The Dirty War

It is 1849 in the Southern reaches of Texas, and Captain White is on a civilising mission as he interviews the Kid for his army. He tells him about the "godless mongrel race" of Mexicans who had gone back on every signed treaty. Mexicans were beastly people with no industry, government or religion. Elucidating on these  "degenerates" who were unfit to govern themselves, he tells the Kid that "enlightened Mexicans" were already asking for American intervention on their behalf. By the time Captain is finished with his high minded pitch, the Kid, nobody's fool, is ready with his own set of questions.

"What about a saddle?
Saddle?
Yessir.
You don't have a saddle?
No sir.
I thought you had a horse.
A mule.
I see."

Cormac McCarthy has always had a great ear for the dialogue, with humour coming from seemingly nutty conversations. This interview ends with the recruitment of the Kid with the promise of a horse, saddle, rifle, clothes and potential new farmland once Mexico is conquered and brought under American sovereignty.

That this "civilising mission" will end in disaster, either for the conqueror or for the conquered, is never really in doubt. In "Blood Meridian" however, these dialogues may seem a respite from the thoroughly bleak world that McCarthy creates so successfully.

This is the world of a rag tag band of murderers, who have been contracted to "protect" the Southern, border towns of America from the marauding bands of Apaches. There is a price for each dead Indian, measured in scalps and paid in hard cash. And every scalp counts, with neither age nor gender hindrance in cost or conscience. At the center of this band are two pivotal men - the Kid and the Judge - who provide the vital force to the novel.

The Judge is a heavily built, bald man, with not a single hair on his body, a veteran of Indian hunting expeditions. A complex and voluble personality, he is a man of science and reason, highly learned in both religious and secular literature, who enjoys liquor and dancing. He has a deranged, but highly developed, sense of morality, and spends considerable time philosophising about, when not actually, committing the murders. The Kid is his alter ego. Less than seventeen, of slight build but with large hands, he has fought his battles in streets and bars where knives and pistols come out in lost card games. His motivations, as in the conversation above, are apparently plain in terms of "gainful employment".

To the Judge's penetrating eyes however, the two are not very different, and when they meet years after they participated in unmitigated slaughter, he asks, "Was it always your idea that if you did not speak, you will not be recognised?"

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McCarthy has always depicted the Southern rural landscape - the prairies and mountains and rivers and horses and wolves - very evocatively, embedding it in his sparsely peopled novels as an intrinsic character. In "Blood Meridian", this imagery gets transformed dramatically. In the prairie of blood soaked marauders, there is sand and grit and dust, with blood colouring even the sunrises and dusks. As he writes, in a numbing passage,
"In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature."

The darkness is unremitting throughout, with passages abounding in death and squalor and debauchery. But this misery and violence is described with precision and detachment, but without sorrow or sentimentality. And humour, in rendering all the violence meaningless, is quite inimitable. One of the first street fights of the Kid is over crossing a thin plank, surrounded by mud and grime, to, of course, avoid muddying themselves. By the end of a short, lightly provoked, vicious fight, as both the survivors lie belly up in a pool of blood and mud, you wonder and chuckle about the stupidity of it all.

The capacity of the marauders, particularly as they become more and more adept in killing, to ruin any place is singularly striking. This is true not just for their victims, but their hosts and contractors as well. When they enter the city of Chihuahua after their murderous campaign, they are given a hero's welcome. As McCarthy describes in characteristic graphic prose,
"Small boys ran among the hooves and the victors in their gory rags smiled through the filth and the dust and the caked blood as they bore on poles the desiccated heads of the enemy through that fantasy of music and flowers".

They are followed through the streets by trumpeters and drummers, women fall over and touch them as if they are saints, and lavish parties are given to celebrate their homecoming. A month later, when they leave, with another "contract" in their bags, gold had run out, stores had closed, boulevards deserted and young girls kept indoors. McCarthy writes laconically, "...not even a dog followed them to the gates".

Running through this meanness and violence is the central concern that is probed with urgent inquiry - why do men kill? Most animals kill to eat, or to defend. Men kill for various reasons, mostly for money or food, but also in passion, fear and prejudice. What lies underneath is what psychologists and spiritualists call, peculiarly, "animalistic self", that lies dormant with desire to destroy and kill. But there is, of course, nothing "animalistic" about it. As the Judge argues persuasively, it is all too human. After all, the ritual of sacrifice, animal or human, is as old as the civilisation itself - with evidence of scalping found even in 300,000 years old fossils.

And it is all rooted in the need for the thrill and gamble of sports, the desire to beat and pin down the other. In the Judge's formulation, "War" is the ultimate sport of life and death. It is not about pride or honour. Honourable men die sooner in wars. It is about the kill.

It is also enticing to see, in this mad story, madness of a whole nation, built through aggressive expansion by settler colonialists. As the settlers expanded towards the West from the tiny Eastern settlements, these new men usurped land, created industries, and developed and sustained mythologies of free enterprise, race pride, and dignity of labour.

