I

Eliot Deutsch’s ‘reconstruction’ of Advaita Vedanta makes an inital claim of seeking “to approach Asian philosophy as material for creative thought” (Deutsch 1969, Preface) while recognising its status as “a religion as much as it is a technical philosophy…a way of spiritual realisation as well as a system of thought” (op.cit. p.4). Given this, however, “Vedanta’s concern with spiritual realisation…does not make it less of a technical philosophy” (p. 4-5), and it is in this latter context that Deutsch will ground his own exposition of, specifically Samkaran, Advaitic thought.

     One of the concomitants to this approach is that, as a Western thinker, Deutsch’s “criterion of philosophical truth…is not whether a particular system of thought is consistent with some other body of work; rather, it is whether that system of thought is “consistent” with human experience” (p. 5). His project then is to conceptualise and analyse Advaita in the abstract, as one of many universal responses to a supposedly uniform ‘human experience’.

     While a worthy philosophical aim, it already begs the question of whether that experience implies significant ontological (even biological) variation in the human condition during the millenia in which Advaitic thought evolved; that is, how authentically can a religious metaphysic grounded in a specific temporal and cultural context radically different from the post-Enlightenment Western experience be interpreted or ‘reconstructed’ by that same Western analytical mind, without something being lost ‘in the translation’? (We might for example assume a similar problem with the interpretation of classical Greek thought, except that the Greek corpus is already grounded in an intellectual logos, ancestral to the Western philosophical heritage and largely unmixed with explicitly contemplative, religious elements.) It may potentially have something meaningful for the 20th century mind, but is the value of the original metaphysic being displaced, the point lost, when a tradition is pulled out from its bio-cultural ground? A “re-creative presentation of an Eastern philosophy in which the philosophy is lifted somewhat out of its historical and traditional context” (p. 7) has value perhaps more in its own appropriating terms than in presenting an ostensible understanding of the original content. Like artistic portraiture, we are often in that case being told more about the interpretation than the subject itself.

     Aware of the selectivity of his project, then, Deutsch doesn’t address the hermeneutic problems inherent in the dislocation of it, content to “judge a system of thought in terms of its adequacy in organising the various dimensions of our experience ” (p. 5, my italics). Given the transcendent dialectic of the non-dual teaching this ‘universalising’ of Advaitic metaphysics in the abstract proves philosophically adequate as well as thematically fertile, but the extent to which an analytical philosophical language is imposed on ideas (or rather potential spiritual experience) ultimately irreducible to conceptual definition, will modify and at times distort those same ideas/potentials. Deutsch explicitly concedes that risk (p. 6-7, 10-11) while denying it need occur, and it is in this last sense that his reconstruction generally is conditioned by a reflexivity which remains true to a logical dialectic of description and rationality almost necessarily having more to do with its own discourse than the implied imperatives of the spiritual metaphysic he is attempting to elucidate.

     The dichotomy becomes clear in a discussion of Brahman (Chapter 1): “Saccidananda is a symbol of Brahman as formulated by the mind interpreting its Brahman experience” (p. 9). Where “these terms are really being used properly not so much in a logical as in a phenomenological manner” (p. 10), then the symbolic signifiers of the words are pointing to a content whose phenomenological authority must lie with the author of them. Deutsch in this work proposes ‘recreating’ experiences of phenomenological transcendence associated with centuries of Indian spiritual enquiry, for example in the discussion of Brahman above, insofar as they might be “capable of being understood by any student of philosophy” (p.7). This intention engenders the questions: 1) what kind of authority does this particular author have for re-casting these concepts in their own terms when they are necessarily based on phenomenological (ie. subjective) experience and then rendered into suitable symbols (words)? and 2) are these ideas capable of being subsequently understood by ‘anyone’ when the author himself is seemingly going on trust of what exists as language in the corpus of Vedantic literature, as opposed to a comprehension of the meaning of the words by direct experience? (In addition, where the author doesn’t claim the epistemological testimony, or sabda, of a personal guru, of extra-intellectual modes of knowledge, of mystical experiences etc. to further inform his reconstruction of the Advaitic transcendent project, we have to assume he is working simply from a textual base for his exposition.)

     The provisional conclusion to these questions has to be that if the author is not writing a ‘first philosophy’ out of his own phenomenal experience that accurately accords with what he understands of Advaitic metaphysics (and that possibility need not be dismissed), then he is simply translating into contemporary specialised English the symbols that already exist (in Sanskrit texts and commentaries) to point to an experience he, and perhaps many another textual transcriber also, hasn’t actually known. In that case, Deutsch is simply reconstructing a conceptual edifice from an already exisiting blueprint such that these concepts are given relatively new linguistic life for a new type of (20th century Western) audience. But if, as Deutsch claims, “The Advaitin is convinced that “to know” is “to be”; that one acquires knowledge only in an act of conscious being which is akin to what one knows and is the content of direct experience” (p.4), then we might reasonably ask if the author knows , in that sense, what he is describing? If not, is it essential, by contrast with the Western philosophical tradition as founded on a necessity for the indubitable comprehension of its ideas?

     These questions are significant in initially pointing to a unique problem in the philosophical appropriation of transcendental non-dualism, as well as trying to gauge what the meaning of Deustch’s re-construction ultimately amounts to: does what is communicated ultimately have anything to do with what Advaita Vedanta proper might be, if it is not merely a re-telling in new linguistic terms of a transcendent fairy-tale called “Advaita Vedanta” faithfully told down the aeons by other such commentators, and so lacking in that knowing Deutsch significantly isolates as essential to genuine comprehension of Advaita’s truth?

     These queries in turn question to what extent such a philosophical project can ever be genuinely meaningful, given the incompatibililty of conceptually formulating a metaphysical-spiritual proposition that in its essence sublates (or “subrates”, see Deutsch, p.15 ff.) intellectual comprehension and requires an intuitive transcendence of thought to have genuine life as such. Insofar as Deutsch is interpreting the claims of a religious and mystical tradition, as well as a philosophical one, his description of them is already vulnerable to the insufficient truth-claims existing in the margins between a rational philosophical epistemology on the one hand, and a super-rational mystical revelation on the other.    

II

These considerations are to an extent initially pre-empted by Deutsch in a discussion of Brahman where he asserts that “The Real is thus unthinkable: thought can be brought to it only through negations of what is thinkable” (p.11), which hence traditionally gives rise to the negative dialectic of neti neti – ‘not this, not that’ – in any possible discussion of transcendent states of being. Deutsch also confirms by contextualising his own enquiry within this same larger dilemma: “Advaita Vedanta…must labour under this fact, which it explicitly acknowledges, that whatever is expressed is ultimately non-Brahman, is ultimately untrue” (p.12). Given this admission, and the qualification of meaningfulness it points to in his own exposition of Advaita as with any attempt in the subject, Deutsch nevertheless assays as thorough an understanding of the conceptual bases of Advaita as manas (mind) and buddhi (intellect) will allow. Nevertheless, inconsistency in the expression of the theory betrays the inbuilt contradictions of the project.

