ISODICE© ROLL I
Rolling the Isodice© NATARANJAN BOHIDAR 05/08/2020
Soulful Rumination in Lockdown Isolation
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Covid-19 Upshakes Ovid-43 to Morph Metanormal-21
As the
pandemic rages, the world is at 6's and 7's quite unsure what narrative
approach to take - ethnographic, topographic, mythological, numerological - to
explain this most recent oracular echo of the perpetual human predicament of survival to
our perplexed minds, and to unlock its purpose
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WYSIWYG:What You See Is What You Get..what you don't see is speculation (wydsis) "Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is", asserts Albert Camus (1913-1960),in his Introduction to THE REBEL. Human passion for an upgrade, an update, a curiosity to experience what he is not, a curious need to be another, or merge with many others, is classically insatiable, thrilling the very core of our imagination, even if it means suffering real or voyeuristic transformational conditions imposed on us of turning into a Diana stag Actaeon-like, or an Apuleius Bottom-ass, however golden, a Tithonus cicada, a Swan laid-her, Hayavadana horse, or consorting piles of Pyramus and Thisbe ashes rising from diamond-love returning to its allotropic form..as long as one can break the dividing wall or find a chink in it..to transport, if not transform, oneself to another, supposedly higher level of existence. Is it our proteanism, then, that makes us rebel? To morph, to dream of transposing heads and body, perchance to meta-morph? "What is a rebel?", Camus goes on to ask, and answers, "A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation". Man holds on, therefore, to the desire - desperately, some say ruthlessly - to transit, change into something else, essentially different, perhaps superior, seeking in deep irony a permanence and immunity from transience, death and disease. Though, this last is not as easily achieved as desired! In fact, quite the contrary. So, even death becomes acceptable as long as it is a gateway to something better, not beta, but alpha state of undeath, for instance, chanting, "Anything i can do, I can do meta"! That is the selfie. The selfish human perspective. How about nature, or Nature? Does n/Nature rebel? Does Naturen© seek to improve itself, herself, himself..re-arrange, re-define...not for the sake of humans, not to launch the super-(hu)man, nor in abhorrence of inhuman "bloody business", but "unruly" all by itself, herself, himself, demanding change, and "screwing its courage to the sticking place" in its bid to not fail in this insistence? If humans can seize wild naturalN© forces to power, say, empower themselves, why should the reverse not be true? As of this morning, carpe diem, 688,080 souls have been seized out of 18,100,000 of what used to be perfectly normal lives but now diseased, and the process of decease yet not ceased. Will Naturen return these "captives"? In what form and to whom, animal or plant kingdom, and where? In a metaphysical interpretation of the physical, souls lost = souls gained. Energy is never diminished, it only changes shape. How we lost over six hundred thousand "shapes" is still a mystery. How will Naturen gain from this? Is natureN making room for something, somebody else? What "thing", what other ? The next evolutionary stage? What will fill the "room"? What will be the shape of "it" - soul? - to come? The robotic, the cyborg, the replicant? What quantum of soul-ace would these need? Is that the emerging speculation, the elephant in the room, with a human view, so to say, or not, mask or ventilator fitted, or not? "One day a dog was being thrashed in the street, and behold, Pythagoras,
philosopher of spirits, was chancing by.
His heart was in his mouth for the poor pup.
"Stop! Stop!" he cried. "Don't beat him anymore. This is my dear friend's soul. I recognize the voice when i hear him bark" - PYTHAGORAS & THE TRANSMIGRATED SOUL, Xenophanes (570-470 BCE). Now, on Samos, Pythagoras(570-490 BCE) island of birth, where Aristarchus (310-230 BCE) rebelled by infusing heliocentric dynamism into static planet Earth, a slave by the name of Aesop(620-564 BCE) regaled - before the two were even born - with his fabulous immemorial moralspewing-humanimals©! Soul celebrations in the shape of a slave? Well, who'd understand human-natureN better than an outsider, a migrant, observing from the bottom up? Here are two of Aesop's bat stories that soul-stun by virtue of their prescience 2500 years ago: 1. "A Singing-bird was confined in a cage which hung outside
a window, and had a way of singing at night when all other birds were asleep.
One night a Bat came and clung to the bars of the cage, and asked the Bird why
she was silent by day and sang only at night. "I have a very good reason
for doing so," said the Bird: "it was once when I was singing in the
daytime that a fowler was attracted by my voice, and set his nets for me and
caught me. Since then I have never sung except by night." But the Bat
replied, "It is no use your doing that now when you are a prisoner: if
only you had done so before you were caught, you might still have been
free." - Precautions are
useless after the event" |
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MOOD MANAGEMENT (m&m's): Narrative vaccine is just another namefor comfort food |
2. "The
Birds and the Beasts declared war against each other. No compromise was
possible, and so they went at it tooth and claw. It is said the quarrel grew
out of the persecution the race of Geese suffered at the teeth of the Fox
family. The Beasts, too, had cause for fight. The Eagle was constantly pouncing
on the Hare, and the Owl dined daily on Mice.
It
was a terrible battle. Many a Hare and many a Mouse died. Chickens and Geese
fell by the score—and the victor always stopped for a feast.
Now
the Bat family had not openly joined either side. They were a very politic
race. So when they saw the Birds getting the better of it, they were Birds for
all there was in it. But when the tide of battle turned, they immediately sided
with the Beasts.
When
the battle was over, the conduct of the Bats was discussed at the peace
conference. Such deceit was unpardonable, and Birds and Beasts made common
cause to drive out the Bats. And since then the Bat family hides in dark towers
and deserted ruins, flying out only in the night.
- The deceitful have no friends"
While story No. 2 is infested with genetic material and cruel evolutionary fFate© of flying mammals - neither this, nor that (brings back memories of my directorial debut of Girish Karnad's horse-headed "Hayavadana" : "is this one that, or that one this"...that opens with the elephant-headed you-know-who!) - the moral is impeccable for all mammals of the 2-legged kind, on both sides of the border parsing Birds and Beasts..is this one bat, and barb-wired at that!!
As for 4-legged beast side stories, Aesop has over 20 tales
on dogs, but it is unlikely he'd have one that goes anything like this:
"The dog though...He resolved to drown him...and walked on looking about for a pond; picking up a heavy stone and tying it to his handkerchief as he went.
"The animal
looked up into his master's face while these preparations were making; whether
his instincts apprehended something of their purpose , or the robber's sidelong
look at him was sterner than ordinary, he skulked a little farther in the rear
than usual, and cowered as he came more slowly along.
"When his master
halted at the brink of a pool , and looked round to call him, he stopped
outright."Do you hear me call? Come here!" cried Sikes.
"The animal came
up from the very force of habit; but as Sikes stooped to attach the
handkerchief to his throat, he uttered a low growl and started back. "Come
back!", said the robber.
"The dog wagged
his tail, but moved not.
"Sikes made a
running noose and called again.
"The dog
advanced, retreated, paused an instant, turned and scoured away at his hardest
speed.
"The man whistled
again and again, and sat down and waited in the expectation that he would
return. But no dog appeared...." -OLIVER TWIST, Charles
Dickens(1812-1870,June 9)
What exactly did Diana do with Actaeon's hunting dogs after they had torn their master into shreds under her command, that has left the world speechless for centuries about freedom of speech? 50 dogs left to their own guilt and bewildered madness? Until a centaur - half human, half horse - Actaeon's hunting trainer erects a statue to the dogs' recklessness? Check out Diana's snarling pup in this Titian(1488/90-1576)!
