Last year on August 31 as I began my sabbatical year
my life as a blogger was inaugurated by sheer chance. Convinced by a colleague
and spurred by external and internal happenings, I wrote my first essay called
“’No Country for Women’: A Tantric Interlude.” In it I invoked my two habitats,
India and the USA. In both countries overwhelming news of abysmal gender and
gun violence had eclipsed all else. Gruesome rapes had shaken India; Newtown
massacre of innocents had momentarily stunned America. A year later I have this
uncanny feeling that things are the same, and yet they are not. So I find
myself pondering the meaning of repetitions, sabbaticals and the myth of the
eternal return.
Once again I stand under the Mother Principle
and invoke here an ancient Moon Goddess who images cyclicality like the phases
of the moon; both dark and light, she seamlessly weaves her magic of the
illusion of time. She speaks of the rhythm of life as work and rest, being and
non-being, day and night. In her profound embrace both Kronos as death who eats
his children and Kairos as life, an indeterminate creative instant, find solace.
People invented linear time to get out of the circularity of the feminine; yet,
a clock is circular like the moon; in an hour glass shape, time empties itself
out as textured sand.
We can’t see time so we create incessant images. Some
say time flies. Does it fly like a bird or like a plane? Where does it fly to? Heraclitus
thought it flows, and you can never step into the same stream again. So it
flows like a river? Or is it like hot steaming lava? Slow, glowing, inscrutable
and unstoppable. Zeno’s paradox hints at time as a motionless arrow in flight
with no target to hit. Or maybe it just folds upon itself and returns over and
over again like the waves in the ocean. Although
concepts of space-time continuum create even more confusion for the mind, it
makes a strange experiential sense. Quo Vadis time? Perhaps nowhere!
In Cloud Atlas,
a Science Fiction film that enacts the myth of the eternal return, time folds
over and the drama continues eternally.
Is life a never ending story where we each play different roles at
different time stages? Do we recognize the sound of music played in another
life time? Tom Hanks’ character is good here and bad there. A human woman is
worshipped as a deity in another time. A black woman is white in other time
guise; like shape shifters, one is a man here, a woman there. Do our
non-individual souls grow impersonally through taking various shapes as Indian
traditions of Karma and reincarnation as well as ancient Greek notions of metempsychosis
imagine?
Are time and the cosmos “Turning and turning in the
widening gyre” as Yeats envisioned in “The Second Coming.” Is time cycling or is it spiraling? Again and again it seems Yeats was right in
proclaiming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of
passionate intensity”? Some beast has been “slouching toward Bethlehem”
perennially it seems, given the Middle Eastern crisis, ad nauseam. The US is
bombing Iraq once again. May be it is the same war turning and turning. Who
could think “death had undone so many” to recall another modernist classic, “The
Wasteland.” Did I just repeat myself? Yet like Eliot’s Prufrock, “I grow old…I
grow old…I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
Our Déjà vu experiences happen sometime every
morning. One hundred year anniversary of the so called Great War is being
remembered in various academic circles this year while images of abducted women
in Africa vie for attention with women warriors fighting against a deadly Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria, wrongly nicknamed ISIS. The Egyptian goddess figure is
a nurturing Mother not a killer drone or a mutilator of women. It may seem gruesome violence is happening
somewhere far away and yet death by guns, suicide or homicide, is a recurring
event in the US. Ferguson is seething.
What is wrong with us, asks an American after a 9
year old killed her instructor with a fully automatic machine gun at a shooting
range near Las Vegas. Whose accident was it? Middle Eastern or American
phenomena? We kill children and teach children to kill. They say, “There is
nothing illegal about a girl handling an Uzi.” The ad states: “You will choose
the guns which you want to shoot from our extensive collection, and we provide
the eye/ear protection, ammunition, and expert guidance.” It adds: “Our .50
Cal. selections includes the Barrett Sniper Rifle, the Browning BMG .50 Cal
(‘the deuce’) and the Desert Eagle. We even have the actual firearms used in
several Hollywood hits including ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Rambo II.’ ”
Expert guidance, indeed! A literature teacher like
me would rather have a 9 year old read an essay I read as a teen ager called
“On Doing Nothing” by J. B Priestley, I believe. It had fantasized what if all
the generals and kings of the world had decided one fine morning in 1914 to go
to the meadows and lay down under the clear sky and do nothing. Unfortunately, so many of us fantasize about
being Rambos and Terminators than dream of lying under a green wood tree. So we
are determined and destined to repeat the wars and destroy our green earth. Some say we can always go to another planet
once we have depleted this one. Or maybe we can all take a sabbatical, let the
earth breathe, and do nothing for a while.
