A passion for empire-building?

Niranjan Mohanty in his reflections on the current scenario has raised certain vital issues that must be debated before it is too late. I agree with his view: “At times I feel that the colonial, deconstructionist and postcolonial discourses have elusively alluded to the construction of a passion for empire-building, for erecting boundaries, for perpetuating the dialectical, often subvertive relationship between the center and the periphery, between the privileged and the marginalized.” INDIAN ENGLISH WRITING: POLITICS OF REJECTION? Published by R.K. SINGH April 2nd, 2007 in Poetry Discussion and Poetry India.

For those of us born after Independence, postcolonialism should have ended in fifty-five years of romance with democracy. With the current politics of empowerment of the socially and economically deprived and too much Hindu and Muslim, or majority and minority, only the signs of a new colonialism are visible. At national and international level, after the fall of the USSR and the rise of the processes of globalization, the postcolonial societies everywhere have been experiencing a new dominance under the control of the USA. It seems to me that postcolonialism is not devoid of colonialism. It is rather continuation of colonialism with certain added features to suit the perpetrators of colonialism, be it art, culture, commerce, or politics. Or, we are heading back to colonialism by not resisting the politics of tyranny of a handful of zealots who have virtually consolidated their brutal power and are now out to obliterate the “marginalized”.

I think it makes sense to talk in terms of revival of colonialism after post-colonialism. And this is what we face in the first three years of the 21st century: the totalitarian morality of Information Technology, the manipulated fear of war/disaster/doom through globalization, multi-national capitalism, corporate economy, WTO, environmental concerns, various rights, war on terrorism, etc.; through political orthodoxy in the name of democracy, religious fanaticism, ethnic dominance, and repression of the liberals and the simple, and through the new processes of fossilization of the precolonial/colonial/postcolonial that may render many of us irrelevant. I wonder if we are not terribly dislocated in our world divided into North/South and First/Third world today, just as many postcolonial writers, settled abroad, have been communicating with a colonized mind/subjectivity and getting media recognition.

A new colonialism of the right wing, the American and the British, is taking its hold in developing countries, which have become a playground for long-term exploitation by the newly empowered colonialists within. A process of re-colonization is going on in the name of decolonization, as evident from post-September 11 developments, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Against such a perspective, new writers and poets, be it in India or in any other country need a positive mediation on the basis of equality rather than “us vs. them” treatment which is geared to separate or ignore talents that await discovery and recognition. With empathy, recognition, and responsiveness, the literary scholastic orthodoxies of the earlier decades can be replaced with fresh contexts, unaffected by monopolistic approaches. Instead of pronouncing the demise of Indian English Writing or lamenting over its poor quality, if academic critics could demonstrate professional dedication and commitment, they would be able to locate good poets/fiction writers, and playwrights besides fostering the art, harnessing the taste, and developing the talent. –R.K. SINGH

REFERENCES Niranjan Mohanty. 2003. Sirs/Madams, This is the Indian Poetry in English Scenario for you. The Journal of Indian Writing in English, Vol.31, No.1, p.12-17. M. K. Naik and Shyamala A. Narayan. 2001. Indian English Literature: 1980-2000.Delhi: Pencraft International, p.183.

Intuitive discrimination is more keen and precise in its sight than the reasoning intelligence

The soul of beauty in us identifies itself with the soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt in creation. Criticism reaches its highest point when it becomes the record, account, right description of this response; it must become itself inspired, intuitive, revealing. In other words, the action of the intuitive mind must complete the action of the rational intelligence and it may even wholly replace it and do more powerfully the peculiar and proper work of the intellect itself; it may explain more intimately to us the secret of the form, the strands of the process, the inner cause, essence, mechanism of the defects and limitations of the work as well as of its qualities.

For the intuitive intelligence when it has been sufficiently trained and developed, can take up always the work of the intellect and do it with a power and light and insight greater and surer than the power and light of the intellectual judgment in its widest scope. There is an intuitive discrimination which is more keen and precise in its sight than the reasoning intelligence.

What has been said of great creative art, that being the form in which normally our highest and intensest aesthetic satisfaction is achieved, applies to all beauty, beauty in Nature, beauty in life as well as beauty in art. We find that in the end the place of reason and the limits of its achievement are precisely of the same kind in regard to beauty as in regard to religion. It helps to enlighten and purify the aesthetic instincts and impulses, but it cannot give them their highest satisfaction or guide them to a complete insight. It shapes and fulfils to a certain extent the aesthetic intelligence, but it cannot justly pretend to give the definitive law for the creation of beauty or for the appreciation and enjoyment of beauty. It can only lead the aesthetic instinct, impulse, intelligence towards a greatest possible conscious satisfaction, but not to it; it has in the end to hand them over to a higher faculty which is in direct touch with the supra rational and in its nature and workings exceeds the intellect.

And for the same reason, because that which we are seeking through beauty is in the end that which we are seeking through religion, the Absolute, the Divine. The search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty which appeals to the physical senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction in the beauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them the soul of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all things which it feels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its channels, - for it is suprasensuous, - nor the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel, - for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual, - but to which through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive.

When it can get the touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind, the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms.

When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify our Selves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God. Page-135, Document: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > Social And Political Thought Volume-15 > The Suprarational Beauty

Focus on sharing art rather than selling art

Jewish Musicism By: Doni Joszef 5tjt.com Published: Friday, June 22, 2007

There is a concrete divide between the worlds of “Jewish Music” and “Secular Music,” and when presented with the two options, many of us tend to cling to art that touches us in a deeply meaningful way. We want to be moved, inspired, and excited. The art of music can open the heart in a uniquely Divine way. Music has a key to the inner chambers of our souls. This truth does not have to be proved or developed—personal experience with the power of music speaks for itself. Indeed, Rebbe Akiva compares the Kodesh HaKedoshim to the book of Shir HaShirim—“Song of Songs” (Mishnah, Yadayim 3:5 ).

We can explain the comparison to teach us—just as the Kodesh HaKedoshim was the innermost domain of the Beis HaMikdash, so does the power of shir—song—dwell in our innermost essence. And, so, we look to fill this inner realm with the song that taps into that personal spot. The tastes, styles, and genres of music vary—each appealing to a different personality—but they all have a common spark of creativity that triggers something within...

Our desire remains constant—to share our art. An artist who uses his creativity to sell himself sabotages his talents and stunts the natural flow of creative expression. This challenge—to focus on sharing art rather than selling art—is a significant nisayon for every musician. As the velt says, “Never become a sell-out!” That is, share from the heart rather than from the internal desire to please the outside world. Any writer, musician, artist, lecturer, etc. is surely in touch with these nisyonos.

