Archaeology of Civilization (poem)

The dead continue to haunt by their
mummified memories

in humble tombs, in great monuments,
in minted coins,

now in the networks caught on the web
in virtual reality,

while leaving the Earth of the living
further desertification,

in false promises of Shangri-La;
the ego flights don’t stop;
the digging graves don’t stop.

The bloody shameless hypocrite societies
Continue to haunt

the aborigine – the sons of soil –
in the wilderness of their
forests or even the deserts.

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There is news. The world’s oldest city, a fabled ‘mother city’, is found in the desert of Peru. It was found by Ruth Shady Solis, an archaeologist at National University of San Marcos, Lima. The ancient city of Caral in Supe Valley of Peru dates to 2,627 BC, which was much older than the Harappa towns and the pyramids of Egypt. It is interesting to note that Caral, Harappa and pyramids in Egypt are in the deserts, though I wonder what was the environment then!

Remigius de Souza

19-12-2007
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© Remigius de Souza. All Rights Reserved.

Remi’s resolve

Remi’s resolve
by Remigius de Souza

The metropolis of my mind is a space
of inward–outward–tray. The messages
flutter, ricochet from high-rise walls;
walls, walls everywhere, reverberate,
echo, send tremors of heat and noise.

I wander in my attire made of rags
of politics, of dogmas, of crafty arts,
to find some peace – place – of cool waters
and soothing foliage, in vain. Desolate
Remi wonders, was I born like this?

There’s no way than to shed your skin sooner.
and be on your feet than head better.

(In the modern civilized wilderness either
you laugh at yourself or be a buffoon!)

Copyright © Remigius de Souza 2007

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Remigius de Souza
Post Mail: 69-243 S. B. Marg, Mumbai 400028, INDIA
My poetry homepage:
www.poetsindia.com/poet/Remigius+de+souza/

Watering the farms

Watering the farms:
Learning from the people

Paddy farming in Konkan

 Paddy farming needs plenty of water. Even during monsoon the farmers need water management during different events of farming actions.

While watering their farms, the farmers traditionally use simple, commonsense techniques. They use various implements to lift water from wells or streams for irrigation, which work by human energy and/or bull energy. Now some use pumps that work on diesel or electricity.
Before pouring the water in the troughs or channels dug in the farms, they prepare cow dung slurry in water, and spread it in the beginning stretch of the channel. That helps to seal the pores in the channel and thus prevents water loss by percolation right in the beginning, thus it assures that water reaches to the end of the farm.

Theories of economics, or politics, or democracy may sound and seem glamorous, but the instruments of application matter. Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in physics, is quoted by DR. Judah Kahn, to have said: “I was asked to assist in the creation of the world’s most destructive machine but I was never asked how to use it. Now I realize what I have done and the machine could do, and I am afraid” (Richard P. Feynman, ‘Don’t you have time to think?’ Ed. Michelle Feynman, Penguin, 2005, p. 361). Feynman died by cancer. (Was it due to the atomic radiation?) He was deeply interested in the mysteries of Nature, in the compartment of Physics, and perhaps missed Biology – his own body.

In modern society, while intellect takes topmost level, body – individual or the collective – is neglected, exploited, and oppressed. This is evident at national, regional and global levels in a great mass of human body of the underclass, the other living beings and the Earth; the corporate flourish. Do the numbers or statistics — one or one million, ten percent or ninety percent — matter, except for those who sit in the chambers, or move in a grove, or fly high and don’t see beyond their eyelids?

Unfortunately much of the resources – cash or kind, education or skills, which may be appropriate to 21st century – that are meant for the target groups on the lowest economic rungs are absorbed by the administrative channels of the governments; a known secret. Indeed, it is similar in nature to irrigation by pump sets, where water is wasted because of high velocity and volume, which is not controlled. It is high time, the governments learn from the people, and find the ways to plug the dissipation of resources. And please stop treating these people as second class citizens and beneficiaries until the next round of elections.

Sadly, it seems Indian Democracy has lost its sense of proportion and priorities for last six decades, which claims to be a ‘developing nation’, of course at the cost of the Third World India (and the Fourth World India) that only benefits the First World India. We only hope the “PAYBACK TIME’ comes soon.