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| PRICE OF DISCOVERY: What do you pay for
uncovering what you are not permitted to see? |
In other portrayals check out the satyrs - half human, half goat. Why is their fertility-inclined permanent erection not a profanation of Diana's virginity? What manner of bestiality is this? Why is Actaeon so particularly bugging, such a mega soma? Megasoma Actaeon! Heaviest scarab on planet Earth! And what or who is that black woman behind the pup? Nymph or slave? African? S. American? Brazilian ethnic? Can you even keep up with the questions, let alone find the answers? Bewildering...
Equally intriguing is this question: had Sikes looked into the dark pool that he had planned to drown his pet dog into silencing him, gorging with 19th century industrial waste, coal perhaps, spreading scarab-like, would he have ecstatically, narcissistically fallen in love with himself? Or was he already a megalomaniac? Is there an ECHO here, somewhere? Industrious, stubborn, ruthless, dogged? Sidelong looks, not meeting the eye, ey, i, i, i, i ....self-ie-eye! (Diana's Mirror, incidentally, is a pool at Nemi - a ruthless ritual marking its change of guard!)
China's annual dog-meat festival opens
despite new guidelines
China’s notorious dog meat
festival has opened in defiance of a government campaign to improve animal
welfare and reduce risks to health highlighted by the novel coronavirus
outbreak. The annual 10-day festival..is being held despite new guidelines..Over
10,000 dogs will be slaughtered this year as well. Many of these dogs are often
sick or injured, many die on the transport trucks because of dehydration,
shock, suffocation, and heatstroke and the ones that survive the journey often
suffer from low immunity. The coronavirus is believed to have originated in
horseshoe bats - the most recent common
ancestor of all horseshoe bats lived 34–40 million years ago - before
crossing into humans in a (wet) market
in the city of Wuhan and there is a hypothesis that Beijing's second wave
of cases emerged from a salmon stall.
Human relations with animals - and animal power - petted or in the wild is a long story of love and hate, with divine intervention providing the twist, that some call LOVE & ATE on at least one side, because animals are not known to play with their food, nor speak with their mouths full, therefore the distinctions are significant: that while it is purely functional for animals, (no animal feasting on a human believes that this is a moment of evolutionary change that will transport the animal to a higher plane of existence!), with humans the belief that animals are imbued with special powers, forceful and potent, that can be transferred to them on consumption - (panthera tigris penis & claws, pachyderm tusks, rhino horn...the list is endless..and this is not the place to enter into the debate whether Vishnu is actually avataric-Fishnu©) - and morph them as well as their abilities into what they are not, is a significant aphrodisiac!
Perhaps this a variation on the Camus theme of rebellious refusal to accept what one is and, therefore, look for transformation, perhaps an existential upgrade, at whatever cost.
"Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark now I hear them,- ding-dong, bell."
- FULL FATHOM FIVE, my favorite alliteration in 1964, too
young to know what kettle of fish William Shakespeare(baptized 400 years earlier in1564) was, burbot or turbot, lamprey or
bass ...
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MAMMALIAN MAELSTROM: Divining the depths of mythos, ethnos, topos, ethos Beijing Shuts Down Seafood Market After Dozens Test Positive for Coronavirus The Beijing authorities shut down a major seafood and produce market and locked down several residential complexes on Saturday after 53 people tested positive for the coronavirus in the city..Nearly everyone who tested positive had worked or shopped at the Xinfadi market, a wholesale market on the city’s south side that sells seafood, fruit and vegetables, according to the Beijing health commission..The virus was reportedly detected on cutting boards for imported salmon there. Like most seafood, salmon enjoys a rich history as a natural aphrodisiac. But it is only in recent times that this fish with the pink edge, that swims upstream and spawns hugely, has been pinpointed as a sexual powerhouse. It is an excellent source of protein–essential for stamina–and is also loaded with omega-3 fatty acids besides being vitamin rich - https://www.eatsomethingsexy.com/aphrodisiac-foods/salmon/ Eating sexy can perk up lives, particularly if you are a senior citizen caught in a Covidian vortex that's dragging your investments down just when you need an upgrade: "I
have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. "I do not think that they will sing to
me",
is in 2020 become a Coviditty©
that sings to the all-aging self-quarantined in “chambers
of the sea”, a space of tragic retreat, from where they hear faint dull
sounds of what life used to be, in a fading memory, of grand outdoor levity and
weekend party, food plates, candle light, glass and cutlery, where (wo)men come
and go never speaking of co-morbidity! "Crab or lobster, Sir?"
That is the proposed question at
a post-Corona Metanormal-21 speculated Boston diner called 'Rosebud', named
after a certain Citizen Kane fetish, in the city of Sylvia Plath's (1932–1963)
birth, popped up by the sanitized robotic waiter on wheels, while another turns
burger patties in the kitchen with its patented canadarm, no interns these from
the local business school, but perhaps M.I.Tech-inventions, as you sit at a
table in isolated splendor..the evening outside spread like a Covid-Comorbid© patient etherized upon a table
ventilatored and ventriloquised as well as soliloquized..with Hamlet and
Gertrude, both talking- head mannequins, sitting at your table to keep you
company.. in convenient social proximity, machine learning your preferences.. Moodily, you drop a coin or two
in the inviting intelliterary© slot machine and tune them into an argument
thus: In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", singing the
plight of a trouser bottom rolled-up man like me, the young T.S. Eliot famously
wrote: "I should have been a pair
of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." But do
these claws belong to a lobster or a crab? Or neither? Or both?" Hamlet, the man-ne-kin opts for
the crab reading...but Gertrude, the man-e-queen, begs to differ, noting,
"Crabs are endowed only with rudimentary claws, when they have them at
all," and concludes thus, "These are most likely the claws
specifically of a Maine lobster."  AQUA-FETISH & AMPHIBIAN COMPLEX: Plath'sFROG AUTUMNAL METAPHORS & Hughes phallic OTTER Maine! The very word is like a bell that tolls
you back 400 years to thy forlorn fore-colonial ancestral self!
" One of the first English attempts to settle the Maine coast was by Christopher Levett, an agent and a member of the Plymouth Council for New England. After securing a royal grant for 6,000 acres (24 km2) of land on the site of present-day Portland, Maine, Levett returned to England in 1623 to drum up support for his settlement, which he called "York" after the city in England of his birth. Originally called Machigonne by the local Abenaki, later settlers named it Falmouth and it is known today as Portland. "By the middle of the 17th century the Abenaki were living in a nightmarish landscape shaped by conflict, disease, and alcohol, and they turned to the missionaries for help and reassurance. After the cessation of hostilities in Europe, the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth quickly brought peace to the Maine frontier. By this time it was apparent that English population expansion would engulf southern Maine, and most Indians in the area withdrew to the St. Lawrence settlements."
