from india to romania to home.
VINOD:
Oct 17th 2005 (morning)
As we sit in an eight-sided monk's cell the monk and my mother discuss the merits of controlling one's breathing as it concerns quieting the mind. She makes some noises of assent though it seems they might be untruthful. I stare at the octopyramid ceiling and silently disagree with his faded 101 Dalmatian sheets.
The uncle with us begins to argue with the monk revealing his agricultural technocrat leanings. The day before we toured his fields where he preened over his vast hybridization project: genetically modified cotton from America bred with a local strain. The GM crops necessitate royalties to Monsanto, which he grudgingly pays; hopeful his crops will be bug free. The plants are sexually segregated, the females impregnated by hand held flowers plucked from the males, an arduous process performed by a small army of teenage girls that he admonishes for giggling and running about.
As we leave the meditation center he rushes us into his car, a candy green Fiat, out of whose windows he will point out cashew trees, jackfruit bushes, and the small cocoa trees carefully planted and pruned under the towering coconuts. He juggles the gearshift as we rattle along rain packed red dirt roads, the noise of the car kicking up a clean white heron that had been drinking form a puddle. He smiles as it flaps lazily, gliding just above the hood.
JOHN:
it's cold and gasoline in the streets. won't even go into the stores,
refuse to photograph or hand out medicine, maybe when we get to the
monasteries where somebody can look at me without pride or hate can i look
them back. it's the first morning, fat on bread, that patina of gasoline
and dogshit, the internet cafe smells like bacon.
VINOD:
The background open sewer miasma stink hit me smack in the face as soon as i got off the plane. How do you get a billion people to shit where they're supposed to?
I'm staying with my mother's brother in their home above the clinic they run. My grandpa's health is failing; he shuffles around unsteadily straining to hear what is being said. My grandma shuffles too, but with more purpose her mind still quick. My uncle stumps instead of shuffling into the other room where he can smoke cigarettes without my mother yelling at him.
At night I tent the blanket completely over me to hide from the bugs and the fan above presses the air down fluttering the blanket rustles against my arm and ear like a restless bedfellow.
And when the current cuts out all the conversations in the house become audible for a moment, or a few moments, then they're back, electrons marching lock-step, the fans wind up and we all become hidden again behind walls of ambient sound.
I am leaving on a trip today to the state of Kerela with my mom, sister, girl cousin, and three of my aunts on my dad's side of the family. Kerela is at the extreme southwest of the country, the train ride is going to take a solid day but when we get of I'll see a sea that I have never seen before. My geologist uncle made me promise to watch the sunrise and sunset paying attention to the shape of the earth.
Finished Ulysses once through...
VINOD (Cont.):
The road from Munnar to Thekady smells of Cardamom and the occasional exhaust of a passing truck. The tops of some of the trees are red not with leaves leeched of green but with bright blooming flowers. So far I have seen nine elephants and thirteen white people.
JOHN:
i'm thinking a lot about chastity, not that i want to attempt it, or that i
long for it, but that maybe i do a little bit, yes, chastity has its flower,
but vinod, are we judged by our fruits? are we? maybe this is the prompt
that God has given us, learn to pray, then pray, and discover the essence of
the Creator, create. this is prompt. And a prompt is very much like a
responsibility. Remember my cousin daniel, he makes me play soccer and i
have the collected blisters, cramps, sighs and hard sleeps to show, the
romanian boys play on asphalt with puddles, mounds of garbage in the
corners, dilapidated fish-net fences, and they were jeans and racing jackets
and short-short soccer shorts and one shinguard and smoke during the breaks
and smoke during the games and they kick hard hard and scream, swear, spit,
their hair is sometimes gelled, their faces are spherical, they spit seeds
that stick to their enflamed lips and they, "Ai! Ma! Hai!" slick,
hodge-podge, growing up eating cold meat and disco-dancing, strong jaws,
sloping noses, everybody wants a belly, strong fingers, broken nails,
skinned knees, kicking hard hard and blaspheming for mistakes, the ball
bounces dirty, half-inflated, around the puddle and the sharp legs skittling
after it, they belch on their haunches on the sidelines and try to keep
their shirts spotless, the kid with the ball has to leave and they switch to
a basketball, it doesn't matter, they know the moves, the names, the songs,
the teams, the cars by heart, they will play until its dark, fighting,
kicking hard, almost in tears, one day they will have women...
i dream vinodian dreams, all about blue, heather says i'm magic, i called
her, i'm in love.