Music is the “soul’s art.” Many have termed it the language of the soul. Experience has taught us that we can only flourish when our intent is to naturally share what has sprouted from the accumulated seeds of the jam sessions. From Pinny’s basement, to the Danbury Lake, to my garage, to Shaya’s upstate cabin, to Matt’s studio, we have accumulated hundreds of hours of jamming and have finally turned potential into actual at Eitan Kantor’s Hyperstudio.

The search for a deeper, fresher, more sincere musical experience presents itself to a large majority of our communities’ youth. Although this inner struggle may not pertain to everyone, the underlying principles and roots of the issue certainly touch the core of who we are and how our souls seek the sparks of creativity to guide us in our spiritual journey. The essence of this matter is quite relevant to us all...

Does this struggle represent a sense of corruption? Has our exposure to the evil forces of secular music polluted, defiled, and mutated our Jewish minds to the extent that Jewish music no longer stimulates the Yiddeshe neshamah? Perhaps.

Such is certainly the case with regard to certain secular philosophies. For instance, a century ago, the deceptive lures of Communism took captive thousands of Jewish souls. These individuals were so enamored by the ideas of revolution that Toras Hashem no longer penetrated into their hearts. Interestingly, the Vilna Gaon (Biyur HaGra, Yoreh Deah, 179:13) actually accuses the Rambam of being pulled too deep into secular philosophy that he became misguided in certain Midrashic explanations. (If this strikes you as controversial, you’ll have to consult with the Vilna Gaon).

So, maybe the fact that some secular songs touch us in a deeply meaningful way is just an unfortunate result of modernization and unhealthy exposure. Maybe Jewish music is inherently perfect, while English music is inherently evil, and it is we who have the problem.

It is the rose that conquers

Re: 14: This Outbreak of Perfection's Law by RY Deshpande on Tue 19 Jun 2007 04:10 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link Rose of God

We shall conclude the present set of postings on the Outbreak of Perfection's Law with Sri Aurobindo’s Rose of God. The poem was written on 31 December 1934 and, in response to Parichanda’s query, he wrote a letter on 2 January 1935; in those days Parichanda was looking after the gardens in the Ashram. A typed copy must have been kept in the Reading Room where he must have read it and asked Sri Aurobindo about the significance of the flower: “Does the rose of all flowers most perfectly and aptly express the divine ecstasies or has it any symbolic allusion in the Veda or the Upanishad?”

Sri Aurobindo answered: “There were no roses in those times in India—roses came with the Mahomedans from Persia. The rose is usually taken by us as the symbol of surrender, love, etc. But here it is not used in that sense, but as the most intense of all flowers it is used as symbolic of the divine intensities—Bliss, Light, Love, etc.” It is remarkable that Sri Aurobindo had written the poem in one go and no further corrections were made afterwards. A part of the poem in his own handwriting can be seen in slide 5 at

http://www.searchforlight.org/Flash8/CollectedPoems/RoseofGod_poem.html

Bliss-Light-Power-Life-Love, Ananda-Prakasha-Shakti-Jivan-Prema, are the five divine intensities mentioned in the stately incantatory Rose of God. About the technical aspects: Rose of God is written in pure stress metre. In it quantity and accent are subordinate and it is the emphasis which gives the force to the rhythmic success. Each line in the poem has six stresses and the arrangement of feet varies freely to suit the movement of thought and feeling, as the poet-critic tells us. The whole poem is built of five stanzas, each containing four lines...

Sri Aurobindo himself had given the example by marking stresses in the third stanza. The poet is definite that there are only six stresses in each line and any attempt from the point of view of melody or singing or any other consideration to make departures by stressing all the three syllables in the repetitive phrase “Rose of God” will amount to ignoring the demands of his poetry. It might make the invocation effective and living, as is claimed, appealing also perhaps but it will be more dramatic than natural.

One must bear in mind that, this poem is based purely on hexametric form with six stresses in each line. Therefore, putting stress on “of” of the phrase will make half of the composition with seven stresses and the other with six. I am not inclined to accept this, stressing of “of” also. Surely, Sri Aurobindo’s ear sees everywhere six stresses and this is important, his aesthetic perception in terms of sound value too. Very likely, we will be missing something subtle if we have the hybrid 7-6 stress-combinations...

Rose of God is the symbol of perfection and, full-blown, it must bloom here, manifest itself here upon our sorrowful and transient earth, Reality take possession of the Phenomenon. “Rose of God, damask force of Infinity”—Sword of Damask steel is unbreakable; also, damask rose is a bluish-red variety of rose. It is the rose that conquers, makes possible for the Law of Perfection prevail in every circumstance. Let us live in it, in its perfection, in the Rose of God. RYD

Imagination can make even the Unknowable tangible, true, graspable, knowable

Re: 14: This Outbreak of Perfection's Law by RY Deshpande on Fri 08 Jun 2007 07:13 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link The magical spell of imagination

If over there, in the perfection’s house, in the House of the Spirit, mind is a sun of vision’s rays and if it can shape substance by the sheer brilliance of its thoughts, imagination has the power to cast its spell on the unknown and make it dwell in it. Under its gainful charm truth wears rich and bright colours of the rainbow; or else it sings dream-notes and brings closer to us all that is far, makes all that is inaccessible proximate, known, makes the Real familiar. The wonder is, the power of imagination can make even the Unknowable tangible, true, graspable, knowable. It builds a temple wherein the One as the single deity of all can be installed and worshipped. Countless aspects of this God in his mood of manifestation are brought into play, the aspects of the Supreme himself.

That indeed is something remarkable of imagination’s power, to make the potent the actual. Its speech voices the ineffable, its ray reveals the hidden presence, its forms disclose the formless, its ideas hold the Idea of the Infinite, divine in the house of the divine, it is the Word which has the mantric supremacy to usher the divine experience, to set things in its rhythm and movement, set all that is ready en rapport with the Law of the Truth in the strength of its Time, in the Dynamics of Ritam... RYD

Irrigate these energies so that others share in the sensations

« The grammar of art « Home » Great Artistry Posted by Matthew

Great Artistry requires the ground of disciplinary study. In my case, for example, Great Artistry begins when I commit deeply to my discipline of music composition. It is traditional to use the organizing principle of the Trivium to understand disciplinary study. The Trivium consists of Grammar (the rules), Dialectic (the relationships) and Rhetoric (the representation). So for the discipline of music composition, there exists the Grammar of tone, the Dialectic of harmony, and the Rhetoric of orchestration.

Every discipline can be seen as working on these three levels — of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, and successful disciplinary creation, where the artist cuts his teeth, integrates the three into a whole work of art, which provides a mimesis (or full experience) for the audience.

Art from an interdisciplinary point of view anchors study in the transferring of methods or practices from one discipline to another. For example, the method of “jump cutting” in film can be transferred to music (such as artfully changing tonal center, dramatically but persuasively), creating a analogue mimesis in this different art discipline. In this way, disciplines learn from one another by allowing new methods to shine new or deeper perspectives on ways to accomplish the making of the art object.

