Ali Akbar Khan steps out slowly, deliberately during the
alap to “Goojari Todi / Morning Raga.” It feels broad enough to hold the whole
morning and light enough to pass through it.
A wonderful book I enjoyed and recommended to many friends is “The Dawn
of Indian Music in the West” by Peter Lavezzoli. http://www.amazon.com/The-Dawn-Indian-Music-West/dp/0826428193
Ali Akbar Khan comes through in that book as fathomless
gentleman. Sitting down to write I felt
a whim and found this on Rdio. Their
library is proving a rich pool to draw from. If I had the choice I think I’d like to have a
try at the sarod, rather than the sitar.
It sounds so punchy, fluid and loud.
I was probably twenty-one or so when I first read “A
Moveable Feast.” I remember being awed by one of the things that Hemingway
mentioned. Casually, perhaps during some
conversation with Gertrude Stein, Earnest mentions that he sets out to
consciously imitate this or that famous author’s style, for fun. He would write like Melville or Dostoyevsky
(as I recall) and mimic them as part of his literary calisthenics. This seemed to me, utterly unapproachable. As if one sat down with a saxophone and
casually shifted from in phrasing from Coltrane to Rollins. Joyce too, purposefully crafted each chapter
of “Ulysses” in a different style so that ‘Aeolus’, for example, was written to
be like headings and snippets from newspaper articles. More recently I noticed the Economist had an
obit for Elmore Leonard that was written tongue-in-cheek, in his style. This stuck with me.
I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” as regular
readers will already know. http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Meridian-Evening-Redness-West/dp/0679728759 It’s slow and deliberate and brutal. Still ,hot and dusty for the most part. The blurbs on the book suggest McCarthy’s style
is somehow “Biblical” or “Illiad”-like.
I thought I would try to write some fiction, set in the outskirts of contemporary
Beijing, in the style of Cormac McCarthy.
These were the days of walking,
unerring stretches, plodding, beneath dusty rows of flat metallic poplar trees,
and blunted willows with branches dangling down into the road shoulder waste. Air settling visually, xanthous, into the
roadside grit. Accretions of the same
material that lined their pleura and snarled up their alveoli.
Sleeping at night, beside the road,
behind bushes that smelled of urine and other human waste. Walking early again, stiff and dry. The kid
moved a few paces behind the judge in the morning yolk. The thirst was on them, narrowing the
duration, the breadth of their thoughts.
Ahead to the side of gnarled, roundabout they came upon a row of truck carriages,
parked as if they were tethered. The kid
hoisted himself up the first carriage. Inside
two drivers lay sleeping, without their shirts.
The kid knocked hard on the window with the butt of his knife and both
men jumped up quickly:
“Huh? What do you want?” came the voice from
inside. You got water? Asked the
kid? “What?” “You got water or don’t you?” yelled the
kid. This time he showed the man his
knife. The driver reached over to get
the door handle and then flung open the door with a hard shove, sending the kid
flying down six feet with a dull thud like an enormous bundle of wet
laundry. The judge pulled his blade and
regarded the kid. He’d be alright. The truck roared to life and began to back
up, and the driver leaned on his horn.
The kid stepped up and looked for
the blade. Another truck and then
another turned on its lights. Now the
blue animal roared forward straight at them.
The judge had to jump to avoid the oncoming chassis. Then he did his best to take a slice of the big
tire as it passed, but the blade wouldn’t hold and the force twisted his wrist.
The blue beast continued out into the traffic, riding its horn, barley missing
an oncoming truck with laden with a leaning shelf of pressed colored cardboard,
like strata and strata of smoldering prayer flags no longer fluttering.
They continued to the north without
rest. The pale, dirty sun fell slowly. The air smelled of chalk and then
exhaust. Roadside garbage, cobalt
plastic and cyan rappers all netted down beneath the strawberry vines with days
of dust. The runt, following them danced
in and out between the traffic pylons. He
came up beside the kid and the kid kicked the dog in the ribs with his
boot. The beast yelped and snarled but
still he continued on behind them with no other way to go. The coat, once white, was clotted with tar
and infinite granules of fine, particulate waste.
The judge turned and made his way
up a road that bent and turned towards a verdant garden vista of healthy
vines. They could hear water and see a
small hut in the distance. The kid
followed behind as they made for the hut.
Presently four other dogs, considerably larger in size than their pilot
fish pooch, came out to confront them. The
little dog made a show but could not hold his ground. The big wolves chased him. Then they came to chase the kid and the judge
who backed away from the phalanx of angry, growling curs.
The kid had a branch, which he got
one of the dogs to snap at. Then he
began to work the branch in. He swung at
the dog and missed. Twisting on his foot
and almost falling he regained his way and arched his shoulder down into the
dogs ribs. It howled and stumbled. Then the kid cut the dog’s neck deep. The artery sprayed blood about wildly for a few
seconds. And in the same instance
another dog had snuck around behind him and bitten him in the calf. He swang for it and missed.
The judge still had his pole and
was fending off the other two dirty hell hounds.
The kid noticed his leg. White
bits were clear through the flowing blood and a large flap of skin hung
uselessly. This would begin to hurt bad
soon. But now he was too full of
fire. He needed to kill the dog who’d
bit him and he made his way to the sign post where the dog was barking. The kid went right for the mongrel who
backed away and then turned again as he had before. This time the kid cut him in the
shoulder. Yelping the dog continued on and then fell over and tried to stand. The kid brought his blade down again and
again, 血肉横飞[1]. The
judge had smashed the skull of one dog and the other now withdrew, barking arhythmically
like a crazy magpie.
A guard now threatened them with an
electric stick and they made their way back out of the drive. The kid dragged the dog who’d bit him as he
went. Their pooch was nowhere to be
found. They walked a while and then skinned and roasted the big carcass. The meat was gritty like coal. Both men pulled sinews from between their
teeth long after they’d finished picking at the hind bones.
Off a ways they spied small piles
of boxes like a field of stupas laid out deliberately. They made their way toward them and laid out
their coats, each beside one, beneath the thick dark sky from which no stars showed. They were
to learn more about the beekeeper huts they lay beneath, in a few hours time.
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