Listening as Philosophy in Action: A Poetic Presentation

Listening as Philosophy in Action: A Poetic Presentation

as pdf, here, chandola_Listening as Philosophy in Action_ A Poetic Presentation

_statement of purpose + statement of originality = Roadmaps to Revolutions + Formula for Revolution (or, a plea to seek redemption from my savage pasts)

If philosophy is “class struggle in action the field of theory”, listening as philosophy in action in the same fields, is the proposition that this report aims to qualify to forward a simple listening hack, a methodological tool, to salvage the comrade from within the recesses of our savage pasts, which cannot never be escaped, only ever be tamed, towards our revolutionary futures. The report is also a presentation in motion, a submission, to the academy, not the academia, to recognize poetry itself as a theoretical act = poetry as theory written in slow, dripping pain. The report is also a shrieking plea to posterity’s ethical & poetic courts of justice to let me present my pain sometimes presented as letters, but always poetry, as my only evidence to consider acquitting me of my savage pasts.
The report aims to make a case for listening as a methodological tool for poetic, political and pedagogical futures. By insisting on listening as a philosophical location of being, I am merely making explicit the methodological roadmaps to the instructions left by Hegel to pursue true self-consciousness in the bootcamps of being. Here, following Hegel (who is also the master in this equation), recognizing that I am NOT because I think, but I think therefore I am, I submit (not surrender) to desire to be the flaneur of the only thinking, never not thinking, always knowing absolute knowing is always an aspiration, never an ambition, terrains.
Hegel did not bring me here, he doesn’t speak to me (yet), in fact, besides what others have read of what he’s written, I have not read any primary texts. My only knowledge of texts written by Hegel are quotable quotes, often quoted, which I have pasted (as “things to do” details) over my desk (borrowed from other’s lives), overlooking a wild, partly rubble-filled, field & erect, handsome never-leaving mountains, with the skies staring into my soul, my only witness, as the only quotes whose quotability ain’t questionable, “… the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk to paint grey on grey” & “… although this does not mean that we all should be mad, but being human presupposes the possibility of madness”.
In these terrains I am led by the only mere-mortal of a man, still alive, the closest approximation to a god that will do just well for me, whom I shall call the Master he is in the following equations, Slavoj Zizek.
Befitting his Hegelian-masterly role, he is not the benevolent sorts, he is enlightened & brutal, he demands the knowing. Of course, he offers only two commandments, 1st to be followed by the 2nd, & none further, this is where the endings begin & beginning end, he insists: 1st: submit to the chaos to submit you are the chaos 2nd: submit to structuring the chaos by entering into structures of the chaos
He doesn’t offer any enlightenment in the immediate & for eternity, in fact poetry as theory written in slow, dripping pain is his demand. By always revealing the destruction poets can cause, he presents his own pain as his evidence to acquit himself of his savage past.
This report is NOT a project, it does not have a due date or its deadline, it is a report which only performs its assigned duty of always reporting.
Via this report, I want to report to the Master, …if you are almost a god, I am a student even beyond the symbolic need of a statute. I shall surely not offer my thumb, it is also my tool, I can only write, I have no other skill sets; I will never sacrifice my life or soul for you, but in the pain, the Master presents in his presentations, I heard his unspoken instructions, he let me know in his own shaking & quivering ways, only churning poetry out of pain (aka & also theory, which shall save the world; if not, beauty will be the casualty), can be the only philosophical redemption from our savage pasts.
I shall return back to the pleas I want to make, the permissions I seek, & the recognitions I desire to seek my own redemptions from my own savage pasts.
But, here, I outline what I learned, listening to the Master, & the teachings which enabled & empowered me to claim my own structures of chaos, which I excavated & extracted from the submissions he demanded (also, fulfilling the literature review demand, complying with the structural integrity of a report).
Hegel is right, always so, but here, even more particularly so.
Recognition is the game, desire throws the dice, all the faces the dice show, particularly the ones which are not shown, are still of the same, the self. The only escape from the misery of self, its being & becoming, is to acknowledge the mystery of the others of the self. However, unlike the Kantian core which surrenders (not submit, submission requires deliberation, a master-slave dialogue, the Master insisted) to these mysteries always remaining mysterious, the Hegelian self braces itself, & all of its others too, to enters the bootcamps of being, not to resolve the mystery, but to commit to knowing the mystery, even when knowing that mystery by its default etymological ‘mystic presence, hidden religious symbolism’ associations, shall always remain an aspiration, never an ambition (an ambitions demands destinations). In this always knowing that the mystery cannot be contained, only ever constrained but only by putting “it” (everything which seems mysterious, even the others of self, & particularly the others of the other which the others are presenting) under rigorous due-diligent dialectical bootcamp demands is the Hegelian hack to not let the mystery become mysterious. As I mentioned earlier, I am merely making explicit the methodological hack provided by Hegel, as explained by the Master, by mapping its roadmaps [Zizek Interview: Sex and the Failed Absolute with Douglas Lain, 2023].