Jerked off and memory jogged, you decide to return to simpler quibbles of the crab-lobster kind you and call for another cover..and a chair..actually two rubber dolls in two chairs - spotty Orson Welles(1915—1985) and ARIEL-creative SHOEecidal© horse-lady Sylvia Plath in them, to break the deadlocked discussion between mother and son, on Mother's Day, so dad-loving but patriarch-confused Hamlet just can't hurt his mum, which is exactly how his "Daddy" wanted it! Meantime, you brood over the main course, written on the backlit display palm of the waiter, and decide to go green - sea weed salad protein enhanced with cannabis extracts sponsored by Aurora Aromatics© and Molex Mohamaya© - food companies in advanced stage of a breakthrough, collaborating under the combined slogan: WHY EATUS FOETUS, WHEN YOU CAN BE LOTOS EATERS.(SOURCE- SHELL GAME, famous speculative eat-out publication, dying to get out, during lockdown..) You hi-5 with the waiter, his eyes light up and a smile flashes across his face along with the latest culinary news commercially interrupted : COMMERCIAL BREAK: (ANCHOR is a simple GOOGLE Chrome extension which plays on this feeling of sinking. The further down you scroll, the deeper you dive — and you can watch as your screen slowly turns a dark blue, a little fish swims across your screen, and finally, you hit a (literal AND LITERARY) rock bottom. This could be easily adapted and expanded into a whole series of scrolling experiments: Elon Musk BORING CO. to the centre of the Earth, Jules Verne 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE you-know-what, et al.. Try it out and see what it's like to scroll to the bottom of the ocean and lose complete sense of daylight, of daybreak, the morning, as though you were high, or low, on hallucinogens and couldn't fathom aurora borealis or the northern lights - a term coined by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) in 1619, 3 years after Shakespeare's death in 1616, from the Roman goddess of the dawn and the Greek name for the north wind.) Now, Aurora (Eos) fell so in love with Tithonus that she carried him off to Ethiopia..(where Tedros GhebrEYEsus would one day become Health Minister and WHO would later warn the aged of their Covid-Comorbid vulnerability). When Eos asks Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life, the god consents politely - (and no one can see him laughing on the other side of his eternal face) - because Eos forgets to ask also for eternal youth, so the onus is now on her husband to grow old and withered..but not wither away, such as some States North and North-west of India are expected to by their own admission..and, thus, he/it Tithonus is transformed into a cicada - a sound-producing insect (order Homoptera) that has two pairs of membranous wings, prominent compound eyes, and three simple eyes(ocelli). "Cicadas are medium to large in size,
ranging from 2 to 5 cm (0.8 to 2 inches). They have featured in literature since the
time of Homer's "Iliad" - the blind poet of 9th
century B.C.E. who, it is suspected, died failing to solve a riddle set by
fishermen - and as motifs in art from
the Chinese Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 B.C.E.).
They have also been used in myth and folklore as symbols of carefree living and
immortality. The cicada is also mentioned in Homer's contemporary poet-agri-economist
Hesiod's epic " Shield".
The cicada sings when millet first ripens. Cicadas are, today, eaten by
human beings in various countries, including China, where the nymphs are served
deep-fried in Shandong cuisine, famous for using raw
materials that are mainly domestic animals and birds, seafood and vegetables.."
Male cicadas produce loud noises by vibrating membranes (tymbals) near the base of the abdomen. These noises can be rhythmical ticks, buzzes, or whines, although in some species the “song” is musical. Here is Lord Alfred Tennyson's (1809-1892) adapted Tithonus Cicada Whine...nasal, slow, decrepit...try reading it aloud that way: "The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms." How do you like the nasal twang, the complaining whine of the old, "consumed" by large dosage of modern medicine, thereby "consumed' by "induced" immortality in return? But explore a little farther! Try reading it again - loud, nasal, slow, decrepit, but now with a shot of cannabis - your substitute for Aurora, currently the modern name of a sophisticated multi-national cannabis manufacturer! Now, Lord Tennyson had a lifelong fear of mental illness. Several men in his family had a mild form of epilepsy, which was then thought a shameful disease, like the CovidCough© today. Tennyson was sure to be, like all great poets, a keen student of the mental state as well as the state of the mental, and in his "LOTOS EATERS" forcefully captures the essence of the mood-mind co-relation and conflict with regard to tedious domesticity and the siren-like beckoning of adventure, particularly relevant to our current lockdown!  HALLUCINO-GENETICS: Music, Mythypnosis© & Vaccine Narrative But, why not home into the
original Homeric Greek re-report, which raises "home-sickness" to
mythical heights giving it differentiated meaning at different layers of the
social pyramid with regard to responsibility, recklessness and ruthlessness? "In Homer's ODYSSEY, Book
IX, Odysseus tells how adverse north
winds blew him and his men off course: "I
was driven thence by foul winds for a space of 9 days upon the sea, but on the
tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that
comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our
crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. "When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to
see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third
man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the
lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about
home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but
were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking
further of their return;
"....nevertheless,
though they wept bitterly, I forced them back to the ships and made them fast
under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of
them should taste of the lotus and leave
off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea
with their oars" Have you
ever seen grown men cry? Heroic mythological warriors, that too! Such
realism..The last time such a question arose was in an ad: a grown man had
dropped a whole new bottle of Regal, Chivas Regal..and there it lay on the
floor at his feet, shards of labeled glass in an ocean of labeled scotch.. It is unclear what this "lotus" was - perhaps red flowered poppy-opium, a pain killer - that made men weep to let go of, such as scotch, as found in a land you reach after being blown off course for 10 days while rounding Cape Malea, the southernmost tip of the Pelopponesus (plenty of p's as in poppy, so should be PeloPOPPYnesus©), headed westwards for Ithaca in a 1194 BCE vessel (1+1+9+4=6) but "with respect to the topic of mental health..cannabis has been touted in popular media as an effective treatment for a variety of psychiatric conditions, such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, psychosis and addiction." So, can Canada? Cannabis for COVID-19: Canadian research
claims extracts from the psychoactive drug could fight coronavirusThe
study found that extracts from cannabis can affect the ACE-2 receptors in the
host cells. ACE2 receptors are proteins that have been found to be the
"entry points" for coronavirus in the host's body. Cannabis is more effective at preventing and
treating COVID-19 than hydroxychloroquine Now, the Lord poet Tennyson would not have known antibiotics—literally "opposing life", from the Greek roots ἀντι anti, "against" and βίος bios, "life"—because it came two decades after his demise. Govt reviews use of HCQ and antibiotic combo
in treating coronavirus cases According to the health ministry’s current
clinical management protocol for Covid-19, which was revised on March 3,
hydroxychloroquine in combination with azithromycin can be used for patients
with severe disease and requiring intensive care unit (ICU) management.
Why are antibacterial agents
being used in patients infected with the new coronavirus?
