You have to go back to school for the answer

Remember the very big, very dim class bully who wanted to beat you, the one imbued with brain and not brawn?

He could beat you because he could. Might endows some inalienable rights.

But he wanted to, not for the reason that he could, but because his intelligence was always put to shame by your very existence.

You were bright and he was, as I said, dim.

It wasn’t envy. It was the sheer frustration of knowing that no matter how much he might exercise his body, his brain was condemned forever to be as frail as your body was.

When you look back and examine the rants of Trump before he became anointed, he went at Obama with a racist fury: his birth, his religion, his very citizenship. I don’t know if Trump is truly racist or not, though signs exist like the lingering spoor of animals. 

But he abused Obama because how could a black man be smarter, oh so much smarter than a white man and that too someone born into privilege?

And even now, after he has all the bullying power of the Presidency, Trump continued to talk of Obama.Bad man, sick man he tweeted.

And then he proceeds, with no forethought or alternative vision, to try to dismantle Obamacare.  He has not succeeded yet.He got rid of all the scientists in the EPA. He attacked the anti-coal legislation. He presents a budget which at its core seems to be anti-Obama, i.e. it’s pro rich and anti-poor. 

This is like the bully saying, “ So you think you are better than me. Let me take away your baseball glove, your bat and ball and let’s see how smart you are?”

It is sad watching this. It’s unfortunately tragic for the people of a country you want to hold to a higher standard, and it is calamitous for the world when the most powerful country in the world presents its power as procrustean muscle.

Yesterday he withdrew from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.  This was something that Obama had worked on very hard for years. 

It felt almost like Trump was wagging his fingers and saying, Take that Barack!

Admittedly  Trump has said that global warming is a hoax. He is of that ilk who believe that science is over rated. And why wouldn’t he and they? After all they don’t understand it. They would make a virtue of ignorance. So they react wth vitriol, flinging acid in the face of reason.

Trump seems to go beyond dislike of Obama. He seems to hate him.

Intelligence is truly the thorn in the flesh of stupid people.

 

My friend Howard Jacobsen referred to his friend the art critic Robert Hughes and in eulogy talked about how he laughed like Jove.

I must say at this point that I have never met Mr Jacobsen. I am his friend because I read his essays and I feel that if he and I ever met we could become friends. In fact Mr Jacobsen says that while he had met Mr Hughes he wasn’t a close personal friend either.
Admiration does presume kinship

Anyway the word Jove got my attention.
It is a word quite forgotten to the generation of twitterati who abbreviate almost every emotion.

Oh My God which may at one time have been a lament, or a remembrance of the creator or a way of acknowledging gratitude has now been abbreviated . This of course removes any tinge of possible blasphemy in taking the Lord’s name in vain.

OMG!
We cry and in those three letters,as short as the eponymous spelling of Jehovah,YWH, awe and surprise, both pleasant and unpleasant is expressed.
The idea of divinity , present or recalled, is absent.
Of course in times past, because it was somewhat verboten to use the word God except in fervent prayer, a Roman substitute was used for the same purpose . Jupiter or Jove came in handy . And “By Jove” was used by anyone ,even those without a Classic education.
Batsmen bowled by a splendid ball would say ‘By Jove’ in both surprise and admiration of the bowler. A young man’s fancy caught by the fleeting glimpse of beauty may have exclaimed similarly.Or just a poet stunned by a rainbow, sunset or just daffodils a la Wordsworth may have been inspired to such outburst.

Today the ancient Gods are forgotten even in exclamation.
Maybe I can revive them.

BJ!
I could cry as I spot a rare red-necked plover( if such an avian exists)or if I was moved by a fabulous Messian move in La Liga.

BJ!
I think this may catch on.

I would not however be able to use it as declamation about a beautiful woman as I think I may be misunderstood.

Some years ago, maybe before the heads of PepsiCo and The Coca Cola company sat down and had a really fizzy after better sense prevailed chat,India was subjected to the Cola wars.

Most of it, it must be said, came from the challenger, Pepsi who insisted that there was nothing official about it. Many millions of rupees were spent in attacking each other.

