relationship between the master and the serf. But with the all-comprehending realization of capital, the concealment of human relations has been rendered complete.
The human consciousness is endowed with capacity for impressionistic absorption where by the structure of commodity relations is impressed upon it with the substance and form of a weltanschaung. The consciousness then becomes the subjective manifestation of the commodity. This alienates man from the natural universe and his own original nature of immediate spiritual and physical activity. From this alienation emanates the conundrum of human condition wherein instead of being the proprietor of his own labour man is possessed by it; from it also stems man's divided socio-economic self wherein the man himself and his labour are two discrete and independent entities, undetermined and detached from each other.

The capitalist society thrives on the economic mystification of the commodity. "A commodity is a mysterious thing" because it takes on a life of its own; social relations get substituted by commodity relations; because the labour of man whose quality is blood, sweat, and tears is equalized by the commodific value of the product he creates; because commodities determine the socio-economic value of a man's time and work; because a commodity is an object of utility whose power extends beyond its utility for man, which, on the contrary, determines the utility of the man and his activity. 

A commodity has two aspects: perceptible and imperceptible. The perceptible aspect lends to the commodity its spectacular quality imbued with deceitfulness  But more pernicious still is its imperceptible aspect which evades all point-blank intelligibility and works its societal and psychological effects from over and under the radar of window displays. Its activity is subterranean in the figurative sense of subconscious forces which shape the impulse of the human conscious and the sovereign directive will of society. "It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things." That mysterious quality of the commodity dwells in the relational character it comes to acquire in an exchange economy where man's activity is rendered a passive objective value and objects shed their passivity to acquire the selfsame economic agency of which man has been denuded. However, there is nothing fantastic about the palpably hard impact of commodity relations on human lives. The impact is hard partly through the fantastic form of these relations which appear so unaccountable and mysterious - a game of chess where human beings are pawns moved by the ineluctable force and logic of capital.

Man's labour is freed from his agency, realizes its sovereignty in the form of the commodity, and then begins to hold man in its sovereign thralldom. Man becomes bonded to his own labour whose product is only ontologically liberated from man's labouring self, but to which man is still tied by the umbilical cord of his economic need; tied up by questions of economic, social and spiritual survival. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an extreme, but on multiple attributes, a competent metaphor cut out for commodity, especially from the all significant perspective of possessing agency and the potentiality to delimit its creator's freedom. Has man created a monster in the economic evolution of commodity?

How can man exist in relation to his own labour (and its concomitant product) in an unestranged mode? Heidegger's elucidation of the origin of the work of art is a revelation of such a relationship between the creator and his product. "The work, according to common understanding, springs out from and through the activity of the artist. But through what and from what is the artist what he is? Through the work; the saying that the work commends the master, says: The work first lets artist emerge as a master of art. The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other." This is remarkably similar to Pope John Paul the IInd's pronouncement upon work (albeit in theological and humanistic terms) in his Laborem Exercens: "As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process; independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity." Which in turn is remarkably similar to Hegel's theorization of the subject as one who realizes his content by "translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality." Work is a way for man to realize himself. He constitutes himself as subject through self-activity. But the capitalistic society has witnessed an ontological reversal wherein man exists for work and not work for man.

In this new economy of exchange objects exceed their purposed boundaries. The self-activity of man transcends his self and becomes imbued with its own motivational spring and goes beyond him in the guise of an independent entity called commodity or the product of his labour. Just as the economy of commodification has alienated human beings from their true selves, objects too have acquired proclivities and powers alien to the one originally envisaged for them in an instinctive socio-economic order of things. In this economy of objects, it is human beings rather which fall to a mediating position between the objects and their environment; the two primary elements of the dialectical exchange are still the object and the environment (through the via media of persons). It is a political economy of objects and, hence, an economy of signs or a semiotic economy where use-value is a pretext, but not the reason, for the object to exist. The ontology of commodities 'exists' at two levels - the first  and more obvious dimension is that of the luminous simulacrum, the salient ocular object (its raw evidentiary aspect); the second is the semiological level at which the socio-economic discourses surrounding the object are generated. The second dimension has a further twofold character: a primary or ostensible one and a secondary or real one. Depending on one's epistemology, the reality and the ostensibility of the semiotics at this level are two mutually exchangeable criteria, or rather, open to determination and allocation. The two parallel semiotics at work here pertain to the raw commerce of exchange economy circumscribing the object at the primary level and the economy of symbolic exchange of multiplex significations invested in the object at the secondary level. The production of goods in the consumerist society is not dictated by necessity; it is rather governed by laws inherent in the nature of commodity itself, thus, creating a phantom world of objects whose ineluctable force is nevertheless felt very palpably by individuals and societies. Man does not eventually remain unscathed from the influence of the commodification of the non-human world which comes home to roost by fetishizing human consciousness. The first step towards this reification of human subjectivity inheres in the commodification of man's activity, which, like a phantom Frankenstein is gifted by the market economy with the energy of disengaged (from the actor) economic motility. Man and his activity each stand over against the other, independent but reciprocal. They belong to each other in a relationship of reciprocity where the one trades in the worth of the other. The power of agency belongs equally to both, and given a situation of economic equivalence, the commodity can fetch the time and value of man's activity just as adequately as man can barter his labour for the commodity.

