In Sanskrit the word "jāratā" is used primarily at the end of a compound--- I have never seen it used otherwise, though anyone familiar with the language knows that we only know what we have seen and there is always more to meet the eye. "Jāratā" means something like "to be in love with," "having an affair with," and I mean to use the compound rājānaka-jāratā as a place to put notes, references, poetry, lyrics, anything that Rajanaka is in love with, reaching beyond Indian traditions and towards everything that inspires the mind but moreso fevers the heart. So I will start here:
A Note on the Storm that Does Not Abate:
Agni, Menos, and the Inner Incandescence
When we experience hardship and that turns to desperation, and we watch the world pass us by, we turn in all sorts of directions looking for meaning. We likely gather up failure, shame, and resentment and inflict more upon ourselves _and_ also understand that we've been had, that there are real biases and injustices, opportunities that never came. The natural world, unless you are an interventionist theist, is blind, pitiless, and indifferent to our human situation. All the rest of what is possible to flourish must manifest in culture: we are made by and make the worlds we inhabit. To believe otherwise is not invalid even if its likely unsound. No one can reduce life to arguments but without them we’ve few other ways to know what people are thinking and what they might do because they do indeed believe things. What rages and sizzles within may or may not be arguable but the fire is all the same real.
Sometimes in candor we can admit we didn't have what it takes -and sometimes we just didn't get a break, no matter how hard we tried. The lucky is not aall luck--- it’s also a way in which opportunity follows privilege, advantage yields to history’s uncontrollable destinies, and we are commanded again to find ourselves within a world of vulnerabilities that we don’t control or manifest by sheer will or self-determination. It's always change that we cannot fully fathom because the whirlwind around us cannot be actually stanched. We can choose a path of avoidance and call it spiritual introversion, assert all sorts of privilege to its promises of deliverance but we can only decamp if we ignore everyone else’s needs. If an elopement into meditative equipoise will bring you back refreshed and eager to help, I can’t resent what you need to do to suffer the whirlwind. But for my part, I choose not to shelter from the storm but instead find shelter within it.
If you’re looking for poised and graceful engagement, you're still looking _for_ the storm. There’s no part of life that excludes our fire, rage and grief. The first word of the Illiad is menos (μένος, ménos) “rage” and India’s Rg Veda creates a parallel. The first word of the very first Rg Veda hymn is “agni”, the name of the god of fire. This is no happenstance but instead the poet’s invitation to say first what must come first. Agni is our messenger to the gods, the principal in the story of human success ---we are, as the Brahmanas later tell us but “food and eaters of food”---and he is the god on whom everything that lives depends. We burn just to live. Feel your breath, touch your heart, the warmth of your skin, you know that just a few degrees from your homeostasis and is sickness and death. Agni rages inside us, around us, and in every part of our experience. Rage takes no pause, even when you think you need one.
The rage that is menos and the agni within us will wake us from a deeper somnambulance, because it defines what it means to be alive. When we are asleep, the Illiad tells us, we lose touch with the menos.
There will not be a pause for rest [from battle] in between, not a bit, unless the night comes and separates the menos from the men. Iliad, II.386-387
We must awake from our swoon, our death, just as it is in the Sanskrit cognate manas, which refers to our minds and hearts and points to Agni as the menos of fire (Illiad 23.238) who takes us from cremation to the fires of life that Zeus blows into horses (Iliad 17.456) and which possesses the heroic Achilles because it is menos and manas, the fire itself that rages and burns that is the hero’s most reliable resource. That fire burns in all of us as the rage, the mind and heart that feels all the grief and gain, all that is present in what lies beneath and within us. Even in our drowsy enervation the glint of warmth and heat seeks to awaken. To kindle, to ignite that power refuses bypass, the heat and the light resists death but to draw it from the darkness and wake to a world that is made of incandescence and shadow is no small matter. Whatever the world brings, nothing takes that possibility form you so long as you choose to live in the storm that made you and ignites you to possess what is yours. “So now let no one hurry to sail for home, not yet…” (Iliad II.420)
A Note on the Storm that Does Not Abate:
Agni, Menos, and the Inner Incandescence
When we experience hardship and that turns to desperation, and we watch the world pass us by, we turn in all sorts of directions looking for meaning. We likely gather up failure, shame, and resentment and inflict more upon ourselves _and_ also understand that we've been had, that there are real biases and injustices, opportunities that never came. The natural world, unless you are an interventionist theist, is blind, pitiless, and indifferent to our human situation. All the rest of what is possible to flourish must manifest in culture: we are made by and make the worlds we inhabit. To believe otherwise is not invalid even if its likely unsound. No one can reduce life to arguments but without them we’ve few other ways to know what people are thinking and what they might do because they do indeed believe things. What rages and sizzles within may or may not be arguable but the fire is all the same real.
Sometimes in candor we can admit we didn't have what it takes -and sometimes we just didn't get a break, no matter how hard we tried. The lucky is not aall luck--- it’s also a way in which opportunity follows privilege, advantage yields to history’s uncontrollable destinies, and we are commanded again to find ourselves within a world of vulnerabilities that we don’t control or manifest by sheer will or self-determination. It's always change that we cannot fully fathom because the whirlwind around us cannot be actually stanched. We can choose a path of avoidance and call it spiritual introversion, assert all sorts of privilege to its promises of deliverance but we can only decamp if we ignore everyone else’s needs. If an elopement into meditative equipoise will bring you back refreshed and eager to help, I can’t resent what you need to do to suffer the whirlwind. But for my part, I choose not to shelter from the storm but instead find shelter within it.
If you’re looking for poised and graceful engagement, you're still looking _for_ the storm. There’s no part of life that excludes our fire, rage and grief. The first word of the Illiad is menos (μένος, ménos) “rage” and India’s Rg Veda creates a parallel. The first word of the very first Rg Veda hymn is “agni”, the name of the god of fire. This is no happenstance but instead the poet’s invitation to say first what must come first. Agni is our messenger to the gods, the principal in the story of human success ---we are, as the Brahmanas later tell us but “food and eaters of food”---and he is the god on whom everything that lives depends. We burn just to live. Feel your breath, touch your heart, the warmth of your skin, you know that just a few degrees from your homeostasis and is sickness and death. Agni rages inside us, around us, and in every part of our experience. Rage takes no pause, even when you think you need one.
The rage that is menos and the agni within us will wake us from a deeper somnambulance, because it defines what it means to be alive. When we are asleep, the Illiad tells us, we lose touch with the menos.
There will not be a pause for rest [from battle] in between, not a bit, unless the night comes and separates the menos from the men. Iliad, II.386-387
We must awake from our swoon, our death, just as it is in the Sanskrit cognate manas, which refers to our minds and hearts and points to Agni as the menos of fire (Illiad 23.238) who takes us from cremation to the fires of life that Zeus blows into horses (Iliad 17.456) and which possesses the heroic Achilles because it is menos and manas, the fire itself that rages and burns that is the hero’s most reliable resource. That fire burns in all of us as the rage, the mind and heart that feels all the grief and gain, all that is present in what lies beneath and within us. Even in our drowsy enervation the glint of warmth and heat seeks to awaken. To kindle, to ignite that power refuses bypass, the heat and the light resists death but to draw it from the darkness and wake to a world that is made of incandescence and shadow is no small matter. Whatever the world brings, nothing takes that possibility form you so long as you choose to live in the storm that made you and ignites you to possess what is yours. “So now let no one hurry to sail for home, not yet…” (Iliad II.420)
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