The Sacrifice of Human Life for Trees (7)


Early morning sky.

© Eso A. B., 2012

The story of how the Maharajah Abhay Singh of Jodhpur ordered the decapitation of 363-6 women in the forest surrounding Khejarli village has mostly likely been edited, and the story has been ‘cleaned up’ of the more bloody details. This is why, we who do not live in the locale as the Bisnois, may deconstruct the cleaned-up version and reconstruct it somewhat differently.

First, the following is the version of the story of theKhejarli forest as recorded in Wikipedia:

“The Bisnois (a religious group in India, whose members reverence nature and live in Rajasthan) narrate the story of Amrita Devi, a Bishnoi woman who, along with more than 366 other Bishnois, died saving the Khejarli trees. Nearly 2 centuries back, Maharajah Abhay Singh of Jodhpur required some woods for the construction of his new palace. So the king sent his soldiers to cut trees in the nearby region of Khejarli, where the village is filled with the large number of trees. But when Amrita Devi and local villagers come to know about it, they opposed the king's men. The malevolent feudal party told her that if she wanted the trees to be spared, she would have to give them money as bribe. She refused to acknowledge this demand and told them that she would consider it as an act of insult to her religious faith and would rather give away her life to save the green trees. This is still remembered as the great Khejarli sacrifice. Some Bishnois who were killed protecting the trees were buried in Khejerli village near Jodhpur, where a simple grave with four pillars had been erected.”

Let us look more closely at the sentence: “The malevolent feudal party told her (Amrita Devi) that if she wanted the trees to be spared, she would have to give them money as bribe.”

Let us imagine the scene with close attention: The inncer logic of the story suggests that the Maharajah’s soldiers already know that Amrita Devi has refused the Maharajah’s demand [malevolent feudal party] to cut down the Khejarli Village trees. Why send soldiers, when under normal circumstances it is wood cutters who should have been sent?

The soldiers would not have come to just talk with Amrita Devi and other villagers who have gathered to guard the forest of Khejarli. However, after the soldiers come and see the women and other villagers embrace the trees about to be felled , the soldiers’ offer to let the trees be--if the women pay them a bribe. The women and the villagers, we are told, refuse to do so. This leads us to ask: Why would the villagers refuse to give money to save the trees, but rather offer their lives instead?

Alright, maybe there is no money to be had, because it is hoarde (just like today) in the vaults of the banks.

On the other hand, there is something sinister about this blunt choice—money or your life. While the story presented to the popular mind is pictured as the decapitation of a mother and her two daughters, the story also speaks of “others”, perhaps of the male sex. If there were males, who also were decapitated, would they not have fought back or attempted to do so? After all, a forest is an excellent site for hand to hand and one to one combat. A forest does not permit military formations. When men fight in a forest, their strength is equalized and a soldier has no guarantees that he can win the fight or survive alive.

Is it not more likely that the soldiers came to rape the women rather than ask from them money? If a bribe would have saved the trees, then the women should have paid or the villagers should have held a collection. Common sense makes one think of such an alternative. In most other circumstances, it is men-soldiers who pay women for sex. Why should the women up the ante and pay with their lives?

This is what leads us to think that before the trees are cut, the women are faced with being raped. As suggested above, a forest is, among other things, a hiding place as much for wild-life as dark deeds.

It is likely that the destruction of the forest and the rape of the women was a foregone conclusion from the very beginning of the story.

The question therefore is how did the women find their way into the forest? One may suspect that the answer is that the women were kidnapped (rounded up), then carried into the forest, and then raped there. It is also lpossible that the women’s cries for help brought other villagers to help them.

To cover up their acts of  rape, the soldiers then began to ax and fell the trees, and had them fall on top of the women. Perhaps this was done to cover up their violence and save themselves from being court marshalled (if there was a military justice system). As the picture at the link shows, today the story is sentimentalized, and Amrita Devi’s daughters are portrayed as girl children rather than young maids as in other pictures.

If this reconstructed version of the story  is what happened, then the Maharajah may not be the guilty party at all. It is more likely then that the soldiers raped because they were entrapped by the prison of military discipline (law as a crime), and because this criminal law were denied the men normal contact with the community round about them. As for the Maharajah, he—like his soldiers--is trapped by the fact that the society he is born into has developed in such a way that it is necessary for him to maintain an army.

The story—as it stands or is presented to the people of India today—puts emphasis on the act of self-sacrifice over the act of violence embodied by military arms. Unfortunately, the story obscures and hides the superiority of the concept of self-sacrifice as means to peace. As for the helpless trees, our empathy over their destruction causes us to think of the saw-cross.

The “Wealth Virus” Tires and Morphs Into an Eye (5)

Painted Over Clay

© Eso A. B., 2012

The quote from Odin (see blog 4), does not suggest that Odin was hanging on a tree for nine windy nights, because he was a symbol for a  phallus either as a tree or his- her- sex. However, Odin/ John/ Jane may have hung there, because without such an experience of devoting “one’s self to one’s self”, he-she feels lost and not fully in possession of themselves.

