Johnson & Faulkner at the Crossroads

Essay


Johnson & Faulkner at the Crossroads


“I went down to the Crossroads and fell down on my knees, asked the Lord up above for mercy, save poor Bob if you please.”

Robert Johnson


“My subject is the human heart in conflict with itself.”

William Faulkner in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech



Visualise the father of rock n roll, a prince of the jook-joint, a womanising latter-day king of the Blues. Go back further and think of him as just another tattered poor black playing tricks on his guitar in the dirt. Now picture the future Nobel laureate, the mayor of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, scratching away unheralded as he works the night shift at the local power plant. Note that the Blues-man recorded just 29 songs with 13 of them in an alternate version: 42 tracks in all, during two recording sessions, and was paid about $10 a song to do so. Accept also that the Nobel laureate to become had 17 of his books out-of-print for lack of sales in the 1940s, when he was in his prime, already a famous champion of the dispossessed. What do these two have in common besides the Mississippi delta? After all, to be a musician and a man of “race” is one thing. To be a writer and genteel white is clearly another.

Robert Johnson (1911-1938), was a self-taught musician who played and played, everywhere, anywhere. That’s how he got to be so good, playing the base string and a different melody line at the neck, making it sound like there was someone else playing along with him as he sang his alliteration in a high tight voice. Some say that there really was. Others say it was the gift of his really big hands that helped Johnson invent riffs and chords and slides nobody else had heard of till then. That’s why he’d turn his back on stage so you couldn’t see his action. Legend won’t give him the credit though. It says that he went down to the crossroads (of US Highway 61 and US Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi), and sold his soul to the Devil in return for virtuosity and fame. But Johnson didn’t get to enjoy it much, not for long anyway, because there were just 27 years for him – he was killed with rat poison, administered in his whisky by a jealous husband a year after his second recording session. But the fame kept growing, unhampered now by the disadvantages of “race” in the Mississippi delta. It grew to legendary proportions, Johnson’s songs covered by an astounding range of famous musicians: Muddy Waters, Cream, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, Grateful Dead, BB King, Led Zeppelin, Bonnie Raitt, The Rolling Stones….

William Faulkner (1897-1962) was the white writer, celebrated in Europe, resented at home for offending his own kind with his anti-slavery and his contrary take on the Civil War. Faulkner, ever the writer, added the “u” in Faulkner to sound more English and fraud his way into the RAF during the war. And even though he won the Nobel in 1950, Faulkner had to make a living, once he was known, by writing commercial screenplays in Hollywood, often without credit. Faulkner raged away in his novels though, occasioning modest print runs of a 1,000 or sometimes 2,500. These were dark works, incorrigibly dense, highbrow, obsessed with violence, insanity and incest, loaded with biblical allusions, written in stream-of-consciousness and cooked in lashings of despair. The state of Mississippi, the poorest in the US was apparently no picnic! He was called “The Paradoxical William Faulkner” by The Christian Science Monitor in 1951, a year after his Nobel, for insisting he was celebrating the ultimate triumph of mankind all the while he was relentlessly degrading the lives of his characters, piling calamity upon calumny on them to test their spirit.

So what do these two southern folk have in common? Mr. Johnson’s struggles and innovations, it is amply clear, have borne substantial posthumous fruit. Today his memory lives on in the toniest echelons of blues and rock iconography with a place in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame and his face on a 1994 US Postal Service Stamp. His fans in the musical stratosphere make sure the royalties that go to his heirs flow like the river that bred him. Some even think Eric Clapton is Bob Johnson reincarnated, rich and white and long-lived and criss-crossed with enough tragedy to qualify him as the genuine article…

And Faulkner? One of the greatest writers of the 20th century they now say, a Nobel and two Pulitzers worth, but just as neglected as Marcel Proust or James Joyce who occupy the high pedestal too. Well, Faulkner’s heirs are in for a windfall, in the sudden nature of the beast. His books, at least 3 of them, including the one written in the power plant, have turned into instant best sellers for the first time! On Amazon.com, the June 05 demand for Faulkner is second only to the new Harry Potter expected soon. There are 500,000 of an inexpensive ($29.95) three-book box set in paperback on order from the publishers (Vantage) as of June the 4th. Why, you might well ask? Because Oprah, on June 3rd, (born poor too and surprise, surprise, in Kosciusko, Mississippi), has chosen to name As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury and The Light in August as her Oprah Book Club (OBC) selections for June, July and August respectively. She even rubbed it in on her show and said you’re not a “serious” reader unless you’ve read Faulkner. And so, the millions of Oprah viewers want to make sure they fit the description this summer!


PS: And if you care to go there, to the crossroads, just before midnight of a night, you’re likely to meet a big black man with a sly smirk on his face. If you’ve taken your guitar he’ll be happy to tune it for you and if it’s a book you’re carrying, why he’ll likely grin in your face and just scrawl in his name…

(1,036 words)

Title: Johnson & Faulkner at the crossroads
By Ghatotkach
Wednesday, 29th June, 2005



This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.

Nobody knows but Jesus

Bryan Stanley Johnson- British Exprimental Fiction Writer

Essay



Nobody knows but Jesus…

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen

Nobody knows but Jesus…

Louis Armstrong

It’s true, truth is stranger than fiction and the delineation of this strangeness is pushing non-fiction sales up to the top of the charts. It could even be that fiction, in its pristine make-it-all-up glory, is a little winded. In trying to keep up with the innovations of television, film and the internet, fiction may indeed be grateful to sink into the comfort of the park bench - to sit out a round or two in contemplation. Besides, never mind categorisation, the King of de Carnaval in 2005 has to be King Idea, fecund as rain, impregnating everything comely, fathering more children every time he twitches. Genres today are running after ideas like a bunch of flabbergasted mix n match mammies trying to keep their wards safe, if hyphenated. Last year’s runaway bestseller, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is what, fact or fiction or a bit of both? Does anyone really care? The idea is to be interesting and fresh in the rendering and so the market is flooded with novelised biographies, novelised histories and novelised management books, even anecdotal cookbooks – the mainstay of publishing outside of prescribed text books and pornography.

It’s also true that startling new ideas, left to marinade in the crucible of time, seem to age and mature, migrating from the preposterous to the pleasurable. But of course, it is not the ideas which change, little by little, ageing in the barrel like whisky and wine, imperceptibly transformed in the fullness of time. Ideas once stated can be as static as tombstones. They are strangely elliptical in shape, neither round enough to roll, nor possessed of the legs to walk by themselves. Heady they may well be, brewed with awesome innovation, but no longer at liberty to breathe gently in the gloom of cool cellars, properly absorbing the goodness of their ingredients, because now, like newborn babies, they have been cast out of the womb.

Ideas once born need succour, care, appreciation, protection. In time, ideas need advocates and successors. Ideas need you and I, from the start and at the end, the poignant beginning of their mutation. So it is fitting that we change our minds sometimes about sharp ideas, too tart to be tasty at first, we look on them differently when we gain a mellowness of perspective over time. The erstwhile avant-garde no longer offends, as it did a previous generation. Decades, sometimes centuries later, we sometimes redeem ourselves. On these blessed occasions, rare as heart’s blood for all that, we can raise that which was thought bizarre earlier, by the shoulders, with honour, raise it from the fringes and place it squarely in the mainstream. We can regard it well now, discovering things to admire and appreciate in its features. This is a bittersweet communion, as old as history, allowing us to beatify and exalt that which our predecessors have rejected, sometimes deliberately harmed. That irony and cliché walk hand in hand does nothing to faze us because we can feel none of the pain of the people who gave birth to those ideas that took so long to gain legitimacy.