A self which surrenders to the mysteriousness of the others of the self (& thus also, others of the other) without applying due-diligent dialectical bootcamp instructions can only emerge as a savage self (Ss).
As Zizek categorically insists, everywhere & all the time, that surrendering to the mysteriousness of any other, without investigating their mystery, one only encounters nothingness, which can only produce violence. Nothingness, true to its designated duties, is “a state where nothing is present or where nothing exists that is important or gives meaning to life”. It cannot have structures, not even to demolish, as it lacks foundational grammatical of locations of the “I” to articulate the vocabularies, which are always the chaos & cacophonies of others, into any meaningful, let alone collective, blueprints of being. He further elaborates that the object “I” has to emerge victorious in these dialogues. “I” as the master of the never-not thinking, always-knowing, terrains, the “I” which is the object, the “I” want to be objectified as by the world I have already objectified. I employed the already available Zizekian hacks as a tool kit to map the cartographies in the bootcamps of being by recognizing, identifying & often confusing desire itself with listening in search of the “I”.
Desire as itself listening into the multiplicities of multiplicities of being, self, which always remain partly inaccessible, sometimes incomprehensible, but always available archives to review, classify, discard, reject & dismiss, if not all, the others of the self, but surely some of them. Thus, by identifying listening as a philosophical location of being (otherwise, also desire), in this schematic I further elaborate that the task, challenge & compulsion of the bootcamps of being, which demands translating the love of knowing (self) into absolute knowing (others of the self) can only be actualized by listening to the self (lS) and reading the others (Ro).
Here, reading is not a metaphorical evocation, it is implied in its distinct materiality. The insistence is to recognize, collect & collate the markings only which the others have deliberately made, imprinted, which they are themselves pointing out to, whilst dismissing the self’s listening of the others, but as an unresolvable matter of desire. To always know, as standing orders to the self whilst in these bootcamps, that desire (dS) in its 12th century sense perhaps can only mean “await what the stars will bring” & to know that showers of these stars can never be contained, but often should be constrained (for these showers can often be acidic too), & perhaps even redirected, by following the methods provided by the Master in his readings of Lacan’s objet petit a’s crisis, cries & its conundrums.
Within this schematic, the report aims to qualify the ‘listening as philosophy in action’ (LpA) proposition as a methodological hack towards poetic, political & pedagogical futures. These futures will necessarily be revolutionary(Rf), not utopian (revolution should always be a distance to cover. utopia are destinations which logically demand destruction), as only a self, “one who shares the same room” with the others of self, hence, “a close companion” can emerge. This self which walks with the markings of the many of its others, in its duties shares its etymological destinies with its 15th century comradely qualifications, thus it always emerges as always already a comrade(cS).
In my attempts to escape my own savages, I trained myself, much like a circus animal, to engage with the other (Oo), big & otherwise, but always an other, to draw desire of the self (dS), desire which is always only of the self, to its never-actualizing, thus always-revolutionary futures(Rf), whilst employing listening to the self as a tool to instruct the self, summoning standing orders in the bootcamps of being, to listen to the Self & read the others.
The other is not a project, who presents a report, which has an end, a delivery date or review demand. An Oo (or, oO) is always already a program on a podium, an invitation, a cast, crew and structures, which are not merely facades but scaffoldings. I insist on listening as a methodological tool for poetic, political & pedagogical futures as it not only facilitates, but is fact built on robust solidarities and the layered scaffoldings on which many of the others, of the self & the others of the others are already always present and presenting themselves.
Otherwise elucidated, the locations on revolutionary roadmaps are thus mapped, pCS (= philosophy as class struggle in the field of theory) demands constantly negotiating the Ss (=savage self {self surrendering to its Kantian core}) by ls (=listening to the self) & practicing with immovable integrity the task of Ro (=Reading of the others) to channelize dS (=desire of the self, desires which are always of the self) towards Rf (=Revolutionary futures) by the privileging the Cs (=comrade self {self sentenced to the Hegelian bootcamps of being}) in its encounters with OSo / oSO (=others of the self, big or otherwise, but always an other), thus, thereby always enacting & performing LpA (=Listening as philosophy in Action) claim of the report.
Based on these deductions, the report forwards a simple listening hack to salvage the cS from our Ss, which is also not really an original contribution, but it allows to deduce a straightforward formula for revolution:
(dS ↔LpA) (Ss ↔Os) = cS, thus, Rf = Cs {pCS + LpA (ls + Ro)}

