The Wisdom of Stones

17.06.2024

Hard. Unyielding. Dead. A stubborn thing a stone. Yet, even so, there are men that make love to the stone.

And as I think about the stone, a memory glides up from the depths. A memory from childhood.

As was often the case with my grandfather, a fine day would mean a fine walk. It was a habit he instilled in me, walking for a long time and talking for a long time. Even today, with some of my closest friends, we will walk for three or four hours after work or a whole day if I am not working. Walking and talking. With my grandfather, I would be his closest companion because I was his crutch. He was partially sighted. So he would clasp my arm and I would be his eyes and feet, scanning the ground for him and crossing the road with him.

The walk that day took us up to some factories in Essex – my grandfather was visiting us from London on that occasion with my grandmother. And then we noticed that the floor was strewn with pebbles.

‘Did you know…’ my grandfather began, ‘that there are a type of stone which confers wisdom?’ My grandfather came from the generation that believe in magic. He attributed his first job after his university degree to a visit to the Hanuman temple in the mountains. He believed in witchcraft and black magic.

‘The stones that you need to find have bands in them. If you find a stone with one band in it, then that is the first step towards knowledge. If you find a stone with two bands in it, then that is the second step towards knowledge. And if you find a stone with three bands within it, then that is the third step towards knowledge… What do you say, will you find?’

I remember scrabbling in the stones on the ground, picking up one after the other, absorbed in the quest to find these stones that conferred wisdom. Incredibly, or fatefully, in just one search of thirty minutes, I found each of the wisdom stones that my grandfather had mentioned.

I have kept them my whole life.

Later on in life, we were at a training session at a place that I volunteered and they asked us to bring some personal items in. I brought the wisdom stones. I described what they were and where I found them. I told her that I took them into my ‘A’ Level exams with me as luck. The trainer asked me if I believed in them. I said no. Then she asked me how I did in school. I told her that I was the top student with six ‘A’ Levels and with ‘A’ grades. She would not believe that I did not believe in the stones. I tried to explain to her – she did not understand. They were the memory of my grandfather and his stories.

Why is the wisdom in the stone? The stone appears to be durable, resilient, strong and eternal. Knowledge itself we feel would have those qualities within it. And the bands? They are unique. And they add layers to the stone. Knowledge itself is multi-layered. The more the layers, the more knowledge the stone confers. The more nuance, appreciation, insight. For about thirty years I have carried these knowledge stones with me. And I know that they are heavy. Because knowledge itself is heavy. It is a load to bear throughout life.

And the stone is also plain. It looks like nothing. It is worth nothing to most people. Because the world is ruled by the ignorant that hate wisdom. Not the wise.

Who to share the stones with? Who to share the burden with? One day, there will be an heir. The bearer of the stone that is knowledge.

The Dance of Shiva’s Third Eye: A Lower Class Indian Woman Against the English Law of the Middle Classes in Damini(1993)

07.11.2016 (edited 14.05.2024)

Jai Maata Di! (Hail the Mother Goddess!)

Although it was appreciated in India and won a number of awards, the Hindi film Damini (1993) is largely and unfairly unappreciated in the West. It is one of my favourite films. What you see is an answer to the injustice of the middle classes that masquerades as legal truth. and how to base resistance against it. The resistance to the law is in the form of the image, idolatry and photography. The film is not obviously about vision and photography, although for those that see nothing and will try to stop others seeing, it is emphasised that photography is integral to the medium of film.

Damini is about English law, the remnant of British colonisation in India, and its relationship to vision, particularly the vision of a woman of the lower classes. Damini (‘the lightning’) is a lower-class girl that marries into a rich family and makes friends with the house-maid Urmi. Damini’s brother-in-law Ramesh (‘the ruler of Rama’) rapes Urmi, pinning her down below him with the help of his friends and Damini sees him doing so. Damini finally agrees to say what she saw in the court of law, but every attempt is made to exclude her lower class woman’s truth by the middle class which is fully in control of the western-derived legal apparatus, a truth in which the exploitation of the lower classes forms a continuum with the sexual violation of woman and her forced submission to masculine desire. Damini is indeed confined to the mental asylum because of her truth – the lawyer who goes up against her says that she is mad. Here, Damini is indeed driven insane.

Then, in one of the most powerful scenes in world cinema, Damini sees a procession of Durga Maa (‘the Invincible’, Devi Maa, the Mother Goddess, Mata Rani, The Mother Queen, Maa Shaktishaali, The Powerful Mother) in the streets accompanied by the common people through a window in the asylum and regains her memory. The look of the idolater upon the idol, the Mother and the multiple forms of Hinduism behind her, the last true religion of syncretism and one that is not organised around scripture (whatever its other faults), merges with an intense tandava, perhaps one of the most intense dance sequences on film. Damini (‘the lightning’) flashes and her energy is converted in Shiva’s dance, the dance of creation, preservation and dissolution. Shiva is Durga’s consort – her lover. Damini becomes the lightning because it illuminates the world in a flash – like photography and the writing of light.

