Scorched earth used to be a military tactic — Samson caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails, sending them through enemy fields — but what if nature out-flames the foxes? What if floods engulf those waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
Hosing down used to be a police tactic — against dissenting crowds, with dissent almost a badge of honor, police visor and shield almost an admission of guilt — ah, earth, water, air, mind — all ablaze!
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For sure
No sense in wasting a poem on impeachment, those things pass like leaves in the wind, Nixon, Clinton,Trump, and by the time you read this another fistful, maybe no doubt — on second thought, poems too are leaves in a high wind, sacred altitude at best.
Han Shan sent his poems floating downstream, scribbled them on the walls of caves and hermitages, wrote them on beech-bark on the off-chance someone would find them — Pulitzer-winner Gary Snyder for sure found them!
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Forecast
Floods and firestorms: the planet is not so much burning as oscillating, floods, the element of water, fire would evaporate them, but only after bringing them to boiling point, firestorms, wrathful, water would quench them, but boiling point is hardly the issue.
We are deep into future problems, the courage of our blind denial blithely fire-walking with water-walking ability granted us solely in scriptures — prediction succeeds, prophecy fails, what next?
This is to alert BrownPundit readers to a series I’ve begun on Zenpundit, my other punditry-posting place. It’s about Ioan Couliano’s argument in his book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance that the Renaissance art of Magic was essentially a matter of conjuring desire in the recipient by means of visual imagery, and that the Art has been revived with great success in the present day, in the form of commercial advertising.
Roughly speaking, then, Magic is the defendant, modernity-secularity-technology is the prosecution team — who don’t bother to call witnesses because, m’lord, it’s plain obvious that magical thinking is superstitious nonsense — and a bucket-load of TV commercials form the evidence presented by the defense.
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But wait a minute — here’s magic:
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Whether you’re secular or a devotee, that photographic image is magical in that a simple hand-gesture conjures up a flute. The flute isn’t there, objectively speaking — and yet there’s a flute, Krishna is quite obviously playing it, and indeed its mellifluous power of enchantment has drawn the lovely Radha to his side.
About Krishna’s flute — you may know far more than I, but at least I can point to Denise Levertov and Edward C Dimmock’s poem in Songs in Praise of Krishna — from the Bengali: .
Radha is terrified on her way to the forest
O Madhava, how shall I tell you of my terror? I could not describe my coming here if I had a million tongues. When I left my room and saw the darkness I trembled: I could not see the path, there were snakes that writhed round my ankles!
I was alone, a woman; the night was so dark, the forest so dense and gloomy, and I had so far to go. The rain was pouring down — which path should I take? My feet were muddy and burning where thorns had scratched them. But I had the hope of seeing you, none of it mattered, and now my terror seems far away. . . . When the sound of your flute reaches my ears it compels me to leave my home, my friends, it draws me into the dark toward you.
I no longer count the pain of coming here, says Govinda-dasa
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And what does all this have to do with advertising?
My response is that the Krishna and Radha in this photo were captured, and Krishna’s flute conjured, by the eye of a pro commercial guy:
JEREMY HUNTER began his career in advertising – as a television creative, working for Young and Rubicam, Leo Burnett, Ogilvy and Bates, along the way winning a number of international awards in Cannes, Venice, New York and Los Angeles. During this time he worked with some of Britain’s most iconic film directors – John Schlesinger, Ken Russell, Tony Scott, Dick Lester, Nic Roeg, Richard Loncraine as well as Oscar-winning Editor Jim Clark and photographer Terence Donovan.
That’s the resume of a contemporary magician.
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In case you’re interested, the posts in my Magic and Commercials series on Zenpundit to date are:
Since on the “Brown Roundup” thread, there was some spirited discussion about baby Prince Louis and his being named after Lord Mountbatten, I was reminded of W.H. Auden’s poem “Partition”. It’s a short poem, so I’m just going to copy it out from my edition of Auden’s Collected Poems (Edited by Edward Mendelson). The poem appears on pages 803- 804 of the volume.
Partition
Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission
Having never set eyes on this land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.
“Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.
The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we’ve arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.”
Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.
The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.
–May 1966
The poem speaks for itself. The central character (never actually named in the poem itself) is Sir Cyril Radcliffe.
A translation (by Ruchira Paul) of Pakistani Feminist poet Fahmida Riaz’s poem Aqlima (daughter of Adam and Eve)
Audio in the poet’s own voice. (mislabeled as another poem). Aklima jo Habil aur Kabil ki maa jaani hai maa jaani, magar muqtalif muqtalif beech raano ke aur pistanon ki ubhaar mein aur apne pait ke andar aur kokh mein is sab ki kismet kyun hai ek farba bher ke bachche ki qurbani woh apne badan ki qaidi taptee hui dhoop mein jalte teele par khadi hui hai patthar par naksh banee hai us naksh ko ghaur se dekho lambee raano se upar ubharte pistanon se upar paicheeda kokh se upar Aklima ka sar bhi hai Allah kabhi Aklima se qalam karain aur kuchh puchhain.
(Translation) Aqlima.. Born of the same mother as Abel and Cain Born of the same mother but different Different between her thighs Different in the swell of her breasts Different inside her stomach And her womb too Why is the fate of her body Like that of a well fed sacrificial lamb She, a prisoner of that body See her standing in the scorching sun on a smoldering hill Casting a shadow that burns itself into the stones Look at that shadow closely Above the long thighs Above the swelling breasts Above the coils in her womb Aklima also has a head Let Allah have a conversation with Aklima And ask her a few questions. (Aklima was the lesser known offspring of Adam and Eve, the sister or Cain and Abel)