The fathers and mothers of this race of novelty come in a variety as diverse as the ideas they extol. Some are noble of brow, archetypical - heroic, lonely, proud, self-absorbed-others, even as they contain the spark of genius are also branded by the mark of Cain. These latter are fragmented, tortured, inadequate vessels for their talent, venting their spleen in chicanery and epistolary beggary. Some are celebrated for a brief season before their audiences tire of them. Others spend years of soul-searing struggle to attain their measure of success. Either way, this is an audacious breed, not hesitant to climb on to the rack of popular judgement, seeking the edge in their daring, tacitly prepared for martyrdom from the very start. They are willing, they believe self-indulgently, to endure insults, ridicule, the pain of neglect, poverty and despair. But too often, the part of the prophet is too much to bear and there comes a time when death appears mesmerizing, its embrace sweeter than the most tender of lovers, guaranteeing oblivion.

Take the story of Bryan Stanley Johnson which is exciting quite a bit of comment at present because of the BBC Four’s Samuel Johnson Prize. The Samuel Johnson is the UK's and the world’s richest prize for non-fiction, with the winner receiving £30,000. Named in honour of the critic, essayist, lexicographer, poet and biographer Samuel Johnson, the prize is funded by an anonymous British businessman and open to any work of non-fiction published in English in the UK, regardless of the author's nationality. Set up in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award, the 2005 prize, announced in mid-June, went to a conventional novelist named Jonathan Coe who has written a novelised biography, Like a Fiery Elephant: the story of BS Johnson.

The subject, Bryan Stanley Johnson, is viewed by Coe, and by the literary establishment by virtue of the bestowal of this most prestigious prize, today in 2005, as a gifted and prolific novelist, poet, playwright and filmmaker, whom Coe describes as "Britain's one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s". Johnson’s relentless pursuit of re-invention and innovation despite an icy neglect from the public drove him to suicide in 1973 at the age of 40. The irony is doubly compounded by the fact that Johnson was not without support in his lifetime, being acclaimed by fellow avant garde writers Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess and championed by literary agent extraordinaire, the late Giles Gordon (who also represented Prince Charles and our own Vikram Seth). Whatever be the peculiar alchemy of Johnson’s destiny, that seems to be reaching out beyond the grave some 30 years on, in his time, the experimentation and anarchic playfulness that characterised his fiction and a small body of short films and documentaries for cinema and television, was not seen as refreshing.

Johnson didn’t let the disapproval stop him–he wrote, and at a furious pace: Travelling People-novel, (1962), Albert Angelo-novel, (1964), Statement Against Corpses – poetry, (1964), Trawl-novel, (1967), You’re Human Like The Rest of Them-novel, (1967), The Unfortunates - novel, (1968) Paradigm- novel, (1969), Unfair- novel, (1970), Fat Man On a Beach, novel, (1970), B. S. Johnson v. God - play, (1971), House Mother Normal-novel, (1971),Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry-novel,(1973), Aren't you a Bit Young to be Writing your Memoirs? -non-fiction, (1973); and, published posthumously, See the Old Lady Decently - novel, (1975). Almost everything BS Johnson wrote is unavailable and has been long out-of-print but let us see what happens now.

Johnson earned a B.A. from King's College, London, was poetry editor of the Transatlantic Review, worked in film and TV and even won two awards, the Gregory Award (1962) and the Somerset Maugham Award (1967). He displayed his penchant for the bizarre, Yoko Ono like, offering his books with holes cut into them, others with blackened pages and unbound books that could be read in any sequence. These attention-grabbing antics might have produced love and loathing, in equal measure, if it had been Johnson’s fate to be indulged, but sadly, it did neither, at least while he lived. Today, after being reprised by a man whose writing is nothing like his subject’s, a writer from another era (born in 1961), who has applauded his efforts without reservation, calling his experimentation with the novel, its form and content, profound: Brian Stanley Johnson is famous at last.

“... Jack calls me, from the liver-house, Jack who keeps interesting things for me, curiosities which turn up in the trawl. Today he has a dogfish, the only one caught so far, stiff and bent rigorously by the shape of the bucket it has lain in, about two pounds in weight, looking just like a baby shark, vicious enough for its size.... Jack shows me at the bottom of the bucket the brown flatness, flecked with orange spots, of a plaice. As he puts his hand in, the plaice flaps twice before he can hold it through the gills: looking at me as though about to reveal a secret, he suddenly reverses the fish to show that the bottom two fillets have been cut away. That's what 1 like about plaice, Jack says, They do keep trying.” (From Trawl, BS Johnson, 1967).

(1,411 words)

Title: Nobody knows but Jesus
By Ghatotkach
Saturday 25th June 2005

Serendipity

Essay-inspirational


Serendipity

Serendip is the tranquil once-upon-a-time Indian-Arab-Persian name for present day Sri Lanka. This name, with its blue sapphire resonance was extant in Sinbad the Sailor’s day, that fabulist, happy-making never-never-time. And the name Serendip stayed, sparkling and glinting for aeons before the Portuguese invaded the tear-drop shaped isle they renamed Ceilao. Then the Dutch colonised Ceilao, calling it Ceylan before the British took it off the Dutch and renamed it a right and proper Ceylon.

But along the way, in the 18th century, Horace Walpole, the 4th Earl of Orford, the youngest son of a British prime minister, a writer of some 3,000 belle lettres, coined a word. In one of his letters to the British diplomat, Horace Mann, on January 28, 1754 he wrote “serendipity.” Most academics, while agreeing that Walpole coined the word, say that the concept of serendipity originates in the ancient tales of the Panchatantra and that the Three Princes of Serendip story, on which Walpole drew, is a derivative.

What is certain is that it is rare to find a word with such a charge of etymological curiosity. And if the word was just a word it might have done no more than entertain lexicographers and pedants because theirs is a rarefied craft. But no, serendipity began life saying it meant one thing while being taken for another. The Panchatantra brand of serendipity, with its earthy folklore origins, had much in common with the modern crossword in its cherchez le clueism. Serendipity the ancien, is definitely not about the sunny concept of happy coincidence we believe it to be.

Let us look at the story that inspired Walpole to coin the word. You’ll see that the story is about being clever and deductive like Sherlock Holmes in his hat. It is called The Three Princes of Serendip:

Three goodly young princes were travelling the world in hopes of being educated to take their proper position upon their return. On their journey they happened upon a camel driver who inquired if they had seen his missing camel. As sport, they claimed to have seen the camel, reporting correctly that the camel was blind in one eye, missing a tooth, and lame. From these accurate details, the owner assumed that the three had surely stolen the camel, and they were subsequently thrown into jail. Soon the wayward camel was discovered, and the princes brought to the perplexed Emperor of the land, who inquired of them how they had learned these facts. That the grass was eaten on one side of the road suggested that camel had one eye, the cuds of grass on the ground indicated a tooth gap, and the traces of a dragged hoof revealed the camel's lameness. (Adapted from The Peregrinaggio [1557] in Remer, 1965)

From the above story Walpole created serendipity to refer to the combination of accident and sagacity in recognizing the significance of a discovery (Remer, 1965, pp. 6-7). Other people since have defined serendipity as:

• The faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.
  
• Accidental sagacity; the faculty of making fortunate discoveries of things you were not looking for.
  

This, of course, screams of the Biblical concept of “Providence” and the action of the unseen hand of God. It implies that what is “happy coincidence” to us is actually God’s foreknowledge of all things and his nudge is to see that his Supreme Will is realised. Also, the reason that we run into happy coincidences as opposed to their converse is also not accidental but quite in keeping with His divine blue-print. Good discoveries and consequent good outcomes happen because God wants it that way. God has an understandable vested interest in preserving and controlling the universe and all that is in it after all!

