A Wild Thorn

Posted on October 26, 2011 by

I have passed nights with ascetics in the monastery,
I have slept with infidels before the idols of the pagoda.
I am the pangs of the jealous, I am the pain of the sick.
I am both cloud and rain: I have rained on the mead
     –Jalaluddin Rumi, “Soul of the World,” Mathnawi, Trans. R A Nicholson

There is a certain quiet that falls in the mind when one enters any forest. Of course, even the most troubled and the tortured souls have found silence and calm in the solitude of the deep jungle. The Silent Valley reserve forests of Kerala, in south India, are no different. The last of the remaining tropical wet-evergreen rain forests, this 200 odd square miles of almost virgin forest had created such a profound social unrest in the lives of many people living in the far southern coast of India in the mid seventies and early eighties almost to the level of being raised to the iconic level of signifying the struggles of environmental protection and preservation.  The forests are so named because of the huge silence that descends amidst the rocky cliffs and giant trees and the near-total absence of the otherwise persistent cicada.  Through the valley snakes the river Kunthi (recalling the epical presence of the Pandava lineage) and the jungle goes by the name of Sairandhri (Panchali renamed herself as Sairandhri, the queen Sudeshna’s aide, while the Pandavas were in exile).

I first heard about Silent Valley in the summer of 1976, while I was registered as a Graduate student in Trivandrum.  My college was a premier institution in the state and the country considering its stupendous history and the large number of scholars and intellectuals who had sauntered across its portals in the years of yore.  The University College had celebrated its centenary and more by then. As they used to say in the small laid back city this was the college to grow up in!  Those years were also years of tremendous change and political upheaval. Every second student I met there had an ideological point to debate and prove. The teachers who came to the classes were also equally intelligent and committed (or perhaps gave such an impression, or even appeared thus to my youthful imagination.) It did not appear strange to me that our professor turned out to be an accomplished ornithologist and I recall the many hours we chatted about pelicans and pigeons and edible-nest swiftlets, while he did have some spare time away from the classes and other work. The red brick-walls of the old British style building were built to last any amount of student unrests and rebellions apparently because I had witnessed quite a number of those during the years I spent there. The bird-watcher professor was always quite nonchalant and unmoved by those million mutinies and kept on lighting up his non-filtered cigarettes one after another. He was a confirmed skeptic and was quite derisive about student agitations.  The song of a bulbul or the call of the White-breasted Kingfisher was no doubt more capable of creating ripples in his sardonically cynical mind than any number of political happenings. He was the President of our Kerala Natural History Society organized in the lines of the Bombay version of the same. We used to get together during the last Saturday of every month in the Museum campus under the trees or when it rained during the persistent monsoon days in the damp up-stairs rooms of the silent citadels of a colonial era. Nature was our concern and ecology and conservation our subject. It was then that I came across the Silent Valley debate and the time and age were so volatile that soon I was sucked into the maelstrom of the first ever people’s movement for environment in India.  Silent Valley was a passion, it became the icon and symbol of what we humans were about to lose forever on account of the wayward march of uncaring science and technology. The whole project of development was something I came to detest and deride. The very idea of the city and its ambience was what I came to identify with the inhuman policies and projects of the imperial west! When one is young one’s thoughts are pretty fast and the youthful brain adapts easily to the ideas of resistance to authority and power. One arrays oneself always with the underdogs and identifies everything else as potential threats. For my enthusiastic mind urbanization appeared as some kind of Americanisation, and technology that ushered in the terrible change figured as the juggernaut of maldevelopment and calamity. The very name Silent Valley was enough to evoke the idea of greenness and solitude, tranquility and serenity.  Over and above it when I came to know more about the policy of the State Government to build a dam across the placid water of the deep jungle stream—the Kunthi river—I was determined to throw in my might to save all that I stood for at any cost. I trekked the hills and mountains of the western ghats sometimes with friends and fellow naturalists but mostly alone. Many of those few close friends I had in the literary artistic circles thought I was a freak and started keeping safe distances from me.  And yet there were a handful who sympathized with my view and I soon found myself drawn into a larger circle of committed young people like me.

