Ramana Maharshi and Shakespeare

Twenty years or so ago, I wrote a series of articles about affinities between the wisdom of Shakespeare and the wisdom of Hinduism.  All the essays appeared in the British journal, Self Enquiry, and were fairly widely read.  While I was in India recently, my house suffered severe water damage due to a burst pipe.  So many books and manuscripts were irretrievably lost! During the clean-up, I came across my old copies of Self Enquiry, all of which are intact.

I would write these articles somewhat differently now, but I thought they might be of some interest, at least to some readers.  I intend to post only this one, unless there is interest for me to post more.  (For those with an interest in Shakespeare's works, I refer you to my article, "Caliban Explained," which is recent.  To access it, simply google the title along with Thomasdorsett.)

SHAKESPEARE AND BHAGAVAN

Editor's Note:  Bhagavan (Ramana Maharshi) loved to listen to readings from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and so on.  He enjoyed them all and brought out their inner significance by a few words of comment at once apt, penetrating and revealing.  Once he said, "Shakespeare the Self wrote this so that born again as we, he might enjoy it."  Bhagavan was surprised to learn that Emerson had made a statement to the same effect." (Excerpted from Ramana's Muruganar by A.R. Natarajan, published by Ramana Maharshi Center for Learning, Bangalore.)

                                                         1.

The ego is an illusion, maya.  It is a great good; without it there would be no Shakespeares.  It is also a great evil; without it there would be no Hitlers. The ego, evolution's tool, blindly created by genes, has allowed human beings to survive longer and better.  All the great achievements of humankind--and there are so many!--have been achieved by people who are convinced, by means of their consciousness of (supposed) individuality, that they are separate from the environment--and thus are able to make, love and wonder.

The ego, however, is also the tool of ignorance.  When people feel unconnected to the world, they are capable of causing much mental and physical suffering.  Hamlet and Auschwitz; without the ego, neither would have been possible.

Wisdom and love teach us that peace comes when the ego is transcended.  Very few have wholly transcended their ego, however; for those very few it no longer exists.  Buddha and Jesus are two outstanding examples--the former, who became completely enlightened, the latter subsumed under the reality of God--two culturally distinct ways of viewing the same phenomenon.  In our own era, an outstanding example of complete transcendence of individuality is Ramana Maharshi, who, known before his moksha as Venkataraman Iyer, became one with the Self at age 16.

Ramana Maharshi, Bhagavan, taught that separation is not ultimate.  The ego, which imagines itself to be an independent actor, is unaware of the unseen strings.  Bhagavan said it best:

The difficulty is that man thinks he is the doer.  But it is a mistake.  It is the Higher Power that does everything and he is the tool.  If he accepts that position, he is free from troubles.  Otherwise he courts them. (1)

How this statement of Bhagavan subverts the cult of individualism; how his teachings flout illusion, however disguised as so-called common sense!  Many people have realized that all images of God are merely that--images; this has led some to conclude that God is dead. Very few people are aware, however, that the ego, from a cosmic perspective, is as illusory as the images of God it conceives.  Although the average Westerner--even the average Easterner--clings to illusion, science, in contrast, has in many respects come close to the teachings of Ramana Maharshi by undermining the ego and all its creations.  What the ego believes to be solid--a table, for instance--is in reality a phantom, a swirl of subatomic particles.  We feel the atomic bonds which make it appear solid; it is, however, mostly empty space.  What the ego believes to be an individual is no less a phantom, a concatenation of nerves centered in the brain, a thing. Many books point out the consistencies between Hinduism's school of non-duality, (advaita), and the implications of modern physics, for example, the most recent book by Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, excellently reviewed in a previous edition of Self Enquiry. (2)

Science at its most profound is consistent with Ramana's teaching; what about art?  This is a largely unexplored area.  What about the parallels between advaita and the center of the Western literary canon, Shakespeare?  It is the purpose of this essay to bring these similarities to light.

Shakespeare, the creator of so many diverse characters--no one has ever created profounder literary characters than he--might not Shakespeare best be viewed as a champion of individuality?  Having created great characters with such exuberance in an age that began to see individuality as the highest good; might not even Shakespeare be excused for not seeing beyond?  Didn't he view the individual as the primary arbiter of human destiny?  Didn't he view the individual as the "doer?" A close reading of Hamlet, arguably the best play ever written, has taught me otherwise, as the following analysis will show.

                                                     2.

Hamlet's problem is his ego.  Things haven't been going well in his life, to say the least.  Events--that is, his ego's interpretations of them and reactions to them--have made him miserably depressed.  With Hamlet's first soliloquy of the play, Shakespeare establishes that the problem is in himself, in his reaction to events, and not in the events themselves:

Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!  Oh God!  God! (3)

What exactly is Hamlet's problem?  His mother has married his father's brother, approximately two months after his father's death.  He has been very close to his mother; she dotes upon him.  His father, also named Hamlet, was a fierce warrior.  We can infer that he never had a close relationship with his son.  Hamlet mentions that his father was "so loving to my mother" (4), but not in the entire play is there any reference of his father ever having been kind to him.  (The only reference of a male being kind to Hamlet in his youth is of Yorick--we will discuss this episode later in this essay.)  Hamlet, in his first soliloquy which gives so much information about his state of mind, mentions the close relationship that his father and his mother had.  Now he berates his mother for her speed to "incestuous sheets" (5),  i.e. her marriage to Hamlet's uncle.  Hamlet does not recognize the marriage, so in his mind the union of his uncle with his mother is incest.  But we can't escape a deeper meaning here: Hamlet might also be referring subconsciously to his own desires.

Freud used Greek tragedy to illustrate his theory of the Oedipus complex.  It is Hamlet, however, not Oedipus, who, at least in my opinion, best illustrates that complex.  It is not a post-Freudian anachronism to suggest that Hamlet has subconscious sexual desires for his mother.  Shakespeare indicates this with the classical setup: a distant father, a close--perhaps too close--mother and a sensitive son.  The Great Bard  thus anticipates Freud three centuries before the Viennese doctor lived.

