10 June 2012

Takin' a dip in Departures / Please, One Carrion per Passenger


I don't intend to go away so much as a predatory departures sneak up on me. That despite what I recognize since yesterday as the 'extreme crazy factor' involved in a move to India!
Now people see me; now they don't. And then again, in reverse, a few months later.
In its worst moments, it’s a comedy of errors; but I’m awash in better scenes, many consisting of a flo’-row ticket at a fire-side chat with long-beard characters, whose black & grey ashen locks are lit as a night-skyward gaze roll into bees’ nest turned upside-down on the head top perched for long-term comfortability—buckle in for a long-haul conversation—‘cause this is gonna be a trip, ‘cause
here slows down and there 
where lots changes and a lot's changed, 
who's to match the slow
from the slower with the fast
from the faster how?
Now,
I don't intend to go on & away makin’ no sense so much as I gotta bait a prayer to prey on me. What better Revs. believers' compassionable engines ‘an first-hand witness, or even second-hand testifyin’ than travel in India?! Yoga moms and ‘skrit kids, hear this! But…uh, dear… yeah, you, don’t strain. Don’tchyou worry, I’m prayin’ you up, I’m prayin’ you up,
even in the midst of so much misery, I’m prayin’ you up so you jus’ enjoy yourself in this precious space for written word. We ain’t lookin’ for solutions here for problems there; but we I to detail below or above in fancy-type script with numbers and numbers and likely more numbers, lettering the pages so to forget me not that word is flesh and splendour of the holy isn't, indeed, misery; but misery it could be you experiencin’, if I started to share in this precious space from memory of this first week I spent arriving to India, when I mostly slept in Bangalore.
Mind you, I did manage to vicariously enjoy the fruits of a botanist who grows more variety of mangoes & jackfruits than you’d care to know about. Not that I’m sayin’ science is misery! This one, Dr. Sivan Paneer Menon, outside the exquisite glass house at Lal Bhag gardens in Bangalore, ensured I took notes for the reward he (now I know) intended to give to me. I was tired!
I’s still luggin’ all my luggage from Whiteland through Dehli and onto Bangalore to stop at Lal Bhag, where it was arranged I’d meet a diplomat friend on assignment to just chill in the park with this prospect (me), but then Dr. Menon caught me outside the glass house—it’d have been exquisite for a fruit exhibition--exquisite but not-to-be-used; set up outside, please.
Nonetheless, Dr. Menon insists me to jot down notes, “X variety of mango; that Y variety of jackfruit…gene sequence Q spliced with T chromosome and grafted onto an apple tree…” and at the end Menon sir hands to me this fruitbag. Seriously! A bag full of delicious, delicious fruit.
Taste of the fruit, you ask? Taste of Andhra aam mango is unlike any mango other than the common Andhra mango, which, of course, you’ve tasted before? Well, I mean, I’ve had some great mangoes in the U.S…?
Here & now I introduce you to one side of a possible misery, and to teach you how you avoid it on your travels for tasting the Andhra aam mango. Alright then. Imagine yourself in situ, Whiteland circa 2012. You’re engaging a mango-enjoyment process: Step first, “I’d like a mango.” So great a difference in the experience exists already here, already at this inescapable stage of the process, let alone what’s about to happen ahead—peel the skin, but not too close to the fruit; laterally cut only just firmly enough to continue through the husky, inner-fruit layer—already we’re in different mango worlds.

We’re in different mango worlds! But what, like a person’s name a subject, shapes the mango? Is it just a name? Is there magic, too?
I don’t know about magic, but I’d be miserable if I wanted to taste an Andhra aam mango in White Foods, or any other high-quality Whiteland grocery market. I’d be miserable because of expectation and possibility. A linear slope defined as a real number at expectation may meet a hot possibility function of all possible values at the precise force-point of habit. And it can be quite messy to reconcile the two; ‘reconcile’ itself is too nice a word, for it indicates something ‘ameliorable’, when, in fact, it’s more like fucking without genes in jeans a potsherd, or any broken piece of ceramic material, esp. one found on an archaeological site. It’d just give you a headache, and there’d be no relief in sight. None. Nowhere. At least not walkable distance.
And nonetheless after years I land, a metempsychotic turtle out to sea, to walk around, to encircle a home for my Self on ne'er so far an oceans’ shores of yore in bark & in palm cartographed, on playback to hear through what Ear left from the horn (Indian English mein, this word should be understood plural) or to imagine as a peaceful shanty kingdom come. But the kingdom’s, I think, come; and the kingdom’s gone. In attendance at this fascinating wake imperial louts and pillage capitalists from stage northwest and more northwest still. "'ear right! 'ear right!
No funeral 'ere! No pyre to see!" 
at this the longest wake in history.
Letters and books, 
of kośa moopht sāgara—
didn't think words came out like that there, eh?
well neither’s supposed to spinach—
but one's got the looks & the brains
young lass & young lad, when
in tie & starin’ at grampy's suit plaid
you thought, “I got it bad,”
no wonder they’re sad!
Plaid?! A fucking suit?!
Try a white sheet on for size,
like the one you sleep with.
Yeah.
Roll out of bed, roll it
into your dowsers
and walk away. Just walk away.
There’re Andhra aam mangoes waiting outside.
A pretty lady sells them.
She’ll peel the skin better than you could. Closer ‘an Ever
to the inner-fruity husk
Unless you sold mangoes, too,
outside of your house,
as a different person, which,
truthfully,
is possible only here in India,
Incredible India!