Dementia, Gandhi Thesis

Day Two of Fast Dementia, Gandhi Thesis

By John Taylor; 3 March, 2006

Stu asked me about this fasting thing and I realized I could say that
I had been doing this annual fast since I was eighteen years old, some
thirty odd years. Fasting, we have faith, is like a mining expedition.
As the Great Being said, regard man as a mine rich in minerals of
great value. Yeah, that is the ticket. Like Shrek the ogre, we are
like onions, we have layers. The fast strips off layer after layer
until just before the sundown meal, we are what we really are. In my
case, it is a very annoyed, impatient, critical, harping, bitter
pessimist. I start off in the morning this fat, tolerant, content,
kindly individual and at the end I slouch about, a horrible,
hypercritical, sniveling, complaining, rampaging, well, ogre. Just ask
my family. We had a horrible meal last night, until I got some hooch
in my belly and changed back again. This is the valuable mineral
underneath being exposed by fasting, an angry, embittered non-entity
incapable of remembering from one minute to the next. Call it "fast
dementia." Maybe my gems just need processing, maybe these essays will
polish them.

After all these years, I know just what to expect from the fast, and
from myself; that is, a great deal less. I have learned not even to
try to continue on in a straight line with my little investigations,
which tend to be scatterbrained at the best of times. Experience
conditions me to expect nothing better than nineteen days of
puttering. Not that I can complain, I have mountains of puttering to
do. If in the future others work like me, Naw Ruz will be followed by
the world's biggest garage sale season.

Yesterday, fast day one, I woke at four AM -- the fast long ago
changed my sleeping schedule, so that not only during Ala but year
round my sleeping schedule is that of a farmer, very early waking,
very early retiring to bed. First thing, I ate my gazpacho soup along
with breakfast, and started into inanition and aridity by rapidly
finishing off a half finished essay on One God and the Golden Rule.
Its structure was what the French call "broken sticks," scattered
about worse than usual, but at least it was done.

Then I set in on an extended puttering session, meant to last as long
as my limping cognitive faculties endured, after which I had prepared
a pile of library VHS tapes and DVD's to take me through the long,
long late afternoon of the fast.

For months I had missed having a stereo system in the living room, so
I scrounged parts from disparate components in the study and the
living room and connected them to the tower speakers waiting there,
lonely and unused. In the process two of the scrounged stereo
components broke down; I ran out into the snow flurry and dumped them
into the trash can. My stereo equipment all comes from the garbage can
or the garage sale, which does not make me feel deprived, since the
technology in the 1960's surpassed the ability of the adult ear to
hear its subtleties. Still, this old equipment is very time consuming
to set up, and I could see why people spend money on new stuff.

Finally I got it all together well enough to listen to a cassette on
the tape deck as I puttered. It was the last side of a book-on-tape I
have slowly been going through, "The Happy Isles of Oceania, Paddling
the Pacific," by Paul Theroux. In spite of his French name, this
American novelist and travel writer is, for an American, typically and
topically anti-French; though in this case quite understandably so, in
view of the devastation they have wrought upon their colony in
Polynesia, which is, he observes, one of the ugliest places in the
whole ocean. He portrays their "Tahiti Day" celebrations as an act of
intimidation, their fiercest legionnaires marching down the street
before a glum, silent crowd of natives. His impression of that island
contrasts sharply with the American Hawaii, wherein he settles with
palpable relief, as if at home, which it is, being a state of union.

Theroux's are the observations of a very well traveled tourist, and
are all the more interesting for his broad experience. When he says
that Easter Island temporary workers, and Australians on the outback,
both white and "Abo," are rivaled only by winter-bound Finns for their
determination to use every spare moment of their lives to drink
themselves into oblivion, you tend to believe him. He has nothing but
contempt for the natives on the islands who have adapted to the touch
of Western civilization. He seeks every opportunity to dig out what he
calls the "traditionalists," who can be seen at a distance, since they
build their thatched houses in the old way, out of local materials.
They do not use corrugated metal for their roofs. Theroux has done
ample background reading and fits many of these isolated places into
their context in the history of literature and discovery. He compares
the islands of the Pacific to stars of the sky, very far apart,
separated by an endless ocean.

