synekism…
the word ‘synekism’ comes from the greek word ‘synokismos’… ‘synoi’ part means ‘coming together of’ (as in synthesis) and the ‘kismos’ part coming from the greek word ‘oikos’ that means ‘house’… synoikismos would mean the condition created by the material fact of coming together of houses, or in a general sense, by the increasing denseness of human settlement… synekism, as borrowed from various sources of inspiration and finally used in a qualified sense by edward soja, means the formation and reformation of social relations by the changing organisation of human lives in material (being inseparable from conceptualisations of the material) space, with increasing density of settlements… soja distinguishes the subtly different sense in which he uses the word synekism by shifting away from an older spelling ‘synoecism‘…
i use the term here in a very specific and clearly reduced meaning… in munirka gaon (south delhi), i came across this curious house architecture where the first courtyard after entering the house, on one hand becomes the modern lobby, and on the other hand remains the pre-modern courtyard… and in some cases, they also have a well… in the pics here we see this woman using one of such wells and going back holding the bucket of water…
clearly here takes place a reconfiguration of material spaces of life, caused by increased density of settlements… a spatial juxtaposition forced by lack of availability of space… the well which is not supposed to be in the courtyard had to be moved there… at the same time the courtyard which is supposed to be private or at least less-public than the street, is moved straight next to the street (i took the pics standing on the street), again due to space crunch… what induced me to take the pics is this woman’s complete veiling… now, i think, there cannot be a grand statement regarding whether the space of obtaining water is a private or public space… but usually the well, if private, enjoys a certain seclusion (mostly spatial) that allows it to be used by the women of the house without being directly seen by the men or the guests/pedestrians, and if public, would have a seclusion (mostly temporal) that provides a semi-women-only space, which though not private, is more relaxing than public-with-male-presence… it is of interest here, in the pics, how the veiling regime within the physical boundary of the house has changed with the architecture co-determined by space crunch…
this is micro-scale synekism…
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Tags: architecture, delhi, munirka, private/public, space, urban
baul brityanto…
another year-end, another poush mela, and another bout of listening to baul-s and fakir-s from across bengal performing…
poush mela is this fair that takes place during 23-25th December in shantiniketan, with shops selling clay pots to tractors, coffee and pastries to state emporia… since high school days, one of the major attractions has been listening to the baul-s and fakir-s…
and here are some thoughts on this year’s performances…
> what made my coming home for mela worth is listening live to kalachNad dorbesh, one of the most intense singer/philosopher around… the song he was singing talks about the religion and religiosity: the gods don’t eat the food we give to them during the pujas, those things are only for the mortals like us, come to me [kalachNad] to listen about the pujas that do not require any sacrifice [as in animals]…
> heard this fakiri qawali in bengali about nizamuddin auliya coming to delhi! i have to get hold of the lyrics of this song, as i still remember the tune… hopefully in a month, ‘dilli-te nizamuddin auliya elo’ will be heard in jnu…
> the groups (sampraday) of baul-s and fakir-s usually sit in a half circle-ish form, as one of them stand in the middle and perform… and some among the sitting accompany the person singing, with various instruments… as always, it is a curious experience to notice how the politics of support operates within these groups… as in who are people playing when a particular baul/fakir is singing… this is especially noticeable in case of child performers… there always are certain members of the group who are making eye contacts with each other and either supporting the singer with backing vocals or instruments or otherwise… the greater intensity of activity regarding giving or not giving support in case of child performers perhaps has to do with it greater amount of uncertainty regarding the future of the child… that is an adult performer already is or at least is aware that s/he is going to be member of a sub-group within the group… in case of children, i guess there is a greater scope for manipulation, a competition to attract him/her to a certain sub-group… and once attracted, to feel comfortable there… in a particular case this year, this child was singing, and there were some on the spot conflict in negotiation regarding which baul-s would accompany her… so two of them got up… while one of them were playing with the sitting musicians, keeping the link between the child and the sitting musicians… the other was playing to the audiences… pure extravagant performance, with not a second spent in front of the microphone… clearly, both these duties enhance the child’s experience of singing, the former by helping her to sing with the music, and the latter by connecting her to the audience…
