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Dantewada Delirium(1999) |
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While spending time in India — a country which, more than any other, takes the geographical shape of a heart — my heart took on the shape of that country. In Madhya Pradesh, the central-axis state, the forest that is now one-tenth as dense as before the British came was at that time of year a rustscape — the crowning achievement of a mute force of golden chaos. The grotesque ghosts of tigers were all around us, mocked by advertisements employing their likenesses as symbols of strength and unvanquishability. My temporary home was Idwadpara, a hamlet of villages thirteen kilometers from the town of Dantewada. Dantewada is a town known by the people of that province primarily for its central temple, the main idol and altar of which predates the Aryan invasion and the development of Hinduism. In Christian terms, it has stood and been worshipped continuously since three thousand years before the Son of God walked among us. I knew I’d be unable to write or create much of anything while I was there — I was in too much fluid. At night, after the light set the forest on fire and the dark fills up all spaces, another sense was heightened, and it seemed as though the entire landscape, although invisible, could be directly sensed, like the presence an unseen observer. The night embraced all; after dinner mid-prayer lean back to see a firefly mating with Orion’s belt. I hoped I would be able to use some amount of the unimaginable pain I witnessed during the day to later create, if only in myself, some sort of understanding. I passed out after each long day under a picture of Gandhi spinning his hexagonal loom on the mud walls of my small blue room.
I shared the room with a young man from Melbourne (no more a man that I was, really); he read spy novels. He was seemingly unaware of the sweetness of modesty. The small room in a freestanding mud-brick building built by villagers was also occupied by an overactive microecology of geckoes and the enormous moths they hunted, as well as the stacks of dusty medical and school supplies meant for the children of Idwadpara. The brightly colored astronomy textbooks contrasted absurdly with my tattered copies of A Season In Hell and the Divine Comedy which I mistakenly believed I could use to keep my mind distant yet active. Not so very distant, it turned out. In the temperature moderated by the antique ceiling fan and the chemical-blue paint, Michael and I would play cards and disagree vehemently over iterations of Anarchist theory. I usually beat him at cards. Occasionally I would meditate upon the idea of devoting my life to an area one hundred kilometers wide, appreciating at least abstractly the lack of pride involved, the lack of self-importance. Every night in that arterial place brought me closer to my desired abolition of self-interest, yet I never did come upon the revelation that the direction I was pursuing was the correct one. I felt it breathing its way towards me as I slept. I have seen archipelagos in the stars, Feverish skies where I was free to roam! Are these bottomless nights your exiled nests, Swarm of golden birds, O strength to come? You pulled my hands, you pulled my thought, you pulled my clothes, you pulled my tongue, you pull my breath inclusive bits of sand and smell the night under the shade of fires orbiting the mahua trees. ***** Michael and I helped prepare the meals when we weren’t sick in our beds or with Himanchu, the man who, with his family, ran this particular watershed development project. The project, and thus the ashram, was funded, ironically, by the same international financial organizations that subsidized and brokered the massively exploitative mineral and water trade rights away from the indigenous Gond people of Idwadpara. Himanchu was the only member of the family and the small full-time staff that spoke English, so Michael and I did our best to communicate through phrasebooks and gestures when he wasn’t around. The mechanics of tripping over customary offerings, cringing as the women beat the mange-deepened ridges between the massive horns of the cattle with reeds. Two of the women on the ashram used to be Jagdalpur prostitutes; they are showed me how to cook the chapatti in the small clay oven. They laughed as I tried to explain in nonsense Hindi that the bracelets on my wrist were a gift from a girl in the United States. My wife? No, not my wife.
Dirt on light bulb and stereo singing to the children. Himanchu and Lena’s baby asserted her class superiority on the maid’s five year-old girl by not sharing her bright blue plastic ball. Out of spite, the elder theatrically derived an excess of pleasure from a plastic bag and the water pump — filling the bag with water glittering with rust and drinking mouthfuls at a time, letting the rest pour over her dirty blue t-shirt dress. All around her in the distance the nightly fires burned away the dry leaves around the tree trunks, clearing the ground for the next day’s harvest. In these dry months, the primary occupation of the villagers was the collection and trading of the alcoholic paste derived from the fermented mahua bulbs for rice at the weekly market in Dantewada. The children would rather have gathered flowers with their parents and older siblings all day than be forced to learn English or have drops of hepatitis vaccine dropped in their throats. Carrying them a solid three or four kilomenters or more, tearing them from their goats and dogs and fences, delivering them to the cement slab at the base of an ancient tamarind tree that served as a classroom — these were my cherished responsibilities. The only method I discovered to keep them from kicking and screaming the entire way was to confuse them, if they were young enough, by singing. I quickly realized that the children did most of the work in the village — cockfighting being a far more lucrative pasttime for the men. We would visit their families' houses at night, the children's dry, cracked skin coated in dust as they shoveled dirt into bags with their hands, sorted and arranged mahua bulbs, carried boxes to and from the backs of small motorbikes that periodically arrived and departed down the forest paths.