JOHN (Cont.):
romanian dawned all over me, yesterday, squabbles mid-language with Daniel,
four hours back to fagaras and poof a glass of wine down my guzzle and a man
named sandu and i are throttling over potholes, quadruple passes and
high-beams picking up straggling horses, cattle, bicyclists before the
swerve,
i feel the language crawling up my back, and mornings are reserved for
prayer,
VINOD:
Yesterday I saw the Arabian sea, walked in its surf and had it pull the ground from underneath my heels as I watched it obliterate the tiny patterns that crows' feet had left in the sand.
We drive past or float past tiny villages with horrible Indian pop music playing and everyone is crowded around tvs.
VINOD (Cont.):
I light a string of fireworks with a sparkler and start as the first one puffs and pops hard in my face against my glasses and eardrums sending my little cousin Anusha shrieking and giggling to hid behind the legs of her father, my father's youngest brother who stands with his weight on one leg (the abhanga pose of classical Indian sculpture denoting a god lost deep in thought) arms crossed top lip slightly pursed to bristle moustache as his brow furrows, a pose that evokes not a sculpture but once again the striking resemblance between him and my father even though they were separated by a great multifaceted distance: temporal (the sixteen year disparity in age), geographical (my father's education took him to another city) and emotional (their propensity for silence and sarcasm).
We stand there with our fingers in our ears and our eyes winced to watch the garland of explosives reduce itself to a mass of noise, ash, and white paper. A neighborhood boy named Siva comes to my uncle's apartment bearing more fireworks, the patience to help my two young cousins use them, and his namesake's penchant for destruction. We stand on the balcony which is decorated with carefully spaced and taped orange flowers and little clay bowls filled with oil and a carefully placed wick. Traditional Diwali decorations. As the sun sets we climb the stairs to the roof and view a city that is wreathed in a thick acrid smoke that smells like burnt marshmallow and that we all helped create. Siva finds a glass Pepsi bottle to light bottle rockets out of, and he and my little cousin Pavan send missiles back into the air and towards adjoining buildings, answers to the ones that hit among our feet with the red spent spark skid of bottle rockets gone to ground. My aunt passes me sparkler after sparkler, trying to keep me entertained, as I look out over the city stone faced and thinking as usual. They substitute the planned polish of a fourth of July spectacle with duration and universal participation in the cacophony. The explosions start around five, gain momentum until eight, and then continue past ten. Even through the night and into the next day the occasional bang or boom would make you start out of bed or drop the piece of idli of dosa you held in your hand for breakfast.
…at the train station the other day I disturbed myself profoundly by not having small enough change to give a beggar…
Do the words of the Jesus prayer matter? If you could invest the same feeling into another series of sounds would they also suffice? Or is it that those words connect with the similar feelings of all the other people that are speaking those words? But that seems like a bit of a fantasy, or wishful thinking at least because by what mechanism would those words connect to each other? A collective unconscious, shared dreams? More likely that we simply invest in those words ourselves, each alone, and in that case each word is what we make of it. Which seems almost better doesn't it? At least for writers anyways, because then we can just work on investing every word we write (and speak, and think, and hear?) with the humility and devotion of that prayer. Or is that too hard? To strengthen those feelings to the point where they could support any word?
And what about the whole needing a master thing? Because the orthodox Christian and the Hindu ascetic strains seem to either recommend or insist that one find a guru. But that is an idea I can't help but resist, I'm too self-willed, and I know that's exactly the point.
chastity: I was reading a book-long interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and in it he alludes to a group of writers/readers/libertines in a certain Caribbean town of which he was a part and who influenced him. Or that whole circle Virginia Woolf ran with, they were all sleeping with each other. Or Henry Miller's open marriage. It seems that writers, at least the ones we like, are predisposed towards sexual looseness and license. What does it say about us that we are quite the opposite? That our mental track leads us towards refusal/discipline?
I had a dream the other night that you were throwing rocks at the windows of my house in Strongsville (which was on stilts) and when I came down you had turned yourself into an albino porcupine and stuck your head in the ground. You then turned yourself into a toy cement mixer truck before finally returning to your own shape at which point you me and Dimitri had a discussion about how you should stop changing your shape because you had trouble getting out of it because your mind changed too.
JOHN:
hot my gosh, Vinod!
