http://www.lawrencewinkler.com
Lawrence Winkler is a physician, traveler, and natural philosopher. His molecules have morphed from medicine to manuscript. He lives with Robyn on Vancouver Island and in New Zealand, tending their gardens and vineyards, and dreams.
Saturday, 21 March 2015
Friday, 20 March 2015
Wednesday, 18 March 2015
Tuesday, 17 March 2015
Thursday, 5 March 2015
Sunday, 24 August 2014
Where God Divided by Zero 3
“Ginsberg, a self-proclaimed Dharma Bun, had seen the best minds of
his generation screaming for release from the American dream.
Presumably this spiritual bedlam led him to take a sabbatical in the
city of Calcutta. To most Indians this would seem an eccentric is not
totally mad decision. Calcutta is not famed for its serenity. The poet
had his reasons. Calcutta, he announced, is the most liberated city in
the world. The people have no hang-ups. They go around naked. It was
a characteristically original view. No one before had suggested to the
natives that their destitution was a sign of advance. But the Bengali
resident of Calcutta love novelty and are predisposed to regard poets of
all persuasions with favour.”
Gita Mehta, Karma Cola
Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Under his grey sun, on his mud stage, I found his Jessore Road homeless, sleeping in shit flood foul'd lairs and huge pipes, starving wet black angels in human disguise. There were monkey-sized sad groaning stunted starving silent newborns with swollen bellies on elderly nun legs, bony headskulls with big round eyes watching the sky of the living blue hand itself, curled naked on thin laps weeping at my knees, hands to their mouths in prayer. Where will we sleep when Our Father dies? Whom shall we pray to for rice?
The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time. But in the Black Hole of Calcutta, they were all pushing for space, and running out of time. After three days without food, they would vomit their next milk powder, lentils, and rice, unless they ate slow. There was no place to squat. Dysentery drained bowels all at once, into the open drains. Oxcart skeletons dragged charcoal loads past watery flood ruts. Millions of babies in pain, Millions of mothers in rain, Millions of brothers in woe, Millions of children nowhere to go.
The Red Shield was full across the street so I was checked into Modern Lodge, joining the freaks in the dorm. ‘An ideal place for foreign tourists.’ A few mosquitoes awakened the itch. The fan turned slowly. There were crickets awake in the ceiling. The gate was locked.
The street outside held sleepers, moustaches, and nakedness, but no desire. Train whistles and dog barks brought edges to the sweating and rotting teeth. Here, in this Black Hole, you would have to be careful not to get stuck in the corner of the universe, sticking morphine in your arm and eating meat. I slept like a dog in Calcutta.
The Modern Lodge was where Ginsberg, the Beat Generation and the Hungry Generation of Bengali poets had hung out. The poetry had fled, leaving heroin tracks, lost or sold passports, and missionary positions and emissions.
I awoke to find the Englishman selling his cache of batteries. His name was Ian. He told me that Button Nose wanted to see me.
We found ourselves back at the Fairlawn. Under the jungle foliage and bright-striped umbrellas of the garden terrace, we ordered tea, and waited. Kites flew spirals overhead. A Bo leaf floated to the maroon-colored concrete floor.
“I got a message from my boyfriend!” Resonated around my skull. I looked up to Button Nose and her new friend, who could have been her android double- mechanical mandible, with a broken connecting rod from the dashboard, plastic trim and plain interior. Long on miles, hard on fuel.
They both chattered uncontrollably as the sun went over the terrace.
“I bought a sari!” Said Button Nose. She wanted me to help her mail it. I asked her if that was why she wanted to see me.
“Let’s all go to a movie!” She said. But it was too late. I told her I was leaving Calcutta the following night. She asked me where.
“South.” I said. That’s when Ian and I left. To the Taj Continental, ‘where you get food of your choice.’ Our choice was mutton, potato and tomato, with rotis and coffee. Ian let me buy him cigarettes on my way back to Modern Lodge.
I found Doug and Mike had checked in, and regaled them with tales of Button Nose, and my plans of heading to Puri. They warned me that South African Sue was also planning to take that route, but I reassured them that the statistical probability of repeating my Button Nose fiasco was infinitesimal.
But, as they pointed out, it wasn’t zero. That’s what God divided by to get a black hole. Consideration of particle emission from black holes suggested that God not only played dice, but also sometimes threw them where they couldn’t be seen. And that’s where I was going.
I spent the next morning at the Indian museum, the nation’s oldest, established in 1814. The statuary and archaeology relics were decent enough, though poorly displayed, but the prizes went to the art gallery upstairs, and the natural history sections, whose display of Indian botanical and taxidermic butchery impressed by its sheer size.
My afternoon languished at Modern Lodge. I was reading in the aquarium room, when a young Canadian began to play his brand new sitar. David’s father wanted him to go to university, but he had chosen a more noble, and Nobel prize-winning, path. In 1983 Calcutta was still the iconic epicenter of poverty and overpopulation. David decided to do something about the first problem, and signed on with Mother Teresa. I told him he should have listened to his father.
Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She had spent her life opposing any structural measures to cure it, the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction, campaigning publically against abortion in a city of fourteen million hungry mouths. —“So you wouldn’t agree with people who say there are too many children in India?” She said, “I do not agree, because God always provides... And those little children are his life. There can never be enough.”
Her Missionaries of Charity, created as the blind dogmatic cult of a mediocre personality, based on death and subjection, promoted suffering to further its own financial ends. Teresa said that suffering was a gift from God, that it would bring people closer to Jesus.
A Mother Teresa’s ‘Home for the Dying’ was not a ‘hospice.’ A hospice emphasized minimizing suffering with professional medical care and attention to the expressed needs and wishes of the patient. There was no treatment at Teresa’s. You were there to die, even if you didn’t have to.
The order didn’t distinguish between curable and incurable diseases. Not because they couldn’t, but because they wouldn’t.
Instead of doctors who could have made systematic diagnosis, she used volunteers without medical knowledge to make decisions about care. A request to take a fifteen year-old boy to hospital was refused. Patients were transferred away from friends and family. Missionaries of Charity nuns were prohibited from seeking medical training or reading secular books and newspapers, and obedience was emphasized over independent thinking and problem-solving.
Living conditions resembled concentration camps. There were stretcher beds, but no chairs. Baths were cold, hypodermics reused, care administered on a prescribed schedule. On principle, no painkillers were administered. One could hear the screams of people having maggots tweezered from their open wounds without pain relief. It was God alone who would be expected to empower the weak and ignorant. Teresa preached surrender and prostration, and urged her poor supplicants to accept their fate, and quiet baptism.
Teresa’s donors thought their gifts were going to improve her facilities, but the primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been, and her order always refused to publish any audit. Instead, she used her global contributions to open 500 convents in 150 countries, all bearing the name of her own sect. Rather than establishing real medical care and teaching hospitals and hospices, she chose self-aggrandisement. Rather than the relief of suffering, she chose its glorification.
Teresa portrayed the rich as favored by God, taking misappropriated money from the Duvaliers in Haiti, and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. When her own health began to break down, during bouts with heart trouble and old age, Mother Teresa checked into the finest and costliest clinics in California. According to Christopher Hitchens, she was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud. In the City of Joy, Mother Teresa was a Hell’s angel who was beatified into a sacred cow. Her God was a philosophical black hole- the point where reason broke down.
After a last supper with Ian at the Taj International, a fifteen- rupee taxi took me to Howrah station. I sat outside the first-class waiting room under the full moon, reading.
“California sunlight, sweet Calcutta rain
Honolulu starbright--the song remains the same.”
Led Zeppelin, The Song Remains the Same
Saturday, 23 August 2014
Where God Divided by Zero 2
“Black holes are where God divided by zero”
Stephen Wright
“I’m off!” She bubbled, slamming the door next morning. Button Nose had left me a list of chores, mainly to do her laundry and mail her postcards. These were completed without much enthusiasm and with some haste, as I had a date with a horse.
We trotted to the zoo, where I was enthralled by Himalayan black bears, red pandas, leopards, strangely helmeted multicolored fowl, and especially by Franka, the cute little tiger that scared the Tibetan morning momos back out of me. I rode to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, to compare my exploits with those of better climbers, and on to the Happy Valley tea estate, for a lesson in cultivation. Darjeeling produced twenty million pounds of tea every year, and my guide told me how it was disbursed.
“We send the finest tips to the British.” He explained. “The rest of the leaves we market to the rest of India. And then there are the twigs and stems.”
“What do you do with them?” I asked.
“We send them to the Americans.” He said. I bought ten rupees worth of Golden T.P., and galloped my horse back in time. Button Nose was already at the Welkin.
“How was Kalimpong?” I asked.
“Where?” She queried.
“The town you went to today.” I said.
“Oh yeah.” She said. “I bought some silver earrings.” Except they weren’t. Later we met Doug and Mike at the Chowrasta Restaurant for a curry, and Button Nose’s percolating description of all the new addresses she had collected on her jeep ride. Doug gave me a small bottle of rum on the way out.
“You never know...” He said. “You may just want to set yourself on fire. Self-Immolation. Very Tibetan.”
The reason I had come to Darjeeling wasn’t to ride horses (or Button Nose), but to take the narrow gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway ‘toy train’ up to India’s highest railway station in Ghoom, and then down Hill Cart Road, to New Jalpaiguri, on my way to Calcutta.
Button Nose told me she already made a reservation at the Fairlawn Hotel in Calcutta, for two days hence. I told her about how fascinating the toy train was, with its 1889 British ‘B’ class steam locomotive running switchbacks down fifty-three miles and over two kilometers in altitude, along a two-foot wide track.