Then came the wild-life week celebrations. The State Department of forests also came to our aid and sometimes provided some sort of help.  During one of the ubiquitous poster exhibitions of those days I was awarded a bird-book by our President in the presence of a few committed naturalists and wild-life enthusiasts—and as he proclaimed it, it was in return for the single-handed service I had rendered for the social awareness raising campaign. Life was in the fast lane those days and much was happening beside the valley issue. The political emergency clamped on the country by the then prime minister Mrs Indira Gandhi was crucial and critical in the way of our growing up. No one was allowed to protest and there was little one could do by way of resistance. Mrs Gandhi herself was a sensitive soul when it came to issues of conservation and preservation, as I came to realize, but the political climate of those days inspired innumerable young people to take to the streets and be tortured and martyred—apparently for no significant purpose. This might appear no big deal to the youth of today so very used to terrorism and needless political massacres.  But then protest and resistance were the order of our youthful days! And Kerala was a hotbed of soico-political and cultural action.  However, there were many so called pretentious intellectuals who hid themselves away from the prying eyes of the Gestapo-like police force of the ruling powers that be. Strangely enough many of them made it big in some way or other in later days, conveniently forgetting those times of struggle in the darkness. I can recall a couple of instances when as a student I had occasions to witness the dastardly and cowardly actions of some so-called intellectuals who later paraded themselves as big shots and culture-vultures! Julien Benda had rightly dubbed such situations as the betrayal of the intellectuals. And then there were other mean minds that played havoc with several innocent younghearts who were absolutely unaware of the profound political intrigues of the times and their deeper significance. They would organize some action rally or other forms of activities like street plays etc and parade the unknowing innocent victims in the forefront while hiding behind their shadows lurking and ducking the vigilant police and political spies. How many times did I fall prey to these dirty games that these political big-wigs played! How many dark nights and sleepless dawns did I tread the erroneous by lanes running reckless errands for these uncaring scoundrels! The worst thing was that I had carried out all these under the pretence that I was doing something heroic! And growing up in those dragon-ridden days and nights I had played out my active part in the dram of the silent valley too. We got ourselves organized as a society calling It the Save Silent Valley Society. There was an equally involved student of Engineering with whom I struck up a good working friendship.  The two of us were the conveners of this society. We sent out a call for a public seminar and proclaimed our intentions to create an open forum to bring the great intrigues into the clear light of day.  There was also a specially mounted exhibition that displayed posters and photographs depicting the facts and figures of the silent valley issue. On the date of the rally and march the court issued an injunction order and it was announced that anyone found defying the court order would be punished—the rally was called off.  But a few enthusiastic friends had decide to take out a march to the government secretariat silently holding forth placards and their mouths covered with handkerchiefs symbolizing the imposed silence. Many were arrested and the march disbanded cruelly. Some of my friends forcibly locked me up in the exhibition hall to keep me safe from being arrested. I don’t actually know what happened except through the newspapers that carried detailed reports daily. There were of course no television or cell phone in those days—and anyway we were too poor to afford to buy even a book or a journal: the ubiquitous newspapers came and went.  And days moved onto nights and darkness made way for the next dawns. The people’s movement had caught on and there were many hands to carry the placards and prepare the posters and many mouths to spread the message.  The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad the people’s science movement in the state had taken up the issue and another organization acme to be founded: the Prakriti Samrakshana Samithi (the people’s association for the protection of nature) Leading poets, intellectuals and cultural acitivists came to take up the flag from our tired hands and the burden of saving the valley came to be the problem of a larger community of sensitive people. The silent valley was silent no more.  It was a burning issue and vociferous political problem debated and discussed by thousands and millions not only in Kerala but all the way from Gujarat to the far eastern states and from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. The desecration of the valley symbolized the perilous avarice of the human beings and its deprivation signaled the disappearance of an all-time green soul from the human body. The silent valley was a passion in my youthful mind and its memories are even now ever-green, and will be like that forever, even after I pass. Three decades after that when I visited the place, I lugged with me the dead weight of a long lost past. I walked down the much trodden path into the green jungle and trampled carelessly over brown and yellow leaves and rounded boulders. The rush of the forest stream had not lost its power and passion. The wild breeze taunted me with the touch of evergreen green deeps. Occasional bits of blue sky showed through the rich verdance of the west coast tropical wet evergreen rain forests. I had forgotten even to wet my feet in the swirling waters of the Kunthi river. Did I hear the whistling thrush mock me for attempting to stop the building of a dam across these waters? Who can resist the juggernaut of change? When I left the forest I fumbled in my pockets for the change I had brought along.  I pulled out a clutch of currency notes but no change! I realized I had lost the coins in the jungle. The deep-chested whoop of the Nilgiri Langur  floated down wind and a Sambhar stag bellowed.  An old friend who had spent long years in Russia had told me that whenever the Russians leave a place where they want to return later they fling a coin behind their backs. The magic of the lost coins would take me again and again to Silent Valley! Who knows! At least, there is still a valley one could think of going back to.