     In a discussion of the distinctions between nirguna and saguna Brahman, one inference stands out in stark underdevelopment against the general reasoning: “In saguna Brahman [all distinctions] are integrated: a duality in unity is present here, and consequently, the power of love” (p.13, my italics). Deutsch’s classification of nirguna Brahman into the “mental-spiritual enlightenment” of jnana, and saguna Brahman into a “vital loving awareness” of bhakti commits exactly those distinctions nirguna Brahman is conceptually supposed to invalidate, but moreso what does this specific distinction of nirguna Brahman actually mean, apart from what the words signify to us in our relative comprehension of them? Does the implication here that nirguna Brahman isn’t also ‘the power of love’ (or not everything-that-the-power-of-love-isn’t), follow from Deutsch’s distinctions?

     While simplistic, and we can give Deutsch some benefit of the doubt in following the direction of his thought, this example is representative of the kind of linguistic inadequacy inherent in a philosophical reconstitution of spiritual propositions. When this extends to thematic concepts like ‘the power of love’, however, the status of meaning within its pedagogic value becomes questioned. What has been a conceptual abstraction (Brahman as that absolute principle which is everything the contingent and discriminatory phenomenal world isn’t), is suddenly allied to an affective state of being which makes a clear value-choice necessarily rejecting its antithesis. What kind of love is Deutsch implying in phenomenological terms? Is it still what we imperfectly, or subjectively, experience as human love, or something else altogether? These questions are left largely unexplored, especially insofar as they disturb the categories of (very abstract) human being essayed in the continuing theoretical discourse. Deutsch’s response is, however, symptomatic: “It [saguna Brahman] is the experience that, although negated by nirguna Brahman, yet complements nirguna Brahman experience” (p.13), which itself questions how long such concepts can continue to have relation with their meaning as already posited before they begin signifying something else. The doubt here is not necessarily with the potential reality of the ontological states so suggested, as with the ability of language, especially that of philosophical discourse, to adequately describe them.

     Similarly, saguna Brahman is further described as that “Brahman as it is conceived by man from his limited phenomenal standpoint” (p.14), which formulation begs the extended question of: if that kind of Brahman does literally come within the powers of phenomenal human understanding, then is either:

     1) saguna Brahman qualitatively or quantitively different from nirguna, in which case it exists either ontologically in proximity of or categorically separate from nirguna Brahman, or,

     2) is the range of man’s ‘limited phenomenal standpoint’ so a) actually expansive that it does encompass saguna Brahman (as Deutsch claims above), in which case given nirguna and saguna are both partaking of Brahman qua Brahman, then the ‘limited human viewpoint’ is at best potentially capable of coming ‘close to’ nirguna Brahman and so deserves to be classified in more ‘complementary’ terms, or b) so essentially limited that saguna Brahman must necessarily be a comparatively mundane experience (compared to nirguna Brahman) for it to be accessible to that same ‘limited human standpoint’?

     If anything, these queries suggest there is a philosophical-structural distance between what Deutsch’s exposition of Advaitic ideas actually imply, and what the conceptually rich edifice of those ideas as we envision them might in fact mean, that is not being bridged. We would need to address these kinds of questions before the Advaitic project could have the kind of philosophical context in which its ideas might ground themselves, in a philosophical context. Alternatively, Advaita is in fact talking about something else and might be approached in a speculatively heuristic and intuitive sense which has more to do with ‘contemplative science’ than rational philosophy. Again, the discrepancy isn’t uniquely Deutsch’s, but arises from the very project of attempting to align a relative comprehension of ideas with the nature of those ideas which are by definition absolute.     

III

 In his delineation of relative ‘levels of being’ and categories of thought that can be conceivably identified and then superceded by further experiences of insight, Deutsch is more internally consistent in generating corroborative meaning. His formulation of the idea of subration, synonymous with Advaita’s badha, “whereby one disvalues some previously appraised…content of consciousness because of its being contradicted by a new experience” (p.15), grounds a thorough re-working of the Advaitic insight oft-cited in Samkara’s image of the rope mistaken for a snake (in Mahadevan, Atma-Bodha, Verse 27, passim), whereby māya (the illusory reality) is mistaken for Brahman-Atman (the Real) via the various mental phenomena of āvidya, (ignorance), adhyasa (or superimposition), and upadhi (limiting condition). 

     Reality, in this analysis of a possible spiritual epistemology via levels of subration, becomes a new term for the absolute principle, that is: “The Real is (nirguna) Brahman” (p.19), that which in practice and principle cannot be subrated by anything else. Deutsch’s model of an ontological hierarchy of Reality-Appearance-Unreality, (including Real Existent, Existent, and Illusory Existent within that of Appearance) is grounded in a sequence of value-judgements ostensibly determined by a process of subration. This model (excluding of course Reality/Brahman), introduces the relative world of samsara, and in its own terms follows a familiar Vedantic pattern of establishing ontological levels of reality in relation to the human perception of them.

     Other potential relations, however, are left ambiguous by exclusion. Given a conceptual fidelity to Advaitic absolute idealism, man’s status as natural organism in relation to Nature as a primordial given, for example, is unclear, though presumably belongs within the Existent (in Appearance), which would conceptually conform with Advaita’s equation of the world as “not a transformation or modification of Brahman…but an illusory appearance (vivarta) thereof” (Mahadevan, 1975: 14). Still granting this, nevertheless, can the human relation with the “particular object” of the biophysical world of which man is a part, be subrated by his relation with the “works of art” made by man himself which Deustch (1969: 20-21) posits as belonging to the Real Existent (the last rung on the ladder of Appearance, only a step beneath the Real itself) in his scale of hierarchies? Is the model given here a feasible re-creation of an aspect of vyavaharika, the ontology of the phenomenal pseudo-real? In short, why does man’s relation with the psychic effects (in the subtle body) of his own aesthetic artefacts hold ontological precedence over that of his relation with Isvara’s creation – the natural world – in this model? (Though it might also be asked of Advaita itself whether this relation belongs only with the narrowly-formulated sthula-sarira of the gross physical body (Mahadevan 1975: 22), even where Samkara confims that “It is maya that projects creation, gross and subtle” [op.cit. p.21].)

     Deutsch is faithful to Advaita in this case, but where, as he concedes, “The sublevel of the “real existent” is not clearly formulated in Advaitic literature, but is implied, we believe, by the divisions that are established…” (1969: 26, n.10), his example of what one reference-point (‘a work of art’) within the ‘real existent’ might be calls into question, again, the ‘reconstructed’ sense of the original Advaitic formulation (of vyavaharika). Are Deutsch and Advaita referring to the same thing? Can the claim that “the nature of (and definition of) a successful aesthetic experience is valuation of it as belonging to the highest order of sense-mental experience” (op.cit.p.20-21), carry weight in the Advaitic context when what determines the status of ‘a successful aesthetic experience’ is a wholly subjective and arguably ego-derived value-judgement in which any one of an infinite number of such judgements must necessarily have equal and autonomous value? Perhaps some, but not possibly all, ‘successful aesthetic experiences’, might have meaning here, in which case the idea as a whole must be re-considered, which further makes it doubtful how meaningfully the idea could be extended into a spiritual ontology theoretically founded on transpersonal (non-egoic) experiences. (Or perhaps Deutsch might have consigned his example to that of the Existent, rather than the Real Existent, given his own definitions of those ontological categories, but then his point of ‘high-souledness’ is lost.)