WHO is very clear that antibiotics do not work
against viruses, only bacteria, and yet health care providers are using
antibiotics in some patients with COVID-19. As the debate rages on , so does the disease. And the vaccine narrative, vying with the narrative vaccine for our attention, goes something like this: there is no vaccine yet to be found, and even if it was, some years from now - say 2 years or 3 - who could afford it, when patients can't even make it to a CovidBower© and the dying, the already dead and the just about living, symptomatic as well as asymptomatic, are sharing their inerasable individuality on a common Covidead©, sorry CovidBed©? Not to speak of the cremation and burial of the dead...the wasted, in the chilling summer months of a cruel lockdown..  MIND ON FIRE, soul on ice, yogadoo© bed of thorns “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, opens "Anna Karenina" (1878). Writing today, the genius of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) could have replaced any one of the "unhappy" with the single word - Covidented© and launched into a war and peace discussion on whether egalitarian Chimera has wiped out all distinctions...infecting equally...until the vaccine arrives! Or is expected to arrive, but only as Bellerophon for the privileged few: "Trump admin secures nearly the entire stock of antiviral drug Remdesivir from Gilead sciences for the next 3 months, leaving hardly any supplies for the rest of the world" - Times of India, July 2, 2020 (There's the catch or the rub, as the
procrastinating case may be. Governments
have been blamed for dragging feat, delaying action, letting the killer spread
rot, allowing the mammalian villain, in flight, to slip through the fingers,
and - viciously put - off a greased palm! There is no evidence, though, and
this could all be myth-interpretation or mis-interpretation..a difference of
just a lisp! But the manner in which governments are scrambling to make up makes
every one of them suspicious..barring one that is using aggression sans borders to make cowards of them all in a bid to silence and cover
up in a Diana-Actaeon sort of way.) (There's
the catch or the rub, as the procrastinating case may be. Governments
have been blamed for dragging feat, delaying action, letting the killer spread
rot, allowing the mammalian villain, in flight, to slip through the fingers,
and - viciously put - off a greased palm! There is no evidence, though, and
this could all be myth-interpretation or mis-interpretation..a difference of
just a lisp! But the manner in which governments are scrambling to make up
makes every one of them suspicious..barring one that is using aggression sans
borders to make cowards of them all in a bid to silence and cover up in a
Diana-Actaeon sort of way.) Now, the infectious trajectories of the two - myth as virus and vice versa - which is to say virus attaining mythical proportions and myth going viral, may appear the same, but one is life giving, as proposed earlier, and at worst life anguishing, given the many tragedies myths narrate, while the other - the virus - is life taking and at best life threatening, if at all it allows you to escape its dragon jaws, having as of this morning shown more than 688,000 (of over 18 million infected) the way to not dusty, because pollution is in a lockdown, but Belmondo gasping-for-air BREATHLESS death ("A bout de soufflé", Godard,1960), as statistically abstracted by one John Hopkins or the other University, making the reports bland-numerical, that some call numericallous© view of the competition it may be fuelling among nations and thereby nothing more nor less than: "...a (statistical) tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing...(much)" Thus, even as
we continue to tell tales about the virus, concoct confusion about it with
bacteria, the corona continues to cruelly pursue, drive without respite,
without respect for the thing itself - poor, stripped-bare, forked animal in
desperate unaccommodated debilitation - laying to waste 3 times the entire
population of a certain plague-devastated Oran - a geo-spot in a meta-fictional
account of metaphysical dimensions, the machinery - deus ex machina? cirque
du soleil, god as insect? https://entomologytoday.org/2020/02/25/insects-center-stage-cirque-du-soleil-ovo/- of which is comparable to a
Sophoclean tragedy, that won the author the Prix des Critiques in 1947, a
hundred years after the actual choleric event. So, what gargantuan misanthropy is it that we have yet not found a tongue to lament proportionately our this current fate? Are we waiting for 2120 to find voice? A Nobel prize winning voice, if the Nobel at all exists at that time... "....feeling
of exile and separation. "In this
connection the narrator is well aware how regrettable is his inability to
record at this point something of a really spectacular order; some heroic feat
or memorable deed like those that thrill us in the chronicles of the past. "The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous...the grim days of plague do not stand out like livid flames, ravenous and indistinguishable beaconing a troubled sky , but rather like the slow deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path..." - THE PLAGUE, Albert Camus (1913-1960)  VIRAL SEPARATION & TANGENTIAL FLOWS : Replacing heroic regalism with the slow grind For the
heroic minded, the dragon slaying fire and brimstone types, questions raised by
Camus' very methodical treatise, at the time of India's independence when a
different scourge was racing through the blood of our nation, 73 years ago,
must have seemed highly exaggerated ...and so obtuse... perhaps tangential... Here was the
largest mass exodus - repeat "exodus", not amniotic poetic Prufrockian
confinement - of people unaccommodated,
torn from their homes, stripped of their belongings, forked out into murderous
malevolent non-existent streets, nay paths and pagh-dandi-marched
worse than moving capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in 1327, tugged out, lucked out,
storm forced, blown away, cracked up, to trudge train track thela cycle cart crawl limp stagger drag
bus load lorry scratch claw collapse starve slaughter their way, out of their
very own expressed full blooded free and bonded will, into a bloodier duskier darkening anti-Aurora
mortal sunset of their and their children's lives, and this young
whippersnapper, barely 35 years of age, an ex-Algerian-goalkeeper, happily
ensconced in Metropolitan France, was shifting goalpost, raising some other
hypothetical question of isolated lockdown, rolling it up to mythical Sisyphean
magnitude, and rolling it back, too : "What would it be like to find your town, your state, your
country, shut off from the rest of the world, its citizens confined to their
homes, as a contagion spreads, infecting thousands, and subjecting thousands
more to quarantine? How would you cope if an epidemic disrupted daily life,
closing schools, packing hospitals, and putting social gatherings, sporting
events and concerts, conferences, SSI elections, festivals, religious
gatherings and travel plans on indefinite hold? " Obviously another case of legendary French perversion! The kind that the investigative mind of Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) would call the "Cahiers" - that eponymous memorial, report, document - that dubbed him one of the greatest of modern cinema. This was, of course, before prescient Steven Soderbergh(1963- ) of Swedish-Irish descent raised the bat-pork investigative fictional report to a completely new level less than a decade ago with CONTAGION(2011), spanning all in the line of sight from the particular domestic to the meta-global and back again to the specific meta-individual. Not to mention, Oslo based VERDENSTEATRET (1986- ) foreseeing virulent pandemic of unimaginable proportions invading Kolkata, in its electro-mechanical live-art installation of 2011 (a cautionary, a whole decade before this pandemic strike) at the city's dome demolished British-era Currency Building... To be forewarned, therefore, is not necessarily to be fore-armed. But, once the Armageddon (from ancient Greek Ἁρμαγεδών Harmagedōn) is harmfully upon us, we must rise to the occasion, allow an investigation to spread, over the virus and its myth-making, and until such time that a physiological health cure is found, a medicinal one, and we are cured of our current dilemma either by immortality or by death, which could mean one and the same thing a 100 years from now, give or take a few intervening cataclysmic or bat-aclysmic diversions, we have little choice but to fall back on the existing narratives-as-vaccine available to us, to balance out or catharsise or both, or simply to understand the psychic part of our psychosoma - inject stories, myths, folklore, urban legends, guesses, surmises, sur-mice's, stir up the ratatouille, copy cat and plagiarat©, report news, build fake news, conspiracy theories, views, pews, convoluted views, fiction, diction, tales of affliction, downloads, re-runs, anthologies, editorials, compilations, on-liners, web-searches, beached