The image or, rather, the poem, may refer to the captain tied by his rebellious crew to the bowsprit of his ship here, here, and here. As a crew member of the planet Earth, I would tie to the bowsprit the oligarchs even if the bow is predestined to sail into a rock or sink to the bottom of the sea. The bowsprit is the king of the ship’s nose for and of the future.

One may feel lost when one is wealthy, as well as when one is poor. One’s material status has little to do with being self-imposed. Being self-possessed probably has a lot to do with the sense of being in charge of one’s fate. Being simply rich or poor may turn you into, say, some particular color. Yellow for rich; green for poor, but color does not tell you what to do with yourself. Yellow, for example, could be blowing about like the sands across the Sahara dessert or hide as gold nuggets at the bottom of a stream, while green could be greening like grass and forests.

A broken branch may hang off the main branch for nine long days before the wind dries its woody fibres sufficiently for the next gust to blow it to the ground. If Odin was such a branch, the nine days could have taught him what it is that he is a part of, and though he die and fall, the tree remains. As the poet said: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”— Audre Lorde.

To hang on a windy tree, myself to myself, for nine nights may also be like watching myself in a mirror as the wind wrinkles my face beyond recognition. [Actually, as a twelve year old, I sat at the port bow anchor hole of a German transport ship with my sister for three days, both of us determined that we would spill into the sea and have a chance to swim to the shore, when a torpedo hit the ship. I can still see slicing into the grey Baltic.) The exposure time of Odin is long enough to impress any Godless man with respect to the atheism he proposes, and if he still does not after the experience believe in God, will at least be able to sacrifice himself to himself.) The result for most ordinary men will be to see themselves as a mask.

How else can I appear to myself after nine days hanging on a windy tree? The result of such an frighteningly intimate challenge of being left alone for so long is to become an eye one sees one’s self for ever. As another poet said: “The eye you see is not an eye, it is an eye because it sees you”--Antonio Machado. Such an eye has magic, because it is not simply ‘there’, but it is there because it has evolved from whatever was there before there was an eye.

This phenomenon is slso similar to light receptor cells in our ears. The cells are similar to the cells in our eye. The Finns, who in their Nordic clime never have enough light, put a small light bulb in their ear, to feel they have lived their day to the full. Perhaps one may say that the brain contains similar cells, because it quite literally has hung in the wind to itself for not only nine days, but for the entirety of the evolution of life.

Perhaps we are coming to a day when our brain and not we, our-my ego, will speak for ourselves and myself. This could mean that a “better” human being is on the horizon, because we will act on the evolutionary impulses of the eons of survivors, not on our egotistic impulses mimicking some unfiltered “order” signaled to us by professor Žižek, advertisers, or our better sense being short-circuited by military order.

However, let us return to the experiential lesson of hanging for nine days in a windblown tree. After nine days our eyes may look like shriveled mushrooms. Perhaps they will look like dried out sardines on the beach, that we may pick up still entangled in seaweed. We might even put it to our nose and smell it.

It comes to mind that that is what a Wealth Virus may smell like, and if you eat the sardine, you may not only be poor, but a starving dog that has survived a shipwreck. Or you may be an oligarch walking the beach early one morning and picking up what you see before you just for the curiosity of it. In other words, you are doing what you are doing not because you are an oligarch or a sardine eater, but because the man or woman in you, a several million years old virtual being converted into genes, is doing it.

When imagining such scenes and finding them not making particular, but bizarre sense, we may decide that life is a play in a play that we do not know the role for in a theatre we not chosen to act in. The play does not make sense, because—the rehearsal that expects us to be hanging on a tree for nine days and nights is nothing but a stretch of memory compared to which an animal falls into a trap and the trapper is too drunk to come check his traps and relieve us of our pain by killing us.

No animal can be imagined to write himself a poem: “For nine days and nights, I was trapped myself for myself.” Animals sooner are known to chew off their leg. Would a man (as that animal) saw the bowsprit? Imagine being in the theatre audience, and the play calls you to watch the animal do that in real time.

What vision or visions would then come to our mind?

* * *

One will not find many books where its author tries to convince his readers that trees and human beings are as bound together as an animal to his legs.

This is where, that same author will return to the subject of deforestation and the decapitation of women. If the women are identified with trees, and if the soldiers do the deforesting-rape, because they are on the Maharaja’s payroll, would the men rather not have sex repeatedly than repeatedly chose its alternative?

This is the vision that then comes to my mind.

The maharajah killed 363 women who were hugging the trees to try protect them from the saw and axe, because the maharajah wished to be a greater oligarch than he already was. He had the Wealth Virus infection more than bad.