We can now begin to appreciate why Hamlet hates Claudius so vehemently.  Claudius has done what Hamlet subconsciously would like to have done: kill his father and have his mother for himself.  This dynamic was certainly present since The Prince of Denmark's childhood.  The little Hamlet, jealous of his father, must have felt very vulnerable and inferior from being in competition with a distant, very powerful man. When Hamlet makes the following negative comparison between his father and Claudius, we can now see that he also might be referring to himself:

So excellent a King that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr. (6)

To have an uncle that has killed Hamlet's father would be bad enough; but for Hamlet, on a subconscious level, to view himself as the murderer of this father and usurper of the throne, is intolerable indeed.  The depressed Hamlet can't even bring himself to commit suicide; this might help explain why Hamlet can't bring himself to kill Claudius either, since on a deeper level he identifies with him.  If he can't kill himself, he can't kill Claudius.

The moral order has been violated; the regicide must be avenged.  But Hamlet, who believes he must set things right, cannot; at this point of the play there is no solution.  There is no place for his aggression to go, so he turns it against himself.  It is not surprising that Hamlet has become suicidal: his self-loathing ego desires its own destruction as the only possible release from its torment.

This interpretation is not new.  However, it only partially explains Hamlet's problem.  Hamlet believes that evil times have come.  He alone feels responsible for setting things straight, this is hubris.  His burden of responsibility is greatly increased by his guilt.  He must act, yet cannot.  Like Atlas, he feels the world's burdens on his shoulders with no possibility of laying them down:

The time is out of joint.  Oh cursed spite,
that ever I was born to set it right! (7)

Hamlet is now in the position of the figure at the base of the temple tower in Ramana's Maharshi's famous parable:

Take for instance the figure at the base of the Gopuram, the temple tower, which is made to appear as bearing the burden of the tower on its shoulders.  Its look and attitude picture great strain while bearing the very heavy burden.  But think.  The tower is built on earth and it rests on its foundation.  The figure is part of the tower.  Is it not funny?  So is the man who takes on himself the sense of doing. (8)

Hamlet sees himself as the doer; this is his real tragedy.  The wisdom of the East sees through individuality; this is perhaps why the East has not developed tragedy as an art form as extensively as the West.


                                                            3.

When Hamlet realizes that the ego is nothing--or at least almost nothing--he transcends himself and acts without difficulty.  After his transformation, the moral order inside him is effortlessly restored. Hamlet doesn't accomplish this, the Self--to use Bhagavan's terminology--accomplishes it through Hamlet.  Once he knows he is not the doer, Hamlet is at peace.

Hamlet's transformation occurs in the fifth act.  In the second scene of this act, during his dialogue with Horatio, Hamlet refers to his torment in the past tense:

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
that would not let me sleep. (9)

Hamlet is referring to how he felt on board the ship en route to England.  Unbeknownst to him, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two lackeys,  have a letter which instructs the English to kill Hamlet immediately after the letter is read.  Hamlet, in the darkness of the ship, feels completely lost:

...Methought I lay
worse than the mutines in the bilboes. (10)

...that is, "I thought I lay in a worse condition than that of shackled mutineers."  Yes, it was worse than being shackled--In the pit of the ship, according to my interpretation, Hamlet experienced what is now called a "fear-death" episode. (Something very similar happened to Ramana--see my article, "The Near Death Experiences of Ramana Maharshi," by googling my name and the title of the article.) It is a moment of terror that either kills you, or transforms you and makes you stronger. From this hell, Hamlet begins to act.  He suspects foul play.  Rosencranz and Guildenstern are asleep; he sneaks into their cabin and reads the letter.  He destroys it and writes a new letter, which will send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths instead of him.  He acted "rashly"(11), as he puts it, but this action has saved his life.  Referring to this incident, he speaks the following lines, crucial to our interpretation:

Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall.  And that should lean us
There is a divinity that shapes our ends,
Roughhew them how we will. (12)

Hamlet has completely changed: he realizes that what we imagine to be free will is only a detail--perhaps even an imaginary detail at that--of the work which divinity is accomplishing through us.  The Self is the doer, not the individual ego!

Hamlet has faced death in the previous scene, also crucial to our interpretation.  The grave digger, digging Ophelia's grave, has identified the skull of Yorick, who watched over and entertained Hamlet in the latter's youth.  Hamlet had loved him.  Now all that is left is a hideous skull, which Hamlet addresses at length:

Alas, poor Yorick!  I knew him, Horatio--a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.  He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is!  My gorge rises at it.  Here hang those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.  Where be your gibes now?  Your gambols?  Your songs?  Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?  Not one now, to mock your own grinning?  Quite chapfallen?  Now get yo to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour (face) she must come--make her laugh at that.
(13)

Yorick is the only person Hamlet ever mentions as having been kind to him during his early years.  We can infer that his mother had doted on him during his youth--after all, she still does throughout the play--but there is no reference to this.  By this economy of means, Shakespeare not only indicates that Hamlet's early youth had been lonely; he also indicates that the Yorick episode is not a casual encounter with death, merely for theatrical effect.  It cuts Hamlet to the quick.  He now faces the fact that the body must die, that the ego must die, no matter how lofty its philosophising.   The ego, the body--both are nothing.  Hamlet has come very close to Ramana Maharshi's view of life and death.

