Buddha thought
the action of time is wiser than the vat of knowing
that saddened him
And that is ok
Lao Tsu thought
the inaction of rhyme is timelier than what-not
he was not sad
And that too is ok
I think
the Lordessess gave us time to sort it out
but there is little time
And that is not ok
When I speak of the Tao, I know not
but vaguely I
speak of Lorde the fruit of my wis-
dom is twenty
inches too far from soul, twenty
years too large, twenty
something, perhaps more maybe
much less
When I speak of the Tao, I speak of Lorde
—
for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt
— Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a luxury”
Let no death pierce you, the arrow
make no wound, let
no companion of a companion count
from three to ten –
the death spot is serious; would the
tiger laugh at it?
—
The great unwashed in the park – what is it that makes it so easy to classify the classes? women, children, some veiled, some garish, a festive group visiting this tiny walkpark of mine in this far off city nook love imagines lives a little different from what privilege has taught from the pulpit imagines lives of care, of concern for their sisters, brothers, younguns yuN na tha maiN ne faqat chaaha tha yuN hojaae? 1 no stretch of imagination to immortalize the beaming smiles – under duress too – of my park lot
meanwhile my lot festers unabashed in connivances of convenience, contempt for the sake of bile the unparked ones are the ones that worry me, the platitudes of concern, the beatific biles
the driver happily blocking the road with his car while talking to a friend entitled shout: baap ka road hai? 2 I see joyful camaraderie that cares not a whit for a car or two stacked up behind the pulpit snivels civility love shakes her head tao is good to the good as well as bad, lao tzu sages, so shall I accommodate the pulpit, the snivel?
or shall I retreat to my khanqah while the mongols of the day bludgeon away? our great master prescribed nothing but – this much history teaches about rumi3, trying to spirit away solidarity by trivializing the mundane, the unwashed easier perhaps to be a holy ostrich than to imagine lives of care, concern, sister, brother
yuN na tha maiN ne faqat chaaha tha yuN hojaae
1. “Wasn’t thus, I merely wished it so” – a line from Faiz, iconic Pakistani revolutionary poet who made no secret of his admiration for another “great poet of the east”, Iqbal, who in turn made no secret of his admiration for Nietzche’s superman: the dialectics of poetic confusion.
2. “Is this your father’s road?” A common phrase that like so many others can never be adequately translated.
3. Point raised by the Iranian revolutionary, Ali Shariati. A valid point echoed so many times in history when the gatekeepers of culture/morality/civility/whatnot have been hands-in-glove with despots.
1. this is the interregnum, these here are the symptoms
2. this is the era of the warring states
3. the coefficient of injustice is two minutes to midnight
4. a bent arc of history is not a broken arc
5. the dream of the butterfly will connect the words and the bees
—
1. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” – Antonio Gramsci
2. The era in ancient Chinese history when Lao Tsu and Chuang Tsu, the two seminal Taoists, expounded.
3. “It is still two minutes to midnight” – The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – The Doomsday Clock
4. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” – Martin Luther King
bleed slowly through your dreams
the visage is heaviest when the shadow
pierces your masks –
—
The above is a specimen of a Kai’ku, a lesser known poetic form where the rule is, “aim for a certain number of syllables; if you get it, it’s ok, and if you don’t, then no need to sweat your syllable tree!”
Kai’ku, loosely translated in the Indo-Pakian as “but why?”, is said to have been disemminated by a handful of lesser-known – this is key – mystics going about their un-enlit ways around about the same time as an enlit guy called bodhidharma was bordercrossing Indo-China.
In another account, the origins of Kai’ku have been linked roughly with the time when another enlit – laotsu – bordercrossed, and the gatekeeper requested him to write a little something. Kaikuans would have been least bothered by such inane requests, so this account is less tenable.
i.
wangwei spoke of a distant t’ang
no longer viable
as nature dufu laments laments
his song his
children poor his ambition sharp
sharp till
he channels laotsu but he is late
the river recalls
—
ii.
a bedevilled notion of bloodflow has
ancillary cooptions
tooting a mandatory horn we have
algebra lessons as
our guide to a moral aesthetic (so
foundations are
necessarily wrongfooted) beyond what
the rope of an
eyelid can climb behind actuarian
uncertainties
lie certain possibilities the rope
is mountain –
—
iii.
a burnt conscience stokes the
lament of
objectionable beauty this
form that
begat the warmth of forgetting
now heat
now axis now the plumb of
terror woven
—
iv.