surfs, landlocked networks and look for stories in the massified mystifying misty-eyed alpha-numerical counter 1,2,3,4,...crying out, thus, to each other in our mature adulthood, as do spent swimmers cling together and in competing to survive choke each other's art : This is a mysterious ill-fated predicament for absolutely no fault of ours; that since we are stuck in our poor houses, confined to a bumbling routine, the law having ass-ked us to do that, leaving us totally unknowing of our future HERE & NOW & THEN or AFTER & THEREAFTER, can we, please sir, can we explore our past, kindly, to find some clues for our current beggared state, and then have some more of the roots, too, even as 0.1375% of world population is infected, and we are simply unable to get a grip on the situation, either in this half or the other, the tale of our cities incomprehensible, let alone the pauper fields of rurality, in millions, over billions, over lakhs 5 zeroes, under crores 7 zooks or ducks, scores, tracks, flats, boards, graphs, 3-d charts, ppt's, ppe's, figures masked, unmasked, re-masked, opening , closing, re-opening, re-closing, restricting, releasing, restraining, reminiscing, on and off and off and on, in catastrophic waves, and odd and even, even when even is all very odd, with distancing, re-distancing, incentivizing, disinvesting, sops, soaps, on t.v., too, and hand washes and mopes, and mops, too, sanitizers, insanity-ization, migrants - ah, or aargh, that '47 migratory feeling - rants, qua-rants, restau-rants..quarantines, quatrains, containments and cantonments...and cants and cans, and clubs and fisticuffs..and jones's and zones..and future plans amid current bans?  MIGRATORY MYTHOLOGICS : "Not a corner of this world but
carries...my dirt in the glitter of jewels!"- RETURN
TO NATIVE LAND Caught on the
horns of this dilemma, unsure to whom those horns belong, fighting a many
headed regenerative non-aging immortal Hydra, our un-barbered Samsonic hair grown
Sarpedon Medusa-like, turned to stone not knowing where we are headed, confused
beyond consternation without the jawbone of a donkey to fight the evil, out out-ing
damned invisible spot off our bare hands with soap, we are trying to steer a
clear path between siren song of fake hope and drowning whirlpool of asphyxia. Regurgitating and revaluating our ancient relationships, between man and
animal, in the tame and in the wild, with natural forces benign and
belligerent, now to add the Coronavirus to Scylla and Charybdis, lately
emergent as a ternary force of nature, or unnaturaLAB© force, thanks to the invention
of, well, the modern laboratory, the micro-scope, the micro-lens, the
petri-dish, the patra, the laser
light, the genetic gun (Cornell, are you listening?), the t.c.u. tight close
up, appears to have become germane to our survival instinct, harkening a
seminal time long before the origin of yet another exotic perversion of our modern ways, but with a timeless heritage
positioning : the "wet market"! A place to meat, and meet, dissolve differences in a sauce, resolve separations of source, co-habit, bond emotionally, reflect, rejuvenate, resuscitate, tell a story or two, around stolen Promethean fire, stolen moments and furtive glances, gossiping, myth-making, emoting, e-noting, trading information, striking deals, over an animal or two or three, preferably skewered, has ironically become the cause of distressful separation...and now beginning to snap the overstretched, over extended, strings of connection and longing.. ".....though the chief source of distress, the deepest as well as the most widespread, was separation....it cannot be denied that even this distress was coming to lose something of its poignancy "... Was it that our fellow citizens , even those who had felt the parting from their loved ones most keenly, were getting used to doing without them? "To assume this would fall somewhat short of the truth. It would be more correct to say that they were WASTING AWAY EMOTIONALLY AS WELL AS PHYSICALLY (caps mine). "At the beginning of the plague (read, coronavirus lockdown)they had a vivid reflection of the absent ones, AND BITTERLY FELT THEIR LOSS. But, though they could clearly recall the face, the smile, and voice of the beloved, and this or that occasion when (as they now saw in retrospect) they had been supremely happy, THEY HAD TROUBLE IN PICTURING WHAT HE OR HE MIGHT BE DOING AT THE MOMENT WHEN THEY CONJURED UP THESE MEMORIES, IN A SETTING SO HOPELESSLY REMOTE. "In short, at these moments, MEMORY PLAYED ITS PART BUT THEIR IMAGINATION FAILED THEM.
" DURING
THE SECOND PHASE OF THE PLAGUE, THEIR MEMORY FAILED THEM,TOO. Not that they had
forgotten the face itself, but - what came to the same thing - IT HAD LOST
FLESHY SUBSTANCE, AND THEY NO LONGER SAW IT IN MEMORY'S MIRROR " - THE PLAGUE, 1947  FAILING IMAGINATION & FADING MEMORY: Holey loss
of fleshy substance & the tactile Could
mythologic, the invocation afresh of the perennial human tug-of-war with
natural forces, a TOTAL RECALL (1990) of the link between the two, possibly extra-terrestrial,
a re-telling of star-dust stories, back-to-the garden tales, re-incantations
that man will continue to rebel superman-like, re-connect, re-incarnate, avataric,
leela-like, Platonic and Socratic, cave and corridor, all of which have a logic
of their own, or illogic, if you like, of your own, could they, can they, help
us stem the emotional sapping, the imaginative atrophy thrust on us prisoners condemned
to watching shadows? " 1. "Man made his
Gods, and furnished them with his own body, voice and garments. "2. "If a horse or
lion or a slow ox had agile hands for paint and sculpture, the horse would make his god a horse, the ox would sculpt his as a beast. "3. "Our gods have flat noses and black skins say the Ethiopians. The Thracians say our gods have red hair and hazel eyes." - Xenophanes (570-470 BCE), whose belief in god as essentially a spherical abstraction,( very numerical, in my opinion), neither bird, nor beast, nor man, and definitely not microscopic virus or bacteria, is still up for grabs..because he mars his excellent definition by extension: "He (god) is all eyes and ears but does not breathe. He is in all his totality mind and thinking, and is eternal". Hmmm...O.K., we'll accept that coming from an ancient.. only to while our lockdown time away!
There is some speculation, though, as
to what figure the hands of Tedros Ghebreyesus would paint for a
god. Chinese? Phan Ki? That in some languages means, "bluff"?
Initiator of the Modigliani egg-shape? And if Leda got laid by a swan, perhaps paramahans, why the deuce did she not
lay eggs? A question we dare not raise with Karna,
except sun and son are phonetically sound!  All this hocus poke-us, that China has
revolutionarily abandoned in her State-d
communism within a discontinuum© has the world most concerned if the
Chinese have lost their ability perchance to dream myth-driven,
emotion-bolstering, imagination holstering, soul stirring, well, dreams?
Which is a roundabout way of asking simply: can communism drum up mythologies
over its about a century of State-d godless existence to match millions of
years - and billions of ears - of myth making, myth raking , myth doctoring and
myth sponsoring sans borders across the rest of the world, including Russia?
And, if China did, what mythologies would they be? Linked, if at all, to the
animal kingdom vide the "wet market"? Two legs good, four legs food,
no legs virus, dude? COMMERCIAL
JINGLE BREAK From 'dude' i could easily slip into 'doodh', as in "Amul doodh pita hai India" (one of the biggest advertisers in the lockdown) and launch into a cow-tirade in my
current stream-of-subconsciousness© state, but i have miles to go before i frost on the cold chain, so this
jingoistic jingle of
the animal communisty©, pardon community, must
precede, sung to a tune something between "Clementine" and "La
Cucuracha": "Beasts
of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime. "Hearken
to my joyful tidings Of the
golden future time. "Soon
or late the day is coming , Tyrant
Man shall be o'erthrown, And
the fruitful fields of England Shall
be trod by beasts alone. "Rings shall vanish from our noses , And the harness from our back , Bit and spur shall rust forever,
Cruel whips no more shall crack." - ANIMAL FARM, George Orwell
(1903-1950) Eventually, ofcourse, following a successful revolution, the "Farm" was taken over by the "pigs", the wiley ones, naturally. Notice, however, the unfortunate penguin in the
pig's belly, in the picture below, that recalls pig entrails in cow stomach resulting
in mad-cow disease. Not to mention the P.G.Wodehouse (1881-1975) fool proof business model for a successful cat-fur-coat enterprise: breed cats - breed rats to feed the cats - feed the rats with cat meat after the cats have been skinned! But, seriously, man isn't doing a very good job of heading
the animal kingdom and one might be inclined to propose management be handed
over to beasts. Now, our Brexit-Brits have a beastly chance to experiment with
that!