St. Maximos, a saint, stressed the difference between loving the creator vs.
loving the creation. Sartre (so I gather) despised the dualistic, Kantian
Phenomenon, the essence behind the appearance. This leads to skin- the
greatest paradox of literature. Do I think we need mentors? No. Do I
think we need mentors? Of course we do Vinod. But only if we find them.
That's like skin. What do I think about chastity? Put it between two
slices of bread and eat it. See, that's like skin too. Chastity is like
ink. If you can write a letter with it, it's good. If you can make a
sandwich out of it, yum. It's like the new law, that's Christian, blowing
the old law out of the water, which doesn't mean it's evil, just that, and
this principle I understand but I still don't live, “Nothing is unclean of
itself.” Only we make things unclean. Doesn't that accord with Hinduism?
We are all of God, yet, Hinduism doesn't deny evil. But we are not God. We
are in the Image of God, but not (yet) in the Likeness of God.
So, what do I think of the specific words of the Jesus Prayer. Put them in
a sandwich. Swallow. Engulf. Engulfer of the engulfed. Mouth to her
mouth's kiss. Must be two of 'em. Glue 'em well. What happens at the end
of the Jesus Prayer? He achieves Jesus Prayerlessness. That is the end.
If we could live our lives in a series of ends without means we would be one
with God. And, if you could write like you write about India, about
Strongsville, then you would be living in ends, and that is Genius, that is
genesis, the ENDS.
let's rap grammar.
Heather ended an email to me when I was in Romania: “Give your mother a hug
for you.” That is an extro-objective sentence framed around an imperative.
If I could only write like that…
should we live life symbolically? yes.
VINOD:
we drove back to our home in the quiet orange glow that felt the same as the first night in Hyderabad, light that must be chemically efficient. After a hubbub of moving suitcases that leaves me bleeding I walk out to the driveway to smoke a cigarette saved in a Ziploc bag for the occasion. The air is cold and free of the sweat and life and dirt of India, the trees are bare leaving clear a sky that is night-bright with an almost full moon and Orion crisper than I remember.
are you home?
JOHN:
no. not home. you're writing again, mmm. i'm here with heather. chicago.
i'll be back thanksgiving.
write to me,
the strongest ellipses...
Oct 17th 2005 (morning)
As we sit in an eight-sided monk's cell the monk and my mother discuss the merits of controlling one's breathing as it concerns quieting the mind. She makes some noises of assent though it seems they might be untruthful. I stare at the octopyramid ceiling and silently disagree with his faded 101 Dalmatian sheets.
The uncle with us begins to argue with the monk revealing his agricultural technocrat leanings. The day before we toured his fields where he preened over his vast hybridization project: genetically modified cotton from America bred with a local strain. The GM crops necessitate royalties to Monsanto, which he grudgingly pays; hopeful his crops will be bug free. The plants are sexually segregated, the females impregnated by hand held flowers plucked from the males, an arduous process performed by a small army of teenage girls that he admonishes for giggling and running about.
As we leave the meditation center he rushes us into his car, a candy green Fiat, out of whose windows he will point out cashew trees, jackfruit bushes, and the small cocoa trees carefully planted and pruned under the towering coconuts. He juggles the gearshift as we rattle along rain packed red dirt roads, the noise of the car kicking up a clean white heron that had been drinking form a puddle. He smiles as it flaps lazily, gliding just above the hood.
JOHN:
it's cold and gasoline in the streets. won't even go into the stores,
refuse to photograph or hand out medicine, maybe when we get to the
monasteries where somebody can look at me without pride or hate can i look
them back. it's the first morning, fat on bread, that patina of gasoline
and dogshit, the internet cafe smells like bacon.
VINOD:
The background open sewer miasma stink hit me smack in the face as soon as i got off the plane. How do you get a billion people to shit where they're supposed to?
I'm staying with my mother's brother in their home above the clinic they run. My grandpa's health is failing; he shuffles around unsteadily straining to hear what is being said. My grandma shuffles too, but with more purpose her mind still quick. My uncle stumps instead of shuffling into the other room where he can smoke cigarettes without my mother yelling at him.
At night I tent the blanket completely over me to hide from the bugs and the fan above presses the air down fluttering the blanket rustles against my arm and ear like a restless bedfellow.
And when the current cuts out all the conversations in the house become audible for a moment, or a few moments, then they're back, electrons marching lock-step, the fans wind up and we all become hidden again behind walls of ambient sound.