     Perhaps the most glaring inconsistency in the whole of Deutsch’s text is an obvious one that occurs in the final summary of his discussion of the four-fold ontology of the Advaitic analysis of the Self (Chapter 4, III&IV). After decribing the Advaitic distinction between nirvikalpa and savikalpa samadhi, Deutsch adds that “The distinction between the two…is important because it…makes clear, in terms of the distinction between savikalpa samadhi and susupti, the deep-sleep state, the fundamental difference between Atman and the jiva” (1969: 62). This idea is given further elaboration in “Whereas in susupti [deep-sleep] the self is still a knowing subject, although there is nothing there as such to be known, in savikalpa samadhi the self is aware only of the presence of Reality…In susupti the self is still very much the jiva; in savikalpa samadhi the self is passing into Atman” (pp.62-3). All of which makes it clear that, while devoid of the stimulus of the sense-mental world and face to face, as it were, with the causal origin of it (avidya or ignorance), susupti is still ontologically grounded in the self-identification of the jiva, the dual self.

     In the next paragraph, however, Deutsch allies “the state of deep sleep [susupti] and of savikalpa samadhi to the qualified Brahman (saguna) or the Divine (Isvara)” (p.63).

We can agree that the formulation here of savikalpa samadhi resonates with what we already know of saguna Brahman, but an identification of deep sleep with saguna Brahman is either contradicting the definitions of these terms as already given, or implying a further distinction of them which is not made explicit.

IV

In a discussion of the ‘self-validity of knowledge’ in the context of Advaitic epistemology (Chapter VI), Deutsch makes a claim for the status of relative knowledge in relation to the knowing of Brahman which is representative of the philosophical inadequacy already alluded to and might serve to conclusively summarise the conflict inherent in Deutsch’s position as a ‘re-constructor’ of Advaita: “The whole of perception and reason is negated the moment there is a dawning of the truth of Brahman. If Brahman alone is real, then clearly there cannot be another order of truth that subsists in some kind of finality. From the standpoint of Brahman, all other knowledge is false” (1969: 90).

    Without reiterating the essential presumption in this type of claim already discussed (see Part I above), theoretically this conclusion would appear to obtain given strict logical application of what we understand of the categories of ‘perception and reason’ and Brahman. Yet there is an inconsistency here which may be demonstrated by both logical refutation and a more intuitive inference of what these terms mean in the spiritual (as opposed to epistemological) context of Advaita.

     First, Deutsch has already in an earlier analysis of the knowledge-claims of the pramanas (‘means of valid knowledge’) concluded that “the final goal of knowledge, namely, spiritual intuitive insight, once attained, relegates all other forms and types of knowledge to a lower knowledge…but when attained, insures (that is, does not disturb) the validity of the lower forms of knowledge when they are applied appropriately to their own phenomenal spheres” (op.cit. p.83, my italics). That is, that knowledge engendered by the phenomenal activity of ‘perception and reason’ (viz. pratyaksa and the logic-based types [upamana, anumana and arthapatti especially] of the six pramanas) has its place and even with the ontological advent of Brahman, ‘is not disturbed’ by the ontological subration of that experience. Knowledge derived from perception and reason still obtains as a kind of mechanistic explanation of the phenomenal world of names and forms (nama-rupa-loka), even while it has been transcended by the intuitive insight of Brahman, and even where it cannot maintain “pretensions to finality or ultimacy” (ibid.) In short, while the ontological frame has changed, the epistemological doesn’t necessarily thereby become obsolete (though in more specifically ‘spiritual’ terms it might).

     Deutsch further supports this formulation in that “[Brahman] does not provide one with any facts about the natural order that are not obtainable through the pramanas” (p.84) and quotes Samkara “who shows not only that ‘one means of knowledge does not contradict another’, but that…intuitive experience, cannot contradict the testimony of the senses or of reason when they are operating in their proper domains. ‘You cannot prove’ he writes, ‘that fire is cold, or that the sun does not give heat…’” (ibid., n.5). If so, how is this kind of mechanistic knowledge then wholly “negated” and rendered “false” as Deutsch subsequently claims?

     Second, in appealing to an intuitive comprehension of the relation between Brahman and relative knowledge, the qualifications of ‘negation’ and ‘falsification’ might more meaningfully be substituted with the notions of transcendence and non-exclusion. Can Brahman which is by definition all-inclusive also be defined in terms of that which it falsifies, qua falsification? If so, then both a logical and metaphysical inconsistency results, where Brahman is that ground of all possible attributes definable by none. Is it more intuitively probable that the knowledge of the pramanas is rather ‘seen through’ than wholly excluded in the Brahman-state. The ontological point of view is the more significant dynamic here, as in much of Advaita generally, rather than that of epistemologically defining the final status of pramana-knowledge and its relation to Brahman per se. In short, Brahman can never be exclusionary, cannot negate or falsify any perception or form of knowledge if it is to preserve its logical and metaphysical integrity, but rather transcends them or makes them irrelevant (as in avidya, for example, cf. p.85), which are qualitatively and dynamically different movements of human being.

V

In the 2nd verse of his Atma-Bodha Samkara asserts the primacy of jnana over all other forms of spiritual knowledge: “Compared to other means, knowledge, indeed, is the sole direct means to release./As is fire for cooking, without knowledge, release does not result.” (Mahadevan 1975: 3). Advaita Vedanta, as the classic path of jnana enquiry, begins in the rational intellect but moves into a multi-perceptual field of discovery that can only be assumed to disarm the discriminatory mind entirely. 

     Deutsch holds to this principle and in the face of avidya succeeds in explicating the essential metaphysical ideas of Advaita, yet in the doing perpetuates a categorical equivocation such that their conceptual status might be said to depart from their contextual meaning grounded as devices of Advaitic spiritual enquiry. This enquiry has sought to illustrate how the ‘pre-philosophical’ dichotomy inherent in the incongruence of rational explication with transcendent intuition will give rise to the kinds of problem isolated here. Again, Deutsch concedes his particular dilemma: “Human language is grounded in a phenomenal experience of multiplicity and cannot therefore be used accurately to refer to Brahman; likewise, human logic is based upon phenomenal experience and thus is incapable of “determining”, without at the same time “negating”, its subject” (p.14).

     How, then, make the attempt? Yet isn’t the very hope of Advaita, generally as well as ‘re-constructed’ here by Deutsch, that the human mind ultimately know, both saguna and nirguna, Brahman? If not, what is its import, both philosophically and as a spiritual ideal of human being? The response finally, and by logical imperative as much as spiritual intention, seems to be not to have to find a language to refer to Brahmanic experience, as a necessarily dualistic philosophical discourse does, but to speak that human language which might spontaneously issue from it.

(1999)

_____________

REFERENCES

   – Deutsch, Eliot (1969) Advaita Vedanta, a Philosophical Reconstruction, East-West Center Press, USA.