_methodology+literature review = Political is the Personal; the Personal is Always & Only Poetic

Whilst Zizek is my guide, the Master in these equations, to institute LpA (listening as philosophy in action) towards Rf (revolutionary futures), who empowers & enables me to even attempt seeking redemption from my brutal savage pasts, it was is not Zizek who gave me the hack to first, acknowledge, & then, secondly, be horrified by the recognition the others of the self, the many of me, of which there were some savages (Ss) too.
It was Pessoa who summoned me. In the courts he held, he presented in full regalia, where the judge, jury, executioner & but also the accused (& thus often the convict too) were all the many of him. Even these weren’t too many of (for) him, there were some others which were only later to be found in locked trunks. Each one of these others, they not only had proper names, but each its marked, located histories, dead loves & each, an equally uncertain future.
The Book of Disquiet is the only methodological manual to maintain the field diaries of the self. I followed to document my listening into the others of the self, which after the multiplicities of multiplicities of being (also, aka, madness) presented themselves in even fuller regalia, also equipped with hacks to manage the madness (also, aka, mapping the cartographies in the bootcamps of beings).
“Futile and sensitive, I’m capable of violent & consuming impulses – both good & bad, noble & vile – but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul. Everything in me tends to go on to become something else. My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome childs, its restlessness keeps growing & is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while, I note the slightest facial person I’m talking with, I record the subtlest inflections of his utterances; but I hear without listening, I’m thinking of something else, and what I least catch in the conversations is the sense of what was said by me or by him. And so I often repeat to someone what I’ve already repeated, or ask him again what he’s already answered. But I’m able to describe, in photographic words, the facial muscles he used to say what I don’t recall, or the way he listened with his eyes to the words I don’t remember telling him. I;m two, and both keep their distance – Siamese twins that aren’t attached” [Fragment No. 10, The Book of Disquiet; Pessoa, F; ).
Thus, the methodological hack: ls (listen to the self) & Ro (read the others).
The recognition that the other, particularly of the self, is always a siamese twin that ain’t attached, but a circulating “complete idiot” (Zizek’s refrain to set himself apart from real whilst acknowledging he too is only an idiot, but of a lesser order) in the bootcamps of beings, left me no choice but to set in motion how to discard, reject, dismiss or, only rarely, walk along, with these Ss (savages of the self) was a devastating one; of course, I went mad.
It was, after all, the first time that my many Ss (savage self), announced themselves, not only in a full regalia but suffering serene waves as choruses. I HAD to go mad, only madness made it possible for me – the “I” who is an object, the “I” who wants to be objectified as the object I want to appear to the belligerent, uncouth, circulating complete idiot, embracing circularity as a choice & worse still, celebrating the surrender to the centre without a fight, Siamese unattached twin, who on account of the above is always a savage, always an unattached Siamese twin of the self.
Now you know, DON’T YOU, I HAD to go mAd. But before leaving, madness is also & always an exit (but never an exile), because I am really a revolutionary & thus, already in exile, I HAD to make some amends. I started with making some commonsensical corrections.
This was only tiny start because the generational & historical burdens of violence & vileness I bear, & that are inscribed on my being for all eternal time, require all of my time in every life of all my selves (mad & otherwise) to serve in penance, to make submissions to the ethical & poetic courts of justice in posterity’s galleries to seek not a pardon, merely a recognition that the sentence is being diligently served, I do not seek a respite, I do not want to stop suffering, or serving, but perhaps you could listen to my pleas, perhaps when it is really over, when the end is so real that I wouldn’t know it is the end, maybe, a certificate of redemption can be issued, that I indeed did manage to tame the Ss, that in my desperation to constrain the pervert, I went hysterical.
Thus, An Autoethnography of the Savarna Lifeworlds.
It is my submission, a shrieking plea, to seek redemption from my savage pasts. These mountains, as I informed the archivist comrade to register my changing address in their records of “I”, Also, this project demands my presence here. I cannot leave. Govindpuri was my battlefield & mecca when I was interested in the present, now that it is matters of posterity, time & pain that tickle me, I need to be here, these mountains, which is dev bhumi, the land of all the lords of the Hindu cosmo & some others too, which also are my history, which really is my battlefield [Dated: 16th April 2024]
The commonsensical corrections: Cricket [or, on why angles matters] [Dated: 24th March 2023]
You must understand now, madness is not an excuse; but even if I were to employ it as one, it would still submit evidence in my favour, I will still get the sentence I deserve. You see, I had got it all so wrong, I had reckoned listening into “self” of the others was the game, when all rules in these terrains should always lead to a self-goal.
In preparation of my departure I sent hasty notes to others, of self & others, I told them my deepest desires. I knew I wouldn’t get a response, not because they are unkind, quite to the contrary, but I was asking for support when they could see, I was only committing to a self-goal: I want a safe, warm and kind intellectual space where I can discuss these ideas, revealing all my inadequacies, to learn, to draw, to develop. I am not competitive at all (my lack of stable career, I present in evidence) but I am fiercely theoretically & intellectually ambitious. I want to write ethnography as poetry; philosophy as poetry; and theory as fiction (then perhaps it will have takers). I also dream of Zizek calling me, if not the, one of the many Zizek scholars from & of the South. I have navigated the bootcamps of being (which was an ontological crisis of what I want to exist as, not an existential one; of why for which I don’t think any thinking person should have an answer), only because of theory, poetry, art, and Zizek! During this time, I also wrote poetry which I am really proud of, too shy to show anyone, and I don’t really want to be published by design, but I still desire committed audiences [dated: 23rd April 2023]