There remains the dimension of transdisciplinary to round out Great Artistry. The transdisciplinary aspect of artistry requires rigorous training in a discipline, and requires the capacity to accrue methods and perspectives from an interdisciplinary approach, learning in a community of artists in other mediums. Transdisciplinary artistry goes further, to involve the expanse of the “great conversation” of “great ideas”, “great themes”, “great sensations”, “great myths”, and so on, that one finds in the body of the greatest works of art and thought, both literary and non-literary. All that makes the deep subjects of the Humanities are a part of a flowing continuum, of oceans to rivers and back again. The Humanities, which I organize as the arts, languages, history, theology, and philosophy (including natural philosophy), comprise a vast treasure of perspectives on the human condition deemed inspirational, insightful, and intuitive.

The point is not merely to make, say, a piece of music that works as music, in the normal, conventional expectation. That is a good goal, of course. And an interdisciplinary perspective can raise the work of music beyond conventional expectation and be clever, innovative, or novel. But to make timeless art, that speaks in many ways, many times over and thus is inexhaustible, to make art that offers full and enriched experiences, even when returning time and time again — this is what the transdisciplinary dimension offers because it offers to the artist content: the source material, as, for example, the Geneva Bible was for Shakespeare, or as Hildegard von Bingen plainchant was for Bach, or Rembrandt was for Picasso, and so on. It is about swimming through the rivers into the ocean of our tradition of cultural achievement that is the Humanities, and then building one’s own boat to sail its waters based in part on the models of the greats, using what they found, seeking what they sought.

Inspiration, insight, and intuition flow. The artist not merely submits to these, but also seeks to irrigate these energies so that others share in the sensations of these, themselves. The artist, rigorously disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and having developed her relationship with the great works of art, those that unmistakably evoke the great conversation, has received inspiration, insight, and intuition from these works of art, and in making their sailing vessel that is their own original object of art, pass on these three levels of energy to their audience, and future generations of artists.

Thus Great Artistry is holonic — making art objects both whole in experience evoked, and a part of tradition, and a part of what makes future works of art. Great Artistry incorporates disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary attitudes and practices. It is inherently a means of sustainability in the world of art. And it is, I believe, the only authentic means of genuine aesthetic originality, because originality means not merely novelty of style or character, but having traced back to the origins, plumbing the depths to ultimately return to the surface to share the transformation that can be shared in no other way than to make this electric object. Originality is a reaction, born of learned immersion.

Great Artistry is not limited to mere self-expression. Which, don’t misunderstand, is important and valuable, something all ought (and do) participate in, in some capacity. But, make no mistake, mere self-expression without transformation from the bathing in greatness probably won’t be timeless, classic, or an example of sustainability. For these qualities are not given to every person, but deserved by anyone who does, and thus evokes, the great work, the great elaboration, the great exploration of the common ground of the human condition. This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Art. HomeThe WoodshedElegant Thorn ReviewThe Bookshelf About the Authors Great Quotes

Sri Aurobindo had great respect for Walt Whitman

Whitman's work eventually gained enormous popularity in the West, but it was applauded first by Eastern minds. Sri Aurobindo had great respect for Walt Whitman and extolled him in his essay, Future Poetry. Tagore admired him and even translated one of his poems. Swami Vivekananda paid tribute to Whitman as a "spiritual genius." George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Whitman is a classic. Curious that America should be the only country in which this is not as obvious as the sun in the heavens."

O.K. Nambiar again provides a Hindu perspective: "It is a curious fact that the Hindu mind has shown an instant capacity for responsive incandescence when brought into contact with Whitman's works. I remember one occasion when I read out passages from Leaves of Grass and translated them for the benefit of a Brahman pundit. The pundit's eyes lit up with a flash of recognition, and he exclaimed from time to time: 'He is a realized soul.' 'That is the cream of Vedanta' 'Those are signs of Bhava Samadhi.'" Posted by A at 9:58 AM

Poet of Consciousness hinduismtoday.com/archives/1990/06/1990-06-06.shtml

I often find that it works to turn things upside-down

Robyn Leary interviewed Walker Percy.RL: Freud def...
from enowning by enowning Robyn Leary interviewed Walker Percy.

RL: Freud defines anxiety as the product of intrapsychical conflict. Skinner defines it as a learned behavior. In Zen philosophy, anxiety is an evil to be removed. Heidegger, on the other hand, defines anxiety as ontological, in that it tells us about our humanness. It is for him not a by-product or a learned behavior‹or something to be avoided. To which of these definitions do you most closely subscribe?

WP: Check Heidegger. I would agree with him that we do a lot better treating anxiety (some forms, at least) as a kind of beckoning of the self to a self rather than as a symptom of illness. This is why in writing novels I often find that it works to turn things upside-down and to set forth a character (say, a woman with severe free-floating anxiety) as more interesting, more hopeful, possessing greater possibilities than, say, another perfectly adjusted symptom-free woman. To say this is to say a good deal more than that illness is more interesting than health.

Homer or Stephen King, Sri Aurobindo or Isabel Allende

Armchair Travel Friday, May 25, 2007 Another Fan of the Blind Greek Guy

James O'Reilly, cofounder of Travelers' Tales feels the same way I do about books. Here's an excerpt from his website:

"To James O'Reilly, books are as important as water, air, and food.

He writes: 'I would be a sad fellow indeed without them, and this has been true for as long as I can remember. They are as rivers flowing through a universal mind that doesn't know the bounds of time. I can be with the dead as easily as the living— Homer or Stephen King, Sri Aurobindo or Isabel Allende, Wallace Stegner or Jan Morris, Mary Shelley or Redmond O'Hanlon.

Books are the aqua vita of the spirit; they form a kind of background radiation against which I measure my life and my endeavors. They buck me up when I'm down, inspire me out of torpor, galvanize me when I am ready to walk the fire.'" Stephen Hartshorne ¶ 2:05 PM

The idea of collage drives my mixes

Deleuze/Guattari: Remix Culture, Paul D. Miller Interviews Carlo Simula in Music, Theory, Album/CD/DVD Covers, Remix Culture, Interview, Hip Hop, History, DJ Culture, Criticism Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 Trackback Image source: Dusty Groove Text source: Nettime.org and Djspooky.com November 20, 2005 The following is an interview with Carlo Simula for his book MILLESUONI. OMAGGIO A DELEUZE E GUATTARI (Cronopio Edizioni)

2) I see many analogies between your work and Deleuze and Guattari’s, especially when they talk about the “concept” as a way to define the world, defining it as an “event.” The production of a concept is therefore the way philosophy builds the understanding of the real world. It seems to me that in Rhythm Science you talk a lot about sampling and the figure of the DJ as a manipulator of images, sounds, technologies used to create, exactly, “concepts.” What do you think about it?