But where there is faith can rationality be far behind? The rationalists, scientists, proof-fact-loving-polloi have joined the debate. These good folk suggest, in a there are no mysteries tone of voice that there is nothing serendipitous in the naïve and credulous Walpolian sense. Full of the self-righteousness of the godless they aver that it’s understandable, in an artist, an author who wrote Gothic horror novels too viz. The Castle of Oranto (1765), but just not “right” thinking. To these people, the apple that dropped on Newton’s head was serendipity only in the sense that the eureka moment was an encounter as in planned insight meets unplanned event leading to meaningful and interesting discovery…

The last time this pot was stirred in an archetypical sense was in the 19th century when a naturalist by name of Charles Darwin advanced his Theory of Selective Evolution. It upset a lot of the faithful who didn’t want science monkeying around with the Doctrine of Creation. Today, most of us realise that Science too is an evolutionary ape and yesterday’s inviolate truths have a way of turning into today’s drollery. Also, if we look at the rumbling fault-lines between the adherents of the world’s great religions we see that they are fretting and fuming about the fact that it is trust that is the missing stake. And what is trust if it isn’t an act of faith?

So to me, it all comes back to Faith. Serendipity is indeed the hand of God. It is a good providential and fortuitous energy. It made Alexander Fleming see the possibility in the mould developed serendipitously on a staphylococcus culture plate. The mould, Fleming saw, had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. He was inspired to further experiment and he found that a mould culture prevented growth of staphylococci, even when diluted 800 times. He named the active substance penicillin.


Serendipity. With its alchemy of insight, chance and discovery tells us we are being watched over and that we are not alone. In our moments of despair, it is the hope inspired by what may lie around the bend that keeps us going. It makes us laugh out loud when we triumph and everything looks so obvious, so simple when we breakthrough! There’s the lovely anecdote about the illustrator Rene Goscinny who wrote and Albert Uderzo, the writer, who drew - to create the beloved ASTERIX series. This phenomenally successful collaboration was inspired by the serendipitous twist of this role reversal.

Sometimes serendipity reaches out beyond the grave. Think of Anne Frank’s cloth bound diary thrown on the floor by the Nazi soldiers who came to take away the Franks after their hiding place was discovered. Something made Anne’s friend, Miep Gies, go to the empty rooms just after the arrest, pick up the diary Anne loved to write in and put it away in her desk to give back to Anne, she thought, after the war was over…

And sometimes serendipity can be quirky. Columbus is acknowledged as the discoverer of “The New World,” which he thought was India, when he sailed West on behalf of Spain. His voyages are well documented but those of his contemporary and fellow Italian also voyaging on behalf of Spain are less so. There is some doubt about whether Amerigo Vespucci actually sailed on his first voyage to the continents that came to be named after him. If he didn’t, and was merely the owner of the ship that sailed to South America in his name, then his second and third voyages took place after Columbus got to the Caribbean. Still, serendipity as we can see, has found a berth for them both.

Perhaps the most touching example of the power of serendipity in recent times is illustrated by the film Forrest Gump (1994). This timeless film that reprises the value of faith is immensely inspiring. Here is Forrest Gump, a man with an IQ of 70, 5 points below the “normal” cut-off, who wears callipers on his legs in childhood, and knows how to love. It is this same man in adulthood who becomes a star football player, learns to run like the wind, become a Medal of Honour winning war hero, a very successful shrimp farming businessman with shares in a “fruit” company called Apple, a ping-pong champion, a steadfast friend and a constant lover. The hand of God. Serendipity. His name may be Forrest Gump but “that’s all I have to say about that.”

(1,388 words)
Title: Serendipity
By Ghatotkach
June 23rd, 2005

We need you Gordon Gekko!

Essay-satire


We need you Gordon Gekko!

What would Gordon Gekko have said? Probably “get a better suit,” because Gekko knows the value of appearance. In the movie, Gekko says this to a man who’s already wearing a $400 suit. But GG is not talking about passable. He thinks Brioni is that better suit. And Brioni suits, the best of Italian, wide-in-the-shoulders, narrow-in-the-waist, are gasp inducingly expensive. They were expensive in 1987 when Oliver Stone made Wall Street and they’re even more expensive now. The point? Well, maybe more of a parallel with the point of this essay. India reportedly wants at least $150 billion to start with for infrastructure development from foreign direct investment (FDI). And she also wants foreign institutional investment of $10 billion in 2005 (up from $8 billion plus last year) and $2 billion increments every year on till kingdom come. We’re starting to dare to want but even if the FII comes in the FDI simply won’t. Reason? FDI is rooted money that goes into walls and bridges and needs to be inspired into confidence. And “modern” India can’t have it looking the way she does.

So let’s get Gordon “money never sleeps” Gekko on our team shall we? When I spoke to him today he did this update on his best-known mantra coined for all the post socialist economies that have come out of the closet lately. He said that, for us, specially the mandarins and the political bosses to repeat this (or have it repeated because he knows we have a lot of help in India), at least a million times, maybe a billion times or more, so that we’ve done it for each and every Indian – Wealth is Good. That is the mantra Gekko gave us and he said that it would change everything if we tried to inject the repetitions with faith.

A little startling I admit, because a lot of us, out of good-breeding and leftist leanings tend not to wear this wealth word on our sleeves. On the other hand, Gekko didn’t get to be such a Brioni wearing top-dog high-rolling corporate raider without getting his perception fundamentals right. I decided on balance that it sounds good to me, much better than Greed is Good at any rate even if it did make Gekko infamous in the first place. So I went to the library next to mull things over and providentially came across this piece by the “positioning” guru Jack Trout in which he said, “Perception is reality. Don’t get confused by the facts.” Here’s another one, I thought, who’s been very successful ever since 1968 positioning brands who is saying pretty much the same thing. So where exactly is brand India positioned and what is the perception of it?

At present I’d guess the developed country visitor, which tellingly includes most of our Asia-Pacific brethren in addition to the West, sees India as an over-populated third-world pot pourri, a sort of Egypt with software. He sees chaos, complication, red tape no red super glue everywhere. He can smell the stink of municipal effluent and experience the backbone altering horrors of Indian infrastructure first-hand anytime. He can’t understand why we won’t put the whole of India in the showroom window instead of selling “Incredible India” like some snake-charming fakir dressed as a hopeful mirage complete with forts, elephants, candlelight and red turbans. The perception is that of a quaint old civilization not concerned much with coming up-to-date with destiny. So what happens? The foreigner feels no urge to risk too much of his money in this country. When I ask Gekko what he thinks he says “modern” India needs to up the chant of his Wealth is Good mantra like yesterday.

But Gordon “money never sleeps” Gekko doesn’t want to overdo the pessimism. He says he took a virtual rickshaw into the Indian bazaar, after our last conversation this morning, and he liked a lot of what he saw. There’s Mr. Democracy doing very well thank you and Mr. Judiciary, doing so well that he’s always pushing aside Mr. Executive in his zeal to be defendant, judge and jury himself! He saw heaps of produce in the vegetable and grain markets and mountains of fridges, TVs and all manner of consumer goods selling well. He looked up the ticker and it said the growth rate of the economy is over 6% and climbing. He went by the stock market (how could he resist?) and there he saw FIIs investing in as many as 900 Indian companies everyday - and why there aren’t 900 companies worth investing in daily anywhere else in Asia. But he said, you need to beef it up, this Wealth is Good mantra like now! Look at HSBC, your biggest FII, it’s put in $3 billion in the Indian market, up from $100 million only a couple of years ago but they’ve put the rest of the $35 billion Asia allocation somewhere else. Yes, and I know there are over 500 FIIs registered with you but that tells me the same thing – they’re not investing enough!