Madness is a safe, warm and kind intellectual space. As all mad do, I also headed for the mountains. As also with others, I came to the mountains not because I am mad, but because only their erect always-in-attendance, never-leaving promises can contain my (or, any) madness. Madness is an expansive, unchartered territory of the self, it demands eternal comrade companions, cartographers who are still sharpening their tools., eternal comrade listeners, archivist comrade, last of the lovers, and a couple of mystic & brotherly sorts. They will make their appearances, it is too soon yet.
Thus, when I turned 46, this last year, wearing only madness already inscribed on my body, I left behind quarter of a century in solid time, but all of my time in the only real life I had, without a worry, baggage &/or goodbyes. For official reasons, I submitted clinical credentials: 70 (F25.0, F25.1) Schizoaffective Disorder // 02 (F41.1) Generalised Anxiety Order // 81 (F43.10) Posttraumatic Stress Order //[MCMI -IV, Dated: 5th January 2023]
I memorized the personality patterns the same report outlines as the blueprints of the Ss (savage self), the one I am currently involved in a fierce combat to disembowel, dismember & eventually discard.
Thus, The Portrait of a maDwoman as a Poet which I submit as collateral damage & supporting evidence in the same courts of justice.
Of the blueprints of the Ss, whose demolition are in motion, I have retained the personality prescriptions which matter, which I have mixed in with the foundational mortars to reclaim new futures by demolishing all the previous pasts & its eternal futures, thus the emphasis as instructions to the Comrade self (Cs) whose victorious emergence is essential to my redemption: The MCMI-IV profile of this woman suggests a subdued, inexpressive, dependent way of relating to life. She probably shows a marked deficit in social interest as well as frequent behavioural eccentricities, occasional magical thinking, and depersonalization anxieties. This intense, introversive pattern may coexist with a general lack of energy & a deficit in social initiative. She seems to evince little stimulus-seeking behaviour, exhibits inappropriate or impoverished affect, and displays confusion or a metaphorical thinking in her interpersonal thinking. Although she probably prefers a peripheral role in her family relationships, she is also likely to possess a strong, conflicting need to depend on others. Both of these derive from her low self-esteem and her deficiencies in autonomous behaviour. It is probable that this woman is a detached observer of her immediate environs. She is probably self-belittling and sees herself as being weak and ineffectual. Rather than expose herself to the outside world, she is likely to retreat, becoming increasingly remote from potential sources of opportunity and gratification. Life proceeds in an uneventful way for much of the time. Her extended periods of solitude may be interspersed with feelings of being disembodied, empty, and depersonalised. Ideas of reference may also occur on occasion. For the most part, she probably follows a meaningless, ineffectual, and idle life pattern, generally meaning on the periphery of social activities. It is possible that her thoughts have an unfocused and bizarre quality at times, particularly in regard to emotional and interpersonal matters. Her likely estrangement from others may have led her to lose touch with reality. Social communication may be odd, strained, self-conscious, and tangential, which further alienates her from others. Her inability to express affection may stem from chronic isolation and her failure to experience any source of pleasure in her life. She may exhibit a chronic, mild dysphoria that is occasionally mixed with ill-defined anxiety. Most likely this woman prefers a simple, repetitive, and dependent life in which she can avoid self-assertion and remain indifferent to normal social aspirations. Disengaged from and uninterested in most of the rewards of human relationships, she may appear to others as an unobtrusively strange, disconnected, and lifeless person. By restricting her social and emotional involvements, she likely perpetuates her pattern of isolation and dependency on others.
This woman, Cs, comrade self, whom I’m always becoming, the one who appears to others as an unobtrusively strange, disconnected, and lifeless person, who ain’t interested in most of the rewards of human relationships, & demands recognition for her frequent behavioural eccentricities, occasional magical thinking presented herself as the only way she can as a: Catastrophe ‎(or, why I am not a savage) [Dated: 17th July 2023]
In this endeavour & for my arrival here, to finally make my colonial claims on the “I” which I want to appear as the object as I have objectified myself, I had to abandon naive & native benevolent sentimentality, I had to assume the enlightened but brutal locations. I had demanding teachers, but as earlier insisted (& here further evidenced), I am a student even beyond the symbolic need of a statute. I repeated their words, first without understanding, just to hear their punctuations in these instructions, & then as sermons with a fanatic’s ear who knows it too well that the message is the medium: “Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.” ― Slavoj Žižek “A catastrophic event not only belongs to the future as something that is fated to happen, but at the same time is contingent and accidental, something that might not happen – even if, from the perspective of the future perfect, it appears to be necessary” - Jean–Pierre Dupuy “The whole problem is precisely that humanity never coincides with itself” – Slavoj Zizek “The spirit that awakens knows also crises of