Did Don McLean anticipate the 2020 Biden-Trump election?

I was reflecting on the weirdness of Donald Trump refusing to concede to Joe Biden and the words that came to mind, unbidden, were:

“The players tried to take the field 

the marching band refused to yield…”

From Don McLean’s American Pie.

Could Don McLean have foreseen this moment fifty years ago? 

Sort of like Nostradamus foresaw moments in the future? I’m only half kidding. 

American Pie is so different from, and so much better than, the rest of Don McLean’s work that it is easy to imagine that the song was written by a higher force that just expressed itself through Don McLean when he was in an altered mind-state, sort of like the state Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in when he wrote Kubla Khan.

Discovering the Meaning of "Aagosh"

Do we have an English word for a mother’s shadow, for her presence, for the comfort derived from a mother physically being there? 

I don’t think we do.  

Maybe we should just import aagosh from Urdu to fill this gap. That is what aagosh means. 

Its sort of surprising that English doesn't yet have a word for aagosh. It's a universal experience. I'm sure my dog understands the idea behind aagosh perfectly.

BTW, I discovered this word in Priya Malik’s poem Main 2019 Mein 1999. Click here to watch her perform this piece, and notice the way in which she introduces a maternal tone into what is otherwise a romantic line. 

Thankyou London Underground

The Tube is on strike today. Everybody's cursing (including me). Meaning, it's not a bad day to remember one of my favourite poems, an ode to the London Underground, which I discovered on the London Underground:

Here's to the gaps, the maps
And the elapse of a hundred and fifty years since that first
Steaming monster hurled
Through its Metropolitan Minotaur world.
To all the billiard ball-bottomed straps onto which I've hung.
And here's to the police office, who, when I was illegally
    busking outside Westminster Station, approached me and said,
'Do you know any Neil Young?'

My beloved homeland: the 1990s

I’m homesick.
I want to go home,
to a place where I feel safe,
to a place where I know stuff,
like I know that democracy is good,
that capitalism will save us from poverty,
that the Rio summit will save the planet,
and that Sanjay Manjrekar’s immaculate technique will elevate him to Gavaskar-esque greatness.

I want to know that MTV VJ Sophiya Haque is cool, achingly so,
and that institutions reinvent themselves,
sort of, like, Tony Blair reinvented the Labour Party.

I want to know that if I follow my passion,
try really really hard,
give all I’ve got to give,
give with my body, mind and soul,
that I will find not just success, but fulfilment.

Papa I want to go,
Mama I want to go,
Show me the way to go home.

Khalil Gibran on how Jeffery Johnson became a murderer

"Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world. 

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,

So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also." 

I came across these words thumbing through The Prophet, and was ported to this story about Jeffery Johnson, the Empire State Building gunman. In it, Johnson’s mother talks about how she can’t comprehend how her kind-hearted little boy, “who loved the Boy Scouts and animals, and grew up into a patriotic and thoughtful man”, snapped and turned into a calculating murderer. Khalil Gibran’s uncomfortable thought is that the murderer was always in there, lurking inside the kind and thoughtful man.

David Brooks, the NYT’s conservative cloumnist, agrees with Khalil Gibran. Writing about Robert Bales, the American soldier who murdered sixteen sleeping Afghans in their family home, he quotes CS Lewis, who believed “there is no such thing as an ordinary person, each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.”

Ithaka is to some what Tatooine is to others

Luke Skywalker strides towards the twin sunset on Tatooine

I'd posted yesterday about the poem "Keep Ithaka always in the mind", in which Ithaka is a metaphor for home, for integrity. Other classical traditions have their own Ithakas, their own sacred places that stand for integrity. For instance, Star Wars fans might think of Tatooine - the desert planet in a galaxy far, far away where Luke Skywalker was raised - as their Ithaka.

The mythic, metaphorical Ithaka has a physical analogue: the island of Ithaki in western Greece. It turns out that Tatooine also has a physical analogue: Tataouine, in southern Tunisia.

George Lucas filmed the desert landscapes of Tatooine on location in Tunisia, the Breber architecture in Tataouine is recognizably the inspiration behind Luke Skywalker's childhood home. Apparently, he borrowed the name of a local town as well. Adherents of the Jedi faith are now making pilgrimages to Tataouine. The World's latest Technology podcast has a story about a Jedi knight, Mark from Norwich, who got married at Tataouine.

If only the people in power would uphold Britain's traditions of tolerance and include the Jedi religion on the census questionnaire, conversion to the Jedi faith would hit a tipping point...pilgrim traffic to the Tunisian Sahara would take off...the Tunisian economy would improve...the Arab Spring would be reinforced...inexpensive and effective nation-building in the Arab world!

Berber granaries in Tataouine, Tunisia

Keep Ithaka always in your mind...

Came across another classically inspired poem. This time, I didn't randomly spot it on the tube. It came to my inbox in a farewell email from a Greek colleague, Clementina, who dedicated these lines to us:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. 

Ithaka as a metaphor for integrity reminds me of:

"You, who are on the road, 
must have a code, 
that you can live by. 

And so become yourself...".

Ithaka is where you learn that code, the code itself, and where you get to when you've lived by that code. Echoes of the Bhagavad Gita as well, "not expecting Ithaka to make you rich" maps directly to "कर्मण्ये वाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन".

Clementina found some beautiful words with which to acknowledge us, her colleagues, for being a part of her unhurried, marvellous journey, her Odyssey. Cheers Clementina! May Ithaka remain always in your mind.

Chorus from Hellas, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the London Underground

Spent fifteen minutes or so staring at these words on the London Underground:

The world`s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faith and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore... 

This poem is Chorus from Hellas, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, an explicitly political piece. At the time it was written, Greece had been an Ottoman colony for over three hundred years, and was fighting for independence. The English romantic poets were deeply exercised by the Greek cause.

Shelley wrote these words while raising money for Greek partisans, showing a strong pan-European sensibility; it's possible to read this poem as a creation hymn for the European Union, written one hundred and thirty years before the Treaty of Rome. Unfortunately, now, "wreaks of a dissolving dream" also bring to mind the financial havoc in Greece, and the dissolving dream of Europe.   

Thank you to Transport For London for making room for Shelley on the tube. It would have been so easy to fill this space with yet another advert.