   – Mahadevan, T.M.P. trans. and comm.(1975) Self-Knowledge, the Atma-Bodha of Sri Sankaracarya, Arnold-Heinemann, New Delhi, India.

In Prague I had next to no money, few prospects, fewer friends, and I was not the happiest man alive. I lived for some time in the hostel at the Central Railway Station tower, up under the eaves with the pigeons and other adventurers and escapees from the greater world. I did have one friend, it seems, who came from Louisiana and styled himself Brother John. He had a bottomless supply of bootleg vodka just brought from Lithuania, which drunk from large plastic Coke bottles had a piquant tang of deep forest, aniseed and the faint echoes of reindeer bells. In the nights we drank this, along with Brother John’s bottomless supply of Czech absinthe. During the days, because it was still cold enough, I stayed in bed and read Conrad, which had, all things considered, become my all-time favourite activity in life. Or, failing that, I wrote.

I had, as it happens, been writing in earnest, for some dozen years. Like most other people who pretend to the position, I had from an early age passionately and fitfully produced novels, poems and plays in a prolific bravado of juvenile zeal. I even had, from that young age, an agent who had sought me out, rather than the other way round, and who all confirmed was one of the best in the country, as she must have been, representing some of the ablest writers to be found there.

No-one told me, though, that this was the beginning of my Fall, and for the next dozen years, despite my steady and sweated-over industry, my agent failed, as I did, to get anything of mine, at all, printed. Not a paragraph, not a sentence, not even a sequence of a few humble, disenfranchised words, as of the last gasp of a dying race, whose language might never be heard from again. To all intents and purposes, my voice, before it had even made a noise, had effectively died without a single trace of it to be seen, as if an invisible double of the Titanic that had not merely sunk deep beneath the surface of a cold ocean, but had always and only ever cruised just beneath its surface, a ghost-ship, ghost-written, ghostily-gone.

So to write, at this point, in Prague, was an exercise in both folly and renunciation. I had given up sending anything anywhere, and wrote for my own perverse pleasure, past hope of sharing it with humankind. Prague, too, was good for this: the winter, and the city, was unwilling to let go its predatory claws, it snowed most days, and the cold poe-faces of Czech hostel-attendants, bar-keeps, restauranteurs, even of the wistfully beautiful Czech women who served me the black Russian Caravan or Lapsang Souchong in the tea-house that was my only personal indulgence – all discouraged approach, and at any rate I was sick of being charged extra insidious amounts for things like packaged milk for my coffee, wine for a wine-glass of whose larger dimensions I had not originally asked, or being over-charged on the assumption that, dumb tourist as I must be (I did not qualify, with my means, for the word), I would not notice.

They were mendacious, arrogant, attitudinising new capitalists who all assumed every traveller had vast reserves of Western currency to throw away on poor coffee or mediocre food in every transaction, and if you have far, far less than such reserves, and come from a place whose currency is worth no more in any case, the whole course of subsistence becomes painfully demoralising. I started getting bitter and resentful, angry and morose.

And there had been recent thefts in the hostel, despite the presence of a police headquarters half-way up the Railway Station tower, directly below our upper-most floor. Thieves, at 2am, had gone through every dormitory while we slept, taking cameras, cash and the odd passport. I was miraculously spared. But it was clear Prague was a place of crime and callous, disinterested, mercenary opportunism. I loved, with the purest and deepest fraternity, Kafka and Kundera, Havel and Holub, Janacek and Martinu, but this was not that. This was just an over-touristed, exploitative and acquisitive bid for milking the old capitalist enemy of everything he still had. And I had nothing. Literally. As the month came to a dreary, freezing close, I decided to save on funds and move to a marginally cheaper place on the other side of the river, in Mala Strana, the Old Town. There, I hoped, I would be left to Conrad, medicinal doses of absinthe, and my irrelevant and unacquisitive writing, in the peace of snow and a steadily descending social disenfranchisement. What I would do when my slithery funds ran out, I had no idea.

This is not to say I had not sought out employment in Prague. I spoke to the tediously style-conscious proprietors of antipodean bars who recommended I try American ones instead, or Irish, or Scottish, or South African. I had two, even three, degrees, including a recently completed post-graduate stint with one of the last greats of what is still called the Beat Generation – still alive, and, so he said, very awake to what I was doing, who gave me straight High Distinctions which could have been as much to do with his Buddhist compassion as anything else. Perhaps he also knew, as a Buddhist, that High Distinction grades are empty of inherent existence, so that they shouldn’t be taken too seriously in any case.

With my not-too-serious High Distinctions I trawled every English language-school in Prague, especially when things had begun to get desperate. I was not eating very much by this stage, and the absinthe, perhaps, was beginning to deal the death-blows to whatever spirit I could still summon. Walking into the icy wind, snow melting on my face, I would find myself seeping tears, motionlessly, water coming out of my eyes as if everything they saw was just a seamless continuation of the sadness that seemed imbued in the inane tourists, the illusioned lovers, the starving pigeons, the grey and leaden Vltava flowing under the Charles Bridge, under our snowbound feet, everything just sad, too sad. I persevered, and one by one was asked by every language-school in Prague to provide a current CV of all relevant experience and academic attainment.

These I had. But, as I used a Mac laptop (a cherished, stalwart companion over years, continents, novels and degrees, lovers lost and found), copies of the same were only to be had by printing from my Mac-formatted discs. They wouldn’t accept electronic applications. These were, remember, those dim, obscurely transitional days of 2004, and the former Communist-bloc of the Czech Republic had barely met this greater Middle Age from its own more intractable Dark one. With the aim of lightening my load, I had decided not to carry hard-copies of banal but essential documents like CVs, assuming it easier to print them out as needed. But after a fortnite of scouring the city, I found not a single Prague printing-shop able to deliver my single page of Quixotic, lean and patchy, writerly CV. There were other solutions, surely, but the truth was I’d lost the heart for it. It was a no-go, the white skies were telling me loud and clear, just as it had been a no-go in my own hometown, no-go in the United States, no-go in Munich (where I had just come from, and been poisoned by bad fish-soup my first day there). Just as it had been no-go from agents and publishers on three continents vis-a-vis my most recent, largest and heaviest novel, a copy of which, like my own personal albatross, I still carried with me everywhere. I reasoned that I didn’t want to join the upwardly mobile American expat class of English-teaching professionalism in any case, and decided to all-out retire from the race, back to Conrad, absenteeism via absinthe, and absolute obscurity. I could expire in the snow for all I cared.

But before I had left the hostel in the Railway tower, I had written a last, summary piece of fiction, inspired by a Prague street-beggar, a man without legs, whom I had occasionally sponsored with the odd offering, and who, of all the thousands of human bipeds in the city, was the sole soul with whom I felt, and felt returned, some fellow-feeling. If he was Estragon, I could be his Vladimir. If he was Quixote, I would be his Sancho.

I moved then, at the end of the month, negotiating the obtuse tourist thousands crushed into the icy paths of every bridge spanning the river, so that there was no choice but to make a sorry way through the fray. They all had pounds and dollars and Swiss francs bursting out of the seams of their clothes, were stuffing themselves with fatty Czech sausages, already drunk from the cheap, dark beer.

