On meditative stillness

So I was trying to find some good writers to read. Reading is an investment of time, presence and effort; hence you have to choose carefully as if your life depends on it or else do not read, go for a walk or hang upside down, just don’t degrade yourself by reading mediocre nonsense that forms much of writing these days. Crass stampede to get attention, they demean the medium as also devalue humanity. Your presence is important to life don’t disregard by participating in the orgy of degradation, the sickness that invades the soul if you are not discerning and vigilant. Your attention is precious to your being. As I was meticulously flipping through website to anchor on to the best of writers I was in presence of remarkable human being and a brilliant writer. I really haven’t heard of Harry Martinson before, and so here I was trying to find more of his writing. Harry Martinson was a Swedish writer and poet. He was an orphan who had a tough life, while a teenager he ran away from foster home and picked up odd menial jobs. He eventually got a job as a stoker labor, shoveling coal into the boilers firebox to power the engine of the ship -the same that was used in steam engine of railways that some of us have seen in old movies. This one of the poems that I happen to read:  

The Cable Ship

We fished up the Atlantic Cable one day 

between the Barbados and theTortugas,

held up our lanterns

and put some rubber over the wound in its back,

latitude 15 degrees north, longitude 61 degrees west.

When we laid our ear down to the gnawed place

we could hear something humming inside the cable.

"It's some millionaires in Montreal and St John

talking over the price of Cuban sugar, and ways to

reduce our wages", one of us said.

For a long time we stood there thinking, in a circle of lanterns,

we're all patient cable fishermen,

then we let the coated cable fall back

to its place in the sea.

His poems reflected deep humanism and care for nature. One of his noted works is an epic poem, a profound science fiction titled Aniara -a spacecraft in which people are escaping to mars from a destroyed earth and is knocked off course into deep space oblivion, it has been adapted into opera and recently a movie. What is remarkable about this poem is profound ideas of science and technology into human frailties and a prescient understanding of life. What is much more remarkable is that Martinson was self-taught, didn’t have much schooling nor stable childhood, indeed after working in ships -that took him to far off  places, he suffered from lung problems and had to abandon his job and ended up living as a vagabond on country roads, he was even arrested for vagrancy. That he was able to produce high quality work of evolved sensibilities points to not only his remarkable resilience but also the context of society that nurtures best ideas and expressions despite worst of circumstances.

Meditative stillness is unique evolution of human mind and relatively rare communion of society. It is not chance or providence but unique characteristic that is patterned in ideas, freedom and expressions that leads to stillness, a deeper involvement with life. Political and economic stability plays a significant role but isn’t the defining. Ancient Greeks and Egyptians are examples in its varying and unique expression of thoughts and aesthetics that survived in unique strands to emerge as and when society stills and individual meditates. Societies were not egalitarian but majority enjoyed spaces that had access to meditative stillness. This stillness is not satisfaction but absence of crave. It is inquisitive awareness of human condition necessarily hinged on compassion. Primitive societies survive on fear and crave, they herd to exist. Even with material comfort and economic security they are trapped in their pathetic life of want and control. Individual minds remain putrid pits while society becomes sinkhole that attract the worst. Much of world is trapped in this vicious state, and any number of opportunities of modern technologies and egalitarian options is wasted. Their occupations are daily struggles of negation of life and possibilities. Their crude expressions and stale ideas nurture crass entertainments of want and inspiration for crave.  

Much of framework for human enterprise and progress stems from meditative stillness that seeps into all forms of human expressions and thoughts. It needs constant strive to reach this luxury of stillness. For hundreds and thousands of years nature provided this stillness for life to thrive. This created brilliant expressions of biodiversity. With consciousness human mind reach meditative state. Very few regions of the world have achieved this evolved state that a self-taught man living in worst of condition could produce such astounding expression of subtlety and finesse. Such spaces are precious. Ofcourse in the last few years virtual world has created such spaces that is accessible from all across the world. 

Harry Martinson also happened to visit Bombay (now Mumbai India) in 1920s while his ship was docked for few days. His observation in those few hours that he spent in Mumbai is a testament to sensibilities that I rarely find in Indian writers who spent lifetime in putrid pit lacking compassion or connection with life except as patronizing or self-justifying redemption of miserable life cloaked in blessing. Martinson writes “Sometimes my whole being shudders at the inconceivability of the throng, at the unimaginability of the multitude of sights”. There is poignant mention of his witnessing ‘dancing girls’ on the streets, compassion as he documents his observations. “Small groups of dancers, the youngest of the dancing girls not more than five years old at the most, wild, tormented, ecstatic, most of the time commanded by an old man, continuously shouting and threatening, ugly and repulsive: a sensational and upsetting contrast to the slender beauty of the whirling little dancers” Martinson writes “Bells are ringing wildly on the ankles of the tiny ballet dancers. He, the ugly one, shouts when the dance shall go over into acrobatics, and the tiny ones go backwards on their hands and feet, their bellies pointing up towards the sky. He shouts, as if he wanted to kill them, and they throw their legs up as they dance on, standing on their hands while he, with a murderous expression, plays on a monotonously humming string instrument; with the form of a fish and the appearance of a museum specimen, prehistorically evil”.... “What if John Bauer had seen you, dear little heart. How happy he would have been. John Bauer was our great fairy tale painter. He drowned in a long, spool-shaped lake called Vättern. He would have painted a dark picture of you, deep as a fairy tale. You would be sitting on an enormous lingonberry tuft within the woods of Holaved, blinking with your eyes, as dark as a wood-mere, so that the mere itself would rumble like thunder down in its mud, rumble out of envy”. Martinson pays money to the man to stop the exploitation, and writes that he wanted to hurt the man but avoided such a confrontation as he was concerned for the girls. “I could never be that cruel, not even if I was so angry with both the entire Brahminism and the vast constipation of the English lord system”. With this prescient line he was able to put his finger on the pulse of this degraded depraved society that generations of mediocre Indian writers nurtured to control narration lacked in moral capacity. And if you glimpse through the literary awards, you will see this urge to control narration as also nepotism of squatter camaraderie breeding the most mediocre but with high sense of self-worth of blessed gift. Like everything else most Indian writers are embarrassment. That they couldn’t sufficiently appreciate writers of caliber, like say, Mohd Basheer speaks of beggar minds haggling for next meal while stampeding for power and connections. Here artists are cheapskates who create slum cakes while marketeers define art. Mediocre nurture crass to justify itself.