But returning to Asia-Pacific. "Futurology without genealogy is no more than a ripple in a children's pool", said Regis Debray (1940- ) the French philosopher in his "CIVILIZATION: HOW WE ALL BECAME AMERICAN", but did not stop to dwell on what that ripple would be in a scaled up children's pool called the South China Sea! Engaged in that "Pool" are a gamut of civilizations with solid global, local and indigenous cultures and mythologies - within a continuum, assimilating colonialism and resisting it, too, which is another kind of Herodian assimilation - at "play" against one that would rather deny what would have been its very own civilization in the 3rd millennium if it had not been discontinued, divested of its proud pagodas, severed in a fervor of discontinuum. In the absence of any mythological
handle to estimate China's futurology, its post-corona "culture"
plans, the world assumes the spread of the virus, even if accidental, is an
official aggrandizing pogrom, a territory gaining move to grab leadership
position, not "a natural mechanism or process", not "a
redeeming forward flight thrust by way of an emergency response to unforeseen
challenges" (Debray, ibid).
But what is a territory without a
genealogy, a heritage? Mythology inevitably traipses in with the
territory...labyrinthine, insidious, like the virus, more powerful than the
virus, more powerful than any ism - capitalism, communism, animalism - and as the eye-ball to eye-ball staring
continues and who-will-blink-first speculations amass, it is becoming more and
more evident that myth-sponsorship, even if aligned incoherently to the
economy, is merrily engaged in by capitalists and communists alike, each of the
two a gigantic myth in the war for civilizational dominance. (China may actually be experiencing a
myth-frenzy, frenziedly looking for a friendly myth to define itself genially
to a hostile world getting increasingly hostile because no one is quite able to
understand just what this myth-less country of mirthless people is getting at
or to. Could AMITAVA GHOSH (1956- ) help to create one for them in the
poppy-opium mould, the anthropomorphic plant-god genre to take people's minds off the dragon-spewing-fire and other flesh-consuming imagery, perhaps pursuing C.K.PRAHLAD's (1941-2010) Now, myth-making is contained both in product-brand
as well as nation-brand positioning and is as integral to nation building as it
is to brand building. Strategic laws of differentiation and territorial distribution of comparatives are observed by
both within a mythological, or perceptual, preferential hierarchy of 1,2,3..The
myth sponsor - the nation, in our study case here - abducts godly powers to
itself to fill a vacuum, a void left by God, in general, and local gods, in
particular, Who, experience shows,("My God, My God, why have you forsaken Mme?")
simply recuse themselves during times of high skepticism and at other times
during high incredulity, qualifying miracles for sainthood, demanded from
across nations, notwithstanding! Such recusal is particularly exacerbated when
there is a severe conflict of interest and Ggod finds it difficult
to be both nNation and gGod at one and the same time! Consumers, the "NEW" substitute
name for human beings, thus, clutch at the "NEW" sponsored "handle"
- "NEW" boldly printed on all "packaging", ergo, myths old
and "NEW" - extended towards their hand as substitute goods following
the rule of positive cross elasticity of demand replacing the real thing , Ggod
or gGod, whichever you prefer, for gGoods or Ggoods,
that are securely in the hand of the handler, the puppeteer aka the myth-maker,
with strings attached - patented, protected, proprietorial - such as the
CoronaVaccine©
(CoronaShield?) that mythads© (advertising
mythologies, hearsay, word of mouth, editorials, expert - and export -
opinions, conjectures et al) have already begun to promote, so you may not yet
see them in the spaces ostensibly reserved for advertisements! This itself is a
matter of great fascination, but somewhat diminished in the lockdown owing to a
slowing economy because mythads© or neo-myths©
are essentially linked with the Eeconomy, vide a
psychological state called "sentiment", more elaborately "feel good" sentiment! Advertising mythologies aka mythads, as is well known, work best in an ambience aka sentiment of tepid anxiety. There is no way in hell, or Greek mythology, which some believe is one and the same thing, that you can sell a can or bottle of cherry red hair dye, hair coloring, sorry, to Helen unless you first drop in her unsuspecting adulterous mind a hint amounting to a gentle nudge that Paris may be tiring of dumb blondes. Mythads, therefore, flourish neither in a holocaust (because then no one has the money to pay for the things aka myths advertised) nor in circumstances of solid firm footed security (because then it works only for the Jones's which are not you - just that other unfortunate dude who lost his animal farm, tut tut, to animals, ha ha, what a pity, while my stash is all into stocks of the other kind..). Mythads, thus, work in a space somewhere between a low fear, like a tepid fever, and lowly pity, like a warm feeling, but with cathartic money to buy out both, pity and fear. So, you buy the stuff, even if it is a ticket to a Shakespearean tragedy, or a sanitizer-mask combo and quell your scare, and, in a hubristic mood, pity those who did not make it. This delicate balance is exactly what all salesmen seek, even the mythological one in his very own Arthurian tragedy, apropos Arthur Miller (1915-2005),deceased at the onset of the sub-prime, the last "virus" before the current one, a solid promo-ad for modern myths overflowing with irony - the toxic security! But look at how a certain Frenchman does it! The salesmanship of mythologizing and mythogazing at the future, evoking Ggod every step of the way centuries ahead of his time, thereby selling a future in the future to future generations in total absentia. Yes, mythology can be pre-ordained, and salesmanship projected, (classical literature is in essence just that, forward thrown, either consciously, sub-consciously or unconsciously), though some call it an offering of and a clutching at straws. Self professed seer, not witch, mind you, nor saint, Michel de Nostredame aka Nostradamus (1503 – 1/2 July 1566), offers the straw - in fact, a clutch of straws totaling 1200 qua-trains of 4 tracks each making 4800 shuttles - to take us from here, actually from 1555 A.D. to 3797 A.D, that would be the envy of Piyush "railways" Goyal of the Einsteinian gravitational mind-frame. This Nostradamus, having first cleverly set himself down in our minds as a forbearer of bad news, very bad news, indeed, which is one way of getting our tepidly anxious attention and upping our slow fever exactly the way media does and has been doing down the ages, particularly during the worst days of our lives, starting very early in the 17th century in print! Then, wham! Nostradamus comes up with his nemetic bid (the numerical value of "nemetic" in Pythagorean Numerology is 6...a very important dice number): "...that before the
universal conflagration shall happen so many great inundations , that there
shall scarce be any land that shall not
be covered with water, and this shall last so long , that except for
Ethnographies and Topographies all shall perish. Before and after these
inundations in many countries there shall be such scarcity of rain and such
great deal of fire, and burning stones shall fall from heaven, that nothing
unconsumed shall be left. All this shall happen a little while before the great
conflagration..." Now, Nostradamus was no Delphic Sybil, nor was meant to be, but neither were the Delphic Oracles themselves. They all spoke, or mumbled , or whined, or Babelled© in strange "tongues" that had to be interpreted accurately given the many meanings that could issue from their prognostications. Shakespeare, born a couple of years before Nostradamus's death, would have a field day - and many perfectly profitable theatre days - regaling his audiences and having them interpret, too, the "ambitious guesswork" of his witches, ghosts and soothsayers, not discounting the "fool" who would be closest to interpreting future reality, and stirring up current fantasies of his times and ours, too, such as a certain academic anguish, a fevered, lovelorn, desperate cry that Shakespeare is Indian!! (Some decades ago, it is reported that at a hotel seminar to fete a certain Norwegian playwright, father of theatre modernism, the event managers had boldly printed placards saying : WELCOME TO A CELEBRATION OF THE WORKS OF SHRI I.B.SEN, 1828-1906)  LA
