it's you again, gandhari...

I have this moment of BANG realization at times reading a very very good book of a certain sort that I think of as my secret elitist canon, my Golden Bookshelf, my best of the best... where I realize OH. IT"S THE MAHABHARATA. the pancatantra? yup. dance to the music of time? yup. saga of burnt njal? oh most definitely and in fact nearly every really good norse saga or maybe All the Norse Sagas together. And not very far into Time Regained the sense of doom was building and I just BANG had that realization while driving home from the dump. Oh my god it's the Mahabharata again! Oh fuck!

It's the relation of the understanding of human relationships and families, which is almost understandable, to the most important and momentous and frightening thing, WAR. Which is not understandable. ("Why is there evil" being an important question to try to answer and War being the ultimate reality-destroying expression of evil, because it destroys what has been built and building is love, but maybe i'm just saying that as an avatar or worshiper of creating. ) And it is not just about War it is about how not to have War, but then if you have War, what happens. it is to express the buildup and the inevitability once the buildup of doom reaches a certain point, it is the juggernaut wound up like clockwork and released and unstoppable. it is the fire demons from Nausicaa. individual evils and jealousies and misunderstandings in a cacophonic feedback effect like compressed and compressing air in a spraycan jouncing around in there under high heat and pressure - so dangerous - it is the attempt to understand the 3-body or 5-body problem of the predictions of the orbits of planets or molecules but times millions and millions and colliding with another complex system and those complex systems are nations.

So that the pettiness between Arjuna and Dhristadyumna when they were little kids and their uncles and how their parents met and what happened back in their great-grandfathers' time ALL INTERRELATES AND INTERSECTS with "Now" making war horribly inevitable. Anyone who reads the Bhagavad Gita is familiar with Arjuna in the chariot begging Krsna to help him not be able to kill the enemy. "O my uncles and cousins!" if you read the whole Mahab. then you start to get it -- they are his uncles and cousins and friends that he grew up with, it is not "the enemy" in "war" -- he really knows them all and that makes it all the more unspeakable but you understand that all war is that way becasue of course the enemy is always on some level your uncles and cousins. You have to understand that when marcus aurelius writes of the individual self, or the family, or the city, being a microcosm of the State or Nation, it can be really true.

As Marcel keeps emphasizing that his neurotic microanalysis of his love and jealousy of gilberte and albertine and the lies and m. charlus's complexities have made him able to understand france and germany: "But just as there are animal bodies and human bodies, each one of which is an assemblage of cells as large in relation to a single cell as Mont Blanc, so there exist huge organised accumulations of individuals which are called nations: their life does no more than repeat on a larger scale the lives of their constituent cells, and anybody who is incapable of comprehending the mystery, the reactions, the laws of thses smaller lives, will only make futile pronouncements when he talks about struggles between nations. But if he is master of the psychology of individuals, then thesee colossal masses of conglomerated individuals will assume in his eyes, as they confront one another, a beauty more potent than that of the struggle which arises from a mere conflict between two characters; and they will seem to him as huge as... [blah blah blah] .. And considered from this point of view, the body Germany and the body France, and the allied and enemy bodies, were behaving to some extent like individuals... but since, even if one chose to consider them as individuals, they were at the same time giant assemblages of individuals, the quarell took on immense and magnificent forms, like the surge of a million-waved ocean which tries to shatter an age-old line of cliffs, or like gigantic glaciers which with their slow destructive oscillations attempt to break down the frame of mountains which surrounds them.... People, as they go about their pleasures, do not normally stop to think that, if certain moderating and weakening influences should happen to be supsended, the proliferation of infusoria would attain its maximum theoretical rate and after a very few days the organisms that might have been contained in a cubic mmillimetre would take a leap of many millions of miles and become a mas a milliion times greater than the sun, having in the process destroyed all our oxygen and all the substances on which we live, so that there would exist neither humanity nor animals nor earth, nor do they reflect that an irremediable and by no means improbable catastrophe may one day be generated in the ether by the incessant and frenzied activity which lies behind the apparent immutability of the sun; they busy themselves with their own affairs without thining about those two worlds, the one too small, the other too large for us to be aware of the cosmic menaces with which they envelop us."

(and I totally disagree with H1llis Wanker about what P. is doing with it and why)

It is horrible to realize I am living in those times, that we all are...

Everyone please savor the moment and appreciate everything and love everything, because of the possibility and reality of war...

Comments

[justkristin]

Namaste.

[Jo]

I keep thinking about how world religions of all kinds seem to come to the conclusion that this world, since it is so flawed, must not be the important one, or the final one. That certainly THIS can't be IT.