terra infirma

Our book club had one of our best book discussions last night. The book for this month was The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie. His writing is complex and lush and his mastery of words is mind boggling. It is the first time in our little book club that we all unequivocally loved the book, and that we all were in awe of the words; so much so that we had to keep reading passages out loud. Rushdie uses words in such a sculpted, meaningful way. A beautiful read. I highly recommend it.

The passage I read was his goodbye to India.

"India, I have swum in your warm waters and run laughing in your high mountain meadows. Oh, why must everything I say end up sounding like a filmi gana, a goddamn cheap Bollywood song? Very well then: I have walked your filthy streets, India, I have ached in my bones from the illness engendered by your germs. I have eaten your independent salt and drunk your nauseatingly sugary roadside tea. For many years your malaria mosquitoes would bite me wherever I went, and in deserts and summers around the world I was stung by cool Kashmiri bees. India, my terra infirma, my maelstrom, my cornucopia, my crowd. India, my too muchness, my everything at once, my Hug-me, my fable, my mother, my father, my first great truth. It may be that I am not worthy of you, for I have been imperfect, I confess. I may not comprehend what you are becoming, what perhaps you already are, but I am old enough to say that this new self of yours is an entity I no longer want, or need, to understand.
India, fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of my heart.
Goodbye."

Another wonderful passage read by G was, in reference to rock and roll and the Vietnam War.

"That's when I really fell in love with rock...

It was not just saying fuck you Uncle Sam, or give peace a chance, or I feel like I'm fixin' to die, or even making patriotic noises, zap zap zappin' the Cong. Rather, it was making love in a combat zone, insisting on the remembrance of beauty and innocence in a time of death and guilt; it privileged life over death and asked life to take its chance, let's dance, honey honey, in the street, on the phone, and we'll have fun fun fun on the eve of destruction....

The soldiers are singing these songs as they die. But this is not the way soldiers used to sing, marching into battle bellowing hymns, kidding themselves they had god on their side; these aren't patriotic-bullshit, get-yourself-up-for-it songs. These kids are using singing, instead, as an affirmation of what's natural and true, singing against the unnatural lie of war. Using song as a banner of their doomed youth. Not morituri te salutant, but morituri say up yours, Jack, those about to die give you the fucking finger."

Go read it.