Destiny, however,has not yet run its course.  The king plans to kill Hamlet and make it look like an accident.  Hamlet is to dual with Laertes, an accomplished fencer, for the court's entertainment.  Hoatatio, Hamlet's erudite companion, suspects foul play and warns him not to accept the challenge--Laertes, after all, has his own revenge to accomplish, Hamlet having killed his father.  Hamlet is not afraid, even though Laertes is an expert fencer.  Hamlet's feeling of invincibility is not to be attributed to a post-depression manic state, for he has reason to feel worthy of the challenge.  When Horatio tells him point-blank that he will lose the wager, Hamlet replies:

I do not think so.  Since he went into France I have been in continual practice.  I shall win at the odds. (14)

Horatio still tries to dissuade him.  But Hamlet is ready to let things happen as they will.  At this point, he says the following words, which are most important:

There's special providence in the fall of a sparrow.  If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.  The readiness is all.  Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is 't to leave betimes?  Let be. (15)

Ramana Maharshi could have used the exact same words.  As a matter of fact, he almost did use the same words as a young man in response to his mother, who begged him to give up his life as a sage and return home:

...Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try as you may.  Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to prevent it.  This is certain.  The best course, therefore, is to remain silent. (16)

Hamlet wasn't fit to be king for most of the play.  The irony of the play--and life is sometimes like that--is that the enlightened Hamlet  is killed just after gaining the ability to be a great ruler.



                                                         4.

Shakespeare is arguably the most profound and greatest writer who ever lived.  As the eminent scholar, Harold Bloom, wrote in The Western Canon: "Shakespeare is to world literature what Hamlet is to the imaginary domain of literary character: a spirit that permeates everywhere, that cannot be confined.  A freedom from doctrine and simplistic morality is certainly one element in that spirit's ease of transference...Shakespeare has the largesse of nature itself..." (17).   "There is more of Shakespeare himself in this play than in any of his others," (18), the critic G.B. Harrison wrote in his introduction to Hamlet.  Shakespeare created a literary world of many astoundingly complex, diverse personalities that parallels the great diversity of personalities found in life.  I am convinced that he realized, from his pinnacle of creation, as Hamlet's transformation indicates, that real personalities are no different: that is, just as Shakespeare stood above his fictive creations, he realized that Shakespeare's Shakespeare, as it were, stands above non-fictive ones. Something else has, was, and is creating them all--call it God, destiny, genes and environment, the Self, or what you will.  Shakespeare's favorite character learned this fact by a great struggle; is it too much to say that Shakespeare, Hamlet's creator, struggled and finally knew it as well?  I think not.  Shakespeare transcends Shakespeare, just as Hamlet transcends Hamlet, just as Venkataraman Iyer transcended himself and became Ramana Maharshi.

In Hamlet occurs the famous play within the play, when Hamlet strives "to catch the conscience of the King,"  (19).  By the end of the play, Hamlet becomes an actor within an actor, as it were, when he realizes that he has only been playing a role.  Shakespeare knew, as Ramana Maharshi knew, that "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players," (20).  Ramana uses the same imagery in a passage where he tells his followers that it is not necessary to renounce the world to find peace--one can continue in one's role, provided that one comes to the realization that it is a role:

It is like an actor.  He dresses and acts and even feels the part he is playing,  but he knows really that he is not that character but someone else in real life...Nothing that the body does should take you from abidance in the Self.  Such abidance will never interfere with the proper and effective duties the body has, any more than an actor's being aware of his real status in life interferes with his acting his part on the stage. (21)

As one can tell from this passage, what is mot important is not the insight that one is merely playing a role, but gong beyond one's role.  Without this self-transcendence, realizing that one is only an actor is apt to lead to cynicism and despair.  Shakespeare knew this well, as the famous lines of the despairing Macbeth attest:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets an hour upon the stage
And then is seen no more.  It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.  (22)
                              
Macbeth is horribly trapped; his hell entails the loss of all illusions while remaining ignorant of what more than compensates for this loss--wisdom.  The state of ego-despair is so painful that one is very likely to do horrible things--from committing suicide to committing genocide--in the attempt to relieve it. Pity those like Macbeth, in despair over their supposedly meaningless roles!  Their numbers are certainly not decreasing in the present age, during which true spirituality is proving to be more elusive than ever.

Yet like the Prince of Denmark, before the last act of Hamlet and like the King of Scotland in the last act of Macbeth, one is closer to the truth than Polonius or Banquo could ever imagine.  Although despair is both dangerous and always ready to strike the unwary--all it takes is a little learning to change a worldling into a wretch--at least the Macbeths of this world are wise enough to realize, albeit painfully, that the ego is nothing. However, once one identifies not with the self but with the Self, as Hamlet seems to have come very close to doing, true peace and joy arise: "Then the world becomes the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within you," (23).  Joy is always just one insight away!  Why then, do we continue in our ignorance, like Hamlet before the last act of the play?

Nearly everyone one encounters, unlike the transformed Hamlet, is lost in the roles that the Self has provided; nearly everyone is exceedingly ignorant of the great and timeless truth of advaita Hinduism, which Ramanan Maharshi embodied and taught.  How satisfying it is to know that the most profound writer of the West was in basic agreement with one of the most profound sages of the East! Shakespeare knew what life is about; Ramana Maharshi knew what life is about.  I ask you, dear reader, why don't we?

Notes

1. Thus Spake Ramana (Tiruvannamalai, Sri Ramansaraman 1989) 35
2. Heimer, Hans, Book Review: The Web of Life (London, Self Enquiry, Summer 1997) 66-71
3. Shakespeare, The Complete Works, G.B. Harrison, ed (New York, Harcourt, Brace & Wold, 1952
Hamlet, Act 1, sc.ii, lines 129-132
4. Ibid., Hamlet, Act 1, sc.ii, line 140
5. Ibid., Hamlet, Act 1, sc.ii, line 157
6. Ibid., Hamlet, Act 1, sc.ii, lines 139-140
7. Ibid., Hamlet, Act 1, sc.v, lines 189-190
8. Thus Spake Ramana, 35-36
9. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Avt V, sc.ii, lines 4-5
10. Ibid., Hamlet, Act V, sc.ii, lines 5-6
11. Ibid., Hamlet, Act V, sc.ii, line 6
12. Ibid., Hamlet, Act V, sc.ii, lines 8-11
13. Ibid., Hamlet, Act V. sc.i, lines 202-216
14. Ibid., Hamlet, Act V, sc.ii, lines 220-222
15. Ibid., Hamlet, Act V, sc.ii, lines 230-235
16. Videlcassette; The Sage of Arunachala Asrama, 1992
17. Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon (New York, Riverhead Books, 1994) 50
18.Shakespeare, 884
19. Ibid., Hamlet, Act 111, sc.1, lines 633-634
20. Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 11, sc.1, lines 139-140
21. The Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, ed. Osborne, Arthur, (Tiruvannamalai, Sri Ramanasramam, 1993) 92
22. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, sc.v, lines 19-28
23. Thus Spake Ramana, 82

