more »

In this article on the work of the striking and short-lived Ranjabati Sircar, Alessandra Lopez y Royo discusses the problems of cultural decolonization in the wake of Orientalist and Nationalist constructions concerning India.

Does a nation (or any group identity formation for that mattter) have to seek its purity by denying historicity and creative change? Or is contemporary engagement with historicity a way towards the reinvention of cultural discourse as a form of body politics? The work of Ranjabati Sircar and her mother in Kolkata explored such issues which are pertinent to the fashioning of a postcolonial world. - db   more »

streaming algorithmic apparitions in a fractal Elysium
perish in the effluvium of electric oblation,
escaping the tyranny of genetics and memory,
for the magnetic field of the circuit,
for the immortal promise of the splice,

prosthetic bodies hollowed out in binary extracts,
thought traces etched in silicon,
sentient forms that vanish in a carbon dusk,
archiving an incarnation of deciphered flesh;
a zero/one existence that reconfigures the body
for desiring at the speed of light,
that remaps identity on to a frictionless destining of species
consecrating its virtuality while under cosmic erasure
without even a mote of dust to impart a corpuscular existence

with dense sea stratus shrouds after a dark night of condensation
gray fractus lifting slowly into coral sunrise;
shedding nuclei of terrestrial ash,
for an elemental omega point of air
a misty alphabet dissipating in heat radiance of incandescent star
evaporating dreams before apprehension stirs
once a soul awoke in a mantle urn,
to churn molten rock, spark consciousness in clay,
sculpt magma into obsidian blade and diamond body,
turn cytoplasm of orb into cell, skin, spasm
fire into torment, tapas, ecstasy

before the flip transfiguration was imagined
a metamorphosis of matter, ether, spirit,
now the alchemical anatomy edges its tropism
along the ph-gradient of the proto-cell,
across a firmament of code
weightless it bends toward counterfeit territories
to house its disappearance
   more »

Playground Meditation

Its as if at twilight you’ve stepped onto a Fellini set
halos of golden light illumine miniature rainbows
refracting in the surreal slow motion steps of old men,
hunched over shadows creeping silently through clammy air;
a heat index like day time in Roma, but in this part of India,
a waxing monsoon moon has just begun to rise,

Grey beards who resist mortality, who revolt against nature,
who spit at the mugginess, make a beeline through the ardent nightfall,
piercing mist and mirages; sweating profusely,
old men whose nirvana is tightly bound to a body,
who run at a pace at which the tortoise overtook the hare,
who quiver breathlessly for the ecstasy of the finish line,
hoping to outrun death itself by making an offering to the impossible,

When they were younger the congregation gathered here
under the watchful gaze of its wise guardian, a Mother,
whose eyes wandered over this ochre playground
with the vigilance of a white-tale hawk, who; when their nest is approached
are airborne in a flash, observing swiftly the predator from above;
her protection was meted out through swift occult action,
intruders kept under surveillance, screech owls stopped from unfurling threats,
foreign worlds prevented from encroaching on the games of sun-eyed children

Once simple children who paraded lockstep over this playground sanctuary,
one arm over chest another outstretched before them
athletically pledging allegiance to the goddess nation,
but this still sticky evening a community of aging inmates file in for meditation,
initiates who long ago bargained away chance in the world, for a destiny here,
trading surrender for shelter, thought for a regiment of gymnastics and devotion,

After their ritual exercises they come here to sit and stare intensely inward
into an inner sarcophagus mind that houses the guru’s samadhi
but, the matriarch is no longer present,
her organ music replaced by the scratch of a distant analog machine,
darshan replaced by simulation, what remains is an empty chair,
a simulacra of enlightenment, a placeholder for a vacant avatar    more »

As SCIY charts its post human destiny, whatever that..maybe?...
Here is what my long strange trip reminiscences of it will be,in a sort of a triptych with poems, ...

Balloon Boy

Even before you awoke you knew the weather would be calm,
that take off was now imminent, across autumn’s parallax horizon
your heart started to race the dark fractured clouds streaming above;
when the squalls subsided before dawn a black hole appeared
within an atom of the storm, at that moment you knew that peak experience
could be found within a wormhole of bliss,

once a singularity became your destiny
you were certain that this last trip would be ecstatic,
like us all, you had caught a glimpse of danger,
a silver saucer, plywood bow pitched upward, riding gusts, gleaming in the sun,
streaking across open Colorado skies, a small boy huddled in darkness within.
clutching for a distant mother, dangling from a metallic balloon,

seeing the spectacle unfold, after a year of fending off demons,
you could imagine what it would be like to be that child inside;
that night you dreamed that you were six years old and you were learning to fly,
the threatening shadows of cumulonimbus whose anvils
had towered above you receded with the planet below,
as you reached escape velocity, you slept silently

Helium: atomic number: 2 atomic symbol: He
melting point: -272C @26 a.t.m boiling point: - 268.6 C near absolute 0
used in cryogenic research, expands greatly at room temperature
used for pressuring liquid fuel on Apollo lunar missions,
used to fill balloons, available at Wal-Mart in the party decorations section,
if asked; it could be used for a party you’ll be giving for your birthday,

fix the tube inside the plastic bag, pre-set the flow rate,
get comfortable, a cup of warm tea, soft lights and music,
turn the regulator on, hold the bag so it inflates,
place it loosely over head, secure the string so it does not float away,
keep the house as warm as you’d like,... relax,....
sleep,....... fall silently into azure sky    more »

Canada's Margret Atwood -who should be a candidate for the Nobel at some point- recent work has dealt with various dystopian themes of future societies ravaged by technological blowback and religious fundamentalism. I recently picked up her latest work, The Year of the Flood that continues where her previously acclaimed novel Oryx and Crate left off. This is a review by renown cultural historian Fredric Jameson, whose book on Utopias: Archaeologies of the Future, has been a subject of discussion on SCIY

Who will recount the pleasures of dystopia? The pity and fear of tragedy – pity for the other, fear for myself – does not seem very appropriate to a form which is collective, and in which spectator and tragic protagonist are in some sense one and the same. For the most part, dystopia has been a vehicle for political statements of some kind: sermons against overpopulation, big corporations, totalitarianism, consumerism, patriarchy, not to speak of money itself. Not coincidentally, it has also been the one science-fictional sub-genre in which more purely ‘literary’ writers have felt free to indulge: Huxley, Orwell, even the Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale. And not unpredictably, the results of these efforts have been as amateurish as analogous experiments in the realm of the detective or crime story (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, if you like), but including a message or thesis.[*] So-called mass cultural genres, in other words, have rules and standards as rigorous and professional as the more noble forms.   more »