For me, the Silent Valley is a wild thorn—a painful memory of a lifetime.  I have kept it buried deep within my secret memories with the sacredness and rectitude of a serene religious experience, nursing and preserving the bitter-sweetness of an unhealing wound, not relishing or caressing it even in my dreams for fear of losing it forever!

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Biomimicry and Industrial Design?

Posted on October 6, 2011 by

May 6, 2011, marked the first etchings of a new tree ring in my life.  I walked away from a marketing research career at the largest media company in Arizona in order to pursue another degree–this time in industrial design at ASU’s Herberger Institute, with a minor in sustainability. I think there is huge opportunity in product design and execution by using a human-centered research methodology coupled with biomimicry philosophies. 

Biomimicry, studying nature’s best systems and then imitating them to solve human problems, has made some headway in the military, medical, and architectural fields but, as far as I can tell, the everyday products we take for granted are farther behind in their adaption and relationship to natural systems.  For the most part it seems that we create plastic, we generate materials, we cause runoff, we toxify the environment in search of just the right “in season” product produced in the cheapest and most efficient way possible in order to maximize profits.

We create large machines that sit in huge warehouses that are powered by one of our nation’s three power grids in order to make millions of pieces of plastic ware which get dumped in a garbage can and taken to a landfill to sit for hundreds of years before maybe breaking down.  If we’re lucky, a third of that garbage is filtered to a recycling plant and can be used again in another manner–the movie Addicted to Plastic suggests only about 5% of plastic actually gets recycled; the rest is downcycled to produce other products.   Why do we use so much plastic? Because it’s cheap, because it can be any shape or color, any weight, and because it offers lots of new solutions to old or new problems. To use something else, or pay for research to find another material is an added expense, an added detractor from the profit growth performance that corporations need to keep their market price high so the big guys at the top of the food chain can retire and allow the next four generations of their families to live in riches. 

Yet in a few generations’ time, the great grand-kids of those corporate bigheads may be coughing dust, drinking brown water, and wondering what it was like in the old days when birds could be found in the city and it was actually safe to eat the fish in the ocean.

An unnatural obsession with profit growth drives some companies to morally bankrupt themselves, producing products as cheaply as possible, treating customers with as little service as they can get away with, disposing of their waste however necessary to avoid public scrutiny, keeping worker morale and income at a minimum, and creating products that have a short lifespan because they will need to be replaced and purchased again.  This is not a “healthy” species of company culture or manufacturing practices. 

I heard once that a species is healthy if its population is growing 1-2% a year.  We should be mimicking this in our expectations of companies.  Why do we look for 10-30% profit growth a year? If a species is “healthy” growing at 1-2%, can’t we be happy if a company grows 1-2% a year? 

By concurrently learning more about how products are currently made–the good and bad case studies–and joining it with studying the science and properties of plants and natural systems and materials, I’m hoping to apply some philosophies found in our natural systems to shift more products to models that are able to be recycled or downcycled again and again and again, that last longer, take less to produce and maintain, and solve problems of design we encounter every day.  How can we better design products in harmony with natural systems through practices that corporations may be attracted to adopt?  Understanding that consumerism is a modern truth, can we make the process better?  My hope is yes, but right now I have a lot to learn.

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Issue Twelve: Summer 2011

Posted on August 24, 2011 by

With the heat index regularly in triple digits, the constant threat of afternoon thunderstorms, and a hurricane looming off the coast, the summer is fully upon us here in central Florida.