> the elements of commercialisation and populism operate at great extent… and it is tedious to watch when the labour behind the ‘performance’ becomes explicit… when the particular little bit of dance being performed can be read as being performed as part of the ‘performing baul’… and not as coming from within, inspired by the song, by the thoughts… i shall not attempt to verbally describe the visual difference between these two kinds of performance… it is more a matter of experience… experience as in experiencing it directly (instead of reading about it), and not (or at least less) as in experiencing it for this amount of years… ‘performing baul’ happens a lot, and it is only a few who steer clear (or at least does little) of it… fakir-s in comparison, i think, are far less commercialised… in any case, fakir-s have seen less commercial success as ‘ethnic’ or ‘world music’ performers… and this clearly make their performances different from baul-s for having lesser commercial/populist stunts…
> while the younger (adult) female baul-s/fakir-s appear as passive serene figures, almost medium-like, the older women’s performances are far more aggressive… of course i have not conducted a census among them, but i strongly feel that the line between younger and older coincide with menopause… while the not-yet-reached-menopause baul-s/fakir-s act as passive (in a trance but unlike men it is not the state of ecstasy, but a state of tranquillity) and calm, singing the song almost as a medium would say words, without agency… the post-menopausal baul-s/fakir-s, however, perform with great agency, the way they utter the words, in a very indicating back at the speaker manner… they are also rarely (if ever) accompanied by any other standing musicians.. where the younger women usually have one, and sometime two, musicians standing and playing with her… the spatial significance of this is unmistakable… the voice throwing of older women is sharply different from younger ones, in the sense of the former being more assertive…
i have some more stories about baul-s and ‘performing security’ to tell, but that will be part of a different post…
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Tags: baul, gender, music, performance, shantiniketan
me and love… at last!
there is so much warmth this world offers me… and all in unexpected places…yet all i cause is sadness…
i am a great leaver… fought against myself forever on the path… fought not to leave… yet…
‘leave’ aint the right word perhaps…i dont leave…does the sun leave the earth at night? lover of sun, i , aint that regular though… nights tend to be long with me…and i dont rise at the same places anyway…
eyes of warmth gaze upon the sunset everyday…me too
why it’s…it’s almost as if…
if you could only crack the code
then you’d finally understand what this all means
but if you could…do you think you would
trade it all, all the pain and suffering?
but then you’d miss
the beauty of the light upon this earth
and the sweetness of the leaving”
– k d lang
but some say leaving aint all that sweet…well… rather its an acquired taste (like everything else?)…
do i really cause all this sadness? well i clearly do… but so does other people for me…
but the funny (and frustrating) bit is that i do have that fucking acquired taste…
i love it bitter… coffee… uchche… neem… shukto… you name it…
i fall in love with people i leave miles and miles and miles across…
and i be in love with them… all of them… all the time… across space…
i imagine them, converse with them, share all the bits of little things with them, fantasise them, go dirrrty with them, as if they are right here right now with me… right in my own spatial specificity…
lot of people imagine… so do i…
but this aint just imagining for me…
even that very term of ‘imagine’ (same for ‘leave’) always already have in-built sensibilities that exclude my experiences when i use them for my expression…
bitter is the new sweet… and i aint gonna trade anything for the sweetness of leaving… sweetness of that sky in that dawn when it dint know what to paint… sweetness of that central kolkata street after that lunch when it dint know where to take me or anybody… sweetness of that relationship consisting of 4 meetings (or 6?) in 4 years… sweetness of those sooo-hidden, that they were hidden from myself even when i was reading them, letters…
i am aware of the bitterness i create… but believe me it aint that bitter… i know it is an acquired taste… but it is never too late to acquire it… i too swim in that same ocean of bitterness… only that i am fond of it… i find it sweet…
this sounds so bloody apologetic and justificatory (is there a word like that?)… but this is…
the leaving sun has a crazy warmth… and all through out the night, which may end or may not, that craziness of the warmth, and that warmth of the craziness remains…
what i love about the sun is not that it comes up everyday… that is the boring part…
i love it for its craziness and its warmth… here… or there… day… or night…
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Tags: k d lang, kari, love
she danced all night and suddenly it was all about being loved like a woman ought and i thought i would die of gin and adoration, i thought if only i could freeze this dance into a loop, carve it out of whitefaced time and paste it into a sea of brown, if only the earth permitted the holding of hands across the line, heroes and grandkids would be born, but it was just a berlin night and the earth kept spinning, drunk off her axis that if it weren’t for fucking gravity, she could fucking love the sun again
[i already posted a link to this poem below… but while posting this pic, i thought lets post the poem too… here is the link to the poem: http://www.kylapasha.com/main/?page_id=36]
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Tags: kyla pasha, love, poetry, wall
A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers (both these terms in the plural) – from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via economic and political installations…
‘the eye of power’, power/knowledge, p. 149
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Tags: michel foucault, quote, space
intimacy…
.