I am leaving on a trip today to the state of Kerela with my mom, sister, girl cousin, and three of my aunts on my dad's side of the family. Kerela is at the extreme southwest of the country, the train ride is going to take a solid day but when we get of I'll see a sea that I have never seen before. My geologist uncle made me promise to watch the sunrise and sunset paying attention to the shape of the earth.
Finished Ulysses once through...
VINOD (Cont.):
The road from Munnar to Thekady smells of Cardamom and the occasional exhaust of a passing truck. The tops of some of the trees are red not with leaves leeched of green but with bright blooming flowers. So far I have seen nine elephants and thirteen white people.
JOHN:
i'm thinking a lot about chastity, not that i want to attempt it, or that i
long for it, but that maybe i do a little bit, yes, chastity has its flower,
but vinod, are we judged by our fruits? are we? maybe this is the prompt
that God has given us, learn to pray, then pray, and discover the essence of
the Creator, create. this is prompt. And a prompt is very much like a
responsibility. Remember my cousin daniel, he makes me play soccer and i
have the collected blisters, cramps, sighs and hard sleeps to show, the
romanian boys play on asphalt with puddles, mounds of garbage in the
corners, dilapidated fish-net fences, and they were jeans and racing jackets
and short-short soccer shorts and one shinguard and smoke during the breaks
and smoke during the games and they kick hard hard and scream, swear, spit,
their hair is sometimes gelled, their faces are spherical, they spit seeds
that stick to their enflamed lips and they, "Ai! Ma! Hai!" slick,
hodge-podge, growing up eating cold meat and disco-dancing, strong jaws,
sloping noses, everybody wants a belly, strong fingers, broken nails,
skinned knees, kicking hard hard and blaspheming for mistakes, the ball
bounces dirty, half-inflated, around the puddle and the sharp legs skittling
after it, they belch on their haunches on the sidelines and try to keep
their shirts spotless, the kid with the ball has to leave and they switch to
a basketball, it doesn't matter, they know the moves, the names, the songs,
the teams, the cars by heart, they will play until its dark, fighting,
kicking hard, almost in tears, one day they will have women...
i dream vinodian dreams, all about blue, heather says i'm magic, i called
her, i'm in love.
JOHN (Cont.):
romanian dawned all over me, yesterday, squabbles mid-language with Daniel,
four hours back to fagaras and poof a glass of wine down my guzzle and a man
named sandu and i are throttling over potholes, quadruple passes and
high-beams picking up straggling horses, cattle, bicyclists before the
swerve,
i feel the language crawling up my back, and mornings are reserved for
prayer,
VINOD:
Yesterday I saw the Arabian sea, walked in its surf and had it pull the ground from underneath my heels as I watched it obliterate the tiny patterns that crows' feet had left in the sand.
We drive past or float past tiny villages with horrible Indian pop music playing and everyone is crowded around tvs.
VINOD (Cont.):
I light a string of fireworks with a sparkler and start as the first one puffs and pops hard in my face against my glasses and eardrums sending my little cousin Anusha shrieking and giggling to hid behind the legs of her father, my father's youngest brother who stands with his weight on one leg (the abhanga pose of classical Indian sculpture denoting a god lost deep in thought) arms crossed top lip slightly pursed to bristle moustache as his brow furrows, a pose that evokes not a sculpture but once again the striking resemblance between him and my father even though they were separated by a great multifaceted distance: temporal (the sixteen year disparity in age), geographical (my father's education took him to another city) and emotional (their propensity for silence and sarcasm).
We stand there with our fingers in our ears and our eyes winced to watch the garland of explosives reduce itself to a mass of noise, ash, and white paper. A neighborhood boy named Siva comes to my uncle's apartment bearing more fireworks, the patience to help my two young cousins use them, and his namesake's penchant for destruction. We stand on the balcony which is decorated with carefully spaced and taped orange flowers and little clay bowls filled with oil and a carefully placed wick. Traditional Diwali decorations. As the sun sets we climb the stairs to the roof and view a city that is wreathed in a thick acrid smoke that smells like burnt marshmallow and that we all helped create. Siva finds a glass Pepsi bottle to light bottle rockets out of, and he and my little cousin Pavan send missiles back into the air and towards adjoining buildings, answers to the ones that hit among our feet with the red spent spark skid of bottle rockets gone to ground. My aunt passes me sparkler after sparkler, trying to keep me entertained, as I look out over the city stone faced and thinking as usual. They substitute the planned polish of a fourth of July spectacle with duration and universal participation in the cacophony. The explosions start around five, gain momentum until eight, and then continue past ten. Even through the night and into the next day the occasional bang or boom would make you start out of bed or drop the piece of idli of dosa you held in your hand for breakfast.