I checked into the hostel, which was a converted old Communist youth sports complex. There was a cheery young Czech native, from Ceske Budjejovice, sharing the dormitory. I gathered he was looking for work in Prague, and that he had an automated electric German-made massage machine I could buy from him if I was interested. Was I ever! I said, though some irony was proverbially lost. I told him I was hard up myself, had tried looking for work in Prague, and in a spirit of comradely optimism offered to buy him a meal and a beer. He chose the restaurant, where I spent a good proportion of the last of my money on his sustenance and well-being. He didn’t have any English, seemed not too bright, and didn’t appear to have any sympathy or interest in my own plight, as a fellow-sufferer of Prague’s ravenously dismissive employment policies. But he was my only dorm-mate, and perhaps, as time wore horribly on, a friend. After the meal I told him I was taking a walk down by the river, and agreed to meet later that night at a nightclub to broker some romantic transactions with young Czech womanhood.

When I returned to the hostel he was gone. My locker, with lock still intact on the plyboard door, was smashed into unrecognition, and everything that I might still have had of value, including my computer, CD player, and all music and back-up discs, had been stolen. He had left me the German massage-machine as a kind of fair trade (spoken with a gritted-teeth German massage-maschine its apparent funktion seemed more ironic still). Otherwise only the recently-written story about the legless beggar, in hard-copy, still remained – clearly worthless, to the new, young Czech sub-class. I took it out of the damage and kept it in my jeans’ back pocket, went to the police and reported the crime.

It was April Fool’s Day.

It would be gratuitous to describe this new Czech adventure, tempting though it is. Kundera in The Joke, and Kafka in The Trial, have described it far better than I might be able to. Though both the hostel and police had the full name, address and details of the young malefactor from Ceske Budjejovice, and though they came in in the early hours of the following days with full, purse-lipped, post-Communist Slavic circumspection, and finger-printed and Polaroided every irrelevent detail of the scene of the crime, though they kept me waiting for whole mornings on end in fluorescent police waiting-rooms, as though I was the criminal, the upshot, a year later, was that they sent me a huge envelope, all in legalese Czech, apparently informing me that nothing of my property had been recovered, and they had been unable to charge the suspected felon because, as he told them, ‘you can’t prove it was me that did it’. As doubtless they couldn’t.

He might have been lucky to make $50 from the computer on the black-market – though I had already discovered that Mac computers were virtually redundant in the Czech Republic, and one as old as mine, with its foreign configurations, probably useless. It was gone, along with five to ten years of the poems, short-stories, novels and plays, that no-one had ever wanted to publish anyway.

As for me, now I knew for certain that my only friend was Joseph Conrad, and that I would go to the Buddhist monastery in the south of France that I had, in any case, been fantasising in just such a contingency. When I left Prague, the only thing I carried out of there that I could see as a positive gain to shore against all the loss, was the short-story I kept folded in my jeans. And that kind of faith has to be seen as the biggest folly of them all.

Exactly a year later, after many and divers a tragic and hilarious circumstance, I found myself teaching English literature (including my patron saint Conrad himself) to students in a Krishnamurti high-school in the remote deeps of Andhra Pradesh, southern India. It was while there, during a long stretch of school holidays and in the humid solitude of the pre-monsoon, that I received message that my short-story about the legless Prague street-beggar had been accepted by a literary journal somewhere. It was, incredibly, my first appearance in print, outside of university rags and youthful journalism. Incredibly, because to my prelapsarian mind it should have happened much earlier, and because it had finally happened at all. I had already resigned myself to lifelong literary celibacy, a brahmacharya of the word where the only syntactical emissions would be uncalled-for, unaroused, breaking-forth in the deep mystery of nocturnal dream-generation. I would stay a teacher of the gospel of Heart of Darkness for the rest of my natural term if need be.

A few days before receiving this news I had read Kafka’s The Judgment, one of his earliest published short-stories, written at age 29, which described his painfully antipathetic relationship with his mercantile, defiantly middle-class and a-literary father. The experience Kafka describes was so like the one I had known with my own uncomprehending (also Slavic) father, that I was struck with a moment of uncanny recognition. At 29, I had left my homeland, in part prompted by the same kind of paternal standoff, and that year in graduate school in California had written with a kind of half-digested compulsiveness on Kafka, blind authority, and the nature of alienness. This essay had been definitively lost on the computer stolen on April Fool’s Day in, of all places, Prague. (I had, in the two years since writing the essay, travelled through at least a dozen big cities on four continents – so why then, in Prague?) That event had also seemed to mark a final relinquishing of a writer’s ambition, yet that same month I had written a slight story about that same city, that would, a year later, break the twelve years drought that had failed to see anything I had written in print.

If, as many still suggest, our failures or our mistakes are secret wish-fulfilments, I have reason to be grateful to the malefactor from Ceske Budjejovice, who knew the plot all along. There’s no gain without loss, and whatever comes without cost, might not be worth the coming. I had paid, and I could still pay a little more.

Paris, 2006

I

In November 2005, Ram Bahadur Bomjon or the popularly known ‘Buddha Boy’, a Nepali youth who began meditating beneath a pipal tree in his local village of Ratanapuri, Bara district, in May of that year, claimed he would achieve full Buddhahood within six more years of deep meditative practice. Bomjon’s claim followed an initial feat of ten months of apparently uninterrupted fasting, also in sustained meditation; other apparent miracles ensued following his exposure to the world media, the scientifically curious, and not least the Buddhist faithful in his native Nepal, in south Asia and much further afield, in the West.

It is six years now, in late-2011: is Bomjon now the Buddha he is believed by many to be? Hundreds of thousands of his sympathisers wait on his every word with bated breath.

The resonance with the original is telling: the Buddha of our aeon, Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakya clan, also came from Nepal, 2,600 years ago, his mother had the same first name of Maya Devi, he also performed extreme austerities for six years before attaining enlightenment beneath a pipal tree. (Voluntary fasting was a large part of Siddhartha Gautama’s, and general, yogic practice then and before, and still is now among the Hindu ascetics of modern India.) Bomjon’s family are from the Nepalese Tamang community, many of whom are devout Vajrayana Buddhists. He was in 2005 by his own lights already a rinpoche, or precious reincarnated being with already profound levels of realization, but he has become for the popular spiritual imagination a living Buddha. He is also, however, a pop-culture figure for faux-worship and satire, made the subject of bumper stickers and You Tube cartoons.

Bomjon’s extraordinary physical feat of meditating for at least ten months apparently without food or water, is remarkable by any standards, especially if it is true. (There is in this some uncertainty due to interrupted medical observation of Bomjon subsequent to the critical period of fasting; he was also thought to have moved, perhaps taken sustenance, when behind a hessian screen put up periodically for his privacy.) There are of course many thousands, if not millions, of authentic yogis in South Asia, in and outside of monasteries, many of whom have been documented to have achieved almost unimaginable feats of voluntary bodily control and apparent immunity to a range of normal biological requirements for survival. This does not make their achievements miracles, nor their practitioners living enlightened Buddhas.