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Tags: architecture, delhi, munirka, urban
for some people, it is important that sex be embedded in contexts resonant with meaning, narrative and connectedness with other aspects of life; for other people it is important that they not be; to others it doesn’t really occur that they might be.
the epistemology of the closet, p. 25
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Tags: quote, sex
k d lang – quote of the day
i worship this tenacity
and the beautiful struggle we’re in
love will not elude us…i am calm in oblivion
calm, as i ever have been
love will not elude me…and love, as philosophy
is simple…
‘simple’, invincible summer
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Tags: k d lang, love, quote
kari and angel…
finished reading amruta patil‘s kari yesterday… utterly moving… dunno what to say… one of those books which you converse with while reading… you learn about its experiences and you share yours with it… you are thrilled to realize how you two have walked similar paths… and thrilled hearing some of its closely guarded secrets… and then you start telling, with considerable hesitation and nervous grin, your own ones… best thing is that it understands… it has been there… done that (imagining)… or somewhat there… and somewhat that (imagining)… it knowingly winks…
and allows you to get distracted by thoughts ignited by a line or a character… patiently waits for you to come back to it… and you do the same when it gets distracted by something it or you said and goes away temporarily into its own thoughts… into all those non-stories behind the written/drawn/camouflaged stories… into all those longings for stories… for real… what happened and what is imagined are all blurred… but all that blurriness has been disciplined by strokes and swishes to tell the story of kari… to make story out of those blurrinesses… not of those blurrinesses… but at times the blurriness overpowers the lines and dissolves them and goes back into the blurry non-story… where there is no definitive ‘imaginary’ that comes with the story-hood… just a longing for t/ruth… t/ruth beyond real/imaginary…
and when it comes back to the pages, is happy to see you waiting for it… not that it needs you to wait… but happy nonetheless to see you waiting… it comes back with that look in its eyes that you get when you are just coming up after being immersed in memories…
it is indeed a sad day for this wall city when angel forgets our rain journey memories…
i miss my kari… and my angel too… and please dont confuse them with amruta’s kari and angel…
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Tags: amruta patil, angel, kari
‘m’
recently started attending classes of a course on ‘cinema and the city’… it is a mphil level optional course for those doing mphil in cinema studies in jnu… my entry point is of course through the city part of the course… last thursday (04/09/08) we saw the film ‘m’ directed by fritz lang… of the german expressionist school… made in 1931… one of the earlier movies on the serial killer theme…
the theme of charting/mapping/categorizing is played out through out the entire film… as a great ‘modern’ endeavor…
the police draws concentric circles on the map of the city, centered around the point representing the place where the body of the victim was found… this refers to an already mapped city space and the juxtaposition of the event of murder on such a map and thus the spatialization of the event… then both the bodies of the victim and that of the murderer gets mapped, through forensic test and fingerprint matching respectively… there is narrative mapping of the crime event… police interrogates and tries to construct a temporally played out narrative to explain/assist the spatial certainties of the event of murder (such as the house of the victim, her school where she was last seen by her friends and where her body was found)… there are further references to acts of categorizing – the stolen goods recaptured by police being categorized neatly among piles of watches, knives, pistols etc; the lines of half/semi-smoked cigarettes, according to lengths and perhaps brands too, rescued by the beggars from city streets etc… also there are multiple references to already existing encyclopedias, or prior acts of categorization… such as criminal records kept by the police, patient records kept by the mental asylums, finger print and hand writing records etc… all refers to a total and categorizing vision…