somnambulism, delirious manias; at times it consults the stars or magnetizers, at times it weeps endlessly over those it has lost whom it never managed properly to mourn” – Catherine Malabou “Politics is a protracted war. Do not be in a hurry. Try to see things far in advance and know how to wait, today. Don’t live in terms of subjective urgency” – Louis Althusser “The failure to change the world may not be unrelated to the failure to understand it” – Ray Brassier “…the proper interpretation is that life as such bears the gem of death within itself and that the finite sublates itself because it contradicts itself inwardly” – Hegel “As that time it was a monk, so now is the philosopher in whose brain the revolution begins” – Karl Marx “The practice of philosophy isn’t just reading, or demonstration. It is interpretation, interrogation, meditation. It aims to make the great works say what they mean or might mean, in the unfathomable Truth that they contain, or rather, indicate by ‘gesturing’ at it” – Louis Althusser “The (psychoanalytic) subject is nothing but the failure to become an (Althusserian) subject” – Alenca Zupancic
Not knowing that I was NOT savage would have been a relief, had it not brought along the unattached Siamese self of the savage, who it turns out is a pervert, “who by definition don’t question things…it is very difficult in psychoanalysis to cure perverts because they have answers, they know what’s good for you, even you are suffering it, perverts are typically politically totalitarians” [Zizek, Samuel Beckett’s Art of Abstraction, University of Dundee, 2019]
Each history has its own savage, each epoch is a battlefield between the world, who is a bitch, history, who is fucking bitch on heat, & madness who is a fucking bitch on heat who eats world for breakfast & chases history for dinner, to overcome the savage’s savagery. Each history’s savage can only be tamed, each epoch is defined by whether it could be only constrained or it could not be contained.
A savage is not a primitive man, he is always, first, a poet. The spectrum of savagery is mapped by how far the original poet falls for his original crimes, whether he lies suffering like a poet or still walks like a caveman.
The Ss (savage of self) wasn’t the crisis, the horror was that this Siamese unattached other who was not only a bumbling fool, complete idiot, orgasming over its nowhere going into nothingness circularity (even atoms more integrity), but a fucking blown pervert.
Of course “I”, the subject in search of an object, went hysterical, which is, “…historical. Forms of hysteria are always historically specified…Hysteria is (by the old Lacanian & at the same time Marxian thesis) the elementary form of critique of ideology. [Hysteria is] Critique of ideology at its most elementary subjective level…Hysteria is feminine…[H]ysteria at its most elementary is an undermining of interpellation (this mechanism elaborated by Louis Althusser of ideological identification)…figures of authority are telling you who you are, what is your symbolic identity…you are my wife…you are a revolutionary, you are a communist…you recognize yourself in it…But the basic hysterical Q is, BUT WHY I AM WHAT YOU ARE SAYING THAT I AM…this elementary doubt…it’s not about reality, are things really like that…[T]he Q is WHO AM I, AM I REALLY…true undermining of authority is the hysterical one, it’s this Q(ing), WHY AM I WHAT YOU ARE TELLING ME I AM?” [Zizek, ibid]
The baggage of my PclSs (perverted class logic savage self) is immense. Born a Savarna & a woman, my job description for all time in all abstracted pasts & in all circulating futures is to join the ranks of other “bouncers of Brahmanism”. Even this identification, precise qualification, ain’t an original claim.
I am merely borrowing the words of a comrade, one of the only two other Savarna women I have encountered in my entire life of almost half-a-century long, who were not only as acutely aware I am, but also pained by the eternal violence that is carried in our names & were consumed by the rage that others like us were calling themselves victims, when they (we, bouncers of Brahmanism) are in fact the vilest, most insidious, evil, agents & executors of all the violence needed to sustain the perversion which is the only outcome caste-logic NON(QIing), bumbling, complete idiot, subjectivity can produce.
We are NOT revolutionaries, left-leaning, leaving a lot of what was ours to take, no questions asked, no responsibility for any actions, no consequences to bear, because we listened to the others, (because revolution is always on the outside); we are IN FACT लाल सलाम waving, carrying anger as our arsenal, walking away from the worlds already mapped for us, revolutionary sorts because we listened to the self. It is also true, each of us in our own particular worlds are universally recognized only as hysterical. To be counted in their ranks, to be told, it’s OK, we are also called mad, we are also asked to mend our ways, but it hurts too much to stay, not sitting is not a choice, always-in-action is the only prescription for the pain which our presences cause, is a badge of honour for me. The manner in which these two women were enacting their actions was the only proof of concept I needed to to commit to madness as a methodological, philosophical, political position. Both of them, in their very particular & peculiar, assured me, yes, it’s only listening that counts, & but, it is only in being counted that one can demand a listening, (listen to the self, read the others = savage self ————> comrade self).
Is it a wonder, they are from two of the most revolutionary states in the country, Bihar & Bengal? I am reserving the right to properly introduce them, they demand a profile, a revolutionary eulogy, not this fragmented presentation to make my own point.
I seek solace in high theory & poetry, hysterically performing both, without a care or concern, worry in my hair, because the pain of being, my mere presence occupying every moment in any space-time matrix in all eternity is an act of violence, is a profound philosophical burden. In the Savarna lifeworlds, my location is the starting point which institutes the cunning of reason which allows the authoritarian leaders to become obscene.
The pain is profound, but it is not personal.