Bemused consumers , initially pleased at the ruckus much like  passerbys at a traffic accident, watched on till it all became a bit too much and a bit too little to be of any difference to him or her. They drank any soft drink that suited their palate, regardless of all the exhortation of the manufacturers.

Nowadays we have the Cola Wars in Parliament.

As usual, the dispossessed opposition bereft of elected position raised the questions and suggested that there was everything official about it. They fought about many issues seemingly of deep import to them. They even invaded the waterless well of the House, much to the consternation of the Speaker who looks on in powerless horror like a sheriff in a Wild West town.

Of course once again to the initial delight of the citizenry, this was replayed often on television, aided and abetted by anchors with high voices and low morals

And then we all the common people of India said what has this to do with us?

What has this to do with the important matters of life and livelihood, of macro and micro economics, of creating jobs and bringing in investment, of farmers and their struggling lands, of urban renewal and small industry and of pollution and environment, of drinking water and irrigation, of sanitation and disease control,of education and medical facilities, of the girl child  and women empowerment  and of so many many things that are more important than cabbages and kings!

We are being held hostage by our own democracy..

Sadly unlike the Cola Wars, we cannot go about drinking sugared, aerated water to appease ourselves. We are thirsty and we need our thirst quenched.

And there is everything official about it!

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/millenials-generation-x-baby-boomers-a7570326.html   

I was reading this article about “generational wars” in the Independent. 

It was droll, and at the same time poignant, as it had tinges of nostalgia in it, harking to the past while looking at the future. My dear  departed friend Viji would have called it Intimations of Mortality, rudely paraphrasing Wordsworth.

I am a baby boomer ( not that we ever stopped baby-booming in India, ever!)

When I was beginning work in the 70’s I though of myself as a Gen X person even though the term had not been invented yet

I continued to work hard and play hard ( shouting rants such as 18-till-i-die and sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll!)

I have made it through no fault of my own to the 21st century.

And see the millennials calling this earth as their own.

I was part of those that struggled with telephone-booth size mobile phones ( we called them handphones in those days to differentiate them from cordless ones), choosing whether Explorer or Netscape was better as a browser, thinking that an AOL account would somehow mysteriously  increase my net speed which peaked at 64 kpbs, and  composing songs to the tune of my dial up sounds.

I was also part of the launch of smart phones, and ,as everyone did, taught myself to overcome Nokia’s rule of thumb to full digit communication

I remain (as this article suggested to me) a Gen X guy.

But sadly I was not born with a silver touchpad in my brain.

Gen X still rules the big world of politics ( with many baby boomers thrown in), the world of really big business and finance , and certainly has its finger on the weapons of war.

But it is the last analogue generation of Planet Earth

Many millennials ( the early ones born in 1982 to 1995) were still analogue in their upbringing.

Those born post 2000 are  digital.  And in fact those born after 2007 when the iPhone was launched  are even more so.

And we will need to coin another phrase for them.

Welcome to the Digiverse!

 

I must confess that I am inspired by Howard Jacobsen. He writes like the essayists of yore, like Lamb and Hazlitt and Arnold. His wit is rapier, and his language is like a stiletto between the third and fourth rib. He makes me laugh while he makes me think, which is so rare. And the subjects of his admiration and his disdain are as varied as diatoms in pond water.

So when I was reading him on the subject of reading and language and a delightful segue to the subject of his library, I was inspired to think about the need to read, the sense of individual history and the nature of memory.

By now, you who are reading this would have guessed that I love reading. Let me qualify that. I love reading everything and anything. I am gourmet and gourmand, refined and philistine, civilized and savage when it comes to the written word: I read potboilers, poetry, essays,  critiques, critics, cookbooks for the hungry stomach and recipes for the soul, reasons to be reasonable and causes to be mad about, explorations into space , outer and inner,  the bible and the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, history, travelogues, biographies, fairy tales, erotica, science fiction and science fact, dungeons and dragon tales, the unexpurgated  classics and the unpunctuated comics, fast adventures and quieter perambulations, humour and  tragedy, and the commonplace in-between ;the list goes on.