Late News: Where do the money go? Read: Flood Fraud - January 12, 2007.
~~~~~~~~

Remigius de Souza

(02-10-06)

Reflections on ‘A Devil’s Chaplain’

Engraving of moon phases on bone (30,000 yBP

 

A Devil's Chaplain

Reflections on ‘A Devil’s Chaplain’ by Richard Dawkins

By Remigius de Souza

My second attempt to continue reading the book, ‘A Devil’s Chaplain’, failed. It is not because I have any bias against science. Being Indian there is a belief at back of my mind that humans go through cycle/s of rebirth, through as many as 8.4 million yonis (life forms such as, a animal, bird, insect, human etc.) – depending upon their karma; even the gods are not spared. I do not expect Darwin or Dawkins should subscribe to this belief.

Typically, like the western, and later the westernized societies, the book, too, boasts, as if no science did exist in the bygone eras before the Industrial Revolution.

The image of the engraved bone plaque illustrated here is 30,000 yBP old, from Blanchard, France. It shows phases of the Moon, engraved by different tools and in different styles of strokes. It’s from the Palaeolithic Era. The schematic representation shows the serpentine mode of accumulating the sequential information within a small area (Source: Eccles, John C., ‘Evolution of Brain: Development of the Self’, Routledge, 1991, p. 135).

Which compartment does the plaque belong? Is it a work of art or science? It is holistic. Modern science is digging in the past and probing the celestial space. Both certainly could help us to see our place in the geological and cosmic times, with humility.

However, it has so far not succeeded to know and understand the human phenomenon – in body, mind and spirit – that is so dynamic. How does the plaque qualitatively rank in arts, sciences or technologies among all the artefacts the humanity has produced from the beginning of time? Are the so-called self-proclaimed superior societies truly so? 

What prompted Darwin to coin the phrase, ‘devil’s chaplain’, I do not know. Perhaps it is because of the hold of Creation myth, or hypothesis, or theory, of faith, of belief on the Christian societies, and that he by his proof of evolution was challenging it or the contemporary society. I believe that the Creation myth expects one to be humble before God, Nature, or mystery that is Life. 

How ironic that after Darwin (1809-1882), after nearly two hundred years, that the plant and animal species continue to vanish at a faster pace than ever before: ecological collapse. That the rate of rapid climate change and global warming frighten us: environmental degradation. That the reserves of fossil fuels and other finite resources of the earth are depleting progressively at a faster speed: energy crisis. Above all, it is the widespread deadly poverty and deadly deceases such as, HIV-AIDS. These are fallout of the Industrial Revolution, in the name of social and economic development. Its assaults on land and waters and the living beings continue.

Only the coffer of the gene banks and money banks thrive and grow, which, however, has no tangible value. Evolution now takes place on a laboratory table at the mercy of moneys and monopolies. In the past, the Easter Island reduced to a desert. How long would it take the Earth to come to that disastrous state? Could the slogans at world summits, without action, change it?

The western society has grown old with the advent and growth of Mechanical and Industrial revolutions, now identified as one. Small populations, human labour replaced by machine, mass production, sophisticated land, water and air transport, so also weapons of war, establishment and expansion of colonies, greed for more power and profit are some of the characteristics of the western society, which indeed have turned into an addictions. A line between the science and technology too is already blurred.

Science has emerged as a new religion with its several gods – Marx, Freud, and Darwin etc. Technology is its essential ritual, which penetrates in every sphere of an individual and the collective, and their institutions, and followed either mechanically or blindly without checking ground realities. The high priests of science design, the rest of the mass society follows, not knowing the meaning of the great mantra: E=mc². This has been happening also in many established institutionalized religions.

It ultimately has resulted in founding the so-called global society, which spreads across the world irrespective of their sovereign boundaries in the First World and Third World countries. Along with the new religion of science, there emerged also the myths for the delight of the pundits. 

For example: Marx’s myth. Lawrence Coupe quotes and comments on several authors – Edgell Rickword, Kenneth Burke, Fredrick Jameson, Herbert Simson and Trevor Mellia, Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook – who speak of Marx’s myth. Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook in ‘The Politics of Hope’ draw a comparison, says Coupe, that suggests ‘both Christianity and Marxism are myths of deliverance’ (‘Myth’, Routledge, 1997, p. 70).

As pundits continue their intellectual exercises, there would emerge many more myths in literary discourse; or they already are there! The recent debate (and dialogue?) between the Creationist and Evolutionist lobbies in the West signifies the Evolution myth is already there, but no deliverance!

As a result, perhaps, the school children there may have to go through a new or revised syllabus for their salvation!

Once in a public speech at a conference, I remarked, “The politicians and the usurers take rebirth as mosquitoes and continue their mission of sucking the blood of the people”, while referring to the hordes of mosquitoes at the conference venue, of course in a lighter vein. However, the wars in various forms, against the poor people and insects have caused their populations too grows: by instinct to save the race and by immunity.

“Be fruitful, and multiply…” Genesis, Holy Bible, 1:28

Now the New Religion of Science practices:
Kill and multiply profits.

~~~~~
Remigius de Souza
07 December 2007

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©Remigius de Souza 2000 - 2007

LIFE is not a matter

Life is not a matter

LIFE is neither a matter nor a concept. Life is larger than all religions and philosophies, arts and sciences, leave aside trades and technologies, and even the gods that civilization has invented in all the ages and places.

Our ego, however, is larger than Life. We deliver it in sugar-coated benevolent polite words. Here, entities become letters and numbers, and get divided and coded by deductive systems; we are devoid of sensitivity to Life.

We are not only dependent on others but also ignorant. We design the standards of living though utterly ignorant of worth of Life, not knowing how dependents are we on whom we depend.

We hide our inadequacies under verbal – physical cosmetics to face the naked facts of Life, or our egocentric vested interests shy away from facing them.

In that we don’t realize we become entities living in Virtual Reality, moving in virtual time, sustain on borrowed memories – from bygone PAST and/or speculated Futures.

In our Age of Trade and Technology, we equate Life with our elite hi-tech living standards.

Indeed, how many times do I proclaim, words, "My life"? I treat Life as if it is my possession, an object; as if I own Life. The fact, however, is that Life owns me; I am at mercy of Life; that Life is totally indifferent to my mind's tantrums. 

Life is ruthless, unkind unlike God that gets angry or loving.

Life isn’t a four letter word like Love, Work, Time… etc. 

I quote my short composition:NOTE

Promise

No more cannibalism
in any form ― not even by proxy
as tomorrow's sun rises —
Alas, the night endless.

[Written on April 8, 1994, published online on June 4, 2001 on my poetry Homepage]

NOTE: Image above is from Internet
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©Remigius de Souza, all rights reserved.