Issue Twelve: Summer 2011For me, it has been a summer of change: we moved closer to campus last month, and our daughter started college this week. And there is change here, too, at Willows Wept Review.

Not only did we add Kathleen Kraft to our masthead as associate editor this summer, but we are also adding a print edition to WWR beginning with this issue. Many of our readers and contributors have requested a print version of the journal, so I’m glad to announce that beginning with Issue Twelve, the journal will be available in digital and print formats through HP’s print-on-demand service, Mag Cloud. Digital versions of the issue, including iPad and PDF versions, will (of course) be free. Perfect-bound print copies of the issue will cost twelve dollars.

I hope that readers who choose to order the print edition of this issue will have the same experience of fascination and joy that I had on the day the proof copy arrived in the mail–I had read all of the work many, many times, but it was wonderful to hold it in my hand, to experience something of what Walter Benjamin might have described as the aura of the issue.

And so I’m very happy today to offer Issue Twelve in both digital and print formats. The issue features a striking cover image by the 15-year-old award-winning photographer Eleanor Leonne Bennett, and it includes work by John Paul Calavitta, William Cullen Jr., Jim Davis, Howie Good, Timothy Gray, A. H. Hofer, B. J. Hollars, Rose Hunter, Colleen Khachatourians, George Korolog, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Tarn W.P. MacArthur, Florence Major, Dave Malone, Neila Mezynski, Lisa Roney, Rae Spencer, Judith Skillman, Nicol Stavlas, Alison Carb Sussman, and Helen Vitoria.

For trusting us with their words, I am thankful.

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Waters of the US

Posted on July 20, 2011 by

Much contemporary judicial interpretation supposes, in the words of Justice Scalia: “garbage in, garbage out.”  Where a judge is confronted by a law, so long as that law is constitutional or not in direct conflict with another law, it is that judge’s responsibility to uphold the oath of her office and apply the law as written.  While reasonable people can always disagree on the meaning of a given text as it applies to a given situation, some language and concepts are so clear as to allow for only the smallest amount of interpretations.  As Scalia explains, in these instances, if people do not like a judge’s decision, the legislature, not the judiciary, has the responsibility to rectify any problems.

Although the above points sound obvious, this type of judicial interpretation has not always dominated judicial philosophy.  Rather, this new breed of judicial integrity arose antagonistically in response to what was understood as liberal judicial activism.  Unfortunately, however, this purist-sounding type of interpretation has never been applied evenly or balanced.  The approach is often used to justify unpopular decisions or to justify judges’ reneging on their responsibility to uphold a modicum of justice in our society (incidentally, Scalia believes justice is not his business, despite his title).

Where these supposed strict-interpretation judges, however, often find themselves in a bind is where they confront laws which are contrary to their desires.  That is, this new breed of judicial interpretation arose as a mechanism to combat the sweeping social reforms that occurred as a result of the Warren Court throughout the beginning of the second half of the past century.  However, during that period, broad environmental legislation was passed which contemporary conservative judges today are unwilling to uphold.    Perhaps that is why this past November the Supreme Court refused to hear Friends of the Everglades v. South Florida Water Management District.

Though I think all interested in American environmentalism should learn about the nuance of the Clean Water Act, I will not delve too deeply into the intricacy of that law here.  However, to those interested I would recommend The Clean Water Handbook (American Bar Association) by Mark Ryan (if the high price tag doesn’t dissuade you).  Suffice it to say that the Clean Water Act prohibits all discharge of pollutants from point sources into waters of the United States without a permit.  This one clause has been the spring for an era of dramatic environmental rehabilitation.  Although we are unfortunately a long way from the goal set by the Act (completely clean waters by 1985), America’s waterways are healthier than they have been in many generations.

Still, environmental rehabilitation has never been easy.  A number of presidential administrations have gone to great lengths to undermine the Clean Water Act; though some such attempts may have been justified in light of the circumstances, the fact remains that such attempts were counter to environmental interests and counter to the democratic principles which led to the development of the Clean Water Act.  Of course, it comes as no surprise that the intensely political office of president will oftentimes lead to corruption of firmly established law in favor of public whim.  Less excusable, however, is how judges can often be complicit in such manipulation.