Most uniquely, Theroux has found a wonderful way to get out of the
trodden tourist pathways. He carries along with his normal baggage a
collapsible kayak. It is made of canvas, is very serviceable and takes
him to the most unexpected places, and it all folds up into the size
of two suitcases, evidently. I have been out on the open ocean in a
Northumberland Sea lobster trawler and the very thought of braving
those waves the size of small mountains in a tiny kayak makes me break
out in a cold sweat. But you cannot argue with the fellow's success in
getting away from corrupted locales into some wonderful, beautiful,
unspoiled, tiny islands that are otherwise inaccessible. Maybe some
Baha'i travel teacher should do the same thing, as long as that
teacher is not myself. I would restrict myself to a folding bicycle if
ever I got away from the Dunnville area.

Here I am at paragraph eight of my daily essay, and I am already
losing it. So let me interject a fragment from my junk writing bin
something I started months ago but abandoned, called "Gandhi Thesis."
It seemed pretty terrible until my brain slipped down a notch a few
minutes ago and now, suddenly, it is better than anything I could
conceivably write right now.

Gandhi thesis

Love breeds love, and hate breeds hate. Love stands for life, hate is
its denial. Between life and death, between the realm of the heart and
that of the body, there is a huge gap that cannot be crossed. It
cannot, yet it must be.

The story of Mohandas Gandhi is the Brothers Karamazov told in the
East, with a special eastern twist. Having read a little about him
lately, I ask myself, was Gandhi a politician, as some consider him to
have been, or was he a spiritual leader, as he thought of himself?
Consider this,

"I can say without the slightest hesitation ... that those who say
that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what
religion means."

Gandhi said that. My question is, would a Baha'i agree? I am inclined
to say, perhaps yes, but with a huge amount of hesitation. Far more
than Gandhi had, who as he says had not the slightest hesitation in
saying it.

Yes, religion has a huge formative impact on the grounds of politics,
nobody can deny that. Politics is a tree that grows out of our
thought, and thought is conditioned by the heart, the concern of
religion. Baha'is have a principle of non-interference in politics. At
the same time, we do not. On one hand, the meddling of religious
leaders in political affairs, and vice versa, confuses all camps, both
religious and political. On the other, you cannot draw thick lines
between them, such divorces betray the oneness of nature, of humanity,
and ultimately of God. Everything loves, serves and depends upon
everything else, under one sun.

You need look no further than the life of Gandhi himself to see the
dire dangers of confounding politics for religion, and vice versa.
Gandhi was a religious leader, but he was also very much a politician
with political goals. A religious teacher has educative goals and
cannot be concerned with policy and implementation. Or, not. If
religion is totally quiescent, it is useless. Baha'u'llah said, if
something begins and ends in words, it is fit for fire. But as things
are right now, charged and inflamed, a spiritual leader cannot stick a
finger in without getting it chopped up. Things are not working now.
We need to make a world where politico and pastor both have clear jobs
and do not interfere with one another.

In the end Gandiji was assassinated by one Nathuram Godse, who
excoriated both Gandhi's politics and his religion, accusing him of
bringing back superstitious beliefs such as the power of the soul, the
inner voice, fasting, prayer and purity of mind. Later the Hindu
nationalists got even more bloody minded. The Hindutva and Bajrang Dal
movements regard Gandhi's Hinduism as weak and effeminate. You can go
to www.hinduunity.org and see them urging Hindus to exterminate Islam.

This is Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov playing out in real life.
Dostoevsky's story was the story of denial of God and love told in
Western terms; one brother denies out of conscience, the second
brother out of habit, and the last carries them through to the logical
conclusion, premeditated murder. In the Eastern story of Gandhi, it
was not denial that degraded into murder, it was crossing the line,
confusing faith with praxis. It was faith meddling with politics, it
was politics infecting religion, and it was both missing the point
completely, the point being love and unity.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com