Gekko’s been on other people’s minds too. Forbes Magazine put him on the cover of its June 13, 2005 issue in connection with the current concern about global hedge funds. They think Gekko is the presiding deity of the fund managers who manage them hedges and imply that they play-back the Gekko credo every day before they hit the keys: "Greed is good /Greed is right./Greed works./Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit./Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind."

It’s unfair really. If the hedges make a killing Gekko in Brioni looks like a hero and if they fail then Gekko is the bad-guy in the morality play. But the truth is Gekko is a prime example of an attitude the New Yorker calls chutzpah, a kind of Jewish audacity, which can be used everywhere, even India. We just need to update Gekko a little bit. He said so himself. Gekko knows: “the most valuable commodity…is information.”

The word is out there. The world expects India to be wealthy soon and Gordon “lunch is for wimps” Gekko couldn’t have expressed the sentiment better than when he said: “I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun-tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”

With lines like that it’s no wonder Michael Douglas walked with the Oscar for playing Gekko.

(1,109 words)

By Ghatotkach
Sunday, 19th June 2005

Carpe Diem!

Madonna-With Love Dita...

Essay- inspirational

Carpe Diem!
An idea as old as the hills and just as wise…


What does this grand sounding phrase Carpe Diem actually mean? Roughly translated from the Latin, it reads robustly in capture-and-hold-mode as Seize the Day! The grandness does not, you will notice, diminish in the translation, but you do feel a tingle of excitement at the implications. You sense draughts of potentially invigorating intangibles that could gust into your life, if only you learn which buttons to press that is. There is an urgency about Carpe Diem that says: mortal that you are, think about it, why don’t you, when you have the power to introspect, given only to you amongst all the creatures of the earth.

The first mention of Carpe Diem, in the Latin aphorisms from Horace had more of a pluck rather than seize about it but that may just be reflective of the confidence of a surer age. Today, the phrase suggests, at one level, a kind of gladiatorial or wartime-morality grasping - as an exhortation to eat, drink and be merry because (perhaps) tomorrow we die. This idea derives its sanction, in part, from certain verses in the Books of Ecclesiastes and Isaiah in the Old Testament taken conveniently out of context, just a tad, because the old prophets (peace be upon them), only meant us to “lighten up” at the end of a day’s labour rather than take to the lotus-eating full-time. But this hasn’t stopped the legions of arty Carpe Diem bars and cafeterias from putting up their shingles has it? Yes, and brand consultancies, scholarship programmes, annual cultural programmes – all busy seizing the day as if it were some kind of clichéd Frisbee in the park.

But like everything innately grand, pure and exalted, well nigh impossible to sully, Carpe Diem has ruled the imaginations of men for over 4,000 years of recorded history. The sheer mystery and power of this phrase, more suggestive of the cathedral than the pub or boudoir, all the lascivious carpe diem poetry notwithstanding, is what has kept it going. Carpe Diem is about all that is best in ourselves, our capacity to love, this faith-driven ability that can raise us above insignificance and mortality and give us a fighting chance at greatness. Carpe Diem encapsulates our deepest yearnings and has given expression to a very pluckable flowering in the arts. Robin Williams plays English master John Keating in the celebrated carpe diem film Dead Poet’s Society (1989) and amongst all the Whitman and Herrick poems he uses to awaken the imaginations of his young charges, is one pure gem of his own: “Tis only in their dreams that men truly be free,/’Twas always thus, and always thus will be.”

But Carpe Diem goes back a long way. It features in the earliest known literary work, the 3rd millennium B.C. epic about Gilgamesh, a Sumerian king, a great warrior and bon vivant. In this tale, after many heroic adventures in the company of his friend and alter ego Enkidu, Gilgamesh is plunged into gloom and despair when Enkidu dies suddenly. Thereafter Gilgamesh roams the earth disconsolate, seeking answers to life’s deepest questions only to eventually meet Siduri, significantly employed as the wine maker for the gods. She tells him, “Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill you belly with good things day and night night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this is the lot of man.”

So, Carpe Diem, at its best, is also about courage, about how to take it on the chin and move on - smiling, affirming love and beauty and the future in the face of loss. Ezra Pound, the poet’s poet, had this to say in his Erat Hora: “Thank you, whatever comes.” And later in the same poem “… Nay, whatever comes/One hour was sunlit and the most high gods /May not make boast of any better thing/Than to have watched that hour as it passed.”

(725 words)

By Ghatotkach
14th June 2005

Tune

Essay-satire

Tune

“I am easily influenced. Compared with me a weather vane is Gibraltar.”
Franklin Pierce Adams (1881-1960), US journalist and humorist.

Empire, Imperial–these are terms now found adorning old boards of third-generation owned medicine stores, renovated heritage properties and obscure brands of thingies worn to practice safe sex. Even in a unipolar world dominated by challenging philosophies derived from The Quick and the Dead and High Noon, the only talk of Empire is ghostly, whispered out of the collapsible gates at the silent and forlorn Bijou waiting to be overwhelmed by a multi-screened successor. But once, still in the living memory of a rare old soldier on a Queen’s Pension who spoke intensely, his white eyebrows a waggling, Empire meant everything! Empire was one word that stood in for two to describe the universe, its twin presiding deities, its mother and its father - its mai-baap! When White Brow was young, coins were struck with loyalty on one side and treason on the flip. The choices? There weren’t any unless you thought there was anything to choose from between order and chaos. The prevailing tune then was best expressed by a brass band playing a Sousa march and, if you listen carefully, you can still hear the thump of the big drum. I never asked White Brow about the stirrings of nationalism or the decades he has lived through in an independent India - it would have served only to bewilder an old man.

In childhood and even as a young reporter on The Pioneer, Rudyard Kipling could hear the sound of the sitar clearly. He celebrated the enthusiasms of the Gungas, Kims and Lamas he wrote about with gusto and appreciated the derring-do of 16th century Mogul ruler Sher Shah Suri who tamped down the 2,575 km. Grand Trunk Road from Kabul to Calcutta. Kipling wrote democratically then, with that lump-in-the-throat-inducing you’re a better man than I tone. His attitudes towards the “native” were formed from the fun he had interacting with the Kipling family retainers in Bombay where father Lockwood ran the JJ College of Art. Lockwood did send Rudyard off to be miserable through the set-piece public-school education back “Home” but it didn’t cure Rudyard of his sympathies for the underdog. As a young man he wore his White Man’s Burden lightly, like a cashmere cloak and not like a rain-sodden great-coat!

The change in the tune came later. Just as well as it turned out. Because had Rudy kept the world-view of his childhood and youth he would have ended up as just another minor Raj writer penning his thoughts while doing his colonial time in near obscurity. What made him a celebrity writer in his own lifetime and gave him his exalted place in history is the fact that Kipling gradually changed into the most prolific publicist and defender of Empire travelling to South Africa and Rhodesia to enthuse John Bull at his post. But then why do we still read Kipling today? Because now, we switch off the Sousa march and let the sun shine through the genius of his writing. We are confident in our brownness, yellowness and blackness as we turn the pages and unembarrassed in our whiteness as well. We feel easy like this because RK the publicist is long dead and what a lost cause it turned out to be after all.

Looking at this, we realise a lot of tunes change, for all of us, they grow tiresome, grow silent and just when we think that’s it, all there is, here they are again making a come-back! So perhaps it’s patience we should exhibit along with instituting a search for motives buried far below the surface when confronted with a leopard attempting to change its spots. It gets easier if we regard the writers of some inconvenient proverbs as incorrigible right-wingers and upholders of the status quo. Because becoming someone else has been accorded serious “make-over” status now and is a tried-and-tested formula used by the prescient to very good effect on their “growth.”