"Blood Meridian" is a dark, disconcerting novel, apocalyptic in scope, and written in fantastic, lyrical prose. McCarthy's style is complex, situated in the here and now, but with cadences of religious literature. I have read nothing quite like this, and doubt if anything comparable is there in all of literature. This is a great, must read, novel, which works at all levels, and which will sustain for all ages.

The ecstatic holy fools - Part One

The windows are shut, and "Haq Ali Ali" inhabits the car and it's occupants completely. As I peer out, things seem to move slower than usual. The people on the road have acquired both a new gravity, and at the same time an intense fatalism in what they are doing. I see their expressions clearly; with their bored, intent or plain vacant eyes. I close my eye lids slowly, as if on weed, and feel a strange lightness come into my heart with current flowing through whole of my body. The moments of spiritual ecstasy may, in most cases, be nothing more than this - a general feeling of ease when an essential goodness seems to overflow without any intercession from reason. At least for these few moments, I see greater clarity and purpose than what the reality warrants.

As the Sufis would say, this is seeing from the heart's eye.

For a host of South Asians, the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has long been the face of Qawwali, the ecstatic Sufi music form. Its lyrics are characterised by love poetry addressed to the Divine or His earthly intercessors, and it is sung in a uniquely stylised and rhythmic form of Hindustani classical music. In the shrines of Sufi pirs, where it has been performed at least since the fourteenth century, it frequently, even today, induces some of the listeners to dance ecstatically and go into trances or what is termed as "hal", where they achieve the desired spiritual communion with God. These highly conspicuous men, dishevelled, dazed, and as if stoned on very potent drugs, are the darwishes or faqirs, sometimes tied to the shrine, sometimes wandering restlessly from one place to the other. And they are part of the larger body of Sufis, who embody the inner dimensions of Islam. 

Sufis have long represented, what is termed, as the "soft" face of Islam, not always positively. Some modern commentators venture so far, perhaps misled by the excesses of the Persian poets, as to characterise them as secular torch-bearers and free-thinkers, who have gone outside the fold of their traditionally "hard" Islamic core. Many Muslims, both modern and orthodox, also associate Sufism with obscure and superstitious practices of saint worshipping, devotional Pir cults, magic, miraculous cures, and wild parties of singing and dancing that verge on heresy. Most have long held Sufism, with it's attendant beliefs, to be primarily responsible for Muslims not taking their rightful place in world history. 

To be sure, Sufis are profoundly religious, and, by and large, very devout Muslims. Since at least the ninth century, Sufism has existed alongside the more normative, scriptural Islam, and exerted tremendous hold over it's followers all over the Islamic world. Who are these men, who sing and dance in mad abandon, and are still apparently of very strong religious orientation?

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Economists, and modern city life, have for long conditioned us to believe in the primacy of self-interest in everything that governs our life. We all want a well-paying job, a swanky 3-BHK apartment, and the next new VTEC engine powered car. We are all "rational" creatures, yes. But ten thousand years of human history of settled life tells us that we are much more than that. We also have a deep yearning for the presence of sacred in our lives. We want meaning, real or created, in the absence of which we can quickly fall into despair. Albert Camus was quite right to postulate the problem of suicide - whether to live without hope or divine order - as the one governing the most fundamental of human conditions. 

Mysticism, as an internalized form of religion, has offered sacred meaning of life to many without the entrapment of external ritual or doctrine. All major religions have this branch that is slightly tangential to the majoritarian discourse, and which, even while appropriating the core doctrines, makes the religion more accessible and attractive to the commoners. Mystics bring interiority into religions, which get typically hijacked after brief early creative periods by literalists and dogmatists, who place far too much emphasis on ritual purity, outward piety and "correct" behaviour. Hindus have had their Bhakti saints, Christians the desert fathers of the East, and Muslims their Sufis.

Sufism is thus a form of Islamic mysticism, in which believers seek communion with God within the framework of Islam. The core of Sufism is in the idea of abandonment of man by God, and a fierce longing to be reunited with Him. It originated in the eight century as a reaction against the obscene wealth and splendour of Umayyad Caliphs. The first Sufis were pure ascetics who discarded all material attachments and led intense, lonely lives, committed to meditation of God. Hasan al-Basri, the patriarch of Muslim asceticism, for instance, was a witness to the Umayyad conquests, and was distressed by the hypocrisy he saw between the professedly pure ideals of Islam, and the very material richness that adorned the Caliphs. He, and the other early ascetics, essentially, in protest, withdrew from the world they saw as profane.

Extremely individualistic and interesting, there is nevertheless an undercurrent of great sadness in these early mystics. They shunned family life, preferred celibacy, lived with minimal material goods, and advocated strict renunciation of the world. An early ascetic Fudayl reflected this aversion of people when he proclaimed:- "When night comes, I am happy that I am alone, without separation, with God, and when morning comes I get distressed because I detest the view of those people who enter and disturb my solitude". The most significant early influence was from the Christian ascetics living lonely in the mountains of Lebanon and Iraq, with Jesus being the ideal ascetic. The patched woollen cloak that they wore as an emblem of their poverty, wool or "Suf", gave this set of ascetics the distinctive name of Sufis. 