I confess to needing reading like a meth addict needs methamphetamine.

Reading moves me; so much so that I need to read when I retreat to my personal adytum in the toilet. And once to my own self deprecating amusement I found myself reading the small print on the side of a washing powder pack which was the only reading matter in the washroom of a house I was visiting.

Unlike movies and TV, (and as a disclaimer to snobbishness, i confess to liking them too,) I find myself living various lives, inhabiting new minds, exploring uncharted wilderness within,  and reinventing my view of the world  when I read. I am as Alice in wonderland.

I find myself defined by reading in many ways. I can be raconteur, hedonist, philosopher, creator, voyeur, expressionist and impressionist, thinker and feeler all together. The selves emerge appropriately. Maybe I channel writers and words like some people channel the Great Rameses to give them wisdom and advice.

I owe books an un-payable debt. 

Books are our collective memory. They tell us where we have been and where we might be today. They hint at our futures. And they stitch together our different myriad of lives into a fantastic patchwork.

Without them we would not have  a sense of place or of where we came from. We would, without them, examine ourselves very darkly through a very myopic lens. 

When I for example walk into my meagre library, I can see where I have been. I can  pick up an old book, say Rinehart’s the Diceman and suddenly remember as I re-read it, that i was once fascinated by the idea of chance and destiny. And today I can wonder whether it is chance that I am here. I am empowered by wonder.

Writing transcends language. The heart can speak  with many tongues.

And when translated well Marquez and Cortazar can make me smile and wince and cry as much as Updike and Bellows. Premchand and Narayan  are book fellows. Chekhov can make me feel as desolate as Ibsen.

books also transcend time and space: the poems of Kalidasa can have a conversation with Neruda, and Shakespeare has tea with Cervantes. The myths of Gilgamesh find comfort in the story of Manu, and the nonsense of Leacock would giggle with Mr Pickwick. Would Holmes like Feluda, would Nero Wolfe think highly of Father Brown , and would Miss Marple say to Precious Ramotswe, “Go for  it girl!”? The pain of Juliet is no different from that of Laila. The wisdom of the tenth century Persian master, Hafiz, sings from the same music sheet as that of the seventeenth century Japanese poet Basho. And the dreamtime and song lines of the Aborigine  travel well with Coelho and his Alchemist.

Yeshua aka Jesus asks the same questions of us as the unknown author of the Brihandakarnya Upanishad. And Teresa of Avila cries with the same longing as Rabia wandering the desert or Meera in a  palace. The  musings of Ibn Battuta about customs and language in strange lands are as redolent with the richness of travel as that of Herodotus in ancient Egypt  or Abbe Dubois in Hindu India. 

The Astra shastras of the Mahabharata reoccur in the Excalibur and the Lord of the Rings:Magic lives forever. Verne creates flying machines, and the demon Ravan abducts Sita in one.  Wells makes aliens fearsome and Clarke makes them messiahs.  

As mirrors, books can show us as fat, thin, ugly, beautiful, tall, short, statuesque or misshapen: We can read about the evil in man when we dare delve into Mein Kampf. Or we can see God in the human soul when we read  the stories of Tolstoy. Tagore asks us to be better than we are. Genet believes that we are meaningless. Capra wants us to see infinity dance on a pin, and Hawkings wants us to dive into the ever nothingness of a black hole. De Chardin sees divine wonder in evolution and Dawkins sees the selfish gene. 

When we read, all these warriors of the Word ask us to  question and think. they provoke us to refresh resolution and intention. They invite us to forget our limitations. They beguile us  with possibilities.  They want us,some times,just to relax and make time flow more slowly.  

They are us and we are them.

Reading is probably the finest argument for our humanity.  And the best way to become un-mired from the sloughs of despond.

 Now read the amazing T H White as he educates Arthur in his once and future classic:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then ― to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” 

Reading is one of the best ways to learn.

And if  a book can just create one curious inquitsive mind, it fulfills itself.

The mind gets wings and the spirit can travel.

I worry with possibly the anxiety of archaism, about multimedia as we now call it and to the digital revolution and whether the instant blurb, the sound bite, the flashed subliminal will make us read less. Whether we will seek only those words that have utility like a balance sheet, or writing that offers comfort like a one night stand.   