Which brings me to the two new biographies out on Mao, one by Jonathan Spence and the other by Philip Short. It turns out, not surprisingly, for the Great Helmsman, who started a China down on its knees on the path that has raised it to near greatness today-that he was also responsible for the deaths of over 20 million of his own people in the process. Short says “history is laid down slowly in China” and “a final verdict on Mao’s place…is still a very long way off.” Spence, on his part, tells us that Mao, aged 27 then, wrote feelingly, in a 1920 essay on Lenin, that, “a forced attempt at construction simply will not work.” However, the Mao of later years had changed his tune beyond all recognition – he now fostered fear with constant purges, caused immense suffering with bizarre social transformation experiments and saw the horrific effects of all these pogroms as just so much acceptable collateral damage. Despite the anguish of the millions who died under the wheel, Mao in his mausoleum, can’t be expected to care over-much when the legacy grew up so nicely into present day China.

What is certain, from the worm’s eye view, is that dancing to a given tune and changing it are undeniably two sides of the same coin. It makes little difference to us worms. And, aurally speaking, it’s sweet Melody, not Feed-back (those howling noises that Hendrix extracted from his amplifiers sometimes, not the result of opinion polls or hotel-guest surveys), that changes into Grunge when it starts to bore, the better to express all those very real negative emotions! Tunes live in the ether and play in our heads, massaging our cranium, rib-cage, pit, gut and gonads, but from the inside. They buzz when we up the audio and startle when they stop. Tunes work well in the shower, mist-wrapped and warm. Tunes become anthems, when enough people tune in, capable of programming whole nations into Stepford Wives like conformity.

Personally, I prefer tunes one-on-one, in cars, in bars, even in muzak-filled elevators, in fact, all enclosed, womb-like places, but that’s just me. Tunes roll really well too, pebble smooth, comfortable being metaphors of change. Change the arrangement or up the tempo and it becomes a thing transformed. The change can be dramatic, more so in politics, as I’ve been saying all night, than elsewhere. And current day India still answers to its pretty British given name, influenced by the Indus, now in Pakistan. We didn’t mind at all as long as our frontiers stretched from Afghanistan to Burma. What fun could be had by one-and-all running up and down Sher Shah Suri’s Grand Trunk from end-to-end. The trouble began in our fractured psyches when 480 km. of the GT between Peshawar and Lahore went missing one hot August midnight in 1947.India was left with a mere 2,000 km. that link, after a fashion, only six of our modestly proportioned states. The pining for the lost arm, albeit overwhelmingly Muslim, has gone on unabated for 58 years. The arm, on its part, has been mortally afraid of being seized upon when it wasn’t looking and being grafted back forcibly on to the heaving and wholly unacceptable Hindu body politic. This has been the tune complete with periodic sabre-rattling, three bloody wars, constant skulduggery, mistrust, chicanery and appalling acts of terrorism thrown in free-of-charge.

And then, mere days ago, the hawkiest-hawk in India’s body politic, he of the Rath Yatra and Babri Mosque demolition, the steely nay-sayer of the Agra summit, decided to very astutely change his tune. It’s true that there is much consternation in India and reams of newsprint have already been expended on trying to understand the move because the song the Leader of the Opposition and President of India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) has chosen to sing is from Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s song-book. But isn’t Mohammad Ali Jinnah the founder of Pakistan, a country that largely came into being because of Jinnah’s strident advocacy of the two-nation theory for Hindus and Muslims?? Mr. Advani, picked out a particular tune in which Jinnah said that Muslims and other minorities should live in harmony and peace in Pakistan to find a way to call him “secular”. Justifiable outrage in India apart, Advani has received very kind notices in Pakistan because here was the master hawk from across the border recognising the right of the arm to live its own life on its own terms. It would have brought a tear to the eyes of the early summiteers Begin and Sadat. They understand intractable, Oh do they just! So what’s next? Smiling faces and casinos in Kashmir? Gorbachev coming by to give us a tutorial on Glasnost? Bush giving us nice Indians a high chair at the Security Council? From the worm’s eye view this is wonderful for the people of the sub-continent and the businessmen are liking it very much too. The ruling Congress and its allies are miffed with this blatant hijack of its we are secularists and here to save the nation from those nasty communal forces platform but they’re not saying very much yet. And despite the turbulence at present, this is an audacious political make-over for Lal Krishna Advani that will propel him to the bride-spot, electorate willing, he’s definitely caught the bouquet this time, so no more bridesmaid for us to kick around!

(1,590 words)

By Ghatotkach
Saturday, 11 June 2005

Truth, truisms etc...

JAN BOLLAERT- A little taste of heaven


Truth, truisms, virtual truths, facsimiles and friends

“ The petty done
The undone vast”

Robert Browning - from “The last ride together”

The subject is truth, that greatest moral yardstick that underpins belief. Nobody has a point of disagreement- in principle - truth is good, necessary and basic to our grip on reality. The trouble comes with looking at the proposition straight in the eye- naked and unvarnished. This kind of truth is very hard to take. This is the type of truth that we sometimes call “brutally honest.” The type, that we all end up agreeing, albeit with some embarrassment, is helped considerably with the sprinkling in of a few “white lies.” The practical point is that pure truth is a lot like pure research - good in a laboratory and for the Mahatmas amongst us. For the rest, practicality demands a splash or two of compromise, some low-lighting and soft music, self-adulatory affirmations and the inclusion of others from amongst truth’s euphemistic cousins.

For those of us with more “jaan” yet left in us, the mixture is stiffer- mostly neat truth with just a dash of wry excuse-making in tolerance of our few modestly admitted imperfections. For the others, vast legions of us on the slippery slopes of decline, we need much greater artifice, a flurry of illusion making and spin to make ourselves, our truths – presentable and bearable. So if the truth be told - what we are really dealing with is a slide-rule rather than that moral yardstick we intended to uphold when we started out.

Getting away from the private to the public domain for a moment - we notice, bemused, that the truth of the mighty is subject to large helpings of self-serving embroidery. Moreover, we see that the powerful can rewrite the truth to suit themselves at any time while they reign supreme. It invariably becomes quite a different story when the self-same powerful are overthrown but that too is yet another beautiful aspect of truth! The observer need not be caught on the horns of any moral dilemma. On the contrary, he can become acquainted with another version - a fresh point-of-view, a new set of emphases and sometimes a completely different conclusion. After all, many things are not realised at first and we discover that there are two, four, even eight sides to a story in the telling!

And every truth we can think of - in the personal and the public domain alike- comes to life because of our value systems. These value systems are the deep inspirations of our sense of self, the bedrock of our humanity and that which distinguishes us from animals who are ruled by mere instinct. Here too, we have to admit the winds of change if we nurture any hopes of keeping up. The truth is in dire need of perennial updating with its ageless “eternal” aspects deep embedded for the benefit of the orthodox. But is this reassurance necessary when the eternal truths survive all history in any case? To the victor go all the spoils and the truth, willy-nilly, alongside. How else can it be?

The eternal truth we observe is that the mighty and the good are interchangeable terms that just highlight different virtues of the same entity. It is also clear from history that weariness and a sense of futility are always the province of the cynical, the degenerate, the weak and the subversive. But, since the truth is destined, by its very nature, to reign supreme in the beginning, the middle and the end – there is really no need to worry about untruth, because all untruth is doomed to failure sooner or later. We need to attack untruth on sight however, with a view to do no less than kill. Any relaxation of attitude in this regard could undermine our very existence. People have been slack before and empires have come and gone as a consequence. Either this be true or the truth decided to change without a by-your-leave and there were a lot of hapless practitioners caught on the wrong foot every now and then in history.

