Once upon an icy Monday a crystalline snow flake
envisioned a scene. A woman walks on her
ice laden lawn shimmering in its translucent glory. At first she could not see the ice. When walked on the grass, her footsteps reveal
something marvelous: each blade of grass was delicately covered with transparent
liquid beauty. Human steps crush the ice and the whitening and wilting grass tells
a story that if you were Wallace Stevens’ snow man with a mind of winter, you
would understand. To listen in the snow is to see that one is a pattern, a slight
variation on a theme, a snowflake.
“One must have a mind of winter….
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,….
Of the January sun; and not to
think
Of any misery in the sound of
the wind,….
For the listener, who listens
in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and
the nothing that is. “ (Wallace Stevens “The Snow Man” 1921)
Can you imagine a Connecticut insurance executive
meditating on nothingness with such poetic brilliance that the January Sun
would bow to him? Along with Frosty Bob,
Wallace captures the snowy American sensibility like no other. By the way, did
you know January is Janus faced? Jean Shinoda Bolen tells us, it is a portal;
it is named after the Roman God of the doorway, Janus. The old man face looks
to the past; the forward looking one, youthful, feminine, to the future. Janitors
too, who open and close doors in this liminal space, are named after this god,
Bolen tells. We don’t think much of
janitors in this mercantile age, but their cleansing acts may open magic doors.
The woman enters the portal or is it the polar
vortex? She takes one more step on the crunching grass and walks into another
January, in 1994. She now speaks after 20 years, “Bees Saal Baad”(an old Hindi
movie with haunting songs based on a Sherlock Holmes tale), about an arrival 20
years ago, “Bees Saal Pahele”- another desi film. “L’evenir” – Jacques Derrida speaks of the
arrival of another future – coming of an Other that you cannot predict. “Suppose that time is not a quantity but a quality,
like the luminescence of the night above the trees just when a rising moon
touched the treeline. Time exists, but
it cannot be measured” (Einstein’s Dreams,
Alan Lightman).
Did she sleep for 20 years like Rip Van Winkle in the
nearby Catskills Mountains, or did she lose her head in the Sleepy Hollow? This
portal messes with her brain; can’t figure out if it is now or then. Heavy with
child rushing to the Danbury hospital in the middle of the night, she watches
with breathtaking wonder what a massive snow storm has done to the Connecticut
landscape. So silent, so cold and so
white, the car window shows a quietly pulsating exterior like the life spanda, quivering
of the child eager to separate from the womb. A boy born in the depth of an
American winter on a predawn January could only be named Shiv Satyam after a
Himalayan inhabitant, the most ancient of gods that has been continually
worshipped since perhaps the Indus Valley days.
Boy’s January born temporarily Allahabadi father with
eyes transfixed on the bundled baby holds him like the Penguin dads warming the
egg when the mothers move away in search of sustenance - March of Penguins. Boy’s exhausted, astonished and awake mother
watches as the milk of human kindness flows in her body. Baby’s summer born 3
year old brother calls him Goolu. Was he
making Igloos while playing in the snow? Or is the mother remembering a Bengali book
her father brought about polar bears and snow dogs - Kingmik o nanooker deshe-
in the Land of Kingmik and Nanook, or is it that Russian fairy tale about snow
people. She might have dreamed of a snow
baby in the heat of India.
The snow flake flutters away into space and sees spread
out against the sky in Mt Kailash the figure of a meditating Shiva. The snowcapped mountain peak and the lake
Mansarovar form a natural Yub/Yum, Shiva/Shakti, Karuna/Prajna. What a curious marker
of divine masculinity is Shiva! A most high god that does not mind being a dead
body (shava) and lets a pitch black gory Kali awaken him by the touch of her
foot! Shava (unconscious jiva/creature) becomes Shiva by uniting with the ‘e’
sound (eekar) of the mystery of the feminine. Sat (existence) becomes chit (consciousness)
and begins to dance in ananda (bliss).
So we say in old India -Satyam, Shivam Sundaram. To Keatsian “Truth is beauty, beauty truth,”
Hindus add auspicious goodness of Shiva.
Keats would have recognized Shiva since he knew ‘negative capability.’
Like myriad Indian gods, Shiva too has many faces,
many names, many forms but his majestic beauty even in the Aghora Bhairava form
is only matched by his profound quiescence and his undulating dance. He dances
ananda tandava, joyful masculine dance and he dances samhara tandava, dance of
annihilation. Always accompanied by his other side, the feminine principle who
dances lasya, the dance of beauty, he is ardhanarishwar – half woman god. In the Puranic tales beautifully retold by
Devdutt Pattanaik in 7 Secrets of Shiva,
the howling Shiva’s grief stricken mad dance at the self-immolation of his
indignant beloved forces Vishnu to cut her body into pieces. Emptied, Shiva comes to his senses and begins
another meditation in another time cycle.
Khepababa explains Shiva’s innumerable names from
Rudra, Neelakantha, Bholanath to “Shava, the Dead in the ecstasy of death;
Mahakala, the eternal Time in the ecstasy of Voidness; Nairaatma, the
nothingness of Self in the ecstasy of Self-enjoyment; Avadhuta, the ever free
in the ecstasy of renouncing the renunciation itself.” Outside of time, ash
smeared, vagabond, serpent infested, Parvati, daughter of the Himalaya’s
beloved, easily pleased and yet indifferent Shiva is a not- god, an expansive
singularity of being that is always many. He is “Nothing that is not there and
the nothing that is,” a naked absence – stripped of the mask of existence and
yet totally present in the cosmic drama, Devi’s lila. Shiva is Bhokta, Shiva is
Bhojya, the enjoyer and the enjoyed; there is nothing other than Shiva.
Once upon a time Dr. Manas Mukul Das, our Manasda, who
kept us spellbound teaching English poetry at Allahabad University, had
explained how Nataraj Shiva dances on the ego ridden apasmara, our dwarfish
ignorant selves. Shiva’s damaru captures the sound of past and future while he
holds the eternal present in the middle.
That’s the rhythm of life that no clock time can capture. A wide eyed girl once in Allahabad, this
blogger had wandered lonely in the land of time pieces, Switzerland. She recalls
seeing on a store window in Interlaken a picture of Aishwarya Rai selling Swiss
watches!
How amazing, the land of measured time also housed C
G Jung, U G Krishnamurti, the Black Madonna and of course Albert Einstein who
would turn, just about a century ago, time and space upside down. Or is it
inside out? She had seen in 2006 from the cobblestone streets in Bern the 13th
century Zytglogge tower. Yet, she can easily “imagine a world in which there is
no time. Only images” (Einstein’s dreams). But Alan Watts reminds us, we need the clock
time or we could not keep our appointments with others; we could very easily be
lost in the splendid isolation that a narcissistic reverie or a self-absorbed deep
meditation could induce.
That January baby is 20 years old today and an
accomplished drummer and guitar player. Last
Monday after his winter break, as he drove away to school accompanied by his
brother, he reassured his anxious mom that he is trained to drive an ambulance.
Who would have thought! L’evenir, indeed! Shiv Satyam may discover “Quantum
vibrations in the brain neurons” and their connection with consciousness in his
study of neuroscience at Tufts, but may his Music and Trance class this spring initiate
him and all unpredictable children into Shiva’s ecstatic dance.