A Poet in India

From February 13 through March 2nd, 2015, the Dorsett family, (Nirmala, I, Thomas and our son Philip), was in India. We saw many sites in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, two southern Indian states; we visited Nirmala's relatives, and I,  a widely published poet, wrote a dozen poems.  What I've written here is a "literary travelogue,"  which includes the external--people and places--and the internal, poetry. Tamils have a very apt word for God, Kadavul, which translates as "inside/outside."   On a lower rung, this is a "Kadavulian," inside/outside, account of my experience in India.  It is written for the general reader in the hope that she, by reading it,  will be enabled to climb a rung or two and get a view of the landscape that is India and of the inscape that is poetry. 




February 13, 2015, Chennai

Vidya!  That's whom I saw when I opened my eyes.  We had arrived from Baltimore the night before and my body was still very much in a different time zone.  My wife and I--my son in a room upstairs--were staying for one day in a nice little residency hotel, fifty dollars or so a night.  The room was large and oblong, a significant portion of which was taken up by a king-size bed.  My wife was nearby.

Vidya, Nirmala's niece, is quite special for us.  When I first saw her in the 1970s she was a thin twelve year old wisp.  Her health was precarious.  She was born with a life-threatening congenital heart disease; her lips, upon exertion, took on the color of blueberries.  I remember her bicycling on a circular path in the courtyard of a building complex where she and her family lived.  Her mother, Vimala, was standing at the doorway shouting, Vidya! Vidya! Stop!  But feistyVidya wouldn't stop.  Her situation was precarious, even hopeless.  Her mother thought she would die soon.  The doctors in India tried to give her a diagnostic test to determine the type of heart disease she had.  However, since she had a severe allergic reaction to the dye, the study was incomplete.  The film was reviewed by many, including by the great American cardiologist, Dr. DeBakey.  His prognosis was grim: she had an inoperable condition and would soon die.

Nirmala and I were not going to leave it at that.  We showed the film to a cardiologist, Dr. Griep, at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, where Nirmala was working.  He was sure that her condition could be corrected by surgery.  Talk about luck of the non-Irish: Dr. Griep, a young doctor, needed cases and offered to do everything for free--those were the days!  I remember saying good-bye (for a while) to her as she was wheeled into the operating room.  Vidya being Vidya was in quite good spirits.  The operation was a complete success.  She returned to India and eventually married a neighbor, Venkataraman.  They have a lovely daughter, Shrada, who is now twenty years old!
As I opened my eyes in the hotel room, it was over thirty years later.  Vidya, bubbly as ever, was talking to me, thoroughly frazzled by jet lag.  She told me that she is a practitioner of Reiki.  

This is originally a Japanese practice, invented in the 1920s by a Buddhist monk.  It asserts that there is a separate, immaterial psychic energy that can heal all sorts of ailments.  An important aspect is the laying on of hands.  You can even operate, as it were, from a distance!  For someone trained in science, as I was, Reiki is something impossible to accept.  (My paradigm, science, will not shift!)  But the laying on of hands by someone with a very upbeat demeanor can have great psychological benefits, no doubt about that.  One could learn a lot from Vidya.

That night--and that night only--I was glad Vidya left.  I was so tired!  As I began to doze off, my inner voice began to recite a poem that I hadn't read since 1965: Lebenspflichten, by Ludwig Hölty;  it is an eighteenth century carpe diem drinking song.  Times were changing--Just a few years before it was written, Bach was writing his otherworldly/worldly cantatas in Leipzig.  The enlightenment was beginning to change everything.  The emphasis was now on this, mortal life.  But survival, before the modern era, was precarious.  (20% of the died before he was thirty.)  The theme of the poem: enjoy life while you can.  Images of imminent death, which occur throughout the poem, are there to encourage the reader to use his time joyfully.  Andrew Marvell beautifully portrays this world-view with the following words:  "The grave's a fine and private place/ but none, I think, do there embrace."
I translated the first stanza "in my sleep."   I looked up the poem on Google, and wrote the following poem, loosely based on Hölty's poem:

CARPE DIEM

Strew roses on whatever path;
stay mindful, despite pain--
Before you're taken, take the time
to heal and understand.

Today you have a lovely friend
who full fills mind and eye:
tomorrow whom you loved is dry
and lies upon a bier.

(How many years do you still have?
No one knows for sure, yet
in your grave you will not be
for many, many more.)

Without worms no nightingale
turns matter into song--
See and any butterfly
engenders jubilation.

Nothing lasts; a human life
even if long, is too short--
Might as well praise everything,
while you still can talk.

Love as long as life permits:
befriend whomever you can;
be helpful, humble, mindful, kind;
be generous and whole.

Bodies rotting in the ground

absolutely have no time

to smell roses overskull--
They have no sense at all--

They do not hear the joyous sound
when glasses clink together;
no need to die before you die:
accept self--then forget it.

One of my more distant relatives, this is a house gecko, Hemidactylus frenatus.  They are endemic all across Southeast Asia  and in other warm climates, where they were accidentally transported by ships.  This little fellow, whom I named Bimbisara, remained throughout our trip on the hallway wall next to the electricity meters. Geckos are nocturnal; Bimbisara hid a good deal of the time.  In Tamil and Malayalam they are called pallis--in South America they are called "limpia casas"--that is, house cleaners, since they feed on insects and other little creatures. They make strange clicking sounds when alarmed, usually three at a time, which to some sounds like "gecko, gecko, gecko." They live about five years; the species, however, veritably unchanged, has been on Earth for over 100 million years.  Immutability hasn't worked very well for our species--which is a good thing--but has worked very well for this perfectly adapted lizard, which is a good thing, too.