Lastly, it must be true that the final arbiter of truth is God the infinite. God is good. God is true and the only earthly inconvenience is in the number of religions and names of God that we have to reckon with. Which is probably why most people around the world, particularly in the developed nations, have given up the ghost and simply abandoned religion. India is, of course, an exception in this regard and is probably the most religious country on earth. As Indians, we seem to have no problems with contradictions - calling them half-truths and defining the term as being descriptive of being wholly true for half of the time! Also because of the sheer religious fervour of our teeming millions, irrespective of the Gods they worship, it is more than likely that the Gods in turn are persuaded to take over the worrying for us truly devout Indians - blessing us most munificently for the power of our bhakti and our grip on the truth.

(864 words)

By Ghatotkach
16 May 2005

Words to the naive

Essay- satire

Words to the naive


“Go with slow speed. You will get there sooner if you go that way.”
Sri Paramahansa Yogananda

I am currently reading the second volume of the two-volume rendering of The Mahabharata by Ramesh Menon. And what a wonderfully readable version it is too! After completing the over 800 pages of the first volume I am struck by a couple of thoughts which I want to unburden myself of here. Why is life so unfair to some? And, how close to the fantastic is it possible to live? The first question has KARMA written all over its forehead but for those who don’t believe in cause-and-effect they can always subscribe to the theory of “random occurrence” being grappled with in the physics departments of every great university around the world. The second question has no ready answer whichever way you cut it but has indeed set the cash-registers ringing through notable eruptions of popular entertainment via fantasia and science-fiction-in print, celluloid and limelight alike-Harry Potter, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars etc.. etc…

The entertaining uses of rationale busting fastasia apart, the elliptical and obscure does brisk business elsewhere too-for instance, in the high-growth spirituality business. Maybe I’m challenged in the esoteric regions but it’s zen statements like “Go with slow speed. You will get there sooner if you go that way,” that I struggle to fathom. Coming from highly respected seers like Swami Yogananda, they cannot, of course, be taken lightly. But a little voice in my innards that won’t be suppressed says what would going fast do that is undesirable? Don’t we all aspire to the fast-track, fast cars and the seductive fast buck! Some of us wouldn’t say no to fast women and fast food either, consequences be damned! And don’t we like it when we skid onto any of these goodies on the proverbial purple patches that come our way every now and then? So why is the learned Swami trying to put a brake on the proceedings? Perhaps he’s only recycling the old hare and tortoise story with lashings of the slow and steady to help us win races. It’s probably meant to promote endurance over flamboyance, stamina over pyrotechnics, substance over froth but ends up sounding disappointingly like soda over bubbly instead!

Self-improvement is another massive career option for the enigmatic proposition. So what if it’s a sort of mental yoga contortion with some very impressive mind-benders thrown in. Eckhart Tolle, after his own 19th nervous breakdown, says there’s Power in the Now and rides by waving to us from his Maybach. If he only knew the effect his book has had on hapless millions around the world! Here we are, in office and park, in dark corridors and dazzling courtyards, fluffing up our pillows in bed and shaking our heads on the pot, closer than ever to breaking point, as we try to still the unruly traffic whizzing by – rushing onto the past and future totally unmindful of all our arm-waving to the contrary. The plausibility of the statement makes it all the more tantalising. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to work this particular Rubik’s Cube we mutter - but overall it feels like trying to catch a bus in a dream underwater... We tuck the book back on the shelf, wide-awake when we find ourselves doing it of course, and humbly admit it’s our own running technique (both concept and speed) and leave it at that.

Self-improvement and spiritual upliftment aren’t the only arenas in which inexplicable messaging works - mostly by inspiring an uncomprehending awe. Round-robin statements are, were, and always will be, to the political manor born! Remember the prime minister from the “alternative option” who loved wearing full-fur astrakhan caps and frequently said he was busy “managing contradictions” with an absolutely straight face? Of course, to some of us this is going to sound reasonable and to such persons I need to suggest beginning soon as a “social worker” (start small), that is, if they are not already prime-ministers-in-waiting (silly me!).

Another Indian prime minister with a most impressive pout, said he was actually acting when he wasn’t - meaning inaction itself was action of a terrifyingly effective kind! The world economy and I (in no particular order) are quite prepared to believe anything this multilingual bidda said (or didn’t in the practice of his particular brand of zen), because he had the temerity to run a full-term government populated largely by persons from the grand-old-party without benefit of guidance from “the family”. He also liberated us irrevocably from the yoke of third world pessimism symbolised perhaps by the overthrow of the jokes named the Premier Padmini and the Ambassador - mark XXXIII! That they still run as taxis in Mumbai and as transportation for the geriatric political set respectively is quite another story.

Yet another PM, from the other party this time, in this very deep country, practiced the art of the pregnant pause to punctuate both poetry and national policy. His pauses between phrases were the stuff crib-deaths are made of! And of course, all his ministers started imitating his syntax and delivery. Next it spread to the opposition and to the senior bureaucracy till eventually the only ones talking in complete sentences were the absolutely inconsequential who had no appetite for power-speak at all.

If you still don’t get it, please start from the beginning again or alternatively catch the next episode of the X Files because, as you watch, it is bound to dawn on you that the truth is truly and really out there… And please don’t be tiresome and ask “Where?”

(955 words)

By Ghatotkach
1st June 2005

The expected and the unexpected

Essay-satire

The expected and the unexpected

I’ts strange how we remember people- women by their smiles, men by their mannerisms, rich men by their possessions, politicians by their wiliness, underlings by their effort, and so on. They’re just split-screen mental snap-shots and could serve as our epitaphs because it’s, as if we are, each of us, branded by this impressionistic iron like so many cattle in the stream of life. We are represented by a single characteristic, a symbol, a hieroglyphic, a stroke or two of mental caricature and what is more – all others subliminally agree that the cat fits the mat. This “impression” says more about each of us than finger-prints, it predicts who we will become as much as who we are. It makes little prophets of all of us as we decide, so very ruthlessly, about the outer limits of potential and possibility, about truth and lies in the lives of people we gaze out at.

The big historical picture also swirls and eddies in unexpected ways and throws up its own meanings. Meanings we meekly accept and hold as obvious even though we realise it wasn’t always so clear and least of all to the incumbent. For example- fat people never saw themselves as fat in a mirror-mirror-on-the-wall type of illusion-making, murderers saw themselves as social reformers, the magnum opus was rubbish but the T shirt slogan was emblazoned on a million shirts as pure genius, people were only cruel to be kind, every accident of birth was actually intended…

Take these two Italian gentlemen. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) and Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) are two Italians that we’ve all heard of, thanks to a celebrated book they each wrote and left behind to posterity. Casanova is the great Italian lover from the 18th century whom we all know because of the publicity given to his memoirs called “History of My Life” first published in complete form as late as the 1960’s. If that doesn’t ring a bell you might remember the film the celebrated Fellini made on him where a lot of name actors cavorted naked in the name of art.

Machiavelli too is familiar and depending on whether you lean politically right or left he was either a “pragmatic strategist” or a “cunning, unscrupulous…” well, Machiavellian sort of bloke. And this reputation too hinges on a slim book he penned and let slip called “The Prince.”

But in both cases posterity used its own unexpected judgement on their lives as it is wont to do. Casanova, who was quite a bundle of sticks- soldier, spy, diplomat, writer, adventurer, traveller, gambler and yes, lover- might have been surprised to find his name practically synonymous with “Romeo” or “Don Juan” at the top of the Western romantic tradition. Not bad to be at the top of anything right? But Casanova probably did realise the potency of his strongest suit at a subliminal level as two events clearly show. Casanova met Mozart in 1787 at Prague and gave him some authoritative advice to help shape the character of Don Giovanni in the composer’s famous opera. Mozart respected Casanova’s insights for his chameleon-like ability to become what each of his lovers wanted. So Casanova did the lover of the ages bit it in his own right and also via Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It’s insight plus genius compounded - I mean, some people have all the luck. Every time they perform the opera, that’s Casanova coming to life under a pseudonym!