The political economy of capitalism is that of a materialist self-aggrandizement or a semiotics of prestation. Materialist self-aggrandizement is the unconstrained expansion of the capital as a manifestation of the grandiose expression of the self. This same self-grandiosity is mirrored at the micro level in the prestation or prestige-significations inhering in the commodities one chooses to consume; a choice reflective of the hierarchical function of the commodity and the consumer's comparative position in his society. It is in fact a necessary component of the logic of capitalism that commodities be invested with prestige significations that inscribe within the object the signature of the pre-existing capitalist social order; that commodities engraved with a mini-architectural impression of the social hierarchy be produced, reproduced, exchanged and consumed. It is a necessary part of the perpetuation and amplification of the status quo - an inertia intrinsic to the essential reproductive trait of all social states including the capitalist one. Prestration is an unpercieved dimension of marxist sociology unveiled by Baudrillard's semiological researches. Chanel, Baduet, and limited editions are some of the densest metaphors of prestration in contemporary society. This semiotic economics is a fundamental driver of the capitalist enterprise by whose agency objects perpetuate and multiply themselves through a process of infinite differentiation. The rallying cry of the prestrationist philosophy would be a negation of Shakespeare's fabled epigram, "That which we call rose would smell just as sweet by any other name." As the current expression has it, it's all in the name; it is either a Gucci or a Prada, or nothing. In fact, the latest advertisement of Jockey doing the rounds on Television communicates precisely this message of either this brand or none at all.

The primary driver of capitalism is the self-differentiating activity of the object. Social discourse transpires on a discriminatory basis analogous to language in Saussurean linguistics. Much the same as the functional value of commodities is a matter of economic necessity, their semiotic import is the collective product of the hierarchical interactions within the social order. Commodities acquire their significations in a relational chain of conception. Capitalism is an endlessly proliferating system like language in which the particular commodity gathers all of its significance from being situated in a comparative context populated with other commodities; the fetishistic worth of the object resides in its differential value with respect to the other objects surrounding it in the economy, rather than in some inner substance or intrinsic property of the object itself. It is what it is not which defines the object - its ontological difference from all the other objects in the totality. The basic function of the commodity is to differ. Operational here is the notion of differance with its Derridean furnishings of distinction, inequality and discernibility. The visibility/evidentiality/conspicuity of objects in an unequal economy of individuals is a critical marker of the consumerist discourse. The irony of the capitalist society is that it thrives on a discourse of nonidentity to perpetuate an order of the same. The statism of the order is secured by the entrenched base/root that holds erect the differentially fructifying socio-economic-politico-cultural superstructure.

It is an order of things that perdures by necessitating the unnecessary. "With its a, differance more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin or production of differences and the differences between differences, the play (jeu) of differences." In macroeconomic terms, the Marxist base would be that origin productive of differences in the economy of objects which go on self-differentiating ad-infinitum (in a language of historical semantics), generating differences between difference, to produce ever more homoousiae of the commodity; differences which return to constitute the subject in its self-differentiality, grafting an alien nature upon consciousness through the implanting of abstract differences imported from the commodity.

There can be no prescriptive closure to the order of things but their limits can be reset from the extremes of desire to the golden mean of necessity. Capitalism, however, is the discourse on the boundless production of productions themselves, culminating in the form of the fetish being abstracted from commodity and incorporated into consciousness. It is this abstract form of the commodity in consciousness that allows for the conception of commodity as a universal category enabling the "equal exchange of qualitatively different objects." The exchange, however, we know, is far from equal and commodification is an endeavour in equalization that is predominantly reinforced by the abstract violence of economic coercion. In such a context, human labour takes on a formal quality of equivalence that serves as the ratiocinative principle for the systematization of commodity values. This formal quality is a function of the reification of human subjectivity and the consequent isolation and atomisation of labour which masquerades itself in the name of emancipation or free labour. This labour is free in the reverse sense of a gift to the capitalist. The economics of labour is the epitome of precision as as its value is calculated to the nicety of decimal points of currency and moments. This level of abstraction of labour where its comparatizations and equalizations are a matter of inexorable and utmost accuracy reflects an advanced stage in capitalist production whose originary premise and quintessential product are both human labour in its objective existence. 

The word of the dead

1)

Not guilty was me,
the kuudan-yo screened,
presumed innocent Sina,
the stroke-knitted neiet

Would regret it?
My heart gray
What are you crying, what? -
Jääkukan edge

2)

The hardest not to break the word
The most painful is death hellyytes.
But the urgent problem
press yha
evil deed a good heart

Pain was not the pain of the largest,
when you created me, your suojaas thirsty.
Therefore, exept jarkyn sydanjuurin,
when you created the woman
patients, mi wept for the dead.