In 1972, an American photographer named Kalima photographs a monk in India, who incinerates himself in protest to war. She is arrested for complicity in murder by the Indian government. Her past, her present, her perspectives are expressed from her jail cell and small adjacent patch of sun scorched earth through her lamentations and dialogues.
Prologue
Facing east from the sunset to the darkening sky surrounding the still, solitary saffron robed monk, Kalima's ever-honed intuition alerted, her finger tips already magnetized to the camera. The silence of the moment seemed to relax her and all that her eyes surveyed. The monk's right arm raised like a tentacle above his head. In his hand was an ordinary red and gold liter container of kerosene, which poured outward over the monk's head and down his robes like blood cut from an artery. The moment that held themade in Japan lighter in the monk's left hand etched a void in Kalima's minds eye for all eternity. Her professional fingers held the moistures and tensions under control, while sparring not a millisecond of time or footage, as the flames enveloped and charred the last threads of saffron cloth on the motionless monk twenty feet from the camera's eye.
1
Way down here
in Kali's garden
Way down here
digging deep
Way down here
While the faithful sleep.
Scarlet Roses wake
when moon has risen
fallen Petals shine
in darkest heaven.
Way down here where bones
turn to soil
turn to roots
to rose petals of blood.
Way down here
while the faithful sleep.
The truth of mechanized Buddhist perception of the dance of life, of reality if you will, of relationship to that thing called self. A cord of stability into that ground of nothingness that is called self. The mind moving ever inward; a single projectile against the flood, the storm, the crushed volcanic rock of outward perception, into the valley of non-existence, where neither warmth nor cold, gentleness nor harshness, where passion and romance, attachment to another human being, nor its pains and joys have any meaning, any consequence. Where the ecstasy and sorrow of the chase, of the pursuit of right and wrong, of accumulations song of needing to belong is cast into the illusionary space debris of outward perception in the journey towards emptiness. Oh where is that thing called self.
3
You just keep looking at another person as if they are not there, an empty vessel running amock, filling the void of existence with an unrelenting panic. The line between phony and real blurred in the haze. The nothing amidst all the something as if everyone can have something but you, because you are operating through a perception of void and they are not. The wars of right and wrong. The wars of accumulation. The wars of love, sex, money and acquisition, all bringing a rush, albeit temporary impermanent. If you do not lie, cheat, steal, or kill for a slice of the pie, than you usually don't get a slice of the pie. Like you can't get both Heaven and earth. If you go for Heaven then you miss the fruits of the earth. The meek rarely inherit anything.
way down here in Kali's garden
way down here digging deep
way down here while the faithful sleep.
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to be continued.
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