The subliminal was acting again when Casanova wrote his memoirs over the last five years of his life ostensibly “to keep from going mad or dying of grief.” What a sense of high drama when what he probably meant was that he was sick of being in exile, old, toothless and terribly bored. But here too, his instinct did not fail him and cannily, he stopped his reminiscing around 1744 because that’s when the lover in him folded his tent. He must have sensed that the other aspects of Casanova would not have interested any outside of those who study 18th century Italian history.

And Machiavelli, who was a big-wheel diplomat in high Florentine circles during the Renaissance, expressed his ideas sumptuously in his Discourses upon the First Ten Books of Livy. But, like the erstwhile modern-day Don of gangster fiction, Mario Puzo, who amazingly thought his own “Godfather” was “trash” written for a quick buck, Machiavelli too is remembered today for the clear little book he knocked-off to curry favour with the immensely powerful Caesar Borgia. In fact, “The Prince” is the only work of Machiavelli that is ever read!

Human nature, of course, puts its own spin on this game between the expected and the unexpected. It is something to do with the attraction of opposites- beauty and the beast, success and failure, love and hate, happiness and sorrow, interesting and boring, the long and the short of it all. Perhaps one defines the other and each would lose meaning on its own. Comedian George Burns said if he was married to Marilyn Monroe he would end up being unfaithful with some ugly girl! Well this may be Burns being comic but it wouldn’t be funny if it didn’t sound authentic. I take comfort however in thinking of the men that MM did marry, and none of them, from all accounts, committed that particular sacrilege. The promiscuity was left to the goddess herself but whoever said goddesses have to conform to the ways of mortals.

( 925 words)

By Ghatotkach
26 May 2005

The Thread of Life

JAN BOLLAERT- Floral Einstein


Essay- satire


The Thread of Life

“The three Fates are Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis measures it and Atropos- cuts it.”

From Greek mythology

You will observe that the metaphor and the proverb are rolled up together like Cleopatra in the carpet for Julius Caesar. The three protagonists, a.k.a. the divine stooges, are stand-ins for circumstance, feasibility and ahem – ability… It makes a good composition and some could make a prize-winning photograph out of it. There they are, “The Fates” looking at the camera, wearing the Greek tailor’s props of cloth, measurement and the cut (unkind or otherwise).

The unwritten part, in such fateful discourse, is the role of that all important factotum named “timing” without which, all endeavour, no matter how “measured” and howsoever “cut” would whiz its way towards the bin of oblivion. So the key Robert Brucism, (he of the struggle and the spider fame), in all of this, is thus to do with a mandatory attitude of persistence and faith while we wait.

And here is the statutory warning for whatever it’s worth - we could, it must be realised, be waiting for a long time, days, years, decades, even lifetimes. Daunting as this sounds, we cannot allow it to shake us off when we are discussing “The Fates” with a capital letter to start each word. After all, “Service” as a concept may or may not be familiar to the arbiters of “The Fates.” The reactions too can be highly subjective and so not suitable as precedents or guides. I mean, if I am attended to quickly, helpfully and satisfyingly, I will go away praising the whole circus clearly and loudly. If, however, I am suspended on the hook till the last vestiges of my hope and cockiness have drooped and atrophied into an abyss beyond memory - I might not care very much about the explanations, however eloquent!

But meanwhile, back at the ranch, there is indeed a bit of a discussion going on. “Clotho” – says one worthy, “obviously the Greek cousin of metaphorical cloth, is imbued with the suggestion in above snippet that it has anima - a spirit, a soul, an innate ability to create itself. Further, that it comes, not really from the yarn-spinner’s gossamer, marvellous to behold as that would surely be, but from the very thread of life”.

“And here,” said the second worthy as I arrived at the ranch, not without kindness, “You were thinking you had unravelled the mystery of the last remaining unicorn!”

The thread of life. The thread of life. The phrase has a ring of infinity about it. But from my perspective the actors in positions 2 and 3 are decidedly finite mongrels not cut from the same Clotho at all. I mean, consider the measurer Lachesis and the cutter Atropos with a steady gaze for a spell. Lachesis, you’ll agree, because of his rather limiting function, has a decidedly utilitarian air about him devoid of poetry but echoing the very down-to earth attitudes of an auditor, a quartermaster, an issuer of provisions and the like. I can’t imagine Lachesis as well-dressed somehow even though he deals with the cloth made from the very “thread of life”. It’s as if he doesn’t care to be well turned out - not because he lacks vanity or self-respect, but because he holds us, his customers, in contempt for the habitual mess we make of our lives no matter how carefully he does his measuring and distributing. His friend and fellow henchman Atropos has an even more odious role in life - going around atrophying the product made up of the infinite threads is how scissors have acquired their negative image, master cutters notwithstanding!

The wags at the makeshift bar on the deep ranch veranda - were still, surprisingly, on the same topic.

“The measuring and the cutting makes the infinite thread of life something useful, not airy-fairy gossamer-like abstract,” says the first, always a bit wordy.

“Ever seen gossamer,” says the other, with the bluntness of a sledge-hammer.

This brought me back from my musings full-circle- back to the Greeks and the long lost age of mythology. To be fair, the Greeks hadn’t given top billing to Clotho as I had. In fact, Lachesis and Atropos were held in equally high standing. All three were “The Fates” with similar perks and travelling allowances. So, on balance, if the proverb about coats, cutting and cloth wants to be popular in 2005 and promote fashion to boot, it had better lay some emphasis on the artistry inherent in “The Fates” creating their seamless blend. Think of them, Mr. Proverb, as a trio of very harmonious bathroom singers and you’ll soon get the drift.

On my part, I’m off to the promontory at the edge of the garden to admire the rainbow that seems to have sprung up all of a sudden. And as for the wags - pleasantly tiddly by now, they are of the same accord, slightly unfocussed grins notwithstanding, and to prove it they come to lean over the veranda railing and start a fresh argument about the pot of gold instead.


(870 words)

By Ghatotkach
18 May 2005

Shoe-speak

Elle McPherson in Jimmy Choo Shoes for Elton John's Aids Charity Book Four Inches

Essay-satire


Shoe-speak

Silhouettes, glances, footprints-in-the-sand, colours, hair, lipstick, fragrances, flashes-all this and more press our buttons all the time. We react, incoherently, from the unconscious, instantly throwing up signals of approval or rejection, wanting the insufferably cute little girl in the red shoes strangled at once and the nice policeman in the hob-nailed sandals made from tyre given a cold glass of water at the back door. But such are the stuff of dreams! Even so, perhaps the big daddy of personal symbols are indeed to do with our feet, more precisely what we choose to clad them in. We have very strong views on the subject, absolute tales from the unfathomable. That is why we’re so decisive when it comes to our choice of sandals, slippers, jooties, Chinese heavy metal numbers, leather-soled clicker-clackers, rubber-soled brothel-creepers, moulded heel-toe-arch supporting bits of high-tech, little neat fetishes or big in-your-face statements.

Shoes are important-the Pope wears “the shoes of the fisherman,” meaning those belonging to the apostle Peter who was the first Pope, and, before that, a fisherman. In Kerala, amongst the matriarchal Nairs, when a lover is given the push, the civilised signal from the rejecter is to put his shoes outside the door.