One of my favorite books of the last several years, African Philosophy: An Anthology edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, explores this kind of thing: how do we re-map the scripted territories of Eurocentric thought to create new tools, new ways of thinking about the multi-plex scenario any idealist will find at the end of any investigation of philosophy in the 21st century.

• For Deleuze and Guattari, and for me, the idea is always an “event” - it presupposes a kind of frame of reference that closes one action and starts another - they overlap and blur.
• For me “sampling” is the same thing: thought event, sound event. Computers generate algorithms that create tableaux of continuous uncertainty - the screen is not a locked space.
• My work asks about how the networks of creativity that we have inherited from the “bricks and mortar” world of the 20th century, have imploded, evolved and accelerated the “im-material” networks of the frequencies, fiber optic networks, and mathematically driven world of the 21st century. That’s the real “dematerialization of the art object” - it becomes patterns meshed, working between the spaces of pre-scripted behavior.

My book Rhythm Science looked at foundations of contemporary thinking from the viewpoint of “how do we make art out of patterns of culture?” It was meant to ask more questions, not offer answers to contexts that are continually changing. The landscape of contemporary digital media is undefined. Anything that tells you it is “defined” is pretty much making a false observation. The undefined defined?

Heraclitus said something like this years ago - dj culture tells us it has become the way we organize information in a media ecology of unstable subjectivity. My take on this is basically “pro-active” - for me, music is all about creating tools for thinking - about giving people systems to organize information outside of the European categories of “rationality” and “universal subjectivity” that drove the Enlightenment. That is what I learned from them. Abstraction is the ultimate weapon. Multiculturalism is the ultimate destabilizing category because, like sampling, it can absorb anything. It defies limits, and posits “the subject” as an imploded category - one that is, and always has been, basically a construct.

What other constructs - the nation state, the idea of the “self” etc - are linked to this category that is slowly being pulled apart by the centrifugal forces of digital media? Deleuze and Guattari give us tools to think about this kind of stuff - they posit these as fictions holding together other fictions. The mirror is held up to another mirror, and we can see an infinite corridor in either direction. I kind of want to break the mirror. Warhol’s “From A to B and Back Again” drifted as word dust through the fiber optic cables and satellite transmissions of a world of invisible meshworks. Stuff like that.

3) Among other things the cd inside the book Rhythm Science is a concentrated “improvisation” of the Subrosa archive, a label which more than others promoted a certain genre of music connected to art.. It reminded me, with the proper differences, John Oswald’s “Greyfolded”, where he ends up building a version of Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” from hundreds of live versions. Thoughts?

The “fold” is about involution - it’s about taking multiple perspectives on an event - just like the “break” in hip-hop, it’s the break beat, the broken fragment of time recorded on the sample that gives the “flow” of discourse its meaning in this context. In dj culture, you create structure from sequences. My style is the sound track to urban sprawl. It’s my way to look at compositional strategy in the era of digital media.

My favorite photographer, Etienne Jules Maret’s “stop motion photography” alludes to this kind of thing. The fragment is greater than the interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari was about, and if you look at John Cage’s idea of “indeterminancy” and it’s relationship to turntables - the concept fits solidly. Composers have been using the “fold” for many centuries - the main issue is that they haven’t had the tools to describe the process. D&G gave us those tools - I guess I look more to stuff like Grand Master Flash’s “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel,” Steinski and Double D’s “Hip-hop Lessons” than John Oswald, but we’re both driven by the same concept. The idea of collage drives my mixes - that’s the point.

Contemporary art - art that explores the economies of scale that software allows us to explore - points to the idea of the “input-output” schemata that Delueze and Guattari talked about with their concept of the body without organs. I think it’s a good analogy. I really want to set music up as a platform - I want to make sure to remind people, that yes, I’m an artist… It’s really weird how much people are set against the idea of existing in multiple contexts. Mono-reality… something like that. It’s boring. Again, the D & G connection about multiple situations occurring simultaneously - reflects the “post post modern” scenario - it’s not about “deconstruction,” but reconstruction - of building a new vision of how we can live and think in the info ecology we’ve built for ourselves. And so on, and so on, and so on…

The gothic and the ghost story

The Constructivist My Web Page

At the end of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe attempts to politicize Poe's achievements. Critics have rightly focused on her adroit mixing of popular antebellum genres to account for the success of her novel--drawing everything from the novel of sentiment to the slave narrative, Stowe attempts to make her readers feel the evils and injustices of slavery, not just understand them conceptually. I haven't read enough Stowe criticism to see if scholars have been paying attention to her use of the gothic and the ghost story, but it is crucial to her novel's mediation of Enlightenment and Christian attacks on slavery--her linking of appeals to violations of rights to life, liberty, and property to the notions that slavery is a sin and that true Christians can neither hold slaves nor tolerate the existence of slavery.

When Cassy and Emmeline conspire to manipulate Simon Legree into believing the garret in his mansion is haunted by the spirit of a slave woman he tortured, raped, and killed, they are participating in one of the classic conventions of the explained Gothic--but instead of the vulnerable protagonist being tormented by a conspiracy out to make her believe she is being haunted, here the vulnerable female slaves are the ones who are protecting themselves by making the garret the safest place for them to hide from the slave catchers trying to hunt them down after they are seen trying to escape the plantation.

Stowe takes us behind the scenes to see how Cassy stages all the supposedly supernatural events that heighten Legree's guilt, horror, and fear--this is the explained Gothic with a vengeance--and asserts that it is Legree's atheism that makes him particularly susceptible to her manipulations. In so doing, she echoes Poe's language--and provides some imagery that Dickinson may well be responding to in her Civil War-era poem #670 (the revolver that is no protection against spirits, the locked door that is no protection against your own internal haunting)--in a way that mixes their philosophical and psychological emphases with her own social and political projects.

Cassy's staging of an "authentic ghost story," as one late chapter title proclaims it to be, enables her and Emmeline to escape the fate of the tortured and murdered slave woman--and the martyrdom of Uncle Tom by Legree that is framed by the narrative of their escape--even as it shows the consequences on Legree of his own actions. Stowe's hauntings emphasize the horrors of slavery and install the metaphor of the slaveholder haunted by his sins and the nation haunted by the peculiar institution... The Constructivist : 5:57 AM

Where the material transcends itself and ceases to be material

Tue 15 May 2007 Music to My Ears Posted by larvalsubjects

under Lars Watch , Boring Stuff About MeNo Comments

Lars and company have invited me to speak at Newcastle University in the UK for the 3rd Symposium in the Music, Philosophy and Vernacular series in November. I suppose I’ll finally have to get a passport now and come up with something to say about music from a suitably hip continental perspective. Actually I’ve been wishing to discuss the symptomatic role that music plays in Plato’s Republic and up through the writings of Augustine and Plotinus for some time now, as there music seems to occupy an odd position between the fallen material world and the world of logos or the intellect.