The men, the maharajah’s soldiers, decapitated the women for many days—day after day—until the maharajah’s order was completed. Then the commander of the regiment came to the maharajah and reported: “It is done, sir, as you ordered”.

The maharajah then rose from his couch, told his woman friend to remain there with her legs open, and went up to the mirror on the wall nearby. He looked into the mirror to see if the woman had obeyed him and if the commander of the regiment was masturbating. When he saw the commander standing uncertain over what to do, the maharajah asked: “You waiting to hang? ” The very moment the commander showed the maharajah his erection and pulled the skin, the mirror in the Jodhpur castle had an orgasm and shattered in 363 slivers of glass, which all flew into the Maharajah’s eye.

It should be no surprise that this is how the story ends. This is how death looks when you look into the eye of its eye. That is how the Maharajah of Jodhpur died of the Wealth Virus.

Women Who Died For Trees (3)

The Saw-Cross. FOR SALE HERE.

© Eso A. B., 2012

 

The Wealth Virus clusters, whence come the dreams of becoming rich, often turn into nightmares. The following is a nightmare that comes of a dream to have money. The dreams currently dreamt in Russia leads to the nightmarish result shown in the following video .

When the pot of gold at the end of a rainbows is not discovered to be where imagined, human beings turn to less romantic sayings in order to suppport their unfulfilled dreams, for example: “Money grows on trees”. This last in due time transports the dreamer over the rain’s golden dew to the edge of a forest with an axe and saw in hand.

The axe and saw mark the beginning of violence against tree. The invention of the circular saw nthed the violence. Just as a man riding a horse with saber in hand is nthed by a tank .

With the cutting of trees, the values of violence prone princes and kings began to interfere with the values of a forest people. Noteworthy features of forests, trees and ferns, never before much noticed, suddenly began to be mentioned by story tellers and writers. There arose stories about trees, roots, mushrooms, animals, wells, and swamps not much taken note of before. For example, the ol’ rabbit hole that Alice fell into and discover her wonder world became an entrance to another realm. Perhaps the story had already been known, but not taken much note of before, because it was such an obvious day to day feature.

Which ever feature of the forest interests us, its appearance in fairy tales provides evidence that when our planet was still covered with forests, human beings had identified with trees for a long time already. It was not only that a linden tree stood for a woman, and an oak for a man, but at festival time a birch was brought into the house and was thought of as a young. Only in our own time do we hear brutish urban bureaucrats call birch trees weeds that need not be spared when land is cleared for a building project..

One famous story that associates human beings with trees is from India. It is about the Bishnois of India. 366 Bishnois were killed by the soldiers of Maharajah Abhay Singh of Jodhpur in an event known as The Khejarli Massacre in 1730. Today the Bishnois remember the event in a September festival. The stories about the Maharajah’s gruesome deed come with minor variations. Ths following version tells us, that it was only 363 women who were decapitated.

That most of the victims at Kherjarli should be women, suggests that it was women who particularly identified themselves with trees as Latvian people of long ago had done. The suggestion of the involvement of women with trees is corraborated by the story from the Bible, the one about apple tree from which Eve held in her hands an apple.

The apple is a symbol of temptation and desire. By putting the apple into the hands of Eve, the ancient writers hinted that women were and Eve certainly was associated with apple trees. Of course, when tempted and desiring, we sooner associate a woman with a kiss, whereas an apple suggests a bite. The possibility of juxtaposing a kiss with a bite and women with felled trees, appears to confirm the poetic aspects of dreams of a time that followed a time when the setting sun gave the forests a haircut with the shears of her rays.

As strange as it may seem, a meme presents to me an image of the “Kiss of Judas".

Why is betrayal done with a kiss? Does it have something with a “knowing” kiss?

“Yes”, certainly, however, since this “knowing” occurs between two males, it raises—for many—questions. I suppose it is this very question (of homosexuality) that that presents one with a potentially atheistic interpretation. Judas may kiss as a whore kisses (for thirty pieces of silver), which is why whores are reputed not to kiss.

Sometimes dreams repeat themselves. In the instance of my self, “the wealth virus”, when associated with desire for a particular woman I may be tempted to have a sexual relationship, may be frustrated by lack of money (which may make a certain woman unapproachable). Then, my desire does not turn into a kiss, but may turn into anxiety and the pervert itself into the buzz of a chainsaw.

One thing that urban people forget is that their sex is more virtual  than it is real. Virtual sex is like a passing image, which is why modern business thinks of selling men plastic dolls as sexual partners.

However, in earlier times, sex was associated with “knowing”. When two people slept with each other, they got to “know” each other. Sex therefore was thought of as a bonding agent. There were no “one night stands” then.

The one night stand probably also has a lot to do with “silent sex” or undemonstrative sex . One may hear an “ooh ooh”, yet a man may never know if his woman partner did come off or n o. I wonder how Janis Jopplin did it?