On our first full day in Chennai, we visited Nirmala's elder sister and had a great lunch--one of many--with additional family members at Mridula and Jose's condominium, located two flights above Bimbisara's patch upon the wall. I was still very tired from the long flight, as this poem, which I wrote the following day, attests:


The Owl and the Loon

A giant jet lag is
two little bags
which remain for days
under eyes

noon is midnight
midnight is noon
by day I'm an owl
by night I'm a loon

with kisses with coffee
after day one
I rise from the dead!
then go back to bed

after day three
with coffee with kisses
I'm composing again,
a force not to be reckoned with

by nearly everyone.  How sad!
Some merely exist, lagged by life,
and don't know it--I'm writing

for them--Almost nobody's glad.

February 14-17, 2015, Kerala

At the ungodly hour of 4 a.m., a van came to pick us up, (Nirmala, our son Philip and me), from the lodge where we were staying, and take us to the airport.  Along the way, Sudha, Nirmala's niece, and Sudha's son, Varun, joined us.  Our final destination before the airport was Milla's place, where Shyamala, Nirmala's sister and Walter, her husband, came into the van.  All seven of us were off to Kerala, a small gem of a state on the West coast.  On the map, Chennai is in the upper right hand corner; we flew to Kochi, (Cochin), which is a major coastal city in the middle of Kerala.
The flight (IndiGo Airlines) was uneventful and took about an hour.

Kerala is very different from Tamil Nadu, ("the land of the Tamils.")  The Indian states, by the way, are recent creations.  In 1956, India was divided into fourteen states on a linguistic basis--India has twenty-nine states now, not to mention the union territories.  Yes, almost every state in India has its own language and, in most cases, its own script.  There are, however, many other languages in India, which has the greatest language density of the world--officially, there are 122 languages, but there are actually many more.  (Africa has the second greatest language density.) The language of Kerala is Malayalam, the palindrome sister of Tamil, which are roughly similar to each other as Portuguese is to Spanish.  
Nearly all of Nirmala's family, with the exception of those who are part of the family by marriage, such as myself, were born and raised in Kerala, and are thus Malayalees.
Kerala is unique in many ways.  It is about twice the size of New Jersey, and has about the same number of inhabitants as California.  
The birth rate, however, is now quite low and heading for zero growth.  It is a very educated state, with a literacy rate (in Malayalam) well over ninety percent. Kerala is also a very diverse state, having a Christian population that dates back to the 3rd century C.E. (20% of the inhabitants); a longstanding Muslim population, (20% of the population) and the rest being Hindus. Its public health system has been a model for third world countries the world over.

  It has been a very left-leaning state; the communist party has been in power several times.  (The communist party has never been able to devolve into extremism in Kerala; the central government was always there to take over if the regime became too radical. Kerala, thus, got the best of both worlds, having a non-totalitarian regime that advocated for the working class and for the poor.)
Unlike in Tamil Nadu, there is much precipitation in Kerala, and during the monsoon season, which corresponds roughly to the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere, it rains a lot.  The vegetation is thus much more lush--forests of coconut trees and waterways abound--in marked contrast to much of the rest of India.
As soon as we arrived in Kochi, we booked a van to take us to our destination, Kumarakom and the Kerala backwaters.  Here's a little video to give you an idea of the traffic.  (India has the most road accidents and driving fatalities per capita in the world.  Drunk driving is a major problem, compounded by an almost total lack of law enforcement.  Indians on scooters rarely use helmets; only a minority use seat belts, including infants and small children.  Something needs to be done!  The Parliament is working on this problem.)

We finally arrived at the famed Kerala backwaters.  The backwaters are a group of lakes, some quite large, and canals that run half the length of the state.  The waters are brackish; some of the lakes and canals contain freshwater, others saltwater and still others contain a combination of the two.  Wildlife is abundant, especially birds, (jackdaws, cormorants, kingfishers and many varieties of egrets are among the birds we saw.)  We stayed at a beautiful resort named Waterscapes.    The area is now choked with resorts, much as some of the canals are choked by algae. Kashmir used to be the center of houseboat tours, but the political situation there reduced the number of tourists to virtually nothing.  I'm happy to say that tourists are now returning, cautiously I would suppose, to the lakes of Kashmir.

It is obligatory to take a houseboat (kettuvallam in Malayalam) tour.  Kettuvallams are made of planks of wood, (Jack wood is most frequently used), held together by ropes--not a single nail is used.  Many have thatched roofs.  Some people stay overnight; a meal is usually served on board.

We took about a two hour ride along the canals.  The natural beauty of the surroundings made this the highlight of our trip.  It made me feel so happy to be alive--As I looked at the shimmering water, the lush vegetation and the countless birds, my mind put on a recording of Louis Armstrong singing, "What A Wonderful World!"

It apparently is not that way for everybody.  A man in a canoe crossed in front of us; I had a good look at him as he passed.  The captain informed us that he was a toddy maker.  (Toddy, kallu, or Palm Wine, quite popular in Kerala, is made from coconuts and has an alcohol content ranging from four to eight percent.)  His profile was typical for a man his age--mid-thirties perhaps--he had a full head of hair and also had the almost obligatory full-lip mustache worn by most men in Kerala.  When he turned his face towards us--he seemed to look through rather than at us--I saw the saddest face of my entire stay in India.  I imagined that he was having an inner dialogue between his demon and his angel, which became the following poem of four lines:

The Toddy Maker

You should commit suicide.

Never, you mind! No? Why?

Bruised egos and fanned peacock tails

are equally sublime.

I hope the angel wins.

The next day, after about a four kilometer-or so hike through a bird sanctuary. Most of the reserve's winged saints who gave us darshan on the day of our walk were egrets.  A few hours thereafter, we returned to Kochi, this time in two taxis.