Rabia al-Adawiyya (d.801), the woman saint from Basra, perhaps made the most fundamental early contribution to the doctrine of Sufism when she introduced the idea of "selfless love" into the austere teachings and gave Sufism the hues of true mysticism. Once, in the streets of Basra, she was asked why she was carrying a torch in one hand and a ewer in the other, she answered:-
"I want to throw fire into Paradise and pour water into Hell so that these two veils disappear, and it becomes clear who worships God out of love, not out of fear of Hell or hope for Paradise." This was love for love's sake, without any expectations of rewards, in this or the afterlife. Paradise and Hell are thus ultimately Created entities, designed to keep oneself away from the divine. This quite delightfully made afterlife irrelevant, even while not denying the existence of it.

Post Rabia period, the ninth century, saw perhaps the most original and creative period of Sufi thought. It established the basic set tenets that governed the later, more systemized orders. Dhu'n-Nun (d. 859) brought love of life and created beings into the realm of Sufi thought, from it's renunciation by the earlier ascetics. He wrote short, charming poems about the "rustling of the trees, splashing of the waters, voice of the birds", in which he sensed a unity of all of God's creation. His writings impressed a generation of later medieval Persian poets with it's baroque imagery and deep devotion. 

Bayezid Bistami (d. 874) was the first to describe the mystical experience in terms of the image of the miraj, the heavenly ascension of the Prophet. He was also the first to describe mystical intoxication in it's ultimate experience of "fana" or annihilation of the self. This was the state of complete immersion in the divine in which no trace of the ego remained to separate the Human from the Divine. This was the ideal of divine love and intoxication subsequently sought by both liberal orders of Chishtiyas, as well as ecstatic sufi orders of Qalandars and Malamatis.

These early pioneering ascetics are rounded off by the enigmatic figure of Mansur al-Hallaj, the Persian mystic, who was sent to the gallows for uttering the apparently blasphemous cry, an'al-Haqq, literally, "I am the Absolute Truth". This has been compared for its roots with Upanishadic "Aham Brahma Asmi", though historical evidence is tenuous at best.  Hallaj's death became a symbol for mystical reunion with God for Sufis. It is ultimately with the death of man, both literally and metaphorically, that he reunites with God, the Ultimate reality. So, the biggest celebration in any sufi shrine even today is the death anniversary of the Sufi Pir, "Urs", literally "marriage with God".

The basics of Sufi doctrine - renunciation, poverty, love, recollection, death - thus got defined in these early centuries. How these beliefs became systemized and entered into the everyday life of common Muslims is what I would cover in the next part.

The Terrors of the Self

David is an American boy, who has reached the age, but not quite the self sufficiency, of adulthood. He is living in a country home in the south of France. It is late evening, he is drunk, the countryside is still with the stillness that only countrysides have, and his soul is in torment. He narrates us the story of his doomed affair with Giovanni, an Italian immigrant, in Paris.

The story is short, but the wounds it left on his insides are enduring. For us, the readers, there is nothing to learn but this. Human beings are frail creatures. Made of tissues and bones, which cut and bruise easily. With souls that get scarred by the very people and their faiths that are meant to protect them. And, a happiness felt in the bones is more real than any artificial construct of it.

David left Giovanni, his friend, his lover, his soulmate perhaps, alone precisely when Giovanni needed him the most. Giovanni had just been kicked out of his low paying but sustaining bartender job, after he rebuffed the sexual advances of his predatory boss. The boss felt compelled to humiliate Giovanni, accusing him of theft and ingratitude publicly before firing him. Giovanni came back crying into the arms of his reluctant lover in the small room, which was the abode of these two penniless immigrants in Paris.

Giovanni sees David as the last hope in a hopeless world, and the only recourse in a "dirty world" filled with "dirty bodies". David feels the burden of his salvation acutely, and resists with his full might. He wallows in the guilt of Giovanni's profane touch, a man's touch, and loathes the desire he feels towards him. Giovanni sees a future full of hope and happiness. David sees an impossible future without the accoutrements of the American, and admittedly most of modern world's, version of family happiness that he has grown to long for - a woman to go back home to, babies to rear, continuity of the family name. Above all, he risks losing his manhood in his own eyes.

So, David does what he has to do, and deserts Giovanni for Hella, his on and off mistress and fiancé, just back to Paris after "discovering" herself in Spain. And it destroys the lives of these three inter-connected lovers irrevocably.

Giovanni's room is a compressed masterpiece of repressed sexuality and desire. James Baldwin, black, gay, American, evokes the city of Paris in dark, wonderful hues. And he makes all his characters come alive with seering intensity. We see them making mistakes, and committing worst of follies, but we still empathise with their actions and only pity them. Because he makes us see the internal logic of their motives, however warped it may be. No one has written about shame, guilt and fear about one's own sexuality with the interiority that Baldwin does. This novella remains as refreshing and relevant as it was half a century back when it was published.