We achieve a net effect with our shoes, most of us that is, other than my friend who opened a shoe shop for very small children in a prominent location and went completely broke for lack of customers. But here I’m talking of shoes on feet, bought ones, and they speak. One says, “Look, I’m practical, comfortable and sturdy and my owner says he wants to live in me”. Another, a female pair, says, “I’m made for pleasure and I don’t have to walk much you see…” Some of this chat is culturally loaded, even sexist one might say, but once they start, shoes do talk all the time but rarely above the monotone and cadence of a John Wayne. Which brings me to cowboys and careerists, both of whom generally prefer dying with their boots on because then their ghostly selves can come through the swing doors anytime and not worry about the broken glass lurking in the sawdust on the floor. For the Sherlocks and Watsons amongst us I want to suggest many a rewarding afternoon sitting below stairs to assess the footwear going by. They can catalogue what of it is beautiful, ugly, blunt, sharp, decorated, plain, buckled, zipped, strappy, dull, exciting, cheap, expensive, soft, hard, sleazy, ostentatious, complicated, kinky, playful, dominant or understated. You never know when one or more of this expression kills someone and then you’re in business, just like that!

All of us need to fill in the following blanks I’m afraid. It’s that out-of-date pomade shiny shoe-salesman with the fetching gap-tooth who’s been at me to assist. So, “Tell me Sam,” he yells above the roar of the Dakota engines, “When I send her away, from this tarmac forever, what should I remember her for…is it her comfort or her style?”

Or, leaving Casablanca and the Bogey alone before the Fida discovers it and paints 88 instant canvases on the subject, is it best when there is total rejection of the whole business as in the Hussain? This, as a proposition, is definitely neat as a malt but how many of us want to go barefoot and be pregnant with ideas all the time?

Thing is, the damn things speak! They talk to us and about us to all and sundry. They describe us and proxy for us. They show off and celebrate our sense of free choice- making us wear it if the shoe fits, bear in mind that we musn’t get too big for our boots and assure us we wouldn’t be caught dead in ‘em!

Shoes illustrate rites of passage and succession too-we talk of stepping-into-the-shoes-of, being man enough to fill the shoes of… They comment and bitch-calling us down-at-heel and judge us in our “cheap shoes.” They cause our determination to burn-shoe-leather in the pursuit of our dreams to be admired or laughed at.

The good news is we can get our own back. When we wear it on the other foot we can be supremely annoying as miss goody-two-shoes (don’t know a male/universal version of this one), dominate in our jackboots (with ways and means), tantalise in stilettos, be urban cowboys in hand-made knee-highs with risen-phoenix embroidery, corporate or drunk in Irish Brogues...

We can wear square-toes or pointy, round or roomy, safety shoes with steel toe-caps in mines or gum-boots in mud. We can become self-financing brand ambassadors in Nike, Adidas or Reebok or wear patent, plastic, rubber, polished, scuffed, faux, nubuck, suede or a designer chop-suey of all of the above particularly, (and what is it with these people), in red or white! We can smile, play Cinderella in glass slippers, drink out of them if we like and practice other euphemisms including plain laying offa dem blue suede shoes!

Abstinence apart, shoes are probably the most commonplace of fetishes expressing the fascination innocently enough by being collected, kept and cared for better than Imelda Marcos! Shoes express sensuality, power, luxury, well-being and a hundred other human emotions from knowing where the shoe pinches to being comfortable as an old shoe and also make for strong and sometimes bizarre fashion statements. And perhaps it is this ability to be many things to many people that inspired Elton John’s Aids Charity to rustle up a coffee-table book just released called “Four inches”. It features 44 wonderfully high-achieving ladies including Padma Lakshmi, Kate Moss, Serena Williams and the Duchess of York – photographed delectably nude in nuttin besides Cartier jewels and 4 inch Jimmy Choo pedestals! And O yeah… Kate Moss has this very nice cigar.


(972 words)
By Ghatotkach
Saturday, 04 June 2005

Elvis has left the building...

Essay-satire

Elvis has left the building…


“I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone.”

John Banville in his new novel “The Sea”


Banville’s old-man narrator in the just released The Sea is talking about an inferiority complex. This is a keeping up with the Joneses kind of thing, which is such a sad yearning that so many of us succumb to. It’s as if we need to invent fresh boots to kick ourselves with nightly and the ambition isn’t even grand enough to want to stand out as exceptional! We are content, according to Banville’s narrator, to merely pass as “successful” so that no-one laughs at us behind their masks of propriety. We don’t want our prominence to be too clearly understood in its particulars as that would hardly be awe-inspiring and possibly get in the way.

If we decide to agree with old Banville for a moment, isn’t this then a fig-leaf kind of success we’re after- being both good enough and unremarkable at the same time? It may really be a yearning for freedom in disguise but I’ll be damned if I can a get anyone to admit it! Everyone likes to go around saying they’re “fine, just fine”. But Banville’s old man needs to explain how come he can see his no-oneness so clearly when most of us can’t even see our someoneness that we are assured and reassured decidedly exists!

What we observe, to our discomfiture and chagrin - looking up and down, left and right, on the road of substance, are lots of Flash Harrys - well, flashing by. And what we want to know is how they do it, all these indistinct someones who know how to flash by when we don’t.

Other traditions go into different parts of the garden. We have the compelling fantasy of The Invisible Man read in childhood in which H.G. Wells created that sweet bushy-tailed scientist who concocts a potion (but no antidote) that renders him completely invisible forever and this being not there gradually turns the gentle genius into a homicidal maniac. He can’t accept that the very thing he’s invented hasn’t actually erased him and thereby hangs the whole tale. Most poignantly, he becomes visible once again, like magic-ink, only in death when he meets his premature and tragic end by misadventure.

In the same section of the garden is the Oscar winning musical Chicago wherein you have the cuckolded husband of the Roxie character singing Mister Cellophane in clown make-up lamenting his nobodyness. Hard going on the heartstrings as this is, the shrewd will identify that stuff like this happens when reach exceeds grasp and dullards aspire to Roxies! The Cellophane guy may have been perfectly happy if only he had picked on someone his own size, but, as we know, the rivulets of love don’t always flow where they should.

This theme of misfit-induced agony has been around so long that we’ve perhaps grown a little blasé about it. A dark comedy staple is about the old-lusting-after-the-young memorably showcased in Josef von Strindberg’s B/W classic The Blue Angel. Generations of art-film buffs, particularly in their acne-ridden teenage years, have squirmed in anguish for the hapless and horribly humiliated professor played by Emil Jannings. There he is, fat and sixty - prancing and panting in a chicken suit for the amusement of a bored, brassy but oh-so-sexy Marlene Dietrich. This film created Dietrich and she set off for Hollywood and an international career the same day The Blue Angel premiered on April 1, 1930. Emil Jannings? We don’t know what became of him but why does it seem so appropriate?

Still, around this particular garden, you soon realise that visibility is less than half the story. The winners don’t end up taking all. That some people grow richer and more successful than others is true enough but the mystery is in the suffering that is spread pretty evenly like Marmite on the no-ones and someones alike. This is baffling in the extreme and panic inducing too. Isn’t success meant to be the greatest revenge? Are there to be no celestial trumpeters announcing our new status as henceforth free-from-all-worldly-harm now that we have crossed over and have the brass ring firmly in our grasp? But, in effect, we find that many successful people are far from happy.

Take a look, for instance, at the other side of the same garden where, metaphorically speaking, you have these giant permaglo-color flowers that have a presence that even death cannot subdue! The owners of legendary success are many but let’s just take one that cannot be denied. And in talking of Elvis I want to mention only the love that he inspired rather than his very many accomplishments. The soul of a singer is in his singing and in his live performances. Elvis evoked such adoration that long after his encores, his dressing room champagne and pills time and even after the tail lights of his Cadillac had winked away Memphisward - the announcers would still be at it, intoning that Elvis had indeed left the building. So to me, writing this decades after Elvis went skywards, the point is not about presence and absence but about being no-one and someone at the same time. I think we all have this in common with Elvis and that is why we belong in the same garden, Banville’s old man, the unnamed Flash Harrys, H.G.’s invisible one, Mr. Cellophane, Emil Jannings, You and I.


(924 words)

By Ghatotkach
20 May 2005