My son was telling me how those who strictly follow
their Sabbath rules hire somebody to even turn their home lights on. It’s a
caricature of course of a beautiful ritual and won’t do. I was quite thrilled
to go to the root of the word Sabbath. Guess what? There too you meet a Moon
Goddess. But who worships moon goddesses
today? It’s a primitive ritual meant for anthropologists and religionists to
study and marvel about the archaic mindset of people from pre-scientific age.
After all once man landed on its rocky surface, apparently all its magic was
gone. We are all progressing in a straight line toward a utopia under rational
religions in a technological golden age!
The myth of the eternal return says otherwise; we
reenact ancient rituals without knowing, both good and bad. Religious rituals are
an attempt to contain our habitual aggressions and give us time to ponder inner
realities. Without awareness, we are condemned to repeat our unconscious patterns.
So the Sabbath apparently recalls the rise of a patriarchal and warrior deity. God
worked hard for 6 days and “He” needed rest.
What if God was menstruating and needed the rest to rejuvenate Herself
for another creative cycle? Anathema? Yes, in some circles. I love the roots of
words; anathema was a woman’s offering to the goddesses in ancient Greece. The
root of the word Sabbath is “sabattu,” when Ishtar, the moon goddess of Babylon,
was thought to be menstruating.
Sabattu comes from Sa-bat or Heart-rest according to
Jungian scholar M Esther Harding: “It is the day of rest which the moon takes
when full, at that time it is neither increasing nor decreasing. On this day,
which is the direct forerunner of the Sabbath, it was considered unlucky to do
any work or to eat cooked food or to go on a journey.” Very similar to the
goddess’s menstruation rituals still practiced in my part of Tantric India. My
sabbatical is ending. Academics are lucky to receive this time to read, write,
publish and sleep under the tree if we want to. When we return to teaching, we
will have to deal with the anguish of the young students reeling under the
pressure of time.
A culture of aggression
creates vicious cycles of violence, both economic and physical. Innumerable gun
deaths remind us that we live and die by our own swords. President Obama’s
apparent “inactivity” and reluctance to wage wars around the world is a sign of
hope. On the other side of the world, my other habitat, there is a new prime
minister who has to prove to the world that he can lead a secular democracy
with a 5000 year history without resorting to narrow religious shenanigans. But at his Independence Day address on August
15, he said something that big Indian politicians have never said before: “Our
heads hang in shame when we hear about rapes. Parents ask about daughters but
did anyone dare ask their sons. After all, the rapist is someone's son. As
parents, have we asked our sons where he is going? Why not put same yardstick
for sons too?”
More, he said: “India's
sex ratio is 1000 boys for 940 girls. Who creates this disparity? It isn't God.
Don't fill your coffers by sacrificing the mother's womb. People feel that sons
will take care of them when they are old. But I have seen aged parents in
old-age homes. I have seen families where one daughter serves parents more than
five sons.” Well, we do not procreate because of ulterior motives, but I will
take this for now. Women have been taught to serve, and it can serve them in
the long run if their service is not misread as servitude. Women’s life
sustaining, cyclical and not too exciting daily activities have long maintained
the world. Today’s hyper active and aggressive cultures have to learn to
respect and imitate rhythms of the Mother if we want our planetary existence to survive.
Prime Minister Modi’s
words are heartening but are they empty words or a prophetic cry of the times?
Maybe something changes as time turns. Regeneration is inherent in degeneration,
and polarities of life ensure growth. Nietzsche, the prophet of the eternal
return with a difference affirms life in spite of its horrors. In The Gay Science he writes: "And
thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me and a
woman will be born, just like Mary - only that it is hoped to be that the head
of this man may contain a little less foolishness...” Amor Fati!