We arrived in that city around lunch time.  We had difficulty finding our hotel; what follows is what happened next, excerpted from my article, "Impressions of Islam," which is available on the internet by googling the title along with my name.  This encounter was at least as pleasant as the image of the toddy maker was depressing.

"We returned to Kochi on the 16th, frazzled by a harrowing taxi ride back.  We had difficulty finding our hotel.  We were on the right street; it wasn't long, so I set out alone, trying to find our destination.  I knocked on a door of a stately white building.  A very hospitable middle-aged man invited me inside.  I asked whether this building was our hotel.  He laughed in a very friendly way.  "This is a mosque," he said.  We laughed together.  Our encounter lasted less than a minute; the man's smile, however, left a deep impression, the best by far of the many smiles I received and returned in Kerala.  The smile provided a window into the man's soul, as it were, and I liked very much what I saw."

That evening we attended a Kathakali performance, located in a little theatre on the block of our hotel. Kathakali is the famous dance drama of Kerala, dating back to the 17th century.  It is very stylized--it reminds me of the Japanese Kabuki theatre.  The make-up, which takes sometimes hours to put on, and the costumes are quite elaborate. The movements are very rhythmic; each dancer has an anklet with small bells on each leg to mark the beats of his movements. (Traditionally, as in the performance we attended, the female roles are also danced by men, as was the case in Shakespeare's England.)  There are usually only two or three dancers present at any one time.  A singer sings/declaims the story of each dance, often taken from an Indian epic such as the Mahabharata.  The percussive accompaniment is performed on a maddalam, a type of drum.  
Traditionally, performances began after dark and lasted all night. Modern performances last only three or four hours.  The Wagnerian stamina of the performances stems from years of training in a dance that stylizes aspects of a form of martial arts.
The performance we attended was exclusively for tourists.  It consisted of a half hour demonstration and a half hour performance.  One of the performers depicted in turn the nine navarasams or emotions, anger, love, hate, fear, etc.  This was truly astounding.  In Kathakali the face movements, which take years of training to master, as well as the hand movements are of primary importance. The man's control of his facial muscles and his ability to express emotions with them was astounding.  
Having said that, I must admit I've yet to warm up to Kathakali.  Both carnatic music and Hindustani music are close friends of mine; Kathakali, however, remains an interesting, exotic stranger.  
The brochure boasted a picture of a visit by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles.  They looked even more bored than usual.

The highlight of the following day was a visit to the famous Paradesi synagogue.  I again quote from my article, "Impressions of Islam."

"The next day we walked to the famous Paradesi synagogue in Kochi.  It is the oldest functioning synagogue in the Commonwealth; it was built in 1567.  (The previous one on the same site was destroyed by Portuguese Christians.)  The history of the Jews of Kerala goes back many centuries--the caretaker told us that her family has been in India for eight generations.  There are few Jews left; nearly all emigrated voluntarily to Israel.) It took us about forty minutes to walk to the synagogue.  The route passes through a Muslim neighborhood for most of the way--The names on the stores were Arabic; some of the women were covered; some of the men were dressed in white--otherwise it was like any other neighborhood in India.  Soon we were in a little enclave called "Jew Town"--now part of the Muslim neighborhood.

The entrance to the orthodox synagogue was crowded with visitors; we were soon among them.  After paying a nominal entrance fee of five rupees, we entered the sanctuary.  It is a gem.  The most striking aspect are the 101 hand-painted tiles which were imported from China centuries ago; many shared similar motifs, but they are all unique.  It has an intimate and very spiritual ambiance; I experienced something joyfully beyond words within me and within everyone present.


What was perhaps most remarkable about this remarkable building is the total lack of security.  No searching of bags, no metal detectors, nothing.  There were, as far as I could tell, only two caretakers, one of them being the last woman of child-bearing years in the community. 


I thought of the security checks at the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.; I also recalled that many European synagogues now have heightened security. And, no doubt about it, this little synagogue would last about five minutes in present day Pakistan, Syria or Iraq.


Think of it: a synagogue crowded with tourists with no security, in the middle of a Muslim community! The Muslims and Jews have been living side by side here for centuries.  The vast majority of Kerala Muslims are living proof that tolerance is intrinsic to their faith."

That night we returned to Chennai by plane.  As you might suspect by now, I said good-bye to Kerala with a poem:

A Side Trip to Kerala

The landscape around Kumarakom
looks like a set of an Indian film
starring Jack Daw and Paddy Fields.

(One night I watched the movie, "God"--
Although the screen was absolutely blank,
eyes gave it a great Rem review.)

After boat rides, we returned to Chennai
fresh as a shimmering body of water--
Pinch me, I think I'm a lake.



February 18th, The Family Gathering

On the evening of February 18th, we gathered at Milla and Jose's condominium for a family gathering.  Milla has been ill, and as yet can't leave the condominium, but the doctor believes she will be in remission soon.  (She and my wife--the only two of the siblings who have yet to retire--have phenomenal stores of energy; hope Milla gets hers back soon!)

Since life sometimes feels as ephemeral as if we were mayflies approaching the first of June, we decided to get everyone together.  How we all fit into the condo--the gathering reminded me of that famous scene from "A Night at the Opera" where everyone crowds into Groucho's room only to tumble out as a human wave when someone opens the door.  Here is a list of all those present--Since Milla was the cause of our getting together, I define most of the people present according to their relationship to her:

Residents of Chennai, India

Mridula (Milla) and her husband, Jose
Vimala, Mridula's elder sister
Shyamala, Mridula's elder sister, and her husband, Walter
Vimala's daughter Sudha, their son, Varun
Vimala's daughter, Vidya, her husband, Venkataraman, and their daughter, Shrada


Visiting Residents of Bangaluru

Mridula's elder brother, Rajagopalan, and his wife, Vilasini


Visiting Residents of the United States

Nirmala, Mridula's elder sister and her son, Philip
Romila, Mridula's younger sister, and her husband, Sudhir
Amita, Romila's daughter, and her husband, Aaron
Anisha and Anand, their children, Romila's grandchildren


Resident and Non-Resident Aliens

Thomas, a poet
Bimbisara, a gecko

Here is a photo of all six surviving siblings:

From left: Shyamala, Vimila, Rajagopalan (Ramsay), Romila, Nirmala and Mridula (Milla)

Everyone felt a little sad, since it is doubtful that all siblings will ever get together again. 