Music, in this view, inhabits the edge of materiality or that point of materiality where the material transcends itself and ceases to be material. Not only is music the most mathematical of all the arts, but it is that art that is least attached to the five senses due to the unique temporal structure that renders a musical refrain simultaneously something that unfolds in time while nonetheless being a unity with itself that can only be grasped through operations of thought. As such, the musical requires an operation of the intellect to be grasped or a movement beyond appearances. It will be recalled that Plato, in the Phaedo, will argue that all philosophy is a preparation for death and that the philosopher lives his life as if he were already dead.

By this Plato is referring to the necessity of cultivating the soul through a purification of the soul that separates it from the body, where the body refers to anything having to do with the sensations and the passions. This will lead to elaborate discussions of what sort of music and poetry is permissible in the Republic, and a categorical rejection of certain rhythms and the flute due to the manner in which these meters and instruments excite the passions and incite a sort of madness. Augustine will later make similar points about music, discerning the study of certain musical structures and grammatical patterns as a necessary stage in the cultivation of the soul that separates it from the body.

You didn’t think Catholic church services were so somber and boring because the early founders of the church lived in boring times, did you? Of course these are only vague thoughts and I’m not sure what the cash value of all this would be. The question would be one of pushing past this dualistic tradition and discerning, in this strange relation to music, a symptom that both belongs to a certain metaphysics and upsets that metaphysics. I’ll have to wait and see what the actual theme of the series will be this year. It appears I need to send Lars, the Newcastle staff, and the students even more love letters than I already do. Perhaps Anthony will stop being angry with me and we can share a pint. I’m both tremendously excited and honored. It’s nice to be appreciated. Especially when it isn’t deserved.

Haridas and Bina Chaudhuri Award for Distinguished Service

Sarod Great Ali Akbar Khan Honored by California Institute

By LISA TSERING India-West Staff Reporter Friday, May 11, 2007

SAUSALITO, Calif. - After a lifetime dedicating himself to music, Ali Akbar Khan has racked up some impressive credentials. The sarod maestro, now 85, has earned India's Padma Vibhushan, a MacArthur genius grant, several Grammy nominations and the National Endowment for the Arts' prestigious National Heritage Fellowship.

But he said he was especially touched by an honor he received recently from the California Institute of Integral Studies. "Your love and feeling for me is so wonderful," the frail artist whispered into a microphone to a warmly appreciative crowd after being named the recipient of the Haridas and Bina Chaudhuri Award for Distinguished Service at the annual banquet of the California Institute of Integral Studies held April 28 at Gaylord India restaurant.

Khan, a Kolkata native who settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 and founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in 1967, "embodies the sound of the sarod," said CIIS president Joseph Subbiondo in his opening remarks. Khan's achievements, he said, mirror the school's mission as laid out by the Chaudhuris, founders of the CIIS, who sought to "integrate higher values of East and West."

Chosen for the honor because of his work nurturing and fostering a worldwide appreciation of Indian music, Khan is a noted composer and teacher as well as instrumentalist.Born in 1922, he started his musical training at age three at the feet of his father, the virtuoso Padma Vibhushan Acharya Baba Allauddin Khan. Trained by his father in vocal music as well as several instruments, Khan later settled on the sarod, giving his first public performance at the age of 13 in Allahabad. Khan (who hails from the gharana founded by the great 16th century musician Mian Tansen) became the court musician for the royal family of Jodhpur before becoming one of the first Indian professional musicians to perform in the United States, making his U.S. debut in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

For over 20 years, Khan practiced 18 hours a day and always held the utmost respect for his illustrious father. He has often said that of all the honors he has won, it was the one bestowed by his father and guru, "Swara Samrat," or emperor of melody, that made him most proud.

So it was not surprising that Khan evoked his famous father in his comments receiving the award. "He taught many, many students," said Khan in a soft voice. "He wanted everyone to be happy." Khan, who is known for blending spiritual lessons in with his music tuition, referred to "Nad Brahma," or the Vedic idea of the sacred vibrational current of one's essence, with the comment: "I request that to make your life happy, you need to have awareness of Nad Brahma."

The evening was marked with sincere comments of appreciation from Prasad Vepa, the CIIS's chair of the board of trustees; Margy Boyd, CIIS trustee; Dr. Rina Sircar, a longtime CIIS faculty member who sang a touching invocation; and two talented youths - Gaayatri Kaundinya and Ram Kaundinya - who performed a song to Khan that left the audience rapt.

The late Haridas Chaudhuri, a philosopher, educator, and humanist from West Bengal who was a disciple of Sri Aurobindo, founded the CIIS in 1968. An accredited institution of higher education, the CIIS expands the boundaries of traditional degree programs with specializations in psychology, philosophy, religion, cultural anthropology, transformative learning and leadership, integrative health, and the arts. His wife, Bina, carried on his work until her death last December, creating a void that lent a melancholy air to the gathering, leading Subbiondo to suggest a moment of silence before the festivities began. :by indiawest

As a Buddhist sympathizer, I respect a lot of things about Weil’s ethics of attention

Animal Passion: Bataille, Agamben, and Grizzly Man March 21, 2007 at 11:37 am In no-self, excess, the animal, weil, materiality, ethics, mysticism, bataille, film 8 Comments uncomplicatedly

Something has been troubling me in all this talk of ecstatic self-forgetting. In order to make Bataille and Weil play nice with each other, I had to sand off some of their rough edges. In particular, I had to paint both Bataille’s abandon and Weil’s obedience as essentially mental states; in the foregoing post, these writers resemble nothing so much as a Buddhist monk and nun who, in their quite distinct ways, are striving to quiet the chatter of conscious thought and to replace it with the profound silence of the sacred. As a Buddhist sympathizer, I respect a lot of things about Weil’s ethics of attention, but the weakest link in her chain is the way that attention translates into action — all she can say is that “the actions that follow [attention] will be automatic.”

There is a troubling refusal of responsibility here that seems to have to do with Weil’s discomfort in her own embodiedness; we have already seen, in my post on Weilian self-sacrifice, the fierceness with which she deprives herself of necessities in the name of ethics, but her wish to be “decreated” is more profound than a wish for death — it is a wish, as her term suggests, to undo her own creation. She writes, “When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.” She wishes, in short, to not have a body, and this creates a problem in terms of engaging with the physical world — her efforts at ethical action, as outlined in that earlier post, are often bizarre, unsuccessful, and misunderstood. Ultimately they are fatal. (Though they retain, as I argued, a symbolic value.)