PESTE: Art of pandemics past and their civilizational impress So, what precisely did Nostradamus mean by universal devastation of all, "...except for Ethnographies and Topographies"? Precisely which ones? Mythologies abound in every region, every topographic corner of the world, and over the years since the first ones were crafted or simply became prevalent millions of ages ago, metaphorical abstractions have piled up on top of metaphoric abstractions, such that we now have a jumble, or jungle, of what computer software-ists call "spaghetti codification", and it is become impossible to untangle one from the other from a third and so on and so from a fourth...all of it in outrageous clumps, tasty masala-Maggi-comfort-food-like, particularly enticing to unravel in a plenty-of-time-on-your-hands- lockdown. For instance, what would be a war on the Ganges predicted by this Frenchman? Could it well be our partition in 1947, our current reverse trirurban© migration of labor preferring once again rural poverty to urban destitution, our struggle at Galwan or later in Garhwal, or earlier, or not at all, and who knows? But Nostradamus is smart. He calls his predictions "Perpetual Prophecies"!Touché..Every one of his quatrains - and in some cases, two or three events in each of the four-liners - could apply not just to one event at one specific time but any number of events during world time 1555 to 3797..and beyond, should the human race exist beyond 3797. So, the dramatis personae may change but the events will repeat and therefore, even if human life continues after 3797 A.D., his quatrainy© script raining predictions simply becomes a recurrent theme, that only need some reigning in. (Talk about the
cyclical nature of existence that some foolish Hindus swear by that the commies
sworn to linear progress abhor. Which is why China may be extremely wary of
transmigration, transmogrification, metamorphosis, except in a sociable sense
aka "change", and even that!) But returning to Nostradramatics© which is so close to Shakespearana and
theatre in perpetuity that you could have Uttam Kumar play Othello in a 20thC
production of a self-same named play of the 17thC, or have Shah Rukh
Khan do it in the 21st, if only he knew how to act, but he has time
till the end of the century to, well, learn to act. Or "R&J"
could become "Race & Jealousy" in any age, or any time, and
thereby runs a tail, or tale, timeless. So, a prediction, therefore, of Nostradamus that may have appeared to come true for Mahatma Gandhi and Indira Gandhi, surname interpolated, and interlopated, in his "heat oppressed mind" (Nostradamus's) , or Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira, could well apply to Narendra Modi and Priyanka Gandhi in an inter-related situational, in the same quatrain! How do you like that? It's seer, sorry sheer, genius! Why not try Century III, Quatrain 28, for a lark..or nightingale..and interpret, interlopate, interpolate, for yourself! Did Nostradamus mean, then, - and this quote is from his letter to his young son, so he must have been in dead earnest - that amidst the inevitable all consuming holocaust in the remaining 1777 years of planet Earth (anagram of Heart, mine, not Nostradamus's) that Nostradamus threatens to extinguish in 3797-2020=1777 years, there will be some peoples, some communities, some races, some, who will weather the storm better..that except for them the rest of the world of humans will be deleted. Poof, evoking pity and fear! But, who would the lucky duckies be, that would survive? And, more pertinent, why? Why them alone or together? Would their ethnic-stories be, or better still, are their mythistories© more robust in any way? More life-sustaining? Is their mythology on the right track, been on the right track or trick or right click? On the better track or better truck or better myth-mover, better myth-excavator? Perhaps deemed wrong or futile currently digging or dug up but will prove to be pay dirt in the near future proving them right Nostradamnically© sometime 35 years from today, i.e. in 2055? Why A.D. 2055? Well, here's why...and not because i'll be a 100 that year ... "For five hundred years no account shall be made "Of him who was the ornament
of his time, "Then of a sudden he shall give so great a light , "That for that age he shall make them to be most contended" There is a touch of sincerity here, even if it is somewhat short on the side of humility. What kind of prophesier can see 2200 years into the future but can predict nothing about himself? So, Nostradamus here refers to himself. "After 500 years", he opines or quatrains, if you like, "i.e. in 2055, my predictions will have been shown to bear fruit". Not bear fruit, mind you..but will have been shown to have borne fruit..ergo, humankind will recognize 2055 onwards that all he has predicted until then has been fruitful and will continue to be true, bear fruit! Marvelous, as far as the "tepid anxiety" sentiment, or sentinel, goes!
So, who or what are these ethnos and in what topos? Birds, beasts, humans, virus, bacteria, inter-planetaries, x-men, why-men, lgbtqi? What ethnic groups are these? What political tribes? What dominant majorities or dominating minorities? Migrants, immigrants, nomads? Non-dominating currently? Indomitable then? What stories have they been telling their children? Where? In what geo-clusters? What latitude and longitude? What instrument can measure this up to mathematical precision? Speculations of specifications abound.. (India, for instance, prides itself as a unique experiment: the world's largest democracy of the indigenous within a trirurban civilizational continuum© of hundreds of thousands of years, disrupted and distracted, but not deviated from its evolutionary destiny! What that fate is no one can see, but 1777 years is merely a few dawns away, if you consider civilizational time, with Aurora still deeply in love with an old, old, old sun-baked land whining immortal like Tithonus not yet turned into cicada curry! But the modern Indian's take on the LOVE & ATE dichotomy can be both hesitant and hilarious as a certain film maker who sneaks out his pet peeves masked as "re-making Shakespeare", Vishal Bhardwaj, (born 4 August 1965) agonizes : "....it became mandatory to get an NOC (No Objection Certificate) from the Animal Welfare Board of India if an animal had been employed in the film...In the trailer of film "Pathaka" there was a shot jismein ghode ke kaan dikh raha tha. I was asked to procure an NOC to get that passed. It's such a joke! In our country animals sometimes become part of the frame without us doing anything - dogs running in the frame, kabhi haathi chala gaya peeche se, ya gai road pe baithi hai. We have to produce NOC for that also, which is harassment". There are embarrassing reports that when these films are shown abroad western audiences are curious why Indians are starving when there's such a lot of food ambling about the streets on four legs!) It is the same with numbers! Exactly as it is with mythology, statistical details have poured on top of statistical detail and have so bored and gored us that while we can count the numbers - as in an almanac - we don't know their significance, their human consequence or sequence - emotional, psychological, metaphysical! And this drives us so batty we take recourse to numerology and the occult out of bewildered exasperation, prepared to re-visit the witches because we simply cannot read the reality around us in our numbered days, trusting rather their brinded cats and hedge-pigs, stone toads and frog toes, snake fillet, newt-eye and bat-wool, lizard leg, owlet wing, tongues of dog sycophantic, tongue of adder forked, blind worms, dragon scale, wolf tooth, sea shark, goat gall, tiger intestines and baboon blood!
Such is our dependence on the power of the animal kingdom that we fantasize we head and, therefore, cannot see how obviously we are failing to lead. The more sober take recourse to tasseomancy, as some have lately done, as a safer alternative to necromancy. Here again Nostradamus fires a few mysterious numerological shots in the dark... But first a word from our myth-sponsors, colonizers, adventurers, authors, prospectors, settlers, myth-warriors, brigands, pirates, company representatives, expansionists, expatriates, pioneers of globalization, legalized thieves encouraged by royalty, from about the time Nostradamus predicted his predictions would begin to come true...the notorious 18th century...which was the time, too, that Shakespeare's genius-crafted characters began to pour into India, 1300 of them, never anything seen like them in this country, bartered in, traded off, one bunch of 30-35 at a time, carrying on their backs C- ('C' minus) Covid = Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 B.C.E - 17/18 A.D.), neatly meta-morphed out of his poetry, and a selection of his 250 myths, smartly packaged a-"NEW" into plays, that some say, provided therapeutic and theatrical relief to plunderers of India such as does Ovid Therapeutics Inc., a biopharmaceutical company, that develops impactful medicines today for patients and families with neurological disorders in the United States.
