code to ow & nanga gotes

dogs consistently anxious, gathering outside of peak sun to yelp their incomprehensible politics. the humans in their omnipresence like the dead christian god - emerging relentlessly from invisible crevices, tsunamis of flesh morphing in and out of packs like loud clouds. for one increasingly used to wilderness spaces, humanless

expanses, to impossible silences, how to move, think? accosted constantly - boat? sir where are you going? namaste. money. hello sir. sir. where are you from? hello boat? what's your name? - i survive by speaking gibberish. ka-loo miamooshqa rela'oghifoo ... i am no boat ... the conversation ends. here human unsustainability is habituated and visible (unlike the west where it tends to be habituated and invisible, laundered). only the cows - regardless of the chaos around them - are uniformly calm : models of meditation in all circumstances. beatific, noble, more worthy of sainthood and governing than any biped. even more reason not to eat them. i want them to inherit the earth but who would bequeath it to them and in what extremes of disrepair? far from any green pastures they rummage in garbage heaps, stand nonchalantly in the middle of raging motorcycles and tuktuks, sleep through cacophonous religious festivals, gaze into spaces of murky times and meanings. other than the architectures of the long stretch of ghats, only the cows impress. the ganga, the sky, society, the earth are powerfully polluted. the humans are humans and full of false glories, narcissistic and gonadal loves. then there are monkeys - humans with less pretense and fewer weapons, machines belching and screaming with phallic violence, gurus repeating the familiar lines ... but the cows ... the cows

varanasi. abandoned regality, spilling alienness, as if i'm plunked onto another planet that humans have somehow found and are abandonedly desecrating, the perfection of no

planning, the entire jumble the product of a mad, collective, unconscious architect - a monster, a god, founder of geometry, mind of stone and hole, secrets so piled on each other they almost speak, variegations of coloured time on surfaces that signal indifference, the recent phones and cameras like mutual funds in front of a crocodile. at night it's not the ganga in its shimmering fogs that turns animate but the architectures - the lit windows that seem asleep, the dark ones that watch, neither bemused nor scornful of the human below but simply patient for the inevitable departure of such a strategically stupid species so that they can get on with their business and turn to sand. the holy river if anything is the stones' feet, their capacity to move. the structures - one and many - themselves are all mind but no mind of philosophy or religion, east or west, but earth as it blinks in apertures of life and death. far wilder than any videogamescape - because one actually's in it, because its subtleties are manifold in every centimetre and glance - there are no apparent monsters to fight, no stages to pass through, no terminus to reach, no console but one's body. the humans, despite their omnipresence, seem irrelevant, an annoying, petty, brief usurpation in the cosmic kingdom of stone

praise, varanasi. praise

nothing like delhi's effervescent hells, the absence of

motorized terror on the ghatscape offers a grand tranquillity (despite the hawking humans), the lit trees in smoky dark laughing the laughter the stone can't, the countless official temples nothing next to the amalgam of tumbling magnificence

how can mental health or illness exist when we don't even know what mind is, when the civilization that creates these concepts seems pervasively and visibly ill?

isn't ocd an attempt to rediscover rites integrated with body and psyche, as collective rites have shattered and all that

remains in the community are rites of money and power and their corollaries - amusement, amassment, display, war, name and virtue signalling. so i must relate to my socks and shoes in particular, in special ways - not just to find control in a world that's overcontrolled and undercontrolled - but to create meaning, to create gods (the gods of shoes and socks), to please them, to transgress. as is now a commonplace cultural mechanism, a manufacture and righteous necessity, society creates ocd from its unacknowledged lack, the professional classes projecting their secure inadequacies, packaging it in distributed commodities of graded human meat for its comfortable avoidance

we can admire if we want the place of religion in india - its riotous sensuous ubiquity, ostensible integration with quotidian reality, gods at every turn, temples in every recess.

rites still observed. (and there's no shortage of pilgrims to romanticize these effects.) but if the manifest is effectively the same as elsewhere - species extinction, hyperpollution, radical inequalities, legally protected tyrannies and greed ... who cares? worship ganga and kill it. praise christ (allah, buddha, money, love, social justice, knowledge, reason, nothing, art, whatever ...) but torture and slaughter and sleep with blind impunity

we're in this together - cows, humans, tuktuks, shiitakes, mosquitoes, viruses, cruise ships, owls, sand ... and there's a temple, a god, a love, a truth - planet earth wandering its little path in the vast black ocean of a breathing universe

praise, varanasi. praise