We were building a schoolhouse. The man who shone specter-white in the hot sun atop the flatbed hoisted the rusty metal hemisphere full of dirt above his head, conveying the raw material that is used to make all of the houses and buildings the villagers use, dirt I’d dug and lifted from the ground; the massive bowl whirled and from my vantage point described a half-lunar phase. I wouldn’t be there to see the building fin use, full of children. unfamiliar with indoor learning. I wondered if they would continue to be taught languages and cultures other than their own; I thought about returning when they had grown up, so that they could teach me. Despite our best intentions, our visits to the government schools in Jagdalpur and Raipur were always a type of condescension; we were inevitably symbols of a chauvinistic attempt at Western-style development. The young girls in their navy uniforms touched our feet with their hands out of respect. They fed us, guided us, shared everything with us. Days and nights alternated this way, and I saw palm leaves harbor deep red light, curiously alive, crumbling corners of building dissolving in humidity. Flower distilled colors deepened the mystery of the lives of those schoolgirls, their ponytails black and reflective of the sky. I saw the white hair of the ninety year-old teacher, a true Gandhian, appear as the plumage of an angry silver bird; he had aided in the dismantling of an empire and yet spoke sentimentally of the British in flawless Queen’s English. He yelled with his hands while the sun set, the veins on his arms like roots of thousand year-old trees in color and torment. The shit on his sandals was democracy. Torrential bats clouded in the too-dark.
Walking back to the ashram: the tension of cheap ironwork gates with wood latches kept the cows nearby and functional. Johar and raise your holy hand to say hello in Gondi to passing shapes of men, occasionally a fear-soaked glance. I wanted to understand the chemical wonders of the green-yellow fireflies — I imagined dissecting them and decanting the secret of their luminescence, like dissecting angels. To unweight the stars, rip apart the muses — these paths were illusions and the climax was under your feet at every moment. How do you relate an epic journey without constraining it in metaphor? Rimbaud merely and magnificently intoxicated his boat, thereby sobering his waters, burning the robes of Dante’s muses (”the worn out ideas of old-fashioned poetry played an important part in my alchemy of the world”) and, from this point of view, Rimbaud inverted the traditional formula of poetics: he demonized the “source of beauty” and sanctified his insanity (i.e. Second Delirium). Yet it seems impossible to ever say that I will have passed the considerations “of the world / What will it become when you leave it?”, but at the least Arthur can transmit his conclusions. Every successive phase of life requires a relearning of all previous knowledge in addition to a flow of new knowledge ten times as strong. It is as tiring and refreshing as swimming in the tides. You could not boil down that ocean of air — it humiliated my nights steeped in longing. A multiplied dislocation of empathy was omnipresent. My boat was bound by fake lungs, grown in a country of steel architecture. The ocean of air — not abracadabrantesque, nor to wash my toxic skin.
***** I woke up in leftover darkness to fireflies trading their sporadic flashes in fours with the croaking of tiny toads huddled in pools of mud-clouded water. We left in a hurry that morning, after tea of course and a transcontinental phone call from my San Francisco sweetheart. There was a distinct sense of urgency as Himanchu had forgotten an engagement the previous morning with the villagers the lived next to the broken electric water pump — his mistake was a potential threat to the delicate trust of the tribal leaders. The pump hung off a cliff on the river bank, across from which was a forest of uncleared tik. It was on that ridge that Himanchu had been chased by a tiger, which he recalled to us almost nostalgically. I volunteered to climb down the eighty foot shaft that disappeared beneath the river bed, a task I accomplished by traversing a downward spiral of iron rods that protruded from the walls. Upon reaching the neglected subterranean mechanism, I could see that a coagulation of gear-digested bat carcasses had jammed the pump. The villager explained to Himanchu that the vibrations of the machine loosened the grip of the small mammals on the rafters above — a persistent and entirely modern problem that was preventing the farmers from irrigating their land, since the shallower water sources were poisoned by the runoff of the world’s largest iron-ore mine only thirty kilometers away. A chicken wire safety net was decided upon as the best solution for all beings concerned. The trip back from the river found me far less nervous to be riding three on the back of a half-size Rajdoot motorcycle at 80km per hour over barely distinguishable and unpredictable forest paths. Upon our arrival, the baby Alisha couldn’t wait for her father’s embrace. As Michael and I dismounted and approached her on her mother’s lap, it was obvious in her expression that she regarded us differently after seeing us share the dirtshine vinyl seat of her father’s motorbike. The next day, inexplicably, we would discover in an explosion of screams and confusion that Himanchu had beaten Alisha and then fled after his wife, who had left with their daughter on the motorbike. Left without a single English or Hindi speaker in the ashram, Michael and I shared a bus back to Raipur, where we then went our separate ways. I went to Bihar to find another volunteer project, Michael went to Rajasthan to ride camels. It is strange how I can lose entire sections of my being, massive reservoirs of blood, for certain experiential periods. I felt for those two months only a portable version of myself. Leaving Dantewada that evening, I tried to soak it all in — mango trees, the smell of burning leaves, the yellow Cheshire moon. Stopped at a railroad crossing in the jeep-taxi: the sound of some great mammal approaching, a blue whale with one giant bright white eye blinding us, it’s metal husk invertebrating. That track and the machine that halted us served the mining corporations, hauling ore to the coast, leaving behind a toxic stain that kills many of the animals and children that grow within a 300 kilometer radius of it. I have forgotten most of their names.
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