In Friends of the Everglades, a 2009 case which began in south Florida and ended up in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, the court considered “whether the transfer of a pollutant from one navigable body of water to another is a ‘discharge of a pollutant’ within the meaning of the Clean Water Act.”  Specifically, the court queried whether pumping water from a complex system of dikes and canals contaminated with a high number of nutrients into a wetland along Lake Okeechobee constituted an addition of a pollutant.

The EPA, during George W. Bush’s presidency, had promulgated a regulation which supposed that it is not an an addition to navigable waters to move existing pollutants from one navigable water to another.  This position has come to be known as the “unitary waters theory.”  Put simply, this EPA regulation contends that all waters of the United States are the same.  Thus, transferring water from one body of American water to another can never be covered by the Clean Water Act because no addition ever occurred.  The Eleventh Circuit deferred to the EPA’s interpretation of the Clean Water Act and held that the water transfer did not constitute a discharge and thus required no permit.  The Supreme Court refused to hear the case on appeal.

Plenty of time can (and has) been spent deriding the legal interpretation of the court in Friends of the Everglades.  What else could waters (stress the “s”) mean if all American waters were the same?  But I am confronted with a question which requires no legal analysis whatsoever.

We all must wear a different hat at different times.  At times I like to wear the poetic hat.  Other times I wear my legal hat.  My science hat.  Still, I have sought in my own life to fuse all of these interests into one smorgasbord of philosophical inquiry.  I have never found this fusion so frustrating as I do when I think of unitary waters.

I think my difficulty stems from the fact that, more than any other issue I confront, unitary waters actually makes explicit the three hats I mentioned above.  Certainly the legal is implicated, but so too are science and art.  My scientific mind brews brackish.  My poetic mind can barely form a couplet.

The many waters of my life were, certainly, all connected.  They were connected through my own visceral experience with them, but also through a very tangible hydrological cycle.  Clouds do not really seem to care whether the hydrogen and oxygen molecules within them came from the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Baikal, or the waters of Lethe.  However, once the rain has fallen and the clouds parted, we all must recognize that each water is distinct.

I think of the time I spent in South Dakota one summer, going cliff diving in some of the most beautiful places I have ever been.  And I remember my high school years spent along Florida’s Gulf Coast hoping for the future to come.  The Hudson River of my college years.  Those waters were not one piece of water–scientifically, poetically, or legally.  They were unique and they were worth protecting.

What saddens me most about all this is not that my own personal sense of America’s waters has been perverted.  What saddens me most is that that perversion can only lead to the further degradation of that which I hold so dear.

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Transition

Posted on July 10, 2011 by

As a child of the sage-steppe plateau of eastern Washington–someone who has spent a lifetime explaining, “No, actually, it’s the part of Washington that is not green, or alpine, or near the ocean, and it is not covered in pine trees or carpeted with rain forest ferns”–I have spent my adult decades wandering in the desert of my most fragile ambition: to live among mountains and trees such as those that called to me from the windward side of the Cascades in my divided homeland.

Yet ambition was time and again subsumed by love and work. Whether in pursuit of or in exile from a relationship or a job, my choices of place were randomized by necessity. Utah, California, Nevada, and Iowa (twice, and most recently) simply became the next place from which to dream of crossing the physical and psychological boundary that demarcated my youth. Would I ever find my spirit home?

Finally, the question came down to this: How much do I want it? Enough to sacrifice pay and position, house and home, friends and hard-won professional relationships? (And, ironically, my biennial pilgrimage to ASLE. An extended drought for my writerly roots in order to set them down in a fertile place?)

And so opened the road to Flagstaff. At nearly 7,000 feet among the Ponderosa pines in the shadows of the San Francisco peaks, it certainly rises to my alpine ambitions. Trails abound and beauty imbues the landscape in and around this mountain town set among national forests.

But there is a price to pay for such a locale. The almost prideful local expression “poverty with a view” became a well-worn adage during my consideration of Flag, as it’s known here, and when I described to a storage unit manager my family’s quest to squeeze a four-bedroom house on a double lot into a two-bedroom apartment, she laughed and said, “We call that urban camping.”