 The food, some of it cooked by Jose, who is an excellent cook, and some of it ordered from a local hotel, was wonderful. (There are many who can write about food much better than I, Nirmala's nephew, Ranjit, who is a broadcaster and food critic living in Indonesia, is a good example.  I will therefore sum up my culinary experience in India with one sentence: the food was fresh, spicy, mostly vegetarian, non-fattening and just about always delicious.)  Everybody was involved in lively conversation--except me.  For some reason, I was out of sorts, and even felt alienated.  I'm really not sure why; it certainly wasn't the fault of Nirmala's family, who are all good folks.  I remained quiet and unnoticed as Bimbisara for most of the evening.  After the party was over, I wrote a few lines.  I'm including them because I promised myself I would publish all the poems I wrote in India (twelve) and also because many, perhaps at a holiday dinner, have felt uneasy for a time among friends and family. Perhaps they can relate to the following lines:

Family Gathering

February 18, 2015

Like a crabapple among

matching, mirror-skinned reds,

I didn't fit in; everyone else

chain-laughed into the night--

I smiled; this was almost enough.

That night my mood got even worse.  I had a dream--the toddy maker was moving slowly across my visual field.  The head was different--it was the head of a man of European descent, with thinning blond hair and without a mustache. It was the face of my friend, P.S., who committed suicide in 2004.  

Nirmala and I became friends with his wife and him in the 1970s. We thought he had everything: a graduate of Harvard business school, he had a good job and a lovely family.  A few months later Nirmala and I were visiting him at Cornell Hospital.  He had deliberately jumped from his seventh story apartment window--Hard to believe he was still alive.  His fall had been broken by a store awning directly below.  His right arm suffered serious nerve damage; he had to learn to write with his left hand.
We visited him several times in New York; he and his wife  visited us in Baltimore also.  Then he disappeared.  A year later his wife informed us that they had moved out West.  He started his own investment firm--it failed.  One night he left a note, got into his car, pressed down hard on the gas pedal and crashed into a tree.

A note about the poem: when doctors prescribe an antidepressant like Zoloft, they must be very cautious, since, albeit rarely, it can paradoxically lead one to suicide.  This is because when someone is severely depressed, they are sometimes paralyzed, as it were, and can't to anything.  Zoloft sometimes will "cheer them up" until they are happy enough--to die.

The Suicide
(P.S. 1945-2004)

I was so lonely I couldn't even die.
Even Zoloft couldn't cheer me up
enough to catapult into a tree.

The jewel is hidden beneath miles of ice!
No matter, chance, I'm better now--
It's a new night and I'm happy enough.

The next morning I woke up next to Nirmala, holding her hand.  I was back in stride. I am a very lucky man--my wife and son are among the kindest and most honest people I know.

 A quote of Marcus Aurelius came to mind, which is the way I have felt since that difficult night of February 18th:

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive--to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

This became the theme of my next poem, written after many happy encounters with the amazing kaleidoscope of peoples and landscapes that is India:

(Note: did you know there are over a billion times a billion atoms in one grain of sand?  Did you know that the average density of the universe is one--yes, only one--hydrogen atom per cubic meter of space? Consciousness, which requires many atoms, is unbelievably rare--and unbelievably wonderful.)

Atmans and Atoms

Not trillions and trillions
as in one grain of sand,
but only one, on average,
in each cubic meter of space.

Even untouchables have won
the cosmic lottery against
unbelievable odds:
whoever breathes is a mortal

success.  Beneath the surface
of Enceladus,
buried under miles of ice,
a vast moonful of water

might contain primitive life--
Even if it did, one tear
of a child in Brooklyn matters
more than that entire sea.

Faith nor physics can answer
the question, consciousness,
why is there suffering?
God's silent.  Gods smile.

(Upon our return to Baltimore, we learned that Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, is giving Enceladus competition.  A buried ocean has been discovered there, also; Ganymede, though large for a moon, is much smaller than the Earth and now, apparently, has much more water than Earth.  I am getting increasingly confident that extraterrestrial life will be discovered during my lifetime.)

For the rest of our trip, (February 19th--March 2nd), much of our time was spent visiting family, shopping, taking long walks, etc.  All of these quiet joys meant a lot to us, but a recounting of them would mean little to general readers.  I will therefore only include a few highlights--and, of course, a few poems, too.

Every morning Nirmala and I--and sometimes Philip--went for a walk.  Here is a video clip of the street in front of Milla's condomininum which concludes with Nirmala and me returning from our walk.

By Indian standards, this is a very quiet street.  Behind the wall in the background is the vast grounds of the international headquarters of the Theosophical Society, which was a very popular movement world-wide at the beginning of the last century.  The movement has seen better days; developers would love to get their hands on the many acres of the compound, which contains, to my knowledge, the last open spaces in Chennai.  The grounds, however, are still off limits to bulldozers.

There are hordes of stray dogs--at least in our section of Chennai.  Most of them lie lolling in the sun.  They are thin, but not emaciated.  These members of the canine caste have found their niche, as many human castes have done throughout the centuries.

During one of our walks, we came across a jet-black dog, well groomed, and well fed.  He wore a collar and was obviously lost or recently abandoned.  As we admired him, he sat down in front of us and began to mournfully howl.  He sounded like a wolf.  He would stop for a minute, follow us a few steps, then begin howling again.  If you closed your eyes, you would be convinced that this was the sound of a lone wolf in distress.  I never heard a dog howl like this.  He followed us home; I tried to give him some food but he wouldn't eat.  We left him at the gate of the condominium complex, a video of which you saw in the last clip.  He continued to howl; the distress signals gradually faded away as the dog went on his (lost) way.  We recognized many dogs during our subsequent walks; the howler, however, never appeared again.