In Bataille, the disconnect between mind/soul and body is just as profound, but since he values the body and not the soul, we encounter Weil’s difficulty reversed, as in a mirror: the blind spot in his thinking is how to get from action to attention, from ecstatic bodily practice to reflective morality. Bataille is not even really interested in reflective morality; the closest he comes is to argue for the continual overthrow of moral systems in favor of a continual quest for the authentically contradictory promptings of the deepest self. My problem with this is not so much that this ‘deepest self’ disappears into the bodily (though it could be said that this is another escape from responsibility), but rather with the particular way in which Bataille mobilizes the category of the animal in order to describe the embodied aspects of personhood.

Last time, I described Bataille’s sense of humans as “discontinuous” beings, fundamentally alone in their heads. This is imagined, in Erotism and especially in Theory of Religion, in contrast to the “continuity,” the immanence and immediacy, of the animal world, for which he argues we have a deep nostalgia. We imagine that animals “exist in the world like water in water,” and we experience ourselves as lacking this feeling: “Man is the being that has lost, and even rejected, that which he obscurely is, a vague intimacy.” Bataille’s pursuit of the experience of sovereignty is the quest to “lose his head” and give himself over to the animal within.

This account of the animal world resonates with us because it does sound true, it does recall a feeling we can empathize with. Animals are frequently evoked, in literature and film, as figures of Edenic innocence or of blind necessity — and either way, we see in their unselfconsciousness a state we envy. Rilke, in the poem excerpted in the epigraph, describes this nostalgia: “All other creatures look into the Open / with their whole eyes. But our eyes, / turned inward, are set all around it like snares.” The problem, as in Bataille, is self-consciousness; if only we could rid ourselves of it, we could exist “in that pure space . . . in which flowers endlessly open,” we could reside in “Nowhere without No.” uncomplicatedly

Because art cannot survive the banal disfigurements of want, it has to throw off the burden of pity

Sentimental novels, which depict human beings lifted out of misery through virtue and the generosity of others, or ruined through vice, assuaged the consciences of readers who wanted to solve political problems through tricks of perspective and scale. Modernist novels, on the other hand, which are sometimes accused of abandoning politics in favor of subjectivism, actually brought to full flower the unsentimental novel, which is based on the extrapolation of crime. From the standpoint of crime, the beggar has the potential to become a thief, and to revenge himself freely on his oppressors, by doing so excessively, far beyond the sympathetic limit of need. The ruling class is revealed to be dependent on the underclass, not only in the acquisition of wealth, but even through its defining pleasure in philanthropy and vicarious criminality.

The unsentimental novel has no need for pity because it is revolutionary. An absolute commitment to art announces, in its moments of lucidity, its nature as crime. (It also reveals, where it becomes intentionally confused, the victim to be the missing term.) Because art cannot survive the banal disfigurements of want, it has to throw off the burden of pity by becoming monstrous. It follows its own laws by transgressing against love and retreating into an unfeeling solitude. Thus it pierced the veil that separates the subjective experience of alienation from its sources in hideous poverty, hideous ugliness, and hideous starvation. Thank you very much. Filed under: Philosophy, pop culture, The Valve, Literature, Politics, Art, Movies, Music

I'm saying it's time for us to reassess our conceptions of the West

Warrior for the word Pages 1 2 3 4 5 At the end of the introduction, you write: "I am uncertain about whether the West's chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it. Hence it is critical that we reinforce the spiritual values of Western art, however we define them." It has a markedly a different note than "Sexual Personae," which is largely celebratory and optimistic about Western culture.

But no, actually. "Sexual Personae" is about decadence! -- the beautiful decadence of Western civilization. There I say I am a decadent, and I celebrate it, but I don't know how long the West is going to last. If our popular culture is equivalent to Hellenistic culture during the Roman republic and empire, I have no idea if we are going to last 50 years or 500 years. But there is no doubt that there is an end to every civilization, whether it's from some climatological disaster or invasion or something else. I mean, last December's tsunami showed everyone that my vision in "Sexual Personae" of nature was right -- that we just huddle here on the thin, brittle skin of the globe. Civilizations rise and fall. I'm saying it's time for us to reassess our conceptions of the West. In all its failings, the West has produced a great art tradition.

So I'm saying to the left: Stop bad-mouthing your own civilization; get over it, you little twerps. I'm saying to the religious far right: If we are defending Western civilization, as you claimed in the incursion into Iraq, then you'd better realize it's much more than Judeo-Christianity and the Bible. You'd better get real and accept that we have a Greco-Roman tradition of literature and art that started in 700 BC. And yes, some of it deals, quite frankly, with sex and the body; you must deal with it and allow students to deal with it, because that is part of the brilliant strength of our arts. I'm demanding that conservatives support the arts and that liberals stop being so snobby about art and quit celebrating art that is simply cheap sacrilege of other people's beliefs.
Artists have got to get back to studying art history and doing emotionally engaged art. Get over that tired postmodern cynical irony and hip posing, which is such an affliction in the downtown urban elite. We need an artistic and cultural revival. Back to basics! Camille Paglia, from a 2005 interview 1:26 PM

He lays the whole of existence in front of us more vividly than our own imaginations could conjure

Damian Whitworth From The Times April 11, 2007

Examining the abuse of Cressida, as well as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew and Emilia in Othello , can help us to shape our own lives by avoiding similar mistakes, Dr Maguire believes.
This is Shakespeare that the Oprah generation can grab hold of. In King Lear , the bad bastard Edmund wants to be loved. So does Lear, of course. Cordelia, may have been principled and honest when she refused to compete with her sisters to say who loved their father most. But she lacked the imagination to see the situation from his point of view. Would she have behaved this way if she had seen that beneath the bizarre test lay an old man’s fear of being unloved? Shakespeare seems to suggest that finding forgiveness for those close to you and telling them that you love them can go a long way to salving the world’s ills.

He does not specifically prescribe strategies for navigating life. But he lays the whole of existence in front of us more vividly than our own imaginations could conjure and allows us to see our little lives in the giant characters he has created. The individual can extract whatever self-help lessons he chooses. And if he sees the play, rather than reads it, he’ll feel even better. A night at the theatre watching Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra must be worth a lifetime of poring over Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus , however many copies it has sold.

At the very least Shakespeare provides comfort by telling us more beautifully than any other member of our species has managed that we all share the same experiences. And he has words for any occasion. Just last week my father reminded me that nobody does it better than Shakespeare when he read this passage from Cymbeline at my grandmother’s funeral.

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,/Nor the furious winter’s rages;/Thou thy worldly task hast done,/Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;/Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

Earning the right to receive Great Art

Yes, that's the thing with Great Artistry posted by MD Amidst this Roger Kimball commentary about Sol LeWitt and minimalist art, a sentence in paragraph six:

Great art repays renewed scrutiny with new insights, new perceptions.Another way of saying this is that Great Art beckons longterm friendship with the audience. Such art, like one's friends, rewards the time, energy, and sacrifice required for intimacy. Good friends, in the sense that they uplift each other to their most expansive, fullest nature, are sometimes easy, and sometimes not, are they not? Truly relating to someone for their deepest benefit is certainly not a 24/7 bowl of cherries; and you can be sure that the same goes for such people for your deepest benefit. (For more about this sort of friendship, see Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.)

