Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Fri 20 Nov 2009 12:54 AM PST
We sit in a suspended cage
surrounded by bandaged and numbered forms
cured cadavers of the past:
only instead of the macabre
flashes of beauty escape in scintillations
exotic fragrances and memories instead of formaldehyde.
your soft and disinterested
distant eyes in a breathing body
question my subjectivity
with some compassion some sadness.
peeling the feeling i read that language
compassion is yours for me and more
akin to the fractured golden
silences waiting timelessly around us.
but sadness not for me not for you
sadness of surfaces that refuse restitution
hurtling headlong in a time of terrible ambiguity
sadness of the incomprehesible
of words that crumble and dissipate
engendering looming monsters where once was beauty
like a pungent tea the savor of irony rises.
a century ago some silent men had walked through rubble
carefully with tender hands,
a landscape sorted and pieced together from ruins
developed a language of preservation and reconstruction
transformed much maligned monsters into gods
made proud victors bow their heads to peace
left the intuition of a global consciousness
noosphere, supermind or world of archetypes
touching down on the summits of cosmopolitan mind.
the white disaster of colonial racial violence
almost they turned to a blessing, dreamt of making
the universal terrestrial and material
sowed the seed of a confederacy of nations
to embody the legacy of intersecting human histories
cosmogenesis, christogenesis, anthropogenesis
the restitution of the body of the sacrificed Person
arising out of the human in the image of Viswarupa
but the hour of god departs
time curls like a dog's tail back to the archaic
the language of ownership like a resistant virus grows
the encaged structure endlessly proliferates,
the psychology of subject making, packaged desire
the colonization of time, days and nights of Corporation
the cosmos vanishing into information technology
endlessly formatted and reformatted.
the gods now shackled or dressed like cadavers
serve a world Empire, histories carefully ordered
in a Museum that structures the telos of Capital,
the god making enterprise displaced to the eugenics factory
the comfortable numbness of neo-liberal globalization,
death-dealing hidden in the exhibitionary apparatus of Civilization's anodyne.
but this is also the hour of the rise of the rest
modernity's cracks yield the swarm populations
identities narrowing and hardening to enumerable gestures
the classficatory mechanism of western hegemony gone awry.
the kamikaze return, the costumed traditions burn
in protest or bare their fangs and burn whatever escapes
comprehension. the gods return but hardly
godlike, riding their chariots of hate and popular frenzy.
the past returns, economic barbarism in a three-piece suit
pitted against the barbarism of lying priesthood.
the rhetoric of cultic blood-rites and suspicion
at the swiftly multiplying altars of the first god, the last prophet or the one who died for our sake
or the avatars without number oozing from the walls
demanding adherents and ethnic cleansing
in exchange for the Promised Land for the Chosen People
Matter the contested interior and exterior
you are indian you say, and american
you shuttle between two countries, two continents
two time zones, two histories, two languages.
To wear two semiotic coats and survive
one must study construction i say.
trailing clouds of history we come
identity blurred at the interstices
between subject and self like water i pass
a spiritual anthropology opens its gates
sedimented signatures, author, authority and authorization
peeled apart, the wholesome brotherhood of clans
the us/them laughter turns phantasmal,
muffled like a distant explosion.
between two alien descriptions i shuttle
using one's instruments to sound the other
cultivating a ear for the unstruck sound.
we piece together the hybrid vocabulary
prepare the subjective topography of the posthuman
in rhizomatic encounters we expand
deconstruction is an act of love
the other swells like yeast from within
like east within west, west within east
we secretly prepare the subjective topography
of the confederacy of nations, the return of the gods
recreating themselves perpetually like jazz.
blessed are those who take a leap towards the future.
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