Which is where the advent of Ram Bomjon is genuinely compelling: his messianicity has been proclaimed from the beginning. It is already curious that while claiming a solitary ascetic practice that sought no attention, Bomjon began sitting in a place conspicuous to the local people who know him. What then appeared in late-2005 as an espousal of him by the local Tibetan Buddhist Sakyapa hierarchy became a first religious contextualization of Bomjon, as both a Buddhist avatar, and more specifically a Tantric yogi who had so mastered his nervous system as to be able to sweat at will, in mild conditions and without any bodily movement. (Marlon Brando was well-known for doing the same in some of his early auditions!) Bomjon’s teenage brother also speaks humbly of a topknot manifesting spontaneously in Bomjon’s long hair, as in one of the physical signs of the Buddha. Other apparent miracles can be observed on YouTube footage—a naked Bomjon performs puja in the flames of a fire, or he is described as unaffected by a cobra-bite.

After the initial ten-month period of apparent fasting, Bomjon disappeared into the jungle of Bara district in March 2006 to seek another place for less-disturbed meditation. At this point also the police froze the bank-account of the local committee managing the crowds of pilgrims who had come to him with donations—an amount then of more than Rps. 600,000. Much of this revenue came from an entrance-fee to view him, and the pamphlets, books, cassettes and DVDs sold promoting Bomjon as a new Buddha. Bomjon’s formal religious (rather than purely ascetic) status was further authorised by the monastic title of Palden Dorje—again confirmed in an ‘official website’: www.paldendorje.com, which offers sensitively framed footage of Bomjon’s various public addresses since 2007.

In a lay-yogi’s robe, Bomjon sits on a newly-built raised vasana painted white and gold, with steps on each side. Pilgrims come from near and far to hold worshipful puja, burning incense and making prayers, or line up inside a cordoned area to offer katag to the near-Buddha. It’s a peaceful and uncanny vision, redolent with the saffron succour of old India and its oldest myths of the salvation of the soul through the form of a youthful enlightened being. It is hard to imagine that not far away in neighbouring thick jungle, and not too long ago, Maoist revolutionaries have for decades lived clandestinely and fought the national army in a bitterly-contested bid for freedom. The promise of freedom, even in an old culture such as that of Nepal, comes in many guises.

II

Available for a global audience on You Tube are Ram Bomjon’s two speeches of August 2007, one of which is closed-eyed, the other longer and more open-eyed. They are similar in their effect, and what I suggest below of the ‘closed-eyed’ speech can also be said of the ‘open-eyed’ one. Bomjon speaks in the monotonous tones of an adolescent reciting a reasonably well-memorized speech. There is no sign of a smile or an emotional gauge of his audience. He keeps his eyes closed for virtually the entire roughly eight minute performance. He pauses now and then, it seems in nervousness, at having lost his place or of being uncertain how to proceed. The broadcast in Nepali on the “Supreme Master TV” station offers an onscreen English translation of this speech, but even without translation Bomjon’s diction suggests a disconnect between syntax and the natural speech-rhythms required to express it. About five minutes into the speech he repeats, then corrects himself, and for the very first time lightly smiles, bashfully, a very human and self-conscious gesture, as any young performer in a school presentation would before he regains his place after stumbling.

The speech given in October 2009, an appeal against the mass animal slaughter of the Gadhi Mai Festival in Nepal evinces still more the same ‘performative glitch’. It is a movingly painful performance: also roughly ten minutes long, it begins boldly but from 8.30 Bomjon’s uncertain delivery, his own discomfort, is palpable. Who has written a possible original text—Bomjon himself? or an uncredited mentor? One Western witness and blogger, a seeker sympathetic to Bomjon, writes that “Strangely, he concluded halfway between a sentence, trailing off, letting the words, both spoken and unspoken, hang in the air,” before “the brief spell of serenity quickly degenerated into a frenzy again as Palden Dorje returned to his pedestal and people began lining up to receive darshan.”

The verbal content of Bomjon’s speeches might be uncharitably described as Buddhist platitude, if its somewhat alarmist and righteous, even apocalyptic, urgency were not so clearly sincere in intent. In a corrupt and fast degenerating world, it is only the law of dharma that will rescue all beings from the current irreversible results of negative action. It is the karmic function of the bodhisattva, of whom Bomjon is one ‘on the way’, to proclaim the Buddha’s holy truth in such times as these. Bomjon’s worthy truth is unsurprising; its high-messianic tone however is. Rarely does missionary Buddhism become so personalised; but this is not normal missionary Buddhism when the speaker is an ostensibly enlightened Buddha.

Does poor public speaking alone disclaim Bomjon as such? (His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama also reports his great apprehension when as a novice he was first called upon to speak to crowds of thousands in the early fifties in Tibet.) The answers are not so simple, but the given facts and the questions they raise certainly muddy the waters of the orthodox Buddhist representation surrounding Bomjon himself, willing but inadequate poster-boy (it would appear) for the religious hierarchy that guides him.

If Bomjon is a visionary near-Buddha who has spent the previous four years in a profound and virtually mute immersion in esoteric planes barely conceivable by even seasoned meditators, he is also an amazingly natural, human, and in that sense ordinary, one. His performative paralysis is only a brief if consistent moment, but it betrays, resoundingly, an authentic natural humanness amidst all the built-up ceremony and high-flown spiritual rhetoric. There is little sense of a new Buddha having spoken, of the gravitas, charisma or power of a highly-realised mature being offering his own natural words and self-won insight into the nature of reality. Indeed, the previously-quoted witness writes that “The young man suddenly shifted gears into overdrive, ludicrously blessing with a pace so quick he was practically bonking people on the head with the dorje as they passed.”

III

Religious Buddhism holds that an authentically enlightened being can most effectively transmit its values because they are concentrated in him, or her, in their purest, most essential, unalloyed, uncorrupted or corruptible, realized form. In Bomjon religious Buddhism receives a partly convincing and telegenic messianic throwback to the archetype of Sakyamuni Buddha, a young man who appears to fulfil all the needed criteria. There is nothing cynical here, Tibetan Buddhism is if anything globally respected for its general lack of taint, of maintaining a record for transparency: H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama is of course its universally-respected paragon.

Unless of course the claim is simply not true: that Bomjon is not a bodhisattva or Buddha, but rather a highly gifted young ascetic. H.H. the Dalai Lama has only ever claimed the status of a simple monk (despite the supreme religious office he has been called upon to assume). Bomjon however loses this modest representation from the beginning. Bomjon is reified (by himself and by significant others) in a way that can only work in an old primary culture where religion serves symbolic and archetypal ends, not purely epistemic ones, and where gods are still respected and worshipped as such, where literal truth is not something that carries the primary value it does to the Western mind. On this level, a psychologically and culturally very real one, little blame can be placed.

