Cultivate the sense of being lost

I write to myself, pen scratching

Thin tissue paper in a bar, Bob

Marley tape on the stereo

My friend has a roll of toilet paper he

Wrote a poem on and on and on

I wouldn’t say he’s Kerouac but

Ten years later he’ll be a creative director

And will reject me for a job

While I cultivate the sense of being lost

So every day is fresh, even this

Muddled evening, stomach mildly poisoned

Fingers clacking on keyboard, Beth

Hart mp3 on the comp speakers

Two cats sit in judgment

Spying for Bast, no doubt

No doubt that scroll still sits

In a box somewhere in his house

A fragment of everything he let go

The day he chose to find his place

Cultivate the sense of being lost

I whisper to myself

Footheld on the familiar

The mundane and diurnal

Let the cats sit in judgment

And no one else

And, yes I have a place too

Something like a thief in your sanctuary

Something like a key to your heart

But I hold my confoundment carefully

I hone this sacred disorientation

It keeps me honest, keeps me keen

And when we reckon what we’ve lost

It won’t be you, it won’t be me

Your Gita

Tell me, supreme soul
How does it feel to have to
Fall into flesh
Just to teach your children
Why they should kill

Tell me, supreme weigher and
Measurer of it all
How does it feel to condone
Fingers being cut
Dreams shattered and lives broken
How does it feel, wisest judge,
To approve such harsh judgement

Tell me, greatest being, most perfect one
What makes you plunge into flesh
And walk as a man
Just to tell brother to kill
Brother?

Tell me about your wheel
And your book of rules
Tell me about this reincarnation scam
You’ve got going on
Tell me about fate and curses
And doom that falls
On everyone
Is that how you show
You are impartial?

I don’t need a god
To kill everyone in the end.
Reality will do that.

19 footnotes to an absent treatise.

1.    Why this renaissance of weird fiction, why now?
2.    The last two movements of note in spec fic were New Weird and mundane SF. Both leeched off the zeitgeist, revealing truths about our changing perspectives of the world. Life is messy and grotesque, and we are unlikely to ever leave this planet. These insights still hold good even if the mainstream of escapist spec fic has bypassed them and moved on from these passing trends.
3.    Just as the New Wave saw spec fic become self aware about its existence as an Art, so Weird fiction sees horror/fantasy become aware of its existence in a universe that is absurd and far stranger than human minds can grasp.
4.    Is reality becoming more permeable? Is that why so many more writers are turning to dark, cosmic terror fiction? Even if the actual number is minuscule, what is significant is the pace and exponential growth of the trend.
5.    If the universe is truly incomprehensible, truly meaningless and it were to become self-aware, what would it feel? Is this not what drives puny humans into conditions labeled ‘insanity’?
6.    If we are part and parcel of the universe, maybe prophecy, vision and hallucination are all ways in which the universe is expressing itself. Fiction is the stories the universe wants to tell.
7.    Then all this means that perhaps the universe has woken up. Is screaming out its meaningless, its inchoate randomness and unknowability. And some who profess our writerly Art are tuning in on this frequency.
8.    Enthralled, we voice the universe.
9.    It starts with a whisper, a murmured surmise.
10.    It moves from vague intuitions and a stock sense of reality, through detours unexpected into a sudden opening out of scale, like the cosmic waste on the other end of the telescope suddenly coming into focus.
11.    This is what we are revealing as we mirror the universe. As we mirror ourselves. As above, so below. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm.
12.    Any literature that imposes meaning must be abjured,
13.    Any theory that claims literature imposes meaning must be repudiated.
14.    In thrall, we are a universal voice.
15.    Then plot is a lie. Resolution is a lie. Hero’s journey a non-starter, the film-script diagrams of the beats of storytelling are all trash, so much irreal raving.
16.    In visions of beady eyes staring out of navels, of mountains that fly and skies that fall to earth, of people with clocks for faces and stethoscopes for limbs, in visions of prisoners chained in arenas for the delectation of weeping gods, in these absurdities and more something is revealed. It is no more real than anything else; and that is its point.
17.    What pretends to realism is nothing of the kind.
18.    What aspires to the breakdown of the mind and all its scripts is authentic. Cherish it.
19.    Voiced, the universe is in thrall.

