“And I wrote her an answer, just for to let her know
That no young man would venture where he once could not go,
O he once could not go.” *
She provides the allegorical element, Uncle Wally added thereby setting himself off on his latest ‘last adventure’ again. From which arises that essential feeling of nostalgia, cousin Boldelairy chipped in. Meanwhile grandfather McScrooge was entertaining his grandaughter Ba with Rabelaisian stories of Pampas Trails and the Wild West, as they clip-clopped past a disgusting shrivelled head stuck on a pole. It is a dead Italian poet, the ancestrally speaking grandfather said more or less in the the manner of a Guide to the Underworld, The poet had the appetites of a pike and has received his just deserts.
We remember that there is a cheeky aesthetic: we prefer to walk, and there is a web of paths.
February is the Festival Season in southern India. Shiva is out and about, strange mix of God, family man, outlaw and vagabond, secular priest and erotic ascetic. There is no lack of sincere emotion since t today is also Purgation Day for me. Or Purification Day some prefer to say. At 7.00am this morning I was given a glass of castor oil mixed with other medicinal herbs to drink. Mostly the Ayurvedic approach is ‘slow’ therapy spread over two or three weeks of accumulative treatment, but not today. Good Golly Miss Molly – The lengths we go to try to have a quiet life! None of us lack ambition.
It is also the middle of a week long local Kerala village celebration of Shiva. Yesterday evening I spent a couple of hours at the fragrant smelling and freshly swept and decorated village temple, radiant with flowers and sparkling with coloured fairy lights and fresh orange paint . However, He was out and the metal gates of the temple precinct were padlocked. I knew that He has been out and about all weekend, travelling all the highways and being seen by everybody. I had been told He was due back at 6pm yesterday evening, but He had obviously been held up. I could hear cornets and drumming coming from somewhere distant beyond the surrounding green fields and forested slopes, and the occasional thump and crackle of fireworks. There is no such thing as late in India.
I left after two hours yesterday evening, but I was not disappointed. This morning I check my watch again. It is now 9.00am, and I am also still waiting for the castor oil potion to begin to take effect. In India nostalgia comes in many guises, and in many there is no lack of sincere emotion (and there is no such thing as late). Ventrem Omnipotentem!
Great Guts Almighty… and Wordstall as a literary magazine and/or longer-form writing belongs to the ‘minuscule’ type of the former, and a form of endless project as regards the latter! About magazines, I learned this from reading the informative piece by Evan Kindley in the LRB (24 Jan 2014) on the 3 volume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. This provides a four way classification: little magazine, mass market, and miscellany, as well as our ‘miniscule’ (a private sort for and by friends, such as Georges Bataille’s Acephale). I also learned the ‘true enemy’ of all magazines is not size of circulation or number of readers, but “mere muddle” (as argued in a 1930 ‘Little Magazines‘ essay by Ezra Pound) meaning ideological indiscrimination or pluralism: the kind of cramming everything into the final work ambition, along with an insincere emotion which goes with a sentimental trying to please nostalgia. About the plan which is endless, I gained equal insight from reading an essay in the latest NLR 84 (P 121-129) taken and translated from a work by Valery Podoroga, Mimesis (2006). The essay is called Dostoyevsky’s Plans , and describes the Russian writer’s prodiguous use of Notebooks, usually two or three or more being worked on simultaneously, which were filled with the making of an endless kaleidoscope of ‘writing plans’: handwritten variants (rough drafts, working notes, deepening and widening proliferations of story, gaps, cancellations and crossings out), as well as quick sketches and cartoon-like illustrations. There is a constant process of multiplication of possibilities, in which Podoraga explains “the plan always exceeds the work”.
In India, where there is a countless web of paths, the Sanskrit term for this is called Upayasala. There is no “mere muddle” in a centripetal counter-force, the nodal paths which emerge out of and cut across the endless kinds of nostalgia. Nor any lack of sincere emotion I think as I look at my watch again and see that it is nearly noon. My four friends who come from the local village and work at the Ayurveda centre, and for whom it is my duty to present my body into their hands each day, tell me that Shiva will be in the village temple precinct on next Thursday evening. Visitors are welcome any time from 6.30pm onwards throughout the night at this climax to the week’s festival. Of this and the certainty of His presence during the hours of darkness on Thursday night there is complete confidence. I have BEEN, and HE will be there.
[* from The Rejected Lover (Traditional Appalachian Folksong)]