The dance begins with the eyes and the eyebrows, as can be seen in the video. For it is the opening of Shiva’s third eye, the eye of power. It is a dance of vision. Damini’s bindi, the red mark on her forehead, represents the third eye. The story of Shiva’s third eye is traditionally associated with anger and the renunciation of desire, the renunciation of the desire for the middle class in the movie, it would appear, and the form of power that they represent. The dance is not a solo performance. It is directed at the enemies of the Indian lower class woman. The dance requires mastery of will and body, improvisation and the knowledge of classical forms. The dance is a fight which pre-empts the moves of its opponents, which enlarges and expands the body, which can suit the circumstances and adjust and adapt, which can bedazzle and confuse its opponents. The dance is a carefully constructed martial arts performance, like kata in karate. It is both exhibition and internal consciousness.

Shiva’s third eye is a vision bestowed from integration with the Mother Goddess. For Shiva, like Damini, is the one that loves the goddess – Shiva is Damini’s consort. The love of the Mother Queen and Damini’s bhakti returns her to herself and her vision and gives her the energy to fight for her truth, the truth and vision of woman and the lower classes. It allows her to fight against the legal system of the middle classes and flee the asylum. It gives her the force to say what she saw and destroy the forces of concealment and reorder the world.

The empowered Damini unites with a good lawyer who submitted himself to the desire of woman, his wife, in order to take up his occupation and she is triumphant. The good lawyer returns Damini to her alienated husband, he returns her to her love: he gives her back her desire. In one scene, the good lawyer calls himself a tiger: the tiger is the vehicle of the Mother Goddess, also known as Maa Sherawali, the Mother with or of the Tiger. The good lawyer’s wife, now dead, is only presented to us as photograph, the image. When one looks at the traditional images of Durga, the connection is clear. In an inversion of the picture of the rape that Damini saw, with woman pinned down by men, the Mother is above the tiger, it is her vehicle which she directs (the tiger itself is the national animal of India and Mother India). Above the law, there is the Mother and the law itself must only be the Mother. Thus, the quote by Mahatma Gandhi at the beginning of the movie which is said to have inspired it: “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts”.

Damini’s justice is self-serving. It has an identity which it declares and serves, the identity of an Indian lower class woman. It is meant to protect a lower class woman that is her friend. Damini’s justice is based in emotion and empathy. She feels the hurt of another. Damini’s justice invokes a different form of power to the middle class men in power, a power that is feminised and derives its source from the mother and the sphere of the maternal. Damini’s justice is resistance: to serve not those in power, but those that are disenfranchised from power. In India, rapes are concealed by men so that the honour of their household is maintained. Thus, the powerful can prey on the weak. Damini’s justice exposes the act of making the less powerful submit to the powerful via gender in Indian society and calls for the public to claw back their honour. It is a film where justice operates in the honour economy and not the property economy of the West, where the white middle classes not only control the legal apparatus, but are also favoured by it as clients because they have more money.

Shiva’s Ability to Withstand the Flood of Woman’s Power

10.04.2024

Woman in the male imagination is the awesome and sublime power of nature. Uncontrollable, devastating.

The other name for Durga the Mother Goddess, the one with the tiger, is Shakti or ‘power’. Kali, her other face, is unchecked rage and blood lust. The beserker. Total carnage.

Amongst the gods, there is only one that can control and shape the flood of woman’s power. Over and over again in the myths. It is Shiva, the lord of the beasts (pasupati).

In one myth, Shiva is the only one powerful enough to funnel the flow of the river Ganga (Ganges) from heaven as she falls to earth. Devastatingly she floods down with raw energy. Serenely, he takes her force into his untamed head of hair to bring her down to earth.

In another myth, Kali’s dance of blood lust is only brought to an end when Shiva lays down before her so she dances upon him. It is the cosmic dance – the creation of the universe. Shiva’s control that channels the raw power of woman, the flood of her rage and power.

In both myths, there is one striking aspect of Shiva. That he is completely inert and still, passive. This is his power. Where woman floods with elemental force, Shiva sits down quietly to let the flood enter his hair, or he lays down before it. It is with stillness that the flood of woman’s power is channelled to create life – whether through the water or through the creation of all things. In response to total emotion, like Kali’s, in response to being moved, like in emotion, like the movement of the flood of the Ganga, Shiva is meek and unemotional. Unmoving. Unmoved.

Have you ever argued with the woman you love in the heat of her passion? You cannot fight them. Because you cannot hurt them when they are already hurt. It is wrong. It goes against the responsibilities of being a man. It is dishonourable. So you have to become inert. In response to fury, you reply without emotion. In response to provocation, you are still. In the face of accusation, you are silent. Shiva embodies the only way to act: with absolute restraint and self-control. The one you love is attacking you with everything she has got. She wants to kill you. The only one that can hurt you is hurting you. And you? You have to put your head upon the sword that she offers, and offer her your naked throat. You have to become Shiva. It is the only way forward. Psychologically, even if you are losing the argument, but your opponent is getting more and more heated, by becoming cooler and cooler, you win. That is what it means to be Shiva. Absolute stillness. Stillness in war, as personified by Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata, the leader of the hero brothers (Yudhishthira means ‘still in war’).

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