Just heard that a young woman who had been raped and burned was left to die by the roadside just around the corner from where I live a few days back. She was found by a neighbour's dog who was out for a walk. The police whisked her away and there has been no further information on her, and no coverage in the press.

While we are all being outraged or ironic or clever about the latest brouhaha over the headlines, about actors saying things and politicians saying things and writers returning awards and college girls trolling politicians, the real world is carrying on with its bloody, horrific agenda just meters away from the glowing screens on which we perform our parodies and punditry.And while we are talking about people talking about people talking, problems and solutions remain very far away from our discussion.

There is a real war this country is engaged in: it is a war against the feminine. Women. Girls. Infants - a three year old was raped in a city school a week back. Further down the same road where the nameless young woman was found is a goddess temple. India may be the only country in the world with living goddess traditions in an unbroken chain from the past. And yet, at the same time, it is a country at war with the feminine, with sexuality and with mothers, with among the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. It is a country at war with the bahujan and dalit women whose labour tills the soil, cleans the streets and homes, but is devalued and paid for in violence and rape all too often.

There is probably nothing that can be done for that young woman - if she is even still alive - but each of you can make a difference by thinking about this war, and how you can declare a ceasefire in your own heart and your own life.

and the next

The first time the world changed
I saw it on black and white TV

The second time the world changed
My roommate had cable

The third time the world changed
I had a job

The fourth time the world changed
I disconnected the cable

The fifth time the world changed
I lost my job

This time the world changed
Again

This time when the world changed
I wasn't even sure it was the same world

And this time when the world changed
I wasn't even sure I was myself

And the next time the world changes
And the next, and the next

poem about a singer

She strums the city

She gets to the point

The dreams out of joint

The pity of the streets

She sings the day and the

Theatred nights

Frights

Sights

She strums the city lights

Serendipity in fifths

The filth, the wealth

Langour, squalor

The city hums

She strums

Sings the waste

Taste of exhausted air

Cost of civilization

Realisation

Elevation

She strums in observation

Urban, caustic, slum-clad

And tower-capped

Crossword streets, cryptic shoes

Hand-me-down blues

Turnaround, start again

In neon and smog and rain

The city hums

Her

Peenya

In gutted factories         where weeds grow

From spaces between   paving slabs

Fading safety posters     preside over the

Industry of oxygen the  empire of rust

In empty warehouses      where spiders mediate

Between life and death       shadows and dust

A stopped wall-clock      forever tells time

Precisely what it                is worth to these

In quiet corners               where stalls decay

A memory of                     cups of strong tea

Beedi smoke                    someone’s radio

Like a premonition           of silence

[Peenya is an industrial area in my city, Bangalore. Sections of it are currently dormant, fallout of the financial crises of the past decade. Other sections are still active.]

If you liked this poem, please consider showing your appreciation. My PayPal ID is jayaprakash@gmail.com but be sure to specify that you are sending me a professional payment because PayPal is not allowed to process personal transfers to people in India. 

I am a vegan and I oppose the beef ban. Here's why.

I am a vegan. I've been a vegan for about 3 years now. I was a vegetarian for 5 years before that, and apart from 8 years of half-assedly including sheek kebab and shavarma rolls in my diet because of convenience, I was a vegetarian since birth. I went back to vegetarianism with a considerable sense of relief and I gladly went vegan when I realised that the dairy industry is just as cruel and exploitative as the meat industry. I am as vegan as I can manage to be: no leather, no honey, no other animal products if I can help it and am aware. Of course, it's amazing the things they will sneak animal products into.

I was born into a Tamil Brahmin Hindu family. Many, but not all, upper-caste Hindu communities are vegetarian. Most Hindus claim to venerate the cow as a sort of mother-symbol. I have been accused of being vegan just because that is a caste characteristic, and I have been told I can afford to be a vegan because of my financial status. So I'd like it to make it very clear that my veganism is a personal, ethical decision. It's about compassion, not caste, class, health or religion. For the record I am an atheist and I reject the concept of caste. I never had my thread ceremony, so I have not been initiated into being  proper Brahmin. And unsurprisingly it isn't expensive at all to eat a healthy vegetarian or vegan diet in India.