Now ensues the tricky proposition of choosing a place for the place and then learning if it is what I had imagined it to be. Do the requirements of living here resonate with my true self? New fears are introduced, manifested as megadrought and catastrophic fires, and there is the nagging concern about what will change over the years, progress being what it is.

But being here is the only way to know, and the only way to eradicate the poverty of my aspirations by opening a wealth of possibilities.

Posted in Literature, the Arts, and the Environment, Willows Wept Review | Tagged

The Call of the Coppersmith Barbet

Posted on June 27, 2011 by

All afternoon the Coppersmith Barbet on the fig tree beside the river had been tonking away: tonk . . . tonk . . . tonk . . . , his call reverberated over the steely-still waters of the Mahanadi, while like a skillful ventriloquist the bird hid behind the large green leaves far from the inquisitive eyes of humans. Only the sound floated about. From where I sit I can see miles and miles of water; little wonder this is Mahanadi, the great river, the lifeblood of Orissa! A few miles off the trees I can see the rising concrete structure of the Hirakud dam in the district of Burla. The waters are stopped by the massive structure and canalized for purposes of generating electricity and to irrigate large areas of otherwise dry terrain. Now the river flows into the evening as darkness starts to descend slowly. One by one an array of lights come alive piercing the sky and water like arrows. Only the lapping of the strange silent waters as they caress the shore. And now the sounds of night begin–the chuk . . . chuk . . . chuk . . . chukkoor of the nightjar announces the settling in of the night. The cicadas and frogs take it up. Suddenly all nature is once again up and alive, the transference of light into life. Of course, what we see, what we feel, and what we hear, is only a tiny, tiny slice of nature. Life around us is so abundant, so very varied. And we are immersed in its being–our being is no different. And yet we see so little, feel so little, and hear so little.

Now, from over the waters I can hear bits and pieces of bhajans from some temple somewhere upstream where the devotees have gathered for puja and arathi. The voices and instruments are so soft, so very like the rise and fall of the waters of the Mahanadi. Like the deft fingers of the maestro moving over the tiny holes cut into the bamboo stem, the waters of the Mahanadi lap and lave over the sand shore. Everything blends so well. I am at peace. I could sit for hours like this while the bhajans die out and the lamps are put out. The devotees would troupe back to their homes and their home lights would come on. Life is so perfect!

In nature all sounds have meanings. We have also learned to mean much through our own production of sounds; in fact we have created a parallel acoustic world through our sounds and voices. There are hardly any human communities without speech or music. Of course, we have come so far away from the primitive noise making process and our super technologies have helped us constitute complex structures of the likes of Hirakud in terms of sounds and voices. Perhaps humans have almost forfeited their ability to listen to silence. We need to recourse to voice and sound to analyze, interpret, and mean. The worst part is what technology has done to our voices: we can record and replay and resort to a thousand ways of delivering the sound through a million modes and means. We can make it sound a thousand times over. An ordinary whisper can be magnified to resound like thunder. While the Hindu displays his religion’s magnificence through the loud notes played all mornings and evenings over the temple loud-speakers, the muezzin in the Islamic tower casts out louder verses from the Koran at the very top of his voice! Of course he needs to wake up the ardent devotee and remind him of his religious duties of worship. The Christians are not far behind: they have their own ways of keeping the spirit of religion alive and sparkling through the loudest of notes. Religion in the present depends so very much on the world of sight and sound. Sing aloud and thou shalt be heard! The Christians were missionaries before anybody else; they carried the word of god to all and sundry. Now the television has afforded them another way of televangelism! Indeed all religions have their own special channels for dispensing their version of truth! After all we need to tell the other how to live better and reach god faster, whether we need it ourselves or not! All sounds and notes of religions apparently are meant only for the other. One does not pause to consider whether the other needs it or not ever. Songs and sermons are blasted from over a million loudspeakers everyday and every minute, from all corners of India, tearing any remaining silence into shreds of disconnected dots and dashes. Religions are so loud these days, and they get louder by the minute. The word of god is to be treasured and meditated up on in our silent hearts and never to be violated like this. But who cares!