However, in the West at least, which (arguably) prides itself on its capacity for impartial discrimination, ontological exactitude and epistemic integrity, it is increasingly impossible to take on faith something which is only uncertainly true at best. Culturally, psychologically and ethically it is proving difficult for agnostic Western culture to sustain the myth of reification (though theistic religion, and scientistic ‘faiths’ like contemporary neo-Darwinism, hold on tenaciously) when more provisionally true, multiple, cross-fertilising and mutually-productive interpretations can do a good working job of understanding what ‘the truth’ might ultimately signify. Fifty years of recent Western philosophy has at least reached such a consensus. We live in an hermeneutic age, not an absolutist one: this is of course the enormously threatening gauntlet held out to Islam and fundamentalist Christianity alike. Even in terms of Buddhism itself ‘enlightenment’ is merely a word, one which carries a varying wealth of signification, wears an infinitude of guises (or even, most radical of all, none at all). Even if Bomjon’s Sakyapa entourage mean only the global good in elaborating in messianic terms the possibly much more prosaic nature of Bomjon’s attainment, doing so is still manipulating the reception of whoever it is he might more authentically be.

If this is a deception of a kind, then however benign it also unfortunately succeeds in compromising whatever is of value in Bomjon’s public ‘ascendency.’ What would be of inestimable use would be if Bomjon were able to offer in his own words a description of his yogic and other experience as it is, without metaphysics—and with or without the sustenance of food. (Regarding such austerities the Buddha made it explicitly clear that such extremes of tapas were of no essential benefit or use to anyone vis-à-vis achieving enlightenment: hence the Buddhist ethico-pragmatic ‘Middle Way.’) Because Bomjon embodies a far more complex, and confused, nexus of religious, metaphysical, mythological and ethical forces and subconscious cultural assumptions than those that have been simplistically projected onto and then publicly represented by him. Those complexities are rich, real and interesting, and it would be enlightening to explore and perhaps come to understand them.

Instead, what the world is offered is a closed term: Bomjon-as-Buddha, seated on a throne, reifies a complex human person to be a single, essential ‘something’ in ontologically disturbing ways. By absolutising something as fixed in an essential identity, little room is left for nuance, natural ambiguity, irony, shifts of emphasis, undirected trajectories of unexpected influence. Its translation into the common cultural currency tends to require a univocal, often dogmatic, form of interpretive transmission. It implies monolingual authority rather than a dialogical mutuality. A symbol taken as really-existing catalyses a chain-reaction of associated demands and conditions that can, and do, become economic and political, that enter into manipulations of power indistinguishable from the enmeshments of saṃsāra. It is disturbing to discover, more recently, that Bomjon has been accused during 2010 of violently assaulting young men come to disturb his meditative retreat. It would be impossible to verify this also; its mere appearance smacks of slander, but that only rehearses, all too inevitably, the enmeshment already alluded to.

In Nepal, as elsewhere in the Buddhist world, the criteria for belief, for better and for worse, remain steeped in mytho-poetic tropes of deep cultural continuity as well as social conservatism. Where the individual autonomy of scepticism might be seen as a threat to deeper social cohesion and identity, it is diminished as a form of existential integrity. Where the depth of tradition still provides much of the psychic social bulwark for increasingly unstable and erratically modernizing societies, of which Nepal is a prime example, the old forms of security cannot go questioned, let alone deconstructed.

Who would demand they should be? If Ram Bahadur Bomjon may never redeem and ‘save the world’ from its real misguidedness, we can at least be grateful that he gives us all pause to consider that misguidedness itself, and perhaps his own as well, and provide for that rare space in which all of us, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, can try to dream again. We look to see how much of that all-too-possible freedom he will invite us to dream along with him in the time to come.

(2010; August- December 2011)

hopelessly          pursuing itself

hunger for the woman

                                        gopi-girl

these words     fragment of torn stuff

rachitic curtain put up

against far plain knotted space

                                       between us

         masque       (for dancing)

another veil        like this rain

                   shot through with holes –

the first to come in months

Bihar 2001

Long years of the dark-eyed lens

           obscuring sight              losing focus on what’s been lost

                           inland seas of tears opened/ unburdened

                a humming jet-plane moving empty-faced

across Antipodes desert and drift

                        sheer Himalaya ridge of mind’s eye

                                               breaking through

                                                                                  unknown space.

Is that what all exiles are:

                                            every morning meeting ‘the air of another planet’

knowing that freedom comes out

                       of a cupful of silent water

               where bodies everywhere seek their own weight

in another                             wait in abeyance

                                           to inner-city street-grit worlds

stories dried-up                       books forgotten

                              love               sex                dissolved in

film-frame all 64 shapes of ecstasy

                                                       gone in a second

of wheels lifting from earth

                                 the end-click of a long-distance line.

In buses           trains            planes

                         rickshaw               tempo-ride

               bicycle and oxcart                      cargo ship

                                      moving through still earth

without the Original ticket

                      the next stop-point only

                                   half a destination

to take flight                   flutter

                unfurl                  get cast down/ out

from nectar places                unravel in fever-beds of

              hunger or

                                the deafening suburbs

where does everything go?

In India passing alone by Ganges steps

        the ghats frantic with Sivaratri

    mania of bells            didgeridu

                   among the flames              Brahmin dead

satellite-enshrouded                   beamed-out from Krishna maw

         of mouth             kaleidoscope of all the worlds turning there:

                    Wall Street pretas               Fairfax demi-gods

                belly-dancing brokermen              flab-fool’d

                                            grasping at hours                champagne flute

           sewer-music                 efflux of the spheres

before the rage of yuga’s turning

                     CNN oraculars                        World Cup finals

                bedtime benedictions of the BBC

                                        updates on the bombing raids

                                                                           ‘keep the homefires burning’

           terrorist cells inciting

domestic fissures                                 new cracks in the wall –

stop in at Shiva’s druggy shrine

                    make offerings to all the ghosts

     spirits             yakshas

crowded inside the Shadow of untold lives

                             10,000 years gathered in this town

               someone wants to sell you opium someone else enlightenment

                          drumbeats bloodletting Varanasi arteries

bhanged-out in the night

                         time-blown in the year 2001

on Dasaswamedh Ghat the aarti

              hums an open-tuning on the air

all beings with the dead                       turning Shiva blue

                      by dawn chillum-smokers rouse

                                                             Ganges lapping bank

                                      pale blue boat

drifting loose                              vulture hovering above

                                                     smoke-stained roof…

Syndicated News in Economy doesn’t show the burning

               of Gujerati Hindu                     of Jew

of Palestinian human-bomb inferno

                             Bosnian-Serb brothers-in-blood

                                             Kurdish no-man’s land

                Tibetan genocide unsung

                                        Hutu plains of bone-bleached soil

lost peoples                 every one                      where do they all go

silent as                     old Buddhas of Afghanistan

                                  blown up into ten-thousand pieces

                          each pregnant with Kasyapa’s smile

lying in dust forever to ask of us

             if the great matter of life and death

                   sphinx-riddle that refuses any answer

world’s perpetual will to suffer                    is the only will to tame her

                              the hungers the horror of a self-willed hell

the only proof to convince us

              of death’s provisional night

                             the steady grace of pain

       evaded     misread       unheeded

under stratosphere sonorities          rustled newspapers                static

                  over the intercom from some God to here …

Dawn come

       birthing inbetween the blinds

someone else’s motherland                   yielding beneath the wheels

                breast of coastal hills

                                    nervous system of Los Angeles grid

vast                                                    serpentine.