Pessoa’s methodological guide was instructive in maintaining the field diaries of the self, & its others, but I had to make some amends, his compulsions were merely obsessive, compulsive neurotic. Perhaps because he knew he had salvaged the poet out of his savage pasts, he reckoned his debts were paid, he could leave merely “a factless autobiography”, perhaps that was his revolutionary act to not make any colonial claims over his “impressions” rendering them “random” in all time, even without the currency to be used as “confessions”.
As aforementioned, I am NOT hysterical because of my past, I am FUCKING hysterical because I need to demolish all my pasts in all eternal times which is the only way I can erase all futures (thus, presences) of my being in any space-time matrix in all eternity in any time. Thus, whilst I retain the structural integrity of fragments, I abandon its “random” aspirations.
Whilst I employ poetic formations to serve their Pessoan purpose of allowing me the orchestration of self but also its self-subservience, accommodating my fragmented, but not frail, multiplicities into states of non-being and un-being, sometimes at once, I amend the Pessoan disclaimer to insist: there is nothing random about these impressions, in fact I have NO desire to be random, I explicitly narrate my autobiography with all its raw, brutally skinned facts, there is nothing lifeless about my history. There are my CONFESSIONS, & if in these I am saying damned, I truly, eternally am.
Whilst the plea is poetic, the pain is political.
Perhaps always hesitant to “share hesitance” is the crisis of being human as Zizek suggests [The Three Whites & The Two Blacks, Universality at the Edges, 14th April 2024].
Animals never hesitate, they always share, particularly their frights, perhaps because even when they can feel the pain, they don’t fear the pain because this paining remains always personal. The shrieking of a dying animal shakes its human to the core, but it doesn’t provoke its own kin & kith, who also hear these howls, are also shaken by them, into revolt or resistance (that is why Orwell’s allegory remains so profoundly horrifying, it is this horror actualized)
An animal’s pain is philosophically pedestrian because it remains eternally personal, alone, singular in its currency & circulation in all time. An animal’s immediate, intense, & urgent pain can never be precisely located because it never attaches to itself an archive. That is also the reason for the animal’s fierce fearlessness in the moment, here & now, because even when it can attempt a collective in its purest manifestation, they cannot collectivize.
An animal responding to its own pain is always either reverence or revenge, an animal’s violence always remains animal. It never weaves an enduring tapestry of any violence, divine or otherwise, into any symphonies of pain, haunting the poetic courts of ethical justice in eternal time.
An animal’s pain only makes poets out humans, not their own kind, that is their crisis. A poet can be an animal, but an animal can never walk in the poet’s shoes.
They do not dread to “share hesitance” because they don’t know poetry. We, humans, who are only divine because we in fact feel, sense, carry, contain the others’ pain, always hesitate to “share hesitance” precisely because our pain is never personal, it is always already shared, it is always philosophical, already political.
Our pain is always other’s poetry, only other’s poetry can complete our pain, that is our metaphysical curse. Our pain is always political, that is our philosophical burden.
It is always the other’s pain which makes meaning of ours, it is always only another’s touch that eases these pains. It is not an easy feat to surrender to the poetry of pain, look at the Greeks, they dared & we already know where they are. It is so commonsensical that I hesitate to repeat, our destinies are drawn by the distances we draw with pain (aka, alienation is an aspiration, not an abomination).
Pain’s poetry is so profound because it is always accompanied by the chorus of cries across centuries & constellations, sounding like suffering serene waves which only “two sons of god” (apropos, Marx), Mozart & Beethoven, had the courage to document.
Of course their music is still original, after all, they were the original listeners who upped the game of “ears to the ground” to “quite simply: listen to it” (Feld, 2012) by tuning their “ears to the skies”, is it a wonder neither could endure their eternal listener destinities? Is it a wonder the one who was in throes of love, disintegrated into a incomprehensible chaos to drown the cries (which in fact death is), and the one who was in attendance to the revolution in action, heard its eternal cries, was too much a revolutionary to succumb to chaos, so instead decided to go deaf?
I cannot speak of either of their music in any educated way, I will still think Requiem is Beethoven & Moonlight Sonata, Mozart, I can never be sure. You see, I am still learning to listen, tuning my ears to the skies, perhaps when I also have my head in the clouds, I finally figure what they are listening to, their ethnographies of the self (their music sheets, notations & such), but until then, I am just listening to how they listen, what are their methodologies to self? It is a long way, I know. But I have the time, all of mine & everyone else’s too.
If they are the masters, which indeed they are, I am a student beyond even the symbolic need of a statute. I have tamed time, I can challenge time’s motions, movement, sometimes it’s circularity, with my silences & stillness, there are times when I can even turn world into a bitch, history, a fucking bitch on heat, & behave like madness, who is fucking bitch on heat who has the world for breakfast & chases history for dinner. I may not ace in the eternal listener race, but I know a thing or two about the listening game.
It is true, what they say, time can ease the pain, but they are wrong when they insist time also heals the pain. Time & pain are siamese twins of the Thoraco-omphalopagus7] variety, “two bodies fused from the upper chest to lower belly. The heart is always shared in these cases”, none, either of the twins, has ever survived the separation. It is hypothesised that, “a designated twin who is allotted the heart may survive if the other twin is sacrificed”