There are rules and regulations in our civil societies about personal space and private space. There are rules that one cannot hurt the other; neither should one trespass on what is termed private property. However there is almost nothing to stop one from screaming aloud one’s religion right into the other’s delicate apparatus of hearing! What violence, what aggression, when one considers the songs and slogans renting the sacred air of morning and evening in our towns and villages! This is sheer desecration of human acoustic space; no one seems to care! The genuine searchers of religious and spiritual truths have always left the marketplaces of the world to seek for silence elsewhere. Nietzsche wrote: solitude ends where the market place begins. The entire civilized world has become a market place of meaningless sounds and screeches. And yet the Mahanadi flows with majestic peace and silence. There is a genuine silence in the heart of any river, provided one can sense the same. This cannot be dislocated by the aural-oral discourses of the vociferous culture of our religions. All rivers are compassionate and they proffer their hearts to the listening ear.

Somehow we have come to believe that it is through a culture of sound we reach the other shore of communication and meaning. Bhartrhari, the Sanskrit linguist of ancient India, speaks of the Nada Brahmam, the Sound Absolute of the Eternal Spirit. Tyagaraja, the Saint Singer, writes of Nada Brahma as well, to where the song eternal would lead the singer ultimately. There is also the Sabda Brahmam, the articulate universe of sound. Between Nada and Sabda there is a world of difference. Sabda is definitely of the lower order in the scale, where the presence of articulated meaning and interpretation dwells. Sabdartha sahitam kavyam, says Bhamaha, one of the Sanskrit aestheticians–poetry is the perfect union of sound and sense. But sound and sense do not often go together. Most of our everyday life is replete with the former devoid of any sense. And many people mistake mere sound as meaning.

Sound is so often a corruption of silence. Sound can also be seen as defiance and disturbance. Perhaps sound is one way man defies god in the face of the absurdity of his existence. It could be that sound issues forth from his disordered mind or brain. Often enough mere sound could also substitute the sense and spirit. However, the louder we make out sounds the farther we move from the logic of meaning; the maha satta, or the ultimate meaning remains seated so far deep in silence, one cannot wean it through the disturbances in the acoustic space, neither can one defy the might of the silent spirit that is both immanent and transcendental at the same time. Those who know this, move away from the cacophonic conglomeration of our absurd world of sounds, the repertoire of our weak minds, the noise of our perturbed souls. The Mahanadi moves and yet moves so still in time.

All sounds in nature apart from those made by us humans sometimes have an intrinsic balance. We too can sing, we too can whistle, we too can make a million other ways of expressing delight and pain. However, the moment we resort to the complex technological modes of delivery and broadcasting, we begin the de-sacralization of nature and spirit. The human ear has a fine delicate sensibility to sounds and voices to noises and notes. We have the great ability to distinguish the slapdash from the harmonious–or at least some of us have.

The human ear can receive and respond to sounds of a certain decibel range, below or beyond which the audibility ceases to be. Many animals and bats have inbuilt sensitivity to sound waves of amazingly lower and higher range. The vibrations our sounds make in the air can either be sensed as audible or even inaudible. Even if a large tree falls in a deep jungle where no human ear is available to receive it as audible sound, the vibrations it causes ranges through the entire cosmos. Even the closing and unclosing of butterfly wings can travel miles and miles of apparently silent space. There is a sense of sound as we humans make it out and there is a sound of sense which we often times ignore. The Mahanadi’s lapping waters speak to me of the age old wisdom of the saints and seers, in a language of silence, where the gaps and crests hold equal sense, an uncanny balance.

The calls of the Coppersmith Barbet has left this shore so long ago and yet they will be traveling for all eternity.

