The Kesh People, Franz Kafka, Annie Besant
Welcome again to Rabbit Reading Are Cool, a blog where I read a poem, story and essay every day, as much as I can.
The Kesh - Some "Five/Four" Poems from Madidinou
LOSS
My heart is heavy.
It lies down crossways,
stopping my breathing,
a stone of grieving.
JEALOUSY
That one with the earrings,
what can she give you?
More wine? More mutton?
Bigger erections?
FIRST LOVE
Weeding tomatoes,
the vines smell bitter
in the hot sunlight.
A long time ago.
THE DARK GIRL
Blackwinged butterfly
turns, lights, flits, returns
to the yarrow stem,
intent, uncertain.
Technically these poems are written by Ursula K Le Guin, but they are from her fictional race of people who live in the far future following a near extinction event. These are from her book Always Coming Home which is a novel in the form of a loose collection of anthropological records.
I am not sure if I love the book, but I love the poems she has written for it, which she notes are often improvised, sung, or used in playground nursury rhymes. The notes for these ones say "spoken at a poetry event on a river bank after work". I like that this detail says everything and nothing.
I also love that she made up her own fictional poetry form, the five/four. It seems quite similar to the haiku in its brevity. Four lines, five syllables each. I also like that these four poems seem written by four different people.
This is the first I have read of Le Guin's poetry and I love it.
Franz Kafka - In the Penal Colony
I don't feel the need to say much about this well-known story other than that it is much much more violent than I expected.
Most of it describes in extreme detail the workings of a mechinal torture machine that slowly engraves the victim with a needle for 12 hours before cutting them in half.
It is a typical Kafka nightmare like all his others. I really wish I liked his stories more than I do, but I find them all very unaffecting in their prose. This is probably a problem with the favourless translations.
It might be interesting to compare the richness of Italo Calvino's prose to the sparseness of Kafka's. Both write highly imaginative fantastical works, but Calvino's you can really inhabit his worlds with the senses, whereas Kafka's worlds seem so removed from direct perception. As I said, I am still trying to appreciate Kafka's writing. I'll get there.
Annie Besant - The Physical Body
As Schopehauer said "the sages in all times have always said the same thing, and the fools, that is to say, the immense majority in all times, have always done the same thing, that is, the opposite".
Only recently have I found the value in reading from different religious philosophy texts without necessarily commiting to them but just taking the wisdom I find. This is why the Theosophy movement is somewhat appealing to me; a group of scholars and political activists in the late 19th century who sought to discover and share the baseline wisdom found across all faiths and cultures, notably faiths from Eastern religions. They also had a penchant for more esoteric mysticism- astral planes and such, and the Theosophical Society soon paved the way for the less scholarly and less political New Age movement.
Annie Besant (1847-1933) was a prominent member of the Theosophical Society and wrote a large number of books, including this one I found at the op shop, Man and his Bodies (1897). I have just finished the first chapter which discusses the Self's relationship to the Body and stresses the importance of keeping ones body in its place, that is, as a subserviant container.
it does not matter what wishes the body may have, what habits it may have contracted in the past, the body is ours, to be employed as we desire, and the moment it takes the reins into its own hands and claims to guide the man instead of being guided by him, at that moment the whole purpose of life is subverted, and any kind of progress is rendered utterly impossible. (12)
Besant abuses the comma here, having long run on sentences, but still, I quite like the run-on sentence which propells me forward at a brisk pace.
Besant places a lot of importance on bodily health and the avoidance of toxins (cigarettes, alcohol, meat of all kinds). Without naming any religions, the chapter explains some of the more curious aspects of religious diets. We know why Buddhists don't eat meat and why Hindus don't eat beef, but what about the more "arbitrary" rules such as Jews not eating shellfish, Mormons not drinking tea or Hare Krishna's not eating onion and garlic?
She comes upon a few reasons:
- The body is made up of smaller particles that become overrun by unclean particles. (An interesting 19th century way of explaining things).
- The purpose of a spiritual life is to live up to one's highest spiritual potential- (or for the atheists, creative/intellectual/social-change potential). An ailing or addicted body distracts or sabotages one from a real purpose.
- Different foods are seen as harmful depending on their "impurity" (eg animals such as pigs and shrimp feed on carrion or waste); addictiveness too or their clouding of consciousness.
Besant of course has a lot to say against alcohol:
Evil elementals clad in elemental essence cluster around the thoughts of drunkards while the physical body attracts to itself from the surrounding atmosphere other gross particles given off from drunken and prolificate bodies, and these are also built into it, coarsening and degrading it. If we look at people who are engaged in manufacturing or distributing spirits, wines, beers, and other kinds of unclean liquors, we can see how their bodies have become gross and coarse. A brewers man, a publican — to say nothing of persons in all ranks of society who drink to excess— show fully what everyone who builds into his body any of these particles is doing to himself: the more of these he builds in, the corser will his body become. (25)
For all its quaint science (eg. the body being made up of solids, liquids, gas and four types of ether), I felt like this chapter has been helpful to read as I really need to break my bad eating habits but cannot bear to pay any mind to "common sense". I find common sense too boring to seek out.
It was the uncommon sense of Buddhist texts that gave me courage and motivation to quit smoking at the start of the year, and also to break the nihilistic habits of drinking. Common sense encourages drinking, and in Australia, often holds up getting drunk to be a heroic act.
After reading this, today was the first day in a long time that I broke the habit of going through a fast food drivethrough on the way to work. I have quite a bad junk food addiction that I am ashamed to have.
The second chapter was about the "ethereal double" which gets really bizarre, and continues to get more and more far fetched. I think I will shelve the book for a while.