+outcomes = An Autoethnography of Savaraa Lifeworlds & The portrait of a Madwoman as a Poet.

In this auto-ethnographic account, revealing all of myself, leaving no crevice, corner or cemetery of the self hidden, or leaving anything to imagination, the aim is to expose the visceral, philosophical, political & poetic violence the mere presence of a savarna representative in all eternal times causes.
My dear sirs. I seek an extension in the matter. A new discovery has to come to light, the matter needs to be investigated further; you see, my good lord, the blueprints of my beings have presented themselves, these are epistemological concerns, as you know, you told me so, these demand ontological deliberations.
My lords, dear good sirs, I am as shocked as you are that I didn’t notice the logic earlier. I know, time is the only currency, seeking an extension for the obvious is an abomination. Please, my dear, some dead, sirs, I appeal to your lordly good hearts, it is after all an ontological crisis. I saw it all around, I did, caste in all its forms & formations in all forms & every formation, but the logic of caste is the reason why logic took so long, as you already know.
A charge sheet needs to be filed, the perverted-caste-logic-savage-self (PclSs) is not merely an unattached Siamese savage self of all my futures & its present, this is my eternal destiny & thus damnation in all times, seconds stretched to all eternities in every epoch. Unlike the Savage self, but you already know that, sirs, the PclSs cannot be tamed, it is beyond containment &/or constraint, but it only yours lordly hearts, sirs, which also didn’t leave me unarmed. I am only sharpening the tools crafted by you. Whilst it is true, we have never been modern, it is also true, as you have taught me so, even if we have to pretend, putting up a modern face is the only face (card) we have to meet all the faces we have to meet.
If not, as only you have further shown, every encounter with the O(o)ther always turns into “thing-in-itself” Kantian crisis which willingly surrenders to the chaos, makes fires of the mysteriousness, dances in abandon, dizzy having abandoned its reason, it circulates in its now-where going into nothingness as if it were a joyride & from which only a pervert can emerge, who is truly NON-Q(ing) subject, who is “always the obscene other side of power structure(s)” & how “every power structures needs some kind of support in perversion”.
Wasn’t it you, my dear ladies, whom I also think of lords (authority is not always bad, but it is always masculine in nature), who taught me too well? It was only following you, I acquired my faking ways, I excel at pretending to be modern, I now have another hack: become space to contain time.
Allow me the impertinence, goodly sirs & lordly ladies, you are implicated in my madness too, you turned me into a hysterical fucking mad bitch who eats world for breakfast & chases history for dinner, whose bites causes insanity, much like rabies, this too is fatal. In the now, I don’t touch anything & nothing touches me. I am safe for now, I also know it too well, there is no now, it is always on the move, I know too well, at once, there is only time & none at all.
You must, I insist, you have to, dear lords, allow me the time. The burdens I bear are eternal, I only have a lifetime to offer. But I do not come empty-handed, & I have a plan.
A forensic autopsy of the perverted-caste-logic-savage-self (PclSs)PclSs is underway, I have corrected my ways, sharpened the tools, employed the methodological hack to Ro (read the other); now you know, my lords, why I need the time, my burden is eternal, I only have a lifetime to offer, which as you already know, dear sirs, ain’t enough of a landscape to contain the multiplicities of multiplicities being, which is our curse & our only cure.
But dear sirs, I do know, I know now that the solidity of the collective sleep of the others are the borders/boundaries which are essential for me to seek & secure the forts of my being. The presence of an-other is always an interruption. The articulation (not mute acceptance) of the presence of an-other is always a cartographic negotiation unfolding at working the hyphen which maps the landscapes of self always in a conversation with an- other. The maps of the self await, dread, delight &/or are horrified at the appearance of an-other. The arrival of an-other is always an intrusion which punctuates, punctures or paints the yet-un-realised trajectories & tributaries of the self. It is only in a listening relationship with the others of the self & others of the other, the poetic possibilities of a/the self unfold in all its theatrics laden with revolutionary potentials. Working the hyphen is merely fire drill maintenance, it is the interruption of the meeting of the others of the self & others of the other where the battles start.
Allow me prophetic concessions, if my confessions aren’t enough, I foretold my futures. I am the not-so-young-woman now, it was always my shriek: The not-so-young woman, here, is the perennial, but not the static other. She is the woman in the slums. Slum in the city. The lower-caste, lower-class man beaten up on a whim of a middle-class woman. The transgendered person. The Other’s body is always an identified feminine. The You is the City. The Violence-ordering middle-class woman. The Hegemonic discursive space and its practices. In its perverse masculinity, the You demands silence as a right, and practices silencing with its desire to contain, denying a becoming and voice to the Other. But the You, in its arrogant unhearing forgets, that on certain nights, the not-so-young woman can and does shrieks, even if you momentarily silence her. In her shrieking, the sound she finally finds, the not-so-young woman establishes she has a voice, which one fine morning, when she is not the only, will drown: The Many-of-You.
I always knew, it is only now that I understand that the silencing of the self to listen to others was/is a flawed strategy. The silence of the self nurtures the others of the self to speak in tongues, a conversation from which the self is abstracted whose eventuality lies in its subtraction. The self of the other is always an enigma. It is the source code which no binary logic can crack; a music composition which no piano or fingers can imitate, a map whose tracks to its treasures are inscribed in secret inks. The navigation into the self of the other to listen to the precise balance between the zeros & the one corrupts their code. It is only the scientific impulse to read the pulse to measure the exact notation when the D minor of the self of the other morphs into its revolutionary D major potential registers the silences of their symphonies. The pedestrian attempts to listen into the terrains of the self of the other blunts the sharp tools of cartographic imagination which demands precise measuring tools to outline & contain the self of the others to their last inches.
If for nothing else, then you have to, have to extend me time tickled by my Wittgensteinian games? Often haven’t you also given into clever compulsions? I may also later apologize, but what better way to evidence that I have indeed listened to the self than by pronouncing the earlier shrieking calls of listening to others as just another hoax of the savage self, yet another hegemonic trick to in fact silence & unsee the eternal other?
Whilst I gather my tools to start reading the perverted caste-logic savage self’s itineraries to expose the depravity, depth & enormity of its perversions, you get the idea why I wasn’t very welcome in academia? They ousted me in the most disgusting manner, hunted is more like it. I am not complaining. They tried to destroy me, I broke, literally and in the head, I HAD TO & DID exit the world, and YET I SURVIVE, that is solely on account of my savarna caste location. And your observation is spot on, about needing someone beneath them, that is the logic of caste as they draw out in which even “freedom” as an idea is absent and abandoned. It isn’t as if these fuckers don’t know what freedom is, they do know & know it very well, and that is our real privilege. They(We) know if they(we) keep the freedoms only to themselves(ourselves), it will be limited, so they “abandon” their own freedoms in the name of nothingness as a logic to “absent” other’s freedoms. Yes, I do think of auto-ethnography as a methodological framework for life, not just an intellectual project.
You are right, sir, yet again, “…the system wants you, the caste system, limited to your caste & so on. But you are not even allowed to say this publicly. You must behave as if publicly everything is OK. We all are equal. You know this is nice irony, that prohibition itself is prohibited. You are not only subordinated, but you must act as if you are free. And this is our typical capitalist drama”.