along with this very modern preoccupation with categorization and mapping there is vivid depiction of modern organizational/management forms in practice… it is not only the police but also the grand association of ‘criminals’ who want to capture this unknown serial killer (will go into the ‘why’ aspect of that a bit later/lower)… and both these organizations – police’s and criminals’ – are the absolute epitomes of modern organization…
in both the organization sense and in the categorization sense, the film talks about the victory, the prevailing of the ‘modern’ way of doing things… while the criminals are the first to catch the murderer, it is the police who re-catches him before he is subjected to death penalty by the criminals’ court, which takes place almost as a parody of the proceedings at the ‘legal’ court that follows… there are hypotheses that fritz lang meant the criminals to represent the emerging nazi-s – the ‘other’/distorted side of legality, which however is immaculate in its ‘impersonation’ of the police and court proceedings… interestingly, fritz initially planned to title the film the murderers are amongst us… what i would like to note here is the plural in use, murderers and not murderer… this gives a whole different perspective on ‘who is murderer’ question… in the ‘illegal’ court scene the serial killer pleads that he does not kill by intention, he is driven by his psyche to commit those crimes and he wants to resist that side of his mind but he fails… except for the defense lawyer (himself a criminal), the rest of the criminals are not much moved by this logic… and they ask for his death penalty… but before that happens the police reaches the place to rescue+capture the serial killer… the legal court puts him in prison… thus re-producing the just, uber-human, fairness of modern legal system… thus the victory of the true modern over the distorted modern (nazi) even when the subject matter concerned is something as ‘beyond modern’ as a serial killer who kills young girls…
the point, however, is whether the serial killer is really ‘beyond modern’? or undeniable part of the same modern (city) life? and here we would go back/up to the question of why criminals were searching for the serial killer in the first place? because he was unproductive/excessive… he was illegal, and that put him to closer to the criminals vis-a-vis the police… but he was unproductive, and the dichotomy of productive/unproductive is far bigger a modern concern than that of legal/illegal… the modern society attempts for total denial of the unproductive, even the recognition of its presence… that is the reason that drove the criminals to find out and eliminate this excess of the society, to suppress the fact that he indeed was excess of the society…
the character of the serial killer is the uncanny, the stranger, not because s/he is unfamiliar but because s/he is intimately familiar but recognition of that simple fact would imply falling apart of the very identity, the center, of the modern city-dwellers… he is the human form of the uncanny/uncomfortable empty plot beside the housing complex… empty and hence unproductive/excessive… this is not the empty plot which the city planner has decided to keep empty… this is the plot which is empty for unknown reason… perhaps because while planning for zoning that area of the city, city planner’s hand slipped and tea fell on the map… the planner neatly drew streets around that tea-stained plot and decided it is best to not to do anything with that plot, not being sure what lies there in the first place…
an acceptance of such humane chance/uncertainty or simple unknowability unsettles the whole modern, encyclopedic, total vision project… in the film, while interrogating people about the act of murder, there is an incident where two persons who are being interrogated fight among each other arguing whether the murderer wore a green or a red hat… that is the loose/untied wool in the sweater… pull it and entire encyclopedias come undone… here it is absolutely urgent to refer to borges’ chinese encyclopedia… a huge take on the modern preoccupation with categorization…
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Tags: borges, cartography, cinema and the city, encyclopedia, excess, fritz lang, m, mapping, modern, urban
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