“I’ll take a taxi and meet you at the bottom.” She said. “Then we can go to Calcutta together.” My brain formed a mental picture of a small bottle of rum, and a match.
After a lukewarm bucket bath and a cuppa next morning, I told Button Nose that I would meet her at the Kwality Restaurant in Siliguri at seven that evening. I gave my Nepali toque to the Welkin desk clerk on the way out, and hiked to the train station to begin my excursion. During a patio breakfast I met two female missionary nuns, one from Singapore, the other Irish. I asked about qualifications. They mentioned celibacy and suffering. I told them I had it covered.
And then, for nine rupees, we stumbled into Lilliput. What used to be bullock carts and palanquins morphed into a whimsical cabin.
The first hour was a carnival of shunting cars and engines. Then, with a noise out of all proportion to the size of its blue locomotive, our little toy cabin gave a jerk, and started. A stocky railway worker sat perched over the forward engine buffers, scattering sand on the rails when the wheels lost their metal grip, with the din of a giant spring running down when the control had been removed.
Locals materialized from nowhere to hang on the outside, the whistle and steam blew incessantly, and coal dust coated my sweater. Sometimes we crossed our own track after completing a conic circuit. Sometimes we zigzagged backwards and forwards.
The fog descended as we ascended the Batasia Loop, at a steady gradient, to Ghoom Monastery. It was freezing, and only a quick chai saved me from terminal shivering. From the highest point on the line, a small push supplied all the energy necessary to carry us to the bottom of West Bengal.
The track simply followed the roadside. Long stretches of the road were surrounded with buildings, and the railway line often rather resembled an urban tramway than an overland track line.
Our engine was equipped with a very loud horn that could even drown out the ear-piercing horns of Indian trucks and buses. It blared without pausing for breath.
The first four hours were idyllic. Clouded views of the lush hills, close-up views of village shops, picking flowers out the window, and stupas, poinsettias and tea plantations in profusion.
The last five hours dragged. Button Nose passed and shouted from a cab. I shouted back that I'd be late. Down, down to a series of impressive switchbacks and loops as the sun dropped on the horizon and the full moon rose in sympathy. At long last we pulled into Siliguri Station, and I traded in my nuns for my anchoress.
“Oh, I’ve already bought my ticket.” She said. “You should get yours right away.” I returned to find that Button Nose had adopted another new friend, a tall lanky Englishman, dressed in purple, holding his head in his hands.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“My bag. It's been nicked. It's the end. Finished.” He said. He had lost his travelers cheques, a flashlight, and love letters.
“That’s really bad.” Agreed Button Nose. “Terrible. Awful.” She asked me to help him. I handed over my flashlight, tea, and a hundred rupees. I had love letters, but the line had to be drawn somewhere. I turned to find that Mary and Button Nose were jumping up and down with the glee that came from rediscovering each other.
“Let’s all get on the bus!” Said Button Nose. We got on the bus. She asked me to change seats with her. I gave her the window and, in exchange, I got a metal crossbar night of alternating between splayed and fetal torment. The agony was made even more exquisite by three obnoxious teenage Bengali boys, who flew into hysterical fits of sniggering whenever Button Nose’s sleeping head landed on my shoulder.
A red sun eventually rose to our left. We followed the east bank of the Hooghly River into India’s literary capital, the ‘City of Furious, Creative Energy,’ and the ‘Field of Kali.’ Kali, the black figure of annihilation, meant ‘time’ or ‘death’, as in ‘the time had come.’
On June 19, 1756, the time had come for 123 of 146 British and Anglo-Indian soldiers and civilians, who perished in the Black Hole of Calcutta. In a dungeon cell intended to hold only three men, they died of asphyxiation, heat exhaustion, and crushing. The fires raging in different parts of Fort William didn’t help. They raved, fought, prayed, blasphemed, and many then fell exhausted on the floor, where suffocation put an end to their torments. After the prison was opened, the corpses were thrown into a ditch. Robert Clive liberated the remaining survivors.
I liberated Button Nose off my man-powered rickshaw at the Fairlawn Hotel. The Fairlawn had been built twenty-seven years after the last emissions from the Black Hole reached Clive’s ears. The ruling Nawabs restricted Bengali construction materials to coconut palm and mud, but William Ford built his hotel out of pukka brick. Subsequent owners were seafarers, smuggling opium and textiles into and from China. In 1942, the place became ‘Canada House’, requisitioned by the Canadian Air Force.
Upper Canada Button Nose checked in, and I didn’t. First, in the poorest city in the world, I still couldn’t afford to stay here. Second, I was given the brush-off by the hybrid English-Armenian rani queen, too busy talking about Tony Wheeler’s recent visit. Her mother used to hide coins in empty kerosene cans, but I was untouchable. Finally, there was a push to break from Button Nose, and a pull to seek Calcutta. I headed for the Black Hole.
“The black hole teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of
paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a
blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as
'sacred,' as immutable, are anything but.”
John Wheeler
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