But we are not here to discuss specifics, just the general trend of global mythsharing© aka mythimposition©: "A turtle which explorer Captain Cook gave to the King of Tonga in 1777 died yesterday. It was nearly 200 years old. The animal, called Tu'imalila', died at the Royal Palace Ground in the Tongan capital of Nuku, Alofa. The people of Tonga regarded the animal as a Chief and special keepers were appointed to look after it. It was blinded in a bush fire a few years ago. Tonga radio said Tu'imalila's carcass would be sent to the Auckland Museum in New Zealand" - Reuters 1966. Now, if
Tu-he-ma-leela is a Tongan Chief, why call the Chief an animal, when Tongan
Chief's are reputed to have magical healing powers! How can a Chief's body be a
"carcass", when Chiefs would be equated with Ggod, and it
is somewhat dicey to play dice with Hhim? And how did Reuters, of over half
a century ago, understand LEELA? Perhaps the indigenous could help to figure it
out because tales of the community and their significance, however arcane, would be found in the community, not in the
museum! Or could it? In perhaps, a Museum of Mythological Warfare. A "Shakespeare Home" in Delhi, for instance, could harbour in a section of its premises tales of rapacious looting (an Indian word, per "ANARCHY" by William Dalrymple, 1965- , see quote below) and asset stripping to the sounds of Shakespearean ribaldry and invasive audience laughter, with an exhibition of artefacts borrowed back from Powis Castle that once belonged here that SHASHI THAROOR (1956- ) ribbon-cuts with the scissory© speech he made at Oxford on "REPARATIONS"? "What are Mughal Artifacts Doing
in a Castle in the Welsh Marches?"One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain. To understand how and why it took root and flourished in so distant a landscape, one need only visit Powis Castle in the Welsh Marches. The last hereditary Welsh prince, the memorably named Owain Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, built Powis Castle as a craggy fort in the thirteenth century; the estate was his reward for abandoning Wales to the rule of the English monarchy. But its most spectacular treasures date from a much later period of English conquest and appropriation. For Powis is simply awash with loot from India, room after room of imperial plunder, extracted by the East India Company (EIC) in the eighteenth century." James Cook was also the first to give sheep to New Zealand. Though the first two he introduced there died unceremoniously, sheep today outnumber people by 6:1 in New Zealand..reason why "The Lord's My Shepherd", my favorite psalm in the school choir, must have taken on a completely new meaning for the Maori's. A sheepish myth does not immediately come to mind, unless you think "Mary Had A Little Lamb" is one(rhymyth©), but a goat story surely needs recounting to establish the complex triangulation of Mman, Ggod and Aanimal and as a variation on the "love & (h)ate" theme earlier expressed:"An animal whose form Dionysus assumed was the goat. One of
his names was "KID". To save him from the wrath of Hera, his father
Zeus changed the youthful Dionysus into a kid; and when the Gods fled to Egypt
to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat . Hence when his
worshippers rent in pieces a live goat and devoured it raw, they must have
believed that they were eating the body of and blood of the god...Killing a god
in animal form belongs to a very early stage of human culture (but practiced as
a religious rite even in modern times)..The advance of thought (over time)
tends to strip animal gods of their bestial husk, leaving their human
attributes as the final and sole residuum. This change, when gods who have been
developed out of animals become wholly anthropomorphic, leaves the relationship
of the animal with the god vague and ill-understood leading to invention of
various NEW mythstories© to explain
the god-animal linkage and why it was spared or slain in sacrifice. "Devised for the
former purpose - of sparing the sacred animal - the myth would tell of some service
rendered to the deity by the animal; devised for the latter purpose , the myth
would tell of some injury inflicted by the animal on the god. The reason given
for sacrificing goats to Dionysus exemplifies a myth of the latter sort."Goats were sacrificed to Dionysus , it was said, because
they injured the vine. Now, the goat, as we have seen, was originally an
embodiment of the god himself. But when the god had divested himself of his
animal character and had become essentially anthropomorphic, the killing of the
goat in his worship came to be regarded no longer as a slaying of the deity
himself but as a sacrifice offered to him; and since some reason had to be
assigned why the goat in particular had to be sacrificed , it was alleged that
this was a punishment inflicted on the goat for injuring the vine, the object
of the god's especial care. "THUS WE HAVE THE STRANGE SPECTACLE OF A GOD SACRIFICED TO
HIMSELF ON THE GROUND THAT HE IS HIS OWN ENEMY. AND AS THE DEITY IS SUPPOSED TO
PARTAKE OF THE VICTIM OFFERED TO HIM , IT FOLLOWS THAT , WHEN THE VICTIM IS THE
GOD'S OLD SELF, THE GOD EATS OF HIS OWN FLESH. HENCE , THE GOAT GOD DIONYSUS IS
REPRESENTED AS EATING RAW GOATS BLOOD; AND THE BULL-GOD DIONYSIUS IS CALLED
"EATER OF BULLS". "ON THE ANALOGY OF THESE INSTANCES WE MAY CONJECTURE THAT WHEREVER A DEITY IS DESCRIBED AS THE EATER OF A PARTICULAR ANIMAL, THE ANIMAL IN QUESTION WAS ORIGINALLY NOTHING BUT THE DEITY HIMSELF" Adapted from THE GOLDEN BOUGH, JAMES GEORGE FRASER (1854-1941) Of course, myths hold up to us our schizosuicidal© mirror or apple of originating sin and surely we are missing a Covid-god that would swallow its own virus-self! Worth inventing, but, morphepic© distributary diversions aside, Christian and Pagan, the interesting number in the Cook report above is 1777...not the year - though that is fascinating, too - because of the number of years to go to Nostradamus 3797 from our current 2020.. Between today, year 2020 and year 3797, the year Nostradamus's predictions abruptly
end, we have exactly 1777 years (3797-2020 = 1777).
In Metanormal-2021, i.e., next year this will reduce by 1 to 1776, which is the
year of independence of the largest economy
of the world today, where war continues to be waged to answer the 300 year old question:
whose land is it anyway... and, therefore, whose mythology rules? Hollywood in a
desperate bid to break the impasse has been fooling around with super heroes of
every size, gender and color - white, black, red and even green - with comical success!Intriguingly, Nostradamus uses the same
number 1777/6, with 1 less 7/6 in it, that is 177 instead of 1777/6, to say
that his predictions would begin to take effect within about 177 years from the
date of its publication which was 1555 - about a decade before Shakespeare was
born in a plague. That, then, would be 1555+177=1732 - about the middle of the
notorious 18thC that declared open season for land grabbing and myth
disintegration - which is 116 years after Shakespeare died in 1616, about the
time his remarkable characters walked in to make an impression on Indian life
and subsequently mythimposed© mind.
Check out these numbers, the years and
the news round about that time-span of 177 years peppered
with 6's and 7's, plague and land grab, disease and myth destruction, with 1 playing value-add or subtract: - TO BE CONCLUDED - Nataranjan Bohidar, not a doctor, has over 40 years of transformational expertise derived from teaching, training and implementing change mechanism, motivation and management. His interests are socio-cultural symbiogenesis© & citizen positioning© - both peculiar to his unique creativity. His overarching ambition is to re-position India as a democracy within an indigenous civilizational trirurban continuum© where mythmaking is a key substrate. Nataranjan brings to play his intimate association of half a century with literature, cinema, theatre, media, brand volatility, mass communications, corporate visioning and strategy formulation. Some of his experiential learning can be accessed @ mychangebook.blogspot.com. |
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