Dread is my mouth’s resonance dead is
the willingness
of its voice which voice? the stone
demands which
need goes in search of this voice? the
stone is now rock
in becoming in riveting itself to the
tales of two pasts
one which is my mouth’s resonance one
which is its voice
—
v.
so we can say physics is the aftermath
of reason
ethics the shell of the shell & art?
art is
the longing for wrong when right-left
revels as an unjust di
chotomy –
This is the sixth post in the Tagore/Kabir series.
The bridge is the swan that tickles your
fickle feather at night; it is the shadow
That falls between heaven and
The idea of earth; it is the
Bellows that swings between the
Real and what passes for the act
Of motion and its resting place; it is
The poem, but you knew that, no?
Tagore/Kabir
II. 59. jânh, cet acet khambh dôû
Between the poles of the conscious and the unconscious, there has
the mind made a swing:
Thereon hang all beings and all worlds, and that swing never
ceases its sway.
Millions of beings are there: the sun and the moon in their
courses are there:
Millions of ages pass, and the swing goes on.
All swing! the sky and the earth and the air and the water; and
the Lord Himself taking form:
And the sight of this has made Kabîr a servant.
T.S. Eliot/Lao Tsu
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow – T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
—
The space between Heaven and Earth
Is it not like a bellows?
Empty, and yet never exhausted
It moves, and produces more. – Lao Tsu, “Tao Te Ching”
This is the first of series of posts to follow up on my recent visit to Accra, Ghana. 2008 was when I was there last, and 2002 was when Ghana introduced me to Africa. Since then, what has changed without as seen through the prism of what has changed within is written out in verse and reflection. The context has always been work, but content can change context.
May 15 – Inflight Dubai to Accra
The plumb fascination dons every mask, every trite boredom, every sink that wishes well, the Plum fascination is a gasp, a gap of known and little known facts, a gap of missing factotums.
“Small small” is Ghanaian speak for a little quantity, small change, etc. Poetically, it captures the spirit of the Tao Te Ching, “know the high, stick to the low.” But all that has been forgotten and turned upside down historically in favor of the grand. A redemptive poetics of the small small is not possible without reaching back and bringing back to the fore the “little known facts” and the “missing factotums.”
May 16
The tailbone of the journey is far from
Release unless you
Endear its father & soulfish its
Ancestry; its ghoul of
Faith & train of unreason; the
Tailbone of your untapped
Soulwhistle is the further ash
That trammels and pouts
As it sings, inks into the
Untimed meter of gash
Of ink and the body of craft & pain.
A poetics of the small small is also not possible without a soulful accounting of the damage done by the patriarchal laws of entitlement and its “train of unreason” masked as faith.
May 17
The old dominion of dread is but half past dead, half past the fleet of the unsaid, the blue cart of a thrush's unusual said, and done and what is untrue of sky is true of sin, true too of the half past unsung dread the languor, the peel of dread and its song.
What has been damaged is felt today as dread, what Erich Fromm calls “the fear of freedom.” The machinery of sin and shame keeps that fear – though irrelevant, unrooted, out of place and time – in play.
May 18
The sin has to decide to drown its bellowed Insight in the shadow of this here wanton Word wanting to drift a broken toast, a Wooden art and the semblance of a power turret
In the following posts, I will try to tackle aspects of the “power turret”, the myth of the great leader, the history of colonialism, neoliberalism and Orientalism as they relate to Ghana and as voiced by its poets.
“The empire is a sacred vessel and nothing should be done to it. Whoever does anything will ruin it; whoever lays hold of it will lose it.” Tao Te Ching (XXIX)
An odd navel gazing that makes and keeps on making the same
Error; an uneven
Bent of sight goes on galvanizing sightless tirades of excellentia,
Apologia when
The naught of naughts was so much at hand, when the grace
Of a zero could
Persuade an inner calm, when the stream could have meandered
Downwards as
Physics would have it had it not been for a relentless will of wanton
Magnanimity.
Gathering just-a-bit-o moss 