Milarepa was wrong

               there is no homeland                     other than this mind

                                    though the relinquishing give it dreams

no choice

             though filmic narrations

                         demand heroes and ill-histories

                     succour of war

              refugee-plagues

                                         knocking at democracy’s

Janus-faced door

                                                 another crusade against

apostate                the meek

                                                     earth’s poor.

Coming to every unknown shore

                      an innocent and a fool

               stepping-down                    touching earth

history’s weight             uncaught

                                       flies                            breathless

                       away from you

          unyoked now                      always

                                          unsought

- this life the only life to bring breath to.

India – California May 2002

play electronic Für Elise

as they collect the town waste –

                 (where else so talented?)

in different keys, moving

closer, now further away, to

the outskirts.

I hear them from the 7^th floor, the building moves

in sea-breezes, the oneiric

Casiotone, a polyphony

underwater     & out of tune.

This century already more haunted

than the last

not least by Ludwig

 - aesthetically impaired, technobiotically dumb –            

raging deafly from the grave.

Toucheng, Taiwan July 2011

all of China behind me

already stood in line half the day

               shuts just as I reach..

some gentle overseer hovers

     doubtless over these billions

                   with-holding the plan;

everyone else might just

             strip & fuck right on the floor

mass-production of the species

engineered like any other.

No-one knows

the girl in tight shorts a thousand yelling men dwarfen guy

with a little boy he drags beside the bars

the seething ones still coming

no-one knows

where they’re going

willing to wait now

for the great harvest.

Xiamen, China 10.VII.2011

A short talk for World Press Freedom Day celebrated at ExPPACT (Ex-Political Prisoners’ Advocacy, Counselling and Training) given Mae Sot, Thailand, May 1, 2011:

The defense of genuine freedom of speech is one of the most critical issues in the world right now. It will decide a lot of things about our collective future. It also faces a lot of challenges. Everyone knows the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo is still behind bars despite winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and that his colleague the artist Ai Wei Wei has disappeared; that the great U Gambira still languishes in a Burmese prison; that writers like Arundhati Roy in India receive regular death-threats for trying to expose government injustice; that Thai intellectuals, just this last week, are spuriously charged with insulting the Thai king; and that journalists all through the war-zones of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are lucky to find the truth, let alone free to report it. Last month in Tibet a Buddhist monk performed self-immolation in protest against Chinese abuse: the only way, he doubtless felt, to have his voice truly heard.

I’ve been talking about China, and other Asian countries, but press freedom also has a hard time in so-called open Western societies. Everyone also knows about the investigative journalists and rights workers in Russia, who sixty years after Stalin, are assassinated at the hands of political or ideological hit-men. But the problem is also much closer to home. The courageous but perhaps slightly crazy Australian whistle-blower Julian Assange is someone who with Wikileaks has challenged American neo-imperial self-interest in a way that changes the rules of the game for good. Whether or not you agree with Assange’s shock-tactics is your own decision, but few could deny that he deserves the full protection of the law, and certainly in the U.S. the First Amendment, before being demonised as a ‘criminal’ as even the Australian Prime Minister did of him as soon as the Pentagon whispered something in her ear.

No-one knows yet precisely how Assange and Wikileaks should be judged and that’s how it should be. Freedom of speech, including freedom of the press, also implies that we are each free to come to our own informed opinion given all the facts we have at our disposal. I’m not suggesting it’s an easy task to find the right level of responsibility towards different stakeholders, as a writer or a reader. But the bottom line is that the more true accounts of an event we have, the more informed we are. That is what Wikileaks seeks to do and in presenting previously withheld facts about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Assange has done us all a great service. What really justifies Wikileaks’ guerilla tactics? The fact that these are our nations’ wars, we started them and now we have the right and responsibility for intelligently understanding them. The same thing can be said for the recent exposure of Guantanamo detainee documents. It often seems that freedom of speech is endangered, and I think that’s true, but Wikileaks, among many others, also proves that the defenders of press freedom are alive and well and ready to expose abuses of power; and that millions of journalists and concerned citizens stand behind them.

But is it just by chance that Assange is currently also behind bars? Somehow I don’t think so. The long dark tunnel towards extradition has already begun for him, and he’s probably forfeited a real degree of freedom for the rest of his life, even if the U.S. Justice Department loses its case against him, as it probably will. Orwell once said that some of us are ‘more equal than others’, and it seems that in the U.S.A. as elsewhere, some are ‘more free to be free’ than others. But who has the right or power to decide who that is? No-one should have that right, or else everyone should.

We know, of course, that genuine media freedom doesn’t really exist in Burma. Recently Burma was classified as the 2^nd worst country in the world for Internet freedom, though recently President Thein Sein has promised more relaxed direct government censorship of print media. I’m not really qualified to talk about free speech in Burma, in front of men and women who have sacrificed so much for their beautiful country. But when I was there, in November last year during the so-called election, I did realize one thing I’ve never felt anywhere else. For more than a week during the election, Internet access where I was was completely shut down. I realized that at any moment, if they chose, the military could roll the tanks in, put up wire barriers and lines of troops, and there would be nothing me or anyone else could do. But what was almost worse was that it might prove pretty difficult, even impossible, to tell the rest of the world about it. For a moment I felt a fear I’d never known before. I could have been deaf or mute, completely locked in. That’s how it is for many in Burma and the world today, in their prison cells, or even in the privacy of their own homes: they can’t talk to us, or not easily, and tell us the truth. Or not until it’s sometimes too late.

Think about this: were the passengers on the 9/11 planes, or the Twin Towers workers, any more free when they could phone their families and loved ones from cell-phones before the Towers went down? Perhaps it made all the difference to them to tell people how much they loved them, a radical freedom inside a certain hell. And in fact that is what Liu Xiaobo said, from his Chinese prison-cell. His Nobel Prize address was a love-letter to his wife; one of the most moving and original messages to come from any prison anywhere.

I think all prisoners of conscience are really sending love-letters, sometimes in silence and sometimes in words, to those whose freedom they are trying to safeguard. Today we should recognize those who keep the value of free and transparent communication literally alive for the rest of us. They keep not only hope but the future itself alive. And the evidence is there: look at Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain. They already prove there are no guarantees, but they also prove that hope dies last or not at all. The Burmese regime may be the next to fall, however long it takes. And it will be because of great defenders of the truth, like you here at EXPPACT, that freedom may be at hand. And for that we honour you.

(also at the ExPPACT sites: http://exppact.org/?p=538; http://borderlinereport.blogspot.com/2011/05/world-press-freedom-day-2011.html)

a hoopoe calling out of silence.

The tree against which infants were killed,

broad, and green.

A boy from the shanty nearby who calls from the other side

of the perimeter-fence,

hand held out.

The tree is beyond innocence

it never built this ageless fence

these walls of skulls

the invisible line between

Us      and

Them.

Phnom Penh, March 2011

My interview with them can be read here: http://www.thebestfriend.org/2011/03/17/the-pen-is-sharper-than-the-sword-martin-kovan-interviews-ashin-kovida-and-ashin-issariya/