Will we forget how we came here, who we are in our blood and why we are going anywhere.

Will we stop reading?

Reading creates writers, not the other way around. 

When we stop reading, all of these people will finally die and with them will die our history and  our evolution.

And Clio, Thalia, Erato, Euterpe, Polyhymnia, Calliope, Terpsichore,Urania and Melpomene will all vanish as wisps of imagination, leaving possibly only the sound of a sigh.

I was recently advised by my very close friend who is a true blue journalist, that my writing is a bit ‘prolix’** 

Prolix sounds like and probably should be a recreational drug, but alas for me it is not.

It means this.

1. Tediously prolonged; wordy: editing a prolix manuscript.

2. Tending to speak or write at excessive length. 

 Verbosity. A verbal stomach upset. In short long winded.

But a visit  to the dictionary much like a  penitent to his church reveals a ‘kinder’ root meaning.

[Middle English, from Old French prolixe, from Latin prolixus, poured forth, extended.]

I like that . pouring forth, extended. 

These words do pour forth gushing as in the flooding of the Nile.

Which got me thinking.

Why do I like words?

When I was very young, a friend of mine who was upset with me about something or the other, called me a wordmonger.

It wasn’t I suspect a compliment.

More like warmonger than costermonger. The word monger means to sell or hawk. So one who sells or hawks words, unlike say, one who peddles wares on the street.

I was upset then. But not now. For I like the idea of selling words. They are worthy of price and imbued with inherent as well as generous value, intended to enrich the moment with better meaning than the silence which precedes their employ.

Take the word imbued for example. The rough cut version of this could have been filled with ; but the polished and faceted meaning is also to inspire by its quality. ‘Imbued’ shines. ‘Filled with’ doesn’t.

I  am also old school. Dickens lives within, as does  Trollope and Austen and Hardy and Bronte and Lawrence and Collins and Chesterton and Joyce and Proust all the way down to Wodehouse. I eat slower when it comes to words and descriptions, preferring to masticate like a ruminant scholar rather than swallow whole . I am more ungulate than reptile.

It is not that pithiness is anathema. I love the way for example Robert Parker writes his modern detective novels. He conveys in a few words what I would take paragraphs to explore. And he does so with unfailing wit with a piquant dash of  literary reference  which would  be out of place in any other serving, but he makes the whole dish work.

He is a like a  molecular  chef, microscopic portions exploding with fissionable delight on your tongue. 

I am   Pantagruel in my approach, dealing with “serious matters in a spirit of broad maybe even cynical good humor”. But given the gargantuan origin, it means that my feasts are lavish, bedecked with feather and plume, redolent with overt fragrances and asking for appetite to be brought unrestrained to table. My spices are fresh- plucked, never dehydrated or freeze dried. The fruits on the table are succulent and ripe and will not last another day of not eaten at the instant.

I like words. They talk to me. Often they whisper from dark corners of my mind where they were stored and lay forgotten. They say ,Here we are, use us, we were created for this precise moment. 

And so I do for I  am not afraid of these whispers.

At the same time I like the laconic cowboy: ‘yup’ is sometimes as eloquent as ‘I concur’. And in turn of phrase, “Hi Ho Silver Away”, is much more poetic than “Giddy up horse!”

What can I say, when it comes to words and language  of which unfortunately I am fluent only in one, I am epicurean. In fact to borrow from one of my favorite cooking websites, I am ‘epicurious!’

I search for  meaning in life. I search for meaning in language.

 There is a history to words. Each one was first used by someone, now  long dead, in a particular context to tell someone something, to elucidate  an argument, to persuade of a conviction,  to inflame one to fiery action  or  simply to caress  someone with the softer syllables of love.

When we use that unusual  word again, when we place in it our own time and place we bring forth  that person too. History lives in the present with those words.

I confess to being a spendthrift with words. I can’t help it. I love the joy of using them flagrantly. And unlike my meagre income, this is inexhaustible treasure, a cornucopia replenishing  itself even as it tries in vain to expend its resource.