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An Evening of Delight

Posted on June 22, 2011 by

There is something alive in a feather. The power of it is perhaps in its dream of sky, currents of air, and the silence of its creation. It knows the insides of clouds. It carries our needs and desires, the stories of our brokenness. It rises and falls down elemental space, one part of the elaborate world of life where fish swim against gravity, where eels turn silver as moon to breed.
     –Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

Late last evening we were driving over one of the long seemingly unending dykes of the huge Hirakud dam spanning across the Mahanadi in the Burla district of Orissa. The night was very quiet and the moon was so very full hanging just above the horizon as a silvery orange balloon and painting the slow moving ripples below in all casualness. Everything was so very beautiful. Only sound of the tyres ripping over the asphalt floors. We were there due to the courtesy of the Department of Forests and Wildlife of the Orissa state, and we had on board a fully trained tracker and forest ranger with us to guide us. And we were on our way back after a long day in the reserve forests of Debrigarh. The headlights of the Jeep picked up occasional nightjars perched so closely in the middle of the road. They would sit there apparently blinded by the headlights of the vehicle until we are almost over their tiny bodies and then take off on their spread wings in a tangent of fright and indignation. Comfortably perched on the passenger seat next to the driver with eager open eyes, I could count nearly thirty odd birds like that all along the dyke. Each one had a different flight plan. And they were spaced almost equally, perhaps having a special personal-distance chart of their own. The Mahanadi was full and silent below, compassionate to the birds and also to us mortals who had attempted to strangulate her free flow and diverted her energies for other purposes. Earlier in the evening we had been fortunate enough to have close sightings of many wild animals and birds, including a full grown specimen of a Sambhar deer, an exquisite male, who jumped across our road and turning a mighty glance of defiance at us sprinted away.

The day had very nearly come to a close and I was heading back to my guest house in the Sambalpur University, where I had come as a short-term Visiting Professor. The visit was so nearly over, and it had been sufficiently fruitful in terms of experiences. The dyke still stretched unending before us under the moon. The nightjars took off one by one on their padded wings, their dark and light patterns clearly visible against the headlights. How very peaceful and how very majestic the coming night!

Life has a habit of becoming terribly habitual. It becomes repetitive and monotonous. But such rare opportunities like this tear it apart into moments of sheer amazement and delight. I think of the million others in their homes and offices now, leading a humdrum existence and engaging with the trivialities of everyday life! How very different and indefinite it all appears to be! This is not to state that a mere stroll in a wildlife park has made me a great, exceptional, superhuman being, or anything, but only that it gives me a space for beginning to think like myself—perhaps all over again! And that’s what usually matters.

The Mahanadi has been straddled and caught under the huge span of the Hirakud dam. The free run of the river to the sea has been diverted to produce electricity, run machines and maneuver many things, irrigate a thousand acres through controlled channels and several thousand villages and forested land have also been inundated in the bargain–many people made homeless. We do not yet fully know the damage we would have caused to the environment while we were doing it–the amount of wildlife, insects, amphibians, reptiles, crustaceans, and a host of innumerable unseen creatures, we have wiped out in the process. Just like the casual plastic covers we fling out of our moving vehicles, we simply did not care! After all it is only a small act, an insignificant one for us. Consider the great results. Did we ever consider the million tiny forces of energy that were at work so deep under the dam, the profundity of the force of thousands of kilolitres of waters, that were even now slowly edging their way in and out? Perhaps one day the river would finally free itself from the clutches of the mortar and cement and steel girders! We would then call it calamitous and blame it all on the river. But then these are inevitable facts. As the poet writes: all things fall and are built again! We humans are great builders. We build structures visible and tangible, as well as invisible like our social norms, our culture, and our history. We cannot cease from exploration and perhaps the end of all our exploration would be to arrive where we started from and see the place for the first time! Every act requires a distance in time and space to reveal its significance. Every nano-second requires its own inevitable other to comprehend its being! The human mind reflecting on itself is replete with amazing moments like these. As we slip on over the dyke in the Hirakud dam across the Mahanadi, there is this vast expansion of seconds and nano-seconds into eons and eras, into history and ultimate timelessness! Into the awful space of the cosmos! The nightjars are there to remind us of our own mortality, spaced so very well among themselves. The headlights of the moving vehicle are our reflective ego, the dyke the point of awareness, the night our infinite being, the moon our destiny, and the water our conscience. The night and the moon are never merely given. The uniqueness of the moment is in its slow unwinding. Everything is so good. Even the human atrocities in building the dam and extinguishing life is forgiven, for a great compassion spreads over the earth! One by one the nightjars swing free of the circle of light. The moon moves behind a clump of trees. The tyres move. We are heading toward the other shore.

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