…at the train station the other day I disturbed myself profoundly by not having small enough change to give a beggar…
Do the words of the Jesus prayer matter? If you could invest the same feeling into another series of sounds would they also suffice? Or is it that those words connect with the similar feelings of all the other people that are speaking those words? But that seems like a bit of a fantasy, or wishful thinking at least because by what mechanism would those words connect to each other? A collective unconscious, shared dreams? More likely that we simply invest in those words ourselves, each alone, and in that case each word is what we make of it. Which seems almost better doesn't it? At least for writers anyways, because then we can just work on investing every word we write (and speak, and think, and hear?) with the humility and devotion of that prayer. Or is that too hard? To strengthen those feelings to the point where they could support any word?
And what about the whole needing a master thing? Because the orthodox Christian and the Hindu ascetic strains seem to either recommend or insist that one find a guru. But that is an idea I can't help but resist, I'm too self-willed, and I know that's exactly the point.
chastity: I was reading a book-long interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and in it he alludes to a group of writers/readers/libertines in a certain Caribbean town of which he was a part and who influenced him. Or that whole circle Virginia Woolf ran with, they were all sleeping with each other. Or Henry Miller's open marriage. It seems that writers, at least the ones we like, are predisposed towards sexual looseness and license. What does it say about us that we are quite the opposite? That our mental track leads us towards refusal/discipline?
I had a dream the other night that you were throwing rocks at the windows of my house in Strongsville (which was on stilts) and when I came down you had turned yourself into an albino porcupine and stuck your head in the ground. You then turned yourself into a toy cement mixer truck before finally returning to your own shape at which point you me and Dimitri had a discussion about how you should stop changing your shape because you had trouble getting out of it because your mind changed too.
JOHN:
hot my gosh, Vinod!
St. Maximos, a saint, stressed the difference between loving the creator vs.
loving the creation. Sartre (so I gather) despised the dualistic, Kantian
Phenomenon, the essence behind the appearance. This leads to skin- the
greatest paradox of literature. Do I think we need mentors? No. Do I
think we need mentors? Of course we do Vinod. But only if we find them.
That's like skin. What do I think about chastity? Put it between two
slices of bread and eat it. See, that's like skin too. Chastity is like
ink. If you can write a letter with it, it's good. If you can make a
sandwich out of it, yum. It's like the new law, that's Christian, blowing
the old law out of the water, which doesn't mean it's evil, just that, and
this principle I understand but I still don't live, “Nothing is unclean of
itself.” Only we make things unclean. Doesn't that accord with Hinduism?
We are all of God, yet, Hinduism doesn't deny evil. But we are not God. We
are in the Image of God, but not (yet) in the Likeness of God.
So, what do I think of the specific words of the Jesus Prayer. Put them in
a sandwich. Swallow. Engulf. Engulfer of the engulfed. Mouth to her
mouth's kiss. Must be two of 'em. Glue 'em well. What happens at the end
of the Jesus Prayer? He achieves Jesus Prayerlessness. That is the end.
If we could live our lives in a series of ends without means we would be one
with God. And, if you could write like you write about India, about
Strongsville, then you would be living in ends, and that is Genius, that is
genesis, the ENDS.
let's rap grammar.
Heather ended an email to me when I was in Romania: “Give your mother a hug
for you.” That is an extro-objective sentence framed around an imperative.
If I could only write like that…
should we live life symbolically? yes.
VINOD:
we drove back to our home in the quiet orange glow that felt the same as the first night in Hyderabad, light that must be chemically efficient. After a hubbub of moving suitcases that leaves me bleeding I walk out to the driveway to smoke a cigarette saved in a Ziploc bag for the occasion. The air is cold and free of the sweat and life and dirt of India, the trees are bare leaving clear a sky that is night-bright with an almost full moon and Orion crisper than I remember.
are you home?
JOHN:
no. not home. you're writing again, mmm. i'm here with heather. chicago.
i'll be back thanksgiving.
write to me,
the strongest ellipses...
posted by Bobby Nintendo at 10:55 AM
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