Now here's something else about me: politically I lean left/anarchist and socially I am a liberal. That means I think you should be free to do anything that does not harm another person. As a vegan I would like to extend that to being free to do anything that does not harm another living thing. But I do believe that a country's laws are a human construct and need to reflect interhuman  issues first. If that makes me a worse vegan, I understand your perspective and readily admit I am not a perfect anything.

So.

A state government in India has banned beef, as an extension of the fetish around the cow as a mother figure. For some reason, sheep, goats, fowl and presumably any other creature a person may choose to eat simply aren't that sacred or deserving of compassion. A lot of my fellow vegans supported this ban. I didn't, and don't. Because it is meaningless. It is vote bank politics, to do with pandering to a core Hindu community and in the process further alienating minorities such as Muslims and Christians and the many Hindu communities that do allow the consumption of beef.

Besides, it still doesn't address the horrors of the dairy industry, which I mentioned earlier. It still doesn't change the fact that India is a beef exporter of mammoth proportions. So I oppose the beef ban. But you won't see me handing out beef snacks like the vegetarian, headline-hungry literary somebody Girish Karnad.

I am horrified by the Dadri atrocity, where a man accused of eating beef was lynched by a mob. I don't understand how you can oppose killing one living being and enforce your view by killing another. In fact, I think this episode is symptomatic. Because what we have here is a Hindu mob killing a Muslim man. The beef ban has nothing to do with animal welfare, nothing to do with compassion. It is about clinging to sentimental, religious notions and taking a stand against those who are not pure Hindu upper caste cow-worshippers.

I would support sweeping reforms to the dairy and meat industries in India. I would support campaigning to reduce and eventually eliminate meat from our national diet. But by taking choice away from people and helping foster an environment where people can be killed for their dietary choices, the political powers that be have created a situation where my cause, compassion and veganism, is actually being hurt. People who might have been allies, or sympathisers, now proudly fly the flag of meat eating as a thumbed nose at Brahmins, saffronists and bigots. The writer Temsula Ao went so far as to say she doesn't see why meat eaters have to empathise with vegetarians. This is the fallout of the Hindutva crusade against beef. People are unwilling to empathise with each other, nevermind the animals who live in misery and die in horrific pain so that we can have things to eat and wear and use.

To reduce it all down to something more pithy, I will quote a recent status update I made on facebook: I support your right to eat whatever the fuck you want to. I am not obliged to support you eating meat. But I will oppose anyone who tries to impose their dietary fetishes on you.

And once you accept that, I'd love to have a conversation with you about why you should go vegan. Not because I'm a Hindu, or a Brahmin, or middle-class. But because I believe in kindness and compassion and I suspect you do too, if you think about it.

If you liked this article, please consider showing your appreciation. My PayPal ID is jayaprakash@gmail.com but be sure to specify that you are sending me a professional payment because PayPal is not allowed to process personal transfers to people in India. 

Introduction

My name is Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. I live in Bangalore, India. I am a writer and musician. I am a vegan and I run an animal welfare organisation with my wife, Yasmine, who is a teacher.

I've run several blogs before. Like everyone I've been sucked into the closed but interactive environment of facebook and the pithy pissing matches of twitter. I enjoy these platforms, but I want to get back to the discipline of writing a daily post, or posts, that explore topics that I care about in a more focused way. That doesn't mean lengthy essays - but I will try to make each post at least a 1000 words long. Less than that and there isn't really enough space to offer a central thought, bat it about, consider different perspectives and actually get some thinking done. Some might argue that even a 1000 words is too little, but I know few online readers love teal deers, the poor dears.

The topics I write will include metal music, my bands, weird fiction, my writing, veganism, animal welfare and my experiences dealing with something that is probably bipolar type 2, but my doctor doesn't like to be too cut and dried about labels.

I will also post poetry and occasional short fiction.

I will not tolerate trolls. Troll comments will be deleted. All moderation decisions are mine and are final.