All of which is to say that Great Art isn't necessarily easy to read or experience, doesn't present itself without its perceiver earning his or her right to receive. Of course, sometimes great art, those you have lived with for many years, comforts, heals, and rejuvenates. Great Art is worth the investment, worth the patience, worth the confusion. This sort of rationale was common to the "Great Books" movement in 20th century America; it remains in use in my Basic Program at UChicago. It is also entirely applicable to not just literary thought, but all disciplines of art, and the rest of the Humanities. Labels: Great Artistry 2:20 PM

Her poems accentuated a deep anguish and identity-crisis

At present Meena is distinguished professor at Hunter College, New York...Her poems accentuated a deep anguish and identity-crisis, which eventually characterizes all expatriate writing. What makes her different from others is her desire to connect to her past. The sense of being one in exile and struggle to forge a sense of identity are prevalent features of her writing.

Her autobiography Fault Lines also demonstrates her struggle for identity and self-creation amidst a world that strives for definitions demanded by greater society and cultural identification. Fault Lines reflects both her triumph of will and her talent as a writer.

Moreover, the remarkable facet of her muse is that not only her poems possess such sharp and emotional nuances, but also reflects her naturally gifted ability to give vent to these feelings in a manner which enthralls from a common student to a colossal critic of poetry. Posted by Dhirendra Mishra at 1:05 PM Thursday, March 29, 2007 Meena Alexander in Allahabad

Kahnucharan was a household name in Orissa for over half a century

A master storyteller HARIHARAN BALAKRISHNAN Kahnucharan Mohanty's stories evoked something personal in each reader. In his last days: Kahnucharan was a household name in Orissa. Photo: Courtesy Pratibha Ray

GOPINATH MOHANTY is a name that evokes instant recognition in literary circles across India, and in some other parts of the world; but not the name of his elder brother, Kahnucharan. Against more than 1000 links for the former in Google, a lone link to "Kahnucharan Mohanty" mocks you from the screen. While Gopinath, the first Jnanpith awardee from Orissa, undoubtedly deserves his place in the firmament, Kahnucharan is considered to be the true successor of Fakirmohan Senapati, "the father of the Oriya novel". In a span of 57 years from 1924 to 1982, he wrote an astounding 55 novels and four collections of short stories. He had the rare honour of being made a Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi.

This prolific novelist inspired Pratibha Ray, one of contemporary India's foremost novelists. His works like Adekha Hatho (The Invisible Hand) and Chutiley Ghata (When Life Departs) left a lasting impression on future Oriya legends like Sitakant Mahapatra. Kahnucharan's novels, like Fakirmohan's, had their hand on the pulse of the poor, the destitute, the disempowered and the disowned. In Shaasthi, a seminal novel about hopeless love and the inner strength of women against the backdrop of the Great Famine, he captures rural Orissa as it was 40 years before he was born. This is considered a remarkable feat by itself. Jayashree Mohanraj of CIEFL, Hyderabad, who translated this novel from Oriya to Telugu, thinks that Kahnucharan had an instinctive feel for the heartbeat of victims of circumstance. She is the only one to have translated any of his works into another Indian language.

Kahnucharan's language was earthy and colloquial. It did not require a scholar to understand what he had to say. The stories touched a chord in the heart of the paan-shop owner, rickshaw puller, the tenant farmer, a woman in the kitchen and the girl waiting to be a bride. In those days, women were not encouraged to study. The marginalised, with limited opportunity for education, had a hunger for the written word. As a result, Kahnucharan's novels were read in those places where scholastic works never found a place earlier — the wayside tea stall, languorous bullock-cart, urban kitchen and village haystack...

Kahnucharan was a household name in Orissa for over half a century because his language was closer to the people's vocabulary, the themes were of daily life mostly in rural setting and there was a romantic touch in every novel. During his lifetime, the TV was a dream in India. Yet, at least four novels were made into films with remarkable success. Annapurna Theatre staged dramas of his stories with the legendary actors of the day. The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Mar 04, 2007

This Dream's a bright and colourful treat for the eyes

Though the aim is to make money no one's compromising on the bold vision he and his cast of 23 worked on at Auroville in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Only about half the dialogue is in English - the rest is in a mixture of Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Sinhalese, Malayalam, Marathi and Sanskrit...

Indian designer Sumant Jayakrishnan and lighting designer Zuleikha Chaudhari have conjured up the essence of South Asia on stage: this Dream's a bright and colourful treat for the eyes.

The play is one of Shakespeare's most exotic works
The cast dance and sing, although Mr Supple says that he wants to avoid too clichéd a stage view of India.
Actors weave in and out of a tall bamboo frame and swing from ropes above the red soil of South Asia.
Tim Supple says the core of the play is highly relevant to Indians.
"At least a third of this company will have had severe family ruptures over marriage or career choice.
"So the dilemma of the play - the insistence by Egeus that his daughter Hermia marry the man he chose for her - is much closer to many of this company than it would be in Britain.
"Also many of them will live where belief in the spirit-world is much stronger than in the UK.
"And extreme differences between rich and poor, which underlie so much of the play, are much more alive in India than in the West."

The play has started a commercial run in the UK
Archana Ramaswamy, who plays Titania, says the actors haven't had to look far for parallels between Shakespeare's story and their own lives.
"The complete madness that we all carry within ourselves - the vibrancy of Indian culture - the richness, the earthiness, the spirit... it's all there in the play. It's like the chaotic lives we all live!"
Chandan Roy Sanyal, playing Lysander, thinks Shakespeare isn't far removed from today's Bollywood.
"When we film a love story in India it's based on Romeo and Juliet. That's the essence of any love story: there is a girl and there is a boy. It's still prevalent in society right now. I've realised that Shakespeare was a very commercial writer."
This is a production for the open-minded.

By Vincent Dowd BBC arts reporter

Baudrillard had a unique way of casting peace and clarity over the Valley of Shadows

integralgrid // Mar 8th 2007 at 5:04 pm I don’t recall to have ever been so touched by someone’s passing as I am now. My whole day today has been ruined–I can’t even read or write properly!

Baudrillard died many deaths–and has ressurected an equal number of times. When he died to sociology, sociology experienced a rebirth through him. He died to Reality, and Reality rescued him promptly. Political economy and Marxism have also lost Baudrillard at some point, and they were then forced to secrete him anew. Modern art, including the Hollywood industry of film also suffered defeat after defeat when trying to take on Baudrillardesque faces, but Baudrillard was always quicker and smarter, and knew how to come clean before his copies.