You really do get the trauma which is the cause of our perversions: “In our daily lives, we deal with what Julia Kristeva calls ‘abject’ in a variety of ways: ignoring it, turning away from it with disgust, fearing it, constructing rituals made to keep it at a distance or constraining it to a secluded place (toilets for defecation, etc.). Disgust, horror, phobia… but there is yet another way to deal with abjection which is to enact a split between abjectal objects or acts and the symbolic ritualisation meant to cleanse us from defilement, i.e., to keep the two apart, as if there is no shared space where they may encounter each other since the abject (filth) in its actuality is simply foreclosed from the symbolic. Kristeva evokes the case of castes in India where the strong ritualisation of defilement (numerous rituals, prescribed in painful details, that regulate how one should purify oneself) appears to be accompanied by one’s being totally blind to filth itself, even though it is the object of those rites. It is as if one had maintained, so to speak, only the sacred, prohibited facet of defilement, allowing the anal object that such a sacralisation had in view to become lost within the dazzling light of unconsciousness if not of the unconscious. V. S. Naipaul points out that Hindus defecate everywhere without anyone ever mentioning, either in speech or in books, those squatting figures, because, quite simply, no one sees them. It is not a form of censorship due to modesty that would demand the omission in discourse of a function that has, in other respects, been ritualised. It is blunt foreclosure that voids those acts and objects from conscious representation. A split seems to have set in between, on the one hand, the body’s territory where an authority without guilt prevails, a kind of fusion between mother and nature, and on the other hand, a totally different universe of socially signifying performances where embarrassment, shame, guilt, desire, etc. come into play – the order of the phallus. Such a split, which in another cultural universe would produce psychosis, thus finds in this context a perfect socialisation. That may be because setting up the rite of defilement takes on the function of the hyphen, the virgule, allowing the two universes of filth and of prohibition to brush lightly against each other without necessarily being identified as such, as object and as law. On account of the flexibility at work in rites of defilement, the subjective economy of the speaking being who is involved abuts on both edges of the unnameable (the non-object, the off-limits) and the absolute (the relentless coherence of Prohibition, sole donor of Meaning). [Žižek, Slavoj. “Abjection, disavowal and the masquerade of power.” Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research 26 (2015): 33-43]
Our (Savaranas) real privilege which no wants to expose is the assuredness of being in fucking all time to come, the time that is available to us in every abstracted & recurring eternity (past +present+future) based which on these fuckers, my brethren & their crooked sisters, “bouncers of brahmanism” can make perverse claims.
I am presenting my pain in abstraction & wasn’t it you let me to believe that, “the lesson of this hysterical subject is praising abstraction – true Hegelians are not thinkers of the concrete-…the first step is to always understand a situation in its brutal abstraction…privilege one feature which even if it appears pathological, marginal & then by tearing out this feature, denaturalize all of it (the context, situation), the organic whole is lost & you reestablish reality from this stand point…pathological phenomenon are the key to understand the normal phenomena of the mind”.
Now you know, what burdens of PclSs I am bearing, those I have to serve penance for by committing to revealing the perversity that prevails within these circuits, disrobe these perverts, they have no shame, but there skins are none of my business, it is their innards I shall reveal, I will be insider, I will be the whistleblower, I was born to be a “bouncer of Brahmanism”, but I will not Die as One.
I shall undertake the task of Ro(reading the other), who is here identified as PclSs, in public display, I shall hide nothing, I am already disrobed, that is my commitment to the RF (revolutionary futures).
In the meantime, to seek more time, I submit in evidence The Portrait of a mAdwoman as a Poet to substantiate my listen to the self(ls) claims to demand some comradery qualifications of my own(Cs): (dS ↔LpA) (Ss ↔Os).
To further insist on my intentions, I also reveal geographies of me when I was only listening to the others because the self was allowed its mysterious ways without any question or consequences.
I, as first mentioned, submit this report as a presentation in motion, a submission, to the academy, not the academia, to recognize poetry itself as a theoretical act = poetry as theory written in slow, dripping pain. The report is also a shrieking plea to posterity’s ethical & poetic courts of justice to let me present my pain sometimes presented as letters, but always poetry, as my only evidence to consider acquitting me of my savage pasts.
The fact that I can make such obscene pleas is also my PclsSs (perverse caste-logic savage self) location’s privilege. To demolish all the eternal pasts & futures already assigned to this complete idiot of PclsSs, I have learned it well, now I know, it’s time has to be contained, calling out its perversity of privileges & permissions is not a bad start.
I wonder on what ethical grounds will you deny my plea, not allow me more time, when I have been responding to the plea even before you knew that was the ask of the hour, to echo like the bora winds, “we, old people, will most likely die before catastrophe strikes. But young people know that the catastrophe will happen in their time, decades from now, therefore what can they do? I think the first step for them is to realize they can’t do anything to stop it. They can protest & so on…but the system will move on. We live in an era where the truth is not hidden, but is promulgated everywhere, whatever media you use, they are talking about ecological catastrophe, war, Palenstianians dying in Gaza…but nothing happens, which doesn’t mean we should do nothing. We can, & now this is a philosophical point, we can change the very situation within which nothing can be done, in many ways. For example, you can change the way of discussion so as to mobilize people. You can organize, boycott, strikes & so on. And this is for the young people to do. It not enough for them “to be heard”, the voice of young people must echo. Not in the respectful sense, “young people have said what they wanted to say, but now we have to be realistic”. NO! THE VOICE OF YOUNG PEOPLE MUST ECHO LIKE THE BORA WIND! A WIND THAT TOUCHES EVERYTHING THAT CHANGES THE FIELD. And here I even argue for … not against people, but in moderate form, forcible means. Sabotage & so on. DO NO LISTEN TO THE EMPTY PHRASE, “YES, BUT NON-VIOLENTLY”. THERE IS VIOLENCE & THERE IS VIOLENCE. THAT IS, THERE IS VIOLENCE OF NOT KILLING, BUT OF SABOTAGING THE SYSTEM, WHICH IS NEEDED, THIS IS WHAT IS EXPECTED OF THE YOUNG…BE THE [BORA] WINDS”.
My sirs, I thus attend to your good heart, what if I am the not-so-young-woman, I still have bora winds in the hair, & what else am i seeking an extension for, only to gather the evidence already provided by you, to read the other of the self as you, yourself, have prescribed ? Do you not find me in attendance when you are attending to your good heart? I want nothing from you, I need only time, which I know is a big ask, but my burdens are eternal & I only have a lifetime on offer.
Until further notice, these are my locations: political, philosophical & existential.
Also, as an aside, we poets never have to eat, we need to, there are some mere mortal concerns even we cannot overcome. I am looking for work which is equally pleasurable, if also as painful, and also pays a pretty penny, this is I.

&A Listener’’s References: Houndtracks (H(er)+(S)oundtracks)

Mornings

Sun’s seductions & moon’s delight-revolutionary lovings

Soundtrack the sonic stock taking of the lovers demolished and selves rehabilitated

Nagma ka castle in the sky

Mounting Mornings

Managing Mania

Zizek to Zero – an exploration

Pervert’s Guide to Slumming

Listening as Philosophy in Action: A Poetic Presentation

ask, & again, for the first monsoons of my love (or, मेरे शब्द इतने भी सस्ते नहीं की शोर ना करें)

Working weekends with civilised colleagues (or, call me comrade)

The Notetaker: On hosting a Dinner