But how  can one resist? Look at the word spendthrift for example. It is oxymoronic in its construct. Spend versus thrift. Put together with impish delight by an unknown wit?

That’s the other thing. Words are essential for wit. Used well they make you smile. Often a wry twitch of the lips  more than a loud guffaw, but I defy anyone to read the schoolboy words of Richmal Crompton’s William series and not be moved even as  a soured adult to laughter. Or when Wilde twists the knife in with his ever so sharp riposte. Or when Ambrose Bierce makes bitter sweet in his diabolical dictionary.

I suppose I am Victorian in my tastes. Words were currency at that time. Your ability to turn a pretty phrase was possibly as desirable as turning a pretty leg. So I am enamored of the need to craft words. To create intricate intaglios of language  in which I may embed the odd gemstone ,the mused upon epithet and the less used synonym. It gives me pleasure. And I am appreciative that it may not do so to others. But as the cannibal confessed to the missionary, What to do?

I am a hopeless quivering in-need-of-a-fix word addict. There is no cure for Prolix!

P.S.  The right use of the word prolix would have been something like ‘ your writing suffers from prolixity.’ But my friend was quoting from what used to be our bible for anti-establishmentarianism,  Catch 22 and the character of PFC Wintergreen. And it sounds much better to say you are a bit prolix!

A river of white houses flow

To a great cream-yellow church.

Then you see the spring 

And the river taking birth

And flowing away.

I saw this amazing visual in this documentary on Platon, considered an iconic photographer.

The film wasn’t about light and exposures and even textures of shadow.

It was a perspective on seeing.

And in that slightly heightened awareness sparked by this film, I “saw” this establishing shot of a typical Grecian island white village in a  shallow valley. There were two clusters of white houses with almost no other colour except little splashes of that crystal blue you sometimes see in the Mediterranean.

One ran up against the side of the hill. The other ran down into the V of the valley, at the end of which was a wide,and in relative proportion, giant church. It felt like it had these welcoming arms ready to embrace the village coming towards it.

And this thought came up: that the energy of places of worship were fed by the people who came there. 

And turned on its head: these same places of worship create the energy for the people as they move into the world.

This is then what ☯ means.

Watching a inspirational documentary on Bjarke Ingels, this young architect who is, at the age of 41, a wunderkind, I was struck by something he said: that when naïveté matures., it gives way to another kind of confidence.

And I was taken by that: first in the obviousness of naïveté fostering confidence, or in fact being a synonym for it. Of course, when you are naive you are confident. That’s because you believe: in innocence, in possibility, in ‘why not’ as opposed to why, in failure as being unimportant and in why pigs can fly. 

It’s the open eyed idea of the world that children bring to the party of unicorns and dragons and evil wizards.

It’s the other kind of confidence however that piqued me: that confidence born from practice and effort, the knowing that in any universe pi is an constant recurring fraction, or that somethings will work and somethings won’t.

This is the confidence of How. 

I wonder whether these two paradigms of confidence can ever co exist in the same time and space continuum.

Innocence lost and knowledge gained: Ah, for the garden of Eden.

There is no correct political correctness

So I was amused to discover that the word Silly originally meant blessed . In about 300 years it had grown warts and carbuncles and had come to mean empty headed and simple minded  and foolish.

At one level one could say that say  that  those that are blessed are probably bereft of serious opinions, purely because they are so content and happy in their blessed state that they need not the cares and woes of deep thought.

Be that as it may, I said to myself that words change their meaning based on their present social milieu and context.

Gay is an obvious word: The Gay Caballero of 18th century Spain or Mexico was heterosexually virile. 

Queer was an oddity, not a disparaging epithet for gays.

Being lame, blind , deaf and dumb did not necessarily come loaded with either scorn or pity. 

And so to white, black, brown or yellow people. 

In the USA they are to be referred to as Caucasian, African American, Indian American or Asian American. The place  of origin is now more important than who they are in the present moment.

Anchored to the past it so hard to look Into the future as just a beautiful white black or brown  person.

I say let the skin speak and show how deep the beauty lies.