As disruptive as his texts may have been, stirring up the depth of our depths and seemingly inviting trouble to set in, Baudrillard had a unique way of casting peace and clarity over the Valley of Shadows. He was a special kind of challenger–one knowing how to remain alert and ready, while at the same time keeping a safe distance from things that most people would very likely have invaded without much thought. And if Baudrillard is primarily seen as a challenger, I’d say that he was infinitely respectful towards things–including the thing called “man”. But that which people thought insulting–to be treated as objects–was in fact an hommage payed to them, a bow before their immortal nature.

An extravagant non-functional energy

Living Tradition. An interview with Veenapani Chawla
From time to time we make it a point to meet someone who, though not an ex-student, is part of the larger Aurobindonian family and has done significant work in his or her field. "Our Guest" this time is Veenapani Chawla, a renowned theatre personality who has researched traditional Indian performance arts and used them in her plays, which include A Greater Dawn(Savitri)(1992), Impressions of Bhima (1994), Khandava Prastha (1998), Brhannala (1998) and Ganapati (2000). She is known as someone who has always experimented, as someone who extends the boundaries and possibilities of theatre to the maximum. We met her at Adishakti, the theatre space and research centre she has created not far from Pondicherry.
A visit to Adishakti is in itself a revelation. The compound looks almost like a farm — there are many trees (those that help replenish ground-water were specifically chosen), there is a vegetable and flower patch, there are a couple of cows standing peacefully — and that is because the land itself helps sustain the members of Adishakti. The four or five buildings which are spread around the campus are strikingly beautiful and remind one vaguely of Kerala. Natural and traditional building materials have been used as far as possible: blocks of laterite or fossilized mud from Kerala for the walls of the theatre, finely finished varnished mud walls for the guest house, coconut shells in the ceiling of Veenapani’s home. Everywhere one sees the intelligent use of appropriate traditional technologies to create something contemporary, elegant and practical. After having gone around the Adishakti campus we settle down to have a chat...

THE SPIRIT AND PURPOSE OF THEATRE MAY 2005 The Golden Chain What are the failings of the conventional realistic form of theatre? Why the urge to experiment and create a different language?

The realistic or representational form of theatre comes to us from the West. It is not our convention. I don’t want to reject it as such, but it loses ground in the age of cinema. In fact theatre is losing its validity today because cinema can do everything that representational theatre does and much better.
Theatre therefore has to reinvent itself and reinforce its validity. It can do that because it has an edge over cinema. While cinema can accommodate every other reality, it lacks the reality of the actor. On the other hand Presence is the only reality in theatre. Theatre’s forte therefore, its inimitable strength, is the live, sensorial presence of the performer, which elevates the audience through a contagion of consciousness/energy. And it is around this strength that theatre must try to re-invent itself. It must try to evolve a performance language, which enhances this presence. This will ensure its continuing validity in the times of cinema.
Hence any performance language that we try to develop must be one which enhances the performer’s energy and consciousness to the largest degree. The performance language perforce will have to be one which does not use the language of daily behaviour, but one which employs an extravagant non-functional energy. There is in our tradition the distinction between natya and lok dharmi; the behaviour of performance and the behaviour of daily life. Natya dharmi uses non-functional energy [as you see in all our dance and performance forms], lok dharmi uses functional and therefore little energy.
The problem with daily, functional behaviour is that the use of the body occurs without reflection or choice. It is stereotyped and executed unconsciously. The more our actions are carried out spontaneously, without the least difficulty, the more can attention be directed to something else. But this spontaneity is a conditioned reflex and it does not encourage the performer to be present in every detail of her action when in performance.
If however one wants to free oneself from reflexive response, which is what natya dharmi demands, one must fight against the spontaneous and the natural in the body. One must initiate a process, which undermines automatisms, by using the body in a different way: by re-learning how to stand, by using a different balance axis, by moving according to rules which deny those of daily behaviour. This will call for a constant awareness in the body. Only by using the body in this non-functional way, is the consciousness in the body stimulated to take on a more active role, thus displacing automatisms.
This is what is demanded from performance behaviour, which aims at enhancing the presence of the performer so as to lead an audience into an elevated experience. I believe that our traditional forms employ these very methods too.

Nearer our times we have Sri Aurobindo writing poetry as part of his `Yoga sadhana'

Integration of the sacred and the secular PREMA NANDAKUMAR The Hindu Book Review Tuesday, Mar 06, 2007 ANCESTRAL VOICES - Reflections on Vedic, Classical and Bhakti Poetry: Ramesh Chandra Shah; Motilal Banarsidass, 41, U. A. Bungalow Road, Jawahar Nagar, Delhi-110007. Rs. 195.

One needs intelligence to understand a word but one must perform tapasya to understand the word. The words spoken by our ancients were a divine Morse code that conveyed immense areas of imaginative experience that gave a rounded perfection to man's earthly life. Indian epics are not a celebration of mere battle heroism. Rama, Arjuna, Karna, Ravana: they all have characteristics that are not just a brilliant wielding of the bow, the sword and the mace. Arriving at the core concept that moves all these heroes, one comes face to face with Dharma, a word so mantric that it has defied all attempts at translation.

The genius of Indian culture links even poetic criticism to a soul view of Beauty seeing it as no different from Truth. Art experience is looked upon as an instrument of Yogic realisation. The theory of `Rasa-dhwani' posited by eminent critics like Ananadavardhana and Abhinavagupta helps us appreciate all Indian literature without losing significant perspectives.

Fusion: By the time of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, there is a perfect fusion of the near and the far, the integration of the here and the hereafter, of poetry and spirituality. Nearer our times we have Sri Aurobindo writing poetry as part of his `Yoga sadhana'. Ramesh Chandra Shah asks himself: "How exactly is Yoga, that realm of silent wordless inward action related to the same man's unrelenting passion for the order of words?" Relation there must be, a connection with our earliest dawns but which we have lost by limiting our visions to our own "egoistic shells of separativity." These ideas and more are woven with expertise by Shah in a seamless argument.

In her foreword, Kathleen Raine makes a passionate statement: "The time has come to re-learn from the Orient — and above all from the spiritual mainstream of India — that special kind of wisdom of which Professor Shah speaks." There has been too much doctrinaire deconstruction and compartmentalisation of thoughts, a sourness of the intellect that can only forage through agony and disillusionment. The author rightly feels that we must hark back to the medieval Bhakti movement which can give spiritual nourishment by positing the delight of existence. Not a turning away from life nor seeing it as a field of broken shards but becoming electrically free to watch existence as the eternal Ras of soul-unity. Ancestral Voices contains not only reflections but also pointers for the reconstruction of our critical tools to unify the sacred and the secular. As the Vedic poet sang: "Let the sacred threads by which we weave the coloured web of our song remain intact." Yes, for all future time.