The next morning I arose well before anyone else.  I did not put the light on.  I took some leftovers from the fridge and ate some of the bitter gourd that Jose made the previous night.  In my mind I composed the following haiku:

Chennai Haiku

A stray dog howling--
It is dark outside while I
eat breakfast  alone.

During one of our morning walks to Elliotts beach, a stretch of beach along the Bay of Bengal, about half a kilometer from Milla's condominium, I sought out a familiar monument, known to me since the 1970s. It was built in tribute to a Dane named Kai Schmidt, who lost his life while rescuing a British girl. The girl attended a party the next day as if nothing had happened.  The governor was irate, and ordered the structure to be built to commemorate the brave Danish sailor.

The monument brings back many memories.  In the 1970s and into the 80s, we had the beach virtually--by Indian standards, at least--to ourselves.  We would put down a blanket and have a picnic.  I used to swim in the ocean quite often--during my current visit, I didn't see anybody swim there at all.  The area where the fishermen lived was less than half a kilometer away.  Little fisherman boys, dressed in khaki rags, would plop themselves down beside me, and offer me edibles--kadalai, peanuts, and murukku, a snack, which were transported in large steel containers.  If integument could talk, their skin would be saying to mine: "You have no choice.  You're going to buy what I'm selling."  Nirmala's late and lovely mother taught me a very important word, which she would exclaim with annoyed insistence: Wandapa--"I really don't want any!"   
Every morning, fisherman--the area of their huts began at the northern end of the beach--could be seen squatting, doing their business at the edge of the water.  (Their women did not have that luxury.)  This happens no more.

We usually shared the entire beach with a dozen or so people and one or two cows.  Cows and bullock carts were everywhere to be seen in Madras--we called Chennai Madras in those days.  Progress has whisked them away to rural areas--by government decree. This is necessary, I know, but it still makes me sad.  Madras was more rural in those days, closer to nature.  
I had difficulty finding the monument; the beach is full of scores and scores of little booths selling all sorts of things, such as, gasp!  American-Style Chicken and American Sweet Corn.  I eventually found it.

The last time I saw it, in 2010, it was in terrible shape.  Young men gathered there every morning to lift weights.  I expected that its current state would be even worse and would put me in the mood that I assume after reading Shelley's Ozymandias.  I was wrong.  It has been lovingly restored.  It now has  a fence around it, even a little garden.  Two caretakers were present.  I struck up a conversation with them, telling them of my decades-long connection to the monument.  They opened the gate and let me in and showed me the inscription--which I knew by heart.  The monument commemorates Madras's past; the kindness of the caretakers commemorates Chennai's present, and I hope, future.

One day, walking home from the beach with Nirmala, I composed another haiku:

Distant relatives
on Elliotts beach: sand crabs,
twin sisters, and gulls.

Though Milla, like presumably all members of the middle class, has a television set, we were too busy enjoying each other's company to watch it.  One of our favorite activities was playing cards--a type of rummy which Philip taught us.  Such simple pleasures were very satisfying.  I wish there was a Dravidian Degas somewhere who could paint a work of art on the basis of this photo:

We attended two concerts.  The first one was a Bhatanatyam performance, the classical dance of South India.  It took place in the nearby Kalakshetra Arts colony.  As usual, Nirmala concentrated on the dancer while I concentrated on the musicians.

The second concert meant much more to us.  It was a performance of carnatic music, the vocalist being the great Sri Sanjay Siva.  The venue, a huge nondescript hall of a temple, was less than ideal--but I soon forgot about it when the concert started.  Sri Sanjay has a beautiful voice which he is able to use with great dexterity.  The most important thing--at least for me--is his emotional intensity.  Even a deaf person would get some idea of this intensity just by looking at his gestures and at his facial expressions.  (Most Indian singers, especially female singers, are much less demonstrative.)

It was a great performance, but the one we attended in 2010 was even more memorable.  Instead of being in a large hall, it took place in a small temple.  Sri Vijay gave an electrifying performance that night.  This is the poem I wrote then:

Sri Vijay Siva, Vocal
February 8, 2010

How I must look to the wiry Tamilians
milling about on the sides of roads; hordes
predictable on scooters as a single electron's
choice of a pinhole; almost everyone

under 30 years old: women in salwar kameez
or saris, almost none (except my wife) in pants;
men in pants lungis mundus with short-sleeve shirts
never tucked inside their trousers and

everyone thin as a lizard's tail--How do I look,
an old white man in kurta and pyjamas
trying his best to cross a road in Besant Nagar
and get back home--Who knows?

Unlike tortoises and Keralites, Tamilians don't stare.
Trying to survive after a concert of
carnatic music at the local Siva temple, during which
I sat on the floor for three hours

still as the neon-lit statue of Ganesh, while
(what would make a rapid Rossini passage sound
declamatory Wagner), notes notes notes rose controlled
by the om of the drone.  The tablist good,

the violinist better.  But best of all, the voice--
What can I say?  Mozart first, carnatic music
second?  I don't say.  I listen.  I sing, I swing,
dodge a bus and return to the world.

(By the way those lizards tails are now morphing from the pencil-like ones of geckos  to the chubby appendages of Gila monsters.)

Soon it was time to say good-bye for now to this fascinating country and to Nirmala's many relatives among whom I have long since felt at home.  

I will finish with--you guess right again--a poem:

INDIA!

Lizards on walls,
vegetable stalls,
lorries and buses
and auto-rickshaws--

Caws--hardly an old
man or woman among
throngs of youths--
Stray dogs and idlis,

turmeric, lungis,
cheeni and spice,
basmati rice;
head lice, chapatis,

malaria, too--
Everything you love and don't:
poverty, health,
misery, wealth,

shoe flowers, cows,
cell phones and saris,
gods, curds and crowds;
ordered disorders;

a temple of Siva
a statue of Christ
a muezzin with answers
about death and life;

melons and gurus,
laughing clubs; yoga;
carnatic music
and Kingfisher beer.